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

Luther sung,
Than his who, old, and cold, and vain,
At Weimar sat, a demigod,

And bowed with Jove's imperial nod
His votaries in and out again!
Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet!
Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!
Who
envies him who feeds on air
The icy splendor of his seat?
I see your Alps, above me, cut
The dark, cold sky; and dim and lone

I see ye sitting,--stone on stone,--
With human senses dulled and
shut.
I could not reach you, if I would,
Nor sit among your cloudy shapes;

And (spare the fable of the grapes
And fox) I would not if I could.

Keep to your lofty pedestals!
The safer plain below I choose
Who
never wins can rarely lose,
Who never climbs as rarely falls.
Let such as love the eagle's scream
Divide with him his home of ice

For me shall gentler notes suffice,--
The valley-song of bird and
stream;
The pastoral bleat, 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