Poems - Household Edition | Page 7

as none was scorned,
Adorn
her as was none adorned.
I make this maiden an ensample
To Nature, through her
kingdoms ample,
Whereby to model newer races,
Statelier forms and fairer faces;

To carry man to new degrees
Of power and of comeliness.
These presents be the
hostages
Which I pawn for my release.
See to thyself, O Universe!
Thou art better,
and not worse.'--
And the god, having given all,
Is freed forever from his thrall.
THE VISIT
Askest, 'How long thou shalt stay?'
Devastator of the day!
Know, each substance and
relation,
Thorough nature's operation,
Hath its unit, bound and metre;
And every
new compound
Is some product and repeater,--
Product of the earlier found.
But the
unit of the visit,
The encounter of the wise,--
Say, what other metre is it
Than the
meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature,

Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,

Hearts to hearts their meaning show,
Sum their long experience,
And import
intelligence.
Single look has drained the breast;
Single moment years confessed.

The duration of a glance
Is the term of convenance,
And, though thy rede be church
or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger,--thou shalt
rue the fault:

If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
URIEL
It fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time
coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads
walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To
his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb,
quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones
that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a
line.
'Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all
rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A
shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs
frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;

The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong
Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.
A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell
On the beauty of Uriel;
In heaven once eminent,
the god
Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;
Whether doomed to long gyration
In
the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler
sight.

Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the

secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.
But now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit
of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or
out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged
the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.
THE WORLD-SOUL
Thanks to the morning light,
Thanks to the foaming sea,
To the uplands of New
Hampshire,
To the green-haired forest free;
Thanks to each man of courage,
To the
maids of holy mind,
To the boy with his games undaunted
Who never looks behind.
Cities of proud hotels,
Houses of rich and great,
Vice nestles in your chambers,

Beneath your roofs of slate.
It cannot conquer folly,--
Time-and-space-conquering
steam,--
And the light-outspeeding telegraph
Bears nothing on its beam.
The politics are base;
The letters do not cheer;
And 'tis far in the deeps of history,

The voice that speaketh clear.
Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak
and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.
Yet there in the parlor sits
Some figure of noble guise,--
Our angel, in a stranger's
form,
Or woman's pleading eyes;
Or only a flashing sunbeam
In at the
window-pane;
Or Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.
The inevitable morning
Finds them who in cellars be;
And be sure the all-loving
Nature

Will smile in a factory.
Yon ridge of purple landscape,
Yon sky between the
walls,
Hold all the hidden wonders
In scanty intervals.
Alas! the Sprite that haunts us
Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious
gods,
And leaves us in the mire.
We cannot learn the cipher
That's writ upon our
cell;
Stars taunt us by a mystery
Which we could never spell.
If but one hero knew it,
The world would blush in flame;
The sage, till he hit the
secret,
Would hang his head for shame.
Our brothers have not read it,
Not one has
found the key;
And henceforth we are comforted,--
We are but such as they.
Still, still the secret presses;
The nearing clouds draw down;
The crimson morning
flames into
The fopperies of the town.
Within, without the idle earth,
Stars weave
eternal rings;
The sun himself shines heartily,
And shares the joy he brings.
And what if Trade sow cities
Like shells along the shore,
And thatch with towns the
prairie broad
With railways ironed o'er?--
They are but sailing foam-bells
Along
Thought's causing stream,
And take their shape and sun-color
From him that sends
the dream.

For Destiny never swerves
Nor yields to men the helm;
He shoots his thought, by
hidden nerves,
Throughout the solid realm.
The patient Daemon sits,
With roses and
a shroud;
He has his way, and deals his