Songs In Many Keys | Page 9

melting snow;?And dark--plumed Hamlet, with his cloak and blade,?Looked on the royal ghost, himself a shade.?All in one flash, his youthful memories came,?Traced in bright hues of evanescent flame,?As the spent swimmer's in the lifelong dream,?While the last bubble rises through the stream.
Call him not old, whose visionary brain?Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.?For him in vain the envious seasons roll?Who bears eternal summer in his soul.?If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,?Spring with her birds, or children at their play,?Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art,?Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,?Turn to the record where his years are told,--?Count his gray hairs,--they cannot make him old!?What magic power has changed the faded mime??One breath of memory on the dust of time.?As the last window in the buttressed wall?Of some gray minster tottering to its fall,?Though to the passing crowd its hues are spread,?A dull mosaic, yellow, green, and red,?Viewed from within, a radiant glory shows?When through its pictured screen the sunlight flows,?And kneeling pilgrims on its storied pane?See angels glow in every shapeless stain;?So streamed the vision through his sunken eye,?Clad in the splendors of his morning sky.?All the wild hopes his eager boyhood knew,?All the young fancies riper years proved true,?The sweet, low-whispered words, the winning glance?From queens of song, from Houris of the dance,?Wealth's lavish gift, and Flattery's soothing phrase,?And Beauty's silence when her blush was praise,?And melting Pride, her lashes wet with tears,?Triumphs and banquets, wreaths and crowns and cheers,?Pangs of wild joy that perish on the tongue,?And all that poets dream, but leave unsung!
In every heart some viewless founts are fed?From far-off hillsides where the dews were shed;?On the worn features of the weariest face?Some youthful memory leaves its hidden trace,?As in old gardens left by exiled kings?The marble basins tell of hidden springs,?But, gray with dust, and overgrown with weeds,?Their choking jets the passer little heeds,?Till time's revenges break their seals away,?And, clad in rainbow light, the waters play.
Good night, fond dreamer! let the curtain fall?The world's a stage, and we are players all.?A strange rehearsal! Kings without their crowns,?And threadbare lords, and jewel-wearing clowns,?Speak the vain words that mock their throbbing hearts,?As Want, stern prompter! spells them out their parts.?The tinselled hero whom we praise and pay?Is twice an actor in a twofold play.?We smile at children when a painted screen?Seems to their simple eyes a real scene;?Ask the poor hireling, who has left his throne?To seek the cheerless home he calls his own,?Which of his double lives most real seems,?The world of solid fact or scenic dreams??Canvas, or clouds,--the footlights, or the spheres,--?The play of two short hours, or seventy years??Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes,?Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies;?Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this;?The cheating future lends the present's bliss;?Life is a running shade, with fettered hands,?That chases phantoms over shifting sands;?Death a still spectre on a marble seat,?With ever clutching palms and shackled feet;?The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain,?The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain,?Death only grasps; to live is to pursue,--?Dream on! there 's nothing but illusion true!
A POEM
DEDICATION OF THE PITTSFIELD CEMETERY,?SEPTEMBER 9,1850
ANGEL of Death! extend thy silent reign!?Stretch thy dark sceptre o'er this new domain?No sable car along the winding road?Has borne to earth its unresisting load;?No sudden mound has risen yet to show?Where the pale slumberer folds his arms below;?No marble gleams to bid his memory live?In the brief lines that hurrying Time can give;?Yet, O Destroyer! from thy shrouded throne?Look on our gift; this realm is all thine own!
Fair is the scene; its sweetness oft beguiled?From their dim paths the children of the wild;?The dark-haired maiden loved its grassy dells,?The feathered warrior claimed its wooded swells,?Still on its slopes the ploughman's ridges show?The pointed flints that left his fatal bow,?Chipped with rough art and slow barbarian toil,--?Last of his wrecks that strews the alien soil!?Here spread the fields that heaped their ripened store?Till the brown arms of Labor held no more;?The scythe's broad meadow with its dusky blush;?The sickle's harvest with its velvet flush;?The green-haired maize, her silken tresses laid,?In soft luxuriance, on her harsh brocade;?The gourd that swells beneath her tossing plume;?The coarser wheat that rolls in lakes of bloom,--?Its coral stems and milk-white flowers alive?With the wide murmurs of the scattered hive;?Here glowed the apple with the pencilled streak?Of morning painted on its southern cheek;?The pear's long necklace strung with golden drops,?Arched, like the banian, o'er its pillared props;?Here crept the growths that paid the laborer's care?With the cheap luxuries wealth consents to spare;?Here sprang the healing herbs which could not save?The hand that reared them from the neighboring grave.
Yet all its varied charms, forever free?From task and tribute, Labor yields to thee?No more,