To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free; To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires, And grief and hunger climb about his knee Welcome as children; thou upholdest The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest, And gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss, Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss, And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted. Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly Their own souls they were scarring; con querors see With horror in their hands the accursed spear That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear; Thou, too, art the Forgiver, The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; Pierce error's guilty heart, but only pierce for Oh, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams, bear me? 56 Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,— A charm against the present sorrow The ancestral buckler calls, In the high temple of the soul; To feed the soul with patience, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that 1845. never wearies. 83 James Russell Lowell. ODE Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, O TENDERLY the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire. The cannon booms from town to town, The joy-bells chime their tidings down, 4 For He that flung the broad blue fold One third part of the sky unrolled The men are ripe of Saxon kind United States! the ages plead,- For sea and land don't understand, Nor skies without a frown See rights for which the one hand fights By the other cloven down. Be just at home; then write your scroll Of honor o'er the sea, And bid the broad Atlantic roll, A ferry of the free. And henceforth there shall be no chain, Save underneath the sea The wires shall murmur through the main Sweet songs of liberty. The conscious stars accord above, The waters wild below, 32 12 16 24 And under, through the cable wove, [1 For He that worketh high and wise, Will take the sun out of the skies 1136 Ere freedom out of man. 1140 1867. Ralph Waldo Emerson. TO THE UNKNOWN EROS WHAT rumour'd heavens are these! O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze Speeding at far returns of time from inter- '/ To speak of whence they came, or whither they That moves me like the Child Who in the flushing darkness troubled lies, 169 Which even to his Mother mild He dares not tell; To which himself is infidel; His heart not less on fire 20 With dreams impossible as wildest Arab Tale, (So thinks the boy,) With dreams that turn him red and pale, Yet less impossible and wild Than those which bashful Love, in his own way and hour, Shall duly bring to flower? O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss, Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird, In me life's even flood What eddies thus? What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood, Like a perturbed moon of Uranus, Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid; And whence This rapture of the sense Which, by the whisper bid, Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine; 4° This subject loyalty which longs For chains and thongs Woven of gossamer and adamant, To bind me to my unguess'd want, Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine ether pant, |