sunbeams through a ruin’d hall—
Strains of glad music at a funeral:—
So sad, and with so wild a start
To this long sober’d heart,
So anxiously and painfully,
So drearily and doubtfully
And, oh, with such intolerable change
Of thought, such contrast strange,
O unforgotten Voice, thy whispers come,
Like wanderers from the world’s extremity,
Unto their ancient home.
In vain, all, all in vain,
They beat upon mine ear again,
Those melancholy tones so sweet and still;
Those lute-like tones which in long distant years
Did steal into mine ears:
Blew such a thrilling summons to my will
Yet could not shake it:
Drain’d all the life my full heart had to spill;
Yet could not break it.
To Fausta
Joy comes and goes: hope ebbs and flows,
Like the wave.
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles: and then,
Both are laid in one cold place,
In the grave.
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die,
Like spring flowers.
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves, with bitter tears,
For their dead hopes; and all,
Maz’d with doubts, and sick with fears,
Count the hours.
We count the hours: these dreams of ours,
False and hollow,
Shall we go hence and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend,
Faces that smil’d and fled,
Hopes born here, and born to end,
Shall we follow?
Shakespeare
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil’d searching of mortality:
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure,
Didst walk on earth unguess’d at. Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
To the Duke of Wellington
On Hearing Him Mispraised
Because thou hast believ’d, the wheels of life
Stand never idle, but go always round:
Not by their hands, who vex the patient ground,
Mov’d only; but by genius, in the strife
Of all its chafing torrents after thaw,
Urg’d; and to feed whose movement, spinning sand,
The feeble sons of pleasure set their hand:
And, in this vision of the general law,
Hast labour’d with the foremost, hast become
Laborious, persevering, serious, firm;
For this, thy track, across the fretful foam
Of vehement actions without scope or term,
Call’d History, keeps a splendour: due to wit,
Which saw one clue to life, and follow’d it.
Written in Butler’s Sermons
Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—
So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,
Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.
Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,
Spring the foundations of the shadowy throne
Where man’s one Nature, queen-like, sits alone,
Centred in a majestic unity;
And rays her powers, like sister islands, seen
Linking their coral arms under the sea:
Or cluster’d peaks, with plunging gulfs between
Spann’d by aerial arches, all of gold,
Whereo’er the chariot wheels of Life are roll’d
In cloudy circles, to eternity.
Written in Emerson’s Essays
“O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world,
That thou canst hear, and hearing, hold thy way.
A voice oracular hath peal’d to-day,
To-day a hero’s banner is unfurl’d.
Hast thou no lip for welcome?” So I said.
Man after man, the world smil’d and pass’d by:
A smile of wistful incredulity
As though one spake of life unto the dead:
Scornful, and strange, and sorrowful; and full
Of bitter knowledge. Yet the Will is free:
Strong is the Soul, and wise, and beautiful:
The seeds of godlike power are in us still:
Gods are we, Bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will.—
Dumb judges, answer, truth or mockery?
To an Independent Preacher
Who Preached That We Should Be “In Harmony with Nature”
“In harmony with Nature”? Restless fool,
Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility;
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool:—
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more.
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood:
Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore:
Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:
Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!
In Utrumque Paratus
If, in the silent mind of One all-pure,
At first imagin’d lay
The sacred world; and by procession sure
From those still deeps, in form and colour drest,
Seasons alternating, and night and day,
The long-mus’d thought to north south east and west
Took then its all-seen way:
O waking on a world which thus-wise springs!
Whether it needs thee count
Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things
Ages or hours: O waking on Life’s stream!
By lonely pureness to the all-pure Fount
(Only by this thou canst) the colour’d dream
Of Life remount.
Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow;
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts: marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams:
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.
But, if the wild unfather’d mass no birth
In divine seats hath known:
In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe,
Forms, what she forms, alone:
O seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bath’d head
Piercing the solemn cloud
Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread!
O man, whom Earth, thy long-vext mother, bare
Not without joy; so radiant, so endow’d—
(Such happy issue crown’d her painful care)
Be not too proud!
O when most self-exalted most alone,
Chief dreamer, own thy dream!
Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown;
Who hath a monarch’s hath no brother’s part;
Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem.
O what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart—
“I, too, but seem!”
