Poetry

SCENES of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre!Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!

Long have I wandered; the returning tideBrought back an exile to his cradle's side;And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled,To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time,I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;Oh, more than blest, that, all my wanderings through,My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!

The morning light, which rains its quivering beamsWide o'er the plains, the summits, and the streams,In one broad blaze expands its golden glowOn all that answers to its glance below;Yet, changed on earth, each far reflected rayBraids with fresh hues the shining brow of day;Now, clothed in blushes by the painted flowers,Tracks on their cheeks the rosy-fingered hours;Now, lost in shades, whose dark entangled leavesDrip at the noontide from their pendent eaves,Fades into gloom, or gleams in light againFrom every dew-drop on the jewelled plain.

We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave,Reflect the light our common nature gave,But every sunbeam, falling from her throne,Wears on our hearts some coloring of our ownChilled in the slave, and burning in the free,Like the sealed cavern by the sparkling sea;Lost, like the lightning in the sullen clod,Or shedding radiance, like the smiles of God;Pure, pale in Virtue, as the star above,Or quivering roseate on the leaves of Love;Glaring like noontide, where it glows uponAmbition's sands,--the desert in the sun,--Or soft suffusing o'er the varied sceneLife's common coloring,--intellectual green.

Thus Heaven, repeating its material plan,Arched over all the rainbow mind of man;But he who, blind to universal laws,Sees but effects, unconscious of their cause,--Believes each image in itself is bright,Not robed in drapery of reflected light,--Is like the rustic who, amidst his toil,Has found some crystal in his meagre soil,And, lost in rapture, thinks for him aloneEarth worked her wonders on the sparkling stone,Nor dreams that Nature, with as nice a line,Carved countless angles through the boundless mine.

Thus err the many, who, entranced to findUnwonted lustre in some clearer mind,Believe that Genius sets the laws at naughtWhich chain the pinions of our wildest thought;Untaught to measure, with the eye of art,The wandering fancy or the wayward heart;Who match the little only with the less,And gaze in rapture at its slight excess,Proud of a pebble, as the brightest gemWhose light might crown an emperor's diadem.

And, most of all, the pure ethereal fireWhich seems to radiate from the poet's lyreIs to the world a mystery and a charm,An AEgis wielded on a mortal's arm,While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,Usurped his Maker's title--to create;He, whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,What others feel more fitly can express,Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own.

There breathes no being but has some pretenceTo that fine instinct called poetic senseThe rudest savage, roaming through the wild;The simplest rustic, bending o'er his child;The infant, listening to the warbling bird;The mother, smiling at its half-formed word;The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large;The girl, turned matron to her babe-like charge;The freeman, casting with unpurchased handThe vote that shakes the turret of the land;The slave, who, slumbering on his rusted chain,Dreams of the palm-trees on his burning plain;The hot-cheeked reveller, tossing down the wine,To join the chorus pealing "Auld lang syne";The gentle maid, whose azure eye grows dim,While Heaven is listening to her evening hymn;The jewelled beauty, when her steps draw nearThe circling dance and dazzling chandelier;E'en trembling age, when Spring's renewing airWaves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair;--All, all are glowing with the inward flame,Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name,While, unenbalmed, the silent dreamer dies,His memory passing with his smiles and sighs!

If glorious visions, born for all mankind,The bright auroras of our twilight mind;If fancies, varying as the shapes that lieStained on the windows of the sunset sky;If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;If passions, following with the winds that urgeEarth's wildest wanderer to her farthest verge;--If these on all some transient hours bestowOf rapture tingling with its hectic glow,Then all are poets; and if earth had rolledHer myriad centuries, and her doom were told,Each moaning billow of her shoreless waveWould wail its requiem o'er a poet's grave!

If to embody in a breathing wordTones that the spirit trembled when it heard;To fix the image all unveiled and warm,And carve in language its ethereal form,So pure, so perfect, that the lines expressNo meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;To feel that art, in living truth, has taughtOurselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;--If this alone bestow the right to claimThe deathless garland and the sacred name,Then none are poets save the saints on high,Whose harps can murmur all that words deny!

But though to none is granted to revealIn perfect semblance all that each may feel,As withered flowers recall forgotten love,So, warmed to life, our faded passions moveIn every line, where kindling fancy throwsThe gleam of pleasures or the shade of woes.

When, schooled by time, the stately queen of artHad smoothed the pathways leading to the heart,Assumed her measured tread, her solemn tone,And round her courts the clouds of fable thrown,The wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,And wondering earth proclaimed the Muse divine.Yet if her votaries had but dared profaneThe mystic symbols of her sacred reign,How had they smiled beneath the veil to findWhat slender threads can chain the mighty mind!

Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,And verse bestows the varnish and the frame;Our grating English, whose Teutonic jarShakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car,Fits like mosaic in the lines that girdFast in its place each many-angled word;From Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide,As once they melted on the Teian tide,And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills againFrom Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plainThe proud heroic, with, its pulse-like beat,Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,Where waves on waves in long succession pour,Till the ninth billow melts along the shore;The lonely spirit of the mournful lay,Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray,In sable plumage slowly drifts along,On eagle pinion, through the air of song;The glittering lyric bounds elastic by,With flashing ringlets and exulting eye,While every image, in her airy whirl,Gleams like a diamond on a dancing girl!

Born with mankind, with man's expanded rangeAnd varying fates the poet's numbers change;Thus in his history may we hope to findSome clearer epochs of the poet's mind,As from the cradle of its birth we trace,Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal race.