Till, love completing what in awe began,
  From the rude savage dawns the thoughtful man.
 
 
  Then, oh, behold the Glorious comforter!
    Still bright’ning worlds but gladd’ning now the hearth,
  Or like the lustre of our nearest star,
    Fused in the common atmosphere of earth.
  It sports like hope upon the captive’s chain;
  Descends in dreams upon the couch of pain;
  To wonder’s realm allures the earnest child;
  To the chaste love refines the instinct wild;
  And as in waters the reflected beam,
  Still where we turn, glides with us up the stream,
  And while in truth the whole expanse is bright,
  Yields to each eye its own fond path of light,—
  So over life the rays of Genius fall,
  Give each his track because illuming all.
 

IV

FORGIVENESS TO THE ERRORS OF OUR BENEFACTORS

 
  Hence is that secret pardon we bestow
    In the true instinct of the grateful heart,
  Upon the Sons of Song.  The good they do
    In the clear world of their Uranian art
  Endures forever; while the evil done
    In the poor drama of their mortal scene,
  Is but a passing cloud before the sun;
    Space hath no record where the mist hath been.
  Boots it to us if Shakspeare erred like man?
    Why idly question that most mystic life?
  Eno’ the giver in his gifts to scan;
    To bless the sheaves with which thy fields are rife,
  Nor, blundering, guess through what obstructive clay
  The glorious corn-seed struggled up to day.
 

V

THE IDEAL IS NOT CONFINED TO POETS.—ALGERNON SIDNEY RECOGNIZES HIS IDEAL

IN LIBERTY, AND BELIEVES IN ITS TRIUMPH WHERE THE MERE PRACTICAL MAN

COULD BEHOLD BUT ITS RUINS; YET LIBERTY IN THIS WORLD MUST EVER BE AN

IDEAL, AND THE LAND THAT IT PROMISES CAN BE FOUND BUT IN DEATH

 
  But not to you alone, O Sons Of Song,
  The wings that float the loftier airs along.
  Whoever lifts us from the dust we are,
    Beyond the sensual to spiritual goals;
  Who from the MOMENT and the SELF afar
    By deathless deeds allures reluctant souls,
  Gives the warm life to what the Limner draws,—
  Plato but thought what godlike Cato was.⁴
  Recall the Wars of England’s giant-born,
    Is Elyot’s voice, is Hampden’s death in vain?
  Have all the meteors of the vernal morn
    But wasted light upon a frozen main?
  Where is that child of Carnage, Freedom, flown?
  The Sybarite lolls upon the martyr’s throne.
  Lewd, ribald jests succeed to solemn zeal;
  And things of silk to Cromwell’s men of steel.
  Cold are the hosts the tromps of Ireton thrilled,
  And hushed the senates Vane’s large presence filled.
  In what strong heart doth the old manhood dwell?
  Where art thou, Freedom?  Look! in Sidney’s cell!
  There still as stately stands the living Truth,
  Smiling on age as it had smiled on youth.
  Her forts dismantled, and her shrines o’erthrown,
  The headsman’s block her last dread altar-stone,
  No sanction left to Reason’s vulgar hope,
  Far from the wrecks expands her prophet’s scope.
  Millennial morns the tombs of Kedron gild,
  The hands of saints the glorious walls rebuild,—
  Till each foundation garnished with its gem,
  High o’er Gehenna flames Jerusalem!
  O thou blood-stained Ideal of the free,
  Whose breath is heard in clarions,—Liberty!
  Sublimer for thy grand illusions past,
  Thou spring’st to Heaven,—Religion at the last.
  Alike below, or commonwealths or thrones,
  Where’er men gather some crushed victim groans;
  Only in death thy real form we see,
  All life is bondage,—souls alone are free.
  Thus through the waste the wandering Hebrews went,
  Fire on the march, but cloud upon the tent.
  At last on Pisgah see the prophet stand,
  Before his vision spreads the PROMISED LAND;
  But where revealed the Canaan to his eye?—
  Upon the mountain he ascends to die.
 

VI

YET ALL HAVE TWO ESCAPES INTO THE IDEAL WORLD; NAMELY, MEMORY AND

HOPE.—EXAMPLE OF HOPE IN YOUTH, HOWEVER EXCLUDED FROM ACTION AND

DESIRE.—NAPOLEON’S SON

 
  Yet whatsoever be our bondage here,
  All have two portals to the phantom sphere.
  What hath not glided through those gates that ope
  Beyond the Hour, to MEMORY or to HOPE!
  Give Youth the Garden,—still it soars above,
  Seeks some far glory, some diviner love.
  Place Age amidst the Golgotha,—its eyes
  Still quit the graves, to rest upon the skies;
  And while the dust, unheeded, moulders there,
  Track some lost angel through cerulean air.
 
 
  Lo! where the Austrian binds, with formal chain,
  The crownless son of earth’s last Charlemagne,—
  Him, at whose birth laughed all the violet vales
    (While yet unfallen stood thy sovereign star,
  O Lucifer of nations).  Hark, the gales
    Swell with the shout from all the hosts, whose war
  Rended the Alps, and crimsoned Memphian Nile,—
    “Way for the coming of the Conqueror’s Son:
  Woe to the Merchant-Carthage of the Isle!
    Woe to the Scythian ice-world of the Don!
  O Thunder Lord, thy Lemnian bolts prepare,
  The Eagle’s eyry hath its eagle heir!”
   Hark, at that shout from north to south, gray Power
    Quails on its weak, hereditary thrones;
  And widowed mothers prophesy the hour
    Of future carnage to their cradled sons.
  What! shall our race to blood be thus consigned,
    And Ate claim an heirloom in mankind?
  Are these red lots unshaken in the urn?
  Years pass; approach, pale Questioner, and learn
  Chained to his rock, with brows that vainly frown,
  The fallen Titan sinks in darkness down!
  And sadly gazing through his gilded grate,
  Behold the child whose birth was as a fate!
  Far from the land in which his life began;
  Walled from the healthful air of hardy man;
  Reared by cold hearts, and watched by jealous eyes,
  His guardians jailers, and his comrades spies.
  Each trite convention courtly fears inspire
  To stint experience and to dwarf desire;
  Narrows the action to a puppet stage,
  And trains the eaglet to the starling’s cage.
  On the dejected brow and smileless cheek,
  What weary thought the languid lines bespeak;
  Till drop by drop, from jaded day to day,
  The sickly life-streams ooze themselves away.
  Yet oft in HOPE a boundless realm was thine,
    That vaguest Infinite,—the Dream of Fame;
  Son of the sword that first made kings divine,
    Heir to man’s grandest royalty,—a Name!
  Then didst thou burst upon the startled world,
  And keep the glorious promise of thy birth;
  Then were the wings that bear the bolt unfurled,
    A monarch’s voice cried, “Place upon the earth!”
   A new Philippi gained a second Rome,
  And the Son’s sword avenged the greater Caesar’s doom.
 

VII

EXAMPLE OF MEMORY AS LEADING TO THE IDEAL,—AMIDST LIFE HOWEVER HUMBLE, AND IN A MIND HOWEVER IGNORANT.—THE VILLAGE WIDOW

 
  But turn the eye to life’s sequestered vale
    And lowly roofs remote in hamlets green.
  Oft in my boyhood where the moss-grown pale
    Fenced quiet graves, a female form was seen;
  Each eve she sought the melancholy ground,
  And lingering paused, and wistful looked around.
  If yet some footstep rustled through the grass,
  Timorous she shrunk, and watched the shadow pass;
  Then, when the spot lay lone amidst the gloom,
  Crept to one grave too humble for a tomb,
  There silent bowed her face above the dead,
  For, if in prayer, the prayer was inly said;
  Still as the moonbeam, paused her quiet shade,
  Still as the moonbeam, through the yews to fade.
  Whose dust thus hallowed by so fond a care?
  What the grave saith not, let the heart declare.
    On yonder green two orphan children played;
  By yonder rill two plighted lovers strayed;
  In yonder shrine two lives were blent in one,
  And joy-bells chimed beneath a summer sun.
  Poor was their lot, their bread in labour found;
  No parent blessed them, and no kindred owned;
  They smiled to hear the wise their choice condemn;
  They loved—they loved—and love was wealth to them!
  Hark—one short week—again the holy bell!
  Still shone the sun; but dirge like boomed the knell,—
  The icy hand had severed breast from breast;
  Left life to toil, and summoned Death to rest.
  Full fifty years since then have passed away,
  Her cheek is furrowed, and her hair is gray.
  Yet, when she speaks of him (the times are rare),
  Hear in her voice how youth still trembles there.
  The very name of that young life that died
  Still heaves the bosom, and recalls the bride.
  Lone o’er the widow’s hearth those years have fled,
  The daily toil still wins the daily bread;
  No books deck sorrow with fantastic dyes;
  Her fond romance her woman heart supplies;
  And, haply in the few still moments given,
  (Day’s taskwork done), to memory, death, and heaven,
  To that unuttered poem may belong
  Thoughts of such pathos as had beggared song.
 

VIII

HENCE IN HOPE, MEMORY, AND PRAYER, ALL OF US ARE POETS

 
  Yes, while thou hopest, music fills the air,
    While thou rememberest, life reclothes the clod;
  While thou canst feel the electric chain of prayer,
    Breathe but a thought, and be a soul with God!
  Let not these forms of matter bound thine eye.
    He who the vanishing point of Human things
  Lifts from the landscape, lost amidst the sky,
    Has found the Ideal which the poet sings,
  Has pierced the pall around the senses thrown,
  And is himself a poet, though unknown.
 

IX

APPLICATION OF THE POEM TO THE TALE TO WHICH IT IS PREFIXED.—THE

RHINE,—ITS IDEAL CHARACTER IN ITS HISTORICAL AND LEGENDARY ASSOCIATIONS

 
  Eno’!—my song is closing, and to thee,
    Land of the North, I dedicate its lay;
  As I have done the simple tale to be
    The drama of this prelude!
                                    Faraway
  Rolls the swift Rhine beneath the starry ray;
  But to my ear its haunted waters sigh;
  Its moonlight mountains glimmer on my eye;
  On wave, on marge, as on a wizard’s glass,
  Imperial ghosts in dim procession pass;
  Lords of the wild, the first great Father-men,
  Their fane the hill-top, and their home the glen;
  Frowning they fade; a bridge of steel appears
  With frank-eyed Caesar smiling through the spears;
  The march moves onwards, and the mirror brings
  The Gothic crowns of Carlovingian kings
  Vanished alike!  The Hermit rears his Cross,
  And barbs neigh shrill, and plumes in tumult toss,
  While (knighthood’s sole sweet conquest from the Moor)
  Sings to Arabian lutes the Tourbadour.
    Not yet, not yet; still glide some lingering shades,
  Still breathe some murmurs as the starlight fades,
  Still from her rock I hear the Siren call,
  And see the tender ghost in Roland’s mouldering hall!
 

X

APPLICATION OF THE POEM CONTINUED.—THE IDEAL LENDS ITS AID TO THE MOST FAMILIAR AND THE MOST ACTUAL SORROW OF LIFE.—FICTION COMPARED TO SLEEP,—IT STRENGTHENS WHILE IT SOOTHES

 
  Trite were the tale I tell of love and doom,
  (Whose life hath loved not, whose not mourned a tomb?)
  But fiction draws a poetry from grief,
  As art its healing from the withered leaf.
  Play thou, sweet Fancy, round the sombre truth,
    Crown the sad Genius ere it lower the torch!
  When death the altar and the victim youth,
    Flutes fill the air, and garlands deck the porch.
  As down the river drifts the Pilgrim sail,
  Clothe the rude hill-tops, lull the Northern gale;
  With childlike lore the fatal course beguile,
  And brighten death with Love’s untiring smile.
  Along the banks let fairy forms be seen
  “By fountain clear, or spangled starlike sheen.”⁵
  Let sound and shape to which the sense is dull
  Haunt the soul opening on the Beautiful.
  And when at length, the symbol voyage done,
  Surviving Grief shrinks lonely from the sun,
  By tender types show Grief what memories bloom
  From lost delight, what fairies guard the tomb.
  Scorn not the dream, O world-worn; pause a while,
  New strength shall nerve thee as the dreams beguile,
  Stung by the rest, less far shall seem the goal!
  As sleep to life, so fiction to the soul.