And if at times an evil strain, To lawless love appealing, Broke in upon the sweet refrain Of pure and healthful feeling,
It died upon the eye and ear, No inward answer gaining; No heart had I to see or hear The discord and the staining.
Let those who never erred forget His worth, in vain bewailings; Sweet Soul of Song! I own my debt Uncancelled by his failings!
Lament who will the ribald line Which tells his lapse from duty, How kissed the maddening lips of wine Or wanton ones of beauty;
But think, while falls that shade between The erring one and Heaven, That he who loved like Magdalen, Like her may be forgiven.
Not his the song whose thunderous chime Eternal echoes render; The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme, And Milton's starry splendor!
But who his human heart has laid To Nature's bosom nearer?
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid To love a tribute dearer?
Through all his tuneful art, how strong The human feeling gushes The very moonlight of his song Is warm with smiles and blushes!
Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme, But spare his Highland Mary!
1854.
TO GEORGE B. CHEEVER
So spake Esaias: so, in words of flame, Tekoa's prophet-herdsman smote with blame The traffickers in men, and put to shame, All earth and heaven before, The sacerdotal robbers of the poor.
All the dread Scripture lives for thee again, To smite like lightning on the hands profane Lifted to bless the slave-whip and the chain.
Once more the old Hebrew tongue Bends with the shafts of God a bow new-strung!
Take up the mantle which the prophets wore; Warn with their warnings, show the Christ once more Bound, scourged, and crucified in His blameless poor; And shake above our land The unquenched bolts that blazed in Hosea's hand!
Not vainly shalt thou cast upon our years The solemn burdens of the Orient seers, And smite with truth a guilty nation's ears.
Mightier was Luther's word Than Seckingen's mailed arm or Hutton's sword!
1858.
TO JAMES T. FIELDS
ON A BLANK LEAF OF "POEMS PRINTED, NOT PUBLISHED."
Well thought! who would not rather hear The songs to Love and Friendship sung Than those which move the stranger's tongue, And feed his unselected ear?
Our social joys are more than fame; Life withers in the public look.
Why mount the pillory of a book, Or barter comfort for a name?
Who in a house of glass would dwell, With curious eyes at every pane?
To ring him in and out again, Who wants the public crier's bell?
To see the angel in one's way, Who wants to play the ass's part,-- Bear on his back the wizard Art, And in his service speak or bray?
And who his manly locks would shave, And quench the eyes of common sense, To share the noisy recompense That mocked the shorn and blinded slave?
The heart has needs beyond the head, And, starving in the plenitude Of strange gifts, craves its common food,-- Our human nature's daily bread.
We are but men: no gods are we, To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked in self-complacency.
Better his lot whose axe is swung In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl's Who by the him her spindle whirls And sings the songs that Luther sung,
Than his who, old, and cold, and vain, At Weimar sat, a demigod, And bowed with Jove's imperial nod His votaries in and out again!
Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet!
Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!
Who envies him who feeds on air The icy splendor of his seat?
I see your Alps, above me, cut The dark, cold sky; and dim and lone I see ye sitting,--stone on stone,-- With human senses dulled and shut.
I could not reach you, if I would, Nor sit among your cloudy shapes; And (spare the fable of the grapes And fox) I would not if I could.
Keep to your lofty pedestals!
The safer plain below I choose Who never wins can rarely lose, Who never climbs as rarely falls.
Let such as love the eagle's scream Divide with him his home of ice For me shall gentler notes suffice,-- The valley-song of bird and stream;
The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees, The flail-beat chiming far away, The cattle-low, at shut of day, The voice of God in leaf and breeze;
Then lend thy hand, my wiser friend, And help me to the vales below, (In truth, I have not far to go,) Where sweet with flowers the fields extend.
1858.
THE MEMORY OF BURNS.
Read at the Boston celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo., 1859. In my absence these lines were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
How sweetly come the holy psalms From saints and martyrs down, The waving of triumphal palms Above the thorny crown The choral praise, the chanted prayers From harps by angels strung, The hunted Cameron's mountain airs, The hymns that Luther sung!
Yet, jarring not the heavenly notes, The sounds of earth are heard, As through the open minster floats The song of breeze and bird Not less the wonder of the sky That daisies bloom below; The brook sings on, though loud and high The cloudy organs blow!
And, if the tender ear be jarred That, haply, hears by turns The saintly harp of Olney's bard, The pastoral pipe of Burns, No discord mars His perfect plan Who gave them both a tongue; For he who sings the love of man The love of God hath sung!
To-day be every fault forgiven Of him in whom we joy We take, with thanks, the gold of Heaven And leave the earth's alloy.