Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantlehem.

Come back, then, noble pride, for 't is her dower!

How could poet ever tower,

If his passions, hopes, and fears,
If his triumphs and his tears,

Kept not measure with his people? 380 Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and waves!

Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple !

Banners, adance with triumph, bend your

exaltation

XII

down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!

Thy God, in these distempered days, Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways,

And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace!

410

Bow down in prayer and praise ! No poorest in thy borders but may now Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow.

O Beautiful! my country! ours once more !

Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, And letting thy set lips,

Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare,
What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond com-
pare?

What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee,

421

Down 'mid the tangled roots of things
That coil about the central fire,
I seek for that which giveth wings
To stoop, not soar, to my desire.

Sometimes I hear, as 't were a sigh, The sea's deep yearning far above, 'Thou hast the secret not,' I cry,

'In deeper deeps is hid my Love.'

They think I burrow from the sun, In darkness, all alone, and weak; Such loss were gain if He were won, For 't is the sun's own Sun I seek.

'The earth,' they murmur, is the tomb
That vainly sought his life to prison;
Why grovel longer in the gloom?
He is not here; he hath arisen.'

More life for me where he hath lain

Hidden while ye believed him dead,

1 See Lowell's letter sent with these verses, February 27, 1867, in the Letters, vol. i, pp. 378, 379. In this letter a stanza was added to the poem:

A gift of symbol-flowers I meant to bring,
White for thy candor, for thy kindness red;
But Nature here denies them to the Spring,
And in forced blooms an odorous warmth will cling
Not artless: take this bunch of verse instead.

(Life of Longfellow, vol. iii, p. 84.)

'COME forth!' my catbird calls to me, 'And hear me sing a cavatina

1 I have not felt in the mood to do much during my imprisonment. One little poem I have written, The Nightingale in the Study.' 'T is a dialogue between my catbird and me- he calling me out of doors, I giving my better reasons for staying within. Of course my nightingale is Calderon. (LOWELL, in a letter to Professor C. E. Norton, July 8, 1867. Lowell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. i, p. 390.)

On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out!" with me the oriole cries,
Escape the demon that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.'

Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Hast poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

30

To which I hold a season-ticket, 'A season-ticket cheaply bought With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries, 'Deem me not faithless, if all day Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger. 40

'A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

'I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me,

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,
But made us all feeling and voice?
When we went with the winds in their
blowing,

When Nature and we were peers,
And we seemed to share in the flowing

Of the inexhaustible years?

30

Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write

His word or two, and then comes night.

'Lo, time and space enough,' we cry,
To write an epic!' so we try
Our nibs upon the edge, and die.

Muse not which way the pen to hold,
Luck hates the slow and loves the bold,

Too fine for earth's sordid uses?

Have I heard, have I seen

All I feel, all I know?

Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been