Man of the mighty days-and equal to the days! Thou from the prairies !-tangled and many-vein'd and hard has been thy part, To admiration has it been enacted ! RED JACKET (FROM ALOFT.) [Impromptu on Buffalo City's monument to, and re-burial of the old Iroquois orator, October 9, 1884.] Upon this scene, this show, Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth, (Nor in caprice alone-some grains of deepest meaning,) Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds' blended shapes, As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill'd with its soul, Product of Nature's sun, stars, earth direct—a towering human form, In hunting-shirt of film, arm'd with the rifle, a half-ironical smile curving its phantom lips, Like one of Ossian's ghosts looks down. WASHINGTON'S MONUMENT, FEBRUARY, 1885. Ah, not this marble, dead and cold: Far from its base and shaft expanding—the round zones circling, comprehending, Thou, Washington, art all the world's, the continents' entirenot yours alone, America, Europe's as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer's cot, Or frozen North, or sultry South-the African's-the Arab's in his tent, Old Asia's there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins; (Greets the antique the hero new? 'tis but the same-the heir legitimate, continued ever, The indomitable heart and arm-proofs of the never-broken line, Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same-e'en in defeat defeated not, the same :) Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night, Through teeming cities' streets, indoors or out, factories or farms, Now, or to come, or past-where patriot wills existed or exist, Wherever Freedom, pois'd by Toleration, sway'd by Law, Stands or is rising thy true monument. OF THAT BLITHE THROAT OF THINE. [More than eighty-three degrees north· about a good day's steaming distance to the Pole by one of our fast oceaners in clear water - Greely the explorer heard the song of a single snow-bird merrily sounding over the desolation.] Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank, I'll mind the lesson, solitary bird-let me too welcome chilling drifts, E'en the profoundest chill, as now-a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv'd, Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay-(cold, cold, O cold!) These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet, For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last; Not summer's zones alone-not chants of youth, or south's warm tides alone, But held by sluggish floes, pack'd in the northern ice, the cumulus of years, These with gay heart I also sing. BROADWAY. What hurrying human tides, or day or night! What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters! What curious questioning glances-glints of love! Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration! Thou portal-thou arena-thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups! (Could but thy flagstones, curbs, façades, tell their inimitable tales; Thy windows rich, and huge hotels-thy side-walks wide ;) Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet! Thou, like the parti-colored world itself-like infinite, teeming, mocking life! Thou visor'd, vast, unspeakable show and lesson ! TO GET THE FINAL LILT OF SONGS. To get the final lilt of songs, To penetrate the inmost lore of poets-to know the mighty ones, Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Tennyson, Emerson; To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt to truly understand, To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price, Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences. OLD SALT KOSSABONE. Far back, related on my mother's side, Old Salt Kossabone, I'll tell you how he died: (Had been a sailor all his life-was nearly 90-lived with his married grandchild, Jenny; House of a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and stretch to open sea ;) The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his regular custom, In his great arm chair by the window seated, (Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,) Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself -And now the close of all: One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long-crosstides and much wrong going, At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering, And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering, cleaving, as he watches, "She's free-she's on her destination"-these the last words— when Jenny came, he sat there dead, Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother's side, far back. THE DEAD TENOR. As down the stage again, With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable, Back from the fading lessons of the past, I'd call, I'd tell and own, How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee! (So firm-so liquid-soft-again that tremulous, manly timbre! The perfect singing voice-deepest of all to me the lesson-trial and test of all:) How through those strains distill'd—how the rapt ears, the soul of me, absorbing Fernando's heart, Manrico's passionate call, Ernani's, sweet Gennaro's, I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting, Freedom's and Love's and Faith's unloos'd cantabile, (As perfume's, color's, sunlight's correlation :) From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor, A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel'd earth, To memory of thee. CONTINUITIES. [From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist.] Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, No birth, identity, form-no object of the world. Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. The body, sluggish, aged, cold-the embers left from earlier fires, The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again; The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns, YONNONDIO. [The sense of the word is lament for the aborigines. It is an Iroquois term; and has been used for a personal name.] A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge, Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night, I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors, As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the twilight, (Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls! No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future :) To-day gives place, and fades-the cities, farms, factories fade; A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air for a moment, Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost. LIFE. Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man ; (Have former armies fail'd? then we send fresh armies-and fresh again ;) Ever the grappled mystery of all earth's ages old or new; Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the loud applause; Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last; "GOING SOMEWHERE." My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend, (Now buried in an English grave—and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake,) Ended our talk-"The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern learning, intuitions deep, "Of all Geologies-Histories—of all Astronomy-of Evolution, Metaphysics all, "Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering, "Life, life an endless march, an endless army, (no halt, but it is duly over,) "The world, the race, the soul-in space and time the universes, "All bound as is befitting each-all surely going somewhere." From the 1867 edition L. of G. SMALL THE THEME OF MY CHANT. Small the theme of my Chant, yet the greatest-namely, One'sSelf-a simple, separate person. That, for the use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse ;-I say the Form complete is worthier far. The Female equally with the Male, I sing. Nor cease at the theme of One's-Self. I speak the word of the modern, the word En-Masse. My Days I sing, and the Lands-with interstice I knew of hapless War. (O friend, whoe'er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return. And thus upon our journey, footing the road, and more than once, and link'd together let us go.) TRUE CONQUERORS. Old farmers, travelers, workmen (no matter how crippled or bent,) Old sailors, out of many a perilous voyage, storm and wreck, Old soldiers from campaigns, with all their wounds, defeats and scars; Enough that they've survived at all-long life's unflinching ones! Forth from their struggles, trials, fights, to have emerged at all —in that alone, True conquerors o'er all the rest. |