If to embody in a breathing word
Tones 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 express
No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;
To feel that art, in living truth, has taught
Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought; ·
If this alone bestow the right to claim
The deathless garland and the sacred name;
Then none are poets, save the saints on high,
Whose harps can murmur all that words deny.
So every grace that plastic language knows
To nameless poets its perfection owes.
The rough-hewn words to simplest thoughts confined
Were cut and polished in their nicer mind;
Caught on their edge, imagination's ray
Splits into rainbows, shooting far away; -
From sense to soul, from soul to sense, it flies,
And through all nature links analogies;
He who reads right will rarely look upon
A better poet than his lexicon.
OLIVER Wendell HolMES
STAY with me, Poesy! playmate of childhood!
Friend of my manhood! delight of my youth!
Roamer with me over valley and wildwood,
Searching for loveliness, groping for Truth.
Stay with me, dwell with me, spirit of Poesy;
Dark were the world if thy bloom should depart;
Glory would cease in the sunlight and starlight,
Freshness and courage would fade from my heart.
Stay with me, comfort me, now more than ever,
When years stealing over me lead me to doubt
If men, ay, and women, are all we believed them
When we two first wandered the green earth about!
Stay with me, strengthen me, soother, adorner,
Lest knowledge, not wisdom, should cumber my brain,
And tempt me to sit in the chair of the scorner,
And say, with sad Solomon, all things are vain.
Stay with me, lend me thy magical mirror,
Show me the darkness extinguished in light;
Show me to-day's little triumph of Error
Foiled by to-morrow's great triumph of Right!
Stay with me, nourish me, robe all creation
In colors celestial of amber and blue;
Magnify littleness, glorify commonness,
Pull down the false and establish the true.
Stay with me, Poesy! Let me not stagnate!
Despairing with fools, or believing with knaves,
That men must be either the one or the other, -
Victors or victims, oppressors or slaves!
Stay with me, cling to me, while there is life in me!
Lead me, assist me, direct and control!
Be in the shade what thou wert in the sunshine,
Source of true happiness, light of my soul !
(Suggested by "ALICE IN Wonderland.")
"POET, sit and sing to me;
Sing of how you make your rhymes,
Tweedledum and tweedledee,
I have tried it fifty times.
When I have a perfect sense,
Then I have imperfect sounds;
Vice versa! Tell me whence
You get both, I neither."
Cried the poet, "Don't you see
Easy 't is as rolling log,
Holding eel or catching flea,
Meeting friend or leaving grog!
No such matter should annoy,
Deep the poet never delves;
Take care of the sense, my boy,
And the sounds care for themselves."
"When we seek to explain our musical emotions, we look about for images calculated to excite similar emotions, and strive to convey through these images to others the effect produced by music on ourselves."— HAWEIS, Music and Morals.
WIND, and the sound of a sea
Heard in the night from afar,
Spending itself on an unknown shore,
Feeling its way o'er an unseen floor
Lighted by moon nor star;
Telling a tale to the listening ear
Of wounds and woes that the rolling year
Hath brought to the human heart;
Telling of passion and innermost pain,
Sinking and swooning, and growing again,
As the wind and the waves take part;
Lifting a voice to the voiceless skies,
Tender entreaties that faint for replies,
Pauses of sorrow that pass into sighs
Born of a secret despair;
Fluttering back on the clear tide of tone,
Gathering in force till the melody's grown
Strong to interpret the accents unknown
Haunting the dark fields of air;
Speaking the longings of life, the full soul's
Hidden desires in music that rolls
Wave-like in search of a shore ;
Eddies of harmony, floating around,
Widen in circles of lessening sound,
Die in the distance, till silence is found
And earth redemands us once more.
"THE world is very beautiful!" I said,
As, yesterday, beside the brimming stream,
Glad and alone, I watched the tremulous gleam
Slant through the wintry wood, green carpeted
With moss and fern and curving bramble spray,
And bronze the thousand russet margin-reeds,
And in the sparkling holly glint and play,
And kindle all the brier's flaming seeds.
"The world is very horrible!" I sigh,
As, in my wonted ways, to-day I tread
Chill streets, deformed with dim monotony,
Hiding strange mysteries of unknown dread,
The reeking court, the breathless fever-den,
The haunts where things unholy throng and brood: Grim crime, the fierce despair of strong-armed men, Child infamy, and shameless womanhood.
And men have looked upon this piteous thing,-
Blank lives unvisited by beauty's spell,
And said, "Let be: it is not meet to bring
Dreams of sweet freedom to the prison cell;
Sing them no songs of things all bright and fair,
Paint them no visions of the glad and free,
Lest with purged sights their miseries they see,
And through vain longings pass to blank despair."
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