Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall; cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses; Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are; Thrive, cities bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers! Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual! Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting! We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all; We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids; Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality; Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves. You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices! We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward; Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us; We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us; We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also; You furnish your parts toward eternity; Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. NIGHT AND DEATH. IGHT on the prairies. I. The supper is over—the fire on the ground burns low; The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapped in their blankets; I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized before. Now I absorb immortality and peace, I admire death, and test propositions. How plenteous! How spiritual! How resumé ! The same Old Man and Soul—the same old aspirations, and the same content. 2. I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited, I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes. Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will measure myself by them; And now, touched with the lives of other globes, arrived as far along as those of the earth, Or waiting to arrive, or passed on further than those of the earth, I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life, Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive. 3. OI see now that life cannot exhibit all to me—as the day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death. ELEMENTAL DRIFTS. I. E LEMENTAL drifts! O I wish I could impress others as you and the waves have just been impressing me. As I ebbed with an ebb. of the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walked where the sea-ripples wash you, Paumanok, Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old Mother endlessly cries for her cast aways, I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Alone, held by this eternal self of me, out of the pride of which I have uttered my poems, Was seized by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, In the rim, the sediment, that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. Fascinated, my eyes, reverting from the south, dropped, to follow those slender winrows, Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the seagluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide; Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok, there and then, as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me, you fish-shaped Island, As I walked with that eternal self of me, seeking types. 2. As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wrecked, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify, at the utmost, a little washed-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. O baffled, baulked, bent to the very earth, Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, |