Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be, And life pulsates in rock or tree. Saadi! so far thy words shall reach; Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech."
And thus to Saadi said the Muse; "Eat thou the bread which men refuse; Flee from the goods which from thee flee; Seek nothing; Fortune seeketh thee. Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep The midway of the eternal deep. Wish not to fill the isles with eyes To fetch thee birds of paradise. On thine orchard's edge belong All the brass of plume and song; Wise Ali's sunbright sayings pass For proverbs in the market-place; Through mountains bored by regal art Toil whistles as he drives his cart. Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind, A poet or a friend to find;
Behold, he watches at the door, Behold his shadow on the floor
Open innumerable doors,
The heaven where unveiled Allah pours The flood of truth, the flood of good, The seraph's and the cherub's food; Those doors are men; the pariah kind Admits thee to the perfect Mind. Seek not beyond thy cottage-wall Redeemer that can yield thee all. While thou sittest at thy door, On the desert's yellow floor, Listening to the grey-haired crones, Foolish gossips, ancient drones,— Saadi, see, they rise in stature To the height of mighty Nature, And the secret stands revealed Fraudulent Time in vain concealed, That blessed gods in servile masks Plied for thee thy household tasks.”
BLIGHT.
GIVE me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and pimpernel, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,— Oh that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun, And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions!
But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flower, And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names; for these were men, Were unitarians of the united world, And, wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell, They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say "Not in us;" And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant, and mineral, say "Not in us," And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain,
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due.
But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes, The stunted trees look sick, the summer short, Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay. And nothing thrives to reach its natural term; And life, shorn of its venerable length, Even at its greatest space, is a defeat, And dies in anger that it was a dupe, And, in its highest noon and wantonness, Is early frugal like a beggar's child: With most unhandsome calculation taught, Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims And prizes of ambition, checks its hand, Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped, Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.
DAUGHTER of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing,
Maketh all things softly smile,
Painteth pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Girls are peeling the sweet willow,
Poplar white, and Gilead-tree;
And troops of boys
Shouting with whoop and hilloa,
And hip hip three times three !
The air is full of whistlings bland; What was that I heard
Out of the hazy land?
Harp of the wind, or song of bird, Or clapping of shepherd's hands, Or vagrant booming of the air, Voice of a meteor lost in day? Such tidings of the starry sphere Can this elastic air convey. Or haply 'twas the cannonade Of the pent and darkened lake, Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade, Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break, Afflicted moan, and latest hold
Even unto May the iceberg cold.
Was it a squirrel's pettish bark, Or clarionet of jay? or hark
Where yon wedged line the nestor leads, Steering north with raucous cry
Through tracts and provinces of sky, Every night alighting down
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans By lonely lakes to men unknown. Come the tumult whence it will, Voice of sport, or rush of wings, It is a sound, it is a token, That the marble sleep is broken, And a change has passed on things.
Beneath the calm, within the light, A hid unruly appetite
Of swifter life, a surer hope,
Strains every sense to larger scope, Impatient to anticipate
The halting steps of aged Fate.
Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:
When Nature falters, fain would zeal
Grasp the felloes of her wheel,
And grasping give the orbs another whirl.
"Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball, And sun this frozen side!
Bring hither back the robin's call, Bring back the tulip's pride!"
Why chidest thou the tardy Spring? The hardy bunting does not chide; The blackbirds make the maples ring With social cheer and jubilee; The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee, The robins know the melting snow; The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed, Her nest beside the snowdrift weaves, Secure the osier yet will hide Her callow brood in mantling leaves; And thou, by science all undone, Why only must thy reason fail To see the southing of the sun?
. As we thaw frozen flesh with snow, So Spring will not, foolish fond, Mix polar night with tropic glow, Nor cloy us with unshaded sun, Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance; But she has the temperance
Of the gods, whereof she is one,
Masks her treasury of heat
Under east-winds crossed with sleet.
Plants and birds and humble creatures
Well accept her rule austere ; Titan-born, to hardy natures Cold is genial and dear.
As Southern wrath to Northern right Is but straw to anthracite ; As in the day of sacrifice When heroes piled the pyre The dismal Massachusetts ice Burned more than others' fire; So Spring guards with surface cold The garnered heat of ages old:
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