No More Learning

Through all your various ranks and fates
He opens doors to duty,
And he that waits there at your gates
Was servant of his Beauty.


XVII

'The Earth must richer sap secrete,
(Could ye in time but know it! ) 130
Must juice concrete with fiercer heat,
Ere she can make her poet;
Long generations go and come,
At last she bears a singer,
For ages dumb of senses numb
The compensation-bringer!


XVIII

'Her cheaper broods in palaces
She raises under glasses,
But souls like these, heav'n's hostages,
Spring shelterless as grasses: 140
They share Earth's blessing and her bane,
The common sun and shower;
What makes your pain to them is gain,
Your weakness is their power.


XIX

'These larger hearts must feel the rolls
Of stormier-waved temptation;
These star-wide souls between their poles
Bear zones of tropic passion.
He loved much! --that is gospel good,
Howe'er the text you handle; 150
From common wood the cross was hewed,
By love turned priceless sandal.


XX

'If scant his service at the kirk,
He _paters_ heard and _aves_
From choirs that lurk in hedge and birk,
From blackbird and from mavis;
The cowering mouse, poor unroofed thing,
In him found Mercy's angel;
The daisy's ring brought every spring
To him love's fresh evangel! 160


XXI

'Not he the threatening texts who deals
Is highest 'mong the preachers,
But he who feels the woes and weals
Of all God's wandering creatures.
He doth good work whose heart can find
The spirit 'neath the letter;
Who makes his kind of happier mind,
Leaves wiser men and better.


XXII

'They make Religion be abhorred
Who round with darkness gulf her, 170
And think no word can please the Lord
Unless it smell of sulphur,
Dear Poet-heart, that childlike guessed
The Father's loving kindness,
Come now to rest! Thou didst his hest,
If haply 'twas in blindness! '


XXIII

Then leapt heaven's portals wide apart,
And at their golden thunder
With sudden start I woke, my heart
Still throbbing-full of wonder. 180
'Father,' I said, ''tis known to Thee
How Thou thy Saints preparest;
But this I see,--Saint Charity
Is still the first and fairest! '


XXIV

Dear Bard and Brother!
let who may
Against thy faults be railing,
(Though far, I pray, from us be they
That never had a failing! )
One toast I'll give, and that not long,
Which thou wouldst pledge if present, 190
To him whose song, in nature strong,
Makes man of prince and peasant!



IN AN ALBUM

The misspelt scrawl, upon the wall
By some Pompeian idler traced,
In ashes packed (ironic fact! )
Lies eighteen centuries uneffaced,
While many a page of bard and sage,
Deemed once mankind's immortal gain,
Lost from Time's ark, leaves no more mark
Than a keel's furrow through the main.

O Chance and Change! our buzz's range
Is scarcely wider than a fly's;
Then let us play at fame to-day,
To-morrow be unknown and wise;
And while the fair beg locks of hair,
And autographs, and Lord knows what,
Quick! let us scratch our moment's match,
Make our brief blaze, and be forgot!

Too pressed to wait, upon her slate
Fame writes a name or two in doubt;
Scarce written, these no longer please,
And her own finger rubs them out:
It may ensue, fair girl, that you
Years hence this yellowing leaf may see,
And put to task, your memory ask
In vain, 'This Lowell, who was he? '



AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 1866

IN ACKNOWLEDGING A TOAST TO THE SMITH PROFESSOR

I rise, Mr. Chairman, as both of us know,
With the impromptu I promised you three weeks ago,
Dragged up to my doom by your might and my mane,
To do what I vowed I'd do never again:
And I feel like your good honest dough when possest
By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast.
'You must rise,' says the leaven. 'I can't,' says the dough;
'Just examine my bumps, and you'll see it's no go. '
'But you must,' the tormentor insists, ''tis all right;
You must rise when I bid you, and, what's more, be light. ' 10

'Tis a dreadful oppression, this making men speak
What they're sure to be sorry for all the next week;
Some poor stick requesting, like Aaron's, to bud
Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood,
As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on
Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton.

They say it is wholesome to rise with the sun,
And I dare say it may be if not overdone;
(I think it was Thomson who made the remark
'Twas an excellent thing in its way--for a lark;) 20
But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting
On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating,
With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow
As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo,
Undercontract to raise anerithmon gelasma
With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma,
And jokes not much younger than Jethro's phylacteries,
Is something I leave you yourselves to characterize.

I've a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech,
Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach, 30
Swerving this way and that as the wave of the moment
Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim's foam on 't,
And leaving on memory's rim just a sense
Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense;
Not poetry,--no, not quite that, but as good,
A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.