No More Learning

To invest existence with a stately air,
Needs but to remember
That the acorn there
Is the egg of forests
For the upper air!





VIII.

LIFE'S TRADES.

It's such a little thing to weep,
So short a thing to sigh;
And yet by trades the size of these
We men and women die!





IX.

Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, 't is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode
Where hope and he part company, --
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker's cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.





X.

How still the bells in steeples stand,
Till, swollen with the sky,
They leap upon their silver feet
In frantic melody!





XI.

If the foolish call them 'flowers,'
Need the wiser tell?
If the savans 'classify' them,
It is just as well!

Those who read the Revelations
Must not criticise
Those who read the same edition
With beclouded eyes!

Could we stand with that old Moses
Canaan denied, --
Scan, like him, the stately landscape
On the other side, --

Doubtless we should deem superfluous
Many sciences
Not pursued by learned angels
In scholastic skies!
Low amid that glad _Belles lettres_
Grant that we may stand,
Stars, amid profound Galaxies,
At that grand 'Right hand'!





XII.

A SYLLABLE.

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable,
'T would crumble with the weight.





XIII.

PARTING.

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.





XIV.

ASPIRATION.

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.

The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king.





XV.

THE INEVITABLE.

While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
There is a fitting a dismay,
A fitting a despair.