No More Learning

If I but deserve you,
I keep all you grant to him and more:
You shall make me dare what others dare not,
You shall keep my nature pure as snow,
And a light from you that others share not
Shall transfigure me where'er I go.

Let me be your thrall! However lowly
Be the bondsman's service I can do,
Loyalty shall make it high and holy;
Naught can be unworthy, done for you.
Men shall say, 'A lover of this fashion
Such an icy mistress well beseems. '
Women say, 'Could we deserve such passion,
We might be the marvel that he dreams. '



ON HEARING A SONATA OF BEETHOVEN'S PLAYED IN THE NEXT ROOM

Unseen Musician, thou art sure to please,
For those same notes in happier days I heard
Poured by dear hands that long have never stirred
Yet now again for me delight the keys:
Ah me, to strong illusions such as these
What are Life's solid things? The walls that gird
Our senses, lo, a casual scent or word
Levels, and it is the soul that hears and sees!
Play on, dear girl, and many be the years
Ere some grayhaired survivor sit like me
And, for thy largess pay a meed of tears
Unto another who, beyond the sea
Of Time and Change, perhaps not sadly hears
A music in this verse undreamed by thee!



VERSES

INTENDED TO GO WITH A POSSET DISH TO MY DEAR LITTLE GODDAUGHTER, 1882

In good old times, which means, you know,
The time men wasted long ago,
And we must blame our brains or mood
If that we squander seems less good,
In those blest days when wish was act
And fancy dreamed itself to fact,
Godfathers used to fill with guineas
The cups they gave their pickaninnies,
Performing functions at the chrism
Not mentioned in the Catechism.
No millioner, poor I fill up
With wishes my more modest cup,
Though had I Amalthea's horn
It should be hers the newly born.
Nay, shudder not! I should bestow it
So brimming full she couldn't blow it.
Wishes aren't horses: true, but still
There are worse roadsters than goodwill.
And so I wish my darling health,
And just to round my couplet, wealth,
With faith enough to bridge the chasm
'Twixt Genesis and Protoplasm,
And bear her o'er life's current vext
From this world to a better next,
Where the full glow of God puts out
Poor reason's farthing candle, Doubt.
I've wished her healthy, wealthy, wise,
What more can godfather devise?
But since there's room for countless wishes
In these old-fashioned posset dishes,
I'll wish her from my plenteous store
Of those commodities two more,
Her father's wit, veined through and through
With tenderness that Watts (but whew!
Celia's aflame, I mean no stricture
On his Sir Josh-surpassing picture)--
I wish her next, and 'tis the soul
Of all I've dropt into the bowl,
Her mother's beauty--nay, but two
So fair at once would never do.
Then let her but the half possess,
Troy was besieged ten years for less.
Now if there's any truth in Darwin,
And we from what was, all we are win,
I simply wish the child to be
A sample of Heredity,
Enjoying to the full extent
Life's best, the Unearned Increment
Which Fate her Godfather to flout
Gave _him_ in legacies of gout.
Thus, then, the cup is duly filled;
Walk steady, dear, lest all be spilled.



ON A BUST OF GENERAL GRANT

Strong, simple, silent are the [steadfast] laws
That sway this universe, of none withstood,
Unconscious of man's outcries or applause,
Or what man deems his evil or his good;
And when the Fates ally them with a cause
That wallows in the sea-trough and seems lost,
Drifting in danger of the reefs and sands
Of shallow counsels, this way, that way, tost,
Strength, silence, simpleness, of these three strands
They twist the cable shall the world hold fast
To where its anchors clutch the bed-rock of the Past.

Strong, simple, silent, therefore such was he
Who helped us in our need; the eternal law
That who can saddle Opportunity
Is God's elect, though many a mortal flaw
May minish him in eyes that closely see,
Was verified in him: what need we say
Of one who made success where others failed,
Who, with no light save that of common day,
Struck hard, and still struck on till Fortune quailed,
But that (so sift the Norns) a desperate van
Ne'er fell at last to one who was not wholly man.

A face all prose where Time's [benignant] haze
Softens no raw edge yet, nor makes all fair
With the beguiling light of vanished days;
This is relentless granite, bleak and bare,
Roughhewn, and scornful of aesthetic phrase;
Nothing is here for fancy, naught for dreams,
The Present's hard uncompromising light
Accents all vulgar outlines, flaws, and seams,
Yet vindicates some pristine natural right
O'ertopping that hereditary grace
Which marks the gain or loss of some time-fondled race.

So Marius looked, methinks, and Cromwell so,
Not in the purple born, to those they led
Nearer for that and costlier to the foe,
New moulders of old forms, by nature bred
The exhaustless life of manhood's seeds to show,
Let but the ploughshare of portentous times
Strike deep enough to reach them where they lie;
Despair and danger are their fostering climes,
And their best sun bursts from a stormy sky:
He was our man of men, nor would abate
The utmost due manhood could claim of fate.

Nothing Ideal, a plain-people's man
At the first glance, a more deliberate ken
Finds type primeval, theirs in whose veins ran
Such blood as quelled the dragon In his den,
Made harmless fields, and better worlds began:
He came grim-silent, saw and did the deed
That was to do; in his master-grip
Our sword flashed joy; no skill of words could breed
Such sure conviction as that close-clamped lip;
He slew our dragon, nor, so seemed it, knew
He had done more than any simplest man might do.
Yet did this man, war-tempered, stern as steel
Where steel opposed, prove soft in civil sway;
The hand hilt-hardened had lost tact to feel
The world's base coin, and glozing knaves made prey
Of him and of the entrusted Commonweal;
So Truth insists and will not be denied.
We turn our eyes away, and so will Fame,
As if in his last battle he had died
Victor for us and spotless of all blame,
Doer of hopeless tasks which praters shirk,
One of those still plain men that do the world's rough work.




APPENDIX


I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND SERIES OF BIGLOW PAPERS

[Lowell took occasion, when collecting in a book the several numbers of
the second series of 'Biglow Papers,' which had appeared In the
'Atlantic Monthly,' to prefix an essay which not only gave a personal
narrative of the origin of the whole scheme, but particularly dwelt upon
the use in literature of the homely dialect in which the poems were
couched. In this Cabinet Edition it has seemed expedient to print the
Introduction here rather than in immediate connection with the poems
themselves. ]

Though prefaces seem of late to have fallen under some reproach, they
have at least this advantage, that they set us again on the feet of our
personal consciousness and rescue us from the gregarious mock-modesty or
cowardice of that _we_ which shrills feebly throughout modern literature
like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house that has passed its
prime.