TO BAYARD TAYLOR. To range, deep-wrapt, along a heavenly height, To loiter down lone alleys of delight, And hear the beating of the hearts of trees, And think the thoughts that lilies speak in white By greenwood pools and pleasant passages; With healthy dreams a-dream in flesh and soul, From out the forest to the open knoll Where much thyme is, whence blissful leagues of lawn Betwixt the fringing woods to southward roll By tender inclinations; mad with dawn, Ablaze with fires that flame in silver dew When each small globe doth glass the morning-star, Long ere the sun, sweet-smitten through and through With dappled revelations read afar, Suffused with saintly ecstasies of blue To fare thus fervid to what daily toil Not drudge unriched, as grain rots back to soil,— No profit out of death,-going, yet still at stand, Giving what life is here in hand to-day For that that's in to-morrow's bush, perchance,— Of this year's harvest none in the barn to lay, All sowed for next year's crop,-a dull advance In curves that come but by another way Back to the start,-a thriftless thrift of ants Whose winter wastes their summer; O my Friend, Where amiabler winds the whistle heed, To sail with Shelley o'er a bluer sea, And mark Prometheus, from his fetters freed, While bursts the flame from out his eager reed Or, prone with Plato, Shakspere and a throng Or, mingling free in choirs of German song, To learn of Goethe's life from Goethe's lips; These, these are thine, and we, who still are dead, Not to the dark of sense, the blinking brain, The cross of love, the wrench of faith, the shame By all the mortal space 'twixt heaven and hell, On others' plots, the tricks that passion plays The endless grief of art, the sneer that says, The war, the wound, the groan, the funeral pall Not into these, bright spirit, do we yearn To bring thee back, but oh, to be, to be Unbound of all these gyves, to stretch, to spurn The dark from off our dolorous lids, to see Our spark, Conjecture, blaze and sunwise burn, And suddenly to stand again by thee! Ah, not for us, not yet, by thee to stand: For us, the fret, the dark, the thorn, the chill; For us, to call across unto thy Land, "Friend, get thee to the ministrels' holy hill, And kiss those brethren for us, mouth and hand, And make our duty to our master Will." BALTIMORE, 1879. 1 A DEDICATION. TO CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. As Love will carve dear names upon a tree, So thought I thine with loving text to set But, writing it, my tears begin to fall— This wild-rose stem for thy large name's too small! Nay, still my trembling hands are fain, are fain Perchance such folk as mark the blur and stain Or, haply these o'er-woundings of the stem |