Comes that cheerful troubadour, This mound shall throb his face before, It rose a bubble from the plain. Shall not be forms of stars, but stars, All his county, sea and land, I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding; "See there the grim gray rounding Of the bullet of the earth Whereon ye sail, Tumbling steep In the uncontinented deep." He looks on that, and he turns pale. Cooped in a ship he cannot steer, Risk or ruin he must share. I scowl on him with my cloud, With my north wind chill his blood; Then, at last, I let him down As in the old poetic fame The gods are blind and lame, And the simular despite Betrays the more abounding might, So call not waste that barren cone Above the floral zone, Where forests starve: It is pure use; What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse? Ages are thy days, Thou grand affirmer of the present tense, And type of permanence! Firm ensign of the fatal Being, Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief, That will not bide the seeing! Hither we bring Our insect miseries to thy rocks; Where flowers each stone rosette and metope brave; Still is the haughty pile erect Of the old building Intellect. Complement of human kind, O barren mound, thy plenties fill! Thou art silent and sedate. Thou, in our astronomy An opaker star, Seen haply from afar, Above the horizon's hoop, A moment, by the railway troop, As o'er some bolder height they speed, By circumspect ambition, By errant gain, By feasters and the frivolous, — Recallest us, And makest sane. Mute orator! well skilled to plead, And send conviction without phrase, The shortness of our days, And promise, on thy Founder's truth, FABLE. THE mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter 'Little Prig;' Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, I'll not deny you make A very pretty squirrel track; Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, ODE. INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING. THOUGH loath to grieve The evil time's sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest's cant, Or statesman's rant. |