I know not how, in other lands, What purple lights on Alpine snow! A dream alone to me is Arno's vale, And the Alhambra's halls are but a traveller's tale. VIII Yet, on life's current, he who drifts Is one with him who rows or sails; And he who wanders widest lifts 60 No more of beauty's jealous veils Than he who from his doorway sees The miracle of flowers and trees, Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air, And from cloud minarets hears the sunset call to prayer! IX The eye may well be glad that looks Where Pharpar's fountains rise and fall; But he who sees his native brooks Laugh in the sun, has seen them all. The marble palaces of Ind Rise round him in the snow and wind; 70 From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles, And Rome's cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles. X And thus it is my fancy blends The near at hand and far and rare; 1 With this and the following stanzas, compare Emerson's Written in Naples,' and the note on it; Lowell's 'An Invitation; Holmes's After a Lecture on Wordsworth;' and Whittier's 'To-': No sweeter bowers the bee delayed, A charmed life unknown to death, Are now and here: Dodona's shrine The Beauty which old Greece or Rome Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home; We need but eye and ear In all our daily walks to trace The outlines of incarnate grace, The hymns of gods to hear! Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt By the women o' Morble'ead!' 1 The story of Skipper Ireson was told to Whittier by a schoolmate from Marblehead, when he was a student in Haverhill Academy (see Pickard's Life, vol. ii, p. 409, and the poem 'A Sea Dream '), and he began to write the ballad at that time, in 1828. It was finished, and published in the second number of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1857. Lowell, then editor of the Atlantic, suggested the use of dialect in the refrain (see Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, pp. 417-418, and Lowell's Letters, the letter to Whittier of Nov. 4, 1857). Mr. Samuel Roads, Jr., in his History of Marblehead, published in 1879, tried to show that Captain Ireson was not responsible for the abandonment of the disabled ship. Whittier characteristically wrote to Mr. Roads: I have now no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ireson's ride is the correct one. My verse was founded solely on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of my early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead. I supposed the story to which it referred dated back at least a century. I knew nothing of the participators, and the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy. I am glad for the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are given in thy book. I certainly would not knowingly do injustice to any one, dead or living. I am very truly thy friend, JOHN G. WHITTIER.' Hear me, neighbors!' at last he cried, – What to me is this noisy ride? What is the shame that clothes the skin 80 To the nameless horror that lives within? Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck, And hear a cry from a reeling deck! Hate me and curse me, I only dread The hand of God and the face of the dead!' Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead ! Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea Said, 'God has touched him! why should we!' 90 And the golden-rod and aster bloom around thy grave, Rantoul ! With the memory of that morning by the summer sea I blend A wild and wondrous story, by the younger Mather penned, In that quaint Magnalia Christi, with all strange and marvellous things, Heaped up huge and undigested, like the chaos Ovid sings. |