Puslapio vaizdai
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COME, spread your wings, as I spread mine,
And leave the crowded hall

For where the eyes of twilight shine
O'er evening's western wall.

These are the pleasant Berkshire hills,
Each with its leafy crown;
Hark! from their sides a thousand rills
Come singing sweetly down.

A thousand rills; they leap and shine,
Strained through the shadowy nooks, 10
Till, clasped in many a gathering twine,
They swell a hundred brooks.

A hundred brooks, and still they run
With ripple, shade, and gleam,

1 This and the following poem were read by Holmes as postludes to lectures given by him at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in 1853, on English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Two years later Lowell lectured at the same Institute on English Poetry from its Origins to Wordsworth.

Till, clustering all their braids in one, They flow a single stream.

A bracelet spun from mountain mist,
A silvery sash unwound,
With ox-bow curve and sinuous twist
It writhes to reach the Sound.

This is my bark, a pygmy's ship;
Beneath a child it rolls;
Fear not, -one body makes it dip,
But not a thousand souls.

Float we the grassy banks between; Without an oar we glide;

The meadows, drest in living green, Unroll on either side.

Come, take the book we love so well,
And let us read and dream
We see whate'er its pages tell,
And sail an English stream.

Up to the clouds the lark has sprung,
Still trilling as he flies;

The linnet sings as there he sung;
The unseen cuckoo cries,

And daisies strew the banks along,

And yellow kingcups shine, With cowslips, and a primrose throng, And humble celandine.

Ah foolish dream! when Nature nursed
Her daughter in the West,
The fount was drained that opened first;
She bared her other breast.

On the young planet's orient shore
Her morning hand she tried;
Then turned the broad medallion o'er
And stamped the sunset side.

Take what she gives, her pine's tall stem,
Her elm with hanging spray;
She wears her mountain diadem
Still in her own proud way.

Look on the forests' ancient kings,
The hemlock's towering pride:
Yon trunk had thrice a hundred rings,
And fell before it died.

Nor think that Nature saves her bloom And slights our grassy plain;

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Where in its old historic splendor stands
The home of England's far-famed Parliament,
And waters of the Thames in calm content
At England's fame flow slowly o'er their sands;
And where the Rhine past vine-entwined lands
Courses in castled beauty, there I went ;
And far to Southern rivers, flower-besprent:
And to the icy streams of Northern strands.
Then mine own native shores I trod once more,
And, gazing on thy waters' majesty,

The memory, O Hudson, came to me

Of one who went to seek the wide world o'er

For Love, but found it not. Then home turned he And saw his mother waiting at the door.

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So, parted by the rolling flood,
The love that springs from common blood
Needs but a single sunlit hour

Of mingling smiles to bud and flower;
Unharmed its slumbering life has flown,
From shore to shore, from zone to zone,
Where summer's falling roses stain
The tepid waves of Pontchartrain,
Or where the lichen creeps below
Katahdin's wreaths of whirling snow.

Though fiery sun and stiffening cold
May change the fair ancestral mould,
No winter chills, no summer drains
The life-blood drawn from English veins,
Still bearing wheresoe'er it flows
The love that with its fountain rose,
Unchanged by space, unwronged by time,
From age to age, from clime to clime!

(1861.)

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WHEN life hath run its largest round
Of toil and triumph, joy and woe,
How brief a storied page is found
To compass all its outward show!
The world-tried sailor tires and droops;
His flag is rent, his keel forgot;
His farthest voyages seem but loops
That float from life's entangled knot.
But when within the narrow space
Some larger soul hath lived and
wrought,

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Whose sight was open to embrace
The boundless realms of deed and
thought,-

When, stricken by the freezing blast,
A nation's living pillars fall,
How rich the storied page, how vast,
A word, a whisper, can recall!

No medal lifts its fretted face,

Nor speaking marble cheats your eye, Yet, while these pictured lines I trace, A living image passes by:

A roof beneath the mountain pines;
The cloisters of a hill-girt plain;
The front of life's embattled lines;
A mound beside the heaving main.

These are the scenes: a boy appears;
Set life's round dial in the sun,
Count the swift arc of seventy years,
His frame is dust; his task is done.

Yet pause upon the noontide hour,

Ere the declining sun has laid His bleaching rays on manhood's power, And look upon the mighty shade.

No gloom that stately shape can hide, No change uncrown its brow; behold!

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Dark, calm, large-fronted, lightning-eyed, Earth has no double from its mould!

Ere from the fields by valor won

The battle-smoke had rolled away, And bared the blood-red setting sun, His eyes were opened on the day.

His land was but a shelving strip

Black with the strife that made it free; He lived to see its banners dip

Their fringes in the Western sea.

The boundless prairies learned his name, His words the mountain echoes knew. The Northern breezes swept his fame From icy lake to warm bayou.

In toil he lived; in peace he died;

When life's full cycle was complete Put off his robes of power and pride,

And laid them at his Master's feet.

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The raid that swooped with sword and flame,

Give place to law and order.'

Not while the rocking steeples reel
With midnight tocsins ringing,

Not while the crashing war-notes peal,
God sets his poets singing;
The bird is silent in the night,

Or shrieks a cry of warning
While fluttering round the beacon-light,
But hear him greet the morning!

The lark of Scotia's morning sky!
Whose voice may sing his praises?
With Heaven's own sunlight in his eye,
He walked among the daisies,
Till through the cloud of fortune's wrong
He soared to fields of glory;
But left his land her sweetest song
And earth her saddest story.

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