Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

The needs of the first sight absorb my blood,
And all the following hours of the day

Drag a ridiculous age.

To-day, when friends approach, and every hour

Brings book, or starbright scroll of genius,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,

And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught

After the master's sketch fills and o'erfills

My apprehension? why seek Italy,

Who cannot circumnavigate the sea

Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn The nearest matters for a thousand days?

BLIGHT.

GIVE me truths;

For I am weary of the surfaces,

And die of inanition.

If I knew

Only the herbs and simples of the wood,

Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,

Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes, and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,

Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,-
O, that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun
And planted world, and full executor

Of their imperfect functions.

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,

Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,

And travelling often in the cut he makes,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names.

The old men studied magic in the flowers,

And human fortunes in astronomy,

And an omnipotence in chemistry,

Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,

And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, 'Not in us;'
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, 'Not in us,'
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,

And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.

Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due;

But the sweet affluence of love and song,

The rich results of the divine consents

Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;

And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out

Daily to a more thin and outward rind,

Therefore, to our sick eyes,

Turn pale and starve.

The stunted trees look

sick, the summer short,

Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,

And nothing thrives to reach its natural term;
And life, shorn of its venerable length,

Even at its greatest space is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe;
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal, like a beggar's child;
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims

And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,

Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped, Chilled with a miserly comparison

Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.

« AnkstesnisTęsti »