NEW-YEAR’S EVE, 1850

This is the midnight of the century,—­hark! 
Through aisle and arch of Godminster have gone
Twelve throbs that tolled the zenith of the dark,
And mornward now the starry hands move on;
‘Mornward!’ the angelic watchers say,
’Passed is the sorest trial;
No plot of man can stay
The hand upon the dial;
Night is the dark stem of the lily Day.’

If we, who watched in valleys here below,
Toward streaks, misdeemed of morn, our faces turned
When volcan glares set all the east aglow,
We are not poorer that we wept and yearned;
Though earth swing wide from God’s intent,
And though no man nor nation
Will move with full consent
In heavenly gravitation,
Yet by one Sun is every orbit bent.

FOR AN AUTOGRAPH

Though old the thought and oft exprest,
’Tis his at last who says it best,—­
I’ll try my fortune with the rest.

Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.

‘Lo, time and space enough,’ we cry,
‘To write an epic!’ so we try
Our nibs upon the edge, and die.

Muse not which way the pen to hold,
Luck hates the slow and loves the bold,
Soon come the darkness and the cold.

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,—­
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Ah, with what lofty hope we came! 
But we forget it, dream of fame,
And scrawl, as I do here, a name.

AL FRESCO

The dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me: 
Away, unfruitful lore of books,
For whose vain idiom we reject
The soul’s more native dialect,
Aliens among the birds and brooks,
Dull to interpret or conceive
What gospels lost the woods retrieve! 10
Away, ye critics, city-bred,
Who springes set of thus and so,
And in the first man’s footsteps tread,
Like those who toil through drifted snow! 
Away, my poets, whose sweet spell
Can make a garden of a cell! 
I need ye not, for I to-day
Will make one long sweet verse of play.

Snap, chord of manhood’s tenser strain! 
To-day I will be a boy again; 20
The mind’s pursuing element,
Like a bow slackened and unbent,
In some dark corner shall be leant. 
The robin sings, as of old, from the limb! 
The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush! 
Through the dim arbor, himself more dim,
Silently hops the hermit-thrush,
The withered leaves keep dumb for him;
The irreverent buccaneering bee
Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery 30
Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor