OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. All at once, and nothing first, 223 Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main, - In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed, Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! UNDER THE VIOLETS. HER hands are cold; her face is white; But not beneath a graven stone, To plead for tears with alien eyes; A slender cross of wood alone Shall say, that here a maiden lies And gray old trees of hugest limb To make the scorching sunlight dim That drinks the greenness from the ground, And drop their dead leaves on her mound. When o'er their boughs the squirrels run, And through their leaves the robins call, And, ripening in the autumn sun, Stretched in his last-found home, and For her the morning choir shall sing knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings: Its matins from the branches high, When, turning round their dial-track, At last the rootlets of the trees Build thee more stately mansions, O my And bear the buried dust they seize soul, As the swift seasons roll! In leaves and blossoms to the skies. So may the soul that warmed it rise! |