MORALITY WE cannot kindle when we will But tasks in hours of insight will'd With aching hands and bleeding feet Then, when the clouds are off the soul, When thou dost bask in Nature's eye, Ask, how she view'd thy self-control, Thy struggling, task'd morality— Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air, Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair. And she, whose censure thou dost dread, Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek, See, on her face a glow is spread, A strong emotion on her cheek! "Ah, child!" she cries, "that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine? And to my mind the thought Is on a sudden brought Of a past night, and a far different scene. Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep As clearly as at noon; The spring-tide's brimming flow Houses, with long white sweep, The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away, The night was far more fair But the same restless pacings to and fro, And the same vainly throbbing heart was there, And the same bright, calm moon. And the calm moonlight seems to say: That whirls the spirit from itself away, Never by passion quite possess'd And never quite benumb'd by the world's sway ? And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield and be For most men in a brazen prison live, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall. And as, year after year. Fresh products of their barren labor fall Gloom settles slowly down over their breast; And while they try to stem The waves of mournful thought by which they are pressed, Death in their prison reaches them, Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest. And the rest, a few, Escape their prison and depart There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart THE BURIED LIFE LIGHT flows our war of inocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves Hardly had skill to utter one of all But they course on for ever unexpress'd. Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth up borne As from an infinitely distant land, vey A melancholy into all our day. Only-but this is rare- When a belovéd hand is laid in ours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd-A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. WRITTEN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS IN this lone, open glade I lie, Birds here make song, each bird has his, Sometimes a child will cross the glade Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out, And, eased of basket and of rod, Yet here is peace for ever new! Then to their happy rest they pass! The will to neither strive nor cry, THE FUTURE A WANDERER is man from his birth. On the breast of the river of Time; stream. As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes Where the snowy mountainous pass, Of the new-born clear-flowing stream; Where the river in gleaming rings Vainly does each, as he glides, Of the lands which the river of Time Only the tract where he sails Who can see the green earth any more And we say that repose has fled Drink of the feeling of quiet again. But what was before us we know not, Haply, the river of Time As it grows, as the towns on its marge And the width of the waters, the hush As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast As the pale waste widens around him, As the stars come out, and the nightwind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea. 1852. STANZAS IN MEMORY OF THE AUTHOR OF “OBERMANN "1 IN front the awful Alpine track The autumn storm-winds drive the rack, 1 The author of Obermann, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost uuknown. But the profound inwardness, the aus tere sincerity, of his principal work, Obermann, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest. Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: Eternité, deviens mon asile! The influence of Rousseau, and certain affìnities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,-Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though Obermann, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of senti ment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of ak writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinizing. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but more fully bringing to light, -all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high. Beside Obermann there is one other of Se nancour's works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting its title is, Libres Méditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu. (Arnold's note. The passage of George Sand alluded to may be found in her Questions d'Art et de Littérature, Sainte-Beuve has several times written of Senancour: especially in his Portraits Contemporains, Vol. I, and in Chateaubriand et son Groupe littéraire, Chap. 14.) |