60

Are these celestial manners? these
The ways that win, the arts that please?
Ah yes; consider well the guest,
And whatsoe'er he does seems best;
He ruleth by the right divine
Of helplessness, so lately born
In purple chambers of the morn,
As sovereign over thee and thine.
He speaketh not; and yet there lies
A conversation in his eyes;
The golden silence of the Greek,
The gravest wisdom of the wise,
Not spoken in language, but in looks
More legible than printed books,
As if he could but would not speak.
And now, O monarch absolute,
Thy power is put to proof; for, lo!
Resistless, fathomless, and slow,
The nurse comes rustling like the sea, 70
And pushes back thy chair and thee,
And so good night to King Canute.

There are two guests at table now;
The king, deposed and older grown,
No longer occupies the throne,
The crown is on his sister's brow;
A Princess from the Fairy Isles,
The very pattern girl of girls,
All covered and embowered in curls,
Rose-tinted from the Isle of Flowers,
And sailing with soft, silken sails
From far-off Dreamland into ours.
Above their bowls with rims of blue
Four azure eyes of deeper hue
Are looking, dreamy with delight;
Limpid as planets that emerge
Above the ocean's rounded verge,
Soft-shining through the summer night.
Steadfast thy gaze, yet nothing see
Beyond the horizon of their bowls;
Nor care they for the world that rolls
With all its freight of troubled souls
Into the days that are to be.

V

80

Again the tossing boughs shut out the

I see the table wider grown,
I see it garlanded with guests,
As if fair Ariadne's Crown

Out of the sky had fallen down;
Maidens within whose tender breasts e
A thousand restless hopes and fears,
Forth reaching to the coming years,
Flutter awhile, then quiet lie,
Like timid birds that fain would fly,
But do not dare to leave their nests;-
And youths, who in their strength elate
Challenge the van and front of fate,
Eager as champions to be

In the divine knight-errantry
Of youth, that travels sea and land
Seeking adventures, or pursues,
Through cities, and through solitudes
Frequented by the lyric Muse,
The phantom with the beckoning hand,
That still allures and still eludes.
O sweet illusions of the brain!
O sudden thrills of fire and frost!
The world is bright while ye remain,
And dark and dead when ye are lost!

120

Quickens its current as it nears the mill; And so the stream of Time that lingereth

In level places, and so dull appears,
Runs with a swifter current as it nears
The gloomy mills of Death.

And now, like the magician's scroll,
That in the owner's keeping shrinks
With every wish he speaks or thinks,
Till the last wish consumes the whole,
The table dwindles, and again
I see the two alone remain.

The crown of stars is broken in parts;
Its jewels, brighter than the day,
Have one by one been stolen away
To shine in other homes and hearts.
One is a wanderer now afar

140

'Mid clink of arms and horses' tramp, 150 And battle's terrible array.

I see the patient mother read,

With aching heart, of wrecks that float
Disabled on those seas remote,
Or of some great heroic deed

On battle-fields, where thousands bleed
To lift one hero into fame.
Anxious she bends her graceful head
Above these chronicles of pain,
And trembles with a secret dread
Lest there among the drowned or slain
She find the one beloved name.

VII

160

After a day of cloud and wind and rain Sometimes the setting sun breaks out again, And, touching all the darksome woods with light,

Smiles on the fields, until they laugh and sing,

Then like a ruby from the horizon's ring Drops down into the night.

What see I now? The night is fair,
The storm of grief, the clouds of care, 170
The wind, the rain, have passed away;
The lamps are lit, the fires burn bright,
The house is full of life and light;
It is the Golden Wedding day.
The guests come thronging in once more,

AN old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and
hound,

And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery
mead.

I PACE the sounding sea-beach and behold How the voluminous billows roll and run, Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,

And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold

All its loose-flowing garments into one,
Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
Pale reach of sands, and changes them to
gold.

So in majestic cadence rise and fall
The mighty undulations of thy song,
O sightless bard, England's Mæonides !
And ever and anon, high over all
Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.
1873.

KEATS

(1875.)

THE sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied

As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foresee、
ing

Of things beyond our reason or control.

And whose discourse was like a generous wine,

I most of all remember the divine Something, that shone in them, and made us

see

The archetypal man, and what might be
The amplitude of Nature's first design.
In vain I stretch my hands to clasp their
hands;

I cannot find them. Nothing now is left

10

1 Keats' epitaph upon himself, inscribed on the simple stone that stands at the head of his grave beside the walls of Rome. Of the many poets' protests against its cutting pathos, perhaps the best is this, by J. E Spingarn:

The Star of Fame shines down upon the river,
And answering, the stream of Life repeats;
Upon our waters shall be writ forever

The name of Keats ¦'

1 C. C. Felton, for many years professor of Greek at Harvard, and president of the University from 1860 till his death in 1862. See the Life of Longfellow, in many passages, but especially vol. iii, pp. 4, 7, 9.

2 Agassiz was a constant companion of Longfellow's. See note on p. 211, and many passages in the Life.

3 Charles Sumner was lecturer in the Harvard Law School when Longfellow first came to Cambridge, in 1836, and from that time until his death, in 1874, was one of Longfellow's closest friends.

Ye do not answer us! ye do not hear! We are forgotten; and in your austere And calm indifference, ye little care Whether we come or go, or whence or where.

What passing generations fill these halls, What passing voices echo from these walls,

1 In October, 1874, Mr. Longfellow was urged to write a poem for the fiftieth anniversary of the graduation of his college class, to be held the next summer. At first he said that he could not write the poem, so averse was he from occasional poems, but a sudden thought seems to have struck him, very likely upon seeing a representation of Gerome's famous picture, and ten days later he notes in his diary that he had finished the writing.

The painting by Gerome, referred to, represents a Roman arena, where the gladiators, about to engage in mortal combat, salute the emperor, who with a great concourse of people is to witness the scene. Beneath the painting, Gerome, following a popular tradition, wrote the words, Ave Caesar, Imperator, Morituri te Salutant: Hail, Cæsar, Emperor! those who go to their death salute thee.' The reference to a gladiatorial combat, which these words imply, is doubted by some scholars, who quote ancient authors as using the phrase in connection with the great sea-fight exhibition given by the emperor on Lacus Fucinus. The combatants on that occasion were condemned criminals, who were to fight until one of the sides was slain, unless spared by the mercy of the emperor. (Riverside Literature Series.)

Compare Emerson's 'Terminus,' Holmes's 'The Iron Gate,' Whittier's To Oliver Wendell Holmes,' etc.

They are no longer here; they all are
gone
Into the land of shadows, -all save one. 30
Honor and reverence, and the good repute
That follows faithful service as its fruit,
Be unto him, whom living we salute.

The great Italian poet, when he made
His dreadful journey to the realms of
shade,

Met there the old instructor of his youth, And cried in tones of pity and of ruth: 'Oh, never from the memory of my heart Your dear, paternal image shall depart, Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,

40

Taught me how mortals are immortalized; How grateful am I for that patient care All my life long my language shall declare.' 2

To-day we make the poet's words our own,
And utter them in plaintive undertone;
Nor to the living only be they said,
But to the other living called the dead,
Whose dear, paternal images appear
Not wrapped in gloom, but robed in sun-
shine here;

Whose simple lives, complete and without flaw,

Were part and parcel of great Nature's law;

Who said not to their Lord, as if afraid,
Here is thy talent in a napkin laid,'

But labored in their sphere, as men who live

In the delight that work alone can give.
Peace be to them; eternal peace and rest,
And the fulfilment of the great behest:
'Ye have been faithful over a few things,
Over ten cities shall ye reign as kings.'

2 Dante to Brunetto Latini. Inferno, Canto XV, lines 82-87.