Seven years long was the bow
Of battle bent, and the heightening
Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe
Of their uncontainable lightning;
Seven years long heard the sea
Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder;
Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee,
And new stars were seen, a world's won-
der;

Each by her sisters made bright,
All binding all to their stations,
Cluster of manifold light
Startling the old constellations:
Men looked up and grew pale:
Was it a comet or star,
Omen of blessing or bale,
Hung o'er the ocean afar ?

4

Stormy the day of her birth:
Was she not born of the strong,
She, the last ripeness of earth,
Beautiful, prophesied long?
Stormy the days of her prime:
Hers are the pulses that beat
Higher for perils sublime,
Making them fawn at her feet.
Was she not born of the strong?
Was she not born of the wise?
Daring and counsel belong
Of right to her confident eyes:
Human and motherly they,
Careless of station or race:
Hearken! her children to-day
Shout for the joy of her face.

II

I

No praises of the past are hers,
No fanes by hallowing time caressed,
No broken arch that ministers

To Time's sad instinct in the breast:

60

She builds not on the ground, but in the mind,

Her open-hearted palaces

For larger-thoughted men with heaven and earth at ease:

Her march the plump mow marks, the sleepless wheel,

The golden sheaf, the self-swayed commonweal;

The happy homesteads hid in orchard trees Whose sacrificial smokes through peaceful

air

180

Poets, as their heads grow gray,
Look from too far behind the eyes,
Too long-experienced to be wise
In guileless youth's diviner way;
Life sings not now, but prophesies;
Time's shadows they no more behold,
But, under them, the riddle old
That mocks, bewilders, and defies:
In childhood's face the seed of shame,
In the green tree an ambushed flame,
In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night,
They, though against their will, divine,
And dread the care-dispelling wine
Stored from the Muse's vintage bright,
By age imbued with second-sight.
From Faith's own eyelids there peeps out,
Even as they look, the leer of doubt;
The festal wreath their fancy loads
With care that whispers and forebodes:
Nor this our triumph-day can blunt Me-
gæra's goads.

2

Murmur of many voices in the air Denounces us degenerate,

191

Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate,
And prompts indifference or despair:
Is this the country that we dreamed in
youth,

200

Where wisdom and not numbers should
have weight,
Seed-field of simpler manners, braver
truth,

Where shams should cease to dominate
In household, church, and state?

Is this Atlantis? This the unpoisoned soil,
Sea-whelmed for ages and recovered late,
Where parasitic greed no more should coil

HERS all that Earth could promise or bestow,

Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,

Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears,
A life remote from every sordid woe,
And by a nation's swelled to lordlier flow.
What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts
or fears,

When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers

Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? The guns were shouting Io Hymen then That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;

The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men

To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb.
Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it
blind,
Knowing what life is, what our human-kind?

1 Anything more tragic than the circumstances of her death it would be hard to imagine. She was actually receiving extreme unction while the guns were firing in honor of her eighteenth birthday, and four days later we saw her dragged to her dreary tomb at the Escorial, followed by the coach and its eight white horses in which she had driven in triumph from the church to the palace on the day of her wedding. The poor brutes tossed their snowy plumes as haughtily now as then. (LOWELL, in a letter to his daughter, Mabel Lowell Burnett, July 26, 1878. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

It is a wee sad-colored thing,

As shy and secret as a maid,
That, ere in choir the robins sing,
Pipes its own name like one afraid.

It seems pain-prompted to repeat
The story of some ancient ill,
But Phœbe! Phœbe! sadly sweet
Is all it says, and then is still.

It calls and listens. Earth and sky,
Hushed by the pathos of its fate,
Listen: no whisper of reply

Comes from its doom-dissevered mate.

Phœbe! it calls and calls again,

And Ovid, could he but have heard, Had hung a legendary pain

About the memory of the bird;

A pain articulate so long,

În penance of some mouldered crime

ΤΟ

20

2 For Lowell's careful revision of this poem, see his letters to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, September 4, 5, 6, 8, and 12, and October 24, 1881; quoted in the Cambridge Edition of Lowell, pp. 480-481.