MORALITY

WE cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.

But tasks in hours of insight will'd
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.

With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 't were done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.

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
Heaved dazzlingly between;

Houses, with long white sweep,
Girdled the glistening bay;
Behind, through the soft air,

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:
Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast,
Which neither deadens into rest,
Nor ever feels the fiery glow

That whirls the spirit from itself away,
But fluctuates to and fro,

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
Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,

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
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,

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
On the wide ocean of life anew.

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!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll,
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest.
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost
soul.

Alas! is even love too weak

To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame
reproved;

I knew they lived and moved

Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves-and

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
The nameless feelings that course
through our breast,

But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well-but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;

Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and

forlorn,

From the soul's subterranean depth up

borne

As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and con-

vey

A melancholy into all our day.

Only-but this is rare-

When a belovéd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear

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,
Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye,
Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-
trees stand!

Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries
come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out,

And, eased of basket and of rod,
Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.
In the huge world, which roars hard by,
Be others happy if they can!
But in my helpless cradle I
Was breathed on by the rural Pan.
I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave.

Yet here is peace for ever new!
When I who watch them am away,
Still all things in this glade go through
The changes of their quiet day.

Then to their happy rest they pass!
The flowers upclose, the birds are fed,
The night comes down upon the grass,
The child sleeps warmly in his bed.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give!
Calm, calm me more! nor let me die
Before I have begun to live.. 1852.

THE FUTURE

A WANDERER is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light,
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the

stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.

Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,
Echoing the screams of the eagles,
Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain;
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea--
As is the world on the banks,
So is the mind of the man.

Vainly does each, as he glides,
Fable and dream

Of the lands which the river of Time
Had left ere he woke on its breast,
Or shall reach when his eyes have been
closed.

Only the tract where he sails
He wots of; only the thoughts,
Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought, [breast,
The tribes who then roam'd on her
Her vigorous, primitive sons?

And we say that repose has fled
For ever the course of the river of Time.
That cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker, incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead.
That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time

As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream--
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the gray expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with
foam

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 banks fade dimmer away,

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
Crawls up its rocky stair;

The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.

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.)