Читать книгу The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell - James Russell Lowell - Страница 180

Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow

To outward sight, and through your marshes wind;

Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,

Your twin flows silent through my world of mind:

Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray!

Before my inner sight ye stretch away,

And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell,

Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,

Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220

Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise,

Where dust and mud the equal year divide,

There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,

Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

Virgilium vidi tantum—I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;— Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;—230 One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow—

Our only sure possession is the past;

The village blacksmith died a month ago,

And dim to me the forge's roaring blast;

Soon fire-new mediævals we shall see

Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,

And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne,

Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's, 240

Panting have I the creaky bellows blown,

And watched the pent volcano's red increase,

Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down

By that hard arm voluminous and brown,

From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

Dear native town! whose choking elms each year

With eddying dust before their time turn gray,

Pining for rain—to me thy dust is dear;

It glorifies the eve of summer day,

And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250

The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns,

The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away.

So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few,

The six old willows at the causey's end

(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew),

Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send,

Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread,

Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,

Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.

Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, 260

Beneath the awarded crown of victory,

Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer;

Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,

Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had— It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

Nearer art thou than simply native earth,

My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie;

A closer claim thy soil may well put forth,

Something of kindred more than sympathy; 270

For in thy bounds I reverently laid away

That blinding anguish of forsaken clay,

That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

That portion of my life more choice to me

(Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole)

Than all the imperfect residue can be;—

The Artist saw his statue of the soul

Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,

The earthen model into fragments broke,

And without her the impoverished seasons roll. 280