Читать книгу The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell - James Russell Lowell - Страница 198

Hear him but speak, and you will feel

The shadows of the Portico 50

Over your tranquil spirit steal,

To modulate all joy and woe

To one subdued, subduing glow;

Above our squabbling business-hours,

Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers,

His nature satirizes ours;

A form and front of Attic grace,

He shames the higgling market-place,

And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.

What throbbing verse can fitly render 60

That face so pure, so trembling-tender?

Sensation glimmers through its rest,

It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest

That palpitates with unfledged birds;

'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream,

Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,

White with the angel's coming gleam,

And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans, 70

And larger destinies seem man's;

You conjure from his glowing face

The omen of a fairer race;

With one grand trope he boldly spans

The gulf wherein so many fall,

'Twixt possible and actual;

His first swift word, talaria-shod,

Exuberant with conscious God,

Out of the choir of planets blots

The present earth with all its spots. 80

Himself unshaken as the sky,

His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high

Systems and creeds pellmell together;

'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye,

While trees uprooted splinter by,

The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;

Less of iconoclast than shaper,

His spirit, safe behind the reach

Of the tornado of his speech,

Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper. 90

So great in speech, but, ah! in act

So overrun with vermin troubles,

The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact

Of life collapses all his bubbles:

Had he but lived in Plato's day,

He might, unless my fancy errs,

Have shared that golden voice's sway

O'er barefooted philosophers.

Our nipping climate hardly suits

The ripening of ideal fruits: 100

His theories vanquish us all summer,

But winter makes him dumb and dumber;

To see him mid life's needful things

Is something painfully bewildering;

He seems an angel with clipt wings

Tied to a mortal wife and children,

And by a brother seraph taken

In the act of eating eggs and bacon.

Like a clear fountain, his desire

Exults and leaps toward the light, 110

In every drop it says 'Aspire!'

Striving for more ideal height;

And as the fountain, falling thence,

Crawls baffled through the common gutter,

So, from his speech's eminence,

He shrinks into the present tense,

Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds

Not all of life that's brave and wise is;

He strews an ampler future's seeds, 120

'Tis your fault if no harvest rises;

Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught

That all he is and has is Beauty's?

By soul the soul's gains must be wrought,

The Actual claims our coarser thought,

The Ideal hath its higher duties.