Читать книгу The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Various - Страница 2

As one, who under pay of priest or pope,

Painteth an altar picture boldly bad,

Yet winning worship from the common eye,

Is less than one, who faltering day by day

Before the untouched canvas, dreams, and feels

An unaccomplished greatness: so is he

Who scrapes the skies and cleaves the patient air

For rhyming ecstasies to cheat the crowd,

That sees not in the stiller worshipper

The truer genius, who, in heights lone lost,

Forgets to interpret to a lesser sense.

O there do dwell among us minds divine,

In which th' etherial is so subtly mixed,

That only matter in its outward mien

To the observer shows. Such ever live

Unto themselves alone, in sweet still lives,

And die by all men misinterpreted.

Within a churchyard rise two honored urns

O'er graves not far removed. The one records

The 'genius of a Poet,' whose fitter fame

Lies in the volumes which his facile pen

Filled with the measure of redundant verse:

Before this urn the oft frequented sod

Is flattened with the tread of pensive feet.

The other simply bears the name and age

Of one who was 'a Merchant,' and bequeathed

A fair estate with numerous charities:

Before this urn the grass grows rank and green.

I knew them both in life, and thus to me

They measured in their lives their effigies:

He who the pen did wield with facile power,

Created what he wrote, and to the ear

With tact, not inspiration, wrought the sounds

To careful cadence; but the heart was cold

As the chill marble where the sculptor traced

Curious conceits of fancy. Let him pass,

His name not undervalued, for his fame

Shall in maturer ages lie as still

As doth his neighbor's now.

Turn we to him.

He was a man to whom the general eye

Bent with the confidence of daily trust

In things of daily use: a man 'of means,

—Sagacious, honest, plodding, punctual,—

Revolving in the rank of those whose shields

Bear bags of argent on a field of gold,

His life, to most men, was what most men's are,—

Unceasing calculation and keen thrift;

Unvarying as the ever-plying loom,

Which, moving in same limits day by day,

Weaves mesh on mesh, in tireless gain of goods.

But I, that knew him better than the herd,

Yet saw him less, knew that in him which lives

Still gracious and still plentiful to me

Now he hath passed away from me and them.

This man, whose talk on busy marts to men

Teemed with the current coin of thrifty trade,

—Exchanges, credits, money rates, and all,—

Hath stood with me upon a silent hill,

When the last flush of the dissolving day

Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere

Unconscious of my listening, uttered there

The comprehensions of a soul true poised

With elemental beauty, giving tongue

Unto the dumbness of the blissful air.

So have I seen him, too, within his home,

When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze

Seemed scanning issues from the money list;

But comments came not, till my curious eye

Led out his meditation into words,

Thought-winding upward into sphery light,

So utterly unearthly and sublime,

That all the man of fact fled out of sense,

And visual refinement filled the space.

Oft hath he told me, nothing was so blind

As the far-seeing wisdom of the world,

And none within it knew him, save himself,

And that so scantily, that but for faith

In a redeeming knowledge yet to come,

He would lie down and let his weakness die

In self-reclaiming dust.

After his death,

I searched his papers, vainly, for a scrap

Whereon some dropped memento might record

His inner nature; but he nothing left—

Nothing of that deep life whose wondrous light

Guided him onward through the realms of sense,

And in a world of practical self-need

Sustained him with a glory unexpressed.

And thus it is that round the Poet's urn,

The sod is beaten down with pensive feet:

And thus it is that where the Merchant lies,

The grass, untrodden, groweth rank and green.