15 20 And at a bound annihilate Surely ill news might wait, And tell-tale faces that reveal, To senses finer than the eyes, Their errand's purport ere we break the seal; They wind a sorrow round with circumstance To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace 25 The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance The inexorable face : 30 But now Fate stuns as with a mace; The savage of the skies, that men have caught And some scant use of language taught, Tells only what he must, The steel cold fact in one laconic thrust. 2. So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes, 35 And read of public scandal, private fraud, Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud, Office made vile to bribe unworthiness, 40 And all the unwholesome mess The Land of Broken Promise serves of late winged sandals, was the tutelar divinity of merchants, so that in a double way the modern application to the spirit of the electric telegraph becomes fit. 39. At the time when this poem was written there was a succession of terrible disclosures in America of public and private corruption; loud vaunts were made of dishonoring the nationa As happens if the brain, from overweight Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, 45 And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead. As when, beneath the street's familiar jar, An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far, Men listen and forebode, I hung my head, And strove the present to recall, 50 As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall. 3. Uprooted is our mountain oak, That promised long security of shade word in financial matters, and there were few who did not look almost with despair upon the condition of public affairs. The aspect was even more sharply detined to those Americans who, travelling in Europe, found themselves openly or silently regarded as representatives of a nation that seemed to be disgracing itself. Lowell's bitter words were part of the goadings of conscience which worked so sharply in America in the years immediately following. He was reproached by some for such words as this line contains, and, when he published his Three Memorial Poems, made this noble self-defence which stauds in the front of that little book:— "If I let fall a word of bitter mirth When public shames more shameful pardon won, Through veins that drew their life from Western earth In no polluted course from sire to son; And thus was I predestined ere my birth To love the soil wherewith my fibres own With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow." 55 60 And brooding-place for many a wingèd thought; Not by Time's softly warning stroke By pauses of relenting pity stayed, But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed, 4. Well might I, as of old, appeal to you, And no less perfect birth of nature can, Though they yearn tow'rds him, sympathize with mian, 65 Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall; Strong poets of a more outspoken day, That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and 70 Lead me some steps in your directer way, Teach me those words that strike a solid root 59. In classical mythology Adonis was fabled as a lovely youth, killed by a boar, and lamented long by Venus who was inconsolable for his loss. The poets used this story for a symbol of grief and when mourning the loss of a human being were wont to call on nature to join in the lamentation. This classic form of mourning descended in literature and at different times has found very beautiful expression, as in Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais which is a lament over the dead poet Keats. Here the poet might justly call on nature to lament the death of her great student, but he turns from the form as too classic and artificial and remote from his warmer sympathy. In his own strong sense of human life he demands a fellowship of grie! from no lower crder of nature than man himself. Within the ears of men; Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben, 75 For he was masculine from head and heel. Nay, let himself stand undiminished by With those clear parts of him that will not die. Himself from out the recent dark I claim To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame; 80 To show himself, as still I seem to see, A mortal, built upon the antique plan, Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran, And taking life as simply as a tree! To claim my foiled good-by let him appear, 85 Large-limbed and human as I saw him near, Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame: And let me treat him largely: I should fear, (If with too prying lens I chanced to err, Mistaking catalogue for character,) 90 His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame. Nor would I scant him with judicial breath And turn mere critic in an epitaph; I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff That swells fame living, chokes it after death, 95 And would but memorize the shining half Of his large nature that was turned to me: Fain had I joined with those that honored him With eyes that darkened because his were dim, And now been silent: but it might not be. 74. Chapman and Ben Jonson were contemporaries of Shakspere. The former is best known by his rich, picturesque translation of Homer. Lowell may easily have had in mind among Jonson's Elegies, his majestic ode, On the Death of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison. He rightly claims for the poets of the Elizabethan age a frankness and largeness of speech rarely heard in our more refined and restrained time. 84. Since the poet could not be by Agassiz at the last. II. 1. 100 In some the genius is a thing apart, 105 Man's web of circumstance and fate Are to the planet's sun-swung curve Or jar of human neighborhood: Some find their natural selves, and only then, 120 They wander worldward, 't is to blink and stare, He knew, for he had tried, 118. Travellers in the wilderness find their camp-fires the attraction of the beasts that prowl about the camp. 123. "Agassiz was a born metaphysician, and moreover had pursued severe studies in philosophy. Those who knew him well were constantly surprised at the ease with which he handled the more intricate problems of thought." Theodore Ly man, in Recollections of Agassiz, Atlantic Monthly, February |