Fallen Nature's myriad shapes! 1844. STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS. I. SOME sort of heart I know is hers,— And yet is never nobly right; Her eye, it seems a chemic test And drops upon you like an acid; It bites you with unconscious zest, So clear and bright, so coldly placid; It holds you quietly aloof, It holds, and yet it does not win you; It merely puts you to the proof And sorts what qualities are in you; There, you are classified: she's gone proper shelf In her compact and ordered mind, Is no more to her than the wind; In that clear brain, which, day and night, No movement of the heart e'er jostles, Her friends are ranged on left and right,— Here, silex, hornblende, sienite; There, animal remains and fossils. And yet, O subtile analyst, That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare Each mental nerve more fine than air,-O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err, For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art;Thou never canst compute for her The distance and diameter Of any simple human heart. II. HEAR him but speak, and you will feel To modulate all joy and woe 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 That face, so pure, so trembling-tender? Sensation glimmers through its rest, That palpitates with unfledged birds; Hear him unfold his plots and plans, Himself unshaken as the sky, His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high 'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye, The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; His spirit, safe behind the reach Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper. So great in speech, but, ah! in act 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: 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, 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, Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds |