Page:Littell's Living Age

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POETRY AND CIVILIZATION.

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more from the self-refraining nature which will not merge in the creature the fulness of the heart that should be given to the Creator. Again, would not Wordsworth himself have felt his heart bound with the same kind of proud exultation which he felt when he had written such a sonnet as the grand one on Toussaint l'Ouverture for instance, if he had conceived the following, concerning the fear that when the heart has gained all in gaining God, it may lose him again by the mere intrinsic feebleness of its own wasting powers? —

Life's Gain.

"Now having gained Life's gain, how hold it fast?
The harder task! because the world is still
The world, and days creep slow, and wear the will,
And Custom, gendering in the heart's blind waste,
Brings forth a winged mist, which with no haste
Upcircling the steep air, and charged with ill,
Blots all our shining heights adorable,
And leaves slain Faith, slain Hope, slain Love the last."
O shallow lore of life! He who hath won
Life's gain doth hold nought fast, who could hold all,
Holden himself of strong, immortal powers.
The stars accept him; for his sake the sun
Has sworn in heaven an oath memorial:
Around his feet stoop the obsequious hours.

These four last lines, in the exaltation of their claim that God and all his creatures conspire to strengthen the man who has won the eternal for his own, may fairly be placed — nor will they lose by the comparison — with the grand lines in which Wordsworth assured the negro patriot of the powers which would sustain him even in the "deep dungeon's earless den:" —

Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee — air, earth, skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

Again, to show how Mr. Dowden appreciates the world of limitation and convention which is bred of modern frivolity and fashion, take the fine sonnet alluding to the anger felt by David against Michal for laughing at the Oriental passion of his dance before the ark: —

David and Michal (2 Samuel vi. 16).

But then you don't mean really what you say —
To hear this from the sweetest little lips,
O'er which each pretty word daintily trips
Like small birds hopping down a garden way,
When I had given my soul full scope to play
For once before her in the Orphic style
Caught from three several volumes of Carlyle,
And undivulged before this very day!
O young men of our earnest school confess
How it is deeply, darkly tragical
To find the feminine souls we would adore
So full of sense, so versed in worldly lore,
So deaf to the eternal silences,
So unbelieving, so conventional.

Or for the mixture of sympathy with nature and the humor of its glance at human society of the religiously conventional kind, take the following graceful verses entitled, "In the Cathedral Close:" —

In the dean's porch a nest of clay
⁠With five small tenants may be seen,
Five solemn faces, each as wise
⁠As though its owner were a dean;

Five downy fledglings in a row,
⁠Packed close as in an antique pew
The schoolgirls are whose foreheads clear
⁠At the Venite shine on you.

Day after day the swallows sit
⁠With scarce a stir, with scarce a sound,
But dreaming and digesting much,
⁠They grow thus wise and soft and round.

They watch the canons come to dine,
⁠And hear the mullion-bars across,
Over the fragrant fruit and wine,
⁠Deep talk about the reredos.

Her hands with field-flowers drench'd, a child
⁠Leaps past in wind-blown dress and hair,
The swallows turn their heads askew, —
⁠Five judges deem that she is fair.

Prelusive touches sound within,
⁠Straightway they recognize the sign,
And, blandly nodding, they approve
⁠The minuet of Rubenstein,

They mark the cousins' schoolboy talk,
⁠(Male birds flown wide from minster bell),
And blink at each broad term of art,
⁠Binomial or bicycle.

Ah! downy young ones, soft and warm,
⁠Doth such a stillness mask from sight
Such swiftness? can such peace conceal
⁠Passion and ecstasy of flight?

Yet somewhere 'mid your Eastern suns,
⁠Under a white Greek architrave
At morn, or when the shaft of fire
⁠Lies large upon the India wave,

A sense of something dear gone by
⁠Will stir, strange longings thrill the heart
For a small world embowered and close,
⁠Of which ye some time were a part.

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