The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes — Complete. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ Unwonted lustre in some clearer mind,

       Believe that Genius sets the laws at naught

       Which chain the pinions of our wildest thought;

       Untaught to measure, with the eye of art,

       The wandering fancy or the wayward heart;

       Who match the little only with the less,

       And gaze in rapture at its slight excess,

       Proud of a pebble, as the brightest gem

       Whose light might crown an emperor's diadem.

      And, most of all, the pure ethereal fire

       Which seems to radiate from the poet's lyre

       Is to the world a mystery and a charm,

       An AEgis wielded on a mortal's arm,

       While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,

       And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;

       And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,

       Usurped his Maker's title—to create;

       He, whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,

       What others feel more fitly can express,

       Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,

       Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own.

      There breathes no being but has some pretence

       To that fine instinct called poetic sense

       The rudest savage, roaming through the wild;

       The simplest rustic, bending o'er his child;

       The infant, listening to the warbling bird;

       The mother, smiling at its half-formed word;

       The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large;

       The girl, turned matron to her babe-like charge;

       The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand

       The vote that shakes the turret of the land;

       The slave, who, slumbering on his rusted chain,

       Dreams of the palm-trees on his burning plain;

       The hot-cheeked reveller, tossing down the wine,

       To join the chorus pealing "Auld lang syne";

       The gentle maid, whose azure eye grows dim,

       While Heaven is listening to her evening hymn;

       The jewelled beauty, when her steps draw near

       The circling dance and dazzling chandelier;

       E'en trembling age, when Spring's renewing air

       Waves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair;—

       All, all are glowing with the inward flame,

       Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name,

       While, unenbalmed, the silent dreamer dies,

       His memory passing with his smiles and sighs!

      If glorious visions, born for all mankind,

       The bright auroras of our twilight mind;

       If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie

       Stained on the windows of the sunset sky;

       If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,

       Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;

       If passions, following with the winds that urge

       Earth's wildest wanderer to her farthest verge;—

       If these on all some transient hours bestow

       Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow,

       Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled

       Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,

       Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave

       Would wail its requiem o'er a poet's grave!

      If to embody in a breathing word

       Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard;

       To fix the image all unveiled and warm,

       And carve in language its ethereal form,

       So pure, so perfect, that the lines express

       No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;

       To feel that art, in living truth, has taught

       Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;—

       If this alone bestow the right to claim

       The deathless garland and the sacred name,

       Then none are poets save the saints on high,

       Whose harps can murmur all that words deny!

      But though to none is granted to reveal

       In perfect semblance all that each may feel,

       As withered flowers recall forgotten love,

       So, warmed to life, our faded passions move

       In every line, where kindling fancy throws

       The gleam of pleasures or the shade of woes.

      When, schooled by time, the stately queen of art

       Had smoothed the pathways leading to the heart,

       Assumed her measured tread, her solemn tone,

       And round her courts the clouds of fable thrown,

       The wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,

       And wondering earth proclaimed the Muse divine.

       Yet if her votaries had but dared profane

       The mystic symbols of her sacred reign,

       How had they smiled beneath the veil to find

       What slender threads can chain the mighty mind!

      Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,

       And verse bestows the varnish and the frame;

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