Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

With fluted columns, and a roof of red, The Squire came forth, august and splendid sight!

Slowly descending, with majestic tread, Three flights of steps, nor looking left nor right,

Down the long street he walked, as one who said,

'A town that boasts inhabitants like me Can have no lack of good society !'

The Parson, too, appeared, a man austere,
The instinct of whose nature was to kill; 50
The wrath of God he preached from year
to year,

And read, with fervor, Edwards on the
Will;

His favorite pastime was to slay the deer
In summer on some Adirondac hill;
E'en now, while walking down the rural

lane,

[blocks in formation]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

O LITTLE feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;
I, nearer to the wayside inn
Where toil shall cease and rest begin,
Am weary, thinking of your road!

O little hands! that, weak or strong,
Have still to serve or rule so long,

Have still so long to give or ask;
I, who so much with book and pen
Have toiled among my fellow-men,

Am weary, thinking of your task.

O little hearts! that throb and beat
With such impatient, feverish heat,

Such limitless and strong desires;
Mine, that so long has glowed and burned,
With passions into ashes turned,

Now covers and conceals its fires.

[blocks in formation]

The lovely town was white with appleblooms,

And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread.

1 Hawthorne and Longfellow were friends for many years. This poem records the impressions and feelings of the day of Hawthorne's burial, May 23, 1864: 'It was a lovely day; the village all sunshine and blossoms and the song of birds. You cannot imagine anything at once more sad and beautiful. He is buried on a hill-top under the pines.' (See the Life, vol. iii, pp. 36, 38, 39; and Mrs. Hawthorne's letter to Longfellow, pp. 40-42.)

Across the meadows, by the gray old manse,
The historic river flowed:

I was as one who wanders in a trance,
Unconscious of his road.

The faces of familiar friends seemed strange;

Their voices I could hear,

And yet the words they uttered seemed to change

Their meaning to my ear.

For the one face I looked for was not there,
The one low voice was mute;
Only an unseen presence filled the air,
And baffled my pursuit.

Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and

stream

Dimly my thought defines;

I only see -a dream within a dream
The hill-top hearsed with pines.

I only hear above his place of rest
Their tender undertone,

The infinite longings of a troubled breast,
The voice so like his own.

There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold,

Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told.

[blocks in formation]

Watch the dead Christ between the living
thieves,

And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,

Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic What exultations trampling on despair,

[blocks in formation]

I

OFT have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,

1 The poet's life and work were interrupted by the tragic death, through fire, of Mrs. Longfellow. What he felt most deeply, he never expressed, and this burden of sorrow is scarcely alluded to in his poetry, except in the first of these sonnets, and in The Cross of Snow,' written eighteen years later, and not published till after his death. Unable to write, and unable to live without writing, he took refuge in the work of translating Dante's Divine Comedy, which he had begun in 1843, taken up again in 1853, and now continued and completed, finishing the long task in 1867. From 1861 to 1869 he wrote hardly anything else, except some

III

I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

fragments needed to complete the first part of Tales of a Wayside Inn.

During the same years Robert Browning was trying to benumb the intensity of his own sorrow through absorption in the Ring and the Book; and Bryant, after the loss of a wife whom he had worshipped, yet whom he scarcely alludes to in his verse (see O Fairest of the Rural Maids,' The Future Life,' and 'A Lifetime'), took for his task the translation of Homer.

Longfellow's Journal, and his letters to Sumner, show also how deeply he felt the life-and-death crisis through which his country was passing in the same years, and to which, also, his verse hardly alludes except for the first of these sonnets.

« AnteriorContinuar »