7/1/2023 0 Comments Sail forth longfellow![]() Only, perhaps, by right divine of song It may to me belong Or by what reason, or what right divine, Can I proclaim it mine? ![]() Only because the spreading chestnut tree Of old was sung by me. The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath, Dropped to the ground beneath.Īnd now some fragments of its branches bare, Shaped as a stately chair, There, by the blacksmith’s forge, beside the street, Its blossoms white and sweetĮnticed the bees, until it seemed alive, And murmured like a hive.Īnd when the winds of autumn, with a shout, Tossed its great arms about, The affluent foliage of its branches made A cavern of cool shade. Have by my hearthstone found a home at last, And whisper of the past. The Danish king could not in all his pride Repel the ocean tide,īut, seated in this chair, I can in rhyme Roll back the tide of Time.Īnd hear the children’s voices shout and call, And the brown chestnuts fall. The heart hath its own memory, like the mind, And in it are enshrined I see the smithy with its fires aglow, I hear the bellows blow,Īnd the shrill hammers on the anvil beat The iron white with heat!Īnd thus, dear children, have ye made for me This day a jubilee,Īnd to my more than three-score years and ten Brought back my youth again. The precious keepsakes, into which is wrought The giver’s loving thought. Only your love and your remembrance could Give life to this dead wood,Īnd make these branches, leafless now so long, Blossom again in song.Ĭried the African monarch, the splendid, As down to his death in the hollowĭark dungeons of Rome he descended, Uncrowned, unthroned, unattended Ĭried the Poet, unknown, unbefriended, As the vision, that lured him to follow, With the mist and the darkness blended, And the dream of his life was ended Made from a fetter of Bonnivard, the Prisoner of Chillon the handle of wood from the Frigate Constitution, and bound with a circlet of gold, inset with three precious stones from Siberia, Ceylon, and Maine. Is this, than wandering up and down An old man in a country town, His voice is harsh, but not with hate The brushwood, hung The treacherous undertow and stress Of wayward passions, and no less He sings of love, whose flame illumes The darkness of lone cottage rooms Is clothed with beauty gorse and grass And heather, where his footsteps pass, Touched by his hand, the wayside weed Becomes a flower the lowliest reed Songs flush with Purple bloom the rye, The plover’s call, the curlew’s cry, The laverock’s song we hear, or his, Nor care to ask.įor him the ploughing of those fields A more ethereal harvest yields Lies the Pen, with its mitre of gold, And its jewels inviolate.įor the gift, and the grace of the gift, O beautiful Helen of Maine!Īs a drop of the dew of your youth On the leaves of an aged tree.Ī ploughman, who, in foul and fair, Sings at his task That this wood from the frigate’s mast Might write me a rhyme at last, I dreamed these gems from the mines Of Siberia, Ceylon, and Maine With beard that floats to his waist It is Simon Magus, the Seer įrom this life of sorrow and shame, I will lift thee and make thee mine Through the purple mist of the years, Itself but a mist like these? Welcome! this vacant chair is thine, Dear guest and ghost! His presence haunts this room to-night, A form of mingled mist and light His voice is in each rushing brook, Each rustling bough. The falsehood that tempts and deceives, And the promise that betrays.ĭark is the morning with mist in the narrow mouth of the harbor Motionless lies the sea, under its curtain of cloud Dreamily glimmer the sails of ships on the distant horizon, Like to the towers of a town, built on the verge of the sea. Now they have vanished away, have disappeared in the ocean Sunk are the towers of the town into the depths of the sea! AU have vanished but those that, moored in the neighboring roadstead, Slowly and stately and still, they sail forth into the ocean With them sail my thoughts over the limitless deep, Farther and farther away, borne on by unsatisfied longings, Unto Hesperian isles, unto Ausonian shores. Vanished, too, are the thoughts, the dim, unsatisfied longings Sunk are the turrets of cloud into the ocean of dreams While in a haven of rest my heart is riding at anchor, Held by the chains of love, held by the anchors of trust! Sailless at anchor ride, looming so large in the mist.
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