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Complete Poetical Works
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The glowing future lies unrolled;
And yet, one moment for the Past,
One retrospect,—the first and last.
"The world's a stage," the Master said.
To-night a mightier truth is read:
Not in the shifting canvas screen,
The flash of gas or tinsel sheen;
Not in the skill whose signal calls
From empty boards baronial halls;
But, fronting sea and curving bay,
Behold the players and the play.
Ah, friends! beneath your real skies
The actor's short-lived triumph dies:
On that broad stage of empire won,
Whose footlights were the setting sun,
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates.
Your shifting scenes: the league of sand,
An avenue by ocean spanned;
The narrow beach of straggling tents,
A mile of stately monuments;
Your standard, lo! a flag unfurled,
Whose clinging folds clasp half the world,—
This is your drama, built on facts,
With "twenty years between the acts."
One moment more: if here we raise
The oft-sung hymn of local praise,
Before the curtain facts must sway;
HERE waits the moral of your play.
Glassed in the poet's thought, you view
What money can, yet cannot do;
The faith that soars, the deeds that shine,
Above the gold that builds the shrine.
And oh! when others take our place,
And Earth's green curtain hides our face,
Ere on the stage, so silent now,
The last new hero makes his bow:
So may our deeds, recalled once more
In Memory's sweet but brief encore,
Down all the circling ages run,
With the world's plaudit of "Well done!"
DOLLY VARDEN
Dear Dolly! who does not recall
The thrilling page that pictured all
Those charms that held our sense in thrall
Just as the artist caught her,—
As down that English lane she tripped,
In bowered chintz, hat sideways tipped,
Trim-bodiced, bright-eyed, roguish-lipped,—
The locksmith's pretty daughter?
Sweet fragment of the Master's art!
O simple faith! O rustic heart!
O maid that hath no counterpart
In life's dry, dog-eared pages!
Where shall we find thy like? Ah, stay!
Methinks I saw her yesterday
In chintz that flowered, as one might say,
Perennial for ages.
Her father's modest cot was stone,
Five stories high; in style and tone
Composite, and, I frankly own,
Within its walls revealing
Some certain novel, strange ideas:
A Gothic door with Roman piers,
And floors removed some thousand years,
From their Pompeian ceiling.
The small salon where she received
Was Louis Quatorze, and relieved
By Chinese cabinets, conceived
Grotesquely by the heathen;
The sofas were a classic sight,—
The Roman bench (sedilia hight);
The chairs were French in gold and white,
And one Elizabethan.
And she, the goddess of that shrine,
Two ringed fingers placed in mine,—
The stones were many carats fine,
And of the purest water,—
Then dropped a curtsy, far enough
To fairly fill her cretonne puff
And show the petticoat's rich stuff
That her fond parent bought her.
Her speech was simple as her dress,—
Not French the more, but English less,
She loved; yet sometimes, I confess,
I scarce could comprehend her.
And yet, one moment for the Past,
One retrospect,—the first and last.
"The world's a stage," the Master said.
To-night a mightier truth is read:
Not in the shifting canvas screen,
The flash of gas or tinsel sheen;
Not in the skill whose signal calls
From empty boards baronial halls;
But, fronting sea and curving bay,
Behold the players and the play.
Ah, friends! beneath your real skies
The actor's short-lived triumph dies:
On that broad stage of empire won,
Whose footlights were the setting sun,
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates.
Your shifting scenes: the league of sand,
An avenue by ocean spanned;
The narrow beach of straggling tents,
A mile of stately monuments;
Your standard, lo! a flag unfurled,
Whose clinging folds clasp half the world,—
This is your drama, built on facts,
With "twenty years between the acts."
One moment more: if here we raise
The oft-sung hymn of local praise,
Before the curtain facts must sway;
HERE waits the moral of your play.
Glassed in the poet's thought, you view
What money can, yet cannot do;
The faith that soars, the deeds that shine,
Above the gold that builds the shrine.
And oh! when others take our place,
And Earth's green curtain hides our face,
Ere on the stage, so silent now,
The last new hero makes his bow:
So may our deeds, recalled once more
In Memory's sweet but brief encore,
Down all the circling ages run,
With the world's plaudit of "Well done!"
DOLLY VARDEN
Dear Dolly! who does not recall
The thrilling page that pictured all
Those charms that held our sense in thrall
Just as the artist caught her,—
As down that English lane she tripped,
In bowered chintz, hat sideways tipped,
Trim-bodiced, bright-eyed, roguish-lipped,—
The locksmith's pretty daughter?
Sweet fragment of the Master's art!
O simple faith! O rustic heart!
O maid that hath no counterpart
In life's dry, dog-eared pages!
Where shall we find thy like? Ah, stay!
Methinks I saw her yesterday
In chintz that flowered, as one might say,
Perennial for ages.
Her father's modest cot was stone,
Five stories high; in style and tone
Composite, and, I frankly own,
Within its walls revealing
Some certain novel, strange ideas:
A Gothic door with Roman piers,
And floors removed some thousand years,
From their Pompeian ceiling.
The small salon where she received
Was Louis Quatorze, and relieved
By Chinese cabinets, conceived
Grotesquely by the heathen;
The sofas were a classic sight,—
The Roman bench (sedilia hight);
The chairs were French in gold and white,
And one Elizabethan.
And she, the goddess of that shrine,
Two ringed fingers placed in mine,—
The stones were many carats fine,
And of the purest water,—
Then dropped a curtsy, far enough
To fairly fill her cretonne puff
And show the petticoat's rich stuff
That her fond parent bought her.
Her speech was simple as her dress,—
Not French the more, but English less,
She loved; yet sometimes, I confess,
I scarce could comprehend her.
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Последний отзыв
Удивительная книга. Как никогда актуальна сегодня. Язык и стиль автора настолько тонок, лёгок и изыскан, что легко поведёт читателя в мир героев, кото...
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