Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 90, June, 1875

'Tis not a law of necessity
That a trade just naught but a trade must be!
Does business mean, Die, you—live, I?
Then 'business is business' phrases a lie:
'Tis only war grown miserly.
If Traffic is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so,
And we victims less will blame it so.
But oh, for the poor to have some part
In the sweeter half of life called Art,
Is not a problem of head, but of heart.
Vainly might Plato's head revolve it:
Plainly the heart of a child could solve it."

And then, as when our words seem all too rude
We cease from speech, to take our thought and brood
Back in our heart's great dark and solitude,
So sank the strings to heartwise throbbing,
Of long chords change-marked with sobbing—
Motherly sobbing, not distinctlier heard
Than half wing-openings of the sleeping bird,
Some dream of danger to her young hath stirred.

Then stirring and demurring ceased, and lo!
Every least ripple of the strings' song flow
Died to a level with each level bow,
And made a great chord tranquil-surfaced so
As a brook beneath his curving bank doth go
To linger in the sacred dark and green
Where many boughs the still pool overlean,
And many leaves make shadow with their sheen.
But presently
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony,
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone,
And boatwise dropped o' the convex side
And floated down the glassy tide,
And clarified and glorified
The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.

From the velvet convex of that fluted note
Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float—
As if God turned a rose into a throat—
"When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
Sweet friends,
Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends.
For I, e'en I,
As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
Demand of Science whence and why
Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
When he doth gaze on earth and sky?
Behold, I grow more bold:
I hold
Full powers from Nature manifold.
I speak for each no-tonguèd tree
That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
And dumbly and most wistfully
His mighty prayerful arms outspreads
Above men's oft-unheeding heads,
And his big blessing downward sheds.
I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves,
Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
And briery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins;
For every long-armed woman-vine
That round a piteous tree doth twine;
For passionate odors, and divine
Pistils, and petals crystalline;
All purities of shady springs,
All shynesses of film-winged things
That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings;
All modesties of mountain-fawns
That leap to covert from wild lawns,
And tremble if the day but dawns;
All sparklings of small beady eyes
Of birds, and sidelong glances wise
Wherewith the jay hints tragedies;
All piquancies of prickly burs,
And smoothnesses of downs and furs
Of eiders and of minevers;
All limpid honeys that do lie
At stamen-bases, nor deny
The humming-birds' fine roguery,
Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly;
All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings;