When
he was minister to Berlin, every facility was given him to pursue
those studies in the lives of Goethe and Schiller which would have
resulted in the crowning work of his life, but which were destined
never to be completed.
he was minister to Berlin, every facility was given him to pursue
those studies in the lives of Goethe and Schiller which would have
resulted in the crowning work of his life, but which were destined
never to be completed.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v25 - Tas to Tur
"
And grasping it, he goes and casts himself headlong down a precipice.
Shortly after his departure, Sylvia, not dead, not even wounded, reappears
on the scene, and calmly explains how the mistaken report of her death had
arisen. "Ah! " says Daphne, the friend who all along had blamed her cold-
ness, "you live, but Amintas is dead. " Her words are confirmed by the
messenger who comes in, after the way of the classic drama, to narrate the
catastrophe. Sylvia's heart is melted; she regrets her severity, and says that
if a hater's falsely reported death has killed Amintas, it is only fit that she
should herself be slain by the true tidings of the death of so true a lover. ]
"Let me
First bury him, then die upon his grave.
Farewell, ye shepherds! plains, woods, streams, farewell! "
[Elpino, the favorite of the Muses, enters in the last act to explain how
Amintas, stunned, not killed, by his fall, was brought to life by the tears of
Sylvia, whose aged father has been sent for to bless their happy union.
The lyrics of the Chorus are very melodious. Most celebrated of all is its
song at the end of the first act. ]
THE GOLDEN AGE
"O bella età dell' oro »
LOVELY age of gold!
Not that the rivers rolled
O
With milk, or that the woods wept honey-dew;
Not that the ready ground
Produced without a wound,
Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew;
Not that a cloudless blue
For ever was in sight,
Or that the heaven, which burns
And now is cold by turns,
## p. 14508 (#70) ###########################################
14508
TORQUATO TASSO
Looked out in glad and everlasting light;
No, not that even the insolent ships from far
Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war:
But solely that that vain
And breath-invented pain,
That idol of mistake, that worshiped cheat,
That Honor,- since so called
By vulgar minds appalled,-
Played not the tyrant with our nature yet.
It had not come to fret
The sweet and happy fold
Of gentle human-kind;
Nor did its hard law bind
Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold,
That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,
Which Nature's own hand wrote: What pleases is permitted.
Then among streams and flowers
The little wingèd powers
Went singing carols without torch or bow;
The nymphs and shepherds sat
Mingling with innocent chat
Sports and low whispers; and with whispers low,
Kisses that would not go.
The maiden, budding o'er,
Kept not her bloom un-eyed,
Which now a veil must hide,
Nor the crisp apples which her bosom bore;
And oftentimes, in river or in lake,
The lover and his love their merry bath would take.
'Twas thou, thou, Honor, first
That didst deny our thirst
Its drink, and on the fount thy covering set;
Thou bad'st kind eyes withdraw
Into constrainèd awe,
And keep the secret for their tears to wet;
Thou gather'dst in a net
The tresses from the air,
And mad'st the sports and plays
Turn all to sullen ways,
And putt'st on speech a rein, in steps a care.
Thy work it is,- thou shade, that will not move,-
That what was once the gift is now the theft of love.
## p. 14509 (#71) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14509
Our sorrows and our pains,
These are thy noble gains.
But, O thou Love's and Nature's masterer,
Thou conqueror of the crowned,
What dost thou on this ground,
Too small a circle for thy mighty sphere ?
Go, and make slumber dear
To the renowned and high:
We here, a lowly race,
Can live without thy grace,
After the use of mild antiquity.
Go, let us love; since years
No truce allow, and life soon disappears.
Go, let us love: the daylight dies, is born;
But unto us the light
Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night.
Translation of Leigh Hunt.
ODE TO THE RIVER METAURO
(A fragment written at the age of forty, and left unfinished. )
HILD of great Apennine!
CH
River, if small yet far renowned,
More glorious than by waters, through thy name,-
I these thy banks benign
A flying pilgrim seek: their courteous fame
Make good; let rest and safety here be found.
And may that oak which thou dost bathe, whose frame
Fed well by thy sweet waters, stretches wide
Its branches, seas and mountains shadowing,
O'er me its safe shade fling!
Thou sacred shade, which hast to none denied
'Neath thy cool leaves a hospitable seat,
Now 'mid thy thickest boughs receive and fold me;
Lest that blind, cruel goddess should behold me,
Who spies me out, though blind, in each retreat,
Albeit I crouch to hide in mount or vale,
And lit by moonbeams pale,
At midnight ply on lonely track my feet;
Yet with sure aim her darts still wound, and show
Her eyes as arrows keen to work my woe.
## p. 14510 (#72) ###########################################
14510
TORQUATO TASSO
Ah me! from that first day
That I drew breath, and opened first
Mine eyes to this, to me still troubled light,
I was the mark, the play
Of evil, lawless Fate; whose hand accursed
Gave wounds that longer years have scarce set right.
This knows that glorious Siren bright,
Beside whose tomb me the soft cradle pressed:
Ah! would that at that first envenomed wound
I there a grave had found!
Me cruel Fortune from my mother's breast
Tore, yet a child: ah! those fond kisses
Bathed by the tears that sheds her anguish,
I here, with sighs remembering, languish,
And her warm prayers—prayers that the wind dismisses;
For not again might I lay face to face,
Clasped in that close embrace
By arms the treasury of my infant blisses:
Thenceforth, like Trojan boy or Volscian maid,
My weak steps followed where my father strayed.
I 'mid those wanderings grew,
In exile bitter and hard poverty,
And sense untimely of my sorrows gained;
For ripeness, ere 'twas due,
Mischance and suffering brought to me,
Sad wisdom learning while my heart was pained.
My sire's weak age despoiled, his wrongs sustained,
Must I narrate? Does not my proper woe
Make me so rich, that no more store I need
Whereon my grief to feed?
Whose case, save mine, should bid my tears to flow?
My sighs are all too few for my desire;
Nor can my tears, though in abundance given,
Equal my pain. Thou, who dost view from heaven,—
Father, good father, unto God now nigher,-
I wept thee sick and dead, this know'st thou well;
With groans my hot tears fell
Thy bed, thy tomb upon: but now, raised higher
To endless joys, I honor thee, not mourn;
My whole grief pouring on my state forlorn.
Translation of E. J. Hasell.
## p. 14511 (#73) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14511
CONGEDO AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE RINALDO›
WRITTEN AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN
Dedicated to Cardinal Luigi d'Esté
THUS
HUS have I sung, in battle-field and bower,
Rinaldo's cares, and prattled through my page,
Whilst other studies claimed the irksome hour,
In the fourth lustre of my verdant age;
Studies from which I hoped to have the power
The wrongs of adverse fortune to assuage;
Ungrateful studies, whence I pine away
Unknown to others, to myself a prey.
Yet oh! if Heaven should e'er my wishes crown
With ease, released from law's discordant maze,
To spend on the green turf, in forests brown,
With bland Apollo whole harmonious days,
Then might I spread, Luigi, thy renown,
Where'er the sun darts forth resplendent rays;
Thyself the genial spirit should infuse,
And to thy virtues wake a worthier Muse.
Be thou, first fruit of fancy and of toil,
Child of few hours and those most fugitive!
Dear little book, born on the sunny soil
By Brenta's wave! may all kind planets give
To thee the spring no winter shall despoil,
Life to go forth when I have ceased to live;
Gathering rich fame beyond our country's bounds,
And mixed with songs with which the world resounds.
Yet ere I bid thy truant leaves adieu,
Ere yet thou seek'st the prince whose name, impressed
Deep in my heart, upon thy front we view,—
Too poor a portal for so great a guest! —
Go, find out him from whom my birth I drew,
Life of my life! and whose the rich bequest
Has been, if aught of beautiful or strong
Adorns my life and animates my song.
He, with that keen and searching glance which knows
To pierce beyond the veil of dim disguise,
Shall see the faults that lie concealed so close
To the short vision of my feeble eyes,
## p. 14512 (#74) ###########################################
14512
TORQUATO TASSO
And with that pen which joins the truth of prose
To tuneful fable, shall the verse chastise
(Far as its youth the trial can endure),
And grace thy page with beauties more mature.
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO THE PRINCESS LEONORA
WHEN FORBIDDEN BY HER PHYSICIANS TO SING
Ahi! ben è reo destin, che invidia e toglie
H! 'TIS a merciless decree,
That to the envied world denies
The sound of that sweet voice which we
So much admire, so dearly prize!
OH!
The noble thought and dulcet lay,
Breathing of passions so refined
By Honor's breath, would drive away
Sharp sorrow from the gloomiest mind.
Yet 'tis enough for our deserts,
That eyes and smiles so calm and coy
Diffuse through our enchanted hearts
A holy and celestial joy.
There would be no more blessed place
Than this, our spirits to rejoice,
If, as we view thy heavenly face,
We also heard thy heavenly voice!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE POET'S ARRIVAL AT FERRARA
Amor l'alma m' allaccia
L
OVE binds my soul in chains of bliss
Firm, rigorous, strict, and strong;
I am not sorrowful for this,
But why I quarrel with him is,
He quite ties up my tongue.
When I my lady should salute,
I can on no pretense;
## p. 14513 (#75) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14513
XXV-908
But timid and confused stand mute,
Or, wandering in my reason, suit
My speech but ill with sense.
Loose, gentle love, my tongue, and if
Thou'lt not give up one part
Of thy great power, respect my grief,
Take off this chain in kind relief,
And add it to my heart!
TO LEONORA OF ESTÉ
Al nobil colle, ove in antichi marmi
[Written when the Princess was on a visit to her uncle, the Cardinal Ippo-
lito II. d'Esté, at his villa at Tivoli, considered the most beautiful in Italy. ]
O THE romantic hills, where free
To thine enchanted eyes,
Works of Greek taste in statuary
Of antique marble rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloom of groves
Fast bears me as it flies;
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.
T
There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things,
Of heroes, to the Tuscan strings
Of my sweet lyre anew;
And to the brooks and trees around,
Ippolito's high name resound.
But now what longer keeps me here?
And who, dear lady, say,
O'er Alpine rocks and marshes drear,
A weary length of way,
Guide me to thee? so that, enwreathed
With leaves by Poesy bequeathed
From Daphne's hallowed bay,
I trifle thus in song? - Adieu!
Let the soft zephyr whisper who.
Translation of J. H. Wiffen,
## p. 14514 (#76) ###########################################
14514
TORQUATO TASSO
TO THE PRINCESS LUCRETIA
WHILE SOJOURNING WITH HER AND HER HUSBAND AT CASTELDURANTE
Negli anni acerbi
HOU, lady, in thine early days
Of life didst seem a purple rose,
That dreads the suitor sun's warm rays,
Nor dares its virgin breast disclose;
But coy, and crimsoning to be seen,
Lies folded yet in leaves of green.
THO
Or rather (for no earthly thing
Was like thee then), thou didst appear
Divine Aurora, when her wing
On every blossom shakes a tear,
And spangled o'er with dewdrops cold,
The mountain summits tints with gold.
Those days are past; yet from thy face
No charm the speeding years have snatched,
But left it ripening every grace,
In perfect loveliness, unmatched.
By what thou wert, when, young and shy,
Thy timid graces shunned the eye.
More lovely looks the flower matured,
When full its fragrant leaves it spreads;
More rich the sun, when, unobscured,
At noon a brighter beam it sheds:
Thou, in thy beauty, blendest both
The sun's ascent and rose's growth.
THE
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO TARQUINIA MOLZA
A LADY CELEBRATED FOR HER BEAUTY AND HER ITALIAN VERSES
Mostra la verde terra
HE green earth of its wealth displays
White violets, and the lovely sun
Its sparkling crown of rosy rays
O'er shaded vale and mountain dun.
Thou, lady, for thy sign of wealth,
Of genius, beauty, thought sublime,
## p. 14515 (#77) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14515
Fling'st forth in glorious show by stealth
The riches of unfading rhyme.
And whilst thy laurels, charmed from blight,
Thus greenly mock the passing hours,
Thy verses all are rays of light,
Thy living thoughts ambrosial flowers.
TO THE DUKE OF FERRARA
IMPLORING LIBERATION FROM HIS DREADFUL PRISON
O magnanimo figlio
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
O
GLORIOUS prince, magnanimous increase
Of great Alcides, whose paternal worth
Thou dost transcend! to thee who in sweet peace
From troublous exile to thy royal hearth
Received'st me erst,—again, yet once again,
I turn, and faint from my deep cell,
my knee,
Heart, soul, and weeping eyes incline; to thee
My lips, long silent, I unclose in pain,
And unto thee, but not of thee, complain.
-
Turn thy mild eyes, and see where a vile crowd
Throng, where the pauper pines, the sick man moans;
See where, with death on his shrunk cheeks, aloud
Thy once-loved servant groans;
Where, by a thousand sorrows wrung, his eyes
Grown dim and hollow, his weak limbs devoid
Of vital humor, wasting, and annoyed
By dirt and darkness, he ignobly lies,
Envying the sordid lot of those to whom
The pity comes which cheers their painful doom.
Pity is spent, and courtesy to me
Grown a dead sound, if in thy noble breast
They spring not: what illimitable sea
Of evil rushes on my soul distrest!
What joy for Tasso now remains? Alas!
The stars in heaven, the nobles of the earth
Are sworn against my peace; and all that pass
War with the strains to which my harp gives birth:
## p. 14516 (#78) ###########################################
14516
TORQUATO TASSO
Whilst I to all the angry host make plea
In vain for mercy,- most of all to thee!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO THE PRINCESSES OF FERRARA
FOR THEIR INTERCESSION WITH THE DUKE
O figlie di Renanta
D
AUGHTERS of lorn Renée, give ear! to you
I talk, in whom birth, beauty, sense refined,
Virtue, gentility, and glory true
Are in such perfect harmony combined;
To you my sorrows I unfold,— a scroll
Of bitterness,—my wrongs, my griefs, my fears,
Part of my tale; -I cannot tell the whole,
But by rebellious tears!
I will recall you to yourselves, renew
Memory of me, your courtesies, your smile
Of gracious kindness, and (vowed all to you)
My past delightful years:
What then I was, what am: what, woe the while!
I am reduced to beg; from whence; what star
Guided me hither; who with bolt and bar
Confines; and who, when I for freedom grieved,
Promised me hope, yet still that hope deceived!
These I call back to you, O slips divine
Of glorious demigods and kings! and if
My words are weak and few, the tears which grief
Wrings out are eloquent enough: I pine
For my loved lutes, lyres, laurels; for the shine
Of suns; for my dear studies, sports, my late
So elegant delights,- mirth, music, wine;
Piazzas, palaces, where late I sate,
Now the loved servant, now the social friend,-
For health destroyed, for freedom at an end,
The gloom-the solitude- th' eternal grate-
And for the laws the Charities provide,
Oh, agony! to me denied! denied!
From my sweet brotherhood of men, alas,
Who shuts me out!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
## p. 14517 (#79) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14517
TO THE DUKE ALPHONSO
BEGGING FOR A LITTLE WINE TO BE SENT TO HIS CELL
Col giro omai delle stagioni eterno
NOV
ow in the seasons' ceaseless round, the earth
Pours forth its fruits; the elm sustains with pride
The ripe productions of his fruitful bride,
To whom the smiling suns of spring gave birth;
In luxury now, as though disdaining dearth,
Bursts the black grape; its juice ambrosial flows:
Wherefore so tardy to console my woes?
The rich Falernian sparkles in its mirth!
This with its generous juice the generous fills
With joy, and turns my Lord's dark cares to bliss:
Not so with mine; but o'er my various ills
It pours the dews of sweet forgetfulness,
Inducing blest repose: ah, let me find
This slight relief, this Lethe of the mind!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
OR CHE L'AURA MIA*
Τ
ILL Laura comes,- who now, alas! elsewhere
Breathes amid fields and forests hard of heart,-
Bereft of joy I stray from crowds apart
In this dark vale, 'mid grief and ire's foul air,
Where there is nothing left of bright or fair.
Since Love has gone a rustic to the plow,
Or feeds his flocks, or in the summer now
Handles the rake, now plies the scythe with care.
Happy the mead and valley, hill and wood,
Where man and beast, and almost tree and stone,
Seem by her look with sense and joy endued!
What is not changed on which her eyes e'er shone?
The country courteous grows, the city rude,
Even from her presence or her loss alone.
--
Translation of Richard Henry Wilde.
*A play on the word "L'Aura» (the breeze) and the name Laura.
## p. 14518 (#80) ###########################################
14518
BAYARD TAYLOR
BAYARD TAYLOR
(1825-1878)
BY ALBERT H. SMYTH
B
AYARD TAYLOR was born in Kennett Square, Chester County,
Pennsylvania, January 11th, 1825. The story of his life is
the history of a struggle. His career began in humble cir-
cumstances, and ended in splendor. The love of letters was awak-
ened in him in childhood; he yielded passionate homage to the great
names of literature. When he was seven years old he grieved over
the death of Goethe and of Scott, and in
the same year (1832) composed his first
poems. His early surroundings tended to
repress his enthusiasms. He inherited two
strains of blood, German and English. By
the first he was related to the Lancaster
Mennonites who had migrated from East
Switzerland, and who spoke the Pennsylva-
nia Dutch dialect; by the other he was kin
to the seventeenth-century Mendenhall fam-
ily of Wiltshire, and the Cheshire Taylors.
He was raised in a Quaker atmosphere
which suppressed imagination and emotion.
When he was nineteen years old, he said he
felt as if he were sitting in an exhausted
receiver, while the air which should nourish his spiritual life could
only be found in distant lands. The courage, restless curiosity, and
push of the country lad found a way to finer air. He published
in 1844 a little volume of poems called 'Ximena, or the Battle of
the Sierra Morena. ' With the small profits of this literary venture,
and a few dollars advanced by Philadelphia editors, Bayard Taylor,
in company with two friends, left New York July 1st, 1844, bound
for Liverpool. For two years he traveled on foot through Europe,
eagerly studying the memorials of art and history, enduring every
hardship and privation, often penniless and hungry, never without
hope and courage, and always welcoming returning joy.
"Born in the New World, ripened in the old," Berthold Auerbach
Isaid of him. This first tramp trip abroad was symbolic of his whole
## p. 14519 (#81) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14519
life. It showed splendid energy, and acute sensibility; and it was
really Bayard Taylor's university education, supplying the deficien-
cies of his simple life and country schooling. Although a safe and
at times brilliant literary critic, and although his wide reading quali-
fied him for the professorship of German literature at Cornell Univer-
sity, he was not a scholar. He was never sure of his Latin, and
Greek he did not begin to study until he was fifty. His education
came largely from travel; he picked his knowledge from the living
bush.
It was as a traveler that he was most widely known, though it
was the reputation that he least cared for. . His great success as
a public lecturer was largely due to his fame as a traveler. He
published eleven books of travel, beginning with 'Views Afoot, or
Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff' (1846),—a work so popular
that it went through twenty editions in ten years.
N. P. Willis introduced Bayard Taylor to the literary society of
New York; and before the end of January 1848, Horace Greeley
offered him a situation on the Tribune. In one capacity or another
he continued to serve the Tribune until his death; and he was one
of the most eagerly industrious and prolific writers on the staff. For
the Tribune he visited California in 1849; and his letters from the
gold fields were republished in 'Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path
of Empire. '
Two years of distant travel, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, pro-
ceeding by the White Nile to the country of the Shillooks, gave him
the materials for 'A Journey to Central Africa,' 'The Lands of the
Saracen,' and 'A Visit to India, China, and Japan. '
Subsequent journeys resulted in Northern Travel,' Travels in
Greece and Russia,' 'At Home and Abroad,' 'Colorado: a Summer
Trip,' and 'Byways of Europe. ' The chief merit of Taylor's books
of travel is reporterial. They tell of adventure, of courage and per-
sistence. They make no pretense to antiquarian knowledge, they at-
tempt no theory or speculation; but simply and vividly they tell the
visible aspects of the countries they describe. Architecture, scenery,
and habits of life, stand in clear outline, and justify the criticism
that has named Bayard Taylor "the best American reporter of scenes
and incidents. "
<
Bayard Taylor's literary triumphs were not made in English lit-
erature alone. His inclinations were toward German life and let-
ters. Goethe was his chief literary passion. Like, him he yearned
after "the unshackled range of all experience. " The calm self-poise
and symmetrical culture of Goethe fascinated him. He craved intel-
lectual novelty, and continually wheeled into new orbits; seeking, as
he wrote to E. C. Stedman, "the establishing of my own Entelecheia
## p. 14520 (#82) ###########################################
14520
BAYARD TAYLOR
the making of all that is possible out of such powers as I may have,
without violently forcing or distorting them. " Astonishing versatility
is the chief note of his life and of his inclusive literary career. He
was famous as a traveler, and successful as a diplomatist in Russia
and in Germany. To his eleven volumes of travels he added four
novels, several short stories, a history of Germany, two volumes of
critical essays and studies in German and English literature, a famous
translation of 'Faust,' and thirteen volumes of poems comprising
almost every variety of verses,— odes, idyls, ballads, lyrics, pastorals,
dramatic romances, and lyrical dramas.
For seven years he worked upon his translation of Faust,'
which he completed in 1870. The immense difficulties of the poem
he attacked with unresting energy, and with a singularly intimate
knowledge of the German language. He undertook to render the
poem in the original metres, and in this respect succeeded beyond
all other translators. The dedication 'An Goethe' which Taylor pub-
lished in his translation is a masterpiece of German verse.
It can
stand side by side with Goethe's own dedication without paling a syl-
lable. Taylor was completely saturated with German literature; and
in his lectures upon Lessing, Klopstock, Schiller, and Goethe, his
illustrative quotations were the genuine droppings from the comb.
He was widely read and appreciated in Germany. When he delivered
in German, at Weimar, his lecture upon American literature, the
whole court was present; and among his auditors were the grand-
children of Carl August, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland.
When
he was minister to Berlin, every facility was given him to pursue
those studies in the lives of Goethe and Schiller which would have
resulted in the crowning work of his life, but which were destined
never to be completed.
It was partly with the hope of working a lucrative literary vein
that would take the place of the repugnant lecturing trade, that he
turned his attention to the novel. 'Hannah Thurston' and 'The
Story of Kennett' are attempts to interpret the life of his native
region in Pennsylvania. The beautiful pastoral landscapes of the
Chester valley, and the homely life of its fertile farms, he dwells
affectionately upon; but the curious crotchets and fads of the Quaker
community in which he grew up are ridiculed and rebuked. Spirit-
ualism, vegetarianism, teetotalism, and all the troop of unreasoning
"isms" of the hour, enter into the plot of Hannah Thurston. ' 'John
Godfrey's Fortunes' is constructed out of the author's literary and
social experiences in New York about 1850, and is to a considerable
extent autobiographical.
Bayard Taylor's darling ambition was to be remembered as a
poet. However he might experiment in other fields of literature, and
## p. 14521 (#83) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14521
however enviable the distinctions he might win in statecraft and
in scholarship, nothing could reconcile him to the slightest sense of
failure in his poetic endeavor. He had real lyric genius, as is abund-
antly shown in the 'Poems of the Orient': 'The Bedouin Song'-
paralleled only in Shelley-and The Song of the Camp' are two
lyrics that will last as long as anything in American poetry. The
sadness of Bayard Taylor's life was its frustrated purpose. It was a
full and happy life as a whole, for his work was a joy to him, and
he dwelt always in an atmosphere of generous and noble thoughts;
yet the reward often seemed inadequate to the high endeavor. He
had a generous plan of life, he was ambitious for himself and family.
He acquired a large estate, and built an expensive house, - Cedar-
croft, at Kennett Square, and lived an open, generous, hospitable
life. Involved in heavy domestic expenses, he never knew the value
of freedom. His life became a struggle for the means to live, and he
had neither time nor opportunity to refine his exquisite sense of lyric
harmony.
He planned great poems like 'Prince Deukalion' and 'The Masque
of the Gods,' which insensibly convey the impression of vast move-
ments in human affairs, of the strange stirrings of nations and races,
but which are distinctly poems of the intellect. He had splendid rhet-
oric, and his verse was sonorous, resonant, and at times. as in the
'National Ode'-stately. Had he devoted himself to song, he would
have been a noble poet; but he had a dozen kinds of talent, and he
had restless curiosity and ambition. His health failed under the
stress of labor and the strain of care. In 1878 he was appointed
minister to Germany. At last success seemed to be attained, and the
long struggle was over. But his vital powers were overtaxed. He
took the ovations of his friends with an abandon which left him
physically exhausted long before he sailed. He died in Berlin, Decem-
ber 19th, 1878.
Allesse. Amy to
―
## p. 14522 (#84) ###########################################
14522
BAYARD TAYLOR
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
Address at the dedication of the Halleck Monument at Guilford, Connecticut,
July 8th, 1869. From 'Critical Essays and Literary Notes. ' Copyright
1880, by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
E HAVE been eighty years an organized nation, ninety-three
years an independent people, more than two hundred
years an American race; and to-day, for the first time
in our history, we meet to dedicate publicly, with appropriate
honors, a monument to an American poet. The occasion is thus
lifted above the circle of personal memories which inspired it,
and takes its place as the beginning of a new epoch in the story
of our culture. It carries our thoughts back of the commence-
ment of this individual life, into the elements from which our
literature grew; and forward, far beyond the closing of the tomb
before us, into the possible growth and glory of the future.
The rhythmical expression of emotion, or passion, or thought,
is a need of the human race coeval with speech, universal as
religion, the prophetic forerunner as well as the last-begotten off-
spring of civilization. Poetry belongs equally to the impressible
childhood of a people and to the refined ease of their maturity.
It is both the instinctive effort of nature and the loftiest ideal
of art; receding to farther and farther spheres of spiritual beauty
as men rise to the capacity for its enjoyment. But our race was
transferred, half-grown, from the songs of its early ages and the
inspiring associations of its past, and set here face to face with
stern tasks which left no space for the lighter play of the mind.
The early generations of English bards gradually become for-
eign to us; for their songs, however sweet, were not those of
our home. We profess to claim an equal share in Chaucer
and Spenser and Shakespeare, but it is a hollow pretense. They
belong to our language, but we cannot truly feel that they
belong to us as a people. The destiny that placed us on this
soil robbed us of the magic of tradition, the wealth of romance,
the suggestions of history, the sentiment of inherited homes and
customs, and left us, shorn of our lisping childhood, to create a
poetic literature for ourselves.
It is not singular, therefore, that this continent should have
waited long for its first-born poet. The intellect, the energy of
character, the moral force,-even the occasional taste and refine-
ment,— which were shipped hither from the older shores, found
## p. 14523 (#85) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14523
the hard work of history already portioned out for them; and the
Muses discovered no nook of guarded leisure, no haunt of sweet
contemplation, which might tempt them to settle among us.
Labor may be prayer, but it is not poetry. Liberty of conscience
and worship, practical democracy, the union of civil order and
personal independence, are ideas which may warm the hearts and
brains of men; but the soil in which they strike root is too full
of fresh, unsoftened forces to produce the delicate wine of song.
The highest product of ripened intellect cannot be expected in
the nonage of a nation. The poetry of our colonial and revolu-
tionary periods is mostly a spiritless imitation of inferior models
in the parent country. If here and there some timid, uncertain
voice seems to guess the true language, we only hear it once or
twice; like those colonized nightingales which for one brief sum-
mer gave their new song to the Virginian moonlights, and then
disappeared. These early fragments of our poetry are chanted in
the midst of such profound silence and loneliness that they sound
spectrally to our ears. Philip Freneau is almost as much a shade
to us as are his own hunter and deer.
In the same year in which the Constitution of the United
States was completed and adopted, the first poet was born,-
Richard Henry Dana. Less than three years after him Fitz-
Greene Halleck came into the world, the lyrical genius follow-
ing the grave and contemplative Muse of his elder brother. In
Halleck, therefore, we mourn our first loss out of the first gener-
ation of American bards; and a deeper significance is thus given
to the personal honors which we lovingly pay to his memory.
Let us be glad, not only that these honors have been so nobly
deserved, but also that we find in him a fitting representative of
his age!
Let us forget our sorrow for the true man, the stead-
fast friend, and rejoice that the earliest child of song whom we
return to the soil that bore him for us, was the brave, bright,
and beautiful growth of a healthy, masculine race! No morbid
impatience with the restrictions of life, no fruitless lament over
an unattainable ideal, no inherited gloom of temperament, such
as finds delight in what it chooses to call despair, ever muffled
the clear notes of his verse, or touched the sunny cheerfulness
of his history. The cries and protests, the utterances of "world-
pain," with which so many of his contemporaries in Europe filled
the world, awoke no echo in his sound and sturdy nature. His
life offers no enigmas for our solution. No romantic mystery
-
## p. 14524 (#86) ###########################################
14524
BAYARD TAYLOR
floats around his name, to win for him the interest of a shallow
sentimentalism. Clear, frank, simple, and consistent, his song and
his life were woven into one smooth and even thread. We would
willingly pardon in him some expression of dissatisfaction with a
worldly fate which in certain respects seemed inadequate to his
genius; but we find that he never uttered it. The basis of his
nature was a knightly bravery, of such firm and enduring temper
that it kept from him even the ordinary sensitiveness of the
poetic character. From the time of his studies as a boy, in the
propitious kitchen which heard his first callow numbers, to the last
days of a life which had seen no liberal popular recognition of
his deserts, he accepted his fortune with the perfect dignity of a
man who cannot stoop to discontent. During his later visits to
New York, the simplest, the most unobtrusive, yet the cheerful-
est man to be seen among the throngs of Broadway, was Fitz-
Greene Halleck. Yet with all his simplicity, his bearing was
strikingly gallant and fearless; the carriage of his head suggested
the wearing of a helmet. The genial frankness and grace of his
manner in his intercourse with men has suggested to others the
epithet "courtly"; but I prefer to call it manly, as the expres-
sion of a rarer and finer quality than is usually found in the
atmosphere of courts.
Halleck was loyal to himself as a man, and he was also loyal
to his art as a poet. His genius was essentially lyrical, and he
seems to have felt instinctively its natural limitations. He qui-
etly and gratefully accepted the fame which followed his best pro-
ductions, but he never courted public applause. Even the swift
popularity of the Croaker series could not seduce him to take
advantage of the tide, which then promised a speedy flood. At
periods in his history when anything from his pen would have
been welcomed by a class of readers whose growing taste found
so little sustenance at home, he remained silent because he felt
no immediate personal necessity of poetic utterance. The Ger-
man poet Uhland said to me: "I cannot now say whether I
shall write any more, because I only write when I feel the posi-
tive need; and this is independent of my will, or the wish of
others. " Such was also the law of Halleck's mind, and of the
mind of every poet who reveres his divine gift. God cannot
accept a mechanical prayer; and I do not compare sacred things
with profane when I say that a poem cannot be accepted which
does not compel its own inspired utterance. He is the true
## p. 14525 (#87) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14525
priest of the human heart and the human soul who rhythmically
expresses the emotions and the aspirations of his own.
It has been said of Halleck as of Campbell, that "he was
afraid of the shadow which his own fame cast before him. " I
protest against the use of a clever epigrammatic sentence to
misinterpret the poetic nature to men. The inference is that
poets write merely for that popular recognition which is called
fame; and having attained a certain degree, fear to lose it by
later productions which may not prove so acceptable. A writer
influenced by such a consideration never deserved the name of
poet. It is an unworthy estimate of his character which thus
explains the honest and honorable silence of Fitz-Greene Halleck.
The quality of genius is not to be measured by its productive
activity. The brain which gave us 'Alnwick Castle,' 'Marco
Bozzaris,' 'Burns,' and 'Red Jacket,' was not exhausted; it was
certainly capable of other and equally admirable achievements:
but the fortunate visits of the Muse are not to be compelled by
the poet's will; and Halleck endured her absence without com-
plaint, as he had enjoyed her favors without ostentation. The
very fact that he wrote so little, proclaims the sincerity of his
genius, and harmonizes with the entire character of his life. It
was enough for him that he first let loose the Theban eagle in
our songless American air. He was glad and satisfied to know
that his lyrics have entered into and become a part of the
national life; that
"Sweet tears dim the eyes unshed,
And wild vows falter on the tongue,"
when his lines, keen and flexible as fire, burn in the ears of the
young who shall hereafter sing, and fight, and labor, and love, for
"God and their native land! "
It is not necessary that we should attempt to determine his
relative place among American poets. It is sufficient that he
has his assured place, and that his name is a permanent part of
our literary history. It is sufficient that he deserves every honor
which we
can render to his memory, not only as one of the
very first representatives of American song, but from his intrinsic
quality as a poet. Let us rather be thankful for every star
set in our heaven, than seek to ascertain how they differ from
one another in glory. If any critic would diminish the loving
enthusiasm of those whose lives have been brightened by the
## p. 14526 (#88) ###########################################
14526
BAYARD TAYLOR
poet's personal sunshine, let him remember that the sternest criti-
cism will set the lyrics of Halleck higher than their author's un-
ambitious estimate. They will in time fix their own just place
in our poetic annals. Halleck is still too near our orbit for the
computation of an exact parallax; but we may safely leave his
measure of fame to the decision of impartial Time. A poem
which bears within itself its own right to existence, will not die.
Its rhythm is freshly fed from the eternal pulses of beauty,
whence flows the sweetest life of the human race. Age cannot
quench its original fire, or repetition make dull its immortal
music. It forever haunts that purer atmosphere which overlies
the dust and smoke of our petty cares and our material interests
- often indeed calling to us like a distant clarion, to keep awake
the senses of intellectual delight which would else perish from
our lives. The poetic literature of a land is the finer and purer
ether above its material growth and the vicissitudes of its his-
tory. Where it was vacant and barren for us, except perchance
a feeble lark-note here and there, Dana, Halleck, and Bryant rose
together on steadier wings, and gave voices to the solitude: Dana
with a broad, grave undertone, like that of the sea; Bryant with
a sound as of the wind in summer woods, and the fall of waters
in mountain dells; and Halleck with strains blown from a sil-
ver trumpet, breathing manly fire and courage. Many voices
have followed them; the ether rings with new melodies, and yet
others come to lure all the aspirations of our hearts, and echo
all the yearnings of our separated destiny: but we shall not for-
get the forerunners who rose in advance of their welcome, and
created their own audience by their songs.
Thus it is that in dedicating a monument to Fitz-Greene Hal-
leck to-day, we symbolize the intellectual growth of the American.
people. They have at last taken that departure which repre-
sents the higher development of a nation,- the capacity to value
the genius which cannot work with material instruments; which
is unmoved by Atlantic Cables, Pacific Railroads, and any show
of marvelous statistical tables; which grandly dispenses with the
popular measures of success; which simply expresses itself, with-
out consciously working for the delight of others; yet which, once
recognized, stands thenceforth as a part of the glory of the whole
people. It is a token that we have relaxed the rough work of
two and a half centuries, and are beginning to enjoy that rest
and leisure out of which the grace and beauty of civilization
## p. 14527 (#89) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14527
grow. The pillars of our political fabric have been slowly and
massively raised, like the drums of Doric columns; but they still
need the crowning capitals and the sculptured entablature. Law,
and Right, and Physical Development build well, but they are
cold, mathematical architects: the Poet and the Artist make
beautiful the temple. Our natural tendency, as a people, is to
worship positive material achievement in whatever form it is dis-
played; even the poet must be a partisan before the government
will recognize his existence. So much of our intellectual energy
has been led into the new paths which our national growth
has opened, so exacting are the demands upon working brains,
that taste and refinement of mind, and warm appreciation of the
creative spirit of beauty, are only beginning to bloom here and
there among us, like tender exotic flowers. "The light that never
was on sea or land" shines all around us, but few are the eyes
whose vision it clarifies. Yet the faculty is here, and the earnest
need. The delight in art, of which poetry is the highest mani-
festation, has ceased to be the privilege of a fortunate few, and
will soon become, let us hope, the common heritage of the peo-
ple. If any true song has heretofore been sung to unheeding
ears, let us behold, in this dedication, the sign that our reproach
is taken away,- that henceforth every new melody of the land
shall spread in still expanding vibrations, until all shall learn to
listen!
The life of the poet who sleeps here represents the long
period of transition between the appearance of American poetry
and the creation of an appreciative and sympathetic audience for
it. We must honor him all the more that in the beginning he
was content with the few who heard him; that the agitations of
national life through which he passed could not ruffle the clear
flow of his song; and that, with a serene equanimity of temper
which is the rarest American virtue, he saw, during his whole
life, wealth and personal distinction constantly passing into less.
deserving hands, without temptation and without envy. All pop-
ular superstitions concerning the misanthropy or the irritable
temper of genius were disproved in him: I have never known a
man so independent of the moods and passions of his generation.
We cannot regret that he should have been chosen to assist in
the hard pioneer work of our literature, because he seemed to be
so unconscious of its privations. Yet he and his co-mates have
walked a rough, and for the most part a lonely track, leaving a
## p. 14528 (#90) ###########################################
14528
BAYARD TAYLOR
smoother way broken for their followers. They have blazed their
trails through the wilderness, and carved their sounding names on
the silent mountain peaks; teaching the scenery of our homes a
language, and giving it a rarer and tenderer charm than even
the atmosphere of great historic deeds. Fitz-Greene Halleck has
set his seal upon the gray rock of Connecticut, on the heights
of Weehawken, on the fair valley of Wyoming, and the Field of
the Grounded Arms. He has done his manly share in forcing
this half-subdued nature in which we live, to accept a human
harmony, and cover its soulless beauty with the mantle of his
verse.
However our field of poetic literature may bloom, whatever
products of riper culture may rise to overshadow its present
growths, the memory of Halleck is perennially rooted at its
entrance. Recognizing the purity of his genius, the nobility of
his character, we gratefully and affectionately dedicate to him
this monument. There is no cypress in the wreath which we
lay upon his grave. We do not meet to chant a dirge over un-
fulfilled promises or an insufficient destiny. We have no willful
defiance of the world to excuse, no sensitive protest to justify.
Our hymn of consecration is cheerful, though solemn. Look-
ing forward from this hallowed ground, we can only behold a
future for our poetry, sunnier than its past. We see the love of
beauty born from the servitude to use; the recognition of an
immortal ideal element gradually evolved from the strength of
natures which have conquered material forces; the growth of all
fine and gracious attributes of imagination and fancy, to warm
and sweeten and expand the stately coldness of intellect. We
dream of days when the highest and deepest utterances of rhyth-
mical thought shall be met with grateful welcome, not with dull
amazement or mean suspicion. We wait for voices which shall
no more say to the poet, "Stay here, at the level of our delight
in you! " but which shall say to him, "Higher, still higher!
though we may not reach you, yet in following we shall rise! "
And as our last prophetic hope, we look for that fortunate age
when the circle of sympathy, now so limited, shall be coextensive
with the nation, and when, even as the poet loves his land, his
land shall love her poet!
-
## p. 14529 (#91) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14529
[The following poems of Bayard Taylor are all copyrighted, and are repub-
lished here by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers. ]
CHARMIAN
DAUGHTER of the sun,
O
Who gave the keys of passion unto thee?
Who taught the powerful sorcery
Wherein my soul, too willing to be won,
Still feebly struggles to be free.
But more than half undone?
Within the mirror of thine eyes,
Full of the sleep of warm Egyptian skies,-
The sleep of lightning, bound in airy spell,
And deadlier, because invisible,-
I see the reflex of a feeling
Which was not till I looked on thee;
A power, involved in mystery,
That shrinks, affrighted, from its own revealing.
Thou sitt'st in stately indolence,
Too calm to feel a breath of passion start
The listless fibres of thy sense,
The fiery slumber of thy heart.
Thine eyes are wells of darkness, by the veil
Of languid lids half-sealed; the pale
And bloodless olive of thy face,
And the full, silent lips that wear
A ripe serenity of grace,
Are dark beneath the shadow of thy hair.
Not from the brow of templed Athor beams
Such tropic warmth along the path of dreams;
Not from the lips of hornèd Isis flows
Such sweetness of repose!
For thou art Passion's self, a goddess too,
And aught but worship never knew;
And thus thy glances, calm and sure,
Look for accustomed homage, and betray
No effort to assert thy sway:
Thou deem'st my fealty secure.
XXV-909
O Sorceress! those looks unseal
The undisturbèd mysteries that press
Too deep in nature for the heart to feel
Their terror and their loveliness.
## p. 14530 (#92) ###########################################
14530
BAYARD TAYLOR
Thine eyes are torches that illume
On secret shrines their unforeboded fires,
And fill the vaults of silence and of gloom
With the unresisting life of new desires.
I follow where their arrowy ray
Pierces the veil I would not tear away,
And with a dread, delicious awe behold
Another gate of life unfold,
Like the rapt neophyte who sees
Some march of grand Osirian mysteries.
The startled chambers I explore,
And every entrance open lies,
Forced by the magic thrill that runs before
Thy slowly lifted eyes.
I tremble to the centre of my being
Thus to confess the spirit's poise o'erthrown,
And all its guiding virtues blown
Like leaves before the whirlwind's fury fleeing.
But see! one memory rises in my soul,
And beaming steadily and clear,
Scatters the lurid thunder-clouds that roll
Through Passion's sultry atmosphere.
An alchemy more potent borrow
For thy dark eyes, enticing Sorceress!
For on the casket of a sacred Sorrow
Their shafts fall powerless.
Nay, frown not, Athor, from thy mystic shrine:
Strong Goddess of Desire, I will not be
One of the myriad slaves thou callest thine,
To cast my manhood's crown of royalty
Before thy dangerous beauty: I am free!
ARIEL IN THE CLOVEN PINE
N°
ow the frosty stars are gone:
I have watched them one by one,
Fading on the shores of Dawn.
Round and full the glorious sun
Walks with level step the spray,
Through his vestibule of Day,
While the wolves that late did howl
Slink to dens and coverts foul,
Guarded by the demon owl,
## p. 14531 (#93) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14531
Who, last night, with mocking croon,
Wheeled athwart the chilly moon,
And with eyes that blankly glared
On my direful torment stared.
The lark is flickering in the light;
Still the nightingale doth sing:-
All the isle, alive with spring,
Lies, a jewel of delight,
On the blue sea's heaving breast:
Not a breath from out the west,
But some balmy smell doth bring
From the sprouting myrtle buds,
Or from meadowy vales that lie
Like a green inverted sky,
Which the yellow cowslip stars,
And the bloomy almond woods,
Cloud-like, cross with roseate bars.
All is life that I can spy,
To the farthest sea and sky,
And my own the only pain
Within this ring of Tyrrhene main.
In the gnarled and cloven pine
Where that hell-born hag did chain me,
All this orb of cloudless shine,
All this youth in Nature's veins
Tingling with the season's wine,
With a sharper torment pain me.
Pansies in soft April rains
Fill their stalks with honeyed sap
Drawn from Earth's prolific lap;
But the sluggish blood she brings
To the tough pine's hundred rings,
Closer locks their cruel hold,
Closer draws the scaly bark
Round the crevice, damp and cold,
Where my useless wings I fold,-
Sealing me in iron dark.
By this coarse and alien state
Is my dainty ess
essence wronged;
Finer senses that belonged
To my freedom, chafe at Fate,
Till the happier elves I hate,
## p. 14532 (#94) ###########################################
14532
BAYARD TAYLOR
Who in moonlight dances turn
Underneath the palmy fern,
Or in light and twinkling bands.
Follow on with linkèd hands
To the ocean's yellow sands.
Primrose-eyes each morning ope
In their cool deep beds of grass;
Violets make the airs that pass
Telltales of their fragrant slope.
I can see them where they spring,
Never brushed by fairy wing.
All those corners I can spy
In the island's solitude,
Where the dew is never dry,
Nor the miser bees intrude.
Cups of rarest hue are there,
Full of perfumed wine undrained,—
Mushroom banquets, ne'er profaned,
Canopied by maiden-hair.
Pearls I see upon the sands,
Never touched by other hands;
And the rainbow bubbles shine
On the ridged and frothy brine,
Tenantless of voyager
Till they burst in vacant air.
Oh, the songs that sung might be,
And the mazy dances woven,
Had that witch ne'er crossed the sea
And the pine been never cloven!
Many years my direst pain
Has made the wave-rocked isle complain.
Winds that from the Cyclades
Came to blow in wanton riot
Round its shore's enchanted quiet,
Bore my wailings on the seas;
Sorrowing birds in Autumn went
Through the world with my lament.
Still the bitter fate is mine,
All delight unshared to see,
Smarting in the cloven pine,
While I wait the tardy axe
Which perchance shall set me free
From the damned witch Sycorax.
## p. 14533 (#95) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14533
BEDOUIN SONG
FRO
ROM the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
Look from thy window and see
My passion and my pain;
I lie on the sands below,
And I faint in thy disdain.
Let the night-winds touch thy brow
With the heat of my burning sigh,
And melt thee to hear the vow
Of a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
My steps are nightly driven
By the fever in my breast,
To hear from thy lattice breathed
The word that shall give me rest.
Open the door of thy heart,
And open thy chamber door,
And my kisses shall teach thy lips
The love that shall fade no more
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
## p. 14534 (#96) ###########################################
14534
BAYARD TAYLOR
HYLAS
TORM-WEARIED Argo slept upon the water.
No cloud was seen; on blue and craggy Ida
The hot noon lay, and on the plain's enamel;
Cool, in his bed, alone, the swift Scamander.
STO
་ Why should I haste? " said young and rosy Hylas:
"The seas were rough, and long the way from Colchis.
Beneath the snow-white awning slumbers Jason,
Pillowed upon his tame Thessalian panther;
The shields are piled, the listless oars suspended
On the black thwarts, and all the hairy bondsmen
Doze on the benches. They may wait for water,
Till I have bathed in mountain-born Scamander. "
So said, unfilleting his purple chlamys,
And putting down his urn, he stood a moment,
Breathing the faint, warm odor of the blossoms
That spangled thick the lovely Dardan meadows.
Then stooping lightly, loosened he his buskins,
And felt with shrinking feet the crispy verdure;-
Naked save one light robe that from his shoulder
Hung to his knee, the youthful flush revealing
Of warm white limbs, half-nerved with coming manhood.
Yet fair and smooth with tenderness of beauty.
And grasping it, he goes and casts himself headlong down a precipice.
Shortly after his departure, Sylvia, not dead, not even wounded, reappears
on the scene, and calmly explains how the mistaken report of her death had
arisen. "Ah! " says Daphne, the friend who all along had blamed her cold-
ness, "you live, but Amintas is dead. " Her words are confirmed by the
messenger who comes in, after the way of the classic drama, to narrate the
catastrophe. Sylvia's heart is melted; she regrets her severity, and says that
if a hater's falsely reported death has killed Amintas, it is only fit that she
should herself be slain by the true tidings of the death of so true a lover. ]
"Let me
First bury him, then die upon his grave.
Farewell, ye shepherds! plains, woods, streams, farewell! "
[Elpino, the favorite of the Muses, enters in the last act to explain how
Amintas, stunned, not killed, by his fall, was brought to life by the tears of
Sylvia, whose aged father has been sent for to bless their happy union.
The lyrics of the Chorus are very melodious. Most celebrated of all is its
song at the end of the first act. ]
THE GOLDEN AGE
"O bella età dell' oro »
LOVELY age of gold!
Not that the rivers rolled
O
With milk, or that the woods wept honey-dew;
Not that the ready ground
Produced without a wound,
Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew;
Not that a cloudless blue
For ever was in sight,
Or that the heaven, which burns
And now is cold by turns,
## p. 14508 (#70) ###########################################
14508
TORQUATO TASSO
Looked out in glad and everlasting light;
No, not that even the insolent ships from far
Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war:
But solely that that vain
And breath-invented pain,
That idol of mistake, that worshiped cheat,
That Honor,- since so called
By vulgar minds appalled,-
Played not the tyrant with our nature yet.
It had not come to fret
The sweet and happy fold
Of gentle human-kind;
Nor did its hard law bind
Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold,
That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,
Which Nature's own hand wrote: What pleases is permitted.
Then among streams and flowers
The little wingèd powers
Went singing carols without torch or bow;
The nymphs and shepherds sat
Mingling with innocent chat
Sports and low whispers; and with whispers low,
Kisses that would not go.
The maiden, budding o'er,
Kept not her bloom un-eyed,
Which now a veil must hide,
Nor the crisp apples which her bosom bore;
And oftentimes, in river or in lake,
The lover and his love their merry bath would take.
'Twas thou, thou, Honor, first
That didst deny our thirst
Its drink, and on the fount thy covering set;
Thou bad'st kind eyes withdraw
Into constrainèd awe,
And keep the secret for their tears to wet;
Thou gather'dst in a net
The tresses from the air,
And mad'st the sports and plays
Turn all to sullen ways,
And putt'st on speech a rein, in steps a care.
Thy work it is,- thou shade, that will not move,-
That what was once the gift is now the theft of love.
## p. 14509 (#71) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14509
Our sorrows and our pains,
These are thy noble gains.
But, O thou Love's and Nature's masterer,
Thou conqueror of the crowned,
What dost thou on this ground,
Too small a circle for thy mighty sphere ?
Go, and make slumber dear
To the renowned and high:
We here, a lowly race,
Can live without thy grace,
After the use of mild antiquity.
Go, let us love; since years
No truce allow, and life soon disappears.
Go, let us love: the daylight dies, is born;
But unto us the light
Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night.
Translation of Leigh Hunt.
ODE TO THE RIVER METAURO
(A fragment written at the age of forty, and left unfinished. )
HILD of great Apennine!
CH
River, if small yet far renowned,
More glorious than by waters, through thy name,-
I these thy banks benign
A flying pilgrim seek: their courteous fame
Make good; let rest and safety here be found.
And may that oak which thou dost bathe, whose frame
Fed well by thy sweet waters, stretches wide
Its branches, seas and mountains shadowing,
O'er me its safe shade fling!
Thou sacred shade, which hast to none denied
'Neath thy cool leaves a hospitable seat,
Now 'mid thy thickest boughs receive and fold me;
Lest that blind, cruel goddess should behold me,
Who spies me out, though blind, in each retreat,
Albeit I crouch to hide in mount or vale,
And lit by moonbeams pale,
At midnight ply on lonely track my feet;
Yet with sure aim her darts still wound, and show
Her eyes as arrows keen to work my woe.
## p. 14510 (#72) ###########################################
14510
TORQUATO TASSO
Ah me! from that first day
That I drew breath, and opened first
Mine eyes to this, to me still troubled light,
I was the mark, the play
Of evil, lawless Fate; whose hand accursed
Gave wounds that longer years have scarce set right.
This knows that glorious Siren bright,
Beside whose tomb me the soft cradle pressed:
Ah! would that at that first envenomed wound
I there a grave had found!
Me cruel Fortune from my mother's breast
Tore, yet a child: ah! those fond kisses
Bathed by the tears that sheds her anguish,
I here, with sighs remembering, languish,
And her warm prayers—prayers that the wind dismisses;
For not again might I lay face to face,
Clasped in that close embrace
By arms the treasury of my infant blisses:
Thenceforth, like Trojan boy or Volscian maid,
My weak steps followed where my father strayed.
I 'mid those wanderings grew,
In exile bitter and hard poverty,
And sense untimely of my sorrows gained;
For ripeness, ere 'twas due,
Mischance and suffering brought to me,
Sad wisdom learning while my heart was pained.
My sire's weak age despoiled, his wrongs sustained,
Must I narrate? Does not my proper woe
Make me so rich, that no more store I need
Whereon my grief to feed?
Whose case, save mine, should bid my tears to flow?
My sighs are all too few for my desire;
Nor can my tears, though in abundance given,
Equal my pain. Thou, who dost view from heaven,—
Father, good father, unto God now nigher,-
I wept thee sick and dead, this know'st thou well;
With groans my hot tears fell
Thy bed, thy tomb upon: but now, raised higher
To endless joys, I honor thee, not mourn;
My whole grief pouring on my state forlorn.
Translation of E. J. Hasell.
## p. 14511 (#73) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14511
CONGEDO AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE RINALDO›
WRITTEN AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN
Dedicated to Cardinal Luigi d'Esté
THUS
HUS have I sung, in battle-field and bower,
Rinaldo's cares, and prattled through my page,
Whilst other studies claimed the irksome hour,
In the fourth lustre of my verdant age;
Studies from which I hoped to have the power
The wrongs of adverse fortune to assuage;
Ungrateful studies, whence I pine away
Unknown to others, to myself a prey.
Yet oh! if Heaven should e'er my wishes crown
With ease, released from law's discordant maze,
To spend on the green turf, in forests brown,
With bland Apollo whole harmonious days,
Then might I spread, Luigi, thy renown,
Where'er the sun darts forth resplendent rays;
Thyself the genial spirit should infuse,
And to thy virtues wake a worthier Muse.
Be thou, first fruit of fancy and of toil,
Child of few hours and those most fugitive!
Dear little book, born on the sunny soil
By Brenta's wave! may all kind planets give
To thee the spring no winter shall despoil,
Life to go forth when I have ceased to live;
Gathering rich fame beyond our country's bounds,
And mixed with songs with which the world resounds.
Yet ere I bid thy truant leaves adieu,
Ere yet thou seek'st the prince whose name, impressed
Deep in my heart, upon thy front we view,—
Too poor a portal for so great a guest! —
Go, find out him from whom my birth I drew,
Life of my life! and whose the rich bequest
Has been, if aught of beautiful or strong
Adorns my life and animates my song.
He, with that keen and searching glance which knows
To pierce beyond the veil of dim disguise,
Shall see the faults that lie concealed so close
To the short vision of my feeble eyes,
## p. 14512 (#74) ###########################################
14512
TORQUATO TASSO
And with that pen which joins the truth of prose
To tuneful fable, shall the verse chastise
(Far as its youth the trial can endure),
And grace thy page with beauties more mature.
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO THE PRINCESS LEONORA
WHEN FORBIDDEN BY HER PHYSICIANS TO SING
Ahi! ben è reo destin, che invidia e toglie
H! 'TIS a merciless decree,
That to the envied world denies
The sound of that sweet voice which we
So much admire, so dearly prize!
OH!
The noble thought and dulcet lay,
Breathing of passions so refined
By Honor's breath, would drive away
Sharp sorrow from the gloomiest mind.
Yet 'tis enough for our deserts,
That eyes and smiles so calm and coy
Diffuse through our enchanted hearts
A holy and celestial joy.
There would be no more blessed place
Than this, our spirits to rejoice,
If, as we view thy heavenly face,
We also heard thy heavenly voice!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE POET'S ARRIVAL AT FERRARA
Amor l'alma m' allaccia
L
OVE binds my soul in chains of bliss
Firm, rigorous, strict, and strong;
I am not sorrowful for this,
But why I quarrel with him is,
He quite ties up my tongue.
When I my lady should salute,
I can on no pretense;
## p. 14513 (#75) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14513
XXV-908
But timid and confused stand mute,
Or, wandering in my reason, suit
My speech but ill with sense.
Loose, gentle love, my tongue, and if
Thou'lt not give up one part
Of thy great power, respect my grief,
Take off this chain in kind relief,
And add it to my heart!
TO LEONORA OF ESTÉ
Al nobil colle, ove in antichi marmi
[Written when the Princess was on a visit to her uncle, the Cardinal Ippo-
lito II. d'Esté, at his villa at Tivoli, considered the most beautiful in Italy. ]
O THE romantic hills, where free
To thine enchanted eyes,
Works of Greek taste in statuary
Of antique marble rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloom of groves
Fast bears me as it flies;
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.
T
There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things,
Of heroes, to the Tuscan strings
Of my sweet lyre anew;
And to the brooks and trees around,
Ippolito's high name resound.
But now what longer keeps me here?
And who, dear lady, say,
O'er Alpine rocks and marshes drear,
A weary length of way,
Guide me to thee? so that, enwreathed
With leaves by Poesy bequeathed
From Daphne's hallowed bay,
I trifle thus in song? - Adieu!
Let the soft zephyr whisper who.
Translation of J. H. Wiffen,
## p. 14514 (#76) ###########################################
14514
TORQUATO TASSO
TO THE PRINCESS LUCRETIA
WHILE SOJOURNING WITH HER AND HER HUSBAND AT CASTELDURANTE
Negli anni acerbi
HOU, lady, in thine early days
Of life didst seem a purple rose,
That dreads the suitor sun's warm rays,
Nor dares its virgin breast disclose;
But coy, and crimsoning to be seen,
Lies folded yet in leaves of green.
THO
Or rather (for no earthly thing
Was like thee then), thou didst appear
Divine Aurora, when her wing
On every blossom shakes a tear,
And spangled o'er with dewdrops cold,
The mountain summits tints with gold.
Those days are past; yet from thy face
No charm the speeding years have snatched,
But left it ripening every grace,
In perfect loveliness, unmatched.
By what thou wert, when, young and shy,
Thy timid graces shunned the eye.
More lovely looks the flower matured,
When full its fragrant leaves it spreads;
More rich the sun, when, unobscured,
At noon a brighter beam it sheds:
Thou, in thy beauty, blendest both
The sun's ascent and rose's growth.
THE
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO TARQUINIA MOLZA
A LADY CELEBRATED FOR HER BEAUTY AND HER ITALIAN VERSES
Mostra la verde terra
HE green earth of its wealth displays
White violets, and the lovely sun
Its sparkling crown of rosy rays
O'er shaded vale and mountain dun.
Thou, lady, for thy sign of wealth,
Of genius, beauty, thought sublime,
## p. 14515 (#77) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14515
Fling'st forth in glorious show by stealth
The riches of unfading rhyme.
And whilst thy laurels, charmed from blight,
Thus greenly mock the passing hours,
Thy verses all are rays of light,
Thy living thoughts ambrosial flowers.
TO THE DUKE OF FERRARA
IMPLORING LIBERATION FROM HIS DREADFUL PRISON
O magnanimo figlio
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
O
GLORIOUS prince, magnanimous increase
Of great Alcides, whose paternal worth
Thou dost transcend! to thee who in sweet peace
From troublous exile to thy royal hearth
Received'st me erst,—again, yet once again,
I turn, and faint from my deep cell,
my knee,
Heart, soul, and weeping eyes incline; to thee
My lips, long silent, I unclose in pain,
And unto thee, but not of thee, complain.
-
Turn thy mild eyes, and see where a vile crowd
Throng, where the pauper pines, the sick man moans;
See where, with death on his shrunk cheeks, aloud
Thy once-loved servant groans;
Where, by a thousand sorrows wrung, his eyes
Grown dim and hollow, his weak limbs devoid
Of vital humor, wasting, and annoyed
By dirt and darkness, he ignobly lies,
Envying the sordid lot of those to whom
The pity comes which cheers their painful doom.
Pity is spent, and courtesy to me
Grown a dead sound, if in thy noble breast
They spring not: what illimitable sea
Of evil rushes on my soul distrest!
What joy for Tasso now remains? Alas!
The stars in heaven, the nobles of the earth
Are sworn against my peace; and all that pass
War with the strains to which my harp gives birth:
## p. 14516 (#78) ###########################################
14516
TORQUATO TASSO
Whilst I to all the angry host make plea
In vain for mercy,- most of all to thee!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
TO THE PRINCESSES OF FERRARA
FOR THEIR INTERCESSION WITH THE DUKE
O figlie di Renanta
D
AUGHTERS of lorn Renée, give ear! to you
I talk, in whom birth, beauty, sense refined,
Virtue, gentility, and glory true
Are in such perfect harmony combined;
To you my sorrows I unfold,— a scroll
Of bitterness,—my wrongs, my griefs, my fears,
Part of my tale; -I cannot tell the whole,
But by rebellious tears!
I will recall you to yourselves, renew
Memory of me, your courtesies, your smile
Of gracious kindness, and (vowed all to you)
My past delightful years:
What then I was, what am: what, woe the while!
I am reduced to beg; from whence; what star
Guided me hither; who with bolt and bar
Confines; and who, when I for freedom grieved,
Promised me hope, yet still that hope deceived!
These I call back to you, O slips divine
Of glorious demigods and kings! and if
My words are weak and few, the tears which grief
Wrings out are eloquent enough: I pine
For my loved lutes, lyres, laurels; for the shine
Of suns; for my dear studies, sports, my late
So elegant delights,- mirth, music, wine;
Piazzas, palaces, where late I sate,
Now the loved servant, now the social friend,-
For health destroyed, for freedom at an end,
The gloom-the solitude- th' eternal grate-
And for the laws the Charities provide,
Oh, agony! to me denied! denied!
From my sweet brotherhood of men, alas,
Who shuts me out!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
## p. 14517 (#79) ###########################################
TORQUATO TASSO
14517
TO THE DUKE ALPHONSO
BEGGING FOR A LITTLE WINE TO BE SENT TO HIS CELL
Col giro omai delle stagioni eterno
NOV
ow in the seasons' ceaseless round, the earth
Pours forth its fruits; the elm sustains with pride
The ripe productions of his fruitful bride,
To whom the smiling suns of spring gave birth;
In luxury now, as though disdaining dearth,
Bursts the black grape; its juice ambrosial flows:
Wherefore so tardy to console my woes?
The rich Falernian sparkles in its mirth!
This with its generous juice the generous fills
With joy, and turns my Lord's dark cares to bliss:
Not so with mine; but o'er my various ills
It pours the dews of sweet forgetfulness,
Inducing blest repose: ah, let me find
This slight relief, this Lethe of the mind!
Translation of J. H. Wiffen.
OR CHE L'AURA MIA*
Τ
ILL Laura comes,- who now, alas! elsewhere
Breathes amid fields and forests hard of heart,-
Bereft of joy I stray from crowds apart
In this dark vale, 'mid grief and ire's foul air,
Where there is nothing left of bright or fair.
Since Love has gone a rustic to the plow,
Or feeds his flocks, or in the summer now
Handles the rake, now plies the scythe with care.
Happy the mead and valley, hill and wood,
Where man and beast, and almost tree and stone,
Seem by her look with sense and joy endued!
What is not changed on which her eyes e'er shone?
The country courteous grows, the city rude,
Even from her presence or her loss alone.
--
Translation of Richard Henry Wilde.
*A play on the word "L'Aura» (the breeze) and the name Laura.
## p. 14518 (#80) ###########################################
14518
BAYARD TAYLOR
BAYARD TAYLOR
(1825-1878)
BY ALBERT H. SMYTH
B
AYARD TAYLOR was born in Kennett Square, Chester County,
Pennsylvania, January 11th, 1825. The story of his life is
the history of a struggle. His career began in humble cir-
cumstances, and ended in splendor. The love of letters was awak-
ened in him in childhood; he yielded passionate homage to the great
names of literature. When he was seven years old he grieved over
the death of Goethe and of Scott, and in
the same year (1832) composed his first
poems. His early surroundings tended to
repress his enthusiasms. He inherited two
strains of blood, German and English. By
the first he was related to the Lancaster
Mennonites who had migrated from East
Switzerland, and who spoke the Pennsylva-
nia Dutch dialect; by the other he was kin
to the seventeenth-century Mendenhall fam-
ily of Wiltshire, and the Cheshire Taylors.
He was raised in a Quaker atmosphere
which suppressed imagination and emotion.
When he was nineteen years old, he said he
felt as if he were sitting in an exhausted
receiver, while the air which should nourish his spiritual life could
only be found in distant lands. The courage, restless curiosity, and
push of the country lad found a way to finer air. He published
in 1844 a little volume of poems called 'Ximena, or the Battle of
the Sierra Morena. ' With the small profits of this literary venture,
and a few dollars advanced by Philadelphia editors, Bayard Taylor,
in company with two friends, left New York July 1st, 1844, bound
for Liverpool. For two years he traveled on foot through Europe,
eagerly studying the memorials of art and history, enduring every
hardship and privation, often penniless and hungry, never without
hope and courage, and always welcoming returning joy.
"Born in the New World, ripened in the old," Berthold Auerbach
Isaid of him. This first tramp trip abroad was symbolic of his whole
## p. 14519 (#81) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14519
life. It showed splendid energy, and acute sensibility; and it was
really Bayard Taylor's university education, supplying the deficien-
cies of his simple life and country schooling. Although a safe and
at times brilliant literary critic, and although his wide reading quali-
fied him for the professorship of German literature at Cornell Univer-
sity, he was not a scholar. He was never sure of his Latin, and
Greek he did not begin to study until he was fifty. His education
came largely from travel; he picked his knowledge from the living
bush.
It was as a traveler that he was most widely known, though it
was the reputation that he least cared for. . His great success as
a public lecturer was largely due to his fame as a traveler. He
published eleven books of travel, beginning with 'Views Afoot, or
Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff' (1846),—a work so popular
that it went through twenty editions in ten years.
N. P. Willis introduced Bayard Taylor to the literary society of
New York; and before the end of January 1848, Horace Greeley
offered him a situation on the Tribune. In one capacity or another
he continued to serve the Tribune until his death; and he was one
of the most eagerly industrious and prolific writers on the staff. For
the Tribune he visited California in 1849; and his letters from the
gold fields were republished in 'Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path
of Empire. '
Two years of distant travel, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, pro-
ceeding by the White Nile to the country of the Shillooks, gave him
the materials for 'A Journey to Central Africa,' 'The Lands of the
Saracen,' and 'A Visit to India, China, and Japan. '
Subsequent journeys resulted in Northern Travel,' Travels in
Greece and Russia,' 'At Home and Abroad,' 'Colorado: a Summer
Trip,' and 'Byways of Europe. ' The chief merit of Taylor's books
of travel is reporterial. They tell of adventure, of courage and per-
sistence. They make no pretense to antiquarian knowledge, they at-
tempt no theory or speculation; but simply and vividly they tell the
visible aspects of the countries they describe. Architecture, scenery,
and habits of life, stand in clear outline, and justify the criticism
that has named Bayard Taylor "the best American reporter of scenes
and incidents. "
<
Bayard Taylor's literary triumphs were not made in English lit-
erature alone. His inclinations were toward German life and let-
ters. Goethe was his chief literary passion. Like, him he yearned
after "the unshackled range of all experience. " The calm self-poise
and symmetrical culture of Goethe fascinated him. He craved intel-
lectual novelty, and continually wheeled into new orbits; seeking, as
he wrote to E. C. Stedman, "the establishing of my own Entelecheia
## p. 14520 (#82) ###########################################
14520
BAYARD TAYLOR
the making of all that is possible out of such powers as I may have,
without violently forcing or distorting them. " Astonishing versatility
is the chief note of his life and of his inclusive literary career. He
was famous as a traveler, and successful as a diplomatist in Russia
and in Germany. To his eleven volumes of travels he added four
novels, several short stories, a history of Germany, two volumes of
critical essays and studies in German and English literature, a famous
translation of 'Faust,' and thirteen volumes of poems comprising
almost every variety of verses,— odes, idyls, ballads, lyrics, pastorals,
dramatic romances, and lyrical dramas.
For seven years he worked upon his translation of Faust,'
which he completed in 1870. The immense difficulties of the poem
he attacked with unresting energy, and with a singularly intimate
knowledge of the German language. He undertook to render the
poem in the original metres, and in this respect succeeded beyond
all other translators. The dedication 'An Goethe' which Taylor pub-
lished in his translation is a masterpiece of German verse.
It can
stand side by side with Goethe's own dedication without paling a syl-
lable. Taylor was completely saturated with German literature; and
in his lectures upon Lessing, Klopstock, Schiller, and Goethe, his
illustrative quotations were the genuine droppings from the comb.
He was widely read and appreciated in Germany. When he delivered
in German, at Weimar, his lecture upon American literature, the
whole court was present; and among his auditors were the grand-
children of Carl August, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland.
When
he was minister to Berlin, every facility was given him to pursue
those studies in the lives of Goethe and Schiller which would have
resulted in the crowning work of his life, but which were destined
never to be completed.
It was partly with the hope of working a lucrative literary vein
that would take the place of the repugnant lecturing trade, that he
turned his attention to the novel. 'Hannah Thurston' and 'The
Story of Kennett' are attempts to interpret the life of his native
region in Pennsylvania. The beautiful pastoral landscapes of the
Chester valley, and the homely life of its fertile farms, he dwells
affectionately upon; but the curious crotchets and fads of the Quaker
community in which he grew up are ridiculed and rebuked. Spirit-
ualism, vegetarianism, teetotalism, and all the troop of unreasoning
"isms" of the hour, enter into the plot of Hannah Thurston. ' 'John
Godfrey's Fortunes' is constructed out of the author's literary and
social experiences in New York about 1850, and is to a considerable
extent autobiographical.
Bayard Taylor's darling ambition was to be remembered as a
poet. However he might experiment in other fields of literature, and
## p. 14521 (#83) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14521
however enviable the distinctions he might win in statecraft and
in scholarship, nothing could reconcile him to the slightest sense of
failure in his poetic endeavor. He had real lyric genius, as is abund-
antly shown in the 'Poems of the Orient': 'The Bedouin Song'-
paralleled only in Shelley-and The Song of the Camp' are two
lyrics that will last as long as anything in American poetry. The
sadness of Bayard Taylor's life was its frustrated purpose. It was a
full and happy life as a whole, for his work was a joy to him, and
he dwelt always in an atmosphere of generous and noble thoughts;
yet the reward often seemed inadequate to the high endeavor. He
had a generous plan of life, he was ambitious for himself and family.
He acquired a large estate, and built an expensive house, - Cedar-
croft, at Kennett Square, and lived an open, generous, hospitable
life. Involved in heavy domestic expenses, he never knew the value
of freedom. His life became a struggle for the means to live, and he
had neither time nor opportunity to refine his exquisite sense of lyric
harmony.
He planned great poems like 'Prince Deukalion' and 'The Masque
of the Gods,' which insensibly convey the impression of vast move-
ments in human affairs, of the strange stirrings of nations and races,
but which are distinctly poems of the intellect. He had splendid rhet-
oric, and his verse was sonorous, resonant, and at times. as in the
'National Ode'-stately. Had he devoted himself to song, he would
have been a noble poet; but he had a dozen kinds of talent, and he
had restless curiosity and ambition. His health failed under the
stress of labor and the strain of care. In 1878 he was appointed
minister to Germany. At last success seemed to be attained, and the
long struggle was over. But his vital powers were overtaxed. He
took the ovations of his friends with an abandon which left him
physically exhausted long before he sailed. He died in Berlin, Decem-
ber 19th, 1878.
Allesse. Amy to
―
## p. 14522 (#84) ###########################################
14522
BAYARD TAYLOR
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
Address at the dedication of the Halleck Monument at Guilford, Connecticut,
July 8th, 1869. From 'Critical Essays and Literary Notes. ' Copyright
1880, by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
E HAVE been eighty years an organized nation, ninety-three
years an independent people, more than two hundred
years an American race; and to-day, for the first time
in our history, we meet to dedicate publicly, with appropriate
honors, a monument to an American poet. The occasion is thus
lifted above the circle of personal memories which inspired it,
and takes its place as the beginning of a new epoch in the story
of our culture. It carries our thoughts back of the commence-
ment of this individual life, into the elements from which our
literature grew; and forward, far beyond the closing of the tomb
before us, into the possible growth and glory of the future.
The rhythmical expression of emotion, or passion, or thought,
is a need of the human race coeval with speech, universal as
religion, the prophetic forerunner as well as the last-begotten off-
spring of civilization. Poetry belongs equally to the impressible
childhood of a people and to the refined ease of their maturity.
It is both the instinctive effort of nature and the loftiest ideal
of art; receding to farther and farther spheres of spiritual beauty
as men rise to the capacity for its enjoyment. But our race was
transferred, half-grown, from the songs of its early ages and the
inspiring associations of its past, and set here face to face with
stern tasks which left no space for the lighter play of the mind.
The early generations of English bards gradually become for-
eign to us; for their songs, however sweet, were not those of
our home. We profess to claim an equal share in Chaucer
and Spenser and Shakespeare, but it is a hollow pretense. They
belong to our language, but we cannot truly feel that they
belong to us as a people. The destiny that placed us on this
soil robbed us of the magic of tradition, the wealth of romance,
the suggestions of history, the sentiment of inherited homes and
customs, and left us, shorn of our lisping childhood, to create a
poetic literature for ourselves.
It is not singular, therefore, that this continent should have
waited long for its first-born poet. The intellect, the energy of
character, the moral force,-even the occasional taste and refine-
ment,— which were shipped hither from the older shores, found
## p. 14523 (#85) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14523
the hard work of history already portioned out for them; and the
Muses discovered no nook of guarded leisure, no haunt of sweet
contemplation, which might tempt them to settle among us.
Labor may be prayer, but it is not poetry. Liberty of conscience
and worship, practical democracy, the union of civil order and
personal independence, are ideas which may warm the hearts and
brains of men; but the soil in which they strike root is too full
of fresh, unsoftened forces to produce the delicate wine of song.
The highest product of ripened intellect cannot be expected in
the nonage of a nation. The poetry of our colonial and revolu-
tionary periods is mostly a spiritless imitation of inferior models
in the parent country. If here and there some timid, uncertain
voice seems to guess the true language, we only hear it once or
twice; like those colonized nightingales which for one brief sum-
mer gave their new song to the Virginian moonlights, and then
disappeared. These early fragments of our poetry are chanted in
the midst of such profound silence and loneliness that they sound
spectrally to our ears. Philip Freneau is almost as much a shade
to us as are his own hunter and deer.
In the same year in which the Constitution of the United
States was completed and adopted, the first poet was born,-
Richard Henry Dana. Less than three years after him Fitz-
Greene Halleck came into the world, the lyrical genius follow-
ing the grave and contemplative Muse of his elder brother. In
Halleck, therefore, we mourn our first loss out of the first gener-
ation of American bards; and a deeper significance is thus given
to the personal honors which we lovingly pay to his memory.
Let us be glad, not only that these honors have been so nobly
deserved, but also that we find in him a fitting representative of
his age!
Let us forget our sorrow for the true man, the stead-
fast friend, and rejoice that the earliest child of song whom we
return to the soil that bore him for us, was the brave, bright,
and beautiful growth of a healthy, masculine race! No morbid
impatience with the restrictions of life, no fruitless lament over
an unattainable ideal, no inherited gloom of temperament, such
as finds delight in what it chooses to call despair, ever muffled
the clear notes of his verse, or touched the sunny cheerfulness
of his history. The cries and protests, the utterances of "world-
pain," with which so many of his contemporaries in Europe filled
the world, awoke no echo in his sound and sturdy nature. His
life offers no enigmas for our solution. No romantic mystery
-
## p. 14524 (#86) ###########################################
14524
BAYARD TAYLOR
floats around his name, to win for him the interest of a shallow
sentimentalism. Clear, frank, simple, and consistent, his song and
his life were woven into one smooth and even thread. We would
willingly pardon in him some expression of dissatisfaction with a
worldly fate which in certain respects seemed inadequate to his
genius; but we find that he never uttered it. The basis of his
nature was a knightly bravery, of such firm and enduring temper
that it kept from him even the ordinary sensitiveness of the
poetic character. From the time of his studies as a boy, in the
propitious kitchen which heard his first callow numbers, to the last
days of a life which had seen no liberal popular recognition of
his deserts, he accepted his fortune with the perfect dignity of a
man who cannot stoop to discontent. During his later visits to
New York, the simplest, the most unobtrusive, yet the cheerful-
est man to be seen among the throngs of Broadway, was Fitz-
Greene Halleck. Yet with all his simplicity, his bearing was
strikingly gallant and fearless; the carriage of his head suggested
the wearing of a helmet. The genial frankness and grace of his
manner in his intercourse with men has suggested to others the
epithet "courtly"; but I prefer to call it manly, as the expres-
sion of a rarer and finer quality than is usually found in the
atmosphere of courts.
Halleck was loyal to himself as a man, and he was also loyal
to his art as a poet. His genius was essentially lyrical, and he
seems to have felt instinctively its natural limitations. He qui-
etly and gratefully accepted the fame which followed his best pro-
ductions, but he never courted public applause. Even the swift
popularity of the Croaker series could not seduce him to take
advantage of the tide, which then promised a speedy flood. At
periods in his history when anything from his pen would have
been welcomed by a class of readers whose growing taste found
so little sustenance at home, he remained silent because he felt
no immediate personal necessity of poetic utterance. The Ger-
man poet Uhland said to me: "I cannot now say whether I
shall write any more, because I only write when I feel the posi-
tive need; and this is independent of my will, or the wish of
others. " Such was also the law of Halleck's mind, and of the
mind of every poet who reveres his divine gift. God cannot
accept a mechanical prayer; and I do not compare sacred things
with profane when I say that a poem cannot be accepted which
does not compel its own inspired utterance. He is the true
## p. 14525 (#87) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14525
priest of the human heart and the human soul who rhythmically
expresses the emotions and the aspirations of his own.
It has been said of Halleck as of Campbell, that "he was
afraid of the shadow which his own fame cast before him. " I
protest against the use of a clever epigrammatic sentence to
misinterpret the poetic nature to men. The inference is that
poets write merely for that popular recognition which is called
fame; and having attained a certain degree, fear to lose it by
later productions which may not prove so acceptable. A writer
influenced by such a consideration never deserved the name of
poet. It is an unworthy estimate of his character which thus
explains the honest and honorable silence of Fitz-Greene Halleck.
The quality of genius is not to be measured by its productive
activity. The brain which gave us 'Alnwick Castle,' 'Marco
Bozzaris,' 'Burns,' and 'Red Jacket,' was not exhausted; it was
certainly capable of other and equally admirable achievements:
but the fortunate visits of the Muse are not to be compelled by
the poet's will; and Halleck endured her absence without com-
plaint, as he had enjoyed her favors without ostentation. The
very fact that he wrote so little, proclaims the sincerity of his
genius, and harmonizes with the entire character of his life. It
was enough for him that he first let loose the Theban eagle in
our songless American air. He was glad and satisfied to know
that his lyrics have entered into and become a part of the
national life; that
"Sweet tears dim the eyes unshed,
And wild vows falter on the tongue,"
when his lines, keen and flexible as fire, burn in the ears of the
young who shall hereafter sing, and fight, and labor, and love, for
"God and their native land! "
It is not necessary that we should attempt to determine his
relative place among American poets. It is sufficient that he
has his assured place, and that his name is a permanent part of
our literary history. It is sufficient that he deserves every honor
which we
can render to his memory, not only as one of the
very first representatives of American song, but from his intrinsic
quality as a poet. Let us rather be thankful for every star
set in our heaven, than seek to ascertain how they differ from
one another in glory. If any critic would diminish the loving
enthusiasm of those whose lives have been brightened by the
## p. 14526 (#88) ###########################################
14526
BAYARD TAYLOR
poet's personal sunshine, let him remember that the sternest criti-
cism will set the lyrics of Halleck higher than their author's un-
ambitious estimate. They will in time fix their own just place
in our poetic annals. Halleck is still too near our orbit for the
computation of an exact parallax; but we may safely leave his
measure of fame to the decision of impartial Time. A poem
which bears within itself its own right to existence, will not die.
Its rhythm is freshly fed from the eternal pulses of beauty,
whence flows the sweetest life of the human race. Age cannot
quench its original fire, or repetition make dull its immortal
music. It forever haunts that purer atmosphere which overlies
the dust and smoke of our petty cares and our material interests
- often indeed calling to us like a distant clarion, to keep awake
the senses of intellectual delight which would else perish from
our lives. The poetic literature of a land is the finer and purer
ether above its material growth and the vicissitudes of its his-
tory. Where it was vacant and barren for us, except perchance
a feeble lark-note here and there, Dana, Halleck, and Bryant rose
together on steadier wings, and gave voices to the solitude: Dana
with a broad, grave undertone, like that of the sea; Bryant with
a sound as of the wind in summer woods, and the fall of waters
in mountain dells; and Halleck with strains blown from a sil-
ver trumpet, breathing manly fire and courage. Many voices
have followed them; the ether rings with new melodies, and yet
others come to lure all the aspirations of our hearts, and echo
all the yearnings of our separated destiny: but we shall not for-
get the forerunners who rose in advance of their welcome, and
created their own audience by their songs.
Thus it is that in dedicating a monument to Fitz-Greene Hal-
leck to-day, we symbolize the intellectual growth of the American.
people. They have at last taken that departure which repre-
sents the higher development of a nation,- the capacity to value
the genius which cannot work with material instruments; which
is unmoved by Atlantic Cables, Pacific Railroads, and any show
of marvelous statistical tables; which grandly dispenses with the
popular measures of success; which simply expresses itself, with-
out consciously working for the delight of others; yet which, once
recognized, stands thenceforth as a part of the glory of the whole
people. It is a token that we have relaxed the rough work of
two and a half centuries, and are beginning to enjoy that rest
and leisure out of which the grace and beauty of civilization
## p. 14527 (#89) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14527
grow. The pillars of our political fabric have been slowly and
massively raised, like the drums of Doric columns; but they still
need the crowning capitals and the sculptured entablature. Law,
and Right, and Physical Development build well, but they are
cold, mathematical architects: the Poet and the Artist make
beautiful the temple. Our natural tendency, as a people, is to
worship positive material achievement in whatever form it is dis-
played; even the poet must be a partisan before the government
will recognize his existence. So much of our intellectual energy
has been led into the new paths which our national growth
has opened, so exacting are the demands upon working brains,
that taste and refinement of mind, and warm appreciation of the
creative spirit of beauty, are only beginning to bloom here and
there among us, like tender exotic flowers. "The light that never
was on sea or land" shines all around us, but few are the eyes
whose vision it clarifies. Yet the faculty is here, and the earnest
need. The delight in art, of which poetry is the highest mani-
festation, has ceased to be the privilege of a fortunate few, and
will soon become, let us hope, the common heritage of the peo-
ple. If any true song has heretofore been sung to unheeding
ears, let us behold, in this dedication, the sign that our reproach
is taken away,- that henceforth every new melody of the land
shall spread in still expanding vibrations, until all shall learn to
listen!
The life of the poet who sleeps here represents the long
period of transition between the appearance of American poetry
and the creation of an appreciative and sympathetic audience for
it. We must honor him all the more that in the beginning he
was content with the few who heard him; that the agitations of
national life through which he passed could not ruffle the clear
flow of his song; and that, with a serene equanimity of temper
which is the rarest American virtue, he saw, during his whole
life, wealth and personal distinction constantly passing into less.
deserving hands, without temptation and without envy. All pop-
ular superstitions concerning the misanthropy or the irritable
temper of genius were disproved in him: I have never known a
man so independent of the moods and passions of his generation.
We cannot regret that he should have been chosen to assist in
the hard pioneer work of our literature, because he seemed to be
so unconscious of its privations. Yet he and his co-mates have
walked a rough, and for the most part a lonely track, leaving a
## p. 14528 (#90) ###########################################
14528
BAYARD TAYLOR
smoother way broken for their followers. They have blazed their
trails through the wilderness, and carved their sounding names on
the silent mountain peaks; teaching the scenery of our homes a
language, and giving it a rarer and tenderer charm than even
the atmosphere of great historic deeds. Fitz-Greene Halleck has
set his seal upon the gray rock of Connecticut, on the heights
of Weehawken, on the fair valley of Wyoming, and the Field of
the Grounded Arms. He has done his manly share in forcing
this half-subdued nature in which we live, to accept a human
harmony, and cover its soulless beauty with the mantle of his
verse.
However our field of poetic literature may bloom, whatever
products of riper culture may rise to overshadow its present
growths, the memory of Halleck is perennially rooted at its
entrance. Recognizing the purity of his genius, the nobility of
his character, we gratefully and affectionately dedicate to him
this monument. There is no cypress in the wreath which we
lay upon his grave. We do not meet to chant a dirge over un-
fulfilled promises or an insufficient destiny. We have no willful
defiance of the world to excuse, no sensitive protest to justify.
Our hymn of consecration is cheerful, though solemn. Look-
ing forward from this hallowed ground, we can only behold a
future for our poetry, sunnier than its past. We see the love of
beauty born from the servitude to use; the recognition of an
immortal ideal element gradually evolved from the strength of
natures which have conquered material forces; the growth of all
fine and gracious attributes of imagination and fancy, to warm
and sweeten and expand the stately coldness of intellect. We
dream of days when the highest and deepest utterances of rhyth-
mical thought shall be met with grateful welcome, not with dull
amazement or mean suspicion. We wait for voices which shall
no more say to the poet, "Stay here, at the level of our delight
in you! " but which shall say to him, "Higher, still higher!
though we may not reach you, yet in following we shall rise! "
And as our last prophetic hope, we look for that fortunate age
when the circle of sympathy, now so limited, shall be coextensive
with the nation, and when, even as the poet loves his land, his
land shall love her poet!
-
## p. 14529 (#91) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14529
[The following poems of Bayard Taylor are all copyrighted, and are repub-
lished here by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers. ]
CHARMIAN
DAUGHTER of the sun,
O
Who gave the keys of passion unto thee?
Who taught the powerful sorcery
Wherein my soul, too willing to be won,
Still feebly struggles to be free.
But more than half undone?
Within the mirror of thine eyes,
Full of the sleep of warm Egyptian skies,-
The sleep of lightning, bound in airy spell,
And deadlier, because invisible,-
I see the reflex of a feeling
Which was not till I looked on thee;
A power, involved in mystery,
That shrinks, affrighted, from its own revealing.
Thou sitt'st in stately indolence,
Too calm to feel a breath of passion start
The listless fibres of thy sense,
The fiery slumber of thy heart.
Thine eyes are wells of darkness, by the veil
Of languid lids half-sealed; the pale
And bloodless olive of thy face,
And the full, silent lips that wear
A ripe serenity of grace,
Are dark beneath the shadow of thy hair.
Not from the brow of templed Athor beams
Such tropic warmth along the path of dreams;
Not from the lips of hornèd Isis flows
Such sweetness of repose!
For thou art Passion's self, a goddess too,
And aught but worship never knew;
And thus thy glances, calm and sure,
Look for accustomed homage, and betray
No effort to assert thy sway:
Thou deem'st my fealty secure.
XXV-909
O Sorceress! those looks unseal
The undisturbèd mysteries that press
Too deep in nature for the heart to feel
Their terror and their loveliness.
## p. 14530 (#92) ###########################################
14530
BAYARD TAYLOR
Thine eyes are torches that illume
On secret shrines their unforeboded fires,
And fill the vaults of silence and of gloom
With the unresisting life of new desires.
I follow where their arrowy ray
Pierces the veil I would not tear away,
And with a dread, delicious awe behold
Another gate of life unfold,
Like the rapt neophyte who sees
Some march of grand Osirian mysteries.
The startled chambers I explore,
And every entrance open lies,
Forced by the magic thrill that runs before
Thy slowly lifted eyes.
I tremble to the centre of my being
Thus to confess the spirit's poise o'erthrown,
And all its guiding virtues blown
Like leaves before the whirlwind's fury fleeing.
But see! one memory rises in my soul,
And beaming steadily and clear,
Scatters the lurid thunder-clouds that roll
Through Passion's sultry atmosphere.
An alchemy more potent borrow
For thy dark eyes, enticing Sorceress!
For on the casket of a sacred Sorrow
Their shafts fall powerless.
Nay, frown not, Athor, from thy mystic shrine:
Strong Goddess of Desire, I will not be
One of the myriad slaves thou callest thine,
To cast my manhood's crown of royalty
Before thy dangerous beauty: I am free!
ARIEL IN THE CLOVEN PINE
N°
ow the frosty stars are gone:
I have watched them one by one,
Fading on the shores of Dawn.
Round and full the glorious sun
Walks with level step the spray,
Through his vestibule of Day,
While the wolves that late did howl
Slink to dens and coverts foul,
Guarded by the demon owl,
## p. 14531 (#93) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14531
Who, last night, with mocking croon,
Wheeled athwart the chilly moon,
And with eyes that blankly glared
On my direful torment stared.
The lark is flickering in the light;
Still the nightingale doth sing:-
All the isle, alive with spring,
Lies, a jewel of delight,
On the blue sea's heaving breast:
Not a breath from out the west,
But some balmy smell doth bring
From the sprouting myrtle buds,
Or from meadowy vales that lie
Like a green inverted sky,
Which the yellow cowslip stars,
And the bloomy almond woods,
Cloud-like, cross with roseate bars.
All is life that I can spy,
To the farthest sea and sky,
And my own the only pain
Within this ring of Tyrrhene main.
In the gnarled and cloven pine
Where that hell-born hag did chain me,
All this orb of cloudless shine,
All this youth in Nature's veins
Tingling with the season's wine,
With a sharper torment pain me.
Pansies in soft April rains
Fill their stalks with honeyed sap
Drawn from Earth's prolific lap;
But the sluggish blood she brings
To the tough pine's hundred rings,
Closer locks their cruel hold,
Closer draws the scaly bark
Round the crevice, damp and cold,
Where my useless wings I fold,-
Sealing me in iron dark.
By this coarse and alien state
Is my dainty ess
essence wronged;
Finer senses that belonged
To my freedom, chafe at Fate,
Till the happier elves I hate,
## p. 14532 (#94) ###########################################
14532
BAYARD TAYLOR
Who in moonlight dances turn
Underneath the palmy fern,
Or in light and twinkling bands.
Follow on with linkèd hands
To the ocean's yellow sands.
Primrose-eyes each morning ope
In their cool deep beds of grass;
Violets make the airs that pass
Telltales of their fragrant slope.
I can see them where they spring,
Never brushed by fairy wing.
All those corners I can spy
In the island's solitude,
Where the dew is never dry,
Nor the miser bees intrude.
Cups of rarest hue are there,
Full of perfumed wine undrained,—
Mushroom banquets, ne'er profaned,
Canopied by maiden-hair.
Pearls I see upon the sands,
Never touched by other hands;
And the rainbow bubbles shine
On the ridged and frothy brine,
Tenantless of voyager
Till they burst in vacant air.
Oh, the songs that sung might be,
And the mazy dances woven,
Had that witch ne'er crossed the sea
And the pine been never cloven!
Many years my direst pain
Has made the wave-rocked isle complain.
Winds that from the Cyclades
Came to blow in wanton riot
Round its shore's enchanted quiet,
Bore my wailings on the seas;
Sorrowing birds in Autumn went
Through the world with my lament.
Still the bitter fate is mine,
All delight unshared to see,
Smarting in the cloven pine,
While I wait the tardy axe
Which perchance shall set me free
From the damned witch Sycorax.
## p. 14533 (#95) ###########################################
BAYARD TAYLOR
14533
BEDOUIN SONG
FRO
ROM the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
Look from thy window and see
My passion and my pain;
I lie on the sands below,
And I faint in thy disdain.
Let the night-winds touch thy brow
With the heat of my burning sigh,
And melt thee to hear the vow
Of a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
My steps are nightly driven
By the fever in my breast,
To hear from thy lattice breathed
The word that shall give me rest.
Open the door of thy heart,
And open thy chamber door,
And my kisses shall teach thy lips
The love that shall fade no more
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!
## p. 14534 (#96) ###########################################
14534
BAYARD TAYLOR
HYLAS
TORM-WEARIED Argo slept upon the water.
No cloud was seen; on blue and craggy Ida
The hot noon lay, and on the plain's enamel;
Cool, in his bed, alone, the swift Scamander.
STO
་ Why should I haste? " said young and rosy Hylas:
"The seas were rough, and long the way from Colchis.
Beneath the snow-white awning slumbers Jason,
Pillowed upon his tame Thessalian panther;
The shields are piled, the listless oars suspended
On the black thwarts, and all the hairy bondsmen
Doze on the benches. They may wait for water,
Till I have bathed in mountain-born Scamander. "
So said, unfilleting his purple chlamys,
And putting down his urn, he stood a moment,
Breathing the faint, warm odor of the blossoms
That spangled thick the lovely Dardan meadows.
Then stooping lightly, loosened he his buskins,
And felt with shrinking feet the crispy verdure;-
Naked save one light robe that from his shoulder
Hung to his knee, the youthful flush revealing
Of warm white limbs, half-nerved with coming manhood.
Yet fair and smooth with tenderness of beauty.
