Part 2

Here are some other bits of verse which on the sea and on the lands, in the deserts or in the jungles have served the same purpose for other men, perhaps indeed for you.

"It has been prophesied these many years I should not die save in Jerusalem, Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land. But bear me to that chamber, there I'll lie, In this Jerusalem shall Hardy die."

"And gentlemen of England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhood cheap while any speaks Who fought with us upon St. Crispin's day."

"Let me come in where you sit weeping, aye: Let me who have not any child to die Weep with you for the little one whose love I have known nothing of. The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed Their pressure round your neck, the hands you used To kiss. Such arms, such hands I never knew. May I not weep with you Fain would I be of service, say something Between the tears, that would be comforting. But ah! So sadder than yourselves am I Who have no child to die."

"Your picture smiles as once it smiled; The ring you gave is still the same; Your letter tells, O changing child, No tidings since it came! Give me some amulet That marks intelligence with you, Red when you love and rosier red, And when you love not, pale and blue. Alas that neither bonds nor vows Can certify possession. Torments me still the fear that Love Died in his last expression."

"He walks with God upon the hills And sees each morn the world arise New bathed in light of Paradise. He hears the laughter of her rills; She to his spirit undefiled Makes answer as a little child; Unveiled before his eyes she stands And gives her secrets to his hands."

"Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, The river sang below, The dim Sierras far beyond uplifting Their minarets of snow. The roaring campfire with good humor painted The ruddy tints of health On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted In the fierce race for wealth. Till one arose and from his pack's scant treasure The hoarded volume drew, And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure To hear the tale anew. And as around them shadows gathered faster And as the firelight fell, He read aloud the book wherein the Master Had writ of Little Nell. Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy, for the reader Was youngest of them all, Yet, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar A silence seemed to fall. The fir trees gathering closer in the shadows Listened in every spray, While the whole camp with little Nell, on English meadows, Wandered and lost their way. Lost is that camp and wasted all its fire, And he who wro't that spell; Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye have one tale to tell. Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story Blend with the breath that thrills With hop vines' incense all the pensive glory That fills the Kentish hills. And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreath entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine."

"Dark browed she broods with weary lids Beside her Sphynx and Pyramids, With her low, never lifted eyes. If she be dead, respect the dead; If she be weeping, let her weep; If she be sleeping, let her sleep; For lo, this woman named the stars. She suckled at her tawny dugs Your Moses, while ye reeked with wars And prowled the woods, rude, painted thugs."

"The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart; Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, The humble and the contrite heart."

"Careless seems the Great Avenger, History's pages but record One death grapple in the darkness Twixt old systems and the word. Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; But that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim Unknown Standeth God within the shadow. Keeping watch above his own."

"Pledge me round, I bid you declare, All good fellows whose beards are gray, Did not the fairest of the fair Common grow and wearisome, ere Ever a month had passed away? The reddest lips that ever have kissed, The brightest eyes that ever have shone May pray and whisper and we not list Or look away and never be missed Ere yet ever a month is gone. Gillian's dead. God rest her bier! How I loved her twenty years syne! Marian's married and I sit here Alone and merry at forty year, Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine."

"Under the wide and starry sky Dig my grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse ye grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'"

"By the brand upon my shoulders, By the lash of clinging steel, By the welts the whips have left me, By the wounds that never heal, By the eyes grown dim with staring At the sun-wash on the brine, I am paid in full for service,-- Would that service still were mine."

And with these the more familiar verses beginning:

"Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea."

"Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music."

"Just for a handful of silver he left us."

"Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead."

"O to be in England, now that April's there."

"The mists are on the Oberland, The Fungfrau's snows look faint and far."

"The word of the Lord by night To the watching pilgrims came."

"Fear, a forgotten form; Death, a dream of the eyes; We were atoms in God's great storm That raged through the angry skies!"

And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War.

Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to your taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range of literature is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand--best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have loved the highest." It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach. Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will give you a fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doing this instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English. And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne in memory.

Take this from Emerson:

"The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love--there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."

"I took a walk the other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown to me--to whom the sun was servant. I saw their path, their pleasuring ground through the woods in Spaulding's cranberry meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision, the trees grew through it. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart path which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of the pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through their house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. It is painted on the pines and the oaks. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again aware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this I think I should move out of Concord."

In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher living and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have felt and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It is the movement of man. It is the movement of individual men, and it is in giving illumination to personal and racial characters that the succession of incidents has its value. The picturesque individual, the man who could not be counted with the mass, the David, the Christ, the Brutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the Charlemagne, the Cromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the Helmholtz, the Goethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all these give inspiration to history. It is well that we should know them, should know them all, should know them well--an education is incomplete that is not built about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship of great men.