Prince Amadis

Prince Amadis lay in a flowery brake,
By the side of Locarno's silver lake:
It seems a very long while ago,
Or else it may be that time goes slow.

Those were the days when the world of spirit
Filled the old earth to the brim, or near it;
And marvels were wrought by wizard elves,
Which happen but rarely among ourselves.

The heart of Prince Amadis did not pant
With an indwelling love, or blameless want
Of chivalrous friendship, or thirst of power;
His youth was enough for its own bright hour.

He floated o'er life like a noon-tide breeze,
Or cradled vapor on sunny seas,
Or an exquisite cloud, in light arrayed,
Which sails through the sky and can throw no shade.

Wishes he had, but no hopes and no fears;
He smiled, but his smiles were not gendered of tears:
Like a beautiful mute he played his part,
Too happy by far in his own young heart!

His twentieth summer was well nigh past,
Each was more golden and gay than the last;
The glory of earth, which to others grows dim,
Through his unclouded years glittered fresher to him.

And oh how he loved! From the hour of his birth,
He was gentle to all the bright insects of earth;
He sate by the green gilded lizards for hours,
And laughed, for pure love, at the shoals of pied flowers.

As he walked through the woods in the cool of the day,
He stooped to each blossom that grew by the way;
He tapped at the rind of the old cedar trees,
When its weak breath had sweetened the evening breeze.

He knew all the huge oaks, the wide forest's gems,
By their lightning-cleft branches or sisterly stems;
He knew the crowned pines where the starlight is best,
And the likeliest banks where the moon would rest.

He studied with joy the old mossy walls,
And probed with his finger their cavernous halls,
Where the wren builds her nest, and the lady-bird
slumbers,
While winter his short months of icy wind numbers.

All things were holy and dear to his mind,
All things, — except the hot heart of his kind,
And that seemed a flower in a withered hood,
Which the cold spring cankered within the bud.

The wrongs of the peasant, the woes of the peer,
Ne'er wrung from the prince a true sigh or a tear;
The strife of his fellows seemed heartlessly bright,
Like the laurels in winter in cold moonlight.

He cared for no sympathy, living in throngs
Of his own sunny thoughts, and his mute inward songs;
And if in the sunset his spirit was weary,
Sleep was hard by him, young health's sanctuary.

'Twould not have been so had he e'er known his mother,
Or had had, save the green earth, a playmate and brother;
For deep in his heart a most wonderful power
Of loving lay hid, like an unopened flower.

Ah! luckless it is when a spirit is haunted
By all kindly powers, but attractions are wanted,
Life's outward attractions, by calm, pensive law,
Love, sorrow, and pity, from shy hearts to draw!

Yet mid all the natural forms of delight,
Whose footfalls stole round him by day or by night,
He was pure as the white.lily's dew-beaded cup,
Which, bold because stainless, to heaven looks up.

His mind was a fair desert temple of beauty,
Unshaded by sorrow, unhallowed by duty;
A dream in a garden, a midsummer bliss
Was the youth, the bright youth, of Prince Amadis.

Prince Amadis lay in the chestnut shade
Where the flickering light through the green leaves
played,
And the summer lake, with its blue heart throbbing,
Chafed the white sand with a reedy sobbing.

He saw not the hills through his half-closed eye,
But their presence was felt like a spirit nigh;
To the spell of the noon-tide he gave himself up,
And his heart overflowed like wine in a cup.

He smiled at the silence that stole o'er the day,
While the singing birds slumbered upon the spray,
Till moss-scented airs o'er the green sward did creep,
And tremulous mallow-leaves fanned him asleep.

And dreams whispered to him, the tongues of sweet
flowers,
Striking the chimes of the uncounted hours;
And, as though he were sinless, the wood-haunting
creatures
Bent o'er the sleeper with love in their features.

Sleeping or waking, his vision was one, —
That the knots of the world might by him be undone,
That the Natures below and the Spirits above
Might with man be confused in one Eden of love.

Beautiful dreamer! how far hadst thou strayed
From the love at thy doors by the pensive earth laid,
And the household chains of our true love rent,
Which were forged for the soul's enfranchisement!

The day drifted out, like the ebb of the ocean,
From the havens of earth with a quiet motion;
And a cool flapping breeze grew out of the air,
Which the mallow-leaves fanned to the sleeper there.

Prince Amadis rose from the flowery brake,
While, imaged serenely down in the lake,
The roseate sky, with gold bars freaked,
By a flight of wild swans was duskily streaked.

In a stiff-bending line through the rich sunset
They wavered like cloud-spots of glossy j et,
And with rude piping they marshalled their rear
In a phalanx above the tranquil mere.

There for one moment their huge wings they shake,
Then in wide spiral circuits drop down to the lake;
The dark water gurgles, thus suddenly cloven,
In wakes of white bubbles interwoven.

Are there deep instincts that lurk below
In those dipping breasts of driven snow?
Or why do they steer their conscious way
To the Prince in the mallow-curtained bay?

A pale-feathered cygnet was with them, and he
Swam centre of all the company,
And round him they anchored in that calm pool,
A vision solemn and beautiful.

He wore on his head a black diadem,
Looped to a clasp of orange gem;
His plumage gleamed in the dusk star-bright,
Of purple but faintly muffled with white.

There needed no voices: Prince Amadis read
A dream in that show interpreted;
He strode the fair cygnet, and rose from the ground
With those wild white swans on a voyage bound.

Young Prince! they will search for thee all through
the night,
And the lake and the bush will gleam wan with torch-
light;
And there will be weeping and wailing then,
If monarchs have hearts like other men.

But away and away in the midnight blue
That fleet of white creatures went steering through;
And away and away through the sweet day-break,
From the white Alps flashed, their road they take:

Through the tingling noon and the evening vapor,
Which Hesper lights with his little taper,
Through the tremulous smiles of moonlight mirth,
And the balmy descents of dew to the earth,

Through the calms, through the winds, when the hail-
stones ring,
The convoy passed with untiring wing,
And oft from their course for hours they drove,
As though they winnowed the air for love.

And now they would mount and now they would stoop,
And almost to earth or river droop,
And harshly would pipe through the sheer delight
Of their boisterous wings, and their strength of flight.

They saw the young Save in the next night's moon,
They were over Belgrade by the afternoon,
And ere the sun set their journey was o'er
On a willow-isle by the Danube's shore.

They left the young Prince, (for their mission was done,)
There on the green willow-island alone;
And, in their hoarse language they bade him farewell,
And swept o'er the sun-bleached Bulgarian fell.

More and more sadly as daylight died,
The breeze-troubled marsh-plants sobbed and sighed,
And the pulse of the river with panting sound
Beat in the swamps and the hollows round.

But the stream travelled on like a pilgrim weary
In search of his eastern sanctuary,
Through the heart of old Europe guiding his floods
From beneath the green boughs of the Freybourg woods.

The lone swampy island lay down in the river,
Whose strong nervous waves made the ground and trees
quiver;
It swung with its head up the stream, anchored lightly
By the tree roots and marsh-plants that just held it
tightly.

It trembles for ever as the ruffled stream rushes,
And the mud-bubbles splutter and quake in the bushes;
Nay, it seemed in the twilight to float by the marge,
Uneasily slow, like a half-sunken barge.

He looked to the shore, — faded herbage, wild swamp,
One ruined old mosque, all begreened with the damp;
The willows leaned over in half-fallen ranks,
And the cold river gurgled under the banks.

The moon could scarce rise, and she rose all of blood,
And with lurid reflection bedabbled the flood;
And the night-wind fled frightenedly past with a wail,
Ais if some deed of murder had freighted the gale.

Then when the wind had passed on out of hearing,
Came an audible hush, as if spirits were nearing
The lone willow-island, and made the Prince shiver,
And long to seek rest in that black rushing river.

Then straightway wild music played over the scene,
The moon became white, and the earth moonlit green,
And the breaths from the mosses like incense rose up,
And each still open flower caught the dew in its cup.

What is it? the features of earth seem uncommon;
His heart glows with thoughts that are wilder than
human;
And surely that music, those waves of bright light,
Are more than the charm of a beautiful night.

He felt the strange wail of the music dissolving
The life that was in him, and new life evolving;
His innermost being turned fluent, and fled,
As if magnets were drawing it out of its bed.

He saw it go forth in thin streams of gray light,
Which was greedily drunk by the darkness of night;
For a moment he seemed to flow out upon nature,
Without personality, substance, or feature.

Then back came his life like a tide-wave sublime;
It had circled the world in that moment of time.
But what was it like? Was it matter, or spirit?
Should he welcome it, love it? or shun it, and fear it?

He felt all at once viewless arms were around him;
Flesh and blood had no sinews like those that now
bound him;
He felt hands within him, — then all things gave way,
His soul lay down and fluttered in extatic dismay.
His heart turned to stone; a strange panic had chilled
him;
His old life died out, as this new terror filled him;
He felt as if through some ordeal he was winning
His way to some grand but terrific beginning.
He was colder than ice, with an inward cold pain,
And his blood left his heart, and encircled his brain;
Man's life was unmade in him, crossed by new sections,
With mind for a centre instead of affections.

We are plants, we are beasts, we are metals, and earth,
And the life of the stars too went in us at birth;
We are all things in one thing, life's manifold flame
Chaos gave us, when out of its bosom we came.

So now in Prince Amadis, down in his being,
The plant to the plant-life was evermore fleeing,
The beasts to the beast-life; star, metal, and gem
Paired off with the inner life suited to them.

And now they flowed into him, now they flowed out,
And mingled and circled and wavered about;
One life now repelled, now invited another,
But the pulses that beat in them answered each other.
New unity too did his nature discover;
He had but one sense, he was eye-sight all over:
He sa\v tastes, he saw touches, strange mortal was he!
He saw sountls, he saw scents, — he did nothing but see!

He had sympathies too, but not after man's fashion;
He loved, but his love was a cold shiny passion:
Father-love, sister-love, all were effaced,
And all his old home-idols rudely displaced.

In spite of himself his whole being must hasten
Its affections on wholly new objects to fasten;
He must speak a new language which nature will teach,
But a many-tongued silentness now must be speech.

Darkness was to him what sorrow had been,
And light was his joy, with its smiles of white she-en;
And color was pathos, and sympathy flowers,
And his homes were unnumbered, — all beautiful bowers.

Alas! I much fear that poetic desire
Had grown in his heart, like a cosmical fire;
He had burned for a change, and had found the change
there.
And a dream had been answered as if it were prayer!

From the deeps of the Danube there rose right before
him
A glorious spirit, with a light-halo o'er him,
Whose heart was transparent, yet visibly heaving,
With the light shining through, and yet real and living.

'Twas the essence of beauty, the spirit of earth,
The Kosmos, that lurked in the marvellous birth
Of the outlying universe, orbs without number,
Nothingness waked from its unmeaning slumber.

O who shall define this strange life of the world,
That for ever unfurls all the things that are furled,
A power unfatigued, and a life ever vernal,
Immaterial matter, and almost eternal.

Like angel he seemed, with a look on his features
Of a human sort, dashed with the lowlier creatures,
And he seemed at each winnow to shake from his wings
The splendor of all terrestrial things.

He spoke, — what a voice of most musical sweetness,
Like streams in their flowing, like winds in their fleet-
ness!
It was wildest enchantment, incredible bliss
To the listening heart of the Prince Amadis.

Art thou weary, he cried, of that intricate strife,
Which for lack of a better sad mortals call life;
Then change places with me, and deep shalt thou drink
Of the fountain that springs on eternity's brink.

I will give thee my powers; thou wilt need to be brave;
My far-reaching subtlety too thou shalt have;
My science infused in thy spirit shall be;
Thou shall beat as the world-soul awhile, 'stead of me.
Thy mind shall be filled with all sweet shapes and shows;
Mute creation shall watch o'er thine equal repose;
And unmoral beauty shall be to thy soul
An incessant delight while the weary worlds roll.

Beauty shall feed thee at heaven's own portals,
With an exquisite influx unknown to poor mortals;
Thou shalt drink of the sunstrearn of light as it flows,
And the sight of fair things be thy spirit's repose.

Art thou weary of wills, of hearts sinful and rude,
Of earth's dark and bright mixtures, and curses that
brood
O'er a whole stricken race, and the service they need,
Where the eyes ever weep, and the hearts ever bleed?

Art thou sick of distractions from self, and would fain
Let thy soul walk at large in a world without pain,
Where law, not caprice, shall direct every force,
And the absence of sin make you free of remorse?

Lo! I am the Kosmos! such beauty is mine,
Where all things in truth and in harmony shine,
Where no word of command, since the first one, is
spoken,
Where no work is unmeaning, no decree ever broken.

Where the swerving of systems is the rising and falling
Of unmeasured epochs to each other calling,
Where change and variety blend without flaw,
And calm and catastrophe are but one law.

But if this grand life is to go into thee,
Impassible, passionless, cold must thou be;
A single stray tenderness quick would dispel
The new life thou hast on, and which fits thee so well.

I cannot put from thee thy flesh-and-blood heart;
I have set it alone in a corner apart;
Only see that earth's pity wake it not up again, —
If thou sheddest one tear, my gift is all vain.

Magnificence cannot be meek in a creature:
Tis a stretch that would wear out and break up his
nature;
To be high, — high above all our kind we must dwell;
He who longs to be grand must be cruel as well.
Lxxvnr.
He spoke, and there came on the earth sirch a hush!
He threw off from himself a scarce visible flush
Of the rosiest light, that passed into the heart
Of the wondering Prince, with an exquisite smart.

For a moment a mist-shadow seemed just to hover —
The low stars looked through it — the moonlit stream
over,
Then Kosmos unsouled, earth's king dispossessed,
Laid down in the bed of the Danube to rest.

The stars ceased to twinkle, the moon shed no beam,
There came a strange murmur all over the stream;
Earth felt just the slightest vibration, — then tore
Right away through cold space unconcerned as before.

For a moment the Prince in astonishment mused,
Till he felt his whole being without effort diffused
Thro' the unsurveyed universe, and his new wings
Seemed to drop life forever into the nature of things.

Then away, and away, and away, — from the haunts
Of poor moping man, and his numberless wants,
Away o'er the regions of beauty that lie
Beneath and beyond the wide dome of the sky!

Sense of the power was the very first thought that
possessed him,
And infinite space, he expected would rest him;
So he darted aloft on the wings of the night,
And in secret the soundless air closed on his flight.

O grand was the hush of sidereal space,
Mid the huge orbs that looked at him full in the face;
There his mind worked in greatness, unlimited then
By the shrill interruptions of frivolous men.

Majestic he traversed our own Milky Way,
Tracked each winding current, and sounded each bay;
Its collections of worlds are the neighbors, next door
To the planet that lies on Sol's furthermost shore.

He was lonely as poet could e'er wish to be,
From all outward entanglement blessedly free
As second-rate greatness could covet, whose charm
Is in license that startles, and power to do harm.

He was where the wistfullest vacancy broods
O'er the great empty stars and their bright solitudes,
Where space, running over, petitioned for bounds,
And silence itself almost ached for sweet sounds.

Yet the Milky Way world is our own, and his home
Was not far enough off; he must still further roam;
For the sense of magnificence o'er his soul stealing
Was narrowed, he felt, by some patriot feeling.

Yes! the Milky Way world is but one step in space;
It is but as France is to England, a place
Scarcely foreign when seen o'er the sun-misty strait,
With the wild German ocean crowding in at the gate.

The worlds where poor man hath got nothing to do!—
There are plenty of such in the neighboring blue! —
Will not meet what he wants; oh no! he must be
In a world which no telescopes even can see.

There are plenty of such, ere we come to the end
Where the actual things with the possible blend,
Other oceans of blue, a conceivable place; —
But it burdens my heart to imagine such space!

Art thou sure, gentle Prince! there is no sorrow there.
No laws helping laws, no, angelical care?
Art thou sure that obedience and duty intrude
Not at all in that viewless and far solitude?

For the lonely have duties, thyself mid the rest;
Like a wounded bird bleeding, the heart in thy breast
Sheds remorse on the air, and unkings thee when highest,
While duties undone mark the track where thou fliest.

Then away, in thy striving to get clear of strife!
There is nought youth loves more than an unwitnessed
life.
Thou art gone, out of sight amid nameless worlds fleeing,
With the earth-string of conscience at work in thy being.

When he came to the edge of the Milky Way world
Tracts of space lay before him in silence unfurled;
But he winged his way o'er the blue gulfs without check
To worlds far beyond, from which this looked a speck.

All the systems of suns that we see in the night
Dwindled down to a point, and then vanished from sight;
Then came fresh sets of worlds, and more inlets of space,
Old types disappearing, new forms in their place.
xcvu.
They rose up to view, like the tall masts of ships
Out at sea, when the sky-line of dark ocean dips;
Worlds round him, above, and beneath him, were seen,
Like woods in a mist with abysses between.

Huge nebular regions, oases of light
Strewed thickly or thinly the void infinite;
Each of which in itself countless worlds can compress,
As thick as the sands of the wide wilderness; —

Long islands of worlds, far apart in the blue,
Xow so near that a bridge of great suns joins the two:
Now an isthmus of orbs, now a wide continent
Where the numberless worlds in a bright patch are
blent:—

Worlds made, worlds preparing, worlds then and there
making,
And inchoate spirals their white tresses shaking,
Worlds liquid, worlds solid, worlds vapor all over,
Worlds with or without atmospherical cover.

He went, horror hushing the songs in his mouth,
To that drear restless universe down in the south,
And he trembled to see reeling Argus so flicker,
Like a torch as we wave it, now slower, now quicker.
cu.
He had favorite tracks out in space where he toured,
And, from old childish longings, he deftly explored
Those dark mottled patches, once scorned as delusion,
Molten light, molten darkness, in orderly fusion.

Creation, so deemed he, was scarcely begun,
A grandeur in childhood, a race yet to run,
A hymn that this moment through new space has rung,
The first strophe of which has yet scarcely been sung.

He saw rings part from centres in flaming projection,
Worlds weltering wildly towards their perfection,
Where the work that was done appeared more like un-
doing,
Contraction, explosion, dark deluge, and ruin.
He met rays of light falling earthward, like tears,
That had been on their travels thirty millions of years,
Cleaving like lightning the thin purple gloom,
Yet would hardly reach earth until after the Doom.

What is distance but nature's best poem, that sings
As it lengthens its flight, throwing off from its wings
The most magical softness, which veils and discloses,
Bringing out, filling up, wheresoe'er it reposes.

It is distance which robes far and near with their tints,
Excites by concealing, and heightens by hints,
On earth blends green forests and indigo mountains,
And above presses star-worlds to single light-fountains.

His home was the poet's home, space, and beyond,
All the worlds knit in one world, with thought for a
bond,
Strong musical thought to repel and to draw,
With metre for ether, and song for a law.

For his thoughts peopled space, or at times drew it in
To itself, making all things its kith and its kin;
The bleakest of nebulas grive him as much
Of a home as the lake which the alp-shadows touch.
ex.
He was not more at home, where his own Lombard sky
Looks down through the chestnuts, than when he
might lie
On forlorn wisps of stars that with pendulous motion
Writhe about over space, like the wrecks on the ocean.

When his boat on Locarno scarce heaved in the calm,
Things around him were clothed not in more homely
charm,
Than the gulfs where gaunt systems in awful embrace
Put forth arms made of worlds, like huge feelers, in
space.

The universe taught him that space was less vast
Than the world of his soul, which all time will outlast;
And mind, more colossal than matter, can come
In the world of Orion to be straitened for room.

What hope for the future, he thought, when he saw
Orbs condense and compress themselves, plainly by
law,
Worlds by millions slow gathering in dread concentra-
tion,
To some marvellous oneness of undreamed creation!

He watched giant systems break up and re-form,
Like nations renewed by a popular storm:
It was fearful to see how they cracked, swang asunder,
And closed up in new systems of order and wonder.

He beheld with glad terror our own Milky Way
At its north and south poles self-unrivet, out-sway,
And some world-groups heave anchor, like icebergs
sublime,
Thawed out in the lapse of unwriteable time.

So the Clouds of Magellan drifted off and dipped down
Towards earth, as a cloud settles over a town,
Mighty realms of white worlds, their soft tremulous
shining
With the sunsets of earth most fraternally twining.

All is change and advance, not a cyclical-race;
Love only survives wrecks of Time, Force, and Space;
Love only shall see out of all revolution
How creation shall perfect its grand constitution.

All around us is Home: the heart owns no Abroad
In the lap of this beautiful Free Act of God;
His Love is the instinct that pilots its Course,
And His sweet Will its true Imperceptible Force.

O how his heart grew with the largeness of things!
His sights were all thoughts, and his thoughts were all
wings:
Yet one look of love from his sister were bliss
More eternal, more infinite surely than this.

Then went he, and stood in the face of the sun,
At the end of the race which that orb has to run,
An invisible goal in ethereal seas,
Which lies to the north of the bright Hercules.

But ah! when the sun that far home hath attained,
We may hope that our souls better homes will have
gained,
Fairer heavens above, where earth's troubles will cease,
But not without winning us glory and peace.

The Prince goes oil hunting for beauty, nor dreams
That the beauty of earth is above what it seems,
That the heart is the trial of what we are worth,
And the best of all heavens is made out of earth!

He watched the swift moon, when her shadow first nips
The bright edge of the sun in a total eclipse;
And he flew to those'strange rosy thumbs that protrude
From the moon-darkened rim, when the light is subdued.

He went near the sun to see comets unbind
Their long lucent ringlets now flowing behind,
And saw the scared things, as they looked in the glass,
Ruffle back their light tresses the moment they pass.

Near the grand double stars he would watch with
delight
The beautiful quarrel between day and night,
Blue sunset, red sunrise, both striving together,
Weird landscapes, weird foliage, and the weirdest of
weather.

He loved to see planets in sweet occupation
Pass under the moon, while the double vibration,
Like an echo of light, makes the planet start back,
As if frightened to let the moon ride o'er its track.
cxxvu.
He watched Jupiter's moon jumping back in alarm,
Keeping step with its mother, who put forth her arm,
And drew the young child with herself into night,
Herself more to blame than the poor satellite!

Then right in the flames of the sun would he go,
Where an unconsumed planet lies dazzling and low,
Deeper down in the sunshine than Hermes, all drowned
To mortal research in the light-floods around.

He trod the outskirts of the last solar seas,
AVhere the cold is not measured by human degrees,
Where the orbs seem uncertain on what line to venture,
Lest the sun might not prove their legitimate centre, —

Far out in the dreary cold, far, far away,
Beyond Neptune, where outlying planets obey,
Reluctant and sluggish, the suck of the sun,
But who drag in their orbits rather than run.
cxxxr.
Then for change would he seek the least jewels of night,
The gardens of crystal that swing into sight
Every year, 'twixt the lines on which Jupiter rolls,
And Mars With the white cap of snow on his poles.

He saw little earth hold its atmosphere down,
While space-matter strove the poor orb to uncrown;
Outside its crisp top he hung poised in the sky
To see with what fleetness the planet flew by.

In all the wide worlds, great and little, he saw,
With sweet re-assurance one beautiful law, —
That each world to itself its own centre should seem,
An honest untruth, a self-realized dream.

He saw that the people's large language was better
Than the phrases of science, and for common use meeter;
For thus all the orbs, through the vastness that roam,
Feel themselves in each nook of creation at home.

For what is each heart, wheresoe'er it may live,
But the centre of all the love God has to give,
As dear to its Father, whatever its station,
As if it by itself were the whole of creation?

O Prince! hast thou not in thy heart some misgiving
Of the centreless life that thy selfwill is living?
For where self is the centre, all life is abroad,
Unrooted in home, and unfastened to God.
O good for the soul is the merciful strain
Of a grave obligation; still better the pain
Of repentance, whose tears are professions of faith
In the God who forgives, in the life after death.

Then wander no longer, thou sunshiny cloud!
With thy shadow just dappling the fields on thy road;
Weep away to the earth in soft rain, and the shower
Shall at least make one green spot more green than before.

Life that lives for itself in an unrooted youth
Must one day do penance for all its untruth,
Must revenge on itself what it slighted before,
In old age cast away on a desolate shore.

There are plants in the woods of Brazil, parasites,
Who give out their fragrances only at nights,
Fresh rooted each moment in wandering airs,
Which are solid enough for such thin roots as theirs.

Even such is thy round in this beautiful ring,
An air-rooted, windshaken, unlife-like thing,
Perfuming for no one night's untrodden bowers,
With no holier pain than a headache of flowers.

When could others awaken fond youth from a dream?
It must wake of itself: for it flows like a stream, —
It is gone while we speak, its swift currents unbinding;
Its home is in seeking, its exile in finding!

In love have we spoken, for this Prince is our brother;
But one beailty reminds him far off of another,
And, ere we had time our advice to rehearse,
Twice or thrice has he gone round the whole universe.

O see how he wheels up aloft in the air!
Heavy wisdom from earth cannot reach to him there;
Now he drops, but it is in the thick of yon wood,
Where precipitous rocks overhang the dark flood.

There again! he has left us in lightning-like flight,
And is hidden far up in the whiteness of light,
Whence faint sparkles fall like a rocket-shower breaking,
Where from pinions unseen the soft motes he is shaking.

Then down the blue waters of islandless ocean
He dives, like the gale, with exulting emotion,
Now passively floats as the frolic wind blows him,
Now tunnels the crests of cold brine that oppose him.

When he teases the earth in his low-drooping flight
It is not home draws him, he will not alight;
He but skims, like a swallow, in swift mazy rings,
And feeds, like the bird, on invisible things.

When lie hovers o'er earth it is only to sing,
Beating time for himself with his vibrating wing;
While the hot spell is on him perforce must he roam,
For an uneasy heart is most homeless at home.

He has thoughts, so he thinks, above all thoughts of ours,
Inconceivable echoes from heavenly bowers;
He has words, so he says, which we always mistake,
And a silence of song which we rude mortals break.

Ah! little he deems how much deeper a thing
Is the action of life, a more bountiful spring
Of beauty, of wonder, of truth, and of power,
A joy more long-lived, a more heavenly dower.

Tears shed for others are waters that rise
To their levels above in the grace-giving skies:
Time wasted for others is paid back at last,
Counted out in eternities, future and past.

Though thy life may be fretful and swift, yet delay
To soothe the least sorrow that comes in thy way;
For sympathy, happily choosing its times,
Cheers the long nights of grief with its beautiful chimes.

More tall than the stars is the wonderful height
Of unselfishness, always reposing in light,
On whose glorious summits the night falleth never,
But the seen Face of God is its sunrise for ever.

How great is the gift to have sisters and brothers!
They only who lose them can estimate mothers!
For to hearts, where the world would fain fling its first
spell,
A home can be almost religion as well.

Souls only sell dear in the markets of heaven,
And on earth for hearts only high prices are given;
Men who love while they suffer, and work while they
grieve,
Heaven and earth in their one web of life interweaves.

They only who love, and love meekly, are blest;
And true love is nothing but self dispossessed;
They only who labor at last win the prize;
They only who sorrow can ever be wise.

All these beauties are toys to thee, Prince Amadis!
Thy chase is not life; it was ne'er meant for this.
A schoolboy at play will outweigh thy worth soon,
If he gives and takes kindly one whole afternoon.

Hast thou got any purse in the which thou canst treasure
The fine glowing sunsets that give thee such pleasure?
Do the angels in heaven hoard the scents of the flowers,
Or photograph all the fair lights of the hours?

The secrets of children, who whisper and chatter,
Are worth half a score of the secrets of matter,
Unless they can make us still more the world's master,
To sail our ships safer, or go our way faster.

If too much is made of them, earth, sun, and moon
Are but sights at a theatre, songs out of tune;
And the round stars are only like hoops up on high,
Which child-poets trundle through infinite sky.

O man is the beauty, and hearts are the glory
Of all the world's science and all the world's story;
And sorrow is softness, a heavenly birth,
To prevent our becoming as hard as the earth.

These far worlds astonish the mind out of breath,
So vastly outstretched in magnificent death;
But grandeur wants something more changeful to rest it;
It aches when one vision a long while hath pressed it.

Homely earth, solar system, Milky Way all around us
Worlds beyond the horizon with which weak science
bounds us, —
In and out of all these will he fitfully wander,
In his speed blending strangely the Here and the Yonder.

Of all changing things far the loveliest is life,
And with that, of all places, the earth is most rife;
For awhile then at least will the Prince now descend,
And exhaust all the beauty of earth to its end.

But earth is so beautiful, he who is greedy
May take all he wants, and leave more to the needy;
For its lights and its shadows are fair to excess,
But its fairness is least of its happiness!

Where the red Aurora wavily quivers,
He saw winter arrest the Siberian rivers,
And the glaciers bear on their patient backs
Huge boulders, and move in their slow stiff tracks

He saw open sea round the silent pole,
Neath the arctic moon watched the waters roll,
Felt the earth nod with a rocking motion,
Like a ship at anchor on the ocean.
From the leaning top of the world's north tower
He gazed entranced for many an hour,
Looked out into space, and wished there were bars
To hinder his leaping among the stars.

Then he went over lakes that so deeply lie
The sun has to drink their waters dry,
Where the rivers of central Asia flow,
By the steppes which the salt-rime powders with snow.

He dwelt with delight for many a day
Mid the fabulous trees of the Himalay,
Where earth comes nearest to heaven, more near
Than the Andes come with their burning spear.

The bountiful life of the jungles was his,
Its grand vegetation, its animal bliss;
The day-life, the night-life of forests he knew,
And the monster-life of the waters blue.

He floated down Chinese rivers that lie
Above the champaign threateningly;
He slumbered mid opiate spices in bays
Near the pirate barks of the vile Malays.

O sweet were the trees! O wild was the scene,
In the centre of Africa peopled and green,
With beautiful rivers that shun the sea,
And die in the sands without agony.

The heart of Australia was known to him,
And the Southern Pole with its coast-line dim,
With its tall volcanoes that ruddily glare,
Over deserts of snow in the silent air,

Where the icebergs flash and grow dark again,
And black crevices streak the horrible plain,
Where the fiery reflection flickers and pants
In caves where not even the white bear haunts.

He swung in the air o'er the hanging wash
Of the two worlds of waters that fearfully clash
Round the Horn, where the grim cape with passionate soul
Ever strains its wild eyes to behold the South Pole.

He loved most those regions which man had least tram-
melled,
The southern Pacific, with islands enamelled,
An old world submerged, with conjectural climes
Whose glory was passed ere historical times.

The chief lands of the planet now seem to unroll,
Like a cincture with pendants, around the North Pole;
Time was when the world was antarctic, but now
The silent Pacific keeps that drowned world below.

He loved the sweet dream-lands that rise to view
From the soft warm deep, with their mountains of blue,
AVith the palm groves and inlets and scent laden bays,
That lie evermore in a fairy-land haze.

He could almost have worshipped, when noon was still
Mid the populous forests of green Brazil,
Where incredible creepers hang from the trees
Their huge-blossomed flags in the stifled breeze.

For a while he was witched by the wind that yields
Faint fragrance out of vanilla fields,
And watched the pendulous humming-bird cling
To the rocking flower, like a golden thing.

In the sultry noon there were palaces cool
In the weedy depths of a crystal pool,
All pillared with juicy stalks, and their eaves
Trauslucently roofed with lotus-leaves.

Then he would drowsily float for hours
Over leagues and leagues of prairie flowers,
And find in the wide horizons round
Something that made his spirit bound, —

A dash of the Tartar-like impulse, that leaps
The perilous dykes of the Asian steppes,
And goes mad with the wind, and the swiftness, and
stretch
Of the glorious sky-line he gallops to reach.

He has leaned his face on the desert sand
To feel the hot breath of the sunburnt land;
He has counted the pulses that sob in the wind,
Which always seems fainting and lagging behind.

He found a strange magic in noxious shades,
In poisonous plants, and the stilted arcades
Of mangrove roots, and the cedar swamps,
And the growths of the equatorial damps.

In the rain he watched for the sun to come out,
And he shifted the ends of the rainbows about;
The lightning obeyed him, and startled the night
With most beautiful tempests and wild plays of light.

After sunset he marked where the light of a star
First struck with its thin shaft the ground from afar,
And listened, if haply shrill sound it might yield,
As the spear may ring on the boss of a shield.

When weary of color, and dazzled with light,
He thickened the darkness of palpable night;
And his soul floated out of him, sweetly unbound
By the measured concourse of silence and sound.

There were times when he hungered for sunsets, and
pressed
'Gainst the motion of earth to the up-rolling west,
And thus draughts of beautiful light he kept drinking,
Where the sun, that he hunted, was evermore sinking.

But eastward sometimes with the earth he was borne,
And lived the day long in perpetual morn,
Where the down-dipping rim of the planet gave way
Evermore in the white light, the fountain of day.

Sometimes he would hang up in space for a year,
And move without toil with the huge atmosphere;
Suns rose not and set not, no star shone, nor moon, —
He enjoyed the green blaze of a shadowless noon.

In wild hours he rushed through earth's body and seas,
Up from, and down to, the antipodes,
So swiftly that darkness And light flashed together,
With the beauty of both and the sameness of neither.

What a study was earth, so terrific, so tender,
Such a dove-tailing process of blackness and splendor,
An orb so mature, with what time had done for her,
Gentle beauty, stern beauty, and beautiful horror.

She told all her secrets to Prince Amadis,
Of her secular ages, uninhabited bliss;
She unveiled her vapor wheels, always at play,
The machinery that makes her phenomena, —

The grim whistling avalanche, rough breath of the
mountains,
The strange intermittence that sobs in some fountains,
The tiny frost atoms, that are stronger than thunder,
Which creep into rocksandthen thrust them asunder, —
cxcvu.
The life of volcanoes, with the lava all seething,
And the fire and the sulphur the fierce earth is
breathing,
With craters disposed round the globe in long rows
Over veins of dread fire-life whose tide ebbs and flows, —
cxcvur.
The tortuous suck of the huge water-spout,
And unorbited meteor-globes, wheeling about,
The geysers, the mud-lakes, the fountains of naphtha,
Earth's roof falling in through the slip of a rafter, —

The new mountain-range that yet neath the sea lingers,
Just lifting among the cold waters its fingers,
The mixtures, the gases, the forces, the glories,
Of the subterranean laboratories.

Now he changes the silence of pure pathless snows,
For the crunching and grinding of icebergs and floes,
And he watches the isotherms waver and blend
With the line of the iceblink all round the world's end.
ccr.
He revolved in the wheels of the circular gales,
When they lash the deep sea with invisible flails,
And was splashed by the salt foam the ocean with
clangor,
Like rockets of water, up-threw in its anger.
ecu.
He found out the hearts of the wide-spreading rains,
In the glens of the mountains, or wood-mantled plains;
He drew the wet curtains around him in glee,
And rode, like a king, in sublime privacy.
coin.
He examined the laws which the snow-drifts follow,
As they lie amphitheatre- wise round the hollow,
As if water congealed on the uneven hind
Took the patterns the sea-water makes on the sand.

O what beauty there was in the crystallized grains,
Each with its prism, and its deftly joined veins;
And he laughed at the voices of clocks and of bells,
As They quaked through the drift with their querulous
swells.
rev.
There was beauty in fogs, in their white fleecy gloom,
With each nook of earth curtained off like a room,
With the seemingly mist-echoed sounds that up-roll,
As if from another world down in a hole.
ccvr.
He heard the ice yawn in the still winter night,
As if the frost's slumber were broken and light,
And, in spite of his science, was startled at times
By the firs flinging off their light loads of snow-rimes.

Xow he spans all at once fifty leagues of a storm,
Till he comes where its outskirts a frontier may form,
Twixt the calm and itself, and he halts and looks
through
Silver windows of white mist, and beyond them the blue.
O see how yon hills fold their green arms and sleep,
Where the cataract faints summer-dried on the steep;
Go, find out the ear of the echo, and there
Rest awhile, and dream well, in the soft tingling air.

Now he rouses tired nature, and bids her awake,
For his beauty-palled spirit hath craved an earthquake;
And he races his thoughts 'gainst the shock, in his mirth,
Thro' the sinuous veins of elastic old earth.

He knocks at the hollow of purple midnight,
To see if his knocking will make it strike light,
Or if the jarred planets will vibrate and quiver,
As they seem to do down in the tremulous river.
ccx i.
When he yearned for deep silence he dwelt in the moon,
Where the earth looked like thirteen moons melted in one;
If his eyes ached with this, earthless homes he could find
In the side that looks always away from mankind.

Then he dived thro' the holes in the black-spotted vest
Of bright blinding matter around the sun's breast;
And he might have learned lessons there, — how hearts
of pride
May be colder than ice, with their fire all outside.

The world was all written, without and within,
With wonderful sciences, such as might win
A philosopher's heart to a glorious excess
Of intellectual blessedness.

No cloud rode more softly than he rode in air;
He could live under water; the thin void could bear
Of sidereal spaces; and such was the bliss
Of the untoilsome travel of Prince Amadis.

Are you hungry, Prince Amadis, hungry for kindness;
Arc you dazzled with matter-light, praying for
blindness, —
A blindness that sees a sweet twilight all round it,
Earth's sorrows, earth's hopes, earth's affections that
bound it.

W ill thou come, gentle Amadis, down from thy mountain,
And be bathed straightway in the Lethe-like fountain,
Where men's hearts forget all the grand world outside,
And in humbling and human things cast off their pride.

The waters will be in thee fountains of tears,
To brighten dim eyes, break the hard hearts of fears,
And teach thee that he 'bove all poets is blest,
To whom beauty is second thought, duty is best.

Through the love of our neighbor \ve go to love God.
Or it may be that God to our kind is the road;
And of all the fair things in the broad human mind
The most lovely by far is the love of our kind.

Do good to thy fellows, and thy heart shall not miss
These visions of matter, fancy's riot and bliss;
Thou wilt think it almost waste of time to unravel
This star-moon-and-earthly confusion of travel.

It is vain to upbraid him; the time is not come:
He is drunken with sunshine; he will not seek home;
There is no earth as yet in his heart; we must wait,
And sit up for our traveller, should he be late.

It must be some outward tiling only will reach
To the depths of his soul, and some outward thing teach
That wisdom which lies beneath thoughts, words, and
years,
AVhose meaning is worship, whose language is tears.

He. has lost his old habit of looking within;
He is deafened by elements, hears not his kin,
As they wail from the earth's distant surface below him,
Yet fear his return, lest their hearts should not knowhim.

Let him drink his wild fill of material charms;
Some accident doubtless will wake sweet alarms
In a nature fast losing itself, and astray;
For accidents work the best wonders alway!

It was beauty he sought and beauty he found,
On the earth, in the air, and under the ground:
Time was one beauty, and space was another,
And a man has no griefs who is not man's brother.

He could pass through the planet diameter-wise,
Where the granite arch o'er the centre lies,
Through the central fires, and the voiceless wailing
Of spirits there eternally ailing.

He could circle the earth underground,
Where the subterranean waters sound,
In grottoes and streets which the diamond lights,
And the lamps of the opal stalactites.
ccxxvi i.
On the top of the atmosphere well could he ride,
Or again in the hollow equator slide,
Or lie where it bulges, and midnight and noon
Be cradled there by the nursing moon.

'Twas a poet's life, a voluptuous calm,
All music and metre, all fragrance and balm,
A half-waking dream from the dawn to the even,
A banquet of blossoms, a pantheist heaven!

Forever to him jealous nature was bidden
To open her gates, that he might pass unchidden
To all the vast palaces God was adorning,
When the stars sang together in nature's first morning.

All beauty that matter can show him shall be
Unrolled to his eyes like the broad open sea;
The elements too shall go with him in throngs,
Singing their sweet untranslateable songs.

He saw and he handled the powdery stuff,
The insoluble atoms the world is made of;
He divined how their forces, their scent and their taste
All came from the patterns in which they were placed.

He saw how the rocky foundations of matter
Were volatile, weightless, and fluent by nature;
How all in swift currents was flowing and crossing,
And staying with no one and never reposing.

He shall rifle the universe far as it stretches,
He shall look o'er the outside of space where it reaches
The confines of nothing, and exhaust if he can
All the beauty God made, save the grand heart of man.
ccxxxrv.
Thus over the world for long years he was borne,
To the lands of the sunset, the lands of the morn;
And summer-winds fanned him wherever he went,
And the soft charms of sunshine with moonlight were
blent,

Not a nook, not a hollow the whole planet over,
AVhere he did not fresh Wonder, fresh beauty discover,
From the gardens of ocean the green billows under.
To the lone mountain top which belongs to the condor.

Earth, water, air, fire, were his loves at the first;
Then under-earth growths, where the metals are nursed;
Then the outlines of landscapes, and mountains' grave
faces,
And the green things that grow in tropical places.
ccxxxvu.
He heard the plants breathe out their soft tiny sighs,
And he saw chemist air dole them out their supplies;
He asked of the flowers, and they answered him right,
Why some sleep with their eyes open all through the night.

He enquired of the solar beam, how it enchanted
The blossoms to take just the mixed hues it wanted:
He watched threadlike roots pierce the clay, cleave the
rock,
Strong as bodkins of steel, slow as hands of a clock.

Sometimes he lay on a cloud, and looked down
On the field and the woodland, blue sea and white town;
And he thought earth's geography surely was given
To be a substantial reflection of heaven.

He studied the natures and instincts of beasts,
And saw possible worlds imaged deep in their breasts;
And he read a whole science newly-made in the features,
The deep tender wildness of the faces of creatures.
He knew every chord that the rich wind could change,
Its loud, and its soft, and its musical range,
From the storms of the night to the song.s it will sing
As it sinks to an almost inaudible thing.

Sound is a language of beauty for ever,
From the sigh of the reeds to the dash of the river,
From the plaintive soul prisoned within the pine tree
To the foam effervescing on a wave out at sea.

The piping of wild-fowl was music to him,
As it rose from the marsh, fenny, sedgy, and dim,
Though it sounded sometimes, long haunting the ear,
Too like human anguish, too word-like, too clear.

Yet the shouts of the gulls to the deaf storms complaining,
Their shrieks, and their oaths 'gainst the strong winds
maintaining,
Were excitement at times, in the sea-sounding ear,
As if the wild woes of all shipwrecks were there.

Even sounds out of harmony filled him with wonder,
Like the cry of the curlew in the middle of thunder,
Inopportune sounds, or sounds cursed from their birth,
Like unmusical souls among men upon earth.

There was one sound of sweetness he loved and he feared,
Which full oft in the oak-groves of summer was heard;
Twas a thing close to tears, and it madehim turn pale, —
The half-human soul of the grieved nightingale.

He lay long to listen in caves, where the swell
Of the sea-murmur sings, like the air in a shell,
Now idyll, now elegy, storm-ode or pean,
Mid the cavernous isles of the classic Egean.

Where the mountains were folded one over another,
And the hanging woods the echoes smother,
He loved the sea's voice, where its courage fails,
Speaking low, like a stranger, in inland vales.

He discovered that time made a sound in its going,
A tremulous ringing, a rhythmical flowing,
Slowest at noon, as if day in its net
Caught the sun for awhile ere he slanted to set.

He wrapt his soul round in each kind of perfume
From the bright open gardens or close forest gloom,
And he saw how within him each fragrance was mother
Of a brood of soft thoughts that was like to no other.

But the sounds and the scents floated into his being,
Not by hearing or smell, but a new kind of seeing,
Which brought all unbodied delights within reach,
And gave color and form to the beauty of each.

'Twas the same wondrous eyesight which o'er the earth
cast,
Saw clear through the gauze of the Present the Past,
And the Future, which under old centuries lay,
Like a grave pre-existence, work up into day.

The cosmical meanings, the calmness and strife,
The internmtations of earth's ancient life,
He read off from her strata, strange ciphers and dread,
And great thoughts sang out loud in his soul as he read.

He sings funeral hymns over buried creations,
Or inaugurates epochs with grandest orations,
While the rocks at his bidding re-plant, re-adorn
Earth's secular landscapes e'er Adam was born.

The deltas all told him what history was theirs
White shells and black soil in alternate thin layers;
The dunes let him feel their slow pulses, dumb things
That can walk without feet and can fly without wings.

In truth it was strange and suggestive to see
The patience of earth's monotony,
How grand in its slowness the march of a law
That must work without tool and complete without flaw.

How slowly the desert stalked into the land,
And had powdered old Egypt with handfuls of sand,
And how calm and contented the pyramids were
To be buried so slowly by hair-breadths a year.

He saw how old history patiently waited
Her time under green mounds still unexcavated;
In unthought-of places he watched mortals treading
The graves of old grandeurs, unknowing, unheeding.

In Edom and Tadmor he staid to imbibe
The spirit of ruins, but found that the tribe
Of the great human race left a taint where it travelled,
Making earth's peaceful spells still bewildered and
ravelled.

Earth showed him the footprints of ages, which she
Had so tenderly veiled with green grass or blue sea,
And he saw the true process of world-peopling, flowing
By routes unsuspected, a science worth knowing.

Hieroglyphical marks became clear by degrees,
Either crooked or straight, like the wakes on calm seas,
The paths by which Asia her children had driven
From her hearth to fill earth at the bidding of heaven.

He dreamed that he saw, was it more than a dream?
Laws, faiths, and philosophies national seem,
And that all mental glories subservient must be
To the physical spells of geography.

In the bright silver havens of cloudland above
He lingered to watch how the rainbow-looms move;
He heard light sing its songs in the calm upper ether,
And the whispers the clouds made when touching to-
gether.

Earth-weary he rose up again on swift wings
Through the half-solid space-matter, graven with rings,
The grooves of the stars in their orderly race
Through the infinite purple of icy-cold space.

But his thoughts were more earthly; he lagged on the
wing,
As earth's sounds in his ears kept murmuring;
Space appeared to resist him much more than before,
As he breasted the light on its outermost shore.

And the marvels of starry life soon became weary,
And the gulfs of the Milky Way manless and dreary:
How sweet looked our planet, when it first came in sight,
Like a teardrop of joy on the fair brow of night.

Ah! this foolish Prince! was the first hopeful feeling
That o'er thy young lifetime already was stealing;
This the true fountain deep in thee, the root
Of earth's wonderful flower that bears heavenly fruit.

At last he was homesick; at last he was weary;
At last the world's outside shone cold-bright and dreary;
He had come to th% end, and he saw that the light
Of beauty fell short of the infinite.

He was sick of the luscious cup nature had brought him,
And began to distrust the thin truths she had taught him;
At last came the time, when a soul full of beauty
Should feel the one lovely thing wanting was duty.

Sad thoughts rose within him, distracting, prolific,
As he sank to the earth in the Southern Pacific,
On a cocoa-crowned crater, which coral worms built,
And the yellow brine-lichens had modestly gilt.

In his absence of mind, he had lighted below
Near a dwelling of man, where the plaining of woe
On the warm spicy wind arose touching and wild, —
'Twas a mother just closing the eyes of her child.

First there came o'er his heart a most strange agitation, —
Then it flashed on his mind like a new revelation, —
No love without depth, and no depth without sorrow;
For the tears of to-day are the joys of to-morrow.

'Twas as old as the hills; but it is so with youth, —
It must find out as new the most primary truth:
No wisdom self has not found out is our own;
Truths taken on trust are oft cold as a stone!

He though of the creed of his now sainted mother;
It taught the same lesson; it was based on no other;
How the great God himself, who all beauty had given,
Came on earth to find woe when there was none in
heaven.

All at once what a change had come over his spirit;
For tho' sorrow be not the whole truth, it is near it.
A thousand false lights were put out on the earth,
For the beauty of things seemed a poor kind of mirth.

It was persons, not things, that the Prince wanted now,
And he welcomed the ache just begun in his brow;
O beautiful sorrow! thy tears how they shine, —
Ah! none can preach God with persuasion like thine!

All wisdom is in thee, O fairy-like sorrow!
The faith of to-day, and the crown of to-morrow,
The love, for God's sake, of these deep human faces,
With their troubles, and joys, and their heart's com-
mon-places.

The sound of the savage in the cocoa-isle weeping
Hath wakened the Prince from the sleep he was
sleeping;
To mourn with the sad was his first act of duty,
And at once he found out the imposture of beauty.

He hath shed a man's tear o'er the grief of another;
And lo! earth fell beneath him, and man was his
brother;
And a kindhearted soul, with a sad sort of bliss,
In his hoary old age was the Prince Amadis!