Too soon the mortal mixture in me caught Red fire from her celestial flame, and fought

For tyrannous control in all my veins:
My fool's prayer was accepted; what re-
mains?

Or was it some eidolon merely, sent
By her who rules the shades in banishment,
To mock me with her semblance? Were
it thus,

How 'scape I shame, whose will was traitorous?

What shall compensate an ideal dimmed? How blanch again my statue virgin-limbed, Soiled with the incense-smoke her chosen priest

181

Poured more profusely as within decreased The fire unearthly, fed with coals from far Within the soul's shrine? Could my fallen

THE PREGNANT COMMENT

Was I not wiser to credit

OPENING one day a book of mine,
I absent, Hester found a line

Praised with a pencil-mark, and this
She left transfigured with a kiss.

When next upon the page
I chance,
Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,
And whirl my fancy where it sees
Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,
Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,
Still young and glad as Homer's verse.
'What mean,' I ask, 'these sudden joys?
This feeling fresher than a boy's?
What makes this line, familiar long,
New as the first bird's April song?
I could, with sense illumined thus,
Clear doubtful texts in Eschylus !'

Laughing, one day she gave the key,
My riddle's open-sesame;
Then added, with a smile demure,
Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure,
"If what I left there give you pain,
can take it off again;

You-you

'T was for my poet, not for him,

Your Doctor Donne there!'

If he be a nobler lover, take him!
You in you I seek, and not myself;
Love with men 's what women choose to
make him,

Seraph strong to soar, or fawn-eyed elf: All I am or can, your beauty gave it,

Lifting me a moment nigh to you,

And my bit of heaven, I fain would save

it

Mine I thought it was, I never knew.

TURNER'S OLD TÉMÉRAIRE

UNDER A FIGURE SYMBOLIZING THE

CHURCH

THOU wast the fairest of all man-made things;

Thy thunders now but birthdays greet,
Thy planks forget the martyrs' feet,
Thy masts what challenges the sea-wind
brings.

Thou a mere hospital, where human wrecks,

wings,

That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man's outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good;

1 This poem is the last, so far as is known, written by Mr. Lowell. He laid it aside for revision, leaving two of the verses incomplete. In a pencilled fragment of the poem the first verse appears as follows:

Strong, simple, silent, such are Nature's Laws. In the final copy, from which the poem is now printed, the verse originally stood:

laws.

Strong, steadfast, silent are the but steadfast' is crossed out, and 'simple' written above.

A similar change is made in the ninth verse of the stanza, where simpleness' is substituted for 'steadfastness.' The change from steadfast' to 'simple' was not made, probably through oversight, in the first verse of the second stanza. There is nothing to indicate what epithet Mr. Lowell would have chosen to complete the first verse of the third stanza. (Note by Professor C. E. Norton, in Last Poems of James Rušsell Lowell.)