PART I.

Of Poets and Poetry.

If to embody in a breathing word

Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard;
To fix the image all unveiled and warm,
And carve in language its ethereal form,
So pure, so perfect, that the lines express
No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;
To feel that art, in living truth, has taught
Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;
If this alone bestow the right to claim

The deathless garland and the sacred name;
Then none are poets, save the saints on high,
Whose harps can murmur all that words deny.

So every grace that plastic language knows
To nameless poets its perfection owes.

The rough-hewn words to simplest thoughts confined
Were cut and polished in their nicer mind;
Caught on their edge, imagination's ray
Splits into rainbows, shooting far away;
From sense to soul, from soul to sense, it flies,
And through all nature links analogies;
He who reads right will rarely look upon
A better poet than his lexicon.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

THE HUMBLER POETS.

PART I.

Of Poets and Poetry.

AN INVOCATION TO POESY.

STAY with me, Poesy! playmate of childhood!
Friend of my manhood! delight of my youth!
Roamer with me over valley and wildwood,
Searching for loveliness, groping for Truth.
Stay with me, dwell with me, spirit of Poesy;
Dark were the world if thy bloom should depart;
Glory would cease in the sunlight and starlight,
Freshness and courage would fade from my heart.

Stay with me, comfort me, now more than ever,
When years stealing over me lead me to doubt
If men, ay, and women, are all we believed them
When we two first wandered the green earth about!
Stay with me, strengthen me, soother, adorner,
Lest knowledge, not wisdom, should cumber my brain,
And tempt me to sit in the chair of the scorner,
And say, with sad Solomon, all things are vain.

Stay with me, lend me thy magical mirror,
Show me the darkness extinguished in light;

Show me to-day's little triumph of Error

Foiled by to-morrow's great triumph of Right!
Stay with me, nourish me, robe all creation
In colors celestial of amber and blue;
Magnify littleness, glorify commonness,
Pull down the false and establish the true.