Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/183

Rh :Nor how the pomp of sunrise waits
 * On Venice at her watery gates;

A dream alone to me is Arno’s vale, And the Alhambra’s halls are but a traveller’s tale.


 * Is one with him who rows or sails;
 * And he who wanders widest lifts
 * No more of beauty’s jealous veils
 * Than he who from his doorway sees
 * The miracle of flowers and trees,

Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air, And from cloud minarets hears the sunset call to prayer!


 * Where Pharpar’s fountains rise and fall;
 * But he who sees his native brooks
 * Laugh in the sun, has seen them all.
 * The marble palaces of Ind
 * Rise round him in the snow and wind;

From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles, And Rome’s cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles.


 * The near at hand and far and rare;
 * And while the same horizon bends
 * Above the silver-sprinkled hair
 * Which flashed the light of morning skies
 * On childhood’s wonder-lifted eyes,

Within its round of sea and sky and field, Earth wheels with all her zones, the Kosmos stands revealed.


 * The toiler to his task-work bound,
 * Behold their prison-walls outspread,
 * Their clipped horizon widen round!
 * While freedom-giving fancy waits,
 * Like Peter’s angel at the gates,

The power is theirs to baffle care and pain, To bring the lost world back, and make it theirs again!


 * When masters of the ancient lyre
 * Obey my call, and trace for me
 * Their words of mingled tears and fire!
 * I talk with Bacon, grave and wise,
 * I read the world with Pascal’s eyes;

And priest and sage, with solemn brows austere, And poets, garland-bound, the Lords of Thought, draw near.


 * “In vain the human heart we mock;
 * Bring living guests who love the day,
 * Not ghosts who fly at crow of cock!
 * The herbs we share with flesh and blood
 * Are better than ambrosial food

With laurelled shades.” I grant it, nothing loath, But doubly blest is he who can partake of both.


 * Have I not seen before me sit,
 * And watched his puritanic face,
 * With more than Eastern wisdom lit?
 * Shrewd mystic! who, upon the back
 * Of his Poor Richard’s Almanac

Writing the Sufi’s song, the Gentoo’s dream, Links Mann’s age of thought to Fulton’s age of steam!


 * Have I not welcomed to my hearth
 * The gentle pilgrim troubadour,
 * Whose songs have girdled half the earth;
 * Whose pages, like the magic mat
 * Whereon the Eastern lover sat,

Have borne me over Rhine-land’s purple vines, And Nubia’s tawny sands, and Phrygia’s mountain pines!


 * Of ages adds the lore unpriced,
 * The wisdom and the moral health,
 * The ethics of the school of Christ;
 * The statesman to his holy trust,
 * As the Athenian archon, just,

Struck down, exiled like him for truth alone, Has he not graced my home with beauty all his own?