Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/419

Rh Yet hath thy spirit left on me
 * An impress Time has worn not out,

And something of myself in thee, A shadow from the past, I see,
 * Lingering, even yet, thy way about;

Not wholly can the heart unlearn
 * That lesson of its better hours,

Not yet has Time’s dull footstep worn
 * To common dust that path of flowers.

Thus, while at times before our eyes
 * The shadows melt, and fall apart,

And, smiling through them, round us lies The warm light of our morning skies,—
 * The Indian Summer of the heart!

In secret sympathies of mind,
 * In founts of feeling which retain

Their pure, fresh flow, we yet may find
 * Our early dreams not wholly vain!

not soon forget that sight:
 * The glow of Autumn’s westering day,

A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,
 * On Raphael’s picture lay.

It was a simple print I saw,
 * The fair face of a musing boy;

Yet, while I gazed, a sense of awe
 * Seemed bending with my joy.

A single print,—the graceful flow
 * Of boyhood’s soft and wavy hair,

And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow
 * Unmarked and clear, were there.

Yet through its sweet and calm repose
 * I saw the inward spirit shine;

It was as if before me rose
 * The white veil of a shrine.

As if, as Gothland’s sage has told,
 * The hidden life, the man within,

Dissevered from its frame and mould,
 * By mortal eye were seen.

Was it the lifting of that eye,
 * The waving of that pictured hand?

Loose as a could-wreath on the sky,
 * I saw the walls expand.

The narrow room had vanished,—space,
 * Broad, luminous, remained alone,

Through which all hues and shapes of grace
 * And beauty looked or shone.

Around the mighty master came
 * The marvels which his pencil wrought,

Those miracles of power whose fame
 * Is wide as human thought.

There drooped thy more than mortal face,
 * O Mother, beautiful and mild!

Enfolding in one dear embrace
 * Thy Saviour and thy Child!

The rapt brow of the Desert John;
 * The awful glory of that day

When all the Father’s brightness shone
 * Through manhood’s veil of clay.

And, midst gray prophet forms, and wild
 * Dark visions of the days of old,

How sweetly woman’s beauty smiled
 * Through locks of brown and gold!

There Fornarina’s fair young face
 * Once more upon her lover shone,

Whose model of an angel’s grace
 * He borrowed from her own.

Slow passed that vision from my view,
 * But not the lesson which it taught;

The soft, calm shadows which it threw
 * Still rested on my thought:

The truth, that painter, bard, and sage,
 * Even in Earth’s cold and changeful clime,

Plant for their deathless heritage
 * The fruits and flowers of time.

We shape ourselves the joy or fear
 * Of which the coming life is made,

And fill our Future’s atmosphere
 * With sunshine or with shade.

The tissue of the Life to be
 * We weave with colors all our own,

And in the field of Destiny
 * We reap as we have sown.

Still shall the soul around it call
 * The shadows which it gathered here,

And, painted on the eternal wall,
 * The Past shall reappear.