Classic Poem

They know me well, —
My long, lank, ebon locks, and still, set face.
(And think me proud, alas!) Once 't was not so.
Como! they call their place. Strange names they take,
As some might deem, for spots along the prairie.
And yet the lake shows fair, and sweet the view,
Broad in its graceful swells and rolling green,
The deep seclusion of the inland world.
On the bare outskirts of this Kansas life.
They prize the leaven in the sea-shore news;

As the neat shop-boy deals his costly silks,
Christened at Paris in fantastic French, —
Soiled with the Hoosier's patois. I must come,
Twice in the long twelve months, to purchase lead
And powder for my guns, and trade away,
Poor spoil, the lovely furs I robbed in sooth
From our poor cousins of the ambushed wood.
And oh! how slow did twenty winters fall,
And twenty summers deck the grove with green,
Since constant to the Precinct, shadow dim
Of man's civilities, I needs resort;
See the log-cabins fading off the streets,
See the old settlers sloping toward the west,
Mark the new stations, view the flying train
Glide o'er the dangerous slough, where erst the crane
Stretched his white neck and turned his wary head,
(A hundred rods,) split on my rifle's flash.
Why, all doth change, all goes, all flits but me.
Their faultless curiosity ne'er cools.
As when the first day I stalked o'er the plam,
The children stared me, and the drowsy curs,
A red-eyed swarm, peevish with idleness.
Snarled in my track, scenting the game I lugged,
To-day the same.
" Who 's he? " " Why, do you know,
He lives within the forest, miles afar,
Alone, — a hunter. He can spoil a deer
At eighty rod. " " What! alone there in the bush?
He looks it. What a face, and eyes so deep
Sunk in his head. I should not care to meet
Him in the shadows of his forest lair,
And in a cave! " " It takes all sorts of men
To make a world. "
" For the last time! "
Strangely that thrilled me. 'T was a showman's puff.
At once the presage to myself I linked;
And some one cried amid the gaping crowd:
" He 'll never come this road again " (a clown,
The favorite of the circus, for his wit
And shining heel, potential). I once thought
These callow omens mattered most little.
Such as the blood-red circle at the west
I saw last eve, when tardy sunset slid,
That seemed to carve some gory creature there.
Questions are native here. If so, my mind
Is tasked why they ne'er ask me of myself:
They never question me! Has destiny
Scarred on my form, " This being 's beyond life,
And all that draws to life, its interest " ?
Ask of the desert sands why lone they bask,
Dreary and bleaching in the lidless sun;
Ask of the surf that 's combing o'er the beach
When the tall breakers lift their awful forms;
Ask the tornado, as it cuts the trees,
The whirling windrow of the prairie wood,
Like a long swath of hay, to answer questions, —
Or of me, why I live and suffer still,
Who am I, or what?
I would I knew them,
If they need me not. Simply a vagrant
To their laws, I come, at these far intervals,
Tossed like the winter goldfinch on a breeze
In ricochets, against their household gods,
And they are barred from me. I am not bought,
As they are, day by day, nor sold. I learn
The lessons taught in Nature's school, her creeds;
My code is but the stream that shuts the glen;
My market is the herb-field, or the trunk
Where the industrious bee lodges his sweets;

The lights of my saloon are mournful stars,
That shine and say, " We would, we cannot come,
To warm your pale complexion by our fires. "
My living suits not them, nor with me theirs,
Fenced off and barricaded from my race;
And yet would I could please them. I could take
Not merely of their kindness. If my heart
Would open, it might warm as a new sun.
Their help I ne'er shall seek again. Rest there,
Ye implements of hunger, fit for such
As I. Death will come sweet; hunter no more.
I shall not weep to slay the timorous deer;
Nor clutch her turquoise and her sapphires forth,
Nature's wet gems, from her cold emerald streams.
" Eliot, " — I read my name upon a sign,

After I heard the warning, — " for the last time. "
I am not stooped in form, or shuflling yet;
My hair unbleached, my gaze unerring flies.
Is misery, then, a styptic for Time's wounds?
Does sorrow, like Arabian gums, o'erspread,
Infix these poisoned images, and mask
A clear transparency that shows all light,
When there's within a Upas sure to slay?
Perchance there 's wisdom in that outward life,
In the red circle on the sunset sky;
And, as I neared my cell, the owlet's cry
Shook through the pines that weep the torrent's roar, —
That weird, unearthly knell. They say, in sooth,
That men have heard that sob brief ere their deaths, —
Yea, as they died!
My life is foul and poor,
And hunger-bitten, where my sorry bones

Peer through the tightened flesh. And yet this frame
Seems strong, and I might keep another century,
If 't were not for the plague-spot at my breast.
I could embrace the sunshine as it falls,
And list the pleasant song of matin birds,
As if the joys of children tugged my heart, —
Children! those human birds, with trills of love.
And when the gems of eve silver the fields
With their soft shower of starlight barely guessed,
And lay aside the loud and dissonant day,
Which like a noisy school-boy whistled long
His brawling catch, the old devotion dawns
In figures born of faith. That I might fly, —
There is no flight for him whose memory
Burns like a meteor through all times and scenes,
And as a nerve of everlasting pain,
Eats on the rusting shroud he hates — himself!
How light I made of omens, called them cheap,
Foolish dreams; in happier days laughed them to scorn.
I once could mock at them. Sorrow doth teach
Such lessons as our gayer hours forget.
I see events prefigured in each mote, —
It floats across my passage, shapes from dark
And awful regions. I am now become
A sailor on the invisible sea of fate,
That the mist covers.
With man my peace is sealed;
Again I shall not visit Como's shore, —
Not in my living form; but they will find
My bones after some days, and put them there,
In sad November, when the heart is slow,
Under the prairie, " Eliot, a stranger, " marked
Upon the place. 'T is right that men outlay
Their compliments on things, to them which are
No more than the thin purple grass that flaunts,
Across the graveyard's swale; for 't is so human!
It floats upon the current of my thought,
When in such places, one of Eliza's rhymes:
" Fear not the end, the quickening hour draws near;
Rise upward, hope, dispel this earthly fear;
The shepherd waits his flock to gather in;
A truce to worldliness, good-bye to sin. " —
Little of me could find the villagers,
As mutely on their narrow gaze I dawned,
Denizen of the forest; lean my scrip,
Nothing my business to the eager race.
I trafficked with them, followed up the trail
Across the rolling prairie, struck the ridge,
Took the Oak-barrens, and beneath the woods
Sank, with deer I hunted. 'T is near night;
The journey's long; the day hangs heavy on me;
My foil is mostly o'er. Far to the north,
Vibrate the waving lights, that o'er their ice
Alarm the Eskimo, and furnish forth
Their freezing calendars. To me they look
Repugnant; there 's no warmth, no heart to them, —
Brilliant and bending as the polished friends,
Who most me wounded. Hark! the owl's low sobs
Quiver from out the grove! What world lies yon,
To whose depths I pass? Do spirits look therefrom
On such as I, and touch their fading hours
With the brief, borrowed moonlight of the grave?