Classic Poem

Kin to the Parsee, I well know
How heals and sanctifies the glow
Of the frank flame, and how its cure
Makes the far source of being pure.
And you who love the open fire
Should now feed fat your heart's desire:
Idle in bliss all night before
Your chimney's hospitable roar,
While the red hearth builds up your frame
With healing fingers of the flame.
Let nothing, for the nonce, disturb,
Nor aught your winged fancy curb,
But fix among the gledes your glance
And give your fieriest wish its chance.

Seven-gated Thebes shall entertain,
Or wind-swept Ilium o'er its plain;
There Capaneus shall scorn Jove,
Pandarus aim, and Paris love.
There shall you of your day be shrived,
Shall taste old pleasures underived.
Shall tread Dodona's storm-bleak brow
All warm within; and, meeting now
The rugged shepherd, hail with cheer
His unbroached, tumid goatskin near,
Whose wine, pressed out by maidens' feet,
Shall seem past telling wild and sweet.

Or if, like mine, your fancy stray
With shepherds of a later day,
You'll tend, among your flames, the flocks
Of dark girls of the Tuscan rocks,
And learn to love the songs and vines
Of the romantic Apennines,
Where passion and religion blend
Like colors of the evening-end.

Mayhap your memory, too, has held
The legends of the Dovrefjeld,
And now among the changeful coals
There'll sport quaint nixies, gnomes, and trolls,
Inviting, luring, beckoning on,
To distances unknown where wan
Some shrunk Walhalla waits, and its
Diminished Odin nodding sits.

Haply your eye with deeper flash
Will answer the yet-blooming ash
At thought that, as it goes to grey
In yielding you its inmost ray,
That light was once a morning's blue
On the dawn-greeting peak where grew
Stalwart and supple, lithe, divine,
Some Baldur of a Norway pine.
And, looking so upon the pyre
Where burns the heroic farewell fire,
Think once that in your reverie there
Two friends your finest thought would share.

Once the split tree we send you felt
The sun and storms his mountains dealt,
And thrived indifferent through the sure,
Strong years that made his fate secure.
(Fate that prepared him for this end,
To burn for friends to warm a friend.)

I call that Destiny as bright
As could wish any pine to-night!
But more he felt ere yet your hand
Laid him upon the kindling brand;
He had a longer voyage to you,
And weightier errands, than you knew.
First, out of Norway, stripped and bare,
To Scotland like a king did fare
The beaten, exile pine, and lent
His form to strange habiliment.
They made him serve them like a slave
With burthens sore as he was brave;

And on a day at length decreed
That he should go with scrip and screed
A-wandering on the old grey sea,
Their trusty messenger to be
In courts remote, and bear them goods
Right welcome in those latitudes.
A fine sense of the forest made
Joyance of duties stern and staid:
He felt as on his native height
The beauty of the spreading light.
Thus books he brought, fair, faithful books
That spread their light on whoso looks,
As shines the day on striving trees,
Or hearthfire on sweet reveries.

So, after mountain, exile, toil,
And drudgeries that not despoil,
Let him give life, in dying, then,
And make the woman well again!
Let his unconscious, ancient strength
Find rest and permanence at length
There in a soul as high and fine
As the straight Baldur mountain-pine!