Classic Poem

And once we built our fortress where you see
Yon group of spruce-trees sidewise on the line
Where the horizon to the eastward bounds, —
A point selected by sagacious art,
Where all at once we viewed the Vermont hills,
And the long outlines of the mountain-ridge,
Ever renewing, changeful every hour;
And, sunk below us in that lowland world,
The lone Farm-steading where the bleaching cloth,
Small spot of white, lay out upon the lawn;
Behind, smooth walls of rock, and trees each side,
Sifting the blast two ways; and on the south
Our wigwam opened, showing in its length
That flattened hay-stack or repeated hill, —
Wachusett!

Hither, not often wandered
From the vale a sportive lad, whose lessons
Rightly learned, and brought from out-door science,
Still desired the growths of nature, new or old;
Forever in review his choosing thought
Purely might sit; and so as one, the two,
Himself and Nature, truly linked might know.
So strangely was the general current mixed
With his vexed native blood in its crank wit,
That, as a mirror, shone the common world
To this observing youth, whom noting, thence
I called Idolon: ever firm to mark
Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole,
As if in truth he had been rather that
Than what he was, — a mortal as ourselves.
His ever-bubbling wit broke on the sides
Of that small plateau; and the gray rocks smiled,
And all the listening host sent up their crow.
At times, I guessed the giant porcupine,
With his black quill dropping upon my brain,
Or biting on the ledges in the gien;
And sometimes fancied, as the theme became
More cynic, that the bear, lurking below,
Had scaled deep Purgatory and crawled out
To hear the sport, or sharpen up his claw;
So radiant was his talk. Much did he know
The face of all the hills, and stopped to read
Lecidea's black or green parmelia's fruit,
And the round shields that lobe the olive cliffs,
(Tripe of the rock and Muhlenbergian styled),
Or alpine heaths, and where the mosses grew
Most complex in their teeth, and gracious ferns,
Or jungermannia, rich in purple fronds,
Painting the trunks with its delicious tint.
Each hour this laughing boy tenacious caught
A fist full of existence, spread it out
Flat on its back, and dried it in the sun
Of all his breezy thoughts to shape its truth.
Intent to know what meant the outward life
To an unwearied searcher, never slack,
Yet fixed within it all, himself he saw,
Shooting his arrows into all that crowd
Of unaspiring objects, quite engaged
Simply in carrying on their general trade;
Whereat Dame Nature smiled to see her boy.
Oh! let him search in nature, — he who loves
An individual life, prepared to be
The mirror by his notions, if he may;
Yet not too boastful fancy that the kings
Who rule this lower world will stoop their crowns.
Yet the craving soul asks curious questions;
And it asks far more for its usurping pride
Than seats in speechless corners to tell beads.
Thus slumbered not Idolon; ere the day
Had broke the ebon shell, or stretched her pink
Upon the auroral curtains, he set forth,
Making as if the shepherd of the dawn
To drive his scattered flocks, and sum the tale;
In a self-comfortable pride resolved
To equalize things mundane. Much he sought
The limit of the exact. He testified
By painful art how much his world produced,
Precisely how he stood with every fact
Wherein co-adjutor with Nature's truth:
So of the mountains he would draw the map,
And thus, by circumambient tape
Deduce the just extent of those vague rocks,
What spire was that, and how yon lowland's name;
To some, such searches in the intricate
A cold vacuity sliding and cheap:
Such scorn the petty, harnessed to the vast,
And pray for wings, and sure release from time.

Not far below our tent an Indian camp
All softly spread its shelter in the glen
Where the old mountain-road circuits the gulf:
Three wigwams here they held; and one old man,
The hunter of the tribe, whose furrowed brow
Had felt the snow of sixty winters' fall,
At eve would mess with us, and smoke the pipe
Of peace before our cabin. He gave voice
To many a story of the past, else dim, —
Things he had done in youth, or heard them told,
And legends of religion, such as they
Who live in forests and in hardships tell.
One day Idolon said, musing of him,
" As there's no plant or bird from foreign shores
That just resembles ours, so, behind us,
Figures transported off an ancient cast, —
The Indian comes, and just as far from us.
I never dream how wildness fled from man
Among those Arab deserts, and how Greece
Fetched from the Lycian seacoast her tame myths,
Or why that fiery shore, Phaenicia's pride,
Should be so civil in her earliest creed.
But on our wild man, like this Sagamore,
Nature bestows her truthful qualities, —
Fleet on the war-path, fatal in his aim,
More versed in each small track that lightly prints
Some wandering creature, than the thing itself,
And wreathed about with festoons of odd faiths,
By which each action holds a votive power.
He hears the threatening wood-god in the wind,
That, hollow-sounding, fills his breast with fear;
His eye, forelooking as the night unrolls
The forked serpents darting on the cloud,
Sees all the great procession of his saints;
And, while the gloom rolls out the thunder's peal,
Listens the voices of his god command.
Truly the evil spirit much he fears,
Believing, as he drains the calabash,
Or solemn fills the calumet's red bowl
With Kinni-Kinnek, that a god of love
Will not produce for him much fatal loss
To be considered. When the lightning came
And snapt the crested rock whereon he played
With all his Indian boys, he felt the bolt
Crash through his heart, and knelt before the power.
Thus with the careful savage culture fares
As the event looks forth. He does not preach
And pray, or tune of violin the string,
And celebrate the mercies of the Lord,
But flings in his fire the fish-bones, lest the fish,
Whose spirits walk abroad, detect the thief,
And ne'er permit the tribe a nibble more:
So, in the bear-feast, they are firmly bound
To swallow absolutely all that hangs
Appended, cooked or raw, about the game,
Lest he, the figment of the bear, should rise,
And thence no drop of medicable grease
The Indian coat should show, nor poll of squaw
Shine like a panel with protrusive oil.
They thus insure the state, and give the fiend,
The evil one, due homage, — pay the cash;
And the tribe say, " What will the good god do?
Alack! the evil one is full of wile,
And black and crafty as our Indian selves;
Far better for us to keep peace with him."

" A catalogue of woe the Indian's fate,
Drawn by the holy Puritan, and all
For his divine religion. Thence the names
Fixed to the aborigines, sweet titles, —
Cruel, fiendish, brute, and deeds to match,
At which the earth must rise. The Indian maids,
Oh, lovely are their forms! No cultured grace
Superior breeding, finer taste has shown; "

And tints of color in their modest cheeks
Shaming Parisian beauty with its glow.
And the young hunter, or the agile boys,
As that plain artist claimed who named the first
The Belvidere (of all the statues known to art),
Sunbright Apollo, a young Mohawk chief.
Alas! the race, possessors of these hills,
Would not at once desert their hunting-grounds,
Loved by the Pilgrim, — martyred to the cent! "

Thus could Idolon image his red race,
While o'er our heads the night-hawks darting swarm
(On sharded wing the unwary beetle
Like Indians to the godly, falling in),
Ripped through the empty space, and the young stars, —
The glittering Pleiades and Orion's crest,
Or she who holds the chair, Cassiopeia,
Or swift Bootes driving from the north,
And the red flame of war, the torrid Mars —
Oft added to our strange society
On those religious nights when all the air
That lingered on the rocks was fragrant with a flower
Not of that lowland kind. Then flit abroad
Dim figures on the solitary stones.
Almost I see the figure of my friend
Scaling the height, or running o'er the slabs;
I hear his call for which I listened long;
His fresh response, as swift I shouted back,
Echoes in the space; see his light form
Bound o'er the dark crevasse, or thread the slide
Where never from the year deserts the ice.
Stay! 'twas a shadow fluttering off the past,
A multiplex of dreams that kindled thus;
And, if near eve, the circle of small lakes,
Around the Mountain's foot securely drawn,
Like smoothest mirrors sent me back the world
Caught from their cheerful shores; and, slow revealed,
Came forth new lakes, or even seemed
A river in one path, — I thought I heard
My old companion's voice, who in his heart
Did treasure all their joys!

And great those days,
And splendid on the hills, when the wild winds
Forever sweep the cloud, at once re-formed
From off the plateau's slope; and at a breath
Uplift the sunlit valleys sweet with morn,
The hamlet's homely Grange, the dappling shades
Thrown from the sultry clouds that sail its heaven;
And in a second instant, the wild mist
Instantly obscure, the valley vanishes,
Gone as a flitting vision from the skies,
And by our camp the spruce in brightest green
Laughs at our brigand jackets shining wet.
And night, that eateth up substantial things,
Leads us strange dances o'er the chopping shelves,
Down bosky slide and gravitating cliff,
Where we go plunging madly for our lives,
All safe divisions, paths, and tracks foregone;
And balances we strike, and learn the rule,
That downward motion soon appears reversed.

At times, the hour admitted of debate, —
High topics breaking on the rocky fells
Of Church or State, and how devised their metes,
Whether such bounds are sure, or will not sway
For each superior soul. And once of love,
That subject of burlesque. " I, " said Miranda,
Goddess of an isle that sleeps in Grecian seas, —
" I crave a real passion, not a ghost
Dancing about o'er airy vacancies.
May I meet human sympathies not less
Demanding lively truth of me than I
Of them! For who can fence and gesture here
In this swift-moving world, and cast away
Precarious fortune on a thin-spun web
Of blank deception, blowing in the air?
May be that saints and lovers stupefy
Themselves and others with a threadbare dream,
Like famous Dante, that translated great,
To whom poor Beatrice was a myth,
As to his last translator, gaping still.
Ideal love, my friends, do you desire?
Write some congenial sonnets to the moon,
As Sidney did, or spend your soul on one
Whose face you never saw and only guessed. "

To her, who sometime spake as full of jest,
Replied a doctor of less lovely sex:
" In that ideal love I see the life
Of a confiding soul destined to soar
Beyond the vain realities he flies,
And, by his deep affection purified,
Become like Dante in a far-off dream,
Worshipping forever a superior soul.
Shall not that star to which I distant tend,
Pure in its crystalline seclusion set
To be an altar of the constant truth, —
Shall not that being, ever to my heart
Utterly sacred, some small grace impart?
Raise my dejected fortunes sunk so low?
And as I see the sunset from the peak,
Before me far the ever-reaching chains
Figured by their blue valleys thrown between,
And raised above to purer skies sublime, —
As the last beams of day o'erpass the scene,
I still forever feel the saint, I love,
Never by me to be approached more hear;
A distant vision lighting up my soul,
Like Helen to her lover on the heights,
And Beatrice shining through the cloud. "