--
See his restless soul's creation!
Harmony of truth he yearned for,
Found it not, but wonder-working
New discoveries and pathways,
--Like those alchemists aforetime
Who, though gold was all their seeking,
Found not that, but mighty forces,
Which to-day the world are moving.--
***
Deepest ground of all his being
Was the polar power of contrast,
For his thought, to music wakened
By the touch of _Northern Saga_,
Vibrated melodious longing,
Toward the _South_ forever tending.
In his eye the lambent fire,
Of his thought the glint, showed kinship
With the free improvisator
In the land of warmth and vineyards.
And his swiftly changing feeling
And his all-consuming ardor,
That could toil the livelong winter
Till caprice the fruit discarded,--
That immeasurable richness
Wherein thoughts and moods and music,
Joy and sorrow, jest and earnest,
Gleamed and played without cessation,--
All a Southern day resembled!
Therefore was his life a journey,
Towards the South in constant movement,--
Through the mists of intuition,
From the darker to the brighter,
From the colder to the warmer,--
On the bridge of ceaseless labor
Bearing over sea and mountain!
Oh, the time with wife beside him
And his bonny playmate-sisters
(Gladsome children, winsome daughters),
When he stood, where evening sunshine
Glowed on Capitol and Forum,--
Stood where from the great world-city,
As from history's very fountain,
Knowledge wells in streams of fullness;--
Where a clearness large and cloudless
Falls upon the bygone ages
That have laid them down to rest here;--
Where to him, the Northern searcher,
It would seem, he had been straying
Too long lost in history's fogland,
Rowing round the deep fjords' surface;--
Stood where dead men burst the earth-clods
And themselves come forth for witness
In their heavy marble togas;--
Where the goddesses of Delos
In the frescoed halls are dancing,
As two thousand years before now;--
Pantheon and Coliseum
In their spacious fate have sheltered
All the world's swift evolution;--
Where a Hermes from that corner
Saw the footsteps firm of Cato,
Pontifex in the procession,--
Saw then Nero as Apollo
Lifted up take sacrifices,
Saw then Gregory, the wrathful,
Riding forth to rule in spirit
Over all the known world's kingdoms,--
Saw then Cola di Rienzi
Homage pay to freedom's goddess
'Mid the Roman people's paeans,--
Saw Pope Leo and his princes
Choose instead of the Lord Jesus
Aristotle dead and Plato;-
Saw again how stouter epochs
Raised the Church of Papal power,
Till the Frenchman overthrew it
And exalted Nature's Godhead;
Saw anew then wonted custom
In its pious, still processions
With a Lamb the great world's ruler!--
All this saw the little Hermes
On the corner near the temple,
And the wise man from the Northland
Saw that Hermes and his visions.
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