And though at times impetuous with emotion The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean, We will be patient, and assuage the feeling By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. THE BUILDERS. Finished May 9, 1846. ALL are architects of Fate, Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best ; For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these ; Leave no yawning gaps between ; Such things will remain unseen. In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Else our lives are incomplete, Standing in these walls of Time, Build to-day, then, strong and sure, And ascending and secure Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOURGLASS. A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought. How many weary centuries has it been About those deserts blown! Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite When into Egypt from the patriarch's sight Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare, Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate, These have passed over it, or may have passed! Now in this crystal tower Line 18. Pacing the Red Sea beach, Imprisoned by some curious hand at last, And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand; Before my dreamy eye Stretches the desert with its shifting sand, Its unimpeded sky. And borne aloft by the sustaining blast, And onward, and across the setting sun, The column and its broader shadow run, The vision vanishes! These walls again Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain; THE OPEN WINDOW. Published in The Southern Literary Messenger, November, 1849. The old house by the lindens is what is known as the Lechmere house on Brattle Street, corner of Sparks Street, in Cambridge. It has been altered since the poem was written, but belongs to a group of houses, of which Mr. Longfellow's was one and Mr. Lowell's another, standing on what was sometimes called Tory Row, since these houses, built before the war for independence, were the spacious homes of rich merchants who held by the king. There is a picture of the Lechmere house from a pencil-sketch by Mr. Longfellow in Lossing's Field-Book of the Revolution, I. 557. It was in this house that Baron Riedesel was quartered as prisoner of war after the surrender of Burgoyne, and the window-pane is shown on which the Baroness wrote her name with a diamond. THE old house by the lindens I saw the nursery windows. But the faces of the children, The large Newfoundland house-dog They walked not under the lindens, The birds sang in the branches, With sweet, familiar tone; But the voices of the children Will be heard in dreams alone! And the boy that walked beside me, I pressed his warm, soft hand! |