ancient song, reciting, ending,
    Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,
    Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,
    Accept for me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,
    And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.

    (Of many debts incalculable,
    Haply our New World's chiefest debt is to old poems.)

    Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
    Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
    The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
    The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
    The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
    Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
    The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
    The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
    Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
    The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales,
        essays, plays.
    Shakspere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
    As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
    The great shadowy groups gathering around,
    Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
    Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with
        courteous hand and word, ascending,
    Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them,
        blent with their music,
    Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
    Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.

1891 1891-2

A CHRISTMAS GREETING

WELCOME, Brazilian brother — thy ample place is ready;
A loving hand — a smile from the north — a sunny instant hail!
(Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
     impedimentas,
Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the
     acceptance and the faith;)
To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck — to thee
     from us the expectant eye,
Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning
     well,
The true lesson of a nation's light in the sky,
(More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
The height to be superb humanity.

(1889) 1891-2

SOUNDS OF THE WINTER

SOUNDS of the winter too,
Sunshine upon the mountains — many a distant strain
From cheery railroad train — from nearer field, barn, house,
The whispering air — even the mute crops, garner'd apples,
     corn,
Children's and women's tones — rhythm of many a farmer
     and of flail,
An old man's garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we
     give out yet,
Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.

1891 1891-2

A TWILIGHT SONG

AS I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
Musing on long-pass'd war-scenes — of the countless buried
     unknown soldiers,
Of the vacant names, as unindented air's and sea's — the
     unreturn'd,
The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the deep-fill'd trenches
Of gather'd dead from all America, North, South, East, West,
     whence they came up,
From wooded Maine, New-England's farms, from fertile
     Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio,
From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the
     Carolinas, Texas,
(Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless
     flickering flames,
Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising — I hear the
     rhythmic tramp of the armies;)
You million unwrit names all, all — you dark bequest from all
     the war,
A special verse for you — a flash of duty long neglected — your
     mystic roll strangely gather'd here,
Each name recall'd by me from out the darkness and death's
     ashes,
Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for
     many a future year,

Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or
     South,
Embalm'd with love in this twilight song.

1890 1891-2

WHEN THE FULL-GROWN POET CAME

WHEN the full-grown poet came,
Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with
     all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;
But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and
     unreconciled,