The Portland daily press., 1888-03-26

IL atmosphere:
My day began nottill the twilight fell
And 10. in ether from heavens sweetest web
The New Moon swan divinely isolate.
The delicate and devoted beauty of the verse
rises with its moon expressing
The love that In itself can find
Seed Of white thoughts, the lilies of the mind.
AS the passion of the shepherd grows and
changes with the waxing moon. the shadow
OF his earth begins to creep toward "the
disc OF that celestial worth" His dreams
grow holder, and confuse him with visions
Of the goddess, coming towsrd him together
with Sleep,
But softer-footed, sweeter-browed than she.
The rapture of her words awakes him
and already she is remotean
Silent in the silent sky o'erhead,
But cold as on ce-plated snow she CLEANS
Herself the mother and the child OF dreams.
The tragedy of the granted prayer is nobly
Indicated
My FOOLS prayer was accepted; what remains?
Or was IL some eid0l0n merely, sent
BY her who rules the shades In Punishment
How 'scape j shame, whose will was traitorous?
What shall compensate an ideal dimmed?
How blanch again my statue yirgin-limbed,
Poured more profusely as within decreased
The fire unearthly, fed with Goals from far
Within the sOuPs shrine.
But Endymion, with will perverted and
mind dismayed. can onl, sum up his renun-
citation in q last superb cry:
Goddess Triform, own thy triple spell,
hell
The force of passion and of fancy, the
purity and beauty of imagery, and the dra-
matte sanity Of the poem are beyond praise.
Verse upon verse pours flood of silver
splendof OF music and light over this medita-
ton, as nobly mature in thought as it Is per-
feet in its act.
In the elegy upon Agassiz, which has the
first place in the volume, Mr.. Lowell gives
us of his best and Of his worser work. The
opening is not fortunate; the mood of high
grief for the death of his friend is lily her
aided by note of complaint, at times even
simultaneously petulant and again COM
monplace in its arraignment of the telegraph
lie news columns. The moment of sudden
sorrow at reading of the death of Agassiz
cal abuses, in the spirit Of that critical indie
pendent faction with which Mr.. Lowell has
seemed affiliated.
The poem really begins with the strophe:
Uprooted is our mountain oak.
although one could not afford to lose the
exquisite dispraise of the electric wire:
Surely III news might wait,
And man be patient of delay to grieve:
Letters have sympathies
And te11-tale faces that reveal
To senses finer than the eyes
Their errands purport ere we break the seal;
They wired sorrow round with circumstance
To stay its feet nor all unwarned displace
The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance
The memorable face;
But now Fate stuns as with mace;
The savage of the skies, that men have caught
And some scant use of language taught,
Tells only what he must
The steefcold fact in one laconic thrust.
The poet does not choose here to follow
the traditions handed down from the days
of Giecian elegy, and call upon inanimate
nature to second his lament. but invokes the
men of earlier English song to lend him
their direct forceful utterance. He cele-
brates the vigorous humanity Of Agassiz in a
finely imagined passage:
In some the genius is thing apart
A pillared hermit of the brain,
Hoarding with incommunicable art
Its intellectual gain 80.
We're shaken from its serviceable mood
BY unprecedented stirs Of heart
Or lar OF human neighb0rho0d:
Some find their natural selves, and only then,
In Burroughs OF divine escape from men,
And when, by that brief ecstacy left bare,
Driven by some instinct OF desire.
They wander worldword, tits to blink and stare,
Like wild things OF the wood about IRE,
pazed BY the social glow they cannot share,
But basked and burgeoned In eopartnery,
Companionship, and open-windowed glee i.
In no self-spun cocoon OF prudence wound,
He by the touch OF men was best inspired,
And caught his native greatness at rebound
Prom generosties itself had fired;
Then how the heat through every fibre ran,
Felt in the gathering presence of the man.
While the apt word and gesture came unbid.
How glowing and exact is this eulogy-if,
as must occasionally be allowed In the work
of Mr.. Lowell, one forbear to challenge the
mixed metaphor of the generosities which
when fired, emit greatness like projectile,
hot In the hands that catch 1t on the re-
bound.
The poet recalls In memory the group OF
friends separated by death; and the picture
grows In his mind more and more vivid, I'M
til he doubts whether he, himself, indeed be
not the shade and they substantial, whether
to the truly sane the world Of sense or Of
spirit is the more real A magnificent medi-
tation on Immortality is the strophe begin
ming
seem to see the black procession go
which first expands with the dreary imper-
sonality of pantheism
Nay to be mingled with the elements,
The fell0w-servant of creative powers,
Partaker u the solemn years events S,,rs
To share the work OF busy-hngered hours.
To be nights silent almOner OF QeW,
To rise again in plants and breathe ana grow.
To stream as tides the ocean caverns through
or with the rapture of great winds to blow
About earth's shaken cOignes. were not fate
To leave us all disconsoiate
and, after this superb series of eloquent
images, results in an emphatic creed;
But such was not his faith.
Nor mine: IL may be he had trod
Outside the plain old path OF God thus spdke,
But God to him was very God,
And not p visionary wrath
Skulking ia mHrky corners OF the mind;
And he was sure TO be
somehow somewhere, impeYishable as He,
Not with His essence mystically comDlnel,
AS some high spirits long, but whole and Tree.
A perfected and conscious Agassz.
The general effect Of the elegy is of fine
theme, with occasional I&pses into irrele-
want remote keys, here and there careless
and uneven In treatment, but abouncins IN
passages that prove the master-hand.
In the birthday poem to Dr. Oliver Wen
dell Holmes this variable quality is In its
right place, and wit ia well alternated with
tenderness. The sonnet to Mr.. Whittier is
grave aud affectionate. The letter to DIR.
Curtis is excellent in feeling and remlnis-
cens4. In Arcadia Rediviva, Phoebe. Es-
arrangement and other verses, we find COM
mon themes glorfed By the revealing touch
Of poetry. The stanza which begins
How was worthy so divine loss?