Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
To a Comrade
By Harrison Smith Morris (18561948)J. A. H., Obiit 14 March, 1889.
The bugle winds of April blow their note;
The little buds dance in with dewy head
And curtsy to their lover where they spread;
The robin fills her throat,
Making the customed answer to his oat,
But he—alas! his fingered airs are fled!
And breathe their sweetness through the quiet closes,
And knew the rustled converse of the roses
About the edges of the country eaves;
And where the dappled sunlight dozes,
And where the ditties wake the sheaves,
The silence lulled him into long reposes
And happy world-reprieves.
And morning hill-tops meet,
Where breezes through the yellow barley run
With dimpling feet;
His heart went thither, though he trod the street.
He left his toil undone
To listen to the runnel eddies fleet—
He better loved the reveries won
In some old tree-retreat,
The mid-bough twitter and the homeward bleat,
And twilight village fun.
Nor lets the prodigal forget
His penitential debt;
And, late, his merry music ebbed in moans.
Who loved the noonday minuet
Of sun and shadow forest-met,
The freshened herbage bending in the wet
And birds in thicket-wones—
Who touched his pipe to a thousand tender tones—
He passed us woe-beset!
That wait the under whisper of the year,
Then break the crumbling loam and reappear
And work a beauty in the naked woods.
He waited, oh, how long! for happier moods,
And walked the city’s peopled roods,
With music at his ear:
With murmur of the leaves he loved to hear
In day-long solitudes—
But songs that should have made his presence dear,
And purchased love and long beatitudes,
Like early blossoms drenched with many a tear
Lay withered on his bier.
That bound us into comradeship complete.
We came together in the rainy street
At night, nor either knew
How close the current of our being drew,
How wide the circles rippling from our feet.
It was as if a pair of leaves that grew
Bough-neighbors ere the severing autumn blew
Had come again to meet,
And, finding solace in each other, knew
Remembrance of the far-off summer sweet.
Arustle with the buskined forest flights,
And pipe-réveillés of the Doric days.
We found our attic full of arching ways—
Or, bound afield, beheld the sights
Embalmed in old poetic rites,
And saw the slender dances of the fays.
And knew the winding region of romance;
His fingers fitted to the olden reeds;
And, when the music eddied, in his looks
Came vision of the wood, the circled dance,
And all the secret sweetness of the deeds
By forest brooks.
His riches were an idle dreamer’s meeds;
But yet he gave his best for others’ needs,
And nurtured with his love the seeds
Of worth grown up in sordid city nooks.
Pursuing hopes of melancholy made:
The lights that ever seem to fade
And leave the midnight darker by retreat.
The quiet counsel of the trees
He heeded not, nor sought the country peace,
But, like a quarry goaded—like a shade
Swept on in darkness, all his being beat
In maddened seas
Headlong against the granite of defeat.
He trusted not, but made
Foemen of guardian laws that give us aid
And lost his treasured music in the breeze.
Their matin music ere the grain be eared
And glancing sickles go abroad the field,
He lay storm-broken. Fame, that would have turned
With but a little wooing, could but yield
A chaplet of her young leaves seared.
And he who was to earth endeared
By tendril loves that clasped him like a vine;
Who held her soil as something sweet and fine;
And loved her still, though severed from her long—
He lies, in union grown divine,
Within her bosom, whence a flower-flight,
Sole guerdon of his dreams of day and night,
Springs from his seeds of song.
The Literary World. 1889.