James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
December 19To Bayard Taylor beyond Us
By Paul Hamilton Hayne (18301886)
A
While the chill heavens without shine wanly white,
I wonder, friend! in what rare realm of souls,
You hail the uprising Christmas-tide to-night!
And peering past these shadowy window-bars,
See through broad rifts of ghostly clouds unrolled,
The pulsing pallor of phantasmal stars.
Till the winds cease, and cloudland’s ghastly glow
Gives place above to luminous calms of sleep,
Beneath, to glittering amplitudes of snow!
Stud constellations measureless in might;
Some lily-pale, make fair the ethereal fields,
In which, O friend, art thou ensphered to-night?
Its souls, I know, are clothed with wings of fire;
How wouldst thou scorn even Immortality,
In whose dull rest thou couldst not still aspire!
Hears the orbed thunders of celestial seas;
And Shakespeare, lofty almost as a God,
Smiles his large smile at Aristophanes;
Great souls made perfect in the eternal noon,
There thy loved Goethe holds thee to his heart,
Re-born to youth and all life’s chords in tune.
He whispers: “Come! we share the self-same height;
To me on earth thy noblest toils were given,
Brothers, henceforth, we walk these paths of light.”
More bright grand shapes and glorious faces grow;
While like deep fugues of victory, heard in dreams,
A thousand heavenly clarions seem to blow!