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Home  »  Yale Book of American Verse  »  136 Credidimus Jovem Regnare

Thomas R. Lounsbury, ed. (1838–1915). Yale Book of American Verse. 1912.

James Russell Lowell 1819–1891

James Russell Lowell

136 Credidimus Jovem Regnare

O DAYS endeared to every Muse,

When nobody had any Views,

Nor, while the cloudscape of his mind

By every breeze was new designed,

Insisted all the world should see

Camels or whales where none there be!

O happy days, when men received

From sire to son what all believed,

And left the other world in bliss,

Too busy with bedevilling this!

Beset by doubts of every breed

In the last bastion of my creed,

With shot and shell for Sabbath-chime,

I watch the storming-party climb,

Panting (their prey in easy reach),

To pour triumphant through the breach

In wall that shed like snowflakes tons

Of missiles from old-fashioned guns,

But crumble ’neath the storm that pours

All day and night from bigger bores.

There, as I hopeless watch and wait

The last life-crushing coil of Fate,

Despair finds solace in the praise

Of those serene dawn-rosy days

Ere microscopes had made us heirs

To large estates of doubts and snares,

By proving that the title-deeds,

Once all-sufficient for men’s needs,

Are palimpsests that scarce disguise

The tracings of still earlier lies,

Themselves as surely written o’er

An older fib erased before.

So from these days I fly to those

That in the landlocked Past repose,

Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes

From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes;

Where morning’s eyes see nothing strange,

No crude perplexity of change,

And morrows trip along their ways

Secure as happy yesterdays.

Then there were rulers who could trace

Through heroes up to gods their race,

Pledged to fair fame and noble use

By veins from Odin filled or Zeus,

And under bonds to keep divine

The praise of a celestial line.

Then priests could pile the altar’s sods,

With whom gods spake as they with gods,

And everywhere from haunted earth

Broke springs of wonder, that had birth

In depths divine beyond the ken

And fatal scrutiny of men;

Then hills and groves and streams and seas

Thrilled with immortal presences,

Not too ethereal for the scope

Of human passion’s dream or hope.

Now Pan at last is surely dead,

And King No-Credit reigns instead,

Whose officers, morosely strict,

Poor Fancy’s tenantry evict,

Chase the last Genius from the door,

And nothing dances any more.

Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do,

Drumming the Old One’s own tattoo,

And, if the oracles are dumb,

Have we not mediums? Why be glum?

Fly thither? Why, the very air

Is full of hindrance and despair!

Fly thither? But I cannot fly;

My doubts enmesh me if I try,—

Each lilliputian, but, combined,

Potent a giant’s limbs to bind.

This world and that are growing dark;

A huge interrogation mark,

The Devil’s crook episcopal,

Still borne before him since the Fall,

Blackens with its ill-omened sign

The old blue heaven of faith benign.

Whence? Whither? Wherefore? How? Which? Why?

All ask at once, all wait reply.

Men feel old systems cracking under ’em;

Life saddens to a mere conundrum

Which once Religion solved, but she

Has lost—has Science found?—the key.

What was snow-bearded Odin, trow,

The mighty hunter long ago,

Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears

Still when the Northlights shake their spears?

Science hath answers twain, I ’ve heard;

Choose which you will, nor hope a third;

Whichever box the truth be stowed in,

There ’s not a sliver left of Odin.

Either he was a pinchbrowed thing,

With scarcely wit a stone to fling,

A creature both in size and shape

Nearer than we are to the ape,

Who hung sublime with brat and spouse

By tail prehensile from the boughs,

And, happier than his maimed descendants,

The culture-curtailed independents,

Could pluck his cherries with both paws,

And stuff with both his big-boned jaws;

Or else the core his name enveloped

Was from a solar myth developed,

Which, hunted to its primal shoot,

Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root,

Thereby to instant death explaining

The little poetry remaining.

Try it with Zeus, ’t is just the same;

The thing evades, we hug a name;

Nay, scarcely that,—perhaps a vapor

Born of some atmospheric caper.

All Lempriere’s fables blur together

In cloudy symbols of the weather,

And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas

But to illustrate such hypotheses.

With years enough behind his back,

Lincoln will take the selfsame track,

And prove, hulled fairly to the cob,

A mere vagary of Old Prob.

Give the right man a solar myth,

And he ’ll confute the sun therewith.

They make things admirably plain,

But one hard question will remain:

If one hypothesis you lose,

Another in its place you choose,

But, your faith gone, O man and brother,

Whose shop shall furnish you another?

One that will wash, I mean, and wear,

And wrap us warmly from despair?

While they are clearing up our puzzles,

And clapping prophylactic muzzles

On the Actæon’s hounds that sniff

Our devious track through But and If,

Would they ’d explain away the Devil

And other facts that won’t keep level,

But rise beneath our feet or fail,

A reeling ship’s deck in a gale!

God vanished long ago, iwis,

A mere subjective synthesis;

A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears,

Too homely for us pretty dears,

Who want one that conviction carries,

Last make of London or of Paris.

He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm,

But calmed myself with Protoplasm,

A finer name, and, what is more,

As enigmatic as before;

Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease

Minds caught in the Symplegades

Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions,

Each baffled with its own omniscience.

The men who labor to revise

Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,

And print it without foolish qualms

Instead of God in David’s psalms:

Noll had been more effective far

Could he have shouted at Dunbar,

“Rise, Protoplasm!” No dourest Scot

Had waited for another shot.

And yet I frankly must confess

A secret unforgivingness,

And shudder at the saving chrism

Whose best New Birth is Pessimism;

My soul—I mean the bit of phosphorus

That fills the place of what that was for us—

Can’t bid its inward bores defiance

With the new nursery-tales of science.

What profits me, though doubt by doubt,

As nail by nail, be driven out,

When every new one, like the last,

Still holds my coffin-lid as fast?

Would I find thought a moment’s truce,

Give me the young world’s Mother Goose

With life and joy in every limb,

The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!

Our dear and admirable Huxley

Cannot explain to me why ducks lay,

Or, rather, how into their eggs

Blunder potential wings and legs

With will to move them and decide

Whether in air or lymph to glide.

Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing

That Something Else set all agoing?

Farther and farther back we push

From Moses and his burning bush;

Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below,

All Nature mutters yes and no!

’T is the old answer: we ’re agreed

Being from Being must proceed,

Life be Life’s source. I might as well

Obey the meeting-house’s bell,

And listen while Old Hundred pours

Forth through the summer-opened doors,

From old and young. I hear it yet,

Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,

While the gray minister, with face

Radiant, let loose his noble bass.

If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll

Waked all the echoes of the soul,

And in it many a life found wings

To soar away from sordid things.

Church gone and singers too, the song

Sings to me voiceless all night long,

Till my soul beckons me afar,

Glowing and trembling like a star.

Will any scientific touch

With my worn strings achieve as much?

I don’t object, not I, to know

My sires were monkeys, if ’t was so;

I touch my ear’s collusive tip

And own the poor-relationship.

That apes of various shapes and sizes

Contained their germs that all the prizes

Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win

May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin.

Who knows but from our loins may spring

(Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing

As much superior to us

As we to Cynocephalus?

This is consoling, but, alas,

It wipes no dimness from the glass

Where I am flattening my poor nose,

In hope to see beyond my toes.

Though I accept my pedigree,

Yet where, pray tell me, is the key

That should unlock a private door

To the Great Mystery, such no more?

Each offers his, but one nor all

Are much persuasive with the wall

That rises now, as long ago,

Between I wonder and I know,

Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep

At the veiled Isis in its keep.

Where is no door, I but produce

My key to find it of no use.

Yet better keep it, after all,

Since Nature ’s economical,

And who can tell but some fine day

(If it occur to her) she may,

In her good-will to you and me,

Make door and lock to match the key?