POETRY.
TEE NIGHTINGALE.
"BELIEVE ME, LOVE, IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE."
WITHIN a roadside dingle late I stood, In the deep hush and middle of the night, Beneath unwhispering birches, stirless planes, To hear the wonder of the nightingale,—
The long, far, lonesome call of one in pain, The sob, the shout, the gurgle, smothered fire, The panting, breathless ripple, silvery haste, And keen exhilaration of the song.
Only the nightingale sings in the night ; Only in the soft dusk of memory Come the lost, gentle people, ghosts of tones Once filled the woodlands of the heart with charm. For me three visions and three voices there Rose to the cry of that enchanted strain: The first, of her, the purest of the fair, Love's holy angel that enravished youth, A beautiful and winsome figure girt "With golden exhalations of the dawn :" And next, of one commanding, eager, sweet, Who was my guide up to the Alps of thought, Shewed me the kingdoms of the mind, and all The glory of them, and the power, and then Was wafted in a troubled cloud away : Last, but not least, of him, who in the fresh And gracious season when the joy of birds Swells to its fullest, not thirty moons ago, Passed over to the numberless mute host That through the years do neither strive nor cry, But noiseless gather, waiting some great light; Striker of chords high, pure, engaging, sad, Most liquid poet of our turbid time, Who drew in sensitive and shining lines Its fret, its fever, its desire, its fear ; Who in his fair "bird-haunted" Surrey, there Where the fields slope to the grey stealing stream, And Geist and Kaiser sleep below the beech, Under his loved ailanthus must have heard Full oft the peerless bird of all the bards, And gloried in the grace, the limpid force, The light ironic notes, the gush subdued Of surging pathos that so imaged him, Whose stately cadences I will not think Are stilled for ever somewhere outside life, But set against his wistful doubt, my faith, Urgent if strained, that in some clearer world, "An ampler ether, a diviner air," They still make music tenderer, more strong, More sweet than all the nightingales of May.
JOSEPH TRUMAN.
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