I WALKED the ancient graveyard's ample round,
Yet found therein not one illustrious name
Wedded by Death to Fame.
The sea-winds moaned by each deserted mound,
Where mouldering marbles shed their pungent must
O'er that worn human dust.
Thin cloudlets passed, with purpled skirts of rain
Grazing the sentinel pine-trees, gaunt and tall;
Some trembling to their fall.
From out the misty marsh-lands next the main,
Long lines of curlews in the sunset flame,
With dissonant noises came;
O'erswept the tombs in slow, high-wheeling flight,
And while the sunset verged on evening's gray,
Faded, ghostlike, away.
Yet down the dusky, shimmering, weird twilight
(Though lost their forms beyond the outmost hill),
Their strange cries sounded still;--
Prolonged by elfin echoes, 'mid the rocks,
Or lapsing in sad, plaintive wails to die
'Twixt darkling wave and sky.
The garrulous sparrows, in home-wending flocks,
Sought their rude nests among those shattered tombs,
Veiled now in vesper glooms;
Till o'er the scene a mystic influence stole;
The wave-enamored winds their pinions furled;
Pale Silence clasped the world.
Beside a grave, the lowliest of the whole
Obscure republic of the fameless dead,
Pausing, I mused, and said:--
All graves are equal! His, the laurelled, great,
Miraculous Shakspeare's, some far day shall rest
As level on Earth's breast,--
And all unknown--through stern behests of Fate--
As this, round which the rustling dock-leaves meet
Here, tangled at my feet.
All graves are equal to all-conquering Time;
Scornful, he laughs at monumental stones,--
Wasting a great man's bones,
A great man's sepulchre, though reared sublime
Toward heaven, until both stone and record pass,
Mocked by the flippant grass;
The feeblest weeds in Nature flaunting high
Above a Shakespeare's or a Dante's dust:--
Just then a gentle gust
Breathed front beyond the gloaming: Night's first sigh
Of conscious life touched the awakened trees,
And blended with the sea's
Monotonous murmur, seemed to whisper low:
"I rise, and sink, am born, and lose my breath,
Yet am not held by Death.
"For since the world began--when sunset's glow
Melts in the western tide--my air of balm
Rises, if earth be calm.
"My spell is sacred, wheresoe'er it falls;
The dreariest graves grow brighter at my voice,
And human hearts rejoice,
"Because that I, winged from these twilight halls,
In this, my life renewed, would subtly seem
A sweet, half-uttered dream
"Of immortality, made bright by love:
That love which binds the humblest human clod
Fast to the throne of God."
I left the graves, but now my gaze above
Ranged through the heavenly spaces, clear and far;
I marked the vesper star
Silver the edges of the wavering mist,
And centred in an air-wrought, luminous isle
Of lambent glory, smile;--
Smile like an angel whom the Lord hath kissed,
And freed from arms divine, in soft release,
To bless our earth with peace.
