SAINT-GAUDENS

BY ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.

I.

UPLANDS of Cornish! Ye, that yesterday
Were only beauteous, now are consecrate.
Exalted are your humble slopes, to mate
Proud Settignano and Fiesole,

For here new-born is Italy's new birth of Art.
In your beloved precincts of repose
Now is the laurel lovelier than the rose.
Henceforth there shall be seen

An unaccustomed glory in the sheen

Of yonder lingering river, overleant with green,
Whose fountains hither happily shall start,
Like eager Umbrian rills, that kiss and part,
For that their course will run

One to the Tiber, to the Arno one.

O hills of Cornish! chalice of our spilled wine, Ye shall become a shrine,

For now our Donatello is no more!

He who could pour

His spirit into clay, has lost the clay he wore,
And Death, again, at last,

Has robbed the Future to enrich the Past.
He, who so often stood

At joyous worship in your Sacred Wood,

He shall be missed

As autumn meadows miss the lark,

Where Summer and Song were wont to keep melodious tryst.

His fellows of the triple guild shall hark

For his least whisper in the starry dark.
Here, in his memory, Youth shall dedicate
Laborious years to that unfolding which is Fate.
By Beauty's faintest gleams

She shall be followed over glades and streams.
And all that is shall be forgot

For what is not;

And every common path shall lead to dreams.

II.

Poet of Cornish, comrade of his days:

When late we met,

With his remembrance how thine eyes were wet!
Thy faltering voice his praise

More eloquently did rehearse

Than on his festal day thy liquid verse.
Since once to love is never to forget,
Let us defer our plaint of private sorrow
Till some less unethereal to-morrow.
To-day is not the poet's shame
But the dull world's; not yet
Shall it be kindled at the living flame
Whose treasured embers

Ever the world remembers.

Not so the sculptor-his immediate bays
No hostile climate withers or delays.
Let us forego the debt of friendly duty;
A nation newly is bereft of beauty.
Sing with me now his undeferrèd fame,-
For Time impatient is to set

This jewel in his country's coronet.

When all men with new accent speak his name,

And all are blended in a vast regret,

There is no place for grief of thee or me:
One reckons not the rivers in the sea.

Sing not to-day the hearth despoiled of fire:

Ours be the trumpet, not the lyre.

Death makes the great

The treasure and the sorrow of the State.

Nor is it less bereaved

By what is unachieved.

Oh, what a miracle is Fame!

We carve some lately unfamiliar name
Upon an outer wall, as challenge to the sun;
And half its claim

Is deathless work undone.

Although the story of our art is brief,
Thrice in the record, at a fadeless leaf,
Falls an unfinished chapter; thrice the flower
Closed ere the noonday glory drank its dew;
Thrice have we lost of promise and of power-
The torch extinguished at its brightest hour-
His comrades all, for whom he twined the rue.

But though they stand authentic and apart
This is in our new land the first great grief of Art.

III.

Yet, sound for him the trumpet, not the lyre

Him of the ardent, not the smouldering, fire:
Whose boyhood knew full streets of martial song

When the slow purpose of the throng

Flamed to a new religion, and a soul.

He knew the lure of flags; caught first the far drums' roll; Thrilled with the flash that runs

Along the slanted guns;

Kept time to the determined feet

That ominously beat

Upon the city's floor

The firm, mad rhythm of war.

With envious enterprise

He saw the serried eyes

That, level to the hour's demand,

Looked straight toward Duty's promised land.

Then to be boy was to be prisoned fast

With the great world of battle sweeping past
While every hill and hollow

Heard the heart-melting music, calling "Follow!"
The day o'erbrimmed with longing, and the night
With beckoning dreams of many a dauntless fight,
As though doomed heroes summoned us to see

Thermopylas and Marathons.

-Ah, had he known who was to be
Their laureate in bronze!

But who can read To-morrow in To-day?
Fame makes no bargain with us, will not say
Do thus, and thou shalt gain, or thus and lose;
Nay, will not let us for another choose

The trodden and the lighted way.

She burns the accepted pattern, breaks the mould,
Prefers the novel to the old,

Revels in secrets and surprise;

And while the wise

Seek knowledge at the sages' gate

The schoolboy by a truant path keeps rendezvous with Fate.

IV.

This is the honey in the lion's jaws:
That from the reverberant roar

And wrack of savage war

Art saves a sweet repose, by mystic laws

Not by long labor learned

But by keen love discerned;

For this it bears the palm:

To show the storms of life in terms of calm.
Not what he knew, but what he felt,

Gave secret power to this Celt.

Master of harmony, his sense could find
A bond of likeness among things diverse,
And could their forms in beauty so immerse
That, to the enchanted mind,

Ideal and real seem a single kind.

Behold our gaunt Crusader, grimly brave,

The swooping eagle in his face,

The very genius of command,

And her not less, with her imperious hand,

The herald Victory holding equal pace.

Not trulier in the blast

Moves prow with mast;

Line mates with flowing line, as wave with following waveRider and homely horse

Intent upon their course

As though she went not with them. Near or far
One is their import: she the dream, the star-
And he the prose, the iron thrust-of War.

So, on the travelled verge

V.

Of storied Boston's green acropolis

That sculptured music, that immortal dirge
That better than towering shaft

Has fitly epitaphed

The hated ranks men did not dare to hiss!
When Duty makes her clarion call to Ease
Let her repair and point to this:
Why seek another clime?

Why seek another place?

We have no Parthenon, but a nobler frieze,-—
Since sacrifice than worship nobler is.

It sings the anthem of a rescued race;
It moves the epic of a patriot time,
And each heroic figure makes a martial rhyme.
How like ten thousand treads that little band,
Fit for the van of armies! What command
Sits in that saddle! What renouncing will!
What portent grave of firm-confronted ill!
And as a cloud doth hover over sea,

Born from its waters and returning there,

Fame, sprung from thoughts of mortals, swims the air
And gives them back her memories, deathlessly.

VI.

I wept by Lincoln's pall when children's tears,
That saddest of the nation's years,

Were reckoned in the census of her grief;