Delivered on the first anniversary of the Carolina Art Association, Feb. 10, 1856.
THERE are two worlds wherein our souls may dwell,
With discord, or ethereal music fraught,
One the loud mart wherein men buy and sell
(Too oft the haunt of grovelling moods of Hell),
The other, that immaculate realm of thought,
In whose bright calm the master-workmen wrought,
Where genius lives on light,
And faith is lost in sight,
Where crystal tides of perfect harmony swell
Up to the heavens that never held cloud,
And round great altars reverent hosts are bowed,
Altars upreared to love that cannot die,
To beauty that forever keeps its youth,
To kingly grandeur, and to virginal truth,
To all things wise and pure,
Whereof our God hath said, "Endure! endure!
Ye are but parts of me,
The hath been, and the evermore to be,
Of my supremest Immortality!"
We falter in the darkness and the dearth
Which sordid passions and untamed desires
Create about us; universal earth
Groans with the burden of our sensual woes;
The heart heaven gave for homage is consumed
By the wild rages of unhallowed fires
The blush of that fine glory which illumed
The earlier ages, hath gone out in gloom;
There is no joy within us, no repose
One creed our beacon, and one god our hold,
The creed, the god, of gold;
The heavenward wingèd Instinct that aspires,
Like a lost seraph with dishevelled plume,
Pants humbled in the "slough of deep Despond,"
The present binds us, there is no Beyond,
No glorious Future to the soul content
With the poor husks and garbage of this world;
And are indeed the wings of worship furled
Forevermore ? Is no evangel blent,
No sweet evangel, with the hiss and hum
Of the century's wheels of progress? Science delves
Down to the earth's hot vitals, and explores
Realms arctic and antarctic, the strange shores
Of remote seas, or with raised vision stands,
All undismayed, amidst the starry lands:
Man too, material man, our baser selves,
She hath unmasked even to the source of being;
Almost she seems a god,
Deep-searching and far-seeing;
And yet how oft like some wild funeral wail
Which goes before the burial of our hopes,
Emerging from the starry-blazoned copes
Of highest firmaments, or darkest vale
Of the nether earth, or from the burdened air
Of chambers where this mortal frame lies bare,
Probed to the core, her saddening accents come;
"What! call'st thou man a seraph? nay, a clod,
The veriest clod when his frail breath is spent,
Man shows to us who know him; what is he?
A speck! the merest dew-globe 'midst the sea
Of life's infinity;"
Or, "we have probed, dissected all we can,
But never yet, in any mortal man,
Found we the spirit! thing of time and clay,
Eat, drink, enjoy thy transient insect-day!"
Thus Science; but while still her mocking voice
Rings with a cold sharp clearness in our ears,
Her beauteous sister, on whose brow the years
Have left no cankering vestige of decay,
Eternal Art, she of the fathomless eyes
Brimming with light, half worship, half surprise,
In whose right hand a branch of fadeless palms,
Plucked from the depths of golden shadowed calms,
Points upward to the skies,
She answers in a minor, sweet and strange
The while, all graces in her aspect meet,
And Doubt and Fear shrink shuddering at her feet,
"I bring a nobler message! Soul, rejoice!
Rise with me from thy troublous toils of sense,
Thy bootless struggles, born of impotence,
Rise to a subtler view, a broader range
Of thought and aim;
Mine is a sway ideal,
But still the works I prompt, alone, are real;
Mine is a realm from immemorial time
Begirt by deeds and purposes sublime,
Whose consecration is faith's quenchless flame,
Whose voices are the songs of poet-sages,
Whose strong foundations resting on the ages,
The throes and crash of empires have not shaken,
Nor any futile force of human rages.
"Come! let us enter in!
Behold, the portal gates stand open wide!
Only, from off thy spirit shake the dust
Of any thought of sin,
Or sordid pride,
For sacred is the kingdom of my trust,
By mind, and strength, and beauty sanctified."
She spake! and o'er the threshold of a sphere,
A marvellous sphere, they passed;
From the deep bosom of the purpling air
A lambent glory broke along the vast,
Horizon line, whence clouds, like incense, rolled
Athwart a firmamental arc of gold
And sapphire; clouds not vapor-born,
But clasping each the radiant seeds of morn,
Which suddenly, clear zenith heights attained,
Burst into light, unfolding like a flower,
From out whose quivering heart a mystic shower
Of splendor rained:
A spell was hers to conquer time and space,
For from the desert grandeur of that place
A hundred temples rise,
The marble poems of the bards of old,
Whereon 'twere well to look with reverent eyes,
Because they body noblest aspirations,
Ethereal hopes, and winged imaginations,
Whether to fabled Jove their walls were raised,
Or on their inner altar offerings blazed
To wise Athèna, or, in Christian Rome
Beneath St. Peter's mighty circling dome,
A second Heaven, the golden censers swing,
The clear-toned choirs those hymns of rapture sing,
Which, on harmonious waves of gratulation,
The outburst of the sense of deep salvation,
Uplift the spirit where the Incarnate Word
Amid the praise no ear of man hath heard,
The peace no mind of man can comprehend,
Awaits to welcome Time's worn wanderers home!
"But look again!" Art's eager Genius cried:
"Thou hast not seen the end,
Scarce the beginning!" As she spake, a tide
Of all the mighty masters, loved, adored,
From out the shining distant spaces poured,
All those who fashioned, through an inward dower,
The concrete forms of beauty and of power;
Whether from white Pentelic quarries brought,
The voiceless stone uprose, a breathing thought,
Or, from the mystic rays of rainbows drawn,
And colors of the sunset and the dawn,
The painter's pencil his ideal fine,
Had clothed in hues divine;
Or, skilled in living words
Melodious as the natural voice of birds
(But each a sentient thing, a meaning grand,
It is not given to all to understand),
The poet from the shade of breezy woods,
From barren seaside solitudes,
And from the pregnant quiet of his soul
Outbreathed the numbers that forever roll
Perennial, as the fountains of the sea,
And deep almost as deep eternity!
Near and yet nearer the bright concourse came,
Their faces all aflame,
As when of yore the quick creative thrill
Did smite them into utterance, and the throng,
Awed by the fiery burden of the song,
Grew reverent pale and still;
O! solemn and sublime Apocalypse
That wresteth, from the dreary death-eclipse,
The sacred presence of these marvellous men!
Yonder the visible Homer moves again,
Moves as he moved below,
Save that his smitten vision
Rekindled at the fount of fire Elysian,
Burns with a subtler, grander, deeper glow,
And yonder Æschylus, with "thunderous brow,"
Scarred by the lightning of his own creations,
Wrapped in a cloud of sombre meditations,
Hath seized the tragic muse, as if to her
He scorned to bend an humble worshipper,
But would extort her gifts;
Then Shakespeare mild,
Blessed with the innocent credence of a child,
With a child's thoughts and fancies undefiled,
And yet a Magian strong
To whom the springs of terrible fears belong,
Of majesty, and beauty, and delight,
To the weird charm of whose infallible sight,
The heart's emotions,
Though turbid as the tides of darkest oceans,
Shone clear as water of the woodland brooks--
He passed with wisdom thronèd in his looks
Attempered by the genial heats of wit;
While close beside him, his grand countenance lit
By thoughts like those which wrought his Judgment Day,
Grave Michel Angelo
His massive forehead lifts,
In a strange Titan fashion, unto Heaven;
Next Raphael comes, with calm and star-like mien,
Fresh from the beatific ecstasy,
His face how beautiful, and how serene!
Since God for him the awful veil had riven
That shrouds Divinity,
And rolled before his wondering mind and eye
Visions that we should gaze on but--to die!
They passed, and thousands more passed by with them;
Again Art's Genius spake: "Lo! these are they
Who, through stern tribulations,
Have raised to right and truth the subject nations;
Lo! these are they,
Who, were the whole bright concourse swept away,
Their fame's last barrier, built the surge to stem
Of chaos and oblivion, whelmed beneath
The pitiless torrent of eternal death,
Would yet bequeath to races unbegot
The precepts of a faith which faileth not;
Pointing, from troublous toils of time and sense,
From bootless struggles born of impotence,
To that fair realm of thought,
In whose bright calm these master-workmen wrought,
Where crystal tides of perfect music swell
Up to the heavens that never held a cloud,
And round great altars worshipping hosts are bowed--
Altars upreared to love that cannot die,
To beauty that forever keeps its youth,
To kingly grandeur, and to virginal truth,
To all things wise and pure,
Whereof our God hath said: 'Endure! endure!
Ye are but parts of me,
The HATH BEEN, and the evermore TO BE,
Of my supremest Immortality!' "
