AS here within I watch the fervid coals, | |
| While the chill heavens without shine wanly white, | |
| I wonder, friend! in what rare realm of souls, | |
| You hail the uprising Christmas-tide to-night! | |
| |
| I leave the fire-place, lift the curtain’s fold, | 5 |
| And peering past these shadowy window-bars, | |
| See through broad rifts of ghostly clouds unrolled, | |
| The pulsing pallor of phantasmal stars. | |
| |
| Phantoms they seem, glimpsed through the clouded deep, | |
| Till the winds cease, and cloudland’s ghastly glow | 10 |
| Gives place above to luminous calms of sleep, | |
| Beneath, to glittering amplitudes of snow! | |
| |
| Some stars like steely bosks on blazoned shields, | |
| Stud constellations measureless in might; | |
| Some lily-pale, make fair the ethereal fields, | 15 |
| In which, O friend, art thou ensphered to-night? | |
| |
| Where’er mid yonder infinite worlds it be, | |
| Its souls, I know, are clothed with wings of fire; | |
| How wouldst thou scorn even Immortality, | |
| In whose dull rest thou couldst not still aspire! | 20 |
| |
| There, Homer raised where genius can not nod, | |
| Hears the orbed thunders of celestial seas; | |
| And Shakespeare, lofty almost as a God, | |
| Smiles his large smile at Aristophanes; | |
| |
| With earth’s supremest souls, still grouped apart, | 25 |
| Great souls made perfect in the eternal noon, | |
| There thy loved Goethe holds thee to his heart, | |
| Re-born to youth and all life’s chords in tune. | |
| |
| While in the liberal air of that wide heaven, | |
| He whispers: “Come! we share the self-same height; | 30 |
| To me on earth thy noblest toils were given, | |
| Brothers, henceforth, we walk these paths of light.” | |
| |
| Clear and more clear the radiant vision gleams! | |
| More bright grand shapes and glorious faces grow; | |
| While like deep fugues of victory, heard in dreams, | 35 |
| A thousand heavenly clarions seem to blow! | |
| |
