Auf Wiedersehen.[60]

Until we meet again! That is the meaning Of the familiar words that men repeat At parting in the street. Ah, yes, till then! but when death intervening Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain We wait for the Again!

The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow Of parting as we feel it who must stay Lamenting day by day, And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow, We shall not find in its accustomed place The one belovèd face.

It were a double grief, if the departed, Being released from earth, should still retain A sense of earthly pain; It were a double grief if the true-hearted Who loved us here, should on the farther shore Remember us no more.

Believing, in the midst of our afflictions, That death is a beginning, not an end, We cry to them, and send Farewells, that better might be called predictions, Being foreshadowings of the future thrown Into the vast Unknown.

Faith overleaps the confines of our reason, And if by faith, as in old times was said, Women received their dead Raised up to life, then only for a season Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain Until we meet again.

Written in memory of the Poet’s long-time friend and publisher, Mr. James T. Fields.

ULTIMA THULE.

TO G. W. G.

With favouring winds, o’er sunlit seas, We sailed for the Hesperides, The land where golden apples grow; But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far since then the ocean streams Have swept us from the land of dreams. That land of fiction and of truth, The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these The tempest-haunted Hebrides, Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar, And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle! Here in thy harbours for awhile We lower our sails; awhile we rest From the unending, endless quest.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.

As Seleucus narrates, Hermes described the principles that rank as wholes in two myriads of books; or, as we are informed by Manetho, he perfectly unfolded these principles in three myriads six thousand five hundred and twenty five Volumes.

Our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes.—IAMBLICUS.

Still through Egypt’s desert places Flows the lordly Nile; From its banks the great stone faces, Gaze with patient smile; Still the pyramids imperious Pierce the cloudless skies, And the Sphinx stares with mysterious, Solemn, stony eyes.

But where are the old Egyptian Demigods and kings? Nothing left but an inscription Graven on stones and rings. Where are Helius and Hephoestus, Gods of eldest eld? Where is Hermes Trismegistus, Who their secrets held?

Where are now the many hundred Thousand books he wrote? By the Thaumaturgists plundered, Lost in lands remote; In oblivion sunk for ever, As when o’er the land Blows a storm-wind, in the river Sinks the scattered sand.

Something unsubstantial, ghostly, Seems this Theurgist, In deep meditation mostly Wrapped, as in a mist. Vague, phantasmal, and unreal, To our thought he seems, Walking in a world ideal, In the land of dreams.

Was he one, or many, merging Name and fame in one, Like a stream, to which converging Many streamlets run? Till, with gathered power proceeding, Ampler sweep it takes, Downward the sweet waters leading From unnumbered lakes.

By the Nile I see him wandering, Pausing now and then, On the mystic union pondering Between gods and men; Half-believing, wholly feeling, With supreme delight, How the gods, themselves concealing, Lift men to their height.

Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated, In the thoroughfare Breathing, as if consecrated, A diviner air; And amid discordant noises, In the jostling throng, Hearing far, celestial voices Of Olympian song.

Who shall call his dreams fallacious? Who has searched or sought All the unexplored and spacious Universe of thought? Who, in his own skill confiding, Shall with rule and line Mark the border-land dividing Human and divine?

Trismegistus! three times greatest! How thy name sublime Has descended to this latest Progeny of time! Happy they whose written pages Perish with their lives, If amid the crumbling ages Still their name survives!

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately Found I in the vast, Weed-encumbered, sombre, stately Graveyard of the Past; And a presence moved before me On that gloomy shore, As a waft of wind, that o’er me Breathed, and was no more.

DECORATION DAY.

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms, Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks; Here is no fevered breath, No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace, Untrampled lies the sod; The shouts of battle cease, It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep! The thoughts of men shall be As sentinels to keep Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green We deck with fragrant flowers; Yours has the suffering been, The memory shall be ours.