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Heartsease and Rue

9781465673855
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
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The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes, Confutes poor Hope’s last fallacy of ease,—The distance that divided her from ill: Earth sentient seems again as when of old The horny foot of Pan Stamped, and the conscious horror ran Beneath men’s feet through all her fibres cold: Space’s blue walls are mined; we feel the throw From underground of our night-mantled foe: The flame-winged feet Of Trade’s new Mercury, that dry-shod run Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun, Are mercilessly fleet, And at a bound annihilate Ocean’s prerogative of short reprieve; Surely ill news might wait, And man be patient of delay to grieve: Letters have sympathies And tell-tale faces that reveal, To senses finer than the eyes, Their errand’s purport ere we break the seal; They wind a sorrow round with circumstance To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance The inexorable face: But now Fate stuns as with a mace; The savage of the skies, that men have caught And some scant use of language taught, Tells only what he must,—The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust. So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes, I scanned the festering news we half despise Yet scramble for no less, And read of public scandal, private fraud, Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud, Office made vile to bribe unworthiness, And all the unwholesome mess The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late To teach the Old World how to wait, When suddenly, As happens if the brain, from overweight Of blood, infect the eye, Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead. As when, beneath the street’s familiar jar, An earthquake’s alien omen rumbles far, Men listen and forebode, I hung my head, And strove the present to recall, As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall.

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