To My Readers

Nay, blame me not; I might have spared     Your patience many a trivial verse,     Yet these my earlier welcome shared,     So, let the better shield the worse.     And some might say, "Those ruder songs     Had freshness which the new have lost;     To spring the opening leaf belongs,     The chestnut-burs await the frost."     When those I wrote, my locks were brown,     When these I write - ah, well a-day!     The autumn thistle's silvery down     Is not the purple bloom of May.     Go, little book, whose pages hold     Those garnered years in loving trust;     How long before your blue and gold     Shall fade and whiten in the dust?     O sexton of the alcoved tomb,     Where souls in leathern cerements lie,     Tell me each living poet's doom!     How long before his book shall die?     It matters little, soon or late,     A day, a month, a year, an age, -     I read oblivion in its date,     And Finis on its title-page.     Before we sighed, our griefs were told;     Before we smiled, our joys were sung;     And all our passions shaped of old     In accents lost to mortal tongue.     In vain a fresher mould we seek, -     Can all the varied phrases tell     That Babel's wandering children speak     How thrushes sing or lilacs smell?     Caged in the poet's lonely heart,     Love wastes unheard its tenderest tone;     The soul that sings must dwell apart,     Its inward melodies unknown.     Deal gently with us, ye who read     Our largest hope is unfulfilled, -     The promise still outruns the deed, -     The tower, but not the spire, we build.     Our whitest pearl we never find;     Our ripest fruit we never reach;     The flowering moments of the mind     Drop half their petals in our speech.     These are my blossoms; if they wear     One streak of morn or evening's glow,     Accept them; but to me more fair     The buds of song that never blow.     April 8, 1862.