THE HOUSEHOLD DIVINITY

From “A winter evening Hymn to my Fire”

BEAUTY on my hearth-stone blazing!
To-night the triple Zoroaster
Shall my prophet be and master:
To-night will I pure Magian be,
Hymns to thy sole honor raising,
While thou leapest fast and faster,
Wild with self-delighted glee,
Or sinkest low and lowest faintly
As an aureole still and saintly,
Keeping cadence to my praising
Thee! still thee! and only thee!

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O thou of home the guardian Lar,
And, when our earth hath wandered far
Into the cold, and deep snow covers
The walks of our New England lovers,
Their sweet secluded evening-star!
It was with thy rays the English Muse
Ripened her mild domestic hues;
It was by thy flicker that she conned
The fireside wisdom that enrings
With light from heaven familiar things;
By thee she found the homely faith
In whose mild eyes thy comfort stayed,
When Death, extinguishing his torch,
Gropes for the tatch-string in the porch;
The love that wanders not beyond
His ealiest nest, but sits and sings
While children smooth his patient wings:
Therefore with thee I love to read
Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs
Life in the withered words! how swift recede
Time’s shadows! and how glows again
Through its dead mass the incandescent verse,
As when upon the anvils of the brain
It littering lay, cyclopically wrought
By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet’s thought!
Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred,
The aspirations unattained,
The rhythms so rathe and delicate,
The bent and strained
And broke, beneath the somber weight
Of any airiest mortal world.

What warm protection dost thou bend
Round curtained tal of friend with friend,
While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,
To softest outline rounds the roof,
Or the rude North with baffled strain
Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane!
Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne
By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems
Gifted upon her natal morn
By him with fire, by her with dreams,
Nicotia, dearer to the Muse
Than all the grapes’ bewildering juice,
We worship, unforbid of thee;
And, as her incense floats and curls
In airy spires and wayward whirls,
Or poises on its tremulous stalk
A flower of frailest revery,
So winds and loiters, idly free,
The current of unguided talk,
Now laughter-rippled, and now caught
In smooth dark pools of deeper thought.
Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,
A sweetly unobtrusive third;
For thou hast magic beyond wine,
To unlock natures each to each;
The unspoken thought thou canst divine:
Thou fill’st the pauses of the speech
With whispers that to dream-land reach,
And frozen fancy-springs unchain,
In Artic outskirts of the brain;
Sun of all inmost confidences,
To thy rays doth the heart unclose
Its formal calyx of pretences,
That close against rude day’s offences,
And open its shy midnight rose!

James Russell Lowell.