Bird of the forest, thy song is sweet As breezes that summer wavelets greet, And thy liquid notes melt into one, Like hearts of lovers in unison. Yet sweeter far were thy tones that broke The spell of silence when Eden woke, And angel forms on their plumes delayed, To list to thy notes ’mid the garden shade; And, ceasing to sweep their chords of fire, In wonder gazed on thy mimic lyre.
Since the eve when the stilly grove was stirred By the voice of God in the garden heard, And the cherubs waved the fiery sword At Eden’s gate ’gainst its banished lord— Since the brow of the guilty Earth was bent ’Neath the sentence of sin’s dread punishment, A spell of woe on thy heart has lain, Sorrow has saddened thy dulcet strain; And the grief of the exile that pines alone Is heard in the breathing of every tone.
Still pour thy song; and still mount higher With the day-god. Bird of the plumy lyre! And know as thou pourest thy saddened strain, That the meek heart is purified by pain, And at length will rest on a palmy shore, Where grief and suffering are no more. In that sweet land from all sorrow free, There’s a place of bliss, lone bird, for thee; With the beasts of the field and the birds of the shade, Immortal as first when God had made. There shall the strains of thy music flow In a ceaseless stream, without note of woe; And the gloss of thy pinions forever play In the glorious beams of eternal day.
I perceive with regret that it has of late become fashionable among the critics and mediocre authors, on both sides of the water, to decry German literature. Having rifled the gems—and bright and precious are they—the casket is now to be kicked aside as useless lumber. Even Blackwood—so long an oracle almost of the literary world—even Kit North himself, than whom a better man or truer poet never existed—has turned cynic and snarler in his old age, and after having marched side by side with Scott, Göethe, Byron, Coleridge, Schiller, Schlegel, and Shelley, through the brightest era of literature that has dawned and blazed upon the world since Johnson, has at last sunk to the level of a literary parvenu, and laughs at German literature! _He_ should not have done it! I tell you, Christopher, that the inspiration of a century was concentrated in a few mighty brains, which, within the last century, have returned to dust. For another hundred years to come, human intellect will seldom rise above the mere practical concerns of life—railroads, manufactures, and machinery. Practical science and natural philosophy will progress; but not that sublime and immediate gift of God, the embodying of the Ideal Perfect. The old world is exhausted. Greece, and her mouldering monuments of classic beauty—Rome, and her magnificent mementos of the shadowy past—Spain with her high romance, and Asia with her gorgeous grandeur—who will venture again to explore? Chateaubriand, Byron, De Stäel, Moore, Rogers—are not such names barriers to frighten all aspirants? No—not till America—the new world—becomes rich and settles herself down in quiet grandeur—not till her thousand mountains, her mighty lakes, her stupendous cataracts, and her boundless prairies, become invested with the magic of intellectual association—not until history begins to lose itself in dreamy and indistinct fable, to cast a vague interest over every charmed spot—will the bright-winged Ideal rouse from her sleeping nest. She shrinks from every thing practical, palpable, and common-place, as the rainbow loses its hues as it approaches the earth.