Heartsease and Rue

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 throe

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.