"T is the natural way of living: Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe From The Vision of Sir Launfal, by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. HELPS TO STUDY 1. The first stanza has the general idea that all nature feels the life and warmth and beauty of June. 2. Explain lines 3-4. What is meant by saying that the clod feels " a stir of might " and "climbs to a soul in grass and flowers"? 3. How does the bird show the spirit of the season? What is his mate doing? Explain the last line of the stanza. 4. The second stanza, beginning "Now is the high-tide of the year," speaks of the things that human beings see and feel in the warm summer days. What are they? 5. The third stanza tells of the influence of the season upon our moral natures, as in lines 1, 3, 4, 9, and 10 of the stanza. 6. Explain lines 12–14. For Study with the Glossary: Instinct, chalice, illumined, deluge, nice, couriers, chanticleer, sulphurous, craters. For Oral and Written Composition: 1. A summer day. 2. The sounds and smells of a summer day. 5 10 LOWELL James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was a poet, an essayist, a scholar, an editor, and a diplomat, — and distinguished in all these fields. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., the son of a clergyman and the descendant of a long line of New England clergymen. He graduated from Harvard in 1838, and soon after that chose writing as his profession. In 1855 he was made professor of modern languages at Harvard, the position from which Longfellow had just resigned. He was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, from 1857 to 1862, and the editor of The North American Review from 1863 to 1872. From 1877 to 1880 he was minister to Spain, and from 1880 to 1885 minister to England, where he did much to bring about good feeling between England and America. The English people liked his wit, his tact, and friendliness, and admired him for his great learning. He was one of the most scholarly men we have produced, and a particularly brilliant talker. You have read a number of his poems. You should read some time also these essays of his: "Democracy," "Books and Libraries," "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." Here is a sample passage from the lastnamed essay: Lowell had just refused a request for five dollars from a well-enough dressed and able-bodied young German beggar, who had halted him on the street. "He took a high tone with me at once. . . He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to join himself to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he might give me his views of the American people, and thus inclusively of myself. . . . I listened for some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail his opinions of my country and my people. America, he informed me, was without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of supplying them. We were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who, having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it fast. . . I hastily left him to finish his diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better than I. That young man will never know how near he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman of middle age, at the corner of Church Street." THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread; 5 The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers 10 Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again. The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; 15 But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood, And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men, And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen. And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come, To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home; When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still, And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill, The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more. And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died, The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf, And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief : Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours, So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. HELPS TO STUDY 1. What month of the year does the poem portray? 2. What is nature like? are left? 4. 3. Which creatures and what flowers have gone? Which The personal grief in the last stanza is for his sister who had died not long before. For Study with the Glossary: Sere, eddying, orchis. 5 10 |