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James Russell Lowell - The Nightingale In The Study
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`Come forth!` my catbird calls to me,
  `And hear me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familiar tree,
  Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

`These buttercups shall brim with wine
  Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine?
  My ode to ripening summer classic?

`Or, if to me you will not hark,
  By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing
Till all the alder-coverts dark
  Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

`Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
  With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,
  Without premeditated graces.

`What boot your many-volumed gains,
  Those withered leaves forever turning,
To win, at best, for all your pains,
  A nature mummy-wrapt to learning?


`The leaves wherein true wisdom lies
  On living trees the sun are drinking;
Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,
  Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

`"Come out!" with me the oriole cries,
  Escape the demon that pursues you:
And, hark, the cuckoo weather-wise,
  Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.`

`Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,
  Hast poured from that syringa thicket
The quaintly discontinuous lays
  To which I hold a season-ticket.

`A season-ticket cheaply bought
  With a dessert of pilfered berries,
And who so oft my soul hast caught
  With morn and evening voluntaries,

`Deem me not faithless, if all day
  Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
  With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

`A bird is singing in my brain
  And bubbling o`er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
  Fed with the sap of old romances.

`I ask no ampler skies than those
  His magic music rears above me,
No falser friends, no truer foes,--
  And does not Dona Clara love me?

`Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars,
  A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing,
Then silence deep with breathless stars,
  And overhead a white hand flashing.

`O music of all moods and climes,
  Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly,
Where still, between the Christian chimes,
  The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

`O life borne lightly in the hand,
  For friend or foe with grace Castilian!
O valley safe in Fancy`s land,
  Not tramped to mud yet by the million!

`Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale
  To his, my singer of all weathers,
My Calderon, my nightingale,
  My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

`Ah, friend, these singers dead so long,
  And still, God knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
  To Nature`s self her better glory.`
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