Fugitive Poetry. 1600–1878/To Myself

To Myself.

Is solitude a burden to thy soul?Hear what to great Pythagoras, of old,Where through deep vales Peneus' waters roll,By Echo and the Nightingale was told.

"Wherefore, 0 Nightingale!" the sage demands,(For he the varied language understandsOf bird and beast, and e'en of wave and wind),"Wherefore, O Songstress, dost thou love to findThy sunless shelter 'mid secluded dales,Scattering thy melodies on desert gales,And the deaf woods unheard by human kind?"From the low thicket by the water's edgeThe halycon flitting from the trembling sedge,"I sing to heaven," the Nightingale replied;The wise man smote upon his breast and sighed.

Long was the pause, the gliding stream was heard,Wind in the leaves, the notes of that lone bird!Sudden, a parting fragment of that rookDown the steep side, bounding and crashing fell,Awakening Echo, slumbering in her cell,Whose startling voice reverberates the shock."Why, thus," the sage inquired, "O Echo, tell,Lovest thou in secret cave alone to dwell?""Alone to dwell!" the aërial height replied;Then, dimly visioned on the mountain side,Where the tall cliffs in hoary grandeur tower,The nymph's reclining form apparent grew;In moss of many hues these lines she drew—"The voice of heaven in solitude I hear,Whether in distant thunder on mine ear.Or in the winds of eve that whisper near;In lonely silence comes that voice most clear,And I can best repeat the sounds to me most dear."

The sage departs, instructed, humbled, thence,And calls admiring grace to reverence,The sacred truth his mystic lays impart,"Silence and solitude," he cries, "shall discipline the heart.'