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SONNETS.
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MARTYRS OF HISTORY.
VII. ESAU.
Esau, wild huntsman, rough and frank and free,By crafty Jacob, God's accepted one,
Of birthright spoiled and place beneath the sun,
That, when the waves of Time's resurgent sea
Brought vengeance to thy hand and wrath to be,
Yet, for old Isaac's sake, the victory won
Forewent'st and spar'dst thy treacherous father's son,
My heart is heavy, when I read of thee.
Still, though Jehovah on the traitor smile
And the world's laughter in thy steps ensue,
For us, who honour more of worth than wile
Hold, through the darkness of four thousand years,
Echoes thy cry despairing, “Bless me too,
“Me also, o my father!” in our ears.
VIII. HECTOR.
Of all that by their deaths at Ilium came,There's none the chord of sympathy in me
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Who to the boor Achilles life and fame
Not only lost, but, by Fate's spite, whose name,
Miswritten on the page of history,
(Though modest he as brave,) is grown to be
A byword for a braggart and a shame.
What bard hath e'er bethought himself of thee,
To justify thy memory in his lays?
One only, mightiest of the sons of men,
Hath set thee somedele in thy place of praise,
In that his song of Trojan times, where he
Of Troïlus and Cressid told erewhen.
IX. JULIAN.
“Vicisti, Galilaee!” In these days,When, on the mouldering cross, his discrowned head
The Galilean hangs, a last time dead,
His brow dishaloed, reft of power and praise,
Forsaken of the folk his temples' ways,
Thought turns to him who for the old faith led
The fight and dying, by his fall foresaid
His, unto whom he left the conqueror's bays.
Thou fellest, Julian, and thy Gods with thee;
Yet ever honoured shall thy memory be
That to relight the extinguished altar-fires
Strov'st and forbaddest, in the face of Fate,
The sons of Shem barbarian desecrate
The tombs and temple-places of thy sires.
X. CLIVE.
England, to whom he gave the gorgeous EastOf Ind from Ganges to the Waters Five,
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How dealt'st thou with the founder of thy feast?
Alack! Thou sufferedst the blatant beast
Of calumny thy hero hound and drive
To a dishonoured sepulchre, alive,
And dead, well nigh to think of him hast ceased.
Such, such is heroes' fortune, so ill-starred
Their horoscope and such the abiding curse
That stains the shields of nations! In repine
They live and at their epicedial shrine
None kneels but some expiatory bard,
Who sets their names in his enbalming verse.
XI. EDWARD JOHN EYRE.
Thy given trust pluck out from treason's fire;'Gainst rebel rogues uphold the sacred tree
Of English rule for law and liberty;
And thou by fools and knaves shalt through the mire
Be dragged and die in misery, like Eyre,
Whose memory, England, honour, for that he
As true a martyr lived and died for thee
As any saint e'er perished on the pyre.
Would but his fate (yet History's sorry tale
Forbiddeth hope) to teach us might avail
How wantonly unwise it is to entrust
The arbitrament of states to the fool folk,
Who by the shell the egg judge, not the yolk,
Nor gold distinguish can from glittering dust!
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XII. TOMAS ZUMALACARREGUI.
Though the Gods favoured the victorious cause,That which pleased Cato was the vanquished one.
Few viler causes ever shamed the sun
Than that, which, founded in contempt of laws
And uses immemorial, on this clause
Established of descendance, sire to son,
But for the ball uneath might have been won
Which at Bilbáo gate gave victory pause.
Few now remember him who, for the right,
Pure, grave and gracious, battling, a true knight,
Plucked victory well nigh from the jaws of doom.
But he who looks beyond our idle day
Will at this page of history pause, to lay
A wreath on Zumalacarregui's tomb.
The great Carlist general, whose triumphant career was ended by a gunshot-wound received at the siege of Bilbáo. Ob. 24th June, 1835.
XIII. QUI CARENT VATE SACRO.
How many lives there be, misfortune-marred,Whereto the Fates such little pity show
That they through grief to death not only go,
But for remembrance lack the sacred bard!
Such England's Charles, the noble, the ill-starred;
Such Maximilian of Mexico;
Such France's Third Napoleon, evenso,
The kind, the sad, of fortune followed hard;
Such Pedro of Brazil, the modern Lear,
Such Laud, such Strafford, to the fated goal
Their lord foregoing, whom they loved so dear:
To whom and many a Fate-forsaken soul,
Martyred and mortified of traitor Time,
Too late I consecrate this tribute rhyme.
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MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.
FRANZ LISZT.
Small wonder is it that thou dwellest, Liszt,Yet in Olympus of the Gods alone
And that few worship at thy shrine of stone!
Who were there, in our world of sciolist
And huckster, worth with thee Art's Eucharist
To share or to thy wild heroic tone
Thrill with nostalgia for the worlds unknown,
Beyond our sorry sphere of mire and mist?
Nay, noble soul, our age is not the first
That hath the prophets, crying in its gate
Their message from the heavens, stoned and cursed.
In every age have mindless men disdained
Their highest, neither noted, till too late,
That angels unawares they entertained.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Arnold, no trumpets thunder in thy song;The shrill-voiced fife too harsh was for thy need.
The Dorian flute, wherewith thou sought'st to lead
Men's footsteps, piping low, the meads along
Of plaintive thought, unnoted of the throng
Passed in our troublous times, when men scant heed
Yield to what serveth not their lust and greed;
Nor was thy voice for many enough strong.
Yet, for those spirits, few and far to find,
In whom the Delicate outvies the Loud,
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Who prize, 'tis well, thy guiding feet behind,
To wander, careless of the unthinking crowd,
Among the quiet byways of the soul.
BERKELEY.
“Few think; yet all will have opinions.” SoA sage declared, in saner days than these.
How, Berkeley, of our time of tense unease
How hadst thou deemed, if Time's resurgent flow
Had stranded thee amidst our idle show
Of shrill pretence that might a Socrates
Drive aforethought to drain the cup that frees
The imprisoned spirit from this world of woe?
Sure, thou hadst veiled thy visage, not to see
The lost folk, whirling on their wild career,
And this our life, a ship with none to steer,
Hither and thither on Will's shoreless sea
Hurried, where none to counsel lendeth ear
And every fool's his own divinity.
CHARLES ALLSTON COLLINS.
Collins, the credit which thou mightest claim,Hadst thou on honour's bederoll stood alone,
Was shadowed by a brother better known,
Though less deserving than thyself of name,
And more yet by the world-involving fame
Of one, to whom thou stood'st, though not his own,
In son's stead: he who dwelleth near the throne
Must needs be cast in shadow by its flame.
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And more to those who shun the garish light
Incline than those who in the full noon-sheen
Of public favour bask, too oft by chance,
With thee “on wheels” to wander love and e'en
A-horseback, through the wilder ways of France.
See his forgotten, but delightful, books, “A Cruise upon Wheels,” “The Bar Sinister” and “A New Sentimental Journey.” Collins died in 1873, at the early age of 45.
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON.
Burton, old fighter, frankest foe and friend,The glamour of the East it was that drew
Our lives together, mine, that only knew
The Orient glories by the dreams that lend
Enchantment to the far, and yours, whose trend
Your steps through lands untravelled, old and new,
Still led; and this sufficed, for me and you,
To hold our hearts unsundered to the end.
Through stormy seas your vessel drove of life;
Your feet were foremost in the front of strife:
My travel in the trackless ways of thought,
My battles in the bounds of fancy fought
Still were. Yet oft in dreams I clasp your hand,
Athwart the shadows of the Silent Land.
ST. AMBROSE'S PRAYER.
Mortem repentinam inopinatamque.
Ambrose, “a servant of the Most High God,”
His voice to Heaven for celestial aid
And succour, in his need, uplifting, prayed
That, when of him, obedient to Fate's nod,
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Death, sudden, unexpected, unforesaid,
Swift as the lightning, might his sense invade
And leave his body lifeless as a clod.
Thy God I know not, Ambrose; but thy prayer
I'd pray, if Gods to answer it there were;
For none of those am I to life who cling,
When for deliverance sues the imprisoned soul,
And liefer would, a lark, die on the wing
Than rot, a rat, by inches in a hole.
THE DAY'S END.
Si quis, totâ die currĕns, pervenit ad
vesperam, satis est.
Petrarca de Verâ Sapientiâ.
“If any, having run the livelong day,
“Win, in the end, to evening, 'tis enough.”
Thus Laura's lover said. — To Age's bluff
Come, — where, with all its multiform array,
Its versicoloured hours of gold and grey,
Life's lingering road into Death's tumbling trough
Slopes and is lost, reviewing smooth and rough,
Enough for him the overtravelled way.
Singer of loves long-drawn, their golden thread
Thin-broidered glancing through Life's hodden woof,
Laden with laurels, pampered with approof,
Of lore and passion weary, blame and praise,
Nought dwelt with him of all Life's golden days
But the way wended and the evening-red.
THE INSULTS OF THE VULGAR.
Foremost of all the ills, that here besetThose at the goal of soaring thought who aim,
The insults of the vulgar fain I'd name,
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Ambitions higher than the needs which fret
Their duller fellows in Life's fitful game,
Raining, too often with their darts of flame
Drive them untimely on Death's open net.
Where, among those exalted o'er their kind,
The kings of thought, by Nature's sacring spell
From Heaven banished to this earthly hell,
Were't possible a soul unscarred to find
By “insults” (such as Wordsworth erst to mind
Called) “unavenged and unavengeable?”
SCORN AND SYMPATHY.
Unendliche Verachtung, unendliches Mitleid.
(Schopenhauer's formula of the philosopher's attitude toward mankind.)
(Schopenhauer's formula of the philosopher's attitude toward mankind.)
Nothing with men it profiteth the sage
To mell or seek their dull delirium
With words to allay. The time must cast its scum,
Like wine that 'gainst the enclosing cask doth rage,
And the fool commons, children in each age,
Deaf to all music but the huckster's drum,
Through own experience must to wisdom come
Nor heed the scripture on the Past-Time's page.
So will the wise upon Life's labouring main
Gaze, unpartaking in men's pride and greed,
As one who, in a madhouse only sane,
His frantic fellows watches, moved indeed
To limitless contempt by their unwit,
But full of pity no less infinite.
IN THE CRUCIBLE.
Oncoming eld the web of devious dreams unweaves,Which youth about the cheeks and limbs of Life had cast,
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The greenwood's giant scheme in Winter one perceives,
Which he, at Summer's height, might not discern for leaves.
The Present blurs no more the Future and the Past;
Their outlines bare combine to build the vision vast
Of Truth that ne'er forsakes its lover nor deceives.
Then to our clearer sight the I and Thou are one;
Death is a form of Life, as Night a phase of Morn,
Sorrow of gladsomeness and shadow is of sun;
And in Thought's limbeck all seethes till at bottom we
Descry the ultimate sheer simpleness that's born
In the fierce furnace-heart of cold complexity.
THE LATTER DAYS.
Might I but see one day of the new daysAnd die, content to have looked upon my dream
Indubitable, the days which, if I deem
Aright, shall yet from out the Future's haze
Awake to lighten these our loveless ways,
When Truth shall free the folk with its sun-beam
From tbe oppression of the things which seem
And Life flower full beneath Love's fostering rays,
Quit of the baffling toils of our base time,
Which, to all faults of former ages known
And other such misfeasance of its own
As might have made Tiberius shrink to see,
For culmination adds the crowning crime,
The sin that feeds Hell-fire, Hypocrisy!
ULTIMA RATIO.
For this I thank the Fates, that else have beenStepmothers frowning-faced to me and stern,
That they have granted me my bread to earn
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Vouchsafing me from sordid strife and mean
To hold and base compliances to spurn,
That stain the soul, and fellowships that burn
Their brand indelible on mind and mien.
So, back on life, now drawing to its goal,
'Spite darksome days and sorrow-stricken nights,
Content I look, that never have forsaid
My faith, but for the flowerage of my soul
Have forced the unwilling world to yield me bread,
If scanty, sweet, being gotten on the heights.
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