The Poetical Works of George Barlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

I would leave the accursed city—I would take her child with me,
So she begged me, so she wished it—I would seek the old pure sea:
There by stainless wastes of water, by blue wavelets undefiled,
It might be a fairer future might await the sinless child.

It was something—just a little—for the lost sad mother's sake
That I still might do—a little—so my heart not quite might break;
Break not yet at least,—my life's work not as yet was wholly done;
I had yet to preach of darkness, I the prophet of the sun.

How my thoughts flew back remembering how some fifteen years before
I had borne away the mother, then a child, and left the door
Of the hospital in London thanking God that I could give
To a dying woman comfort—then it seemed worth while to live!

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Annie—little dark-eyed darling—how I proudly bore you away!
How I showed you to my mother! how I watched you at your play!
How I bought you dolls and trinkets, and a hundred wondrous toys,
And tin soldiers—till my mother said that soldiers were for boys.

When the railway journey ended, the long journey to Penzance,
How I watched your bright eyes sparkle, when you saw the white waves dance:
How I thought, “There yet is sunlight, if all other sunlight dies;
This is God's eternal sunlight—even the light in sinless eyes!”

Oh, how well I can remember when the sea flashed on your sight
How you stretched your eyes wide open, with a laugh of pure delight;
How with that same voice which, later, made the throstle's heart despond
With an eager gasp you asked me, “Are there ducks upon that pond?”

216

How you loved to gather sea-weed—red and green and white and pink;
I can see to-day your shudder—I can see your fingers shrink
At their sudden startling contact with that cold flower of the sea,
The bright scarlet turquoise-beaded furtive sea-anemone.

With what pride—I can remember—you once brought me in your hand
A translucent lovely treasure which the sea had tossed on land;
Just a piece of broken bottle—but to us it seemed to be
Surely a priceless emerald stolen from the fairies of the sea!

Then the terror—oh! the terror—when beneath that granite slab
Your poor finger came in contact, cruel contact, with a crab;
How I kissed the poor pinched finger—how I soothed your sobs and sighs—
And we bore the rude crab homeward in a teacup for a prize.

217

Then the rapture, the wild rapture, when we saw the goby gleam
In our net at last, a captive—the fulfilment of a dream
That had lasted the whole summer, for that summer's dearest wish
Was to capture from his rock-pool that swift-darting tiny fish.

Then the glories of the shore too—there were butterflies on land,
Fair to see, but hard to capture. Once you brought me in your hand
(Now a hundred bright wing-cases count for nothing on your fan)
Such a prize—a great rose-beetle—splendid past the speech of man!

Has one jewel in London glittered with as fairylike a gleam
As the spots upon the trout's side which we jerked from out the stream,
Making all the alder-bushes—and our clothes too—wringing wet,
With a happy sudden side-jerk of the diamond-dropping net?

218

Oh those were our golden moments, though more golden were to come
When I read you in the quiet and the silence of our home
Tales of giants, dwarfs, and ogres, tales of knights and ladies fair
—Thinking all the time “no lady ever had my Annie's hair!”

How you loved the marvellous stories—nothing as you older grew
Was too marvellous, too fantastic, too miraculous for you:
Yes—I sometimes even think that our old readings' very charm
Turned your mind from life's real duties, did your dawning spirit harm.

Take for instance that grand story which would move you even to tears
Of the wondrous Fairy Palace which no mortal footstep nears,
Magic Palace of the Seasons where the seasons four are one,
Where the white snow gleams for ever, yet it melts not at the sun.

219

How your fancy seized the notion of the mingled seasons there,
Of the scents of summer mixing with the snow-flakes in the air,
Of the measureless bright Palace where eternal summer gleamed,
Where the nightingale for ever sang and loved, and loved and dreamed.

How you revelled in the notion of the fragrant summer room
Where for ever all the roses of the fay-land were in bloom:
Where the leafage of a summer that no mortal might behold
Lit the deep trees with a splendour mortal tongue has never told.

Summer—yes, eternal summer—in that fragrant central room
Nought of darkness, nought of horror, nought of sorrow, nought of gloom:
That is how your life, my darling (so I murmured!) ought to be;
Perfect happiness proceeding from unsullied purity.

But the Palace—the bright Palace—oh! my fancy lingers there;
If a mortal could but find it, and could breathe its sinless air—

220

If again we could but find it, how contented we should be
Even its solemn winter chamber, not the summer room, to see!

For within the winter chamber endless hoary winter reigned;
Whitest snows of earthly mountains would seem muddy, blurred and stained,
By the pure unsullied whiteness of the eternal snows within
That far-off enchanted Palace, where no heart had dreamed of sin.

Yes, the keen eyes of the fairies might with reason view with scorn
Even the bluest ice that glitters on our lordly Matterhorn:
Not from noblest Alpine summit was there ever view so grand
As from even the humblest summit of the hills of fairy-land.

And the night, the wondrous night there, when upon the peaks sublime
Fell a silence, such a silence; on the shadowy hills of time
That our Wordsworth made immortal, when the moon breathed down her spell
And the stars shed forth their glamour, never such a silence fell:

221

Silence perfect, strange, unearthly—silence as of utmost peace—
Such as when the trumpet clamours of the warring wild winds cease
On a sudden in mid-ocean, and the sea with gentle lips
Whispers, “I was only playing,” to the sea-birds and the ships:

Silent peace—I used to fancy—such as Jesus might have known
When he murmured “It is finished,” when he stood at last alone
Face to face with labour ended; peace no mortal sorrow mars:
Such the calm was when those ice-peaks glittered underneath the stars!

Sinless calm and peace most holy, so the dear old fable ran,
Brooded o'er those stainless summits never soiled by foot of man:
Calm divine and rapture perfect—through the crags no thunder rolled;
There the sun rose storm-defiant, there he sank in cloudless gold.

222

That was far too grand for mortals—we could breathe with easier breath
In that Palace of the Seasons where life mocks the sword of death
When we entered the bright chamber where rich autumn reigned superb,
Crowned with fiery leaves and sunshine, and with glowing corn and herb.

(That was just what took your fancy—to have all good gifts in one—
Noble whiteness of the winter, nobler glory of the sun;
Spring's soft colours never dreading, with a pang of sudden grief,
Death that turns the green leaf living to the golden dying leaf.)

For within the fairy palace the rich woods of autumn shone,
Forest after forest flaming into distances unknown:
No such colours in the far-famed Indian summer of the West
Ever burned on leafy banners, ever flashed from leafy crest.

223

Fairy oaks and fairy beeches, scarlet maples, glittered there
And such radiance gleamed along them from the magic heights of air
That, had mortal vision seen them, mortal tongue could never tell
How the tossing waves of colour on the light wind rose and fell.

Even here was contradiction. What would fairy landscapes be
Without wizard feats of colour, glorious incongruity?
There were roses, there were snow-drifts, there were yellow autumn leaves—
There were dahlias by the ice-ponds, there was frost upon the sheaves.

But the loveliest of the chambers in the Palace was the one
Where the green leaves gave a softness to the full flame of the sun:
Where the may-bloom ever glistened, but more fragrant far than ours;
Where the children of the fairies gathered never-dying flowers.

224

There was spring-time everlasting—not a spring that fades away
Leaving littered in the foot-paths trodden blossoms of the may,
Not a spring that shrinks from summer, but a spring that still will last
When the earthly flowers and foliage of a million springs are past.

You with sunlight in your glances, and with spring-time in your heart,
Seemed yet fuller fairer meaning to the story to impart:
When the fairy queen came singing through her palace, every word
Seemed to suit you, to express you—it was Annie that I heard.

Ours is the unfading pleasure
That never can grow old;
A joy beyond man's measure,
Delight no tongue has told.
No death within our palace
For ever will there be,—
No wild storm's wrath or malice,
No terror of the sea.

225

If man with all his sorrow
Could reach us where we dwell
There would be no to-morrow
For fairy mount or fell;
If man with all his sadness
Within our gates could stand
There would be no more gladness
Then left for fairy-land.

For man would bring his yearning,
His hopes and fears and sighs,
His passions fierce and burning,
His feverish enterprise:—
We post our keen-eyed warders
Along the frontier line;
Upon the magic borders
Their fairy sabres shine.

If man could ever enter
The fairy-land, what grief
Would thrill its very centre,
A horror past belief.

226

For all our flowers are stainless
And all our fields are fair:
The life we live is painless,
But man's life means despair.

Never the fairy warders
Will let one mortal pass:
Imperative their orders—
Were they to yield alas!
What thunderous change of weather
Upon our hills would loom,
For man and sin together
Would bring about our doom.

But man with heart infernal
Will never trespass here;
His sentence is eternal,
His destiny is clear:
He sees the golden portal
Through silent slumber gleam,—
He cries “I am immortal!”
He wakes—It is a dream.