University of Virginia Library

3. PART III

BROTHERS

Passion is a wayward child,
Art his brother firm and mild.
Lonely each
Doth fail to reach
Hight of music, song, or speech.
If hand in hand they sally forth,
East or west, or south or north,
Naught can stay them
Nor delay them.
Slaves not they of space or time
In their journeyings sublime.

LOVE, ART, AND TIME

ON A PICTURE ENTITLED “THE PORTRAIT,” BY WILL H. LOW

Sweet Grecian girl who on the sunbright wall
Tracest the outline of thy lover's shade,
While, on the dial near, Time's hand is laid
With silent motion—fearest thou, then, all?
How that one day the light shall cease to fall
On him who is thy light; how lost, dismayed,—
By Time, and Time's pale comrade Death, betrayed,—
Thou shalt breathe on beneath the all-shadowing pall!
Love, Art, and Time, these are the triple powers
That rule the world, and shall for many a morrow—
Love that beseecheth Art to conquer Time!
Bright is the picture, but, O fading flowers!
O youth that passes! love that bringeth sorrow!—
Bright is the picture; sad the poet's rhyme.

THE DANCERS

ON A PICTURE ENTITLED “SUMMER,” BY T. W. DEWING

Behold these maidens in a row
Against the birches' freshening green;
Their lines like music sway and flow;
They move before the emerald screen
Like broidered figures dimly seen
On woven cloths, in moony glow—
Gracious, and graceful, and serene.
They hear the harp; its lovely tones
Each maiden in each motion owns,
As if she were a living note
Which from that curvèd harp doth float.

THE TWENTY-THIRD OF APRIL

A little English earth and breathèd air
Made Shakespeare, the divine; so is his verse
The broidered soil of every blossom fair;
So doth his song all sweet bird-songs rehearse.
But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion
That part of him which took those wilding flights
Among imagined worlds; whence the white passion
That burned three centuries through the days and nights!
Not heaven's four winds could make, nor the round earth,
The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed;
Nor anything of merely mortal birth
Could lighten as when Shakespeare's name is named.
How was his body bred we know full well,
But that high soul's engendering who may tell!

EMMA LAZARUS

When on thy bed of pain thou layest low,
Daily we saw thy body fade away,
Nor could the love wherewith we loved thee stay
For one dear hour the flesh borne down by woe;
But as the mortal sank. with what white glow
Flamed thy eternal spirit, night and day;
Untouched, unwasted, tho' the crumbling clay
Lay wreckt and ruined! Ah, is it not so,
Dear poet-comrade, who from sight hast gone;
Is it not so that spirit hath a life
Death may not conquer? But, O dauntless one!
Still must we sorrow. Heavy is the strife
And thou not with us; thou of the old race
That with Jehovah parleyed, face to face.

THE TWELFTH OF DECEMBER

On this day Browning died?
Say, rather: On the tide
That throbs against those glorious palace walls;
That rises—pauses—falls
With melody and myriad-tinted gleams;
On that enchanted tide,
Half real, and half poured from lovely dreams,
A soul of Beauty,—a white, rhythmic flame,—
Past singing forth into the Eternal Beauty whence it came.