The Finding of The Book and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The tale that leads us o'er the loftiest ranges,
In splendour or in tears,
That none can make more perfect when he changes,
Stands steadfast through the years.

A MINOR LATIN POET IMPROVING VIRGIL

Here speaks the laureate of a little throng,
The young Licentius whose deft art confers
Some grace upon the later Latin song—
Waxwork, not marble, in hexameters,
Drawing in colours, soft but soon to cease,
A pastel, not a proud old masterpiece.

End of their idlesse to the friends drew near,
It chanced the afternoon was mild and fine.
The Master cried, ‘What ho! the sky is clear.
Come, poet, read the verse thou call'st divine.
Nay, and I will not blame thee overmuch
If thou mix with it thine own gentle touch.

‘Thy Virgil bring. With him thou shalt bring flowers,
Odours emparadised in fadeless phrase.
Thou shalt set bees a-humming in the bowers,
And make us weep for old immortal days;
And, pagan though he be, yet shall we bless
God's gift in him of exquisite tenderness.

‘Fling, then, o'er us the great magician's spell,
Read with meet cadence while the eve is clear,
Tell o'er again what our hearts know so well.
The moonlit sea shall quiver as we hear—
In one six-beated line a tale be stored,
A garden gathered in one perfect word.’

To whom Licentius.—‘Lately I was thinking
Of the delicious love-tale Virgil wrought—
Out of his cup my spirit had been drinking;
Rather, I sank into his ocean thought.
And with the tide I swam that summer sea,
And all its waves grew buoyant under me.

‘There was a murmur in my ears and heart,
Whereof the larger music came from him;
But of mine own there was a little part,
Little indeed to his, and harsh and dim.

Of Homer's mighty song and high intent,
Sonorous echo, theft magnificent

‘He made; but ah! I marred whate'er I stole—
He the rich-fruited scion, the stem I
Of the poor pomegranate, lending to the whole
Only the red tint of my poverty—
He like the bird's white wing above the river,
I the white shadow that can reach it never.

‘Listen! I breathed our soft Numidian air;
I saw Elissa to the hunting go;
The golden-netted sunshine of her hair
Flickered in sunshine as it fell below.
The golden baldrick flung she round her breast,
The golden fibula clasped her purple vest.

‘With yellow jasper-stone his sword-hilt starred,
He how majestic, like a prince indeed,
How stately she, how regal of regard!
A huntress on her white Massylian steed.
And, though the jocund morning waxes late,
Herself impatient makes her lover wait,—

‘Who looks like Phœbus, when he Cynthus treads,
After the Lycian snows and streams icemute,
Walking with murmurous rush of river-beds;
While heaven is silver, and far underfoot
Anemones spring, and daffodils are born
For golden tassels to his bugle-horn.

‘Ah me! how beautiful to her he seem'd,
To whom such fascination there was given.
The mountain-tops whereon his boyhood dream'd
Had forests haunted by the hosts of Heaven.
Out of the sunset sky ablaze with flame,
Out of the far-off silences he came;

‘Came with the music of the Idalian pines
Round him, with whispered message from the star,
His mother's herald o'er the mountain lines,
Until dawn steeps her pure pale primrose bar
In rosiest-coloured radiance ever born
Out of the ivory palaces of morn;—

‘Came with such touch of moonlight on his sail,
From such resplendent distances of foam,
With all the loveliness of such a tale,
The spell of such a visionary home;
And finely floated round that princely form
A mystery of the battle and the storm.

‘Full soon she sobs, “Stay if my prayer avails;
Train me to bear the last long parting thus;
Stay till our Afric wild-flow'rs fill the dales,
Till yon waves look less strange and dangerous,
Till I shall discipline this poor heart so
That with the swallows I may let thee go.

‘“Ah! an thou fleest, then my wraith be found
Where'er thy fateful footsteps yet shall stand—
My very shadow shall be gold-encrowned,
My very shadow shall be sad and grand;
My shadow haunt thee on each sea and lawn,
Mute in the moonlight, dying in the dawn.

‘Perchance he would have stayed, but not in vain
The calling to our purpose on us lies.
Our lives are links in a remorseless chain.
Of what avail to her that his heart sighs
“Elissa, and a Carthaginian home,”
When Heaven and all its influence will have Rome?

‘Soon this hath passed. The parting all is o'er,
And all her passionate reproach of him,
And all the watching from the salt seashore
Of the sail fading o'er the ocean rim—
Of the sail fading on the cruel sea,
On the false wave not half so false as he.

‘Night, gentle night, rushed from the Afric sky.
Head under wing the birds of wave and air
Slept, hushing all their sweet small poesy.
If we have our forgetfulness of care,
So have those little hearts in bower and brake,
And the still dreamland of the starlit lake.

‘But she her fiery bed premeditates,
And “Let him see the smoke, a far-off breath,”
She wails; “a blur on Summer's lustrous gates,
And bear with him the omen of my death—
Ah no! my poor heart be, till it wax dim,
A taper on a shrine, and burn for him.

‘“And if so be that Herè in her ruth
Send Iris with the hopes and hues of heav'n
To hang above my death, I pray in sooth
That half the sweetness may to him be given,
And half my rainbow melt away in rose
And violet on the ocean where he goes.”

‘This passed away—and then meseemed to tread
The underworld in visionary sleep.
Æneas-like I visited the dead.
Behold! a spirit passed, who seemed to weep
Not hopelessly. “Young Poet!” did he say,
“Men called me Maro while I saw the day.

‘“Each of us poets hath his proper gift;
Not all the gift to use the gift aright.
Red cups of battle or of wine they lift
Wildly, and stain what should be lily-white.
Each bloom has thus its cankerworm within,
Each splendid line is thus a splendid sin.

‘“And others sang high strains with mean intent
Or for the tyrant of their little time,
Or gave to hatred what for love was meant;
Less than immortal made immortal rhyme,
So that the satire with the years has grown
A fossil scorpion with a sting of stone.

‘“The Latin tongue was lent me at my will.
Lo! the flowers fade upon the summer leas,
The storm of battle passes, and is still;
But sorrow is a deeper thing than these—
Sorrow for human things lasts through the years,
I was the first that chose the gift of tears.

‘“I used it as an instrument to express
Beyond all battle camps, and courts of kings,
The majesty of human tenderness,
Sweet ruth for the vicissitudes of things—
The subtle pathos, the magnetic touch,
The broken voice that tells the heart so much.

‘“Once the dim prophecies floating round the earth
I gathered—thornless roses, stormless seas,
Meadows in blossom for a better birth,
Mother and child, nova progenies—
All this I twined for all the race of man
In higher strains than aught Sicilian.

‘“And is it nothing that I taught all this,
That through the world's confusion sweetly smiled
Before me the conception of our bliss,
The happiest Mother, the divinest Child,
That scarcely once or twice did touch impure
Fall on my virginal emportraiture?”

‘Then with low voice he asked, “And is there hope?
Or must I wander always—lost, lost, lost?”
Out like a rose the dawn began to ope,
This side and that the clouds were crimson crossed,
And manifold voices round us seemed to say,
“Yea, there is hope, but it is far away.”

‘Ah! not so far—for low and winning sweet,
“Venite, invenietis,” some one said;
Like breath of balm upon the heart it beat.
Light ran along the region of the dead.
The echoes multiplied from east to west,
“Venite ad me omnes—suave est.”’

Licentius ceased. To Elissa's tale at even
A hundred times within the twenty years
Augustine's tender heart had duly given
The tributary offering of his tears.
Yet,—while the boy's big drops of ruth he chid,
The salt dew trembled on the Master's lid.

100

And Monica thought how first she read the tale
In her Numidian home at eventide,
Thought of Æneas with each sunlit sail,
Thought of Elissa with each wave that died.
The saint perhaps condemned it, but alas!
The woman sighed, and said how sweet it was.

As to the boy's deep ruth and tender prayer
For Virgil, be there silence grave and wise.
The mother of the Master was aware
How the first woodland walk through which we rise
To the precipitous mountain-peak of truth
Is love—the sunlit heresy of youth.

During the retreat of St. Augustine and his party at Cassiciacum before his baptism, Licentius frequently read Virgil or his own poems to his companions.

101

ST. AUGUSTINE BY THE ITALIAN LAKES

Sometimes at morning, or at eventide,
Augustine look'd upon the lake and sky—
Not there the glory of light for which he sigh'd
In all the autumn heaven of Italy.
‘Poor shadows are ye—yea, but dimly bright
To me remembering my Afric light.

‘Ah, light! with its attendants all day long,
Soothing and charming with a magic touch.
It passes not like every measured song,
Its vast and variegated train is such,
Its omnipresent tide of silver flow,
The queen of all the colours of the bow.

102

‘O light! which Isaac and which Jacob saw
Falling upon the dim prophetic scroll,
When with closed eyes they taught the holiest law,
The light that radiates from the luminous soul—
True light thou art of an unsetting sun,
And all who see thee and who love are one.

‘And they who turn away and this disdain
Dwell in the flesh as in a shady place;
And yet of this whatever doth remain,
Whate'er half-glooming glimmer touch their face,—
Yea, all that charms—is overflow divine,
And circumfulgence of that light of Thine.

‘Yet even here, upon this lawn of rest,
I miss the splendour of my own far ocean,
The various robes which wondrously invest
The evanescent moods of his emotion—
Green of a hundred shades and the fine fall
Of azure tint and pomp purpureal.

103

‘Fair are these waters as these hills are fair,
A fit enfolding for a rustic home;
But who their narrow beauty may compare
With that majestic amplitude of foam?
These azure reaches where the reeds scarce shake
The long calm silver of the Lombard lake,

‘They cannot thunder with a voice like his,
They cannot show the immeasurable line,
They have no smoke of white foam o'er the abyss,
No distances that infinitely shine,
No beat of a great heart, no pendulous swing,
No angry flap as of an eagle's wing.

‘He has the magic swell, the tinkling fall,
In drowsy days of truce, when skies are pure,
Monotonous, incessant, musical;
And when his trumpets sound for war, the obscure
Æonian eloquence, the vast replies
Voluminous, the interminable sighs.

104

‘The fierceness of him no man shall refrain—
See him with all his water-floods astir,
Like a great king, nigh dispossess'd of his reign,
Staggering with fated hosts, a traveller
Against the wind upon his shoreward track,
His torn white hair tormentedly blown back.

‘They have but one sweet look and steadfast tone:
Save when the tempest's battle may be set,
The war of their white passion passes soon;
His the great epic, theirs the canzonet,
And the brief storm-bursts like an angry ode,
And the floods flashing like an episode.’

105

A NAMELESS PENITENT

With her a boy of fifteen summers came.
Into the presence of the lad did pass
An influence from a climate as of flame;
And in those lustrous eyes of his there was
A hint of flowers and oceans far away
Amid the woods and waves of Africa.

Him evermore a shadow overhung,
Not of the great Numidian forests born—
The prophecy of genius that dies young,
The far cloud-film of a too radiant morn.
Ah! they who early pass through one dark gate
Have looks like thine, thou young Adeodate!

106

Thou art of those who breathe with a strange smile
The delicate words that only genius saith;
Guests whom God spares us but a little while,
For they are wanted in the land of death,
And leave but tracks of light that was not seen,
Hints of a golden land that might have been.

Hast thou no mother with a name to note?
It is not written in the tenderest scroll
That love and recollection ever wrote,
The perfected confession of a soul.
Into the dark she glides, a silent shame,
And a veil'd memory without a name.

And the world knoweth not what words she pray'd,
With what long wail before the altar wept,
What tale she told, what penitence she made,
Whatmeasure by her beating heart was kept,
Nor in what vale or mountain the earth lies
Upon the passionate Carthaginian's eyes.

107

Well that one penitent hath found such grace
As to be silent in the silent years,
That no light hand hath lifted from her face
The silver veil enwoven of her tears.
Well that to one book and one sod 'tis given
To keep one tender secret half with Heaven.

Well that the virgin saints of her may cry,
‘Our sister comes, mute after many tears—
Some anguish rounded by a victory
Is hers, some calm after a storm of years.
O noble pity, that consoles her quite!
O large forgiveness, touching all to white!’

St. Augustine's Confessions.

108

ST. AUGUSTINE'S RECOLLECTION OF CASSICIACUM

‘My one holiday,’ oft the old man cried,
‘When shall a holiday be mine again?’
When the fierce Huns are on the mountain-side,
When he lies sick to death in August—when
The cactus-flowers of Hippo 'neath the blue
Are steep'd with crimson blood-drops through and through;

When through the date-groves in the scarce-lit dales
Over the Seybous and his dreaming calms,
The importunate sweetness of the nightingales
Disturbs the old man's memory of his psalms,
And a thin thread of scarlet morning breaks
Silently on the Atlantéan peaks.

109

DEATH OF ARCHBISHOP MALACHY

Late, late, in the October afternoon,
The monks sat listening spellbound in the choir;
The voice went ringing on, a lovely tune,
A touch of pathos, or a shaft of fire.
The sunset flared blood-red, the wild marsh-hen
Shriek'd through the long reed lances of the fen.

Within was spring. Voice to low breezes set
Through the greenwood, over the mountain's brink—
Voice of Christ's dove, His undefilèd—yet,
Not so much sweet itself of song, I think,
As the soft sign whereby we understand
That all things sweet are gathering in the land.

‘O that some saint might come to us, and teach
From his rich certainty our poor perhaps!

110

Yea, by his death preach what I cannot preach—
How earth's hopes scare at last, as when there taps
Some broken branch of bloom through storm and rain,
Like death's white finger on the windowpane.’

Scarce was the sermon done, the blessing o'er,
A train of horsemen halted at the gate.
‘My Lord the Abbot,’ said the janitor,
‘One like an angel comes to us full late,
Primate of a green island o'er the sea;
His name, too, is an angel's—Malachy.’

Four or five days flow'd on in fair discourse;
Gracious his speech and stately his regard.
Oft would he warn them with prophetic force
That he was come to them to meet the Lord.
He rode to Clairvaux in October mist,
The Feast-day of St. Luke the Evangelist.

111

Something of fever flush'd his pallid cheek;
To Bernard mournfully a little while
Out of his spirit's trouble did he speak
Of certain tribesmen in his restless isle.
‘Patience,’ he cried, ‘that tree of hidden root,
And bitter rind, that hath so sweet a fruit,

‘Be the good guerdon of the bishop's heart,
The turbulent sheep who shepherds in that land.
Full often must he bear, with breaking heart,
The long ingratitude, the plot well plann'd,
The deep suspicion hid with laughing eye,
The poison'd dagger sheath'd with flattery.

‘They do possess such imitative grace,
Such exquisite sympathy when needed most,
Such fine emotion feign'd with mobile face,
Such passionate speech—withal the enormous boast,
The shallowness of hearts that seem so deep,
The candid lie that makes you laugh and weep.

112

‘O grand traditions, forged me any morn,
Ethereal sentiment for solid gold,
Vows soon unvow'd, oaths laughingly forsworn,
Facts no historian happens to have told,
Fair, faint, false legends of a golden spring,
A past that never was a present thing.

‘The thrush sings sweetest with his speckled breast
Against the hawthorn jags, their poets say;
His loveliest notes are agony exprest,
So that the little pain seems rapture: they,
So sharp, so soft, so pitiless, so forlorn,
Sing like the thrush, and stab you like the thorn.

‘God's pardon rest on them. All that is o'er,
The time of my departure is at hand,
And here my rest shall be for evermore,
Far from Armagh and from that fatal land.’
So he; yet still his frame was full of grace,
And death seem'd distant from that comely face.

113

Yet on All Saints, ‘Behold,’ the leeches said,
‘Before to-morrow must the Archbishop die’;
Her loftiest rite the monastery made,
And sang her music of festivity.
Thankless the task, inopportune the art,
To sing sweet songs to sorrow's heavy heart.

And sorrow was in that Cistercian home—
Sorrow untuned the chant of choir and priest.
One only tasted of Christ's honeycomb,
One only knew the fulness of the feast.
All Saints to Malachy was but the small
Dim vesper of his glorious festival.

‘Lover and friend are darkness—light within.
Love is eternal; and I love my Lord,
And love you all; haply my love may win
Somewhat from Thee, O Christ! whom I regard
Humanly pitying, for man's heart is Thine;
Divinely helping, being Thyself divine.

114

‘Let me not fall into the bitter pain
Of death eterne for any pains of death.
Let Christ's omnipotence manifested reign,
Making omnipotent one who languisheth,
Whose thought and will and memory growing dim,
A trinity of misery, call to Him.’

So, near the twilight was the veil withdrawn.
Into a morn-red sea did his sail sweep—
A sea not dim with twilight, flushed with dawn.
If grey mists melt, if God's belovèd sleep,
Why search the sea-mists when he sails no more?
Why weep for him whose weeping all is o'er?

Then, though all look'd to see the fair soul sail
Into the mystery o'er life's furthest line,
The moment that it cross'd might none prevail
To note for a memorial, or divine
The very moment on God's clock to tell
When all was over, and when all was well.

115

Only the Abbot softly said—‘Behold,
Life is a sea, whose waters ever swing;
A wood, whose leaves like bells are ever toll'd.
A tranquil God makes tranquil everything.
Here is no trembling leaf, no wrinkling wave,
But such serenity as sleepers have.

‘Sleep, brother, sleep, until the golden year;
Until thou sing, “Let us arise and see
If the vine flourish—whether the grapes appear,
If all the red buds gem the Passion tree?
Till on our hearts shall breathe a better day,
And chase the clouds of human things away.’

Ah! never sorrow comes that comes alone.
Deep calleth unto deep, and wave to wave;
Saint calleth unto saint, and ere hath grown
Grass on one sod, there is another grave.
The angels of one deathbed come again—
White clouds returning after God's own rain.

At Clairvaux on his way back from Rome to Armagh.

The unpleasing character here given is very much softened from the original. Writing from several years of personal knowledge, I can say with entire truth that the people of every element in Armagh—Celts, English, or Scots—are distinguished by mutual kindliness and social as well as personal virtue.

116

SIR TESCELIN'S REMONSTRANCE

I would much rather rest with my rough race
Close to the altar in the church I built;
I would the villagers should see my face
And Aleth's marble under a canopy gilt,
Whispering—‘This was a joyous knight and just,
They say he is a thousand years in dust.

‘A thousand years he wears his shirt of mail,
And his good hound is couchant at his feet;
If that tough cheek of his be deathly pale,
'Tis but the stone that makes such paleness meet,

117

And in his calm eye, come what tide soe'er,
Is sure regard of everlasting prayer.

‘Yet is it certain what monks say—that souls
Are lost in circles of light as in a flood,
That the saints worship day and night in stoles,
Posed without end in marble attitude,
Or like the angels on a vestment shown
Stitched in a sapphire prayer before the throne?

‘All the night long Sir Tescelin looks to the east,
And the sweet lady by him never stirs.
But when the thin moon wanes down to her least,
And dawn plays faint about his marble spurs,
Doth he not sometimes seem to waken? Hist!
Doth the white falcon flutter on his fist?

‘All the night long he prays, I have no doubt,
When o'er the October moon the big clouds whirl,
And ever and anon she cometh out
With fleece of rainbow and of mother-o'pearl—

118

Her flying touch some minutes' space being still
White on the broken waters by the mill.

‘But is not yon stiff hound about to yawn?
The lady to hear mass as is her wont?
Are not the rustics going to the lawn
To see the gallants gathering for the hunt?’
Ah! this is idle talk, for well know I
Such things are not in that eternity.

But what and if my appointed time draws near,
And I and all I have is doomed to death;
And what and if for all that I hold dear,
The grace of the fashion of it vanisheth;
And if this poor old heart at last must go
Like a tree broken by its weight of snow—

May I not die upon my Aleth's bed,
With shadows of the long familiar trees
Making their chequer-work upon my head,
Amid the humming of my yellow bees,
Where to the sun my peacocks spread their stains
Upon my castle terrace of Fontaines?

The father of St. Bernard. The Saint prayed, ‘I would be saved, O Lord, but not alone.’ He pleaded that the whole family should be given to him and drawn into his Cistercian house—six brothers, a sister, his mother, Lady Aleth, and his father. All came to him, his father last. No doubt the free spirit of the Burgundian noble revolted against the monastic life, and after the lapse of so many years one can still pity the old man.

119

YOUTH RENEWED

Yes; with heavy dashing
Of a shower just shed
On the gloomy beech-tree,
Wet were leaves o'erhead.
Wet were all the roses
On the garden wire,
Wet were all the cornfield's
Flakes of yellow fire.

By the gloomy beech-tree,
By the rose o'er-blowing,
Looking on the cornfields
Whence the gold was going,
Walked I sadly thinking,
‘I am no more young,’
When among the dripping
Leaves a wild bird sung.

120

Ah! I thought, it chanted
Some immortal strain
Of a silver sunshine
Coming after rain;
Of a richer flushing
On a finer rose;
Of a tint more golden
Than the autumn knows.

Yes; with sorrow wetted
In life's autumn day,
Is the cheek full often
When the hair grows gray:
All the leaves and blossoms
Drip with rain of tears,
And the sheaves lie sodden
On the field of years.

Then a sweet bird singeth
Of a joy that lies
In the grief that's truer
Happiness in disguise;
Sings of youth more lasting,
Sunlight more divine—
Gentle bird, sweet Spirit,
What a song is thine!

121

Forty seems as old age
In youth's happy light.
Fifty counts as nonage
When the head is white.
Fifty, sixty, seventy—
Old age cometh never,
If the Life gives the life
Which is for ever and ever.

122

THE ROSE OF THE INFANTA

[_]

(TRANSLATED FROM VICTOR HUGO)

She is so little—in her hand a rose;
A stern duenna watches where she goes.
What sees she? Ah, she knows not—the clear shine
Of waters shadow'd by the birch and pine.
What lies before?—a swan with silver wing,
The wave that murmurs to the branch's swing,
Or the deep garden flourishing below?
Fair as an angel frozen into snow,
The royal child looks on, and hardly seems to know.

As in a depth of glory far away,
Down the green park, a lofty palace lay.
There drank the deer from many a crystal pond,
And the starr'd peacock gemm'd the shade beyond.

123

Around that child all nature seem'd more bright,
Her innocence was as an added light.
Rubies and diamonds strew'd the path she trode,
And jets of sapphire from the dolphins flow'd.
Still at the water's side she holds her place.
Her bodice bright is set with Genoa lace;
O'er her rich robe, through every satin fold,
Wanders an arabesque in threads of gold.
From its green urn the rose, unfolding grand,
Weighs down the exquisite smallness of her hand.
And when the child bends to the red leaf's tip
Her laughing nostril and her carmine lip,
The royal flower purpureal kissing there
Hides more than half that young face, bright and fair,
So that the eye, deceived, can scarcely speak
Where shows the rose, or where the rose-red cheek;
Her eyes look bluer from their dark brown frame—
Sweet eyes, sweet form, and Mary's sweeter name.
All joy, enchantment, perfume, waits she there,
Heaven in her glance, her very name a prayer.

124

Yet 'neath thy sky, and before life and fate,
Poor child, she feels herself so vaguely great.
With stately grace she gives her presence high
To dawn, to spring, to shadows flitting by,
To the dark sunset glories of the heaven,
And all the wild magnificence of even:
On nature waits, eternal and serene,
With all the graveness of a little queen.
She never sees a man but on her knee;
She Duchess of Brabant one day will be,
And rule Sardinia, or the Flemish crowd—
She is the Infanta, five years old, and proud.

Thus it is with king's children, for they wear
A shadowy circlet on their foreheads fair;
Their tottering steps are toward a kingly chair.
Calmly she waits, and breathes her gather'd flower
Till one shall cull for her imperial power.
Already her eye saith, ‘It is my right’;
Even love flows from her mingled with affright.
If some one, seeing her so fragile stand,
Were it to save her should put forth his hand,
Ere he had made a step, or breath'd a vow,
The scaffold's shadow were upon his brow.

125

While the child laughs, beyond the bastion thick
Of that vast palace, Roman Catholic,
Whose every turret like a mitre shows,
Behind the lattice something fearful goes.
Men shake to see a shadow from beneath,
Passing from pane to pane, like vapoury wreath;
Pale, black, and still, it glides from room to room,
Or stands a whole day, motionless in its gloom,
In the same spot, like ghost upon a tomb,
Or glues its dark brow to the casement wan,
Dim shade that lengthens as the night draws on.
Its step funereal lingers like the swing
Of passing bell—'tis death, or else the king.

'Tis he, the man by whom men live or die;
But could one look beyond that phantom eye,
As by the wall he leans a little space,
And see what shadows fill his soul's dark place,
Not the fair child, the waters clear, the flowers
Golden with sunset—not the birds, the bowers—

126

No; 'neath that eye, those fatal brows that keep
The fathomless brain, like ocean dark and deep,
There, as in moving mirage, should one find
A fleet of ships that go before the wind:
On the foam'd wave, and 'neath the starlight pale,
The strain and rattle of a fleet in sail,
And through the fog an isle on her white rock,
Hearkening from far the thunder's coming shock.

Still by the water's edge doth silent stand
The Infanta, with the rosebud in her hand,
Caresses it with eyes as blue as heaven.
Sudden a breeze—such breeze as panting even,
From her full heart, flings out to field and brake—
Ruffles the waters, bids the rushes shake,
And makes through all their green recesses swell
The massive myrtle and the asphodel.
To the fair child it comes, and tears away
On its strong wind the rose-flower from the spray,

127

On the wild waters casts it, bruised and torn,
And the Infanta only holds a thorn.
Frighten'd, perplex'd, she follows with her eyes
Into the basin where her ruin lies,
Looks up to heaven, and questions of the breeze
That had not fear'd her Highness to displease.
But all the pond is changed—anon so clear,
Now black it swells as though with rage and fear;
A mimic sea, its small waves rise and fall,
And the poor rose is broken by them all;
Its hundred leaves, toss'd wildly round and round,
Beneath a thousand waves are whelm'd and drown'd—
It was a foundering fleet, you might have said.
Quoth the duenna, with her face of shade:
‘Madam’—for she had mark'd her ruffled mind—
‘All things belong to princes—but the wind.’

WILLIAM DERRY.

C. F. ALEXANDER.

128

THE ICE-BOUND SHIP

TO ADMIRAL SIR F. LEOPOLD M`CLINTOCK, K.C.B.

Various and manifold as they are vast
The glories whereunto men bend the knee,
And an exceeding glory is for thee;
Triumphant quietude of soul thou hast.
When now far futures shall lie in the past,
Thine, O my kinsman, partly thine shall be
Colossal epic of the frozen sea,
Pindaric passionate of the Northern blast.
O strongholds of the winter wild and lone,
O Balaklavas of the rolling ice,
O struggles on the sledge or in the yards,
Ye tell our England that of many a son
Like thee are borne victorious agonies
Magnificent as charges of the Guards.

129

I

Strike, strike the golden lyre,
Sound forth the measured praise of something higher
Than fair adventures be or battle's breath of fire—
Not tales that burn or thrill
So much as the unconquerable will,
The patience better than heroic pride.
Wherever this doth yet abide,
There is the making of a martyr still;
There is the gentleness that alone is great,
There is the purity inviolate,
There are the noble noiseless things
Whose genuine glory shall see out
The roses and the palms of emperors and kings.
Not with a battle-kindling fire,
Not to keep tune with war's sonorous shout,
Strike strike the golden lyre!

II

Nor let there want
Aught of a human pathos for the chant.
The heart is long in breaking,
The eye is long in weeping,

130

The strong man long in dying.
Never a flag is flying,
Never a pulse is leaping,
Never a sailor waking,
Never a moving hand
Within that dreadful land.
His sail is frozen to the mast.
He waits the world out aye in the glory white and vast.
The woman's heart at home is slow in breaking,
The woman's hair from day to day
Is slow in fading into gray.
Long, but at last the hope is dead;
Slow, but at last the last year comes for taking
The latest thin and silver thread.
Wherefore as ages come and go,
Lest other chronicles be lost
In that interminable frost,
In that eternal snow,
Strike, strike the golden lyre!

III

Strike then, and as thou strikest proclaim
An unimaginable fame

131

For those who wrought
A Waterloo without a wound,
A Trafalgar with no triumphant sound.
A strain be sought
Suiting the wondrous lights
Of all the starry Arctic nights,
Simple as was their faith
Yet rising mountainously high
In its sublime simplicity.
In the default of war, their death
Was something that was higher,—
Strike, strike the golden lyre!

IV

How shall we bury him?
Where shall we leave the old man lying?
With music in the distance dying—dying
Among the arches of the Abbey grand and dim;
There, if we might, we would bury him;
And comrades of the sea should bear his pall;
And the great organ should let rise and fall
The requiem of Mozart, the ‘Dead March’ in Saul.

132

Then, silence all!
And yet far grandlier will we bury him.
Strike the ship-bell slowly—slowly—slowly!
Sailors! trail the colours half-mast high;
Leave him in the face of God most holy,
Underneath the vault of Arctic sky.
Let the long, long darkness wrap him round,
By the long sunlight be his forehead crown'd.
For cathedral panes ablaze with stories,
For the tapers in the nave and choir,
Give him lights auroral—gird with glories
Mingled of the rose, and of the fire.
Let the wild winds like chief mourners walk,
Let the stars burn o'er his catafalque.

V

And must we say—if all the truth be told—
‘His life was but a failure, a wrong guess’?
Hush! be not overbold.
Who dares to talk about success
In presence of that solemn blessedness?
Who, but God, dares to give a martyr gold?
Hush! Oh leave him in the darkness of the land,

133

Cover'd with the shadow of Christ's hand;
Leave him in the midnight Arctic sun,
God's great light o'er duty nobly done,
God's great whiteness for the pardon won;
Leave him waiting for the setting of the Throne,
Leave him waiting for the trumpet to be blown,
In God's bosom, in a land unknown.
Leave him (he needeth no lament)
With suns, and nights, and snow;
Life's tragedy is more magnificent,
Ending with that sublime and silent woe.
'Tis well it should be so.

Brave hearts! ye cannot stay;
Only at home ye will be sure to say
How he has wrought and sought, and found—found what?
The bourne whence traveller returneth not!
Ah no! 'tis only that his spirit high
Hath gone upon a new discovery,
A marvellous passage on a sea unbounded,
Blown by God's gentle breath;
But that the white sail of his soul has rounded
The promontory—Death!