The Poetical Works of James Thomson :: :: University of Virginia Library

The Poetical Works of James Thomson

The City of Dreadful Night: By James Thomson ("B. V."): Edited by Bertram Dobell: With a Memoir of the Author: In two volumes

Thomson, James (1834-1882)

VOL. I

II.

VOL. II

LAST POEMS

EARLY POEMS

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iii

I. VOL. I

xviii

MEMOIR

TO JOSEPH AND ALICE BARNES.

I

My dear, dear friends, my heart yearns forth to you
In very many of its lonely hours;
Not sweetlier comes the balm of evening dew
To all-day-drooping in fierce sunlight flowers,
Than to this weary withered heart of mine
The tender memories, the moonlight dreams
Which make your home an ever-sacred shrine,
And show your features lit with heavenly gleams.
I have with some most noble friends been blest;
I wage no quarrel with my human kin,—
Knowing my misery comes from my own breast,
At war with Fate by chance and God by sin:
But of all living friends you claim in me
The love most sanctified by memory.

II

When too, too conscious of its solitude,
My heart plains weakly as a widowed dove,
The forms of certain women sweet and good,
Whom I have known and loved with reverent love,
Rise up before me; then my heart grows great
With tearful gratitude, and no more pines.
You lovely souls that fitly consecrate
The whiteness of your alabaster shrines!
You tender lives of purest good, that leaven
The monstrous evils of our mortal birth!
There are no female angels up in Heaven,
Because they all are women here on earth:
As once God's sons, God's daughters now come down,
But these to share, not lose, the heavenly crown.

xix

III

Of all these women fair and wise and good,
Of all save only her who died so young,
Thou art in this angelic womanhood,
Whose solemn praises bards have seldom sung,
Supreme to me—most lovely and most pure,
O second mother of my orphaned youth:
Thou patient heart to suffer and endure,
Thou placid soul to mirror heavenly truth,
Thou gracious presence wheresoe'er you go
To gladden pleasure, or to chasten strife,
Thou gentlest friend to sympathise with woe,
Thou perfect mother and most perfect wife,
Whose priceless goodness shed on worthless me
Makes gratitude itself half agony.

IV

A man of genial heart and liberal mind,
A man most rich in that rare common-sense,
Whose common absence in its name we find;
A man of nature scorning all pretence,
And honest to the core, yet void of pride
Whose vice upon that virtue most attends;
A man of joyous humour, unallied
With malice, never making foes but friends;
As such all know you, knowing you at all:
But I, dear Guide and Teacher of my youth,
When deeply shamed, yet strengthened, I recall
Your goodness, patience, constant loyal truth
In love for one whose life's a long defeat,
Say—Souls like this keep human nature sweet.

V

When I trace back from this my death-in-life,
Through years of sensual sin and nerveless sloth,
And weary thought with Earth and Heaven at strife,
And dull decay preventing natural growth:—
Trace back until that period I attain
When still stirred in me living seeds of good—
Some faith in soul; some active power in brain,
Some love in heart, some hopefulness in mood;
I always reach at last that little room
Wherein we lived a life so sweet and mild,
When he who now lies sleeping in the tomb
Was but an infant, and your only child:
The happy child! thus saved, still pure in soul,
From our false world of sin and strife and dole.

VI

Indeed you set me in a happy place,
Dear for itself and dearer much for you,
And dearest still for one life-crowning grace—
Dearest, though infinitely saddest too:
For there my own Good Angel took my hand,
And filled my soul with glory of her eyes,
And led me through the love-lit Faerie Land
Which joins our common world to Paradise.
How soon, how soon, God called her from my side,
Back to her own celestial sphere of day!
And ever since she ceased to be my Guide,
I reel and stumble on life's solemn way;
Ah, ever since her eyes withdrew their light,
I wander lost in blackest stormy night.

xxiii

VANE'S STORY

Prologue.

This is the story
(To God be the glory!)
Which Vane, found in bed
When a splash of fierce red
From the sunset made strange
The street's opposite range,
Told me; who, astonished,
Had firstly admonished,
Then asked him outright,
“On the spree all last night?”

Pale looked he, and queer;
But his speech calm and clear,
And his voice, sweet and strong,
So swayed me ere long,
That I almost or quite
Believed him that night.
He named not the hall
Where he went to the ball;

Of his friends I could trace
None who knew of the case,
Nor the Jones, nor the Brown—
There are myriads in town!
The landlord avows
He went out with his spouse
After tea; slept at Bow,
At her sister's.

And so,
Shall we trust Vane? or deem
Him the dupe of a dream?
Let who will decide.
The next week he died,
And thus ended his story.
(To God be the glory!)

The Story.

One flamelet flickered to and fro
Above the clear vermilion glow;
The house was silent, and the street
Deserted by all echoing feet;
And that small restless tongue of light
Possest my ear and mocked my sight,
While drowsy, happy, warm, I lay
Upon the couch at close of day,

And drowsy, dreamy, more and more,
I floated from the twilight shore
Over the vague vast sea of sleep,
Just conscious of the rest so deep;
Not sinking to the under caves,
But rocking on the surface waves.
When fitfully some muffled sound
Came from the crowded streets around,
It brought no thought of restless life
With wakeful care and passionate strife;
But seemed the booming of a bell
Sweetly ringing tumult's knell,
Slowly chiming far away
The euthanasia of the day.
And then unsummoned by my will
Came floating through this mood so still
The scenes of all my life's past range,
In perfect pictures, fair and strange,
As flowers limned in purest light
Upon a background such as might
Expand beneath some forest-screen
After the sunset, goldbrowngreen.
And then I heard on every side
The shadowy rustling slow and wide
Of night's dim curtains softly drawn
To hush the world asleep till dawn.
I heard the rustling, and my eyes
Were curtained with the curtained skies;

And I lay wrapt as in a fleece
Of warmth and purity and peace;
While consciousness within the stream
Of rippling thought and shadowy dream
Sank slowly to the deepest deep,
Lured by the murmuring Siren, sleep;
When suddenly a little thrill
Of splendour pricked both mind and will,
And brought me tidings grand and strange;
I did not stir with outward change,
But felt with inward royal mirth,
On all this dusk of heaven and earth
The moon may rise or not to-night;
But in my soul she rises bright!

The globe of glory swelling rose
In mighty pulses, solemn throes;
And filled and overfilled me soon
With light and music, with the swoon
Of too much rapture and amaze,
A murmurous hush, a luminous haze.
How long in this sweet swoon I lay,
What hours or years, I cannot say;
Vast arcs of the celestial sphere
Subtend such little angles here.
But after the ineffable,
This first I can remember well:

A Rose of Heaven, so dewy-sweet
Its fragrance was a soul complete,
Came, touched my brow, caressed my lips,
And then my eyes in their eclipse;
And still I stirred not, though there came
A wine of fire through all my frame,
An ecstasy of joy and love,
A vision of the throne above,
A myriad-voiced triumphant psalm
Upswelling through a splendour calm;
Then suddenly, as if a door
Were shut, veiled silence as before.

The sweetest voice said, “True it is!
He does not waken at my kiss!”

I smiled: “Your kisses three and four
Just gave me Heaven, no less, no more;
I held me still, eyes shut, lest bliss
Should overflow and waste a kiss.”

Then dreamily my lids I raised,
And with grand joy, small wonder, gazed,
Although the miracle I saw
Might well have made me wan with awe.
“Why have you left your golden hair,
These gorgeous dusky braids to wear?
Why have you left your azure eyes,
To gaze through deep dark mysteries?

Why have you left your robe of white,
And come in cloudy lace bedight?
Or did you think that I could fail
To know you through whatever veil?
As bird or beast, as fish or worm,
In fiendish or angelic form,
As flower or tree, as wave or stone,
Be sure I recognise My Own!”

The sweet sad voice was sad no more,
But sweeter, tenderer, than before;
“Oh, ask no questions yet,” said she,
“But answer me, but answer me.

“I now have listened very long
To catch some notes of that great song
Your youth began to sing so well;
Oh, why have none yet reached me? tell!”
“And why is any lamp not bright,
With no more oil to feed its light?
Why does a robe moth-eaten fade
When she is gone whom it arrayed?
Great songs must pulse with lifeful breath,
No hymns mark time for timeless death;
One long keen wail above the bier,
Then smothered moans, then stillness drear.”

“I long have listened, all aflame,
For some full echoes of the fame

Youth pledged ripe manhood to achieve:
Why must I, hearing none, still grieve?”
“And why should he who cannot spend
Not make of gold his life's chief end?
O Love, the jewels of renown,
So priceless in a monarch's crown,
What are they when his realm is lost,
And he must wander like a ghost
Alone through wilds of rocky dearth,
But pretty pebbles nothing worth?
And would you have our love's proclaim
In shouts and trumpet-peals of fame;
Or whispered as I whisper here,
Into this little pink-shell ear
Still full of echoes from the sea
Of fathomless Eternity?”

“I do not seek thy fame because
Enamoured of the world's applause,
Though even its most reckless shout
Involves some true love-praise no doubt:
But, Dearest, when fame's trumpets blare
Great hearts are battling with despair:
Better the tumult of the strife
Than stillness of lone-wasting life.
If you were working out God's will,
Could all the air around be still?”

“But I am working out God's will
Alike when active and when still;
And work we good or work we ill,
We never work against His will. . . .
All work, work, work! Why must we toil
For ever in the hot turmoil?
God wrought six days, and formed the world;
Then on the seventh His power refurled,
And felt so happy that He blest
That Sabbath day above the rest;
And afterwards, we read, He cursed
The work He thought so good at first;
And surely Earth and Heaven evince
That He has done but little since.

“Well, I, who am a puny man,
And not a God who all things can,
Have also worked: not six short days
Of work refulgent with self-praise,
Of work ‘all-good,’ whose end was blest
With infinite eternal rest:
No, I have worked life after life
Of sorrow, sufferance and strife,
So many ages, that I ask
To rest one lifetime from the task,

To spend these years (forlorn of thee)
Sequestered in passivity;
Observing all things God hath made,
And of no ugliest truth afraid,
But having leisure time enough
To look at both sides of the stuff. . . .
With Shelley to his ocean-doom,
With Dante to his alien tomb;
With Wallace, Raleigh, Sidney, Vane,
All to the axe's bloody stain;
With Socrates until the cup
Of hemlock lifted calmly up,
With Jesus to the fatal tree
After the garden's agony,
With Mohammed in flight and fight,
With Burns in all his fate's deep night,
With Joan to the fiery screen,
With Charlotte to the guillotine,
With Campanella all the while
And Tasso in their dungeons vile,
With Swift slow-dying from the top,
With Rabelais to the curtain's drop,
Cervantes prisoner and slave,
Columbus on the unknown wave,
And Luther through his lifelong war;
With these, and with how many more,
Since poor Eve fell, and as she fell
Of course pulled Adam down as well,—

In these, and in how many more,
Have I outbattled life's stern war,
Endured all hardships, toiled and fought,
Oppressed, sore-wounded, and distraught,
While inwardly consumed with thought;
How long! how long!—Mankind no whit
The better for the whole of it!
And I, look at me, do I need
The little rest I claim, indeed,
With body dwindled, brain outworn,
Soul's pith dried up, and heart forlorn? . . .
And so I rest me, half-content
That all my active power is spent:
No new campaign till after cure!
Meanwhile I passively endure
The wounds bequeathed by so much strife,
The hopelessness of present life:
And this is much; what further can
Be looked for from a wreck of man?
I bear in silence and alone
What maddened me at first, I own.”

“The wounds bequeathed by so much strife,
The hopelessness of present life.”
She dwelt upon these words again
With such a look of wistful pain
As made my heart all creep and stir
With pity, not for self, for her.

“O my true love!” she said (the while
Her poor lips sought and failed to smile),
“O love! your laugh is like a knell;
Your phantasy is horrible,
Thus calmly plunged a glittering knife
Into the core of your own life!”
And there she broke down; all the grief,
Love, pity powerless for relief,
Yearning to suffer in my stead,
Revulsion against fatal dread,
Long swelling mighty in her soul
O'erflooded now beyond control.
She gave a little laughing cry,
Choked sharply off; then heavily
Flung herself down upon my breast
With passionate weeping unreprest;
A night-dark cloud upon some bleak
And thunder-furrowed mountain peak
Pouring itself in rain and fire;
For now through all the black attire
Heaving about her heaving frame
Fermented flashes of swift flame;
Not tempest-lightnings, but indeed
Auroral splendours such as speed
Battling with gloom before the day,
And herald its triumphant sway.
Her instincts in that mighty hour
Of insurrection grasped at power;

And her true self arrayed in light,
Azure and golden, dazzling-bright,
Was struggling through the mask of night.

The mask remained,—for some good cause
Well emphasised by Heavenly laws;
She sobbed herself to self-control,
Represt the heavings of her soul;
Then stood up, pallid, faint, distraught,
Facing some phantom of dread thought.

“Another spasm like this,” I said,
“Will kill me! When we both are dead
I'll use my very first new breath
To thank you for the blissful death,
The torture-rapture utterless,
You dear life-giving murderess!”
I laughed; and yet the while I gazed
Upon her standing wan and dazed:
Would I had bitten out my tongue
Ere any word of mine had stung
With such an unforeboded smart
That purest and most loving heart!

“And do you never kneel and pray
For comfort on your lonely way?
And have you no firm trust in God
To lighten your so-heavy load?”

The voice how strange and sad! the mien
How troubled from its pure serene!
“You good Child! I beseech no more
That one and one may make up four,
When one and one are my assets
And four the total of my debts:
Nor do I now with fervour pray
To cast no shadow in broad day:
Nor even ask (as I asked once)
That laws sustaining worlds and suns
In their eternal path should be
Suspended, that to pleasure me
Some flower I love,—now drooping dead,
May be empowered to lift its head.”

“Ah, good pure souls have told me how
You laughed at prayer as you laugh now,
And turned all holy things to mirth,
And made a mock of heaven and earth;
And sometimes seemed to have no faith
In God, in true life after death.”
“But God exists, or not, indeed,
Quite irrespective of our creed;
We live, or live not, after death,
Alike whatever be our faith;
And not a single truth, in brief,
Is modified by our belief.

And if God does subsist and act,
Though some men cannot learn the fact,
Who but Himself has made mankind,
Alike the seërs and the blind?
It may be that for some good cause
He loves to rest deep-veiled in laws;
And better likes us who don't ask
Or seek to get behind the mask,
Than those our fellow-insect fry
Who creep and hop and itch and pry,
The Godhead's lice, the swarming fleas
In Jove's great bed of slumbrous ease?”

“They said you scorned all wise restraints,
And loved the sinners, not the saints;
And mocking these, still dwelt with those
The friends who are the worst of foes.”

“They told you something like the truth,
These dear tale-bearers full of ruth.
How proffer mere coarse human love
To hearts sole-set on things above?
And furthermore, although of old
Wolves ravaged dreadfully the fold,
Yet now Christ's tender lambs indeed
Securely frisk, unstinted feed.
To us poor goats they freely give
The dreariest tracts, but they—they live

In pastures green, by rivers clear,
Quite sleek and happy even here:
And when these lambs that frisk and leap
Are all staid, stout, and well-clothed sheep,
The shepherd, having taken stock,
Will lead away the whole white flock
To bleat and batten in galore
Of Heavenly clover evermore!
The dear saints want no earthly friend,
Having their Jesus: but, perpend;
What of the wild goats? what of us,
A hundred times more numerous,
Poor devils, starving wretched here
On barren tracts and wild rocks drear,
And in the next life (as they tell)
Roasted eternally in Hell?”

“But when you join the multitude
Of sinners, is it for their good;
To hale them from the slough of sin,
Or but to plunge your own soul in?”
“And what they are, must I not be?
The dear Lord made them Who made me?
If God did make us, this is sure,
We all are brothers, vile and pure.
I've known some brilliant saints who spent
Their lives absorbed in one intent,

Salvation each of his own soul;
The race they ran had just one goal,
And just one modest little prize,
A wicket gate in Paradise,
A sneaking-in there through the wall
To bliss eternal; that was all.
Some of them thought this bliss would too
Be spiced by the contrasting view
Of Hell beneath them surging crammed
With all the tortures of the damned.
Their alms were loans to poor God lent,
Interest infinity-per-cent.,
(And God must be hard-up indeed
If of such loans He stands in need);
Their earnest prayers were coward cries,
Their holy doctrines blasphemies;
Their faith, hope, love, no more, no less,
Than sublimated selfishness.

“Now my gross, earthly, human heart
With man and not with God takes part;
With men, however vile, and not
With seraphim I cast my lot:
With those poor ruffian thieves, too strong
To starve amidst our social wrong,
And yet too weak to wait and earn
Dry bread by honest labour stern;

With those poor harlots steeping sin
And shame and woe in vitriol-gin:
Shall these, so hardly dealt with here,
Be worse off in a future sphere;
And I, a well-fed lounger, seek
To ‘cut’ them dead, to cringe and sneak
Into that bland beau monde the sky,
Whose upper circles are so high? . .
If any human soul at all
Must die the second death, must fall
Into that gulph of quenchless flame
Which keeps its victims still the same,
Unpurified as unconsumed,
To everlasting torments doomed;
Then I give God my scorn and hate,
And turning back from Heaven's gate
(Suppose me got there!) bow, Adieu!
Almighty Devil, damn me too! ”

As lightnings from dusk summer skies,
Mirth dazzled from her brow and eyes;
A charming chiming silvery laughter
Accompanied my speech, and after

Still tinkled when the speech was done
Its symphony of faëry fun:
And then her lips superbly smiled.
“You are the child, the naughty child,
Screaming and kicking on its back,
And choking with convulsions black,
At these old-bogey tales of Hell
Its hard-pressed priestly nurses tell!”
And gaylier, sweetlier yet she laughed,
Till I was drunken, dizzy, daft.
“You wicked holy one!” I cried,
“You changeling seraph! you black-eyed
Black-hearted scoffer! Heaven itself
Has only made you worse, mad elf, [OMITTED]
Well, I confess that I deserve
Your arrowy laugh, your lip's grand curve,
For foaming out in such a rage
Of boyish nonsense at my age,
Anent this stupid Hell and Heaven
Some half-believe one day in seven.
Let all who stickle for a Hell
Have it; they deserve it well. . . .
Not often in these latter years
Am I, my darling, moved to tears,

Or joyous laughter or hot scorn,
While plodding to the quiet bourne;
'Tis you have brought me back a part
Of my old youthful passionate heart.”

“And do you feel no bitter grief
Of penitence for unbelief?
No stings of venomous remorse
In tracing backward to its source
This wicked godless lifetime's course?”

“I half remember, years ago,
Fits of despair that maddened woe,
Frantic remorse, intense self-scorn,
And yearnings harder to be borne
Of utter loneliness forlorn;
What passionate secret prayers I prayed!
What futile firm resolves I made!
As well a thorn might pray to be
Transformed into an olive-tree;
As well a weevil might determine
To grow a farmer hating vermin;
The I am that I am of God
Defines no less a worm or clod.
My penitence was honest guile;
My inmost being all the while
Was laughing in a patient mood
At this externe solicitude,

Was waiting laughing till once more
I should be sane as heretofore;
And in the pauses of the fits
That rent my heart and scared my wits,
Its pleasant mockery whispered through,
Oh, what can Saadi have to do
With penitence? and what can you?
Are Shiraz roses wreathed with rue?

“Now tell me, ere once more we turn
To things which us alone concern,
Of all the prosperous saints you see
Has none a kindly word for me?”
“First Shelley, parting for above,
Left you a greeting full of love.”

“The burning Seraph of the Throne!
Not for my worship deep and lone
Of him, but for my love of you,
He loves and greets me; in his view
I stand all great and glorified,
The bridegroom worthy of the bride
For whom the purest soul in Heaven
Might wait and serve long lifetimes seven,
And other seven when these were past,
Nor deem the service long at last,
Though after all he failed for ever
In his magnificent endeavour.”

“Then that dear Friend of yours, who came
Uncouthly shrinking, full of shame,
Hopeless and desolate, at first,
Dismayed that he was not accurst;
But when his essence shone out clear
Was found the noblest of our sphere;
Beautiful, faithful, valiant, wise,
With tenderest love that may suffice
When once with equal power unfurled
To sway and bless a whole bad world:
Is it for my own sake that he
Bows down, Sir, half-adoring me?”

“The great deep heart of purest gold,
Ever o'erflowing as of old
From the eternal source divine
With Heaven's most rich and cordial wine!
Enough: the loneliest on earth,
Famishing in affection's dearth,
Who found but two such friends above
Would banquet evermore on love.”

“Now ask me what you wish to ask;
Your slave is eager for her task.”
“Then, firstly, I, who never mix
With our vile nether politics,
Have also ceased for many years
To study those of your high spheres.

Who now is, under God and Fate,
The Steward of the world-estate,
The Grand Vizier, Prime Minister,
Or (if you will) sole Manager
Of this bewildering Pantomime
Whose scenes and acts fill Space and Time?”

“I have heard many and many a name;
The laws seem evermore the same,
The operation of the laws
Reveals no variance in the cause.”

“A learned politician, you!
Well, any name perchance will do;
And we will take an old one, say
That Demiurgos still bears sway.
I want a prayer to reach his throne,
And you can bear it, you alone;
For neither God nor fiend nor man
(Nay, scarcely any woman) can
Resist that voice of tenderest pleading,
Or turn away from it unheeding.
Not in this mystic mask of night,
But in your dazzling noonday light;
Not with this silent storm of hair,
But crowned with sunbeams you shall fare,
Not with these darkest Delphian eyes,
But with your luminous azure skies;

For powers of solemn awe and gloom
Love loveliness and joy and bloom.
Only your voice you must not change;
It is not, where all else is, strange;
The sweetest voice in all the world,
The soul of cosmic music furled
In such a little slender sound,
Delighting in its golden bound;
The evening star of melody,
The morning star of harmony;
When I can catch its faintest tone
In sighing breeze, in dim wave's moan,
I feel you near, my Love, my Own.”

“And who shall guide me to the throne
Whose place is unto all unknown?”
“By one at least the path is known:
To Demogorgon's awful throne,
Down, down, through all the mysteries
He led the Oceanides:
Where Demogorgon dwelleth deep
There Demiurgos watch doth keep,
Though Vesta sleeps æonian sleep:
Shelley himself shall be your guide,
Since I must still on earth abide:
Down, down, into the deepest deep;
Down, down, and through the shade of sleep;

Down, down, beyond the cloudy strife
Of interwoven death and life;
Down, down, unto the central gloom
Whose darkness radiates through the tomb
And fills the universal womb.

“Then he shall leave thee lonely there,
And thou shalt kneel and make thy prayer,
A childish prayer for simple boon:
That soon and soon and very soon
Our Lady of Oblivious Death
May come and hush my painful breath,
And bear me thorough Lethe-stream,
Sleeping sweet sleep without a dream;
And bring you also from that sphere
Where you grow sad without me, Dear;
And bear us to her deepest cave
Under the Sea without a wave,
Where the eternal shadows brood
In the Eternal Solitude,
Stirring never, breathing never,
Silent for ever and for ever;
And side by side and face to face,
And linked as in a death-embrace,
Leave us absorbing thus the balm
Of most divinely perfect calm,
Till ten full years have overflowed
For each wherein we bore the load

Of heavy life upon this earth
From birth to death from death to birth:
That when this cycle shall be past
We may wake young and pure at last,
And both together recommence
The life of passion, thought and sense,
Of fear and hope, of woe and bliss;—
But in another world than this.

“For I am infinitely tired
With this old sphere we once admired,
With this old earth we loved too well;
Disgusted more than words can tell,
And would not mind a change of Hell.
The same old solid hills and leas,
The same old stupid patient trees,
The same old ocean blue and green,
The same sky cloudy or serene;
The old two-dozen hours to run
Between the settings of the sun,
The old three hundred sixty-five
Dull days to every year alive;
Old stingy measure, weight and rule,
No margin left to play the fool;
The same old way of getting born
Into it naked and forlorn,
The same old way of creeping out
Through death's low door for lean and stout;

Same men with the old hungry needs,
Puffed up with the old windy creeds;
Old toil, old care, old worthless treasures,
Old gnawing sorrows, swindling pleasures:
The cards are shuffled to and fro,
The hands may vary somewhat so,
The dirty pack's the same we know
Played with long thousand years ago;
Played with and lost with still by Man,—
Fate marked them ere the game began;
I think the only thing that's strange
Is our illusion as to change.

“This is the favour I would ask:
Can you submit to such a task?”

“All you have told me I will do,
Rejoicing to give joy to you:
Oh, I will plead, will win the boon,
That we may be united soon. . . .
But sameness palls upon you so,
That to relieve you I will go.”

“By no means! wait a little, Dear!
The change is in your being here.
Besides, I have not finished yet—
How stupid of me to forget!
Sh! I shall think of it just now. . . .
Your kiss, my Angel, on my brow!

Your kiss that through the dullest pain
Flashed inspiration on my brain!”

Her face was fulgent with clear bliss;
She bent down o'er me with the kiss
As bends a dawn of golden light
To kiss away the earth's long night.
The splendour of her beauty made
Me blind, and in the rapturous shade
From head to foot my being thrilled
As if with mighty music filled,
To feel that kiss come leaning down
Upon me like a radiant crown.
Her royal kiss was on my brow
A burning ruby, burning now
As then, and burning evermore;
A Star of Love above the roar
And fever of this life's long war:
And suddenly my brain was bright
With glowing fire and dancing light,
A rich intoxicating shine
Like wave on wave of noble wine,
The Alcahest of joy supreme
Dissolving all things into dream.

So when at length I found a tongue,
Bell-clear and bold my voice outrung:

“Dearest, all thanks were out of place
For this thine overwhelming grace.
The kiss of tenderness, the kiss
Of truth, you gave me erst; but this
Is consecration; to the man
Who wears this burning talisman
The veil of Isis melts away
To woven air, the night is day,
That he alone in all the shrine
May see the lineaments divine:
And fate the marble Sphinx, dumb, stern,
Terror of Beauty cold, shall yearn
And melt to flesh, and blood shall thrill
The stony heart, and life shall fill
The statue: it shall follow him
Submissive to his every whim,
Ev'n as the lion of the wild
Followed pure Una, meek and mild.

“Now, I can tell you what we two
Before we part this night will do.
There is a dance—I wish it were
Some brilliant night-fête rich and rare,
With gold-and-scarlet uniforms
Far-flashing through the music-storms;
Some Carnival's last Masquerade,
Wherein our parts were fitly played.

This is another sort of thing,
The mere tame weekly gathering
Of humble tradesmen, lively clerks,
And fair ones who befit such sparks:
Few merry meetings could look duller;
No wealth, no grandeur, no rich colour.
Yet they enjoy it: give a girl
Some fiddle-screech to time her twirl,
And give a youth the limpest waist
That wears a gown to hold embraced;
Then dance, dance, dance! both girl and boy
Are overbrimmed and drunk with joy;
Because young hearts to love's own chime
Beat passionate rhythms all the time.

“This is the night, and we will go,
For many of the Class I know;
Young friendly fellows, rather rough,
But frank and kind and good enough
For this bad world: how all will stare
To see me with a dark Queen there!
I went last winter twice or thrice,
As dull as lead, as cold as ice,
Amidst the flushed and vivid crowd
Of youths and maidens laughing loud;
For thought retraced the long sad years
Of pallid smiles and frozen tears

Back to a certain festal night,
A whirl and blaze of swift delight,
When we together danced, we two!
I live it all again! . . . Do you
Remember how I broke down quite
In the mere polka? . . . Dressed in white,
A loose pink sash around your waist,
Low shoes across the instep laced,
Your moonwhite shoulders glancing through
Long yellow ringlets dancing too,
You were an angel then; as clean
From earthly dust-speck, as serene
And lovely and beyond my love,
As now in your far world above.

“You shall this night a few more hours
Be absent from your heavenly bowers;
With leave or not, 'tis all the same,
I keep you here and bear the blame.
Your Star this night must take its chance
Without you in the spheral dance,
For you shall waltz and whirl with me
Amidst a staider companie;
The Cherubim and Seraphim
And Saintly Hosts may drown their hymn
With tenfold noise of harp and lyre;
The sweetest voice of all the quire

Shall sing to me, shall make my room,
This little nutshellful of gloom,
A Heaven of Heavens, the best of all,
While I am dressing for the Ball! . . .

“What book is this I held before,
The gloaming glooming more and more,
Eyes dreamed and hand drooped on the floor?
The Lieder—Heine's—what we want!
A lay of Heine's you shall chant;
Our poor Saint Heinrich! for he was
A saint here of the loftiest class,
By martyrdom more dreadly solemn
Than that of Simeon on the column.
God put him to the torture; seven
Long years beneath unpitying heaven,
The body dead, the man at strife
With all the common cares of life:
A living Voice intense and brave
Issuing from a Mattress-grave.
At length the cruel agony wrung
Confessions from that haughty tongue;
Confessions of the strangest, more
Than ever God had bargained for;
With prayers and penitential psalms
That gave the angels grinning qualms,
With jests when sharp pangs cut too deep
That made the very devils weep.

Enough of this! the Monarch cried;
Fear gave what mercy still denied;
Torture committed suicide
To quench that voice; the victim died
Victorious over Heaven and Doom;
The Mattress-grave became a tomb
Deep in our Mother's kindly womb,
Oblivion tranced the painful breath,
The Death-in-Life grew perfect Death.”

“Is it the mere quaint German type,
Or is it from some blackened pipe?
The volume seems, without a joke,
A volume of tobacco-smoke!”

“The choice is difficult in sooth;
But sing that song of love and ruth
The Princess Ilse sang his youth:
And sing it very softly sweet,
As not to ravish all the street;
And sing it to what air you will,
Your voice in any tune must thrill. . . .
Yet stay, there was a certain hymn
Which used at Sunday School to brim
Our hearts with holy love and zeal,
Our eyes with tears they yearned to feel:
Mild Bishop Heber shall embrace
Wild Heine by sweet music's grace,

The while you sing the verses fair
To Greenland's icy mountains' air;
A freezing name! but icy mountains
Were linked with Afric's sunny fountains.”

Ich bin die Prinsessin Ilse,
Und wohne im Ilsenstein;
Komm mit nach meinem Schlosse,
Wir wollen selig sein.
“Dear Princess, I will come with thee
Into thy cavern's mystery,
And both of us shall happy be.”

In meinen weissen Armen,
An meiner weissen Brust,
Da sollst du liegen und träumen
Von alter Märchenlust.
“In your white arms, on your white breast,
I'll lie and dream in perfect rest,
With more than faëry blessings blest.”

Es bleiben todt die Todten,
Und nur der Lebendige lebt;
Und ich bin schön und blühend,
Mein lachendes Herze bebt.
“Yes, dead the dead for ever lie;
But you my Love and your Love I
Are of the souls that cannot die.”

Doch dich soll mein Arm umschlingen,
Wie er Kaiser Heinrich umschlang;—
Ich hielt ihm zu die Ohren,
Wenn die Trompet erklang.
“Roll drum, plead lute, blare trumpet-call;
Our ears shall be fast closed to all
Beneath divine Oblivion's pall.”

Oh what a quaintly coupled pair
The poem and the music were!
The Sunday School's old simple air,
The heathen verses rich and rare!

This couch was sofa and not bed.

The last chapter of George Sand's Lélia may seem to be the source of the following section: in fact, however, I chanced to read that work just after, and not before, this section was written.

This was written before Mr. J. S. Mill published a similar declaration. It will be noticed, however, that while the philosopher treated the matter with his habitual lofty earnestness, the flippant rhymester but makes it a subject for mockery and laughter.

Prometheus Unbound, act ii., scene 3, et seq.

Wan ghosts have risen from the grave
To flit across the midnight wave;
Pale phantoms started from the tomb
To hurry through the wildwood gloom;
Cold corpses left their wormy bed
To mingle in high feasts, 'tis said;
But never since old Noah's flood
Turned Eden into sand and mud,
(Relieving thus the Heavenly guard
From its long spell of duty hard?)

Has any Angel left the sphere
Of Heaven to dance with mortals here:
Though earthly angels crowd each ball,
Since women are such angels all.

My partner was no icy corse,
No phantom of a wild remorse,
No Lamia of delirious dream,
No nymph of forest, sea, or stream:
A soul of fire, a lovely form
Lithe to the dance and breathing warm;
A face that flushed with cordial pleasure,
Dove-feet that flew in perfect measure;
A little hand so soft and fine,
Whose touch electric thrilled through mine;
A heart that beat against my breast
Full pulses of triumphant zest;
Deep eyes, pure eyes, as dark as night,
Yet full of liquid love and light
When their moon-soul came floating through
The clouds of mystery into view,
And myriad star-rays glittering keen
Were tempered in its mystic sheen;

Soft lips full curved in ruddy glow,
And swift as young Apollo's bow,—
What arrowy laughters flashing free
With barbs of pleasant mockery
Pierced through and through the whirling rout,
And let thought in where life flew out,
And made the world a happy dream
“Where nothing is, but all things seem!”

The splendid beauty of her face,
Her dancing's proud and passionate grace,
Her soul's eternal life intense
Lavishly poured through every sense,
Intoxicated all the air,
Inspiring every dancer there:
Never again shall that old Hall
Spin round with such another Ball;
The human whirlwind might have whirled
It through the heights of air and hurled
It down at last into the sea,
Nor yet disturbed the revelry.
The violin and the violoncello,
The flute that withered little fellow,
The red-faced cornet always mellow,
Our noble Orchestra of four,
Played as they never played of yore,
Played as they will play nevermore,

As if the rushing air were cloven
By all the legions of Beethoven.

In one of the eternal trances
(Five minutes long) between two dances,
The Brown whom one meets everywhere
Came smug and grinning to me there,
And “May I have the pleasure,—honour?”
A glance (encouraging) upon her.

“My dear good Brown, you understand
This lady's from a foreign land,
And does not comprehend a word
You speak so well: nay, I have heard
That one may search all England through,
And not find twenty scholars who
Can speak or write her language clearly,
Though once our great men loved it dearly.
The little of it I know still
(Read well, write badly, speak so ill!)
I first learnt many years ago
From her, and one you do not know,
A restless wanderer, one of these
You call damned doubtful refugees,
Enthusiasts, whom while harboured here
All proper folk dislike and fear.”

Brown muttered, “I've a little knowledge
Of French,—the Working Man's New College.”

“Ah, yes; your French is doubtless good,
And French we know is understood
By polished people everywhere;
But then her land, though rich and fair,
Lies far beyond the continents
Of civilised accomplishments;
And she could sooner learn to speak
Persian or Sanskrit, Norse or Greek,
Than this delightful brilliant witty
Tongue of delightful Paris city,
(‘The devils' paradise, the hell
Of angels,—Heine loved it well!).
And finally, my dearest Brown,
The customs of her folk would frown
Austere rebukes on her if she
Dared dance with any one but me!”

Brown went and whispered strange remarks
To eager girls and staring clerks. . . .
We are caught up and swept away
In the cyclone-gallop's sway
And round and round and round and round
Go whirling in a storm of sound.

But in the next brief perfect trance
That followed the impassioned dance,
The Jones whom one too rarely sees
Came rushing on me like a breeze:
“What miracle! what magic might!—
But have you seen yourself to-night?”

“Oh yes! twin-mirrored in the skies
Of these my Lady's glorious eyes!

In our rude days of kingly fear,
If any monarch drawing near
The palace saw so bright and clear
His picture in the windows shine,
He well might say, Auspicious sign
That still this noble home is mine!”

“But you are half as tall again,
And stately as a King of Men;
And in the prime of health and youth,
Younger by twenty years, in sooth;
Your face, the pale and sallow, glows
As fresh as any morning rose;
Your voice rings richly as a bell,
Resonant as a trumpet-swell;
Your dull and mournful dreamy eyes
Now dazzle, burn, and mesmerise:
Thus gazed, thus spoke, thus smiled, thus trod,
Apollo the immortal God!”

“Dear Jones, as usual, you are right;
I stand revealed Myself to-night,
The God of Poesy, Lord of Light. . . .
But you would learn now whence the change:
Listen; it is and is not strange.

“There was a Fountain long ago,
A fountain of perpetual flow,

Whose purest springlets had their birth
Deep in the bosom of the earth.
Its joyous wavering silvery shaft
To all the beams of morning laughed,
Its steadfast murmurous crystal column
Was loved by all the moonbeams solemn;
From morn to eve it fell again
A singing many-jewelled rain,
From eve to morn it charmed the hours
With whispering dew and diamond showers;
Crowned many a day with sunbows bright,
With moonbows halo'd many a night;
And so kept full its marble urn,
All fringed with fronds of greenest fern,
O'er which with timeless love intent
A pure white marble Goddess leant:
And overflowing aye the urn
In rillets that became a burn,
It danced adown the verdant slope
As light as youth, as gay as hope,
And ‘wandered at its own sweet will;’
And here it was a lakelet still,
And there it was a flashing stream;
And all about it was a dream
Of beauty, such a Paradise
As rarely blooms beneath our skies;
The loveliest flowers, the grandest trees,
The broadest glades, the fairest leas;

And double music tranced the hours,—
The countless perfumes of the flowers,
The countless songs of swift delight
That birds were singing day and night.

“But suddenly there fell a change;
So suddenly, so sad, so strange!
The fountain ceased to wave its lance
Of silver to the spheral dance;
The runnels were no longer fed,
And each one withered from its bed;
The stream fell stagnant, and was soon
A bloated marsh, a pest-lagoon;
The sweet flowers died, the noble trees
Turned black and gaunt anatomies;
The birds all left the saddened air
To seek some other home as fair;
The pure white Goddess and her urn
Were covered with the withered fern,—
The red and yellow fans outworn,
And red and yellow leaves forlorn,
Slow drifting round into a heap
Till the fair shapes were buried deep:
The happy Eden rich and fair
Became a savage waste, a lair
Where Silence with broad wings of gloom
Brooded above a nameless tomb. . . .

And thus it was for years and years;
And only there were bitter tears
Beneath those dark wings shed alway
Instead of the bright fountain's play,
And in the stead of sweet bird-tones
Low unheard solitary moans.

“Ah, sudden was that ruin sad;
As sudden, resurrection glad!
Unheralded one quiet night
There came an Angel darkly bright,
An Angel from the Heavenly Throne,
Or else that Goddess carved in stone
Enraptured into life by power
Of her most marvellous beauty's dower:
And from her long robe's sweeping pride
The dead leaves all were scattered wide;
And from a touch of her soft hand,
Without one gesture of command,
All suddenly was rolled away
A mighty stone, whose broad mass lay
Upon the urn, as on a tomb
There lies a stone to seal its gloom:
And straightway sprang into the night
That joyous Fountain's shaft of light,
Singing its old unwearied tune
Of rapture to the quiet moon,

As strong and swift and pure and high
As ere it ever seemed run dry:
For never since that Long-ago
Had its deep springlets ceased to flow;
But shut down from the light of day
Their waters sadly oozed away
Through pores of the dim underearth,
Bereft of splendour, speed, and mirth;
Yet ever ready now as then
To leap into the air again.”

“Ah yes,” said Jones, “I understand.”
Then with his smile of sadness bland,
“My fountain never got a chance
To spring into the sunlight's glance,
And wave its mystic silver lance
In time with all the starry dance;
Yet I believe 'tis ever there
Heart-pulsing in its secret lair,
Until the Goddess some fine day
Shall come and roll the stone away. . . .
Nor have you startled me; I knew
Quite well it was a Goddess too.”

“Because so well you know and speak
Her esoteric Persian-Greek.”

“Or shall we say (a truth of wine,
If falsehood in the nectar-shine),

Because a beauty so divine
Has stirred no envy, grudge, or pine
In any girl's or woman's breast,
But only love and joyous zest?—
For if the beauty dazzling thus
Were nubile and not nebulous?”

“This beauty is more real far
Than all the other beauties are;
And such a beauty's bridal kiss
Transcends all other bridal bliss;
And such a marriage-love will last
When all the other loves are past.
You know this well, dear friend of mine,
When drinking nectar and not wine.”

“I know it,—know it not: we rhyme
The petals of the Flower of Time;
And rhyming strip them off, perplext
For every leaflet by the next
Is contradicted in its turn;
And thus we yearning ever yearn,
And ever learning never learn;
For while we pluck, from hour to hour
New petals spring to clothe the flower,
And till we strip the final one
Can final answer fall to none. . . .

To strip and strip the living bloom,
Nor learn the oracle of Doom
Until the fulgent Flower o' the Day
Is altogether stripped away;
Then with the dead stem leave the light,
And moulder in eternal night!”

“The sad old truth of earthly wine;
The joyous fable in the shine
Of nectar at the feast divine! . . .
Love a near maid, love a far maid,
But let Hebe be your barmaid;
When she proffers you the cup,
Never fear to drink it up;
Though you see her crush her wine
From a belladonna vine,
Drink it, pouring on the clods
Prelibation to the gods.
Reck this rede unto the end:
It is my good night, good friend.”

The Holy Bible unfortunately tells us nothing of this. Readers may, however, refer to our auxiliary Bible, “Paradise Lost,” Book xi., Michael's prophecy of the Flood. But Milton was really too careless about the fate of the guard. Was it recalled in time, or did it perish at its post? Did the deluge sweep over that gate, “With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms?” Let us hope not. It would be sad to think that the “flaming sword” was extinguished with a hiss; and that the “Cherubim” were drowned like the other animals, without even the salvation of a single live specimen in the Ark. Probably, however, being abundantly and superabundantly furnished with wings, they all flew away to Heaven when the waters began sweeping the Mount of Paradise “Down the great river to the opening gulf.”

“Mich ruft der Tod ------
[OMITTED] Glaub mir, mein Kind, mein Weib, Mathilde,
Nicht so gefährlich ist das wilde
Erzürnte Meer und der trotzige Wald,
Als unser jetzige Aufenthalt!
Wie schrecklich auch der Wolf und der Geier,
Haifische und sonstige Meerungeheuer:
Viel grimmere, schlimmere Bestien enthält
Paris, die leuchtende Hauptstadt der Welt,
Das singende, springende, schöne Paris,
Die Hölle der Engel, der Teufel Paradies—
Das ich dich hier verlassen soll,
Das macht mir verrückt, das macht mir toll!”
Letzte Gedichte: Babylonische Sorgen.

The title suggests, and may have been specially suggested by, that great verse of Jeremiah li. 7: “Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad.”

So Béranger, in his Jean de Paris:

“Quel amour incroyable,
Maintenant et jadis,
Pour ces murs dont le diable
A fait son paradis!”

And he who knew his Paris best, Balzac the Terrible: “Cette succursale de l'enfer.” —Melmoth Reconcilié.

Again, “Paris a été nommé un enfer. Tenez ce mot pour vrai.” —La Fille aux Yeux d'or. (Histoire des Treize.)

And yet again, “Ce Paris qualifié d'antichambre de l'enfer.” —Balzac, to the Abbé Eglé.

The music 'gan again arise;
A music of delicious sighs,
A music plaintive with a grief
More exquisite than all relief;
Music impassioned, but subdued
To a sweet sad dreamy mood. . . .

And now a swift and sudden stream
Of melody breaks through the dream:
The still air trembles, and the whole
Night-darkness fills with life and soul,
And keen stars listen throbbing pale
The drama of the nightingale. . . .
The nightingale is now a thrush. . . .
And now a soaring skylark. . . . Hush!
Never a song in all the world!
But low clouds floating soft and furled,
And rivers winding far away,
And ripples weaving faëry spray,
And mists far-curving swelling round
Dim twilight hills that soon are drowned,
And breezes stirring solemn woods,
And seas embracing solitudes;
Interminable intervolving,
Weaving webs for redissolving;
The intertwining, interblending
Of spirals evermore ascending;
The floating hither, wheeling thither,
Without a whence, without a whither;
And still we whirl and wheel and float,
But how the dancers are remote!

“Is that the wonderful waltz-tune,
Or is it the full-shining moon?

And are those notes, so far and far?
Each seems to me a brilliant star!
Can we be dancing in the ball,
And yet not see the earth at all? . . .
The starry notes are round us whirling,
Beneath the great moon-waltz is twirling;
And thus without our own endeavour
May we float and float for ever?”

“When six long days of toil are past,
The holy Sabbath comes at last.”

Oh better than a battle won,
And better than a great deed done,
And better than a martyr's crown,
And better than a king's renown,
And better than a long calm life
With lovely bairns and loving wife,
And better than the sweetest thought
That tearful Memory ever brought
From searching with her rapturous woe
Within the moonlit Long-ago,
And better than the stillest sleep
To him who wakes to moan and weep,
And better than the trance of death
To him who yearning suffereth;
Better than this, than these, than all
That mortals joys and triumphs call,
Was last night's Meeting, last night's Ball!

The tongue of flame had ceased to play,
The steadfast glow long died away;
The house was grave-still, and the street
Re-echoed to no wandering feet;
And still and chill as any stone
I lay upon the couch alone,
Drest to the white kid-gloves in all
The dress I put on for the Ball:
And there, that glorious flower you see,
She fixed it in my breast for me;
Could such a flower of flowers have birth
Upon our worn-out frigid earth?
That golden-hearted amethyst
Her own hand held, her own mouth kissed.

The clocks struck one and two and three,
And each stroke fell as aimed at me;
For none should muse or read or write
So late into the awful night,
None dare awake the deep affright
That pulseth in the heart of night,
None venture save sleep-shrouded quite
Into the solemn dead of night,
None wander save in dreams of light
Through the vast desert of black night;

And none at three be dressed at all,
Unless mere night-clothes dress you call
Or underlinen of a pall;
Therefore, my friend, in bidding you
And all the rest a long adieu,
For I am weary, Alleleu!—
Yourself and all I re-advise,
Early to bed and early to rise,
Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise!

The previous note anent this couch.)

Epilogue.

(Grossness here indeed is regnant,
But it is the grossness pregnant;
Heine growled it, ending thus
His wild Book of Lazarus;
Modern swansong's final note,
Hoarse death-rattle in the throat.
Swan was white or black?—Our candour!
Black or white no swan's a gander.)

“Glory warms us in the grave!
Stupid words, that sound so brave!
Better warmth would give to us
Molly Seagrim amorous,
Slobbering kisses lips and tongue,
And yet reeking from the dung.

Better warmth would likewise dart
Through the cockles of one's heart,
Drinking mulled wine, punch, or grog,
Until helpless as a log,
In the lowest den whose crowd is
Thieves and drabs and ragged rowdies,
Mortgaged to the gallows-rope,
But who meanwhile breathe and hope,
And more enviable far
Than the son of Thetis are.
Yes, Pelides was a judge;—
Better live the poorest drudge
In the upper world, than loom
On the Stygian shore of gloom
Phantom-Leader, bodiless roamer,
Though besung by mighty Homer.”

Eine Kuh-magd—Any farm-wench; but Heine, who knew Fielding, probably had Molly Seagrim in his mind.

1864.

WEDDAH AND OM-EL-BONAIN

[_]

Note.—I found this story, and that of the short piece following, which merit far better English versions than I have been able to accomplish, in the De l'Amour of De Stendhal (Henri Beyle), chap. 53, where they are given among “Fragments Extracted and Translated from an Arabic Collection, entitled The Divan of Love, compiled by Ebn-Abi-Hadglat.” From another of these fragments I quote a few lines by way of introduction: “The Benou-Azra are a tribe famous for love among all the tribes of Arabia. So that the manner in which they love has passed into a proverb, and God has not made any other creatures so tender in loving as are they. Sahid, son of Agba, one day asked an Arab, Of what people art thou? I am of the people who die when they love, answered the Arab. Thou art then of the tribe of Azra? said Sahid. Yes, by the master of the Caaba! replied the Arab. Whence comes it, then, that you thus love? asked Sahid. Our women are beautiful and our young men are chaste, answered the Arab.”

On this theme Heine has a poem of four unrhymed quatrains, Der Azra, of which the sense without the melody may be given in English:—

Daily went the wondrous-lovely
Sultan's daughter to and fro there
In the evening by the fountain,
Where the waters white were plashing.

Daily stood the youthful captive
In the evening by the fountain,
Where the waters white were plashing;
Daily grew he pale and paler.

And one evening the princess
Stepped to him with sudden question:
“I would know your name, young captive,
And your country and your kindred.”

Then the slave replied: “My name is
Mohammed, I come from Yemen,
And my kindred are the Azra,
They who when they love must perish.”

Part I.

I

Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, scarcely grown
To boy and girlhood from their swaddling bands,
Were known where'er the Azra tribe was known,
Through Araby and all the neighbouring lands;
Were chanted in the songs of sweetest tone
Which sprang like fountains 'mid the desert sands:
They were so beautiful that none who saw
But felt a rapture trembling into awe.

II

Once on a dewy evetide when the balm
Of herb and flower made all the air rich wine,
And still the sunless shadow of the palm
Sought out the birthplace of the day divine,
These two were playing in the happy calm.
A young chief said: In these be sure a sign
Great God vouchsafes; a living talisman
Of glory and rich weal to bless our clan.

III

Proud hearts applauded; but a senior chief
Said: Perfect beauty is its own sole end;
It is ripe flower and fruit, not bud and leaf;
The promise and the blessing meet and blend,
Fulfilled at once: then malice, wrath, and grief,
Lust of the foe and passion of the friend,
Assail the marvel; for all Hell is moved
Against the work of Allah most approved.

IV

Thus beauty is that pearl a poor man found;
Which could not be surrendered, changed, or sold,
Which he might never bury in the ground,
Or hide away within his girdle-fold;
But had to wear upon his brow uncrowned,
A star of storm and terrors; for, behold,
The richest kings raged jealous for its light,
And just men's hearts turned robbers at the sight.

V

But if the soul be royal as the gem,
That star of danger may flash victory too,
The younger urged, and bring the diadem
To set itself in. And the other: True;

If all Life's golden apples crown one stem,
Fate touches none; but single they are few:
And whether to defeat or triumph, this
One star lights war and woe, not peaceful bliss.

VI

But nothing recked the children in that hour,
And little recked through fifteen happy years,
Of any doom in their surpassing dower:
Rich with the present, free from hopes and fears,
They dwelt in time as in a heavenly bower:
Their life was strange to laughter as to tears,
Serenely glad; their partings were too brief
For pain; and side by side, what thing was grief?

VII

Amidst their clan they dwelt in solitude,
Not haughtily but by instinctive love;
As lion mates with lion in the wood,
And eagle pairs with eagle not with dove;
The lowlier creatures finding their own good
In their own race, nor seeking it above:
These dreamt as little of divided life
As that first pair created man and wife.

VIII

The calm years flowed thus till the youth and maid
Were almost man and woman, and the spell

Of passion wrought, and each was self-dismayed;
The hearts their simple childhood knew so well
Were now such riddles to them, in the shade
And trouble of the mists that seethe and swell
When the large dawn is kindling, which shall grow
Through crimson fires to steadfast azure glow.

IX

That year a tribe-feud, which some years had slept
Through faintness, woke up stronger than before;
And with its stir young hearts on all sides leapt
For battle, swoln with peace and plenteous store;
Swift couriers to and fro the loud land swept
Weaving thin spites to one vast woof of war:
And Weddah sallied forth elate, ranked man,
A warrior of the warriors of his clan.

X

Ere long flushed foes turned haggard at his name;
The beautiful, the terrible: for fire
Burns most intensely in the clearest flame;
The comeliest steed is ever last to tire
And swiftest footed; and in war's fierce game
The noblest sword is deadliest in its gyre:
His gentle gravity grew keen and gay
In hottest fight as for a festal day.

XI

And while he fought far distant with his band,
Walid the Syrian, Abd-el-Malek's son;
Renowned already for a scheme long planned
With silent patience, and a sharp deed done
When its ripe fruit leaned ready for his hand,
And liberal sharing of the fruit well won;
Came south to greet the tribe, and knit anew
Old bonds of friendship and alliance true.

XII

He had full often from the poets heard
Of these two children the divinely fair;
But was not one to kindle at a word,
And languish on faint echoes of an air;
By what he saw and touched his heart was stirred,
Nor knew sick longings and the vague despair
Of those who turn from every nearest boon
To catch like infants at the reachless moon.

XIII

But when one sunset flaming crimson-barred
He saw a damsel like a shape of sleep,
Who moved as moves in indolence the pard;
Above whose veil burned large eyes black and deep,

The lairs of an intense and slow regard
Which made all splendours of the broad world cheap,
And death and life thin dreams; fate-smitten there
He rested shuddering past the hour of prayer.

XIV

Be heaven all stars, we feel the one moon's rise:
Who else could move with that imperial grace?
Who else could bear about those fateful eyes,
Too overwhelming for a mortal face?
Beyond all heed of questions and surprise
He stood a termless hour in that same place,
Convulsed in silent wrestling with his doom;
Haggard as one brought living from the tomb.

XV

And she had shuddered also passing by,
A moment; for her spirit though intent
Was chilled as conscious of an evil eye;
But forthwith turned and o'er its one dream bent;
A woman lilting as she came anigh:
But to destroy on earth was Weddah sent;
There where he is brave warriors fall before him,
Where he is not pine damsels who adore him.

XVI

And thus with purpose like a trenchant blade
Forged in that fierce hour's fire, the Syrian chief

Began new life. When next the Council weighed
The heavy future charged with wrath and grief,
He spoke his will: I ask to wed the maid,
The child of Abd-el-Aziz: and, in brief,
I bring for dowry all our wealth and might,
Unto our last heart's blood, to fight your fight.

XVII

All mute with marvelling sat. Her sire then said:
From infancy unto my brother's son
She has been held betrothed: our Lord can wed
Full many a lovelier, many a richer one.
But quite in vain they reasoned, flattered, pled;
This was his proffer, other he had none:
A boy and girl outweighed the Azra tribe?
'Twas strange! His vow was fixed to that sole bribe.

XVIII

And as their couriers came in day by day
Pregnant with portents of yet blacker ill;
And all their urgence broke in fuming spray
Against the rock of his firm-planted will;
The baffled current took a tortuous way,
And drowned a happy garden green and still,
O'erwhelming Abd-el-Aziz with that gibe,
A boy and girl outvalue all our tribe?

XIX

He loved his daughter, and he loved yet more
His brother's son; and now the whole tribe prest
The scale against them: there was raging war,
Too sure of hapless issue in his breast;
Sea-tossed where rocks on all sides fanged the shore.
She heard him moaning: Would I were at rest,
Ere this should come upon me, in the grave!
Her poor heart bled to hear him weep and rave.

XX

She flung herself all yearning at his feet;
The long white malehair dashed her brow with tears;
But her tears scalded him; her kisses sweet
Were crueller than iron barbs of spears;
He had no eyes her tender eyes to meet;
Her soft caressing words scarce touched his ears
But they were fire and madness in his brain:
Yet while she clasped he mutely clasped again.

XXI

At length he answered her: A heavy doom
Is laid upon me; now, when I am old,
And weak, and bending toward the quiet tomb . . .
Can it then be, as we are sometimes told,

That woman, nay, that young girls in their bloom,
Lovely, beloved, and loving, have been bold
To give their lives, when blenched the bravest man,
For safety of their city or their clan?

XXII

She trembled in cold shadow of a rock
Leaning to crush her where she knelt fast bound;
She grew all ear to catch the coming shock,
And felt already quakings of the ground;
Yet firmly said: Your anguish would not mock
Your daughter, O my Father: pray expound
The woeful riddle; and whate'er my part,
It is your very blood which feeds this heart.

XXIII

He told her all: the perils great and near;
The might of Walid; and the friendship long
Which bound them to his house, and year by year
With mutual kindnesses had grown more strong
His offer, his demand, which would not hear
A word in mitigation right or wrong.
Her young blood curdled: bring him to our tent,
That I may plead; perchance he will relent.

XXIV

He came; and found her sitting double-veiled,
For grief was round her like a funeral stole.

She pleaded, she o'erwhelmed him, and she failed;
For still the more her passion moved his soul,
The more he loved her; when his heart most quailed,
His purpose stretched most eager for the goal:
I stake myself, house, friends, all, for the tribe
Which gives me you; but for no meaner bribe.

XXV

So her face set into a stony mask,
And heavy silence crushed them for an hour
Ere she could learn the words to say her task:
Let only mutes appeal to Fate's deaf power!
Behold I pledge myself to what you ask,
My sire here sells me for the settled dower:
The sheikhs can know we are at one; I pray
That none else know it ere the wedding-day.

XXVI

Which shall be when next moon is on the wane
As this to-night: my heart is now the bier
Of that which we have sacrificed and slain;
My own poor Past, still beautiful and dear,
Cut off from life, wants burial; and though vain
Is woman's weeping, I must weep I fear
A little on the well-beloved's tomb
Ere marriage smiles and blushes can outbloom.

XXVII

He left them, sire and daughter, to their woe;
Himself then sick at heart as they could be:
But set to work at once, and spurred the slow
Sad hours till they were fiery-swift as he:
With messengers on all sides to and fro,
With ravelled webs of subtle policy,
He gave the sheikhs good earnest of what aid
They had so cheaply bought with one fair maid.

XXVIII

Thus he took Araby's one peerless prize,
And homeward went ungrudging all the cost;
Though she was marble; with blank arid eyes,
Weary and hopeless as the waste they crossed
When neither moon nor star is in the skies,
And water faileth, and the track is lost.
He took such statue triumphing for wife,
Assured his love would kindle it to life.

XXIX

She had indeed wept, wept and wailed that moon,
But had not buried yet her shrouded Past;
Which ever lay in a most deathlike swoon,
Pallid and pulseless, motionless and ghast,

While Fate withheld from it death's perfect boon:
She kept this doleful mystery locked up fast;
Her form was as its sepulchre of stone,
Her heart its purple couch and hidden throne.

XXX

She went; and sweeter voiced than cooing dove
Hassan the bard his farewell ode must render:
We had a Night, the dream of heaven above,
Wherein one moon and countless stars of splendour;
We had a Moon, the face of perfect love,
Wherein two nights with stars more pure and tender:
Our Night with its one moon we still have here;
Where is our Moon with its twin nights more dear?

Part II.

I

As Weddah and his troop were coming back
From their first foray, which success made brief,
Scouts met him and in sharp haste turned his track
On special mission to a powerful chief,
Who wavered still between the white and black,
And lurked for mere self-profit like a thief.
This errand well fulfilled, at last he came
To flush her tear-pearls with the ruby fame.

II

Into the camp full joyously he rode,
Leading his weary escort; as for him,
The love and trust that in his bosom glowed
Had laughed away all weariness of limb.
The sheikhs, his full report heard, all bestowed
Well-measured praises, brief and somewhat grim;
As veterans scanning the enormous night
In which this one star shone so bravely bright.

III

Then Abd-el-Aziz rose and left the tent,
And he accompanied with eager pace;
And marked not how his frank smiles as he went
Were unreflected in each well-known face;
How joyous greetings he on all sides sent
Brought hollow echoes as from caverned space:
His heart drank sweet wine 'mid the roses singing,
And thought the whole world with like revels ringing.

IV

He entered with his uncle, and his glance
Sank disappointed. But the old man wept
With passion o'er him, eyeing him askance;
And made him eat and drink; and ever kept

Questioning, questioning, as to every chance
Throughout his absence; keen to intercept
The fatal, But my cousin? ready strung
Upon the tense lips by the eager tongue.

V

At length it flew, the lover's wingèd dart;
He sped it wreathed with flowers of hope and joy,
It pierced with iron point the old man's heart,
Who quivering cried: You are, then, still a boy!
Love, love, the sweet to meet, the smart to part,
Make all your world of pleasure and annoy!
Is this a time for dalliance in rose bowers?
The vultures gather; do they scent sweet flowers?

VI

It is a time of woe and shame, of strife
Whose victory must be dolorous as defeat:
The sons of Ishmael clutch the stranger's knife
To stab each other; every corpse you meet
Has held a Moslem soul, an Arab life:
The town-serfs prisoned in stark fort and street
Exult while countless tents that freely roam
Perish like proud ships clashing in the foam.

VII

We might learn wisdom from our foes and thralls!
The mongrels of a hundred barbarous races,
Who know not their own sires, appease their brawls,
Leave night and sunward set their impure faces,
To bay in concert round old Syrian walls,
And thrust their three gods on our holy places:
We have one Sire, one Prophet, and one Lord,
And yet against each other turn the sword.

VIII

Thus long he groaned with fevered bitterness,
Till, Say at least, my Father, she is well!
Stung prudence out of patience: Surely yes!
The children of the faith whom Azrael
Hath gathered, do they suffer our distress?—
But smitten by that word the lover fell,
As if at such rash mention of his name
That bird of God with wings of midnight came.

IX

Deep in the shadow of those awful plumes
A night and day and night he senseless lay;
And Abd-el-Aziz cowered 'mid deeper glooms,
Silent in vast despair, both night and day:

It seemed two forms belonging to the tombs
Had been abandoned in that tent; for they
Were stark and still and mute alike, although
The one was conscious of their double woe.

X

At last death left the balance, and the scale
Of wretched life jarred earth: and in the morn
The lover woke, confused as if a veil
Of heavy dreams involved him; weak and worn
And cold at heart, and wondering what bale
Had wounded him and left him thus forlorn:
So still half-stunned with anguish he lay long,
Fretful to rend the shroud that wrapt his wrong.

XI

He turned; and on the pillow, near his head,
He saw a toy, a trifle, that gave tongue
To mute disaster: forthwith on his bed
The coiled-snake Memory hissed and sprang and stung:
Then all the fury of the storm was shed
From the black swollen clouds that overhung;
The hot rain poured, the fierce gusts shook his soul,
Wild flashes lit waste gloom from pole to pole.

XII

He hardly dared to touch the petty thing,
The talisman of this tremendous spell:
A purse of dark blue silk; a golden ring,
A letter in the hand he knew so well.
Still as he sought to read new gusts would fling
Wet blindness in his vision, and a knell
Of rushing thunder trample through his brain
And tread him down into the swoon again.

XIII

He read: Farewell! In one sad word I weave
More thoughts than pen could write or tongue declare.
No other word can Om-el-Bonain leave
To Weddah, save her blessing; and her prayer.
That he will quail not, though his heart must grieve,
That all his strength and valour, skill and care,
Shall be devoted loyally to serve
The sacred Tribe, and never self-ward swerve.

XIV

For verily the Tribe is all, and we
Are nothing singly save as parts of it:
The one great Nile flows ever to the sea,
The waterdrops for ever change and flit;

And some the first ooze snares, and some may be
The King's sweet draught, proud Cairo's mirror; fit
For all each service of the stream whose fame
They share, by which alone they have a name.

XV

And since I know that you cannot forget,
And am too sure your love will never change,
I leave my image to your soul: but yet
Keep it as shrined and shrouded till the strange
Sad dream of life, illusion and regret,
Is ended; short must be its longest range.
Farewell! Hope gleams the wan lamp in a tomb
Above a corpse that waits the final doom.

XVI

This writing was a dear but cruel friend
That dragged him from the deep, and held him fast
Upon life's shore, who would have found an end,
Peace and oblivion. Turn from such a past
To such a future, and unquailing wend
Its infinite hopeless hours! he shrank aghast:
Yet in this utmost weakness swore to make
The dreadful sacrifice for her dear sake.

XVII

But when he stood as one about to fall,
And would go weep upon her tomb alone,
And Abd-el-Aziz had to tell him all,
The cry of anguish took a harsher tone:
Rich harem coverlets for funeral pall,
For grave a Syrian marriage couch and throne!
A human rival, breathing mortal breath,
And not the star-cold sanctity of Death!

XVIII

This truth was as a potent poison-draught,
Fire in the entrails, wild fire in the brain,
Which kindled savage strength in him who quaffed
And did not die of its first maddening pain.
It struck him like the mere malignant shaft
Which stings a warrior into sense again,
Who lay benumbed with wounds, and would have died
Unroused: the fresh wound makes him crawl and hide.

XIX

A month he wandered in wild solitude;
And in that month grew old, and yet grew strong:

Now lying prone and still as death would brood
The whole long day through and the whole night long;
Now demon-driven day and night pursued
Stark weariness amidst the clamorous throng
Of thoughts that raged with memory and desire,
And parched, his bruised feet burning, could not tire.

XX

When he came back, o'ermastered by his vow
To serve the Tribe through which he was unblest,
None gazed without remorse upon his brow,
None felt his glance without an aching breast:
Magnificent in beauty even now,
Ravaged by grief and fury and unrest,
He moved among them swift and stern of deed,
And always silent save in action's need.

XXI

And thus went forth, and unrejoicingly
Drank deep of war's hot wine: as one who drinks
And only grows more sullen, while yet he
Never the challenge of the full cup shrinks;
And rises pale with horror when the glee
Of careless revellers into slumber sinks,
Because the feast which could not give him joy
At least kept phantoms from their worst annoy.

XXII

The lion of the Azra is come back
A meagre wolf! foes mocked, who mocked no more
When midnight scared them with his fresh attack
After the long day's fighting, and the war
Found him for ever wolf-like on their track,
As if consumed with slakeless thirst of gore:
Since he was cursed from slumber and repose,
He wreaked his restlessness on friends and soes.

XXIII

The lightnings of his keen sword ever flashed
Without a ray of lightning in his glance;
His blade where blades were thickest clove or clashed
Without a war-cry: ever in advance
He sought out death; but death as if abashed
Adopted for its own his sword and lance,
And rode his steed, and swayed aside or blunted
The eager hostile weapons he affronted.

XXIV

Once in the thick of battle as he raged
Thus cold and dumb amidst the furious cries,
Hassan the bard was near to him engaged,
And read a weird in those forlorn fixed eyes;

And singing of that combat they had waged
Gave voice to what surpassed his own surmise:
For our young Lion of the mateless doom
Shall never go a cold corpse to the tomb!

XXV

Awe silenced him who sang, and deep awe fell
On those who heard it round the campfire's blaze:
But when they questioned he had nought to tell;
The vision had departed from his gaze.
The verse took wing and was a mighty spell;
Upon the foe new terror and amaze,
To friends redoubled force; to one alone,
The hero's self, it long remained unknown.

XXVI

While Weddah in the South with fiery will
Bore conquest wheresoe'er his banner flew,
Walid with royal heart and patient skill
Upon the Syrian confines triumphed too.
They never met: each felt a savage thrill
Which jarred his inmost being through and through
As still fresh fame the other's fame enlarged:
Each wished his rival in the ranks he charged.

XXVII

And when the foemen sued at length for peace
To victors surfeited with war's alarms,
Save him who knew all rest in rest must cease,
They said: O warriors, not by your own arms,
Though they are mighty! may their might increase!
But more by Om-el-Bonain's fatal charms,
Possessing both who lost her and who won,
Have we been baffled, vanquished, and undone.

XXVIII

Whence Hassan sang his sudden daring ode
Of Beauty revelling in the storm of fight:
For if the warriors into battle rode,
Their hearts were kindled by her living light;
Either as sun that in pure azure glowed,
Or baleful star in deep despair's black night:
And whether by despair or joy she lit
Intenser fires perplexed the poet's wit.

XXIX

And would you know why empires break asunder,
Why peoples perish and proud cities fall;
Seek not the captains where the steedclouds thunder,
Seek not the elders in the council hall;

But seek the chamber where some shining wonder
Of delicate beauty nestles, far from all
The turmoil, toying with adornments queenly,
And murmuring songs of tender love serenely.

XXX

The clashing cymbals and the trumpet's clangour
Are peacefuller than her soft trembling lute;
The armies raging with hot fire of anger
Are gentler than her gentle glances mute;
The restless rushings of her dainty languor
Outveer the wind, outspeed the barb's pursuit:
Well Hassan knows; who sings high laud and blessing
To this dear fatal riddle past all guessing.

Part III.

I

The war was over for the time; and men
Returned to heal its wounds, repair its waste,
And thus grow strong and rich to fight again.
And Weddah, cold in victory's sun, embraced
The uncle whom his glory warmed; and then,
Gathering his spoil of gems and gold in haste,
Rode forth: the clansmen wondered much to find
His famous favourite steed was left behind.

II

He set out in the night: none knew his goal,
Though some might fix it in their secret thought.
He could no longer stifle or control,
In calm by battle's fever undistraught,
The piteous yearning of his famished soul
Which unappeasably its food besought;
Fretting his life out like an infant's cry,
Let us but see her once before we die!

III

When he returned not, soon the rumour spread,
That he had vanished now his work was done;
The prophecy had been fulfilled; not dead,
But in the body borne beyond the sun,
He lived eternal life. He heard this said
Himself in Walid's city, where as one
Who sojourns but for traffic's sake he dwelt;
And hearing it, more surely shrouded felt.

IV

Courteous and humble as beseemeth trade,
While ever on the watch, some gems he sold:
Men said, this young man is discreet and staid,
Yet fair in dealing, nor too fond of gold.

He smiled to hear his virtues thus arrayed,
A smile that gloomed to frowning; but controlled
The haughty spirit surging in his breast;
The end in view, what mattered all the rest?

V

The end in reach: for now the favourite slave
Of Om-el-Bonain, as he knew full well;
A frank-eyed girl, whose bosom was a wave
Whereon love's lotus lightly rose and fell;
Drew near to him, attracted by his grave
Unsceptred majesty, and by the spell
Of his intense and fathomless regard,
Splendid in gloom as midnight myriad-starred.

VI

She haggled for a trinket with her tongue
To veil the eager commerce of her eyes;
Those daring smugglers when the heart is young,
For contraband of passion. His disguise
In talk with her but loosely round him hung;
She glimpsed a secret and an enterprise;
Love's flower, unsunned by hope, soon fades; she grieves,
Yet still returns to scent the rich dead leaves.

VII

Till sick at heart and desperate with delay
He ventured all, abruptly flinging down
The weary mask: if death must end the play,
Better at once: I learn that in your town
Dwells Om-el-Bonain, whom you know men say,
Upon her eye-flash dropped a decent frown:
She is my mistress, and great Walid's wife—
The word his heart sought, stabbed in with a knife.

VIII

Your mistress is my cousin; and will be
The friend of who shall tell her I am here.
But if I may not trust your secrecy,
Tell Walid, tell not her: and have no fear
That I will harm you for harm done to me,
Unaimed at her. The life I hold not dear
Might dower you well. But with a passionate oath
The eager girl swore loyalty to both.

IX

Then hurried from him to her lady sweet,
And thrilled her frozen heart with burning pang:
For life resigned and torpid in defeat
To new contention with its fate upsprang,

This sword of hope sound lying at her feet
While love's impetuous clarion summons rang:
Weddah alive: alive and here! Beware!
If you now mock, Hell mock your dying prayer!

X

I saw a merchant: never chief or king
Of form so noble visited our land;
He wore a little ring, a lady's ring,
On the last finger of a feared right hand;
Some woe enormous overshadowing
Made beauty terrible that had been bland;
He was convulsed when he would speak your name,
From such abysses of his heart it came.

XI

Now whether this be Weddah's self or not,
My Lady in her wisdom must decide.
The lady's questions ploughed the self-same spot
Over and over lest some grains should hide
Of this vast treasure fallen to her lot:
Swear by the Prophet's tomb I may confide
In you as in myself until the end;
And Om-el-Bonain lives and dies your friend.

XII

Brave Amine swore, and bravely held the vow.
Her mistress kept her babbling all that eve,
A pleasant rill. And on the morrow: Now
Go bid him tell all friends that he must leave
In seven days; so much we must allow,
So many starving hours of bliss bereave!
His travels urge him in his own despite;
He gives a farewell feast on such a night:

XIII

And in the meanwhile he shall fully learn
What is to follow. When this message came,
The thick dark in him 'gan to seethe and burn
Till soul and body fused in one clear flame.
His guests all blinked with wonder to discern
This glowing heart of joy; and flushed with shame
Unmerited for having thought him cold,
Who made their old feel young, their young feel old.

XIV

The long week passed; the morning came to crown
Or kill the lovers' hope. It was a day
Well chosen, for some guests of high renown
Left Walid, who would speed them on their way;

And festal tumult filled the sunny town.
The merchant in departure strolled astray
Amongst the groups about the palace heaving
To glimpse the rich procession form for leaving.

XV

And when it left, absorbing every eye;
A stream of splendours rolling with the din
Of horn and tabor under that blue sky;
Came Amine carelessly and led him in,
With chat of certain anklets she would buy;
And led him lounging onwards till they win
A storeroom where her mistress daily spent
Some matin hours on household cares intent.

XVI

Large chests were ranged around it, one of which
They had made ready with most loving care;
Lurked apertures among the carvings rich,
Above its deep soft couch, for light and air:
Behold your prison cell, your palace niche,
The jewel casket of my Lady fair!
I lock you in; from her must come your key:
Love's captives pay sweet ransom to get free!

XVII

She found her mistress fever-flushed, and told
Their full success: Our prisoner is secure;
A lion meek as lambkin of the fold,
Prepared your harshest torments to endure!
But, dearest Lady, as you have been bold,
Be prudent, prudent, prudent, and assure
Long life to bliss. Now with your leave I go
To be well seen of all the house below.

XVIII

She took another stairway for descent,
And sauntered round to the front courtyard gate,
Chatting and laughing lightly as she went
With various groups, all busy in debate
On those departed guests: and some were shent
For meanness maugre retinue and state,
And some extolled for bounteous disposition,
And all summed up with judgment-day precision.

XIX

Of all her fellow-slaves it seemed but one,
Whose breast was tinder for love's flame would she
Vouchsafe a spark, had spied the venture run:
Soho, my flirting madam, where is he

You brought in here an hour since with your fun?
A happy rogue, whoever he may be!
Have you already tired of this new dandy,
Or hid him somewhere to be always handy?

XX

The stupid jealous creature that you are!
Where were your eyes, then, not to know his face?
For weeks back he has dealt in our bazaar,
And now is on the road to some new place.
He had an emerald and diamond star
I thought might win my poor dear Lady's grace;
She would not even look at it, alack!
I packed him off for ever with his pack.

XXI

Thus these long-hapless lovers for awhile,
Enringed with dreadful fire, safe ambush found,
Screened by its very glare; a magic isle
By roaring billows guarded well till drowned;
A refuge spot of green and liquid smile
Whose rampart was the simoom gathering round:
If darkness hid them, it was thunder gloom
Whose light must come in lightnings to consume.

XXII

And even as Iskander's self, for whom
The whole broad earth sufficed not, found at last
Full scope vouchsafed him in the narrow tomb;
So he long pining in the desert vast
As in a dungeon, found now ample room,
Found perfect freedom and content, shut fast
Alive within that coffer-coffin lonely,
Which gave him issue to that chamber only.

XXIII

They knew what peril compassed them about,
But could not feel the dread it would inspire;
Imperious love shut other passions out,
Or made them fuel for his altar fire.
At first one sole thought harassed them with doubt;
To kill her lord and flee? Then tribe and sire
Would justly curse them; for in every act
He had been loyal to the evil pact.

XXIV

He had indeed wronged them; for well he knew
Their love from infancy, their plighted troth,
When merciless in mastery he drew
From her repugnant lips the fatal oath:

That love avenged the wrong of love was due;
But still his blood was sacred to them both;
The tender husband and the proved ally
They dare not harm; must death come, they could die.

XXV

Die! Often he would dream for hours supine
Upon his lidded couch, Life's dream is over;
I wait the resurrection in this shrine:
Anon an angel cometh to uncover
The inmost glories of the realm divine,
Because though dead I still am faithful lover;
My spirit drinks its fill of bliss, and then
Sinks back into this twilight trance again.

XXVI

Like bird above its young one in the nest
Which cannot fly, he often heard her singing;
The thrill and swell of rapture from her breast
In fountains of delightful music springing:
It seemed he had been borne among the blest,
Whose quires around his darksome couch were ringing;
Long after that celestial voice sank mute
His heartstrings kept sweet tremble like a lute.

XXVII

She heard his breathing like a muffled chime,
She heard his tranquil heart-beats through the flow
Of busy menials in the morning time;
Far-couched at night she felt a sudden glow,
And straight her breathing answered rhyme for rhyme
His softest furtive footsteps to and fro:
And none else heard? She marvelled how the sense
Of living souls could be so dull and dense.

XXVIII

Once early, early, ere the dawn grew loud,
She stole to watch his slumber by its gleam;
And blushing with a soft laugh-gurgle bowed
And sank as in the bosom of a stream,
An ardent angel in a rosy cloud
Resolving the enchantment of his dream:
Where there is room for thee, is room for us;
So may I share thy death-sarcophagus!

XXIX

She grew so lovely, ravishing, and sweet,
Her brow so radiant and her lips so warm;

Such rich heart-music stirred her buoyant feet,
And swayed the gestures of her lithe young form,
And revelled in her voice to bliss complete;
That Walid whirled with his great passion's storm,
Befooled with joy, went doting down his hell:
Oh, tame and meek, my skittish wild gazelle!

XXX

Thus these, sings Hassan, of their love's full measure
Drank swiftly in that circle of swift fire;
A veil of light and ardour to their pleasure
Till it revealed their ashes on one pyre:
Some never win, some spend in youth this treasure,
And crawl down sad age starvelings of desire:
These lavished royal wealth in one brief season,
But Death found both so rich he gave them reason.

Part IV.

I

The tender almond-blossom flushed and white
Sank floating in warm flakes through lucid air;
The rose flung forth into the sea of light
Her heart of fire and incense burning bare;

The nightingale thrilled all the breathless night
With passion so intense it seemed despair:
And still these lovers drank love's perfect wine
From that gold urn of secrecy divine.

II

Then Fate prepared the end. A grey old man,
Bowed down with grief who had not bent with time,
Made way to Walid in the full divan:
His son, great-hearted and in youth's hot prime,
Was now a fugitive and under ban
For an indignant deed of sinless crime;
A noble heirloom pearl the suppliant brought
To clear the clouded face ere he besought.

III

This pearl in Walid's mood of golden joy
Shone fair as morning star in rosy dawn;
He called his minion, Motar: Take this toy
Unto your Lady where she sits withdrawn,
With my love-greeting, and this message, boy:
Were this a string of such, a monarch's pawn,
A pearl for every note, it would not pay
That song I heard you singing yesterday.

IV

They had been leaning for an hour perchance,
Motionless, gazing in each other's eyes;
Floating in deep pure joy, whose still expanse
Rippled but rarely with long satiate sighs;
Their souls so intermingled in the trance,
So far away dissolved through fervent skies,
That it was marvel how each fair mute form
Without its pulse and breath remained life-warm.

V

When rapid footsteps almost at the door
Stung her to vigilance, and her fierce start
Shook Weddah, and that lion of proud war
Must flee to covert like a timid hart:
But drunken with the message he now bore
The saucy youth flew in, Fate's servile dart,
Without announcement; and espied, what he,
Still subtle though amazed, feigned not to see.

VI

The message with the goodly pearl he gave:
She could for wrath have ground it into dust
Between her richer teeth, and stabbed the slave
Who brought it; but most bitterly she must

Put on sweet smiles of pleasure, and the knave
With tender answer full of thanks entrust.
He lingered: Our kind lady will bestow
Some little mark of bounty ere I go?

VII

Her anger cried: Only the message dear
Has saved the messenger from punishment;
If evermore as now you enter here
You shall be scourged and starved and prison-pent.
He cowered away from her in sullen fear,
And darted from the room; and as he went
The sting of her rebuke was curdling all
His blood of vanity to poison gall.

VIII

He hissed in Walid's ear the seething spite:
My Lord's pearl by my Lady's was surpassed;
In that rich cedar coffer to the right
I saw the treasure being hidden fast;
A gallant, young and beautiful and bright.
Unmothered slave, be that foul lie your last!
And clove the scandal with his instant sword
Strong Walid: Motar had his full reward.

IX

When Weddah, plunged from glory into gloom,
Heard that last speech of Om-el-Bonain there,
A sudden ominous sense of icy doom
Assailed his glowing heart with bleak despair.
The moment that false slave had left the room
She sprang to seize her lover in his lair:
She bowed all quivering like a storm-swept palm;
He rose to meet her solemn, pale and calm.

X

He clasped her with strong passion to his breast,
He kissed her with a very tender kiss:
Soul of my soul! what lives men call most blest
Can be compared to our brief lives in bliss?
But one wild year of anguish and unrest;
Three moons of perfect secret love! Were this
My dying hour, I thankfully attest
Of all earth's dooms I have enjoyed the best.

XI

What, weeping, thou, such kiss-unworthy tears!
The glory of the Azra must not weep,
Whom mighty Weddah worships, for cold fears;
But only for strong love, in stillness deep,

Secluded from all alien eyes and ears.
And now to vigil, and perchance to sleep,
Enshrined once more: be proud and calm and strong;
Your second visitor will come ere long.

XII

And scarcely was all said when Walid came,
Full gently stealing for a tiger-spring;
His love and fury, hope and fear and shame,
All mad with venom from that serpent's sting,
Like wild beasts huddled in a den of flame
Within the cool white palace of a king:
She rose to greet; he deigned no glance of quest,
But went and lolled upon that cedar chest.

XIII

I come like any haggler of the mart,
Who having sent a bauble seeks its price:
Will you forgive the meanness of my part,
And one of these fair coffers sacrifice?
A clutch of iron fingers gript her heart
Till it seemed bursting in the cruel vice:
And yet she quivered not, nor breathed a moan:
Are not myself and all things here your own?

XIV

I thank you for the bountiful award;
And choose, say this whereon I now sit here?
Take any, take them all; but that, my Lord,
Is full of household stuff and woman's gear.
I want the coffer, not what it may hoard,
However rich and beautiful and dear.
And it is thine, she said; and this the key:
Her royal hand outheld it steadfastly.

XV

Swift as a double flash from thunder-skies
The angel and the devil of his doubt
Flamed from the sombre windows of his eyes:
He went and took the key she thus held out,
And turned as if he would unlock his prize.
She breathed not; all the air ran blood about
A swirl of terrors and wild hopes of guilt;
Calm Weddah seized, then loosed, his dagger-hilt.

XVI

But Walid had restrained himself, and thought:
Shall I unlock the secret of my soul,
The mystery of my Fate, that has been brought
So perfectly within my own control?

That were indeed a work by folly wrought:
For Time, in this my vassal, must unroll
To me, and none but me, what I would learn;
I hold the vantage, undiscerned discern.

XVII

He summoned certain slaves, and bade them bear
The coffer he had sealed with his own seal
Into a room below with strictest care;
And followed thoughtful at the last one's heel.
At noontide Amine found her mistress there,
Benumbed with horror, deaf to her appeal;
The sightless eyes fixed glaring on that door
By which her soul had vanished evermore.

XVIII

Beneath the cedar whose noonshadow large,
Level from massive trunk, outspread halfway
Adown a swardslope to the river marge,
Where rosebowers shone between the willows grey,
The wondering bearers bore their heavy charge;
And where the central shadow thickest lay
He bade them delve a pit, and delve it deep
Till watersprings against their strokes should leap.

XIX

Then waved them to a distance, while he bowed
Upon the coffer, hearkening for a space:
If truth bought that poor wretch his bloody shroud,
I bury thus her guilt and my disgrace;
And you, as by the whole earth disavowed,
Sink into nothingness and leave no trace:
If not, it is a harmless whim enough
To sepulchre a chest of household stuff.

XX

With face encircled by his hands, which leaned
Upon the wood, he challenged clear and slow:
The hollow sound, his full hot breath thus screened
Suffused his visage with a tingling glow;
His pulse, his vesture's rustling intervened
And marred the silence: he drew back, and so
Knelt listening yet awhile with bated breath:
The secret lay as mute and still as death.

XXI

Above there in her chamber Weddah might
Have leapt forth suddenly their foe to kill.
Ev'n here with hazard of swift fight and flight
Escaped or perished as a warrior still;

But thus through him her name had suffered blight:
He locked his breath and nerves with rigid will.
So Walid first let sink his key unused,
Then signed the slaves back: they wrought on, he mused

XXII

Against the dark bulk swelled the waters thin,
The stones and earth were trampled to a mound.
He then broke silence, stern and sad: Within
That coffer ye have buried, sealed and bound,
Lies one of the most potent evil djinn,
Whose hate on me and mine hath darkly frowned;
He sought to kill your mistress: Hell and Doom
And Allah's curse all guard this dungeon-tomb!

XXIII

And Walid never spoke of this again,
And none dared ask him; for his brow grew black
His eye flamed evil and appalling when
Some careless word but strayed upon a track
That might from far lead to it: therefore men
Spoke only of the thing behind his back.
The cedar shadow centred by that mound
Was sacredly eschewed as haunted ground.

100

XXIV

But one pale phantom, noon and night and morn,
Was ever seen there; quiet as a stone,
Huddled and shapeless, weeping tears forlorn
As silent as the dews; her heart alone
And not her lips, whose seal was never torn,
Upbraiding sluggish death with constant moan.
Hushed whispers circled, piteous eyes were wet;
The captive djinnee holds her captive yet.

XXV

Thus Walid learned too well the bitter truth,
His home dissolved, its marvellous joy a cheat;
Yet gave no sign to her: for there was ruth
Of memories gall itself left subtly sweet;
And consciousness of wrong against her youth,
And surfeit of a vengeance so complete:
He could not stab her bleeding heart; her name
With his own honour he kept pure from shame.

XXVI

She thought Death dead, or prisoned in deep Hell
As sole assuager of the human lot:
But when the evening of the seventh day fell
Walid alone dared tread the fatal spot:

101

She crouched as who would plunge into a well,
Livid and writhed into a desperate knot;
Her fingers clutched like talons in the mould:
Thus the last time his arms about her fold.

XXVII

As if to glut the demon with her doom,
And break the spell, there where her corse was found
He had it buried; and a simple tomb
Of black-domed marble sealed the dolorous mound;
And there was set to guard the cedar gloom
A triple cirque of cypress-trees around:
Thus Love wrought Destiny to join his slaves
Weddah and Om-el-Bonain in their graves.

XXVIII

True Amine, freed and richly dowered, no less
Had served until the end her lady dear;
And shrouded for the grave that loveliness
Whose noon-eclipse left life without its peer:
Then sought the Azra in her lone distress,
And tended Abd-el-Aziz through the sere
Forlorn last days; and married in the clan,
And bore brave children to a valiant man.

102

XXIX

Great Walid lived long years beyond this woe,
And still increased in wealth and power and glory;
A loyal friend, a formidable foe;
Each Azra was his mother's child saith story;
And he saw goodly children round him grow
To keep his name green when Death took him hoary:
So prosperous, was he happy too? the sage
Cites this one counsel of his reverend age:

XXX

Have brood-mares in your stables, my young friend,
And women in your harem, but no wife:
A common daggerblade may pierce or rend,
A month bring healing; this, the choicest knife
In Fate's whole armoury, wounds beyond amend,
And with a scratch can poison all your life;
And it lies naked in your naked breast
When you are drunk with joy and sleep's rich rest.

XXXI

As surely as a very precious stone
Finds out that jeweller who doth excel,
So surely to the bard becometh known
The tale which only he can fitly tell:

103

A few years thence, and Walid's heart alone
Had thrilled not to a talisman's great spell,
His deathstone set in Hassan's golden verse;
Here poorly copied in cheap bronze or worse.

XXXII

He ends: We know not which to most admire;
The lover who went silent to his doom;
The spouse obedient to her lord's just ire,
The mistress faithful to her lover's tomb;
The husband calm in jealousy's fierce fire,
Who strode unswerving through the doubtful gloom
To vengeance instant, secret and complete,
And did not strike one blow more than was meet.

XXXIII

With stringent cords of circumstance dark Fate
Doth certain lives here so entoil and mesh
That some or all must strangle if they wait,
And knife to cut the knots must cut quick flesh:
The first strong arm free severs ere too late;
Fresh writhings would but tangle it afresh:
To die with valiant fortitude, to kill
As priest not butcher; so much scope has will.

104

XXXIV

These perished, and he slew them, in such wise
That all may meet as friends and free from shame,
Whether they meet in Hell or Paradise.
If he has won long life and power and fame,
Our darlings too have won their own set prize,
Conjoined for evermore in true love's name:
The Azra die when they do love, of old
Was graven with the iron pen, on gold.

XXXV

May Allah grant eternal joy and youth
In fateless Heaven to one and all of these.
And for himself a little grain of ruth
The bard will beg, this once, while on his knees;
Who cannot always see the very truth,
And does not always sing the truth he sees,
But something pleasanter to foolish ears
That should be tickled not with straws but spears.

1868–9.

105

TWO LOVERS

Their eyes met; flashed an instant like swift swords
That leapt unparrying to each other's heart,
Jarring convulsion through the inmost chords;
Then fell, for they had fully done their part.

She, in the manner of her folk unveiled,
Might have been veiled for all he saw of her;
Those sudden eyes, from which he reeled and quailed;
The old life dead, no new life yet astir.

His good steed bore him onward slow and proud:
And through the open lattice still she leant;
Pale, still, though whirled in a black rushing cloud,
As if on her fair flowers and dreams intent.

Days passed, and he passed timid, furtive, slow:
Nights came, and he came motionless and mute;
A steadfast sentinel till morning-glow,
Though blank her window, dumb her voice and lute.

106

She loved: the Cross stretched rigid arms to scare
Her soul from the perdition of that love;
She saw Christ's wounds bleed when she knelt in prayer,
And frown abhorrent all the saints above.

He loved: the Crescent hung with sharp cold gleam,
A scimitar to cleave such love in twain;
The Prophet menaced in his waking dream,
Livid and swoln with wrath that great brow-vein.

Each sternly true to the immortal soul,
Crushed down the passion of the mortal heart;
Which bled away beneath the iron control,
But inwardly: they die; none sees the smart.

Thus long months went, until his time came round
To leave that city terrible and dear;
To go afar on soulless business bound,
Perchance for absence of a whole dead year.

No word: but as she knelt to pray one night,
What was that silk thing pendant from the Cross?
Half of a talisman of chrysolite:
Farewell! Full triumph stunned like fatal loss.

107

A sacred jewel-charm of sovereign power
'Gainst demons haunting soul and sense and brain,
'Gainst madness: had it not until that hour
Despite love's impious frenzy kept him sane?

Now let her look forth boldly day by day;
He will not come to wound her with his eyes;
Now at the open lattice darkling stay,
Only the stars are watching from the skies;

Now with clear spirit let her sing and pray;
No human presence clouds her Lord's full light:
Now let her weep and moan and waste away,
With broken heart a-bleeding day and night.

Thin as a spectre, haggard, taciturn,
He reached his native city; there did all
He had to do: indifferent yet stern,
As one whose task must end ere evening-fall.

Then sank, and knew that Azrael was near:
The hard dull rage of impotent remorse
Burned into passion that consumed old fear:
He loathed his unlived life, his unspent force.

108

“Must we be sundered, then, beyond the grave,
By that which here has sundered us? Not so!
I can be lost with her I cannot save,
And with these Christian dogs to deep Hell go.”

A priest baptized the sinking renegade,
A priest assured him of the Heaven he spurned;
His wealth for many a mass thereafter paid;
And many a Moslem his example turned.

A friend had sworn to do his last behest;
To be his swift and faithful messenger:
His own half talisman from his true breast
Would seal the truth of all things told to her.

The funeral over, while the stars yet shone
Though pale in the new dawn, this friend forth-spurred;
Brief rests, long stages, hurried fiercely on;
Hating the errand, loyal to his word.

Twenty days' travel done in thrice three days,
He reached her city, found her mansion there;
A crowd before it busy with amaze,
Cries from within it wounding the sweet air.

109

She was no more since that day's sun had set;
But wonder outran grief; for ere she died
Infinite yearning, fathomless regret,
Flooded her soul and drowned its faith and pride.

“Shall I be happy with the saints above,
While he is burning in the paynim Hell?
Here I have cheated him of all my love,
But there with him I can for ever dwell.”

So she renounced the Cross and threefold God,
And died in Islam; whence the bruit was great.
Silent the friend his backward journey trod,
Silent, and shrouded with the sense of Fate.

Thus in the very hour supreme of death
These two great hearts first dared live perfect life;
Drew inspiration with their failing breath,
Snatched victory as they sank down slain in strife.

And thus Fate mocked them, who when life was sweet
Had kept apart, both famished to the core;
Let them draw near and in the death-point meet,
But to diverge for ever, evermore.

110

Yet both died happy in self-sacrifice;
A dolorous happiness, yet true and deep:
And Gods and Fate and Hell and Paradise
Perchance are one to their eternal sleep.

Poor human hearts, that yearn beyond the tomb,
Wherein you all must moulder into dust!
What has the blank immitigable gloom
Of light or fervour to reward your trust?

Live out your whole free life while yet on earth;
Seize the quick Present, prize your one sure boon;
Though brief, each day a golden sun has birth;
Though dim, the night is gemmed with stars and moon.

Love out your cordial love, hate out your hate;
Be strong to grasp a foe, to clasp a friend:
Your wants true laws are; thirst and hunger sate:
Feel you have been yourselves when comes the end.

Let the great gods, if they indeed exist,
Fight out their fight themselves; for they are strong:
How can we puny mortals e'er assist?
How judge the supra-mortal right and wrong?

111

But if we made these gods, with all their strife,
And not they us: what frenzy equals this;
To starve, maim, poison, strangle our poor life,
For empty shadows of death's dark abyss?

This man and maiden claim a brother's tear,
Martyrs of sweet love, killed by bitter faith;
Defrauded by the Gods of glad life here,
And mocked by Doom in their heroic death.

1867.

112

TO OUR LADIES OF DEATH

“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.”
—Shakespeare: Sonnet 66.

Weary of erring in this desert Life,
Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain,
Weary of struggling in all-sterile strife,
Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain,
I close my eyes and calm my panting breath,
And pray to Thee, O ever-quiet Death!
To come and soothe away my bitter pain.

The strong shall strive,—may they be victors crowned;
The wise still seek,—may they at length find Truth;
The young still hope,—may purest love be found
To make their age more glorious than their youth.

113

For me; my brain is weak, my heart is cold,
My hope and faith long dead; my life but bold
In jest and laugh to parry hateful ruth.

Over me pass the days and months and years
Like squadrons and battalions of the foe
Trampling with thoughtless thrusts and alien jeers
Over a wounded soldier lying low:
He grips his teeth, or flings them words of scorn
To mar their triumph: but the while, outworn,
Inwardly craves for death to end his woe.

Thus I, in secret, call, O Death! to Thee,
Thou Youngest of the solemn Sisterhood,
Thou Gentlest of the mighty Sisters Three
Whom I have known so well since first endued
By Love and Grief with vision to discern
What spiritual life doth throb and burn
Through all our world, with evil powers and good.

The Three whom I have known so long, so well,
By intimate communion, face to face,
In every mood, of Earth, of Heaven, of Hell,
In every season and in every place,
That joy of Life has ceased to visit me,
As one estranged by powerful witchery,
Infatuate in a Siren's weird embrace.

114

First Thou, O priestess, prophetess, and queen,
Our Lady of Beatitudes, first Thou:
Of mighty stature, of seraphic mien,
Upon the tablet of whose broad white brow
Unvanquishable Truth is written clear,
The secret of the mystery of our sphere,
The regnant word of the Eternal Now.

Thou standest garmented in purest white;
But from thy shoulders wings of power half-spread
Invest thy form with such miraculous light
As dawn may clothe the earth with: and, instead
Of any jewel-kindled golden crown,
The glory of thy long hair flowing down
Is dazzling noonday sunshine round thy head.

Upon a sword thy left hand resteth calm,
A naked sword, two-edged and long and straight;
A branch of olive with a branch of palm
Thy right hand proffereth to hostile Fate.
The shining plumes that clothe thy feet are bound
By knotted strings, as if to tread the ground
With weary steps when thou wouldst soar elate.

Twin heavens uplifted to the heavens, thine eyes
Are solemn with unutterable thought
And love and aspiration; yet there lies
Within their light eternal sadness, wrought

115

By hope deferred and baffled tenderness:
Of all the souls whom thou dost love and bless,
How few revere and love thee as they ought!

Thou leadest heroes from their warfare here
To nobler fields where grander crowns are won;
Thou leadest sages from this twilight sphere
To cloudless heavens and an unsetting sun;
Thou leadest saints into that purer air
Whose breath is spiritual life and prayer:
Yet, lo! they seek thee not, but fear and shun!

Thou takest to thy most maternal breast
Young children from the desert of this earth,
Ere sin hath stained their souls, or grief opprest,
And bearest them unto an heavenly birth,
To be the Vestals of God's Fane above:
And yet their kindred moan against thy love,
With wild and selfish moans in bitter dearth.

Most holy Spirit, first Self-conqueror;
Thou Victress over Time and Destiny
And Evil, in the all-deciding war
So fierce, so long, so dreadful!—Would that me
Thou hadst upgathered in my life's pure morn!
Unworthy then, less worthy now, forlorn,
I dare not, Gracious Mother, call on Thee.

116

Next Thou, O sibyl, sorceress and queen,
Our Lady of Annihilation, Thou!
Of mighty stature, of demoniac mien;
Upon whose swarthy face and livid brow
Are graven deeply anguish, malice, scorn,
Strength ravaged by unrest, resolve forlorn
Of any hope, dazed pride that will not bow.

Thy form is clothed with wings of iron gloom;
But round about thee, like a chain, is rolled,
Cramping the sway of every mighty plume,
A stark constringent serpent fold on fold:
Of its two heads, one sting is in thy brain,
The other in thy heart; their venom-pain
Like fire distilling through thee uncontrolled.

A rod of serpents wieldeth thy right hand;
Thy left a cup of raging fire, whose light
Burns lurid on thyself as thou dost stand;
Thy lidless eyes tenebriously bright;
Thy wings, thy vesture, thy dishevelled hair
Dark as the Grave; thou statue of Despair,
Thou Night essential radiating night.

Thus have I seen thee in thine actual form;
Not thus can see thee those whom thou dost sway,
Inscrutable Enchantress: young and warm,
Pard-beautiful and brilliant, ever gay;

117

Thy cup the very Wine of Life, thy rod
The wand of more voluptuous spells than God
Can wield in Heaven; thus charmest thou thy prey.

The selfish, fatuous, proud, and pitiless,
All who have falsified life's royal trust;
The strong whose strength hath basked in idleness,
The great heart given up to worldly lust,
The great mind destitute of moral faith;
Thou scourgest down to Night and utter Death,
Or penal spheres of retribution just.

O mighty Spirit, fraudful and malign,
Demon of madness and perversity!
The evil passions which may make me thine
Are not yet irrepressible in me;
And I have pierced thy mask of riant youth,
And seen thy form in all its hideous truth:
I will not, Dreadful Mother, call on Thee.

Last Thou, retirèd nun and throneless queen,
Our Lady of Oblivion, last Thou:
Of human stature, of abstracted mien;
Upon whose pallid face and drooping brow
Are shadowed melancholy dreams of Doom,
And deep absorption into silent gloom,
And weary bearing of the heavy Now.

118

Thou art all shrouded in a gauzy veil,
Sombrous and cloudlike; all, except that face
Of subtle loveliness though weirdly pale.
Thy soft, slow-gliding footsteps leave no trace,
And stir no sound. Thy drooping hands infold
Their frail white fingers; and, unconscious, hold
A poppy-wreath, thine anodyne of grace.

Thy hair is like a twilight round thy head:
Thine eyes are shadowed wells, from Lethe-stream
With drowsy subterranean waters fed;
Obscurely deep, without a stir or gleam;
The gazer drinks in from them with his gaze
An opiate charm to curtain all his days,
A passive languor of oblivious dream.

Thou hauntest twilight regions, and the trance
Of moonless nights when stars are few and wan:
Within black woods; or over the expanse
Of desert seas abysmal; or upon
Old solitary shores whose populous graves
Are rocked in rest by ever-moaning waves;
Or through vast ruined cities still and lone.

The weak, the weary, and the desolate,
The poor, the mean, the outcast, the opprest,
All trodden down beneath the march of Fate,
Thou gatherest, loving Sister, to thy breast,

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Soothing their pain and weariness asleep;
Then in thy hidden Dreamland hushed and deep
Dost lay them, shrouded in eternal rest.

O sweetest Sister, and sole Patron Saint
Of all the humble eremites who flee
From out life's crowded tumult, stunned and faint,
To seek a stern and lone tranquillity
In Libyan wastes of time: my hopeless life
With famished yearning craveth rest from strife;
Therefore, thou Restful One, I call on Thee!

Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;
Down, down, far-hidden in thy duskiest cave;
While all the clamorous years above me sweep
Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance,
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.

Upgathered thus in thy divine embrace,
Upon mine eyes thy soft mesmeric hand,
While wreaths of opiate odour interlace
About my pulseless brow; babe-pure and bland,
Passionless, senseless, thoughtless, let me dream
Some ever-slumbrous, never-varying theme,
Within the shadow of thy Timeless Land.

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That when I thus have drunk my inmost fill
Of perfect peace, I may arise renewed;
In soul and body, intellect and will,
Equal to cope with Life whate'er its mood;
To sway its storm and energise its calm;
Through rhythmic years evolving like a psalm
Of infinite love and faith and sanctitude.

But if this cannot be, no less I cry,
Come, lead me with thy terrorless control
Down to our Mother's bosom, there to die
By abdication of my separate soul:
So shall this single, self-impelling piece
Of mechanism from lone labour cease,
Resolving into union with the Whole.

Our Mother feedeth thus our little life,
That we in turn may feed her with our death:
The great Sea sways, one interwoven strife,
Wherefrom the Sun exhales a subtle breath,
To float the heavens sublime in form and hue,
Then turning cold and dark in order due
Rain weeping back to swell the Sea beneath.

One part of me shall feed a little worm,
And it a bird on which a man may feed;
One lime the mould, one nourish insect-sperm;
One thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed;

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This swell a fruit, and that evolve in air;
Another trickle to a springlet's lair,
Another paint a daisy on the mead:

With cosmic interchange of parts for all,
Through all the modes of being numberless
Of every element, as may befall.
And if earth's general soul hath consciousness,
Their new life must with strange new joy be thrilled,
Of perfect law all perfectly fulfilled;
No sin, no fear, no failure, no excess.

Weary of living isolated life,
Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain,
Weary of struggling in all-sterile strife,
Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain,
I close my eyes and hush my panting breath,
And yearn for Thee, divinely tranquil Death,
To come and soothe away my bitter pain.

1861.

The Three Ladies suggested by the sublime sisterhood of Our Ladies of Sorrow, in the “Suspiria de Profundis” of De Quincey.

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THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT

“Per me si va nella città dolente.”
—Dante.

“Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre là donde son mosse;
Uso alcuno, alcun frutto
Indovinar non so.”
“Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
Ogni creata cosa,
In te, morte, si posa
Nostra ignuda natura;
Lieta no, ma sicura
Dell' antico dolor. . .
Però ch' esser beato
Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.”
—Leopardi.

Proem.

Lo, thus, as prostrate, “In the dust I write
My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.”
Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?
Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
And wail life's discords into careless ears?

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Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,
False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
Because it gives some sense of power and passion
In helpless impotence to try to fashion
Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.

Surely I write not for the hopeful young,
Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
Or such as pasture and grow fat among
The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
Or pious spirits with a God above them
To sanctify and glorify and love them,
Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.

For none of these I write, and none of these
Could read the writing if they deigned to try:
So may they flourish, in their due degrees,
On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.
If any cares for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would die.

Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
In that same city of tremendous night,

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Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
“I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.”

O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
To any who divined it not before:
None uninitiate by many a presage
Will comprehend the language of the message,
Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.

I.

The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold grey air;
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;
The sun has never visited that city,
For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought
And deadly weariness of heart all day.
But when a dream night after night is brought

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Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern that dream from real life in aught?

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.

A river girds the city west and south,
The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon
For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.

Upon an easy slope it lies at large,
And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest
Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.

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The city is not ruinous, although
Great ruins of an unremembered past,
With others of a few short years ago
More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement
In house or palace front from roof to basement
Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of rangèd mansions dark and still as tombs.
The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Yet as in some necropolis you find
Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
So there; worn faces that look deaf and blind
Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
A woman rarely, now and then a child:

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A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth
To see a little one from birth defiled,
Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to themselves, they speak
To one another seldom, for their woe
Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
One anodyne for torture and despair;
The certitude of Death, which no reprieve

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Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.

Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it will.

II.

Because he seemed to walk with an intent
I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:
Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet
We travelled many a long dim silent street.

At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:
He murmured to himself with dull despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.

Then turning to the right went on once more,
And travelled weary roads without suspense;
And reached at last a low wall's open door,
Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:

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He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.

Then turning to the right resumed his march,
And travelled streets and lanes with wondrous strength,
Until on stooping through a narrow arch
We stood before a squalid house at length:
He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.

When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,
I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
Of desolation I had seen and heard
In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
When Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed?

As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.

Then turning to the right paced on again,
And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms

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Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;
And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;
And paused to murmur with the old despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.

I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt
Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
He circled thus for ever tracing out
The series of the fraction left of Life;
Perpetual recurrence in the scope
Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.

Life divided by that persistent three=LXX/333=210.

III.

Although lamps burn along the silent streets;
Even when moonlight silvers empty squares
The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;
But when the night its sphereless mantle wears
The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,
The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,
The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.

And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:
The night remains for it as dark and dense,
Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns
As in the daylight with its natural sense;

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Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,
Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,
Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.

The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep
Becomes familiar though unreconciled;
Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,
And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,
Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;
But all more dubious than the things of vision,
So that it knows not when it is beguiled.

No time abates the first despair and awe,
But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing
Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law
Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;
Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,
Dazed with such mysteries of woe and error,
The soul is too outworn for wondering.

IV.

He stood alone within the spacious square
Declaiming from the central grassy mound,
With head uncovered and with streaming hair,
As if large multitudes were gathered round:
A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,
The glances burning with unnatural light:—

132

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note,
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
And thus for hours; then some enormous things
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,
That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow
Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell
For Devil's roll-call and some fête of Hell:
Yet I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

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As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Meteors ran
And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;
The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,
The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;
The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged
And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:
Yet I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Air once more,
And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;
Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,
The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;
White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;
The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:
And I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: On the left
The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;
There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,
A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;

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Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,
And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:
Still I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: From the right
A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;
A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;
O desolation moving with such grace!
O anguish with such beauty in thy face!
I fell as on my bier,
Hope travailed with such fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: I was twain,
Two selves distinct that cannot join again;
One stood apart and knew but could not stir,
And watched the other stark in swoon and her;
And she came on, and never turned aside,
Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:
And as she came more near
My soul grew mad with fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Hell is mild
And piteous matched with that accursèd wild;

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A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
A broad blackband ran down her snow-white shroud;
That lamp she held was her own burning heart,
Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:
The mystery was clear;
Mad rage had swallowed fear.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: By the sea
She knelt and bent above that senseless me;
Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,
She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;
She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,
She heeded not the level rushing flow:
And mad with rage and fear,
I stood stonebound so near.

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: When the tide
Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,
She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne
Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
They love; their doom is drear,
Yet they nor hope nor fear;
But I, what do I here?

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V.

How he arrives there none can clearly know:
Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,
Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,
Or down the river's boiling cataracts:
To reach it is as dying fever-stricken;
To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;
And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.

But being there one feels a citizen;
Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:
Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?
And yet release does come; there comes a morn
When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly
That all the world is changed for him completely,
And he is verily as if new-born.

He scarcely can believe the blissful change,
He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;
Never again will he approach the range
Infected by that evil spell now burst:
Poor wretch! who once hath paced that dolent city
Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,
With horror ever deepening from the first.

Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,
A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,

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And love them more than death or happy life,
They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;
Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,
Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,
Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared:

VI.

I sat forlornly by the river-side,
And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
Above the blackness of the swelling tide,
Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;
And heard the heave and plashing of the flow
Against the wall a dozen feet below.

Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;
And under one, a few steps from my seat,
I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,
Although I had not heard approaching feet:
These bodiless voices in my waking dream
Flowed dark words blending with the sombre stream:—

And you have after all come back; come back.
I was about to follow on your track.
And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.

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That I have failed is proved by my return:
The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn.
But listen; and the story you shall learn.

I reached the portal common spirits fear,
And read the words above it, dark yet clear,
“Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:”

And would have passed in, gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain,
Instead of this insufferable inane.

A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;
First leave your hopes behind!—But years have passed
Since I left all behind me, to the last:

You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,
This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:
How could I seek to enter void of it?

He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,
And would find entrance to our gulf of dole
Without the payment of the settled toll?

Outside the gate he showed an open chest:
Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;
Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.

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This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
They are so thin that it will never glut.

I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;
And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.

When one casts off a load he springs upright,
Squares back his shoulders, breathes with all his might,
And briskly paces forward strong and light:

But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;
The whole frame sank; however strong and proud
Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.

And as they passed me, earnestly from each
A morsel of his hope I did beseech,
To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.

Not one would cede a tittle of his store,
Though knowing that in instants three or four
He must resign the whole for evermore.

So I returned. Our destiny is fell;
For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,
Shut out alike from Heaven and Earth and Hell.

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The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope
With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,
We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;

And, sharing it between us, entrance win,
In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:
Let us without delay our search begin.

VII.

Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,
And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;
And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
But others think them visions of illusion,
Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
No man there being wholly sane in mind.

And yet a man who raves, however mad,
Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:
The phantoms have no reticence at all:
The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless,
The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.

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I have seen phantoms there that were as men
And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
The City rests for man so weird and awful,
That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,
And phantoms there may have their proper home.

VIII.

While I still lingered on that river-walk,
And watched the tide as black as our black doom,
I heard another couple join in talk,
And saw them to the left hand in the gloom
Seated against an elm bole on the ground,
Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.

“I never knew another man on earth
But had some joy and solace in his life,
Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:
My doom has been unmitigated dearth.”

“We gaze upon the river, and we note
The various vessels large and small that float,
Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat.”

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“And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil
Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;
But homely love with common food and health,
And nightly sleep to balance daily toil.”

“This all-too humble soul would arrogate
Unto itself some signalising hate
From the supreme indifference of Fate!”

“Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.

“The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow

“That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”

“As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
At once so wicked, foolish, and insane,
As to produce men when He might refrain!

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“The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

“While air of Space and Time's full river flow
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:
It may be wearing out, but who can know?

“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.

“Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death.”

IX.

It is full strange to him who hears and feels,
When wandering there in some deserted street,
The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,
The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:
Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?
Who in this city of the stars abideth
To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?

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The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky
As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,
The harness jingles, as it passes by;
The hugeness of an overburthened wain:
A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges
Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:
And so it rolls into the night again.

What merchandise? whence, whither, and for whom?
Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,
Bearing away to some mysterious tomb
Or Limbo of the scornful universe
The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions
Of all things good which should have been our portions,
But have been strangled by that City's curse.

X.

The mansion stood apart in its own ground;
In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,
High trees about it, and the whole walled round:
The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;
And every window of its front shed light,
Portentous in that City of the Night.

But though thus lighted it was deadly still
As all the countless bulks of solid gloom:

145

Perchance a congregation to fulfil
Solemnities of silence in this doom,
Mysterious rites of dolour and despair
Permitting not a breath of chant or prayer?

Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad
Whereon lay still light from the open door;
The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,
Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;
And ample stairways rose to left and right
Whose balustrades were also draped with night.

I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,
Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;
But each was hung with its funereal pall,
And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,
With picture or with statue or with bust,
All copied from the same fair form of dust:

A woman very young and very fair;
Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,
And loving these sweet lovers, so that care
And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:
Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,
These shapes lit up that mausoléan night.

At length I heard a murmur as of lips,
And reached an open oratory hung

146

With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;
Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;
And one lay there upon a low white bed,
With tapers burning at the foot and head:

The Lady of the images: supine,
Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:
And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine
A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:
A crucifix of dim and ghostly white
Surmounted the large altar left in night:—

The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
In every one whereof thine image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.

The inmost oratory of my soul,
Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.

I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
With eyes for ever fixed upon that face,
So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.

I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
As patient as a statue carved in stone,
Of adoration and eternal grief.

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While thou dost not awake I cannot move;
And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
And I alive feel turning into stone.

Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,
Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,
Dear vision better than all death or life.

But I renounce all choice of life or death,
For either shall be ever at thy side,
And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.—

He murmured thus and thus in monotone,
Intent upon that uncorrupted face,
Entranced except his moving lips alone:
I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.
This was the festival that filled with light
That palace in the City of the Night.

XI.

What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,
And fill their living mouths with dust of death,
And make their habitations in the tombs,
And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,
And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error
To reach that void of darkness and old terror
Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?

148

They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,
They have much goodness yet they do not well,
(The fools we know have their own Paradise,
The wicked also have their proper Hell);
They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,
Much patience but their time endureth longer,
Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.

They are most rational and yet insane:
An outward madness not to be controlled;
A perfect reason in the central brain,
Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,
And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly
The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly
To cheat itself refusing to behold.

And some are great in rank and wealth and power,
And some renowned for genius and for worth;
And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower
And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth
Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others
All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,
The saddest and the weariest men on earth.

XII.

Our isolated units could be brought
To act together for some common end?

149

For one by one, each silent with his thought,
I marked a long loose line approach and wend
Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,
And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.

Then I would follow in among the last:
And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:
Whence come you in the world of life and light
To this our City of Tremendous Night?—

From pleading in a senate of rich lords
For some scant justice to our countless hordes
Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From wandering through many a solemn scene
Of opium visions, with a heart serene
And intellect miraculously bright:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee
By my transcendent feats of mimicry,
And humour wanton as an elfish sprite:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

150

From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,
Which brought an ecstasy ineffable
Of love and adoration and delight:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From ruling on a splendid kingly throne
A nation which beneath my rule has grown
Year after year in wealth and arts and might:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From preaching to an audience fired with faith
The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,
Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From drinking fiery poison in a den
Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From picturing with all beauty and all grace
First Eden and the parents of our race,
A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From writing a great work with patient plan
To justify the ways of God to man,

151

And show how ill must fade and perish quite:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

From desperate fighting with a little band
Against the powerful tyrants of our land,
To free our brethren in their own despite:
I wake from daydreams to this real night.

Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,
Each one responded with his countersign,
Then entered the cathedral; and in turn
I entered also, having given mine;
But lingered near until I heard no more,
And marked the closing of the massive door.

XIII.

Of all things human which are strange and wild
This is perchance the wildest and most strange,
And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating
How time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
How naught is constant on the earth but change.

The hours are heavy on him and the days;
The burden of the months he scarce can bear;

152

And often in his secret soul he prays
To sleep through barren periods unaware,
Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;
Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,
He would outsleep another term of care.

Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make
Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;
This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
Wounded and slow and very venomous;
Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,
Distilling poison at each painful motion,
And seems condemned to circle ever thus.

And since he cannot spend and use aright
The little time here given him in trust,
But wasteth it in weary undelight
Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust
He naturally claimeth to inherit
The everlasting Future, that his merit
May have full scope; as surely is most just.

O length of the intolerable hours,
O nights that are as æons of slow pain,
O Time, too ample for our vital powers,
O Life, whose woeful vanities remain

153

Immutable for all of all our legions
Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
Not of your speed and variance we complain.

We do not ask a longer term of strife,
Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
We do not claim renewed and endless life
When this which is our torment here shall close,
An everlasting conscious inanition!
We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
Dateless oblivion and divine repose.

XIV.

Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;
And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,
No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;
No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,
And the high altar space was unillumed.

Around the pillars and against the walls
Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood
Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.
Perchance they were not a great multitude
Save in that city of so lonely streets
Where one may count up every face he meets.

154

All patiently awaited the event
Without a stir or sound, as if no less
Self-occupied, doomstricken, while attent.
And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:

Two steadfast and intolerable eyes
Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;
The head behind it of enormous size.
And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,
Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,
By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:—

O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!
O battling in black stoods without an ark!
O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
Oh, dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!

My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
And perish in your perishing unblest.
And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
Of all our universe, with desperate hope
To find some solace for your wild unrest.

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And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being's gall.

It was the dark delusion of a dream,
That living Person conscious and supreme,
Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;
Whom we must curse because the life He gave
Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
Could not be killed by poison or by knife.

This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

We finish thus; and all our wretched race
Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
To other beings, with their own time-doom:
Infinite æons ere our kind began;
Infinite æons after the last man
Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.

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We bow down to the universal laws,
Which never had for man a special clause
Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
If tigers burn with beauty and with might,
Is it by favour or by wrath of fate?

All substance lives and struggles evermore
Through countless shapes continually at war,
By countless interactions interknit:
If one is born a certain day on earth,
All times and forces tended to that birth,
Not all the world could change or hinder it.

I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme;
With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us the flitting shadows of a dream.

O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;
A few short years must bring us all relief:
Can we not bear these years of labouring breath?
But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death.—

157

The organ-like vibrations of his voice
Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
Our shadowy congregation rested still
As brooding on that “End it when you will.”

XV.

Wherever men are gathered, all the air
Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,
Are breathed into it with our respiration;
It is with our life fraught and overfraught.

So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
As if alone on mountains or wide seas;
But nourishes warm life or hastens death
With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,
Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,
Incessant of his multitudinous neighbours;
He in his turn affecting all of these.

That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,
Although not many exiles wander there,

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With many a potent evil influence,
Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair.

XVI.

Our shadowy congregation rested still,
As musing on that message we had heard
And brooding on that “End it when you will;”
Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
When keen as lightning through a muffled sky
Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:—

The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:
We have no personal life beyond the grave;
There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
Can I find here the comfort which I crave?

In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years' term of gracious human life:
The splendours of the intellect's advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;

The social pleasures with their genial wit;
The fascination of the worlds of art,
The glories of the worlds of nature, lit
By large imagination's glowing heart;

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The rapture of mere being, full of health;
The careless childhood and the ardent youth,
The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
The reverend age serene with life's long truth:

All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
The storied memories of the times of old,
The patient tracking of the world's great plan
Through sequences and changes myriadfold.

This chance was never offered me before;
For me the infinite Past is blank and dumb:
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.

And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
Of noble human life upon this earth
So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
I worse than lose the years which are my all:
What can console me for the loss supreme?

Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?

160

Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
Hush and be mute envisaging despair.—

This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
And none gave answer for a certain while,
For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:—

My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
This life itself holds nothing good for us,
But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.

XVII.

How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
Their thick processions of supernal lights
Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
And men regard with passionate awe and yearning
The mighty marching and the golden burning,
And think the heavens respond to what they feel.

161

Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream,
Are glorified from vision as they pass
The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;
Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
To restless crystals; cornice, dome, and column
Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
Like faëry lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.

With such a living light these dead eyes shine,
These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;
There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,
They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.

If we could near them with the flight unflown,
We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
Or suns all self-consuming like our own
Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:
They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,
The empyréan is a void abyss.

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XVIII.

I wandered in a suburb of the north,
And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,
Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth
Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:
The air above was wan with misty light,
The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.

I took the left-hand lane and slowly trod
Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went
The humid leafage; and my feet were shod
With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,
With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,
So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.

After a hundred steps I grew aware
Of something crawling in the lane below;
It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there
That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
To drag; for it would die in its own den.

But coming level with it I discerned
That it had been a man; for at my tread

163

It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,
Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,
And with the left hand twitched back as in ire
Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.

A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,
An infamy for manhood to behold.
He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?
You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold
And all that men go mad upon, since you
Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?

You think that I am weak and must submit;
Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
And you are dead as if I clove with it
That false fierce greedy heart. Betrayed! betrayed!
I fling this phial if you seek to pass,
And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.

And then with sudden change, Take thought! take thought!
Have pity on me! it is mine alone.
If you could find, it would avail you naught;
Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:
For who of mortal or immortal race
The lifetrack of another can retrace?

164

Did you but know my agony and toil!
Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;
My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;
Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:
My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;
I cannot move but with continual moan.

But I am in the very way at last
To find the long-lost broken golden thread
Which reunites my present with my past,
If you but go your own way. And I said,
I will retire as soon as you have told
Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.

And so you know it not! he hissed with scorn;
I feared you, imbecile! It leads me back
From this accursed night without a morn,
And through the deserts which have else no track,
And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:

And I become a nursling soft and pure,
An infant cradled on its mother's knee,
Without a past, love-cherished and secure;
Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,
Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,
And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.

165

He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed
Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
He should to antenatal night retrace,
And hide his elements in that large womb
Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.

And even thus, what weary way were planned,
To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!
For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
What never has been, yet may have its when;
The thing which has been, never is again.

XIX.

The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
Is named the River of the Suicides;
For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,
And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,
Within its cold secure oblivion hides.

One plunges from a bridge's parapet,
As by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;
Another wades in slow with purpose set
Until the waters are above him furled;

166

Another in a boat with dreamlike motion
Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,
To starve or sink from out the desert world.

They perish from their suffering surely thus,
For none beholding them attempts to save,
The while each thinks how soon, solicitous,
He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;
Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance
Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance
Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.

When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,
Why actors and spectators do we stay?—
To fill our so-short rôles out right or wrong;
To see what shifts are yet in the dull play
For our illusion; to refrain from grieving
Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:
But those asleep at home, how blest are they!

Yet it is but for one night after all:
What matters one brief night of dreary pain?
When after it the weary eyelids fall
Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;
And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
That one best sleep which never wakes again.

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XX.

I sat me weary on a pillar's base,
And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight
O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,
A shore of shadow slanting from the right:
The great cathedral's western front stood there,
A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.

Before it, opposite my place of rest,
Two figures faced each other, large, austere;
A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,
An angel standing in the moonlight clear;
So mighty by magnificence of form,
They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.

Upon the cross-hilt of a naked sword
The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;
His vigilant intense regard was poured
Upon the creature placidly unquelled,
Whose front was set at level gaze which took
No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.

And as I pondered these opposèd shapes
My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon
Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes
The outworn to worse weariness. But soon

168

A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,
And from the evil lethargy I woke.

The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,
And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:
A warrior leaning on his sword alone
Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;
The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware
Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.

Again I sank in that repose unsweet,
Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;
The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:
An unarmed man with raised hands impotent
Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept
Such mien as if with open eyes it slept.

My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;
A louder crash upstartled me in dread:
The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,
And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head
Between the monster's large quiescent paws,
Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.

The moon had circled westward full and bright,
And made the temple-front a mystic dream,

169

And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,
The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:
I pondered long that cold majestic face
Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.

XXI.

Anear the centre of that northern crest
Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
From which the city east and south and west
Sinks gently in long waves; and thronèd there
An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,
The bronze colossus of a wingèd Woman,
Upon a graded granite base foursquare.

Low-seated she leans forward massively,
With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might
Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;
Across a clasped book in her lap the right
Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.

Words cannot picture her; but all men know
That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought
Three centuries and threescore years ago,
With phantasies of his peculiar thought:

170

The instruments of carpentry and science
Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance
With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;

Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;
The grave and solid infant perched beside,
With open winglets that might bear a dove,
Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;
Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,
But all too impotent to lift the regal
Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;

And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems
To mock her grand head and the knotted frown
Of forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,
The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown
Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid
As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,
The feet thick shod to tread all weakness down;

The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,
The massy rainbow curved in front of it,
Beyond the village with the masts and trees;
The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,

171

Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions
Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,
The “Melencolia” that transcends all wit.

Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
Her fate heroic and calamitous;
Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration
Of the day setting on her baffled prime.

Baffled and beaten back she works on still,
Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
Sustained by her indomitable will:
The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore
And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
Till death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre
That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.

But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
More desperate than strife with hope debarred,
More fatal than the adamantine Never
Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:

172

The sense that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.

Titanic from her high throne in the north,
That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,
In bronze sublimity she gazes forth
Over her Capital of teen and threne,
Over the river with its isles and bridges,
The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-ridges,
Confronting them with a coëval mien.

The moving moon and stars from east to west
Circle before her in the sea of air;
Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.
Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
And confirmation of the old despair.

1870–1874.

173

IN THE ROOM

“Ceste insigne fable et tragicque comedie.”
—Rabelais.

I

The sun was down, and twilight grey
Filled half the air; but in the room,
Whose curtain had been drawn all day,
The twilight was a dusky gloom:
Which seemed at first as still as death,
And void; but was indeed all rife
With subtle thrills, the pulse and breath
Of multitudinous lower life.

II

In their abrupt and headlong way
Bewildered flies for light had dashed
Against the curtain all the day,
And now slept wintrily abashed;
And nimble mice slept, wearied out
With such a double night's uproar;
But solid beetles crawled about
The chilly hearth and naked floor.

174

III

And so throughout the twilight hour
That vaguely murmurous hush and rest
There brooded; and beneath its power
Life throbbing held its throbs supprest:
Until the thin-voiced mirror sighed,
I am all blurred with dust and damp,
So long ago the clear day died,
So long has gleamed nor fire nor lamp.

IV

Whereon the curtain murmured back,
Some change is on us, good or ill;
Behind me and before is black
As when those human things lie still:
But I have seen the darkness grow
As grows the daylight every morn;
Have felt out there long shine and glow,
In here long chilly dusk forlorn.

V

The cupboard grumbled with a groan,
Each new day worse starvation brings:
Since he came here I have not known
Or sweets or cates or wholesome things:
But now! a pinch of meal, a crust,
Throughout the week is all I get.

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I am so empty; it is just
As when they said we were to let.

VI

What is become, then, of our Man?
The petulant old glass exclaimed;
If all this time he slumber can,
He really ought to be ashamed.
I wish we had our Girl again,
So gay and busy, bright and fair:
The girls are better than these men,
Who only for their dull selves care.

VII

It is so many hours ago—
The lamp and fire were both alight—
I saw him pacing to and fro,
Perturbing restlessly the night.
His face was pale to give one fear,
His eyes when lifted looked too bright;
He muttered; what, I could not hear:
Bad words though; something was not right.

VIII

The table said, He wrote so long
That I grew weary of his weight;
The pen kept up a cricket song,
It ran and ran at such a rate:

176

And in the longer pauses he
With both his folded arms downpressed
And stared as one who does not see,
Or sank his head upon his breast.

IX

The fire-grate said, I am as cold
As if I never had a blaze;
The few dead cinders here I hold,
I held unburned for days and days.
Last night he made them flare; but still
What good did all his writing do?
Among my ashes curl and thrill
Thin ghosts of all those papers too.

X

The table answered, Not quite all;
He saved and folded up one sheet,
And sealed it fast, and let it fall;
And here it lies now white and neat.
Whereon the letter's whisper came,
My writing is closed up too well;
Outside there's not a single name,
And who should read me I can't tell.

XI

The mirror sneered with scornful spite,
(That ancient crack which spoiled her looks

177

Had marred her temper), Write and write!
And read those stupid, worn-out books!
That's all he does, read, write, and read,
And smoke that nasty pipe which stinks:
He never takes the slightest heed
How any of us feels or thinks.

XII

But Lucy fifty times a day
Would come and smile here in my face,
Adjust a tress that curled astray,
Or tie a ribbon with more grace:
She looked so young and fresh and fair,
She blushed with such a charming bloom,
It did one good to see her there,
And brightened all things in the room.

XIII

She did not sit hours stark and dumb
As pale as moonshine by the lamp;
To lie in bed when day was come,
And leave us curtained chill and damp.
She slept away the dreary dark,
And rose to greet the pleasant morn;
And sang as gaily as a lark
While busy as the flies sun-born.

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XIV

And how she loved us every one;
And dusted this and mended that,
With trills and laughs and freaks of fun,
And tender scoldings in her chat!
And then her bird, that sang as shrill
As she sang sweet; her darling flowers
That grew there in the window-sill,
Where she would sit at work for hours.

XV

It was not much she ever wrote;
Her fingers had good work to do;
Say, once a week a pretty note;
And very long it took her too.
And little more she read, I wis;
Just now and then a pictured sheet,
Besides those letters she would kiss
And croon for hours, they were so sweet.

XVI

She had her friends too, blithe young girls,
Who whispered, babbled, laughed, caressed,
And romped and danced with dancing curls,
And gave our life a joyous zest.

179

But with this dullard, glum and sour,
Not one of all his fellow-men
Has ever passed a social hour;
We might be in some wild beast's den.

XVII

This long tirade aroused the bed,
Who spoke in deep and ponderous bass,
Befitting that calm life he led,
As if firm-rooted in his place:
In broad majestic bulk alone,
As in thrice venerable age,
He stood at once the royal throne,
The monarch, the experienced sage:

XVIII

I know what is and what has been;
Not anything to me comes strange,
Who in so many years have seen
And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are good or bad,
When well or ill, he slowly said;
When sad or glad, when sane or mad,
And when they sleep alive or dead.

XIX

At this last word of solemn lore
A tremor circled through the gloom,

180

As if a crash upon the floor
Had jarred and shaken all the room:
For nearly all the listening things
Were old and worn, and knew what curse
Of violent change death often brings,
From good to bad, from bad to worse;

XX

They get to know each other well,
To feel at home and settled down;
Death bursts among them like a shell,
And strews them over all the town.
The bed went on, This man who lies
Upon me now is stark and cold;
He will not any more arise,
And do the things he did of old.

XXI

But we shall have short peace or rest;
For soon up here will come a rout,
And nail him in a queer long chest,
And carry him like luggage out.
They will be muffled all in black,
And whisper much, and sigh and weep:
But he will never more come back,
And some one else in me must sleep.

181

XXII

Thereon a little phial shrilled,
Here empty on the chair I lie:
I heard one say, as I was filled,
With half of this a man would die.
The man there drank me with slow breath,
And murmured, Thus ends barren strife:
O sweeter, thou cold wine of death,
Than ever sweet warm wine of life.

XXIII

One of my cousins long ago,
A little thing, the mirror said,
Was carried to a couch to show,
Whether a man was really dead.
Two great improvements marked the case:
He did not blur her with his breath,
His many-wrinkled, twitching face
Was smooth old ivory: verdict, Death.—

XXIV

It lay, the lowest thing there, lulled
Sweet-sleep-like in corruption's truce;
The form whose purpose was annulled,
While all the other shapes meant use.

182

It lay, the he become now it,
Unconscious of the deep disgrace,
Unanxious how its parts might flit
Through what new forms in time and space.

XXV

It lay and preached, as dumb things do,
More powerfully than tongues can prate;
Though life be torture through and through,
Man is but weak to plain of fate:
The drear path crawls on drearier still
To wounded feet and hopeless breast?
Well, he can lie down when he will,
And straight all ends in endless rest.

XXVI

And while the black night nothing saw,
And till the cold morn came at last,
That old bed held the room in awe
With tales of its experience vast.
It thrilled the gloom; it told such tales
Of human sorrows and delights,
Of fever moans and infant wails,
Of births and deaths and bridal nights.

1867–8.

183

SUNDAY UP THE RIVER

AN IDYLL OF COCKAIGNE

“En allant promener aux champs,
J'y ai trouvé les blés si grands,
Les aubépines florissant.
En vérité, en vérité,
C'est le mois, le joli mois,
C'est le joli mois de mai.

“Dieu veuill' garder les vins, les blés,
Les jeunes filles à marier,
Les jeun' garçons pour les aimer!
En vérité, en vérité,
C'est'le mois, le joli mois,
C'est le joli mois de mai.”

—Carol of Lorraine.

I.

I looked out into the morning,
I looked out into the west:
The soft blue eye of the quiet sky
Still drooped in dreamy rest;

184

The trees were still like clouds there,
The clouds like mountains dim;
The broad mist lay, a silver bay
Whose tide was at the brim.

I looked out into the morning,
I looked out into the east:
The flood of light upon the night
Had silently increased;

The sky was pale with fervour,
The distant trees were grey,
The hill-lines drawn like waves of dawn
Dissolving in the day.

I looked out into the morning;
Looked east, looked west, with glee:
O richest day of happy May,
My love will spend with me!

II.

“Oh, what are you waiting for here, young man?
What are you looking for over the bridge?”
A little straw hat with the streaming blue ribbons
Is soon to come dancing over the bridge.

185

Her heart beats the measure that keeps her feet dancing,
Dancing along like a wave o' the sea;
Her heart pours the sunshine with which her eyes glancing
Light up strange faces in looking for me.

The strange faces brighten in meeting her glances;
The strangers all bless her, pure, lovely, and free:
She fancies she walks, but her walk skips and dances,
Her heart makes such music in coming to me.

Oh, thousands and thousands of happy young maidens
Are tripping this morning their sweethearts to see;
But none whose heart beats to a sweeter love-cadence
Than hers who will brighten the sunshine for me.

“Oh, what are you waiting for here, young man?
What are you looking for over the bridge?”
A little straw hat with the streaming blue ribbons;
—And here it comes dancing over the bridge!

186

III.

In the vast vague grey,
Mistily luminous, brightly dim,
The trees to the south there, far away,
Float as beautiful, strange and grand
As pencilled palm-trees, every line
Mystic with a grace divine,
In our dreams of the holy Eastern Land.

There is not a cloud in the sky;
The vague vast grey
Melts into azure dim on high.
Warmth, and languor, and infinite peace!
Surely the young Day
Hath fallen into a vision and a trance,
And his burning flight doth cease.

Yet look how here and there
Soft curves, fine contours, seem to swim,
Half emerging, wan and dim,
Into the quiet air:
Like statues growing slowly, slowly out
From the great vault of marble; here a limb,
And there a feature, but the rest all doubt.

Then the sculpturing sunbeams smite,
And the forms start forth to the day;

187

And the breath of the morning sweepeth light
The luminous dust away:
And soon, soon, soon,
Crowning the floor of the land and the sea,
Shall be wrought the dome of Noon.

The burning sapphire dome,
With solemn imagery; vast shapes that stand
Each like an island ringed with flashing foam,
Black-purple mountains, creeks and rivers of light,
Crags of cleft crystal blazing to the crest:
Vast isles that move, that roam
A tideless sea of infinite fathomless rest.

Thus shall it be this noon:
And thus, so slowly, slowly from its birth
In the long night's dark swoon,
Through the long morning's trance, sweet, vague, and dim,
The Sun divine above
Doth build up in us, Heaven completing Earth,
Our solemn Noon of Love.

IV.

The church bells are ringing:
How green the earth, how fresh and fair!
The thrushes are singing:
What rapture but to breathe this air!

188

The church bells are ringing:
Lo, how the river dreameth there!
The thrushes are singing:
Green flames wave lightly everywhere!

The church bells are ringing:
How all the world breathes praise and prayer!
The thrushes are singing:
What Sabbath peace doth trance the air!

V.

I love all hardy exercise
That makes one strain and quiver;
And best of all I love and prize
This boating on our river.
I to row and you to steer,
Gay shall be Life's trip, my dear:
You to steer and I to row,
All is bright where'er we go.

We push off from the bank; again
We're free upon the waters;
The happiest of the sons of men,
The fairest of earth's daughters.
And I row, and I row;
The blue floats above us as we go:
And you steer, and you steer,
Framed in gliding wood and water, O my dear

189

I pull a long calm mile or two,
Pull slowly, deftly feather:
How sinful any work to do
In this Italian weather!
Yet I row, yet I row;
The blue floats above us as we go:
While you steer, while you steer,
Framed in gliding wood and water, O my dear.

Those lovely breadths of lawn that sweep
Adown in still green billows!
And o'er the brim in fountains leap;
Green fountains, weeping willows!
And I row, and I row;
The blue floats above us as we go:
And you steer, and you steer,
Framed in gliding wood and water, O my dear.

We push among the flags in flower,
Beneath the branches tender,
And we are in a faerie bower
Of green and golden splendour.
I to row and you to steer,
Gay must be Life's trip, my dear;
You to steer and I to row,
All is bright where'er we go.

A secret bower where we can hide
In lustrous shadow lonely;

190

The crystal floor may lap and glide
To rock our dreaming only.
I to row and you to steer,
Gay must be Life's trip, my dear;
You to steer and I to row,
All is bright where'er we go.

VI.

I love this hardy exercise,
This strenuous toil of boating:
Our skiff beneath the willow lies
Half stranded and half floating.
As I lie, as I lie,
Glimpses dazzle of the blue and burning sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
Faerie Princess of the secret faerie scene.

My shirt is of the soft red wool,
My cap is azure braided
By two white hands so beautiful,
My tie mauve purple-shaded.
As I lie, as I lie,
Glimpses dazzle of white clouds and sapphire sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
Faerie Princess of the secret faerie scene.

191

Your hat with long blue streamers decked,
Your pure throat crimson-banded;
White-robed, my own white dove unflecked,
Dove-footed, lilac-handed.
As I lie, as I lie,
Glimpses dazzle of white clouds and sapphire sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
Faerie Princess of the secret faerie scene.

If any boaters boating past
Should look where we're reclining,
They'll say, To-day green willows glassed
Rubies and sapphires shining!
As I lie, as I lie,
Glimpses dazzle of the blue and burning sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
Faerie Princess of the secret faerie scene.

VII.

Grey clouds come puffing from my lips
And hang there softly curling,
While from the bowl now leaps, now slips,
A steel-blue thread high twirling.
As I lie, as I lie,
The hours fold their wings beneath the sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene.

192

I gaze on you and I am crowned,
A Monarch great and glorious,
A Hero in all realms renowned,
A Faerie Prince victorious.
As I lie, as I lie,
The hours fold their wings beneath the sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene.

Your violet eyes pour out their whole
Pure light in earnest rapture;
Your thoughts come dreaming through my soul,
And nestle past recapture.
As I lie, as I lie,
The hours fold their wings beneath the sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene.

O friends, your best years to the oar
Like galley-slaves devoting,
This is and shall be evermore
The true sublime of boating!
As I lie, as I lie,
The hours fold their wings beneath the sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene.

193

VIII.

The water is cool and sweet and pure,
The water is clear as crystal;
And water's a noble liquid, sure;—
But look at my pocket-pistol!

Tim Boyland gave it me, one of two
The rogue brought back from Dublin;
With a jar of the genuine stuff: hurroo!
How deliciously it comes bubblin'!

It is not brandy, it is not wine,
It is Jameson's Irish Whisky:
It fills the heart with joy divine,
And it makes the fancy frisky.

All other spirits are vile resorts,
Except its own Scotch first cousin;
And as for your Clarets and Sherries and Ports,
A naggin is worth a dozen.

I have watered this, though a toothful neat
Just melts like cream down the throttle:
But it's grand in the punch, hot, strong, and sweet:
Not a headache in a bottle.

194

It is amber as the western skies
When the sunset glows serenest;
It is mellow as the mild moonrise
When the shamrock leaves fold greenest.

Just a little, wee, wee, tiny sip!
Just the wet of the bill of a starling!
A drop of dew for the rosy lip,
And two stars in the eyes of my darling!

'Faith your kiss has made it so sweet at the brim
I could go on supping for ever!
We'll pocket the pistol: And Tim, you limb,
May this craturr abandon you never!

IX.

Like violets pale i' the Spring o' the year
Came my Love's sad eyes to my youth;
Wan and dim with many a tear,
But the sweeter for that in sooth:
Wet and dim,
Tender and true,
Violet eyes
Of the sweetest blue.

Like pansies dark i' the June o' the year
Grow my Love's glad eyes to my prime;

195

Rich with the purple splendour clear
Of their thoughtful bliss sublime:
Deep and dark,
Solemn and true,
Pansy eyes
Of the noblest blue.

X.

Were I a real Poet, I would sing
Such joyous songs of you, and all mere truth;
As true as buds and tender leaves in Spring,
As true as lofty dreams in dreamful youth;
That men should cry: How foolish every one
Who thinks the world is getting out of tune!
Where is the tarnish in our golden sun?
Where is the clouding in our crystal moon?
The lark sings now the eversame new song
With which it soared through Eden's purest skies;
This poet's music doth for us prolong
The very speech Love learnt in Paradise;
This maiden is as young and pure and fair
As Eve agaze on Adam sleeping there.

XI.

When will you have not a sole kiss left,
And my prodigal mouth be all bereft?

196

When your lips have ravished the last sweet flush
Of the red with which the roses blush:
Now I kiss them and kiss them till they hush.

When will you have not a glance to give
Of the love in whose lustre my glances live?
When, O my darling, your fathomless eyes
Have drawn all the azure out of the skies:
Now I gaze and I gaze till they dare not rise.

When will you find not a single vow
Of the myriads and myriads you lavish now?
When your voice has gurgled the last sweet note
That was meant from the nightingales to float:
Now I whisper it, whisper it dumb in your throat.

When will you love me no more, no more,
And my happy, happy dream be o'er?
When no rose is red, and no skies are blue,
And no nightingale sings the whole year through,
Then my heart may have no love for you.

XII.

My Love o'er the water bends dreaming;
It glideth and glideth away:

197

She sees there her own beauty, gleaming
Through shadow and ripple and spray.

Oh, tell her, thou murmuring river,
As past her your light wavelets roll,
How steadfast that image for ever
Shines pure in pure depths of my soul.

XIII.

The wandering airs float over the lawn,
And linger and whisper in at our bower;
(They babble, babble all they know:)
The delicate secrets they have drawn
From bird and meadow and tree and flower;
(Gossiping softly, whispering low.)

Some linden stretches itself to the height,
Then rustles back to its dream of the day;
(They babble, babble all they know:)
Some bird would trill out its love-delight,
But the honey melts in its throat away;
(Gossiping softly, whispering low.)

Some flower seduced by the treacherous calm
Breathes all its soul in a fragrant sigh;
(They babble, babble all they know:)

198

Some blossom weeps a tear of balm
For the lost caress of a butterfly;
(Gossiping softly, whispering low.)

Our Mother lies in siesta now,
And we listen to her breathings here;
(They babble, babble all they know:)
And we learn all the thoughts hid under her brow,
All her heart's deep dreams of the happy year:
(Gossiping softly, whispering low.)

XIV.

Those azure, azure eyes
Gaze on me with their love;
And I am lost in dream,
And cannot speak or move.

Those azure, azure eyes
Stay with me when we part;
A sea of azure thoughts
Overfloods my heart.

“Mit deinen blauen Augen
Siehst du mich lieblich an;
Da ward mir so träumend zu Sinne
Dass ich nicht sprechen kann.

“An deine blauen Augen
Gedenk' ich allerwärts;—
Ein Meer von blauen Gedanken
Ergiesst sich über mein Herz.”

—Heine.

199

XV.

Give a man a horse he can ride,
Give a man a boat he can sail;
And his rank and wealth, his strength and health,
On sea nor shore shall fail.

Give a man a pipe he can smoke,
Give a man a book he can read;
And his home is bright with a calm delight,
Though the room be poor indeed.

Give a man a girl he can love,
As I, O my Love, love thee;
And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate,
At home, on land, on sea.

XVI.

My love is the flaming Sword
To fight through the world;
Thy love is the Shield to ward,
And the Armour of the Lord
And the Banner of Heaven unfurled.

XVII.

Let my voice ring out and over the earth,
Through all the grief and strife,
With a golden joy in a silver mirth:
Thank God for Life!

200

Let my voice swell out through the great abyss
To the azure dome above,
With a chord of faith in the harp of bliss:
Thank God for Love!

Let my voice thrill out beneath and above,
The whole world through:
O my Love and Life, O my Life and Love,
Thank God for you!

XVIII.

The wine of Love is music,
And the feast of Love is song:
And when Love sits down to the banquet,
Love sits long:

Sits long and ariseth drunken,
But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
That great rich Vine.

XIX.

Drink! drink! open your mouth!
This air is as rich as wine;
Flowing with balm from the sunny south,
And health from the western brine.

201

Drink! drink! open your mouth!
This air is as strong as wine:
My brain is drugged with the balm o' the south,
And rolls with the western brine.

Drink! drink! open your mouth!
This air is the choicest wine;
From that golden grape the Sun, i' the south
Of Heaven's broad vine.

XX.

Could we float thus ever,
Floating down a river,
Down a tranquil river, and you alone with me:
Past broad shining meadows,
Past the great wood-shadows,
Past fair farms and hamlets, for ever to the sea.

Through the golden noonlight,
Through the silver moonlight,
Through the tender gloaming, gliding calm and free;
From the sunset gliding,
Into morning sliding,
With the tranquil river for ever to the sea.

202

Past the masses hoary
Of cities great in story,
Past their towers and temples drifting lone and free:
Gliding, never hasting,
Gliding, never resting,
Ever with the river that glideth to the sea.

With a swifter motion
Out upon the Ocean,
Heaven above and round us, and you alone with me;
Heaven around and o'er us,
The Infinite before us,
Floating on for ever upon the flowing sea.

What time is it, dear, now?
We are in the year now
Of the New Creation one million two or three.
But where are we now, Love?
We are as I trow, Love,
In the Heaven of Heavens upon the Crystal Sea.

And may mortal sinners
Care for carnal dinners
In your Heaven of Heavens, New Era millions three?
Oh, if their boat gets stranding
Upon some Richmond landing,
They're thirsty as the desert and hungry as the sea!

1865.

Reprinted from Fraser's Magazine, October 1869, with the kind assent of Messrs. Longmans & Co.

From Victor Fournel's charming book, “Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris.”

203

SUNDAY AT HAMPSTEAD

(AN IDLE IDYLL BY A VERY HUMBLE MEMBER OF THE GREAT AND NOBLE LONDON MOB.)

I.

This is the Heath of Hampstead,
There is the dome of Saint Paul's;
Beneath, on the serried house-tops,
A chequered lustre falls:

And the mighty city of London,
Under the clouds and the light,
Seems a low wet beach, half shingle,
With a few sharp rocks upright.

Here will we sit, my darling,
And dream an hour away:
The donkeys are hurried and worried,
But we are not donkeys to-day:

204

Through all the weary week, dear,
We toil in the murk down there,
Tied to a desk and a counter,
A patient stupid pair!

But on Sunday we slip our tether,
And away from the smoke and the smirch;
Too grateful to God for His Sabbath
To shut its hours in a church.

Away to the green, green country,
Under the open sky;
Where the earth's sweet breath is incense
And the lark sings psalms on high.

On Sunday we're Lord and Lady,
With ten times the love and glee
Of those pale and languid rich ones
Who are always and never free.

They drawl and stare and simper,
So fine and cold and staid,
Like exquisite waxwork figures
That must be kept in the shade:

We can laugh out loud when merry,
We can romp at kiss-in-the-ring,
We can take our beer at a public,
We can loll on the grass and sing. . . .

205

Would you grieve very much, my darling,
If all yon low wet shore
Were drowned by a mighty flood-tide,
And we never toiled there more?

Wicked?—there is no sin, dear,
In an idle dreamer's head;
He turns the world topsy-turvy
To prove that his soul's not dead.

I am sinking, sinking, sinking;
It is hard to sit upright!
Your lap is the softest pillow!
Good night, my Love, good night!

II.

How your eyes dazzle down into my soul!
I drink and drink of their deep violet wine,
And ever thirst the more, although my whole
Dazed being whirls in drunkenness divine.

Pout down your lips from that bewildering smile
And kiss me for the interruption, Sweet!
I had escaped you: floating for awhile
In that far cloud ablaze with living heat:

206

I floated with it through the solemn skies,
I melted with it up the Crystal Sea
Into the Heaven of Heavens; and shut my eyes
To feel eternal rest enfolding me. . . .

Well, I prefer one tyrannous girl down here,
You jealous violet-eyed Bewitcher, you!
To being lord in Mohammed's seventh sphere
Of meekest houris threescore ten and two!

III.

Was it hundreds of years ago, my Love,
Was it thousands of miles away,
That two poor creatures we know, my Love,
Were toiling day by day;
Were toiling weary, weary,
With many myriads more,
In a City dark and dreary
On a sullen river's shore?

Was it truly a fact or a dream, my Love?
I think my brain still reels,
And my ears still throbbing seem, my Love,
With the rush and the clang of wheels;
Of a vast machinery roaring
For ever in skyless gloom;
Where the poor slaves peace imploring,
Found peace alone in the tomb.

207

Was it hundreds of years ago, my Love,
Was it thousands of miles away?
Or was it a dream to show, my Love,
The rapture of to-day?
This day of holy splendour,
This Sabbath of rich rest,
Wherein to God we render
All praise by being blest.

IV.

Eight of us promised to meet here
And tea together at five:
And—who would ever believe it?—
We are the first to arrive!

Oh, shame on us, my darling;
It is a monstrous crime
To make a tryst with others
And be before our time!

Lizzie is off with William,
Quite happy for her part;
Our sugar in her pocket,
And the sweet love in her heart.

Mary and Dick so grandly
Parade suburban streets;
His waistcoat and her bonnet
Proving the best of treats.

208

And Fanny plagues big Robert
With tricks of the wildest glee:
O Fanny, you'll get in hot water
If you do not bring us our tea!

Why, bless me, look at that table,
Every one of them there!—
“Ha, here at last we have them,
The always behindhand pair!

“When the last trumpet-solo
Strikes up instead of the lark,
They'll turn in their sleep just grunting
Who's up so soon in the dark?”

Babble and gabble, you rabble,
A thousand in full yell!
And this is your Tower of Babel,
This not-to-be-finished Hotel.

“You should see it in the drawing,
You'd think a Palace they make,
Like the one in the Lady of Lyons,
With this pond for the lovely lake!”

209

“I wish it wasn't Sunday,
There's no amusement at all:
Who was here Hot-cross-bun-day?
We had such an open-air ball!

The bands played polkas, waltzes,
Quadrilles; it was glorious fun!
And each gentleman gave them a penny
After each dance was done.”

“Mary is going to chapel,
And what takes her there, do you guess?
Her sweet little duck of a bonnet,
And her new second-hand silk dress.”

“We went to Church one Sunday,
But felt we had no right there;
For it's only a place for the grand folk
Who come in a carriage and pair.

“And I laughed out loud,—it was shameful!
But Fanny said, Oh, what lives!
He must have been clever, the rascal,
To manage seven hundred wives!”

“Suppose we play Hunt-the-Slipper?”
“We can't, there's the crinoline!”—“Phew!
Bother it, always a nuisance!”
“Hoop-de-dooden-do!”

210

“I think I've seen all the girls here,
About a thousand, or more;
But none of them half so pretty
As our own loving four.”

“Thank you! and I've been listening
To lots of the men, the knaves;
But none of them half such humbugs
As our devoted slaves.”

“Do you see those purple flushes?
The sun will set in state:
Up all! we must cross to the heath, friends,
Before it gets too late.

“We will couch in the fern together,
And watch for the moon and the stars;
And the slim tree-tops will be lighted,
So the boys may light their cigars.

“And while the sunset glory
Burns down in crimson and gold,
Lazy shall tell us a story
Of his wonderful times of old.”

211

V.

Ten thousand years ago, (“No more than that?”)
Ten thousand years, (“The age of Robert's hat!”—
“Silence, you gods!”—“Pinch Fanny!”—“Now we're good.”)
This place where we are sitting was a wood,
Savage and desert save for one rude home
Of wattles plastered with stiff clay and loam;
And here, in front, upon the grassy mire
Four naked squaws were squatted round a fire:
Then four tall naked wild men crushing through
The tangled underwood came into view;
Two of them bent beneath a mighty boar,
The third was gashed and bleeding, number four
Strutted full-drest in war-paint, (“That was Dick!”)
Blue of a devilish pattern laid on thick.
The squaws jumped up to roast the carcass whole;
The braves sank silent, stark 'gainst root and bole.
The meat half-done, they tore it and devoured,
Sullenly ravenous; the women cowered
Until their lords had finished, then partook.
Mist rose; all crept into their cabin-nook,
And staked the mouth; the floor was one broad bed
Of rushes dried with fox and bearskins spread.
Wolves howled and wild cats wailed; they snored; and so
The long night passed, shedding a storm of snow;
This very night ten thousand years ago.

212

VI.

Ten thousand years before, (“Come, draw it mild!
Don't waste Conk-ology like that, my child!”)
From where we sit to the horizon's bound
A level brilliant plain was spread all round,
As level and as brilliant as a sea
Under the burning sun; high as your knee
Aflame with flowers, yellow and blue and red:
Long lines of palm-trees marked out there the bed
Of a great river, and among them gleamed
A few grey tents. Then four swift horsemen streamed
Out of the West, magnificent in ire,
Churning the meadow into flakes of fire,
Brandishing monstrous spears as if in fight,
They wheeled, ducked, charged, and shouted fierce delight:
So till they reach the camp: the women there
Awaiting them the evening meal prepare;
Milk from the goats and camels, dates plucked fresh,
Cool curds and cheese, millet, sweet broiled kid's flesh.
The spear struck deep hath picketed each barb;
A grave proud turbaned man in flowing garb
Sups with a grave meek woman, humbly proud,
Whose eyes flash empire. Then the solemn crowd
Of stars above, the silent plain below,
Until the East resumes its furnace-glow;
This same night twenty thousand years ago.

213

VII.

Ten thousand years before, (“But if you take
Such mouthfuls, you will soon eat up Time's cake!”)
Where we are sitting rose in splendid light
A broad cool marble palace; from the height
Broad terrace-gardens stairlike sank away
Down to the floor of a deep sapphire bay.
Where the last slope slid greenly to the wave,
And dark rich glossy foliage shadow gave,
Four women—or four goddesses—leaned calm,
Of mighty stature, graceful as the palm:
One stroked with careless hand a lion's mane,
One fed an eagle; while a measured strain
Was poured forth by the others, harp and voice,
Music to make the universe rejoice.
An isle was in the offing seen afar,
Deep-purple based, its peak a glittering star;
Whence rowed a galley (drooped the silken sails),
A dragon-barque with golden burning scales.
Then four bronzed giants leapt to land, embraced
The glorious women, chanting: “Did we haste?
The Cavern-Voice hath silenced all your fears;
Peace on our earth another thousand years!”
On fruits and noble wine, with song's rich flow,
They feasted in the sunset's golden glow;
This same night thirty thousand years ago.

214

VIII.

Ten thousand years before, (“Another ten!
Good Lord, how greedy are these little men!”)
This place where we are sitting (“Half asleep.”)
Was in the sea a hundred fathoms deep:
A floor of silver sand so fine and soft,
A coral forest branching far aloft;
Above, the great dusk emerald golden-green;
Silence profound and solitude serene.
Four mermaids sit beneath the coral rocks,
Combing with golden combs their long green locks,
And wreathing them with little pearly shells;
Four mermen come from out the deep-sea dells,
And whisper to them, and they all turn pale:
Then through the hyaline a voice of wail,
With passionate gestures, “Ever alas for woe!
A rumour cometh down the Ocean-flow,
A word calamitous! that we shall be
All disinherited from the great sea:
Our tail with which like fishes we can swim
Shall split into an awkward double-limb,
And we must waddle on the arid soil,
And build dirt-huts, and get our food with toil,
And lose our happy, happy lives!” And so
These gentle creatures wept “Alas for woe!”
This same night forty thousand years ago.

215

IX.

“Are you not going back a little more?
What was the case ten thousand years before?”
Ten thousand years before 'twas Sunday night;
Four lovely girls were listening with delight,
Three noble youths admired another youth
Discoursing History crammed full of truth:
They all were sitting upon Hampstead Heath,
And monstrous grimy London lay beneath.
“The stupidest story Lazy ever told;
I've no more faith in his fine times of old.”
“How do you like our prospects now, my dears?
We'll all be mermaids in ten thousand years.”
“Mermaids are beautiful enough, but law!
Think of becoming a poor naked squaw!”
“But in these changes, sex will change no doubt;
We'll all be men and women turn about.”
“Then these four chaps will be the squaws?—that's just;
With lots of picaninnies, I do trust!”
“If changes go by fifty thousand, yes;
But if by ten, they last were squaws, I guess!”
“Come on; we'll go and do the very beers
We did this night was fifty thousand years.”
Thou prophet, thou deep sage! we'll go, we'll go:
The ring is round, Life naught, the World an O;
This night is fifty thousand years ago!

216

X.

As we rush, as we rush in the Train,
The trees and the houses go wheeling back,
But the starry heavens above the plain
Come flying on our track.

All the beautiful stars of the sky,
The silver doves of the forest of Night,
Over the dull earth swarm and fly,
Companions of our flight.

We will rush ever on without fear;
Let the goal be far, the flight be fleet!
For we carry the Heavens with us, Dear,
While the Earth slips from our feet!

XI.

Day after day of this azure May
The blood of the Spring has swelled in my veins;
Night after night of broad moonlight
A mystical dream has dazzled my brains.

A seething might, a fierce delight,
The blood of the Spring is the wine of the world;
My veins run fire and thrill desire,
Every leaf of my heart's red rose uncurled.

A sad sweet calm, a tearful balm,
The light of the Moon is the trance of the world;

217

My brain is fraught with yearning thought,
And the rose is pale and its leaves are furled.

O speed the day, thou dear, dear May,
And hasten the night I charge thee, O June,
When the trance divine shall burn with the wine
And the red rose unfurl all its fire to the Moon!

XII.

O mellow moonlight warm,
Weave round my Love a charm;
O countless starry eyes,
Watch from the holy skies;
O ever-solemn Night,
Shield her within thy might:
Watch her, my little one!
Shield her, my darling!

How my heart shrinks with fear,
Nightly to leave thee, dear;
Lonely and pure within
Vast glooms of woe and sin:
Our wealth of love and bliss
Too heavenly-perfect is:
Good night, my little one!
God keep thee, darling!

1863; 1865.

(Since finished, in a fashion. The verses were written in 1863.)

218

THE NAKED GODDESS

------“Arcane danze
D'immortal piede i ruinosi gioghi
Scossero e l'ardue selve (oggi romito
Nido de' venti).”
—Leopardi.

Through the country to the town
Ran a rumour and renown,
That a woman grand and tall,
Swift of foot, and therewithal
Naked as a lily gleaming,
Had been seen by eyes not dreaming,
Darting down far forest glades,
Flashing sunshine through the shades.

With this rumour's swelling word
All the city buzzed and stirred;
Solemn senators conferred;
Priest, astrologer, and mage,
Subtle sophist, bard, and sage,
Brought their wisdom, lore, and wit,
To expound or riddle it:
Last a porter ventured—“We
Might go out ourselves to see.”

219

Thus, upon a summer morn
Lo the city all forlorn;
Every house and street and square
In the sunshine still and bare,
Every galley left to sway
Silent in the glittering bay;
All the people swarming out,
Young and old a joyous rout,
Rich and poor, far-streaming through
Fields and meadows dark with dew,
Crowd on crowd, and throng on throng;
Chatter, laughter, jest, and song
Deafened all the singing birds,
Wildered sober grazing herds.

Up the hillside 'gainst the sun,
Where the forest outskirts run;
On along the level high,
Where the azure of the sky,
And the ruddy morning sheen,
Drop in fragments through the treen
Where the sward surrounds the brake
With a lucid, glassy lake,
Where the ample glades extend
Until clouds and foliage blend;
Where whoever turneth may
See the city and the bay,

220

And, beyond, the broad sea bright,
League on league of slanting light;
Where the moist blue shadows sleep
In the sacred forest deep.

Suddenly the foremost pause,
Ere the rear discern a cause;
Loiterers press up row on row,
All the mass heaves to and fro;
All seem murmuring in one strain,
All seem hearkening fixed and fain:
Silence, and the lifted light
Of countless faces gazing white.

Four broad beech-trees, great of bole,
Crowned the green, smooth-swelling knoll;
There She leant, the glorious form
Dazzling with its beauty warm,
Naked as the sun of noon,
Naked as the midnight moon:
And around her, tame and mild,
All the forest creatures wild—
Lion, panther, kid, and fawn,
Eagle, hawk, and dove, all drawn
By the magic of her splendour,
By her great voice, rich and tender,
Whereof every beast and bird
Understood each tone and word,

221

While she fondled and carest,
Playing freaks of joyous zest.

Suddenly the lion stood,
Turned and saw the multitude,
Swelled his mighty front in ire,
Roared the roar of raging fire:
Then She turned, the living light,
Sprang erect, grew up in height,
Smote them with the flash and blaze
Of her terrible, swift gaze;
A divine, flushed, throbbing form,
Dreadfuller than blackest storm.

All the forest creatures cowered,
Trembling, moaning, overpowered;
All the simple folk who saw
Sank upon their knees in awe
Of this Goddess, fierce and splendid,
Whom they witless had offended;
And they murmured out faint prayers,
Inarticulate despairs,
Till her hot and angry mien
Grew more gentle and serene.

Stood the high priest forth, and went
Halfway up the green ascent;

222

There began a preachment long
Of the great and grievous wrong
She unto her own soul wrought
In thus living without thought
Of the gods who sain and save,
Of the life beyond the grave:
Living with the beasts that perish,
Far from all the rites that cherish
Hope and faith and holy love,
And appease the thrones above:
Full of unction pled the preacher;
Let her come and they would teach her
Spirit strangled in the mesh
Of the vile and sinful flesh,
How to gain the heavenly prize,
How grow meet for Paradise;
Penance, prayer, self sacrifice,
Fasting, cloistered solitude,
Mind uplifted, heart subdued;
Thus a Virgin, clean and chaste,
In the Bridegroom's arms embraced.
Vestal sister's hooded gown,
Straight and strait, of dismal brown,
Here he proffered, and laid down
On the green grass like a frown.

Then stood forth the old arch-sage,
Wrinkled more with thought than age:

223

What could worse afflict, deject
Any well-trained intellect
Than in savage forest seeing
Such a full-grown human being
With the beasts and birds at play,
Ignorant and wild as they?
Sciences and arts, by which
Man makes Nature's poor life rich,
Dominates the world around,
Proves himself its King self-crowned,
She knew nothing of them, she
Knew not even what they be!
Body naked to the air,
And the reason just as bare!
Yet (since circumstance, that can
Hinder the full growth of man,
Cannot kill the seeds of worth
Innate in the Lord of Earth),
Yet she might be taught and brought
To full sovranty of thought,
Crowned with reason's glorious crown.
So he tendered and laid down,
Sober grey beside the brown,
Amplest philosophic gown.

Calm and proud she stood the while
With a certain wondering smile;

224

When the luminous sage was done
She began to speak as one
Using language not her own,
Simplest words in sweetest tone:
“Poor old greybeards, worn and bent!
I do know not what they meant;
Only here and there a word
Reached my mind of all I heard;
Let some child come here, I may
Understand what it can say.”

So two little children went,
Lingering up the green ascent,
Hand in hand, but grew the while
Bolder in her gentle smile;
When she kissed them they were free,
Joyous as at mother's knee.
“Tell me, darlings, now,” said she,
“What they want to say to me.”
Boy and girl then, nothing loth,
Sometimes one and sometimes both,
Prattled to her sitting there
Fondling with their soft young hair:
“Dear kind lady, do you stay
Here with always holiday?
Do you sleep among the trees?
People want you, if you please,

225

To put on your dress and come
With us to the City home;
Live with us and be our friend:
Oh, such pleasant times we'll spend! . . .
But if you can't come away,
Will you let us stop and play
With you and all these happy things
With hair and horns and shining wings?”

She arose and went half down,
Took the vestal sister's gown,
Tried it on, burst through its shroud,
As the sun burns through a cloud:
Flung it from her split and rent;
Said: “This cerement sad was meant
For some creature stunted, thin,
Breastless, blighted, bones and skin.”

Then the sage's robe she tried,
Muffling in its long folds wide
All her lithe and glorious grace:
“I should stumble every pace!
This big bag was meant to hold
Some poor sluggard fat and old,
Limping, shuffling wearily,
With a form not fit to see!”
So she flung it off again
With a gesture of disdain.

226

Naked as the midnight moon,
Naked as the sun of noon,
Burning too intensely bright,
Clothed in its own dazzling light;
Seen less thus than in the shroud
Of morning mist or evening cloud;
She stood terrible and proud
O'er the pallid quivering crowd.

At a gesture ere they wist,
Perched a falcon on her wrist,
And she whispered to the bird
Something it alone there heard;
Then she threw it off: when thrown
Straight it rose as falls a stone,
Arrow-swift on high, on high,
Till a mere speck in the sky;
Then it circled round and round,
Till, as if the prey were found,
Forth it darted on its quest
Straight away into the West. . . .
Every eye that watched its flight
Felt a sideward flash of light,
All were for a moment dazed,
Then around intently gazed:
What had passed them? Where was She,
The offended deity?

227

O'er the city, o'er the bay,
They beheld her melt away,
Melt away beyond their quest
Through the regions of the west;
While the eagle screamed rauque ire,
And the lion roared like fire.

That same night both priest and sage
Died accursed in sombre rage.
Never more in wild wood green
Was that glorious Goddess seen,
Never more: and from that day
Evil hap and dull decay
Fell on countryside and town;
Life and vigour dwindled down;
Storms in Spring nipped bud and sprout,
Summer suns shed plague and drought,
Autumn's store was crude and scant,
Winter snows beleaguered want;
Vines were black at vintage-tide,
Flocks and herds of murrain died;
Fishing boats came empty home,
Good ships foundered in the foam;
Haggard traders lost all heart
Wandering through the empty mart:
For the air hung thick with gloom,
Silence, and the sense of doom.

228

But those little children she
Had caressed so tenderly
Were betrothed that self-same night,
Grew up beautiful and bright,
Lovers through the years of play
Forward to their marriage-day.
Three long moons of bridal bliss
Overflowed them; after this,
With his bride and with a band
Of the noblest in the land,
Youths and maidens, wedded pairs
Scarcely older in life's cares,
He took ship and sailed away
Westward Ho from out the bay:
Portioned from their native shrine
With the Sacred Fire divine,
They will cherish while they roam,
Quenchless 'mid the salt sea foam,
Till it burns beneath a dome
In some new and far-off home.

As they ventured more and more
In that ocean without shore,
And some hearts were growing cold
At the emprise all too bold,
It is said a falcon came
Down the void blue swift as flame;

229

Every sunset came to rest
On the prow's high curving crest,
Every sunrise rose from rest
Flying forth into the west;
And they followed, faint no more,
Through that ocean without shore.

Three moons crescent fill and wane
O'er the solitary main,
When behold a green shore smile:
It was that Atlantic isle,
Drowned beneath the waves and years,
Whereof some faint shadow peers
Dubious through the modern stream
Of Platonic legend-dream.
High upon that green shore stood
She who left their native wood;
Glorious, and with solemn hand
Beckoned to them there to land.
Though She forthwith disappeared
As the wave-worn galley neared,
They knew well her presence still
Haunted stream and wood and hill.
There they landed, there grew great,
Founders of a mighty state:
There the Sacred Fire divine
Burned within a wondrous shrine

230

Which Her statue glorified
Throughout many kingdoms wide.
There those children wore the crown
To their children handed down
Many and many a golden age
Blotted now from history's page;
Till the last of all the line
Leagued him with the other nine
Great Atlantic kings whose hosts
Ravaged all the Mid Sea coasts:
Then the whelming deluge rolled
Over all those regions old;
Thrice three thousand years before
Solon questioned Egypt's lore.

1866–7.

Plato: the Timæus, and the Critias.

231

THE THREE THAT SHALL BE ONE

Love on the earth alit,
Come to be Lord of it;
Looked round and laughed with glee,
Noble my empery!
Straight ere that laugh was done
Sprang forth the royal sun,
Pouring out golden shine
Over the realm divine.

Came then a lovely may,
Dazzling the new-born day,
Wreathing her golden hair
With the red roses there,
Laughing with sunny eyes
Up to the sunny skies,
Moving so light and free
To her own minstrelsy.

232

Love with swift rapture cried,
Dear Life, thou art my bride!
Whereto, with fearless pride,
Dear Love, indeed thy bride!
All the earth's fruit and flowers,
All the world's wealth are ours;
Sun, moon, and stars gem
Our marriage diadem.

So they together fare,
Lovely and joyous pair;
So hand in hand they roam
All through their Eden home;
Each to the other's sight
An ever-new delight:
Blue heaven and blooming earth
Joy in their darling's mirth.

Who comes to meet them now,—
She with the pallid brow,
Wreathing her night-dark hair
With the red poppies there,
Pouring from solemn eyes
Gloom through the sunny skies,
Moving so silently
In her deep reverie?

233

Life paled as she drew near,
Love shook with doubt and fear.
Ah, then, she said, in truth
(Eyes full of yearning ruth),
Love, thou would'st have this Life,
Fair may! to be thy wife?
Yet at an awful shrine
Wert thou not plighted mine?

Pale, paler poor Life grew;
Love murmured, It is true!
How could I thee forsake?
From the brief dream I wake.
Yet, O belovèd Death,
See how she suffereth;
Ere we from earth depart
Soothe her, thou tender heart!

Faint on the ground she lay;
Love kissed the swoon away;
Death then bent over her,
Death the sweet comforter!
Whispered with tearful smile,
Wait but a little while,
Then I will come for thee;
We are one family.

1863.

234

ART

I.

What precious thing are you making fast
In all these silken lines?
And where and to whom will it go at last?
Such subtle knots and twines!

I am tying up all my love in this,
With all its hopes and fears,
With all its anguish and all its bliss,
And its hours as heavy as years.

I am going to send it afar, afar,
To I know not where above;
To that sphere beyond the highest star
Where dwells the soul of my Love.

But in vain, in vain, would I make it fast
With countless subtle twines;
For ever its fire breaks out at last,
And shrivels all the lines.

235

II.

If you have a carrier-dove
That can fly over land and sea;
And a message for your Love,
“Lady, I love but thee!”

And this dove will never stir
But straight from her to you,
And straight from you to her;
As you know and she knows too.

Will you first ensure, O sage,
Your dove that never tires
With your message in a cage,
Though a cage of golden wires?

Or will you fling your dove:
“Fly, darling, without rest,
Over land and sea to my Love,
And fold your wings in her breast”?

III.

Singing is sweet; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.

Did he ever suspire a tender lay
While her presence took his breath away?

236

Had his fingers been able to toy with her hair
Would they then have written the verses fair?

Had she let his arm steal round her waist
Would the lovely portrait yet be traced?

Since he could not embrace it flushed and warm
He has carved in stone the perfect form.

Who gives the fine report of the feast?
He who got none and enjoyed it least.

Were the wine really slipping down his throat
Would his song of the wine advance a note?

Will you puff out the music that sways the whirl,
Or dance and make love with a pretty girl?

Who shall the great battle-story write?
Not the hero down in the thick of the fight.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand,
But they are not the Life for which they stand.

1865.

237

PHILOSOPHY

I.

His eyes found nothing beautiful and bright,
Nor wealth nor honour, glory nor delight,
Which he could grasp and keep with might and right.

Flowers bloomed for maidens, swords outflashed for boys,
The world's big children had their various toys;
He could not feel their sorrows and their joys.

Hills held a secret they would not unfold,
In careless scorn of him the ocean rolled,
The stars were alien splendours high and cold.

He felt himself a king bereft of crown,
Defrauded from his birthright of renown,
Bred up in littleness with churl and clown.

238

II.

How could he vindicate himself? His eyes,
That found not anywhere their proper prize,
Looked through and through the specious earth and skies.

They probed, and all things yielded to their probe;
They saw the void around the massy globe,
The raging fire within its flowery robe.

They pierced through beauty; saw the bones, the mesh
Of nerves and veins, the hideous raw red flesh,
Beneath the skin most delicate and fresh:

Saw Space a mist unfurled around the steep
Where plunge Time's waters to the blackest deep;
Saw Life a dream in Death's eternal sleep.

III.

A certain fair form came before his sight,
Responding to him as the day to night:
To yearning, love; to cold and gloom, warm light.

239

A hope sprang from his breast, and fluttered far
On rainbow wings; beyond the cloudy bar,
Though very much beneath the nearest star.

His eyes drew back their beams to kindle fire
In his own heart; whose masterful desire
Scorned all beyond its aim, lower or higher.

This fire flung lustre upon grace and bloom,
Gave warmth and brightness to a little room,
Burned Thought to ashes in its fight with gloom.

IV.

He said: Those eyes alone see well that view
Life's lovely surfaces of form and hue;
And not Death's entrails, looking through and through.

Bones, nerves, and veins, and flesh, are covered in
By this opaque transparency of skin,
Precisely that we should not see within.

The corpse is hid, that Death may work its vile
Corruption in black secrecy; the while
Our saddest graves with grass and fair flowers smile.

240

If you will analyse the bread you eat,
The water and the wine most pure and sweet,
Your stomach soon must loathe all drink and meat.

Life liveth but in Life, and doth not roam
To other realms if all be well at home:
“Solid as ocean-foam,” quoth ocean-foam.

If Midge will pine and curse its hours away
Because Midge is not Everything For-aye,
Poor Midge thus loses its one summer day;
Loses its all—and winneth what, I pray?

1866.

241

LIFE'S HEBE

In the early morning-shine
Of a certain day divine,
I beheld a Maiden stand
With a pitcher in her hand;
Whence she poured into a cup
Until it was half filled up
Nectar that was golden light
In the cup of crystal bright.

And the first who took the cup
With pure water filled it up;
As he drank then, it was more
Ruddy golden than before:
And he leapt and danced and sang
As to Bacchic cymbals' clang.

But the next who took the cup
With the red wine filled it up;
What he drank then was in hue
Of a heavy sombre blue:

242

First he reeled and then he crept,
Then lay faint but never slept.

And the next who took the cup
With the white milk filled it up;
What he drank at first seemed blood,
Then turned thick and brown as mud:
And he moved away as slow
As a weary ox may go.

But the next who took the cup
With sweet honey filled it up;
Nathless that which he did drink
Was thin fluid black as ink:
As he went he stumbled soon,
And lay still in deathlike swoon.

She the while without a word
Unto all the cup preferred;
Blandly smiled and sweetly laughed
As each mingled his own draught.

And the next who took the cup
To the sunshine held it up,
Gave it back and did not taste;
It was empty when replaced:
First he bowed a reverent bow,
Then he kissed her on the brow.

243

But the next who took the cup
Without mixture drank it up;
When she took it back from him
It was full unto the brim:
He with a right bold embrace
Kissed her sweet lips face to face.

Then she sang with blithest cheer:
Who has thirst, come here, come here!
Nectar that is golden light
In the cup of crystal bright,
Nectar that is sunny fire
Warm as warmest heart's desire:
Pitcher never lacketh more,
Arm is never tired to pour:
Honey, water, milk, or wine
Mingle with the draught divine,
Drink it pure, or drink it not;
Each is free to choose his lot:
Am I old? or am I cold?
Only two have kissed me bold!

She was young and fair and gay
As that young and glorious day.

1866.

244

A POLISH INSURGENT

What would you have? said I;
'Tis so easy to go and die,
'Tis so hard to stay and live,
In this alien peace and this comfort callous,
Where only the murderers get the gallows,
Where the jails are for rogues who thieve.

'Tis so easy to go and die,
Where our Country, our Mother, the Martyr,
Moaning in bonds doth lie,
Bleeding with stabs in her breast,
Her throat with a foul clutch prest,
Under the thrice-accursed Tartar.

But Smith, your man of sense,
Ruddy, and broad, and round—like so!
Kindly—but dense, but dense,
Said to me: “Do not go:
It is hopeless; right is wrong;
The tyrant is too strong.”

245

Must a man have hope to fight?
Can a man not fight in despair?
Must the soul cower down for the body's weakness,
And slaver the devil's hoof with meekness,
Nor care nor dare to share
Certain defeat with the right?

They do not know us, my Mother!
They know not our love, our hate!
And how we would die with each other,
Embracing proud and elate,
Rather than live apart
In peace with shame in the heart.

No hope!—If a heavy anger
Our God hath treasured against us long,
His lightning-shafts from His thunder-clangour
Raining a century down:
We have loved when we went most wrong;
He cannot for ever frown.

No hope!—We can haste to be killed,
That the tale of the victims get filled;
The more of the debt we pay,
The less on our sons shall weigh:
This star through the baleful rack of the cope
Burns red; red is our hope.

246

O our Mother, thou art noble and fair!
Fair and proud and chaste, thou Queen!
Chained and stabbed in the breast,
Thy throat with a foul clutch prest;
Yet around thee how coarse, how mean,
Are these rich shopwives who stare!

Art thou moaning, O our Mother, through the swoon
Of thine agony of desolation?—
“Do my sons still love me? or can they stand
Gazing afar from a foreign land,
Loving more peace and gold—the boon
Of a people strange, of a sordid nation?”

O our Mother, moan not thus!
We love you as you love us,
And our hearts are wild with thy sorrow:
If we cannot save thee, we are blest
Who can die on thy sacred bleeding breast.—
So we left Smith-Land on the morrow,
And we hasten across the West.

1863.

Some time after writing this I found that the great Balzac, in La Cousine Bette, dwells on this very phrase, “Que voulezvous?” as characteristic of the gallant and reckless Poles.

247

L'ANCIEN RÉGIME;

OR, THE GOOD OLD RULE

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king,
Our king all kings above?
A young girl brought him love;
And he dowered her with shame,
With a sort of infamous fame,
And then with lonely years
Of penance and bitter tears:
Love is scarcely the thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
A statesman brought him planned
Justice for all the land;

248

And he in recompense got
Fierce struggle with brigue and plot,
Then a fall from lofty place
Into exile and disgrace:
Justice is never the thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
A writer brought him truth;
And first he imprisoned the youth;
And then he bestowed a free pyre
That the works might have plenty of fire,
And also to cure the pain
Of the headache called thought in the brain:
Truth is a very bad thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
The people brought their sure
Loyalty fervid and pure;
And he gave them bountiful spoil
Of taxes and hunger and toil,
Ignorance, brutish plight,
And wholesale slaughter in fight:
Loyalty's quite the worst thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

249

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
A courtier brought to his feet
Servility graceful and sweet,
With an ever ready smile
And an ever supple guile;
And he got in reward the place
Of the statesman in disgrace:
Servility's always a thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
A soldier brought him war,
La gloire, la victoire,
Ravage and carnage and groans,
For the pious Te Deum tones;
And he got in return for himself
Rank and honours and pelf:
War is a very fine thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
A harlot brought him her flesh,
Her lusts, and the manifold mesh
Of her wiles intervolved with caprice;
And he gave her his realm to fleece,

250

To corrupt, to ruin, and gave
Himself for her toy and her slave:
Harlotry's just the thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our lord the king?
Our king who fears to die?
A priest brought him a lie,
The blackness of hell uprolled
In heaven's shining gold;
And he got as guerdon for that
A see and a cardinal's hat:
A lie is an excellent thing
To bring as a gift for our king.

Has any one yet a thing
For a gift to our lord the king?
The country gave him a tomb,
A magnificent sleeping-room;
And for this it obtained some rest,
Clear riddance of many a pest,
And a hope which it much enjoyed
That the throne would continue void:
A tomb is the very best thing
For a gift to our lord the king.

1867.

251

E. B. B.

The white-rose garland at her feet,
The crown of laurel at her head,
Her noble life on earth complete,
Lay her in the last low bed
For the slumber calm and deep:
“He giveth His belovèd sleep.”

Soldiers find their fittest grave
In the field whereon they died;
So her spirit pure and brave
Leaves the clay it glorified
To the land for which she fought
With such grand impassioned thought.

Keats and Shelley sleep at Rome,
She in well-loved Tuscan earth;
Finding all their death's long home
Far from their old home of birth.
Italy, you hold in trust
Very sacred English dust.

252

Therefore this one prayer I breathe,—
That you yet may worthy prove
Of the heirlooms they bequeath
Who have loved you with such love:
Fairest land while land of slaves
Yields their free souls no fit graves.

1861.

253

POLYCRATES ON WATERLOO BRIDGE

Let no mortals dare to be
Happier in their lives than we:
Thus the jealous gods decree.

This decree was never heard,
Never by their lips averred,
Yet on high stands registered.

I have read it, and I fear
All the gods above, my Dear,
All must envy us two here.

Let us, then, propitiate
These proud satraps of sole Fate;
Our hearts' wealth is all too great.

Say, what rich and cherished thing
Can I to the river fling
As a solemn offering?

254

O belovèd Meerschaum Pipe,
Whose pink bloom would soon be ripe,
Must thou be the chosen type?

Cloud-compeller! Foam o' the Sea,
Whence rose Venus fair and free
On some poet's reverie!

In the sumptuous silken-lined
Case where thou hast lain enshrined
Thou must now a coffin find!

And, to drag thee surely down,
Lo! I tie my last half-crown:
We shall have to walk through town.

Penny toll is paid, and thus
All the bridge is free to us;
But no cab, nor even a 'bus!

Far I fling thee through the gloom;
Sink into thy watery tomb,
O thou consecrate to Doom!

May no sharp police, while they track
Spoils thrown after some great “crack,”
Ever, ever bring thee back!

255

No mudlarkers, who explore
Every ebb the filthy floor,
Bring thee to the day once more!

No sleek cook—I spare the wish;
Dead dogs, cats, and suchlike fish,
Surely are not yet a dish? . . .

Gods! the dearest, as I wis,
Of my treasures offered is;
Pardon us our heavenly bliss!

What Voice murmurs full of spleen?
Not that Pipe, but—Ssss! how mean
All the gods have ever been!

1865.

256

SHAMELESS

Kew Gardens.

That irreverent scoundrel grinned as he passed;
And perhaps we did look silly!
As I on you those sheep's eyes cast,
Which you cast back willy-nilly:

While both my hands patted your dear little hand,
As if in a fit of abstraction;
And you let it lie at their command,
Quite unaware of the action!

A deaf mute, say, for the first time sees
A youth and a damsel dancing,
With their bows, twirls, shuffles, and one-two-threes,
Retreating and advancing.

He hears not the music, he finds no cause
For such bewildering antic;
He thinks the poor creatures obey no laws,
But are certainly daft or frantic.

257

So one who has felt not the love which rules
And stirs, the harmonious passion,
Must deem us lovers demented fools
To act in so queer a fashion.

I have heard that this theme in the assonant rhyme
Has been sung with a beauty entrancing:
The Spaniards have ever been sublime
In passionate love and dancing.

1865.

258

THE FIRE THAT FILLED MY HEART OF OLD

I

The fire that filled my heart of old
Gave lustre while it burned;
Now only ashes grey and cold
Are in its silence urned.
Ah! better was the furious flame,
The splendour with the smart:
I never cared for the singer's fame,
But, oh! for the singer's heart
Once more—
The burning fulgent heart!

II

No love, no hate, no hope, no fear,
No anguish and no mirth;
Thus life extends from year to year,
A flat of sullen dearth.

259

Ah! life's blood creepeth cold and tame,
Life's thought plays no new part:
I never cared for the singer's fame,
But, oh! for the singer's heart
Once more—
The bleeding passionate heart!

1864.

260

TWO SONNETS

I

“Why are your songs all wild and bitter sad
As funeral dirges with the orphans' cries?
Each night since first the world was made hath had
A sequent day to laugh it down the skies.
Chant us a glee to make our hearts rejoice,
Or seal in silence this unmanly moan.”
My friend, I have no power to rule my voice:
A spirit lifts me where I lie alone,
And thrills me into song by its own laws;
That which I feel, but seldom know, indeed
Tempering the melody it could not cause.
The bleeding heart cannot for ever bleed
Inwardly solely: on the wan lips too
Dark blood will bubble ghastly into view.

261

II

Striving to sing glad songs, I but attain
Wild discords sadder than Grief's saddest tune;
As if an owl with his harsh screech should strain
To over-gratulate a thrush of June.
The nightingale upon its thorny spray
Finds inspiration in the sullen dark;
The kindling dawn, the world-wide joyous day
Are inspiration to the soaring lark;
The seas are silent in the sunny calm,
Their anthem-surges in the tempest boom;
The skies outroll no solemn thunder psalm
Till they have clothed themselves with clouds of gloom.
My mirth can laugh and talk, but cannot sing;
My grief finds harmonies in everything.

1860.

262

A SONG OF SIGHING

I

Would some little joy to-day
Visit us, heart!
Could it but a moment stay,
Then depart,
With the flutter of its wings
Stirring sense of brighter things.

II

Like a butterfly astray
In a dark room;
Telling:—Outside there is day,
Sweet flowers bloom,
Birds are singing, trees are green,
Runnels ripple silver sheen.

263

III

Heart! we now have been so long
Sad without change,
Shut in deep from shine and song,
Nor can range;
It would do us good to know
That the world is not all woe.

IV

Would some little joy to-day
Visit us, heart!
Could it but a moment stay,
Then depart,
With the lustre of its wings
Lighting dreams of happy things,
O sad my heart!

1868.

264

DAY

Waking one morning
In a pleasant land,
By a river flowing
Over golden sand:—

Whence flow ye, waters,
O'er your golden sand?
We come flowing
From the Silent Land.

Whither flow ye, waters,
O'er your golden sand?
We go flowing
To the Silent Land.

And what is this fair realm?
A grain of golden sand
In the great darkness
Of the Silent Land.

1866.

265

NIGHT

He cried out through the night:
“Where is the light?
Shall nevermore
Open Heaven's door?
Oh, I am left
Lonely, bereft!”

He cried out through the night:
It spread vaguely white,
With its ghost of a moon
Above the dark swoon
Of the earth lying chill,
Breathless, grave still.

He cried out through the night:
His voice in its might
Rang forth far and far,
And then like a star
Dwindled from sense
In the Immense.

266

He cried out through the night:
No answering light,
No syllabled sound;
Beneath and around
A long shuddering thrill,
Then all again still.

1864.

267

VIRTUE AND VICE

She was so good, and he was so bad:
A very pretty time they had!
A pretty time, and it lasted long:
Which of the two was more in the wrong?
He befouled in the slough of sin;
Or she whose piety pushed him in?
He found her yet more cold and staid
As wedded wife than courted maid:
She filled their home with freezing gloom;
He felt it dismal as a tomb:
Her steadfast mind disdained his toys
Of worldly pleasures, carnal joys;
Her heart firm-set on things above
Was frigid to his earthly love.

So he came staggering home at night;
Where she sat chilling, chaste, and white:
She smiled a scornful virtuous smile,
He flung good books with curses vile.
Fresh with the early morn she rose,
While he yet lay in a feverish doze:

268

She prayed for blessings from the Throne,
He called for “a hair of the dog” with a groan:
She blessed God for her strength to bear
The heavy load,—he 'gan to swear:
She sighed, Would Heaven, ere yet too late,
Bring him to see his awful state!
The charity thus sweetly pressed
Made him rage like one possessed.

So she grew holier day by day,
While he grew all the other way.
She left him: she had done her part
To wean from sin his sinful heart,
But all in vain; her presence might
Make him a murderer some mad night.
Her family took her back, pure saint,
Serene in soul, above complaint:
The narrow path she strictly trod,
And went in triumph home to God:
While he into the Union fell,
Our halfway house on the road to Hell.
With which would you rather pass your life
The wicked husband or saintly wife?

1865.

269

LOW LIFE

AS OVERHEARD IN THE TRAIN.

That jolly old gentleman, bless his white hat!
Wouldn't come in to spoil our chat;
We are alone and we can speak,—
What have you done, Miss, all the week?

“Oh, all the day it's been fit and shew,
And all the night it's been trim and sew,
For the ladies are flocking to Exeter Hall
In lovely light dresses fit for a ball.”

Under your eye a little dark streak,
And a point of red on the top of your cheek,
And your temples quite dim against your hair;
This sha'n't last very much longer I swear.

And what is the news from the workroom now?
“The week began with a bit of a row;
Emmy Harley married young Earl
Just in the busy time!”—sensible girl!

270

“That was on Monday; Missis said
It was very ungrateful, very ill-bred,
And very unkind to us when she knew
The work so heavy, the hands so few.

“But this was nothing: the minute we woke
On Wednesday, before it seemed any one spoke,
We knew that poor Mary Challis was dead;
Kate Long had been sleeping in the same bed.

“Mary worked with us till twelve, when tea
Was brought in to keep us awake, but she
Was so ill then, Miss Cooper sent her to bed;
And there in the morning they found her dead;

“With Kate fast asleep by her side: they had come
To see how she was, and the sight struck them dumb:
At last they roused Kate and led her away;
She was sick and shuddering all the day.

“Kate says when she went up at four to their room
She was stupid with sleep; but she marked a faint bloom
On Mary's pale face, and she heard her breathe low—
A light fluttering breath now quick and now slow;

“And feared to disturb her, for she had a cough,
But the moment she laid her head down she was off,

271

And knew nothing more till they stood by the side
Of the bed: p'r'aps Mary slept on till she died.

“They buried her yesterday. Kate was there,
And she was the only one Missis could spare;
Some dresses were bound to be finished by night,
For the ladies to go in to Church all right.

“Poor Mary! she didn't fear dying, she said,
Her father drinks and her mother is dead;
But she hoped that in Heaven the white garments wear
For ever; no fashions and dressmaking There.”

My Love, if the ladies most pious of all
Who flock to the Church and to Exeter Hall
Find Heaven has but one dress for rich as for poor,
And no fashions, they'll very soon cut it I'm sure.

I saw you ten minutes on Tuesday night,
Then I took the 'bus home for I had to write;
And I wrote and I wrote like an engine till five,
When my fingers were dead and the letters alive.

A fair bill of costs from a deuce of a draft
In our Cashier's worst scrawl like Chinese ran daft;
With entries between, on the margin, the back,
And figures like short-hand marks put to the rack.

272

But our Common-law Clerk is going away,
And the Gov'nor had me in yesterday,
And said he would try me, he thought I might do;
And I jumped at the chance, for this child thinks so too.

Just fancy, each morning a jolly good walk,
And instead of the copying, bustle and talk!
And if I do well—and well I will do—
A couple of sovs. a week for my screw!

And then when I'm free of the desk and the stool,
Do you think you will keep to the nunnery rule
Of the shop, till you go off like Mary some night
Smothered in work from the air and the light?

We'll use our professional talents, my dear:
You shall make such a wedding dress, best of the year!
And a wonderful marriage-deed I will draw
With magnificent settlements perfect in law.

Thus doing our duties in those states of life
In which it has pleased God to call us, my wife!
“And how much a year will you settle on me?”
My body and soul and—what we shall see.

1865.

273

PROLOGUE TO THE PILGRIMAGE TO SAINT NICOTINE OF THE HOLY HERB

In every country and in every age
Have men been wont to go on pilgrimage,
As I have read,—each visiting that shrine
Which seems to him most blessèd and divine;
Athwart far lands, athwart the wild sea foam:
Some to Jerusalem, and some to Rome;
And some to Lourdes,—très lourdes, très lourdes God wot,
Les pauvres âmes which seek that sacred spot;
And some to Santiago far in Spain,
Anear the roar of the Atlantic main;
And some unto our Lady of Lorette,—
Full many votaries this Dame doth get:
The very Paynims bring their vows and prayers
To Mecca and to Yeddo and Benares:

274

While others piously seek out the tombs
Of mighty men who have fulfilled their dooms,
The fields where battles long ago were fought,
The scenes wherever wondrous works were wrought,
The sites of antique cities overthrown,
The fanes of fair gods dead and turned to stone:—
What need write more? when saint and bard and sage
Declare our whole life but one Pilgrimage;
A journey from the cradle to the bier
Of all the restless millions wandering here;
A toilsome travel of all things alive
Unto the Temple where they all arrive,
And bowing down before the Shrine of Death
Find peace at last in breathing their last breath.

But furthermore thus teacheth the wise man;
That age by age our human caravan
Is like unto all those that went before
And all that shall come after evermore:
New names, new robes, new thoughts and words and deeds,
New toys and treasures, sciences and creeds
But ever the same passions and same needs:
The same old Drama on the same old Stage,
The same old tears and laughters, joy and rage;
The selfsame characters upon the Scene,
Wise, foolish, rich and poor, and great and mean

275

Old actors fall away with weary hearts,
Fresh actors come to take the selfsame parts;
And whosoe'er the destined rôles may fill,
Hamlet is Hamlet—Osric, Osric still;
And ever with the fifth act come the knaves
To vent their clownish jests and dig the graves;
And ever with the last scene entereth
Some princely one demanding—“O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell?
And so the Play is over: very well,
It shall be played again, and have a run,
Coëval with the earth's around the sun.

Lo this is what men call philosophie,
Whereof I know not anything perdie,
But it hath brought us to our proper theme,
Our Card of beauty and of joy supreme,
Our peerless Pilgrimage unto the Shrine
Of most beneficent Saint Nicotine.
Five hundred years agone Dan Chaucer went
A-riding through the pleasant lanes of Kent,
In April on the eight and twentieth day,
Which were with us I ween a week in May,

276

He and his compagnie of twenty-nine,
Both men and women, to the holy shrine
Of Him by hot Knights at the altar slain,
And now by Master Froude killed over again
All in cold blood; alas! a piteous doom,
Sword-pierced in life and pen-pierced in the tomb:
But Master Freeman now hath set to work
To maul this Froude as if he were a Turk;
And he who kicked A'Becket as he lay
Is like to kick the bucket in this fray.
This compagnie it was of all degrees,
The high, the low, the midway; and all these,
Yea, each and all, our Poet doth rehearse
And picture lifelike in his cordial verse;

277

As sweet and rath as his own daisy was
“Upon the smalè, softè, swotè gras,”
As rich and free and cheerful as the gush
Of gratulation from a mid-June thrush:
I rede you read him once and twice and thrice,
And over again; it is my boon advice;
And learn what all these men and women were
In mind and body, state and garb and air;
And feel what full red-blooded life did flow
Thorough their veins five hundred years ago;
And find what Tales they told upon their way
Of noble tragedy and jolly play;
And see that we are now what they were then,
Since fashions change, not women, neither men.

What this first Poet, whom we love so well,
Of merrie England, in his verse did tell
Of these glad Pilgrims, both their mind and make,
That Artist of the Visions clepèd Blake,
Who also sang delightful young-world songs,
Soaring aloof from all our old-world wrongs,
Did picture forth with pencil and engrave,
Form after form to match the Poet brave:
We touch not him, for he was grand and wild;
We leave this giant who became a child.
A graceful limner, Stothard was his name,
Did set himself to enterprise the same,

278

And him we follow in our noble Card;
But whereas he went backward to the Bard
Through all the centuries, to match his rhyme,
We choose our Pilgrims from our very time:
For why? our Saint is not the Saint of old,
But hath more votaries a hundredfold;
Lo you shall hear of him anon, but first
Behoves the jolly Pilgrims be rehearsed;
New Saint, New Pilgrims, but the counterparts
Of Chaucer's rout en route in brains and hearts.

1878.

There has been much learned astronomical discussion, of dubious import, about the exact time of the year, as indicated in the opening of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales.” If the deep scientific gentlemen engaged had but condescended to look forward to the Man of Law's Prologue they might have read in the beginning thereof—

“And though he [the host] were not depe expert in lore,
He wiste it was the eighte and twenty day
Of April, that is messager to May.”

This may suffice to fix the date accurately enough for us who are not astronomers. The Old Style, I suppose, would then be about eight days behind the New, as the difference I believe increases three days in every four centuries (one in each of the three which is not a multiple of four), and was eleven days in 1752, when the New Style was adopted in England (we all know how the populace vociferously demanded the eleven days of which they conceived themselves defrauded): the Russians, who keep to the Old Style, now date twelve days behind us. Thus Chaucer's April 28 would be our May 6. In reading Herrick and his contemporaries on the delights of going a-Maying, we are apt to forget that their May-day the 1st was our 11th; so with many old weather proverbs.

279

VERSICLES

Wherever on this round earth
Your shaft shall enter,
Strike it straight, and never fear
But you'll reach at last the centre.

Each doth by his birth belong
To some sphere wherein he's strong;
Nine of ten with passion seek
Alien spheres wherein they're weak;
Whence in almost every man
Such incongruous Will and Can.

Dear Mother Earth, tell us, tell us, tell us!
What is the meaning of all the things we see?—
Oh! what a family of puny little fellows,
Calling me always, Tellus, Tellus, Tellus!
Eat your bread, drink your wine, snatch at all you see;
But I am very busy, do not bother me.

November 1866.

280

L'ENVOY

When the sixties are outrun,
And the seventies nearly done,
Or the eighties just begun;
May some young and happy man,
Wiser, kinder, nobler than
He who tenders this one, bring
You the real Magic Ring.

This one may have pleasant powers;
Charming idle girlish hours
With its tales from færie bowers;
Tinting hopeful maiden dreams
With its soft romantic gleams;
Breathing love of love and truth,
Valour, innocence and ruth.

281

But may that one bless the life
Of the woman and the wife
Through our dull world's care and strife;
Year by year with rich increase,
Give you love, and joy, and peace;
And at last the good death bring,
Sweet as sleep: your Magic Ring.

282

Sunday LILAH, ALICE, HYPATIA, 14/2/69.

Who was Lilah? I am sure
She was young and sweet and pure;
With the forehead wise men love,—
Here a lucid dawn above
Broad curved brows, and twilight there,
Under the deep dusk of hair.

And her eyes? I cannot say
Whether brown, or blue, or grey:
I have seen them brown, and blue,
And a soft green grey—the hue
Shakespeare loved (and he was wise),
“Grey as glass” were Silvia's eyes.

283

So to Lilah's name above
I will add two names I love,
Linking with the bracket curls
Three sweet names of three sweet girls,
Sunday of Saint Valentine,
Eighteen hundred sixty nine.

284

CREEDS AND MEN

Twohosts received me in one day,
And poured their best to greet my stay;
The bottles, labels, seals were twins
Alike as penalties and sins:
Yet one flowed forth the richest wine;
The other acid, gall, and brine.

Two hosts received me the next day,
And poured their best to greet my stay;
The bottles, labels, seals in sooth
Unlike as falsehood unto truth:
Yet both flowed forth a liberal wine
Of festal jubilance divine.

Seals, labels, bottles are but vain;
Regard the spirit they contain. [OMITTED]
A poor gin-bottle I found one day,
Full of the wine of rich Tokay;
A Tokay-bottle I found, within
Only the vilest vitriol gin:
No more of the outward form I ask,
But, what is the spirit that fills the flask?

1878.

285

VERSIFICATION OF THOMAS COOPER'S ARGUMENT

IN A DEBATE ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD BETWEEN THAT GENTLEMAN AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH

My poor friends, I come to you kindly,
With a brotherly kiss, not a rod;
For I know that sincerely, though blindly,
You look up in vain for a God.
For a very long time I have sought you—
Since we met last the years are now seven—
And here I have found you and brought you
My Ladder for climbing to Heaven.

My wonderful Ladder, that reaches
From Self here to God (be not vext);
Though its rungs are so few, and though each is
A quite simple step from the next.
For five years and eight months precisely
It has borne me to either extreme,
As cleverly, safely, and nicely
As those angels of Jacob's sweet dream.

286

You have seen a lamp-lighter at work, friends?
Well, just in his fashion I'll stop,
Set my Ladder, mount quick, give a jerk, friends,
And light up a God at the top.
And Bradlaugh, this ignorant fellow,
May pelt at my lamp as he likes
(Young fools often do so when mellow);
I wager no stone of his strikes.

I plant it on I; you can never
Persuade me I am not, now, here:
But as I have not been for ever,
I must have a Cause—that is clear.
And as I am a personal being,
Intelligent, conscious, I claim
That the stupidest cannot help seeing
My Cause must be ditto—the same.

Take another neat step: there is nowhere
Where Nothing at all can be found;
Wherever our thoughts go, they go where
Unlimited Something's around:
And the Cause of this infinite Something
Must be certainly infinite too;
For it would be a monstrous and rum thing
To fancy a finite would do.

287

So ourselves and the whole world of Matter
Have one Cause—for who would explore
(Without he was mad as a hatter)
Still backwards forever for more?
One cause, without cause, thus eternal;
And infinite, therefore the power
Of His will uncontrolled is supernal—
Omnipotence must be His dower.

And this all-wise, all-good, and almighty
Creator of spirit and clod,
At the top of my Ladder of light, He
It is whom we worship as God.
O my friends, is the climbing not easy?
And are not the steps safe and strong?
And how should my Ladder not please ye
When I've trusted to it so long?

O my luminous, logical Ladder,
My natural musical scale,
Whose notes swell up gladder and gladder
In glory and triumph—all hail!
The Cross, though a very good notion,
And on the whole rather divine,
Inspires no such fervid devotion
As doth this grand Ladder of mine.

288

P.S. penn'd for such as Truelove there
And Bradlaugh: My God in the sky
Is the little round dot up above there
Perfecting this neat little i:
For i wants the dot for completion,
But no dot is wanted by u:—
O Plato, much lecturing Grecian,
The Metempsychosis is true!

1864.

289

MR. MACCALL AT CLEVELAND HALL

(April 15, 1866)

Mr. Maccall at Cleveland Hall,
Sunday evening—date to fix—
Fifteenth April, sixty-six,
Speech reported and redacted
By a fellow much distracted.

I.

Who lectures? No mere scorner;
Clear-brained, his heart is warm.

She sits at the nearest corner
Of I will not say what form.

II.

The Conflict of Opinions
In the Present Day, saith Chair.

What muff in the British dominions
Could dispute that she is fair?

290

III.

Mammon-worship is horrid,
Plutocracy is base.

Dark hair from a fine small forehead;
I catch but the still side face.

IV.

We wallow in mere dimension,
The Big to us is Great.

If she stood at her utmost tension
She might pass four feet eight.

V.

We lay on colour in splashes,
With a mop, or a broom for brush.

How dark are her long eyelashes!
How pure is her cheek's slight flush!

VI.

But we have no perception
For form—the divinest—now.

Each curve there is perfection,
In nostril, chin, and brow.

291

VII.

Our women are good kind creatures,
But they cannot dress at all.

Does her bonnet grace her features?—
Clear blue with a black lace fall.

VIII.

Low Church—very low—in the gutter;
High Church—as ven'son high.

O'er the flower of her face gleams the flutter
Of a smile like a butterfly.

IX.

Herder, Wieland, Lessing;
Bossuet, Montalembert.

Fine names, but the name worth guessing
Is the name of the sweet girl there.

X.

The individual; true man;
Individuality.

A man's but one half; some woman
The other half must be.

292

XI.

Persistent valour the sternest,
With love's most gentle grace.

How grand is the eye fixed earnest
In the half-seen up-turned face!

XII.

“How did you like the lecture?
Was it not beautiful?”

I should think she was! “I conjecture
That your brains have been gathering wool!”

P.S.

The Chairman was a rare man;
At every telling point
He smiled at his post like a jolly host
Carving rich cuts from the joint;
Which the name he bore was Richard Moore
Whom Heaven with grace anoint!

That conflict of opinion
It had its counterpart
In conflict for dominion
Between my head and heart.

April 16, 1866.

293

BILL JONES ON PRAYER

Well, I'm not much of a hand at prayer,
It's hardly in my line;
I am pretty fair at a laugh and a swear,
But a duffer at a whine.

And if so be that a God there be
On high above the sun,
Why, who can know so well as he,
What's the best thing to be done?

And since he is no less good than wise,
And has all power thereto,
Why should one pester him with cries
Of what he ought to do?

God helpeth him who helps himself,
They preach to us as a fact,
Which seems to lay up God on the shelf,
And leave the man to act.

294

Which seems to mean—You do the work,
Have all the trouble and pains,
While God, that Indolent Grand Old Turk,
Gets credit for the gains.

November 1, 1880.

295

EPIGRAMS

IPHIGENIA À LA MODE

How many a noble father since Agamemnon sinned,
Has sacrificed his daughter just to raise the wind!

1864.

LOVE'S LOGIC

Love's Logic:
I am and thou art . . . . must be marriage.
(A syllogism who will dare disparage.)

1865.

296

A TIMELY PRAYER

Thou great Physician, fair play is divine
To “M.D.” add “V.S.”; for, by the powers,
The cattle on a thousand hills are thine,
The cattle with a thousand ills are ours.

1866.

This was written at a time when the cattle-plague was very prevalent.

WHO KILLED MOSES?

Who killed poor Moses?
Goethe supposes
That the terrible son
Of a masculine Nun,
And Caleb his crony,
Whose sire is Jephone,
Together killed Moses;
So Goethe supposes!

1866.

297

SUGGESTED FROM SOUTHAMPTON

Mr. Kingsley's faith is just
What a candidate should swear;
Mr. Kingsley takes on trust
All these trifles light as Eyre.

September 1866.

This refers to Mr. Kingsley's professed faith in the necessity of the severe measures taken by Governor Eyre in the suppression of the rebellion in Jamaica.

POOR INDEED!

The earth is the lords' and the fulness thereof,
The country and also the towns;
Our dear old Queen is our only sov.,
And she's hardly worth three crowns;
And we very much fear when her loss we deplore,
The sovereign or crown we shall never see more.

April 1871.

298

IN EXITU ISRAEL

The Jew came up from the land of Goschen;
Now Gladstone makes that land the ocean;
A miracle which brings to thought
The plaguey wonders Moses wrought.

March 1871.

THE SUCCESSORS WHO DO NOT SUCCEED

I.

The first Apostles, called to be
Fishers of men in Galilee,
By hook or crook, as all agree,
Did catch their men by shoal;
Now each Successor has his see,
Fine gold and silver fish nets he,
Some jolly place, p'raps two or three,
But never any soul.

II.

Could the Twelve see their faith's retrogression,
The Bishops they would not bless,
“These rich rogues claim our succession,
But the Infidels have our success.”

April 1871.

299

BLESS THEE! THOU ART TRANSLATED

Dizzy translated the Bishop
For his Irish eloquence;
But who can translate his sermons
Into English, and common sense?

April 1871.

Bishop Magee.

CROSS LINES FROM GOETHE

[_]

(Being No. 67 of the Epigrams dated Venice, 1790)

Very much can I put up with. Most things that are trials of temper
I in tranquillity bear, as if imposed by a God.
Some few, however, I find as hateful as poison and serpents:
Four: the smoke of tobacco, garlic and bugs, and the +.

April 1871.

300

WE CROAK

When Stork succeeded Log as King
The poor frogs fared but ill;
We've both at once—the senseless thing,
The damnable long bill.

May 1871.

IN A CHRISTIAN CHURCHYARD

This field of stones, he said,
May well call forth a sigh;
Beneath them lie the dead,
On them the living lie.

May 1871.

301

OUR CONGRATULATIONS ON THE RECOVERY OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

Though we have not a God to thank for this grace,
Though we care not a fig for the man,
We have yet our share in the general joy
At the lengthening of his span.

Yes, because we scorn himself and his race,
And because we love not the crown,
We are truly pleased that this model prince
May add to its bright renown.

If we wished him well we might wish him gone;
As it is, we rejoice in his breath;
For his life is likely to damage the throne
Such a great deal more than his death.

January 1872.

302

PATHETIC EPITAPH

I

Gould and Fisk in sacred league
Were full bold:
Gould has lost his precious fisc,
Fisk his gold.

II

When one leads an Erie life,
He must risk
Even such an eerie death,
Sweet James Fisk.

1872.

James Fisk, a great American “financier,” famous for his dealings with the Erie Railroad Stock, was shot in 1872 by Gould, one of his victims.

303

SONG

[“The Nightingale was not yet heard]

“The Nightingale was not yet heard,
For the Rose was not yet blown.”
His heart was quiet as a bird
Asleep in the night alone,
And never were its pulses stirred
To breathe or joy or moan:
The Nightingale was not yet heard
For the Rose was not yet blown.

Then She bloomed forth before his sight
In passion and in power,
And filled the very day with light,
So glorious was her dower;
And made the whole vast moonlit night
As fragrant as a bower:
The young, the beautiful, the bright,
The splendid peerless Flower.

304

Whereon his heart was like a bird
When Summer mounts his throne,
And all its pulses thrilled and stirred
To songs of joy and moan,
To every most impassioned word
And most impassioned tone;
The Nightingale at length was heard
For the Rose at length was blown.

February 1877.

“Traveller in Persia” (Mr. Binning); cited by Mr. Fitzgerald in the notes to his translation of Omar Khayyam.

305

WILLIAM BLAKE

He came to the desert of London town
Grey miles long;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Singing a quiet song.

He came to the desert of London town,
Mirk miles broad;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Ever alone with God.

There were thousands and thousands of human kind
In this desert of brick and stone:
But some were deaf and some were blind,
And he was there alone.

At length the good hour came; he died
As he had lived, alone:
He was not missed from the desert wide,
Perhaps he was found at the Throne.

1866.

306

SUPPLEMENT TO THE INFERNO

I.—Relating to the Apotheosis of a Noble Universal Genius.

[_]

(See especially opening of Canto V., and close of Canto XXI.)

“A Great Soul! A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Ere we left Minos after parleying
To trace the second circle's storm of gloom,
There came with haughty strides a monstrous Thing

Among the spirits crowding for their doom:
I ween that when it crossed in Charon's boat
No other freightage in that boat found room.

Who, what art thou, roared hard the judge's throat,
More hugeous than my grandson's fierce man-bull?
The thing swelled chanting on a lofty note:

I am a poet of the Beautiful,
Priest of the Good, and Prophet of the True;
Clothed thick with glory as a sheep with wool:

307

I sole have done what twenty great men do;
Historian, statesman, orator and sage,
Wit, dramatist, and Fiction's master, who

Have pictured every clime and every age,
Have written everything in every style,
And read the Tome of Thought through page by page:

The Pilgrim-Genius, travelling mile by mile,
This orbèd whole of Matter and Idea,
Is comprehensive and not versatile;

And I—Be damned! Great Jove, did e'er one see a
Creature like this 'mong men or beasts or birds?
A dictionary with the diarrhœa

Could hardly spout such feculent flux of words:
Strip, strip; I cannot judge you till I know
What core of life this shaggy bulk engirds.

The thing screamed: Aï! Aï! ever woe
For the Promethean-souled; uncomprehended
By men on earth, abhorred by fiends below,

Pursued with fear and jealous anger blended
By the monopolising Gods above!
Be firm, O Titan heart, thou unbefriended;

308

Nor sour the sweetness of thy solemn love
For the Illimitable Fathomless,
Wherein the eagle droops as droops the dove,

With thought of gnats that sting thy nakedness!—
Strip naked first! snarled Minos; and the Shapeless Shape
Must piece by piece cast off its wondrous dress:

Cloak, tunic, surplice, toga, mantle, cape,
Hood, bonnet, hat, boot, slipper, buskin, sock,
Bulged slowly to a heap that well might drape

A college of professors with their flock,
And furnish 'guises for a masquerade,
And still leave six old clo'-men ample stock.

The process went on till we grew dismayed;
The Bulk and Voice together dwindling down:
And when at intervals the sad work stayed

For desperate protests, Minos with his frown
And snarl of Strip, strip! urgent as a whip,
Compelled renewal. Ah me! take a brown

Ripe Spanish onion, and proceed to strip
It very patiently fold after fold;
So small at length you'll find the central pip,

309

So large the volume of the swathes unrolled;
And even so through piteous tears your eyes
That core when reached but dimly will behold.

But soon my tears were dashed off by surprise:
The Kernel of that Shapeless Shape hopped there
Upon its mount of cloth of many dyes,

A restless bladder-skin distent with air,
And sundry pebbles or baked peas within
That rattled as it danced. Then Minos sware,

The while some humour curled his savage grin:
I sit to judge real living human souls,
Not lively windbags: now you next, begin:

And went on with his calling o'er the coals
As who would make up for lost time. I said,
How gayly, Master dear, it leaps and rolls

Unto its own dry rhythmus, quick or dead:
Where are the Good, the Beautiful, the True?
Whither have Wisdom, Wit and Genius fled?

And he: That heap of clothes must answer you;
I can't think how it ever made them fit on,
For they are of all fashions old and new,

310

And of all sizes: whensoe'er it lit on
Garments which to its fancy beautiful were
Of Greek, Jew, Roman, German, Gaul or Briton;

And whether they of linen, silk or wool were
It must have begged or filched them for its pile,
Till froggy swelled as large as if it bull were:

Mark well, those peas which frisk in rapid style
From point to point within the orbèd bladder
Are comprehensive and not versatile.

Then I who always in his smile grew gladder
Said: Master, ere in this we touch the ground
Behoves another step down reason's ladder:

Dried peas within, a tumid film around,
Which call you soul, or essence of this wonder?
And He: Its soul is hollowness with sound;

While it exists these two can never sunder;
The selfsame soul in bladder and balloon,
In thin pea-rattle and in far-heard thunder:

When thou revisitest the sun and moon
Remember this, and pay no heed at all
To bulks of noisy emptiness. As soon

311

As he had spoken an outreaching squall
From the great cyclone of that second cirque
Scattered the robes and bore away the ball,

Which soon was lost to vision in the mirk;
And so I thought Its spurious being ended,
And quite forgot it in our serious work.

But often afterwards as we descended
It flitted past us like a twilight bat,
And seemed to hover wheresoe'er we wended;

As if endowed with more lives than a cat,
Or by its very want of substance safe,
Dancing upon the tempest which laid flat

Substantial human souls; and it would chafe
With its most arid noise our ears intent
On solemn words of sinners. Thus the waif

Annoyed us much throughout our sad descent
Until we stood anear that broken bridge
In Malebolge, where the demon lent

Us demon escort to the farther ridge.
Just as he blew the signal to set out,
The bladder, flung abruptly as a midge

312

Against the troop, became a silent clout,
Collapsing pierced by Graffiacave's hook;
Who wheeling his third step faced right about

And held it forth to Malacoda: Look!
If thy sweet lips are moist with trumpeting,
Here is a rag to wipe them! and he took.
We saw no more of that preposterous Thing.

May 1870.

“Et egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”—A verse too easy to translate. Note that the austere Dante so enjoys this Aristophanic touch that he chuckles over it, not grimly, through twelve lines of grave burlesque opening the following Canto XXII., the only case of such self-indulgence I remember in the Divine Comedy.

313

DON GIOVANNI AT COVENT GARDEN

(June 8, 1866)

Who is this appealing, with archly tender feeling,
To that sturdy rustic as sullen as a boar?
Sweet Zerlina Patti singing Batti, batti;
Rustical Masetto sulking sulking more and more.

Enviable peasant! sulking must be pleasant
Feasted with such beauty, such caresses and such art;
Adelina Patti singing Batti, batti,
Soul and body singing with the voice that sings Mozart.

By that sweet love's token, even had she broken
All the ten commandments and twice as many more,
I would cry, Dear Patti, singing Batti, batti,
Sin and sing, you angel, sin and sing encore!

314

Darling young Zerlina, charming Adelina,
Long be you the Hebe of this heavenly music-wine;
First, O Patti, Patti, pouring Batti, batti,
Then Vedrai carino, the nectar more divine!

315

AQUATICS (KEW)

Tommy Tucker came up to Kew,
And he got in a boat—an outrigger too:
O, but the pity, the pity!
For Tommy had made up his mind to show
His pals and the gals how well he could row.
Would he were safe in the city!

The thing like a cradle it rocked in the tide,
And he like the blessèd babby inside:
O, but the pity, the pity!
To hire out such shells so light and so slim,
Is cruel as murder, for Tommy can't swim.
Would he were safe in the city!

And why should they stick out the rowlocks that way?
He couldn't keep both hands together in play:
O, but the pity, the pity!
He spluttered, missed water, and zig-zag'd the boat,
Each pull made a lurch, brought his heart in his throat.
Would he were safe in the city!

316

The river was crowded behind and before,
They chaffed, and they laughed, and they splashed, and they swore:
O, but the pity, the pity!
He twisted his neck to attend to some shout,
A four-oared came rushing, Confound you, look out!
Would he were safe in the city!

They made him so nervous, those terrible men,
That he caught enough crabs for a supper of ten:
O, but the pity, the pity!
He crept back, a steamer came snorting astern,
With hundreds on deck—it gave him a turn:
Would he were safe in the city!

A mass of strange faces that all stared and laughed,
And the more Tommy flustered the more they all chaffed:
O, but the pity, the pity!
They passed him and roared out, Head on to the swell!
But he thought he would rather keep out of it well:
Would he were safe in the city!

So it caught him broadside, and rolled him away,
As a big dog rolls over a puppy in play:
O, but the pity, the pity!

317

It rolled him right over—Good Heavens! he'll drown!
For his arms they went up, and his head it went down.
Would he were safe in the city!

Three men dragged him out with a hook through his coat,
He was blue in the face and he writhed at the throat:
O, but the pity, the pity!
They hung his head down, he was limp as a clout,
But the water once in him refused to turn out:
Would he were safe in the city!

To the house by the bridge then they carried him in;
He was taken upstairs and stripped to the skin:
O, but the pity, the pity!
They wrapt him in blankets, he gave a low moan,
Then lay there as stark and cold as a stone:
Would he were safe in the city.

Then they forced down his throttle neat brandy galore,
He had taken the pledge, too, a fortnight before:
O, but the pity, the pity!
As it mixed with the water he woke in a fog,
For his belly was full of most excellent grog:
Would he were safe in the city!

318

He got very sick, then felt better, he said,
Though faintish, and nervous, and queer in the head:
O, but the pity, the pity!
He paid a big bill, and when it got dark
Went off with no wish to continue the lark:
Would he were safe in the city!

His coat was stitched up, but had shrunk away half,
And the legs of his trousers just reached to the calf:
O, but the pity, the pity!
No hat; they had stuck an old cap on his head;
And his watch couldn't tell him the time when he said:
Thank God I'm safe in the city!

1865.

END OF VOL. I.