The coming of love :: :: University of Virginia Library

If heaven's bright halls are very far from sea,
I dread a pang the angels could not 'suage:
The imprisoned seabird knows, and only he,
How drear, how dark, may be the proudest cage.
Outside the bars he sees a prison still:
The self-same wood or mead or silver stream
That lends the captive lark a joyous thrill
Is landscape in the seabird's prison-dream.
So might I pine on yonder starry floor

For sea-wind, deaf to all the singing spheres;
Billows like these, that never knew a shore,
Might mock mine eyes and tease my hungry ears;
No scent of amaranth, moly, or asphodel,
In lands that bloom above yon glittering vault.
Could soothe me if I lost this briny smell,
This living breath of Ocean, sharp and salt.

II
NATURE'S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

(A morning swim off Guernsey with a Friend.)
As if the Spring's fresh groves should change and shake
To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,
Then break to bloom of England's hyacinth,

So 'neath us change the waves, rising to take
Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake
Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,
Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,
Show how the sea's fine rage dares make and break.
Young with the youth the sea's embrace can lend,
Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,
Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,
Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,
Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend
Over the magic wonders of the world.

III.
THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE'S FRAGRANCY.

(The Tiring-room in the Rocks.)
These are the “Coloured Caves” the sea-maid built;
Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,
For she must fly at every tide's return,
And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.
Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt
With morning's gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn
Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn
On sand more soft than Avon's sacred silt.
And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,
From lips of may or eglantine,

Comes with the language of a breath benign,
Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,
Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,
Like scent of seaweed rich of morn and brine.

IV
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA.

(Percy sailing with a friend past the Casquette Lighthouse.)

Amid the Channel's wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high, joys;

The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. “The bustling world,” said she,
“Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.”
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor—one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o'er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.

But Love brings Fear with eyes or augury:—
Her lover's boat was out; her ears were dinned

With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun's red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm's high revelry
Woke petrel, gull—all revellers winged and finned—
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
“My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,”
The Mother sang. “Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred's poison, gangrened Envy's knife—
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!”

V
MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKEN

(Percy, on seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, takes down the cage with the view of releasing the bird.)

I cannot brook thy gaze, belovèd bird;
That sorrow is more than human in thine eye;
Too deeply, brother, is my spirit stirred
To see thee here, beneath the landsmen's sky,
Cooped in a cage with food thou canst not eat,
Thy “snow-flake” soiled, and soiled those conquering feet
That walked the billows, while thy “sweet-sweet-sweet”
Proclaimed the tempest nigh.

Bird whom I welcomed while the sailors cursed,
Friend whom I blessed wherever keels may roam,
Prince of my childish dreams, whom mermaids nursed
In purple of billows—silver of ocean-foam,
Abashed I stand before the mighty grief
That quells all other: Sorrow's King and Chief,
Who rides the wind and holds the sea in fief,
Then finds a cage for home!

From out thy jail thou seest yon heath and woods,
But canst thou hear the birds or smell the flowers?
Ah, no! those rain-drops twinkling on the buds
Bring only visions of the salt sea-showers.

“The sea!” the linnets pipe from hedge and heath;
“The sea!” the honeysuckles whisper and breathe,
And tumbling waves, where those wild-roses wreathe,
Murmur from inland bowers.

These winds so soft to others—how they burn!
The mavis sings with gurgle and ripple and plash,
To thee yon swallow seems a wheeling tern;
And when the rain recalls the briny lash.
Old Ocean's kiss we love—oh, when thy sight
Is mocked with Ocean's horses—manes of white,
The long and shadowy flanks, the shoulders bright—
Bright as the lightning's flash—

When all these scents of heather and brier and whin,
All kindly breaths of land-shrub, flower, and vine,
Recall the sea-scents, till thy feathered skin
Tingles in answer to a dream of brine—
When thou, remembering there thy royal birth,
Dost see between the bars a world of dearth,
Is there a grief—a grief on all the earth—
So heavy and dark as thine?

But I can buy thy freedom—I (thank God!),
Who loved thee more than albatross or gull—
Loved thee, and loved the waves thy footsteps trod—
Dreamed of thee when, becalmed, we lay a-hull—

'Tis I, thy friend, who once, a child of six,
To find where Mother Carey fed her chicks,
Climbed up the boat and then with bramble sticks
Tried all in vain to scull—

Thy friend who shared thy Paradise of Storm—
The little dreamer of the cliffs and coves,
Who knew thy mother, saw her shadowy form
Behind the cloudy bastions where she moves,
And heard her call: “Come! for the welkin thickens,
And tempests mutter and the lightning quickens!”
Then, starting from his dream, would find the chickens
Were daws or blue rock-doves—

Thy friend who owned another Paradise,
Of calmer air, a floating isle of fruit,
Where sang the Nereids on a breeze of spice,
While Triton, from afar, would sound salute:
There wast thou winging, though the skies were calm;
For marvellous strains, as of the morning's shalm
Were struck by ripples round that isle of palm
Whose shores were Ocean's lute.

And now to see thee here, my king, my king,
Far-glittering memories mirrored in those eyes,
As if there shone within each iris-ring
An orbèd world—ocean and hills and skies!—

Those black wings ruffled whose triumphant sweep
Conquered in sport!—yea, up the glimmering steep
Of highest billow, down the deepest deep,
Sported with victories!—

To see thee here!—a coil of wilted weeds
Beneath those feet that danced on diamond spray,
Rider of sportive Ocean's reinless steeds—
Winner in Mother Carey's Sabbath-fray
When, stung by magic of the Witch's chant,
They rise, each foamy-crested combatant—
They rise and fall and leap and foam and gallop and pant
Till albatross, sea-swallow, and cormorant
Must flee like doves away!

And shalt thou ride no more where thou hast ridden,
And feast no more in hyaline halls and caves,
Master of Mother Carey's secrets hidden,
Master and monarch of the wind and waves,
Who never, save in stress of angriest blast,
Asked ship for shelter—never till at last
The foam-flakes hurled against the sloping mast
Slashed thee like whirling glaives?

Right home to fields no seamew ever kenned,
Where scarce the great sea-wanderer fares with thee,
I come to take thee—nay, 'tis I, thy friend!
Ah, tremble not—I come to set thee free;
I come to tear this cage from off this wall,
And take thee hence to that fierce festival

Where billows march and winds are musical,
Hymning the Victor-Sea!

Yea, lift thine eyes to mine. Dost know me now?
Thou'rt free! thou'rt free! Ah, surely a bird can smile!
Dost know me, Petrel? Dost remember how
I fed thee in the wake for many a mile,
Whilst thou wouldst pat the waves, then, rising, take
The morsel up and wheel about the wake?
Thou'rt free, thou'rt free, but for thine own dear sake
I keep thee caged awhile.

Away to sea! no matter where the coast:
The road that turns for home turns never wrong;

Where waves run high my bird will not be lost:
His home I know: 'tis where the winds are strong—
Where, on a throne of billows, rolling hoary
And green and blue and splashed with sunny glory,
Far, far from shore—from farthest promontory—
Prophetic Nature bares the secret of the story
That holds the spheres in song!

(Percy, carrying the bird in the cage, turns to cross a rustic wooden bridge leading past Gypsy Dell, when he suddenly comes upon a landsman-friend of his, a “Scholar-Gypsy,” who is just parting from a lovely young Gypsy-girl. He stands dazzled, for he recalls that she is the same gypsy girl whom he saw on Raxton Strand the day he went out to sea, a year before. He forgets the petrel. The bird pushes its way through the half-open door and flies away.)

VI. SCENE: RINGTON PINGLE.

THE KAS-KAIRIN' GHYLLIE.

(A hayfield on the Rington Estate. A group of gypsy hay-makers have just finished their noon-day meal and are enjoying a rest by the hedge-side beneath the shadow of the willows that overhang a large pond covered with yellow and white water-lilies. At the other end of the meadow, near Rington Grove, village girls are seen hay-making. A very tall gypsy girl, Sinfi Lovell, the famous seeress of Snowdon, is playing the Kas-Kairin' Ghyllie (Hay-making chorus) upon her crwth (the old Welsh violin). Rhona Boswell and the other gypsy girls are singing to the air. Jericho Boswell (Rhona's father), Panuel Lovell (Sinfi's father), Videy Lovell (her sister), Sagul, Perpinia, old Mrs. Herne, Jim Boswell (the gypsy boxing-hero), and Jim Herne, called “the Scollard” (who is in love with Rhona), are all sitting in a circle with a little keg of beer in the midst. Percy Aylwin and his friend the scholar gypsy are looking on. Percy stands looking at Rhona like a man bewitched.)

KAS-KAIRIN' CHORUS.

RHONA.
Smell the scent the breeze is blowin'!
Hear the chirikels

Birds.

what they say,
‘Never a garden-rose a-glowin',
Never a meadow-flower a-growin',
Can match the smell from a Rington mowin'
O' new made hay!’

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it!’

RHONA.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

RHONA.
Shake it, shake it!

SINFI.
All along the river reaches
‘Cheep, cheep, chee!’—from osier an' sedge;
‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ rings from the beeches;
Every chirikel's

Birds.

song beseeches
Ryes

Gentlemen

to larn what Lennor

summer.

teaches
From copse and hedge.

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it!’

SINFI.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

SINFI.
Shake it, shake it!

RHONA.
Lennor

Summer.

sets 'em singin' an' pairin'
Chirikels

Birds.

all in tree an' grass,—
Farmers say, ‘Them gals

Girls.

are darin',
Sometimes dukkerin', sometimes snarin'

Fortune-telling.

,
But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin'

Hay-making.

Toss the kas

Hay.

!’

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it!’

RHONA.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

RHONA.
Shake it, shake it!

PERPINIA.
While them milk-faced gorgie-sillies

Gentile women.

In yon swathes by Rington Grove
Drink with mumply gorgio-billies

Gentile men.

,
Field-flowers here an' water-lilies
Hearin' the chirikels

Birds

sing their ghyllies

songs.

,—
Laugh with love.

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it’!

PERPINIA.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

PERPINIA.
Shake it, shake it!

SAGUL.
Hark the sharpenin' scythes that tingle!
What say Rington

Farmers.

farmin' ryes?

‘Leave them tents in Gypsy Dingle!
Never a gorgie

Gentile women.

, married or single,
Can toss the kas

Hay.

in Rington Pingle
Like Romany chies

Gypsy girls.

,’

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it’!

SAGUL.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

SAGUL.
Shake it, shake it!

VIDEY LOVELL.
Bees a-buzzin' in chaw

Grass.

an' clover
Steal the honey from sperrits o' morn,
Shoshus

Hares field.

leap in puv an' cover,

Doves are a-cooin', like lover to lover,
Larks are awake an' a-warblin' over
Their kairs

Homes.

in the corn.

CHORUS.
Make the kas

Hay

while the kem

sun.

says ‘make it’!

VIDEY LOVELL.
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it—

CHORUS.
Scent the meadows!

VIDEY LOVELL.
Shake it, shake it!

(At the conclusion of the song Percy and his friend walk away, and the scholar Gypsy tells Percy an anecdote of Rhona Boswell as a child.)

Gypsies' love of woodland perfumes is proverbial. Indeed, their olfactories are far more sensitive than those of the gorgios. I have known a gypsy girl walking along the high road, stop suddenly and cry out, “I smells a fox!” and then I have seen the fox in the distance running along the end of a field.

VII. NATURA BENIGNA REVEALED THROUGH A GYPSY CHILD.

The Scholar-Gypsy's story of Rhona Boswell as a Child
‘The child arose and danced through frozen dells,
Drawn by the Christmas chimes, and soon she sate
Where, 'neath the snow around the churchyard gate,
The ploughmen slept in bramble-banded cells:
The gorgios pass'd, half-fearing gypsy-spells,

Gentiles.

While Rhona gazing seem'd to meditate;
Then laugh'd for joy, then wept disconsolate:
‘De poor dead gorgios cannot hear de bells.’

Within the church the clouds of gorgio-breath
Arose, a steam of lazy praise and prayer
To Him who weaves the loving Christmas-stair
O'er sorrow and sin and wintry deeps of Death;
But where stood He? Beside our Rhona there,
Remembering childish tears in Nazareth.”

For this anecdote of Rhona Boswell as a child I am indebted to my friend Francis Hindes Groome, author of “In Gipsy Tents” and the Romany novel, “Kriegspiel.”

CONCLUSION OF PART I.

II. Part II
THE DAUGHTER OF THE SUNRISE

I
RHONA'S FIRST KISS

(Percy alone in Rington Furze: Rhona has just left him.)
If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,
Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?
I seem to clasp her still—still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kiss'd these lips, for now they seem

Scarce mine: so hallow'd of the lips they press'd.
Yon thicket's breath—can that be eglantine?
Those birds—can they be Morning's choristers?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!

II
THE GOLDEN HAND

PERCY.
Do you forget that day on Rington strand
When, near the crumbling ruin's parapet,

I saw you stand beside the long-shore net
The gorgios spread to dry on sun-lit sand?

RHONA.
Do I forget?

PERCY.

You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band
Around your hair which shone as black as jet:
No fairy's crown of bloom was ever set
Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.

I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:
Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:

Love-lips (with one tattoo “for dukkerin”)

Good-luck.

tanned
By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.

RHONA.
Do I forget?
The Golden Hand shone there: it's you forget,
Or p'raps us Romanies ondly understand
The way the Lovers' Dukkeripen is planned
Which shone that second time when us two met.

PERCY.
Blest “Golden Hand”!

RHONA.
The wind, that mixed the smell o' violet
Wi' chirp o' bird, a-blowin' from the land
Where my dear mammy lies, said as it fanned
My heart-like, “Them 'ere tears makes mammy fret.”

She loves to see her chavi

Child.

lookin' grand,
So I made what you call'd a coronet,
And in the front I put her amulet:
She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.

PERCY.
Blest “Golden Hand”!

Among the Gypsies of all countries the happiest possible “Dukkeripen” (i.e., prophetic symbol of Natura Mystica) is a hand-shaped golden cloud floating on the sky. It is singular that the same idea is found among races entirely disconnected with them—the Finns, for instance, with whom Ukko, the “sky god” or “angel of the sunrise,” was called the “golden king” and “leader of the clouds,” and his Golden Hand was more powerful than all the army of Death. The “Golden Hand” is sometimes called the Lover's Dukkeripen.

III
RHONA'S LOVE LETTER AFTER PERCY'S FIRST STAY IN GYPSY DELL

Gypsy Dell, Wensdy.

This ere comes hoppen, leaven me the same,
And lykwise all our breed in Gypsy Dell,
Barrin the spotted gry, wot's turned up lame;

Horse.

A crick have made his orfside fetlock swell.
The Scollard's larnen me to rite and spel,
It's 'ard, but then I longed to rite your name:

Them squrruls in the Dell have grow'd that tame!
How sweet the haycocks smel!

Dordi!

Faith.

how I should like you just to see
The Scollard when he's larnen me to rite,
A buzzin like a chafer or a bee,
Else cussen you wi' bloodshot yockers

Eyes.

bright
And moey

Mouth,

girnin, danniers

teeth.

gleamin white.
He's wuss nor ever follerin arter me,
Peepin roun' every bush an every tree
Mornin and noon and night.

When I wur standin by the river's brim,
Hearin the chirikels

Birds.

in Rington wood,
And seein the moorhens larn their chicks to swim,
Thinks I, “I hears the Scollard's heavy thud”;

And when I turned, behold ye, there he stood!
He says I promised as I'd marry him,
And if I di'n't he'd tear me limb from limb.
Sez I, “That's if you could.”

But when I thinks o' you, a choon aglall

A month ago.

,
Dray mendys tan

In our tent.

a-studyin Romany—
Nock, danniers, moey, yockers, canners, bal

Nose, teeth, mouth, eyes, ears, hair.

—
It make me sometime larf and sometime cry;
And that make Granny's crinkles crinkle sly;
“Dabla!

Faith.

” my daddy says, “de blesséd gal
Shall lel

Get.

herself a tarnow Rye

Young gentleman.

she shall—
A tarnow Romany

Gypsy gentleman.

Rye.”

I lets em larf, but well I knows—too well—
The ondly tarnow Rye, and ondly man,
That in my dreams I sometime seem to lel

Get.

Ain't for the lyks o' mee in this 'ere tan,

Tent.

The Rye wot sat by mee where Dell-brook ran,
And larnt my Romany words and used to tell
Sich sweet, strange things all day, till shadders fell
And light o' stars began.

Mose nights I lays awake, but when the cock
Begin to crow and rooks begin to fly
And chimes come livelier out o' Rington clock,
It's then I sees your pictur in the sky
(So plane, it seems to bring the mornin' nigh),
Bal, danniers, canners, yockers, moey, nock:

Hair, teeth, ears, eyes, mouth, nose.

My daddy's bort me sich a nicet new frock.
Your comly korly chy.

Your loving dark girl.

The gypsies of the present generation cease, except in childhood, to say “de” for “the.”

IV
PERCY READING THE LETTER AT RINGTON MANOR

The trees awake: I hear the branches creak!
And ivy-leaves are tapping at the pane:
Dawn draws across the grey a saffron streak,
To let me read at sunrise once again
Beautiful Rhona's letter, which has lain,
Balming the pillow underneath my cheek,
While in the dark her writing seemed to speak:
Her great eyes lit my brain.

I felt the paper—felt her thumb's device
That stamped the wax; I seemed to feel the fingers
Which wrote these misspelt words of rarer price
Than songs of bards I worshipped as the bringers

Of light from shores where spheral music lingers,
Till came this girl, whose music could entice
My soul to that diviner Paradise
Where lovers are the singers—

That Paradise which Rhona can transfer
From Eden to the tents of Gypsy Dell,
Where Love is still his own orthographer
As when on scriptured leaves of asphodel
He taught his earliest pupil, Eve, to spell—
Where Love speaks out what makes his bosom stir
Frankly as yonder woodland chorister,
Whose first notes rise and swell.

V
EVENING ON THE RIVER

PERCY AND RHONA.
More mellow falls the light and still more mellow
Around the boat, as we two glide along
'Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,
The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.
She knows the nightingales of “Portobello;”
Love makes her know each bird! In all that throng
No voice seems like another: soul is song,
And never nightingale was like its fellow;
For, whether born in breast of Love's own bird,
Singing its passion in those islet-bowers
Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers

The rosy river's glowing arms engird,
Or born in human souls—twin souls like ours—
Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.

VI
THE NATURE WORSHIPPER AND WOMAN'S WITCHERY

(Percy walking along the river-side near Gypsy Dell at break of day.)

Love knows a wrong no tears can ever atone:
A word can break the web of Passion's spell,
And then away the enchanted woof is blown
That made a faery world of wood and dell:
But direr than all direst words are deeds:—
Can I, who saw her body shake and sway
Before a storm of rage, like yonder reeds

When March winds bend them o'er the water-weeds—
Can I forgive that wrong of yesterday?—

Can I, who saw the lips of this wild girl,
So loving once, shrink back till pearly teeth,
That once seemed lovelier than the morning's pearl,
Flashed bright as that bright blade she dared unsheathe—
Can I, who saw a brow, a throbbing throat
Glassed in the stream beneath the willow tree,
As up she sprang, a tigress, in the boat—
Can I forgive her, though the siren wrote
The loveliest letter in the world to me?

(He comes upon a second letter from Rhona lying on the grass, and stands looking at it with yearning eyes, but afraid to pick it up.)

Another letter! Ah, full well I know
Those characters so childish, big, and round:

I think she watches where the hawthorns throw
Those shortening shadows on the dewy ground.
Ah yes! that head which gleams by yonder bush,
Where golden shafts from out the quiver of morn
Pierce the wet leaves and wake the hidden thrush—
That cheek which seems to lend a lovelier blush
To blushing may-buds on the dew-bright thorn!

(He takes up the letter and reads it aloud.)

THE LETTER.

This time you can't forgive me—that I know—
But when I'm dead o' cryin and in the groun,
You'll come, afore my grass has time to grow,
And say, “That's hern; the clods is fresh and brown.
Lord, how I misses her in puv

Field.

and tan

Tent.

,”

You'll say, “that gal wot axed me to forgive her!
It druv her mad to see me kis my han
And smile so sweet—pore Rhona's ondly man!—
To that fine rawni

Lady.

rowin on the river.

Pore gal,” you'll say, “she never touched her knife,
Leaseways, just touched the handel so,” you'll say;
“She'd never ha' drawed: she wur to bee my wife,
And loved me, loved me, loved me night and day.
What made the chi

Girl.

,” you'll say, “start from the seat?
What made her flesh goo hot and cold and shiver

Right down her back-like—yis, from hed to feet?
She seed me kis my han and smile so swete
To that fine rawni rowin on the river.

The Dell,” you'll say, “do seem that dul and sad;
It dreems o' one wot loved me body and soul,
And loved me most that day I druv her madd
And turned her choori zee

Poor heart.

to burnin coal;
The chiriklos

Birds. The birds attend the funeral of a true Romany maid.

'ull chirp ‘He should ha' gien
All them sweet smiles—yis, all he had to give her—
To her we buried with her Romany kin,
And laid wi' clods all round her eyes an' chin,
Through that fine rawni rowin on the river.’”

You'll say, “Instead o' havin Jasper's gal,
So spry at snare and rod and landin net,

This teeny clisson from her korley bal

Lock from her dark hair. Clisson really means a lock for a key.

Is all, and that'll ondly make me frett.
I'd sooner fish wi' her where swallows fan
The brook,” you'll say, “where water creases quiver,
Tryin to hide the trouts, but never can,
Than smile so sweet and look and kis my han
To that fine rawni rowin on the river.

'Twur here,” you'll say, “where many and many a night
We stayed a-settin snares in Gypsy Dell
Beneath the stars, or when the moon wur bright,
Till ‘twitter’ came the arliest chirikel

Bird.

,
And larks the sunshine turned to specks o' gold
Flew whistlin up, but none as could deliver
A tale o' love like that as then wur told
By that pore Rhona, her wot's dead and cold.”

PERCY.
The witching rogue! But still I can't forgive her.

THE LETTER CONTINUED.

“'Twur here,” you'll say, “'twur here, dooey choons aglal,

Two months ago.

Out o' her daddy's tan

Tent.

one night there crep'
A gal to meet me—sich a rinkeni

Handsome.

gal—
Though well she knowed the watch the Scollard kep':
She stayed wi' me till all the eastern sky
Biled, steamed, and broke to many a fiery slivver
That lit up puv and tan and sooterin grei

Field and tent and sleeping horse.

”:
You'll seem to feel her lips—

RHONA.
(Advancing from the bush, watching him as he reads, then rushing towards him, covering his eyes with her hands, and pulling down his head and kissing him.)
These lips, my Rye!

PERCY.
These lips, indeed! Ah! who would not forgive her?

RHONA.
Lips as 'ud turn to clods without you, dear!

PERCY.
But how this loving Rhona tries my love!

RHONA.
And yet she'd walk the world barefoot to hear
Them words o' yourn in tan or vesh or puv

Tent, wood, field.

—
Yis, walk and never know her feet wur sore
To hear you say, “Ah! who would not forgive her?”

PERCY.
But that young lady?

RHONA.
Her what flicks her oar?

PERCY.
The same.

RHONA.
You'll never kiss your han no more
To that fine rawni rowin on the river?

(Two gypsies, Herne the “Scollard” and another, rush out from the bushes, and throw themselves upon Percy. The “Scollard” seizes Percy's throat and raises a knife. Rhona leaps forward and plunges her gypsy knife into the “Scollard's” shoulder, which makes him drop his weapon. Another gypsy then runs forward from another bush. Rhona springs in front of Percy, who stands gasping, having been almost choked. The gypsies stop, cowed as much by Rhona's threatening gaze as by the knife, and, eventually seeing that Percy is reviving, slink away.)

VII. “KISSING THE MAY BUDS.”

(Rhona, half-hidden by the branches of a hawthorn tree, is stretching up to kiss the white and green may buds.)
PERCY.
(Looking at her.)
Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings,
Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
From Rhona's eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,

Kissing the buds for “luck o' love” it brings,
While from the dingle-grass the skylark springs,
And merle and mavis answer finch and jay? (He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches apart and clasps her in his arms.)

Can she here covering with her childish kisses
These pearly buds—can she so soft, so tender,
So shaped for clasping—dowered of all love-blisses—
Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
An angel storming hell, through death's abysses,
Where never a sight could fright or power bend her?

“It's nice to see Rhona on a summer mornin', kissin' the may buds for ‘luck o' love,’ as us Romanies say.” —Sinfi Lovell.

VIII
OCEAN-SORCERY

(Percy on the deck of “The Petrel” after he has been separated from Rhona.)
Was it indeed but two sweet years ago
When once a sailor on a star-lit sea
Babbled about its spell, and did not know
How Love makes Nature breathe her poesy?
When did the sea-spell vanish? On that day
When his beloved petrel flew away.
But as for them who bade him, made him, come,
Though love had crowned him man, to thee, wild Ocean,
Prated of some nepenthe in thy foam
To quell his love as by a magic potion—
Some anodyne within thy billowy swirl
To soothe the body—make the soul forget
Its guileless passion for a “guileful girl”

Whose beauty caught him in a “Gypsy net”—
They should be here to see these billows heaving
Beneath yon Southern Cross that holds the sky,
They should be here to see how thou art weaving
Pictures of home by ocean-sorcery!
A dingle's fragrance breathed from every billow,
Sweeter than Orient frankincense and myrrh—
A slim girl-angler shown beneath a willow,
Leaning against its mossy bole for pillow,
Must needs recall his every thought to her!

IX
“GYPSY HEATHER.”

(Percy, standing on the deck of “The Petrel,” takes from his pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south seas, the Melbourne post had brought him—a letter from Rhona, staying then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the Boswells, called “Gypsy Heather.” He takes from the envelope a withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on which Rhona has written the words “Remember Gypsy Heather.”)

I

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember Jasper's camping-place
Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,
And scents of meadow wood and chase,

Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?
Remember where, in Rington Furze,
I kissed her and she asked me whether
I “thought my lips of teazel-burrs,
That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,
Felt nice on a rinkenny moey like hers.”—
Gypsy Heather!

II

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember her whom nought could tame
But love of me, the poacher-maiden
Who showed me once my father's game
With which her plump round arms were laden,
Who when my glances spoke reproach
Said, “Things o' fur an' fin an' feather

Like coneys, pheasants, perch an' loach,
An' even the famous ‘Rington roach’
Wur born for Romany chies to poach!”—
Gypsy Heather!

III

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Atolls and reefs, you change, you change
To dells of England dewy and tender,
You palm-trees in yon coral range
Seem “Rington Birches” sweet and slender
Shading the ocean's fiery glare:
We too are in the Dell together—
My body is here, my soul there
With lords of trap and net and snare,
The Children of the Open Air,—
Gypsy Heather!

IV

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Its pungent breath is on the wind,
Killing the scent of tropic water;
I see her suitors, swarthy skinned,
Who pine in vain for Jasper's daughter;
The “Scollard,” with his features tanned
By sun and wind as brown as leather—
His forehead scarred with Passion's brand—
Scowling at Sinfii tall and grand,
Who sits with “Pharaoh” by her hand.—
Gypsy Heather!

V

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Now Rhona sits beneath the tree
That shades our tent, alone and weeping;
And him, the “Scollard,” him I see:
From bush to bush I see him creeping—

I see her mock him, see her run
And free his pony from the tether,
Who lays his ears in love and fun,
And gallops with her in the sun
Through lace the gossamers have spun.—
Gypsy Heather!

VI

Remember Gypsy Heather?
She reaches “Rington Birches”; now,
Dismounting from the “Scollard's” pony,
She sits alone with heavy brow,
Thinking—but not of hare or coney.
The hot sea holds each sight, each sound
Of England's golden autumn weather:
The Romanies now are sitting round
The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;
Now Rhona dances heather-crowned.—
Gypsy Heather!

VII

Remember Gypsy Heather?
She's thinking of this withered spray
Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming
Darker than night, yet bright as day,
While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;
I see the lips—the upper curled,
A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,
Whence—while the floating shawl is twirled,
As if a ruddy cloud were swirled—
Her scornful laugh at Herne is hurled
Gypsy Heather!

VIII

Remember Gypsy Heather?
In storm or calm, in sun or rain,
There's magic, Rhona, in the writing

Wound round these flowers whose purple stain
Dims the dear scrawl of Love's inditing:
Dear girl, this spray between the leaves
(Now fading like a draggled feather
With which the nesting song-bird weaves)
Makes every wave the vessel cleaves
Seem purple of heather as it heaves.—
Gypsy Heather!

IX

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home
Are everywhere; the skylark winging
Through amber cloud-films till the dome
Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing
The sea-wind seems an English breeze
Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether
Over the heath from Rington Leas,

Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,
You taught me Romany 'neath the trees.—
Gypsy Heather!

“If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it'll show him the selfsame heather where it wur born.” —Sinfi Lovell.

Pretty mouth.

X
THE MUSIC OF NATURA MYSTICA

(Percy on board “The Petrel” in the Pacific, cruising among coral islands.)
Last Sunday morn I thought this azure isle
Was dreaming mine own dream; each bower of balm
That spiced the rich Pacific, every palm,
Smiled with the dream that lends my life its smile.
“These waves,” I said, “lapping the coral pile
Make music like a well-remembered psalm:
Surely an English Sunday, breathing calm,
Broods in each tropic dell, each flowery aisle.”

The heaven's were dreaming, too, of English skies:
Upon the blue, within a belt of grey,
A well-known spire was pictured far away;
And then I heard a psalm begin to rise,
And saw a dingle—smelt its new-mown hay
Where we two loitered—loitered lover-wise.

XI. THE HAUNTED GIRL.

(RHONA IN WALES.)

Scene: Snowdon—Knocker's Llyn.
(Sinfi Lovell, being anxious to use Rhona as a clairvoyante (in order to learn the fate of a certain friend of her own believed to be in danger abroad), has enticed her to leave the camp in Rington Hollow and accompany her to a llyn on Snowdon called Knocker's Llyn, on the face of whose waters the “knockers” (or gnomes) of Snowdon paint their pictures whenever they hear the sound of Sinfi's crwth.
64

The two girls are standing on the rocky ledge overhanging the llyn. Sinfi is playing a wild air and Rhona in a hypnotic state is gazing intently into the llyn to read the knockers' pictures. But her soul is so absorbed in her grief at parting from Percy when he went to sea (promising to return with the “coming of the swallow”) that she can read nothing in the water but pictures of that parting.)
SINFI.
Now that the mornin's veil o' gold grows thin
The haunted water shines so bright and clear
That I can see the trouts, as I stand here,
An' see the sunlight kindlin' every fin
To yellow an' lollo

Red.

an' blue; yet Rhona's eyes
Can read no fortunes in the Haunted Llyn
Except her own and his, her tarno rei's.

Young gentleman.

But if the pennin o' the dukkerin

Prophesying.

fails,
I've brought her here for nothink—here to Wales;
I've made her leave the Dell and leave the Chace

Where, in the leaves, she still could see the face
She loves the more because it's far away.
I plays the crwth, but all her lips can say
Is jist the words, “He'll come, he'll come pallal

Back.

:
Next summer I shall see my dear, I shall.”

(Rhona in a kind of trance, talks in a dreamy voice about her recent parting with her lover in Gypsy Dell.)
SINFI.
Her sperrit's gone, jist liek a homin' dove,
To Rington where she left her tarno rei
The day they parted. She's in Rington Drove;
Ah! well I knows a Romany chi

Gypsy girl.

in love
Can't see no sights in water, earth or sky
But sights o' one. She's bound in sich a chain

My crwth 'll find it hard to clear her brain.
The knockers too 'll find it hard to throw
True pictures on the water and to show
The dukkeripen

Second sight.

I wants to see and know.

RHONA.
(A strange kind of smile, painful and yet coaxing, passes over her features: her eyes seem filled with tears, while she murmurs in a wheedling tone.)
We'll part beside the mill-pool,—here's the stream
Where you whipped out that splutterin' boro

Big.

perch;
Don't you remember what a leap an' lurch
He gave, and druv the bleaks among the bream? . . .
A little further dear! See—what a gleam
O' mornin' lollo

Red.

strikes old Rington church! (She pauses for some time—then proceeds.)

A little further dear!—to that big birch
Where fust you kissed me—O it's like a dream,
Your goin' away: it is, it is my darlin'!
But you'll come back at swallow time, you will! (Again she pauses for some time: then proceeds.)

Yes, here's the birch: but let's walk up the hill:
Oh, look! A gypsy-magpie

Water wagtail.

an' a starlin,
They're meetin' on the chaw

Grass.

!—Good luck you know
Must follow you wherever now you go.

(Sinfi looks with pitying eyes upon her face, occasionally turned up to hers. After a while she changes the measure of her music to a well-known air among the Welsh gypsies, called “The Parting Ghyllie

Song.

,” but it fails to call Rhona's spirit back from the Drove; it simply makes her thoughts on the one subject move in response to the new air.)

RHONA.
This path thro' the spinny is nearest
Where the light, a quivering lace,
Falls sweet through the pattinor

Leaves.

, dearest—
Oh! slacken the pace.

(Sinfi's music now returns to the previous movement, and Rhona's chant answers to it.)
RHONA.
Another sign o' luck! See every where
All twinklin' in the kem

Sun.

, the blessed drops!
On hedge an' hay-field, meadow an' lea an' copse!
A million tarno

Little.

rainbows laugh in the air!
Them cows look round with wrinkled necks to stare
Stretched, chewin', chewin' in the buttercups,
See! in that furrow in the young green crops
That crouchin' shoshu

Hare.

—what a one to snare!

An' that means luck; an' so does that sweet din
O' blackbird, mavis, finch an' missel thrush.
An' if the cuckoo's v'ice is rather thin,
It's June you know!—I sees him in that bush:
Let's go an' look, dear—plenty o' time for that—
Lord how they hates him—linnet, finch an' chat!

(Sinfi again changes the measure to the “Parting Ghyllie,” and again Rhona's chant responds to it; but her mind cannot be drawn from Rington Drove.)
RHONA.
Let us part where the river runs clearest
Through the shadow an' shine o' the Chace
Where often we've angled my dearest,
For gudgeon and dace.

(Sinfi returns to the previous air and again Rhona answers it by the changed movement of her chant.)

RHONA.
(In a still more coaxing tone.)
You say we must part here at Rington Cross—
Lord, how it minds me o' them snares we set,
That day you got me that white violet
For luck, you know: 'twur growin' in that green moss.
Now fare ye well: it's hard to lose ye thus—
I ain't a cryin'; but still it's hard—an' yet
Sweet-like, to think I've got no call to fret;
Good luck 'll come to you thro' Rhona's loss.
An' here's the clisson—what you calls a curl—
Take it an' think o' her you're leavin' here
Till swallow-time—till swallow-time, next year

For you'll be thought on by your Romany girl
When bavals wel

Winds come.

an' strike an' shake an' dirl
The ship. Let's walk a little farther, dear.

(Sinfi again plays a bar or two of the “Parting Ghyllie” and again Rhona answers it.)
RHONA.
You called me that mornin', my dearest,
When you see'd me at fust in the Place

Camping place.

—
“Your Rhona, the best, the sincerest
O' the Romany race.”

(Sinfi returns to the previous air and again Rhona's chant responds to it.)
RHONA.
Let's take the meadow path an' smell the kas

Hay.

:
How green the swathes look 'against them brownish cocks!

Them chaps in shirt-sleeves, mowin'—an them in smocks,
See how they're watchin' every rinkenny

Pretty.

lass. (An expression of playful humour shines through her tears.)

Or is it that 'ere beer-cask on the grass?—
I knows them gals with sunburnt cheeks an locks
An' stick-burrs in their chuffas

Petticoats.

an' their frocks,
Tossin' them swathes an' chatterin' as we pass;
That one a starin', leanin' on her rake,
Is that one's sister paddlin' in the brook.
Hark, from the standin' chaw

Grass.

comes “crake, crake, crake!” (Her voice now breaks into sobs.)

Now—leave me—here—behind these trees,—to look
While—you walk on. (She totters and nearly falls into the llyn.)

He's gone! my heart will break.

(She sobbs hitterly in her trance.)
SINFI.
It's hard to see a lovin' woman cry,
If only in a dream. Well, well, I know
A tune 'll make the heaviest-hearted chi

Girl.

Stir to the music o' the heel and toe;
The old Kas-Kairin' Ghyllie

Haymaking song.

'll change her trance
And make her think o' many a lennor

Summer.

dance
And then, perhaps, the thought o' him 'll go.

(Sinfi now plays “The Kas-Kairin' Ghyllie”; and at once Rhona springs away from the margin of the llyn, and begins to sing and dance to the air.)

SINFI.
Dancin' an' singin' as she used to sing
An' dance one time in puvs

Fields.

o' Rington Hollow
As merry as a skylark on the wing
That mounts to meet the mornin' gold an' lollo

Red.

Like some poor chirickli

Hen bird.

what sorrows late
An' sorrows airly, pinin' for her mate,
Has she forgot who left her there to wait
The comin' o' the swallow?

(She begins to play softly and tentatively a bar of the “Parting Ghyllie” putting her arm round Rhona's waist. Tears at once start into Rhona's eyes, and she begins to murmur through her sobs.)
RHONA.
Closer, closer, my dearest!
Let me feel the dear breath on my face!
Closer, my nearest and dearest:
The last embrace!

XII
LOVE'S CALENTURE

(Percy on hoard “The Petrel” in a tropic calm.)
I hear our blackbirds singing in our grove,
And now I see—I smell—the eglantine—
The meadow-sweet where rivulets laugh and shine
To English clouds that laugh and shine above;
I feel a stream of maiden-music move,
Pouring through all my frame a life divine
From Rhona's throbbing bosom claspt to mine—
From that dear harp, her heart, whose chords are love!
Vanished!—
O God! a blazing world of sea—
A blistered deck—an engine's grinding jar—

Hot scents of scorching oil and paint and tar—
And, in the offing up yon fiery lee,
One spot in the air no bigger than a bee—
A frigate-bird that sails alone afar!
(He takes from his pocket and reads a letter from Rhona which reached him in Australia.)

THE LETTER

On Christmas-eve I seed in dreams the day
When Herne the Scollard comed and said to me,
Hes off, that rye

Gentleman.

o yourn, gone clean away
Till swallow-time; hes left this letter: see!
In dreams I heerd the bee and grasshopper,
Like on that mornin, buz in Rington Hollow,
Shell live till swallow-time and then shell mer,

Die.

For never will a rye

Gentleman.

come back to her
Wot leaves her till the comin o the swallow.

All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers;
All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,
Mixed sweet wi smells o honey from the furze,
Like on that mornin when you went away;
All night I heerd in dreams my daddy sal,

Laugh.

Sayin, De blessed chi

Girl,

ud give de chollo

Whole.

O Bozzles breed—tans, vardey, greis, and all—

Tents, waggons, horses. Back.

To see dat tarno rye o hern palall
Wots left her till the comin o the swallow.

I woke and went a-walkin on the ice
All white with snow-dust, just like sparklin loon,

Salt.

And soon beneath the stars I heerd a vice,
A vice I knowed and often, often shoon

Hear.

;
And then I seed a shape as thin as tuv

Smoke.

;
I knowed it wur my blessed mammys mollo

Spirit.

.
Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,

Hes thinkin on you; dont you go and rove

Weep.

;
Youll see him at the comin o the swallow.
Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the grass
When he wur gone, and freeze the brooklets ghyllies

Songs.

;
There wornt no smell, dear, in the sweetest kas

Hay.

,
And when the summer brought the waterlilies,
And when the sweet winds waved the golden giv

Wheat

,
The skies above em seemed as bleak and kollo

Black.

As now, when all the world seems frozen yiv

Snow.

.
The months are long, but mammy sez youll live
By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.

She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver throat
Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin,
And soon the blackcaps airliest ghyllie ull

Song.

float
From light-green boughs through leaves a-peepin thin;
The wheat-ear soon ull bring the willow-wren,
And then the fust fond nightingale ull follow,
A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
Still out at sea, the spring is in our glen;
Come darlin, wi the comin o the swallow.

And she wur gone! And then I read the words
In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
They made the Christmas sing with summer birds,
And spring-leaves shine on every frozen tree;

And when the dawnin

Red.

kindled Rington spire,
And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and lollo
Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o fire,
Another night, I sez, has brought him nigher;
Hes comin wi the comin o the swallow.

And soon the bull-pups found me on the Pool—
You know the way they barks to see me slide—
But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
Comed on, it turned my head to see em glide.
I seemed to see you twirlin on your skates,
And somethin made me clap my hans and hollo;
Its him, I sez, a-chinnin

Cutting.

o them eights.
But when I woke-like—Im the gal wot waits
Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.

Comin seemed ringin in the Christmas-chime;
Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,
In beads o frost along the nets o rime,
Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
And when the pups began to bark and play,
And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock and wallow
Among the snow and fling it up like spray,
I sez to them, you know who rote to say
Hes comin wi the comin o the swallow.

The thought ont makes the snow-drifts o December
Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o spring
Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups, remember;
If not—for me no singin birds ull sing:
No chorin chiriklo

Cuckoo.

ull hold the gale

Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, over hill and hollow:
Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
Therell be no jug-jug o the nightingale,
For her wot waits the comin o the swallow.

Come back, minaw

Mine own.

, and you may kiss your han
To that fine rawni

Lady.

rowin on the river;
Ill never call that lady a chovihan

Witch.

,
Nor yit a mumply gorgie

Miserable gentile.

—Ill forgive her.
Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.
Come back—or, say the word, and I will follow
Your footfalls round the world: Ill leave this life
(Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)—
Im dyin for the comin o the swallow.

Mostly pronounced “mullo,” but sometimes in the East Midlands “mollo.”

Mostly pronounced “kaulo,” but sometimes in the East Midlands “kollo.”

The gypsies are great observers of the cuckoo, and call certain Spring winds “cuckoo storms,” because they bring over the cuckoo earlier than usual.

XIII
THE FIRST DUKKERIPEN OF THE STARS

(Percy on the night of his return to the encampment lingers before calling for the ferry-boat upon the tongue of land called Portobello, and looks down the river, where the stars are brilliantly reflected. Rhona, who has secretly come to meet him, appears on the opposite bank, but does not perceive him, owing to the shadowing trees under which he stands.)
PERCY.

What sees she in the river as it flows?
Does she recall that summer night when we
Rowed here beneath the stars—the night when she,
Unconscious, then, of that within my breast
Which held me mute, murmured in loving jest,
“Our Tarno Rye,

Young gentleman.

he's dreamin while he rows”?
Or is she gazing at the stars that shine
Mirrored within the stream to read their sign—

The dukkeripen

Nature's prophetic symbol.

of good or evil made
By their reflections mingled with the shade
Yon pollard willow throws?

That night I murmured, “Life's one joy is this,
To love, to taste the soul's divine delight
Of loving some most lovely soul or sight—
To worship still, though never an answering sign
Should come from Love asleep within the shrine.”
That night I said, “I ask no more of bliss
Than—while beneath the boat the wavelets heave—
To touch the gauds upon a gypsy's sleeve,
To see the bright nails shine on glistening fingers,
To see the throat on which the starlight lingers,
The mouth I dare not kiss.”

But that same night Love wrote around the prow
In stars! Her trembling body turned to me
In joyful fear of joy, and I could see,
Pictured in frightened eyes, the blissful things
A girl's pure soul can see when Love's young wings,
Fragrant of heaven and earth, fan first the brow.

(Rhona gives a sudden start and looks behind her.)

What means that start? Why stands she there to listen?
I see her eyes that in the starlight glisten—
Her eyes—but not the thing of dread they see:
She's feeling where her knife was wont to be—
Ah, would she wore it now! (“The Scollard's” figure appears from behind the willow.)

'Tis he, my gypsy rival, by her side!
He lifts a knife. She springs, the dauntless girl,
Lithe as a leopardess! Ah! can she hurl
The giant down the bank?

(He prepares to plunge into the river in order to swim to her, when Rhona meets the onrush of her assailant with a blow in the mouth from her fist, which causes him to totter and then stumble over the bank.)

He falls below,
Falls where the river's darkest waters flow!
Twice, thrice, he rises—sinks beneath the tide!
Only the stars and I have seen him fall.
Death is her doom who slays a Romany

Gypsy.

-chal
And weds a gorgio

Gentile.

: death! But only we,
The stars and I who love the slayer, could see
The way the ruffian died. (He looks in the river, where the reflected stars make mysterious figures as the ripples twist round the bulrushes.)

'Twas only we who saw, ye starry throng!
And one white lie of mine will hide the deed
Of her who gave me love against her creed—
The Romany woman's creed of tribal duty—
Gave Rhona's wealth of love and faith and beauty.

THE STARS WRITE IN THE RIVER.

Falsehood can never shield her: Truth is strong.

PERCY.

I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
In Heav'n that wove this net of life for men?
Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth—
King that can do no wrong!

Ah! Night seems opening! There, above the skies,
Who sits upon that central sun for throne
Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
Far, far away, of living dazzling motion?
Hearken, King Truth with pictures in thine eyes
Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
Of infinite light, 'tis Love that stands immortal,
The King of Kings. And there on yonder bank
Stands she, and, where the accursed carrion sank,
The merry bubbles rise!

At last she sees me on this tongue of land;
She plunges through the fringe of reed and moss,
She takes the boat; she's pulling straight across,
Startling the moorhens as the dark prow brushes
Through reeds and weeds and water-flags and rushes.

Yes, yes, I saw! Is this the little hand
That slew him? How the slender fingers quiver
Against my lips! Those stars within the river
May write of how he died, but Love, my darling,

Looks straight at Doom, though wolves of Death are snarling,
And smiles: “Behold, I stand!”

XIV
THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE

(Percy in the tent on the morning after his marriage with Rhona in Gypsy Dell.)

The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
The tent's mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
Thro' which I see the deepening bars of pink.
I hear the earliest anvil's tingling clink
From Jasper's forge; the cattle on the leas
Begin to low. She's waking by degrees:
Sleep's rosy fetters melt, but link by link.

What dream is hers? Her eyelids shake with tears;
The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
“You'll never leave me now? There is but you;
I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
‘The Dukkeripen o' stars comes ever true.’”

She rises, startled by a wandering bee
Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree—
Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl
Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl—
The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
And says, “This bride of yours, I know her well,
And so do all the birds in all the bowers

Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
See, on the curtain of the morning haze
The Future's finger writes of happy days.”

XV
THE MIRRORED STARS AGAIN

(After only a few months with her.)
The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel's, yet with woman's dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.

What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.

XVI
THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE RENEWED

(Percy, on the anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of Rhona, stands in the mouth of his solitary tent in Gypsy Dell. He looks towards the spire of Rington Church in the distance, over which the dawn is gradually brightening into a gorgeous sunrise.)

Death's year has passed: again the new-mown hay,
As on that night, perfumes the Dell—that night

Whose darkness seemed more dear than Eden-light—
Fragrant of Love's warm wings and Love's warm breath—
Where here I left her doomed to treacherous death
By Romany guile that lured me far away;
'Twas here—where petals of the morn are cast
'Mid Night's wild phantoms from the spectral past—
'Twas here she made the vow I smiled at then
To show her face some morn when hill and glen
Took the first kiss of Day.

But now—not all the starry Virtues seven
Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.

And morning says, “Love hath such godlike might
That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
Were quelled by Doom, Love's high-creative leaven
Could light new worlds.” If, then, this Lord of Fate,
When Death calls in the stars, can re-create,
Is it a madman's dream that Love can show
Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
And build again my heaven?

“The birds,” she said, “they knows us Romany chies

Gypsy girls.

—
Leaseways the gypsy-magpie

Water-wagtail.

an the jay—
They knows the Romany tongue—yis, all we say:

So, if the Hernes should do away wi' me
'Cause o' the Scollard's death, the birds will see
An' tell the flowers where Rhona's body lies.
The Scollard's strong to strive wi' now he's dead:
Outside the tent o' nights I hear his tread.
You mind them stars a-shinin in the river
That seemed a snake o' fire? I see'd you shiver:
It had the Scollard's eyes!

But when I'm dead, the Golden Hand o' Love
Will shine some day where mists o' mornin swim;
Me too you'll see, dear, when the sun's red rim
Peeps through the Rookery boughs by Rington spire,

And makes the wet leaves wink like stars o' fire;
Then, when the skylark wakes the thrush and dove,
An' squrrels jump, an' rabbits scrabble roun',
An' hares cock up their ears a-shinin brown,
An' grass an' blossoms mix their mornin smells
Wi' Dingle songs from all the chirikels

Birds.

,
You'll see me there above.”

I think 'twas here—though now I know not whether
Dead joy or living sorrow be the dream—
In this same tent—round which the branches seem
To stir their whispering leaves as if to tell
The morn the dreadful secret of the Dell—
I think 'twas here we lived that life together.

(A shape that at one moment seems like a hand, and then a feather of gold, appears in the eastern clouds near the brightening wings of the Spirit of the Sunrise.)

My senses mock me: these mad eyes behold
What seems a hand, a mystic hand of gold,
Traced on the steaming canvas of the mist,
Gilding the woof of pearl and amethyst—
A hand or golden feather.

(Beside the Golden Hand Rhona's face appears.)

Is that a picture in a madman's eye?
Or is it Memory, like a mocking elf,
Weaving Hope's tapestry to cheat herself?
Or does great Nature, she who garners all
The fleeting pictures Time can limn, recall
The face of her the Romanies doomed to die?
Or is there glowing a face from brow to chin
Where yonder wings of morn are widening thin,

Her very face, her throat, her dimpling cheek,
Her mouth—the mouth that love first taught to speak—
Smiling, “'Tis I, 'tis I”?

THE LARK RISING FROM THE HAY-FIELD.

Birds of the Dell, the veils of morn are shaking!
And see the face of her, ye loving birds,
Who knew your songs—who gave them human words
In those sweet mornings when her breath would mingle
With breath of flowers, and all the dewy Dingle
Greeted the Spirit of the Sunrise waking;
Ye birds who saw her buried—ye who know
But cannot utter where she lies below—
Can never tell yon mourner, for the spell

100

The monstrous deed hath cast about the Dell—
The man whose heart is breaking!

THE BIRDS OF THE DINGLE.

She keeps her promise, she who made the vow
No Romany law, no Romany guile, should ever
Divide their lives, nor Death's fell malice sever
The chain the sunrise forged 'twixt her and him;
She keeps her promise: see, through mists that swim,
Those eyes are hers—that brow is Rhona's brow—
Rhona's, who vowed to show the dukkeripen

Symbol.

Of Hope, the Golden Hand of promise, when

101

Fate should fulfil the prophet-river's warning—
Vowed she would gaze from ruby domes of morning;
She keeps her promise now.

THE SPIRIT OF THE SUNRISE.

Though Love be mocked by Death's obscene derision,
Love still is Nature's truth and Death her lie;
Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
To taste the fell destroyer's crowning spite
That blasts the soul with life's most cruel sight,
Corruption's hand at work in Life's transition:
This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
Her body's image pictured in thy brain;

102

The flowers above her weave the only shroud
Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
Rhona! Behold the vision!
PERCY.
As on that morn when round our bridal pillow
The sunrise came and you cried: “Smell the whin!”
And oped the tent to let the fragrance in,
Yon clouds—like molten metal, boiling brass,
Brightening to gold—are crested as they pass
With Love's own fire!—And while each gleaming billow
Rolls o'er the Dell, 'tis Love's own hand that launches
The self-same promise through the self-same branches—

103

The promise of the Sunrise!—Oak and ash
And birch and elm and thorn pass on the flash
Down to the river-willow!

XVII
NATURA MALIGNA

(Percy, in the Alps, whither he has gone to escape the haunting effect of English scenery upon his mind, has, after living alone in a lonely chalet, passed into a state of spiritual exaltation, and has come to look upon Nature with the puritanical eyes of a Hindoo Saivite, as being the malignant foe of Man. And yet the dominant thought drives him to go every morning to watch for a sign at sunrise.)
The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood—by cataract-spray—
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.

104

At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
“'Tis hers whose hand God's mightier hand doth hold.”
I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
When lo, she stood! . . . . God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge! . . . . Oh, there in sallow light,
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.

105

XVIII
THE PROMISE AGAIN RENEWED

(Percy's dream in the chalet.)
Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
“Sorrow,” I said, “has made me old, my dear;
'Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph's neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel's hair.”
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes—
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;

106

But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.

XIX
NEW YEAR'S EVE IN THE ALPS.

(Percy at midnight standing in front of his chalet.)

Through Fate's mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and, see! Time's star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
There where the veil of Alpine clouds is cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft

107

Of all that was its music—stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left—
The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this mountain hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, “No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!”
And yet I cannot join the dead—and live.

(The sound of the New Year bells comes up from the valley.)

Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling

108

Each to the other ere you say adieu!—
I seem to hear their chimes—the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year's Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.
If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears—
And with the past bring her I weep in vain—
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.

109

(The clouds move away and show the stars in dazzling brightness over the mountain peaks.)

Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove—
They bring the mighty Mother's new-year greeting:
“All save great Nature is a vision fleeting”—
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
“All, all,” I cry, “except man's dower of love!—
Is Love but born of Nature's mystic cheating?”
And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On earth's wide mirror—secrets of the night—

110

To feel again the spirit's wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature's lyre.

New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, “Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning's gold
Blooms o'er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;

111

The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona: things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth's fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature's light!”

112

XX
NATURA BENIGNA

(The promise of the sunrise.)
What power is this? what witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?

113

Mother, 'tis I reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.

117

CHRISTMAS AT THE MERMAID

[_]

(With the exception of Shakspeare, who has quitted London for good, in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has lately rebuilt, all the members of the Mermaid Club are assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson dealing out the wassail from a large bowl. At the other end sits Raleigh, and at Raleigh's right hand the guest he has brought with him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man, whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or false, given him in the Low Countries a great reputation, the echo of which had reached England. Raleigh's desire was to excite the public enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice spirits as those associated with the Mermaid Club.)

118

Drink first to Stratford Will—belovèd man,
So generous, honest, open, brave and free,
Who merriest at the Apollo used to be—
Merriest of all the merry Falcon clan.

(All drink to “Will Shakspeare.”)
CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:

119

Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

BEN JONSON.

That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,
With life at golden summit, fled the town
And took from Thames that light to dwindle down
O'er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.

But, tho' we feast without the king to-night,
The Monarch leaves a regent—friend of friends,
With whose own soul the thronèd spirit blends
In one fair flame of love's commingling light.

Brother of Shakspeare, wilt thou not rehearse
Those sugared sonnets thy shy muse hath made,

120

Those lines where Avon, glassing wood and glade,
Seems rippling through the sunshine of thy verse?

Wilt thou not tell the Mermaid once again,
In golden numbers, what the poet told,
Of how his spirit ever was controlled
By Avon-ripples shining in his brain,

And how those ripples greeted him that day,
Which was the Mermaid's night, when he the Swan
Flew to the bosom he was nursed upon—
The bosom he so loved when far away?

Wilt thou not tell us how the river spake
To that sweet Swan returning to its nest
Among the lilies dreaming on the breast
Of Avon, dear to us for Shakspeare's sake?

121

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

SHAKSPEARE'S FRIEND.

To sing the nation's song or do the deed
That crowns with richer light the motherland,
Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need
When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,
Is joy to him whose joy is working well—
Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame
Should find a thrill of music in his name;
Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim
Her arrows at his soul's high citadel.

122

But if the fates withhold the joy from me
To do the deed that widens England's day.
Or join that song of Freedom's jubilee
Begun when England started on her way—
Withhold from me the hero's glorious power
To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,
And give that sacred guerdon to another,
Him will I hail as my more noble brother—
Him will I love for his diviner dower.

Enough for me who have our Shakspeare's love
To see a poet win the poet's goal,
For Will is he; enough and far above
All other prizes to make rich my soul.
Ben names my numbers golden. Since they tell
A tale of him who in his peerless prime
Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time

123

Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,
Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.

THE EVENING AFTER WILL'S RETURN TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON

As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
And all his happy childhood came to view;
He saw a child watching the birds that flew
Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,

124

With power beyond all power of things beholden
Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
And closed him in from all but willow musk.

And then a child beneath a silver sallow—
A child who loved the swans, the moorhens' “cheep”—
Angled for bream where river holes were deep—
For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
Or ate the “fairy cheeses” of the mallow,
And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;

125

And then a child to whom the water-fairies
Sent fish to “bite” from Avon's holes and shelves,
A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
The flower-sprites sent the bees and “sunshine elves;”
Then, in the shifting vision's sweet vagaries,
He saw two lovers walking by themselves—

Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain—
Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
By sudden silence, “lest his plaint should cloy”—
Knew when the skylark's changing note of joy
Saith, “Now will I return to earth again”—

126

Knew every warning of the blackbird's shriek,
And every promise of his joyful song—
Knew what the magpie's chuckle fain would speak;
And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.

He heard her say, “The birds attest our troth!
Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
Round summer's royal field of golden cloth
Shines o'er the buttercups like snowy froth,
And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
‘We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.’

127

And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory
River and church, grows rosier with our story!
This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
They breathe—o'er mead and stream they breathe—the blessing,
‘We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!’”

A FRIEND OF MARLOWE'S.
(Who has been sitting moody and silent.)

'Tis when the Christmas joy-bells fill the air
That memory comes with half-reproachful eyes
To hold before the soul its legacies,
Of grief and joy from Christmas-songs that were.

128

Friends, friends, there come to me, I know not why,
The words I wrote that day my Kit was slain.
I would not chill this feast, yet am I fain
To tell of Kit and how I saw him die.

ON SEEING KIT MARLOWE SLAIN AT DEPTFORD

'Tis Marlowe falls! That last lunge rent asunder
Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe's life,
Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heav'n at strife,
Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
Heav'n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,

129

If Fate's hand guided yonder villain's knife
Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
With dower of poets—song and love and wonder.
Or was it Chance? Shakspeare, who art supreme
O'er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe's sight
To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
Where man and men and gods and all that seem
Are Nature's mutterings in her changeful dream—
Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!

(They drink in silence to the memory of Marlowe.)

130

MARLOWE'S FRIEND.
Where'er thou art, “dead Shepherd,” look on me;
The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!

RALEIGH.
(Turning to David Gwynn.)
Wherever billows foam
The Briton fights at home:
His hearth is built of water—

CHORUS.
Water blue and green;

RALEIGH.
There's never a wave of ocean
The wind can set in motion
That shall not own our England—

CHORUS.
Own our England queen.

131

RALEIGH.
The guest I bring to-night
Had many a goodly fight
On seas the Don hath found—

CHORUS.
Hath found for English sails;

RALEIGH.
And once he dealt a blow
Against the Don to show
What mighty hearts can move—

CHORUS.
Can move in leafy Wales.

RALEIGH.
Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
Who hast a heart akin
To England's own brave hearts—

CHORUS.
Brave hearts where'er they beat;

RALEIGH.
Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
And tell the Mermaid how
A galley-slave struck hard—

132

CHORUS.
Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

DAVID GWYNN'S STORY OF HOW HE AND THE GOLDEN SKELETON CRIPPLED THE GREAT ARMADA SAILING OUT

“A galley lie” they called my tale; but he
Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales.
The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,

133

Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire—
Stands asking here Truth's one reward, belief!

And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
This tale of mine—shall tell, in future days,
How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
For England when she moved in perilous ways;
But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea—

134

Doth England—she who loves the loudest tongue—
Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?

I see—I see ev'n now—those ships of Spain
Gathered in Tagus' mouth to make the spring;
I feel the cursèd oar, I toil again,
And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out—
Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.

135

And one we call the Princess, one the Royal,
Diana one; but 'tis the fell Basana
Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
For by their help Hope whispers me that I—
Whom ten hours' daily travail at a stretch
Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die—
May strike once more where flags of England fly,
Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.

True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
Answered by boatswain's laugh and scourge's crack;
Again I feel the pang when trying to choke

136

Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.

By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
And soldiers cry, “What saint shall bid her rally?”
Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
The Dons to free them from the metal tether
By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;

137

Some shout, in answer to the billows' roar,
“The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.”

“Bring up the slave,” I hear the captain cry,
“Who sank the golden galleon El Dorado.
The dog can steer.”

“Here sits the dog,” quoth I,
“Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!”
With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
“Hearken, thou pirate—bold Medrado's bane!—
Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain.
If thou canst take the galley through this sea.”

138

“Ay! ay!” quoth I. The fools unlock me straight!
And then 'tis I give orders to the Don,
Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night.
Oh then I see beneath the galley's beak
A glow like Spanish auto's ruddy reek—
Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!

A skeleton, but yet with living eyes—
A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold—
Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
And round his brow, of high imperial mould,

139

A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
Throwing a radiance o'er the foam-lit brine:
“'Tis God's Revenge,” methinks. “Heaven sends for sign
That bony shape—that Inca's diadem.”

At first the sign is only seen of me,
But well I know that God's Revenge hath come
To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
Quoth I, “How fierce soever be the levin
Spain's hand can hurl—made mightier still for wrong
By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven—

140

Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven—
Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.”

“The dog can steer,” I laugh; “yea, Drake's men know
How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.”
Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
Some 'neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
Beside the foremast, covered by a sail.
The captives guess my plan—I see their smiles
As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.

141

I say, they guess my plan—to send beneath
The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth—
Hate's nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
Then wait until the tempest's waxing might
Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.

Past Ferrol Bay each galley 'gins to stoop,
Shuddering before the Biscay demon's breath.
Down goes a prow—down goes a gaudy poop:
“The Don's Diana bears the Don to death,

142

Quoth I, “and see the Princess plunge and wallow
Down purple trough, o'er snowy crest of foam:
See! see! the Royal, how she tries to follow
By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.”

Now three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
Each rower murmuring o'er my whispered plan,
Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
“Rise, every man, to tear to death his man—
Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
When God's Revenge sings loud to ocean's lyre.”

143

Taller the spectre grows 'mid ocean's din;
The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
I give the sign: the slaves cry, “Ho for Gwynn!”
“Teach them,” quoth I, “the way we grip in Wales.”
And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
I win the key—let loose a storm of slaves:
“When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,”
They cry; “sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
Or drink to England's Queen in foaming waves.”

We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
We stab the Dons at random, till I see

144

A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
Then, lo! a bony shape with lifted hands—
A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
O'ertopping groans, o'ertopping Ocean's quire—
A skeleton with Inca's diadem stands!

It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
Sniffing man's flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
Anon the spectre, when the strife is o'er,

145

Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
Burning upon the conquered galley's beak.

And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
The Royal bearing down upon our craft—
Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
I take the helm; I put the galley near:
We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
Amid the Royal's din I laugh to hear
The curse of many a British mutineer,
The crack, crack, crack of boatswain's biting scourge.

“Ye scourge in vain,” quoth I, “scourging for life
Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don;”

146

For from the Royal's poop, above the strife
Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
“What! is it thou, Pirate of El Dorado?”
He shouts in English tongue. And there, behold!
Stands he, the devil's commodore, Medrado.
“Ay! ay!” quoth I, “Spain owes me one strappado
For scuttling Philip's ship of stolen gold.

“I come for that strappado now,” quoth I.
“What means yon thing of burning bones?” he saith.
“'Tis God's Revenge cries, ‘Bloody Spain shall die!’
The king of El Dorado's name is Death.
Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,”

147

I cry; “strong hands are stretched to save you now;
Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.”
But when the Royal, captured, rides adrift,
I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.

When all are slain, the tempest's wings have fled,
But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
My soul knows well it hath that Inca's form.
“It lights,” quoth I, “the red cross banner of Spain
There on the flagship where Medina sleeps—
Hell's banner, wet with sweat of Indians' pain,
And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.

148

There on the dark the flagship of the Don
To me seems luminous of the spectre's glow;
But soon an arc of gold, and then the Sun,
Rise o'er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
That take all shifting colours as they shake,
I see the great Armada coil and twist
Miles, miles along the ocean's amethyst,
Like hell's old snake of hate—the wingèd snake.

And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
Before the slackening horses of the wind,
Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
“Behold,” quoth I, “their floating citadels,
The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,

149

Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells—
Yea, sailed from Tagus mouth, for Christ's behoof.

For Christ's behoof they sailed: see how they go
With that red skeleton to show the way
There sitting on Medina's stem aglow—
A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse—
Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
Their trucks, their flags—behold them, how they pass—
With God's Revenge for figurehead—to Doom!”

150

BEN JONSON.

Now drink to Drake and drink to those
Who when they saw through evening's purple veils
Two far-divided points that rose—
Two crescent horns that brightened into sails—
Laughed—though methinks their laugh was grim—
Laughed when those horns like evening's pinion tips
Burnt ruddier, and the centre dim
Came up and filled the horizon's rim—
Laughed loud and cried: “See how the pirzes swim,
Our Spanish ships”—

The men who saw the Armada float,
And lit the beacon fires to spread the news,

151

While smack, and hoy, and fishing boat
Swelled big with pride, and landsmen joined the crews.
Papist like Lutheran met with laughter
The ban of Rome—Drink to those Papist halls
That rang with shouts from rush to rafter,
“Whate'er the bans the winds may waft her,
England's true men are we and Pope's men after,
When England calls.”

DRAYTON.
Fill every cup with Mermaid-sack,
And sing a song of Drake and Howard's men,
Who broke the Spanish Bloodhound's back
In England's glorious week of triumph, when
Her fate, which aye was Freedom's fate,

152

Hung on the sons she suckled to be free—
When down before them in the Strait
Went that fell flag the free waves hate,
And God said: “England, this is thine estate!
And gave the sea.

CHORUS.
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?

153

BEN JONSON.
(Turning to Raleigh.)

To win the Theban prize, each brought his lay,
When, lo! a stranger stood, wind-flushed and tanned,
Who sang of marvellous sights in many a land
And voices heard on waters far away.

But fools shall give to fools the bay for prize,
Yea, though Apollo's self hath brought an ode:
And songs are sung in Time's forgotten mode
When high gods sing from still-receding skies.

The bard whose song the Thebans might not follow.
Because he sang of more than Theban things,

154

Was he whose music, struck from Nature's strings,
Builded the walls of Ilion, great Apollo.

Cried Phœbus, soaring high—his bright feet shod
With Day that quenched the day and hid the town—
“Ye spurn Apollo as a sunburnt clown,
Ye pallid priestlings of a sunburnt god!

“The milk-white forehead, tender and dainty-skinned,
Your sculptors give me—lips too fine to quaff
The wine of morning—make Olympus laugh:
Gods know the sun-god bronzed by brine and wind.”

155

The Mermaid, “Ocean-shepherd,” drinks to thee:
Sunburnt thou art, and knowest the great round world,
As Phœbus knows: tell us how England hurled
Spain to the bottom of the guardian sea.

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

Raleigh.

Hail the wassail-steam that rises
Above the head of him who brewed it, Ben.
Rare shapes it takes and wondrous guises
Of ships, and flags, and guns, and fighting men.

156

The Mermaid's spicy steam to-night
Brings back the curling clouds of other smoke—
Less dainty of scent, less pure and white,
Yet sweet and full of high delight
To me who saw how English sailors fight
On English oak.

I feel the west wind blowing in,
And, when out-warps the fleet of every sail,
I hear Drake say, “'Twill soon begin,
The game between the sword-fish and the whale”—
Hear Wynter say: “Those galleons towered,
With Philip's trinkets, Philip's filigree,
And painted trucks and pennons flowered,
Shall feel the stroke of England's Howard,
And touch the ships of Drake whose keels have scoured
Philip's own sea.”

157

CHORUS.
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?

RALEIGH.

Out-warp the ships the Spaniards knew
Ere Drake returned from “singeing Philip's beard,”
With flags that under Cadiz flew
When right between the Spanish keels he steered;
Out-warp the ships John Hawkins made—

158

Hornets for golden bees from El Dorado—
With keels as fine as rapier-blade,
Slipping to follow or evade
As swiftly through a Spanish cannonade
As sea-gull's shadow.

Off Plymouth Sound the Sabbath smiles
When whale and swordfish meet in deadly play—
When up the Channel, miles on miles,
The swordfish stabs and stabs and glides away.
The Spaniard hath both sail and oar.
And what hath England? Sons who strike with glee
To music of the cannon's roar—
Strike, strike till e'en the rooks on shore
Rise scared, and Channel sea-fowls wheel and soar
Right out to sea.

159

And now from bays and creeks and coves,
Through all the sacred ways, from farthest Scillies
To that sweet bay where whispering groves
Stretch on to many a lawn of Jersey lilies!
From Lyme to that flower-fragrant home
Of nightingale and rose, beloved Wight,

160

They come—in smacks, in skiffs they come—
And even in little shallops some—
To show how foes who brave our Channel-foam
Will have to fight.

When, like a playful hound released,
From purple portals of the opening day
At last the wind from out the east
Drives smoke and vapour over Weymouth Bay,
Medina hath the wind, he sees,
And bears on Howard's line with luckless might;
And Drake knows well the Narrow Seas
That nurtured him—knows how the breeze
Of summer follows all the sun's decrees
From dawn till night.

At last Medina finds his goal,
And, safe as hunted wolf within his lair,

161

He anchors close by Calais shoal,
While England's sea-dogs fret around him there.
“Damned be the foe who will not fight!”
Saith Wynter. “List, my Lord High Admiral;
Beneath yon moon a-shining bright
There lies the Don in direst plight,
With riddled hulls and sails—with men in fright,
But fight he shall.

“O' nights, my lord, the tide sets down
To where yon gaudy-bellied gold-tubs lie
So close they seem like Plymouth town
Save for the lanterns swaying there on high.
When midnight sounds by Spanish bells,
To-morrow night, before the moon shines free,
Send fire-ships round their caravels,
Their clumsy galleon-citadels;

162

The Don will deem them ‘Antwerp's floating hells’
That turn on sea.”

CHORUS.
The sea!
Thus did England fight:
And shall not England smite
With Drake strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?

RALEIGH.

The midnight bells! I hear them rung!
In strength the Spaniard sleeps, but battle-thinned;

163

No dreams hath he of Prowse and Young,
There stealing with the fire-ships down the wind,
Till smoke up-curls and flames devour
And Night's black wings are glowing like fiery pinions,
Which wax in light and wax in power,
Illuming Gravelines wakened tower
With sparks and flakes that seem a ruddy shower
From hell's dominions.

Troops, priests, and sailors dance with dread,
As dance bewildered steeds in burning stables;
Sails open in the reeking red:
The Fleet Invincible hath slipped its cables!
“The Antwerp fire! the floating mine!”
The Spaniards shout. But now there comes to me
A sign I know, the Channel's sign—

164

A sound most like the sleuth hound's whine
When slot is found: Drake knows that cry divine:
'Tis England's sea!

CHORUS.
The sea!
Thus did England fight:
And shall not England smite
With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?

RALEIGH.

Six miles from shore lies trembling Spain,
Yearning for Calais Roads and Flushing sands;

165

But Drake hath said, “Never again
Shall Parma with the Golden Duke shake hands.”
The south-west wind has never shifted,
And there, while morning opes bewildered eyes,
While Spain lies shattered, scattered, drifted,
With hulls and sails the balls have rifted,
Both warring fleets as by a hand are lifted—
Our billows rise!

While morning gazes o'er the waves,
Gilding the ships, the Spaniards sallow-skinned,
The cruel oars, the weary slaves,
Drake starts: “What signs are these on sea and wind?”
He knows what glorious combatant
Is moving now to hold our England free;
He knows our Channel's covenant
With Freedom—knows how billows pant,

166

Ere yet begins the Channel's English chant
Of wind and sea.

The choirboys sing the matin song,
When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard's right.
He drives the wing—a huddled throng—

167

Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
While galleon hurtles galeasse,
And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
As scythes cut down the summer grass,
Drake closes on the writhing mass,
Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
Skimming the waves.

Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
Running from ship to ship like living things.
With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
And once I see within a waist
Wild English captives ashen-faced,
Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
In purple weals.

168

(David Gwynn here leaps up, pale and panting, and bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from Raleigh sits down again.)

The Don fights well, but fights not now
The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
To pluck the gold from off the brow,
Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
He hunts not now the Indian maid
With bloodhound's bay—Peru's confiding daughter,
Who saw in flowery bower or glade
The stranger's god-like cavalcade,
And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro's trade
Of rape and slaughter.

His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,

169

Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
Like any wolf that tears his cage!
'Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
Till set of sun!

Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
Are packed away in every hold—
Targets of flesh for every English gun—
Till, like Pizarro's halls of blood,
Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
Reddening the waves for many a rood,

170

As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
Before the wind.

“Doth mighty Parma wait to join
The ‘deathless fleet’ that holds four thousand dead?
That fleet shall never turn the Groyne
If cannon-gear be ours and sailors' bread.”
As thus he speaks brave Cumberland
Sweeps down to set the crown on Victory;
While privateers on every hand
Are flocking, flocking, from the land,
To drive out Philip's Pope-anointed band
To the open sea.

CHORUS.
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite

171

With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?

BEN JONSON.
(At the conclusion of Raleigh's song.)
Sweet is the song of victories
Which only leaves the singer's deed unsung. (He stops, having perceived that Gwynn, who has been following Raleigh's story with intense excitement, has now passed into a condition resembling hysteria, staring into the air and pulling open his dress to display scars of the branding iron and of the boatswain's galley-scourge.)

Look to thy friend! Before his eyes
What ghostly picture in the air is hung?

172

LODGE.
Good Master Gwynn, we pray thee tell
The Mermaid what hath blanched thy lips and brow.

DEKKER.
Some sight he sees of Death or Hell.

CHAPMAN.
We marvel, friend, what mighty spell,
Making each vein upon thy forehead swell,
Hath seized thee now.

GWYNN.

With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!

173

Who leads them down the tempest's path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweed-mouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind's wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!

At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca's bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney's witch,
Waves to the Spectre's song her lantern-switch
O'er ocean-graves.

174

The glimmering crown of Scotland's head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath's defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o'er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest's foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
“Tyrants, ye die!”

The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes “God's Revenge” on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest's roar,

175

Snapping of ropes, cracking of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
“Spain's murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!”

BEN JONSON.
So lists the Mermaid to the sailor's song,
But let not wassail cool on Christmas Eve:
The hero's tale being told, why, let us leave
For merrier themes the fight of Right with Wrong.

He who alive to them a Dragon was
Shalbe a Dragon unto them againe,
For with his death his terrour shall not passe,
But still amid the aire he shall remaine.

Sir Francis Drake, by Charles Fitzgeoffrey Oxford, 1596.

“So lists the sailor to the mermaid's song.” —Arden of Feversham.

176

WASSAIL CHORUS.

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

RALEIGH.
'Tis by Devon's glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls—
El Dorado's rare domain—
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter's feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.

177

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place.
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

DRAYTON.
'Tis where Avon's wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O'er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost—
O'er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed—
Strains of olden time.

178

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

SHAKSPEARE'S FRIEND.
'Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakspeare's feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship's face he loveth well:
'Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o'er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.

179

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

HEYWOOD.
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam—
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.

180

CHORUS.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

BEN JONSON.
Love's old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof;
Love's old drink of Yule brew I,
Wassail for new love's behoof:
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring—
Yea, from rush to roof.

181

FINALE.
Christmas loves this merry, merry place:—
Christmas saith with fondest face
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
“Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
Rare!”

183

A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE

THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW

We talked of “Children of the Open Air,”
Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
Till, on a day across the mystic bar
Of moonrise, came the “Children of the Roof,”
Who find no balm 'neath evening's rosiest woof,
Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star

184

We looked o'er London, where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies,
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.

185

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

187

A DEAD POET

Thou knewest that island, far away and lone,
Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
In spray of music and the breezes shake
O'er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
While that sweet music echoes like a moan
In the island's heart, and sighs around the lake,
Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.

188

Life's ocean, breaking round thy senses' shore,
Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:
For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay—
Pain's blinking snake around the fair isle's core,
Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
Around thy lovely island evermore.

189

A GRAVE BY THE SEA

I

Yon sightless poet whom thou leav'st behind,
Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,
Above the grave he feels but cannot see,
Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,
Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?
Ah no!—For all his sobs, he seems to me
Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,
Than I—less lonely, nearer—standing blind!

190

Free from the day, and piercing Life's disguise
That needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,
His inner eyes may see thee as thou art
In Memory's land—see thee beneath the skies
Lit by thy brow—by those beloved eyes,
While I stand by him in a world apart,

Philip Bourke Marston.

II

I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine
Saw that strange swan which drew a faëry boat
Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote
Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine

191

For many a day with sights that seemed divine,
Till that false swan returned and arched his throat
In pride, and called him, and she saw him float
Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.

I stand like her, for she, and only she,
Might know my loneliness for want of thee.
Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,
Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother.
And then, departing like a vision thence,
Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.

192

III

Last night Death whispered: “Death is but the name
Man gives the Power which lends him life and light,
And then, returning past the coast of night,
Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.”
What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim
The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?
Art thou not vanished—vanished from my sight—
Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?

With Nature dumb, save for the billows' moan,
Engirt by men I love, yet desolate—

193

Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,
King'd by my sorrow, made by grief so great
That man's voice murmurs like an insect's drone—
What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?

IV

Last night Death whispered: “Life's purblind procession,
Flickering with blazon of the human story—
Time's fen-flame over Death's dark territory—
Will leave no trail, no sign of Life's aggression.

194

Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,
Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.
Since Life is only Death's frail feudatory,
How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?”

I answered thus: “If Friendship's isle of palm
Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,
Can knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm
This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?
If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,
What balm in knowing that Love is Death's—what balm?

195

V

Yea, thus I boldly answered Death—even I
Who have for boon—who have for deathless dower—
Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,
Filling with music earth and sea and sky:
“O Death,” I said, “not Love, but thou shalt die;
For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,
And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,
Death striking Love but strikes to deify.”

Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,
For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,

196

And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;
And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,
I watched—I listened for that voice of thine,
Though Reason said: “Nor voice nor face can come.”

Birchington, Eastertide 1882.

197

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF LOVE

I
THE SLAVE GIRL'S PROGRESS TO PARADISE

(Beneath the cypress overhanging her lover's tomb the slave girl lies stretched on the stone. In the shadow by the tree are seen the “wide black eyes” and the sombre wings of Azraeel, the Angel of Death.)
THE SLAVE GIRL.
Angel of Death! Hearken in yonder wood
How turtle and nightingale are murmuring “Pity”;

198

“Pity,” yon slave-girls moan who brought me food
And milk and shawls, to soothe my solitude:
See how they weep, returning to the city.

(Ilyàs the Prophet, who is passing the tomb, stops to listen.)
ILYÀS.
What sorrow, child, hath made thee fain to die?

THE SLAVE GIRL.
I would not die: this frame of mine remembers
Each touch of his which gave it sanctity,
Flickering within the body's memory,
As come and go the sparks in slumbering embers.

199

Save me from Azraeel—him whose sword divides
Love's dearest bonds—whose malice struck to sever
My life from one who loves me, though he bides
Where never slave girl stood, with houri brides.
I would not die, but live and weep for ever.

ILYÀS TO AZRAEEL.
Yea, Love is strong! This child would spend her days
Here on this tomb with cypress boughs for cover,
While travellers whisper as they stop and gaze
Across the graveyard, “See how love can craze!
She lives upon the tomb where sleeps her lover.”

200

THE SLAVE GIRL.
Death knows I have no soul, and never more
Those lips shall touch the widowed lips that quiver
With memories of the light which once they wore.
Death knows I have no soul with wings to soar
To one who stands beside the Holy river.

(A spirit resembling the slave girl herself in form and feature, but winged like a Peri, descends from the sunset clouds, leaving an iridescent track behind it.)
ILYÀS TO AZRAEEL.
Lo! Allah sends a vision down the air
That leaves a rainbow track o'er thy dominions.

201

THE SLAVE GIRL.
What shape is that which treads the Peris' stair?
It stands beside me now with shining hair,
I breathe the musk of Aidenn from its pinions.

ILYÀS.
No soulless Peri this whose eyes illume
With mirrored radiance of a deathless glory
The cypress branches round thy lover's tomb,
And flush the vans of Death with such a bloom
That Evening's rosy wings seem wan and hoary.

202

THE SLAVE GIRL TO THE VISION.
Spirit, whose tears are falling on the stone,
Doth sorrow stamp an angel's forehead human?
Thou speakest not, but as a sight half known,
Within a dream, thy face seems like mine own,
And eyes that weep must needs be kin to woman.

AZRAEEL.
Thy lover waiteth by the Holy Lote.

THE SLAVE GIRL.
With houris?

AZRAEEL.
Nay, he loveth still a maiden.

203

THE SLAVE GIRL.
That maiden hath no soul to ford the moat.

ILYÀS.
Thou'rt loved of Allah!

THE SLAVE GIRL.
Yet his servant smote
Him whom the houris dare not clasp in Aidenn.

(The spirit stoops and kisses the slave girl's forehead.)
ILYÀS.
I think the spirit's kiss upon thy brow
Seals Allah's promise of a blissful morrow.

THE SLAVE GIRL TO THE VISION.
Morrow for me! Speak, spirit, who art thou?

204

ILYÀS.
'Tis thine own soul—the spirit with thee now
Is thine own soul new-lit by love and sorrow.

Although the Koran refers three times to the wives of the just accompanying them into Paradise (Sura xiii. 36–42), and although there is a tradition of a Paradise apart from the men reserved for the few women whom Mohammed did not see in his vision of perdition, the popular notion in some Mohammedan countries is that women have no souls to be either blessed or damned.

II
THE BEDOUIN-CHILD

[_]

(From “Aylwin”)

(Among the Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, for a daughter is considered a disgrace.)

Ilyàs the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale

205

'Neath wings of Death—'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.

“Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help—“Plead on: such pure love-breath.
Reaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes.”

The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;

206

'Mid empty water-skins and camel-maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
“Sleep fans my brow: Sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land.”

“Nay,” saith a Voice. “the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath hath stilled; so God decrees”:—
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

207

JOHN THE PILGRIM

THE MIRAGE

[_]

(From “Carniola”)

Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river's winding maze:
“Water, water! Blessed be God!” he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.

208

“God heard me not,” says he, “blessed be God!”
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav'n's outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: “Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life—blessed be God!”

209

COLUMBUS

FOR THE FESTIVAL AT HUELVA

A Castilla y a Leon
Nuevo Mundo dió Colon.

To Christ he cried to quell Death's deafening measure
Sung by the storm to Death's own chartless sea;
To Christ he cried for glimpse of grass or tree
When, hovering o'er the calm, Death watched at leisure;
And when he showed the men, now dazed with pleasure,

210

Faith's new world glittering star-like on the lee,
“I trust that by the help of Christ,” said he,
“I presently shall light on golden treasure.”

What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow—
Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find
Whose footfalls mark the music of mankind!
'Twas his to lend a life: 'twas Man's to borrow:
'Twas his to make, but not to share, the morrow
Who in Love's memory lives this morn enshrined.

211

BEATRICE

FOR THE SIXTH CENTENARY OF BEATRICE'S DEATH, COMMEMORATED AT FLORENCE IN MAY, 1890

Thou, spreading through six hundred years an air
Of memory fresh as Morning's altar-spice,
Thou, Star of Dante—Star of Paradise,
Hast made the star of womanhood more fair;
For though thou art now his lofty guardian there,
Victress o'er jealous Sin, who dared entice
His feet from thee —though now the high device

212

Of wisdom lights the wreath around thine hair;
Those eyes can dim the angels' eyes above
Because they tell what flight was thine below:
No eagle-flight past peaks of fire and snow,
But through Life's leaves the flutter of a dove
Whose beating wings soothed Dante's air with love—
Struck music from the wind of Dante's woe.

“ Purg.,” c. xxx. See also Guido Cavalcanti's sonnet to Dante Alighieri, rebuking his way of life after the death of Beatrice.

213

THE THREE FAUSTS

INSCRIBED TO MISS ELEONORE D'ESTERRE KEELING

I
THE MUSIC OF HELL

I had a dream of wizard harps of hell
Beating through starry worlds a pulse of pain
That held them shuddering in a fiery spell,
Yea, spite of all their songs—a fell refrain
Which, leaping from some red orchestral sun,
Through constellations and through eyeless space
Sought some pure core of bale, and finding one
(An orb whose shadows flickering on her face

214

Seemed tragic shadows from some comic mim
Incarnate visions mouthing hopes and fears
That Fate was playing to the Fiend of Time),
Died in a laugh 'mid oceanic tears:
“Berlioz,” I said, “thy strong hand makes me weep,
That God did ever wake a world from sleep.”

II
THE MUSIC OF EARTH

I had a dream of golden harps of earth:
And when they shook the web of human life,
The warp of sorrow and the weft of mirth,
Divinely trembling in a blissful strife,
Seemed answering in a dream that master-song
Which built the world and lit the holy skies.

215

Oh, then my listening soul waxed great and strong
Till my flesh trembled at her high replies!
But when the web seemed answering lower strings
Which hymn the temple at the god's expense.
And bid the soul fly low on fleshly wings
To gather dews—rich honey-dews of sense,
“Gounod,” I said, “I love that siren-breath,
Though with it chimes the throbbing heart of Death.”

III
THE MUSIC OF HEAVEN

I had a dream of azure harps of heaven
Beating through starry worlds a pulse of joy,

216

Quickening the light with Love's electric leaven,
Quelling Death's hand, uplifted to destroy,
Building the rainbow there with tears of man
High over hell, bright over Night's abysses,
The arc of sorrow in a smiling span
Of tears of many a lover's dying kisses,
And tears of many a Gretchen's towering sorrow,
And many a soul fainting for dearth of kin,
And many a soul that hath but night for morrow,
And many a soul that hath no day but sin;
“Schumann,” I said, “thine is a wondrous story
Of tears so bright they dim the seraphs' glory.”

217

TOAST TO OMAR KHAYYÀM

AN EAST ANGLIAN ECHO-CHORUS

INSCRIBED TO JAMES ROBERTS BROWN AND OLD OMARIAN FRIENDS IN MEMORY OF HAPPY DAYS BY OUSE AND CAM

CHORUS.

In this red wine, where Memory's eyes seem glowing,
And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
And Norfolk's foaming nectar glittered, showing
What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
We drink to thee, right heir of Nature's knowing,
Omar Khayyàm!

218

I

Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing
Her scriptured orbs on Time's wide oriflamme,
Nature's proud blazon: “Who shall bless or damn?
Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!”

Chorus:

Omar Khayyàm!

II

Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing
Through Persian gardens, widened till it swam—
A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam—
Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,

Chorus:

Omar Khayyàm!

219

III

Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,
And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,
And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,
And swish of scythe in Bredfield's dewy mowing?

Chorus:

Omar Khayyàm!

IV

'Twas Fitz, “Old Fitz,” whose knowledge, farther going
Than lore of Omar, “Wisdom's starry Cham,”
Made richer still thine opulent epigram:
Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.

Chorus:

Omar Khayyàm

220

221

PRAYER TO THE WINDS

ON PLANTING AT THE HEAD OF FITZGERALD'S GRAVE TWO ROSE-TREES WHOSE ANCESTORS HAD SCATTERED THEIR PETALS OVER THE TOMB OF OMAR KHAYYÀM

“My tomb shall be on a spot where the north-wind may strow roses upon it.” Omar Khayyàm to Kwájah Nizami.

Hear us, ye winds!
From where the north-wind strows
Blossoms that crown “the King of Wisdom's” tomb,
The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,
Dreaming in seed of Love's ancestral rose,

222

To meadows where a braver north-wind blows
O'er greener grass, o'er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
And all that make East England's field-perfume
Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.

Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West and South,
This granite covers him whose golden mouth
Made wiser ev'n the Word of Wisdom's King:
Blow softly over Omar's Western herald
Till roses rich of Omar's dust shall spring
From richer dust of Suffolk's rare Fitzgerald.

223

QUEEN KATHERINE

ON SEEING MISS ELLEN TERRY AS KATHERINE IN “KING HENRY VIII.”

Seeking a tongue for tongueless shadow-land,
Has Katherine's soul come back with power to quell
A sister-soul incarnate, and compel
Its bodily voice to speak by Grief's command?
Or is it Katherine's self returns to stand
As erst she stood defying Wolsey's spell—
Returns with those wild wrongs she fain would tell
Which Memory bore to Eden's amaranth-strand?

224

Or is it thou, dear friend—this Queen, whose face
The salt of many tears hath scarred and stung?—
Can it be thou, whose genius, ever young,
Lighting the body with the spirit's grace,
Is loved by England—loved by all the race
Round all the world enlinked by Shakespeare's tongue!

225

DICKENS RETURNS ON CHRISTMAS DAY

A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” —June 9, 1870.

“Dickens is dead!” Beneath that grievous cry
London seemed shivering in the summer heat;
Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:
Dickens is dead! said they, and hurried by;
Street children stopped their games—they knew not why,
But some new night seemed darkening down the street.

226

A girl in rags, staying her way-worn feet,
Cried, “Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?”

City he loved, take courage on thy way!
He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.
Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey—
Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,
Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears—
Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!

227

THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT “THE PINES”

Life still hath one romance that naught can bury—
Not Time himself, who coffins Life's romances—
For still will Christmas gild the year's mischances,
If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry—
To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry—
To smile with eyes outshining by their glances
The Christmas tree—to dance with fairy dances
And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.

228

And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung
Are fresh as ever. Bright is yonder bough
Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung
When you and I and Friendship made a vow
That Childhood's Christmas still should seal each brow—
Friendship's, and yours, and mine—and keep us young.

229

PROPHETIC PICTURES AT VENICE

[_]

(From “Carniola”)

I
THE WALTZ AT THE VENETIAN BALL

Has she forgotten for such halls as these
The domes the angels built in holy times,
When wings were ours in childhood's flowery climes
To dance with butterflies and golden bees?—
Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze
Shook out those English harebells' magic chimes
On that child-wedding morn, 'neath English limes,
'Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?

230

The love that childhood cradled—girlhood nursed—
Has she forgotten it for this dull play,
Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway
Like dancers in a telescope reversed?
Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,
“Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed”?

But was it this that bought her—this poor splendour
That won her from her troth and wildflower wreath
Who “cracked the foxglove bells” on Grayland Heath,
Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,

231

Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,
Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,
Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,
When Love grew grave—to hide her soul's surrender?
Her soul's surrender! Well—yon future spouse
Paid nothing for the soul! He bought, as rake,
“A woman's points”: bought, bought these lips that shake
The heart with wonder when they seal their vows—
These eyes where hues of sky and ocean take
All shapes of love—these brows!—my darling's brows!

232

The body knows me as I touch her waist—
The fingers throbbing through the little glove—
The fingers trembling at my arm above—
The breast whose pearls are heaving interlaced:
All know these arms of mine that once embraced.
Though I could give no coronet but love—
That gift which “only a child had dared approve”—
The soul's sweet temple holds me uneffaced:
The body feels me “crack” those foxglove bells
In this soft hand to “make the elfin thunder”:
In these pink ears I think the music swells
To Fate's world-waltz that holds the stars asunder:

233

But 'tis the soul has learnt what Mammon sells:
As here we spin, what are its thoughts? I wonder.

II
THE TEMPTATION

THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT AFTER THE WALTZ AT THE VENETIAN BALL

When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live,
And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed,
Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need
Than truth, if lies a little peace can give.
A little peace! 'tis thy prerogative,
O Sleep! to lend it; thine to quell or feed

234

This love that starves—this starving soul's long greed,
And bid Regret, the queen of hell, forgive.
Yon moon that mocks me thro' the uncurtained glass
Recalls that other night, that other moon,—
Two English lovers on a grey lagoon,—
The voices from the lantern'd gondolas,
The kiss, the breath, the flashing eyes, and, soon,
The throbbing stillness: all the heaven that was.
(The Lover lies watching the moonlight as it shines through the emblazoned glass of the bedroom windows, illuminating the walls and moving from picture to picture.)

235

III
PROPHETIC PICTURES ON THE WALLS.

How ruby-red the light of morning falls
On each emblazoned pane whose tints illume
With prophecies the pictures round the room!
The warriors, doges, nobles, cardinals,
Battles, processions, floating festivals,
Venetian girls, Venetian dames a-bloom
With mid-life's chilly joys of gem and plume,—
All leap to life upon the kindled walls.
Each painted vision seems a living part
Of Memory's pageant marshalled by my grief.
It says, “The future garners no relief,
No solace for that anguish at thy heart.”
The light that falls thro' yonder amulet
Makes every picture say, “Forget, forget.”

236

IV
PROPHECY OF THE FIRST PICTURE

(The light falls through the windows on the picture of “The Dark Knight and the Ferryman.” The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)
The boatman sate with brawny arms embrowned,
Steadying the wherry as it rocked afloat;
The “Dark Knight” came, and on his shield and coat
Symbols of doom and hell's devices frowned.
He leapt aboard. “Wilt row to Devil's Ground
For gold?” The man sate dumb with choking throat.
“Who finds the devil in his ferry-boat
Must row him,” said his soul, “across the sound.”

237

To Devil's Ground he rowed, a sulphurous coast;
“Alight,” said then the Knight, “'tis here we dwell.”
“Nay, Dark Knight, nay, though here my boat hath crossed,
I asked thee not aboard.” “Thou rowest well;
Who ships the devil is not always lost,
But lost is he who rows him home to Hell.”

“He who takes the devil in his boat must row across the sound.” —Old Proverb.

V
PROPHECY OF THE SECOND PICTURE

(The light falls through the windows on the picture of “The Damsel of the Plain.” The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)

Childe Rowland found a Damsel on the Plain,
Her daffodil crown lit all her shining head;

238

He kissed her mouth, and through the world they sped,
The beauteous, smiling world, in sun and rain.
But when long joys made love a golden chain,
He slew her by the sea; then, as he fled,
Voices of earth and air and ocean said,
“The maid was Truth: God bids you meet again.”

Between the devil and the Lord's deep sea
He met a foe more soul-compelling still;
A feathered snake the monster seemed to be,
And wore a wreath o' the yellow daffodil.
Then spake the devil: “Rowland, fly to me:
When murdered Truth returns she comes to kill.”

239

VI
PROPHECY OF THE THIRD PICTURE

(The light falls through the windows on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called “The Rosy Scar,” depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine galley watching, on Christmas-eve, for the promised appearance of Rosenkreutz as a “rosy-phantom.” The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)
“While Night's dark horses waited for the wind,
He stood—he shone—where Sunset's fiery glaives
Flickered behind the clouds; then, o'er the waves,
He came to them, Faith's remnant sorrow-thinned.
The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,
Cried, ‘Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?
Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,

240

The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.”
All night he stood till shone the Christmas-star;
Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,
Flushed the grey sky—flushed sea and sail and spar,
Flushed, blessing every slave's woe-wasted cheek.
Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King, speak:
“Sufferers, take heart, Christ lends the Rosy Scar.”

241

NEW YEAR'S MORNING, 1867, AFTER THE LIBERATION OF VENICE

(The Poet goes to the window of his bedroom and gazes down the Grand Canal, over which the morning is glowing.)
“Man's knowledge, save before his fellow man,
Is ignorance—his widest wisdom folly.
In Nature's eyes still gazing, dazzled wholly
By sights his own eyes make, how should he scan
Pictures like those in Nature's iris-span?
Hers show the cypress, his the melancholy,
His shine with Christmas, hers with simple holly
That knew no mirth till Yule-tide feasts began.”
So Reason says; yet to my heart it seems
That yonder sun, firing the mists of morn,

242

Gilding each dome that scorned the Austrian's scorn,
Painting the Grand Canal with rosy gleams,
Looks conscious down on me and vanished dreams—
But—Freedom's year o'er Venice smiles new-born!

243

WHAT THE SILENT VOICES SAID

A SONNET SEQUENCE

I
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

“As the procession wound through the vast fane, bars and curiously formed flakes of golden light would, every now and then, break through the gloomy atmosphere and play along the tops of the arches and the roof.”

“Love is the spirit's life and withers never:
We twain shall meet again on some bright shore!”
So spake my heart, but still within its core
Whisper'd that foe who mocks the soul's endeavour:
“The very greatness of the man shall sever

244

Thy soul from such a soul so wing'd to soar:
Love wins no starry strand that can restore
To thee a soul whose pinions mount for ever.”

Though well I knew the voice was coward Fear's,
It marred the solemn music in mine ears,
Till, sudden, through the vapour-curtain grey
Veiling the roof, fluttered a flake of light:
A golden hand it seemed: I saw it play
Along the roof—along the “Lantern's” height.

II
THE GOLDEN HAND

Was it a sign from those, forgot by Fame,
Who built the minster—built by that same spell

245

Which bids the honey-bee fit cell to cell—
Who shaped in joy until dead stone became
A thing of life—who worked with poet's aim
When seized by song to make what shall compel
The maker's own fierce heart to say “'Tis well”—
Careless for other praise, for other blame?

For I recalled how scarce three years before
I followed Browning down the sacred floor,
When minster-spirits seemed to haunt the fane:—
Heroes of song and those whose blood was spilt
For England and those nameless ones who built
Our temple seemed to join the funeral train.

246

III
THE GOLDEN SCROLL

“That beckoning hand,” I said, “mysterious, golden,
Playing along the roof in bright unrest
As if in welcome of this royal guest:
Comes it from those who built these arches olden?”
But as I spoke it changed: a scroll unfolden
Shone with the master's words that oft had bless'd
My heart in youth when, dark and sorely press'd,
It yearned for light to strengthen and embolden.

I read the words that helped me when a boy
Roaming with book in hand the Ouse's side:

247

I drew again, from founts that cannot cloy,
Draughts of immortal song, till Faith defied
Fear's hissing head, and poetry and joy
And youth returned, and grief was quelled by pride.

IV
THE MINSTER SPIRITS

“Behold, ye builders, demigods who made
England's Walhalla, ye who haunt this pile
Of living stone! behold us here defile
Behind this pall, winding through light and shade
Of arch and pillar, where such bones are laid
As Time can only breed in one loved isle—
'Tis Tennyson we bring: he was erewhile
Our king,” I said; “we loved him undismayed!”

248

Sorrow had fled; for pride and joy of him
Made Life seem Death—made Death seem Life's own life—
And more and more the mighty fane grew rife
With spirits mighty. Yet mine eyes grew dim
For her who watch'd at Aldworth, that dear wife
He loved so well, when rose her loving hymn.

V
THE SILENT VOICES

Sweet was the sweet wife's music, and consoling:
The past returned: I heard the master's talk,
That many a time in many a happy walk
I heard when through the whin of Aldworth strolling,

249

Or on the cliffs of Wight with billows rolling
Below the jaggy walls of gleaming chalk:
Again I saw him stay his giant-stalk
To watch the foamy-crested breakers shoaling.

And when the music ceased and pictures fled
I walked as in a dream around the grave,
And looked adown and saw the flowers out-spread,
And spirit-voices spake from aisle and nave:—
“To follow him be true, be pure, be brave:
Thou needest not his lyre,” the voices said.

VI
WHAT THE VOICES SAID

“Beyond the sun, beyond the furthest star,
Shines still the land which poets still may win
Whose poems are their lives—whose souls within

250

Hold naught in dread save Art's high conscience-bar—
Who have for muse a maiden free from scar—
Who know how beauty dies at touch of sin—
Who love mankind, yet, having gods for kin,
Breathe zephyrs, in the street, from climes afar.

Heedless of phantom Fame—heedless of all
Save pity and love to light the life of Man—
True poets work, winning a sunnier span
For Nature's martyr—Night's ancestral thrall:
True poets work, yet listen for the call
Bidding them join their country and their clan.”

October 1892

251

COLERIDGE

I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open—saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web 'tween her and summer's glory;
Who, when that web—so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath—had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.

252

Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh
But lets the poet see how heav'n can shine.

253

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

THE TWO CHRISTMASTIDES

I

On Winter's woof, which scarcely seems of snow,
But hangs translucent, like a virgin's veil,
O'er headstone, monument, and guardian-rail,
The New Year's sun shines golden—seems to throw
Upon her coffin-flowers a greeting glow
Prom lands she loved to think on—seems to trail
Love's holy radiance from the very Grail
O'er those white flowers before they sink below.

254

Is that a spirit or bird whose sudden song
From yonder sunlit tree beside the grave
Recalls a robin's warble, sweet yet strong,
Upon a lawn beloved of wind and wave—
Recalls her “Christmas Robin,” ruddy, brave,
Winning the crumbs she throws where blackbirds throng?

II

In Christmastide of heaven does she recall
Those happy days with Gabriel by the sea,
Who gathered round him those he loved, when she
“Must coax the birds to join the festival,”
And said, “The sea-sweet winds are musical
With carols from the billows singing free

255

Around the groynes, and every shrub and tree
Seems conscious of the Channel's rise and fall”?

The coffin lowers, and I can see her now—
See the loved kindred standing by her side,
As once I saw them 'neath our Christmas bough—
And her, that dearer one, who sanctified
With halo of mother's love our Christmas-tide—
And Gabriel too—with peace upon his brow.

256

TO A SLEEPER AT ROME

For the unveiling by Edmund Gosse of the American memorial bust to the poet Keats in Hampstead Parish Church, July 16, 1894.

Thy gardens, bright with limbs of gods at play—
Those bowers whose flowers are fruits, Hesperian sweets
That light with heaven the soul of him who eats,
And lend his veins Olympian blood of day—
Were only lent, and, since thou couldst not stay,
Better to die than wake in sorrow, Keats,

257

Where even the Siren's song no longer cheats—
Where Love's long “Street of Tombs” still lengthens grey.

Better to nestle there in arms of Flora,
Ere Youth—the king of Earth and Beauty's heir—
Drinking such breath in meadows of Aurora
As bards of morning drank, Ægean air—
Wake in old age's caverns of Ellora,
Carven with visions dead and sights that were!

258

IN A GRAVEYARD

OLIVER MADOX BROWN
November 12, 1874

Farewell to thee, and to our dreams farewell—
Dreams of high deeds and golden days of thine,
Where once again should Art's twin powers combine—
The painter's wizard-wand, the poet's spell!
Though Death strikes free, careless of Heaven and Hell—
Careless of Man, of Love's most lovely shrine;
Yet must Man speak—must ask of Heaven a sign
That this wild world is God's, and all is well.

259

Last night we mourned thee, cursing eyeless Death,
Who, sparing sons of Baal and Ashtoreth,
Must needs slay thee, with all the world to slay;
But round this grave the winds of winter say:
“On earth what hath the poet? An alien breath.
Night holds the keys that ope the doors of Day.”

260

TWO LETTERS TO A FRIEND

Letter I. AFTER THE WEDDING

Bright-browed as Summer's self, who claspt the land,
With eyes like English skies, where seemed to play
Deep azure dreams behind the tender grey,
All light and love, she moved: I see her stand
Beneath that tree; I see the happy band
Of bridesmaids on the lawn where blossoms sway
In light so rare, it seems as if the day
Glowed conscious of the future's rosy strand.

261

O Friend, if sun and wind and flowers and birds,
In language deeper drawn than human words,
From deeper founts than Time shall e'er destroy,
All spoke to thee in Summer's rich caress,
Even so my heart, though wordless too, could bless;
It could but feel a joy to know thy joy.

Letter II. AFTER DEATH'S MOCKERY

When death from out the dark, by one blind blow,
Strikes down Love's heart of hearts—severs a life—
Cleaves it in twain as by a sudden knife,
Leaving the dreadful Present, dumb with woe,

262

Mocked by a Past, whose rainbow-skies aglow
O'erarch Love's bowers, where all his flowers seem rife
In bloom of one sweet loving girl and wife—
Then Friendship's voice must whisper, whisper low.

Though well I know 'tis thou who dost inherit
Heroic blood and faith that lends the spirit
Strength known to souls like thine, of noblest strain,
Comfort I dare not proffer. What relief
Shall Friendship proffer Love in such wild grief?
I can but suffer pain to know thy pain:

I can but suffer pain; and yet to me
Returns that day whose light seemed heavenly light,

263

Whose breath seemed incense rising to unite
That lawn—where every flower and bird and bee
Seemed loving her who shone beneath that tree—
With lawns far off, whose flowers of higher delight,
Beyond Death's icy peaks and fens of night,
Bloomed 'neath a heaven her eyes, not ours, could see.

Brother, did Nature mock us with that glory
Which seemed to prophesy Love's rounded story?
Or was it that sweet Summer's fond device
To show thee who shall stand on Eden slopes,
Where bloom the broken buds of earthly hopes—
Stand waiting 'neath a tree of Paradise?

264

ANCESTRAL MEMORY

THE DEAF AND DUMB SON OF CRŒSUS

He saw their spears who scaled the parapet,
Then—pouring, glittering, with a torrent's force,
Through battered gates—the spears! Without remorse
He struck, he slew, round Crœsus sore beset.
He heard not Slaughter's din, but felt her sweat
And smelt her breath where many a bloody corse,
Trampled by Persian camel, Lydian horse,
Showed how at Sardis Fate and Crœsus met.

265

But when he saw his father down at last—
Down, waiting death at some fierce foeman's stroke—
Louder the dumb boy shrieked than Winter's blast:
“Man, kill not Crœsus!”
'Twas the Race that spoke:
The blood of Lydian Kings within him woke
Ancestral memory—woke the sceptred Past.

266

APOLLO IN PARIS

TO THE FRENCH ACADEMY ON THE ELECTION OF M. J. M. DE HÉRÉDIA

I

Spires, roofs, and towers gleam in the sunset's glow
Till Paris burns like some old poet-town
That draws Apollo's radiant presence down
By music mounting from his sons below:
Methinks he greets you, fearless men who know
His sons and guard them, lest their sire's renown
Be dimmed when bastard fingers clutch the crown
Of him, our Lord of light and lyre and bow.

267

As when he scared the hordes who sacked old Rome
That day he soared above his temple-dome
When gods were fleeing the voices of the Vandals,
I see him now whose song keeps heaven immortal;
I see him now: he shines above your portal,
Phœbus from golden curls to golden sandals!

II

With limbs of light I see the song-god stand
Flushing your roof! He knows your hands are strong
Against his foes, the brazen-throated throng,
Whose breath is blight to beauty in every land;

268

“Foes of my foes,” saith he, “who dare withstand
The great coarse voice that works my children wrong,
Ye crown Hérédia with the crown of song
Heedless of all save Art's divine command!

He sings the past—the beauty that hath been:
I love him, I—remembering those bright days
Before the world grew grey of Vandal haze,
When gods might mix with men of godlike mien
And maids with lovesome eyes of mortal sheen,
Sweet goddesses of earth with Woman's ways:

269

III

I love the song-born poet, for that he
Loves only song—seeks for love's sake alone
Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown
To feudaries of Fame, are known to me.”
So saith the god, in tones which seem to be
That music of the sunset richly blown
When sinks the sun-god from his sinking throne
Within the burnished bosom of the sea.

He soars away, a star in rosy air;
But see! the memory of his presence there
Lives where he stood. Yea, though a god hath fled,
Leaving a fading memory scarce beholden,
A true god's very shadow glimmers golden
With lovelier light than mortal brows can shed.

270

ENVOY.

The poet sings what Nature, dreaming, saith,
But still his Bride is Art—that starry wife
From shores where music of the gods is rife.
She teaches him the strain that conquereth,
Whether he touch the lyre, or breathe his breath
Through flute of Phœbus or through Pan's wild fife—
Whether of Man he sings or Nature's life,
Or shining sward beyond the dykes of death.

Yet, though he asks but this, the Bride's acclaim—
Though not Fame's trumpet nor the wreath of Fame

271

Can give the bridegroom joy whose Bride is Art—
He grieves when bastard-brows are crowned with flowers,
And Helicon grows noisier than a mart—
Remembering Poesie within her bowers.

272

AT THE THÉATRE FRANÇAIS

ON THE REVIVAL, AFTER FIFTY YEARS, OF “LE ROI S'AMUSE” November 22, 1882

Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime—
Titan of light, with scarce the gods for peers—
What thoughts come to thee through the mist of years,
There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?
Homage from every tongue, from every clime,
In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.
Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with tears

273

In very pride of thee, old man sublime!
And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,
Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is spun!—
I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance—
Victress by many a victory he hath won;
I hear thy voice o'er winds of Fate and Chance
Say to the conquered world: “Behold my son!”

274

TO MADAME CARNOT

At Dijon gleamed on that bright countenance—
Illumed by love of thee and love of those
Who sprang from thee—tears born of coming woes.
The sad prophetic Spirit of joyous France
Wept too, methinks, to see her son advance

275

To death; and when he kissed the child there rose
That sight the Future's mirror sometimes shows,
The mother-land in grip of Fate or Chance.

“Daughter,” saith France to thee, “this day of sorrow
Wins for his threatened land a sunnier morrow:
His was the death could save me—not another:
For me thy dear one robbed thee of his life—
For me fought, bosom bare—yea, met the knife
Hell whetted for the bosom of his Mother.”

“When the President reached Dijon he had the happiness to find awaiting him on the railway platform his son, the lieutenant, and his daughter and son-in-law, with their little daughter, a sweet child of four. The grandfather took her into his carriage, and embraced her affectionately, and said how much more pleasant it would be to get out and stay at Dijon with her than to go on to Lyons. His eyes filled with tears as he gave her the parting kiss, and handed her to her father.” —Daily News, June 25, 1894.

276

THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR'S HILL

TO A. C. S.

I

One after one they go; and glade and heath,
Where once we walked with them, and garden-bowers
They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
One after one does Sorrow's every wreath
Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.

277

Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
To-day as on that day when last we parted,
Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
Love shapes a presence out of Memory's dream,
A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.

II

Can he be dead? We walk through flowery ways
From Boar's Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
What nugget-gold, in drift of Time's long flow,
The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;

278

He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
Still talks of Plato while the scene below
Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.

Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,
And by the river you arrest the talk
To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
The boatmen's children shining in the wherry
And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
Making the clumsy craft an angel's ferry.

279

III

The river crossed, we walk 'neath glowing skies
Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
Fading as colour after colour dies:
We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
We win the scholar's nest—his simple fare
Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.
Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.
Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew

280

The poet's heart of gold that gives the spell!
Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,
How shall ev'n Death make that dear presence dim
For you who loved him—us who loved him well?

281

THE OCTOPUS OF THE GOLDEN ISLES

“What! Will they even strike at me?”

Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,
With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,
Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was joy
To him, my friend—dear friend of godlike mien!
But soon he felt beneath the billowy green
A monster moving—moving to destroy:
Limb after limb became the tortured toy
Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.

282

“And canst thou strike ev'n me?” the swimmer said,
As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,
Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish wise,
Quivering in hate around a hateful head.—
I saw him fight old Envy's sorceries:
I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!

283

LOVE HOLDS OF HEAVEN IN FEE

AT A FUNERAL

I

These tears, as down the slope Death's pageant wends—
These tears, whence come they—tears I cannot smother?
Is it for thee they flow, my brother's brother?
Is it for him they flow, or these dear friends?
My thoughts are far away where water bends
Around a grange—my thoughts are with that other
Who held thee—yea, ere thou couldst babble “Mother,”
Who holds thee still by strength that never ends.

284

She holds thee—she who, like the mother-dove,
Draws near her nestlings only to caress,
Whose love for thee, for them, boundless, above
All other wealth of Woman's tenderness,
Is not their dower alone: its boon can bless
All eyes which see that mother's eyes of love.

II

She holds thee still: Love holds of heaven in fee:
Still lives that face where Nature seemed to write
Life's twin-ancestral story in mingled light
On lips whose smile was hers of love or glee,
In eyes whose pictures from the blue-grey sea,
Radiant of laughters, radiant in despite

285

Of shadowy bars from lashes dark as night,
Seemed like a sailor's memory haunting thee.

She holds thee still; Death dares not dim that face
Rich with the runes of each historic race,
Where, like the message of an olden scroll
Deep-glimmering in a priceless palimpsest,
The language of the past seemed half-exprest
Beneath the scriptures of a new-lit soul.

286

THE WOOD-HAUNTER'S DREAM

The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:
“Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,
And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle.
Where are the dreams that flush'd thy childish bed?
The Spirit of the Rainbow thou wouldst wed!”
I rose, I found her—found a rain-drench'd girl
Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl
Coloured the rain above her golden head.

287

But when I stood by that sweet vision's side
I saw no more the Rainbow's lovely stains;
To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed
The sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:
“God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,”
The wood-sprite laugh'd, “our seeker finds a bride.”

288

MIDSHIPMAN LANYON

“Midshipman Lanyon refused to leave the Admiral and perished.” —Times, June 30, 1893.

Our tears are tears of pride who see thee stand,
Watching the great bows dip, the stern uprear,
Beside thy chief, whose hope was still to steer,
Though Fate had said, “Ye shall not win the land!”
What joy was thine to answer each command
From him calamity had made more dear,
Save that which bade thee part when Death drew near,
Till Tryon sank with Lanyon at his hand!

289

Death only and doom are sure: they come, they rend,
But still the fight we make can crown us great:
Life hath no joy like his who fights with Fate
Shoulder to shoulder with a stricken friend:
Proud are our tears for thee, most fortunate,
Whose day, so brief, had such heroic end.

290

A REMINISCENCE OF THE OPEN-AIR PLAYS

TO PIERROT IN LOVE THE CLOWN WHOSE KISSES TURNED A CRONE TO A FAIRY-QUEEN

What dost thou here, in Love's enchanted wood,
Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and thief—
Held safe by love of fun and wine and food—
From her who follows love of Woman, Grief—

291

Her who, of old, stalked over Eden-grass
Behind Love's baby-feet—whose shadow threw
On every brook, as on a magic glass,
Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass
When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?

Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:
Thine have restored a princess to her throne,
Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss
A fay and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;
But, if thou dream'st that thou from Pantomime
Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon—
Clasp her on banks of Love's own rose and thyme,
While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime—
Bottom to thee were but a meek buffoon.

292

When yonder fairy, long ago, was told
The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,
Turning her radiant body foul and old,
Would yield to some knight-errant's virgin lips,
And when, through many a weary day and night,
She, wondering who the paladin would be
Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,
Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,
Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?

'Tis true the mischief of the foeman's charm
Yielded to thee—to that first kiss of thine.
We saw her tremble—lift a rose-wreath arm,
Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her pine;
We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,

293

As if the morning breeze across the wood,
Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak
Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,
Were light and music now within her blood.

'Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand—
Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,
Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,
A queen of Faëry yet a lovesome girl,
Within whose eyes—whose wide, new-litten eyes—
New litten by thy kiss's re-creation—
Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise
Made all her flesh like light of summer skies
When dawn lies dreaming of the morn's carnation.

294

But when thou saw'st the breaking of the spell
Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,
Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell
In which its purple pinions slept confined,
And when thou heard'st the strains of elfin song
Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above her—
Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,
And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,
Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?

Hearken, sweet fool! Though Banville carried thee
To lawns where love and song still share the sward
Beyond the golden river few can see
And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;

295

And though he bade the wings of Passion fan
Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,
Feathered thy spirit's wing for wider span,
And fired thee with the fire that comes to man
When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;

And though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze
Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid blue—
That face, where pity through the frolic plays—
That form, whose lines of light Love's pencil drew—
That voice, whose music seems a new caress
Whenever passion makes a new transition
From key to key of joy or quaint distress—

296

That sigh, when, now, thy fairy's loveliness
Leaves thee alone to mourn Love's vanished vision:

Still art thou Pierrot—naught but Pierrot ever;
For is not this the very word of Fate:
“No mortal, clown or king, shall e'er dissever
His present glory from his past estate”?
Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;
The clown's first kiss was needed, not the clown,
By her who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,
Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:
Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.

Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville's “Le Baiser,” in which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part of “Pierrot” and Miss Annie Schletter the part of the “Fairy.” —Coombe, August 9, 1889.

297

LECONTE DE LISLE

July 17, 1894

A REMINISCENCE OF THE JUBILEE REVIVAL OF “LE ROI S'AMUSE” November 22, 1882

Where'er thou art, canst thou forget that night
When, after fifty years, the victory came,
And Hugo—throned above all thrones of Fame—
Watched his own mighty dream uncoil its might,
And thou didst stand with shining locks of white
And eyes that, answering our proud hearts' acclaim,
Lost all their arrowy mockeries, and became
Dim with the tears that made their lashes bright?

298

Nirvana was thy quest! But love like thine
For that great soul must bear thy kindled soul
Where Love's high-chosen constellations shine
Of stars unmingled with the “loveless Whole”:
When love hath coloured life with hues divine,
What poet seeks Nirvana's hueless goal?

299

TO BRITAIN AND AMERICA

ON THE DEATH OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
Your fathers drew, for Freedom's pioneers,
Your English speech, your dower of English blood—
Ye ask to-day, in sorrow's holiest mood.
When all save love seems film—ye ask in tears—
“How shall we honour him whose name endears
The footprints where belovèd Lowell stood?”

300

Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling, each, to seize a brother's throat:
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you still?—Keep Love's bright sails afloat,
For Lowell's sake, where once ye strove and smote
On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.

301

TO MRS. GARFIELD

ON THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT

Such strength as his, striving in such a strife,
Will win at last: God gave thy dear one all:
A seat above the conflict, power to call
Peace like a Zephyr, when alarms were rife;
Home music too, children and heroine wife,
God gave: then gave Death's writing on the wall,
And on the road the assassin: bade him fall,
Death-stricken at the shining crest of Life.

302

And yet our tears are sweet. God bade him taste
All gifts of heav'n, like manna raining down—
Clothed him with Good for Might, whose sweet renown
Touched Ocean's lyre to music as it passed;
Then crowned him thine indeed—giving at last
Pain suffered well,—thy Garfield's deathless crown.

University of Virginia Library

THE COMING OF LOVE

RHONA BOSWELL'S STORY

AN IDYL OF THE OPEN AIR

CHARACTERS

I. Part I PERCY BEFORE THE COMING OF LOVE

I A STARRY NIGHT AT SEA

II NATURE'S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

III. THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE'S FRAGRANCY.

IV LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA.

V MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKEN

VI. SCENE: RINGTON PINGLE.

THE KAS-KAIRIN' GHYLLIE.

KAS-KAIRIN' CHORUS.

VII. NATURA BENIGNA REVEALED THROUGH A GYPSY CHILD.

II. Part II THE DAUGHTER OF THE SUNRISE

I RHONA'S FIRST KISS

II THE GOLDEN HAND

III RHONA'S LOVE LETTER AFTER PERCY'S FIRST STAY IN GYPSY DELL

IV PERCY READING THE LETTER AT RINGTON MANOR

V EVENING ON THE RIVER

VI THE NATURE WORSHIPPER AND WOMAN'S WITCHERY

THE LETTER.

THE LETTER CONTINUED.

VII. “KISSING THE MAY BUDS.”

VIII OCEAN-SORCERY

IX “GYPSY HEATHER.”

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X THE MUSIC OF NATURA MYSTICA

XI. THE HAUNTED GIRL.

(RHONA IN WALES.)

XII LOVE'S CALENTURE

THE LETTER

XIII THE FIRST DUKKERIPEN OF THE STARS

XIV THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE

XV THE MIRRORED STARS AGAIN

XVI THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE RENEWED

THE LARK RISING FROM THE HAY-FIELD.

THE BIRDS OF THE DINGLE.

THE SPIRIT OF THE SUNRISE.

XVII NATURA MALIGNA

XVIII THE PROMISE AGAIN RENEWED

XIX NEW YEAR'S EVE IN THE ALPS.

XX NATURA BENIGNA

CHRISTMAS AT THE MERMAID

THE EVENING AFTER WILL'S RETURN TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON

ON SEEING KIT MARLOWE SLAIN AT DEPTFORD

DAVID GWYNN'S STORY OF HOW HE AND THE GOLDEN SKELETON CRIPPLED THE GREAT ARMADA SAILING OUT

WASSAIL CHORUS.

A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE

THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

A DEAD POET

A GRAVE BY THE SEA

I

II

III

IV

V

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF LOVE

I THE SLAVE GIRL'S PROGRESS TO PARADISE

II THE BEDOUIN-CHILD

JOHN THE PILGRIM

THE MIRAGE

COLUMBUS

FOR THE FESTIVAL AT HUELVA

BEATRICE

FOR THE SIXTH CENTENARY OF BEATRICE'S DEATH, COMMEMORATED AT FLORENCE IN MAY, 1890

THE THREE FAUSTS

I THE MUSIC OF HELL

II THE MUSIC OF EARTH

III THE MUSIC OF HEAVEN

I. Part I
PERCY BEFORE THE COMING OF LOVE

I
A STARRY NIGHT AT SEA

II
NATURE'S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

III.
THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE'S FRAGRANCY.

IV
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA.

V
MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKEN

II. Part II
THE DAUGHTER OF THE SUNRISE

I
RHONA'S FIRST KISS

II
THE GOLDEN HAND

III
RHONA'S LOVE LETTER AFTER PERCY'S FIRST STAY IN GYPSY DELL

IV
PERCY READING THE LETTER AT RINGTON MANOR

V
EVENING ON THE RIVER

VI
THE NATURE WORSHIPPER AND WOMAN'S WITCHERY

VIII
OCEAN-SORCERY

IX
“GYPSY HEATHER.”

X
THE MUSIC OF NATURA MYSTICA

XII
LOVE'S CALENTURE

XIII
THE FIRST DUKKERIPEN OF THE STARS

XIV
THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE

XV
THE MIRRORED STARS AGAIN

XVI
THE PROMISE OF THE SUNRISE RENEWED

XVII
NATURA MALIGNA

XVIII
THE PROMISE AGAIN RENEWED

XIX
NEW YEAR'S EVE IN THE ALPS.

XX
NATURA BENIGNA

I
THE SLAVE GIRL'S PROGRESS TO PARADISE

II
THE BEDOUIN-CHILD

I
THE MUSIC OF HELL

II
THE MUSIC OF EARTH

III
THE MUSIC OF HEAVEN

I
THE WALTZ AT THE VENETIAN BALL

II
THE TEMPTATION

III
PROPHETIC PICTURES ON THE WALLS.

IV
PROPHECY OF THE FIRST PICTURE

V
PROPHECY OF THE SECOND PICTURE

VI
PROPHECY OF THE THIRD PICTURE

I
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

II
THE GOLDEN HAND

III
THE GOLDEN SCROLL

IV
THE MINSTER SPIRITS

V
THE SILENT VOICES

VI
WHAT THE VOICES SAID

OLIVER MADOX BROWN
November 12, 1874