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

Beneath the high majestic morning gleaming
Once field and mount and moor and forest lay:
O'er joyous vale and hill I wandered, dreaming
That all life's hours were as the dawn of day.

The sun's touch woke the golden daffodilly;
His clear beam drew the snowdrop from repose:
Then first love said, “My heart is like the lily!”
And passion said, “My soul is as the rose!”

First love and passion with the sun's rich glory
Mixed souls as ardent as that mighty flame.
When love spake, every flower took up love's story:
When passion spake, dream-flowers yet lovelier came.

So love and passion took the world with sweetness,
With sovereign sceptre swayed the sea and land:
The flowers at love's touch won their full completeness,
And passion thrilled the world through woman's hand.

Woman was queen of all the young day's splendour,
Her crown was woven of morning's lustrous light.
At noontide love, perhaps, a shade less tender
To man's heart seemed,—passion a shade less bright.

Through the still afternoon, when shadows lengthened
And on the hills fell silence as of grief,
Though deep within the soul love's sweet force strengthened,
The fierce heat scorched full many a flower and leaf.

Full many a dream had passed, the light of morning
No longer lingered on the sapphire wave.
The shadows whispered, as in sombre warning,
“The sun's sea-cradle is the great sun's grave!

“The sea, from which he rose to fill the air-spaces
With light that laughed to see his victory won,
His joy reflected in a million faces,
Will spread forth darkness, and engulf the sun.

“As surely as the morning flamed resplendent,
Full, as it seemed, of leagues of deathless light,
Will evening, dark slave on the sun attendant,
Turn traitor, slay the sun, and serve the night.”

Ah! so the shadows whispered. But I waited,
I let the dreary shadows tell their tale:
I watched the flowers within the woods belated;
I saw the light upon the hill-tops fail.

I saw the sun's gold chariot, wave-encumbered,
Sink in those very waters whence it shone—
Not long, devoid of life, the darkness slumbered:
Star-torches flashed round black night's ebon throne.

Then, as Love's heart made all its vast aim clearer,
I saw that one pale sun had taken flight
For this—that Love might bring to man's gaze nearer
Unnumbered suns, and never-ending light.

ELEVEN YEARS AGO

Eleven years since all the night was filled
With thee, and at thy spirit-touch I thrilled,
Long years of pain.
Ah! wilt thou never, blossom of my dream,
Within the palace of my slumber gleam,
Never again?
All seems so far, so long ago,
The sweet joy that I once did know!

Thou camest: and the solemn night was hushed,
And on thy face the rose of passion blushed,
So soft and fair;
And I was wrapt in ecstasy sublime,
And wafted upward towards an unknown clime
Of lordlier air;
And yet it seems so far to-day.
The heavens were blue. They are so grey!

Thou camest: and before thy feet fell dead
Each sin and terror, and thy queenly head
Lay close to mine;
And all the music of our ancient shore
Seemed round about our listening hearts to pour
A chant divine.
O Alice, o'er eleven years
The winged thought flies and wakens tears.

Thou camest.—Ah, what days have since been ours!
Thorns I have gathered. Hast thou gathered flowers?
How long and strange
The gloomy sun-forgotten years have been,
As day passed day and scene succeeded scene
With little change.
It seemeth now a far-off thing,
That night when all the stars did sing!

Thou wilt come? When the sunset o'er the sea
Brightens to solemn gold, wilt thou not be
Beside the waves?
When all the flowers of life are pale and dead,
Wilt thou not stand beside the last flower's head
With touch that saves?

I missed thee at life's dawn. Shall I
Possess thee once before I die?

Thou wilt come. Surely when the roses die,
And never more the lily's laugh is nigh,
In autumn days,—
When the great red leaves burn with autumn fire,
As I with lifelong measureless desire,
The woodland ways
Will smile to see thee pass along,
And, almost, wake to summer song!

Thine eyes of old were wet with tender love;
Passion fell like an aureole from above
Upon thy brow:
How is it with thee now long years have seen
Our forest haunts devoid of bard and queen,
Most songless now?
Wilt thou for ever tarry, sweet?
Is it not time that hands should meet?

Thou camest through the night. Wilt thou not come
When all the blossoms of long labour bloom
Around thy path?

Lo! for the eleven long years I, day and night,
Have laboured, Alice, for thy soul's delight,
And faced the wrath
Of time, and conquered time, I deem:
Make love's truth sweeter than a dream!

Feb. 13, 1882.

LYRICS AND BALLADS

I. IN AUTUMN

If thou and I indeed must part,
If even the sweetest days must close,
If time that severs rose from rose
Must also sever heart from heart,—
Oh, then let not our parting be
In Spring, that were too hard to bear!
For then the copses ring with glee,
A thousand blossoms scent the air.

When Spring's glad myriad voices
Sing love-songs of the heart,
When every bird rejoices,
It were too sad to part!

If thou and I must face the night,
The darkness where hopes earthly end,—
If, having called me “sweetest friend,”
Thou yet must vanish from my sight,—

Oh, then let not our parting be
In Summer, that were worse to bear!
Such glory rests upon the sea;
This world is then so wondrous fair.

When every hour discloses
More fully Summer's heart
To Summer's countless roses,
'Twere sadder still to part!

If thou and I must face the fate
So many souls have faced before,
And, having met, must meet no more,
And, having loved, have loved too late,—
Oh, let our maddening parting be
In Autumn. If we part at last,
Let it be when the winds at sea
Thunder “Despair” in every blast!

When wild red leaves are flying,
Each bleeding at the heart,
Then is the time for sighing,
Then is the time to part!

II “THE BRIGHT YOUNG DAYS”

Long life brings many a blessing;
With the years man's wisdom grows:
There are world-wide wrongs for redressing,
There are noble truths to disclose.
Yet ever man's heart keeps turning,
With a strange and a fathomless yearning,
To the beautiful bright young days
When the blue sea laughed in the bays,—
When the sunlight gilded the meadows,
In the beautiful bright young days!

There is love for the old in their season
(Bright gold is the autumn grain)—
But the love that knew nothing of reason,
Will it ever be with us again?
No: ever man's heart keeps turning
With a wild gaze tearful and burning

To the love of the sweet young days,
For the tenderest laughter is May's,—
The rich forest-gold is October's
But the rose and its splendour are May's!

So the songs that will perish never,
Be the world's age what it may,
That will haunt men's hearts for ever
Till the ashes of life turn grey,
Are the beautiful songs of yearning
Where the soul is swift and burning,
The songs of the bright young days
Ere flowers forsook the ways,—
The songs of the days that are vanished,
The beautiful bright young days!

III. THE LAND EVERLASTING

The fairest things, alas! are ever fleetest;
How glad, and yet how short, is sunny May:
For just one hour the rose is at its sweetest;
The violet's perfume lasts but for a day.
For some short weeks the waves are at their brightest;
The stars grow pale within the morning air:
One day the chestnut-bloom is at its whitest—
The next day sees it wither and despair.

And so with love.—It has its perfect splendour,
Its summer glory, when the twain hearts meet:
Its perfect hour of June, its moment tender,
Its sudden rapture, and its perfume sweet.
But ah! it follows the departing roses!
It trembles when the thunder smites the sky:
At autumn airs its fragrant blossom closes;
At touch of wintry wind its petals die.

And yet beyond the days of pain and sadness,
Beyond time's seasons full of clouds and grief,
There must be somewhere everlasting gladness,—
A heaven that sees no red-stained autumn leaf.—
The loved souls who have left us travel thither;
Within the gateways of that heaven they stand:
Ah, there the roses never pale nor wither!
There is no loveless winter in that land!

IV. AUTUMN WAILINGS

When youth is gone, and love is gone,
What lights the woodland way?
October's sunset, chill and wan;
The light of Autumn grey.
When youth is gone, and love is fled,
For us the world might well be dead!

When youth is gone,—as dead leaves go
Along the autumnal blast,—
Then first ourselves we seem to know
What all shall know at last;
The autumn weariness of life,
Past love and labour, zeal and strife.

When love is gone,—as blossoms fade,
Fade swiftly one by one,—
Our tired hearts tremble, as cold shade
Replaces summer sun.
When youth and love alike are fled,
The brain lives on, the heart is dead.

V. THE TEARLESS DAYS

Was it sweet to have lived, I wonder,
In the days when the world was young?
When, parting the boughs in sunder,
In the forest the wood-nymph sung?
Was it sweet, in the woods' recesses,
To mark 'neath a moonlit sky
The glitter of Venus' tresses
As the queen and her train swept by?

She must have been grand and peerless,
Queen Venus, with Love in her train.
Then the eyes of the world were tearless:
Will they ever be tearless again?
Our woods and our groves are chilly,
The goddess is no more there:
'Mid our rocks and regions hilly
We mark not the light of her hair.

But still on the hedge there are roses,
There is light in our true love's eyes;
In the woods there are wild-flower posies,
And the sun still smiles in the skies.
Not a dark cloud threatens with thunder,
Not a white storm-wave gives tongue:
Shall we ever grow old, I wonder,
While the love in our hearts is young?

VI. CHANGELESS LOVE

The bloom is fair upon the hawthorn hedges;
The throstles sing from many a budding spray;
Blue ripples laugh along the river-edges;
The blue sky seems to whisper, “It is May!”
And yet the thought of tawny-leaved September
Dismays the fancy with a touch of gloom:
Aye, and a mem'ry of old wild November,
Whose storm-winds trumpet forth pale Autumn's doom.

When love is at its sweetest, in its season,
When it is full of summer joy and mirth,
There sometimes comes the thought, “In love is treason.
Not always Summer sways the green-robed earth.”
The bloom is bright upon the garden roses;
Their red lips whisper, “Love is king to-day:”
Man's heart upon love's word in faith reposes,
Yet even love, so trusted, can betray.

Oh! is there not some heart which never changes,
Some sympathy eternal and divine,
Some love that time nor weakens nor estranges?
O sweetheart, let such changeless love be thine!
Then, whether storm-winds wail through wild November,
Or whether August splendour floods the sky,
Glad past all words it will be to remember
That, come what will, sweet love can never die.

VII. PAIN'S CONSTANCY

When the thought of our joys forsakes us
The thought of our sadness clings.
Its lovers and friends grief makes us,
But joy is a spirit with wings.
The place where we met is forgotten
Though the marvellous rose grew there;
But the meadow-sweet where we parted
Wins its sweetness from despair.

The stars of the past have a lustre
Outshining the light of the sun:
The dreams of our youth will haunt us
Till our life's whole race is run.
Aye, ever in pale December,
When the fires of Christmas glow,
The dream that our hearts remember
Is the dream of long ago.

There is friendship in countless faces;
There is true sweet love in a few;
There are blossoms in endless places;
Each summer brings skies of blue:
But the flowers our young hands gathered
Are the sweetest flowers that be,
And the faces we love for ever
Are the faces we never shall see!

VIII. “IF ONLY THOU ART TRUE!”

If only a single Rose is left,
Why should the Summer pine?
A blade of grass in a rocky cleft;
A single star to shine.
—Why should I sorrow if all be lost,
If only thou art mine?

If only a single Blue-bell gleams
Bright on the barren heath,
Still of that flower the Summer dreams,
Not of his August wreath.
—Why should I sorrow, if thou art mine,
Love, beyond change and death?

If only once on a wintry day
The sun shines forth in the blue,
He gladdens the groves till they laugh as in May
And dream of the touch of the dew.
—Why should I sorrow if all be false,
If only thou art true?

IX. A DREAM OF A FLOWER

I dreamed a wonderful dream of a flower.
On the hill-side green it grew:
But the tongue would fail, nor has brush the power
To paint that flower for you.
It scented the hill-side far and wide,
And scented the fields of corn:
Its odour was sweet through the tall gold wheat,
And sweet on the airs of morn.
And when I woke, I marvelled:
My soul seemed breathing still
A fragrance never lavished
On mortal grove or hill.

And never, till love came down from above
With its rapture and despair,
Did I know what it meant,—nor God's intent
When he sent that dream so fair.

'Twas as if God said, “The flower so sweet
That upon the hill did gleam
Was love; for love is my tenderest flower,
And only blooms in a dream!”
And still I see the blossom,
And still the scent is there;
And sometimes it brings gladness,
But oftener despair.

X CONSUMMATION

Life was full of sweet emotion
When the spring of life was fair:
Bright blue shone the summer ocean;
Songs of throstles charmed the air.
Passing through the fields one day,
Every hedge was rich with may,
Sweetening, silvering, every spray.

Followed fast the summer's glory,
Sheen of lily, flame of rose:
Flower by flower took up the story,
Till the tired eye claimed repose.
Though the summer's touch could thrill
Flower and leaf and wave and hill,
Something sweet was missing still.

Ah, my queen, my sovereign sweetness,
When thy fairy glance I knew,
Life attained its full completeness
And the rose its tenderest hue!
All things waited, pale, undone—
As the stars his heart has won
Watch the sea-line for the sun.

XI. BLACKBERRY PICKING

How happy we were in the deep green wood,
Picking blackberries, you and I!
Round us the heather and tall ferns stood:
Over us shone the sky.
Rich and ripe in the bramble-copse
The tempting blackberries gleamed:
In the dark-green feathery fir-tree tops
The wood-doves cooed and dreamed.

Far away is the deep green wood
And the silent ferny glen
Where happy and hand-in-hand we stood,
Craving for nothing then.
Far away that happy day
Seems in the sunlit past:
Why will never a pleasure stay?
Do only the sad things last?

Yet in your album safely dried
A heather sprig I see:
The delicate purple tints have died,
But it blossoms still for me.
For the joyous past is never dead,—
No, still the blackberries gleam,
And still in the fir-trees overhead
The wood-doves coo and dream!

XII. RED LEAVES AND GREEN LEAVES

What is the whisper of the leaves
Round ruined turrets reddening fast,
Or nestling under cottage-eaves
While autumn winds go sighing past?
“Life is sorrow,” they whisper,
“Life is only a dream:
The sky seemed blue, but it was not true;
The sky is as grey as the stream!”

What is the whisper of the heart
When love and life have ceased to please,
When passion's fairy dreams depart
And cold winds rustle through the trees?
“Life is trouble,” it whispers,
“Trouble and wild despair:
Once love seemed bright, but at morning light
Love's face was no more fair!”

Yet autumn leaves and troubled soul
May hardly read life's tale aright:
Green leaves shall crown the elm-tree bole
And love's joy shall outlive the night.
“Green leaves,” the red leaves whisper,
Fast falling one by one:
When night's stars die, behold the sky
Laughs out to see the sun!

XIII. SISTER ROSES

“O sister,” the white rose said to the red,
“Could only my face be as bright as thine!
I am pale. Could I only be pink instead,
I would lift to the sunlight my beautiful head,
And never be weary, or weep, or pine!”

“O sister,” the red rose said to the white,
“Could only my face be as pale as thine!
I am doomed to be gathered to-night, to-night,—
I shall faint at a ball in the hot gas-light,
While you will be glad in the cool moonshine.”

“Ah! sister,” the white rose sighed to the red,
“You are wrong, you are wrong, and the truth is mine.
Far better than life in the dull flower-bed
It is to be worshipped, and then to fall dead
Where live hearts flutter, and gay lights shine.”

XIV. SPRING AND AUTUMN

“The rose-tree longs for its beautiful rose,
And sighs till its bloom is there:
So life will never attain repose
Till love its exquisite blossom blows
In the beautiful scented air.”
These dream-sweet words from a poet's page
A girl to her mother read;
And the young girl smiled, while the eyes of age
Watched softly the fair gold head.

But the mother's eyes were dim with tears,
While the daughter's eyes were gay;
For the mother thought of the long-past years,
And of dead sweet hopes, and of sighs and fears,
But the young heart dreamed of to-day.

“And why are you sad?” the young voice said,
“For reading of love is sweet:
O bright-eyed Love, with the lips so red—
I would fall at his darling feet!”

Then the mother said: “Dream on, my child,
For love is a beautiful dream;
And truly the earth were a desert wild,
Had never the eyes of sweet love smiled
With their wonderful magic gleam.
Smile on: but leave their thoughts to the old,
For the poet's words that bring
Delight to the young, and a hope untold,
Full oft on the older heart fall cold.
Mine are the grey locks: yours are the gold!
I am autumn: you are the spring!”

XV. SHOREHAM CHURCH

Storm and sunshine, summer glory,
August thunder, wintry snow,
Many a human sweet love-story,
Many a tale of wrath and woe,—
Hours of dark funereal anguish,
Hours when 'neath the summer sun
Even the flowers he loves must languish,
Hours when autumn's peace is won—
All of these the church has known,
Gazing from its tower of stone;
Watching gladness change to grief,
Golden to the faded leaf.

Witness here to something holier
Than our cares and strife, it stands.

Round its turrets time creeps slowlier
Than across the changing lands.
Fields of corn in blood may welter,
Human cities reek with crime,—
Here is blessing, here is shelter
From the sins and shocks of time.
Human race succeeds to race,
Still the tower stands in its place.
“Tremble,” cries the wild wind's tongue;
But it answers, “I am young!”

Many a lightning-flash, half-grazing,
Threatens,—still the tower, upright,
At the morning sun is gazing,
Scatheless, at the stars by night.
Though the soul of man may darken,
Still that grey old tower of stone
To the sunrise-hymn will hearken,
Stand erect, alert, alone,
Facing seasons soft or grim,
Watcher when man's eyes grow dim,
Guardian of man's hopes and fears
Through another thousand years.

XVI. A BALLAD OF WINTER

Said Winter to the Rose:
“When first my cold breath blows,
Your gentle reign is done.”
But said the Rose quite fearless:
“New splendid buds and peerless
Are waiting for the sun.”

Said Winter to my love:
“With fur and muff and glove
Guard thou thyself, or die.”
But said my love: “What folly!
Though flowers be dead, the holly
Is bright against the sky.”

Said Winter unto me:
“Take heed, arise and flee;
Thy strength is spent. Beware!”
Said I: “My love is near me;
Her bright eyes soothe and cheer me;
Lo! June is in the air.”

XVII. THE GOLDEN ISLES

Wonderful golden islands
Of old, so the fable ran,
Lay in the Western Ocean,
Closed from the vision of man
Wonderful cloudless islets,
Set in a stormless sea;
Splendid with banks of coral,
Blossom and fruit and tree.

Wonderful magic islands
Ever before us gleam.
Ever we strive to reach them:
Ever they melt in a dream.
Ever we struggle onward
Over the lonely seas:
Never the islands glitter,
Never their fringe of trees!

So it goes on for ever.
What will the issue be?
Oh, will our vessel never
Traverse this endless sea?—
If we can reach our dreamland,
What will be waiting there?
Rapture of noble passion?
Pallor of white despair?

XVIII. THE GOLDEN CARP

Fishing! fishing! fishing!
The old man sits in a dream;
Wishing! wishing! wishing!
Watching his float on the stream.
Minnows and roach and gudgeon
Lie in heaps by his side;
But he scowls like an old curmudgeon,
He never seems satisfied.

So I passed through the open gateway,
By a copse of larch and fir,
And I asked the old man straightway,
“What are you fishing for, sir?”
And he said, with his features working
And a keen look strange and sharp,
“Do you see in the rushes lurking
That monstrous golden carp?”

And I looked, and I saw the willows,
And I saw the rushing stream—
I marked the blue swift billows,
But I saw no golden gleam.
Ah me! he has fished for ever
(And we all of us do the same)
For a prize that glittered never,
For a carp that never came.

XIX. AUTUMN LEAVES

What do the red leaves whisper?
What do the wild winds say,
When they wail and roar o'er hill and shore
On a stormy autumn day?
“The past was sweet with flowers,
And beautiful was June;
But now on leafless bowers
Looks down the lonely moon.”

What do our sad hearts utter?
What do our spirits cry,
When autumn hues at length suffuse
Vale, hill, and wood, and sky?
“Love's summer heart was tender,
But summer glory goes,
And Love forgets the splendour
He once loved in the rose.”

XX. HARROW HILL

O green old slopes of Harrow Hill
That countless hearts remember,
Those hearts are often near you still;
Bright May can touch December.
O Harrow Hill, green Harrow Hill,
What thousands April-hearted
Have paced your slopes! They love you still,
Though young dreams have departed.

O green old slopes of Harrow Hill,
Which English elms environ,
One deathless shadow haunts you still—
The mighty shade of Byron.
The soul in him to greatness grew
Upon your greensward dreaming;
Though Harrow skies then little knew
The star within them gleaming.

O green old slopes of Harrow Hill
All change and storm outliving,
In hearts of those who love you still
What memories are surviving!
O fair green slopes, so bright with hopes
By countless young hearts cherished,
Old hearts will still love Harrow Hill,
Though countless hopes have perished!

XXI. CHURCH-BELLS

The church-bells rang, and the skylark sang,
On a beautiful morn in May;
And a mother and son walked side by side,
And the boy's gold head was the joy and the pride
Of the mother's heart that day.
They opened the worn old churchyard gate,
And a sunbeam shot from the sky,
And its glory was shed on the boy's gold head
And it tinted the daisies tipped with red
And the buttercup-fields hard by.

Long years passed by, and the boy became
A soldier of fortune bold:
Through the East his fame flashed on like a flame,—
He feathered his nest, and he played his game,
And won renown and gold.

But his hands were stained with sin and crime,
Aye, red with blood some say:
'Neath the Indian sun wild deeds were done,
And a dark and an evil name was won
As the gold hair grew to grey.

The church-bells rang, and a skylark sang,
On a beautiful morn in May;
By a tomb-stone white in the morning light
Stood a lonely man, and the sun was bright
Not on gold hair now but on grey.
His swift thoughts flew o'er the fifty years,
And a sunbeam shot from the air
As he stood by his mother's grave in tears;
And the church-bells whispered in his ears,
“It is never too late for prayer!”

XXII. THE VOICE OF THE RIVER

The river was ever a siren:
It sings to the reed-fringed shore;
It sings to the floating lilies,
And they love it more and more.
When the autumn leaves are golden
It gathers them all to its wave:
It takes, but it never tells them
That its waters are deep as the grave.

And it sings with a siren sweetness
As it eddies to and fro
To fairer things than blossoms,
With its tempting cold dark flow.
And some there are who listen,
And they plunge in the cold deep wave:
One moment the gold locks glisten—
But the moonlight cannot save!

But oh, there are voices sweeter
Than the river's siren tone!
Not even the saddest outcast
In the moonlight stands alone.
For the face of Christ in the moonlight
Shines out over the wave,
And he saith to the saddest of mortals,
“It was you that I came to save.”

XXIII. LIFE'S LAST GIFT

A thousand gifts life brings us,
And some are passing fair:
What perfect flowers it flings us
When June's breath scents the air!
Yes, Life begins with pleasure:
The year begins with glee;
With golden blossom-treasure
And stormless azure sea.

Then how the prospect darkens:—
Hearts fail us, and betray;
Death glides amid our loved ones,—
Steals one by one away:
Life, which began in glory,
Grows sombre towards its close,
For old age chills our pleasures
As autumn chills the rose.

But one thing life will bring us
In autumn days and cold:
October's lips can tell us
What August never told.
Life's latest gift is fairer
In that all past gifts cease;
Life's last gift is supremest,
For life's last gift is peace.

HYMN

[When our bitter foes surround us]

When our bitter foes surround us,
Father, be our stay!
When in chains our sins have bound us
And our follies have discrowned us,
Shine thou on our way!

Starlike through the darkness gleaming,
Father, lift and save!
Strengthen us through youth's wild dreaming,
And when age's wan moon beaming
Slants upon our grave.

When fierce passions would betray us,
Father, safeguard be!
Rose-crowned pleasures would delay us,
Cares and griefs of life would slay us,
Were it not for thee.

Though rich flowers fill all life's garden,
Thou art more than these.
Thou canst soothe and heal and pardon,
Soften the wild hearts that harden,
Bend the stubborn knees.

When our closest friends have failed us,
Thou canst hold us fast.
Friends who in life's morning hailed us
Now as foes have oft assailed us,
But thy love doth last!

Lo! the grave's cold hands are taking
Mother, wife, or child.
What can dull the soul's lone aching,
Save man's maddened heart from breaking
In its anguish wild?

Nought can aid us then but knowing,
Father, that with thee
Our dead dear ones live in glowing
Tender new life, ever flowing
From thy Being's sea.

We, alive, would trust thee ever,
Father, sweet and sure;
Knowing that no death can sever,—
Knowing that the grave parts never,—
In thy love secure.

November, 1881.

HYMN

[Through the foaming white-lipped surges]

Through the foaming white-lipped surges,
Great All-Father, steer us on.
Pain behind us stings and scourges;
In the sky the sun gleams wan.

All our lives are blent with sorrow;
Not one heart doth understand.
When we sleep, we dread the morrow;
Stretch thou forth thy strong right hand!

Songs and flowers and sunsets fail us
And the sweet God hidden in these.
When pain's barbed red points assail us,
Worthless is the singing breeze.

Helpless is a rose to aid us
When our feet grief's wild ways tread;
When despair's fierce spears invade us,
And the hopes of youth fall dead.

Lift thou then, thou great All-Father,
Thy majestic helping hand!
All our weary spirits gather
Towards thine own eternal land.

Not one flower's exceeding splendour
Helps a torn soul on its way:
Thou, than all flowers far more tender,
Change the darkness into day!

O'er cold mount, through moonless hollow,
O'er lone seas, our footsteps tend.
God, thy banner we would follow!
Yet is death the awful end?

Past the peaks where stars wax breathless,
Past all heights man dimly knows,
Lift us: blend with ours thy deathless
Fathomless divine repose.

November, 1881.

O MOON!

I

O moon thou shinest down this London street
With light most sweet:
What doest thou here?
Once did thy clear
Splendour illume a road for Iseult's feet?

II

Shonest thou once glorious o'er the Cornish foam
To lead her home?
Did moonlight fair
Mix with her hair
When through the night with Tristram she did roam?

III

O moon in this, the London of to-day,
With clear soft ray
Thou shinest,—but yet
Dost thou regret
Thy lands and flowers and loves so far away?

IV

For thou wast all unchanged when Jezebel
Bowed 'neath thy spell:
And, long ere she
Shone, white like thee,
Thy light o'er the unpeopled planet fell.

V

Thou hast seen the ages of great endless flowers
In old-world bowers,—
Of ferns now black
Beneath our track;
Thou hast sailed the sailless sea for lone vast hours.

VI

And now thou shinest down this London street
So white and sweet;
And all the din,
Turmoil and sin,
Of our great city thine unmoved eyes meet!

VII

With truth the Greek profound soul saw in thee
The maiden glee
Of Artemis,—
Whose virgin kiss,
Calm, unimpassioned, fell on hill and sea.

VIII

For all our city's travail moves thee not
One breath, one jot!
The city's roar
Shakes thee no more
Than lisp of wind-moved rush in loneliest spot.

IX

What doest thou here O Goddess with those eyes
That thrill the skies?
What doest thou here,
Far from the drear
Lone sea-wastes o'er which thy white sea-bird flies?

X

O pitiless silent lovely soulless moon,
Soft as in June
Thy tender white
Bewitching light
Falls o'er the city,—bright as o'er lagoon!

XI

O heartless Goddess! Are the spirits not dead
Whom thy light led?
And dost thou still
The far skies fill,—
What battle-fields beneath thy gaze have bled!

XII

But thou art changeless,—and as full of joy,
Girl-moon, or boy,
As in the days
When through thy rays
Paris led Helen towards the towers of Troy.

QUESTIONINGS

I.

If God be dead, and life be void
Of hope that lifted us and buoyed,—
If heaven no more in front may shine,—

Chorus of the sons and daughters of men.—
Yet have we love's own wreaths to twine!

If all be passed and over soon,
And soulless gleam the stars and moon,
And heartless the triumphant sun,—

Chorus.
Yet have we toil, till toil is done!

If ne'er the dreams that once so bright
Laughed golden-winged in April light
A heavenly fair reward shall find,—

Chorus.
Yet have we rose-breath on the wind!

If now beside the rush-fringed stream
No naiad's sun-kissed locks may gleam,—
If all the old gods with God be gone,—

Chorus.
Yet Love's firm footstep labours on!

II.

But there came answer through the night,
Loud thundering from the mountain-height
And whispering softly o'er the sea:
“I am, and thou art part of me.”

The great seas caught the sound, and mirth
Rang through the sunlit vales of earth:
O'er heathery hill and gold-flowered lea
God's voice came—“These are part of me.”

And lovers' souls no more were dead,
Nor faded the sweet rose's head:
They all were gladdened with strange glee;
God said to each “Thou art part of me.”

The lonely spirit, whose pathway dim
Seems full of foes who encompass him,
Has caught the sound and feels that he
Is saved, since God said, “Trust in me.”

The sinner feels God's tender glow
Of pity about his dead heart flow:
It flowers, as flowers a barren tree,
For God said, “Son, believe in me.”

O live strong God, make me a part
Of thine unmeasured mountain-heart;
Pure like the sky, strong like the sea,
A spirit of boundless love like thee!

“AND YET!”

Hold thou thy loved one through the summer night;
Soon 'twill be light;
The armies of the stars will own defeat:
The sun will frighten love from out the skies,
With flaming eyes:
But yet the night was sweet!

The velvet lips that rested once on thine,
With touch divine,
Turn elsewhere. Will love pause, though tears entreat?
Through all time, never!—Yet in days gone by
(Yes, one swift sigh!)
Those lips to thee were sweet.

One hour of rapture, and the sun's warm breath;
Then sunless death;
Death for the poppies and the golden wheat:

Death for the larkspur gathering pearls of dew,
And pansies blue:
Yet pansies find life sweet!

Places where love in the old bright days was fair,
And joys that were,
Have one same sombre message to repeat;
The grass will shortly wave above our tomb
With green wild bloom—
And yet the grass is sweet!

The honeysuckle in the hedge last year
Loved to be near
Those lovers whispering on the garden-seat.
Divided are those loving hearts to-day!
Sundered for aye!
Yet was not last year sweet?

The fierce-eyed sun has risen, and we look back
Upon love's track:
Were ever starlit tender moods discreet?
Could ever flower of fragrant passion bear
The morn's keen air?
(Yet passion-flowers are sweet!)

The summer mocks us with its wealth of blue,
And wondrous hue,
And fervent fierce unsympathetic heat;
The blossoms mock us with their wealth of sheen,
Gay 'midst the green—
Yet starlit nights are sweet!

Love and all tender joys will soon be o'er,
And we no more
Shall thrill at the approach of woman's feet;
Quiet we soon in the chill earth shall lie,
My love and I—
And yet my love is sweet!

“HALF-SEEN!”

O girl who turnest down the street,
Over-slow yet over-fleet,
Half-seen,
Thy face was fair and soft and sweet
I ween!

Never through all eternity
Shall I thy full true beauty see:
Thou art lost
For ever now alas! to me,
Crowd-tost.

It is so strange and sad to think
That just one sudden broken link
Snaps all.
Our dreams are light-beams. Through a chink
They crawl:

Then something passes and the light
Is quenched, and all again is night.
So now
Thou art gone, O clear of gaze and white
Of brow!

Thou art gone.—Yet wholly felt, half seen,
A haunting grace was in thy mien
And air;
And soft as Helen's might have been
Thy hair.

Even the colour of thine eyes
I ne'er shall know, more than of skies
That beam
Next year. In vain e'en fancy tries
To dream!

For fancy dreams of many things—
Of bird that flies, and bird that sings
I'the snare;
But finds the bird with swiftest wings
Most fair.

We love the thing we cannot gain;
And most of all what brings us pain
We prize.
I love, because I love in vain,
Thine eyes.

In unseen bower, on unknown day,
Thine eyes will dream (be it brown or grey,
Thy glance!)—
And what Love wins, he'll cast away
Perchance.

And I, who could have loved thee well,
Shall never know what thing befell,—
Nor see
Thy moment's heaven, thy lifelong hell
To be.

Only the stars that watch thy sleep
Will know if thou dost moan or weep,
Or where
Thou singest, or dost sink in deep
Despair.

What thou art, I shall never know.—
One moment's pang. Then let it go,
The pain!
This dream-born flower can never blow
Again.

SUMMER'S DREAM

The summer flees away, and who shall find or follow
Her footstep, or discern the green-browed hollow
Wherein fair summer seeks to rest,
With flowers upon her breast?

The summer flies.—Perchance her restless heart grows weary;
Perchance she finds earth's love-tales waxing dreary;
Perchance she tires of praise, and longs
To escape men's lutes and songs.

In forests weird and strange, she would be followed after
By Jove's deep voice or swift Apollo's laughter;
And would be gathered, like a rose,
Into sublime repose.

She would be seized from heaven, and in the flashing splendour
Of the god's white arms wrapt, in sacred tender
Ineffable supreme embrace,
And know Love face to face.

In the dim forest-deep, among soft blossoms sleeping,
She dreams the golden-bowed keen god comes leaping
Along the pink-flowered woodland ways,
Upon his brows the bays.

She dreams the white-browed god, her fiery-hearted lover,
Comes, swiftly pressing through the tangled cover,
And that his burning kiss falls light
Upon her bosom white.

But when she wakes, behold! the frost has touched the larches:
She gazes now no more through leafy arches.
The wind has changed. 'Tis keen and chill.
Grey is the emerald hill.

Apollo's harp is hushed. Lo! summer was but dreaming:
Cold in the sky the unroyal sun is gleaming.
Closed now are August's golden gates:
Hard by November waits.

Ah! woman too can dream. She dreams of Love for ever.
Does Love fulfil one sweet old promise? Never!
Love stoops from heaven one single day—
Then wings, and he's away!

The maiden dreams of Love. As Summer sought Apollo,
The maiden would find deep-eyed Love and follow:
Till the eyes of very Time grow dim,
The girl would follow him.

But will he wait for her? Will Love delay his flying?
Never! not for ten thousand wild hearts sighing.
Love kisses once, and then he goes
To seek an unkissed rose.

So vanish all the dreams! So woman's heart is broken!
She moans, “Would soft-voiced Love had never spoken!
Would Love had never seemed so fair—
For Love's name is Despair.”

TWO SONNETS

I.
REPRESENTATIVE SOUNDS

A young girl's perfect ringing silvery laugh;
The strange slow sullen plunge of waves that break;
The ripple of leafage which the June winds shake;
The lisp of rivers which the breezes quaff;
The flapping of the flag around its staff;
The subtle hissing of the sinuous snake;
The sighing of reeds upon the mountain-lake;
The salmon's fierce splash, bleeding from the gaff;—
The cheer of legions thundering through the breach;
The songs of children, and their thoughtless glee;
A woman's heartfelt moan of dull despair;
The strong man's deep groan when the surgeons reach
The rankling bullet; crash of falling tree;
The light soft sound of heavy back-flung hair.

II.
REPRESENTATIVE COLOURS

The sunlight glinting on a space of bright
Green grass within a wood; the blue-green leaves
Of the sea-poppy; the rich amber sheaves;
The sea—grey-blue, or brown, or angry white,
Or Southern blue against broad Southern light;
A woman's hair—blue-black, or golden-brown;
The sudden flash of jewels in a crown;
The depth of purple-black vast starless night;—
The subtle blending in a woman's eyes
Of green and brown; a soldier's scarlet coat;
A woman's white form,—nobly, fully, bare,
Save for the shadow of chin upon the throat
Shadeless; the red sun seen through fog-bound skies;
The carmine sea-weed that green waves' lips tear.

THE LAST FAREWELL

A long farewell and strange, a deep farewell, I send thee,
The last farewell of all—
Not death's farewell, but life's.—May all life's joys attend thee
Till life's last red leaf fall!

All pleasures high be thine, all flowers bloom round about thee,
All bright suns shine for thee!
The sun cannot forsake, spring cannot smile without thee;
All things thou swayest but me.

Mine heart thou swayest no more. A nobler brave heart finds me,
A stronger soul than thine.
New chains of love are woven. A new love holds and binds me,
And makes its sweetness mine.

For years and years and years thy wondrous beauty held me,
A captive at thy feet:
To song and love and toil thy grey clear eyes impelled me,
And love of thee was sweet.

But thou,—thou hadst not heart to meet supreme devotion
With love as pure and strong!
The waves of love and praise fell back in their own ocean;
No soft voice answered song.

I asked for trust,—I sought for perfect truth,—I pleaded
For tender love and faith:
My eager words of love rose answerless, unheeded;
Hear now what strong love saith.

“Farewell! farewell! farewell!—My strangest saddest greeting,
My last, I send to thee:
Just the last silver sound of singing waves retreating,
The last voice of our sea.

“The last sound of the breeze amid our ferns and heather
And many a mountain-pine;
The last blue gleam of old sweet passionate August weather,
The last song's sad last line.

“The last voice of my youth.—My manhood turns not hither,
It turns away from thee:
It turns with tenderest love and tenderest yearning whither
Thou canst not follow me.

“It turns towards other eyes—eyes stedfaster and sweeter,
Eyes yet more bright than thine;
Towards love whose soul is sure, and whose young feet are fleeter
To watch and follow mine.

“So this last time in words I turn towards the old palace
Of youth and love and song;
Turn this last time to thee whom all my youth loved, Alice
(And love's last look is long!)

“Farewell! farewell! farewell!—Yet forceless for estranging
Is the lute-voice of Art:
The last and sad farewell, eternal and unchanging,
Rings from the altered heart.”

March 5, 1885.

ON THE DEATH OF DR. CUMMING

The mighty stars pursue their course
And the waves break with ordered force,
Heedless of man;
All things flow outward from their source,
As they began.

One prophet more whose rash weak thought
Set law and time and force at nought
Has passed away:
And still the green bright spring is brought
From winter grey.

The primrose and the crocus bold
Still fill with pale or with deep gold
The grass of spring:
Still the first sure thrush as of old
Starts up to sing.

The cowslips yellow and violets blue
Drape fields and banks in diverse hue;
Nought fails us yet;
Each spring's soft head hath glory new
For coronet.

As surely as summer comes, the rose
In all its old rich grandeur blows,
And gardens shine,
And the fierce tiger-lily glows;
Then comes the vine.

The prophet who predicted all
Should end so soon, himself must fall:
The world swings on.
Bright months flash by, dull seasons crawl,
Till all are gone.

But when the fresh clear mornings break
On sea or shore or mountain-lake
The same sun's might
Bids still the same sweet flowers awake
And bathe in light.

The green immense smooth-curling seas
Shake lions' manes before the breeze
And no man stays
The vast advancing files of these:
They go their ways.

The rash-tongued seer himself is dead;
But no rose blooms to-day less red:
No bell less blue.
More light upon man's path is shed
Than his thought knew.

He passes: and the stars awake,
And not one lessens for his sake
Its wonted fire;
Still hearts will bound, and hearts will break,
At Love's desire!

Will there be one hour less of bloom,
Because he passes to his doom
And leaves love here?
Man's is the light,—his is the gloom,
His is the fear.

If there be judgment, 'tis for him
Within the death-land dark and dim:
This world is bright;
Aye, brighter now that prophet grim
Is lost in night.

The birds may sing, the sun may shine,
The blue grapes ripen on the vine,
The hill-tops gleam,
The wind may whisper to the pine
Its latest dream:

The butterfly may love the rose,
The red bee in the hive repose
Beside his queen,
Without one fear lest God disclose
Hell's sudden sheen.

The emerald flies may buzz and wheel,
The lizard through the leaves may steal
With sides that flash;
The Last Day's thunder will not peal
With sudden crash.

The fisher standing by the stream
May watch the silver salmon gleam
Above the weir;
God will not trumpet through his dream
“The end draws near!”

The girl may pluck forget-me-not,—
Not dreading lest the stream turn hot,
The flowers turn white,
As God in anger sears the spot
With lightning-light.

The youth may watch his true love's eyes,
Without a fear lest horror rise
Therein and dread
At sight of hell's fierce underskies
Of angry red.

The world awakes; the prophet sleeps.
With laughter in its eyes it leaps
Towards newer things:
And as its fruited corn it reaps,
Its great heart sings!

Not yet its end is.—Many a day
Shall the brave world spin on its way
Through joy and dole:
Through dawns of gold and eves of grey
Its wheels shall roll.

While woman breathes, the world-heart glows
Most young and fervent; while the rose
Each year is red,
The world's tired spirit may repose,
But is not dead!

July, 1881.

HARROW v. ETON AT LORD'S

1881

Just twenty years ago the same shouts sounded.
With boyish eager eyes I watched the field:
Watched the red ball that o'er the live hedge bounded;
Joined in the merry cries that rang and pealed.

To-day with sense of speechless desolation
Each dead year thrills me from its ghostly throne:
Years that began with songs and exultation,
Then left me in the starless dark, alone.

How strange to think that these boy-hearts awaking
To life to-day, are ignorant indeed!
Yet that on each love's pitiless morning breaking
Will change the hearts that sing to hearts that bleed.

No spirit shall shun the love-doom waiting ready,
Ready to seize and shape to newer things.
All shall be whirled around Fate's frothing eddy,
Helpless as are i'the stream a moth's white wings.

Ye know so little of what shall surely follow:
Your clear gaze centres on the cricket-green.
You Venus touches not, nor great Apollo;
Nought is to you the golden-girdled queen.

Nought are her white arms eager for embraces—
Eager as ever, though her shrines may fall.
She waits. She peers into the young fresh faces.
She wonders which heart first will heed her call.

She wonders who will chant afresh her praises,
Gathering wild garlands from the wind-swept wold,
Crowning her now with fern or pink-tipped daisies;
For silent are the lips which sang of old.

Nought is she to you.—Yet than rivers clearer
Shall ring some voice whose music waits afar.
Daily Fate brings the destined moment nearer,
As evening brings the sky its certain star.

Sweeter one day shall sound a girl's soft laughter
Than laugh of comrade brave, or trusty friend.
Theirs is one hour: but hers is the hereafter.
They triumph now: she triumphs till the end.

Touching her hand, ye shall forget to covet
The whitest flower that in earth's garden grows:
Hearing her voice, ye shall for ever love it:
Touching her lips, ye shall forget the rose.

Far sweeter things there are than ye are dreaming
In this strange world where love is linked to pain;
Eyes with a lovelier light than summer's gleaming.—
We mortals vanish. But the stars remain.

The stars of love for ever shine resplendent:
They lighted Byron on his lonely way.
They still abide, in love's train still attendant,
And they shall light you. Ye shall have your day.

VENUS AND THE EVANGELISTS

Gathered upon the beach one day I saw
A group of preachers.—They had made a square
With four green common benches, and they stood
Within the square—just ordinary men,
Shopkeepers, tradesmen, grocers, what you will.
They stood within their green-bench-guarded square,
With the wide grey indifferent sea behind
And preached their rendering of the word of God.
And with them stood some stumpy servant-maids,
Sallow, ill-dressed, and awkward; and they sang
With help of these their hardly sweet-toned hymns.
And then along the beach there came a form
Slender and graceful, robed in quiet black,
A woman,—one it may be of the band
Whom some call “gay,” and some “unfortunate.”
She listened to the hymn, and soon received
A hymn-book from a stumpy servant-maid,
Red-cheeked, red-handed, and red-ribboned too.

She stood there, leaning on the green top-bar
Of one of the four benches, just outside
The hollow angel-guarded preachers' square.
—A myriad thoughts flew through me as I watched.
“Lo! here is Venus, just outside the heaven
Of these the Galilean folk,” I thought;
“And yet her grace of mien and attitude
Hath surely something in itself of heaven.”
She leaned against the bench, and every limb
Took of itself the right most fitting pose;
She seemed a sudden message sent from Greece,
And round her the weird gospel-music rang,
And that top-bar of the dividing bench
On which she leant seemed like God's judgment-bar,
Or like a gulf between the righteous fixed
And stately Venus on the other side,
And all the ages' strife seemed symbolized
By those gaunt preachers safe within the square,
They and their women-followers, and the slight
Poor fair sad woman in her black silk dress
And white straw hat with flowers of lavender
Who leant with such unconscious grace of form
Against the bench,—against it, but outside.

“And yet,” I thought, “is God within that square,

Along with those gaunt-eyed repulsive men
And sallow stumpy women, or is he
Perhaps outside the bench-square sometimes too,—
Just as the grey-waved calm far-stretching waste
Of water yonder hath but little heed
Of these four benches? is not God outside
As well as inside—with his grey-waved sea
And this grey-eyed poor woman?
Surely, yes!”

ISOLINA

Lines Written on again Reading an old Romance

O Isolina, loved in boyish fashion,
Loved when the heart was nobly pure and free,
Again I read thy tale of love and passion,
Again forget the world and gaze on thee.

Romance beyond romance is in thy story:
I read the wild tale thirty years ago—
Yet still I see the sunlight's ceaseless glory
Poured over plains and hills of Mexico.

And still, though thirty years have done their tragic
Grim work on heart and weary brain of mine,
Thy dark-fringed eyes retain their glow, their magic,
And mine grow younger as they gaze in thine.

The boy grew strong for thee, and manhood's yearning
Throbbed through his heart and life became a dream:
The man to-day, on his own steps returning,
Regains his boyhood as thy dark eyes gleam.

Thou filledst boyhood with wild thirst and hunger
Of ardent passion, fiery, unexpressed:
Thou makest manhood thirty long years younger,
And bringest somewhat of repose and rest.

Thou wast my earliest love-queen, even far earlier
Than she who swayed my heart by Northern seas;
Thou smiling under skies more blue and pearlier,
And wandering 'mid strange tropic flowers and trees.

When life flowed on, when the boy's heart grew older,
Was any riper passion half so wild?
As life progresses, our tired hearts turn colder:
The boy loves best, while still in part a child.

So, queen of high romance, take this song smiling
At the old tale—yet smiling through its tears.
How few real loves, for all their soft beguiling,
Have held a poet's heart for thirty years!

Not even the waves round English white cliffs dancing
Allure me, like that sunlit land of thine:
The land of silvery speech, and eyes swift-glancing,
And limbs whose every movement seems divine.

O dream-wrought flower which I shall never gather,
Flower blossoming sweetly in those sunlit wilds,
Take this, song's tribute,—nay, receive thou rather
The man's love, even as thou hadst the child's!

101

TO THE CZAR

[_]

This poem was written in 1890, with the most passionate earnestness. I, therefore, retain it. But, at the same time, i think it well to say that I should not to-day write it, or fully endorse all the sentiments it contains. February, 1902. G. B.

103

O thou who rulest by the might of legions,
Lord of the snow-robed plains, the ice-bound sea,
Hear thou man's word in far-off sunnier regions
Spoken, the thought of thousands who are free.

Deem'st thou thy millions trampled down for ages
Will never rise in multitudinous scorn?
God clothes thee in darkness, but no God engages
That darkness shall not change to fiery morn.

Blood cries for blood, and slaughter shrieks for slaughter;
Man's dagger flashes back thy keen sword's light:
Son seeks for sire, and father seeks for daughter;
They win nor smile nor answer from the night.

Lo!—with an Emperor's arms to seize and pinion—
A woman dies beneath the ensanguined rod:
Her cry, though stifled, rings through thy dominion,—
Aye! past thy sky's cold starlight, up to God.

104

Not only up to God,—man's soul has shivered
With horror, hearing this accurséd thing:
A woman's cry, as 'neath the lash she quivered
King-smitten, becomes the death-knell of a king.

Her cry is cry of triumph for the nations,
For worn-out dynasties the trump of doom.
It shall be heard by hearts of generations;
Our women hear it from the Northland's gloom.

Here, where our swordless task is but to listen
Till Liberty speaks fully from her throne,
'Tis well to call to mind, while Spring's eyes glisten,
That still in one land Winter holds its own;

To call to mind that one, well born and cherished
By many a friend ere this grim deed was done,
At the flail's hundredth blood-stroke sank and perished
Where Russia's dim vaults still defy the sun.

And thou, whom darkness' sable wide wings sheltering
Still shield from sword-thrust of the avenging light,
Think'st thou that corpses in thy blind gaols weltering
Can stain the flags, yet sully not the night?

105

Construct thy walls of sound-proof stern ingredients!—
Erect thy prisons in thy deserts lone!—
Blood oozes out, for all thy royal expedients,
And trickles Westward from thine hells of stone.

The shrieks of thousands doubtless have been stifled:
Thine iron-barred dungeons drip with tongueless gore:
While gold-crowned dynasties have mocked or trifled,
Man's blood has rippled on a voiceless shore.

That strange Siberian snow-path, full of terror,
Along whose dismal track the doomed feet go—
Thousands, through royal crime or royal error,
Have crimsoned with their blood the silent snow.

Their suffering all seems wasted—wasted wholly
Their agelong fierce defiance of the Czars:
Still o'er that path the hapless troop winds slowly,
And still the snow turns red beneath the stars.

A hundred years have passed since, skyward flaming,
The black French fortress owned man's conquest wrought;
Confessed its hellish sins, its crimes past naming,—
Born of kings' fancies, perished at man's thought.

106

How many years will slowlier pass—not, surely,
Another century—ere, gaunt wall by wall,
Will flame to heaven the fort that holds securely
Liberty bound—the prison of Peter-Paul?

Or—better still—if thou, whose life is terror
To thine own self, wouldst ere that stormy hour
Fling wide the gates thy fathers closed in error
And mix with reason's dreams thy dreams of power!

What is thy life but anguish now?—immuring
Thyself behind Gatschina's massy gates,
'Spite of ten thousand bribeless bolts securing,
Thou shiverest if one rusty hinge but grates.

Chief of a hundred millions, king-commander
Of armies cumbering space with lance and plume,
Thou art thyself imprisoned, Alexander,—
Lord of the earth, yet penned within a room!

The humblest child within thy vast dominions,
Watching the free-winged swallow on the breeze
Or the glad butterfly's untrammelled pinions,
Is happier than the lord of lands and seas.

107

The serf within his cottage calmly slumbers;
He knows that, when he wakes, all will be well:
But thou, whose guards are unimagined numbers,
Art at the mercy of one fuse from hell.

Summer brings nought of change; in every season
Sedition's threats allow thee no repose;—
May's flower-sweet air is rank with deadliest treason;
Danger may lurk within the scented rose:

The morning sun may guide the assassin's dagger;
Aim may be trustier underneath the moon;
Thou, watching the clear skies, mayest backward stagger
Struck dead beneath the stars of fragrant June!

Sole despot-ruler of a mighty nation,
Yet art thou but the shadow of a king:
Thou startest at a green leaf's palpitation,
As the earth quakes at thy black eagle's wing.

Lifting the gold cup to thy lips thou tremblest:
Pause—what if subtlest poison should be there?
In face of friends and foemen thou dissemblest;
Long terror changed to white thine Empress' hair.

108

Within the holiest church the bomb exploding,
With splinters full of fiery tongues may cry,
“Remember prisoners in damp cells corroding;
Remember Bernstein choked to death—and die!”

The knife may flash forth from the embroidered curtain:
Thou, shuddering as thou see'st the cold steel shine,
Mayest hear a voice that thunders, “Czar, be certain
That Zotoff's bloodless veins must drink at thine!”

Within the night pale countless ghosts surround thee:
“Why tarry thus on earth?” their tongues exclaim;
“Already as lord of hell our hands have crowned thee,
Czar of the dungeons lit by ceaseless flame.

“Priest of the torments in the realms infernal,
Prince of the unmeasured leagues of sunless gloom,
Pass thou from earth—thine empire is eternal
Within the shades, thou Cæsar of the tomb!”

109

POETRY AND SCIENCE

Not all the suns that throng the soundless spaces
Are worth the radiance of one loving heart:
The least and humblest of all human faces
Hath nobler import in the eyes of Art.

Gaze through your glass till ye be stricken with blindness!
Peer at the heavens whose bright star-clusters gleam!
One human heart that glows with loving-kindness
Outshines the stars, and makes your heavens a dream.

Fair Science trumpets her own praise so loudly
She fails to catch creation's under-tune;
But listening Art, who walks the earth less proudly,
Can hear—while Science quarries in the moon.

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What is it worth to know the leagues that sever
Our green-grassed earth from Sirius or from Mars?
The skies are lampless wastes, if we for ever
Must cease to tell our fortunes by the stars!

If darkness' doors were sundered, and we knew them,
Gold star by star deploying from the deep,—
If we could muster and rank by rank review them,
Would it be worth one gift of white-armed Sleep?

Love ruled the past, and love will rule the ages
Unseen, unknown, the summers yet to be:
In spite of Science' wand the storm-wind rages,
But Venus' touch wrought magic on the sea.

We need not Science' barge, slow-sailed and lumbering,
To bear us o'er the ocean of the past;
It is enough to know that earth, long slumbering,
At love's touch woke to passionate life at last.

I'd surely choose, had I the choice, to follow,
When morning thrills the dazzled air with pride,
Along heaven's heights the footsteps of Apollo
Rather than Proctor's, though his path be wide.

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Of Grimm and Andersen no heart could weary;
We turned to another when each tale was done:
But now we yawn, and feel that earth grows dreary,
While Norman Lockyer lectures on the sun.

Give me the days of faith, and not of Science!
Give me the days of faith in unseen things!
The days of self-doubt, not of self-reliance:
Days when the rainbow flashed from fairy wings.

Knowledge hath little worth, if dreams are going.
Let me watch in the stream the Naiad's hair;
Or wander forth when balmy winds are blowing
Through sunlit groves, and find sweet Daphne there.

To know is well, but not to know is better.
'Tis ignorance that makes the child sublime.
To learn new facts adds fetter unto fetter
For all the already weary sons of time.

We count the stars,—yet dream not what we are losing,
Aye, losing all of us, the whole wise race,
In that no more among the reed-beds musing
Shall we see Pan's half-human wrinkled face.

112

OLD LETTERS

I.

Letters mixed in strangest wild communion—
Was there ever such a wondrous heap?
There they lie, diverse, in seeming union:
Some in faded brown ink, some in deep.

Such a strange assortment! There, collected
Through the ups and downs of twenty years,
See them lying helpless,—disconnected
From the old joys that filled them and the fears.

Disconnected are they now for ever
From the hopes and fears of early days.
They will speak their ancient language never.
Can November sing one song of May's?

113

Can the winter with the spring hold parley?
Can the wild red poppies as they gleam,
Flashing through the wheat and tufted barley,
Ever of the frozen furrows dream?

No: to-day must face to-day's own troubles.
Of the old sorrows, some have past away:
Hopes have melted into air like bubbles;
Golden dreams have darkened into grey.

Ah! the twenty years, the myriad letters—
Some that pierced my very soul with pain:
Some that bound my heart in loving fetters
(Would that we could wear those bonds again!)

—Some from India, yet with memories in them
Of the dear old Isis' grassy banks!
If I once unfasten and begin them,
Ghostly thoughts will rise in endless ranks;

Thoughts of Oxford, of young days sun-lighted,
Of the swift boats racing past the shore;
Thoughts of early vows of friendship plighted:
Sounds will echo as of wave and oar.

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If I open—Shall I open any?
Dreams are sometimes very sweet indeed,
Yet they weaken, when too sweet, too many;
Undermine the present strength we need.

II.

Letters some there are in boyish seasons
Written, when the unfeverish hours were fair;
Long ere passion's tenderness and treasons
Filled the skies of life with burning air.

Letters written in the days of rapture,
Days of merry gladness all unfeigned;
Days when very heaven it was to capture
Perch or roach, or whiting rosy-stained.

Days when butterflies before us flaming
Charmed us as with flash of fairy light,
Robed in magic hues past mortal naming,
Lustrous yellow, crimson, snowiest white.

Letters some there are that breathe of passion.
How their value lessens with the years!
Now we estimate in sober fashion
Sighs and kisses, burning words and tears.

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Passion doubtless had its truths to teach us:
Sent from heaven, it teaches every one.
Passion dies—we think no light can reach us—
Yet God overtakes us with the sun.

Stars and sun again for us are shining;
All our sorrow darkens not the sea:
“Mortal,” God saith, “while thou wast repining,
See what treasures I kept back for thee!

“While thou dreamedst that the world was over,
Starlight, sunlight, storm and cloud and rain,
Golden waving corn and crimson clover,
All these came again and yet again.

“Though thy sullen vision thou wast sealing,
On the hedges miles of may were white:
Through the silent darkness slowly stealing
Came the moon, and silvered all the night.

“Let thy dream of passion fade behind thee
Like the tossing vapours seaward blown!
Let my comfort breathed through nature find thee:
While God liveth, thou art not alone.”

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III.

Strange to think that all these hearts' outpouring
Will so soon be ashes...if I burn!
Thoughts that sought the blue sky wild and soaring:
Love that made the answering spirit yearn.

If I cast old letters in the ocean,
Trust them to the boundless waves to keep,
Will the waters thrill to man's emotion?
Can I trust my treasures to the deep?

If I fling them forth amid the clover
Or the fields where countless daisies grow,
Will the skylark care to con them over?
Will the clouded yellow care to know?

Here are letters full of love and tender,
Love that made life's morning like a dream—
Shall I cast them 'mid the golden splendour
Of the buttercups beside the stream?

Oft I think that sacred letters breathing
Love of mother, sweetheart, trusty friend,
Never ought to feel the hot flames wreathing
Round them, ought to find a nobler end.

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Then I take the letters and I tear them
Sadly, gently, tearfully maybe,
And I let the loving west wind bear them,
Little white-sailed fragments, out to sea!

Or I cast them on the eddying river,
Watch them floating downward, one by one.
Some to starlight, trusting, I deliver:
Some I give to morning and the sun.

But I never can destroy quite tearless
What has cost the writers love and pain.
Letters of expostulation fearless,
Through my soul your accents ring again!

Letters some of love most sweet and simple
(These I'll keep for ever, close to me!)—
Not a fragment torn of these shall dimple
Softest bosom of the sunniest sea.

Even the buttercups shall never carry
Fragments to their sister-flowers to read:
Not one word of these shall ever tarry,
Adding sweetness to the scented mead.

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While I tear—and sometimes not with sorrow—
Here a poet's, there a thinker's words,
These shall dwell with me for many a morrow,
Sweet and simple as the notes of birds.

Lo, this canon to the waves I scatter!
Burn this maundering prelate in his pride!
Rend this preacher's homily—small matter!
Love is far too rare to fling aside.

IV.

But alas! some writers' souls have floated
Farther than the letter-fragments sail.
Noble spirits, faithful and devoted,
Where are ye? Man's wondering thought turns pale.

Farther than the stars that watch me read them
Have the writers of some letters sped:
Angel hearts, it may be, love and heed them,
But for us they rank among the dead.

Past the goals of mortal joy and anguish,
Past our winters of the barren bough,
Hours of storm or summer days that languish,
Past all change of seasons are they now.

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Some whose power had vanished of discerning
God behind his veil of purple air,
God behind his sunset-raiment burning,
God beyond the flowers he makes so fair,—

These have travelled into viewless regions:
Now, perhaps, God face to face they see,
Find the deathland holds its living legions,
Find how crowded is eternity.

Much they suffered, these, while life enchained them.
God, perhaps, whom they disdained to own,
Generous more than they, has not disdained them,
Given an audience unto each alone.

Has not God in whom their hearts found pleasure,
Though they called him by another name,
Said to each with love no words may measure,
“Heaven was very lonely till you came!”

As I read their loving simple letters
Oft I feel that though their creed was grim
They have grown to-day beyond its fetters,
Each has found God looking out for him.

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Each has found that if the soul beseech him
Truly, in the tongue of any land,
Ever will its urgent crying reach him,
Ever will he stoop and understand.

V.

But—a sadder thought—some souls have wandered,
Though among the living yet they be,
Farther than the letter-fragments squandered
On the billows roaring in from sea.

Farther than the dead souls (love can perish
Never, though the loving hearts be dumb)—
Souls whom once our own souls loved to cherish,
Whom we think of when the roses bloom:

Whom we think of when the roses lavish
Scented flying petals on the gale:
Think of when the autumn wild winds ravish
Crimson leaves that down the eddies sail.

Farther than all thought or recollection
Even—for their minds have grown apart:
Death can bring deep sorrow and dejection,
But it never quite dismays the heart.

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This dismays—that some are near us living,
Close beside our threshold it may be,
Whom we loved with all our power of giving,
Yet between us rolls a bridgeless sea!

Friends whose souls from ours the swift years sever,
Friends whose love is lost in starless gloom,
These indeed are lost to us for ever,
Buried deeplier than in any tomb.

122

SONNET TO ERNEST BIRCH

O thou who through high Music's golden gate
Hast right of entrance to the land divine
Wherein the poets' crowns and sceptres shine,
Thy coming we, Song's warders, celebrate.
Thou art a poet-soul beyond debate:—
Thy music thunders out like Milton's line:
Thou canst describe in music and design;
Thy music sighs forth love, or volleys hate.

Poems are silent till thou layest thine hand
Upon their chords. Lo! then the poems speak,
And utter all their souls in music rare.—
Thou dost interpret poets to their land,
Adding the music-charm they vainly seek,—
Making the fairest poem yet more fair.

Feb. 23, 1887.

123

TO SEPTEMBER

I love the soft September days.—
When summer's ardent life is done,
I love to see the red leaves fall
And know that death is lord of all;
Lord of the green-grassed flowery ways,
Lord even of the sun.

As Wordsworth loved and worshipped May,
I love the calm autumnal time.
The gift most needed at the close
Of this sad century is repose:
Rapture was for a former day
And for another's rhyme.

As bright May cheers the buoyant soul
And fills the glad with gladder thought,
So thou, September, cheer'st my heart;
For in this world all joys depart,
And endless effort wins no goal
And labour counts for nought.

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I love thee, pale September, well.
The summer flaunted flower on flower
And filled the hedges with its bloom,
But thou, September, bringest gloom,
And gloom is heaven and light is hell
In this the world's dark hour.

When Wordsworth sang his song to May,
The world had hardly learnt to doubt—
God smiled from heaven: he loved us all:
Without his will no leaf could fall:
But in this later darker day
Despair has found us out.

We realise that we may be,
We human sufferers, quite alone:
Created by no conscious will,
Doomed to live on and suffer still,
Without a heavenly eye to see
Or ear to hear us groan.

We realise that star on star
May mock us from the depths of space,
But that in star or moon or sun
There may be none to aid us, none:

125

In regions near or regions far
No voice, no human face.

We deem perhaps that human life
Alone in our star buds and flowers,
Here having been evolved alone:
No whispers on the night-winds blown
Bring messages of love or strife
From other worlds than ours.

But Wordsworth in that happier day
Knew not that ere his century's close
Dark doubt so deadly would arise.
He watched the heavens with tranquil eyes,
And sang his loving song to May
And to the summer's rose.

Ah! dark September suits us best.
It meets our humour to behold
The bright hues fade on flower and leaf:
God knows we are most at home with grief,
And in despair are most at rest!
We and the age are old.

126

So, sad September, I love thee:
The lessening sunshine on the rills,
The winds that toss the shuddering leaves,
The wind-swept withered sedge that grieves,
The chillier sunlight on the sea
And on the darkening hills.

127

AN EASTERN YEARNING

Woman is part of Nature. She was born
From the bright sea-wave. She and flowers are one.
Can your cold Western culture e'er adorn
Her who is taught by sea-waves and the sun?

Oh, God deliver me from Western dreams!
Give me warm moonlight on an Arab tent:
Within, the touch that thrills, the glance that gleams;
Soft bosom o'er me through the darkness bent.

Then am I saved and crowned,—for bliss is there,
And perfect bliss is heaven. Whate'er men say,
I hold that God set stars within the air
That mouth to mouth might find a readier way!

Is this ignoble? More than sky or flower
To love the glory of a woman's grace:
To win eternal rapture in an hour,
Life at her lips, and heaven in her embrace?

128

Ever to find fresh shapely wonders shown
(And beauty has unmeasured power to bless!)—
Ever to come on some grand curve unknown,
Some line of more than mortal loveliness?

To feel—as ever it is deepliest felt
At midmost thrilling of the close warm kiss—
The sense of form throughout one's being melt,
The sculptor's mingled with the lover's bliss?

I hold that God made flowers that man might know
That woman's beauty is a lovelier joy.
Breathe wisdom on the petals—Down they go!
Woman becomes an intellectual toy.

Here in the West sweet womanhood is dead.
Woman is master: mankind is the slave.
Awestruck, the trembling spouse draws near her bed
And claims the rights her condescension gave.

But she is master, ruler of the West:
The days of fragrant love have all gone by.
Ah me, the olden days were far the best!
There were more stars I think, then, in the sky.

129

There was more tenderness in woman's heart,
Less curséd Greek and Hebrew in her brain!
Then all she knew (enough to know) of Art
Was just the art man's passionate love to gain.

130

THIS TIME LAST YEAR

Lines written in Memory of Philip Bourke Marston

This time last year, the sun and stars and sea,
Which thou seeing not didst love, saw and loved thee;
The world thou couldst not see beheld thee, friend:

We saw the sightless eyes that saw no light,—
To whom bright midday was eternal night,
And moonlit clear skies moonless to the end.

All things that heard thy song, rejoiced to hear;
Thy singing made our dreary world less drear;
Thou through thy darkness led'st us to the light:

And yet that light thou sawest not. Even the sea
That spake so many a wondrous word to thee
Was never blue, the white rose was not white,

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The storm-cloud was not dark, the sky not fair,
Nor golden-bright the flame-filled sunset air
For thee, save only through thy sightless dream:

Thou sawest not aught. Yet all things saw thee, friend;
The stars and blossoms loved thee to the end;
The blue sea loved thee, and the silver stream.

And now, perchance—we know not—it may be—
Thou dost behold in turn our poor blind sea
That fails to apprehend thee where thou art:

'Tis we who are blind to-day,—yes, every one.
Blind are our stars, our moonbeams, and our sun;
Blind are our daisies with the golden heart.

We cannot see thee. We are left in turn
With loving souls and sightless eyes that yearn
Towards that far land wherein thy foot has trod;

Not yet can we behold what thou hast seen;
Thou see'st us, it may be; perhaps dost lean
Above our struggles like a helpful god.

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We know not. All is darkness where thou art.
And yet, O poet with the true deep heart,
Darkness to us may be strange light to thee;

Thou who wast blind on earth mayest now behold
Heaven's sky from east to west aflame with gold,
Immortal morning on a deathless sea.

July 23, 1887.

133

FRUITLESS CREATION

[_]

I retain this poem, written in or about 1890, as the very fact of its being based on so glaring and serious a mistake may perhaps render it of some value,—when the mistake is recognised and acknowledged.

The mistake is, of course, that into which Tolstoy and so many earnest modern thinkers bave plunged headlong; the error of regarding physical love as in its essence degrading. It is the most dangerous error imaginable, leading straight back to all ascetic and monkish aberration, and involving the desecration of love and woman.

If the “Woman” who speaks in the poem had confined herself to the advocacy of pure and exalted physical passion, she would have been wholly right, and might justly have claimed the support of the God who created those miracles of noble and beneficent design, the human love-organs.

But, reacting against such pernicious heresies as those of Tolstoy, she confuses true with base passion, places herself in a seeming opposition to the God of love and nature, who is in fact so tenderly and lovingly on her side,—and thus puts herself wholly in the wrong.

It seems necessary to-day to say this much in explanation of the poem.

February, 1902. G. B.

135

I. THE FIRST STAR

Upon the stocks the first star-vessel waited.
The bright prow flashed and gleamed.
Within his soul the great Shipwright debated:
He doubted, and he dreamed.

“The ship is shaped. The masts and shrouds are ready:
Its Builder's work is o'er.
Soft river-waves around the gold bows eddy;
It yearns to quit the shore.

“Yet shall I launch it 'mid the wild commotion
Of the outer air and sea?
Can my star-ship withstand the fierce real ocean?
Will it steer back to me?

136

“When launched upon the seas of space exceeding
All measurement and bound,
Will it be lost? Will my star triumph, speeding
O'er depths no lead can sound?

“I hesitate. Shall I impart my being
To others, less than I?
Shall I send forth this star,—then watch it fleeing
Lone through the unkindred sky?

“The void is dark, and in the gloom is sweetness;
Safety for it, for me.
Shall I break up the lampless gloom's completeness,
Saying to the first star: ‘Be’?”

And then the Maker's soul within him reasoned:
“If, when I make a sun,
I deepen night; if good deeds must be seasoned
With evil, every one;

“If, when I send my winds to range the valleys
And breathe forth peace and bliss,
With passionate force they search the woods' green alleys,
And ravish when they kiss;

137

“If bluest waves must at the storm's hoarse bugle,
Arrayed in furious white,
Bay round the bows of labouring ships that struggle
Through the stupendous night;

“If, having made sweet love, divine and tender
And full of purest bloom,
Man must attack the flower, and mar its splendour,
And plant lust in its room;

“If woman, whom my thought would make resplendent,
Whom I would grandly mould,
Must change into man's slave, on man dependent,
And sell her love for gold;

“If this be so, let not my star-ship wrestle
With life and space and time!
Within some creek I had best lay up my vessel,
Nor risk the voyage sublime.”

So pondered God.—Then his resolve was taken.
(With what result, we know.)
God signalled with his hand,—with voice unshaken
Said to the first star: “Go.”

138

II. THE LAST STAR

The thought of God had flowed for years past numbering
Into the facts of time.
Through age on age God watched, with gaze unslumbering,
Sorrow and sin and crime.

God watched the grief that follows first love's rapture:
From his great throne in space
He watched maybe some city's blood-stained capture,
Or death-throes of a race.

He saw the dead beneath his white moons lying;
He heard gaunt lions roar:
He heard the groans and curses of the dying;
He heard ships strike the shore.

He marked the doom that weighs down all creation;
He saw love change to shame:
He saw death sweep the stars with devastation;
He saw hell's leaping flame.

139

He saw love's bloom forsake each woman's features,
As old in turn they grew:
He saw disease waste millions of his creatures:
He saw the leper's hue.

He saw faith seize its victims and devour them;
He saw mad hatred rage:
He saw pure women strive, man's lusts deflower them,
From darkling age to age.

He sent his Sons. To star on star he sent them,
Love's messengers sublime.
Mad unbelief rose, armed to circumvent them:
Death conquered them, and time.

He sent his eldest Son to one doomed city:
But him the people slew.
Man steeled his heart against Christ's tender pity,
And so man's sorrow grew.

Ever the same! As Christ was born of Mary,
So other Christs were born.
Their various fates in one point did not vary;
Each Christ was crowned with thorn.

140

If in nought else the vast star-hosts resemble
Each other, all alike
Smote their own Christs with hands that did not tremble,
And lifted spears to strike.

Wherever genius, born of God and woman,
Flashed on a world's dim way,
Its fellow-beings strove with hate inhuman
To quench the genius-ray.

Wherever God appeared, in seer or poet,
Satan appeared as well.
God's hand, revealing heaven, disclosed below it
The yawning gulfs of hell.

God pondered long.—Then his resolve was taken.
The heavens in darkness deep
He wrapped. The voice that bade the first star waken
Said to the last star: “Sleep.”

141

III. THE SECOND PARADISE

Yet, ere that star was quite destroyed,
A tenderer thought of pity came:
God would not leave the heavens quite void;
There still should burn one beacon-flame.

One star should still through leagues of gloom
Fling light, though all stars else were dead.
For countless mighty suns a tomb!
For one small star new birth instead!

For one small star another day,
And for two human beings as well
More life to use, or fling away;
A grander heaven, or deeper hell.

“For”—thus God said—“two I will choose,
The sole survivors these shall be:
For mine own purpose I will use
This rearguard of humanity.

142

“They shall rule o'er their star alone,
Lords of its wastes of wood and plain:
The whole wide earth shall be their throne,
Their vast impregnable domain.

“The past shall perish. Not a sign
Shall testify of ancient hours.
No ghosts of dead cold stars shall shine,
Nor pale ghosts of forgotten flowers.

“All shall be new. Aye, once again
An Adam and an Eve shall be
Sole in the glory of their reign
O'er silent earth and sailless sea.

“And these shall love me. I shall find
In these the recompence I sought
In vain, in vain, amid mankind,
Born of mine unripe earlier thought.

“Man failed, and woman failed as well:
I sweep the whole race to their tomb.
Man staggered, woman wholly fell;
Tearless, I leave them to their doom.

143

“Two spotless spirits alone I save:
These two shall carry out my plan;
Shall live, and grow beyond the grave
To perfect woman, perfect man.

“But let their love be holy and chaste!
On this one point the whole depends:
Let not love's image be defaced,
Disfigured, for ignoble ends.

“Let them develope onward, up
From man to angel, but abstain
From quenching at wild passion's cup
A thirst whose quenching is not gain.

“Let passion perish,—passion slew
The whole primeval world indeed!
Now I would make all wholly new,
And gift man with a nobler creed.

“Grow on to angelhood,—disdain
To recreate the lower type
Upon this sorrowing earth again:
Your star for higher forms is ripe.”

144

IV. THE SECOND FALL

The Man.

I am as Adam, thou art Eve; we stand
Lonely at last upon a lonely star.
The lot of those who peopled earth was grand,
But our dispeopling doom is grander far.

We form the first link with a higher race:
All earth's old passions vanish into air.
I see the dawning angel in thy face;
I mark heaven's halo brightening round thy hair.

We, letting all old instincts fade and flee,
Dismissing all that marred the race's powers,
Shall add new glory to an unknown sea,
Mix tenderer fragrance with the unborn flowers.

For every blossom suffered at the birth
Of sin,—the fields took on a sombre hue:
Gladness forsook the green old festive earth;
The waves grew grey that once were joyous blue.

145

Love has to answer for the stormy past:
Love, guided well by woman's traitorous hand,
Has wrecked the stars—till this, the very last,
On which to-day with lonely feet we stand.

Thou art the culprit,—thou, with eyes so sweet
And lips that seem like pure half-opened flowers,
Hast forced the world's Creator to retreat:
The power to extinguish love at last is ours!

The Woman.

Nay! 'tis the power to make a new beginning
That's ours, to shed new splendour o'er the sea.
If love be sin, then very sweet is sinning:
Sin shall endure throughout eternity.

Was ever rose less pure in that it nestled,
Luxuriant, on some bosom warm and white?
When God with Chaos' ebon darkness wrestled,
It was to give love never-ending light.

Was ever star less brilliant at the casement,
Has ever moon with lesser lustre gleamed,
Watching some lover in sweet first amazement
Kissing the lips of which for years he dreamed?

146

Wilt thou resume with speechless exultation
The passionate raptures of past years untold,
See in my eyes the love-looks of a nation,
A century's sunshine in my hair of gold?

The flowers of all the past, the loves resplendent
That starlike lit old cities, hills, and plains,
Are all for thee,—on thee they wait attendant:
Lo! Cleopatra burns within my veins.

Holding my hand, quite fearless thou mayest enter
Strange bowers of love in many a far-off place:
For thee shall Fate with ardent touch concentre
All beauty in one incomparable face.

Wilt thou consent to make me mighty mother
Of timeless generations yet to arise?
Adam begat one world—beget another!
Make fruitful all the dark womb of the skies!

Be father of the years beyond man's numbering;
Propel afresh the life-throbs of the race
Along the channels where life pauses, slumbering:
Behold new starlight, gazing on my face!

147

Wilt thou consent, O mortal, firm, unfearing,
To crowd the lifeless heaven that o'er us gleams
With fleets of planets through the dark waves steering,
Lord of a kingdom mocking mortal dreams?

This thou canst do, and more,—the moment fateful,
August and solemn, calls thee to decide.
Above us loom vast starless heavens and hateful:
Around us stretch lone lifeless fields and wide.

Trust thou the power of fatherhood residing
Within thy soul to me—Disperse the gloom!
The winds of winter look to thee for guiding:
Raise the dead summers from their darkling tomb.

Lo! at thy word the June-days bright and burning
Shall flash their spears once more against the sun:
Within new lovers' hearts shall wake the old yearning;
Win me! even so our daughters shall be won.

New buoyant springs, whose young hearts leap for gladness,
Shall fill the warm pure air with scent of may:
New autumns, full of soft and tremulous sadness,
Feel at love's touch that sadness melt away.

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Thou shalt be lord of all the circling seasons;
Lord of the summer, as of winter's snows:
Ruler and lord of all the dark sea's treasons;
Lord of the love that beckons from the rose.

Thou, the creator of the new world's rapture,
Shalt share the passionate life that is to be:
Preside, it may be, at some new Troy's capture,
Hold the steep pass at some Thermopylæ.

New cities shall be thine, new Londons greet thee;
New fiercer life than that which throbbed of old
Along the madding streets surge round thee and meet thee;
New sunsets tinge their skies with stormier gold.

Aye, like the waves of their own seas let nations
Rise into light, flash high, then disappear,—
Calm joys succeed to stormy tribulations,
And golden springs to many a snow-clad year.

New poets, mightier than the great who slumber,
Through the broad portals of the years shall move:
But all shall sing of me,—of all their number
Thorn-crowned, sin-marred, not one shall fail to love.

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Music shall seek the skies, a form imperial:
But, as more skilled time's strong musicians grow,
Still must love render the wild strings ethereal;
I sway them, whether their hearts will or no.

New sculptors, marble-moulding, still for ever
Their heavenliest impulse from my form shall take.
Shall one curve pass from human memory? Never!
Dead marble shall be deathless for my sake.

Anew the vast cathedrals where love sleeping
Waited love's longed-for resurrection morn
Shall rise, and hear the sound of women weeping,
The passionate prayers of races yet unborn.

With kingly wealth impassioned Art combining
Shall raise bright palaces in many a land:
But ever love's shall be the heart designing,
And love's the shaping and adorning hand.

Nought shall evade us! by this sweet transgression,
This sin superb, if sin indeed it be,
We shall for ever stamp our own impression
On stars and sun, and towns and hills and sea.

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Nor only heaven again in all its glory
Thou shalt compel time's hand to recreate:
Thou shalt rewrite the legend, the fierce story,
Of hell,—reprint man's epic poem of hate.

Again shall Torquemada's spirit sinister
Flash forth upon the world, blood-stained yet grand;
Ambassador for God, yet Satan's minister,
Climbing the stairs of heaven with dripping hand.

Again shall many a prelate's voice of thunder
Proclaim his own flock saved, the heathen doomed.
At hell's Bastille again shall sweet love wonder,
And weep for thousands in its vaults entombed.

Again shall man, invincible, eternal,
With thousand-throated laugh of mocking scorn
Roll back the gates barred by the hands infernal,
And flood night's dungeons with the sunlit morn.

Again shall battle's fierce throbs course and tingle
Through ardent souls on many a future sea:
Again smoke-vomiting iron fleets commingle;—
Their guns await one signal-flash from thee!

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Thou hast to speak the word that hurls an ocean
Of sword-points at some far-off Waterloo
Against calm squares: thine is the intense emotion
Of combat, ever-fierce and ever-new.

Thine is the fury of battle—thine for ever
Love's pleasure; young lips pause at lips most sweet,—
Apart, they wait thy mandate.—Wilt thou never
Speak the one radiant word that bids them meet?

Thou hast the power to bid wild passion waken;
The power to bid great countless stars arise
Upon the night wherethrough with heart unshaken
The maid who seeks her lover peers and flies.

Hand thrills not hand till thou dost join them—never
Without thy will can one love-deed be done.
Thou canst blindfold the watchers,—thou for ever
Canst bring sweet darkness, and blindfold the sun.

The woman tremulous in her moonless chamber
Dreads lest love's foot i'the darkness go astray:
But thou canst light love's lamp of golden-amber,
The summer moon that shows love's foot the way.

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Thou hast the power to unbar the morning's portal:
Thou canst restore the sun's kiss to the wave.
Love, slain by Fate, will rise up, vast, immortal,
If thou wilt summon Love's form from the grave.

Say to the drowséd waters, turning seaward,
“Awake!”—to heaven say, “Let the darkness flee!”
Scatter the soul's deep darkness, turning meward:
Lift up thine eyes, thy princely face, on me.

Wilt thou consent to be the king-creator
On whom the eyes of the ages shall be bent,—
Wilt thou, my slave, be to all else dictator,—
Wilt thou consent to love me?

The Man.

I consent.

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DEAD FLOWERS

A tuft of mignonette, a withered rose!
Numberless foolish hearts have treasured such.
Now, as I lift them from their long repose,
They turn to dust and crumble at a touch—
Poor flowers that meant so much!

They meant—pure love and limitless belief
In summer's faithfulness, in sunny skies:
They mean—one lonely pang of silent grief,
Just one true tear that in a moment dries,
For even sorrow dies.

So with the millions who have hoarded flowers:
The frail love-token lasts, the heart's love goes.
Man's vaunted strength and woman's boasted powers
Are more ephemeral even than the rose,
The frailest flower that blows!

154

A withered rose, a tuft of mignonette—
How passing weak must be the human heart,
For these outlive even love, outlast regret,
Abide even when grim pain, with blunted dart,
Makes ready to depart.

157

THE SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

When the twentieth century fadeth, when the dusk is round it closing fast,
When it hears each singer sadly, knowing that each song may be the last;

Will the singers it remembers, glancing back along the years of bloom,
Be diviner than the singers chanting through our century's sun and gloom?

What strange wars and tribulations will the far-off voices have to sing!
Creeds and thrones of newer peoples: flowers of many another laughing spring:

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Sunrise over many a cornfield red with battle's blood-stains, it may be:
Moonlight over wastes of breakers, hideous shipwreck on full many a sea:

Love in many a grove and bower, burning love with many an honeyed word—
Love whose message old as history seems half whispered, never fully heard:

Love co-equal with the ages—love who though his singers fail and pass
Is as young as woman's beauty, or the dew-spheres on the morning grass.

Yet though grand the future singers, stately though their march of music be,
Our strange century hath been gladdened; woodland green and lake and silver sea,

These have heard our century's singers. What glad faces shone beneath the light
Of the passionate early morning, when the fields of Europe rang with fight!

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Far-off, very far, it seemeth. Close beside those early singers stood
Blood-smeared wild-eyed Revolution, and her spirit mingled with their mood.

Something of her ardent message Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, caught:
Somewhat of her fiery nature wove itself within their inmost thought.

But the mountains soon from Wordsworth hid the red and blood-streaked dawn of day:
To his spirit Revolution had but one pale far-off word to say.

Then he turned with growing rapture to the valleys' calm, the mountains' might;
Rested 'mid the solemn silence of the countless starlit peaks by night:

Chose amid the hills to ponder rather on the great Creator's plan
Than to hear mad Paris thunder from her cannon-throats the rights of man:

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Chose to hear the wild streams murmur, chose to watch the flashing waters gleam,
Joining in the green fields' gladness, sharing in the mountains' lonely dream.

Grey-haired venerable Landor full or classic passion lived and died:
Strong-browed drama-moulding Browning won our womanpoet for his bride.

She too was this century's singer,—she who into deathless music wrought
All the wealth of woman's passion, all man's sober strength of weightier thought;

She who taught the world for ever what a power resides in woman's soul
When the brain is there to guide it, and the sovereign genius to control.

Shelley, too, divinely laboured—made the half of life a lyric dream;
Into music wove the moonlight, made in song a lovelier starlight gleam:

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Made in verse the blossoms fairer, poured a nobler light on hill and plain;
Built in song a lyric Eden, brought to Adam spotless Eve again.

And he showed in noble drama, dealing with the old tale of deadly wrong,
That his hand could wield the lightning, not alone the lyre of loveliest song.

Later on our brother singers fought their battle vast beyond the wave:
Longfellow and Whittier struggled, hurling slavery to its blood-red grave.

Now at last the slave is chainless, through their power of brain and force of heart:
Lowell, Bryant, countless others—nobly each one played a giant's part.

Poe with mystic sweetness murmured—left us lyrics time's touch may not wrong:
Whitman spake but half his message, failing through the immenseness of his song;

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Failing through his very largeness of desire co-equal with the land
—Left a vast work unaccomplished, waiting for some even mightier hand.

Far in France Love found a singer, in whose rich voluptuous song should be
Somewhat of its own strange music—somewhat of Love's own eternity:

And the singer's heart responded, feeling Love's fair beauty overmuch,
Feeling all things else ephemeral, just mere foam-bells melting at the touch:

Love to Musset was so lovely that the whole world brightened at its feet;
When love passed the whole world darkened, when it vanished nothing else was sweet.

Yet for ever bears he witness what the world is like in love's first hour:
We may win the fruit he won not, for he never sought beyond the flower.

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We may see the soul he saw not fill the eyes of love with deathless light:
We may see the stars he saw not lift its veil of darkness from the night.

In the dawning of the era swift-eyed, seeing, the laurelled singers rose:
But the God-endowed blind singer, pale and patient, waited for its close.

Never yet the rolling waters held more might of colour than they hold,
Marston, in thy deep rich music; there the sunset breathes and burns with gold.

Was the tender heart of poet ever filled with tenderer sweeter things?
In thy song the roses whisper, heard of thee the “garden fairy” sings.

Lonely, many waited for thee—blind, that thou mightest give them eyes to see:
Jealous flowers and hills and rivers left forlorn by Shelley looked to thee;

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All the unsung heart of Nature, many a voiceless lake and silent stream:—
Many a star no singer heeded through thy music flashed its infant gleam.

For the whole of Nature never, bridelike, conquered by a single bard,
Kissed his lips and stood before him, loosed her purple deep hair golden-starred.

If the whole of Nature truly were one bride for one great king of song,
Would not kingly Victor Hugo lure her coy reluctant feet along?

Would not she the spirit of Nature who was girlish, young, when Shelley came,
Meet, mature, the century's singer, Hugo,—wreathe his brows with fadeless fame?

Other singers win the kisses of the flowers her handmaids sweet and white:
But for him her voice of ocean sounds, and calls him towards her through the night.

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He, the giant message hearing, leaves all friends and passes forth alone,
Knowing that the woman calls him, Nature, to be sharer of her throne:

Knowing that while other singers worship at her altar, then depart,
He may watch her eyes for ever, he the lord and ruler of her heart.

Yet the age hath room for others. When the chant of Wordsworth waxéd old
Tennyson, most English-hearted, sang to English cliff and English wold.

His the message not of ocean, not the kiss that floats across the sea;
His the calm heart of the valleys, filled with many a flower and golden tree:

His all English women's beauty, and the sweetness of our rose-hung lanes,
And the lovelier perfect sweetness that in English women's hearts remains:

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His the glory of the combat, clash of splintering spear and ringing shield,
Courteous strife of many a tourney, fiery strife of many a blood-stained field.

Fame of battle's wild narration, crown of martial verse, with Scott he shares—
Scott, through whom mankind for ever breathes the sweetness of the mountain-airs:

Scott, through whom mankind for ever hears the ancient border minstrels sing,
Tweed “repine” and Teviot murmur, and a thousand mountain-runnels ring:

Scott, through whom the world for ever grasps the grandeur of the feudal time;
Learns to love the grey old castles, grey with clambering lichen, red with crime.

At the feet of Europe's monarchs Danton in his huge Titanic mirth
Flung the head of Louis bleeding. Then another era dawned on earth.

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But two singers scorned the era, turned away with eager hearts and eyes;
Scott resought his grey old castles, Morris dreamed beneath far sunny skies.

Morris took the Greek wise legends,—made us hear through London's dreary roar
Witch Medea's luring laughter, and the wave that leaped from Jason's oar:

Sang to us wild Northern Sagas, many a weird old chant and mythic rune;
Made us love the Volsung Legend, love the grey-eyed wondrous queen Gudrun:

Made us with Pygmalion marvel as the white stone grew to woman's form,—
Cold eyes flashing into sunlight, marble changing into bosom warm:

Made us feel with Galatea what the glory of passion ought to be;
Made her break time's marble silence once, and then reseek eternity.

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Matthew Arnold felt the Zeit-Geist bear him into regions cold and dim;
Faith was only for the weak-brained, not the clear-souled poet—not for him.

All our century's sadness smote him: Science ruled him, ruled him to the last,
Though the Church enchained his father, loyal-souled, the servant of the past.

Never more would sign or portent—so the poet's keen-edged tongue proclaimed—
Flash upon a world turned sceptic, of faith's earlier follies grown ashamed.

Yet how brightly blossoms glitter, here and there, through his world-weary thought!
Gems of love and jewels of fancy that the poet's happier genius wrought.

So with Clough—the grim doubt seized him, drew him forth from sweet faith's golden shore:
This alone he knew for certain—that the old hope could avail no more.

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Not with Kingsley—he for ever, casting logic's dead weight overboard,
Held to the old faith, stern and stedfast; knotty points he settled—with his sword.

Fearless noble deathless singer! while his England still confronts the sea
Eyes shall soften, hearts shall tremble, at the pathos of the “Sands of Dee.”

Would he had written a thousand ballads!—even when he wore the bonds of prose
Brighter gleamed the ferns of Devon, lovelier colour glittered in the rose.

Round him thronged the Elizabethans, grand old worthies of the heroic time;
Is not “Westward Ho!” a poem rich in music though it lacks a rhyme?

Rhyming subtly came Rossetti—he who with the Italian music-force
Re-imbued the English sonnet, gave the sonnet-stream an altered course.

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Many a soul in many a sonnet, many a burst of lyric rapture, strove
Passion's tenderest lore to utter, stars to ravish from the brow of love:

He, with mightier touch, for ever in one sonnet sealed the depth, the height,
Sweetness, strangeness, awe of passion, all the mystery of the nuptial night.

Can there be a greater glory than this crown man's judgment hath conferred?
Even that, singing after Shakespeare, still Rossetti spake a wanting word.

Edwin Arnold's “Light of Asia” turned our eyes from English bowers of green,
Turned our thoughts from strife of moderns, from our Europe's over-crowded scene;

From the clash of sects and parties, all that makes our Western life a storm,—
Set before us in the old sunlight, calm and restful, Buddha's princely form.

171

Generations pale and vanish—stars that now are old were fair and young
When that “Light” shone forth resplendent which the poet of to-day has sung.

Somewhat as of Buddha's greatness, somewhat of his strength that cannot cease,
Fills his singer's soul that points us past the storms of time to timeless peace:

Peace that reigned in the early ages, ere our Western warrior-life begun;
Peace,—and Arnold's song resumes it, full of light and fervent with the sun

But the century hath another whom the thunder crowned and sought for bard;
Whom the lightning kissed, and loved him; for whose soul the sea-wind wrestled hard.

Byron! still the lonely Jura seeks thee, widowed, weary,— and her sighs
Rolling through the rolling thunder find no kindred heart nor song-replies:

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Unto thee, as unto Musset, passion was the gift of perfect worth,
Light of woman's eyes the loveliest light that left the heaven and sought the earth:

Unto thee—not unto Musset—was the dark-blue ocean-waste divine;
Through thy song a thousand wave-crests curl and sparkle, rise and leap and shine.

Yet the wild sea's stormy message through a younger fiery singer thrills,
And his heart hath caught the rapture somewhat of the green far foam-flecked hills.

Swinburne! somewhat of the eternal might and wrath and rapture of the sea
Through thy sealike song hath sounded, somewhat of the soul of all things free:

And the heart of many a goddess left forlorn through many a weary day
Dares to glance up, and rejoices hearing the old note within thy lay.

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Bowed and full of desolation was full many a goddess' golden head
When along the viewless valleys rang the news that bright-souled Keats was dead:

Eyes long dry and tearless wept him, pale was Venus watching at his tomb,
Stars put off their robes of splendour, and for years no rose won all its bloom.

Now the gods shake off their mourning. Lo! again the trembling water glows
Round about the form of Venus, wakeful after over-long repose:

Once again a lovelier music than the music of our hills and streams
Brings again the thought of Sappho, thrills the evening with the morning's dreams.

Yet a note of sadness mingles with our song that praises these who sing.
All must pass. One century forward, just as blue shall gleam the swallow's wing.

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Pink the early almond-blossom still amid the branches brown shall shine,
And the bees shall hum for ever through the ivy and round about the vine.

One live flower shall have the magic all dead things and bloodless to surpass:
Who can dream on dead pale singers, when the kingcups glitter through the grass?

Who will ponder on our singing, when the very queen of song is there?
We may sing of passion's sweetness, but the songless lips will find it fair.

All our crowns of blood-stained laurel are not worth the crown the maiden brings,
Giving passion to her lover, giving but one glance to him who sings.

Though our singing live for ever, little is our sweetest singing worth;
Deathless value is in the love-song of the glad old everlasting earth.

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Deathless glory is in the love-song of the blue old everlasting seas:
Endless sweetness in the chanting of the pure fatigueless mountain-breeze.

We shall pass, but love shall linger,—linger while the golden mornings gleam;
Linger while the last white lily tells its love-tale to the listening stream.

We shall pass, but love shall linger while the light in woman's eyes is young,
Fair as if no soul had seen it, undescribed as if no soul had sung.

Ghosts may wander through the starlight, ghosts of poets crowned with phantom bays;
All dead songs shall miss the magic of one thoughtless throstle's living lays.

Every night the night's star thrilleth at the marriage-message of the sea:
What grows old and grey in Nature? Nought that Nature fashions; only we.

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Not more snowy was the primal than last April's dazzling chestnut-bloom:
Bright last night the star-hosts glittered, bright as when they flashed on Eden's gloom.

Round about each new-born poet arms most white his virgin era flings:
“Never have I heard sweet singing”—so she whispers to the soul that sings.

“Never have I owned a lover!” so she says with glance half shy, half wild:
“What is love?” she whispers gently, nestling closer like a loving child.

“What is love?” she whispers softly,—and will whisper while the starlit deep
Watches over woman's beauty, passion's flower, and fragrant-bosomed sleep.

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LOVE'S PLEADING

If you love me, love of mine,
Let me feel it day by day!
Never take the light divine
Of your tender love away!
Let me feel it when we meet,
By the joy that fills my heart
Making every moment sweet;
By my sorrow, when we part.

Let me feel that you are mine,
When the autumn leaves alight;
When the suns of summer shine;
When the stars begem the night.
Let me feel it hour by hour,
As the seasons come and go:
When the golden kingcups flower;
When the fields are white with snow.

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Let me feel it in your hand;
Let me see it in your eyes:
—Then will sky and sea and land
Gleam with light of Paradise.
Let me hear it in your voice!
Let me know that love is there,
Bidding all my heart rejoice,
Casting out a life's despair.

Let me feel that love will last
Though the seasons fade and wane:
That, when Time itself is past,
Love will store its golden grain.
Though the restless waves may chafe,
Though the storm-wind smite the shore,
Let me feel that love is safe,
Far beyond the billows' roar!

Let me, as time onward flows
Stealing sunshine from the air,
Stealing colour from the rose,
Stealing blackness from your hair,—

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Let me, as the days depart,
Feel you growing through the days
Ever dearer to my heart,
Ever fairer to my gaze.

Let me feel that, when we met,
That was life's propitious hour.
Though Time's sickle may be set
To the grass-blade and the flower,
Let me, darling, know that you
Dwelling in love's sunnier clime,
Where the skies are ever blue,
Are beyond the reach of Time.

Let me find—when dart on dart
Strikes me, giving little rest—
Perfect refuge in thine heart,
Holiest haven on thy breast!
Let me, when with hate increased
All the world's one hostile line,
Feel that one sweet heart at least
Beats in unison with mine.

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Let me feel that all that's best
In my life to thee I owe;
Aye, and every hour most blest
Of my seasons here below.
What in me is good and pure
—If some stray pure thoughts there be—
What of life's work may endure,
True love, all I owe to thee.

Let me feel, if all forsake,
One is true for evermore.
When the lonely wild waves break
All along life's lonely shore,
Let me feel, if thou art there,
With thy faithful hand in mine,
That in thousands through the air
All the stars of summer shine.

Be on earth my perfect queen,
Tender, loving, helpful, fond;
Lead me past things felt and seen
To our unseen home beyond.

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Let the mystery in thine eyes
Ever sacred presage be,
Of a light beyond the skies,
Of a land we cannot see.

Help me onward day by day;
When my weary thoughts despair,
Soothe my weariness and say,
“Wait till night. The stars are there!”
When my restless thoughts repine
Longing that the night be done,
Whisper, with thy hand in mine,
“Wait till morning brings the sun.”

So for ever be my guide.
Weary was I, sad, alone—
All the world I had defied,
But I bent to thee, my own.
Haughty helm and vengeful sword
At thy word I flung away:
Ceased from hatred, and adored;
Half remembered how to pray.

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Teach me to be true and strong,
Brave and humble, pure and glad:
Let thy soul inspire my song;
Let my soul no more be sad.
Change my hatred of the world
Into perfect love of thee,
As the river onward hurled
Calms its wild wave in the sea.

Change my dark despairing soul;
Lead my thoughts towards peace and rest.
Lo! in thee I find my goal;
Lo! at thee I end my quest.
Let me feel that thou art mine—
Gentlest, thou, of all things born:
Let me feel that I am thine—
I, whose very breath was scorn.

Lead me slowly through the love,
Changeless, vast, I give to thee,
Back to hope, if so it prove;
On to heaven, if this may be.

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When this fleeting life is past,
Past its suns that set and rise
Lead me, angel-love, at last
Back with thee to Paradise!

184

“AMONG THE WILDWOOD BOWERS”

The sun streamed over vale and hill,
How joyous all things seemed!
Far in the distance, clear and still,
The yellow cornfields gleamed.
Fair was the summer land;
I held in mine your hand;
Your eyes drew mine, and in their depths I dreamed,
Holding in mine your hand!

Then, on another golden day,
Among the wildwood bowers,
Love had its golden word to say
The while we gathered flowers.
“O love, my heart is thine;
Be thou for ever mine;
Life's loveliest purest gifts will all be ours,
If thou art ever mine!”

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In what far other land than this,
Beneath what heavenly sky,
Shall we with wild undreamed-of bliss
Meet, sweetheart, you and I?
In what far other land
Shall we together stand,
Past death, past pain and parting, by and bye,—
In what far other land?

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LOVE'S GIFTS

The bright blue wave were sad and drear
Without its sea-bird white:
The rose would die, did it not hear
The soft breeze sing at night:
Lest heaven should be the storm-wind's prey,
Love made the grand sun shine:
Lest clouds should cover all my day,
He made thy splendour mine!

Love sent the sweetest thing on earth
To charm me and to chain;
To thrill my soul to tenderest mirth,
Or—pierce my heart with pain!
Love bade the blue sea kiss the land,
The gold shore kiss the sea,
Then made the marvel of thine hand,
And brought my queen to me.

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FAREWELL!

When morning comes, the last pale star
Must crowd all sail and flee:
The wave that leaps the harbour-bar
Says “Farewell” to the sea.
The violet in the hollow lane
May long to linger there:
Nay, it must pass! The golden grain
Must leave the furrows bare.

“Farewell!” they say, “Adieu!” they cry,
All sweet sad earthly things:
The loveliest sun-kissed rose must die;
The swallow spreads her wings.
The crocus with its golden smile
Must vanish from the grass:
The tulip tarries for awhile,
And then it too must pass.

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Farewell! farewell!—the saddest cry
That ever earth has heard:
So says the sunset to the sky,
The green bough to the bird.
So says the rainbow to the spray,
The linnet to her nest;
So says the dying summer day
Unto the mountain's crest.

So many golden hours we've known,
May know so many yet;
We've seen the sun ascend his throne,
Have watched the same sun set:
Will there be one last hour of all?
Last hour of summer bloom,
Last green leaf trembling to its fall,
Last roseleaf to its doom?

Oh sweetheart, must we say “Farewell”?
Will all be over soon?
Will that green pathway through the dell
With dying leaves be strewn?

189

—Life's vessel glides away so fast,
Away from you and me:
We saw the hull—we see the mast—
That soon we shall not see!

190

“THE SWEETEST LOVE IS OVER”

I.

The sweetest love is over
This world has ever seen.
No more am I your lover!
No more are you my queen!
The stars are in the sky, love,
They glitter as of old:
Starless are you and I, love,—
Our heavens are dark and cold.

Oh, if you had been true, love,
We could have conquered pain!
My whole soul trusted you, love
—It will not trust again.
The flowers again will brighten
At Spring's swift loving tread,
The waves will leap and lighten,
But oh, my heart is dead!

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It was so little, surely—
I asked so little, dear;
That you should love me purely,
And be my true love here.
I loved in man's strong fashion,
And valued far above
The sweetest gifts of passion
The simplest gift of love.

The tenderest love is over
That life has ever seen.
No more am I your lover!
No more are you my queen!
The stars in heaven are shining;
Not one star shines for me!
There is no light for me to-night—
Oh, what light can there be?

II.

A boundless darkness covers,
Gloom utter and complete,
The souls of us—two lovers
Who once found sunlight sweet.

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The gloom is full of terror,
The terror full of pain:
Somewhere there has been error,
Mistake,—that much is plain.

Misunderstanding ghastly,
Oh, this there must have been!
Satan has triumphed vastly,
And stolen away my queen.
By means most strange and stealthy
The cruel deed was wrought:
Love deemed himself so wealthy;
Lo! Love possesses nought.

Love stays you not with yearning,
Arrests you not by prayer.
You pass a sudden turning—
Your figure is not there.
I strain my eyes in wonder;
Nought is there to behold.
We twain are leagues asunder,
Who were one heart of old.

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Of all love's bloom and splendour
What relic will there be?—
Not even one message tender!
Not even a look for me!
“Lost!” “lost!” the wail of sadness
Goes shivering through my heart.
We met in perfect gladness:
In hopeless pain we part.

194

LOVE'S CHOICE

Because I feel that I cannot forget,
I thank thee, Lord!—Because for ever now
My eyes will meet the sinless eyes I met,
And see the dark hair shade a sinless brow:

Because, though she is dead,—aye, dead in shame,
Polluted through the villany of one
Who, lusting, did in love's dishonoured name
The meanest deed that ever on earth was done;

Because, though she be lost, she for whose sake
I would have gone with singing to my tomb,
I think of her...as even the ice-bound lake
Dreams of green banks divine with summer's bloom:

Because I think of her, so sweet and pure
And tender—ere the villany of man
Spread forth its cautious net, its cunning lure,
And ended darkly what in light began:

195

Because I still can see within her eyes
The light of very heaven as once it gleamed;
Because my heart, though in hell's depth it lies,
Will dream for ever as at first it dreamed:

Because the past is with me evermore;
Because love is in me a changeless thing;
Because the blue waves may forsake the shore,
Green leaves forget to deck the brow of Spring—

Because there is in me no power to change,
Because my pain is everlasting, Lord,
I thank thee with a passion grim and strange:—
My love thou slayest not with thy keen-edged sword.

If thou couldst change despair to joy of heart,
Then would there be no story of love to tell!
Love bids all untrue comforters depart,
And lest in heaven it falter, chooses hell.

196

A POET'S VENGEANCE

I.

This is my vengeance—not to take away
My love, to leave it with you to the end:
To speak to you, when flowers are fair;
When starlight glistens, to be there;
From the blue spotless summer skies to bend.
I may not speak in weak words? I can pray.

Pray that the higher self I would have died
To reach, and at its highest point to keep,
May ever, guided by God's hand,
Develope, blossom, grow, expand:
Pray that the fruits my hand may never reap
May fill God's fostering heart with joy and pride.

True, the pure freshness of our love is lost.
Your dagger smote (ah! if it had but slain)—
The blow was cowardly, mean and base:

197

You should have struck before my face,—
I would have said, “Smite on—yea, smite again!”
But you—you struck when I was trusting most.

I trusted you, as man might trust his heart
To God his Maker—gave you love supreme.
For years I laboured night and day
And only ceased from love, to pray:
I made your life for years a happy dream:
I crowned you with the laurels of my Art.

I would have loved you to the very end:
I would have shielded you from all things sad.
But you—you turned away to seek
False love, unfaithful, foolish, weak,
Perverse, half blind it may be, wholly mad;
For one hour's pleasure you destroyed a friend.

You chose the lesser love, the meaner heart:
The nobler loving heart you crucified.
I gave you heaven: you gave me hell:
Was this thing womanly or well?
You let the base man win you for his bride,
And bade the true strong husband-spirit depart.

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Now do I curse you? No: nor do I bless.
There is a living God in all these things.
God shall do justice to the twain:
In his safe hands I place my pain:
We both must face the judgment sure time brings;
In one way love will deepen, not grow less.

In this way: love is truth, and truth must be
For ever now between us—that is clear.
All lies are o'er, they could not last;
The untruth is buried in our past;—
You love me, or you do not love me, dear:
We have to face the future—we shall see!

Your soul will grow, or not grow. If it grows,
There yet might be on some far future day
Peace for our spirits, autumnal rest,
A wedded calm in either breast
(This is the nobler end for which I pray:
Not passion's rapture—rapture of repose).

Aye once again, if you could be quite true,
True-souled and pure through all eternity,
Some happiness my heart might win,—

199

Some day I might forget the sin;
I might hear glad birds singing, and the sea
Might even regain for me some note of blue.

But if your soul will grow not—If it still
Lingers as this man's plaything through the years,—
If you, a poet's love, his queen,
Can wholly choose a thing so mean,—
If you forget love's kisses, aye love's tears,—
If nothing now can move your nobler will,—

If, having once been loved with love most fair,
Most strong, most sweet, most gentle, you to-day
Can wholly turn your face aside,
Why then your true soul must have died!
Then God and love and I must turn away:
I meet God's eyes, and in them is despair.

Yes: if a woman's heart can quite forget
The countless happy moments that we shared,
If six years are as nothing, then
Indeed the creed of vulgar men
Would seem like truth—if you too can be snared
By diamonds glittering through a golden net.

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II.

But if the nobler course may still be ours,
If you to whom I gave my heart can now
With perfect love of heart atone,
If you can be my very own,
My love with faithful eyes and honest brow,
We still may gather some immortal flowers.

I gave you love beyond the love I gave
Ever to any,—love beyond all speech:
You stabbed me deeplier far than all:
Must our love-temple wholly fall?
Is there atonement, love, within our reach?
Is there a passion deeper than the grave?

I think there may be. Yes: I think the man
Who died on Calvary, and rose they say
Triumphant from the fast-closed tomb,
Might help us through this deadly gloom
And change our darkness into sunlit day.
No human soul can help, unless Christ can.

Is there a darkness star-proof evermore?
A depth of hell where God's foot fails to tread?
Height beyond height the heavens arise,

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Vast heaven on heaven of starlit skies;
Depth below depth hell's ocean seethes blood-red;
Is it unsounded and without a shore?

Is there a depth where God's glance cannot go?
Darkness from which the Father shrinks away?
Then Christ upon the cross in vain
Bore for our sakes unmeasured pain;
Then is there no word hopeful left to say;
We reap despair, whatever seed we sow.

But if the love of God can pierce the gloom,
Then man's love too can follow where God's goes.
My love can reach you evermore
And circle hell's sea with a shore
And smite the savage wave-crests to repose:
My love and Christ's love can outlive the tomb.

My love: for Christ and God and man are one,
And God can save you, burst your prison-bars
Oh love, whose look dismays despair,
Can robe you in raiment pure and fair,—
As dark night jewels heaven's zone with the stars,
As morning gems heaven's forehead with the sun.

202

“THE ETERNAL SILENCE”

Round us spreads the eternal silence.—Not the silence of the deep
Lonely dark-blue open ocean, leagues from headland and from bay,—
Not the silence of the mountains where the solemn summits sleep,—
Not the silence of the star-land at the closing of the day,—
Not the silence of the forest, when its every leaf is still,
When the whole dense tropic woodland basks beneath the tropic sun,
Matches death's eternal silence. Wholly settled seems God's will:
When the human life is ended, then for us that life is done.

Not one sweet word! Not a whisper from beyond the deadly gloom!
Not a single word to cheer us, us the living, on our way!
Not a single flash of torchlight to illuminate the tomb!
Never sunshine, never moonshine, never one thin starry ray!

203

Only yesterday they loved us—then their living eyes were bright—
Only yesterday we held them in our living warm embrace:
What has happened? What has changed them? Still the form rests in our sight;
But the human love has vanished from the dead white quiet face.

Only yesterday they heard us, knew the loving voice and hand,
And to-day the furthest star-gleam in the blue heaven is more near.
What can measure the wild distance? As beside the dead we stand,
We confront a ghostly figure, not the figure once so dear.
Perfect silence, endless distance—past man's measure, past man's thought!
Depth no human lead can fathom—darkness utter and profound!
Well God keeps his final secret. All the ages have besought;
Every soul has craved an answer from the darkness. Not a sound!

204

Is it well, O God, to take them? Is it nobly, rightly, done?
Is this policy of darkness quite the grandest line of all?
If a son must lose his mother, or a mother lose her son,
Is it well to sweep the dead one out of earshot, out of call?
Would not one slight vision help us—just a whisper, just a word,
Just a green leaf sent for token, just a touch from out the gloom?
Life is changed from epic grandeur—it becomes three parts absurd,
One part bitter, when confronted with the sphinx-face of the tomb.

Yes, absurd: for through the sorrow and the mystic awe and dread
Something of grotesqueness glimmers, something farcical and strange.
Why does God create his millions, just to strike those millions dead?
Is he hampered, is he pestered, by the ceaseless love of change?

205

Trouble, endless toil and trouble, to complete a human life—
Pains to educate and train it—and it ends so very soon!
God provides the child a mother, and he sends the man a wife;
Lest the earth trip in the darkness, lo! he sends the earth a moon:

All seems full of thought and labour, wrought with endless love and care;
Blue and grand is the wide ocean, green and flower-sown are the meads,
Full of star-lamps is the darkness, full of fragrance is the air,—
All the living world bears witness to the Lord God's mighty deeds;—
Yes, and mightier than the star-land hung with lamps that gem the night,
Grander than the heaven of August when its utmost calm is won,
Is the rapture God created when he made the darkness bright
With the glory of love that needs not earthly moon or star or sun.

206

Yet it ends in utter darkness! All this noble work of God's
Ends abruptly, ends in failure. Death is Conqueror, so it seems:
Sweetest flesh must turn to ashes, mightiest brains must mix with clods,
Love must wake—within its coffin—from its life of pleasant dreams.
Grandly God mapped out his drama, but the villain of the piece
Was too forceful for the Playwright, Death has got the upper hand:
When he stalks along the footlights, the light-hearted plaudits cease;
Death has introduced some “business” that the Author never planned.

But God's answer came, soft-whispered through the silence of the night:
“Have I moulded one fair planet? Can I not mould thousands more?
Have I made the morning radiant with the great sun's golden light?
Can I not devise new sunshine for the dead souls to adore?

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Lo! I keep my solemn secret. But I keep it for your sakes.
To the gentle, to the simple, I can whisper through their dream:
I can whisper sweetest comfort to the heart that well-nigh breaks;
When the stars of heaven are clouded, I can make my starlight gleam.

“Not for genius is my message. Genius on the earth may rule,—
Sway the hearts of many women, win the worship of the rose;
Genius is but as a pupil (not an apt one) in my school;
What he doubts, and what he questions, the unlettered peasant knows.
Yes: the simple heart that trusteth never fails to hear my voice,
Knows my secret often better than the genius it may be;
Catches even my faintest whisper, when I bid that heart rejoice,
Past the trumpets of the storm-winds, through the thunders of the sea!

208

“Did the humble ever dread me? Did the lowly patient heart
Ever tremble, as Death's angel made a silence in the room?
Soul by soul, the human millions rise up softly and depart:
Summer after summer sends me every field's and forest's bloom.
Mothers yield to me their children, and the husband yields his wife,
And the night-time yields its starlight, all the splendour it has won:
Am not I, the Lord of deathland, also Lord of birth and life?
Am not I, the Lord of darkness, the creator of the sun?”

209

THREE SONNETS

I.
LOVE, AND DREAMS OF LOVE

Through years on years a man dreamed dreams on dreams
Of love.—The flowers of every spring were fair,
And love-thoughts glistened through the summer air
And mingled with the lilies on the streams
And wove gold circlets from the starry beams:—
Slow step by step Love's marble palace-stair
The man climbed, and it rang with laughter rare,
And sweet eyes met his own with answering gleams.

At last he reached the central palace-room,
And lo! a woman's form he there descried.
She rose to meet him. In that fragrant gloom,
Dream following dream, a whole life's love-thoughts died.
Love's voice to every dream of love spake doom,
And the soul found its all-sufficient Bride.

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II.
SWEETER

O love, love, never turn away thy face!
If I am faithful—if the stormy sea
Gives its wild strength and wilder song to thee,
Hold thou, sweet river, full of light and grace,
River whose tides green thymy shores embrace,
Hold thou for ever firm of heart to me!
If my fierce waves defy eternity,
Within those waves thy soft blue waters place.

I tire of images—I tire of song—
Song leads to love, and love bestows at last
Not fame but rest. Sweeter it is to me
The soft love-light within thine eyes to see
Than all old triumphs won by labour strong,
All laurel-crowns or dream-crowns of my past.

211

III.
LOVE'S FINAL POWERS

There are strong powers of love that early years
Know little of.—All added force of being
Gives love new deeper tenderer eyes for seeing,
And love wins sweetness from a lifetime's tears.
All pangs and hopes and joys and trembling fears
Add strength to love. As life's black darkness grows
Love's firmer step through that murk darkness goes
And, dauntless, over the grave's brink Love peers.

There are strange powers of love that youthful days
Know little of. There is a love beside
Whose strength the passion of the ocean wide
Is like the ripples whispering in blue bays:
A love beside whose strength death's fingers wild
Are weak as pink soft fingers of a child.

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“NEVER FAREWELL TO THEE!”

Never farewell. Though all life changes round about us,
Never farewell to thee!
The summers smile and pass. The new spring days without us
Win the same ecstasy.

Life deepens into death, and death brings new life bearing
New gifts that time may take.
Leaf saith to leaf farewell, and flower to flower despairing:—
Flower-hearts and men's hearts break.

Death seems to rule, and pain with foot alert and deadly
Treads through the ill-fated throng.
The world seems just one waste, one sorrowful vast medley
Of wrath and grief and wrong.

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“Farewell!” “farewell!” “farewell!” saith one heart to another;
The sad cry fills the air.
“Farewell!” saith love to love. “Farewell!” saith son to mother.
This world's gift is despair.

Yet, though all things be thus, despair shall never reach us
If Love's strong hand we hold.
If Love be guide of ours, if Love sustain and teach us,
Joy never shall grow old.

Let “farewell” ring throughout the universe—I care not,
If thou art true to me.
My love looks in death's eyes, yet crieth “I despair not:
Never farewell to thee!”

March 8, 1885.

214

THE ETERNAL LIFE

This is the eternal life. All spheres are one:
The sphere of our own vast monarchal sun
And all the suns of space;
The sphere of this world's hare-bells, and the sphere
Of yonder gold-brown runnel tinkling clear
Through pebbly shoals and bays.

The eternal life impinges upon this.
The red-lipped maid and lover, when they kiss,
Join lips in heaven, not here:
The murderer, poising high his bloody brand,
Stabs deep his victim in another land
Than this. Hell's gates are near.

All things that here seem local and apart
Unite their powers in one surpassing Art
Which circles strong and weak

215

When life climbs upward to a higher range.
The sculptor's work becomes a living strange
New form. The dead eyes speak.

The poet hears the music of his strain
As outward chords of music; and, again,
The great composer hears
The passionate torrent of unspoken speech
Which, latent in his notes, he could not reach
Nor utter to our ears.

The painter sees the hills and dales he sought
Not now mere subjects of pictorial thought,
Mere panoramic things;
He marks the actual height of azure air
Which on his canvas was exceeding fair,—
Each actual oak-branch swings.

The silver rivulets he painted leap
Now down an actual craggy pine-clothed steep;
The blue waves that he limned
Dance underneath true sunlight, and the sky,
Real, hears real larches and real aspens sigh;
The stars flash out undimmed.

216

He painted Cleopatra? Lo! she stands—
With laughing eyes and with beseeching hands
She lures him to her side.
Among the women of his artist's dream
He now may choose that one whose glances gleam
Most tenderly, for bride.

Sphere touches sphere. They mingle and collide.
Hell's arches gloom and threaten by the side
Of heaven's doors all aglow.
The man who sits beside us, it may be,
Is fire-tossed on the intolerable sea
Of hell, could we but know.

A darkness not of night, unlit by stars,
Void of the moon—a gloom which no sound jars
(Harsh sounds were welcome there!)
Wraps all the lonely weary wastes of earth
For some, doomed spirits from their very birth,
The bond-slaves of despair.

For others the whole earth is glad and sweet.
With the spring's buoyant pulse their pulses beat;
Their endless life is won:

217

This world to them is heaven, for they create
In this dark world of wretchedness and hate
Light fairer than the sun.

And so with God. Behind the lying sphere
Of the unjust grim god who rules us here
Another Godhead dwells:
A God whose eyes can pierce beyond the feasts
Of Churches,—past the idols of the priests,
Past all their heavens and hells.

To him the poets, one by one, appeal.
When shines the sunlight of his face, they feel
That hell's flame dies away:
That darkling lands whereover chaos reigned,
Where captives in murk dungeons pined and plained,
Are crimsoned with the day.

To him, past God and God, the poets reach.
Him they believe in; him their hearts beseech;
His eyes and his alone
They seek. Their spirits search behind the stars,
Making away with every mist that bars
The sky-way to his throne.

218

All souls who come between they hurl aside,
Whether they be by centuries deified
Or for one instant strong.
The same swift inspiration through them flows
Whence Jewish prophets' fiery speech arose
And David's eager song.

Behind the souls that hate, the Gods that slay,
Ephemeral dying Gods of yesterday
Whose thrones one moment gleam,
The changeless just Eternal One abides:
And past him all the ages' movement glides
Like an unending dream.

219

THE ACTIVE DEAD

The dead work for our good with love beyond
The love they here attained:
Their spirits bid our spirits not despond;
They bid us climb the hill-tops they have gained.

They, could they speak to us, would evermore
Forbid our souls to weep:
They would command our hearts and thoughts to soar;
They would awaken us from hopeless sleep.

They, who have ever helped, know better now
What high gifts to bestow:
They breathe repose upon the weary brow;
At night their solemn whispers come and go.

And they are with us in the summer days;
They speak in our still hours:
Though wondrous scenes are bursting on their gaze
They never can forget earth's simple flowers.

220

Our hyacinths still bloom within their hearts;
Our snowdrops still are white:
And still our various-blossomed June imparts
Joy to their day and fragrance to their night.

They rest. But this their rest—to love us more,
To guard us till we meet:
The hearts whose loss our faithless souls deplore
Were never quite so close, nor half so sweet.

221

THE CROWN OF DEATH

Strange is it how the hand of Death bestows
Upon the humblest head
A crown more sweet than garlands woven of rose,
How kingly are the dead!

To-day this girl laughs out from coral lips:
Within, the smooth teeth shine.
She climbs the hills, or watches the white ships
Upon the horizon-line.

How full of lovely life she is to-day!
How her clear laughter rings!
To-morrow she is dead and passed away:
No more the young voice sings.

And then how deep the awe that holds us bound!
The merry girl we knew
Has passed beyond earth's silvery rillets' sound,
Beyond sunshine and dew.

222

She knows to-day what we not yet may know,
Sees what we cannot see,
Hears songs we cannot hear. She puts on now
Her immortality.

The simplest child, when crowned by death's great hand,
Becomes a queen or king;
A citizen of the untraversed land;
A dream-girt ghostlike thing.

The golden hair that once we knew so well,
Bright-shining in our sun,
Shines now in sunlight strange that never fell
On heights man's foot has won.

The eyes we loved,—that looked along with us
On green-robed hedge and plain,
Will never more regard the prospect thus,
Will gaze not thus again.

They gaze at flowers and hills we cannot see;
At stars we cannot guess:
But yesterday they smiled at you or me;
The red lips laughed their “Yes!”

223

To-day they will not answer. No, the child
Has outgrown our demesne.
We are the children. She was falsely styled
A child,—she is a queen.

224

THE REAL AND THE IDEAL

Some live through many lives. Some pass at once
Beyond the region of our stars and suns
Into a higher air.
Back some return, and ever back again—
Renew their pleasures, and renew their pain;
Their foreheads once again are grooved with care.

With lust some souls for countless ages burn:
Some after earth's high prizes pant and yearn
And toil for years untold,
Some seek for raptures won at point of sword
And for wild battle's turbulent reward
For ages. Some for centuries worship gold.

The beauty of form that womanhood reveals,
A robe which half displays and half conceals
The spirit's deeper charm—

225

The glory of this may keep a soul spell-bound
For centuries that lapse past without a sound.
His heaven is in sweet curve of breast or arm.

The joy of holding manhood's heart enchained—
For this joy many a woman has remained
On earth for centuries long.
A robin here and there repeats one note
Till, wildly in love with his own throbbing throat,
He greets eternal mornings with his song.

There are, I doubt not, souls on earth to-day
Who watched the waves in many a Grecian bay
Break, with their ripples blue.
Some hearts have loved a woman's form so well
That only to possess her soul were hell:—
These tarry on earth for a myriad ages too.

Helen is here mayhap, and Paris' face
Troubled to madness by her changeless grace.
Napoleon haunts the field
Of ominous Waterloo. He is not dead:
He still confronts the line of moveless red,
And cannot die because he will not yield.

226

Hosts of uneasy spirits cannot pass.
All souls who fail in the earth-sphere to amass
Sufficient spirit-power,
Too weak to enter on the life beyond,
Still travail here, and sorrow, and despond:
For ever in the bud, they cannot flower.

Lovers have found their ladies' lips so sweet
That they have prayed for nothing save to meet
Those lips eternally.
God grants their prayer; for back to life they come
And haunt unalterably their earthly home
And watch the same sun light the same grey sea.

But those who pass and never need to turn
Back to this earth-sphere, live and love and yearn
And labour in higher ways.
Theirs is reality. Ours is the dream.
They live and love indeed. We only seem
To live and love. We twine pale phantom-bays.

The soul's eternal never-cloying kiss,
This has the true possession in it,—this
Is sweeter than the dream,

227

The phantom of a kiss that has detained
Millions of lingering hearts its ghost-touch gained
While earth-suns glimmered on green wood or blue stream.

228

CHARLES GEORGE GORDON:

Killed at Khartoum, Jan. 26, 1885

SONNET

In these wild later days when faith seems dead
And the old Hebrew creed a worn-out thing;
When hope in heaven's eternal righteous King
Seems fading from the earth, despair instead
Filling the hearts of Youth and Age with dread
And crowning Winter and dethroning Spring;
When no man knows what the next morn may bring
While watching sunset flaunt its soulless red;
When grim doubt triumphs, and all hearts wax cold
And weary, yet again was faith new-born
In one man's heart on whom the world's first morn
Still gleamed, with God within the morning's gold:
God, disregarding this deaf century's scorn,
Spake face to face with one man as of old.

229

THE DIRECT AND THE INDIRECT TOUCH

In closest contact with the Jewish race,
Hand as it were in hand, and face to face,
God stood.
Each mortal action thrilled to the very heart
Of the Immortal. Man was actual part
Of God. Man—God: one double solitude.

Man acted then as limb, or tongue, or hand
Of God,—as under his direct command,
As swayed
By his immediate voice, or his swift eye.
God's trumpet-message shook the stormless sky
And man, with terror at his heart, obeyed.

God spoke to Greece through loveliness of form:
Not through the rolling Sinaitic storm,
Or thunderless blue air.

230

Nay! through a girl's unfathomable grace;
Or through the kinghood in a Hector's face;
Or through the golden light in Venus' hair.

By gifts he spake—not now by the direct
Strong former touch, as to his old elect
In fiery Palestine.
God here withdrew the fierce light of his face
That men might better apprehend the grace
Of Beauty, curve by curve and line by line.

To-day he speaks to us—sometimes by Art;
Sometimes directly—to the broken heart,
Or will.
Sometimes by messages the sunset brings,
Or the first star whose golden sandal springs
Alert above yon purple-shouldered hill.

Perhaps for many a day and many a night
He leaves the moon and soft stars to give light;
The world seems empty of him;
Then on a sudden, sundering the skies,
He, the Jehovah, on the spirit's eyes
Flashes, till every star in heaven turns dim.

231

A POET'S THOUGHTS

The thoughts that haunt the poet like a dream,
Strange sweet ghost-shapes that through his fancy gleam,
Will one day haunt all hearts as well.
He fills the wide world with his love of flowers,
And with his love of summer sunlit hours,
And with his hate of hell.

The woman whom he loves and crowns shall stand
One day imperial over every land.
The passionate eyes that haunt his sleep
Shall one day flash upon the world, and make
(Not now the poet's, nay) the world's heart ache,
And make the world's eyes weep.

Whom he has crowned, is crowned. Whom he has raised
Shall in the end by all men's tongues be praised.
The carven brow he moulds for us

232

Before the world is ever statuesque.
The king or charlatan he makes grotesque
Shall be grotesque for ever,—alway thus.

While creeds and sub-creeds pass, his dreams endure.
All that he dreamed of tender things and pure,
All that he touched to beauty and bloom,
All that he loved with godlike love, shall last
When every star we see to-day has past,
Orb following orb, into eternal gloom.

233

LOVE'S ARGUMENT

He.—
“How lovely is that curve of dazzling breast!
Now am I blest
Beyond all words, in that thou art so fair!”

She.—
“Thou art the stronger. Teach me, love, to be
Ever to thee
True helper. In life's struggle let me share!”

He.—
“The starlit heaven is less sweet than thine eyes:
Within them lies
An unknown passionate world beyond my dream.”

She.—
“Yet must we, prisoners in this world of woe,
Climb from below
Long leagues before heaven's mountain-summits gleam.”

He.—
“Bend forward gently. Shaped e'en Phidias' hand
A neck more grand
In every passionate sweet imperious line?”

234

She.—
“Time will not spare, who spares no loveliest flower;
It has its hour:
Seek thou the soul's imperishable shrine.”

He.—
“Hath the soul radiant beauty such as this?
Such lips to kiss,
Such hair to fondle, and such hands to stroke?”

She.—
“To-morrow some new woman will pass by:
Through mouth and eye
'Twill be to thee as if a new God spoke.”

He.—
“Love me to-day. Lo! all the heaven is bright
With sweet sunlight,
And yet thy loveliness outshines the sun.”

She.—
“If I love thee, wilt thou love me till death?
Will his cold breath
Leave the two souls inseparably one?”

235

PAST AND FUTURE

Vales where the silken rose
In rathe abundance grows,
These, as the long years close,
Our souls sigh after.
Not yet our tired heart thrills
At sight of blue bright rills
That rift the heavenly hills
With silver laughter.

Still the old vales attract,
And still their charms exact
From word and thought and act
Love and devotion.
Not yet through magic sleep
We pass to a new steep
And from it mark a deep
Undreamed-of ocean.

236

Our thoughts still backward turn
Towards far-off brook and burn,
Forget-me-not and fern,
And heath and daisy.
We are half in love with life,
Half long for death to wife,
So pass our days in strife
And wanderings mazy.

Death hath not wholly won.
Still charm is in the sun;
The gleaming ripples run,
The blue wave dances:
We dream of boyish days
And smiling woodland ways,—
And now the soul delays,
And now advances.

A bird's nest in the wood;
A mountain solitude;
A hill where rain-clouds brood;
A river region

237

Where the clear current sips
The green bank's mossy lips;
Hedges of haws and hips,
A scarlet legion;

A reeded river marge
Whereby the painted barge
Slides, seeking the far large
Waste sea's redundance;
Gardens where blossoms spread,
Geraniums pink and red,
Pansies with purple head,
In sweet abundance;

These things lure back again
Our thought, our love, our pain.
We hear the old love-strain
Which that brown throstle
Sang through the sunset-air
In the great beech-tree there,
Pure, silver-throated, fair
Spring's first apostle.

238

And yet a nobler song
May greet our ears ere long,
Full of glad voices, strong
Unknown new-comers,
When past our death we climb
Beyond the reach of time,
Past snows and ice and rime,
Past springs and summers.

The future is our own:
Youth's flower-bright fields are mown;
The past is overthrown
By God's enacting.
No past, however sweet,
Can be the soul's retreat:
To ponder is defeat;
Rise, and be acting!

239

WOMAN AND NATURE

A glory of light beyond his utmost dream
Had flashed with sunlike flame and moonlike gleam
On Wordsworth's eyes
Had he discerned the sovereign force that fills
With lovelier light than theirs the laughing hills
And answering skies.

The secrets of the grass and of the dew,
And of the lakes, the lonely poet knew:
These spake aloud.
He heard the voices of the stars at night
As they climbed upward from slow height to height,
From cloud to cloud.

And yet he missed the magic of each place,
Because he missed the magic of the face
Of her whose power

240

Sways Nature,—fills the golden fields with bloom
And bids a million rosebuds burst their tomb
In one bright hour.

Who yields his spirit to the sterile hills
Wins his reward. His lonely strong heart thrills
At storm and sun;
At bastioned thunder-cloud, and mountain rain,
And light renewed when the green slopes again
Gleam one by one.

He hath his high reward,—and yet the higher
Reward and sweeter is to feel the fire
Of love suffuse
The crags and glens and mountain-threatened vales;
To know the sovereign of the streams and dales,
Their queen-recluse.

The surmise of the love within the rose,
The sense as of a Spirit whose passion glows
In flower and tree,
Links a diviner magic than he knew
To those same valleys Wordsworth wandered through
Yet could not see.

241

SONNET TO ENGLAND

Dark days are coming, England. Lo! the sky
Is foul and rank with treason, and there are
Who say they see the setting of thy star
And hold that thou wilt pass away and die.
With storm and strife, with keen device and lie
Thy foes assail thee. Thou hast journeyed far
Since on the Belgian plain thine hosts did bar
The hosts of France, and mocked the eagle's cry.

But thou art still the same. Thine eyes of fire
Have still the strange strong look of Waterloo:
If now thy foes are many, and full of ire,
Eager thy toil of centuries to undo,
Yet still thou hast the power, if thou desire,
To thine own deathless record to be true.

Feb. 8, 1885.

242

“THE SOVEREIGN ROSE”

“God, having made the countless flowers of earth
That laugh amid our woods with choral mirth
Of clustering sister-stems
And having thronged the realms of azure space
With star on star, and crowned each star with grace
Of blossom-diadems,—

“God, having made the flowers, had still one more
To mould and shape—no model in his store
Suited his work's grand close;
So he created woman's lips for this,
And with the royal fragrance of her kiss
Imbued the sovereign rose.

“Therefore all love is good. Who wins a flower
Wins a new fragment of God's life that hour
And wins one glance supreme

243

Into the deep abysses of God's heart,
Limitless depths beyond the strength of Art
To fathom in a dream.”

So speaks the poet in his early days.
Each sweet first tender impulse moves and sways
His heart, so swiftly won!
He dreams beneath the moon, and thinks the night
Sufficient. When a million stars are bright
The eye forgets the sun.

Yet surely comes the hour when through his dream
The morning breaks. Sweet was the moony gleam
That lit the soft night-breeze;
Sweet was it just to cull love's lighter flowers
In life's first lighter less impassioned hours
And rest content with these.

At last the poet apprehends the soul
Of woman,—knows that he, to win the whole,
Must give the whole as well:
That what he gives, he wins; that woman grows
(Just as man wills) to earth's divinest rose
Or fieriest flower of hell.

244

Who giveth much, receiveth much. Not he
Who sings of her soft tresses tenderly
And loves her for an hour,
Not he shall win her worship absolute:
Seldom that man shall grasp the final fruit
Who dallies with the flower.

Woman can equal man in loving strength:
She shall surpass him, when her heart at length
Quite flowers with fragrance fair.
The man who brings her all the soul of Art
Never quite wins her secret silent heart
Unless his soul is there.

'Tis soul and soul. The perfect souls must meet
In union never-ending, ever-sweet,—
In love's sublime repose.
He who would sway the gentlest girlish heart
Must give his own, and give it not in part;
He wins what he bestows.

245

PURITY OF HEART

What lured and won the poet's heart? Who knows?—
The passion of the throat, the lips' repose—
The night's sweet darkness gathered in her hair?
Or was it rather the deep Spanish eyes?
The glance of light that to love's glance replies?
The girlish gentleness of mien and air?

I think the poet's soul was won by this;
Not by the sweetness of her rich soft kiss,
Not by this only—though by this in part:
I think the poet's soul was won indeed
And won for evermore, though won with speed,
By sovereign truth and purity of heart.

May 30, 1886.

246

“THE MIGHTY MANY-SOUNDING ENGLISH SEA”

The mighty many-sounding English sea
Forgets to love its moon and worships thee;
The English meadows, by thy beauty won,
Dream in thy glances and forget the sun;
The English dales, and dells of deep-green gloom,
Beneath thy footing tremble into bloom;
The morning follows thee; the wondering night
Forgets its stars—for are not thine eyes bright?
The English summer wind must tune its lute,
Love, at thy voice,—or be for ever mute;
The laughter in the branches of the pine
Was never lovely till it copied thine;
An English poet loves thee,—and his heart
For ever singing sings how small a part,
How frail a fragment, of thy beauty's soul;
Can mortal foot attain love's timeless goal?
Can mortal strength avail to worship thee
Who hast the sweetness of Eternity?

247

DEATH AND LOVE

We rule the blue-green waves that round our shores
For ever surge. In vain the tempest roars;
The sea yields, and the land:
But death and love evade our conquering will.
We strive to master them. They cheat us still
With unique sleight of hand.

The humblest cottage-home, whose garden gleams
With scented English blossoms, has its dreams
Of love and death, alas!
Beside our hamlets ever stands the church,
And white tombs near it—under elm or birch,
Nestling in dark-green grass.

The kingliest race is subject unto death.
The lordliest heart oft shudders at the wreath
That it perforce must wear

248

One day,—the wreath of agony, when those
For whom life's sun, long ere our sunrise, rose
Pass, and our souls despair.

No stroke of mortal sword, or shock of spear,
Can force our English-bred tough hearts to fear;
But one thing even we
Dread,—that shrill trumpet of malignant doom
Which summons our belovéd to the tomb
With fiendish constancy.

To see them pass, and helplessly to stand
By their bed-sides while with white trembling hand
They grasp death's hand and go,
This pierces to the heart. No mastering force
Can hold the blood from faltering in its course,
From freezing in its flow,

When at the touch of death lo! love is gone,
And we are left unalterably alone.
Death drives us to despair,
And when despair lifts up wild anguished eyes
To the grim heights of waste unlighted skies,
Behold, a God is there!

249

Christ conquers race on race, and heart on heart,
Because he speaks a message not of Art
And not of flowers and trees,
And not the message of the lover's rose,
And not the word of woman's mouth that glows
Red-ripe, nor of the seas,—

No, not the thunder's or the lightning's word,
Nor voice as of the solemn mountains stirred
By storms that never cease;
When earth has not one accent left of cheer
At last Christ's one word wins the human ear,
And that one word is “Peace.”

250

BURIED FLOWERS

To-day the poor man's fire ablaze
That saves him from the cold
Takes back the thought to other days,
To tropic woodlands old.
These coals that give the poor man heat
Once filled the air with odours sweet.

They waved as grass, they smiled as flowers,
They climbed the trunks of trees;
They filled old long-forgotten hours
With odorous ecstasies.
These English coals which now we burn,
Black now, were once gay flower or fern.

They fill to-day the poor man's grate
And warm the wintry air.
Black lumps they seem! How strange their fate:
Once they were passing fair.
They smiled in heaven's old morning-mirth
And then were buried deep in earth.

251

It matters not! To-day they rise,
And nobler work they do
Than when, 'neath ever-burning skies
Of ceaseless sunlit blue,
They filled the flowery vales with scent,
Till their first languid life was spent.

In this grey Northern land they burn,
Black shiny precious things.
They lend the heat by which the urn
To the bright tea-pot sings.
They lend us heat of heart to jog
Through ceaseless rain and endless fog.

Their lives are measured not by ours.
We live and die; but they
Count by a million years their hours:
We are of yesterday:
The coals we pigmies pile and light
Were born in pre-Noachian night.

The chestnut-seller in the street
Keeps his hot chestnuts warm
With buried flowers that once were sweet,
That fronted sun and storm

252

In lands and years when things we see
Were still remote futurity.

The humming-bird has glittered down
On yonder mass of coal
When it was pliant creeper-crown
To some tree's mossy bole.
Nature's strange all-embracing plan
Stores up the priceless past for man.

Within earth's granary deep and thick
These silent stores were heaped
Till at the miner's sturdy pick
From the black depths they leaped.
Dead flowers must face our smoke and mist
Whose petals once the sun's mouth kissed.

And then they cheer us—you and me—
With steady warmth and light.
They aid our English fireside glee;
They make the ingle bright;
And then in flames once more expire
And, born in sunlight, pass in fire.

253

“WILL YOU GET ME SOME FAIRY-TALES?”

Three years ago you asked for fairy-lore;
Three years ago, three wild strange years or more,
With girlish laughter
You revelled in the fairy-tales I brought.
We only dreamed of love. We guessed not aught
Of all life's pain and strife that followed after.

To-day, again, you say “Bring fairy-tales.”
Yes, you are right. Whatever woe assails
Wall, beam and rafter,
Of the frail house of life, it still is well
As far as may be in the realm to dwell
Of love and fairy-dreams and young light laughter.

“ Life should be one long fairy-tale for you”
I said—“one summer dream of skies of blue,
Were I deviser

254

Of life's events.” Three years have passed away.
Your poet's hair is some degrees more grey:
Your black hair crowns a forehead three years wiser!

But I will work your bidding. We will go
Once more where magic silver waters flow;
Once more surprise her,
The Fairy Queen, and mark her deep eyes change
With sudden transformation sweet and strange
Into your eyes, my miracle-deviser!

255

DRAMATIC DIALOGUES

257

I.

She.—
“Why do you love me?”

He.—
“For your coal-black hair
That brings before my eyes the passionate South:
Because, although my lips in song despair,
Hope thrills them at the touching of your mouth.
Because, when life was weary and at an end,
Like the bright soul of very Spring you came,
Sister and love, a sweetheart in a friend,
And fanned with girlish breath joy's flickering flame
And so I love you.”

She.—
“Will your love abide
Stedfast and faithful, since we cannot be
Sweetheart and lover, husband and fair bride,
But have to move apart eternally?”

He.—
“Lady! the night when first you came to meet
A weary poet, placing trust in him,
Will fill my soul with memories starry-sweet
Till on night's purple robe each star grows dim.”

258

She.—
“But think, how long is life, how dull and cold!
Can such a love as this content you well?
To love, but never to possess and hold,
Men teach that this, to man, is worse then hell.”

He.—
“Worse than a hell it is! Yet you are fair:
God made me love you, and such love is gain.
If love at times seems shadowed by despair,
Still will I love,—if not in joy, in pain.
Perhaps, if early in life our eyes had met,
The strength for perfect love had not been ours:
But now upon the hills our feet are set,
And we can gather noble mountain-flowers.”

She.—
“But if you die, and if I marry then?”

He.—
“Sweetheart, if God who made me love you so
Can take your lips, your heart, from me again,
There is no medicine for that mastering woe.”

She.—
“Stay—”

He.—
“Never! Did not God himself declare
As down the starry heights his great voice rang
That you were destined for the one thing fair
For me? So I took up my harp and sang.
Did God not let me kiss the coal-black hair?
Yes, God and you—allowing bliss and pang?”

259

She.—
“But ought you thus to have acted? Was it wise,
Knowing the barriers Fate has placed between?”

He.—
“Lady, I met the splendour of your eyes,
And barriers vanished at that glance, I ween!”

She.—
“What is the gain? Ephemeral surely and small,
When weighed with what man's heart counts gain and bliss?”

He.—
“Not half your soul I ask. I ask for all.
I ask for years of marriage in one kiss.
To feel your soul grow to me day by day
With lovely trust and confidence serene:
To know that doubts and fears have fled away:
To feel your girlish heart completely lean
On mine: this is the high reward I pray
Your sovereign grace to gift me with, my queen!”

She.—
“And is that marriage?”

He.—
“That is the deep soul
Of marriage, not the phantom and the form:
The marriage-love that, though wild thunders roll,
Can breast the cloud-waves and defy the storm.
Yes, this is marriage.”

She.—
“Is not marriage, then,
The orange-blossomed daily thing we see?”

260

He.—
“Will lace and orange-blossoms help you when,
Loveless, you have to face eternity?
Will silk and silver and gold and praise of men
Assist, when you at last—look round for me?”

She.—
“Nay, not so fast!”

He.—
“Nay, faster—for I know,
As man knows deep by intuition's law,
I, having worshipped, having loved you so,
With such sweet homage and such rapturous awe,
That every other love, though it sound fair
And whatsoever gifts its right hand bring,
Would in its left hand bring you black despair
And sorrow past our mortal reckoning.
No woman ever is loved as I love you
Twice on the earth, twice in eternity:
You'd miss my old grey eyes, and find the new
Brown eyes a trifle tedious, it may be!”

She.—
“Brown eyes are pretty.”

He.—
“Yes, your brown eyes have
The Pyrenean magic in their gaze:
Most stately, queenly, thoughtful, noble, grave,
They make me dream of Southern hills and bays.”

She.—
“But I,—I was not talking of my own”—

He.—
“And I—I never talk except of yours”—

261

She.—
“To argue with a poet”—

He.—
“Ah, your tone
So silver-sweet, ineffably allures!”

She.—
“But, just to say the same old thing once more,
We are debarred and shut off, each from each.”

He.—
“Can wave thrill wave along the shadowy shore,
Can moonbeams mix above the glimmering beach,
Can star reach star across the tremulous night,
Can sun touch sun across wan leagues of air,
And cannot we blend sorrow and delight
And peace unchangeably, my one thing fair?”

She.—
“A poet's thought and diction!”

He.—
“Nay, the truth
To-day as ever is in a poet's dream:
True visions, as of everlasting youth
And endless summer, through your glances gleam.”

She.—
“And if I trust you utterly?”

He.—
“Your trust
Will not be misplaced. Set your lips on mine.
When heaven's stars vanish, worn to golden dust,
Unwrecked, undaunted, shall our love-star shine.”

262

II.

He.—
“Marriage is friendship,—but it adds a higher
And nobler sweetness to the friendly phase;
Touches emotion with diviner fire,
And wreathes pale crowns with crimson blossom-sprays.
Something supremely sweet and pure it brings,
Yet all the sacred gifts that friendship brought
Are still included.”

She.—
“Necklaces and rings
And bracelets seem to me the gifts most sought
By average brides; and by the average man”—

He.—
“Yes, that is just the sorrow and curse—
The misery, the grief, the bitter ban,
Too sea-deep to be sounded in a verse.

263

Most bitter indeed it is that love should be
Degraded (as it is) far, far, below
The level of friendship even.”

She.—
“Yes, I see
Daily how marriage ends in strife and woe.
That makes a woman cautious.”

He.—
“Well may she
Be cautious, for she, giving, gives her all.
She gives the wonder of her purity.
Her gift is infinite: man's gift is small.
And yet not always. When a man bestows
His noblest purest manhood, then the gift
Has its own godlike fragrance, though the rose
Of womanhood be sweeter.”

She.—
“Thus to sift,
Divide and analyse, dissect and part
Love (poor old sweet love!) makes one half despair.”

He.—
“Yes, but the lesson is—Find one true heart;
Hold it God's choicest gift, his dower most rare.
And for much-blundering man the lesson is—
Raise woman; help her; learn, if she be pure,
She wholly gives her being in her kiss:
She loves with love most sacred and most sure.”

264

She.—
“How did you learn this? True it is indeed,
But as a rule men hear it with surprise.”

He.—
“I learnt it where I learnt my whole love-creed,
Through watching the pure woman in your eyes.
One woman can reveal all purity,
All love, all womanhood, deep things past speech,
To her one lover, so that lover be
Willing to let her, quite unconscious, teach.”

She.—
“Unconscious—yes!”

He.—
“That is the very chief
Of all things. As our love and friendship grew
From spring to summer, from slow bud to leaf,
From autumn skies to heights of summer blue,
I watched you daily and within your eyes
I read deep lessons, as I marked the change
From fair bright girl to woman fair and wise,
As your thoughts ripened, took a wider range.
But if you had not been unconscious—quite—
All had been spoilt. So tender is the flower
Of womanhood the least fleck mars the white,
Sullies its petals, and discounts its power.
In fact the insane whole effort of the world
Is to destroy the thing it values most;

265

To force from blossom-folds not half unfurled
A fragrance which, if scattered, soon is lost.
If only all women were as pure as you”—

She.—
“Or all men sound of heart, my true old friend”—

He.—
“Love would be fresh and sweet as morning dew,
And half the sorrows of the world would end.”

266

III.

She.—
“Have you no faith in God?”

He.—
“At times I have:
At other times my very soul despairs.
The world seems one enormous loveless grave,—
Dark, but for fiery blasts of hell's hot airs.
Yes, my queen-sweetheart, were it not for you,
I think I'd hardly care to struggle on:
Still on me beamed a glimpse of sunlit blue
And God's eyes seemed to smile, when your eyes shone.
I know it. Yet a horror grips me hard,
A horror lest the Lord, in bringing you
Into my life thus, played his last trump card
And now has nothing further good to do.
Such eyes as yours he wisely kept in store:
He could not twice produce a thing so sweet.
Now, having played you, what can he do more,
Save acquiesce in sorrow and defeat?”

267

She.—
“Another inference is just and wise,
Juster and wiser: that the God who put
Beauty and hope (you say) within my eyes
Can bring life's bud to flower, life's flower to fruit.”

He.—
“And yet he seems to me a Janus-god
Often,—two-faced, deceiving, wanton, hard.
Why did he open out so sweet a road,
And then leave every gate at the ending barred?
In one word, why did God so fill my heart
With overflowing love and sweet desire,
Desire of you, if at the end we part?
Can God make holiest hope, profoundest liar?”

She.—
“We have not parted yet.”

He.—
“The very thought
Is like a storm-wind whirling all the stars
Across black space. God made this world for nought,
The golden sun, soft Venus, fiery Mars,
The universe in fine, when thus he brought
My strong love face to face with mocking bars!”

She.—
“Perhaps, where love is, iron bars only seem:
One day yourself may own that God is true,
True past your wildest most poetic dream.”

He.—
“On one condition—that he gives me you.”

268

BORN UPON NEW YEAR'S DAY

Born with the glad New Year,
Thou bringest blessing, dear,—
Thou also makest all things bright and new:
Thoughts of spring's sunnier skies
Gleam soft within thine eyes,
And dreams of summer's dome of statelier blue.

Thy birthday is a sign
Made evermore divine
To me, as unto man the New Year's birth:
A sign that God is good;
That bare-branched dreary wood
And grove will laugh once more with leafy mirth.

A sign that once again
Summer will banish pain;
Thou art my ever-present New Year's day—

269

Thou art my sign from heaven,
My sweet one bright star given
To light a weary heart along the way.

Be ever unto me
A New Year. As to thee
Thy birthday brought the New Year's light and shine,
Bring me an ever-true
Delight, an ever-new
Summer of hope in God and love divine.

270

A QUEEN'S MANDATE

Back to the smoke-fed city from the sea
Thou, stronger than the sea's hand, drawest me:
Back, past green hill-side, flower and field and tree,
To where the eternal fog-bound turrets rise.

For thy sake dearer than the mountain-air
And than the breezy cliff-tops even more fair
Are the dim robes of mist the houses wear
Beneath their sunless moonless starless skies.

Thou biddest me return, and lo! I leave
The golden-coloured morn, the crimson eve;
Thy queenly laughing mandate I receive,
And bend before the sovereign in thine eyes.

I leave my labour here,—I put it by;
I bid farewell to the wide dome of sky
And to the sea-bird's silver wings that fly
Across the watery waste that throbs and sighs.

271

Thou art my ocean, love, my star and sun;
Without thee heaven is lost, heaven hardly won;
As if love never yet had even begun
I seek thee, longing to be made more wise

In holiest love-lore, love, than ever yet;
Feeling as though our eyes had never met;
Feeling as though thy lips had not been set
On mine,—as if sweet love were still surprise.

For that is what I ever feel of thee:
Thou art as new-born as the new-born sea
Each morning, or the new pink almond-tree
That with the pinkness of the morning vies.

Thou art as new-born as the gracious gold
That clings around the sun's form, fold on fold,
Each break of day. Thou never canst grow old;
Thou art the truth, and death is he who lies.

Thy strong attraction over leagues of space
Lures me and draws me to thy dwelling-place;
I long to watch the beauty of thy face,
The magic in thy glance that never dies.

272

As the strong sun attracts the furthest star,
Piercing past wall of storm and cloudy bar,
So where thy most magnetic glances are
I have to be. I am thy spoil and prize.

If I were further than the furthest light
Whose rippling wave-beats strike upon our sight
Still wouldst thou draw me, O my one delight;
Thy magic spell I still should recognise!

So farewell, hill and sky and stars and sea!
My love, my own true loved one, summoneth me.
Where thou art, all God's stars must surely be,
For in thy glances star to star replies.

273

THE ARTIST-SOUL

The clear wave's tender green, the purple skies,
Take all their colour as the soul's deep eyes
Regard them day by day.
Nought, save as we regard it, has one shade
Of colour. Our thought gilds the autumn glade
And tints the rainbow spray.

Is any soul in love? The groves assume
That heart's high radiance, and they steep their bloom
In that heart's tender light.
If our hearts quite were sinless, we should know
How streamed each fiery sunset's golden glow
O'er Eden's every height.

If our hearts quite were pure, and quite were fair,
What wondrous raiment would the spring-meads wear,
Outdoing all their past!

274

With what gold crownals would the kingcups reign!
The orange lily at our doors would gain
Its marriage-robes at last.

If our souls saw with conquering sinless eyes
The heights and depths, the sacred sunlit skies,
The moon's orb silver-fringed,
All things would be transfigured. Eden waits
To ope to mortal its immortal gates:
On our will all is hinged.

Who conquers self, shall for the first time see
The marvel of a snowdrop's purity,
Inhale the violet's breath.
Who conquers self, shall wholly understand
The solemn meaning of the sea and land,
The laws of life and death.

Who conquers self, shall understand the whole
And with the cleanséd eyesight of the soul
Observe all things anew.
The new-born emerald mountain-slopes shall gleam
With all the light and richness of a dream,
Sparkling with morning dew.

275

The soul shall rise triumphant, and shall say,
“The wonder of this rhododendron spray
Is wholly new to me.
In all old days the tossing tides I saw
Were dark and turbulent. With love and awe
I watch my first blue sea.”

276

THE HEAVENLY ARMIES

The heavenly hosts are ever marching
Upon their eager way
To reach the abodes of mortal anguish:
They march both night and day.

Along the heavenly plains their banners
And plumes and keen swords shine:
The heavenly hosts are ever passing
Across earth's frontier-line.

Never was human soul beleaguered
But in some barrack-square
Far, it may be, in utmost heaven
Rang out the bugles' blare.

Never was human soul encompassed
By dark foes crowding round
Without the tramp of heavenly legions,
Without their trumpets' sound.

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For ah! their strong celestial Leader
Sends not his aid too late.
He finds not us, as we found Gordon,
Dead at the city's gate.

Too late our “thin red line” advancing
Filed through the desert grim;
We saved a fragment of our honour,
But ah! we saved not him.

Remember this—the hosts have started.
They march by day and night:
At dawn perhaps, or in the gloaming,
They'll flash upon thy sight.

Far-off upon the highway dusty
Their plumes and helms will gleam!
And all thy night, or day, of battle
Shall end, as ends a dream.

278

WALT WHITMAN

Thy country waits its bard. This thou hast seen.—
Thy soul hath revelled in the forests green;
The solemn purple plains;
The immense far range of hills whose summits hoar
Mix with the eternal blue; the ceaseless roar
Of rivers swollen by Titanic rains:

Somewhat thy soul hath gathered of the might
Of thine America; by day, by night,
Watching, thy gaze hath won
A measured glimpse of what man's eyes shall see;
While Europe's slaves to kings have bent the knee
Thou, yokeless, hast been vassal of the sun:

Thou, scaling thought's untrodden mountain-sides,
Hast felt the heart of Freedom like a bride's
Against thine own heart beat;

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While the old world struggled, cramped by prison-bars,
Thou, seeking Freedom's palace lit by stars,
Didst pass the heights where storms and the eagles meet:

And yet thy giant-futured marvellous land
Still needs a seer whose soul shall understand,
And, understanding, sing.
When the true poet comes, then he will reign
O'er vast America from plain to plain,
And be the land's first royal-sceptred king.

Nature's wild heart is fevered till it speaks.
The deathless music of the mountain-peaks
And waves is yet to be!
America, though Whitman gave you much,
He gave you not the missing royal touch:
He spake not like your plains, nor like your sea.

280

THE LONDON STREETS

Of old the streets were sad and grim:
They stretched along, one mass of grey,
Vast leagues on leagues of saddening hue
That changed not if the heaven were blue
Or if the wintry sky were dim,
The same from day to day.

But now the London streets are bright:
In this one point our victory's won;
Pure country flowers adorn our streets
And fill our balconies with sweets,
And make our homes a blaze of light,
And tell us of the sun.

Geraniums red as flame are there,
And golden-centred daisies white:
London makes Sussex ferns its own,
And calls on Devon for a loan;

281

Pink fuchsias smile in London air,
And calceolarias bright.

But one thing yet remains to do—
To look beyond our balconies.
The girl-flowers who in thousands fade
Within our city's noisome shade,
Let them be loved and cherished too,
Not cared for less than these!

Not cared for less than flowers that cry
With somewhat in their speech of scorn,
“Shame that the town that worships flowers
Should let far lovelier lives than ours
Perish! What it one rose should die?
Another rose is born.

“But if ye lose one girl-flower fair
In these dark streets by thousands trod,
That means the loss to your grim town
For ever of one lily-crown,—
That means to angel-hearts despair,
And agony to God.”

282

GAZING BACKWARD

We shall survey our lives, when life is past,
With strange transfigured vision,—when at last
The whole before us gleams.
We shall say, “Here a victory was ours:
Here gathered we sweet wealth of passion's flowers:
Here love's eyes filled our dreams.”

Yes, all shall then be changed, and yet the same.
The fiery current of the sun's red flame
Shall still dart down the air:
The flowers shall lavish fragrance on the breeze,
And still Spring's kiss shall greet the lilac-trees
In London street and square.

Yet, as we look, how changed ourselves shall be!
With how far different glances shall we see
The house-tops veiled in smoke:
With what far other eyes shall we behold
The sunset struggle with its soot-grimed gold
Through city plane and oak.

283

Here loved we; here we suffered; here we won
A noble victory; were here undone,
Were here restored and saved:—
Such thoughts upon the souls with which we rise
Through sullied smoke-spheres to the spotless skies
Shall be past change engraved.

284

THE WOMANHOOD OF THE FUTURE

When woman understands her own pure soul;
When she no longer takes
Man's thought of her to guide her to the goal;
When she awakes;

When she once knows herself, the one pure thing
Upon an earth impure,
Then she will change man's nature, and will bring
Peace sweet and sure.

When she once knows herself—when she will be
True to her own pure heart,
Then she will clothe with radiant purity
All life and Art.

The world will be transformed. It waits for this,
And it has waited long:
It waits for woman's perfect marriage-kiss
And nuptial song.

285

It waits till she arises in her strength
To bid all evil flee,
Saying, “Who would learn God's deepest truths at length,
Must learn of me.

“For at the ending of the ages I,
Man's sister and man's queen,
Stand forth to bid all forms of evil fly
From our demesne.

“I come to make man pure as I am pure;
To bring delights unguessed;
Joy that shall vanish not, but shall endure;
Raptue and rest.

“For man, unless his heart be pure and true,
Must ever fail to see
The heart of that pure God who speaks his new
Gospel through me.

“Aye, to the pure in heart God's world is fair!
These see with perfect sight
How glorious is the summer sunlit air,
The rose how white!

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“These only can perceive the God who dwells
In woman, and take part
In that great movement which our age foretells
With brain and heart.

“Who seeth woman, shall see God. Who fails
To see and understand,
Shall fail to find God—though he spread wide sails
From land to land.”

287

“HAVE FAITH IN TRUTH”

Have faith in truth. The generations pass:
The centuries wither like sun-stricken grass:
The very stars are doomed:
Yet never one true word shall pass away.
The songs of David thrill our hearts to-day;
His soul is disentombed.

His words move English hearts.—The words of Paul
Electrify and aid and lift us all
In our far Northern land.
No true word ever passes,—no Ideal.
Is any word of Christ to-day less real
Or parable less grand?

Words spoken by blue calm Gennesaret
Are heard to-day where ceaseless wild waves fret
Wild echoing granite shores.

288

Though all things tremble at the touch of time
There is a power more solemn, more sublime,
Which past the time-realm soars:

There is a power at which the stars of space
Tremble,—a power which finds God's dwelling-place,
Quitting earth's lowlier clime:
The power of each strong human soul to say,
“My life's true work shall never pass away;
It laughs at death and time.”

289

THE INSPIRING SPIRITS

The spirits of stars, the spirits of waves and seas,
The spirits of sunset-clouds, the spirits of trees,
Inspire the poet's song.
He passes rapidly from sphere to sphere:
The mountain-thunder now enthrals his ear;
Next with the sea-wind's harp he dallies long.

The dead hosts, myriads who have passed away,
Are marshalled and divided. Some hosts sway
The stormy purplest seas:
Others, far inland in the forest-nooks,
Rule only flowers and birds and rippling brooks
And the thyme-scented breeze.

The mortal poet, as from sphere to sphere
Upon our earth he passes, now can hear
The gentler dead hosts speak:

290

Next full of lordly triumph, he bestows
Large speech and song's divine relief on those
Whose spirits haunt clouds, mist, and mountain-peak.

Therefore his heart is diverse, and his strain
Diverse—charged now with a tremendous pain,
The anguish of the dead:
Next winged amid the woods, and light as air,
And buoyant as that butterfly poised there
Upon the thistle-head.

Wild spirits' jealous outcries fill the breeze:
“Sing us,” they say, “before thou singest these;”
“Is not my wave-breast white?”
The ocean-spirit says. “Hath not my face,
Full of soft forest-beauty, yet more grace?”
The forest-spirit asks with laughter light.

“One sonnet!” begs the fairy of the rose.
“Once let me speak in song that throbs and glows!”
The battle-spirit craves.
Dead Cromwell yearns for utterance. Heaven and hell
Have each their calm or bitter tale to tell:
Each claims its own song-staves.

291

In every varying spot, in each new place,
The poet's singing changes heart and face.
He meets beside the foam
The passionate form of Venus, still as young
As when the eager waves that round her clung
Were altered, wave by wave, to white flower-bloom.

He meets again by yonder vine-tressed hill
Dante. His heart can sympathize and thrill
At a great city's pain.
In Paris blood-red revolution sweeps
Superb and dread before his eyes,—then leaps
In fierce song from his brain.

292

TO ------

The light of mountains, and the light of skies,
Will fade out swiftly from before thine eyes:
No more, blue seas will break.
Cast off thy faith in heaven! The earth will fade.
Cease to believe in love! No sunlit glade
Will laugh and gleam and brighten for thy sake

Thou standest now in deadly peril, friend.—
Lose faith in God and woman—all things end;
All things at least for thee.
Thy poethood, so sweet and pure and strong;
The might and force and manhood of thy song;
Thy heart's communion with the stars and sea;

These things depend on purity of heart.
Lose faith in woman; desecrate thine art
By low base dreams of her;

293

Pollute thy poethood by thoughts untrue—
At the same moment all the sea's wide blue
Thou dost defile and change and blot and blur!

Nature and God and woman,—these are one.
Thy worship of the rose and of the sun,
And of the hills and skies,
This worship in thy heart is based indeed
On faith in heaven and God. Renounce thy creed,
And lo! that moment thy pure genius dies.

Pause—pause in time. Thou hast the power to teach,—
To lift men higher. Thou hast power to reach
The fair heights of the Ideal.
Defile not thus thy soul with thoughts impure.
Lose not thy faith in woman. Be thou sure,
Whatever else is false, her love is real.

Put doubt and sorrow from thee. Linger not
In that malarious and ill-omened spot
Where now thy tired feet stand.
Shake off the oppressing chains! Be once again
A poet-flame, a light to lesser men;
A light of song to lighten all the land.

294

“THE PURE IN HEART”

The beauty of little things we never see;
The beauty of one leaf upon a tree
Where thousands wave:
The beauty of one shell upon the beach
Where thousands crackle at our tread, yet each
Buries a sunset in its spiral cave.

The olive-green sea-weed upon the shore,
Strewing the shingly sunlit briny floor,
With sunlight cast
Through the bright fronds: the stretch of white chalk cliff:
The white foam-streak behind the arrowy skiff:
The yellow moon against the tapering mast:

It needs a pure fresh heart to see these things.
To catch the music of the west wind's wings
The soul must be

295

Freed from harsh labour and laborious care:
Then can it drink the beauty of moonlit air
And apprehend the message of the sea.

So with large things. Until the soul is pure
God is not seen, nor can the light allure
That clothes the line
Of the next world's high hill-tops. Nor can she,
Woman, whose soul is like the sky or sea,
Be apprehended save by love divine.

Who would see God, or woman, or the next
World—yes, or even understand the text
Of hills or plains—
Must purify his inward vision first.
Never God's beauty yet, nor woman's, burst
Upon the soul that selfishness enchains.

A rose to one man's insight is a rose:
A woman just a supple form that goes
Along the street.
But to the pure in heart a rose's breath
Is woman's. Rose and woman smile at death.
Rose, woman, God, are equal, being so sweet.

296

THE BACKGROUND OF LANDSCAPE

The sweet face loved within the city's smoke
Is not the face that, under birch or oak,
The poet loves and sings.
The wingless love of cities changes form
When mixed with ardour of the wild sea-storm,
And takes the sea-bird's wings.

This gives to love its splendour and its bloom,
This, the background of landscape. Love for home
Hath all the world indeed.
The maiden loved within a wood of firs
Is not the maiden of the lone hill-spurs
Or austere mountain-mead.

Change place, change power of loving.—Each new place
Hath its presiding tutelary grace,
Its woman-spirit there.

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The bower of roses gives the poet love:
But lordlier passion thrills the peaks above
And the large roseless air.

The quiet garden gives the poet rest;
The spot where, lip to lip, and breast to breast,
Lilies and wall-flowers grow:
But passion revels 'mid the curves of seas,
Deeper and vaster than the waves of trees,
Crested with furious snow.

So who would make the landscape of his heart
Superb in aspect, perfect in each part,
Must add pure line to line:
Must love not only maidens of the sea
But maidens born where the cloud-shadows flee
O'er rolling slopes of pine.

Thus varying Nature adds a nameless charm
To beauty of dark eyes and curve of arm:
In each place each is new.
Nor did yon beechwood ever seem so fair
As when we met that mountain-maiden there
With eyes of mountain-blue.

298

For woman adds to Nature charm as well.
She adds the witchery to the ferny dell:
Without her all is nought.
Without the brightness of her eyes, the night
Misses and mourns its stars. The lily white
With lovelier touch she wrought.

She gives and she receives. The charm is hers
In truth that adds such magic to those firs
Upon the green hill-side.
The laughter of those branches in the woods
Follows and corresponds to all her moods,
Her love, her joy, her pride.

When boyhood's simpler hours are left behind,
The man at first seems deaf and dull and blind
To Nature's unchanged grace.
The boy saw wondrous beauty in the woods:
The man sees only leafy solitudes;
He longs for form and face.

But, later on, he catches further sight
Of woman—feels her in the snow-storm white,
In the hills' starlit sleep.

299

His growing worship of the royal rose
Is worship of the royal mouth that glows
Within the petals deep.

Never again is Nature wholly free
From woman now. Man knows her in the sea,
For Venus nestled there.
Man feels with magic and unspoken thrill
Her beauty in the beauty of the hill,
Her charm i'the sunset air.

Nature is woman's minister and slave.
The man resumes the worship that he gave
To Nature in years gone by.
He takes his homage back from flower and tree
And sunlit lake and thunder-shadowed sea
And star-embroidered sky.

He takes again the worship that he gave:
The lovely silver laugh o'the leaping wave
To woman he transfers.
She is the universe: she sways the whole.
For her the waters lift their tides and roll.
The witching moon is hers.

300

All things are hers, her own, by day, by night.
The man again revels in Nature's light,
But now loves what he knows.
The flowers are no more what the boy's heart dreamed
For something sweeter than the rose has gleamed
As it were within the rose.

301

SOUL TO SOUL, IN HELL

This damns our souls, this keeps us ever apart,
Apart from life and blue seas and the sun,
This,—that we slew an ever-trusting heart:
This damns us,—this vast evil we have done.

We,—you and I who in this weary hell
Gaze at each other with love-lacking eyes,—
Had once the chance to do supremely well,
Yet did supremely, foully, otherwise.

In seeking love, we lied to love. We lied
Each to the other, when we lied to her.
She might have climbed to heaven's heights at our side:
We trod her into hell. Did we not err?

Did we not sin beyond all mortal thought,
Beyond redemption, in our ghastly dream?
We longed to crown ourselves. A crown we wrought;
But with her blood its hellish blossoms gleam!

302

That was our love, our passion—to create
An endless sorrow for a child to bear:
To make our “love” to her seem Satan's hate:
To turn her trust to limitless despair.

This was our love, our worship of the Lord.
And lo! the Lord in whose high name we swore
Stood in our pathway with a fiery sword
And barred us back from Eden evermore.

So great we were,—in our own thought so grand!
So far above, beyond, the vulgar throng!
And yet the humblest heart in all the land
Would not have done a child this deadly wrong.

We thought to win each other,—and our doom
Is endless separation, endless loss.
Our bridal-chamber changes to a tomb
Which holds the form we nailed upon her cross.

303

GENIUS

No mother owns a son.—Their lives are drawn
Together for a time. O'er valley and lawn
Of this our earth they pass.
But as they older grow, their spheres divide:
One seeks by choice the ice-blue mountain-side:
The other loves the daisied sunlit grass.

Many have lived before. Christ had derived
From many a star wherein his soul had lived
Soul-learning, lessons high:
Perhaps had suffered for another race;
Others perhaps had loved the royal face;
Another cross perhaps had seen him die.

And this is genius.—Genius has rehearsed
In other lives its tasks, performed them first
In other lands than these.

304

On other azure waters Shelley sailed
Long ere his watchful guardian-spirit failed
To gauge the peril of the Spezzian breeze.

Genius has lived and loved. Its head is hoar
With strange experience. Centuries before
Its birth, it toiled and dreamed.
No Phidias ever carved, no Titian drew,
Save from remembrance of an art they knew
Long ere the earthly stone or canvas gleamed.

And so with love.—What draws our spirits close
Is just remembrance. Lo! this scent of rose
Upon the bridal night
That floats with sudden sweetness through the room
Brings back the faint remembrance of love-bloom
Gathered in regions far beyond man's sight.

This subtle scent that in the girl's loose hair
Startles her lover—till his thoughts despair,
They wander back so far!
What is it but the memory of an hour
When she perhaps, ensphered within a flower,
Made sweet with that same scent some ancient star?

305

This is what draws our souls together,—this.
Not the lips' pressure, but the former kiss
Repeated once again.
All perfect love is memory, nothing more.
Remembrance of a rapture known of yore:
A pleasure our souls wrestle to retain.

306

DOUBLE PICTURES

I

This silent river flows in channel deep:
Along its margin giant elm-trees sleep,
Immersed in dreams.
It breathes the placid and thyme-scented air:
Past sedges bright and rushes debonair
Its blue wave gleams.

II

A foam-belled mountain streamlet leaps along
Its rocky banks with swift defiant song,
Past boulders springs.
Its rippling waters, crystal-pure gold-brown,
Come bubbling, boiling, eddying, splashing, down:
The moor-side rings.

307

I

This Southern girl's heart changes like the stream:
Yet how divine, how perfect, is the dream
That rests and sleeps
Within her marvellous eyes. Half cruel, she
Is passion's queen and slave,—yet quite love-free,
For all she weeps.

II

An English girl, deep-hearted, silent, strong,
Is like the river-wave that flows along,
Calm, hastening never.
Her love once given, is given. Is passion slow
To dawn? Yet, when she loves, for weal or woe
She loves for ever.

308

SELF-FORGETFULNESS

This is the secret of triumphant Art,—
To lose itself in Nature, pour its heart
Upon the winds away.
Not to turn pale-hued at the storm-blast's drum,
Nor bugles of the wild waves when they come
Fanfaring past the headland grey.

To lose its single self, and to suspire
With Nature's breath; to know the cloud's desire,
The life of stars and trees;
To hold itself suspended in the mid
Large tide of things; to lurk most safely hid
Within the soft plumes of the breeze;

This is the life of Art, the life of man:
This is the immortal life that ne'er began
Nor has it end nor break.

309

We are constituents of the deathless whole.
To every golden star the human soul
Is linked. The sun shines for our sake.

What heart can dread the billows fierce and strong
Who hears behind their blue-green ranks the song
Of One who leads their charge?
What human soul can sink to final death
Beneath their tides, if that soul breathes the breath
Of deathless God through soul-lungs large?

The lightning is our own. We tame its wings,
And lo! our messages of love it brings
Along the safe straight wire.
We use the very force whose flash perturbs.—
We make the poison-hearted sluggish herbs
Lull human pain at our desire.

Nought fails us. Straight down history's iron grooves
A spirit cognate to our own heart moves:
His dwelling-place is ours.
If we once lose ourselves in his superb
Vast life, we win the force to chain and curb
The giant elemental powers.

310

All loss of self is gain. Love is just this—
Not the mere single isolated kiss,
Though every kiss is sweet,
But the reception through a woman's eyes
Of a new life, as self shrinks up and dies:
Heaven opens, when two spirits meet.

311

SIN,—AND FORGIVENESS

A gift was given us once, a gift most rare,
To keep:
A child, with God's own sunshine in her hair
And God's own heart of love most pure and deep.

We understood her not. Her ways were not
Like ours.
We understood her not, because she brought
Held tight in childish hands heaven's unknown flowers.

And, seeing that her flowers were not of earth
Indeed,
We pained her soul and mocked her simple mirth
And called her choicest flower a worthless weed.

Her choicest sweetest flower was perfect trust,
Sublime:
A flower whose roots rebel against earth's dust
And sickly sand and waste infertile slime.

312

This flower from heaven we wildly cast away:
We slew
Her childlike faith. What searching hand to-day
Shall find so sweet a flower where that plant grew?

We thought because the flower was pure and white
And frail,
Dreading excess of heat and ardent light,
That therefore was its scent of small avail.

But we know better now. The angels sought
And seized
What first in heaven by sinless hands was wrought:
With what we heeded not God's heart was pleased.

We would not have her flowers. She bore them back
To heaven:
Yet, passing, dropped one love-flower on the track
That we who slew might know ourselves forgiven.

313

AFTER WEARY YEARS

When after weary years the poet dies
His chant will still add colour to the skies
And paint the sea-line blue.
Pure souls shall purer be; the strong more strong.
Young hearts will leap with rapture at his song
To whom the world is new.

Never one shell upon the golden shore
But shall be brighter, freaked and tinted more
With rose-light, in that he
Watched with sad heart the slowly sinking sun
On many an evening when his toil was done
Over its parent sea.

For all his sorrow past, the future gains.
Its joys are deepest for his deepest pains.
It reaps the corn he sowed.—

314

A girl's eyes flash with light? That light has leapt
Straight from his song.—A weary soul has slept?
He lifted that heart's load.—

Through him the seasons smile, the blossoms bloom.
But he,—he sleeps so quiet in the tomb;
All round him spreads the dim
Night of the dead. Man he has raised indeed;
Laid the foundations of the future's creed;
But, just God, what of him?

315

TRUE KINGSHIP

Not those who hold earth's thrones are rightful lords,—
Propped up by brainless and subservient hordes,
And fenced by walls of steel.
These are not the true kings whose sovereign grace
Reveals God's kingship to the human race,
To whom the ages kneel.

The highest king of earth, who sways wide lands
And grips blind millions as with iron bands,
When once his foot is set
Upon the irreparable spirit-shore
May find himself a human being, no more—
May find his kingship pending even yet.

316

WOMAN, AND GENIUS

Not genius, genius needs.
The fiery touch of genius would exhaust
Genius; 'twas Margaret who conquered Faust.
Where genius fails, the simpler heart succeeds.

The heart that saves the heart
Wherethrough the wild poetic fire-throbs beat
Is not the heart wherethrough likewise there fleet
Strange fevering dreams of life, and dreams of Art.

The heart that saves is this—
The heart that represents in simplest guise
Woman. God's light must shine within her eyes;
God's love must hallow her undoubting kiss.

The simplest singlest heart,
This saves the poet,—not the complex brain,
But woman; simply she; and she again.
She, being herself, transcends all heights of Art.

317

LOVE'S TEACHING

Thy life has not been wasted. Thou hast taught
Truths beyond thought,
Sweet sacred truths beyond my dream, to me.
Truths not one other woman could have told
Thy lips unfold.
Blind was I. Thou hast taught my soul to see.

For this I owe
Thanks infinite. For this I love thee so,
That thou hast shown me woman's heart indeed,—
So fair and sweet,
So far beyond a poet's dreams of it,
So far above man's common thoughtless creed.

Ah! never think thy life is wasted, dear.
It blossoms here;
'Twill blossom tenfold when thy work is done,

318

And when beyond these earthly scenes we go
To grasp and know
Joys that on earth can only half be won.

God surely sent
Thy soul to teach love's stormless deep content
To me, thou haven of a poet's soul!
For this great end,
Love, sweetheart, lady, truest dearest friend,
He gave my spirit into thy control.

319

A WOMAN'S HEART

What gift is there that time cannot replace,
Not all its grace,
Not all the sundry gifts and dowers of time,—
A sweeter thing
Than all the seasons bring,
Than suns' and moons' and stars' gifts more sublime?

What gift is there which, if once flung away,
Nought can repay,
Not all the silent years of loss and grief,—
Not heaven indeed,
Nor any faith nor creed,
Nor summer's bloom, nor autumn's golden leaf?

What gift is there which God himself once deigned,
Since man complained
Of lonely life and of his daily task,
With his own hands
To bring the sorrowing lands
That groaned and grieved, yet knew not what to ask?

320

What gift is there beyond which lies a gloom
Deep as of tomb,—
No hope, no sunrise, should its light depart?
The gift is this—
A noble woman's kiss,
The perfect love of a good woman's heart.

321

THE STATUE

White, pure, superb, entrancing to the eye,
What living form can emulate or vie
With this divine Psyche?
Greek art is just the soul of God made clear,
Undraped,—his message to the human ear
Fresh from his burning lips eternally.

In the white perfect figure, nobly shaped,
Revealed for ever, beautiful, undraped,
Unmarred, unstained, divine,
There is a gospel hidden. If we will seek,
God preaches through the stately curve of cheek
And through each limb's inevitable line.

This is God's gospel written in white stone.—
Not on the Sinaitic Mount alone
He thundered, through the storm.
He speaks to mankind's spiritual sense
Through beauty, and through the mystery intense
That seems to robe an unrobed perfect form.

322

UNCONSCIOUS TEACHING

The thoughts that trouble poets vex not thee:
Thy purity
Lifts thee for ever to a higher air.
Above the mists of life and all its gloom
Thou see'st the bloom
In blue skies of the star-flowers clustered there.

We weary souls must struggle, ere we reap;
Toil, ere we sleep;
But thou without an effort enterest straight
The golden palace-doors that we unclose
By fierce wild blows;
At thy mere hand-touch opens wide the gate.

Thou art so close to heaven and God indeed
That book nor creed
Thou needest. Thine own soul is so divine

323

Thou findest ready-graved and written there
Commandments fair,
Pure law by law, and sacred line by line.

If I would learn of God, I come to thee
And then I see
Straightway what long strange epochs could not reach.
Through thee, so simply sweet, I apprehend
Life's high true end
And learn as thine eyes, all unconscious, teach.

324

RENUNCIATION

Man fears sometimes lest, giving up too much,
Things sweet to touch,
Things sweet to see, things lovely to possess,
He may, perhaps, proceed a step too fast,
And, yielding, cast
Upon God over-labour, over-stress.

“If I give up my dearest heart's desire,
Can God inspire
His world mine abnegation to repay?
I yield my snowdrop. Can the Lord disclose
A queenly rose
Whose glory of bloom may light my wandering way?

“Or am I casting overmuch of weight,
A care too great,
Upon the Maker of all stars and flowers?

325

I shrink from giving up this longed-for thing
Lest I should fling
On God the burden of dark anxious hours.

“Each joy we quit for God, each deed we do
Noble and true
For his sake, claims its final just reward.
Sometimes to pass through self-denial's gate
I hesitate,
Lest I increase sums owed me by the Lord.

“The countless orbs are his,—star beyond star
Careering far
Through regions infinite of purpling air.
Yet can God cash me my one small star-cheque,
Or will it wreck
The starlit bank of God, presented there?”

326

BEYOND, EVER BEYOND

Beyond the outline of the furthest star
It may be, new star-globes and sun-globes are,
Full of new life and force.
Past these again new systems, and past these
Eternal ever-blossoming galaxies
That urge through the blue depths their fiery course.

In each star human beings there may be,
And forests full of many a giant tree,
And ardent great new flowers,
And tides gigantic, plunging through the deep
Of oceans beating on vast shores asleep
And dull and reckless of the waves like ours.

The sun itself, our sun, hurls from its heart
Titanic flames aloft. They upward dart,
Hundreds of miles on high.

327

They shoot, red-flickering, through the enormous space
So tall they almost lick the next star's face
And almost traverse the unmeasured sky.

There may be stars that sway as many moons
As we see stars. The human weak thought swoons
Before the space profound.
Our sun (and we too) may be whirling fast
Around some unseen sun,—careering past
Its unseen golden orb without a sound.

All stars we see may be but one small part
Of wide creation. All perhaps may dart,
All star-ships in full sail,
Around some central sun; and this, maybe,
Round other suns to all eternity;
Sun beyond sun, till brain and eye-ball fail.

Gods behind gods, vast rulers, there may be:
Some gods to whom is given to rule the sea,
And some to rule the air.
Each star may have a ruler, and each sun
A ruler; or huge depths may own but one
Monarch, whose power no rival thrones impair.

328

Beyond Christ, God.—And, beyond God again,
New Gods of more Titanic heart and reign:
Beyond these we may find
New star-gods, ruling depths we cannot see:
God behind God to all eternity,
Just as each star suggests a star behind.

The Ruler of this earth, this speck in space,
May be subservient to the sun-god's face,
A tributary lord.
Account he renders often, it may be,
Of his great dealings with our land and sea
To the higher God, for judgment or reward.

The God of the gold-tressed gigantic sun
May be a mere proconsul-god to one
Who rules beyond his gaze:
God behind God, and dream beyond our dream,
Till the stern eyes of far-off rulers gleam
So faint, they seem like stars in the sea-haze.

329

THE BORDER-BATTLE

Yes, weary it is. The days are full of sighing.—
Close to our hands the remedy is lying,
The cure for sorrow and care.
Stretch out thine hand. The poison-draught is ready.
See how below that bridge the dark waves eddy!
Are not sleep's lips of all lips the most fair?—

So pleads the inner voice with dangerous pleading.
And yet the soul is great which, rent and bleeding,
Lives on and on and on.
“Great souls are strong to live.” Great past our knowing
Is the brave soul who lives, when hope seems going
Where all youth's joys and rainbow-dreams have gone.

When hopes and joys and friends have crossed the border,
Most great is he who, following out God's order,
This side the boundary stands

330

Safeguarding their retreat with sword undying
And mighty heart, and deathless self-relying
Strong fearless hands.

As yet no right is ours to cross life's limit.
The stream runs there. We may not ford or swim it,
Nor follow our friends, nor cry.
Silent we stand, our faces lifeward turning:
We may not yet indulge the soul's deep yearning:
We must not die.

The great soul trusts. The great soul waits, in quiet,
Though round him rings the unceasing border-riot
Of the red steely storm.
He waits till through the dawn, or through the gloaming,
He hears the tramp of the relief-guard coming
And sees their Leader's form.

331

THE VOYAGE OF DEATH

Just as the traveller, putting forth from land
At sunset, sees the waste on either hand
Widen, and sees the shore
Slowly diminish, till the last land-breeze
Brings the last scent of thyme and scent of trees,—
One faint waft, then no more:

As the night darkens slowly, and the coast
Becomes a faint far shadow, while the host
Of waters wails around;
As still the darkness deepens, till the sail
Stands out alone against the sky—one pale
Ghost on the black background:

As next the gold stars one by one appear,
While the moon dominates with silver sphere
The darkness wide and deep;

332

As we forget the flower-delights of land,
Holding new star-companions by the hand,
While worlds awake from sleep:

So life starts from green shores and early vales
Full of the scent of thyme, and rich with tales
Of youthful fairy-lore;
So life trends outward, till the deepening blue
Wild waters thrill the heart with laughter new
That answers sail or oar.

So life steers onward, till the ghostly land
Glimmers far-off, while strips of yellow sand
Shine faintly through the haze;
Till on a sudden stars and moon seem close
To the white sail, and sea-wind round us blows,
Not land-wind of the bays.

Then first with awe we face the silent night;
But afterward with solemn deep delight,
Delight that ever grows:
For love seems nearer. If our souls give ear,
Love speaks through starlit waves with voice more clear
Than through the sunlit rose.

333

Love still is with us in the lonely night;
Though stars and moon and waters and the white
Sail are our only friends.
Love still pervades this awe-inspiring realm,
And still Love's hand is at the vessel's helm,
And still Love's song ascends.

Then, as the sense of earth-life fades away,
Glimmers a faint pure line of distant grey
In front: the dawn is near—
The golden morning in whose ardent rays
A new land, with new cliffs and green-blue bays,
Will make its outline clear.

The middle sea is death. The morning-land,
Full of flower-scents and rich with golden sand
Along its sunlit marge,
Is the new morning-life towards which we haste,
Travelling across the moonlit landless waste,
The flowerless meads and large.

Death's agony, its central pang, is this—
The old thyme-scent upon life's shores to miss
Ere we can trust the new

334

Eternal sweet illimitable grand
Wild waste of water,—ere the morning-land
Lifts its faint peaks of blue.

This is the agony. But trust the deep;
The stars and waves that through their haunted sleep
Murmur and chant and pray.
Then sweeter than life's cliffs with all their bloom
Shall be death's waves, for just beyond their gloom
Lies unimagined day.

335

THE DEPTH OF HELL

Where heaven exists, there must be also hell.—
When royal Guinevere succumbed and fell,
O singer of Arthurian days,
Was there not scope for agony profounder
Than if no love passing man's love had crowned her
And led her steps through sunlit ways?

In this one point, O poet whose golden tongue
Has made the grey-haired far-off epochs young
And filled them with immortal bloom—
In this one point thou hast failed. Thou hast drawn love's magic,
But not love's dark wherethrough there flash the tragic
Unearthly lights of hell and doom.

A rose once fallen, and smutched and soiled and stained,
Is sadder than an oak-leaf sturdy-veined
That falls, and little loss is there.

336

Just in proportion to a woman's sweetness
Is her great downfall's rigorous completeness,
When hell breathes round with burning air.

The inconceivable and hopeless change!
The knowledge that, far as the eye can range,
No pitying star will intervene:
The bitter sense that God has here no power;
That the mad deed of one bewildered hour
Is ceaseless, since it once has been:

The keen most clear inevitable sense
That pain most deep, or sorrow most intense,
Can never cleanse man's touch away:
The passionate grasp of this one fact undying—
That she in Lancelot's arms one night was lying;
That in his arms again she lay:

This knowledge would rise up till time had end.
On either soul this knowledge would descend
As the storm lowers on mountain land.
The very Maker of the stars and seas,
Who can uplift and change and govern these,
Could not remove the mark of Lancelot's hand.

337

This is the agony, the hell-deep wrong;
And this, O great true poet, this thy song
Softens and veils and half conceals:—
The agony that through the day and night
As sombre vast eternity took flight
Would still stalk close at a doomed Arthur's heels.

The agony whose changeless curse, it seems,
Not God nor Christ can move—not even in dreams:
The agony which grasps with grim
Portentous grip that those lips kissed again
Would never be the wife's. They would retain
The touch of Lancelot, the savour of him.

338

THE ETERNAL DEATH

There is no death.—The death-deep awful gloom
We see and dread
Is not the real invincible fog-fume
Round the death-bed.

There is no death, no darkness. All is light.
The deepest gloom
Is not the murk impenetrable night
Around the tomb.

There is a deeper darkness than the dark
Where no stars beam:
A blackness where not one most faint star-spark
Can ever gleam.

Wrong-doing is death, and this alone is death.
Death is sent here
That we may shiver at his ice-cold breath
And, shuddering, fear:

339

But fear not him, but his similitude—
The death more deep
Than ever mortal dreamed, the death more rude
Than deathlike sleep.

The death we, and we only, can create;
The death we bring
By fraud and selfishness and wrath and hate
And misdoing.

This is the eternal death. The other death
Is just a change,
A sudden dreamlike passage underneath
A process strange.

And all that gives it horror, steeps in gloom
Earth's golden springs,
Is but a symbol of the eternal doom
Wrong-doing brings.

340

MAN AND GOD

Far through the stars the human heart can reach
And mark the waves on some celestial beach
Breaking, along the night.
Our human deeds affect the furthest stars—
Change to blood-red the leaves in iron Mars,
Or change the colours of the rings and bars
That Saturn bears, storm-bright.

Our actions bound before us into space:
Not one far heavenly spectral dwelling-place
Lambent amid the gloom
But burns with deeper or with fiercer hue
For the misdeeds and sins of me or you;
The comet-birds who haunt the enormous blue
Heaven-sea, our crimes displume.

341

The whole is one.—A single act of will
(God cannot stay it) mounts the purple hill,
Climbs the stupendous night,
And, having struggled up the heavenly stair
And passed right through the star-impeded air,
Impinging on the farthest star-cliff there
Fringes its base with white.

Such air-waves are our deeds. God cannot stay
The airy course they take. From day to day
We mould all things anew.
One woman ruined in an English town
Alters the fashion of the dainty crown
Some far star-blossom bears, and sends a moan
For leagues across the blue.

The solitude is peopled with our deeds.—
Not words and thoughts, and hopes and fears, and creeds,
Not these make history grow.
Our actions build the stars, and make all space
Fit either for the high God's dwelling-place
Or a vast dungeon where our own disgrace
Fiendlike tramps to and fro.

342

The slightest noble deed is felt to-day,
Though it took place in far-off ages grey.
The woman who first clung
To the wild dream of woman's purity
Passed to the dark unhonoured; and yet she,
None other, saith to her sisters “Ye are free”
To-day, and speaks our tongue.

The singer hidden in the years unknown
Who first had eyes to see and soul to groan
For woman unredeemed
Passed,—yet his soul is seen in woman's eyes
To-day, when through them gleams the light of skies
Pure, sweet, unstained, unsullied. In like wise
They dream, as once he dreamed.

One royal act, one regal stroke of will,
Can quite remake the universe,—can thrill
The farthest bounds of space.
The seas are only blue as we design;
Ours is the sketch, though God's is the outline;
We grant their fruitage to the corn and vine;
We mould and shape the race.

343

And our immortal life is in our hand
Likewise. Fate hath no force that can withstand
The human force of will.
God gives the power to wrench the bolts aside
And force an entrance large, an entrance wide,
Into the deathless house death will provide:
Death has no power to kill.

God reaches us, and rules us. And we reach
The Lord of all the stars. Our broken speech
Can move the King of kings.
Not only we are governed; we affect
God by our will, and force him to reject
This or that plan. We force him to select
New modes and motive-springs.

We act upon the stately will of God;
Force it sometimes to choose another road.
We, gnats who dance in space,
Can none the less affect the central Power:
We, creatures whose life lasts one short sweet hour,
We, more ephemeral far than the June-flower,
Can stir God's dwelling-place.

344

We can so rule our daily devious way
That in the end the Lord cannot but say,
“This soul must pass the gloom:
New labour waits beneath another sun
This pale ephemeral, whose one life is done.”
This life is ended, when the right is won
To disregard the tomb.

345

GOD AND MAN

Our minor daily acts are in our hand
To do, or not to do. Our deeds are planned
Slowly from day to day.
We fix the hour for meeting with a friend.
We bring our mapped-out labour to an end.
We speak. The months obey.

The human will is free. Yes, free indeed!
Along its woodland path it can proceed,
Dealing with wood-side flowers.
It gathers here a pink anemone
And there a blue-bell, bluer than the sea
In its most sunlit hours.

The human will appoints its daily track;
Climbs the steep mountain,—loiters, or turns back;
The human heart is proud:

346

It says, “I will, or will not do this thing;”
It says, “I will see Venice in the spring:”
Its laugh is long and loud.

“This woman I will love,—or here abstain:”
“Here I will yield me to sweet passion's reign,—
There exercise control:”
“To-day dark hair allures me,—but to-night
Strange tresses golden-pure or auburn-bright
May magnetise my soul.”

Ah! so God lets the human spirit dream.
He lets us revel in the silver gleam
Of the electric light:
Then on a sudden through the night's blue damp
Flashes his heavenly mountain-shadowed lamp,
His moon, full on our sight.

He watches us illume pale town on town
When dying sunset steals away its crown
Of colours from the air;
He marks our glow-worm lamps through street on street
Crawl slowly one by one, with flashing feet,
Till legions glitter there:

347

He watches through the night the yellow gas
Flicker behind the dust-streaked London glass;
He waits till all is done,—
Then brings his single golden-armoured knight
To quench ten million lustres with one light,
Parades his conquering sun.

He lets the human will create one flower;
He lets us rear geraniums for one hour,
Red petals and green stalks:
He lets the human will and human hand
Adorn a window-frame with bloom well planned,
Or edge the garden walks:

And then he spreads the countless tropic bloom
As if in mockery through the tropic gloom
Of forests dark and dim,
Weird places never pierced by human eye,
Designing all flower-souls to satisfy
With the lone sight of him.

The human will maps out futurity.
“I love this maid. To-morrow she shall be
For ever mine, I deem!”

348

God at the very altar stands austere,
Saying, in tones that thrill the human ear,
“Your marriage is a dream.”

God binds what we unbind, and setteth free
What we would join.—We marry. Straightway he
Annuls the marriage-bond.
What we would seal as final, he unseals:
Removes the mist of marriage, and reveals
Limitless heights beyond.

We plan—he finishes: commence—he ends.
He takes the old, and gives our hearts new friends.
He lifts the gloomy night
Far from our gaze, and fills the sky and air
With morning's golden rapture, and the fair
Song of the new-born light.

Again, when we are weary of the day,
He hurls the burning ceaseless sun away
And hangs in heaven the moon:
He spreads across the solemn skies his peace
Nocturnal,—darkens daylit towers and trees
That stars may gem his throne.

349

We make our strange machines, our doll-like toys:
God's hand is stretched across the heavens, and buoys
The stars whose wild prows race.
We mould and shape our sculpture, wrought of stone:
But God's triumphant sculptor-hand alone
Could mould the model's grace.

Our gods and heroes, full of strength and force,
Ride down the road of time, that echoing course,
With sword and shield and plume:
Full of heroic fire of life are they;
Souls reverenced by the race until to-day;
Vast epochs they illume.

We mould our leaders. We construct all these:
Napoleon, Frederick, Ajax, Hercules,
The Cæsars,—that wild line.
But God constructed, at an epoch's close,
The heart of Christ, and filled it with repose
Ineffably divine.

We plant one tree, and nurture it with care.
In all stars God can make all seasons bear
Their fruited stores of grain.

350

Our tree has withered? Lo! a million springs
Are bringing forth their green-leaved fosterlings
Beneath his bounteous rain.

We reap one field in autumn. Lo! God stands
And reaps the far skies with immortal hands;
The stars are as his sheaves:
And the great comets plunging through the night,
Whirling through ceaseless space with wild delight,
Glean the lost stars he leaves.

We toil all day, and through the midnight hours:
We guard our lands with grey grim castle towers:
We mark our frontier line.
God sends his wild snow-warriors in the dark:
Our lands are like the sea, without an ark—
White wastes, from pine to pine!

Our mortal armies meet. We deck them out—
The glittering wrestlers close with curse and shout;
Guns flash,—the quick swords gleam.
But lo! God's moon beholds the hosts at night:
Their strength is withered, and their lordly might
Has faded like a dream.

351

God's moon is still superb above the plain;
But on the ground red heaps of cloth remain,—
Red, mixed with green and blue.
No eye can tell the Russian from the Turk;
The Southern sword is as the Highland dirk,
Wet with the same strange dew.

All love, all life, God rules. We rule a part:
But he with vigilant and ceaseless heart
Observes and sways the whole.—
A day's delight we plan. The vast surprise
Of death he springs on us before the eyes
Of our astonished soul.

We hold the right to put to shameful death
One crime-clad soul, to stay the mortal breath
Of one man,—this is ours.
But God? He can with one storm-blast unmake
The living universe,—as we can shake
One dewdrop from the flowers.

University of Virginia Library

VII. Vol VII: FROM DAWN TO SUNSET

PRELUDE

DAWN TO SUNSET

ELEVEN YEARS AGO

LYRICS AND BALLADS

I. IN AUTUMN

II “THE BRIGHT YOUNG DAYS”

III. THE LAND EVERLASTING

IV. AUTUMN WAILINGS

V. THE TEARLESS DAYS

VI. CHANGELESS LOVE

VII. PAIN'S CONSTANCY

VIII. “IF ONLY THOU ART TRUE!”

IX. A DREAM OF A FLOWER

X CONSUMMATION

XI. BLACKBERRY PICKING

XII. RED LEAVES AND GREEN LEAVES

XIII. SISTER ROSES

XIV. SPRING AND AUTUMN

XV. SHOREHAM CHURCH

XVI. A BALLAD OF WINTER

XVII. THE GOLDEN ISLES

XVIII. THE GOLDEN CARP

XIX. AUTUMN LEAVES

XX. HARROW HILL

XXI. CHURCH-BELLS

XXII. THE VOICE OF THE RIVER

XXIII. LIFE'S LAST GIFT

HYMN

[When our bitter foes surround us]

HYMN

[Through the foaming white-lipped surges]

O MOON!

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

QUESTIONINGS

I.

II.

“AND YET!”

“HALF-SEEN!”

SUMMER'S DREAM

TWO SONNETS

I. REPRESENTATIVE SOUNDS

II. REPRESENTATIVE COLOURS

THE LAST FAREWELL

ON THE DEATH OF DR. CUMMING

HARROW v. ETON AT LORD'S

1881

VENUS AND THE EVANGELISTS

ISOLINA

Lines Written on again Reading an old Romance

TO THE CZAR

POETRY AND SCIENCE

OLD LETTERS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

SONNET TO ERNEST BIRCH

TO SEPTEMBER

AN EASTERN YEARNING

THIS TIME LAST YEAR

Lines written in Memory of Philip Bourke Marston

FRUITLESS CREATION

I. THE FIRST STAR

II. THE LAST STAR

III. THE SECOND PARADISE

IV. THE SECOND FALL

I.
REPRESENTATIVE SOUNDS

II.
REPRESENTATIVE COLOURS

I.
LOVE, AND DREAMS OF LOVE

II.
SWEETER

III.
LOVE'S FINAL POWERS