QUATRAINS
I The Love Chase
On, towards the purlieus of impossible space,
From Death, enamoured, Life, capricious, flies:
Communicated sorrow of his face
Freezing her ever backward burning eyes.
II The Garden of Days
Man's days are planted as a flower-bed
With labor's lily and the rose of folly:
Beneath grief's cypress, pale, uncomforted,
The phantom fungus blooms of melancholy.
III Faith and Facts
With starry gold Night still endorses what
Man's soul hath written, guessing at the skies:
Day on Night's scribble drops a fiery blot,
And 'thwart the writing scrawls, “The lie of lies.”
IV Hell and Heaven
And it may be that, seamed with iron scars,
One in vast Hell oft lifts fierce eyes above,
And one, inviolate as God's high stars,
Looks from far Heaven, sighing: “Alas, O love!”
V Alchemy
Into her heart's young crucible Life threw
Affliction first, then Faith,—by which is meant
Hope and Humility:—Love touched the two,
And, lo! the golden blessing of Content.
VI Trial
As oft as Hope weighed, coaxing, on this arm,
On that Despair dashed heavily his fist:
He knew no way out of Grief's night and storm,
Until a child, named Effort, came and kissed.
VII Nightmare
Some obscene drug in her dull draught Sleep gave,
For dead I lay, yet heard a man-faced beast
Dig, dig with wolfish fingers in my grave,
With horrible laughter to a horrible feast.
VIII Clairvoyance
Some few may pierce the phantom fogs, that veil
Life's stormy seas, into futurity,
And see the Flying Dutchman's ominous sail,
Portentous of dark things that are to be.
IX The Flying Dutchman
Through hissing scud, mad mist, and roaring rain,
On thundering seas, I see her drive and drive,
Crowding wild canvas 'gainst the hurricane,
Her demon ports with glow-worm lamps alive.
X Destiny
Within the volume of the universe
With worlds she writes irrevocable laws:
From everlasting unto everlasting hers
The evolutions of effect and cause.
XI Fame, the Mermaid
A mirror, brilliant as a beautiful star,
She lifts and sings to her own loveliness:
Not till her light and song have lured him far
Does man behold the lie he did not guess.
XII The Hours
With stars and dew and sunlight in their hair,
They come, the daughters of the Day, who saith:
“The gifts my children bring are rest and care,
Of which the last is Life, the first is Death.”
XIII Despair
So sick at heart, so weary of the sun,
In her sad halls the Soul sits desolate,
Her Hope surrendered to Oblivion,
Whose coal-black charger neighs outside the gate.
XIV The Misanthrope
Shut in with its own selfishness his soul
Sees,—as a screech-owl in a dead tree might,
Blinking avoided daylight through one hole,—
The white world blackened by his own dull sight.
XV The Hun
On splendid infamies—a thousand years
Heaven tolerated—like a Word that trod
Incarnate of the Law, vast wrath and tears
In pagan eyes, behold the Scourge of God!
XVI Greece
The godlike sister of all lands she stands
Before the World, to whom she gave her heart,
Still testifying with degenerate hands
Her bygone glory in enduring art.
XVII Egypt
With ages weighed as with the pyramids
And Karnac wrecks, still—out of Sphinx-like eyes
Beneath the apathetic lotus-lids—
With Memnon moan her granite heart defies.
XVIII Poe
Wild wandering witch-lights and, dark-wing'd above,
A raven; and, within a sculptured tomb,
Beside the corpse of Beauty and of Love,
Song's everlasting-lamp that lights the gloom.
XIX Hawthorne
Dim lands and dimmer walls, where Magic slips
A couch of velvet sleep beneath Romance:
Where Speculation, Prince-like, kneels; his lips
Fearing to break the long-unbroken trance.
XX Emerson
Our New-World Chrysostom, whose golden tongue
Through Nature preached philosophy and truth:
Old intimate of loveliness he sung,
Wise and instructing with the lips of youth.
XXI Jaafer the Vizier
Lutes, odorous torches, slaves and dancing girls
In gardens by a moonlit waterside,
And one whose wise lips scatter words like pearls—
Behold the true Haroun whom naught may hide!
