The complete poems of S. Weir Mitchell

Christmas! Christmas! merry Christmas! rang the bells. O God of grace!
In the stillness of the death-room motionless I kept my place,
While beneath my eyes a wanness came upon the little face,
And an empty smile that stung me, as the pallor grew apace.
Then, as if from some far distance, spake a voice: “The child is dead.”
“Dead?” I cried. “Is God not good? What thing accursed is that you said?”
Swift I searched their eyes of pity, swaying, bowed, and all my soul,
Shrunken as a hand had crushed it, crumpled like a useless scroll
Read and done with, passed from sorrows: only with me lingered yet
Some dim sense of easeful comfort in the glad leave to forget.

260

But again life's scattered fragments, memories of joy and woe,
Tremulously came to oneness, as a storm-torn lake may grow
Quiet, winning back its pictures, when the wild winds cease to blow.
As if called for God's great audit came a vision of my years,
Broken gleams of youth and girlhood, all the woman's love and tears.
Marvelling, myself I saw as one another sees, and smiled,
Crooning o'er my baby dolls,—part a mother, part a child;
Then, half sorry, ceased to wonder why I left my silent brood,
Till the lessoning years went by me, and the instinct, love-renewed,
Stirred again life's stronger fibre, and were mine twain living things;
Bone of my bone! flesh of my flesh! Who on earth a title brings
Flawless as this mother-title, free from aught of mortal stain,
Innocent and pure possession, double-born of joy and pain?
Oh, what wonder these could help me, set me laughing, though I sobbed
As they drew my very heart out, and the laden breasts were robbed!
Tender buds of changeful pleasure came as come the buds of May,
Trivial, wondrous, unexpected, blossoming from day to day.

261

Ah! the clutch of tendril-fingers, that with nature's cunning knew
So to coil in sturdy grapple round the stem from which they grew.
Shall a man this joy discover? How the heart-wine to the brain
Rushed with shock of bliss when, startled, first I won this simple gain!
How I mocked those seeking fingers, eager for their earliest toy,
Telling none my new-found treasure! Miser of the mother's joy,
Quick I caught the first faint ripple, answering me with lip and eyes,
As I stooped with mirthful purpose, keen to capture fresh replies;
Oh, the pretty wonder of it, when was born the art to smile,
Or the new, gay trick of laughter filled my eyes with tears the while,—
Helpful tears, love's final language, when the lips no more can say,
Tears, like kindly prophets, warning of another, darker day.
Thus my vision lost its gladness, and I stood on life's dim strand,
Watching where a little love-lark drifted slowly from the land;
For again the bells seemed ringing Christmas o'er the snow of dawn,
And my dreaming memory hurt me with a hot face, gray and drawn,
And with small hands locked in anguish. Ah! those days of helpless pain!

262

Mine the mother's wrathful sorrow. Ah! my child, hadst thou been Cain,
Father of the primal murder, black with every hideous thought,
Cruel were the retribution; for, alas! what good is wrought
When the very torture ruins all the fine machine of thought?
So, with reeling brain I questioned, while the fevered cheek grew white,
And at last I seemed to pass with him, released, to death's dark night.
Seraph voices whispered round me. “God,” they said, “hath set our task,—
Thou to question, we to answer: fear not; ask what thou wouldst ask.”
Wildly beat my heart. Thought only, regnant, held its sober pace,
Whilst, a wingèd mind, I wandered in the bleak domain of space.
Then I sought and seeing marvelled at the mystery of time,
Where beneath me rolled the earth-star in its first chaotic slime,
As bewildering ages passing with their cyclic changes came,
Heaving land and 'whelming waters, ice and fierce volcanic flame,
Sway and shock of tireless atoms, pulsing with the throb of force,
Whilst the planet, rent and shaken, fled upon its mighty course.

263

Last, with calm of wonder hushed, I saw amid the surging strife
Rise the first faint stir of being and the tardy morn of life,—
Life in countless generations. Speechless, mercilessly dumb,
Swept by ravage of disaster, tribe on tribe in silence come,
Till the yearning sense found voices, and on hill, and shore, and plain,
Dreary from the battling myriads rose the birthright wail of pain.
God of pity! Son of sorrows! Wherefore should a power unseen
Launch on years of needless anguish this great agonized machine?
Was Himself who willed this torment but a slave to law self-made?
Or had some mad angel-demon here, unchecked and undismayed,
Leave to make of earth a Job; until the cruel game was played
Free to whirl the spinning earth-toy where his despot forces wrought,
While he watched each sense grow keener as the lifted creature bought
With the love-gift added sorrow, and there came to man's estate
Will, the helpless; thought, the bootless; all the deathward war with fate?
Had this lord of trampled millions joy or grief, when first the mind.

264

Awful prize of contests endless, rose its giant foes to bind;
When his puppet tamed the forces that had helped its birth to breed,
And with growth of wisdom master, trained them to its growing need;
Last, upon the monster turning, on the serpent form of Pain,
Cried, “Bring forth no more in anguish;” with the arrows of the brain
Smote this brute thing that no use had save to teach him to refrain
When earth's baser instincts tempted, and the better thought was vain?
Then my soul one harshly answered, “Thou hast seen the whole of earth,
All its boundless years of misery, yea, its gladness and its mirth,
Yet thou hast a life created! Hadst thou not a choice? Why cast
Purity to life's mad chances, where defeat is sure at last?”
Low I moaned, “My tortured baby!” and a gentler voice replied,
“One alone thy soul can answer,—this, this only, is denied.
Yet take counsel of thy sadness. Should God give thy will a star
Freighted with eternal pleasure, free from agony and war,
Wouldst thou wish it? Think! Time is not for the souls who roam in space.
Speak! Thy will shall have its way. Be mother of one joyous race.

265

Choose! Yon time-worn world beneath thee thou shalt people free from guilt.
There nor pain nor death shall ruin, never there shall blood be spilt.”
Then I trembled, hesitating, for I saw its beauty born,
Saw a Christ-like world of beings where no beast by beast was torn,
Where the morrows bred no sorrows, and the gentle knew not scorn.
“Yet,” I said, “if life have meaning, and man must be, what shall lift
These but born for joy's inaction, these who crave no added gift?
Let the world you bid me people hurl forever through the gloom,
Tenantless, a blasted record of some huge funereal doom,
Sad with unremembered slaughter, but a cold and lonely tomb.”

Deep and deeper grew the stillness, and I knew how vain my quest.
Not by God's supremest angel is that awful secret guessed.
Yet with dull reiteration, like the pendulum's dead throb,
Beat my heart; a moaning infant, all my body seemed to sob,
And a voice like to my baby's called to me across the night
As the darkness fell asunder, and I saw a wall of light

266

Barred with crucificial shadows, whence a weary wind did blow
Shuddering. I felt it pass me heavy with its freight of woe.
Said a voice, “Behold God's dearest; also these no answer know.
These be they who paid in sorrow for the right to bid thee hear.
Had their lives in ease been cradled, had they never known a tear,
Feebly had their psalms of warning fallen upon the listening ear.
God the sun is God the shadow; and where pain is, God is near.
Take again thy life and use it with a sweetened sense of fear;
God is Father! God is Mother! Regent of a growing soul,
Free art thou to grant mere pleasure, free to teach it uncontrol.
Time is childhood! larger manhood bides beyond life's sunset hour,
Where far other foes are waiting; and with ever gladder power,
Still the lord of awful choice, O striving creature of the sod,
Thou shalt learn that imperfection is the noblest gift of God!
For they mock his ample purpose who but dream, beyond the sky,
Of a heaven where will may slumber, and the trained decision die
In the competence of answer found in death's immense reply.”

267

Then my vision passed, and weeping, lo! I woke, of death bereft;
At my breast the baby brother, yonder there the dead I left.
For my heart two worlds divided: his, my lost one's; his, who pressed
Closer, waking all the mother, as he drew the aching breast,
While twain spirits, joy and sorrow, hovered o'er my plundered nest.

Newport, October 1891.

OF DEATH AND OF ONE WHO FELL ON THE WAY

Death's but one more to-morrow. Thou art gray
With many a death of many a yesterday.
O yearning heart that lacked the athlete's force
And, stumbling, fell upon the beaten course,
And looked, and saw with ever glazing eyes
Some lower soul that seemed to win the prize!
Lo, Death, the just, who comes to all alike,
Life's sorry scales of right anew shall strike.
Forth, through the night, on unknown shores to win
The peace of God unstirred by sense of sin!
There love without desire shall, like a mist
At evening precious to the drooping flower,
Possess thy soul in ownership, and kissed
By viewless lips, whose touch shall be a dower
Of genius and of winged serenity,

268

Thou shalt abide in realms of poesy,
Where soul hath touch of soul, and where the great
Cast wide to welcome thee joy's golden gate.
Freeborn to untold thoughts that age on age
Caressed sweet singers in their sacred sleep,
Thy soul shall enter on its heritage
Of God's unuttered wisdom. Thou shalt sweep
With hand assured the ringing lyre of life,
Till the fierce anguish of its bitter strife,
Its pain, death, discord, sorrow, and despair,
Break into rhythmic music. Thou shalt share
The prophet-joy that kept forever glad
God's poet-souls when all a world was sad.
Enter and live! Thou hast not lived before;
We were but soul-cast shadows. Ah, no more
The heart shall bear the burdens of the brain;
Now shall the strong heart think, nor think in vain.
In the dear company of peace, and those
Who bore for man life's utmost agony,
Thy soul shall climb to cliffs of still repose,
And see before thee lie Time's mystery,
And that which is God's time, Eternity;
Whence sweeping over thee dim myriad things,
The awful centuries yet to be, in hosts
That stir the vast of heaven with formless wings,
Shall cast for thee their shrouds, and, like to ghosts,
Unriddle all the past, till, awed and still,
Thy soul the secret hath of good and ill.

1889.

269

OF THE REMEMBERED DEAD

There is no moment when our dead lose power;
Unsignalled, unannounced they visit us.
Who calleth them I know not. Sorrowful,
They haunt reproachfully some venal hour
In days of joy, or when the world is near,
And for a moment scourge with memories
The money-changers of the temple-soul.
In the dim space between two gulfs of sleep,
Or in the stillness of the lonely shore,
They rise for balm or torment, sweet or sad,
And most are mine where, in the kindly woods,
Beside the childlike joy of summer streams,
The stately sweetness of the pine hath power
To call their kindred comforting anew.
Use well thy dead. They come to ask of thee
What thou hast done with all this buried love,
The seed of purer life? Or has it fallen unused
In stony ways and brought thy life no gain?
Wilt thou with gladness in another world
Say it has grown to forms of duty done
And ruled thee with a conscience not thine own?
Another world! How shall we find our dead?
What forceful law shall bring us face to face?
Another world! What yearnings there shall guide?
Will love souls twinned of love bring near again?
And that one common bond of duty held
This living and that dead, when life was theirs?
Or shall some stronger soul, in life revered,
Bring both to touch, with nature's certainty,

270

As the pure crystal atoms of its kind
Draws into fellowship of loveliness?

1889.

E. D. M.

There is a heart I knew in other days,
Not ever far from any one day's thought;
One pure as are the purest. All the years
Of battle or of peace, of joy or grief,
Take him no further from me. Oftentimes,
When the sweet tenderness of some glad girl
Disturbs with tears, full suddenly I know
It is because one memory ever dear
Is matched a moment with its living kin.
Or when at hearing of some gallant deed
My throat fills, and I may not dare to say
The quick praise in me, then I know, alas!
'T is by this dear dead nobleness my soul is stirred.
He lived, he loved, he died. Brief epitaph!
What hour of duty in the long grim wards
Poisoned his life, I know not. Painfully
He sickened, yearning for the strife of War
That went its thunderous way unhelped of him;
And then he died. A little duty done;
A little love for many, much for me,
And that was all beneath this earthly sun.

1889.

271

PAINED UNTO DEATH

E. K. M.

One life I knew was a psalm, a terrible psalm of pain,
Dark with disaster of torment, body and brain
Racked as if God were not, and hope a dream
Some demon wrought to bid this soul blaspheme
All life's remembered sweetness. “Peace, be still,”
I hear her spirit whisper. “His the will
That from some unseen bow of purpose sped
Thy sorrow and my torture.” God of dread!
The long sad years that justify the dead,
The long sad years at last interpreted:
Serene as clouds that over stormy seas
At sunset rise with mystery of increase,
One with the passionate deep that gave them birth,
Her gentled spirit rose on wings of peace,
And was and was not of this under earth.

1890.

THE WHOLE CREATION GROANETH

Art glad with gladness of youth in thy veins,
In thy hands, for the spending, earth's joy and its gains?
Lo! winged with storm shadows the torturers come,
And to-night, or to-morrow, thy lips shall be dumb,
Thy hands wet with pain-thrills, thy nerves, that were strung
To fineness of sense by earth's pleasure, be wrung

272

With pangs the beast knows not, nor he who in tents
Lives lone in the desert, and knoweth not whence
The bread of the morrow. Pain like to a mist
Goeth up from the earth, and is lost, and none wist
Why ever it cometh, why ever it waits
In the heart of our loves, like a foe in our gates.
Lo! summer and sunshine are over the land,—
Who marshalled yon billows? what wind of command
Drives ever their merciless march on the strand?
Thus, dateless, relentless, the children of strife
None have seen, on the sun-lighted beaches of life
March ever the ravening billows of pain.
O heart that is breaking, go ask of the brain
If aught of God's spending is squandered in vain?
Yea, where is the sunshine of centuries dead?
Yea, where are the raindrops of yesterday shed?
God findeth anew his lost light in the force
That holdeth the world on its resolute course,
And surely, as surely the madness of pain
Shall pass into wisdom, and come back again
An angel of courage if thou art the one
That knoweth to deal with the lightnings that stun
To blindness the many. A thousand shall fall
By the waysides of life, and in helplessness call
For the death-alms which nature gives freely to all;
And one, like the jewel, shall break the fierce light
That blindeth thy vision, and flash through the night
The colors that read us its meaning aright.

1890.

273

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

THE CENTURION

A dark cell of the Circus Maximus. The Centurion and his child.

“Father! father; hold me closer. Are they lions that I hear?
Once beside the Syrian desert where we camped I heard them near
While our servants made us music; and there 's music now. 'T was night,
And 't is very dark here, father. There we had the stars for light.
Father, father! that was laughter, and the noise of many hands.
Why is it they make so merry? Shall we laugh soon? On the sands
How you smiled to see my terror! ‘What,’ you said, ‘A Roman maid
Tremble in the Legion's camp! A Roman maiden and afraid!’

“Hush! Who called? Who called me? Mother! Surely that was mother's voice.”
But the gray centurion, trembling, murmured, “Little one, rejoice!”
Yet a single moan of sorrow broke the guard his manhood set,
While the sweetness of her forehead with a storm of tears was wet.

274

And he answered, as she questioned, “That was but the rain God sends
To the flowers he loves,”—then lower,—“Death and I are friends.”

“Father, father, now 't is quiet. Was it mother? I am cold.
Who, I wonder, feeds my carp? who, I wonder, at the fold
Combs my lambs? who prunes my roses? Think you they will keep us long
From the sunshine? Hark, the lions! Ah! they must be fierce and strong!”

“Peace, my daughter. Soon together we shall walk through gardens fair,
Where the lilies psalms are singing, and the roses whisper prayer.”
“Who will bring us to the garden?” “Christ! Thou wilt not hear him call;
Suddenly wide doors shall open; on thy eyes the sun shall fall;
Thou shalt see God's lions, waiting, and, above, a living wall.
Yea, ten thousand faces waiting, come to help our holiday,
Music, flowers, and the Cæsar.—Rest upon my shoulder, lay
One small hand in mine,—and peace. A moment I would think and pray.

“I am sore with shame and scourging, I, a Roman! I, a knight!
Yea, if nobly born, the nobler for the birth of higher light.

275

Was it pain, and was it shame? The lictor's rods fell on a man;
On the God-man fell those scourges, and the bitter drops that ran
Flowed from eyes that wept for millions, came of pain none else can know,
An eternity of anguish, counted as the blood drops flow.
Mine is but an atom's torment; mine shall bring eternal gain;
His, the murder pangs of ages, paid with usury of pain.

“Art thou weary of the darkness? Art thou cold, my little maid?
Hast thou sorrow of my sorrow? Kiss my cheek. Be not dismayed.
Lo, the nearness of one moment setteth age to lonely thought,
Would his will but make us one ere yet his perfect will be wrought.
That may not be. Once, once only Love must drop the hand of love.”
“Father, father! Hark, the lions!” “Peace, my little one, my dove;
Soon thy darkened cage will open, soon the voice of Christ will say,
‘Come and be among my lilies, where the golden fountains play,
And an angel legion watches, and forever it is day.’
So, my hand upon thy shoulder. Thou, so little! I, so tall!
Now, one kiss—earth's last! My darling.”—Back the iron gate-bolts fall.
Lo, the gray arena 's quiet, and the faces waiting all,

276

Waiting, and the lions waiting, while the gray centurion smiled,
As, beneath the white velarium, fell God's sunlight on the child:
For a gentle voice above them murmured, “Forth, and have no fear,”
And the little maiden answered, “Lo, Christ Jesu, I am here!”

1890.

A CANTICLE OF TIME

Hours of grieving,
Hours of thought;
Hours of believing,
Hours of naught.
Hours when the thieving
Fingers of doubt steal
Heart riches, faith bought.
Hours of spirit dearth,
Earthy, and born of earth,
When the racked universe
Is as a hell, or worse.
Hours when the curtain, furled
Backward, revealed to us
Sorrowful sin-gulfs
Self had concealed from us.
Hours of wretchedness;
Palsies that blind.
Hours none else can guess,
When the dumb mind

277

Faints, and heart wisdom
Is all that we find.
Hours when the cloud
That hides the unknown,
A cumbering shroud,
About us is thrown.
Hours that seem to part
Goodness and God.
Hours of fierce yearning,
When fruit of love's earning
Is shred from the heart.
Hours when no angel
Hovers o'er life.
Hours when no Christ-God
Pities our strife.
Yea, such is life!

Slowly the hours
Gather to years;
They deal with our tears
That grief be not vain,
Gently as flowers
Deal with the rain.
Slowly the hours
Gather to years,
Sowing with roses
The graves of our fears.
Lo! the dark crosses
Of torture's completeness
Mistily fade into
Symbols of sweetness,
And behold it is evening.
Swift through the grass

278

Shuttles of shadow
Silently pass,
Weaving at last
Tapestries sombre,
Solemn and vast,
And behold it is night!
Silence profound,
Solitude vacant
Of touch and of sound
Thy being doth bound.
This is death's loneliness,
Answerless, pitiless!
What of thee was king,
Let it crownless descend
From its tottering throne;
Lo! thou art alone,
And behold, 't is the end!

What sayeth the soul?
“God wasteth naught.
Thinkest, in vain
He sowed in thy childhood
Thought-seed in the brain,
And the joy to create,
Like his own joy, and will,
Like a fragment of fate
For the godlike control
Of the heaven of thy angels,
The loves of thy soul?
Ay, strong for the rule
Of devils that tempt thee,
Of demons that fool?
Shall so much of Him

279

Merely perish in haste,
Just stumble, and die,
And Death be a jester's mad riddle
Without a reply?
And Life naught but waste?
Behold, it is day,”
Saith the soul.

1890.

LINCOLN

Chained by stern duty to the rock of State,
His spirit armed in mail of rugged mirth,
Ever above, though ever near to earth,
Yet felt his heart the cruel tongues that sate
Base appetites, and foul with slander, wait
Till the keen lightnings bring the awful hour
When wounds and suffering shall give them power.
Most was he like to Luther, gay and great,
Solemn and mirthful, strong of heart and limb.
Tender and simple too; he was so near
To all things human that he cast out fear,
And, ever simpler, like a little child,
Lived in unconscious nearness unto Him
Who always on earth's little ones hath smiled.

Newport, October 1891.

280

COLERIDGE AT CHAMOUNY

I would I knew what ever happy stone
Of all these dateless records, gray and vast,
Keeps silent memory of that sunrise lone
When, lost to earth, the soul of Coleridge passed
From earthly time to one immortal hour:
There thought's faint stir woke echoes of the mind
That broke to thunder tones of mightier power
From depths and heights mysterious, undefined;
As when the soft snows, drifting from the rock,
Rouse the wild clamor of the avalanche shock.

Who may not envy him that awful morn
When marvelling at his risen self he trod,
And thoughts intense as pain were fiercely born,
Till rose his soul in one great psalm to God.
A man to-morrow weak as are the worst,
A man to whom all depths, all heights belong,
Now with too bitter hours of weakness cursed,
Now winged with vigor, as a giant strong
To take our groping hearts with tender hand,
And set them surely where God's angels stand.

On peaks of lofty contemplation raised,
Such as shall never see earth's common son,
High as the snowy altar which he praised,
An hour's creative ecstasy he won.
Yet, in this frenzy of the lifted soul
Mocked him the nothingness of human speech,
When through his being visions past control
Swept, strong as mountain streams.—Alas! to reach

281

Words equal-winged as thought to none is given,
To none of earth to speak the tongue of heaven.

The eagle-flight of genius gladness hath,
And joy is ever with its victor swoop
Through sun and storm. Companionless its path
In earthly realms, and, when its pinions droop,
Faint memories only of the heavenly sun,
Dim records of ethereal space it brings
To show how haughty was the height it won,
To prove what freedom had its airy wings.
This is the curse of genius, that earth's night
Dims the proud glory of its heavenward flight.

1888.

TENNYSON

The larks of song that high o'erhead
Sung joyous in my boyhood's sky,
Save one, are with the silent dead,
Those larks that knew to soar so high.

But still with ever surer flight,
One singer of unfailing trust
Chants at the gates of morn and night
Great songs that lift us from the dust,

And heavenward call tired hearts that grieve,
Beneath the vast horizon given
With larger breadth of morn and eve,
To this one lark alone in heaven.

1890.

282

CERVANTES

[7]

Cervantes, who lost a hand at Lepanto, was for five years a prisoner in Algiers, and on his release lived a life of sad vicissitudes, dying in want on the 23d of April, 1616, the day of Shakespeare's death. Where lie the bones of the creator of Don Quixote is wholly unknown.

There are who gather with decisive power
The mantle of contentment round their souls,
And face with strange serenity the hour
Of pain, or grief, or any storm that rolls
Destruction o'er the tender joys of life.

There are whom some great quest of heart or brain
Keeps even-poised, whatever fate the years
May fetch to mock with lesser loss or gain,
And find brief joy in smiles, small grief in tears,
And tranquil take the hurts of human strife.

A few there be who, spendthrift heirs of mirth
Immortal, mock the insolence of fate,
And with a breath of jesting round the earth
Ripple men's cheeks with smiles, and gay, elate,
Sit ever in the sunshine of their mood.

Oh, royal master of all merry chords,
Of every note in mirth's delightful scale,
To thee was spared no pang that earth affords,
Nor any woe of sorrow's endless tale,—
Want, prison, wounds, all that has man subdued;

But, light of soul, as if all life were joy,
Forever armed with humor's shining mail,
True-hearted, gallant, free from scorn's alloy,
When life was beggared of its best, and frail
Grew hope, 't is said thou still wert lord of smiles.

283

This could I wish; and yet it well may be
Thy heart smiled not, for wit, like fairy gold,
Mayhap won naught for him who scattered glee,
No help for him by whom the jest was told,—
The world's sad fool, whose ever-ready wiles

Rang the glad bells of laughter down the years,
And cheated pain with merry mysteries,
And from a prison cell, the twins of tears,
Sent forth his Don and Squire to win at ease
Such joy of mirth as his could never be.

Ah, who can say! His latest day of pain
Took Shakespeare's kindred soul. I trust they met
Where smiles are frequent, and the saddest gain
What earth denies, the privilege to forget
“The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely.”

But where he sleeps, the land which gave him birth,
And gave no more to him, its greatest child,
Knows not to-day. Some levelled heap of earth,
Some nameless stone, lies o'er him who beguiled
So many a heart from thinking on its pain.

Yet I can fancy that at morning there
The birds sing gladder, and at evening still
The peasant, resting from his day of care,
Goes joyous thence with some mysterious thrill
Of lightsome mirth, whose cause he seeks in vain.

October 1888.

284

OF A POET

WRITTEN FOR A CHILD

He sang of brooks, and trees, and flowers,
Of mountain tarns, of wood-wild bowers,
The wisdom of the starry skies,
The mystery of childhood's eyes,
The violet's scent, the daisy's dress,
The timid breeze's shy caress.
Whilst England waged her fiery wars
He praised the silence of the stars,
And clear and sweet as upland rills
The gracious wisdom of her hills.
Save once when Clifford's fate he sang,
And bugle-like his lyric rang,
He prized the ways of lowly men,
And trod, with them, the moor and fen.
Fair Nature to this lover dear
Bent low to whisper or to hear
The secrets of her sky and earth,
In gentle Words of golden Worth.

1886.

HERNDON

[8]

On Sept. 12, 1857, the Central America was lost at sea. Captain Herndon of the navy was in command. His tranquil courage preserved discipline up to the last, and until his passengers, officers, and crew were all in the boats. Seeing that the last boat was already overloaded, Captain Herndon refused to add to its danger, and, ordering it off, went down with his ship.

Ay, shout and rave, thou cruel sea,
In triumph o'er that fated deck,
Grown holy by another grave—
Thou hast the captain of the wreck.

285

No prayer was said, no lesson read,
O'er him, the soldier of the sea;
And yet for him, through all the land,
A thousand thoughts to-night shall be.

And many an eye shall dim with tears,
And many a cheek be flushed with pride;
And men shall say, There died a man,
And boys shall learn how well he died!

Ay, weep for him, whose noble soul
Is with the God who made it great;
But weep not for so proud a death,—
We could not spare so grand a fate.

Nor could Humanity resign
That hour which bade her heart beat high,
And blazoned Duty's stainless shield,
And set a star in Honor's sky.

O dreary night! O grave of hope!
O sea, and dark, unpitying sky!
Full many a wreck these waves shall claim
Ere such another heart shall die.

Alas, how can we help but mourn
When hero bosoms yield their breath!
A century itself may bear
But once the flower of such a death;

So full of manliness, so sweet
With utmost duty nobly done;
So thronged with deeds, so filled with life,
As though with death that life begun.

286

It has begun, true gentleman!
No better life we ask for thee;
Thy Viking soul and woman heart
Forever shall a beacon be,—

A starry thought to eager souls,
To teach it is not best to live;
To show that life has naught to match
Such knighthood as the grave can give.

1857.

THE TOMBS OF THE REGICIDES

LUDLOW AND BROUGHTON

[9]

The regicides buried in the church of St. Martin, at Vevey, are Broughton, Ludlow, and Phelps. The tomb-stones of the first two are visible. Phelps has recently been commemorated by a stone placed upon the wall by the American descendants of his family,—Phelpses of New England and New Jersey. Ludlow and Broughton lived to a great age at Vevey, and so, also, I believe, did Phelps, of whom less is known.

Alone on the vine-covered hillside,
Set gray 'gainst the ivy-clad walnuts,
Stands, sombre as Calvin, and barren
Of crucifix, altar, and picture,
The church of St. Martin. A stranger,
I stood where the pride of its arches
Looks scorn on the Puritan's sadness.
Not prouder for Switzerland's annals
The glory of Morat or Sempach
Than these darkened tablets that tell us
How gladly for Ludlow and Broughton
She lifted the shield of protection,
How sternly she answered the summons
To render her guests to the headsman.
The parents that gave their true soul-life
Were England and Freedom. Ah, surely
With courage and conscience they honored

287

That parentage costly of sorrow,
And did the just deed and abided.
Long, long were the days that God gave them
With friendships and peace in this refuge,
Where sadly they yearned for the home-land,
And saw their great Oliver's England
Bowed low in the dust of dishonor.

Vevay, August 19, 1888.

KEARSARGE

On Sunday morning, June 19, 1864, the noise of the cannon during the fight between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was heard in English churches near the Channel.

Sunday in Old England:
In gray churches everywhere
The calm of low responses,
The sacred hush of prayer.

Sunday in Old England;
And summer winds that went
O'er the pleasant fields of Sussex,
The garden lands of Kent,

Stole into dim church windows
And passed the oaken door,
And fluttered open prayer-books
With the cannon's awful roar.

Sunday in New England:
Upon a mountain gray
The wind-bent pines are swaying
Like giants at their play;

288

Across the barren lowlands,
Where men find scanty food,
The north wind brings its vigor
To homesteads plain and rude.

Ho, land of pine and granite!
Ho, hardy northland breeze!
Well have you trained the manhood
That shook the Channel seas,

When o'er those storied waters
The iron war-bolts flew,
And through Old England's churches
The summer breezes blew;

While in our other England
Stirred one gaunt rocky steep,
When rode her sons as victors,
Lords of the lonely deep.

London, July 20, 1864.

HOW THE CUMBERLAND WENT DOWN

Gray swept the angry waves
O'er the gallant and the true,
Rolled high in mounded graves
O'er the stately frigate's crew—
Over cannon, over deck,
Over all that ghastly wreck,—
When the Cumberland went down.

289

Such a roar the waters rent
As though a giant died,
When the wailing billows went
Above those heroes tried;
And the sheeted foam leaped high,
Like white ghosts against the sky,—
As the Cumberland went down.

O shrieking waves that gushed
Above that loyal band,
Your cold, cold burial rushed
O'er many a heart on land!
And from all the startled North
A cry of pain broke forth,
When the Cumberland went down.

And forests old, that gave
A thousand years of power
To her lordship of the wave
And her beauty's regal dower,
Bent, as though before a blast,
When plunged her pennoned mast,
And the Cumberland went down.

And grimy mines that sent
To her their virgin strength,
And iron vigor lent
To knit her lordly length,
Wildly stirred with throbs of life,
Echoes of that fatal strife,
As the Cumberland went down.

290

Beneath the ocean vast,
Full many a captain bold,
By many a rotting mast,
And admiral of old,
Rolled restless in his grave
As he felt the sobbing wave,
When the Cumberland went down.

And stern Vikings that lay
A thousand years at rest,
In many a deep blue bay
Beneath the Baltic's breast,
Leaped on the silver sands,
And shook their rusty brands,
As the Cumberland went down.

1862.

MY CASTLES IN SPAIN

Ho, joyous friend with beard of brown!
A half-hour back 't was gray;
A half-hour back you wore a frown,
But now the world looks gay.
For here the mirror's courtly grace
Cheats you with a youthful face,
And here the poet clock of time
Each happy minute counts in rhyme;
And here the roses never die,
And “Yes” is here Love's sole reply.
Gladder land can no man gain
Than my mystic realm of Spain.

291

Come with me, for I am one
Hidalgo-born of Aragon;
I will show you why I choose
Thus to live in Andalouse.
Across the terrace, up the stair,
Our steps shall wander to and fro
Where pensive stand the statues fair,
And murmur songs of long ago.
Or will you see my pictures old,
The landscapes hung for my delight
In window-frames of fretted gold,
Where, glowing, shines in color bright
That Claude of mine at full of noon,
When the ripe, eager blood of June
Stirs bird and leaf, and everywhere
The world is one gay love-affair?
Or shall we linger, looking west,
Just when my Turner 's at its best,
To watch the cold stars, one by one,
Crawl to the embers of the sun,
Whilst all the gray sierra snows
Are ruddy with the twilight rose?
Believe me, artists there are none
Like those of mine in Aragon;
Nor painter would I care to choose
Beside the sun of Andalouse.
Or shall we part the shining leaves
Down drooping from the vine-clad eaves,
And see, amidst the sombre pines,
The maiden take a shameless kiss?
Around his neck her white arm twines,
And still is sweet their changeless bliss.
I know she cannot aught refuse,

292

For that 's the law in Andalouse,
And ever 'neath this happy sun
There is no sin in Aragon.
Or shall we cast yon casement wide,
And see the knights before us ride,
The charging Cid, the Moors that flee?
Grim although the battles be
That through my window-frames I see,
No death is there, nor any pain,
Because on my estates in Spain
All passions gaily run their course,
But lack the shadow-fiend remorse.
Something 't is to make one vain
Thus to be grandee of Spain;
For the wine of Andalouse
All the world a man might lose,
Could he see what rosy shapes
Trample out my Spanish grapes,
Know how pink the feet that bruise
My gold-green grapes of Andalouse.
Ah, but if you 're not a don,
Drink no wine of Aragon.
Dreamland loves and elfin flavors,
Gay romances, fairy favors,
Moonlit mists and glad confusions,
Youth's brief mystery of delusions,
Racing, chasing, haunt the brain
Of him who drinks this wine of Spain.
Where the quarterings were won
That make of me a Spanish don
No one asks in Aragon.
Never blood of Bourbon grew
So magnificently blue;

293

Blood have I that once was Dante's;
Kinsman am I of Cervantes.
Come and see what nobles fine
Make my proud ancestral line:
In my gallery set apart,
Lo where art interprets art.
Yes, you needs must like it well,—
Shakespeare's face by Raphael.
Ah, 't is very nobly done,
But that 's the air of Aragon.
He left me that which till life ends
Is surely mine,—the best of friends;
And chiefly one, if you would know,
I love of all, Mercutio.
Velasquez? Ay, he knew a man,
And well he drew my Puritan,
With eyes too full of heaven's light
To dream our day as aught but night.
If my soul stirs swift at wrong,
This sire made that instinct strong.
Da Vinci touched with love the face
That keeps for me young Surrey's grace.
And that,—ah, that is one to like,
My kinsman Sidney, by Vandyke.
Some words he gave, of which bereft
My life were poorer. There, to left
Are they whose rills of English song
Unto my royal blood belong.
For poet, painter, priest, and lay
Went to make my Spanish clay;
And here away in Andalouse,
Whatever mood my soul may choose,
The poet's joy, the soldier's force,

294

Finds for me its parent source
Where, along the pictured wall,
Hero voices on me call,
With the falling of the dews,
In Aragon or Andalouse,
When the mystic shadows troop,
When my fairy flowers droop,
And the joyous day is done
In Andalouse or Aragon.

Granada, May 27, 1888.

DREAMLAND

Up Anchor! Up anchor!
Set sail and away!
The ventures of dreamland
Are thine for a day.
Yo, heave ho!
Aloft and alow
Elf sailors are singing,
Yo, heave ho!
The breeze that is blowing
So sturdily strong
Shall fill up thy sail
With the breath of a song.
A fay at the mast-head
Keeps watch o'er the sea;
Blown amber of tresses
Thy banner shall be;
Thy freight the lost laughter

295

That sad souls have missed,
Thy cargo the kisses
That never were kissed.
And ho, for a fay maid
Born merry in June,
Of dainty red roses
Beneath a red moon.
The star-pearls that midnight
Casts down on the sea,
Dark gold of the sunset
Her fortune shall be.
And ever she whispers,
More tenderly sweet,
“Love am I, love only,
Love perfect, complete.
The world is my lordship,
The heart is my slave;
I mock at the ages,
I laugh at the grave.
Wilt sail with me ever
A dream-haunted sea,
Whose whispering waters
Shall murmur to thee
The love-haunted lyrics
Dead poets have made
Ere life had a fetter,
Ere love was afraid?”
Then up with the anchor!
Set sail and away!
The ventures of loveland
Are thine for a day.

Newport, 1890.

296

THE QUAKER LADY

'Mid drab and gray of moldered leaves,
The spoil of last October,
I see the Quaker lady stand
In dainty garb and sober.

No speech has she for praise or prayer,
No blushes, as I claim
To know what gentle whisper gave
Her prettiness a name.

The wizard stillness of the hour
My fancy aids: again
Return the days of hoop and hood
And tranquil William Penn.

I see a maid amid the wood
Demurely calm and meek,
Or troubled by the mob of curls
That riots on her cheek.

Her eyes are blue, her cheeks are red,—
Gay colors for a Friend,—
And Nature with her mocking rouge
Stands by a blush to lend.

The gown that holds her rosy grace
Is truly of the oddest;
And wildly leaps her tender heart
Beneath the kerchief modest.

297

It must have been the poet Love
Who, while she slyly listened,
Divined the maiden in the flower,
And thus her semblance christened.

Was he a proper Quaker lad
In suit of simple gray?
What fortune had his venturous speech,
And was it “yea” or “nay”?

And if indeed she murmured “yea,”
And throbbed with worldly bliss,
I wonder if in such a case
Do Quakers really kiss?

Or was it some love-wildered beau
Of old colonial days,
With clouded cane and broidered coat,
And very artful ways?

And did he whisper through her curls
Some wicked, pleasant vow,
And swear no courtly dame had words
As sweet as “thee” and “thou”?

Or did he praise her dimpled chin
In eager song or sonnet,
And find a merry way to cheat
Her kiss-defying bonnet?

And sang he then in verses gay,
Amid this forest shady,

298

The dainty flower at her feet
Was like his Quaker lady?

And did she pine in English fogs,
Or was his love enough?
And did she learn to sport the fan,
And use the patch and puff?

Alas! perhaps she played quadrille,
And, naughty grown and older,
Was pleased to show a dainty neck
Above a snowy shoulder.

But sometimes in the spring, I think,
She saw, as in a dream,
The meeting-house, the home sedate,
The Schuylkill's quiet stream;

And sometimes in the minuet's pause
Her heart went wide afield
To where, amid the woods of May,
A blush its love revealed.

Till far away from court and king
And powder and brocade,
The Quaker ladies at her feet
Their quaint obeisance made.

Newport, 1889.

299

THE QUAKER GRAVEYARD

Four straight brick walls, severely plain,
A quiet city square surround;
A level space of nameless graves,—
The Quakers' burial-ground.

In gown of gray, or coat of drab,
They trod the common ways of life,
With passions held in sternest leash,
And hearts that knew not strife.

To yon grim meeting-house they fared,
With thoughts as sober as their speech,
To voiceless prayer, to songless praise,
To hear the elders preach.

Through quiet lengths of days they came
With scarce a change to this repose;
Of all life's loveliness they took
The thorn without the rose.

But in the porch and o'er the graves,
Glad rings the southward robin's glee,
And sparrows fill the autumn air
With merry mutiny;

While on the graves of drab and gray
The red and gold of autumn lie,
And wilful Nature decks the sod
In gentlest mockery.

1879.

300

DOMINIQUE DE GOURGUES

[11]

In 1565, Menendez, an officer of Philip II. in Florida, put to death, under circumstances of strange atrocity, two hundred and eighty French Huguenots, most of whom were driven by starvation to surrender at discretion. Dominique de Gourgues, a French soldier, avenged this massacre as I have described, devoting to this purpose his fortune, and exposing himself to the malice of his town King, Charles IX. I have used a poet's license in the introduction of a supernatural influence. The tale is told at length by my friend the late Francis Parkman, in his “Pioneers of France in the New World.”

In his cheerful Norman orchard
Lay De Gourgues of Mont Marsan,
Gascon to the core, and merry,
Just a well-contented man,

With his pipe, that comrade constant,
Won in sorrowful Algiers,
In the slave's brief rest at evening
Left for curses and for tears.

Peacefully he pondered, gazing
Where his plough-ribbed cornfields lay,
With their touch of hopeful verdure,
Waiting patient for the May.

Joyous from the terrace o'er him
Came the voice of wife and child,
And the sunlit smoke curled upward
As the gaunt old trooper smiled.

“St. Denis,” quoth the stout De Gourgues,
“Yon beehive's ever busy hum
Doth like me better than the noise
Of the musketoon and drum.

“Tough am I, though this skin of mine
By steel and bullet well is scarred,
Like those round pippins overhead
By the thrushes pecked and marred.

301

“Forsooth I'm somewhat autumn-ripe,
Yet like my apples sound and red.
And life is sweet,” said stout De Gourgues,
“Yea, verily sweet,” he said.

“Three things there were I once did love—
One that gay jester of Navarre,
And one to sack a Spanish town,
And one the wild wrath of war.

“And two there were I hated well—
One that carrion beast, a Moor,
And one that passeth him for spite,
That 's a Spaniard, rest you sure.”

Still he smoked, and musing murmured,
“There be three things well I like,
My pipe, my ease, this quiet life,
Better far than push of pike.

“And to-day there be two I love
Who lured me out of the strife,
The lad who plays with my rusty blade,
And the little Gascon wife.

“Parbleu! parbleu!” cried gray De Gourgues,
For at his side there stood
A soldier, scarred and worn and white,
In a cuirass dark with blood.

“Ventre Saint Gris! good friend, halloa!
Art sorely hurt, and how? and why?
Art Huguenot? Here 's help at need:
Or Catholic? What care I!”

302

No motion had the white wan lips,
The mail-clad chest no breathing stirred,
Though clear as rings a vengeful blade
Fell every whispered word.

“That Jean Ribaut am I
Who sailed for the land of flowers;
Fore God our tryst is surely set;
I wearily count the hours.”

And slowly rose the steel-clad hand,
And westward pointing stayed as set:
“Thy peace is gone! No morn shall dawn
Will let thee e'er forget.

“Thy brothers, the dead, lie there,
Where only the winds complain,
And under their gallows walk
The mocking lords of Spain.

“If ever this France be dear,
And honor as life to thee,
Thy wife, thy child are naught to-day,
Thy errand 's on the sea.”

“St. Denis to save!” cried stout De Gourgues,
“One may dream, it seems, by day.”
The man was gone!—but where he stood
A rusted steel glove lay.

“I 've heard—yea twice—this troublous tale,
It groweth full old indeed;
But old or new, my sword is sheathed
For ghost or king or creed.”

303

Full slow he turned and climbed the hill,
And thrice looked back to see:
“The dream! The glove!—How came it there?—
What matters a glove to me?”

But day by day as one distraught
He stood, or gazed upon the board;
Nor heard the voice of wife or boy,
Nor took of the wine they poured.

He saw his bannerol flutter forth,
As tossed by the wind of fight,
And watched his sheathed sword o'er the hearth
Leap flashing to the light.

He told her all. “Now God be praised!”
She cried, while the hot tears ran;
“She little loves who loves not more
His honor than the man.”

His lands are sold. A stranger's hand
The juice of his grapes shall strain;
Another, too, shall reap the hopes
He sowed with the winter grain.

His way was o'er the windy seas,
But, sailed he fast or sailed he slow,
He saw by day, he saw by night,
The face of Jean Ribaut.

The sun rose crimson with the morn,
Or set at eve a ghastly red,
While over blue Bahama seas
Beckoned him ever the dead.

304

Till spoke, sore set at last, De Gourgues:
“Ho, brothers brave, and have ye sailed
For gain of gold this weary way?
Heaven's grace! but ye have failed!

“A sterner task our God hath set;
In yon wild land of flowers
Our dead await the trusty blades
Shall cleanse their fame and ours.

“Ye know the tale.” Few words they said:
“We are thine for France to-day!”
By cape and beach and palmy isles
The avengers held their way.

The deed was done, the honor won,
Nor land nor gain of gold got they,
Where 'neath the broad palmetto leaves
Their dead at evening lay.

The deed was done, the honor won,
And o'er the gibbet-loads was set
This legend grim for priests to read,
And, if they could, forget:

“Not as to Spaniards: murderers these:
Ladrones, robbers, hanged I here,
Ransom base for the costly souls
Whom God and France hold dear.”

How welcomed him that brave Rochelle,
With cannon thunder and clash of bell,
What bitter fate his courage won,
Some slender annals tell.

305

No legend tells what signal sweet
Looked gladness from a woman's eyes,
Or how she welcomed him who brought
Alas! one only prize,—

A noble deed in honor done
And the wreck of a ruined life.
Ah, well if I knew what said the lips
Of the little Gascon wife!

1890.

THE WRECK OF THE EMMELINE

This tack might fetch Absecom bar,
The wind lies fair for the Dancin' Jane;
She 's good on a wind. If we keep this way,
You might talk with folk in the land of Spain.

A tidy smack of a breeze it be;
Just hear it whistle 'mong them dunes!
It ain't no more nor a gal for strong,—
Sakes! but it hollers a lot of toones.

Ye 'd ought to hear it October-time
A-fiddlin' 'mong them cat-tails tall;
Our Bill can fiddle, but 'gainst that wind
He ain't no kind of a show at all.

Respectin' the wrack you want to see,
It 's yon away, set hard and fast
On the outer bar. When tides is low
You kin see a mawsel of rib and mast.

306

Four there was on us, wrackers all,
Born and bred to foller the sea,
And Dad beside, that 's him you seed
Las' night a-mendin' them nets with me.

Waal, sir, it was n't no night for talk;
The pipes went out, an' we stood, we four,
A-starin' dumb through the rattlin' panes,
And says Tom, “I 'd as lief be here ashore.”

The wust wind ever I knowed
Was swoopin' across the deep,
An' the waves was humpin' as white as snow,
An' gallopin' in like frighted sheep.

Lord! sich a wind! It tuk that sand
An' flung it squar' on the winder-sash,
An' howled and mumbled 'mong the scrub,
An' yelled like a hurt thing 'cross the ma'sh.

Old Dad as was sittin' side the fire,
Jus' now an' agin he riz his head,
An' says he, “God help all folks at sea,—
God help 'em livin', and bury 'em dead.

“God help them in smacks as sail,
An' men as v'yage in cruisers tall;
God help all as goes by water,
Big ship and little,—help 'em all.”

“Amen!” says Bill, jus' like it was church;
An' all of a sudden says Joe to me,
“Hallo!” an' thar was a flash of light,
An' the roar of a gun away to sea.

307

“An' it 's each for all!” cries Dad to me;
“The night ain't much of a choice for sweet.”
So up he jumps an' stamps aroun',
Jus' for to waken his sleepy feet.

“An' it 's into ilers and on with boots,”
Sings Dad; “thar be n't no time to spar'.
Pull in y'r waist-straps. Hurry a bit;
The shortest time'll be long out thar.”

I did n't like it, or them no more,
But roun' we scuttles for oar and ropes,
An' out we plunged in the old man's wake,
For we knowed as we was thar only hopes.

The door druv' in; the cinders flew;
The house, it shook; out went the light;
The air was thick with squandered sand,
As nipt like the sting of a bluefly bite.

We passed yon belt of holly and pine,
An' in among them cedar an' oak
We stood a bit on the upper shore,
An stared an' listened, but no man spoke.

“Whar lies she, Bill?” roars Dad to me,
As down we bended. Then bruk' a roar
As follered a lane of dancin' light
That flashed and fluttered along the shore.

“She 's thar,” says Joe; “I 'd sight of her then;
She 's hard and high on the outer bar.
Nary a light, and fast enough,
And nary a mawsel of mast or spar.”

308

Groans Dad, “Good Lord, it 's got to be!”
Says Tom, “It ain't to be done, I fear.”
Shouts Joe, a-laffin' (he allus laffed),
“It ain't to be done by standin' here.”

Waal, in she went, third time of tryin'—
“In with a will,” laffs Joe, in a roar,
Tom a-cussin' and Dad a-prayin',
But spry enough with the steerin' oar.

Five hours—an' cold. I was clean played out.
“Give way,” shouts Dad, “give way thar now!”
“Hurray!” laffs Joe. An' we slung her along,
With a prayer to aft an' a laff in the bow.

There was five men glad when we swep' her in
Under the lee, an' none too soon.
“Aboard thar, mates!” shouts Dad, an' the wind
Just howled like a dog at full of moon.

“Up with you, Bill!” sung Dad. So I—
I grabbed for a broken rope as hung.
Gosh! it was stiff as an anchor-stock,
But up I swarmed, and over I swung.

Ice? She was ice from stem to starn.
I gripped the rail an' sarched the wrack,
An' cleared my eyes, an' sarched agin'
For livin' sign on that slidin' deck.

Four dead men in the scuppers lay.
Stiff as steel, they was froze that fast;
An' one old man was hangin' awry,
Tied to the stump of the broken mast.

309

Ice-bound he were. But he kinder smiled,
A-lookin' up. I was sort of skeered.
Lord! thinks I, thar was many a prayer
Froze in the snow of that orful beard.

Thar was one man lashed to the wheel,
An' his eyes was a-starin' wild,
An' thar, close-snuggled up in his arms,—
O Lord, sir, the pity!—a little child.

“Dead all,” says I, as I lep to the boat.
“Give way,” an' we bent to the springin' oar;
An' never no word says boy or Dad,
Till we crashed full high on the upper shore.

Then Dad, he dropped for to pray,
But I stood all a-shake on the sand;
An' the old man says, “I could wish them souls
Was fetched ashore to the joyful land.”

But Joe, he laffs. Says Dad, right mad,
“Shut up. Ye 'd grin if ye went to heaven.”
“Why not?” says Joe. “As for this here earth,
It takes lots of laffin' to keep things even.”

Ready about, an' mind for the boom;
Ef ye keer for to hold that far,
You may see the Emmeline, keel and rib,
Stuck fast an' firm on the outer bar.

Newport, October 1891.

310

A PSALM OF THE WATERS

Lo! this is a psalm of the waters,—
The wavering, wandering waters:
With languages learned in the forest,
With secrets of earth's lonely caverns,
The mystical waters go by me
On errands of love and of beauty,
On embassies friendly and gentle,
With shimmer of brown and of silver.
In pools of dark quiet they ponder,
Where the birch, and the elm, and the maple
Are dreams in the soul of their stillness.
In eddying spirals they loiter,
For touch of the fern-plumes they linger,
Caress the red mesh of the pine-roots,
And quench the strong thirst of the leafage
That high overhead with its shadows
Requites the soft touch of their giving
Like him whose supreme benediction
Make glad for love's service instinctive
The heart of the Syrian woman.
O company, stately and gracious,
That wait the sad axe on the hillside!
My kinsmen since far in the ages,
We tossed, you and I, as dull atoms,
The sport of the wind and the water.
We are as a greater has made us,
You less and I more; yet forever
The less is the giver, and thankful,
The guest of your quivering shadows,

311

I welcome the counselling voices
That haunt the dim aisles of the forest.

Lo, this is a psalm of the waters
That wake in us yearnings prophetic,
That cry in the wilderness lonely
With meanings for none but the tender.
I hear in the rapids below me
Gay voices of little ones playing,
And echoes of boisterous laughter
From grim walls of resonant granite.
'T is gone—it is here—this wild music!
Untamed by the ages, as gladsome
As when, from the hands of their Maker,
In wild unrestraint the swift waters
Leapt forth to the bountiful making
Of brook and of river and ocean.
I linger, I wonder, I listen.
Alas! is it I who interpret
The cry of the masterful north wind,
The hum of the rain in the hemlock,
As chorals of joy or of sadness,
To match the mere moods of my being?
Alas for the doubt and the wonder!
Alas for the strange incompleteness
That limits with boundaries solemn
The questioning soul! Yet forever
I know that these choristers ancient
Have touch of my heart; and alas, too,
That never was love in its fulness
Told all the great soul of its loving!
I know, too, the years, that remorseless
Have hurt me with sorrow, bring ever

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More near for my help the quick-healing,
The infinite comfort of nature;
For surely the childhood that enters
This heaven of wood and of water
Is won with gray hairs, in the nearing
That home ever open to childhood.

And you, you my brothers, who suffer
In serfdom of labor and sorrow,
What gain have your wounds, that forever
Man bridges with semblance of knowledge
The depths he can never illumine?
Or binds for his service the lightning,
Or prisons the steam of the waters?
What help has it brought to the weeper?
How lessened the toil of the weary?
Alas! since at evening, deserted,
Job sat in his desolate anguish,
The world has grown wise; but the mourner
Still weeps and will weep; and what helping
He hath from his God or his fellow
Eludes the grave sentinel reason,
Steals in at the heart's lowly portal,
And helps, but will never be questioned.
Yea, then, let us take what these give us,
And ask not to know why the murmur
Of winds in the pine-tree has power
To comfort the hurt of life's battle,
To help when our dearest are helpless.
Lo, here stands the mother. She speaketh
As when at his tent door the Arab
Calls, Welcome! in language we know not.
Cries, Enter, and share with thy servant!

1890.

313

EVENING, AFTER A STORM ON THE RISTIGOUCHE RIVER

A MOOD

The air is cool; a mist hangs low
Above the wild waves' gleaming flow,
An earth-born cloud, a prisoner fair
Held captive from the upper air.
Its life is brief; 't is gone, unseen
As souls set free. The blue serene
Shall claim it, as, of heaven's race,
It speeds a viewless way through space.
As souls set free! Oh, memories fair
That substance of my boyhood were;
What subtle process of the brain
Called that dear company again:
Those honest eyes of tranquil gray,
That heart which knew but honor's way,
And one, the strong, the saint of pain,—
That visage smiles for me again,
Laughs as it laughed when life was here,
Smiles as it smiled when death was near.
What thought-linked sweetness of the hour
Bade memory's folded buds to flower?
The dim horizons of the mind
In vain I search, nor answer find.
The sombre woods make no reply;
The busy river, rambling by,
Is silent; silent is the sky.
And yet to-day this nature dear
Than human help seems far more near;

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And closer to my listening soul
The rhythms of the rapid roll
Than any words of human tongue,
Than any song of poet sung.
Alas, the bounding walls of time
Still hem us in; the poet's rhyme,
The brain, the air, the river's flow,
The frank blue sky, the waves below,
Refuse to tell us half they know.
In vain our search, in vain our cries,
Our dearest loves lack some replies;
And thought as infinite as space
May never tell us face to face,
Though sought beneath death's awful shroud,
The secrets of one flitting cloud,
All of a monad's story brief,
The history of a single leaf.
Ah, mystery of mysteries,
To know if under other skies
Shall Nature wait with open hand,
To hold her secrets at command.

O'er other hills and far away
The red scourge of the lightning flies;
The thunder roar of smitten clouds
Reverberant in distance dies;
The western sky, an arch of green,
Fades o'er me, and my still canoe
Floats on a mystic sea of gold
Flecked thick with waves of sapphire blue;
The silent counsels of the night
Float downward with the failing light;

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Strange whispers from the darkened stream
Rise like the voices of a dream;
The joy of mystery gathers near,
The joy that is almost a fear.
Speechless the infinite of space,
Star-peopled, looks upon my face,
The patience of heaven's planet gaze,
That bids me wait for death's amaze,
Or for the death of deaths to tell
The secrets Nature guards so well.
Lo, darkness that is substance falls
Between the mountain's nearing walls,
The sky drops down, and to my eye
The watery levels closer lie,
Till wood and wave and mountain fade
'Neath the dear mother's cloak of shade.
She brings for me the scented balm
Her spruce-trees yield; a sacred calm
Falls softly on my kneeling heart.
“Peace, child,” she whispers, “mine thou art.
Lo, in my darkness thou hast found
Content my daylight does not bound;
My silence to thy soul doth preach;
Night unto night still uttereth speech,
And the black night of death shall be
As eloquent of truth to thee.”

1886.

316

RAIN IN CAMP

The camp-fire smoulders and will not burn,
And a sulky smoke from the blackened logs
Lazily swirls through the dank wood caves;
And the laden leaves with a quick relief
Let fall their loads, as the pool beyond
Leaps 'neath the thin gray lash of the rain,
And is builded thick with silver bells.
But I lie on my back in vague despair,
Trying it over thrice and again,
To see if my words will say the thing.
But the sodden moss, and the wet black wood,
And the shining curves of the dancing leaves,
The drip and drop, and tumble and patter,
The humming roar in the sturdy pines,
Alas, shall there no man paint or tell.

1870.

ELK COUNTY

From lands of the elk and the pine-tree,
Of hemlock and whitewood and maple,
You ask me to write you a lyric
Shall thrill with the cries of the forest,
And flow like the sap of the maple,—
The rich yellow blood of the maple,
That hath such a wild, lusty sweetness,
Such a taste of the wilderness in it.
And surely 't were pleasant to summon

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The days which so lately have vanished,
The friends who were part of their pleasure.
Right cheery for me, in the city,
To think once again of the sunsets
We watched from the crest of the hilltop,
Alone on the stumps in the clearing;
When slowly the forms of the mountains,
Our own hills, our loved Alleghanies,
Grew hazy and distant and solemn,
Cloaked each with the shade of his neighbor;
Like rigid old Puritans scorning
The passion and riot of color,
Of yellow and purple and scarlet,
Which haunt the gay court of the sunset,
Where Eve, like a wild Cinderella,
Awaits the gray fairy of twilight.
Sweet, ever, to think of the forests,
Their cool, woody fragrance delicious;
To think of the camp-fires we builded
To baffle those terrible pungies;
To think how we wandered, bewildered
With wood-dreams and delicate fancies
Unknown to the life of the city.
To tread but those cushioning mosses;
To lie, almost float, on the fern-beds;
To feel the crisp crush of the foot on
The mouldering logs of the windfall,
Were things to be held in remembrance.
Dost recall how we lingered to listen
The sound of the wood-robin's bugle,
Or bent the witch-hopple to guide us,
As one folds the page he is reading,
And felt, as we peered through the stillness,

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Through armies and legions of tree-trunks,
Such solemn and brooding sensations
As told of the birth of religions,
As whispered how men grow to Druids
When the fly-wheel of work is arrested,
And they live the still life of the forest?
Ay, here in the face of the woodman,
You see how the woods have been preaching,
As he leans on the logs of his cabin
To watch the prim city-folk coming
O'er the chips, and the twigs, and the stubble,
Through the fire-scarred stumps, and the hemlocks
His axe hath so ruthlessly girdled.
Ay, he too has learned in the forest,
One half of him Nimrod and slayer,
Unsparing, enduring, and tireless,
In wait for the deer at the salt-lick;
Yet one stronger half of his nature—
This rough and bold out-of-door nature,
Hath touches of sadness upon it,
And is grown to the ways of the forest,
Till wildness and softness together
Are one in the sap of his being.

Right pleasant it were, friend and lady,
To tell you some tale of the woodland;
To hear the faint voice of tradition,
Of childish and simple conceptions,
And find in their half-spoken meanings
Some thought all the nations have muttered
In the parable tongues of their childhood.
Alas for the tale and the writer!

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The land has no story to tell us,—
No voice save the Clarion's waters,
No song save the murm'rous confusion
Of winds gone astray in the pine-tops,
Or the roar of the rain on the hemlocks;—
No record, no sign, not a word of
The lords of the axe and the rifle,
Who camped by the smooth Alleghany,
And blazed the first tree on the mountain.
Yet here, even here in the forest,—
The soul-calming deep of the forest,
Where cat-birds are noisy and dauntless,
And deft little miserly squirrels
Are hoarding the beech-nuts for winter;
Where rattlesnakes charm, and the hoot-owl
By night sounds his murderous war-pipe,—
Yes, here in the last home of Nature,
Where the greenness that swells o'er the hillock
Is pink with the blossoming laurel,
The wants of the city still haunt us,
When busy blue axes are ringing,
And totter the kings of the mountain.
Ah, well you recall, I can fancy,
The morn we looked down on the valley
That bears the proud name of the battle,
Itself a fair field for the winning;
Recall, too, the frank speech which told us
Who felled the first tree in the valley
Where now the red heifers are browsing,
And reapers are swinging their cradles,
And fat grow the stacks with the harvest.
Canst see, too, the dam and the mill-pond,
The trees in the dark amber water,

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Where thousands of pine logs are tethered,
With maple and black birch and cherry?
Canst hear, as I hear, the gay hum of
The bright, whizzing saw in the steam-mill,
Its up-and-down old-fashioned neighbor
Singing, “Go it!” and “Go it!” and “Go it!”
As it whirrs through the heart of the pine-tree,
And spouts out the saw-dust, and filleth
The air with its resinous odors?
Ay, gnaw at them morning and evening,
Thou hungry old dog of a sawmill!
The planks thou art shaping so deftly
Shall ring with the tramp of the raftsmen,
Shall drift on the shallow Ohio,
Shall build thy fair homes, Cincinnati,
Shall see the gay steamers go by them,
Shall float on the broad Mississippi,
Shall floor the rough cabins of Kansas.

And here is a tale for the poet,—
A story of Saxon endurance,
A story of work and completion,
A legend of rough-handed labor
As wild as the runes of the fiords.

1858.

A CAMP IN THREE LIGHTS

Against the darkness sharply lined
Our still white tents gleamed overhead,
And dancing cones of shadow cast
When sudden flashed the camp-fire red,

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Where fragrant hummed the moist swamp-spruce,
And tongues unknown the cedar spoke,
While half a century's silent growth
Went up in cheery flame and smoke.

Pile on the logs! A flickering spire
Of ruby flame the birch-bark gives,
And as we track its leaping sparks,
Behold in heaven the North-light lives!

An arch of deep, supremest blue,
A band above of silver shade,
Where, like the frost-work's crystal spears,
A thousand lances grow and fade,

Or shiver, touched with palest tints
Of pink and blue, and changing die,
Or toss in one triumphant blaze
Their golden banners up the sky,

With faint, quick, silken murmurings,
A noise as of an angel's flight,
Heard like the whispers of a dream
Across the cool, clear Northern night.

Our pipes are out, the camp-fire fades,
The wild auroral ghost-lights die,
And stealing up the distant wood
The moon's white spectre floats on high,

And, lingering, sets in awful light
A blackened pine-tree's ghastly cross,
Then swiftly pays in silver white
The faded fire, the aurora's loss.

1870.

322

LAKE NIPIGON

High-shouldered and ruddy and sturdy,
Like droves of pre-Adamite monsters,
The vast mounded rocks of red basalt
Lie basking round Nipigon's waters;
And still lies the lake, as if fearing
To trouble their centuried slumber;
And heavy o'er lake and in heaven
A dim veil of smoke tells of forests
Ablaze in the far lonely Northland:
And over us, blood-red and sullen,
The sun shines on gray-shrouded islands,
And under us, blood-red and sullen
The sun in the dark umber water
Looks up at the gray, murky heaven,
While one lonely loon on the water
Is wailing his mate, and beside us
Two shaggy-haired Chippewa children
In silence watch sadly the white man.

1871.

EVENING STORM—NIPIGON

Upon the beach, with low, quick, mournful sob,
The weary waters shudder to our feet;
And far beyond the sunset's golden light,
Forever brighter in its lessening span,
Shares not the sadness of yon dark wood-wall,

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Where green and noiseless deeps of shadow rest
In growing gloom 'twixt golden lake and sky.
Fast fades the lessening day, and far beneath
The tamarack shivers and the cedar's cone
Uneasy sways, while fitful tremors stir
The tattered livery of the ragged birch;
And over all the arch of heaven is wild
With tumbled clouds, where swift the lightning's lance
Gleams ruby red and thunder-echoes roll;
Far, far below—sweet as the dream of hope
What time despair is nearest—lies the lake.
Fast comes the storm; spiked black with pattering rain,
The darkened water gleams with bells of foam.
Fast comes the storm, till over lake and sky,
O'er yellow lake and ever-yellowing sky,
Cruel and cold, the gray storm-twilights rest;
And so the day before its time is dead.

1870.

NOONDAY WOODS—NIPIGON

Between thin fingers of the pine
The fluid gold of sunlight slips,
And through the tamarack's gray-green fringe
Upon the level birch leaves drips.

Through all the still, moist forest air
Slow trickles down the soft, warm sheen,
And flecks the branching wood of ferns
With tender tints of pallid green,

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To rest where close to mouldered trunks
The red and purple berries lie,
Where tiny jungles of the moss
Their tropic forests rear on high.

Fast, fast asleep the woodland rests,
Stirs not the tamarack's topmost sheaf,
And slow the subtle sunlight glides
With noiseless step from leaf to leaf.

And lo, he comes! the fairy prince,
The heir of richer, softer strands:
A summer guest of sterner climes,
He moves across the vassal lands.

And lo, he comes! the fairy prince,
The joyous sweet southwestern breeze:
He bounds across the dreaming lake,
And bends to kiss the startled trees,

Till all the woodland wakes to life,
The pheasant chirps, the chipmunks cry,
And scattered flakes of golden light
Athwart the dark wood-spaces fly.

Ah, but a moment, and away!
The fair, false prince has kissed and fled:
No more the wood shall feel his touch,
No more shall know his joyous tread.

1872.

325

AFTER SUNSET—LAKE WEELOKENE-BAKOK

At twilight Azescohos standeth
With domes that are builded of color:
Its deep-wrinkled strata and boulders,
Its sombre-leaved greenness of noonday,
Fade, lost in the blue misty splendor
That seems like the soul of a color;
While far, far away to the eastward
One vast fading glory of scarlet—
A color that seems as if living—
Possesses the sky like a passion,
And higher and higher in heaven
Fades out in the soft bluish greenness
That climbs to the zenith above us.
Below, far below, as if thinking,
At rest lies the sensitive lake; and
Like one who sings but to her own heart
Such thoughts as a loving lip whispers,
Thus deep in the waters are pictured
The beauty of sunset and hillside.
For the blue that was blue on the mountain,
Seen deep in the heart of the water,
Hath the touch of some blessing upon it,—
Some strangeness of purity in it,
Like color that shall be in heaven.
This water-held vision of sunset,
Ablaze in the depths of the darkness,
Is it but for the sight? Canst not hear it,
This prophet of color, to tell us

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Of what may be yet, when the senses
Awaken to lordlier being,
And the thought of the blind man is ours:
When colors unearthly men know not
Shall float from the trumpets of angels,
And tints of the glory of heaven
Shall be for us color and music?

1871.

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA

How gentle here is Nature's mood! She lays
A woman-hand upon the troubled heart,
Bidding the world away and time depart,
While the brief minutes swoon to endless days
Filled full of sad, inconstant thoughtfulness.

Behold 't is eventide. Dun cattle stand
Drowsed in the misted grasses. From the hollows deep,
Dim veils, adrift, o'er arch and tower sweep,
Casting a dreary doubt along the land,
Weighting the twilight with some vague distress.

Transient and subtle, not to thought more near
Than spirit is to flesh, about me rise
Dim memories, long lost to love's sad eyes;
Now are they wandering shadows, strange and drear,
That from their natal substance far have strayed.

The witches of the mind possess the time,
And cry, “Behold thy dead!” They come, they pass;

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We yearn to give them feature, face. Alas!
Love hath no morn for memory's failing prime;
What once was sweet with truth is but a shade.

The ghosts of nameless sorrow, joy, despair,
Emotions that have no remembered source,
Love-waifs from other worlds, hope, fear, remorse
Born of some vision's crime, wail through the air,
Crying, We were and are not!—that is all.

Yet sweet the indecisive evening hour
That hath of earth the least. Unreal as dreams
Dreamed within dreams, and ever further, seems
The sound of human toil, while grass and flower
Bend where the mercy of the dew doth fall.

Strange mysteries of expectation wait
Above the grave-mounds of the storied space,
Where, buried, lie a nation's strength and grace,
And the sad joys of Rome's imperious state
That perished of its insolent excess.

A dull, gray shroud o'er this vast burial rests,
Is deathly still, or seems to rise and fall,
As on a dear one, dead, the moveless pall
Doth cheat the heart with stir of her white breasts,
Mocking the troubled hour with worse distress.

A deathful languor holds the twilight mist,
Unearthly colors drape the Alban hills,
A dull malaria the spirit fills;
Death and decay all beauty here have kissed,
Pledging the land to sorrowing loveliness.

Rome, May 1891.

328

THE GRAVE OF KEATS

THE PROTESTANT CEMETERY AT ROME

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Fair little city of the pilgrim dead,
Dear are thy marble streets, thy rosy lanes:
Easy it seems and natural here to die,
And death a mother, who with tender care
Doth lay to sleep her ailing little ones.
Old are these graves, and they who, mournfully,
Saw dust to dust return, themselves are mourned;
Yet, in green cloisters of the cypress shade,
Full-choired chants the fearless nightingale
Ancestral songs learned when the world was young.
Sing on, sing ever in thy breezy homes;
Toss earthward from the white acacia bloom
The mingled joy of fragrance and of song;
Sing in the pure security of bliss.
These dead concern thee not, nor thee the fear
That is the shadow of our earthly loves.
And me thou canst not comfort; tender hearts
Inherit here the anguish of the doubt
Writ on this gravestone. He, at last, I trust,
Serenity of sure attainment knows.
The night falls, and the darkened verdure starred
With pallid roses shuts the world away.
Sad wandering souls of song, frail ghosts of thought
That voiceless died, the massing shadows haunt,
Troubling the heart with unfulfilled delight.
The moon is listening in the vault of heaven,

329

And, like the airy march of mighty wings,
The rhythmic throb of stately cadences
Inthralls the ear with some high-measured verse,
Where ecstasies of passion-nurtured words
For great thoughts find a home, and fill the mind
With echoes of divinely purposed hopes
That wore on earth the death-pall of despair.
Night darkens round me. Never more in life
May I, companioned by the friendly dead,
Walk in this sacred fellowship again;
Therefore, thou silent singer 'neath the grass,
Still sing to me those sweeter songs unsung,
“Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,”
Caressing thought with wonderments of phrase
Such as thy springtide rapture knew to win.
Ay, sing to me thine unborn summer songs,
And the ripe autumn lays that might have been;
Strong wine of fruit mature, whose flowers alone we know.

Rome, May 1891.

ROMA

Ripe hours there be that do anticipate
The heritage of death, and bid us see,
As from the vantage of eternity,
The shadow-symbols of historic fate.

As o'er some Alpine summit's lonely steep,
Blinding and terrible with spears of light,
Hurling the snows from many a shaken height,
The storm-clad spirits of the mountain sweep,—

330

Thus, in the solitude where broodeth thought,
Torn from rent chasms of the soundless past,
Go by me, as if borne upon the blast,
The awful forms which time and man have wrought.

Swift through the gloom each mournful chariot rolls,
Dim shapes of empire urge the flying steeds,
Featured with man's irrevocable deeds,
Robed with the changeful passions of men's souls.

Ethereal visions pass serene in prayer,
Their eyes aglow with sacrificial light;
Phantoms of creeds long dead, their garments bright,
Drip red with blood of torture and despair.

In such an hour my spirit did behold
A woman wonderful. Unnumbered years
Left in her eyes the beauty born of tears,
And full they were of fatal stories old.

The trophies of her immemorial reign
The shadowy great of eld beside her bore;
A broidery of ancient song she wore,
And the glad muses held her regal train.

Still hath she kingdom o'er the souls of men;
Dear is she always in her less estate.
The sad, the gay, the thoughtful, on her wait,
Praising her evermore with tongue and pen.

Stately her ways and sweet, and all her own;
As one who has forgotten time, she lives,

331

Loves, loses, lures anew, and ever gives,—
She who all misery and all joy hath known.

If thou wouldst see her, as the twilight fails,
Go forth along the ancient street of tombs,
And when the purple shade divinely glooms
High o'er the Alban hills, and night prevails,

If then she is not with thee while the light
Glows over roof and column, tower and dome,
And the dead stir beneath thy feet, and Rome
Lies in the solemn keeping of the night,—

If then she be not thine, not thine the lot
Of those some angel rescues for an hour
From earth's mean limitations, granting power
To see as man may see when time is not.

Rome, May 1891.

VENICE

I am Venezia, that Sad Magdalen,
Who with her lovers' arms the turbaned East
Smote, and through lusty centuries of gain
Lived a wild queen of battle and of feast.
I netted, in gold meshes of my hair,
The great of soul; painter and poet, priest,
Bent at my will with picture, song, and prayer,
And ever love of me their fame increased,
Till I, queen, became the slave of slaves,
And, like the ghost-kings of the Umbrian plain,
Saw from my centuries torn, as from their graves,

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The priceless jewels of my haughty reign.
Gone are my days of gladness; now in vain
I hurt the tender with my speechless pain.

Venice, June 1891.

VENICE TO ITALY

O Italy, my fateful mistress-land,
That, like Delilah, won with deathful bliss
Each conquering foe who wooed thy wanton kiss,
And sheared thy lovers' strength with certain hand,
And gave them to Philistia's bonds of vice;
Smiling to see the strong limbs waste away,
The manly vigor crippled by decay,
Usurious years exact the minute's price.
Ah! when my great were greatest, ever glad,
I thanked them with the hope of nobler deeds.
Statesman and poet, painter, sculptor, knight,—
These my dear lovers were ere days grew sad,
And them I taught how mightily exceeds
All other love the love that holds God's light.

Venice, June 1891.

THE DECAY OF VENICE

The glowing pageant of my story lies,
A shaft of light, across the stormy years,
When, 'mid the agony of blood and tears,
Or pope or kaiser won the mournful prize,

333

Till I, the fearless child of ocean, heard
The step of doom, and trembling to my fall,
Remorseful knew that I had seen unstirred
Proud Freedom's death, the tyrant's festival;
Whilst that Italia which was yet to be,
And is, and shall be, sat, a virgin pure,
High over Umbria on the mountain slopes,
And saw the failing fires of liberty
Fade on the chosen shrine she deemed secure,
When died for many a year man's noblest hopes.

Venice, June 1891.

PISA: THE DUOMO

Lo, this is like a song writ long ago,
Born of the easy strength of simpler days,
Filled with the life of man, his joy, his praise,
Marriage and childhood, love, and sin, and woe,
Defeat and victory, and all men know
Of passionate remorses, and the stays
That help the weary on life's rugged ways.
A dreaming seraph felt this beauty grow
In sleep's pure hour, and with joy grown bold
Set the fair crystal in the thought of man;
And Time, with antique tints of ivory wan,
And gentle industries of rain and light,
Its stones rejoiced, and o'er them crumbled gold
Won from the boundaries of day and night.

Pisa, May 1891.

334

THE VESTAL'S DREAM

Ah, Venus, white-limbed mother of delight,
Why shouldst thou tease her with a dream so dear?
Winged tenderness of kisses, hovering near,
Her gentle longings cheat. Forbidden sight
Of eager eyes doth through the virgin night
Perplex her innocence with cherished fear.
O cruel thou, with sweets to ripen here
In wintry cloisters what can know but blight.
Wilt leave her now to scorn? The lictors' blows
To-morrow shall be merciless. The light
Dies on the altar! Nay, swift through the night,
Comes pitiful the queen of young desire,
That reddened in a dream this chaste white rose,
And lights with silver torch the fallen fire.

Rome, May 1891.

AFTER RUYSDAEL

Through briery ways, from underneath
The far-off sadness of the gold
That fades above the sun, the waves
Swift to our very feet are rolled.

Above, beyond, to either side,
The sombre woods bend overhead;
And underneath, the wild brown waves
Leap joyously, with lightsome tread,

335

From rock to rock, and laugh and sing,
Like lonely maids in woods at play;
Till in the cold, still pool below,
A-sudden checked, they stand at bay,

Like girls who, in their mood of joy,
To this more solemn woodland glide,
And with some brief, sweet terror touched,
Stand wistful, trembling, tender-eyed.

What half-felt sense of something gone,
What sadness in the moveless woods;
What sorrow haunts yon amber sky,
That over all so darkly brood!

AFTER ALBERT CUYP

A sunset silence holds the patient land;
Against the sun the stolid cattle stand;
Framed hazy, in the gold that slips
Between the sails of lazy ships,
And floods with level, yellow light
The broad, green meadow grasses bright.

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NEAR AMSTERDAM

AFTER ALBERT CUYP

Sober gray skies and ponderous clouds,
With gaps between of pallid blues;
Bluff breezes stirring the brown canal;
A broad, flat meadow's myriad hues

Of soft and changeful breadths of green,
Barred with the silvery grass that bows
By straight canals, and dotted o'er
With black and white of basking cows;

And distant sails of hidden ships
The ceaseless windmills show or hide,
Through languid willows white they gleam,
And over red-tiled houses glide.

Two sturdy lads with wooden shoes
Go clumping down the reed-fringed dyke,
And tow a broad-bowed boat, where dreams
The quaint, sweet virgin of Van Eyck.

And slipt from out the revel high,
Where gay Franz Hals has bid him sit,
Above the bridge, his lazy pipe
Smokes placidly the stout De Witt.

337

AFTER TENIERS

A quiet curve of sombre brown water,
Flecked with duck-weed and dotted with leaves;
A low brick cottage, where shadows nestle
'Neath velvet edges of well-thatched eaves.

In front a space, with its gaudy dahlias
And solid shade of the branching lime,
Where, soberly gay, two boors are drinking
In the deep'ning gloom of the evening time.

1870.

MILAN

DA VINCI'S CHRIST

All day long, year after year,
Maid and man and priest and lay
Wander in from crowded streets,
And through the long, cool gallery stray.

And with them, in the fading light,
We loiter past the pictured wall,
Till lo! a face before us comes,
And something wistful seems to fall

From two strange eyes that speak to all;
For here a priest, and there a maid,
Two lads, a soldier, and a bonne,
Before the rail their steps have stayed.

338

What message bore this awful face,
Through all the waning centuries fled?
What says it to the gazer now?
What said it to the myriad dead

Who came and went like us to-day,
And, pausing here in silence, all
In silence laid their weight of sins
Before this still confessional?

A face more sad man never dreamed,
A face more sweet man never wrought;
So solemn-sad, so solemn-sweet,
Serenely set in quiet thought.

The silent sunlight slips away,
The soldiers pass, the bonne goes by;
The painter drapes his copy in,
And stops his work and heaves a sigh.

And followed by those eyes, that have
The patience of eternity,
We carry to the bustling street
Their loving Benedicite.

1870.

339

BRUGES: QUAI DES AUGUSTINS

AFTER VAN DER VEER

Within the sad, deserted street,
We stand a little space to gaze,
Beneath the high-walled garden's shade,
Amid the twilight's growing haze.

The still depths of the dark canal,
Between gray walls of ancient stone,
Stir not to any wind that blows,
And seem so silent, so alone,

We wonder at the lazy swans
That o'er the water dare to glide,
And marvel at the lads who cast
Their pebbles from the bridge's side.

Quaint houses bound the darksome wave,
Time-tinted, yellow, umber, gray,
With gaping gargoyles overhead,
And underneath sweet gardens gay,

With ivy, flung like cloaks of green
Upon the worn and mottled wall;
Forgotten centuries ago
By burgher dames at even-fall.

Across the narrow space of flowers,
A maid in scarlet petticoat
Comes with the shining pail of brass,
And bends above the moveless moat;

340

And breaks her image with the pail,
And scares the swans, and trips away,
And leaves the stern, gray, sombre street
To silence and the waning day.

1870.

THE WAVES AT MIDNIGHT

THE CLIFFS, NEWPORT

Seen in the night by
Their snows, as they crush,
Evermore saying—
Hush—hush—hush—
They fall, and they die,
Break, and perish, without reply.

And are not and are,
And come back again
With the sob and throb
Of a constant pain,
And snatch from afar
The tremulous light of a single star.

Always the cliffs hear,
How mournfully sweet
Their murmurous music,
Their cry of defeat,
As near and more near
They shiver and die in darkness drear.

341

Bleaker the cliffs be,
And blacker the night,
Where tender with sorrow,
Where eager for light,
The waves of life's sea
Wail, crushed at an answerless cliff-wall for me.

1889.

THE RISING TIDE

An idle man, I stroll at eve,
Where move the waters to and fro;
Full soon their added gains will leave
Small space for me to come and go.

Already in the clogging sand
I walk with dull, retarded feet;
Yet still is sweet the lessening strand,
And still the lessening light is sweet.

Newport, October 1891.

EVENING BY THE SEA

With noble waste of lazy hours
I loitered, till I saw the moon,
A rosy pearl, hang vast and strange
Above the long gray dune!

342

And hither, thither, as I went,
My ancient friend the sea beside,
Whatever tune my spirit sang
The dear old comrade tried.

Bar Harbor, 1892.

BEAVER-TAIL ROCKS

CANONICUT

Fare forth my soul, fare forth, and take thine own;
The silver morning and the golden eve
Wait, as the virgins waited to receive
The bridegroom and the bride, with roses strown;
Fare forth and lift her veil,—the bride is joy alone!
To thee the friendly hours with her shall bring
The changeless trust that bird and poet sing;
Her dower to-day shall be the asters sown
On breezy uplands; hers the vigor brought
Upon the north wind's wing, and hers for thee
A stately heritage of land and sea,
And all that nature hath, and all the great have thought,
While low she whispers like a sea-born shell
Things that thy love may hear but never tell.

1889.

343

THE CARRY

NIPIGON

Blue is the sky overhead,
Blue with the northland's pallor,
Never a cloud in sight,
Naught but the moon's gray sickle;
And ever around me, gray,
Ashes, and rock, and lichen.
Far as the sick eye searches
Ghastly trunks, that were trees once,
Up to their bony branches
Carry the gray of ruin.
Lo! where across the mountain
Swept the scythe of the wind-fall,
Moss of a century's making
Lies on this death-swath lonely,
Where in grim heaps the wood sachems,
Like to the strange dead of battle,
Stay, with their limbs ever rigid
Set in the doom-hour of anguish.
Far and away o'er this waste land
Wanders a trail through gray boulders,
Brown to the distant horizon.

1870.

344

IDLENESS

There is no dearer lover of lost hours
Than I.
I can be idler than the idlest flowers;
More idly lie
Than noonday lilies languidly afloat,
And water pillowed in a windless moat.
And I can be
Stiller than some gray stone
That hath no motion known.
It seems to me
That my still idleness doth make my own
All magic gifts of joy's simplicity.

Ristigouche River, 1892.

THE LOST PHILOPENA

TO M. G. M.

More blest is he who gives than who receives,
For he that gives doth always something get:
Angelic usurers that interest set:
And what we give is like the cloak of leaves
Which to the beggared earth the great trees fling,
Thoughtless of gain in chilly autumn days:
The mystic husbandry of nature's ways
Shall fetch it back in greenery of the Spring.
One tender gift there is, my little maid,
That doth the giver and receiver bless,

345

And shall with obligation none distress;
Coin of the heart in God's just balance weighed;
Wherefore, sweet spendthrift, still be prodigal,
And freely squander what thou hast from all.

Lucerne, July 1891.

GOOD-NIGHT

Good-night. Good-night. Ah, good the night
That wraps thee in its silver light.
Good-night. No night is good for me
That does not hold a thought of thee.
Good-night.

Good-night. Be every night as sweet
As that which made our love complete,
Till that last night when death shall be
One brief “Good-night,” for thee and me.
Good-night.

Newport, 1890.

COME IN

“Come in.” I stand, and know in thought
The honest kiss, the waiting word,
The love with friendship interwrought,
The face serene by welcome stirred.

Bar Harbor, 1892.

346

LOSS

Life may moult many feathers, yet delight
To soar and circle in a heaven of joy;
The pinion robbed must learn more swift employ,
Till the thinned feathers end our eager flight.

Bar Harbor, 1892.

A GRAVEYARD

As beats the unrestful sea some ice-clad isle
Set in the sorrowful night of arctic seas,
Some lorn domain of endless silences,
So, echoless, unanswered, falleth here
The great voiced city's roar of fretful life.

Rome, 1891.

OCTOBER

Stay, gentle sunshine, stay;
Sweet west wind, bide awhile;
Nay, linger, and my maid
Shall bribe you with a smile.

Sweet sun and west wind, stay,
You know not what you miss;
Nay, linger, and my maid
Shall pay you with a kiss.

1890.

347

SEPTEMBER

Sir Goldenrod stands by and grieves
Where Queen September goeth by:
Her viewless feet disturb the leaves,
And with her south the thrushes fly,
Or loiter 'mid the rustling sheaves,
And search and fail, and wonder why.
The burgher cat-tails stiffly bow
Beside the marsh. The asters cast
Their purple coronets, and below
The brown ferns shiver in the blast,
And all the fretted pool aglow
Repeats the cold, clear, yellow sky.
The dear, loved summer days are past,
And tranquil goes the Queen to die.

1889.

YOU AND I

What would you say
If you were I,
And I were near,
And no one by;
If you were I?

What would you do
If you were I,
And night were dark,
And none were nigh?
What would you do?

348

What would I say
If I were you,
And none were near,
And love were true?
What would I say?

What would I do?
Just only this.
And on my cheek
Soft lit a kiss.
This did she do!

I heard a cry,
And through the night
Saw far away
A gleam of white,
And there was I!

But not again
This she was I;
Yet still I loved,
And years went by.
Ah, not again!

1890.

THE CHRIST OF THE SNOWS

A NORWEGIAN LEGEND

Set wine on the table
And bread on the plate;
Cast logs on the ashes,
And reverent wait.

349

The wine of love's sweetness
Set out in thy breast,
And the white bread of welcome,
To comfort the Guest.

For surely He cometh,
Now midnight is near;
The wild winds, like wolf-packs,
Have fled in their fear,

Or hid in far fiords,
Or died on the floes:
For surely He cometh,
Our Christ of the Snows.

Along by the portal,
Half joy and half fear,
Wait man, maid, and matron
The step none shall hear;

The babe at the doorway,
And age with eyes dim,—
They whom birth near or death near
Make closest to Him.

The clock tolleth midnight:
Cast open the door;
Shrink back ere He passeth,
Kneel all on the floor.

The stillness of terror
Possesseth the night,
From star-haunted heaven
To snow spaces white.

350

Lo! shaken by ghost gods
Who angrily fly,
The banners of Odin
Flame red on the sky.

The last note hath stricken:
Did He pass? Was He here?
Is it sorrow or joy that
Shall rule the new year?

The mother who watcheth
The face of the child
Saith, Ah, He was with us,—
The baby hath smiled!

The virgin who bends o'er
The cup on the board
Cries, Lo! the wine trembled,—
'T was surely the Lord!

Sing Christmas, sweet Christmas,
All good men below;
Sing Christmas that bringeth
Our Christ of the Snow.

1880.

351

ST. CHRISTOPHER

FOR A CHILD

There was none so tall as this giant bold.
He had a name that could not be told,
A name so crooked no Christian men
Could say it over and speak again.
One day he came where a good man prayed
All alone in the forest shade.
Then the giant in wonder said:
“Why do you bend the knee and head?”
“I bend,” he said, “because I be
The weakest thing that you can see.
To Christ who is so good and strong,
I pray for help to do no wrong.”
“Ho,” said the giant, “when I see
One strong enough to conquer me,
I shall be glad to bend my knees,
Which are as stout as any trees.”
“But,” said the good man, sad and old,
“Yon stream is deep, the water cold.
Prayer is the Spirit's work for some.
Work is the prayer of the body dumb.”
“If that be prayer,” said the giant tall,
“The maimed and sick, the weak and small,
Across the stream and to and fro,
I shall carry and come and go,
Until the time when I shall see
Thy strong Christ come to humble me.”
So all day long, with patient hand,
He bore the weak from strand to strand.

352

At last, one eve, when winds were wild,
He heard the voice of a little child
Saying, “Giant, art thou asleep?
Carry me over the river deep.”
On his shoulder broad he set the child,
And laughed to see how the infant smiled.
Up to his waist the giant strode,
While fierce around the water flowed;
His great back shook, his great knees bent,
As staggering through the waves he went.
“Why is this?” he cried aloud;
“Why should my great back be bowed?”
Spake from his shoulder, sweet and clear,
A voice,—'t was like a bird's to hear,—
“I am the Christ to whom men pray
When comes the morn and wanes the day.”
“No,” said the giant, “a child art thou.
Not to a babe shall proud men bow!”
He set the child on the farther land,
And wiped his brow with shaking hand.
“In truth,” he cried, “the load was great,
Wherefore art thou this heavy weight?”
The little child said, “I was heavy to thee
Because the world's sins rest on me.”
“If thou canst carry them all on thee,
Who art but a little child to see,
Thou must be strong, and I be weak,
And thou must be the one I seek.”
Therefore the giant, day by day,
Still kept his work, and learned to pray.
And his pagan name that none should hear
Was changed to Giant Christopher.

1887.

353

LINES TO A DESERTED STUDY

Hush! Feel ye not around us teem
The shapes that haunted Goethe's dream?
When lifted genius mused apart,
And taste inspired the soul of art;
Young first Love, coy with trembling wings,
And Hope, the lark that soaring sings,
And boyhood friendships prone to fade
Through pleasant zones of sun and shade;
With many a phantom born of youth,
The trust in honor, faith, and truth
That fails in after years;
The perfect pearls of life's young dream
Dissolved in manhood's tears.
Through Time's swift loom our joys and griefs
In braided strands together run;
To weave about this world of ours
Wild tapestries of shade and sun.
And seems it not as if to-night,
Dear, dusty, many-memoried room,
Our souls had lost the threads of light,
And like the eve kept gathering gloom?
Ay, and for one of us the hour
Must have, methinks, a double power,
As backwards turns his saddened look,
To view again those many scenes,
When life was like an uncut book,
And Joy was in her rosy teens,
Yes, even we who later knew
The home of friendship and of taste,

354

Stand saddened by the parting view
Of scenes by recollection graced.
Ah, there the books looked meekly out
Above an alligator's snout;
And bugs and fossils, birds and bones,
Round-shouldered bottles, jars, and stones,
Stood up in order sage,—
Memorials they of every clime,
Remains of every age.
Oh, yes, 't was here at eventide
We lingered by the table's side,
While Wit her lightning stories told,
And through Havana's clouds of gold
The thunder-storm of laughter rolled,
Till Mirth her very contrast brought,
And drooped the brow in earnest thought;
While tranced we sat, as now we sit,
And fast the parting time draws near,
And these stained walls seem gathering grace
As if to grow more doubly dear;
And not an ink-mark on the boards
But wears a half-appealing look.
The mottled wall, the naked floor,
I read them as ye read a book,—
As if they something had to say,
And sought but could not find a way;
As often 'mid the waning year,
In brown-cheeked autumn's bowers,
The leaves ye tread seem rustling low,—
Tread gently, we were flowers.

355

AN OLD MAN TO AN OLD MADEIRA

When first you trembled at my kiss
And blushed before and after,
Your life, a rose 'twixt May and June,
Was stirred by breeze of laughter.

I asked no mortal maid to leave
A kiss where there were plenty;
Enough the fragrance of your lips
When I was five-and-twenty.

Fair mistress of a moment's joy,
We met, and then we parted;
You gave me all you had to give,
Nor were you broken-hearted!

For other lips have known your kiss,
Oh! fair inconstant lady,
While you have gone your shameless way
Till life has passed its heyday.

And then we met in middle age,
You matronly and older;
And somewhat gone your maiden blush,
And I, well, rather colder.

And now that you are thin and pale,
And I am slowly graying,
We meet, remindful of the past,
When we two went a-maying.

356

Alas! while you, an old coquette,
Still flaunt your faded roses,
The arctic loneliness of age
Around my pathway closes.

Dear aged wanton of the feast,
Egeria of gay dinners,
I leave your unforgotten charm
To other younger sinners.

ADAM

A HUNGARIAN LEGEND

Far in Asia, saith the legend,
On a peak whose nameless towers
Use the plains a hundred miles off
For their dial of the hours;

Where the tallest Himalaya
Rises sad because so lonely,
Whence the eagle swoops in terror,
And the stars of God are only,—

Sitteth one of ancient visage,
One more strange than aught below him,
One who lived so near to God once
That for man we scarce should know him;—

Far above the busy world tribes,
Miles above the pine-trees, bending,
Lonely as when God first made him,
There he keepeth watch unending.

357

Wearily his eyes are searching
Wide and far amid the nations,
In their centuried depths a million
Pictures of earth's desolations.

And his garments long and ample
Lie as though in death he slumbered;
Never breeze hath stirred their stillness
Since his earthly days were numbered.

But their tints are ever changing,
Painted by the woes of mortals,—
Scarlet, mottled, darkened, whitened,
Like the morning's cloud of portals;

For the mists of human passion,
Anger, sorrow, love, devotion,
Rise from town, and mart, and forest,
Float from hill, and field, and ocean,

And with hate and murder's crimson
Stain and blot his mantle's brightness,
Or with love, and faith, and patience,
Bleach its folds to noonday whiteness.

Yet with solemn eyes he waiteth,
Since for sins that rack him ever
One still greater heart grows sadder
With a love that wearies never;

For above the sad earth's murmurs,
And above the pale star's gray light,
Far beyond unthought-of systems,
And the shining homes of daylight,

358

One there is, at whose dear coming
Peace and love his robes shall whiten,
When, his earth-long vigil ended,
Death his troubled face shall brighten.

TO THE FORGET-ME-NOTS

ON THE PASS OF THE MAIDEN, JAPAN

Lo! Fujiyama's snowy cone
The green horizon bounds,
And Miajimi's sacred isle,
And Budda's temple-grounds.

Ah, once again thy voice is heard;
Again we keep our tryst,
As when upon the Switzer's hill
I stood amid the mist.

Within the garden's ordered walks
Thy name alone I hear,
And miss the gentle voice that calls
When none but I am near.

But where the mountain summits rise
Is ever sacred sod,
And here thy timid counsel breathes
A deep appeal to God.

Ah, least of all the many flowers
That on my path are set,
Read me thy Sermon on the Mount:
What should I not forget?

359

“Forget me not.” How simple seems
The counsel shyly given!
Let each interpret for himself
This voice of earth and heaven.

Ah! once on Albula's gray pass
I prayed that I might get,
With foresight of a darker day,
The sad leave to forget;

Nor knew, alas! how soon would come
Sore need to urge my prayer.
Ah, tender maidens of the hill
That constant sorrow share.

Forget? Ah, yes! the living fade
From memory, not the dead.
Thine are their voices as to-day
These alien hills I tread.

Tokio.

TO A MAGNOLIA FLOWER

IN THE GARDEN OF THE ARMENIAN CONVENT AT VENICE

I saw thy beauty in its high estate
Of perfect empire, where at set of sun
In the cool twilight of thy lucent leaves
The dewy freshness told that day was done.

360

Hast thou no gift beyond thine ivory cone's
Surpassing loveliness? Art thou not near—
More near than we—to nature's silentness;
Is it not voiceful to thy finer ear?

Thy folded secrecy doth like a charm
Compel to thought. What spring-born yearning lies
Within the quiet of thy stainless breast
That doth with languorous passion seem to rise?

The soul doth truant angels entertain
Who with reluctant joy their thoughts confess:
Low-breathing, to these sister spirits give
The virgin mysteries of thy heart to guess.

What whispers hast thou from yon childlike sea
That sobs all night beside these garden walls?
Canst thou interpret what the lark hath sung
When from the choir of heaven her music falls?

If for companionship of purity
The equal pallor of the risen moon
Disturb thy dreams, dost know to read aright
Her silver tracery on the dark lagoon?

The mischief-making fruitfulness of May
Stirs all the garden folk with vague desires.
Doth there not reach thine apprehensive ear
The faded longing of these dark-robed friars,

When, in the evening hour to memories given,
Some gray-haired man amid the gathering gloom
For one delirious moment sees again
The gleam of eyes and white-walled Erzeroum?

361

Hast thou not loved him for this human dream?
Or sighed with him who yesterevening sat
Upon the low sea-wall, and saw through tears
His ruined home and snow-clad Ararat?

If thou art dowered with some refinèd sense
That shares the counsels of the nesting bird,
Canst hear the mighty laughter of the earth,
And all that ear of man hath never heard,

If the abysmal stillness of the night
Be eloquent for thee, if thou canst read
The glowing rubric of the morning song,
Doth each new day no gentle warning breed?

Shall not the gossip of the maudlin bee,
The fragrant history of the fallen rose,
Unto the prescience of instinctive love
Some humbler prophecy of joy disclose?

Cold vestal of the leafy convent cell,
The traitor days have thy calm trust betrayed;
The sea-wind boldly parts thy shining leaves
To let the angel in. Be not afraid!

The gold-winged sun, divinely penetrant,
The pure annunciation of the morn
Breathes o'er thy chastity, and to thy soul
The tender thrill of motherhood is borne.

Set wide the glory of thy radiant bloom!
Call every wind to share thy scented breaths!
No life is brief that doth perfection win.
To-day is thine—to-morrow thou art death's!

Cortino d'Ampezzo, July 1897.

362

ON A BOY'S FIRST READING OF THE PLAY OF “KING HENRY THE FIFTH”

When youth was lord of my unchallenged fate,
And time seemed but the vassal of my will,
I entertainèd certain guests of state—
The great of older days, who, faithful still,
Have kept with me the pact my youth had made.

And I remember how one galleon rare
From the far distance of a time long dead
Came on the wings of a fair-fortuned air,
With sound of martial music heralded,
In blazonry of storied shields arrayed.

So the Great Harry with high trumpetings,
The wind of victory in her burly sails!
And all her deck with clang of armor rings:
And under-flown the Lily standard trails,
And over-flown the royal Lions ramp.

The waves she rode are strewn with silent wrecks,
Her proud sea-comrades once; but ever yet
Comes time-defying laughter from her decks,
Where stands the lion-lord Plantagenet,
Large-hearted, merry, king of court and camp.

Sail on! sail on! The fatal blasts of time,
That spared so few, shall thee with joy escort;

363

And with the stormy thunder of thy rhyme
Shalt thou salute full many a centuried port
With “Ho! for Harry and red Agincourt!”

1898.

GUIDARELLO GUIDARELLI

RAVENNA WARRIOR (1502)

[_]

What was said to the Duke by the sculptor concerning Guidarello Guidarelli, and of the monument he made of his friend.

I

“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Ran a murmur low or loud,
As he rode with lifted vizor,
Smiling on the anxious crowd.

“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Rang the cry from street and tower,
As our Guido rode to battle
In Ravenna's darkest hour.

“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Little thought we of his doom
When a love-cast rain of roses
Fell on saddle, mail, and plume.

364

Low he bowed, and laughing gaily
Set one red rose in his crest,
All his mail a scarlet splendor
Frem the red sun of the west.

“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
So, he passed to meet his fate,
With the cry of “Guidarelli!”
And the clangor of the gate.

II

Well, at eve we bore him homeward,
Lying on our burdened spears.
Ah! defeat had been less bitter,
And had cost us fewer tears.

At her feet we laid her soldier,
While men saw her with amaze—
Fearless, tearless, waiting patient,
Some wild challenge in her gaze.

Then the hand that rained the roses
Fell upon his forehead cold.
“Go!” she cried, “ye faltering cravens!
One that fled, your shame has told.

“Go! How dare ye look upon him—
Ye who failed him in the fight?
Off! ye beaten hounds, and leave me
With my lonely dead to-night!”

No man answered, and they left us
Where our darling Guido lay.

365

I alone, who stood beside him
In the fight, made bold to stay.

“Shut the gate!” she cried. I closed it.
“Lay your hand upon his breast:
Were you true to him?” “Ay, surely,
As I hope for Jesu's rest!”

Then I saw her staring past me,
As to watch a bird that flies,
All the light of youthful courage
Fading from her valiant eyes.

And with one hoarse cry of anguish
On the courtyard stones she fell,
Crying, “Guido Guidarelli!”
Like the harsh notes of a bell

Breaking with its stress of sweetness,
Hence to know a voiceless pain.
“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Never did she speak again:

Save, 't is said, she wins, when dreaming,
Tender memories of delight;
“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Crying through the quiet night.

III

Ah! you like it? Well, I made it
Ere death aged upon his face.
See, I caught the parted lip-lines
And the lashes' living grace:

366

For the gentle soul within him,
Freed by death, had lingered here,
Kissing his dead face to beauty,
As to bless a home grown dear.

He, my lord, was pure as woman,
Past the thought of man's belief;
Truth and honor here are written,
And some strangeness of relief

Born beneath my eager chisel
As a child is born—a birth
To my parent-skill mysterious,
Of, and yet not all of, earth.

Still one hears our women singing,—
For a love-charm, so 't is said,—
“Guidarello Guidarelli!”
Like a love-mass for the dead.

In caressing iteration
With his name their voices play—
“Elli, Nelli, Guidarelli,”
Through some busy market-day.

Ah, my lord, I have the fancy
That through many a year to come
This I wrought shall make the stranger
Share our grief when mine is dumb.

Venice, June 1897.

This monumental recumbent statue is now in the museum at Ravenna.

367

A WAR SONG OF TYROL

FREELY ENGLISHED FROM JOHANN SENN

(1792–1858)

“Wild eagle of the Tyrol,
Why are thy feathers red?”
“I 've been to greet the morning
On Ortler's crimsoned head!”

“Gray eagle of the Tyrol,
'T is not the morning light
Drips from the soaring pinions
That wing thine airy flight.

“Proud eagle of the Tyrol,
Why are thy claws so red?”
“I 've been where Etschland's maidens
The ruddy vintage tread.”

“Gray eagle of the Tyrol,
Red runs our Tyrol wine;
But redder ran the vintage
That stained those claws of thine.

“Wild eagle of the Tyrol,
Why is thy beak so red?”
“Go ask the gorge of Stilfes,
Where lie the Saxon dead!

368

“The grapes were ripe in August
Wherewith my beak is red;
The vines that gave that vintage
No other wine will shed:
My beak is red with battle;
I 've been among the dead!”

1897.

Here the Tyrolese defeated Marshal Lefebvre and the Saxon auxiliaries of France.

THE “TEXAS”

SEEN FROM THE BEACH AT ATLANTIC CITY, MAY 6, 1898

Fair in the white array of peace,
We saw her from the distant shore,
And felt the quickened pulse increase
To know what gallant flag she bore.
Proud namesake of the Lonely Star,
God speed thee on thy watery way,
Or be it peace, or be it war,
That waits thee in that Southern bay.
To yon far island of the sea,
Twin sister of the Lonely Star,
Good-luck and honor go with thee,
Or be it peace, or be it war!

1898.

369

THE SEA-GULL

I

The woods are full of merry minstrelsy;
Glad are the hedges with the notes of spring;
But o'er the sad and uncompanioned sea
No love-born voices ring.

II

Gray mariner of every ocean clime,
If I could wander on as sure a wing,
Or beat with yellow web thy pathless sea,
I too might cease to sing.

III

Would I could share thy silver-flashing swoop,
Thy steady poise above the bounding deep,
Or buoyant float with thine instinctive trust,
Rocked in a dreamless sleep.

IV

Thine is the heritage of simple things,
The untasked liberty of sea and air,
Some tender yearning for the peopled nest,
Thy only freight of care.

V

Thou hast no forecast of the morrow's need,
No bitter memory of yesterdays;
Nor stirs thy thought that airy sea o'erhead,
Nor ocean's soundless ways.

370

VI

Thou silent raider of the abounding sea,
Intent and resolute, ah, who may guess
What primal notes of gladness thou hast lost
In this vast loneliness!

VII

Where bides thy mate? On some lorn ocean rock
Seaward she watches. Hark! the one shrill cry,
Strident and harsh, across the wave shall be
Her welcome—thy reply.

VIII

When first thy sires, with joy-discovered flight,
High on exultant pinions sped afar,
Had they no cry of gladness or of love,
No bugle note of war?

IX

What gallant song their happy treasury held,
Such as the pleasant woodland folk employ,
The lone sea thunder quelled. Thou hast one note
For love, for hate, for joy.

X

Yet who that hears this stormy ocean voice
Would not, like them, at last be hushed and stilled,
Were all his days through endless ages past
With this stern music filled?

371

XI

What matters it? Ah! not alone are loved
Leaf-cloistered poets who can love in song.
Home to the wild-eyed! Home! She will not miss
The music lost so long.

XII

Home for the night wind signals, “Get thee home”;
Home, hardy admiral of the rolling deep;
Home from the foray! Home! That silenced song
Love's endless echoes keep.

1898.

EGYPT

I saw two vultures, gray they were and gorged:
One on a mosque sat high, asleep he seemed,
Claw-stayed within the silver crescent's curve;
Not far away, another, gray as he,
As full content and somnolent with food,
Clutched with instinctive grip the golden cross
High on the church an alien creed had built.
Yon in the museum mighty Rameses sleeps,
For some new childhood swaddled like a babe.
Osiris and Jehovah, Allah, Christ,
This land hath known, and, in the dawn of time,
The brute-god-creature crouching in the sand,
Ere Rameses worshipped and ere Seti died.
How much of truth to each new faith He gave
Who is the very father of all creeds,

372

I know not now—nor shall know. Ever still
Past temple, palace, tomb, the great Nile flows,
Free and more free of bounty as men learn
To use his values. Only this I know.

Cairo, 1899.

GIBRALTAR AT DAWN

Up and over the sea we came,
And saw the dayspring leap to flame.
Full in face Gibraltar lay,
Crouching, lion-like, at bay,
Stern and still and battle-scarred,
Grimly keeping watch and ward.
Hark, and hear the morning gun
Salute time's admiral, the sun,
While the bleak old storied keep,
That hath never known to sleep,
Golden 'neath the morning lies,
Sentinelled with memories,
Heard when, rolling from afar,
The hoarse waves thunder, “Trafalgar!”

At Sea, December 1898.

373

STORM-WAVES AND FOG ON DORR'S POINT, BAR HARBOR

The fog's gray curtain round me draws,
And leaves no world to me
Save this swift drama of the stirred
And restless sea.

Forth of the shrouding fog they roll,
As from a viewless world,
Leap spectral white, and, pausing, break,
In thunder hurled.

Ever they climb and cling anew,
Slide from the smooth rock wall,
With thin white fingers grip the weeds
And seaward crawl.

In rhythmic rote o'er shivering sands
They glide adown the shore
With murmurous whispering of “Hush!”
And then no more.

1907.

374

THE BIRTHDAY OF WASHINGTON

1900

Remembering him we praise to-day,
Hushed is the mighty roar of trade,
And, pausing on its ardent way,
A nation's homage here is paid.

Upon the great Virginian's grave
Look down the new-born century's eyes,
Where by his loved Potomac wave
In God's long rest His soldier lies.

A hundred years have naught revealed
To blot this manhood's record high,
‘That blazoned duty's stainless shield
And set a star in honor's sky.’

In self-approval firm, his life
Serenely passed through darkest days;
In calm or storm, in peace or strife,
Unmoved by blame, unstirred by praise.

No warrior pride disturbed his peace,
Nor place nor gain. He loved his fields,
His home, the chase, his land's increase,
The simple life that nature yields.

375

And yet for us all man could give
He gave, with that which never dies,
The gift through which great nations live,
The lifelong gift of sacrifice.

With true humility he learned
The game of war, the art of rule;
And, calmly patient, slowly earned
His competence in life's large school.

Well may we honor him who sought
To live with one unfailing aim,
And found at last, unasked, unsought,
In duty's path, the jewel, fame!

And He who girded him with power,
And gave him strength to do the right,
Will ask of us, in some stern hour,
“How have ye used the gift of might?”

Since, till this harried earth shall gain
The heaven of Thy peace, O Lord!
Freedom and Law will need to reign
Beneath the shadow of the sword.

376

FLORENCE

APRIL FIRST

Come, let us be the willing fools
Of April's earliest day,
And dream we own all pleasant things
The years have reft away.

'T is but to take the poet's wand,
A touch or here or there,
And I have lost that ancient stoop,
And you are young and fair.

Ah, no! The years that gave and took
Have left with you and me
The wisdom of the widening stream;
Trust we the larger sea.

Except the last two lines, which I failed to capture, the rest of these verses I composed while asleep. I have many times seemed to make verses in sleep; only thrice could I recall them on waking. The four lines called “Which” were also made in sleep. The psychological interest of this sleep product may excuse this personal statement.

WHICH?

Birth-day or Earth-day,
Which the true mirth-day?
Earth-day or birth-day,
Which the well-worth day?

February 15, 1909.

377

JEKYL ISLAND

EBB-TIDE

Fading light on a lonely beach,
A slow out-creeping tide
That leaves to me on sea-etched sands
The ocean's cryptic speech.

Adown the ever broadening strand
Moon-witched waters steal,
And over the dunes a wild wind swoops
And frets the silted sand.

INDIAN SUMMER

The stillness that doth wait on change is here,
Some pause of expectation owns the hour;
And faint and far I hear the sea complain
Where gray and answerless the headlands tower.

Slow fails the evening of the dying year,
Misty and dim the waiting forests lie,
Chill ocean winds the wasted woodland grieve,
And earthward loitering the leaves go by.

Behold how nature answers death! O'erhead
The memoried splendor of her summer eves
Lavished and lost, her wealth of sun and sky,
Scarlet and gold, are in her drifting leaves.

378

Vain pageantry! for this, alas, is death,
Nor may the seasons' ripe fulfilment cheat
My thronging memories of those who died
With life's young summer promise incomplete.

The dead leaves rustle 'neath my lingering tread.
Low murmuring ever to the spirit ear:
We were, and yet again shall be once more,
In the sure circuits of the rolling year.

Trust thou the craft of nature. Lo! for thee
A comrade wise she moves, serenely sweet,
With wilful prescience mocking sense of loss
For us who mourn love's unreturning feet.

Trust thou her wisdom, she will reconcile
The faltering spirit to eternal change
When, in her fading woodways, thou shalt touch
Dear hands long dead and know them not as strange.

For thee a golden parable she breathes
Where in the mystery of this repose,
While death is dreaming life, the waning wood
With far-caught light of heaven divinely glows.

Thou, when the final loneliness draws near,
And earth to earth recalls her tired child,
In the sweet constancy of nature strong
Shalt dream again—how dying nature smiled.

Bar Harbor, 1900.

379

FRIENDSHIP

No wail of grief can equal answer win:
Love's faltering echo may but ill express
The grief for grief, nor more than faintly mock
The primal cry of some too vast distress.
Or is it for fair company of joy
We ask an equal echo from the heart?
A certain loneliness is ever ours,
And friendship mourns her still imperfect art.

1908.

LOVE

“For I have always loved you for many reasons and in many ways.”—
P. B.

The daily tribute of the sun
Lives on, in tree, and fruit, and flower;
Lives on, with subtle change of power,
When the last hour of day is done.

And what the kindly sun has given,
Reborn in many a varied form
Is in the wind, the sea, the storm,
And when the lightning flames through heaven,

And is itself again; and so
Through many ways of diverse change
Has love equality of range,
And back again as love may flow;

380

For deathless, as God's sunlight still,
Its tender ministry renewed
In each divine beatitude,
Shall love its purposes fulfil.

INNOGEN

[_]

A stage direction in the old copies of “Much Ado about Nothing” is: “Enter Leonato, Governour of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his niece, and a messenger.” As the wife of Leonato takes no part in the action, and neither speaks nor is spoken to throughout the play, she was probably no more than a character the poet had designed in his first sketch of the plot, and which he found reason to omit afterward.

Immortal shadow, faint and ever fair,
Dear for unspoken words that might have been,
Compelled to silent sorrow none may share,
A ghost of Shakespeare's world, unheard, unseen,
How many more like thee have voiceless stood
Uncalled upon the threshold of his mind,
The speechless children of a mighty brood
Who were and are not! Never shall they find
The happier comrades unto whom he gave
Thought, speech, and action—they who shall not know
The end of our realities, the grave,
Nor what is sadder, life, nor any human woe.

381

PRAYER

When the day is growing old
And the stars their vigils keep,
Lo, a gentle voice within
Calling to the fold of sleep.

Whither, thither, know I not:
His the silence, His the care,
When my soul is called to rest,
Shepherded by quiet prayer.

THE ANGELS OF PRAYER

Ye to whom my prayer is given,
Gentle couriers of heaven,
Sailing through the world of space
'Neath the sun of Mary's face,
To the joy of Mary's grace,
Let it seem a little child,
Such as came when Jesu smiled.

A CHILD'S PRAYER

Holy Mother! Holy Mother!
In the dark I fear.
Light me with thy shining eyes,
Be thou ever near.

382

Holy Mother! Holy Mother!
Call thy little Son,
Bid Him bring me praying dreams
Ere the night be done.

Call the angels, call them early,
Bid them fly to thee,
One to call the little birds,
One to waken me.

LINES GIVEN TO M. AT CHRISTMAS

WITH A GIFT OF THE VIRGIN OF LUINI

What shall I give thee, dear, to-day,
Upon this sacred Christmas morn,
That tells us of the gift of love
God gave when Christ was born,

And hope became a seraph winged
With timeless dreams, and love elate
Saw with young eyes another world
Where love's lost angels wait?

Ah, small were any richest gift
Without such love as thro' the years
Was sweeter for the hour of joy
And nobler for the day of tears.

383

Take, then, with love this gentle face
That had a more than human share
Of joy and grief, and haply, too,
Through the long years of sorrow bore

In that gray village of the hills,
The sense of some diviner loss
Than death deals out, and evermore
The anguish of the lifted cross.

1905.

THE PURE OF HEART

GENNESARET

O'er my head the starry legions marched upon their trackless way;
Far below, Gennesaret's waters, silent, in the moonlight lay,
And the Orient, brooding mother of all creeds that men hold dear,
Cast her mystic spell upon me, and I murmured, “Was it here?”
Was it here a man, a peasant, strange ambassador of God,
Called to hear His stately message those sad children of the sod;
Sowed for them hope's boundless harvest, lavished for those shepherds rude
All that wonder-wealth of promise, each divine beatitude?

384

Marvelling, my thought I carried into sleep, and if the earth
Breathed some memory of the legend, or in dreams it had its birth,
Who may say? I tell the story as it came to me at night,
From the underworld of slumber, from the inner world of light.
On the hilltop, in the twilight, grave and still the Master lay,
While the westward summits crimsoned, lustrous in the dying day.
What had I to learn, a rabbi, schooled and lessoned in the law?
Half in doubt and half in wonder, there apart I stood, and saw
How some gentle impulse moved Him, and there came upon His face,
With the final gold of sunset, other light, of joy and grace,
While the mountains cast their shadows, slowly cloaking all the hill
Where the multitude in silence waited on the Master's will;
For His features stirred, uplifted as with thought upon the wing,
Stirred as stirs the great earth-mother when she feels her child, the spring.
Wistfully men bided, longing for the voice their eyes entreat,
Forward bent, hands locked, and quiet, till He rose upon His feet.

385

And He gave as none has given through the long and weary years,
Blessings that have lightened labor, promises that answer tears.
When at last the white-clad peasants slowly from the hill withdrew,
Long I lingered, why I knew not, till at last I surely knew
That my soul some yearning counselled, bidding me remain. I stayed,
Bolder for the dark, then heard Him: “Rabbi, ask. Be not afraid.”
Low I questioned: “Lord and Master, who most surely are the pure?
Is it they who, born and dying, have no sorrow to endure,
Like the snow that melts at morning, from the soil of earth secure?
Who is it shall see ...?” But spoke not that one word is left unsaid
When the priest intones the psalmist, and the sacred scrolls are read.
“Who is it shall dare behold Him, and the Nameless One abide,
When the seraphs' wings are folded, and the angel hosts divide?”
Then I felt how great my daring, and my forehead flushed with shame;
Like a child in fear I waited, waited for the word of blame.
But He said, “Draw near, O Rabbi,” and those strange eyes fell on mine,

386

And I knew that not in folly I had sought what none divine.
Touching heart and lips and forehead, as when one salutes a friend,
Low I bent, assured and silent, waiting what His heart would send.
“See, O Rabbi,” and a gesture summoned with the lifted hand;
Lo, a mighty wind, arising, drave across the wakened land,
Swept Gennesaret's startled waters, beat across the billowed grain,
Waking from its evening quiet, far below, the dreaming plain,
While the gnarled and aged olives wildly swayed above my head,
Heavy with the summer fruitage wherewithal a man is fed,
Rich with oil that feeds the lamps that keep remembrance of the dead.
And, behold, the wind He summoned for His parable, at will,
Gone as flies a bird, and stillness fell upon the lonely hill.
“Thou art learned in all our learning. Once at Nazareth I saw
How men listened to Thy teaching, ‘Come and read My higher law.’”
“Rabbi, Rabbi, sweet at evening are the lilies bending low;
Was it prayer they breathed, when rising from their dewy overflow?”

387

Wondering, I answered: “Master, who may know? But pure and sweet
Are they to the desert weary, freshness to the sand-hot feet.”
For I guessed where now He led me, and with thought that swift forewent,
As if spirit spake to spirit, glad at heart, I stood intent.
“Lo,” He said, “behold the olives failing with the summer heat,
Guarding still their precious harvest, though the mad wind on them beat.”
“Yea,” I cried. “Oh, surely, Master, strong are they, yet pure and sweet.”
For I guessed the fuller meaning of His speech, as one foreknows
When on Lebanon the rose-light prophet of the dawning glows.
And I said: “Not they are purest who, in hermit trance of prayer,
Bide untempted in the desert, sinless as Thy lilies were;
More there be who share Thy promise, more for whom this hope has smiled:
They the burdened, they the weary, they who ever, unbeguiled,
Through the home, the street, the market, bear the white heart of the child.”
Lingering, I heard His answer: “Go in peace.” I moved away,
While afar the westward summits slowly turned from gold to gray.

Bar Harbor, October 1904.

388

THE COMFORT OF THE HILLS

Blessed of the Lord be his land, for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills.

Here have I wandered oft these many years
Far from the world's restraint, my heart at ease,
With equal liberty of joy or tears
To welcome Nature's generosities,
Where these gray summits give the unburdened mind
To clearer thought, in freedom unconfined.
What made this wide estate of hill and plain
So surely mine to-day? Of God, the law
That gave to joy the right of ampler reign—
For in love's title none may find a flaw,
And mine the equities of tribute brought
From vassal lands no earthly gold has bought.

As flit gray gulls, with silver flash of wings,
Leap and are lost the whitecaps of the sea
When swoops the norther o'er the deep and sings
Mad music in the hemlocks, and for me
A litany of joy and hope and praise,
Sweet to the man who knows laborious days.

The wild hawk here is playmate of my thought.
Like him I soar, upon as eager wings,
And something of his liberty have caught,
The simple pleasure in material things,
Unvexed, in thoughtless joy a child to be,
The moment's friend of all the eye can see.

389

Kind to the dreamer is this solitude.
Fair courtesies of silence wait to know
What hopes are flattering a poet mood,
Stirred by frail ecstasies that come and go,
Like birds that let the quivering leaves prolong
The broken music of their passing song.

Here may we choose what company shall be ours;
Here bend before one fair divinity
To whose dear feet we bring the spirit-flowers,
Fragments of song, stray waifs of poetry,
The orphans of dead dreams, more sweet than aught
Won by decisive days of sober thought.

Day-dreams that feed the folly of the fool,
The wisdom of the wise, the hour endears;
Despite the discipline of life's stern school,
And the gray quiet of monastic years,
I sit, companioned by life's young desires,
And warm my fancies at yon sunset fires.

For 't is the children's hour, and I, the child,
Self-credulous, am pleased myself to tell
Stories that have no ending, ventures wild
O'er chartless oceans to glad isles where dwell
Loves that no bitter debt to time shall pay,
Loves that to-morrow shall be as to-day.

Ay, 't is enchantment's hour. A herald star
Marshals the silent armies of the night.
The eastward scarlet frets the waves. Afar
Fades in the pallid west a violet light,
And murmurs of the tide rise up to me,
Huge breathing of the sea's immensity.

390

Among the hills I know a dreaming lake
No wind disturbs, and drowsily it seems
The pictured stillness to itself to take.
All day it sleeps, and then at evening dreams
Brown twilight shadows,—till it dreams at dark
A silver dream, the pale moon's crescent bark.

There is a hill-crest where the dwarfish forms
Of crippled pines a scant subsistence win:
Gnarled by long battle with the winter storms,
Scarred cousins of their stately forest kin,
Whence came the force that waged victorious strife
For the mere hold upon their meagre life?

Companionable folk are they; at ease
Upon the rocks their wooden elbows rest.
Something they hint of ancient pleasantries;
Grim burgher soldiers they, who take with zest
Their pension of the sunshine, half aware
Of one with right their lazing life to share.

As wearily the mountain crest I gain,
Mysterious vigor feels the freshened mind,
And wide horizons gladden eye and brain.
Serenely confident I wait to find
Thoughts that no clouded hours knew to guess
Float upward to the light of consciousness.

Here truth the certainty of instinct feels,
When joy akin to awe the soul acquires,
And beauty, God's interpreter, reveals
Something of Him no meaner hour inspires.
Help Thou my unbelief, that I may be
By Nature's mother-hand led near to Thee.

391

Once, all there was of beauty on the earth
Became religion. Love was but a prayer
To gentle deities, whose sylvan mirth
Heard man or maid, at dusk of eve, aware
Of gods who shared love's piety, and of faint
Sweet whispers from some pagan flower saint.

If these were dreams, I envy those who dreamed
Into the world long dramas of belief,
This joyous passion-play of gods who seemed
To be so near to human joy and grief;
Or were they tender yearnings willed by Him
Whose creed left lonely all the woodways dim?

If I have lost this heritage divine,
Some pentecostal hour may give to me
The tongues earth's childhood knew, and it be mine
To read beyond what seems reality.
Grant me this gift of wisdom's fullest flower,
O fair Egeria of the evening hour.

Lo, in the twilight's dim confessional
Come agèd voices from this ice-scarred rock;
I hear the avalanche in thunder fall,
The glacier's many voices, and the shock
When from these granite shoulders, seaward hurled,
Fell the white ruin of an elder world.

My summer friends, the maples, cease to shed
Their red and gold, are bare and gaunt and gray.
In changeless quiet, towering overhead,
Hemlock and pine defy the autumn's sway,
The wintry winds. To them the call of spring
A gracious autumn with the birds shall bring.

392

If time might hold for us no sad surprise
Of autumn's mournful change, what joy it were,
Earth-fed, deep-rooted, year by year to rise
Where thought uplifted breathes serener air,
And at life's ripest, of a summer day
To feel the lightning fall and pass away.

Among these rifted rocks creep stealthily
Faint dusking shadows, and the forest air
Stirs when the topmost leaves, uneasily,
A moment shiver in the winds that bear
Hoarse murmurs from the unrepentant deep;
Like one who mutters of far deaths in sleep.

A strange supremacy of quietness
Awaits the thoughtful where, in wreckage vast,
These riven rocks old agonies confess,
The half-told story of a dateless past;
Prophetic dooms of change the soul oppress,
And some chill sense of ancient loneliness.

Why in this scene my truant footsteps found
Should come to me the urgent thought of death?
For when this ruin fell, the barren ground
Knew naught of life, nor any mortal breath,
Yet generous of color are to-day
These moss-clad rocks, with fern and lichen gay.

Alas, vain thought! Death's royal loneliness
Still bids the voice of love its silence share,
Where, in that land of grief companionless,
Familiar things a far remoteness wear,
And futile thoughts, like yearning tendrils, find
No hold secure, and hope and faith are blind.

393

Yet Nature stands, a finger on her lips,
Glad mother of mysterious sympathy,
Sure as the light that through the greenery slips,
Far-winged at eve with loving certainty,
To gild these glooming rocks, by glaciers worn,
With constant promise of another morn.

If Nature, soulless, knows not how to weep,
Take that she has for thee. Wilt know how much?
Bring here thy cares, and find upon the steep
Some kingly healing in the wild wind's touch.
The best of love and life is mystery,—
Take thou the pine-trees' benedicite!

The years that come as friend and leave as foe,
The years that come as foes, and friends depart,
Leave for remembrance more of joy than woe,
All memory sifting with Time's gentle art,
Till He who guides the swallow's wintry wing
Gives to our grief-winged love as sure a spring.

The mountain summit brings no bitter thought;
And in my glad surrender to its power,
Familiar spirits come to me unsought,
But unto thee, my child, the twilight hour,
When level sun-shafts of the waning day
Their girdling gold upon the forest lay.

Here, long ago, we talked or silent knew
The woodland awe of things about to be,
And, as the nearing shadows round us drew,
Some growing sense of unreality,
Ancestral pagan moods of far descent
That thronged the peopled woods with wonderment.

394

Art with me now, and this thy gentle hand?
Or is it that love's yearning love deceives,
And in too real a solitude I stand,
Hearing no footfall in the rustling leaves,
Sole comrade of far sorrows, left alone
The wakened memory of a dream to own?

Slow fades the light of day's most solemn hour.
The autumn leaves are drifting overhead.
In vain I yearn for some compelling power
To keep for me these ever-living dead.
Peace, peace, sad heart; for thee a gentle breeze,
God's angelus, is sighing in the trees.

Bar Harbor, September 1906.

AN ODE OF BATTLES

GETTYSBURG AND SANTIAGO

Long ages past
The slow ice sledges bore
These alien rocks from some far other shore;
Gray witnesses of power
In some prophetic hour
Dropped on the glacier's bed,
Strange burial-stones, to find at last
Their long-awaited dead.

Here, as if to mock regret,
Has careless nature set
The wild rose and the violet;

395

For what to her is battle's iron lot?
She has no memory of a day
When man had ceased to slay,
And by her strife his war is infant play;
Yet here the frail forget-me-not
Entreats remembrance of what death may gain:
For not in vain
Upon this lone hillside
Uncounted hopes have died;
And not in vain
The lordship of the soul
In that wild strife
Asked an heroic dole,
The tribute gift of life,
While homes long held in bondage of their fears
Heard what they too had spent and wailed in tears,—
The loss of youth's young love and manhood's remnant years.

Weep for thy many dead,
O Northland, weep!
Even for thy triumph weep!
Here too our brothers sleep;
Not we alone have bled.
Tears! tears for those who lost!
For bitter was the cost
When that ripe manhood at its flood
Ebbed away in blood.
Yet who beneath the shrouded sun
Upon yon battle-wearied plain
Could know they too had won,
And had not died in vain?

396

Gone the days of lingering hate!
Came at last a happier fate
That welded state to state,
When along the island shore
We together stood once more,
And the levin blight and thunder
Were strange echoes of a day
When Spain's galleons went under.
Or, death-hunted, fled away,
While the sturdy gales that keep
Guard o'er England, beach and steep,
Sped the billows from afar,
Leaping hounds of the sea's wild war,
And set them on the track
Where, o'er ruin and o'er wrack,
Shrouding all
Fell the fog's gray funeral pall,
And the sea-greed took its toll
Of the pride of Philip's soul.

Hark and hear, ye admirals dead!
Comrades of the burly deep,
Whatsoever decks ye tread,
Wheresoever watch ye keep,—
Hark! the channel surges still
Roll o'er wrecks ye left to bide
The master might of the sea's stern will,
Scourge of storm and stress of tide:
When upon the Spaniard's flight
Closed in shame the northern night,
Not yours alone the count of sorrow
Ye left to some avenging morrow:
Far-sown islands west and east,

397

Thro' one long revel of misrule,
Reign of tyrant, knave, or fool,—
Cursed too the bigot and the priest.
From their days of bitter need,
From the sea-lords of our breed,
To the patience of the strong
Fell that heritage of wrong.
Rest in peace, ye captains bold:
When the tide of battle rolled
Thunderous on the island shore,
To thy children's hand the Lord
Gave for judgment doom the sword.
And at last forevermore
On those haunted Cuban coasts
That long-gathering debt was paid
And the sad and silent ghosts
Of unnumbered wrongs were laid.

Awake, sad Island Sister! Wake to be
The glad young child of liberty.
The storm of battle wholesomely
Has swept thy borders free.
Ringed with the azure of the Carib Sea,
No more the joy of thy abounding waves
Shall mock a land of slaves.

And lo! the matchless prize,
Great kingdoms craved with eager eyes,
Was ours blood-bought.
With no base afterthought
We left unransomed and complete
Earth's richest jewel at fair Freedom's feet;
Her dream of hope a glad reality;

398

Our share a memory!
Ah, never since the lightning of gray war
In other lands afar
Dismembered nations smote, and justice slept
While greed her plunder kept,
Has conquest left no shame
Upon the victor's name;
But here at last from war's sad field
Proud honor bore a stainless shield,
And o'er our silent dead the air
Throbbed with Freedom's answered prayer.

University of Virginia Library

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

THE MOTHER

OF DEATH AND OF ONE WHO FELL ON THE WAY

OF THE REMEMBERED DEAD

E. D. M.

PAINED UNTO DEATH

E. K. M.

THE WHOLE CREATION GROANETH

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

THE CENTURION

A CANTICLE OF TIME

LINCOLN

COLERIDGE AT CHAMOUNY

TENNYSON

CERVANTES

OF A POET

WRITTEN FOR A CHILD

HERNDON

THE TOMBS OF THE REGICIDES

LUDLOW AND BROUGHTON

KEARSARGE On Sunday morning, June 19, 1864, the noise of the cannon during the fight between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was heard in English churches near the Channel.

HOW THE CUMBERLAND WENT DOWN

MY CASTLES IN SPAIN

DREAMLAND

THE QUAKER LADY

THE QUAKER GRAVEYARD

DOMINIQUE DE GOURGUES

THE WRECK OF THE EMMELINE

A PSALM OF THE WATERS

EVENING, AFTER A STORM ON THE RISTIGOUCHE RIVER

A MOOD

RAIN IN CAMP

ELK COUNTY

A CAMP IN THREE LIGHTS

LAKE NIPIGON

EVENING STORM—NIPIGON

NOONDAY WOODS—NIPIGON

AFTER SUNSET—LAKE WEELOKENE-BAKOK

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA

THE GRAVE OF KEATS

THE PROTESTANT CEMETERY AT ROME

ROMA

VENICE

VENICE TO ITALY

THE DECAY OF VENICE

PISA: THE DUOMO

THE VESTAL'S DREAM

AFTER RUYSDAEL

AFTER ALBERT CUYP

NEAR AMSTERDAM

AFTER ALBERT CUYP

AFTER TENIERS

MILAN

DA VINCI'S CHRIST

BRUGES: QUAI DES AUGUSTINS

AFTER VAN DER VEER

THE WAVES AT MIDNIGHT

THE CLIFFS, NEWPORT

THE RISING TIDE

EVENING BY THE SEA

BEAVER-TAIL ROCKS

CANONICUT

THE CARRY

NIPIGON

IDLENESS

THE LOST PHILOPENA

GOOD-NIGHT

COME IN

LOSS

A GRAVEYARD

OCTOBER

SEPTEMBER

YOU AND I

THE CHRIST OF THE SNOWS

A NORWEGIAN LEGEND

ST. CHRISTOPHER

FOR A CHILD

LINES TO A DESERTED STUDY

AN OLD MAN TO AN OLD MADEIRA

KEARSARGE

On Sunday morning, June 19, 1864, the noise of the cannon during the fight between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was heard in English churches near the Channel.