The Garden of Years And Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The Garden of Years

I

I have shut fast the door, and am alone
With the sweet memory of this afternoon,
That saw my vague dreams on a sudden grown
Into fulfilment, as I oft have known
Stray notes upon a keyboard fall atune
When least persuaded. I besought no boon
Of Fate to-day; I that, since first Love came
Into my life, have been so importune.
To-day alone I did not press my claim,
And lo! all I have dreamed of is my own!

II

I have shut fast the door, for so I may
Relive that moment of the turn of tide—
That swift solution of the long delay
That clothed with silver splendor dying day;
And, with low-whispering memory for guide,
See once again your startled eyes confide
The secret of surrender; and your hand
Flutter toward mine, before you turn aside—
And the gold wings of young consent expand
Fresh from the cracking chrysalis of Nay!

III

I did not dare to speak at first. It seemed
A thing unreal, that with the air might blend—
That strange swift signal—and I feared I dreamed!
Ahead, the city's lamps, converging, gleamed
To a thin angle at the street's far bend,
And, as we neared, each from its column's end
Stepped out, and past us, furtive, slipped away:
Nor could Love's self a longer respite lend
The radiant moments of our shortening day,
That Time, the donor, one by one redeemed.

IV

We spoke of eloquently empty things;
Of younger days that were before we met,
The trivial acts to which the memory clings,
And in familiar spots unbidden brings
To mind, when graver matters we forget.
The sacred secret lay unspoken, yet
Hovered, half-veiled, between our conscious eyes,
Touched with an indefinable regret
For that swift moment of our love's surprise—
Like a waked bird, poised upon ready wings.

V

I cannot tell how first we came to dwell
In short, shy words upon this closer theme,
Or how it was each understood so well
There was no need in clearer speech to tell
The phases of our duplicated dream.
In that sweet intimacy, it would seem
Our endless love had never been begun:
Like the twin branches of a tranquil stream
Our two hearts ran together and were one,
With no trite word to mar the perfect spell!

VI

Heart of my heart, I am no longer young:
Long have I waited for this day of days
When some small sign from you should loose my tongue—
When I should see that gate wide-open flung
That of Love's garden screened the sunlit ways;
Long have I waited, till your hand should raise
The veil between our understanding eyes,
That you in mine, that I in yours might gaze,
While my heart shouted to the open skies
The song that long in silence it hath sung!

VII

Dear eyes of earnest brown! How well I know
Their every sadness and their every smile;
How I have watched their laughter come and go,
Or some swift shadow cloud their bonny glow
Of stingless scoffing and of guiltless guile:
How jealous grew I in an instant, while
Some thought I knew not on the mirror blew!
Forgotten, from my heaven I stood exile,
And my rose dreamings dimmed upon my view,
As sunset's fire grays on the Alpine snow.

VIII

But each doubt fled as swift as it appeared;
And, day by day, I grew to understand
The heart of him who long his death hath feared,
And, sudden, sees the stately palms upreared
Of some oasis in a desert land.
Yet, even as that far green across the sand
Cheered the dry way of my heart's wandering,
I hardly looked at length to plunge my hand
And thirsty lips deep in the distant spring
That step by step my feet so slowly neared.

IX

For often I had seen the broken pledge
Of far mirages, swung upon the air,
Touched with the tender green of palm and sedge,
And where a thin stream, sliding from a ledge,
Promised me hope and paid me in despair.
So, come at last, in spite of all, to where
The falling waters all the senses cool,
Is it so strange that I should hardly dare
Believe I stand in truth beside the pool
That shone so small upon the desert's edge?

X

I have come far. If my lips cannot say
The words that younger lovers use to woo,
It is because the long and thirsty day,
The sun-baked stretches of my weary way,
Have dried their memory of the holy dew.
If I cannot at once my claim renew
To light, and perfume, music, and a smile,
It is because of discords, had in lieu
Of harmonies. Sweet, patience for a while!
I shall praise later. Grant me time to pray.

XI

Heart of my heart, blame not the arid sand:—
It has but lent the turf a deeper green.
Blame not the copper skies that overspanned
The heartless reaches of that backward land:—
For them the water shows a smoother sheen.
And blame me not if at the brink I lean
Mutely, and seem uneloquent and cold:—
Viewing the verdure of this fair demesne.
I am so young, who yesterday was old!
It is enough to try to understand.

XII

'T was in the garden, phantom-trod, of those
My younger years, when life before me lay,
That first I saw the flower of Love unclose
From fancy's folded bud. Youth only knows
How tenderly I longed to pluck it! Nay,
I would not waken those dead hours to-day:
For Time's consuming fire, with lambent lip,
Has kissed my fair frail flower, and so I may
Not touch with the most careful finger-tip
Its ashes, perfect as the unburnt rose.

XIII

From our Fate's map of matters foreordained
Who of us all would rend the veil away—
See the sealed shrine of destiny profaned,
And all the awful ultima explained,
And so lose right to hope and need to pray?
Who is there of us all who would not say
That mystery is merciful? Too soon
Our roses droop, our limpid skies go gray,
And youth's morn glooms to age's afternoon:—
Let the lees lie until the wine be drained.

XIV

Yet are some hours by rapture made so bright
That the sense reels before the blinding blaze
Of an effulgent radiancy, that might,
Spread through a lifetime, shed the steady light
Of calm content on twice ten thousand days.
Ah, if the jealous future would but raise
These, like white beacons on a sad sea thrown,
How patient we should be of life's delays
That seem denials!—Ah, love, had I but known
All my life long the will of Fate to-night!

XV

Close was your secret guarded, empty years!
No far horizon ever hid so well
The dreamt-of harbors of imagined spheres
From the strained eyes of ocean's pioneers,
Until the appointed dawn from swell to swell
Leaped, and decreed discovery befel.
Had I but known, how different all had been!
To-day—to-day of which you would not tell—
Had lain upon my heart like the unseen
Familiar green of shores their native nears.

XVI

Ah, prescient day when I came down to thee,
Heart of the sea, rebellious as my own!
No other tongue could tell the tragedy
Of those boy-dreamings that were not to be;
Such eloquence was thine and thine alone.
So that fair western land, where they had grown,
Sank to a thin grey line, and so I turned
And pledged my troth unto the great unknown,
Cruel, kind world. How little had I learned
In all the years before I sought the sea!

XVII

For as a myriad bubbles on our stern
Flashed to swift life, and then as swiftly died,
My fancy saw, like them, my visions yearn
An instant on my eyes, and then return
Upon the eddies of the backward tide.
Dear hopes of youth, so youthfully allied
With one familiar corner of the world!
Dear foolish dreams, in mercy thus denied!
How little knew I what the East unfurled:—
I was so wise, and had so much to learn!

XVIII

All my life long in memory I shall guard
That slow sea-swing that lullabied the heart,
While the thin, thoughtful mast, shrouded and sparred,
Moved in and out upon the silver-starred
Midnight, as if it traced upon a chart:
And the prow forced the fluttering waves apart,
As they had been the leaves of some wise tome,
Wherefrom it read Life's story from the start,
Set to the music of the whirling foam,
Wind-rippled cordage, and slow-straining yard.

XIX

All my life long in memory I shall know
How the slow, careful fingers of the light
Sort and shift countless jewels to and fro
On liquid velvet, when the breezes blow
After the calm that lay upon the night.
All my life long shall linger on my sight
One flower-like cloud that watched the daylight die,
Until the west-wind, pausing in its flight,
Plucked it, and idly on a turquoise sky
Scattered its petals in a crimson snow.

XX

And yet, had I but known what was to be,
The stillness sweet had been more sweetly still,
The laughter-laden singing of the sea,
That hallowed life and pledged eternity,
I should not then have understood so ill.
And, seeing how the west-wind worked its will
Upon the cloud, I should have known how you
Would one day in a myriad roses spill
My life, and give me faith and hope, in lieu
Of the black heart that you plucked out from me.

XXI

O my one love, so frail, so fair, so pure,
Had I but seen you faintly and afar,
My fluctuating faith had pointed sure
As swings the needle—slave, while worlds endure,
To the mute bidding of the northern star—
And many things had never been that are!
Had I but known what Life would bring to-day,
How had the years sung by, with naught to mar
That sweet crescendo, to our fairy-play
Hope's eloquent, enchanted overture!

XXII

Now, from the goal of this, my heart's fair fate,
I scan the backward way with wondering eyes,
And, in the silence of the night, debate
Upon each changing charm that lay in wait
Beneath the arch of ever stranger skies.
Like to a map the varied prospect lies
Of the long years since from your side I turned:
Fata Morgana-wise my pleasures rise,
Each in its turn sought after, squandered, spurned—
More trivial each, that treasured was of late!

XXIII

How wide a world it was that met my sight,
Whose eyes were narrowed to but childish things!
Asia lay bathed in unimagined light,
With all the splendors of her past bedight,
Work of the ages' full-forgotten kings:
And, rocking 'twixt her summers and her springs,
The blue-robed Indian Ocean slept and sighed,
Decked with her emerald islands, looped in strings
Upon the breathing bosom of her tide:—
Slept all bronze day, and all star-studded night.

XXIV

Africa frowned across my breathless lee,
Mute, unforgetful, cursed, but unconquered still,
Sahara-hemmed in heart and destiny,
Unpardoned yet, and yet too proud for plea,
Pregnant with purpose of unaltered ill.
Distant, the swerved sirocco seemed to spill
From its black cup a plague upon the land,
And, crawling on past barren ridge and hill
Through hope-devouring endlessness of sand,
The swarthy Nile sulked northward to the sea.

XXV

Those earliest Americas of all
That, with half-lowered lids, dream on the day
Of the imperial Incas, seemed to call,
As, when their own long, languid evenings fall,
The sea calls landward from her curving bay.
Hearing, I answered, bent my aimless way
To the cool shade that nestled 'neath their palms,
And so, long nights on sloping shoreways lay,
While moons crept, silver-shod, across the calms,
And wrapped their radiance in the horizon's pall.

XXVI

Years melted into years as still I strayed,
And Life, still searching, from her pack withdrew
More novel baubles, offered me in trade
For those unvalued days, wherewith I paid
Because with them I knew not what to do:
Till at the end, I smiled to think of you
As but a memory. Fool! How swift I found,
Like the mechanic mole, I burrowed through
Oblivion, an inch below the ground!
One touch, and all my blindness lay displayed.

XXVII

I know, should some one ask me which was best
Of all the lands wherewith our world is starred,
There could be but one answer to the test.
A rover heart had urged me on a quest
Wherein all gates of distance were unbarred,
Yet never was I able to discard
The thought of that young land that gave me birth:
Still in my memory's holiest shrine I guard
That virgin daughter of the grim old earth,
The star-eyed White Republic of the West!

XXVIII

Yet, like some chapter of an old romance,
My heart holds one memorial morning dear,
When the gray hazes whirled, as in a dance,
Up from the rippled Channel's wide expanse,
And sunlit shores stept, on a sudden, near.
On that chief day of that prophetic year
Some pledge I could but dimly understand,
Some subtle spell, lay on the calm and clear
Blue harbor of this mute majestic land,
And hope shone smiling in the eyes of France!

XXIX

And France it was that crushed my callow creed,
That held me like a mother to her breast;
That staunched the wounds my ignorance made bleed,
And, in the hour of that, my direst need,
Showed where my star still hung against the West.
France was the judge that put my faith to test,
Little by little lent it sturdier strength,
And schooled the rover in the rules of rest;
And now, dear heart, that you are mine at length,
I see 't was she that taught me love indeed.

XXX

Thus, in my deepest heart must I inshrine
Her stately cliffs, patrolled by guardian seas;
Her hollowed hillsides, where the slender vine,
Pregnant with promise of the autumn wine,
Leans on its staff against the battling breeze:
And all her silver streams, that seek the seas,
Threading the dappled fabric of her lawns—
Her crimson sunsets, snared among the trees,
And all the crescent glory of her dawns,—
For I am hers for aye, and she is mine!

XXXI

The murmured secrets of her Norman firs,
Wherein at night the whisper of the air
To busy babble all the branches spurs,
Till every drowsy needle wakes and stirs,
And of the gossip speaks its little share:
Her shadowy mines, her southern gardens, where
The oval olives crowd the bending bough:
All these are mine:—but, most of all, O fair
Laughing and languid Paris, mine art thou,
Pinned like a pearl on that white brow of hers!

XXXII

Waywardest wanton of the world to woo,
Blackest of heart, of face the most sublime,
O Cleopatran city, through and through
Blazing with sin and splendor, once I knew
No star upon the black night of thy crime;
Till on the stagnant bosom of thy slime
Bloomed a white lily with a heart of gold:—
Heart of my heart, what matters it if Time
Damned this fair city in the days of old?
She stands regenerate, as the home of you!

XXXIII

As the rank refuse of the city goes
Out to the sea, that maketh all things clean,
So past your doorway all her folly flows,
Rubbish purged pure by one redeeming rose:—
Paris and Hell, but your face in between!
Upon that ground where rose the guillotine
Your slender feet, like benedictions, fall.
With this redress the grim Fates intervene:—
The past is naught, dear love, and you are all!
Paris is pure since your pure eyes she knows.

XXXIV

And it was Paris fully roused me first
From that, my torpor. Flashing on the scene
With nimble feet, this dearest dancer burst
Upon my sight, within her eyes such thirst
As dares and damns, a rose her lips between.
Girdled with jewels, crowned as is a queen,
With Lethe's poppies dozing in her hair,
Gowned in thin stuffs of silver-dotted sheen,
Humanly sinful, and divinely fair,
She tore the mask from off my best and worst!

XXXV

I know not how it was she spun that spell
Which made me see, who had been blind so long,
Or with what kiss aroused; nor can I tell
How such a one as she contrived so well
To tempt my weakness and to leave me strong.
Some note there was in her compellant song
That made me man who had been boy till then,
And hurled the idler in among the throng,
Frontward to fight his way with other men,
Scale highest Heaven, and plumb profoundest Hell.

XXXVI

But this I know:—she flung the gauntlet true,
And at the challenge fear shrank back ashamed:
Hope, silver-armored, roused herself anew,
A blast upon the brazen trumpet blew,
And at the call my hand the gage reclaimed.
Wounded, mayhap, in earlier combats maimed,
Yet, as of old, with my escutcheon clean,
A space I sought, where red the pennants flamed,
To see the seat of Love and Beauty's queen,—
And from the past leaned out the thought of you!

XXXVII

You stepped into my life once more, and lo!
The well-drilled steeds tore loose from every rein:
They whom the years had taught so meek to go
Felt the old breezes past their nostrils blow,
And whirled Love's chariot to the fore again!
Afresh I knew the rapture and the pain
Of your dear voice, so kind, so unconcerned;
Despite my will, the incense, quenched in vain,
With sweeter perfume on your altars burned,
And gowned in gray the temple columns' snow.

XXXVIII

For siren Paris with her tenderest smile
Had failed to blot the old songs from the score.
The every glamor and the every wile
Of this most sovereign sorceress of guile
But left the tempted truer than before!
Loving I lost, regaining, loved the more:—
What ne'er I learned from sweet propinquity,
My exile taught. Blindness I begged her for:—
She touched my eyes, and showed them how to see,
And how that they had been but blind erewhile.

XXXIX

Upon that day hope turned one golden grain
Of purest promise from the loam of toil,
Significant of some yet hidden vein
Beneath, and by the signal bade me gain
What lay unmined below the stubborn soil.
As if by magic, cleared of ruck and roil,
The spring of Life grew undefiled and pure,
And, limpid lying, freed of all turmoil,
Mirrored your face, immutable and sure,
And then I knew that we should meet again.

XL

Oh, clad in all a dream's unstable guise,
And unsubstantial as the veriest air,
Thenceforward hung your presence on my eyes,
Worthy of all and any sacrifice,
Pale, but beyond my maddest memory fair!
Walked I by day, the phantom form was there;
Slept I, its radiance on my dreams was cast,
Teaching me mutely how I might prepare
To be, when we should meet again at last,
More pure, more humble, worthier,—and more wise.

XLI

No longer toy of each most idle whim,
But unto nobler aims apprentice made,
I filled my duty's chalice to the brim,
And daily drank my portion, good or grim;—
So was Hope's stirring summons well obeyed.
And, grew I ever of the end afraid,
Despaired I of my ultimate design,
In that dark hour, when most I needed aid,
As if my draught grew stimulant with wine,
Your promised lips hallowed the goblet's rim.

XLII

Love, to all men that loathe their lives to-day
I fain would give of those rapt years a part;
Of all the words I dreamt I heard you say,
I could spare some to cheer the hapless way
Of every mortal who is sick at heart.
Of hope and honor all the cruel mart
I fain would have one rose relieve the gloom,
Appeasing the unutterable smart
With one sweet breath of that self-same perfume
That turned my own December into May.

XLIII

And yet—and yet—let the great world go past!
God holds within the hollow of His hand
Each scourged pariah, down-trodden, and outclassed,
Who pauses at the steep abyss, aghast;—
His will we cannot hope to understand.
Only of all good things that He hath planned,
And all that in the future He may send,
There is no further boon that I demand,
Since I have this—that half I comprehend—
That I have held you to my heart at last!

XLIV

I know that I am worthier to-day
Of your consent than in that long ago
When first I loved you. All the winding way
Was somehow shot with an enlightening ray
That taught me things that I had need to know.
At every step there lay some sign, to show
How best to win you, where I had but lost:
The years were stern and merciless, but oh,
With you the prize, how little seems the cost:—
'T were in my heart tenfold the price to pay!

XLV

I often wondered if you ever guessed
How over leagues of sea your influence sped,
How in my every mood of vague unrest
Completest calm crept close against my breast,
Night lightened, and the dawn was mine instead:
And if, perchance, when, woven thread by thread,
My rhyme-linked thoughts lay on some printed page,
They came unto your hand, and, as you read,
You knew them birds bred in your soul's pure cage,
That I had kissed, and given again the West.

XLVI

Rereading these, I mind me well what night
Saw each first flutter to my eager hand,
How to my heart I held the wanderer tight,
Smoothed its soft wings, all ruffled by the flight,
And strove each timid note to understand.
O sweet unconscious breeder of the band,
Let others say my thoughts are all my own!
I know them nestlings of my native land,
Whose songs were taught by you and you alone:—
All I can do is note the strains aright.

XLVII

I love them all so well that I would fain
Believe you held their songs as dear as I,
That on your memory may perchance have lain
Some one or two of all the rhythmic train
That you inspired, and I taught how to fly.
Could I but know that some so softly lie
In that most silken nest, I were content!
Ah, tell me some sang true in brushing by
The only ear for which their songs were meant,
And made the meaning of my message plain.

XLVIII

For this the curse of those that tempt the pen:—
Where thousands read, one eye may never see
The thoughts that are but lifeless creatures, when
Taken into the myriad hearts of men,
If one intended ear heed not the plea.
What though I knew that, in mine own degree,
I had made lips to laugh and eyes to weep?
Rather that one unworthy word from me
Within your heart should sleep, and wake, and sleep:—
All I have done were worth the labor then.

XLIX

Heart of my heart, what all the world may do
To blot my name or keep its memory green
Is naught. I crave not to be of the few
Who, unforgotten, thread the ages through
And lordlier laurels with each cycle glean.
Grant me but this, whereon my life may lean:
As once I saw you in your bonny way
Your mirror kiss, that stood two flowers between,
Let these, my pages, the reflector play,
And kiss again what mirrors only you!

L

Dearest, to me come oftentimes at night
Pictures, wherein I find you fitly framed—
Shores of strange seas, incomparably bright,
And hill-girt landscapes, haloed with a light
Ethereal, that none hath ever named.
No ownership in these I could have claimed:
They are not of my making. Love alone
Could so blind Nature, utterly ashamed,
With beauty thus out-rivalling her own,
That seems transcendent to our mortal sight.

LI

For I am not of those who, in their dreams,
Are wont to rank their love with simple things,
With humble flowers, babble of vapid streams,
Or that rare note of rapture that redeems
The idle gossip that the blackbird sings.
The grim old earth hath seen too many springs,
Lovers enough have trapped her charm in words:
To all her flowers the mould of usage clings,
And, to the music of her weary birds,
The burden of reiterated themes.

LII

This love of ours doth wonderfully dwell
In new demesnes, born when it first arose;
Treads the young turf of some yet virgin dell,
Where novel buds miraculously swell
On trees not known before, and where unclose
Unprecedented vistas. Where it goes,
Strange birds invent unwonted melodies,
That in all earth no other lover knows
Save our two selves alone, for each of these
Sounds a fresh note, as of a new-wrought bell.

LIII

I cannot tell in words what lands these are
Through which I see you moving like a queen:
There is no earthly radiance like that star
That stands in silent majesty, afar,
The peaks of unfamiliar hills between.
Some unknown pigment turns the tender green
Of all that dreaming landscape to a hue
That never was, save in the lovely scene
That Love hath only planned for framing you,
And that no mortal hand could make or mar.

LIV

There is a sheen in those soft gowns you wear
Like water turned to opal by the moon;
A lustre in those jewels that you bear,
Twined in and out amid your dusky hair,
Like the still stars, and like the blaze of noon.
There is a perfume of some sweeter June
Than earth hath seen, that follows where you go;
And all the solemn silence is atune
With unvoiced songs, such as the angels know,
Born without breath upon the breathless air!

LV

We may not hope to find each other thus
In waking hours. Our days are too beset
With the world's voices, shrill and clamorous:
Life is too sharply strained, too strenuous—
We are but mortal, and we may forget!
The momentary pang of some regret
May lay its hand an instant on your eyes
And mine, dear heart, and cloud our vision—yet
Remember that with earthly fears and sighs
We two have naught to do, nor they with us.

LVI

What though unbidden tears may turn us blind?
Twilight still comes, and still brings sweet release:
Merciful night, in spite of all, shall find
Us waiting each for each, for sleep is kind,
And moulds from sorrow's clay the cup of peace.
Heart of my heart, drink deep of that surcease
That at her goblet's rim divinely gleams:
Whate'er may be deceptive day's caprice,
I wait you on the borderland of dreams,
Where the world stumbles and is left behind!

LVII

And, through my visions as you thread your way,
Girt with that grace my eyes alone may see,
If I make bold your noiseless steps to stay,
It is because in sleep alone I may
Be half to you of all that I would be.
It is because my longing lips, set free,
Can compass then alone each subtle phrase,
And snare in speech that magic melody
Which, since your coming, sings adown my days.
Only in sleep my lips my heart obey.

LVIII

And who shall say but what our dreams may tell
Some secret we were hardly meant to know,
As if a feather from a rapt lark fell,
To say that in high heaven all things are well,
However black the heart of man below?
If through my visions thus you nightly go,
Robed round with love, may not my dreaming mean
That some day we may wander to and fro
In unknown meadows gowned in such a green
As all the fields of earth cannot excel?

LIX

Ah, love, there is a pledge of keener bliss
In these unbidden dreams of sleeping hours,
That set all right that may have been amiss,
And lend us wings to clear whate'er abyss
Darkly across our waking pathway glowers.
There is some promise in these strange new flowers
Holier than we have dreamt of or have planned;
Some fairer fate eternally is ours:—
Only it is so hard to understand.
You love me! Are there greater things than this?

LX

I think that in the past, unheard, unseen,
All influences of the earth and air,
The gleam of water, and the forest's green,
Have spun some cobweb sympathy between
Our hearts, now one in finding them so fair:
That every sunset taught us to prepare
For the pure dawn when Love was sure to rise;
That every cloud but made us more aware
That soon or late his sun would greet our eyes,
And all our heaven be cloudless and serene!

LXI

Else, how should we have come to understand
The perfect meaning of this perfect day?
How could this hour, unbidden and unplanned,
Bring in its train such infinite command
Of all the things we do not need to say?
It is too soon, mayhap, to trace the way
By which we came, guided by birds and flowers,
To the full knowledge of the joys of May:—
We can retrace the path in later hours,
And all our haunts revisit, hand in hand.

LXII

To-night it is enough for us to know
That we are one; to know that, if we will,
We may a bridge across the darkness throw,
Whereon our tender thoughts may come and go,
In silent love that distance cannot kill.
I only seek the heart-begotten skill
To put in simple words this truth sublime:—
That I have loved you, dearest, love you still,
And so shall love you till the end of time!
It is enough that what is so is so.

LXIII

Let me but tell you, lamely if I must,
Of how I love you; how, despite all wiles,
That tender flower, that in my boyhood thrust
Its star-eyed promise from the barren dust,
Still on my path with purest fragrance smiles;
Of how my heart returns, through weary miles,
To that song-spilling throng of birds unseen
Whose inter-rippling music so beguiles
All the long hours, the dawn and dark between.
Love, let me place the secret in your trust!

LXIV

I loved you first, I know not how or where:—
The world began upon the day we met!
Truth's self slept in your eyes; and in your hair
The sun lay trapped, as in a silken snare:
The tinkle of some crystal fountain's jet
Sang in your voice; a hint of violet
Slept on your breath, and dawn's divinest glow
Flushed your soft cheek—but ah, more tender yet
The ivory of your throat's ascending snow!
I loved you first when first I found you fair.

LXV

Could you but guess how like the dawn you grew
Upon my east, slow as such dawnings will!
Spell-bound and breathless, diademed with dew,
My sunless world its sudden sovereign knew;
And all the fern-fringed forest waited, still.
Slow spread the glory on the distant hill,
From that faint early flush grown clear and strong,
And then, with one divinely daring thrill,
A single bird unleashed its soul in song,
And swung exultant upward in the blue!

LXVI

I loved you first because, when first you stood
Upon the threshold of my world new-born,
That strange new note I dimly understood
Leapt laughing from the bosom of the wood
Straight to the arms of my supremest morn!
Because your clear eyes, innocent of scorn,
Swept infinite horizons into view;
And the gray hazes, from their moorings torn,
Revealed wide fields that thenceforth, knowing you,
It was for me to till for gain and good.

LXVII

Yet was I blind to all the better part
Of morning's mute miraculous intent.
That spell you wove about me at the start,
Conjured to life by simple beauty's art,
Told but a tithe of all the truth it meant:
And all the higher purpose that you lent
Unto my life, went wrapped within a veil.
Uneloquent, the message that was sent,
Wan with desire of speech, stood, proud and pale,
Outside the holiest holy of my heart.

LXVIII

The chiefest lessons Life makes clear are those
She teaches most at leisure. Sure and slow
Successive leaves of her wise book unclose;
And, day by day, the vital story grows
To consummation, till we come to know
Its perfect purport. All that lay below
The rapture of my earliest glimpse of you
Only that stoic tutor Time could show:—
Long evenings of reiterated dew
Alone perfect the perfume of the rose!

LXIX

The patient years polished with practised hand
Love's crystal to a smooth symmetric swell,
Till the curved lens lay, accurately planned,
Flawlessly fitted to the brazen band
Within whose compass it was meant to dwell.
Then from my eyes the scales of blindness fell:
Undreamt-of planets swam into my ken,
And new-mapped heavens with stars made haste to spell
The meaning of the message that, till then,
It was not in my power to understand.

LXX

I love you now, not with the love alone
Of blind rebellious boyhood, as of old:
The blooms of mere enchantment, beauty-blown,
Lie withered, and the full fruit, slowlier grown,
Bends the slim bough beneath unmeasured gold.
The sun, of these new secrets, Time hath told—
The tempests of communicative tears—
The strong, blind winds of passion—and behold!—
The careful cultivation of the years
Hath made a harvest of what Love hath sown.

LXXI

I love you now, because that I and you
Were complements before the birth of Time;
Because our souls have come, the ages through,
Down to the moment when God's purpose drew
The twain together in one perfect rhyme;
Because that I have made Love's aria climb
The scales that every subtler phrase involved,
Until I struck the seventh chord sublime,
And one low word upon your lips resolved
My melody, beyond all music new!

LXXII

You are the magnet moon, and I the sea,
Cradling her face, climbing to catch more clear
The image of her pure tranquillity:
You are the west-wind, mistress of the lea,
And I the reed, that bows when she is near:
You are the spring, and I the obedient year
Whose soul awakens where her footfalls go:
You are the stream, and I a leaf, to veer
Where'er the singing current choose to flow:—
O light and breath, perfume and melody!

LXXIII

I love you for your lips the rose hath kissed—
Your cheeks, more tender than arbutus blooms;
For those half-hidden veins of amethyst
In your white throat, and for the tender mist
That clouds your eyes, as haze the autumn glooms:
For that faint subtle fragrance which perfumes
The soft bewitching tangle of your hair;
For your low laughter in the darkening rooms,
Where our instinctive hands lie linked, and where
Daylight and dark keep transitory tryst!

LXXIV

Life of my love, love of my life, in vain
I marshall every phrase that speech supplies:
The summits of my meaning yet remain
Cloud-capped, above the flat familiar plain
Of spoken thought, unscaled against the skies!
The mute interrogation of your eyes
My own must mutely meet. Ah, touch my hand,
And, like a child, instruct me in what wise
I may contrive to make you understand
The love that aught but silence must profane!

Paris, 1901.

The White Republic

Of Pilgrim eyes previsioned and Puritan lips foretold,
Dowered with wealth of woodland and glory of virgin gold,
Awoke the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High,
As broad and free as the borders be of her own wide western sky!
Mother of loyal daughters, whose girdle and guard are these—
Their leagues of inland waters and bulwarks of splendid seas,
Each to the other plighted till the end of time they stand,
Palmetto to pine united and prairie to pasture-land.

She hath store of grain ungarnered and harvests her sons have sown,
She is jewelled with mines unminted whose measure no man hath known,

And the light of her eyes is steady, and her onward march is free,
For it knows no rest, but is like the quest of her rivers that seek the sea.
Upward and on she presses with a zeal no check may rein,
With a strength no shock may shatter while her seasons wake and wane;
Nerved of her stirring stories of the deeds and the deaths of men,
She wins for greater glories till the lapse of human ken.

Her breath is sweet of the southland and the fragile jasmine blows,
On her brow is the excellent whiteness of still Sierra snows,
And her feet are shod with the mosses of the murmurous woodland ways,
And her head is crowned and her temples bound by fillets of slender maize:
As the wild Atlantic fearless, as the hushed Pacific calm,
She rules her rugged hilltops and her breathless groves of palm;
And, whether in waste or city, with freedom her shining shield,

She is queen by right of her splendid might and the love her children yield.

And on through the unrun ages, through stormy and sunlit days,
Still shall the crescent pages of history sing her praise,
As by ways of strife and burden to the goal of strife's surcease
She pursues the priceless guerdon, the dawn of a deathless peace—
The wise and wonderful mother of states and states to be,
Guarded and well defended of the sons who made her free,
Of the sons who learned to love her, and of loving her learned to die
For the flag of the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High!

New York, 1897.

Rex Captivus

(THE EAGLE'S CAGE, CENTRAL PARK)

Americans if ye be, who stand surrounding my prison,
Has the sight of me, caged and cowed, no hint of the past to say,
Of the days when ye chose me symbol of Freedom the New-arisen?
Free ye found me, and King ye crowned me,
And what is your King to-day?
Shackled for fools to laugh at, shorn of defence and defiance,
Tainted and reeking with filth in this barred, unspeakable slough,
Behold the sign of a creed divine, the bird of your faith's reliance!
Polluted and shamed, the King ye acclaimed
Recalls your allegiance now!

Born to be Prince of the Air, and the great Sun's peer and brother,
Who alone might meet his eye in the infinite heights of blue,
Butt of the vulgar and lewd, in the ruck of my pen I smother:
Yet King! Ye have said it! Is my discredit
Not greater disgrace for you?
Men—if ye still be men, not blind, unreasoning cattle—
See what the work of your hands hath made of the work of God!
These tabid things were once such wings as flash on your flags in battle,
And benisons put on every foot
Of your hardly-ransomed sod!

To me the faith of your fathers its resolute eyes uplifted,
I poised on your earliest banners, I routed your youngest foe,
I was borne in your van of late, where the Spanish smoke-bank drifted:—
Is all forgotten, that, smirched and rotten,
You make of me squalid show?

I am stained with blood of your sons, and armored with prayers of your daughters,
To me your defenders point as sign of their aim most true,
On the prows of your mail-clad ships I sail to guard your conquered waters:
O sons of the West, will ye sully your crest
With this hideous thing ye do?

Nay! By the oath ye swore, by the pledge of your ancient duty,
By the blood ye spilled for my honor, I bid you to bend the knee!
Yield me my place again, in its purity, pride, and beauty!
Men of my nation, is this my station?
I summon you, set me free!
Let there be one rift in the cloud of man's world-wide dominion,
One thing of all breathing things that he bids no hand molest!
Let Liberty's sky be hallowed by the beat of the eagle's pinion,
By her sons released, from the earliest east
To the shores of the farthest west!

Else am I king no more, acclaimed of bugle and tymbal;
No longer Bird of the Free, but, palsied, defiled, and sore;
Leave me to dream on the days when ye hailed me Liberty's symbol,
On how I led you, to victory sped you,
And how ye are mine no more!
Are ye blind, American men, that ye pass me, caged and pining?
Are ye deaf, American men, to that daring and distant cry,
The cheer of your sons, above their guns, for the bird on your banners shining,
For the world to see?—Ah, God of the Free,
That symbol and sign am I!

New York, 1901.

Ad Finem Fideles

Far out, far out they lie. Like stricken women weeping,
Eternal vigil keeping with slow and silent tread—
Soft-shod as are the fairies, the winds patrol the prairies,
The sentinels of God about the pale and patient dead!
Above them, as they slumber in graves that none may number,
Dawns grow to day, days dim to dusk, and dusks in darkness pass;
Unheeded springs are born, unheeded summers brighten,
And winters wake to whiten the wilderness of grass.

Slow stride appointed years across their bivouac places,
With stern, devoted faces they lie, as when they lay,
In long battalions dreaming, till dawn, to eastward gleaming,
Awoke the clarion greeting of the bugles to the day.
The still and stealthy speeding of the pilgrim days unheeding,

At rest upon the roadway that their feet unfaltering trod,
The faithful unto death abide, with trust unshaken,
The morn when they shall waken to the reveille of God.

The faithful unto death! Their sleeping-places over
The torn and trampled clover to braver beauty blows;
Of all their grim campaigning no sight or sound remaining,
The memory of them mutely to greater glory grows.
Through waning ages winding, new inspiration finding,
Their creed of consecration like a silver ribbon runs,
Sole relic of the strife that woke the world to wonder
With riot and the thunder of a sundered people's guns.

What matters now the cause? As little children resting,
No more the battle breasting to the rumble of the drums,
Enlinked by duty's tether, the blue and gray together,
They wait the great hereafter when the last assembly comes.
Where'er the summons found them, whate'er the tie that bound them,
'T is this alone the record of the sleeping army saith:—
They knew no creed but this, in duty not to falter,
With strength that naught could alter to be faithful unto death.

New York, 1898.

When the Great Gray Ships Come In

(NEW YORK HARBOR, AUGUST 20, 1898)

To eastward ringing, to westward winging, o'er mapless miles of sea,
On winds and tides the gospel rides that the furthermost isles are free;
And the furthermost isles make answer, harbor, and height, and hill,
Breaker and beach cry, each to each, “'T is the Mother who calls! Be still!”
Mother! new-found, beloved, and strong to hold from harm,
Stretching to these across the seas the shield of her sovereign arm,
Who summoned the guns of her sailor sons, who bade her navies roam,
Who calls again to the leagues of main, and who calls them this time home!

And the great gray ships are silent, and the weary watchers rest;
The black cloud dies in the August skies, and deep in the golden west
Invisible hands are limning a glory of crimson bars,
And far above is the wonder of a myriad wakened stars!
Peace! As the tidings silence the strenuous cannonade,
Peace at last! is the bugle-blast the length of the long blockade;
And eyes of vigil weary are lit with the glad release,
From ship to ship and from lip to lip it is “Peace! Thank God for peace!”

Ah, in the sweet hereafter Columbia still shall show
The sons of these who swept the seas how she bade them rise and go;
How, when the stirring summons smote on her children's ear,
South and North at the call stood forth, and the whole land answered “Here!”
For the soul of the soldier's story and the heart of the sailor's song
Are all of those who meet their foes as right should meet with wrong,

Who fight their guns till the foeman runs, and then, on the decks they trod,
Brave faces raise, and give the praise to the grace of their country's God!

Yes, it is good to battle, and good to be strong and free,
To carry the hearts of a people to the uttermost ends of sea,
To see the day steal up the bay, where the enemy lies in wait,
To run your ship to the harbor's lip and sink her across the strait:—
But better the golden evening when the ships round heads for home,
And the long gray miles slip swiftly past in a swirl of seething foam,
And the people wait at the haven's gate to greet the men who win!
Thank God for peace! Thank God for peace, when the great gray ships come in!

Tripoli

One to ten of you lesser men—these are the odds we crave:
For the ring of the sword, at the cry to board, is a song that befits the brave.
Board and burn, that ye well may learn, how American tars atone:
Borrow ye may, but there dawns a day when we come to claim our own!

Tripolitan pirate and Turkish thief, they had harried her there on the sunken reef,
Plundered, and robbed, and stripped her crew, for such was Tripoli law:
Lowered her barred and star-set flag, and run to her peak their pirate rag,
For the shaming of William Bainbridge and the fame of Jussuf Bashaw!
They had towed the wreck to the haven's neck, and under the castle's guns,
And bound and jailed all them that sailed as the Philadelphia's sons:

So the frigate lay in Tripoli Bay, by the Molehead batteries pinned,
And along her flank, in a watchful rank, the guardian gunboats grinned!

Out of the Gulf of Sidra's gales, a brig and a ketch, with flattened sails,
Slid toward Tripoli harbor as the sun ahead went down,
And, by the forts of Jussuf Bashaw pinned like prey in a panther's paw,
The captured frigate at anchor saw, in the curve of the pirate town.
And one of the pair had the peaceful air of a merchantman landward led,
And one of the two a Maltese crew, in fezzes of flaming red;
But they muttered on deck as they marked the speck of the flag that swung on high
Where the crimson bars and the silver stars had rippled against the sky!

Then a wind came out of the cool northwest, and lifted the ketch on a heaving crest,

Bulging her sails till the sea sang low at the touch of her slender prore,
And she leapt, with the joy of a living soul, through the narrow channel 'twixt reef and shoal,
And ran, like a racer, toward the goal of the tall black hull inshore!
But the brig lay to on the darkening blue of the offing, a mile outside,
And watched the ketch on the rippling stretch of the fortgirt harbor ride,
Till out of the light she slid from sight, tackle, and sails, and mast,
Undismayed, in the sombre shade that the hull of the frigate cast.

Now the staunch Sicilian pilot cried to them that leaned on the frigate's side:
“This is the Stella of Malta, with her anchors swept away,
And her cables, too, to the very last, when the storm of yester night went past,
So we crave your leave to take a fast from your quarter until the day.”

“And what ye ask is an easy task,” an officer made reply.
“Since ye have no line, I will send you mine, with leave in our lee to lie.”
So the ketch crept near to the frigate's sheer, and, swung by the swirling tide,
Veered around, till her bowsprit ground on the Philadelphia's side.

Then Stephen Decatur's slender sword in the moonlight winked, as he thundered “Board!”
The hatches yawned on the ketch's deck, and, quick as a man may turn,
Up from her hold, with a stirring shout, sixty American tars leapt out,
And mounted the frigate's black redoubt like a wave that breaks astern!
And the startled night saw such a fight as none but the desperate make,
Blow on blow from foe to foe for the Philadelphia's sake!
Cheer on cheer, as the end drew near, and a final charge, and then
The frigate lay in Tripoli Bay—an American ship again!

From twoscore ports the smoke-wreaths crept, and a single rocket skyward leapt
To tell the brig in the offing that Decatur's work was done,
As the victors sprang to the ketch's deck, and pulled away from the blazing wreck
That reddened the tide to the harbor's neck, with news of the glory won!
And the slim flames struck from rail to truck, till the haven gleamed and glowed,
And the whole wide night was ablaze with light where Decatur's oarsmen rowed;
While Tripoli's sons from a hundred guns sent shot from the shelving shore,
And the frigate replied with her last broadside—an American ship once more!

But Stewart had seen that Decatur's crew had done the work that they came to do,
And the boats of the brig lay close inshore, as the ketch out-won her way;
Watching, the oarsmen, drawing near, pause in their rowing, and, deaf to fear,

Rise to their feet with a stunning cheer in a harbor light as day!
Over the tide from the boats outside the answering cheer came in,
The hail of his mate who must watch and wait to the lad who may work and win!
And Decatur's men, at their sweeps again, sped on from the panther's paw,
While the frigate flamed, by her own reclaimed, at the gates of Jussuf Bashaw!

One to ten of you lesser men—these are the odds we crave:
For the ring of the sword, at the cry to board, is a song that befits the brave.
Board and burn, that ye well may learn how American tars atone:
Borrow ye may, but there dawns a day when we come to claim our own!

New York, 1902.

Gloria Mundi

(PARIS, 1900)

Magician hands through long, laborious nights
Have made these princely palaces to loom
Whiter than are the city's legion lights,
On threads unseen stretched out across the gloom.
Reared in an hour, for one brief hour to reign,
The proud pavilions watchful hold in fee
A world's achievements, where the stately Seine
Slides slowly past her bridges to the sea.

Mute and memorial, as on either bank
She sees the marvel worked before her eyes,
Beholds as in a vision, rank on rank,
Pagoda, dome, and campanile rise,
Like to a mother scowling on a child
Sceptred and crowned to make a queen of May,
The Seine, that sorrowed not for France defiled,
Past France triumphant frowning goes her way.

Yet, dragged reluctant from these ransomed shores,
Upon her tide, that sullenly and slow
Creeps channelward, the unapparent scores
Of history's spectres disregarded go;
And as the Empress City gains the seat
Of that imperial throne to which at last
By devious ways she comes, beneath her feet
The Seine in silence blots away the past.

Blots out the warning of cathedral bells,
The night of snowy scarfs, of swords, of staves,
The muffled bass of tumbril wheels that tells
Of mortal men that dig immortal graves;
Blots out the faces, calmly unafraid,
Of prince and peasant, courtesan and queen,
When men made martyrs and were martyrs made,
When France meant Hell and God meant Guillotine!

Like pilgrims whom a holy city calls,
The peoples bring their miracles to her;
The world of peace lays down within her walls
Its gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh:

The West, wide-eyed, alert, intrepid, young,
With rush of shuttles and the song of steam;
The East, that, lotus-eating, gropes among
The half-remembered fragments of her dream.

From minarets the muezzins call to prayer,
From violins the mad mazurkas rise,
And western rangers watch in wonder, where
The camel boy his listless lash applies:
And nations warring, or that late have warred,
Their feuds forgot, their battles under ban,
Proclaim above the clamor of the sword
The pæan of the mastery of man.

Man! Born to grovel in a squalid cave,
Whose hand it is that every door unbars,
Whose cables cleave three thousand miles of wave,
Whose lenses tear their secrets from the stars!
Man! Naked, dull, unarmed, barbaric, dumb,
What magic path is this that he had trod?
Through what refining furnace hath he come,
This demi-brute become a demi-god?

As some great river merges every song
Of tributary waters in its own,
To blend in turn its music in the strong
Full measure of the ocean's monotone—
So this triumphant anthem, skyward sent
Man's marvellous finale to presage,
Within its thunderous diapason blent,
The keynote holds of each succeeding age!

For here the whip-lash sings above the slaves
Who bend despairing to the galley's oars;
The hoarse hail rings, across the sunlit waves,
Of vikings bound to unexploited shores:
Here is the chant of ransomed Israel's joy,
The moan of Egypt stricken in her home,
The challenge of the Grecian host to Troy,
The shout of Huns before the gates of Rome:

The oaths of sailors on the galleon's decks,
The welcome of Columbus to the land,
The prayers upon the doomed Armada's wrecks,
The rallying cry of Braddock's final stand;

Trafalgar's cannon, and the bugle's calls
Where France's armies thread the Alpine gorge,
The Campbell's pipes heard near to Lucknow's walls,
The patriot's hymn that hallowed Valley Forge!

All, all are here! The feeble and the strong;
The spoiled beside the victors of the spoil
Of twenty centuries swell the sacred song
Of human triumph won by human toil!
Up and yet upward to the heaven's wide arch
The thunders of the great thanksgiving roll
To mark the way of that majestic march
Of mortal man toward his Maker's goal!

And while the echo of her folly dies,
As in the hills the sound of village bells,
Upward from Paris to the April skies
Her hymn of rehabilitation swells;
From dark to dawn, from weakness back to strength,
The pendulum majestically swings,
And o'er the ashes of her past at length
The phœnix of her future spreads its wings!

The Fog

The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow,
Southwardly shifting, far inshore, so never a man might know
How the sea it trod with feet soft-shod, watching the distance dim,
Where the fishing-fleet to the eastward beat, white dots on the ocean's rim.
Feeling the sands with its furtive hands, fingering cape and cove,
Where the sweet salt smells of the nearer swells up the sloping hillside rove;
Where the whimpering sea-gulls swoop and soar, and the great king-herons go,
The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!

Then a stillness fell on crag and cliff, on beach and breaker fell,
As the sea-breeze brought on its final whiff the note of a distant bell,
One faint, far sound, and the fog unwound its mantle across the lea,
Joined hand in hand with a wind from land, and the twain went out to sea.
And the wind that rose spoke soft, of those who watch on the cliffs at dawn,
And the fog's white lips, of sinking ships where the tortured tempests spawn,
As, each to each, they told once more such things as fishers know,
When the fog slinks down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!

Oh, the wan, white hours go limping by, when that pall comes in between
The great, blue bell of the cloudless sky and the ocean's romping green!
Nor sane young day, nor swirl of spray, as the cat's-paws lunge and lift;—

On sad, slow waves, like the mounds of graves, the fishermen's dories drift.
For the fishing-craft that leapt and laughed are swallowed in ghostly gray:
Only God's eyes may see where lies the lap of the sheltered bay,
So their dories grope, for lost their lore, witlessly to and fro,
When the fog slinks down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!

Oh, men of the fleet, 't is ye who learn, of the white fog's biting breath,
That life may hang on the way ye turn, or the way ye turn be death!
Though they on the lea look out to sea for the woe or the weal of you,
The ominous East, like a hungry beast, is waiting your tidings, too.
A night and a day, mayhap, ye stray; a day and a night, perchance,
The dory is led toward Marblehead, or pointed away for France;

The shore may save, or the sea may score, in the unknown final throw,
When the fog slinks down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!

Ah, God of the Sea, what joy there lies in that first faint hint of sun!—
When the pallid curtains sulking rise, and the reaches wider run,
When a wind from the west on the sullen breast of the waters shoulders near,
And the blessed blue of the sky looks through, as the fog-wreaths curl and clear.
Ah, God, what joy when the gallant buoy, swung high on a sudden swell,
Puts fear to flight like a dream of night with its calm, courageous bell,
And the dory trips the sea's wide floor with the verve 't was wont to know,
And the fog slinks back to Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!

Marblehead, 1901.

Harlequin

The world lay brown and barren at the closing of the year,
Where the rushes shook and shuddered on the borders of the mere,
And the troubled tide ran shoreward, where the estuaries twined
Through the wide and empty marsh toward the sullen hills behind:
And the smoke-engirdled city sulked beneath the leaden skies,
With the rain-tears slowly sliding from her million window eyes,
And the fog-ghost limped and lingered past the buildings clad in grime,
Till the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!

Then we heard the winds of winter on their brazen trumpets blow
The summons for the ballet of the nimble-footed snow,
And the flakes, all silver-spangled, through the mazy measures wound,
Till each finished out his figure, and took station on the ground.
And the drifts, in shining armor, and with gem-encrusted shields,
Spread their wide-deployed battalions on the drill-ground of the fields,
Till the hillside shone and shimmered with the armies of the rime,
As the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!

He spread a crystal carpet on the rush-encircled pond,
And looped about with ermine all the hemlock-trees beyond:
He strung his gleaming icicles along the scowling eaves,
And decked the barren branches of the oak with snowy leaves.

And, when the world was silver-girt with garland and festoon,
He drew the cloudy curtain that had lain across the moon,
And his wand awoke the wonders of his dazzling distant clime,
When the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!

Then around the benches, crowded with the audience of earth,
Ran the sound of hands applauding, and of little people's mirth,
And the air was full of savors such as only Christmas knows,
When the ruddy cottage windows cast their roses on the snows:
And the Fire-God cracked the drift-wood 'twixt his fingers and his thumbs,
And the merry pop-corn answered like the roll of little drums,
While the snow-clad belfries wakened, and the midnight heard their chime,
As the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!

With blaze of starry splendor, and with brilliance of the moon,
With fir-trees dressed grotesquely, like the slippered Pantaloon,
With snowflakes light as fairies, and with slender ivy vines
In their spangled winter-dresses, like a host of Columbines;—
With sheen of silver scenery, and sleigh-bells' merry din,
The whole world laughed and capered 'neath the wand of Harlequin!
With the cap and bells of Folly he invested Father Time,
When the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!

Swampscott, 1902.

The Passing of Pan

Laughter, velvet-lipped, runs ringing
All along the woodland ways,
While a strange, bewitching singing
Fills the glad Arcadian days;
Ripple-rocked, the slender naiads
Rush-fringed shores expectant scan
For attendant hamadryads,
Heralding the path of Pan.

Through the swaying bushes sliding,
Dark-eyed nymphs before him trip,
And the god, with stately striding,
Follows, laughter on his lip;
While the wild bird-hearts that love him
In the haunts untrod by man,
Riot rapturously above him,
Heralding the path of Pan.

From the yellow beds of mallows
Gleams the glint of golden hair,
Nereids from the shorewise shallows
Fling a greeting on the air;
Slim white limbs, divinely fashioned,
Of the fair immortal clan
Sway to harmonies impassioned,
Heralding the path of Pan.

Round his brow a wreath he tosses,
Twined with Asphodel and rose,
As triumphant o'er the mosses,
Song-saluted on he goes;
Frail wood-maidens who adore him,
When he rests his temples fan—
When he rises, run before him,
Heralding the path of Pan!

New York, 1896.

Phœbus Apollo

Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, who are shorn of contempt and pride,
Humbled and crushed in a world gone wrong since the smoke on thine altars died;
Hear us, Lord of the morning, King of the Eastern Flame,
Dawn on our doubts and darkness and the night of our later shame!
There are strange gods come among us, of passion, and scorn, and greed;
They are throned in our stately cities, our sons at their altars bleed:
The smoke of their thousand battles hath blinded thy children's eyes,
And our hearts are sick for a ruler that answers us not with lies,
Sick for thy light unblemished, great fruit of Latona's pain—
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!

Our eyes, of earth grown weary, through the backward ages peer,
Till, wooed by our eager craving, the scent of thy birth grows clear
And across the calm Ægean, gray-green in the early morn,
We hear the cry of the circling swans that salute the god new-born—
The challenge of mighty Python, the song of thy shafts that go
Straight to the heart of the monster, sped from the loosened bow.
Again through the vale of Tempe a magical music rings
The songs of the marching muses, the ripple of fingered strings!
But this is our dreaming only; we wait for a stronger strain:
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!

There are some among us, Diviner, who know not thy way or will,
Some of thy rebel children who bow to the strange gods still;
Some that dream of oppression, and many that dream of gold,
Whose ears are deaf to the music that gladdened the world of old.

But we, the few and the faithful, we are weary of wars unjust,
There is left no god of our thousand gods that we love, believe, or trust;
In our courts is justice scoffed at, in our senates gold has sway,
And the deeds of our priests and preachers make mock of the words they say!
Cardinals, kings, and captains, there is left none fit to reign:
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!

We have hearkened to creeds unnumbered, we have given them trial and test,
And the creed of thy Delphic temple is still of them all the best;
Thy clean-limbed, lithe disciples, slender, and strong, and young,
The swing of their long processions, the lilt of the songs they sung,
Thine own majestic presence, pursuing the nymph of dawn,
In thy chariot eastward blazing, by the swans and griffons drawn;

The spell of thy liquid music, once heard in the speeding year:—
These are the things, Great Archer, that we yearn to see and hear,
For beside thy creed untarnished all others are stale and vain!
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!

Monarch of light and laughter, honor, and trust, and truth,
God of all inspiration, King of eternal youth,
Whose words are fitted to music as jewels are set in gold,
There is need of thy splendid worship in a world grown grim and old!
We have drunk the wine of the ages, we are come to the dregs and lees,
And the shrines are all unworthy where we bend reluctant knees;
The brand of the beast is on us, we grovel, and grope, and err,
Wake, Great god of the Morning, the moment has come to stir!
The stars of our night of evil on a wan horizon wane:—
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!

Rome, 1900.

“Whom the World Calls Idle”

He is brother-born to the wind. Its song, in his heart implanted,
Stirs and wakes when the morning breaks and the wide horizon burns;
He is brother-born to the sea, and visions of isles enchanted
Slowly rise to his dreaming eyes from the furrow his labor turns.
Child of fate, be it soon or late that his heart he learns to know,
Not his to say if he roam or stay when the summons bids him go:
Brother-born to the wind of morn, he must share its endless quest
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

The stretch of the open road, the challenge of heights unmounted,
The distant cry of the beasts that lie at the mouth of some latent lair,

The sweep of the pathless plain and the speeding of miles uncounted,
When the rangers ride, with a star for guide, in the face of the battling air—
These are his whose fortune is, like the tireless tide's, to roam,
Brother-born to the wind of morn, with the whole wide world for home:
Child of the soil, he must turn from toil to the dim and dreamt-of West,
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

Song of the stately pines to the winds of northward high-lands,
Song of the palms across the calms that sleep on the long lagoon,
Glamour of breathless dawns on the shores of southward islands,
And the mystical light that tells the night of the birth of the tardy moon:
These—at the gate of his future fate, where the earthly questings end

And the shadows fall—he hath learned to call by the sacred name of friend;
These, in the strife of his hapless life, he hath learned to love the best
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

Then shall it be for us, who have dreamed no dream Elysian,
To cry the ban of our fellow-man who brings no grist to mill?
'T is the verve of his viking sires that awakes the plough-boy's vision,
And the rover roil in the child of toil is the roil of the rover still!
What is it all, this thrill and thrall, that hath mapped his earthly plan,
Unless some gain we may not explain in the onward march of man?
Brother-born to the wind of morn, may his lot be not the best
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest?

Paris, 1899.

Hesperia

Across the stretch of southward seas
The zephyr-swept Hesperides
Lie smiling, ever smiling;
And there the laughter-loving Pan
Leads on his joyous woodland clan
Through halcyon haunts, unknown to man,
With song the hours beguiling.
O fair, far land, thy portals
Swing only to immortals!
Thy scented bowers, thy wondrous flowers,
Thy pleasant ways of ease,
Thy nights dew-dipped and breathless,
Thy birds, unwearied, deathless—
These charms untold I 'd fain behold,
Fair, far Hesperides!

The dusk with all her wealth of stars,
The dawn, when clouds like crimson bars
Turn all the east to splendor,
Bring roseate dreamings unto me
Of Nereids flashing from the sea,
Who turn their shining eyes to thee,
Thou land of music tender.
But ah, 't is useless dreaming—
Thy woodland pools that, gleaming
Like bits of sky, unruffled lie,
Are not for eyes like these;
Yet, could my longing vision
Behold thy fields Elysian,
What peace divine I 'd claim as mine,
Fair, far Hesperides!

New York, 1896.

Haven-Mother

By ways I know not of they come, wind-swept along the miles,
From the palm-encircled beaches of the jewelled southern isles,
Through stress of gales that shred their sails and split their straining spars,
Through nights of calm unbroken and the wonder of the stars:
And, sliding to their moorings where the harbor beacons shine,
They drop their sullen anchors for a moment, and are mine.
Of their questing grown a-weary, for a moment they abide,
Standing mutely and majestic, where the ripple of the tide
With its lazy lips is lapping in the shadows at their side.

Of the wind and waves beleaguered, and assailed of berg and floe,
To the ends of sea undaunted, these, my errant children, go;
Seeking out the northern waters, it is theirs a way to win
Through the grinding of the ice-pack, threading slowly out and in,
Where the castles of the Frost King in their pride and pallor rise,
Thrusting tower and buttress upward to the steely Arctic skies:
And a deep auroral glory from the white horizon grows,
Mounting swift towards the zenith and reflected on the snows,
Till each pinnacled escarpment turns to amethyst and rose.

Or, by southward pathways faring, where the stately islands are,
They, by beach and breaker gliding, run to safety by the bar;
And, their sails serenely furling where the motionless lagoon
In its lap as in a cradle holds the duplicated moon,

Hear the sound of sailors singing and the plash of rhythmic oars
Run to meet the midnight murmurs that are born along the shores.
But I fear not these enchantments; where the trumpet-creepers twine,
Though the air be filled with music, though the air be sweet as wine,
These my children stay not—may not. I am theirs, and they are mine.

Let them go their ways unquestioned, let them come, unquestioned still,
I shall wait them, I shall welcome, come they when or whence they will;
Am I not the Haven-Mother? 'T is a mother's part to bide,
To be ready, to be tender, when the turning of the tide
Brings the rovers homeward, weary of their strivings with the sea,
To the sweet surcease that waits them in the port where they would be.

Let them roam to north or southward—wheresoe'er their ways are cast,
To my bosom backward turning when their journeying is past,
They shall gleam within the offing, and be mine again at last!

New York, 1897.

Gettysburg

(JULY 3, 1863)

Though the winds be strong that lash along the steeds of the charging sea,
With lunge and urge of assaulting surge yet seeking a further goal,
God in His pleasure hath set a measure, the bound of their boast to be,
Where, pile upon pile, and mile on mile, are the cliffs of calm control.
But the Lord of Hosts who guardeth the coasts yet loveth each sieging swell,
And He who is Brother to surge and smother is Brother to cliff as well:
He giveth the word if the shore be stirred, He biddeth the sea subside,
And this is our trust, that His will is just, however He turn the tide!

As night went gray at the touch of day and the slow dawn mounted higher,
On the Federal right the third day's fight was born in a sheet of fire:
Gun upon gun to the front was run, and each in its turn spoke forth
From fevered mouth to the waiting South the word of the watching North:
And the wraith of Death with withering breath o'er the wide arena played,
As across the large swept on the charge of the old Stone-wall brigade;
But the first great wave on a sudden gave, retreating across the slain—
Gave and broke, as the rifles spoke from the long blue line of Kane!

Then silence sank on the double rank deployed on the sullen hill,
And, across the plain of the early slain, the hosts of the South were still,
Waiting, each, till further speech from the guns should dart and din—

Sign to the brave that the final wave of the tide was rolling in.
Adown the line like a draught of wine the presence of Hancock came,
And eyes grew bright in the steadfast light of his own that blazed to flame;
For the Federals knew, where his banner blew—and they saw their leader ride,
That a righteous God on that sea of sod had decreed a turn of tide!

So came one, when a signal gun awoke on the Southern side,
And Hunt's brigade with a cannonade to the challenge of Lee replied,
Like arrows sent from a bow well bent to the heart of a distant targe,
Virginia's hope rode down the slope, with Pickett leading the charge!
Steady and slow, as soldiers go in some serried dress parade,
With flags a-dance in their cool advance came the gallant gray brigade,

And steady and slow, as if no foe on the frowning heights abode,
To the cannon's breath, to the scythe of Death, Pickett, their leader, rode.

God! what a mile he led them! From the slope they sought to scale,
Sullen and hot, the swingeing shot was hurling its awful hail:
Where a long ravine ploughed through the green they halted, anew to form,
And then, with a cheer, to the ridge's sheer they swept like a summer storm.
Hand to hand at the guns they manned, the Federals fought and fell,
Where Armistead his regiment led up the cannister-harrowed swell,
He touched a gun—for a breath he won the crest of the Union's pride—
Then over the hill Jehovah's will decreed the turn of the tide!

Taken in flank each gallant rank of Pickett's battalions gave,
Trampled and tossed, since hope was lost, there was left but life to save;

Beaten back on the travelled track, they faltered, and broke, and fled,
And, swinging his scythe, Death claimed his tithe in the pale and patient dead!
For the arm of the Lord had raised the sword that man may not gainsay,
'Twixt the cause of the Free and the cause of Lee the issue no longer lay;
For the word of the Lord had gone abroad that the strife of the right had won,
And Freedom's foe at the call bowed low and answered “Thy will be done!”

Pickett, ah, Pickett, the staunchest heart in the Southern host that day,
Hail to the brave in the last great wave of the long and fearful fray,
That broke in foam on the trampled loam of that tempest trampled mount—
In the glory born of a hope forlorn they passed to their last account!
Meade, ah, Meade, there are hearts that bleed for your host that fought and fell,

When the final charge broke on the marge of a hillside turned to Hell!
Yet this the speech on the crag-girt beach that the sea proclaims for aye,
And this the word that the cliffs unstirred through the ages still reply:

Though the winds be strong that lash along the steeds of the charging sea,
With lunge and urge of assaulting surge yet seeking a further goal,
God in His pleasure hath set a measure, the bound of their boast to be,
Where, pile upon pile, and mile on mile, are the cliffs of calm control.
But the Lord of Hosts who guardeth the coasts yet loveth each sieging swell,
And He who is Brother to surge and smother is Brother to cliff as well:
He giveth the word if the shore be stirred, He biddeth the sea subside,
And this is our trust, that His will is just, however He turn the tide!

New York, 1898.

Atlantis

The light of suns unseen, through depths of sea descending,
Within her street awakes the ghost of noon
To bide its little hour and die unheeded, blending
Into her night that knows nor stars nor moon.
The hurrying feet of storms that trample o'er the surges
Arouse no echo in these silent deeps;
No thunder thrills her peace, no sword of lightning scourges
The dim, dead calm where lost Atlantis sleeps.

Long leagues above her courts the stately days advancing
Kindle new dawns and see new sunsets dim;
And, white and weary-eyed, the old stars, backward glancing,
Reluctant pause upon the ocean's rim.
But she, of dawns and dusks forgotten and forgetful,
Broods in her depths with slumber-weighted eyes;
For all her splendid past unanxious, unregretful,
She waits the call that bids her wake and rise.

No mortal voice she hears. The strong young ships, full-freighted,
With hopes of men, with women's sighs and tears,
Above her blue-black walls and portals golden-gated
Sweep on unnoted through the speeding years—
Until at last they come, as still in silence resting
She keeps her vigil underneath the waves,
By tempests tossed and torn, and weary of their questing,
Slow sliding downward past her to their graves.

So side by side they lie in ever gaining number,
The sunken ships, by fate or fortune led
To this, their final port, resistless sent to slumber
Until the sea shall render up her dead—
Shall render up her dead to all their olden glories,
Shall render up what now so well she keeps,
The buried lives and loves, the strange, unfinished stories
Of these dim depths where lost Atlantis sleeps!

Paris, 1899.

The Easter Lily

A little child, as winter turned to spring,
Tended a lily-plant with patient care,
Thinking, when she should see it blossoming,
To set it on the chancel-step; that there,
When Easter dawned on Lent, the spotless thing
Might on the feast-day be her offering,
Lifting its own white face to One more fair.

But, as the plant grew upward day by day,
Raising itself from earth towards the sky,
So seemed the child from earth to draw away,
The while she feared to see the lily die;
Unthinking that, ere broke the Easter ray,
She might her own white soul before Him lay
For Whom she sought the flower to sanctify.

Time passed. The lily bloomed not; and the night
Before the feast had come. And so the child
Sent to the church the cherished plant, despite
'T was but an unblown bud; and—reconciled
That on the altar-step, midst flowers white,
Her poor green stalk watched out the silent flight
Of hours until the morn—contented smiled.

[OMITTED]

Fair broke the dawn upon the altar's hem
Of lilies, breathing Easter greeting sweet;
But, with the night that so perfected them,
The child's own spirit fled, the Light to meet
Beyond the heaven's roseate diadem;
And, with the morning, bloomed upon the stem
The fair, white soul her own had longed to greet!

New York, 1893.

“The Winds and the Sea Obey Him”

Who once hath heard the sea above her graves
Sing to the stars her requiem, and on whom
Her spell is laid of shoreward-sliding waves,
Alternate gleam and gloom,
In reverent mood and silent, standing where
Her hundred throats their diapason raise,
Hath found the very perfectness of prayer
And plenitude of praise.
Thenceforward is his hope a thing apart
From man's perplexing dogmas, good or ill;
Deep in the sacred silence of his heart
His faith abideth, still:—
A faith that fails not, steadfast, humble, kind,
Amid a vexing multitude of creeds
That bend and break with every passing wind,
Like tempest-trampled reeds.

The tide of man's belief may ebb or flow;
Its swift mutations, many though they be,
He heedeth not who once hath come to know
The anthem of the sea.
From sages and their blindly fashioned lore
He turns, to watch with reverential eyes
The seas men fear serve ceaselessly before
The God whom men despise!
Through length of days and year succeeding year
Earth's strongest power serves Heaven's still stronger one,
And all the winds, in holy-hearted fear,
To do His bidding run.
Ah, likewise serving, restless hearts, be still,
And learn, like little children, of the way—
Secure in Him, Whose strong enduring will
The winds and sea obey!

Swampscott, 1897.

Derelict

In younger days, of idleness grown sick,
On this low bank I saw, as in a dream,
The fingers of the leaning willows prick
Long dimples in the slow, reluctant stream.
Watching the pilgrim leaves forsake the stem,
Impatient of the dull familiar cove,
And idle down the tide, I longed like them,
Untrammelled, homeless, free of heart, to rove.

I mind me that of these I noted one
That at the bend a wayward eddy turned
And drifted back, its journey just begun,
The secret of the wider stream unlearned.
It seemed a poor reward for one so bold,
Checked at the start, and beaten back, to find
So stale a death. I did not know, of old,
What seemed so hard could be in truth so kind!

I little thought that on a larger stream
I, too, one day should drift away at will
Toward the distant reaches of my dream
From the safe shelter where I lived so still.
I little thought that I should one day grow
Weary of endless pictures filing past,
Of idle life and idler love, and so
Come gladly to some little cove at last.

Kind eddy that has caught me from the tide,
Of drifting weary, tempest-torn and tost,
To find, from the swift current turned aside,
The simpler things I thought that I had lost!
What have they brought me, all the wasted years,
The river's turns that opened with a smile
And ended in the bitterness of tears?
Kind God! How little were they worth the while!

Yet, here and there, around the sudden bends,
The opening reaches held some sweet surprise:—
My arm has linked and lingered in a friend's,
My eyes have seen love swim in lovely eyes!

I have kissed pleasure—walked alone with pain;
And, if to life I was apprentice made,
My years of toil have brought the toiler's gain—
By life equipped, of life I know the trade!

I have made foes, and so can keep a friend;
Learned of a friend how gently foes may score;
Played fast and loose with love, and in the end
Lost it, and, losing, learned to love the more!
Seeking for gifts, I found 't is joy to give,
Searching for truth, was taught to know a lie;
Pursuing death, I learned 't is good to live,
In quest of life, I learned it safe to die!

What were it better that the past should be
Than like that leaf, turned helplessly aside,
That drifted back beneath its mother-tree,
And at its root to purer purpose died?
Another year yet other leaves there sprung,
Fed by the mould of which it formed a part,
That subtly heard, mayhap, that voiceless tongue
And laid its lesson silently to heart.

100

From soil of pride the plant of meekness grows,
From labor's mine comes gold of sweet surcease;
By sorrow's showers is fed contentment's rose,
And passion's vultures build the nest of peace:
So from past weakness future strength I gain,
As poise of knowledge to my doubt succeeds,
And faith's fresh flower, that long I sought in vain,
Blooms on the rubbish of my mouldered creeds.

Now at the end I see that it was well
To drain the cup down to the bitter lees;
To foretaste heaven—thread the paths of hell,
Else empty words and meaningless were these:
Else might I stand, as once I stood outside
My fast-locked heart, its best and worst unknown,
Till life's firm hand flung the barred portals wide
And led me in, a stranger, to my own!

Poissy-sur-Seine, 1900.

101

The Débutante

To-day dawned not upon the earth as other days have done:
A throng of little virgin clouds stood waiting for the sun,
Till the herald-winds aligned them, and they blushed, and stood aside,
As the marshals of the morning flung the eastern portals wide.
So Nature lit her playhouse for the play that May begins,
And the twigs of honeysuckle sawed like little violins:
In the dawn there dwelt a whisper of a presence that was new,
For the slender Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

As yet I could not see her, and the stage was wide and bare;
As yet the Winter's chorus echoed faintly on the air
With a dying wail of tempest, and of dry and tortured trees,
But a promise of new music lent enchantment to the breeze.

102

In the scene's secluded corners lay the snow-drifts, still secure;
But the murmur of their melting sang another overture
Than the brooks of brown November, and I listened, and I knew
That blue-eyed Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

The world was all attention, and the hemlocks stood, a-row,
Ushers, never changing costume through the Seasons' wonder-show,
While the day, below the hillside, tried her colors, one by one,
On the clouds experimenting, till the coming of the sun.
In the vines about my window, where the sparrows all convene,
They were practising the chorus that should usher in the Queen,
And the sod-imprisoned flowers craved the word to shoulder through:
Green-girdled Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

103

She shall enter to the clarion of the crystal-ringing brooks,
She shall tread on frail arbutus in the moist and mossy nooks;
She shall touch the bleak drop-curtain of the Winter with her wand
Till it lifts, and shows the wonder of the apple blooms beyond!
Yet with all her golden sunlight, and her twilights of perfume,
Yet with all the mystic splendor of her nights of starlit gloom,
She shall bring no sweeter moment than this one in which I knew
That laughing Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

Swampscott, 1902.

104

Shells

Where the long waves put cool, caressing hands
Upon the fevered temples of the shore,
And with their eager lips are telling o'er
Their strange, unspoken secrets to the sands,
Along the shining rim of cape and cove
The shells in fair, unplanned mosaic lie;
And there the children, keen of heart and eye,
Gather their harvest in of treasure-trove.
Yet this is one of ocean's mysteries—
That, while the humbler shells the breakers brave,
The fairest are most fragile, and the wave,
Ruthless, has crushed and mutilated these!

Ah, sea of life, we, too, like children, stand
Through youth and age, expectant, at thy rim,
To pray for golden argosies from Him
Who holds thee in the hollow of His hand.

105

Capricious tides delude us, veer and turn,
And flash our dreams to view, again to hide;
A moment on the breaker's crest they ride,
The while we watch, their destiny to learn.
Poor, fragile dreams! Our humbler hopes befall;
But crushed and shattered, tempest-tossed and torn,
These come to shore, the dreams of youthful morn—
Most fair, most frail, and best beloved of all!

New York, 1897.

106

At Twilight

Was it so long? It seems so brief a while
Since this still hour between the day and dark
Was lightened by a little fellow's smile;
Since we were wont to mark
The sunset's crimson dim to gold, to gray,
Content to know that, though he loved to roam
Care-free among the comrades of his play,
Twilight would lead him home.

A year ago! The well-remembered hail
Of happy-hearted children on the green
We hear to-night, and see the sunset pale,
The distant hills between:
But when the busy feet shall homeward turn,
When little wearied heads shall seek for rest,
Where shall you find the weight for which you yearn,
Ah, tender mother-breast?

107

Dear lips, that in the twilight hushed and dim
Lulled him with murmured fantasies of song;
Dear slender arms, that safely sheltered him,
The empty years are long!
The night's caressing wind moves babbling on,
And all the whispered gossip of the firs
Is busy with his name who now is gone—
My little lad and hers!

But if we so, with eager eyes and glad,
Looked forward to his coming in the gloom;
If so our hearts leaped out to meet the lad
Whose smile lit all the room,—
Shall there not be a Presence waiting thus
To still the bitter craving of the quest?
Shall there not be a welcome, too, for us
When we go home to rest?

Yes, God be thanked for this: the ashen-gowned
Sweet presence of the twilight, and, afar,
The strong, enduring hills, in beauty crowned
With one white, steadfast star!

108

A year ago? What, love, to us are years?
The selfsame twilight, cool, and calm, and dim,
That led him home to us, despite our fears,
Shall lead us home to him!

New York, 1898.

109

Paris

I knew when first I looked into her eyes,
And she in mine, that what has been must be,
And so let others say she told them lies:
She told no lie to me!
She spoke me fair, of lees as well as wine,
Then, with that subtlest charm of all her charms,
Half-dropped her languid lids, and at the sign
I ran into her arms!

Now it is she who flings my window wide
At dawn, and lets the perfumed morning in,
And she who walks so softly at my side,
Through noonday's dust and din.
But, most of all, 't is she, where blue night falls,
Whose firm, imperious fingers tap the pane,
And she whose velvet voice it is that calls,
Nor calls her own in vain!

110

It is as if the siren understood
How that she is so strong at this still hour,
That I could not repulse her if I would,
Nor would, had I the power:
As if she knew that, should I try to check
The strength of that enrapt, responsive thrill,
Let her but slide her arm about my neck,
And I obey her will!

So, when she speaks, I answer; when she woos,
Her voice, like wine, the slow pulse goads and spurs:
I go to meet her through the dropping dews,
And lean my lips to hers.
All the long hours run laughing into one—
The strange, sweet moment when the evening falls—
And, like a mother summoning her son,
Resistless Paris calls!

Paris, 1901.

111

Ebb-Tide

A sodden reach of wide and wind-swept lea,
A sky of shattered steel that palls the sight,
And one long shaft of sun that seems to write
Vast letters slowly on a slate of sea;
The dreary wail of gulls that skim the crest
Of sullen breakers sliding in to land,
A world grown empty, full of vague unrest,
And shadow-shapes that stride across the sand!

The gray beach widens. Foot by foot appear
Strange forms of wreckage creeping from the waves,
Like ghosts that steal in silence from their graves
To watch beside the death-bed of the year;
Poor shattered shapes of ships that once stood out
Full-freighted to the far horizon's sweep
To music of the cheery sailor-shout
Of men who sought the wonders of the deep!

112

Poor shattered ships! Their gallant cruising o'er,
Their cargoes coral-crusted, leagues below,
They rise, unnamed, unnumbered, from the slow
Recession of the ebb along the shore.
The fickle tide, that bore them bravely then,
Betrays their shame and nakedness to be
Mute witness to the littleness of men
Who battle with the sovereignty of sea.

For me, as well, alone upon the dune,
There sinks a tide that strips the beaches bare,
And leaves but grim, unsightly wreckage where
The brooding skies make mockery of noon.
Ah, dear, that hopes, like tides, should ebb away,
Unmasking on the naked shore of love
Flotsam and jetsam of a happier day,
Dreams wrecked and all the emptiness thereof!

New York, 1899.

113

June

Lightsome, laughter-loving June,
Days that swoon
In beds of flowers;
Twilights dipped in rose perfume,
Nights of gloom
Washed clear by showers.
Suns that softly sink to rest
In the west,
All purple barred;
And a faint night-wind that sighs
Under skies
Still, silver-starred.
Languorous breaths of meadow land
Overspanned
By clouds like snow;
And a shouting from the brooks,
Where in nooks
Late violets grow.
June, ah, June, to lie and dream
By the stream,

114

And in the maze
Of thy spells never to heed—
How they speed,
Thy witching days;
Watching where the shadows pass,
And the grass
All rustling bends,
While the bees fly east and west,
On a quest
That never ends.
Thus to shun the whirl of life,
Freed from strife
And freed from care—
Hear, as when a lad I heard
How the bird
Sings, high in air.
June, to hear beneath the skies
Lullabies
That night airs blow;
Ah, to find upon thy breast
That pure rest
I used to know!

New York, 1895.

115

The Children

(AVENUE DU BOIS, APRIL, 1901)

A moment since, I paced almost alone
This wonderful wide way, of all her streets
The one wherein the pulse of Paris beats
Most gaily. Like some sweep of beachway, blown
Empty by west-born winds, the tapering line
Of path and drive swelled up the rising ground
Toward the Arch, deserted, and I found
The most majestic mile in Europe mine!

Was it some word I did not comprehend,
Some sign too subtle for my grosser sense,
That in an instant brought, I know not whence,
This throng that fills the path from end to end?
Or was it that the wizard April sun
Bent and tapped lightly at the myriad doors

116

Wherefrom this tide of laughter daily pours?
I know but this:—a miracle was done!

The children! All the world 's a garden grown,
Thrilled with a rush of inter-rippling words
Than all the liquid babble of the birds
Supremely sweeter; and my steps are strown
With faces made of roses, and my hand
Kept busy with the venturesome who stray
Out of their course, and pause upon the way
To bend above some treasure in the sand.

An instant gone, it was a little face
Framed in white satin, and two violets
That looked me through, and fathomed the regrets
Of my whole lifetime in a second's space!
And now see where he stands, that elder one,
Poised straight and slender, with the languid South
Snared in his eyes and in his proud young mouth:—
Ah, God, ah, God, why hast Thou hid the sun?

I thought them long since dead, these dreams, and yet
Behold, they stand before me in the way,

117

Amid the throng of little ones at play,
Gowned in their ashen robes of vain regret!
Ah, first love of my young, believing heart,
Haven of my hopes, white light across my fears,
How strange it is to think the empty years
Might of this heaven have granted us a part!

How slow upon the air the music dies!
How blind am I, how loath to understand!
The wraiths of dreams denied brush by me, and
I find my unborn bairns in strangers' eyes!
Exiled, I watch them, romping as they run,
Heartsick for this that now can never be:—
One that should at my coming run to me!
Ah, God, ah, God, why hast Thou hid the sun?

118

Narcissus

Since the great, glad greeting of dawn from the eastern hills
Triumphant ran with a shout to the woods below,
With the song in his ears of the clearly clamoring rills
He has lain, like a man of snow,
Slender and straight as the joyous immortals are made,
Born of woman, but born with the grace of a god.
Unheeded airs, caressingly cool, have played
With his hair, and the nymphs have trod
Close to his side, and have kissed him, waiting to flee—
But Narcissus, what recketh he?

In the pool where the lithe fish flashes and slips
From his covert to snap at the careless, fluttering flies,
Narcissus has seen the curve of his drooping lips,
And, like mirrored miniature heavens, his shining eyes.

119

And a flush like a dew-dipped rose has dyed the pool,
He has laid his cheek to the ripples cool;
Brow touches brow, lips lips, and his eyes of violet roam
Down through the crystal depths. In the darkening dome
The stars shine forth from their faint, far ways,
Trimming their lamps; and, from the purple haze,
The moon, cloud-veiled, her circle just complete,
Wan as a travail-spent mother, plants her feet
On the carpeted hills, and fearful of change
Seeks her reflected face in the sea's southward range—
But Narcissus, what recketh he?

Narcissus, Narcissus, where is thy boyish bloom,
Thy long, slim form that lay beside the pool,
And the lips cold smiling to their smiling image cool?
Narcissus!

Only a strange, indefinite perfume,
And a dim white spot in the night when soft airs blow;
A flower, bending, bending low
Its petals and its yellow heart to where the waters flow;
Its scent the winds have borne
Through the pearl-gray east to the arms of morn,

120

To faint and to die in the wakening light—
But of time's swift flight, the dawn, and the noon, and the night,
The sun's gold glory, the moon's white mystery,
Narcissus, what recketh he?

New York, 1896.

121

Pompeii

The giant slept, and pigmies at his feet,
Like children moulding monuments of snow,
Piled stone on stone, mapped market-place and street,
And saw their temples column-girdled grow:
And, slowly as the gradual glaciers grope
Their way resistless, so Pompeii crept,
Year by long year, across the shelving slope
Toward the sea:—and still the giant slept.

Belted with gardens, where the shivered glass
Of falling fountains broke the pools' repose,
As they had been asleep upon the grass,
A myriad villas stretched themselves and rose:
And down her streets, grown long and longer still,
Grooving the new-laid stones, the chariots swept,
And of a sudden burst upon the hill
Vast amphitheatres. Still the giant slept.

122

With liquid comment of the wooing doves,
With wanton flowers, sun-conjured from the loam,
Grew the white city of illicit loves,
Hostess of all the infamy of Rome!
A marble harlot, scornful, pale, and proud,
Her Circean court on ruin's brink she kept,
Lulled by the adoration of the crowd
To lethal stupor. Still the giant slept.

Incense-encircled, pacing day by day
Through temple-courts reëchoant with song,
Sin-stunned and impercipient, on her way
She dragged her languid loveliness along.
With lips whereon a dear damnation hung,
With dark, dream-clouded eyes that never wept,
Flawlessly fair, the faulty fair among,
She kissed and cursed:—and still the giant slept.

Here, for a mute reminder of her shame,
Her ruins gape out baldly from their tomb;
A city naked, shorn of all but name,
Blinking and blind from all her years of gloom:

123

A beldam who was beauty, crying alms
With leprous lips that mouthe their prayers in vain;
Her deaf destroyer to her outstretched palms
Respondeth not. The giant sleeps again!

Pompeii, 1900.

124

On the Prow

Strange, silent East! Across the solemn calm
The slender ship outward and onward strives,
Bearing to odorous shores of date and palm
The burden of a hundred little lives.

On a like course drift I toward the verge
Beyond which lies what now I may not know;
Yet my heart whispers these gray wastes of surge
Stretch whither it is good for me to go.

Youth, like the speeding sun, left far behind—
Unanswered questions mutely sent before—
Oh, great, dim East, what welcome shall I find
When thy wide arms unveil the distant shore?

The prow knows not the harbor that it nears,
Nor I if thou shalt bring the seeker rest:—
Yet the strong hand the fragile ship that steers
Will guide her to the haven that is best!

New York, 1896.

125

A Fragment

When she is forward, querulous, or wild,
Thou knowest, Abba, how in each offence
I stint not patience lest I wrong the child,
Mistaking for revolt defect of sense—
For wilfulness mere sprightliness of mind;
Thou knowest how often, seeing, I am blind.
[OMITTED]

And how, when twice, for something grievous done,
I could but smite, and though I lightly smote,
I felt my heart rise strangling in my throat;
And when she wept I kissed the poor red hands.
All these things, Father, a father understands;
And am I not Thy son?
[OMITTED]

Thou 'st seen how closely, Abba, when at rest
My child's head nestles to my breast;

126

And how my arm her little form enfolds,
Lest in the darkness she should feel alone;
And how she holds
My hands, my hands, my two hands in her own!
[OMITTED]

A little easeful sighing
And restful turning round,
And I, too, on Thy love relying,
Shall slumber sound.

New York, 1893.

127

The Spirit of Mid-Ocean

The hesitant sun stands still, with the arch of a day complete,
And fingers the yielding latch on the door of his sequent dawn,
And the slender poplars shiver and gather about their feet
Their long, limp skirts of shadow that lay on the eastward lawn.
Then the night, the blue-black night, breathes on the mirror of heaven,
Blurs to the ghost of gray the reflected blue of the sea,
And the soul of her stirs on the calm, a sudden impalpable leaven,
Troubling inanimate twilight with hints of a storm to be.
White on the gathering dusk, a gull swings in to the west,
Touching the ominous ocean with the tips of tentative wings,
And the bell of a distant buoy, a dot on a sluggish crest,
Bays in reverberant bass monition of threatening things!

128

Then, like a wraith that stands in the presence of them that sleep,
Pacing the pinguid sea as a ghost on a slated floor,
Uncloaking her shining shoulders from the robe of the jealous deep,
The Spirit of Grave Mid-Ocean steps silently in to shore.
And her strong hands hold the keys to the depths that none may plumb,
And the bond of God with His sea her ears alone have heard;
But her stern lips guard the secret, loyal, unfaltering, dumb,
Till the sums on which we labor be solved by a single word!
Calm with the infinite calm of the North's immutable star,
Crowned with serene omniscience, O Spirit of Deep Mid-Sea,
If thus majestic and mute God's stately seneschals are,
What, in His own high heaven, shall your Maker and Master be?

Am I then the last of the men that this day departed saw,
Sole survivor of all whom it roused to strive and stir,

129

That I stand alone in the night, and, beaten to bay by awe,
Confront in the sudden stillness the eloquent eyes of Her?
Wake! my unconscious comrades, my brothers in shame and sin,
Vexed with your ominous dreaming, tortured by doubt and fear!
See on the wings of midnight the presence of peace come in,
With the calm, disburdening message that never a noon may hear.
Stand face-front to the surges, deaf to your preachers' lore,
Claim no creed of their making, for, on the awestruck sea,
The Spirit of Strong Mid-Ocean steps silently in to shore:—
Hush! If this be the servant, what must the Master be?

Swampscott, 1901.

THE END