Voices and visions :: :: University of Virginia Library

Voices and visions

Fawcett, Edgar (1847-1904)

THE OLD NOVELIST'S MONOLOGUE

DEI GRATIÂ

BASILICA SAN PIETRO

THE TWILIGHT OF POETRY

‘BLEST BE THAT PATRIOT’

A MILLIONAIRE'S FUNERAL

A BOY'S THOUGHTS OF LIFE

LANDSCAPE IN SOME OTHER PLANET

TO ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

ŒDIPUS AND THE SPHINX

ANNORUM RECENTIORUM

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WOLFE AT QUEBEC

September, 1759

Cloudy that momentous morning, over sheer Canadian steeps,
Broke upon the insurgent silver that St. Lawrence bends and sweeps.

Bourgainville had rashly blundered; Vergor did his trust betray;
Brave Mountcalm stood guard at Beauport, miles from where the danger lay.

Off at Cap Rouge, cloaked by midnight, clomb the intrepid Wolfe, even then,
Struggling through the tangled pines with seventeen hundred sturdy men.

Up and on they pushed and clambered, briar and rock and slag their track,
Up and on, with each his musket slung behind his straining back.

Though achieved this arduous vantage, yet beyond still gleamed the goal;
‘Now for victory or for ruin!’ murmured Wolfe to his own soul.

Troops ere long tumultuous joined him, from the war-ships massed below,
On the Plains of Abraham, with redcoats reddening its plateau.

Troops ere long tumultuous faced him, whitecoats of Quebec each one,
Scampering from the gate St. Louis, scurrying from the gate St. John.

Languedoc's tough legion, victors in Ticonderoga's fray;
Rousillon's, that made the ramparts of Fort William Henry sway;

Bold Béarns, that whelmed Oswego, ere its hour of ghastly sack;
These, and more, that plunged through slaughter at Crown Point and Frontenac.

Swift they sped, while Indian allies, wrath and scorn in every glance,
Swelled with war-paint, shrieks and scalp-locks the battalions of old France.

Strategist of rapier cunning, soldier of superb command,
Wolfe, undaunted as a whirlwind, met and smote them with his band.

Front and flank their fire beset him; knoll and thicket devilish grew,
Where with ambuscaded muzzle sly sharpshooters crawled and slew.

Weak of body, although in spirit staunch like his bright warrior sword,
Recked he but of King and Country, heedless of renown's award.

While the clansmen's Highland slogan pierced through storms of British cheers,
Charged he in the teeth of peril with his Louisbourg grenadiers.

Hot shot buzzed and showered about him; wounded, he would still persist—
Binding quick a random kerchief round one bullet-shattered wrist.

Keen at last the death-blow came, and staggering from its hurt he fell;
Hands of eager comrades caught him—camp-fire friends that loved him well.

Ere he died they bore him tidings of the enemy's routed host;
Then, with passionate thanks to God, he rendered up that gallant ghost!

Large from history's pale perspective doth his valorous image press,
Towering o'er the dusk of discord with memorial stateliness;

His indeed the loftier laurel, his indeed the patriot's palm,
His the fame Time's benediction should immortally embalm.

Dear to England shines his honour, yet with radiance not more mild
Than to us, o'er tracts of ocean, England's transatlantic child.

America, 1896.

THE OLD ACTOR

He plays the parts we watched him play of old
With supple and vibrant voice, with healthful frame;
But all his ancient skill has now grown cold
And tame.

The people are kind; their strenuous welcome cheers,
Yet rings as if 'twere echoing, loud or low,
The hardier plaudits that were given him years
Ago.

His art of yore, both real and regnant then,
Courts now mere vacant mummery; and at whiles
Mirth wages fight with melancholy ... as when
He smiles.

Or yet so tired he seems, by claims that task
Those powers of portraiture once firm and high,
Pathos but half screens humour, like a mask
Worn wry.

Ah, piteous trend of time, that thus may bring
Genius from grand achievement to grotesque—
Turn Falstaff tragic, and round Hamlet fling
Burlesque!

CONJECTURE

How sad it seems that Earth should reign in space
Thus lonely, and yet companioned, as we mark,
By stellar myriads that so throng her dark
Nightly with their pale-glittering populace!
Why should her glory and grandeur miss the grace
To win from heaven's creation-crowded arc
At least one obvious if elusive spark
Of tidings from some sister star's vague race?

Nay, is it not that thousands of far spheres
Yearn for communion with our own this hour,
Yet find her speechless as a dead man's lip?
Ah, what if Science, amid the unborn years,
Might vest her with some new strange bounteous power
Of interplanetary kindredship!

NATURE TO ART

Painter, beware lest thou too dearly prize
All variant blame or cheer from clique or clan.
Below the intense blue blaze of tropic skies,
In valley and dell untrod by mortal man,
For centuries do my giant fern-plumes tower,
My bristling cacti break in glorious flower,
Or yet my lissome orchids throng to raise
The delicate rainbow splendours of their sprays.

Sculptor, be warned ere thou too precious rate
Censure or eulogy. ... Thou dost behold
How carelessly in heaven I lift the great
Palatial purples of my sunsets—mould
The snows of my proud mountain-summits—curl
To airier symmetries the plastic pearl
Of my pale dawns—or hew, year after year,
With silver-chiselling waves my cliffs austere.

Master of music, let thine own soul make
Its choicest audience. ... Do I reck who heeds
Melodious and delirious winds that wake
Lyres in my tree-tops, lutes among my reeds?

Or if alone the meek brute grazing herds
Hark to the blithe arpeggios of my birds?
Or if blank sands and crags alone may hear
The orchestral ocean I sublimely rear?

Thee, last yet loftiest, Poet, I would remind
That ever in thine own large passionate heart
Thou shalt for thine own song the encomiums find
Worthier as they are wiser. ... I, apart
From all men, mantle my enormous nights
In silence, yet their labyrinthine lights
Thrill deeply with grand strains no discord mars,—
The rhythm and cadence of my choric stars.

PORTRAITS

I
THE PRIG

Though genius clad you with a golden mist,
For him your verses would but lamely stammer,
If in their texture should by chance exist
One least unholy blemish of bad grammar.

Vainly, for him, the powers you would unite
Of Shakespeare, Virgil, Dante, Lope de Vega,
If, quoting Greek, you once presumed to write
An omicron in place of an omega.

II
A FAILURE

With all the Egyptian dynasties he copes
Undaunted, and the whole long line of Popes.

To nimblest English, if the mood may please,
He turns the tough Greek of Thucydides.

Than he no pundit wiser views may give
On Sanskrit and the Æolic optative.

With ease his memory, name by name, can shoot
Backward from Queen Victoria to Canute.

Yet still, at fifty-seven, he sighs and frets,
Pinioned by poverty and dogged by debts.

III
A KIND OF HYPOCRITE

He grips your hand with hearty and fervid pressure;
A wealth of candour beams from his full smile;
And yet no Machiavelli could outmeasure
The compass of his ambuscaded guile.

Others by artful flatteries may caress you;
Not he, thank heaven, with warm phrase blunt and terse!
And yet, his most ingenuous-toned ‘God bless you’
Can cloak the sleeping scorpion of a curse.

Thus brazenly through life, its one most daring
And dangerous masquerader, doth he go;
Frank as Jack Falstaff in his outward bearing,
But wily as Mephistopheles below!

IV
AN OLD LADY

As bold October checks his gaudier tints
Frosting some sheltered tree with tenderer trace,
So, mild of mood, relentless age imprints
With delicate blight her pink autumnal face.

V
A YOUNG GIRL

Her mouth demure, with that shy smile it houses
Below the silvery dusk of those deep eyes,
Hath semblance of a curled wild-rose that drowses,
Watched by mesmeric stars in summer skies.

BURIALS

When thou hast conquered in thine errant heart
Evil desires, base passions bold or sly,
Fighting them till to death at last they yield,
Then bid oblivion bury them apart
From all thy future, and so let them lie
In their own ignominious Potter's Field!

But when sweet aims and acts that now control
Moods of warm human pity and helpful care,
Cease from thy days, by full achievement crowned,
Bid memory build for these within thy soul
A mausoleum of majesty as fair
As any in earthly sculpture to be found.

AUX INVALIDES

What dead king ever knew sepulchral gloom
Lordlier than he in this last haughty home,
Below the Invalides' huge golden dome,
Twelve marble Victories ranging round his tomb?
Here from mosaics of laurel-pictured floor
We throng to mark his monolith high loom;
Here sculptures laud for us his deeds and state;
Here lie his brothers, kings too, since they bore
His name. As though to have breathed here were to be
By some reflected force of greatness great,
The insensate air itself seems charged with immortality.

And yet these proud memorial grandeurs, wed
With reverence for the regal dust they hide,
Are in their glory and pomp like petrified
Tears that by widow and orphan have been shed.
These porphyries and chalcedonies are cold
As once was his ambition; overhead
St. Louis, offering Christ the martial blade,
Stares mockery; still in mockery we behold
On arch or spandrel saints of earlier times; ...
Till now the twelve great marble Victories fade,
And in their stead tower twelve great ghosts of war's colossal crimes.

Paris.

LUTE AND FLUTE

[I Fancy, my falcon, from this willing wrist]

Fancy, my falcon, from this willing wrist
Leap forth, and roam the radiant morning weather!
Float high, till all its ambient amethyst
Has bathed thy bold wings to their downiest feather!
Here, far below thee, in the meadow's mist,
I feel, dear bird, that still we bide together,
Since back to earth, whene'er the mood may list,
I lure thee by a touch upon thy tether!

II
WHITE VIOLETS

While Hesper gemmed the ruby West,
And lulled was all the land,
You broke white violets from your breast,
You laid them in my hand.
‘Their poor pale ghosts,’ with sighs you said—
You said with shadowy tears,
‘Will haunt, long after they are dead,
The unalienating years!’

White violets, ah, white violets, love,
Whene'er I see them now,
Mysterious from their pallor steals
The beauty of your white brow!

I kissed the frail flowers one by one,
With pangs of speechless pain;
For me full many a future sun
Might shine, yet shine in vain!
For me, howe'er the altering scene
Should shift from dark to fair,
White violets must for ever mean
White memories of despair!
White violets, ah, white violets, love,
In hope's last long eclipse
The fragrance is but anguish, now,
That floats from their white lips!

[III I dreamed that Love came knocking]

I dreamed that Love came knocking
At your door one winter night,
While the spectre trees were rocking
In a blast of savage blight.
‘Oh, I perish!’ poor Love pleaded;
‘Ope the door, for Love's dear sake.’
But although you heard and heeded,
Still no answer would you make!

Not one word of sweet replying
Would your haughty lips have said,
Even if Love had lain there dying,
Even if Love had lain there dead!

Then I dreamed that Love o'er-ruled you;
For in tenderest voice he cried,
‘Nay, dear lady, I sadly fooled you,
Since I am not Love, but Pride.’
And you straightway oped your portals
With a merry and welcome nod,
To that wiliest of immortals,
To that masquerading god.
Ah, you oped your portals lightly,
Not for Love's but Pride's dear sake;
Yet, O lady, if I dreamed rightly,
Love soon taught you your mistake!

IV
BOUNDARY LINES

Who can tell when sleep and waking meet to mingle,
Meet to mingle so that sleep's deft opiate wins?
Who can tell when waking pushes past the portals,
Past the portals whence its potency begins?
Just the moment for the breaking
Of the spell between our waking
And our sleep, who can tell?
Just the moment for the breaking of the firm yet fragile spell,
Who can tell?

Who can tell when girl and woman meet to mingle,
Meet to mingle so that woman wins the day?
Who can tell when woman wanders past the portals,
Past the portals whence outsweeps her witching sway?
Just the moment for assuming
That the flower at last is blooming
From its bud, who can tell?
Just the moment that bids girlhood from its bondage first rebel,
Who can tell?

Who can tell when love and languor meet to mingle,
Meet to mingle so that love may win the soul?
Who can tell when love goes proudly past the portals,
Past the portals whence its radiant realms outroll?
Just the moment of surrender
To that new large life of splendour
And surprise, who can tell?
Just the moment that would make of earth a heaven if it were hell,
Who can tell?

[V From its myriads mazy]

From its myriads mazy
Pluck with laughter lazy
This the daintiest daisy
That your look descries.
Tear its bloom to tatters
That the south wind scatters. ...
Well-and-away! what matters
If it lives or dies?

From this breast where dart, love,
Pangs of sorrow and smart, love,
Pluck the adoring heart, love,
Howsoe'er it sigh! ...
Heart that reverie flatters
Till despair's hand shatters,
Well-and-away! what matters
If you live or die?

[VI In her bodice there were lilies of the valley]

In her bodice there were lilies of the valley,
While we strolled the starlit lane between mossed bars;
All the valleys of the night seemed sown with lilies,
All the lilies at her bosom burned like stars.

Now the valleys of the night, whene'er I search them,
Bear but melancholy splendours, proudly far;
And a Lily of the Valley of the Shadow
Is her lost face, that was once my pilot star!

VII
BROWN EYES

In one maid's eyes, demurely blue,
Coy imps of mirth conspire;
Another maid's, grey-green of hue,
Are sea-mist flecked with fire;
In yet another's, darkly deep,
Shy flames of shadowy passion sleep.

But dowered for me with dearer worth
Are one more maid's rich eyes,
Brown like the old brown human earth,
Yet starred like midnight skies—
As though in their warm glooms 'twere given
That earth should interblend with heaven!

[VIII In this green glade, at set of sun]

In this green glade, at set of sun,
I clasp your timorous hand;
Things more divine hath nature done,
In generous mood or grand;
But rarely, even with spells of subtlest power,
Hath she made flesh to such perfection flower.

These agile fingers' willowy pearl,
Each with a dimple of snow,
This palm of tenderest roseleaf curl,
These nails of sea-shell glow,—
What choicer bevy of charms could she create?
So dear a miracle how duplicate?

Nay, but erroneous have I been
And self-condemned I stand!
For lo, the birdlike-fluttering twin
Of this belovèd hand!
Nature, deft counterfeiter, your device
The same sweet miracle has fashioned twice!

IX
SYMPATHY

The breeze is abroad with the daisies,
Like a playmate that never tires,
And they flutter in pale pulsations,
They are stirred as by dim desires.

Do they dream of the poor wan children
In the slums of the stifling towns,
Who would love so to romp through their blossoms
And to wreathe them in holiday crowns?

[X Girt by a meadow mirthful in flowers]

Girt by a meadow mirthful in flowers,
Yonder a mountain massively towers.

Heaven his firm comrade through smile or frown,
Moonlight his mantle, starbeams his crown,

Grand gales to bear him homage unsought,
Still would he languish but for the thought

That far beneath him, hauntingly sweet,
Daisies and buttercups break at his feet.

XI
FLOWER GIRLS

I know a girl who's a pansy,
Wistful and shy of face,
Yet with her lowly and wildwood air
Blending patrician grace.

I know a girl who 's an orchid,
Symmetry's choicest mould,
Body and soul as by sculpture wrought,
Both statuesquely cold.

I know a girl who 's a red rose,
Passionate, proud, yet sweet;
I know a girl who 's a white rose,
Pensive, serene, discreet.

But ah, one girl, who 's a rose-in-bloom,
Is dearer than all to me,
While my love o'er the opening leaves of her life
Hangs poised like a buoyant bee.

XII
INNUENDO

While Paris wears her midnight calms,
You lounge among your lamps and palms,
Natalie;

Your saint-like porcelain brows outvie
The meek star of each vestal eye,
Natalie!

Yet when you fill with cool gold wine
These flower-shaped beakers opaline,
Natalie,
The foamy and fragrant vintage makes
A delicate hiss like some coiled snake's,
Natalie!

Paris.

[XIII The flowers have their bold bees to woo them]

The flowers have their bold bees to woo them;
The brooks have their fresh rains to feed them;
The nights have their stars to o'erstrew them;
The dawns have their pure dews to bead them:
Yet my steps go darkling,
With but the dim sparkling
Of memory's lamp, love, to lead them!

The sea hath its waves to make sheen with;
The winds have their music to sigh with;
The groves have their boughs to be green with;
The birds have their fleet wings to fly with:
But I, in my lonely
Allegiance, have only
This deep-wounded heart, love, to die with!

XIV
EXTRAVAGANZA

Were I the sun that shines for you
Betwixt your arbour screens,
I 'd fill with autumn wines for you
The grapes that summer greens.
I 'd turn your pippins gold for you
Ere fierce July had fled,
And bid the rose unfold for you
In May its richest red.

Were I the moon that beams for you,
I 'd quench the unwilling stars,
And flower the night with dreams for you
Like silvery nenuphars.
But ere my light should break from you,
As heavenward larks upsoared,
With silvery showers I'd make from you
The Danaë I adored!

XV
FELICIA'S FAN

I

Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
A fairy calendar I call.
She opes it, and you smell the spring;
She furls it, and the snowflakes fall.

Nay, more: Watteau-like, on one side,
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
Is wrought with shepherdesses, tied
By cherubs in a silken string.

But on the other, dark elves cling
To lily or fern-leaf, and burlesque
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
With goblin antics Rembrandtesque.

And so the airiest little sway
Has power distractingly to bring
From day to night, from night to day
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing.

II

Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
Such winnowing welcomes now pervade,
You dream that she hath stolen a wing
From Cupid's roseate shoulder-blade.

Anon, if adverse moods prevail,
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
Is flirted like the fluttering sail
Where barks are tossed and tempests ring.

But when the tale of love's keen sting
Your frenzied murmurs may have breathed,
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing,
Shuts tightly, as though a dagger sheathed.

Yet fate, however fleet or slack,
Shall turn at last, when Love grows king.
To mere innocuous bric-a-brac
Felicia's fan, that flimsy thing!

[XVI I am alone with you, Ellen Vane]

I am alone with you, Ellen Vane,
In the dim room where you lie;
You cannot hear the wind in the pines,
Nor see the red sunset die.
The peace on your brow is an utter peace,
Your rest an unchanging rest,—
With one white rose in your hand, Ellen Vane,
And one white rose on your breast.

In life you loved me not, Ellen Vane. ...
Do you love me now when dead?
Believe me, I cast no sad reproach
On your beautiful stirless head.
Perhaps ... and perhaps ... and perhaps ... who knows?
—But now, good-morrow, good rest,
With one white rose in your hand, Ellen Vane,
And one white rose on your breast.

XVII
SERENADE

Every flower in your garden
Has a star to love it,
On your lawn every grass-blade
A dew-pearl above it.
Every rose at your lattice
Has a breeze to adore it,—
Blossoming to praise it,
Or dying deplore it!
I that am lonely
Linger and long for you,—
Pale with my passion,
Weave this poor song for you!

White-winnowing the darkness,
Dawn will behold you,
With delicate splendour
Inform and enfold you.
From the elm at your casement
The bold birds will fling you
Those revelling plaudits
They love so to sing you!
I that am lonely
Linger and sigh for you,
Wearying to live for you,
Willing to die for you!

XVIII
SANCTUARY

Come, love, while the light is yet lowly and lazy
O'er languors of evening's red glooms;
While still the pale disc of each delicate daisy
Has died not from pastures it plumes.
Come, hear the large boughs of the sycamores quiver
With breeze that the sunset has brought,
And watch how the reeds by the rims of the river
To luminous ripples are wrought.

Here bide we encompassed with calms and contentments,
Our souls full of exquisite rest,
The haughty old world, with its hollow presentments,
Remoter than yonder dim west.
Its fevers and follies, its boasts and ambitions,
Like vanishing vapours are past;
We flouted the flaunt of their trivial traditions;
We broke from their bondage at last.

Great Nature has girt us with spells like the greeting
Of arms that allure and enwreathe;
Her brooks in their flowing, her winds in their fleeting,
Have grown like the breaths that we breathe.
She sighs, and we sadden; she laughs, and we brighten;
Her gay moods or sombre we share;
Our hope to the reach of her rainbow can heighten,
Or turn, with her tears, to despair.

She charms, yet she chides us, denies, yet endows us,
And brews for us bitter with sweet;
Yet never by tawdry pretension o'erbrows us,
Nor stings us by stealthy deceit.
Her gifts to no caste or preferment she panders;
Divine her democracy stays;
In sequences kinned with magnificent candours,
We search all her deeds and her days.

At last have we changed for these pageants of cloudland
The pomp that from falsity flows;
At last have we bartered the loud land, the proud land,
For bournes of relief and repose. ...
Come, love, while the light is yet lazy and lowly,
Ere starshine the rich blue has cleft;
Come, learn from great Nature how lofty and holy
She looms o'er the life we have left.

BLUEBEARD'S CHAMBER

Strange old tale of crime and woe,
Told heaven knows how long ago,
With what shrewd insidious fret
Do you haunt our memories yet!

Ever as the years glide by,
Fatima, with footstep sly,
Lures us while her trembling tread
Seeks the dim lair of the dead.

Ever through long lapse of years
Thrill we, as with storms of tears
Fain poor Fatima would free
Red stains from the ensanguined key.

Round this nursery legend dwells
What continuing spell of spells?
Few grim husbands hide to-day
Slaughtered wives in weird array,

Yet how many a husband's heart
Hoards in selfish pride apart,
Hope, regret, ambition, aim,
From the wife that wears his name!

Ah, the Bluebeard's Chamber still
Bides, yet bears no blood-stained sill
Blest the wives that need not learn
What its envious walls inurn.

Blame not Fatima to-day
If too venturesome she stray;
Blame not Fatima if she
Scours to-day the tell-tale key!

MONITIONS

TO A COQUETTE

They laud to-night your dark eyes' diamond thrall,
Your lily of hand or rose of lip. ... And yet
Some trick of lamplight on the gilded wall
Has made your shadow a hag's gaunt silhouette.

TO A POET

First from pure strong thought build your structure strong,
Then deck with beauty and music its firm shape,
Till rich rilievos round its portals throng
And garland-wise its roofs and oriels drape—
But ah! beware lest from your sculptured song
The gargoyles of hysteria idly gape!

TO A STATESMAN

Never canst thou so near true grandeur's goal,
Nor from penurious life wring such choice gains,
As when in some dim reach of thine own soul
Dungeoned Ambition clanks his hopeless chains.

AN EPITAPH

Imperial was the palace of his life;
With memory you may roam its chambers yet.

Here was the throne-room of his intellect,
Sumptuous for purple tapestries; and here
The aerial domed hall of his eloquence;
And here the innumerous-alcoved library
Of his vast erudition; and here drowsed
The rosy and many-mirrored lair of all
His fine poetic visions; and here gleamed
The sanctum of his heartiest friendships, fair
With clustering lights, heaped fruit, and ruddy wine;
And here, august and sculptural, abode
The shrine of his white honour. Oh, in truth,
Imperial was the palace of his life!

Yet memory, if you will, may lead you past
The cobwebbed gloom of yonder bolted door,
And show you there the assassinated shape
Of Charity. Long since he smote her dead,
And hid her thus, to moulder through the years
In that dark haunt, once beautiful, but now
Dolorous with mildewed garniture—sole blot
On this the imperial palace of his life.

ASSOCIATION

I know a maid who says me nay,
But whose warm wizardries of lure,
Whate'er the distance I shall stray,
With dear companionships endure.

For when the lily of dawn breaks pure,
Its peace and sanctity impart
In chaste auroral portraiture
The semblance of her virgin heart.

Or yet, while pulses glow and start,
Her voice my answering spirit thrills,
When deep through lyres of leafage dart
The zephyr's long euphonious trills.

Or in some damask rose that spills
Rare balms and dews her lips I trace;
Her laugh the allegros of the rills
Repeat; the willow applauds her grace.

And when the darkening doors of space
Benignant night's bold hand unbars,
The silvery symbols of her face
Throng earthward from a thousand stars.

THE AËRONAUT

An aëronaut, who dwelt upon the moon
Of a huge planet which at night's full noon
From shadow and mystery anon and oft
Would loom in gold enormity aloft,
After long labours wrought a wondrous car,
Wherewith to journey toward that statelier star.

Alone he ventured, in audacious flight,
From world to world,—a task of peerless might!

But when he had reached the star, at bland mid-day,
One of its giant habitants, who lay
Dreamily dozing near a summer sea,
With vast prone breast and mountainous crooked knee,
Deemed him some insect, troublous although small,
And brushed him to oblivion, car and all!

THE OLD NOVELIST'S MONOLOGUE

So you've written a novel, you clever boy, and ask me to read it through?
A serious task, at my time of life, when I'm turning seventy-two.
But it 's complimentary, nevertheless, for a grandson twenty-four
To vote his grandfather's views and creeds are a boon instead of a bore.
I 've written famous novels, you say? Dear Guy, it was long ago!
I must read myself up. I 've forgotten the names of at least a dozen or so.
Do the people take to them kindly still? I recall—the publishers do ...
That 's a bit of a pose, I'm afraid you'll think, for a fellow of seventy-two.
But I never posed, and I told my tales no less with head than with heart,
And I trusted art for the sake of truth, not art for the sake of art.
Let me give you a bit of warning, boy; it 's a path full of snares and slips
Before, like Roland, you reach the tower and set the slug to your lips.

Hell 's paved, they say, with intentions good; you may take it ill or well,
But you'll find before you are forty, Guy, that literature is hell!
God help the best of 'em when they seek, howsoever brave their laugh,
To make it (as old Sir Walter said) a crutch instead of a staff!
But thanks to your dear dead father's thrift, you can twirl the cane to your taste—
You never need drown in the newspaper sea; there 's a belt of cork round your waist.
I 've seen so many who went like that—poor, dauntless, with troops of friends;
They burned their candle to quite a blaze, for they burned it at both its ends.
And soon they had left but the smoking wicks in lieu of the bridling flame,
And even the smoke long ago has gone, though the world once called it fame.
But you, dear boy, have the chance and choice; you 've the honey without the gall;
Euterpe may wait in your anteroom and Pegasus fume in your stall.
You can spend a week on the turn of a phrase till its tinkle is deftly placed;
You haven't that hair at the nib of your pen, with its harsh little name of haste.
You can stare in Minerva's grey-green eyes, and vow, by their dreams beguiled,
That you'll ache with a discontent divine till her sculptured lips have smiled.

But ah, be cautious, my gifted Guy; there are waves that lurk to whelm
Even hardier-builded boats than yours, when leisure is at the helm.
Excalibur meant mere clumsy steel till Pendragon its hilt had reared,
And Aladdin, you know, had to rub his lamp before the genie appeared.
You ask me for counsel? Gird your loins; disheartenment laugh to scorn;
With a sturdy alpenstock clamber up where the mountains meet the morn.
Don't aspire to scale the loftiest peak; Shakespearian lungs are rare. ...
Still, climb as long as your own can breathe the attenuated air.
Of its tonic opal quaff great gulps ere you look on the lands below;
For the lands will be Life; you must watch them well, with their wonderful overflow.
Then choose what you cannot will but choose in their bounty of shades and shines,
From the glimpses of brooks' far silver threads to the glooms of austere pines;
From the heavenward hope of a neighbour hill to the storm-cloud's black despair;
From arrogances of the splintry crags to the meek sweet moss they wear;
From the sleepy calms (with their browsing goats) of the emerald vales and glades
To those pale perpetual suicides of the precipiced cascades.

You will find them all, for they all are merged, with their moods of peace or strife,
In the deeps and heights, in the lengths and breadths, of that Switzerland called Life. ...
Out of Life take phases you love the best—only these, if you are wise;
Through Inferno Dante walked like a god, but he stumbled in Paradise.
Yet be most of all your authentic self. Seek truth and beauty and power
By a straight road, not by sinuous ones. Disdain the ephemeral hour.
From the cavern of memory brush with zeal all the echoes that bat-like cling
Till the only echoes its walls throw back from your own voice rise and ring.
Academic? Gothic? Who cares which, so long as you shun mere sham?
If you long for a Parthenon, try it, lad. If you don't, try a Notre Dame.
But whatever conception you may plan, make sure it is crystal-clear.
Half a thought, half a brain. Besides, the obscure is mostly the insincere. ...
So, I'll read your novel. My eyes are poor, but I'll read it faithfully through—
A serious task, at my time of life, when I'm turning seventy-two.

DEI GRATIÂ

The height of his dead father's throne he gained,
With supple courtiers cringing at his nod.
A shallow and beardless boy, thenceforth he reigned
By the grace of God.

Impervious to the people's blame or praise,
Through codes of civic needs he scorned to plod;
With harlots, dice and wine he passed his days—
By the grace of God.

But oft, when spurned by some rash whim of rule,
O'er laws and liberties he rode rough-shod,
And lived as reprobate no less than fool,
By the grace of God.

For years the crown did he thus coarsely keep,
Wearing its grandeur like a dolt and clod,
Then died one evening in a drunken sleep—
By the grace of God.

BASILICA SAN PIETRO

I

Here in firm armistice do I behold
Antagonisms commingled with strange ease—
Humility and grandeur blent in one,
And meekness with humility allied.

How sovereign these vast ceilings, groined with gold!
This bounty of paintings, frescoes, pillars; these
Rich mausoleums of martyr, pope, saint, nun;
This baldachino, towering in bronze pride!

II

And yet the Christ, for whose apostle's fame
Such flare and riot of luxury were wrought,
Went barefoot over Galilean sand,
Among the obscure and outcast lowliest He!

Nay, of the suppliant votaries that came
Seeking His benediction, He besought
Renouncement of their moneys, flocks, and land,
Saying to them, ‘Leave all and follow Me.’

Rome.

THE TWILIGHT OF POETRY

I moved at midnight through veils of vapour that interblended or backward blew,
Until the folds of their drowsy volumes at last had faded like morning dew.

And then before me a land was visioned, a land of dimness and calm intense,
By dawn or sunset alike discarded, illumined vaguely, I knew not whence.

Through laurelled verges a stream went slipping where towered a temple in marble peace,
A pillared fabric that wore like fragrance the skill, the grandeur, the grace of Greece.

Beneath it wandered a stately wardress, whose brows were god-like, who roamed and sang
Melodious tumults of lamentation, where lyric anguish divinely rang.

‘Though vestured once with its vaunted homage, I droop to-day with the world's disdain;
Lo, these my fountains and courts forsaken; lo, this my temple, deserted fane!

‘Above me arches no more the azure that warmed and welcomed my birds and blooms;
I dwell diskingdomed in desolation; I grope and falter through taunting glooms.

‘White-bearded Homer once blindly sought me; from foot-worn sandals I loosed their thongs,
And bade him smite me his harp of thunder, and bade him sing me his mighty songs.

‘Clear on through ages, like pious pilgrims, all proudest minstrels, with humbled air,
Have crossed my thresholds and craved my counsels, have paced my gardens and found them fair.

‘In lofty converse my lips have taught them the creeds of beauty and all its claims;
For beauty and poesy intertangle, and flash from contact ambrosial flames.

‘I told of languors on lakes that slumber where dense woods clasp them and boughs hang low;
Of mountains plunging and tumbling skyward to fling at failure clenched hands of snow.

‘I spake of nights, how they know as mortals long lonesome vigils, like prayer and pain,
With stars like hopes and with moons like passions, that wax for ever, for ever wane.

‘I spake of days, how they die as men do, their listless lilacs, their silvers cold,
Their pearly rose-tints like resignation, delirious crimsons, rebellious gold.

‘Of that huge portrait, the sea, where mingle such myriad emblems of human fates—
Its wrath like man's and its lulls repentant, its deeps unsounded, its loves, its hates.

‘For man to nature by bonds of beauty is bound in spirit, and ever shares
The march and meaning of her mutations, her calms or frenzies, her joys, despairs.

‘What power like mine may reveal or picture these forms and phases, twofold yet one?
What power like Poesy, me, arch artist, whom throngs that worshipped now spurn and shun!

‘O sister Music, full well thou knowest, howe'er thine altars be crowned and kissed,
That I transcend thee and tower above thee, as heaven o'ermantles its moods of mist.

‘O sister Painting, for all thy potence, for all thy wonder of hue and line,
I am to thee as an oak to its ivy, and thou to me art as palm to pine.

‘O sister Sculpture, whose charms I cherish, whose pale dominions my heart adores,
Thy genius breaks on my grander genius like shining surges on beetling shores.

‘Ye are three sweet strings, O my three sweet sisters, of that great lute which my arms can shrine;
There are many strings besides these ye symbol, but these and the lute itself are mine!

‘For I am intellect, love, emotion; my realm is vast as the human soul;
I oversoar ye and undersweep ye; I comprehend ye and I control.

‘Men flout me and fleer me in this base epoch, degrade my godship, despise my tears,
While racked with odium of such gross usage, I bide immortal, for all their jeers!’

So Poesy in my vision lifted her voice of protest, of woe and pride;
And yet through all the ungrateful twilight not even one pitying echo sighed.

AN IDYL OF THE SLUMS

Daughter.
How the stench reeks from that piled garbage there,
Out in the courtyard at the alley's end!
I can't sleep—Mother, are you still dead-drunk?

Mother.
No. What 's o'clock, Jess?

Daughter.
Clock? We 've got no clock.
You pawned it yesterday to buy more drink.

Mother.
Yes, I remember.

Daughter.
Mother, you believe
There 's a God somewhere, don't you?

Mother.
Go to sleep.

Daughter.
I can't. I keep so wishing I was well,
Not stung with this dry cough that splits my throat,
Not lame of an ankle, not so cursed with scabs
On hips, breasts, eyelids. I'm half blind, sometimes,
The rank sores weigh and drag so. Mother, hark:
Is there a God? A God that cares, I mean.

Mother.
Go to sleep.

Daughter.
Now, if I was like Nell Page!
She 's got a clean pink skin and big blue eyes.
Last night a sailor stopped her in the street
And took her to a place where they had beer,
Cheese, meat—you know the rest. But when we met,
Why, Nell was merry as a canary-bird
While its cage brims with sun. I 'd get a meal,
A ribbon, and things to light up life a bit,
If I 'd Nell's eyes and skin. The meanest man
Won't give me one kind look. Say, mother, say—
Is there a God?

Mother.
Go to sleep, rattle-tongue!
Curse ye, to keep me awake!

Daughter.
Oh, I was cursed
Before you 'd brought me forth. Folks tell me blunt
That this weak sick maimed body o' mine was made
All by my father. Yes, folks tell me blunt
He 'd put some filthy poison in his blood.
Where is my father? Do you know for sure?

Mother.
Go to sleep, brat, or else I'll crack your skull
With the old rusted axe—I swear I will!

Daughter.
How the lice pester! Oh, I'll soon sleep sound!
Yet, ah, before then I 'd so like to face
That father o' mine and shame him if I could,

With this poor twisted piteous little shape,
With these red sores that itch and burn me so.
I'm sure, though he were scarlet from raw drink
As you are now, I 'd bring a kind o' a new
Flush to his bloated cheeks, once harrying him
With the hurt thing he 's made me. Come, now; say
Who is my father? Tell me; you must know.

Mother
(drowsily).
Go—to—sleep. ‘Who 's—your—father?’ I—forget.

CONTEMPLATIONS

I
ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

I believed thee, friend, with unflinching faith, I revered and loved thee well,
Till the foe drew near whom I need not name, with his hints like sparks from hell.
He showed me a blot that I dared not doubt on thy large unsullied soul;
He tore from the sacred head of my saint its illumining aureole.

Oh, strange by the shattered statue's form to watch where its fragments lie!
From the lute's half-ruptured strings, oh, strange to hear the old music sigh!
Oh, strange where the bounteous lamp once beamed, its enfeebled flame to scan!
In place of the white-browed god, oh, strange to behold but the earthly man!

And yet is perfection always rich in the rarer, the subtler charms?
Would the Venus of Melos lure the same were she reendowed with arms?

Has the speckless pearl a delight to match the pearl that must always bear
Its pathos of one little birth-mark flaw to remind us it still is fair?

So now, while I feel thee fallible thus, I find (as 'twere fate's choice boon!)
That reverence had keyed my love too high, and that sympathy sets it in tune.
Nay, the fault I have loathed for the stain it stamps on a purity such as thine,
Makes thee dearer still to my human heart, since it leaves thee less divine.

[II A thousand years ago]

A thousand years ago
Two lovers, fond as we,
Saw the rich moondawn glow
On glooms of breezy sea.
The same titanic moon, the same swart waves!
Where are those lovers? Who may break the oblivion of their graves?

A thousand years from now
Two lovers will behold
A moondawn wake and plough
These tides to airy gold.
The same grand moon, the same lulled sea's caress!
Where are those unborn lovers? Who shall dare even dream or guess?

A thousand years ago?
A thousand years from now? ...
Let us not care to know
If ardour of kiss or vow
To slumberous past or mystic future be
Either, for time's unswerving sweep, memory or prophecy!

Let us this one supreme
Night so augustly dower
With passion that 'twill seem
A dark yet gorgeous flower,
Blossoming for love to pluck, for love to bruise,
For love with holy and fiery tears to dim its heavenly hues!

III
HOME-COMING

Back after journeying leagues of guileful sea,
Back from long tarriance among climes remote.

I did not guess what heats of amity
Lay hidden among the hearts of these my friends.
Absence has clothed me with a purple state,
Crowned me and sceptred me a transient king
With those I love and those I had dreamed till now
Not half so rich in love's warm loyalties;
While clear through every greeting, equable
As breezes through a grove of sister trees,
One bland familiar human impulse floats!

Different indeed the welcome, had I fared
Back from that vaporous voyage we all must make
Sooner or later to the Unknowable!
How then the faces leaned toward mine would flash
With query, amazement, awe! How Faith would clutch
My hand victoriously! How Science, then,
Eager for larger lore, would clasp my knees!
And ah, how chill Negation's eyes of ice
Would blaze upon me their supreme surprise!

IV
ENCOURAGEMENT

Pause if the adverse phrase
Too careless from your lips
Unpitying slips,
Whene'er you are prompted to dispraise
Man's dreams in poem or painting wrought,
Music or marble. Ask your thought
If power and purpose may not here
Inseparably bide,
Yet to your cursory heed appear
Valueless because dim-descried.
From charms of sky, field, brook,
Coldly one oft will turn,
While some more fortunate look,
Gifted with keener pupil, suppler lid,
Magic may there discern

And treasure. To the Egyptian, drowsy-eyed,
Half its grey grandeur may perforce be hid,
Even as the pages of an unread book,
By his familiar yet proud pyramid.

Ye that, being human, therefore should be kind,
Bear well in mind
That he who strives to trim art's holy flame,
Finds in the applausive glance
Given him sincerely, zest for larger aim—
For loftier effort finds rare sustenance.
Spleen on conspicuous faults forbear to wreak,
Nor merely carp and cavil at what is weak
In his creation. Better gaze askance
At flaws, remembering how rich help is lent
By even a whispered word
Heard faintly, and yet when heard
Dear as choice balms to limbs fatigue hath spent,
A boon and benediction sweetly blent,
Live with the elixir of encouragement.

V
HOLLYHOCKS

Your long stalks bend not, though some drowsy breeze
Comes flying to their gay blooms with warm caress;
And yet you allure and cheer us, none the less,
By sturdy beauty and honest homespun ease.

Like some sweet housewife whose plain graces please,
Dear charms of domesticity you possess,
In simple uncoquettish motherliness
Taking the homage of allegiant bees.
Around you countless happy memories thrive:
We hear the cluck of chickens or low of kine;
We see the old dog, the willow gnarled and great,
The meek grey horse that rosy children drive,
The mossy well with lattice-tangled vine,
The lovers loitering by the moonlit gate.

[VI O Prejudice, thou spider shrewd]

O Prejudice, thou spider shrewd,
For ever weaving on, in wicked mood,
From threads of slander, threads of shame,
Thy cobwebs through the halls of fame,
Till Death, with besom bluff and strong,
From groins and rafters where they throng,
Sweeps clear away
The unclean array!

[VII There are three ways God might reveal Himself]

There are three ways God might reveal Himself
To one that sought His deity full declared.

The first, through Nature—mountain, valley or sea,
From heaven's height to cave's deep; from clod to star.

The second, still through Nature, and that man's—
His loftier doings, his diviner aims.

The third, through Scriptures—Bible or Koran,
Or Zendavesta—words that seem God's own.

Of these three ways, tired mortal, which thy choice?
Either, or none? If none, doubt bravely on.

[VIII If, after many a year of cold eclipse]

If, after many a year of cold eclipse,
I broke death's bonds and breathed once more on earth,
What question, then, from these long-exiled lips,
Would leap to instant and impetuous birth?

How sweet of Science, and its new stronger sway,
To ask! Yet all such query, I do avow,
Would be postponed that I might merely say:
‘Tell me what new grand poet have ye now?’

[IX Imperious to the dying rose rang forth]

Imperious to the dying rose rang forth
A blare of autumn, like a blast of fate:
‘The South was once your lover; now the North
Shall whelm you with a wave of equal hate.
Quick from your lissome leaves the glad red goes—
Quick from their deep heart floats the fragrant breath!
Of all your beauty and grace, O boastful rose,
I am the desolation and the death!’

Mysterious where a withered rose-tree grew,
Murmured Spring's voice, half cadence, half caress:
‘Wake, flower, below bland calms of summer blue,
With lures of reincarnate loveliness!
Back to your phantom leaves the sly red flows—
Full soon with heavenly balm shall they be rife!
Of all your beauty and grace, O trustful rose,
I am the resurrection and the life!’

X
A VISION OF PROGRESS

I dreamed that on some planet like our own
Man had for certainty at last found out
There was no God. All possibility
Of faith had shrivelled into nothingness.
The secret of the Sphinx at last was told;
The universe had no more mystery
Wherewith to enmantle its magnificence.
Knowledge reigned victor; from minutest life
To lordliest she had solved the Why and Whence.

Then thousands, crying in horror and dismay
‘There is no God!’ slew misery and despair
By the same stab, leap, bane that slew themselves,
Till all the lands reeked red with suicide.

But myriads more (so marked I in my dream)
Dared to live on, desired it, and communed

Thus with their own souls: ‘Die, if so ye must;
Humanity is with immortality
Still wedded; right and justice, truth and love
Shall be our deity. Tear our churches down;
Too long their spires have pointed to a lie.
Far holier temples than their holiness
Are built invisibly yet palpably
By mutual pity, fellowship, and help.’

Years passed like minutes in my dream. I saw
Life grown a sanctitude of high resolve,
Centred in one divine democracy,
With Now and Here its region of reward,
Not fabulous Hereafter. And I saw
Death utterly dispeopled of its dreads,
Ghosts, legends, fantasies and menaces.

Then, in my dream, I said to my glad heart,
‘Knowledge hath told this world there is no God,
Yet left it love and cast out fear of death.
Surely such boon of unexampled peace
Were worth a million vacuous creeds and prayers!’

[XI To the ivy said the oak]

To the ivy said the oak:
‘Half my majesty you cloak,
Half my power and pride efface!
You are beauteous, yet I vow
That I tire, through bole and bough,
Of your burdening embrace.’

From the heavens a wild storm broke,
Gashed with lightning the grand oak,
Then in roars of wrath withdrew.
But the pitying ivy twined
Round the great tree's ruined rind,
And so veiled its blight from view.

[XII We greet with quickening pulse the story]

We greet with quickening pulse the story
That shrouds a warrior's name in glory.

Yet loftier courage means the giving
Far less to dying than to living.

It means with grip no stress can sever
To clutch the sword of high endeavour,

And wage, in patience and persistence,
This bloodless battle called existence.

XIII
THE OUTLOOK

We prate of progress with so sure
A trust in its firm onward sweep,
As though mankind from sluggard sleep
Had risen, and sturdier and more pure,
Since warmed by his awakening hour,
Bloomed unmolested into statelier power.

Nay, Evolution, in thy name
Bewildering errors have been wrought.
Thou deadenest retrospective thought
Until its reach and scope are lame,
Until even fancy's backward bound
Thrills, pauses, at thine origins profound.

Centuries are thy mere minutes; all
Of seeming betterment we trace
In any or every earthly race
To-morrow extinction with her pall
May shroud; and where vast sea now sighs,
Old submerged continents may re-arise!

Once more from protoplasm's dull mire
May man crawl slothful, and once more
May nature thrust him, as of yore,
Through ape and cannibal to higher,
Till superstition's loom re-weaves
New mythic Edens, with new Adams, Eves.

Once more the old train of tragic things
May find our history so rehearsed
That poor mortality will be cursed
By new popes, priests, fanatics, kings,
New Neros, Torquemadas, new
Odiums of sect, with all dire deeds they do.

Again, for ages dim as dream,
The annihilation may precede
The recommencement. Love, hate, greed,
Humanity, envy, ruth, may seem
To threads of that famed broidery kin
Which the Greek Queen, unravelling, would re-spin.

But always through each phase of change
Loitering, will flow henceforth as flows
To-day, one strenuous force (who knows?)
Toward riper growth and richer range. ...
It cost a million million years
To shape your eye that sees, mine ear that hears.

The individual perishes; man thrives,
Though æons of stern failure balk
With ruining hindrance. We may talk
Whole heavens of hope about our lives
Hereafter, while our spendthrift days
Glare at us here with sarcasm in their gaze.

Live for the actual balm or sting
Of joys and sufferings that concern
The intense keen present. Nay, nor turn
Mystery's mute acolyte, and swing
Blind faith's theatric censer, fraught
With suave insidious fumes that strangle thought!

[XIV So many of us are dead before we die]

So many of us are dead before we die!
The rhythm of life has lost for us all tune;
Our dial of sunshine hath forgot its noon;
We think in autumns, while the ungrudging sky
Still bends to us the effulgence of its June,
And every flower amid our garden's maze,
With each bluff zigzag bee that thither strays,
Plots blithe rebellion against winter's blast.
Thus we turn callous to the live day's deeds,
Deafening our ears howe'er the present pleads,
Crowning with memory's myrtles our pale past,
A thankless ghost that neither hears nor heeds.

SLEEP AND DEATH

In ancient years, where yew and cypress made
Long avenues of labyrinthine shade,
Death, while he sauntered through their cryptic deep,
Came sudden upon the spectral shade of Sleep.

‘How like, though differing,’ mused he, ‘is our lot!
Thou art my sister, yet I know thee not;
Thou hast thy sorceries, even as I have mine—
Tell me, sweet ghost, what spells do they enshrine?’

Then Sleep, with sorrowing voice: ‘My reign would be
All bounty of sacred blessing, save for thee!
To-day earth's millions cower thy servile slaves,
Wide-wandering one, whose footsteps are men's graves!

‘Thy boon, I grant, is infinite release;
But ah, how oft, before its final peace,
The appointed paths thy vassalages tread,
Archways of lingering anguish overspread!

‘Ghastly thy cold halls of oblivion gleam;
Ethereal float through mine fair forms of dream.
How ruthless frown thy ministries! In mine
Are opiates and mandragoras divine!’

Then Death: ‘With nightmares, too, thy realm is rife;—
Signs of our kinship, these, being death-in-life!
Thus merge our mysteries, even as sea with sky;
Sovereigns alike we reign, yet know not why.

‘Still, with strange whispers, full of charm and cheer,
The spirit whose name is Hope hath sought mine ear.
Boast not that thou alone from realms of rest
Benignantly thy votaries wakenest.

‘Perchance for my nepenthes fate may bring
Some antidote's revitalising sting.
Perchance the drafts lethean that I distil
May kill far kindlier than they seem to kill.

‘Perchance when all, sweet sister, hath been said,
I am clad far more with mercy than with dread.
Ah! wait with me, through all time's vague advance,
The authentication of that bright Perchance.’

HYDE PARK ON SUNDAY

In weather matchless for a London March,
I rambled slowly past the Marble Arch.

The Common, broad below a silver sun,
Swept its green turf toward misty Kensington.

But nearer still, huge pearls of transient clouds
Flung sprays of rainfall on the unheeding crowds.

Engirt by one, a lean and flame-eyed man
Thundered his theories red-republican.

In one a scoffer glowered o'er huddled heads,
And tore with sneers the Bible into shreds.

Keen through a third some woman's dismal yell
Pictured in vocal daubs a chronic Hell.

I sauntered onward. ... ‘Vulgarisms of rant,
Half pompous brawl,’ I mused, ‘half piteous cant!

‘For gyves disrupt, for tyrannies defied,
Too many an English life has bled and died

‘That liberty from its ideal should stray
In this licentious and fantastic way!’

Yet soon like bell-peals that new measures clang,
My altering mood with self-reproaches rang.

‘Carper,’ I said, ‘in penitence confess
The folly of your own fastidiousness!

‘This freedom you deplore with dainty hate
Old England laboured centuries to create.

‘Let them shout on, in sunshine, rain, or mist,
Fanatic, bigot and sensationalist,

‘While clear through all the clamorous webs they weave
Wisdom's authentic voice will sometimes cleave.

‘Better their coarsest babblings than the banes
Of choked opinion, argument in chains;

‘Better their worst of spleens unthralled should fume
Than rankle and fester in a dungeon's gloom.

‘Better this wordy warfare, loth to cease,
Than pests of parliamentary police.

‘Better these lingual wranglings, first and last,
Than chill star-chambers of the purblind past.

‘Better Hyde Park on Sunday, though it shock
Taste and decorum, than the Tower and Block.

‘Better loud rights of speech, whate'er the creeds,
Than those vile silences the despot breeds!’

LOVE AT SCHOOL

Fatigued by tricks whose guile and glee
Would man or maid for ever fool,
At last Love told himself that he
Would mend his ways and go to school.

His purple-shimmering wings he slipped
Inside a jerkin plain and spare;
With dews that strange dark night-flowers dripped
He stained his glorious golden hair.

Then, carrying neither dart nor bow,
Meek-browed beneath his raven curls,
To school he fared, with eyelids low,
And joined the little boys and girls.

In goggles green a grisly shrew
Flung forth her questions, harsh and quick;
She made her pupils bound Peru;
She racked them with arithmetic.

She shook her birch, while pale and dumb
They balked at grammar, piteous throng! ...
She bade them spell ‘chrysanthemum,’
And snorted when they spelt it wrong.

With gaze demure and mien sedate
Through all the bluster she revealed,
Now mirthful, now compassionate,
His mighty wisdom Love concealed.

Exempt from tasks, a scholar new,
He slyly marked his mates forlorn,
And while he watched them yearnings grew
To quell their tyrant's wrath and scorn.

‘Quit books,’ he cried, in merriest voice,
And pranced impetuous from his chair;
‘The heavens with holiday rejoice,
And buds are bursting everywhere!’

He lightly doffed his dull disguise
And lightly dashed, in gladsome haste,
To seize, despite her wild surprise,
The beldame by her bony waist.

‘Come, dance!’ he hailed, and woke the wiles
Whose power no vantage may avert. ...
Her doleful wrinkles died in smiles;
With nimble wrist she twirled her skirt.

Then straight the stiff room's ugly square
Was filled with torches' fairy jets,
And all the new irradiate air
Was loud with lutes and clarionets.

Love laughed as though gone wild for joy,
Pirouetting on his bloomy toes,
And every little girl and boy
Tumultuous from their seats arose.

Unchecked, unchid, they romped and raced,
By spells of mystic zeal possessed,
And every little boy embraced
The little girl he liked the best.

‘A reel!’ they heard their master shout,
And swept to shape the double row,
With round-about and in-and-out,
With down-in-the-middle and dos-à-dos.

They danced like mad, but madder yet
The gaunt old teacher's form would whirl.
She kissed each little boy she met,
But did not kiss—each little girl.

So all his caprioles, curves and springs
Love made their scampering steps obey,—
Till tired he oped his orient wings
And impudently flew away.

And then, while fleeting fast and free,
With diamond eyes and dimpled cheeks,
He cried: ‘What fools these mortals be!
I have not found such fun for weeks!’

ANTITHESES

Ethel's eyes are evening,
In their vaporous blue;
Mabel's eyes are morning,
Diamonded with dew.

Ethel's hair hath lustres
Like a midnight sea's;
Mabel's daffodil tresses
Might delude the bees.

Ethel's voice flows golden,
Like her calm wise words;
Mabel's treble of laughter
Stills the envious birds.

Ethel's brows are sculpture,
And a lily her lips;
Mabel's mouth is rosier
Than dawn's finger-tips.

Ethel's air shines candour
Unto all she meets;
Mabel's varying dimples
Are divine deceits.

Ethel has one sweetheart,
Held in holiest thrall;
Mabel at least has twenty,
And she mocks them all.

ACTÆON

Long had I known that steep wood you may enter
Best where the labyrinthine laurels cluster—
Long heard that in its breezy and pool-pearled centre,
With gold hair showering o'er her snow-chaste lustre,
The goddess bathed, of rough intrusion fearless,
Ringed by her maids, herself a maid of mien sublime and peerless.

What dolt in all Bœotia knew not surely
The sheer-perched grove no mortal had invaded,
Where every flickering leaf shone out more purely
Because of the immaculate Shape it shaded?
How oft in woodside strolls, when but a stripling,
Heard I from this fair mountain-slope æolian laughters rippling!

‘Thither forbear with impious feet to venture,’
My kindred warned, in eager tones yet tender;
‘Hot on his head shall fall the fury and censure
Who scans but one brief instant her white splendour.
Better the boar's rude tusk to fleet death called him
Than that those luminous limbs of hers and sea-green eyes appalled him.’

And yet, that noon, while my tired dogs were lolling,
Loose-tongued from chase, on turfy emerald reaches,
With folly I spurned the wiser will controlling
All that is best in man. ... Great murmurous beeches
And shadowy firs before my stretched hands yielded;
I glided slowly along—then, shuddering, my rash gaze I shielded.

Nude, lovely, and terrible, I saw her clearly ...
Yet from that hour the sun in heaven turned sickly;
The violet valley-mist grew vapour merely;
Tame the pale cataract from the crag shot quickly:
For so the immortal in her might had chidden
This insolence of mine entrance past the bounds of the forbidden.

And thus, being shorn of every earthly gladness,
I drag my days out. ... Silly and false the story
That these my faithful dogs were fired by madness,
Fought for my body and ate its fragments gory.
A deadlier vengeance yet from life hath reft me:
I have drained all joy at one wild draught—the lees alone are left me!

TO DANTE

O Dante, if you had lived in later years,
I think the regal radiance of your brain
Would not have spent itself on all those vain
Sarcasms and ironies, where vengeance rears
A crest so viperous! Not the groans and tears
Wrung from your foes in their eternal pain
Would best have pleased you, but that loftier gain
Of pity and pardon for the world's worst jeers.

This house of hate you have builded, wrought so dread
With gargoyles that leer scorn below, above;
With huge dark spires; with noisome crypt and den;—
Ah, Dante, if you had fashioned it, instead,
From the pure marble of mercy and of love,
How mightier and more beauteous were it then!

SLANDER

From random converse, grave or gay,
A poisonous little lie was born.
Like many a lie that looks on day,
It failed to hold itself in scorn.
It preened each tiny and bat-black wing,
And felt for its nice poignant sting,
And said, with secret gladness, ‘I
Am a full-fledged symmetric lie.’

Mounting in air, it paused a while,
Then lighted on a gossip's lip;
The gossip, with indifferent smile,
Brushed it aside, yet bade it slip
Into an old beau's prattling mouth,
Whence wandering north, east, west and south,
It buzzed beside the ear, at last,
Of one who gazed on it aghast.

Slyly it buzzed a tale of taint
That smirched with blame the treasured life
Of one whose duteous deeds made saint
The unworded synonym for wife.
He caught the weak slim wasp-like lie,
Crushed it in both hands, watched it die. ..
But dying it dared this taunt to fling:
‘My ghost lives on; my ghost can sting!’

ALLEGORY

One day sweet Poesy, with her cheeks aflame,
To the large land of Science angered came.

She had borne till now from her new neighbour foe
A thousand odious wrongs—or fancied so.

But he, indifferent to her love or hate,
Had smiled contemptuous at her vaunted state.

Yet both, being met, were pierced with sharp surprise
At deeps divine in one another's eyes.

‘I deemed,’ said Poesy, ‘thou couldst never wear
So much of human in thine austere air!’

‘And I,’ said Science, ‘dreamed not thou couldst be
So simple and yet so clad with sovereignty!’

Hence 'tis now rumoured that erelong these twain
Shall merge in marriage their divided reign,

And that grim Reason, when the knot is tied
(Science commanding), shall as priest preside,

While Poesy issues an august decree:
All the Nine Muses must her bridesmaids be.

TRIUMPH

He sat alone, with brooding glance;
He gnawed his lips, with angered frown;
He thought of how austere mischance
Had crushed him tyrannously down.

Faint footfalls echoed at his side:
He turned; a shadowy shape was near;
He scanned it with rebellious pride:
‘Dark form,’ he breathed, ‘what dost thou here?’

The strange guest laughed in harsh disdain:
‘Forbear,’ she scoffed, ‘from tame deceit.
Behold, I am the incarnate pain
Long dealt thee by thine own defeat!’

He rose and faced her, stern of brow. ...
‘I know thee, Failure, fierce and brave!
So be it; thou shalt not quit me now,
But bide my prisoner and my slave!’

His rough hands caught her as to kill;
With scorn he marked her moan and plead;
He bowed her to his dauntless will;
He bent her like a wind-bent reed.

For days his mastery taxed her sore;
No menial task she dared refuse;
She cooked his meat; she swept his floor;
She trimmed his lamp; she latched his shoes.

Yet always, while she served him so,
Her mien of gloom with gradual stir
Kept altering, till at last the glow
Of glorious change invested her.

Then low, in tenderer mood, said he,
With softening gaze, with fond caress:
‘Come, reign my wedded wife, and be
Henceforth not Failure, but Success!’

THE DAWN OF ETHICS

(The heart of a tree. A man-ape, a woman-ape. It is early twilight, thousands of years ago.)
Man-ape.
You know that huge tree by the small stream's edge,
Where dwells, with two weak babes, the pair we hate?

Woman-ape.
I know.

Man-ape.
To-night both sire and dam will join
The great dance in the valley at moonrise. I
Shall mix not with them, this once, nor do thou.

Woman-ape.
Why thus resolve? The Moon-God may be wroth
If we shriek not his praise and gash ourselves
On this the sacred night when he beams full.

Man-ape.
'Tis a mild god. His wrath we need not fear.
He is not like the Sun-God, who darts death,

Nor like the erratic lightning, nor its mate,
The august thunder—nay, nor like those gods
Of snow, flood, pest, grim powers we dare not slight.
Stay thou, as I have bid thee. When those babes,
Left all alone, are slumbering, seek their sides,
Leap at their throats and choke them. Afterward
Bring me their corpses to that cave whose mouth
Is bearded thick with vines—you know the spot.
There shall I feast that have not sucked man's blood
For days, but starve lean-lipped on herb and root.

Woman-ape.
I will obey thee.

Man-ape.
Else, I'll beat thee so
That thou shalt writhe and rave beneath my strokes!

(He goes away, and the woman-ape muses.)
Woman-ape.
There, in a covert of cool leaves, with limbs
Laid languid on the bough's clean brawn of bark,
Slumbers my babe. If I indeed should slip
At moonrise to that big stream-bowering tree,
Clutch those two babes and choke them ere they waked,
Hurrying their dead forms to the cave where crouched
My mate, with hunger's glare in his fierce eyes
Between dark fells of hair on brows and cheeks,—
If so I obeyed this murderous hest of his,
What chance for my poor babe, some future eve,

When parents of those twain I late had killed
Should scent my guilt and lust for vengeance dread? ...
Nay, I'll not do this work he bade me do,—
Not though he beat me till my yells rang out
Keener than those wild voices that erelong
Shall fill the valley at moonrise, when mad throngs
Tear limb-from-limb our heaven-doomed captives' frames
And toss their bleeding fragments to the stars.

WHOM THE GODS LOVE

You say that being so old
'Twas time for him to die?
Rings not your comment cold
And even inhuman? Why
Should tenderer tears be shed
When death lays young lives low,
Spared years of sorrow and fret,
Spared age's overthrow?

When young we are called away,
We shirk untold regret;
For austere time will slay
Not merely ourselves, but yet
Brand with authentic sign
His despotisms elsewhere—
Drape wisps of silvering hair
O'er eyes beloved—plough line
And furrow on treasured cheeks.
‘Whom the gods love die young.’ ..
Ah me! there wisdom's tongue
With sovereign accent speaks!

Pity the old who die;
The young behind them leave
Such bounteous grief whereby
Fate bids they shall not grieve!
Heart-racked with many a sigh,
Wounded with many a scar,
Pity the old who die;
The young are happier far!

POMPEII

One bland morn, while I stood near that famed bay
Which fronts the world's most tragic ruin of all,
And while, in violet vapour's dimming thrall,
Castellammare and Sorrento lay
Southward beyond the luminous cove, some sway
Of trance, or witchery still more magical,
Seized me and bade, with swiftness to appal,
The live luxurious past my soul dismay.

From many a villa's bright floor, flower-bestrewed,
Fountains leaped glittering; temple and street and square
Swarmed with gay Greeks; rich chariots rumbled by;
And in one sweet miraculous glimpse I viewed,
Rebuilt, repeopled, reincarnate there,
The revel of radiance that was Pompeii!

Naples.

HER STATUE

A sculptor who adored his fair young wife,
Wrought her as Purity from marble pure.
But snatched by sudden malady out of life,
She vanished, leaving that pale portraiture
In sanctity of pathos to endure.

Greatly the sculptor mourned her. But one day,
Searching among old letters of the dead,
He found, with pangs of anguish and dismay,
She had never loved him—that her love, instead,
Elsewhere with affluent ardour had been shed.

‘Ah, wiliest hypocrite!’ he cried, and raised
His mallet, threatening that majestic stone
Whose white curves many a eulogist had praised
For proofs of genius that by power unknown
Such charm of chastity could so enthrone.

But soon, with softening tempest of intent,
Though all his desolate soul was yet astir,
‘Nay, it shall live,’ he sighed, ‘the embodiment
Of love's ideal, and shall to art aver
Through ages my past passionate faith in her!’

Time fled. Innumerous wayfarers had won
That bourne of shadow and silence all shall win;
Yet still with rapture did throngs gaze upon
This flower of sculpture that for years had been
Blossoming so stainless from a soil of sin!

Florence.

‘BLEST BE THAT PATRIOT’

Blest be that patriot whose firm-handed might
Can twist the snake of bribery till its fangs
Turn on its own coils with self-murdering pangs
And slay them with its own shrewd guile and spite!
Sovereign, yet servant of the people's right,
A chief contemptuous of all deft harangues
Whose oily flattery soothes rash mobs and gangs,—
History's wide page could have no grander sight.

On faction's crags, where feuds in ireful foam
Tumble tempestuous tides, big-packed with ill,
The lamp of his large honour shines and stays:
And here greeds, frauds (the sinewy birds that roam
Our storm-swept sea of life to swoop and kill),
Dash themselves dead against its blinding blaze.

LOVE'S LITTLE DIARY

Sunday

To-day I found, in mischief's mood,
A fair young shepherd, whom with speed
Two desperate damosels pursued,
Each wrangling for his tender heed.
My feathery arrow's impish touch
The lad's rare coldness quick had slain—
And lo, he loved them both so much
He could not choose betwixt the twain.

Monday

To-day Sir Light-of-Heart through town
Rode languid on his charger fleet,
While high dames from their bowers flung down
Fond glances he disdained to greet.
I drew my bow; I poised its dart. ..
Pert country Doris waved a hand. ..
And now even less cares Light-of-Heart
For all the ladies in the land.

Tuesday

To-day, deep-stirred by wistful ruth,
A pale girl, in the cypressed gloom,
Knelt sorrowing near a gentle youth,
Stretched Romeo-like beside a tomb.
I wrought my archery's pranksome spell,
And lingeringly, ere set of sun,
This Romeo had found out there dwell
More Juliets in the world than one.

Wednesday

To-day where grouped like rusty spears
Dry reeds below the misted skies,
I saw Queen Summer chide with tears
King Autumn in his conqueror guise.
His rule she spurned; he scorned her charms;
Fierce clashed they, till two shafts I sped. ..
Then soon in Autumn's pitying arms
Poor Summer bowed her sovereign head.

Thursday

To-day I chanced upon a maid
Who crouched beside a woodland well,
With rapture-lighted look that strayed
Where sweet her own reflection fell.
Such rank self-worship roused my spleen. ..
The clumsiest oaf came rambling by. ..
Henceforth with fervours fiery-keen
For him she lives, for him would die.

Friday

To-day it pleased my whim to join
A dungeoned miser, grey and spare,
Who slowly counted coin by coin
With greedy clutch and fevered glare.
His dear dead sweetheart's fleshly mould
Re-sentient to his sight I gave ...
Swift at my feet he swept his gold,
And cowered before me like a slave.

Saturday

To-day I chose, at early dawn,
Through palace walls unseen to float,
And watch, from draperies half withdrawn,
The sleeping princess, Ivory Throat.
With airy kiss I brushed her cheek,
Then backward sprang, a wondering elf—
Since I, Love, I (O fate unique!)
Had fallen in love with her myself!

WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY

The family coach, in cumbrous pride,
Rolls creaking through the verdant lane.
Demure and sweet she sits beside
Her portly parent, Lady Jane.

In rank her peer, though poor of purse,
He notes her while she nearer draws,
And flings an acrimonious curse
At lucre's desolating laws.

‘Oh, shame’ (his wrath and scorn rewake),
‘To shatter thus a maid's pure life!
So meek a pearl of girls to make
Lord Steeplechaser's purchased wife!’

A furtive glance, and lo, 'tis done;
She hears his heart's unspoken prayer:
‘The Romilly elm at set of sun—
Dear Marian, will you meet me there?’

From her shy lids one starrier glow
The alert assent has full confessed.
He hears her love's voice whispering low:
‘Dear Algy, I will do my best!’

BORROWED PLUMES

Once through an ancient garden,
Austere and with solemn strides,
Death came stalking where Laughter
Was holding both her sides.

The sound was so unfamiliar
That he heard it with bated breath;
For strange indeed was all music
Of mirth to the ears of Death.

Yet the silvery trill entranced him
As it leaped from the lips of the elf,
And he tried, like a clumsy mimic,
To laugh the same way himself.

But the only sound he could utter
Was so raucous with hates and sneers,
That while Death broke into laughter,
Poor Laughter burst into tears.

VENICE

Great lute, once played upon by history's hand,
But now lying indolent, with shattered shell;
Proud lily of civic pomp, whose floral spell,
Once daybreak's own, wears now such withering brand;
High sovereignty disthroned, whose lost command
The Campanile's thunder-throated bell,
The erratic sea-gull's cry, can fitliest knell;—
What speech may voice thy sorrow, obscure yet grand?

Court, campo and palace glimmer bleared and wan;
Weeds fringe the marble of stairways, bridges, piers;
Dank labyrinths of canals crawl everywhere
Through squalor, desuetude!—O dying swan,
Thy death-song, freighted with five centuries' tears,
Flutes o'er the Adriatic its despair!

Venice, 1898.

LONDON

Haunted by all the historic smiles and tears
Of many a great soul vanished into space,
Tomb of prides, aims and passions, pure or base,
Yet theatre where life loudly domineers,
From fabulous epochs through a thousand years
Of battle and dear-bought peace your annals trace,
Till now (on earth man's mightiest meeting-place)
Your vastness this columnar fame uprears!

In fogs of noonday night, in rains and sleets,
In yellow and silver mists, or suns blood-red,
Or violet alps of cloud, deep charm I see, ...
For always through your monstrous maze of streets,
With steps unechoing, walk your Deathless Dead,
O city of ghosts, that can so ghostly be!

FOUR CHORUSES

I
CHORUS OF UNTHINKING TOILERS

Through years and years,
Fate's living jeers,
We've soaked our blood in bread and tears.
What wonder now
If bold of brow
Its nauseous vileness we avow?

Go, search the spots
Where squalor squats,
Custodian of our loathsome lots;
Then dare to blame
The frenzied shame
That riotous in revolt would flame.

Then dare to tell
If life may dwell
This side the grave in ghastlier hell;
Then dare to speak,
Ye rich and sleek,
Of tolerance that should make us meek.

From dens of slums
Our chorus comes,
From penury's pale martyrdoms.
To judge us fair
Would be to share
The abysmal deeps of our despair.

We, reared in dearth,
Dull rabble of earth,
Were branded prisoners at our birth.
To each befell,
As each learned well,
The heirloom of a dungeon cell.

On each the curse
Was wreaked adverse
Of ragged beggary for his nurse;
To each the cheer
Of want's chill sneer
Became his cradle and swaddling-gear.

While new suns rise,
Our roaming eyes
Glare haggard at the unaidful skies.
While new suns fade
Our worn feet wade
Through rubble and slush whose filths degrade.

No more we heed,
In our strong need,
Mild-murmuring patience if she plead;

With maxims wise
In vain she sighs
For suffering to philosophise.

Nay, is it strange
Our fancies range
Through visions of volcanic change?
Or that intrigue
Would vengeance league
To attest our terrible fatigue?

Shrewd tongues may prate
That this hot hate
Its mad self would annihilate;
Yet captive pain
At least would gain
Some transient shattering of its chain.

Ah, sweet to stray
Through frantic fray
For even one red tempestuous day!
Ah, sweet to shower,
For one wild hour,
The slaves' wrath on the despot's power!

II
CHORUS OF SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS

Do not heed their foolish plaints;
Dense they teem with envious taints.

Chaste religion's holy dawn
Spurn they, anarchy's dull spawn.

When we bid them to endure,
Their responses rise impure.

Blasphemy their speech outrolls
That appals our Christian souls.

They have often dared to claim
We are Christians but in name.

They have insolently said:
‘Not for such as you Christ bled.’

Mouthing at us, in coarse glee,
His ‘Leave all and follow me,’

They have insolently cried
Shame upon our greed and pride.

‘Pah! You Christians?’ they have scoffed,
‘Housed in ease, clad warm and soft,

‘Giving from your golden store
Stray gratuities, and no more?

‘Tell us, would such boons be priced
Precious in the eyes of Christ?

‘Was not this the creed that taught
Self-disdain in deed and thought?

‘Each He loved in like degree,
Sacrifice and charity.

Slight the second would He rate
If the first were not its mate.

‘Give not save the gift be blent
With your own impoverishment.

‘Give not save at heart ye choose
From your feet to strip the shoes.

‘Give not save the mood invoke
From your back to pluck the cloak.

‘This is Christ, and this alone
His clear doctrine, blood and bone.

‘If ye spurn such holy thrall,
Best ye did not give at all.

‘Take some other creed, and be
Buddhist, Mussulman, Parsee,

‘Brahman, Jew, so ye evade
This coarse Christian masquerade!’

[OMITTED]

Thus the raucous cries have rung,
Hot from many a reckless tongue.

We but hold them void of sense,
Pitying their impertinence.

Serious heed we scarce have lent
Their anarchical ferment.

We not Christians?—we that pray
Night and morn in holiest way!

We that reverently brood
On our own rare rectitude;

Aid the poor, and yet restrain
Prodigalities insane;

Love our neighbour, yet disclose
No grand philanthropic pose;

Lie not, steal not, do, in fact,
All that Scripture's laws exact!

—Nay, with idiot rant let these
Blusterers prattle what they please!

How could Christ, alive to-day,
Our gentility gainsay,

Or demand that we should flee
From respectability!

Altered lands and altered skies
He Himself would recognise—

Years wherethrough fresh thoughts have ranged,
Habits, fashions, customs changed.

Nineteen centuries' gloom and shine
Part New York from Palestine;

Hold at each far-sundered hem
London and Jerusalem;

Broad in severance, verge from verge
Hudson and Euphrates urge;

Thames and Jordan, tide from tide,
Incontestably divide.

—Wherefore, at thy throne-foot now,
Heavenly Hierarch, we bow,

Feeling thine approval sure
Of our decorous lives and pure;

Confident thou wilt not think
Duty and piety we blink,

For the simple cause that we
Take religion rationally,

Nor its precious codes attire
In cheap spangles and red fire.

III
CHORUS OF THINKING TOILERS

We scorn the insurgence of that shriek
Which far too oft is flung
From feverish lips that only speak
With acrimonious tongue;
No more we crave, no more we plead
Than Justice would herself concede.

100

The lands are loud, the lands are hot
With hates of ravenous rage;
The labourer loathes his drudging lot,
He loathes his vassalage;
He learns at last his own large power,
He longs to make his tyrants cower.

Yet we, rough labour's burly brood,
That ache in thew and bone,
The murderous paroxysmal mood
Disfavour and disown;
We rate as weapons weak and slight
Incendiarism and dynamite.

At learning's font stray draughts we drank,
Yet sweet as May's mild rains;
Deep in our thirsting souls they sank
And vitalised our veins.
Invaluable the draught to us,
For its ennobling stimulus!

The rare elixir cleared our glance,
Like sunshine scattering snow;
Mankind must cope with ignorance
And lay its cohorts low.
Life hath no genie, luck no elf,
To help him till he helps himself.

'Tis vain to dream our freedom's day
Fortuitously shall rise;

101

Millennial morrows long delay
The bloom of their bright skies;
From darkness and turmoil are drawn
The peace and splendour of their dawn.

A century since, beyond the sea,
Our motto and watchword flamed;
Of Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity 'twas framed.
Where battle and massacre prevailed,
It towered unsoiled and unassailed.

But though man's mind hath striven to free
His fate from creeds unsound,
Though liberty and equality
In largess he hath found,
Still doth fraternity remain
Thus far his unaccomplished gain.

Sweet thoughts of help may haunt his ken,
But these coarse interests gloom;
Men do not love their fellow-men,
Howe'er they so assume.
We paupers, prospering by their aid,
Know just how grudgingly 'tis paid.

They love us not; their happier lives
Are swayed by severing powers;
They love their parents, children, wives,
As we in turn love ours;
Why blame their souls if unenticed
By the grand altruism of Christ?

102

That rigorous and divine unrest
Obeys but one clear call;
Spontaneous throbs it in the breast,
Or fails to throb at all;
More firm than subterranean gold,
The future doth its fires enfold.

Rich beauty of its unrisen day,
While time's tides onward sweep,
Our children's children's children may
Inestimably reap.
For us the hid seeds torpid cower;
For them shall blaze the effulgent flower.

‘They serve who only stand and wait,’
Sang Milton, long ago.
Our toil is harsh; our need is great;
Our trust in heaven ebbs low;
We wait, yet ah! not idly stand;
We bow tired back, ply wearied hand.

Complaint is fatuous; wrath even worse;
Revolts fresh wrongs evolve;
We can but hope the unholy curse
In blessing may dissolve—
In bounteous blessing without flaw—
When Love grows universal law!

103

IV
CHORUS OF EVERYDAY OPTIMISTS

‘Heigh! the stream of pompous prattle!
Ho! the gush of high-flown tattle!
Life 's a bow to bravely bend;
Life 's a coin to wisely spend.
We, for all that say us nay,
Answer: ‘Folderolderado,’
Answer: ‘Folderolderay!’

‘Why, if you 've with want fought vainly,
Scold society insanely?
How may any man dare think
That the world should wait his wink?
We, to all who claim he may,
Toss our ‘Folderolderado,’
Fling our ‘Folderolderay.’

‘True, it 's heartily distressful
Not to find one's self successful;
Yet you'll scarce revoke missed aims
Calling skilled shots ugly names.
All such babble is apt to weigh
Light as—folderolderado,
Light as—folderolderay.

‘If the rich and poor were equals,
How absurd would be the sequels!

104

Millionaire and pauper peers,
Where would work find volunteers?
Each man toil so long each day?
Pooh! mere folderolderado!
Pah! mere folderolderay!

‘Socialism 's a madhouse revel;
Anarchy 's a masquing devil.
Greet your joys; accept your cares;
Go to church and say your prayers.
Every other earthly way
Is but folderolderado,
Is but folderolderay!

‘Read good books, but writing sceptic
Hold obnoxious and dyspeptic;
It can ne'er (wise, witty or terse)
Re-create the universe.
When such task it would essay
Cry it ‘Folderolderado,’
Cry it ‘Folderolderay!’

‘Swing to men like Herbert Spencer
No encomiastic censer;
Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, bring
No devout burnt-offering.
If you hear they 've ‘come to stay,’
Laugh your ‘Folderolderado,’
Laugh your ‘Folderolderay!

105

‘Proffer all time-worn traditions
Your unqualified submissions;
Gaze askance at silly storms
Big with picturesque reforms.
Quick their bubbles, glittering gay,
Turn to folderolderado,
Turn to folderolderay!

‘Take the world as you have found it;
Neither seek to gauge nor sound it.
In this one stanch maxim rest:
Everything that is, is best.
You'll but follow, if thence you stray,
Wraiths like—folderolderado,
Ghosts like—folderolderay!’

106

A MILLIONAIRE'S FUNERAL

Stand with me here where these rich draperies fall,
Shadowing this alcoved orchid. We can mark
The costly and simple coffin, and the face
It holds, part visible, with waxen brow
And pale pinched nostrils, from the satined sides.

This was a bad man. (Start not; I speak low.)
For years he clad his life in sordidness,
The idolater of gain. He played with chance
Like the coarse gambler, rattling random dice,
Brooding o'er slippery and fortuitous cards.
Yet loftier was he—grander, if you please—
Just as an arch-fiend might above his imps
Loom in sheer evil. Dice and cards to him
Were fluctuant millions, ever lost or won
In that gross bevy of gamesters not far off,
Our New York Wall Street. Rainbow-tinted dreams
Of some half-baby Aladdin might not cope
With his gold splendours of rank loot and luck.
Anarchy spawned him. The metropolis
Reeked, in his youth, with those vile fumes of fraud
Which mean the lingering fever-heats that fold
A nation while it wakes from war's hot trance.

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He seized the occasion; judges had grown base
Barterers of justice; these he bribed with zeal.
The rulers of his land had flung in slime
Their sacred national trust, and these he lured
To infamies. His railroads poured their steam
With big vuluminous deceptive clouds
Into the people's eyes. Throngs watched him wear
The stolen insignia of philanthropy
And gaped, some reverent, some with covert scorn.

This was a bad man. If America
Had more such insolent egotists as he,
Heaven save our proud republic! Their cold souls
Are ice whose chill would freeze all patriot warmth
Which pulsed, a century since, in our loved land.
Between himself and many an outcast doomed
To shorn head and guilt's flaring livery dwells
One difference: they were thieves begot of slums;
He was the statelier kind of thief that stole
Pictorially—a Claud Duval who drave
The pistol-muzzle of his brigandage
Into the vehicle-window of the State—
A fierce Dick Turpin of finance, who clothed
His crime in galliard swagger, tinged it red
With bluff romanticism. As ripe result,
You see the mass abhor one thief and lift
The other to that same bad eminence
Glorious dead Milton made his Satan scale.

Dare we to doubt the civic wrong he wrought?
Perchance the mob doubts, but the mob has gone

108

Sheep-like and plaintless for so many a year
Into the shambles of gross bigot faiths
Built for it by such despot slaughterers! ... Mark!
The clergyman comes now; draw back a step.
Ah, how incongruous that the saintly name
Of Christ should sound above this greed-racked flesh!
Still, charity is the noblest human trait;
Let us have mercy on him at this last hour;
Let us recall the age that moulded him;
Let us be mindful of heredity,
With all its deadly and subtle flows of force.
This railroad-wrecker, this corruptionist,
This bane of widow and orphan whose past tears
Have dropped so copious that if all were blent,
Their salt tides might have drowned him, this dacoit,
Revelling in cut-purse arrogance ... who knows
The mystic ante-natal trends that met
To make him what he was? A scorpion tempts
Our loathing, not our spleen; we shun it, packed
With venomous ill, nor think to blame the sting
It carries. That we accept, like destiny.

See yonder pale girl at the coffin's edge,
With bright hair brighter from her garb's black folds;
His only child. Of all his kith or kin
Alone she is left, too. Note her plaintive eyes
Brim with large tears, like over-plenteous dew
Burdening twin blooms. At least this delicate girl
Has loved him, and can weep that he is dead!
Perchance no life was ever lived in vain
If just one sentient human soul could grieve

109

Above its grave. ... And yet even Nero dead
(Save history blunders) knew such fate benign.

Well, better we should lapse not, you and I,
Into harsh dictatorial pessimisms.
They serve no end. We'll both stay merciful.
Come; the crowd parts; the coffin-lid has fallen:
Once more dust claims this towering plutocrat.

110

LITERATURE

Four are the sovereign arts that echoes call
Out from those large dim deeps, our human heart;
But yet the inclusive magic of one art,
While being allied to each, transcends them all.
Here rhythms and melodies rise, pause or fall
Perpetual; here hues, tinges, gleam or start
With rainbow glory; and here, too, hold their part
Form, symmetry, twin powers of cogent thrall.

With marvel of colour Painting may delight;
Music the wings of our pent souls may free;
Sculpture may charm us with high dreams and pure;
But thou that mirrorest the beauty and might,
The delicacy and splendour of all three,
Still than all three art loftier, Literature!

111

SURRENDER

Come, my Despair; 'tis either fight or truce;
I will not longer bear thy thrall one hour!
I will not watch thee lying, as 'twas her use
To lie, in yonder cushioned alcove's gloom,
And mark thee shame with the white spectral flower
Of thy loathed face the lovely and living bloom
Of hers! Thou shalt not borrow, austere Despair,
The flutterings of her garment on my floor,
Nor ape the lily of her uplifted hand;
Thou shalt not, in thy marble mockery, wear
The dear dishevelled mutinies of her hair!

Nay, as entreaty and tears alike were vain,
So fight proves failure, truce thy look doth greet
With blankness drearier than waste arctic snow!
Come, then, Despair, since thou wilt have it so:
I break at last my rebel sword in twain,
I fling its powerless fragments at thy feet.
Her face, her form, her presence, till I die,
Usurp thou with imperious travesty!

112

A VENETIAN HONEYMOON

For us the marvel and magic have not flown
That once were Venice in her palmy prime;
For us bloom taintless from the blights of time
Her pale mediævalisms of sculptured stone.
As though mysteriously for us alone,
Piazzetta and San Marco blend like rhyme
Their festal pomps; for us the church-bells chime
Dead hours, and shadowy Doges re-enthrone!

The past its beauty accords us, not its tears;
Lagoon, canal, street, campo are fairied thus,
And Lido, and all her sweet calm sister isles.
But where the Riva is massed with gondoliers,
To-day reasserts itself, and lo, for us,
The Bridge of Sighs becomes the Bridge of Smiles!

Venice.

113

THE STRUGGLER

Zealots, philosophers, makers of creeds,
Infidels, pantheists, makers of doubt,
Hear me, the Struggler; I lift up my voice,
I, of the universe impulse immense,
I, coexistent with time and with space.

Formless yet multiform, ever I strive,
Blazing in suns or uproarious in seas,
Torpid in worms or in tigers alert,
Lissome in lilies or stalwart in oaks,
Riotous in thunder or lyric in birds.

Shapeless yet palpable, age after age
Yearn I insatiate through world upon world,
Always by throes of supreme discontent
Harried and thwarted, from mammoth to gnat,
Balked and defeated, from grass-blade to pine.

Resolute, obstinate, still do I strive;
For the imperious purpose I hold
Millions of failures have failed to disturb.
Nay, since already, on stars that I know,
Up sheer through brute have I pushed into man.

114

I, the endeavour, the spirit, the will,
I that am All yet that aim to be One,
I that on boundless experiment thrive,
I, unabashed by enormous rebuff,
I, having made Man, at last shall make God.

115

A BOY'S THOUGHTS OF LIFE

The years have left me a boy no longer; yet boyhood lingers in breast and brain,—
Dear careless boyhood, that soon must perish, and clothe its parting with tender pain!

A few more morrows, and I shall wonder how mirth and frolic so long could stay,—
From skies familiar the same sun shining, yet ah, not shining the same sweet way!

'Tis no real sadness that steals to warn me; it half is pleasure and half regret,
As though a welcome had met a farewell, and intermingled when they had met.

For while gay fancies may from the future delight and longing my spirit bring,
I'm like a nestling whose wings unfolded feel yet the nest-warmth about them cling.

This life that waits me, I yearn to know it; my heart is with it, my hope is there;
The large winds float it across my forehead, with tingle of nostrils, caress of hair.

116

It moves in mornings; it speaks in starlight; it lurks in sunset's fantastic hues;
I hear it murmur through swaying tree-tops; I watch it sparkle from roadside dews!

All nature tells me my altered impulse, my manhood's heirdoms to gifts unguessed;
The streams in flowing, the blooms in blowing, are rich with prophecies half-confessed!

I listen, I tremble with expectation; the secret answer I vainly plead!
To learn that answer is to have lived it;—to live it nobly were life indeed!

117

LANDSCAPE IN SOME OTHER PLANET

The sun, that eastward drops, pours purplish lights
On blood-red foliage by dense woods outrolled,
Till fiercely with long level rays he smites
A towering mountain shaped from solid gold.

White gloaming spills erelong its noiseless damps
On sweeps of ebon grass by faint wind stirred,
And lo, through yonder thicket softly tramps
A monstrous mild-eyed thing, half beast, half bird.

In glooms of heaven, while day still eastward dies,
The dim discs of strange alien stars are seen,
And now—ah, look!—north, south and west uprise
Three mighty moons, two violet and one green!

118

HELEN, OLD

There, in my mirror's gloss of steel,
Jeers the gaunt mockery I am grown.
For me did heroes bleed and reel?
For me was Ilium overthrown?
For me did Greece, in those wild years,
Throng her dark ships with wrathful spears?

Did grand Achilles, frowning doom,
Slay glorious Hector, and then drag
His body about Patroclus' tomb
For me, this bony and withered hag?
For these blanched lips and locks of snow
Did tides of scarlet slaughter flow?

This wreck with beauty a brief sweet while,
Ah, pitying goddess, re-endow!
Give me again the auroral smile,
The sunlight hair, the moonlight brow,
The heaven of eyes, the heaven of head—
Then, if thy mood wills, dash me dead!

119

THE PAWNBROKER

In some grim purlieu doth he dwell, that seems
Always through tricks of sorcery midnight's lair;
Above his door, in lamplight's dubious beams,
Darts out one shadowy word that reads ‘Despair.’

With marble face, with quick insidious hand
Whose fingers glide like pale snakes to and fro,
Behind his dark-barred grating doth he stand,
To meet the timorous forms that come and go.

Each with some treasured offering that allures
His look, and wins from it satanic glee,
These vague and variant forms are mine, are yours,
Yes, even are thousands' wild and weak as we!

Love, pride, hope, honour, fame, year after year
We pawn him, by infatuate ardours urged,
Then grasp the coin he doles, and disappear
Back to the swallowing gloom whence we emerged.

But oft, with pay close-clutched, while hurrying o'er
His threshold, bent on our fleet homeward course,
We cast one farewell glance at his dim door,
And in the flickering lamplight read ‘Remorse.’

120

CLOUDED NIGHTS

Nights clothed in dense cloud I have rarely seen
But subtle and vague remonstrance thrilled me through,
Fain to unveil that vault of heavenly blue
Where myriad swarms of shining worlds convene.
Why, being so brief and transient, should life screen
Our vision from one hour's dear chance to view
This meadow of heaven whose dusk so guards its dew
In diamond immobility serene?

Unpitying for those tireless eyes that toil
The devious deeds of stars to scan and trace,
Are clouds whence no sweet beam shall dare to burst;
Since, ah, not even a single night should foil
The soul of Science, harrying time and space
With all its glory of hunger and of thirst!

121

HOPE

Blithe portress at the gateways of the soul!
Dear sycophant, that dost so fondly cling
To even our worst of sorrows! Bark whose wing
Dauntlessly voyages to illusion's goal,
Heedless if it be shadow, if rock and shoal!
White bird that carollest unwearying
Trebles of song, like those by new-born spring
Lured skyward from some blossom-tinted knoll!

Ah, Hope, thou art sweet when mad seas glass wild skies,
When war, pest, earthquake riots in bitter glee,
Or yet when tyranny tortures and enslaves;
But sweetest when thy shape phantasmal flies,
A will-o'-the-wisp named Immortality,
Over the darkness of earth's myriad graves!

122

PAVEMENT PICTURES

Wild storm, this languid summer night,
Clashed o'er the city an hour ago;
But now, released in heaven's blue height,
A moon has brought her sorrowing glow,
To flood the massed roofs' dimness dense
With pale celestial penitence.

The breeze wakes rich in soothing damps;
Faint spires loom silvered; and one sees
In street or square, by rain-splashed lamps,
The wet leaves flickering on stray trees;
While black fantastic shapes of dream
Bold from the drying pavements gleam.

Chance moods of moisture's random change,
The dumb stone flaunts their blots grotesque,
Where freaks of spectral traceries range
Through many an elfin arabesque—
Till the huge town's vice, crime, despair,
Seems devilishly pictured there.

123

TRAFFIC

Life, the shrewd lapidary, is rich in wares
Whose worth our casual glances may decree;
And like perpetual purchasers are we,
Won by the bounteous opulence he airs.
Here shines a pearl of hope; here subtly glares
An emerald of revenge; here thrilled we see
A diamond of ambition; here may be
Some ruby of sin that lures us and ensnares.

Incessantly above this bright array,
As time flows on, we mortals flock to bend,
Till body and limbs turn frail, till brows grow grey,
Through trading, haggling, bartering without end—
While for the inexorable price we pay,
Months, years, even centuries, are the coins we spend.

124

WAYNE AT BRANDYWINE

The autumn dawn was dim with mists on that disastrous day;
With dews like tears the oaks were strung, below still skies of grey.

In fringy throngs the stirless pines were gloomed as with regret;
The clustering laurels glimpsed no ray from foliage dark and wet.

All earth and heaven, in blended pain, seemed prescient of the ills
That war would shower erelong on those green Pennsylvanian hills.

The sun crept higher in mantling fog; the battle growled and broke;
You heard its thunderous onslaughts crash; you saw them blaze and smoke.

From Osbourne's Hill Cornwallis rushed, with troops of well-tried power;
He dreamed not then, this high-born Earl, of Yorktown's humbling hour.

125

He scanned our shabby and rebel hordes, nor dared to rate them peers
Of all his dexterous infantry, chasseurs and grenadiers.

Hurling his trained battalions down, he deemed their might anon
Would crush like gnats the astounded bands of Greene and Washington.

Yet these with zeal struck firmly back, defiant of hope's eclipse,
And bade the scarlet tongues of flame lick their black cannons' lips.

Like some fleet silvery mountain stream their serried bayonets flashed,
As with the impetuous foe above they sternly closed and clashed.

In furious wise fought Sullivan (whose blunders heaven forget!);
Down from his steed, with rallying shouts, leaped fiery Lafayette.

De Gorre and Conway strained and strove; so, too, with high-waved sword,
Lord Stirling, falsely titled thus, though every inch a lord.

Fierce waxed the fray on blood-soaked turf; in sheets the bullets flew;
A battle of men it ceased to be, a battle of tigers grew.

126

Artillery clamoured on the slopes, from sheltering rocks and trees;
Artillery from the meadows roared voluminous repartees.

One storm of sound, as though in words, tempestuous challenge threw:
‘God save King George the Third and blast all traitorous droves like you!’

One answering storm of equal sound, as though in words, rang then:
‘Go back and tell your idiot King we are not slaves, but men!’

Meanwhile at Chad's Ford, vigilant, a sombre warrior stood,
Light glittering from his hazel eyes, though marble seemed his mood.

A stalwart shape in buff and blue, he noted without sign
The hirelings of Knyphausen mass beside the Brandywine.

Roods off he saw, with stolid mien, the reddening river glow,
And knew the precious patriot blood ensanguining its flow.

Erewhile from vaporous rifts of sky one slanted beam had filled
Pulaski's dark proud Polish face, by glorious courage thrilled.

127

And reared beyond him, it had shown, that same bright random beam,
The loftier form of Washington, in dignity supreme.

A form this watcher by the bridge beheld with bated breath—
A form he would have died to shield from such engirding death.

He looked along the Brandywine; he marked, in ominous ranks,
The fierce dragoons of Anspach wheel beside its willowy banks.

What menace ruled their mustering scores he read with rapid ease,
Then vaulted on the sinewy roan that neighed to feel his knees.

A thousand hardy followers heard his voice quick mandates throw,
And sprang to obey them as the shaft will spring to obey the bow.

‘Mad Anthony’ he oft was named, yet these that knew him best,
What method in his madness lay had learned with loving zest.

And each was keen, with him for chief, to front war's harms and smarts—
Tatterdemalions, if you will, but all with heroes' hearts.

128

Accoutred rich in black-and-gold by black plumes overspread,
Five thousand rancorous Hessians poured, Knyphausen at their head.

Ah, not in legend or in song does lordlier daring shine
Than this, the intrepid countercharge of Wayne at Brandy-wine.

Riflemen, horsemen, stanch alike, the greybeard by the youth,
His rabble of Continentals rushed, magnificent, uncouth.

Straight on tornado-wise they tore, and bluffly set at naught
The butchering tactics, deft and shrewd, that British pounds had bought.

Splendid for bravery did they smite, and bleed, and kill, and die,
With country, honour, home and kin their blows to sanctify.

And even in teeth of such harsh odds the prize perchance were won,
If prudence had not pushed from fight the army of Washington.

Afar, through lurid air Wayne saw, with pangs of sharp dismay,
His dear Commander's trusted troops retire in broken array.

129

Then full amid thick hail of shot, with victory almost gained,
Back on its haunches, in a trice, his good brown steed he reined.

Veering, he signalled swift recoil, howe'er his pride it stung,
And with vociferous resonance these words broadcast he flung:

‘Superior numbers have o'erwhelmed our main force with defeat;
We follow (it is our sacred task!) protecting their retreat!’

He bade them leave their dying and dead—their guns, munitions, all—
He steeled his heart, he bowed his head, to duty's claim and call.

And though from bearded Teuton lips the insulting laughter pealed,
He did not heed, but swept his men sheer on to Dilworth field.

And there, with many a gallant blade uplifted in the sun,
He grandly guarded the retreat of Greene and Washington!

[OMITTED]

'Twere easy, in sooth, to snatch the palm from triumph's outstretched hand,
Yet oh, how hard, at wisdom's will, such guerdon to withstand!

130

Nay, for that high-strung spirit, I know, renouncement brought reward
Past all his prowess at Stony Point, his pluck at Jamestown Ford!

Ah, not in story or myth or song does deed more stoic shine
Than this, the exalted self-control of Wayne at Brandywine!

131

TO ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

Thou hast peered at all creeds of the past, and each one hath seemed futile and poor
As a firefly that fades on a marsh, as a wind that makes moan on a moor;
For thy soul in its large love to man, in its heed of his welfare and cheer,
Bids him hurl to the dust whence they sprang all idolatries fashioned by fear.

Not the eagle can gaze at the sun with more dauntless and challenging eyes
Than thou at the radiance of truth when it rifts the dark durance of lies.
From thy birth wert thou tyranny's foe, and its deeds were disdain in thy sight;
Thou art leagued with the dawn as the lark is—like him dost thou leap to the light!

Having marked how the world's giant woes for the worst part are bigotry's brood,
Thou hast hated, yet never with malice, and scorned but in service of good.

132

Thy compassionate vision saw keen how similitude always hath dwelt
Between fumes poured from altars to God and from flames haggard martyrs have felt.

What more splendid a pity than thine for the anguish thy race hath endured
Through allegiance to spectres and wraiths from the cohorts of fancy conjured?
At the bold pomps of temple and church is it wonder thy wisdom hath mourned,
Since the architect, Ignorance, reared them, and Fright, the pale sculptor, adorned?

But sterner thy loathing and grief that the priesthoods have shamed not to tell
Of an infinite vengeance enthroned in the heart of an infinite hell;
That they shrank not to mould from void air an Omnipotence worship should heed,
And yet clothed it with ruffian contempt for the world's multitudinous need!

Thy religion is loftier than theirs; nay, with vehement lips hast thou said
Its foundations are rooted in help to the living and hope for the dead.
All eternity's richest rewards to a spirit like thine would prove vain,
Were it sure of but one fellow-mortal that writhed in unperishing pain.

133

Like a mariner drifted by night where tempestuous wracks overshade
Every merciful star that perchance might with silvery pilotage aid,
Resolution and vigilance each close-akin as thy heart-beat or breath,
Dost thou search in thy courage and calm the immense chartless ocean of death.

There are phantoms of ships that lurch up, and thou seëst them and art not allured
By their masts made of glimmering dream, by their bulwarks from cloudland unmoored;
For the helmsmen that steer them are mist, and the sails they are winged with, each one,
By the feverish hands of fanatics on looms of delusion are spun.

At the vague stems are visages poised that in variant glimpses appear. ..
Here the swart and imperial Osiris, the crescent-crowned Mahomet here;
Or again, mystic Brahma, with eyes full of omens, monitions, and vows;
Or again, meek and beauteous, the Christ, with the blood-crusted thorns on his brows.

But thou sayest in thy surety to all: ‘Empty seemings, pass onward and fade!’ ...
Not by emblems and symbols of myth wert thou born to be tricked and betrayed;

134

For aloof o'er the desolate blank thou discernest, now dubious, now plain,
The expanse of one sheltering shoreland, worth ardours untold to obtain.

Full of promise, expectancy, peace, in secure sequestration it lies,
Undismayed by a menace of storm from its arch of inscrutable skies. ...
Canst thou reach it, strong sea-farer? ... Yes! for the waves are thy bondsmen devout.
Look! they wash thee safe-limbed on its coast, clinging firm to thy tough spar of doubt!

Roam at large in its glorious domain; from its reaches night half has withdrawn;
Over inlet, bay, meadow, and creek broods the delicate damask of dawn;
Roam at large; 'tis a realm thou shouldst love; 'tis the kingdom where Science reigns king;
In its lapses of grove and of greensward sleeps many a crystalline spring.

To the eastward are mountains remote, with acclivities towering sublime:
The repose of their keen virgin peaks mortal foot hath not ventured to climb.
In their bastions and caverns occult, in their bleak lairs of glacier and stream,
There are treasures more copious and costly than fable hath yet dared to dream.

135

Thou shalt see not their splendours, for fate may retard through long ages the hour
That in bounteous bestowal at last shall mankind inconceivably dower.
Yet thy prophecies err not, O sage; thou divinest what wealth shall outpour
When exultant those proud heights of knowledge posterity sweeps to explore.

Not for thee, not for us, those dear days! In oblivion our lots will be cast
When the future hath built firm and fair on the bulk of a petrified past.
Yet its edifice hardier shall bide for the boons fraught with help that we give—
For the wrongs that we cope with and slay, for the lies that we crush and outlive.

And if record of genius like thine, or of eloquence fiery and deep,
Shall remain to the centuries regnant from centuries lulled into sleep,
Then thy memory as music shall float amid actions and aims yet to be,
And thine influence cling to life's good as the sea-vapours cling to the sea!

136

TO A YOUNG VERSIFIER

A slender book of lyrics you have printed,
Echoing the famous bards you most esteem;
Yet woe betide the man who shall have hinted
Its authenticity is not supreme!

With scorn austere, with prejudice in plenty,
Your moods toward fellow-singers are replete;—
Last January you were three-and-twenty,
Though seventy in your own sublime conceit.

For life has no dark deeps that your bold plummets
Of self-believed experience do not dare;
No laurel thrives on calm Parnassian summits
Too green or bounteous for your brows to bear.

Thrice-blest, indeed, if you should deign to prize him,
The poet of this dull age you scarce endure!
And yet, if Shakespeare lived, you'd patronise him,
And grieve that Hamlet should be so ‘obscure.’

137

NOCTES DOLOROSAE

At the might of the night when its light and its gloom
Have been blent like the scent and the tinge of a bloom,
At the might of the night while its height is one haze
From the stars it unbars out of darkness, we gaze,—
Till our pain like the strain of a god's voice would smite
On the might of the night, on the might of the night.

Keen-possessed by a quest whose unrest seems to roam
All the might of the night from its base to its dome,
Fierce-possessed by a quest that would wrest what we miss
From the might of the night in its lift or abyss,
Our despair like the flare of a god's wrath takes flight
Through the might of the night, through the might of the night.

138

COINCIDENCE

Where these waste winter swamplands quaff
A brackish creek's chill ooze and drain,
The uncouth poles of the telegraph
Loom spangled thick with frozen rain.

Careless of each rude blast that stings,
A bevy of birds, in tumult fleet,
Shower down upon the ice-clad strings
And clutch them with courageous feet.

And now, below the sky's harsh gleams,
In teeth of gusts whence discord floats,
A monstrous bar of music seems
To tower, with birds' black shapes for notes.

Then, radiant where the steel-grey west
Has drowsed like some stern arctic lake,
Roughening it into glad unrest,
The obtrusive sun's broad splendours break.

On the strange emblem full they dash
The glory of their fresh-kindled fires,
Till visible music seems to flash
And fade along the illumined wires!

139

ANDRÉE

Far where the daybreak's domains beyond porches of pearl are reposing,
Wanders with bravery and buoyance the lark in its passion for light;
Far where steep hills are to heaven all their tumults of silence disclosing,
Float the huge condors round peaks which no thunderbolt's ravage may smite.

Yet since the wisdom of man could its fables from history sever,
Since from miraculous valour was torn the impossible palm,
Still more adventurous thou, in the dash of thy peerless endeavour,
Bankrupting courage with prowess, and shattering frenzy to calm.

Angers of sky, land or sea thou hast daunted alike in thy daring,
Poised on thy perilous craft between tempests aloft or below,

140

Whirled toward the bleak polar glooms whence auroras are rosily flaring,
Swept where the sun hangs appalled o'er illimited stagnance of snow.

Thine was the purpose, the project, that veiled as with volumes of splendour
Tawdrier glories and honours, chance-garnered where battlefields blaze;
Thine the ambition that bounded, in flush of superb self-surrender,
Past all the tinsels and spangles man loots from his fratricide frays.

Laud not the captains that kill or the soldiers whom slaughter hath sated;
Here was a captaincy spotless and here was a soldiership high;
Broad though the doom of our death, 'tis alone with divinity freighted
When for large help to the living unsullied by bloodshed we die.

If thou indeed art no more, flung to earth from thy dome of defiance,
Warrior of warfare so matchless, meteor so fervid of flame,
Have not the winds and the waters achieved thee in stately alliance
Elegies, eulogies, obsequies, meet for so mighty a name?

141

Nay, among lands thou hast left, with requital and requiem blending,
Memory shall bide monumental and grief despite pain shall be proud:
Yonder in lands that beheld thine austere and magnificent ending,—
Ice for thy sepulchre, blast for thy mourners, and frost for thy shroud!

142

KNOW THYSELF

Know thyself, said the old Greek. Obey his hest
Invaluable. With hand that swerves no jot,
Lift thou the torch of knowledge and roam on
Through all those devious corridors that branch
Darkly below thy labyrinthine soul.
Leave not one cranny or nook unvisited.
As though, some reverend monk, thy feet should break
The calm of some long-slumbering catacomb,
Peer in this niche whose dusk may hide a skull,
Delve in this pit where vermin broods may nest.
With torch firm-gripped prowl onward, prowl and stare,
Till all thy soul's dread coigns of evil-doing
Are mercilessly envisaged. Search each lair
That peradventure some base tenant shields,
And flash on each, howe'er they toadlike squat,
Serpentlike coil, or batlike cling, or crawl
Wormlike, thy cresset's tyrannous blaze of quest.
So much of this weird edifice, thy soul,
Deep-rooted in creation's mysteries,
Thou shalt have learned. Yet be thou not content
With wanderings through these crypts of grosser build,

143

This heritage of animalism, so rank
With records of the earlier ape. Ascend
By yonder twilight stair to higher haunts,
Where chamber sweeps toward chamber, luminous
With lamps that dim thy torch, all being the abode
Of intellect, thy soul's first privilege,
A crowd of towers, high-bastioning thy state
Above those lives unspiritual that swarm
In frailty or hardihood earth's million holds.

This new realm shalt thou roam with loftier mood,
Among thine own mind's large palatial bounds.
Reason its hall of sculptural stone waits here;
There Truth its bower of gold; there tapestries
Pictured with history's deeds may Justice gird;
For Wisdom stateliest preparation gleams
From yonder marble sanctuary. All these,
And more—that rare imperialism we name
The Virtues, thy stanch allies, aids and guides,
If so thou choose to accede them—shall attend
Thy summons, and their various vantages
At thy decree, thine only, shall assume.

Know thyself better still. Mount higher, and heed
With what fine delicacy of trellisings,
What loggias, galleries, belfries, balconies,
Thy subterranean yet aspirant soul
Can crown itself. The Emotions harbour here,
In all their mutability and sweet grace.
They front the billowing clouds, the bedouin gales,

144

The oracular moon, mesmeric stars, dawns pale
With fire of prophecy, and sunsets red
With passion of farewell, and are kinned to these
In splendour, beauty and charm of symbolism.
Such bright aerial summits of thy soul
May rainbow Imagination, Fancy fleet,
Love, Hope, Awe, Pity and Sympathy possess,
If thus thy choice, and Art, which means them all,
Though Love than all hath mightier dominance.
Wild birds of dream, yet quick to obey thy beck,
On palisade and parapet their wings
May scatter at thy command white benisons
Of welcome. Yet pay rich thy fostering care,
Else Love, the loveliest of them, will be first
To fly, should he and every volatile mate
Feed not undaunted from thy lavish hand,
Crouch not elate below thy sheltering heart.
So, having known thyself, abide thou firm
Against the assailant and distracting world.
Adore thine own ideals—not secretly,
Nor timorously, but with proud nakedness.
Each creed thou hast made sure thou reverencest
Grasp at and fight for, though Babelian tongues
May chatter about thine ears dissentience fierce.
Live thou thy life; thou hast but one to live,
And pedestal that upon consistency.
Let not thy just wraths cower for prudence' sake;
Rather unleash them, bloodhounds though they be,
And watch with joy their fangs plough deep in wrong.
Nay, though thou canst not kill wrong, once to have plunged

145

A dirk of odium past its callous hide
Spurs by this act intrepid myriads
Abominative as thou of its brute reign.
Having once loved the good in thee and spurned
The ill, stay incontestibly thyself.
Slavery has vanished; kindred shames have died;
Others endure. If these thou dost abhor,
Strike at them, even with maimed and bleeding hands.
If thou detestest war, as all men should,
Make monumental thine antipathy;
Intoxicate thyself with loathing of it;
Give policy's least mood of protean guile
No quarter. Sound one note, and vary it not,
While tumults of insidious ‘ifs’ and ‘thoughs,’
Like locust-legions loudening as they swell,
Would buzz and hiss thee mute. Even so with Caste,
With despotisms of Capital, with laws
Perverted and evaded, briberies, pacts
To filch the labourer's loaf—quick dagger-blows
That wealth, turned cut-throat, may creep up to deal
In the back of prostrate poverty. Should harms
Freighted like these with poison, breed thy hate,
Shower out such hate from every duct and sluice
Of thine indignant spirit, shower it out
Unstintedly, torrentially, and cleave
Its onslaught with thy scorn's hot lightnings.

Think:
Thine individual span is but a day;
Posterity is for aeons; help its weal,
If only a mite of betterment shall bide

146

As earnest of thine effort. Interblend
Thy conscience and conviction till the twain
Are twinned like flower to fragrance. Ocean's waste
Hath not one star in its huge canopy
Whose pilotage is radianter than theirs.

147

ŒDIPUS AND THE SPHINX

‘This way, Lysander,’ shouted Œdipus,
‘Why tarriest thou inert?
Here, where these bluff crags glisten against the blue,
Our fated path sheers. Come!
A hollow of rock is twisted summitward,
Even as I said. From yonder vale we reach,
By just these devious clamberings, we two,
The vile Thing's lair.
So shall we steal upon It, swords alert,
Ere It hath time to turn Its greedy gaze
From the broad popular stream-rimmed street.
Nay, boy, thy courage? Hast thou moulted it
Like a sick eagle his feathers? Come!’

‘Look, Œdipus!’ Yards down, through prongs of cliff,
Lysander's cry shot shuddering.
‘By this dread signal, rolled from yonder steeps,
We are warned! The fates rule unpropitiable!
Fare back, dear friend,
Fare back, though all Thebes hiss thy baffled vaunt!
Fare back, I adjure thee!’

148

Pity and scorn laughed Œdipus, and now
Impetuously upsprang.
Cloakless his breast and shoulders braved the breeze
With symmetries august
As those the great Greek sculptors give their gods;
With feet a goat's for surety, and his eyes
Radiant rebellions.

The strait ravine veered narrowing till it coiled
A stair whose rough sides pricked his restless arms.
Then sudden, as though your step
Should crush dry reeds, the youth trod snarls of bones
In hideous lacework; some gnawed nude,
And others bloody and ragged, as from wrench
Of ravelling teeth. He paused,
An instant numbed by nausea; then
Dashed on and up, imperious, terrible.

At last the ascent ceased, and a flat space gleamed,
Ranged round with splints of rock, and foully paved
With pallors and raw reds of carnage. Here
Lodged the unutterable Thing.
Here, here—but where? Beyond him, drowsed
With marble might of tower and temple Thebes;
But ere one reached it, one must thread
The people's way—wide-winding cityward
Between two bright streams, Dirce and Ismenus,
For months by this live Horror sentinelled.

149

Here, there, the youth gazed searching—
Stony yellow, and stony brown,
And stony white on every side of him!
No hint of life, all immobility—Ah!
Yonder a movement! Yellow and brown and white,
Like Its encompassings, a Shape sprawled huge.
He dashed to assault It; but his two-edged sword
Grew instantaneously void air,
While the Shape turned and looked on him.

A lion, a bird, yet human! Œdipus
Felt first the intense monstrosity
Of wings half sheathed, of leonine body. Then
A woman's breast, a woman's face
Dizzied him with wild wonder. Centuries
Of effort to attain the beautiful
Seemed in that breast and visage concentrate.
Massive were both, yet rich with delicacies;
The neck, throat, bust, one lily of regal grace;
The lips, a flowering passion; brow, cheek, chin,
Melodiously attuned and intertwined,
As if their curves were rhythms of some high strain
Inaudible here, and heard alone in realms
Where gods commingle; and the eyes,
For pupil and orbit grand,
Emeralds of drowsy mystery, drowsy fire,
Twilights of eves or dawns, howbeit the soul
Might will to interpret them; twin deeps,
Fathomless and crepuscular.

150

Rallying from shock, spake Œdipus: ‘Thou art
That pest who fain would desolate fair Thebes.
Thou art goddess, too; else my stout sword
Had not so vanished from this grasp whose aim
Was thy destruction.’

Loiteringly the Sphinx: ‘I am goddess. Why
Hast thou adventured thus
By sidelong stealth upon my vantage—thou,
A mortal? Didst thou dream
By trickeries to o'erthrow me? Look
On these crude records of audacity
Less rash than thine.’

‘I have looked,’ he hurled, still obdurate
Though awed. ‘I have known, besides,
The abomination of thy questionings
To all who pass thee. Nay, if such thy power,
Kill me, as thou hast melted into naught
The sword I had meant to plunge in thy dark heart.
Yet, ere thy Riddle is asked,
Thy Riddle it bodes quick death
To fail of answering, tell me what thou art,
And wherefore, and how long thy beauty of beast,
Blent with thy beauty of woman, shall inflict
Bane upon Thebes.’

‘I tell thee nothing. Guess my Riddle or die.’

With fierceness of the tiger and wolf in one,
He darted toward her. ‘Give thy Riddle, O fiend,
And may the gods befriend me!’

151

‘Fatuous boy,’ she laughed,
In calm of supercilious indolence,
‘Guess this.’ And then with tones of gold,
Languid, yet savouring of harsh cruelty,
She further spake. What fell from her was not
The old legendary enigma, catchword snare,
That children learn to-day, but weightfuller
With many a pregnant meaning. Time
Was in it, and eternity, and the flux
Or reflux of man's destiny; the laws
Of love, hate, honour, duty, obedience;
Of art, song, music, and the idealisms
That haunt us with such tender tyrannies;
The starry and silver cobweb spun by space;
The whither, whence, beginning, end of all
We have named Divinity, glimpsed vague through life.
And ever amid this awful monologue,
A note of query implacably would ring,
Until at last the tones of gold grew hoarse:
‘You hear my Riddle. Unweave it me, or die.’

A trance had fallen on Œdipus. He stood
Statuesquely motionless and calm,
While some power made of him an oracle,
Delivering from unconscious lips
Largess of truth and wisdom. Then he waked,
As from a dream sublime, with echo and throb
Of thoughts miraculous in brain and blood.

But violently the Sphinx
Had risen erect. Against her lion flanks

152

Lashed the sleek lion tail; her claws distent
Rasped the tough rock; strange pulses woke
In her chimæric wings. Yet boundless burned
The tragedy of anguish on her face.

‘Thine is the victory. Take it, Œdipus!
I had feared this, dubiously, yet feared it. Now
The death dealt many another swings
Back with annihilation upon myself.
But thou, my conqueror, be thou merciful!
Think not of me hereafter in hard scorn,
As glacial intellect with animalism
Conjoined, an individuality
Spurred by its own will to its own crime. Nay,
I was but the incarnate Prophecy
Of what the People in future years will prove,
Half bestial and half spiritual. I flaunt
My Riddle, as they will flaunt their own.
Time thus doth pre-delineate their wild need,
And they will punish, even as I have done,
Thousands incapable of answering it.
But thou art emblem of the omnipotence
Which Knowledge, luminous guide and guard and god
Of man, will somehow, sometime, somewhere, pour
Torrentially, beneficently down
Upon his darkness and his ignorance.
For all is Knowledge; even the loftiest Love
Is parcel of it. We are but images
And symbols. In rehearsal weird
Thou hast slain me, Superstition. Thou,
Science, assaulter of the Unknowable

153

Until it yields its ultimate secret, thou
Must suffer, and with exorbitance of pain,
This being the doom of all who fight to tear
From nature, deity, what thou wilt, its mask
Of incommunicable reserve—
O Œdipus, farewell! yet thou shalt fare,
I fear me, not so calmly as I, whom now
Morningless night enshrouds. We are shadows both,
Flung on the eternal by the temporal,
And both in shadow at last one shadowland
Obliviously shall sepulchre. Farewell!’

‘Stay, stay!’ cried Œdipus, ‘I am fain
To question of thee ...’ But, with drearier cry
The Sphinx, her vast vans opening, upward soared.
One moment lofty in air she hung,
Without a quiver of plumage hung serene,
As though in fixity perpetual; then,
With speed to have shamed the eye's alertest wink,
Whirled herself to the chaos whence she had come.

156

ANNORUM RECENTIORUM

157

THE PHILIPPINE PURCHASE

We that believed thee and loved thee, despite multitudinous errors,
Can we forgive, O Republic, thy deep degradation to-day?
Thou that hast boasted of freedom from talons of tyranny wrested,
Thou to turn tyrant thyself, and their freedom from others despoil!

Thus canst thou mock thine own valour, and all the chill hand-clasps of anguish
There in that blaze of rebellion whence England recoiled with fatigue?
Was it for this that thy loathing the rancours of slavery slaughtered?
Thus canst thou waste thine Antietam? Thy Gettysburg squander disfamed?

Once through the harp of thine honour great winds of democracy wandered,
Straining to thunders aeolian the strength of its eloquent strings.

158

Why unto earth hast thou flung it and shattered the might of its music?
Why from the oak of its framework hast lighted the bonfires of greed?

Spirits of Washington, Lincoln, and throngs of thy patriot helpers,
Quicken their dust at thine outrage and scan thee with spectral rebuke;
Faithless Republic, thou quenchest the stars that have burned on thy banners,
Leaving the stripes but as emblems of scorn that thy body should bear!

Thou that for safeguard and shelter from stains of monarchial stigmas
Fledst where new skies might envault thee, new breezes pour balm on thy breast,
Thou to dare envy the ravage of empire that once thou contemnedst,
Craving with terrible famine thine own Finlands, Polands, and Cretes!

Thou that hast loomed for thy lovers in wisdom's large warless aloofness,
Thou that wert so statuesquely the world's one republic erewhile,
Thou to stretch arms across ocean, where far-away Philippines cluster,
Babbling the shibboleths ancient of ‘destiny,’ ‘progress’ and ‘trade’!

159

Name it by what name thou choosest—protectiveness, guidance, or pity,
Suzerainty's resolute vigil, fraternity's bountiful aid;
Lust for the lucre of conquest and arrogance trampling the vanquished—
These are the names that thy barter should glare with while truth remains truth.

Ah, the old story—we know it! From king-beguiled priest-ridden Europe,
On through the ages it echoes: the weak overswept by the strong—
Vultures of plunder and cunning, in ‘civilisation's’ false plumage,
Fierce for the signs to dismantle its flesh from slain liberty's bones!

1901.

160

THE ENIGMA

Sweeps of mellowing prairie, soaked with suns and rains;
Breadths of patriarch forest never an axeblow stains;
Wreaths of radiant rivers, marged with fecund soil;
Miles of houseless farmland, hungering for man's toil;
Troops of sovereign mountains, rich with precious ore;
Droves of game that scamper, flocks that float or soar;
Nature's hand so bounteous!—Yet (whate'er it means!)
Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars
For the Philippines!

Factories crammed with craftsfolk, deft at spools and looms;
Mines where grisly thousands delve in sullen glooms;
Fields where stalwart scythemen crop the lissome wheat;
Seas where tawny fishers urge the fruitful fleet;
Bred and reared and slaughtered, swarms of swine and kine;
Orchards orbed with apples, grapes that whelm their vine;
Largess poured from Labour!—Yet (whate'er it means!)
Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars
For the Philippines!

161

In the mightiest city that our New World rears
Bribery stalking lawless, justice choked with jeers;
Washingtonian Senates fouled by guileful tricks;
Halls of court and council smeared with politics;
Money and honour fighting—strong that fights with frail;
Patriotism at auction, statesmanship for sale;
Civic avarice rampant—Yet (whate'er it means!)
Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars
For the Philippines!

School, asylum and sick-house yet forlornly few;
Mercy in anguish pleading for the dole her due;
Throngs of ragged children lean from famine's irk;
Many a sturdy workman craving honest work;
Widow and orphan helpless, age from comfort shorn;
Dark disease rank-flowering where in filth 'twas born;
Plenty and want still battlers—Yet (whate'er it means!)
Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars
For the Philippines!

162

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Avert, my country, from thine ear the voice
That urges empire as thy chance or choice.
Shame on the demagogues who plan thy doom
Till foul with sophistries their senates fume.
No sibyl yet among thy natal stars
Hath leagued thy destiny with kings and czars.
What boon or bourne could flattering conquest pledge
Thee whose enormity two oceans edge?
Nay, when at last, war's hells of gloom withdrawn,
White peace brings daybreak whiter than earth's dawn,
Set Cuba free, if such thy civic mood,
Yet claim no tribute save her gratitude.
Quit Asian waves; let Europe's prides and spleens
Bicker like minnows round the Philippines.
Tell Spain what heartless tactics thy soul shuns
Of Alexanders and Napoleons;
Reveal to her there is one land this hour
Lured by no lust of territorial power;
Teach her thy troops (though churlish be her thanks)
Have drummed old veteran Greed from out their ranks.

Flaunt not, Republic, from thy victory won
Coarse triumphs to the unsympathetic sun.

163

Hermit of nations let them call thee still;
Hermits at least for bloodshed have no will.
Agrarianism in menace let them cite;
Vast houseless plains thy tillage yet invite.
For lordlier commerce let them prate and plead—
Meaning monopoly's brute maw to feed. ...
Dear land, whose promises were half divine,
Shalt thou to deeps of sordidness decline?
About the calms and grandeurs of thy shape
Tradition's purples deign once more to drape.
Vulgar imperialism should vainly thrall
Thee whose ideals were so imperial.
The gladdest pæan of battle, thou shalt own,
Has merely for its echo an orphan's moan;
Though mightful be the warrior's pluck or grit,
The widow's heartbreak may outmeasure it.
A thousand slaughterous fields thou shouldst command
Hereafter, but with unensanguined hand;
A thousand batteries where the foe fights hard
Thy cannonades of wisdom should bombard.
And when to science and intellect low bow
The last of all the inimic legions, thou
Monarchical for motherhood mayst be,
Gathering thy children round thy mighty knee.

How falls it, O my country, that the schemes
Of avarice tempt with these ignoble dreams?
Would that my verse, in hatred of such wrong,
Might flash from every line a sword of song!
Would that my words, this madness to arraign,
Were squadrons and battalions of disdain!

164

Would that my grief might drown, for untold years,
This rash fatuity with tides of tears!
Yet few the bards from whose firm lips are borne
Miltonic thunder, Juvenalian scorn;
And in thy peril fate allots my strain
Only the weak prerogative of pain. ...
Yet still this unction to unrest I lay—
The shadow hath stolen, but it will not stay.
For now, even now, while doubt and dread are sore,
I hear strange melodies wax more and more,
That bode through all my spirit's listening scope
Tempestuous music from the harp of hope!

July 1898.

165

THE SULTAN'S JUBILEE

Strange are these plaudits thy foul reign begets,
When fitlier all Gehenna might discuss
With glee demoniac thine iniquitous
Annals of agonies and bloody sweats.
Insurgently the soul of progress frets
To mark eulogium's blasphemy deck thus
Thy City of Shame, where the blue Bosphorus
Reduplicates her domes and minarets.

Murder and slavery at thy jubilee
Shall riot unseen—the assassinated shapes
Of many a martyr wail unheard their woes!
And when thy revel is done, Polygamy
Shall guide thee at dawn, gross Abdul, where sin drapes
With poisonous purples thy seraglios!

166

TO NIKOLA TESLA

If power and confidence were wed as one
In thy bold search o'er that far heavenward track,
Renown as dominant thou shouldst not lack
As all that fable on her dim loom hath spun.
Thou shouldst be held in high communion
With him Caucasian agonies did wrack;
With Atlas, pondering Earth on his huge back;
Or even Apollo, charioting the sun.

Yet ah, too venturous, though man's toil may wrest
Rich ores and gems from his dull globe's domain
And bid their smothered light subservient shine,
What mortal here, when spiritual his quest,
Hath pick or spade that shall not quarry in vain
Those blue vaults of Eternity's vast mine?

167

LINCOLN LOQUITUR

I

Sternly the spirit of Lincoln speaks from the vague inane:
‘Hear me and heed, O my children, me for the love of you slain!
Whence is the wild war-madness, thralling your brains and souls?
Where have your footsteps wandered, scornful of wisdom's goals?
Was it for this that my starlight glittered while hurricanes raved?
Was it for this that I served you? Was it for this that I saved?
How should your impulse and purport lapse to such paltrier gain?
Hear me and heed, O my children, me for the love of you slain!

II

‘When amid frenzies of faction shuddered and shouted our land,
Slavery's curse from its annals tore I with terrible hand.
Postured sublimely unselfish, earth should envisage at last
You, the one perfect Republic, found after venturings vast.

168

Closer I burned to rebuild you—pediment, girder, and cope—
Fervid with dreams of your future, high as my haughtiest hope.
Such was your prophesied splendour. ... Weak does it falter and wane?
Hear me and heed, O my children, me for the love of you slain!

III

‘What of the bondsmen I rescued? Can ye so lightly forget
Wrong that of old was their durance, wrong that to-day is your debt?
These from the blight of their bondage have ye upraised so supreme
That in remote isles of ocean others ye fain would redeem?
Yonder, unbarred from debasement, scourged by the lashes of caste,
Look to your true “Filipinos,” heirs of an infamous past!
Let not your lips laud as martyr him whom your actions profane;
Hear me and heed, O my children, me for the love of you slain!’

September 1899.

169

INGERSOLL DEAD

What ails the blue of day, the mirth of birds,
The pomps of dawn and evening, the high calms
Of night's miraculous gardens flowered with stars?
Why sobs the ocean sadlier, and why laugh
Less jocundly its bright innumerous lips?
What spell hath stolen the emerald from the turf,
And made the majesty of mountains loom
Lowlier?

It is the loss that sears our souls;
It is not nature sorrowing; it is we!
Nature, in mindless mechanism superb,
Neither laments nor yet doth she rejoice.
Nay, she but takes the tints, chameleon-wise,
Of our own agony, while we stretch void arms
For him that yesterday sublimely was!

August 1899.

170

THE AMERICAN ELECTIONS

November 8, 1898

Sweet urn of poesy by Petrarca wrought,
The lily or rose of his rare love to rear,
Presumptuous do I choose thy sculptures clear
To shrine this gaudier passion-flower of thought.
Still, though in petal and calix it is fraught
With fire whose vehemence might scorch and sear,
Even hate hath moods when she is love's compeer,
When sorrow an equal task to both has taught.

Nay, wert thou not, my country, dear through dower
Of acts that diamond from thine annals glow,
To applaud or to upbraid thee were as one.
But now? Ah, shame for lust of needless power,
Shame for gross treachery to a fallen foe,
Shame for this rank jeer at thy Washington!

171

PRIDE OF NATIONS

Pride of nations, work your will
While its powers are in their prime,
Hedge it round with tact and skill,
Paint it fair in prose and rhyme;
Tinge it gaudier than the slime
That red battlefields distil;
Stain it with the gold you spill
Brighter than the daffodil;
Work your will; yet—War is crime.

Pride of nations, work your will;
Bid its fiery meanings chime
With an epic charm sublime—
Teach your eloquence to thrill
Gathered throngs in many a clime;
Wrest from words, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’
Their appropriate sense, until
Conscience, grown a dexterous mime,
Raiments good in robes of ill—
Work your will; yet—War is crime.

172

Pride of nations, work your will—
Cleanliness was never grime;
Chaste the woodland's crystal rill;
Gross the swine and rank the swill;
Pure the pasture's clustering thyme;
Foul the swamp and fresh the hill—
Pride of nations, work your will;
Save all heaven's fleet stars grow still,
One stern truth shall bide through time:
War is crime.

173

TO ZOLA IN EXILE

Weaver of tales that thrill the world
With fearless fact in art's rare guise,
What wonder your disdain is hurled
On treason's labyrinth of lies?

Nay, from your own proud fame you tore
The safe insignia of its pride,
And chose the brand your country bore
In patriot passion to deride.

All wars you loathe, but chiefly these
Where scorpion guile would sting and fell;
And when your pitying spirit sees
Poor Dreyfus in his island hell,

Old memories haunt you, crimson-streaked
With brute mediæval brawls of class,
With martyrdoms insanely wreaked
On Ghetto and on Judenstrasse.

‘Give this man liberty,’ you cry,
‘Reft of its boon by rogue and cheat,’
While starlike burns your poignant eye
Through fogs of forgery and deceit.

174

But ah, too idly falls your breath
(With mercy, entreaty, wisdom rife)
On souls for whom steel, blood and death
Are creeds and litanies of life.

Zola, the France wherewith you wrest
Adores to-day at hate's black shrine;
Sedan still rankles in her breast,
She drinks revenge's dizzying wine.

Vainly doth Justice rear the scales
Your grand zeal strives to poise aright.
Alas, the heavier sword prevails;
The honour of your land weighs light!

Still, bide your time, with droopless brow;
In pain and exile, bide your time; ...
This France you love hath known ere now
Repentances that were sublime.

Truth groans already in its drugged sleep;
Your haughtiest foes fate snares and slaves;
The mirk and mire they dig so deep
Are their own ignominious graves!

September 1898.

175

AFRICA AD EUROPAM

Here for milleniads my immensity
Hath cloven the waters of the world and stretched
South from that sea of story and song to where
Welter, like thresholds of the infinite,
Surges that break upon the Antarctic Pole.
Ere through the granite of my loins had thronged
Sphinxes and obelisks that once were Thebes,
Were Karnak, I was old in memories.
The Pyramids are but my yesterdays;
The Ptolemies that many an age have lain
Shrivelling among their spice and linens, count
Only as upstarts from the soil I clasp.
And yet thou, Europe, wouldst invade me thus,
Thou that from Norway sheer to Greece my realm
Could compass, while it spared for surplusage
A continent Australia ill might match!
Why hast thou left me not, O Malcontent,
Sovereign of this my heritage from time?
Barbarian though I be, barbarianism
Is part and parcel of me, my nature's growth,
Heightening toward phases that the future stores
In mystery. Not by hest and hurry of thine
Should bud to flower be forced, or flower to fruit.
Nay, long I have watched thee from afar, with stare
Of wonderment, thou Europe, whose past swarms

176

One rhythm of vermin! Thou, whose tyranny
Of avarice, pride, voluptuousness, deceit
I have gazed on with abhorrence, thou to uplift
My savages, who hast thyself scarce found
Humanitarianism's mere fundaments!
Look to thine England, soaked in pauperdom;
Look to thy France, democracy's burlesque;
Look to thy Germany, a swagger of swords;
Look to thine Austria, torn with feuds and spites;
Thine Italy, a braggadocio armed;
Thy Spain, a corpse on horseback, like her Cid!
Thou thus to have lessoned me, thou riot of spleens,
Wrangling since Attila! Why hast thou dared
Pour this the mockery of thy tutelage
Among my lions and serpents and gazelles,
My deserts where thy London were a speck,
My forests that in gloom could sepulchre
Scores of thy Parises, my leagues of lakes,
My majesties of mountains, my repose
Of pampa or swamp, whose flat rims cleave the flames
Dawn lights or sunset lulls, my glory and grace
Of rivers, and my cataracts—altars raised
Heavenward in scintillance, with haze of pearl
For incense? Fain my Genius would attend
Undesecrate the centuries' doles of doom,
Here girt with swarthy myriads, men like thine.
Fain unmolestedly would I live out
The individuality of my lot.
Thou hast achieved thy destiny. For me
It flares all folly and failure. I mine own
Would solve unmarred. Back, tamperer, to thy brawls!

177

THE BATTLE SONG OF PEACE

I saw, in a dream of the years to be, how Peace, with her gaze aglow,
Shall throne herself on a throne too firm for earthquakes to overthrow.

I heard how the chords of her great gold harp shall wait on her white hand's flash,
With music now like the break of a brook and now like the whirlwind's crash.

Then her voice, in my vision, skyward soared, with sublimity of release,
And she sang me her song that the world awaits. 'Twas the Battle Song of Peace.

‘Day had come. Fate spoke. No tarriance, now; no manœuvre of shift and screen;
Only two vast armies face to face, with a vast bare plain between.

‘Ere the reddening east from startled stars their last vague silver stole,
I unsheathed my sword, bade our clarions play and our drums defiance roll.

178

‘At the enemy's lines full speed we plunged; they marked us, intent to spring;
And then, while the lurid sun lurched up, did our battle reel and ring.

‘My troops of Charity massed their might as the great gales mass the tide,
And shoulder to shoulder poured hot shot on the ranks of Civic Pride.

‘With homespun serge o'er their stout young hearts, my hordes of Humanity dashed
At the dainty and picked-out clans of Caste, white-gauntleted, silken-sashed.

‘Sharpshooters all were the soldieries of Ambition, Hate and Greed;
They sidled rearward, they slipped like snakes, while scattering deadly seed.

‘But the Warriors Born were bolder far; they pushed us with haughty stress,
Till shelled by our batteries on the heights, from Fort Loving-Kindliness.

‘To Order and Wisdom and Law, staunch Aides, I would murmur my brief commands,
And lightning-like would they leap to obey through our smoke-entangled bands.

179

‘The Makers of Money from Politics were a cohort fierce and foul,
But our Makers of Money from Honest Toil held chat with them, cheek by jowl.

‘The Cut-Throats Commercial were firm at first, but we routed them till they ran,
With our big battalions of Peace on Earth, our brigades “Good Will to Man.”

‘Then at last from a woodside's muffling boughs, on their steeds that reared and neighed,
The Scorners of Arbitration rushed, an imperious cavalcade.

‘“Have at them!” I heard old Justice cry, through the fitful dins and flares,
And his horsemen, bannered “Thou Shalt not Kill,” came thundering thick on theirs.

‘All the air clashed, roared; it was wrath against wrath, it was frenzy with frenzy at bay;
They were fighting to keep the whole world in their clutch; we were fighting to tear it away.

‘In our strength we trusted, yet dared not exult, for we knew them a host grim, strong;
And we knew that though ours was the right, still the right had too oft been crushed by the wrong.

180

‘So the turmoils of onslaught grew terribler yet, while from zenith to verge day passed,
And I wondered its globe did not pause for sheer awe, and like Joshua's watch us aghast.

‘But by eve strife ended; the conquest was ours; all opponents that yet lived had fled. ...
As I leaned on my sword in the dimness I heard many voices that called “War is Dead.”

‘Then they brought me to where archangelic he lay, on a sweep of the blood-soaked sod,
With the hilt of a shattered blade in his hand, with the brows and brawn of a god.

‘And I stooped, stung by pity, beside his grand form, while the zephyrs of twilight veered south,
And I that am woman, I, Peace, laid my lips on his cruel and beautiful mouth.

‘And I said: “Throw about him the purples of pomp: let his tomb like a king's be built;
Let the fame of his courage be legended clear, but forbear to emblazon his guilt.”

‘Nay, to them that grouped round me with marvelling looks, from the deeps of my pity I said:
“Though alive I have loathed him through thousands of years, thus I pardon him now, being dead!”‘

181

THE YELLOW DANGER

O Europe, that so long hath spent thy spleen
In tough trans-barrier battlings, till no peace
Has thriven secure, from Denmark sheer to Greece,
Past all thy heavens of hills and grandeurs green,
Beware this menace, dire and unforeseen,
That big with rally of onslaught, ere it cease,
Calamitous through thy lands, at fate's caprice,
Mongolian millions wildly would convene!

Half yours the blame, Britannia, and half yours,
Omnivorous Russia, since your greeds dared wake
These torpid swarms to furious flame of ill!
Yet shun Japan's conciliatory lures,
Lest she, the old kith of China, turn and make
This loathsome Yellow Danger yellower still!

July 1900.

182

SOCIALISM

Mould me a thousand men who shall together bide
Harmoniously for ten staunch years, whate'er betide.
Let them to love's large creed secure obedience bring;
From envy and malice freed, from egotism's cold sting,
Let them to avarice, pride and fraud unwavering challenge fling.

Let them, in reverent mood, each for the other toil,
One mutual gain of good their victory and their spoil.
With neither plaint nor pause, though strenuous tasks dismay,
To self-surrendering laws let them allegiance pay;
Let them break bread with life the ideal fraternal way.

When these ten crucial years have proved these thousand men
Impervious to all jeers of sarcasm's tongue or pen,—
Have watched them struggle uncowed for honour's height and might,—
Let faith's glad lips cry loud, ‘I have seen, with raptured sight,
Sepulchral darkness flower at last in pure prophetic light!’

183

Yet while the unravelled skein of human wrong persists,
Even such weak test were vain, precipitate Socialists!
The goals your gaze descries prodigious barriers block;
Till your Utopias rise, great throes our world shall shock.
The hours are centuries long on hope's millennial clock.

184

THE CZAR'S MESSAGE

Wake from a thousand thunderbolts one crash
Win from a thousand lightning-strokes one flash
Revive, in ravages of blasts and rains,
The uproar of a century's hurricanes;
Let earthquake, locked by slumber from alarms,
Yawn yet again with subterranean arms;
Bid pest and famine riot anew; make all
A single concentrated blow to appal
Our world;—and still such magnitude of might
Were weak beside the amazement, the affright,
The opprobrium, eulogy, disdain or joy
Wrought in an hour by this Imperial Boy.

From lands that despotism and slavery sear,
What means his heavenly heart-cry, pealing clear?
Aghast we marvel at the work so grand
That fate's miraculous mystery hath planned.
Though oft her whims be wayward, sharp her shocks,
Why daze us with such dizzying paradox? ...
Is this the Russia that we knew erewhile,
Knouts in her frown and sabres in her smile?
Whose ruffian dynasty of sovereigns rose
Crime-crowned and ermined by Siberian snows?

185

Whose thrones were scaffolds, and who shaped her laws
Taloned with terror, like her bear's black paws?
In galleries of whose palaces would lurk
Assassination with its butchering dirk?
The rubies of whose Urals were not more
Than blood-drops on her torture-chamber's floor?
Whose halls of justice were a dungeon's hells,
Whose juries were its Moujik sentinels?
Whose Alexanders, Katharines, Pauls, Ivàns
Gave every sin full freedom, yet slew man's?

Ah, never yet, sage history, hast thou known
Figs thus from thorns or grapes from thistles grown!
In vain, philosophy, shall thy best lore
This radiant inconsistency explore!
Yet even as through a swamp's dark reek of mire
Some lily of taintless petal may aspire,
So climbs through tyranny's gross mirk and bane
The power and splendour of a soul humane.
At last we read on destiny's dim scroll
What empire may an emperor control,
And thrilled through earth's five continents we see
An autocrat's divine autocracy.
Heed it or scorn, ye kings whose prides and fears
With death have barricaded your frontiers;
Heed it or scorn, abuzz like broods of gnats,
Ye deft and oleaginous diplomats;
Heed it or scorn, ye money-gorging mess,
Who coin from slaughter your percentages;
Heed it or scorn, ye politicians wise,
Who garb self-worship in a patriot's guise;

186

Heed it or scorn, ye concourse near and far,
Who feast like vultures on the woes of war,
And quaff with thirst unsated from their flood
Inebriant vintages of tears and blood!
Heed it or scorn. ... Howe'er with subtlest mien
Procrastination on her crutch may lean;
Howe'er expediency, like some coy lass,
May attitudinise before her glass;
Howe'er sly sophistry, with leer of ice,
Clicks or manipulates his loaded dice;
Howe'er all hindrance, massed and interblent,
Grow mountainous in its impediment,
Still shall this Message, rich with sacred cheers,
Lend ardour to the iconoclastic years,
And bid them, at some future hour's glad reign,
Cleanse from all nations' brows the Brand of Cain.

Oct. 4, 1898.

187

ANARCHY

Out of your own black records, reeking with shame and sham,
Ye have wrought me, O nations of Europe, the leprous thing that I am.

Aloof in humanity's twilight, where kings and gods were as one,
I was born like the swine that wallow, like the moles that slink from sun.

Raw feudalism begot me, with shuddering fear for mate;
I was rocked in my cradle by squalor and my swaddling-gear was hate.

Through the dark mediæval decades, forgot amid mirk and ruck,
An infant, a giant, a monster, despair from its dugs gave me suck.

I was earthy and yet was I spirit, demoniac and yet was I meek,
While the vulture of degradation in my vitals would plunge its beak.

188

Even thus lying helpless, I waited, alone with my fiery tears,
Unaware how I won slow vigour from the stealthy and strengthening years.

Yet the pageants of history passed me as I writhed in my lair of mud,
All their purples of arrogance flaunted, and their crimsons ablaze with blood.

I beheld how the backs of the people were branded with scar upon scar
From the curses of caste, from the curses of greed, from the curses of war.

And at last I arose, I exulted, with my hardihood fostered of time,
An Anguish by anguish made potent, a Crime procreated by crime.

If ye ask me my purport what boots it your heed on my answer to hang?
Do they question the cobra where found he the venom that leaps from his fang?

Can ye tear the foul fume from corruption, or cleanse from dishonour the stain?
To a tiger your logic is lifeless, to a viper your maxims are vain.

189

When ye slay in your own souls their evil, my infamies then shall ye slay;
I am sin that man sinned through the ages; I am sin that he still sins to-day.

And like dews below noons I shall perish, when shall perish from lands that they mar
The curses of caste and the curses of greed and the curses of war.

And while these are yet regnant and rampant, in my veins their vile spell shall not die;
Nay, while these o'er the world loom colossal, the shadow of them shall be I!

October 20, 1898.

190

THE FORBIDDEN CITY

Not holy of holies were your sitting name—
Profanest of profanities were best,
O lair whence long toward heaven hath reeked the pest
Of crime concentrate, of sequestered shame!
But now spoliation pours its tardy flame
On garden, temple and throne with equal zest;
Violation poniards now through each rash breast
The inviolabilities you dare to claim.

So, City of Arrogance, your vauntful sway
Hath vanished from below the insulted sky
That long too leniently endured its den.
And lo, you have learned at last in what sure way
Nations that scorn their fellow-nations die,
Cursed like the men who scorn their fellow-men.

1900.

191

PEACE INDIGNANT

I weary of all this moving to and fro,
This welcome and exile, thraldom and release.
To-day I am throned a queen; to-morrow, lo,
My dignities lie whelmed in overthrow—
From sovereignty my crown and sceptre cease.

Shame, bitter shame, ye people of ampler mind,
My shivering spirit now to wrench and rack,
As once, in thought's dim twilight, centuries back,
While plaintless to barbarianism resigned,
I bore your ribaldries demoniac.

Hope dawned for me when Egypt, India, Greece
Flowered out from brutish darkness, and when Rome
At her wise councils gave me help and home—
Nay, built me as Divinity of Peace
Temples with pillared porch and stainless dome.

Yet ah, she worshipped me in name—no more!
Her smoking tripods were the flare of fools,
Her homage was the speech an idiot drules;
She blotched my robes with desecrating gore,
With battle invaded my pure vestibules.

192

At last in its immensity Rome fell,
Scourged of the Christ whose lash was love alone. ...
I reared my head, bound firmer my gold zone,
And murmuring to my glad heart ‘All is well,’
Dreamed that war's foul vans were for ever flown.

Mockery of promise! I have proved, since then,
With pain whose ache dealt many a throb and pang,
Those perfidies whence my delusion sprang;
I have learned how ‘peace on earth, good will to men’
With but the hypocrisy of braggarts rang.

What wonder that from these tumultuous veins
Meekness and tolerance alike ye scare,
O giddy and greedy nations that still dare
To insult your Prince of Peace, through all his fanes,
With sarcasms and with blasphemies of prayer?

Nay, mother and wife and daughter, how shall fail
Your agony while hideous hates intrigue
To fire it, and so fiercely against it league? ...
For me, my pity and wrath and scorn prevail,
Even though I falter with a god's fatigue.

193

THE FALLEN CAMPANILE

As one that draws the drapery from a face
Where some great painter's power hath sought to crush
The souls of lily and rose in one rare blush
Of heavenly womanhood, I seem to trace
Ethereal hands that tenderly displace
Memory's dull veils, till o'er my spirit rush
Tumultuous dreams of Venice, with her flush
Of beauty and pomp, her grandeurs robed in grace.

Folded for ever by the sweet caress
Of arms that from the blue auxiliar sea
Glide up to engird and clasp her as their own,
O flower of cities, with pale palaces
And glitter of waves for petals, can it be
That time thy glorious crest hath overthrown?

September 1902.

194

THE NEGRO LYNCHINGS

Blacker the crime, I grant, than his black skin,
O ye who hale him to hot penances.
And yet he is man—though bestial, still is man,
And law was made for man, however large
May tower his turpitude. The strength and right
Of Justice in her scales and bandaged eyes
Hold sanctuary, and when from hand or brow
Ye ravish these, the insignia of her rule,
Forthwith ye have turned her fragile as a reed.
Throne in her place Revenge, if so ye will,
With torture for its minion. What avails?

Lo, placid History plucks ye by the sleeve. ...
Who is this monster that your blasts of wrath
Buffet so furiously? Bid patience track
With rearward look his paths of pedigree.
In Africa, through shades of giant fern,
To some near verge of ocean spired with palms,
A youth strayed careless from his playfellows,
When suddenly ambushed captors leapt on him,
And felled his body, and leashed his limbs, and gagged

195

His mouth, and rowed him where a bark hugged shore—
That scorpion of the sea, their slave-ship! Here
In filth and fetor many a night and day
Of anguish did he toss, moan, supplicate.
Then came release, though slavery brought its boon!
And on through generations born of him
Did slavery linger. Who but knows the tale?
Whittier's melodious muse hath sung it us,
The oratory of Summer phrased it us,
The guns of Grant and Sherman roared it us,
And yet with mightier meaning than all these,
The martyrdom of Lincoln left it us!
A zephyr, and not a whirlwind, shall we reap
When once we have sown the wind? Who dares to dream
That ignorance and abasement breed their kind
Unsmirched? O ye that with the autocracy
Of lawlessness would cloak yourselves, beware!
Punishment shorn of justice rates ye all
A bevy of mere assassins, who defame
The freedom that your sires' blood-sacrifice
Inviolable should keep.

Ah, yes, we know
Your grievance to its hideous depth and height.
But these no longer are the days that robe
Precipitate passion with spectacular
Tinsels of dignity. Each thrust of blade,
Each glittering fagot, each lewd jeer ye deal
The swart bound wretch who shrieks his vile life mute,
Infects your own souls with his bane of sin,

196

Rebrutalises there the brute benumbed
By civilisation, drags ye darkly back
To savagery whence life hath striven to steer
Your destinies, and swathes with ruffian fog
The august gold orb of wisdom's pilot star.

197

THE OLD CENTURY TO THE NEW

While feebly at last in my great soul has burned
That flame whose full resplendence did confer
Far mightier meeds than thrones and miniver
On generations that have here sojourned,
Oh thou, toward whose bright face hope's tides are turned,
I feel thy warm palm in this cold clasp stir,—
Cold as the long walls of that sepulchre
Where many a dead forefather lies inurned.

Farewell! I have sought with majesty to bear
My sceptre; shames and wrongs I have sought to kill;
Knowledge to feed;—lend virtue hardier girth.
Go, therefore, thou, mine offspring and mine heir;
With boons and benedictions costlier still,
Go grandly forth and greet the awaiting earth.

December 1900.

University of Virginia Library

WOLFE AT QUEBEC

September, 1759

THE OLD ACTOR

CONJECTURE

NATURE TO ART

PORTRAITS

I THE PRIG

II A FAILURE

III A KIND OF HYPOCRITE

IV AN OLD LADY

V A YOUNG GIRL

BURIALS

AUX INVALIDES

LUTE AND FLUTE

[I Fancy, my falcon, from this willing wrist]

II WHITE VIOLETS

[III I dreamed that Love came knocking]

IV BOUNDARY LINES

[V From its myriads mazy]

[VI In her bodice there were lilies of the valley]

VII BROWN EYES

[VIII In this green glade, at set of sun]

IX SYMPATHY

[X Girt by a meadow mirthful in flowers]

XI FLOWER GIRLS

XII INNUENDO

[XIII The flowers have their bold bees to woo them]

XIV EXTRAVAGANZA

XV FELICIA'S FAN

I

II

[XVI I am alone with you, Ellen Vane]

XVII SERENADE

XVIII SANCTUARY

BLUEBEARD'S CHAMBER

MONITIONS

TO A COQUETTE

TO A POET

TO A STATESMAN

AN EPITAPH

ASSOCIATION

THE AËRONAUT

THE OLD NOVELIST'S MONOLOGUE

DEI GRATIÂ

BASILICA SAN PIETRO

I

II

THE TWILIGHT OF POETRY

AN IDYL OF THE SLUMS

CONTEMPLATIONS

I ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

[II A thousand years ago]

III HOME-COMING

IV ENCOURAGEMENT

V HOLLYHOCKS

[VI O Prejudice, thou spider shrewd]

[VII There are three ways God might reveal Himself]

[VIII If, after many a year of cold eclipse]

[IX Imperious to the dying rose rang forth]

X A VISION OF PROGRESS

[XI To the ivy said the oak]

[XII We greet with quickening pulse the story]

XIII THE OUTLOOK

[XIV So many of us are dead before we die]

SLEEP AND DEATH

HYDE PARK ON SUNDAY

LOVE AT SCHOOL

ANTITHESES

ACTÆON

TO DANTE

SLANDER

ALLEGORY

TRIUMPH

THE DAWN OF ETHICS

WHOM THE GODS LOVE

POMPEII

HER STATUE

‘BLEST BE THAT PATRIOT’

LOVE'S LITTLE DIARY

I
THE PRIG

II
A FAILURE

III
A KIND OF HYPOCRITE

IV
AN OLD LADY

V
A YOUNG GIRL

II
WHITE VIOLETS

IV
BOUNDARY LINES

VII
BROWN EYES

IX
SYMPATHY

XI
FLOWER GIRLS

XII
INNUENDO

XIV
EXTRAVAGANZA

XV
FELICIA'S FAN

XVII
SERENADE

XVIII
SANCTUARY

I
ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

III
HOME-COMING

IV
ENCOURAGEMENT

V
HOLLYHOCKS

X
A VISION OF PROGRESS

XIII
THE OUTLOOK

I
CHORUS OF UNTHINKING TOILERS

II
CHORUS OF SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS

III
CHORUS OF THINKING TOILERS

IV
CHORUS OF EVERYDAY OPTIMISTS