University of Virginia Library

SECTION IV. Euphrasy and Rue.

SOUL SENSE.

A sense of something lost, a missing joy
Comes to me often
As I lightly toy
With pleasure, or the uttermost fine fringe
Of exquisite deep pain;
I strangely soften
And feel a touch, that may be even a twinge
Like sorrow or the aftermath of grief
Mature and mellow,
Stirring me within
Above the thought or wish of a relief.
Is it some vanished fellow
Or a fond
Old playmate, who was close to me akin,
In wider worlds most beautiful and fair;
Whose memory haunts me from a bliss beyond,
Like a calm crowned despair?
It hardly troubles
And yet it takes my heart, expands the sky
That is the heaven of hope
Unbounded in its majesty and scope,
And sweetly doubles
The meaning of our dim ambiguous life,
To rapture joined and yet with suffering rife,
And breathes through all my blood Eternity.
What is it,
The strong pull of Powers afar,
Which upward draw
Past yoke of earthly law
My soul, and thus with no infrequent visit
Then leave for me the golden gates ajar?
But nothing clear,
And nothing sound or certain
Results, however sweet
And dread and near
The sense with sound of tinkling angel feet—
Drops on the dawning sight a misty curtain.
And I confess—
Bear with my folly, brother—
I have at times, what words cannot express,
The feeling I am other
Than my comrades here
In mould and measure and aspiring heart,
And do inhale a different atmosphere—
A thing apart.
It is not vulgar pride,
Which lifts me up to glory's giddy tops
And puffs my vanity,
Or with idle sops
Feeds me and fills me to a wild inanity—
The world goes on its way, I stand aside.
I have a hidden faith,
A firm assurance
Of higher steps and holier ancestry
Above mere lineage royal and the wraith
Of earth that lack endurance,
And a birth
That reaches out to all Infinity,
Not spanned by any fortune's splendid girth.
My fashion is not what it seems,
A lot
Deformed by many a narrow bound or blot
And as my neighbour deems,
But orbits vast
With a grand Future and as grand a Past.
I was pre-destined to a princely state,
Perchance not here, but in a goodly land;
To sit upon a throne
And not alone,
But with co-equals in a dazzling fate
And the great custom of command.
I know
Within me, I was born for nothing less
Than perfectness,
Which now I cannot live
In the pale shadow of the Truth below;
I have a high prerogative
And aim;
Which in the fulness of the rounded times
And richer climes,
I shall in triumph claim.
Meanwhile, these thoughts, that well nigh break my heart
With passion more than love,
Are a sweet witness
Unto the precious title-deeds above,
And my clear fitness
For a wider part.

MY BED.

Mingled of dew and dreams and roses
With all delightful scents,
And married to delicious poses
While broad as continents;
Wrapt round with sweetest maiden kisses
Like music to the ears,
And on the edge of soft abysses
That tremble into tears;
O'erarched by whatso'er is good
And calm and exquisite,
The tender warmth of womanhood
And patience infinite;
Lapt in the love that dwells for ever
In faithful hearts and wise,
The bloom of beauty and endeavour
Up to the starry skies;
Cradled in shadows of the even
And yet with morning rays,
The best of earth, the most of heaven,
And summer nights and days;
Based firm on an eternal seat,
A lotus land of rest,
And swaying to the Kosmic beat
As on a mother's breast.

CRADLE SONG.

WHAT IS LIFE?

CUCKOO.

ETERNAL CORRESPONDENCE.

Ah, one by one these fetters as they break
Though soft as silk and precious as the gold
And sweet as heart-strings, yet are fetters still,
Which bind me to the earth I have outlived
And all outgrown. My spirit frets within,
It chafes at even the very charms of life
And feels the angel wings, that gently flutter
For larger circuits and serener air,
And fain would rise and spread themselves abroad
On wider and undreamed of spaces. Time
Drops from me like a garment old, moth-eaten,
And far too small for this consuming fire
Which thirsts and thirsts for full eternity
And cannot, will not be assuaged with less.
Flesh is a burden and a bondage now,
And not as erst a proud empalacement
With avenues of joy on every side
Expanding freely to whate'er is good,
And letting in the gladsome influences
Which make and shake to beautiful fine form
The world within to be the world without
But more. I weary of this anchorage
And restless roadstead, and I would unmoor
My sense-bound soul and voyage out alone
Into the awful silences. I see,
I know the waxing wonderment of things,
And long to rend the coloured veil that dazzles
But yet deludes not with mysteriousness
A steadfast faith, and errs not from defect
But its excess of vision and vast light.
I am the sport of dim disharmonies
Here, and I darkly reach towards realms above,
Beyond, outside this murky mortal state
Now, till I win the fair enfranchisements
Of bliss and being somehow fixed for me
And somewhere, past the idle mocking mists
On these gray shores with their unsheltered harbours.
And surely each strange appetency strong,
Which stirs the mind and in the haunted heart
Beats out low music, is a certain sign
And murmur of a real foreshadowing
Of richer dreams and rarer destinies,
In final blossom of the act and fact.
I do believe—I will be sure of this—
Our noblest feelings do not trick or thwart
The pilgrim bound and battling for the Truth,
With girded mind and staff of stout resolve,
And like to like must correspond for ever.

THE THEOTEKTONES.

Delay me not, nor ban me, as I build—
Who work for nothing less than for all time,
As one (though most unworthy) of the Guild
And goodly craftsmen sealed through every clime,
The separate holy Makers. We are few
But strong and steadfast, and our work is one;
To fashion Him we name with awed dim breath,
Heart of our life and hidden Soul of death
With sweetest loveliest things, the fire and dew
And thought that into deed could not be done
But yet is vaster; thus to lift Him high,
Embodied in our prayer and praise, and clothed
With dazzling terror bitted and brought nigh
As to a natural consuetude of calm,
Among rich bounties in their region blest.
To this we labour, plucking out of storm
The beautiful dear bosom of white rest,
And rapture bred of sorrow and betrothed
To silence. From the passion of the palm,
Which out of ashes climbs to fairer form
We borrow bloom and resurrection dress,
With shyness of the evening shadows draped,
And by the touch of tears and magic shaped
Of light and love to everlastingness.
For He, of whom we speak with reverent song,
Hath for the world no outwardness of aim
Nor might nor meaning, till the arms that can
Externalize (if by imperfect plan)
The Truth with which the earth has travailed long,
And cast in statued strength its righteous claim;
Or paint by pictures of unfading hue
Guesses of one that flowers in rose and rue.
There is no God for men, unless we make
Him breathe and move and burn beneath the glow
Of urgent hands, that kindle and compel
To visible and varied substance. We
Conflict with giant forces that rebel
Idly, and earthquake shocks arise and shake
Not the clear purpose in its tidal flow,
To set the Prisoner of the Ages free
For act and utterance. Taught in different schools
The same grand lesson, we are only tools
To raise the lid which coffins as with doubt
The jewel swathed in sweetest mystery
And noontide night of old Eternity,
Till art unriddling lets the secret out.
So we Theourgoi toil and watch and weep,
Each at his post and with anointed part
In every land and time, to body Him
Who but for us would in eternal sleep
Lie as a fountain frozen at the heart,
And never wake and overflow its brim.
We make Him live, the Beautiful, the Best,
And draw from secret wells the murmuring stream
Which winds about the bases of all things
And yields the sap by which they flower and fruit;
We upward raise, till it is manifest
And robed in radiance, the inspiring dream
Above these baubles and the vulgar bruit
Of animal pleasures and vain perishings,
The clue in clouds. The maskèd miracle,
Below the tricksy surface of our stage;
Implicit even in mire that splashes up
And is to seers an hourly parable,
A rainbowed wonder and a haunting hope;
We do reveal, and read the blotted page
Writ in the legend of the carven cup,
The ampler duty and abounding scope.
A thousand thousand veils are on the Light,
The luminous Darkness, many an ancient scroll
And mighty script of bard, or fearful fane
August, and periods like a weather vane
That left at least some promise in their flight;
And we, by solemn symbols, do unroll
Farther and farther the tremendous Truth
Which lends the Kosmos its perpetual youth.
O here and there and everywhere the Fact
Lurks, for the eyes that have a loftier look
And piece from fancy or phenomenon
Or broken words or antique vessel crackt,
Now measured pomp of some poetic book,
Now marvels in a pillared Parthenon;
And in them each a broader earth and sky,
With the dread Presence of Divinity.
Behold! ye that enjoy the Vision pure
If but a fragment of its vastness, how
The grandeur of the Ineffable is mixed
With melody in all our mortal stuff,
Immortal, and is the one gift secure;
That cannot be unfashioned or unfixed,
And chimes in answer to the changeless vow
Sweet balm as medicine to man's brute rebuff.
And we the Master Builders, south and north,
By scattered rays and gems converging still
And with the same white clear unswerving will
Create the God we darkly utter forth.
And generations yet unborn shall reap
Of the rich harvest which we may not taste
And riot in its glorious wealth, or waste
The golden ears and count the blessing cheap;
While children's children, entering in of right,
Do dwell beneath the Shadow that is Light.

THE GOD-MAKERS.

IMPERIUM IN TABERNÂ.

UNLOVELY AGE.

Unlovely Age, which makes dead things so fair,
Dims these dark eyes and bleaches this brown hair
That children fondled once and women chose
To toy with, while the gallant careless pose
Is gone for ever. Life, that bubbled out
And leapt the giant walls of fear or doubt
From overflowing fountains in me, strong,
And set to music as a bridal song,
Now freezes at its source. The joy, the spell
Of youth that rose the higher if it fell,
Sleeps on in sullen ashes with no fires
Which could be kindled by long-dead desires.
But I go on, as groping through a mist
With blind uncertain feet, and do exist—
To suffer. In each wrinkle of my brow
Is buried some true love, or broken vow,
Or unfulfilled grand resolution. Faith
Dies hard and last, a dulled but glorious wraith.
And yet, if this poor figure fail and bend,
Is there no beauty in the evening end
And hush and shadow? Is the dying day
Less comely, with the glory of decay
Than cold gray morning's pearls? And why should man
Be all unpleasing in his faded plan
And crumbling bonds of earth, and meet the eye
With but defects of sere mortality
Or death? I am a witness to the law
Laid upon every creature, star or straw,
And just fulfil my destiny and doom
Of being; and as I have borne the bloom
I now put on the garmenting of blight,
A sad discrowned but not dishonoured sight
To be re-cast in other worlds and made
More fitting and desirable, from shade
And long repose of Nature's night. I bow,
Because I must and also choose, my brow
That looks no more up to a kindred sky,
Beneath the pale and iron Necessity.
I pass a willing soul, and on my face
Obedience sets its crown of kingly grace.

DEATH AT THE HELM.

HOW TO LIVE.

SYMPATHY.

TO MY FUTURE JUDGES.

FOX HUNTING.

TO MYSELF.

THE SUN.

BREAKING NEW GROUND.

CHARACTER.

MY CHILTERN HOME.

LIBER PUDORIS.

TO THE LATE JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE.

Large-minded sage, whose just and generous pen
Wrote in its breadth and touch incisive nought
That should have been unwritten and unwrought,
Or was hall-marked (if uttered oft) till then;
Thou sittest now for ever among men,
An equal of the sweetest hearts that sought
God's Truth on lines of the eternal thought
Which breaks like Light on far untravelled ken.
Poet, and critic foremost of our time
To catch the note of that serener chime,
Amid the pulse and babblement of pain
And empty strivings after knowledge vain;
O in the shiftings of each creed and clime,
What thou hast said need ne'er be said again.

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, K.G., K.T.

Argyll, the humblest of the Poets brings
One tiny leaf of laurel for thy head;
For thou hast walked, with no unequal tread,
Those glorious circuits higher than a King's.
Thy faith hath solved the secret heart of things,
Which none by naked reason's clue have read;
And tracked through Nature's night, the golden thread
That is God's path with awful communings.
Great Thinker, whom the careless world doth yet
Not honour in thy measure as it ought,
Thou hast for future generations wrought;
New systems shall rise up, old systems set
While thine endures, nor is there coronet
So dazzling as thy crown of deathless thought.

TO THE REV. T. E. BROWN, late FELLOW OF ORIEL.

Thy years have yet the youthful heart of hope,
Thy frost burns with a soul of singing flame,
Olympic man of light, whom none can name
Except with honour and its larger scope!
Thy foot is high and sure upon the slope
Leading the Few to that eternal Fame
Set round its jewels with a storied frame,
And pure and lofty as the heaven's blue cope.
Thy words of wisdom, linked to the true strain
Which moves in music but is more than pain,
Compel my breast to beat in tune with thine;
And those deep thunder-throbs, in shade and shine,
Are what the Powers we serve do pre-ordain—
One with the Cosmic harmonies Divine.

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD.

O sweet magician, at whose touch of light
The golden East gave up its secret store,
The wisdom of the ages, and the lore
Revealed to souls that do not walk by sight;
Thy brow with all that vision yet is bright,
Thy lips drop jewels and the better ore
Bequeathed by Masters who have sung before,
And left like stars their footsteps through the night.
Thy larger hope sees God unveiled in man,
Eternity in hearts, space in a span,
And Heaven betwixt the harvest and the seed;
Thorns blossom at thy breath, the humble weed
Becomes a precious ruby in thy plan,
Which hails a glory in the darkest creed.

IN MY LIBRARY.

I dwell among my people, all my own,
And commune with them in a speech unknown
To others, woven of faiths and pleasant fears
And crimson kisses and the joy of tears,
With murmur as of wind that dies and drops
In passing music on the pine-tree tops
To play a moment as a harper might,
And surf of distant seas on lands of light
That wash white feet of maidens, and the sound
Of wings that follow what is never found;
Familiar to the wraiths that rise and flee
At morning, and to butterfly and bee
Like splashes of bright colours on the flowers,
And whispered by the yellow-lichened towers
That seem to prop (as centuries go by)
The heavens and rooted in Eternity;
Talked by the ripples of the running brooks
That laugh and weep, but not in science books
Though read betwixt the lines, and heard at night
By poet ears when song melts into sight.
The dear old volumes are to me most fair,
Some gallant knights and some with golden hair
And all my comrades, living and not dead
In silks or harness clanging as they tread.
The dust of ages goes, the stains are stars
Of beauty, and the walls no longer bars
Burst into space and blossom through all Time
And mingle every stage and every clime.
They come to me at eve from haunted shade
With lisp of satin or in crisp brocade
Of costly stuffs, and rustle as they go
Their stately circuits, through the gloom and glow
Of dusk and firelight; tall untroubled Queens
Majestic step from depths of silver screens,
And move to slow and secret melody;
Then visored forms tramp from the tapestry
In armoured death, and splendid with their spears,
Red from the glory of undying years.
I hear the clash of conflict far away,
As if all buried hosts made holiday
Of battle, upon sad and sullen moors,
And struggle foot to foot; till dreadful doors
Of dungeons, black and bottomless, shut in
The hurly-burly and the hell and sin.
Then pretty Baby Innocents, with eyes
Of wonderment that open as the skies
Poems of blue, run as from radiant bowers
And sport and flutter off in light and flowers,
But leave the perfume of their presence. Next
A prophet broad and grim, with blood as text,
The stormy petrel of his age, leans out
With testifying hands and hurls a shout
Of wrath and thunder down the tide of time
And disappears in blood, sole and sublime.
Here forth from ancient chivalry's gray tome
Troop revellers, and crowd the castled home
With mirth and madness and the wealth of wine;
The torches flare, the brows of beauty shine
Pre-eminent, and yellow locks and brown
And sworded doublet and bepearlèd gown
Mix in the strife of joy. The jewelled wrist
And belted waist pass, in a sudden mist
Of morning. Figures too of fiction start
From populous deep shelves and walls of art,
More delicate than life, exceeding fair
With voice of laughing waters and proud hair
Of moonlit darkness in which day and night
Perfected meet and for the victory fight
In vain. Old realms of magic and romance
Give up each scene and solemn circumstance
Of riot and of rapture yet to be,
Evolved in cunning pageantries for me
Alone; the pictured face in pomp and flame
And shadow leaves the shelter of its frame
Wrought curiously and well, and paces bright
And conquering yet in music from the sight,
But casting back shy Parthian shafts of love,
A rose of red, the glimmer of a glove
For tournament. The statue from its niche
Steps down, and robed with many memories rich
Discourses of the dead heroic times
That are not dead and wake a thousand chimes
Of slumbering grandeurs, crown and judgment rod,
When men were nearer Heaven and walked with God.
The bust of Shakspeare moves, the mighty brow
Descends again to earth and to the vow
Of homage uttered by my heart, and sends
Deep rolling music to the utmost ends
Of thought and passion, words that breathe and burn
Whereon the axles of all Nature turn.
And not unequal from his carven rest
Consenting too, most beautiful and blest
Milton with step magnificent and strong
Outpours his heart in one great sea of song,
And bids the darkness bloom in elder skies
Of heathen faiths and hoar cosmogonies.
Till as I gaze and dream the books depart
And in their stead unnumbered forms upstart,
Civilisations dead, and dying some,
And whiter graces of the worlds to come

THE CENTENARIAN.

To-day I tell my century of years,
With mind still verdant and the fount of tears
Still bubbling up in sweeter waves than wine,
And plenitude of human joy Divine;
For yet my heart is young, my bosom beats
With piston pulses and the fiery heats
Of everlasting summer, as if here
Within me was the centre of the Sphere
And I gave out the passion and the strife,
Which are the curtains of this clouded life
And tell us nothing of the star or clod,
Or of ourselves—if we are man or God.
But, as beyond the babble of each sect
And system, in a solemn retrospect
I now look back and weigh departed joys
And greatnesses, they seem but tiny toys
As of a moment, and the golden gain
Looks from this vantage-ground a cheat and stain
Across the staring record, and the skies
That lured me on were veils and vanities,
And I alone the real. And, as I guess,
Who cannot know, the world were emptiness
But for the sorrow and the crownèd sin;
And the Divinity is all within.

ORPHEUS.

Our hearts no longer hear the chimes
Of the old stirring strain,
And in these prosy modern times
Sweet Orpheus sings in vain.
For no one courts the gentle sound,
Though it shall ever last,
Which made all earth the holy ground
In the dear golden Past.
Our ears are deaf with other notes
That drown the highest dreams,
Our eyes see nothing but the motes
Within the brightest beams.
And while our Orpheus lingers on
With the same lovely voice
And haunts each broken Parthenon,
Who now in him rejoice?
Though moving is his magic yet
As it has always been,
Our souls to baser tunes are set,
He walks and sings unseen.
Another lyrist in his stead
Has come and cannot save,
Whose playing only lulls the dead
More deeply in their grave.
The wooden head and flinty heart
Retain their narrow pride,
Contracted more by vulgar art,
And stocks and stones abide.
The modern jangler feels no call
From reverend fane or mount,
The tavern and the music-hall
Supply his muddy fount.
He makes no living fair and free
By loftier aim or ode,
And pipes the lost Eurydice
Down to the Dark Abode.
He never soars above the clod
Nor drinks of Nature's well,
The scalpel is his bloody God,
He has no heaven but hell.
He pays no heed to solemn laws,
Lets nothing sacred rest,
And inspiration cheaply draws
From his own sordid breast.
He dances naked round the Ark
Of evil to his shame,
And leaves on all the lurid mark
That is his chosen fame.
He bids the groundling be content
And hug his native mire,
Reveals the spots of man's descent
Or veils the heavenly fire.
He catches not from wave or wood
One ray of old romance,
Denies all visions great and good
And crowns our ignorance.
He shows us that mere matter rules,
Howe'er with graces girt,
Reducing mind to molecules
And deifies the dirt.
And still his tuneless ditties fall
On ghastly lives and gray,
And the Divinity in all
To him is common clay.
The reek of brothels and of slums
Pervades his broadest flight,
With discords as of heathen drums
From worse than heathen night.
He rifles graves for grimy stores
Instead of gardens fresh,
Parades the leper's loathsome sores
And tyrannies of flesh.
And still his dull and droning airs
Transforming men to beasts,
Are heard in Mammon's lying lairs
And hiccoughed at strange feasts.
While our true Orpheus travels forth
Where Dryads are at play,
An outcast in this iron North
He sings his heart away.
He loiters by the lilied brim
Of meres, that gather up
All legendary glories dim,
And bathe the buttercup.
A touch of something more than art,
A glimpse of bluer sky,
A homeless murmur in the heart,
Tell he is passing by.
And sometimes on the ancient walls
He hangs a ballad bright,
And on enchanted ruins falls
His shadow that is light.
And from the cloister comes his sigh
When temptings round us close,
And brings the breath of Nature nigh
As perfume to the rose.
But no one listens to his lute
Which bears a better plan,
And only may when lust is mute
Interpret God to man.

THE MAKING OF WOMAN.

THE MAKING OF MAN.

PARISH WILL PAY.

THE CHILDREN OF THE CHILTERNS.

It lies among the hollows of the hills
And hears the music made by countless rills,
As it has lain five hundred years and more
And garnered human love and quiet lore,
While listening to the same old simple tale
Told by the trees or shouted by the gale;
A story of the common use, that rounds
The sober lives content in narrow bounds
With homely joys and sad infrequent feasts,
Or owns a kindly fellowship with beasts
And birds and flowers which of one table share,
Bound by familiar bonds and kindred care.
No storms but those of winter strike the rest
Of ages and the dulness all so blest,
And fortunate in its obscurer lot;
Outside the fever of the fight and plot
And hurly-burly which uplift a State
To glory, through the iron mills of Fate
And fiery blasts of dreadful hope and doubt,
On darksome forges slowly hammered out
And hardly shaped by cruel shocks at length
To the full measure of its final strength.
Green Mossdale lies and sleeps and hears from far,
As through some crevice or a gate ajar,
Strange echoes dropping out of larger life
In worlds of onset and heroic strife,
And wakes awhile to visions and broad lists
Of clashing arms and proud protagonists,
But turns aside from that unwonted strain
To its more welcome peace and sleep again,
And mingles with the melody of streams
Faint snatches of those wild forbidden dreams.
Thus generations after others walk
Along the same old path of even talk
And work allotted as it was at first,
Perform the daily task and quench their thirst
Or break the fast and meekly at the close
Without a murmur seek well-earned repose.
Ambition never moves a single heart
To spurn the yoke and play a spacious part,
But on they drudge the one appointed way
In the same ruts from which they cannot stray,
Like their own cattle gently plodding still
About the weary slope and up the hill,
As tamely as their sires in frost and heat,
And drone the same blind prayers and yet entreat
The unknown God and yield to the old snare
Brute-like, and little do and nothing dare.
Mild are their sports and gray their festivals,
And grim the gladness found in funerals
That rouse from wounded breasts a creature cry
At gloomy hours of sullen revelry.
No fruitful thought with seeds of beauty rife
May stir the stagnant bosom of their life
And roll a pulse of passion through the days,
As on they go their animal dumb ways
And rise to work and sleeping rise once more
To tread the dreary round they trod before
And do their portion of determined care,
Just as their fathers who for ages bare
The same old burden with the same old brow
And destined shoulders that in patience bow;
And take the pittance hardly buying bread,
Ill-clothed and poorly paid and badly fed,
Repeating the blind errors of the Past
And its blank aimless customs to the last,
In the mild measured manner of the slave
Who has no higher goal beyond the grave;
And buy and sell and slowly eat and drink
As kine that ruminate and cannot think,
And drag along the same old iron chain
Of habit void of pleasure as of pain,
And dawdle through the dim unmeaning hours
In vegetable fashion like their flowers—
A starved unmoral fate, a stunted plight
With common griefs and but their pigs' delight.
At times a murder for a moment shakes
The drowsy toiler, who just then awakes
And rubs his rheumy eyes and nods his head
Impervious, ere he seeks the narrow bed
Of use and wont again and dodders on
Deep in the track he has for ever gone,
At heart unmoved by all that does not pinch
His person, settled not to budge an inch
Outside the ancient grooves wherein he plods;
Who feels his kinship with the beasts and clods
And fastens on the soil his lowly gaze,
Nor knows one love to set his life ablaze.
His children come and sprawl about the floor
And bring the want that darkens oft his door,
With that fierce fibre of unbroken will
Which made our England great and keeps it still;
Nursed by the bleak north-easter into force
Bending the earth to its own conquering course
And shaping empires out of shade and doom,
Where once the spade that levels all finds room.
And his the faith that never can grow old
But quarries worlds, as in the times of gold
When men like equals walked with God through death,
In the grand days of great Elizabeth.

A SEA-SHELL

MY OAK.

O immemorial oak, that standest still
As though a part of this old centuried hill,
First sown when other stars were in the sky
Root not of earth but of eternity;
Thou art my comrade and my kin, thy state
Is bound with me in one mysterious fate,
Told by the furrows of Time's equal plough
And iron rustling of each wrinkled bough
Through which the garish rays can hardly shine,
With leaves as awful as the Sibylline
And intermurmurous airs in mid green gloom
Burdened with woe and pendulous with doom.
To me thou art no common growth, a thing
That gives us shade or rests the raven's wing
Furled for a season on that withered branch;
But something far more human, if more staunch
Than mortal men, who scarce with toil and tears
Attain the measure of a hundred years
In trembling want and weakness. Thou art yet
Strong, though a thousand summers on thee set
And kingdoms wove and then unwove fresh ties
With races new and reverend dynasties.
Yea, thou art history, England's and my own,
And with our country hast to greatness grown
A living portion of her mind and might
And glorious with her mingled clouds and light,
Firm with the fibre and the gallant grain
Which made her sons indignant of all stain
Indomitable; wrestling with the storm
And fattening on its rage, thy giant form
(When lesser stems of lighter stuff went by)
Clomb to its crown and grand maturity
Of mellow ease that is a sure defence,
The seasoned pomp of its magnificence.
Beneath thy dome of ages statesmen walked
Serene, intent on high affairs, and talked
Of empire and its conduct with calm brows
That breathed eternal faith and solemn vows,
And out of fancy into substance wrought
Fair constitutions with imperial thought.
Here came the clash of weaponed strife, when lords
Had hotter blood and quicklier played with swords
Than fence of speech, and noble blood was spilled;
And here the sighs of silken lovers thrilled
Thy dreadful shadows, and wild eyes were wet
With passion and red lips betrothing met.
The ravening Roman eagle and the Dane
Who brought the scent of seas with battle bane,
The Saxon wassail and the Norman pride
All found a ready refuge at thy side,
With wolf and boar and outlaws fiercer far,
And left some fragrance or a scornful scar.
Long generations here of childhood held
Their pastimes from the splendid days of Eld,
And sported in the shelter of thine arms
Or slept a season, drinking rosier charms
From commune with thy majesty. And here
Enkindled with the generous atmosphere,
The poet now takes comfort in thy powers,
Renews his youth and puts forth other flowers
Upon this storied ground, the citadel
Of Time, where thou art set as sentinel
And at the marriage of the earth and sky,
The lonely outpost of Eternity.

IN A CHURCHYARD.

THE LUTE OF LIFE.

A SOLITARY SEA.

ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS.

HOMESPUN.

DREAM OF PERFECTION.

THIS WAY LIES MADNESS

MAN THAT IS BORN OF WOMAN.

SPINNING.

APHRODITE.

Ambrosial night hung over sea and land,
The kissing moonbeams played about the sand
In warm white beauty, and each murmuring shell
Laughed as the silver fire upon it fell.
A little wind rose from the west, and flew
On wings of music that a season blew
In fragrant wafts, half-weary and half-shy,
As some spent babe sings its own lullaby.
And, lo, a shadow, that was light and lay
As soft as sleep when silence has its way,
Dropt with its cloak and left its magic mark;
And all the earth was all divinely dark;
The northern lights flashed in the northern sky,
And the great wheels of Time went dreamily.
But then, incarnate ecstasy, she came
In mist and movement and the flower of flame
That blushed and blossomed into crimson joy,
As if the world were but its tender toy;
Not out of fruitful soil or lilied lea,
But from the embraces of the earth and sea
Just where they met and married, glad she came
Naked and lovely without thought of shame;
Queen Aphrodite, wonderful and sweet,
As ripples leaped and washed her pure white feet.
She stood a moment dallying ere she stept
Forth on the land, that in the shadow crept
Or seemed to creep as conquered to her side
And laid beneath her all its power and pride.
Beautiful there she bowed to meet the bliss,
With mouth that gave and yet denied the kiss
Of sacrament, and leant upon the wind
Which touched one heavy tress that trailed behind
And caught its perfumed passion, while she stood
In the young wealth of conscious womanhood,
With pearls of foam and spray of emeralds fair
And snakes of gold that were her gleaming hair,
Laden with love that from her seemed to flow;
Her scornful lips were like a scarlet bow
And shot forth burning arrows, dew and breath
Of bloom and life that was delicious death.
The bushes knelt, the tall trees bowed the head,
The moonbeams made a carpet for her tread,
The green leaves rustled and stretched out their arms
And wove a dress for her uncovered charms,
The flints before her turned to precious gems
And stepping stones, the iron armèd stems
Forgot their thorns and nature, and the soil
Opened its treasures without stint or toil
An offering, and the world unbought by price
Became one altar of free sacrifice.
Her large glad eyes with sorrow seemed to fill,
Earth trembled at her footstep and stood still.
She felt the calling of the yearning years,
The joy that fed the fountain of our tears,
And forward bent to catch the distant strain
Mixed with the measures of all bliss and pain,
While rapture wrestled with the glorious grief
And clasped and yet refused its rich relief.
But then a passion, like some mighty gale's
Wet with the memories of a thousand tales
Of surging seas, that took and shook her form,
Poured in her eyes the trouble of the storm
And clothed the heavy lids with gracious gloom
That heightened the round cheeks' rejoicing bloom,
And hung the long dark lashes with soft sights
Of diamond drops and opals' mystic lights,
And curled the ripe red lips with messages
Till they brimed over as bright chalices,
And left a haunting shadow deep and dim
On the bold curve of each voluptuous limb,
And threw around the palpitating frame
The poetry that has no mortal name.
She marked the picture of all space and time,
All worlds revolving to the same rapt chime
Of everlasting love; the pomp of Rome;
And Israel's faith, that walked the heaven as home;
The wit of Hellas, that revealed the heart
Of life and shaped it forth in shining art
Exceeding fair, and made the deeps disclose
The power of passion wedded to repose;
And the cold culture of the earth-bound West
Forged in the fire and on the iron breast
Of anvils hammered into soulless might
And brute perfection of a dead delight,
With fragrance yet in vision and at feast
And golden gleams of the enchanted East—
All set to one great conquering melody,
That moved the engines of eternity.
And everywhere she saw, that sovereign clue
To kingly action made it strong and true,
Love's one white moment, when the unveiled face
Looked first in awe on Nature's naked grace
And lived, and read the riddle of the years,
Knowledge of good and evil, orbed with fears;
And consciousness turned inward thrilled to find
Itself so comely and the God behind,
And laughed and trembled as a fluttered dove
To feel the final word of life was love.
This rolled life's river beneath bluer skies
On its broad path of fair humanities
And ministrations of heroic hands
That shook the world and moulded larger lands,
And gave sweet codes and uses to redress
Moralities of gaunt unloveliness,
And charters of high thought that drank of wells
Where beauty bathed and so renewed its spells.
Love was the breath of liberties and right,
And edged the sword that in the front of fight
Waved ever onward as it flashed and fell;
And laid warm limbs on beds of asphodel,
Where lips met lips and bosom bosom fired
And sobbed the secret that the soul desired.
Ah, beyond bloody creeds and cults she saw
A new religion and another law
Of gentleness that ruled the ruler's pride
And bade him walk a subject at her side,
With charities that rose on eagle wings
To heaven and thence returned as crowns for kings;
And earth the passing fashion of a glove,
To the great sceptred sweetnesses of love.
But then the trouble from her scarlet lips
And haunted eyes in passionate eclipse,
Dropt like a robe in the outbreaking shine
That showed her human daintiness divine,
And the one glory and the simple dress
Of her own pure and naked loveliness.
A rosy cloud, that hid no glowing part
And quivered with the beating of her heart,
Like innocence was coyly round her curled;
Heaven smiled above, and at her feet the world.
Thus forth she went to conquer every god,
And on all time to triumph as she trod;
While those white feet, that nothing could asperse,
Seemed as the pulsings of the universe.
And stept in tune with Nature, on her way
Through the dim night that crimsoned into day.

PALIMPSEST.

Talk not of dark December
And all its cruel snow,
For then I still remember
And hear the life below.
I see no rod of iron
Empearled with icy gems,
But only Spring the Siren
Betwixt the barren stems.
In frost I mark but pages
Of summer flowering free,
And in the wind that rages
The murmuring of the bee.
The shine is in the shadow,
The harvest in the cold,
And on the miry meadow
Are buttercups of gold.
Talk not of dark December
Because my head is grey,
My heart's undying ember
Keeps youthful holiday.

ARCHITEKTON.

I build no temples out of common stone;
My starry throne
Disdains the marble, as the sordid mud
And tinsel bud;
But in my work are wedded blood and fire
With grim desire,
And thoughts that blossom in heroic reach
Of spacious speech;
No gems, though born a thousand thousand years,
But iron tears
And prayer and passion of enduring trust
In death and dust;
No harlotries of paint or nude undress,
But war's caress
Of flame and sword that meet with careless might
The armèd Night,
And leaping life that is the light of men
With human ken,
The natural touch as true as sunrise call
Redeeming all.

MY OLD SCHOOL.

MY LADY SLEEPS.

When down my Lady laid her head
Gold on the dusky night,
The silence like a curtain spread
A sweetness more than sight.
A little moon was in the sky,
A little moon went up,
And O but it went pleasantly
With its dear yellow cup.
It seemed so small and very near
The dim and hollow land,
As if its treasures cool and clear
Could lie within my hand.
And like a silvèr tear one star,
Caught in the outer glow
As if it might not travel far,
Hung beautiful below.
And through the purple night a cloud
By gentle winds was drawn,
That did not dare to speak aloud
The tidings of the dawn.
And still the blossoms watched and wept
Beside my Lady's place,
And shed their petals (where she slept)
White-rose on rose-white face.
Break not the spell,
For she sleeps well,
With lily arms
And shadowed charms,
And graces all too pure for harms
Delicious and ineffable.

CHURCH BELLS.

Through the curtained mist and snow
Come those voices,
Come those voices
From the land of Long-ago,
Like an angel who rejoices
In the loves of Long-ago:
Chiming, chiming,
Rhyming, rhyming,
In a rapture more than art,
With the music of the heart.
Little Mother,
Is it thou
From the beauty on thy brow,
From the bliss which cannot smother
Human feeling where it lies
Lapt in the eternities,
Calling, calling
Words of balm and comfort falling
On my breast
That will not rest?
Little Mary
On thy throne,
With the story
Of thy glory
As a zone,
Where no winds of trouble vary
The unutterable joy
And the peace that cannot cloy,
Little Mother,
Is it thou
Drawn more nearly dearly now?
Or another,
Whom I lost,
When by waves of trouble tost
I was left along and low
In the land of Long-ago?
Little Una, soft and white,
Is it thou,
From the splendour infinite
Fain to bow
With thy blessings
And caressings
Framed in tender sounds and tunes
Sweet as roses of all Junes,
On this gray and care-worn head
And my heart already dead?
Do I hear my children crying,
Crying, crying,
For me yet,
In that ghostly music dying,
Dying, dying,
For the one they can't forget?
Up and down and high and low,
Soft and slow,
Melodies of Eden blow
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
Out of heaven
Unto earth
From the darkness and the dearth.
Little brother
Is it thou,
Christ, in answer to my vow,
Not another,
With the thorns all turned to stars
And bright jewels where were scars?
Art Thou speaking
To my soul,
As those echoes run and roll,
Through the frost and shadows wreaking
All their icy wrath and pain
On my eyes that upward strain,
But in vain—
But in vain?
Hear the voices swelling, swelling
Through the night and telling, telling
What on earth we never know,
As they faintly ebb and flow;
Hopes and fears and joys and sorrows
Sweeter than the sweetest morrows,
Truths that in the bosom flutter
Which no mortal yet may utter
To his fellow,
Till the yellow
Sheaves of garnered toils and times
Murmur with those evening chimes
Prophecies of peace and wonder
In new life,
And the strains above and under
All our strife;
Hear the voices ringing, ringing
Messages of larger hope,
Like the angels singing, singing
As the gates of Eden ope.
But the secret that they tell
Though in part,
As they gently swoon and swell,
To my heart;
Is that it were only vain
To pursue by quest or pain
Beauty that has no one dress,
And through changes
Flits and ranges,
Now as love, now happiness;
That is never seen till past,
And when on the clouds before
Shadows of the truth are cast,
While we wonder and adore.
When we seem to lay our hold
On its treasure,
Better far than gain of gold
And all pleasure;
Lo, it melts within the grasp
Of the noblest deed or duty,
Like the melting of the snow:
It eludes the iron clasp
And is gone—and where is Beauty?
In the land of Long-ago.

THE OLD YEAR.

I take the book and turn the pages
So mean and squalid to the last,
And shut it in the shadowed Past
Among the dead and buried ages.
I lay it with the relics older
Of each departed time and toy,
Like roseleaves crushed, to mix and moulder.
And there with many a glorious vision
Too often all the world to me,
Will it abide a bliss to see
Or fade in darkness and derision?
It looks a volume sad and awful,
Now as it passes from my hand
Into the sere and silent land,
A thing unlovely and unlawful.
A blank has gulfed the mighty sentence,
And jeweled word and chiseled line
That as the morning seemed to shine
Are dashed with tears of salt repentance.
But there my life is full depicted
And gathered to the misty shelf,
The dust and stains are all myself
And they by me alone convicted.

THE NEW YEAR.

Before me looms the threshold, lying
Between two shadows yet a shade
Itself by unseen fingers made,
Between the future days and flying.
The old dear loves behind grow dimmer
With downcast eyes and veilèd face
And outstretched hands beyond embrace,
And dear new loves that greet me glimmer.
I waver between tears and laughter,
And all my heart distracted cries
Drawn by the two eternities,
The precious Past and hope's Hereafter.
The ties were beautiful now broken,
The red lips vanished more than sweet
And fond the white and rhythmic feet
With passion that was never spoken.
But then the Future tells a story
Of larger worlds and ways to be,
Unknown and virginal and free
Like some fair woman in her glory.
The two hands drop with crimson roses,
Soft music is the fragrant breath,
And be it life or be it death
I choose the grace that half uncloses.

RECONCILED.

But yet the same are brow and bosom,
The same the glances coyly cast,
For in the Future lies the Past
And in the Past the Future's blossom.
But though I may not turn or tarry
And must go sadly gladly on,
It is the former sun that shone
And the old peace with me I carry.
I cross the bound, I pass the portal,
With the old heart and feelings bright
And Him whose Shadow is our Light,
Until he calls me home immortal.

MORS MORTUA.

UNDER SCARLET.

Under the beautiful scarlet of skies
Thunder-appareled and thwart, she arose
Fair as a blossom and sweet with her brown
Hair that in fluctuant ecstasy heaved;
Over the heather that blushed at her feet,
Rover-like, fetterless, exquisite, white,
Clad in her viriginal purity, tall,
Glad as a child just escaped from a school.
Lightly she met me with laughter and song
Brightly attuned to the beat of her heart
Set to my music of love, as I played
Yet on the strings with a masterful touch.
Long were our kisses, and never thought we
Wrong of the union that made us both one.
Little we recked of the future or dreamed
Brittle the bond of our passion, that then
Throbbed out the story so soon to be all
Robbed of its liberty, blanched in its bloom.
Gaily we parted, expecting again
Daily renewal of raptures foredoomed.

NO MORE.

The way is closing in, like barriers rise
Hedges of armèd thorn,
Betwixt me and each rapturous old surprise
And gates of golden morn.
No more for me the boundlessness of blue,
The splendid courts of Space,
The clouds of glory that were but the clue
To show my Father's face;
No more the tossing and tempestuous hills,
The thunder-cradled crest
Lost in the light, as souls from stormy ills
Sink on the Saviour's breast.
No more the statued galleries of Time
In pillared palaces,
Stay unreluctant steps with dreams sublime
And marble messages.
No more I wake each day to something new
As eager as a boy,
While from fresh worlds I lightly brush the dew
As from a flower or toy.
The curtained path grows smaller with my cares,
The burden and the rod,
And shutting out the earth and all its snares
It shuts me in to God.
New thoughts arouse no more the glow and thrill
That bade my heart rebound,
Till it ran over and was fain to spill
Its joy on all around.
The pride and passion of the world seem fled,
Its altars do not burn,
And dear old faces that were cold and dead
Like dawn to me return.
The children and the fancies of my youth,
Whatever made me free,
Come back with every simple sacred truth
Learned at my mother's knee.
The grandest things put off their royal dress
And step most humbly down,
While many a mean unhonoured littleness
Assumes a kingly crown.
The shadows wrap me close, the sunbeams droop
With morning once so sweet,
And blush (where stars were beacons) as I stoop
The daisies at my feet.
The earth goes farther off, the Heaven draws near
Which faith has ever trod,
And with an awful bliss akin to fear
Alone I walk with God.

THE SPIRIT OF SPACE.

GENESIS.

Its cradle was the cloud of fire
That rolled for endless ages back,
And wrapt in terrible attire
It trod the solitary track
And silent zone
Around God's throne,
The seed of life and all desire,
Through awful space and worlds in wrack;
While systems rose
And systems fell,
And passed through blackness of repose
To blazing force ineffable.
The shadow went, the beauty came
With ordered day and ordered night;
From cunning frost and carving flame
The flower of earth burst into light,
And rolling on
Rejoiced and shone
In homage to the Holy Name,
The Love that fashioned all aright;
And bliss to be
A living tide,
In systolè, disastolè,
Pulsed through its heart in rhythmic pride.

THE LAST WOMAN.

JACOB'S LADDER.

Lo, weary once of toiling
And weary once of rest,
And finding roseleaves soiling
In love's sublimer quest,
As each day I grew sadder
And hopeless of my kind
I passed up Jacob's Ladder
And left the world behind.
But how, O do not question;
The angels sealed my lips
(For fear of this suggestion)
With soft and sweet eclipse.
The prophet and the poet,
The maiden and the child
As yet unfallen know it,
And all the undefiled.
I entered the white portal
Where one are flower and seed,
And where in life immortal
Unite the will and deed.
The birds with satin pinions
Drenched in the dazzling sun,
Have soared to those dominions
And in their circuits run.
And babies, with their moulding
Fresh from the Maker's hand,
Like heavenly blooms unfolding
Come from the Golden Land.

SOMEWHERE.

The light is shining somewhere,
If I in darkness move,
Though it has never come where
I wait my life and love.
Somewhere in purple mountains
Leap forth the laughing waves,
When I can see no fountains
But tears that water graves.
And somewhere eyes flash greeting
That promise joys to be,
And ripe red lips are meeting
But have no kiss for me.
The dew is somewhere falling
On golden cups of flowers,
While I keep vainly calling
For never-dropping showers.
The night somewhere brings cover
And kindness of pure rest,
But I am not a lover
To sleep upon her breast.
Somewhere the yoke is pleasure
And battle is but play,
While I have toil for treasure
And only clouds that stay.
But yet I know that somewhere
The dawn will hallow strife,
And blessing smile and come where
I wait my love and life.

PRE-EXISTENCE.

THE MISSING ATOM.

When God made man and dowered with awful reason
He did not finish quite His poor clay vessel,
But planted him on land and turned the seas on
And gave him hills and woods with which to wrestle;
That he might quarry out a soul by toiling,
And be again himself his own creator
Through sin and sorrow of the day and morrow,
By armèd will which took the world for spoiling,
And be its legislator.
He wrought him comely and keen-witted,
With eyes that coasted heaven and earth and boasted
Tremendous things of thought and vision;
But He omited
Among the glorious gifts that which was greatest,
Not in delight of cold derision,
But out of love and wisdom the sedatest.
He clothed his lips with thunder, as on Chatham
He poured the passion of the speaker,
And breathed a gnôsis
Quick as the lark's apotheosis
Which walks the paths of air, but left him weaker
By this one vital flaw—a missing atom.
But what it is, no sage, no lover,
No seer who reads the future's riddle
And plucks its secret from the Night's blank middle,
Can yet discover.
It's that which in the sweetest sounds' election
Establishes the void of something lacking,
The cracking
Of strainèd strings, the jar and trouble
Which turn the best to lovely imperfection;
An absent note, that else would double
The treasures setting in the getting,
And proved but flashes
Shed idly upon funeral ashes.
And thought of subtlest mind however far gone
Down in the deeps unplumbed, unsounded,
Has never compassed this ethereal argon
And from the search comes back confounded,
Baffled by this one ray so dim, so distant;
Which is a blurring
In brightest portraits and a blot resistant;
And seems a slurring
Of pictured beauty which denies its duty,
Without the sweetness
Which only gives the crown of full completeness.
When God made man He gave His own Divinity
In measure,
Short of that dread infinity
Encompassing all space and time at pleasure
To see before and after,
Through blessèd tears and bitter laughter
And surf of sinning
Which at His calm white feet is broken
And spoiled of fruits ere done or spoken,
The end in the beginning.
That man thus wrought should wax yet wiser
From conscious might and native neediness,
And be a brave despiser
Of little pains and brittle gains
And fleeting gawds and earth-bound greediness;
Attaining slowly and by stages lowly
To something grand and beautiful and holy,
Purged of his drosses by the losses
And lifted up on burning crosses
To the great stature
Of gracious Godhead and consummate nature.
And so among the crime and kissing
Of clashing souls that firmly, faintly,
Climb up or down His altar steps and stumble
To unconjectured issues sad or saintly,
We have one atom missing—
Which bids the firmest of foundations crumble.
We mourn it in the music never rounded
Quite by the last fair finish
Of perfect art, ungrounded
All on the eternal bases, lacking somewhat
To carry sick hearts home when days diminish
Their glory, and to rest us (come what
Might in the morning of the morrow)
With the clear dayshine of diviner sorrow.
This absent ray, which could enkindle ages
With unheard splendour
And turn our midnight bosoms tender
As the soft light on golden Gospel pages,
We ask for ever;
And still we must in poor purblind endeavour,
Who seek we know not what and dimly, dumbly,
Do voyage for a yet uncharted haven
Where marriage bells are always ringing;
Led by that dream-note which (though we be craven)
Would, if we listened humbly,
Put all the world in tune and keep it singing.

GRAY FEELINGS.

IN MOHAMMED'S COFFIN.

GOD'S BROOMS

LETTER TO A FRIEND.

Expand thyself, my comrade, and be kind
To all good things and scorn the local mind,
Which dwells on its own spot or village pump
Or glories in its pet peculiar hump
And void or vices; look beyond the bound
Of vestry vision, and the barren ground
Where the old meanness in its fetters moves
As on a treadmill through the ancient grooves
And ruts; away with sour parochial pride!
But leave the doors and windows in thee wide
To every grace that comes however far,
And do not deem thy private stain a star
Or others' beauty blots. The mind is deep
And soars above the petty rounds of sleep
Which custom builds, and daily links or loads
Along the beaten regulation roads.
Look up to Heaven and know thyself as large
As that, and measured by no prison marge
Of cold conventions. All the earth and sky,
The universe and even eternity,
Belong to thee—thou art; and nothing less
Than infinite, though in a mortal dress
Clothed but not coffined, tied but never chained
To any wheel of passion pre-ordained;
With instincts more than consecrated pelf—
Yea, thou art God; arise, and be thyself!
In present moods and moments do not live,
A purblind toy, by fancies fugitive
Tost to and fro with every idle gust
Or nosing like the swine amid the dust;
Before and after send thy searching aims
In quest of duties, not the sordid claims
Which drag men down to their primordial earth
And feed their hearts with hunger. Out of dearth
From darkness lift thy life in thought, to be
Thy better self, Divinity, and free.
No more the shutters of a sheltered vice,
And dismal curtains woven by prejudice
That keep the shadows in and sunbeams out
And throw fantastic figures with the doubt
Engendered! Let the freshening breezes blow
Through all the chambers of thy heart and flow
Into each act and fact, the airs that fly
Abroad in wingèd words of liberty,
To make or break the peoples. Join the hand
Of fellowship with every fair demand.
And honour woman, as thou would'st a tryst
With the Belovèd One, the Blessèd Christ.
Nature is big, and broadens at the tread
Of truth and love which into regions dead
Breathe life and light; it opens its great walls,
When once the honest seeker comes and calls
And knocks for entrance; and it takes him in
Though torn with trouble and defiled by sin,
To tell him secrets and the solemn use
Of higher things, the miracles profuse,
The ends and issues, where the fountains flow
Forth from God's feet to water worlds below.
Be all with Nature, be not much with men
Who travel not past their own pavement ken
Or grope in gutters for some jewel; stand
Upright and sunward, and about the land
Look as a child might in his mother's face
With confidence, who knows a foremost place
Lies ever there and welcome in her arms;
O commune with her kindly, let her charms
And teaching be thy daily cheer and rest;
Hang on her lips, and hide within her breast.
But, mixed with her, thou shalt be likewise son
Of God and with her and thyself at one.

BLUE ROSES.

TO LEWIS MORRIS, K. B.

To thee I fly, O latest
Of all our Cymric Bards and greatest,
Robed in a royal dress;
And to the noble art
Yet nobler fashioned, through the falsehoods rifted
By the same touch and strong wise gentleness,
And lordly lifted
As to a heaven of bliss and blue.
For thou hast poured the passion and the heart
Of earth and sky
And all eternity
Into thy calm white temple, sober
With conscious grandeur and the secret clue
To every cosmic riddle.
Roses of June, red berries of October,
The reverend uses of the larger times
Which rang the everlasting chimes;
Not the loud modern scranny fiddle
Of patriots paid
To twang their loyal aid,
And tunes more fitted for the tavern;
High privileges, now the people's wont,
Once kept like treasures in a cavern
By dragon powers to grace the gilded front
Of titled greed and languid lust;
The universe of hope and fear
Orbed in the compass of an unshed tear,
With woman's warm deliciousness
And lily loveliness
Of pure and perfect trust;
Ripe memories of old actions rich and stately
When men were gods and walked sedately
Within a brighter broader land,
Honoured and honourable, deeming
The life more precious than a perjured seeming
And duty the one sure demand;—
All these and many more, the numbers
Wherein thou movest to the melody
Part of all truth and fair philosophy,
While the dull jangler of the current jargon
Who bleats of oily platitudes or “argon”
Reels off his vulgar rant and drinks and slumbers.
But the Parnassian dew is
For ever fresh and fragrant
On thee, O Lewis;
And thy serene and certain note,
The hand which never wrote
When too audacious and too vagrant
A vile or vicious word,
Is only seen and heard
Among the chaste and choicer paths
Of classic heights and deeps
And golden aftermaths—
It nowise halts and sleeps
Nor riots in the orgies rude,
But keeps unstained its own sweet solitude.
To thee I gladly fly,
O'ercumbered with the crude mortality
For ever with us now,
From sordid flesh
Which laves in public sores to sin afresh—
The omnipresent world, the sodden brow
Of lechery that sprawls and spumes at length
In bestial strength—
The harlot raptures of the sexy novels
Wherein the female rake unbosomed grovels
With every kind of ugly antic,
Naked and frantic
And not ashamed,
To find her proper level
In dancing to the devil,
Unblushing and unblamed.
Lord of two worlds, who dost from singing sires
Hand down the imperishable fires
And at thy blest perpetual altar
Burn incense meet,
Without which earth had not been half so sweet
Nor heaven so glad;
Thou didst not in thy wildest wanderings palter,
As others lightly had,
With purity and faith
And the eternal laws of right and wrong,
For any passing wraith
However crowned with garlic and renown'd,
In thy calm silver song.
In thee I see, no dallying with the dark
And pleasures hidden, by æsthetics chidden,
To all but gutter bards forbidden;
But our high water-mark,
Consummate, pure,
Of living literature,
And God's accomplished plan
The flower of every culture
(Not that which feeds on carrion like a vulture),
The scholar and the Christian gentleman.
Here my last refuge lies,
Away from worship of the body
And educated shame and shoddy,
Which breaks our decent ties
And boasts that we (however white the shirt
Or sham) are chiefly dirt.
Thou knowest better,
Morris, and long our one unstainèd Knight
Of chosen chivalry,
Hast shown thyself we have no kind of fetter
Short of Divinity
Our dwelling-place and glory and delight.
I roam among thy classic bowers
And pluck the lotus
Or asphodel,
And hail thee as a Seer on tranquil towers
Above the Night and Notus,
A solitary sentinel.
Thine eye is on the morning, and thy feet
Outside the shade and shock
Tread bases of the Rock
Which anchors to the Infinite;
Thy prophet glances greet,
Beyond the writhings and the babble
Of all this pessimistic rabble,
The good, the sure, the sweet, the exquisite.
No mincings and no maulings
In thy clear leisured lofty verse,
No prurient prattle and no bludgeoned Truth
And efforts which asperse
The thing they fain would bless, no caterwaulings
Of crapulous gray youth
Seeking it knows not what, a maid, the moon,
And fitter for the cudgel and the spoon
To stay its idiot cry,
Than the most gentle art of Poesy.
I find no refuge in our English Prose,
But affectations, irritations,
And popinjays' green pullulations;
No march of thought to its predestined close
Inevitably reached just by mere stress
Of grace and reason its ally,
An ordered pomp of tunefulness
And mere necessity.
Instead I meet but sound divorced from sense,
And marriages of words not fated
Or fixed in heaven but all mismated,
Blunders and ignorance prepense,
Adulterous unions and illicit matches
Of ill-assorted pairs and patches,
And fustian trimmed with purple lace,
The ornaments that are a clothing
For nastiness or nothing,
And pimples hid not by the powdered face.
In thee I have fair form, good measure,
That unlearned instinct of eternal fitness,
The soft assurance which bears witness
To the true master's strong unerring touch,
And wakes at pleasure
But will not overmuch
The tear or laughter.
And in thy chastened and divine content
I gain my own, and a new continent
Of hope and rest; I cannot grieve in
The doubts of dimness, but believe in
Myself and all things here and God's Hereafter.

MIMOSA PUDICA (Sensitive Plant).

THE WORM OF DOUBT.

One night I passed through portals of soft sleep,
Where all was silence, to a dreadful land
More real than life, more sorrowful than truth,
Builded of running waters on the web
Of yellow sands that drift and shift and crumble
For evermore beneath a yellow moon
Low in a purple heaven, when a light wind
Laughs; it was neither day nor night, but both
Blended in one great meek and mournful dimness;
The sun and its pale sister too were there,
And sometimes this and sometimes that did wane
Or wax and brighten or grow dull. Nor light
Nor darkness held the upper hand and quenched
Its rival, but a vast mysteriousness
Hung over all and fretted at the heart
Of everything that moved and did not move,
Within this realm that was not life or death
And yet partook of either. Long I looked.
The sadnesses and gladnesses did fight
For mastery in vain; and a mild music,
Mingled with tears and muffled like the voice
Of many waves, that wash a dreary shore
Far far away in other times and climes,
Brake on mine ears as drowsily as dreams
Of poppied visions faint and wonderful,
Trodden by naked maidens' pink and white
Adorableness. But the speech was doubt,
The spectacle was doubt, the common air
Was nothing more and nothing less than doubt.
Ghostly misgiving gaunt and manifold,
Crept like a curse that struggled with a blessing
And beat it down and breathed through alien lips
A message that belonged to baser things,
And triumphed in its might uncertain. Men
Passed to and fro, and women beautiful
And wanton some; and human and divine
Children who sought for their lost infancy
Like paradise but found it not, and went
Without the joy of incunabula
And motherhood's blue sky with timid stumbling
Steps; fading in the gloom majestical
And gray horizons, straying on and on
Deeper and deeper, in forlornness mute.
A nameless fear did haunt the doomèd place,
With dismal thoughts that grew exceedingly.
Nothing was constant, and no act or fact
Was fixed, but might or might not be and follow
The same old causes; none could guess the fruit,
The burden or the issuings of work,
When mirth and measured pomp's solemnities
Were mixed; the morrow and the present use
Seemed one in spite of differences, and past
And future married strove; uncertainty
Alone was certain, and in all prevailed.
The inhabitants were shy, and through the shadow
That had a silver seam walked up and down,
In search of what they knew not, warily,
With wavering feet; but none did trust another;
While each was simply sure that nought was sure,
And questioned his existence—if he lived
Or lived not, and with aimless empty arms
Toiled at beginnings and beginnings and beginnings
Which had no end and no proportion. Love
Died in its birth, and grim suspiciousness
Grew. Words were frozen on the lips, confessed
And unconfessed at once, and thought hardly
Dared to lift up its eagle wings and pined
For lack of food and sympathy and hope.
And jealousy gnawed at the troubled breast
Of barren wives, and husbands did refuse
The troth which they had plighted yesterday.
And God appeared a phantom, and was bodied
At times in blessèd garments beautiful
And incarnations of sweet Christ-likeness,
Walking in human flesh; and then at times
Was but a gorgeous mist, that mocked the heart
And plagued the head with foolish fantasies;
Who might and might not be, and was apparent
And was not. The Divinity was doubt,
A pious hope, a veil of vastnesses
Betwixt the earth and heaven, a vague unrest,
Within, without, nowhere and everywhere;
Now bedrock of the mighty Multiverse,
And then the thinnest wreath of thinnest cloud
Inpalpable; the matrix of all things,
Oceans and airs and the eternities,
And yet a toy for children or a terror
To chain brute force and iron ignorance down
As with the weight of many atmospheres
In dust of bondage. Then a horror seized
My palsied soul, I did misdoubt myself;
I knew and knew not aught, and everything
Swooned as I swum in awful fog. The dear
Kind sanities and gentle modes of usage,
And daily coin of current intercourse
Melted; and nothing fixed or final stayed
My meaningless blind paces anywhither,
From twilight unto twilight; courtesies
Became a mockery and an empty play
Of shadows duped by shadows, each alike
Meandering through a labyrinthine maze
Of idlenesses. Was I what I seemed?
Did mind exist? Did matter have a root
In sure reality? Was all a vision,
And God and man and the whole moving mass
Of systems only a great shining sham
Phantasmagoria? O I tried to flee
From this pursuing madness, and myself
Who was not I, my friend, my foe, my pressing
Shame and confusion fooling me with gawds
That vanished as I grasped them. But in vain,
By horror of discomfortableness
Hounded, I struggled on, bewildered more
And more. Till I awoke in weary dusk
Of ghostly dawn to weep again, and find
The worm of doubt was busy at my heart,

TO THE MOST REV. DR. ALEXANDER, Archbishop of Armagh.

Prelate and teacher, poet and divine,
On whose broad forehead many gifts entwine
Their excellences fair, I gladly bring
To thee this praise and in my measure sing.
Thy namesake, Lord of Hellas and the lands,
Made but one world the slave of his commands;
But, as they fable, in his glory fell
Before a baby,—though invincible.
Yet thou hast conquered every world which thought
Could enter, earth and heaven itself, and fought
With each great problem of all time and shed
Light beautiful as day, where'er thy tread
Came in its triumphs. Thou hast wrung their spoil,
From darkest ages; and the deepest coil
Of mysteries, in labyrinthine maze
Involved path behind path with mocking haze
Inextricable, yielded to thy hand
Their secret treasures to less natures bann'd.
By every child and child-like spirit blest,
Thou winnest each and turnest fear's unrest
To faith; and masking even the mitre's awe,
The poet's lays and love's most righteous law
Do form thy crown, to brighten with the years
While hearts are young and Erin smiles through tears.

THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE.

Strong Devonshire, thy calm and equal mind
Embraces each great question's tangled knot
Which bares to thee the burden of its plot
And hidden powers, when others all are blind;
No fleeting splendour hides the fatal spot,
A witness to its false unworthy kind,
From that clear gaze which reads the future lot
And looks before our pathway and behind.
Among the wavering thou unwavering art,
A pillar of this English earth and sky
And precious Truth that never passes by;
For statesmanship lies human in thy heart,
And of our glory thou a living part
Dost build the Empire broad on Liberty.

ELEGY.

Unhonoured thou by men but all my own,
Dear heart, the better loved the better known,
And truly great in gifts that fashion men
To guide through conflict or in danger; then
Supreme and kingly and a sheltering tower,
By that calm wisdom which with heaven is power
And conquers earth. Yet what thou couldest dare,
None but myself might ever be aware.
And now betwixt me and thy foreign grave,
Rise up a thousand leagues of wind and wave
With stern forbidding arms and thrust me back,
If thought would try to follow thy far track
And mark the footsteps. Nor can mortal trace
The lowly spot that is thy resting-place;
Whether among the blazing flowers that nod
Beneath the blazing sky, where the palm's rod
Springs like a prayer in blessing for the land
Of thirst, or tossing with the tawny sand
That shifts its bound and shape for ever. Still,
If thy low bed be under tree or hill,
My guardian love doth sweetly fence it round
With benediction and makes holy ground,
Where'er it be, and screens from glare and gust—
Though others pass thy unremembered dust.

A SYMPOSIUM OF POETS.

Here, Lewis Morris, in this green and cosy umbrageous retreat, let's have a poet swing
And chat of every mortal thing—
We'll hold a brief Symposium.
And with a sonnet catch the shy bird Bridges,
Who writes so little and yet gives so much
And has, with you, the architekton's touch,
Serene, sedate,
And marches on to his predestinate
Goal, swerving not. And as June brings its midges,
With nightingales and roses, let me come—
Though scarce as finely feathered as are some
And not in favour,
Like our bold Laureate with his loyal jumping
And paid tub-thumping
Of courtly savour;
I may be tiny but I yet can sting,
And you must do the royal part and sing.
Beneath my beech-trees—sub tegmine fagi—
We well may pass a pleasant hour,
And fancy knowledge is a power
Or ignorance a costly plague; I,
As here delectably we sit,
Will gladly serve the wine if you the wit.
You two are scholars, with a broader ken
Than these poor Bumblepuppy babblers,
And like brave gentlemen
You take your learnèd leisure with the ease
Of conscious grace and strength,
And not as sordid scrabblers
Who smell of garlic and but write to please;
You please to write, in larger moods and strains,
And grandly utter in due time at length
The free and finished
And rounded orb of perfect pains,
With magic undiminished.
No gutter mark on your sweet toil,
Which breathes of moorlands and the fresh-turned soil
And mountain tops, and marries
Wide culture and virginity
Of all untrodden ways and higher air,
And carries
The seal of whatsoever is most fair
And true Divinity.
Mud-raking lurks not here, you love it not—
The reek of brothels and the blare of taverns,
Corruption gilt and glorified, the spot
Thrice-damned to splendour turned, and Lady Charlotte
Undressed in public and adored as harlot;
Your steps lie elsewhere, by the crystal caverns
And tumbling waves—
Afar from London gas and legs
And all the treasured dregs
Of pavements, music halls, and whited graves—
By breezy wood,
And flowers like flame that ravish and refine
Or pastures golden with the celandine,
Where womanhood
Retains the jewels of her purity
And prizes it, and deems not shame
Is honour. You, O Bridges,
Classic and calm upon the snowy ridges
Untravelled (yet your haunt) look down futurity,
And leave a heritage and name;
As you, dear Cymric Bard,
With the bright crown so regal and unmarr'd.
No futile shaping
Yours, and no mock-heroic fits,
The bastard blisses and sky-scraping,
The waxen lilies, paper passions,
And meretricious fires and fashions,
Of shoddy poets
And all the little-mighty Thundertits
Who rape the Muses and their manner,
Half Jingoes and half Jowetts,
Yet harping on the same dull string—
Who strut beneath their signboard banner,
But lack the vital thing.
Your silver converse breaks, like wimpling waters,
Upon my charmèd ears;
My spirit hears
Long cadences of time, that swoon and swell
With the low laugh of England's daughters
Among green clouds of trees
Touched by a gentle breeze,
Now infinite as ocean, now one shell;
In the calm measured fate
Of words that move to thought's own melody
In it's eternity,
Pure and proportionate.
Alas, that I may never dare to give
To others, to the world, a copy
Of catholic great notes
Which are your glory and prerogative;
To this false age, so sham and shoppy,
Which grabs at greasy votes
And hands of Demos (or Arithmos) drunk
With ignorance and wind and pelf,
And daily lower sunk
In Caliban brute worship of itself.
The universe beats in each little chime
Of yours, and music of all time;
While their cosmography,
May be summed up in one sick term pornography.
Ah, hear my bees in branches pendulous
Discoursing better
With their unstudied music murmurous
Among the flowers
Of rarer souls in dim forgotten bowers;
Than these that wear a fetter
And call it freedom, while they dance and gabble
To any tune that's set them by the Rabble
Of crowned stupidity,
Or insipidity,
And know no feeling and no aim
(Whate'er they speak and spoil and claim)
Beyond the malice sour
Or idle impulse of the hour.
For, ah, the moment of the mean has struck
The strumpet-call of lewdness,
And vermin revel in the mire and muck
Of unrenewedness.
Yes, this white port is famous
For twenty miles and more;
A precious German Prince, fat ignoramus,
With fifty pounds a year and rich in Rotdam
In search of English money and a bride,
Once tasted it and swore
He never drank such royal sherry—
Not he, “Ach, Gott dam!”
And much he maundered of his country's pride,
Her wars and Williams, and waxed merry;
And then, still praising his good cheer,
He asked me for cigars and beer!
It has a finer fragrance
Than any red, a delicate sweet note
Of warmer lands, the vagrance
Which comes not but from brighter suns,
Where beneath cloudless blue its epic runs
The stream of Camoens and he wrote.
Ah, here no politics,
No cant
Of party cries or candlesticks
And crosses or the everlasting sex!
No hateful Socialistic sputter
Of unwashed orators who smell and pant,
No bread and butter
Problems to harry us and vex
The rates, no redolence of gas!
No schoolboards here,
To bring a red-tape atmosphere
Of musty rations
And all the last abominations—
But vinum et in vino Veritas!
Here's to a gayer earth, a broader sky
For grand old English letters,
And confusion
To those who cramp our New Academy
And their abettors
With squalid pale seclusion
And sickly art,
Which has each mortal trick except the heart—
The fringes down to the last tag,
The paint and powder
And every sort of purple rag,
Each loop and button—
Which, as it feebler wanes, yet scolds the louder.
O I am more than weary, sirs,
Of leperous loves and these anaemic stirs
In petticoats and pinched philosophers!
Art, for Art's sake, is dead as mutton—
Yes, dead and damned for ever and for ever,
And no endeavour
Will galvanise to life that nauseous mess
(Too mean for Adderlèy's gaunt clerics)
Of cheap hysterics,
And all imaginable filthiness.
So here we found—and on a wider basis
Than any passing phasis
Of fashion's folly—here we found
(In truth and sanity,
Whate'er is fresh and beautiful and fair
And walks on earth and breathes a heavenly air,
On sure and solid ground)
Our New Academy.
Hence no appeal to any further court—
This is the bar,
The final and the supreme central star
Which gives the first and last report,
And brooks no other.
For each of you will bring a brother,
The fittest that he knows to make
The living line of uttermost white finish
Which nought can add to or diminish,
In righteousness of art
And with the holy heart,
For love and beauty sake.
And each of them will guarantee one more,
Foredestined by the calling as of grace
And its election to an equal place,
Pre-eminent in sweet poetic lore,
Among the chosen Few.
And these will gather in yet two glad wearers
Of golden bloom and dawn and dew,
The radiant crown of song,
Most gentle and most strong,
Who will be too the guardians and the bearers
Of that most heavenly fire
Lit first at flaming founts
In lightning and on legendary mounts,
And handed down through ages
By reverence of the sages
In wonder and desire.
And were my own poor hearty wish opportune, which you deny,
We might have had a great Archbishop
To give his blessing and paternal pressing,
And the pure odour lent by sanctity;
For instance, that commander
Of faithful souls, the second Alexander,
Who conquers far more worlds and wins a pœan
Of wider praise than the Pellœan;
For he, in aching lives of dearth,
Has poured refreshing streams
Of all enchantments and all soothing dreams
And conquered Heaven as well as earth.
Nor will you suffer woman,
Whom I would warmly hail,
To blend her weakness rich and human
And perfect that which would be thus divine
With what is fairest and most feminine—
Although she shall prevail.
You dread the “Higher Morals,”
Which are a trade mark for triumphant lust
Perched on our social drains,
Playing with vice as babes with bells and corals,
And every Scatterbrains
Who would build Eve anew from dirt and dust,
And prurient madam
Who knows the first man was Macadam.
We'll lift Poetics to its proper seat,
The centre of our light and lore,
A mint for but refinèd ore;
No commerce whereby men do drink and eat
Who only care to cheat
Not charm, and fill the shop or belly
(Like the primæval protoplasmic jelly)
And curse our ethic ends and snore.
The minor key, you say is settled
For centuries, and subjectivity
Played sadly out;
And the new era, many-mettled,
With other eyes and pure proclivity
Dwells on the graces beyond doubt
And gifts of the external.
The pessimist is passing from the stage,
With all his moans and groans profuse
And self-abuse;
While on the joys of the Eternal,
We build the temple of a brighter age.
Your lofty level speech,
O Bridges, raises me in hopes
Away from this thin period and the screech
Of femininity
And forcible and feeble in-and-inity;
For like the heliotrope
You turn for ever to the sun,
And each fair end is a fresh work begun.
But, Morris, hear the stutter
Of the great owl that cannot tell the tale
Borne down the endless years
And big with grave arrears,
Which still he strives to utter;
And there the nightingale,
As jealous of your richer voice
And truer fiction
Pours out the tempest of his benediction,
And bids a better world rejoice.
My wine is good, you cry—celestial tonic;
I thank you much, yet yours is sweeter—
But see the moonlight on that mullion!—
And what Tertullian
Might well have called though in a nobler sense
A draught demonic
And in the taste and perfume meeter,
Not under-toned nor over-tense;
And in your music, with you both,
Nature rejected now renews her troth.
Lo, we have talked the evening out, and night
Has taken flight,
And a serener day
Is trembling in the East,
A glorious feast
Of gold and pearls in sweetest disarray.
We hail the omen,
And will accept the solemn charge
A better race to run,
In spite of hidden fears and many foemen—
To write our history large
In co-extensive thought and song,
And roll a happier earth along;—
Hail to the rising sun!

BENEATH A SKY OF GRAMARY.

SPRING.

Spring, like a splendid thief, comes on the lands
With sweet and subtle arts,
It hangs its jewels on dead buds and brands
And steals away our hearts.
It runs in flame on branches pendulous
With weight of many years,
And wipes away with kisses amorous
The cold and lingering tears.
Before we know its presence a soft change
Falls on decay and blight,
And with a stirring beautiful and strange
Moves the embodied light.
It breathes with rapture on the balmy air,
And to the poplar spire
Steps in its glory up the rippling stair
The vegetable fire.
Till, beyond guessing, over the grim scars
A laughing gown of green
Is cast, and winter frets behind its bars
And idly frowns between.
For as a wedding garment earth assumes
Its resurrection dress,
As if it were God's laughter that illumes
Eternal loveliness.

POËTICS.

Yes, every man of woman born
To crown of thunder or of thorn,
I am convinced—it is my honest credo—
May do one thing which not another can,
And has in him some private plan
For building up or pulling down,
And framing (just for his renown)
A toy or death torpedo.
And each of us, hitched to reality,
Possesses still
To use or lay aside at will
A glorious individuality,
Unlike the rest and all apart and fair
However slight or simple it may be,
Hung upon golden hair
Or like a splendid ocean broad and free;
A spacious song
To roll the weary world along,
And set a thousand hearts on fire
With stern magnificence of hate
At evil fate,
Or love of beauty and divine desire;
A talent
Worth finding and worth using and worth telling,
Which never will be given again—
For thus the Powers ordain—
To gentle wisdom or imperious youth,
And might make earth more gay and gallant
Or kindle sunshine in a brother's dwelling;
A truth,
Which would be falsehood to a different mind,
But here could turn all nations kin and kind.
Yet most, the millions,
Are quite content to eat and drink and sleep
And at their petty tasks in squalor creep
Or ride on pillions
Behind the noisy Few who lead and lie,
And then (not coming to their own)
To neighbours and themselves unknown,
Decay and die.
And there the treasure goes with them, is lost,
An undiscovered land
Though ripe and ready to the hand,
Which by them only could be crost;
And the full grace and blessing
Not for a single class
But the great total mass—
The book, the picture,
The deed of light like God's supreme caressing,
The red-hot stricture
Which blasts to ashes the brute wrong
However throned and diademed and strong—
These and a thousand more,
That might have grandly lifted
The multitude of toilers unto rest
And higher levels, adding to the store
Of happiness and learning and rich art,
Or rifted
The ragged clouds and shown the bright and best;
That should have striven to humanise the heart
With all its rudeness
And clothe in comely garments nudeness,
Or sound a science or new chord
Which predecessors failed to reach and raise
Out of the darkness unto dawn and praise,
Or whet a saving sword—
These quite unheard, with their sweet languages,
Pass into the cold Silences
Unsyllabled, and the grand sum of things
Is so much poorer for their unwaked springs.
And I,
Who move unhonoured among men,
Am still a player needed
Though all unheeded,
If but by some rejected song or sigh
Or little touch of an obscurer pen,
To round the orb of labour and bring heaven
Just one thought nearer,
And be an atom of the secret leaven
Fermenting in the minds of those who toil
And make earth dearer.
I, too, a factor
In the broad compass of the land and sky,
Do yield my measure of the power or oil
To the great wheels and piston rods,
A hidden but inevitable actor
Amid the legions that are God's
Upon the platform of Eternity.
The giant in me romps
And asks for revels,
Though he may sport alike with babes and devils,
And pageantries and varied pomps;
He fain would sprawl his giant length
About an endless canvas in profusion
Of all sweet colours, and assay the strength
Which is his weakness and his joy,
And treat the universe as though a toy—
Yet, after every form
Or freak of tranquil ease and storm,
Be quite as far from the conclusion.
Let others drag in the old ruts,
Or hoop themselves in meagre butts
Of wine they turn to water;
I want a larger space,
A continent or two for my embrace
And not the curled and scented quarter
Of some small fraction,
As tame and tiny as a lady's lap,
Wherein to feed on sugarplums and pap
And serve the silken reins of idle traction.
I have big notions,
Not narrowed to mere Matins and devotions,
But wide as is the world of being
And deep as the abyss of hell—
Yes, sometimes with a brimstone smell—
And gathering in the purview of its seeing
The honest mud, and not by ounces,
As much as furbelows and flounces
And midnight shapes
Like monstrous owls and bats
And beetles and Egyptian cats,
With sunrise and sunsetting,
And not forgetting
Our oldest friends, the blest anthropoid apes.
I hold Poetics
To be the mirror of each mortal thing—
Your skeleton, your dear wife's apron string,
Your private mole,
Your comicals as well as your pathetics;
Not quite the cinder-hole,
Or cesspit or the gutter;
For there I draw a decent line,
And bar our ethics and the true Divine
Within a shade and shutter.
I do believe in good taste and good morals
And leave the dirty capers
To d——d Religious Papers,
And grand young men who yet are cutting
Their teeth and new opinions
On babies' corals
Throughout the Press in our too free dominions,
Or roar their time of rutting.
I duly try to catch
The perfume and the passion as they flower,
The one sweet moment, if a smear
Of glory on some cottage latch,
The moonlight on a mossy tower,
A terrible tear
Which in the shadowed light looks red as blood,
Like sweat of gray Gethsemane—
Love at its topmost flood,
And in calm woods the coy anemone
A fallen star.
But, though I never veil the scar
Which has a grace and is a gem of jewels
According to its range,
I do not rashly blaze it out
Exposing it to study strange;
I leave the maid her crewels,
Her pretty zone and pout
And magic dimple—
I wish her to be clean and simple.
From those who lightly tear the figleaves off
And make of purity their scoff
Or gloat in coarse excesses
And squirmings of mere lewd undresses,
I turn with loathing
As from the dunghill and the awful reek;
My soul is vexed
With vice made sweet and virgins all unsexed,
And the rouge-plastered cheek—
I want a creed and clothing.

AS THE LIGHT.

THE BLIND GODDESS.

THE RED COCK.

THANATOS.

TRUTH UNVEILED.

Truth stood before me—and my mouth was mute—
White-bosomed, sweet and sole, and absolute;
Intolerably pure in soft undress,
Clothed with the light of naked loveliness.
Immortal life shone from her calm gray eyes,
That looked on me like twin eternities;
And her low voice, dim as forgotten tears,
Dropt music of the immemorial years
And in a moment down the stream of Time
Bare me with chant of its unearthly chime.
Flamed in her hand a lily, and at the rest
And gracious heaven of her uncinctured breast,
One jewel brake into ten thousand beams
Mixed with the marvels of all dazzling dreams
And dear familiar sights. I gazed at her,
Frail as a form of golden gossamer
And still more strong than bases of the Deep,
Mingled of madness, dawn, and poppied sleep
And dew and fire; and into me her might
Burned, with the glory of a great delight
And virgin bloom and passion of pure ken;
While the red rose of lips unkissed by men
Moved as in blessing, and at last I heard
(What none may live and name) the secret word,
That taught me how she married in one breath
The mystery of ancient life and death.
But now I read the riddle of all Time
Known and unknown to every creed and clime,
And earth can never be the same to me
When earth is heaven and beautiful and free
And heaven is earth. Most luminous I mark
The thread of light through the untravelled dark
And mapt-out chaos, and with joy I stand
A lonely watcher in a waiting land;
Because I have the clue of things, and know
Where the ways meet, and hear the grasses grow.

ETERNAL NOTHING.

MOTHER EARTH.

THE CRIME OF CREATION.

Alas,
That I being God should greatly sin
And let a world of woe begin,
That shall not lightly pass!
Oh I repent me
In framing but the mockery of man,
I so unbent me
From the grand purpose of my glorious plan
As to delight in something less than All,
And dabble with the incomplete and sport
With such creation;
Which only was foredoomed to fall
From its first brightness, and come short
And find damnation.
Yea, I have sinnèd sorely, and through Time
Must bear the burden of my grievous crime
And fatal error,
In toil and terror;
To expiate, on an unceasing Cross
And by the torment of a daily death
Which cannot die,
And in the shadow of a lonely loss
Which cannot lose,
The evil which will never be atoned,
Till man with God at last has been enthroned.
I must draw on the insufferable breath,
Because I choose
To be Divinity
And cannot 'scape the horror of Infinity,
Nor one small drop of that wherein I drown,
Which is alike My bitter curse and crown.
Alas,
That I may not undo the wrong
Wrought on the clay that issued from My moulding
And pictured Me though in a broken glass,
With fragments of the heavenly song;
Which could not bear the folding
Of iron arms and evils,
And met with all-unequal front
Legions of dooms and devils,
Intextured in the web of hourly wont.
And could that fragile being,
When darkness was its seeing,
Cope with the crushing weight of sleepless foes
For ever camped round his unarmoured walls,
Temptations which were leagued with native lust
Rooted in dust,
And bearing fruit of fatal woes
Or falls?
In other tracks and times
And with a loftier making
Man might have stood against the storm
Of clouded climes,
And reared erect a stainless form
With no necessity of breaking;
He might have gathered sweeter grace
And in the grandeur of his godlike serving,
Undimmed by swerving,
Shown some bright shadows of My own fair Face.
Alas,
That now the creature thing and the Creator
Should have reversed their portions quite,
And man is the real educator
With Me a pupil in his class;
If I may, through æonian pain,
Somehow regain
The old lost Beauty infinite!
For he, in sorrows vast and various
And death vicarious,
Atones for Me and on My Cross
For ever hangs
In mortal pangs,
That purging from him all the dross
He might redeem Me from the station
Of guilty grief,
And bring in turn the ripe relief
Of full salvation.
For he whom I threw lightly out
From sheer exuberance of Strength,
Into a Kosmos dark with doubt
And rank with every shape of trial,
As helpless as a babe new-born,
Shall be at length
My rescuer from a fate forlorn
By his denial;
And I the Potter,
When it has gone the weary way
Through the red furnace heated seven times hotter,
Shall be re-fashioned by the clay
And issue from this awful cerement,
Saved by the love of man my lost experiment.
My cup is now already sweeter,
Though I must drink it to the bottom lees
In utter shame
And feel My Name
But a reproach, from which God flees
Yet hides not, and thus grows completer.
They deem I died once only,
But God is always dying
And always sad and lonely;
Yea, in the wounded creature's sobs My Voice,
And even the baby's crying
Re-echoes from my lips and through My Heart
So haunted yet apart.
And man, who could not have a virile choice
In his own dim creation,
Consigned at first to weakness,
Still greatly has forgiven
His Maker now the Made
And now no more unshriven;
Till, as from waters of regeneration
And by the path of meekness,
I shall arise with Him from winter shade,
Unto new glories vernal;
And man shall reign with Me upon the Throne,
No longer God alone,
Co-equal, co-eternal.

THE SKYLARK.

NO LAURELS.

He needs no laurels for his head,
He needs no vulgar shouts of men;
He liveth still and is not dead,
All history shall be his pen.
His name was sculptured not in stone
Nor blazoned by the painter's art,
He asked no crumbling crown or throne
And dwells in every human heart.
He let the soldier trace in blood
The paltry triumph of a day,
For revolutions' rising flood
To sweep it and his sword away.
He let the statesman's gilded lie
Flaunt for a moment at its power,
And then in shame and shadows die
With other creatures of an hour.
He let the poet idly sing
Of visions past and vain as clouds,
And fawn as lacquey to a king
Or shape for patriots their shrouds.
While for himself he was the slave
Of all and bare the people's ban,
And thus for evermore his grave
Is but the grateful mind of man.

THE WILDERNESS OF SIN.

BLIND LOVE.

THE BRIDE OF THE SNOW.

THE FRIEND OF MAN.

THE BABY KING.

THE PANTHEIST.

Creation steps from pose to pose,
There was a thistle—is a rose,
But not commencement, not a close.
No separate life has ever stood,
The stone is beautiful and good,
And heaven is all in womanhood.
I see the whole of Nature's spell,
Hid in the shaping of a shell—
The colour of a blossom's bell.
Nor could I for a moment live,
Did not the Maker freely give
To all His full prerogative.
He is as much in every drop
Of dew that bends the spicule prop,
As in the mighty mountain top.
I feel Him in the thronèd thought,
No less than in the Empire wrought
Through strife across the ages fought.
I know the total sum of things
Is everywhere, in insect wings,
And faintest air of golden strings.
I find the glamour of the globe
In violet's breath, the surgeon's probe,
The rustling of a maiden's robe;
And in the second that goes by,
With but a new-born baby's cry,
The passion of Eternity.
While I am in each humblest part
And one with Nature and with Art,
The Universe is in my heart.
And I am God and God is I,
For ever far, for ever nigh,
Within the sun, within the sigh.
The earth is but the shifting dress,
Through pain and joy's more sad caress,
Of the Eternal Loveliness.
And nought there is that cannot say,
While life and death together play,
“Behold, I sup with God to-day.”
He is the star, the crumbling clod,
The beggar's crutch, the prophet's rod,
And all in all and always God.

LOST AND LOVED.

INFANCY.

ICHABOD.

THE MIDNIGHT TRYST.

THE NEW YEAR.

LOOKING BACK.

ON THE KNEES OF THE GODS.

MY FLOWER.

Woven of air, a virgin thought, embodied as it came
Fresh from the Maker's mind and wrought of phantasy and flame;
A rift of blue, a message true
Within a sky of gramary
And ever still the same.
The rapture of all sweetest things and gossamers and fairy wings,
The grape's bewitching blood,
The glamour which the sunset brings
To bathe a mountain flood.
The mystery of history from secret sluices drawn,
A note of love and perfect rest made beautiful and manifest,
A prophecy of dawn.
The voice of silence and the scent of lands that none have seen,
Borne over gulf and continent where holy steps have been—
All gathered up in one fair cup,
To gladden some great Queen.

OVER MY GRAVE.

The Spirit moved me and I spoke
Of many thoughts and things,
Just as its music in me woke
And wafted ready wings.
Great windows opened in my brain
And let a Presence in,
Which stirred to Beauty and its pain
And was to all akin.
I had no purpose of my own
Except to do my part,
And gather fruit which God had sown
With sorrow in my heart.
He softly breathed on me in song,
And thence I faltered out
Eternal hatred of the wrong,
If dimly and by doubt.
I was His lute, a humble chord
Whereon He played at will,
And only echoed back His Word
Though jarred and jangled still.
And all my worst and wildest airs,
That murmured dark and low,
Yet strove to climb the altar stairs
Whence life and healing flow.
And if I ever uttered right,
Or sent one saving note
To help a brother, His the might
Which through my weakness wrote.
And when I wandered from His seat
Or found but cruel scars,
It was my foolish wings that beat
Against their prison bars.
I would too often go my way
And blundered from His tune,
Which had I let the Master play
Had turned all winter June.
I sang of children and the poor
In flickering swallow flight,
And in the rudeness of the boor
I showed a jewel bright.
The mystery of Nature wrought
On me, to syllable
By bridges of my quarried thought
The awful miracle.
The humour at the heart of life
Was often on my lip,
Which peeped in laughter out of strife
And curbed the cruel whip.
I saw it growing out of grief
Forbidding me be dull,
While making tears their own relief,
And grinning from the skull.
Though still in every note I struck
I knew a ruling Hand,
And from its holding seemed to pluck
The sweetness of the land.
Till I was all respondent strings
Whereon a Law was laid,
Which marked the melody of things
And babbled what it said.

IN MY GRAVE.

THE TRYST.

In the sweet of the morning I rose
To the trysting and went,
And the violet from its repose
Gave me greeting of scent;
And the foxglove awoke from its dreams
In the rivulet glassed,
And though white blushed with alien beams
As in passion I passed.
All the birds tuned their silvery throats,
And the throstle and dove
Brushed the dew from their bosoms and coats
At the meeting of love.

TIME IS NOTHING.

PHAROS.

THE QUARRIED HEART.

The generations yet unborn shall come,
And quarry at his treaure houses; some
To hang in tawdry frames some priceless gem,
Or join it to a harlot's diadem
Of borrowed beauty; some to turn their mud
To palaces, that make the marble bud
And laugh for ever in immortal lines.
But, while he lived, men counted not his mines
As rich with jewels and red gold; they passed
To others, when they saw their features glassed
In vulgar forms and squalid fancies. None
Would know, that here a Master's work was done.
They loved to find their own mean stupid parts
Reflected by the same ignoble arts
And glorified, and hail themselves all girt
With native folly and congenial dirt
Gilt. But this man would never soil his hand
With touch of vileness, for a King's command
Or ransom, and he went his royal way
Unswerving if the whole world stept astray
And left him stranded still. He held the truth,
Who rendered it in dreams of deathless youth—
And syllabled in song, till earth shall fly,
Sole in his splendid wise insanity.
But now, though he did with his beauty bless
The poor and needy, and in lavishness
Of regal robes made fine the naked form
Which else had no defence against the storm;
And scattered praises, like pure flowers of white,
To lift the little to his infinite;
Even now they call their own his riches, fain
To steal that plenty which he wrung from pain;
Till all the world is sweeter for his art,
The quarried fragments of a broken heart.

MAKING OF A WORLD.

Somewhere in the great eternity
Where no angel even had trod,
From the womb of time's maternity
And the death-throes of a God
(Who alone by daily death
Gives the universe its breath);
Rocked by earthquakes and eclipse
And all tempests at hand-grips,
Swung the planet
Out of night
Into sight,
Hazy, mazy, as if crazy
Fear or drunken force began it.
Fire and cloud,
Shining shroud,
Dim and dolorous and trembling
Into order and new life,
Forth from agonies of strife
And strange energies assembling;
Wan and ghostly thus it came
Bodied flame,
Fretting at the measured bounding
Which compelled it now to bend
To the predetermined end.
So in dying which is living
Every moment the dear God
(Grown and realized by giving)
As a woman might her gloves,
Drops a planet
To be someday gold and granite
Full of burning hates and loves,
Just to show the pathway trod
And to prove Himself our God.

MY LOST GARDEN.

My pretty garden,
Framed in the silence of the Chiltern Hills
And hung as those for ever dead and gone
In sun-bright Babylon,
Discrowned by dearth,
But then a glory betwixt Heaven and earth!
With oaks like Arden,
Whereon the silver cloud a season stills
Its wayward flight and leaves at leisure
The liquid treasure,
Which by some magic process turns
To precious gold
The niggard mould,
And fills with dews the empty urns.
I hear it yet,
Nor can forget
The murmurous sound of ceaseless rain
Which haunts the rustling poplar trees,
Touched by no breath of earthly breeze
As of a prisoned soul in pain;
Which in the wondrous land of Long Ago
I drank from open casement
In pure and deep amazement,
At night, from that soft lake of leaves below.
The beeches glimmer,
Far down the slope and up the happy height
In gracious bounties
Of tossing branch and tumbled spray
That soar and sink and melt away
Along a line of prospect dimmer
And six fair counties,
Into a solemn sea of misty light.
Their virginal coy green
Falls like a balm in blessed vision
Of sweeter lands and other skies
Upon the drought of old world-weary eyes
Mocked by the years of vain derision,
And fairies hide between.
My gracious garden,
In this dull barren city pent
I mourn your Eden bowers
And holy flowers
For me unfallen, and without a spot
Of evil, and I miss the pears that harden
To ripeness rich and garment sober
Of mellow scent,
And change their colour with the chill October—
I miss and mourn each little nook and plot.
Soft lawn,
Where daises struggled with the mosses
Dew-sweet but alien, and in joy looked up
And found fair sisters in the buttercup,
To make the gardener crosses,
In dim shy shades withdrawn!
A stranger's foot now on your greensward stands
Regardless of the love
And gentle hands,
Which ministered to all your daily needs
And followed larger creeds
Than those which simply saw the flowers above,
But not the flowers below
And beauty brighter yet within
Which is to God Himself akin,
And thence must overflow.
Far outpost of the armies of the Hills,
Thy wind-swept area
For ever makes with many tones and trills
A music in my breast,
Which cannot rest;
It holds the white stellaria
Inside the glory of its ample girth,
And brings to heavenly birth
Beneath the shelter of the hazel copse
And guardian oaktrees, which did erst environ
The routed Stuart with their arms of iron,
And pure snowdrops.
A fragrance of old herbs and times
Seems mingled with the battle chimes,
Lost honour but not loves
And ladies' gloves
That were the colours of most gallant knights,
And stolen blisses
Of desperate kisses
Snatched from the flame and agony of fights,
In breathless pause
Betwixt the rally
And the sad final clause.
The branching brake,
And gnarled and twisted thorns
On paths with fallen foliage crisper
In fancy's wider Spring awake
And nod their glamoured heads, and whisper
Of deathless morns.
Those graces twine
Their tendrils round my inmost heart,
And strike a deep and nobler chord
Than earthly art;
Until it seems a thing Divine,
And like the Garden of the Lord.

THE STATESMAN.

I see him now, the statesman stand
As some lone crag by lightning rent,
With thunder voice and lifted hand
Sole, sad, and eminent.
From caverned eyes black beams of fire
Shoot forth as arrows awful fate,
And lava-like his heart's desire
Is speech predestinate,
He is his message, but the voice
Which carries him and all his woes;
Necessity, that has no choice,
Shakes him with earthquake throes.
No thought of wavering or a rest—
He gives the simple mandate nude;
Possessing and by this possest,
In dreadful solitude.
No weak misgiving now can bend
His purpose, all unmoved by arts;
He sees before him but one end—
To break those stubborn hearts,
Around him rolls an iron storm—
The burning words that blast and strike
The hardest life to light and form,
Rain fast and hammer-like.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION.

HOEING.

IN HONOREM SENECTUTIS.

FINAL FORM.

WHITE FIRE—SNOWDROP

BURY ME.

PAINTER AND PORTRAIT.

BIRDS OF PASSAGE.

WHITE HORSES.

NATURE UNVEILED.

I looked at Nature, and her face was cold
And almost stern and hard;
As if she had some hidden truth to hold,
And ever stood on guard.
But then I moved away in doubt and fear,
And like a timid child;
Till in a moment she was more than near,
And through her shadow smil'd.
Ah, now it was no stranger that I saw
Who dim and distant stood,
Entrenched behind the inexorable law
Above me darkly good.
I saw myself, though fairer grander still,
Stript of the earthly dress;
And, under every human blot and ill,
Diviner loveliness.
For I was one with her in blessed power,
And by her beauty clothed;
The awful life, that thrilled the star and flower,
Was unto me betrothed.
And when I would in helplessness despond,
Before the bounding ridge;
The very limit was the life beyond,
And the o'erpassing bridge.

SECRET OF AN EGYPTIAN TOMB.

UNDER THE GROUND.

“DOG'S EARS.”

Here fell his hand. and for a moment trifled
With the reluctant page,
Objecting to be rifled
Thus of its glory in the virgin stage
Of new first freshness; by the strain and struggle,
When rude young vigour tried to snuggle
Too closely, madam, with its unwashed Adam,
And the protesting page upcurled in rage.
A boy's brown hand,
Which fitted better to the bat or ball,
And yet was beautiful in all,
Shaped for command.
Tall Harold! Now the earth upon him lies,
And he has read the ancient mysteries
Veiled from the mortal glances
Of these lame deathward dances,
And in the calm eternities
He knows the secret of romances.
Alas, that I, now shunted on the shelf
With faded goods and hardihoods,
Then did not go myself!
And here—it is the same old story book
With the same injured look,
She toyed with baby fingers
Most delicate and fair,
But with a reverent awestruck air
And timid touch that moved me much
Almost to tears—and lingers;
She tried to turn one stubborn leaf
And got entangled in a sheaf,
Then laughed and blushed in pink and white deliciousness
At her poor awkward aims and baffled claims,
And then had nearly cried
In sheer capriciousness
When she again and vainly tried.
Bright Ethel!
And she is likewise gone, who travelled far
To sleep, no more a wayward child
Though ever wild,
Under the Southern Cross and alien star,
And in no homely Bethel.
But this?
A dreadful combat here was hotly waged,
Which ended in the usual kiss
When sunk the storm that for five minutes raged
And broke two tea cups and one golden head;
Mab wanted pictures,
Rob something to be read,
And both had loving pats and strictures.
But thus, you see, the shocking deed was done,
And such a “dog's ear” (rather say a “hog's ear”)
Was surely seen by none.
Mab married—
Well? A big house in Belgrave Square
And half a million too, which with them carried
A drunken bully and a world of care;
She dressed divinely and was good
At waltzing, pious acts and tracts,
And early services and patent facts—
Yes, everything but motherhood.
Some artist fellow
Who could when sober write
And did (himself a dirty green and yellow)
In “Black and White,”
Made capital of her and took her off, in
A season's tale,
Which reeked of stale cigars and ale
And ran through ten editions with the sale—
But Mab was happiest in her coffin.
Rob could not qualify for scarlet,
And with one great mouth-filling d—n
Swearing he would not be a lazy varlet
Renounced the ordeal of exam;
But then, born soldier, he—
Yes, teste patre, sir, a game son—
Went over sea
To do his little share
Of duty and a glorious care
And rode and fought and died with Jameson.
Look at this pucker!
'Twas here my parson boy, the placid Fred
So fond of books he always jibbed at bed
Like some Malay went suddenly a mucker;
Because a visitor,
One of the cousins whom he had by dozens,
Called him a “baby”!
Fred's fist soon turned inquisitor
And one eye black and may be,
The pretty pair—
I can't remember now.
His cooing voice and girlish hair
And white unruffled brow,
Took in his playmates till they felt
His angry knuckles;
His Bishop knows, if any Rector truckles
To lord or layman, then his name is spelt
With different letters.
He is a book in trousers
Unto this day, and it requires some rousers
To tear him from his gilded fetters.
One more!
This is my Dolly's private mark,
Pet and particular,
Whose dainty fingers were not slack to score;
She used to cuddle up to me at dark,
With some auricular
Confession of commandments chipped,
When she had stolen sugar lumps or slipped
On stony paths of virtue;
With looks half-pleased, half-shy,
As if I said, “No punishment shall hurt you!”
With frocks and words awry,
My precious Dolly!
So exquisite, and wiser
In all the riches of her radiant folly
And pure defence of innocence,
Than any miser
With his tremendous balance at the bank
And in his joyless soul a blank.
It seemed not right that she should suffer,
That fragile form of gossamer and dew
And light be wrung with cruel pains
Of many a throe and sounds of woe,
And hear a sentence grim and gruffer
Than torture's footfall cursed anew
Or groans of prison chains;
And lie for years of tears upon her back,
As on a martyr's rack
Or at a fiery stake to burn and quake
In ceaseless pangs to lie,
As she does yet
With every pulse of agony beset—
But not to die.
And lo!
I would you should consider next
This turned-up text,
The one reserved and ready show
Meant for the infant of the cradle,
A spectacle of most amazing art,
With fearful hues of reds and blues
And every colour too in part—
Somebody feeding something with a ladle,
And four and twenty blackbirds in a tart!
Here golden Cicely,
The baby romp then regnant
Set her sweet rosebud lips,
With mirth and mischief pregnant—
Though all her sins were done so nicely—
And took ecstatic sips
With coral gums and greedy thumbs,
Which left eclipse.
Where is she now, I often weep and wonder?
I question night and day
The birds and breezes at their play,
The flowers and thorns along my way,
And thought and thunder;
I ask myself, I beg of all,
But nothing answers to my call.
By many winsome naughty wiles
And dazzling smiles
To me and every one endeared,
She sprang up as a splendid poppy
Proud and despising shams and what was shoppy
Or smelled of soil and honest toil—
And disappeared.
She left no single trace,
A glance, a glove, a tiny thread of love,
But in the boundless awful ocean
Of life and strife without commotion
Went down, and left an empty place
In heart and home which never can be filled—
Untamed, self-willed.
Ah, death were fuel
For an abiding sorrow and a shade
Which could not fade,
But this is worse and the most cruel
Last mad refinement of all malice
Which brims the chalice
Above full measure with its flow—
Never to know.
One other rumpled
Dear corner, and I then will cease.
It is no common crease,
Believe me, but is neatly wrought and rumpled
By a fond mother's hand,
Which here and there has left a pleasant sign
Of ministries and care benign
For ever yielding to some young demand
Unsated; yes, the whole wide book
Is blurred and blotted
With her great tender love, which saw
In each new whim's imperious law,
Just the one task allotted.
But at this tumbled page,
I note a special stage
And every wrinkle seems to twinkle
With some sad heritage.
O here
There is a sacred scent,
A solemn atmosphere
Of things departed,
Which dimly went out of our great content
To leave me lone and broken-hearted.
But at this very spot—I see her now
Divinely bow,
With not unconscious grace and queenly pose—
Her elbow rested,
As to my face she turned full-breasted
And laid on mine her mouth's dear crimson rose;
To tell me of her secret trouble,
Hardly, at length,
The gnawing curse which sapped her strength
By silence long made double.
And then she met the horror, fought
Up to the citadel,
As at his post a hero sentinel
Unshaken stands and never flinches,
Though deeply in her blood the poison wrought—
And died by inches.
You see, I find a sanctity and spell
In this old picture-book so torn and tattered,
And every “dog's ear” is a tomb
Of hopes all shed and shattered.
But yet, at times of evening chimes,
It is a wondrous womb
Of old and new creations and beginnings;
And then my darlings do come back to me
Bright without sear or sinnings,
And falls another light on land and sea.

POESY.

DOCTOR JOHNSON.

THE GRAY MARE IS THE BETTER HORSE.

THE SIREN'S SONG.

LACRYMÆ RERUM.

I WALKED WITH SHAKSPEARE.

I walked with Shakspeare, once, his kingly pace
Consented to my own, and in his face
I basked a season as beneath a sun
Of glory, and I marked the fountains run
That flow from him in fruitful love and life
And water all the world with beauty rife.
His calm clear eyes looked gently down on me,
Big with those thoughts that make the nations free
And brave and strong, and like a river swept
His tidal speech in majesty and kept
Communion with the currents of the earth
And heaven alike, and fell in dew on dearth.
I talked with Shakspeare for a while, and drank
Deep of his wisdom as it played with rank
And reputations and large modes of mind
That shook and shaped their fortunes for mankind;
He touched on all high policies of State
As with the finger of unerring fate,
And toyed with trifles and the fringe of facts
Bodied by him in fine immortal acts.
I heard and wondered and while near him felt
Uplifted to the light wherein he dwelt
Serene and sure with universal look,
Who gathered sweetness from the star or brook
And wove the leaf and portent in his plan,
Which read the hidden heart of things and man;
But, ah, I could not reach, howe'er he bent,
The awful height of his great argument.

THE SONGWRIGHT.

HISTORY OF A LIE.

Dropt by rose-red lips in play,
Just a word
Told in idle jest that stirr'd
Laughter, and then died away;
Just a moment's mirth, a fleet
Bubble on the stream of life,
Low and little, soft and sweet,
But the seed of lasting strife.
Thus it came
Forth into the world, and had
Hardly substance of a name,
But that it made gossip glad;
With the sound
Of light lisping, and the crisping
Raised by silken frocks and satin
Skirts that seemed to sigh in Latin
With their dim susurrus dear,
Born betwixt a smile and tear;
Yet a Lie,
Though so delicate and simple
And begotten with a dimple,
Owning not a sacred tie.
Thus it went
Up and down and to and fro,
As an erring child might go
If on nought but mischief bent.
In the drawingroom and street
Growing, growing,
Flowing, flowing,
Quick to scandalize and greet
Every comer with its tale,
Blowing, blowing,
To the volume of a gale;
With the patter
Of the multitude of feet
Hurried on at last to meet,
With the chatter
Of a thousand thousand rooks
And a thousand thousand brooks
All a-talking, all a-walking
All together,
Bound by the same common tether
And by one desire to say
What they should not and they would not,
If they trod the truthful way.
Till a trifle light as breath,
By the progress of decay,
Filled the country with its law
And the awe
As of universal death.

IS THE WIND BLOWING?

BLOOD AND MILK.

BROWN BIRD.

IN A WOOD.

THE CATHOLIC.

No one nation,
No one time,
Compasses his glorious vision
Which embraces every clime
In the purpose of its plan;
Builded on the sole foundation
Meet for universal man,
Bridging earth and scaling sky
In divine and calm derision
Of our poor mortality,
Lo, he fights not for the fraction
Of a faith,
Or the colour of the stole
Won by some small dying fraction
And the wraith
Of a long departed creed;
Nothing less,
Can content him, than the Whole
And Eternal Loveliness
In accord with every need.
Down the ages
Runs his thought like golden thread,
With a pulse of fiery leaven
Kindling all our blotted pages
And old stories dim and dead,
With the life and light of Heaven;
Till each broken prayer and part,
Find an echo in God's heart!

THE PROTESTANT.

Erring often,
Always thorough
With a moral and a mode
Which no time or turn will soften;
As if wisdom were his code
And no other's, and his plan
Just the only way for man,
And all heaven his rotten borough.
Yes, he blunders
Terribly, and tires his friends
With the old familiar ends
Which we know alas! too well,
And the little throes and thunders
Dooming half the world to hell.
Yet he does believe, as few,
Still in something and a God
Though for ever with a rod
To reduce us to his level,
And indeed more like the devil
Whom we rather would eschew.
But despite his petty range,
He has marrow
With the rant,
Bone and muscle in his strange
Medley of ill-mated lore
From an unhistoric store;
There's a jewel, in the narrow
Protestant.

TO MY ALMA MATER.

BURNS.

THE GOLDEN AGE.