University of Virginia Library

WENDELINE.

An English Rosebud without Thorns.

I hail alike the good and ill,
And when gray sorrows do rise up
They take the moulding of my will,
As troubled waters in a cup.
But it is thou, O magic maid,
Repairing every broken string,
By whose unconscious art and aid
I learned to conquer so and sing.

SECTION I. English Roses.

PRELUDE.

MY RED ROSE.

ROSA MUNDI.

Rosa Mundi—
Somewhere bright and somewhere sweet
With a nation at your feet;
Dainty morsel, not a common Salmagundi,
For a monarch fair and meet—
Rosa Mundi!
I shall never see that beauty
Which is just the dress of duty
Sitting on you softly, well;
In the bosom's swoon and swell,
And the shoulder
With a shaping white and innocent and bolder,
And the rounding of the dainty cheek and chin
Smooth and smiling beyond art
And a sculptor's power and part,
Beautiful to sense as sin;
Sitting on you truly, lightly,
As the colour on the flower,
As the moonshine on the tower,
As its lustre on the star—
Swaying slightly;
As the fire-bloom on the scar,
Brought by saintly souls who travelled down to hell
Just for others,
Virgin wives and maiden mothers,
And adventured right through the great burning bar
In the sureness
Of their pureness,
And came back serene and pale—
Living yet—to tell the tale.
But I never ask for vision
Of your face,
Or the falling of those feet
With their wanton indecision
And a miracle of grace,
Like the glow flakes
Of the snow flakes
Tinged by sunbeams coy and fleet,
Hesitating down to earth and dropping calm
On the upturned tiny palm
Of a baby's blessed hand;
Or the studied
Shy simplicity of gestures
Waved about you like command,
And the stainlessness of priestly rites and vestures
By our outer world unmuddied.
No, I never
Wish to see you, Rosa Mundi;
Nor would I make one endeavour
To behold you ere the hour,
When the spirit bursts in flower
And puts off this clogging flesh,
As the passing moon and sun die
And we break in glory from our prison mesh.
If I were indeed admitted
Just to the half-showing haze
Of a dim and distant gaze
And the uttermost far court,
I should be a life unfitted
And a moment's toy and sport.
O the veiled and mystic flashes
Of your cruel comeliness and spotless charms
And the tyrannous proud arms,
Worse than lightning,
With their curtained breath and bright'ning
Ooze of splendour, would consume my heart to ashes.
But I would in no wise come where
You are throned,
And enzoned
With a worship worthy of your awful dower;
Yet I know that you are somewhere,
Beautiful and blest, a power
Summing in your central seat
All that can be delicate and most delicious,
Made of heavy gold-brown tresses
And the white-pink lovelinesses
Melting in the bosom's beat,
And the mouth of red propitious;
Somewhere crownèd
By divinest right of merit,
As a Queen who doth inherit
Every goodness, every gift,
Which becomes a figure gownèd
Perfectly and not by thrift;
Just as if its pleasant robes
Were a portion
Of the exquisite pure bust and pouting lips,
Wedded as warm lips to lips,
Or as dusky lashes to their blue-gray globes—
And no milliner's distortion.
This is quite enough for me,
Rosa Mundi,
Fairer than fair Cleopatra
Or whoever now is, sweetest
And completely incompletest,
From the little isle of Lundy
To the furnace of Sumatra;
Just to know you are a living form and fragrance,
Moulded as no sculptor could
Carve in richest womanhood,
And a breathing
Pulse of passion's fiery vagrance
Bodied in a web of nerves
And most cunning hues and curves,
With a kind of halo's gentle dim enwreathing.
I can picture you at night,
In a terrible clear light
Making, breaking
Destinies of men and cities,
Not without immortal pities
Trembling in your dream-füll eyes,
Like the far gleam
And the star gleam
Of yet unarisen skies;
Acting history,
Turning nations and the individual's weakness
Into any show or shape,
As one might a silken cape—
But, amid the plastic meekness,
You, a mystery.
Sometimes in the sultry noon.
All ablaze with quivering light,
When great secret forces fight
(As not ever mortal men did)
Into open bounty of their languorous boon,
Fancy sees you,
Fancy flees you
Unapproachably removed and darkly splendid;
And a thousand thousand lustres
Speak and sparkle and contend
On your brow and scarlet lips
And from dazzling night of heavenly hair descend,
Till with coruscating clusters
On my soul drops down eclipse.
Love's own Lady,
In the gleams
Of a world of sunlit streams,
You are welcome, you are royal,
And they subject are and loyal;
While in shy retreats and shady
Corners, you are likewise fit
With your countless moods and modes
Quite beyond our common codes,
Fathomless and infinite.
Rosa Mundi,
Never shall your works begun die,
Though we ail and fail and falter
Ere the winnings,
Or faint-hearted pule and palter
With magnificence of sinnings;
You must carry
On the glorious labour as you only can,
Ministering to lonely man
By the beauty, by the bliss
Of the wedded clasp or kiss;
If you tarry
Now and then, and grudge those favours
Which are all our life's sweet savours.
You are just what each one wishes,
Every mother's son is sure
(If no other joys endure)
You will satisfy his heart
With the honey-due soft dishes
Which love only may impart.
So you are most ripe and real,
Though ideal,
To the love-sick and forlorn
And will be to breasts unborn
Still the same,
Fuel of a deathless flame
In the temple of the universal soul,
Past the compass and the map of our control.
You are just what each one fancies,
Night or day,
Grave or gay,
The delight of his romances;
For his converse, at his call,
Staid and steady,
Romping-ready,
And the one desire of all.
In the darling of our choice,
In the burden of our voice
You are regnant;
We behold you
And enfold you.
In your naked charms and graces
Pure, yet pregnant
With the homage of unnumbered times and places;
Out of light and out of darkness
Shadowed, shining,
But refining
Whatso'er you touch or take—
Till the stoniest lot and starkness,
To a gentle life awake;
Proud or mild,
With the wisdom of the ages
And philosophies of sages,
But not less a woman child;
Matron, maid
With her hidden passion blushing and afraid.
Ah, to me you are divinity
Clear, consummate, and my own;
Lovely, loveable, infinity,
Of my flesh and blood outgrown
Part and parcel, yet unknown
Whitest blossom of virginity;
Goddess, earthly, sole and separate and far
Up behind the dreadful bounds of many a bar,
While as near
As the laughter to the tear;
Shallow as a limpid brook,
Deeper than the Bay of Fundy
And the ocean's awful book—
Rosa Mundi.

THE INVALID.

JOAN.

I tell you, Joan
Was never and will never be as cheap
As your great market heap
Of marriageable girls, all sorts and sizes—
But one of the few prizes;
And she is staunch
As my pet strawberry roan,
From tiny head to shapely haunch:
Excuse the simile;
Not like that made-up Lady Emily,
All rouge and powder—see her puff box!
And sniffling like that priest of Bethel,
The Baal jumper
And mad tub-thumper;
I'll take a pinch—
Thanks for your snuff-box!
You talk of Ethel—
Ah, my true Joan is honest every inch,
And looks it, walks it in high-stepping paces,
With all the usual gifts and graces;
Plus that which makes the grand totality
(Without the fads that turn most silly)
Her bright fresh individuality;
And fairly broken now to hand—
Yes, running in a silken band—
My chestnut filly.
Just see her action, mark her head
So delicately poised on arching
Swan neck and shoulder—
All thoroughbred.
None of your stupid codes and starching,
But freedom, fire, and open ways
And (as there is no figure bolder)
What I should call sheer “devil”—
Force bursting through thin custom stays,
In gay ripe revel.
You are a scholar, I a mere plain man, sir,
Though not a simple Simon;
And you would reel me off a sounding chain
Of learnèd words, in form of answer,
Out of your loaded classic brain,
And say she has a “Daimon.”
Ah, many a moth
Was scorched in her fierce candle
And went out into utter
Darkness—if with a sputter.
She hourly made and broke her solemn troth
And liked to dandle
One puppet, then another, as a loan
Repaid in tears
And blighted years—
That's Joan.

CICELY.

A BESOM.

HALLELU NELL.

“I'm just bustin' wi' glory,”
Said our Hallelu Nell,
“From a-tellin' the story
Of triumphs o'er 'ell.
And the Capting and me
Had a thunderin' tea,
Of good shrimps and salvation,
When we pluckt from damnation,
A 'ot firebrand young swell.
O 'e dropt in like Balaam
Orl to cuss and confound us,
An' e' went 'ome no stray lamb
But a-folded and sure,
An' a convert secure.
But the Lard were around us,
And as blindness could see,
Played the Divil wi' 'e.
Yes, the Lard gave 'is pepper
To that lost one and leper,
An' 'is arrer went hin;
Till that mighty 'igh stepper
Were convicted of sin.
So the Capting and me
Had the shrimps for our tea—
Hallelu! Hallelee!”

JEANNE D'ARC.

IN THE ROUGH.

SALVATION SALLY.

MURIEL.

NAOMI.

“TOM'S A-COLD!”

TANSY.

THE SIBYL.

TO MAUDE.

GLADYS.

THE ROWAN TREE.

THE EVERLASTING BOY.

DELICIOUS DEATH.

CHILD GOING TO SLEEP.

Men are so wicked, father says—he knows,
Who never did or felt a naughty deed
And loves them all, from surly Sol the miser
To our good Queen. Ah, how the river flows
And scatters round it life, and none take heed
Though wealthier for its gifts—yet none the wiser.
Chitter, chatter, pitter, patter,
Through the village street;
Laughing, lisping, creeping crisping
With its pretty feet.
That's me—or rather how I want to live
And minister to every one in need,
By sowing here a kindness as a seed
And there what little comfort I can give
Out of my slender store. I see the fetter
Of evil binding hand and foot and fast
The multitude, that fight and fall at last—
And I do long to make the wide world better!
True, I am very small and but a child,
Who cannot come and go as others may
And walk about and work—and only seven;
But then, though sinners are so rude and wild,
They would not hurt me on my humble way
And I might show them too the path to Heaven.
How the wind blows! Like a lost baby crying
Among the trees and shadows, as it goes
And hardly touches earth with just the toes—
It must be weary of such ceaseless flying.
Hurry, hurry, flurry flurry,
Never taking rest;
Rustle, rustle, bustle, bustle,
With its burdened breast.
Yes, I should dearly like to wander free
As that among the busy crowds and sing
And bear them blessings, though they could not see
The giver. Yet I would not ever cry,
At least not loud, nor harm a bonnet string
Nor set a single hair a bit awry
With blustering blast; I would play proper tunes
And make all months as pleasant as rose Junes.
At morning I would rouse the lazy sleepers
With trumpet notes, and when the evening fell
I should breathe on them just a quiet spell
And rock them out of all their misery—
The suffering souls and overwrought, and weepers,
And dear tired children's heavy breast and brow—
With music of the softest lullaby,
Like that sweet silence falling on me now.

SACRED SEVEN.

“I have four children”—thus I spoke,
Heedless of jealousy it woke
In one warm bosom—“Nay,” said Maud,
The niece that had no little part
Of love and housing in my heart,
With eyes effulgent from the laud
Just laid upon her—“We are five,
All bees in one dear honey hive.”
I laughed, and with convenient kiss
Hushed lips that had not urged amiss;
And then continued, “Five we are!”
When of a sudden from afar
The baby voice of him that died,
In music soft as tears replied—
“Not so,” dear father, we are six,
And I unheard do ever mix
With all your joys, though none may see.”
So answered I, “Six let it be!”
But then the street door opened wide,
And stepped a beggar boy inside
With rags and hunger and distress
Clad in his lonely helplessness;
Who, as I gave the broken bread
And warming him embraced that head
Of suffering, said, “We are seven!”
For it was Christ, and Christ was Heaven.

MAUDIE.

THRICE-BORN.

GREEN AND GOLD.

Finis Coronat Opus.

WILD FACE.

BUBBLE.

ASPASIA.

CHIVALRY.

PULCHRIORI DETUR.

AN INCIDENT.

Nut-brown Bridget
Woke one dawn with dewy eyes
Glistening like the opening skies,
In a fever and a fidget.
Had not Ethel,
Daughter of the Minister
Who was want to roar in Bethel,
She that played the dulcimer
In the chapel,
Asked her on that summer day
Just to steal with her away
And enjoy a little bite
(Which would soil no garment white)
Of the fair forbidden apple?
Birds were calling,
Petals falling
From the roses pink and red
In the garden at the gate,
As she crowned her pretty head
With a hat as fit as fate.
But then surely
And demurely,
Like a kitten with a mouse,
Off she started
Summer-hearted
From the house;
With the glory of her errand
Played with, patted, as a boy
Makes in class a serious toy
Of some unfamiliar gerund.
At the corner
Ethel clothed in pearly gray,
Tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and prim
With the meekness of a mourner
Met her like a muffled hymn,
Which has sadly gone astray;
So subdued her Sabbath voice,
Which yet hardly dared rejoice.
Both soon bubbled up with glee,
And ran over
Like a vessel
Filled beyond its fullest measure,
As they felt themselves so free,
Passing fields of crimson clover
Where the rippling wind would wrestle
With the blossoms at their feet,
And remove the choicest treasure
Honeyed by reposing sweet.
Then they came
To the iron road and carriage
Ready with the steed of flame,
As if going to their marriage;
Laughing, talking, full of light—
Till the crash and cruel night.

AUGUSTA REDIVIVA.

Soaked in depths of day and night, in sleep and laughter,
Art thou goddess, art thou child,
Woman-born but with no heed of our Hereafter
Yet by nothing here beguil'd?
When I gaze upon the ripeness of those pouting
Rhythmic rose-red old-world lips,
Then down ages comes the thunder of the shouting
In the Roman great eclipse;
And I picture pomp and state-craft with the gory
Sands of scenic pride and power,
And thy beauty throned by Cæsar in his glory,
Bursting into scarlet flower.
Other-time, and ancient circumstance and splendour,
Round thee with a harder line;
Yet those eyes of midnight can be mild and tender,
With deliciousness divine.
And that mouth that curls to meet me, proud and fearless,
Once by Emperors was kist;
When they leant upon thy bosom, lustful, tearless,
In their robes of amethyst.
Like verbena perfumes of the past and stages
Tramped by loud prætorian feet,
Cling about thee and unclose those grand grim pages,
Living, terrible and sweet.
Light of dew and bloom of passion, rich and rotten,
Yet in dying more than ours;
Breathe from thy full fairness of repasts forgotten,
And ambrosial breasts and bowers.
O Augusta, blood and flame and arms of iron,
If thou dost to love consent,
Yield their dreadfulness to thee and thus environ
Favours when thy limbs relent.
But thy milk is wine, thy meekness but the pity
Of the gods who cannot spare,
Dealing out the destined fate to soul or city
In the calmness of their care.
Heroes from those loins must issue, lordly natures,
Not the starvelings of our days;
Minds that give and take no seal or legislatures,
Duller than imperial rays.
Once thy love was death to little hearts of mortals
Who would flutter in thy fires,
And the fools that dared thee never left those portals
Blasted with their vain desires.
For thy cosmic unconcern was vast and awful
As the sweep of planets' path,
Never asking if thy pleasure might be lawful
Or consuming in its wrath.
Yet amid thy larger fancies lurked that sportive
Spirit of a babe at play,
Dropping deaths and lives and passing loves abortive,
Tears and laughters, on its way;
Infancy divinely deaf for ever making
Treasures of unhoarded joys,
In unconscious nakedness, and idly breaking
Hearts and continents and toys.

CIRCE.

TOOTSY.

PETSOME.

Petsome—
So I called my pretty boy,
Who was every mother's son—
Aye, each spinster's;
Tumbled here and there, like jetsam
Or the waters' idle toy,
When the tempest work is done.
In old minsters,
I have seen a cherub face
Often with a kindred grace,
Carved in stone that brake in laughter
From the cunning leaf and flower,
Wrinkling,
Twinkling,
And with almost living power;
As though time had no hereafter,
And were a perpetual jest
Mocking, if not manifest.
When he sickened
Still he smiled,
And the suffering only quickened
Mirth that owed no mortal bars;
Finding fun without a measure
In the pain that was his pleasure,
And beguiled
Weary ways, that had no morrow
But of misery and sorrow—
Now he is beyond the stars.

DEAREST.

ROSES AND RUE.

STREET BOY.

English boy,
Let me picture as I see you
Sturdy, square and impudent;
Dandled not the silken toy
Of a mother, who would free you
From the rolling in the gutter
And the splendid dirt and splutter,
Which will shake us
Yet and make us
Kings of sea and continent.
Ragged, soiled and rude, and heeding
Little what the weather says
Or the solemn parson prays;
Sometimes bleeding
From the rough-and-tumble strife,
Still your loftiest dream of life;
Always fit
Now for mischief and the danger
Unto which you are no stranger,
Full of cussedness and grit.
Yet we really prize and love you,
Though the language that we hear
Sounds surprising,
And no foreign imp above you
Ever scored by early rising,
Or possessed such follies dear;
Though you are a doubtful joy,
English boy.

COUNTRY GIRL.

English girl,
Shy and saucy, rude and ready
For the error and the stripe;
In a petticoated whirl
Here, and there with footstep steady
Doing little duties bidden,
But for ever though so chidden
Romping-ripe!
Well, I know those honest eyes
Gray and glancing,
Or entrancing
With a soft and sudden flame
As at some detected shame,
Like the light of clouded skies;
And those kissing lips of scarlet
Which Erasmus loved and knew,
When he got that honey-dew
Leaving his dull record starlit.
Yes, beneath the shabby clothes
And the shady touch of grime
Or the crudeness
Sometimes sauced with ugly oaths,
Is a rosebud at its prime—
Nature in her pretty nudeness;
And when floods in anger swirl,
Or the fire is seven times hotter
And the potter
Thrusts in vesels to refine,
You come out unscathed, divine,
English girl.

POLLY.

Polly—
Never was there such a child
Fashioned of her fragile clay,
Full of pure and sweetest folly;
Seldom serious,
Though in all her humours wild
Touched with an unearthly ray,
And mysterious
Glimpses of another land
Always just at her command.
Trouble
Cannot fall upon that face
Which refuses to be sad,
And would turn the darkness glad
(Were it double)
With the brightness of its grace;
Eager, flashing
Freely out because she must
Wreak herself in act or die,
And obeys no earthly tie
Owned by others;
Splashing
Flakes of splendour on the dust
Of these common tasks, that smothers
Our dull efforts as they pine.
Yet her little scoffs and scorns,
Like the thorns
Of the holly,
Bid no stranger arms entwine
Polly.

EPITHALAMIUM.

OLIVE

AT THE ACADEMY.

HETTY.

A YEAR AFTER.

RUBY.

HERAIS.

AN EGYPTIAN BOY.

Thou art the same, Egyptian boy,
As England's own,
A mother's torment and her joy
Of price unknown.
The rippling laughter or the jest
Upon thee lies,
As soft as dew on roses' breast
Beneath our skies.
No playful banter, threatened deed,
Do differ now
In childhood's crude and daring creed
And broken vow.
The pouting word, the petulance,
The candid truth,
Attest in each bright circumstance
Our English youth.
The merry quips, the careless flaws,
The scribbled name
Defying grammar and its laws,
Are still the same.
The love of sport, the hated toil
And study's chain,
The father whom his sons despoil,
Come back again.
Ah, those dear eyes are in the grave,
That sunny smile,
Which saw the sacred lotus wave
Upon old Nile.

CICELY.

UNA.

DOROTHY.

ANGELICA.

PANSY.

EMMELINE.

At times the look of other lands
Shone in her eyes so far away,
For she had heard her Lord's commands
And would not if she could delay.
How might she linger or be glad
With yellow gold or earthly yields,
When but a stranger here who had
A life laid out in broader fields?
She found a daily task to do,
Though every hope and thought was there,
And felt a pilgrim passing through—
For her whole heart dwelt otherwhere.
And while her feet on dusty roads
Walked with the bowed and burdened throng,
And bare her own and alien loads,
She heard on high a sweeter song.
No work of kindness that she did
Was mingled with a petty shame,
But only in God's keeping hid
And never blotted with a name.
The words of comfort that she spake
Seemed of her fulness said and sown,
But bade some sleeping soul awake,
Yet to herself were all unknown.
Confronting death she knew no doubt,
Like some white angel flitting by,
And earth enriched by her gave out
The perfume of that piety.

A GLIMPSE.

'Twas but a glimpse of golden hair,
A little gleam of laughing eyes;
But èver since the world is fair,
With greener earth and bluer skies.
No more; and yet, when ways are rough
Or deeper knowledge brings but pain
And human hearts are false, enough
To guide me through these fashions vain.
I only saw her face was sweet
With limpid look and haloed head,
And music in those rhythmic feet
To move the silence of the dead.
She never marked me as I stood,
Lost in the clamour of the crowd;
But still her fleeting maidenhood,
Spake to my spirit yet more loud.
I knew that we had met before
In other worlds, and would again;
While she had grace I should adore,
And nought but love could thus ordain.
Our lives had mingled in one stream,
And flowed together to a chime
Which was the note of every dream
And inner burden of all Time.
So now I carry with me still
A certain joy, a secret trust,
In union with a fellow will,
Eternal over death and dust.

ENDYMION.

The lush green grasses washed his soiled white feet
With cooling waves of verdure, as he slept,
And kissed his mouth that melted to a smile
Of joy and glory; one blue shaft of light
Shot through the cave and showed its golden gloom,
As shines a good deed through a shadowed life.
Tears, but of rapture, glittered on his eyes
And graced the darkness of those curtained lashes,
Pearl-dropping; and his pillow was the moss,
Brown, yellow, red, and softer than the silk
Tost idly on the beauty of tall queens
Sunk in undress and amorous. He dreamed,
A goddess came to him most wonderful
And ministrant, as though the moon herself
Stept from her purple halls of native night,
With starry robes and native loveliness
Of straining bosom and bright limbs, and drew
Nearer and nearer to his eager arms
And blood that beat like fire within his veins;
Until she touched him with her tender hands,
And all his being gathered to itself
Her passion and its warm deliciousness,
Unveiled. She offered him a dazzling choice,
Empire and realms of majesty and might,
Or riches that the world had never given
Yet to its votaries, or exceeding love
Passing the love of woman; and she laid
Her ripe red lips a seal upon his own,
And left a blushing rose a-flame. But he
Thrust from him wealth and the magnificence
Granted with power and sceptred pomp of kings
And stately use and circumstance, and pageants
Crowned; and aside he put voluptuousness
Of married lives and faiths, and full desire
Drinking its pleasure. But he asked for youth
Perpetual, and the springtide and the spell
Laughing and leaping in the pulse of bliss,
Which mocks us for a moment and is gone
Before we taste those hidden truths unplumbed
And mix ourselves with their deep ecstacies.
Smiling she seemed to answer, and embraced
Once more his ardour with the bursting blossom
Of her own breast; she promised him his prayer,
Conquest of time and gray infirmities
And all the old sad burdens heaped on age
Unequal; but she added the delights
Known not to any, save the sealed and few.
So he slept on and shall for ever sleep,
Awake alone to her high communings,
Though in the world he liveth yet and loves
And with him bears a glorious heart of dreams.

CHRISTABEL.

ROSALIND.

A golden song for her—
The gorgeous Ind
That robes with gossamer
My Rosalind,
Yet cannot find a gem
Of sweetest fire
Worthy to kiss the hem
Of her attire.
And fairest things that die
Could not express,
Save with a transient lie,
Her loveliness;
Which gathers from within
Its purest part,
And claimeth as its kin
God's very Heart;
While lesser graces come
And lightly go
As flowers in May, and some
Like winter snow.
A golden song for her,
Wafted by wind
Of deathless dulcimer—
For Rosalind.

AN EASTBOURNE CAMEO.

WINIFRED.

WENDELINE.

YOLANDE.

OLGA.

IRENE.

MAUDIE.

ISOBEL.

LOVE IN IDLENESS.

SWEET-LOOKING AND SWEET-LIVING.

A BROWN STUDY.

SILVER AND GOLD.

POPPY.

THE CAPTIVE PRINCE.

WINIFRED.

UNFLEDGED.

MY LOST CHILD.

TALLER THAN THE TALLEST.

AN ARRANGEMENT IN GREEN.

TO MY HELIOTROPE.

THE MOSS ROSE.

ANGEL WINGS.

SECTION II. Blood and Iron.

“TRUST IN GOD AND KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY.”

“DOWN WITH THE PEERS!”

GOD OF OUR FATHERS.

A BATTLE SONG.

PRO PATRIA.

WHAT MAKES ENGLAND?

GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT.

FOR THE UNION.

INVICTA.

A NATIONAL HYMN.

THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK.

A FIGHTING SONG.

UP WITH THE BAYONET.

MARCHING ORDERS.

IN ACTION.

AN OBJECT LESSON.

A BLOOMING ADMIRAL.

SONG OF THE FLAG.

HOW WE STORMED THE BATTERY AND REGAINED THE GUNS.

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!—1897.

GOD OF BATTLES.

QUO DEINDE RUIS?

WHERE IS OLD ENGLAND?

BLOOD BROTHERHOOD.

CURSE OF COMPULSION.

THE YOUNG PRINCE.

23rd June, 1094.

ENGLAND'S MISSION.

CROMWELL.

THE CHARGE OF THE 21st LANCERS.

THE QUEEN'S WRIT RUNS.

WILSON'S LAST STAND.

“HOLD THE GUN!”

A Ballad of the Chitral Campaign.

NELSON.

THE BLUE RIBAND OF THE SEA.

BOOT AND SADDLE.

A True Incident in the Matabele Campaigm.

ATBARA.

THE LONG RIGHT HAND.

THE GREAT POWDER MAGAZINE.

Thunder and lightning,
Iron and steel,
Taxes yet tight'ning,
Millions to heel,
Millions for battle,
Millions that rattle
Iron and steel,
Nations in arms,
Death and alarms,
Churches that reel,
Plots' grim pursuits,
Kings like dead fruits'
Castaway peel,
Demagogue swagger,
Dynamite, dagger,
Cannon and keel,
Tears in a flood,
Iron and blood,
Women who kneel,
Europe's armed camp,
Trumpet and tramp
Corpses might feel,
Pigs at the trough
With never enough,
Iron and steel,
Threats growing louder,
Millions to heel,
Earth all one powder
War magazine,
Cannon and keel,
Murder machine—
Who'll sit upon it,
Fly on a wheel?
Wanted a phrase,
Wanted a sonnet
Run off the reel,
Or a red bonnet,
Or some mad craze,
Iron and steel—
Then for the blaze!

TO THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY, K.G.

TO THE BLUEJACKET.

OUR FRONTIER MEN.

THE WALLS OF ENGLAND.

WELLINGTON.

THE FLAG OF ENGLAND.

THE THUNDER RAM.

OUR PIONEERS.

SONG OF DAWNRISE.

England, awake!
The pillars tremble,
And those that (suckled at thy breast) partake
Of all the grandeur and with thee have grown,
No more dissemble
The doubts which littleness had never known.
Gird on the dreadful sword,
Estate thy ships
With thunder for the battles of the Lord
Who goes before and speaketh through thy lips;
And choose the smiters
Who turn not from the face of any foe
Or fiery throe,
But march straight on to their predestined end,
World-righters,
And to their purpose bend
Along a path appointed
The arms of iron like vessels of the clay
Refashioned in their proud imperial way,
As God's anointed.
The time for slumber
Hath passed and lo, it strikes, the fated hour,
Decreed for action under this gray sky
From all eternity.
Put off thy silken cumber
And use of gentle arts and elegance,
Put on the dower
Which is thy glory and inheritance
Of awful Power;
And in the splendour of that dress
Which is the cause of righteousness,
Go forward;
Though to the dimness, now yet closer drawn,
The shy dear shadow of the coming dawn.
And on the bitted and the bridled wave,
That loyal slave
Which wafts thee shoreward
The tribute of each farthest clime and coast,
Launch thy stout fleets, and let the banner fly
Which is the enfranchised nations' boast
Of law and liberty.
England, awake!
For enemies are greedy and arise
In braggart weakness,
And think thy sons are fearful and forsake
The duty which their daring fathers led;
And fools despise
The day of meekness,
Won only by the blood so richly shed.
Horizons darken,
And on the anvil of the patient years
The sickle sharpens, from the toils and tears
Of suffering souls and damned and dying,
Which thou alone canst wield
In the red harvest-field.
The kingdoms hearken
For that true charter, which shall bid them be
Themselves and free;
And all the earth is crying
For justice unto God, who rules by thee.

WRITTEN IN RED.

CUSTODES PATRIÆ.

TO THE PREMIER.

Est Modus in Rebus.

To thee, grand Cecil, in the rush of things
Around us and the tumult at our gate,
The shakings and the overshadowings,
We turn; to one who can with peril cope
In sure serenity of anchored hope,
Which finds occasions even in adverse fate
Commensurate with need. Thy larger look
Foresees beyond the bubbles of the times
With quantitative vision the full book
And far completed orb of change and chance,
Above the babble of brute circumstance,
And the one moment ethical that chimes
With the eternal truth beneath them all.
No aimless edicts falter from thy lip
Schooled to the uses of wide statesmanship,
And quick to snatch from evils ere they fall
Advantage still, with staid consummate art
Of equal hand and no unequal heart
Sedate and fixed. And in these troubled years,
Which travail with insufferable fears,
When enemies are loud and some unseen;
Lo, thou dost bring a true proportioned mind
To meet the shock of battle, and between
The banded bars of hate to note the wind
Of vaster other currents, that will bear
Our vessel to the port where it would be;
Through storms that waft us forward, though they wear
An angry face, and buffets that make free.
The stumbling-blocks to thee are only stairs
Uplifting to a blue and better sky,
And big with rifts of opportunity.
There is a measure in all men's affairs,
Known unto him who needs not refuges
Of desperation, like the gambler's leap,
But steers a course of straight observances
With the ripe touch and educated glance.
Here is our strength, a bulwark broad and cheap,
Whereon the bases of this isle's romance
Rest, in the rocking of a hundred waves
And cruel weathers. England looks to thee.
Thou hast the philosophic eye to see
Horizons of the future, and in graves
The cradles of yet new adventures meet,
When this huge world will be one native street.
Thou hast the strong imperial arm to strike
And bless with sovereign Ministries alike,
Or reach across the kingdoms; and thy voice
Is law and light to dim and distant shores,
Where anarchy is the sole government,
And in its thunder music realms rejoice
Through all their heaving night incontinent
And yield to thee their faith and richer stores.
Thy deep deliberate policies are just
And clothed with mercy like a royal dress,
A might more awful from its gentleness.
Thy will is deed and destiny. No gust
Of passion or an idle prejudice
Shall bid thee swerve a hairsbreadth from thy track
As foredecreed as duty, nor the wrack
Of toppling thrones or worlds of sacrifice
Doomed. Treaties come and go, a poor defence
Against an armed and hostile Europe. Thou
Art rooted in the rock of principles,
Which cannot veer and do not ever bow
Unto the backwash of blind outrun creeds,
Abiding in their own magnificence;
And at the tideways of great thoughts that roll
In the interpreting of higher needs,
For ever on by ordered miracles
Of services and fine intents that flower
And fruit in glory of a chastened power,
The earth to its inevitable goal.

THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISHMAN.

RUSSIAN PEACE.

HER MAJESTY'S BIRTHDAY.

WILD OATS.

THE THIN RED LINE.

SONG OF EMPIRE.

INDIA'S HEROES.

BUILDERS OF EMPIRE.

THE MODERN SOLDIER.

TIME WAS.

GOD BLESS OUR QUEEN.

THE POET'S SWAN SONG.

IN HONOREM V.R.I. 20 JUNE, 1897.

ENGLAND'S FRONTIERS.

A MODERN JUBILATE.

Behold, they flock with multitudinous feet,
The countries, even from earth's remotest marge,
Empires and kingdoms and democracies
And potentates and principalities,
That lay aside their jealous doubts and meet
At one broad table with the same high charge;
To honour her, whom all
Consent to crown with reverence as their own,
The sovereign of the seas,
The foremost Lady of the Land,
Who never did an action mean or small
But by her gentle charities is known,
A ready listener to the lowliest pleas
And servant of her servants' least command.
O parliament of peoples
Most visible, most vast,
A hundred towers and stately steeples
Remind you of the more heroic past;
And from the shadow of their glorious graves
Bring back the men of might
Who built this England Queen of winds and waves
Up to her goodly height.
It is the greatness of the undying dead
About you grandly in its splendour spread,
And under captive nations
The solid sure foundations,
That to the living
Establishes a firm and faithful pledge
Of safety, on red revolution's edge
With sheer sharp downward slopes;
And grants forgiving
In fair eternal hopes,
For judgment blindness
And calculated years of armed unkindness.
Rejoice, that England is herself and strong
For ruling yet,
And has a sceptre infinite and long
To reach the ills that God doth nigh forget;
Which is indeed His dreadful Arm and draws,
Though throned as stars in stations
Above the range of common laws,
Princes and populations
Unto that awful Will
Which brooks no rival still.
Rejoice, that England in her freedom reigns,
Serene and sole,
And carries on her head the aureole
Of destiny too large for other brows,
And sways the righteous sword
In battles for the Lord
Which weakness tries to lift but only feigns,
And keeps her plighted vows.
She stands, nor at the hour delays to strike,
Colossus-like
On sea and continent,
Dispensing round her liberties and charters
And crowns and “garters”
To those who win her favour, and the earth
In desert wastes and wilds forgets its dearth,
At her arbitrament.
Her commerce is the life-blood of the lands,
It carries with it plenitudes of wealth
And prophecies of health
Unknown, undreamed of at the morn
Of leaves and ragged thorn,
In better broader times to be;
And broken bands
That come with loftier works and ways
Than all our yesterdays,
And beateth out through justice and its light
The music that makes slaves erect and free,
Like noon and night;
So sure and sweet her interchange of act
And word, that as the seasons run
Obedient to the sun
And principle of God's great primal fact.
Rejoice, that England's hold
Falls on the helm
Of progress, and is pioneer of things
And guideth on by character, not gold,
Each willing realm
And vassal strength or State
By paths predestinate
And passionings,
With tournaments of truth
And friendly provocations
To fuller powers and yet more splendid youth,
By loving emulations.
Rejoice, that our big world is vaster
And comelier now for England's sake,
Which is the master,
With the imperial hand to make or break;
And, once in history, crownèd Might
Is Right.

ROYAL—LOYAL.

ENGLAND.

SECTION III. Laughing Philosophy.

THE MODERN OLYMPUS.

O, ye elegant reviewers, with the very best of wine
And the hands that dip in ewers all of crystal superfine,
Do ye trifle with your sherry and the choicest of cigars
While with Cato waxing merry over “merum” and guitars?
Holy teachers love to skimp us and allow us little marge,
But like gods upon Olympus ye are liberal and large;
And we earthworms, humbly plodding in a labour often stern,
Never dream ye may be nodding in your catholic concern;
We look up to you with wonder in your golden-shadowed show,
As ye launch the bolts of thunder on our little world below.
There are exquisite fine ladies, who discourse of laws and loves
On your thrones, and send to Hades our poor souls with white kid gloves.
Are they goddesses like Venus or Minerva with her owl,
Who so lightly step between us and soft vices as we prowl?
Though we hear a breezy bustling when we sow our wildest oats,
As of fragrant roseleaves rustling or of pretty petticoats.
Yet the sound is sweet and crisper than of mortal milliners,
With the educated whisper of Divine philosophers;
And we follow, if ye spurn us, though as lambs to slaughter led,
For we love the blue cothurnus and for it have freely bled.
O, forgive us the transgression, if we kiss your dainty feet
And repeat the indiscretion just because it is so sweet.

THE LAST MAN.

Bald as a vulture,
Toothless and blind,
See the result of the curse of our Culture—
Progress of Science and marching of mind;
All head and no body,
All brain without sense,
With a lip more suggestive of tea than of toddy,
And an ear less for music than Greek root or tense!
No fist and no muscle,
No stomach, just nerves
Shrinking in awe from the shade of a tussle,
And a pitiful poacher on female preserves;
Dogs in the gutter,
Birds of the air,
Snap at him, peck at him—thin bread and butter,
Reason's delight and the ages' despair!
Look at him hobbling
Blear-eyed and blank,
Back to the jelly-fish whence he came wobbling
Down the dim times to a dignified rank;
Scold at him, sparrows,
Tramp on him, swine,
And away with homunculus now as he narrows
To mere cerebral tissue his glory Divine.

IS IT PEACE?

RATHER REVEREND.

THE NEW CODE OF 1999.

PARENTS AT SCHOOL.

VERB. SAT. SAP.

Let Haeckel with his magisterial nod
Which shows his small acumen,
Deny the Being of his God (poor God!)
And deify Albumen;
He tells us Carbon is the source of all
By wondrous combination,
And snaps his fingers at mere Christ and Paul
With Science's salvation.
But how, I ask, did Carbon first combine
And get those happy forces,
Except from some great Mystery Divine
Or hidden sacred sources!
Give me the Great Unknown the awful X,
The Plus of all and Spencer;
And they may crown the meanest mollusc rex
To make the darkness denser.
Let grubby Camper set his fossil throne
With brother fossils round him,
On his pet intermaxillary bone—
A Goethe can confound him.
And let the os hyoides be the crux
Or crust of dry contention,
I humbly bow to the evolving Flux
And slow but sure ascension;
Let Darwin with his undecided nose
But views of grand decision
Find little room for God, whom seers disclose
That bring the truer vision.
Let sophists of the scientific kind
Demur to praise or mention
The One who is all works and laws behind,
Or honour with a pension!
I care not for collective wisdom's vow,
Or drum whoe'er may thump it;
I only see it falling ap'onou,
At the first penny trumpet.
And though Laplace did sweep through mighty space
To find no Blessed Being,
Yet that vast vision was His glorious Face,
And all he lacked was seeing.
The hand that holds the telescope is God's,
If mortals mark but Tophet,
Or poke among the gases and the clods
Before the Veilèd Prophet.
I know He is within me and without
And bridges every chasm,
Though pedants mock or pull his worlds about
Or prate of protoplasm.
And while from Him I could not, would not fly
Nor from His moulding Fingers,
The shadow of my far-off ancestry
Yet on me darkly lingers.
His heaven is Love, and there is burning hell
In any evil action;
But still the smallness of the parent shell,
Bequeathes a tell-tale fraction.
Yea, all the cries and passions of the Past,
The reptile, brute, and savage,
Toss in me like a surging sea upcast
And long to rend and ravage.
While all the pulses of a fairer morn
And worlds no words can utter,
The formless plumes of beauties yet unborn
Deep in my bosom flutter.

THE NEW SCHOOL OF MANNERS.

THE BIG POT OF SOCIALISM.

“La Propriété, c'est le vol.”

Let us be logical, sir, if you please,
Let us be logical first,
Calmly discussing the case at our ease
Just with a rational thirst.
You are a Socialist, sir—very good;
I may observe, I am not;
Property, land with its corn and its wood,
Money and honey and all that you could,
Whether you ought not or whether you should,
Palace and labourer's plot,
Served up with ignorance hot—
All that for ages has privately stood,
Proof against Radical shot—
Even the Monk, I suppose with his hood—
You would pitch into the Pot.
In they go tumbling—O, let us commence,
None of your shabby reserves or pretence,
Only be logical now—
Vestals with virginal brow,
Dives in purple with pickings immense,
Hodge with his acres and cow;
Sinners and saints and the Gentile and Jew,
All must souse into the General Stew,
None must have luxuries, down with the beer!
While one poor brother is starved,
Cut up the capons, distribute the cheer—
What if the landlord is carved?
Castle and cottage both mix in the pottage,
Hovel in ruins and Hall,
Wise men like Platos and tiny potatoes—
Plenty of room for them all.
Kindly remember that nothing is left,
Nothing to claim as your own;
Every possession is simply a theft,
If it may still be unknown;
Taken perhaps by some rascally Lord
Ages ago against right,
When there existed no rule but the sword
And the one tenure was Might.
Empty your pockets of treasures and purse,
Watch and the trinkets of gold;
Do not forget selfish hoards are a curse,
Even if centuries old!
Never suppose you can chalk off a line
Really Protection by name,
Though you may choose to demur and repine—
Manfully play out the game.
Yes, your dear labours as well as your neighbour's,
Product of brain or the hand,
Equally grateful a pan or a plateful
Yield to the public demand.
Make no exceptions of jewels or clay—
Nothing—howe'er it be got;
No “moral minimum,” no private pay
Rises from national rot.
Now for your clothing—be logical, pray—
Keep not one leprosy spot;
Strip like a man in the primitive way,
Breeches and all in the Pot!
Do have the courage, I beg, of your creed
Blazoned in glorious crudity,
Proved to the hilt by your personal need;
Who cares for trifles like nudity?
Spare not a rag of your wardrobe, be true,
Sir, to your principles yet;
Grudge not the General Fund what is due,
Cast in your poodle or pet;
In with your pudding and in with your parson,
In with your penny or pound,
In with your patriot playing at arson
Though in the holiest bound.
Let us be logical. In goes the vice,
Long so indulged in and hugged;
Be a brave Socialist, down with the price—
If it's your grandmother jugged.
Yes, that reminds me, relations are nought;
Ties are obstructions that block,
Family fetters have merely been wrought
Just to replenish the Stock.
Children—of course, they belong to the State,
Sentiment goes to the wall;
Ah, and the helpmeet misjoined to your fate,
Now belongs freely to all!
Mine, sir, if thine, and poor tumble-down Dick
Claims with connubial band
Her to whom you would so jealously stick—
Married is she to the Land!
Married to Matthew and married to Mark,
Married to Peter and Paul,
Married to men of the light and the dark
Married (God bless her!) to all!
Those precious darlings too curled and too kissed,
Daintily gartered and gowned,
Now will receive (what they fain would have missed)
Tubbing and scrubbing right round.
O, and your Baby (which follows the Purse)
Each will with emulous wits
Handle and dandle, and awfully nurse
Out of its senses to fits.
Each of us now will be welcome to brush
Each of your treasures at will,
Or if we like with a whipping to hush
Each little lacrymal rill.
They will be combed and corrected and led
Nightly to each little stall,
Comforted, physicked, instructed and fed
Everywhere ever by all.
Hope not by subterfuge yet to defy us,
Think not from duty to swerve,
Playing the part of a false Ananias
Keeping a sop in reserve;
Holding a tit bit away from the Store,
Lips or delights of the shelf,
Something to guzzle alone or adore—
Kisses or cakes for yourself!
Near ones and dear ones, the choicest and chief,
Those of the tenderest lot,
Those who partook of your gladness or grief,
All are condemned to the Pot.
Private taps too you say now are forbidden,
Into one Tap they are thrown;
How then can you retain ever unchidden.
One rosy mouth as your own?
All fingers poke in one general pie,
All are the Hydra-like head,
All are the tail and all brotherly lie
Snoring in one blessed bed.
All eat from one and the same precious plate,
All drink of one common mug,
All are both governed and governing State,
All share the parson and pug.
Make no objections or idle corrections,
Let us be logical, do;
Persons and chattels, though twopenny rattles,
Droned by the devil knows who—
Each whether peg or propriety dress,
Plumps as a part in your catholic mess.
We are advancing—it's well—with the times,
Taking together our ills,
Cant, influenza, our churches and chimes,
Beggaring neighbours by legalized crimes—
Aye, and political pills;
Now let's apportion the bills;
Nothing is sacred in reason or rhymes,
All must partake of all tills.
We are returning to early old founts,
Civilized backward again;
Savage simplicity here only counts,
As the Great People ordain.
Why, my good sir, have you sacrificed friends,
Liberty, justice and pride,
Each to your conscience and Socialist ends—
You yet remaining outside?
Let us be logical, let us be fair
Always to Truth and its kin;
Muse on the happy regenerate air,
When you are boiling within.
Think of your bed-fellows in the same Stew,
Honesty, honour and love,
Empire and Union and faith, with the new
Devilry dancing above;
Bess of the brothel and Sal of the slum
Shouldering Bishop and Peer,
Scrapings of gutter and crossing and scum
Reeking of skittles and beer.
O, it's a wondrous receptacle—this,
Great with class-levelling greed,
Grandly capacious and like the Abyss;
Here's a “solution” indeed.
All things are solved or dissolved—it is one,
All folks are equal and free,
Subjects are sovereigns and all work is done
Jointly and all disagree.
Bless the Big Pot which contains lean and fat,
Capital, labour and Grace
With the last century hit off his bat,
And for the Crofter finds place.
Stir it and feed it with fuel till hot,
Properly heated right through;
Throw in our Royalty too,
Playing decorum or loo,
Welshman and German and Paddy and Scot,
Millionaire's mansion and penury's cot;
Then take a header yourself in the Pot—
I, my dear sir, after you.
Life may be broken—not theories bend,
Let us be logical still to the end.

CAPTAIN MARY JONES (S. A.)

BROTHER BATHOS.

CAVE CANEM.

I hear it now—
O, Cave Canem,
The Cerberus that asks for sops
Of blood and fire—in warning drops,
Ere the great heavens in thunder bow
And belch their bolts, the cry of Panem
(That sheathes old enses)
And the Circenses!
Fate's warhounds still may wear a muzzle,
And whine and whimper in their chain
Which yet is yielding to the strain,
And take the catlap
From Dives' fat lap;
But they alone can solve the puzzle,
And some day in their slavering jaws
Will mumble monarchs and their laws,
And pick the bones
Or tear the warm and quivering flesh
From bloated bodies full and fresh,
Of tumbled States and toppled Thrones.
Awake, ye peoples,
Downtrodden sore through ghastly years
Of impotence and fumbling fears,
By kings and priests and perjured statesmen,
And lay the steeples
Or hoary towers
Of ill-got powers
Flush with the kennel—ye are Fate's men!
Red revolution is about—
It's in the air, and on the threshold
And at the door and faintly knocking,
Nor will it long be kept without
By mouldy bars and musty blocking—
And Death has woven its awful mesh-hold.
It mocks at ancient bounds precarious,
And clearer looms
From cruel glooms—
God's retiarius.
I hear the dreadful white lips mutter,
Low in the caverns at their forges
And drunken orgies,
The final sentence;
And soon the trumpet blast will stutter
The message mixed
With doom and fixed,
Past praying and beyond repentance.

THE ASTRAL PLANE.

Don't say this is the heavenly land,
The final goal to Man for ever
Of happy thought, and high endeavour
To find a basis where to stand;
Don't tell me, what around environs
My view, is hell-without gridirons,
And all the precious tools to brand.
Too bad for Heaven, too good for hell,
With pleasant sounds if not like Simms' tone;
It has not even the proper smell,
Nor just the faintest breath of brimstone.
It can't be Tophet or Gehenna,
Or (what is worse) our own Vienna;
It can't be Calvin's blissful bound,
Or Hebrew Sheol or Greek Hades—
For I can see no nice old ladies,
Who deemed salvation to be sound.
I'm sorely puzzled at the sight,
And whether under this or that sky
I waver between day and night—
But here (good luck) is the Blavatsky!
“Dear Madam, is it bliss or bane?”
“You d—d fool, it's the Astral Plane.”

GOÜN TO THE DAWGS.

QUEER STREET.

I strolled at random down the street called Queer,
And watched the tenants at their occupations
Or gravitations—
Though these were mainly Beer.
They seemed but careless folks and jolly,
Given up to idle ways and useless things
Or works of folly,
And some were tied to pretty apron strings.
Both sexes there and every age and class
Disported as they chose
And clinked the frequent glass,
Or kissed their neighbours' maids beneath the rose.
All were in trouble,
Which they invoked with quite religious claims
And rendered double
By suicidal aims.
All were at sixes and at sevens,
Unless they played at fives,
And had their own peculiar hells and heavens
But not their proper wives;
They lived on borrowed money
Which they would rather die than pay,
Or buzzed about the alien honey
Which tempted them to stumble more and stray.
None looked before and none behind,
They found the present
Enough and beautiful and pleasant,
And in the passing moment were confined.
From hand to mouth they lived, and tarried
For no wise future or good end
Or the matured and mellow fruit;
But simply loved to splash and spend,
And without service and fair suit
Were married and unmarried,
And doddered down the same sad courses
With wine and women, hounds and horses,
Wrecked now by shadow, now by shoal
And every day with fresh divorces,
Unto the fated goal.
They never thought
And drowned their many cares in drink,
Were vainly sold and vainly bought
And dreamed not of the least production,
Excepting their own self-destruction,
But toppled over the wild brink;
By mocking loves and meteor lights illumed,
Consuming and consumed.
Not one was serious, few were sane,
And all
Turned with each breath of Fashion's weather vane,
They cared not to what dreadful issue of time and tissue,
To the last curtain's fall.

IRONY OF THINGS.

THE SKELETONS' DANCE.

AN EGOTIST.

BIDDY.

Painted Biddy
Was a most distracting widdy,
Who had served in many schools
And was trying
Ere she turned to thoughts of dying
How to sit upon two stools;
And to make the best and utmost
Of both worlds, with wide maternity;
Not by any chance to miss
Those hot pleasures, which abut most
On this side of the Abyss
In eternity.
O her unconfounded face
Was a beacon and a landmark,
Blazing like a warming-pan
Or a copper kitchen-can,
Till it left each haunted place
Dry and dusty with the sand-mark
Of an ever ebbing sea.
She was mighty too at tea,
And her tattle
Spared not any
Of the many,
When she sniffed from far the battle,
And disdained the orphan's plea.
Like a pestilence she travelled
Up and down, at Devil's tasks,
With a dozen different masks
Lean and louring
And devouring
All who came within her reach
And remained to hear her preach
Of the plots she had unravelled.
Woe to even the bravest parson,
When upon the wartrack keen
Biddy breathing death and arson
Was to his confusion seen!
Soon he felt he was post-dated,
Scalped and scotched, eviscerated
By her blarney;
While the widdy snuffed and snorted,
Till he wished himself transported
(If she only came not thither)
Anywhither—
To Killarney.
She was equal to the best,
And no lawyer
Or top-sawyer
Was her match, as all confest.
Yet she loved the stole and cassock
In her way,
And kept clean and nigh a hassock
Of a solemn
Cut and colour,
Where a priestly friend might pray;
Then her voice assumed the dolour
Of a pallid penitent,
And she rose up like a column
Of the dear Establishment.
In subscription
Lists, her name was always foremost;
And she once gave her Egyptian
Bonds or plagues, but yet her own,
To the cause which they adore most
Who on Temperance have grown.
Painted Biddy,
Though a widdy,
Had a host of hot admirers
(Quite perspirers)
Ready to divide the spoil
Which they fancied she possest,
With a maximum of toil
And a minimum of rest.
So they liked to fetch and follow,
And upon a courteous leg
Bow and beg;
Though I knew the nut was hollow,
And a maggot
Merely occupied the shell.
If she boasted
Of her riches and her hoard,
Yet her nose smelt out the faggot
Where she would be rightly toasted
(Though a member of our Board)
Down in h—ll!
But she had a virtuous blending
With some honey,
And secreted not pure gall;
She was generous in spending
Others' money,
Squeezing from them by her wiles
And those false affected smiles,
At her pleasure,
Coin and credit without measure—
Quite a bankful,
Coal and beeftea and good wine
And the choicest things in raiment
(For her sugared words repayment);
But was then alas! unthankful,
And continued still to whine,
Still to ask and still went further;
While her victims thought of murther
And still somehow kept on giving
More and more
To her never-sated store,
And men wondered they were living.
For refusal led to slander
New and old,
With infractions of the Bible;
And our careful Alexander,
Though a copper-smith, dropt gold—
To escape her thirst for libel.
And her name, despite her nature,
Was uplifted
As the sifted
Precious grain, by every Press-cat
And the local legislature;
Till the journals, which she read,
Praised the Lord that she was dead
With a snuffling “Requiescat.”
And cried Amen,
Clerks and laymen.

O BAAL, HEAR US!

THE PLYMOUTH BROTHER.

STEAM DEVILRY.

THE STRAYED ANGEL.

STATE NURSING.

NEBULAR ENGLISH.

THE MORAL MINIMUM.

THE GREAT QUACK.

THE LOST ART OF SUCKING EGGS.

PIOUS OPINIONS.

THE PROBLEM AND THE PROFESSOR.

I never will believe, that our Professor
Who burrows so profoundly in Greek Roots
And wears a model coat and patent boots
Can have become so sudden a transgressor,
As he is widely said to be at last;
I stand aghast.
No man thrice twenty,
Nemo repente
Would ever be, could ever be turpissimus;
And he ipsissimus!
Why, it is quite a proper man, stipendiary,
And pious too and of the Church a pillar—
At least, from the outside—a tried fulfiller
Of each grave decent duty, no incendiary
Or ravisher of creeds and cults; a quiet
Old-fashioned and respectable
Good solid person, most delectable
To curates and the spinsters and the rest,
And careful in his diet.
He never bore a firebrand in his breast,
Or launched one flaming phrase
And scorched his fingers
With burning questions and some boiling phase
Of vice or Venezuela. Nay, he lingers
Over his wine and walnuts and conventions
Which social use has made its own, and sweet
With centuried wont; he has no crude intentions,
Or doctrine which might savour of the street
And gutter.
O no!
He takes his tea at five, thin bread and butter,
And goes just whither gentlemen should go
In regulation ruts; he's safe and sound,
Both wind and limb, in all the ancient articles
And all decorum's particles,
Do be convinced, and treads the common round
Of commonplace and common sense society,
And has no kick in him of impropriety.
But he to drop unseemly terms as oaths!
He were as likely, sir, without his clothes
To dance a drunken measure
And at some Moenad's pleasure
Cut capers in gymnosophy—
He who is quite three parts at least philosophy!
His character is good, and then his learning
Above suspicion;
He has no yearning
For primrose paths, that lead men to perdition
And penury and shame
With broken knees and name—
Not he! we pay him to be strait and steadfast,
And nice and dull with dignity;
He keeps his balanced head fast
Amid the storms of error and malignity
Or ponderous German jokes—the Higher Criticism,
Too vague for tears, too vast for witticism
And mouldy ere the book—he prays by proxy,
No doubt, and sends his wife to early Matins
For him and knows but nought of pyx and patins—
But who can doubt his orthodoxy?
And then there is the honour of the Chair,
So far-descended, wide-extended
And venerable and most fair,
The heritage of ages and the sages
With its historic air;
That has a whiff of Bentley's gown,
And was the chosen stair
By which the grand old scholars won renown
And climbed, by no venality,
To their Pantheon and their immortality!
This stands at stake, in peril,
If our Professor's
Sobriety has failed and flesh prevailed
To turn his studies sterile
And all unworthy of his predecessors.
O when he speaks of just the merest platitude,
He has a pretty ex cathedra attitude
And makes his minnows talk like whales;
When he regales
Our appetites with hoary jests, they catch
A reflex glory from the Chair,
A solemn and a sapient air,
And hatch
Into a new and true and monstrous miracle
Of wit, as though it were the spiracle
For awful wisdom from above. The mint,
Which is his mighty brain
Evolves without a strain
Each sentence crisp and clean and ripe for print;
He has capacity,
I can assure you, and will turn you out
Great thumping propositions by the dozen,
To glut the worst voracity,
Or solve you the enigma or the doubt
And cozen
The clearest mind into a hopeless fog.
Yet he is loyal to the Decalogue,
And never broke a law or even cracked
The lightest of the ten; he has not lacked
In reputation aught for life,
And covets not his neighbour's wife.
If he had sworn in Greek or good round Latin,
Which he is pat in,
It might have passed—a scholar's trick—no more;
And Porson swore
In pure and perfect Attic,
All know, though he was more erratic
And mingled with his verses
Such polished classic curses,
They sounded just like blessings and could shock
Nor Quaker nor a Miss in Sunday frock;
O yes, he swore so sweetly,
As ladies ply the fan
And like a gentleman—
Not indiscreetly;
The habit fitted him, a graceful vesture,
As any little private turn or gesture.
And Madame Dacier,
Correct and cool and blue as is a glacier,
Yet sometimes lilted into oaths
Which our refinement loathes,
But sanctified when decked in learned dresses
And coming out as harmless as caresses
Or innocence itself. And, what is odder,
Casaubon used to dodder
(Unless it's slanderous fiction's
Tale) into maledictions,
That would not hurt a fly or Puritan
And were but milk-sop to an artisan
Of the full-blown and healthy modern type,
Roaring all hell betwixt his glass and pipe.
Nor is there much, I warn you to prefer
In Joseph Scaliger,
Who drew a daily round of hearty rations
From bumper imprecations,
And in a decent veil of neat obscurity—
Ni fallor—left a witness for futurity.
But these were scholars,
They wore a fitting mask
And mouthed through classic collars,
Which our conventions ask,
Their dear damnations and abominations.
If the Professor too had sworn in German
Like Doctor Herman,
Who cannot say a sentence without crutches
Of awful words and ways, and seems to sputter all
His viscera up in groans and every guttural,
And what he treats on smutches
With smear-like hand; or if in French he fiddled
A naughty tune or two,
And played the sapeur or what is most torrid
Or to our hearing horrid;
The burden had been left unriddled,
And without more ado.
But now I should remember,
He told me something—O what was this! Hang it!
Which asks from me for no apology,
And got none from old “Hang-theology”—
He told me last December,
When he had ended lecture—how he did harangue it!
He was engaged on some tremendous toil,
Another Heraklean task,
On some lost letter,
Which promised him a splendid spoil
And even a Falernian cask
Or something better.
What was it? Ah, I am no scholar
With classic idioms pigeon-holed
And almost as it were religion-holed,
Each with a shrine and halo; but I'd bet a dollar,
Here is the secret or its right solution
Which would dispel at once the cloud
And give his credit handsome restitution—
If I remembered what he spoke aloud.
Ha, now I have it! Hear me, Porson's ghost,
To whom this night I vow a generous toast!
He never could have said, “I d—n her”—
He, so polite, who has been known to bow
Unto a cow—
But what he did say was, “Digamma.”

THE BLUE HOURS

ERGA—PARERGA.

PIMPLE AND PATCH.

SPORTING POLITICS.

FIN-DE-SIECLE BABY.

THE SCIENTIST.

IN SUSPENSE.

MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM. (Old style).

THE DEVIL AND THE SERMON.

IN THE COUNTRY.

THE SHADDER OF GAWD.

There's a Big Boss (but not pal) at Constantinopal,
As I doant like to menshun who pays no attenshun
To the truth, an jest wallers in fraud—
An they stiles 'e the “Shadder of Gawd!”
'E as wives by the duzzins an unkills an cuzzins,
An most illigant eunicks in bowstrings an tunicks,
But delights in the beastliest bawd—
An they stiles 'e the “Shadder of Gawd!”
In orl as is nasty an d—d paderasty
An with shebooks an pizen is bloomin orizen,
Iz az sick az iz stummick with lawd—
An they stiles 'e the “Shadder of Gawd!”
Ah, 'e brekfusts on babbies an un-faithful cabbies
An 'e sits at iz lunchin their marryboans crunchin,
While good Christians fur dinner iz chaw'd—
An they stiles 'e the “Shadder of Gawd!”
But he aint got no 'atter an 'e doant get no fatter
Fur iz pipes an iz coffee an sherbut an toffee,
Though with brains iz fine progress be straw'd—
An they stiles 'e the “Shadder of Gawd!”
Not to justiss 'e arkins an iz jallussy darkins
Earth an sky, an it follers the chappies with dollars
Till their teeth an the money be draw'd—
An they stiles e' the “Shadder of Gawd!”

BUFO ANTIQUUS LOQUITUR.

THE DEVIL IN PARLIAMENT.

Ho, the Devil rose up, like Lord Coningtower's cup
To his lips, with as graceful an attitude;
And he dropped in to dine with Sir William at nine,
In the midst of his prettiest platitude.
He was modernised quite, and fresh painted all white,
With an orchid of cost in his buttonhole,
He had manners of mark, good enough for the park,
And looked cool as the frigidest mutton-hole—
From New Zealand, you guess—with an easy address,
And a way that you could but call affable.
In Church matters and State not a bit out of date,
And with anecdotes pointed and laughable.
Then the two (a sweet pair) with an innocent air,
To the House toddled in for some oratory;
There was Joseph in power with his eyeglass and flower,
And the Premier from his Laboratory.
Then the famous “First Whig,” half a Blue-book, half prig,
Took his place with the others in Parliament;
Though the brewers looked black, for he was on their track,
And he knew all that d——d foreign barley meant.
But he called himself now, with a Radical brow,
A pure Socialist plunging in politics;
For he followed that card of conceits by the yard,
And the timepiece of party's new folly ticks.
Ah, the Devil was apt with his reasons, and tapt
Sweet quotations and took just the quiddity;
He was gallant and good to Tim Healy, who stood
On the “right of his private stupidity.”
He had precedents ripe, and as pat as a stripe,
For his service and all who were entering;
Ready-made little saws, and most wonderful laws,
Far ahead of the wildest Dissentering.
He gave many a hint, not yet published in print,
To the pets of his latest Democracy;
And a sinister heat, for each ill-gotten seat
Of his partners in gambling and Stock-cracy.
But sometimes he would trail the least tip of his tail,
Just to show himself still the old gentleman;
With the tiniest whiff of the brimstone to sniff,
Which encouraged his peaflour-and-lentil man.
Till he started at last from a vision aghast,
And upset dear Sir William's own suavity,
While he tumbled down flat upon Morley's best hat—
Hiding him in its awful concavity.
Then he bolted apace from Lord Rupert's red face
(Which he thought was the judgment fire beckoning),
And his terrible nose like the trump of doom's close,
But left William to pay for the reckoning.

THE CONCERT OF EUROPE.

The Frenchman tootles on his horn;
The Kaiser beats the drum of scorn;
The Tsar (who would annex the moon)
Plays in the distance his bassoon;
The Briton on a trumpet blares,
And shudders at his Foreign Shares;
The Austrian Emperor won't be mute,
With variations on the flute;
And Italy in sorrow sends
With organ (but no dividends)
A monkey and her Nicolo;
While Turkey in the Concert strives
And fiddles on her subjects' lives,
Though Hellas pipes the piccolo.
For all (remembering sweet per cents)
Are playing different instruments
To different tunes, in sharps and flats,
Like thirty thousand squalling cats,
With thirty thousand kettles tied
Upon their tails—and thus allied.
But from this harmony of fears
And doubts that darken with the years,
Which with hot shrapnel soon may shiver us,
May God in mercy now deliver us.

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.

SECTION V. Brake and Brier.

DE MINIMIS CURAT DEUS.

You say—“I am nobody, nought, a thing
That can never tell in the total count
When the Creditor sums the grand amount,
Any more than a straw or bonnet string;
I am little and ugly and mean and fat,
With a face that has not one curve of comeliness
And a general look of squalid homeliness—
Not a touch of the true soft sweet Divinity
To redeem a life that is false and flat,
But the barren charm of a cheap virginity.”
And you add, “I would rather be a buckle
Or the crumpled tag of a creased rosette
On the harlot shoe of the fair Babette,
And have bastard sons at my breast to suckle
(Just the little accidents by the way)
With a score of gilded lovers gay
And a fuller past, and a bodice rounding
With the milk of joy and a lot abounding;
I would chance the priest and his musty morals,
And the prudes and their infant bells and corals,
Or risk the wrath of an outraged Deity
In a possible Heaven of impossible capers
Like a vestry lit with its prim wax tapers,
To be myself in all spontaneity.”
And you murmur—“I loathe the stays and starch,
The pitiful whole and wretched portion
Of a birth like mine, a mere abortion;
That must creep and crawl on the millround march
Of an unknown nameless and empty toiling,
And sneak and snivel for fear of soiling
The proper dress with improper attitudes
Or the tiniest trick of a semblance prurient,
And be choked with the husks and paltry platitudes
When the soul rebels in a rage esurient;
While the rich, the beautiful, and the luckier
May kick up their heels in a bean-fed coltishness
In the stews and palace brothels muckier,
And from every trammel of every code
Break free (if they sacrifice to the mode)
And rejoice in a wanton wild revoltishness.”
But you think—“The measures are not the same
For the poor and the wealthy, the plain and pretty;
And the form that is like imprisoned flame
With its ardent eyes and the lashes jetty,
May sin and repent and souse in the gutter
And emerge once more to the sheet and candle
With a cultured lisp and a dainty stutter,
For another bath in another scandal;
“Though I,” you moan, “may not taste a particle
Of the sweets forbidden to pauper stuff
And the yard-round waist and the doubtful cuff,
On the features without a bit of devil
And ruled to one dreary common level,
But must keep the law in its lightest article;
And life like this is not worth living
In its sordid ruts and the sober chances
And want of skittish nude skirt-dances,
When the legs at least are among wild oats
And may show with assurance of forgiving
Their womanly shape under petticoats.
And to put aside the mere pomps and vanities,”
You argue, “and social names and nods
And fashion's fooling and golden gods
Or the becks and bows of padded popinjays,
Like the dummies in town—if you only shop in Jay's,
I know nothing yet of the real humanities.
No, I have not truly lived a second,
Though I ate and drank and secreted matter
And excreted waste and grew out and fatter,
As a cabbage does in its garden row
Unseen in the vulgar shade below—
But life is by other standards reckoned.”
You conclude—“I would rather walk in the street
And drink of the darkness and the sweet,
Than live in the light and get salvation
By a process of nought but vegetation;
For I long to indulge my fling and fill,
Whatever the priest may brag and bellow
Who has grown with vice prematurely yellow
Though he now denies the smallest latitude,
Of the lusts for which I would gladly grill
In a brimstone fire and give up Beatitude.
I have never felt my pulses beat
In the madness of unlawful blisses,
With the rapture and the stolen kisses
When the blood was full at its fever heat;
I have never throbbed with the thrill of Nature,
Or yielded the palpitating flesh
To the lips that stamped their legislature
On the conquered mouth that asked afresh;
I have never loosed, what they want to hide in us
By the figleaf texts of a narrow quorum
And a starved and straightlaced dead decorum,
The wild free breath of the power libidinous.
I would rather be a depowdered trull,
Than the saint with the rouge inside her skull.”
I know—you are wrong in your facts and fancies,
And the gold-dust on the butterfly's wing
Has a place and part in the splendid whole;
As well as the sceptre of a king,
Or the presbyter decked in his painted stole—
And Truth is more than your gilt romances.
Not a useless thing, not a cypher rivet
In the grinding wheels of the grand machinery,
Not an idle spray in the hedge of privet
That is splashed about your home in greenery;
Not a speck of rust on the two-penny pannikin
That cooks the broth of the freeborn gipsy,
Not a stain of dirt on the booted mannikin
In the sleek of his sober groove or tipsy;
But each is an item with its weight,
And helps to the balance of all freight.
For you have a settled office if I can't
And not to be spared, in your quiet nook
No less than the sages with vast outlook,
And the veriest trifle is significant.
Why, if the least little screw or cog
In the awful sweep of the wide world's jog
As it grumbles round, were to get awry
And be lost in the cosmic swirl and sway,
Or but for a moment went astray,
It would unseat God in Eternity.
There is not a superfluous mite nor may be
In the supreme synthesis of totality,
And the molecule and the mightiest mount
Have each a place in the last account,
And every hair of the newborn baby
Must be reckoned too in the fair finality.
For each, if deducted, would be missed
By something or some one and by God
Who has never an atom more or less
Than He wants, and leaves not a mouth unkissed
Nor a pea without its enswathing pod,
In the width of His guardian watchfulness.
And were you away from the pensive corner
Where you sit and mope an unmated mourner,
Then the Universe would be so much lacking
And worse for the silent chord—you give
In your measure strength and beauty's backing
And proportion, whereby the Sum may live.
In the grand orchestra, absent Nicolo
Creates a blank, though it's but the piccolo.
I know—that our earth is sick with trouble,
And the poor and weak bear more than double
Because they are such, and the evil rises
Secure and crowned and above the curse—
If it only keeps the keys and purse;
But I will not own, that it has the prizes.
For to suffer is the highest blessing
And a fate Divine, that we drop with peril
To the soul thus left to a struggling sterile—
It is good, and the Father's fond caressing.
To be let alone is an Ephraim lot,
While you fool and flourish and heed no issue
And riot at ease in the pleasant places
With flattering lips and false embraces,
Regardless all of the canker spot
And gather more of the adipose tissue.
To romp in a round of elegant dresses
And a whirl of the sweetest eyes and hair
That to riches are always bright and fair,
While you ride on the flood tide of successes;
If you rake in the gold and never fail
To glut the passions howe'er importunate,
And lack the point of a single nail
Of a single care—you are the unfortunate.
If you hold your gun or stick to the station
Though it be but a barnacle's inch of rest,
And fulfil the end of your own creation—
By scrubbing a floor or washing a platter,
Or growing a grass blade out of a clod,
And planting a pulse of mind in matter—
You are dutiful, wise, and doing your best
And one with the inmost Heart of God.
For he aids, if but by the merest decimal,
Who falls in line with the marching orders
And steps to the tune by the piper played,
Whether all in rags or with silk arrayed,
But inside the fence of his nature's borders—
And we need both great and infinitesimal.
O the humblest beat of the human love,
Not a ripple upon the tidal river
Which rolls the earth on its wondrous way,
Has yet its mark and immortal ray;
It flings, to the Central Source above
And the uttermost orb, a vital quiver.
Would you be a discord or rusty screw,
In the onward journey to ripe perfection
Which is building the House of God anew?
Shall the dust rebel at its resurrection?

BLOW THE TRUMP IN ZION.

MY GRANDFATHER.

LALOO.

THE DEAD MARCH OF THE LIVING.

We are marching, we are marching
Under heavens all overarching
But all pitiless and dumb,
In the winter cold and numb
And in summer pinched and parching;
Though the sparrow gets its crumb,
With a little drop of water
And a kind and cosy quarter
From the frost;
While we are tost
By the stony hearted street
To and fro
In want and woe,
With the tramp of countless feet.
And we stay not,
For we may not
Loiter upon Eden's borders,
Though the weakly
Ones fall meekly
Down and still beneath us lie;
For we have our marching orders
Marching though we drop and die,
Marching on
Though health is gone
And the early light that shone
Sweetly for the opening page
Of our early pilgrimage—
Though the pleasure in our toil
(When we started)
Which is only sin and soil
For the brow
And bosom now,
Has departed.
Marching on
Though friends are gone,
And our eyes can hardly con
Still the lesson we must learn,
While our hands do rarely earn
Just the pittance,
That is quittance
For the shadow that with blight
Enters not the rich man's door,
Darkens not the marble floor,
And at last is all our light.
Marching on,
If hope is gone
In the rags we scarce may don
With our tired and trembling fingers,
And the feeble fluttering breath—
Woe to him who turns or lingers,
When to lag behind is death!
Marching on
And marching on
Through the devil's Babylon,
Marching hence and marching hither,
But alas! we know not whither,
Up and down
And to and fro
In the many-palaced Town
Which on us does only frown,
Weary dreary must we go
Without pity, without rest,
Homeless, sleepless, and unblest;
With no bread
Except the stone,
With no bed
But earth alone.
Ah, if we indeed might stop
For a space
In some soft place
And learn some of Nature's grace
(Not in gutter or the shop)
In the sunshine, though we dim it
With our squalor, that may drop—
But, save death, can find no limit!
Dives with his gold and starch,
With his linen clean and fine
And his wine
Wetting lips that never parch,
With his pampered hounds and kine
Rests and revels while we march
Under heavens that overarch
All with equal shade and shine.
Flung like flotsam of the wave
On the shore
Which denies it of the store
That might save,
And repels it as before
To the grave—
Yes, to the grave.
We are marching, marching on,
Hope and health and living gone—
If we live,
Though we are dead
And our bodies only tread
Now the streets that grudge us bread,
And can nought but curses give;
We are ghosts and fugitive,
Ghosts of women, ghosts of men,
Ghosts of children—dead and gone,
From the jail and sweater's den,
From the paupers' cattle-pen,
Marching on
And marching on
Through this heartless Babylon;
Dwarfed and stunted,
Hooted, hunted
By the State that feasts its robbers
And its jobbers,
While it starves us
Down and carves us
With the scalpel of its scorn,
And protection
Not affection—
Wretches that were best unborn,
In our helplessness forlorn.
We are marching, while we can,
As we may,
The child and man
On the same old weary way
In one ragged disarray,
With no plan
But a brief and ghostly span,
As the ghosts of yesterday,
Just to keep still marching on,
(Where the hopes of childhood ran
And the lights of childhood shone),
Marching on
And marching on.
Outcasts in great Babylon.

BRIDE OF DEATH.

A STUDY IN GRAY.

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

THE OLD FOGEY.

KING HODGE'S COMPLAINT.

THE SOULS OF THE CHILDREN.

THE ENGLISHMAN.

He washed his lips with honest beer,
As every Briton should,
Who loves his country and the cheer
Of health and hardihood.
He stood broad-breasted as a tower,
And imaged in his pipe
At every breath the pride of power—
His sentiments were ripe.
Frank was his face, with labour seamed
In lines, and sorrow some;
And in his open glances, gleamed
New empires yet to come.
Though rude and racy of the soil
And shaped by winter sky,
He showed beneath the tan of toil
A tender chivalry.
A trifle surly, if you will,
When babies come too fast;
A word, a buffet—he could strike,
And leave a manly mark—
Came ready to him, each alike
But never in the dark.
He honoured each high instinct much,
He drank of beauty springs;
And finding him, you seemed to touch
The fountain of all things.
And none could call that being poor,
Which mingled in its life
The fragrance of the mount and moor,
And breezy airs at strife.
The flowers and morning freshnesses
Were married with the flood
In him, and green wood impulses
Ran riot in his blood.
The rustling of the heather bell
And happy birds at play,
O'erflowed his limbs and with their spell
Made music of his day.
His sinewy arms had gathered strength
From many an iron storm,
Which hewed by tardy strokes at length
His gnarled and rugged form.
But thus he grew from Nature's mould
And by her broadening plan,
A thing of plastic clay and gold,
A true imperial man.

THE BUMBLEPUPPY.

I look around and see no rival fit
To break with me a lance or dance a measure
Of nudity and manliness, and grind
Beneath our cold conventionalities
With foot perfervid and indignant flight
Of fancy. I am young, I see, I know,
And never, never, never make mistakes;
Infallibility is mine and more,
The privilege of this assured estate,
Prerogative of callow beardlessness—
Modernity of mind. I am amazed
At my own grace and cleverness, I step
Aside from them and gaze and gaze enraptured
Before the wealth of this large littleness,
Which gathers of all times and chimes and cults
And dwells alike in gilded drawing-rooms
Or servants' halls, and equally at home
Romps with the housemaid or dear Duchesses
And steals a kiss from both impartially
With calm instructed ease and gentle might,
And grand indifference to the counter claims
Of pigwash and the thinnest bread and butter—
With educated armed neutrality.
In all the best societies I live,
The fast, the slow, the superfine, the mixed,
The white, the blue, the black, and suck the sweetness
From every one in turn. Adultery
And indiscretions of the softer sort
I love to dabble in, as children play
With dirt and danger; they admit of art
And big broad strokes, virilities, and strength
Restrained, the rich sub-possibilities
That prove the master's hand. I leave to fogeys
And frumps the feeble milk-and-water way.
Give me a canvas that will cover life,
And elbow-room and air; and, if you will,
From hospitals the flowers, and jeweled jests
Of titled dames who to the Conqueror
Ascend, with whiffs and splashes of the gutter
Thrown in to add a colour and a warmth
And raciness of soil and subject; I
Disdain no tool, not even the apprenticeship
Of others not so well equipt, but glad
To work with me to one illustrious end,
And clean my brushes—maids preferred—and share
The hopes and joys of commensality.

“RAGS AND BONES.”

HUNCHBACK AND ANGEL WINGS.

Hunchbacked and foul? And yet God made me so;
This piece of dark deformity
Came from the fulness of His loving Heart
And was His thought and of Himself a part,
As much as beauty's most bewitching show,
And is no mere enormity.
It has a meaning and a proper place
Somewhere in blue-rose gardens
Above, or in the bosom of broad earth,
And to the Maker's eye a secret grace;
If eye of other hardens,
And sees alone a land of utter dearth.
Last night I dreamed of pinions—
And up aloft I voyaged on great vans
That oared the purple space in proud content
And larger scope than any time-bound plans,
With Heaven my own dominions
And all the freedom of the firmament.
I am assured this very hunch of mine
Is one with bright and blest immortal things,
A sign of something better;
It will at last in unveiled glory shine
And blossom into sweet white angel wings,
When I have burst my fetter.
I know the thorn is an imperfect flower,
And shall by kindly tending
Have yet a goodly ending,
And even forget its nature and rude arms
Forsaking these for soft and other charms
And add its colour to some great Queen's bower.
The balance must be one and true and right,
For me just as for nations;
And I was carried in God's blessed womb
That bare me with a precious seed of light,
And I can read the joy beyond the tomb
In splendid compensations.
For earth is but a stage, and many still
Await the soul that travels forth and far
And heeds the horizon of no single star
Or constellation; but, a pilgrim rapt
By upward holy vision
And careless of the fleeting form or ill,
With feet of firm decision
Presses right onward through wide realms unmapt
And belted shade and iron brute bar and shoal,
In fierce and fiery chrisms
Over unplumbed abysms,
Straight to the grand inevitable goal.
Hunchback and foul? Nay, I am wondrous fair
To him who deeper looks than husk or skin,
And loves and hears the flutter
Of ardent unconjecturable hope
In golden courts and palaces within;
That steps a priest up the pure altar stair,
Baulked by a prison shutter
But shining out of its mean envelope,
With promise of all being
And infinite glad seeing.
The scaffolding of strnctures that will rise
Beyond our climbing fancies
Or transcendental truth of wildest dreams
In gentlest joyous fashion heavenly-wise,
Doth veil a moment unimagined gleams
Of uttermost romances;
But there the Temple, crowned and sure as fate,
And girt with many a column
In testimony solemn,
And builded by no touch of human hands
Unto its orbèd calmness consummate,
Inhabited by vernal
Airs and the Breath Eternal,
White, as of carven sunlight awful stands.

A LATE FLOWER.

THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MIMNERMUS AND NANNO.

Say, Nanno, is it twice or thrice
A thousand years since we
Toyed with the trappings of the vice,
Which made thee softly free?
And did I act in human form,
Whilst thou upon the flute
Didst conquer every human storm
And win a world's repute?
And have I danced with purest joy
To hear thee sweetly play,
And were we ever girl and boy—
It seems but yesterday?
Yes, we have wandered wide and far
And drunk at other founts,
In many a dim and distant star
But by no fairer mounts.
And here we meet in aching dearth
To find a discrowned head,
And on a squalid homeless earth
We see our Hellas dead.
Ah, by her broken altars fling
Again thy breaking flute,
And for the shadow of a king
Let music now be mute.

SHOEBLACK BOY.

“SHE KNEW NOT HOW TO PLAY.”

IN A CIRCLE.

ROARING BILL

SWEARING SALLY.

BISMARCK.

SECTION VI. Palms and Passion Flowers.

INCARNATE LORD.

INVOCATION.

PAIN THE DIVINE.