Songs of A Worker :: :: University of Virginia Library

I carry in my soul the loss of her,
A grief past words and tears; when these are o'er,
Speechless I can but send you to some shore
Lone desolate, to sit there and confer
With the immense sea weeping evermore,
To know the inward weeping of my soul,
A flood no calms can soothe, no tides control.

Go forth, too, in the silence of the night,
When nothing moves beneath the dismal blue,
And, if a mighty sadness lapses through

The pulseless wakeful pauses, while the light
Of moon and stars wastes down in splendid dew,
A moment you may know a thought akin
To the great sadness of my soul within.

My sorrow goes abroad over the fields,
Darkening the meanings of each leaf and flower;
Or if you linger in the desolate bower
Of some waste rose-garden that no more yields
The summer fragrance, you may feel the power
Of my lone endless grievings, ere you start
And brush the mood of autumn from your heart.

Perchance some fading face of long ago
Limned by a sombre master, in such wise
May set you musing, with unearthly eyes
Of infinite appeal, that you may know,
Through its pale oval, passion-worn with sighs,
A haunting long regret of buried years
Like to the woe my living spirit bears.

Or when, though I am dead and this untold,
You listen where a hundred hearts are bound
In one and lifted on a thin sweet sound
Of music, like a strenuous thread of gold,
Oh, think of me! I have been there and found
My life-long thought a moment all contained
In the inspired string Ernst's finger strained.

SONG OF A FELLOW-WORKER.

I found a fellow-worker when I deemed I toiled alone:
My toil was fashioning thought and sound, and his was hewing stone;
I worked in the palace of my brain, he in the common street,
And it seemed his toil was great and hard, while mine was great and sweet.

I said, O fellow-worker, yea, for I am a worker too,
The heart nigh fails me many a day, but how is it with you?
For while I toil great tears of joy will sometimes fill my eyes,

And when I form my perfect work it lives and never dies.

I carve the marble of pure thought until the thought takes form,
Until it gleams before my soul and makes the world grow warm;
Until there comes the glorious voice and words that seem divine,
And the music reaches all men's hearts and draws them into mine.

And yet for days it seems my heart shall blossom never more,
And the burden of my loneliness lies on me very sore:
Therefore, O hewer of the stones that pave base human ways,
How canst thou bear the years till death, made of such thankless days?

Then he replied: Ere sunrise, when the pale lips of the day
Sent forth an earnest thrill of breath at warmth of the first ray,
A great thought rose within me, how, while men asleep had lain,
The thousand labours of the world had grown up once again.

The sun grew on the world, and on my soul the thought grew too—
A great appalling sun, to light my soul the long day through.
I felt the world's whole burden for a moment, then began
With man's gigantic strength to do the labour of one man.

I went forth hastily, and lo! I met a hundred men,
The worker with the chisel and the worker with the pen—

The restless toilers after good, who sow and never reap,
And one who maketh music for their souls that may not sleep.

Each passed me with a dauntless look, and my undaunted eyes
Were almost softened as they passed with tears that strove to rise
At sight of all those labours, and because that every one,
Ay, the greatest, would be greater if my little were undone.

They passed me, having faith in me, and in our several ways,
Together we began to-day as on the other days:
I felt their mighty hands at work, and as the day wore through,
Perhaps they felt that even I was helping somewhat too:

Perhaps they felt, as with those hands they lifted mightily
The burden once more laid upon the world so heavily,
That while they nobly held it as each man can do and bear,
It did not wholly fall my side as though no man were there.

And so we toil together many a day from morn till night,
I in the lower depths of life, they on the lovely height;
For though the common stones are mine, and they have lofty cares,
Their work begins where this leaves off, and mine is part of theirs.

And 'tis not wholly mine or theirs I think of through the day,
But the great eternal thing we make together, I and they;

For in the sunset I behold a city that Man owns,
Made fair with all their nobler toil, built of my common stones.

Then noonward, as the task grows light with all the labour done,
The single thought of all the day becomes a joyous one;
For, rising in my heart at last, where it hath lain so long,
It thrills up seeking for a voice, and grows almost a song.

But when the evening comes, indeed, the words have taken wing,
The thought sings in me still, but I am all too tired to sing;
Therefore, O you, my friend, who serve the world with minstrelsy,
Among our fellow-workers' songs make that one song for me.

CHRIST WILL RETURN.

Christ will return.' The Church is in high state,
The mighty conquest of the world is made;
The mitred priests in robes of purple wait
Before triumphal altars richly laid
With the memorial feast in chalice fine,
And chiselled paten; no way harsh and rude
Leads to the taking of that food divine
But steps of alabaster; no rough wood
Is now the cross, but a great golden sign
Of outstretched power that holds the earth in sway,
Whereto great folk on cushions kneel and pray.

The Church is waiting. It has fought right well,
And now, the battle over, swords are sheathed,

And no one talks of blood, and few of Hell.
And when on festal days, with sighs low breathed,
Set to time-honoured strains, they chant or tell
That story of the Founder's cross, blood-stained,
That was of wood; all heads with reverence bend
But no one weeps, because the cause is gained.
No mother's shriek of Mary comes to rend
The silence; but the crowd, with seemly look,
Worshipped and worshipping, serenely prays
Its perfumed prayer out of its ivory book.
Now sits, now kneels, now rises all demure,
While rustles through the church the soft secure
Demi-religion of these prosperous days.

The Church is waiting. With no crown of thorns
In the great picture of the story.
Ah! what a glittering halo now adorns
Each rich-robed Saint; and where, 'mid all the glory
Of vestments rich, are Joseph's working-coat

And Mary's rags? It is a throne that waits;
For 'tis become a fair thing to devote
A portion of one's goods to Church estates,
Holy endowments, and choice charities.
And they are all the nobles of the earth
Who kneel, the richest where it holiest is,
Ranged round the throne according to their worth.
Great folk no whit ashamed now to beseech
That Nazarene to come and be their king;
For Christ's religion is a comely thing
Well looked on, and the Church has grown quite rich.

But Christ is very poor!
He has no purple robe and wears no crown.
How will He find His way from town to town?
Who will proclaim Him King,
And give Him great renown,
As He goes from door to door?
He has no goods nor gold
More than He had of old.

Who will His praises sing?
He has no garment of fine linen sweet,
To enter palaces, and sit at meat
At rich men's tables. Who will take His hand,
And set Him high in the land?
There is no halo round His head;
Nay, who will give Him bread,
And bid Him rest His feet?
He has no house to go to, and no bed,—
Like a beggar in the street.

He has only love!
Yea, and hard things to teach,
With a strange and vehement speech,
Against the great of the earth,
And every law but love.
Who will give Him His worth?
Who will hear Him preach?
He has not changed!
He loves what rich men hate,

He would spoil their high estate,
Their houses well arranged,
And give their goods to the poor;
He loves what priests have cursed;
If He enters His own church-door,
He will hear no prayers rehearsed,
No praises sung.
He will bid them serve Him no more,
Till the golden vessels are flung
To the flames, and the cross on high
Is broken upon the floor.
It will be to raise a cry,
It will be to scatter the gold,
And cause the priests to fly—
It will be to purge as of old.

He has only love!
Shall He go to the house of the great?
Shall He take His place above
All the officers of state?

Shall He go and sit on the throne?
Shall He rule His Church, His own?
Shall He come to the men set apart—
To the women whose goodness is known—
Shall He knock at the door of each heart?

The rich love wealth and fame,
Forgetting whence they came.
The officer loves the place
Above his place, and to sit,
Respected and with good grace,
Among men—their Christ, to wit,
To whom they make their prayer,
Is a minister or the mayor,
This worthy or that other,
Small love have they to greet
A poor or ill-dressed brother,
Or a beggar out of the street.
And 'tis not they will believe
In the Christ with a tattered sleeve.

The king loves to be king.
If his kingdom comes to fall,
He hates all men and everything,
And his countrymen first of all.
All other kings are his foes,
But most of them all he hates
The uncrowned king who goes,
From heart to heart and prates
Of a kingdom for which he waits;
And the beggar in the street
Is the man he fears to meet.

The Priests love patronage,
Fat livings and Peter's pence,
And charities that engage
Great folk bringing recompence
Of power; women they cheat,
And men keep silence for fear
To lose what they hold most sweet.

The Christ the priest holds dear
Is gentle and musical.
A murmur of genteel prayer,
Mellow and rhythmical,
A perfume of piety;
His service is, above all,
A thing of good society.

The brazen censer is swung,
No heart has been sorely wrung;
The words of blessing are sweet,
And the evening hymn is sung,
But the Christ outside in the street,
Is begging for bread to eat.

When wilt thou come, O Christ? Come not to these
They will not know Thee. There are those will know:
Things have scarce changed since by those peaceful seas

Of Galilee it was Thy wont to go,
And sitting with the lowly—Thyself low—
To tell the folk of love, of love to ease
The burdens of their labour and their heart,
Of love to shrive them of their sin, of love
To shrink not from their shame, and bear a part
Of their reproach. Art Thou to-day above
Hearing their sorrows? Wouldst Thou sit to-day
In the high throne the rich have set for Thee,
The rich men and the priests? the same are they
Who scourged and cast Thee out in Galilee.
But there are outcast folk on other shores
Dragging the nets, lo! they have taken nought,—
Their heart is heavy as they ply the oars,
Their lives are full of woe; no man has sought
To solace them. Go, enter Thou their boat,
Tossed in the storm, and speak one little word
Of comfort, and their skiff will seem to float
On a less troubled sea, their hearts be stirred
With a new strength; soon will their net be full,

And going home, they shall believe they heard
God's voice above the tempest, pitiful,
More than a man's.

Lo! in the streets and lanes
Seest Thou, O Christ, the starved ones know Thee now?
Not yet forgetting—though their sick hope wanes,
As day by day Thou comest not—'twas Thou
Didst feed them once, the day Thy word increased
The scanty viands, and the crumbs that through
Thy sweet word's miracle became a feast.
No man hath fed them since, or if one threw
A bitter morsel to them in Thy name,
Missing Thy word, they knew 'twas none of Thine.

Come unto those who suffer; sin and shame
Are stamped on all alike, but when they pine,
All hopeless, there are some whose sin God knows
Was not their own, whose mark of shame was set

Upon them in the shameful world by those
Who ne'er had cast the stone hadst Thou but met
Their guileful glance with Thine all-seeing gaze,
And made them cower. Now 'tis with Thine own word
That world has cursed them, so they dare not raise
Their hearts to Thee; yet have they never heard
The mercy that Thou sent'st them long ago.
See Magdalen in tears upon the ground,
Spurned once of yore by hard-eyed priests; and lo!
The poor Samaritan, outside the bound
Set by self-righteous judges, fears to cross
Threshold of church and synagogue alike.

Come unto thsoe who seek through shame and loss
Of goods, and prisons, and bitter deaths, to strike
With the same sword Thou hadst of old, when men
Cried Peace, and there was no peace; those who fight,

And strive, and plan, and dream, as Thou didst then,
Now to uproot these shams; those who would smite
Yon smooth-faced tyrants on the lips, and blast
With the long-smouldering fires of man's chained soul
Their pompous edifice of wiles: at last
Freeing the fettered, shamed, downtrodden whole
And fair humanity of man. These are of Thee,
Pure, fearless young Reformer! they will clutch
New hope with fervour when they faint or flee,
Spent or in exile, when Thy feet but touch
The earth once more; rent, never restful graves
Will give them back to life, the too-soon slain
Before their victory; and o'er the waves
And mountains of the world the cry again
Will be Thy name, the true Christ comes and saves!

Come unto those who love. They have thrown down
The gold they had, cast off the costly dress,

Forsaken a throne and laid aside a crown,
Because of love; now they are penniless,
As Thou art, having nought else; all men bemoan,
Or mock, or brand them with an evil name.
But sitting in their penury alone,
Or wandering in the desert of their shame,
Or dying with eyes wide open in amaze
To find themselves deceived, betrayed, undone,
Have they repented? As the days
Close round them and they turn them from the sun,
Wasted and broken, when their words grow weak,
Their weeping silent, their unanswered sighs
Scarce part their lips, as having nought to seek,
Earth falling from them, are there not inward skies
Opening to heaven since the flame, I say,
Transmuted all their lives into their love,
Casting the days of them for dross away?
Come unto these, O Christ! they live above
The world, as Thou didst.

Crowned with griefs Thou art,
Clad in rough rags, dishonoured or unknown;
And so are these who love, they are Thine own.
Come, for they need Thee! lay Thy bleeding heart
Against theirs broken; make their love a part
Of Thy love—let them weep their tears with Thine;
Pour out to Thee the woe that makes divine,
Not of the world, their lives. These who have given
And lost their love without a hope of heaven,
Will see Thee coming from the bitter ways
And deserts, from the life of wasted days,
Footweary, bearing within a burden wrought
Of every man's refusal. God having sought
Love in each offered prayer; Christ having tried
The door of every heart for love, and cried
Sorely and waited; Man having taken Thy stand
In each man's path, and begged for love with hand

Out-held, begging for bread, now clothed withal
In shreds, the greatest beggar, yea, in all
The world, since only shreds Thy robes will be
Of love the world could give—these will see
Thee coming, and run and fetch Thee to their home,
And Thou shalt rest at last. When Thou art come,
These will bring water, greet Thee with a kiss,
Share the last crust with Thee; Thou shalt not miss
The love Thou seek'st in vain, for falling down,
Breaking the precious vessel of their own
Tear-laden hearts upon Thy weary feet,
So they will wash and ease them with the sweet
Weeping of all their lives; and it may be
That I, having shown men things they will not see,
Having spoken to the unreplying soul
Of man and woman, having poured out the whole
Vain-ruined heaven within me on the snows
And deathly ways of life, shall be of those
Sitting alone at last, whom even Thou,
Before whose effigy men falsely bow,

Ever rejecting Thee, wilt come a-thirst,
A-hungered, greatest, saddest, most accurst
Of all the world, and have that hopeless last
Outpouring of our hearts; and as we cast
Our fallen, piteous look at Thy bent head,
Thou mayst be known in breaking of our last bread
To me and them! O keep that dying tryst!
Come unto those when Thou return'st, O Christ!
Having loved others, shall they not love Thee?
Come! Thou shalt save perchance that few and me.

But avoid the Cardinal's palace: seeing Thee poor,
His serving-men may drive Thee from the door.

EN SOPH.

I. PART I. Prayer of the Soul on Entering Human Life.

En Soph, uncomprehended in the thought
Of man or angel, having all that is
In one eternity of Being brought
Into a moment: yet with purposes,
Whence emanate those lower worlds of Time,
And Force, and Form, where man, with one wing caught
In clogging earth, angels in freer clime,
From partial blindness into partial sight,
Strive, yearn, and, with an inward hope sublime,
Rise ever; or, mastered by down-dragging might,
And groping weakly with an ill-trimmed light,
Sink, quenched;

En Soph was manifest, as dim
And awful as upon Egyptian throne
Osiris sits; but splendour covered Him;
And circles of the Sephiroth tenfold,
Vast and mysterious, intervening rolled.

And lo! from all the outward turning zones,
Before Him came the endless stream of souls
Unborn, whose destiny is to descend
And enter by the lowest gate of being.
And each one coming, saw, on written scrolls
And semblances that he might comprehend,
The things of Life and Death and Fate—which seeing,
Each little soul, as quivering like a flame
It paled before that splendour, stood and prayed
A piteous, fervent prayer against the shame
And ill of living, and would so have stayed
A flame-like emanation as before,
Unsullied and untried. Then, as he ceased

The tremulous supplication, full of sore
Foreboding agony to be released
From going on the doubtful pilgrimage
Of earthly hope and sorrow, for reply
A mighty angel touched his sight, to close,
Or nearly close, his spiritual eye,
So he should look on luminous things like those
No more till he had learned to live and die.

And when the pure bright flame, my soul, at last
Passed there in turn, it flickered like them all;
But oh! with some surpassing sad forecast
Of more than common pains that should befall
The man whose all too human heart has bled
With so much love and anguish until now,
And has not broken yet, and is not dead,
And shaken as a leaf in autumn late,
Tormented by the wind, my soul somehow
Found speech and prayed like this against my Fate:

The pure flame pent within the fragile form
Will writhe with inward torments; blind desires,
Seizing, will whirl me in their frenzied storm,
Clutching at shreds of heaven and phantom fires.
A voice, in broken ecstasies of song,
Awakening mortal ears with its high pain,
Will leave an echoing agony along
The stony ways and o'er the sunless plain,
While men stand listening in a silent throng.

And all the silences of life and death,
Like doors closed on the thing my spirit seeks,
Importuning each in turn, will freeze the breath
Upon my lips, appal the voice that speaks;
Until the silence of a human heart
At length, when I have wept there all my tears,
Poured out my passion, given my stainless part
Of heaven to hear what maybe no man hears,
Will work a woe that never can depart.

Oh, let me not be parted from the light!
Oh, send me not to where the outer stars
Tread their uncertain orbits, growing less bright,
Cycle by cycle; where, through narrowing bars,
The soul looks up and scarcely sees the throne
It fell from; where the stretched-out Hand that guides
On to the end, in that dull slackening zone
Reaches but feebly; and where man abides,
And finds out heaven with his heart alone.

I fear to live the life that shall be mine
Down in the half lights of that wandering world,
Mid ruined angels' souls that cease to shine,
Where fragments of the broken stars are hurled,
Quenched to the ultimate dark. Shall I believe,
Remembering, as of some exalted dream,
The life of flame, the splendour that I leave?
For, between life and death, shall it not seem
The fond false hope my shuddering soul would weave?

I dread the pain that I shall know on earth.
Give me another heart, but not that one
That cannot cease to suffer from its birth
With love, with grief, with hope; that will not shun
One human sorrow; that will pursue, indeed,
With tears more piteous than the woes they weep,
Hearts which, soon comforted, will leave to bleed
My heart on all the thorns of life. Oh, keep
That life from me—let me some other lead!

I fear to love as I shall love down there;
It is not like the changeless heavenly love.
I see a woman as an angel fair,
And know that I shall set her face above
All other hope or memory. Day by day,—
Ah, through what agonies and what despair!—
My soul's eternity will melt away
In following her. O God! I cannot bear
The passionate griefs I see along my way!

I shall not keep her; and I fear the grave
Where she will lie at last; for though my soul
Would yearn to wreck itself, yea, even to save
Her earthly perishable beauty whole,
I shall but pray to lie down at her side
And mingle with her dust, dreaming no dream,
Unless we wander hand in hand or hide,
Hopeless, together by some phantom stream—
Lost souls in human lives too sorely tried.

So prayed I, feeling even as I prayed
Torments and fever of a strange unrest
Take hold upon my spirit, fain to have stayed
In the eternal calm, and ne'er essayed
The perilous strife, the all too bitter test
Of earthly sorrows, fearing—and ah! too well—
To be quite ruined in some grief below,
And ne'er regain the heaven from which I fell.
But then the angel smote my sight—'twas so
I woke into this world of love and woe.

II. PART II. Last Prayer of the Soul.

After a few short years of feverish being
On earth, years all so swiftly flown, I seemed
To have filled them with a madness, as one seeing
No goal, but rushing on for something dreamed
Or lost, torn past endurance of an earthly frame
By griefs and angers and some brief-snatched bliss
More cruel, and with no stay for praise or blame,
Or thought of whether righteous or amiss
I did, only the roaring loud within
Of two great contrary voices loud in strife
The momentary prevalence to win;
Some last turn on the heated path of life

Brought me most suddenly before a door,
Dark and a mystery in the narrow way,
With look of nothing known to me before.
Only a moment had I then to stay,
Appalled: the latest frenzies of the blood
And o'erwrought heart abating rapidly,
Ere with me, overmastering me, there stood
One greater than in its weak humanity
My soul could comprehend, He touched the gloom
Of that closed door gigantic, the latest bar
Of iron earthliness, the body's tomb.
It opened noiseless: and for sight too far
I seemed to gaze, while feeling all his will
That I should enter or go out thereby,
And that above my head a moment still
As 'twere his other hand was raised on high.
But through quick inward change that brought to mind
Neglected knowledge, sudden flashing bright

Of flames burnt down or darkened, as one blind
A dream's space I began to see, with sight
Not of the failing eye, but such as thought
And memory use, the ample image unfailing
And look within. I saw my life as nought
In the eternity of spirit prevailing
Before and after; a moment's dream delayed
In the dense meshes of a slackening zone,
Where lights are scarce and wandering, or they fade
In some remote cessation. Clear my own
I saw an ever-brightening upward way,
Through finer-growing ocean and atmosphere,
The widening spirits' habitation lay
Open before me, and the mystery near;
Breaking a new-found revelation to my soul
Of that which, all beyond an angel's scope,
Tried me; and, farther than a star may roll
Unsundered from its sun, sent me to grope
Among the griefs and stumble o'er the graves
Of man's wrecked realm, yet drew me like a breath

Through all-dark walls and intervening waves,
And clogging heaviness of life and death,
Back to His bosom of ineffable calm,
And splendour of the soul's eternal source.

Yet, while that moment lasted, the disease
Of life was on me; its arrested course
My blood resumed and to my heart returned,
The latest fit of agony suspended,
At sudden shock. The unwrought purpose burned
Once more in all my being, with the blended
Fires and energies of love and grief,
Intense desire, and bitterness of hate.

FALLEN FLOWERS.

One of the workers of the world
Living toiled, and toiling died;
But others worked and the world went on,
And was not changed when he was gone,
A strong arm stricken, a wide sail furled;
And only a few men sighed.

One of the heroes of the world
Fought to conquer, then fought to fail,
And fell down slain in his blood-stained mail,
And over his form they stept;
His cause was lost and his banner furled;
And only a woman wept.

One of the singers among mankind
Sang healing songs from an o'erwrought heart;
But ere men listened, the grass and wind
Were wasting the rest unsung like a wave;
And now of his fame that will ne'er depart
He has never heard in his grave.

One of the women who only love,
Loved and grieved and faded away—
Ah me! are these gone to the God above,
What more of each can I say?
They are human flowers that flower and fall,
This is the song and the end of them all.

AT HER GRAVE.

I have stayed too long from your grave, it seems,
Now I come back again.
Love, have you stirred down there in your dreams
Through the sunny days or the rain?
Ah no! the same peace; you are happy so;
And your flowers, how do they grow?

Your rose has a bud: is it meant for me?
Ah, little red gift put up
So silently, like a child's present, you see
Lying beside your cup!
And geranium leaves—I will take, if I may,
Two or three to carry away.

I went not far. In yon world of ours
Grow ugly weeds. With my heart,

Thinking of you and your garden of flowers
I went to do my part,
Plucking up where they poison the human wheat
The weeds of cant and deceit.

'Tis a hideous thing I have seen, and the toil
Begets few thanks, much hate;
And the new crop only will find the soil
Less foul, for the old 'tis too late.
I come back to the only spot I know
Where a weed will never grow.

GROWING ON A GRAVE.

Love, on your grave in the ground
Sweet flowers I planted are growing;
Lilies and violets abound,
Pansies border it round,
And cowslips, all of my sowing;
A creeper is trying to cover
Your name with a kiss like a lover.

Dear, on your grave, in my heart,
Grow flowers you planted when living,
Memories that cannot depart,
Faith in life's holier part,
Love, all of your giving;
And Hope, climbing higher, is surer
To reach you as life grows purer.

A PARABLE OF GOOD DEEDS.

A woman, sweet, but humble of estate,
Had suddenly, by Providence or fate,
Good fortune; for a rich man made her wife,
And raised her to a high and sumptuous life,
With gold to spare and pleasurable things.
Himself being great, in the employ of kings,
Earning an ample wage and fair reward,
He led his days like any lord,
That made him rank among that country's lords;
But little pity had he for the poor,
Nor cared to help them: rather from his door
Bidding his servants drive them shamefully,
Till all knew better than from such as he
To beg for food; and only year by year

Some wanderer out of other lands drew near
His hated house. Riches corrode the heart
That hath not its own sweetness set apart.
But in his wife no inward change was wrought—
Sweet she remained, and humble in her thought.
And lo, one day, when, at the king's behest,
This man was gone, there came and asked for rest
A certain traveller, sad and very worn
With wayfaring, whose coat, ragged and torn
By rock and bramble, showed the fashion strange
Of distant countries where the seasons change
A different way, and men and customs too
Are strange; and though the woman hardly knew
His manner of speech, seeing his weary face,
She thought of toiling kinsfolk in the place
Where she was born, and knew what heaviness
It was to fare all day beneath the stress
Of burning suns, and never stay to slake
The bitter thirst or lay one down to take
A needful rest, the natural due of toil;

So she dealt kindly, and gave wine and oil,
And bade the stranger comfort him and stay
And sleep beneath that roof upon his way:
That hour the sweetness of her fettered soul
Was like the stored-up honey of a whole
Summer in one rich hive; and secretly
She wept for joy to think that she might be
Helpful to one in need. So when her lord
Returning chided her, she bore his word
Meekly, and in her spirit had content.

A long while after that, a poor man, bent
And weak with hunger, wandered there, and prayed
A little succour for God's sake, who made
The rich and poor alike, and every man
To love his fellow. But the servants ran
And beat him from the house, along the lane,
Back to the common road. Ah! with what pain
She saw it, but durst never raise her voice

Against her husband's rule! Then with no noise
She went out from the house into the street,
And, like a simple serving-maid, bought meat
And bread, and hurried to and fro to find
And feed the starving man. That day the kind,
Pitiful heart within her ached full sore,
And much she grieved, thus little and no more
'Twas hers to do to ease so great a woe,
As home she went again, that none might know.
Then at another time it chanced that one,
Whose brother, if 'twas truth he told, had run
Into the den of robbers unawares,
And lay a prisoner, sought that house of theirs,
Having fared thus and thus with others first,
To gather gold enough to go and burst
His bonds. And lo! her husband gave him nought,
But bade him lie again to those he caught
With such a shallow tale. But she was stirred
Greatly within; and rather would have erred,
And been a trickster's dupe, than let depart,

Unhelped, a brother with a bleeding heart.
And so when none was nigh, she gathered all
The store of gifts and gold that she could call
Her own, and gave it to the man. Ah dear
And blissful seemed that brother's thanks to hear.

A good wife with her husband now some span
Of years she dwelt, and had one fair child born,
And life grew easier to her every morn;
For living with such sweetness day by day,
The hardest heart will change, and put away
Some of its meanness. So it did not fail
But that her husband softened, and the tale
Of poor folks' wrongs would strike upon his ear
With a new sound that once he could not hear.

At length he died, and riches with him ceased;
The king's pay came no more, and scarce released
From greedy creditors, when all was sold,
The woman and the child with little gold,

A meagre sum against hard want and shame,
Went forth to find the land from whence she came.
The world was drear to them, and very hard,
E'en as to others. Luckless or ill-starred
Their wanderings seemed. One day their gold was spent,
And helpless, in a sad bewilderment,
The woman sat her down in sore distress
In the lone horror of the wilderness.

Then the child cried for food, and soon again
More piteously for drink, and all in vain.

And the poor woman's heart of love was wrung
With agony; all hopelessly she hung
Her head upon her breast, and said ‘Ah me!
Life is no longer, child, for such as we;
For I am penniless, and men give nought
To those that cannot buy!’

Then there was brought
An answer in her ear which said, ‘Not so,
But thou art even rich: look up and know!’

Therewith she looked and saw three persons, fair
And shining as God's angels, standing there
Beside her in the way.

One gave the child
Drink from a jewelled cup; one held high, piled
With richest foods and fruit, a goodly tray,
And bade him eat; the third did stoop and lay
A purse upon her lap, the gold in which
Sufficient was to make a poor man rich.
And when o'erwhelmed with joy, and in amaze,
Seeing the loveliness beyond all praise
Of those three persons, on her knees she sank
To worship them for angels, and to thank
The God that sent them to her in her need,
They said, ‘O woman, kneel not to us indeed,
But thank thyself; for we were wrought by thee,

And this the loveliness that thou dost see,
Half wondering, is thine own, the very light
And beauty of thy soul, for just so bright
We are as thou didst make us; and at last
Dost thou not know us? is all memory past
Of three good deeds that in prosperity
Thou didst? Those three good deeds of thine are we.’

And then they walked before her, and she went
And found her home, and lived in great content.

A FALLEN HERO.

They found him dead upon the battle-field.
One said, ‘A hard man, and with scarce a heart;
There lay his strength, a man who could not yield.
For, after all, too many, playing a part
Of judge or warrior in the world, strong-armed,
Or with the mental sinews stoutly set
To the far-reaching thought, have faltered, charmed
To softness and half purpose when they met
The sweet appeal of individual lives,
Or vanquished by the look of wounded foes.
This man was iron. Who has striven strives
Where the cause leads him; where that is, who knows?

Content with partial good the cooler crowd,
Using its heroes, steps aside, well served,
Waits for another; and the applause, so loud,
So general once, grows fainter—more reserved
Around his steps who, holding first the flag
In a well-honoured fight, is left to wage
The war alone, above him a red rag
With now his name upon it. So, 'twas a rage
Urged this man on; good, evil, grew but in dreams,
The changeless opposites; and to comrades, shamed
Or timely fallen away, the man now seems
Well-nigh the contrary of the thing he named.’

Another said, ‘Ay, seems to such as these
Who fought for half the goal—the goal was good,
Immense, remote, a blessing that may ease
The world some ages hence; half-way was food,
Content, a crumb for lesser lives to gain:
He gained and spurned it to them. For the rest,

The future man may count his death not vain,
Finding him in Time's strata, as with crest
Frenzied and straining jaws and limbs, some old
Imbedded dragon lies defiant still
In an unfinished fight. If such pass cold
Mid the dwarfed folk whose generations fill
Their striding steps, their soul is all the sun
Gilding the dawn and lengthening out the span
Of yet unrisen days, when men may run
To greater heights and distances of man.’

A third said, ‘Yet to fall, as this one hath,
Not with the earlier laurel newly earned,
Nor having cleared the later doubtful path,
But with a red sword firmly clutched and turned
Against the heart of his time, is no fair fate.
He who now drives a hundred men to death
Is bound to show the thousand saved; else hate
And scorn will quickly blow him such a breath
No flowers will grow about his memory,

No goodly praise sit well upon his name.
The men, who for his shadow could not see
The peaceful sun of half their days, cry shame
Against him; lives he stinted of their love,
Denying his own, lopping the tender boughs
And leaflets that the trunk might rise above
Its fellows, spoil the glory on his brows,
Accuse him just as surely with their tears
And ruin as with words that seemed too weak.

‘Better, perhaps, out of the hopes and fears
That round the generation's life, to speak
And win assent of every lesser man,
Or, fighting, only wrest from that dark foe,
The Future, jealous holding all she can
For hers unborn, some moderate trophy, no
Abiding portion; dazzled, men will praise,
While that great gift the dream-led seeker strives
To gain and give them, scarcely they may raise
Their hearts to the great love of all their lives.’

So spake they round one fallen in a fight,
Whence most had turned away, deeming the good
A doubtful one, the further path too rife
With thrusts across the common ground, where stood
Friend and foe mingled. Half praise, almost blame
One and another uttered, as they gazed
Down at the dead set face, and named the name
That once upon their foremost banner blazed,
But late flashed fitfully on distant quest
Strained past endurance. Bitterness still wrought
Somewhat within their hearts, or memory prest
Maybe upon them with some late look fraught
With passing scorn, and these—the feet that rushed
Onward, too reckless of weak lives that hide
Along the wayside of the world—had crushed.

But lo! a woman wrung her hands and cried,
‘Ah, my beloved! ah, the good, the true!’
And clasped him lying on the ground, and kept
Her arms about him there. She only knew
The passion of the man, and when he wept.

IN THE OLD HOUSE.

In the old house where we dwelt
No care had come, no grief we knew,
No memory of the Past we felt,
No doubt assailed us when we knelt;
It is not so in the new.

In the old house where we grew
From childhood up, the days were dreams,
The summers had unwonted gleams,
The sun a warmer radiance threw
Upon the stair. Alas! it seems
All different in the new!

Our mother still could sing the strain
In earlier days we listened to;

The white threads in her hair were few,
She seldom sighed or suffered pain.
Oh for the old house back again!
It is not so in the new.

SILENCES.

To—

'Tis a world of silences. I gave a cry
In the first sorrow my heart could not withstand;
I saw men pause, and listen, and look sad,
As though an answer in their hearts they had;
Some turned away, some came and took my hand,
For all reply.

I stood beside a grave. Years had passed by;
Sick with unanswered life I turned to death,
And whispered all my question to the grave,
And watched the flowers desolately wave,
And grass stir on it with a fitful breath,
For all reply.

I raised my eyes to heaven; my prayer went high
Into the luminous mystery of the blue;
My thought of God was purer than a flame
And God it seemed a little nearer came,
Then passed; and greater still the silence grew,
For all reply.

But you! If I can speak before I die,
I spoke to you with all my soul, and when
I look at you 'tis still my soul you see.
Oh, in your heart was there no word for me?
All would have answered had you answered then
With even a sigh.

LYNMOUTH.

I have brought her I love to this sweet place,
Far away from the world of men and strife
That I may talk to her a charmèd space,
And make a long rich memory in my life.

Around my love and me the brooding hills,
Full of delicious murmurs, rise on high,
Closing upon this spot the summer fills,
And over which there rules the summer sky.

Behind us on the shore down there the sea
Roars roughly, like a fierce pursuing hound;
But all this hour is calm for her and me;
And now another hill shuts out the sound.

And now we breathe the odours of the glen,
And round about us are enchanted things;
The bird that hath blithe speech unknown to men,
The river keen, that hath a voice and sings.

The tree that dwells with one ecstatic thought,
Wider and fairer growing year by year,
The flower that flowereth and knoweth nought,
The bee that scents the flower and draweth near.

Our path is here, the rocky winding ledge
That sheer o'erhangs the rapid shouting stream;
Now dips down smoothly to the quiet edge,
Where restful waters lie as in a dream.

The green exuberant branches overhead
Sport with the golden magic of the sun,
Here quite shut out, here like rare jewels shed
To fright the glittering lizards as they run.

And wonderful are all those mossy floors
Spread out beneath us in some pathless place,
Where the sun only reaches and outpours
His smile, where never a foot hath left a trace.

And there are perfect nooks that have been made
By the long growing tree, through some chance turn
Its trunk took; since transformed with scent and shade,
And filled with all the glory of the fern.

And tender-tinted wood flowers are seen,
Clear starry blooms and bells of pensive blue,
That lead their delicate lives there in the green—
What were the world if it should lose their hue?

Even o'er the rough out-jutting stone that blocks
The narrow way some cunning hand hath strewn
The moss in rich adornment, and the rocks
Down there seem written thick with many a rune.

And here, upon that stone, we rest awhile,
For we can see the lovely river's fall,
And wild and sweet the place is to beguile
My love, and keep her till I tell her all.

The thing I have to tell her is so great,
The words themselves would seem of little worth;
But here grand voices at my bidding wait;
The torrent is my heart, and roars it forth.

I take my love's hand; looking in her eyes,
I strive to speak, but the thought grows too vast—
Lo! a bird helps me out with it; she sighs;
Sing on, sweet bird, 'twill reach her heart at last!

Oh, torrent, say thou art this heart of mine,
Strong, rapid, overwhelming; I will break
Life's very rocks with rage akin to thine,
And vanquish, ever striving for her sake.

Oh, bird, sing thou art even the voice my heart
Will find to woo her life through day by day,

So that she hearing never shall depart,
And the long way shall seem a little way.

Oh, wandering river that my love and I
Behold to-day through many a leafy screen,
Tell her that life shall be a gliding by,
A course like thine through this enchanted scene.

EDEN.

Weary and wandering, hand in hand,
Through ways and cities rough,
And with a law in every land
Written against our love,
We set our hearts to seek and find,
Forgotten now and out of mind,
Lost Eden garden desolate,
Hoping the angel would be kind,
And let us pass the gate.

We turned into the lawless waste,
Wild outer gardens of the world—
We heard awhile our footsteps chased,
Men's curses at us hurled;

But safe at length, we came and found,
Open with ruined wall all round,
Lost Eden garden desolate;
No angel stood to guard the ground
At Eden garden gate.

We crossed the flower-encumbered floor,
And wandered up and down the place,
And marvelled at the open door
And all the desolate grace;
And beast and bird with joy and song
That broke man's laws the whole day long;
For all was free in Eden waste:
There seemed no rule of right and wrong,
No fruit we might not taste.

Our hearts, o'erwhelmed with many a word
Of bitter scathing, human blame,
Trembled with what they late had heard,
And fear upon us came,

Till, finding the forbidden tree,
We ate the fruit, and stayed to see
If God would chide our wickedness;
No God forbade my love and me
In Eden wilderness.

The rose has overgrown the bower
In lawless Eden garden waste,
The eastern flower and western flower
Have met and interlaced;
The trees have joined above and twined
And shut out every cruel wind
That from the world was blown:
Ah, what a place for love to find
Is Eden garden grown!

The fair things exiled from the earth
Have found the way there in a dream;
The phœnix has its fiery birth
And nests there in the gleam;

Love's self, with draggled rainbow wings,
At rest now from his wanderings,
In Eden beds and bowers hath lain
So long, no wealth of worldly kings
Will win him back again.

And now we need not fear to kiss;
The serpent is our playfellow,
And tempts us on from bliss to bliss,
No man can see or know.
Love was turned out of Eden first
By God, and then of man accurst;
And fleeing long from human hate,
And counting man's hard laws the worst,
Returned to Eden gate.

Now every creature there obeys
Exuberantly his lawless power;
The wall is overthrown, the ways
Ruined by bird and flower;

The nuptial riot of the rose
Runs on for centuries and grows;
The great heart of the place is strong—
It swells in overmastering throes
Of passionate sigh and song.

And while we joy in Eden's state,
Outside men serve a loveless lord;
They think the angel guards the gate
With burning fiery sword!
Ah, fools! he fled an age ago,
The roses pressed upon him so,
And all the perfume from within,
And he forgot or did not know;
Eden must surely win.

SONG.

When the Rose came I loved the Rose,
And thought of none beside,
Forgetting all the other flowers,
And all the others died;
And morn and noon, and sun and showers,
And all things loved the Rose,
Who only half returned my love,
Blooming alike for those.

I was the rival of a score
Of loves on gaudy wing,
The nightingale I would implore
For pity not to sing;

Each called her his; still I was glad
To wait or take my part;
I loved the Rose—who might have had
The fairest lily's heart.

FOLLOWING A DREAM.

I should not follow a dream in vain,
Loving, forsaking, loving again,
If this one loved a little more,
If that one sorrowed a little longer;
If red lips holier kisses bore,
If passionate hearts were stronger.

I should not leave brown hair for gold,
The warm and fair for the fair and cold,
If one I loved ne'er loved again;
As years go by and loves grow fewer,
I should not follow a dream in vain,
If a beautiful woman were truer.

KEEPING A HEART.

To M—— D——.

If one should give me a heart to keep,
With love for the golden key,
The giver might live at ease or sleep;
It should ne'er know pain, be weary, or weep,
The heart watched over by me.

I would keep that heart as a temple fair,
No heathen should look therein;
Its chaste marmoreal beauty rare
I only should know, and to enter there
I must hold myself from sin.

I would keep that heart as a casket hid
Where precious jewels are ranged,

A memory each; as you raise the lid,
You think you love again as you did
Of old, and nothing seems changed.

How I should tremble day after day,
As I touched with the golden key,
Lest aught in that heart were changed, or say
That another had stolen one thought away
And it did not open to me.

But ah, I should know that heart so well,
As a heart so loving and true,
As a heart that I held with a golden spell,
That so long as I changed not I could foretell
That heart would be changeless too.

I would keep that heart as the thought of heaven,
To dwell in a life apart,
My good should be done, my gift be given,
In hope of the recompense there; yea, even
My life should be led in that heart.

And so on the eve of some blissful day,
From within we should close the door
On glimmering splendours of love, and stay
In that heart shut up from the world away,
Never to open it more.

PROPHETIC SPRING.

TO-DAY 'tis Spring; the hawthorn-tree
Is green with buds; to-day maybe
She whom I think of thinks of me,
And finds the thought enough;
And when those buds are grown to leaves,
That thought wherein she scarce believes
Will grow perhaps to love.

Soon as the flowers of May appear,
For love of me she will draw near,
And hoping, dreading, I shall hear
Perhaps, and own my bliss.
Awhile beneath the hawthorn sweet
Our o'erstrained quickening hearts will beat,

Our purple thirsting mouths will meet
And revel in their kiss.

But when pink May becomes red June,
And summer sounds a glorious tune,
Under some lordlier tree aswoon
Together we shall lie.
And then to-day's half-timid thought,
May's thrill and kiss will seem as nought
To the full joy we shall have taught
Each other, she and I.

A FALLING LEAF.

My love is one of the falling leaves
That flourished high in the blue,
Taking part in the dreamwork the gossamer weaves
Out of gauzy sunlight and dew;
My love believed what the spring believes,
With nothing to promise it true:

And lived like a leaf, and rose so high
On a topmost bough in the smiling sky,
That it joyed, did my love, as the blithest may,
Ay, joyed in its heaven of fond belief,
In its hope, in its gossamer dream, as a leaf
In its summer that passeth away.

And now that the sky is darkened and chill,
My love scarce dreams or believes:
My broken love, stay a moment still,
For a word, a token, a sound—
It trembles, it falls with the falling leaves,
It will die, one of them, on the ground.

IF SHE BUT KNEW.

If she but knew that I am weeping
Still for her sake,
That love and sorrow grow with keeping
Till they must break,
My heart that breaking will adore her,
Be hers and die;
If she might hear me once implore her,
Would she not sigh?

If she but knew that it would save me
Her voice to hear,
Saying she pitied me, forgave me,
Must she forbear?

If she were told that I was dying,
Would she be dumb?
Could she content herself with sighing?
Would she not come?

BETWEEN TWO POSTS.

Stay with me, relic of the rose
I gave her in love and June;
I knew she must send you back, I suppose,
Some Autumn day, but the day she chose
Seems many a day too soon.

Silken-coffined you lay in her breast,
And felt her heart grow cold,
And so died slowly, at least soft-prest,
Not as my heart dies now; for the rest,
'Tis much the same when told.

A word may come, there may yet be room
To hope and hold your troth;
Lie here at my heart and share its doom—
If life, you may yet come forth from your tomb,
If death, I have buried you both.

A LOVE SYMPHONY.

Along the garden ways just now
I heard the flowers speak;
The white rose told me of your brow,
The red rose of your cheek;
The lily of your bended head,
The bindweed of your hair:
Each looked its loveliest and said
You were more fair.

I went into the wood anon,
And heard the wild birds sing,
How sweet you were; they warbled on,
Piped, trilled the self-same thing.

Thrush, blackbird, linnet, without pause,
The burden did repeat,
And still began again because
You were more sweet.

And then I went down to the sea,
And heard it murmuring too,
Part of an ancient mystery,
All made of me and you.
How many a thousand years ago
I loved, and you were sweet—
Longer I could not stay, and so
I fled back to your feet.

IN A BOWER.

A path led hither from the house
Where I have left your doubt and pain,
O fettered days of all my past;
I lingered long, but came at last;
One lifting up of fragrant boughs,
Then love was here and broke my chain
With eager hands: the die is cast,
No path leads back again.

Henceforth, cold tyrant of my heart,
You rule no longer pulse or breath;
Love, with rich words and kisses hot,
Has told me truth in this charmed spot;

And, though your hand this hour should part
The leaves, I have no thought, but saith
My life is Love's: I fear you not,
Now you are only Death.

And Death creeps up the garden walks;
But Love hastes, winning more and more:
My hands, my mouth are his, my hair,
My breast, as all my first thoughts were;
Across the moonlit sward Death stalks;
But Love upon this flower-strewn floor
Hath made me wholly his: ah, there!
Death stands outside the door.

A DUET: PIANO AND VIOLONCELLO.

Dedicated to M. Laserre.

PIANO (preluding).

There is a land above the land where life
Frets the dull chains of speech, and strains the ear,
And wearies out the heart in passionate strife
With sullen fate; and there, released from fear
And doubt, and putting off the earthly veil,
The soul finds solitudes akin to those
Her infinite sadnesses; moonlit and pale
Those pathways gleam: no sun ere rose
On such receding shores; but lengthening waves
Of the soul's urgent ocean reach and break

Upon them, wailing round remembered graves
Where buried lie the hopes she did forsake.

There with an infinite utterance, more than words,
I ask those things that never life hath found
Response to; there with stricken, grieving chords,
I mourn, I weep, I pour forth the great sound
Of all the desolate groaning of my days,
Till an unearthly echo takes my soul,
Become that sound, up into loftier ways,
Where it is almost bliss to bear my dole;
Or soon the luminous cloud-work of a dream
Hath wrapt me in its frail delicious heaven;
Or, rarely, one voice, gifted it would seem
With the sole tone to blend with mine, and even
Out of its own great yearning answer me,
Hath wrought me such content through sweetest strain
Of lofty converse, that the end would be,
If not of joy, a sadness one were fain
To live and die with,—Ah, that voice again!

VIOLONCELLO.
Thou call'st me then! and dost thou not divine
My soul hath longed for thine,
Since last in rare exalted mood we met,
And spake and sang and wept
Things we can ne'er forget,
Songs that our souls have kept,
And tears that still combine?

PIANO.
Whence com'st thou, soul that once so joyed with mine?

VIOLONCELLO.
I lingered in Vienna, dreaming still
Some rhapsodies to fill
The aching years, and lift them from their grief.
That grief, rememberest thou?
It is nor light nor brief;
Dost thou remember how
Thine own tears wrought relief?

PIANO.
Yea, grieving soul, and I would hear thee now.

VIOLONCELLO.
The thing I loved is lost for evermore!
I sing me o'er and o'er
The name thereof, and nothing answers me.
And year by year the earth,
And heaven and the sea,
Promise me nothing worth
In years that are to be.

I had a high belief that like a star
Made light for me afar,
Ruling life's cloudlands with a distant spell,
Now, or the darkness grows,
Or the star paled and fell,
And only as a vision my soul knows
That loftier thing that glorifies a day,
An hour, then fades away,—

Leaving a palace with the lights burned down,
A soul sitting in gloom,
Uncrowned that wore a crown,
A temple with no priest—a tomb.

THOUGHTS IN MARBLE.

POEMS OF FORM.

HER BEAUTY.

I knew that in her beauty was the healing
Of sorrows, and the more than earthly cure
Of earth-begotten ills man may endure,
Gnawed on by cares, or blown by winds of feeling.
For in her beauty was the clear revealing
Of Truth; and with the sight a man grew pure,
And all his life and thinking steadfast, sure,
As one before a shrine of Godhead kneeling.
But then, alas! I saw that she was made
No whit less mortal, frail,—or she might miss
Death—than the summer substance of a flower;
That on her beauty Death had even laid
A touch, and in the distance called her his,
And Time might steal her beauty every hour.

A PRIEST OF BEAUTY.

Love's hard-earned grace I deem a scanty grace,
And hardly given seems the bliss Love gave;
For not at all times, nor in every place,
I have her whom I wholly seem to have,—
But days of barrenness that are as weeks
Divide the days of bliss that are as hours;
Brief weeks, I count for summers, my heart seeks,
And, for one flower I gain, lose many flowers.

For is not this the Lady who is mine
By all my winning, and by love's free hand?
Yea, for me only may she bloom or shine,
Or deck herself: I only may command

That splendid spirit that abides in her,
And makes her living form and look and voice,
A temple, whose sole priest and minister
I am by love's anointment and love's choice.

And lo! how is it that, ere some brief night
Hath had in whole impassioned sacrifice,
Through mystic incarnations of delight,
Her beauty that no priesthood may suffice—
How is it that some bitter envious morn
Compels me from her—intense haloes yet
Above her breasts, and many a joy unborn
In places that no kissing hath made wet?

How is it that long through the languid day,
With broken memories of unfinished bliss,
Soul torn from soul, heart from the heart its prey,
Kiss-seeking lips, lips still a-thirst to kiss—
Our reddening human flower rent in twain,
We agonise and die back through each gate

Of bloom and raptured past made void and vain,
For some supreme desire insatiate?

Alas! but all too oft, as though indeed
Sad widowhood and no fair happy part
With living lover were our fate decreed
By Love—the famine fierce in eyes and heart—
On either side the darkness, each to each
We yearn and stretch vain hands forth and make moan,
And frame fond words for ears they never reach,
And weep in vain, and sorrow all alone.

Is this Love's royalty? this all their state
Who smile beneath his purples and his crown,
His very favoured ones, whom all men rate?
Why am I not there when my Queen, my own,
All sleepless on her couch lies burning white,
Tossed with strange fevers, spent with strange unrest,

Beneath some waning lamp's pale opal light,
Sick of her sweet limbs many times carest?

Why am I not there when the amber morn
Brings her its gift of fragrance all diffused,
Repaints her lip and sets there newly born—
The honeyed store of kisses, to be used
That day, my Love thinks—as new blushes haste
To fill her face's flower from her heart's core—
Alas! nay, rather, to lie there, and waste,
Just like the kisses of the day before?

Why am I not there?—yea, for that hour's share
Of what should be my daily life-long bliss,
Her sight beloved—when, without shame or care,
She gives her body to the clinging kiss
Of waters that no memory preserve
Or impress of her beauty on their wave—
I who, for one sight of her side's fair curve,
Shall think of her for ever in my grave?

She lingers with her fairness, a warm eye
Worshipping all the unstained loveliness
Of her white self, smiling at smiles that lie
Hid in each rosy dimple that felt press
Some white tooth of the water—feeling joy
That she is even thus; till the sweet throng
Of effortless desires weary and cloy
With aching thought of days empty and long.

Truly, if any sight or kiss or sense
Be in the air and light of day, the touch
Of waters, the night's jealous prevalence,
Yea, all life's common ministers—then such
As these are they that have her and that learn
How sweet she is, not I who have their right:
Some coldest maid, her fellow, shall quite earn
More than I to be with her day and night.

Most bitter is it: for the world, ay, space
And times and duties and men's envious will

Are ever between me and my love's place,
That, having her, I should be joyless still,
As though I had her not. Ah, curse this wrong!
And ofttimes, when I haste to see her most,
Some jealous robe hath held from me too long
That beauty all my life hath too long lost.

Shall these things be so, Love?—where is thy spell?
What care I now to do as others do?
Have I not honoured thee and served thee well?
Cannot some lightning-shaft of thine break throug
These shames?—or, make the world by night and day
Translucent to me, walls of things and space:
That robe too—so I see my love alway,
Bathe myself alway in her perfect grace?

That beauty of my Lady, meant for me—
That mortal gold no heaven can e'er repay;
My mortal life—is plundered secretly
By Death and Time; ay, every passing day

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Is ravishing what all my soul holds dear.
Each hour contends with me for what is mine,
And every moment—yea, in every year—
Spoileth some part of her for whom I pine.

How doth it profit me that in her—veiled
Beneath some robe—all miracles are met;
That forming hands long-striving once prevailed
In her? What life scarce tastes, death may forget.
How doth it profit me she is so fair,
My Lady, though all women should concur
There is no one for envy who durst bare
Her paler charms?—how doth it profit her?

Yea, her and me, how profiteth, alas,
This love, this loveliness of her divine?
Fooled by dull fates, we let the fair days pass
In which Time's miracle hath made her mine.
And, ah! I can but think in what slight space
She shall be lost to time and love and me:

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Shall I but find her once in any place
Quite on through all the bare eternity?

Shall not some gnawing voice of great regret,
Down in the grave, be taunting me for aye?
Saying, Thou hadst her, was her beauty set
Like holy flame before thee night and day?
Didst thou well use the moments—seeing so brief
Was life—to fill thine eyes with her, to throng
Thy heart with her? If not, great is thy grief:
Thou canst not do it now—and Death is long!

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LIVING MARBLE.

When her large, fair, reluctant eyelids fell,
And dreams o'erthrew her blond head mutinous,
That lollingly surrendered to the spell
Of sleep's warm death, whose tomb is odorous
And made of recent roses; then unchid
I gazed more rapturously than I may tell
On that vain-hearted queen with whom I dwell,
The wayward Venus who for days hath hid
Her peerless, priceless beauty, and forbid,
With impious shames and child-like airs perverse,
My great, fond soul from worshipping the sight
That gives religion to my day and night—
Her shape sublime that should be none of hers.

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The wonder of her nakedness, unspoiled
By fear or feigning, showed each passionate limb
In reckless grace that failed not nor recoiled;
And all the sweet, rebellious body, slim,
Exuberant, lay abandoned to the whim
And miracle of unabashed repose.
I joyed to see her glorious side left bare,
Each snow-born flow'ret of her breast displayed,
One white hand vaguely touching one red rose,
One white arm gleaming through thick golden hair.
I gazed; then broke the marble I had made,
And yearned, restraining heart and holding breath,
That sleep indeed were endless, even as death.

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BLACK MARBLE.

Sick of pale European beauties spoiled
By false religions, all the cant of priests
And mimic virtues, far away I toiled
In lawless lands, with savage men and beasts.
Across the bloom-hung est, in the way
Widened by lions or where the winding snake
Had pierced, I counted not each night and day,
Till, gazing through a flower-encumbered brake,
I crouched down like a panther watching prey—
Black Venus stood beside a sultry lake.

The naked negress raised on high her arms,
Round as palm-saplings; cup-shaped either breast,

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Unchecked by needless shames or cold alarms,
Swelled, like a burning mountain, with the zest
Of inward life, and tipped itself with fire:
Fashioned to crush a lover or a foe,
Her proud limbs owned their strength, her waist its span,
Her fearless form its faultless curves. And lo!—
The lion and the serpent and the man
Watched her the while with each his own desire

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THE LINE OF BEAUTY.

When mountains crumble and rivers all run dry,
When every flower has fallen and summer fails
To come again, when the sun's splendour pales,
And earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh
Spent in her annual circuit through the sky;
When love is a quenched flame, and nought avails
To save decrepit man, who feebly wails
And lies down lost in the great grave to die;
What is eternal? What escapes decay?
A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line,
Curving consummate. Death, Eternity,
Add nought to it, from it take nought away;
'Twas all God's gift and all man's mastery,
God become human and man grown divine.

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PENTELICOS.

In dark days bitter between dream and dream,
I go bowed down with many a load of pain,
Increasing memory gathers to remain
From paths where now, all snakelike, lurk and gleam
Love's last deceits that loveliest did seem,
Or hurrying on with hope and thought astrain,
To reunite love's worn just broken chain,
Whose links fall through my fingers in a stream;
When, sometimes, mid these semblances of love,
Pursued with feverish joy or mad despair,
There flashes suddenly on my unrest
Some marble shape of Venus, high above
All pain or changing, fair above all fair,
Still more and more desired, still unpossest.

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PAROS.

When I took clay—with eager passionate hand
Inspired by love—to mould the yielding curves
Of all her shape consummate that deserves,
Immortal in the sight of heaven, to stand;
Then, undismayed, as at a god's command,
Laborious, with the obedient tool that serves
The sculptor's mighty art and never swerves,
Beside the crumbling form I carved the grand
Imperishable marble. Henceforth—seeing
The glory of her nakedness divine—
My heart is raised, I bend the knee and deem her
Not simply woman and not merely mine,
But goddess, as the future age shall deem her,
Ideal love of man's eternal being.

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CARRARA.

I am the body purified by fire;
A man shall look on me without desire,
But rather think what miracles of faith
Made me to trample without fear or scathe
The burning shares; the thick-set bristling paths
Of martyrdom; to lie on painful laths
Under the torturer's malice; to be torn
And racked and broken, all-victorious scorn
Strengthening the inward spirit to reject
The frame of flesh, with sins and lusts infect,
Whose punishment, like to the sin, was gross,
And man the executioner. I arose
Changed from those beds of pain, and shriven at last
From the whole shameful history of the past—

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Of earth-bound pride and revelry; yea, shriven
From Love, at first the one sin, and forgiven:
Beauty that other, with the vanity
That set me crowned before humanity;
So I was led, a priestess or a saint,
Robed solemnly, leaving the latest taint
Of earthliness in some far desert cell
Ascetic; and the hand late used to tell
Rough rosaries, the hand for ever chilled
With fingering the death-symbol, feels unthrilled
With any passionate luxury forbidden
The world's new wedlock. Man and woman chidden
For all their life on earth wed timorously,
And full of shames, fearing lest each should see
The other's greater sin; so they unite,
Two penitential spirits, to take flight,
In one ethereal vision sanctified,
Two bodies for the grave. I am the bride
Who clings with terror, suppliant and pale,
And fears the lifting of her virgin veil,

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Because the shrinking form, spite of her prayers,
Has grown to know its earthliness, and bears
The names of sins that gave up shameful ghosts
On antique crosses. Raised now amid the hosts
Of living men, my effigy is grown
Passionless, speechless through the postured stone
That holds one changeless meaning in its pose;
The murmuring myriads pass, and each man knows
And sees me with a cold thought at his heart;
For I am that from which the soul must part.

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DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO VENUSES.

FIRST VENUS.

With me the soul's Eternity began,
Before me wastes of waters were, and earth,
And elemental agonies that ran
Through human chaos, till my perfect birth
Fulfilled the life and made the dream of man.

For I was with him in the foamless deep,
Vaguely he saw me through glistening water,
In the veined marble spell-bound or asleep,
A goddess, and a woman, and a daughter,
Of dreams, to make men joy henceforth, or weep,

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A goddess when I stood upon the wave
Green haloed further than all arms could reach;
A woman when I came to earth and clave
Unto men's lives, filling the heart of each—
Then died, and took the marble for a grave.

Until then Praxiteles, with passionate Art
Sought me, and saw, and lifted me to strange
Life, above life and death to stand apart,
The one thing of the world that cannot change,
The true religion of the human heart.

But what art thou, whom in the twilight time
Lifted by faint or failing hands I see,
Repeating timidly a form sublime?
Whose chisel hath made mimicry of me
In the cold quarries of what northern clime?

The mid-day sun caressing, warmed the soul,
Long in unchiselled marble slumbering;
On gleaming shores that felt the rhythmic roll,

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Of ancient azure waves: but thou pale thing,
Wert wrought beneath some ghost light of the pole.

SECOND VENUS. (‘The Venus of Gibson.’)
I am the pure ideal of a day
Purer than thine. Long since men put away
The ancient sin thou symbolest, and broke
Love's altars, and beat down his flower yoke;
No longer holding up his torch of flame
Drags he the soul dishevelled, and with shame,
A captive trampled with relentless feet.
Nor leads it haltered, powerless of retreat.
A weak, blindfolded child to consummate
Base union with Desire; nor a fate
With eyes averted, and strong cruel hand
Holding the shrivelled victim o'er the brand,
Maybe consume it as a moth at length.
A new and holier faith gave man new strength
And Athens lies a ruin, the ancient crowned
Passion-gods writhe as bitter serpents, bound

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In the all-quenchless hell that gave them birth;
And priests of virtue have transformed the earth.

FIRST VENUS.

I hear the language of some Gothic lie,
That like a darkness bred of one blown cloud
Hath spread itself over man's azure sky,
And his affrighted heart hath disavowed,
The glory set before his soul on high.

The poisoned moments of eclipse hath wrought
His fair fruits bitter, and diseased his breath;
And in the sour ranklings of his thought,
He hath tormented to a sense of death,
The clear bright truth of life Love's self had taught.

For on the sure swift pinions of desire
The soul was wont to soar to every height
Of heaven; and in Love's hand the only fire
Burnt upward, and in his hand the only light
Shone for the soul to spring from and aspire.

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And I a little higher than the heart,
A little further than the outstretched hand,
The very soul of man's soul, set apart
From all his shifting days, and toil by land
And sea, dwelt with him never to depart.

Sister, of all his thoughts, nowise he read
The marble meaning in my eyes of fate;
Made one with him, and mystically wed,
His bride, he left me still immaculate,
Yet had content of me, and rests, being dead.

What fairer helpmate is there given to each
Still striving soul of man for joy and good
'Twixt birth and death? What virtues can they teach
That were not perfect in my womanhood
Ere gods were known or there were priests to preach?

For whoso looks on me is filled with faith,
And walks exalted in a transformed earth,
Worshipping alway, serving no mere wraith

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Of dreaming, no frail vision's doubtful birth,
Nor leaning on the word that any saith.

And I am the great love, no thing may shun
My heart's warmth—as no flower can escape
The fever from the centre of the sun—
And I the single chastity, the shape
Adored by all and never given to one.

SECOND VENUS.
A god of virtue walked upon the earth,
And man repented him of love and mirth;
He looked upon the image he had made,
And, lo! 'twas naked; then he grew afraid,
And, with a righteous zeal, he overthrew
The marbles of Praxiteles: they strew
The trampled land of Greece; the shameless stone
Of Thespiæ fell, and grass of years has grown
Over the broken Cnidian; and that pride

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Of Athens, Artemis, whose lips denied
The kiss they seemed to covet—age by age
The growing storm of man's ascetic rage
Battered each sculptured fane, and burst upon
The chiselled idols of the Parthenon
With ruin; and when the vengeful tide that surged,
Stirred by the priests of man's new faith, had purged
The world of Phidias' works, or only left
Disordered remnants—goddesses bereft
Of arms and feet, Apollo scarce divine,
Marred of his manhood, Mercury supine,
Headless Cephissus and maimed daughters three
Of Cecrops—when the immortality
Of marble, fashioned in the form of lust
That once was Phryné, trodden into dust,
No longer stood between him and the sky,
Man put on sackcloth and rebuked the eye
Because of sight, and chid the hand for touch,
And chained the heart lest it should feel too much.

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Henceforth the daily thought of heaven or hell,
Chastened man's life; almost he fears to dwell
His perilous time of travail on the earth,
Full of pollutions, knowing first his birth
A shame done when the face of God was turned
Away in wrath or pity, having earned
His mortal right to labour with the hand
Till the brow sweats as an accursed brand
And punishment of sin; fleeing, the while
His sense is linked thereto, the deadly smile
And lure of beauty, worker of his ill
And sister of the serpent-temptress still,
Through all his trembling and divided days.
The sackcloth shrouds too in a thousand ways
That fallen form, ere death with safe last gloom
Hurries it to the darkness of the tomb—
A rotting secret, recordless; and shroud
And death and the revilings long and loud
Of priests, yea, and corroding sermons set
In each man's heart, as 'twere a worm, to fret

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Upon the earth; these have so well combined,
All men have passed the peril as though blind;
And the close veil that woman meekly wears,
No hand hath raised for eighteen hundred years.

FIRST VENUS.

Man raves, and in the madness of his dreams
A Moloch hath enslaved him; covetous priests
Have spoiled his good, and poisoned all his streams.
He dare not sit at any of the feasts
Of life, and, wholly darkened, he blasphemes

The goddess giver of true holiness
To all his days. If still his heart can find
A little love; if, in its abjectness,
A glimmering light of truth lasts in his mind,
So that he see not foul or meaningless;

Or, with distorted falsehood written o'er
Its shining parable of faultless Form,
Let him tear off the veil, and look once more

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On woman, white divinity, of marble warm,
With all of life, the soul hath waited for.

If he but see aright, in glory sweet,
Unsullied by dull heresies or lust,
Or vile invented shames designed to cheat
The soul, and dwarf into degraded dust
That truth in which God's heaven and man's earth meet,

He shall be healed. For the great purity
Of the soft bosom, guileless in its rest,
Yet holding all within the mystery
That maketh man, shall show that God hath blest
Birth and the secret of humanity.

And if he look upon the arms that hold
And circle round the heaven of his bliss,
And the mouth with its lovelier gift than gold,
Stored in the consummation of a kiss,
Then he shall know he hath been falsely told

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To count life's labour of relentless days
A cursed pain and punishment of sin.
Eternal light shall show the upward ways
Of toil, and man all holy entering in
Where heaven is earth's achievement and earth's praise.

And if he read in the revealing eyes
Looks of the spirit from the depths of time,
It shall be written in his heart what dies
Hopeless and lost, and what lives on sublime;
Clouds shall be cast away and he shall rise,

Lifted by love, as on a wing or wave,
To luminous heights above the world and live,
Full of all great and deathless thoughts that save
From death; so in no manner shall he give
His glory or his manhood to the grave.

Behold, moreover, if to the inward soul
Of any man there enter, to be known,
The presence of that Beauty, perfect whole,

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Goddess and woman, reigning on a throne
O'er all the thoughts and ways with sweet control.

If with surpassing revelation rare,
The mystery of the one ineffable line,
Transcending time and space, changelessly fair,
Before and after all things, law divine
Enter the soul and make religion there,

Then is man saved; for in that soul's clear sight
No falsehood or impurity shall stand;
That soul shall fashion darkness into light,
And moulding human clay with holy hand,
Exalt man pure upon a marble height.

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A VENUS.

Fallen from ancient Athens to the days
When sculpture hides her forms beneath a shroud,
I mingle sometimes with the bourgeois crowd
Of rich church-going serious folk, to gaze
On each demure-faced Venus who obeys
The crabbed daily rule of some purse-proud
Merchant or lawyer, graceless and bald-browed,
Cheating abroad for what at home he pays.
And marking well her beauty, which he bought
With cunning eye; I marvel is this she
Whom Paris knew? Does she not chafe at all?
And ofttimes sorely expiate in thought
Her desecrated godhead, secretly
Standing lone, white, upon some pedestal?

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THE LAST LOOK.

Lastly, an angel ushered me in haste
Out through the sunrise. I beheld the earth
Setting behind me; I beheld the Past
Reddened with life and love, and knew the worth
Of life itself, and love itself and time;
And of two women, there was one sublime
Waiting in sadness, tears, and love, and faith,
Clad brilliantly—crowned was that delicate wraith
Of white immortal face, and haloed hair,
Seen of remembered gold veiled in the fair
White widowhood of many a holy year;
And her tried soul, transcendent now and clear,

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Like the last summit, like a steadfast star,
And merged into the lucent opening far
Away in widening heaven.

Then I turned
To seek that other, for whom life had burned
So long unquenchably; and dimly seen
In dismal joys and anguish, that had been
An altered shadow on a failing shore,
Pained me awhile: then I looked back no more.

127

A FRAGMENT.

Man shall not die. The darkness in his brain,
The canker at his heart, the ill of ages,
Shall pass and leave him as a worn-out pain.
Life from her books shall tear a thousand pages,
And like an unread record shall remain.

The history of his madness, when he fled
Beauty, the soul's bride, set before his gaze,
And followed necromantic ties to wed,
Death, with a lingering spousal all his days,
Gnawed on by worms as though already dead.

129

COLIBRI.

131

CANTO THE FIRST.

Deep in the warm heart of Brazil
There lay a diamond bright and still;
The summers sinking through the ground,
Dead flowers and some lost water-rill,
Dim secrets of the earth profound,
Long symphonies of all her sound—
These things enriched and nourished it
With splendours of their infinite.
And, through each dark terrestrial birth,
Regenerating to the light,
That quenchless star of central night
Passed upward from the occult earth;

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Became an emanating dew,
Bloomed forth a passion-flower, or flew
A humming-bird with crimson-crest,
Or melting in a virgin's breast,
Made for her heart a diamond too.

Among the forest-folk that child
Seemed a sweet wonder. Strange and wild
From the first years she grew, as one
With superhuman secrets, things
Unspeakable; who oft must shun
Her people for far communings;
Having unclouded sights and clues
Of swift ways to an unknown land
Past all the trails their feet might use.
A spell they could not understand
Was with her, that she did begin
To move unwontedly their hearts,
And there was nought she might not win
With her charmed smile and lovely arts.

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Her fellow-children's forest-play
Grew beautiful when she was there;
The butterflies they chased would stay
With blue wings closed, and seemed more rare
And of a gaudier kind; the way
Led more resplendently along,
Lit vividly with the forked ray
The sun shot through the trees; and song
And sweet, unbridled folly reigned,
As though that day the summer bright
Trebled with joyance unexplained.
The children thought she had some might
With all the glowing things, whose flight
Was like an arrow's flash, or fair
And buoyant on the rapturous air.
They thought for her the flowers could talk,
Each one upon its quivering stalk,
In an enchanted tongue she knew
And all day long was listening to;
And sure were they she was a queen

134

Far in the forest-lands unseen,
Whence wondrous voices that they heard
Shouted her many a magic word,
Or sang or called confusedly.
So that all through the radiant hour
A sweet awe mingled with their glee,
And they had called her Colibri,
Thinking her brother was the bird
Whose sister was the passion-flower.

Oft in the middle flush of sport
She fled them waywardly, and went
Smiling and singing, till the short
Impenetrable paths that bent
Inwardly through the trees were closed
Behind the echoes of her song.
But when all lovely she reposed
In dense, sweet places where days long
No foot drew near and no eye saw;
Where purple-scented stillness grew,

135

And red trees had not stirred, for awe
Of the eternal thing they knew;
Strange richness of thought undivulged
Would roll upon her heart, and dreams,
In whose remote joy she indulged
Until the warm day's yellowing beams
Fell vaguely on her dazzled cheek.
For soon within her there began
To grow more thoughts than she could speak,
Than she could show to any man,
Sometimes for joy, sometimes for shame,
Since they were measureless and vast
As great blue skies, or went and came
As troops of fair birds flying fast,
Since each was stranger than the last,
And none of them had yet a name.
She could but feel the solitude
Held something of their endless mood,
That they were a mysterious part
Of flower's sweet soul and bird's strong heart;

136

She could but think it was a share
Of her rich secrets that did gleam
On many a bell-bloom red and fair;
And that in truth it was her dream
The palms dreamed in the lofty air.

The forest voices great and sweet,
The speaking, yea, and singing there,
That seemed so often to repeat
Some powerless murmur of her own,
Were in a language better known
Than any of her kindred's speech.
And what those strange, sweet tongues could teach
Her yielding spirit day by day
Prevailed to lure her far away
And ever farther: till she grew
United more to each wild thing
Of furtive foot or rushing wing,
Than to the sister that she knew;

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And many a nameless flower had been
With rich effusive spell between
Her and her mother's heart.

Her friends
Were none else than the blue macaw,
The troupial, whose long nest she saw
Dragging down all the plantain's ends
Close to the canes and swaying sedge
Of every dim lake's hidden edge;
Or, more than these, the tanager,
Whose bright eye had no fear of her;
She loved to hear the joyous stir
He made among the leaves all round,
And knew he followed her for miles
About the forest, with swift bound
Through sidelong ways and green defiles
He only, or the lithe tree snake,
Had skill to thread; and, but for him,
Sometimes she felt her heart would break
With the great throng of thoughts so dim,

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So wonderful and hard to speak,
When, watching his shape, vivid, slim,
Ecstatic, she could well believe
He too was bearing in his breast
A secret rapture unconfest.
And more and more she did conceive
That all these in their several ways
Were telling her for days and days
Of one whose face she had not seen,
Who surely some long while had been
Roaming about the forest, felt
By bird and flower, and many a time
Dreamed of by her; strangely sublime
And beautiful, with a great kind
Of power and sweetness, such as dwelt
Perchance in no one man. And still
More than that dream she thought to find,
Wandering with yet a mightier thrill
Deeper and deeper through the wild
Magnificence of trees. Each bird

139

Had newly seen him, and just heard
Some rare harmonious speech that died
Into its liquid song; each place
Was awed yet, having felt him glide
Loftily through it, leaving trace
Of luminous majesty and grace
And strange transfigurement on all.
O! there was many a clear footfall
Approaching grandly, shaking long
The attentive solitudes with strong
Rythmical thunder,—O the leaves!
The ponderous draperies of green
The dragon-like liana weaves,
Were ofttimes stirred, ay, parted e'en,
As though a hand would have been laid
That moment on her wondering head,
And sudden revelations made
Of all the mystery of her thought—
And yet no miracle was wrought;
While only lasted there instead

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The great appalling quiet noon,
With yellow glints of sunlight shed
Through long bright inlets; or too soon
The day in momentary glare
Went down, and joyless, shook the air
With the immense night-shudder.

Then
A weary melancholy ill
Became her life to her, as when
Some crushed palm-sapling fades or dies
Whom its rich inward scents must kill,
And the repression of flushed leaves
That cannot rise to wave and thrill
In azure heights of tropic skies:
So seemed it with her, and she went
To a lone forest lake that heaves
With no fond swell of cadenced waves,
But hollows out its liquid tomb,
And deepens shadowy and content

141

In the green hollows of its gloom;
Above it monstrously the trees
Have stridden, and their crossèd limbs are bent
And locked in the contorted throes
Of savage strife, while o'er them grows,
Darkening with cumbersome increase,
The dank black parasite. Alone
She sat there drooping; a disease
Her melancholy thought was grown,
Her love of a great thing unknown,
Or known to all and hidden from her.
She was estranged now from blithe day,
And left the fair birds far away,
Nor chose to hear the tanager,
Whose black eye seemed to know so well
All things she sought, and would not tell.

Greater it seemed her heart must grow
Than bird or flower at all might know,

142

And very desolate was her walk
Through the green lovely solitude;
For no wild creature of the wood
Was high enough to feel or talk
Or commune with her. For her love
Might be the God who reigned above,
Unknown, tremendous in the blue;
But the slim palm-trees were so high,
She might no way ascend thereto.
Or perchance he was wandering through
Some mightier forest all remote,
Or dwelt in marvellous countries nigh
The world's end, where the salt wave smote
The shadowy blue Bahamas' shore,
And she must dream on evermore.
And lo! her dream's exalted joy,
And endless wonder and vague sweet—
The faith no long day might destroy,
The vast hope making her heart beat
Through silent hours of the sun's heat,

143

The vision that had filled the fiery west,
And rose up making the huge night
Speak and sing wondrously—were best
Of all things to her life, and more,
Yea, e'en than that strange country, bright
With manifold shapes and hues, and more
Than its red warrior-folk, whose town
Boisterous along the river shore
Held yet a home that seemed her own.
And to the lover who now bore
Such hopeless passionate looks, that wooed
With their dumb desolation, nought
She yielded, save some pitying thought
And strange word he scarce understood—
How a surpassing god, unsought,
Unknown, was holding all her heart
Close to his mysteries, and no part
He or her brethren had therein,
Unless some flower should quite begin
To teach them out of its rare hues

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Unheard of secrets, or with loose
O'erflowing song, a forest bird
Should tell such things, as when they heard
They should be changed and live again
Could he who loved her say one word?
The countless voices sang so plain,
Passing her charmed ear, from height
Or depth or far unfathomed green,
Gave answer to her, making bright
Some dim place in her heart; could e'en
That love of his for summer have been
To one of those unfading blooms
Of speechless and transcendant thought
That grew up, filling with perfumes
And fervours all her being, fraught
With unknown seed within? But well,
Alas! she saw that bird and flower,
And all the eloquent forest, turned
Their dim side unto him, or fled,
Or shut their sweet mouths, or sang lower

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Their song, or sang mere vain things, learned
Of empty echoes and dull dread;
And even the tanager would glance
Full of bright scorn amid his dance,
Mocking him, out of arrow-reach
On topmost bough. Full of dumb love,
That youth would follow afar off,
Daring no longer to beseech,
Stricken through to his warrior's heart
More keenly than his whistling dart
Was wont to strike in war or chase,
All silent and with scarce a stir
More than a gliding snake made,—her
He followed, hearkening many a space
In the side forest's hiding-place.

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CANTO THE SECOND.

I am that curst and hopeless one. My face
Has caught the brown glow of these Southern seasons,
And warm new virgin worlds have burnt the trace
Of half a summer on me; in its place
Is none the less that memory of treasons
And faithless faces, and that love, half hate,
The rest despair and lust, that woe—that fate—
That evil I perceive, not one man's doom,
But a great death in a decorous tomb
Called Europe.

Would the taintless sun could reach
To burn away the dull dust at my heart,
And quite transmute its yearnings, and then teach
The ruined intuitions of pure feeling

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One frank, warm love of this unsullied part
Of lovely, passionate earth. I mock that thought!
The old world's wound is past the new world's healing,
And Europe holds the child that Europe taught.

The last days in a desolate-peopled city
Were long with wretchedness. I felt the whole
Dissembled pang that inwardly depraves
The love alike of king and courtezan,
And dries the very sources of soft pity,
Hardening the farewell word the heart most craves
To leave behind. I understood each man
In his consummate coldness, and the lying
Of every woman's love and jewelled smile
Was bare to me in secret. I saw dying
In agonizing bonds, beneath the vile
Enamelled falsehood of triumphant fashion,
All lonely loveliness of truth and passion,
Stung to a poisoned death by one small asp,
The deathless fiend, Mistrust—from kiss to kiss,
From heart to heart, crawling for aye unseen;

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Given in the ready hands, unheeding clasp,
Lying in wait beneath each coming bliss,
Spoiling the fair place where a true past hath been.

And so I did not curse her whom I curst
In the appalling hour that taught me first
To see her as she is; to be alone
For ever with the angel overthrown,
The self she spoiled, and left me. No, the throne
She has not moved from hath a chain as cruel
As gold can be, drawn tight across the heart,
Till the restraint hath cankered every part,
And joyless is the splendour of each jewel,
And pitiless the semblance of each joy
Put on her daily. He who out of love
Or hate should change or slay her, would destroy
One long, keen punishment some Lord above
Sees and remits not. For she may not fall,
And she shall never dare to love at all.

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Sitting at noontide in the gilded hall
Of one of those vain-glorious palaces,
Haunted ere night time by some shrieking host
Of void, disconsolate souls, whose miseries
Stalk tombless through the shifting centuries.
That shadowy horror that appalleth most,
The loneliness of kings, took hold on me.
Surely it laid a cold hand on my heart,
And with the cruel, supernatural speech
Of one who knoweth all things, made me see
And measure and consider, part by part,
The soul of Cleopatra; then of each
Most exquisite and exorable queen,
And still, in clear discourse, unshrinking, keen,
Told me the truth concerning many a dame,
Adored and of an all unspotted fame,
Laid bare the shallow secret or the shame,
And bade me then be wise with scarce a taunt.
And many times, in the histories of doom
Written of men and women, over whom

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The graves are tearless, and the past makes vaunt
Of hollow praise or passionless lament,
I saw the face, I found the lineament
In all respects of her I was content
To bind myself the slave of: in my soul
She was the prophecy of page on page,
That named her with the name some former age
Counted its curse, and left its aureole.

And then I scarcely know what fatal rage
Urged me to seek such wisdom's sad extreme,
To probe yet further, and to find the core
Of all her life; to overthrow each dream,
To question, to examine, to explore,
To rack each reticent nerve of memory,
Piercing and ruining the lovely ore
Of many a fond illusion, just to see
How hollow the clear hollowness might be—
In truth, to work out with a fearful might
Myself mine own unmitigated hell;

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For, when I stood in the cold, cruel light,
And knew the depths, and gazed up to the height
Of that consummate knowledge, O! I fell—
Yea, weeping as the hopeless souls may weep,
And for one little hope of her—to keep
One undestroyed deception as before
To love and live in,—would have knelt once more
And served the blindest God that men adore.
Alas! if some world-conquering Emperor,
Roaming among his ruins, with the sun
For compeer, and the moon, that weeping nun,
For pale, reproachful consort, should repent,
Loathing the loneliness of empire won,
And yearn to bring again the sweet content
Of people there, and life, and grace, and sound,
To fill once more each hollow tenement,
And lift the fallen temples from the ground,
Whom, yearning so, the sun's red taunt at noon
Must answer, and the misery of the moon
Mock him at night with silence; then my own

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Great hopelessness were a thing not unknown,
Nor quite unparalleled, nor all alone.

I had long ceased from that consuming need,
To seek her where she was, to have indeed
The sight and presence of her; now, alas!
It mattered little how her days might pass,
I knew and saw; having so felt and seen,
There could not be one thing that had not been;
And in some rugged and remotest cell—
Rock-guarded, sea-environed solitude,
Silenced and overawed by my great mood
Of mightier desolation—I could tell
Her deepest thought that hour, and see and dwell
Most intimately with her in the home
Of inward self-avowal. There with crowds
In some cold glittering capital—at Rome,
In languid ease; at Venice, in disguise—
I reached her through the glitter and the shrouds,

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I alone; for my soul's enlightened eyes
Had read her inward self, and did divine
A soul dividing solitude with mine.

And once, beholding vain eternity,
Made of irreparable life—aghast,
With nearness of her face for destiny,
And all the future plighted to the past,
Seen like an arid country, red and vast,
Scathed by one present memory—I besought
Some death that were not momentary—aught,
For blindness and oblivion and reprieve,
A grief not all of mine to share and grieve,
A labour to be lost upon, a wide
Inhuman wilderness, wherein to hide—
A darkness of a forest.

154

CANTO THE THIRD.

Refulgent moment of supreme emotion,
Sweetening the earth, swelling the lurid ocean,
Making a flagrant painting of the sky,
Burdening the soul of things with dumb devotion,
Urging the heart of man to speak and die,
Speaking then in a bird's despairing cry,
Breaking then, agonizing, passing by!

So the tremendous evening fades, and night,
Like a great noiseless eagle, at one flight
Covers the glowing country of the light.

Hark how, a mile away, the wild Savannah
Wakens and heaves and roars! Inward this road,
And then a rush through plantain and banana,
And then the forest. Where the strange flower glowed,
The giant yellow flower between the trees,
The blossom of the dragon-like liana,

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There she awaits me; there her hands will seize
And hold me to the fire of her heart,
That wild Brazilian fire, whose diamond dart
Makes the small bosom of the humming-bird
A coruscation.

Who would speak a word
Through such transcendant silence? All was done.
And once more in the day, beneath the sun,
She and I journey, as though two were one.
She and I, in a gliding boat of bark,
Are going up the mighty Amazon;
On either side of us a forest dark
With wonders that the light ne'er looked upon,
Whence ever here and there some brilliant thing
Issues enchanted. Sometimes great trees fling
Their tortuous arms across, and endless trails
And coils and thongs of leafage and of bloom
Hang down and sweep the wave, and scarce leave room,

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Or stretch their dense impenetrable veils
All overhead. And now the waters dream
And darken in the shadows where they keep
Rich stains of leaf and flower buried deep,
In pastures where the feeding fishes gleam,
Spangled with suns and stars; and now the stream,
Bounding with glossy back beneath some cape,
Goes onward like an oscillating snake,
Until one midmost rock's unyielding shape
Thwarts it, and lo! whole seas of fury break
From lashèd sides, and the rock and river wage
A roaring, endless strife; but slim and swift
As the Anhinga bird, we dart or drift,
Or hurry through the eddies, and the rage
Of the wave's desperate onset far behind
Is lost among rich murmurs. Then the noon,
In some delicious spot where slowly wind
The weakened currents round soft oases,
Linked by their joining flowers, allures us soon
So overwhelmingly with perfumed breeze,

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And purple glow and wonderful appeal
Of supernatural colours that reveal
Strange speechless yearnings of the heart, and steal
Into its subtlest communings, that long
We linger, feeling what the waters feel,
And what the flowers are faint with, and a throng
Of passionate thought goes mingling with the song
Of low-voiced love-birds, till we join the dream
Of all their emerald Eden. Nothing said
Around, beneath, or answered overhead,
Yet all one soul in one effusion seem
The opulent odours, the transcendent gleam,
The radiant heights of verdure—the cool gloom,
The flowering orgies of unwonted bloom,
The love, the thought—one soul, one dream, one doom!
Nursed in the noiseless water haunt where night
And day are softened, and the liquid light
And shallow fawning wastes for ever dwell
In unison beneath an amber spell,

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We watch some burnished miracle of green,
Piercing the hollow shade with vivid sheen,
The plume-tailed halcyon, with scintillant wing,
Sudden and flashing, like a meteor stone;
Or gazing upwards, long enamouring
Enthralling moments, all that world unknown,
That labyrinth of leaves and blossoming,
That waving ocean of sonorous day,
Where the red palms expand in vast array,
And the sun works his wonders, opens deep
Surpassing vistas; and enchantments keep,
Or visions lure us thitherward in sleep.
Unnumbered pass those redolent hours: a trance
Of luminous magic lulls the whole expanse
Of lovely wilderness. At length a call
Comes from the waters; then the clamorous din
Of some amphibious host: then aimless fall
The spent red arrows of the lurid light
Among the tree stems, and a sun akin
To flame leaves crimson on the palm-trees' height,
And orange on the wave. Then sudden night.

159

This Indian girl came softly to my side,
In the resplendent border-land, one noon.
I, lingering through the day's luxurious swoon,
Communing with colossal sadness hewn
In the red sunset, felt her long look steal
Into my soul, as some dark glade may feel
The sweet insinuation of the light;
And when I turned the momentary sight
Of her unfaining face touched me with yet
One other thing my soul may not forget.
Neither shall I forget a long rich hour,
Eloquent between pausing sun and moon,
The darkening forest and the closing flower
Spoke in the silence with an unknown power.
She stirred not at my side; but let her cheek
Fall in its soft effusion on my breast,
The while her long, dark yearning gaze exprest
Thoughts wonderful, and things she could not speak.

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And looking on her face, I saw indeed
How inwardly that hour her soul took heed
Of love and far-off fate, and life and death,
In some great height of sadness, passionate
And pensive. And the woodlands' wavering breath
Seemed tremulous, because it bore a freight
Of unrequited tears. On either hand
Brethren and sisters of her tribe did stand,
Speechless and saddened; then, a little while,
Made farewells fading, and in shadowy file
Passed onward through the shadowy forest land,
Leaving her there and me; and at her feet
Her Indian lover, dying, making sweet
His death with gazing on her.

Here is our oasis. Slow water-ways
Murmur meandering through the golden maze:
All the lulled river, like a winding snake,
Fondles the flowerage of the bending shores,
Glistens half hidden under blooming brake,

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Or basks in glossy opening. Secret pores
Enchant the air with an exhaling scent,
And great corollas tossing redolent,
Like high-swung censers, lavish a large gift
Of magical strange fragrance; while the palms,
Rising exuberant, emulously lift
Crowned heads surpassing to the exalted calms
And luminous heats of high ethereal day.
In such an Eden glorious creatures stay,
Fearless of foe, and many a nest is made
Safe in the blue recesses of the shade,
By lazy golden fowl, whose feathers flame
Most like the burning phoenix of old fame.

Here, when our gliding soft canoe was heard,
Failed there a flower or ceased there any bird
His lone ecstatic song? The red canes stirred
Only with wonted music, shuddering sweet
In long unanimous revelry: the wave
Fawned on insatiably about their feet;

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The large leaves met behind us to repave
The blossoming path for wading water-hen,
And glossy green-billed trampler of the fen.
And nothing broke the high beatitude,
Harmonious through the one-voiced solitude,
Where jubilant birds and scents of dreaming flowers,
Poured out rich souls and blended them with ours.

And, truly, to be here in this our isle,
In the red hour of the sun's last smile,
Is fair and full of wonder; for the banks
Gleam with a moving splendour; dazzling ranks
Of lories, and the parrots manifold,
In fluttering glory, crimson, green and gold,
Flown banded from the forest hitherward,
Dapple with shifting hues the bended sward
Down to the wave; or, lighting on some space
Of rustling cane and undulating rush,
Amaze the forests with their swaying grace,

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And break the deepening blue with sudden gush
And pageantry of colour.

Colibri!
Yea, let me live for ever here, and see
Only the beauty of the place, and thee,
Strangest and loveliest. There is some part
Of the snake's fascinating soul in thee;
'Twas a surpassing flower that made thy heart
Of passionate secrecy, of hues that start
And rise and fill the soft depths in thy face,
As unknown crimsons formed beneath the wave
Expand and fade; and all thy wild swift grace
Belongeth to the bird that dims the eye
With sunny lightning: whence one name they gave
To thee and to the bird.

And by-and-by
I shall know better all thy mystery.
Here thou shalt bind me, and the flowers maybe
Shall also bind me for thee day by day,

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Adding inscrutably some lasting link
Of fragrance round my heart; here thou and they,
Joining soft league against me, lull away
My life to dream a life again, or think
In lofty-cadenced rhapsodies that hold
The long sonorous winds in worlds of gold,
Singing transcendently above the palms.

Already I have felt the inward balms,
Rich stealing emanations from the deep
Unfathomable forest, healing me,
O'erwhelming me in an enchanted sleep
Of unremembering, buoyant luxury,
Whence colour, perfume, sound, on painless wings,
Issue immortal in wide liquid thrill
Of softest dissolution. Unknown things,
Reaching the secret of my kindred sense,
Lure me, moreover; so that I fulfil
A daily-growing bond with the immense

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Exuberant solitude; while now the will
Of some long-stifled ancient being intense
Wakes me to soar forth boundless.

Oh, last night,
The great voice of the universal soul
Seemed to be speaking to me from the height
And from the depth, bidding me rise up whole,
Blasting my weakness in the scornful roll
Of thousand-throated thunder. Every tongue
Of fair infuriate creature, gracious, strong,
Uttered or roared or sang the frenzied song
Of its appalling self, that once more flung
A loud defiance through the fearless night,
Great and without a grief. And I, like one
Roused by some vast resuscitating voice
From death's drugged lethargy, watched with delight,
Against the jaggèd blue, the faultless poise
And sheer intrepid leap or violent run
Of ounce or jaguar—hearkening while the noise

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Of all that hurricane of life and strife
Roared and rolled on terrific through the leagues
Of shaken woodland, till a loftier life
Of great primeval passions and fatigues
Rose and grew mine—a long exuberant breath
Of pauseless life to end in dreamless death.