The Poetical Works of Walter C. Smith :: :: University of Virginia Library

Thanks, Hester dear, this little hand
Was always gentle; none like thee
Can smooth a pillow in all the land,
Or sweeten the sick-room delicately:
A tender, loving hand to me—
Too good, for I was rough and bold;
Now, let me to the sunshine hold
The dainty fingers up, and see
The red light through, as in days of old.

How sweet the day gleams through the faint
Pink curtains of the dear old room,
Like heaven-sent visions of a saint
Tinged with the nature they illume!
You've kept all here as fresh as bloom,
Just as it was long years ago;
I have not felt blanch linen so
Lavender-sweet since fateful doom
Lured me abroad to a world of woe.

The old flowers through the window toss
Wafts of sweet incense; roses pink
Knock at the pane, cushioned in moss,
And yellow buds, too, smile and blink
Over the sill; and as I drink
The fragrant breath, an airy jet
From the sweet-pea and mignonette
Falls on the sense, and makes me think
Of the old bright mornings, dewy wet.

Why should, at times, a passing scent,
Just sniffed a moment on the breeze,
Its sensuous power so swiftly spent,
Come laden with more memories
Than the low hum of honey bees,
Or sound of old familiar strains,
Or rustling of the autumn grains,
Or voices from the whispering trees,
Or the running brooks, or the pattering rains?

The smell of these moss-roses sweet,
More than aught meets the ear or eye,
Speaks of old times, and seems to greet
Me kindly from the days gone by:—
There by the window you and I
Hearken the kirk-bell in the air,
I see our mother on the stair,
And white-capped matrons leisurely
Trudging along to the house of prayer.

They are all gone, all sainted now,
All clothed in raiment clean and white;
With palm-crown on each grave sad brow,
They stand before the Fount of light,
And praise His glory day and night;
No wrinkles on their face I see,
No toil-rough hand, nor stiffening knee,
Yet clinging to their glory bright
Is the scent of the sweet thyme and rosemary.

How the old books look bright in gold!
You must have dusted them all day
To keep them so from moth and mould.
Those were school prizes near you; pray
Give me my Homer, that I may
Smell the old Russia smell once more,
And feel the old Greek torrent pour,
Like plashing waves on shingly bay,
As the King mused, wrathful, along the shore.

Have you forgot your Greek, and all
Our quarrel? How you would have sent
Fair Helen from the Trojan wall
Back to the King of men, nor spent
One arrow though the bow were bent,
Nor borne a dint on Hector's shield,
Nor planted banner on the field,
Nor shouted from the battlement,
For a woman whose faithless heart could yield.

You held the men unfit to rule
Who'd launch their galleys on the deep,
And leave their realms to mickle dule,
And lonely wives to watch and weep,
By sandy shore and rocky steep,
For leman false, and lover faint;
Yea, were she pure as purest saint,
Better have died than so to keep
The kings from their high task of government.

What scornful beauty you would show
In scorning beauty and its charms!
How eloquent your words would grow
O'er lordless realms and vague alarms,
And feeble age with rusty arms
Fending the matrons, while the men
Were bleeding on the sand or fen,
Or dreaming of their homes and farms,
Or fattening the lean wolf in his den.

I think you should have been the boy,
You were so politic and wise,
Impatient of an idle toy,
And piercing with those stedfast eyes
The heart of all great enterprise.
While I—ah me! my life is sped,
Already numbered with the dead;
And with the vanities and lies
Clasp it up in its coffin lead.

Yes, yes; I know you'll say me nay;
You still believe in me, though I
Have lost faith in myself, and pray
For nothing but in peace to die,
And be forgotten by and by.
O sister's faith, so fond and true,
Still hiding failure from our view!
Close-clinging ivy green and high,
That covers the ruin with glories new!

Dear, there's a small flower lying in
My Terence, near the fortieth page:
'Twas the first honour I did win
In science, and my youthful gage
Of earnest battle to assuage
The thirst for knowledge. Near a stone
I found it blooming all alone,
Upon an eager pilgrimage:
I was first to discover where it had grown.

'Tis almost the sole mark to know
That I have lived; and I would feel
What then I felt, when bending low
I saw its delicate petals steal
A coy glance, almost where my heel
Had crushed the treasure; and I drew
A long breath, trembling; and I knew
The passion of science, and the zeal
To broaden the realm of the known and true.

I found it: but the shepherd lad
Had found it centuries before,
And made his rustic maiden glad
By gilding with its golden store
Her golden hair—nor cared for more.
We find we know not what; we know,
And idle blossoms, as they blow
By mountain burn or cottage door,
Fashion our life into which they grow.

That little flower gave bent to all
The best years I have lived on earth
To any purpose. I recall
Gladly our days of childish mirth,
The blithe home, and the kindly hearth;
But a rarer light still gilds the hour,
When happening on this tender flower,
I found an impulse that gave birth
From an aimless life to a life of power.

Of power? Ah no! This life hath been
Feeble and fruitless, like the faint
And watery glimmer you have seen
Of broken rainbows, never bent
In glory athwart the firmament—
A sickly splendour, would-be light,
That had not beauty's awful might:
And now the bootless years are spent,
And the darkness cometh on me like night.

Oh for more time! a little more!
I am so young; and I had planned
So many years for gathering lore,
So many for my work in hand—
My Book which, with a purpose grand,
Our fragmentary truth should knit
In cosmic clearness, wholly lit
And by one sovran doctrine spanned—
And now, alas! it will never be writ.

How strangely Destiny is ruled!
This small pale flower became my lot;
And all my wandering fancies schooled,
And gave my life a fixèd thought,
Which to one centre all things brought;
And henceforth this base earth was all
Instinct with meaning, prodigal
Of riches; yet there cometh not
One full-ripe fruit to my blossomed wall.

So be it; God hath ordered all
The way by which my life was led.
Success it had not, or but small;
Nor care I now for laurelled head,

Or sleeping with the glorious dead.
Slight are the trophies I have won,
Meagre is all the work I've done;
But I have lived, at least, and fed
On that which the noblest live upon.

And now that we are here alone,
Sweet sister, let me tell you all;
I could not speak to any one
As unto you. Can you recall
A lovely girl, stately and tall,
A maiden with a queenly look,
And how she praised my little book,
And spake of Fame that should befall
The grey old house by the brattling brook?

You did not like her much, I know.
But there was never maiden fair
Seemed worthy, as queen flower, to grow
Well gardened in my heart with care,
The chiefest treasure and glory there.
Fond, foolish Hester! you could see
No Eve my help-meet fit to be
Of all that breathed the common air,
Unless God should fashion her purposely.

And I deceived you, Hester dear,
And spake of loving none like you,
And talked of seeking a career
Of ardent toil and science true,
When all the while I had in view
Her stately form, her glorious eye,
Her high imperial majesty
Of sovran beauty; for I knew
She was my Fate, to live or to die.

And so I left the dear old home,
And so I left you, sister dear,
And precious scroll, and cherished tome,
The gathered wealth of many a year;
And listed no more to appear
With hammer deftly bringing forth
The buried records of the earth,
Or to enhance their facts with clear
Thought, which gives to them all their worth.

And I went forth from thee and them
To the great world of London, where
Men crowd, they say, to touch the hem
Of Wisdom's robes, and breathe the air
Of serene Science; and the care
Of a wise State has garnered all
Fruits of research, since Adam's fall
By wisdom made our wisdom rare,
And man forgot what we now recall.

Heaven help me! I used all the slang
Of penny-a-liner big words then;
I guessed 'twas cant, and yet I rang
The changes on't, like other men;
Sweet, you may count that nine in ten
Have nought to say but cant prolific;
The pious kind is more terrific,
But there's as much in people when
They are literary and scientific.

Abhorred it is of scholar true,
High musing with his books alone;
Abhorred of accurate science too,
Slow-pondering a leaf or stone;
But fashion has its torrid zone
Where sages in a week shall grow
Ripe and ready, and seem to know
All that long painful thought hath won
From the heaven above, and the earth below.

I left you then with little truth
In me—and truth alone is power;
I left you in your lonely youth
For her; and found her like a flower

Bee-haunted in the sunny hour,
With a great crown of wits and beaux,
And varied hum of verse and prose
Encircling her, while she would shower
Several influence as she chose.

And they were mainly fools—a set
Of parlour-pedants chattering science,
Their thoughts all tangled in a net
Of hard, dry fact; the pigmy giants
Hurled at the gods their proud defiance,
Tracing fit genealogies
Far back among the cocoa trees,
And fondly hugging brute-alliance
With the monkey tribes and the chimpanzees.

All heresies of art came there,
All heresies of science too,
All theorists were free to air
All social heresies, and new
Commandments that a man should do,
And women who had wrongs and rights,
And patriots from disastrous fights,
And geniuses came there, who grew
Quicker than mushrooms overnights.

A Babel of confusèd tongues!
A Limbo of the inchoate!
A gasping of distempered lungs
That blamed the air, and not their state!
All fain to mend the world and fate,
All hating labour, and the slow
Results that from its patience grow;
And oh, the froth was very great
As they swirled and eddied to and fro.

Yet wherefore should I speak in scorn?
God made them in their kind, and He
Had use for them, at least had borne
With their most flippant vanity:
As in his Universe we see
A province for all meanest things;
Even for the earth-worm's twisted rings
A service and a ministry,
To silence our hasty cavillings.

And London is not One. It is
A group of villages, a lot
Of cliques and clubs and coteries;
Where the fresh fact or novel thought,
Filtered from stage to stage, may not
Long time the simple fact remain,
Or thought as sent from the thinker's brain;
Rogues sweat their sovereigns; fools, I wot,
Clip smaller the thoughts of their wisest men.

But she? Well, she was like a spring
Of purest water, cold and clear,
Where bright birds come to preen their wing,
And owls and ravens too appear:
She mirrored all as they drew near,
And they all drank, and left no trace;
But each man deemed he saw his face
Deep in her heart, and had no fear
That the shadow changed when he changed his place.

Me for a while she honoured with
Selectest intercourse of few,
Rehearsing every night a myth
Of what I was, and how I grew
In a lone country-house, and knew
Science like Pascal, with no aid,
Except the quaintest little maid
Who was a delicate genius too,
And how she had drawn me out of the shade.

I tired of this; 'twas weary all,
And all unlike the glorious dream,
Which now with smiles I can recall,
Of a fair woman who did seem
Down on my lower world to gleam,
Like something from the heavens untainted,
And for whose love my spirit fainted,
And would all lowliest worship deem
Too poor for her I had enshrined and sainted.

Perhaps I judged her wrong; her way
Was harder than at first I knew;
Her young life panted to be gay,
Her young heart panted to be true,
Her home was all divided too,
False science false religion met,
And lavish waste with scrimping debt;
Poor heart! the wonder is she grew
Half so noble as she was yet.

You did not know—you could not guess;
But we had plighted love before;
We pledged it in a long caress
One evening on the grey sea-shore,
As thought came surging like the hoar,
Wild, bursting waves upon the beach;
It was a passion beyond speech,
Ne'er quite articulate, and the more
Dumb, that its hope seemed so far out of reach.

And I do think she loved as well
As she could love; at any rate
I will not judge her, but will tell
The sorry issue of my fate.
I spake: she said she might not wait
For the slow ripening of my fame,
And the high honours that my name
Would win for some more worthy mate,
But she would cherish it all the same.

Enough! why dwell on it? She chose,
After her kind, one of the set;
A man of blue-books, cold and close,
A scientific baronet,
A creature who would vex and fret
Her soul with circumstantials,
And pottering among chemicals,
And prosing about funded debt,
And his articles in the serials.

So all was over. I had striven
'Gainst clearest proofs, to prove them wrong,
Had fought with doubts, as if for Heaven,
To cherish a delusion strong:
And oh the cruel, bitter throng
Of haunting memories that came,
Still summoned by her cherished name,
Sweeping like mocking ghosts along,
As the drear night wind shook the window-frame!

Seemed now the world a weary waste,
A heartless world, a thing to scorn;
'Twas only coldness made the chaste,
And Cupid was of Plutus born;
And evermore my soul was torn
With jealous rage to think of him,
The dainty prig, so spruce and trim,
Whose acres made my heart forlorn,
Whose love was nought but a summer whim.

Then turned I to my work. Not mine
I said, to pule for woman's love;
With searching thoughts will I entwine
Round Nature's porches; I'm above
Being a slight girl's silken glove
Shaped to her hand, and laid away,
Or taken up, as fancy may:
I have a problem high to prove,
And the facts to gather, and set in array.

Alone, through many a weary day,
Alone through many a silent night,
I wended on my patient way,
Groping through darkness into light,
Now sore perplexed, now staggered quite,
Yet slowly working out a thought
That all to clearest order brought:
It held me with a spell of might,
And my days were happy, for I forgot.

Happy, for I forgot! Ah me!
I met her one day in the street,
Looking so sorrow-stricken! he
Was glancing at his dainty feet,

And with his ready smirk would greet
Me heavy-laden: but I hid
My sorrow as a thing forbid,
And while my pained heart madly beat,
Silently into the throng I slid.

Again I met her in the Park;
I was then thin and worn and faint;
It was about the gathering dark,
And scarcely did she know me bent
With toiling day and night. I went
Close to her carriage, and she said,
“Cruel! I hoped to crown your head
With laurel; must my care be spent
On pallid flowers for a grave, instead?”

A weary look was in her eye,
A wasting grief on her cheek so pale;
And in my heart then muttered I,
“So, the stony heart has an unheard wail
Low moaning on the midnight gale,
And sighing now for love like mine,
When love alone is felt divine,
And life is flat, and riches stale,
And the soul awakens to long and pine.”

An evil thought! God pardon me;
The fevered joy of passion fell,
A lurid light, could only be,
Glared upward from the depths of hell!
Nay, be not wroth: I loved her well,
Loved her, and love is ne'er in vain,
Loved her, and found in all its pain
A dew and blessing, and the swell
Of a life that joyed like the bounding main.

And I had died in early youth
At any rate. Oh blame her not;
She did but make my path more smooth,
And shed some sunlight on my lot.
I had of old this hectic spot—
Our mother's gift of delicate bloom:
And it is well she 'scaped the doom
Of early widowhood. I sought
To wed her young life to a fated tomb.

And as I loved her, you will love,
And gently scan her, hap what may;
Sweet, as we hope to meet above,
You promise, ere I go away.
There, kiss me in pledge of it. I lay
A wager, that's your Hermann strong,
His deep bass booming a Luther-song
Out of a heart as big as gay:
What a great life is that coming tramping along!

Would I be like him? Nay, not now;
Best as it is, dear: all is best.
I've lived my life; and gladly bow
Unto the high, supreme Behest,
As I draw near the hour of rest,
Leaving no care behind me here:
Soon all the mystery shall be clear,
Or in high fellowship of the Best
Little we'll heed, with the great God near.

My sun sinks without clouds or fears;
No spectral shadows gather round
The gateway of the endless years,
Where we, long blindfold, are unbound,
And lay our swathings on the ground,
To face the Eternal. So I rest
Peacefully on the Strong One's breast,
Even though the mystery profound
Ever a mystery be confessed.

My old doubts?—Well, they no more fret,
Nor chafe and foam o'er sunken rocks.
I don't know that my Faith is yet
Quite regular and orthodox;

I have not keys for all the locks,
And may not pick them. Truth will bear
Neither rude handling, nor unfair
Evasion of its wards, and mocks
Whoever would falsely enter there.

But all through life I see a Cross,
Where sons of God yield up their breath:
There is no gain except by loss,
There is no life except by death,
And no full vision but by Faith,
Nor glory but by bearing shame,
Nor Justice but by taking blame;
And that Eternal Passion saith,
“Be emptied of glory and right and name.”

Anselm and Luther, Tauler, Groot,
With reverent search and solemn awe,
Saw each some angle of God's great thought,
Saw none of them the perfect Law,
And, in defining much, some flaw
Marred all their reasoning; nor may
I fashion forth the truth which they
Only in broken fragments saw;
But the way of the just, is to trust and pray.

I wonder how the twilight shines
On the tinkling brook that cleaves the hill,
And how it rays with great broad lines
Through rifted clouds that slumber still,
And how the fall that turned our mill
Glistens, and how the shadows fold
Around the dew as night grows cold,
And how the lark with tuneful bill
Sings o'er the meadows we loved of old.

I ever loved our earth, and still
I love its scaurs and brooks and braes,
The long bleak moor, the misty hill,
And all their creatures, and their ways,
And many waters sounding praise;
It seems as if my lingering feet
Clung to its moss and grasses sweet,
And ferny glades, and golden days
When cowslips and ladybirds made our hearts beat.

Throw up the window; let me hear
The mellow ousel once more sing,
The carol of the sky-lark clear,
The hum of insects on the wing,
The lowing of the kine to bring
The milk-maid singing with her pail,
The tricksy lapwing's far-off wail,
The woodland cushat's murmuring,
And the whish of the pines in the evening gale.

Fain would I carry with me all
Blithe Nature's blended harmony;
The half-notes and the tremulous fall
Of her young voices, and the free
Gush of full-throated melody;
And, like a child, I'm loath to go,
And leave the elders to the flow
Of speech and song and memory,
And take me to sleep in the room below.

But I can yet take up the prayer
Of childhood at the mother's knee,
And breathe it as the natural air
Of truest Faith and Piety,
Its meanings deepening as I see
My deeper needs, His deeper light;
For wonder grown to wisdom, might
Find there fit utterance, and a key
To the thoughts that reach to the Infinite.

Our Father, lo! the end draws near,
And in Thy presence I am dumb;
Have mercy on my lowly fear,
And Father, let Thy kingdom come:
I thank Thee for my daily crumb,
Forgive me, as I do forgive;
And in my dying may I live;
And when the hours of trial come,
Help and deliverance do Thou give.