Sonnets :: :: University of Virginia Library

OUR aspens quiver in these pallid rays
Of mid-September, more than when the red
Hearts of their tender leaves were newly wed,
And grew together through the lengthening days.
Their first self-centred joys have gone their ways,
And now we may behold where overhead
Their larger, more responsive leaves outspread,
Give trembling answer to each breath that plays.

So is it well for us, if so it be,
Dear love; if hearts that still so closely cling,
Of Time have learnt large hospitality.
Yet dear, withal, the best of me I bring
And offer first of all the world to thee
Whose love is still of all my fruit the Spring.

ENVOY TO C. R. AND M. L.

SWEET sisters, far away in space, but near
In love, to you this shapen thought I bring
As 'twere a jewel that might clasp or cling,
Well knowing that however it appear
To others poor, your loves will hold it dear;
And all the dearer that the song I sing
Is mine, and verily the only thing
That I can truly give of all my gear.

Sisters! None better than we three can know
Where absence tells on love, where tries in vain;
To hearts it cannot quell it worketh woe;
And thus I send o'er land and sea this chain
To bind your thoughts to me an hour or so
In links that shall be other than of pain.

THE PALMER LOVE.

LORD, is it Thou disguised in Palmer's weed,
That coming in life's early morning frore,
Standest so humbly knocking at our door
Who know Thee not for whom Thou art indeed—
The Lord of Life—yet piteous of thy need,
Open to Thee, and offer of our store,
Which lo! as we partake with Thee, grows more,
Water to wine, and bread to fruitful seed?

Such miracle attends Thy passage, Love,—
Thy skirts flow out in blessing like the Nile,—
But should Thy longer presence once approve
Some House of Life, all that it held erewhile
Of rare, would to a lordlier music move,—
Yea, very dust take honour in Thy smile.

ETNA.

[_]

(From the Straits of Messina.)

THOU shinest in the morning's eye alone,
Pure on the blue, a pyramid of light,
Immaculate, but lifted to that height
By burning wrong and sorrow made thine own.
Fierce evils, out-cast from a depth unknown,
Pour from thy open wounds by day and night,
And still thou standest silent, calm, and white,
While at thy feet the shallow waves make moan.

Martyr of mountains, shall I say, the Christ,
Bearing earth's sorrows, for its trespass made
Sin, that her sons may reap the fair increase
Of smiling fields? The offering hath sufficed:
The olive thrives, since on thy head is laid
The fiery “chastisement of” Europe's “peace.”

ASPIRATION.

(“As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings. . . . He made him ride on the high places.”— Deut. xxxii. 11-13.)

I.

THE callow eagle in its downy nest,
Betwixt the blue above and blue beneath,
Or wrapped in swirling cloud or misty wreath,
Drops its weak wings and folds itself to rest.
But hardly is it settled ere its breast
Is pierced with anguish, which, in face of death,
Drives it to mount on the unquiet breath
Of viewless winds, upon an unknown quest.

Thou art a callow eagle, O my soul!
Forth driven from the home of thy content
And made to stretch t'wards some far distant goal
Of Glory, on thine upward journey sent
By warning of the Spirit, ere the whole
Frame of thy trust from under thee be rent.

II.

Free Spirit striving in my human breast!
I see thine image when above her young
The parent eagle, hovering, has flung
Her shadow 'twixt the sunshine and her nest.
I see thee dark, but know thy gleaming crest
Burns in the daybreak, and I have no tongue
To speak a joy no heart hath fitly sung,—
The awful joy of thy divine unrest.

O mighty blades of shadow-spreading wings
Unfurled above me! will ye bear me up
When I, in mounting with ye t'wards the springs
Of light, from lack of strength or faith shall drop?
Will ye not leave me till in loftier rings
Of flight t'wards God I need no earthlier prop?

III.

All creatures eagle-born and eagle-taught,
Whose nests are set upon the giddy height,
Who fear the dread abyss, but love the light,
And sheer through love and pain to trust are brought;
How is it when ye, too, are overwrought,
Seized with love-madness, and in upward flight
Quit the sure world to hold the sun in sight?
How fares it with ye when, no sole ray caught
Or kept of him, ye drop again to earth?
What are your lives the better of the sun?
And if, as well may be, you should give birth
To others soaring higher, what were won?
No answer,—but wide wings and hearts aglow;
The sun is there, he draws them, and they go!

IV.

O. Thou, the Sun, that rising on the world
Of human souls, hast waxed to many a noon,
And waned in many a twilight, and gone down
In frequent darkness—like a meteor hurled
From heaven,—how oft hath night's black flag unfurled,
Mocked at our hopes, and signalled Thy defeat?
Yet when Thou camest with new light and heat,
We rose to meet Thee fresh, and dew-impearled.

Help those faint hearts that tremble in the gloom,
Unknowing that the inmost work of life
Is shy, and needs the darkness as a womb
That with the weight of ripening seed is rife.
So we but know Thee living, through the night
Waiting in patience, we shall wax in might.

LEARN OF THE DOG.

“Stern law of every mortal lot
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.”
Mathew Arnold. From lines on the death of his dog Geist.

I.

O HEART of man! be humble, nor disdain
The latest gospel preached beneath the sun;
Learn of the brute how thou, when life is done,
May loose its bonds, and cease, and know no pain:
Learn of the dog to die,—nay, that were vain;
Death followeth in the steps of life, and none
Win more of Death, the Shadow, than they won
Of Life in years of travail and of strain.

Learn of the dog to live, if thou wouldst find
His peace in death; for him, the silent spheres
Keep their long watch unchallenged overhead;
Know as he knows; love as he loves his kind,
Unweave the web of human toil and tears;
Die like a dog, when thought and love are dead.

II.

Poor friend and sport of man, like him unwise,
Away! Thou standest to his heart too near,
Too close for careless rest or healthy cheer,
Almost in thee the glad brute nature dies.
Go, scour the open fields in wild emprise,
Lead the free chase, leap, plunge into the mere,
Herd with thy fellows, stay no longer here,
Seeking thy law and gospel in man's eyes.

He cannot go; love holds him fast to thee;
More than the voices of his kind thy word
Lives in his heart; for him thy very rod
Has flowered; he only in thy will is free;
Cast him not out, the unclaimed savage herd
Would turn and rend him, pining for his God.

THE LOST LIGHT.

(George Eliot.)

I.

I NEVER touched thy royal hand, dead queen,
But from afar have looked upon thy face,
Which, calm with conquest, carried still the trace
Of many a hard-fought battle that had been.
Since thou hast done with life, its toil and teen,
Its pains and gains, and that no further grace
Can come to us of thee, a poorer place
Shows the lorn world,—a dimlier lighted scene.

Lost queen and captain, Pallas of our band,
Who late upon the height of glory stood,
Guarding from scorn—the æis in thy hand—
The banner of insurgent womanhood;
Who of our cause may take the high command?
Who make with shining front our victory good?

II.

Great student of the schools, who grew to be
The greater teacher, having wandered wide
In lonely strength of purity and pride
Through pathless sands, unfruitful as the sea.
Now warning words—and one clear act of thee,
Bold pioneer who shouldst have been our guide—
Affirm the track which Wisdom must abide;—
For man is bond, the beast alone is free.

So hast thou sought a larger good, so won
Thy way to higher law, that by thy grave
We, thanking thee for lavish gifts, for none
May owe thee more than that in quest so brave—
True to a light our onward feet must shun—
Thou gavest nobler strength our strength to save.

December 29, 1880.

A PLEA.

[_]

(Carlysle.)

I.

O YE in all the world who love true Song,
Be gentle to the singers who uplift
In innocent delight a cradle gift—
So often found to work them fatal wrong.
Judge them not wholly as the tuneless throng,
But if within their instrument a rift
Be found to mar not music, give it shrift—
Song justifies itself, if sweet and strong.

Song justifies itself, but they who sing,
Raining ethereal music from a height
Lonely and pure, grow strong upon the wing,
And more and more enamoured of the light;
But faint for any earthly journeying,
And fain to seek a lowly bed at night.

II.

And oh! be tenderest to the seers who lack
The wild-bird's song, the wild-bird's wing to rise
And bathe their souls in light of summer skies—
Poets who gather truth with bended back,
And give forth speech of it as on the rack;
Speech urgent as the blood of grapes that dyes
His garments who must tread it out with sighs,
And ceaseless feet that follow no fair track.

Think of the manful work of those who bruise
The grape in setting free its life divine;
And if some favour they should thereby lose,
Count it no marvel that a soul should pine,
Which often for its sustenance must use
But dregs of that it pours thee forth as wine.

III.

Words that are idle with the songless crowd
Are as the poet's ripest deed, the fruit
And flower of all his working days, the suit
He weaves about his soul, which, if endowed
Too richly, and so called to ends more proud,
Builds with his breath a house of high repute,
Wherein he chants the office for the mute,
Appealing ones, who at his feet are bowed.

Yet let the Maker mould them as he will,
A spirit that he knows not to control
Works in his words beyond his utmost skill,
Making them yield his measure, and the whole
Form of his being, be it good or ill,—
For no man's work is greater than his soul.

IV.

The Love is the Man. Emanuel Swedenborg.

Dear soul, that cannot see thyself, nor measure
Thy fitness for the mould of Art, thy right
To cast thy dubious image, and invite
The eyes of men to take of thee their pleasure—
Mark where thy Love disports herself at leisure;
Glassed in the fountain of her own delight,
Your soul will stand revealed; be sure her height
Surpasseth not the radius of her treasure.

Not Art its sovereign self claims foremost place
With those who can command the richest store
Wherewith to build a palace in its praise.
He loves Art best that loves like him of yore,
Who could not, as his song divinely says,
So love, if that he “loved not honour more.”

June, 1881.

HELLAS.

AN INVOCATION.

I.

HAIL Goddess of the heaven-reflecting eyes,
Divine Athena! thou whose sweet breath blew
The message of the Gods the wide world through,
And showed us sovereign Reason in the guise
Of all-unearthly beauty; wake, arise
With fresh revealings; where the plant first grew
The fallen seed its life may still renew,
And yield young offshoots, strange to denser skies.

Fair sleeper! Long ago a lordly bard,
Errant from England, to thy wakening gave
A fiery kiss; and still thy forehead, starred,
Nay sunned, and burning with the hopes that save,
Lies low; great Goddess, hath the world debarred
Thee room to rise, and made thy bed thy grave?

II.

Yes, soul of Greece, they mock who call it sleep
That holds thee; by the questing of thine eyes,
By thy heart-beatings, and thy struggling cries,
Thou wakest, and, O Gods! we see thee weep.
We see thee, we, whose boast it is to keep
Thy sacred flame alive, and we pass by
Unaiding as unmoved, or hovering nigh
Make strong the bars thy strength would overleap.

England! by all great memories that abide,
By kindling hopes of that which yet may be,
By the dead tongue, for thee which never died
And is not dead, be bold as thou art free,
Let not the hoof of that barbarian pride
Crush Hellas! Stretch thy hand across the sea.

December, 1880.

SHELLEY.

I.

[_]

(It will be remembered that Pisa, associated as it is with Shelley, was the scene of the life and labours of Galileo.)

THERE lies betwixt dead Pisa and the sea
A haunted forest, with a heart so deep,
That none could sit beneath its pines to weep,
But it would throb for them mysteriously.
Here, in this place I dreamed there met with me
The spirit who his part in it doth keep,
Albeit his starry orbit now hath sweep
As vast as Galileo's, if more free.

He drew me on to where the hollow beat
Of waves upon a shore seemed to my mind
The moan of a remorseful soul, to weet
The homicidal Sea, whose passion blind
Had slain him; as it writhed about my feet
Methought his spirit passed me on the wind.

II.

Wild Sea, that drank his life to quench the thirst
Thou had'st of him; and all devouring Fire,
Who made his body thine with love as dire;
Air pregnate with his breath, and thou accurst,
Mother of Sorrows, Earth, whose claim is first
Upon thy children dead, who from the pyre
Received his dust,—what did his soul require—
Wring from ye—ere your Protean bonds he burst?

Perchance ye failed to reach him, and he hath
O'er-leapt the rounds of change the earthlier dead
May weary through, nor needing Lethean bath
To speed anew his soul's ethereal tread,
Hath left the elements, spurned from his path,
To challenge grosser spirits in his stead.

INVOCATION.

TO SLEEP.

COME, weight mine eyelids with thy kiss, but creep
Upon me unaware, for I so long
Have trod the hills, fulfilled with life and song,
I cannot loose them for thy sake, O sleep.
Yet be my Fairy Godmother, and keep
Thy gift to countervail the spells too strong,
Which crown my days and do my nights this wrong;
Draw me unwitting to thy friendly deep.

Pluck from my clasping thought its cherished store,
That so disburthened, I may lie at ease;
Give me oblivion, let me see no more,
But feel awhile the rocking of the trees,
Hear the sea-mother singing to the shore,
And think I leave my bounteous life with these.

INVOCATION.

TO MEMORY.

O DIM, sweet Memory, if thou couldest dower
My latter day with snatches of such rest
As that wherewith my twilight thoughts were blest,
When life for me was yet a folded flower;
Could I but feel again for one soft hour
All hope, all fears annulled upon that breast,
Whereto when I—a weary child—was pressed,
God was made flesh for me and dwelt in power!

Could she—my mother—lay me down at even,
Soft, warm, with glow of merry flames that leapt,
And babble of her ministers, who kept
Watch when she went to shine in some near heaven,—
While over me the very dreams that crept,
Whispered of love still waking while I slept!

A REMINISCENCE.

IF I might save from out the wreck of years
Some loveliest moment to eternalise,
I would not seek it where the fervid eyes
Of passion long ago were dulled with tears.
Nay, liefer I would look where nature nears
The cloudy confines of her mysteries,
Where Sleep prepares his balmy ministries,
And almost so his brother Death endears.

Yes, I would lie and drowse as in my bed—
A four-years' child—with, through the open door,
The nurses' voices, merry in my stead,
And sounds of music wafted through the floor;
Such idling best contents my wearihead
To-night; to-morrow I may ask for more.

THE JOY OF JOYS.

[_]

(In face of the picture of the radiant Madonna and Child, by Fra Angelico, in his cell at San Marco.)

THOU standest within thy tabernacle, crowned,
Rapt from the world's vain pleasures and turmoil,
While, filled with blessing, and sweet hourly toil,
In lasting service thy meek hands are bound;
Nor on thy hands alone love's chains are wound,—
They bind thy soul, whose airier flight they foil,
And bring thee home again with fond recoil,
When thou too far wouldest leave familiar ground.

But thou who givest the nectar of thy veins
In self-surrender, what were costliest toys
Of man's creation, to the heaven-sent gains,
Which, holding spirit and flesh in equipoise,
Keep thee suspended in thy flower-soft chains,
And yield to thee alone the joy of joys!

THE SORROW OF SORROWS.

[_]

(In face of the Mater Dolorosa in the fresco of the Crucifixion, in the Chapter room, by the same.)

WOMAN, those hands are bare that were love's throne,
On alien props thy helpless arms are spread;
Thy hope is mocked at, and thy glory fled,
Thy labour nought; love could not make thine own
Him, who was of thy flesh and of thy bone;
By woman's tears is no man's doom withstead;
Prayer could not ransom that devoted head;
Grief cannot pierce death's silence with its moan.

Thou—sainted mother of a son divine—
Whose lips are guarded by thy chastened will,
The blind, brute anguish marked thee with its sign
Before love crucified beheld thee still—
Indrawn—as one who travails with a birth,
Vast as the shadow which o'erwhelms the earth.

TO THE MOURNERS OF LOVE.

COME sit thee down and rest at Death's pale feet,
Learn of his silence, in his shadow lie,
And never shade more false will come thee nigh;
Nay, think no shame of sorrow, it is meet,
Think shame of idle love that words can cheat;
So love that looks on death and cannot die,
Will bear Death's message with his parting sigh,
And find for thee erewhile a loftier seat.

O fire of love that makes the soul athirst
For life, eternal as thou seemest to be!
Or thou art deathless in us, or the worst
Fiend of a hell that but exists by thee,—
And thou wilt die from off the earth accurst,
Or, newly armed, from death will set us free.

WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT.

AH me, I am a singer, and no seer!
I cannot pierce the clouds which gather chill,
I can but lift a voice too faint to fill
The darkness, or to cheat my lonely fear.
Is the night wearing? Is the morning near?
Lives any hope of help or comfort still?
Hath any strength of heart to scale the hill
And tell us of the signs which thence appear?

The battle is for ever; Life and Death,
Darkness and Light, and nowhere settled peace,
But all who live must breathe unquiet breath,
Hunger and agonise, or wholly cease;
And for the hour, the soothest watchman saith
He knoweth not if day or night increase.

A WIND FROM OFF THE SEA.

THE blue above, the sheep-shorn grass beneath,
Over the shoulder of the Down we sped,
And saw the picture of the world outspread
Where Solent winds beyond the purple heath.
And sudden, waked as by the salt sea breath,
I felt the earth forlorn, because the tread
Of one who taught my earliest steps had fled,
And he in cold attainder lay of death.

Then with my tears a kindling triumph strove,
It was such joy to this poor heart of mine
To be so shrewdly stung of long lost love;
To know it living by a bleeding sign,
And, in the hungry, shaping tooth thereof,
Feel it at work to make my soul divine.

TO NATURE

[_]

(In her ascribed character of unmeaning and all-performing force.)

I.

O NATURE! thou whom I have thought to love,
Seeing in thine the reflex of God's face,
A loathed abstraction would usurp thy place,—
While Him they not dethrone, they but disprove.
Weird Nature! can it be that joy is fled,
And bald unmeaning lurks beneath thy smile?
That beauty haunts the dust but to beguile,
And that with Order, Love and Hope are dead?

Pitiless Force, all-moving, all-unmoved,
Dread mother of unfathered worlds, assuage
Thy wrath on us,—be this wild life reproved,
And trampled into nothing in thy rage!
Vain prayer, although the last of human kind,—
Force is not wrath,—but only deaf and blind.

II.

Dread Force, in whom of old we loved to see
A nursing mother, clothing with her life
The seeds of Love divine,—with what sore strife
We hold or yield our thoughts of Love and thee!
Thou art not “calm,” but restless as the ocean,
Filling with aimless toil the endless years—
Stumbling on thought, and throwing off the spheres,
Churning the Universe with mindless motion.

Dull fount of joy, unhallowed source of tears,
Cold motor of our fervid faith and song,
Dead, but engendering life, love, pangs, and fears,
Thou crownedst thy wild work with foulest wrong
When first thou lightedst on a seeming goal,
And darkly blundered on man's suffering soul.

III.

Blind Cyclops, hurling stones of destiny,
And not in fury!—working bootless ill,
In mere vacuity of mind and will—
Man's soul revolts against thy work and thee!
Slaves of a despot, conscienceless and nil,
Slaves, by mad chance befooled to think them free,
We still might rise, and with one heart agree
To mar the ruthless grinding of thy mill!

Dead tyrant, tho' our cries and groans pass by thee,
Man, cutting off from each new “tree of life”
Himself, its fatal flower, could still defy thee,
In waging on thy work eternal strife,—
The races come and coming evermore,
Heaping with hecatombs thy dead-sea shore.

IV.

If we be fools of chance, indeed, and tend
No whither, then the blinder fools in this:
That, loving good, we live, in scorn of bliss,
Its wageless servants to the evil end.
If, at the last, man's thirst for higher things
Be quenched in dust, the giver of his life,
Why press with growing zeal a hopeless strife,—
Why—born for creeping—should he dream of wings?

O Mother Dust! thou hast one law so mild
We call it sacred—all thy creatures own it—
The tie which binds the parent and the child,—
Why has man's loving heart alone outgrown it?
Why hast thou travailed so to be denied,
So trampled by a would-be matricide?

PAST AND FUTURE.

FAIR garden, where the man and woman dwelt,
And loved and worked, and where, in work's reprieve,
The sabbath of each day, the restful eve,
They sat in silence with locked hands, and felt
The voice which compassed them, a-near, a-far,
Which murmured in the fountains and the breeze,
Which breathed in spices from the laden trees,
And sent a silvery shout from each lone star.

Sweet dream of Paradise! and though a dream,
One that has helped us when our faith was weak;
We wake, and still it holds us, but would seem
Before us, not behind,—the good we seek,—
The good from lowest root which waxes ever,
The golden age of science and endeavour.

BROKEN SPEECH.

RIPE fruit of science—demonstrated fact—
We grasp at thee in trembling expectation,
We humbly wait on thee for explanation:
Words of the Universe, enshrined in act!
Words, pregnant words, but only parts of speech
As yet, curt utterance such as children use,
With meanings struggling through but to confuse,
And hinted signs which soar beyond our reach.

Work on in patience, children of the time,
Who lend your faltering modes to Nature's voice,—
Fulfil your present task; some prize sublime,
Ye wot not of, your hearts may still rejoice,—
Some strain of music shape the wild turmoil,
And consecrate the pauses of your toil.

TO THE BLIND ARCHITECT OF THE CITY OF LIFE

[_]

(Whose Humble Homes are the Creatures of Earth, Water, and Air, and whose “Meeting-house” is Man.)

HOW true thy work, blind Builder of the homes
Which throng the paths of Life, beasts, fishes, birds,
All things which be, they are as bodied words,
Or moving thoughts of some high whole which looms
Above us in the star-dust and the mist,
Around us in the voices of the night,
Within us in quick glimpses of love-light
That leave us doubting if we dreamed or wist.

But true thy art, its unmeant meanings telling,
Blind Builder of the city, on whose crown
Man stands—a temple for a God's indwelling,
Thy finest—no! thy sole false work—Cast down
The lying altar, raze it to the sod,—
What means a temple where there is no God?

TO A MOTH THAT DRINKETH OF THE RIPE OCTOBER.

I.

A MOTH belated,—sun and zephyr-kist,—
Trembling about a pale arbutus bell,
Probing to wildering depths its honeyed cell,—
A noonday thief, a downy sensualist!
Not vainly, sprite, thou drawest careless breath,
Strikest ambrosia from the cool-cupped flowers,
And flutterest through the soft, uncounted hours,
To drop at last in unawaited death;—
'Tis something to be glad! and those fine thrills
Which move thee, to my lip have drawn the smile
Wherewith we look on joy. Drink! drown thine ills,
If ill have any part in thee; erewhile
May the pent force—thy bounded life—set free,
Fill larger sphere with equal ecstasy!

II.

With what fine organs art thou dowered, frail elf!
Thy harp is pitched too high for dull annoy,
Thy life a love-feast, and a silent joy,
As mute and rapt as Passion's silent self.
I turn from thee, and see the swallow sweep
Like a winged will, and the keen-scented hound
That snuffs with rapture at the tainted ground,—
All things that freely course, that swim or leap,—
Then, hearing glad-voiced creatures men call dumb,
I feel my heart—oft sinking 'neath the weight
Of Nature's sorrow—lighten at the sum
Of Nature's joy; its half-unfolded fate
Breathes hope—for all but those beneath the ban
Of the inquisitor and tyrant, man.

THE WINGED SOUL.

MY soul is like some cage-born bird, that hath
A restless prescience—howsoever won—
Of a broad pathway leading to the sun,
With promptings of an oft-reprovèd faith
In sun-ward yearnings. Stricken though her breast,
And faint her wing with beating at the bars
Of sense, she looks beyond outlying stars,
And only in the Infinite sees rest.

Sad soul! If ever thy desire be bent
Or broken to thy doom, and made to share
The ruminant's beatitude,—content,—
Chewing the cud of knowledge, with no care
For germs of life within; then will I say,
Thou art not caged, but fitly stalled in clay!

THE GOSPEL OF DREAD TIDINGS.

IF that sad creed which honest men and true
Are flouting in the cheerful face of Day,
Are teaching in the schools, and by the way,—
Tho' only guesses on a broken clue,—
If such should in the end quench all the blue
Above us, then the saddest souls were they
Who knew and loved the most, and could not lay
The ghost of Hope, and hold the grave in lieu.

O Christ, Thou highest man! if it were so,
And Thou couldst see it, that great heart of Thine
Would burn to come amongst us,—not to preach
Thy law again, or set our loves a-glow,
Still less in glory,—but to blot each line,
Each thought, each word, Thou camest first to teach.

DREAMING.

WHEN vexed with waking thought, and its dull gleam,
I—waiting on the shore of Time—oft close
Mine eyes, and while the ocean ebbs and flows
Around me, hear its murmurous voice, and dream.
And sometimes dreaming thus, the Will supreme
My thoughts have bent beneath, will seem to be
A Will, not working by its sole decree,
But one that wrestles with a counter-stream.

And dreaming thus, my heart will give a bound
Of yearning love, and wake me with a cry;
Oh for the feet of Hermes that I might—
A chartered messenger—spurn back the ground
And through the reeling world be charged to fly,
With but one word to help Him in the fight.

ON HEARING THE INTRODUCTION TO “LOHENGRIN.”

I.

THOSE fine-drawn stringèd notes so inly smite,
It is as if the bows of sprites could strain
The sensitive nerve-fibres of the brain,
And tune them to an all too keen delight.
And still as they resound they gather might,
Seeming a new-born pulse of life to gain
With each new bar, until the beating rain,
The deluge of quick sound, is at its height.

Then all our soul is drowned as in a sea
Of glad sensation, and we faintly seek
Some continent for boundless ecstasy:
In vain;—we are but carried down the wake
Of Time, to throb awhile primevally
With the young World in passion's blind outbreak.

II.

Is this the music that the wise presage
As of the “Future”?—this that storms and seeks
To force each door of sense, and loudest speaks
Through organs that grow less from age to age?
Alas! its human burthens so engage
The human soul, that not for us there breaks,
Wave-like, as on a life that first awakes
The careless joy of Nature's infant stage.

We think, we toil, we hope, we love, we die,
We know and would foreknow, we doubt and fear;
Till 'neath thy spell, O Wagner! we put by
“Future” and Present too, and drawing near
The base of life, thy breath, like the wild sigh
Of some Æonian Past, steals on the ear!

A CHRYSALIS.

WHEN gathering shells cast upwards by the waves
Of progress, they who note its ebb and flow,
Its flux and re-flux, surely come to know
That the sea-level rises; that dark caves
Of ignorance are flooded, and foul graves
Of sin are cleansed; albeit the work is slow;
Till, seeing great from less for ever grow,
Law comes to mean for them the Love that saves

And leaning down the ages, my dull ear,
Catching their slow-ascending harmonies,
I am uplift of them, and borne more near,
I feel within my flesh—laid pupa-wise—
A soul of worship, tho' of vision dim,
Which links me with wing-folded cherubim.

THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT.

ALL ye child-hearted ones, born out of time,
Born to an age that sickens and grows old,
Born in a tragic moment, dark and cold,
Fair blossoms opening in an alien clime,
Young hearts and warm, spring forward to your prime,
But lose not that child-spirit glad and bold
Which claims its heirship to the tender fold
Of parent arms, and with a trust sublime,
Smiles in Death's face if only Love be near;
Oh worshipful young hearts that love can move,
And loveless loneliness contract with fear,
Hold fast the sacred instincts which approve
A fatherhood divine, that clear child-eyes
May light the groping progress of the wise.

AN INVOCATION.

THE forms that in our life's reflecting glass
Confront the passive consciousness alone,
Are as unmated blossoms, hardly blown,
Ere doomed in sad virginity to pass;
But when some wandering love once bends to them,
Some waft of life endues the Fact with power,
Or moves the slumbering ardours of the flower,—
God's gift creative, straight extends to them.

O fire divine that kindles virile souls
That dwell among us, touch our thoughts with light
Of lyric love, that they once more may tremble
Into new life, which shall the old resemble;
But owning added strength and keener sight
For striving on to unimagined goals.

THE “STING OF DEATH.”

O THOU whom men affirm we cannot know,
It may be we may never see Thee nearer
Than “in the clouds,” nor ever trace Thee clearer
Than in that garment which, howe'er aglow
With love divine, is still a changing show,
A little shadowing forth, and more concealing,
A glory which, in uttermost revealing,
Might strike us dead with one supreme life-blow.

We may not reach Thee through the void immense
Measured by suns, or prove Thee anywhere,
But hungry eyes that hunt the wilds above
For one lost face, still drop despairing thence
To find Thee in the heart—life's ravished lair—
Else were the “sting of death” not sin, but love!

TO L. C. SMITH.

[_]

(Widow of Wm. Smith, author of “Thornedale,” “Gravenhurst,” etc.)

YOU marvel, lady, you whose tender soul
Is all subdued to love, that Love still near
Had power in face of death, to cast out fear,
And in the teeth of loss, to silence dole.
But Love, great Love, he knows not such control
Of law as binds the planet to his sphere;
With Love 'tis ever now, and always here,
And he in body's sickness is most whole.

As Love and Joy are of one being, so
When Love is in ascendant in the heart,
Then Joy too shines, albeit in guise of woe,
Until, from the belovèd rent apart,
His God-lit face appearing from afar,
Pierces our night of thought—a guiding star.

AMONG THE GLACIERS.

LAND of the beacon-hills that flame up white,
And spread as from on high a word sublime,
How is it that upon the roll of time
Thy sons have rarely writ their names in light?
Land where the voices of loud waters throng,
Where avalanches sweep the mountain's side,
Here men have wived and fought, have worked and died,
But all in silence listened to thy song.

Is it the vastness of the temple frowning
On changing symbols of the artist's faith,
Is it the volume of the music drowning
The utterance of his frail and fleeting breath,
That shames all forms of worship, and of priase,
Save the still service of laborious days?

ON THE THUNER SEE.

BRIGHT Lake of Thun! thou hast the power to woo
My soul to silence with thy wavering show
Of mead and mountain, and thy ebb and flow,
The heavings of thy heart so deep and true.
I love thee, for I am a mirror too:
The universe is glassed upon my soul,
Which trembles like thy wave, beneath the whole
Vast pageant, with God's glory shining through.

Glass of those Alpine summits which receive
The dawn's first kiss, which blind with light at noon,
And catch the sun's last burning word at eve,—
If haply thou couldst drop me as a boon
Some secret of the sun, some word to weave
Into my trembling silence—Lake of Thun!

THE HUNGER OF LIFE.

IF Life is but a hunger to attain,—
A longing for some unattested Good,
Whose secret has been whispered to the blood
Which bears upon its way each gathered gain,
And leaves our questionings in dumb disdain,
Then in fulfilment, life itself must cease,
Nearer to death related than to peace,
And as it slowly waxed, must slowly wane.

Dim consciousness, whose cradle was the ocean,
How high art thou uplifted since thy birth!
On the twin arches of man's feet, his motion
Is as a god's upon the subject earth;
Life hath fulfilled itself, played out its part:
Will refluent hunger turn to eat its heart?

EVOLUTION.

HUNGER that strivest in the restless arms
Of the sea-flower, that drivest rooted things
To break their moorings, that unfoldest wings
In creatures to be rapt above thy harms;
Hunger, of whom the hungry-seeming waves
Were the first ministers, till, free to range,
Thou mad'st the Universe thy park and grange,
What is it thine insatiate heart still craves?

Sacred disquietude, divine unrest!
Maker of all that breathes the breath of life,
No unthrift greed spurs thine unflagging zest,
No lust self-slaying hounds thee to the strife;
Thou art the Unknown God on whom we wait:
Thy path the course of our unfolding fate.

LOVE AND JOY.

FROM sea to shore, from river-bed to strand,
O'er plain and mountain, Life hath held its way,
Clothed in new revelation day by day,
Until one golden noon, in the bright land
Of Greece, by all sweet Attic breezes fanned,
It flowered full in man, and Earth at rest
After long labour, gave her plenteous breast
Responsive to the pressure of his hand.

Narcissus-like he worshipped at the shrine
Of beauty, whose elected rite is pleasure,
But of his ardent youth, the strong new wine
Was held by Beauty's self, in such rare measure,
That blind young Love and Joy could scarce go wrong,
So hailed upon their way by sacred song.

LOVE AND SORROW.

THE flower-crowned Greek, amid his ilex-groves,
Breathing sweet breath, the morning in his heart,
Is Nature's fairest word, wherein each part
Of balanced utterance as to music moves.
Not dearer to the Muses than the Loves,
He—braced by art—holding the hippocrene
Which sparkled in his cup, with poise serene,
Drinking grew perfect, as his work approves.

But evening followed on this palmy noon;
The Roman came, and from the drowsy clasp
Wrenched the glad cup; drank and grew strong, too soon
Drank and was drunken; from his loosened grasp
Lapsed cup and wine together. Dawned a morrow
On which the ministry of Love was sorrow.

THE PRISONER IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

OUR house of Life that hath been built so long,
That is so fitly stored, whose plan denies
That it shall further wax in worth or size,
Yet stands on its foundations, fair and strong.
But what of these swift motions that still throng
Its courts, these longings, these disquietudes,
As of a restless presence that still broods,
Or prisoner making protest against wrong?

We stand a-gaze before each door of sense;
Or are we eyeless, or is nought to see?
We turn within, and straight upon the tense
Rack of blind hunger for some thing to be,
Are stretched again: this consciousness of night,
Is't of a spirit travailing with sight?

ON LOCH KATRINE.

[_]

(The Realm of the Scottish Prospero.)

CLOUDS that gather round Loch Katrine,
I know not which is the earth or sky;
Your sun-smit battlements float so nigh
To the mountains stoled in purple and sheen.
Dark cloud shadows that seem to race
Like a vengeful clan o'er the mountain's side,
Is't ye that rush, or the hills that glide?
Or whirl ye together on one mad chase?

Great wizard who made this lake thine own,
To dwell in for ever with one fair child,
Thine perchance is the glamour-light thrown
O'er its tricksy face and its cradle wild;
And I tremble to see, through the vanishing blue
Of its shadows, our work-a-day world look through!

AMONG THE HEBRIDES.

FROM blue Loch Carron rise white and sheer
Its bare rock faces and island cones,
And they glitter as frost and wind-bleached bones;
Coral and sapphire far and near,
Pearl-white coral and sapphire clear,
Finely-chiselled as cameo stones,
No blurred edges or soft mixed tones:
Blue as the bottomless, white as fear.

Do I sleep, do I dream, in the hard clear day,
On the windy deck, in the afternoon,
With the sough of the wave, and the spume of the spray,
And my hair like the dank sea-tangle blown
On the landward breeze? Is it Portree bay
That we make, or some cove in the long dead moon?

TO THE HERALD HONEYSUCKLE.

DEEP Honeysuckle! in the silent eve
When wild-rose cups are closed, and when each bird
Is sleeping by its mate, then all unheard,
The dew's soft kiss thy wakeful lips receive.
'Tis then the sighs that throng them seem to weave
A spell whereby the drowsy night is stirred
To fervid meanings, which no fullest word
Of speech or song so sweetly could achieve.

Herald of bliss! whose fragrant trumpet blew
Love's title to our hearts ere love was known,
'Twas well thy flourish told a tale so true,
Well that Love's dazzling presence was foreshown;
Had his descent on us been as the dew
On thee, our rarer sense he had o'erthrown.

TO IMMORTAL MUSIC.

NAY, Music, thou art young! Not long ago
Thou hadst but rounded to thy perfect form,
Thy virginal, sweet heart was hardly warm,
And little knew of passion or of woe.
Now, prescient darling of the world's old age—
Born to its gathered wealth, its subtlety,
And sadness—thou canst sound the soundless sea,
Deeper than line of deepest thought can gauge.

Thy voice, veiled Seraph serving among men,
Wakes strains in us immortal as thine own;
O say thou wilt not vanish from our ken,
Fly our dim earth as elder lights have flown,
And leave us dumb amid the tuneful spheres,
With nothing lasting to the end but tears!

TRANSFIGURATION.

POOR, troubled heart, if thou wouldst find relief,
And think'st thy woe were eased if it were heard,
Go, 'prentice thee to that sad-coloured bird,
And learn to make the world in love with grief.
Sing as he sings, and tender eyes will weep,
Sing to the Night, as after summer drouth
The dew unseals the rose's silent mouth,
And all but love and sorrow are asleep.

Drug Day with work, for Day is loud and bold
Sing to the Night, let sorrow make no sign
Till it can flutter in the sunset gold,
Or in the silver moonlight softly shine;
Then let it forth, wild fire, or saving stream,
To take its way unchallenged—as a dream!

TO THE FRIENDS OF LOVE.

I.

ALL love-adepts, all faithful hearts who wear
In Love's sweet prime—his hour of blossoming—
The full, harmonious colours of his spring,
O think not when they fail ye shall go bare.
Take heart, his very mourning still is fair;
Ay, though the world its hail of pity fling,
Cutting as scorn, no meaner, earthlier thing
Can match the royal robe of Love's despair!

Put on his weeds, then, ye who fear to sleep,
Because ye fear to wake to grief new-blown;
Rise, bear sweet spices to the grave, and weep
Love's balmy tears, there where by Love o'erthrown,
Death leaves but empty cerements in a heap,
And Love for love still rolls away the stone.

II.

FAIR friends of Love, who fear to take his pay,
Counting his service loss, his joys too brief
Too much o'erweighted by his long-drawn grief,
Try his Conclusions, ere ye say him nay.
What though his servants walk at close of day
And hold sad commune o'er some vanished chief,
Not for Love's death, but birth of high belief,
Their hearts still burn within them by the way.

They know their Love is living, and take shame
That they one moment sought him with the dead;
They feel their Love immortal, by the flame
That burns the brighter as it burns unfed;
So weeping, sing Love's praise, who could reframe
The universe whence all but love had fled.

I.FALLEN FROM GRACE.

SLEEP, half-blown rose, against my lady's breast,
Rocked by my lady's heart and rhythmic breath,
Sleep on, sweet rose, awaiting sweeter death,
Such cradle may beseem a rose's rest.
Nay, hapless one, thou wakest dispossest;
Swooning for joy, or overborne of pride,
I see thee from thy snowy summit glide,
Low on the common earth to die unblest.

I stoop to lift thee, and I turn aside,
I dare not touch thee with a furtive hand,
I dare not keep thee wanting her command,
Nor bow before the holy thing I hide!
But here I wait and watch, here take my stand,
None else shall seize a joy to me denied.

II.UNDER THE ROSE.

DIE, half-blown rose, upon a grateful heart,
Whose life is quickened by thy ebbing breath;
Nay, thus to die were for a rose no death—
Live of my life the subtlest, keenest part!
I could have seen thee, precious as thou art,
Fade at my feet; but not to have thee blown
Of any breath less reverent than mine own,
My hand was fain a ruder hand to thwart.

And now, for fear my trespass should be known,
I do bestow thee where no eye may come,
I take thee to my heart, for thou art dumb,
And canst not mock my madness, or my moan;
If of my folly thou dost mount the sum,
Just sorrow will too soon my wrong atone.

ON GUARD.

THIS is the Sabbath season of the year,
When summer silence falleth on the earth—
When truce hath come to husbandry and mirth,
To mower's scythe and wanton wood-notes clear.
The world is still, as if with holy fear,
And from its heart, through lily-bell and rose,
A stream of incense rises up, and flows
Godward with soft repinings for His ear.

And I would with the Sabbath world take rest,
Could breathe my life out with the Summer's sigh,
Could lay it at God's feet if, dispossest,
My soul might feed new life as glad as high;
But of no vagrant of this earth unblest—
This fair, lost world, where mortals love and die!

I.TO A FLEDGLING ROBIN.

ROBIN, thou art too young as yet to wear
The badge of robinhood in full confest—
The burning breast-plate on the conscious breast—
And hast not learnt to build, to sing, or care;
Only to live, filled with the liberal air,
Which, when it gently breathed from south or west,
Found and o'erflowed thee in thy sheltered nest
To dwell as marrow in thy feathers fair.

I, weary thinker 'neath the aspen trees,
See thee win past me, lightsome as a bubble—
No labouring bark, with purblind thought to steer it,
But a plumed will that rules with sovereign ease;
Approach, glad life, as free of doubt as trouble—
I feel as if in presence of a spirit.

II.TO THE SAME, ON BEGINNING HIS SONG.

SIT at my table, welcome guest, and sing
The olden song, with young unpractised throat;
I hold my breath to hear the perfect note
Thy tender organs cannot yet make ring.
Sing to me, unpaired fledgling of the spring,
Sing, solace me, as if I were thy mate;
Teach me fond patience as I sit and wait,
Brooding quick thoughts with unprogressive wing.

Thy song is faint as breath of unblown flowers,
And only that it shakes thy budding breast,
I could have deemed it homeless; as I hear it,
With lowered eyelids and suspended powers,
I, too, from doubt, and toil, and strain find rest,
And, Spirit! seem to hear thee in the spirit.

STUDIES FROM THE ANTIQUE.

KASSANDRA.

I.

VIRGIN of Troy, the days were well with thee
When wandering singing by the singing streams
Of Ilion, thou beheldest the golden gleams
Of the bold sun that might not facèd be
Come murmuring to thy feet caressingly;
But best that day when, steeped in noontide dreams,
The young Apollo wrapped thee in his beams,
And quenched his love in thine as in a sea!

And later, in thy tower 'twas sweet to teach
The loveless night the joys high day had known;
To dream, to wake—and find thy love impeach
Late sleep with kisses, and thy spirit flown
To his, and at the ivory gates of speech
Breaking in words as burning as his own.

II.

How far from Ilion, and how far from joy,
Captive Kassandra, wert thou, when in sight
Of conquering Greece thou satest on thy height
Of shame—a waif from out the wreck of Troy!
Thine still the burning word, but slave's employ
Had from thy trembling lip effacèd quite
The kisses of the god, and heaven's light
Now shone upon thee only to destroy.

For thee, sun-stricken one, th' abysmal sties
Of sin lay open as the secret grave—
Things of which speech seemed madness—while thy cries
On wronged Apollo lost the way to save;
Till at the last, the faith of upturned eyes
Brought him to right, as death to free the slave.

KLYTEMNESTRA.

I.

DAUGHTER of gods and men, great ruling will,
Seething in oily rage within the sphere
Which gods and men assign the woman here,
Till, stricken where the wound approved thee still
Mother and mortal, all the tide of ill
Rushed through the gap, and nothing more seemed dear
But power to wreak high ruin, nothing clear
But the long dream you waited to fulfil.

Mother and spouse—queen of the king of men—
What fury brought Ægysthus to thy side—
That bearded semblant, man to outward ken,
But else mere mawworm, made to fret man's pride?
Woman, thy foot was on thy tyrant then—
Mother, thou wert avenged for love defied!

II.

Woman and Greek—so doubly trained in art!—
Spreading the purple for the conqueror's tread,
Bowing with feline grace thy royal head—
How perfect whelp-robbed lioness thy part!
One wrong the more to wring the ancient smart
Then three swift strokes, and the slow hope blooms red,
Who shamed the hero lays him with the dead,
Where nevermore his word may vex her heart.

Bold queen, what were to thee the gods of Greece?
What had been any god of any name,
More than the lion-heart you made to cease,
Or the live dog to all your humours tame?—
The very furies left your soul in peace
Until Orestes' sword drave home their claim.

TO DR. WILHELM JORDAN.

[_]

(The German Poet and Apostle of the New Faith.)

I.

JORDAN, I stand a-gaze upon the shore
Of that deep mind of thine, and trembling hold
My breath the while thy pæans glad and bold
Above the wild world's discord rise and soar.
So came the desert-wearied ones of yore,
To rest and breathe refreshment manifold,
Beside thy sweet-voiced name-stream, as it rolled;
So paused, and quailed its sounding depths before.

Yes, looking down thy stream of thought, so clear,
So clear, yet bottomless, my mortal hand
Clips the frail growth around—the first thing near—
To stay my feet, else from that giddy stand
My soul could fall with one blind plunge and sheer
Quit of thy boundless hopes and promised land!

II.

One day, perplexed with desert wandering,
I clomb that Pisgah of young thought, from whence
New prophets glass for us a scene immense—
Vast beyond hope or reach of seraph's wing.
Was it the valley mist that so did cling
Around me, or but due to feebler sense,
That at the heart of splendour so intense
I felt the void of every cherished thing?

I know not, but I know that from that height
Love, who is still a tender child and shy,
Was taken weeping and in piteous plight—
Nor ever more the place will come a-nigh—
That he is all my business and delight,
And I elect with him to live or die!

I.IN LOVE'S ECLIPSE.

WHEN death—the dreadful shadow of the earth—
Rests on the mortal face of Love's twin star,
Love turns dismayed, as if that shadowy bar
Could shut him off for ever in his dearth;
He turns within, and lo! a shy, new birth,
A spark of light from near, or from afar,
Pierces the darkness till, a fiery car,
It lifts him into light more wonder-worth.

Sad love! bewail not tho' you be bereft,
Nor faint not for the weary road you fare;
The spark enkindled when your heart is cleft,
The strength that grows from burthens that you bear,
Are gifts of grace for many who were left
Undowered, but for treasure you must share.

II.LOVE THE REVEALER.

O YE elect of sorrow and of love,
Who bear for others' weal a double strain,
And share the surplus of love's costly gain
With hearts his presence doth more feebly move,
Count not your grief's excess too far above
The worth of those you serve, nor all disdain
The lesser pressure of the barren pain
The light of love in love's surcease may prove.

Pity the poor who are by God's decree
Your pensioners, and fear not, for your part,
To harbour Love, how dear soe'er he be.
O Love that cometh, Love that may depart,
The gates of life are set so wide by thee,
The lord of Love can enter where thou art!

A PARTNERSHIP.

SORROW, since I perforce must dwell with thee,
Being as thou art, no transient guest, but bold
As cunning to invade my heart, and hold
The darkened mansion of my life in fee;
And since thy face uncomely is to see,
Thy voice more harsh than shrillest tongue of scold,
I wrap thee in my fairer thought, and fold
My song about thee when thou sufferest me.

And, thus disguised, I take with thee the air,
We walk together on life's open ways;
Then meeting us, if some account thee fair,
I hold thee too less foul, and weave new lays
To robe thee in—alas, it is my share
To toil, and own thy title to all praise.

TO E. BURNE JONES, ON HIS PICTURE OF THE ANNUNCIATION.

THOU so to deepest heart the hope divine
Hast taken, that it blossoms forth anew;
And lo! a vision opens on our view—
A Virgin other than of Judah's line.
No maiden waking to the golden shine,
The spring-tide sun of joy undreamt, undue;
This maid hath known to wait and learnt to sue—
A weary woman watching for a sign.

The burthen of the world is on her heart,
Her eyes have seen its sorrow, wept its sin;
She heedeth not the angel for her part,
Feeling the witness of the life within:
The hope grown quick, the miracle of birth,
The living love that shall redeem the earth.

SUGGESTED BY THE PICTURE OF THE ANNUNCIATION, BY E. BURNE JONES.

WOMAN, whose lot hath alway been to bear
Love's load beneath the heart, set there to hold
It high, and keep it resolute and bold
To clasp God's feet, and hang on to the fair
Wide skirts of light—thy sealèd sense can spare
The open vision, thou being called to fold
From time's mischance, and from the season's cold,
The wonder in thy breast, and nurse it there.

What though thy travail hath been long and sore,
Love being borne in so great heaviness,
Through loss and labour, joy shall be the more
Of love that, living, shall the nations bless:
Love that shall set man's bounden spirit free,
The “Holy Thing” that still is born of thee.

KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID.

[_]

(Suggested by the picture of E. Burne Jones, A.R.A.)

A BEGGAR maiden, poor and pale was she,
In whom the King Cophetua saw his fate,
And brought her in, and on a chair of state
Set her for worship. Now king's houses be
To homes of men of lowlier degree
As hollow husks; but with this pallid mate
Came suddenly to this king's house a freight
Of all that makes man's life most rich and free.

Love's glamour made of those high walls a place
Where gentle souls might dwell in time and space
Nor feel of longest summer days the length.
Love's knight, his glimmering armour took on grace,
His very sword caught love-light from her face;
He lent her beauty and she gave him strength.

I.LOVE AND DEATH.

[_]

(On the picture by G. F. Watts, R.A.)

LOVE, one while seen with wings of many dyes,
An infant mischief, but a God withal,—
Still changeth semblance with the changing call
Of human need; how have we known his eyes
Dark with the dire and passionate surprise
Of youthful sorrow, as the phantom tall,
Shrouded in Death's impenetrable pall,
Forced back his portal, ruthless of his cries.

Cold Death, that holdeth Love in such despite,
Trampling his roses, leaving him forlorn,—
The Lord of Love well knoweth to requite!
And you, Love's tyrant, have been made his scorn,
Since in the dunnest shadow of your night
First unto Love immortal Hope was born.

II.LOVE AND LIFE.

[_]

(On the picture by G. F. Watts, R.A.)

HOW beautiful upon the mountains are
The feet of Love, beneath whose tread there grows
The verdure that is herald of the rose;
And Life, in lead of Love, how art thou fair!
Thy soul, if tremulous, still brave to dare
The upward path, unwitting where it goes,
And all in holy trust of Love, who knows,
To climb at ease from doubt, at rest from care.

Dear Love, that leadeth Life toward the springs
Of Light, what darkness may o'erwhelm her way;
How dense the mist upon the mountain clings;
Though she may see thee not, be thou her stay!
Lo the abyss! take heed, she hath no wings,
But hold her fast,—her feet will still obey.

CAIN AND ABEL.

[_]

(From Three Designs by G. F. Watts, R.A.)

[_]

[So much of the conduct of the story in the following three sonnets as is not to be found in Genesis is contained implicitly in Mr. Watts's three studies, or made explicit in the words by which he described them. To him belongs the conception of the nature of the mark set upon Cain—the smoky cloud of secrecy and self-hood which cut him off, while it preserved him from punishment at the hands of his fellows; the silence and aloofness which fell upon his protected life, reached by “no child's laughter and by no bird's song”; and last and chiefest, the return of Cain to Abel's altar, a token of repentence followed by the sudden rending away of the cloud.]

I.CAIN AND ABEL.

THOU, the young world's first dead, unwept shall be
Through storied time, pure spirit, called to rise
With the first flame of thy first sacrifice—
Thy door of life so forced but set thee free;
All pity be reserved, dark Cain, for thee,
Who from the delvëd earth drew forth a prize,
Then withering in God's unregarding eyes,
Watched the first fruit of lifeless husbandry.

For straight within thy stubborn heart of man
The beast unsacrificed to God, found place,
And brute, unbrotherly instincts overran
Thee wholly, making strange thy human face
Before the angel came to brand, not ban,
But hide thee in a hell of saving grace.

II.OUTCAST CAIN.

NO death by brother's hand to us shows dire
As this thy life, cut off from man and God—
From brother's vengeance and from father's rod—
The cloud about thee closing ever nigher,
No wrath to scourge, no love to re-inspire,
Nought felt but under foot the senseless clod,
Nought hoped but what might spring from out the sod,
Nought seen but smoke of hell's averted fire.

Thus safe in lone invisibility
Thou, wandering o'er the earth from sea to sea,
Must bear the curse of life and blinding hate;
No gush of joy, no cry of mortal pain,
No plaint of love or song of bird, dark Cain,
Makes thy dull harp of life reverberate.

III.CAIN REPENTANT.

[_]

(See the Picture now at the Royal Academy, 1886.)

BLACK to the heart and calcined to the bone
With love that desolates and fills no sphere,
The barren love that holds the sole self dear,
Which makes the hell wherein it reigns alone;
So wanders Cain till self to self is grown,
A spectre which, in flying, he falls sheer—
Bowed to God's all-consuming breath—a mere
Dumb sacrifice on Abel's altar-stone.

Then lo, the cloud that darkened all his day
And hid the watchful angel of God's love,
The angel's stormy hand has rent away;
Pure light of life beats on him from above,
Cool tears of dawn make soft his hardened clay,
And heal the frienzied heart God's lightnings rove.

HOPE.

[_]

[After the picture by Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A.,—at the Grosvenor Gallery, 1886,—in which Hope is represented drooping over a lute, of which all the strings but one are broken. She is seated on the globe; the time is night; the darkness is pierced by a single star; the eyes of Hope are bandaged.]

HOPE, thou hast wandered far into the night,
Thy weariness has made the world its throne
While all thy life hangs trembling on the tone
Which stands thy darkened eyes in lieu of light.
Thy lute has felt the storm's extreme despite,
And but one string whence music has not flown
Is left to it, one string wherewith alone
To sound the spirit's depths or prove its height.

Oh win for us the secret of that tense
Unbroken midmost chord! It may recall
The scattered tones, nay, haply may surprise
Thee with a vision to inform the sense;
And gift thee out of wreck and wrong withal
To see the city of God to music rise.

DEAF.

NEVER to hear the chorus that awakes
The morning strive together in the grove;
Never to hear the plaining of the dove
Or babble of the childish glee that makes
The sick heart whole; or any voice that breaks
Beneath the tender burthen of its love;
Nor any strain of music that can move
The sense until with ravishment it aches.

If of old time one thus bereft, in vain
Had sought that pool an angel Pity stirred,
The human voice of Christ he had not heard;
But human pity, like the all-visiting rain,
May reach the grief that makes such faint appeal
And touching, soothe what only death can heal.

MID-OCEAN.

[_]

(On board the “Bothnia” for New York.)

WILD fields of Ocean, piling heap on heap
Thy mountainous wealth of water, but to fling
Abroad in spendthrift haste, still gathering
And scattering to the winds what none would keep;
Thou canst not know so sweet a thing as sleep
For all thy toil, nor hope whereto to cling,—
Ploughed by the winds in one unending spring—
What harvest of the storm hast thou to reap?

My spirit owns, but will not bend before
This dull brute might and purposeless, of thine;
The sea-bird resting on thy wave is more
Than thou, by all its faculty divine
To suffer; pang is none in this thy roar,
And all the joy that lifts thy wave, is mine!

NIAGARA.

ALMIGHTY voice that callest me from sleep,
Sleepless thyself through all the past of time,
And still unspent, inscrutable, sublime,
What answer can I make thee but to creep
And hide my silence in the all-sheltering deep
E'en of thy music? Clash of rhyme on rhyme
Offends mine ear as 't were a futile crime,
Breaking the peace which reverence should keep.

Yet for my worship lacking better way,
And seeing how thy strength is crowned with grace,
And maddened with the beauty of thy face,
I am constrained to cry as best I may
And tell thee with my faint, adoring breath
That at thy hand I fain would taste of death.

BEATING THE AIR.

SONG drew the curtains of my life aside,
But left me songless ere the risen day,
When hurried heart-beats took my breath away,
And overdone with life I almost died.
Then it was laid upon me to abide
What time my thought was searched with sharp assay,
What while my will in fiery durance lay,—
All coinage of their store as yet denied.

So held in silent depths my grievèd soul
Would listen to the crowned ones harping high,
And yearn to touch such gentle hearts with dole;
When at the last a kindling breath, a cry,
Unsealed my lips as if with burning coal;—
Alas! the crowned ones heard me, and passed by.

THE SOUDAN.

ENGLAND, the sound of weeping breaks thy rest,—
The voice of women wailing o'er the slain,
Whose generous blood hath purpled all in vain
The Desert sands;—what victory unblest
Is thine, proud nation thronèd by the West,
Who, knowing most of men the costly gain
Of freedom, dare to quell in dull disdain
Hearts burning with its insults unredressed.

England, those shrill accusing cries that broke
The calm of the Arabian night, declare
Thee banded with the ancient powers that yoke
Life to the body of Death;—think what despair
Of human justice in those cries awoke,
What doubt of God made sick the desert air!

GORDON.

The Unrequitable.

GONE, with the toil of nigh twelve months undone,
Cut from thy grasp by sloth and treachery,
When friendly hands across that sandy sea
To reach thee at thy post had all but won.
Gone when thy hope was high as Egypt's sun,
From sting of failure and all charge set free,
A man no king was great enough to fee—
God's Servant, taking wage of Him alone.

Gordon, we may not give thee so much earth
As might suffice thy bones for resting-place,
But must remain thy debtors in our dearth;
Souls pure as thine are channels of God's grace,
And all our famished lives must grow more worth
When such have dwelt among us for a space.

A PROTEST.

I.

LET no man charge thee, woman if thou art,
And therefore pitiful, to veil thine eyes
From any naked truth whereof the cries
Reveal the anguish. Woman to the heart—
There be foul shames which for thy purer part
Appear through bleeding wounds in purple guise,
And at their aspect, showing in such wise,
No whitest angel of God's throne would start.

And more; if it be true that life terrene,
Mocking our hope, admits a depth obscene,
Wherein lost souls must fall to mend our ways;
Feed full that gulf of hell which is man's lust,
But rob not those its devotees; be just:
Cheer its frail victims; give its martyrs praise!

II.

Sweet Christ! That there be men in virtue's name
And Thine, would levy on Thy “poor” a toll
Whereof each fraction is a living soul
To drop in stygian depths of sin and shame.
O, vainly lost ones! If of our fair fame,
Our woman's peace and purity, the whole
Fierce chastisement is laid on you, your dole
Brands our white brows with more than answering blame.

From such salvation, turning in despair,
They well might sigh for cloistered days, who dare
Not walk without such guardians of the night!
God help the braver hearted to allay
The torments of these damned, until they may
Pluck from the rose of innocence this blight.

III.

And you, the queens who claim to reign in right
Of this foul wrong; you who from thought would spurn
Your hapless hostages; how do you earn
The service you so hardly would requite?
Have you emerged like stars from some dark night
Of ignorance, or compassed a return
From sin foredoomed? What wonders may we learn
From you of deadly hunger's conquered might?

Alas! on simpler plea your titles rest:
For these to float it needs that those must drown;
And you who ride upon the waves' high crest,
Whose thoughts are narrowed by your unearned crown,
How should it irk you if the partial frown
Of Him you worship, banned whom Jesus blest?

THE COMING DAY.

IN dream I saw a vision of the world
Caught in mid-space, a heavy-laden ship
Panting and bounding in a squall's fierce grip,
Her hatches battened and her canvas furled,
Reeling on slippery crests of waves which swirled
From under her, and let her blindly dip
Into their clamorous caves beneath the whip
Of winds which on her hope defiance hurled.

But lo, when that swift squall had swept ahead,
I marvelled at the way the ship had won,
How, straight in doubt and darkness she had sped,
Borne by the storm-winged messenger of One
Unnameable; and last, I saw her spread
All sail, and signal back the rising sun.

I.THE SOUL'S PRAYER.

OUR souls are natives of the Infinite,
And learn with toil to breathe the air of Time;
Our early loves and sorrows are sublime
In sense of durance and unfettered might.
Kind Nature take us, weary ere the night
As children are, and from this alien clime
Shelter, and let us dream its morning prime
Fans our worn spirits with its fresh delight.

But if the scorner Time that makes our woe
Prove very lord of us, then on thy breast
Quell once for all this feverish thirst to know,
This hungry love, the traitor's bitterest jest;
End on thy mother's heart these pangs too slow
To kill; let sleep be death since that is best.

II.THE SOUL'S PRIDE.

AND, mother, if nor sleep nor death may be
Till, slaves of Time, we drain his poisoned cup,
Still let no lifeless images set up
Perturb our sinking soul's long agony.
Gods without hearing, gods that cannot see,
Are idols all; how to the reckless troop
Of science and its forces should we stoop
To worship who can suffer and be free?

Needless cold altars plead against these new
Unheeding Baals for Him quick hearts approve
With answering fire; the soul that knows her due
Holds herself lifted high as heaven above
All heartless postulates, if only through
The power to feel one pang of dying love.

WEARIHEAD.

DEAR Nature, hide me in thine inmost heart,
Safe from the pangs of doubt and strife of will—
Mine own and others; I would fain lie still,
Bathed in thy silence, of thy life a part.
Unconscious and unerring as thou art,
Bear me as mothers bear their babes, until
Of thy pure strength my weakness takes its fill,
And I may dare on some new course to start.

Yea, find for me some grave wherein my soul
May lie as bodies lie when life is fled,
Freed from the madness of its own control,
By Wisdom's self through unknown changes sped
In sleep unvexed by dream of end or goal,
And living still be all as good as dead.