University of Virginia Library

TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN.

1837—1887

England felt
Her heart beat; England loved You! It was good
So great a Queen should be a girl so true!
Madam, these Realms praise God—and reverence You—
For Fifty Years of Sovereign Womanhood.

A LOST EPIC.

This is his little grandchild! . . . Run away,
And pluck the gentleman a bunch of flowers!
A pretty tot! Poem he never wrote
To match in freshness and in winning grace
That rosy little slip of roguery!
Four years ago he came and brought the child,
A prattling three-year-old, and lived alone—
An aged maid for housekeeper and nurse—
In yon small cottage, where the beechwood shrinks
From over-keen blown kisses of the sea.
A tall, mild, wise-eyed, silver-bearded man—
The sea-wind scattering down our village street
His sixtieth autumn's crimson leaves—he moved
Among us, noting all our seaboard ways,
Stealing our little people's hearts with sweets,
And through the children winning all the wives;
But when the men, rough storm-flushed fellows, smiled
With slightly pitying, half-amused contempt,
Their homespun wits he startled to respect
By better knowledge of the things they knew,
Till all our ale-house sages, pipe in cheek,
Confessed “the Doctor” knew a sight o' things
Beyond their weather-gage, and last of all
Our gaunt old whaler, ear-ringed and tattooed,
Bragged less of outland folk and foreign ports.
Nay, I, too, when the gracious Sunday bell
Gathered our village—little children all
Around a common knee—began to feel
An undefined attraction to the man,
And found my sermon three-parts preached to him;
While he, with reverend hair and solemn beard,
A sprig or flower-bud at his button-hole,
Would sit, his grandchild's tiny hand in his,
Listening and musing,—musing most, I thought,—
Patient if not improved, until the close.
I came to like the man—who liked him not?—
And watched his tall grey figure as he passed
Seaward along the bright side of the street,—
Wee flax-head trotting gaily at his side
In crimson cloak and buckled crimson shoes;—
Watched, and surprised him on the breezy downs
Poring through lenses o'er the silvery frost
Of lichens on some ice-scored boulder-stone,
And oft at sunset met, a furlong off,
His spare stretched shadow on the glittering sands,
And then himself—the little one asleep,
Nestled in flaxen hair and hoary beard.
The village folk, with that blank bovine stare
Which never seems to see the thing it scans,
Observed and gossiped, wondered, and surmised,
But found no evil in the lonely man
Whose life seemed wholly bound up in his child;
And, tired of vain conjecture, grew content
To love him merely, and let him hold his way
Mysterious and unquestioned. So the year
From autumn round to autumn rolled; and then,
Whether it were he felt the social need
Or simply liked me out of liberal heart,
The Doctor lost his strangeness and reserve,
At length cast all the anchors of his trust,
Nor found me lack that gracious temper of youth
Which worships lofty aims in patient lives.
A poet, heart and brain, the man but lived
To write one book which no man yet had dared;
One life-work, one colossal poem, fraught
With all the joy and travail of mankind,
Enriched with all the lore of all the years—
“The Epic of the Pageants of the World.”
Smiling, 'twas so he named it for the nonce;
And truly as he sat in dreamy mood
And sketched the vasty outlines of his theme,
I, grown from very sympathy a bard,
Saw, as he spoke, strange masquerades of Time
Sweep past in awful splendour.
Years had fled,
Ay, forty years of florid life, since first
He planned this large majestic epopee;
And years must still be spent in search and thought;
And years, perchance, in waiting, sail outspread,
To catch the ever-imminent breeze of song;
Years on the voyage through that sea of dreams;
Years—and the man who had thought and wrought, too rapt
To note the years, forgot that he was old!
Small wonder! For his eye, grown keen to scan
The cosmic cycles from the nebular dawn,
Was dulled to human epochs, mortal dates.
Why, Rome was thatched and fenced but yesterday!
The Pyramids were reared—a year ago?
Nay, mark, those fiery-blossomed weeds have flamed
Along the furrows of an Aryan plough;
These ripples wash the self-same water-line
As when the dwellers on the reed-roofed piles
Moulded clay crescents of the holy Moon!
What pageants these of his! He spoke of Art;—
And the sea-crinkled, ice-cragged, palm-plumed world
Spread like a marvellous map before the eye;
And vaguely seen in dimly shimmering light,
Lo! Man the Artist wrought. Before his cave
Th' autochthon sketched upon a mammoth's tooth
The picture of a mammoth, chipped the flint
To shape of prehistoric man or beast.
Tribes perished, forests crumbled, sea and land
Changed places, and the stars changed colour and place
In changing skies, but Man the Artist lived—
Scratched, whittled, painted, grew in eye and hand;
Pictured the river-bluffs, the rocky walls
Of sea-carved creeks, the snow-capped precipice,
The ice-borne boulder on the tropic isle,
Till sun and moon, fish, reptile, bird and flower,
Mammal and Man, on ivory, slate, horn, rock,
Ringed with strange zodiacs all the savage globe!
And nations perished, cities rose and fell,
And Man the Artist lived and wrought and throve,
Grew bold in thought and opulent in means,
Survived all wreck, till Titian, Raphael came—
For life indeed is short and art is long!

Blossom and Babe.

THE DEATH OF ANAXAGORAS.

Cleon of Lampsacus to Pericles:—
Of him she banished now let Athens boast;
Let now th' Athenians raise to him they stoned
A statue;—Anaxagoras is dead!
To you who mourn the Master, called him friend,
Beat back th' Athenian wolves who fanged his throat,
And risked your own to save him,—Pericles—
I now unfold the manner of his end.
He paused; and blowing softly from the sea,
The fresh wind stirred the ilex, shaking down
Through chinks of sunny leaves blue gems of sky;
And lying in the shadow, all his mind
O'ershadowed by our grief, once more he spoke:—
“Let not your hearts be troubled! All my days
Hath all my care been fixed on this vast blue
So still above us; now my days are done,
Let it have care of me! Be patient; meek;
Not puffed with doctrine! Nothing can be known;
Nought grasped for certain; sense is circumscribed;
The intellect is weak; and life is short!”
He ceased and mused a little, while we wept.
“And yet be nowise downcast; seek, pursue;
The lover's rapture and the sage's gain
Less in attainment lie than in approach.
Look forward to the time which is to come!
All things are mutable; and change alone
Unchangeable. But knowledge grows! The gods
Are drifting from the earth like morning mist;
The days are surely at the doors when men
Shall see but human actions in the world!
Yea, even these hills of Lampsacus shall be
The isles of some new sea, if time not fail!”
He lay back smiling, and the reverend men
Departed, heavy at heart. He spoke no more,
But haply musing on his truant days,
Passed from us, and was smiling when he died.
Thus wrote to Pericles from Lampsacus
The poet Cleon; and the Master's words,
Wherein he spoke of change unchangeable,
Hold good for great things but hold ill for small;
For lo! six hundred fateful years have sped
And Greece is but a Roman province now,
Whereas through those six centuries, year by year
When summer and the sun brought back the time,
The lads and lasses, free of task and school,
Have held their revelry in Lampsacus,—
A fact so ripe with grave moralities,
That I, Diogenes, have deemed it fit
To note in my “De Vita et Moribus.”

MORNING.

THE LEGEND OF THE ARK.

I.—THE GREAT WITNESS.

The sword showed him the Woman's face, showed her
The Man's. They shrank apart. Their faces were
More fearful than the darkness, than the sword.
Then God in pity gave them fire; the Lord
Gave them the fire for solace and a stay.
When sixteen hundred years had passed away
The whole earth was fulfilled of evil and woe.
The Man and Woman wandered to and fro
In hordes and tribes and nations. They did eat
Of every beast and tree. The track of feet
Lay wide through polar snow and tropic sand.
No ocean beat on any utmost land
But some wild fisher watched the heaving blue.
Tribes thronged the sunset and the dawn. They knew
The glow of arctic and antarctic skies.
In savage lands they lived in wolfish wise.
The tree, the hanging rock, the cavern gave
Shelter for fire and slumber—and a grave.
Time changed them—colour and stature, hair and skin.
They knew not whence they came. They owned no kin.
The Man and Woman in them had forgot
All ancient days, the sad primeval lot,
The brotherhood of dust, the sword of fire.
Their god was hunger, and their law desire.
In ancient realms, from golden cities, bright
With lamps of revel, roared into the night
The orgies of the giants of the earth.
And men and beasts, by day, to make them mirth,
Slew and were slain. Their spearmen, early and late,
Drove virgin troops from every land to sate
The tigerish greed of their delirious lust.
The evil of their fame was blown, like dust—
A blinding drouth—through all the world's broad ways.
And they too had forgot the olden days,
The kinship of mankind, the sword of fire.
Their god was luxury, their law desire.
Between the cities and the savage waste
Were men in myriads. These were they who chased
The elephant and ostrich; they who fed
On marrow of lions on the watershed
Of mighty rivers; they who lived on canes
And locusts; they who roamed in sail-drawn wains
With flocks and herds, and made the heavens their fold;
And serpent-eaters, wearing coils of gold;
And fisher-folk, who slept on rafts of logs,
And throve on river-fish and milk of dogs;
And last, in regions green with sun and rain,
The husbandmen who planted roots and grain,
And dwelt in huts of water-reeds and mud.
And all these had forgot the brotherhood
Of man, the Garden days, the sword of fire.
Their god was turbulence, their law desire.
And now, when after sixteen hundred years,
Beneath the whole wide heaven men's blood and tears
Cried out to God; and God the Lord looked forth
And saw the violence that filled the earth,
The bloody worship and lascivious glee
Around the boulder and beneath the tree,
And all men's wickedness, it grieved the Lord
That He had made man's image. He abhorred
All flesh on earth, both man and creeping thing,
And every beast, and bird of every wing.
And God prepared the vengeance of His rain
To slay them, that all evil might be slain
And utterly destroyed before His face.
The sons of Noah dug his giant grave.

II.—THE PENITENT.

God shut him in. The Lord God sealed his door.
Whom God shuts in is safe for evermore.
For yet seven days did God the Lord restrain
The vengeance of the deep and of the rain.
There was a noise of viols in the earth,
Eating and drinking, pomp and bridal mirth,
And violence, and cries of captives sold,
And worshippings of stone and wood and gold.
Around, the ancient woods were hushed and dark.
The Ark was closed. No cry of beast or bird
Was heard within. No stir, no sound was heard.
Hushed were the heavens, and dark with brooding cloud.
The Woman felt her limbs grow heavy as stone.
She bade her people leave her there alone.
She watched them go; with scared dilated eyes
She followed them beneath the lowering skies,
And saw them riding far across the land.
Then from the Woman rose a piercing cry:
“Hear, earth; ye heavens, hearken! here am I,
The world's great Harlot, who have snared and slain
The last old giants of the seed of Cain,
And reddened all my robes with youthful blood.
And now the Lord will chase me with His flood,
And hunt me as a beast; and though He spare
The beast, will spare not me, but clutch my hair,
And slay me without mercy for my sin!
I came to mock thee, O thou man within,
But fear hath fallen upon me. Now I know
That anguish and unutterable woe
And sure destruction are at hand.”
No sound
Was heard, save bitter weeping on the ground,
Where, sobbing with her face among the dust,
The Harlot moaned: “The Lord is just—is just!”
Then spoke a voice, gentle, compassionate:
“Why weepest thou?”
“Because it is too late.”
“It never is too late to mourn for sin.”
“Then open.”
“Nay, the Lord hath shut me in.”
“Must I then perish?”
“Nay, thy flesh alone
Shall for thine evil in the flesh atone!”
There was a noise of viols in the earth:
Eating and drinking, pomp, and bridal mirth.
But day and night the Harlot, weeping sore,
Crouched in the dust before the sealèd door.

III.—THE VOICES.

“Look!” one cried;
“What see'st thou?”
And the other Voice replied:
“Yet once again. What dost thou see or hear?”
“What doth the man?”
“He sits with covered head.”
“Is the man weeping?”
“Lord, the man is dead.”

IV.—THE WATERS.

TWO LIVES.