University of Virginia Library

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.