University of Virginia Library

I. SIGNS AND SEASONS.

THE MONTHS.

TWO DAYBREAKS.

IN THE HALLERTHAL.

(LUXEMBOURG)

THE water wandered singing by my feet,
As through the dells, with many a red-boled beech
O'erarched, I went, that from the fiery reach
The wood-ways warded of the noontide heat.
Through thronging ferns the silver stream did fleet,
Past range on range of temples, each on each
Ensuing still, without the tongue of speech
That told the story of a time effete.
Ah me, thou tiny, trotting, trickling thread,
Mid age-bleached rock and maze of living green
Thy little life that livest, never dead,
How many a generation hast thou seen!
How many an age hath come and gone, whilst thou
Thy careless ditty chantedst then as now!

PROPHETS OF THE PRIME.

NATURE'S SECRET.

I went in woodlands when the leaves were sere:
The watchet skies of Autumn, clear and cold,
Peeped through their panoplies of red and gold;
The wind went dirging to the dying year.
Yet in the wan waste ways a subtle cheer
There breathed; and as I sought to take and hold
The spell of peace that hallowed wood and wold,
“Content!” the robin carolled in mine ear.
Yea, all that is on earth's alike content
To die and in its like to live again,
Save man, that, after seventy years of pain
And strife, clings yet to personality
And wearies heaven with his vain lament
That others in his likeness live, not he.

IN WINTER.

Methinks, in the dead season of the year,
The very nakedness of Nature brings
A keener sight into the soul of things,
The heart to Nature's heart become more near,
When 'gainst the sky the boughs are black and sere:
And to the eye, with leaves and blossomings,
With sky and sun undazed and flash of wings,
The general scheme of all seems grown more clear.
Nay, this I know; the spirit of delight
Far franklier stirs my heart to songful cheer
And my soul flowers in the Winter's night
More freely than when Spring by mead and mere
Leads her bright train or Summer to the height
Runs up the gamut of the flowering year.

FALSE FEBRUARY.

NOT seldom, whilst the Winter yet is king,
Whilst yet the meads are mute and boughs are bare,
A stirring in the February air
There comes, as with a faint foreshadowing,
A passing prophecy of far-off Spring
And distant days, when all the world shall wear
The lovely liveries of Summer fair,
That sets our wintry thought upon the wing.
Well though we know the thing's a Winter's trick,
To hold the soul with expectation sick,
And he will soon resume his iron reign,
Yet our fond hearts alone with hope in vain
Swell not; for hark, the swallows in the eaves
Rejoice as though the world were lush with leaves.

PRIMULA VERIS.

THE HILLS WHENCE MY HELP COMETH.

MY thought still harbours where the silence fills
The far majestic mountains, as they reign,
Kings crowned with silver, o'er the subject plain.
Whether, rose-vestured, in the morning's sills
They stand or, with the sunset's flaming rills
Imperial purple clad, they glow or stain
With blue the distances of noon inane,
My heart is with the everlasting hills.
There, on those summits where the Immortals dwell,
With clouds and fires and thunders fenced about
'Gainst the profane, as he of Israël
That was the song-voice saith, still hope for me
Of help abideth and I look thereout
To have deliverance in days to be.

THE FIRST OF THE ALPS.

THE train fled, hurtling, through the summer-night,
Across the still flat plains of slumbering France,
And I, I waited, in a waking trance,
For that which was to come with coming light:
And with the first faint streaks of morning-white,
The plains began, meseemed, to heave and dance
On either hand; it was the first advance
Of the hill-host that soared upon my sight.
Then, as the day drew on and light waxed wide,
The hills to mountains swelled on every side
And in the distance, like a giant ghost
Of the world's morning, 'gainst the sapphire sky,
The first fore-runner of the Titan host
Of the snow-summits hove and towered high.

SPRING-SADNESS.

THE middle-sweet of Spring is come
And everywhere the thorn is gray:
The world has put its woes away,
Forgot its Winter's martyrdom:
The cuckoo, in the noon-tide hum,
Answers the throstle on the spray.
My heart is heedless of the May;
The throstle in my throat is dumb.
What ails thee, heart? But yesternight
It seems, when all the world was white,
The seeds of song in thee did spring
And ripened up to flower and fruit;
And now, when all with blossoming
And pipe of birds is glad, thou'rt mute!

THE LARK.

“THE sun is up and up with it am I!”
Thus, in a rain of golden melody,
From th'empyréan wafted 'twas to me,
And in the topmost blue I might espy
The lark upmounting higher and more high,
As, with his pinions spurning land and sea,
Still singing, winging, sun-ward travelled he,
As if new heavens he sought beyond the sky.
Voice of the world's aspiring, as our soul
Thou art, that with no earthly heaven or sun
Contented is, but for its wish unwon
Upstraineth still beyond the topmost pole,
To where all wishes solved, all wills made one
Are in the effulgence of the Undifferenced Whole.

VER SALUTIFERUM.

THE throstles wakened me at morning-red
With such a wild melodious choral shout
Of songful jubilance, I might not doubt
But Spring at last was come and Winter sped.
And of a truth it was as they had said;
For all the world with radiance new about
Was raimented and in me, as without,
Delight there stirred that long had lain for dead.
For who was ever yet might still be sad,
When all the world for Winter gone is glad
And who, when all things bud and bloom and sing,
But in the rathe sweet season had relief
Of pain and offered up his Winter's grief
Upon the flower-bound altars of the Spring?

ROSA BENEDICTA.

WAS ever wonder rarer than the rose,
That, with its gala-robes of green and red,
In the mid-prime uprears its regal head,
Hailing us glory in the winter's woes
Bygone and summer come in garden-close
And meadow wide? With breath of balsam shed,
It mindeth us that beauty is not dead
And Love for lovers lives, if but for those.
Small marvel if with us brief space it bide,
If, of its heaven's eternal blossom-tide
Remembering it, beneath our grey sky-dome,
In this our world of winter and lament,
It weary after its celestial home
And pine and pass for very languishment!

THE DEATH OF THE WOOD-WARBLER.

I read to-day how one, who loved birds well,
Lit erst upon a little wild wood-wren,
That, old and solitary, in a glen
Among the trees beside a spring did dwell;
How friendship betwixt man and bird befell,
Till it, at last, its fear forgot of men,
Slept on his hand, contented, and how then
He found it later dead beside the well.
Ah, what a homily to humankind
This preacheth, that had been joy's very spright
And old and lonely grown, no whit repined
For pleasant life fordone and day fall'n night,
But, poet-like, 'spite age and solitude,
Piped on till death, in cheer and courage good!

LILIES.

THIS middle summer morn, an angel band,
Meseems, is lighted down upon the sward;
In robes of light arrayed, with torch and sword,
The airs of heaven they breathe on every hand.
It is the lilies, in the grass that stand
And o'er the July-prime keep watch and ward,
Telling, with bells of frozen snow, fire-cored,
Sweet Summer's triumph to the laughing land.
Who would not, lilies, deem your lovely light
O'er sweet to pass and like the prime, too fair
For Death's unlovesome manage that you were?
Yet must you die and day give place to night;
For all that is must have its wax and wane
And all that's fair must fade, to flower again.

FEATHERED INGRATES.

IN the March-morning all the world was bright:
The thrushes and the blackbirds on the lawn
Were busy ere the dark was wholly gone.
There was their table spread from overnight
With crumbs and all a songbird's appetite
Might tempt: but thicker, there, than mushroom-spawn,
Alack! were crocuses, as flush of dawn
Purple and golden, lilac, blue and white.
What ailed you, feathered rogues, to make your prey
Of these frail firstlings of the flowered year
And mar their vernal pomp, in mischief pure,
Churl-fashion? Manlike, more than bird-like, sure,
'Twas thus my hospitality to pay
My lawn by spoiling of its Springtide cheer.

CONVALLARIA MAJALIS.

I am the Lily of the Valley.
Where in the woods the silence dwells,
My tiny spire of silver bells
I rear in every verdant alley,
That, to the dance when elves did sally
Anights, with chimings filled the dells:
But, now, within its silver cells
The music's mute, past power to rally.
Yet in my soul the song-pulse tarries
And from its proper port of sound
Debarred, to other senses marries
Itself; and so, where May is found,
The wild-wood breeze in perfume carries
My heart's dumb yearning all around.

A MID-MARCH DAY.

MY heart is heavy on this mid-March day,
When from the mouth of hell the East Wind blows,
With menace of immeasurable woes
Winnowing the air. Though Spring is on the way
And with its promise of the middle May,
In the rathe beds the tulip-flame foreshows
The tale of coming summer and the rose,
The time is sadder than the Winter grey.
Dead season of the snows, is't not enough
That thou shouldst fetter us for half the year
In chains of frost, but with thy counterbuff
Of blood-encurdling blasts our infant Spring
Thou thus must poison and thy phantom drear
'Twixt us intrude and Life's requickening?

AUTUMN.

GONE are the Gods; the time for new is near:
Past is the Summer, past the harvesting:
The meads are mute; the birds have ceased to sing;
Dim is the sun, that yesterday was clear,
And gray the heavens dull-mirrored in the mere.
Yet in the woods the leaves' emblazoning
Outglories all the gladness of the Spring,
Decking the last days of the labouring year.
How comes it, these, of all things new and old,
Alone do glory in their own decay
And garb themselves to die in red and gold,
As if with stress of good and evil chance
Forwearied and content to pass away,
Accounting death to be deliverance?

TWO RIVERS.

II. THE NIGHT-WATCHES.

WHITE NIGHTS.

DREAM-MEETINGS.

WHILES, in the midnight hours, upon my bed,
In dreams once more to me the old delight
Returns and in the visions of the night,
I look upon the faces of my dead.
No thought there is of sorrow, no tears shed,
No word of woe, but unto touch and sight
All is as once it was, the eyes as bright,
The hands as living warm, the lips as red.
But, in the morn, my dreams when I retrace,
Remembrance rends me of the Might-have-been
And to the house of grief I set my face,
Nay, were, methinks, less sad, if I had seen
The dear-loved dead, in all sleep's marble sheen,
Lie with closed lids the coffin-boards between.

THE CUSHAT.

THE wind was wailing in the trees all night,
Before my sills, but in the middle noon
Of night there came the mild mysterious moon,
And with the wonder of her silver sight,
The dim gray world was gladdened and waxed white;
The shrill winds slackened from their wailing tune
And left uprise the soft complaining croon
Of some stray cushat on the limes alight.
Poor pilgrim, from the Summer woods astray,
What cold commandment of unfavouring Fate
Drove thee from thy warm lodging in the green,
With my dull heart to mourn thy hopes' dismay,
In the gray town, where sad are small and great
And pine for air and sunlight, like the treen?

ANIMAE VIGILIUM.

WHENAS the spirit's vigil, in clear dream
And solemn vision shrined, anights I keep,
What while the world is sanctified with sleep,
Thought, over all the troubled, surging stream
Of darkling life casting its searching beam,
Bids, with its ruthless radiance, from the deep
Into full light the things eternal leap
And strips from those the splendour which but seem.
Then many a thing, which in men's sight is good
And fair, unblest and foul to us is shown
And many a God and many a Holy Rood
In that dread hour resolves to wood and stone;
Nay, when the sun returneth with the day,
Meseems that light with night hath past away.

THE FOREDAWN HOUR.

RETROSPECT.

WHENAS the Past unto the stern assize
Of middle night I summon and survey,
With backward thought, the over-travelled way,
Much for repentance, yea, and much for sighs
And more for shamefast sorrow, to mine eyes
There doth appear, and needs my head away
Turn must I from the record for dismay
Which graven there in fire eternal lies.
But for a solace yet I have the thought,
That none I willingly did ever wrong;
And much, meseems, for duty hath he wrought
Who ne'er the eternal things hath sold or bought
And with his unsophisticated song,
The healing tears to some sad eyes hath brought.

TO THE BELOVED DEAD.

I call upon you “in the collied night,”
When all things sleep and only I, I wake,
Beseeching you to come for pity's sake
And my sad eyes to solace with your sight.
How many a time I've watched the dark grow white,
Expecting still to see the shadow take
Your shape, to hear your voice the silence break,
Your speech renew for me the dead delight!
I will not question you. I will not weep;
I will not seek to strain you to my breast:
Let me but look upon your face in sleep,
But feel your touch, but hear you voice my name,
And you shall go, returning whence you came,
And have again your cold and senseless rest.

III. MUSICALIA.

BUT FOR MUSIC ------

“WERE music not, in this our world, well nigh
“Might we avouch, the Beautiful is dead”.
So it of one who knew life well was said,
Beauty of that which to the ear and eye
Immediate is, which to the sense speaks high,
Intending. Here for how were beauty bred,
Where all fore-ordered is by count of head
Of brute majorities, but born to die?
Wherefore, thou darling spirit of delight,
That to our souls, with toil and misery
Forwearied, speak'st of lands of love and light,
Of isles of rest beyond the sheer sun's sight,
Whereas new heavens new earth o'erarch and sea,
Blesséd be thou to all eternity!

HAYDN.

AS on one walking in the graves by night
The glad May morning comes at unawares
And the young day, with all its frolic airs
And throstles' song and scent and flower-delight,
Brims up his darkling soul with life and light,
So, in our time, when vain Tchaikowsky tears
Our still-vexed ears and dreary Dvorak shares
With Brahms and Sullivan the dullard might,
Haydn, thine unsophisticated strain,
Wherein the fields flower and the small birds sing,
Our saddened souls to life and love again
Restores and sets our laggard thought a-wing
To where May-memories fill the heart's inane
With all the happy auspices of Spring.

SCHUBERT.

DEATH, weary grown of monody and dirge,
A singer sought to fill his funeral halls
With strains of jubilation, such as Saul's
Dark spirit in its frenzied hour did purge,
And hearing from afar thy golden surge,
Schubert, of song, straight from earth's echoing walls
He bore thee off, with all its swells and falls,
The tide of tune for him thenceforth to urge.
Surely, such strains as thine might never die,
But, here though mute, must otherwhere throb high:
Surely, in heaven above thou dost prolong
The measures of thine unaccomplished song
And heark'nest, in some interstellar land,
The sphere-harp answer to thy pulsing hand.

MENDELSSOHN.

THIS of the children of the bride-chamber
Was, sure, who mourn not, for the bridegroom yet
With them abideth. Pure of passion's fret,
His song the springs of love and peace doth stir,
Brimming with bliss unmingled heart and ear,
As of the harps before the White Throne set,
That, with their golden jubilance, unlet
Of time, hymn on in heaven's eternal year.
Whilst in this weary world yet hearts there be,
Which forth unto sweet music fain must go,
Still shall his glory fill the lands, though he,
From fret of life and death delivered long,
The rapturous tides of heaven ebb and flow
Feeleth and hearkeneth to the angels' song.

BERLIOZ.

WHAT didst thou here, proud spirit, sad and stern,
In this stepmother world, where praise and fame
But seldom wait upon his living name
Whose high-plumed soul the accustomed ways doth spurn?
To thee alive thy France deaf ears did turn
And now, when all the world doth thee acclaim,
Waking too late to her undying shame,
Vain offerings pours upon thy funeral urn.
Ah would the Gods beyond the grave may some
Requital for thy life's long martyrdom
Foreordered have! May Shakspeare's mighty spright
With Byron, Virgil, Goethe there unite
With love to welcome thee and thanks and praise
And bind thy brows with sempervernal bays!

LISZT.

6. DIVINA COMMEDIA SYMPHONY.

Andante con moto quasi Allegretto.

THIS is the purging-place for things ill-done
And things left undone. In the twilit air
Of dawn, I mount Eld's purgatorial stair,
Whilst all about my way thought's fires there run,
Wherein Life's absolution must be won:
And at the hill-foot, upward as I fare,
For sign of hope and charm against despair,
The waters tremble in the waxing sun.
Here be no pangs of hell; no fiends affright
Our constance, as we urge our pilgrim way,
With eyes uplifted to the morrowing day;
Only the fining-fires of age contrite,
That, with their purging, purifying breath,
Befit us for the sacrament of death.

SMETANA.

RÊVE IN E (AU SALON).

ALL night through the dance and its mazes we swayed:
The folk murmured round us, I knew not of what;
A dream was upon me; I heeded them not,
As I lay in the arms of that loveliest maid.
The wind of the night in her tresses there played;
The stars through the casements their rays on us shot,
As we danced on together, the world all forgot,
To the music the flutes and the violins made.
Through orange-groves gleaming with flowerage and fruit
We floated, we twain, whilst, around and above,
The horn-notes, that blent with the voice of the flute,
Still mimicked the moan of the murmurous dove.
Had the flute-notes not failed and the horns fallen mute,
We had danced on for ever, myself and my love.

WAGNERIANA.

THE PEDIGREE OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN MUSIC.

HAYDN, thy hand 'twas first from heaven that brought
Promethean fire, fair music's failing light
Anew to kindle. From thy slackening might
The falling torch of song sweet Schubert caught
And bore it onward with the speed of thought,
Brightlier forever burning and more bright,
Till all too soon, for Time's untimeous spite,
He too must pass and leave his work half-wrought.
Then Berlioz took the fiery cross again
And bore it flaming over land and sea,
'Spite dearth and doubt and scorn, triumphantly,
Till to his succour other champions twain,
Wagner and Liszt, there came: and who were fain
To add a fourth unto these Thunderers three?

MENDELSSOHN.

MERKEL.

MAILIED, OP. 18, No. 1.

TEN o'clock of a morn of May!
The air wells over with wilding rhyme;
The throstle trills on the leafing lime:
“The nest is built on the bending spray;
“The eggs are hatching”; I hear him say.
“The summer cometh! With song 'tis time
“To hail the heart of the pleasant prime,
“The mid-Spring sweet of the dainty day.”
Come, throstle, trill me thy sweetest song!
God wot, we have languished over long
For Winter-weariness, thou and I!
Our best and brightest behoveth sing,
Whilst green the grass is and blue the sky;
Alack! for Summer is swift of wing.

LA COURSE À L'ABÎME.

(BERLIOZ'S FAUST).

MESEEMS, the World-Faust, through the ages' night,
Upon the courser of the Will-to-be,
Hurtling across Life's darkling plains I see.
Deaf are his ears and blinded is his sight;
He turneth not aside to left or right;
Nay, through the shadows and the darkness, he,
The Mephistophiles Democracy
Spurring, ensueth still his headlong flight.
He noteth not the spectres of the Past,
That on his either hand for warning rise;
He heedeth not the snakes of doom that hiss
About him nor the portents in the skies;
But, at the demon's instance, hard and fast,
Urgeth, unchecked, his course to the abyss.

SCHUBERT.

Symphony in C major.

AT THE PIANO.

AS o'er the answering keys my fingers stray,
The fluctuant fancies into music wooing
And through the haunts of harmony pursuing
The memories of many a bygone day,
The curtain of the Present drawn away
Is from my thought and with the veil's undoing,
The dear dead Past arises, the renewing
Seeking of that which moulders in the clay.
The loves of old once more I see resurging,
That long have slept beside the mouldered hates;
The olden joys and woes the dreamland's gates
Give up again and I, as o'er the abyss
Of thought I lean and watch the wraiths emerging,
Feel on my lips once more my first love's kiss.

FIELD'S NOCTURN, No. 16 IN F.

THE larks are up, abroad in heaven outflinging
Their gladsome cadences of golden rhyme;
Upon the ground bass of the cuckoo's chime
The wrens make descant; all the woods are ringing
With the glad noise of thrush and linnet bringing
Their happy homage to the pleasant prime:
It is the early sweet of Summer-time
And all the air is full of scent and singing.
But hark! Whence comes that minor cadence, breaking
The sweet concent of happy harmony,
As of some moaning surf, sad music making
Upon the beach-bend of a sullen sea?
It is the thought of loves laid waste, awaking
The surges of the sea of memory.

J. P. E. HARTMANN.

ANDANTINO SOSTENUTO IN B♭.

SLEEP, sleep, sad memories, and in your sleep
Be woven all into a dulcet dream.
Wherein, regenerate by the salving stream
Of fain forgetfulness, your sense shall steep
In that afar unfathomable deep
Of peace, that lies beyond the sunset-gleam
And on its bosom bears the Hesperian beam
To lands of rest, where hope in heaven shall reap.
Look through the painted pane of Time's effacement,
Life's sweets remembering and its sours forgetting,
And fill my soul with light of consolation,
Even as the sunlight of a stormful setting
Shines through some many-hued cathedral casement,
O'erflooding all with Faith's transfiguration.

VALLÉE D'OBERMANN.

(A VERSE-TRANSCRIPTION OF LISZT'S TONE-POEM).

IV. LITTERALIA.

DANTE.

WHEN I of poets dream, not Spenser sweet
Nor Hafiz high it is that holds my thought;
Nor Shakspeare, last for crowning wonder wrought;
Nay, in my mind I see Ravenna street
And there, head bowed beneath the noontide heat,
A black-robed dreamer fare, austere and haught,
With eyes turned inward, unregarding aught,
Who no man greeteth and whom none doth greet:
And as he goes, at him the passers-by
Point with scared looks and murmur, “This is he
“Who did hell-fire and purging pains aby.
“Mark but how black his cheeks and temples be!”
Fools, see ye not upon his brows hell's stress
Not only writ, but Heaven's approof no less?

SPENSER.

SPENSER, thou first inspirer of my song,
That o'er the hills and meads of Arcady
Thy radiant train of ladies sweet to see
And mail-clad knights the woodways lead'st along,
The eternal laws of honour, right and wrong
Still hymning, who is there can vie with thee
For dear delight and frolic fantasy?
Others in sterner measures and more strong
Of heaven and hell have sung and to a height
O'ervaulting thine have stopped the tuneful reed,
Of love and war discoursing, hap and need:
Yet from their thunder-tide the sated spright
Still to thy tempered woodlands takes its way
And turns for solace to thy leisured lay.

KEATS.

IF, in our English muster-roll of song,
Our nightingale was Shakspeare, Nature's son,
Milton our thrush, second (save him) to none,
Shelley our skylark lilting loud and long,
Thou wast the ousel of our tuneful throng,
That, in the solemn setting of the sun,
When all was silent else for day fordone,
Wakedst the woods with music sweet and strong.
Yet but brief time with us thou might'st abide:
Alack! La Belle Dame sans merci,
The woodnymph wild and sweet, the April-eyed
Strong sorceress, that men call Poesy,
Unsparing whom she loves , had thee in thrall
And to her heaven too soon did thee recall.

SCHOPENHAUER.

THOU, that hast weighed the world and found it nil,
That with the sword of thought hast rent apart
The inmost veil from off its quivering heart,
Meting the measure of its good and ill,
And as the leach that seeks to cure or kill,
Hast, to their eyes who shrink not from the smart
Of Truth's untempered, life-offending dart,
Bared all the workings of the wheels of Will;
The butt of brainless witlings who outright
All that's unflattering to their wit uncouth
And gross dull sense reject,—the mere dismay
Of those who fear to see the face of light,
Still in their hearts thou dwellest, come what may,
Who look for leading to the torch of Truth.

PARS POETAE.

LOVE AND SONG.

NEEDS must the poet early sing and late
Of Love, that is Life's spring and fountain-head,
Of Love, that dieth not, when all is dead,
That wreathes with flowers the sullen steps of Fate;
Nor, though the Fair he love and imprecate
Confusion on the Foul, upon his head
That evil doth no curse of him is said;
No room there is within his heart for hate.
Nay, since the most part of the poet's wit
From Love, that moves the stars, he hath to boon,
Still in the fair God's track his feet must run;
For song, that hath nor love nor faith in it,
To nothing may be likened but a moon
That unenlightened is of any sun.

SURSUM CORDA.

HAFIZ AND PAUL.

TWO in my thought still linked together be,
Hafiz, the singer of the clustering vine,
And Paul, the mystic of the Gnostic shrine,
As being, both alike, in ecstasy,
Beyond the bounds of earth and sky and sea,
In contemplation of the things divine
Still rapt and drunken with the spirit's wine,
Calénders of the soul's debauchery.
And in this heaven I joy of old and new,
Where bard and prophet mingle good and ill,
Where Antioch Fars, where Hafiz joins with Paul,
As being both deceivers and yet true,
Both sorrowful and yet rejoicing still,
Both having nothing, yet possessing all.

WORDSWORTH.

HERMAN MELVILLE.

NONE of the sea that fables but must yield
To Melville; whether with Whitejacket fain
We are to share, or Redburn, joy and pain;
Whether through Mardi's palaces, palm-ceiled,
We stray or wander in Omoo afield
Or dream with Ishmael cradled at the main,
High in the crow's-nest o'er the rocking plain,
Few such enchantments o'er the soul can wield.
But, over all the tale of Typee vale,
O'er all his idylls of the life afloat,
“The Whale” I prize, wherein, of all that wrote
Of Ocean, none e'er voiced for us as he
The cachalot's mad rush, the splintered boat,
The terrors and the splendours of the sea.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.

FRIEND of my youth, with whom I shared the chance
Of life for thirty years in joy and woe,
That hand in hand and heart in heart didst go
With me, though England's I and thou of France,
Thou hast fared on before me, in advance,
Into the mystic seas, to ebb and flow
Of time that answer not nor to and fro
Are shaken of the surge of circumstance.
Brother, farewell! I shall not see thee more;
I know that nevermore, for joy or pain
Our eyes shall meet, our hands shall clasp again;
Yet closelier, I doubt not, than of yore
Our souls shall join in some translunar sphere,
Where never Winter comes nor leaves are sere.

AUGUSTE VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM.

VILLIERS, old friend, strange spirit, weird but true,
Seeker of that which no man, new or old,
Of woman born might ever yet behold,
What sad sardonic Fate, in days undue,
Was it thy footsteps to the tomb that drew?
What Parcæ, lustres nine scarce overtold,
Put thy fair lamp out, froze thy hot blood cold,
Whilst yet the light of life in thee was new?
Alack, the abyss, by Fate's relentless law,
Once gazed upon, the life to it doth draw,
And thou, beyond the bounds of nights and days
Seeking, with straining hands and eyes that yearn,
Hadst trespassed on the undiscovered ways
And looked upon the Land of No Return.

THEODORE DE BANVILLE.

A songbird thou, if ever was there one!
Pure 'midst corruption, fearless 'midst affray,
Thou faredst still on thine unfaltering way,
In that sad France of thine, the self-undone,
Damned over self with victory never won.
A lark that never doubted of the day,
Thou sangest still, undaunted, on the spray
And through hate's mists look'dst ever for Love's sun.
Thou gav'st me love and comfort in the days
When my heart fainted for my soul's amaze;
Before mine eyes, bedimmed with sorrow's spell,
Thy hand it was that held hope's shining sign;
Nor ever shall I know thy parallel
For songful cheer and kindliness divine.

E. J. W. GIBB.

COMRADE, fare well, whose feet the untravelled East
Long time in equal measure trod with me!
From that fair land of flowers, where strand and sea
Shine with the sun of fable, last not least
Of those who for us Westerns spread the feast
Of Orient lore and Eastern poesy,
I ne'er shall look upon the like of thee
For love of song and care of bird and beast.
The pen is fallen from thine eager hand,
Death's finger laid upon the page undone:
Yet, in some interstellar Morning-land,
I doubt not but thy gentle soul shall find
Its earthly dreams fulfilled in heavenly kind,
Where Life and Death, where Love and Truth are one.

LECONTE DE LISLE.

“HOPE infinite,” saidst thou, “doth Death contain”.
When to Life's buttress-wall at the world's end
With death thou wonnest, Master mine and friend,
Whereas, Time's travel done, the soul full fain
Unto the eternal rest returns again,
What visions met thy view, what shapes did wend
Before thy glances, where the grey beach-bend
Of Life slopes down into Death's surgeless main?
Master, thou never shalt return to show
That which thou foundest in that shoreless sea;
Thou mayst not come to us; but we, to thee
O'erpassing, haply yet shall win to know
If there thy hopes accomplished thou didst see
Or the black night of blank Nonentity.

TRINITAS ANGLICA.

THREE names o'er all do glorify our land;
First his, whilere in England's mightiest day
Our stage illustrious over all for aye
Who made to many an undiscovered strand:
Next his, love, tears and laughter hand in hand
Unpeered to lead; and last, not least, to say,
His, on the canvas who in bright array
Set the whole glorious scheme by Nature planned.
Hereafterward, if any question make
Of thee what men have,—most of all the men
Writ down for great upon the roll of fame,—
For England's glory wrought with brush and pen,
These three for thine exemplars shalt thou take
And Shakspeare, Dickens, Turner shalt thou name.

WITH A COPY OF SULLY PRUDHOMME'S “LES VAINES TENDRESSES”.

HERE, for such as will, are roses;
None of that bright host that flowers,
At the beck of sun and showers,
When the middle May uncloses
All the rapture that reposes
In earth's frost-enchanted bowers;
Such as in the shortening hours
Blow are these for Autumn's posies.
Yet, for some they have their featness,
Gentle souls that from life's madness,
From its cruel cold completeness,
From its hot hysteric gladness
Shrink, content from love and sadness
Still to crush a curious sweetness.

POPULARITY.

TO him, who seeks what is not bought or sold,
Who will not bow the neck in servitude
Nor pander to the unthinking multitude,
Approof comes seldom till his bones are cold,
Or, at the least, until he waxeth old,
Till hope is dead and may not be renewed
And all that life can show of fair and good
Dead leaves and ashes grown, like elfin gold.
So to the poet popularity,
Denied in youth and given when on the wane
Are life and hope, is like the promised fee,
So long withheld and paid at last in vain,
That damned Mehmóud to all eternity,
The gifts that crossed Firdausi's funeral train.

V. UT PICTURA ------

PAN IM GEBÜSCH.

(A PICTURE BY HANS THOMA).

WHAT pip'st thou in the twilit thicket, Pan?
What dost thou here in this our day of June,
Thou that, long shut from sight of sun and moon,
Deforcing death's immitigable ban,
Revisitest the haunts and hours of man
And in our woodlands, where the ringdoves croon
Songs sad as life, re-trillst the olden tune
The blue bird fluted when the world began?
Back to thy grave, gray ghost, in Paxos Isle!
There, mid the moan of the Ionian main,
Under the sapphires of the Grecian sky,
All lapt and rounded with the warm sun's smile,
There dream thy dreams of sunny days gone by,
Far from our sad wan world of strife and pain.

LE CAPUCHON ROUGE.

(A PICTURE BY GREUZE).

WHEN all the world was young and fair,
When all earth's rills ran honey-dew
And all the firmament was blue,
In Eden we together were.
Two lovers on youth's golden stair,
Love's only sweets, indeed, we knew
And nothing of his bitter brew,
Nor ever heard the name of care.
Yet fair and young art thou to-day:
Upon me from the canvas there,
With thy red lips and artless air,
Thou look'st as if the world should ne'er
Grow old nor youth should pass away;
And I, alack! my head is gray.

MEDEA.

(A PICTURE BY F. SANDYS).

VENGEANCE, ye Gods! For I am wild with wrong.
Zeus, Heré, Ares, ye celestial mates,
And Phoebus, thou, that in the morning's gates
Thronest, invincible of shafts and song,
And Cypris, that, as thou art sweet, art strong,
And ye, ye grim inexorable Fates,
That over Gods and mortals hold your states,
Help me, that have endured too long, too long!
Me of mine enemies but justify,
That have no reverence for the most high Gods,
No thought of justice or the Furies' rods:
Then, ye Immortals, with your fiery cars,
Come, snatch your maiden back unto the stars,
To dwell with you forever in the sky!

BACCHANAL.

(A PICTURE BY ARNOLD BÖCKLIN).

WHO loveth girls and golden song,
Here let him come and have his will!
The sun above the heavenward hill
Yet hangs, and all the meads along,
The Winegod leads his winsome throng.
The merry month is with us still;
The world without a doubt of ill
Is glad or thought of Winter's wrong.
Alack! What hath our grayness here
With this glad Paynimrie to pass,
Our Winter with its golden year,
Who of Silenus but his ass,
Who know of Momus but his rod,
His tigers of the tipsy God?

DER TOD ALS FREUND.

(A PICTURE BY ALFRED RETHEL).

NEAR is the night of thy long day at hand.
Past is the Past, with all its joy and dole;
Life's mists are lifting from the appointed goal.
The sunset sleeps upon the slumbering land,
A mellow glory fall'n on sea and strand;
And with his hand of bone, Friend Death doth toll
The bell that parleys with the parting soul:
Almost the hour-glass empty is of sand.
Peace over all the landscape lies without
And peace within upon thy quiet end,
Life and its cares forgotten, hope and doubt,
Its storms all fallen stirless.—Heaven send
That, when my sands of life are running out,
Death by my side, as thine, may stand as friend!

GÖTTER IM WALDE.

(A PICTURE BY MORITZ SCHWIND).

I cannot heal me of the haunting care,
The backward yearning for a bygone day,
When things yet lived which live no longer may,
When the young world was, in a younger air,
On other wise than this our old world, fair.
Belike, 'tis idle; yet, in this our gray
Of modern lightlessness, mine eyes away
I cannot turn from the delights that were.
What boots the exile that 'twere wise to tell
Far from his fatherland content to dwell
Or him, that still in pine must live and die
In this our darkling dulness, he were well
Forget the Gods with whom, in dreams gone by,
He lived and loved beneath a brighter sky?

THE TWO POLES.

TWO poles of Art there be, the false, the true:
One negative, to whose plenipotence
Brute longing turns and sensual appetence
And humour shifting still from old to new:
The other, positive, the soul unto
Speaks and with Beauty sheer to heavens far hence
Above earth's mire uplifts the ennobled sense:
And all things gravitate between these two.
By this assay all spirits thou mayst test.
The high-tuned soul, in this our world of Will,
But Beauty follows, selfless and divine;
Whilst that to seek, which doth but interest
The Self, but stirs the ignoble sense, is still
The stamp and hall-mark of the Philistine.

INNOMINATA.

(A PICTURE BY MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZO).

A face upfloating through a shimmering sea
Of dreams, resurgent whether from the Past
Of Time, meknoweth not, or if forecast
Upon the Present's glass, as yet to be,
From the dim dreamland of Futurity.
But this I know, of women, first and last,
This only she from the Eternal Vast
Of the World's Soul it is that speaks to me.
These are her lips, whom I have sought in vain
Through many a devious waste of nights and days;
These are her starry eyes, whose wax and wane
Still were my beacons in the dreamland's ways;
And never shall I take her by the hand,
Until Death bring me to the Unknown Land.

THE RAPE OF PSYCHE.

(A PICTURE BY PRUDHON).

WHAT is yon slumbering maiden, wonder-white,
That, like a gossamer, through heaven fares,
Upborne and wafted of the frolic airs?
Psyche it is they bring, in brief delight
To dwell with Eros in his land of light.
Alack, poor maid, how many weary stairs
Must thou o'erclimb of toils and doubts and cares,
Ere full thy sense shall steep in thy lord's sight!
Sweet soul of the world's joys and woes, the hand
Of vengeful heaven is heavy upon thee.
True, Love is strong; but Fate supreme command
Hath over him nor suffereth him free
His own, or e'er, in darkness and in cold,
The appointed tale of sufferance be told.

JESUS ON LAKE GENNESARET.

(A PICTURE BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX).

“MASTER, we perish!” was the cry. “Awake!”
And he, the mystic, heaven-deputed guest,
That slumbered, cradled on the billows' breast,
And dreamed, untroubled of the storm-tossed lake,
Amid the winds' wail and the wild wave-break,
Of realms of peace beyond the golden West,
“Where is your faith?” said and the word, from rest
Rising, that stilled the raging waters, spake.
Alack for unbelieving humankind!
How many a Hercules, without their care,
Hath wrought and perished, on the mountain side
How many a high Prometheus erst hath pined,
How many a Christ, exclaiming in despair,
“Where is your faith?” upon Life's cross hath died!

EDWARD BURNE JONES.

“NOUGHT is there better in this world than sleep,”
The Arabs say; “excepting death it be”.
Sweet sleep in death and happy dreams to thee,
Fair soul, that still on earth didst vigil keep,
Life all too short the lovely shapes to reap,
That through thy brain went trooping ceaselessly,
Pleading in colour and in form to be
Bodied and rescued from the dreamland's deep!
The lovesome memories of a brighter day
Thou limnedst, to thy pencil, as my pen,
Dear, when more colour was in life and men
Were simpler than beneath our skies of gray.
Friend, may we meet in some serener land,
Where our lost dreams shall take us by the hand!

VALEDICTORY.

(J. T. N., OB. AUG. 31, 1902).

YOUR name, set down among the names unknown
New-numbered of the innumerable rout,
Wherewith Death rounds our little lives about,
Falls on my heart, like the sepulchral stone.
You loved me not; nay, for your thought alone
You loved, your wayward thought, that would not out,
That mured you lifelong in a mist of doubt
And died with you, to blossom yet unblown.
Yet I, I loved you, as I loved my youth,
And with your death, though many a wave of days
And nights hath welled between our lives, since last
They met, yet somewhat of my Spring of sooth
And dream, methinks, into the darkling haze
Hath sunken of the insatiable Past.

VI. VARIA.

OUR DEAD.

WORK.

OFT have I marvelled, in my sadder mood,
At reading, in the Scriptures of the Jew,
—The race that never yet set hand to do
That which of others done procure they could,
Drawers of water hewers nor of wood,
—Work worst set down of all that makes us rue,
For primal curse that men is born unto
Branded, for chiefest ill life's chiefest good.
Yet that the dictum of the Therapeut,
Of Paul, the Essenian doctor and adépt,
Whose speech for Christ, professing, we accept,
In these our days of vain hysteric heat,
I marvel more, hath borne such scanty fruit,
“Who will not labour, neither let him eat!”

IN MEMORIAM “ROVER”, OB. JULY 2, 1902.

MY little gentle cat, whose eyes no dove
Might ever match for truth and tenderness,
Whose life was one long effort to express,
In thy mute speech, an overflowing love,
The wavering love of women far above,
I cannot think that death thy gentilesse
Hath ended all or that thy fond excess
In this thy ten years' span found scope enough.
I cannot credit that no soul in bond,
No thought there was behind those wistful eyes,
That pleaded for thy dumbness, as one cries
Out from Life's dusk into the dark beyond,
Nor doubt somewhen beyond the stars to find
The soul that lay those looks of thine behind.

MARTYRS OF HISTORY.

WO GÖTTER SIND NICHT ------

“WHEREAS no Gods are, phantasms hold sway”.
Thus he who sang of how the Fates did fill
To Wallenstein the cup of good and ill:
And so say I, in this our meaner day,
When all men worshipped once is passed away
Into oblivion and the idol Will
On our Olympus sole abideth still,
The one base God to whom we bend and pray.
Here, where, in darkness indisseverable,
Love, honour, faith are sunken and no light
Is left to guide us 'midst the utter gloom,
Save that of levins hurtling through the night,
The ways of phantasms of coming doom
Are full; our lives the larvæ haunt of hell.

MENS ANGLICA.

“YOU English have the passion of fair play”,
Quoth France's daintiest living novelist.
How oft hath England what with armoured fist
From the embattled world she rent away
For conscience' sake back given again and aye
Bare thanks for magnanimity hath missed,
Foul thanklessness and hate, that might not list
But wax with benefits, but had to pay!
Yet she forbeareth; for forbearance still
The token is of the superior race
And magnanimity the mark of grace.
Like the Third Henry of the Valois line,
Betrayed she may be, often is, in fine,
But deceived never, rendering good for ill.

TO MAX EBERSTADT IN WILLESDEN CEMETERY.

MY thought to that sad January day
Goes back of half a score of years ago,
When underneath the newly melted snow
The last of that bright wit was laid away,
That eager thought, that with its sunny play
Of love and humour held our hearts aglow,
And we the last sad homage, here below
That loved thee, standing by thy grave, must pay.
Max, shall I never talk with thee again
Of all we loved and none enough but we,
Of Dickens, Dumas, Gautier, (peerless three!)
Liszt, Wagner, Schopenhauer? Woe is me!
How many a part of this sad heart and brain
Of mine is buried in thy grave with thee!

ON THE LIMPOPO. 1900.

“WE, that are Englishmen”, he cried, “shall we
“Run from these dirty Dutchland dogs?” Scarce might
The little band that battled for the right
Against the ambushed foemen, one to three,
Make head, and some began to yield and flee;
When, with these words, into the middle fight
Rushed valiant little Plumer and the flight
Retrieving, of defeat made victory.
Three years have past since this brave deed befell;
Yet, trumpet-like, my heart the tale doth stir
With the assurance that, though heaven and hell
Combine against her, all with England well
Shall be, whilst yet such sons to succour her
She hath as Plumer, Powell, Kitchener.

TRANS ASTRA.

BEYOND the stars! What is beyond the stars?
We question still,—beyond those lamps of gold,
That all things mortal, whether new or old,
Shakspeare as Hafiz, England even as Fars,
Ruin as happiness and peace as wars,
With the like loveless constancy behold,
Each as the other pensive, pale and cold,
Venus as Mercury and Jove as Mars?
No more, grown sadly wise for clearer sight,
We look to find new heavens beyond the blue,
New Paradisal worlds of love and light;
Ourselves resign yet cannot plain on plain
But past the stars to seek of Space inane,
Through Time and Silence stretching still anew.

HERCULIS COLUMNÆ.

BEYOND Gibraltar strait, the narrow seas
'Twixt Spain and Africa, on either hand,
Guarding as 'twere, two mounds heaven-pointing stand
Of stone o'erweathered of the briny breeze,
The Pillars erst so-called of Hercules.
Hither the hero won and having scanned
Waters and skies nor sign of farther strand
Perceiving, for world's end erected these.
We of the Viking breed, for bound nowise
Content illimitable seas and skies,
As Hercules, to take, the world have gone
About, from set of sun to break of dawn,
And for new worlds to conquer still a-strive,
Are like to die of wistfulness, like Clive.

ΠΕΡΙΛΕΙΜ(ΜΑ ΕΘΝΙΚΟΝ.

HOW long shall we the pregnant words o'erhear,
Unheeding, in the Hebrew Writ that stand,
“The poor shall never cease out of the land”?
How long silk purse to fashion of sow's ear
Strive and to cause the dregs of race run clear?
How long with dulcet speech and usance bland
Seek to tame rat and wolf, that understand
No law but force, that know no faith but fear?
When shall we learn that kindness cruelty
Sheer is to him that is his passions' slave,
That from himself there's nothing him can save,
From Death's red furnace-mouth and ruin's maw,
But discipline, enforcing Truth's decree,
And stern fulfilment of an equal law?

LOVE AND REASON.

“A woman, at some time of year, 'tis true,
“Is necessary; but no business make
“Of her.” Thus Fletcher's stout old soldier spake,
In those plain times when all of what all do
Were not ashamed to speak, nor that, from view
By hiding, thought to quell, for prudery's sake,
Which from the very source its root doth take
Of natural life in all things old and new.
Could we but live by sage Leontius' saw
And in our loves unto attemperance hold
And reason keep and understanding's law,
What states had thriven, that fell to ruin red,
What hearts were warm, that long ago are cold,
What faiths and hopes were live, that now are dead!

“SPORT”.

“BUT for amusements, life were tolerable”,
So said the sage; and certes, what in court
And hall and street “amusement” men report
Is weariness for those, past words to tell,
To whom true pleasure is delectable
And highest, noble work; whilst, what for “sport”
Alas! is holden of the baser sort,
What for the nobler sense were direr hell
Than our dumb fellows' pain to see, to hear
The rabbit's scream, the hare's despairing cry,
To meet the dying bird's fast-glazing eye,
Reproachful for its life of harmless cheer
Crushed out by fools, who nothing better know
Than to find pleasure in another's woe?

SPES CRUDELIOR.

EXCEPT for hope, our lives at peace might be.
Worst gift of the sardonic Gods to men,
That of the Nine Beatitudes mak'st ten,
For that of all creation blest is he
Who nought expects, we should not, but for thee,
NOW possible neglect for hopeless THEN;
We should not wallow in the worldly fen,
When with desire despair off-cast might we.
Excepting thou into the fruitless fight
Urgedst us back, we long aside had laid
The hopeless stress toward the mocking light,
That still, the more we follow, more doth fade,
And an eternal harbour for the spright
In Resignation's sanctuaries had made.

FALSE SLAVERY AND TRUE.

MUCH in these prating times of ours hath been
Of slavery discoursed and sung and writ,
But mostly, as meseems, with little wit.
For if (as surely), slavery service mean,
Who is there here but serveth? king and queen,
Peasant and noble, all in service knit
Each unto other, as is well and fit,
So but the wage do to the work convene.
One slavery but there is, of all that be,
Intolerable, making Gods to weep,
The slavery of the wise and passion-free
To those that serve their lusts, of good to ill,
Noble to base. From such a slavery still
God of His grace our kindly England keep!

CATKIND AND HUMANKIND.

MY cat, that sits and sleeps upon my knee,
For sheer intelligence, with men I know
Not only can compare, but, high or low,
Few reach his standard of morality.
That which I do for him he renders me
With love and faith such as few humans show,
Rejoices when I come and when I go,
Cries at my door nor comforted will be.
His spreading ruff, his bushy tail and hair
For vanity sufficing him content:
He does not pine the power with me to share
Nor on the delegation is he bent,
—To harass me who pay for him and care,—
Of representatives to Parliament.

THE CREATION OF WOMAN.

WHEN God an end of making man had wrought,
Flesh of His flesh and blood of His own blood,
He looked upon His work and deemed it good;
Then, overcasting in His pregnant thought
That which in time yet unaccomplished brought
To pass should be, how that His handwork should
Himself defy and in his upstart mood,
Vie with his maker, sighed and knew it naught:
Yet that His glorious work might not undo;
But, casting round for a device whereby
He might forefend Him from His creature new,
Bethought Him to his strivings to apply
A check and woman made, to clog his wings
And hinder him from over-venturings.

RIGHTS AND DUTIES.

LONG of their rights alone have we to men
Enough discoursed; yea, overlong about
To stir their souls to discontent and doubt
Have gone, till all our world is as a fen,
With exhalations foul and meteors vain
Of wish and will fulfilled, a rabble-rout
Of sensual dreams wherein no grass will sprout,
No flowers will blow, fruit ripen neither grain.
Them of their duties, surely, to bespeak
High time it is, of duty,—moon and sun
Which holdeth in their course of day and night,
Which is the star of life for strong and weak,—
And that high prophet's speech, who said, “No right
“Is but ariseth from a duty done.”

NATURA NATURANS.

NATURE concerns herself not much with man.
So but the stream of race run full and free,
All's well for her; the individual she
Leaves for himself to shift as best he can.
“Sleek men, that sleep o' nights”, best fit her plan,
(As Caesar's), such as unconflictingly,
Bound to the car-wheels of the Will-to-Be,
Eat, drink and slumber out their little span.
Of this it is that she, from birth to death,
The human animal still pampereth,
—Those, in whom soul place over body claims,
Rebating,—and that women, who the tools
Immediate are, by which she shapes her aims,
Do for the most part love and tender fools.

ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN HORSE-HOLOCAUST.

OF all these grim three years of grief and gore,
There's nought so stirs the source of tears in me
As the sad myriads from oversea
Of horses brought, to perish without store.
Ah, England of my love, my heart is sore
To think what load of penance laid on thee
In the grim Future, what calamity,
Dearth, famine, pestilence, intestine war,
Must for the wrongs of the true horse atone,
Man's patient, loving slave, for faith inbred
And native virtue worth a world of Boers,
Forsaken on the arid Afric moors,
Offcast to die, despairing and alone,
With the vile vultures hovering round his head.

HILLFOOT AND SUMMIT.

IF there's a good on earth, it is content.
“I never was content, i'faith, not I!
“No hillside was too steep, no peak too high,
“But I must buckle to for the ascent.
“So hath Fate fooled me to my topmost bent;
“For Life is like an Alp; one peak past by,
“Another towers higher 'gainst the sky,
“Between the climber still and his intent.”
How better far to tarry in the vale
And from the base the mountain-top to view!
There, at the least, the sky's not gray, but blue;
The sun is warm and bright, not chill and pale,
As in the summit's over-subtle air;
And one is spared the swink of getting there.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE.

HERE have we but the Present: with the Past
Nor with the Future our concernments are.
Past is the Past, the Future overfar.
Since that which now is with us will not last,
Why leave unjoyed the life that flits so fast,
Why from the sight of sun and moon and star
Hide in the dark, when all before us are
The deserts of Eternity the vast?
Why with the Past concern us, since Time's plough,
Present and past, the selfsame soil doth ear
And the same fruits of joy and pain doth rear?
Why with the Future? Since foregoing men
Were no wise happier when the Now was Then,
How were we happier, if the Then were Now?

OIGNEZ VILAIN, IL VOUS POINDRA ------

“CARESS a churl”, the ancient adage says,
“And he will cuff you. Cuff him till he yell,
“And he'll caress you”. If you've wit to spell
The meaning of these words, in Life's wild ways
Safe shall you walk and easance have and praise.
But, if you use not as the saw doth tell
And with the vulgar seek by doing well
And love to commerce, you will reap amaze;
Yea, for repentance cause you shall enough
Have and your life long feed on bitter food
Of hatred and contempt; for everywhen
Of one consent 'twas holden of wise men
That everywhere the base unthankful chuff
Ill offices returneth still for good.

JUNE 11, 1903.

SERVIA, thou name-devoted, sorry LAND
OF SERFS to their own lusts, how long with thee,
In the sad name of lawless Liberty,
Shall Gods and men endure? How long, unbanned,
Unblasted of His thunders, shalt thou stand,
In the sheer sight of heaven and earth and sea,
Outraging all that right and truth decree,
With ravin-reddened brows and bloody hand?
Since men forbear thee, since the avenging flame
Of heaven yet laggeth, I, that see and hear
Midmost my dream and shudder, in the name
Of all whose hearts with love and pity stir,
Ban such as thou, thou woman-murderer,
Back to that nether hell from which they came.

ENGLAND'S GOD.

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

TWO WAYS OF LOVE.

MOST love is like a stormy Summer day,
That roars and blusters through the hours of light;
Then, when the slackening sun brings on the night,
Without word spoken, falls and dies away;
Nor is there aught of all its tyrant sway,
Save some few lopped-off boughs, that meets the sight,
And haply some stray bird, struck down in flight;
But all 'tis gone, as if it were not aye.
Yet Love, that's worth the name, is othergate:
Like an October day, more gently fair
And less unstable than the Summer's glare,
It till the night prolongs its sober state;
And when with evening needs it must abate,
Affection's sunset glorifies its air.

CONSCRIPT AND VOLUNTEER.

BE mindful, England, of thy heroes dead,
Who on the sun-dried deserts oversea
Lie, slain of cunning or of treachery.
In all thine isle of mists and manlihead
Scarce was a household but one darling head,
Heedless of aught but truth and loyalty,
Gave unrepining up for love of thee,
Thy wounds to med'cine with its best blood shed.
Be mindful, over all, that these were none
Who by the iron rod of ruthless law
Were driven as sheep into the red blind maw
Of ravening war; nay, each, clerk, peasant, peer,
Of his free will left all that makes life dear,
To die for thee beneath the Afric sun.

“A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS!”

THIS world a cage is (old Bandello says)
Full of an infinite variety
Of fools. Since God made heaven and earth and sea
And setting folly in the place of praise,
The world's brows with a fool's cap bound for bays,
Was ever such a rabble-rout to see
As that which squeaks and gibbers, fancy-free,
In these our Will-intoxicated days?
Midas of old was fain his asses' ears
To hide nor bared his blame for all to know:
But now each coxcomb, when the maggot spurs,
In hall and highway, mart and street and school,
Goes glorying in his shame and crying, “Lo!
“With what a peerless grace I play the fool!”

LUX IN ANIMÂ.

THE sage, sole-sitting in the forest hoar,
Moveless and mute, beneath the banyan-tree,
The world forsworn and all its vanity,
Fixeth his thought upon the unknown shore
Whereto our lives, returning evermore,
Are merged again in the unbottomed sea,
The shoreless ocean of Eternity,
That round our little day doth plash and roar.
Still through the years he sitteth, stark and dumb,
Till there a light ariseth in his soul,
Which, waxing aye, as in a flaming scroll
Graven, discov'reth him Life's secret sum,
Concentred in this word ineffable,
“In thee alone are Gods and Heaven and Hell.”

MY LADY DEAD.

VEDANTASARA.

THE END OF THE ÆON.

THE end of the old order draweth nigh;
The air is thick with signs of coming change;
Forebodings vague through all men's fancies range,
Dim clouds of doubt, that overcast the sky,
And mists of fear, that darken every eye.
In hut and hall, in town and tower and grange,
Men's souls are sick with visions void and strange,
Delirious dreams of those about to die.
No faith there is but is a phantom grown
Of its old self; the Gods by doubt and Fate
Are frozen back to shapes of senseless stone.
All eyes are fixed upon the Future's gate,
For that which is to be, and all things wait
To hail the coming of the Gods unknown.

THE RETURN OF THE GODS.

METHINKETH, yet, our time of toil and pain
Shall pass and all the clouds of care and spleen,
That, since the coming of the Nazarene,
Over the blighted earth have brooding lain,
Shall melt away and life grow glad again.
The sun shall have its primal Pagan sheen
And in a world new-ransomed and serene,
The old frank friendly Gods return to reign.
Back to Time's limbos heaven shall fare and hell;
Zeus shall smile down on us from sapphire skies
And joy have leave once more with men to dwell:
Phoebus shall cheer us with his cloudless sight
And Cytherea with her starry eyes,
And Eros have again his ancient right.

THE RETURN TO BARBARISM.

IN the world's youth, men rule by count of head;
The ignoble many crush the finer few
And all confusion is 'twixt false and true,
Till certain of the wise, the state nigh dead
Reviving, with much toil and much blood shed,
Law's checks impose upon the unruly crew,
And wholesome governance and order due
Grow with the rule of those to ruling bred.
But, in its second childhood, children like,
Authority and discipline that spurn
And in their appetites uncurbed will be,
The world descends again into the dyke
And wallows, swine-like, in the lewd return
To barbarism of democracy.

EDUCATION TRUE AND FALSE.

THE cry in this our dear quack-ridden day
For popular education is, and we,
Whose backs already overburthened be,
Must needs, to educate the castaway
In French and Greek and freehand drawing, pay,
And that each liege his leisures may at gree
Charm with cat-consternating harmony,
Banjo and mandoline must teach him play.
Meanwhile, some minor matters, which of yore
Not without weight and import holden were,
Omitted are from our arbitrament,
Nor to the commons teach we any more
Such toys as reverence for good and fair,
Truth, honour, manners, modesty, content.

THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS.

SMALL is our age for better and for worse:
Small in its good, as in its wickedness;
Small in its aim, in its performance less:
Small is its benison and small its curse;
Its art is small and smaller yet its verse.
Small are its men and women, strife and stress,
And small its thoughts, hopes, fears, wish, carefulness;
Nought hath it great, save vanity and purse.
So, with its little sweets, its little strife,
Its little goods and ills, its little spell
Shall it outfool; and when the term assigned
Accomplished is, of this its paper life,
Once flared away in Time's unpitying wind,
Leave but a little ash and an ill smell.

THE NEW INVASION OF THE BARBARIANS.

WHEN I consider this our modern whirl,
Where all the links of life are rent apart
And all things holy, honour, faith, love, art,
Cower at the mercy of the invading churl,
Meseems, the Huns once more I see unfurl
Their banners on the heights, ere to the heart
Of the old world they surge and town and mart
And temple swamp with their resistless swirl;
Save that, to day, no saving streams there come,
Fresh from Life's fountain-head, the world's repair
To work; but from the abysses of Time's sea
The rotting wrecks of race, the ages' scum,
Float up upon the flood and fill the air
With the miasmas of putrescency.

SUPERSTITION.

THOSE who at superstition use to rail
Are blind and deaf to all that is of yore
Recorded of the unrelenting war
Waged by the ruthless Fates against the frail
Sad sons of man,—who, that they might not fail,
Must from sheer sufferance learn the spells that o'er
Their foes unseen prevail;—nor know, this lore
Obscure, they scoff at as an idle tale,
The sum, upon experience's page
Deep-charactered, of thought, in many an age,
Concentred on the endeavour is to find
The natural magic which propitiates
And of their dreadful purpose baulks the blind,
Deaf Gods, the eyeless and the earless Fates.

PROGRESS ------ OVER THE CLIFF.

MESEEMS,—in this our democratic day,
When every wholesome check against abuse,
All lawful reverence and kindly use,
From wiser times inherited, away
Are swept, to give men's lusts the freer play,
When open stands Will's Revolution-sluice
And every dunce full freedom to the deuce
(None other!) has of going his own way,—
The world is like to one that stands, blindfold,
On a cliff-edge, above a raging deep,
What while his fellows hearten him be bold
Nor back a step for sake of safety go,
But, in the name of Progress, o'er the steep
Push on and plunge into the abyss below.

TURK AND SLAV.

NE'ER could I deem the Turk “unspeakable”,
For treason foul he did in blood repress,
Nor wherefore “Slav” should “angel” spell might guess.
Here a folk have we, sober, honourable,
True, clean, brave, honest, all that's fair and well,
And there a race name-doomed, for drunkenness
Theft, sloth, filth, treachery branded and no less
Stained with a soil of lust indelible.
Dark are the days and all the dim To-be
With murk of doubt o'ermisted is for me:
Natheless, I hope to see the conquering Turk,
Regenerate, yet the dregs of Slavdom bring
Back to the one sole necessary thing,
Duty in quiet done and wholesome work.

THE LAST OF THE GODS.

OF all the Gods, for Love my heart is sore,
For Love, that was so frank and fair a thing,
That had so vague and sweet a voice to sing
To our tired sense. Since to the unknown shore,
With all his glamours, he is gone before,
How shall the world again be glad in Spring,
How shall the earth again with blossoming
Be clad or have delight of Summer more?
And yet, and yet, sad heart, be comforted:
Love, of a truth, is not for ever dead;
He sleepeth but for weariness of woe
And sheer despite of this our world of show
And yet will lift again his lovesome head
And take again his arrows and his bow.

THOUGHT AND TRUTH.

FEW for themselves there are who think and fewer
Who an abstráct idea can receive
And follow, unconditioned, who can cleave,
For their life's guidance, unto duty pure
And natural truth, unqualified by lure
Of heaven or threat of hell, but, to believe,
Must clutch at some God's garments nor to leave
Their mythologic crutches can endure.
To harbour on the snow-clad heights of Truth,
Alone with the bare soul, and in the thought
To delve for knowledge of the Must and Ought,
This is the portion of the few, forsooth,
Who in those lands of light can breathe and bear
The coldness of that interstellar air.

PERSONALITY.

MOST of all things which threaten in Death's Must,
We dread the loss of personality.
Though, in our own despite, we know that we,
Once dead, like all things else, must rot and rust
And mingle with the everlasting dust,
That is the stuff of earth and heaven and sea,
Nor evermore return ourselves to be
What once we were, the just as the unjust;
Yet, to the thought of some vague power we cleave,
Beyond the clouds, at will that can unweave
The warp and weft of Nature and of Fate,
Nor can our selves abandon nor forswear
The meeting at the Morning's golden gate
With those who here of us belovéd were.

THE GOD OF THE PAST.

A tyrant slave bound to the wheels of Fate,
Forever forced to be all creatures' bane,
The eternal spring of grief and woe and pain,
The minister of universal hate
And terror, still 'twixt man and man breedbate
And brute and brute to be, for ever fain
His own and all things' misery to ordain,
In His immortal self reduplicate;
The Maker, at whose will the world He made
Was doomed in hell, for faults of Him foresaid,
To burn, Himself self-doomed, in chains self-cast,
With all things' curses heaped, a baleful life
To lead, with all as with Himself at strife;
Such was the God whose power is of the Past.

THE GOD OF THE FUTURE.

VII. THE SILVER AGE.

THE SILVER AGE.

OCULO RETORTO.

IF I might turn the river of the years
Back to its fountain-head and at the spring
Of the Prime Cause drink life's requickening,
I would not seek from the consenting spheres
Lost youth, with all its idle smiles and tears,
Nor with dead Love prevail again to sing
His syren songs of sempiternal Spring,
Nor crave return of manhood's hopes and fears.
I would but ask to draw yet once again
The full fresh breath of frank and fearless life,
To feel once more, now time is on the wane,
Unmarred by any sense of doubt or strife,
The innocent, the ignorant disdain,
The child-unconsciousness of joy and pain.

ET EGO ------

THOUGH long ago it is, God wot,
Since I at Cupid's altars knelt,
I, too in Arcady have dwelt
And shared whilere the lover's lot;
Nor, though the blood no more is hot
Within my veins, that I have smelt
Its roses and its breezes felt
Yet in my dreams have I forgot.
Nay, in this life of every day,
Anon, the old Elysian strain
Makes for a breathing-space its way
The mists of eld and usance through
And I in Arcady am fain
Awhile to live and love anew.

LUCUS DEORUM.

PORTO INVENTO.

THE time is sick with toil and care and sin;
Life's arteries are choked with doubt and strife;
In all its ways Will's brambles, thick and rife,
Hinder his feet that fain to peace would win;
The world without is rotten and within.
No drug will serve; the canker of our life
Calls for the mercy of the surgeon's knife;
The case is past the approof of medicine.
But we, our day to evening drawing near,
Time-taught the real from the things that seem
To know, absolved from hope and doubt and fear,
Here in this backwater of thought we dream,
Content to suffer, with unsorrowing eye,
Life's senseless whirl of chances lapse us by.

HYPNEROTOMACHIA.

BYTIMES from this my dream I wake
And look on life, as it goes by,
Beneath the wondering, pitying sky,
And pity, too, on men I take;
Yea, fain, to ease my spirit's ache,
To venture out with them I sigh
And to the Gods lift hand, that I
May succour them for sorrow's sake.
Alack! In vain to heaven I sue:
What have they, this with that, to do,
The world, with all its troubled streams
Of strife and turmoil, old and new,
Its things that are, its things that seem,
And I, a dreamer with my dream?

LIFE'S SUMMING-UP.

RE INFECTÂ.

ONE thing I do regret and only one;
By token that I feel I'm drawing nigh
The ending of my day and soon must die,
My harvest yet unreaped, my work undone,
The riches of my soul revealed to none:
For poetry like plants is, that deny
To flower their best beneath a frowning sky,
Without their portion due of soil and sun.
So, like Kheyyám, with heart fulfilled I go
Of vain regrets, for that the seed and germ
Of many a fair conceit in me I know,
Which, had Fate smiled and folk been less purblind,
With bloom and fruit had gladdened humankind,
But now must be the portion of the worm.

NEARING PORT.

HOPE and sorrow, smiles and sadness,
Doubt and surety, glee and dole,
Hast thou fed thy full, my soul:
Grief galore and little gladness,
Goodness hast thou known and badness.
Pause and ponder now the whole,
In the distance since thy goal
Glimmers through Life's maze of madness.
Now thy day is near its ending,
Now thy travel home is tending,
Now Life's night is near its morrow,
Conscience clear and quiet mind,
Duty done, 'spite pain and sorrow,
Nothing else of worth thou'lt find.

MORS JANUA VITÆ.

A lapse into the surgeless sea of Night;
Long devious wanderings in the darkling ways;
Some little blinded pause of blank amaze,
Of hands uplifted to the eternal height;
Some little straining of the astonied spright
For thought and cognizance, athwart the haze
Of nothingness, wherewith Death overlays
The deadened sense; and then a flood of light;
A conscience of the at last accomplished goal,
Of Past for ever past, of Present sole,
Without To-be abiding, in a clime
Of peace unchanging, quit of Space and Time,
Of all life's troubles ended for the soul,
Of Self resolved into the Eternal Whole.

MORTUIS DILECTIS.