Flower o' the thorn :: :: University of Virginia Library

Flower o' the thorn

A book of wayside verse: By John Payne

Payne, John (1842-1916)

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[dedication]

[Flower o' the thorn]

ARCADIA IN URBE.

SUN AND SHADOW.

MARTYRS OF HISTORY.

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iii

Per le selvatiche ombre, disiando, Qual di fuggir qual di veder lo sole, Allor si mosse contra il fiume, andando,

Picciol passo con picciol seguitando.

Dante.

Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Werth. Nietzsche.

TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

viii

[Flower o' the thorn]

Flower o' the thorn,
The flower that bloweth of scaith and scorn!
Though foul of faring and stern of sight,
The thorn-path leads to the place of light.

Flower o' the thorn!
What if with plucking the hands be torn?
Was ever blossom so blithe and gay
As that which mantles the thorn in May?

Flower o' the thorn!
Though rough the wreath to the brows forlorn,
No crown, bethink thee, my soul, for less
Than God or poet with thorns they tress.

ARCADIA IN URBE.

INGATE.

STRANGE city of my love and hate,
These to thy name I dedicate,
These snatches of Life's undersong,
O'erhearkened through the hurtling throng
Of sounds that for our saddened ears
Make up thy symphony of tears
And toil. No cullings of my choice,
—Harmonics of thine organ-voice
Titanic, sounding night and day
About my listening soul, are they,
That, at their will, from time to time,
Alight and robe themselves in rhyme.

Some day, belike, when, every stone
From other rent and overthrown,
No more the giant city stands,
Some wanderer from distant lands
Among the ruins, in some nook,
Will happen upon this my book
And turning o'er the leaves to find
Remembrances remained behind
Of all her great and glorious day,
Long faded into nought, will say,
“Here, in this page unknown, unread,
“There lives the soul of London dead.”

THE LAND OF THE MORNING-CALM.

Um die gemeine Deutlichkeit der Dinge Den goldnen Duft der Morgenröthe webend. Schiller.

I WAKEN in the flush of dawn.
The feast of darkness done and gone,
With all the age-accustomed state,
The halcyon heavens celebrate.
Already, see, the uncertain hue,
As nacre fumed, of daybreak new
Unto a rosy flush gives place;
And that, in turn, from Heaven's face,
Slow-paling, fades and bares to view
A virgin bell of wind-washed blue,
The wede of peace and pureness worn
Of new-renascent summer morn.

Light waxes with each waxing breath.
As for Life's victory over Death,
June o'er the sleeping town unfurls
Its oriflamme of gold and pearls.
The sun is out of bed at four
And issuing from the Orient door,
Beams, in the tender-coloured sky,
His blandliest for such as I,
Who lovers born and bonded are,
Beneath some solitary star,
The ways to wander, where and when
They uninfested are of men.
Full at my window in he looks
And grapples me with golden hooks,

As who should bid me, “Lover mine,
Come out and quaff my wonder-wine,
Before Day's dull and tedious tale
Its early morning freshness stale.
Up! Up!” He laughs; for well, him nay,
The glad rogue knows, I cannot say.
So up and forth I go and fare
With him alone the morning air.

Still all about the folk sleep sound;
The streets are consecrated ground,
Sacred to silence, nothing heard,
Except some half-awakened bird,
That stammers out, as best he may,
His drowsy matins to the Day.
In all the world, save bird and sun
And me, meseems, astir is none.

A new world rises, as I go,
Around me in the morning-glow,
A world of purity and peace,
Of dearth unrecking or increase.
The city, in the lustral fires
Of dawning purged of void desires
And purified of strife in vain,
Soars up, a many-steepled fane,
A vast unworded voice of prayer,
Ascending through the stainless air.

Nay, what is come of London's grime?
But yesterday, at eventime,
The flocking ways were all aflood
With cataracts of crass and mud.
Yet now all purged they are of mire:

The grizzled walls to Heaven aspire,
Clean, innocent and glorified,
Transfigured of the hallowtide.
The streets unsullied show; each stone,
It seems to me, is precious grown:
There's nothing common or unclean
Beneath the stainless Morning seen.

Soon from the stony wastes of street
On street by my accustomed feet
I'm borne to where the lonelier ways
Go winding, wandering through a maze
Of thronging trees, all full in leaf,
The firstlings of the Summer's sheaf,
And all the houses nest in bowers
Of shrubs and creepers, grass and flowers.
There, too, all sleep; and I, I fare,
Still steeping in the reverend air
My ravished soul, my lonely mood
Rejoicing in the solitude
And the sweet hour, now fitting words
To the wild ditty of the birds,
That, sheltered from th'undistant crowd,
As in the woods and fields sing loud,
Now pausing by the way to pat
And barter greetings with some cat,
That, on wall-top or window-place
High-perched, sits washing of her face:
For cats, like poets, all above,
The wild free life of Nature love
And lonesome liberty withal,
And oftentimes, at Morning's call,
When all with early dew is wet,
What while the duller dog is yet

Asleep and snoring, hill and lawn
Beseek, to wait upon the dawn.

What benison is in the breeze!
With what an ecstasy the trees
Sway to its wafts, as tow'rd the sky,
That bends on them its soft blue eye
In benediction, they aspire
And to the rhythm of the choir
Stir of the feathered hosts that hymn
The morning's victory o'er the dim
Dead Night and Day newborn and mild
And guileless as a little child!

Wandering I go, content to be
In unison with bird and tree,
To have no soul, no thoughts but share
With grass and flowers and skies and air,
To be, beneath the assaining sun,
With universal Nature one.

How holy is the Morning's mood!
How steeped in sacred solitude!
Who is't can think of worldly things,
When in the lift the laverock sings,
Who but must cast his cares and pains,
When in the heavens the dayspring reigns,
When the thrush carols loud and free
And the finch flutes in hedge and tree,
When earth anew, beneath the dawn,
Is born and safe from sight withdrawn,
The blackbird on the leafing limes
His rapt “O Salutaris!” rhymes?

Joying I go, not only glad,
But that I ever have been sad
Forgetting and with heart a-brim
For solace, hearken to the hymn
Of many-mingling prayer and praise,
That rises from the leafy ways.
Nay, to these voices listening,
That to my soul a rapture bring
Of peace and purity contrite,
Feel, as I fare, my soul washed white
In lustral tides of morning light
And mundified of mortal fret,
Of sin and sorrow and regret:
And oft, where, through some breach of green,
The stainless scope of Heaven is seen,
I stand and drink with dreaming eyes
The benediction of the skies.

Why cannot life lapse ever thus?
Why should intrusive noontide truss
Dawn's dewy skirts for toil and play
And with the besom of the Day
The forenoon freshness brush away,
The rainbow-coloured down that clings
But to the waking Morning's wings?
Myself, this season most of price
Who tender, life in Paradise,
For Eve and Adam, must, I ween,
Have one eternal Morning been,
Where the sweet promise of new birth
Still hovered o'er the happy earth,
Nor, by performance overfilled,
Its trembling cup to waste was spilled,
Where trinketed with dew the flowers

Still were, nor, with the waxing hours
Tyrannic, glade and garth and pool
Their virgin veils, pellucid, cool,
Of shade before the brazen shoon
Must doff of overbearing noon.

But, see, the world begins to wake;
And hearken, yonder, voices break
The sacred silence. 'Tis the hum
Of those to early toil that come.
The houses open, one by one,
Their shuttered eyes, that greet the sun
With blinking panes, and men begin
To stir again, without, within:
The round of yet another day
Of weariness is on the way.

Not one am I that hate my kind;
But in my heart and in my mind,
Unknown to all, I have a shrine
Of adoration, o'er divine
To share with any of my kin.
None may admittance have therein,
None be partakers in my hours
Of worship, save the trees and flowers,
The sun that shines, the bird that sings
And all the innocent fair things
That speak to me with Nature's voice.
With them I sorrow and rejoice;
With them I worship and I love

The True, the Fair; and all above,
I cherish sacred Solitude.

So, on my secret hopes abrood,
I cannot walk the world, beside
My fellows, in the morning-tide.
Enough it is with them to fare
The common ways of toil and care:
But this my pause of peace and thought,
Of benison so dearly bought,
This morning moment of relief
From stress, this season all too brief,
For quiet contemplation set
Between Night's darkness and Day's fret,
This sacred hour, with Nature when
I'm one, I cannot share with men.

And so, when, with the waxing day,
The forenoon freshness fades away
And men about the streets again
Go binding on the burden vain
Of toil, I to my dream of blue
And blissfulness must bid adieu
And to take up the daily load
Of Life address me, by the road
Oft turning back, to wave the hand
Of wistful greeting to the land
Of love and benison and balm,
The Country of the Morning-Calm.

A FRIEND FROM OVERSEA.

DULL is the day;
My thoughts are grey
As it, my soul as ill at ease:
My darkling mood
To-day no food
For comfort finds in grass or trees.

Here, where I sit,
The shadows flit,
Sad thoughts like, o'er the landscape's face:
Like them, for lack
Of sun their track
To gild, my dreams are scant of grace.

Sad is the sky,
The breeze a sigh
That barely stirs the lisping leaves:
For its dead dreams
And hopes, meseems,
As I for mine, the grey year grieves.

“I've had my day,”
It seems to say;
“New years must reap what I have sown:
Like thee, but wind
In hand I find;
Like thee, I live and die alone.”

Yet, as, despite
The Autumn's blight,
Spring's promise in the breeze one feels,

So, unprepense,
A secret sense
Of sympathy upon me steals.

It is as some
Affection dumb,
Some tender thought about me stirred,
Some love too meek
Of mind, too weak
Of wit to give its wishes word.

Nay, what is this
With kiss on kiss
That doth my falling fingers ply?
What velvet tongue
My hand down-hung
Goes greeting with caresses shy?

It is, meseems,
As if in dreams
Some phantom friend, some spirit-love,
My hand, with care
My sleep to spare,
With kisses covered like a glove.

No whit, for fear
It disappear,
I stir nor look to left or right.
The things that thus
Do visit us
Are swift to scare and put to flight.

But, as I take
No note and make
No sign nor yet mine eyes to see
Turn, in the end
My unknown friend
Makes bold to climb up to my knee.

A nose appears,
Two silken ears,
Two great round eyes à fleur de tête,
As soft and bright
And full of light
As ever shone in spaniel's pate:

No sign of claws;
Two feathered paws,
A coat of shaggy silken brown,
A tilted snout,
A child-like pout;
A lapdog 'tis from Pekin town.

A moment there,
With nose in air,
It bides, half doubtful of some trap;
Then, as no part
I stir, new heart
It takes and leaps upon my lap.

Its pretty head,
Though half in dread
To startle it, I stroke and pat.
No fear it shows;
'Tis plain it knows
The friend of dog and child and cat.

From side to side,
For very pride
It rolls and joy to be caressed:
With whines and sighs
And child-like cries
Of love, it nestles to my breast.

Why, little friend,
What kind Gods send
You thus to me from China far?
By the Great Wall
You heard Love's call;
You said, “He's sad;” and here you are.

Scant English you
In Pekin knew;
But love still love is overseas
And good and kind
Are words to find
Alike in English and Chinese.

Strange, seems it not?
My grief's forgot;
The clouds of care that did oppress
For me Life's sky
Are scattered by
A little dog's unsought caress.

Such is Love's power;
In my dark hour,
His humble messenger He sent,

Whose gentle touch
From Sorrow's clutch
Sufficed for my enfranchisement.

Thanks, at the least,
My pretty beast,
To thee I owe, that hast to-day,
With thy dumb love,
Prevailed above
My cares and driven my dole away.

So fare thee well!
Though (who can tell?)
We never meet again, indeed,
I'll ne'er my debt
To thee forget
For love and comfort in my need.

Scarce worth, you'll say,
The telling!—Nay,
Life without love is sorry stuff;
And be't but that
Of dog or cat,
To lighten sorrow Love's enough.

THE STREETS IN FLOWER.

THE streets are all in flower:
Narcissus, daffodil,
Mimosa, violet,

Rose, lily, tulip, flood
The city grey and chill
With Winter's wind and wet
And this our season sour
Of fog and frost and mud
With kindly colour fill:
With their sweet summer scent
The roads are redolent.
The scions of the sun,
From lands where men forget,
In summer never done,
The frost-time and the fret
Of Winter's woeful hour,
Upon our Northern air,
Whilst snow yet seals the earth,
Their horn of plenty shower
And brim our every street,
For pity of our dearth,
With blossoms rathe and rare,
The rearlings of the heat.

See, all the frost-blurred ways,
In February's despite,
With blossom are ablaze:
In vain the grey sky glowers
On pavements hedged with flowers.
Its harvest of delight,
The robe of Springtide new,
Red, orange, yellow, white,
Pink, crimson, purple, blue,
That clothes its blissful bowers,
We borrow from the South,
To stay withal our drouth
Of fragrance and of hue.

Who is it “Winter!” saith?
Nay, blooming far and nigh,
Mimosas, with their breath
Of honey and of myrrh,
Tell all the passers-by
Their tale of myriad Mays;
See, lilies white aver
The triumph of July;
And shedding o'er the rime
Its scent of summer-time,
Its breath of blazing days,
The rose gives him the lie.

Poor pilgrims of the Prime,
Frail firstlings of the sun,
That must, ere summer done,
Forsake your flowering clime
And to our cheerless one
Go wandering, I grieve
For you, that, driven of need
To follow Fortune's law,
Your sunny South must leave
And hither brought to feed
The Moloch city's maw,
Must life and light forgo
And droop in dark and snow,
To pleasure us who pine
In Winter's iron clutch
And yearn to see and smell
And ours, by very touch,
To make the flowering sign
Of Summer full a-swell
In lands where Heaven looks down
Less enviously on earth,

Where ever more benign,
Beneath a softer star,
The influences are,
That govern death and birth.

Yet, in that olden book,
Whereunto still we look
For counsel to this day,
“No greater love a man
“Hath,” written is it, “than
“This, that his life he lay
“Down for his friends.” And you,
Bright blooms, this proof, above
All others, of your love,
You give us, in that thus
Your young life sweet and new,
Your virginal estate,
You spend, to solace us,
Who, in our churlish clime,
Where Winter lingers late,
Go wearying for the Prime,
Nor grudge the full fell price
Of your sweet sacrifice
With every grace to pay:
Nay, whether upon breast,
In hand or window-place,
Beneath our stranger sky,
Dear denizens of field
And wood, at man's behest
Exiled, you droop and die,
Your balmiest of breath,
Unstinting, still you yield,
Nor to our sight refuse
Your fairest forms and hues,

But do your last and best
To pleasure us in death.

So take our thanks, fair flowers,
With this your love and grace
That charm our cheerless hours,
In Winter's frowning face;
And may your martyrdom,
Your exile and your pain,
Be otherwhere, in some
Less uncongenial clime,
Some better, brighter place
Than this our realm of rime
And mist and mud and rain,
Requited unto you!
May you in death become
Inhabitants anew
Of some flower-paradise
Of wood and wold and plain,
Beneath a sky of blue,
As far much more of price
Than that which you regret
As your sweet Southern strand
Is than our loveless land
Of cold and wind and wet!

THE PEACOCK.

THE skies are all aflame:
'Tis one of Nature's freaks: no summer worth the name;
Mist, mire, wet, cold and wind:
But now October's kind

And gives us halcyon heavens and blue and golden days,
That might be June's, except the shortening hours and haze.
The streets are all aflood with folk agog to find
The flittergold of Day, ere darkness end the game.
But I, back turning on the ways,
Where soul, as body, hardens,
Subdued to that wherein
They work, dirt, crowds and din,
To my old harbour from the heat,
The noise, the dust-clouds of the street,
The folk, direct my wandering feet,
—To Kensington's green Gardens.

The wide glades welcome me;
For him, on every hand, they build, with tree on tree,
Whose wont hath ever been
To worship in the green,
Their aisles of light and shade, cathedrals of the air.
Thanks to the mild, moist days, the boughs are not yet bare;
Though many an one hath donned the Autumn's shadow-sheen
And flaunts in red and gold and purple panoply.
A thin haze hovers everywhere,
A web of colours sober,
Mist-curtains for the bier
Woven of the waning year.
The birds all dumb are in the dells
And from the dying leaves there swells
A scent of spicery sad, that tells
The tidings of October.

Among the arching rows
The axe hath busy been; full many a gap there shows,
Where some old trunk must fall,
To save its neighbours tall,

Too closely set to thrive or in the soil strike deep.
Full many a hero hoar the hand of Death must reap,
Following the law of Life, that some must die for all,
As the rose springs from out the ashes of the rose.
Nay, yonder, farther as I peep,
Along the aisles sun-gilded,
Where the trees open out,
A round of sward about,
I see the patriarchs' corpses grey,
As 'twere against the burial-day,
With iron fenced around, by way
Of funeral pyres, up-builded.

But what is that a-sit
Upon the topmost pile, as if, from Heaven down-lit,
A piece of the sky's hue,
A cloud of clustering blue,
Upon the grey old logs had settled like a flower?
A perching peacock 'tis, that, in the halcyon hour,
Spreads out its shimmering tail, to drink the sunlight new,
And preens its sapphire plumes, with watchet eyes o'erwrit.
There, glittering in the golden shower,
A clump of careless colour,
Its body bright, inlaid
With many a mingling shade
Of blue, coerulean, sapphire, smalt,
Sea, watchet, indigo, cobalt,
It rears, all blent without default,
Offsetting brighter duller.

Upon the logs a-brood,
It shows as 'twere the soul and flower of the dead wood,
As if Death's after-day
Its brightness from decay

Had summoned up, to tell the tale in colour-speech
Of all the glories past, that dwelt in elm and beech.
An angel in bird-form upon the ruins grey
Of these in whose young boughs of yore the thrushes wooed,
The merles contended, each with each,
At telling April's story,
It seems, from realms above,
A sign and seal of love
Upon the forest-martyrs set,
So careless men may not forget
To pay their ruins hoar the debt
Of memory and glory.

Nay, what a mistress here
Of unconsidering art thou showest, Nature dear!
Did we essay to win
Conflicting colours kin,
Brothers and enemies, to blend in one delight,
We should but bring to pass a sorrow for the sight.
Sky-blue and sea-blue blent were in our hands a sin;
Sapphire and turquoise each from each would shrink in fear
Or form that worst of discords might,
A discord of the second.
But, with thy Goddess-hand,
From earth to Heaven outspanned,
Thou tak'st the hostile hues to thee
And mak'st a heavenly harmony
Of that which in our use would be
A deadly discord reckoned.

So ever, Mother mild,
That never yet forsook'st thine understanding child,
It is with thee: thou still
For goodness dost fulfil

That which for bale begun and mischief is of men.
The lily from the marsh, the iris from the fen
Thou draw'st for our delight; yea, at thy gracious will,
For him who loves thee, bid'st, in Sorrow's deserts wild,
Hope's blossoms bud and blow again
And from our destitution,
From the harsh clash of strife,
The jar of Death and Life,
With breath of breeze and voice of dove,
With flowers beneath and heavens above,
Draw'st, with the common chord of Love,
Th'eternal resolution.

THE CANAL.

UPON the bridge I pause,
Where the strait-streamed canal runs underneath the road,
And follow on its course with pensive eyes
To where it mingles with the sloping skies.
A viewless hand, meseems, its steel-grey ribbon draws
Forth of the Eastern heavens, the dawning Day's abode,
To where, low harbouring in the extremest West,
The whelming darkness lies
In wait to swallow Life, its worst things as its best.
The roar of London drones across the bridge's crest,
Voice of inveterate toil, that never wholly dies,
But mutters, day and night,
Its tale of termless strife and never-nearing quest.
Yet, underneath it, in the evening light,
How strange a contrast greets the philosophic sight!
Peace! Perfect peace!
The lapsing water tells a tale of strifeless calm,
Of life lived on, unhasting, if perforce.

Obedient to some Fate, that knows no qualm
Of care, the red-brown barges, without cease,
As without haste, it bears upon its tideless course
Toward the mystic lands where sky and ocean meet,
Where, in the West, the balm
Of sleep and silence bides for all things, sad and sweet.

Canal, the sight of thee,
That, through the city's surge of never-ending stress,
In peace immutable,
Having no heed of men, their sorrow or liesse,
Wendest thy quiet way toward the unsighted sea,
The foreapppointed bound and goal of Ill and Well,
Soothes my tired senses, weary of Life's hell,
And to my thought no less
Dreams of full many fair and grave and gracious things,
That sleep far out to yonder, past the press
And roar of London's hoarse still-raging furnace, brings,
Thou, that the drudge
Of the dull town art, 'neath the still-succeeding suns
And moons, that bearest, in thy tireless trudge,
Th'unbeauteous wares that fill its maw of daily need,
Yet, in thy changeless course through the sad streets,
Forgettest not, in fog and frost, in colds and heats,
The rustic ways through which thy silver ribbon runs,
As farm to hamlet, town to thorpe it binds,
The smiling slopes of green and golden mead,
Where, in the noiseless noons, the drowsing cattle feed,
Where, wandering by the rill from hedge to hedge that winds
In that pure silence peace the spirit seeks and finds.

Of many a pine-clad peak,
Whereunderward thou farest in the shade,
Sacred to silence and to solitude,

Thy whispering waters to the fancy speak;
Of many a waiting wood,
Where, in the noontides hot, a pause of peace is made
By the tall trees that bend and overarch thy streams,
Places still consecrate to all the Gods of dreams;
Of many a breezy down
And moorland lush with gold of gorse and purple-brown
Of heather, many a scape of smiling corn-crowned wold,
Where to the flooding sun
The wheat its myriad heads upheaves of living gold;
Of many a leafy deep thou tellest, where there none
Is but the faring things of grass and tree and air
And not a breath of care
Or human footstep comes th'ancestral peace to break;
Where, in the drowsy dells,
Unchased, by rill and lake,
The wild deer harbours and the rabbit there
Breeds at its leisure and the unharried hare
Feeds on the ferns that fringe the forest wells;
Where, in the wild heart of the holy wood,
As in Creation's morning, life is good;
The bosky brakes and glades, where Freedom dwells,
The one true Freedom, that which leaves one face to face
With Nature, sole from sight and commerce of the base.

Tales of all these to him
Who, turning on the streets, the folk, the roar, the mud,
His back, looks down upon thy fretless flood,
And standing on thy brim,
Dreams of the quiet places far away,
Thou tellest, carrying beyond the Day
And the grey city-walls his fain forwandred thought.
Thy versicoloured course he follows on and on,
Beyond the cloud-range, wrought

Of stone and iron, so it seems, to hold
The soul from thrusting through unto the shores of gold,
Wherefrom the sun once shone,
Ere dust and smoke and fog his puissance put to nought:
Beyond the horizon strait afar thou bearest him,
Beyond the night,
Beyond the dark, into the distance dim,
Where realms too fair and bright
Abide to brook the soiling step of man,
Beyond the senses' span,
Beyond the regions of the touch, the sight,
Thou lur'st him, leading with thy silent streams
Straight to the westering sun and to the world of dreams.

LIGHTED WINDOWS.

THE Autumn twilight tints the air: I trudge the treemarged ways of white,
Where, all along the leaf-strewn paths, the first fore-runners of the Night,
The twinkling gas-lamps, firefly-like, the haze begin to prick with lines
Of palest gold. The houses close their eyes, responsive to the signs
Of coming dark, and one by one, about the roads with dusk adream,
Athwart the curtains closely drawn, behold, the lighted windows gleam.

Behind each shining casement-pane an oasis of light and love
My fancy paints, a little world whereon peace broodeth like a dove,

Whence beacon-lamps of kindness beam, that, beck'ning through the evenglome,
Each to his several nest of calm and safety call the wanderers home.
The fancy of a lonely man! Who knows? Yet well the best to think
It were, the wine of Heaven, not Hell, from out the cup of dreams to drink.

Soft-shining evening-stars of earth, sweet sisters of the lights on high
That grave our fates in fire, I gaze upon your promise and I sigh,
Th'involuntary sigh of one who walks Life's ways without a mate
And still must fancy that belike the dear one of his dreams await
For his foregathering stays behind some one of yonder casements bright,
The comrade true whose touch of hand would thrill his darkness through with light,
The love which he hath sought life-long in vain, the vainly-pictured friend,
Whom Heaven, his ardent youth believed, to fill his empty heart should send.
There, haply, from my yearning sight but by some curtain's fabric hid,
My soul's one counterpart there sits, love, comrade, friend, by Fate forbid
From joining hand and heart with me; for, though the wall be but of glass,
A line or two it may be thick, 'twixt me and those for whom, alas!
I long and who, unknowing, long for me, no less impermeable

It is unto my utmost stress than that which sunders Heaven and Hell.

For of the dreamers' order born was I, the race that have no kin
On earth, to whom their alien birth of all accounted is for sin.
Men draw their garments from my touch, for I am other than the rest;
The Fates upon my brow at birth the seal of difference impressed,
The mark that, more than that of Cain, the dreamer severs from his kind,
So that men shrink from him, as one by Heaven to solitude consigned,
And those by blood to him akin, nay, even such as hold him dear,
Still of the wind afar from him are driven of some mysterious fear.
No crime like this of otherness! Who differs from the common clan
An outlaw lives: there is no hope of peace or pardon for the man.
Cain less accursèd was than he; for he sons, daughters had and wife,
Still hand in hand with him to fare and stay him in his haughty strife
Against the grim unreasoning Gods, the Elohim who dug the pit
For his blind feet and branded him for blindly falling into it.

So all his life alone he fares, love, friendship, honour, sympathy

For those are in the common mould who're cast and not for such as he.
Pensive and pale he goes, without a comrade for his spirit's need,
Amid the flowering garths of Life, a dull despised exotic weed,
A plant that, in the general list, the gardener's catalogue unclassed,
Though bright as summer skies it bloom, unmarked of all mankind is passed.
Though love and pity with each year of ripening age for all his kind
Within him wax, though milder still and still serener grows his mind
Toward th'unthinking crew that looks on him with witless scorn, though harm
To them he deem not, but all good, some subtle spell, some fatal charm
Between his human brethren builds and him an ever-thickening wall
And compassed with a cloud of dreams about, he fares, apart from all.

Though from his heart the flowers of song bloom ever brighter, fragranter,
Though few can boast a voice so sweet and strong as his the soul to stir,
None hearkens it and in the choir of those for men's approof who sing,
His place is filled by churls unworth the censer in his train to swing.
“Better than a lifeless lion is a living dog.” 'Twas falsely said.
They mostly dub the live man dog who praise him for a lion dead.

His name, whose mere existence marred the zest of their base appetites
And baulked their cattle-like content of its full flavour of delights,
A club to crush his like becomes, when once he's safe beneath the sod:
The somersault is lightly turned: read backward, what is “Dog” but “God?”

A sorry lot, forsooth, to fare uncompanied from birth to death,
As one in middle Summer doomed to go begirt with Winter's breath,
To pass, unportioned, midst Life's sweets, and read, still written on the air,
In words of fire, the changeless doom, “Forswear still must'st thou, must'st forswear!”
To watch his fellows fling to waste what might have been his spirit's food,
Whilst he must hold his hand and hug renouncement as his only good!

And yet I know, no earthly boon might bribe me to the giving up
The draught of bitter bliss I drink from loneliness's lenten cup.
Wealth, ease, love, friendship, worship, fame, the treasures of the sea and earth,
Were all too poor to buy of me the sacred symbol of my birth,
The doom of difference by the Fates deep branded on my forehead bared,
The precious privacy of soul with only beasts and Nature shared.

True, times there are when I, a man, remember me of other men
And the old Adam in me yearns for what I might have had erewhen,
The common joys of common life, that make the lives of others sweet,
The goods and gauds of love and praise, of wealth and worship at my feet,
Ere the spell thickened round my soul, a fence my kind and me between.
The things my fellows value shine before me with a mocking sheen;
The kingdoms of the world I see displayed before mine eyes and hear,
As hermits in the silent sands, vain voices murmur in mine ear.
“Why cleave to these thy shadow-joys and leave the solid goods of life?
Sure, worship and the praise of men were worthier than this sterile strife
Of thine! Bethink thee, love is sweet, fame fair: it is not yet too late.
Yet, an thou wilt, thou mayst return from this thy desert desolate
To the warm sunshine of the world.”—The voices whisper thus to me.

So the mood comes and passes so. E'en Christ upon Gethsemane,
When, in the senses' anguished trance, th'impending suff'rance showed too grim,
Unto his fancied Father prayed that this last cup might pass from him;
And I,—the paroxysm past, like him, the senses' spasm spent,

Back to my clarity of thought, from passion's brief bewilderment,
Restored,—my dear-belovéd doom, the sacred, sanctifying pain,
That purifies my dreams and holds me purged of worldly dross, again
With firmer faith to me I clasp and in my clearer vision feel
That, for all Life can show of sweet, for all the world of wealth and weal
Can proffer, honour, friendship, fame, the love of kindred, woman's kiss,
Nought earth can promise me of ease or Heaven of other-worldly bliss
Might tempt me to forswear my fate nor move my unenlightened mood
My bitter birthright to forgo, my thorn-set crown of solitude.

THE GODS IN VICTORIA PARK.

HERE, in the early noon,
This day of infant June,
The sun, without a hint of latter summer rage,
Out of the hyacinth heavens, attempered, tender, mild,
Over the flowering earth, for ease of fosterage,
Broods, as a mother broods above her babbling child.
On trees and grass and flowers,
The yeanlings without guile of June's auroral hours,
In this still place of rest, 'midst London's surge enisled,
So near its noise and fret and yet removed so far,
An oasis of balm and peace and praising birds,
The softened midday star
Its gentle glory showers,
A benison of Heaven that hath no need of words.

Here all alone I stray:
For me the dreamy day,
For me alone the birds, the flowers, the blue, the green;
For me alone th'expanse of yonder lake serene,
On which the wild fowl feed, the cygnets oar their way,
As if of man's unrest they ne'er had troubled been.
A breath of days antique,
When yet the world was young, broods o'er the peaceful scene.
So little of our time
Of toil the quiet breathes, so stranger to our clime
Of strife and smoke and spleen
The drowsing noontide shows, the comtemplative eye
Is fain afar to seek,
Where, in the hovering haze, th'horizon meets the sky,
Some heaven-scaling blue of distant Attic peak,
Some grove of Gods high-perched on its Pentelic steep.
It seems the Gods of Greece
Might in the sunshine bask and in the verdant peace:
Here, with their calm, remote from all our modern wars,
Naïs, Cymodoce, Egeria might sleep.
Without, Whitechapel roars;
The surging City's nigh:
But, on these strifeless shores,
Beside this laughing lake, beneath yon smiling sky,
Hymettus' thymy height or Tempe might be near;
'Twere little strange if nymph or dryad should appear.

For me, alone, I say,
The quiet is.—But, nay!
Rude voices rend the calm devoutness of the day.
Out from between the isles tree-overgrown, that break
Yonder the crystal blue
Of the still sleeping lake,
There pushes into sight a swaying, rocking boat,

With man and maid for crew,
Such man and maid, alas!
As the grim city breeds to be a jarring note
Upon the sweet concent of flowers and skies and grass
And with the alien breath of their unlovely mirth
The festival to flout of new-reblossomed earth.

Yet, blesséd sooth to tell,
So potent is the spell
Of peace antique that pours from Heaven on all around,
So holy is the hour, so gracious is the ground,
Th'intruders to itself the sacred silence seems
To take and make them part
Of its assoiling calm and its far-seeking dreams.
Unto its quiet heart
It draws and wraps about with its own reverend peace
Th'invasive shallop, laden
With yonder half-fledged youth,
That, with his mate uncouth,
His flat-faced, paste-complexioned city maiden,
Fares, splashing, to and fro,
Among the ducks and geese,
Themselves beneath the spell divine immune that know
So well, they scarcely cease
Their hunt for food or play, to let them pass and go,
And in their errant wake, unfeared, are fain to follow.
So wholly doth the charm and sorcery of the time,
Suggestive of the past, the high, heroic Prime,
Unto itself subdue
The gross intrusive two,
The magic of the Old so overpowers the New,
The pregnant Past so floods and fills the Present hollow,
That yonder shallow painted skiff,
A-veer upon the wave, as if

It might at any moment cast its unaccustomed crew
Forth of its rocking side into the flooding blue,
There in the desecrated lake to wallow,
Might be Cyllene's bark;
For Venus' very dove,
Low-hovering in the air, the flowering reeds above,
Might pass yon skimming swallow;
Ay, and yon clumsy cockney pair,
With their uncertain ark,
Floating 'twixt lymph and air,
In this East London park,
Might for the dreaming eye be Daphne and Apollo.

ON THE RAILWAY BRIDGE.

THE hour of the setting,
The hour when Time truce calls with faring and fretting,
When Life lays itself in the fields of forgetting
To rest,
Unrecking if any be rueful or careful,
Is here.
All pauses, so holy the hour and so prayerful,
As, face to the West,
I stand on the crown of the causeway, where, under
The breach of the bridge,
The far-stretching lines of the railroad shine clear,
And gaze on the glamorous sky-scape, in sunder
With colour and splendour that's cloven,
Wide-woven
From ridge unto ridge.
From Eastward to Westward, the roar and the hum
Are sunken to silence: with worship and wonder
Life's dumb.

The rail sun-reflecting,
Briareus bounden, whose arms Space-subjecting
My soul and the soul of the world-all connecting
I feel,
Its lines as the rays of a sun-dial spreading,
Runs right
And left, on fan-fashion, encaging, embedding.
Earth's surface in steel.
Thought traces, far-faring, its world-woven grating,
That hums like a loom,
As, working Man's will of the day and the night,
Time and Space it devours in its course unabating,
From where, in the East, Day's renewing
Ensuing,
It gleams through the gloom,
To where, following seaward the feet of the sun,
It lies in the lap of the sunset, awaiting
Day done.

See, feather by feather,
The Phoenix of sunset fades out, as together
The cloud-vultures, freed from Dan Phoebus's tether,
Conspire
To smother its splendours: with wings over-meeting
Its nest,
Behold, they go, ember by ember, out-beating
The flickering fire.
The sun flashes out for a second, wide-wading
In billows of light,
Then drops to his grave in the glooms of the West;
Whilst hard on the heels of his fulgurous fading
Comes twilight, Eve's furnace out-raking,
And waking,
The wind of the West

Its funeral films for the death of the Day
Brings up, Heaven's broideries with cerecloths o'ershading
Of grey.

And lo, as replying,
As noting and voicing the need of Day dying,
A sound from the Eastward of shrilling and crying
There comes,
A sound that still holds, like the stroke of a hammer,
The ear,
Now sinks to a murmur, now soars to a clamour
Of trumpets and drums;
And yonder, to East, whence it comes, as the trace of
A storm in the sky,
A trail of grey smoke in the distance draws near.
An army with banners, it seems, o'er the face of
The landscape, with flashing of lances,
Advances:
With dusk ever nigh
It draweth in thunder, as Night on the plain
Pours, trumpeted in with the roar and the race of
The train.

WIND, RAIN, SUN.

I.

THE wind upon the roofs went rising, falling,
The livelong night;
Like phantom voices from the far worlds calling
Beyond man's sight,
It stinted not from blust'ring and from bawling
Till morning-light.

Then, when, across the streaming house-tops creeping,
Came dawning grey
And in the morning mists the streets lay steeping,
It died away,
As if content to have set the world-all weeping
For birth of day.

II.

Wet and warning, misty morning
Wakens o'er the city's sleep;
Roofs, replying to Heaven's sighing,
In the Day's rebirth, the dying
Of its dam the darkness weep.

Grim and grieving, unbelieving,
O'er the unbelieving town,
Where men groping go, unhoping,
Still for bread beneath their coping
Cold, the loveless skies look down.

Rain falls flooding, housetops thudding
With its myriad phantom hoofs:
From Night's surges nought emerges,
Song nor sunshine, nought but dirges,
Droning from the dripping roofs.

What to do is, when Heaven's blue is
To our summer skies denied?
To the undeigning clouds complaining,
Helpless hands of hope outstraining,
Faith goes groping far and wide.

Thoughts once thought I, signs once sought I:
Now I think and seek no more.
Phantoms, sharing Day's despairing,
Hope and Thought and Fancy faring
Go on Grief's unsheltered shore.

Hope, go hide thee! Faith, betide thee
What there may! To strive is vain.
Nature, sleeping, 'neath the weeping
Of the heavens silence keeping,
Bids thee so abide the rain.

III.

The rush of the rain with the turn of the tide and the neighbouring noon hath ceased;
Heav'n's azure looks through the lessening flocks of the storm-clouds sable-fleeced.
We deemed the sun drowned in the sea of storms and dead for an age at least;
But, lo! with his goldilocks gilded anew, a king clad fresh for the feast,
Up yonder he thrusts through the blossoming blue, in the flowering fields of the East!

The hour of his sight is the shining hour, the sign of victory won;
His oriflamme full in the frowning face he flaunts of the cloud-wreaths dun:
In baffled bands, from that flag of flame they break into rout and run.
But late with their banners the sky was black, and now, East, West, there's none;
The demons of darkness all have fled from the face of the sovereign sun.

All hail to thee, sacred saviour Sun, that com'st with thy sword of sway
To counter the fiends of the flood and war the bands of of the brume away!
Thou hast shattered the shadows' power and purged our thoughts of the gloom and the grey;
Thou hast succoured our souls and made our hearts again as the heavens gay.
All hail to thee, Light of our lives and dreams! All hail to thee, Lord of the Day!

IV.

Wind, rain and sun
Still after one
Another run
And turn the hourglass for a new beginning:
From clime to clime,
As rhyme breeds rhyme,
The ball of Time
In Space's spirals up and down goes spinning.

Gods come and go;
But sun, rain, blow,
Still ebb and flow
And Winter fast on Summer's footsteps follows:
The Year's true form
Of cold and warm
With blast and storm
Is wried and Saturn's sign usurps Apollo's.

When Yule meets May,
The sages say,

When Summer's day
With Winter's night is blent, the sign is fatal;
The days draw nigh
When wet and dry,
When earth and sky,
Will all return to Chaos antenatal.

THE LILAC.

AGAINST my garden-wall,
Rooted in rockery earth, there stands at either end
A tangling mass of stems and branches, great and small,
With soot and smoke as black
As pitch and dead, 'twould seem, past Nature's might to mend.
Toward the grey cloud-rack
Of latter Winter's skies, austere and grim, it spires,
Barring the narrow band of colour in the West,
Where the drowsed wreck of Day sinks slowly to its rest.
A trellis-work of wires
It seems, blocked out in black against the sunset-fires.

Yet but a week or two,
And in the leafless stems the life once more will stir;
The veins, for Winter void, the sap will fill anew;
The grimy bark will first
Less black become, then brown by slow degrees; then here
And there 'twill cleave and burst
And let a bud or two, shy peeping fyorth, be seen;
Then more and more, in crowds, will peep and swell and break,
Till every branching twig towers up, for April's sake,
Toward the sky serene,
New-clad upon with leaves, a cloud of clustering green.

Nor yet by leaf alone
The ecstacy of life in their dead hearts reborn,
The rapture that the Spring excites in them, is shown.
Already, see, each spray
With other-fashion buds is thick; another morn,
And these, to welcome May,
Will wreathe themselves with pomp, like princes, till they stand,
The bright-robed harbingers and heralds of the Prime,
To usher in the feast of Life's refulgent time
And wave, on either hand,
Their white and purple plumes above the laughing land.

Nor yet with leaf and flower,
Lilacs, the May alone are you content to hail.
The ardour in your hearts, for hallowing of the hour
Of still-returning Spring,
For incense freely flung upon the vernal gale,
To every soul doth bring
The news of Winter sped and Summer drawing nigh.
Among the lesser scents, an anthem is your breath,
An organ-voice of balm, Life's victory over death
That celebrates, on high
Proclaiming hope reborn for all beneath the sky.

Dear exile of the East,
From Persia's plains, rose-, lys-, narcissus-, tulip-clad,
To our cold West, where Spring is only Winter ceased,
Transplanted with rude hand,
Small wonder 'twere if thou shouldst sullen be and sad,
In this our stranger land,
Where thou must needs, against thy nature and thy will,
Endure the Autumn's wet and wind, the Winter's cold,
Plagues to thy native plains unknown and skies of gold,
And pine, denying still
Thy flowers for us to yield, thy fragrance to fulfil.

Yet thou, fair tree, more kind
Than we who brought thee here in banishment to live,
Regrettest not thy hills and valleys, left behind
In Khorasan or Fars,
And setst thyself our wrong not only to forgive,
But, 'neath our Northern stars,
To flower and breathe for us thy fairest and thy best.
So, in the dewy days of Heaven-affected May,
In this our toiling town of soot and smoke, each way
With bloom thou brightenest
And cheer'st with breath of balm the city, East and West.

Thou to us men, indeed,
A lesson of content and kindness read'st and cheer.
Well might we learn from thee, if we would but have heed,
The days, when no suns shine
For us, when we from all must part that we hold dear,
To brook without repine,
The hours, when in our heaven the clouds of care are rife
And nothing comes to break the dark of our distress,
To fill with noble thoughts and deeds of kindliness
And cheer this world of strife
And sorrow with the flower and fragrance of our life.

THE HUSH OF DUSK.

THE twilight thickens on the quiet trees:
Prone at Night's feet, an overlaboured slave,
With hands outheld the skirts of sleep to seize,
Tired London lies, whilst on the dead Day's grave,
Where the leaves sleep, unstirred of any breeze,
Darkness oblivion heaps of gladness and unease.

The lamps of Heaven are hidden from our sight;
No sign is in the unresponsive skies.
The courses of the orbs, that wont to light
The dark hours' lapses with their set and rise,
No witness bear to Time's forgotten flight;
No least star pricks the pall of violet-vestured Night.

The laggard minutes lapse with faltering feet;
The city drowses in the darkling hush;
A boding silence broods on every street,
Such as bytimes at evening seems to crush
Out of Earth's flagging heart the vital heat,
Till in her veins the pulse of Life forbears to beat.

The world hath surely eaten of the lote;
On all its face a frowning silence weighs.
No step to hear is, not a cry, a note:
Time, as it were, for some betidement stays,
That shall the measure change of common rote;
The city's frenzied voice is frozen in its throat.

The hush no kin hath with that other hour
Of quietness, that comes in latter June,
When sleep upon the city like a flower
Falls for the softness of the summer noon.
This hath no peace in it; but in the power
Of some expectance dread the world-all seems to cower.

Anon, as sudden as its stress began,
The straining thread of silence snaps in twain
And with its noise of many-mingling man,
Life's organ-voice vociferous, once again
The roar of London all its highways' span
Floods, like a torrent loosed from Winter's broken ban.

Dreamer that I am, I cannot but misdoubt
Me lest some presage in that boding pause,
Some warning dwell, that is not given without
A cause, some sign, that by the secret laws
Of Life unknown may not be spoken out,
From the weird worlds that bound this world of ours about.

Its moment-measured hush leads on my thought
To that eternally enduring one,
Which, when the Giant City's life-sands, brought
To their last granule, through Time's hourglass run,
Shall the remembrance whelm in seas of nought
Of all that there hath been done, suffered, said and sought.

Evenso, meseems, the wonted hush will fall
Upon the streets, the foreappointed day,
And we shall note it not or noting, call
It but the common case and go our way,
Till the dusk darken to a funeral pall
And in the graves of Night all-gendering bury all.

BIRDS IN SNOWTIME.

ALL the landscape lapt and low
In the silence of the snow
Lies; one wan hibernal whiteness blots the blossom-hues of Life:
Save the weather, far and near,
Nought to see is or to hear:
Even the very streets are voided of their customary strife.

Nought to see is?—Nay, I err:
Birds, by hundreds, flocking, here

Fare and there about the garden: want and hunger make them bold.
For an alms of crust or crumb,
See, they sue in misery dumb,
Piteous little balls of feathers, puffed and bloated with the cold.

Thrushes, sparrows, robins, wrens,
All the dainty denizens
Of our English skies, that, rather than forsake their native air
And across the ocean follow
Migrant martin, swift and swallow,
Choose to bide and Winter's hardships here at home with us to bear,

Sadly o'er the sullen snow,
Hither, thither, see, they go;
Every fear of man forgotten in this season of their dearth,
At each door and window-sill,
Lo, they beg with lifted bill
For the stint of food refused them by th'inhospitable earth.

Nay, all ready is the dole
For each little starving soul:
Crumbs and suet, in a platter, night and morning heaped anew;
Crumbs, to fill your empty maws,
Ay, and suet, with this clause,
In your tender breasts for keeping warmth, the cruel winter through.

See, you answer to my call;
Ah, you know who tenders all
Flying creatures of the forests and the meadows and the skies:
Here in London, where I dwell,
One who loves you passing well
Open house and open table holds for every bird that flies.

Come, then, without fear or care,
Semi-spirits of our air,
Angels of our nether heaven, light and eat and drink your fill.
Peace for all pure things and pardon
For all innocents my garden
Proffers: to no feathered flutterer harm shall happen of my will.

Who so hard, of Adam's sons,
Could of heart be, pretty ones,
By your trembling trust to profit, in your piteous hour of need?
You, who make the welkin ring
With delight for us in Spring,
Sure, a crumb or two in Winter were the meanest of your meed.

Who in snowtime would deny
Alms to you? I'faith, not I.
Feed, then, fearless, winsome tremblers! Warm with meat your bodies numb!
Here the spirit every day
In your tender breasts come stay,
Till once more the West Wind whisper and the kindlier season come.

Fear nor trap nor gin nor snare,
Feathered suppliants! If elsewhere
Hearts of stone there be would harm you here at least you're safe with me.
Heaven for this be thanked, at least,
Never yet betrayed I beast,
Bird or man in me that trusted. Here for all is sanctuary.

In the Springtide amorous,
Birds, you sat and sang for us,

Brimmed the air with mirth and music, brought us pleasance without price.
Now the least that we can do
Is the little life in you
Warm with food to hold and foster through the days of snow and ice.

Then, when April's hands once more
Glee and gladness on us pour,
Songsters, for your Winter's pittance with your warble you shall pay
And with chirp and flirt of wing,
Such of you as cannot sing
Thanks for hospitable usance render in their humbler way.

FELLOW-EXILES.

THE winter sun on me looks with his blear-eyed blink,
As if to question, “Here what do we, thou and I,
“I, that was born to throne amidst a tropic sky,
“And thou, the draught of dreams at Nature's fount to drink?
“Why to this darkling town, where Day upon the brink
“Still trembles of the Night, have we been banished, why
“Among this dullard folk condemned to live and die,
“Whose business is to eat and sleep and not to think? ”

Meseemeth, thou, as I, art weary of thy task,
Old sun, yet runnest still thy round from near to far,
Untiring; and in this, no less, alike we are,
That to the general gaze a blank unblenching mask
Of silentness we turn, as overproud to ask
The ease that is the meed of meaner man and star,
But which the constant pride of souls like ours would mar:
The noblest wine is still and silent in the cask.

Long since have I forborne to question that which seems
Of that which is. Long use hath dulled the edge of pain.
Along Life's lightless ways, athwart its mist and rain,
I fare, as one that goes, unquestioning, in dreams.
How should a world be ware of what th'Eternal deems,
That through Time's sandglass drops, an unregarded grain?
For me, I am content if ever and again
A ray of sunlight rest upon Life's troubled streams.

Old star, what profits it to ask, when answer none
There is, alack! to find in earth or sky or sea?
The eye art thou of Heaven and yet no cause canst see
Why Life for thee is Life or me or any one.
Yet in this gaol of grief, this web of dreams thin-spun,
Wherein my lot for life entangled is to be,
Without a waymate soul, some solace sad to me
For fellow-exile 'tis to have th'all-suffering sun.

THE SPIRIT-HOUR.

THE hour that's to me most dear
Of the hours of the day and night, the most of ease and cheer,
Is the hour when it draws to the middle night and all is quiet without,
When, alone, for the folk around me sleep, I sit by the hearthside gleam,
Whilst silent, for very weariness fallen, is London's restless rout,
The hour when the task of the day is done and I turn to the fire and dream.

Too fast asleep to purr,
The cats in the fitful glow lie still and never stir.
There is never a bird on the bough awake; there is never a step in the street;
The silence so tense is, it seems its chord must surely snap and break:
The roar of the daylong ways is dumb and hushed is the fall of the feet:
Old London sleeps with a sleep as sound as if it should never wake.

There is nothing about me heard,
Save the chirp of the crackling logs, that is as a spoken word:
There is nought to be seen but the leaping tongues of versicoloured flame,
That glimmer and flicker, red, blue, green, o'er the salt-soaked oak and beech.
But the voidness is full for me of shapes that have no earthly name,
The silence sweet is with tones that pass the bounds of earthly speech.

My eyes are full of ghosts;
I am companied round about with a band of spirit-hosts:
The loved ones, that loved me passing well in the days that are no more,
They hover about me everywhere, with a mute unfelt caress:
Their eyes into mine look deep and dear, as they looked in times of yore:
Their hands upon mine are laid in love, though I feel not the spirit-press.

No shapes are they of fear;
They are emanations all of the dead that held me dear.

They bid me with silent speech grieve not, for Love can never die:
Such love as was ours, they say, will live, though Life itself turn Death.
They bid me be strong 'gainst Life accurst, for the end of Time is nigh:
There's nothing but love in their looks and speech; there's nothing but balm in their breath.

They whisper me such songs,
If I could sing them, the world were healed of its woes and wrongs;
The best of my rhymes are echoes faint of the dreams of the spirit-hour.
They show me such heaven-high thoughts clear-writ in the lambent deeps of the fire,
If I could think them again, o'er Heaven and earth 'twould give me power;
The best of my thoughts are dreams by these of unfulfilled desire.

With eyes on the blazing coals
I sit; but my heart's afar in the shadow-world of souls,
The world that billows our world about, as the darkness rounds the day.
My feet in the asphodel meadows fare, the Paradisal streets;
The almonds of Eden I scent and hear the stars' supernal lay;
My soul of the seraphs' nectar drinks, of Heaven's honey eats.

But hark! The bell tolls One:
The end of my day it knells; the hour of the dreams is done.

The ghosts are faded and fared away; there is nothing to see or hear
But the cats that waken and stretch and purr in the glow of the embers red.
Good night to you, cats and dreams! The air is waxing cold and drear:
The hour of the spirit's overpast and the body must to bed.

A PAUSE OF PEACE.

LATE-COMING Summer lingers late;
Time tarries in October's gate:
Though Winter near by lessening light
Is notified and early night.

I fare beneath the fading trees:
So bland the sun, so soft the breeze,
But for the russet carpet spread,
One scarce would deem the Summer dead.

The fallen leaves beneath my feet
Their Autumn-threnody repeat,
The knell of youth and glee and grace,
Death's descant on Time's thorough-bass.

The air is heavy with their scent
Of dull indifferent lament,
The exhalation of an earth
That weary is to death of birth.

Its bitter savour fills the soul
With memories of joy and dole,
Of grief and gladness dead and done,
Of April loves and August sun.

Under the opalescent haze
That hovers o'er the windless ways,
So still it is, I hear the sound
Of leaves that flutter to the ground.

I hearken to your ritornel,
Dead leaves, the season's passing-bell
That tolls, as if (so dry its tone)
Its clapper were Death's hand of bone.

I know not why; but, as I go,
The time's phantasmagoric show
Makes men and things as shadows seem;
Life lapses by me like a dream.

Not one am I the Autumn-tide
That love; I watch it weary-eyed;
Its woods for me in vain display
Their vaunted vesture of decay.

The rotting of the ripened year,
That decks itself to die in sheer
Corruption's phosphorescency
Of colour, hath scant charm for me.

Its gold and bronze and crimson trees
Sad memories of April's leas,
May's maiden blush of blossom, bring
And all the glamour of dead Spring.

My soul goes out in sick protest
Against the Autumn's pomp unblest,
That o'er the corpse of pleasance dead
Funereal flaunts in gold and red.

Yet, when once more October comes
To still the o'erstrung pulse that hums
In Life's tense arteries, I feel
A nameless solace o'er me steal.

Still in its vague narcotic scent
There breathes for me a sad content,
A salving spell, I know not whence,
That mollifies my suffering sense.

I know not why, but with its veil
Of mist Life's sad and sordid tale
It soothes and with its dull refrain
Of rustling leaves conjures my pain.

The dagger-edges of despair
It blunts and dulls the blade of care,
Truce calling, for an hour or so,
With Life's immedicable woe.

It fables, with its flagging breath,
Of peace,—the peace, indeed, of Death!
But where, in this our world of strife,
Were peace to seek and find of Life?

So welcome, dim and dreamy time,
Year's pause of peace before the rime,
When Life contrite to Winter's signs
Of coming death itself resigns.

MIST.

A MIST hath arisen from the low-lying places;
Its haze
On gable and steeple,
On pavement and people,
On milestone and margent,
It lays:
It wanders its way through the streets and the spaces
And hangs in the hollows and sides of the city:
On rail
And roadway, on tramway and pathway its argent-
Grey scumble
Is pale.
It lies on the landscape, mysterious and holy,
With drapery of dreams, as in sorrow and pity,
Things homely concealing and casting o'er lowly
And humble
A veil.

So subtle its warp is, its weft is so fragile,
Meseems,
It might of hands folded
For spell have been moulded;
A web of such weaving
Of dreams
Morgane might have hung o'er the towers of Tintagel,
To baffle the bandits that sought to invest it
Whilere:
It is as the fairies had been with us, leaving
Their drapery

There.
It veers o'er the world like a lace-work of vision:
A breath, on it blown, so it seems, might arrest it,
A wind-waft consign back to regions Elysian
Its vapory
Air.

One cannot but fancy, when once 'tis arisen
And gone,
Some vision of wonder
Upon us from under
Its broideries airy
Will dawn:
One cannot but look for some world than our wizen
Old world, with its sordid delight and mean sorrow,
More worth,
But hope, when the woof of its fabric of Faerie
Is riven,
Some birth
Of beauty, some life more of price than our vagrant
Vain fashion of living, some glorified morrow,
Some flowerage of fancy will greet us, some fragrant
New heaven
And earth.

But yonder to Eastward awakened a breeze is:
To wrack
It buffets and follows
The mist through the hollows
And smites it in sunder.
Alack!
It leaves the air mistless; but all that one sees is
The sorry old scape of the weariness olden
Unfurled;

No Isles of the Blesséd, all radiant with wonder,
All jewel-
Impearled;
No visions of hope, such as fancy awaited,
No Paradise-plains, no Hesperides golden,
No bright Eldorados, but only the hated
And cruel
Old world.

THE LIMES.

THE limes are out in bud:
Spring sends its rising thrill of rapture through their blood.
Each bare black branch, each twig, to-day is all beseen
With broidery of beads of faintest fairy green.
To-morrow, stem and bough, enveloped, like a bride,
In one vast virgin veil
Of tiny clustering leaves of tender emerald pale,
Each tree,
From middle trunk to crown, from side to spreading side,
To celebrate aright the coming of the King
And hail the happy year's new nuptials with the Spring,
Will be.

The limes are full in leaf:
The first are they to fill themselves at Summer's sheaf:
No tracery of twig, no black of stem or bark,
Now that the Maytide's here, to-day the eye can mark:
But every tree uprears one vast o'ervaulted dome
Of shimmering green and gold;
One canopy of leaf, most gracious to behold,
Wherethrough

The bated sunbeams stray and sport and glance and roam
And the glad eye looks up, following the golden gleam,
And spies, through webs of light, as in a fairy dream,
Heaven's blue.

The limes are full in flower.
It is the very top of July's rapturous hour.
O'er London's labouring streets the spreading branches hold
Their pendulous flower-spikes of palest perfumed gold
And daylong, nightlong, fill the shimmering summer air,
Whether the sun or moon
It be that overshines their sweetness, with their boon
Of breath,
Whose fragrance tells the tale of lands unearthly fair
And with its scent of myrrh and honey from our lot
Of sorrow lifts the soul to worlds where Life is not
Nor Death.

The limes are bare once more:
They cannot suffer life, once summertime is o'er:
So dear her love they hold, they may not bide their time
To drop, with other trees, their leaves at the first rime,
But orphaned of July and widowed of the Prime,
Before the Autumn's run
Half-way its destined course, ere yet their fellow trees,
Unbeggared of the blast, turn red and brown, one sees
Them cast
The honours of their heads and sorrowers for the sun,
Beneath the watchet dome of Autumn's paling scope,
Leafless and hoar they stand, like skeletons of hope
By-past.

Limes, you to me are dear:
I joy in your rebirth and grieve to see you sere.
You are to me the sign and symbol of my life,

That, once Love's Summer spent, disdains the idle strife
With other meaner goods its loss to compensate
And from the general stress
Withdrawn, its pride and pain in silence doth possess,
New birth
Content in this our world no longer to await,
But from our low estate, that unto death is bond,
Expecting for its Spring to bloom in spheres beyond
Our earth.

NOON.

HIGH noon's begun;
Sad London languishes beneath the sun.
The air is ambient fire; the heavens are brass:
Dead in the gardens is the dried-up grass:
A fiery haze above each suffering street
Floats, the red furnace-breath of the relentless heat.

In the grim glare,
Fainting, along the shadeless streets men fare,
With blank, bewildered brains and aimless eyes,
As the fierce flame from the unsheltered skies
Rains down, relentless, on the pavements white,
That store its ardours up against the sleepless night.

Yonder, in the fields,
No whit of shade the yellowing harvest yields:
The wheat, rejoicing in its ripening ears,
Stands fearless up and shakes its feathery spears
In the triumphant tyrant's flaming face:
The drowsing sun-steeped earth gapes in the God's embrace.

Life's liberal sons,
Red in their veins the blood of Nature runs.
They in her rains rejoice nor fear her snow
Nor grope for shelter from her Summer's glow:
To her sheer sun their heedless health aspires
And draughts of life renewed drinks from his flaming fires.

But we, whose life,
In the dull town and its unseemly strife,
Is lost, are out of favour with the God;
We shun his smile and tremble at his nod:
Phoebus to us a tyrant is; his breath
To us is bane, not boon, his heat not life, but death.

Might we forsake
The cheerless city for the down, the brake,
From the sad streets unto the fields return
And housing with the beasts by hill and burn,
No longer, mouse-like, cower in the dark,
But in the live sun's sight fare fearless with the lark,

Did we but live
With Nature and what she alone can give,
The sympathy with sun and snow and frost,
Which in our crowded cities we have lost,
We should regain and peace would be our dower,
The peace of rock and rill, of bird and tree and flower.

Could we but leave
Our lusts and unto these, that ne'er deceive,
Turn for delights that wealth were vain to buy,
Our hopes, our fears, with earth and sea and sky,
With the blithe birds that hover in the air,
The beasts, the trees, the herbs, the waves, the windwafts, share,

Then Nature kind
Once more to us and kindred should we find:
Her rains, her suns, her frosts, her winds, her snows
Once more should friends to us become, not foes;
Birds, beasts, to us again would comrades be
And Heaven and earth would look upon us lovingly.

Then, once again,
There might for us the soft Saturnian reign
Return and with their first ecstatic state,
The old frank gods the fields reanimate;
Zeus might beside us walk the world reborn
And Phoebus favouring be to us, as to the corn.

CHRYSANTHEMUMS.

BLEAK is the breeze; the boughs are bare;
I feel the first frost in the air.
My cats
Of one accord the greenhouse-stair,
The tool-shed top forsake, the mats,
Where, in the sunshine, at the door,
Their wont to bask is, and retire
Into the house, to sleep before
The fire.

The birds begin once more about
The crumbs I spread for them without
To turn,
The frugal fare, which they, whilst out
The worms on the soft earth are, spurn.

The robin intermits his rhyme,
Regretful yet for Autumn done
Nor yet inured to Winter-time
Begun.

The voices of the air and earth
All speak of Winter's coming dearth
Of grace:
The days of music and of mirth
Are done and Night draws on apace,
Earth's seeding-time, when, buried deep,
Mole-fashion, from the seasons' strife,
Tired Nature seeks in stirless sleep
New life.

Yet out of doors the beds are bright
With blooms that shame the lessened light.
Ablaze
With gold and purple, rose and white,
All colours but the Summer Day's,
They glitter, as if once again
The flowering year itself about
Had turned, old Winter in his den
To flout.

Flower of the East, Chrysanthemum,
That, when the world is dim and dumb,
Thy fan
Flirt'st in the face of Winter glum,
Thine old-world graces of Japan
Might haply with the revel-rout
Of May, the leafage lush of June,
The joybells of July, seem out
Of tune.

But now, against the darkling day,
The blackened trees, thy bright array
Of bloom,
As on some screen of lacquer grey,
Sticks cheerly off from this our gloom
And helps us Northerners forget
Awhile that we, if not to-day,
At least to-morrow Winter's debt
Must pay.

FACES.

THE faces haunt me, all the faring faces,
That surge about me in the strident streets,
Wherein scant sign of thought or saving grace is,
Of love and light, of noble hopes and heats,
The crowd of common visages one meets,
White, brown, wan, ruddy, eager, sad or merry,
But all with looks that speculation show not,
As who whence come they, whither go they, know not,
As vacant-eyed as one at Charon's ferry
Would look to find the crowding shadow-crew,
For whom on earth no longer any place is,
No more the sun is bright, the skies are blue.
The faces haunt me, all the faring faces.

The faces haunt me, all the thronging faces,
All through the hurtling day that hem me round:
Not that each countenance or mean or base is:
On some, at least, the mark of mind is found:
But each is set,—as his whom Furies hound
Into the incommensurable distance
Where the Known ceases and th'Unknown commences,

—Upon some viewless goal, tow'rd which the senses,
Unthinking, struggle with a brute persistence,
That knoweth How nor Why, but only Must.
Orestes, with the Erinnyes on his traces,
Should with such eyes into the Afar have thrust.
The faces haunt me, all the thronging faces.

The faces haunt me, all the hovering faces;
Nor do they loose me with the lapsing Day:
Oft in my dreams their shadow-rout retraces
Its daylong round upon Night's stage of grey.
Wave after wave, on their unending way
Toward the unfated goal which no one reaches,
They circle past me, each the other urging,
As billows o'er Time's far fantastic beaches
Go, in succession, clambering and surging,
Myriads on myriads, countless, by some wind
Infernal driven across the infernal spaces,
They overdrift th'arena of my mind.
The faces haunt me, all the hovering faces.

Would I might rid me of the ruthless faces!
Who was it dubbed the human face “divine”?
He must have dwelt in solitary places
Till all his reason sickened for repine
And reached for what it knew not poisoned wine.
But he, who must his dreaming and his thinking
Compass amidst a crowd that think and dream not,
That scorn and hate all those like them who seem not,
A crowd from whom for him there is no shrinking,
The vision of whose unenlightened eyes,
Daylong and nightlong, all his footsteps chases,
To all the heavenly powers, like me, he cries,
“Would I might rid me of the haunting faces!”

ORGAN-DANCERS.

1.

YONDER at th'end of the street an organ wheezes and groans:
It grinds out a grisly waltz, a jumble of jarring tones:
Or is it a skeleton-march, a rattle of dry dead bones,
That mimics the ghastly mirth of the hosts of Jehoshaphat Vale,
As they gather before the rod of the Resurrection gale?

What matter? The street-children trip and jig to the joyless tune.
It might be the song of the stars or the nightingale under the moon,
So featly it falls for them in the rhythm of their rigadoon.

Trip, little ones, trip!
To-morrow, it may be, Life will have you on the hip:
To-morrow, belike, you'll dance no more with laughing lip,
But follow with crippled feet the crack of Fortune's whip.

2.

But hearken! Another stop is opened; a dull lament,
That voices the vulgar joy in a pinchbeck sentiment,
A parodied passion, racked and tortured, in tatters rent,
Its tame monotonous train of phrases, that once about
The heart might have twined, but now are lifeless, it gurgles out.

Unheeding, the children trim their steps to its dreary drone
And sway with as good a grace to its graceless monotone,
As if 'twere the dance of the days before the Great White Throne.

Sway, little ones, sway!
To-morrow, an't please the pigs, you'll trip to a tune more gay,
But never with hearts and feet more light than they are to-day,
As you dance to the croaking chords, as blithe as the birds in May.

3.

The measure changes again, and now 'tis a canting song,
A patchwork of parrot notes, that shamble and slouch along,
As they echo the joyless japes of the addle-pated throng.
The tale of the bondman born they tell, of the slave in grain,
Who mocks with a mirthless glee at his empty heart and brain.

But nothing the children care. The rhythm in them is young,
Whereto, since the world began, the spheres have swayed and sung:
The brabble of brainless tones they hear in a higher tongue.

Dance, little ones, dance!
Not long will it last, alack! your lovesome ignorance.
To-morrow the light of Life will break your blissful trance:
You'll trip no longer, bound to the whirling wheels of Chance.

4.

Once more is the measure changed. The drone of a dismal hymn,
It croaks of a life in chains and Death in the distance dim:
It tells of a jealous God, a despot dark and grim,
Who frowns on the joys of earth and biddeth a man live sad,
An if he would fain escape from burning with the bad.

No matter! The little ones turn to the dirge of death and dole,
As if 'twere the dance in Space of the new-delivered soul,
As if 'twere a festival peal, instead of a funeral toll.

Turn, little ones, turn!
To-morrow, may be, you'll swing and sway to a strain less stern:
But the lesson you teach to-day may you never more unlearn,
That doubting and dole are still with courage and cheer to spurn!

SUNDOWN.

FAR down in the West, in the ultimate distance,
The wheels of the sun-chariot, slackening, creep;
The day, over-drowsy to dream of resistance,
Itself to its death,
As a child that is tired of the toil of existence,
Resigneth. The breath
Of the breeze as a lullaby is for the senses;
Time's ocean of motion, it seems, in suspense is;
All speaketh of sleep.

What marvel is this from the sky-marge that sallies,
That veers like a vulture and broods like a dove
Of celestial delight o'er the hills and the valleys?
With pinions world-wide,
It hovers and hangs o'er the streets and the alleys,
From side unto side,
To glory transmuting the grimy old city,
A splendour of tender compassion and pity,
Of rapture and love.

And see, broken open, from story to story,
Is Heaven, to the deeps of the infinite blue;
Aswoon in the sunsetting halo, the hoary
Old houses repose:
Their smoke to a sorcery, their grime to a glory
Transfigured, each glows,
Regenerate grown, 'neath the radiance golden,
The lowly made holy, the homely and olden
Made lovesome and new.

The dreams of all poets, who sought have to follow
Their fancies to spheres which no mortal may reach,
Are pictured and painted in Heaven, o'er each hollow
And height of the West;
Each cloud-wreath, that waits on the car of Apollo,
In jewels is drest;
This chrysoprase-green, that pearl-grey, jacinth-yellow,
Star-blue is; each hue is unlike to its fellow,
Each fairer than each.

Each moment the face of the fantasy changes,
New flower-tides o'erflooding its opal and rose;
Each cloud-burst of colour more sweet and more strange is
Than what was before.

As pageant on pageant there rises and ranges,
It is as there bore
Sleep's heralds her standards, through Heaven far-flaming,
Deep-coloured, to dullard and whole-wit proclaiming
The hour of repose.

SNOW FALLS.

SNOW falls;
It flutters o'er the ways; it settles on the walls
And roofs and ridges:
To yonder birds up there,
So far aloft in air
That to our vision short they show no more than midges,
On London's giant hive down gazing from the skies,
The city must one vast grim etching seem to be,
Spread panorama-wise,
In virgin silver graven upon a ground of ebony.

Not long
The pricked-out picture lasts. See, now, the airy throng
Of argent feathers,
Subsiding on the ways,
Sits like a silver haze
Upon the patient roads, accustomed to all weathers,
A haze that thickens fast, beneath the thronging hail,
And overcovers all with its still-starkening cloud,
Till, from a filmy veil,
Fit for a bride, it's grown a sheer sepulchral shroud.

The hum
Of traffic fades afar and all the day is dumb.

Like showers of arrows,
Transpiercing all they meet,
The North Wind whirls the sleet.
Before their frozen flight, the world-all cowers and narrows:
All breath suspended seems beneath the grey cloud-cope.
The hunt of Life is hushed; its fields are frozen deep.
Call off the hounds of Hope!
Who knoweth when the world will wake again from the snow-sleep?

Yet, see,
The friendly elves have woven o'er every bush and tree,
Out in my garden,
Their webs of argent lace,
Whereon frost-diamonds trace
Runes that the ravished eye bespeak of peace and pardon,
As who “In Winter's snow “should say” and cold and gloom,
“In Death, which is the term of love and joy and strife,
“Yet Beauty waits to bloom,
“Beauty, that is the flower of Truth and promise of new life.”

PIGEONS.

THE pigeons in the street
Go gleaning here a crumb and there a grain of wheat:
Among the stones and dust they fare,
Now stalking stately here and there,
Now tripping daintily,
With nodding heads and necks uplifted in the air,
Now for a yard or two
Wide-winging o'er the ways or hovering like a bee.

With plumage grey and blue
And rainbow-tinted breasts, that shimmer in the sun,
About the flocking roads they fly and fare and run
And lighten London's wintry moods
With memories of the meads and woods.

Among the folk they pass
And seek their food between the feet of horse and ass.
Blithe birds, they have no fear of man;
Their beauty 'gainst the general ban
Assureth them of hate;
Their confidence disarms the dull unthinking clan,
That else too ready were
The harmless life in bird and beast to obliterate.
They know no sordid care;
Each day brings food enough to fill their modest need;
And so among mankind their guileless lives proceed,
Midmost our strife for sick increase,
A pastoral of faith and peace.

Well were it if we might,
Like them, contentful, take whatever day and night
Afford nor fret for things which pass
The common ken of man. Alas!
We know not how to live
Or die. True sons of Eve, until beneath the grass
We're laid, we know no rest
Nor can, contrite, accept that which Life has to give
And make thereof the best.
Would, pigeons, we from you might learn, without wanthought,
To live from day to day, nought hoping, dreading nought,
Nor seeking strife nor shunning scaith,
Disarming Doom with fearless faith!

LONDON LIGHTNING.

THE clouds in sunder
Are cloven and scattered by the thrusting thunder,
And through the cleft, at London's lifted spires
The sudden lightning spurts and jets its jagged fires.

By their projection,
As if rehearsing for the Resurrection,
Livid as Lazarus, from Night's narrow tomb,
Dead London starts to life, against the ghostly gloom.

Up for a second
From sleep by Heaven's foreboding finger beckoned,
With brows for dread unto the earth bowed down,
Grim, in its grave-clothes, towers the pale phantasmal town.

Roof, spire, arch, gable,
In lurid outlines, 'gainst the shadow sable,
A moment shown, the spectral city stands,
Lit by the lightning's pale and phosphorescent hands.

Clear as in daylight,
Nay, clearlier, haply, by the livid raylight,
Each object shows, each wall, each stone, each peak,
Smitten of those spectral spears of whiteness wan and bleak.

Then, without warning,
Its night as swift and sudden as its morning,
Extinguished is the lightning's lurid sheen
And the vain vision is as if it had not been.

So to the dying,
In that stern second when, each other nighing,
Life and Death meet and are anon made one,
When the closed eyes no more are conscious of the sun,

A light Elysian,
They say, illuminates the inner vision
And all the features of the life gone by
Stand out in signs of flame before the spirit's eye.

In phosphorescence,
Good, ill, reduced to their eternal essence,
A second graven upon the sight is all
And then for ever quenched by Death's sepulchral pall.

RHODODENDRONS.

THE rhododendrons run along the water's marge,
Sheathing in leafage lush the river's rippled sheen;
Here, where the mellow light of latter May is large,
The heavens' reflected gold they frame in frolic green.
Run, rhododendrons, run!
The sojourn of the sun
Is short and Winter dogs the steps of Summer done.

The rhododendrons burn with blossom-lamps of blue
And red and white; there's scarce a leaf for bloom to spy.
With hosts of frolic flower they hail the season new,
Uplifting faces fair toward the smiling sky.
Bloom, rhododendrons, bloom!
The land on Summer's loom
Is laid and you anon must for the rose make room.

The rhododendrons hang their over-ripened heads:
The ending of their hour of honour is at hand.
See, here and there, a bush its blossom-harvest sheds;
To-morrow, all forlorn and flowerless, they will stand.
Fade, rhododendrons, fade!
The year is like a maid,
That, once her flowertime past, must wither in the shade.

THE CUCKOO'S CALL.

I FARE the flocking highways. What stays my striving feet?
Was that the cuckoo calling across the crowded street?
Nay, no one seems to note it. O cuckoo, can it be
That thou art calling only, of all the world, to me?

Yes, there it rang, insistent, thy distant double rhyme,
That rhyme that hath no fellow in this our songless clime.
Evanished streets and folk are; and at thy call, meseems,
I wander, in thy traces, the woodlands of my dreams.

Alas, 'twixt thee, o cuckoo, and me is many a wall:
None ever knew the answer to thine enchanted call.
Spring even knows the world not whereto thou call'st away;
To speak thy secret passes the magic of the May.

This but I know that ever thy voice the wander-lust
Of dreams in me awaketh, and I, I follow must
Still on thy sightless summons, in all the world's despite,
Although beyond the limits it lead of Day and Night.

BELLS AT DAWN.

THE pealing bell proclaims the coming dawn of day.
Though hidden is Heaven's face behind the close cloud-rack
And not a vein of blue relieves the vault of black,
Yonder in the belfry grim the great bells swing and sway.
“The morning's here: 'tis time to wake and work!” they say.
Each over other climbs and clamours and falls back,
The shrill harmonic tribe still humming in their track,
Like giant bees engaged in elephantine play.

Relic of barbarous times, when humankind forlorn
Beneath Faith's tyrant thrall to bend the neck was fain,
The jarring jangle mars the calm of coming morn,
Enforcing the sad sense, that else to sleep were fain,
Awake and all the chords of the reluctant brain
The weary rhythm keep of rites and creeds outworn.

OUTGATE.

HERE, in this Babel where I dwell,
—As, in dead Dante's dream of Hell,
Old bards and sages, for no sin,
Nor glad nor sorry, were within
The Limboes of the infernal land,
Hell's outer courts, to languish banned,
—This city with the face and heart
Of stone, I mostly live apart.
Scant sympathy of heart and mind

I have with those of mine own kind,
Who breathe with me its murky air,
Heavy with tears and toil and care.
No common standard of exchange
We have of thought or feeling: strange
To me their joys and sorrows are
As dwellers in some distant star
And mine to them: their deeds misdone
I deem; their windy prate I shun,
Their witless mirth, their foolish feasts.
But for the dear-belovèd beasts,
The cattle in the ways one meets,
The cats, the horses in the streets,
The dogs, the donkeys and the birds,
These all the worthless gift of words
That lack, wherewith we men are taught
To cover up our want of thought,
The town, for dreamers of my mood,
Would be a swarming solitude,
A desert all the lonelier
That there one scarce hath room to stir
For crowds of folk, the name that bear
Of men, upon two legs that fare,
That are to me alike in form,
That feel, like me, the cold, the warm,
Like me, when rained upon, are wet
And in the sun at noontide sweat,
Yet less in common have with me
Than fishes swimming in the sea,
Are less to me akin, in aught
That sunders man and brute, in thought,
In feeling, sentiment and wit,
Than yonder birds in heaven that flit.

So from my kind I live aloof
And unto those for my behoof
Who branded with the name of “brute”
Are, for that they are mostly mute,
Turn, to the birds and beasts. With these
And their congeners, flowers and trees,
Sun, stars and moon, skies, clouds and breeze,
I dwell and deal in harmony;
For these the features are to me,
The voices of that general Whole,
The world-all's omnipresent Soul,
Which we, for lack of wit to frame
A fitter title, Nature name.
For even here, in this our waste
Of idle toil and witless haste,
The gracious goddess at the call
With succour ready is of all
Whose loving eye and patient ear
Are trained to turn for help to her.
Nay, even in London one can note
Spring's wild-bird warble in the throat
Of Winter wax to April's strong
And blesséd blossom-tide of song
And watch in every leafing way
The budding miracle of May,
Can see sweet Summer blow and burn,
Ember by ember, out and learn
From Autumn's incense-laden breath
The mysteries of Life and Death.

Myself long since to her I gave
To be her singer and her slave;
And though from woods and fields afar,
I know not by what sorry star,
My life has long been doomed to drone

In London's wilds of brick and stone,
I have not lost my youthful sense
Of her abiding immanence
Nor ever looked to her in vain
For peace and solace in my pain,
The solace she alone can give,
The peace that heartens one to live.
Hot from her heart the dreams I drew
Which here for those, alas! too few
Who, even as I do, love and long
For her, I render into song;
And still about me, everywhere,
She glorifies my daily air.
In her approof I rest secure
Who destined is to overdure
The insect hum and fret of men
And as she now is, to be then
Serene and sovereign still, when they
And all their works have passed away.

Here, in this maze of street on street,
This treadmill-round of toiling feet,
This spider's web of straining hands,
As in the silent Libyan sands,
She follows on her fateful way,
Untroubled of our trifling day;
Her patience passionless survives
The riot of our restless lives;
She waits,—the waiting of the Gods,
For whom our worlds are but the odds
And ends of Being and each age
A pin-prick on Creation's page,
—When once the weakling worm called Man
Has wriggled out his petty span

And beats with helpless hands no more
Upon the never-opened door,
To smoothe away the scars that he
Has made on hill and wold and lea
And cover up Life's faded sheen
With broideries of branching green.

SUN AND SHADOW.

[Out of the shadow into the sun]

Out of the shadow into the sun
A bird flew forth with the day begun.
The world-all glittered with morning-gold,
Its sorrows silenced, its cares consoled:
There was nothing under the bell of blue
But flowers and fragrance and Dawn and dew.

Into the shadow out of the sun,
The bird flew back, with the daylight done.
Gone was the blossom, the song, the light;
The world was wrapped in the robes of Night.
Of all that under the sunlight shone,
There was nothing left but a name on stone.

Sun and shadow, o bird, my soul,
That fleddest, singing, from pole to pole,
Of all thou'st tasted: 'tis time to rest:
Go, get thee back to thy last year's nest:
And fair were Fortune, of all thy rhyme
If one bell trinket the brows of Time

THE OLD AND THE NEW.

I STAND upon the summit, where the turning point of age is,
Youth many a mile behind me left, a faint and fading dream:
The sky serene above me smiles; the wind no longer rages;
Life level lies beneath my feet, unblurred by shade or gleam.

To-morrow I must gird me yet again for the ensuing
The path that darkles downward and the unreturning way:
But now I pause a moment from my stress for the reviewing
The people of my youth and those who fill their place to-day.

In what I see scant comfort is. The Past-time with the Present
When I compare, I'm woeful for the world that is to be.
What was, although its memories all may not be sweet and pleasant,
Both good and gracious shows by that which is to-day to me.

Back to my youth, my manhood, I look. My generation,
For all its faults, a manly was, a proud and generous race;
The time was true and trusty: but this our newborn nation
Is void of pride and purpose, hath neither strength nor grace.

We, at the least, still ready were to bear our birthright's burden,
To face the blasts of battle and the surges of the seas.

We might be heedless dreamers; but, whatever was our guerdon,
We sought for higher things from life than cheaply-gotten ease.

But you, my sons, that boast you you are worthy of our places,
You that the load must soon take up that's lapsing from our hand,
I'faith, my heart misgives me, when I scan your vacant faces,
Wherein but apathetic greed I see and cunning bland.

We, at the least, if rash and rough, had hands the sword for gripping:
That which our fathers won we kept and added thereunto:
But you, the reins of empire from your nerveless grasp are slipping:
Our England's glory, waxed with us, is like to wane with you.

How shall you fight the Future, that can but game and gabble
And sneer at all of worth that leaves your dull complacence cold?
I would not march through Cuckooland with such a thewless rabble.
Where is the man among you all? You are but babes grown old.

The jargon of the race, the ring, the gaming-house your speech is:
Bards, sages, seers, a language speak that hath no sense for you.
You're fed and fat with poison as the fungus on the beech is:
Good, for it's old, you've left and ill have taken, for it's new.

Your virtues are but cowardice: in fear your ease of losing,
You lounge through life with maxims of mean prudence on your lips.
We had more faith in Fate than you, were bolder in the choosing:
You drift like soulless shadows driven before the Furies' whips.

We, at the least, were fighters, though at windmills whiles we tilted;
Our backs we set against the wall and scorned from Fate to run:
But you, scant stomach for the fight you have; by Fortune jilted,
You haste to sell yourselves for slaves, before the battle's done.

We, lovers in our day we were (and love's a thing you know not),
Were quick to risk the cast and count the world for love well lost:
But you, you love your ease o'ermuch; the dice with Fate you throw not:
None ever loved who paused, as you, you pause, to count the cost.

We counted honest work no curse, but faced hard fortune cheerly:
You have no heart for toil, except it be at idle play:

We loved the chase and prized the gain the more 'twas gotten dearly;
But you, roast larks into your mouths must, dropping, “Eat me!” say.

We, many a foolish thing, no doubt, we did, at wise ones aiming:
You, if you err not, 'tis because you venture not at all.
Who nothing doth, occasion scant there is his acts for blaming:
The churl who grovels on the ground, forsooth, need fear no fall.

We, at the least, high thoughts we thought and went high quests ensuing.
You, that no thoughts have of your own, you steal those of our time;
Nor even fairly copy them, but parody, undoing,
As snails and slugs fair fruits and flowers disfeature with their slime.

You grovel in your gutters of corruption nor misdoubt you
Of aught that's worth but feeding on Life's fat and on its sweet.
You care not though the darkness grow and gather all about you,
Provided but your beds be soft and bellies full of meat.

You're blind and deaf to Nature: all the carol of Creation,
All Life's rapture of rejoicing for the Springtime leaves you cold.
You can pass a field of cowslips by without intoxication:
'Tis we that are the young, my sons: 'tis you that are the old.

You have never learned from sorrow or from Pain, the soul's physician;
You walk the world like cripples from the cradle to the tomb.
You will perish, without living, of waste heart and inanition,
As dotards do, unwotting of Life's glory and its gloom.

Too often after shadows, hope-deluded, we, we followed;
The arrows of our purpose swerved too often from the mark;
Our venturous feet not seldom in the bogs of error wallowed;
But at least 'twas light we aimed at, in our questing, and not dark.

But you, the hero-deeds of old, the tales of bygone glories,
No ardour in your hearts excite; you are too worldly-wise:
The dreams of seers and bards for you are only children's stories:
You would scorn to risk your comfort for the conquest of the skies.

Where are the golden hopes that made our boyhood bright as morning?
Where are the rainbow-coloured dreams we followed, nothing loath?
You know them not: all visions fair, all high emprises scorning,
You dream of nought but wealth unearned and fatly-dowered sloth.

Where are the mighty painters all, the seers our lives that lighted?
Where are the makers of winged words, the bards for us that sang?

Where are the sayers, doers now, the world-all's wrongs that righted?
You do but fumble at the strings so sweet for us that rang.

We may have youthful errors made, in riper years repented.
Where is the lad whose ardent feet have strayed not now and then?
Who ever yet rejoiced but he in latter age lamented?
But you, you never have been young and never will be men.

We that have sinned and suffered, in the logbooks of our living
Are things that call for pardon, things omitted and misdone.
But you, who have not lived at all, what need you of forgiving?
Who cares to call a reckoning with the slow-worm in the sun?

We, if of somewhat of our dreams we failed, yet unforgotten
Will be, whilst England dureth, what we ventured for her sake:
But you, who never venture, who, before you're ripe, are rotten,
You will leave no more remembrance than the raindrops on the lake.

The fire of youth within our veins, although our heads nigh white are,
Yet runs; but you, your mother's milk scarce dry upon the tongue,
As cold of heart and dark of wit as any Winter's night are:
'Tis you that are the old, my sons; 'tis we that are the young.

Well, fare ye well! I bear you no ill-will, though little pleasant
You make life with your mumming. Are you worthy hate or scorn?
For me you are but puppets in the peepshow of the Present,
But sorry dreams foredoomed to fade and melt before the morn.

“They (the mean-minded) are arrogant in prosperity: but no sooner does the least reverse befall them than they hasten to sell themselves for slaves.” The Kural of Tiruvallouver (Tamil.)

THE SEVEN SPELLS.

SEVEN spells have puissance o'er us who here
Below go halting 'twixt earth and Heaven:
Love first and Laughter, then Faith and Fear,
Greed, Dreaming, six are; and Sleep is seven.

For Love and Laughter and Fear and Faith,
With one or other each man is bitten;
On each man's forehead, the Prophet saith,
The rune that ruleth his life is written.

Love's spell compelling who follow must
Himself still soweth and nothing reapeth;
For Love is only the mask of Lust,
The world-illusion agate that keepeth.

If God to laughter a mortal give,
He must hold aloof from his laughless brothers;
For none at follies may laugh and live
That mould the minds of a million others.

Whoever's thrall to the thrill of Fear,
In all Life's corners for God or Demon
Who looks, is buffeted far and near
Of the waves of Will, like a helmless seaman.

If one fall under the spell of Faith,
From Right and Reason he needs must sever
And ill, at a priest's word, work and scaith,
For the sake of a good that cometh never.

Another glamour there is, of Greed,
With gold and silver for souls that angles,
That makes men battle for more than need
And brawl like apes in the banyan-tangles.

For him who's curst with the lust of gain,
Life's one vast sand-waste, o'er which the glitter
Of vanishing gold leads on in vain
And death, for leaving, makes yet more bitter.

But worst of all is the spirit-bond,
Past Greed, Love, Laughter, past Faith and Fearing,
That binds men's thought to the things beyond,
That are not for human sight or hearing.

Some under this spell, the spell of Dreams,
Are born, that forces them fare, unresting,
And miscontented with that which seems,
Forever for that which is go questing.

Whoever of this, the deadliest one
Of all spells fated to man, is taken,
No place possesses beneath the sun;
He lives deserted and dies forsaken.

His wings, though weakling, his feet withhold
From any grip on our common mother;
He cannot breathe in our world-air cold
And cannot climb up to any other.

Though off Earth's fetters he cannot strike,
He still would soar to the Planets Seven;
And so he hovers for ever, like
Mohammed's coffin, 'twixt Earth and Heaven.

His flesh forbids him to scale the skies;
And as for the earth, he must forgo it.
He fares unfriended through life and dies
The death of a dog or a praiseless poet.

He only's happy who owns the spell
Of Sleep, who's born 'neath the sign of slumber,
Who delves not under the earth for hell
Nor soars for Heaven past Place and Number;

Who lets life lapse with the hourglass-sand,
Uncareful its How or Why to ponder,
Upon the Present who takes his stand
Nor frets his flesh for the unknown Yonder;

Who strains not his sorry passing breath
For what was never of Time begotten,
Of Life but easance and so of Death
For sleep asks only and strife forgotten.

Through life, unseeing, through life, unhearing
Save that which the senses tell, he goeth
And sated, lies down to die, unfearing
The Future of which he nothing knoweth.

He only's happy, for nought, in fine,
But that which the cattle seek, who yearneth,
Like them who liveth and when Life's wine
Is drained, to nothing, like them, returneth.

THE AIM OF LIFE.

THE eager earth hath drunk our heart's blood; on our sweat,
Our tears, our loves, our strifes, it fattened hath; and yet
No funeral stone it rears, to show the passers-by
That a man's murdered hopes beneath it buried lie.

The sea of Time hath whelmed the city of our hope;
Turret and tower beneath its grey unwrinkled scope
Lie drowned; and yet no sight of bower or sound of bell
There comes, of all that it hath swallowed up to tell.

The skies, that lured us on to sufferance with their smiles,
That beckoned us to wreck and ruin with their wiles,
Bend o'er our graves to-day their griefless brows of blue
Nor to our memories shed a single tear of dew.

Where are the weeping weeds, the burning blood-red flowers,
Earth should for harvest bear of all our blighted hours?
There, in the April sun, the August moon, it sleeps,
As if no myriad hearts lay rotting in its deeps.

Where are the piteous plaints, the thrilling threnodies,
That chanted o'er our heads should be of waves and breeze?
Where are the high sad songs of love and sympathy,
To our rememorance intoned of winds and sea?

Where are the temples high, the marble monuments,
The spires that to the skies should lift a world's laments,
The signs to show that one, who suffered, sought and sighed
For what is not for man, here dared and dreamed and died?

Where are the praising priests, the mourning maiden-throngs,
Hymning our passion past with high symphonious songs?
Where are the choirs to cast commemorative flowers?
If triumph not, at least, compassion should be ours.

Where have the heavens hid the Islands of the Blest,
That, for our heart's deceit, they showed us in the West?
Where are the giant thoughts, that, shining from afar,
They told us, should in air create another star?

Where are the mountain-paths, the sky-ascending stairs,
Whereby we hoped to reach the Heaven of our prayers?
The soaring stairs abide; the paths are there to tread:
But where's the God, the Heaven, to which they should have led?

Alas! We lived and hoped and suffered have in vain,
Since none and nothing have remembrance of our pain.
None laughs us e'en to scorn, so wholly we're forgot.
Who scoffs, indeed, at those whom he remembers not?

What profits us to do? What worth is there in strife,
Since our remembrance all must perish with our life,
Since no memorial we on Time's unstable tide
May leave to tell the tale of how we lived and died?

Love leads us on to live and other lives beget,
Engaging the To-Be to pay the Present's debt,
And blinds us to the law etern, by which we live,
That we for each new life a part of ours must give.

The flower, that barren bides, may flourish out its time;
But that which runs to seed must perish in its prime:
And we, we love and give our lives, that others may
The same round run of grief, when we are passed away.

About us in the air is many a sightless star,
That this our pin-point earth out-flourished once by far,
And many a burnt-out sun, by which what now we name
Our sun in Heaven above were but a taper's flame.

All, with their myriad lives, their glories and their griefs,
Have run their round in Space and wrecked upon Time's reefs,
Have given up the ghost and yield to others must,
That in His furnace-fires are moulded of their dust.

The eternal question runs on all the tongues of men,
What is the aim of Life? How many, now as then,
With blood and tears have sought and perished, asking, “Why,
Why are we born, if we and all the world must die?

Why do we love, if Love the maw of Death must feed?
Why flower, since Death twin-born with Life is in each seed?
Why do we live, since all that ever lived have died,
Since even the sun above must perish in his pride?”

In all the sounds of earth the eternal question's rife,
“What is the aim of Love? What is the end of Life?”
The impassive answer comes, the tale of Time, that saith,
“The aim of Love is Life; the end of Life is Death.”

BRITANNIA CORAM BARBARIS.

[I.]

ENGLAND, when the sceptre passes from thy high unpaltering hold,
When thy puissance pales and ceases from the new worlds and the old,
May I not be there to see it, may I not be there to hear!
Drowned in darkness be my vision, shut in silence be mine ear!

I have loved thee, mighty Mother, since I grew to understand
What a glory is thy story, what a healer is thy hand,
What a shadeless splendour hovers o'er thy proud imperial head,
What a halo flames and flowers round the memories of thy dead;

Since I learned from song and story, from the book of days gone by,
How thy greatness grew and gathered, like the sunlight in the sky,
How thy bright far-flaming banner, to the winds of Heaven outblown,
Flew from ocean unto ocean, opening up the worlds unknown;

How, the fourfold climes o'erranging, sounding o'er the sevenfold seas,
East, South, North, thy war-cry carried Truth and Justice on the breeze,
How the subject-peoples prospered in thy bosom's fostering heat,
How the Peace Britannic followed on thy firm unfaltering feet.

Many an age the world in justice hast thou governed and in truth;
O'er the peoples, well contented with thy rule of right and ruth,
Many an age hast thou the sceptre swayed of empire: one in three
Of the grandchildren of Adam owns allegiance to thee.

Now thy majesty is menaced by a fierce and faithless foe,
Who by force and fraud unflinching many a nation hath laid low;
Many a people hath he strangled, Frank and Saxon, Gaul and Dane:
Now his blood-shot eyes are fastened on thine empery of the main.

Sad the day will be for Europe, sadder for the subject world,
When thy lions cease to ramp it, when thy rainbow flag is furled,
When the empery of the nations passes from the nations' friend,
From the frank free-hearted Briton to the sour sardonic Wend.

Yet, despite his strength and cunning, little cause there were to dread
This thy new rapacious foeman, if, as sovereign Shakspeare said,
To ourselves and thee, our mother, we thy children rest but true,
If the heart of England olden beat again in England new.

Race on race its battle-billows hath against thee hurled and foiled,
From the bulwarks of thy bravery inexpugnable recoiled:
None thy blow might bide, unbaffled, in the fierce earthshaking fight;
None in arms might stand, unstaggered, 'gainst thy calm unconquered might.

But, alas! within thy bosom bred a traitor-crew hath been,
That but spite and hatred cherish for their dam, the Ocean's Queen,
That, their paltry ends to compass and their greed and spleen to sate,
Would upon the rocks of ruin cast the carrack of the State.

These it is upon whose malice counts the fierce insidious foe,
Thine unvanquished arm to palsy in the coming battle-throe,
So, against thyself divided, thou to hate mayst fall a prey
And eternal darkness follow on thy fair imperial day.

On thy guard, then, mighty Mother! Let the traitor feel thine arm!
Cast the coward from thy councils! Make them helpless all for harm!
Else in vain thy true sons' valour and their fortitude will be
And thy name will sink for ever in the surges of Time's sea.

II.

But, (forefend it, God in Heaven!) calm unconquered Mother mine,
If the thing be true they tell us, that thy star is in decline,

That thou soon must pass and perish from thy place beneath the sun,
Leave thy heritage of honour to the Vandal and the Hun;

If it other than a phantom of the fell impuissant will,
Other than a fond intention be of those that wish thee ill,
If indeed it be foreordered that thy course is near its close
And that thou thy head unvanquished needs must vail unto thy foes,

Mayst thou not, as one by inches pineth, wait and waste away,
Till the hand of Time the moment mark for ending of thy day!
Face to foe, in open battle, as thou livedst, mayst thou die,
With the corpses of thy haters for thy catafalque heaped high!

THE LEAVES' LESSON.

NO two leaves are alike upon the tree,
(The wind went whispering these words to me.)
No rose upon the bush is like another;
No meadow-sheep is like his woolly brother.

Thou sighest for a soul akin to thine,
A heart to halve with thee thy joy and pine;
Thou wouldst a lover have, a friend, to share
The things that are, that will be and that were.

Thou sigh'st in vain. Since first the world began,
Man never knew the heart of other man;
None ever might in other one discover
The soul-perfecting half, the friend, the lover.

Since first the sun and moon in Heaven were shown,
Each living thing must walk the world alone:
None is there made to share with other one,
Beneath the mute all-suffering moon and sun.

Love was but made to keep the world agate:
Its aim fulfilled, too oft it turns to hate:
No bond there is, in Time's unstable weather,
Save wont and need, to link two lives together.

Each must his own road run for ill or weal:
Heal thine own heart: none other can it heal.
'Tis better not to dream, since one must wake,
And broken dreams the heart o'er-often break.

No torment is there like to hope deceived:
The loneliest life excels a life bereaved:
No dearth there is can vie for desolation
With that which comes of empty expectation.

Life's lesson learn and to thyself suffice:
No sun of love can thaw the eternal ice.
Trust thine own self and thou without despair
Shalt, if not happy, (Who is happy?) fare.

The case made plain is, when we come to die.
Then “you” nor “they” abide, but only “I.”
The naked soul alone, without a hand
To hold, must fare into the Unknown Land.

Ask not for joy; with calm thyself content.
Peace, pleasance, sympathy, accomplishment
Of hope, are words for which in vain we con
Life's vague unwritten enchiridion.

100

Death only can content thee, Death the just,
That thy dust mingles with the general dust;
Then only shall thy soul with others share
Life, when thou one art with the earth and air.

Then, when of rain and sun thou'rt art and part,
Soul shall thou be and heart of the world's heart.
Till then be wise and weigh this word from me;
No two leaves are alike upon the tree.

TIME AND HIS TENDERLINGS.

RHYTHM and rhyme
Are the roadmates of Time,
His wayfellows frolic and blithe are;
His tenderlings they,
With his forelock who play
And sport with his sandglass and scythe are.

The tramp of his feet
Into music they beat
And vary the theme at their pleasure;
His dogged old trot,
An he will it or not,
They set to melodious measure.

His fingers and toes,
As he hobbles and goes,
With bangles and hawk-bells they trinket;
He well nigh forgets
His gout and his debts,
So blithely their castanets clink it.

101

He'd dance, if he might,
To their tune of delight;
Nay, see but how nimbly he capers!
For all he is old,
With their tinkle of gold,
They've cured him of dumps and of vapours.

Like kittens, now here,
As the maggot may spur,
Now there, round his footsteps they rollick.
No tittle there is
Of his wrinkled old phiz
But wreathed is with smiles for their frolic.

His hourglass they hide
With their flowers, so his stride
He no more can measure to curse us;
There's never a whit
Of his scythe-blade, but it
With tendrils is wreathed, like a thyrsus.

He trips, till you'd think
He had taken to drink,
So merry he is with the metre.
What lost is to-day
He must make up by way
Of robbing of Paul to pay Peter.

He never can find
In his heart or his mind
To part with his mettlesome pages;
And that is why Time
Ever tenders true rhyme
And carries it on through the ages.

102

THE COMMON HOPE.

THE waste years call, from their sepulchral caves,
Upon me for rebirth
In brighter worlds, beyond the winds and waves,
Beyond the strife and stress, the griefs and graves
Of this our narrow earth.

Can it, then, be, as you imply, sad years,
Out-yearning to me thus,
That, in some sphere beyond our hopes and fears,
Beyond our doubts and dreams, our smiles and tears,
There wait new worlds for us?

A thousand ages pass and make no sign;
We die and cease to be;
Our dust is gathered into Nature's shrine,
Nor is there any trace of yours or mine
In Heaven or earth or sea.

For me, indeed, if Death's sepulchral snows
Hide worlds of brighter sheen,
I cannot credit that their joys and woes,
Their strifes and aims, will other be than those
Which here on earth have been.

Flowers live again, because their seeding-plot
Conceals the germs of Spring;
Nor can we,—I, at least, conceive it not,—
Look, in another life, for otherwhat
Than that with us we bring.

103

Be't as it may, behind Life's doubtful dream
Whatever Edens lie,
Whatever eyes behold their morning beam,
I do not crave it, neither do I deem
That I shall see it, I.

Sufferance with Nature is the nameless sin
That she may not forgive:
Her creatures all, that end as they begin,
Suffer and die: but we, who are their kin,
We suffer and we live.

Scant joy I've known: for joy I was not born,
Meseems, as other men:
The wede of sufferance all my life I've worn
And in new worlds, beyond our night and morn,
I feel, should wear again.

Wherefore my heart unto the common hope
Of men may not upleap;
Nor do my thoughts, when they, the Future's scope
Exploring, in the eternal darkness grope,
For better seek than sleep.

UNSEASONABLE SUMMER.

SUDDEN Summer, soaring, pouring with heaped hands
Sun and splendour, warmth and worship, on the unaccustomed lands,
With thy blue and golden banners in the wonder-smitten skies
Heaven unsealing for the healing of our Winter-wearied eyes,

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Where hast thou abidden, hidden, since the Prime,
Leaving Life to pine and perish in the cold Cimmerian clime,
And now comest, late relenting, when October's on the scene,
As it were our yearning spurning for the bliss that might have been?

Now that fading leas are, trees are, day by day,
When the leaves are like to shrivel on the sap-forsaken spray,
And of all the choir that music in the woodlands wont to make,
Now the robin only, lonely, flutes and flutters in the brake,

With thy sunshine mocking, shocking sense and sight,
As of morning rathe and rosy, in the mirk misborn of night,
Now the threadbare year thou takest unawares and putt'st to scorn,
As it's ready making, shaking off, for sleep, its wede outworn.

At the time and season reason-set for thee,
When thy gold and purple pageants in the blue should blazoned be
And the rose should burn with blossom for the bridal world's rebirth,
Wrapped in rain-clouds frowning, drowning lay the sorrow-smitten earth.

How should roses bloom in gloom, in rain and cold?
How should landscapes without sunshine laugh and glow with harvest-gold?
Nay, the roses died, half-blossomed, and half-ripened, dropped the grain;
Life, in darkness groping, hoping for thy waking went in vain.

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Now thy warmth thou wastest, hastest but decay;
Now the dry leaves shrink and shrivel from thy timeless touch away
And the few late flowers that linger in the lonely garden-beds,
By thy sun unwanted daunted, hang their dull diminished heads.

What mad God misruleth, fooleth Life like this,
On such strange sardonic fashion from the ultimate abyss
Rime and rain in June decreeing, summer in the year's decline,
Hail in harvest sending, blending poison still with living's wine?

Nay, meseems, evanished, banished are the Gods:
Jahveh, Allah, Zeus, have taken flight before Alecto's rods:
With Tisiphone have Angels, Muses, Graces ceased the strife:
Given to fiends and furies sure is all the governance of Life.

CORPOSANTS.

O WHAT are these that beckon from the blackness all around me,
From the harbours of the setting and the hollows of the sea?
O what are these that me so long have lost and now have found me,
When the Past and Present mingle and are merged in the To-Be?

There stand they, pale and laying on pale lips yet paler fingers,
The loves of youth, that dead to me are now or worse than dead.

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The light within their looks is quenched for ever; yet there lingers
A sad sepulchral halo for remembrance round each head.

And yonder, resolution, thought, desire, caprice, endeavour,
The ghosts of my dead hopes and dreams are marshalled on the plain:
Dead, drowned and dead in seas of blood and tears they are, nor ever,
Whilst Time his tale is telling, will they walk the world again.

You passed me by, procession-wise, and vanished, never stopping,
For all that I could plead with you, whilst Life was yet in bloom;
And now you throng about me, when, in darkness round me dropping,
Time's troubled torrent smoothens for the plunge into the gloom.

Nay, get you gone! Betake you to your limboes back! I need not
Your corposants to guide me to the goal of all below:
I'm none of those, you wot it, who will linger, if you lead not:
The path which you would point me is the way which I would go.

Come back, when all is over, to the place where my repose is,
And if you will it, follow with your faint funereal tread:
There on my stony pillow strew your pale sepulchral roses
And wave your ghostly standards o'er my stark and heedless head.

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A VOICE FROM DREAMLAND.

THE blackbird warbles on the thorn;
His wonted tale of Night and Morn
In other worlds he tells, unbond
To Time and Space, in climes beyond
The courses of the sun and moon.
I halt and hearken to his tune:
Though all the world to hear is free,
Meseems he sings for none but me.

Here, where he flutes, enchanted ground
It is; he makes the world resound
With magic music. O'er and o'er
He beats the burden of his lore;
The void of this our world of nought,
The nothingness of all but thought,
He tells to all beneath the sky:
Yet who hath heed of him but I?

Ah, blackbird, brother of my soul,
Thou know'st my need, thou know'st my goal;
The path my faring feet have trod,
The secret 'twixt my soul and God,
Thou know'st; from that enchanted clime
Thou com'st, whereof I dream and rhyme,
The never-travelled land that lies
Beneath the undiscovered skies.

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SEA-DRIFT.

SEA-DAYS!
To fare on, floating, through a golden haze,
Toward a goal that fleeth in the West,
Some fair and far and never-compassed quest,
Some rainbow never robbed by nearness of its rays!

Sea-nights!
To wander, wave-borne, 'midst the flitting lights,
The sharp prow thrusting through the thick star-crew,
Like fireflies dancing o'er the darkling blue,
And in the moon's wake steer toward the unseen Mights!

Sea-dreams!
To track through laughing lymph the glancing gleams,
Athwart the boundless blue go gazing down
And in that infinite hyaline feel drown
Thought, wish and wit of that which is and that which seems!

Sea-sleep!
Still rocked and cradled on the chanting deep,
To lapse and lose in that narcotic song
The sense of joy and sorrow, right and wrong,
The memory of a world, where men must work and weep!

HOMING DREAMS.

LIKE homing doves you hail me, with the West Wind in your voices

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And the shimmer of the setting in your world-bewildered eyes:
My dreams, I sent you forth to try and tell me what Life's choice is,
And back with wind in hand you come and voices full of sighs.

I sent you forth at morning-time, when all the East was glowing
And the sun of youth was radiant on the ripples of your way:
You were young and glad and golden, when you girt you for the going,
And now in your returning you are old and grave and grey.

And yet, though by the wayside you have shed your youthful graces,
I would not have you wander in the loveless world alone.
Frail children of my youth, there's room within my heart's high places,
There's room for you to rest with me by Eld's sepulchral stone.

So welcome, empty-handed though you come back from your questing,
Though bowed you are and broken as the waning of the wave,
Like wayworn birds that turn them to their ancient place of nesting,
Come back, my dreams, and die with me upon my last hope's grave!

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MAY-MAGIC.

BUILDING birds
And the air brim-full of a bliss that is overgreat for words!
But yesternight I was old and now I again am young;
The Spring with its coals of fire hath loosened my lips and my tongue.

I sing as I go;
For the world is washed and white of the soil of the Winter's woe;
My soul, that was sad and stained with sorrow but yesterday,
Is pure as the primrose-eyes and glad as the glittering May.

Life strives with Death:
The sun that eases the world of the East Wind's Borgia-breath,
And the quiver of Earth reborn that quickens the hope in my heart
And stirs it to strife anew, when peace were the better part!

VARIATIONS ON AN ALPINE THEME.

I. THE HOPE OF THE HILLS.

HILLS on the skymarge, with the sun behind them,
That hide the Summer from the longing lands,

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Suffering the Autumn and the Winter bind them
With chains of cold and gloom in icy bands,
Fast on the far horizon still we find them,
Back with their barriers from the sunset-strands,
Sentries unflinching from the task assigned them,
Shouldering relentlessly our straining hands.

All that is here below to us forbidden,
All our lost Edens, wood and wold and stream,
All the Chimaeras of our thought bestridden,
All the far glories of the sunset-gleam,
These all behind their giant holdfasts hidden,
Within their frowning fastnesses, we deem,
Nor doubt, each man, the rampart once o'erridden,
To lay his hand upon his darling dream.

Yet of those few who have their spurs surmounted
And stood at gaze upon their topmost spires,
Who have (not all, alas!) returned, recounted
'Tis that no dreamland of their long desires
On high they found, no Eden fairy-founted,
No Paradise of palms and seraph-choirs,
Nay, but a waste of Alp on Alp uncounted,
Forth-stretching far beyond the sunset-fires.

But we, unmindful of their warning pages,
Life's Near-at-hand neglect and to the vain
Dream of the summits, where the storm still rages,
Yearn with the yearning of a soul in pain.
Still, maimed recoiling from the mountain-stages,
Back to th'ascent we brace ourselves again,
Forgetful still that, if, (as say the sages)
Hope of the hills is, peace is of the plain.

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II. THE HUSH OF THE HILLS.

ABOUT the slumbering plains, in moonshine steeping,
Gaunt, stern and white,
The mountains stand, like giant warders keeping
The watch of night.

The moon upon them pours, the still world winding
In stark repose,
Unto Earth's transient green with silver binding
Th'eternal snows.

The summer landscape by the weird light shrouded
In Winter's hue,
The lonely mountains and the valleys crowded
Are like to view.

Life in the sun-flood and the daylight's fountains
Thrones on the plain;
But in the moon-pale night the placid mountains
All Life o'erreign.

There, smiling down on Earth's unending changes
Their changeless smile,
To Heaven their rude, unalterable ranges,
Pile over pile,

They lift, their sempiternal witness bearing
To the world's Prime,
Its ageless ermine on their shoulders wearing
Of snow and rime.

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To fore-eternal epochs testifying,
When, frozen deep,
The dead world slumbered, stark and silent lying
In the ice-sleep,

There, in the calm of certitude unbating,
They stand at gaze,
The aeon's foreassigned return awaiting,
Th'appointed days,

When, the last fire-cell frozen at Earth's centre,
Shall sea and shore
Their antenatal graves of gloom reenter
For evermore,

When Life fore'er from out Time's faded pages
Shall blotted be
And they alone look down, like snow-clad sages,
On shore and sea.

To them our fleeting day of feeble violence
A hyphen seems
Between two grim eternities of silence
And glacial dreams.

III. THE HALLUCINATION OF THE HILLS.

CLIFF over cliff,
The mountain tow'rs into the topmost blue,
As if
The shining sojourns of the Gods to seek.
Hard by those heights, aglow

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With sempiternal snow,
To those, who from below
Their soaring silver in the valley view,
Heaven shows. On yon pellucid peak,
Themseems,
The home is of their hopes, the dwelling of their dreams.

But, once the crest,
After long toil, with aching muscles won
And breast
Well nigh to bursting strained as in a vice,
Look round you, where you stand,
And you on every hand
No bright enchanted land
Of ivory turrets shining in the sun,
But a wild waste of snow and ice
Will find,
Shorn by the storm and rent by the relentless wind.

The snow not white,
But grey you'll find, the ice not crystal-clear
And bright,
As to the looker showed it from afar,
But muddy and opaque,
The sky a cold cloud-lake
Of lead, without a break.
A world of horror dumb and silence drear
It is, the cold corpse of a star,
To death
Frozen in the frantic last convulsive fight for breath.

So with whate'er
We picture bright, because it lies far hence,
And fair,

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Because it is beyond our reach and call.
Its glow and goodlihead
Are of our fancy bred.
Jesus “The Kingdom” said
“Of Heaven within you is;” and one and all
Man's Heavens, be they of thought or sense,
Of plain
Or mountain, owe their birth and being to his brain.

IV. THE HONOUR OF THE HILLS.

THE Spring hath over the grey old mountains drawn
Its glamorous webs of wit-bewildering gladness;
Each hillside slope, each upland lea and lawn
Is drunken with a Dionysiac madness.

A surge of blossom overbrims each crest;
Each Alp flings back the flower-foam to its neighbour:
The hills seem Maenads for the mysteries drest;
One hearkens after cymbal-clash and tabor.

What heart so hard but, when the mountains cast
Their winter-slough, like them, must doff its sorrow
And garb, forgetful of the piteous Past,
Itself in gladness for the summer morrow?

Although, like mine, his head, erst brown, be grey,
Who can, once seen, that sight without a fellow
Forget, the mountains in the flush of May
Belted with gentian blue and jonquil yellow?

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Yet, not alone when Bacchus from the East
Leads back the Nymphs, the Satyrs and Silenus,
My heart with them is in their flowering feast.
Whether in the month of Mars or that of Venus,

Whether in middle Spring or Summer late,
They garb themselves in vests of various glory
And with their rapturous riot celebrate
Life's transient triumph over Winter hoary;

Whether in each upland wood, for June newborn,
The lily of the valley's spathe uncloses
Or in the month of golden-glittering corn
Each pass is purple with the Alpine roses;

Whether narcissus silvers weald and wold
Or gentians carpet all the crests with heaven
Or amaryllis floods with fairy gold
The month whose number in the tale is seven;

Whether mild Autumn all the meadows fills
With saffron, careless of the coming severance,
Still to the flowering honour of the hills
My heart goes forth in flames of love and reverence.

Yea, of the mountains still for me, from first
To last, the old saw over all hath meetness;
Like that which cometh of the strong, as erst
Honey of the lion's mouth, there is no sweetness.

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V. THE HUNGER OF THE HILLS.

WITH you, hills, with you,
In the virginal air,
In the diamond shimmer of Dawn,
As you tower in the silence transcendent, like pillars of prayer,
Aspiration incorporate, Life from Death gendered anew,
From the darkness bygone
White and rose as a dove to the firmament soaring,
In ecstasy rises my spirit, itself like a fountain outpouring.

With you, at the hour
Of the summer noon-sleep,
When heavy with heat is the plain
And you, like to shepherds amidward their slumbering sheep,
You wake, when all else 'neath the scourge of the sun-tyrant cower
From his rutilant rain
And you only stand fast, his oppression rebating,
My soul with you shares in your vigil of solitude, watching and waiting.

How sore to you, hills,
As you glow on heaven's verge
In the gloaming, as sentinels stern,
As you thrust through the storm-clouds of evening and tower o'er the surge
And the surf of the sunsetting ocean, unstirred, like the sills
Of cathedrals etern,
On whose altars the fire of the phantasy burneth,
My heart through the haze of the heat and the dream of the distance out-yearneth!

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With you, in the dead
And the stillness of Night,
When the moon in the welkin shines wide,
When, under the sorrowful spell of her life-numbing light,
Earth lies without stir, white and cold, on her couch silverspread,
As a death-stricken bride,
And you alone live in the death-sheen are shining,
My thought over Life and Death soars to the regions of Peace unrepining.

VI. THE HORROR OF THE HILLS.

ABOVE the climbing pines,
Framed in the mountain's cleft, the far-off glacier shines.
Dropped like a dream from Heaven,
It glances in the glittering Alpine air,
A cloud of silver clear, seven times and seven times seven
Purged and made pure, refined in superstellar fire,
As 'twere.
The hills from out their rugged roots of duty,
It seems,
Have scions upward thrust of thrice-sublimed desires
And long-imprisoned dreams,
That blossom out in Heaven with blooms unearthly rare
Of radiance and beauty.

Throned on those argent piles,
Down on the smiling world below boon Nature smiles,
As placidly and cheerly
As if no storm her brows had ever blurred,
As if she ne'er had frowned nor ever looked austerely.

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With blandness by the thought of wind or winter wild
Unstirred,
Her benison she pours on man's existence:
But yet
There that is in her look, her eye serene and mild,
Which bids him ne'er forget,
If he her favour fain with tree and beast and bird
Would share, to keep his distance.

Beware lest thou ensue
The Goddess to the nooks where she of old makes new,
Where furbishing and mending
She plies upon this worn old earth of ours,
The haunts where she the world's beginning hides and ending,
Where, when some joint or screw gives way beneath storms, snows
And showers,
She sets herself in silence to renew it.
Beware,
I say, lest thou invade the place where in the throes
Of birth and death fore'er
Successive she abides: shun these her secret bowers;
Or by the Gods thou'lt rue it.

Yon glacier, which from far
Shines as the hills of Heaven beneath the midday star,
So white and smooth and candid
That from the valley showed, when viewed anear,
Is all with rocks and stones and gravel over-sanded:
Its smiling visage lowers, clay-coloured, harsh, misshaped,
Austere:
Each step you go, the way grows rougher, ruder,
And all
The slope with crannies huge and grim is over-gaped,

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That from the frowning wall
Of overhanging ice, like monstrous mouths, appear
To yawn for the intruder.

Forth of its clefts a breath
There overcometh thee, that is as ambient Death,
The night that hath no morning
Recalling to the sick and shuddering sense.
The marrow in the bones it numbs; 'tis Nature's warning
Unto the intruder rash that she his presence here
Resents,
Where she rough-hews the mountains' rugged faces
Of stone,
That in her workshop, where the worlds for joy or fear
She shapes, she would alone
Be nor have man invade with his irreverence
Her secret sacred places.

Nay, woman-like, her spleen
It rouses still to be in workday raiment seen;
It likes her not, a Goddess,
To be, with broom and brush and clout and pail
Awork, caught unawares in petticoat and bodice:
And if her warnings, ice, snow, cold, wind, rain and mist
All fail
Th'intruder to rebut and to imbue him
With heed
And reverence for her whim and he withal persist
In spying on her need,
The ruffled beldam sure, for ending of the tale,
A mischief is to do him.

Wherefore contented be
The mountains from the vale to view and bend the knee

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Submiss to Nature's ruling:
For she of the old Gods is, not the new,
And little patience hath, like them, with mortal fooling.
She, like the high Latonian twins, like Bacchus, Isis, Cybele,
Her due
From man exacts and suffers no denying:
Her rites
When she would secret hold, in vain it is that he
With her would bandy mights;
And woe to you and me if she catch me or you
Upon her mysteries spying!

VII. THE HALLOWING OF THE HILLS.

DUSK deepens on highland and lowland; the harpies of darkness descending
Go gathering up and devouring the last of the lingering light:
The day as a down-ridden beast is, that lies, at the long chase's ending,
Its death at the hand of its hunter awaiting, its conqueror, Night.

Awhile, with their whiteness phantasmal, like ghosts, 'gainst the shadow persisting,
Though else out of sight all the landscape is blotted, the snow-peaks shine pale;
Then, one by one, into the darkness they fade, as if tired of resisting,
And Night fore-eternal abideth sole monarch of mountain and dale.

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It is finished; no longer a hand's breadth to see of the hills' shining scalps is;
The glory is gone from the landscape: I sigh, as I turn to go in.
The dream of the daylight is over; for who face to face with the Alps is,
To meditate aught but the mountains, whilst light on them lasts, is a sin.

But lo! what is this that is dawning? What light in the Westward awaketh,
That is as the beam of the dayspring reborn from the Occident's sills,
That surgeth and soareth, sea-fashion? What is it in ripples that breaketh
Of radiance, with rose overflooding and flushing the roots of the hills?

O marvel! Behold how the mountains again from Night's graves have arisen;
But not, as they showed in the setting, as icicles pallid and cold:
Nay, now, like beatified spirits, new-radiant, released from Death's prison,
They thrust through the screen of the shadow, resplendent in rose and in gold.

Yet not rose and gold, as we know them, but rather such transfigurations
Of brightness and blossom for fancy as flower in the worlds unexplored,
The worlds beyond living and dying, undarkened of doubts and negations,

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Where other ideals Faith follows and otherguess Gods they call Lord.

See, Heavenward upsoaring, soft-flaming, the summits, like flambeaux funereal,
Clear-kindled in honour of heroes and demigods, shimmer, like pyres
For Hercules, Horus, Serapis, high-builded, like altars imperial,
From each of whose cloud-climbing censers the soul of some hero aspires.

There stand they, their pole-pointing pillars in mute aspiration upholding,
Like arms of adoring incessant upreared to some Godhead unknown;
And we, who no God know that's worthy our worship, their glory beholding,
Must bow to the power that up-pileth their spires for its luminous throne.

So poignant their pomp is, so voiceful, so solemn their silence, in wonder,
For pealing of paeans Elysian I listen, amazed that there comes
No waft to mine ears of the wailing of hautboys and horns and no thunder,
By clamorous silver of clarions through-lightened, of cymbals and drums.

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But see, now already the pageant is passing away. As I hearken,
The glory fades out from the glaciers. A second yet, pallid and white,
Their pinnacles gleam; then, as sudden anon as they lightened, they darken
And all things the prison re-enter of Silence sepulchral and Night.

MARTYRS OF HISTORY.

Third Series .

XIV. CAIN.

FIRST-BORN of woman, who shall read dry-eyed
The tale of that first horror of the Prime,
Which from Hell's pit to Life's auroral clime
Brought Death, grim guest, forever to abide,
How by thy bloody deed thy brother died
And thou, first murderer branded to all time,
Crowned with thy dreadful diadem of crime,
Fledst outlawed forth into the world-all wide?
Whether to pity of thee or fear more fain
We are, we know not, that, alike withdrawn
From man's approof and condemnation, Cain,
Blackenest the background of the worlds bygone
With thy stern stature, dark against the dawn,
A monument of misery, pride and pain.

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XV. JOAB.

FORTH of the mists of Israel's fable-tide,
Towering from Hell to Heaven, before mine eyes,
I see the giant ghost of Joab rise.
Wan through the battle-blaze I watch thee ride,
With fire and steel and slaughter, far and wide,
Hagen of the Hebrew Heldenlied, God-wise,
Graving, for all eternity's comprize,
Thy red renown on History's steep hill-side.
—Ill though thou wast as great, harrower of hosts,
Yet with dimmed eyes I read how, rended from
The very altar's horns, at the control
Of the cur Solomon, by the vengeful ghosts
Of Abner, Amasa and Absalom
Goaded, thou gavest up thy strenuous soul.

XI. JESUS OF NAZARETH.

PROPHET of the worlds within, schoolman and priest their worst
Have wrought to make thy name a synonym of hate,
Thy name that wouldst on Love have based a new estate,
Where the world's first the last should be, the last the first;
And those, who, after thee, o'er all the earth disperst,
Thy word for standard bore, thy doctrine for breed-bate
Uprearing and thy cross for battle-axe of Fate,
Have won well nigh to make thy memory accurst.
—But we, who through the web discern thy thought divine,
Which they have woven about thy superhuman shape,
Leaving the priest to lie, the schoolman ay or no
To argue and the fond fool folk to grin and gape,
To thy remembrance mild a holier place assign
Than to the man-made Gods in Heaven that come and go.

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XVII. GALLIO .

THY Stoic sense, belike in Attic air
Attempered and in hallowing Hippocrene,
For the fond figments of Judaic spleen,
For words and names and forms of fast and prayer,
For letter strait of Law and split of hair,
Knew only cold contempt and scorn serene
Nor vengeance deigned to wreak of aught so mean:
For none of these things, Gallio, didst thou care.
—Might but all traders in unrest, all foes
Of the world's weal find only Gallios,
Who, as the sun o'erlooks the mists of morn,
Should look on them and let them creep their course
And in the quagmires quibble out of scorn,
Nor by opposing lend their follies force!

Lucius Junius Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia under Claudius, (v. Acts XVIII, 12) appears, as far as can be made out from the tangled maze of Roman record, to have been the brother or other near relative of the famous Stoic moralist and poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca and to have shared the latter's philosophical opinions. His real name seems to have been Titus or Marcus Annaeus Noratus or Novatus, the name of Gallio being one of adoption. In any case, it is certain that he was a man of high culture and wide mind; and he is, perhaps, (momentary as is his appearance on the Christian scene) the most remarkable figure of the second or apostolic part of the New Testament.

XVIII. VASCO NUNEZ DE BALBOA.

(A.D. 1475–1517.)

VASCO, vauntcourier of the conquering crew
For whom the Old World was not enough wide,

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Forth-straining o'er the blue Pacific tide,
Out of the golden heart of far Peru
Thou wouldst for Spain have carven kingdoms new.
But envy, vengeful of thy venturous pride,
To moulder in a coffin's narrow side
Thy vaulting hopes and high ambitions threw.
Others in the page of history hold more room,
To whom the Gods have granted fairer fate;
But deeplier graven on the generous heart
Are such as thou, who played their knightly part
In vain and hounded down of vulturous hate,
Were given for guerdon but a traitor's tomb.

XIX. DON QUIXOTE.

NOBLE unwit, that, in Life's medley thrust
Forth for a makesport to the ignoble wise,
—To those who see but with the body's eyes
And hearken but the voices of the dust,
—After Heav'n-gotten Truth and Faith august,
Birds that but breathe the aether of the skies,
Go'st groping in the darkling byres and sties
Of this our world of Will and lies and lust,
—One only name of all the names of men
Thine essence for our thought embodieth.
Phantom of knighthood, by Cervantes' pen
Evoked and quickened with no mortal breath,
Quixote,—whilst Heaven o'erarches earth and sea,
Saint of the dreamers' order shalt thou be.

XX. RALEIGH.

SEEKER of Eldorados in the West,
Bard, soldier, sailor, with the triple bays

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Bound for the travel of the worldly ways,
Despiteful Death for ending of thy quest
A bloody grave decreed; his hand unblest,
Unheeding worth and worship, power and praise,
Shut up the shining story of thy days,
Blotted the book nor let us read the rest.
—Vain was his malice, Raleigh! Long thy name
Shall glitter in the flowering garths of Fame,
When of the scurvy, pedant, peddling Scot,
Whose greed and spite untimely 'twas did blur
Thy life's fair picture, all shall be forgot,
Save this, that he was Raleigh's murderer.

XXI. A NAMELESS HERO.

SINCE Saul on Gilboa laid him down to die,
Since at Thermopylae, in battle set,
Leonidas the Persian onslaught met
With death-devoted breast, in days gone by,
So, in our own, unasking how or why,
Unnumbered heroes, dying, Life's last debt
Have paid to mother-country. Dulce et
Decorum est pro patriâ mori.
—Yet, most of all who for their native land
Life's service with Death's seal have certified,
The speech of that rude soldier stirs my mood,
Who, gasping out upon the Afric sand
His soul, with choked lungs muttered, “England's good
Enough to die for, isn't she?” And died.

A fact, related of one of the Devon men killed in the Boer War. The only alteration which has been made in his dying speech is the omission of the customary trivial epithet, “Wherewith, in these our days, the common folk Their talk do commonly encarnadine.”

129

VOCES VANAE.

IN this our darkling day,—when men fear nought
So much as light nor will from Error's sleep
Be startled till the Judgment-summons leap
Forth of the trumpet and to reckoning brought,
The world awake to that which it hath wrought,
—Few seek the highest: most, like drowsing sheep,
Drone in fat pastures, far beneath the steep
And stony ways of brain-bewildering thought.
Knowledge they shun, as fearful lest unsweet
Truth prove and stir their dream-deluded sense
To question of Life's whither and its whence.
Like the shorn meadows, in the August heat
That love to lie and fatten, 'tis their one
Desire to steep and starken in the sun.

If some beyond Life's passing joy and pain
There be who seek assurance, who discern
And to their kind would teach the things etern,
Their single voices seldom may distrain
The web of dreams that blurs the general brain;
And such as waken at their summons stern,
Muttering, from one side to the other turn,
“Tis not yet morning,” say and sleep again.
—Yet, whiles, from out Thought's mystery-muted sphere,
To those there cometh that have ears to hear
Their speech's echo, like the word of wonder,
That summoned Samuel rise again and be,
Or like the thronging voices of the thunder,
Reverberate volleying o'er the sounding sea.

130

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

NIETZSCHE, I love thee not; thine every page
With insults to my Gods my teeth doth set
On edge and flouts my fondest faiths: and yet,
For all thy querulous quips, thy crackbrain rage
'Gainst many a well-graced actor on Life's stage,
For this at least I own me in thy debt,
That 'gainst Democracy's soul-straitening net
And dragon's maw thou hast armed the maudlin age.
—Ay, and to me thy thought-awakening word
Is as the angel's coming, erst that stirred
Siloam's sluggish tide and brought to life
Its hidden healing virtues. Good or ill,
My soul it floods with fertilising strife
And makes me know myself and what I will.

Moreover, if of those who Sorrow's chain
For Thought's sake drag, a hero were to seek,
Pagan or Christian, Latin, Jew or Greek,
What one of all Earth's Paladins of Pain
Worthier the bays were than this sage unsane,
Who scorned to own himself of Fortune's wreak
Beaten and with life, a bark of many a leak,
Beneath him foundering, and reeling brain,
Still followed on his mighty monstrous dream
Of lessoning mankind to turn away
From the vain quest of Truth the ne'er-to-find
And Life accepting with an equal mind,
To fit their faith unto its things that seem
And make the most of its recurrent day?

Cf. Nietzsche's capital doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things.

131

THE HONEYSUCKLE.

THE honeysuckle clambers everywhere
And in the quickset hedges left and right
Runs, with its scrolls of gold and red and white
Broidering the rugged thorn, which, now though bare,
But yesterday with fragrant bloom was fair.
Like some sweet thought, too vagrant and too slight
To seize, too vague to follow in its flight,
Its breath of cream and almonds brims the air.
—With soft caressing clasp it seems the thorn
To solace for its loss of flower and scent,
Its bygone blossom-glories of the May,
As some kind humble love the soul forlorn
Heals of the heartbreak of a desolate day
And the repine of Passion's ravishment.

THE SANCTUARY LAMPS.

SEVEN lamps of gold the spirit's sanctuary
Illume, Hope, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude,
Faith, Prudence, Charity, which, when imbued
With oil of Grace, burn bright and clear and free
And with their shining over land and sea,
Startle the fiends of fancies fond and lewd
And hold thy fane unharrowed of their feud,
O soul, for thy Lord's coming unto thee.
—Who this Lord is, none knoweth. This one saith,
His name is Life, and that, his name is Death:

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Some say he bears a palm and some a sword.
This only know we; be he who he will,
My soul, thy lamps behoveth thee hold still
Bright-burning, 'gainst the coming of thy Lord.

QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE.

YE, whom we blush for Englishmen to own
Who love the land that Shakspeare prized so dear,
Ye misbegotten moderns, on whose ear
The tale of England's glories trumpet-blown
Falls as an old wives' fable, ye who drone
Here where your fathers battled, hope nor fear
Having of aught that touches not your sheer
Brute sense, nor love but of your ease alone,
If, on your frenzy following to the end,
You hearken not to counsel and amend,
Nor in old Rome nor new France had the law
Such full approof as it shall find in you,
Which lives for ever in the Latin saw,
“God first dementeth whom He would undo.”

DUO IN DESERTIS.

PAUL, when the fable of Christ crucified
He dreamt, into the desert from the throng
Of men withdrew himself and three years long
Did with the sands and solitudes abide,
Wrestling in loneliness with lust and pride

133

And wearying to sift out right from wrong,
Till in his heart faith flowered high and strong
And forth he fared, to sow it far and wide.
—Not so with thee, my soul! Though years, not three,
But three score, in Life's deserts hast thou dwelt
And watched the dull suns rise and set and felt
The sand-wind scorch the marrow up in thee,
Yet in thy core no faith hath flowered out,
No certitude of aught save only doubt.

THE SOUL'S COLOUR.

THE hue of Life, as of the Spring, is green,
The hue of Hope, sweet salver of our smarts.
Red is the rose's colour and the heart's,
As blood, which, having lips and cheeks beseen,
Its surplus spends upon the blossoms' queen:
And that of God Apollo's glittering darts,
Like joy, which even as they the dark disparts,
Imperial yellow is, the Summer's sheen.
But the sheer colour of the soul is blue;
For to this body of our mortal birth
The soul is as the heavens to the earth
And so for blazon shares their blessed hue.
Red, yellow, green, awhile may please the eye;
But peace is of the colour of the sky.

OLD CYNICS AND NEW.

TUB-TRUNDLING sage, that o'er Life's smooth its rough,
For Freedom's sake, preferredst and to please,

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Not the churl commons, but Diogenes,
How hadst thou of our cynics deemed, who stuff
Themselves with garbage at the general trough
And take for good whate'er the mob decrees,
Nor question whether it be chalk or cheese,
So but the gilt thereon be thick enough?
—For me, considering their hoggish lust,
Their brute complacency and base content
With the swine's husks of Life, perforce I must
Them to some landscape of the moon compare,
Forever void of water and of air,
As they of humour, wit and sentiment.

ANNUS VOLUBILIS.

SPRING startles up the wander-lust in me,
The will to prove and to possess the earth,
To track the transient spirit of rebirth
O'er field and flood and mountain, shore and sea.
Sweet Summer brings me, like the homing bee,
Back to the hive's still cheer and homely mirth;
And Autumn peace for only worship-worth
Proclaims, the peace of death volition-free.
—But thought in me by Winter's stark repose
Still to unrest is stirred and questing goes
Upon the thither margent of the stream
Of Life and Death, the perfume of some rose
Of yesterday pursuing o'er the snows
And the far drift of some forgotten dream.

135

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

SINGER of the worlds unseen, our world about
That press with viewless presence day and night,
Our lives encompassing, as darkness light,
Thy spirit sojourned in the ways without
The common clime of human hope and doubt,
Impalpable to all save those by right
Of birth who have the dreamer's second-sight
And are familiars of the shadow-rout.
Hast thou found peace, proud soul, that no content
Knew'st in the wonted ways of shade and sun?
I cannot rate thee with the rabble dead,
In the pale dust for ever dumbly pent:
Yet, in thine own great language hast thou said,
“Many are the ways: the little home is one.”

FREDERICK BURNABY.

(Abou Klea, Jan. 17, 1885).

THOU wast of those with heart and hand who reared
Our England to her high imperial place
And her therein maintained, despite the base
Curst crew, that fain upon the rocks had steered,
Her constant son, who none and nothing feared,
Nor at Life's hand asked any greater grace
Than leave to look far Danger in the face
And pluck rebated Peril by the beard.
—As first, so last, the Fates to thee were kind,

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Vouchsafing thee the true man's most desire,
Occasion for the land thou lov'dst so well
Fighting to fall and on the desert wind
Pass, borne of Battle's chariots of fire,
To where, death-shrined, the high-souled heroes dwell.

FELIX, INFELIX.

Den kann man selig preisen wessen Natur nichts fordert als was die Welt wünscht und braucht. GOETHE.

THRICE happy he who can himself content
With what the mob suffices of his mates,
Life at its current price who takes and rates
Its chances by the world's admeasurement,
Who to the common error can consent
And with his foolish fellows loves and hates
Nor from the general dupery deviates,
But steers astray by public precedent.
For such as this Life's paths are smooth and plain;
Its goods, its honours, clamour for his clutch;
No envies dog his deeds; no hates restrain
His hopes; all doors fly open to his touch;
And when he dies, unjealous of his fame,
Men on the roll of honour write his name.

But some there be, so destined to defeat,
So curst of Fate, so sadly clear of sight,
They cannot ill for good hold, wrong for right,
But for bread hunger better and more sweet
Than ever yet was baked of worldly wheat,
Nor on Life's empty husks of vain delight
Can batten, nay, would rather starve outright

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Than at the common swine-trough drink and eat.
Sons of some stranger star, through life they go,
For Pariahs branded in the public eye;
Men look on them and pass and greet them not.
Friendship nor pleasance, love nor peace they know,
But sorrow sole and strife; and when they die,
They buried are like dogs and so forgot.

PHANTOM QUEST.

DEEP in the darkness of my grief I grope,
Where, in their sepulchres of silence frore,
The memories of the Mays that are no more
Sleep shrouded in the Winter's marble cope,
So but I may, within the Present's scope,
By the reconquered heats of heretofore,
Rekindled at rememorance's store,
Yet force to flower some phantom rose of hope.
—By the corpse-candles of retorted thought,
I track the trace of bygone happiness,
As one who o'er the midnight-darkened plain,
Whereon a fierce world-battle hath been fought,
Fares seeking for some dear one 'neath the press
Of dead and seeks, as I, I seek, in vain.

NESSUN MAGGIOR DOLORE.

NO greater grief, if we to Dante's saw
Give ear, there is than the remembering
Of happy days in time of sorrowing.

138

Meseems, the saying's false to Nature's law.
Who would not bid Love's rose-red morning daw
Again in eld? Who would not Youth and Spring
Back from Time's limboes in Life's Winter bring
And warm his heart at Memory's fires of straw?
Alack! 'Tis misery only comes again
To our remembrance, overclouding joy.
Pain of itself existeth, pleasance not;
For pleasance absence only is of pain:
Whence it befalls of gladness and annoy
That this remembered is and that forgot.

WALLS OF SEVERANCE.

IF given us 'twere to meet again, my dear,
Whether in this world of man and moon and sun
Or in that other world, about this one
Of ours that spreads its mute mysterious sphere,
Methinks we should but sigh and stand unnear
Nor with wide arms on one another run:
The things that have of us been said and done
Their viewless walls between our loves would rear.
—Nor yet, Francesca like and Paolo,
Might we, at least, before the selfsame blast,
Handed, athwart th'infernal spaces go.
Nay, each, alone, the other should we view
Through crystal walls and reared 'twixt me and you,
The rampart of the irrevocable Past.

139

DATUR HORA QUIETI.

[_]

(See Turner's Watercolour Drawing).

IT is the pause of peace. With gold and rose
The setting floods the skies; the softened sun
Rains benediction down on day nigh done,
As some high passion, lighting up Life's close,
Love only grown, no longer flames, but glows.
It is the time when they, who for Heaven won
Trust and Hell 'scaped to some Omnipotent One
Unknown, are knolled to prayer and when of those
Who own no man-wrought God, no priest-made rite,
Whose service is to seek the True and Fair
And commune with the Universal Spright,
That breathes in every wafture of the air
And every undulation of the light,
The hour is given to quiet, as to prayer.

RESURGENT SORROW.

“SORROW, begone! I will no more of thee;”
I said, intent my heart on making whole
And all the haunted harbours of my soul
From the dim goblins of dead griefs set free,
On launching full upon Faith's sunny sea
Hope's bark, at last refloated from the shoal,
Where it had hung so long, of age-old dole,
With all sail spread toward the bright To-Be.
Alack! It hearkened not. Though heart of grace

140

I took to bury it from sight of moon
And sun, it thrust up through the clodded clay
And showed its wan and weeping-frustred face,
Intrusive, in the laughing lanes of May
And the green garths of jasmine-girdled June.

LIFE TRIUMPHANT.

ONCE on a time, old legends tell, Life won
Th'unpartnered empery o'er the cowering earth.
All fair things shrank and shrivelled; nought of worth
Might bloom and breathe beneath the shadeless sun.
Against the ungovernable God was none
Might steadfast stand in all the round globe's girth.
The world with creatures of a monstrous birth,
East, West and South and North, was overrun.
No flowers there blew; but huge precocious fruits
Ripened and rotted on the stems of strife:
The world was given up unto the brutes;
Faith, Beauty, Honour, Hope, with bated breath,
Sheltered in darkness from Triumphant Life
And Love sought refuge in the arms of Death.

DIMENSIO QUARTA.

LENGTH, breadth and thickness! Take a two-foot rule
Here's length for Past and Future, New and Old,
Breadth for still-broadening Present, fold on fold,
And thickness, depth, to wit,—from June to Yule,

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High to low, reaching, throne to milking-stool,
From Hell's red gloom to Heaven's blithe blue and gold.
Here the world have we; in this triple mould
Life's things all fashioned are for sage and fool.
Yet that unsleeping somewhat in ourselves,
That never was contented with its lot,
Still seeks, upsoaring, through the wastes of Space,
Still in the sea dives, in the darkness delves
For some supernal sphere where Time is not,
Some realm unruled by Number and by Place.

RONSARD TO HIS MISTRESS.

SWEET, if you live, you will grow bowed and grey;
And when a worn old wife you are, with book
And broidery seated in the chimney-nook,
You will bethink you then of what I say
And curse yourself for casting love away.
Far better,—no relent old age will brook,
—With favour now on me it were to look
And love me now, whilst yet your age is May.
For I can keep your eyes for ever blue;
I can immortal make your golden hair,
Your coral lips; yea, I can render you
Immune to Fate's inexorable shears
And with my songs forfend from you, my fair,
Th'irreparable outrage of the years.

ÆTAS PERVERSA.

FOOL-FOSTERER age, base backer of the base,
Time, that thyself consolest for thy curse

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Of empty heart and brain with fulth of purse
And drownest, fearful of the frank sun's face,
In pleasure's poisoned draught thy dearth of grace,
That o'er the better choosest still the worse
And farest, ever favouring the perverse,
On thy mad course athwart the abyss of Space,
—When I the floods of fraud, the seas of sham
Consider, whereupon, all stress in vain,
With maniac shrieks and laughters, still thou'rt hurled
From dark to dark, I know not what I am,
Whether crazed only, where all else are sane,
Or alone sober in a crackbrain world.

MELIUS SIC.

UPON thee, like a curse, my soul, it weighs
That thou through life the world must'st walk alone
And never reaped'st that which thou hast sown,
Nor mightest win the loved one of thy lays
For solace of thy solitary days.
Yet comfort thee! How many hast thou known,
Who, snatching at success, their fields o'ergrown
With tares have found and harvested amaze!
How many a Jacob hast thou seen, whose life,
With blear-eyed Leah burdened, its dull streams
Through devious mazes drags of stress and strife,
Who, in mean misery wearing heart and brain,
His ten times seven years' service spends in vain
Nor ever clips the Rachel of his dreams!

143

ABRANYI.

MAGYAR IRALYU SZONATA.

[_]

(Sonata in the Hungarian Gipsy style) Op. 84.

WHAT strain of far fantastic strife o'errides,
Abranyi, this thy high heroic tale,
What drone of age-old dreams of joy and ail,
By Orient oceans dreamed and streamlet-sides?
As in the shell a mystic murmur bides
(The poets fable) and a voice of wail,
Echo of its mother-ocean's surge and swale,
So in the stresses of thy song the tides
Of tune of ancient India swell and break,
Melodious memories of her sun-steeped plains
And passes, with nostalgic hearts and ears,
O'er range and river, land and sea and lake,
To our cold Europe of the snows and rains
Borne by the exiles of eight hundred years.

Kornel Abranyi (1822–1903) is perhaps the most remarkable of the modern Hungarian composers who have founded themselves upon the traditional music of the Magyar gipsies, now recognized as of Indian origin.

The Jâts, the minstrel-tribe of North-West India supposed to have been the ancestors of the gipsies, are reported to have migrated to Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

“NACH RAUM!”

I DO remember to have been one day,
Whilst straying on the Saxon hills, by night

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O'ertaken unawares, where, left and right,
The deep woods, darkling, hid the homeward way
And one sole signpost, after long essay
Found, these words only, by a match's light,
“Nach Raum!” discovered to the astonished sight,
As who in English “Unto Space!” should say.
—So with the thoughts of age. The goals, that clear
And solid showed as mountains to the eye
Of youth and manhood, being brought more nigh,
Melt as the mists of dawn and disappear,
Whilst, by Eld's night o'erdarkened, in their place,
The soul espies but endless empty Space.

LETHE.

OUR deeds, our words undying are. In vain
Endeavour is to efface the done and said.
Yet fabled 'tis that, when a man is dead
And to the shadow-land, the world inane,
He comes, he finds a river round the plain
With slack flood flowing, drowsed and dull as lead,
Whereto he may bow down his heavy head
And drink forgetfulness of joy and pain.
An idle tale! If we live after death,
Thought will live on with us and memory
Of all that in this world of mortal breath
We did and said and suffered: all that Life
Of pain and pleasance, solace had and strife,
Will dure with us to all eternity.

For First and Second Series (I–VI and VII–XIII) see my “Vigil and Vision” (1903) and “Carol and Cadence” (1908), both issued by the Villon Society.