UNIVERSITY FARM

POEMS AND PLAYS

BY

PERCY MACKAYE POEMS

WORKS BY PERCY MACKAYE

DRAMAS

THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS. A COMEDY. JEANNE D'ARC. A TRAGEDY. SAPPHO AND PHAON. A TRAGEDY. FENRIS THE WOLF. A TRAGEDY. A GARLAND TO SYLVIA. A DRAMATIC

REVERIE. THE SCARECROW. A TRAGEDY OF THE

LUDICROUS.

YANKEE FANTASIES. FIVE ONE-ACT PLAYS. MATER. AN AMERICAN STUDY IN COMEDY. ANTI-MATRIMONY. A SATIRICAL COMEDY. TO-MORROW. A PLAY IN THREE ACTS. A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. A ROMANCE OF

THE ORIENT. THE IMMIGRANTS. A LYRIC DRAMA.

MASQ UES

SAINT LOUIS. A Civic MASQUE. SANCTUARY. A BIRD MASQUE. THE NEW CITIZENSHIP. A Civic RITUAL. CALIBAN. A SHAKESPEARE MASQUE.

POEMS

THE SISTINE EVE, AND OTHER POEMS. URIEL, AND OTHER POEMS. LINCOLN. A CENTENARY ODE. THE PRESENT HOUR.

ESSAYS

THE PLAYHOUSE AND THE PLAY. THE CIVIC THEATRE. A SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR.

AT ALL BOOKSELLERS

Photo by Arnold Genthe, N.Y.

PERCY MACKAYE

POEMS AND PLAYS

BY

PERCY MACKAYE

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I POEMS

Nefo

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1914, Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY PERCY MACKAYE.

COPYRIGHT, 1916,

BY PERCY MACKAYE.

Collected edition published April, 1916.

Copyright in Great Britain and Ireland and in all countries of the copyright union.

All rights reserved, including rights of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

THE PRESENT HOUR

NEW POEMS FOR "THE PRESENT HOUR"

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

URIEL, AND OTHER POEMS

THE SISTINE EVE, AND OTHER POEMS

672 /

PREFACE TO COLLECTED POEMS AND PLAYS

IN accepting the invitation of the publishers to collect a portion of my published work within the compass of two volumes, poems and plays, the oc casion seems fitting for me to comment on some phases of it as related to the reading public.

While the writer was still in his teens, he said to himself: "There is my life-work; it rises over there beyond : I can see its large outlines. I will give my self till I am forty to do its 'prentice work : then per haps I may be ready to tackle the real job — that vision which lies there alluring, waiting to be realized."

Now, then, here is forty; and here is some of the 'prentice work gathered together; yet as far as con cerns myself, apprenticeship has hardly begun : the real life-work still beckons, unrealized, away there

vii

viii PREFACE

beyond. For this reason, in submitting to the read er's interest the works here collected, I should like to introduce them anew rather as the by-gleanings of a journey but just set forth upon, than in any sense the product of a goal attained. As such, I have gathered together the contents of these two volumes.

The volume Poems contains all of my published poems to date. It is a complete edition, not a se lected edition. That is, it does not represent any selective choice on my part, but simply a reprinting in one volume of my four volumes, "The Present Hour," "Uriel" (by courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Co.), "Lincoln Centenary Ode" and "The Sistine Eve," to which are added ten new poems ("Dance Mo tives" to "Christmas 1915")— in part an after math of "The Present Hour" —not till now collected since their appearance in magazines. Thus the volume begins with my most recent work in verse, and pro ceeds, in backward time sequence, to my earliest published poems.

PREFACE ix

Of my Plays, since not more than five could bulk conveniently in one volume, I have selected — to represent both verse and prose — " The Canterbury Pilgrims," "Jeanne d'Arc," "Sappho and Phaon," "The Scarecrow," and "Mater," in the order of their first publication. The selection, therefore, does not include seven other of my published play-volumes, nor my four published Masques.

Here, then, are two volumes, chiefly of verse, sub mitted to the reading public. Very little of their contents, however, was first written for the reading public. Of the poems, though many have appeared in magazines, almost none has been written for them. Indeed three-fourths of all my published work, poems and plays, has been designed primarily for the listening public — that is, for the ears of convened audiences. In so far as it involves language, the art involved is one wholly of the Spoken Word — (not of the written), designed in each case to meet some special problem implied in conveying its idea or image, on tones of the

PREFACE

human voice, to the imaginations of gathered listeners, less or more in numbers. The voice may be that of the actor, or of the poet speaking. The principle applies as much to poems of occasions (designed to express their distinctive spirits to their special audi ences) as to plays.

Recently a most wholesome movement has devel oped among American poets, both of vers libre and of rhymed verse forms, emphasizing the immense im portance of the spoken word in poetry, as distinct from its pale shadow on the printed page. This movement will, I think (increasingly as conditions of our theatre improve), tend more and more toward definite dramatic expression on the part of our poets, whether to audiences through actors on the stage, or to audiences gathered to hear the direct utterances of the poets themselves.

From its beginning my own work has concerned, almost wholly, one or the other of these two technical expressions of the spoken word. Thereby the spoken

PREFACE xi

substance of these words, which lie here in these vol umes silent (one might almost say, embalmed) in type, has been intimately a part of the vital, throbbing, varied reactions of many thousands of people, to whom the writer as an individual meant and means almost nothing.

For a passing instance, the opening poem "Fight," which the reader here peruses as a narrative in print, was written to be spoken aloud within sight of those very waters, at Plattsburg, where the last naval battle between English-speaking nations occurred just a century before. I read it from a platform in a field — among speeches from representatives of Canada, England and the United States — to the thousands that thronged the grandstands, whom it was neces sary to hold as attentive to the folk-theme of a poem as to the political theme of an orator — in both cases, only to be accomplished by spell of the spoken word. After it was over, among the crowding groups that gathered round, many of them to deplore the death

xii PREFACE

of my poem's hero, an old farmer called out to me: " Say, Mister, my grandfather fought in that fight — a real fighting cock too he was ! Do you guess that fellow Jock knowed him ? Tell me : got any more of Jock's letters, like he wrote to his sweetheart ? Maybe they'd tell of my grandfather. How about it?"

Of course I guessed that Jock and his grandfather were chums. That was not the moment (of this printed preface) to explain that Jock's letter to his sweetheart is an imagined one, composed in a stan- zaic form of my own invention.

So, if space afforded, I might suggest further some of the living human relationships of verse-forms in plays to actors and managers at rehearsals, and to "gods of the gallery" at performances; relationships of which the printed word gives no hint. In the Notes of this volume are listed some of the occasions of the spoken poems — exclusive of the acted plays. Pos sibly these bare notes may suggest to the reader that modern poetry, 'applied to specific uses in its universal

PREFACE xiii

aims, is a thing in demand as alive and many-sided as ever it was in the world's history. I believe it is even more so.

Three-fourths also of all my work — like that of a sculptor, architect, mural or portrait painter — has been imagined and executed for definite commissions.

Seldom, after his art-school days, does the artist in paint or marble have opportunity or inclination to design " Salon-pieces," wholly unrelated to any defi nite placement or function. Quite as seldom may the dramatist, or the poet of the convened audience, de sign his work without thought of a special functioning.

Such definite " placement " of statue, painting, play, or poem implies, I think, no lessening — but rather a heightening — of the creative image to be expressed. The Sistine Chapel paintings were no less grandly conceived because they were executed, on special com missions, for definite wall-spaces. The technique of the Greek dramatists was as definitely conditioned by the particular demands of Athenian festivals ; that cf

xiv PREFACE

the Irish bards by the special needs and folk-customs of their listeners.

A commission from without, of course, would be futile if it did not correspond to an inward creative desire, which is itself a commission from what used to be personified as "the Muse." Personally I have never accepted a commission, for play or poem, sub ject to any conditions that might retard its natural creative impulse or its execution. Thus accepted, a commission is simply the practical opportunity for a work, already conceived, to be born — and to be born with the hopeful assurance of survival.

Here, chiefly, then, in these two volumes are col lected in print executed commissions of work involving the spoken word: work conceived and executed not for readers as such.

That this aspect of work by many authors is se curing ever wider circles of readers is a remarkable sign of the times in our country. Especially the reading of plays has enormously increased in America

PREFACE xv

since The Macmillan Company published, in 1903, the author's first play, "The Canterbury Pilgrims. " Its publication was the first, or among the very first, to make available for readers, through the regular book trade, American dramatic work of the contempora neous theatre. That work, a commission from E. H. Sothern, has been followed by the publication of fur ther of the author's commissions from Sothern and Marlowe, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Henry Miller, Margaret Anglin, etc., and since 1903 such publication of plays has become a regular part of the business of all important American publishers. These activities have received increasing support from dramatic Leagues and Societies, and especially from the real revival of interest in contemporary drama at the Universities. There the change of attitude has been phenomenal.

When I graduated from Harvard in 1897, there were no courses there, technical or otherwise, in the modern drama. The official acceptance of my own com-

xvi PREFACE

mencement part "On The Need of Imagination in The Drama of To-day" was the first official sanction of the subject, which was commented upon by the Bos ton Transcript as being unprecedented in the annals of University discussion, especially at Harvard.

Not till some seven or eight years later did Professor George P. Baker begin his excellent work there in his courses on dramatic technique — itself a pioneering work which has spread to many other universities.

Contrary, then, to many public statements regard ing my early dramatic training, it was not at Harvard that I received any technical stimulus or education in writing plays. (There, and at Leipsic, the emphasis of my study was upon languages and history.)

One of my earliest memories is that of a rehearsal of my father's play "Hazel Kirke" in the old Madison Square theatre, New York, of which he was builder, chief actor and director. So much were such rehear sals, and the life on and behind the scenes, a portion of my childhood (as of my life since) that I well recall

PREFACE xvii

the astonishment I felt when one of my schoolmates confided to me that his father was not a dramatist, and never read aloud his plays to the family at home, and never "made-up" in a stage dressing-room to act the chief parts in his own plays. That was my first dawning realization that our native drama is not intimately a part of our people's life.

So it was chiefly through familiar association with Steele MacKaye, my father, through the instigations of his wonderfully versatile dramatic genius, as dram atist, actor, stage designer and director, inventor and teacher of his art, as well as with my brother, William Payson MacKaye, an actor and poet rich in promise, who died at the outset of his career, it was with these and their co-workers in the theatre — and not in the university — that I first became aware of the mag nificent potency of the theatre's art and dedicated my own thought and work to the hope of sharing in its service.

There remains, in this preface, only to comment

xviii PREFACE

briefly on those poems, here published for the first time in book form, as additions to " The Present Hour." Those of the "Present Hour/' occasioned by the course of the Great War, were written during the first two months of the war under the compulsion of an irresistible reaction, which prevented my thinking or expressing anything else than its own impulse to ex pression. Then came the numbing sense of the in- effectualness of all expression in the face of such stu pendous forces. Hence the meagre aftermath of these new poems written during the year that has followed. The chief value of the war poems remains, I think, that they record the sincere reactions of an American poet toward events of the most ominous "hour" in the world's history, and that those reactions are in large measure representatively American. As such they may make their slight contribution to the historical psychology of that hour. At the date of this Preface, there are some judgments and expressions (though few) in the war poems which I would modify or clarify

PREFACE xix

if I were now to revise them. But as this portentous time brings daily its revisions to judgment and feel ing, how could I revise them permanently? I could not, so I have let them stand, unrevised, as at least a true record of true feeling. The few new poems record that increasing sense of the vast complexity of the war which is borne in upon all who seek its just solution. If there be any left in the world to-day to whom this solution seems simple, their belief will hardly, I think, be supported by the disputing his torians of to-morrow. But it is not the poet's function to weigh the minutice of evidence; it is his privilege momentarily to become the kindled focus-point of fiery forces, and to give forth their light and flame according to the tinder of his spirit.

PERCY MACKAYE.

NEW YORK, February 14, 1916.

THE PRESENT HOUR

THE VALIANT DEFENDERS

OF CIVILIZATION

THE BELGIANS

PREFACE

POSTERITY alone can correctly estimate and appor tion the right and wrong of the great war in Europe.

At the present hour, we who look on from neutral America can but judge the war's issues by the facts and arguments laid before us by the press and spokes men of all parties in the conflict.

By such evidence, the sympathies of our citizens, by overwhelming majority, are with the cause of the Allies.

In thus sympathizing with the Allies, we do so, I believe, whole-heartedly in the faith (based on the declared policy of English leaders) that they are waging against militarism a fight to lessen world armament and the political oppression of small na tions. If they win and the stipulations of peace should prove otherwise, our revulsion of feeling would surely be commensurate.

ix

PREFACE

It is conceivable, though hardly probable, that future evidence may alter our judgment of the bel ligerents. Our reasons remain open to conviction. But no future contingencies can, or should, stay us now from taking thought and expressing it.

In view of the world-misery involved by the war, our reaction, while dispassionate, cannot possibly be unimpassioned. Not to feel its awful issues passionately would be uncivilized.

Confronted by moral and social issues of a conflict the most poignant in history, it becomes for us — as neutrals, who alone may help to form untainted world- opinion — a pressing duty and privilege to express ourselves.

PERCY MACKAYE.

CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, October, 1914.

CONTENTS I. WAR

PAGE

FIGHT : THE TALE OF A GUNNER .... . . &

THE CONFLICT: Six SONNETS . . ^ . . . 29

1. To William Watson in England . . . . 29

2. American Neutrality . , . . .30

3. Peace . . . . . . . 31

4. Wilson . . . - . Y . . ... . 32

5. Krappism . . . . .-. . . . 33

6. The Real Germany . . .- . . . 34 THE LADS OF LIEGE • • . , . . . . .35 CARNAGE : Six SONNETS . . . . . * . 38

1. Doubt . . . . . * . . . . 38

2. The Great Negation . . * . 39

3. Louvain . . ..... . . 40

4. Rheims . . . . . . . ; « .41

5. Kultur . . . .42

6. Destiny . . . * . . , . .43 THE MUFFLED DRUMS . . , . . . . 44

ANTWERP ..... »"' . . . . 46

MAGNA CARTA . . . . .* . . . . 47

MEN OF CANADA ....*.". . 50

FRANCE . . . . . ., ..- » « . 52

HAUPTMANN . . , . . . . . .53

NIETZSCHE . . _v 4 /', *' •'•', .... .54

THE CHILD-DANCERS 55

xi

xii CONTENTS

PAGR

BATTLEFIELDS ......... 57

IN MEMORIAM ......... 58

A PRAYER OF THE PEOPLES 60

II. PEACE

PANAMA HYMN .65

GOETHALS . . . . . . . . ' . . 68

A CHILD AT THE WICKET ....>. 71

HYMN FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE . . . . . .74

LEXINGTON . . . . , . . . . 76

SCHOOL . . . . . . •-.-• . . . . . 81

THE PLAYER . . . . . . X' . . 89

To JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY . . . . .92

PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE TO A BIRD MASQUE . . 94 THE SONG SPARROW. . .. \ . .... 99

To AN UPLAND PLOVER . . .. . . , .101

RAIN REVERY . . . 103

THE HEART IN THE JAR . 106

NEW POEMS

Three Dance Motives 117

I. Lethe 117

II. Dionysus . 119

III. The Chase 120

The Bandbox Theatre 122

To"E. A." — Edwin Arlington Robinson . . 124

Charles Klein : Dramatist 125

Edison 128

The Return of August . T . . . .132

Federation 137

Christmas, 1915 140

NOTES • 141

THE PRESENT HOUR

I WAR

FIGHT

THE TALE OF A GUNNER 1

I

JOCK bit his mittens off and blew his thumbs; He scraped the fresh sleet from the frozen sign : MEN WANTED — VOLUNTEERS. Like gusts of brine

He whiffed deliriums

Of sound — the droning roar of rolling rolling drums And shrilling fifes, like needles in his spine, And drank, blood-bright from sunrise and wild shore,

The wine of war.

:In commemoration of the last naval battle between English- speaking peoples. See note at end of volume.

3

THE PRESENT HOUR

With ears and eyes he drank and dizzy brain Till all the snow danced red. The little shacks That lined the road of muffled hackmatacks

Were roofed with the red stain, Which spread in reeling rings on icy-blue Champlain And splotched the sky like daubs of sealing-wax, That darkened when he winked, and when he stared

Caught fire and flared.

MEN WTANTED — VOLUNTEERS ! The village street, Topped by the slouching store and slim flagpole, Loomed grand as Rome to his expanding soul ;

Grandly the rhythmic beat Of feet in file and flags and fifes and filing feet, The roar of brass and unremitting roll Of drums and drums bewitched his boyish mood —

Till he hallooed.

His strident echo stung the lake's wild dawn

And startled him from dreams. Jock rammed his cap

FIGHT

And rubbed a numb ear with the furry flap,

Then bolted like a faun, Bounding through shin-deep sleigh-ruts in his shaggy

brawn,

Blowing white frost-wreaths from red mouth agap Till, in a gabled porch beyond the store,

He burst the door:

" Mother ! " he panted. " Hush ! Your Pa ain't up ; He's worser since this storm. What's struck ye so ? " "It's volunteers!" The old dame stammered "Oh!"

And stopped, and stirred her sup Of morning tea, and stared down in the trembling cup. "They're musterin' on the common now." "I know" She nodded feebly; then with sharp surmise

She raised her eyes :

She raised her eyes, and poured their light on him Who towered glowing there — bright lips apart,

6 THE PRESENT HOUR

Cap off, and brown hair towsled. With quick smart

She felt the room turn dim

And seemed she heard, far off, a sound of cherubim Soothing the sudden pain about her heart. — How many a lonely hour of after-woe

She saw him so !

"Jock!" And once more the white lips murmured

"Jock!"

Her fingers slipped ; the spilling teacup fell And shattered, tinkling — but broke not the spell.

His heart began to knock,

Jangling the hollow rhythm of the ticking clock. "Mother, it's fight, and men are wanted!" "Well, Ah well, it's men may kill us women's joys,

It's men — not boys ! "

"I'm seventeen! I guess that seventeen — " " My little Jock ! " " Little ! I'm six-foot-one.

FIGHT

(Scorn twitched his lip) You saw me, how I skun

The town last Halloween At wrastlin'." (Now the mother shifted tack.) " But

Jean?

You won't be leavin' Jean?" "I guess a gun Won't rattle her." He laughed, and turned his

head. His face grew red.

" But if it doos — a gal don't understand :

It's fight!" "Jock boy, your Pa can't last much

more, And who's to mind the stock — to milk and chore ? "

Jock frowned and gnawed his hand. "Mother, it's men must mind the stock — our own

born land,

And lick the invaders." Slowly in the door Stubbed the old worn-out man. "Woman, let be!

It's liberty:

8 THE PRESENT HOUR

"It's struck him like fork-lightnin' in a pine.

I felt it, too, like that in Seventy-six;

And now, if 'twa'n't for creepin' pains and cricks

And this one leg o' mine, I'd holler young Jerusalem like him, and jine The fight; but fight don't come from burnt-out

wicks ; It comes from fire." "Mebbe," she said, "it comes

From fifes and drums."

"Dad, all the boys are down from the back hills. The common's cacklin' like hell's cocks and hens; There's swords and muskets stacked in the cow pens

And knapsacks in the mills; They say at Isle aux Noix redcoats are holding

drills,

And we're to build a big fleet at Vergennes. Dad, can't I go ? " "I reckon you 're a man :

Of course you can.

FIGHT 9

"I'll do the chores to home, you do 'em thar!" "Dad!" — "Lad!" The men gripped hands and

gazed upon The mother, when the door flew wide: There shone

A young face like a star,

A gleam of bitter-sweet 'gainst snowy islands far, A freshness, like the scent of cinnamon, Tingeing the air with ardor and bright sheen.

Jock faltered: "Jean!"

"Jock, don't you hear the drums ? I dreamed all night I heard 'em, and they woke me in black dark. Quick, ain't you comin'? Can't you hear 'em? Hark!

The men-folks are to fight. I wish I was a man!" Jock felt his throat clutch

tight.

" Men-folks ! " It lit his spirit like a spark Flashing the pent gunpowder of his pride.

"Come on!" he cried.

10 THE PRESENT HOUR

" Here — wait ! " The old man stumped to the back

wall

And handed down his musket. "You'll want this; And mind what game you're after, and don't miss.

Goodbye : I guess that's all For now. Come back and get your duds." Jock,

looming tall

Beside his glowing sweetheart, stooped to kiss The little shrunken mother. Tiptoe she rose

And clutched him — close.

In both her twisted hands she held his head Clutched in the wild remembrance of dim years — A baby head, suckling, half dewed with tears;

A tired boy abed

By candlelight; a laughing face beside the red Log-fire ; a shock of curls beneath her shears — The bright hair falling. Ah, she tried to smother

Her wild thoughts. — " Mother

FIGHT 11

"Mother!" he stuttered. "Baby Jock!" she

moaned

And looked far in his eyes. — And he was gone. The porch door banged. Out in the blood-bright

dawn

All that she once had owned — Her heart's proud empire — passed, her life's dream

sank unthroned.

With hands still reached, she stood there staring, wan. "Hark, woman!" said the bowed old man, "What's

tolling?" Drums — drums were rolling.

II

Shy wings flashed in the orchard, glitter, glitter; Blue wings bloomed soft through blossom-colored

leaves, And Phoebe! Phoebe! whistled from gray eaves

12 THE PRESENT HOUR

Through water-shine and twitter And spurt of flamey green. All bane of earth and

bitter

Took life and tasted sweet at the glad reprieves Of Spring, save only in an old dame's heart

That grieved apart.

Crook-back and small, she poled the big wellsweep :

Creak went the pole; the bucket came up brim ming.

On the bright water lay a cricket swimming Whose brown legs tried to leap

But, draggling, twitched and foundered in the circling deep.

The old dame gasped; her thin hand snatched him, skimming.

" Dear Lord, he's drowned ! " she mumbled with dry

lips: "The ships! the ships!"

FIGHT 13

Gently she laid him in the sun and dried

The little dripping body. Suddenly

Rose-red gleamed through the budding apple-tree

And "Look! a letter!" cried A laughing voice, "and lots of news for us inside!"

"How's that, Jean? News from Jock! Where —

t

where is he ? " " Down in Vergennes — the shipyards." " Ships !

Ah, no! It can't be so."

"He's goin' to fight with guns and be a tar.

See here : he's wrote himself. The post was late.

He couldn't write before. The ship is great!

She's built, from keel to spar, And called the Saratoga; and Jock's got a scar Already — " "Scar?" the mother quavered.

"Wait," Jean rippled, "let me read." "Quick, then, my dear,

He'll want to hear —

14 THE PRESENT HOUR

"Jock's Pa: I guess we'll find him in the yard. He ain't scarce creepin' round these days, poor Dan !" She gripped Jean's arm and stumbled as they ran,

And stopped once, breathing hard. Around them chimney-swallows skimmed the sheep- cropped sward

And yellow hornets hummed. — The sick old man Stirred at their steps, and muttered from deep muse :

"Well, Ma: what news?"

"From Jockie — there's a letter!" In his chair The bowed form sat bolt upright. "What's he say?" "He's wrote to Jean. I guess it's boys their way

To think old folks don't care For letters." "Girl, read out." Jean smoothed her

wilding hair

And sat beside them. Out of the blue day A golden robin called ; across the road

A heifer lowed;

FIGHT 15

And old ears listened while youth read: "'Friend

Jean,

Vergennes : here's where we've played a Yankee trick. I'm layin' in my bunk by Otter Crick

And scribblin' you this mean Scrawl for to tell the news — what-all I've heerd and

seen :

Jennie, we've built a ship, and built her slick — A swan ! — a seven hundred forty tonner,

And I'm first gunner.

" ' You ought to seen us launch her t'other day ! Tell Dad we've christened her for a fight of hisn He fought at Saratoga. Now just listen !

She's twice as big, folks say, As Perry's ship that took the prize at Put-in Bay; Yet forty days ago, hull, masts and mizzen, The whole of her was growin', live and limber,

In God's green timber.

16 THE PRESENT HOUR

" ' I helped to fell her main-mast back in March. The woods was snowed knee-deep. She was a won der: A straight white pine. She fell like roarin' thunder

And left a blue-sky arch

Above her, bustin' all to kindlin's a tall larch. — Mebbe the scart jack-rabbits skun from under ! Us boys hoorayed, and me and every noodle

Yelled Yankee-Doodle!

"'My, how we haw'd and gee'd the big ox-sledges Haulin' her long trunk through the hemlock dells, A-bellerin' to the tinkle-tankle bells,

And blunted our ax edges

Hackin' new roads of ice 'longside the rocky ledges. We stalled her twice, but gave the oxen spells And yanked her through at last on the home-clearin'. —

Lord, wa'n't we cheerin' !

FIGHT 17

"'Since then I've seen her born, as you might say: Born out of fire and water and men's sweatin', Blast-furnace rairin' and red anvils frettin'

And sawmills, night and day,

Screech-owlin' like 'twas Satan's rumhouse run away Smellin' of tar and pitch. But I'm forgettin' The man that's primed her guns and paid her score:

The Commodore.

r' ' Macdonough — he's her master, and she knows His voice, like he was talkin' to his hound. There ain't a man of her but ruther'd drownd

Than tread upon his toes;

And yet with his red cheeks and twinklin' eyes, a rose Ain't friendlier than his looks be. When he's round, He makes you feel like you're a gentleman

American.

"'But I must tell you how we're hidin' here.

This Otter Crick is like a crook-neck jug c

18 THE PRESENT HOUR

And we're inside. The redcoats want to plug

The mouth, and cork our beer; So last week Downie sailed his British lake-fleet near To fill our channel, but us boys had dug Big shore intrenchments, and our batteries

Stung 'em like bees

" ' Till they skedaddled whimperin* up the lake ; But while the shots was flyin', in the scrimmage, I caught a ball that scotched my livin' image. —

Now Jean, for Sam Hill's sake,

Don't let-on this to Mother, for you know she'd make A deary-me-in' that would last a grim age. 'Tain't much, but when a feller goes to war

What's he go for

" ' If 'tain't to fight, and take his chances ? ' " Jean Stopped and looked down. The mother did not speak. "Go on," said the old man. Flush tinged her cheek. "Truly I didn't mean —

FIGHT 19

There ain't much more. He says : ' Goodbye now,

little queen;

We're due to sail for Plattsburgh this day week. Meantime I'm hopin' hard and takin' stock. Your obedient — Jock.' '

The girl's voice ceased in silence. Glitter, glitter,

The shy wings flashed through blossom-colored

leaves, And Phoebe! Phoebe! whistled from gray eaves

Through water-shine and twitter And spurt of flamey green. But bane of thought is

bitter.

The mother's heart spurned May's sweet make- believes, For there, through falling masts and gaunt ships

looming, Guns — guns were booming.

20 THE PRESENT HOUR

III

Plattsburgh — and windless beauty on the bay ; Autumnal morning and the sun at seven : Southward a wedge of wild ducks in the heaven

Dwindles, and far away Dim mountains watch the lake, where lurking for their

prey

Lie, with their muzzled thunders and pent levin, The warships — Eagle, Preble, Saratoga,

Ticonderoga.

And now a little wind from the northwest

Flutters the trembling blue with snowy flecks. A gunner, on Macdonough's silent decks,

Peers from his cannon's rest,

Staring beyond the low north headland. Crest on crest Behind green spruce-tops, soft as wildfowls' necks, Glide the bright spars and masts and whitened wales

Of bellying sails.

FIGHT 21

Rounding, the British lake-birds loom in view Ruffling their wings in silvery arrogance : Chubb, Linnet, Finch, and lordly Confiance

Leading with Downie's crew The line. — With long booms swung to starboard they

heave to,

Whistling their flock of galleys who advance Behind, then toward the Yankees, four abreast,

Tack landward, west.

Landward the watching townsfolk strew the shore; Mist-banks of human beings blur the bluffs And blacken the roofs, like swarms of roosting choughs.

Waiting the cannon's roar

A nation holds its breath for knell of Nevermore Or peal of life : this hour shall cast the sloughs Of generations — and one old dame's joy :

Her gunner boy.

22 THE PRESENT HOUR

One moment on the quarter deck Jock kneels Beside his Commodore and fighting squad. Their heads are bowed, their prayers go up toward God-

Toward God, to whom appeals Still rise in pain and mangling wrath from blind

ordeals

Of man, still boastful of his brother's blood. - They stand from prayer. Swift comes and silently

The enemy.

Macdonough holds his men, alert, devout : "He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea Driven with the wind. Behold the ships, that be

So great, are turned about Even with a little helm." Jock tightens the blue

clout

Around his waist, and watches casually Close-by a game-cock, in a coop, who stirs

And spreads his spurs.

FIGHT 23

Now, bristling near, the British war-birds swoop Wings, and the Yankee Eagle screams in fire; The English Linnet answers, aiming higher,

And crash along Jock's poop

Her hurtling shot of iron crackles the game-cock's coop, Where lo! the ribald cock, like a town crier, ! Strutting a gunslide, flaps to the cheering crew — Yankee-doodle-doo !

Boys yell, and yapping laughter fills the roar : " You bet we'll do 'em ! " " You're a prophet, cocky ! " "Hooray, old rooster!" "Hip, hip, hip!" cries Jockie.

Calmly the Commodore

Touches his cannon's fuse and fires a twenty-four. Smoke belches black. " Huzza ! That's blowed 'em

pocky!" And Downie's men, like pins before the bowling,

Fall scatter-rolling.

24 THE PRESENT HOUR

Boom! flash the long guns, echoed by the galleys. The Confiance, wind-baffled in the bay, With both her port bow-anchors torn away,

Flutters, but proudly rallies

To broadside, while her gunboats range the water-alleys. Then Downie grips Macdonough in the fray, And double-shotted from his roaring flail

Hurls the black hail.

The hail turns red, and drips in the hot gloom. Jock snuffs the reek and spits it from his mouth And grapples with great winds. The winds blow south,

And scent of lilac bloom

Steals from his mother's porch in his still sleeping room. Lilacs ! — But now it stinks of blood and drouth I He staggers up, and stares at blinding light :

"God! This is fight!"

Fight ! — The sharp loathing retches in his loins ; He gulps the black air, like a drowner swimming,

FIGHT 25

Where little round suns in a dance go rimming

The dark with golden coins : Round him and round the splintering masts and jangled

quoins

Reel, rattling, and overhead he hears the hymning — Lonely and loud — of ululating choirs

Strangling with wires.

Fight ! — But no more the roll of chanting drums, The fifing flare, the flags, the magic spume Filling his spirit with a wild perfume;

Now noisome anguish numbs

His sense, that mocks and leers at monstrous vacuums. Whang ! splits the spanker near him, and the boom Crushes Macdonough, in a jumbled wreck,

Stunned on the deck.

No time to glance where wounded leaders lie, Or think on fallen sparrows in the storm — Only to fight ! The prone commander's form Stirs, rises stumblingly

26 THE PRESENT HOUR

And gropes where, under shrieking grape and musketry, Men's bodies wamble like a mangled swarm Of bees. He bends to sight his gun again, Bleeding, and then —

Oh, out of void and old oblivion

And reptile slime first rose Apollo's head :

And God in likeness of Himself, 'tis said,

Created such an one,

Now shaping Shakspere's forehead, now Napoleon, Various, by infinite invention bred, In His own image moulding beautiful

The human skull.

Jock lifts his head ; Macdonough sights his gun To fire — but in his face a ball of flesh, A whizzing clod, has hurled him in a mesh

Of tangled rope and tun, While still about the deck the lubber clod is spun

FIGHT 27

And, bouncing from the rail, lies in a plesh Of oozing blood, upstaring eyeless, red —

A gunner's head.

*******

Above the ships, enormous from the lake, Rises a wraith — a phantom dim and gory, Lifting her wondrous limbs of smoke and glory ;

And little children quake

And lordly nations bow their foreheads for her sake, And bards proclaim her in their fiery story; And in her phantom breast, heartless, unheeding,

Hearts — hearts are bleeding.

IV

Macdonough lies with Downie in one land. Victor and vanquished long ago were peers. Held in the grip of peace an hundred years

England has laid her hand

In ours, and we have held (and still shall hold) the band That makes us brothers of the hemispheres;

28 THE PRESENT HOUR

Yea, still shall keep the lasting brotherhood Of law and blood.

Yet one whose terror racked us long of yore Still wreaks upon the world her lawless might: Out of the deeps again the phantom Fight

Looms on her wings of war,

Sowing in armed camps and fields her venomed spore, Embattling monarch's whim against man's right, Trampling with iron hoofs the blooms of time

Back in the slime.

We, who from dreams of justice, dearly wrought, First rose in the eyes of patient Washington, And through the molten heart of Lincoln won

To liberty forgot,

Now, standing lone in peace 'mid titans strange dis traught,

Pray much for patience, more — God's will be done I — For vision and for power nobly to see

The world made free.

THE CONFLICT: Six SONNETS [August, 1914]

I

TO WILLIAM WATSON IN ENGLAND SINGER of England's ire across the sea, Your austere voice, electric from the deep, Speaks our own yearning, and our spirits sweep To Europe's allied honor. — Painfully, Bowed with a planet's lonely burden, we Held our hot hearts in leash, but now they leap Their ban, like young hounds belling from their keep, To bait the Teuton wolf of tyranny.

What! Would he throw us sops of sugared art And poisoned commerce, snarling: "So! lie still Till I have shown my fangs, and torn the heart Of half the world, and gorged my sanguine fill ! " — Now, England, let him see: Rage as he will,

He cannot tear our plighted souls apart.

29

30 THE PRESENT HOUR

II AMERICAN NEUTRALITY

How shall we keep an armed neutrality With our own souls ? Our souls belie our lips, That seek to hold our passion in eclipse And hide the wound of our sharp sympathy, Saying : " One's neighbor differs ; he might be Kindled to wrath, were one to wield the whips Of truth." — Great God ! A red Apocalypse Flames on the blinded world : and what do we ?

Peace ! do we cry ? Peace is the godlike plan

We love and dedicate our children to ;

Yet England's cause is ours : The rights of man,

Which little Belgium battles for anew,

Shall we recant ? No ! — Being American,

Our souls cannot keep neutral and keep true.

THE CONFLICT 31

III PEACE

PEACE ! — But there is no peace. To hug the thought

Is but to clasp a lover who thinks lies.

Go : look your earnest neighbor in the eyes

And read the answer there. Peace is not bought

By distance from the fight. Peace must be fought

And bled for : 'tis a dream whose horrid price

Is haggled for by dread realities ;

Peace is not paid till dreamers are distraught.

Would we not close our ears against these ills, Urging our hearts : " Be calm ! America Is called upon to rebuild a world." — But ah ! How shall we nobly build with neutral wills? Can we be calm while Belgian anguish shrills? Or would we crown with peace — Caligula ?

32 THE PRESENT HOUR

IV WILSON

PATIENCE — but peace of heart we cannot choose ; Nor would he wish us cravenly to keep Aloof in soul, who — large in statesmanship And justice — sent our ships to Vera Cruz. Patience must wring our hearts, while we refuse To launch our country on that crimson deep Which breaks the dikes of Europe, but we sleep Watchful, still waiting by the awful fuse.

Wisdom he counsels, and he counsels well Whose patient fortitude against the fret And sneer of time has stood inviolable. We love his goodness and will not forget. With him we pause beside the mouth of hell : — The wolf of Europe has not triumphed yet.

THE CONFLICT 33

V KRUPPISM

CROWNED on the twilight battlefield, there bends A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold, Chuckling : "One hundred thousand gatlings — sold !" And the moon rises, and a moaning rends The mangled living, and the dead distends, And a child cowers on the chartless wold, Where, searching in his safety- vault of mold, The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.

We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls And dying do him homage ; yea, and give Daily our living souls to be enticed Into his power. So long as on war's walls We build engines of death that he may live, So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.

34 THE PRESENT HOUR

VI THE REAL GERMANY

BISMARCK — or rapt Beethoven with his dreams :

Ah, which was blind ? Or which bespoke his race ? -

That breed which nurtured Heine's haunting grace,

And Goethe, mastering Olympic themes

Of meditation, Mozart's golden gleams,

And Leibnitz charting realms of time and space,

Great-hearted Schiller, and that fairy brace

Of brothers who first trailed the goblin streams.

Bismarck for these builded an iron tomb,

And clanged the door, and turned a kaiser's key;

And simple folk, that once danced merrily

Their May-ring rites, march now in roaring gloom

Toward that renascent dawn when the black womb

Of buried guns gives birth to Germany.

THE LADS OF LIEGE

[" Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Beiges." — CAESAR'S " Commentaries "]

THE lads of Liege, beyond our eyes They lie where beauty's laurels be — With lads of old Thermopylae,

Who stayed the storming Persians.

The lads of Liege, on glory's field They clasp the hands of Roland's men, Who lonely faced the Saracen Meeting the dark invasion.

The lads — the deathless lads of Liege, They blazon through our living world Their land — the little land that buried

Olympian defiance. 35

36 THE PRESENT HOUR

"Now make us room, now let us pass; Our monarch suffers no delay. To stand in mighty Caesar's way Beseems not Lilliputians."

" We make no room ; you shall not pass, For freedom says your monarch nay ! And we have stood in Caesar's way Through freedom's generations.

"And here we stand till freedom fall And Caesar cry, ere we succumb, Once more his horum omnium Fortissimi sunt Belgoe."

The monarch roars an iron laugh And cries on God to man his guns; But Belgian mothers bore them sons Who man the souls within them :

THE LADS OF LIEGE 37

They bar his path, they hold their pass, They blaze in glory of the Gaul Till Csesar cries again "Of all The bravest are the Belgians!"

O lads of Liege, brave lads of Liege, Your souls through glad Elysium Go chanting : horum omnium Fortissimi sunt Belgce!

CARNAGE: Six SONNETS [September, 1914]

I

DOUBT

So thin, so frail the opalescent ice Where yesterday, in lordly pageant, rose The monumental nations — the repose Of continents at peace! Realities Solid as earth they seemed; yet in a trice Their bastions crumbled in the surging floes Of unconceivable, inhuman woes, Gulfed in a mad, unmeaning sacrifice.

We, who survive that world-quake, cower and start, Searching our hidden souls with dark surmise : So thin, so frail — is reason ? Patient art — Is it all a mockery, and love all lies? Who sees the lurking Hun in childhood's eyes?

Is hell so near to every human heart? 38

CARNAGE 39

II THE GREAT NEGATION

WHEN that great-minded man, Sir Edward Grey,

Said to the hypocritic ' prince of peace ' :

"Let us confer, who hold the destinies

Of Europe, ere the tempest breaks, and stay

Its carnage ! " the proud despot answered nay,

And by that great negation loosed the seas

And winds of multitudinous miseries

To rage around his empire for their prey.

He might have uttered "Peace": Peace would have

been.

He might have abdicated ere he fought For such Satanic empire; but to win Power he refused. Therefore a rankling thought Festers henceforth with that refusal's sin : — He might have saved the world, and he would not.

40 THE PRESENT HOUR

III LOUVAIN

SERENE in beauty's olden lineage,

Calm as the star that hears the Angelus toll,

Louvain — the scholar's crypt, the artist's goal,

The cloistral shrine of hallowed pilgrimage

Rapt in the dreams of many an ardent age,

Louvain, the guileless city of man's soul,

Is blotted from the world — a bloodied scroll,

Ravaged to sate a drunken Teuton's rage.

His lust shall have its laurel. That red sword He ravished with, Time's angel shall again Grasp to sere him, and deify him Lord Of Infamy; yea, brand him with its stain Naked in night, abhorrent and abhorr'd, Where the dead hail him William of Louvain !

CARNAGE 41

IV RHEIMS

APOLLO mourns another Parthenon

In ruins ! — Is the God of Love awake ?

And we — must we behold the world's heart break

For peace and beauty ravished, and look on

Dispassionate ? — Rheims' gloried fane is gone :

Not by a planet's rupture, nor the quake

Of subterranean titans, but to slake

The vengeance of a Goth Napoleon.

O Time, let not the anguish numb or pall

Of that remembrance! Let no callous heal

Our world-wound, till our kindled pities call

The parliament of nations, and repeal

The vows of war. Till then, pain kee'p us thrall !

More bitter than to battle — is to feel.

42 THE PRESENT HOUR

V KULTUR

IF men must murder, pillage, sack, despoil, Let it not be (lest angels laugh) in the name Of sacred Culture. Vulcan still goes lame Though servile Muses poultice him with oil Of sleek Hypocrisy. They waste their toil Whose boast of light and sweetness takes its claim From deeds of night and wormwood, which defame Fair Culture's shrine and make her gods recoil.

No; let the imperial Visigoth put off

His borrowed toga, boast aloud his slain

In naked savagery, and make his scoff

Of Attic graces. So when once again

He asks for Culture's crown, 'twill be enough

To answer him : Once Rheims was — and Louvain !

CARNAGE 43

VI DESTINY

WE are what we imagine, and our deeds Are born of dreaming. Europe acts to-day Epics that little children in their play Conjured, and statesmen murmured in their creeds ; In barrack, court and school were sown those seeds, Like Dragon's teeth, which ripen to affray Their sowers. Dreams of slaughter rise to slay, And fate itself is stuff that fancy breeds.

Mock, then, no more at dreaming, lest our own

Create for us a like reality !

Let not imagination's soil be sown

With armed men but justice, so that we

May for a world of tyranny atone

And dream from that despair — democracy.

THE MUFFLED DRUMS

FOR brothers laid in blood,

For lovers sundered, Defeated motherhood

And manhood plundered — We moan, moan the faith of man forgotten.

For human vision bleared

And childhood bleeding, For ripening harvests sered

Before the seeding — We mourn, mourn the beauty unbegotten.

We were the wanton ones

In old wines sunken, Who sent the nations' sons

Forth, reeling drunken

With blare and rhythm of war's ruthless glory. 44

THE MUFFLED DRUMS 45

Now in our pulse no more

The old wines quicken, For the bannered glory of war

Trails draggled and stricken,

And the blood-red beast crawls home, blinded and hoary :

But we are the beating hearts

Of women, whose yearning Shall harass the beast with darts

Of their myriad burning Till the Angel of God remould him — an image human.

Yea, we are the chanting wills

Of women, whose sorrow Rebels at the age-borne ills

Of a man-built morrow, And we chant, chant the world redeemed by Woman.

ANTWERP i

TOWERS — eternal towers against the sky : Dawn-touched, noon-flamed, night-mantled and moon- flecked !

The tenuous dreams of man, the architect, Imagining in stone what may not die Though man, the anarchist, dream enginery For its destruction : towers of intellect, Towers of aspiration — torn and wrecked, Profaned by robber sacrilege : ah, why ?

Reason shall ask, and answer shall be given;

Justice shall ask, and deal to those insane

Their dark asylums, but to those — the vain

Of lustful power, how shall their souls be shriven ? —

They shall be raised on infamy's renown

And from their towers of tyranny hurled down.

See note at end of volume. 46

MAGNA CARTA

MAGNA CARTA ! Magna Carta ! English brothers, we have borne it On our banners down the ages. — Who shall scorn it ? Bitter fought-for, blood-emblazoned With the fadeless gules of freedom, Interbound with precious pages — English brothers, we who shrine it In our common heart of hearts, Think you we can see a monarch, Tyrant-sceptred, sanguine-shod, Seek to rend it and malign it : We whose sires made him sign it — Him who deemed him next to God ! We who dreamed our world forever Purged and rid

Of his spectre — think you, brothers,

47

48 THE PRESENT HOUR

We can watch this ghost, resurgent, Sweep his servile hordes toward England, And stand silent? — God forbid !

Magna Carta ! Magna Carta ! . Brother freemen, we who bear it Starward — shall we see him tear it ? Fool or frantic,

Let him dare it !

. 0 If he reach across the Channel

He shall touch across the Atlantic : — Scrolled with new and olden annal, Bitter fought-for, blood-emblazoned With the fadeless gules of freedom, We will hand him — Magna Carta ! Yea, once more shall make him sign it Where the centuries refine it, Till his serfs, who now malign it, Are made sick of him, and free Even as we.

MAGNA CARTA 49

So, if ghostly through the sea-mist, You behold his Mediaeval Falcon face peer violating — Lo, with quills and Magna Carta (Sharpened quills and Magna Carta) In a little mead near London, English brothers, we are waiting !

MEN OF CANADA

MEN of Canada,

Fellow Americans, Proud our hearts beat for you over the border:

Proud of the fight you wage,

Proud of your valiant youth Sailing to battle for freedom and order.

On our own battlefields Many's the bout we had —

Yankee, Canadian, redcoat and ranger; But our old brotherhood, Staunch through the centuries,

Shouts in our blood now to share in your danger.

Ah, it's a weary thing Waiting and watching here, Numbing ourselves to a frozen neutrality: Yet, in a world at war, Tis our good part to keep

Patient to forge the strong peace of finality.

50

MEN OF CANADA 51

Though, then, our part be Peace,

Yet our free fighting souls League with your own 'gainst the world-lust of Vandals ;

Yea, in the dreadful night,

We, with your women, weep And for your shroudless dead burn our shrine candles.

So, by the gunless law

Of our sane borderline, By our souls' faith, that no border can sever,

Freedom ! — now may your fight,

Waging the death of war, Silence the demons of cannon forever !

Kin-folk of Canada,

So may your allied arms Smite with his legions the Lord of Disorder !

God speed your noble cause !

God save your gallant sons ! Would we might sail with them — over the border I

FRANCE

HALF artist and half anchorite,

Part siren and part Socrates, Her face — alluring fair, yet recondite —

Smiled through her salons and academies.

Lightly she wore her double mask, Till sudden, at war's kindling spark,

Her inmost self, in shining mail and casque, Blazed to the world her single soul — Jeanne d'Arc !

52

HAUPTMANN

JEAN CHRISTOPHE called to him out of the night — Out of the storm and dark of Europe's hate, Crying : " Where art thou, Hauptmann, who so late Loomed as a rugged tower of human right ? Flame to the world thy lonely beacon-light Of love for alien hearths laid desolate ! " — In answer rolled a voice infuriate Hoarse with the fog of racial scorn and spite :

" Here am I ! — Let them perish ! " And hell laughed To hear that voice — which once was wont to soar With Hannele to heaven, and starward waft The souls of simple weavers — rasp with war ; Yea, laughed to watch that tower's heroic shaft Fall crumbling on the beaconless world shore.

53

NIETZSCHE

SOME worshipped and some bantered, when The prophets of the drawing room Gossiped of Jesus Christ his doom

Under the reign of Supermen,

And how the Christian world would quake

To hear what Zarathustra spake.

Lo, Zarathustra's voice has spoken : And they, who use a mad bard's song To vindicate a tyrant's wrong,

Point to the staring dead for token

Of their triumphant creed, enshrined

In temples of the Teuton mind.

The raving dog-star hath his season : But when the light beyond our death Leads back again from Nazareth

The holy star of human reason —

Then will philosophy no more

Be servile to the Muse of War. 54

THE CHILD-DANCERS1

A bomb has fallen over Notre Dame : Germans have burned another Belgian town: Russians quelled in the east: England in qualm:

I closed my eyes, and laid the paper down.

Gray ledge and moor-grass and pale bloom of light

By pale blue seas !

What laughter of a child world-sprite,

Sweet as the horns of lone October bees,

Shrills the faint shore with mellow, old delight?

What elves are these

In smocks gray-blue as sea and ledge,

Dancing upon the silvered edge

Of darkness — each ecstatic one

Making a happy orison,

With shining limbs, to the low-sunken sun ? —

1 At end of volume see note. 55

56 THE PRESENT HOUR

See: now they cease

Like nesting birds from flight:

Demure and debonair

They troop beside their hostess' chair

To make their bedtime courtesies :

" Spokoinoi notchi ! — Gute Nacht !

Bon soir ! Bon soir ! — Good night!" What far-gleaned lives are these Linked in one holy family of art ? — Dreams : dreams once Christ and Plato dreamed How fair their happy shades depart !

Dear God ! how simple it all seemed, Till once again

Before my eyes the red type quivered : Slain : Ten thousand of the enemy. — Then laughter! laughter from the ancient sea Sang in the gloaming: Athens! Galilee! And elfin voices called from the extinguished light " Spokoinoi notchi I — Gute Nacht ! Bon soir! Bon soir! — Good night!"

BATTLEFIELDS

ON the battlefields of birth, Lulled from pain in twilight sleep,

Languorous in calm reliance

On the Christ-like soul of science, They whose patient soldiership Bore the age-old pangs of earth Till the patient seers of reason set them free —

Volunteers, whose valiant warring

Is the passion of restoring — Mothers, gentle mothers, bless you, Germany I

By the battlefields of death, Racked by prayers that never sleep,

Anguished with a wild defiance

Of the Satan powers of science, They whose loving guardianship Knit the subtle bonds of breath Till their sons of iron tore them ruthlessly —

Victims, whose heart-blinding portion

Is their victory's abortion —

Mothers, maddened mothers, curse you, Germany ! 57

IN MEMORIAM MRS. WOODROW WILSON

HER gentle spirit passed with Peace — With Peace out of a world at war

Racked by the old earth-agonies Of kaiser, king and czar,

Where Bear and Lion crouch in lair To rend the iron Eagle's flesh

And viewless engines of the air Spin wide their lightning mesh,

And darkly kaiser, czar and king

With awful thunders stalk their prey. —

Yet Peace, that moves with silent wing, Is mightier than they.

And she — our lady who has passed —

And Peace were sisters : They are gone Together through time's holocaust

To blaze a bloodless dawn. 58

INMEMORIAM 59

How otherwise the royal die

Whose power is throned on rolling drums ! Her monument of royalty

Is builded in the slums :

Her latest prayer, transformed to law, Shall more than monarch's vow endure,

Assuaging there, with loving awe, The anguish of the poor.

A PRAYER OF THE PEOPLES

GOD of us who kill our kind ! Master of this blood-tracked Mind Which from wolf and Caliban Staggers toward the star of Man - Now, on Thy cathedral stair, God, we cry to Thee in prayer !

Where our stifled anguish bleeds Strangling through Thine organ reeds, Where our voiceless songs suspire From the corpses in Thy choir — Through Thy charred and shattered nave, God, we cry on Thee to save!

Save us from our tribal gods!

From the racial powers, whose rods — 60

A PRAYER OF THE PEOPLES 61

Wreathed with stinging serpents — stir Odin and old Jupiter From their ancient hells of hate To invade Thy dawning state.

Save us from their curse of kings ! Free our souls' imaginings From the feudal dreams of war; Yea, God, let us nevermore Make, with slaves' idolatry, Kaiser, king or czar of Thee !

We who, craven in our prayer, Would lay off on Thee our care — Lay instead on us Thy load; On our minds Thy spirit's goad, On our laggard wills Thy whips And Thy passion on our lips !

Fill us with the reasoned faith That the prophet lies, who saith

62 THE PRESENT HOUR

All this web of destiny, Torn and tangled, cannot be Newly wove and redesigned By the Godward human mind.

Teach us, so, no more to call

Guidance supernatural

To our help, but — heart and will —

Know ourselves responsible

For our world of wasted good

And our blinded brotherhood.

Lord, our God ! to whom, from clay,

Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray —

Not from Thy cathedral's stair

Thou nearest : — Thou criest through our prayer

For our prayer is but the gate:

We, who pray, ourselves are fate.

THE PRESENT HOUR

II PEACE

PANAMA HYMN

LORD of the sundering land and deep, For whom of old, to suage thy wrath,

The floods stood upright as a heap To shape thy host a dry-shod path,

Lo, now, from tide to sundered tide Thy hand, outstretched in glad release,

Hath torn the eternal hills aside To blaze a liquid path for Peace.

Thy hand, englaived in flaming steel, Hath clutched the demons of the soil

And made their forge-fires roar and reel To serve thy seraphim in toil;

While round their pits the nations, bowed,

Have watched thine awful enginery Compel, through thunderbolt and cloud,

The demigods to slave for thee. F 65

66 THE PRESENT HOUR

For thee hath glaring Cyclops sweat, And Atlas groaned, and Hercules

For thee his iron sinews set,

And thou wast lord of Rameses;

Till now they pause, to watch thy hand Lead forth the first leviathan

Through mazes of the jungled land, Submissive to the will of man :

Submissive through the will of us

To thine, the universal will, That leads, divine and devious,

To world-communions vaster still. —

The titans rest; intense, aware, The host of nations dumbly waits;

The mountains lift their brows and stare; The tides are knocking at the gates.

PANAMA HYMN 67

Almighty of the human mind,

Unlock the portals of our sleep That lead to visions of our kind,

And marry sundered deep to deep !

GOETHALS

A MAN went down to Panama

Where many a man had died To slit the sliding mountains

And lift the eternal tide: A man stood up in Panama,

And the mountains stood aside.

The Power that wrought the tide and peak

Wrought mightier the seer; And the One who made the isthmus

He made the engineer, And the good God he made Goethals

To cleave the hemisphere.

The reek of fevered ages rose From poisoned jungle and strand,

Where the crumbling wrecks of failure Lay sunk in the torrid sand -

Derelicts of old desperate hopes

And venal contraband : 68

GOETHALS 69

Till a mind glowed white through the yellow mist

And purged the poison-mold, And the wrecks rose up in labor,

And the fevers' knell was tolled, And the keen mind cut the world-divide,

Untarnished by world gold :

For a poet wrought in Panama

With a continent for his theme, And he wrote with flood and fire

To forge a planet's dream, And the derricks rang his dithyrambs

And his stanzas roared in steam.

But the poet's mind it is not his

Alone, but a million men's : Far visions of lonely dreamers

Meet there as in a lens, And lightnings, pent by stormy time,

Leap through, with flame intense:

70 THE PRESENT HOUR

So from our age three giants loom To vouch man's venturous soul :

Amundsen on his ice-peak, And Peary from his pole,

And midway, where the oceans meet, Goethals — beside his goal :

Where old Balboa bent his gaze

He leads the liners through, And the Horn that tossed Magellan

Bellows a far halloo, For where the navies never sailed

Steamed Goethals and his crew;

So nevermore the tropic routes

Need poleward warp and veer, But on through the Gates of Goethals

The steady keels shall steer, Where the tribes of man are led toward peace

By the prophet-engineer.

A CHILD AT THE WICKET

A LITTLE isle: it is for some Hell's gate, for some Elysium ! — Round Ellis Isle the salt waves flow With old-world tears, wept long ago;

Round Ellis Isle the warm waves leap With new-world laughter from the deep, And centuries of sadness smile To clasp their arms round Ellis Isle.

I watched her pass the crowded piers, A peasant child of maiden years; Her face was toward the evening sky Where fair Manhattan towered high;

Her yellow kerchief caught the breeze, Her crimson kirtle flapped her knees, As lithe she swayed to tug the band

Of swaddled bundle in her hand. 71

72 THE PRESENT HOUR

From her right hand the big load swung, But with her left strangely she clung To something light, which seemed a part Of her, and held it 'gainst her heart:

A something frail, which tender hands Had touched to song in far-off lands On twilights, when the looms are mute : A thing of love — a slender lute.

Hardly she seemed to know she held That frail thing fast, but went compelled By wonder of the dream that lay In those bright towers across the bay.

A staggering load, a treasure light — She bore them both, and passed from sight. From Ellis Isle I watched her pass : Pinned on her breast was Lawrence, Mass.

A CHILD AT THE WICKET 73

O little isle, you are for some Hell's gate, for some Elysium ! Your wicket swings, and some to song Pass on, and some to silent wrong;

But who, where hearts of toilers bleed In songless toil, ah, who will heed — On twilights, when the looms are mute — A thing of love, a slender lute?

HYMN FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE

THEY have strewn the burning hearths of Man with

darkness and with mire, They have heaped the burning hearts of Man with

ashes of desire, Yet from out those hearts and hearths still leaps the

quick eternal fire

Whose flame is liberty.

But the flame which once led deathward all the dazzled

fighting hordes Lights them now to living freedom from the bondage

of their lords, And our mothers are uprisen 'mid their sons to wrest

the swords

From hands of tyranny.

For the freedom of the laborer is freedom from his toil, And freedom of the citizen is right to share the soil, And the freedom of our country is our loosing of the coil

That chokes posterity. 74

HYMN FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE 75

So we who wage our devious wars, in fastness and in fen, Let us claim our common birthright in the living sun

again, Till the battle of the beasts becomes the reasoning of

men,

And joy our destiny.

Let us march then, all together, not because our leaders

call,

But at summons of the mighty soul of man within us all, Men and women, equal comrades, let us storm the

nation's wall

And cry "Equality!"

For the vote that brings to woman and to man life's

common bread, Is mightier than the mindless gun that leaves a million

dead; And the rights of Man shall triumph where once men

and women bled

When mothers of men are free.

LEXINGTON

"WHERE is the little town of Lexington?

Oh, I have lost my way ! " — But all the brawling people hurried on :

Why should they stay To watch a tattered boy, with wistful face, Dazed by the roaring strangeness of the place ? —

In wondering scorn Turning, he tapped the powder from his powder-horn.

" Where is my blood-bright hearth of Lexington ? " —

Strangely the kindling cry Startled the crowded street; yet everyone

Still scrambled by

Into the shops and markets ; till at last Went by a pensive scholar. As he passed,

Sudden, to whet

Of steel, he heard a flint-lock flash : their faces met. 76

LEXINGTON 77

"What like, then, is your little Lexington?'*

"Oh, sir, it is my home, Which I have lost." — The scholar's sharp eyes shone.

"Come with me! Come, And I will show you, old and hallowed, all Its maps and marks and shafts memorial." —

Out of the roar

They went, into green silence where old elm trees soar.

I

" Here is your little town of Lexington :

Let fall your eyes And read the old inscription on this stone :

'Beneath this lies

The first who fell in our dear country's fight For revolution and the freeman's right/"

The boy's eyes fell, But shining swiftly rose : " Yes, I remember well !

" Yet there lies not my lost home Lexington : For none who fall

78 THE PRESENT HOUR

At Lexington is buried under stone;

And eyes of all

Who fight at Lexington look up at God Not down upon His servants under sod

Whose souls are sped; They lie who say in Lexington free men are dead."

"My son, I said not so of Lexington.

'There lie the bones/ I said, 'of great men, and their souls are gone.'

God sends but once

His lightning-flash to strike the sacred spot. Our great sires are departed." — "They are not!

I am alive. / fought at Lexington ; you see, I still survive !

"And still I live to fight at Lexington.

I am come far From Russian steppes and Balkan valleys, wan

With ghostly war,

LEXINGTON 79

Where still the holy watchword in the fight Was Revolution and the freeman's right ! —

Now I am come Back with that battle-cry to help my own dear home.

" Here, here it lies — my lost home Lexington !

Not there in dust, But here in the great highway of the sun,

Where still the lust

Of arrogant power flaunts its regiments, And lurking hosts of tyranny pitch their tents,

And still the yoke Of heavy-laden labor weighs on simple folk.

"Our country cries for living Lexington!

From mine and slum And hearths where man's rebellion still burns on,

Rolls the deep drum :

80 THE PRESENT HOUR

Ah, not to elegize but emulate

Is homage worthy of the heroic great,

Whose memoried spot Serves but to quicken fire from ashes long forgot.

"Here, then, O little town of Lexington,

Burnish anew Our muskets for the battle long begun

For freedom ! — You,

O you, my comrades, called from all world-clans, Here, by the deeds of dear Americans

That cannot die, Let Lexington be still our revolution-cry!"

SCHOOL I

OLD Hezekiah leaned hard on his hoe

And squinted long at Eben, his lank son. —

The silence shrilled with crickets. Day was done,

And, row on dusky row,

Tall bean poles ribbed with dark the gold-bright after glow.

Eben stood staring : ever, one by one, The tendril tops turned ashen as they flared.

Still Eben stared.

Oh, there is wonder on New Hampshire hills, Hoeing the warm bright furrows of brown earth, And there is grandeur in the stone wall's birth,

And in the sweat that spills

From rugged toil is sweetness ; yet for wild young wills There is no dew of wonder, but stark dearth, In one old man who hoes his long bean rows,

And only hoes.

G 81

82 THE PRESENT HOUR

Old Hezekiah turned slow on his heel.

He touched his son. — Through all the carking day

There are so many littlish cares to weigh

Large natures down, and steel The heart of understanding. — "Son, how is't ye

feel?

What are ye starin' on — a gal?" A ray Flushed Eben from the fading afterglow :

He dropped his hoe.

He dropped his hoe, but sudden stooped again And raised it where it fell. Nothing he spoke, But bent his knee and crack! the handle broke

Splintering. With glare of pain, He flung the pieces down, and stamped upon them;

then —

Like one who leaps out naked from his cloak — Ran. — " Here, come back ! Where are ye bound —

you fool?" He cried — "To school!"

SCHOOL 83

II

Now on the mountain Morning laughed with light — With light and all the future in her face, For there she looked on many a far-off place

And wild adventurous sight, For which the mad young autumn wind hallooed with

might

And dared the roaring mill-brook to the race, Where blue-jays screamed beyond the pine-dark pool —

"To school!— To school!"

Blackcoated, Eben took the barefoot trail,

Holding with wary hand his Sunday boots ;

Harsh catbirds mocked his whistling with their hoots ;

Under his swallowtail

Against his hip-strap bumping, clinked his dinner pail ; Frost maples flamed, lone thrushes touched their lutes ; Gray squirrels bobbed, with tails stiff curved to backs,

To eye his tracks.

84 THE PRESENT HOUR

Soon at the lonely crossroads he passed by The little one-room schoolhouse. He peered in. There stood the bench where he had often been

Admonished flagrantly

To drone his numbers : Now to this he said good bye

For mightier lure of more romantic scene : Goodbye to childish rule and homely chore

Forevermore !

All day he hastened like the flying cloud Breathless above him, big with dreams, yet dumb. With tightened jaw he chewed the tart spruce gum,

And muttered half aloud Huge oracles. At last, where through the pine-tops

bowed

The sun, it rose ! — His heart beat like a drum. There, there it rose — his tower of prophecy :

The Academy !

SCHOOL 85

III

They learn to live who learn to contemplate,

For contemplation is the unconfined

God who creates us. To the growing mind

Freedom to think is fate,

And all that age and after-knowledge augurate Lies in a little dream of youth enshrined : That dream to nourish with the skilful rule

Of love — is school.

Eben, in mystic tumult of his teens,

Stood bursting — like a ripe seed — into soul.

All his life long he had watched the great hills roll

Their shadows, tints and sheens By sun- and moon-rise; yet the bane of hoeing

beans

And round of joyless chores, his father's toll, Blotted their beauty ; nature was as not :

He had never thought.

86 THE PRESENT HOUR

But now he climbed his boyhood's castle tower And knocked : Ah, well then for his after-fate That one of nature's masters opened the gate,

Where like an April shower Live influence quickened all his earth-blind seed to

power.

Strangely his sense of truth grew passionate, And like a young bull, led in yoke to drink,

He bowed to think.

There also bowed their heads with him to quaff — The snorting herd ! And many a wholesome grip He had of rivalry and fellowship.

Often the game was rough,

But Eben tossed his horns and never called it off; For still through play and task his Dream would

slip — A radiant Herdsman, guiding destiny

To his degree.

SCHOOL 87

IV

Once more old Hezekiah stayed his hoe To squint at Eben. Silent, Eben scanned A little roll of sheepskin in his hand,

While, row on dusky row,

Tall bean poles ribbed with dark the gold-bright after glow.

The boy looked up : Here was another land ! Mountain and farm with mystic beauty flared

Where Eben stared.

Stooping, he lifted with a furtive smile

Two splintered sticks, and spliced them. Nevermore

His spirit would go beastwise to his chore

Blinded, for even while

He stooped to the old task, sudden in the sunset's pile His radiant Herdsman swung a fiery door, Through which came forth with far-borne trumpetings

Poets and kings,

88 THE PRESENT HOUR

His fellow conquerors : There Virgil dreamed, There Caesar fought and won the barbarous tribes, There Darwin, pensive, bore the ignorant gibes,

And One with thorns redeemed From malice the wild hearts of men : there flared and

gleamed

With chemic fire the forges of old scribes, Testing anew the crucibles of toil

To save God's soil.

So Eben turned again to hoe his beans;

But now, to ballads which his Herdsman sung,

Henceforth he hoed the dream in with the dung,

And for his ancient spleens

Planting new joys, imagination found him means. — At last old Hezekiah loosed his tongue : " Well, boy, this school — what has it learned ye to know?"

He said: "To hoe."

THE PLAYER

[Shakspere]

His wardrobe is the world, and day and night

His many-mirror 'd dressing room : At dawn

He apes the elvish faun,

Or, garbed in saffron hose and scarlet shoon,

Mimics the madcap sprite

Of ever-altering youth ; at chime of noon

He wears the azure mail and blazoned casque

Of warring knighthood; till, at starry stroke

Of dark, all pale he dons his "inky cloak"

And meditates — the waning moon his tragic mask.

His theatre is the soul, and man and woman His infinite repertory: Age on age, Treading his fancy's stage, Ephemeral shadows of his master mind, We act our parts — the human

Players of scenes long since by him designed ;

80

90 THE PRESENT HOUR

And stars, that blaze in tinsel on our boards,

Shine with a moment's immortality

Because they are his understudies, free

For one aspiring hour to sound his magic chords.

For not with scholars and their brain-worn scripts, Nor there behind the footlights' fading glow Shakspere survives : ah, no ! Deep in the passionate reality Of raging life above the darkling crypts Of death, he meditates the awed "To be Or not to be" of millions, yet to whom His name is nothing; there, on countless quests, Unlettered Touchstones quibble with his jests, Unlaureled Hamlets yearn, and anguished Lears up- loom.

Leave, then, to Avon's spire and silver stream Their memory of ashes sung and sighed : Our Shakspere never died,

THE PLAYER 91

Nor ever was born, save as the god is born From every soul that dares to doubt and dream. He dreams — but is not mortal : eve and morn, Dirge and delight, float from his brow like prayer. Beside him, charmed Apollo lifts his lyre; Below, the heart of man smoulders in fire; Between the two he stands, timeless — the poet-player.

TO JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY (On first reading her play "The Wolf of Gubbio")

CONJURESS, here

YouVe poured, all clear,

In a cup, a carven crystal cup —

Pied with lights that flush and falter

And flower again —

All in a three-rimmed loving-cup

Fit for the dear Madonna's altar,

Where thieves and shrews and wolvish men

And wondering children may come to sup —

All in a cup, a shining cup,

Held by the trembling paws and fingers

Of your divine dog Fra Lupone

And him, his crony,

Whose loving laughter lingers

In the echo of song that bubbles so easy

In syllabling: d'Assissi! d'Assissi! 92

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY 93

Him, large white soul in the simple wee body —

Pulsing, you've poured in a glowing cup

For joy of our generations —

Wine : wine distilled from the art

And the sheen

Of the mind and the heart

Of Josephine

Preston Peabody. —

Fair befall her ! — Felicitations !

PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE TO A BIRD MASQUE

PROLOGUE Enter FANTASY, who speaks:

GENTLES, just now I met an elf

Who crooked mid-air his finger joint

To beckon me, poising himself

Sheer on a shining question-point;

And there he cried : " Who may you be ?

Where are you bound, if one may ask?

What are these birds that hold a masque?

What is a masque? What witchery

Can cause my woodland boughs to grace

This walled and crowded shut-in place?

How may divine Aurora rise

Under a roof ? That parchment scroll -

What's written there?" — I said: "Replies

To elves like you, who claim their toll

Of answers." So I cast my eyes

Downward, and read this from my roll : 94

PROLOGUE 95

I

Follow me, Gentles ! Follow me

By hidden paths, for I am Fantasy : —

Between the ear and what is heard,

Betwixt the eye and what is seen,

Midway the poet and his word

I hold my shadowy demesne.

And there to-night I act a thing —

Nor drama nor lyric but mid-way —

Wrought for my fairy folk to sing

And real folk to play.

Your nature critic does not ask

Robin to nest with wren,

Yet both are birds : Why argue, then,

What drama is, or masque?

My theatre's art is nature's, when

It serves the creator's task.

96 THE PRESENT HOUR

II

Then, follow me, Gentles, if you will !

To follow means but tarry still

Here in your seats, for I will bring

Horizons for your journeying,

Till soon this many-murmured hall

Shall be for you a silent wood,

Where we may watch, through leafy solitude,

Quercus the faun, and hear his echo call

In sighing surds

The vowel-bubbling birds,

And spy where Dawn steals past with pale footfall.

Ill

Come, then, for this can only be If you will follow Fantasy. No magic is, except through me; Yet I myself can nothing do Alone ; my radiance 'tis from you.

PROLOGUE 97

For if in woods I walk alone

No light will be around me thrown;

And if alone you walk the woods,

Your eyes will blink through darkening hoods.

IV

Come, then, together let us go, As birds and men together meet Where boughs are dim and woodlands sweet With meditation. Meeting so, My simplest arts

Will serve to please you, and unblind Your own rapt vision; for kind hearts Need no compulsion to be kind To their own natures. So the mind Amongst you which shall act most feelingly ^My simple masque, and find the fewest flaws, Shall win my best award, and he (or she) Be showered by my players' glad applause.

98 THE PRESENT HOUR

EPILOGUE

Gentles, if you have followed me, Now is no need to say goodbye; For we shall meet in revery Wherever glad birds sing and fly — Wherever sad birds bleed and dumbly die.

Oh, where they mount on wings and song 'Tis we who mount there — you and I ; And where they fall and suffer wrong JTis we who perish — you and I : Our own is Ornis' pain or ecstasy.

So, at fresh rise and set of sun,

May Ornis bring her joy to you, each one,

And Tacita her dreams ! — Our masque is done.

THE SONG SPARROW

WHEN June was cool and clover long And birds were glad in soul and body,

I sat me down to make a song, And sweltered in my study:

I swinked and sweat with weary art

To tell how merry was my heart.

With weary art and wordy choice

I toiled, when sudden — low and breezy

I heard a little friendly voice Call : Simple, simple, so easy !

I heard, yet sat apart in dole

To sing how social was my soul.

In vain ! — That artless voice went round

In tiny echoes faint and teasy. I rose : " What toil then, have you found

Simple, simple, so easy?" 99

100 THE PRESENT HOUR

Dauntless, the bird, with dewy beak, Carolled again his cool critique.

Nay, song it is a simple thing For hearts that seek no reason :

Relentless bird, why should you sing Who are the happy season ? —

Still why! The root of joy I seek,

While laughter ripples from your beak.

No wonder, then, the bard's pen creaks, The critic's drone grows wheezy,

When joy the June bird never seeks Is simple, simple, so easy!

While we, who find our art so long,

Still make a subterfuge of song !

TO AN UPLAND PLOVER

CRESCENT-WING'D, sky-clean Hermit of pastures wild,

Upland plover, shy-soul'd lover Of field ways undefiled ! I watch your curve-tipt pinion glean — Slim as a scythe — the rusty green

Reaches of sweet-fern cover That slant to your secret glade, But what you cull with your rhythmic blade What mortal can discover?

Azure-born, gale-blown Gull of the billowy hills,

My heart goes forth to see you hover So far from human sills,

To hear your tweeting, shrill and lone, 101

102 THE PRESENT HOUR

Make from the moorgrass such sharp moan

As some unshriven lover, For you are sorrow-wise With memory, whose passions rise

Whence no man may discover.

Reticent, rare of song,

Rears the shy soul its pain :

You sought no cottage eave as cover To dole a dulcet plain; But swift, on pinions lithe and strong, You sought a place for your wild wrong

God only might discover, And there God, calling, came, And flies with you in His white flame — Your wilding mate, O plover I

RAIN REVERY

IN the lone of night by the pattering tree

I sat alone with Poetry —

With Poetry, my old shy friend,

And his tenuous shadow seemed to blend —

Beyond the lampshine on the sill —

With the mammoth shadow of the hill,

And his breath fell soft on the pool-dark pane

With the murmurous, murmuring muffled hoof

Of the rain, the rain

The rain on the roof.

In the vast of night and its vacancy

I prayed aloud to Poetry,

And his luminous eyes grew large and dim

As my heart-pulse quickened to question him;

For out of that rumbling rhymeless rune

He only might know, by a sense atune,

103

104 THE PRESENT HOUR

To unravel the anguish, and render vain The remorseless will that wove the woof Of the rain, the rain The rain on the roof.

So I cried : " What mute conspiracy

Have you made with the night, O Poetry?

Lover and friend of my warm doorway,

Do you crouch there too on the storm-soaked clay ?

Did you creep indoors when that gust of damp

Raised the dead moon-moths round my lamp

And the wan flame guttered ? — Hark, again !

Do you ride there — so close, so aloof —

With the rain, the rain

The rain on the roof?

"Ah, what of the rapture and melody

We might have wrought, dear Poetry!

Imagined tower and dream-built shrine,

Must they crumble in dark like this pale lampshine?

RAIN REVERY 105

Our dawn-flecked meadows lyric-shrill,

Shall they lie as dumb as the gloom-drenched hill?

Our song- voiced lovers ! — Shall none remain ? " —

Under the galloping, gusty hoof

Answered the rain, rain

Rain on the roof.

THE HEART IN THE JAR

A Meditation on the Nobel Prize Award for Medical Research, 1912

ALIVE it beats in a bosom of glass —

A glowing heart !

It has come to pass I

Ventricle, auricle,

Artery quivering:

No metaphorical

x

Symbol of art,

No cold, mechanical trick of a cog,

But ardent — an organ mysterious,

Alive, delivering

Serene, continuous

Pulses, poised in its chamber of glass,

Beating — the heart of a dog ! 106

THE HEART IN THE JAR 107

II

And it came to pass

While the hearts of men

Were selling and buying

The blood of their brothers,

Then, even then —

While grocer and draper

And soldier were eying

Their market-news in the morning paper,

And, musing there among the others,

Their poet of words

Stood staring — his back to the laboratory

(Where the poet of life

Plied ether and knife) —

Stood musing his rhymes for a miracle-story

Of Babylon queens or Attic birds.

108 THE PRESENT HOUR

III

Yet others were there more strange (More strange, as they spoke in the holy name Of the human heart, while still their eyes Were blind to the light love's visions range) — For they cried : " Lo, the dog — he dies ! Spare him the knife ! What have ye done, Awarders of fame! Will you grant to one Who slaughters — the great world-prize ? " Yet these are the same Who cherish the deed and worship the pain

Of saints that offered their blood in fire

\

For the meed of men,

And these are the same who bend the knee

To One who hung on the bleeding tree

Under the seraphim:

In the name — in the hallowed name of Him

Who raised us from Caliban,

Would they grudge to a dog — what a god might aspire

To render his heart for the Heart of Man ?

THE HEART IN THE JAR 109

IV

How calm in its crystal tomb

It beats to the mandate of life!

How hush it waits in the sexless womb

For the hour of its strange midwife —

The seer, whose talismanic touch

Shall give it birth in another — what ?

The heart of a dog once, was it not?

So then, if it still be such,

Why, then, the dog — (cur, thoroughbred,

Mastiff, was it, or hound ?) —

What of the dog ? — is he quick or dead ?

His soul (as they used to say)

In what Elysian field should he stray,

Or where lie down in his grave?

For hark ! —

Through the clear concave

Of the glass, that delicate pulsing sound !

Ah, once, how it whirred in the flooded dark

Of his deep-lunged chest, with rhythmic beat

110 THE PRESENT HOUR

To the wild curvet of his wonderful feet

And the rapturous passion of his bark,

As he welcomed his homing master's hand,

To crouch at the quick command !

Yet it never has ceased to beat : —

Charmed by the poet of life,

Freed by his art and the cunning knife

That counterfoils the shears of fate,

See it quiver now in that golden bar

Of noon — unlaboring, isolate,

Alive, in a crystal jar !

The heart of a dog — why pause ?

Why pause on your brink, bright jar? Or why

This reticent allocution?

A dog ! — Shall I stop at to-day, because

To-morrow it might be I ? —

Yea, and if it be!

Even this heart of me

THE HEART IN THE JAR 111

The subtle bard of life with his blade

To sever from out the mystic whole

I have deemed my Soul •

And shatter me — like no cloven shade

Divined by a Dante's ecstasy —

In morsels to immortality,

Piecemeal to dissolution!

This, then, that knocks at my breast — Starting at the image of its own inquest Hung in a gleaming jar — this sentient thing Responsive in the night To messages of grandeur and delight, Pensive to Winter, passionate to Spring, Mounting on strokes of music's rhythmic wing, Beating more swift when my beloved's cheek Ruddies with rapture the tongue fails to speak, And pausing quite When her rose turns to white — This servant, delicate to suffering,

112 THE PRESENT HOUR

Insurgent to restraint, soothed by redress, This shall the life-bard place upon his shelf •Beside the dog — and both shall acquiesce.

VI

For he — artist of baffling life — himself

Sculptor and plastic instrument —

He holds within his hand the vast intent,

And carves from out the^crimson clay of death

Incredible images

Of quickening fauns, and headless victories

More terrible than her of Samothrace, —

Yea, toys with such as these,

As, silent, he lifts a severed Gorgon's face

Toward his own;

(The watchers hold their breath,

Hiding their dread.)

Calmly he looks — nor turns to stone,

But with a touch freezes the sphinx instead.

Till last, all pale, beside him — like a dream

THE HEART IN THE JAR 113

That rises into daylight out of sleep —

Death rises from the mystic, crimson stream

And murmurs at his ear: "What, then, am I?

And what art thou whose scalpel strikes so deep

To slay me? Yea, I felt it glance me by

And I am wounded ! Give it me ! " — They clutch :

Death snatches, and his frozen fingers touch

The scalpel's edge — when lo, a lightning gleam

Ruddies their wrestling shadows on the night;

Immense they lengthen down the vasty gloom

And darken in their height

The rafters of a silent room :

Around its walls, ranged in the crystal jars

Of infinite stars,

Beat, as they burn, the myriad hearts of life ;

In lordship, where their lonely shadows loom,

Death and the Artist grapple for the knife.

NEW POEMS

THREE DANCE MOTIVES

Imagined for dances of Isadora Duncan I. LETHE

ALONE by a starless sea

I lay with Sorrow ; And mists of slumber breathed

From the mouth of my lover ;

And I rose from his numbing arms And moaned : " O, release me !

Let me flame, let me leap once more On the hills of vision ! "

Then one by one stood round us

Stars of the morning : Their lyric bodies sang,

Their torch-limbs beckoned ; 117

118 THE PRESENT HOUR

But the fog of my blind lover's breath

Congealed their burning Till they drooped on the banks of dawn

Like lilies frost-slain,

And I drooped to his lethal lips

Of anguish, and lay there Till the shy Stars bloomed again

By shores of the evening,

Beckoning anew, with their palms

Of flame, to rejoin them On the Mountains of Joy, and once more

I rose in my yearning

And gazed : I am coming ! But ah !

The arrows of my gazing Pierced them there, side by side,

And they waned by the waters,

THREE DANCE MOTIVES 119

Lying like mermaids, dead

In the shoals of twilight. — Then my soul waned with them, and kissed

The cold mouth of my lover.

But still, through the pulsing mists

Of our pitiful dreaming, I feel their immortal eyes

Burning with wonder.

II. DIONYSUS

Dionysus ! — io ! lo ! — Dionysus ! Who hath rolled back the rock from the cave Cim merian

And blinded the world with morning ? Dionysus ! — thou ! — It is thou, Dionysus ! Out of the niggard, numbing dark of the ages Thou, from the dead, art restored !

120 THE PRESENT HOUR

Stark from the Tree of Pain,

Crucified, bleeding, disowned,

They bore the beautiful God of our Joy to his charnel :

But there in the flaming dark, thou — thou, his seraph,

Rolled back the awful stone

For the Lord of Life — new risen.

Dionysus ! — io ! lo ! — Dionysus !

Lo ! thy grapes are the clustering hearts of children

And the wine of these is thy worship.

Dionysus ! — once more ! — Once more, Dionysus,

Thou revealest our God, who is One through all ages : —

The Lord of Life is regained !

III. THE CHASE

Through what vast wood,

By what wild paths of beautiful surprise,

Hast thou returned to us,

Diana, Diana of Desire ?

THREE DANCE MOTIVES 121

Coming to thy call What huntresses are these ?

What hallowed chase? What long, long cherished goal?

Through man's wan mind By radiant paths of rhythmic liberty I am returned to you, Diviner, diviner of dreams !

Those huntresses, they are my hallowed desires — My unquenched selves with overflowing quivers. Joy is our chase and goal :

Our bodies the tense crossbows, and our wild souls the shafts 1

THE BANDBOX THEATRE1

LADIES and Gentlemen, to-night we christen Our little new-born venture. — If you'll listen Let us, therefore, bethink ourselves a minute : "What's in a name?" Methinks to us what's in it Implies — what's in a bandbox ? But what's that ?

A bandbox, you will say, implies a hat ; Nay, more, a hat that's shapely to a head ; But shapeliness implies the power to shed Charm to the eyes — in short, to an audience, And meaning you, that means — intelligence. So from our bandbox (when the lid is off) We hope to furnish headgear fair enough To fit your high-bred choice in varied modes Adapted to your pleasures and the codes

1 An Epilogue for the opening night, New York, December 16, 1914, spoken by one of the actors.

122

THE BANDBOX THEATRE 123

Of modern workmanship in world-old art, Building for these a little place apart With roof and walls, to shelter from bad weather King Richard's crown or Lady Teazel's feather.

Such is our Bandbox. To deserve the name Implies, you see, your sanction to the same. Your good-will is our garland. Help us win it ! Our Bandbox holds the palm — while you are in it I

TO "E. A."

[Edwin Arlington Robinson]

WITH CAKE AND CANDLES1

E. A. — Of all the alphabet

That combination is the key

To unlock a door of memory

Into a quiet hall-room, set

With pen and pipe, where smoke of fancy

Swathes with a gentle necromancy

(Remote from Gotham's glare and racket)

One who reclines in crimson jacket

And smiles, in cryptic meditation,

To hold a friendly hand to me. —

E. A. ! — Yes, there's the combination :

The door turns inward to the light

Of kind eyes through the dark. — To-night

Candles illumine there, like day,

The sign above the knocker : See !

Entra, ^4mice, #emane ! — Thanks ; your key

I turn, E. A. -

To friendship the true way.

1 On his birthday : 23 December, 1914. 124

CHARLES KLEIN: DRAMATIST Died 7 May, 1915 on the Lusitania

THE arc-lights gleamed on glare Broadway Where the people passed to see his play — To mingle their own mirth and fears With players' laughter, players' tears ;

Yet while they watched, they little wist

The presence of the dramatist :

The practiced hand, the artful means

Of the mind that moved behind the scenes.

Only the glamour which he wrought Instilled its purpose — stirred their thought, And made its glow and color blaze

Unconscious on their after-ways. 125

126 THE PRESENT HOUR

But once, against an awful hour, They saw him loom — they felt a power Whose blinding and immortal ray Put out the arc-lights of Broadway

To show a planet all on fire ; And there — one instant on that pyre — He stood with those who held strange tryst With Death — the master dramatist.

There shines his great memorial, And we who shudder at his pall Cannot in fitting phrase relate An elegy more grand than fate ;

For make-believe of mirth and fears, And players' laughter, players' tears, Take on more vast and solemn range That he has suffered that sea-change. —

CHARLES KLEIN: DRAMATIST 127

„ Broadway goes by : new players tread Old boards, but still their memoried dead Act on in lordlier demesnes — Moved by the Soul behind the scenes.

EDISON

A THOUSAND leagues on the Arctic sea A ship went down through the frozen floe. Captain and crew they watched her go :

They ran her colors free ;

They cheered her lustily ; And far peoples shouted her praise with them Where a phonograph from her plunging stem Pealed to the stars her requiem.

A thousand leagues through the Afric wood A man went looting the jungle's wealth. Leopard nor lion could stay his stealth,

Nor sleeping-death, nor flood :

He drew not the monsters' blood, But he led them alive through the scorching day By a tape of moving film, to play With the wondering children of Broadway. 128

EDISON 129

A thousand leagues or a thousand years Are motes in the gaze of the seeking mind : By its own radiance thought can find

Its way to ultimate spheres,

Dark, till its beam appears To blazon them. So on that beam hath run Round Arctic moon and Afric sun The electric mind of Edison.

Through delicate engine and disk and reel He quickens the elemental Cause, Kindling the lightnings of its laws

Till atoms of jelly and steel

Are made to stir and feel, And mortals that long have ceased to be Live on, for the world to hear and see, In a semblance of immortality.

The throbbing ticker resounds his fame With its ominous pulse, and the mart responds, K

130 THE PRESENT HOUR

Selling his magic in stocks and bonds ; But they, who toss his name With gold in their mighty game, Behold not the soul of the mightier One Who sits in the brain of an Edison And weighs the dreams, when all is done.

For all that the millions sell and buy And wrangle for, is a dreamful thing Wrought of a lone imagining : Tower'd cities, that top our sky, Loomed first on the pensive eye Of brooding architects ; the glories Of art and science, their sounding stories, Have birth from silent laboratories.

So out of his visioning silences The great inventor reveals to us New pathways of nature, perilous

With unknown skies and seas,

For new astronomies

EDISON 131

To chart, and each dim discovered trail

Is lit by the gleam of a lurid grail

With the legend : What shall the search avail?

What at last shall avail our invention ? Yea, What avails our soul its cunning brain If our paths be hatred, our goal be pain ?

Brain searches in cloud and clay,

But our soul must point us the way Through cloud to a star, through clay to God's breath, Or else it were wiser to welcome death On the star-lit road to Nazareth.

But they shall avail — both — brain and soul ; They avail us now in him who has won Earth's wondering homage — Edison :

For his mind has held as its goal

The good of a world made whole, And his spirit girds it with lightning span — The planetary American Whose master-thought is the joy of man.

THE RETURN OF AUGUST

DARKLY a mortal age has come and gone And man grown ancient in a single year. August ! The summer month is blasted sere With memories earth bleeds to dream upon.

To dream upon ! Ah, were we dreaming then Ere Europe, blindfold, lulled in holiday, Harkened the sudden thunder through her play And, fumbling, held her breath to hark again,

Or is this blighted year our dream ? — How swift The blackening tempest fell ! How vast, through fire And cloud of Belgium's rape, a planet's ire Flared on that pall of shame, while through the rift

The livid sorrows racked our sympathies !

For still thought burned unclouded : Right and wrong

Strove for the palm as in an epic song ;

And so we poured our succor overseas,

132

THE RETURN OF AUGUST 133

Neutral in act but never in our souls, Yet guarding the brave goal of peace. Till soon — Slow-warping to the waning year's blind moon — The tide ebbed back, and in the freezing shoals

We stared upon the dead — the dead, whose mothers Suckled them still in dreams. Stark, mid the stench And yellow choke that reeked from shell and trench, They lay together there — mere boys, and brothers.

Were these the epic hosts of Wrong and Right Whose clash had whirled us in their spirits' war ? These silent boys : what had they battled for To lie such still bedfellows in the night ?

Must breath of dying brothers wake the brass That thrills the call to arms ? Shall ghostly lips Summon the living to the dark eclipse And all their dearest shout to see them pass

134 THE PRESENT HOUR

Merely for this : That these who might have shared A simple handclasp share a bloodied sod ? — So for a while we gazed and questioned God : A haunted while : for dimly, as we stared,

Far off, we heard the multitudinous cry

Of mangled Poland, like a cry in sleep,

And Servia fever-panting, and the deep

Half -breathed self-doubt of prisoned Germany ;

And still far tidings blew, but that first spark Of August splendor burned in them no more ; Pity and sorrow palled, and custom wore A deeper callus and a blur more dark,

Till sudden — the Lusitania ! Lightnings shot The unhallowed message, and a shuddering fire Leapt from our long-charred hearts — a glowing spire, And Europe's sword swung nearer to the knot

THE RETURN OF AUGUST 135

That ties our bonds of peace. And now — and now The summer steals again toward winter's sleep ; The reaping time draws near — ah, what to reap ? And spring, that lurks beyond, comes hither — how ?

Still, O my Country, while we may, look back ! The blighted year cries from the charnel grass : Must breath of dying brothers wake the brass That thrills the call to arms ? — A blood-sered track

Leads backward to that other August day, Prowled by the still unglutted Minotaur ; But we, who watch to slay that beast of War, Shall we hunt him or those he mangles ? — Say :

For reason has its ire more just than hate ; Imagination has its master hour, And pity its foil, and mother-love its power Mightier than blood-lust and more obdurate.

136 THE PRESENT HOUR

My Country ! poised in forward visioning,

With pity, love and reason let us pray

Our lives shall serve to cleanse this August day !

The summer wanes : the ploughman comes with spring.

FEDERATION

OVER there — they know the singeing and blinding of

sorrow. Over there they know the young dead : they know

the dear

Touch of the living that shall be the dead to-morrow : Here — what know we here ?

Over there, they feel the heart-rage, the sick hating Of bitter blood-lust, the imminent storm of steel, Burden and pang of a terror never-abating : Here — what do we feel ?

There, where they snuff the reek of a burning censer

Borne by the stark-mad emperors — their pain, Tinged with a hallowed pride, takes on the intenser

Soul of a world insane. 137

138 THE PRESENT HOUR

We, who still spared to reason, here where the thunder And surge of the madness dwindle to murmurs and

cease,

We who, apart, stand dazed by the demons of plun der — How shall we conjure Peace ?

Peace — did we call her, the gluttonous mother who

suckled

The monster child her lust of dominion bore ? Peace — did we crown her, the secret harlot who truckled To breed from the loins of War ?

One word — one only will — be ours in awaking : Nevermore! Nevermore let us build for merely our

own.

Peace is not ours alone for the making or breaking . Peace is the world's alone.

FEDERATION 139

For the battle-gauge is feud-lust or federation.

The ultimate beast is enthroned and man is its thrall ; And beast or man shall survive, as nation with nation Fights — not for one, but all.

A dream ? — Yes, the dream that once was a planet's

derision

Now blazons a planet's prayer : the cry to be free Of a world unconceived in woe of a Dante's vision, Or Christ's on the blasted tree.

For our deeds are the henchmen of dreams. Since

only by another Dream can the dreamer be vanquished, let ours

create

The beautiful order of brother united with brother : Victorious dreaming is fate. —

America — dreamer of dreams ! Be destiny's leader,

Militant first for mankind, for so your own soul, Blended of all, for all shall be interceder And guide to the world's goal.

CHRISTMAS 1915

Now is the midnight of the nations : dark Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, Screams in her travail, and the planets hark Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades, Wrenching the night's imponderable arc,

Christ ! What shall be delivered to the morn

Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another

Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother

Survive to know the blood-sprent offspring, torn

From her racked flesh ? — What splendor from the

smother ? What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born ?

140

NOTES

OF the poems collected in this volume, those in Part I (War) have been written during the last ten weeks; those in Part II (Peace) have been selected from poems written during the last two years — chiefly during 1914. Most of them have been pub lished, separately, in the following journals and newspapers, to the editors of which the author makes his acknowledgments: The North American Review, Collier's Weekly, The Outlook, The Forum, The Independent, The Boston Evening Transcript, The New York Times and Times Literary Supplement, The New York Evening Post.

NEW YORK CITY,

October 26, 1914.

142

NOTES

MOST of the poems in this volume were written for special occasions. These notes record the dates and events which called forth their expression, as follows : —

I: War

Fight : written for the centenary celebration of the naval battle of Plattsburgh, and read by the author at Pittsburgh, N.Y., September 11, 1914.

In the naval battle of Plattsburgh, the American com mander " Macdonough himself worked like a common sailor, in pointing and handling a favorite gun. While bending over to sight it, a round shot cut in two the spanker boom, which fell on his head and struck him sense less for two or three minutes; he then leaped to his feet and continued as before, when a shot took off the head of the captain of the gun crew and drove it in his face with such force as to knock him to the other side of the deck."

The above quotation is from " The Naval War of 1812," by Theodore Roosevelt.

The Conflict : These six sonnets here printed were originally published, together, in the Boston Evening Transcript, August 29, 1914. The first, "To William Watson," is a response to a sonnet by Mr. Watson entitled " To the United States," first published in The London Post, and cabled to the New York Times.

The Lads of Liege : First printed in the New York Times, September 2, 1914.

Carnage : These six sonnets were first published, together, in the Boston Evening Transcript, September 26, 1914.

The Muffled Drums : These stanzas (published in the New York Evening Post, September 3, 1914) were written 143

144 THE PRESENT HOUR

with reference to the Peace Procession of Women in New York City, August 29, 1914.

Antwerp: The early press accounts of the storming of Antwerp by the Germans told of great damage to the city's architecture. Later accounts have described a less amount of physical injury inflicted. This sonnet, however, has refer ence less to the physical violence, than to the spiritual violation wrought by unwarranted invaders.

Men of Canada : First printed in the Boston Evening Tran script, October 17, 1914, shortly after the sailing of Canadian troops to England.

The Child-Dancers : The little children of the Isadora Duncan School of Dancing, to whom these verses refer, came to America in September, owing to conditions of war in France. Russian, German, French, and English, they form a happy and harmonious family of the belligerent races.

A Prayer of the Peoples : This poem was written on the day of President Wilson's Call to Prayer, Sunday, October 4, 1914. It was published in the New York Times, on October fifth.

In Memoriam : Mrs. Woodrow Wilson : These stanzas were first printed in the New York Evening Post, August 13, 1914. Shortly before her death, the earnest, expressed wish of Mrs. Wilson for the passing of the law for the betterment of conditions in the slum district of Wash ington was fulfilled by vote of the Senate.

II: Peace

Panama Hymn: Sung by a chorus at the Panama Festival for the benefit of the New York Association for the Blind, New York City, March 25, 1913, for which occasion the hymn was written. It was published in the North American Review, April, 1913.

NOTES 145

Goethals : written for the National Testimonial to Colonel George W. Goethals, and read by the author at Carnegie Hall, New York City, March 4, 1914.

A Child at the Wicket : This poem, which narrates a true experience of the author at Ellis Island, refers by implication to the now historic labor troubles at Law rence, Mass., in 1912.

Hymn for Equal Suffrage: Written for the Equal Suffrage Meeting (Authors' Night) held at Cooper Union, New York City, in January 1914, and read by the author on that occasion. The poem is based on one of a like nature in the writer's play " Mater."

Lexington : Written for the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Lexington, and read at Lexington, Mass., June 8, 1913.

School : Written for the centenary celebration of the founding of Meriden Academy, and read by the author at Meriden, N.H., June 25, 1913.

The Player: written for the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shakspere, and read by Mr. Douglas Wood at the ceremonies beside Shak- spere's statue in Central Park, New York City, April 23, 1914.

Prologue and Epilogue to a Bird Masque: Thesewere written for the indoor performance of the author's Bird Masque " Sanctuary " in New York City, at the Hotel Astor Ballroom Theatre, February 24, 1914. On that occasion they were recited by Mrs. Charles Douville Coburn (in the role of Fantasy), who has since made use of them in the performances of the Masque by the Coburn Players at various American universities.

The Heart in the Jar : written at the time of the an nouncement of the award, to Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Nobel Prize for Medical Research, and published in the New York Times Literary Supplement, December 8, 1912.

146 THE PRESENT HOUR

New Poems

Three Dance Motives: Composed for dances of Isadora Duncan, and recited by Augustin Duncan at the Metro politan Opera House and the Century Theatre, New York, March, 1915.

Edison: Written for the National Testimonial to Thomas A. Edison, on his receiving the Civic Forum Medal for Distinguished Public Service, and read by the author at Carnegie Hall, New York, May 6, 1915.

Federation: Read by the author before the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, Boston, Jor dan Hall, November 19, 1915.

Charles Klein: Dramatist: Read by the author at the memorial meeting to Charles Klein, Hudson Theatre, December 19, 1915.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences

at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York

February, 1909

ODE ON THE CENTENARY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

ODE ON THE CENTENARY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I

THEN fell the season bleak Of silence and long night, And solemn starshine and large solitude ; Hardly more husht the world when first the word Of God creation stirred, Far steep t in wilderness. By the frore creek, Mute in the moon, the hunted stag in flight Paused, panting silver ; in her cedarn lair, Crouched with her starveling litter, the numb lynx Winked the keen hoar-frost, quiet as a sphinx ; On the lone forest trail Only the coyote's wail Quivered, and ceased.

2 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

It was the chrisom rude

Of winter and wild beast

That consecrated, by harsh nature's rite,

A meagre cabin crude,

Builded of logs and bark,

To be a pilgrim nation's hallow'd ark

And shrine the goal aspiring ages seek.

No ceremonial

Of pealed chime was there, or blared horn,

Such as hath blazoned births of lesser kings,

When he — the elder brother of us all,

Lincoln — was born.

At his nativity

Want stood as sponsor, stark Obscurity

Was midwife, and all lonely things

Of nature were unconscious ministers

To endow his spirit meek

With their own melancholy. So when he —

An infant king of commoners —

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Lay in his mother's arms, of all the earth,

Which now his fame wears for a diadem,

None heeded of his birth ;

Only a star burned over Bethlehem

More bright, and, big with prophecy,

A gust blew forth from that far February

To fill the organ-reeds that peal his centenary.

II

Who shall distil in song those epic years ? Only the Sibyl of Simplicity, Touched by the light and dew of common tears, Might chant that homely native Odyssea.

For there are lives too large in simple truth For art to limn or elegy to gauge ; And there are men so near to God's own ruth They are the better angels of their age ; And such was he : beyond the pale of song His grandeur looms in truth, with awful grace ;

4 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

He lives where beauty's origins belong Deep in the primal raptures of his race.

Yet may we strive to trace

His shadow — where it pulses vast

Upon imagination, cast

By the oft-handtrimm'd lamp of history —

In carved breath, or bronze, that we may scan

The imagined child and man

Whose life and death are looms of our own destiny.

Ill

The loveliness which is reality Surrounds us, but its glamorous romance We glean afar from heroes of old France, Or Hellas' arms, or Gothic heraldry, While Roland and his conquerors With Sigmund sleep beside our doors, And Homer's age awaits us at our hearth.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

How like a saga of the northern sea Our own Kentucky hero-tale begins !

Once on a time, far in a wintry wood,

A lone hut stood ;

There lived a poor man's son, that was to be

A master man of earth. And so for us,

Like children in the great hall of his spirit, The homebred fairy-story spins Annals whose grace the after-times inherit.

The uncouth homestead by the trail of Boone,

The untitled grant, the needy exodus,

The ox-cart on the Indiana heath,

The log shack by the Sangamon, and soon

The fever'd mother and the forest death —

From these the lonely epic wanders on.

The longshank boy, with visage creased by toil And laughter of the soil,

6 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Cribbing his book of statutes 'mid his chore,

Erelong his nooning fellows of the field

Hail their scrub-orator, or at sundown —

Slouching his gaunt and sallow six-foot-four —

Their native Touchstone of the village store.

Or from the turf, where he has matched his build

To throw the county champion in the loam,

Idly he saunters home

To rock some mother's cradle in the town ;

Or, stretched on counter calico, with Clay

And organ-sounding Webster, dream the night away.

But time begins

Slowly to sift the substance from the slag.

And now along the county pike's last lap,

With giant shins

Shut knifewise in his wabbling rattletrap,

The circuit lawyer trots his tired nag

Toward the noon tavern, reins up, and unrolls

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

His awkward length of wrinkled bombazine,

Clutching his tattered green

Umbrella and thin carpetsack,

And flings a joke that makes the rafters roar :

As if, uplooming from of yore,

Some quaint-accoutred king of trolls,

Out-elbowing a sexton's suit of black

In Christmas glee,

Should sudden crack

His shrilly jest of shrewd hilarity,

And shake the clambering urchins from his back.

IV

How vast the war invisible

When public weal battles with public will !

Proudly the stars of Union hung their wreath

On the young nation's lordly architrave ;

Yet underneath

Its girding vaults and groins,

Half the fair fabric rested on the loins

8 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

And stooping sinews of a slave,

That — raised to the just stature of a man —

Should rend the whole asunder.

And now the million-headed serf began

To stir in wonder,

And from the land, appalled by that low thunder,

"Kansas-Nebraska!" rang

The cry, and with exceeding pang

Out of the earth blood sprang

And out of men's hearts, fire. And that hot flame,

Fed by the book that burned in all men's homes,

Kindled from horizon to horizon

Anguish and shame

And aspiration, by its glow

Ruddying the state-house domes

With monstrous shadows of Dred Scott

And gaunt-limbed effigies of Garrison.

Then in the destined man matured the slow Strong grandeur of that lot

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Which singled him ; till soon,

Ushered with lordly train,

The champion Douglas met him on the plain,

And the broad prairie moon

Peered through white schooners at the mad bonfires

And multitudes astir,

Where — roped like wrestlers in a ring —

The Little Giant faced the Rails plitter ;

And serious crowds harked silently,

With smothered taunts and ires,

While Commonsense grappled with ' Sovereignty/

Till the lank, long-armed wrestler made his fling.

And still sublime

With common sympathy, that cool

Sane manf ulness survives : You cannot fool

All of the people all the time.

No ; by that power we misname fate, 'Tis character which moulds the state. Statutes are dead when men's ideals dissent,

10 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

And public will is more than precedent,

And manhood more than constitutions can create.

Higher than bar and documental ban,

Men's highest court is still the heart of Man.

V

Bold to his country, sick with compromise,

Spoke the plain advocate ;

Half slaw, half free, our Union dies,

But it shall live! And done with sophistries,

The people answered with tempestuous call

That shook the revolutionary dead,

And high on rude rails garlanded

Bore their backwoodsman to the Capitol.

"Who is this common huckster?" sneered the great,

" This upstart Solon of the Sangamon ? "

And chastened Douglas answered : " He is one

Who wrestles well for Truth." But some

Scowled unbelief, and some smiled bitterly ;

And so, beneath the derrick'd half-built dome,

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 11

While dumb artillery

And guards battalioned the black lonely form,

He took his oath.

We are not enemies, but friends!

Yet scarce the sad rogation ends

Ere the warped planks of Union split in storm

Of dark secession.

Then, as on a raft

Flood-rended, where by night the Ohio sweeps Into the Mississippi, 'mid the roil Of roaring waters with eroded soil From hills primeval, the strong poleman keeps Silence, midway the shallows and the rocks, To steer his shipment safe, while fore and aft The scrambling logmen scream at him, or scold With prayers and malisons, or burst the locks And loot the precious bales, so — deaf and mute To sneers and imprecations both — The lone Flatboatman of the Union poled

12 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

His country's wreck midstream, and resolute Held still his goal :

To lash his ballast to the sundered half, And save the whole.

" They seek a sign,

But no sign shall be given them," he said ;

And reaching Godward, with his pilot's gaff

Probed in the dark, among the drowning and the

dead,

And sunk his plummet line Deep in the people's heart, where still his own heart

bled,

And fathomed there the inundated shore Swept by the flood and storm of elemental war.

VI

The War ! — Far on the dim verge of To-day Its rack of livid splendor fades away.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 13

The bane is past ;

The awful lightnings, spent,

Have wrought a chastening not a chastisement ;

The beauty and the benediction last.

And mustering, in season due,

From farthest hill

And hamlet — still

Keeping the morning last but one in May

Proud with great memories — one by one,

Whose young life sank not with the sun

Of Gettysburg or Missionary Ridge,

Buttons his coat of blue,

And from his whitened hair

Removes the hat with golden-corded brim

And plants again old colors in old graves ;

And groups of simple children fair

And folk of middle age are there

To kneel by him,

And honor, though they cannot share,

His pensive privilege.

14 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Still in the living past we may recall

The war's live tribute. Go to Washington

On New Year's morning of Emancipation,

When even from Arlington

Beyond the Capitol

The streets and alleys all

Surge black with singing tides. There creep a few

Sweet-visaged, swart and hoary men

To bask them in the sun

That beats on Pennsylvania Avenue,

Or lounge in smiling knots

At drowsier spots,

To listen where one boasts again

Of ancient bondage, now his pedigree.

Those are the nation's honored slaves

Knighted of old by the great Proclamation.

For them the empower'd saviour dipt his pen

In blood of equity,

And signed away the curse as old as Ptolemy.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 15

The War ! It was a forging blast

From God's own furnace, welding North

And South henceforth

To be one weapon for His hand,

Till even that word which once inflamed the land

Falls idle at the last :

What need to boast of union, being one ?

The War is done.

Yet who that, in complacent day

Of peace, invokes the right divine

Of labor to reward itself,

Or vested power to hoard its pelf,

Reaping the enviable embrace

Of joy denied to others,

Remembering that dark assay

Our country and our chief withstood,

When fathers sought their sons in blood

And brothers fought with brothers, —

Who then, before the memoried face

16 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Of Lincoln, but must pause, and pray For love like his, whose larger grace Outclimbs the individual — Dreadful, and yet more dear than all — The love that serves our race.

VII1

"To sleep, perchance to dream !" — No player, rapt

In conscious art's soliloquy, might know

To subtilize the poignant sense so apt

As he, almost in shadow of the end,

Murmured its latent sadness to a friend ;

And then he said to him : " Ten nights ago

I watched alone ; the hour was very late ;

I fell asleep and dreamed ;

And in my dreaming, all

The White House lay in deathlike stillness round ;

But soon a sobbing sound,

Subdued, I heard, as of innumerable

1 See Note at end of poem.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 17

Mourners. I rose and went from room to room ;

No living being there was visible ;

Yet as I passed, unspeakably it seemed

They sobbed again, subdued. In every room

Light was, and all things were familiar :

But who were those once more

Whose hearts were breaking there ? What heavy gloom

Wrapt their dumb grieving ? Last, the Eastroom door

I opened, and it lay before me : High

And cold on solemn catafalque it lay,

Draped in funereal vestments, and near by

Mute soldiers guarded it. In black array,

A throng of varied race

Stood weeping,

Or gazing on the covered face.

Then to a soldier : ' Who is dead

In the White House ? ' I asked. He said :

'The President.'

And a great moan that through the people went

Waked me from sleeping."

18 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

God ! that a nation too should have bad dreams !

The cities all are still, and voiceless all

The valleys and the woods :

But what are these husht sounds insufferable

Of moaning multitudes ?

Through the Republic's silent house

From room to room the awful Spirit walks,

Yet all things are familiar ; it seems

No change has been :

From Maine to Florida

Still flash the blue seas ; California

Is quick with April green ;

The middle ways are pied

With crocus blooms and river fleur-de-lis ;

And the great western rooms are open wide

To greet the northing sun ;

In every one

Are strewn the Saviour's lilies of white peace

In festival of Him who quenched the fiery feuds.

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 19

What, then, is that which mocks The victory and grace that were before ? Once more, and now insufferably once more — The moan of multitudes !

The lofty Spirit knocks

And, opening last the door

Into the Capitol, with pensive head,

Stooping his deathless stature o'er the dead,

Looks there on his own image — tenderness,

Pity, on which sad truth has set its seal,

Heroic patience, strong humility,

Power, whose human courage shines not less

That humor leavens the shrewd honesty :

Democracy's own brow — the American ideal.

While triumph pealed his consummated task, And that great theatre Where late he watched the war's solemnity Was narrowed to a moment's comedy,

20 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

The sudden angel of the tragic mask Flashed on his gaze the blinding sepulchre.

VIII

It was a dream ! for that which fell in death,

Seared by the assassin's lightning, and there lay

A spectacle for anguish, was a wraith ;

The real immortal Lincoln went his way

Back to his only home and native heath —

The common people's common heart. And they

Who speak of Lincoln to his countrymen —

Now while one vast communion makes To-day

His temple — speak to Lincoln, born again

From that perennial earth

Whereof he had his birth,

And estimating him, they estimate

The source of all that made, and yet shall make us great.

IX

The loving and the wise

May seek — but seek in vain — to analyze

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 21

This man, for having caught

The mystic clue of thought,

Sudden they meet the controverting whim,

And fumbling with the enchanted key,

Lose it then utterly.

Aesop and old Isaiah held in him

Strange sessions, winked at by Artemus Ward,

Till sudden in their midst bright Seraphim

Stood, summoned by a sad, primeval Bard

Who, bearing still no name, has ever borne

Within his heart the music of mankind :

Sometime a lonely singer blind

Beside the Ionian sea ;

Sometime, between two thieves in scorn,

A face in Calvary.

That was his master soul —

The mystic demi-god of common man —

Who, templed in the steadfast mind,

22 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

Hid his shy gold of genius in the bran

Of Hoosier speech and garb, softening the wan

Strong face of shrewdness with strange aureole.

He was the madstone to his country's ire, Drawing the rancorous blood of envious quarrel Alike from foe and friend ; his pity, stirr'd, Restored to its bough the storm-unnested bird, Or raised the wallow'd pig from out the mire. And he who sowed in sweat his boyhood's crop, And tackled Euclid with a wooden spade, And excavated Blackstone from a barrel To hold moot trials in the gloaming, made By lighted shavings in a cooper's shop, He is the people's still — their Railsplitter, Himself a rail, clean-grained, of character Self-hewn in the dark glades of Circumstance From that deep-hearted tree Democracy, Which, by our race's heritage,

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 23

Reforests age on age, Perpetual in strong fecundity.

X

Those are the rails to build republics with,

Their homesteads and their towns. God give us more

And ever more of such to build our own,

Enlarging still in manhood, not in stone

And iron merely and in metal ore :

Not men, like rails of polish'd steel,

Invoice-begotten breeds, that pour

Stillborn from laboring wombs of stark machines

And all alike,

With flange and spike

To couple and dovetail, and serve as means

To cart more gold-dust on the commonweal ;

Not those : but such as breathe

Still of the trail, the redwood and the ranch,

The gale-swept mountain and the prairie's sheen,

And cities where the stars can still look in

24 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

And leave their benediction : common men, Kindled by nature's awe to contemplation, And by her goads to courage ; not too vain Of self, to show the clean knots in their grain, Blazed from the same great bole that grew Abe Lin coln's branch : Such be the men of whom we build our nation !

XI

But he is more than ours, as we are more

Than yet the world dares dream. His stature grows

With that illimitable state

Whose sovereignty ordains no tribute shore

And borderland of hate,

But grounds its justice in the joy it sows.

His spirit is still a power to emancipate

Bondage — more base, being more insidious,

Than serfdom — that cries out in the midst of us

For virtue, born of opportunity,

And manhood, weighed in honest human worth,

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 25

And freedom, based in labor. He stands forth 'Mongst nations old — a new-world Abraham, The patriarch of peoples still to be, Blending all visions of the promised land In one Apocalypse.

His voice is heard —

Thrilling the moulder'd lintels of the past — In Asia ; old Thibet is stirred With warm imaginings ; Ancestral China, 'mid her mysteries, Unmasks, and flings

Her veils wide to the Occident ; the wand Of hope awakes prone Hierapolis ; Even by the straits of old that lo swam, The immemorial Sultan, sceptreless, Stands awed ; and, heartened by that bold success, Pale Russia rises from her holocaust.

And still the emancipating influence,

The secret power, the increasing truth, are his,

26 LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE

For they are ours : ours by the potencies Poured in our nation from the founts of time, Blending in us the mystic seeds of men, To sow them forth again For harvests more sublime Throughout the world.

XII

Leave, then, that customed grief

Which honorably mourns its martyred dead,

And newly hail instead

The birth of him, our hardy shepherd chief,

Who by green paths of old democracy

Leads still his tribes to uplands of glad peace.

As long as — out of blood and passion blind — Springs the pure justice of the reasoning mind, And justice, bending, scorns not to obey Pity, that once in a poor manger lay, As long as, thrall'd by time's imperious will,

LINCOLN CENTENARY ODE 27

Brother hath bitter need of brother, still

His presence shall not cease

To lift the ages toward his human excellence,

And races yet to be

Shall in a rude hut do him reverence

And solemnize a simple man's nativity.

NOTE

The dream of Lincoln, recounted in this poem, takes sig nificance from its authenticity. Shortly before his death, Lincoln actually had this dream, and described it to a friend in words which the writer has closely followed in Part VII of this poem. The passage, To sleep, perchance to dream, Lincoln himself quoted in this connection. Cf. Norman Hapgood's " Abraham Lincoln, the Man of the People," pages 405-406. It is perhaps worthy of mention that the words of Lincoln, italicized in the Ode, are also authentic, being for the most part verbatim his own. The book, referred to in the second stanza of Part IV, is of course " Uncle Tom's Cabin."

29

URIEL AND OTHER POEMS

TO

THE GRACIOUS LIFE AND QUICKENING MEMORY

OF MY BROTHER

WILLIAM PAYSON MACKAYE

POET ACTOR ARTIST

1868—1889,

" He <was a rverray par/it gentil knight. ' '

PREFATORY NOTE

FOR this volume the author has selected, from poems written chiefly during the last two years, such only as are commemorative in their nature. Since most of these are concerned with persons or events of public interest, the following brief references to some of their special occa sions are placed here in lieu of footnotes.

Uriel: William Vaughn Moody, poet and dramatist, died October 17, 1910. This poem was written about a year later. Shortly before his death, he told a friend about a new drama, on the theme of Saint Paul, the outlines of which had come to him splendidly as a vision. To this the sixth stanza of Uriel refers symbolically.

The Sibyl: In 1912 was published The Art of the The atre, by Edward Gordon Craig. The volume is significant of a new era in the art involved.

The Return of Ellen Terry : Read by the author in the Hudson Theatre, New York, November 3, 1910, upon the return of Miss Terry to America, for her series of In terpretive Readings u The Heroines of Shakespeare."

Peary at the Pole : Read by the author in the Metro politan Opera House, New York, February 8, 1910, at the National Testimonial to Robert E. Peary, on his return from the North Pole.

viii PREFATORY NOTE

To the Fire-Bringer : On the death of the author of The Fire-Bringer, the body of the poet was cremated, October, 1910. These verses were written at the time.

The Trees of Harvard : Stanzas read at the Dedication (on Commencement Day, 1912) of a red-oak sapling, chosen by the Harvard Class of Eighteen Ninety-Seven from among those then planted to supersede the dead elms in the College Yard, at Cambridge.

Invocation : Written for a Symposium of tributes by American poets to the memory of Robert Browning, gath ered by Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite, and published in the Boston Transcript, May 4, 1912.

The Bard of Bouillabaisse : Stanzas written for the Centenary of the birth of Thackeray. Read in the Sixty- Ninth Regiment Armory, New York, January 30, 1912, by Mr. Ben Greet, at the Centenary Festival held by the Southern Industrial Educational Society, at which bouilla baisse — the dish celebrated by Thackeray in his ballad — was served to the public.

The Candle in the Choir : Read by the author in the Congregational meeting-house at Old Rockingham, Ver mont, August 4, 1912, on the occasion of the Annual Pilgrimage. The incident narrated is historic.

In the Bohemian Redwoods : Written at San Rio, Cal ifornia, in the Redwood Grove of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, on the festival of the Thirty-Third Mid-

PREFATORY NOTE ix

summer High Jinks and the performance of the Grove Play, August 6, 1910.

Browning to Ben Ezra : Read by the author before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, at the Robert Browning Centennial Meeting, May 7, 1912.

Ninety-Seven : Read by the author at the Decennial Celebration of the Harvard Class of Eighteen Ninety- Seven, at the Hotel Vendome, Boston, June 24, 1907.

To the Editors of the North American Review, The Mask (Florence, Italy), the Century Magazine, the Boston Transcript, The Outlook, Scribner's Magazine, The Church man, the Poetry Review (London), the Harvard Gradu ates' Magazine, the writer makes his acknowledgments in reprinting poems which have appeared in those journals.

CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE October, 1912.

CONTENTS

URIEL: To William Vaughn Moody . . I

THE SIBYL : To Edward Gordon Craig . . . 14

THE RETURN OF ELLEN TERRY . . . 18

PEARY AT THE POLE . .; . . . 19

To THE FIRE-BRINGER: William Vaughn Moody 23

THE TREES OF HARVARD . . • '. 25

INVOCATION: Robert Browning . .28

THE BARD OF BOUILLABAISSE : Thackeray . 30

THE AUTOMOBILE . . •.-. . , . . 33

THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR . , . . 34

IN THE BOHEMIAN REDWOODS - y . , 40

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA , ,. > • 41

NINETY-SEVEN: A Decennial Greeting . t 55

URIEL

STANZAS TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

I

Uriel, you that in the ageless sun Sit in the awful silences of light, Singing of vision hid from human sight, — Prometheus, beautiful rebellious one ! And you, Deucalion,

For whose blind seed was brought the illuming spark, Are you not gathered, now his day is done, Beside the brink of that relentless dark — The dark where your dear singer's ghost is gone ?

ii

Imagined beings, who majestic blend

Your forms with beauty ! — questing, unconfined,

The mind conceived you, though the quenched mind

Goes down in dark where you in dawn ascend.

Our songs can but suspend

The ultimate silence : yet could song aspire

The realms of mortal music to extend

And wake a Sibyl's voice or Seraph's lyre —

How should it tell the dearness of a friend ?

URIEL

in

The simplest is the inexpressible;

The heart of music still evades the Muse,

And arts of men the heart of man suffuse,

And saddest things are made of silence still.

In vain the senses thrill

To give our sorrows glorious relief

In pyre of verse and pageants volatile,

And I, in vain, to speak for him my grief

Whose spirit of fire invokes my waiting will.

IV

To him the best of friendship needs must be Uttered no more ; yet was he so endowed That Poetry because of him is proud And he more noble for his poetry, Wherefore infallibly

I obey the strong compulsion which this verse Lays on my lips with strange austerity — Now that his voice is silent — to rehearse For my own heart how he was dear to me.

Not by your gradual sands, elusive Time, We measure your gray sea, that never rests : The bleeding hour-glasses In our breasts

URIEL

Mete with quick pangs the ebbing of our prime,

And drip — like sudden rime

In March, that melts to runnels from a pane

The south breathes on — oblivion of sublime

Crystallizations, and the ruthless wane

Of glittering stars, that scarce had range to climb.

VI

Darkling those constellations of his soul

Glimmered, while racks of stellar lightnings shot

The white, creative meteors of thought

Through that last night, where — clad in cloudy stole —

Beside his ebbing shoal

Of lifeblood, stood Saint Paul, blazing a theme

Of living drama from a fiery scroll

Across his stretched vision as in dream —

When Death, with blind dark, blotted out the whole.

VII

And yet not all : though darkly alien

Those uncompleted worlds of work to be

Are waned ; still, touched by them, the memory

Gives afterglow ; and now that comes again

The mellow season when

Our eyes last met, his kindling currents run

Quickening within me gladness and new ken

URIEL

Of life, that I have shared his prime with one Who wrought large-minded for the love of men.

VIII

But not alone to share that large estate

Of work and interchange of communings —

The little human paths to heavenly things

Were also ours: the casual, intimate

Vistas, which consecrate —

With laughter and quick tears — the dusty noon

Of days, and by moist beams irradiate

Our plodding minds with courage, and attune

The fellowship that bites its thumb at fate.

IX

Where art thou now, mine host Guffanti ? — where

The iridescence of thy motley troop !

Ah, where the merry, animated group

That snuggled elbows for an extra chair,

When space was none to spare,

To pour the votive Chianti, for a toast

To dramas dark and lyrics debonair,

The while, to Bella Napoli, mine host

Exhaled his Parmazan, Parnassan air !

x

Thy Parmazan, immortal laird of ease, Can never mold, thy caviare is blest,

URIEL

While still our glowing Uriel greets the rest

Around thy royal board of memories,

Where sit, the salt of these,

He of the laughter of a Hundred Lights,

Blithe Eldorado of high poesies,

And he — of enigmatic, gentle knights

The kindly keen — who sings of Calverfy's.

XI

Because he never wore his sentient heart For crows and jays to peck, ofttimes to such He seemed a silent fellow, who o'ermuch Held from the general gossip-ground apart, Or tersely spoke, and tart :

How should they guess what eagle tore, within, His quick of sympathy for humblest smart Of human wretchedness, or probed his spleen Of scorn against the hypocritic mart !

XII

Sometimes insufferable seemed to come

That wrath of sympathy : One windy night,

We watched through squalid panes, forlornly white,

Amid immense machines' incessant hum —

Frail figures, gaunt and dumb,

Of overlabored girls and children, bowed

URIEL

Above their slavish toil : " O God ! — A bomb, A bomb ! " he cried, u and with one fiery cloud Expunge the horrible Caesars of this slum ! "

XIII

Another night dreams on the Cornish hills :

Trembling within the low moon's pallid fires,

The tall corn-tassels lift their fragrant spires ;

From filmy spheres, a liquid starlight fills —

Like dew of daffodils —

The fragile dark, where multitudinous

The rhythmic, intermittent silence thrills,

Like song, the valleys. — " Hark ! " he murmurs, " Thus

May bards from crickets learn their canticles ! "

XIV

Now Morning, not less lavish of her sweets,

Leads us along the woodpaths — in whose hush

The quivering alchemy of the pure thrush

Cools from above the balsam-dripping heats —

To find, in green retreats,

'Mid men of clay, the great, quick-hearted man

Whose subtle art our human age secretes,

Or him whose brush, tinct with cerulean,

Blooms with soft castle-towers and cloud-capped fleets.

URIEL

xv

Still to the sorcery of August skies In frilled crimson flaunt the hollyhocks, Where, lithely poised along the garden walks, His little maid enamoured blithe outvies The dipping butterflies

In motion — ah, in grace how grown the while, Since he was wont to render to her eyes His knightly court, or touch with flitting smile Her father's heart by his true flatteries !

XVI

But summer's golden pastures boast no trail

So splendid as our fretted snowshoes blaze

Where, sharp across the amethystine ways,

Iron Ascutney looms in azure mail,

And, like a frozen grail,

The frore sun sets, intolerably fair ;

Mute, in our homebound snow-tracks, we exhale

The silvery cold, and soon — where bright logs flare

Talk the long indoor hours, till embers fail.

XVII

Ah, with the smoke what smouldering desires Waft to the starlight up the swirling flue ! — Thoughts that may never, as the swallows do,

URIEL

Nest circling homeward to their native fires! Ardors the soul suspires

The extinct stars drink with the dreamer's breath The morning-song of Eden's early choirs Grows dim with Adam ; close at the ear of death Relentless angels tune our earthly lyres !

XVIII

Let it be so : More sweet it is to be

A listener of love's ephemeral song,

And live with beauty though it be not long,

And die enamoured of eternity,

Though in the apogee

Of time there sit no individual

Godhead of life, than to reject the plea

Of passionate beauty : loveliness is all,

And love is more divine than memory ;

XIX

And love of beauty is the abiding part

Of friendship : by its hallowed beams we char

Away all dead and gross familiar

Disguise, and lay revealed truth's living heart —

The spirit's counterpart,

Which was in him a flaming Uriel

Obscured by chaining flesh, but freed by art

URIEL

And by the handclasp that his friends knew well, To make from time the imprisoned splendors start.

xx

The splendors start again from common things

At thought of quiet hours of fellowship,

When his shy fancy, like an elfin ship,

On foam of pipe-smoke spread elusive wings,

While subdued carollings

Of viewless fervors followed in her wake,

Till, with swift tack and rhythmic sweep of strings,

She flew before his darkening thought, and strake

On reefs that rolled with solemn thunderings.

XXI

The simple and the mighty themes, that keep

Friendship robust and taut the mental tether,

Of these we talked in casual ways together,

Delighting in the shallow and the deep :

Nature, quick or asleep,

And poetry, the fool's anathema,

Plays, and the magic house where passions weep

Or laugh at their own image, America

Our gallant country, and her captainship.

XXII

But special-privileged investitures

Of beauty liked him not. To him the fact

io URIEL

Was by its passion only made compact

Of beauty ; as, amid the Gloucester moors,

The loveliness, which lures

The artist's eye, for him was nature's prism

To illume his love of country : art which endures

At once is poetry and patriotism,

In spite of jingoists and epicures.

XXIII

So, since his soul contemned thoughts which suborn

Glory from theft, where he stood, unafraid,

" Before the solemn bronze Saint-Gaudens made,"

It was his consecration to be torn

Between swift grief and scorn

For the island pillage of our Myrmidons,

And there alone, alone of the high born,

He spoke, as the great sculptor spoke in bronze,

From love, whose worth can never be outworn.

XXIV

Long may we heed his voice, though he be mute

As the wan stars to instigate us more!

Long shall we need his voice, in the gross war

Of civic pillagers whose hands pollute

Our country, and confute

The oaths of freedom ! Long his passionate art

URIEL ii

Let serve the people's temple, to transmute The impotence of artists, and impart Strength to the fair, joy to the resolute !

XXV

The joy of that large faith American

In the high will which turns the human tide

He blazed across the sun-crowned Great Divide

To make in art a new meridian,

Stretching the puny span

Of our pent theatre's roof, to arch a flood

Of mightier passion cosmopolitan

And build, in nobler urgings of our blood,

The excellent democracy of man.

XXVI

Nor less he probed the covert cosmical Yearnings which glorify the spirit's sleep, Where dumb Michaelis, 'mid his grazing sheep, Stared on the awful Presence Spiritual, And heard the mystic call Of the clear Christ across the desert waste Lifting from life and death the numbing pall, Subtly for all the anguished and disgraced Cleansing the mind with breath medicinal.

iz URIEL

XXVII

These were the virile omens of his prime

(Unmellowed still, he deemed them, but enough

To give his ardor tang for lordlier stuff),

But these, when from the clear noon of his clime

He sank — to solemn chime

Of stars — in twilight down, the petty grigs

That pipe around the marshes of the mime,

Parched niggards of negation, rasped with jigs

Of glee — to perish in the frost of time.

XXVIII

To her who, 'mid his starry litany, Muffled their niggling jargon from his ears For quiet music of familiar spheres, Soothing the dark inevitability With springs of courage, be Her own strong soul her sentinel : the flame That leaps in praise dies in my monody. Beauty with service hallows her own fame : A living greatness asks no elegy. —

XXIX

Uriel, you of light and vision guard !

Uriel, you who with his fiery being

Are blended in my vision's far foreseeing,

URIEL 13

That by one name I hail you — friend and bard!

Our battling age is starred

With portents of your presence, till the years,

Urged by your voice, besiege time's evil-scarred

Ruin with sounds of singing pioneers,

Whose onward wills, like wings that slip the shard,

XXX

Sweep to the future! What the mind adores

The will of man shall conquer: what his fate

Denies, his courage still shall consummate !

And as Imagination, rising, soars —

Scattering her viewless spores

Of beauty on the tempest — Uriel,

You gaze with her where the blind gloaming roars,

Or murmur, where she sits, with fervent shell,

Rapt in the solitudes of fiery shores.

THE SIBYL

TO EDWARD GORDON CRAIG

UPON THE PUBLICATION OF HIS VOLUME

"ON THE ART OF THE THEATRE"

Cloudy, vast, the caverned stage

Glows with twilight — Where are they:

Ribald love, and conscious rage,

Joyless banter, captious quibble,

Brass and bauble of Broadway ?

What are such to her — -the Sibyl,

Where she dreams beside her solemn

Single column

In the quiet ? —

Bats in swoon,

Gnats in riot,

Midgets swarming 'gainst the moon :

Such are they

Beneath the grace

And the rapture of her face.

She will waken. Long she's slumbered Through the noisy years unnumbered, Since her radiant limbs withdrew —

THE SIBYL 15

Swift, adept,

Divinely calm —

From the leering satyrs' view

To the visioned silences

Where she slept,

Pillowed in her bended arm

On the starred Acropolis.

She has wakened! She has smiled

With a tender, large delight

At the spell-charms of her child,

Her own spirit's acolyte.

At his wand-touch she has risen

In the mind of man — her prison

And her temple. Lo, she moves !

Sensuous, with form of fable,

Most divinely reasonable,

Not the comets through the ether,

Not the planets in their grooves

Tread a more harmonious measure

Than she paces, in her pleasure,

On the silences beneath her.

For the silences are thrumming As with heart beats at her coming, And the Passions pause aghast

16 THE SIBYL

At the glorious decision

Of her movements, as they mark

Wild vivaces of her vision,

Deep andantes of her dark j

And her gestures — as she lifts

Pillared vistas of the past,

Spacious visions of the marches

Of To-morrow, gracious arches

Through whose rifts

Beauty beckons — hold no mirror

To the error

And the grossness of the age,

Mimic not

Whims and gropings of emotion,

Atrophies and tricks of thought,

But her rapture is the rage

Of man's spirit in its fullness

Purged of accident and dullness;

And her music, born of motion,

Recreates the spirit's trance,

Weaving symphonies of sunlight,

Waking chorals from the wan light

Of the Pleiads in their dance.

Through her cloudy, caverned stage Bursts the morning: And she stands

THE SIBYL 17

In the quiet, by her solemn

Shining column,

Gazing forth, serenely glad,

On the roaring dazzled lands,

Where the little children, clad

In the garments of her spirit,

On enchanted feet come streaming,

For she knows they shall inherit

All the ages of her dreaming.

Then the sated ones and blinded, And the timid, callous minded, Clutch the children's sleeves, and stare, Crying: "What behold you there? There is nothing ! " But the lover, And the young of soul, his friend, And the artist, follow after The children in their laughter, And the daring half discover, And the happy comprehend.

THE RETURN OF ELLEN TERRY

How shall we welcome back her image bright Who from our hearts has never been away ? They never lived who never loved to play, Nor ever loved who loved not in delight. Therefore to her who, in Dull Care's despite, Long since has taught the world's sad soul to pray To saints of joy, we bring an homage gay Of hearts made lighter by her own pure light.

Juliet of love, Miranda of the mind, Katherine of quips, and beauty's Rosalind, Truth's Portia, Beatrice the madcap-merry, All heroines wrought of the master's heart — To these we bow, and these bow down to Art, And Art to Time, and Time — to Ellen Terry.

PEARY AT THE POLE

i

Divinely curious

Child of the stars is man ; And the wonder that beckons us

Is a child's, since the world began : For the fire that keeps us purged and free From the sloth of the beast and his sluggardy Is kindled of curiosity.

ii

Beckoned the polar star —

And the world child wandered forth : The aurora blazed afar

Onward in to the north ; And the awful lure, enticing us Long ere the tales of Tacitus, Wrought with a splendor ruinous.

in

The Arctic ages dashed

Spindrift on wreck and spar, Till a Yankee viking lashed

His prow to the ominous star ;

20 PEARYATTHEPOLE

And, blent with breed of the States, he manned His ship with the sinew and the sand And the sea-glad soul of Newfoundland.

IV

Freighted were cabin and hold

With pemmican, sea-gear and pelt :

Skyward the loud cheers rolled, Seaward — the Roosevelt,

And northward beyond Manhattan Bay

They sank to the silences far away

In the sunlit night and the star-strewn day.

v

O silence is a thing

More beautiful than song When the paths of the silent ring

With the valor of the strong : O silent the cliffs of blood-bright snow, The boreal flush, the emerald floe, Where they sailed — the earls of the Esquimaux !

VI

Forth from the glacial coasts

They strode with their dogs and furs,

And their shadows were the ghosts Of old adventurers;

PEARY AT THE POLE 21

For the harrowed dead rose numb from the night And followed their path by the igloo's light Through storm and the smothering infinite.

VII

Silent, and one by one,

Southward the forms turned back, But one, who walked alone,

Held still his starry track, Till the vast sun circled the ocean's sill, And the luring star in the void stood still, And the mind of man had wrought his will.

VIII

From the Arctic's blindfold eye,

From the iris of the world, He tore the mystery

Where a planet's dream lay furled ; And the planet's vision and his were one, For the doer had dreamed and the dreamer had done What the wondering world-child had begun.

IX

How may the singer reveal

Truth from the toiler wrung ? Or how shall the sinew of steel

And the heart of gold be sung ?

22 PEARY AT THE POLE

Who saith unto Caesar : He conquered: He saw ? Weak, weak is word-tribute ; yet mighty is awe That renders its homage, where truth is law.

x

To Peary of the Pole

To the vigilant and wary Undeviating soul,

Viking and visionary — Hail, in honor's meridian : Hail, and honor American To the triumph of manhood and a man !

TO THE FIRE-BRINGER

(WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY)

Bringer of fire Down from the star Quivering far In quiet eternal : Bringer of fire ! — Ashes we are If to thy pyre Out of our hearts Ashes we bring.

Vernal, vernal,

Divine and burning —

A wreath of worlds

And wings — was thy vision:

Fadeless now,

That fiery wreath

Wrought of thy yearning

We lay in death

Bright on thy brow.

24 TO THE FIRE -B RINGER

Singer and lover,

Brother and friend,

Ashes can end

Only the dross of thee :

Quick, Promethean,

Out of the dirge

And the dark loss of thee,

Leaps thy star-wrestling

Spirit in paean !

Fire, fire,

Fire was thy bringing, An urn elemental Of burning song So on thy pyre We leave it flaming — Where Death cannot follow — Toward thee, who earnest singing " Apollo, Apollo ! "

THE TREES OF HARVARD

i

Religion is the shadow of a tree

Cast by a star upon the soul of man Tingeing its substance with solemnity,

For under mystic boughs the soul began

Its progress from the primal Caliban Toward reason, and the beauty yet to be. Therefore perchance it is

That in trees we treasure Our own tranquillities,

Making them the measure Of our own growth — our griefs and ecstasies.

ii

Dear stricken elms of Harvard, while even thus

Now with your wounds we bleed, still, still it seems

Your vanished verdure — multitudinous

With twinkling dryads of our boyish dreams, With orioles of song, and golden gleams

Of youth — abides, a quickening part of us:

26 THE TREES OF HARVARD

Abides, as though it would

By some spell enchanted Disperse this tragic mood,

By your fate implanted, To share with you a secret brotherhood.

in

Your branches die, but not the dreams they bred : They, like immortal choirs of dawn, displace

Your silent ruin with the singing dead.

Still in your shadowed walks, with shadowy pace, The Concord poet lifts his star-pale face,

The Elmwood statesman holds his lyric tread.

Still through your silences Float the far Hosannas

Of that undaunted press,

Brave with tattered banners,

Filing from Lexington to the Wilderness.

IV

Yes, dreams abide ; yet fungus will infect The living tissue and the limb will fall :

Alike in soaring elm and intellect

The cankering worm will bore, and spin the pall Of aspiration ; yet if this were all

Our world of dreams had long ago been wrecked.

THE TREES OF HARVARD 27

It is not all : for growth,

Plying deep substitution, Outwears decay and sloth,

While, with sure revolution, Youth conquers age, and life o'erlords them both.

Then life, give way for life ! Old elms forlorn,

The scion oaks supplant you, and you die ; Shorn are your locks of golden days — all shorn

(Save in our dreams) of glory — so, good-bye!

But hail, strong-limbed in young integrity, Hail, glory of our Harvard boys unborn ! Death is a churlish thing ;

Life, life alone is royal ! Red oak, red oak, we bring

Hearts alive, hearts loyal : The king is dead : Long live our crimson king !

INVOCATION

ROBERT BROWNING: 7 MAY 1912

i

Poet of the vast potential, Curious-minded, quintessential Prober of passion, ample-hearted Lover of lovers, virile-arted Robert Browning, plotter of plays, Leaven us in these latter days !

Now in rebirth,

Renewing time's festa. Spring — the wild quester —

Quickens the earth.

II

Not mere being, but becoming Makes us vital. Stript from numbing Vestiture of self-complacence Naked for our soul's renascence, Robert Browning, riddler of hearts, Pierce us with your singing darts !

INVOCATION 29

Sharp through the sod,

Flower-tipped for His aiming^ Shoot now the flaming

Spear-heads of God.

in

Not our prayer-stool, but our passion Makes us holy. Thus to fashion Psalm and Credo to a human Ritual of Man and Woman, Robert Browning, purger of souls, Heap on us your passion-coals !

So let aspire —

As now this young season — -

Spirit and reason In flower and fire !

THE BARD OF BOUILLABAISSE

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY l8 JULY

Old guests are gone; old friends have faltered

Passed to forgetfulness or fame ; Time's little inn remains unaltered,

The bill of fare is still the same ; And still within his cherished corner

He keeps his " old, accustomed place" — Our brother, cynic, lover, scorner,

Beloved bard of Bouillabaisse.

ii

The grizzled face has grown no older ;

A hundred years, they bring no scars, Pensive, he turns his shadowy shoulder

To snuff the candles — of the stars, Where generations, eager hearted,

Throng newly round his storied chair, And Monsieur Terre, long departed,

Leaves in his stead — Madame la Terre.

THE BARD OF BOUILLABAISSE 31

in

Madame la Terre plays now the hostess

And decks his place for holiday, Where his imperishable ghost is

The guest to whom she bears her tray. That he may friendly smile upon her,

She curtsies to the shadowed face : What may she serve to do him honor ?

Behold — a bowl of Bouillabaisse !

IV

" A hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,"

(Such is his ballad recipe :) " This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is : "

Hotchpotch of all sorts — such as we ! Souls with the garlic and the pepper,

A sort of savory broth or paste Of lover, liar, hero, leper :

He taught us — for ourselves the taste !

For lo, now, to his festa who comes ! — Where Beatrix shines down the stair

Through crowded Crawleys, Esmonds, Newcomes, While Becky, purring in her lair,

32 THE BARD OF BOUILLABAISSE

Sits tangling the besotted Sedley

To bumptious Gumbo's black grimace —

A mordant, brilliant, bubbling medley To mix his bowl of Bouillabaisse!

VI

His recipe remains the human :

Hotchpotch of passions, pruderies, Lusts, raptures, loves of man and woman,

Old vanity of vanities Redeemed in visions of the poet

Who learns from anguish all his arts : His bowl, Madame la Terre, bestow it !

The bowl is brimming — with our hearts.

THE AUTOMOBILE

A FIRST RIDE 1904

Fluid the world flowed under us : the hills Billow on billow of umbrageous green Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen

One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills

And silver-rising storms and dewy stills Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene

Coverts grew loud with our tumultuous wills.

Then all of Nature's old amazement seemed

Sudden to ask us: " Is this also Man ?

This plunging, volant land-amphibian What Plato mused and Paracelsus dreamed ?

Reply ! " And piercing us with ancient scan, The shrill, primeval hawk gazed down — and screamed.

THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR

In Rockingham upon the hill The meeting-house shines lone and still: A bare, star-cleaving gable-peak, Broad roofbeamed, snow-ribbed, stark and bleak, As long ago their needs sufficed Who came from cottage fires to Christ, Sharing with frosty breath Their foot-stoves and their faith.

ii

In Rockingham above the hill The stars are few, the winds are shrill; And pale as little clouds, the prayers Pulse upward round the pulpit stairs, Where silent deacons upright sit Among the gusty shadows, that flit

From hands upholding higher

Faint candles in the choir.

in

Seven candles make a shining dim To mark the psalm and find the hymn;

THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR 35

Seven candles from the choir-rail throw Their blessing on the pews below ; Seven candles make a glimmering heaven Of righteousness, but one of seven

Shines in the hand of her :

Elvira Pulsifer.

IV

High on its place of holy fire

The towered pulpit fronts the choir,

From whence the pastor's hand may strow

The penfolds of his flock below,

Or sign, from under level brows,

Toward them — the seven of his house

Who sing with one accord

The service of the Lord.

Gaunt looms the shepherd in his gown :

" O Lord, Lord God, who lookest down

Serene from Sinai's dazzling height

On deeps of everlasting night —

Deeps where Thy scorching ire hath streamed

Like lava on the unredeemed —

Be merciful to her,

Elvira Pulsifer !

36 THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR

VI

" Thou art our Father, Lord, Lord God !

And they who kiss Thy shining rod

And break Thy bread and keep Thy tryst —

They walk this bitter world with Christ;

All else with dire Apollyon dwell. —

O save her tender soul from Hell,

And with Thy Pity stir

Elvira Pulsifer!

VII

" Brethren, the thirty-second psalm! And let your solemn voices calm The secret fiend from his intent, And make a virgin heart repent ! " — Thin from the dark the pitch-pipe sounds Its note, faint stir the crisping gowns, While the dim shepherd there Creaks down the frosty stair.

VIII

A shrilling sweet of childish throats, With sombre bass of elders, floats Around him through the raftered room, And elvish from the outer gloom

THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR 37

Seven candles on the little panes Sway to the choir's subdued refrains,

As down the aisleway floor

He seeks the entry door.

IX

More faintly now, as if more far,

He hears them through the door ajar,

While from the entry, climbing soft,

He flurries to the choir loft :

Here to a darkling privacy

He beckons — so her glance may see —

God's errant worshipper :

Elvira Pulsifer.

Candle and hymnal in her hands, She comes to where the shepherd stands Her shepherd who hath labored sore, With venerable neighbors more, To lead her spirit to the fold Where all her kinsfolk came of old : All them she loved full well, But not — their fear of hell.

XI

Anxious they whisper in the aisle (The shrilling voices swoon the while

38 THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR

And boom like cymbals in her ears) : " Our Lord and Father, child, He hears The cry of sin's repentant heart ; O obdurate, walk not apart

With one who darkens all, But come to Christ His call."

XII

" Our Lord He is our Father, yes, And He hath come in tenderness To me, in hours both bright and dim. There is no one at all but Him ; And so I cannot walk apart Nor cry with a repentant heart,

Nor heed another's call,

For God is good to all.

XIII

" His wrath it is eternal, child. Who fear it not they are defiled. They may not sit in choir or pew, Defiant, with His chosen few. The hymn is ended, now return : But nevermore His light to spurn!" Dark, dark, she turns about: Her candle — he hath blown out.

THE CANDLE IN THE CHOIR 39

XIV

O elvish from the outer gloom Six little flames they leer and loom, And elvish on the frosty panes Six candles mock the choir's refrains. But one all dark, by inward grace Shines on unseen, and lights the face

Of Christ His worshipper :

Elvira Pulsifer.

IN THE BOHEMIAN REDWOODS

Silent above, with seraph eyes

That peer amid the fronded spars,

More intimate, more friendly wise, More tender glow the eternal stars.

Lyric beneath, with echoing blast

Of fellowship Arcadian, More cosmic-strange, more pagan-vast,

More stellar glow the hearts of Man.

Oracular, aboriginal

Beyond our dreams, the psychic trees Conspire their awful ritual

Of sempiternal silences ;

Till solemn now, with lunar state, The Druid drama slowly dawns,

Where cowled satyrs consecrate A monastery — of the fauns.

Lit by dance and starry scroll,

Aloof, familiar, lone, divine With Delphic laughter of the soul,

The temples of To-morrow shine !

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

A CENTENARY SOLILOQUY

I

A hundred years ! — Hardly I understand :

Unriddle it, Rabbi. Through the Abbey stones

Hearken — the hushed and reverent monotones,

The shuffled feet, that pause! ' Here lie his bones,

Who passed away

From earth, perhaps to heaven,

Aged seventy-seven;

Born on this self-same day,

The seventh May,

A century gone.' — Look, Rabbi : In my hand

I hold this little watch they call their world,

Open it with my thumb, where lo ! each cog,

Each golden wheel, on star-gemmed axis whirled,

Pulses with delicate action. — Pray you, jog

My laggard mind once more ! — They state, you say,

This was my time-piece : on this crystal face

I 'd pore, and through dim introspections trace

The portent of the tickings underneath,

The mainspring of the action. May be so,

For you should know, Ben Ezra. All I know

42 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

Is, that the ticks grew fainter, as it slipped

Under my pillow. Then I fell asleep,

And have been busy dreaming. That was death,

They say, — death. Sudden the quick hair-spring skipped

A turn, trembled, and stopped short. — Much too deep

For me ! — Somehow I don't conceive the soul

Like to a watch unwound. Yet now, they say,

I am a poet who has passed away,

With many common millions, to a goal

Unkenned. — Here 's Limbo, then : and I, a shade,

Soliloquize now, in this cloistral corner,

Among pale forms of other ghosts forlorner,

With you, Ben Ezra, whom alive I made

The Rabbi of my rhyme. — A quaint conceit !

Suppose we grant it. So, then ! Let us sit

On dust of kings and make a rhyme of it

Together — one dead poet and one rabbi

Conceived and born of him. While you keep tab, I

Will muse the elegy, and score our text :

R. Browning to Ben Ezra, adding next :

Suggested by the former's centenary,

And after that — lest precious ears be vext —

Apologies for defunct vocabulary.

II

The question I would stress, then, — pray allow — Is this : To pass away, is it to cease ?

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA 43

But if so, how to cease ? I said just now That, since my pillow muffled this time-piece, I have been busy dreaming. Ha, those dreams ! In what frail shallops, what austere triremes, Unchartered cruisers, barks adventuresome, I have put forth on unimagined seas And sailed — with what courageous companies! Nay, on no phantom ships ! no guest needs fear A skinny-handed, ancient mariner In me. I entertain with dice of doom No spectral crews. My fellow-voyagers were — And are, and shall be still — rich-blooded men, Rare-hearted women, lovers of this life And wrestlers with it, reckless of the strain. My visionary barks, those be my books, And I, whose bones consort here with the spooks, Am admiral there of dreamy argosies, That ply "twixt earth and heaven their perilous mer chandise.

Perilous, yes ; for dreams are perilous craft, When they be manned by fierce doubts, fore and aft, Whose mutinous foreheads scan the heaven for signs, And menace their commander : ' You, who planned Our questing voyage, show us the land — your land Of God, His promise ! All the lone sea-lines

44 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

Are dim with setting stars, and stark with death ;

Yet you, who hold the rudder, answer Faith !

And, once more, only Faith! ' Thus curse my crews !

I share their hearts but overmaster them,

And hold the rudder straight ;

Till now — a star above each plumed stem —

Lo, where my galleons, guided by their Muse,

The surging planet circumnavigate, —

Doubt kindling nobler doubt, faith quelling fate,

Forms flung to revolution, creeds to rack,

Old cities of dead empires put to sack,

Love founding lordlier kingdoms in the future's track !

So, Rabbi, to our question, if you please :

Is sailing thus — to cease?

The ghosts demur;

For, in the nudging vault, I hear one say:

4 Browning, the poet, who has passed away,

This is his sepulchre.'

in

Once a dawn-shaft from God's quiver Struck my soul, and from its embers Flashed a star of song forever. Then the dawn passed. — Who remembers ?

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA 45

Not remember Pippa ? — Pippa who, at sun-up, Rose in her bare attic, while the east boiled gold ! With her rising, see, the morning roses run up Clambering live and warm, concealing the night-mold. —

Pippa, she who sang till little Asolo Widened out its walls — like arms, that reach in pity To nestle lonely things, that yearn for love — till, lo, Vines of Asolo enwall the heavenly city !

Pippa she was Luigi, Ottima was Pippa,

Mighty Monsignor, chafer, bee and weevil :

Life redeemed from listlessness, innocence from evil,

Like the cinder-girl that wore the crystal slipper.

Well, well, Rabbi, so

Now, as long ago,

Even thoughts of Pippa

Lilt another music, breathe an afterglow.

What, then ! Will they say

She, that passed in song, she too has passed away ?

Trust me : as I used to sit and ponder,

Songs, songs, songs she sang me, winged of wonder,

Flitting sunward, till they quite forsook —

Like happy birds from open pages —

My black-barred pages.

46 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

But shyly three and four, with slantwise wing,

Dartled from heaven back, and hovering

Around my head,

Sung my dear earth instead,

Then nested down, beaks spilling, in my book,

Splashing its margin with God's meadow-dew. —

How cage and heart clapped to !

When lo, all lamely, came a scant-winged few

That fluttered, just outside the closing covers,

Too late to slip between, and lingered nigh,

Teasing with matin-tunes the twilit memory.

Listen ! — There pipes one, now ! Hark, while it hovers !

On passion's flower I poised for an hour, A little hour long, Ere I passed in song.

Stay! cried my lover Forsaken : Faded Are love's endeavor And all that made it ! Dead — dead1

But far overhead Where faint stars hung, And low o'er the grass

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA 47

By the eddying river,

Where poising moon-moths flickered and

swung,

I called to my lover Over and over :

I poise, I poise, I poise forever, Because I pass.

IV

To poise — to pass away !

Rabbi, beyond the high groins, rose and gray,

Dimmed by the Minster's adumbrated day,

How, browed in silence, broods my Centenary,

In silence, bred of dust

And the dank charnel's must,

That wraps these bones! — Yes, he is passed away

Forever more ; nor London's warping mist,

Nor Italy's keen amethyst

Shall cast his shadow among men ; and soon

No lingering friend to care, nor old contemporary. —

He, I mean, whom once they pointed at

In Rome and Florence : poet-putterer

Among old pictures,

Uncouth utterer

Of obscure strictures,

48 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

Styleless stutterer

(Quoth his critics,

Itching with their own enclitics), —

Paracelsus ! — how he sat

In chilblain halls, Del Sarto-dippy,

Robbia-mad, or Lippo Lippi-,

Like some mage of alchemy,

Grinding, in his cracked brain-crucibie,

Tortuous rhymes from radiant Titians,

Delving for the thence-deducible

Dialogue-soliloquy :

Not to mention those musicians !

Through the dilettantes' drawl

At the countess' musicale,

What surmise you, English ogler,

Of visions dreamed by old Abt Vogler,

When you stare (nor note his frowning,

Conscious of your own silk gowning)

And pour at tea for Mr. Browning?

Dust to dust : the large, the little,

Ashes both ! Who cares a tittle,

At the teas of Goethe, Horace,

Who wore satin, or who wore lace ?

Ashes all ! even such as — Wait !

What of him — even him, the speaker^

Whose spirit, invoked, comes muffled through this weaker

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA 49

Organ of an alien poet,

Pale, yet not all impassionate,

Sounding subconscious chords that flood and overflow

it,—

Of him, my spirit, Rabbi, — what of him, My poising soul ? Ah, since I died How has this soul of mine been multiplied By minds made pregnant with that seraph's fire, Whose touch conceptual made aspire Mine own from all the ages ! Wherefore I deem — No individual ghost, Moored on some drifting coast, Yearning from out the dark for daylight lost, For youth's wild torch Wind-blown with joyous rages, Hope's lifted latch and laughter in the porch, — Not even now

For dear exchange of love's undying vow With her that was the Aurora of my life, My freed soul longs. For I, that lived, grew old And died, am born again in beings manifold, By grace of that which, once expressed, Bequeathes to them the beautiful, the best, That bloomed of me ; Whereby immortally

50 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

Their passions now partake

Of mine, of mine their raptures, their far wonder-quest.

So, in the spirits I pass through, Still I create my own anew, Broadened in scope ; still I awake Refreshed, in world-awakened eyes Of all whom mine with thought imbue; Still in my critics criticize ; Till, stretching the thralled spirit's cramp, My art becomes an Arabian lamp That, touched, — behold the genie rise ! Who bows his blazing form, and cries : 'Of all my Master's wealth — the true. The beautiful, the strong, the wise, — Mortal, what may his servant bring ? '

Hist, Rabbi ! — What bird 's that ? — I smell the spring. Soft! — Could it be my silk-girl carolling?

Never alone,

Lover of joy,

Delicate scorner

Of death and his dances,

Whether you be

Girl or boy,

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

Rapturous mourner Of life and her fancies, Never may you, never alone, Utter your ecstasy, Make your moan.

Garland your hair : Wind, come unwind it ! Hide away care : Kind heart, come find it !

Winter, you gnome, Shrunken and shrilly, Shut Love in her tomb : Tut ! — willy, nilly, Love through the loam Unlocks with a lily !

Starlight or stone, Nothing Js its own !

Fluent through all flows all, as the Greek saith : The drowned stone ripples the starlight, even as death The living waters

With widening discs of light. No sparrow falls But gray-stoled choirs revive his matinals

52 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

With incense fresh of dawn. — You, Rabbi, friend,

Soul-fellow, busy with me to the end,

Crunching with poet-pestles and rhyme-mortars

Conundrums for the mind to apprehend,

Bear witness with me to this paradox:

What 's permanent must pass. All spirit-shocks,

Numbness and pain arise

Conceiving otherwise.

For Beauty is the flowing of the soul

Without impediment, the effect being joy;

So with a ripple may reveal her whole

Eternal ocean. But the child says : ' See !

My earth is stable ; sun and stars spin wild.'

Not so the man : c Our earth spins dizzily

Round the fixed sun.' The poet (man and child)

Peers in the sun, imagining he sees —

Beyond his face — the shadowy vortices,

Vast suctions and compulsions of the soul.

' Beyond the sun,' he sings, 'beyond — our goal

Is God ! ' Last pries the seer : c Him whom so far

Ye seek, yourselves consider what you are

And find Him : stars aspiring to be,

Life from itself evolving soul — sach He!

Time's runner, not Time's stake; Spring's sap, not sod ;

Man's orbit, not his planet — such is God.

BROWNING TO BEN EZRA 53

Vouch then, Ben Ezra, through the texts we glozed

Of earth's philosophies, I still opposed

The fixed, immutable. To slake His thirst^

You said, there lives our soul's utility —

His thirst unquenchable, for whom also she,

My silk-girl, sang: There is no last nor first !

Therefore through all

The chambers of His spirit, as I passed

In changing roles — to lift the dim tent-flap

(As David) and behold where hung huge Saul,

Supine,

Gigantic, serpentine,

From the cross-beam; or, through the black storm-gap,

Panting beneath a woman's hair

(As Sebald), to watch — now here, now there —

Blind lightnings stab the dark ; thence to unfold

Before the quiet eyes of Cleon

His epos on its burning plates of gold;

Else watch, in Spring of another eon,

(Curled like the finger of an infant faun)

The prying crocus crimson through the lawn,

Idling, without other care,

In England, when my April's there; —

Still it was mine., and /j, in dreams

To search beyond the world that seems,

54 BROWNING TO BEN EZRA

And flash before my fellow men,

Kindling His image to their ken,

Glimpses of that God-Man, who wills yet to become,

Ever for Whom,

In future as in past,

There is nor first nor last.

VI

But hark ! Above our vault,

Rabbi, the footsteps halt;

The organ rolls the chant processionary.

Relinquish here this dust ;

Accomplish there Time's trust;

Ascend with me beyond this centenary.

Go forth, for we are young!

Time's song is yet unsung;

Let our glad voices mingle with God's mass.

You, Rabbi, on my right,

Before us both — His light :

Through men's dear world, with Pippa, still I pass !

NINETY-SEVEN

A DECENNIAL GREETING

After the years, this hour : and after this — the years

Fellows of Ninety-Seven,

Here 's to the hour that 's given

Out of the gladness of Time's gold arrears

For us, once more linking our several spheres,

To revel and remember. So let be

Our toast Reunion in our lifted glasses !

Yet of the wine each fellow passes

A glory shall escape his lip

To wake its magic counterpart

In the ten-years' vintage of his heart ;

For Thought is the master of revelry

Whose common ale of fellowship

Turns to Moselle in memory.

And now one thought which makes us what we are Masters our hearts anew, where we are met On the outer moats of youth, And with strange ruth

56 NINETY-SEVEN

Compels our vision, with a half-regret,

Toward those dear days and far

Of earliest manhood, ere, with souls elate,

We passed the ivied gate

To serve our elder liege, the State,

And paused, with tremulous faces turned, together,

Back to the Yard, as to our native heather :

Then plunged in the blind roar and tide of fatec

II

Put by the years — put by !

Let as it will the lamp

Of old Time lour :

After the years, this hour!

And after this, the years !

For hark ! — above our gay night-camp,

Out of our common sky,

Blown from far bleachers by the winds of memory,

Hark now — the wild, boy cheers

That set us, lang syne, tingling by the ears :

Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Seven, from near and far, Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Seven, to hail our star —

Harvard, Harvard ! Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Seven, here we are !

NINETY-SEVEN 57

And once more the incense rises by the rush-lined banks

of Charles

On the frosty breath of thirty-thousand soul, And the side-line watchers scramble as the skein of torses

snarls

And a shoulder glides from under — past the goal ! And a cataract of crimson pours its wave upon the turf And heaves the sweating victors on its throng, Where the bleachers rise like headlands from the roar of

living surf, And the breakers of wild boys burst forth in song :

For it 's Glory, Glory to the Crimson ! And hoarse echoes from Harvard's halls ; And the ivy overhead is glowing deeper red In the twilight of her walls.

But four years are not Destiny,

And the ultimate June days pass To hail the flower-ensanguined Tree

Where the hosts of Harvard mass, And — banked like iris, sheath on sheath,

A-quiver with all their curls, One mighty, rustling, maiden wreath —

Our coronal of girls !

58 NINETY-SEVEN

»

Then it 's on with the fight of flowers, And the battle of bouquets !

Till the mangled crush of the roses blush In the smile of a maiden's praise.

Soft, then, that glance of smile and tress

Through murmurous evening glows: The lace, the laugh, the loveliness,

The paper-lamps of rose, Are portions of a pageantry

Made of the music's bars ; And now they are a memory,

A Class-day in the stars !

in

Watched from some clear and starry eminence, How calm in plastic beauty dreams the world ! Mile after mile through moon-lit silences, In fronded slumber furled, Murmur the herded forests ; and there is No other sound or passion, but a sense As if some stellar truce perpetual Had healed all life with dews of harmony And quietness ; for all

The nestling foothills and the valleys lie — Lapt in the summer moon's unconscious keep — Like children, or like lovers, fast asleep.

NINETY-SEVEN

59

Fond reverie and illusion ! for beneath That gloom-suspended canopy, the moan Of the struck stag is stifled ; blind, alone, The wood-cat tears his flank; innumerable Throughout the dark, seekers of life and death Pursue their aimless ends of suffering And brief satiety ; claw, tusk and wing Torture, waylay, destroy each other : even The beak, whose morning-song ineffable Shall ravish heaven,

Strikes at the adder with his own despite, And all the pensive wonder of the night Is stung with venom of a monstrous hive Of hearts insatiable — to survive.

So 'neath the gaze of early manhood's eye

Repose the civilizations : derrick and spire,

Lighthouse and looming shaft and armoury —

Islanded grandly in the evening air —

Far-coiling trains spetting the gloom with fire,

And moving barges in the mist, and fair

Suspended bridges, lifting unaware

Beyond the fog-banks — build for one who dreams

Beautiful self-delusion : Fabulous

Must be the master-race of such a world !

Titan and angel in their stature, thus

To guide the lightnings that the gods have hurled.

60 NINETY-SEVEN

— God ! That this only seems

And is not ! No, for us

Who fume and strive beneath the glamour, — we,

The cannibals of competition, see

What things we are : what beasts that hunt and flee

And kill, yet love the life we kill, and breed

The very progeny whose hearts we bleed.

What for ? What need ?

Are we, then, so in awe

Of our own pain, that we may not create

Out of our need the thing we thirst for — Joy ?

Joy is not nature's law

But man's ; and in the mind of man resides

For Joy's subservience —

The angel and the titan, Commonsense ;

So if there still abides

In us the primal spark American

That kindled us in Liberty, a nation,

Let it leap up and burn a clearer flame,

As ever and the same

It still has leaped, since first that fire began,

At the cry : Emancipation !

IV

Fair is the field where Reason and High Will Captain us, and their quickening battle-cry

NINETY-SEVEN 61

Is "Justice, and the New Democracy !

Justice, whose heart-red shield

Blazons this ultimatum on her field :

More Happiness

For all that live, and shall live, and not less.

The noble fustian of a former age,

Surviving still,

Has served its nobler ends ; turn now the page !

All men are not born equal •. let them be,

And let them be born better :

Equal in hope and opportunity,

Better in altruism and in will

To execute their clearer wisdom. Let

The loins of the begetter

Be passionate for his posterity

To breed a race more excellent, until

Our human species shall be perfected

Beyond the sway of passion, and forget

That ever time was when it might be said

(As men have said by San Francisco Bay) :

Nature is not more cruel than mankind.

But this is still To-day,

Our day — not of rebellion or defined

Outburst, as when our law-schooled fathers broke

62 NINETY-SEVEN

The transatlantic yoke,

Or Lincoln the slave's goad

Lifted, and struck the intolerable load

From Freedom's galled shoulders. Not to us

That outward menace : subtler slavery —

The inward canker of corruption, cant

Of predatorial wealth, insidious

Muffling of the bugle-voiced press,

Hazard us none the less.

No more the trumpet's call and stallion's neigh

Incite us to the action : but instead

The ticker's steel tattoo, the teller's drone,

The trip-hammer's iron intermittent clang, the shrill

Steam-whistle, the huge-heaved and sullen moan

Of vast machines in vassalage — resound

Our call to carnage, where no blood is shed,

But where, from skyward cliffs and underground,

The living dead —

Whirled on the spokes of the enormous wheel

Of Commerce — chant their strident monotone.

Classmen of Ninety-Seven — Classmates still

In common conscience for the public weal !

Come forth, and let the quenching of world-sorrow

Kindle our joy ! — Come forth, and make To-morrow

NINETY-SEVEN 63

A new Commencement at the gates of Time

Whence all our deeds shall climb !

America, the matrix of the nations, lies

Fallow before us, and her destinies,

In nascent grandeur furled,

Are ours to shape in beauty for our kind.

Our manhood shines before, but when that shuts behind,

Still beckons - — the young manhood of the world.

FINIS

THE SISTINE EVE AND OTHER POEMS

W. V. M. E. A. R.

& R. T.

IN FELLOWSHIP

FOB permission to reprint certain poems in this volume, the author makes his acknowledg ments to the editors of the following journals : The Century Magazine, The Outlook, Every body's Magazine, Collier's Weekly, The Harvard Graduates9 Magazine.

vii

CONTENTS

PART ONE POEMS CHIEFLY OCCASIONAL

PAGE TlCONDEROGA . * , » . , . . 3

TENNYSON ...... . » . 16

THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON ... 21

CHORAL SONG FOR THE NEW THEATRE . . 23

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES . .24

PROLOGUE TO THE SAINT-GAUDENS MASQUE . 38

A CHRISTMAS CAROL . . • " - , • * • . 42

THE DEATH OF VERESTCHAGIN • « . .46

SHIRLEY COMMON ...;.• . -•'.-. * t 47

ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE > » . 49

THE SISTINE EVE . # . . V • . 51

PART TWO POEMS LYRICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE

GROUP I e . » 89

GROUP II . v" . 141

GROUP HI . . . . . . . .155

INDEX TO POEMS IN PART Two 185

ix

PART ONE

POEMS CHIEFLY OCCASIONAL

TICONDEROGA l

A BALLAD I

What spirits conjure thee from time,

Ticonderoga ? On thy headland rock Of history,

Who are these that knock And summon thee To move thine ancient lips in rhyme,

Ticonderoga ?

Where the wind-blown swallows

Veer and vary,

Where the shore and shallows

Lie visionary,

Titans three

Stand at my knee :

Each one is a century.

In their shadow, silently,

Sits the sibyl Memory.

And her silence questions me :

1 Read at the celebration of the three hundredth anni versary of the discovery of Lake Champlain, at Fort Ticonderoga, July 6, 1909. 3

TICONDEROGA

II

Who glide so dim upon the lake

Ticonderoga ? Over their dreaming prow The morning star Blazes their goal; but now — More dusk and far — What old world dwindles in their wake, Ticonderoga ?

The fleur-de-lis, the fleur-de-lis !

The White Chevalier — lo, 'tis he !

His pale canoe along the tide

The painted Huron paddles guide

With dumb, subdued elation;

The wild dawn stains their bodies bare,

The wild dawn gleams about his hair ;

Steeped in his soul's adventure, lie

The valleys of discovery —

The peaks of expectation.

Midway the lake they pause : on high

His arm he raises solemnly.

Above the lilies, that emboss

His azure banner, and the pied

Algonquin plumes that float beside,

He holds the shining cross.

TICONDEROGA

" Champlain !" — The placid word

The mute air hath not stirred.

Touched by the morning's wing,

The ruddied waters, quickening,

Alone are kindled by that christening

Quaint splendors mass

Within the lake's clear glass,

And liquid lilies golden run

In rose gules of the rising sun.

Naught else there of acclaim

Greets the great Chevalier's name,

Save where the water-fowl's primeval broods

Awake Bulwagga's lone and echoing solitudes.

Ill

What strident horror breaks thy spell,

Ticonderoga ? What long and ululating yell?

The Iroquois : in covert glade

They build their pine-bough palisade,

And weave in trance

Their sachem dance

With hawk-screams of their heathen wars,

Till naked on my shrilling shores

Mohawk and wild Algonquin meet

And taunt, with fleer and blown conceit,

TICONDEROGA

Each other's painted ranks:

But, lo where now their flanks

Give way and reel !

And 'mid the silent sagamores,

In shining cuish and casque of steel,

Before them all

Stands bright and tall,

With gauntlet clenched and helmet vised,

The calm knight-errant of the Christ;

Then, in sign miraculous,

Levels his arquebus

And, charged with bullets from his bandoleer,

Looses the bolt of preternatural thunder.

A sachem falls : the wild men stare in wonder

And mazed fear;

Once more his engine peals, and hurls the fire

Whose flash shall kindle continents to ire.

IV

Like sanguine clouds at sunset spread The ages slumber round thy head,

Ticonderoga / Tremendous forms Loom in their dreams : Through levin-light of starless storms, By giant fords of chartless streams, Saxon and Gaul

TICONDEROGA

Wrestle and rise and fall,

Conquering the region aboriginal.

Hark ! From the long tides of Lake George,

What rolling drum-beat rumbles through thy

gorge, Ticonderoga ?

O why should woman weep for war ? Or man — why should it vex him more ? Or why beside so sweet a shore

Dreadful should the drum be ? O clear the snorting trumpets neigh, And blithe the squealing bagpipes play ! O red the redcoats on the bay,

Sailing with Abercromby !

A thousand bateaux floating glide And flaunt their banners sheen ;

Calm isles swim by on the summer tide Clad in their birchen green.

Lord Howe he lies on a rude bearskin

Beneath the pleasant sky; Says : Never day hath fairer been

For one's dear land to die.

Says: Tell me true now, gallant Stark, What trail may foil the Frenchmen ?

TICONDEROGA

Where should our redcoats disembark To rout Montcalm his henchmen ?

A trout-brook once I fished, Lord Howe, To fry my catch in bacon :

Along that trail, Sir, I'll allow Ticonderoga's taken.

O what so wildly fair as war ! From dancing skiff and dripping oar Land down on yonder dreamy shore

And drowsy let the drum be. O proud as life the far crag's flush ! And sweet as youth — the hermit-thrush ! O deep as death the dark wood's hush,

Marching with Abercromby !

Our trail grows blind, good Putnam: draw More close your forest rangers.

By yonder balsam [hark !] I saw —

Who calls there — friends or strangers ?

A mile hence runs a mill, Lord Howe: Might be the Trenchers sawing;

Or likely, Sir, ye heard yon crow Round Roger's Rock a-cawing.

TICONDEROGA

Qui vive ? Their muskets flare the wood ;

Franpais! Their wild cheers start: Lord Howe is dropt down where he stood,

A hot ball through his heart.

They drive them back, they drown their boast In blood and the rushing river,

But the heart of Abercromby's host — The Lord of Hosts deliver !

Said is prayer and sung is psalm; In the moonlight waits Montcalm. Felled is tree and sunk is trench; On their ramparts rest the French. Moon is waned and night is gone, And the plateau, in the dawn, Strown with strange gigantic wrack, Bristles like a wild boar's back, Horrid shagg'd with monstrous spines Of splintered oaks and tangled pines. Where last night the setting sun Placid forest looked upon, In its place the sunrise sees Rubble heaps of writhen trees, Boughs — that hid the shy bird's nest — Sharpened for a soldier's breast.

10 TICONDEROGA

Hot soars the sun : in dove-white swarms Cluster the dazzling uniforms Along the earthworks ; distant shines The vanguard of the English lines. Scarlet from the sombre firs They start like sudden tanagers, And smoothly sweep the open glade Toward the abatis. There, waylaid, They flounder midst the galling heap Of tumbled branches, where they leap And crawl, as 'mid some huge morass. Like locusts in storm-beaten grass. The looming breastworks now they see But still no foemen. Suddenly, Blinding the noon, a dusk of smoke Blooms, and the roaring air hath broke In hurricanes of scorching hail, Through which, to dying eyes that quail, Falls the round sun — a fiery grail.

Vive le Roif rings from the wall Of flame : Vive noire General !

Choked by the fury and the fire, The rended English ranks suspire A moment's pause, then maddened rush Stifling through the giant brush Where, trapped in pits of jagged spars,

TICONDEROGA 11

Rangers and yelling regulars Struggle to shoot and strain to see The blithe and viewless enemy.

Vive le Roi! shrilly the call Rings clear: Vive notre General!

Whirled from the zigzag bastion's scarp, The hellish crossfire weaves its warp. Thrice they return, and thrice again: Image of God ! and are these men With eyes upturned in sightless stare, Glazed with the dead hate that they glare : And one, with dumb mouth, shouts in death To one the red blood strangleth, And one, outstretched with woful brow, Hangs spiked upon a greenwood bough, Wrought in a sculptured agony Like Him that died upon a tree.

The soul of Abercromby's host

Follows Lord Howe — his shining ghost :

On stormy ridge and parapet

It rides in flame, it leads them yet;

Smiling, with wistful image wan,

A dead man leads the dying on.

And Campbell, Laird of Inverawe,

Hath met the doom his dream foresaw;

TICONDEROGA

Pierced by his murdered kinsman's eyes, His clansmen bear him where he dies.

Lord Howe, Lord Howe, why shouldst thou

fall!

Thy life it was the life of all; Thy death ten thousand hath undone0 England hath sunken with the sun. Ticonderoga's lost and won !

O women, weep ye yet for war ? Bugles and banners, flaunt no more ! For some be sleeping by the shore

In slumber dark, and some be Awake in fever's roaring gorge, And some, in crowded keels that forge Southward, curse heaven and Lake George,

Flying with Abercromby !

V

Still round thy brow the riven war-clouds range,

Ticonderoga :

The conquest marches though the colors change. And now, where revolution's lightnings run, Beyond the battle-smoke, sublime and wan, Quivers the patient star of Washington. Ranger 'gainst regular,

TICONDEROGA 13

Sundered in enmity, Opens thine ancient scar Newly — for liberty. Now with a rushing noise Burst freedom's fountains Where the green-forest boys March from their mountains. Listen! What wheedling fife Quickens thy smouldering memories to life, Ticonderoga ?

We're marching for to take the fort

With Ethan — Ethan Allen, That when with fight he fills a quart

He ups and gulps a gallon. Double-quick it ! faster ! — hep !

Lord ! his blood is brandy. Mind the music and the step,

And hold your muskets handy.

Friends and fellow soldiers — halt !

Mind your P's, you noodle ! What mother's son will earn his salt

And dance to Yankee Doodle? There stands Ticonderoga: state

What now ye mean to do there. Yon's the fortress' wicket-gate:

How many will march through there ?

14 TICONDEROGA

As many now as volunteer

Poise your firelocks ! — Right, Sir ! Each man has swung his musket clear,

Each man files off to fight, Sir. The British sentry points his gun,

And Ethan hears him click it; He fires : the Yankees yell ' Come on ! '

And thunder through the wicket.

They thunder through the barracks court

And ram the British mortars. — What rag-tail rebels make such sport

In great King George's quarters ? — King George's style is over, Sir !

You redcoats wear the wrong dress: Ground arms to the great Jehovah, Sir,

And the Continental Congress !

VI

Thine eyes grow dreamy in the evening haze,

Ticonderoga. Where, in mimic art Ephemeral,

Thy pilgrims hold their part In festival, On what eternal pageants dost thou gaze,

Ticonderoga ?

TICONDEROGA 15

Soldier and saint and sagamore Are vanished from my tranquil shore. The ripples that the summer breeze Awakes — they are my reveries ; The day-fly dartles where below The Royal Savage hides her woe, And where the silver lake-trout ply Arnold still grapples with Sir Guy. On Mount Defiance, looming proud, Glowers Burgoyne — a twilight cloud, In whose spent shower's radiance Macdonough fights the Confiance.

Battles whose blood is liberty, Heroes whose dreams are history, Imagination hath them wrought, Tempering all things to a thought, Painting the land, the lake, the sky, With pageants of the dreamer's eye. .

So by my visionary shore,

Soldier and saint and sagamore

Live in my shadow evermore:

Where, rapt in beauty, sleeps Champlain,

Lulled are the passion and the pain;

The legend and the race remain.

TENNYSON l

I

SONG keeps no dim centennial

Where one who sang lies hushed in earth, And Beauty wears not death nor birth

Though lovers bring her flower and pall;

While Life itself, in endless youth, Is sown along sidereal deeps, From darkness, where the dreamer sleeps,

Trembles the morning-star of Truth.

Not to the singer, but to Song

That lights with viewless finger-tips Her flaming. music at his lips,

Those immortalities belong.

Yet to the singer, for the sake Of austere service lowly lent To make his mind her instrument,

The flower and pall of song we take.

1 Written to be read before the Brooklyn Institute, 1909, in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 16

TENNYSON 17

II

Among the mighty island-choir

His 'earliest pipe' was faintly heard When still the hearts of time were stirred

With revolutionary fire,

While lights and echoes still were blown Across the darkening lyric sky Of Shelley's shrilling ecstasy

And Byron's orphic organ-tone.

He watched the shuddering Age, aghast, Behold the sphinx of Science grow A lion vigilant, and throw

Its shadow o'er the golden past,

Assuming slow an awful Shape

That stood impassive at the feast, Revealing man a mystic beast -

The evolution of an ape.

Still shy he sought his shunning Muse Remote from sceptic clash and curse, And mixed the palette of his verse

With nature's mellow gleams and hues,

18 TENNYSON

And crowned his rhyme with bloom of fern In fiery orchid palaces, And caught in crystal chalices

Bright spillings from a Grecian urn;

Till, touched by human lover's hand, The singer rose to larger thought And took the spurs of Lancelot

And galloped into Fairyland.

But most of olden fair romance

Is rust on Reason's shining shield, And Merlin's hand is weak to wield

The wand of Science' necromance.

And soon the mage of modern rhyme Poured all his alchemy of art In newer purpose — to impart

The noble doublings of his time;

And sped the Mediaeval ghost

Of faith, and hailed the love of all, The lessening individual,

The kingly ' common sense of most ' ;

TENNYSON 19

And watched, with keen prophetic scan,

Wild lightnings from the embattled crew Of ' navies grappling in the blue '

Quenched by 'the Parliament of Man.'

Thus on his centenary page

The Muse has scrolled his name with hers :

A Prince of old Artificers, Knight-errant of the Newest Age.

The poet pales in memory —

Aloof and proud and book-bemused, His Saxon plainness subtly fused

With pomp of Norman chivalry;

His ashes in the Abbey lie

Aristocratic in their place,

But all that lives of him has grace

Of beautiful democracy;

Near mouldering glaive and oriflamme His cerements rest, but he, unwound From death, by human love is crowned

With friendship in memoriam;

By many a far and alien beach

He seeks the holy grail of song, Hailed by the Saxon-thinking throng

The laureate of English speech.

20 TENNYSON

III

O Song — O Grail of man's desire !

O living Splendor, never sped !

Out of the ashes of the dead Rise, rise once more in mystic fire I

Reveal for us, for us, reveal

The Singer in his harness clad, And gird him forth like Galahad

To smite, to chasten and to heal ;

To hallow spear and spade and hod, To wrestle manhood from defeats, To face the mighty in their seats

And humble greatness before God;

To be the bugle of his race

And blazon through 'the age again Thy music in the hearts of men,

Thy beauty in the market-place.

THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON1

LIKE nothing earthly, on awful wings,

It burst on the staring million, Like a dream of ancient dreadful things

In the dusk of the time reptilian.

Our hearts beat quick; we spoke not aloud;

Our minds our senses dissuaded; As we saw the bastions of bird and cloud

By the vision of man invaded.

We caught our breath, as we watched him bound Where the air-billow swirls and serries,

And the shout of our straining hearts is drowned In the din of the roaring ferries.

With sliding pinion and whizzing prow — His sky-ship the sea birds scaring —

Like a thought from Liberty's looming brow, He flashes and soars in his daring.

1 Stanzas written on witnessing, from Battery Park, the first flight made by Wilbur Wright in his aeroplane from Governor's Island to Grant's Tomb and back, on the morning of October 4, 1909, during the Hudson- Fulton celebrations.

21

22 THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON

He has flashed ; he is gone : only fancy aids Our eyes where the haze grows hoarer:

The Ages look up from the Palisades,

That looked down on the Dutch explorer.

But what of their dreams — those gray steel hulks Deep-moored in the river below him,

With the loins of a nation girt in their bulks ? In their iron hearts, do they know him?

Do their deadly engines twinge with a doubt,

A dread of this thing ethereal, That hides in its plumes the earliest scout

Of the armies and navies aerial ?

And what of their hearts — that human throng ?

Do they hail in this creature regal The harbinger of dirge, or of song?

A vulture, or an eagle ?

He tacks; he returns: the news is blown On the winds of a city's wonder:

He comes, in the braying megaphone, He comes, on Manhattan's thunder;

He looms once more by the cwarming bluffs •

A bird of marshes gigantic — And slants on the slumbering mist, and luffs

To his nest by the booming Atlantic.

CHORAL SONG FOR THE NEW THEATRE l

(Written to be sung to music from Gounod's Redemption.)

AWAKE ! awake ! awake !

Spirits of Aspiration !

And hasten to renew

Your ministering vows :

For lo ! the Prince of Faery

Returns within your walls,

Back from his ancient bright dominions :

Awake ! awake ! awake !

For he is crowned again.

But who is he, the Prince of Faery ?

Of Hellas he was god, a swan he was in Avon.

But who is he, the Prince of Faery ?

Of little children lord, of men and angels

master : Within the human mind he rules the world.

1 Sung by members of the Metropolitan Opera Com pany, at the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone of the New Theatre, New York, December 15, 1908, and also at the opening ceremonies, November 6, 1909. 23

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES '

HARVARD PHI BETA KAPPA POEM, 1908 I

ONCE more amid her mountains and her seas American, dream-startled Liberty Stares round her, listening. From her mystic limbs

Sleep like a garment slips;

Between her lips Bright wonder trembles momentarily;

About her knees

Her ancient streams and shores, innumerable With navies and strange peoples, raise new

hymns

In her immortal name. Once more she lifts Her head in proud resistance, beautiful Rebellion: yet not now with martial frown

To glare through scorching rifts Of cannon smoke, smiting her foemen down,

1 Read in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 25, 1908. 24

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 25

But now, with gaze upturned in the deep sky Whose timeless arc reveals each mortal blur Of her bright image overhanging her, To purify herself, for her least worshipper.

II

Ours is an age of mutability,

A threshold radiant yet sinister

Toward strange horizons, where the eternal hills

Of ancient law heave, and sink shuddering under,

Bursting in giant surf against the base

Of vastier summits, newly starred with wonder;

And though that portent thrills Our thoughts with dread, or joy, here is our place ; Here we must look our common future in the face.

Necessity sounds no alarms, and time No tocsin for his patient siege. To-day No detonation of deep Sumter's gun, Nor lightning musket-flash of Lexington,

Nor jangled steeple-chime, Ushers our holy war; but silent-shod,

And in the secret way

Of human hearts, where in the 'sordid street The modern slave and master dumbly meet

And in the other's eyes

26 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Each, unaware, beholds the eyes of God,

That ever after burn and scrutinize

The vitals of his soul ; or where, defiled,

The starless miner barters his own child

For mordant drink to quench his questioning

mind;

Or where, behind The squandered toil of millions, the impeach'd

man

Puts out his life, to shut away the shame; Still silent as the flame Of serpent fire through autumn grass, The radiant revolution creeps, Impregnating the nation's prone morass With seed Promethean That, kindling, leaps

Forth on the peaks of life, aspiring whence it came.

What is that seed ? — that living fire ?

What mystic name,

What secret shrine,

Revealed, sets free That sweet and awful Potency, Which wears, 'neath blasphemy and ire, 'Neath pain and sin and hate and blood, The hallowed smile of brotherhood ?

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 27

A myriad names, a myriad Shrines its worshippers have had,

Yet whatsoever god men call it by, Still the divine

Democracy of man, while man is, cannot die.

Hearken how far

The high persuasion

Of our renascence thunders ! Groping, dumb, Bowed with old burdens of a continent, Branded with immemorial scar Of sheik and king and khan and czar,

They come — they come, Filing, in vast and orderly invasion, The planks of Ellis Island. Who shall tell What numbers thronged the fields where great

Martel

Marshalled his hordes, or old Arminius O'erwhelmed the Roman legions ? — Gaul and

Hun,

Vandal and Visigoth, behold, for us To-day the humdrum agent, one by one,

By sex and ages,

Chalk-marks and checks, and down the bright steel cages

Passes the hybrid clans, Whose migratory hosts pour forth — Americans.

28 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

III

Presides et socii collegiorum!

Masters and scholars of the chosen places !

I ask of you — to whom Shall those inchoate freemen, dazzled races, Turn in their promised land for leadership ?

Who shall equip

Their hope with discipline, their nescience With light, their sudden zeal with reverence?

I ask of you — to whom The amazed Republic, gazing on this skein

And stuff of destiny,

Pied-shot with human passion, joy and pain, Shall look to engineer the awful loom, So that within the fabric of the state The large ideal of the intricate Design shall blazon, bold and beautiful, The gracious lineaments of Liberty ?

Flower-sprung from mesas of the prairied land, Star-strewn along the hills and by the seas — The quiet-bastioned citadels of peace And gunless fortresses of freedom — stand The universities. No breastwork heaves Its brow in menace near; the ivied gates Rise moatless ; from the campus and the eaves Perennial youthhood chimes; and all awaits

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 29

The coming conqueror. Yet inward shrined,

And panoplied

With arms more glorious than glaive of Cid Or Charlemagne, the quenchless human mind

Sits inexpugnable; While far around, from swarming cities and wide

swards,

Murmur the vague, aspiring, passion-driven hordes.

Let us not vest with visionary seal Of sanctity the individual.

Wherever among men The brave and reasonable citizen

Thinks for the common weal And speaks his thought, there the Republic speaks, Yet, if unanswered, speaks in vain.

For ours is a day of coalition: this

Our people, viewed with the perspective eye

Of revery, appears a titan group

Of powers compositive, vast Dramatis

Personse, plying their immortal tasks,

'Neath which their Atlantean sinews stoop,

In that high Comedy Serene Wherein the Evolutionary will immasks; And there, amid those titan forms of Man —

30 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Their torses poised proud

In athlete ease, their foreheads pensive-bow'd - The Spirits of the Universities Enact their corporate roles American.

Therefore to you, lords of the large demesne Of learning, scholars of well-earned degrees, To you, in your confederated power, Preeminently, the Republic turns And charges you, by your just love of her,

To lead, to pilot and uplift Her generations, and administer,

With the most holy shrift Of reason and Time's slow amassed dower, Her bright communion to the multitude.

Toward you, in whose calm hands her chalice

burns

With beauty strange, how many thirst-imbued Gaze, yearning ! Not alone on your own walls, Wherein your chosen meet — your shadow falls Also on alien thresholds, thrown across The nation's childhood, by the increasing glow Of truth that flares beyond you. As you sow, So shall the lesser seekers harvest — dross Or substance. In responsibility, You are the true inheritors of kings

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 31

Whose sceptres now lie impotent, your halls — The sovran courts of the democracy;

And by the royalty Conferred of patient high imaginings,

Your first prerogative — And prime efficiency — is leadership.

IV

Who is the scholar-leader? What is he

Whose learning shows the unlearned best to live ?

There be, who — finger hard on lip — Pore lifelong, with laborious glass, On nature's enigmatic heart, Dissecting shrewdly, part by part, To store her secrets in their scrip, Heedless of human love and art, Or how the passionate generations pass.

Others there are who, moved no less

To explore that mute obscure abysm, Make of their probing minds a prism

Whose many-sided radiance Illumes with their own hearts the heart of Nature,

Touching her darkest feature With revelation for man's happiness,

And with love's couched lance Wresting from Science a new Humanism.

32 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Such is the scholar liberal : for him,

Not knowledge which ignores the Whole, But knowledge grafted in the soul

Is scholarship; to esteem His calling justly is to see

That culture is proficient sympathy.

For all that issues beautiful From dim retort and crucible, And makes our modern day to seem Arabian night or opiate dream : — Genii, that on the wireless air Transport within imagined waves The cosmic Echo from her caves To work their will, or from the stars Expound the mysteries of Mars, Or in earth's rotting shale prepare The alchemy of radium, — All powers, articulate or dumb, Which scholars probe and sages scan, Are meaningless except to Man — To urge his peace, to ease his pain,

And from his mind's domain To exorcise the lurking Caliban.

To exorcise ! — Not in the Middle Age, With Faust's redemption, did the devils cease To lure great doctors to their tutelage,

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 33

Whereby to lengthen their protracted lease Of the lewd rabble's gaping ignorance : Still, with incessant metamorphosis,

The monsters hatch and hiss

And, breeding, grow

To honor'd stature in the imperil'd state, Where the true scholar still is Prospero,

Making their misshaped natures dance Attendance on his master vision: So To humble monsters to the use of men, The foremost scholar is first citizen.

He, when the rank broods teem and generate

Their giant seed,

That prowl the rich land with impunity, W here corporate greatness stoops to cormorant

greed, And that one bulk, much-mouth'd and subtle-

gin'd,

The unsated Minotaur, Monopoly, Extorts his toll in the meek nation's blood

Of boys and maidenhood, — He then, the scholar-leader, pores not stale Upon his book, nor peers where sits the wind In the golden weathercock on Minos' gate, But prescient, girds his clear mind all in mail, And gathering round the time's unperished youth,

34 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Apportions his bright armory of truth And points what right-aimed blow shall make the beast disgorge.

So did that steadfast captain of our race —

A storm-trained scholar — stand at Valley Forge

With all the gales of England in his face,

And sharing forth his visionary arms

Of faith with his shorn comrades, smiled, and

hurled

Victory through disaster's blind alarms, And wrought with fearless mind the future of a

world.

O beautiful and spacious one,

My Country ! Spirit free, Who floatest wild on that lone eagle's wings Fledged in the fiery heart of Washington, And fed on heart's blood of each dauntless son Of that strong father, how exceedingly Fair is thine image, when First the least-born of men Burns with thy story ! Then Thou art a presence never darkling: night Shrouding thy solemn flight, Sprinkles, with hoary rite,

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 35

Stars on thy plumage; morn,

Ere on the cottage thorn

Scarce the shy warbler sings,

Fills all familiar things

With thy far glory ; dreams Of thee at evening haunt the hermit thrush, And in his ecstasy's pure after-hush, High and austerely sweet, thine immanent eagle screams.

So by the large compulsion of that Presence

I make this invocation;

And by the might of that dear name, whose es sence

The staling tongue of usage cannot taint — America — I speak, that I may stir You, her far-ranging universities,

Through glad constraint

Of love you owe to her, Henceforward to conjoin your destinies

In grander federation.

VI

Not adversaries in the scrambling street Of commerce, need your nobler wills compete For numbers and for names. A saner law Moves your cooperation, and the awe

36 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Of that shall fix a sound stability At the base of civic freedom. Strong must be The scholar in himself. Far better were it Your halls stood empty and their corridors Silent, than that the youth who from your doors Go forth to breed the nation, should inherit

The sowings of that spirit

Which bows the mind to serve the vulgar mood, Or truckles to the man that owns the multitude.

It cannot be. Never, till now, before —

In age of Plato or of Abelard,

In empire or republic, linking shore

With shore by aspiration's viewless chain —

Has your high calling held the fair regard

And faith of one vast people. Not in vain

Their faith abides in you. The taint which blinds

The weak shall not be yours. Your yards and

halls

Still with expanding splendor shall be filled By the strong magnet of the sane ideal,

And to the common weal Shall speed their generations of glad youth Forth in the land — alumni of the guild Of leadership, the minute-men of truth, Whose muskets are their uncorrupted minds, Clean for their country where her service calls.

ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 37

VII

Nobly our world renews, even as in ages gone. Man's eras have their vernal equinox No less than nature's : Still, on that wild dawn When the high winds, unleashed, no longer fawn At Winter's knees, but lift his sparse-blown locks In haggard wrack — there, on the looming hills, Sharp with unearthly light, the sudden flocks Show radiant, and on the vista'd sills Of Spring, earth's visionary beauty starts Revealed : Not otherwise in human hearts Recurrent, after seasons numb and blind, Freshly the ancient Loveliness reveals

The love of our own kind, Rekindling in our race the raptures of the mind.

PROLOGUE TO THE SAINT-GAUDENS MASQUE l

PERFORMED AT ASPET IN CORNISH

Enter IRIS

IRIS

FRESH from the courts of dewy-colored eve Jove summons me before you. Who I am And why he bids me here I. must declare.

1 In June, 1905, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Cornish Colony by Augustus Saint- Gaudens, an outdoor masque was devised and performed by his neighbors in a pine grove at Aspet, his New Hamp shire home. In the Masque, written by Mr. Louis Evan Shipman, more than seventy persons took part, among whom were some forty artists and writers of craftsmanly repute, who enacted r61es of Greek deities and demigods.

About twilight, the sculptor with his family and some hundreds of guests were seated in front of a green-gray curtain, suspended between two pines, on which hung great gilded masks, executed by Mr. Maxfield Fairish. Close by, secreted artfully behind evergreens, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra awaited the baton signal of Mr. Arthur Whiting, conductor and composer of the music.

Then, in the softened light, emerged from between the folds of the curtain the tall maidenly figure of Iris, in many-hued diaphanous veils, holding in one hand a staff of living fleur-de-lis. Iris, enacted by Miss Frances Grimes, the sculptress, spoke the accompanying Pro logue.

The three allusions to works by Saint-Gaudens refer, of course, to the Shaw Memorial Bas-relief, in Boston, the Sherman Equestrian Statue, in New York, and the Adams Memorial, in Washington.

38

PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE 39

My home is half-light; you have watched me

oft

Through closing lids at noontide, or at dusk, Moving between the daylight and your dreams, A shape illusory. Whether I pause Midway my quivering arc, that spans the roar And tumbling prisms of sheer Niagara, Or by the ferny banks of Blowmedown Trellis my hair with braided fleur-de-lis, Still I am Iris, and my mission is To shatter the white beam of garish day Into a thousand mellower tints of twilight, Spinning across the sceptic eyes of reason Fine rainbow-films of fancy. Such, then, I. But whence, emerging from the curtained wood Of Aspet, on this longest summer eve, While yet the veerie rings his vesper chimes, I have made journey hither, hearken !

Late,

Below the gilded state-house by the bay, Sitting his horse in proud simplicity, I left a young commander; thronged beneath His lifted brow, clouded with battle dreams, The eager Ethiop faces onward surged ; No sound arose from all their trampling feet, But the imagined drum-beats rolled in bronze.

40 PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE

From these I passed to where the human hives Shadow the stars from the Metropolis, Whence, turning homeward from the hell of war, Another hero, scarr'd and old, there rode; And at his bridle-rein, in maiden awe, Went Victory — with pity in her eyes.

A third and Sibyl form, remote and mute,

Brooding alone beside a secret grave,

Asked with unopening eyes, " What means it all ? "

From these imagined and immortal forms To him, O mortals, who imagined them, And fixed his revery in stone and bronze, I come to render tribute, not of praise Superfluous, but playful badinage And mock-Olympic mummery, whereby If these shall cause the elvish Gallic smile To twitch his lip, or stir his blarney laugh, The mock-Olympians will die content.

Behold, then, by the enchantment of this staff A magic transformation: not such change As once my goddess sister Circe wrought — Circe, whose spell debased the forms divine Of men to bristled shapes of snout and horn: Mine is a charm reverse, that lifts, not lowers, By power whereof all neighbor Jacks and Jills

PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE 41

That tug their art-pails up these pasture slopes Of Cornish are converted here to strut In guise of antic gods and demigods.

[!RIS waves her staff, music sounds from the grove.]

Hark now ! 'Tis they, who clamor to begin Their frolic masque of satyr, muse, and faun, And on the shrine of mirth make sacrifice In honor of their only pagan saint.

[!RIS withdraws between the curtains: the music grows louder, then dies away. The curtains, dividing, open upon the Masque.]

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

KEEP closer to the wall ; stop crawling ; wait. We have our orders. Hold the dynamite. I hear their sentry cough. The moon burns white Behind the battlements, and cuts each one — Turret and tower — an inky silhouette, Like paper castle-tops I used to trace With scissors as a boy. Step softly ! Place The bomb here, underneath the garrison. Now if their souls are dreaming of hell-fire, This will not wake them. Midnight! That's

the choir Of children hailing the Nativity.

What are ye that walk the night

Heaven's will divining? Shining are your mantles white

And your staffs are shining.

Shepherds, we have come from far Dark and danger scorning:

We have seen our King His star By the gates of morning. 42

A CHRISTMAS CAROL 43

Come now, this is no time for hands to quake;

On this one breach depends the victory,

A nation's honor, and her destiny.

And these, who lie so unsuspectingly

In sleep, not one of them must ever wake

This side of -

What is He whose star ye seek.

Toilsomely and slowly? He is monarch of the meek,

Regent of the lowly.

Wise men, seek another land, Shun our lord his greeting:

For we perish at his hand, And our lambs are bleating.

What a devilish close call ! There creeps the sentry on the shadow-wall Like a black ant. Quick, now — the fuse !

What are ye who knock by night

On my palace portals? Triple wreaths of silver light

Crown you like immortals.

Herod, from the east we bring

Fine and lordly treasure. Where is He that born is King ?

We would do him pleasure.

44 A CHRISTMAS CAROL

These your gifts uncover them, Myrrh and spice, before me.

Lo, I am Jerusalem! Bow ye down, adore me!

King, your shepherds wretchedly

Starve without your city. You Jerusalem may be,

But our Lord is Pity.

Quick, fool !

This is our country's job, and you her tool. What are you waiting for ? You want to think Before you kill ? You dream that love may link All born of woman ? Fool, are we the first To live in mothers' memories accurst, Or in the little children's helplessness ? These men, like us, know gentle eyes that bless Their goings and homecomings, baby hands That reach, fine feet that dart, at their commands. What, then ? This is not murder ; this is war. We are not men, but patriots. Think no more: The fuse is lighted ; run ! Run for the shore !

What are ye that screen your eyes

From the awful burning? Look where 'neath Flis star He lies,

Nestled by her yearning.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL 45

Ye that saw His glory shine,, What were dark and danger?

Blessed ye that make your shrine Mother, Child, and manger.

Now the Lord of Love —

Look back ! Look back ! How the torn earth- clouds blot

The stars, and the far hilltop heaves the roar ! Ah, Merry Christmas! Almost I'd forgot.

THE DEATH OF VERESTCHAGIN *

WITH gaze serene and brow of silver rime,

He watched the up-staring sea and reeling

land Converge, as limned beneath the veteran hand

That last, fell sketch of war was traced sublime ;

But even in the act his pencil ruthlessly

Was snatched away, where — blasting all his

view — The inexorable Artist stood, and drew

The awful masterpiece — reality.

And now the silver rime is on the wave, And Verestchagin sleeps with Makarof, And calm, above the red brine's eddying trough,

The eyes of Christ and Buddha guard his grave.

1 Vassili Verestchagin, the Russian painter of war themes, while sketching a naval battle off Port Arthur, sank in the warship Petropavlovsk, with Admiral Makarof, April 4, 1904.

46

SHIRLEY COMMON1

NOT ours, upon the house-tops, here to claim Battles and heroes of historic scene, A century and fifty years of fame : — Our boast is silence and this day's serene.

The loud circumference of jangling lands, Conflict and craft and wrong surround us ; still Shy in her orchard-wildness Shirley stands: A hushed spectator on her mapled hill.

Here to her simple festival she calls Her folk home — yet not all : Where are they now, The Pilgrim race that piled her corn-field walls, And served the Lord with patience and a plough ?

The hardy citizens that now are sod They may not hear her summons home ; and yet The elm-hid belfry nestles toward their God, And we, who gather here, do not forget.

1 Read at the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Town of Shirley, Massachusetts, July 30, 1903, in the First Parish Meeting-House. 47

48 SHIRLEY COMMON

For still the sights familiar to their eyes Are dear to ours: the spires of Groton blaze Their weathercocks from Gallows-Hill's sunrise, And the long slopes of Harvard slant in haze;

And still, at night, the bittern booms to rest, The secret whip-poor-will complains afar ; And still Wachusett marshals in the west The sunset and his solitary star.

Here, then, let thoughts be memories; let our

pride

Be the untainted loveliness, which is Our Shirley's dower on woods and pastures pied ; Let our ambition, even as hers, be this : —

Unenvious, to win the envied bays Of nature's health and honest common sense; And, by the peace of sane, inglorious days, To earn the unrepute of innocence.

ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE

IN that Manhattan alley long yclept,

With gentle olden music, Maiden Lane,

Where sick and sad -eyed Traffic scarce has slept

Even at midnight, in her lust for gain

Rolling in restive pain

Through the stern vigil of a century,

There, mid the din of harsh reality —

The newsboy's shriek, car's clang and huckster's

chaff,

The cobble's roar, and the loud drayman's laugh, And the dull stare, The inhuman, hunted glare Of the faces — the gray faces Of Mammon's stark-mad races, Sordid and slattern, Modish and tattern, Loveless in their misery — There, in the midst of all, Seated upon a stall,

Musing on meadows, Isaak, I met thee ! — E 49

50 ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE

How my heart stopped for too much happiness, To meet thee there in that maelstrom of men, Benignant, wise and calm ! Ah, gently then Came back, in fancy's dress, All that of old was sweet, Serene and fair, to grace the garish street. Musing on meadows now in Maiden Lane, The turbid current surging at my side Became the flow of Thames' sequestered tide, The newsboy's cry waned to a curlew's call, The jangling pedlar tended tinkling sheep Along green hedgerows; even the drayman's

brawl

Sweetened to an old soliloquy, till all That strident world has chastened to a sleep Where, in a twilit eddy of my dream, Thine image, Isaak, pored upon a bream.

THE SISTINE EVE

FRAGMENTS OF AN ORATORIO WRITTEN FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

PLAN

OVERTURE

PRELUDE FIRST CANTO : The Birth of Eve

FIRST INTERLUDE SECOND CANTO: The Temptation of Eve

SECOND INTERLUDE THIRD CANTO : The Birth of Man

PRESENCES l

SPEAKING PRESENCES: The Sistine Spirit

The Spirit of the Vatican

SOLO PRESENCES: Adam

The Persian Sibyl

The Cumcean Sibyl

The Delphic Sibyl

Judith

Goliath

Jonas

Jeremiah

Isaiah

The Expelling Angel

Eve

CHORAL PRESENCES : The Cornice Cherubim Symbolic Figures Botticelli's Women Shapes in " The Last Judgment "

SCENE The Sistine Chapel, Rome

TIME

Midnight, before the Dawn of 1901 High pontifical mass is being celebrated. Car dinals and prelates in splendid vestments, assembled.

1 These Dramatis Personce are figures in the paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel.

53

"Laforza d' un bel volto al del mi sprona [Ch* altro in terra non e che mi diletti] E vivo ascendo tra gli spirti eletti, Grazia ch' ad uom mortal raro si dona.

SI ben col suofattor /' opra consuona, Ch9 a lui mi levo per divin concetti, E quivi informo i pensier tutti e i detti, Ardendo, amando per gentil persona.

Onde, se mai da due begli occhi il guardo Torcer non so, conosco in lor la luce Che mi mostra la via ch? a Dio mi guide. E se nel lume loro acceso io ardo, Nel nobilfoco mio dolce riluce La gioia che nel cielo eterna ride."

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI; Sonetto III

54

OVERTURE

A VOICE FROM THE CHAPEL CEILING

SIBYLS and prophets of undying art, Awake ! for Buonarrotti's golden dome Is as an angel's passing-bell, to toll — On midnight's starry, tingling silentness — The interring of an Age. Wake and behold ! They bear her toward the never-shutting doors Which fearful mortals screen with draperies To bar the eternal night. — Lo, she has passed With bead and psalm and solemn catafalque, With mitred state, and pomp episcopal, The latest of the sovereigns of time — Nineteenth among the entombed centuries — Has sealed forever her pregnant lips, and lies Sculptured in the cold clay of history.

But thou, O live new-crowned Herculean Age, Who clingest to the rugged breast of Labor, Gazing with wonder in calm Science' eyes, While Poesie, with warm tears on her cheek, Searches thy look, in passion lost of pathos, — Thou titan child of promise, hail to thee ! 55

56 THE SISTINE EVE

And while these spirits, with their serene eyes Of strifeless beauty and strong consummation [Spirits that pass not with the passing age] Chant o'er thine earliest breathing, may the hymn Which they shall lift in prayer to the first Mother, Be as an exhortation, to incite Thy dreams to deeds in thy maturer days.

And now, while all the kneeling prelates pray, Spirits, which are my voices, even as the stops Are to the lute, awake your harmonies ! And celebrate the pain and the desire, The daring and the victory, of her Who set love's seal upon the centuries.

A VOICE FROM THE ALTAR

Other? Of whom?

THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING Awake, Divinities !

CHORUS OF PRESENCES

Thou whose form crepuscular

Dawns through the Sistine heaven, as a star

Through autumn twilight, beautiful

Our mother Eve —

THE SISTINE EVE 57

THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR

Peace, painted Forms ! Or if ye, who have sat

The mute spectators of my solemn Mass

For vague centennials of memory,

Now ope your lips inspired, let it not be

To chant amid these rites pontifical

A song of sacrilege. — Peace, painted Forms !

THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING

What art thou there below, with taper eyes Upraised from many a prostrate cardinal, Who puffest, from thy vast, seclusive cowl, Columnar storms of incense ? Whose are thine Imponderous and gilded limbs, which show — Between the silky folds of surplices — Like pillars, sculptured in a pagan shrine Or pillaged Coliseum ?

THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR

Answer thou !

What voice is thine, visible Aspiration, Whose torse, half chiselled from cerulean cloud, Outlifts the youthful arm indomitable Of David, who at Florence guards the Palace, While thy rapt brow hurls the time-piercing gaze

58 THE SISTINE EVE

Of Moses, in St. Peter's-of-the-Chains ? What is thy name, majestic Grace of Power?

THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING I am the Sistine Spirit. What art thou ?

THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR

The Spirit of the Vatican. My voice

Is the peal'd organ of perennial Rome,

And even as those sibyls are thy stops

So all these red and golden reeds are mine:

But now, until this sacred mass be said,

Be silent, thou ! or let our requiem

Be sung in harmony.

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

What discord can

Arise, when Power prays to Innocence And Beauty?

THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN

None ; but these, thy sensuous choir, Dare to uplift their ritual tether — To her, whose fluent and unstable mind, Impregned with lust of new and gloss of beauty, Became a fair conception-place for Satan;

THE SISTINE EVE 59

To Eve, whose folly wrought the fall of Man, Yea, all the dire resultance of his fall.

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

Man never fell. The inexorable blow Of the Expelling Angel was the stroke Which first conferred God's knighthood on his

nature,

Kindling that anguish, whereby first he rose To the protective stature of his soul. This Eve first knew was so, when she loved Adam. For it was she who first, feeling herself A child of God, yearned in her little Eden, Yearned for herself and Adam, as true lovers, For aims beyond their summer-day self-seeking; And even while she grasped the fateful fruit, Smiled in the dream of nobler mortal sons Instead of an idle immortality, — Smiled, and then reached the fruit to Adam, so To share with him the awful insurrection.

THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN

Preposterous Spirit ! does the fallen race Of man fulfil her dream ? Reveal to me A nobler mortal son whose angel stature Exceeds his father Adam's ere his fall.

60 THE SISTINE EVE

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

Spirit of earthward vision, — even I ! Yea, these and I and more than us are Man. Our exaltation doth confute his fall, And build again, in beauty, art and love, Another and inviolable Eden.

Speak ! ye serene and lofty Presences, Delineations of inspired Power ! Awake ! ye children of a child of God, And hymn, with your chromatic harmonies, The prelude and the Trilogy austere, Wherein the intuitive grace of Woman's love Enacts the eternal Genesis of Man.

THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN Strange spirit, they are silent.

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

Dost thou hear

No sound ?

THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN

No sound ; save only the faint breath Of cardinals, that tell their rosaries.

THE SISTINE EVE 61

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

Hark ! — Hearest thou no mural melody ?

The playing organ of an ocular sense,

The hidden choristers of lovely hues,

The chant of heavenly forms ? — Once more, with

all

Thy breathess spirit listening in thine eyes — No music ?

THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN None.

PRELUDE

CHORUS OF PRESENCES

O ye wise, love Beauty ! All

Ye strong, revere her ! Through passion's starry arches thrill The echoes of her light footfall ; The worlds, to do her deathless will,

Draw near her.

By ways divinely sensuous, Her viewless form entices us 'Mid visions pale and passionate To kneel beside her awful gate; Where, girt with song and silences, The lonely mind her mansion is.

The innocent obey her call,

The happy know her dreamy face

And hear her;

Despair is softened by her grace, And sorrow is her worshipper. All things that love grow like to her. O ye wise, love Beauty ! All

Ye strong, revere her. 62

THE SISTINE EVE 63

FIRST SYMBOLIC FIGURE

Who draws his face beneath a cowl of cloud And kneels beside the altar, dumb and bow'd ?

SECOND FIGURE

That is the Spirit of the Vatican : He meditates upon the Fall of Man.

THIRD FIGURE

But what is he, with countenance beguiPd, That smiles upon the sleeping titan-child ?

FOURTH FIGURE

The Sistine Spirit. — See ! he draws away The incense-curtain from our holy play.

THE FIGURES

That all the enactments of our mural stage May pass as dreams before the new-born Ageu

FIRST CANTO: THE BIRTH OF EVE

SEMICHORUS OF SYMBOLIC FIGURES

How like a garden lies the world

The day when love is born; Strange beauty glows upon old boughs,

Strange flowers conceal the thorn; And noon and night are tinged with light

Of unfamiliar morn.

CHORUS

While with a sense — as though a god were near

it — Of noble languor, droops the lover's spirit.

SEMICHORUS

So float the trembling hues around

This maid in Paradise. A joy, a reticence, a prayer,

Clothe with bright poesies Her meek limbs, where she worships there

In God the Father's eyes. 64

THE SISTINE EVE 65

CHORUS

While, drawing deep from beauty's opiate springs A sigh of power, recumbent Adam sings :

ADAM

As I lay :n Eden, Alone with Love and Lethargy, An immortal maiden Was conceived in heaven And born to me.

All that I had dreamed And sculptured from the cloud-lit skies, —

All that loved and gleamed And sang, in my encircling Paradise, —

The summit's calm, The flower's voluptuousness,

The forest's majesty, Night's balm,

The morning's victory And twilight's veiled melodiousness —

Became a glowing fire

In me and my desire.

As I lay in Eden,

My bosom was unfolded;

66 THE SISTINE EVE

And an elemental Hand, Swift, mysterious and grand,

Culled that perfect maiden — With all that my wild soul contained Of passion peerless and unstained —

As erst by heaven she was moulded.

And the maiden, in that place, Grew before her Maker's face To a form [methought I dreamed] Which was what beauty only seemed. And my lax arm limply pressed To my warm and unnerved breast, And my brow sank in a swoon, And I smelt the scents of noon, And I felt the faint winds straying, And my heart could scarce conceive What the Father's Voice was saying: "Adam, behold thine Eve!"

A FIGURE

Hush ! — He is silent. Spirits, he has swooned : And from his breast bright Eve has flowered forth ; As when the passion of the nightingale Thrills and expands through his eternal arches, Recumbent Rome feels the faun-blood of Nature Leap in his limbs, while an imponderous rib

THE SISTINE EVE 67

Of marble sloth from his immortal heart Vast and invisibly is plucked away, And from that rent — profuse of ecstasy, Exhilarant of life and innocence, Trailing bright incense for her naked glory — Outpours the Spring.

FIRST INTERLUDE

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

How fair he sleeps — this lordly child of Time ! In sleep, the soul is in its infancy And Power a babe again. But soon the dawn Will break, and he will rise to titan-stature.

Meanwhile, within the crystal of his slumber, O'erhanging visions pass, as o'er a lake The hues of sunset, sweeping across heaven, Lay down their splendors in its placid heart, And passing, leave no tremor on its face.

68

SECOND CANTO: THE TEMPTATION OF EVE

CHORUS OF THE CORNICE CHERUBIM

The Tree ! — Behold the curtain-cloud is cleft ! The Tree, in all its pride and mystery !

And smiling on its left

Content and Innocence, Self-love and Leth argy;

And on its right, Departing into night — Anguish, Sin, Death, Love and Eternity !

A SYMBOLIC FIGURE

Sister of an Orient eld,

What read'st thou from that parchment, held

Close to thine eyes, as if thou spelled

Secrets from all else withheld, Or as, at twilight, thou should squint to see A form, that moves or stands beyond thy scrutiny ?

THE PERSIAN SIBYL

I trace and read, in Time's obscure abysm, — Where cold Imagination, like a prism, 69

70 THE SISTINE EVE

Darts many-colored beams on the carved

walls, — The subtle sorceries of scepticism.

I seek — and vainly through the centuries I sought — a fire, which kindled never dies,

Like that which yonder, 'neath the darkling

Tree Of Knowledge, burns in Eve's uplifted eyes.

THE FIGURE

Thou, loosened from whose sea-green veil The auburn tresses lightly trail, While soft thy mantle's azure pale Floats round thee, like a filling sail, Where rests thy dreamy gaze, as though, unfurl'd On some Olympic height, it brooded o'er the world ?

THE DELPHIC SIBYL

I dream (and in my dream, I smile) Of a maid in Melos' isle —

How beautiful she was ! She kept no slave, she wore no crown, But all the gods from heaven looked down

To see her pass.

Her brow was calm, her limbs were free; The might of her simplicity

THE SISTINE EVE 71

To men seemed more than human : A Deity ! they cried ; a new Venus ! — But one, who loved her, knew

That she was Woman.

He wrought her all of marble pure. He cried : Thy beauty shall endure

When Hellas sleeps in clay. Behold, O World, thy Womanhood ! — They smote the statue where she stood,

And hewed the arms away.

They buried her both dark and deep ; They bade their wives and sisters heap

Mould on her, with their hands : — She rose like light ! The centuries Slipped like a garment to her knees,

And still she stands !

THE FIGURE

Sibyl hoar, Enchantress holy, Giantess of Melancholy, Tell us —

CHORUS OF CHERUBIM Hush!

72 THE SISTINE EVE

THE FIGURE

What awful book (As when some rugged hill Cleaves with a titan's look) Opens beneath thy gaze, Where thy vast, pagan face

Is darkened under Night-hues of unreverberating thunder?

CHORUS OF CHERUBIM

Still ! O still ! She is not such As tone of mortal song can touch.

THE FIGURE

Speak, Prophetess ! We fear — we guess — What our hearts wait in breathlessness.

THE CUM^EAN SIBYL

"Tarquin ! Tarquin !" — Thousand score They hailed him god and emperor. I entered at his palace door: I looked at him —

CHORUS OF CHERUBIM

No more ! No more !

THE SISTINE EVE 73

THE CUM^AN SIBYL

I said : I bring thee volumes nine. Men name thee lordly and divine: Thou shall be — but the price is mine ! He said : I take no price of thine.

I hurled six volumes in the flame. He cried : What price now dost thou name. O Prophetess ? — I said : The same ! He frowned ; I went the way I came.

He sent for me at set of sun: And hast thou burned them all but one? And hast no other price ? — Nay, none. He answered : Then thy will be done !

THE FIGURE

Speak, Sibyl, speak ! What was the price Which asked so proud a sacrifice?

JUDITH

[Aside to her maid, who bears the head of Holo- femes on a golden salver]

Hark what she saith !

THE CUIVLEAN SIBYL

The same which yonder, of Eve's eyes, The Serpent asks, in Paradise.

74 THE SISTINE EVE

JUDITH I guessed it : — death.

GOLIATH [to David]

Death ! *******

FIRST CHERUB

Hark yonder, where from wall to wall, two

Prophets

Converse like oaks in storm across a grove, One husht in the roar, one vocal in the lull.

SECOND CHERUB Which one is silent?

FIRST CHERUB

He who, browed benign, Sits like the Prince of Death, soliloquizing With the commanding genius of his soul.

SECOND CHERUB

But the other one: What beetling thoughts are

his

Where, like a crag o'erclu'ng by cataracts, He murmurs deep in the tortuous folds of his

beard ?

THE SISTINE EVE 75

FIRST CHERUB Listen !

JEREMIAH

I have likened the Daughter of Zion to a comely

and delicate woman: The shepherds with their flocks shall come unto

her round about. They shall pitch their tents against her ; they shall

feed every one in his place. — Yea, Eve, men are thy shepherds, and thou like

the Daughter of Zion.

Prepare ye war against her ! Arise ! let us go up

at noon. Woe unto us ! for the day goeth away, and the

shadows of evening Are stretched out and afar. Arise ! let us go up

by night, And let us destroy her palaces. Let us smite the

city that fed us ! — Yea, Eve, men are thy shepherds, and thou like

the Daughter of Zion.

ISAIAH

Yet shall they not destroy her ! But their land

shall be named Ignorance. It shall be no more inhabited, but wild beasts of

the desert shall lie there.

76 THE SISTINE EVE

Yea, satyrs shall dance on their hearths, and dragons crouch in their palaces.

For the city is stablished, O Eve, where thy dreaming shall have its fruition.

Where shall the Ignorant dwell? Yea, where is

the land of their Eden ? The grass thereof shall wither; their heavens be

closed as a scroll ; And all their host shall fall down, as the leaf fall-

eth off from the vine. But the city is stablished in Man, where thy

dreaming, O Eve, hath fruition.

CHORUS OF CHERUBIM

The Tree ! The smiling, bitter Tree ! The Tree, in all its pride and mystery !

ADAM [beneath the Tree]

Where dost thou look, beloved, O my Bride?

Where dost thou gaze beyond and far away ? Dost thou not feel thy lover at thy side,

And the soft winds of this cerulean day ? Why look'st thou so, beloved, O my Bride?

THE SNAKE

Lift up thine eyes to mine, daughter of God ! Like birds into heaven let them enter in : —

THE SISTINE EVE 77

Behold an angel battling with a cloud ;

The angel is Man ; the splendid cloud is Sin ; The battle is Man's Soul, daughter of God.

ADAM

Let us go forth into our garden, love:

The birds are singing and the beasts awaken.

Dew-laden dreams fall round us from above,

Like almond-bloom, when breezy boughs are shaken.

Let us go forth into our garden, love !

THE SNAKE

Eat of the fruit of Knowledge, Child of Eden ! Of bitter Knowledge, which hath roots in

death.

Dare with thy dreams — yea, that which is for bidden !

For life is but a dream which conquereth Its coil of slumber. Live, then, Child of Eden !

ADAM

Love, there shall be no thought but Thee and Me Forevermore. When our two spirits mate,

Time and the world shall do us ministry And all the stars contribute to our state.

Love, there shall be no joy but Thee and Me.

78 THE SISTINE EVE

THE SNAKE

Behold the stars — and Thee and Me forgotten ! Time and the world and other lovers, trem

bling At all the beauty still to be begotten;

Yea, hark to thine and Adam's sons assem

bling To hymn thy deed, when Eden lies forgotten.

CHORUS OF MALE PRESENCES

We thirst for life, and the more we thirst The swifter the rivers of love outpour

To quench us;

Like the living, leaping waters that burst From the Prophet's stroke on the desert's shore, They uprise and drench us, Yet we thirst the more And we joy to thirst, For we count the pain a joy to repay us, When the power of love, which pants to allay us, Quickens again And again, as at first, The infinite rapture the. weak call pain.

And we know — for we have sharpened the dull edge Of sense on the sword of the Tree of Knowledge,

THE SISTINE EVE 79

And we feel — as Spring feels the sky in the

sod —

That we are the sons of a son of God. And we kindle from that a divine volition — The fire of more than a mortal ambition, The love of a conflict deep and grand Which only Manhood can understand, — And we bless the Apple, that erst was accurst, And our Mother Eve, who bestowed the thirst, Which vaults, like flame, through spirit and brain, And courses like vigor through every vein, In seeking the joys that the weak call pain.

CHORUS OF BOTTICELLI'S WOMEN

We thirst for love, and the more we thirst The deeper our spirits and limbs are immerst

In the beauty, that is love's radiance: Out at our eyes, o'er the tremulous brim Of our hearts, it beams, as at heaven's rim

The moon brightens over a lake in a trance ; Till a peace, more lovely than morning light, Makes us grow like lilies, tall and bright,

From the banks of Sin, which is Ignorance.

And we take an innocent, shy delight

In the flow of our maiden forms, and the sight

Of our faces, half glimpsed, half recondite,

80 THE SISTINE EVE

And the luminous coils of our looping dresses,

Which emulate the beauty of tresses,

And the flower-like grace of our hands; but

these Are the symbols of inner serenities.

For we know [from that piercing intuition Which takes from Eve its superb ignition] And we feel — by the light in each other's eyes — That we are the daughters of Paradise. And this sense brings with it a certitude .Of the immortal aim of this mortal feud, And makes us simply reconciled With weakness of woman and birth of child, And makes our souls, in largess, be Self-renderers to futurity, With a faith, miscalled fatuity By those who love beauty less than we, And a passive joy in the present's good, And a self-forgetting, understood By the heart alone of womanhood. And therefore we bless the divinely human Heart of Eve, that created us Woman, And gave us that insight, which can prove Its faith, that ours — while the planets move — Are the worship and strength of the men we love.

THE SISTINE EVE 81

CHORUS OF SHAPES IN "THE LAST JUDGMENT"

We are the Phantoms, which the exceeding mad ness Of mortal Ignorance creates in sadness

Out of the clouds of conflict and of pain. Horror and Hopelessness, amid the gnarring And knotted tumult of our rabid warring,

Spawn us, and their own Dark devours us again.

Hateful to others, to ourselves abhorrent, We fume and wrestle, like a falling torrent

That, fearing, hastens its own overthrow; Or bleakly blown upon by winds eternal, Like shadowy spirits strewn on shores infernal,

Downcast, we file in diuturnity of woe.

Far from the lamps of Dawn and pure Orion, We endure the anarch tortures of Ixion —

Immortal anguish : misery ! O pain ! Love, send thy light amid our dim abortions, To show that we are evanescent portions

Of the Mind's mortal battling for the eternal gain.

82 THE SISTINE EVE

JONAS

Awful and dazzling Loveliness ! Immortal Render of our mystery ! O World ! O orbed Time !

0 Heaven ! And does my spirit climb Beyond them all, beyond them all — to thee, Lady ineffable of Love ? — This, this

It is to love, to dare and to achieve !

Behold, O Eve,

The consummation of thy bitter Tree. Look, mighty Mother ! Even thou didst con ceive

This son ! — Thine insurrection leaps in me, An effervescing fire, a piercing foison Of keen effulgence ! Vision in mine eyes Like clouded wine it pours, and in my limbs

Impenetrating joy, subtler than poison, And in mine ears — incomparable hymns !

Yea, like a Charioteer, on whirling Time,

1 sit sublime,

%

And guide, with my majestical left hand, The invisible reins of nameless black Despairs And haughty Miseries — a chafing band That plunge and tremble, like enraged Night mares,

In the dusk of the Last Judgment; these, like steeds,

THE SISTINE EVE 83

Propel the triumph of my viewless car, And while the purple incense streams from under The trampling fleetness of their muffled thunder, And while their flanks froth terrors, in bright beads,

To dare the goal

Of my imperious soul, — Still guiding them, as with a god's control, Over my splendid, shoulder turning

Mine eyes, in giant yearning, Upward, my Mother, upward still to thee I gaze for power and love and immortality.

THE SNAKE [to Eve]

Now canst thou doubt the beauty of thy dream

ing?

Now canst thou doubt the duty of thy deed ? Eat of the fruit, O Eve ! Thou art redeeming

The race of Adam to their latest seed, For Time shall prove the beauty of thy dream ing.

EVE [taking the Apple from the Snake]

O ye Wise, love Beauty ! All Ye Strong, revere Her !

SECOND INTERLUDE

THE SISTINE SPIRIT

Ha ! dost thou shake thy slumber off, young

titan ?

(Unconscious child no more, for now the dawn Proclaims the awaking world.) Ah ! dost thou

seize

The shadow of my mantle, and in mine eyes Gaze with an ecstasy of pain and power? Say, dost thou feel the immitigable blade, Which sings in the light above the Tree of Knowl edge,

Upscorch the loveless impotence within thee, Ignite thy mind, and scorify thy heart ? What ! dost thou reach thy hand thyself to swing

it?

Arise ! Go forth ! Youth of the centuries, And wield thy sword in prayer to thy great Mother !

84

THIRD CANTO: THE BIRTH OF MAN

CHORUS OF PRESENCES

Eden is fallen ! Man is arisen !

Like a knighted warrior, behold him arise. Like a waker from slumber, Like a captive from prison, He bursts from the bondage of Paradise ! For the Almighty's stroke Has severed the yoke Of the beast's contentment and earthward eyes.

SONG OF THE EXPELLING ANGEL

Mine is the stroke Promethean !

The infinite love that burns like ire,

The impregnating might, the conceiving fire,

And the pang that delivers the Birth of Man.

I am the life, whose garment is Death,

And Truth like a lining within is laid,

And him who seeks me I singe with my

blade,

But he weareth the garment and triumpheth. 85

86 THE SISTINE EVE

Adam, depart ! My sword's flame, like a torch's, Reveals thy kingdom consumed and

wrecked,

But the pain that revolts in thine intellect Is the love that heals in the lightning that scorches.

CHORUS OF PRESENCES

Eden is fallen !

Man is arisen !

He is burst from the prison Of Paradise !

ADAM

Eve, crouch more close to me. I will protect thee. The hailing fire my sense like anguish sears. The goal is far — but O ! how glorious, For through the night thine eyes are still the stars.

PART TWO

POEMS LYRICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE

GROUP I

Two song-birds build their nests within my brain,

Arid hatch strange broods, each to his own re frain ; Ever one sings : " To-morrow,

Sweet Joy !" The other: "Yesterday, sweet sor row!"

91

FRAIL Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks

Of quiet, crystal pools, beside whose brink The varicolored dreams, like cattle, come to drink,

Cool Sleep, thy reeds, in solemn ranks,

That murmur peace to me by midnight's

streams,

At dawn I pluck, and dayward pipe my flock of dreams.

THE ARC LIGHT

I WATCHED an arc light under wind-stirr'd trees

Sleep on the pale green grass, in tender swoon,

And held my breath thinking the pensive

moon

Was telling there her lucent rosaries. Light of the Arts ! no more by lonely seas

Wandering in naked glory art thou met;

From out our heaven Homer's moon has set, That lit the love-bowers of the Dryades.

Yet 'neath the conscious vestments Time has wrought,

The simple Graces love and act the same; And through the subtle wires of labored thought

The world is lit by heaven's divinest flame, Till, in the sordid midnight of the poor, The lamp of Zeus illumes a workman's door.

SHE stood before a florist's window-pane.

Roses peered forth and they were envious pale,

And lilies, white as cloistered virgin's veil, Vied with the deep carnations but in vain. If at her beauty's heart a lethal stain

Were hid, to beauty's face it told no tale.

"Cut flowers [so she read the sign] for

sale;" Half to herself she murmured it again.

One stopped within the sharp, electric light, And threw his shadow on her and his eyes, Nor read those sad concealed analogies

Of which her gorgeous, answering look was full.

" Cut flowers," and to-morrow they shall blight, But till to-morrow, God ! how beautiful.

94

I DREAMED a thousand ages, armed with flint And bone and bronze, were toiling in a mint,

And sculptured rude to see On each rough coin they struck was "Poesie."

And now, in that same hall, a mighty wheel, Revolved incessant by a mob in steel,

Showers the round gold thence Stamped with the goddess's head "Conven ience."

95

LEISURE, kind Leisure, I require !

Leisure, whose snood

Of quiethood Conceals shy dreams of sage desire:

For Leisure, only Leisure, Ripens young thought and brings work pleasure.

Dull toil is but a drudge at best;

Sloth has no profit,

Sleep — still less of it ; But idle brains are busiest

While Leisure, shyest Leisure, Ripens young thought and brings work pleasure.

96

HER eyes are casements clear as dew For her kindness to look through ; There, behind their crystal, stray Fairy fancies dressed in gray; Through the trellis'd lashes, till Slumber draws the silken blind, Her quick spirit peeps behind The pane, or signals from the sill.

97

IN VENICE

THE Lady of the Sunset,

The Bride of the New Moon, She lifts her liquid garments

About her silvery shoon, And as she sways their draperies

The dim stars interwoven In their dark fabric swing and ripple

Like winds by music cloven.

The Princess of the Olden Isles,

The Enamored of the Sea, She has glided from her throne of stars

And courtesied, Love, to thee: Along her smooth and turquoise halls

She glides, and kneels with me Before thy shrine, with clasped hands,

And bows and prays to thee !

98

A MATINADE

RISE, sweet signora of the sigh !

The gondola is gliding by.

The queenly Adriatic Sea

Shall hold her mirror, dear, for thee,

Apollo be thy slave, to twine

A fillet for those locks of thine,

And hire the moonlight from thine eyes

To cool the day-star of his skies.

So lady dear, be fleet !

And from your dreamy sighs, Signora mine, signora sweet, Arise !

99

TO A GONDOLA

SWAN of the silver beak and sable breast, Stemming the night,

Art thou a bird of song, or bark of quest, Or heaven-wandered sprite, That in the still moonlight

Makest in palace courts thy liquid nest?

If bird thou be, what swaying skies are these, Between two heavens,

That lap thee in their starry lucencies,

Whilst thou toward unseen havens, With plumage like the raven's

Glidest with pinions closed against the breeze ?

If bark thou be, what fairy argosies

Leadest thou on ? What amber port of all the sunset's seas

Lures thee with music yon ?

What fetes of Oberon,

Tinkling husht joys, twinkling tranquillities ? 100

TO A GONDOLA 101

A sprite thou art — a spirit without peer ! A lover's thought

Thou art, and Fancy is thy gondolier, Whose gliding vision, fraught With song and love, gleams but

An instant in life's dark, only to disappear.

IN THE STILL CAMPAGNA."

IN the still campagna, When no birds were singing, 'Mid the undulating Little hills and hollows Pied with starred mosaic, There I stopped and pondered.

Right against the azure Of the Alban mountains, Rose an overwhelming Gaunt and eyeless ruin: Eyeless, but the sockets Stared on me in sadness.

Loneliness then clutched me Like a chill at noonday; Terrors of old Caesars Taught me a new heartache Where those walls still on me Stared with a stark blindness.

" How ! old earthy phantom, Hast thou, then, no solace 102

IN THE STILL CAMPAGNA." 103

When the burning sunbeam Chars thy skull like Cyclops' ? None ? No inner vision, Thoughts that hymn like Homer's ? "

Hardly had I ceased when Sudden from the knollside, Or perhaps from heaven, Through that hollow, lidless Ruin flying, rose a Flock of songbirds, singing.

Love, you are my nature ! When by lonely breedings Long on mortal anguish I stand blinded, swift and Sweet from lyric fountains, Dart then through my sadness Songbirds of your soul !

EARLY MAY IN NEW ENGLAND

STRAWBERRY-FLOWER and violet Are come, but the wind blows coldly yet ; And robin's-egg skies brood sunny chill Where hyacinth summer sleeps under the hill And the frog is still.

Applebloom floats on the warm blue river, But white shad-blossoms ripple and shiver, And purple-grackle pipes till his blithe heart

grieves,

For his gladdest songs, through the little elm- leaves, Are but make-believes.

104

EARLY APRIL IN ENGLAND

ACROSS the moist beam of the cloud-rimmed sun,

The larks run up in ecstasies of Spring,

And little feathered flutes of melody,

The yellow-ammers, pipe along the hedges.

The sheep, half basking in the golden blaze, Half shivering in the gray, engulfing shadows, Browse on the faint-green hills ; the chilly wind Ruffles the white geese on the rippled pond.

105

SONG

SPRING is Shakspere's garden ! - In May, to the lover's mind, Every rose is a Rosalind

And every wood an Arden.

Hark! "Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!" Sylvius ! Can it he be ?

106

HOLIDAY

WHAT is so free

As a child in its glee,

Or a bird on the tree !

A jumping boy

Is a wave of joy ;

Little girls,

That gayly pass

With flying curls

Across the grass,

The soul unclog:

And oh a sight

Of rare delight

Is a running shepherd dog !

107

THE KATYDID

THOU husky raven of the insect race,

Who hintest — hid by darkness from espial

Of some poor maid's disgrace,

Cease this asseveration and denial !

Whatever the black blame, will it abate it

Thus to incessant rasp and iterate it ?

If Katy did the dark deed, let her state it.

108

THE CRICKET

HARK to the fairy linnet — How reticent he sings ! Sings, stops; then, in a minute, He'll re-begin it,

Then stop again.

The sunset is his dawn:

When day is over,

He pipes a delicate strain Beneath the tiger-lilies, by the lawn,

Or, from the top boughs of the tallest clover, Outpours his Lilliputian carollings.

109

AT night, I prayed for sleep; instead The Muse came, rummaging my head For rhymes. Again I craved the dews Of sleep ; they fell — upon the Muse.

110

WITH A ROSE

TO S. A. D. A ROSE

From lovely Rhodope's remotest time —

The poets chose To instil a lovelier meaning in their rhyme.

A friend Is subtler than a poet. Friendship knows

A way to lend A finer fragrance even to the rose.

Ill

STANZAS

TO THE BURNISHED GRAIN OF AN OLD-FASHIONED MAHOGANY TABLE

AURORAL tempest on an auburn sea,

Scourged by the spectres of unmoving wind, Still storm, dumb gale, immured immensity, Dark thunderer upon the shores of mind, Spirit of oceans ! — here thou art confined In beauty and in silence. Rive thy locks

Tumultuous, till thy bronze waves foam in glory,

Writhe on till thou art hoary, The hush-air'd chamber shall not feel thy shocks, Nor thy smooth polished shore thereby be under mined.

Wild harrier of the mad atmospheres,

Whose looks are lightnings, who hath cap tured thee

And poured in wood this sunny wrath of tears ? Who else but mirror-cinctured Nature, she That lurks by rivers and the placid sea 112

STANZAS 113

To prison-in the silent-roaring thunders

With pomp pictorial. In such still state

Art thou incarcerate,

And Time, whose sitting worketh mellow won ders, Thy jailer sits, in cell of dark mahogany.

The terrors of the guessed invisible

Are worse than seen calamities; the eye Beholds not here the famine- screeching gull,

The ear knows not the night-wreck'd sea man's cry,

Yet may the fancy hear his monody Sung by the mermaids of those amber deeps,

Beneath whose burnished and congealed waves

A lurid dragon raves,

Whose dropping eye with ruddy tinctures steeps That marvel-teeming world in strange mortality.

Tempestuous sea, dash on ! Roar on, dim tides, That come, or go, or stay, — we are not

stirred ; The dark-descending simoon o'er thee glides,

But to the wooden'd sense it moans are surd. Even while we gaze, our inward eyes — grown blurr'd, —

114 STANZAS

Behold thee for illusion, that reproves

Our reason's folly, till we ask: why should

We sympathize with wood ? Yea, thou art like a passionate heart that loves : Wildly it beats upon the world, but is not heard.

SUNSET

BEHOLD where Night clutches the cup of heaven And quaffs the beauty of the world away ! Lo, his first draught is all of dazzling day;

The next he fills with the red wine of even

And drinks ; then of the twilight's amber, seven Deep liquid hues, seven times, superb in ray, He fills — and drinks; the last, a mead pale- gray

Leaves the black beaker gemmed with starry levin.

Even so does Time quaff our mortality !

First, of the effervescing blood and blush Of virgin years, then of maturity

The deeper glow, then of the pallid hush Where only the eyes still glitter, till even they — After a pause — melt in immenser day.

115

FOR F. J. L.

THE flower shall fade, not the spirit Which gave to it being;

That has finer forms to inherit Beyond our mere seeing.

Oh, why does the lily seem fair?

For seeing? for smelling? Or is it that Ariel there

Has found him a dwelling?

Stale flowers for me shall not sere, If you do but give them ;

Slight thoughts for me shall be dear, If you but conceive them.

116

TO M. AND M. L.

I CANNOT think good-by;

How can I say it? My heart's debt lies too nigh

For words to pay it.

Bright cloud, that flingest wide The heaven's wonder,

Dark cloud, and dim hillside, And far-voiced thunder,

Soft breeze, that ringest clear The sweet day's knell,

Sad bird, that singest near, — Speak my farewell !

117

BALLAD

YOUNG rider and steed they dash on through the

dusk, And the fog gathers gray as the mould on the

husk,

And the froth on the flank is like foam on the flood Where the brown stream pours panting through dark underwood.

"But what of the night, love, and what of the

miles, When the morning shall break in my true love's

own smiles ? Oh, I'd ride the white charger that neighs from the

sea To the edge of the world, if she waited for me ! "

Dim head in the doorway it -hears him dash by, And the cold smile curls keen, and the laugh

lights the eye:

118

BALLAD 119

"Ye'll hae off wi' your league-boots and love by

the sea When your bonny hair's white and ye're wiser

like me."

II

The flare's in the chimney, the song's on the

crane, And the maiden sits watching the fog on the

pane,

And the hot glowing hearthlight is cosey and dry, But the warm light that's tender's the light in her

eye.

"Nay, granny, I'll just take a step from the sill, For the twilight is cold, and the mist hides the

hill, And fain would I warm the whole world with my

heart To comfort thee — O my dear love — where thou

art!"

" Ye've let the winds in, lass ; the candle is out ! Now God send ye wisdom, whate'er ye're about ! The parritch is cold, lass, that erst was sae hot: When ye're older ye'll be a deal wiser, I wot ! "

120 BALLAD

III

There's a leap in the mist; there's a voice in the

night ;

There's a step that is heavy with one that is light : " Ah, love, dear, is wisdom, and wisdom is this : The seals of your sages — they melt with a kiss !"

EVEN as an infant fingers the crisp sheet And crumples it, the more his milk is sweet, So we, with restive hands, in happy sleep Enact vague deeds on Nature's cover-slip.

121

A CHILD

BRIEF Revelation of enduring Truth,

Frail snowflake in the silent storm of God,

Scarce lighting on the swallow-wing of youth Ere wafting down to dew the pregnant sod,

Infant ! or Angel else — thine innocence

Is as a crystal, wherethrough men may see

The seedling's might, the star's magnificence, And of our common day the mystery.

More, it enkindles might; and like the pure Polished convex of a bright burning-glass.

Binds the wild hues and lightnings, which perdure In love as heaven, and in concentric mass

Ignites by them the unfeeling dross of nature To conflagrations heavenly in stature.

122

BABY PANTOMIME

SERENE, he sits on other shores

Than ours: with wide, unconscious lands He holds strange speech, or, silent, pores

On denizens of viewless strands; On tablets of the air weird scores

He writes, and makes, with eager hands, As strange erasements ; then, two-fisted, stores

An elfin hour-glass with heavenly sands.

123

THE FIRST TOOTH

DEAR babe, that this should be ! Whence should

this come ? —

This horny 'scutcheon of an eld orang, Where through the tender coral of thy gum

The wee, sly beast has peeped his prying fang:

Colossal meditation ! Can this be

The cropping of that seed which Cadmus

sowed ? Or that gaunt emblem of mortality

Under the sickle, on our earth-abode ?

Forbid it, heaven ! 'Tis but the nursling thorn That nestles near the bloom of every rose,

The curling holly-leafs keen-sharded horn,

The stubborn shield of beauty's frail repose,

The official mace of angels : even as the Lord Guarded the grace of Eden with a sword !

124

THE DESERTED STEEDS

MIDWAY the silent parlor plain

The iron horses stand, nor turn,

But like the yoke that Putnam left,

Await, mid-field, their lord's return.

There they have stood since yestereve —

Nor champed, nor broke their traces — till

The moon looked in the western blind, Till morn peeped o'er the eastern sill.

Then strides their lord to field again

To crack his whip and drive his teams,

Back from the far campaigns of sleep, The baby Bunker Hill of dreams.

125

THE CHILD AND SLEEP

f THIS baby brow, like a smooth handkerchief,

Has in the night been ironed white and even, And all these little limbs, beyond belief,

Are like sweet garments, fresh prepared in heaven

To clothe the littlest angel loved by Mary.

Who was it smoothed these rose-habiliments Of childhood ? — Sleep, a gentle nurse, and fairy,

Who folds the crumplings of our discontents,

And lines Day's chest with viewless lavender To sweeten all the vestments of our care.

All Nature's tired children turn to her For renovation ; for she can repair

The outworn body, from her secret scrip,

And minds outworn seek her physicianship.

126

SUMMER SONG

THE cricket is chirring,

The tree-toad is purring, The busy frog pipes,

The beetle is whirring,

And curled in his nest, 'Mid the night dew of rest,

My wee one is stirring.

Then quick, Fairy Hummer,

Lull my newcomer Rosy and deep In sleep, soft sleep,

9 Mid the sweets of the summer.

The stars at bo-peeping Like white lambs are leaping

On the hills of the dark In the Good Shepherd's keeping:

Their wool is like silk,

And they pour their bright milk For my little one's sleeping. 127

128 SUMMER SONG

Then hush, Fairy Hummer!

Kiss my newcomer,

And cradle him deep In sleep, soft sleep,

9 Mid the sweets of the summer.

FIRE WORSHIP

A POPPY, all on fire with beauty's beams,

Outburned the glamour of the liquid bar Of sunlight where it swam, diffusing far

The brilliance of its spiritual streams:

A chalice, spilled on some blood-stained trireme's Prow, in libation to the sanguine star, The ritual cup of dread Dyauspitar,

Brimmed with the wine of its own opiate dreams.

Before that shrine, in mute idolatry, —

A little Gangean god, an orient

Cupid, rose-flushed with infant wonder ment —

The baby gazed, and reached in rhapsody His small, translucent hands, while silently

From flower to face a rubiate nimbus went.

129

PLASTIC Fancies, form a mould:

Fill it, Heart, with burning gold : Break it, Love, when life is cold.

When the shard is struck away,

There shall stand — where once was clay Beauty, till the Judgment-day !

130

THE UNSAID

THE forms sublime, the moods elate, That rise within the poet's reach,

May never transubstantiate

Their glowing ardors into speech.

Yet sweet — although we fail in words — To feel the changed, creative light

That gleams on nature's fields and herds, Cast by a sun of inner sight,

While burst upon the exultant brain Visions of grandeur and of grace.

He gazes more serene on men

Who looks the Muses in the face

131

I WATCHED a drama, sitting in the wings, And heard the plaudits of eternal things :

But when the Prompter bawled My name, I failed my cue — nor was recalled.

132

ALL joys, familiar and divine, All satisfactions fail, save thine,

Contemplation ! Ambitions climb and fall; Love, and Hope, his thrall, Pity, and our noblest passions pall; Yea, one and all, Each one.

Not Venus, wreathed with bloom and vine, Glows with rapture like to thine —

Meditation ! The rose can never be Sweet as our revery About her. Lord, each deity Bows down to thee, Each one.

133

WHEN subtle passion makes me slave

And leads me, in her golden chain, Where dazzling legions of the grave

Troop in her spurious beauty's train, Poetry, make then thy sign — Lord and Sovereign divine !

The beast wears still his tusk and snout;

Man merely has dispensed with these. The satyr leeringly looks out

Behind the mask of Socrates;

Thou only art of heavenly line, Lord and Sovereign divine !

When, therefore, orient-vestured Sin Holds her usurping court in me, Set thy white torch aflame within Her palace walls, O Poetry,

And on their ashes build thy shrine, Lord and Sovereign divine !

134

THE SLINGER

A BOY, who stoops upon a green hillside, Where he has climbed, exhilarant and flushed, And picks up a flat stone, shell-shaped and

smooth —

A piece of splitty slate, or curved feldspar — Scanned with the relish of an expert eye, And fits it in the hollow of his hand, And sways his body for the joyous fling — How wondrously he shoots it through the air ! How pent with song it soars into the blue Stored with the frenzy of his boyish whim, Skims the sunk summit of the tallest pine, Rounds, dips, tacks, turns, then, twirling, soars

again,

Catching the sunlight like a swallow's wing; Then, like the last dip of a 'cellist's bow, Or a ground-sparrow, slacking to its nest, Slants the long slope, and dives in to the vale. 135

\ \

136 THE SLINGER

Not more inspired the pebble David slung ! A stone, a lump, a clot of hardened loam, Yet, in an instant's metamorphosis, It leaps to beauty like a work of God — A lyric thing, a fellow of the lark, Breathing a moment's immortality — Then sinks to silence and the loam it left.

II

Whose was the hand which flung me into breath ? Whose was the whim or purpose of that deed ? — Flung in the dizzy zenith of clear mind, Whirled in the cloudy vortex of dark will, On, on — projectile of a deathless youth, Poised with his sling upon the brow of heaven — Skimming, and skimmed by other whizzing clay, Skipped in the sun to caper caracoles, What is of man the ultimate Goliath, Giant of 111, whom he must batter down That Saul the Right may reign ? What is man's

goal?

Or — mindful of the grim analogy — What stricken pine, forgotten in the forest That skirts the valley underneath Time's hill, Shall mark his accidental tumbling-tomb ?

LIFE SAID TO DEATH

LIFE said to Death: 'Brother, Who was our mother ? Did not One who bore us Make the world for us: Were we not twin-born ? What hast thou, then, inborn Lordlier, vaster, That thou playest master? By what right or merit Dost thou inherit Earth's beautiful riches?

Answer me : Which is

The world's more deserving —

The served, or the serving?

Thou art a depender

On me, yet a spender

Of all my dear earnings,

Rhapsodies, yearnings.

I build, thou breakest; I bring, and thou takest; I save, thou lavishest; I love, and thou ravishest. 137

138 LIFE SAID TO DEATH

Deaf and disdainful, Thou leavest me baneful — Curst all I care for. Answer me: Wherefore?

O, say that thy spendings Are used in befriendings ; That 'neath barbarity Thou workest in charity, To joy givest feeling, And a quick healing To pain's slow cancer. O, loosen the tied knot Of silence, and answer ! — '

But Death replied not.

OLD Age, the irrigator,

Digs our bosoms straighter,

More workable and deeper still

To turn the ever-running mill

Of nights and days. He makes a trough

To drain our passions off,

That used so beautiful to lie

Variegated to the sky,

On waste moorlands of the heart —

Haunts of idleness, and art

Still half-dreaming. All their piedness,

Rank and wild and shallow wideness,

Desultory splendors, he

Straightens conscientiously

To a practicable sluice

Meant for workaday, plain use.

All the mists of early dawn,

Twilit marshes, being gone

With their glamour, and their stench,

There is left — a narrow trench.

139

As children fling bright silver in the sea To watch it shine and sink there, so do we

Our treasures of wrought rhyme And marble toss amid the surge of time.

140

GROUP II

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

OUT of the ' obscure wood ' and ominous way Which are our life, to that obscurer sea Whose margin glooms and gleams alter nately

With storm and splendor of the shrouded spray —

He has departed. Our familiar day,

His elm-hushed, ivied walks, no more shall

see That radiant smile of austere courtesy:

On Shady Hill the mist hangs cold and gray.

He has departed hence, but not alone:

Still in his steps, where golden discourse

burns, To Virgil now he speaks, and now he turns

Toward Allighieri in calm undertone,

Holding with modest tact his path between The Mantuan and the mighty Florentine.

143

FRANCIS JAMES CHILD

How fain we conjure back his face ! How fain As, bowed with musings long on elvish lore, He clutched his satchel at the class-room door

And shot the quick " Good-morning, gentlemen,"

From under the bronze curls, and entered. Then For us that hour of quaint illusion wore Such spell as when, beside the Breton shore,

The wizard clerk astounded Dorigen.

For we beheld the nine-and -twenty ride

Through those dim aisles their deathless pil grimage,

Lady and monk and rascal laugh and chide, Living and loving on the enchanted page,

Whilst, half apart, there murmured side by side The master-poet and the scholar-mage.

144

TO GEORGE PIERCE BAKER

THE ghosts of Praise-God Barebones and his clan

Still walk, and with their old acerbity

Infect us; even the University Is haunted still, and the sparse Puritan, Turned Prospero, has made a Caliban

Of human passion, and wild Poesie

Pinched in an oak to starve, and Mimicry And all her kindred Muses put to ban.

Yet not so now at Harvard ; there betakes

Him now the scholar-player, with his Muse (That deathless wench, the Mermaid) and renews

His vows, and breaks his fast, and is restored By our own Baker. — May the loaves he bakes

Soon pile a feast at Master Shakspere's board !

145

TO WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

MOODY, our time is glad of you ; 'tis given (After exotic, ineffectual blows) For you, a poet, with sure blade of prose

Keen from the artist's scabbard, to have riven

Our specious theatre from its roof-beam even Unto the pit of smugness, to disclose The emancipated desert's wild repose —

The new-world gladness of our native heaven.

Henceforth we cannot be the same; for us Americans, because of you, the tide

Dramatic turns to seek its heritage Splendidly homeward to ourselves; our stage Is cleft: between its pusillanimous

And daring goals stands now the Great Divide.

146

TO THE SAME, AFTER SEVERE ILL NESS

Now that you are come up from the hush vale Whose crumbling verge hugs close the dread- named stream,

And we, for whom your sojourn there did seem

A time intolerable, may inhale

Glad breath to greet you on the old firm trail Of health again, still that suspense extreme Pervades our deep thanksgiving, like a dream

Of Him whose thin hand felt the sanguine nail.

For not alone the sentient personal

Pang that was spared compels our gratitude, But that contagious loss which would have spread, Unknown, to those who knew you not, through

all

The after-time; but now, that dread sub dued,

With victory life girds you, garlanded. 147

TO GEORGE GREY BARNARD

HEWER of visions from our human clay,

Hewer of man's strong soul in sentient stone, Of maiden limbs, like breath of flowers new- blown,

Of mighty loins, girded in giant fray,

Of hearts that wrestle, vanquish, fall and pray — Hail to you, dauntless Hewer ! Not alone Your arm is raised to shape the vast un known :

A nation's sinews hold that arm in sway.

Though from Carraran hills, by alien hands, Those forms of plastic vision are unfurled,

Yet in their glowing, marble chastities America in naked splendor stands

Inviolate, and looms across the world — Labor's impassioned apotheosis.

148

TO AUGUSTUS FRANZEN '

HAD poet Geoffrey been a painter then

In Richard's days, he would have painted

true, Healthful and bold and beautiful, like you

Franzen, large-souled, sure-handed. Had Fran zen,

Painter in oils, wielded an English pen To-day as artist, he would limn anew Even such a clear-eyed Canterbury view

As Chaucer limned of nature and of men.

So, when I watch, anew, my little son

Take breath beneath your brush, and pout again

His arch and fresh-eyed innocence, I stand Silent, and take your hand in mine, as one

Who, in Old London, or Velasquez' Spain, Held in his own a living master's hand.

1 With a copy of "The Canterbury Pilgrims."

149

TO J. E. F.

Is this our common world of weariness —

The narrow stream we fume and struggle in ?

Soft as a sleeping ocean and serene The quivering city slumbers, measureless Under the moon : the roaring paths men press

By day, are sweet with silences, akin

To dying murmurs of a violin : Such magic has the moon to calm and bless.

The mind, too, has its moonlight, which can

steep Time's sordid commonplace in harmony

That heals pain with oblivion, and the scar

Of garish strife with beauty, and the deep Rebellions of the soul with sympathy :

Such might has quiet friendship's mystic star.

150

THE HILL-SPIRIT

TO R. B.

RIBBED like a conch and ruddy through the dark The frail wedge of his horn-clear tepee glows Above the pasture-cliff, warm with the rose

Light of its own live heart : outside the stark

Grove clinks the wampum of its frozen bark Against the starry cold ; a shadow shows Tall in the tepee's slit ; then in the snows

Valeward husht moccasins imprint their mark.

Blithe with the wonder of their home wood-fire The hillside children, rapt in fairy lore,

Hark suddenly his footstep : giant- geared,

He stands before them ; then upon the floor Seated beside them, like an immortal sire,

Laughs — with one great hand tangled in his beard.

151

TO R. E. F.

ARCH twinklings of the quaint wood-smile of Pan, Far-trembling, golden lights from Jason's

fleece, And lyric breathings from the lutes of Greece,

And gentle ardencies from old Japan,

With whatsoever blithe, Arcadian,

And simply wise accord with such as these, Are blent in you to one true Yankee piece,

Keen, classic, laughter-brewing, Keatsian.

By forum, Alp and oriental fane

(As varied climes color the song-bird's

wings) On you far paths and fair imaginings

Have traced their retrospects; yet, if there be

One word by which to conjure you up plain, That fine home-word is Hospitality.

152

TO E. H. S.

BRIGHT in the dark of sleep all night till morn The henchmen dreams about my bed did sit And looked on me, with their strange torches lit;

And one was passionate, and one was lorn,

And one, that fingered his bronze beard in scorn, Scowled at another's smile of tranquil wit ; And all were dreams of heroes yet unwrit

In dramas high, and pageants yet unborn.

O happy knight ! immortal retinue !

What may we not, when morning breaks,

achieve ! The morning breaks — ah, pale and strengthless

crew !

Who now shall in your mighty forms believe ? Dear friend and host, even you ! My dreams

I leave, (Those happy dreams) to serve and honor you.

153

GROUP III

FAIR is the foreground of her soul With mirth and domesticity,

And vistas far, through cottage vines, Of a storm-lit, pagan sea.

A bluebird nests beneath the porch, A hidden song-sparrow, hard-by,

Sings near the ground ; but overhead A gull's wing glitters high.

Rose-fragrance dreams along the hedge, Wild sea-tangs drift from off the wave,

And girlish trebles sweetly pierce The eternal ocean-stave.

157

MY love was freshly come from sea The morning she first greeted me : The salt mist's tang, the sunny blow Had tinged her cheeks a ripening glow.

She bowed to me with all the ease Of meadow-grasses in the breeze, And yet her look seemed far away Amid the splendors of the spray.

Her step was vigorous and free

As maiden's in the Odyssey;

And when she laughed, I heard the tunes

Of rushes in the windy dunes.

An air so limitless, an eye

So virgin in its royalty —

Hers was a spirit and a form

That took my inland heart by storm.

I felt an impulse, an unrest, And secret tides within my breast Flowed up, with silent, glad control, And drew the rivers of my soul. 158

THE soft rains are falling On wild rose and vine;

The far winds are calling To foreland and pine;

The big wave is rocking The gull on its breast;

The surges are knocking With joyous unrest;

There's a spirit in the sky, love, That pants for the sea,

But the heart that beats nigh, love, Beats higher for thee !

159

SHE was a child of February,

Of tree-top gray and smother'd stream, Of cedar and the marsh rosemary,

Of snowbird and the sunset's dream.

A frozen brook that, April-eyed,

Sings soft beneath its silver fretting,

Her lyric spirit soon belied

The ice of her New England setting;

Till on a day when sudden thaw

Rent all her snowy chains asunder,

The impassioned sun beheld with awe Her heart of deep Italian wonder.

Still Nature has described her best, Veiled in those February skies, With summer singing in her breast, And April laughing in her eyes.

160

I HEARD the waves exulting in their power,

Their unpaced leagues of dim immensity, Their splendors and their thunders and their dower

Of heaven's far glory, and I thought : — the sea,

The sea is mighty ! Yet, O Love, to me Who sought a symbol, meagre was that might

Which was encliffed and shored, for vaster be The tides of love; not beach nor beacon-light Marks where their surges clasp the misty infinite.

161

MAID-MARINER

THE ragged clouds are all a-rout,

And the white gulls reel like swallows, And the billowy herds, at Triton's shout,

Plunge snorting down the hollows, And my heart is with the storms a-stir For Marian, my maid-mariner.

The spray is whiffed by the sneezing wind

Where the dory's prow is ducking, And soughing where the cliff is brined

The seaweed-cows are sucking, And the wild-duck flocks begin to whir, Marian, maid-mariner!

Then come with me to the green salt tides

When the storms have slipt their traces, And the live blood vaults in our glowing sides,

And the winds flap in our faces, And hearken to my heart's harbinger, Marian, maid-mariner!

O, if the world were all a bark,

And wishes all were true, love, With one blithe maiden I'd embark —

Her captain and her crew, love — And sail the world away with her: My Marian, maid-mariner ! 162

OUT of the drenched and leafless night, my dear, Entering to you — like hot-haste March I feel,

Who bows before the beauty of the year,

And spurns presumptuous Winter with his heel.

163

MY thoughts are like pied cattle on the hills,

Browsing the pale green slants, through silt ing mist , That laps the verdant uplands, and far fills

The valleys where the parted woods have kisst.

Scarce can I see them for the purpling rain

That drives across the pastures, where they loom

Beyond the hedges of my shrouded brain, Herding the solemn sunset of my gloom.

O Fancy, be my eager-lung' d Boy-Blue, And blow upon your dewy echo-horn

A blast to call them home to me and you Out of the eerie meads and magic corn ;

For they shall yield us white abundance of Their milk, for me to bring unto my love.

164

WHEN beauty ripens newly in old sheaves, Wears purple 'mid the vine's cold penury.,

And hides young blushes in age-altered leaves, I take one more excuse to think of thee,

Conceiving this : the harvest's mellow gold

Shall gleam, though faded harvests feed the » swine ;

The sheaf's bright glance shall shine in brandies

old, The dark grape's splendor glisten in the wine.

So, too, when thou art withered from the earth, And loveliness no habitation finds

In thy beloved form, yet shall thy worth

Still glow with living lustre in men's minds.

O then to be thy vintager I ask,

And every verse of mine thy beauty's flask !

165

WHEN first the pussy-willow shows

Her fairy muffs of gray, While still amid the poplar tree The blithe, familiar chickadee His morning suet gratis gets, — When first the consternating crows Break on the winter-keen repose

Of February day

Their strident cawings, Startling with Stygian silhouettes

The virgin snows

To wake, and with faint thawings,

Like speech half-audible, Murmur of spring, until we houslings feel — Or dream we feel — the breath Of blowing violets, That start where the old oak-leaf floats to death,

At such a time — On this your birthday morning, winter-weary,

Once more the stealing rhyme Runs up within my heart, to greet you, dearie.

For now through all of nature that we love A vernal change, like love's, has late begun; 166

The northing sun That nightly from Ascutney shall remove

Farther its setting, fills The valley-chalice of the Cornish hills With wine of warmer splendors ; by woodways

Those spurting flames of blue, the jays,

Less oft the eye arid ear amaze,

Mock musical, with gong-like throat,

Ringing the red-wing'd blackbird's note;

More seldom sounds the frosty axe,

And by the rabbit-run Our quaint embroideries of snowshoe tracks

Grow softly blurred and charr'd On their south edgings, while the logging-bells Tinkle less coldly through the hemlock dells. Or cease, amid snow-muffled lumber-stacks, Where sledges come to " Whoa ! " in the mill-yard.

Therefore, because this lovely season leaves,

Like all else, only memory to take

Joy of its vestiges, now for the sake

Of fleet delights that never may return,

Watch, dear, with me, where, 'neath the dropping

eaves

The iris-dewed icicles burn and burn, Till beauty on our minds indelibly Shall brand her image, bright with mutability. 167

STEEP ran the hill-road out of the wood: Lambent, below us Flushed in the valley Snow-colored twilight — Black isles of pine.

Hushed the cold tinklings, shuddered the sleigh Round the horizon, Keen and auroral, Burned on the hill-lines Inexpressible rose.

Snorted the silvery breath of the horse: Into the silken Quivering silence, Slid like a snowflake Saint Agnes' moon.

168

A BIRTHDAY

(FOR s. s. P.)

SEVENTY years !

What memories are the peers

Of such a service ! Who shall send

Awed messengers into the vast of mind

To summon them ? Or who shall find

And herald their grand reticence ? — If hours

Are sometimes epochs, if there are

Minutes, which rise like Babylonian towers

Above time's sordid plain, who shall declare

The grandeur of this life ? What angel compass

it?

Not words, but smiles and tears Can hail, with homage fit, Those seventy years.

169

ONCE more Chopin and Mendelssohn Have conjured you, sweet Mother !

How playfully you charmed the one, How pensively the other,

As, standing tiptoe on the stair,

I watched your waving golden hair !

Again I watch the flashing keys — A dreamy boy, dear Mother,

Climbing to bed by slow degrees ; Again my sobs I smother

Where, hid beneath the muffling spread,

The heavenly music fills my head.

The heavenly music fills again

My heart with childhood, Mother,

And stirs with blended bliss and pain Yearning I cannot smother:

A husht, tear-blinded ecstasy

Of mingled love and memory. 170

Only Chopin, or Mendelssohn, None holier, and none other,

Can paint for me, with magic tone, Your portrait, lovely Mother:

That face, amid the golden hair,

Forever young and debonair !

171

FOR A CHILD CONVALESCENT

BITTER death, Blind heart-ache,

Now that you are gone, How distracting-dear you make This soft breath, this ease-drawn breath

Of my beloved one. Sing, Spring!

Be gracious, weather!

My love and I and you are together.

Budding boughs, Pale blue skies,

What if you had come Senseless to her sealed eyes, Impotent her sleep to rouse,

All your songbirds dumb ! Sing, Spiing!

Be grateful, weather!

My love and I and you are together. 172

FOR A CHILD CONVALESCENT 173

Mighty God, Thou in grace

That didst Death deter: Lovely is Thy tranquil face In the sunlight or the sod,

Loveliest in her.

Sing, Spring! Bring., wind,

Soft weather — Long and kind. Sing, Spring! Wing, Song,

On lark's feather — Silver-lined.

Bring along, Wind,

Kind song and weather, Singing high — High on lark's wing — My love and I

In love and Spring

My love and I are together!

HALFWAY the climbing rose of Infancy -

With tears for dew-drops shining on its thorns, Lit by the Mother-smile of peaceful morns,

All pink in bloom, with now a golden bee,

Burrowed in kisses, to hum lullaby,

And now a shower, that intermits and warns The birds to carol 'twixt the thunder's horns,

Robin of babyhood, thy nest I see.

Babe of the birds, when from thy rosy source Thou shalt upclimb to boyhood's ruddier

charm,

The brooks shall mock thy boisterous discourse, The skies uplift thy shout, where, held from

harm, Thou shalt disport on the big world's battered

torse Like Bacchus on the Elgin Hermes' arm.

174

CATHLEEN

MY Cathleen of the wilding curl And roguish yellow ringlet,

Oh, are you but a budding girl, Or cherub clipt of winglet ?

I kissed you, clambering at my knee, All dimpled, shy and darling,

When every glance you shot at me Flew like a starling.

You sang to me from printless books Of tree- top-boughs a secret

So hushed, that in my heart those looks Of baby wonder speak yet.

Of pussy-cat — the chucklehead !

An epic you told after, Till porch and lawn and garden-bed

Caught that clear laughter.

You kissed me then — Ah, twinging joy !

Cathleen, that I might hover About your steps, a golden boy,

To grow your golden lover. 175

170 CATHLEEN

Your lover ! Nay, I scorn his name, Far rather, oh, far rather

I'll live, to thwart him, what I am:

His someday sweetheart's — father.

A BABY it was, or a bird :

'Twas hard to tell at a guessing ; For the only tidings I heard -

Save a lullaby low and caressing — Was a bunting out on a bough

Calling: Quick, quick, quick, have you seen

her? And a chickadee, perched on the mow,

Singing: Christy, Christy, Christina!

Not a bird, but a baby she is I

So cuddly and quaint and surprising: As fresh as sweet clover to kiss,

More rosy and blithe than sunrising. And her brother he was the bird

Calling: Quick, quick, quick, have you seen

her? And her sister the songster I heard

Singing: Christy, Christy, Christina!

177

BE merry, dear, for merry is the while,

And let Mirth make a ladder of thy woes

Whereon thy thoughts may mount unto thy

smile — As fairies climb by briers to the rose.

178

THOU art the still-renewing spring For poesie's replenishing. By thy brink, like Rachel, stands Beauty pensive : in her hands Poised, she holds her artless pitcher; Her own reveries bewitch her Where she bends, with maiden start, To fill it faultless at thy heart.

But I — poor stumbler with verse- vessels,

Worn rhyme-thin by fancy's pestles,

Stub my toe with too much longing

And break — what I should catch the song in.

179

I SAW white fields and shadows gray

And clouds the low sun lurked behind ; A quiet seemed to tint the day

With fainter colors of the mind, For all of nature to my sight Was tempered by an inner light.

The winter sun set clear as wine,

A silent star stole to its place, And still, beneath a glooming pine, She stood, with visionary grace

Watching the sky: I could not speak; The words that faltered were too weak.

My voice was smothered in my eyes;

I gazed — and what so changeless sweet (Since Love has twined our destinies) As when, in retrospection fleet, All after-visions I forget, And dream that I am gazing yet.

180

THE perfect rose has but a paltry fruit;

The gracious summer but a garish end ; And May's sweet choirs in August all are mute,

And youth's strong loins his largess soon dispend.

The water-lily, at her ripening,

Hides in the muddied lake her beauty's

spores ; Even in the tender calyx of the Spring

The icy-sharded worm of Winter bores.

But you, dear, are a flower of God's own isle, Whose glamours ripen in the spirit's seed ;

The Galilean lilies are your smile,

And in your aching heart the roses bleed ;

And wreathed of fire cold Time can never smother The maiden yields her garland to the mother.

181

ONLY the strong have right to reign in song — The strong of soul, that are the warriors Of God. — The weak-at-heart, he that out pours

His coward pain, perpetuates a wrong.

Therefore I promised you I would be strong,

Or silent : But now — hark ! Again the doors Of heaven are wide, and on the palace floors

I greet the Nine, who wept for me full long.

Look up once more, my love ! The lark is risen; Not as of old, above the immaculate fields, Remote, of May he chants, but now he builds His nest of dew beneath the common prison Of Workaday : — O hark to him, dear one, Rounding, of song and toil, a Pantheon !

182

REALIZING that the lives of men are rills

Coursing in lines consecutive and bright

Down the pied slopes of Time's 'eternal hills/ Or flocks of mingling sea-birds, that alight

An hour upon the icebergs, there to strew Wide Babel o'er the pristine silences,

Then, soaring, blend in the universal blue: Brooding an hundred analogues like these

That show how we, bright atom-points of thought In this congested brain of being, reign

An instant and no longer in the plot Of God; realizing this, and then

Remembering I run my race with thee, I grow in love with my mortality.

183

As ripples widen where the stone is cast,

So we do wane toward the banks of death ; As dips the summer grass before the breath

Of the west wind, so lightly we are passed :

Our lives are liquid ; even when Grief has massed Their evanescent flowers to a mort-wreath, They are such icy blooms as a frosty heath

Paints on the glass-pane, and as long they last.

Therefore, since joy is the acquiescent will

That blends our spirits' limbs with all which flows,

Since pain is the stagnant eddy and the chill

That lies congealed within the withered rose,

Let us, sweet friend, of beauty drink our fill, And fix in natural change our soul's repose.

184

INDEX TO POEMS IN PART TWO

INDEX TO FIRST LINES

OF THE POEMS IN PART TWO

Across the moist beam of the cloud-rimmed sun 105

A baby it was, or a bird 177

A boy, who stoops upon a green hillside 135

All joys, familiar and divine 133

A poppy, all on fire with beauty's beams 129

Arch twinklings of the quaint wood-smile of Pan 152

A rose 111

As children fling bright silver in the sea 140

As ripples widen where the stone is cast 184

At night, I prayed for sleep; instead 110

Auroral tempest on an auburn sea 112

Behold where Night clutches the cup of heaven 115

Be merry, dear, for merry is the while 178

Bitter death 172

Brief Revelation of enduring Truth 122

Bright in the dark of sleep all night till morn 153

Dear babe, that this should be ! Whence should

this come 124

Even as an infant fingers the crisp sheet 121

Fair is the foreground of her soul 157

Frail Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks 92

Had poet Geoffrey been a painter then 149

Hark to the fairy linnet 109

Halfway the climbing rose of infancy 174

187

188 INDEX

Her eyes are casements clear as dew 97

Hewer of visions from our human clay 146

How fain we conjure back his face ! How fain 144

I cannot think good-by 117

I dreamed a thousand ages, armed with flint 95

1 heard the waves exulting in their power 161

In the still campagna 102

1 saw white fields and shadows gray 180

Is this our common world of weariness 150

I watched an arc light under wind-stirr'd trees 93

I watched a drama, sitting in the wings 132

Leisure, kind Leisure, I require 96

Life said to Death : Brother 137.

Midway the silent parlor plain 125

Moody, our time is glad of you; 'tis given 147

My Cathleen of the wilding curl 175

My love was freshly come from sea 158

My thoughts are like pied cattle on the hills 164

Now that you are come up from the hush vale 148

Old Age, the irrigator 139

Once more Chopin and Mendelssohn 170

Only the strong have right to reign in song 182

Out of the drenched and leafless night, my dear 163

Out of the ' obscure wood ' and ominous way 143

Plastic Fancies, form a mould 130

Realizing that the lives of men are rills 183

Ribbed like a conch and ruddy through the dark 151

Rise, sweet signora of the sigh 99

Serene, he sits on other shores 123

Seventy years 169

INDEX 189

She stood before a florist's window-pane 94

She was a child of February 160

Spring is Shakspere's garden 106

Steep ran the hill -road out of the wood 168

Strawberry-flower and violet 104

Swan of the silver beak and sable breast 100

The cricket is chirring 127

The flower shall fade, not the spirit 116

The forms sublime, the moods elate 131 The ghosts of Praise-God Barebones and his clan 145

The Lady of the Sunset 98

The perfect rose has but a paltry fruit 181

The ragged clouds are all a- rout 162

The soft rains are falling 159

This baby brow, like a smooth handkerchief 126

Thou art the still-renewing spring 179

Thou husky raven of the insect race 108 Two song-birds build their nests within my brain 91

What is so free 107

When beauty ripens newly in old sheaves 165

When first the pussy-willow shows 166

When subtle passion makes me slave 134

Young rider and steed they dash on through the dusk 118

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