Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;
The fairy moons of luminous evenings,
Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;
Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,
When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,
Erect and heavy, and all waters lie
Oily, and there is not a bird that sings.
All these I know, I have seen them born and die,
And many another moon in many a sky.
8
There was a moon that shone above the ground
Where on a grassy forest height I stood;
Bright was that open place, and all around
The dense discovered treetops of the wood,
Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,
Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;
Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.
Protruding from the middle of the mound,
Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,
Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.
9
A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,
Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;
An orator exultant in defeat;
Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;
My heart was one with those rebellious people,
Until along a chapel's pointing steeple
My eyes unwitting wandered, and I found
A moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;
And in my spirit's life all human din
Died, and eternal Silence stood within.
10
And once, on a far evening, warm and still,
I leant upon a cool stone parapet.
The quays and houses underneath the hill
Twinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;
And then above the eastern cape's long billow
Silent there welled a trembling line of yellow,
A shred that quickened, then a half that grew
To a full moon, that moved with even will.
The night was long before her, well she knew,
And, as she slowly rose into the blue,
11
She slowly paled, and, glittering far away
Flung on the silken waters like a spear,
Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.
The lighthouse lamp upon the little pier
Burned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.
Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,
I watched the unmoving world beneath my feet
Till, without warning, miles across the bay,
Into that silver out of shadows beat,
Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.
12
These moons I have seen, but these and every one
Came each so new it seemed to be the first,
New as the buds that open to the sun,
New as the songs that to the morning burst.
The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,
Last year it was another blackbird singing,
Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flower
Beyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,
Retain'st for ever an unwithering power
That stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.
13
But O, had all my infant nights been dark,
Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,
Had never a teller of stories bid me hark
The promised splendours of that moon unknown:
How perfect then had been the revelation
When first her gradual gold illumination
Broke on a night upon the conscious child:
My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arc
Climbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,
So large with light, so even and so mild.
14
Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,
This world of shadows cool with silver fires,
Drawing us higher than our human birth:
To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspires
Its saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrant
Tears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:
Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,
Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:
Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,
Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.
15
Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,
But always peaceful and removed and proud,
Whether with loveliness revealed complete,
Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:
Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonder
That men who made of sun and storm and thunder
The awful forms of strong divinity,
Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,
Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,
Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?
16
Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,
The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,
Diana, she whose downward-bending kiss
One only knew, though all men yearned to know;
The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,
The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:
She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,
And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless bliss
Lapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,
All the still night, until the night was gone.
17
By many names they knew thee, but thy shape
Was woman's always, transient and white:
A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,
A sweet descent of beauty in the night:
Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,
Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,
A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,
A witch the man who saw might not escape,
A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,
The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.
18
And even to-night in African forests some
There are, possessed by such a blasphemy;
Through branching beams thy fevered votaries come
To appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.
There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,
Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguish
In the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.
They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,
And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,
Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.
19
So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,
In all the continents, by all the seas,
Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,
Adoring her with gentler rites than these:
The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee uplifted
Rise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,
Perpetual incense poured before thy throne
By those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,
Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,
Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.
20
For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,
Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;
Entranced on templed lakes is many a boat
For thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;
On the great seas where none but thou is tender
Rising and setting, unto thee surrender
All lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;
And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,
Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slips
To gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.
21
O thus they do, and thus they did of old;
Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;
Ere our first records were thy shrine was cold
That speechless eyes went seeking in the night;
Beyond the compass of our dim traditions
Thou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,
Their loves and their despair; within thy ken
All our poor history has been unrolled;
Thou hast seen all races born and die again,
The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.
22
Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyes
Who paced with backward arms beyond his tents,
Lone in the night, and felt above him rise
The ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,
Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,
Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,
But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,
Fighting with his moon-coloured memories
Of vanished kings who builded, and the bare
Sands in the moon before those builders were.
23
Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,
Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fame
Amid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.
And, circling round that fixed monition, came
Woven by moonlight, random, transitory,
Fragments of all the dim receding story:
The moonlit water dripping from the oars
Of triremes in the bay of Syracuse;
The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,
That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.
24
He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,
The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,
The moonlight on the Atlantean wave
That covered all a multitude's distress:
Cities and hosts and emperors departed
Under the steady moon. And sullen-hearted
He turned away, and, in a little, died,
Even as he who hunted from his cave
And struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hide
Under the moon, and was not satisfied.
25
For in the prime, thy influence was felt;
When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;
Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion melt
Before men dreamed of empire. The abyss
Of thought yawned through their jungle then, as ever
Dark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:
Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and sea
Naked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,
Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in thee
Thought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.
26
Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,
Thou shinedst there ere any life began,
When of his pain or of his powerless love
Thou heardest not from heart of any man;
Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour
Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow
Ere aught but her blind elements did move;
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,
And afterwards again shalt see her so.
27
A time there was when Life had never been,
A time will be, it will have passed away;
Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday
Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded;
Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.
She will be barren then as not before,
Bared of her snows and all her garments green;
No darkling sea by any earthly shore
Will take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.
28
Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,
Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,
Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,
Not any voice will cry upon thee then;
Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,
The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,
An end there will have been to all their lust,
Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;
O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,
Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.
29
Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,
The rumours and the marching and the strife;
Earth will be still, and all the face of her
Swept of the last remains of moving life;
The last of all men's monuments that defied them,
Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,
Into the waiting elements will fade,
And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,
A forlorn round of rocky contours made,
A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,
30
Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;
The old, the cold companions, you will go,
Obeying still some long-forgotten past,
And all our pitiful history none will know;
Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,
But on that greater ball no heart will ponder
The thought that rose and nightingale are gone,
And all sweet things but thou; and only vast
Ridges of rock remain, and stars and sun;
O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.
31
And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,
Passing beyond imagination's range,
Away into the void where waits for thee
Thy inconceivable destiny of change;
And after all the memories I have striven
To paint, this picture that thyself hast given
Lives, and I watch, to all those others blind,
Thy form, gliding into eternity,
Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,
The last, most wonderful image of the mind.
32
Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,
I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;
Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,
Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;
That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,
Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,
Did never this most faithful heart invest;
Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,
And I, and I, the heart within my breast,
Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.
J. C. SQUIRE
MISADVENTURES
By L. PEARSALL SMITH
_At Solemn Music_
I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured
wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of
those loud stockings?
Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
musical, shared delight--these awful things will happen--our souls
joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.
_The Platitude_
"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I
exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as
much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak;
but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in
crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art
of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of
"sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in
awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading;
to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat
there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's
rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.
_The Communion of Souls_
"So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?" Then lifting
the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a
higher level, "This notion of free will," I went on, "the notion, for
instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition,
seems, when you think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion
really. I like to think I must follow the things of desire as--how
shall I put it?--as the tide follows the moon; that my actions are due
to necessary causes; that the world inside isn't a meaningless chaos,
but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful
laws, as the Stars are governed."
"How I love the Stars!" murmured Lady Hyslop. "What things they say to
me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions--the promise of ineffable
mitigations."
"Mitigations?" I gasped, feeling a little giddy. But it didn't
matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful
conversations. And is not their greatest charm precisely the fact that
neither of us understands a word the other says?
_Disenchantment_
Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in
the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.
Opalescent, infinitely desirable, tinged with all the rainbow hues of
fancy, inaccessible in the window of a stationer's shop around the
corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my day-dreams. Every day I passed
it, but every day some inhibition paralyzed my will; or my thoughts
would be distracted in a golden dream or splendid disenchantment, some
metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.
So time rolled on; the seasons followed in each other's footsteps.
Empires rose and fell; and still that paste-pot hung, a dragon-guarded
fruit of the Hesperides, in the window I walked by every day.
Then one morning, one awful morning, my pins gave out. I met this
crisis with manly resolution: I was the master of my fate! Summoning
all the forces of my moral nature, I put on my hat and went calmly out
and bought that paste-pot. I bought three paste-pots, and carried them
with me calmly home. At last the countercharm was found, the spell
was broken, and the Devil finally defeated--but, oh, at what a cost!
In the reaction, which immediately followed, I sat, facing those pots
of nauseating paste, unnerved and disenchanted, beyond the reach of
consolation, with nothing to wait for now but Death.
_The Listener_
The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it
was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I
had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they
were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the
fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me
with almost ecstatic attention.
As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud
may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass
of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment.
I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the
lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that
devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.
And anyhow--thus I laughed away the notion--how could she do it anyhow,
even if she tried? Other people perhaps--but me? No, that phrase I had
heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you
to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber.
For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make
fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?
_Shrinkage_
Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all
the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates,
it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which
over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a
teaspoon.
_The Lift_
What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out,
had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.
Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr.
Johnson describes it?
O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of
regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
law of gravitation--if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day,
and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as
remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
_The Danger of Going to Church_
As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath
adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing.
Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered
across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some
maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that
evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips
put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a
sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be
broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding;
their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly
bald. Their little ones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes,
and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away
with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a
drunken man staggereth in his vomit.
But as for the Righteous Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the
blessings of those who walk in the right way. "These blessings"--the
words came back to me from the Evening Lesson--"these blessings shall
come upon thee and overtake thee." And suddenly, in the mild summer
air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened,
the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me.
From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the
Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross
good things were coming to reward me with benedictions for which I had
not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close
behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan.
My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop
fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all
my household and the beasts of my household should beget and bear
increase; and as for the fruit of my own loins, it should be for
multitude as the sands of the sea and as the stars of heaven. My sons
and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the third and fourth
generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet should be
dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish
as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.
My Prayer Book began to smoke in my hand from the hot lava embedded
in it; the meadow was scorched by the live coals of cursing and still
more awful benediction I had so thoughtlessly raked out of the church
furnace and brought down in a hot shower on myself and my neighbours.
_The Wrong Word_
We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since
faced the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears,
and was completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said,
was a great mechanism; man, with his reason and moral judgments, was
the chance product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon
destroy him, he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate
with passionless despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront
a hostile universe with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the
Gorgon face of Destiny, to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling
defiance at the icy stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it
produced, as you can imagine, a very powerful impression on the
company. As for me, I was completely carried away by my enthusiasm. "By
Jove, that is a stunt!" I cried.
_Interruption_
"Life," said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--"life
is a perpetual toothache."
In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
discussed of food-restrictions, epidemics, cancer, and so on.
Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. "Well, I must say," she
remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, "I must say I
enjoy life."
"So do I," I whispered.
"When I enjoy things," she went on, "I know it. Eating, for instance,
the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference," she added, as
she got up to go with the others.
"All the difference in the world," I answered.
It's too bad that I had no chance for further conversation with that
wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot
to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the
mind with garbage: we make a better use of that divine and adorable
endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the
pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir
from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of
consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could
have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and
practice of our art.
_The Rationalist_
Occultisms, fairyisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond,
intimations from another world--all kinds of supernaturalisms are most
distasteful to me; I cling to the world of science and common sense and
explicable phenomena; and I was much put out, therefore, to find this
morning a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace
on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB--what could be the meaning of these
cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar,
my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against
the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her
contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying
smile, the homely, familiar, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT,
which was lying there wrong side up.
_Justification_
Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon-party? Do I not
owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration;
ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt?
And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph
tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted, and Deborah sing
without blame how she arose a mother in Israel? And didn't David boast
of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay,
in his confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of
the universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those
Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?
Was I not made in His image?
_Day-dream_