Set for death's riotous feast
Round the bright board where darkling centuries wait,
And servile slaughter, mute,
Feeds power with fresh red fruit,
Glitter and groan with mortal food of fate;
And throne and cup and lamp's bright breath
Bear witness to their lord of only night and death. 360
Dead freedom by live empire lies defiled, [_Str._ 10.
And murder at his feet
Plies lust with wine and meat,
With offering of an old man and a child,
With holy body and blood, inexpiable
Communion in the sacrament of hell,
Till, reeking from their monstrous eucharist,
The lips wax cold that murdered where they kissed,
And empire in mid feast
Fall as a slaughtered beast 370
Headless, and ease men's hungering hearts of fear
Lest God were none in heaven, to see nor hear,
And purge his own pollution with the flood
Poured of his black base blood
So first found healing, poisonous as it poured;
And on the clouds the archangel cleanse his sword.
As at the word unutterable that made [_Ant._ 10.
Of day and night division,
From vision on to vision, 379
From dream to dream, from darkness into shade,
From sunshine into sunlight, moves and lives
The steersman's eye, the helming hand that gives
Life to the wheels and wings that whirl along
The immeasurable impulse of the sphere of song
Through all the eternal years,
Beyond all stars and spheres,
Beyond the washing of the waves of time,
Beyond all heights where no thought else may climb,
Beyond the darkling dust of suns that were,
Past height and depth of air; 390
And in the abyss whence all things move that are
Finds only living Love, the sovereign star.
Nor less the weight and worth [_Ep._ 10.
Found even of love on earth
To wash all stain of tears and sins away,
On dying lips alit
That living knew not it,
In the winged shape of song with death to play:
To warm young children with its wings,
And try with fire the heart elect for godlike things. 400
For all worst wants of all most miserable [_Str._ 11.
With divine hands to deal
All balms and herbs that heal,
Among all woes whereunder poor men dwell
Our Master sent his servant Love, to be
On earth his witness; but the strange deep sea,
Mother of life and death inextricate,
What work should Love do there, to war with fate?
Yet there must Love too keep
At heart of the eyeless deep 410
Watch, and wage war wide-eyed with all its wonders,
Lower than the lightnings of its waves, and thunders
Of seas less monstrous than the births they bred;
Keep high there heart and head,
And conquer: then for prize of all toils past
Feel the sea close them in again at last.
A day of direr doom arisen thereafter [_Ant._ 11.
With cloud and fire in strife
Lightens and darkens life
Round one by man's hand masked with living laughter, 420
A man by men bemonstered, but by love,
Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove,
And wooed by lust, that in her rosy den
As fire on flesh feeds on the souls of men,
To take the intense impure
Burnt-offering of her lure,
Divine and dark and bright and naked, strange
With ravenous thirst of life reversed and change,
As though the very heaven should shrivel and swell
With hunger after hell, 430
Run mad for dear damnation, and desire
To feel its light thrilled through with stings of fire.
Above a windier sea, [_Ep._ 11.
The glory of Ninety-three
Fills heaven with blood-red and with rose-red beams
That earth beholding grows
Herself one burning rose
Flagrant and fragrant with strange deeds and dreams,
Dreams dyed as love's own flower, and deeds
Stained as with love's own life-blood, that for love's sake bleeds. 440
And deeper than all deeps of seas and skies [_Str._ 12.
Wherein the shadows are
Called sun and moon and star
That rapt conjecture metes with mounting eyes,
Loud with strange waves and lustrous with new spheres,
Shines, masked at once and manifest of years,
Shakespeare, a heaven of heavenly eyes beholden;
And forward years as backward years grow golden
With light of deeds and words
And flight of God's fleet birds, 450
Angels of wrath and love and truth and pity;
And higher on exiled eyes their natural city
Dawns down the depths of vision, more sublime
Than all truths born of time;
And eyes that wept above two dear sons dead
Grow saving stars to guard one hopeless head.
Bright round the brows of banished age had shone [_Ant._ 12.
In vision flushed with truth
The rosy glory of youth 459
On streets and woodlands where in days long gone
Sweet love sang light and loud and deep and dear:
And far the trumpets of the dreadful year
Had pealed and wailed in darkness: last arose
The song of children, kindling as a rose
At breath of sunrise, born
Of the red flower of morn
Whose face perfumes deep heaven with odorous light
And thrills all through the wings of souls in flight
Close as the press of children at His knee
Whom if the high priest see, 470
Dreaming, as homeless on dark earth he trod,
The lips that praise him shall not know for God.
O sovereign spirit, above [_Ep._ 12.
All offering but man's love,
All praise and prayer and incense undefiled!
The one thing stronger found
Than towers with iron bound;
The one thing lovelier than a little child,
And deeper than the seas are deep, 479
And tenderer than such tears of love as angels weep.
Dante, the seer of all things evil and good, [_Str._ 13.
Beheld two ladies, Beauty
And high life-hallowing Duty,
That strove for sway upon his mind and mood
And held him in alternating accord
Fast bound at feet of either: but our lord,
The seer and singer of righteousness and wrong
Who stands now master of all the keys of song,
Sees both as dewdrops run
Together in the sun, 490
For him not twain but one thing twice divine;
Even as his speech and song are bread and wine
For all souls hungering and all hearts athirst
At best of days and worst,
And both one sacrament of Love's great giving
To feed the spirit and sense of all souls living.
The seventh day in the wind's month, ten years gone [_Ant._ 13.
Since heaven-espousing earth
Gave the Republic birth,
The mightiest soul put mortal raiment on 500
That came forth singing ever in man's ears
Of all souls with us, and through all these years
Rings yet the lordliest, waxen yet more strong,
That on our souls hath shed itself in song,
Poured forth itself like rain
On souls like springing grain
That with its procreant beams and showers were fed
For living wine and sacramental bread;
Given all itself as air gives life and light,
Utterly, as of right; 510
The goodliest gift our age hath given, to be
Ours, while the sun gives glory to the sea.
Our Father and Master and Lord, [_Ep._ 13.
Who hast thy song for sword,
For staff thy spirit, and our hearts for throne:
As in past years of wrong,
Take now my subject song,
To no crowned head made humble but thine own;
That on thy day of worldly birth
Gives thanks for all thou hast given past thanks of all on earth. 520
* * * * *
NOTES
_v._ 33. _Odes et Ballades_, 1822-1824.
57. _Les Orientales_, 1829.
69. _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, 1831.
71. _Les Chants du Crepuscule_, 1835.
73. _Les Voix Interieures_, 1837.
81. _Les Rayons et les Ombres_, 1840.
101. _Hernani_, 1830.
105. _Marion de Lorme_, 1831.
109. _Le Roi s'amuse_, 1832.
113. _Lucrece Borgia_, 1833.
121. _Marie Tudor_, 1835.
127. _Angelo, Tyran de Padoue_, 1835.
129. _La Esmeralda_, 1836.
133. _Ruy Blas_, 1838.
137. _Les Burgraves_, 1842.
153. _Cromwell_, 1827: _Etude sur Mirabeau_, 1834 (_Litterature
et Philosophie melees_, 1819-1834).
177. _Han d'Islande_, 1823. _Bug-Jargal_, 1826.
182. _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_, 1829: _Claude Gueux_, 1834.
193. _Notre-Dame de Paris_, 1831.
205. _Le Rhin_, 1845.
216. _Napoleon le Petit_, 1852. _Chatiments_, 1853. _Histoire
d'un Crime_, 1877. In this place I must take occasion to
relieve my conscience from a sense of duty unfulfilled so
long as I for one have not uttered my own poor private
protest--worthless and weightless though it may seem, if
cast as a grain into the scale of public opinion--against
a projected insult at once to contemporary France and to
the present only less than to past generations of
Englishmen.
_On the proposed desecration of Westminster Abbey
by the erection of a monument to
the son of Napoleon III_
"Let us go hence." From the inmost shrine of grace
Where England holds the elect of all her dead
There comes a word like one of old time said
By gods of old cast out. Here is no place
At once for these and one of poisonous race.
Let each rise up from his dishallowed bed
And pass forth silent. Each divine veiled head
Shall speak in silence with averted face.
"Scorn everlasting and eternal shame
Eat out the rotting record of his name
Who had the glory of all these graves in trust
And turned it to a hissing. His offence
Makes havoc of their desecrated dust
Whose place is here no more. Let us go hence."
Feb. 25, 1880.
297. _Les Contemplations_, 1856.
321. _La Legende des Siecles_. _Premiere serie_, 1859; _nouvelle
serie_, 1877.
392. _Les Miserables_, 1862.
409. _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, 1866.
417. _L'Homme qui Rit_, 1869.
433. _Quatre-vingt-treize_, 1874.
441. _William Shakespeare_, 1864.
448. _Actes et Paroles_; _Avant l'Exil_, 1841-1851; _Pendant
l'Exil_, 1852-1870; _Depuis l'Exil_, 1870-1876.
452. _Paris_, 1867.
455. _Mes Fils_, 1875.
456. _Pour un Soldat_, 1875.
457. _Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois_, 1865.
462. _L'Annee Terrible_, 1872.
464. _L'Art d'etre Grandpere_, 1877.
470. _Le Pape_, 1878.
497. "Septidi ventose an X de la Republique (26 fevrier 1802)."
_Victor Hugo raconte par un temoin de sa vie_, 1863,
_tome_ 1, p. 28.
At the end of such a list, so incomparable as to seem
incredible, of one great man's good works, we may be
forgiven the alteration of a word even in a verse from
AEschylus which we cannot choose but apply once more to
this leader in the advance of men made perfect through
doom of trial and long wayfaring, whose progress he
furthers by example and stimulates by song:--
[Greek: kurios esti throein hodion kratos aision andron
ekteleon; eti gar theothen katapneiei
peitho molpan
alkai sumphutos aion.]
AEsch. _Agam._ 104-8.