Gone is the time when phantasms could appease

My quest phantasmal and bring cheated ease;

When, if she glorified my dreams, I felt

Through all my limbs a change immortal melt

At touch of hers illuminate with soul.

Not long could I be stilled with Fancy's dole; 170

Too soon the mortal mixture in me caught

Red fire from her celestial flame, and fought

For tyrannous control in all my veins:

My fool's prayer was accepted; what remains?

Or was it some eidolon merely, sent

By her who rules the shades in banishment,

To mock me with her semblance? Were it thus,

How 'scape I shame, whose will was traitorous?

What shall compensate an ideal dimmed?

How blanch again my statue virgin-limbed, 180

Soiled with the incense-smoke her chosen priest

Poured more profusely as within decreased

The fire unearthly, fed with coals from far

Within the soul's shrine? Could my fallen star

Be set in heaven again by prayers and tears

And quenchless sacrifice of all my years,

How would the victim to the flamen leap,

And life for life's redemption paid hold cheap!

But what resource when she herself descends

From her blue throne, and o'er her vassal bends 190

That shape thrice-deified by love, those eyes

Wherein the Lethe of all others lies?

When my white queen of heaven's remoteness tires,

Herself against her other self conspires,

Takes woman's nature, walks in mortal ways,

And finds in my remorse her beauty's praise?

Yet all would I renounce to dream again

The dream in dreams fulfilled that made my pain,

My noble pain that heightened all my years

With crowns to win and prowess-breeding tears; 200

Nay, would that dream renounce once more to see

Her from her sky there looking down at me!

VII

Goddess, reclimb thy heaven, and be once more

An inaccessible splendor to adore,

A faith, a hope of such transcendent worth

As bred ennobling discontent with earth;

Give back the longing, back the elated mood

That, fed with thee, spurned every meaner good;

Give even the spur of impotent despair

That, without hope, still bade aspire and dare; 210

Give back the need to worship, that still pours

Down to the soul the virtue it adores!

Nay, brightest and most beautiful, deem naught

These frantic words, the reckless wind of thought;

Still stoop, still grant,--I live but in thy will;

Be what thou wilt, but be a woman still!

Vainly I cried, nor could myself believe

That what I prayed for I would fain receive;

My moon is set; my vision set with her;

No more can worship vain my pulses stir. 220

Goddess Triform, I own thy triple spell,

My heaven's queen,--queen, too, of my earth and hell!

THE BLACK PREACHER

A BRETON LEGEND

At Carnac in Brittany, close on the bay,

They show you a church, or rather the gray

Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach

With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach,

Roofless and splintered with thunder-stone,

'Mid lichen-blurred gravestones all alone;

'Tis the kind of ruin strange sights to see

That may have their teaching for you and me.

Something like this, then, my guide had to tell,

Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell; 10

But since I might chance give his meaning a wrench,

He talking his _patois_ and I English-French,

I'll put what he told me, preserving the tone,

In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own.

An abbey-church stood here, once on a time,

Built as a death-bed atonement for crime:

'Twas for somebody's sins, I know not whose;

But sinners are plenty, and you can choose.

Though a cloister now of the dusk-winged bat,

'Twas rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat, 20

Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl,

Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul.

But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire

Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire,

And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary,

Where only the wind sings _miserere_.

No priest has kneeled since at the altar's foot,

Whose crannies are searched by the nightshade's root,

Nor sound of service is ever heard,

Except from throat of the unclean bird, 30

Hooting to unassoiled shapes as they pass

In midnights unholy his witches' mass,

Or shouting 'Ho! ho!' from the belfry high

As the Devil's sabbath-train whirls by.

But once a year, on the eve of All-Souls,

Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls,

Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work,

The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk,

The skeleton windows are traced anew

On the baleful nicker of corpse-lights blue, 40

And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith,

To a preaching of Reverend Doctor Death.

Abbots, monks, barons, and ladies fair

Hear the dull summons and gather there:

No rustle of silk now, no clink of mail,

Nor ever a one greets his church-mate pale;

No knight whispers love in the _châtelaine's_ ear,

His next-door neighbor this five-hundred year;

No monk has a sleek _benedicite_

For the great lord shadowy now as he; 50

Nor needeth any to hold his breath,

Lest he lose the least word of Doctor Death.

He chooses his text in the Book Divine,

Tenth verse of the Preacher in chapter nine:

'"Whatsoever thy hand shall find thee to do,

That do with thy whole might, or thou shalt rue;

For no man is wealthy, or wise, or brave,

In that quencher of might-be's and would-be's, the grave."

Bid by the Bridegroom, "To-morrow," ye said,

And To-morrow was digging a trench for your bed; 60

Ye said, "God can wait; let us finish our wine;"

Ye had wearied Him, fools, and that last knock was mine!'

But I can't pretend to give you the sermon,

Or say if the tongue were French, Latin, or German;

Whatever he preached in, I give you my word

The meaning was easy to all that heard;

Famous preachers there have been and be,

But never was one so convincing as he;

So blunt was never a begging friar,

No Jesuit's tongue so barbed with fire, 70

Cameronian never, nor Methodist,

Wrung gall out of Scripture with such a twist.

And would you know who his hearers must be?

I tell you just what my guide told me:

Excellent teaching men have, day and night,

From two earnest friars, a black and a white,

The Dominican Death and the Carmelite Life;

And between these two there is never strife,

For each has his separate office and station,

And each his own work in the congregation; 80

Whoso to the white brother deafens his ears,

And cannot be wrought on by blessings or tears,

Awake In his coffin must wait and wait,

In that blackness of darkness that means _too late_,

And come once a year, when the ghost-bell tolls,

As till Doomsday it shall on the eve of All-Souls,

To hear Doctor Death, whose words smart with the brine

Of the Preacher, the tenth verse of chapter nine.

ARCADIA REDIVIVA

I, walking the familiar street,

While a crammed horse-car jingled through it,

Was lifted from my prosy feet

And in Arcadia ere I knew it.

Fresh sward for gravel soothed my tread,

And shepherd's pipes my ear delighted;

The riddle may be lightly read:

I met two lovers newly plighted.

They murmured by in happy care,

New plans for paradise devising, 10

Just as the moon, with pensive stare,

O'er Mistress Craigie's pines was rising.

Astarte, known nigh threescore years,

Me to no speechless rapture urges;

Them in Elysium she enspheres,

Queen, from of old, of thaumaturges.

The railings put forth bud and bloom,

The house-fronts all with myrtles twine them,

And light-winged Loves in every room

Make nests, and then with kisses line them. 20

O sweetness of untasted life!

O dream, its own supreme fulfillment!

O hours with all illusion rife,

As ere the heart divined what ill meant!

'_Et ego_', sighed I to myself,

And strove some vain regrets to bridle,

'Though now laid dusty on the shelf,

Was hero once of such an idyl!

'An idyl ever newly sweet,

Although since Adam's day recited, 30

Whose measures time them to Love's feet,

Whose sense is every ill requited.'

Maiden, if I may counsel, drain

Each drop of this enchanted season,

For even our honeymoons must wane,

Convicted of green cheese by Reason.

And none will seem so safe from change,

Nor in such skies benignant hover,

As this, beneath whose witchery strange

You tread on rose-leaves with your lover. 40

The glass unfilled all tastes can fit,

As round its brim Conjecture dances;

For not Mephisto's self hath wit

To draw such vintages as Fancy's.

When our pulse beats its minor key,

When play-time halves and school-time doubles,

Age fills the cup with serious tea,

Which once Dame Clicquot starred with bubbles.

'Fie, Mr. Graybeard! Is this wise?

Is this the moral of a poet, 50

Who, when the plant of Eden dies,

Is privileged once more to sow it!

'That herb of clay-disdaining root,

From stars secreting what it feeds on,

Is burnt-out passion's slag and soot

Fit soil to strew its dainty seeds on?

'Pray, why, if in Arcadia once,

Need one so soon forget the way there?

Or why, once there, be such a dunce

As not contentedly to stay there?' 60

Dear child, 'twas but a sorry jest,

And from my heart I hate the cynic

Who makes the Book of Life a nest

For comments staler than rabbinic.

If Love his simple spell but keep,

Life with ideal eyes to flatter,

The Grail itself were crockery cheap

To Every-day's communion-platter.

One Darby is to me well known,

Who, as the hearth between them blazes, 70

Sees the old moonlight shine on Joan,

And float her youthward in its hazes.

He rubs his spectacles, he stares,--

'Tis the same face that witched him early!

He gropes for his remaining hairs,--

Is this a fleece that feels so curly?

'Good heavens! but now 'twas winter gray,

And I of years had more than plenty;

The almanac's a fool! 'Tis May!

Hang family Bibles! I am twenty! 80

'Come, Joan, your arm; we'll walk the room--

The lane, I mean--do you remember?

How confident the roses bloom,

As if it ne'er could be December!

'Nor more it shall, while in your eyes

My heart its summer heat recovers,

And you, howe'er your mirror lies,

Find your old beauty in your lover's.'

THE NEST

MAY

When oaken woods with buds are pink,

And new-come birds each morning sing,

When fickle May on Summer's brink

Pauses, and knows not which to fling,

Whether fresh bud and bloom again,

Or hoar-frost silvering hill and plain,

Then from the honeysuckle gray

The oriole with experienced quest

Twitches the fibrous bark away,

The cordage of his hammock-nest.

Cheering his labor with a note

Rich as the orange of his throat.

High o'er the loud and dusty road

The soft gray cup in safety swings,

To brim ere August with its load

Of downy breasts and throbbing wings,

O'er which the friendly elm-tree heaves

An emerald roof with sculptured eaves.

Below, the noisy World drags by

In the old way, because it must,

The bride with heartbreak in her eye,

The mourner following hated dust:

Thy duty, wingèd flame of Spring,

Is but to love, and fly, and sing.

Oh, happy life, to soar and sway

Above the life by mortals led,

Singing the merry months away,

Master, not slave of daily bread,

And, when the Autumn comes, to flee

Wherever sunshine beckons thee!

PALINODE--DECEMBER

Like some lorn abbey now, the wood

Stands roofless in the bitter air;

In ruins on its floor is strewed

The carven foliage quaint and rare,

And homeless winds complain along

The columned choir once thrilled with song.

And thou, dear nest, whence joy and praise

The thankful oriole used to pour,

Swing'st empty while the north winds chase

Their snowy swarms from Labrador:

But, loyal to the happy past,

I love thee still for what thou wast.

Ah, when the Summer graces flee

From other nests more dear than thou,

And, where June crowded once, I see

Only bare trunk and disleaved bough;

When springs of life that gleamed and gushed

Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed;

When our own branches, naked long,

The vacant nests of Spring betray,

Nurseries of passion, love, and song

That vanished as our year grew gray;

When Life drones o'er a tale twice told

O'er embers pleading with the cold,--

I'll trust, that, like the birds of Spring,

Our good goes not without repair,

But only flies to soar and sing

Far off in some diviner air,

Where we shall find it in the calms

Of that fair garden 'neath the palms.

A YOUTHFUL EXPERIMENT IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS

IMPRESSIONS OF HOMER

Sometimes come pauses of calm, when the rapt bard, holding his heart back,

Over his deep mind muses, as when o'er awe-stricken ocean

Poises a heapt cloud luridly, ripening the gale and the thunder;

Slow rolls onward the verse with a long swell heaving and swinging,

Seeming to wait till, gradually wid'ning from far-off horizons,

Piling the deeps up, heaping the glad-hearted surges before it,

Gathers the thought as a strong wind darkening and cresting the tumult.

Then every pause, every heave, each trough in the waves, has its meaning;

Full-sailed, forth like a tall ship steadies the theme, and around it,

Leaping beside it in glad strength, running in wild glee beyond it,

Harmonies billow exulting and floating the soul where it lists them,

Swaying the listener's fantasy hither and thither like drift-weed.

BIRTHDAY VERSES

WRITTEN IN A CHILD'S ALBUM

'Twas sung of old in hut and hall

How once a king in evil hour

Hung musing o'er his castle wall,

And, lost in idle dreams, let fall

Into the sea his ring of power.

Then, let him sorrow as he might,

And pledge his daughter and his throne

To who restored the jewel bright,

The broken spell would ne'er unite;

The grim old ocean held its own.

Those awful powers on man that wait,

On man, the beggar or the king,

To hovel bare or hall of state

A magic ring that masters fate

With each succeeding birthday bring.

Therein are set four jewels rare:

Pearl winter, summer's ruby blaze,

Spring's emerald, and, than all more fair,

Fall's pensive opal, doomed to bear

A heart of fire bedreamed with haze.

To him the simple spell who knows

The spirits of the ring to sway,

Fresh power with every sunrise flows,

And royal pursuivants are those

That fly his mandates to obey.

But he that with a slackened will

Dreams of things past or things to be,

From him the charm is slipping still,

And drops, ere he suspect the ill,

Into the inexorable sea.

ESTRANGEMENT

The path from me to you that led,

Untrodden long, with grass is grown,

Mute carpet that his lieges spread

Before the Prince Oblivion

When he goes visiting the dead.

And who are they but who forget?

You, who my coming could surmise

Ere any hint of me as yet

Warned other ears and other eyes,

See the path blurred without regret.

But when I trace its windings sweet

With saddened steps, at every spot

That feels the memory in my feet,

Each grass-blade turns forget-me-not,

Where murmuring bees your name repeat.

PHŒBE

Ere pales in Heaven the morning star,

A bird, the loneliest of its kind,

Hears Dawn's faint footfall from afar

While all its mates are dumb and blind.

It is a wee sad-colored thing,

As shy and secret as a maid,

That, ere in choir the robins sing,

Pipes its own name like one afraid.

It seems pain-prompted to repeat

The story of some ancient ill,

But _Phoebe! Phoebe!_ sadly sweet

Is all it says, and then is still.

It calls and listens. Earth and sky,

Hushed by the pathos of its fate,

Listen: no whisper of reply

Comes from its doom-dissevered mate.

_Phoebe!_ it calls and calls again,

And Ovid, could he but have heard,

Had hung a legendary pain

About the memory of the bird;

A pain articulate so long,

In penance of some mouldered crime

Whose ghost still flies the Furies' thong

Down the waste solitudes of time.

Waif of the young World's wonder-hour,

When gods found mortal maidens fair,

And will malign was joined with power

Love's kindly laws to overbear,

Like Progne, did it feel the stress

And coil of the prevailing words

Close round its being, and compress

Man's ampler nature to a bird's?

One only memory left of all

The motley crowd of vanished scenes,

Hers, and vain impulse to recall

By repetition what it means.

_Phoebe!_ is all it has to say

In plaintive cadence o'er and o'er,

Like children that have lost their way,

And know their names, but nothing more.

Is it a type, since Nature's Lyre

Vibrates to every note in man,

Of that insatiable desire,

Meant to be so since life began?

I, in strange lands at gray of dawn,

Wakeful, have heard that fruitless plaint

Through Memory's chambers deep withdrawn

Renew its iterations faint.

So nigh! yet from remotest years

It summons back its magic, rife

With longings unappeased, and tears

Drawn from the very source of life.

DAS EWIG-WEIBLICHE

How was I worthy so divine a loss,

Deepening my midnights, kindling all my morns?

Why waste such precious wood to make my cross,

Such far-sought roses for my crown of thorns?

And when she came, how earned I such a gift?

Why spend on me, a poor earth-delving mole,

The fireside sweetnesses, the heavenward lift,

The hourly mercy, of a woman's soul?

Ah, did we know to give her all her right,

What wonders even in our poor clay were done!

It is not Woman leaves us to our night,

But our brute earth that grovels from her sun.

Our nobler cultured fields and gracious domes

We whirl too oft from her who still shines on

To light in vain our caves and clefts, the homes

Of night-bird instincts pained till she be gone.

Still must this body starve our souls with shade;

But when Death makes us what we were before,

Then shall her sunshine all our depths invade,

And not a shadow stain heaven's crystal floor.

THE RECALL

Come back before the birds are flown,

Before the leaves desert the tree,

And, through the lonely alleys blown,

Whisper their vain regrets to me

Who drive before a blast more rude,

The plaything of my gusty mood,

In vain pursuing and pursued!

Nay, come although the boughs be bare,

Though snowflakes fledge the summer's nest,

And in some far Ausonian air

The thrush, your minstrel, warm his breast.

Come, sunshine's treasurer, and bring

To doubting flowers their faith in spring,

To birds and me the need to sing!

ABSENCE

Sleep is Death's image,--poets tell us so;

But Absence is the bitter self of Death,

And, you away, Life's lips their red forego,

Parched in an air unfreshened by your breath.

Light of those eyes that made the light of mine,

Where shine you? On what happier fields and flowers?

Heaven's lamps renew their lustre less divine,

But only serve to count my darkened hours.

If with your presence went your image too,

That brain-born ghost my path would never cross

Which meets me now where'er I once met you,

Then vanishes, to multiply my loss.

MONNA LISA

She gave me all that woman can,

Nor her soul's nunnery forego,

A confidence that man to man

Without remorse can never show.

Rare art, that can the sense refine

Till not a pulse rebellious stirs,

And, since she never can be mine,

Makes it seem sweeter to be hers!

THE OPTIMIST

Turbid from London's noise and smoke,

Here I find air and quiet too;

Air filtered through the beech and oak,

Quiet by nothing harsher broke

Than wood-dove's meditative coo.

The Truce of God is here; the breeze

Sighs as men sigh relieved from care,

Or tilts as lightly in the trees

As might a robin: all is ease,

With pledge of ampler ease to spare.

Time, leaning on his scythe, forgets

To turn the hour-glass in his hand,

And all life's petty cares and frets,

Its teasing hopes and weak regrets,

Are still as that oblivious sand.

Repose fills all the generous space

Of undulant plain; the rook and crow

Hush; 'tis as if a silent grace,

By Nature murmured, calmed the face

Of Heaven above and Earth below.

From past and future toils I rest,

One Sabbath pacifies my year;

I am the halcyon, this my nest;

And all is safely for the best

While the World's there and I am here.

So I turn tory for the nonce,

And think the radical a bore,

Who cannot see, thick-witted dunce,

That what was good for people once

Must be as good forevermore.

Sun, sink no deeper down the sky;

Earth, never change this summer mood;

Breeze, loiter thus forever by,

Stir the dead leaf or let it lie;

Since I am happy, all is good.

ON BURNING SOME OLD LETTERS

With what odorous woods and spices

Spared for royal sacrifices,

With what costly gums seld-seen,

Hoarded to embalm a queen,

With what frankincense and myrrh,

Burn these precious parts of her,

Full of life and light and sweetness

As a summer day's completeness,

Joy of sun and song of bird

Running wild in every word,

Full of all the superhuman

Grace and winsomeness of woman?

O'er these leaves her wrist has slid,

Thrilled with veins where fire is hid

'Neath the skin's pellucid veil,

Like the opal's passion pale;

This her breath has sweetened; this

Still seems trembling with the kiss

She half-ventured on my name,

Brow and cheek and throat aflame;

Over all caressing lies

Sunshine left there by her eyes;

From them all an effluence rare

With her nearness fills the air,

Till the murmur I half-hear

Of her light feet drawing near.

Rarest woods were coarse and rough,

Sweetest spice not sweet enough,

Too impure all earthly fire

For this sacred funeral-pyre;

These rich relics must suffice

For their own dear sacrifice.

Seek we first an altar fit

For such victims laid on it:

It shall be this slab brought home

In old happy days from Rome,--

Lazuli, once blest to line

Dian's inmost cell and shrine.

Gently now I lay them there.

Pure as Dian's forehead bare,

Yet suffused with warmer hue,

Such as only Latmos knew.

Fire I gather from the sun

In a virgin lens; 'tis done!

Mount the flames, red, yellow, blue,

As her moods were shining through,

Of the moment's impulse born,--

Moods of sweetness, playful scorn,

Half defiance, half surrender,

More than cruel, more than tender,

Flouts, caresses, sunshine, shade,

Gracious doublings of a maid

Infinite in guileless art,

Playing hide-seek with her heart.

On the altar now, alas,

There they lie a crinkling mass,

Writhing still, as if with grief

Went the life from every leaf;

Then (heart-breaking palimpsest!)

Vanishing ere wholly guessed,

Suddenly some lines flash back,

Traced in lightning on the black,

And confess, till now denied,

All the fire they strove to hide.

What they told me, sacred trust,

Stays to glorify my dust,

There to burn through dust and damp

Like a mage's deathless lamp,

While an atom of this frame

Lasts to feed the dainty flame.

All is ashes now, but they

In my soul are laid away,

And their radiance round me hovers

Soft as moonlight over lovers,

Shutting her and me alone

In dream-Edens of our own;

First of lovers to invent

Love, and teach men what it meant.

THE PROTEST

I could not bear to see those eyes

On all with wasteful largess shine,

And that delight of welcome rise

Like sunshine strained through amber wine,

But that a glow from deeper skies,

From conscious fountains more divine,

Is (is it?) mine.

Be beautiful to all mankind,

As Nature fashioned thee to be;

'Twould anger me did all not find

The sweet perfection that's in thee:

Yet keep one charm of charms behind,--

Nay, thou'rt so rich, keep two or three

For (is it?) me!

THE PETITION

Oh, tell me less or tell me more,

Soft eyes with mystery at the core,

That always seem to melt my own

Frankly as pansies fully grown,

Yet waver still 'tween no and yes!

So swift to cavil and deny,

Then parley with concessions shy,

Dear eyes, that make their youth be mine

And through my inmost shadows shine,

Oh, tell me more or tell me less!

FACT OR FANCY?

In town I hear, scarce wakened yet,

My neighbor's clock behind the wall

Record the day's increasing debt,

And _Cuckoo! Cuckoo!_ faintly call.

Our senses run in deepening grooves,

Thrown out of which they lose their tact,

And consciousness with effort moves

From habit past to present fact.

So, in the country waked to-day,

I hear, unwitting of the change,

A cuckoo's throb from far away

Begin to strike, nor think it strange.

The sound creates its wonted frame:

My bed at home, the songster hid

Behind the wainscoting,--all came

As long association bid.

Then, half aroused, ere yet Sleep's mist

From the mind's uplands furl away,

To the familiar sound I list,

Disputed for by Night and Day.

I count to learn how late it is,

Until, arrived at thirty-four,

I question, 'What strange world is this

Whose lavish hours would make me poor?'

_Cuckoo! Cuckoo!_ Still on it went,

With hints of mockery in its tone;

How could such hoards of time be spent

By one poor mortal's wit alone?

I have it! Grant, ye kindly Powers,

I from this spot may never stir,

If only these uncounted hours

May pass, and seem too short, with Her!

But who She is, her form and face,

These to the world of dream belong;

She moves through fancy's visioned space,

Unbodied, like the cuckoo's song.

AGRO-DOLCE

One kiss from all others prevents me,

And sets all my pulses astir,

And burns on my lips and torments me:

'Tis the kiss that I fain would give her.

One kiss for all others requites me,

Although it is never to be,

And sweetens my dreams and invites me:

'Tis the kiss that she dare not give me.

Ah, could it he mine, it were sweeter

Than honey bees garner in dream,

Though its bliss on my lips were fleeter

Than a swallow's dip to the stream.

And yet, thus denied, it can never

In the prose of life vanish away;

O'er my lips it must hover forever,

The sunshine and shade of my day.

THE BROKEN TRYST

Walking alone where we walked together,

When June was breezy and blue,

I watch in the gray autumnal weather

The leaves fall inconstant as you.

If a dead leaf startle behind me,

I think 'tis your garment's hem,

And, oh, where no memory could find me,

Might I whirl away with them!

CASA SIN ALMA

RECUERDO DE MADRID

Silencioso por la puerta

Voy de su casa desierta

Do siempre feliz entré,

Y la encuentro en vano abierta

Cual la boca de una muerta

Despues que el alma se fué.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

FOR THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL CHILDREN OF THE CHURCH OF THE DISCIPLES

'What means this glory round our feet,'

The Magi mused, 'more bright than morn?'

And voices chanted clear and sweet,

'To-day the Prince of Peace is born!'

'What means that star,' the Shepherds said,

'That brightens through the rocky glen?'

And angels, answering overhead,

Sang, 'Peace on earth, good-will to men!'

'Tis eighteen hundred years and more

Since those sweet oracles were dumb;

We wait for Him, like them of yore;

Alas, He seems so slow to come!

But it was said, in words of gold

No time or sorrow e'er shall dim,

That little children might be bold

In perfect trust to come to Him.

All round about our feet shall shine

A light like that the wise men saw,

If we our loving wills incline

To that sweet Life which is the Law.

So shall we learn to understand

The simple faith of shepherds then,

And, clasping kindly hand in hand,

Sing, 'Peace on earth, good-will to men!'

And they who do their souls no wrong,

But keep at eve the faith of morn,

Shall daily hear the angel-song,

'To-day the Prince of Peace is born!'

MY PORTRAIT GALLERY

Oft round my hall of portraiture I gaze,

By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy,

From stainless quarries of deep-buried days.

There, as I muse in soothing melancholy,

Your faces glow in more than mortal youth,

Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly,

The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden,

Now for the first time seen in flawless truth.

Ah, never master that drew mortal breath

Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death,

Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden!

Thou paintest that which struggled here below

Half understood, or understood for woe,

And with a sweet forewarning

Mak'st round the sacred front an aureole glow

Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning.

PAOLO TO FRANCESCA

I was with thee in Heaven: I cannot tell

If years or moments, so the sudden bliss,

When first we found, then lost, us in a kiss.

Abolished Time, abolished Earth and Hell,

Left only Heaven. Then from our blue there fell

The dagger's flash, and did not fall amiss,

For nothing now can rob my life of this,--

That once with thee in Heaven, all else is well.

Us, undivided when man's vengeance came,

God's half-forgives that doth not here divide;

And, were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame,

To me 'twere summer, we being side by side:

This granted, I God's mercy will not blame,

For, given thy nearness, nothing is denied.

SONNET

SCOTTISH BORDER

As sinks the sun behind yon alien hills

Whose heather-purple slopes, in glory rolled,

Flush all my thought with momentary gold,

What pang of vague regret my fancy thrills?

Here 'tis enchanted ground the peasant tills,

Where the shy ballad dared its blooms unfold,

And memory's glamour makes new sights seem old,

As when our life some vanished dream fulfils.

Yet not to thee belong these painless tears,

Land loved ere seen: before my darkened eyes,

From far beyond the waters and the years,

Horizons mute that wait their poet rise;

The stream before me fades and disappears,

And in the Charles the western splendor dies.

SONNET

ON BEING ASKED FOR AN AUTOGRAPH IN VENICE

Amid these fragments of heroic days

When thought met deed with mutual passion's leap,

There sits a Fame whose silent trump makes cheap

What short-lived rumor of ourselves we raise.

They had far other estimate of praise

Who stamped the signet of their souls so deep

In art and action, and whose memories keep

Their height like stars above our misty ways:

In this grave presence to record my name

Something within me hangs the head and shrinks.

Dull were the soul without some joy in fame;

Yet here to claim remembrance were, methinks,

Like him who, in the desert's awful frame,

Notches his cockney initials on the Sphinx.

THE DANCING BEAR

Far over Elf-land poets stretch their sway,

And win their dearest crowns beyond the goal

Of their own conscious purpose; they control

With gossamer threads wide-flown our fancy's play,

And so our action. On my walk to-day,

A wallowing bear begged clumsily his toll,

When straight a vision rose of Atta Troll,

And scenes ideal witched mine eyes away.

'_Merci, Mossieu!_' the astonished bear-ward cried,

Grateful for thrice his hope to me, the slave

Of partial memory, seeing at his side

A bear immortal. The glad dole I gave

Was none of mine; poor Heine o'er the wide

Atlantic welter stretched it from his grave.

THE MAPLE

The Maple puts her corals on in May,

While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,

To be in tune with what the robins sing,

Plastering new log-huts 'mid her branches gray;

But when the Autumn southward turns away,

Then in her veins burns most the blood of Spring.

And every leaf, intensely blossoming,

Makes the year's sunset pale the set of day.

O Youth unprescient, were it only so

With trees you plant, and in whose shade reclined,

Thinking their drifting blooms Fate's coldest snow,

You carve dear names upon the faithful rind,

Nor in that vernal stem the cross foreknow

That Age shall bear, silent, yet unresigned!

NIGHTWATCHES

While the slow clock, as they were miser's gold,

Counts and recounts the mornward steps of Time,

The darkness thrills with conscience of each crime

By Death committed, daily grown more bold.

Once more the list of all my wrongs is told,

And ghostly hands stretch to me from my prime

Helpless farewells, as from an alien clime;

For each new loss redoubles all the old.

This morn 'twas May; the blossoms were astir

With southern wind; but now the boughs are bent

With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze.

How much of all my past is dumb with her,

And of my future, too, for with her went

Half of that world I ever cared to please!

DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES

Hers all that Earth could promise or bestow,--

Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,

Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears,

A life remote from every sordid woe,

And by a nation's swelled to lordlier flow.

What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts or fears,

When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers

Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago?

The guns were shouting Io Hymen then

That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;

The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men

To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb.

Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it blind,

Knowing what life is, what our human-kind?

PRISON OF CERVANTES

Seat of all woes? Though Nature's firm decree

The narrowing soul with narrowing dungeon bind,

Yet was his free of motion as the wind,

And held both worlds, of spirit and sense, in fee.

In charmed communion with his dual mind

He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind,

Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be.

His humor wise could see life's long deceit,

Man's baffled aims, nor therefore both despise;

His knightly nature could ill fortune greet

Like an old friend. Whose ever such kind eyes

That pierced so deep, such scope, save his whose feet

By Avon ceased 'neath the same April's skies?

TO A LADY PLAYING ON THE CITHERN

So dreamy-soft the notes, so far away

They seem to fall, the horns of Oberon

Blow their faint Hunt's-up from the good-time gone;

Or, on a morning of long-withered May,

Larks tinkle unseen o'er Claudian arches gray,

That Romeward crawl from Dreamland; and anon

My fancy flings her cloak of Darkness on,

To vanish from the dungeon of To-day.

In happier times and scenes I seem to be,

And, as her fingers flutter o'er the strings,

The days return when I was young as she,

And my fledged thoughts began to feel their wings

With all Heaven's blue before them: Memory

Or Music is it such enchantment sings?

THE EYE'S TREASURY

Gold of the reddening sunset, backward thrown

In largess on my tall paternal trees,

Thou with false hope or fear didst never tease

His heart that hoards thee; nor is childhood flown

From him whose life no fairer boon hath known

Than that what pleased him earliest still should please:

And who hath incomes safe from chance as these,

Gone in a moment, yet for life his own?

All other gold is slave of earthward laws;

This to the deeps of ether takes its flight,

And on the topmost leaves makes glorious pause

Of parting pathos ere it yield to night:

So linger, as from me earth's light withdraws,

Dear touch of Nature, tremulously bright!

PESSIMOPTIMISM

Ye little think what toil it was to build

A world of men imperfect even as this,

Where we conceive of Good by what we miss,

Of ill by that wherewith best days are filled;

A world whose every atom is self-willed,

Whose corner-stone is propt on artifice,

Whose joy is shorter-lived than woman's kiss,

Whose wisdom hoarded is but to be spilled.

Yet this is better than a life of caves,

Whose highest art was scratching on a bone,

Or chipping toilsome arrowheads of flint;

Better, though doomed to hear while Cleon raves,

To see wit's want eterned in paint or stone,

And wade the drain-drenched shoals of daily print.

THE BRAKES

What countless years and wealth of brain were spent

To bring us hither from our caves and huts,

And trace through pathless wilds the deep-worn ruts

Of faith and habit, by whose deep indent

Prudence may guide if genius be not lent,

Genius, not always happy when it shuts

Its ears against the plodder's ifs and buts,

Hoping in one rash leap to snatch the event.

The coursers of the sun, whose hoofs of flame

Consume morn's misty threshold, are exact

As bankers' clerks, and all this star-poised frame,

One swerve allowed, were with convulsion rackt;

This world were doomed, should Dulness fail, to tame

Wit's feathered heels in the stern stocks of fact.

A FOREBODING

What were the whole void world, if thou wert dead,

Whose briefest absence can eclipse my day,

And make the hours that danced with Time away

Drag their funereal steps with muffled head?

Through thee, meseems, the very rose is red,

From thee the violet steals its breath in May,

From thee draw life all things that grow not gray,

And by thy force the happy stars are sped.

Thou near, the hope of thee to overflow

Fills all my earth and heaven, as when in Spring,

Ere April come, the birds and blossoms know,

And grasses brighten round her feet to cling;

Nay, and this hope delights all nature so

That the dumb turf I tread on seems to sing.

III. FANCY

UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES

What mean these banners spread,

These paths with royal red

So gaily carpeted?

Comes there a prince to-day?

Such footing were too fine

For feet less argentine

Than Dian's own or thine,

Queen whom my tides obey.

Surely for thee are meant

These hues so orient

That with a sultan's tent

Each tree invites the sun;

Our Earth such homage pays,

So decks her dusty ways,

And keeps such holidays,

For one and only one.

My brain shapes form and face,

Throbs with the rhythmic grace

And cadence of her pace

To all fine instincts true;

Her footsteps, as they pass,

Than moonbeams over grass

Fall lighter,--but, alas,

More insubstantial too!

LOVE'S CLOCK

A PASTORAL

DAPHNIS _waiting_

'O Dryad feet,

Be doubly fleet,

Timed to my heart's expectant beat

While I await her!

"At four," vowed she;

'Tis scarcely three,

Yet by _my_ time it seems to be

A good hour later!'

CHLOE

'Bid me not stay!

Hear reason, pray!

'Tis striking six! Sure never day

Was short as this is!'

DAPHNIS

'Reason nor rhyme

Is in the chime!

It can't be five; I've scarce had time

To beg two kisses!'

BOTH

'Early or late,

When lovers wait,

And Love's watch gains, if Time a gait

So snail-like chooses,

Why should his feet

Become more fleet

Than cowards' are, when lovers meet

And Love's watch loses?'

ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS

Light of triumph in her eyes,

Eleanor her apron ties;

As she pushes back her sleeves,

High resolve her bosom heaves.

Hasten, cook! impel the fire

To the pace of her desire;

As you hope to save your soul,

Bring a virgin casserole,

Brightest bring of silver spoons,--

Eleanor makes macaroons!

Almond-blossoms, now adance

In the smile of Southern France,

Leave your sport with sun and breeze,

Think of duty, not of ease;

Fashion, 'neath their jerkins brown,

Kernels white as thistle-down,

Tiny cheeses made with cream

From the Galaxy's mid-stream,

Blanched in light of honeymoons,--

Eleanor makes macaroons!

Now for sugar,--nay, our plan

Tolerates no work of man.

Hurry, then, ye golden bees;

Fetch your clearest honey, please,

Garnered on a Yorkshire moor,

While the last larks sing and soar,

From the heather-blossoms sweet

Where sea-breeze and sunshine meet,

And the Augusts mask as Junes,--

Eleanor makes macaroons!

Next the pestle and mortar find.

Pure rock-crystal,--these to grind

Into paste more smooth than silk,

Whiter than the milkweed's milk:

Spread it on a rose-leaf, thus,

Cate to please Theocritus;

Then the fire with spices swell,

While, for her completer spell,

Mystic canticles she croons,--

Eleanor makes macaroons!

Perfect! and all this to waste

On a graybeard's palsied taste!

Poets so their verses write,

Heap them full of life and light,

And then fling them to the rude

Mumbling of the multitude.

Not so dire her fate as theirs,

Since her friend this gift declares

Choicest of his birthday boons,--

Eleanor's dear macaroons!

_February_ 22, 1884.

TELEPATHY

'And how could you dream of meeting?'

Nay, how can you ask me, sweet?

All day my pulse had been beating

The tune of your coming feet.

And as nearer and ever nearer

I felt the throb of your tread,

To be in the world grew clearer,

And my blood ran rosier red.

Love called, and I could not linger,

But sought the forbidden tryst,

As music follows the finger

Of the dreaming lutanist

And though you had said it and said it,

'We must not be happy to-day,'

Was I not wiser to credit

The fire in my feet than your Nay?

SCHERZO

When the down is on the chin

And the gold-gleam in the hair,

When the birds their sweethearts win

And champagne is in the air,

Love is here, and Love is there,

Love is welcome everywhere.

Summer's cheek too soon turns thin,

Days grow briefer, sunshine rare;

Autumn from his cannekin

Blows the froth to chase Despair:

Love is met with frosty stare,

Cannot house 'neath branches bare.

When new life is in the leaf

And new red is in the rose,

Though Love's Maytlme be as brief

As a dragon-fly's repose,

Never moments come like those,

Be they Heaven or Hell: who knows?

All too soon comes Winter's grief,

Spendthrift Love's false friends turn foes;

Softly comes Old Age, the thief,

Steals the rapture, leaves the throes:

Love his mantle round him throws,--

'Time to say Good-by; it snows.'

'FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC COGITAVIT'

That's a rather bold speech, my Lord Bacon,

For, indeed, is't so easy to know

Just how much we from others have taken,

And how much our own natural flow?

Since your mind bubbled up at its fountain,

How many streams made it elate,

While it calmed to the plain from the mountain,

As every mind must that grows great?

While you thought 'twas You thinking as newly

As Adam still wet with God's dew,

You forgot in your self-pride that truly

The whole Past was thinking through you.

Greece, Rome, nay, your namesake, old Roger,

With Truth's nameless delvers who wrought

In the dark mines of Truth, helped to prod your

Fine brain with the goad of their thought.

As mummy was prized for a rich hue

The painter no elsewhere could find,

So 'twas buried men's thinking with which you

Gave the ripe mellow tone to your mind.

I heard the proud strawberry saying,

'Only look what a ruby I've made!'

It forgot how the bees in their maying

Had brought it the stuff for its trade.

And yet there's the half of a truth in it,

And my Lord might his copyright sue;

For a thought's his who kindles new youth in it,

Or so puts it as makes it more true.

The birds but repeat without ending

The same old traditional notes,

Which some, by more happily blending,

Seem to make over new in their throats;

And we men through our old bit of song run,

Until one just improves on the rest,

And we call a thing his, in the long run,

Who utters it clearest and best.

AUSPEX

My heart, I cannot still it,

Nest that had song-birds in it;

And when the last shall go,

The dreary days, to fill it,

Instead of lark or linnet,

Shall whirl dead leaves and snow.

Had they been swallows only,

Without the passion stronger

That skyward longs and sings,--

Woe's me, I shall be lonely

When I can feel no longer

The impatience of their wings!

A moment, sweet delusion,

Like birds the brown leaves hover;

But it will not be long

Before their wild confusion

Fall wavering down to cover

The poet and his song.

THE PREGNANT COMMENT

Opening one day a book of mine,

I absent, Hester found a line

Praised with a pencil-mark, and this

She left transfigured with a kiss.

When next upon the page I chance,

Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,

And whirl my fancy where it sees

Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,

Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,

Still young and glad as Homer's verse.

'What mean,' I ask, 'these sudden joys?

This feeling fresher than a boy's?

What makes this line, familiar long,

New as the first bird's April song?

I could, with sense illumined thus,

Clear doubtful texts in Æeschylus!'

Laughing, one day she gave the key,

My riddle's open-sesame;

Then added, with a smile demure,

Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure,

'If what I left there give you pain,

You--you--can take it off again;

'Twas for _my_ poet, not for him,

Your Doctor Donne there!'

Earth grew dim

And wavered in a golden mist,

As rose, not paper, leaves I kissed.

Donne, you forgive? I let you keep

Her precious comment, poet deep.

THE LESSON

I sat and watched the walls of night

With cracks of sudden lightning glow,

And listened while with clumsy might

The thunder wallowed to and fro.

The rain fell softly now; the squall,

That to a torrent drove the trees,

Had whirled beyond us to let fall

Its tumult on the whitening seas.

But still the lightning crinkled keen,

Or fluttered fitful from behind

The leaden drifts, then only seen,

That rumbled eastward on the wind.

Still as gloom followed after glare,

While bated breath the pine-trees drew,

Tiny Salmoneus of the air,

His mimic bolts the firefly threw.

He thought, no doubt, 'Those flashes grand,

That light for leagues the shuddering sky,

Are made, a fool could understand,

By some superior kind of fly.

'He's of our race's elder branch,

His family-arms the same as ours.

Both born the twy-forked flame to launch,

Of kindred, if unequal, powers.'

And is man wiser? Man who takes

His consciousness the law to be

Of all beyond his ken, and makes

God but a bigger kind of Me?

SCIENCE AND POETRY

He who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire

Over the land and through the sea-depths still,

Thought only of the flame-winged messenger

As a dull drudge that should encircle earth

With sordid messages of Trade, and tame

Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse

Not long will be defrauded. From her foe

Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch,

The Age of Wonder is renewed again,

And to our disenchanted day restores

The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought,

The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these

I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore,

Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR'S GREETING

The century numbers fourscore years;

You, fortressed in your teens,

To Time's alarums close your ears,

And, while he devastates your peers,

Conceive not what he means.

If e'er life's winter fleck with snow

Your hair's deep shadowed bowers,

That winsome head an art would know

To make it charm, and wear it so

As 'twere a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come,

May yours fall soft and slow

As, shaken by a bee's low hum,

The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,

Down to their mates below!

THE DISCOVERY

I watched a moorland torrent run

Down through the rift itself had made,

Golden as honey in the sun,

Of darkest amber in the shade.

In this wild glen at last, methought,

The magic's secret I surprise;

Here Celia's guardian fairy caught

The changeful splendors of her eyes.

All else grows tame, the sky's one blue,

The one long languish of the rose,

But these, beyond prevision new,

Shall charm and startle to the close.

WITH A SEASHELL

Shell, whose lips, than mine more cold,

Might with Dian's ear make bold,

Seek my Lady's; if thou win

To that portal, shut from sin,

Where commissioned angels' swords

Startle back unholy words,

Thou a miracle shalt see

Wrought by it and wrought in thee;

Thou, the dumb one, shalt recover

Speech of poet, speech of lover.

If she deign to lift you there,

Murmur what I may not dare;

In that archway, pearly-pink

As the Dawn's untrodden brink,

Murmur, 'Excellent and good,

Beauty's best in every mood,

Never common, never tame,

Changeful fair as windwaved flame'--

Nay, I maunder; this she hears

Every day with mocking ears,

With a brow not sudden-stained

With the flush of bliss restrained,

With no tremor of the pulse

More than feels the dreaming dulse

In the midmost ocean's caves,

When a tempest heaps the waves.

Thou must woo her in a phrase

Mystic as the opal's blaze,

Which pure maids alone can see

When their lovers constant be.

I with thee a secret share,

Half a hope, and half a prayer,

Though no reach of mortal skill

Ever told it all, or will;

Say, 'He bids me--nothing more--

Tell you what you guessed before!'

THE SECRET

I have a fancy: how shall I bring it

Home to all mortals wherever they be?

Say it or sing it? Shoe it or wing it,

So it may outrun or outfly ME,

Merest cocoon-web whence it broke free?

Only one secret can save from disaster,

Only one magic is that of the Master:

Set it to music; give it a tune,--

Tune the brook sings you, tune the breeze brings you,

Tune the wild columbines nod to in June!

This is the secret: so simple, you see!

Easy as loving, easy as kissing,

Easy as--well, let me ponder--as missing,

Known, since the world was, by scarce two or three.

IV. HUMOR AND SATIRE

FITZ ADAM'S STORY

The next whose fortune 'twas a tale to tell

Was one whom men, before they thought, loved well,

And after thinking wondered why they did,

For half he seemed to let them, half forbid,

And wrapped him so in humors, sheath on sheath,

'Twas hard to guess the mellow soul beneath:

But, once divined, you took him to your heart,

While he appeared to bear with you as part

Of life's impertinence, and once a year

Betrayed his true self by a smile or tear, 10

Or rather something sweetly shy and loath,

Withdrawn ere fully shown, and mixed of both.

A cynic? Not precisely: one who thrust

Against a heart too prone to love and trust,

Who so despised false sentiment he knew

Scarce in himself to part the false and true,

And strove to hide, by roughening-o'er the skin,

Those cobweb nerves he could not dull within.

Gentle by birth, but of a stem decayed,

He shunned life's rivalries and hated trade; 20

On a small patrimony and larger pride,

He lived uneaseful on the Other Side

(So he called Europe), only coming West

To give his Old-World appetite new zest;

Yet still the New World spooked it in his veins,

A ghost he could not lay with all his pains;

For never Pilgrims' offshoot scapes control

Of those old instincts that have shaped his soul.

A radical in thought, he puffed away

With shrewd contempt the dust of usage gray, 30

Yet loathed democracy as one who saw,

In what he longed to love, some vulgar flaw,

And, shocked through all his delicate reserves,

Remained a Tory by his taste and nerves,

His fancy's thrall, he drew all ergoes thence,

And thought himself the type of common sense;

Misliking women, not from cross or whim,

But that his mother shared too much in him,

And he half felt that what in them was grace

Made the unlucky weakness of his race. 40

What powers he had he hardly cared to know,

But sauntered through the world as through a show;

A critic fine in his haphazard way,

A sort of mild La Bruyère on half-pay.

For comic weaknesses he had an eye

Keen as an acid for an alkali,

Yet you could feel, through his sardonic tone,

He loved them all, unless they were his own.

You might have called him, with his humorous twist,

A kind of human entomologist; 50

As these bring home, from every walk they take,

Their hat-crowns stuck with bugs of curious make,

So he filled all the lining of his head

With characters impaled and ticketed,

And had a cabinet behind his eyes

For all they caught of mortal oddities.

He might have been a poet--many worse--

But that he had, or feigned, contempt of verse;

Called it tattooing language, and held rhymes

The young world's lullaby of ruder times. 60

Bitter in words, too indolent for gall,

He satirized himself the first of all,

In men and their affairs could find no law,

And was the ill logic that he thought he saw.

Scratching a match to light his pipe anew,

With eyes half shut some musing whiffs he drew

And thus began: 'I give you all my word,

I think this mock-Decameron absurd;

Boccaccio's garden! how bring that to pass

In our bleak clime save under double glass? 70

The moral east-wind of New England life

Would snip its gay luxuriance like a knife;

Mile-deep the glaciers brooded here, they say,

Through æons numb; we feel their chill to-day.

These foreign plants are but half-hardy still,

Die on a south, and on a north wall chill.

Had we stayed Puritans! _They_ had some heat,

(Though whence derived I have my own conceit,)

But you have long ago raked up their fires;

Where they had faith, you've ten sham-Gothic spires. 80

Why more exotics? Try your native vines,

And in some thousand years you _may_ have wines;

Your present grapes are harsh, all pulps and skins,

And want traditions of ancestral bins

That saved for evenings round the polished board

Old lava fires, the sun-steeped hillside's hoard.

Without a Past, you lack that southern wall

O'er which the vines of Poesy should crawl;

Still they're your only hope: no midnight oil

Makes up for virtue wanting in the soil; 90

Manure them well and prune them; 'twon't be France,

Nor Spain, nor Italy, but there's your chance.

You have one story-teller worth a score

Of dead Boccaccios,--nay, add twenty more,--

A hawthorn asking spring's most dainty breath,

And him you're freezing pretty well to death.

However, since you say so, I will tease

My memory to a story by degrees,

Though you will cry, "Enough!" I'm wellnigh sure,

Ere I have dreamed through half my overture. 100

Stories were good for men who had no books,

(Fortunate race!) and built their nests like rooks

In lonely towers, to which the Jongleur brought

His pedler's-box of cheap and tawdry thought,

With here and there a fancy fit to see

Wrought in quaint grace in golden filigree,--

Some ring that with the Muse's finger yet

Is warm, like Aucassin and Nicolete;

The morning newspaper has spoilt his trade,

(For better or for worse, I leave unsaid,) 110

And stories now, to suit a public nice,

Must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.

'All tourists know Shebagog County: there

The summer idlers take their yearly stare,

Dress to see Nature in a well-bred way,

As 'twere Italian opera, or play,

Encore the sunrise (if they're out of bed).

And pat the Mighty Mother on the head:

These have I seen,--all things are good to see.--

And wondered much at their complacency. 120

This world's great show, that took in getting-up

Millions of years, they finish ere they sup;

Sights that God gleams through with soul-tingling force

They glance approvingly as things of course.

Say, "That's a grand rock," "This a pretty fall."

Not thinking, "Are we worthy?" What if all

The scornful landscape should turn round and say,

"This is a fool, and that a popinjay"?

I often wonder what the Mountain thinks

Of French boots creaking o'er his breathless brinks, 130

Or how the Sun would scare the chattering crowd,

If some fine day he chanced to think aloud.

I, who love Nature much as sinners can,

Love her where she most grandeur shows,--in man:

Here find I mountain, forest, cloud, and sun,

River and sea, and glows when day is done;

Nay, where she makes grotesques, and moulds in jest

The clown's cheap clay, I find unfading zest.

The natural instincts year by year retire,

As deer shrink northward from the settler's fire, 140

And he who loves the wild game-flavor more

Than city-feasts, where every man's a bore

To every other man, must seek it where

The steamer's throb and railway's iron blare

Have not yet startled with their punctual stir

The shy, wood-wandering brood of Character.

'There is a village, once the county town,

Through which the weekly mail rolled dustily down,

Where the courts sat, it may be, twice a year,

And the one tavern reeked with rustic cheer; 150

Cheeshogquesumscot erst, now Jethro hight,

Red-man and pale-face bore it equal spite.

The railway ruined it, the natives say,

That passed unwisely fifteen miles away,

And made a drain to which, with steady ooze,

Filtered away law, stage-coach, trade, and news.

The railway saved it: so at least think those

Who love old ways, old houses, old repose.

Of course the Tavern stayed: its genial host

Thought not of flitting more than did the post 160

On which high-hung the fading signboard creaks,

Inscribed, "The Eagle Inn, by Ezra Weeks."

'If in life's journey you should ever find

An inn medicinal for body and mind,

'Tis sure to be some drowsy-looking house

Whose easy landlord has a bustling spouse:

He, if he like you, will not long forego

Some bottle deep in cobwebbed dust laid low,

That, since the War we used to call the "Last,"

Has dozed and held its lang-syne memories fast: 170

From him exhales that Indian-summer air

Of hazy, lazy welcome everywhere,

While with her toil the napery is white,

The china dustless, the keen knife-blades bright,

Salt dry as sand, and bread that seems as though

'Twere rather sea-foam baked than vulgar dough.

'In our swift country, houses trim and white

Are pitched like tents, the lodging of a night;

Each on its bank of baked turf mounted high

Perches impatient o'er the roadside dry, 180

While the wronged landscape coldly stands aloof,

Refusing friendship with the upstart roof.

Not so the Eagle; on a grass-green swell

That toward the south with sweet concessions fell

It dwelt retired, and half had grown to be

As aboriginal as rock or tree.

It nestled close to earth, and seemed to brood

O'er homely thoughts in a half-conscious mood,

As by the peat that rather fades than burns

The smouldering grandam nods and knits by turns, 190

Happy, although her newest news were old

Ere the first hostile drum at Concord rolled.

If paint it e'er had known, it knew no more

Than yellow lichens spattered thickly o'er

That soft lead-gray, less dark beneath the eaves

Which the slow brush of wind and weather leaves.

The ample roof sloped backward to the ground,

And vassal lean-tos gathered thickly round,

Patched on, as sire or son had felt the need,

Like chance growths sprouting from the old roofs seed, 200

Just as about a yellow-pine-tree spring

Its rough-barked darlings in a filial ring.

But the great chimney was the central thought

Whose gravitation through the cluster wrought;

For 'tis not styles far-fetched from Greece or Rome,

But just the Fireside, that can make a home;

None of your spindling things of modern style,

Like pins stuck through to stay the card-built pile,

It rose broad-shouldered, kindly, debonair,

Its warm breath whitening in the October air, 210

While on its front a heart in outline showed

The place it filled in that serene abode.

'When first I chanced the Eagle to explore.

Ezra sat listless by the open door;

One chair careened him at an angle meet,

Another nursed his hugely slippered feet;

Upon a third reposed a shirt-sleeved arm,

And the whole man diffused tobacco's charm.

"Are you the landlord?" "Wahl, I guess I be,"

Watching the smoke he answered leisurely. 220

He was a stoutish man, and through the breast

Of his loose shirt there showed a brambly chest;

Streaked redly as a wind-foreboding morn,

His tanned cheeks curved to temples closely shorn;

Clean-shaved he was, save where a hedge of gray

Upon his brawny throat leaned every way

About an Adam's-apple, that beneath

Bulged like a boulder from a brambly heath.

The Western World's true child and nursling he,

Equipt with aptitudes enough for three: 230

No eye like his to value horse or cow,

Or gauge the contents of a stack or mow;

He could foretell the weather at a word,

He knew the haunt of every beast and bird,

Or where a two-pound trout was sure to lie,

Waiting the flutter of his homemade fly;

Nay, once in autumns five, he had the luck

To drop at fair-play range a ten-tined buck;

Of sportsmen true he favored every whim,

But never cockney found a guide in him; 240

A natural man, with all his instincts fresh,

Not buzzing helpless in Reflection's mesh,

Firm on its feet stood his broad-shouldered mind,

As bluffly honest as a northwest wind;

Hard-headed and soft-hearted, you'd scarce meet

A kindlier mixture of the shrewd and sweet;

Generous by birth, and ill at saying "No,"

Yet in a bargain he was all men's foe,

Would yield no inch of vantage in a trade,

And give away ere nightfall all he made. 250

"Can I have lodging here?" once more I said.

He blew a whiff, and, leaning back his head,

"You come a piece through Bailey's woods, I s'pose,

Acrost a bridge where a big swamp-oak grows?

It don't grow, neither; it's ben dead ten year,

Nor th' ain't a livin' creetur, fur nor near,

Can tell wut killed it; but I some misdoubt

'Twas borers, there's sech heaps on 'em about.

You didn' chance to run ag'inst my son,

A long, slab-sided youngster with a gun? 260

He'd oughto ben back more 'n an hour ago,

An' brought some birds to dress for supper--sho!

There he comes now. 'Say, Obed, wut ye got?

(He'll hev some upland plover like as not.)

Wal, them's real nice uns, an'll eat A 1,

Ef I can stop their bein' overdone;

Nothin' riles _me_ (I pledge my fastin' word)

Like cookin' out the natur' of a bird;

(Obed, you pick 'em out o' sight an' sound,

Your ma'am don't love no feathers cluttrin' round;) 270

Jes' scare 'em with the coals,--thet's _my_ idee."

Then, turning suddenly about on me,

"Wal, Square, I guess so. Callilate to stay?

I'll ask Mis' Weeks; 'bout _thet_ it's hern to say."

'Well, there I lingered all October through,

In that sweet atmosphere of hazy blue,

So leisurely, so soothing, so forgiving,

That sometimes makes New England fit for living.

I watched the landscape, erst so granite glum,

Bloom like the south side of a ripening plum, 280

And each rock-maple on the hillside make

His ten days' sunset doubled in the lake;

The very stone walls draggling up the hills

Seemed touched, and wavered in their roundhead wills.

Ah! there's a deal of sugar in the sun!

Tap me in Indian summer, I should run

A juice to make rock-candy of,--but then

We get such weather scarce one year in ten.

'There was a parlor in the house, a room

To make you shudder with its prudish gloom. 290

The furniture stood round with such an air,

There seemed an old maid's ghost in every chair,

Which looked as it had scuttled to its place

And pulled extempore a Sunday face,

Too smugly proper for a world of sin,

Like boys on whom the minister comes in.

The table, fronting you with icy stare,

Strove to look witless that its legs were bare,

While the black sofa with its horse-hair pall

Gloomed like a bier for Comfort's funeral. 300

Each piece appeared to do its chilly best

To seem an utter stranger to the rest,

As if acquaintanceship were deadly sin,

Like Britons meeting in a foreign inn.

Two portraits graced the wall in grimmest truth,

Mister and Mistress W. in their youth,--

New England youth, that seems a sort of pill,

Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the Will,

Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace

Of Calvinistic colic on the face. 310

Between them, o'er the mantel, hung in state

Solomon's temple, done in copperplate;

Invention pure, but meant, we may presume,

To give some Scripture sanction to the room.

Facing this last, two samplers you might see,

Each, with its urn and stiffly weeping tree,

Devoted to some memory long ago

More faded than their lines of worsted woe;

Cut paper decked their frames against the flies,

Though none e'er dared an entrance who were wise, 320

And bushed asparagus in fading green

Added its shiver to the franklin clean.

'When first arrived, I chilled a half-hour there,

Nor dared deflower with use a single chair;

I caught no cold, yet flying pains could find

For weeks in me,--a rheumatism of mind.

One thing alone imprisoned there had power

To hold me in the place that long half-hour:

A scutcheon this, a helm-surmounted shield,

Three griffins argent on a sable field; 330

A relic of the shipwrecked past was here,

And Ezra held some Old-World lumber dear.

Nay, do not smile; I love this kind of thing,

These cooped traditions with a broken wing,

This freehold nook in Fancy's pipe-blown ball,

This less than nothing that is more than all!

Have I not seen sweet natures kept alive

Amid the humdrum of your business hive,

Undowered spinsters shielded from all harms,

By airy incomes from a coat of arms?' 340

He paused a moment, and his features took

The flitting sweetness of that inward look

I hinted at before; but, scarcely seen,

It shrank for shelter 'neath his harder mien,

And, rapping his black pipe of ashes clear,

He went on with a self-derisive sneer:

'No doubt we make a part of God's design,

And break the forest-path for feet divine;

To furnish foothold for this grand prevision

Is good, and yet--to be the mere transition, 350

That, you will say, is also good, though I

Scarce like to feed the ogre By-and-By.

Raw edges rasp my nerves; my taste is wooed

By things that are, not going to be, good,

Though were I what I dreamed two lustres gone,

I'd stay to help the Consummation on,

Whether a new Rome than the old more fair,

Or a deadflat of rascal-ruled despair;

But _my_ skull somehow never closed the suture

That seems to knit yours firmly with the future, 360

So you'll excuse me if I'm sometimes fain

To tie the Past's warm nightcap o'er my brain;

I'm quite aware 'tis not in fashion here,

But then your northeast winds are _so_ severe!

'But to my story: though 'tis truly naught

But a few hints in Memory's sketchbook caught,

And which may claim a value on the score

Of calling back some scenery now no more.

Shall I confess? The tavern's only Lar

Seemed (be not shocked!) its homely-featured bar. 370

Here dozed a fire of beechen logs, that bred

Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,

And nursed the loggerhead whose hissing dip,

Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip

That made from mouth to mouth its genial round,

Nor left one nature wholly winter-bound;

Hence dropt the tinkling coal all mellow-ripe

For Uncle Reuben's talk-extinguished pipe;

Hence rayed the heat, as from an indoor sun,

That wooed forth many a shoot of rustic fun. 380

Here Ezra ruled as king by right divine;

No other face had such a wholesome shine,

No laugh like his so full of honest cheer;

Above the rest it crowed like Chanticleer.

'In this one room his dame you never saw,

Where reigned by custom old a Salic law;

Here coatless lolled he on his throne of oak,

And every tongue paused midway if he spoke.

Due mirth he loved, yet was his sway severe;

No blear-eyed driveller got his stagger here; 390

"Measure was happiness; who wanted more,

Must buy his ruin at the Deacon's store;"

None but his lodgers after ten could stay,

Nor after nine on eves of Sabbath-day.

He had his favorites and his pensioners,

The same that gypsy Nature owns for hers:

Loose-ended souls, whose skills bring scanty gold,

And whom the poor-house catches when they're old;

Rude country-minstrels, men who doctor kine,

Or graft, and, out of scions ten, save nine; 400

Creatures of genius they, but never meant

To keep step with the civic regiment,

These Ezra welcomed, feeling in his mind

Perhaps some motions of the vagrant kind;

These paid no money, yet for them he drew

Special Jamaica from a tap they knew,

And, for their feelings, chalked behind the door

With solemn face a visionary score.

This thawed to life in Uncle Reuben's throat

A torpid shoal of jest and anecdote, 410

Like those queer fish that doze the droughts away,

And wait for moisture, wrapped in sun-baked clay;

This warmed the one-eyed fiddler to his task,

Perched in the corner on an empty cask,

By whose shrill art rapt suddenly, some boor

Rattled a double-shuffle on the floor;

"Hull's Victory" was, indeed, the favorite air,

Though "Yankee Doodle" claimed its proper share.

''Twas there I caught from Uncle Reuben's lips,

In dribbling monologue 'twixt whiffs and sips, 420

The story I so long have tried to tell;

The humor coarse, the persons common,--well,

From Nature only do I love to paint,

Whether she send a satyr or a saint;

To me Sincerity's the one thing good,

Soiled though she be and lost to maidenhood.

Quompegan is a town some ten miles south

From Jethro, at Nagumscot river-mouth,

A seaport town, and makes its title good

With lumber and dried fish and eastern wood. 430

Here Deacon Bitters dwelt and kept the Store,

The richest man for many a mile of shore;

In little less than everything dealt he,

From meeting-houses to a chest of tea;

So dextrous therewithal a flint to skin,

He could make profit on a single pin;

In business strict, to bring the balance true

He had been known to bite a fig in two,

And change a board-nail for a shingle-nail.

All that he had he ready held for sale, 440

His house, his tomb, whate'er the law allows,

And he had gladly parted with his spouse.

His one ambition still to get and get,

He would arrest your very ghost for debt.

His store looked righteous, should the Parson come,

But in a dark back-room he peddled rum,

And eased Ma'am Conscience, if she e'er would scold,

By christening it with water ere he sold.

A small, dry man he was, who wore a queue,

And one white neckcloth all the week-days through,-- 450

On Monday white, by Saturday as dun

As that worn homeward by the prodigal son.

His frosted earlocks, striped with foxy brown,

Were braided up to hide a desert crown;

His coat was brownish, black perhaps of yore;

In summer-time a banyan loose he wore;

His trousers short, through many a season true,

Made no pretence to hide his stockings blue;

A waistcoat buff his chief adornment was,

Its porcelain buttons rimmed with dusky brass. 460

A deacon he, you saw it in each limb,

And well he knew to deacon-off a hymn,

Or lead the choir through all its wandering woes

With voice that gathered unction in his nose,

Wherein a constant snuffle you might hear,

As if with him 'twere winter all the year.

At pew-head sat he with decorous pains,

In sermon-time could foot his weekly gains,

Or, with closed eyes and heaven-abstracted air,

Could plan a new investment in long-prayer. 470

A pious man, and thrifty too, he made

The psalms and prophets partners in his trade,

And in his orthodoxy straitened more

As it enlarged the business at his store;

He honored Moses, but, when gain he planned,

Had his own notion of the Promised Land.

'Soon as the winter made the sledding good,

From far around the farmers hauled him wood,

For all the trade had gathered 'neath his thumb.

He paid in groceries and New England rum, 480

Making two profits with a conscience clear,--

Cheap all he bought, and all he paid with dear.

With his own mete-wand measuring every load,

Each somehow had diminished on the road;

An honest cord in Jethro still would fail

By a good foot upon the Deacon's scale,

And, more to abate the price, his gimlet eye

Would pierce to cat-sticks that none else could spy;

Yet none dared grumble, for no farmer yet

But New Year found him in the Deacon's debt. 490

'While the first snow was mealy under feet,

A team drawled creaking down Quompegan street.

Two cords of oak weighed down the grinding sled,

And cornstalk fodder rustled overhead;

The oxen's muzzles, as they shouldered through,

Were silver-fringed; the driver's own was blue

As the coarse frock that swung below his knee.

Behind his load for shelter waded he;

His mittened hands now on his chest he beat,

Now stamped the stiffened cowhides of his feet, 500

Hushed as a ghost's; his armpit scarce could hold

The walnut whipstock slippery-bright with cold.

What wonder if, the tavern as he past,

He looked and longed, and stayed his beasts at last,

Who patient stood and veiled themselves in steam

While he explored the bar-room's ruddy gleam?

'Before the fire, in want of thought profound,

There sat a brother-townsman weather-bound:

A sturdy churl, crisp-headed, bristly-eared,

Red as a pepper; 'twixt coarse brows and beard 510

His eyes lay ambushed, on the watch for fools,

Clear, gray, and glittering like two bay-edged pools;

A shifty creature, with a turn for fun,

Could swap a poor horse for a better one,--

He'd a high-stepper always in his stall;

Liked far and near, and dreaded therewithal.

To him the in-comer, "Perez, how d' ye do?"

"Jest as I'm mind to, Obed; how do you?"

Then, his eyes twinkling such swift gleams as run

Along the levelled barrel of a gun 520

Brought to his shoulder by a man you know

Will bring his game down, he continued, "So,

I s'pose you're haulin' wood? But you're too late;

The Deacon's off; Old Splitfoot couldn't wait;

He made a bee-line las' night in the storm

To where he won't need wood to keep him warm.

'Fore this he's treasurer of a fund to train

Young imps as missionaries; hopes to gain

That way a contract that he has in view

For fireproof pitchforks of a pattern new, 530

It must have tickled him, all drawbacks weighed,

To think he stuck the Old One in a trade;

His soul, to start with, wasn't worth a carrot.

And all he'd left 'ould hardly serve to swear at."

'By this time Obed had his wits thawed out,

And, looking at the other half in doubt,

Took off his fox-skin cap to scratch his head,

Donned it again, and drawled forth, "Mean he's dead?"

"Jesso; he's dead and t'other _d_ that follers

With folks that never love a thing but dollars. 540

He pulled up stakes last evening, fair and square,

And ever since there's been a row Down There.

The minute the old chap arrived, you see,

Comes the Boss-devil to him, and says he,

'What are you good at? Little enough, I fear;

We callilate to make folks useful here.'

'Well,' says old Bitters, 'I expect I can

Scale a fair load of wood with e'er a man.'

'Wood we don't deal in; but perhaps you'll suit,

Because we buy our brimstone by the foot: 550

Here, take this measurin'-rod, as smooth as sin,

And keep a reckonin' of what loads comes in.

You'll not want business, for we need a lot

To keep the Yankees that you send us hot;

At firin' up they're barely half as spry

As Spaniards or Italians, though they're dry;

At first we have to let the draught on stronger,

But, heat 'em through, they seem to hold it longer.'

'"Bitters he took the rod, and pretty soon

A teamster comes, whistling an ex-psalm tune. 560

A likelier chap you wouldn't ask to see,

No different, but his limp, from you or me"--

"No different, Perez! Don't your memory fail?

Why, where in thunder was his horns and tail?"

"They're only worn by some old-fashioned pokes;

They mostly aim at looking just like folks.

Sech things are scarce as queues and top-boots here;

'Twould spoil their usefulness to look too queer.

Ef you could always know 'em when they come,

They'd get no purchase on you: now be mum. 570

On come the teamster, smart as Davy Crockett,

Jinglin' the red-hot coppers in his pocket,

And clost behind, ('twas gold-dust, you'd ha' sworn,)

A load of sulphur yallower 'n seed-corn;

To see it wasted as it is Down There

Would make a Friction-Match Co. tear its hair!

'Hold on!' says Bitters, 'stop right where you be;

You can't go in athout a pass from me.'

'All right,' says t'other, 'only step round smart;

I must be home by noon-time with the cart.' 580

Bitters goes round it sharp-eyed as a rat,

Then with a scrap of paper on his hat

Pretends to cipher. 'By the public staff,

That load scarce rises twelve foot and a half.'

'There's fourteen foot and over,' says the driver,

'Worth twenty dollars, ef it's worth a stiver;

Good fourth-proof brimstone, that'll make 'em squirm,--

I leave it to the Headman of the Firm;

After we masure it, we always lay

Some on to allow for settlin' by the way. 590

Imp and full-grown, I've carted sulphur here,

And gi'n fair satisfaction, thirty year.'

With that they fell to quarrellin' so loud

That in five minutes they had drawed a crowd,

And afore long the Boss, who heard the row,

Comes elbowin' in with 'What's to pay here now?'

Both parties heard, the measurin'-rod he takes,

And of the load a careful survey makes.

'Sence I have bossed the business here,' says he,

'No fairer load was ever seen by me.' 600

Then, turnin' to the Deacon, 'You mean cus.

None of your old Quompegan tricks with us!

They won't do here: we're plain old-fashioned folks,

And don't quite understand that kind o' jokes.

I know this teamster, and his pa afore him,

And the hard-working Mrs. D. that bore him;

He wouldn't soil his conscience with a lie,

Though he might get the custom-house thereby.

Here, constable, take Bitters by the queue.

And clap him into furnace ninety-two, 610

And try this brimstone on him; if he's bright,

He'll find the masure honest afore night.

He isn't worth his fuel, and I'll bet

The parish oven has to take him yet!'"

'This is my tale, heard twenty years ago

From Uncle Reuben, as the logs burned low,

Touching the walls and ceiling with that bloom

That makes a rose's calyx of a room.

I could not give his language, wherethrough ran

The gamy flavor of the bookless man 620

Who shapes a word before the fancy cools,

As lonely Crusoe improvised his tools.

I liked the tale,--'twas like so many told

By Rutebeuf and his Brother Trouvères bold;

Nor were the hearers much unlike to theirs,

Men unsophisticate, rude-nerved as bears.

Ezra is gone and his large-hearted kind,

The landlords of the hospitable mind;

Good Warriner of Springfield was the last;

An inn is now a vision of the past; 630

One yet-surviving host my mind recalls,--

You'll find him if you go to Trenton Falls.'

THE ORIGIN OF DIDACTIC POETRY

When wise Minerva still was young

And just the least romantic,

Soon after from Jove's head she flung

That preternatural antic,

'Tis said, to keep from idleness

Or flirting, those twin curses,

She spent her leisure, more or less,

In writing po----, no, verses.

How nice they were! to rhyme with _far_

A kind _star_ did not tarry;

The metre, too, was regular

As schoolboy's dot and carry;

And full they were of pious plums,

So extra-super-moral,--

For sucking Virtue's tender gums

Most tooth-enticing coral.

A clean, fair copy she prepares,

Makes sure of moods and tenses,

With her own hand,--for prudence spares

A man-(or woman-)-uensis;

Complete, and tied with ribbons proud,

She hinted soon how cosy a

Treat it would be to read them loud

After next day's Ambrosia.

The Gods thought not it would amuse

So much as Homer's Odyssees,

But could not very well refuse

The properest of Goddesses;

So all sat round in attitudes

Of various dejection,

As with a _hem!_ the queen of prudes

Began her grave prelection.

At the first pause Zeus said, 'Well sung!--

I mean--ask Phoebus,--_he_ knows.'

Says Phoebus, 'Zounds! a wolf's among

Admetus's merinos!

Fine! very fine! but I must go;

They stand in need of me there;

Excuse me!' snatched his stick, and so

Plunged down the gladdened ether.

With the next gap, Mars said, 'For me

Don't wait,--naught could be finer,

But I'm engaged at half past three,--

A fight in Asia Minor!'

Then Venus lisped, 'I'm sorely tried,

These duty-calls are vip'rous;

But I _must_ go; I have a bride

To see about in Cyprus.'

Then Bacchus,--'I must say good-by,

Although my peace it jeopards;

I meet a man at four, to try

A well-broke pair of leopards.'

His words woke Hermes. 'Ah!' he said,

'I _so_ love moral theses!'

Then winked at Hebe, who turned red,

And smoothed her apron's creases.

Just then Zeus snored,--the Eagle drew

His head the wing from under;

Zeus snored,--o'er startled Greece there flew

The many-volumed thunder.

Some augurs counted nine, some, ten;

Some said 'twas war, some, famine;

And all, that other-minded men

Would get a precious----.

Proud Pallas sighed, 'It will not do;

Against the Muse I've sinned, oh!'

And her torn rhymes sent flying through

Olympus's back window.

Then, packing up a peplus clean,

She took the shortest path thence,

And opened, with a mind serene,

A Sunday-school in Athens.

The verses? Some in ocean swilled,

Killed every fish that bit to 'em;

Some Galen caught, and, when distilled,

Found morphine the residuum;

But some that rotted on the earth

Sprang up again in copies,

And gave two strong narcotics birth,

Didactic verse and poppies.

Years after, when a poet asked

The Goddess's opinion,

As one whose soul its wings had tasked

In Art's clear-aired dominion,

'Discriminate,' she said, 'betimes;

The Muse is unforgiving;

Put all your beauty in your rhymes,

Your morals in your living.'

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Don't believe in the Flying Dutchman?

I've known the fellow for years;

My button I've wrenched from his clutch, man:

I shudder whenever he nears!

He's a Rip van Winkle skipper,

A Wandering Jew of the sea,

Who sails his bedevilled old clipper

In the wind's eye, straight as a bee.

Back topsails! you can't escape him;

The man-ropes stretch with his weight,

And the queerest old toggeries drape him,

The Lord knows how long out of date!

Like a long-disembodied idea,

(A kind of ghost plentiful now,)

He stands there; you fancy you see a

Coeval of Teniers or Douw.

He greets you; would have you take letters:

You scan the addresses with dread,

While he mutters his _donners_ and _wetters_,--

They're all from the dead to the dead!

You seem taking time for reflection,

But the heart fills your throat with a jam,

As you spell in each faded direction

An ominous ending in _dam_.

Am I tagging my rhymes to a legend?

That were changing green turtle to mock:

No, thank you! I've found out which wedge-end

Is meant for the head of a block.

The fellow I have in my mind's eye

Plays the old Skipper's part here on shore,

And sticks like a burr, till he finds I

Have got just the gauge of his bore.

This postman 'twist one ghost and t'other,

With last dates that smell of the mould,

I have met him (O man and brother,

Forgive me!) in azure and gold.

In the pulpit I've known of his preaching,

Out of hearing behind the time,

Some statement of Balaam's impeaching,

Giving Eve a due sense of her crime.

I have seen him some poor ancient thrashing

Into something (God save us!) more dry,

With the Water of Life itself washing

The life out of earth, sea, and sky.

O dread fellow-mortal, get newer

Despatches to carry, or none!

We're as quick as the Greek and the Jew were

At knowing a loaf from a stone.

Till the couriers of God fail in duty,

We sha'n't ask a mummy for news,

Nor sate the soul's hunger for beauty

With your drawings from casts of a Muse.

CREDIDIMUS JOVEM REGNARE

O days endeared to every Muse,

When nobody had any Views,

Nor, while the cloudscape of his mind

By every breeze was new designed,

Insisted all the world should see

Camels or whales where none there be!

O happy days, when men received

From sire to son what all believed,

And left the other world in bliss,

Too busy with bedevilling this! 10

Beset by doubts of every breed

In the last bastion of my creed,

With shot and shell for Sabbath-chime,

I watch the storming-party climb,

Panting (their prey in easy reach),

To pour triumphant through the breach

In walls that shed like snowflakes tons

Of missiles from old-fashioned guns,

But crumble 'neath the storm that pours

All day and night from bigger bores. 20

There, as I hopeless watch and wait

The last life-crushing coil of Fate,

Despair finds solace in the praise

Of those serene dawn-rosy days

Ere microscopes had made us heirs

To large estates of doubts and snares,

By proving that the title-deeds,

Once all-sufficient for men's needs,

Are palimpsests that scarce disguise

The tracings of still earlier lies, 30

Themselves as surely written o'er

An older fib erased before.

So from these days I fly to those

That in the landlocked Past repose,

Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes

From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes;

Where morning's eyes see nothing strange,

No crude perplexity of change,

And morrows trip along their ways

Secure as happy yesterdays. 40

Then there were rulers who could trace

Through heroes up to gods their race,

Pledged to fair fame and noble use

By veins from Odin filled or Zeus,

And under bonds to keep divine

The praise of a celestial line.

Then priests could pile the altar's sods,

With whom gods spake as they with gods,

And everywhere from haunted earth

Broke springs of wonder, that had birth 50

In depths divine beyond the ken

And fatal scrutiny of men;

Then hills and groves and streams and seas

Thrilled with immortal presences,

Not too ethereal for the scope

Of human passion's dream or hope.

Now Pan at last is surely dead,

And King No-Credit reigns instead,

Whose officers, morosely strict,

Poor Fancy's tenantry evict, 60

Chase the last Genius from the door,

And nothing dances any more.

Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do,

Dramming the Old One's own tattoo,

And, if the oracles are dumb,

Have we not mediums! Why be glum?

Fly thither? Why, the very air

Is full of hindrance and despair!

Fly thither? But I cannot fly;

My doubts enmesh me if I try, 70

Each Liliputian, but, combined,

Potent a giant's limbs to bind.

This world and that are growing dark;

A huge interrogation mark,

The Devil's crook episcopal.

Still borne before him since the Fall,

Blackens with its ill-omened sign

The old blue heaven of faith benign.

Whence? Whither? Wherefore? How? Which? Why?

All ask at once, all wait reply. 80

Men feel old systems cracking under 'em;

Life saddens to a mere conundrum

Which once Religion solved, but she

Has lost--has Science found?--the key.

What was snow-bearded Odin, trow,

The mighty hunter long ago,

Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears

Still when the Northlights shake their spears?

Science hath answers twain, I've heard;

Choose which you will, nor hope a third; 90

Whichever box the truth be stowed in,

There's not a sliver left of Odin.

Either he was a pinchbrowed thing,

With scarcely wit a stone to fling,

A creature both in size and shape

Nearer than we are to the ape,

Who hung sublime with brat and spouse

By tail prehensile from the boughs,

And, happier than his maimed descendants,

The culture-curtailed _in_dependents, 100

Could pluck his cherries with both paws,

And stuff with both his big-boned jaws;

Or else the core his name enveloped

Was from a solar myth developed,

Which, hunted to its primal shoot,

Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root,

Thereby to instant death explaining

The little poetry remaining.

Try it with Zeus, 'tis just the same;

The thing evades, we hug a name; 110

Nay, scarcely that,--perhaps a vapor

Born of some atmospheric caper.

All Lempriere's fables blur together

In cloudy symbols of the weather,

And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas

But to illustrate such hypotheses.

With years enough behind his back,

Lincoln will take the selfsame track,

And prove, hulled fairly to the cob,

A mere vagary of Old Prob. 120

Give the right man a solar myth,

And he'll confute the sun therewith.

They make things admirably plain,

But one hard question _will_ remain:

If one hypothesis you lose,

Another in its place you choose,

But, your faith gone, O man and brother,

Whose shop shall furnish you another?

One that will wash, I mean, and wear,

And wrap us warmly from despair? 130

While they are clearing up our puzzles,

And clapping prophylactic muzzles

On the Actæon's hounds that sniff

Our devious track through But and If,

Would they'd explain away the Devil

And other facts that won't keep level,

But rise beneath our feet or fail,

A reeling ship's deck in a gale!

God vanished long ago, iwis,

A mere subjective synthesis; 140

A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears,

Too homely for us pretty dears,

Who want one that conviction carries,

Last make of London or of Paris.

He gone, I felt a moment's spasm,

But calmed myself, with Protoplasm,

A finer name, and, what is more,

As enigmatic as before;

Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease

Minds caught in the Symplegades 150

Of soul and sense, life's two conditions,

Each baffled with its own omniscience.

The men who labor to revise

Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,

And print it without foolish qualms

Instead of God in David's psalms:

Noll had been more effective far

Could he have shouted at Dunbar,

'Rise, Protoplasm!' No dourest Scot

Had waited for another shot. 160

And yet I frankly must confess

A secret unforgivingness,

And shudder at the saving chrism

Whose best New Birth is Pessimism;

My soul--I mean the bit of phosphorus

That fills the place of what that was for us--

Can't bid its inward bores defiance

With the new nursery-tales of science.

What profits me, though doubt by doubt,

As nail by nail, be driven out, 170

When every new one, like the last,

Still holds my coffin-lid as fast?

Would I find thought a moment's truce,

Give me the young world's Mother Goose

With life and joy in every limb,

The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!

Our dear and admirable Huxley

Cannot explain to me why ducks lay,

Or, rather, how into their eggs

Blunder potential wings and legs 180

With will to move them and decide

Whether in air or lymph to glide.

Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing

That Something Else set all agoing?

Farther and farther back we push

From Moses and his burning bush;

Cry, 'Art Thou there?' Above, below,

All Nature mutters _yes_ and _no!_

'Tis the old answer: we're agreed

Being from Being must proceed, 190

Life be Life's source. I might as well

Obey the meeting-house's bell,

And listen while Old Hundred pours

Forth through the summer-opened doors,

From old and young. I hear it yet,

Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,

While the gray minister, with face

Radiant, let loose his noble bass.

If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll

Waked all the echoes of the soul, 200

And in it many a life found wings

To soar away from sordid things.

Church gone and singers too, the song

Sings to me voiceless all night long,

Till my soul beckons me afar,

Glowing and trembling like a star.

Will any scientific touch

With my worn strings achieve as much?

I don't object, not I, to know

My sires were monkeys, if 'twas so; 210

I touch my ear's collusive tip

And own the poor-relationship.

That apes of various shapes and sizes

Contained their germs that all the prizes

Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win

May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin.

Who knows but from our loins may spring

(Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing

As much superior to us

As we to Cynocephalus? 220

This is consoling, but, alas,

It wipes no dimness from the glass

Where I am flattening my poor nose,

In hope to see beyond my toes,

Though I accept my pedigree,

Yet where, pray tell me, is the key

That should unlock a private door

To the Great Mystery, such no more?

Each offers his, but one nor all

Are much persuasive with the wall 230

That rises now as long ago,

Between I wonder and I know,

Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep

At the veiled Isis in its keep.

Where is no door, I but produce

My key to find it of no use.

Yet better keep it, after all,

Since Nature's economical,

And who can tell but some fine day

(If it occur to her) she may, 240

In her good-will to you and me,

_Make_ door and lock to match the key?

TEMPORA MUTANTUR

The world turns mild; democracy, they say,

Rounds the sharp knobs of character away,

And no great harm, unless at grave expense

Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense;

For man or race is on the downward path

Whose fibre grows too soft for honest wrath,

And there's a subtle influence that springs

From words to modify our sense of things.

A plain distinction grows obscure of late:

Man, if he will, may pardon; but the State 10

Forgets its function if not fixed as Fate.

So thought our sires: a hundred years ago,

If men were knaves, why, people called them so,

And crime could see the prison-portal bend

Its brow severe at no long vista's end.

In those days for plain things plain words would serve;

Men had not learned to admire the graceful swerve

Wherewith the Æsthetic Nature's genial mood

Makes public duty slope to private good;

No muddled conscience raised the saving doubt; 20

A soldier proved unworthy was drummed out,

An officer cashiered, a civil servant

(No matter though his piety were fervent)

Disgracefully dismissed, and through the land

Each bore for life a stigma from the brand

Whose far-heard hiss made others more averse

To take the facile step from bad to worse.

The Ten Commandments had a meaning then,

Felt in their bones by least considerate men,

Because behind them Public Conscience stood, 30

And without wincing made their mandates good.

But now that 'Statesmanship' is just a way

To dodge the primal curse and make it pay,

Since office means a kind of patent drill

To force an entrance to the Nation's till,

And peculation something rather less

Risky than if you spelt it with an _s_;

Now that to steal by law is grown an art,

Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart,

And 'slightly irregular' dilutes the shame 40

Of what had once a somewhat blunter name.

With generous curve we draw the moral line:

Our swindlers are permitted to resign;

Their guilt is wrapped in deferential names,

And twenty sympathize for one that blames.

Add national disgrace to private crime,

Confront mankind with brazen front sublime,

Steal but enough, the world is un-severe,--

Tweed is a statesman, Fisk a financier;

Invent a mine, and he--the Lord knows what; 50

Secure, at any rate, with what you've got.

The public servant who has stolen or lied,

If called on, may resign with honest pride:

As unjust favor put him in, why doubt

Disfavor as unjust has turned him out?

Even it indicted, what is that but fudge

To him who counted-in the elective judge?

Whitewashed, he quits the politician's strife

At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life;

His 'lady' glares with gems whose vulgar blaze 60

The poor man through his heightened taxes pays,

Himself content if one huge Kohinoor

Bulge from a shirt-front ampler than before,

But not too candid, lest it haply tend

To rouse suspicion of the People's Friend.

A public meeting, treated at his cost,

Resolves him back more virtue than he lost;

With character regilt he counts his gains;

What's gone was air, the solid good remains;

For what is good, except what friend and foe 70

Seem quite unanimous in thinking so,

The stocks and bonds which, in our age of loans,

Replace the stupid pagan's stocks and stones?

With choker white, wherein no cynic eye

Dares see idealized a hempen tie,

At parish-meetings he conducts in prayer,

And pays for missions to be sent elsewhere;

On 'Change respected, to his friends endeared,

Add but a Sunday-school class, he's revered,

And his too early tomb will not be dumb 80

To point a moral for our youth to come.

IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE