BOOK I

COLLECTED POEMS

by

ALFRED NOYES

VOLUME ONE

New York

Frederick A. Stokes Company

Publishers

Copyright, 1913, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

Copyright, 1906, 1907, 1908, by

The Macmillan Company

Copyright, 1909, 1910, 1911, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

Copyright, 1906, 1909, by

Alfred Noyes

_All rights reserved, including that of translation into

foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. All dramatic and

acting rights, both professional and amateur, are reserved.

Application for the right of performing should be made to the

publishers_

_October, 1913_

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE LOOM OF YEARS 1

IN THE HEART OF THE WOODS 2

ART 5

TRIOLET 8

A TRIPLE BALLAD OF OLD JAPAN 8

THE SYMBOLIST 10

HAUNTED IN OLD JAPAN 11

NECROMANCY 12

THE MYSTIC 15

THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN 17

APES AND IVORY 48

A SONG OF SHERWOOD 49

THE WORLD'S MAY-QUEEN 50

PIRATES 53

A SONG OF ENGLAND 55

THE OLD SCEPTIC 57

THE DEATH OF CHOPIN 59

SONG 62

BUTTERFLIES 62

SONG OF THE WOODEN-LEGGED FIDDLER 66

THE FISHER-GIRL 67

A SONG OF TWO BURDENS 71

EARTH-BOUND 72

ART, THE HERALD 74

THE OPTIMIST 74

A POST-IMPRESSION 76

THE BARREL-ORGAN 80

THE LITANY OF WAR 85

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 86

THE LAST BATTLE 88

THE PARADOX 89

THE PROGRESS OF LOVE 94

THE FOREST OF WILD THYME 123

FORTY SINGING SEAMEN 171

THE EMPIRE BUILDERS 175

NELSON'S YEAR 177

IN TIME OF WAR 180

ODE FOR THE SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY OF SWINBURNE 186

IN CLOAK OF GREY 188

A RIDE FOR THE QUEEN 189

SONG 191

THE HIGHWAYMAN 192

THE HAUNTED PALACE 196

THE SCULPTOR 200

SUMMER 201

AT DAWN 204

THE SWIMMER'S RACE 206

THE VENUS OF MILO 208

THE NET OF VULCAN 209

NIOBE 209

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 211

FROM THE SHORE 220

THE RETURN 222

REMEMBRANCE 223

A PRAYER 224

LOVE'S GHOST 224

ON A RAILWAY PLATFORM 225

OXFORD REVISITED 226

THE THREE SHIPS 228

SLUMBER-SONGS OF THE MADONNA 230

ENCELADUS 235

IN THE COOL OF THE EVENING 241

A ROUNDHEAD'S RALLYING SONG 242

VICISTI, GALILÆE 243

DRAKE 246

COLLECTED POEMS

EARLY POEMS

_DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES PAYNE_

THE LOOM OF YEARS

In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,

In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,

Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,

I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mould

To colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold:

Light and scent and music die and are born again

In the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain.

The hound, the fawn and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo,

We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through,

One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fears

As it goes thro' the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The crosiers of the fern, and the crown, the crown of the rose,

Pass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close,

Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars,

Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars.

Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight?

Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro' the warp of the night!

Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears,

As It comes thro' the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

O, woven in one wide Loom thro' the throbbing weft of the whole,

One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul,

The leaf on the winds of autumn, the bird in its hour to die,

The heart in its muffled anguish, the sea in its mournful cry,

One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon,

One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon,

One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,

We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

IN THE HEART OF THE WOODS

I

The Heart of the woods, I hear it, beating, beating afar,

In the glamour and gloom of the night, in the light of the rosy star,

In the cold sweet voice of the bird, in the throb of the flower-soft

sea!...

For the Heart of the woods is the Heart of the world and the

Heart of Eternity,

Ay, and the burning passionate Heart of the heart in you and me.

Love of my heart, love of the world, linking the golden moon

With the flowery moths that flutter thro' the scented leaves of June,

And the mind of man with beauty, and youth with the dreaming night

Of stars and flowers and waters and breasts of glimmering white,

And streaming hair of fragrant dusk and flying limbs of lovely light;

Life of me, life of me, shining in sun and cloud and wind,

In the dark eyes of the fawn and the eyes of the hound behind,

In the leaves that lie in the seed unsown, and the dream of the

babe unborn,

O, flaming tides of my blood, as you flow thro' flower and root

and thorn,

I feel you burning the boughs of night to kindle the fires of morn.

Soul of me, soul of me, yearning wherever a lavrock sings,

Or the crimson gloom is winnowed by the whirr of wood-doves' wings,

Or the spray of the foam-bow rustles in the white dawn of the moon,

And mournful billows moan aloud, _Come soon, soon, soon,

Come soon, O Death with the Heart of love and the secret of the rune._

Heart of me, heart of me, heart of me, beating, beating afar,

In the green gloom of the night, in the light of the rosy star,

In the cold sweet voice of the bird, in the throb of the flower-soft

sea!...

O, the Heart of the woods is the Heart of the world and the

Heart of Eternity,

Ay, and the burning passionate Heart of the heart in you and me.

II

O, Death will never find us in the heart of the wood,

The song is in my blood, night and day:

We will pluck a scented petal from the Rose upon the Rood

Where Love lies bleeding on the way.

We will listen to the linnet and watch the waters leap,

When the clouds go dreaming by,

And under the wild roses and the stars we will sleep,

And wander on together, you and I.

We shall understand the mystery that none has understood,

We shall know why the leafy gloom is green.

O, Death will never find us in the heart of the wood

When we see what the stars have seen!

We have heard the hidden song of the soft dews falling

At the end of the last dark sky,

Where all the sorrows of the world are calling,

We must wander on together, you and I.

They are calling, calling, _Away, come away!_

And we know not whence they call;

For the song is in our hearts, we hear it night and day,

As the deep tides rise and fall:

_O, Death will never find us in the heart of the wood,

While the hours and the years roll by!_

We have heard it, we have heard it, but we have not understood,

We must wander on together, you and I.

The wind may beat upon us, the rain may blind our eyes,

The leaves may fall beneath the winter's wing;

But we shall hear the music of the dream that never dies,

And we shall know the secret of the Spring.

We shall know how all the blossoms of evil and of good

Are mingled in the meadows of the sky;

And then--if Death can find us in the heart of the wood--

We shall wander on together, you and I.

ART

(IMITATED FROM DE BANVILLE AND GAUTIER)

I

Yes! Beauty still rebels!

Our dreams like clouds disperse:

She dwells

In agate, marble, verse.

No false constraint be thine!

But, for right walking, choose

The fine,

The strict cothurnus, Muse.

Vainly ye seek to escape

The toil! The yielding phrase

Ye shape

Is clay, not chrysoprase.

And all in vain ye scorn

That seeming ease which ne'er

Was born

Of aught but love and care.

Take up the sculptor's tool!

Recall the gods that die

To rule

In Parian o'er the sky.

For Beauty still rebels!

Our dreams like clouds disperse:

She dwells

In agate, marble, verse.

II

When Beauty from the sea,

With breasts of whiter rose

Than we

Behold on earth, arose.

Naked thro' Time returned

The Bliss of Heaven that day,

And burned

The dross of earth away.

Kings at her splendour quailed.

For all his triple steel

She haled

War at her chariot-wheel.

The rose and lily bowed

To cast, of odour sweet

A cloud

Before her wandering feet.

And from her radiant eyes

There shone on soul and sense

The skies'

Divine indifference.

O, mortal memory fond!

Slowly she passed away

Beyond

The curling clouds of day.

_Return_, we cry, _return_,

Till in the sadder light

We learn

That she was infinite.

The Dream that from the sea

With breasts of whiter rose

Than we

Behold on earth, arose.

III

Take up the sculptor's tool!

Becall the dreams that die

To rule

In Parian o'er the sky;

And kings that not endure

In bronze to re-ascend

Secure

Until the world shall end.

Poet, let passion sleep

Till with the cosmic rhyme

You keep

Eternal tone and time,

By rule of hour and flower,

By strength of stern restraint

And power

To fail and not to faint.

The task is hard to learn

While all the songs of Spring

Return

Along the blood and sing.

Yet hear--from her deep skies,

How Art, for all your pain,

Still cries

_Ye must be born again!_

Reject the wreath of rose,

Take up the crown of thorn

That shows

To-night a child is born.

The far immortal face

In chosen onyx fine

Enchase,

Delicate line by line.

Strive with Carrara, fight

With Parian, till there steal

To light

Apollo's pure profile.

Set the great lucid form

Free from its marble tomb

To storm

The heights of death and doom.

Take up the sculptor's tool!

Recall the gods that die

To rule

In Parian o'er the sky,

TRIOLET

Love, awake! Ah, let thine eyes

Open, clouded with thy dreams.

Now the shy sweet rosy skies,

Love, awake. Ah, let thine eyes

Dawn before the last star dies.

O'er thy breast the rose-light gleams:

Love, awake! Ah, let thine eyes

Open, clouded with thy dreams.

A TRIPLE BALLAD OF OLD JAPAN

In old Japan, by creek and bay,

The blue plum-blossoms blow,

Where birds with sea-blue plumage gay

Thro' sea-blue branches go:

Dragons are coiling down below

Like dragons on a fan;

And pig-tailed sailors lurching slow

Thro' streets of old Japan.

There, in the dim blue death of day

Where white tea-roses grow,

Petals and scents are strewn astray

Till night be sweet enow,

Then lovers wander whispering low

As lovers only can,

Where rosy paper lanterns glow

Thro' streets of old Japan.

From Wonderland to Yea-or-Nay

The junks of Weal-and-Woe

Dream on the purple water-way

Nor ever meet a foe;

Though still, with stiff mustachio

And crookéd ataghan,

Their pirates guard with pomp and show

The ships of old Japan.

That land is very far away,

We lost it long ago!

No fairies ride the cherry spray,

No witches mop and mow,

The violet wells have ceased to flow;

And O, how faint and wan

The dawn on Fusiyama's snow,

The peak of old Japan.

Half smilingly, our hearts delay,

Half mournfully forego

The blue fantastic twisted day

When faithful Konojo,

For small white Lily Hasu-ko

Knelt in the Butsudan,

And her tomb opened to bestrow

Lilies thro' old Japan.

There was a game they used to play

I' the San-ju-san-jen Do,

They filled a little lacquer tray

With powders in a row,

Dry dust of flowers from Tashiro

To Mount Daimugenzan,

Dry little heaps of dust, but O

They breathed of old Japan.

Then knights in blue and gold array

Would on their thumbs bestow

A pinch from every heap and say,

With many a _hum_ and _ho_,

What blossoms, nodding to and fro

For joy of maid or man,

Conceived the scents that puzzled so

The brains of old Japan.

The hundred ghosts have ceased to affray

The dust of Kyotó,

Ah yet, what phantom blooms a-sway

Murmur, a-loft, a-low,

In dells no scythe of death can mow,

No power of reason scan,

O, what Samúrai singers know

The Flower of old Japan?

Dry dust of blossoms, dim and gray,

Lost on the wind? Ah, no,

Hark, from yon clump of English may,

A cherub's mocking crow,

A sudden twang, a sweet, swift throe,

As Daisy trips by Dan,

And careless Cupid drops his bow

And laughs--from old Japan.

_There, in the dim blue death of day

Where white tea-roses grow,

Petals and scents are strewn astray

Till night be sweet enow,

Then lovers wander, whispering low,

As lovers only can,

Where rosy paper lanterns glow

Thro' streets of old Japan._

THE SYMBOLIST

Help me to seek that unknown land!

I kneel before the shrine.

Help me to feel the hidden hand

That ever holdeth mine.

I kneel before the Word, I kneel

Before the Cross of flame

I cry, as thro' the gloom I steal,

The glory of the Name.

Help me to mourn, and I shall love;

What grief is like to mine?

Crown me with thorn, the stars above

Shall in the circlet shine!

The Temple opens wide: none sees

The love, the dream, the light!

O, blind and finite, are not these

Blinding and infinite?

The veil, the veil is rent: the skies

Are white with wings of fire,

Where victim souls triumphant rise

In torment of desire.

Help me to seek: I would not find,

For when I find I know

I shall have clasped the hollow wind

And built a house of snow.

HAUNTED IN OLD JAPAN

Music of the star-shine shimmering o'er the sea

Mirror me no longer in the dusk of memory:

Dim and white the rose-leaves drift along the shore.

Wind among the roses, blow no more!

_All along the purple creek, lit with silver foam,

Silent, silent voices, cry no more of home!

Soft beyond the cherry-trees, o'er the dim lagoon,

Dawns the crimson lantern of the large low moon._

We that loved in April, we that turned away

Laughing ere the wood-dove crooned across the May,

Watch the withered rose-leaves drift along the shore.

Wind among the roses, blow no more!

We the Sons of Reason, we that chose to bride

Knowledge, and rejected the Dream that we denied,

We that chose the Wisdom that triumphs for an hour,

We that let the young love perish like a flower....

We that hurt the kind heart, we that went astray,

We that in the darkness idly dreamed of day....

... Ah! The dreary rose-leaves drift along the shore.

Wind among the roses, blow no more!

Lonely starry faces, wonderful and white,

Yearning with a cry across the dim sweet night,

All our dreams are blown a-drift as flowers before a fan,

All our hearts are haunted in the heart of old Japan.

Haunted, haunted, haunted--we that mocked and sinned

Hear the vanished voices wailing down the wind,

Watch the ruined rose-leaves drift along the shore.

Wind among the roses, blow no more!

_All along the purple creek, lit with silver foam,

Sobbing, sobbing voices, cry no more of home!

Soft beyond the cherry-trees, o'er the dim lagoon,

Dawns the crimson lantern of the large low moon._

NECROMANCY

(AFTER THE PROSE OF BAUDELAIRE)

This necromantic palace, dim and rich,

Dim as a dream, rich as a reverie,

I knew it all of old, surely I knew

This floating twilight tinged with rose and blue,

This moon-soft carven niche

Whence the calm marble, wan as memory,

Slopes to the wine-brimmed bath of cold dark fire

Perfumed with old regret and dead desire.

There the soul, slumbering in the purple waves

Of indolence, dreams of the phantom years,

Dreams of the wild sweet flower of red young lips

Meeting and murmuring in the dark eclipse

Of joy, where pain still craves

One tear of love to mingle with their tears,

One passionate welcome ere the wild farewell,

One flash of heaven across the fires of hell.

* * * *

Queen of my dreams, queen of my pitiless dreams,

Dim idol, moulded of the wild white rose,

Coiled like a panther in that silken gloom

Of scented cushions, where the rich hushed room

Breaks into soft warm gleams,

As from her slumbrous clouds Queen Venus glows,

Slowly thine arms up-lift to me, thine eyes

Meet mine, without communion or surmise.

Here, at thy feet, I watched, I watched all day

Night floating in thine eyes, then with my hands

Covered my face from that dumb cry of pain:

And when at last I dared to look again

My heart was far away,

Wrapt in the fragrant gloom of Eastern lands,

Under the flower-white stars of tropic skies

Where soft black floating flowers turned to ... thine eyes.

I breathe, I breathe the perfume of thine hair:

Bury in thy deep hair my fevered face,

Till as to men athirst in desert dreams

The savour and colour and sound of cool dark streams

Float round me everywhere,

And memories float from some forgotten place,

Fulfilling hopeless eyes with hopeless tears

And fleeting light of unforgotten years.

Dim clouds of music in the dim rich hours

Float to me thro' the twilight of thine hair,

And sails like blossoms float o'er purple seas,

And under dark green skies the soft warm breeze

Washes dark fruit, dark flowers,

Dark tropic maidens in some island lair

Couched on the warm sand nigh the creaming foam

To dream and sing their tawny lovers home.

Lost in the magic ocean of thine hair

I find the haven of the heart of song:

There tired ships rest against the pale red sky!

And yet again there comes a thin sad cry

And all the shining air

Fades, where the tall dark singing seamen throng

From many generations, many climes,

Fades, fades, as it has faded many times.

I hear the sweet cool whisper of the waves!

Drowned in the slumbrous billows of thine hair,

I dream as one that sinks thro' passionate hours

In a strange ship's wild fraughtage of dark flowers

Culled for pale poets' graves;

And opiate odours load the empurpled air

That flows and droops, a dark resplendent pall

Under the floating wreaths funereal.

Under the heavy midnight of thine hair

An altar flames with spices of the south

Burning my flesh and spirit in the flame;

Till, looking tow'rds the land from whence I came

I find no comfort there,

And all the darkness to my thirsty mouth

Is fire, but always and in every place

Blossoms the secret wonder of thy face.

* * * *

The walls, the very walls are woven of dreams,

All undefined by blasphemies of art!

Here, pure from finite hues the very night

Conceives the mystic harmonies of light,

Delicious glooms and gleams;

And sorrow falls in rose-leaves on the heart,

And pain that yearns upon the passing hour

Is but a perfume haunting a dead flower.

Hark, as a hammer on a coffin falls

A knock upon the door! The colours wane,

The dreams vanish! And leave that foul white scar,

Tattoo'd with dreadful marks, the old calendar

Blotching the blistered walls!

The winter whistles thro' a shivered pane,

And scatters on the bare boards at my feet

These poor soiled manuscripts, torn, incomplete...

The scent of opium floats about my breath;

But Time resumes his dark and hideous reign;

And, with him, hideous memories troop, I know.

Hark, how the battered clock ticks, to and fro,--

_Life, Death--Life, Death--Life, Death_--

O fool to cry! O slave to bow to pain,

Coward to live thus tortured with desire

By demon nerves in hells of sensual fire.

THE MYSTIC

With wounds out-reddening every moon-washed rose

King Love went thro' earth's garden-close!

From that first gate of birth in the golden gloom,

I traced Him. Thorns had frayed His garment's hem,

Ay, and His flesh! I marked, I followed them

Down to that threshold of--the tomb?

And there Love vanished, yet I entered! Night

And Doubt mocked at the dwindling light:

Strange claw-like hands flung me their shadowy hate.

I clomb the dreadful stairways of desire

Between a thousand eyes and wings of fire

And knocked upon the second Gate.

The second Gate! When, like a warrior helmed,

In battle on battle overwhelmed,

My soul lay stabbed by all the swords of sense,

Blinded and stunned by stars and flowers and trees,

Did I not struggle to my bended knees

And wrestle with Omnipotence?

Did earth not flee before me, when the breath

Of worship smote her with strange death,

Withered her gilded garment, broke her sword,

Shattered her graven images and smote

All her light sorrows thro' the breast and throat

Whose death-cry crowned me God and Lord?

Yea, God and Lord! Had tears not purged my sight?

I saw the myriad gates of Light

Opening and shutting in each way-side flower,

And like a warder in the gleam of each,

Death, whispering in some strange eternal speech

To every passing hour.

The second Gate? Was I not born to pass

A million? Though the skies be brass

And the earth iron, shall I not win thro' all?

Shall I who made the infinite heavens my mark

Shrink from this first wild horror of the dark,

These formless gulfs, these glooms that crawl?

Never was mine that easy faithless hope

Which makes all life one flowery slope

To heaven! Mine be the vast assaults of doom,

Trumpets, defeats, red anguish, age-long strife,

Ten million deaths, ten million gates to life,

The insurgent heart that bursts the tomb.

Vain, vain, unutterably vain are all

The sights and sounds that sink and fall,

The words and symbols of this fleeting breath:

Shall I not drown the finite in the Whole,

Cast off this body and complete my soul

Thro' deaths beyond this gate of death?

It will not open! Through the bars I see

The glory and the mystery

Wind upward ever! The earth-dawn breaks! I bleed

With beating here for entrance. Hark, O hark,

Love, Love, return and give me the great Dark,

Which is the Light of Life indeed.

THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN

_DEDICATED TO CAROL, A LITTLE MAIDEN Of MYAKO._

PERSONS OF THE TALE

OURSELVES

THE TALL THIN MAN

THE DWARF BEHIND THE TWISTED PEAR-TREE

CREEPING SIN

THE MAD MOONSHEE

THE NAMELESS ONE

Pirates, Mandarins, Bonzes, Priests, Jugglers, Merchants, Ghastroi,

Weirdrians, etc.

PRELUDE

You that have known the wonder zone

Of islands far away;

You that have heard the dinky bird

And roamed in rich Cathay;

You that have sailed o'er unknown seas

To woods of Amfalula trees

Where craggy dragons play:

Oh, girl or woman, boy or man,

You've plucked the Flower of Old Japan!

Do you remember the blue stream;

The bridge of pale bamboo;

The path that seemed a twisted dream

Where everything came true;

The purple cherry-trees; the house

With jutting eaves below the boughs;

The mandarins in blue,

With tiny, tapping, tilted toes,

And curious curved mustachios?

_The road to Old Japan!_ you cry,

_And is it far or near?_

Some never find it till they die;

Some find it everywhere;

The road where restful Time forgets

His weary thoughts and wild regrets

And calls the golden year

Back in a fairy dream to smile

On young and old a little while.

Some seek it with a blazing sword,

And some with old blue plates;

Some with a miser's golden hoard;

Some with a book of dates;

Some with a box of paints; a few

Whose loads of truth would ne'er pass through

The first, white, fairy gates;

And, oh, how shocked they are to find

That truths are false when left behind!

Do you remember all the tales

That Tusitala told,

When first we plunged thro' purple vales

In quest of buried gold?

Do you remember how he said

That if we fell and hurt our head

Our hearts must still be bold,

And we must never mind the pain

But rise up and go on again?

Do you remember? Yes; I know

You must remember still:

He left us, not so long ago,

Carolling with a will,

Because he knew that he should lie

Under the comfortable sky

Upon a lonely hill,

In Old Japan, when day was done;

"Dear Robert Louis Stevenson."

And there he knew that he should find

The hills that haunt us now;

The whaups that cried upon the wind

His heart remembered how;

And friends he loved and left, to roam

Far from the pleasant hearth of home,

Should touch his dreaming brow;

Where fishes fly and birds have fins,

And children teach the mandarins.

Ah, let us follow, follow far

Beyond the purple seas;

Beyond the rosy foaming bar,

The coral reef, the trees,

The land of parrots, and the wild

That rolls before the fearless child

Its ancient mysteries:

Onward and onward, if we can,

To Old Japan--to Old Japan.

PART I

EMBARKATION

When the firelight, red and clear,

Flutters in the black wet pane,

It is very good to hear

Howling winds and trotting rain:

It is very good indeed,

When the nights are dark and cold,

Near the friendly hearth to read

Tales of ghosts and buried gold.

So with cozy toes and hands

We were dreaming, just like you;

Till we thought of palmy lands

Coloured like a cockatoo;

All in drowsy nursery nooks

Near the clutching fire we sat,

Searching quaint old story-books

Piled upon the furry mat.

Something haunted us that night

Like a half-remembered name;

Worn old pages in that light

Seemed the same, yet not the same:

Curling in the pleasant heat

Smoothly as a shell-shaped fan,

O, they breathed and smelt so sweet

When we turned to Old Japan!

Suddenly we thought we heard

Someone tapping on the wall,

Tapping, tapping like a bird.

Then a panel seemed to fall

Quietly; and a tall thin man

Stepped into the glimmering room,

And he held a little fan,

And he waved it in the gloom.

Curious red, and golds, and greens

Danced before our startled eyes,

Birds from painted Indian screens,

Beads, and shells, and dragon-flies;

Wings, and flowers, and scent, and flame,

Fans and fish and heliotrope;

Till the magic air became

Like a dream kaleidoscope.

Then he told us of a land

Far across a fairy sea;

And he waved his thin white hand

Like a flower, melodiously;

While a red and blue macaw

Perched upon his pointed head,

And as in a dream, we saw

All the curious things he said.

Tucked in tiny palanquins,

Magically swinging there,

Flowery-kirtled mandarins

Floated through the scented air;

Wandering dogs and prowling cats

Grinned at fish in painted lakes;

Cross-legged conjurers on mats

Fluted low to listening snakes.

Fat black bonzes on the shore

Watched where singing, faint and far,

Boys in long blue garments bore

Roses in a golden jar.

While at carven dragon ships

Floating o'er that silent sea,

Squat-limbed gods with dreadful lips

Leered and smiled mysteriously.

Like an idol, shrined alone,

Watched by secret oval eyes,

Where the ruby wishing-stone

Smouldering in the darkness lies,

Anyone that wanted things

Touched the jewel and they came;

We were wealthier than kings

Could we only do the same.

Yes; we knew a hundred ways

We might use it if we could;

To be happy all our days

As an Indian in a wood;

No more daily lesson task,

No more sorrow, no more care;

So we thought that we would ask

If he'd kindly lead us there.

Ah, but then he waved his fan,

Laughed and vanished through the wall;

Yet as in a dream, we ran

Tumbling after, one and all;

Never pausing once to think,

Panting after him we sped;

Far away his robe of pink

Floated backward as he fled.

Down a secret passage deep,

Under roofs of spidery stairs,

Where the bat-winged nightmares creep,

And a sheeted phantom glares

Rushed we; ah, how strange it was

Where no human watcher stood;

Till we reached a gate of glass

Opening on a flowery wood.

Where the rose-pink robe had flown,

Borne by swifter feet than ours,

On to Wonder-Wander town,

Through the wood of monstrous flowers;

Mailed in monstrous gold and blue

Dragon-flies like peacocks fled;

Butterflies like carpets, too,

Softly fluttered overhead.

Down the valley, tip-a-toe,

Where the broad-limbed giants lie

Snoring, as when long ago

Jack on a bean-stalk scaled the sky;

On to Wonder-Wander town

Stole we past old dreams again,

Castles long since battered down,

Dungeons of forgotten pain.

Noonday brooded on the wood,

Evening caught us ere we crept

Where a twisted pear-tree stood,

And a dwarf behind it slept;

Round his scraggy throat he wore,

Knotted tight, a scarlet scarf;

Timidly we watched him snore,

For he seemed a surly dwarf.

Yet, he looked so very small,

He could hardly hurt us much;

We were nearly twice as tall,

So we woke him with a touch

Gently, and in tones polite,

Asked him to direct our path;

O, his wrinkled eyes grew bright

Green with ugly gnomish wrath.

He seemed to choke,

And gruffly spoke,

"You're lost: deny it, if you can!

You want to know

The way to go?

There's no such place as Old Japan.

"You want to seek--

No, no, don't speak!

You mean you want to steal a fan.

You want to see

The fields of tea?

They don't grow tea in Old Japan.

"In China, well

Perhaps you'd smell

The cherry bloom: that's if you ran

A million miles

And jumped the stiles,

And never dreamed of Old Japan.

"What, palanquins,

And mandarins?

And, what d'you say, a blue divan?

And what? Hee! hee!

You'll never see

A pig-tailed head in Old Japan.

"You'd take away

The ruby, hey?

I never heard of such a plan!

Upon my word

It's quite absurd

There's not a gem in Old Japan!

"Oh, dear me, no!

You'd better go

Straight home again, my little man:

Ah, well, you'll see

But don't blame me;

I don't believe in Old Japan."

Then, before we could obey,

O'er our startled heads he cast,

Spider-like, a webby grey

Net that held us prisoned fast;

How we screamed, he only grinned,

It was such a lonely place;

And he said we should be pinned

Safely in his beetle-case.

Out he dragged a monstrous box

From a cave behind the tree!

It had four-and-twenty locks,

But he could not find the key,

And his face grew very pale

When a sudden voice began

Drawing nearer through the vale,

Singing songs of Old Japan,

SONG

_Satin sails in a crimson dawn

Over the silky silver sea;

Purple veils of the dark withdrawn;

Heavens of pearl and porphyry;

Purple and white in the morning light

Over the water the town we knew,

In tiny state, like a willow-plate,

Shone, and behind it the hills were blue._

_There, we remembered, the shadows pass

All day long like dreams in the night;

There, in the meadows of dim blue grass,

Crimson daisies are ringed with white.

There the roses flutter their petals,

Over the meadows they take their flight,

There the moth that sleepily settles

Turns to a flower in the warm soft light._

_There when the sunset colours the streets

Everyone buys at wonderful stalls

Toys and chocolates, guns and sweets,

Ivory pistols, and Persian shawls:

Everyone's pockets are crammed with gold;

Nobody's heart is worn with care,

Nobody ever grows tired and old,

And nobody calls you "Baby" there._

_There with a hat like a round white dish

Upside down on each pig-tailed head,

Jugglers offer you snakes and fish,

Dreams and dragons and gingerbread;

Beautiful books with marvellous pictures,

Painted pirates and streaming gore,

And everyone reads, without any strictures,

Tales he remembers for evermore._

_There when the dim blue daylight lingers

Listening, and the West grows holy,

Singers crouch with their long white fingers

Floating over the zithern slowly:

Paper lamps with a peachy bloom

Burn above on the dim blue bough,

While the zitherns gild the gloom

With curious music! I hear it now!_

_Now_: and at that mighty word

Holding out his magic fan,

Through the waving flowers appeared,

Suddenly, the tall thin man:

And we saw the crumpled dwarf

Trying to hide behind the tree,

But his knotted scarlet scarf

Made him very plain to see.

Like a soft and smoky cloud

Passed the webby net away;

While its owner squealing loud

Down behind the pear-tree lay;

For the tall thin man came near,

And his words were dark and gruff,

And he swung the dwarf in the air

By his long and scraggy scruff.

There he kickled whimpering.

But our rescuer touched the box,

Open with a sudden spring

Clashed the four-and-twenty locks;

Then he crammed the dwarf inside,

And the locks all clattered tight:

Four-and-twenty times he tried

Whether they were fastened right.

Ah, he led us on our road,

Showed us Wonder-Wander town;

Then he fled: behind him flowed

Once again the rose-pink gown:

Down the long deserted street,

All the windows winked like eyes,

And our little trotting feet

Echoed to the starry skies.

Low and long for evermore

Where the Wonder-Wander sea

Whispers to the wistful shore

Purple songs of mystery,

Down the shadowy quay we came--

Though it hides behind the hill

You will find it just the same

And the seamen singing still.

There we chose a ship of pearl,

And her milky silken sail

Seemed by magic to unfurl,

Puffed before a fairy gale;

Shimmering o'er the purple deep,

Out across the silvery bar,

Softly as the wings of sleep

Sailed we towards the morning star.

Over us the skies were dark,

Yet we never needed light;

Softly shone our tiny bark

Gliding through the solemn night;

Softly bright our moony gleam,

Glimmered o'er the glistening waves,

Like a cold sea-maiden's dream

Globed in twilit ocean caves.

So all night our shallop passed

Many a haunt of old desire,

Blurs of savage blossom massed

Red above a pirate-fire;

Huts that gloomed and glanced among

Fruitage dipping in the blue;

Songs the sirens never sung,

Shores Ulysses never knew.

All our fairy rigging shone

Richly as a rainbow seen

Where the moonlight floats upon

Gossamers of gold and green:

All the tiny spars were bright;

Beaten gold the bowsprit was;

But our pilot was the night,

And our chart a looking-glass.

PART II

THE ARRIVAL

With rosy finger-tips the Dawn

Drew back the silver veils,

Till lilac shimmered into lawn

Above the satin sails;

And o'er the waters, white and wan,

In tiny patterned state,

We saw the streets of Old Japan

Shine, like a willow plate.

O, many a milk-white pigeon roams

The purple cherry crops,

The mottled miles of pearly domes,

And blue pagoda tops,

The river with its golden canes

And dark piratic dhows,

To where beyond the twisting vanes

The burning mountain glows.

A snow-peak in the silver skies

Beyond that magic world,

We saw the great volcano rise

With incense o'er it curled,

Whose tiny thread of rose and blue

Has risen since time began,

Before the first enchanter knew

The peak of Old Japan.

Nobody watched us quietly steer

The pinnace to the painted pier,

Except one pig-tailed mandarin,

Who sat upon a chest of tea

Pretending not to hear or see!...

His hands were very long and thin,

His face was very broad and white;

And O, it was a fearful sight

To see him sit alone and grin!

His grin was very sleek and sly:

Timidly we passed him by.

He did not seem at all to care:

So, thinking we were safely past,

We ventured to look back at last.

O, dreadful blank!--_He was not there!_

He must have hid behind his chest:

We did not stay to see the rest.

But, as in reckless haste we ran,

We came upon the tall thin man,

Who called to us and waved his fan,

And offered us his palanquin:

He said we must not go alone

To seek the ruby wishing-stone,

Because the white-faced mandarin

Would dog our steps for many a mile,

And sit upon each purple stile

Before we came to it, and smile

And smile; his name was Creeping Sin.

He played with children's beating hearts,

And stuck them full of poisoned darts

And long green thorns that stabbed and stung:

He'd watch until we tried to speak,

Then thrust inside his pasty cheek

His long, white, slimy tongue:

And smile at everything we said;

And sometimes pat us on the head,

And say that we were very young:

He was a cousin of the man

Who said that there was no Japan.

And night and day this Creeping Sin

Would follow the path of the palanquin;

Yet if we still were fain to touch

The ruby, we must have no fear,

Whatever we might see or hear,

And the tall thin man would take us there;

He did not fear that Sly One much,

Except perhaps on a moonless night,

Nor even then if the stars were bright.

So, in the yellow palankeen

We swung along in state between

Twinkling domes of gold and green

Through the rich bazaar,

Where the cross-legged merchants sat,

Old and almond-eyed and fat,

Each upon a gorgeous mat,

Each in a cymar;

Each in crimson samite breeches,

Watching his barbaric riches.

Cherry blossom breathing sweet

Whispered o'er the dim blue street

Where with fierce uncertain feet

Tawny pirates walk:

All in belts and baggy blouses,

Out of dreadful opium houses,

Out of dens where Death carouses,

Horribly they stalk;

Girt with ataghan and dagger,

Right across the road they swagger.

And where the cherry orchards blow,

We saw the maids of Miyako,

Swaying softly to and fro

Through the dimness of the dance:

Like sweet thoughts that shine through dreams

They glided, wreathing rosy gleams,

With stately sounds of silken streams,

And many a slim kohl-lidded glance;

Then fluttered with tiny rose-bud feet

To a soft _frou-frou_ and a rhythmic beat

As the music shimmered, pursuit, retreat,

"Hands across, retire, advance!"

And again it changed and the glimmering throng

Faded into a distant song.

SONG

_The maidens of Miyako

Dance in the sunset hours,

Deep in the sunset glow,

Under the cherry flowers._

_With dreamy hands of pearl

Floating like butterflies,

Dimly the dancers whirl

As the rose-light dies;_

_And their floating gowns, their hair

Upbound with curious pins,

Fade thro' the darkening air

With the dancing mandarins._

And then, as we went, the tall thin man

Explained the manners of Old Japan;

If you pitied a thing, you pretended to sneer;

Yet if you were glad you ran to buy

A captive pigeon and let it fly;

And, if you were sad, you took a spear

To wound yourself, for fear your pain

Should quietly grow less again.

And, again he said, if we wished to find

The mystic City that enshrined

The stone so few on earth had found,

We must be very brave; it lay

A hundred haunted leagues away,

Past many a griffon-guarded ground,

In depths of dark and curious art,

Where passion-flowers enfold apart

The Temple of the Flaming Heart,

The City of the Secret Wound.

About the fragrant fall of day

We saw beside the twisted way

A blue-domed tea-house, bossed with gold;

Hungry and thirsty we entered in,

How should we know what Creeping Sin

Had breathed in that Emperor's ear who sold

His own dumb soul for an evil jewel

To the earth-gods, blind and ugly and cruel?

We drank sweet tea as his tale was told,

In a garden of blue chrysanthemums,

While a drowsy swarming of gongs and drums

Out of the sunset dreamily rolled.

But, as the murmur nearer drew,

A fat black bonze, in a robe of blue,

Suddenly at the gate appeared;

And close behind, with that evil grin,

_Was it Creeping Sin, was it Creeping Sin?_

The bonze looked quietly down and sneered.

Our guide! Was he sleeping? We could not wake him.

However we tried to pinch and shake him!

Nearer, nearer the tumult came,

Till, as a glare of sound and flame,

Blind from a terrible furnace door

Blares, or the mouth of a dragon, blazed

The seething gateway: deaf and dazed

With the clanging and the wild uproar

We stood; while a thousand oval eyes

Gapped our fear with a sick surmise.

Then, as the dead sea parted asunder,

The clamour clove with a sound of thunder

In two great billows; and all was quiet.

Gaunt and black was the palankeen

That came in dreadful state between

The frozen waves of the wild-eyed riot

Curling back from the breathless track

Of the Nameless One who is never seen:

The close drawn curtains were thick and black;

But wizen and white was the tall thin man

As he rose in his sleep:

His eyes were closed, his lips were wan,

He crouched like a leopard that dares not leap.

The bearers halted: the tall thin man,

Fearfully dreaming, waved his fan,

With wizard fingers, to and fro;

While, with a whimper of evil glee,

The Nameless Emperor's mad Moonshee

Stepped in front of us: dark and slow

Were the words of the doom that he dared not name;

But, over the ground, as he spoke there came

Tiny circles of soft blue flame;

Like ghosts of flowers they began to glow,

And flow like a moonlit brook between

Our feet and the terrible palankeen.

But the Moonshee wrinkled his long thin eyes,

And sneered, "Have you stolen the strength of the skies?

Then pour before us a stream of pearl!

Give us the pearl and the gold we know,

And our hearts will be softened and let you go;

But these are toys for a foolish girl--

These vanishing blossoms--what are they worth?

They are not so heavy as dust and earth:

Pour before us a stream of pearl!"

Then, with a wild strange laugh, our guide

Stretched his arms to the West and cried

Once, and a song came over the sea;

And all the blossoms of moon-soft fire

Woke and breathed as a wind-swept lyre,

And the garden surged into harmony;

Till it seemed that the soul of the whole world sung,

And every petal became a tongue

To tell the thoughts of Eternity.

But the Moonshee lifted his painted brows

And stared at the gold on the blue tea-house:

"Can you clothe your body with dreams?" he sneered;

"If you taught us the truths that we always know

Our heart might be softened and let you go:

Can you tell us the length of a monkey's beard,

Or the weight of the gems on the Emperor's fan,

Or the number of parrots in Old Japan?"

And again, with a wild strange laugh, our guide

Looked at him; and he shrunk aside,

Shrivelling like a flame-touched leaf;

For the red-cross blossoms of soft blue fire

Were growing and fluttering higher and higher,

Shaking their petals out, sheaf by sheaf,

Till with disks like shields and stems like towers

Burned the host of the passion-flowers

... Had the Moonshee flown like a midnight thief?

... Yet a thing like a monkey, shrivelled and black,

Chattered and danced as they forced him back.

As the coward chatters for empty pride,

In the face of a foe that he cannot but fear,

It chattered and leapt from side to side,

And its voice rang strangely upon the ear.

As the cry of a wizard that dares not own

Another's brighter and mightier throne;

As the wrath of a fool that rails aloud

On the fire that burnt him; the brazen bray

Clamoured and sang o'er the gaping crowd,

And flapped like a gabbling goose away.

THE CRY OF THE MAD MOONSHEE

_If the blossoms were beans,

I should know what it means--

This blaze, which I certainly cannot endure;

It is evil, too,

For its colour is blue,

And the sense of the matter is quite obscure.

Celestial truth

_Is the food of youth;

But the music was dark as a moonless night.

The facts in the song

Were all of them wrong,_

_And there was not a single sum done right;

Tho' a metaphysician amongst the crowd,

In a voice that was notably deep and loud,

Repeated, as fast as he was able,

The whole of the multiplication table._

So the cry flapped off as a wild goose flies,

And the stars came out in the trembling skies,

And ever the mystic glory grew

In the garden of blue chrysanthemums,

Till there came a rumble of distant drums;

And the multitude suddenly turned and flew.

... A dead ape lay where their feet had been ...

And we called for the yellow palankeen,

And the flowers divided and let us through.

The black-barred moon was large and low

When we came to the Forest of Ancient Woe;

And over our heads the stars were bright.

But through the forest the path we travelled

Its phosphorescent aisle unravelled

In one thin ribbon of dwindling light:

And twice and thrice on the fainting track

We paused to listen. The moon grew black,

But the coolies' faces glimmered white,

As the wild woods echoed in dreadful chorus

A laugh that came horribly hopping o'er us

Like monstrous frogs thro' the murky night.

Then the tall thin man as we swung along

Sang us an old enchanted song

That lightened our hearts of their fearful load.

But, e'en as the moonlit air grew sweet,

We heard the pad of stealthy feet

Dogging us down the thin white road;

And the song grew weary again and harsh,

And the black trees dripped like the fringe of a marsh,

And a laugh crept out like a shadowy toad;

And we knew it was neither ghoul nor djinn:

_It was Creeping Sin! It was Creeping Sin!_

But we came to a bend, and the white moon glowed

Like a gate at the end of the narrowing road

Far away; and on either hand,

As guards of a path to the heart's desire,

The strange tall blossoms of soft blue fire

Stretched away thro' that unknown land,

League on league with their dwindling lane

Down to the large low moon; and again

There shimmered around us that mystical strain,

In a tongue that it seemed we could understand.

SONG

_Hold by right and rule by fear

Till the slowly broadening sphere

Melting through the skies above

Merge into the sphere of love._

_Hold by might until you find

Might is powerless o'er the mind:

Hold by Truth until you see,

Though they bow before the wind,

Its towers can mock at liberty._

_Time, the seneschal, is blind;

Time is blind: and what are we?

Captives of Infinity,

Claiming through Truth's prison bars

Kinship with the wandering stars._

O, who could tell the wild weird sights

We saw in all the days and nights

We travelled through those forests old.

We saw the griffons on white cliffs,

Among fantastic hieroglyphs,

Guarding enormous heaps of gold:

We saw the Ghastroi--curious men

Who dwell, like tigers, in a den,

And howl whene'er the moon is cold;

They stripe themselves with red and black

And ride upon the yellow Yak.

Their dens are always ankle-deep

With twisted knives, and in their sleep

They often cut themselves; they say

That if you wish to live in peace

The surest way is not to cease

Collecting knives; and never a day

Can pass, unless they buy a few;

And as their enemies buy them too

They all avert the impending fray,

And starve their children and their wives

To buy the necessary knives.

* * * *

The forest leapt with shadowy shapes

As we came to the great black Tower of Apes:

But we gave them purple figs and grapes

In alabaster amphoras:

We gave them curious kinds of fruit

With betel nuts and orris-root,

And then they let us pass:

And when we reached the Tower of Snakes

We gave them soft white honey-cakes,

And warm sweet milk in bowls of brass:

And on the hundredth eve we found

The City of the Secret Wound.

We saw the mystic blossoms blow

Round the City, far below;

Faintly in the sunset glow

We saw the soft blue glory flow

O'er many a golden garden gate:

And o'er the tiny dark green seas

Of tamarisks and tulip-trees,

Domes like golden oranges

Dream aloft elate.

And clearer, clearer as we went,

We heard from tower and battlement

A whisper, like a warning, sent

From watchers out of sight;

And clearer, brighter, as we drew

Close to the walls, we saw the blue

Flashing of plumes where peacocks flew

Thro' zones of pearly light.

On either side, a fat black bonze

Guarded the gates of red-wrought bronze,

Blazoned with blue sea-dragons

And mouths of yawning flame;

Down the road of dusty red,

Though their brown feet ached and bled,

Our coolies went with joyful tread:

Like living fans the gates outspread

And opened as we came.

PART III

THE MYSTIC RUBY

The white moon dawned; the sunset died;

And stars were trembling when we spied

The rose-red temple of our dreams:

Its lamp-lit gardens glimmered cool

With many an onyx-paven pool,

Amid soft sounds of flowing streams;

Where star-shine shimmered through the white

Tall fountain-shafts of crystal light

In ever changing rainbow-gleams.

Priests in flowing yellow robes

Glided under rosy globes

Through the green pomegranate boughs

Moonbeams poured their coloured rain;

Roofs of sea-green porcelain

Jutted o'er the rose-red house;

Bells were hung beneath its eaves;

Every wind that stirred the leaves

Tinkled as tired water does.

The temple had a low broad base

Of black bright marble; all its face

Was marble bright in rosy bloom;

And where two sea-green pillars rose

Deep in the flower-soft eave-shadows

We saw, thro' richly sparkling gloom,

Wrought in marvellous years of old

With bulls and peacocks bossed in gold,

The doors of powdered lacquer loom.

Quietly then the tall thin man,

Holding his turquoise-tinted fan,

Alighted from the palanquin;

We followed: never painter dreamed

Of how that dark rich temple gleamed

With gules of jewelled gloom within;

And as we wondered near the door

A priest came o'er the polished floor

In sandals of soft serpent-skin;

His mitre shimmered bright and blue

With pigeon's breast-plumes. When he knew

Our quest he stroked his broad white chin,

And looked at us with slanting eyes

And smiled; then through his deep disguise

_We knew him! It was Creeping Sin!_

But cunningly he bowed his head

Down on his gilded breast and said

_Come_: and he led us through the dusk

Of passages whose painted walls

Gleamed with dark old festivals;

Till where the gloom grew sweet with musk

And incense, through a door of amber

We came into a high-arched chamber.

There on a throne of jasper sat

A monstrous idol, black and fat;

Thick rose-oil dropped upon its head:

Drop by drop, heavy and sweet,

Trickled down to its ebon feet

Whereon the blood of goats was shed,

And smeared around its perfumed knees

In savage midnight mysteries.

It wore about its bulging waist

A belt of dark green bronze enchased

With big, soft, cloudy pearls; its wrists

Were clasped about with moony gems

Gathered from dead kings' diadems;

Its throat was ringed with amethysts,

And in its awful hand it held

A softly smouldering emerald.

Silkily murmured Creeping Sin,

"This is the stone you wished to win!"

"White Snake," replied the tall thin man,

"Show us the Ruby Stone, or I

Will slay thee with my hands." The sly

Long eyelids of the priest began

To slant aside; and then once more

He led us through the fragrant door.

And now along the passage walls

Were painted hideous animals,

With hooded eyes and cloven stings:

In the incense that like shadowy hair

Streamed over them they seemed to stir

Their craggy claws and crooked wings.

At last we saw strange moon-wreaths curl

Around a deep, soft porch of pearl.

O, what enchanter wove in dreams

That chapel wild with shadowy gleams

And prismy colours of the moon?

Shrined like a rainbow in a mist

Of flowers, the fretted amethyst

Arches rose to a mystic tune;

And never mortal art inlaid

Those cloudy floors of sea-soft jade.

There, in the midst, an idol rose

White as the silent starlit snows

On lonely Himalayan heights:

Over its head the spikenard spilled

Down to its feet, with myrrh distilled

In distant, odorous Indian nights:

It held before its ivory face

A flaming yellow chrysoprase.

O, silkily murmured Creeping Sin,

"This is the stone you wished to win."

But in his ear the tall thin man

_Whispered with slow, strange lips_--we knew

Not what, but Creeping Sin went blue

With fear; again his eyes began

To slant aside; then through the porch

He passed, and lit a tall, brown torch.

Down a corridor dark as death,

With beating hearts and bated breath

We hurried; far away we heard

A dreadful hissing, fierce as fire

When rain begins to quench a pyre;

And where the smoky torch-light flared

Strange vermin beat their bat-like wings,

And the wet walls dropped with slimy things.

And darker, darker, wound the way,

Beyond all gleams of night and day,

And still that hideous hissing grew

Louder and louder on our ears,

And tortured us with eyeless fears;

Then suddenly the gloom turned blue,

And, in the wall, a rough rock cave

Gaped, like a phosphorescent grave.

And from the purple mist within

There came a wild tumultuous din

Of snakes that reared their heads and hissed

As if a witch's cauldron boiled;

All round the door great serpents coiled,

With eyes of glowing amethyst,

Whose fierce blue flames began to slide

Like shooting stars from side to side.

Ah! with a sickly gasping grin

And quivering eyelids, Creeping Sin

Stole to the cave; but, suddenly,

As through its glimmering mouth he passed,

The serpents flashed and gripped him fast:

He wriggled and gave one awful cry,

Then all at once the cave was cleared;

The snakes with their victim had disappeared.

And fearlessly the tall thin man

Opened his turquoise-tinted fan

And entered; and the mists grew bright,

And we saw that the cave was a diamond hall

Lit with lamps for a festival.

A myriad globes of coloured light

Went gliding deep in its massy sides,

Like the shimmering moons in the glassy tides

Where a sea-king's palace enchants the night.

Gliding and flowing, a glory and wonder,

Through each other, and over, and under,

The lucent orbs of green and gold,

Bright with sorrow or soft with sleep,

In music through the glimmering deep,

Over their secret axles rolled,

And circled by the murmuring spheres

We saw in a frame of frozen tears

A mirror that made the blood run cold.

For, when we came to it, we found

It imaged everything around

Except the face that gazed in it;

And where the mirrored face should be

A heart-shaped Ruby fierily

Smouldered; and round the frame was writ,

_Mystery: Time and Tide shall pass,

I am the Wisdom Looking-Glass._

_This is the Ruby none can touch:

Many have loved it overmuch;

Its fathomless fires flutter and sigh,

Being as images of the flame

That shall make earth and heaven the same

When the fire of the end reddens the sky,

And the world consumes like a burning pall,

Till where there is nothing, there is all._

So we looked up at the tall thin man

And we saw that his face grew sad and wan:

Tears were glistening in his eyes:

At last, with a breaking sob, he bent

His head upon his breast and went

Swiftly away! With dreadful cries

We rushed to the softly glimmering door

And stared at the hideous corridor.

But his robe was gone as a dream that flies:

Back to the glass in terror we came,

And stared at the writing round the frame.

We could not understand one word:

And suddenly we thought we heard

The hissing of the snakes again:

How could we front them all alone?

O, madly we clutched at the mirrored stone

And wished we were back on the flowery plain:

And swifter than thought and swift as fear

The whole world flashed, and behold we were there.

Yes; there was the port of Old Japan,

With its twisted patterns, white and wan,

Shining like a mottled fan

Spread by the blue sea, faint and far;

And far away we heard once more

A sound of singing on the shore,

Where boys in blue kimonos bore

Roses in a golden jar:

And we heard, where the cherry orchards blow,

The serpent-charmers fluting low,

And the song of the maidens of Miyako.

And at our feet unbroken lay

The glass that had whirled us thither away:

And in the grass, among the flowers

We sat and wished all sorts of things:

O, we were wealthier than kings!

We ruled the world for several hours!

And then, it seemed, we knew not why,

All the daisies began to die.

We wished them alive again; but soon

The trees all fled up towards the moon

Like peacocks through the sunlit air:

And the butterflies flapped into silver fish;

And each wish spoiled another wish;

Till we threw the glass down in despair;

For, getting whatever you want to get,

Is like drinking tea from a fishing net.

At last we thought we'd wish once more

That all should be as it was before;

And then we'd shatter the glass, if we could;

But just as the world grew right again,

We heard a wanderer out on the plain

Singing what none of us understood;

Yet we thought that the world grew thrice more sweet

And the meadows were blossoming under his feet.

And we felt a grand and beautiful fear,

For we knew that a marvellous thought drew near;

So we kept the glass for a little while:

And the skies grew deeper and twice as bright,

And the seas grew soft as a flower of light,

And the meadows rippled from stile to stile;

And memories danced in a musical throng

Thro' the blossom that scented the wonderful song.

SONG

_We sailed across the silver seas

And saw the sea-blue bowers,

We saw the purple cherry trees,

And all the foreign flowers,

We travelled in a palanquin

Beyond the caravan,

And yet our hearts had never seen

The Flower of Old Japan._

_The Flower above all other flowers,

The Flower that never dies;

Before whose throne the scented hours

Offer their sacrifice;

The Flower that here on earth below

Reveals the heavenly plan;

But only little children know

The Flower of Old Japan._

There, in the dim blue flowery plain

We wished with the magic glass again

To go to the Flower of the song's desire:

And o'er us the whole of the soft blue sky

Flashed like fire as the world went by,

And far beneath us the sea like fire

Flashed in one swift blue brilliant stream,

And the journey was done, like a change in a dream.

PART IV

THE END OF THE QUEST

Like the dawn upon a dream

Slowly through the scented gloom

Crept once more the ruddy gleam

O'er the friendly nursery room.

There, before our waking eyes,

Large and ghostly, white and dim,

Dreamed the Flower that never dies,

Opening wide its rosy rim.

Spreading like a ghostly fan,

Petals white as porcelain,

There the Flower of Old Japan

Told us we were home again;

For a soft and curious light

Suddenly was o'er it shed.

And we saw it was a white

English daisy, ringed with red.

Slowly, as a wavering mist

Waned the wonder out of sight,

To a sigh of amethyst,

To a wraith of scented light.

Flower and magic glass had gone;

Near the clutching fire we sat

Dreaming, dreaming, all alone,

Each upon a furry mat.

While the firelight, red and clear,

Fluttered in the black wet pane,

It was very good to hear

Howling winds and trotting rain.

For we found at last we knew

More than all our fancy planned,

All the fairy tales were true,

And home the heart of fairyland.

EPILOGUE

Carol, every violet has

Heaven for a looking-glass!

Every little valley lies

Under many-clouded skies;

Every little cottage stands

Girt about with boundless lands.

Every little glimmering pond

Claims the mighty shores beyond--

Shores no seamen ever hailed,

Seas no ship has ever sailed.

All the shores when day is done

Fade into the setting sun,

So the story tries to teach

More than can be told in speech.

Beauty is a fading flower,

Truth is but a wizard's tower,

Where a solemn death-bell tolls,

And a forest round it rolls.

We have come by curious ways

To the Light that holds the days;

We have sought in haunts of fear

For that all-enfolding sphere:

And lo! it was not far, but near.

We have found, O foolish-fond,

The shore that has no shore beyond.

Deep in every heart it lies

With its untranscended skies;

For what heaven should bend above

Hearts that own the heaven of love?

Carol, Carol, we have come

Back to heaven, back to home.

APES AND IVORY

Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong,

Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song,

Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East,

O, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.

Or is it an elephant, white as milk and bearing a severed head

That tatters his broad soft wrinkled flank in tawdry patches of red,

With a negro giant to walk beside and a temple dome above,

Where ruby and emerald shatter the sun,--is it these that should

please my love?

Or is it a palace of pomegranates, where ivory-limbed young slaves

Lure a luxury out of the noon in the swooning fountain's waves;

Or couch like cats and sun themselves on the warm white marble brink?

O, Love has little to ask of these, this day in May, I think.

Is it Lebanon cedars or purple fruits of the honeyed southron air,

Spikenard, saffron, roses of Sharon, cinnamon, calamus, myrrh,

A bed of spices, a fountain of waters, or the wild white wings of

a dove,

Now, when the winter is over and gone, is it these that should

please my love?

The leaves outburst on the hazel-bough and the hawthorn's heaped

wi' flower,

And God has bidden the crisp clouds build my love a lordlier tower,

Taller than Lebanon, whiter than snow, in the fresh blue skies above;

And the wild rose wakes in the winding lanes of the radiant land

I love.

_Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong,

Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song,

Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East,

O, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast._

A SONG OF SHERWOOD

Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?

Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake,

Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,

Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.

Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves

Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves,

Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June:

All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon,

Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist

Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst.

Merry, merry England is waking as of old,

With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold:

For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting spray

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Love is in the greenwood building him a house

Of wild rose and hawthorn and honeysuckle boughs:

Love is in the greenwood, dawn is in the skies,

And Marian is waiting with a glory in her eyes.

Hark! The dazzled laverock climbs the golden steep!

Marian is waiting: is Robin Hood asleep?

Round the fairy grass-rings frolic elf and fay,

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Oberon, Oberon, rake away the gold,

Rake away the red leaves, roll away the mould,

Rake away the gold leaves, roll away the red,

And wake Will Scarlett from his leafy forest bed.

Friar Tuck and Little John are riding down together

With quarter-staff and drinking-can and grey goose-feather.

The dead are coming back again, the years are rolled away

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Softly over Sherwood the south wind blows.

All the heart of England hid in every rose

Hears across the greenwood the sunny whisper leap,

Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?

Hark, the voice of England wakes him as of old

And, shattering the silence with a cry of brighter gold

Bugles in the greenwood echo from the steep,

_Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?_

Where the deer are gliding down the shadowy glen

All across the glades of fern he calls his merry men--

Doublets of the Lincoln green glancing through the May

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day--

Calls them and they answer: from aisles of oak and ash

Rings the _Follow! Follow!_ and the boughs begin to crash,

The ferns begin to flutter and the flowers begin to fly,

And through the crimson dawning the robber band goes by.

_Robin! Robin! Robin!_ All his merry thieves

Answer as the bugle-note shivers through the leaves,

Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

THE WORLD'S MAY-QUEEN

I

Whither away is the Spring to-day?

To England, to England!

In France they heard the South wind say,

"She's off on a quest for a Queen o' the May,

So she's over the hills far away,

To England!"

And why did she fly with her golden feet

To England, to England?

In Italy, too, they heard the sweet

Roses whisper and flutter and beat--

"She's an old and a true, true love to greet

In England!"

A moon ago there came a cry

From England, from England,

Faintly, fondly it faltered nigh

The throne of the Spring in the Southern sky,

And it whispered "Come," and the world went by,

And with one long loving blissful sigh

The Spring was away to England!

II

When Spring comes back to England

And crowns her brows with May,

Round the merry moonlit world

She goes the greenwood way:

She throws a rose to Italy,

A fleur-de-lys to France;

But round her regal morris-ring

The seas of England dance.

When Spring comes back to England

And dons her robe of green,

There's many a nation garlanded

But England is the Queen;

She's Queen, she's Queen of all the world

Beneath the laughing sky,

For the nations go a-Maying

When they hear the New Year cry--

"Come over the water to England,

My old love, my new love,

Come over the water to England,

In showers of flowery rain;

Come over the water to England,

April, my true love;

And tell the heart of England

The Spring is here again!"

III

So it's here, she is here with her eyes of blue

In England, In England!

She has brought us the rainbows with her, too,

And a glory of shimmering glimmering dew

And a heaven of quivering scent and hue

And a lily for me and a rose for you

In England.

There's many a wanderer far away

From England, from England,

Will toss upon his couch and say--

Though Spain is proud and France is gay,

And there's many a foot on the primrose way,

The world has never a Queen o' the May

But England.

IV

When Drake went out to seek for gold

Across the uncharted sea,

And saw the Western skies unfold

Their veils of mystery;

To lure him through the fevered hours

As nigh to death he lay,

There floated o'er the foreign flowers

A breath of English May:

And back to Devon shores again

His dreaming spirit flew

Over the splendid Spanish Main

To haunts his childhood knew,

Whispering "God forgive the blind

Desire that bade me roam,

I've sailed around the world to find

The sweetest way to home."

V

And it's whither away is the Spring to-day?

To England, to England!

In France you'll hear the South wind say,

"She off on a quest for a Queen o' the May,

So she's over the hills and far away,

To England!"

She's flown with the swallows across the sea

To England, to England!

For there's many a land of the brave and free

But never a home o' the hawthorn-tree,

And never a Queen o' the May for me

But England!

And round the fairy revels whirl

In England, in England!

And the buds outbreak and the leaves unfurl,

And where the crisp white cloudlets curl

The Dawn comes up like a primrose girl

With a crowd of flowers in a basket of pearl

For England!

PIRATES

Come to me, you with the laughing face, in the night as I lie

Dreaming of days that are dead and of joys gone by;

Come to me, comrade, come through the slow-dropping rain,

Come from your grave in the darkness and let us be pirates again.

Let us be boys together to-night, and pretend as of old

We are pirates at rest in a cave among huge heaps of gold,

Red Spanish doubloons and great pieces of eight, and muskets

and swords,

And a smoky red camp-fire to glint, you know how, on our

ill-gotten hoards.

The old cave in the fir-wood that slopes down the hills to the sea

Still is haunted, perhaps, by young pirates as wicked as we:

Though the fir with the magpie's big mud-plastered nest used to hide

it so well,

And the boys in the gang had to swear that they never would tell.

Ah, that tree; I have sat in its boughs and looked seaward for hours.

I remember the creak of its branches, the scent of the flowers

That climbed round the mouth of the cave. It is odd I recall

Those little things best, that I scarcely took heed of at all.

I remember how brightly the brass on the butt of my spy-glass gleamed

As I climbed through the purple heather and thyme to our eyrie

and dreamed;

I remember the smooth glossy sun-burn that darkened our faces

and hands

As we gazed at the merchantmen sailing away to those wonderful lands.

I remember the long, slow sigh of the sea as we raced in the sun,

To dry ourselves after our swimming; and how we would run

With a cry and a crash through the foam as it creamed on the shore,

Then back to bask in the warm dry gold of the sand once more.

Come to me, you with the laughing face, in the gloom as I lie

Dreaming of days that are dead and of joys gone by;

Let us be boys together to-night and pretend as of old

We are pirates at rest in a cave among great heaps of gold.

Come; you shall be chief. We'll not quarrel, the time flies so fast.

There are ships to be grappled, there's blood to be shed, ere our

playtime be past.

No; perhaps we _will_ quarrel, just once, or it scarcely will seem

So like the old days that have flown from us both like a dream.

Still; you shall be chief in the end; and then we'll go home

To the hearth and the tea and the books that we loved: ah, but come,

Come to me, come through the night and the slow-dropping rain;

Come, old friend, come thro' the darkness and let us be playmates again.

A SONG OF ENGLAND

There is a song of England that none shall ever sing;

So sweet it is and fleet it is

That none whose words are not as fleet as birds upon the wing,

And regal as her mountains,

And radiant as the fountains

Of rainbow-coloured sea-spray that every wave can fling

Against the cliffs of England, the sturdy cliffs of England,

Could more than seem to dream of it,

Or catch one flying gleam of it,

Above the seas of England that never cease to sing.

There is a song of England that only lovers know;

So rare it is and fair it is,

O, like a fairy rose it is upon a drift of snow,

So cold and sweet and sunny,

So full of hidden honey,

So like a flight of butterflies where rose and lily blow

Along the lanes of England, the leafy lanes of England;

When flowers are at their vespers

And full of little whispers,

The boys and girls of England shall sing it as they go.

There is a song of England that only love may sing,

So sure it is and pure it is;

And seaward with the sea-mew it spreads a whiter wing,

And with the sky-lark hovers

Above the tryst of lovers,

Above the kiss and whisper that led the lovely Spring

Through all the glades of England, the ferny glades of England,

Until the way enwound her

With sprays of May, and crowned her

With stars of frosty blossom in a merry morris-ring.

There is a song of England that haunts her hours of rest:

The calm of it and balm of it

Are breathed from every hedgerow that blushes to the West

From the cottage doors that nightly

Cast their welcome out so brightly

On the lanes where laughing children are lifted and caressed

By the tenderest hands in England, hard and blistered hands of England:

And from the restful sighing

Of the sleepers that are lying

With the arms of God around them on the night's contented breast.

There is a song of England that wanders on the wind;

So sad it is and glad it is

That men who hear it madden and their eyes are wet and blind,

For the lowlands and the highlands

Of the unforgotten islands,

For the Islands of the Blesséd and the rest they cannot find

As they grope in dreams to England and the love they left in England;

Little feet that danced to meet them

And the lips that used to greet them,

And the watcher at the window in the home they left behind.

There is a song of England that thrills the beating blood

With burning cries and yearning

Tides of hidden aspiration hardly known or understood;

Aspirations of the creature

Tow'rds the unity of Nature;

Sudden chivalries revealing whence the longing is renewed

In the men that live for England, live and love and die for England:

By the light of their desire

They shall blindly blunder higher,

To a wider, grander Kingdom and a deeper, nobler Good.

There is a song of England that only heaven can hear;

So gloriously victorious,

It soars above the choral stars that sing the Golden Year;

Till even the cloudy shadows

That wander o'er her meadows

In silent purple harmonies declare His glory there,

Along the hills of England, the billowy hills of England;

While heaven rolls and ranges

Through all the myriad changes

That mirror God in music to the mortal eye and ear.

_There is a song of England that none shall ever sing;

So sweet it is and fleet it is

That none whose words are not as fleet as birds upon the wing,

And regal as her mountains,

And radiant as her fountains

Of rainbow-coloured sea-spray that every wave can fling

Against the cliffs of England, the sturdy cliffs of England,

Could more than seem to dream of it,

Or catch one flying gleam of it,

Above the seas of England that never cease to sing._

THE OLD SCEPTIC

I am weary of disbelieving: why should I wound my love

To pleasure a sophist's pride in a graven image of truth?

I will go back to my home, with the clouds and the stars above,

And the heaven I used to know, and the God of my buried youth.

I will go back to the home where of old in my boyish pride

I pierced my father's heart with a murmur of unbelief.

He only looked in my face as I spoke, but his mute eyes cried

Night after night in my dreams; and he died in grief, in grief.

Books? I have read the books, the books that we write ourselves,

Extolling our love of an abstract truth and our pride of debate:

I will go back to the love of the cotter who sings as he delves,

To that childish infinite love and the God above fact and date.

To that ignorant infinite God who colours the meaningless flowers,

To that lawless infinite Poet who crowns the law with the crime;

To the Weaver who covers the world with a garment of wonderful hours,

And holds in His hand like threads the tales and the truths of time.

Is the faith of the cotter so simple and narrow as this? Ah, well,

It is hardly so narrow as yours who daub and plaster with dyes

The shining mirrors of heaven, the shadowy mirrors of hell,

And blot out the dark deep vision, if it seem to be framed with lies.

No faith I hurl against you, no fact to freeze your sneers.

Only the doubt you taught me to weld in the fires of youth

Leaps to my hand like the flaming sword of nineteen hundred years,

The sword of the high God's answer, _O Pilate, what is truth?_

Your laughter has killed more hearts than ever were pierced with swords,

Ever you daub new mirrors and turn the old to the wall;

And more than blood is lost in the weary battle of words;

For creeds are many; but God is One, and contains them all.

Ah, why should we strive or cry? Surely the end is close!

Hold by your little truths: deem your triumph complete!

But nothing is true or false in the infinite heart of the rose;

And the earth is a little dust that clings to our travelling feet.

I will go back to my home and look at the wayside flowers,

And hear from the wayside cabins the kind old hymns again,

Where Christ holds out His arms in the quiet evening hours,

And the light of the chapel porches broods on the peaceful lane.

And there I shall hear men praying the deep old foolish prayers,

And there I shall see, once more, the fond old faith confessed,

And the strange old light on their faces who hear as a blind man hears,--

_Come unto Me, ye weary, and I will give you rest._

I will go back and believe in the deep old foolish tales,

And pray the simple prayers that I learned at my mother's knee,

Where the Sabbath tolls its peace thro' the breathless mountain-vales,

And the sunset's evening hymn hallows the listening sea.

THE DEATH OF CHOPIN

Sing to me! Ah, remember how

Poor Heine here in Paris leant

Watching me play at the fall of day

And following where the music went,

Till that old cloud upon his brow

Was almost smoothed away.

"Do roses in the moonlight flame

Like this and this?" he said and smiled;

Then bent his head as o'er his dead

Brother might breathe some little child

The accustomed old half-jesting name,

With all its mockery fled,

Like summer lightnings, far away,

In heaven. O, what Bohemian nights

We passed down there for that brief year

When art revealed her last delights;

And then, that night, that night in May

When Hugo came to hear!

"Do roses in the moonlight glow

Like this and this?" I could not see

His eyes, and yet--they were quite wet,

Blinded, I think! What should I be

If in that hour I did not know

My own diviner debt?

For God has made this world of ours

Out of His own exceeding pain,

As here in art man's bleeding heart

Slow drop by drop completes the strain;

And dreams of death make sweet the flowers

Where lovers meet to part.

Recall, recall my little room

Where all the masters came that night,

Came just to hear me, Meyerbeer,

Lamartine, Balzac; and no light

But my two candles in the gloom;

Though she, she too was there,

George Sand. This music once unlocked

My heart, she took the gold she prized:

Her novel gleams no richer: dreams

Like mine are best unanalysed:

And she forgets her poor bemocked

Prince Karol, now, it seems.

I was Prince Karol; yes, and Liszt

Count Salvator Albani: she

My Floriani--all so far

Away!--My dreams are like the sea

That round Majorca sighed and kissed

Each softly mirrored star.

O, what a golden round of hours

Our island villa knew: we two

Alone with sky and sea, the sigh

Of waves, the warm unfathomed blue;

With what a chain of nights like flowers

We bound Love, she and I.

What music, what harmonious

Glad triumphs of the world's desire

Where passion yearns to God and burns

Earth's dross out with its own pure fire,

Or tolls like some deep angelus

Through Death's divine nocturnes.

"Do roses in the moonlight glow

Like this and this?" What did she think

Of him whose hands at Love's command

Made Life as honey o'er the brink

Of Death drip slow, darkling and slow?

Ah, did she understand?

She studied every sob she heard,

She watched each dying hope she found;

And yet she understood not one

Poor sorrow there that like a wound

Gaped, bleeding, pleading--for one word--

No? And the dream was done.

For her--I am "wrapped in incense gloom,

In drifting clouds and golden light;"

Once I was shod with fire and trod

Beethoven's path through storm and night:

It is too late now to resume

My monologue with God.

Well, my lost love, you were so kind

In those old days: ah, yes; you came

When I was ill! In dreams you still

Will come? (Do roses always flame

By moonlight, thus?) I, too, grow blind

With wondering if she will.

Yet, Floriani, what am I

To you, though love was life to me?

My life consumed like some perfumed

Pale altar-flame beside the sea:

You stood and smiled and watched it die!

You, you whom it illumed,

Could you not feed it with your love?

Am I not starving here and now?

Sing, sing! I'd miss no smile or kiss--

No roses in Majorca glow

Like this and this--so death may prove

Best--ah, how sweet life is!

SONG

(AFTER THE FRENCH OF ROSTAND)

O, many a lover sighs

Beneath the summer skies

For black or hazel eyes

All day.

No light of hope can mar

My whiter brighter star;

I love a Princess far

Away.

Now you that haste to meet

Your love's returning feet

Must plead for every sweet

Caress;

But, day and night and day,

Without a prayer to pray,

I love my far away

Princess.

BUTTERFLIES

Sun-child, as you watched the rain

Beat the pane,

Saw the garden of your dreams

Where the clove carnation grows

And the rose

Veiled with shimmering shades and gleams,

Mirrored colours, mystic gleams,

Fairy dreams,

Drifting in your radiant eyes

Half in earnest asked, that day,

Half in play,

Where were all the butterflies?

Where were all the butterflies

When the skies

Clouded and their bowers of clover

Bowed beneath the golden shower?

Every flower

Shook and the rose was brimming over.

Ah, the dog-rose trembling over

Thyme and clover,

How it glitters in the sun,

Now the hare-bells lift again

Bright with rain

After all the showers are done!

See, when all the showers are done,

How the sun

Softly smiling o'er the scene

Bids the white wings come and go

To and fro

Through the maze of gold and green.

Magic webs of gold and green

Rainbow sheen

Mesh the maze of flower and fern,

Cuckoo-grass and meadow-sweet,

And the wheat

Where the crimson poppies burn.

Ay; and where the poppies burn,

They return

All across the dreamy downs,

Little wings that flutter and beat

O'er the sweet

Bluffs the purple clover crowns.

Where the fairy clover crowns

Dreamy downs,

And amidst the golden grass

Buttercups and daisies blow

To and fro

When the shadowy billows pass;

Time has watched them pause and pass

Where Love was;

Ah, what fairy butterflies,

Little wild incarnate blisses,

Coloured kisses,

Floating under azure skies!

Under those eternal skies

See, they rise:

Mottled wings of moony sheen,

Wings in whitest star-shine dipped,

Orange tipped,

Eyed with black and veined with green.

They were fairies plumed with green

Rainbow-sheen

Ere Time bade their host begone

From that palace built of roses

Which still dozes

In the greenwood all alone.

In the greenwood all alone

And unknown:

Now they roam these mortal dells

Wondering where that happy glade is,

Painted Ladies,

Admirals, and Tortoise-shells,

O, Fritillaries, Admirals,

Tortoise-shells;

You, like fragments of the skies

Fringed with Autumn's richest hues,

Dainty blues

Patterned with mosaic dyes;

Oh, and you whose peacock dyes

Gleam with eyes;

You, whose wings of burnished copper

Burn upon the sunburnt brae

Where all day

Whirrs the hot and grey grasshopper;

While the grey grasshopper whirrs

In the furze,

You that with your sulphur wings

Melt into the gold perfume

Of the broom

Where the linnet sits and sings;

You that, as a poet sings,

On your wings

Image forth the dreams of earth,

Quickening them in form and hue

To the new

Glory of a brighter birth;

You that bring to a brighter birth

Dust and earth,

Rapt to glory on your wings,

All transfigured in the white

Living light

Shed from out the soul of things;

Heralds of the soul of things,

You whose wings

Carry heaven through every glade;

Thus transfigured from the petals

Death unsettles,

Little souls of leaf and blade;

You that mimic bud and blade,

Light and shade;

Tinted souls of leaf and stone,

Flower and sunny bank of sand,

Fairyland

Calls her children to their own;

Calls them back into their own

Great unknown;

Where the harmonies they cull

On their wings are made complete

As they beat

Through the Gate called Beautiful.

SONG OF THE WOODEN-LEGGED FIDDLER

(PORTSMOUTH 1805)

I lived in a cottage adown in the West

When I was a boy, a boy;

But I knew no peace and I took no rest

Though the roses nigh smothered my snug little nest;

For the smell of the sea

Was much rarer to me,

And the life of a sailor was all my joy.

CHORUS.--_The life of a sailor was all my joy!_

My mother she wept, and she begged me to stay

Anchored for life to her apron-string,

And soon she would want me to help with the hay;

So I bided her time, then I flitted away

On a night of delight in the following spring,

With a pair of stout shoon

And a seafaring tune

And a bundle and stick in the light of the moon,

Down the long road

To Portsmouth I strode,

To fight like a sailor for country and king.

CHORUS.--_To fight like a sailor for country and king._

And now that my feet are turned homeward again

My heart is still crying Ahoy! Ahoy!

And my thoughts are still out on the Spanish main

A-chasing the frigates of France and Spain,

For at heart an old sailor is always a boy;

And his nose will still itch

For the powder and pitch

Till the days when he can't tell t'other from which,

Nor a grin o' the guns from a glint o' the sea,

Nor a skipper like Nelson from lubbers like me.

CHORUS.--_Nor a skipper like Nelson from lubbers like me._

Ay! Now that I'm old I'm as bold as the best,

And the life of a sailor is all my joy;

Though I've swapped my leg

For a wooden peg

And my head is as bald as a new-laid egg,

The smell of the sea

Is like victuals to me,

And I think in the grave I'll be crying Ahoy!

For, though my old carcass is ready to rest,

At heart an old sailor is always a boy.

CHORUS.--_At heart an old sailor is always a boy._

THE FISHER-GIRL

Where the old grey churchyard slopes to the sea,

On the sunny side of a mossed headstone;

Watching the wild white butterflies pass

Through the fairy forests of grass,

Two little children with brown legs bare

Were merrily, merrily

Weaving a wonderful daisy-chain,

And chanting the rhyme that was graven there

Over and over and over again;

While the warm wind came and played with their hair

And laughed and was gone

Out, far out to the foam-flowered lea

Like an ocean-wandering memory.

_Eighteen hundred and forty-three,

Dan Trevennick was lost at sea;

And, buried here at her husband's side

Lies the body of Joan, his bride,

Who, a little while after she lost him, died._

This was the rhyme that was graven there,

And the children chanted it quietly;

As the warm wind came and played with their hair,

And rustled the golden grasses against the stone,

And laughed and was gone

To waken the wild white flowers of the sea,

And sing a song of the days that were,

A song of memory, gay and blind

As the sun on the graves that it left behind;

For this, ah this, was the song of the wind.

I

She sat on the tarred old jetty, with a sailor's careless ease,

And the clear waves danced around her feet and kissed her tawny knees;

Her head was bare, and her thick black hair was coiled behind a throat

Chiselled as hard and bright and bold as the bow of a sailing boat.

II

Her eyes were blue, and her jersey was blue as the lapping,

slapping seas,

And the rose in her cheek was painted red by the brisk Atlantic breeze;

And she sat and waited her father's craft, while Dan Trevennick's eyes

Were sheepishly watching her sunlit smiles and her soft contented

sighs.

III

For he thought he would give up his good black pipe and his evening

glasses of beer,

And blunder to chapel on Sundays again for a holy Christian year,

To hold that foot in his hard rough hand and kiss the least of

its toes:

Then he swore at himself for a great damned fool; which he probably

was, God knows.

IV

Often in summer twilights, too, he would sit on a coil of rope,

As the stars came out in their twinkling crowds to play with wonder

and hope,

While he watched the side of her clear-cut face as she sat on the

jetty and fished,

And even to help her coil her line was more than he hoped or wished.

V

But once or twice o'er the dark green tide he saw with a solemn

delight,

Hooked and splashing after her line, a flash and a streak of white;

As hand over hand she hauled it up, a great black conger eel,

For Dan Trevennick to kill as it squirmed with its head beneath

his heel.

VI

And at last, with a crash and a sunset cry from the low soft evening

star,

A shadowy schooner suddenly loomed o'er the dark green oily bar;

With fairy-like spars and misty masts in the golden dusk of gloaming,

Where the last white seamew's wide-spread wings were wistfully

westward roaming;

VII

Then the song of the foreign seamen rose in the magical evening air,

Faint and far away, as it seemed, but they knew it was, ah, so near;

Far away as her heart from Dan's as he sheepishly drew to her side,

And near as her heart when he kissed the lips of his newly promised

bride.

VIII

And when they were riding away in the train on the night of their

honeymoon,

What a whisper tingled against her cheek as it blushed like a

rose in June;

For she said, "I am tired and ready for bed," and Dan said, "So

am I;"

And she murmured, "Are you tired, too, poor Dan?" and he answered

her, "No, dear, why?"

IX

It was never a problem-play, at least, and the end of it all is this;

They were drowned in the bliss of their ignorance and buried the rest

in a kiss;

And they loved one another their whole life long, as lovers will

often do;

For it never was only the fairy-tales that rang so royally true.

X

_The rose in her cheek was painted red by the brisk Atlantic breeze;

Her eyes were blue, and her jersey was blue as the lapping, slapping

seas;

Her head was bare, and her thick black hair was coiled behind a throat

Chiselled as hard and bright and bold as the bow of a sailing boat._

XI

_Eighteen hundred and forty-three,

Dan Trevennick was lost at sea;

And, buried here at her husband's side

Lies the body of Joan, his bride,

Who, a little while after she lost him, died._

A SONG OF TWO BURDENS

The round brown sails were reefed and struggling home

Over the glitter and gloom of the angry deep:

Dark in the cottage she sang, "Soon, soon, he will come,

Dreamikin, Drowsy-head, sleep, my little one, sleep."

Over the glitter and gloom of the angry deep

Was it only a dream or a shadow that vanished away?

"Lullaby, little one, sleep, my little one, sleep."

She sang in a dream as the shadows covered the day.

Was it only a sail or a shadow that vanished away?

The boats come home: there is one that will never return;

But she sang in a dream as the shadows buried the day;

And she set the supper and begged the fire to burn.

The boats come home; but one will never return;

And a strangled cry went up from the struggling sea.

She sank on her knees and begged the fire to burn,

"Burn, oh burn, for my love is coming to me!"

A strangled cry went up from the struggling sea,

A cry where the ghastly surf to the moon-dawn rolled;

"Burn, oh burn; for my love is coming to me,

His hands will be scarred with the ropes and starved with the cold."

A strangled cry where the foam in the moonlight rolled,

A bitter cry from the heart of the ghastly sea;

"His hands will be frozen, the night is dark and cold,

Burn, oh burn, for my love is coming to me."

One cry to God from the soul of the shuddering sea,

One moment of stifling lips and struggling hands;

"Burn, oh burn; for my love is coming to me;

And oh, I think the little one understands."

One moment of stifling lips and struggling hands,

Then only the glitter and gloom of the angry deep;

"And oh, I think the little one understands;

Dreamikin, Drowsy-head, sleep, my little one, sleep."

EARTH-BOUND

Ghosts? Love would fain believe,

Earth being so fair, the dead might wish to return!

Is it so strange if, even in heaven, they yearn

For the May-time and the dreams it used to give?

Through dark abysms of Space,

From strange new spheres where Death has called them now

May they not, with a crown on every brow,

Still cry to the loved earth's lost familiar face?

We two, love, we should come

Seeking a little refuge from the light

Of the blinding terrible star-sown Infinite,

Seeking some sheltering roof, some four-walled home,

From that too high, too wide

Communion with the universe and God,

How glad to creep back to some lane we trod

Hemmed in with a hawthorn hedge on either side.

Fresh from death's boundless birth,

How fond the circled vision of the sea

Would seem to souls tired of Infinity,

How kind the soft blue boundaries of earth,

How rich the nodding spray

Of pale green leaves that made the sapphire deep

A background to the dreams of that brief sleep

We called our life when heaven was far away.

How strange would be the sight

Of the little towns and twisted streets again,

Where all the hurrying works and ways of men

Would seem a children's game for our delight.

What boundless heaven could give

This joy in the strait austere restraints of earth,

Whereof the dead have felt the immortal dearth

Who look upon God's face and cannot live?

Our ghosts would clutch at flowers

As drowning men at straws, for fear the sea

Should sweep them back to God's Eternity,

Still clinging to the day that once was ours.

No more with fevered brain

Plunging across the gulfs of Space and Time

Would we revisit this our earthly clime

We two, if we could ever come again;

Not as we came of old,

But reverencing the flesh we now despise

And gazing out with consecrated eyes,

Each of us glad of the other's hand to hold.

So we should wander nigh

Our mortal home, and see its little roof

Keeping the deep eternal night aloof

And yielding us a refuge from the sky.

We should steal in, once more,

Under the cloudy lilac at the gate,

Up the walled garden, then with hearts elate

Forget the stars and close our cottage door.

Oh then, as children use

To make themselves a little hiding-place,

We would rejoice in narrowness of space,

And God should give us nothing more to lose.

How good it all would seem

To souls that from the æonian ebb and flow

Came down to hear once more the to and fro

Swing o' the clock dictate its hourly theme.

How dear the strange recall

From vast antiphonies of joy and pain

Beyond the grave, to these old books again,

That cosy lamp, those pictures on the wall.

Home! Home! The old desire!

We would shut out the innumerable skies,

Draw close the curtains, then with patient eyes

Bend o'er the hearth; laugh at our memories,

Or watch them crumbling in the crimson fire.

ART, THE HERALD

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness"

I

Beyond; beyond; and yet again beyond!

What went ye out to seek, oh foolish-fond?

Is not the heart of all things here and now?

Is not the circle infinite, and the centre

Everywhere, if ye would but hear and enter?

Come; the porch bends and the great pillars bow.

II

Come; come and see the secret of the sun;

The sorrow that holds the warring worlds in one;

The pain that holds Eternity in an hour;

One God in every seed self-sacrificed,

One star-eyed, star-crowned universal Christ,

Re-crucified in every wayside flower.

THE OPTIMIST

Teach me to live and to forgive

The death that all must die

Who pass in slumber through this heaven

Of earth and sea and sky;

Who live by grace of Time and Space

At which their peace is priced;

And cast their lots upon the robe

That wraps the cosmic Christ;

Who cannot see the world-wide Tree

Where Love lies bleeding still;

This universal cross of God

Our star-crowned Igdrasil.

Teach me to live; I do not ask

For length of earthly days,

Or that my heaven-appointed task

Should fall in pleasant ways;

If in this hour of warmth and light

The last great knell were knolled;

If Death should close mine eyes to-night

And all the tale be told;

While I have lips to speak or sing

And power to draw this breath,

Shall I not praise my Lord and King

Above all else, for death?

When on a golden eve he drove

His keenest sorrow deep

Deep in my heart, and called it love;

I did not wince or weep.

A wild Hosanna shook the world

And wakened all the sky,

As through a white and burning light

Her passionate face went by.

When on a golden dawn he called

My best beloved away,

I did not shrink or stand appalled

Before the hopeless day.

The joy of that triumphant dearth

And anguish cannot die;

The joy that casts aside this earth

For immortality.

I would not change one word of doom

Upon the dreadful scroll,

That gave her body to the tomb

And freed her fettered soul.

For now each idle breeze can bring

The kiss I never seek;

The nightingale has heard her sing,

The rose caressed her cheek.

And every pang of every grief

That ruled my soul an hour,

Has given new splendours to the leaf,

New glories to the flower;

And melting earth into the heaven

Whose inmost heart is pain,

Has drawn the veils apart and given

Her soul to mine again.

A POST-IMPRESSION

I

He sat with his foolish mouth agape at the golden glare of the sea,

And his wizened and wintry flaxen locks fluttered around his ears,

And his foolish infinite eyes were full of the sky's own glitter

and glee,

As he dandled an old Dutch Doll on his knee and sang the song of

the spheres.

II

_Blue and red and yellow and green they are melting away in the white;

Hey! but the wise old world was wrong and my idiot heart was right;

Yes; and the merry-go-round of the stars rolls to my cracked old tune,

Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._

III

Then he cradled his doll on his crooning heart and cried as a sea-bird

cries;

And the hot sun reeled like a drunken god through the violent violet

vault:

And the hillside cottage that danced to the deep debauch of the

perfumed skies

Grew palsied and white in the purple heath as a pillar of Dead

Sea salt.

IV

There were three gaunt sun-flowers nigh his chair: they were yellow as

death and tall;

And they threw their sharp blue shadowy stars on the blind white

wizard wall;

And they nodded their heads to the weird old hymn that daunted the light

of the noon,

_Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._

V

The little dog laughed and leered with the white of his eye as he

sidled away

To stare at the dwarfish hunchback waves that crawled to the foot of

the hill,

For his master's infinite mind was wide to the wealth of the night

and the day;

The walls were down: it was one with the Deep that only a God

can fill.

VI

Then a tiny maiden of ten sweet summers arrived with a song and

a smile,

And she swung on the elfin garden-gate and sung to the sea for

a while,

And a phantom face went weeping by and a ghost began to croon

_Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._

VII

And she followed a butterfly up to his chair; and the moon-calf caught

at her hand

And stared at her wide blue startled eyes and muttered, "My dear,

I have been,

In fact, I am there at this moment, I think, in a wonderful fairy-land:"

And he bent and he whispered it low in her ear--"_I know why the

grass is green._

VIII

"I know why the daisy is white, my dear, I know why the seas are blue;

I know that the world is a dream, my dear, and I know that the dream

is true;

I know why the rose and the toad-stool grow, as a curse and a

crimson boon,

_Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._

IX

"If I gaze at a rose, do you know, it grows till it overshadows

the earth,

Like a wonderful Tree of Knowledge, my dear, the Tree of our evil

and good;

But I dare not tell you the terrible vision that gave the toad-stool

birth,

The dream of a heart that breaks, my dear, and a Tree that is

bitter with blood.

X

"Oh, Love may wander wide as the wind that blows from sea to sea,

But a wooden dream, for me, my dear, and a painted memory;

For the God that has bidden the toad-stool grow has writ in his

cosmic rune,

_Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._"

XI

Then he stared at the child and he laughed aloud, and she suddenly

screamed and fled,

As he dreamed of enticing her out thro' the ferns to a quarry

that gapped the hill,

To hurtle her down and grin as her gold hair scattered around

her head

Far, far below, like a sunflower disk, so crimson-spattered

and still.

XII

"Ah, hush!" he cried; and his dark old eyes were wet with a sacred love

As he kissed the wooden face of his doll and winked at the skies above,

"I know, I know why the toad-stools grow, and the rest of the world

will, soon;

_Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._"

XIII

"_Blue and red and yellow and green they are all mixed up in the white;

Hey! but the wise old world was wrong and my idiot heart was right;

Yes; and the merry-go-round of the stars rolls to my cracked old tune,

Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over

the moon._"

THE BARREL-ORGAN

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet

And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain

That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;

And they've given it a glory and a part to play again

In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

And now it's marching onward through the realms of old romance,

And trolling out a fond familiar tune,

And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,

And now it's prattling softly to the moon,

And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore

Of human joys and wonders and regrets;

To remember and to recompense the music evermore

For what the cold machinery forgets....

Yes; as the music changes,

Like a prismatic glass,

It takes the light and ranges

Through all the moods that pass;

Dissects the common carnival

Of passions and regrets,

And gives the world a glimpse of all

The colours it forgets.

And there _La Traviata_ sighs

Another sadder song;

And there _Il Trovatore_ cries

A tale of deeper wrong;

And bolder knights to battle go

With sword and shield and lance,

Than ever here on earth below

Have whirled into--_a dance_!--

Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;

Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)

And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world's a blaze of sky

The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for London.

The Dorian nightingale is rare and yet they say you'll hear him there

At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)

The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo

And golden-eyed _tu-whit, tu-whoo_ of owls that ogle London.

For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard

At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)

And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out

You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorussing for London:--

_Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)_

And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street,

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet

Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat,

And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll never meet,

Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat,

In the land where the dead dreams go.

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote _Il Trovatore_ did you dream

Of the City when the sun sinks low,

Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured stream

On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem

To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam

As _A che la morte_ parodies the world's eternal theme

And pulses with the sunset-glow.

There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone

In the City as the sun sinks low;

There's a portly man of business with a balance of his own,

There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful tone.

And they're all of them returning to the heavens they have known:

They are crammed and jammed in busses and--they're each of them alone

In the land where the dead dreams go.

There's a very modish woman and her smile is very bland

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And her hansom jingles onward, but her little jewelled hand

Is clenched a little tighter and she cannot understand

What she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,

For the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,

In the land where the dead dreams go.

There's a rowing man that listens and his heart is crying out

In the City as the sun sinks low;

For the barge, the eight, the Isis, and the coach's whoop and shout,

For the minute-gun, the counting and the long dishevelled rout,

For the howl along the tow-path and a fate that's still in doubt,

For a roughened oar to handle and a race to think about

In the land where the dead dreams go.

There's a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And his hand begins to tremble and his face to smoulder red

As he sees a loafer watching him and--there he turns his head

And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled,

For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led

Through the land where the dead dreams go.

There's an old and haggard demi-rep, it's ringing in her ears,

In the City as the sun sinks low;

With the wild and empty sorrow of the love that blights and sears,

Oh, and if she hurries onward, then be sure, be sure she hears,

Hears and bears the bitter burden of the unforgotten years,

And her laugh's a little harsher and her eyes are brimmed with tears

For the land where the dead dreams go.

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street

In the City as the sun sinks low;

Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it sweet

Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet

Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand feet

Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat

In the land where the dead dreams go.

So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah,

What have you to say

When you meet the garland girls

Tripping on their way?

All around my gala hat

I wear a wreath of roses

(A long and lonely year it is

I've waited for the May!)

If any one should ask you,

The reason why I wear it is--

My own love, my true love

Is coming home to-day.

And it's buy a bunch of violets for the lady

(_It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!_)

Buy a bunch of violets for the lady

While the sky burns blue above:

On the other side the street you'll find it shady

(_It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!_)

But buy a bunch of violets for the lady,

And tell her she's your own true love.

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street

In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow;

And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet

And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song complete

In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet,

As it dies into the sunset-glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain

That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light,

And they've given it a glory and a part to play again

In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

And there, as the music changes,

The song runs round again.

Once more it turns and ranges

Through all its joy and pain,

Dissects the common carnival

Of passions and regrets;

And the wheeling world remembers all

The wheeling song forgets.

Once more _La Traviata_ sighs

Another sadder song:

Once more _Il Trovatore_ cries

A tale of deeper wrong;

Once more the knights to battle go

With sword and shield and lance

Till once, once more, the shattered foe

Has whirled into--_a dance_!

_Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!_)

THE LITANY OF WAR

Sandalphon, whose white wings to heaven upbear

The weight of human prayer,

Stood silent in the still eternal Light

Of God, one dreadful night.

His wings were clogged with blood and foul with mire,

His body seared with fire.

"Hast thou no word for Me?" the Master said.

The angel sank his head:

"Word from the nations of the East and West,"

He moaned, "that blood is best.

The patriot prayers of either half of earth,

Hear Thou, and judge their worth.

Out of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear,

First, the first nation's prayer:

'_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword

Destroy our enemies, Lord!_'

"Pure as the first, as passionate in trust

That their own cause is just;

Puppets as fond in those dark hands of greed;

As fervent in their creed;

As blindly moved, as utterly betrayed,

As urgent for Thine aid;

Out of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear

The second nation's prayer:

'_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword

Destroy our enemies, Lord._'

"Over their slaughtered children, one great cry

From either enemy!

From either host, thigh-deep in filth and shame,

One prayer, one and the same;

Out of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear,

From East and West, one prayer:

'_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword

Destroy our enemies, Lord._'"

Then, on the Cross of His creative pain,

God bowed His head again.

Then, East and West, over all seas and lands,

Out-stretched His piercèd hands.

"And yet," Sandalphon whispered, "men deny

The Eternal Calvary."

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

[_Written in answer to certain scientific pronouncements_]

I

_In the beginning?_--Slowly grope we back

Along the narrowing track,

Back to the deserts of the world's pale prime,

The mire, the clay, the slime;

And then ... what then? Surely to something less;

Back, back, to Nothingness!

II

You dare not halt upon that dwindling way!

There is no gulf to stay

Your footsteps to the last. Go back you must!

Far, far below the dust,

Descend, descend! Grade by dissolving grade,

We follow, unafraid!

Dissolve, dissolve this moving world of men

Into thin air--and then?

III

O pioneers, O warriors of the Light,

In that abysmal night,

Will you have courage, then, to rise and tell

Earth of this miracle?

Will you have courage, then, to bow the head,

And say, when all is said--

"Out of this Nothingness arose our thought!

This blank abysmal Nought

Woke, and brought forth that lighted City street,

Those towers, that armoured fleet?" ...

IV

When you have seen those vacant primal skies

Beyond the centuries.

Watched the pale mists across their darkness flow,

As in a lantern-show,

Weaving, by merest "chance," out of thin air,

Pageants of praise and prayer;

Watched the great hills like clouds arise and set,

And one--named Olivet;

When you have seen, as a shadow passing away,

One child clasp hands and pray;

When you have seen emerge from that dark mire

One martyr, ringed with fire;

Or, from that Nothingness, by special grace,

One woman's love-lit face, ...

V

Will you have courage, then, to front that law

(From which your sophists draw

Their only right to flout one human creed)

That nothing can proceed--

Not even thought, not even love--from less

Than its own nothingness?

The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride,

And kneel where you denied?

The law is yours! Dare you re-kindle, then,

One faith for faithless men,

And say you found, on that dark road you trod,

_In the beginning--GOD_?

THE LAST BATTLE

Kings of the earth, Kings of the earth, the trumpet rings for warning,

And like the golden swords that ray from out the setting sun

The shout goes out of the trumpet mouth across the hills of morning,

Wake; for the last great battle dawns and all the wars are done.

Now all the plains of Europe smoke with marching hooves of thunder,

And through each ragged mountain-gorge the guns begin to gleam;

And round a hundred cities where the women watch and wonder,

The tramp of passing armies aches and faints into a dream.

The King of Ind is drawing nigh: a hundred leagues are clouded

Along his loud earth-shaking march from east to western sea:

The King o' the Setting Sun is here and all the seas are shrouded

With sails that carry half the world to front Eternity.

Soon shall the darkness roll around the grappling of the nations,

A darkness lit with deadly gleams of blood and steel and fire;

Soon shall the last great pæan of earth's war-worn generations

Roar through the thunder-clouded air round War's red funeral pyre.

But here defeat and victory are both allied with heaven,

The enfolding sky makes every foe the centre of her dome,

Each fights for God and his own right, and unto each is given

The right to find the heart of heaven where'er he finds his home.

O, who shall win, and who shall lose, and who shall take the glory

Here at the meeting of the roads, where every cause is right?

O, who shall live, and who shall die, and who shall tell the story?

Each strikes for faith and fatherland in that immortal fight.

High on the grey old hills of Time the last immortal rally,

Under the storm of the last great tattered flag, shall laugh to see

The blood of Armageddon roll from every smoking valley,

Shall laugh aloud, then rush on death for God and chivalry.

Kings of the earth, Kings of the earth, O, which of you then

shall inherit

The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory? for the world's old light

grows dim

And the cry of you all goes up all night to the dark enfolding Spirit,

Each of you fights for God and home; but God, ah, what of Him?

THE PARADOX

"I Am that I Am"

I

All that is broken shall be mended;

All that is lost shall be found;

I will bind up every wound

When that which is begun shall be ended.

Not peace I brought among you but a sword

To divide the night from the day,

When I sent My worlds forth in their battle-array

To die and to live,

To give and to receive,

Saith the Lord.

II

Of old time they said none is good save our God;

But ye that have seen how the ages have shrunk from my rod,

And how red is the wine-press wherein at my bidding they trod,

Have answered and said that with Eden I fashioned the snake,

That I mould you of clay for a moment, then mar you and break,

And there is none evil but I, the supreme Evil, God.

Lo, I say unto both, I am neither;

But greater than either;

For meeting and mingling in Me they become neither evil nor good;

Their cycle is rounded, they know neither hunger nor food,

They need neither sickle nor seed-time, nor root nor fruit,

They are ultimate, infinite, absolute.

Therefore I say unto all that have sinned,

East and West and South and North

The wings of my measureless love go forth

To cover you all: they are free as the wings of the wind.

III

Consider the troubled waters of the sea

Which never rest;

As the wandering waves are ye;

Yet assuaged and appeased and forgiven,

As the seas are gathered together under the infinite glory of

heaven,

I gather you all to my breast.

But the sins and the creeds and the sorrows that trouble the sea

Relapse and subside,

Chiming like chords in a world-wide symphony

As they cease to chide;

For they break and they are broken of sound and hue,

And they meet and they murmur and they mingle anew,

Interweaving, intervolving, like waves: they have no stay:

They are all made as one with the deep, when they sink and are vanished

away;

Yea, all is toned at a turn of the tide

To a calm and golden harmony;

But I--shall I wonder or greatly care,

For their depth or their height?

Shall it be more than a song in my sight

How many wandering waves there were,

Or how many colours and changes of light?

It is your eyes that see

And take heed of these things: they were fashioned for you, not for Me.

IV

With the stars and the clouds I have clothed Myself here for your eyes

To behold That which Is. I have set forth the strength of the skies

As one draweth a picture before you to make your hearts wise;

That the infinite souls I have fashioned may know as I know,

Visibly revealed

In the flowers of the field,

Yea, declared by the stars in their courses, the tides in their flow,

And the clash of the world's wide battle as it sways to and fro,

Flashing forth as a flame

The unnameable Name,

The ineffable Word,

_I am the Lord._

V

I am the End to which the whole world strives:

Therefore are ye girdled with a wild desire and shod

With sorrow; for among you all no soul

Shall ever cease or sleep or reach its goal

Of union and communion with the Whole,

Or rest content with less than being God.

Still, as unending asymptotes, your lives

In all their myriad wandering ways

Approach Me with the progress of the golden days;

Approach Me; for my love contrives

That ye should have the glory of this

For ever; yea, that life should blend

With life and only vanish away

From day to wider wealthier day,

Like still increasing spheres of light that melt and merge in

wider spheres

Even as the infinite years of the past melt in the infinite

future years.

Each new delight of sense,

Each hope, each love, each fear,

Widens, relumes and recreates each sphere,

From a new ring and nimbus of pre-eminence.

I am the Sphere without circumference:

I only and for ever comprehend

All others that within me meet and blend.

Death is but the blinding kiss

Of two finite infinities;

Two finite infinite orbs

The splendour of the greater of which absorbs

The less, though both like Love have no beginning and no end.

VI

Therefore is Love's own breath

Like Knowledge, a continual death;

And all his laughter and kisses and tears,

And woven wiles of peace and strife,

That ever widen thus your temporal spheres,

Are making of the memory of your former years

A very death in life.

VII

I am that I am;

Ye are evil and good;

With colour and glory and story and song ye are fed as with food:

The cold and the heat,

The bitter and the sweet,

The calm and the tempest fulfil my Word;

Yet will ye complain of my two-edged sword

That has fashioned the finite and mortal and given you the sweetness

of strife,

The blackness and whiteness,

The darkness and brightness,

Which sever your souls from the formless and void and hold you

fast-fettered to life?

VIII

Behold now, is Life not good?

Yea, is it not also much more than the food,

More than the raiment, more than the breath?

Yet Strife is its name!

Say, which will ye cast out first from the furnace, the fuel or

the flame?

Would ye all be as I am; and know neither evil nor good; neither

life; neither death;

Or mix with the void and the formless till all were as one and

the same?

IX

I am that I am; the Container of all things: kneel, lift up your hands

To the high Consummation of good and of evil which none understands;

The divine Paradox, the ineffable Word, in whose light the poor souls

that ye trod

Underfoot as too vile for their fellows are at terrible union with God!

Am I not over both evil and good,

The righteous man and the shedder of blood?

Shall I save or slay?

I am neither the night nor the day,

Saith the Lord.

Judge not, oh ye that are round my footstool, judge not, ere the hour

be born

That shall laugh you also to scorn.

X

Ah, yet I say unto all that have sinned,

East and West and South and North

The wings of my measureless love go forth

To cover you all: they are free as the wings of the wind.

XI

But one thing is needful; and ye shall be true

To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek;

Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you

If ye love one another, if your love be not weak.

XII

Since I sent out my worlds in their battle-array

To die and to live,

To give and to receive,

Not peace, not peace, I have brought among you but a sword,

To divide the night from the day,

Saith the Lord;

Yet all that is broken shall be mended,

And all that is lost shall be found,

I will bind up every wound,

When that which is begun shall be ended.

THE PROGRESS OF LOVE

(A LYRICAL SYMPHONY)

I

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end.

The woodbine whispers, low and sweet and low,

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

The firwoods murmur and the sea-waves know

The message that the setting sun shall send.

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end.

II

And God sighed in the sunset; and the sea

Chanted the soft recessional of Time

Against the golden shores of mystery;

And ever as that long low change and chime

With one slow sob of molten music yearned

Westward, it seemed as if the Love sublime

Almost uttered itself, where the waves burned

In little flower-soft flames of rose and green

That woke to seaward, while the tides returned

Rising and falling, ruffled and serene,

With all the mirrored tints of heaven above

Shimmering through their mystic myriad sheen.

As a dove's burnished breast throbbing with love

Swells and subsides to call her soft-eyed mate

Home through the rosy gloom of glen or grove,

So when the greenwood noon was growing late

The sea called softly through the waste of years,

Called to the star that still can consecrate

The holy golden haze of human tears

Which tinges every sunset with our grief

Until the perfect Paraclete appears.

Ah, the long sigh that yields the world relief

Rose and relapsed across Eternity,

Making a joy of sorrows that are brief,

As, o'er the bright enchantment of the sea,

Facing the towers of that old City of Pain

Which stands upon the shores of mystery

And frowns across the immeasurable main,

Venus among her cloudy sunset flowers

Woke; and earth melted into heaven again.

For even the City's immemorial towers

Were tinted into secret tone and time,

Like old forgotten tombs that age embowers

With muffling roses and with mossy rime

Until they seem no monument of ours,

But one more note in earth's accordant chime.

O Love, Love, Love, all dreams, desires and powers,

Were but as chords of that ineffable psalm;

And all the long blue lapse of summer hours,

And all the breathing sunset's golden balm

By that æonian sorrow were resolved

As dew into the music's infinite calm,

Through which the suns and moons and stars revolved

According to the song's divine decree,

Till Time was but a tide of intervolved

And interweaving worlds of melody;

_In other worlds I loved you, long ago_,--

The angelic citoles fainted o'er the sea;

And seraph citerns answered, sweet and low,

From where the sunset and the moonrise blend,--

_In other worlds I loved you, long ago_;

_Love that hath no beginning hath no end_;

O Love, Love, Love, the bitter City of Pain

Bidding the golden echoes westward wend,

Chimed in accordant undertone again:

Though every grey old tower rose like a tomb

To mock the glory of the shoreless main

They could but strike such discords as illume

The music with strange gleams of utter light

And hallow all the valley's rosy gloom.

And there, though greyly sinking out of sight

Before the wonders of the sky and sea,

Back through the valley, back into the night,

While mystery melted into mystery,

The City still rebuffed the far sweet West

That dimmed her sorrows with infinity;

Yet sometimes yearning o'er the sea's bright breast

To that remote Avilion would she gaze

Where all lost loves and weary warriors rest.

Then she remembered, through that golden haze,

(Oh faint as flowers the rose-white waves resound)

Her Arthur whom she loved in the dead days,

And how he sailed to heal him of his wound,

And how he lives and reigns eternally

Where now that unknown love is throned and crowned

Who laid his bleeding head against her knee

And loosed the bitter breast-plate and unbound

His casque and brought him strangely o'er the sea,

And how she reigns beside him on that shore

For ever (Yrma, queen, bend down to me)

And they twain have no sorrow any more.

III

They have forgotten all that vanished away

When life's dark night died into death's bright day

They have forgotten all except the gleam

Of light when once he kissed her in a dream

Once on the lips and once upon the brow

In the white orb of God's transcendent Now;

And even then he knew that, long before,

Their eyes had met upon some distant shore;

Yea; that most lonely and immortal face

Which dwells beyond the dreams of time and space

Bowed down to him from out the happy place

And whispered to him, low and sweet and low

_In other worlds I loved you, long ago_;

And then he knew his love could never die

Because his queen was throned beyond the sky

And called him to his own immortal sphere

Forgetting Launcelot and Guinevere.

So Yrma reigns with Arthur, and they know

They loved on earth a million years ago;

And watched the sea-waves wistfully westward wend;

And heard a voice whispering in their flow,

And calling through the silent sunset-glow,

_Love that hath no beginning hath no end._

IV

It was about the dawn of day

I heard Etain and Anwyl say

The waving ferns are a fairy forest,

It is time, it is time to wander away;

For the dew is bright on the heather bells,

And the breeze in the clover sways and swells,

As the waves on the blue sea wake and wander,

Over and under the braes and dells.

She was eight years old that day,

Full of laughter and play;

Eight years old and Anwyl nine,--

Two young lovers were they.

Two young lovers were they,

Born in the City of Pain;

There was never a song in the world so gay

As the song of the child, Etain;

There was never a laugh so sweet

With the ripple of fairy bells,

And never a fairy foot so fleet

Dancing down the woodland dells!

She was eight years old that day,

Two young lovers were they.

There was never a sea of mystical gleams

Glooming under enchanted skies

Deep as the dark miraculous dreams

In Anwyl's haunted eyes.

There was never a glory of light

Around the carolling lark

As Etain's eyes were brave and bright

To daunt the coming dark.

Two young lovers were they

Born in the City of Pain;

There was never a song in the world so gay

As the song of the child, Etain;

Blithe as the wind in the trees,

Blithe as the bird on the bough,

Blithe as the bees in the sweet Heart's-ease

Where Love lies bleeding now.

V

And God sighed in the sunset; and the sea

Forgot her sorrow, and all the breathless West

Grew quiet as the blue tranquillity

That clad the broken mountain's brilliant breast,

Over the City, with deep heather-bloom

Heaving from crag to crag in sweet unrest,

A sea of dim rich colour and warm perfume

Whose billows rocked the drowsy honey-bee

Among the golden isles of gorse and broom

Like some enchanted ancient argosy

Drunkenly blundering over seas of dream

Past unimagined isles of mystery,

Over whose yellow sands the soft waves cream,

And sunbeams float and toss across the bare

Rose-white arms and perilous breasts that gleam

Where sirens wind their glossy golden hair;

Oh, miles on miles, the honeyed heather-bloom

Heaving its purple through the high bright air

Rolled a silent glory of gleam and gloom

From mossy crag to crag and crest to crest

Untroubled by the valley's depth of doom.

The hawk dropped down into the pine-forest

And, far below, the lavrock ruffled her wings

Blossomwise over her winsome secret nest.

Then suddenly, softly, as when a fairy sings

Out of the heart of a rose in the heart of the fern,

Or in the floating starlight faintly rings

The frail blue hare-bells--turn again, and turn,

Under and over, the silvery crescents cry

To where the crimson fox-glove belfries burn

And with a deeper softer peal reply,

There came a ripple of music through the roses

That rustled on the dimmest rim of sky

Where many a frame of fretted leaves encloses

For lovers wandering in the fern-wet wood

An arch of summer sea that softly dozes

As if all mysteries were understood:

Yrma, my queen, what love could understand

That faint sweet music, _God saith all is good_,

As those two children, hand in sunburnt hand,

Over the blithe blue hills and far away

Wandered into their own green fairyland?

VI

For the song is lost that shook the dew

Where the wild musk-roses glisten,

When the sunset dreamed that a dream was true

And the birds were hushed to listen.

The song is lost that shook the night

With wings of richer fire,

Where the years had touched their eyes with light

And their souls with a new desire;

And the new delight of the strange old story

Burned in the flower-soft skies,

And nine more years with a darker glory

Had deepened the light of her eyes;

But lost, oh more than lost the song

That shook the rose to tears,

As hand in hand they danced along

Through childhood's everlasting years.

"Oh, Love has wings," the linnet sings;

But the dead return no more, no more;

And the sea is breaking its old grey heart

Against the golden shore.

She was eight years old that day,

Two young lovers were they.

If every song as they danced along

Paused on the springing spray;

Is there never a bird in the wide greenwood

Will hush its heart to-day?

There's never a leaf with dew impearled

To make their pathway sweet,

And never a blossom in all the world

That knows the kiss of their feet.

No light to-night declares the word

That thrilled the blossomed bough,

And stilled the happy singing bird

That none can silence now.

The weary nightingale may sob

With her bleeding breast against a thorn,

And the wild white rose with every throb

Grow red as the laugh of morn;

With wings outspread she sinks her head

But Love returns no more, no more;

And the sea is breaking its old grey heart

Against the golden shore.

Born in the City of Pain;

Ah, who knows, who knows

When Death shall turn to delight again

Or a wound to a red, red rose?

Eight years old that day,

Full of laughter and play;

Eight years old and Anwyl nine,--

Two young lovers were they.

VII

And down the scented heather-drowsy hills

The barefoot children wandered, hand in hand,

And paddled through the laughing silver rills

In quest of fairyland;

And in each little sunburnt hand a spray,

A purple fox-glove bell-branch lightly swung,

And Anwyl told Etain how, far away,

One day he wandered through the dreamland dells

And watched the moonlit fairies as they sung

And tolled the fox-glove bells;

And oh, how sweetly, sweetly to and fro

The fragrance of the music reeled and rung

Under the loaded boughs of starry May.

And God sighed in the sunset, and the sea

Grew quieter than the hills: the mystery

Of ocean, earth and sky was like a word

Uttered, but all unheard,

Uttered by every wave and cloud and leaf

With all the immortal glory of mortal grief;

And every wave that broke its heart of gold

In music on the rainbow-dazzled shore

Seemed telling, strangely telling, evermore

A story that must still remain untold.

Oh, _Once upon a time_, and o'er and o'er

As aye the _Happy ever after_ came

The enchanted waves lavished their faery lore

And tossed a foam-bow and a rosy flame

Around the whispers of the creaming foam,

Till the old rapture with the new sweet name

Through all the old romance began to roam,

And Anwyl, gazing out across the sea,

Dreamed that he heard the distance whisper "Come."

"Etain," he murmured softly and wistfully,

With the soul's wakening wonder in his eyes,

"Is it not strange to think that there can be

"No end for ever and ever to those skies,

No shore beyond, or if there be a shore

Still without end the world beyond it lies;

"Think; think, Etain;" and all his faery lore

Mixed with the faith that brought all gods to birth

And sees new heavens transcend for evermore

The poor impossibilities of earth;

But Etain only laughed: the world to her

Was one sweet smile of very present mirth;

Its flowers were only flowers, common or rare;

Her soul was like a little garden closed

By rose-clad walls, a place of southern air

Islanded from the Mystery that reposed

Its vast and brooding wings on that abyss

Through which like little clouds that dreamed and dozed

The thoughts of Anwyl wandered toward some bliss

Unknown, unfathomed, far, how far away,

Where God has gathered all the eternities

Into strange heavens, beyond the night and day.

VIII

And over the rolling golden bay,

In the funeral pomp of the dying day,

The bell of Time was wistfully tolling

A million million years away;

And over the heather-drowsy hill

Where the burdened bees were buzzing still,

The two little sun-bright barefoot children

Wandered down at the flowers' own will;

For still as the bell in the sunset tolled,

The meadow-sweet and the mary-gold

And the purple orchis kissed their ankles

And lured them over the listening wold.

And the feathery billows of blue-gold grass

Bowed and murmured and bade them pass,

Where a sigh of the sea-wind softly told them

_There is no Time--Time never was_.

And what if a sorrow were tolled to rest

Where the rich light mellowed away in the West,

As a glory of fruit in an autumn orchard

Heaped and asleep o'er the sea's ripe breast?

Why should they heed it, what should they know

Of the years that come or the years that go,

With the warm blue sky around and above them

And the wild thyme whispering to and fro?

For they heard in the dreamy dawn of day

A fairy harper faintly play,

Follow me, follow me, little children,

Over the hills and far away;

Where the dew is bright on the heather-bells,

And the breeze in the clover sways and swells,

As the waves on the blue sea wake and wander,

Over and under the braes and dells.

And the hare-bells tinkled and rang Ding dong

Bell in the dell as they danced along,

And their feet were stained on the hills with honey,

And crushing the clover till evensong.

And, oh the ripples that rolled in rhyme

Under the wild blue banks of thyme,

To the answering rhyme of the rolling ocean's

Golden glory of change and chime!

For they came to a stream and her fairy lover

Caught at her hand and swung her over,

And the broad wet buttercups laughed and gilded

Their golden knees in the deep sweet clover.

There was never a lavrock up in the skies

Blithe as the laugh of their lips and eyes,

As they glanced and glittered across the meadows

To waken the sleepy butterflies.

There was never a wave on the sea so gay

As the light that danced on their homeward way

Where the waving ferns were a fairy forest

And a thousand years as yesterday.

_She was eight years old that day,

Full of laughter and play;

Eight years old and Anwyl nine,--

Two young lovers were they._

And when the clouds like folded sheep

Were drowsing over the drowsy deep,

And like a rose in a golden cradle

Anwyl breathed on the breast of sleep,

Or ever the petals and leaves were furled

At the vesper-song of the sunset-world,

The sleepy young rose of nine sweet summers

Dreamed in his rose-bed cosily curled.

And what if the light of his nine bright years

Glistened with laughter or glimmered with tears,

Or gleamed like a mystic globe around him

White as the light of the sphere of spheres?

And what if a glory of angels there,

Starring an orb of ineffable air,

Came floating down from the Gates of jasper

That melt into flowers at a maiden's prayer?

And what if he dreamed of a fairy face

Wondering out of some happy place,

Quietly as a star at sunset

Shines in the rosy dreams of space?

For only as far as the west wind blows

The sweets of a swinging full-blown rose,

Eight years old and queen of the lilies

Little Etain slept--ah, how close!

At a flower-cry over the moonlit lane

In a cottage of roses dreamed Etain,

And their purple shadows kissed at her lattice

And dappled her sigh-soft counterpane;

And or ever Etain with her golden head

Had nestled to sleep in her lily-white bed,

She breathed a dream to her fairy lover,

_Please, God, bless Anwyl and me_, she said.

And a song arose in the rose-white West,

And a whisper of wings o'er the sea's bright breast,

And a cry where the moon's old miracle wakened

A glory of pearl o'er the pine-forest.

Why should they heed it? What should they know

Of the years to come or the years to go?

With the starry skies around and above them

And the roses whispering to and fro.

Ah, was it a song of the mystic morn

When into their beating hearts the thorn

Should pierce through the red wet crumpled roses

And all the sorrow of love be born?

Ah, was it a cry of the wild wayside

Whereby one day they must surely ride,

Out of the purple garden of passion

To Calvary, to be crucified?

Only the sound of the distant sea

Broke on the shores of Mystery,

And tolled as a bell might toll for sorrow

Till Time be tombed in Eternity;

And in their dreams they only heard

Far away, one secret bird

Sing, till the passionate purple twilight

Throbbed with the wonder of one sweet word:

One sweet word and the wonder awoke,

And the leaves and the flowers and the starlight spoke

In silent rapture the strange old secret

That none e'er knew till the death-dawn broke;

One sweet whisper, and hand in hand

They wandered in dreams through fairyland,

Rapt in the star-bright mystical music

Which only a child can understand.

But never a child in the world can tell

The wonderful tale he knows so well,

Though ever as old Time dies in the sunset

It tolls and tolls like a distant bell.

_Love, love, love_; and they hardly knew

The sense of the glory that round them grew;

But the world was a wide enchanted garden;

And the song, the song, the song rang true.

And they danced with the fairies in emerald rings

Arched by the light of their rainbow wings,

And they heard the wild green Harper striking

A starlight over the golden strings.

_Love, oh love_; and they roamed once more

Through a forest of flowers on a fairy shore,

And the sky was a wild bright laugh of wonder

And the West was a dream of the years of yore.

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end:

The heather whispers low and sweet and low,

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

The meadows murmur and the firwoods know

The message that the kindling East shall send;

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end.

IX

Out of the deep, my dream, out of the deep,

Yrma, thy voice came to me in my sleep,

And through a rainbow woven of human tears

I saw two lovers wandering down the years;

Two children, first, that roamed a sunset land,

And then two lovers wandering hand in hand,

Forgetful of their childhood's Paradise,

For nine more years had darkened in their eyes,

And heaven itself could hardly find again

Anwyl, the star-child, or the flower, Etain.

For on a day in May, as through the wood

With earth's new passion beating in his blood

He went alone, an empty-hearted youth,

Seeking he knew not what white flower of truth

Or beauty, on all sides he seemed to see

Swift subtle hints of some new harmony,

Yet all unheard, ideal, and incomplete,

A silent song compact of hopes and fears,

A music such as lights the wandering feet

Of Yrma when on earth she reappears.

And he forgot that sad grey City of Pain,

For all earth's old romance returned again,

And as he went, his dreaming soul grew glad

To think that he might meet with Galahad

Or Parsifal in some green glade of fern,

Or see between the boughs a helmet burn

And hear a joyous laugh kindle the sky

As through the wood Sir Launcelot rode by

With face upturned to take the sun like wine.

Ah, was it love that made the whole world shine

Like some great angel's face, blinded with bliss,

While Anwyl dreamed of bold Sir Amadis

And Guinevere's white arms and Iseult's kiss,

And that glad island in a golden sea

Where Arthur lives and reigns eternally?

Surely the heavens were one wide rose-white flame

As down the path to meet him Yrma came;

Ah, was it Yrma, with those radiant eyes,

That came to greet and lead him through the skies,

The skies that gloomed and gleamed so far above

The little wandering prayers of human love?...

He had forgotten all except the gleam

Of light when once he kissed her in a dream, ...

For surely then he knew that long before

Their eyes had met upon some distant shore....

Ah, was it Yrma whose red lips he met

Between the branches, where the leaves were wet?

Etain or Yrma, for it seemed her face

Bent down upon him from some happy place

And whispered to him, low and sweet and low,

_In other worlds I loved you, long ago!_

And he, too, knew his love could never die,

Because his queen was throned beyond the sky.

Yet In sweet mortal eyes he met her now

And kissed Etain beneath the hawthorn bough,

And dared to dream his infinite dream was true

On earth and reign with Etain, dream he knew

Why leaves were green and sides were fresh and blue;

Yea, dream he knew, as children dream they know

They knew all this a million years ago,

And watched the sea-waves wistfully westward wend

And heard a voice whispering in their flow

And calling through the silent sunset-glow

_Love that hath no beginning hath no end._

Ah, could they see in the Valley of Gloom

That clove the cliffs behind the City;

Ah, could they hear in the forest of Doom

The peril that neared without pause or pity?

Behind the veils of ivy and vine,

Wild musk-roses and white woodbine,

In glens that were wan as with moonlit tears

And rosy with ghosts of eglantine

And pale as with lilies of long-past years,

Ah, could they see, could they hear, could they know

Behind that beautiful outward show,

Behind the pomp and glory of life

That seething old anarchic strife?

For there in many a dim blue glade

Where the rank red poppies burned,

And if perchance some dreamer strayed

He nevermore returned,

Cold incarnate memories

Of earth's retributory throes,

Deadly desires and agonies

Dark as the worm that never dies,

In the outer night arose,

And waited under those wonderful skies

With Hydra heads and mocking eyes

That winked upon the waning West

From out the gloom of the oak-forest,

Till all the wild profound of wood

That o'er the haunted valley slept

Glowed with eyes like pools of blood

As, lusting after a hideous food,

Through the haggard vistas crept

Without a cry, without a hiss,

The serpent broods of the abyss.

Ancestral folds in darkness furled

Since the beginnings of the world.

Ring upon awful ring uprose

That obscure heritage of foes,

The exceeding bitter heritage

Which still a jealous God bestows

From inappellable age to age,

The ghostly worms that softly move

Through every grey old corse of love

And creep across the coffined years

To batten on our blood and tears;

And there were hooded shapes of death

Gaunt and grey, cruel and blind,

Stealing softly as a breath

Through the woods that loured behind

The City; hooded shapes of fear

Slowly, slowly stealing near;

While all the gloom that round them rolled

With intertwisting coils grew cold.

And there with leer and gap-toothed grin

Many a gaunt ancestral Sin

With clutching fingers, white and thin,

Strove to put the boughs aside;

And still before them all would glide

Down the wavering moon-white track

One lissom figure, clad in black;

Who wept at mirth and mocked at pain

And murmured a song of the wind and the rain;

His laugh was wild with a secret grief;

His eyes were deep like woodland pools;

And, once and again, as his face drew near

In a rosy gloaming of eglantere,

All the ghosts that gathered there

Bowed together, naming his name:

Lead us, ah thou _Shadow of a Leaf_,

Child and master of all our shame,

Fool of Doubt and King of Fools.

Now the linnet had ended his evensong,

And the lark dropt down from his last wild ditty

And ruffled his wings and his speckled breast

Blossomwise over his June-sweet nest;

While winging wistfully into the West

As a fallen petal is wafted along

The last white sea-mew sought for rest;

And, over the gleaming heave and swell

Of the swinging seas,

Drowsily breathed the dreaming breeze.

Then, suddenly, out of the Valley of Gloom

That clove the cliffs behind the City,

Out of the silent forest of Doom

That clothed the valley with clouds of fear

Swelled the boom of a distant bell

Once, and the towers of the City of Pain

Echoed it, without hope or pity.

The tale of that tolling who can tell?

That dark old music who shall declare?

Who shall interpret the song of the bell?

_Is it nothing to you, all ye that hear_,

Sorrowed the bell, _Is it nothing to you?

Is it nothing to you?_ the shore-wind cried,

_Is it nothing to you?_ the cliffs replied.

But the low light laughed and the skies were blue,

And this was only the song of the bell.

X

ANWYL

A darkened easement in a darker room

Was all his home, whence weary and bowed and white

He watched across the slowly gathering gloom

The slowly westering light.

Bitterness in his heavy-clouded eyes,

Bitterness as of heaven's intestine wars

Brooded; he looked upon the unfathomed skies

And whispered--to the stars--

Some day, he said, she will forget all this

That she calls life, and looking far above

See throned among the great eternities

This dream of mine, this love;

Love that has given my soul these wings of fire

To beat in glory above the sapphire sea,

Until the wings of the infinite desire

Close in infinity;

Love that has taken the glory of hawthorn boughs,

And all the dreaming beauty of hazel skies,

As ministers to the radiance of her brows

And haunted April eyes;

Love that is hidden so deep beneath the dust

Of little daily duties and delights,

Till that reproachful face of hers grows just

And God at last requites

A soul whose dream was deeper than the skies,

A heart whose hope was wider than the sea,

Yet could not enter through his true love's eyes

Their grey infinity.

And so I know I wound her all day long

Because my heart must seem so far away;

And even my love completes the silent wrong

For all that it can say

Seems vast and meaningless to mortal sense;

Its vague desire can never reach its goal

Till knowledge vanishes in omniscience

And God surrounds her soul,

Breaking its barriers down and flooding in

Through all her wounds in one almighty tide,

Mingling her soul with that great Love wherein

My soul waits, glorified.

XI

ETAIN

My love is dying, dying in my heart;

There is no song in heaven for such as I

Who watch the days and years of youth depart,

The bloom decay and die;

The rose that withers in the hollow cheek,

The leaden rings that mark us old and wise;

And Time that writes what Pity dares not speak

Around the fading eyes.

He dreams he loves; but only loves his dream;

And in his dream he never can forget

Abana seems a so much mightier stream

And Pharpar wider yet;

The little deeds of love that light the shrine

Of common daily duties with such gleams

Of heaven, to me are scarcely less divine

Than those poor wandering dreams

Of deeds that never happen! I give him this,

This heart he cannot find in heaven above;

This heart, this heart of all the eternities,

This life of mine, this love;

Love that is lord of all the world at once

And never bade the encircled spirit roam

To the circle's bound, beyond the moons and suns,

But makes each heart its home,

And every home the heart of Space and Time,

And each and all a heaven if love could reign;

One infinite untranscended heaven sublime

With God's own joy and pain.

Why, that was what God meant, to set us here

In Eden, when he saw that all was good;

And we have made the sun black with despair,

And turned the moon to blood.

So has Love taught me that too learnèd tongue,

And in his poorer wisdom made me wise;

I grew so proud of the red drops we wrung

From all philosophies.

My heart is narrow, foolish, what you will;

But this I know God meant who set us here,

And gave each soul the Infinities to fulfil

From its own widening sphere.

To annex new regions to the soul's domain,

To expand the circle of the golden hours,

Till it enfolds again and yet again

New heavens, new fields, new flowers,

Oh, this is well; but still the central heart

Is here at home, not wandering like the wind

That gathers nothing, but must still depart

Leaving a waste behind.

Where is the song I sang that April morn,

When all the poet in his eyes awoke

My sleeping heart to heaven; and love was born?

For while the glad day broke

We met; and as the softly kindling skies

Thrilled through the scented vistas of the wood

I felt the sudden love-light in his eyes

Kindle my beating blood.

_Happy day, happy day,

Chasing the clouds of the night away

And bidding the dreams of the dawn depart

Over the freshening April blue,

Till the blossoms awake to welcome the May,

And the world is made anew;

And the blackbird sings on the dancing spray

With eyes of glistening dew;

"Happy, happy, happy day;"

For he knows that his love is true;

He knows that his love is true, my heart,

He knows that his love is true!_

I cannot sing it: these tears blind me: love,

O love, come back before it is too late,

Why, even Christ came down to us from above:

I think His love was great;

Yet he stood knocking, knocking at the door

Until his piteous hands were worn with scars;

He did not hide that crown of love he wore

Among the lonely stars.

This round of hours, the daily flowers I cull

Are more to me than all the rolling spheres,

A wounded bird at hand more pitiful

Than some great seraph's tears.

How should I join the great wise choir above

With my starved spirit's pale inhuman dearth,

Who never heard the cry of heavenly love

Rise from the sweet-souled earth?

Yet it is I he needs, and I for whom

His greed exceeds, his dreams fly wide of the mark!

Is it all self? I wander in the gloom;

The ways of God grow dark;

I watch the rose that withers in the cheek,

The leaden rings that mark us old and wise;

And Time that writes what Pity dares not speak

Around the fading eyes.

XII

And ever as Anwyl went the unknown end

Faded before him, back and back and back

He saw new empty heavens for ever bend

Over his endless track;

And memory, burning with new hopeless fire,

Showed him how every passing infinite hour

Made some new Crucifix for the World's Desire

Is some new wayside flower:

He saw what joy and beauty owed to death;

How all the world was one great sacrifice

Of Him, in whom all creatures that draw breath

Share God's eternal skies;

How Love is lord of all the world at once;

And never bids the encircled spirit roam

To the circle's bound, beyond the moons and suns,

But makes each heart its home,

And every home the heart of Space and Time,

And each and all a heaven if love could reign

One infinite untranscended heaven sublime

With God's own joy and pain.

XIII

Out of the deep, my dream, out of the deep,

A little child came to him in his sleep

And led him back to what was Paradise

Before the years had darkened in his eyes,

And showed him what he ne'er could lose again--

The light that once enshrined the child Etain.

Ah, was it Yrma with those radiant eyes

That came to greet and lead him through the skies;

Ay; all the world was one wide rose-white flame,

As down the path to meet him Yrma came

And caught the child up in her arms and cried,

This is my child that moved in Etain's side,

Thy child and Etain's: I the unknown ideal

And she the rich, the incarnate, breathing real

Are one; for me thou never canst attain

But by the love I yield thee for Etain;

Even as through Christ thy soul allays its dearth,

Love's heaven is only compassed upon earth;

And by that love, in thine own Etain's eyes

Thou shalt find all God's untranscended skies.

As of old, as of old, with Etain that day,

Over the hills, and far away,

He roamed thro' the fairy forests of fern:

Two young lovers were they.

And God sighed in the sunset, and the sea

Grew quieter than the hills: the mystery

Of ocean, earth and sky was like a word

Uttered, but all unheard,

Uttered by every wave and cloud and leaf

With all the immortal glory of mortal grief;

And every wave that broke its heart of gold

In music on the rainbow-dazzled shore

Seemed telling, strangely telling, evermore

A story that must still remain untold.

Oh, _Once upon a time_, and o'er and o'er

As aye the _Happy ever after_ came

The enchanted waves lavished their faery lore

And tossed a foam-bow and a rosy flame

Around the whispers of the creaming foam,

Till the old rapture with the new sweet name

Through all the old romance began to roam.

XIV

And those two lovers only heard

--Oh, love is a dream that knows no waking--

Far away, one secret bird,

Where all the roses breathed one word,

And every crispel on the beach--

Oh, love is a sea that is ever breaking!--

Lisped it in a sweeter speech;

As hand in hand, by the sunset sea

That breaks on the shores of mystery,

They stood in the gates of the City of Pain

To watch the wild waves flutter and beat

In roses of white soft light at their feet,

Roses of delicate music and light,

Music and moonlight under their feet.

Crumbling and flashing and softly crashing

In rainbow colours that dazzle and wane

And wither and waken and, wild with delight,

Dance and dance to a mystic tune

And scatter their leaves in a flower-soft rain

Over the shimmering golden shore

Between the West and the waking moon,

Between the sunset and the night;

And then they sigh for the years of yore

And gather their glory together again,

Petal by petal and gleam by gleam,

Till, all in one rushing rose-bright stream

They dazzle back to the deep once more,

For the dream of the sea is an endless dream,

And love is a sea that hath no shore,

And the roses dance as they danced before.

XV

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end:

Low to her heart he breathed it, sweet and low;

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

This is a word that all the sea-waves know

And whisper as through the shoreless West they wend,

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:

Love that hath no beginning hath no end.

XVI

"Yet love can die!" she murmured once again;

For this was in that City by the Sea,

That old grey City of Pain,

Built on the shifting shores of Mystery

And mocked by all the immeasurable main.

"Love lives to die!"

Under the deep eternal sky

His deeper voice caught up that deep refrain;

"A year ago, and under yonder sun

Earth had no Heaven to hold our hearts in one!

For me there was no love, afar or nigh:

And, O, if love were thus in time begun,

Love, even our love, in time must surely die."

Then memory murmured, "No";

And he remembered, a million years ago,

He saw the sea-waves wistfully westward wend;

And heard her voice whispering in their flow

And calling through the silent sunset-glow.

_Love that hath no beginning hath no end._

"Love dies to live!" How wild, how deep the joy

That knows no death can e'er destroy

What cannot bear destruction! By these eyes

I know that, ere the fashioning of the skies,

Or ever the sun and moon and stars were made

I loved you. Sweet, I am no more afraid.

"Love lives to die!"

Under the deep eternal sky

Her wild sweet voice caught up that deep refrain:

There, in that silent City by the Sea,

Listening the wild-wave music of Infinity,

There, in that old grey City of mortal pain,

Their voices mingled in mystic unison

With that immortal harmony

Which holds the warring worlds in one.

Their Voice, one Voice, yet manifold,

Possessed the seas, the fields, the sky,

With utterance of the dream that cannot die;

Possessed the West's wild rose and dappled gold,

And that old secret of the setting sun

Which, to the glory of Eternity,

Time, tolling like a distant bell,

Evermore faints to tell,

And, ever telling, never yet has told.

One, and yet manifold

Arose their Voice, oh strangely one again

With murmurs of the immeasurable main;

As, far beyond earth's cloudy bars,

Their Soul surpassed the sunset and the stars,

And all the heights and depths of temporal pain,

Till seas of seraph music round them rolled.

And in that mystic plane

They felt their mortal years

Break away as a dream of pain

Breaks in a stream of tears.

Love, of whom life had birth,

See now, is death not sweet?

Love, is this heaven or earth?

Both are beneath thy feet.

Nay, both within thy heart!

O Love, the glory nears;

The Gates of Pearl are flung apart,

The Rose of Heaven appears.

Across the deeps of change,

Like pangs of visible song,

What angel-spirits, remote and strange,

Thrill through the starry throng?

And oh, what wind that blows

Over the mystic Tree,

What whisper of the sacred Rose,

What murmur of the sapphire Sea,

What dreams that faint and fail

From harps of burning gold,

But tell in heaven the sweet old tale

An earthly sunset told?

Hark! like a holy bell

Over that spirit Sea,

Time, in the world it loves so well,

Tolls for Eternity.

Earth calls us once again,

And, through the mystic Gleam,

The grey old City of mortal pain

Dawns on the heavenly dream.

Sweet as the voice of birds

At dawn, the years return,

With little songs and sacred words

Of human hearts that yearn.

The sweet same waves resound

Along our earthly shore;

But now this earth we lost and found

Is heaven for evermore.

Hark! how the cosmic choir,

In sea and flower and sun,

Recalls that triumph of desire

Which made all music one:

One universal soul,

Completing joy with pain,

And harmonising with the Whole

The temporal refrain,

Until from hill and plain,

From bud and blossom and tree,

From shadow and shining after rain,

From cloud and clovered bee,

From earth and sea and sky,

From laughter and from tears,

One molten golden harmony

Fulfils the yearning years.

_Love, of whom death had birth,

See now, is life not sweet?

Love, is this heaven or earth?

Both are beneath thy feet._

_In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

Love that hath no beginning hath no end;

The sea-waves whisper, low and sweet and low,

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

The May-boughs murmur and the roses know

The message that the dawning moon shall send;

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;

Love that hath no beginning hath no end._

THE FOREST OF WILD THYME

_DEDICATED TO HELEN, ROSIE, AND BEATRIX_

PERSONS OF THE TALE

OURSELVES

FATHER

MOTHER

LITTLE BOY BLUE

THE HIDEOUS HERMIT

THE KING OF FAIRY-LAND

PEASE-BLOSSOM

MUSTARD-SEED

Dragons, Fairies, Mammoths, Angels, etc.

APOLOGIA

One more hour to wander free

With Puck on his unbridled bee

Thro' heather-forests, leagues of bloom,

Our childhood's maze of scent and sun!

Forbear awhile your notes of doom,

Dear Critics, give me still this one

Swift hour to hunt the fairy gleam

That flutters thro' the unfettered dream.

It mocks me as it flies, I know:

All too soon the gleam will go;

Yet I love it and shall love

My dream that brooks no narrower bars

Than bind the darkening heavens above,

My Jack o'Lanthorn of the stars:

Then, I'll follow it no more,

I'll light the lamp: I'll close the door.

PRELUDE

Hush! if you remember how we sailed to old Japan,

Peterkin was with us then, our little brother Peterkin!

Now we've lost him, so they say: I think the tall thin man

Must have come and touched him with his curious twinkling fan

And taken him away again, our merry little Peterkin;

He'll be frightened all alone; we'll find him if we can;

Come and look for Peterkin, poor little Peterkin.

No one would believe us if we told them what we know,

Or they wouldn't grieve for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin!

If they'd only watched us roaming through the streets of Miyako,

And travelling in a palanquin where parents never go,

And seen the golden gardens where we wandered once with Peterkin,

And smelt the purple orchards where the cherry-blossoms blow,

They wouldn't mourn for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin.

Put away your muskets, lay aside the drum,

Hang it by the wooden sword we made for little Peterkin!

He was once our trumpeter, now his bugle's dumb,

Pile your arms beneath it, for the owlet light is come,

We'll wander through the roses where we marched of old with Peterkin,

We'll search the summer sunset where the Hybla beehives hum,

And--if we meet a fairy there--we'll ask for news of Peterkin.

He was once our cabin-boy and cooked the sweets for tea;

And O, we've sailed around the world with laughing little Peterkin;

From nursery floor to pantry door we've roamed the mighty sea,

And come to port below the stairs in distant Caribee,

But wheresoe'er we sailed we took our little lubber Peterkin,

Because his wide grey eyes believed much more than ours could see,

And so we liked our Peterkin, our trusty little Peterkin.

Peterkin, Peterkin, I think if you came back

The captain of our host to-day should be the bugler Peterkin,

And he should lead our smugglers up that steep and narrow track,

A band of noble brigands, bearing each a mighty pack

Crammed with lace and jewels to the secret cave of Peterkin,

And he should wear the biggest boots and make his pistol crack,--

The Spanish cloak, the velvet mask, we'd give them all to Peterkin.

Come, my brother pirates, I am tired of play;

Come and look for Peterkin, little brother Peterkin,

Our merry little comrade that the fairies took away,

For people think we've lost him, and when we come to say

Our good-night prayers to mother, if we pray for little Peterkin

Her eyes are very sorrowful, she turns her head away.

Come and look for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin.

God bless little Peterkin, wherever he may be!

Come and look for Peterkin, lonely little Peterkin:

I wonder if they've taken him again across the sea

From the town of Wonder-Wander and the Amfalula tree

To the land of many marvels where we roamed of old with Peterkin,

The land of blue pagodas and the flowery fields of tea!

Come and look for Peterkin, poor little Peterkin.

PART I

THE SPLENDID SECRET

Now father stood engaged in talk

With mother on that narrow walk

Between the laurels (where we play

At Red-skins lurking for their prey)

And the grey old wall of roses

Where the Persian kitten dozes

And the sunlight sleeps upon

Crannies of the crumbling stone

--So hot it is you scarce can bear

Your naked hand upon it there,

Though there luxuriating in heat

With a slow and gorgeous beat

White-winged currant-moths display

Their spots of black and gold all day.--

Well, since we greatly wished to know

Whether we too might some day go

Where little Peterkin had gone

Without one word and all alone,

We crept up through the laurels there

Hoping that we might overhear

The splendid secret, darkly great,

Of Peterkin's mysterious fate;

And on what high adventure bound

He left our pleasant garden-ground,

Whether for old Japan once more

He voyaged from the dim blue shore,

Or whether he set out to run

By candle-light to Babylon.

We just missed something father said

About a young prince that was dead,

A little warrior that had fought

And failed: how hopes were brought to nought

He said, and mortals made to bow

Before the Juggernaut of Death,

And all the world was darker now,

For Time's grey lips and icy breath

Had blown out all the enchanted lights

That burned in Love's Arabian nights;

And now he could not understand

Mother's mystic fairy-land,

"Land of the dead, poor fairy-tale,"

He murmured, and her face grew pale,

And then with great soft shining eyes

She leant to him--she looked so wise--

And, with her cheek against his cheek,

We heard her, ah so softly, speak.

"Husband, there was a happy day,

Long ago, in love's young May,

When with a wild-flower in your hand

You echoed that dead poet's cry--

'_Little flower, but if I could understand!_'

And you saw it had roots in the depths of the sky,

And there in that smallest bud lay furled

The secret and meaning of all the world."

He shook his head and then he tried

To kiss her, but she only cried

And turned her face away and said,

"You come between me and my dead!

His soul is near me, night and day,

But you would drive it far away;

And you shall never kiss me now

Until you lift that brave old brow

Of faith I know so well; or else

Refute the tale the skylark tells,

Tarnish the glory of that May,

Explain the Smallest Flower away."

And still he said, "Poor fairy-tales,

How terribly their starlight pales

Before the solemn sun of truth

That rises o'er the grave of youth!"

"Is heaven a fairy-tale?" she said,--

And once again he shook his head;

And yet we ne'er could understand

Why heaven should _not_ be fairy-land,

A part of heaven at least, and why

The thought of it made mother cry,

And why they went away so sad,

And father still quite unforgiven,

For what could children be but glad

To find a fairy-land in heaven?

And as we talked it o'er we found

Our brains were really spinning round;

But Dick, our eldest, late returned

From school, by all the lore he'd learned

Declared that we should seek the lost

Smallest Flower at any cost.

For, since within its leaves lay furled

The secret of the whole wide world,

He thought that we might learn therein

The whereabouts of Peterkin;

And, if we found the Flower, we knew

Father would be forgiven, too;

And mother's kiss atone for all

The quarrel by the rose-hung wall;

We knew, not how we knew not why,

But Dick it was who bade us try,

Dick made it all seem plain and clear,

And Dick it is who helps us here

To tell this tale of fairy-land

In words we scarce can understand.

For ere another golden hour

Had passed, our anxious parents found

We'd left the scented garden-ground

To seek--the Smallest Flower.

PART II

THE FIRST DISCOVERY

O, grown-ups cannot understand

And grown-ups never will,

How short's the way to fairy-land

Across the purple hill:

They smile: their smile is very bland,

Their eyes are wise and chill;

And yet--at just a child's command--

The world's an Eden still.

Under the cloudy lilac-tree,

Out at the garden-gate,

We stole, a little band of three,

To tempt our fairy fate.

There was no human eye to see,

No voice to bid us wait;

The gardener had gone home to tea,

The hour was very late.

I wonder if you've ever dreamed,

In summer's noonday sleep,

Of what the thyme and heather seemed

To ladybirds that creep

Like little crimson shimmering gems

Between the tiny twisted stems

Of fairy forests deep;

And what it looks like as they pass

Through jungles of the golden grass.

If you could suddenly become

As small a thing as they,

A midget-child, a new Tom Thumb,

A little gauze-winged fay,

Oh then, as through the mighty shades

Of wild thyme woods and violet glades

You groped your forest-way,

How fraught each fragrant bough would be

With dark o'erhanging mystery.

How high the forest aisles would loom,

What wondrous wings would beat

Through gloamings loaded with perfume

In many a rich retreat,

While trees like purple censers bowed

And swung beneath a swooning cloud

Mysteriously sweet,

Where flowers that haunt no mortal clime

Burden the Forest of Wild Thyme.

We'd watched the bats and beetles flit

Through sunset-coloured air

The night that we discovered it

And all the heavens were bare:

We'd seen the colours melt and pass

Like silent ghosts across the grass

To sleep--our hearts knew where;

And so we rose, and hand in hand

We sought the gates of fairy-land.

For Peterkin, oh Peterkin,

The cry was in our ears,

A fairy clamour, clear and thin

From lands beyond the years;

A wistful note, a dying fall

As of the fairy bugle-call

Some dreamful changeling hears,

And pines within his mortal home

Once more through fairy-land to roam.

We left behind the pleasant row

Of cottage window-panes,

The village inn's red-curtained glow,

The lovers in the lanes;

And stout of heart and strong of will

We climbed the purple perfumed hill,

And hummed the sweet refrains

Of fairy tunes the tall thin man

Taught us of old in Old Japan.

So by the tall wide-barred church-gate

Through which we all could pass

We came to where that curious plate,

That foolish plate of brass,

Said Peterkin was fast asleep

Beneath a cold and ugly heap

Of earth and stones and grass.

It was a splendid place for play,

That churchyard, on a summer's day;

A splendid place for hide-and-seek

Between the grey old stones;

Where even grown-ups used to speak

In awestruck whispering tones;

And here and there the grass ran wild

In jungles for the creeping child,

And there were elfin zones

Of twisted flowers and words in rhyme

And great sweet cushions of wild thyme.

So in a wild thyme snuggery there

We stayed awhile to rest;

A bell was calling folk to prayer:

One star was in the West:

The cottage lights grew far away,

The whole sky seemed to waver and sway

Above our fragrant nest;

And from a distant dreamland moon

Once more we heard that fairy tune:

Why, mother once had sung it us

When, ere we went to bed,

She told the tale of Pyramus,

How Thisbe found him dead

And mourned his eyes as green as leeks,

His cherry nose, his cowslip cheeks.

That tune would oft around us float

Since on a golden noon

We saw the play that Shakespeare wrote

Of Lion, Wall, and Moon;

Ah, hark--the ancient fairy theme--

_Following darkness like a dream!_

The very song Will Shakespeare sang,

The music that through Sherwood rang

And Arden and that forest glade

Where Hermie and Lysander strayed,

And Puck cried out with impish glee,

_Lord, what fools these mortals be!_

Though the masquerade was mute

Of Quince and Snout and Snug and Flute,

And Bottom with his donkey's head

Decked with roses, white and red,

Though the fairies had forsaken

Sherwood now and faintly shaken

The forest-scents from off their feet,

Yet from some divine retreat

Came the music, sweet and clear,

To hang upon the raptured ear

With the free unfettered sway

Of blossoms in the moon of May.

Hark! the luscious fluttering

Of flower-soft words that kiss and cling,

And part again with sweet farewells,

And rhyme and chime like fairy-bells.

"_I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine._"

Out of the undiscovered land

So sweetly rang the song,

We dreamed we wandered, hand in hand,

The fragrant aisles along,

Where long ago had gone to dwell

In some enchanted distant dell

The outlawed fairy throng

When out of Sherwood's wildest glen

They sank, forsaking mortal men.

And as we dreamed, the shadowy ground

Seemed gradually to swell;

And a strange forest rose around,

But how--we could not tell--

Purple against a rose-red sky

The big boughs brooded silently:

Far off we heard a bell;

And, suddenly, a great red light

Smouldered before our startled sight.

Then came a cry, a fiercer flash,

And down between the trees

We saw great crimson figures crash,

Wild-eyed monstrosities;

Great dragon-shapes that breathed a flame

From roaring nostrils as they came:

We sank upon our knees;

And looming o'er us, ten yards high,

Like battle-ships they thundered by.

And then, as down that mighty dell

We followed, faint with fear,

We understood the tolling bell

That called the monsters there;

For right in front we saw a house

Woven of wild mysterious boughs

Bursting out everywhere

In crimson flames, and with a shout

The monsters rushed to put it out.

And, in a flash, the truth was ours;

And there we knew--we knew--

The meaning of those trees like flowers,

Those boughs of rose and blue,

And from the world we'd left above

A voice came crooning like a dove

To prove the dream was true:

And this--we knew it by the rhyme

Must be--the Forest of Wild Thyme.

For out of the mystical rose-red dome

Of heaven the voice came murmuring down:

_Oh, Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home;

Your house is on fire and your children are gone._

We knew, we knew it by the rhyme,

Though _we_ seemed, after all,

No tinier, yet the sweet wild thyme

Towered like a forest tall

All round us; oh, we knew not how.

And yet--we knew those monsters now:

Our dream's divine recall

Had dwarfed us, as with magic words;

The dragons were but ladybirds!

And all around us as we gazed,

Half glad, half frightened, all amazed,

The scented clouds of purple smoke

In lurid gleams of crimson broke;

And o'er our heads the huge black trees

Obscured the sky's red mysteries;

While here and there gigantic wings

Beat o'er us, and great scaly things

Fold over monstrous leathern fold

Out of the smouldering copses rolled;

And eyes like blood-red pits of flame

From many a forest-cavern came

To glare across the blazing glade,

Till, with the sudden thought dismayed,

We wondered if we e'er should find

The mortal home we left behind:

Fear clutched us in a grisly grasp,

We gave one wild and white-lipped gasp,

Then turned and ran, with streaming hair,

Away, away, and anywhere!

And hurry-skurry, heart and heel and hand, we tore along,

And still our flying feet kept time and pattered on for Peterkin,

For Peterkin, oh Peterkin, it made a kind of song

To prove the road was right although it seemed so dark and wrong,

As through the desperate woods we plunged and ploughed for little

Peterkin,

Where many a hidden jungle-beast made noises like a gong

That rolled and roared and rumbled as we rushed along to Peterkin.

Peterkin, Peterkin, if you could only hear

And answer us, one little word from little lonely Peterkin

To take and comfort father, he is sitting in his chair

In the library: he's listening for your footstep on the stair

And your patter down the passage, he can only think of Peterkin:

Come back, come back to father, for to-day he'd let us tear

His newest book to make a paper-boat for little Peterkin.

PART III

THE HIDEOUS HERMIT

Ah, what wonders round us rose

When we dared to pause and look,

Curious things that seemed all toes,

Goblins from a picture-book;

Ants like witches, four feet high,

Waving all their skinny arms,

Glared at us and wandered by,

Muttering their ancestral charms.

Stately forms in green and gold

Armour strutted through the glades,

Just as Hamlet's ghost, we're told,

Mooned among the midnight shades:

Once a sort of devil came

Scattering broken trees about,

Winged with leather, eyed with flame,--

He was but a moth, no doubt.

Here and there, above us clomb

Feathery clumps of palm on high:

Those were ferns, of course, but some

Really seemed to touch the sky;

Yes; and down one fragrant glade,

Listening as we onward stole,

Half delighted, half afraid,

_Dong_, we heard the hare-bells toll!

Something told us what that gleam

Down the glen was brooding o'er;

Something told us in a dream

What the bells were tolling for!

Something told us there was fear,

Horror, peril, on our way!

Was it far or was it near?

_Near_, we heard the night-wind say.

_Toll_, the music reeled and pealed

Through the vast and sombre trees,

Where a rosy light revealed

Dimmer, sweeter mysteries;

And, like petals of the rose,

Fairy fans in beauty beat,

Light in light--ah, what were those

Rhymes we heard the night repeat?

_Toll_, a dream within a dream,

Up an aisle of rose and blue,

Up the music's perfumed stream

Came the words, and then we knew,

Knew that in that distant glen

Once again the case was tried,

Hark!--_Who killed Cock Robin, then?_

And a tiny voice replied,

"_I

killed

Cock

Robin!_"

"_I!_ And who are _You_, sir, pray?"

Growled a voice that froze our marrow:

"Who!" we heard the murderer say,

"Lord, sir, I'm the famous Sparrow,

And this 'ere's my bow and arrow!

_I

killed

Cock

Robin!_"

Then, with one great indrawn breath,

Such a sighin' and a sobbin'

Rose all round us for the death

Of poor, poor Cock Robin,

Oh, we couldn't bear to wait

Even to hear the murderer's fate,

Which we'd often wished to know

Sitting in the fireside glow

And with hot revengeful looks

Searched for in the nursery-books;

For the Robin and the Wren

Are such friends to mortal men,

Such dear friends to mortal men!

_Toll_; and through the woods once more

Stole we, drenched with fragrant dew:

_Toll_; the hare-bell's burden bore

Deeper meanings than we knew:

Still it told us there was fear,

Horror, peril on our way!

Was it far or was it near?

_Near_, we heard the night-wind say!

_Near_; and once or twice we saw

Something like a monstrous eye,

Something like a hideous claw

Steal between us and the sky:

Still we hummed a dauntless tune

Trying to think such things might be

Glimpses of the fairy moon

Hiding in some hairy tree.

Yet around us as we went

Through the glades of rose and blue

Sweetness with the horror blent

Wonder-wild in scent and hue:

Here Aladdin's cavern yawned,

Jewelled thick with gorgeous dyes;

There a head of clover dawned

Like a cloud In eastern skies.

Hills of topaz, lakes of dew,

Fairy cliffs of crystal sheen

Passed we; and the forest's blue

Sea of branches tossed between:

Once we saw a gryphon make

One soft iris as it passed

Like the curving meteor's wake

O'er the forest, far and fast.

Winged with purple, breathing flame,

Crimson-eyed we saw him go,

Where--ah! could it be the same

Cockchafer we used to know?--

Valley-lilies overhead,

High aloof in clustered spray,

Far through heaven their splendour spread,

Glimmering like the Milky Way.

Mammoths father calls "extinct,"

Creatures that the cave-men feared,

Through that forest walked and blinked,

Through that jungle crawled and leered;

Beasts no Nimrod ever knew,

Woolly bears black and red;

Crocodiles, we wondered who

Ever dared to see _them_ fed,

Were they lizards? If they were,

They could swallow _us_ with ease;

But they slumbered quietly there

In among the mighty trees;

Red and silver, blue and green,

Played the moonlight on their scales;

Golden eyes they had, and lean

Crookèd legs with cruel nails.

Yet again, oh, faint and far,

Came the shadow of a cry,

Like the calling of a star

To its brother in the sky;

Like an echo in a cave

Where young mermen sound their shells,

Like the wind across a grave

Bright with scent of lily-bells.

Like a fairy hunter's horn

Sounding in some purple glen

Sweet revelly to the morn

And the fairy quest again:

Then, all round it surged a song

We could never understand

Though it lingered with us long,

And it seemed so sad and grand.

SONG

_Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn,

Summon the day of deliverance in:

We are weary of bearing the burden of scorn

As we yearn for the home that we never shall win;

For here there is weeping and sorrow and sin.

And the poor and the weak are a spoil for the strong!

Ah, when shall the song of the ransomed begin?

The world is grown weary with waiting so long._

_Little Boy Blue, you are gallant and brave,

There was never a doubt in those clear bright eyes.

Come, challenge the grim dark Gates of the Grave

As the skylark sings to those infinite skies!

This world is a dream, say the old and the wise,

And its rainbows arise o'er the false and the true;

But the mists of the morning are made of our sighs,--

Ah, shatter them, scatter them, Little Boy Blue!_

_Little Boy Blue, if the child-heart knows,

Sound but a note as a little one may;

And the thorns of the desert shall bloom with the rose,

And the Healer shall wipe all tears away;

Little Boy Blue, we are all astray,

The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn,

Ah, set the world right, as a little one may;

Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn!_

Yes; and there between the trees

Circled with a misty gleam

Like the light a mourner sees

Round an angel in a dream;

Was it he? oh, brave and slim,

Straight and clad in æry blue,

Lifting to his lips the dim

Golden horn? We never knew!

Never; for a witch's hair

Flooded all the moonlit sky,

And he vanished, then and there,

In the twinkling of an eye:

Just as either boyish cheek

Puffed to set the world aright,

Ere the golden horn could speak

Round him flowed the purple night.

* * * *

At last we came to a round black road

That tunnelled through the woods and showed,

Or so we thought, a good clear way

Back to the upper lands of day;

Great silken cables overhead

In many a mighty mesh were spread

Netting the rounded arch, no doubt

To keep the weight of leafage out.

And, as the tunnel narrowed down,

So thick and close the cords had grown

No leaf could through their meshes stray,

And the faint moonlight died away;

Only a strange grey glimmer shone

To guide our weary footsteps on,

Until, tired out, we stood before

The end, a great grey silken door.

Then from out a weird old wicket, overgrown with shaggy hair

Like a weird and wicked eyebrow round a weird and wicked eye,

Two great eyeballs and a beard

For one ghastly moment peered

At our faces with a sudden stealthy stare:

Then the door was open wide,

And a hideous hermit cried

With a shy and soothing smile from out his lair,

_Won't you walk into my parlour? I can make you cosy there!_

And we couldn't quite remember where we'd heard that phrase before,

As the great grey-bearded ogre stood beside his open door;

But an echo seemed to answer from a land beyond the sky--

_Won't you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly!_

Then we looked a little closer at the ogre as he stood

With his great red eyeballs glowing like two torches in a wood,

And his mighty speckled belly and his dreadful clutching claws

And his nose--a horny parrot's beak, his whiskers and his jaws;

Yet he seemed so sympathetic, and we saw two tears descend,

As he murmured, "I'm so ugly, but I've lost my dearest friend!

I tell you most lymphatic'ly, I've yearnings in my soul,"--

And right along his parrot's beak we saw the tear-drops roll;

_He's an arrant sentimentalist_, we heard a distant sigh,

_Won't you weep upon my bosom? said the spider to the fly._

"If you'd dreamed my dreams of beauty, if you'd seen my works of art,

If you'd felt the cruel hunger that is gnawing at my heart,

And the grief that never leaves me and the love I can't forget,

(For I loved with all the letters in the Chinese alphabet!)

Oh, you'd all come in to comfort me: you ought to help the weak;

And I'm full of melting moments; and--I--know--the--thing--you--seek!"

And the haunting echo answered, _Well, I'm sure you ought to try;

There's a duty to one's neighbour, said the spider to the fly._

So we walked into his parlour

Though a gleam was in his eye;

And it _was_ the prettiest parlour

That ever we did spy!

But we saw by the uncertain

Misty light, shot through with gleams

Of many a silken curtain

Broidered o'er with dreadful dreams,

That he locked the door behind us! So we stood with bated breath

In a silence deep as death.

There were scarlet gleams and crimson

In the curious foggy grey,

Like the blood-red light that swims on

Old canals at fall of day,

Where the smoke of some great city loops and droops in gorgeous veils

Round the heavy purple barges' tawny sails.

Were those creatures gagged and muffled,

See--there--by that severed head?

Was it but a breeze that ruffled

Those dark curtains, splashed with red,

Ruffled the dark figures on them, made them moan like things in pain?

How we wished that we were safe at home again.

* * * *

"Oh, we want to hear of Peterkin; good sir, you say you know;

Won't you tell us, won't you put us in the way we want to go?"

So we pleaded, for he seemed so very full of sighs and tears

That we couldn't doubt his kindness, and we smothered all our fears;

But he said, "You must be crazy if you come to me for help;

Why should I desire to send you to your horrid little whelp?"

And again, the foolish echo made a far-away reply,

_Oh, don't come to me for comfort,

Pray don't look to me for comfort,

Heavens! you mustn't be so selfish, said the spider to the fly._

"Still, when the King of Scotland, so to speak, was in a hole,

He was aided by my brother; it's a story to console

The convict of the treadmill and the infant with a sum,

For it teaches you to try again until your kingdom's come!

The monarch dawdled in that hole for centuries of time

Until my own twin-brother rose and showed him how to climb:

He showed him how to swing and sway upon a tiny thread

Across a mighty precipice, and light upon his head

Without a single fracture and without a single pain

If he only did it frequently and tried and tried again:"

And once again the whisper like a moral wandered by,

_Perseverance is a virtue, said the spider to the fly._

Then he moaned, "My heart is hungry; but I fear I cannot eat,

(Of course I speak entirely now of spiritual meat!)

For I only fed an hour ago, but if we calmly sat

While I told you all my troubles in a confidential chat

It would give me _such_ an appetite to hear you sympathise,

And I should sleep the better--see, the tears are in my eyes!

Dead yearnings are such dreadful things, let's keep 'em all alive,--

Let's sit and talk awhile, my dears; we'll dine, I think, at five."

And he brought his chair beside us in his most engaging style,

And began to tell his story with a melancholy smile.--

"You remember Miss Muffet

Who sat on a tuffet

Partaking of curds and whey;

Well, _I_ am the spider

Who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away!

"There was nothing against her!

An elderly spinster

Were such a grammatical mate

For a spider and spinner,

I swore I would win her,

I knew I had met with my fate!

"That love was the purest

And strongest and surest

I'd felt since my first thread was spun;

I know I'm a bogey,

But _she's_ an old fogey,

So why in the world did she run?

"When Bruce was in trouble,

A spider, my double,

Encouraged him greatly, they say!

Now, _why_ should the spider

Who sat down beside her

Have frightened Miss Muffet away?"

He seemed to have much more to tell,

But we could scarce be listening well,

Although we tried with all our might

To look attentive and polite;

For still afar we heard the thin

Clear fairy-call to Peterkin;

Clear as a skylark's mounting song

It drew our wandering thoughts along.

Afar, it seemed, yet, ah, so nigh,

Deep in our dreams it scaled the sky,

In captive dreams that brooked no bars

It touched the love that moves the stars,

And with sweet music's golden tether

It bound our hearts and heaven together.

SONG

_Wake, arise, the lake, the skies

Fade into the faery day;

Come and sing before our king,

Heed not Time, the dotard grey;

Time has given his crown to heaven--

Ah, how long? Awake, away!_

Then, as the Hermit rambled on

In one long listless monotone,

We heard a wild and mournful groan

Come rumbling down the tunnelled way;

A voice, an awful mournful bray,

Singing some old funereal lay;

Then solemn footsteps, muffled, dull,

Approached as if they trod on wool,

And as they nearer, nearer drew,

We saw our Host was listening too!

His bulging eyes began to glow

Like great red match-heads rubbed at night,

And then he stole with a grim "O-ho!"

To that grey old wicket where, out of sight,

Blandly rubbing his hands and humming,

He could see, at one glance, whatever was coming.

He had never been so jubilant or frolicsome before,

As he scurried on his cruel hairy crutches to the door;

And flung it open wide

And most hospitably cried,

"Won't you walk into my parlour? I've some little friends to tea,--

They'll be highly entertaining to a man of sympathy,

Such as you yourself must be!"

Then the man, for so he seemed,

(Doubtless one who'd lost his way

And was dwarfed as we had been!)

In his ancient suit of black,

Black upon the verge of green,

Entered like a ghost that dreamed

Sadly of some bygone day;

And he never ceased to sing

In that awful mournful bray.

The door closed behind his back;

He walked round us in a ring,

And we hoped that he might free us,

But his tears appeared to blind him,

For he didn't seem to see us,

And the Hermit crept behind him

Like a cat about to spring.

And the song he sang was this;

And his nose looked very grand

As he sang it, with a bliss

Which we could not understand;

For his voice was very sad,

While his nose was proud and glad.

_Rain, April, rain, thy sunny, sunny tears!

Through the black boughs the robe of Spring appears,

Yet, for the ghosts of all the bygone years,

Rain, April, rain._

_Rain, April, rain; the rose will soon be glad;

Spring will rejoice, a Spring I, too, have had;

A little while, till I no more be sad,

Rain, April, rain._

And then the spider sprang

Before we could breathe or speak,

And one great scream out-rang

As the terrible horny beak

Crunched into the Sad Man's head,

And the terrible hairy claws

Clutched him around his middle;

And he opened his lantern-jaws,

And he gave one twist, one twiddle,

One kick, and his sorrow was dead.

And there, as he sucked his bleeding prey,

The spider leered at us--"You will do,

My sweet little dears, for another day;

But this is the sort I like; huh! huh!"

And there we stood, in frozen fear,

Whiter than death,

With bated breath;

And lo! as we thought of Peterkin,

Father and home and Peterkin,

Once more that music clear and thin,

Clear as a skylark's mounting song,

But nearer now, more sweet, more strong,

Drew all our wandering thoughts along,

Until it seemed, a mystic sea

Of hidden delight and harmony

Began to ripple and rise all round

The prison where our hearts lay bound;

And from sweet heaven's most rosy rim

There swelled a distant marching hymn

Which made the hideous Hermit pause

And listen with lank down-dropt jaws,

Till, with great bulging eyes of fear,

He sought the wicket again to peer

Along the tunnel, as like sweet rain

We heard the still approaching strain,

And, under it, the rhythmic beat

Of multitudinous marching feet.

Nearer, nearer, they rippled and rang,

And this was the marching song they sang:--

SONG

_A fairy band are we

In fairy-land:

Singing march we, hand in hand;

Singing, singing all day long:

(Some folk never heard a fairy-song!)_

_Singing, singing,

When the merry thrush is swinging

On a springing spray;

Or when the witch that lives in gloomy caves

And creeps by night among the graves

Calls a cloud across the day;

Cease we never our fairy song,

March we ever, along, along,

Down the dale, or up the hill,

Singing, singing still._

And suddenly the Hermit turned and ran with all his might

Through the back-door of his parlour as we thought of little Peterkin;

And the great grey roof was shattered by a shower of rosy light,

And the spider-house went floating, torn and tattered through the night

In a flight of prismy streamers, as a shout went up for Peterkin;

And lo, the glistening fairy-host stood there arrayed for fight,

In arms of rose and green and gold, to lead us on to Peterkin.

And all around us, rippling like a pearl and opal sea,

The host of fairy faces winked a kindly hint of Peterkin;

And all around the rosy glade a laugh of fairy glee

Watched spider-streamers floating up from fragrant tree to tree

Till the moonlight caught the gossamers and, oh we wished for Peterkin!

Each rope became a rainbow; but it made us ache to see

Such a fairy forest-pomp without explaining it to Peterkin.

Then all the glittering crowd

With a courtly gesture bowed

Like a rosy jewelled cloud

Round a flame,

As the King of Fairy-land,

Very dignified and grand,

Stepped forward to demand

Whence we came.

He'd a cloak of gold and green

Such as caterpillars spin,

For the fairy ways, I ween,

Are very frugal;

He'd a bow that he had borne

Since the crimson Eden morn,

And a honeysuckle horn

For his bugle.

So we told our tale of faëry to the King of Fairy-land,

And asked if he could let us know the latest news of Peterkin;

And he turned him with a courtly smile and waved his jewelled wand

And cried, _Pease-blossom, Mustard-seed! You know the old command;

Well; these are little children; you must lead them on to Peterkin._

Then he knelt, the King of Faëry knelt; his eyes were great and grand

As he took our hands and kissed them, saying, _Father loves your

Peterkin!_

So out they sprang, on either side,

A light fantastic fairy guide,

To lead us to the land unknown

Where little Peterkin was gone;

And, as we went with timid pace,

We saw that every fairy face

In all that moonlit host was wet

With tears: we never shall forget

The mystic hush that seemed to fade

Away like sound, as down the glade

We passed beyond their zone of light.

Then through the forest's purple night

We trotted, at a pleasant speed,

With gay Pease-blossom and Mustard-seed.

PART IV

PEASE-BLOSSOM AND MUSTARD-SEED

Shyly we surveyed our guides

As through the gloomy woods we went

In the light that the straggling moonbeams lent:

We envied them their easy strides!

Pease-blossom in his crimson cap

And delicate suit of rose-leaf green,

His crimson sash and his jewelled dagger,

Strutted along with an elegant swagger

Which showed that he didn't care one rap

For anything less than a Fairy Queen:

His eyes were deep like the eyes of a poet,

Although his crisp and curly hair

Certainly didn't seem to show it!

While Mustard-seed was a devil-may-care

Epigrammatic and pungent fellow

Clad in a splendid suit of yellow,

With emerald stars on his glittering breast

And eyes that shone with a diamond light:

They made you feel sure it would always be best

To tell him the truth: he was not perhaps _quite_

So polite as Pease-blossom, but then who could be

_Quite_ such a debonair fairy as he?

We never could tell you one-half that we heard

And saw on that journey. For instance, a bird

Ten times as big as an elephant stood

By the side of a nest like a great thick wood:

The clouds in glimmering wreaths were spread

Behind its vast and shadowy head

Which rolled at us trembling below. (Its eyes

Were like great black moons in those pearl-pale skies.)

And we feared he might take us, perhaps, for a worm.

But he ruffled his breast with the sound of a storm,

And snuggled his head with a careless disdain

Under his huge hunched wing again;

And Mustard-seed said, as we stole thro' the dark,

There was nothing to fear: it was only a Lark!

And so he cheered the way along

With many a neat little epigram,

While dear Pease-blossom before him swam

On a billow of lovely moonlit song,

Telling us why they had left their home

In Sherwood, and had hither come

To dwell in this magical scented clime,

This dim old Forest of sweet Wild Thyme,

"Men toil," he said, "from morn till night

With bleeding hands and blinded sight

For gold, more gold! They have betrayed

The trust that in their souls was laid;

Their fairy birthright they have sold

For little disks of mortal gold;

And now they cannot even see

The gold upon the greenwood tree,

The wealth of coloured lights that pass

In soft gradations through the grass,

The riches of the love untold

That wakes the day from grey to gold;

And howsoe'er the moonlight weaves

Magic webs among the leaves

Englishmen care little now

For elves beneath the hawthorn bough:

Nor if Robin should return

Dare they of an outlaw learn;

For them the Smallest Flower is furled,

Mute is the music of the world;

And unbelief has driven away

Beauty from the blossomed spray."

Then Mustard-seed with diamond eyes

Taught us to be laughter-wise,

And he showed us how that Time

Is much less powerful than a rhyme;

And that Space is but a dream;

"For look," he said, with eyes agleam,

"Now you are become so small

You think the Thyme a forest tall;

But underneath your feet you see

A world of wilder mystery

Where, if you were smaller yet,

You would just as soon forget

This forest, which you'd leave above

As you have left the home you love!

For, since the Thyme you used to know

Seems a forest here below,

What if you should sink again

And find there stretched a mighty plain

Between each grass-blade and the next?

You'd think till you were quite perplexed!

Especially if all the flowers

That lit the sweet Thyme-forest bowers

Were in that wild transcendent change

Turned to Temples, great and strange,

With many a pillared portal high

And domes that swelled against the sky!

How foolish, then, you will agree,

Are those who think that all must see

The world alike, or those who scorn

Another who, perchance, was born

Where--in a different dream from theirs--

What they call sins to him are prayers!

"We cannot judge; we cannot know;

All things mingle; all things flow;

There's only one thing constant here--

Love--that untranscended sphere:

Love, that while all ages run

Holds the wheeling worlds in one;

Love that, as your sages tell,

Soars to heaven and sinks to hell."

Even as he spoke, we seemed to grow

Smaller, the Thyme trees seemed to go

Farther away from us: new dreams

Flashed out on us with mystic gleams

Of mighty Temple-domes: deep awe

Held us all breathless as we saw

A carven portal glimmering out

Between new flowers that put to rout

Our other fancies: in sweet fear

We tiptoed past, and seemed to hear

A sound of singing from within

That told our souls of Peterkin:

Our thoughts of _him_ were still the same

Howe'er the shadows went and came,

So, on we wandered, hand in hand,

And all the world was fairy-land.

* * * *

And as we went we seemed to hear

Surging up from distant dells

A solemn music, soft and clear

As if a field of lily-bells

Were tolling all together, sweet

But sad and low and keeping time

To multitudinous marching feet

With a slow funereal beat

And a deep harmonious chime

That told us by its dark refrain

The reason fairies suffered pain.

SONG

Bear her along

Keep ye your song

Tender and sweet and low:

Fairies must die!

Ask ye not why

Ye that have hurt her so.

_Passing away--flower from the spray! Colour and light from the leaf!

Soon, soon will the year shed its bloom on her bier, and the dust

of its dreams on our grief._

Men upon earth

Bring us to birth

Gently at even and morn!

When as brother and brother

They greet one another

And smile--then a fairy is born!

But at each cruel word

Upon earth that is heard,

Each deed of unkindness or hate,

Some fairy must pass

From the games in the grass

And steal thro' the terrible Gate.

_Passing away--flower from the spray! Colour and light from the leaf!

Soon, soon will the year shed its bloom on her bier, and the

dust of its dreams on our grief._

If ye knew, if ye knew

All the wrong that ye do

By the thought that ye harbour alone,

How the face of some fairy

Grows wistful and weary

And the heart in her cold as a stone!

Ah, she was born

Blithe as the morn

Under an April sky,

Born of the greeting

Of two lovers meeting.

They parted, and so she must die.

_Passing away--flower from the spray! Colour and light from the leaf!

Soon, soon will the year shed its bloom on her bier, and the dust of

its dreams on our grief._

Cradled in blisses,

Yea, born of your kisses,

Oh, ye lovers that met by the moon,

She would not have cried

In the darkness and died

If ye had not forgotten so soon.

Cruel mortals, they say,

Live for ever and aye,

And they pray in the dark on their knees.

But the flowers that are fled

And the loves that are dead,

What heaven takes pity on these?

_Bear her along--singing your song--tender and sweet and low!

Fairies must die! Ask ye not why--ye that have hurt her so._

Passing away--

Flower from the spray!

Colour and light from the leaf!

Soon, soon will the year

Shed its bloom on her bier

And the dust of its dreams on our grief.

* * * *

Then we came through a glittering crystal grot

By a path like, a pale moonbeam,

And a broad blue bridge of Forget-me-not

Over a shimmering stream,

To where, through the deep blue dusk, a gleam

Rose like the soul of the setting sun;

A sunset breaking through the earth,

A crimson sea of the poppies of dream,

Deep as the sleep that gave them birth

In the night where all earthly dreams are done.

And then, like a pearl-pale porch of the moon,

Faint and sweet as a starlit shrine,

Over the gloom

Of the crimson bloom

We saw the Gates of Ivory shine;

And, lulled and lured by the lullaby tune

Of the cradling airs that drowsily creep

From blossom to blossom, and lazily croon

Through the heart of the midnight's mystic noon,

We came to the Gates of the City of Sleep.

Faint and sweet as a lily's repose

On the broad black breast of a midnight lake,

The City delighted the cradling night:

Like a straggling palace of cloud it rose;

The towers were crowned with a crystal light

Like the starry crown of a white snowflake

As they pierced in a wild white pinnacled crowd,

Through the dusky wreaths of enchanted cloud

That swirled all round like a witch's hair.

And we heard, as the sound of a great sea sighing,

The sigh of the sleepless world of care;

And we saw strange shadowy figures flying

Up to the Ivory Gates and beating

With pale hands, long and famished and thin;

Like blinded birds we saw them dash

Against the cruelly gleaming wall:

We heard them wearily moan and call

With sharp starved lips for ever entreating

The pale doorkeeper to let them in.

And still, as they beat, again and again,

We saw on the moon-pale lintels a splash

Of crimson blood like a poppy-stain

Or a wild red rose from the gardens of pain

That sigh all night like a ghostly sea

From the City of Sleep to Gethsemane.

And lo, as we neared the mighty crowd

An old blind man came, crying aloud

To greet us, as once the blind man cried

In the Bible picture--you know we tried

To paint that print, with its Eastern sun;

But the reds and the yellows _would_ mix and run,

And the blue of the sky made a horrible mess

Right over the edge of the Lord's white dress.

And the old blind man, just as though he had eyes,

Came straight to meet us; and all the cries

Of the crowd were hushed; and a strange sweet calm

Stole through the air like a breath of the balm

That was wafted abroad from the Forest of Thyme

(For it rolled all round that curious clime

With its magical clouds of perfumed trees.)

And the blind man cried, "Our help is at hand,

Oh, brothers, remember the old command,

Remember the frankincense and myrrh,

Make way, make way for those little ones there;

Make way, make way, I have seen them afar

Under a great white Eastern star;

For I am the mad blind man who sees!"

Then he whispered, softly--_Of such as these_;

And through the hush of the cloven crowd

We passed to the gates of the City, and there

Our fairy heralds cried aloud--

_Open your Gates; don't stand and stare;

These are the Children for whom our King

Made all the star-worlds dance in a ring!_

And lo, like a sorrow that melts from the heart

In tears, the slow gates melted apart;

And into the City we passed like a dream;

And then, in one splendid marching stream

The whole of that host came following through.

We were only children, just like you;

Children, ah, but we felt so grand

As we led them--although we could understand

Nothing at all of the wonderful song

That rose all round as we marched along.

SONG

_You that have seen how the world and its glory

Change and grow old like the love of a friend;

You that have come to the end of the story,

You that were tired ere you came to the end;

You that are weary of laughter and sorrow,

Pain and pleasure, labour and sin,

Sick of the midnight and dreading the morrow,

Ah, come in; come in._

_You that are bearing the load of the ages;

You that have loved overmuch and too late;

You that confute all the saws of the sages;

You that served only because you must wait,

Knowing your work was a wasted endeavour;

You that have lost and yet triumphed therein,

Add loss to your losses and triumph for ever;

Ah, come in; come in._

And we knew as we went up that twisted street,

With its violet shadows and pearl-pale walls,

We were coming to Something strange and sweet,

For the dim air echoed with elfin calls;

And, far away, in the heart of the City,

A murmur of laughter and revelry rose,--

A sound that was faint as the smile of Pity,

And sweet as a swan-song's golden close.

And then, once more, as we marched along,

There surged all round us that wonderful song;

And it swung to the tramp of our marching feet

But ah, it was tenderer now and so sweet

That it made our eyes grow wet and blind,

And the whole wide-world seem mother-kind,

Folding us round with a gentle embrace,

And pressing our souls to her soft sweet face.

SONG

_Dreams; dreams; ah, the memory blinding us,

Blinding our eyes to the way that we go;

Till the new sorrow come, once more reminding us

Blindly of kind hearts, ours long ago:

Mother-mine, whisper we, yours was the love for me!

Still, though our paths lie lone and apart,

Yours is the true love, shining above for me,

Yours are the kind eyes, hurting my heart._

_Dreams; dreams; ah, how shall we sing of them,

Dreams that we loved with our head on her breast:

Dreams; dreams; and the cradle-sweet swing of them;

Ay, for her voice was the sound we loved best:

Can we remember at all or, forgetting it,

Can we recall for a moment the gleam

Of our childhood's delight and the wonder begetting it,

Wonder awakened in dreams of a dream?_

And once again, from the heart of the City

A murmur of tenderer laughter rose,

A sound that was faint as the smile of Pity,

And sweet as a swan-song's golden close;

And it seemed as if some wonderful Fair

Were charming the night of the City of Dreams,

For, over the mystical din out there,

The clouds were litten with flickering gleams,

And a roseate light like the day's first flush

Quivered and beat on the towers above,

And we heard through the curious crooning hush

An elfin song that we used to love.

_Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn ..._

And the soft wind blew it the other way;

So all that we heard was--_Cow's in the corn_;

But we never heard anything half so gay!

And ever we seemed to be drawing nearer

That mystical roseate smoke-wreathed glare,

And the curious music grew louder and clearer,

Till mustard-seed said, "We are lucky, you see,

We've arrived at a time of festivity!"

And so to the end of the street we came,

And turned a corner, and--there we were,

In a place that glowed like the dawn of day,

A crowded clamouring City square

Like the cloudy heart of an opal, aflame

With the lights of a great Dream-Fair:

Thousands of children were gathered there,

Thousands of old men, weary and grey,

And the shouts of the showmen filled the air--

This way! This way! This way!

And _See-Saw_; _Margery Daw_; we heard a rollicking shout,

As the swing-boats hurtled over our heads to the tune of the roundabout;

And _Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn_, we heard the showmen cry,

And _Dickory Dock, I'm as good as a clock_, we heard the swings reply.

This way, this way to your Heart's Desire;

Come, cast your burdens down;

And the pauper shall mount his throne in the skies,

And the king be rid of his crown:

And souls that were dead shall be fed with fire

From the fount of their ancient pain,

And your lost love come with the light in her eyes

Back to your heart again.

Ah, here be sure she shall never prove

Less kind than her eyes were bright;

This way, this way to your old lost love,

You shall kiss her lips to-night;

This way for the smile of a dead man's face

And the grip of a brother's hand,

This way to your childhood's heart of grace

And your home in Fairy-land.

_Dickory Dock, I'm as good as a clock_, d'you hear my swivels chime?

To and fro as I come and go, I keep eternal time.

O, little Bo-peep, if you've lost your sheep and don't know where

to find 'em,

Leave 'em alone and they'll come home, and carry their tails behind 'em.

And _See-Saw; Margery Daw_; there came the chorussing shout,

As the swing-boats answered the roaring tune of the rollicking

roundabout;

Dickory, dickory, dickory, dock, d'you hear my swivels chime?

Swing; swing; you're as good as a king if you keep eternal time.

Then we saw that the tunes of the world were one;

And the metre that guided the rhythmic sun

Was at one, like the ebb and the flow of the sea,

With the tunes that we learned at our mother's knee;

The beat of the horse-hoofs that carried us down

To see the fine Lady of Banbury Town;

And so, by the rhymes that we knew, we could tell

Without knowing the others--that all was well.

And then, our brains began to spin;

For it seemed as if that mighty din

Were no less than the cries of the poets and sages

Of all the nations in all the ages;

And, if they could only beat out the whole

Of their music together, the guerdon and goal

Of the world would be reached with one mighty shout,

And the dark dread secret of Time be out;

And nearer, nearer they seemed to climb,

And madder and merrier rose the song,

And the swings and the see-saws marked the time;

For this was the maddest and merriest throng

That ever was met on a holy-day

To dance the dust of the world away;

And madder and merrier, round and round

The whirligigs whirled to the whirling sound,

Till it seemed that the mad song burst its bars

And mixed with the song of the whirling stars,

The song that the rhythmic Time-Tides tell

To seraphs in Heaven and devils in Hell;

Ay; Heaven and Hell in accordant chime

With the universal rhythm and rhyme

Were nearing the secret of Space and Time;

The song of that ultimate mystery

Which only the mad blind men who see,

Led by the laugh of a little child,

Can utter; ay, wilder and yet more wild

It maddened, till now--full song--it was out!

It roared from the starry roundabout--

_A child was born in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem,

A child was born in Bethlehem; ah, hear my fairy fable;

For I have seen the King of Kings, no longer thronged with angel wings,

But crooning like a little babe, and cradled in a stable._

_The wise men came to greet him with their gifts of myrrh

and frankincense,--

Gold and myrrh and frankincense they brought to make him mirth;

And would you know the way to win to little brother Peterkin,

My childhood's heart shall guide you through the glories of

the earth._

_A child was born in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem;

The wise men came to welcome him: a star stood o'er the gable;

And there they saw the King of Kings, no longer thronged with

angel wings,

But crooning like a little babe, and cradled in a stable._

And creeping through the music once again the fairy cry

Came freezing o'er the snowy towers to lead us on to Peterkin:

Once more the fairy bugles blew from lands beyond the sky,

And we all groped out together, dazed and blind, we knew not why;

Out through the City's farther gates we went to look for Peterkin;

Out, out into the dark Unknown, and heard the clamour die

Far, far away behind us as we trotted on to Peterkin.

Then once more along the rare

Forest-paths we groped our way:

Here the glow-worm's league-long glare

Turned the Wild Thyme night to day:

There we passed a sort of whale

Sixty feet in length or more,

But we knew it was a snail

Even when we heard it snore.

Often through the glamorous gloom

Almost on the top of us

We beheld a beetle loom

Like a hippopotamus;

Once or twice a spotted toad

Like a mountain wobbled by

With a rolling moon that glowed

Through the skin-fringe of its eye.

Once a caterpillar bowed

Down a leaf of Ygdrasil

Like a sunset-coloured cloud

Sleeping on a quiet hill:

Once we came upon a moth

Fast asleep with outspread wings,

Like a mighty tissued cloth

Woven for the feet of kings.

There above the woods in state

Many a temple dome that glows

Delicately like a great

Rainbow-coloured bubble rose:

Though they were but flowers on earth,

Oh, we dared not enter in;

For in that divine re-birth

Less than awe were more than sin.

Yet their mystic anthems came

Sweetly to our listening ears;

And their burden was the same--

"No more sorrow, no more tears!

Whither Peterkin has gone

You, assuredly, shall go:

When your wanderings are done,

All he knows you, too, shall know!"

So we thought we'd onward roam

Till earth's Smallest Flower appeared,

With a less tremendous dome

Less divinely to be feared:

Then, perchance, if we should dare

Timidly to enter in,

Might some kindly doorkeeper

Give us news of Peterkin.

At last we saw a crimson porch

Far away, like a dull red torch

Burning in the purple gloom;

And a great ocean of perfume

Rolled round us as we drew anear,

And then we strangely seemed to hear

The shadow of a mighty psalm,

A sound as if a golden sea

Of music swung in utter calm

Against the shores of Eternity;

And then we saw the mighty dome

Of some mysterious Temple tower

On high; and knew that we had come,

At last, to that sweet House of Grace

Which wise men find in every place--

The Temple of the Smallest Flower.

And there--alas--our fairy friends

Whispered, "Here our kingdom ends:

You must enter in alone,

But your souls will surely show

Whither Peterkin is gone

And the road that you must go:

We, poor fairies, have no souls!

Hark, the warning hare-bell tolls;"

So "Good-bye, good-bye," they said,

"Dear little seekers-for-the-dead."

They vanished; ah, but as they went

We heard their voices softly blent

In some mysterious fairy song

That seemed to make us wise and strong;

For it was like the holy calm

That fills the bosomed rose with balm,

Or blessings that the twilight breathes

Where the honeysuckle wreathes

Between young lovers and the sky

As on banks of flowers they lie;

And with wings of rose and green

Laughing fairies pass unseen,

Singing their sweet lullaby,--

Lulla-lulla-lullaby!

Lulla-lulla-lullaby!

Ah, good-night, with lullaby!

* * * *

Only a flower? Those carven walls,

Those cornices and coronals,

The splendid crimson porch, the thin

Strange sounds of singing from within--

Through the scented arch we stept,

Pushed back the soft petallic door,

And down the velvet aisles we crept;

Was it a Flower--no more?

For one of the voices that we heard,

A child's voice, clear as the voice of a bird,

Was it not?--nay, it could not be!

And a woman's voice that tenderly

Answered him in fond refrain,

And pierced our hearts with sweet sweet pain,

As if dear Mary-mother hung

Above some little child, and sung.

Between the waves of that golden sea

The cradle-songs of Eternity;

And, while in her deep smile he basked,

Answered whatsoe'er he asked.

_What is there hid in the heart of a rose,

Mother-mine?

Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows?

A man that died on a lonely hill

May tell you, perhaps, but none other will,

Little child._

_What does it take to make a rose,

Mother-mine?

The God that died to make it knows

It takes the world's eternal wars,

It takes the moon and all the stars,

It takes the might of heaven and hell

And the everlasting Love as well,

Little child._

But there, in one great shrine apart

Within the Temple's holiest heart,

We came upon a blinding light,

Suddenly, and a burning throne

Of pinnacled glory, wild and white;

We could not see Who reigned thereon;

For, all at once, as a wood-bird sings,

The aisles were full of great white wings

Row above mystic burning row;

And through the splendour and the glow

We saw four angels, great and sweet,

With outspread wings and folded feet,

Come gliding down from a heaven within

The golden heart of Paradise;

And in their hands, with laughing eyes,

Lay little brother Peterkin.

And all around the Temple of the Smallest of the Flowers

The glory of the angels made a star for little Peterkin;

For all the Kings of Splendour and all the Heavenly Powers

Were gathered there together in the fairy forest bowers

With all their globed and radiant wings to make a star for Peterkin,

The star that shone upon the East, a star that still is ours,

Whene'er we hang our stockings up, a star of wings for Peterkin.

Then all, in one great flash, was gone--

A voice cried, "Hush, all's well!"

And we stood dreaming there alone,

In darkness. Who can tell

The mystic quiet that we felt,

As if the woods in worship knelt;

Far off we heard a bell

Tolling strange human folk to prayer

Through fields of sunset-coloured air.

And then a voice, "Why, here they are!"

And--as it seemed--we woke;

The sweet old skies, great star by star

Upon our vision broke;

Field over field of heavenly blue

Rose o'er us; then a voice we knew

Softly and gently spoke--

"See, they are sleeping by the side

Of that dear little one--who died."

PART V

THE HAPPY ENDING

We told dear father all our tale

That night before we went to bed,

And at the end his face grew pale,

And he bent over us and said

(Was it not strange?) he, too, was there,

A weary, weary watch to keep

Before the gates of the City of Sleep;

But, ere we came, he did not dare

Even to dream of entering in,

Or even to hope for Peterkin.

He was the poor blind man, he said,

And we--how low he bent his head!

Then he called mother near; and low

He whispered to us--"Prompt me now;

For I forget that song we heard,

But you remember every word."

Then memory came like a breaking morn,

And we breathed it to him--_A child was born!_

And there he drew us to his breast

And softly murmured all the rest.--

_The wise men came to greet him with their gifts of myrrh

and frankincense,--

Gold and myrrh and frankincense they brought to make him mirth;

And would you know the way to win to little brother Peterkin,

My childhood's heart shall guide you through the glories of

the earth._

Then he looked up and mother knelt

Beside us, oh, her eyes were bright;

Her arms were like a lovely belt

All round us as we said Good-night

To father: _he_ was crying now,

But they were happy tears, somehow;

For there we saw dear mother lay

Her cheek against his cheek and say--

Hush, let me kiss those tears away.

_DEDICATION_

_What can a wanderer bring

To little ones loved like you?

You have songs of your own to sing

That are far more steadfast and true,

Crumbs of pity for birds

That flit o'er your sun-swept lawn,

Songs that are dearer than all our words

With a love that is clear as the dawn._

_What should a dreamer devise,

In the depths of his wayward will,

To deepen the gleam of your eyes

Who can dance with the Sun-child still?

Yet you glanced on his lonely way,

You cheered him in dream and deed,

And his heart is o'erflowing, o'erflowing to-day

With a love that--you never will need._

_What can a pilgrim teach

To dwellers in fairy-land?

Truth that excels all speech

You murmur and understand!

All he can sing you he brings;

But--one thing more if he may,

One thing more that the King of Kings

Will take from the child on the way._

_Yet how can a child of the night

Brighten the light of the sun?

How can he add a delight

To the dances that never are done?

Ah, what if he struggles to turn

Once more to the sweet old skies

With praise and praise, from the fetters that burn,

To the God that brightened your eyes?_

_Yes; he is weak, he will fail,

Yet, what if, in sorrows apart,

One thing, one should avail,

The cry of a grateful heart;

It has wings: they return through the night

To a sky where the light lives yet,

To the clouds that kneel on his mountain-height

And the path that his feet forget._

_What if he struggles and still

Fails and struggles again?

What if his broken will

Whispers the struggle is vain?

Once at least he has risen

Because he remembered your eyes;

Once they have brought to his earthly prison

The passion of Paradise._

_Kind little eyes that I love,

Eyes forgetful of mine,

In a dream I am bending above

Your sleep, and you open and shine;

And I know as my own grow blind

With a lonely prayer for your sake,

He will hear--even me--little eyes that were kind,

God bless you, asleep or awake._

FORTY SINGING SEAMEN AND OTHER POEMS

_TO GARNETT_

FORTY SINGING SEAMEN

"In our lands be Beeres and Lyons of dyvers colours as ye redd, grene,

black, and white. And in our land be also unicornes and these Unicornes

slee many Lyons.... Also there dare no man make a lye in our lande, for

if he dyde he sholde incontynent be sleyn."--_Mediæval Epistle, of Pope

Prester John._

I

Across the seas of Wonderland to Mogadore we plodded,

Forty singing seamen in an old black barque,

And we landed in the twilight where a Polyphemus nodded

With his battered moon-eye winking red and yellow through the dark!

For his eye was growing mellow,

Rich and ripe and red and yellow,

As was time, since old Ulysses made him bellow in the dark!

_Cho._--Since Ulysses bunged his eye up with a pine-torch in the dark!

II

_Were_ they mountains in the gloaming or the giant's ugly shoulders

Just beneath the rolling eyeball, with its bleared and vinous glow,

Red and yellow o'er the purple of the pines among the boulders

And the shaggy horror brooding on the sullen slopes below,

_Were_ they pines among the boulders

Or the hair upon his shoulders?

We were only simple seamen, so of course we didn't know.

_Cho._--We were simple singing seamen, so of course we couldn't know.

III

But we crossed a plain of poppies, and we came upon a fountain

Not of water, but of jewels, like a spray of leaping fire;

And behind it, in an emerald glade, beneath a golden mountain

There stood a crystal palace, for a sailor to admire;

For a troop of ghosts came round us,

Which with leaves of bay they crowned us,

Then with grog they well nigh drowned us, to the depth of our desire!

_Cho._--And 'twas very friendly of them, as a sailor can admire!

IV

There was music all about us, we were growing quite forgetful

We were only singing seamen from the dirt of London-town,

Though the nectar that we swallowed seemed to vanish half regretful

As if we wasn't good enough to take such vittles down,

When we saw a sudden figure,

Tall and black as any nigger,

Like the devil--only bigger--drawing near us with a frown!

_Cho._--Like the devil--but much bigger--and he wore a golden crown!

V

And "What's all this?" he growls at us! With dignity we chaunted,

"Forty singing seamen, sir, as won't be put upon!"

"What? Englishmen?" he cries, "Well, if ye don't mind being haunted,

Faith you're welcome to my palace; I'm the famous Prester John!

Will ye walk into my palace?

I don't bear 'ee any malice!

One and all ye shall be welcome in the halls of Prester John!"

_Cho._--So we walked into the palace and the halls of Prester John!

VI

Now the door was one great diamond and the hall a hollow ruby--

Big as Beachy Head, my lads, nay bigger by a half!

And I sees the mate wi' mouth agape, a-staring like a booby,

And the skipper close behind him, with his tongue out like a calf!

Now the way to take it rightly

Was to walk along politely

Just as if you didn't notice--so I couldn't help but laugh!

_Cho._--For they both forgot their manners and the crew was bound

to laugh!

VII

But he took us through his palace and, my lads, as I'm a sinner,

We walked into an opal like a sunset-coloured cloud--

"My dining-room," he says, and, quick as light we saw a dinner

Spread before us by the fingers of a hidden fairy crowd;

And the skipper, swaying gently

After dinner, murmurs faintly,

"I looks to-wards you, Prester John, you've done us very proud!"

_Cho._--And we drank his health with honours, for he _done_ us

_very_ proud!

VIII

Then he walks us to his garden where we sees a feathered demon

Very splendid and important on a sort of spicy tree!

"That's the Phoenix," whispers Prester, "which all eddicated seamen

Knows the only one existent, and _he's_ waiting for to flee!

When his hundred years expire

Then he'll set hisself a-fire

And another from his ashes rise most beautiful to see!"

_Cho._--With wings of rose and emerald most beautiful to see!

IX

Then he says, "In younder forest there's a little silver river,

And whosoever drinks of it, his youth shall never die!

The centuries go by, but Prester John endures for ever

With his music in the mountains and his magic on the sky!

While _your_ hearts are growing colder,

While your world is growing older,

There's a magic in the distance, where the sea-line meets the sky,"

_Cho._--It shall call to singing seamen till the fount o' song is dry!

X

So we thought we'd up and seek it, but that forest fair defied us,--

First a crimson leopard laughs at us most horrible to see,

Then a sea-green lion came and sniffed and licked his chops and eyed us,

While a red and yellow unicorn was dancing round a tree!

_We_ was trying to look thinner,

Which was hard, because our dinner

Must ha' made us very tempting to a cat o' high degree!

_Cho._--Must ha' made us very tempting to the whole menarjeree!

XI

So we scuttled from that forest and across the poppy meadows

Where the awful shaggy horror brooded o'er us in the dark!

And we pushes out from shore again a-jumping at our shadows,

And pulls away most joyful to the old black barque!

And home again we plodded

While the Polyphemus nodded

With his battered moon-eye winking red and yellow through the dark.

_Cho._--Oh, the moon above the mountains, red and yellow through

the dark!

XII

Across the seas of Wonderland to London-town we blundered,

Forty singing seamen as was puzzled for to know

If the visions that we saw was caused by--here again we pondered--

A tipple in a vision forty thousand years ago.

Could the grog we _dreamt_ we swallowed

Make us _dream_ of all that followed?

We were only simple seamen, so of course we didn't know!

_Cho._--We were simple singing seamen, so of course we could not know!

THE EMPIRE BUILDERS

Who are the Empire-builders? They

Whose desperate arrogance demands

A self-reflecting power to sway

A hundred little selfless lands?

Lord God of battles, ere we bow

To these and to their soulless lust,

Let fall Thy thunders on us now

And strike us equal to the dust.

Before the stars in heaven were made

Our great Commander led us forth;

And now the embattled lines are laid

To East, to West, to South, to North;

According as of old He planned

We take our station in the field,

Nor dare to dream we understand

The splendour of the swords we wield.

We know not what the Soul intends

That lives and moves behind our deeds;

We wheel and march to glorious ends

Beyond the common soldier's needs:

And some are raised to high rewards,

And some by regiments are hurled

To die upon the opposing swords

And sleep--forgotten by the world.

And not where navies churn the foam,

Nor called to fields of fierce emprize,

In many a country cottage-home

The Empire-builder lives and dies:

Or through the roaring streets he goes

A lean and weary City slave,

The conqueror of a thousand foes

Who walks, unheeded, to his grave.

Leaders unknown of hopes forlorn

Go past us in the daily mart,

With many a shadowy crown of thorn

And many a kingly broken heart:

Though England's banner overhead

Ever the secret signal flew,

We only see its Cross is red

As children see the skies are blue.

For all are Empire-builders here,

Whose hearts are true to heaven and home

And, year by slow revolving year,

Fulfil the duties as they come;

So simple seems the task, and yet

Many for this are crucified;

Ay, and their brother-men forget

The simple wounds in palm and side.

But he that to his home is true,

Where'er the tides of power may flow,

Has built a kingdom great and new

Which Time nor Fate shall overthrow

These are the Empire-builders, these

Annex where none shall say them nay

Beyond the world's uncharted seas

Realms that can never pass away.

NELSON'S YEAR

(1905)

I

"Hasten the Kingdom, England!"

This year, a hundred years ago,

The world attended, breathless, on the gathering pomp of war,

While England and her deathless dead, with all their mighty

hearts aglow,

Swept onward like the dawn of doom to triumph at Trafalgar;

Then the world was hushed to wonder

As the cannon's dying thunder

Broke out again in muffled peals across the heaving sea,

And home the Victor came at last,

Home, home, with England's flag half-mast,

That never dipped to foe before, on Nelson's Victory.

II

God gave this year to England;

And what He gives He takes again;

He gives us life, He gives us death: our victories have wings;

He gives us love and in its heart He hides the whole world's heart

of pain:

We gain by loss: impartially the eternal balance swings!

Ay; in the fire we cherish

Our thoughts and dreams may perish;

Yet shall it burn for England's sake triumphant as of old!

What sacrifice could gain for her

Our own shall still maintain for her,

And hold the gates of Freedom wide that take no keys of gold.

III

God gave this year to England;

Her eyes are far too bright for tears

Of sorrow; by her silent dead she kneels, too proud for pride;

Their blood, their love, have bought her right to claim the new

imperial years

In England's name for Freedom, in whose love her children died;

In whose love, though hope may dwindle,

Love and brotherhood shall kindle

Between the striving nations as a choral song takes fire,

Till new hope, new faith, new wonder

Cleave the clouds of doubt asunder,

And speed the union of mankind in one divine desire.

IV

Hasten the Kingdom, England;

This year across the listening world

There came a sound of mingled tears where victory and defeat

Clasped hands; and Peace--among the dead--stood wistfully, with white

wings furled,

Knowing the strife was idle; for the night and morning meet,

Yet there is no disunion

In heaven's divine communion

As through the gates of twilight the harmonious morning pours;

Ah, God speed that grander morrow

When the world's divinest sorrow

Shall show how Love stands knocking at the world's unopened doors.

V

Hasten the Kingdom, England;

Look up across the narrow seas,

Across the great white nations to thy dark imperial throne

Where now three hundred million souls attend on thine august decrees;

Ah, bow thine head in humbleness, the Kingdom is thine own:

Not for the pride or power

God gave thee this in dower;

But, now the West and East have met and wept their mortal loss,

Now that their tears have spoken

And the long dumb spell is broken,

Is it nothing that thy banner bears the red eternal cross?

VI

Ay! Lift the flag of England;

And lo, that Eastern cross is there,

Veiled with a hundred meanings as our English eyes are veiled;

Yet to the grander dawn we move oblivious of the sign we bear,

Oblivious of the heights we climb until the last be scaled;

Then with all the earth before us

And the great cross floating o'er us

We shall break the sword we forged of old, so weak we were and blind;

While the inviolate heaven discloses

England's Rose of all the roses

Dawning wide and ever wider o'er the kingdom of mankind.

VII

Hasten the Kingdom, England;

For then all nations shall be one;

One as the ordered stars are one that sing upon their way,

One with the rhythmic glories of the swinging sea and the rolling sun,

One with the flow of life and death, the tides of night and day;

One with all dreams of beauty,

One with all laws of duty;

One with the weak and helpless while the one sky burns above;

Till eyes by tears made glorious

Look up at last victorious,

And lips that starved break open in one song of life and love.

VIII

Hasten the Kingdom, England;

And when the Spring returns again

Rekindle in our English hearts the universal Spring,

That we may wait in faith upon the former and the latter rain,

Till all waste places burgeon and the wildernesses sing;

Pour the glory of thy pity

Through the dark and troubled city;

Pour the splendour of thy beauty over wood and meadow fair;

May the God of battles guide thee

And the Christ-child walk beside thee

With a word of peace for England in the dawn of Nelson's Year.

IN TIME OF WAR

I

To-night o'er Bagshot heath the purple heather

Rolls like dumb thunder to the splendid West;

And mighty ragged clouds are massed together

Above the scarred old common's broken breast;

And there are hints of blood between the boulders,

Red glints of fiercer blossom, bright and bold;

And round the shaggy mounds and sullen shoulders

The gorse repays the sun with savage gold.

And now, as in the West the light grows holy,

And all the hollows of the heath grow dim,

Far off, a sulky rumble rolls up slowly

Where guns at practice growl their evening hymn.

And here and there in bare clean yellow spaces

The print of horse-hoofs like an answering cry

Strikes strangely on the sense from lonely places

Where there is nought but empty heath and sky.

The print of warlike hoofs, where now no figure

Of horse or man along the sky's red rim

Breaks on the low horizon's rough black rigour

To make the gorgeous waste less wild and grim;

Strangely the hoof-prints strike, a Crusoe's wonder,

Framed with sharp furze amongst the footless fells,

A menace and a mystery, rapt asunder,

As if the whole wide world contained nought else,--

Nought but the grand despair of desolation

Between us and that wild, how far, how near,

Where, clothed with thunder, nation grapples nation,

And Slaughter grips the clay-cold hand of Fear.

II

And far above the purple heath the sunset stars awaken,

And ghostly hosts of cloud across the West begin to stream,

And all the low soft winds with muffled cannonades are shaken,

And all the blood-red blossom draws aloof into a dream;

A dream--no more--and round the dream the clouds are curled together;

A dream of two great stormy hosts embattled in the sky;

For there against the low red heavens each sombre ridge of heather

Up-heaves a hedge of bayonets around a battle-cry;

Melts in the distant battle-field or brings the dream so near it

That, almost, as the rifted clouds around them swim and reel,

A thousand grey-lipped faces flash--ah, hark, the heart can hear it--

The sharp command that lifts as one the levelled lines of steel.

And through the purple thunders there are silent shadows creeping

With murderous gleams of light, and then--a mighty leaping roar

Where foe and foe are met; and then--a long low sound of weeping

As Death laughs out from sea to sea, another fight is o'er.

Another fight--but ah, how much is over? Night descending

Draws o'er the scene her ghastly moon-shot veil with piteous hands;

But all around the bivouac-glare the shadowy pickets wending

See sights, hear sounds that only war's own madness understands.

No circle of the accursed dead where dreaming Dante wandered,

No city of death's eternal dole could match this mortal world

Where men, before the living soul and quivering flesh are sundered,

Through all the bestial shapes of pain to one wide grave are hurled.

But in the midst for those who dare beyond the fringe to enter

Be sure one kingly figure lies with pale and blood-soiled face,

And round his brows a ragged crown of thorns; and in the centre

Of those pale folded hands and feet the sigil of his grace.

See, how the pale limbs, marred and scarred in love's lost battle,

languish;

See how the splendid passion still smiles quietly from his eyes:

Come, come and see a king indeed, who triumphs in his anguish,

Who conquers here in utter loss beneath the eternal skies.

For unto lips so deadly calm what answer shall be given?

Oh pale, pale king so deadly still beneath the unshaken stars,

Who shall deny thy kingdom here, though heaven and earth were riven,

With the last roar of onset in the world's intestine wars?

The laugh is Death's; he laughs as erst o'er hours that England

cherished,

"Count up, count up the stricken homes that wail the first-born son,

Count by your starved and fatherless the tale of what hath perished;

Then gather with your foes and ask if you--or I--have won."

III

The world rolls on; and love and peace are mated:

Still on the breast of England, like a star,

The blood-red lonely heath blows, consecrated,

A brooding practice-ground for blood-red war.

Yet is there nothing out of tune with Nature

There, where the skylark showers his earliest song,

Where sun and wind have moulded every feature,

And one world-music bears each note along.

There many a brown-winged kestrel swoops or hovers

In poised and patient quest of his own prey;

And there are fern-clad glens where happy lovers

May kiss the murmuring summer noon away.

There, as the primal earth was--all is glorious

Perfect and wise and wonderful in view

Of that great heaven through which we rise victorious

O'er all that strife and change and death can do.

No nation yet has risen o'er earth's first nature;

Though love illumed each individual mind,

Like some half-blind, half-formed primeval creature

The State still crawled a thousand years behind.

Still on the standards of the great World-Powers

Lion and bear and eagle sullenly brood,

Whether the slow folds flap o'er halcyon hours

Or stream tempestuously o'er fields of blood.

By war's red evolution we have risen

Far, since fierce Erda chose her conquering few,

And out of Death's red gates and Time's grey prison

They burst, elect from battle, tried and true.

But now Death mocks at youth and love and glory,

Chivalry slinks behind his loaded mines,

With meaner murderous lips War tells her story,

And round her cunning brows no laurel shines.

And here to us the eternal charge is given

To rise and make our low world touch God's high:

To hasten God's own kingdom, Man's own heaven,

And teach Love's grander army how to die.

No kingdom then, no long-continuing city

Shall e'er again be stablished by the sword;

No blood-bought throne defy the powers of pity,

No despot's crown outweigh one helot's word.

Imperial England, breathe thy marching orders:

The great host waits; the end, the end is close,

When earth shall know thy peace in all her borders,

And all her deserts blossom with thy Rose.

Princedoms and peoples rise and flash and perish

As the dew passes from the flowering thorn;

Yet the one Kingdom that our dreams still cherish

Lives in a light that blinds the world's red morn.

Hasten the Kingdom, England, the days darken;

We would not have thee slacken watch or ward,

Nor doff thine armour till the whole world hearken,

Nor till Time bid thee lay aside the sword.

Hasten the Kingdom; hamlet, heath, and city,

We are all at war, one bleeding bulk of pain;

Little we know; but one thing--by God's pity--

We know, and know all else on earth is vain.

We know not yet how much we dare, how little;

We dare not dream of peace; yet, as at need,

England, God help thee, let no jot or tittle

Of Love's last law go past thee without heed.

_Who saves his life shall lose it!_ The great ages

Bear witness--Rome and Babylon and Tyre

Cry from the dust-stopped lips of all their sages,--

There is no hope if man can climb no higher.

England, by God's grace set apart to ponder

A little while from battle, ah, take heed,

Keep watch, keep watch, beside thy sleeping thunder;

Call down Christ's pity while those others bleed;

Waken the God within thee, while the sorrow

Of battle surges round a distant shore,

While Time is thine, lest on some deadly morrow

The moving finger write--_but thine no more_.

Little we know--but though the advancing æons

Win every painful step by blood and fire,

Though tortured mouths must chant the world's great pæans,

And martyred souls proclaim the world's desire;

Though war be nature's engine of rejection,

Soon, soon, across her universal verge

The soul of man in sacred insurrection

Shall into God's diviner light emerge.

Hasten the Kingdom, England, queen and mother;

Little we know of all Time's works and ways;

Yet this, this, this is sure: we need none other

Knowledge or wisdom, hope or aim or praise,

But to keep this one stormy banner flying

In this one faith that none shall e'er disprove,

Then drive the embattled world before thee, crying,

There is one Emperor, whose name is Love.

ODE FOR THE SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY OF SWINBURNE

I

He needs no crown of ours, whose golden heart

Poured out its wealth so freely in pure praise

Of others: him the imperishable bays

Crown, and on Sunium's height he sits apart:

He hears immortal greetings this great morn:

Fain would we bring, we also, all we may,

Some wayside flower of transitory bloom,

Frail tribute, only born

To greet the gladness of this April day

Then waste on death's dark wind its faint perfume.

II

Here on this April day the whole sweet Spring

Speaks thro' his music only, or seems to speak.

And we that hear, with hearts uplift and weak,

What can we more than claim him for our king?

Here on this April day (and many a time

Shall April come and find him singing still)

He is one with the world's great heart beyond the years,

One with the pulsing rhyme

Of tides that work some heavenly rhythmic will

And hold the secret of all human tears.

III

For he, the last of that immortal race

Whose music, like a robe of living light

Re-clothed each new-born age and made it bright

As with the glory of Love's transfiguring face,

Reddened earth's roses, kindled the deep blue

Of England's radiant, ever-singing sea,

Recalled the white Thalassian from the foam.

Woke the dim stars anew

And triumphed in the triumph of Liberty,

We claim him; but he hath not here his home.

IV

Not here; round him to-day the clouds divide:

We know what faces thro' that rose-flushed air

Now bend above him: Shelley's face is there,

And Hugo's, lit with more than kingly pride.

Replenished there with splendour, the blind eyes

Of Milton bend from heaven to meet his own,

Sappho is there, crowned with those queenlier flowers

Whose graft outgrew our skies,

His gift: Shakespeare leans earthward from his throne

With hands outstretched. He needs no crown of ours.

IN CLOAK OF GREY

I

Love's a pilgrim, cloaked in grey,

And his feet are pierced and bleeding:

Have ye seen him pass this way

Sorrowfully pleading?

Ye that weep the world away,

Have ye seen King Love to-day?--

II

Yea, we saw him; but he came

Poppy-crowned and white of limb!

Song had touched his lips with flame,

And his eyes were drowsed and dim;

And we kissed the hours away

Till night grew rosier than the day.--

III

Hath he left you?--Yea, he left us

A little while ago,

Of his laughter quite bereft us

And his limbs of snow;

We know not why he went away

Who ruled our revels yesterday.--

IV

Because ye did not understand

Love cometh from afar,

A pilgrim out of Holy Land

Guided by a star:

Last night he came in cloak of grey,

Begging. Ye knew him not: he went his way.

A RIDE FOR THE QUEEN

Queen of queens, oh lady mine,

You who say you love me,

Here's a cup of crimson wine

To the stars above me;

Here's a cup of blood and gall

For a soldier's quaffing!

What's the prize to crown it all?

Death? I'll take it laughing!

I ride for the Queen to-night!

Though I find no knightly fee

Waiting on my lealty,

High upon the gallows-tree

Faithful to my fealty,

What had I but love and youth,

Hope and fame in season?

She has proved that more than truth

Glorifies her treason!

Would that other do as much?

Ah, but if in sorrow

Some forgotten look or touch

Pierce her heart to-morrow

She might love me yet, I think;

So her lie befriends me,

Though I know there's darker drink

Down the road she sends me.

Ay, one more great chance is mine

(Can I faint or falter?)

She shall pour my blood like wine,

Make my heart her altar,

Burn it to the dust! For, there,

What if o'er the embers

She should stoop and--I should hear--

"_Hush! Thy love remembers!_"

One more chance for every word

Whispered to betray me,

While she buckled on my sword

Smiling to allay me;

One more chance; ah, let me not

Mar her perfect pleasure;

Love shall pay me, jot by jot,

Measure for her measure.

Faith shall think I never knew,

I will be so fervent!

Doubt shall dream I dreamed her true

As her war-worn servant!

Whoso flouts her spotless name

(Love, I wear thy token!)

He shall face one sword of flame

Ere the lie be spoken!

All the world's a-foam with may,

(Fragrant as her bosom!)

Could I find a sweeter way

Through the year's young blossom,

Where her warm red mouth on mine

Woke my soul's desire?...

Hey! The cup of crimson wine,

Blood and gall and fire!

Castle Doom or Gates of Death?

(Smile again for pity!)

"Boot and horse," my lady saith,

"Spur against the City,

Bear this message!" God and she

Still forget the guerdon;

Nay, the rope is on the tree!

That shall bear the burden!

I ride for the Queen to-night!

SONG

I

When that I loved a maiden

My heaven was in her eyes,

And when they bent above me

I knew no deeper skies;

But when her heart forsook me

My spirit broke its bars,

For grief beyond the sunset

And love beyond the stars.

II

When that I loved a maiden

She seemed the world to me:

Now is my soul the universe,

My dreams the sky and sea:

There is no heaven above me,

No glory binds or bars

My grief beyond the sunset,

My love beyond the stars.

III

When that I loved a maiden

I worshipped where she trod;

But, when she clove my heart, the cleft

Set free the imprisoned god:

Then was I king of all the world,

My soul had burst its bars,

For grief beyond the sunset

And love beyond the stars.

THE HIGHWAYMAN

PART ONE

I

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding--

Riding--riding--

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

II

He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;

They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!

And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,

His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

III

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,

And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked

and barred;

He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there

But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord's daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

IV

And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked

Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;

His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,

But he loved the landlord's daughter,

The landlord's red-lipped daughter,

Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say--

V

"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,

But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;

Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,

Then look for me by moonlight,

Watch for me by moonlight,

I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

VI

He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,

But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand

As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;

And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,

(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)

Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away

to the West.

PART TWO

I

He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;

And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,

When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,

A red-coat troop came marching--

Marching--marching--

King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

II

They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,

But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her

narrow bed;

Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!

There was death at every window;

And hell at one dark window;

For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that _he_

would ride.

III

They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;

They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!

"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her.

She heard the dead man say--

_Look for me by moonlight;

Watch for me by moonlight;

I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!_

IV

She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!

She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!

They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours

crawled by like years,

Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,

Cold, on the stroke of midnight,

The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

V

The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!

Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,

She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;

For the road lay bare in the moonlight;

Blank and bare in the moonlight;

And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her

love's refrain.

VI

_Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot!_ Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing

clear;

_Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot_, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did

not hear?

Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,

The highwayman came riding,

Riding, riding!

The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and

still!

VII

_Tlot-tlot_, in the frosty silence! _Tlot-tlot_, in the echoing night!

Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!

Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,

Then her finger moved in the moonlight,

Her musket shattered the moonlight,

Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him--with her death.

VIII

He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood

Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!

Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear

How Bess, the landlord's daughter,

The landlord's black-eyed daughter,

Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness

there.

IX

Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,

With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!

Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet

coat,

When they shot him down on the highway,

Down like a dog on the highway,

And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his

throat.

* * * *

X

_And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,

When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

A highwayman comes riding--

Riding--riding--

A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door._

XI

_Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;

He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;

He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there

But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord's daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair._

THE HAUNTED PALACE

Come to the haunted palace of my dreams,

My crumbling palace by the eternal sea,

Which, like a childless mother, still must croon

Her ancient sorrows to the cold white moon,

Or, ebbing tremulously,

With one pale arm, where the long foam-fringe gleams,

Will gather her rustling garments, for a space

Of muffled weeping, round her dim white face.

A princess dwelt here once: long, long ago

This tower rose in the sunset like a prayer;

And, through the witchery of that casement, rolled

In one soft cataract of faëry gold

Her wonder-woven hair;

Her face leaned out and took the sacred glow

Of evening, like the star that listened, high

Above the gold clouds of the western sky.

Was there no prince behind her in the gloom,

No crimson shadow of his rich array?

Her face leaned down to me: I saw the tears

Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,

And her mouth yearned to say--

"Friend, is there any message, from the tomb

Where love lies buried?" But she only said--

"Oh, friend, canst thou not save me from my dead?

"Canst thou not minister to a soul in pain?

Or hast thou then no comfortable word?

Is there no faith in thee wherewith to atone

For his unfaith who left me here alone,

Heart-sick with hope deferred;

Oh, since my love will never come again,

Bring'st thou no respite through the desolate years,

Respite from these most unavailing tears?"

Then saw I, and mine own tears made response,

Her woman's heart come breaking through her eyes;

And, as I stood beneath the tower's grey wall,

She let the soft waves of her deep hair fall

Like flowers from Paradise

Over my fevered face: then all at once

Pity was passion; and like a sea of bliss

Those waves rolled o'er me drowning for her kiss.

* * * *

Seven years we dwelt together in that tower,

Seven years in that old palace by the sea,

And sitting at that casement, side by side,

She told me all her pain: how love had died

Now for all else but me;

Yet how she had loved that other: like a flower

Her red lips parted and with low sweet moan

She pressed their tender suffering on mine own.

And always with vague eyes she gazed afar,

Out through the casement o'er the changing tide;

And slowly was my heart's hope brought to nought

That some day I should win each wandering thought

And make her my soul's bride:

Still, still she gazed across the cold sea-bar;

Ay; with her hand in mine, still, still and pale,

Waited and watched for the unreturning sail.

And I, too, watched and waited as the years

Rolled on; and slowly was I brought to feel

How on my lips she met her lover's kiss,

How my heart's pulse begat an alien bliss;

And cold and hard as steel

For me those eyes were, though their tender tears

Were salt upon my cheek; and then one night

I saw a sail come through the pale moonlight.

And like an alien ghost I stole away,

And like a breathing lover he returned;

And in the woods I dwelt, or sometimes crept

Out in the grey dawn while the lovers slept

And the great sea-tides yearned

Against the iron shores; and faint and grey

The tower and the shut casement rose above:

And on the earth I sobbed out all my love.

At last, one royal rose-hung night in June,

When the warm air like purple Hippocrene

Brimmed the dim valley and sparkled into stars,

I saw them cross the foam-lit sandy bars

And dark pools, glimmering green,

To bathe beneath the honey-coloured moon:

I saw them swim out from that summer shore,

Kissed by the sea, but they returned no more.

* * * *

And into the dark palace, like a dream

Remembered after long oblivious years,

Through the strange open doors I crept and saw

As some poor pagan might, with reverent awe,

And deep adoring tears,

The moonlight through that painted window stream

Over the soft wave of their vacant bed;

There sank I on my knees and bowed my head,

For as a father by a cradle bows,

Remembering two dead children of his own,

I knelt; and by the cry of the great deep

Their love seemed like a murmuring in their sleep,

A little fevered moan,

A little tossing of childish arms that shows

How dreams go by! "If I were God," I wept,

"I would have pity on children while they slept."

* * * *

The days, the months, the years drift over me;

This is my habitation till I die:

Nothing is changed; they left that open book

Beside the window. Did he sit and look

Up at her face as I

Looked while she read it, and the enchanted sea

With rich eternities of love unknown

Fulfilled the low sweet music of her tone?

So did he listen, looking in her face?

And did she ever pause, remembering so

The heart that bore the whole weight of her pain

Until her own heart's love returned again?

In the still evening glow

I sit and listen in this quiet place,

And only hear--like notes of phantom birds--

Their perished kisses and little broken words.

_Come to the haunted palace of my dreams,

My crumbling palace by the eternal sea,

Which, like a childless mother, still must croon

Her ancient sorrows to the cold white moon,

Or, ebbing tremulously,

With one pale arm, where the long foam-fringe gleams,

Will gather her rustling garments, for a space

Of muffled weeping, round her dim white face._

THE SCULPTOR

This is my statue: cold and white

It stands and takes the morning light!

The world may flout my hopes and fears,

Yet was my life's work washed with tears

Of blood when this poor hand last night

Finished the pain of years.

Speak for me, patient lips of stone,

Blind eyes my lips have rested on

So often when the o'er-weary brain

Would grope to human love again,

And found this grave cold mask alone

And the tears fell like rain.

Ay; is this all? Is this the brow

I fondled, never wondering how

It lived--the face of pain and bliss

That through the marble met my kiss?

Oh, though the whole world praise it now,

Let no man dream it is!

They blame; they cannot blame aright

Who never knew what infinite

Deep loss must shame me most of all!

They praise; like earth their praises fall

Into a tomb. The hour of light

Is flown beyond recall.

Yet have I seen, yet have I known,

And oh, not tombed in cold white stone

The dream I lose on earth below;

And I shall come with face aglow

And find and claim it for my own

Before God's throne, I know.

SUMMER

(AN ODE)

Now like a pageant of the Golden Year

In rich memorial pomp the hours go by,

With rose-embroidered flags unfurled

And tasselled bugles calling through the world

Wake, for your hope draws near!

Wake, for in each soft porch of azure sky,

Seen through each arch of pale green leaves, the Gate

Of Eden swings apart for Summer's royal state.

Ah, when the Spirit of the moving scene

Has entered in, the splendour will be spent!

The flutes will cease, the gates will close;

Only the scattered crimson of the rose,

The wild wood's hapless queen,

Dis-kingdomed, will declare the way he went;

And, in a little while, her court will go,

Pass like a cloud and leave no trace on earth below.

Tell us no more of Autumn, the slow gold

Of fruitage ripening in a world's decay,

The falling leaves, the moist rich breath

Of woods that swoon and crumble into death

Over the gorgeous mould:

Give us the flash and scent of keen-edged May

Where wastes that bear no harvest yield their bloom,

Rude crofts of flowering nettle, bents of yellow broom.

The very reeds and sedges of the fen

Open their hearts and blossom to the sky;

The wild thyme on the mountain's knees

Unrolls its purple market to the bees;

Unharvested of men

The Traveller's Joy can only smile and die.

Joy, joy alone the throbbing whitethroats bring,

Joy to themselves and heaven! They were but born to sing!

And see, between the northern-scented pines,

The whole sweet summer sharpens to a glow!

See, as the well-spring plashes cool

Over a shadowy green fern-fretted pool

The mystic sunbeam shines

For one mad moment on a breast of snow

A warm white shoulder and a glowing arm

Up-flung, where some swift Undine sinks in shy alarm.

And if she were not all a dream, and lent

Life for a little to your own desire,

Oh, lover in the hawthorn lane,

Dream not you hold her, or you dream in vain!

The violet, spray-besprent

When from that plunge the rainbows flashed like fire,

Will scarce more swiftly lose its happy dew

Than eyes which Undine haunts will cease to shine on you.

What though the throstle pour his heart away,

A happy spendthrift of uncounted gold,

Swinging upon a blossomed briar

With soft throat lifted in a wild desire

To make the world his may.

Ever the pageant through the gates is rolled

Further away; in vain the rich notes throng

Flooding the mellow noon with wave on wave of song.

The feathery meadows like a lilac sea,

Knee-deep, with honeyed clover, red and white,

Roll billowing: the crisp clouds pass

Trailing their soft blue shadows o'er the grass;

The skylark, mad with glee,

Quivers, up, up, to lose himself in light;

And, through the forest, like a fairy dream

Through some dark mind, the ferns in branching beauty stream.

Enough of joy! A little respite lend,

Summer, fair god that hast so little heed

Of these that serve thee but to die,

Mere trappings of thy tragic pageantry!

Show us the end, the end!

We too, with human hearts that break and bleed,

March to the night that rounds their fleeting hour,

And feel we, too, perchance but serve some loftier Power.

O that our hearts might pass away with thee,

Burning and pierced and full of thy sweet pain,

Burst through the gates with thy swift soul,

Hunt thy most white perfection to the goal,

Nor wait, once more to see

Thy chaliced lilies rotting in the rain,

Thy ragged yellowing banners idly hung

In woods that have forgotten all the songs we sung!

_Peace! Like a pageant of the Golden Year

In rich memorial pomp the hours go by,

With rose-embroidered flags unfurled

And tasselled bugles calling through the world

Wake, for your hope draws near!

Wake, for in each soft porch of azure sky,

Seen through each arch of pale green leaves, the Gate

Of Eden swings apart for Summer's royal state._

Not wait! Forgive, forgive that feeble cry

Of blinded passion all unworthy thee!

For here the spirit of man may claim

A loftier vision and a nobler aim

Than e'er was born to die:

Man only, of earth, throned on Eternity,

From his own sure abiding-place can mark

How earth's great golden dreams go past into the dark.

AT DAWN

O Hesper-Phosphor, far away

Shining, the first, the last white star,

Hear'st thou the strange, the ghostly cry,

That moan of an ancient agony

From purple forest to golden sky

Shivering over the breathless bay?

It is not the wind that wakes with the day;

For see, the gulls that wheel and call,

Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar,

Catching the sun-dawn on their wings,

Like snow-flakes or like rose-leaves fall,

Flutter and fall in airy rings;

And drift, like lilies ruffling into blossom

Upon some golden lake's unwrinkled bosom.

Are not the forest's deep-lashed fringes wet

With tears? Is not the voice of all regret

Breaking out of the dark earth's heart?

She too, she too, has loved and lost; and we--

We that remember our lost Aready,

Have we not known, we too,

The primal greenwood's arch of blue,

The radiant clouds at sun-rise curled

Around the brows of the golden world;

The marble temples, washed with dew,

To which with rosy limbs aflame

The violet-eyed Thalassian came,

Came, pitiless, only to display

How soon the youthful splendour dies away;

Came, only to depart

Laughing across the grey-grown bitter sea;

For each man's life is earth's epitome,

And though the years bring more than aught they take,

Yet might his heart and hers well break

Remembering how one prayer must still be vain.

How one fair hope is dead,

One passion quenched, one glory fled

With those first loves that never come again.

How many years, how many generations,

Have heard that sigh in the dawn,

When the dark earth yearns to the unforgotten nations

And the old loves withdrawn,

Old loves, old lovers, wonderful and unnumbered

As waves on the wine-dark sea,

'Neath the tall white towers of Troy and the temples that slumbered

In Thessaly?

From the beautiful palaces, from the miraculous portals,

The swift white feet are flown!

They were taintless of dust, the proud, the peerless Immortals

As they sped to their loftier throne!

Perchance they are there, earth dreams, on the shores of Hesper,

Her rosy-bosomed Hours,

Listening the wild fresh forest's enchanted whisper,

Crowned with its new strange flowers;

Listening the great new ocean's triumphant thunder

On the stainless unknown shore,

While that perilous queen of the world's delight and wonder

Comes white from the foam once more.

When the mists divide with the dawn o'er those glittering waters,

Do they gaze over unoared seas--

Naiad and nymph and the woodland's rose-crowned daughters

And the Oceanides?

Do they sing together, perchance, in that diamond splendour,

That world of dawn and dew,

With eyelids twitching to tears and with eyes grown tender

The sweet old songs they knew,

The songs of Greece? Ah, with harp-strings mute do they falter

As the earth like a small star pales?

When the heroes launch their ship by the smoking altar

Does a memory lure their sails?

Far, far away, do their hearts resume the story

That never on earth was told,

When all those urgent oars on the waste of glory

Cast up its gold?

_Are not the forest fringes wet

With tears? Is not the voice of all regret

Breaking out of the dark earth's heart?

She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though

She turned last night in disdain

Away from the sunset-embers,

From her soul she can never depart;

She can never depart from her pain.

Vainly she strives to forget;

Beautiful in her woe,

She awakes in the dawn and remembers._

THE SWIMMER'S RACE

I

Between the clover and the trembling sea

They stand upon the golden-shadowed shore

In naked boyish beauty, a strenuous three,

Hearing the breakers' deep Olympic roar;

Three young athletes poised on a forward limb,

Mirrored like marble in the smooth wet sand,

Three statues moulded by Praxiteles:

The blue horizon rim

Recedes, recedes upon a lovelier land,

And England melts into the skies of Greece.

II

The dome of heaven is like one drop of dew,

Quivering and clear and cloudless but for one

Crisp bouldered Alpine range that blinds the blue

With snowy gorges glittering to the sun:

Forward the runners lean, with outstretched hand

Waiting the word--ah, how the light relieves

The silken rippling muscles as they start

Spurning the yellow sand,

Then skimming lightlier till the goal receives

The winner, head thrown back and lips apart.

III

Now at the sea-marge on the sand they lie

At rest for a moment, panting as they breathe,

And gazing upward at the unbounded sky

While the sand nestles round them from beneath;

And in their hands they gather up the gold

And through their fingers let it lazily stream

Over them, dusking all their limbs' fair white,

Blotting their shape and mould,

Till, mixed into the distant gazer's dream

Of earth and heaven, they seem to sink from sight.

IV

But one, in seeming petulance, oppressed

With heat has cast his brown young body free:

With arms behind his head and heaving breast

He lies and gazes at the cool bright sea;

So young Leander might when in the noon

He panted for the starry eyes of eve

And whispered o'er the waste of wandering waves,

"Hero, bid night come soon!"

Nor knew the nymphs were waiting to receive

And kiss his pale limbs in their cold sea-caves.

V

Now to their feet they leap and, with a shout,

Plunge through the glittering breakers without fear,

Breast the green-arching billows, and still out,

As if each dreamed the arms of Hero near;

Now like three sunbeams on an emerald crest,

Now like three foam-flakes melting out of sight,

They are blent with all the glory of all the sea;

One with the golden West;

Merged in a myriad waves of mystic light

As life is lost in immortality.

THE VENUS OF MILO

I

Backward she leans, as when the rose unblown

Slides white from its warm sheath some morn in May!

Under the sloping waist, aslant, her zone

Clings as it slips in tender disarray;

One knee, out-thrust a little, keeps it so

Lingering ere it fall; her lovely face

Gazes as o'er her own Eternity!

Those armless radiant shoulders, long ago

Perchance held arms out wide with yearning grace

For Adon by the blue Sicilian sea.

II

No; thou eternal fount of these poor gleams,

Bright axle-star of the wheeling temporal skies,

Daughter of blood and foam and deathless dreams,

Mother of flying Love that never dies,

To thee, the topmost and consummate flower,

The last harmonic height, our dull desires

And our tired souls in dreary discord climb;

The flesh forgets its pale and wandering fires;

We gaze through heaven as from an ivory tower

Shining upon the last dark shores of Time.

III

White culmination of the dreams of earth,

Thy splendour beacons to a loftier goal,

Where, slipping earthward from the great new birth,

The shadowy senses leave the essential soul!

Oh, naked loveliness, not yet revealed,

A moment hence that falling robe will show

No prophecy like this, this great new dawn,

The bare bright breasts, each like a soft white shield,

And the firm body like a slope of snow

Out of the slipping dream-stuff half withdrawn.

THE NET OF VULCAN

From peaks that clove the heavens asunder

The hunchback god with sooty claws

Loomed o'er the night, a cloud of thunder,

And hurled the net of mortal laws;

It flew, and all the world grew dimmer;

Its blackness blotted out the stars,

Then fell across the rosy glimmer

That told where Venus couched with Mars.

And, when the steeds that draw the morning

Spurned from their Orient hooves the spray,

All vainly soared the lavrock, warning

Those tangled lovers of the day:

Still with those twin white waves in blossom,

Against the warrior's rock-broad breast,

The netted light of the foam-born bosom

Breathed like a sea at rest.

And light was all that followed after,

Light the derision of the sky,

Light the divine Olympian laughter

Of kindlier gods in days gone by:

Low to her lover whispered Venus,

"The shameless net be praised for this--

When night herself no more could screen us

It snared us one more hour of bliss."

NIOBE

How like the sky she bends above her child,

One with the great horizon of her pain!

No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild,

No weeping cloud, no momentary rain,

Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief,

That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb.

She stoops in pity above the labouring earth,

Knowing how fond, how brief

Is all its hope, past, present, and to come,

She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth.

Through that fair face the whole dark universe

Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro' one white flower;

And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse

The gods, but cannot die before their hour,

Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head

Bows over all earth's graves. It was her cry

Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways

With children's blood ran red!

Her silence utters all the sea would sigh;

And, in her face, the whole earth's anguish prays.

It is the pity, the pity of human love

That strains her face, upturned to meet the doom,

And her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove

Frozen upon its nest, ne'er to resume

Its happy breathing o'er the golden brace

Whose fostering was her death. Death, death alone

Can break the anguished horror of that spell!

The sorrow on her face

Is sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone;

She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell.

Ah, yet, her woman's love, so vast, so tender;

Her woman's body, hurt by every dart;

Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slender

Soft frightened child beneath her mighty heart.

She is all one mute immortal cry, one brief

Infinite pang of such victorious pain

That she transcends the heavens and bows them down!

The majesty of grief

Is hers, and her dominion must remain

Eternal. God nor man usurps that crown.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

I

Height over height, the purple pine-woods clung to the rich Arcadian

mountains,

Holy-sweet as a sea of incense, under the low dark crimson skies:

Glad were the glens where Eurydice bathed, in the beauty of dawn, at the

haunted fountains

Deep in the blue hyacinthine hollows, whence all the rivers of

Arcady rise.

Long ago, ah, white as the Huntress, cold and sweet as the petals that

crowned her,

Fair and fleet as the fawn that shakes the dew from the fern at

break of day,

Wreathed with the clouds of her dusky hair that swept in a sun-bright

glory around her,

Down to the valley her light feet stole, ah, soft as the budding of

flowers in May.

Down to the valley she came, for far and far below in the

dreaming meadows

Pleaded ever the Voice of voices, calling his love by her

golden name;

So she arose from her home in the hills, and down through the blossoms

that danced with their shadows,

Out of the blue of the dreaming distance, down to the heart of her

lover she came.

* * * *

Red were the lips that hovered above her lips in the flowery haze of the

June-day:

Red as a rose through the perfumed mist of passion that reeled before

her eyes;

Strong the smooth young sunburnt arms that folded her heart to his heart

in the noon-day,

Strong and supple with throbbing sunshine under the blinding

southern skies.

Ah, the kisses, the little murmurs, mad with pain for their

phantom fleetness,

Mad with pain for the passing of love that lives, they

dreamed--as we dream--for an hour!

Ah, the sudden tempest of passion, mad with pain, for its

over-sweetness,

As petal by petal and pang by pang their love broke out into

perfect flower.

Ah, the wonder as once he wakened, out of a dream of remembered blisses,

Couched in the meadows of dreaming blossom to feel, like the touch of

a flower on his eyes,

Cool and fresh with the fragment dews of dawn the touch of her light

swift kisses,

Shed from the shadowy rose of her face between his face and the warm

blue skies.

II

Lost in his new desire

He dreamed away the hours;

His lyre

Lay buried in the flowers:

To whom the King of Heaven,

Apollo, lord of light,

Had given

Beauty and love and might:

Might, if he would, to slay

All evil dreams and pierce

The grey

Veil of the Universe;

With Love that holds in one

Sacred and ancient bond

The sun

And all the vast beyond,

And Beauty to enthrall

The soul of man to heaven:

Yea, all

These gifts to him were given.

_Yet in his dream's desire

He drowsed away the hours:

His lyre

Lay buried in the flowers._

Then in his wrath arose

Apollo, lord of light,

That shows

The wrong deed from the right;

And by what radiant laws

O'erruling human needs,

The cause

To consequence proceeds;

How balanced is the sway

He gives each mortal doom:

How day

Demands the atoning gloom:

How all good things await

The soul that pays the price

To Fate

By equal sacrifice;

And how on him that sleeps

For less than labour's sake

There creeps

Uncharmed, the Pythian snake.

III

Lulled by the wash of the feathery grasses, a sea with many a sun-swept

billow,

Heart to heart in the heart of the summer, lover by lover asleep

they lay,

Hearing only the whirring cicala that chirruped awhile at their

poppied pillow

Faint and sweet as the murmur of men that laboured in villages far

away.

Was not the menace indeed more silent? Ah, what care for labour and

sorrow?

Gods in the meadows of moly and amaranth surely might envy their deep

sweet bed

Here where the butterflies troubled the lilies of peace, and took no

thought for the morrow,

And golden-girdled bees made feast as over the lotus the soft sun

spread.

Nearer, nearer the menace glided, out of the gorgeous gloom around

them,

Out of the poppy-haunted shadows deep in the heart of the purple

brake;

Till through the hush and the heat as they lay, and their own sweet

listless dreams enwound them,--

Mailed and mottled with hues of the grape-bloom suddenly, quietly,

glided the snake.

Subtle as jealousy, supple as falsehood, diamond-headed and cruel as

pleasure,

Coil by coil he lengthened and glided, straight to the fragrant curve

of her throat:

There in the print of the last of the kisses that still glowed red from

the sweet long pressure,

Fierce as famine and swift as lightning over the glittering lyre he

smote.

IV

And over the cold white body of love and delight

Orpheus arose in the terrible storm of his grief,

With quivering up-clutched hands, deadly and white,

And his whole soul wavered and shook like a wind-swept leaf:

As a leaf that beats on a mountain, his spirit in vain

Assaulted his doom and beat on the Gates of Death:

Then prone with his arms o'er the lyre he sobbed out his pain,

And the tense chords faintly gave voice to the pulse of his breath.

And he heard it and rose, once again, with the lyre in his hand,

And smote out the cry that his white-lipped sorrow denied:

And the grief's mad ecstasy swept o'er the summer-sweet land,

And gathered the tears of all Time in the rush of its tide.

There was never a love forsaken or faith forsworn,

There was never a cry for the living or moan for the slain,

But was voiced in that great consummation of song; ay, and borne

To storm on the Gates of the land whence none cometh again.

Transcending the barriers of earth, comprehending them all

He followed the soul of his loss with the night in his eyes;

And the portals lay bare to him there; and he heard the faint call

Of his love o'er the rabble that wails by the river of sighs.

Yea, there in the mountains before him, he knew it of old,

That portal enormous of gloom, he had seen it in dreams,

When the secrets of Time and of Fate through his harmonies rolled;

And behind it he heard the dead moan by their desolate streams.

And he passed through the Gates with the light and the cloud of his

song,

Dry-shod over Lethe he passed to the chasms of hell;

And the hosts of the dead made mock at him, crying, _How long

Have we dwelt in the darkness, oh fool, and shall evermore dwell?_

_Did our lovers not love us?_ the grey skulls hissed in his face;

_Were our lips not red? Were these cavernous eyes not bright?

Yet us, whom the soft flesh clothed with such roseate grace,

Our lovers would loathe if we ever returned to their sight!_

Oh then, through the soul of the Singer, a pity so vast

Mixed with his anguish that, smiting anew on his lyre,

He caught up the sorrows of hell in his utterance at last,

Comprehending the need of them all in his own great desire.

V

And they that were dead, in his radiant music, remembered the

dawn with its low deep crimson,

Heard the murmur of doves in the pine-wood, heard the moan of the

roaming sea,

Heard and remembered the little kisses, in woods where the last of

the moon yet swims on

Fragrant, flower-strewn April nights of young-eyed lovers in Arcady;

Saw the soft blue veils of shadow floating over the billowy grasses

Under the crisp white curling clouds that sailed and trailed through

the melting blue;

Heard once more the quarrel of lovers above them pass, as a

lark-song passes,

Light and bright, till it vanished away in an eye-bright heaven of

silvery dew.

Out of the dark, ah, white as the Huntress, cold and sweet as the

petals that crowned her,

Fair and fleet as a fawn that shakes the dew from the fern at break

of day;

Wreathed with the clouds of her dusky hair that swept in a sun-bright

glory around her,

On through the deserts of hell she came, and the brown air bloomed

with the light of May.

On through the deserts of hell she came; for over the fierce and frozen

meadows

Pleaded ever the Voice of voices, calling his love by her golden name;

So she arose from her grave in the darkness, and up through the wailing

fires and shadows,

On by chasm and cliff and cavern, out of the horrors of death she

came.

Then had she followed him, then had he won her, striking a chord that

should echo for ever,

Had he been steadfast only a little, nor paused in the great

transcendent song;

But ere they had won to the glory of day, he came to the brink of the

flaming river

And ceased, to look on his love a moment, a little moment, and

overlong.

VI

O'er Phlegethon he stood:

Below him roared and flamed

The flood

For utmost anguish named.

And lo, across the night,

The shining form he knew

With light

Swift footsteps upward drew.

Up through the desolate lands

She stole, a ghostly star,

With hands

Outstretched to him afar.

With arms outstretched, she came

In yearning majesty,

The same

Royal Eurydice.

Up through the ghastly dead

She came, with shining eyes

And red

Sweet lips of child-surprise.

Up through the wizened crowds

She stole, as steals the moon

Through clouds

Of flowery mist in June.

He gazed: he ceased to smite

The golden-chorded lyre:

Delight

Consumed his heart with fire.

Though in that deadly land

His task was but half-done,

His hand

Drooped, and the fight half-won.

He saw the breasts that glowed,

The fragrant clouds of hair:

They flowed

Around him like a snare.

_O'er Phlegethon he stood,

For utmost anguish named:

The flood

Below him roared and flamed._

Out of his hand the lyre

Suddenly slipped and fell,

The fire

Acclaimed it into hell.

The night grew dark again:

There came a bitter cry

Of pain,

_Oh Love, once more I die!_

And lo, the earth-dawn broke,

And like a wraith she fled:

He woke

Alone: his love was dead.

He woke on earth: the day

Shone coldly: at his side

There lay

The body of his bride.

VII

Only now when the purple vintage bubbles and winks in the autumn glory,

Only now when the great white oxen drag the weight of the harvest

home,

Sunburnt labourers, under the star of the sunset, sing as an old-world

story

How two pale and thwarted lovers ever through Arcady still must roam.

Faint as the silvery mists of morning over the peaks that the

noonday parches,

On through the haunts of the gloaming musk-rose, down to the rivers

that glisten below,

Ever they wander from meadow to pinewood, under the whispering

woodbine arches,

Faint as the mists of the dews of the dusk when violets dream and

the moon-winds blow.

Though the golden lute of Orpheus gathered the splendours of

earth and heaven,

All the golden greenwood notes and all the chimes of the changing sea,

Old men over the fires of winter murmur again that he was not given

The steadfast heart divine to rule that infinite freedom of harmony.

Therefore he failed, say they; but we, that have no wisdom, can

only remember

How through the purple perfumed pinewoods white Eurydice roamed and

sung:

How through the whispering gold of the wheat, where the poppy burned

like a crimson ember,

Down to the valley in beauty she came, and under her feet the flowers

upsprung.

_Down to the valley she came, for far and far below in the dreaming

meadows

Pleaded ever the Voice of voices, calling his love by her golden name;

So she arose from her home in the hills, and down through the blossoms

that danced with their shadows,

Out of the blue of the dreaming distance, down to the heart of her

lover she came._

FROM THE SHORE

Love, so strangely lost and found,

Love, beyond the seas of death,

Love, immortally re-crowned,

Love, who swayest this mortal breath,

Sweetlier to thy lover's ear

Steals the tale that ne'er was told;

Bright-eyes, ah, thine arms are near,

Nearer now than e'er of old.

When on earth thy hands were mine,

Mine to hold for evermore,

Oft we watched the sunset shine

Lonely from this wave-beat shore;

Pent in prison-cells of clay,

Time had power on thee and me:

Thou and heaven are one to-day,

One with earth and sky and sea;

Indivisible and one!

Beauty hath unlocked the Gate,

Oped the portals of the sun,

Burst the bars of Time and Fate!

Violets in the dawn of Spring

Hold the secret of thine eyes:

Lilies bare their breasts and fling

Scents of thee from Paradise.

Brooklets have thy talk by rote;

Thy farewells array the West;

Fur that clasped thee round the throat

Leaps--a squirrel--to its nest!

Backward from a sparkling eye

Half-forgotten jests return

Where the rabbit lollops by

Hurry-scurry through the fern!

Roses where I lonely pass

Brush my brow and breathe thy kiss:

Zephyrs, whispering through the grass,

Lure me on from bliss to bliss:

Here thy robe is rustling close,

There thy fluttering lace is blown,--

All the tide of beauty flows

Tributary to thine own.

Birds that sleek their shining throats

Capture every curve from thee:

All their golden warbled notes,

Fragments of thy melody,

Crowding, clustering, one by one,

Build it upward, spray by spray,

Till the lavrock in the sun

Pours thy rapture down the day.

Silver birch and purple pine,

Crumpled fern and crimson rose,

Flash to feel their beauty thine,

Clasp and fold thee, warm and close:

Every beat and gleam of wings

Holds thee in its bosom furled;

All that chatters, laughs, and sings,

Darts thy sparkle round the world.

_Love, so strangely lost and found,

Love, beyond the seas of death,

Love, immortally re-crowned,

Love, who swayest this mortal breath,

Sweetlier to thy lover's ear

Steals the tale that ne'er was told;

Bright eyes, ah, thine arms are near,

Nearer now than e'er of old._

THE RETURN

O, hedges white with laughing may,

O, meadows where we met,

This heart of mine will break to-day

Unless ye, too, forget.

Breathe not so sweet, breathe not so sweet,

But swiftly let me pass

Across the fields that felt her feet

In the old time that was.

A year ago, but one brief year,

O, happy flowering land,

We wandered here and whispered there,

And hand was warm in hand.

O, crisp white clouds beyond the hill,

O, lavrock in the skies,

Why do ye all remember still

Her bright uplifted eyes.

Red heather on the windy moor,

Wild thyme beside the way,

White jasmine by the cottage door,

Harden your hearts to-day.

Smile not so kind, smile not so kind,

Thou happy haunted place,

Or thou wilt strike these poor eyes blind

With her remembered face.

REMEMBRANCE

O, unforgotten lips, grey haunting eyes,

Soft curving cheeks and heart-remembered brow,

It is all true, the old love never dies;

And, parted, we must meet for ever now.

We did not think it true! We did not think

Love meant this universal cry of pain,

This crown of thorn, this vinegar to drink,

This lonely crucifixion o'er again.

Yet through the darkness of the sleepless night

Your tortured face comes meekly answering mine;

Dumb, but I know why those mute lips are white;

Dark, but I know why those dark lashes shine.

O, love, love, love, what death can set us free

From this implacable ghost of memory?

A PRAYER

Only a little, O Father, only to rest

Or ever the night comes and the eternal sleep,

Only to rest a little, a little to weep

In the dead love's pitiful arms, on the dead love's breast,

A little to loosen the frozen fountains, to free

Rivers of blood and tears that should slacken the pulse

Of this pitiless heart, and appease these pangs that convulse

Body and soul; oh, out of Eternity,

A moment to whisper, only a moment to tell

My dead, my dead, what words are so helpless to say--

The dreams unuttered, the prayers no passion could pray,

And then--the eternal sleep or the pains of hell,

I could welcome them, Father, gladly as ever a child

Laying his head on the pillow might turn to his rest

And remember in dreams, as the hand of the mother is prest

On his hair, how the Pitiful blessed him of old and smiled.

LOVE'S GHOST

I

Thy house is dark and still: I stand once more

Beside the marble door.

It opens as of old: thy pale, pale face

Peers thro' the narrow space:

Thy hands are mine, thy hands are mine to hold,

Just as of old.

II

"Hush! hush! or God will hear us! Ah, speak low

As Love spake long ago."

"Sweet, sweet, are these thine arms, thy breast, thy hair

Assuaging my despair,

Assuaging the long thirst, quenching the tears

Of all these years?

III

"Thy house is deep and still: God cannot hear;

Sweet, have no fear!

Are not thy cold lips crushed against my kiss?

Love gives us this,

Not God;" but "Ah," she moans, "God hears us; speak,

Speak low, hide cheek on cheek."

IV

Oh then what eager whisperings, hoarded long,

Sweeter than any song,

What treasured news to tell, what hopes, what fears,

Gleaned from the barren years,

What raptures wrung from out the heart of pain,

What wild farewells again!

V

Whose pity is this? Ah, quick, one kiss! Once more

Closes the marble door!

I grope here in the darkness all alone.

Across the cold white stone,

Over thy tomb, a sudden starlight gleams:

Death gave me this--in dreams.

ON A RAILWAY PLATFORM

A drizzle of drifting rain

And a blurred white lamp o'erhead,

That shines as my love will shine again

In the world of the dead.

Round me the wet black night,

And, afar in the limitless gloom,

Crimson and green, two blossoms of light,

Two stars of doom.

But the night of death is aflare

With a torch of back-blown fire,

And the coal-black deeps of the quivering air

Rend for my soul's desire.

Leap, heart, for the pulse and the roar

And the lights of the streaming train

That leaps with the heart of thy love once more

Out of the mist and the rain.

Out of the desolate years

The thundering pageant flows;

But I see no more than a window of tears

Which her face has turned to a rose.

OXFORD REVISITED

Changed and estranged, like a ghost, I pass the familiar portals,

Echoing now like a tomb, they accept me no more as of old;

Yet I go wistfully onward, a shade thro' a kingdom of mortals

Wanting a face to greet me, a hand to grasp and to hold.

Hardly I know as I go if the beautiful City is only

Mocking me under the moon, with its streams and its willows agleam,

Whether the City or friends or I that am friendless and lonely,

Whether the boys that go by or the time-worn towers be the dream;

Whether the walls that I know, or the unknown fugitive faces,

Faces like those that I loved, faces that haunt and waylay,

Faces so like and unlike, in the dim unforgettable places,

Startling the heart into sickness that aches with the sweet of

the May,--

Whether all these or the world with its wars be the wandering shadows!

Ah, sweet over green-gloomed waters the may hangs, crimson and white;

And quiet canoes creep down by the warm gold dusk of the meadows,

Lapping with little splashes and ripples of silvery light.

Others as I have returned: I shall see the old faces to-morrow,

Down by the gay-coloured barges, alert for the throb of the oars,

Wanting to row once again, or tenderly jesting with sorrow

Up the old stairways and noting the strange new names on the doors.

Is it a dream? And I know not nor care if there be an awaking

Ever at all any more, for the years that have torn us apart,

Few, so few as they are, will ever be rending and breaking:

Sooner by far than I knew have they wrought this change for my heart!

Well; I grow used to it now! Could the dream but remain and for ever,

With the flowers round the grey quadrangle laughing as time grows old!

For the waters go down to the sea, but the sky still gleams on the river!

We plucked them--but there shall be lilies, ivory lilies and gold.

And still, in the beautiful City, the river of life is no duller,

Only a little strange as the eighth hour dreamily chimes,

In the City of friends and echoes, ribbons and music and colour,

Lilac and blossoming chestnut, willows and whispering limes.

Over the Radcliffe Dome the moon as the ghost of a flower

Weary and white awakes in the phantom fields of the sky:

The trustful shepherded clouds are asleep over steeple and tower,

Dark under Magdalen walls the Cher like a dream goes by.

Back, we come wandering back, poor ghosts, to the home that one misses

Out in the shelterless world, the world that was heaven to us then,

Back from the coil and the vastness, the stars and the boundless abysses,

Like monks from a pilgrimage stealing in bliss to their cloisters

again.

City of dreams that we lost, accept now the gift we inherit--

Love, such a love as we knew not of old in the blaze of our noon,

We that have found thee at last, half City, half heavenly Spirit,

While over a mist of spires the sunset mellows the moon.

THE THREE SHIPS

(_To an old Tune_)

I

As I went up the mountain-side,

The sea below me glittered wide,

And, Eastward, far away, I spied

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,

The three great ships that take the tide

On Christmas Day in the morning.

II

Ye have heard the song, how these must ply

From the harbours of home to the ports o' the sky!

Do ye dream none knoweth the whither and why

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,

The three great ships go sailing by

On Christmas Day in the morning?

III

Yet, as I live, I never knew

That ever a song could ring so true,

Till I saw them break thro' a haze of blue

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day;

And the marvellous ancient flags they flew

On Christmas Day in the morning!

IV

From the heights above the belfried town

I saw that the sails were patched and brown,

But the flags were a-flame with a great renown

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,

And on every mast was a golden crown

On Christmas Day in the morning.

V

Most marvellous ancient ships were these!

Were their prows a-plunge to the Chersonese?

For the pomp of Rome or the glory of Greece,

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,

Were they out on a quest for the Golden Fleece

On Christmas Day in the morning?

VI

And the sun and the wind they told me there

How goodly a load the three ships bear,

For the first is gold and the second is myrrh

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day;

And the third is frankincense most rare

On Christmas Day in the morning.

VII

They have mixed their shrouds with the golden sky,

They have faded away where the last dreams die ...

Ah yet, will ye watch, when the mist lifts high

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day?

Will ye see three ships come sailing by

On Christmas Day in the morning?

SLUMBER-SONGS OF THE MADONNA

PRELUDE

Dante saw the great white Rose

Half unclose;

Dante saw the golden bees

Gathering from its heart of gold

Sweets untold,

Love's most honeyed harmonies.

Dante saw the threefold bow

Strangely glow,

Saw the Rainbow Vision rise,

And the Flame that wore the crown

Bending down

O'er the flowers of Paradise.

Something yet remained, it seems;

In his dreams

Dante missed--as angels may

In their white and burning bliss--

Some small kiss

Mortals meet with every day.

Italy in splendour faints

'Neath her saints!

O, her great Madonnas, too,

Faces calm as any moon

Glows in June,

Hooded with the night's deep blue!

What remains? I pass and hear

Everywhere,

Ay, or see in silent eyes

Just the song she still would sing

Thus--a-swing

O'er the cradle where He lies.

I

Sleep, little baby, I love thee.

Sleep, little king, I am bending above thee.

How should I know what to sing

Here in my arms as I swing thee to sleep?

Hushaby low,

Rockaby so,

Kings may have wonderful jewels to bring,

Mother has only a kiss for her king!

Why should my singing so make me to weep?

Only I know that I love thee, I love thee,

Love thee, my little one, sleep.

II

Is it a dream? Ah yet, it seems

Not the same as other dreams!

I can but think that angels sang,

When thou wast born, in the starry sky,

And that their golden harps out-rang

While the silver clouds went by!

The morning sun shuts out the stars,

Which are much loftier than the sun;

But, could we burst our prison-bars

And find the Light whence light begun,

The dreams that heralded thy birth

Were truer than the truths of earth;

And, by that far immortal Gleam,

Soul of my soul, I still would dream!

A ring of light was round thy head,

The great-eyed oxen nigh thy bed

Their cold and innocent noses bowed!

Their sweet breath rose like an incense cloud

In the blurred and mystic lanthorn light.

About the middle of the night

The black door blazed like some great star

With a glory from afar,

Or like some mighty chrysolite

Wherein an angel stood with white

Blinding arrowy bladed wings

Before the throne of the King of kings;

And, through it, I could dimly see

A great steed tethered to a tree.

Then, with crimson gems aflame

Through the door the three kings came,

And the black Ethiop unrolled

The richly broidered cloth of gold,

And pourèd forth before thee there

Gold and frankincense and myrrh!

III

See, what a wonderful smile! Does it mean

That my little one knows of my love?

Was it meant for an angel that passed unseen,

And smiled at us both from above?

Does it mean that he knows of the birds and the flowers

That are waiting to sweeten his childhood's hours,

And the tales I shall tell and the games he will play,

And the songs we shall sing and the prayers we shall pray

In his boyhood's May,

He and I, one day?

IV

For in the warm blue summer weather

We shall laugh and love together:

I shall watch my baby growing,

I shall guide his feet,

When the orange trees are blowing

And the winds are heavy and sweet!

When the orange orchards whiten

I shall see his great eyes brighten

To watch the long-legged camels going

Up the twisted street,

When the orange trees are blowing

And the winds are sweet.

_What does it mean? Indeed, it seems

A dream! Yet not like other dreams!_

We shall walk in pleasant vales,

Listening to the shepherd's song

I shall tell him lovely tales

All day long:

He shall laugh while mother sings

Tales of fishermen and kings.

He shall see them come and go

O'er the wistful sea,

Where rosy oleanders blow

Round blue Lake Galilee,

Kings with fishers' ragged coats

And silver nets across their boats,

Dipping through the starry glow,

With crowns for him and me!

Ah, no;

Crowns for him, not me!

_Rockaby so! Indeed, it seems

A dream! Yet not like other dreams!_

V

Ah, see what a wonderful smile again!

Shall I hide it away in my heart,

To remember one day in a world of pain

When the years have torn us apart,

Little babe,

When the years have torn us apart?

Sleep, my little one, sleep,

Child with the wonderful eyes,

Wild miraculous eyes,

Deep as the skies are deep!

What star-bright glory of tears

Waits in you now for the years

That shall bid you waken and weep?

Ah, in that day, could I kiss you to sleep

Then, little lips, little eyes,

Little lips that are lovely and wise,

Little lips that are dreadful and wise!

VI

Clenched little hands like crumpled roses

Dimpled and dear,

Feet like flowers that the dawn uncloses,

What do I fear?

Little hands, will you ever be clenched in anguish?

White little limbs, will you droop and languish?

Nay, what do I hear?

I hear a shouting, far away,

You shall ride on a kingly palm-strewn way

Some day!

But when you are crowned with a golden crown

And throned on a golden throne,

You'll forget the manger of Bethlehem town

And your mother that sits alone

Wondering whether the mighty king

Remembers a song she used to sing,

Long ago,

"_Rockaby so,

Kings may have wonderful jewels to bring,

Mother has only a kiss for her king_!"...

Ah, see what a wonderful smile, once more!

He opens his great dark eyes!

Little child, little king, nay, hush, it is o'er

My fear of those deep twin skies,--

Little child,

You are all too dreadful and wise!

VII

But now you are mine, all mine,

And your feet can lie in my hand so small,

And your tiny hands in my heart can twine,

And you cannot walk, so you never shall fall,

Or be pierced by the thorns beside the door,

Or the nails that lie upon Joseph's floor;

Through sun and rain, through shadow and shine,

You are mine, all mine!

ENCELADUS

_In the Black Country, from a little window,

Before I slept, across the haggard wastes

Of dust and ashes, I saw Titanic shafts

Like shadowy columns of wan-hope arise

To waste, on the blear sky, their slow sad wreaths

Of smoke, their infinitely sad slow prayers.

Then, as night deepened, the blast-furnaces,

Red smears upon the sulphurous blackness, turned

All that sad region to a City of Dis,

Where naked, sweating giants all night long

Bowed their strong necks, melted flesh, blood and bone,

To brim the dry ducts of the gods of gloom

With terrible rivers, branches of living gold._

_O, like some tragic gesture of great souls

In agony, those awful columns towered

Against the clouds, that city of ash and slag

Assumed the grandeur of some direr Thebes

Arising to the death-chant of those gods,

A dreadful Order climbing from the dark

Of Chaos and Corruption, threatening to take

Heaven with its vast slow storm.

I slept, and dreamed.

And like the slow beats of some Titan heart

Buried beneath immeasurable woes,

The forging-hammers thudded through the dream:_

Huge on a fallen tree,

Lost in the darkness of primeval woods,

Enceladus, earth-born Enceladus,

The naked giant, brooded all alone.

Born of the lower earth, he knew not how,

Born of the mire and clay, he knew not when,

Brought forth in darkness, and he knew not why!

Thus, like a wind, went by a thousand years.

Anhungered, yet no comrade of the wolf,

And cold, but with no power upon the sun,

A master of this world that mastered him!

Thus, like a cloud, went by a thousand years.

_Who_ chained this other giant in his heart

That heaved and burned like Etna? Heavily

He bent his brows and wondered and was dumb.

And, like one wave, a thousand years went by.

He raised his matted head and scanned the stars.

He stood erect! He lifted his uncouth arms!

With inarticulate sounds his uncouth lips

Wrestled and strove--_I am full-fed, and yet

I hunger!

Who set this fiercer famine in my maw?_

_Can I eat moons, gorge on the Milky Way,

Swill sunsets down, or sup the wash of the dawn

Out of the rolling swine-troughs of the sea?

Can I drink oceans, lie beneath the mountains,

And nuzzle their heavy boulders like a cub

Sucking the dark teats of the tigress? Who,

Who set this deeper hunger in my heart?_

And the dark forest echoed--_Who? Ah, who?_

"_I hunger!_"

And the night-wind answered him,

"Hunt, then, for food."

"_I hunger!_"

And the sleek gorged lioness

Drew nigh him, dripping freshly from the kill,

Redder her lolling tongue, whiter her fangs,

And gazed with ignorant eyes of golden flame.

"_I hunger!_"

Like a breaking sea his cry

Swept through the night. Against his swarthy knees

She rubbed the red wet velvet of her ears

With mellow thunders of unweeting bliss,

Purring--_Ah, seek, and you shall find.

Ah, seek, and you shall slaughter, gorge, ah seek,

Seek, seek, you shall feed full, ah seek, ah seek._

Enceladus, earth-born Enceladus,

Bewildered like a desert-pilgrim, saw

A rosy City, opening in the clouds,

The hunger-born mirage of his own heart,

Far, far above the world, a home of gods,

Where One, a goddess, veiled in the sleek waves

Of her deep hair, yet glimmering golden through,

Lifted, with radiant arms, ambrosial food

For hunger such as this! Up the dark hills,

He rushed, a thunder-cloud,

Urged by the famine of his heart. He stood

High on the topmost crags, he hailed the gods

In thunder, and the clouds re-echoed it!

He hailed the gods!

And like a sea of thunder round their thrones

Washing, a midnight sea, his earth-born voice

Besieged the halls of heaven! He hailed the gods!

They laughed, he heard them laugh!

With echo and re-echo, far and wide,

A golden sea of mockery, they laughed!

Enceladus, earth-born Enceladus,

Laid hold upon the rosy Gates of Heaven,

And shook them with gigantic sooty hands,

Asking he knew not what, but not for alms;

And the Gates, opened as in jest;

And, like a sooty jest, he stumbled in.

Round him the gods, the young and scornful gods,

Clustered and laughed to mark the ravaged face,

The brutal brows, the deep and dog-like eyes,

The blunt black nails, and back with burdens bowed.

And, when they laughed, he snarled with uncouth lips

And made them laugh again.

"_Whence comest thou?_"

He could not speak!

How should he speak whose heart within him heaved

And burned like Etna? Through his mouth there came

A sound of ice-bergs in a frozen sea

Of tears, a sullen region of black ice

Rending and breaking, very far away.

They laughed!

He stared at them, bewildered, and they laughed

Again, "_Whence comest thou?_"

He could not speak!

But through his mouth a moan of midnight woods,

Where wild beasts lay in wait to slaughter and gorge,

A moan of forest-caverns where the wolf

Brought forth her litter, a moan of the wild earth

In travail with strange shapes of mire and clay,

Creatures of clay, clay images of the gods,

That hungered like the gods, the most high gods,

But found no food, and perished like the beasts.

And the gods laughed,--

_Art thou, then, such a god?_ And, like a leaf

Unfolding in dark woods, in his deep brain

A sudden memory woke; and like an ape

He nodded, and all heaven with laughter rocked,

While Artemis cried out with scornful lips,--

_Perchance He is the Maker of you all!_

Then, piteously outstretching calloused hands,

He sank upon his knees, his huge gnarled knees,

And echoed, falteringly, with slow harsh tongue,--

_Perchance, perchance, the Maker of you all._

They wept with laughter! And Aphrodite, she,

With keener mockery than white Artemis

Who smiled aloof, drew nigh him unabashed

In all her blinding beauty. Carelessly,

As o'er the brute brows of a stallèd ox

Across that sooty muzzle and brawny breast,

Contemptuously, she swept her golden hair

In one deep wave, a many-millioned scourge

Intolerable and beautiful as fire;

Then turned and left him, reeling, gasping, dumb,

While heaven re-echoed and re-echoed, _See,

Perchance, perchance, the Maker of us all!_

Enceladus, earth-born Enceladus,

Rose to his feet, and with one terrible cry

"_I hunger_," rushed upon the scornful gods

And strove to seize and hold them with his hands,

And still the laughter deepened as they rolled

Their clouds around them, baffling him. But once,

Once with a shout, in his gigantic arms

He crushed a slippery splendour on his breast

And felt on his harsh skin the cool smooth peaks

Of Aphrodite's bosom. One black hand

Slid down the naked snow of her long side

And bruised it where he held her. Then, like snow

Vanishing in a furnace, out of his arms

The splendour suddenly melted, and a roll

Of thunder split the dream, and headlong down

He fell, from heaven to earth; while, overhead

The young and scornful gods--he heard them laugh!--

Toppled the crags down after him. He lay

Supine. They plucked up Etna by the roots

And buried him beneath it. His broad breast

Heaved, like that other giant in his heart,

And through the crater burst his fiery breath,

But could not burst his bonds. And so he lay

Breathing in agony thrice a thousand years.

Then came a Voice, he knew not whence, "Arise,

Enceladus!" And from his heart a crag

Fell, and one arm was free, and one thought free,

And suddenly he awoke, and stood upright,

Shaking the mountains from him like a dream;

And the tremendous light and awful truth

Smote, like the dawn, upon his blinded eyes,

That out of his first wonder at the world,

Out of his own heart's deep humility,

And simple worship, he had fashioned gods

Of cloud, and heaven out of a hollow shell.

And groping now no more in the empty space

Outward, but inward in his own deep heart,

He suddenly felt the secret gates of heaven

Open, and from the infinite heavens of hope

Inward, a voice, from the innermost courts of Love,

Rang--_Thou shall have none other gods but Me._

Enceladus, the foul Enceladus,

When the clear light out of that inward heaven

Whose gates are only inward in the soul,

Showed him that one true Kingdom, said,

"I will stretch

My hands out once again. And, as the God

That made me is the Heart within my heart,

So shall my heart be to this dust and earth

A god and a creator. I will strive

With mountains, fires and seas, wrestle and strive,

Fashion and make, and that which I have made

In anguish I shall love as God loves me."

_In the Black Country, from a little window,

Waking at dawn, I saw those giant Shafts

--O great dark word out of our elder speech,

Long since the poor man's kingly heritage--

The Shapings, the dim Sceptres of Creation,

The Shafts like columns of wan-hope arise

To waste, on the blear sky, their slow sad wreaths

Of smoke, their infinitely sad slow prayers.

Then, as the dawn crimsoned, the sordid clouds,

The puddling furnaces, the mounds of slag,

The cinders, and the sand-beds and the rows

Of wretched roofs, assumed a majesty

Beyond all majesties of earth or air;

Beauty beyond all beauty, as of a child

In rags, upraised thro' the still gold of heaven,

With wasted arms and hungering eyes, to bring

The armoured seraphim down upon their knees

And teach eternal God humility;

The solemn beauty of the unfulfilled

Moving towards fulfilment on a height

Beyond all heights; the dreadful beauty of hope;

The naked wrestler struggling from the rock

Under the sculptor's chisel; the rough mass

Of clay more glorious for the poor blind face

And bosom that half emerge into the light,

More glorious and august, even in defeat,

Than that too cold dominion God foreswore

To bear this passionate universal load,

This Calvary of Creation, with mankind._

IN THE COOL OF THE EVENING

I

In the cool of the evening, when the low sweet whispers waken,

When the labourers turn them homeward, and the weary have their will,

When the censers of the roses o'er the forest-aisles are shaken,

Is it but the wind that cometh o'er the far green hill?

II

For they say 'tis but the sunset winds that wander through the heather,

Rustle all the meadow-grass and bend the dewy fern;

They say 'tis but the winds that bow the reeds in prayer together,

And fill the shaken pools with fire along the shadowy burn.

III

In the beauty of the twilight, in the Garden that He loveth,

They have veiled His lovely vesture with the darkness of a name!

Thro' His Garden, thro' His Garden it is but the wind that moveth,

No more; but O, the miracle, the miracle is the same!

IV

In the cool of the evening, when the sky is an old story

Slowly dying, but remembered, ay, and loved with passion still,

Hush!... the fringes of His garment, in the fading golden glory,

Softly rustling as He cometh o'er the far green hill.

A ROUNDHEAD'S RALLYING SONG

I

How beautiful is the battle,

How splendid are the spears,

When our banner is the sky

And our watchword _Liberty_,

And our kingdom lifted high above the years.

II

How purple shall our blood be,

How glorious our scars,

When we lie there in the night

With our faces full of light

And the death upon them smiling at the stars.

III

How golden is our hauberk,

And steel, and steel our sword,

And our shield without a stain

As we take the field again,

We whose armour is the armour of the Lord!

VICISTI, GALILÆE

"The shrines are dust, the gods are dead,"

They cried in ancient Rome!

"Ah yet, the Idalian rose is red,