You tell our doubts in twilight strain;
Untouched by man’s perennial pain,
You give some echo of his grief;
Or so we dream. The very wind
Serves at the soul’s aeolian chords;
Rulers dismayed, uncertain lords,
In all we find, ourselves we find.
But you escape the nets of care.
Whither at last my feet shall go
I know not: from your song I know
You find the truth, and find it fair.
JUSTICE
Nila the youth, first-born, whose father’s name
Was honored in his market-place of Ind,
Loved Unda, and the dreaming twain, betrothed,
Waited the springtide and their marriage-rites.
The springtide came, but Nila’s joy came not,
For she, the girl that was to be his bride,
Was ravished from her lover, kin and home--
Prey to the bull-necked Rajah on the hill.
Then Nila, heedless of his father’s hope,
Vanished. Anon before the palace gate
That looked across the palm-tops to the south,
And whence the road ran eastward to the town,
There sat one cowled, a grey and mournful shape,
Who spoke not, and was deemed, for silence, saint,--
Who lived upon the offerings of the poor,
And gave no sign, nor vision of his face,
To slave nor councillor. “For,” said the youth,
“It well may be that on some day she fare
Forth to the temple, or to other ends:
And I, shall I not know her as she goes,
Tho’ jewelled curtains hide the loyal face?
Aye! but to be as near to her as now
And do her service once in all my days
Were better than despair. Yet if men find
That I am Nila, they may well discern
Wherefore I wait, and so the Rajah know,
Or, at the least, my kindred draw me hence.”
He waiting, season after season came
With weal and woe unto the sons of men--
The time of sowing and the time to reap,
Summer, and crashing of the winter rain,
And plague and famine, gods that slew unseen.
He heard the stars plot evil unto man,
And saw the baleful meteor float to light
And many suns look down upon man’s pain.
The days had each their will of him. The years
Wrought as with cunning chisels. Gaunt he grew,
A silent watcher by the carven gate,
And saw his kind go in and forth again,
But never one whose coming, with a thrill,
Sang to his heart: “Lo! I am even she!”
Hooded, unknown, so sat he ’mid the crows--
Sear as the summer, grey as any rain--
And watched the flowers’ birth and death, and heard
The sparrows’ song of mating, or the din
Where the shrill apes held council in the grove.
Often, in dreams that broke his daytime’s dream,
He somehow, somewhere, found the long-betrothed,
Far-wandered too in sleep’s Elysium,
And clasped her form, and kissed her deathless lips,
Hushed, in some garden of eternal dews;
Then woke to silence and the dark, save where
In one lean tower gleamed a shrouded lamp,
Like some red planet still among the stars,
Or, hung above the temple to the south,
The failing lanthorn of the moon ... Far off
A jackal barked ... A whisper touched the wind.
So for two score of years his vigil ran,
Unbroken save for slumber, till his hope,
More faint at last, for all his hungering,
Than shadows cast by firstling moons, was fled.
But in the dust and detriments of noon,
And in the midnight, still he longed for her,
As, day by day, the marring seasons passed,
Heedless of his despair. And yet he dreamt,
Sustained by that which man must find at last--
Patience, his answer to the sneer of Hell.
Often he whispered prayer, and, in his age,
Spoke unto children and to ancient men,
But craved no word of her he loved, in dread
Lest he be told her death. Then broke a day
Whereon a hush seemed come to mortal things.
A scarlet flower opened, near at hand,
Scentless. Far up, he saw a lonely cloud,
Cold-purple, like a bruise upon the sky.
A restless wind plucked at the parent dust,
And all the apes were silent in the grove.
And Nila knew his end was near, and felt
His soul rise wearily and welcome Death.
Then one came forth from out the palace gate--
Broken and desolate with foul-eyed age,
And sat near by, nor held at all her peace,
Lamenting o’er some matter of a hen.
Whereat said Nila: “Woman, hast thou word
Of one whom, long ago, the Rajah tore
From lover and from kin--of her whose name
Was Unda?” Then the crone bent low her head
And pondered, reaching back to years agone,
As one that in the darkness of the sea
Gropes for a sunken gem. At last she spoke,
Saying, “So long! So long ago! And yet
Do I remember Unda, for alone
Of all her band she mourned, nor would be still;
Wherefore our lord at last was wroth with her
And put her forth, for that she ever wept,
By the northern gate, forbidding that she turn
Again unto her kindred. And some say
That she within the jungle perished, some
That to a city of the west she fared
And dwelt in shame. Doubtless she long is dead.”
And Nila gazed upon the land and sky,
Woven for man’s illusion, and beheld
The scarlet petals fallen from their stem.
The cloud had gone; the wind was fled away.
And Nila turned him from the veils of Time,
And bowed his head, and murmured: “God is just.”
THE FLEET
Stand fast! Though steel on clanging steel
Make the contending turret reel;
Though stern as Hell the battle-blast,
From merciless horizons cast--
Annihilation’s breath--
Thunder no word but “Death!”
Yea! though the blind sea rave
And all its gulfs gape eager as the grave,
Sure of your flesh at last,
O human hearts! stand fast!
And though untested nerve and sinew shrink,
Trapped and astounded at the final brink--
Tho’ hostile guns the march to silence toll,
Beyond it lies the goal,
And past the moment’s tremor smiles the soul.
O brother hearts and brave,
We know you strong to save,
And strong to serve the Star
That past the dusk of war
Imperishable gleams.
And O! how little seems
The price of death men wait so glad to pay
To hold undesecrated every ray!
To serve thro’ many nights
The youngest of the Lights
Until it burns sublime
From uncontested heights--
The whitest beacon on the coasts of Time!
Behold her, our dear country, where she stands
Beneath the unconquered skies,
The sword and trumpet in her sheathéd hands,
But mercy in her eyes!
Behold before her gates
That bar the loyal sea,
Foaming upon her threshholds ceaselessly,
Each messenger that waits
Armed for conclusive fates--
Angels of death made mighty to fulfil
’Mid thunderings her will!
Behold all these and know her wisdom’s length,
Her beauty and her strength,
And know that farther skies
Age-hence shall see her rise,
Hesperus of the high and starry plan
When nations sit unarmored at the feast,
Of freedom, West and East,
Leagued in the deathless faith of men with Man.
REMORSE
At the sea’s verge, near Cypress Point, in Monterey County, the
rain, wind, sun and sea have shaped a crag of the Santa Lucian
granite into the form of a cowled or crowned figure, bent above the
surf.
Prelate or king (the twilight tells not which),
Thou crouchest, silent, by the bitter sea.
Immovable, immortal and alone,
Abidest thou, and in thy stony ears
The changeless moaning of the ancient deep
Is less than prayer to Fate. The flaming noon
Warms, and the spectral mists of evening chill:
Thou heedest not, lapt in granitic dreams,
Nor hast a glance for setting moon or star.
What was thy crime? How long thy bleak remorse?
For never venial sin had strength to bind
In trance so grim despair so terrible.
Gaze! but the stainless wave shall not assoil!
Listen! but ever in thy soul must ring
The ghostly death-cry of a Cause betrayed,--
An empire lost, a people cast to doom!
So might the Spirit of our tragic orb
Behold, aghast with years, its fell result,
And, blinded with the vision he had wrought,
And dumb with clamors frozen at his heart,
Ponder, unpitied by Eternity,
Above the rising sea of human tears.
MOONLIGHT IN THE PINES
Full-starred, seraphic Night arose,
Lifting the Pleiades’ dim lyre
Above that solitude where glows
Rose-red Aldebaran’s fire.
Mute, ere the darkness could forget
The crystal hour of evening’s trance,
I felt the little winds that set
The mirrored stars a-dance
On restless leaves I heard them pass
To touch the yellow vines that lay
Like paler pythons in the grass,
Beside a lonely way.
To forest glades at last it led,
By Silence chosen as her own:
The pines’ soft sighing overhead
Seemed but her whispers flown.
Scarcely it seemed to cross the bound
Where she, aloof, stood sorceress--
That twilight where the feet of sound
Pass unto nothingness.
A little weary of the speech
Of burdened man and troubled sea,
I stood and dreamed that time would teach
Her dream of peace to me,
And, awed by the communing night,
Forgot the haggard world withdrawn,
Ere on my face there fell a light
As of a spectral dawn.
It gleamed beyond the barring pine--
That shattered silver of the moon--
The midnight’s asphodels divine
On field and woodland strewn.
Among the lesser trees it lay
Like veiled and pallid ghosts that slept,
About whose forms, as in dismay,
The fearful shadows crept.
But o’er the dale where Silence stood,
With tranquil dews austerely crowned,
A wilder glory touched the wood,--
A sense of things profound.
And subtlier on the enchanted air
The moonlight’s nacre seemed to melt,
While mosses like a witch’s hair
Stirred to a wind unfelt.
And, like a messenger of night,
Mystical, ominous and slow,
A fragile moth, in purposed flight,
Went past on wings of snow.
It may have been that elder pow’rs
Stood, immaterial, in the glade;
Perchance the moon’s phantasmal flow’rs
At shrines unseen were laid.
For in those isles it seemed there shone
Forsaken marbles, pure and cold--
The gleam of altars overthrown
And ghostly fanes of old.
And since that hour the night can thrill
With haunting chords by day unstirred,
And Beauty’s lips, refusing still,
Move with a secret word.
AT THE GRAVE OF SERRA
’Tis midnight, and the Eagle seeks the sea,
Which, near at hand, eternally intones
Its woe immeasurable. Thro the pane
Of yonder casement giving on the south,
The moonlight holds a chill and gleaming shaft
Above the grave where Serra sleeps. O heart!
Flaming, audacious heart, so long in dust!
’Twas thy reward to die ere died thy works,
To perish, ere the Vision too was fled.
The vineyard and the orchard and the fold
Have passed, and passed as well that other Flock
Thy tenderest concern, O spirit pure!
Who, in an age of infamy and gold
Saw souls alone. The timbers of thy fane
Have men at last renewed; but where are they,
The humble, dusky thousands of thy care?
One mould with thee! About thy place of sleep
The futile, peering pleasure-seekers come,
Glance, and forget. Thy kin in Christ draw near,
Little in numbers now, and less in faith;
For where the faith that grasped thee like a hand
And led thee on to peril and to pain?
The lamp burns low. They ask for them a sign.
Thou Power unseen whose hands implacable
Close in despair what man begins in hope,--
Unto what end, O Fate! unto what end
Dost thou hale forth on quests irradiant
Thy nobler sons? Is duty but a jest,
Seeing its guerdon given? In thy sight
Is Goodness even as Evil? Shall she find
Her wages also death? Wilt thou deride
Our ancient search for justice in thy ways?
With bitter viands evermore appease
Our hunger and our thirst for righteousness?
Dost fashion beauty for a moth’s desire,
And sow thee life to garner thee but dust?
The soundless grave is not more still than Thou,
The moon less husht in heaven ... About my feet
The shadows change ... I hear the unchanging sea.
WHITE MAGIC
Keep ye her brow with starshine crost
And bind with ghostly light her hair,
O powers benign, lest I accost
Song’s peaceless angel unaware!
One eve her whisper came to earth,
As eastward woke a thorny star,
To tell me of her kingdom’s worth
And what her liberations are:
She hath the Edens in her gift
And songs of sovereignties unborn;
In realms agone her turrets lift,
Wrought from the purples of the morn.
Where swings to foam the dusky sea,
She waits with sapphires in her hand
Whose light shall make thy spirit be
Lost in a still, enchanted land.
Musing, she hears the subtle tunes
From chords where faery fingers stray--
A rain of pearl from crumbling moons
Less clear and delicate than they.
The strain we lost and could not find
Think we her haunted heart forgets?
She weaves it with a troubled wind
And twilight music that regrets.
Often she stands, unseen, aloof,
To watch beside an ocean’s brink
The gorgeous, evanescent woof
Cast from the loom of suns that sink.
Often, in eyries of the West,
She waits a lover from afar--
Frailties of blossom on her breast
And o’er her brow the evening star.
She stands to greet him unaware,
Who cannot find her if he seek:
A sigh, a scent of heavenly hair--
And oh, her breath is on his cheek!
THREE SONNETS BY THE NIGHT SEA
I
Surely the dome of unremembered nights
Was heavy with those stars! The peaceless sea,
Casting in foam their fallen shafts to me
Makes ancient music to their awful heights.
O quenchless and insuperable lights!
What life shall meet your gaze and thence go free
From litten midnights of eternity
To havens open to your final flights?
Abides nor goal nor ultimate of peace,
Nor lifts a beacon on the cosmic deep
To guide our wandering world on seas sublime,
Nor any night to grant the soul release,
Swung as a pendulum from life to sleep,
From sleep to life, from Timelessness to Time.
II
Now, as I hear upon the caverned night
The ocean’s ceaseless and stupendous dirge,
And one by one the stars approach its verge,
The deep seems all one prayer, and the light
Of farthest suns but questions for the sight
Of men who yet may test the Dark, to urge
Life’s portent from the starlight and the surge,
And read the ancient Mystery aright.
Do blinded powers from their darkness seek,
Thro human sight, that secret to attain?
From fonts how distant is the spirit fed?
And who are we? And is it we who speak
The Why we utter to the night of pain,
The Whither to the unresponding dead?
III
Thou seemest inexhaustible, O sea!
And infinite of nature; yet I know
That by divine permission could we go
Within thy sealed and silent deeps, and be
Of all thy glooms and treasuries made free,
The soul at last each marvel would outgrow,
Till each were vain as festal fires that glow
Beneath the stars’ immortal scrutiny.
And were all alien worlds and suns laid bare
Till Mystery their secret should declare,
The finite soon its utmost would impart,
And sun nor world at last have power to thrill
Man’s wayward and insatiable heart,
Which God and all His truth alone can fill.
AFTER THE STORM
O turquoise morn!
Had earth a sorrow?
The happy larks, sing they
To-day or yesterday,
Or some enchanted morrow
And winds unborn?
To slopes of green,
Only the brook can tell--
In low, elusive tones
On smooth and fluting stones--
Where flow the rains that fell
By night, unseen.
Ghost-moon, what way
Wouldst thou be riding?
On day’s blue diamond
Thou art a flaw! Beyond,
I know, the stars are hiding,
Ere dusk betray.
I would not see;
For now the day is new,
And now a yellow flow’r
Suffices to the hour--
That, and a star of dew
It hoards for me.
THE HARLOT’S WAKENING
Ere dawn a spirit took my hand,
And once again, a joyous child,
I roamed an unforgotten land
Of orchards fresh and mild.
How fair the apple-blossoms were!
How cool the long-delaying breeze!
Where, half-asleep, I heard the stir
And hum of happy bees.
Clear in the meadow ran the brook,
From pool to pool, in liquid grace,
A glass o’er which I bent to look
At my enmirrored face--
A girlish face, with placid brow
All-innocent of care and hate,--
With eyes I cannot fathom now
And lips undesecrate.
My sister’s laugh, my brother’s call--
So would the morning larks rejoice!
But nearer, dearer far than all,
I heard my mother’s voice.
Her voice? Or did a music break
Across the street’s harsh sea
Whose thunder deepens? Christ! I wake
To miserable me!
THE MIDGES
Alcon, the wood-god, wandering his realm,
Found his son Astries in the meadowland
At sunset, squatted on a fallen pine
And much intent upon a swarm of gnats.
To whom the godling: “Father, I have stayed
This hour to wonder at yon tiny folk,
Who dart, and hum, and make so much a-do,
Mad with the sunlight. What it is they seek
And whom they praise, and why, I do not know;
But as the hour grows old, and twilight hills
Put on the purple, this I see--that they
With wilder zeal do dash this way and that,
And where each in a foot of space had range,
Now flits he two, and shriller grows the cry,
Larger the host, and greater its concern.
Dost note?” Whereat brown Alcon plucked a root
And beat it on the pine, and briefly spake:
“Aye! aye! they call it ‘progress’!” And the sun
Sank on the forest, and the night was chill.
TO AMBROSE BIERCE
I saw a statue in the market-place--
The guerdon of a life of noble toil.
Austerely shone the marble that should foil
Oblivion, tho’ the desecrated base,
Round which the sullen huckster trod, bore trace
Of dogs’ defilement--transitory moil
That expiating rains would soon assoil;
But oh, the sunlight on that tranquil face!
What to the Titan were the mindless deed,
Mire-born, and swiftly with the mire made one?
No more than could the marble couldst thou heed
The mongrel, and the hate of souls uncouth--
Thou eagle who hast gazed upon the sun
And canst endure the light which is the truth!
TO HALL B. RAND
Happy the man whose age attains
Repute and rank among the best!
Whose soul no breath of rumor stains
Nor hath remorse for daily guest.
On him the years as laurels sit,
For Duty at his side hath stood;
Thro him the grateful gods permit
A living witness unto good.
Him shall the love of men surround,
And wisdom shield from darker cares,
Who virtue to the end hath found
And honor whiter than his hairs.
TO VERNON L. KELLOGG
’Tis well, that man is slow to cry “Alas!”--
That Nature’s heart seems eager to atone
For music often ending in a moan
By silence tender with the peace it has;
But ever, as on morning ways I pass,
I see the fields with hints of terror sown--
A tuft of fur, or small and bleaching bone,
Or heap of little feathers in the grass.
How fares it with the lesser wards of life?--
Always they seem so restless, so alert.
Is fear to them an unrelenting care--
The spirit of that dumb and ravenous strife
No Power will justify and none avert?
And in the deep--’tis well we see not there!
CHARLES WARREN STODDARD
O Muse! within thy western hall,
To mellow chord and crystal string,
At many harps thy chosen sing:
His was the gentlest soul of all.
He sang not as the leaping faun
By voiceless rivers cool and clear,
Nor yet as chants the visioned seer
When darkness trembles with the dawn.
A milder music held his lyre--
A wistful strain, all human-sweet,
Between the ashes at our feet
And stars that pass in alien fire.
His skies were sombre, but he lit
His garden with a lamp of gold,
Where tropic laughters left untold
The sadness buried in his wit.
Lonely, he harbored to the last
A boyish spirit, large and droll;
Tardy of flesh and swift of soul,
He walked with angels of the Past.
With tears his laurels still are wet;
But now we smile, whose hearts have known
The fault that harmed himself alone,--
The art that left a world in debt.
Of all he said, I best recall:
“He knows the sky who knows the sod,
And he who loves a flower, loves God.”
Sky, flower and sod, he loved them all.
From all he wrote (not for his day),
A sense of marvel drifts to me--
Of morning on a purple sea,
And fragrant islands far away.
THE ASHES IN THE SEA
N. M. F.
Whither, with blue and pleading eyes,--
Whither, with cheeks that held the light
Of winter’s dawn on cloudless skies,
Evadne, was thy flight?
Such as a sister’s was thy brow;
Thy hair seemed fallen from the moon--
Part of its radiance, as now
Of shifting tide and dune.
Did Autumn’s grieving lure thee hence,
Or silence ultimate beguile?
Ever our things of consequence
Awakened but thy smile.
Is it with thee that ocean takes
A stranger sorrow to its tone?
With thee the star of evening wakes
More beautiful, more lone?
For wave and hill and sky betray
A subtle tinge and touch of thee;
Thy shadow lingers in the day,
Thy voice in winds to be.
Beauty--hast thou discovered her
By deeper seas no moons control?
What stars have magic now to stir
Thy swift and wilful soul?
Or may thy heart no more forget
The grievous world that once was home,
That here, where love awaits thee yet,
Thou seemest yet to roam?
For most, far-wandering, I guess
Thy witchery on the haunted mind,
In valleys of thy loneliness,
Made clean with ocean’s wind.
And most thy presence here seems told,
A waif of elemental deeps,
When, at its vigils unconsoled,
Some night of winter weeps.
THE FORTY-THIRD CHAPTER OF JOB
1. Moreover, the Lord made question of Job, and asked,
2. To what end dost thou search Me, seeing that My wisdom is not as
thine?
3. Shalt thou question My ways, or have dreams concerning My
justice? Am not I the Lord?
4. Who hath strange laughter, Whose judgments are not as those of
the elders;
5. Who leadeth the lamb from the den of the she-wolf, and armies to
the quicksand;
6. Who slayeth the prince in his youth, and rulers at their
marriage-feast, but maketh the slave to grow old in his bondage;
7. Whose rains go forth on bitter waters, tho the land thirsteth;
Who delivereth thee from the javelin thou beholdest not;
8. Who maketh the king in his secret place and him that the
vultures did devour to sleep the same sleep;
9. Who confoundeth the sea, but leadeth the ant to her desire.
10. Have not I sharpened the beak of the kite against the day of
thy hope; the raven’s beak against the eyes of thy young men?
11. I shall bar thee from thy joy with a thread of gossamer; I
shall bind thy sin to thy children’s children with ropes of
adamant.
12. The rock is a bolt for My treasure-house. Thou knockest in vain
upon the doors thereof.
13. Who art thou that eternity should hold parley with thee, or the
pits of the sky be thy fortress?
14. Thou abidest in My sight as the smoke of a sacrifice, or as the
grey moth in the conspection of the stars.
15. What hast thou if thou hast not Me? Thou takest to thee strange
wine, and the kiss of the asp that it comfort thee.
16. Awake, let it be always day with thee! Know that I am the Lord,
17. Who ordaineth His truth as the mountains, and the dust as stars
that conceive;
18. Who teacheth fear with an arrow, and bitter wisdom to thy young
men of war;
19. Who boundeth pain by peace, and setteth a term unto love;
20. Who hath no truce with the day, and slayeth the dark with the
sword of mighty mornings;
21. Who buildeth the house of life with colored beams, and the
house of death without a door;
22. Who hath set harps in hell, and given pure gold for the winding
sheet of kings;
23. By Whose breath are the Signs shaken; as a swarm of gnats are
they troubled by the wind of His passing;
24. Who yoketh stars to His harrow, and the whirlwind to drag his
plough on great waters.
25. Take counsel of Me; behold what shapes I have set as My
servants.
26. The sun is a coal of My hearth, the moon an ember that I have
quenched;
27. Shall not I make her a desolation, and a rock where devils
worship?
28. Shall not My gulfs conceive, and Mine angels whet their scythes
against the day of My reaping?
29. Be thou abased, for they are yet unborn that shall lay thee
out; the worm is unhatched that shall consume thee.
30. Wilt thou hold forth to Me thy heart in thy hand; or turn for
Me its leaves that thou hast writ?
31. Thy wisdom profiteth thee nothing, neither the guards within
thy citadels.
32. Shall I consider for long the mighty, or the habitations of the
strong?
33. Behold! blood shall be in their courts for wine, and the
moaning of their concubines for the voice of the viol.
34. I shall break their temples as a shard; their high pillars
shall be snapt as a bow-string.
35. My tempests shall neigh in the walled cities; My grass shall
lift up her sword against them;
36. The toad shall be judge there; the jackal shall collect the
tax;
37. The owl shall feed her young on their altars; the dung of lions
shall be thereon for a testimony.
38. Wert thou upon the flint when I confirmed it, or upon the
granite when I laid its sheets?
39. The thunder, was it thou that didst call? Was the rain the
tears of thy bringing-forth?
40. Be thou bowed down, nor question the pains that I have set over
thee: for each thing have I ordained its shadow.
41. My thoughts are from eternity; I change not by reason of thy
dismay. Thou shalt know Me for the Lord.
42. Who setteth Capella and Achernar to be gods for a term, and a
guide upon the deep to strange peoples;
43. Who maketh Altair and Rigel the captains of His host; Who
leaneth His spear upon Sirius ere the trumpets call;