We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
_William Ernest Henley_
William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated at the Grammar
School of Gloucester. From childhood he was afflicted with a
tuberculous disease which finally necessitated the amputation of a
foot. His _Hospital Verses_, those vivid precursors of current free
verse, were a record of the time when he was at the infirmary at
Edinburgh; they are sharp with the sights, sensations, even the actual
smells of the sickroom. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his
continued poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and
energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world shine out of
the athletic _London Voluntaries_ (1892) and the lightest and most
musical lyrics in _Hawthorn and Lavender_ (1898).
The bulk of Henley's poetry is not great in volume. He has himself
explained the small quantity of his work in a Preface to his _Poems_,
first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1898. "A principal
reason," he says, "is that, after spending the better part of my life
in the pursuit of poetry, I found myself (about 1877) so utterly
unmarketable that I had to own myself beaten in art, and to indict
myself to journalism for the next ten years." Later on, he began to
write again--"old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of
selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that,
after all, the lyrical instinct had slept--not died."
After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted mostly to
journalism, Henley died in 1903.