His hand in her clasp is cold,--
"If gold may be thy guerdon
Thou shalt not lack for gold;
"And if the love of a mother
Can bless thee for that thou hast done,
Thou shalt stay and be his brother,
Thou shalt stay and be my son."
"Nay, my lady," answered the minstrel,
And his face is deadly pale,
"Nay, this must not be, sweet lady,
But let my words prevail.
"Let me go now from your presence,
And I will come again,
When you stand with your son beside you,
And be your servant then."
VI.
At the feet of the Marquis Gonzaga
Kneels his lady on the floor;
"Lord, grant me before I ask it
The thing that I implore."
"So it be not of that ingrate."--
"Nay, lord, it is of him."
'Neath the stormy brows of the Marquis
His eyes are tender and dim.
"He lies sick of a fever in Naples,
Near unto death, as they tell,
In his need and pain forsaken
By the wanton he loved so well.
"Now send for him and forgive him,
If ever thou loved'st me,
Now send for him and forgive him
As God shall be good to thee."
"Well so,--if he turn in repentance
And bow himself to my will;
That the high-born lady I chose him
May be my daughter still."
VII.
In Mantua there is feasting
For the Marquis' grace to his son;
In Mantua there is rejoicing
For the prince come back to his own.
The pomp of a wedding procession
Pauses under the pillared porch,
With silken rustle and whisper,
Before the door of the church.
In the midst, Federigo the bridegroom
Stands with his high-born bride;
The six true-hearted comrades
Are three on either side.
The bridegroom is gray as his father,
Where they stand face to face,
And the six true-hearted comrades
Are like old men in their place.
The Marquis takes the comrades
And kisses them one by one:
"That ye were fast and faithful
And better than I to my son,
"Ye shall be called forever,
In the sign that ye were so true,
The Faithful of the Gonzaga,
And your sons after you."
VIII.
To the Marchioness comes a courtier:
"I am prayed to bring you word
That the minstrel keeps his promise
Who brought you news of my lord;
"And he waits without the circle
To kiss your highness' hand;
And he asks no gold for guerdon,
But before he leaves the land
"He craves of your love once proffered
That you suffer him for reward,
In this crowning hour of his glory,
To look on your son, my lord."
Through the silken press of the courtiers
The minstrel faltered in.
His clasped hands were bloodless,
His face was white and thin;
And he bent his knee to the lady,
But of her love and grace
To her heart she raised him and kissed him
Upon his gentle face.
Turned to her son the bridegroom,
Turned to his high-born wife,
"I give you here for your brother
Who gave back my son to life.
"For this youth brought me news from Naples
How thou layest sick and poor,
By true comrades kept, and forsaken
By a false paramour.
"Wherefore I charge you love him
For a brother that is my son."
The comrades turned to the bridegroom
In silence every one.
But the bridegroom looked on the minstrel
With a visage blank and changed,
As his whom the sight of a spectre
From his reason hath estranged;
And the smiling courtiers near them
On a sudden were still as death;
And, subtly-stricken, the people
Hearkened and held their breath
With an awe uncomprehended
For an unseen agony:--
Who is this that lies a-dying,
With her head on the prince's knee?
A light of anguish and wonder
Is in the prince's eye,
"O, speak, sweet saint, and forgive me,
Or I cannot let thee die!
"For now I see thy hardness
Was softer than mortal ruth,
And thy heavenly guile was whiter,
My saint, than martyr's truth."
She speaks not and she moves not,
But a blessed brightness lies
On her lips in their silent rapture
And her tender closed eyes.
Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
He rises from his knee:
"Aye, you have been good, my father,
To them that were good to me.
"You have given them honors and titles,
But here lies one unknown--
Ah, God reward her in heaven
With the peace he gives his own!"
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The author of this ballad has added a thread of evident love-story
to a most romantic incident of the history of Mantua, which
occurred in the fifteenth century. He relates the incident so
nearly as he found it in the _Cronache Montovane_, that he is
ashamed to say how little his invention has been employed in it.
The hero of the story, Federigo, became the third Marquis of
Mantua, and was a prince greatly beloved and honored by his
subjects.
[3] "Breve pertugio dentro dalla Muda,
La qual per me ha il titol della fame
E in che conviene ancor ch'altri si chiuda,
M'avea mostrato per lo suo forame
Piu lune gia."
DANTE, _L'Inferno_.
[4] "As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in its flight."
THE FIRST CRICKET.
Ah me! is it then true that the year has waxed unto waning,
And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay,--
Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining,
All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?
Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber,
Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh moan,
Yet with th' unconscious earth's boded evil my soul thou dost
cumber,
And in the year's lost youth makest me still lose my own.
Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and
bleakest,
And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room,
And by my hearthstone gay, as now sad in my garden, thou creakest,--
Thou wilt again give me all,--dew and fragrance and bloom?
Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing,
If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf,
Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling,
Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and--himself:
Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers
Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the bird to his tree.
Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet lingers,
Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?
THE MULBERRIES.
I.
On the Rialto Bridge we stand;
The street ebbs under and makes no sound;
But, with bargains shrieked on every hand,
The noisy market rings around.
"_Mulberries, fine mulberries, here!_"
A tuneful voice,--and light, light measure;
Though I hardly should count these mulberries dear,
If I paid three times the price for my pleasure.
Brown hands splashed with mulberry blood,
The basket wreathed with mulberry leaves
Hiding the berries beneath them;--good!
Let us take whatever the young rogue gives.
For you know, old friend, I haven't eaten
A mulberry since the ignorant joy
Of anything sweet in the mouth could sweeten
All this bitter world for a boy.
II.
O, I mind the tree in the meadow stood
By the road near the hill: when I clomb aloof
On its branches, this side of the girdled wood,
I could see the top of our cabin roof.
And, looking westward, could sweep the shores
Of the river where we used to swim
Under the ghostly sycamores,
Haunting the waters smooth and dim;
And eastward athwart the pasture-lot
And over the milk-white buckwheat field
I could see the stately elm, where I shot
The first black squirrel I ever killed.
And southward over the bottom-land
I could see the mellow breadths of farm
From the river-shores to the hills expand,
Clasped in the curving river's arm.
In the fields we set our guileless snares
For rabbits and pigeons and wary quails,
Content with the vaguest feathers and hairs
From doubtful wings and vanished tails.
And in the blue summer afternoon
We used to sit in the mulberry-tree:
The breaths of wind that remembered June
Shook the leaves and glittering berries free;
And while we watched the wagons go
Across the river, along the road,
To the mill above, or the mill below,
With horses that stooped to the heavy load,
We told old stories and made new plans,
And felt our hearts gladden within us again,
For we did not dream that this life of a man's
Could ever be what we know as men.
We sat so still that the woodpeckers came
And pillaged the berries overhead;
From his log the chipmonk, waxen tame,
Peered, and listened to what we said.
III.
One of us long ago was carried
To his grave on the hill above the tree;
One is a farmer there, and married;
One has wandered over the sea.
And, if you ask me, I hardly know
Whether I'd be the dead or the clown,--
The clod above or the clay below,--
Or this listless dust by fortune blown
To alien lands. For, however it is,
So little we keep with us in life:
At best we win only victories,
Not peace, not peace, O friend, in this strife.
But if I could turn from the long defeat
Of the little successes once more, and be
A boy, with the whole wide world at my feet,
Under the shade of the mulberry-tree,--
From the shame of the squandered chances, the sleep
Of the will that cannot itself awaken,
From the promise the future can never keep,
From the fitful purposes vague and shaken,--
Then, while the grasshopper sang out shrill
In the grass beneath the blanching thistle,
And the afternoon air, with a tender thrill,
Harked to the quail's complaining whistle,--
Ah me! should I paint the morrows again
In quite the colors so faint to-day,
And with the imperial mulberry's stain
Re-purple life's doublet of hodden-gray?
Know again the losses of disillusion?
For the sake of the hope, have the old deceit?--
In spite of the question's bitter infusion,
Don't you find these mulberries over-sweet?
All our atoms are changed, they say;
And the taste is so different since then;
We live, but a world has passed away
With the years that perished to make us men.
BEFORE THE GATE.
They gave the whole long day to idle laughter,
To fitful song and jest,
To moods of soberness as idle, after,
And silences, as idle too as the rest.
But when at last upon their way returning,
Taciturn, late, and loath,
Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,
They reached the gate, one fine spell hindered them both.
Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish
Such as but women know
That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,
And what they would, would rather they would not so;
Till he said,--man-like nothing comprehending
Of all the wondrous guile
That women won win themselves with, and bending
Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,--
"Ah, if beyond this gate the path united
Our steps as far as death,
And I might open it!--" His voice, affrighted
At its own daring, faltered under his breath.
Then she--whom both his faith and fear enchanted
Far beyond words to tell,
Feeling her woman's finest wit had wanted
The art he had that knew to blunder so well--
Shyly drew near, a little step, and mocking,
"Shall we not be too late
For tea?" she said. "I'm quite worn out with walking:
Yes, thanks, your arm. And will you--open the gate?"
CLEMENT.
I.
That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning to sadden,
Full-mooned and silver-misted, glides from the heart of September,
Mourned by disconsolate crickets, and iterant grasshoppers, crying
All the still nights long, from the ripened abundance of gardens;
Then, ere the boughs of the maples are mantled with earliest
autumn,
But the wind of autumn breathes from the orchards at nightfall,
Full of winy perfume and mystical yearning and languor;
And in the noonday woods you hear the foraging squirrels,
And the long, crashing fall of the half-eaten nut from the
tree-top;
When the robins are mute, and the yellow-birds, haunting the
thistles,
Cheep, and twitter, and flit through the dusty lanes and the
loppings,
When the pheasant booms from your stealthy foot in the cornfield,
And the wild-pigeons feed, few and shy, in the scoke-berry bushes;
When the weary land lies hushed, like a seer in a vision,
And your life seems but the dream of a dream which you cannot
remember,--
Broken, bewildering, vague, an echo that answers to nothing!
That time of year, you know. They stood by the gate in the meadow,
Fronting the sinking sun, and the level stream of its splendor
Crimsoned the meadow-slope and woodland with tenderest sunset,
Made her beautiful face like the luminous face of an angel,
Smote through the pained gloom of his heart like a hurt to the
sense, there.
Languidly clung about by the half-fallen shawl, and with folded
Hands, that held a few sad asters: "I sigh for this idyl
Lived at last to an end; and, looking on to my prose-life,"
With a smile, she said, and a subtle derision of manner,
"Better and better I seem, when I recollect all that has happened
Since I came here in June: the walks we have taken together
Through these darling meadows, and dear, old, desolate woodlands;
All our afternoon readings, and all our strolls through the moonlit
Village,--so sweetly asleep, one scarcely could credit the scandal,
Heartache, and trouble, and spite, that were hushed for the night,
in its silence.
Yes, I am better. I think I could even be civil to _him_ for his
kindness,
Letting me come here without him.... But open the gate, Cousin
Clement;
Seems to me it grows chill, and I think it is healthier in-doors.
--No, then I you need not speak, for I know well enough what is
coming:
Bitter taunts for the past, and discouraging views of the future?
Tragedy, Cousin Clement, or comedy,--just as you like it;--
Only not here alone, but somewhere that people can see you.
Then I'll take part in the play, and appear the remorseful young
person
Full of divine regrets at not having smothered a genius
Under the feathers and silks of a foolish, extravagant woman.
O you selfish boy! what was it, just now, about anguish?
Bills would be your talk, Cousin Clement, if you were my husband."
Then, with her summer-night glory of eyes low-bending upon him,
Dark'ning his thoughts as the pondered stars bewilder and darken,
Tenderly, wistfully drooping toward him, she faltered in whisper,--
All her mocking face transfigured,--with mournful effusion:
"Clement, do not think it is you alone that remember,--
Do not think it is you alone that have suffered. Ambition,
Fame, and your art,--you have all these things to console you.
I--what have I in this world? Since my child is dead--a bereavement."
Sad hung her eyes on his, and he felt all the anger within him
Broken, and melting in tears. But he shrank from her touch while he
answered
(Awkwardly, being a man, and awkwardly, being a lover),
"Yes, you know how it is done. You have cleverly fooled me
beforetime,
With a dainty scorn, and then an imploring forgiveness!
Yes, you might play it, I think,--that _role_ of remorseful young
person,
That, or the old man's darling, or anything else you attempted.
Even your earnest is so much like acting I fear a betrayal,
Trusting your speech. You say that you have not forgotten. I grant
you--
Not, indeed, for your word--that is light--but I wish to believe
you.
Well, I say, since you have not forgotten, forget now, forever!
I--I have lived and loved, and you have lived and have married.
Only receive this bud to remember me when we have parted,--
Thorns and splendor, no sweetness, rose of the love that I
cherished!"
There he tore from its stalk the imperial flower of the thistle,
Tore, and gave to her, who took it with mocking obeisance,
Twined it in her hair, and said, with her subtle derision:
"You are a wiser man than I thought you could ever be, Clement,--
Sensible, almost. So! I'll try to forget and remember."
Lightly she took his arm, but on through the lane to the farm-house,
Mutely together they moved through the lonesome, odorous twilight.
II.
High on the farm-house hearth, the first autumn fire was kindled;
Scintillant hickory bark and dryest limbs of the beech-tree
Burned, where all summer long the boughs of asparagus flourished.
Wild were the children with mirth, and grouping and clinging
together,
Danced with the dancing flame, and lithely swayed with its humor;
Ran to the window-panes, and peering forth into the darkness,
Saw there another room, flame-lit, and with frolicking children.
(Ah! by such phantom hearths, I think that we sit with our
first-loves!)
Sometimes they tossed on the floor, and sometimes they hid in the
corners,
Shouting and laughing aloud, and never resting a moment,
In the rude delight, the boisterous gladness of childhood,--
Cruel as summer sun and singing-birds to the heartsick.
Clement sat in his chair unmoved in the midst of the hubbub,
Rapt, with unseeing eyes; and unafraid in their gambols,
By his tawny beard the children caught him, and clambered
Over his knees, and waged a mimic warfare across them,
Made him their battle-ground, and won and lost kingdoms upon him.
Airily to and fro, and out of one room to another
Passed his cousin, and busied herself with things of the household,
Nonchalant, debonair, blithe, with bewitching housewifely
importance,
Laying the cloth for the supper, and bringing the meal from the
kitchen;
Fairer than ever she seemed, and more than ever she mocked him,
Coming behind his chair, and clasping her fingers together
Over his eyes in a girlish caprice, and crying, "Who is it?"
Vexed his despair with a vision of wife and of home and of
children,
Calling his sister's children around her, and stilling their
clamor,
Making believe they were hers. And Clement sat moody and silent,
Blank to the wistful gaze of his mother bent on his visage
With the tender pain, the pitiful, helpless devotion
Of the mother that looks on the face of her son in his trouble,
Grown beyond her consoling, and knows that she cannot befriend him.
Then his cousin laughed, and in idleness talked with the children;
Sometimes she turned to him, and then when the thistle was falling,
Caught it and twined it again in her hair, and called it her
keepsake,
Smiled, and made him ashamed of his petulant gift there, before
them.
But, when the night was grown old and the two by the hearthstone
together
Sat alone in the flickering red of the flame, and the cricket
Carked to the stillness, and ever, with sullen throbs of the
pendule
Sighed the time-worn clock for the death of the days that were
perished,--
It was her whim to be sad, and she brought him the book they were
reading.
"Read it to-night," she said, "that I may not seem to be going."
Said, and mutely reproached him with all the pain she had wrought
him.
From her hand he took the volume and read, and she listened,--
All his voice molten in secret tears, and ebbing and flowing,
Now with a faltering breath, and now with impassioned abandon,--
Read from the book of a poet the rhyme of the fatally sundered,
Fatally met too late, and their love was their guilt and their
anguish,
But in the night they rose, and fled away into the darkness,
Glad of all dangers and shames, and even of death, for their love's
sake.
Then, when his voice brake hollowly, falling and fading to
silence,
Thrilled in the silence they sat, and durst not behold one another,
Feeling that wild temptation, that tender, ineffable yearning,
Drawing them heart to heart. One blind, mad moment of passion
With their fate they strove; but out of the pang of the conflict,
Through such costly triumph as wins a waste and a famine,
Victors they came, and Love retrieved the error of loving.
So, foreknowing the years, and sharply discerning the future,
Guessing the riddle of life, and accepting the cruel solution,--
Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the
thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
"Perish the thorns and splendor,--the bloom and the sweetness are
perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one's Duty,--
These and the world, for dead Love!--The end of these modern
romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?... Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin
Clement."
BY THE SEA.
I walked with her I love by the sea,
The deep came up with its chanting waves,
Making a music so great and free
That the will and the faith, which were dead in me,
Awoke and rose from their graves.
Chanting, and with a regal sweep
Of their 'broidered garments up and down
The strand, came the mighty waves of the deep,
Dragging the wave-worn drift from its sleep
Along the sea-sands bare and brown.
"O my soul, make the song of the sea!" I cried.
"How it comes, with its stately tread,
And its dreadful voice, and the splendid pride
Of its regal garments flowing wide
Over the land!" to my soul I said.
My soul was still; the deep went down.
"What hast thou, my soul," I cried,
"In thy song?" "The sea-sands bare and brown,
With broken shells and sea-weed strown,
And stranded drift," my soul replied.
SAINT CHRISTOPHER.
In the narrow Venetian street,
On the wall above the garden gate
(Within, the breath of the rose is sweet,
And the nightingale sings there, soon and late),
Stands Saint Christopher, carven in stone,
With the little child in his huge caress,
And the arms of the baby Jesus thrown
About his gigantic tenderness;
And over the wall a wandering growth
Of darkest and greenest ivy clings,
And climbs around them, and holds them both
In its netted clasp of knots and rings,
Clothing the saint from foot to beard
In glittering leaves that whisper and dance
To the child, on his mighty arm upreared,
With a lusty summer exuberance.
To the child on his arm the faithful saint
Looks up with a broad and tranquil joy;
His brows and his heavy beard aslant
Under the dimpled chin of the boy,
Who plays with the world upon his palm,
And bends his smiling looks divine
On the face of the giant mild and calm,
And the glittering frolic of the vine.
He smiles on either with equal grace,--
On the simple ivy's unconscious life,
And the soul in the giant's lifted face,
Strong from the peril of the strife:
For both are his own,--the innocence
That climbs from the heart of earth to heaven,
And the virtue that gently rises thence
Through trial sent and victory given.
Grow, ivy, up to his countenance,
But it cannot smile on my life as on thine;
Look, Saint, with thy trustful, fearless glance,
Where I dare not lift these eyes of mine.
Venice, 1863.
ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,
Who died, "with the first song of the birds," Wednesday morning,
April 27, 1864.
I.
In the early morning when I wake
At the hour that is sacred for his sake,
And hear the happy birds of spring
In the garden under my window sing,
And through my window the daybreak blows
The sweetness of the lily and rose,
A dormant anguish wakes with day,
And my heart is smitten with strange dismay:
Distance wider than thine, O sea,
Darkens between my brother and me!
II.
A scrap of print, a few brief lines,
The fatal word that swims and shines
On my tears, with a meaning new and dread,
Make faltering reason know him dead,
And I would that my heart might feel it too,
And unto its own regret be true;
For this is the hardest of all to bear,
That his life was so generous and fair,
So full of love, so full of hope,
Broadening out with ample scope,
And so far from death, that his dying seems
The idle agony of dreams
To my heart, that feels him living yet,--
And I forget, and I forget.
III.
He was almost grown a man when he passed
Away, but when I kissed him last
He was still a child, and I had crept
Up to the little room where he slept,
And thought to kiss him good-by in his sleep;
But he was awake to make me weep
With terrible homesickness, before
My wayward feet had passed the door.
Round about me clung his embrace,
And he pressed against my face his face,
As if some prescience whispered him then
That it never, never should be again.
IV.
Out of far-off days of boyhood dim,
When he was a babe and I played with him,
I remember his looks and all his ways;
And how he grew through childhood's grace,
To the hopes, and strifes, and sports, and joys,
And innocent vanity of boys;
I hear his whistle at the door,
His careless step upon the floor,
His song, his jest, his laughter yet,--
And I forget, and I forget.
V.
Somewhere in the graveyard that I know,
Where the strawberries under the chestnuts grow,
They have laid him; and his sisters set
On his grave the flowers their tears have wet;
And above his grave, while I write, the song
Of the matin robin leaps sweet and strong
From the leafy dark of the chestnut-tree;
And many a murmuring honey-bee
On the strawberry blossoms in the grass
Stoops by his grave and will not pass;
And in the little hollow beneath
The slope of the silent field of death,
The cow-bells tinkle soft and sweet,
And the cattle go by with homeward feet,