And long and loud that gentle maid did weep,
Till in her blurred sight the hills went round,
And, circling far, field, wood, and stream did sweep;
And on the ground the miserable Bopeep
Fell and forgot her troubles in a swound.
IX.
When she awoke, the sun long time had set,
And all the land was sleeping in the moon,
And all the flowers with dim, sad dews were wet,
As they had wept to see her in that swoon.
It was about the night's low-breathing noon;
Only the larger stars were waking yet.
X.
Bopeep, the fair and hapless shepherdess,
Rose from her swooning in a sore dismay,
And tried to smooth her damp and rumpled dress,
That showed in truth a grievous disarray;
Then where the brook the wan moon's mirror lay,
She laved her eyes, and curled each golden tress.
XI.
And looking to her ribbons, if they were
As ribbons of a shepherdess should be,
She took the hat that she was wont to wear
(Bedecked it was with ribbons flying free
As ever man in opera might see),
And set it on her curls of yellow hair.
XII.
"And I will go and seek my sheep," she said,
"Through every distant land until I die;
But when they bring me hither, cold and dead,
Let me beneath these apple-blossoms lie,
With this dear, faithful, lovely runnel nigh,
Here, where my cru--cru--cruel sheep have fed."
XIII.
Thus sorrow and despair make bold Bopeep,
And forth she springs, and hurries on her way:
Across the lurking rivulet she can leap,
No sombre forest shall her quest delay,
No crooked vale her eager steps bewray:
What dreadeth she that seeketh her lost sheep?
XIV.
By many a pond, where timorous water-birds,
With clattering cries and throbbing wings, arose,
By many a pasture, where the soft-eyed herds
Looked shadow-huge in their unmoved repose,
Long through the lonesome night that sad one goes
And fills the solitude with wailing words;
XV.
So that the little field-mouse dreams of harm,
Snuggled away from harm beneath the weeds;
The violet, sleeping on the clover's arm,
Wakes, and is cold with thoughts of dreadful deeds;
The pensive people of the water-reeds
Hark with a mute and dolorous alarm.
XVI.
And the fond hearts of all the turtle-doves
Are broken in compassion of her woe,
And every tender little bird that loves
Feels in his breast a sympathetic throe;
And flowers are sad wherever she may go,
And hoarse with sighs the waterfalls and groves.
XVII.
The pale moon droppeth low; star after star
Grows faint and slumbers in the gray of dawn;
And still she lingers not, but hurries far,
Till in a dreary wilderness withdrawn
Through tangled woods she lorn and lost moves on,
Where griffins dire and dreadful dragons are.
XVIII.
Her ribbons all are dripping with the dew,
Her red-heeled shoes are torn, and stained with mire,
Her tender arms the angry sharpness rue
Of many a scraggy thorn and envious brier;
And poor Bopeep, with no sweet pity nigh her,
Wrings her small hands, and knows not what to do.
XIX.
And on that crude and rugged ground she sinks,
And soon her seeking had been ended there,
But through the trees a fearful glimmer shrinks,
And of a hermit's dwelling she is 'ware:
At the dull pane a dull-eyed taper blinks,
Drowsed with long vigils and the morning air.
XX.
Thither she trembling moves, and at the door
Falls down, and cannot either speak or stir:
The hermit comes,--with no white beard before,
Nor coat of skins, nor cap of shaggy fur:
It was a comely youth that lifted her,
And to his hearth, and to his breakfast, bore.
XXI.
Arrayed he was in princeliest attire,
And of as goodly presence sooth was he
As any little maiden might admire,
Or any king-beholding cat might see
"My poor Bopeep," he sigheth piteously,
"Rest here, and warm you at a hermit's fire."
XXII.
She looked so beautiful, there, mute and white,
He kissed her on the lips and on the eyes
(The most a prince could do in such a plight);
But chiefly gazed on her in still surprise,
And when he saw her lily eyelids rise,
For him the whole world had no fairer sight.
XXIII.
"Rude is my fare: a bit of venison steak,
A dish of honey and a glass of wine,
With clean white bread, is the poor feast I make.
Be served, I pray: I think this flask is fine,"
He said. "Hard is this hermit life of mine:
This day I will its weariness forsake."
XXIV.
And then he told her how it chanced that he,
King Cole's son, in that forest held his court,
And the sole reason that there seemed to be
Was, he was being hermit there for sport;
But he confessed the life was not his forte,
And therewith both laughed out right jollily.
XXV.
And sly Bopeep forgot her sheep again
In gay discourse with that engaging youth:
Love hath such sovran remedies for pain!
But then he was a handsome prince, in truth,
And both were young, and both were silly, sooth,
And everything to Love but love seems vain.
XXVI.
They took them down the silver-clasped book
That this young anchorite's predecessor kept,--
A holy seer,--and through it they did look;
Sometimes their idle eyes together crept,
Sometimes their lips; but still the leaves they swept,
Until they found a shepherd's pictured crook.
XXVII.
And underneath was writ it should befall
On such a day, in such a month and year,
A maiden fair, a young prince brave and tall,
By such a chance should come together here.
They were the people, that was very clear:
"O love," the prince said, "let us read it all!"
XXVIII.
And thus the hermit's prophecy ran on:
Though she her lost sheep wist not where to find,
Yet should she bid her weary care begone,
And banish every doubt from her sweet mind:
They, with their little snow-white tails behind,
Homeward would go, if they were left alone.
XXIX.
They closed the book, and in her happy eyes
The prince read truth and love forevermore,--
Better than any hermit's prophecies!
They passed together from the cavern's door;
Embraced, they turned to look at it once more,
And over it beheld the glad sun rise,
XXX.
That streamed before them aisles of dusk and gold
Under the song-swept arches of the wood,
And forth they went, tranced in each other's hold,
Down through that rare and luminous solitude,
Their happy hearts enchanted in the mood
Of morning, and of May, and romance old.
XXXI.
Sometimes the saucy leaves would kiss her cheeks,
And he must kiss their wanton kiss away;
To die beneath her feet the wood-flower seeks,
The quivering aspen feels a fine dismay,
And many a scented blossom on the spray
In odorous sighs its passionate longing speaks.
XXXII.
And forth they went down to that stately stream,
Bowed over by the ghostly sycamores
(Awearily, as if some heavy dream
Held them in languor), but whose opulent shores
With pearled shells and dusts of precious ores
Were tremulous brilliance in the morning beam;
XXXIII.
Where waited them, beside the lustrous sand,
A silk-winged shallop, sleeping on the flood;
And smoothly wafted from the hither strand,
Across the calm, broad stream they lightly rode,
Under them still the silver fishes stood;
The eager lilies, on the other land,
XXXIV.
Beckoned them; but where the castle shone
With diamonded turrets and a wall
Of gold-embedded pearl and costly stone,
Their vision to its peerless splendor thrall
The maiden fair, the young prince brave and tall,
Thither with light, unlingering feet pressed on.
XXXV.
A gallant train to meet this loving pair,
In silk and steel, moves from the castle door,
And up the broad and ringing castle stair
They go with gleeful minstrelsy before,
And "Hail our prince and princess evermore!"
From all the happy throng is greeting there.
XXXVI.
And in the hall the prince's sire, King Cole,
Sitting with crown and royal ermine on,
His fiddlers three behind with pipe and bowl,
Rises and moves to lift his kneeling son,
Greeting his bride with kisses many a one,
And tears and laughter from his jolly soul;
XXXVII.
Then both his children to a window leads
That over daisied pasture-land looks out,
And shows Bopeep where her lost flock wide feeds,
And every frolic lambkin leaps about.
She hears Boy-Blue, that lazy shepherd, shout,
Slow pausing from his pipe of mellow reeds;
XXXVIII.
And, turning, peers into her prince's eyes;
Then, caught and clasped against her prince's heart,
Upon her breath her answer wordless dies,
And leaves her gratitude to sweeter art,--
To lips from which the bloom shall never part,
To looks wherein the summer never dies!
WHILE SHE SANG.
I.
She sang, and I heard the singing,
Far out of the wretched past,
Of meadow-larks in the meadow,
In a breathing of the blast.
Cold through the clouds of sunset
The thin red sunlight shone,
Staining the gloom of the woodland
Where I walked and dreamed alone;
And glinting with chilly splendor
The meadow under the hill,
Where the lingering larks were lurking
In the sere grass hid and still.
Out they burst with their singing,
Their singing so loud and gay;
They made in the heart of October
A sudden ghastly May,
That faded and ceased with their singing.
The thin red sunlight paled,
And through the boughs above me
The wind of evening wailed;--
Wailed, and the light of evening
Out of the heaven died;
And from the marsh by the river
The lonesome killdee cried.
II.
The song is done, but a phantom
Of music haunts the chords,
That thrill with its subtile presence,
And grieve for the dying words.
And in the years that are perished,
Far back in the wretched past,
I see on the May-green meadows
The white snow falling fast;--
Falling, and falling, and falling,
As still and cold as death,
On the bloom of the odorous orchard,
On the small, meek flowers beneath;
On the roofs of the village-houses,
On the long, silent street,
Where its plumes are soiled and broken
Under the passing feet;
On the green crest of the woodland,
On the cornfields far apart;
On the cowering birds in the gable,
And on my desolate heart.
A POET.
From wells where Truth in secret lay
He saw the midnight stars by day.
"O marvellous gift!" the many cried,
"O cruel gift!" his voice replied.
The stars were far, and cold, and high,
That glimmered in the noonday sky;
He yearned toward the sun in vain,
That warmed the lives of other men.
CONVENTION.
He falters on the threshold,
She lingers on the stair:
Can it be that was his footstep?
Can it be that she is there?
Without is tender yearning,
And tender love is within;
They can hear each other's heart-beats,
But a wooden door is between.
THE POET'S FRIENDS.
The robin sings in the elm;
The cattle stand beneath,
Sedate and grave, with great brown eyes
And fragrant meadow-breath.
They listen to the flattered bird,
The wise-looking, stupid things;
And they never understand a word
Of all the robin sings.
NO LOVE LOST.
A ROMANCE OF TRAVEL.
1862.
BERTHA--_Writing from Venice_.
I.
On your heart I feign myself fallen--ah, heavier burden,
Darling, of sorrow and pain than ever shall rest there! I take you
Into these friendless arms of mine, that you cannot escape me;
Closer and closer I fold you, and tell you all, and you listen
Just as you used at home, and you let my sobs and my silence
Speak, when the words will not come--and you understand and forgive
me.
--Ah! no, no! but I write, with the wretched bravado of distance,
What you must read unmoved by the pity too far for entreaty.
II.
Well, I could never have loved him, but when he sought me and
asked me,--
When to the men that offered their lives, the love of a woman
Seemed so little to give!--I promised the love that he asked me,
Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips, and thought him my hero.
Afterward came the doubt, and out of long question, self-knowledge,--
Came that great defeat, and the heart of the nation was withered;
Mine leaped high with the awful relief won of death. But the
horror,
Then, of the crime that was wrought in that guilty moment of
rapture,--
Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet that struck him,--
Clung to me day and night, and dreaming I saw him forever,
Looking through battle-smoke with sorrowful eyes of upbraiding,
Or, in the moonlight lying gray, or dimly approaching,
Holding toward me his arms, that still held nearer and nearer,
Folded about me at last ... and I would I had died in the fever!--
Better then than now, and better than ever hereafter!
III.
Weary as some illusion of fever to me was the ocean--
Storm-swept, scourged with bitter rains, and wandering always
Onward from sky to sky with endless processions of surges,
Knowing not life nor death, but since the light was, the first day,
Only enduring unrest till the darkness possess it, the last day.
Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living:
All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness;
Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembrance
Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit,--the trouble
Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created,--
And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion,
Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness.
Naught but the dark in my soul remained to me constant and real,
Growing and taking the thoughts bereft of happier uses,
Blotting all sense of lapse from the days that with swift iteration
Were and were not. They fable the bright days the fleetest:
These that had nothing to give, that had nothing to bring or to
promise,
Went as one day alone. For me was no alternation
Save from my dull despair to wild and reckless rebellion,
When the regret for my sin was turned to ruthless self-pity--
When I hated him whose love had made me its victim,
Through his faith and my falsehood yet claiming me. Then I was
smitten
With so great remorse, such grief for him, and compassion,
That, if he could have come back to me, I had welcomed and loved
him
More than man ever was loved. Alas, for me that another
Holds his place in my heart evermore! Alas, that I listened
When the words, whose daring lured my spirit and lulled it,
Seemed to take my blame away with my will of resistance!
Do not make haste to condemn me: my will was the will of a
woman,--
Fain to be broken by love. Yet unto the last I endeavored
What I could to be faithful still to the past and my penance;
And as we stood that night in the old Roman garden together--
By the fountain whose passionate tears but now had implored me
In his pleading voice--and he waited my answer, I told him
All that had been before of delusion and guilt, and conjured him
Not to darken his fate with mine. The costly endeavor
Only was subtler betrayal. O me, from the pang of confession,
Sprang what strange delight, as I tore from its lurking that
horror--
Brooded upon so long--with the hope that at last I might see it
Through his eyes, unblurred by the tears that disordered my vision!
Oh, with what rapturous triumph I humbled my spirit before him,
That he might lift me and soothe me, and make that dreary
remembrance,
All this confused present, seem only some sickness of fancy,
Only a morbid folly, no certain and actual trouble!
If from that refuge I fled with words of too feeble denial--
Bade him hate me, with sobs that entreated his tenderest pity,
Moved mute lips and left the meaningless farewell unuttered--
She that never has loved, alone can wholly condemn me.
IV.
How could he other than follow? My heart had bidden him follow,
Nor had my lips forbidden; and Rome yet glimmered behind me,
When my soul yearned towards his from the sudden forlornness of
absence.
Everywhere his face looked from vanishing glimpses of faces,
Everywhere his voice reached my senses in fugitive cadence.
Sick, through the storied cities, with wretched hopes, and
upbraidings
Of my own heart for its hopes, I went from wonder to wonder,
Blind to them all, or only beholding them wronged, and related,
Through some trick of wayward thought, to myself and my trouble.
Not surprise nor regret, but a fierce, precipitate gladness
Sent the blood to my throbbing heart when I found him in Venice.
"Waiting for you," he whispered; "you would so." I answered him
nothing.
V.
Father, whose humor grows more silent and ever more absent
(Changed in all but love for me since the death of my mother),
Willing to see me contented at last, and trusting us wholly,
Left us together alone in our world of love and of beauty.
So, by noon and by night, we two have wandered in Venice,
Where the beautiful lives in vivid and constant caprices,
Yet, where the charm is so perfect that nothing fantastic surprises
More than in dreams, and one's life with the life of the city is
blended
In a luxurious calm, and the tumult without and beyond it
Seems but the emptiest fable of vain aspiration and labor.
Yes, from all that makes this Venice sole among cities,
Peerless forever,--the still lagoons that sleep in the sunlight,
Lulled by their island-bells; the night's mysterious waters
Lit through their shadowy depths by stems of splendor, that blossom
Into the lamps that float, like flamy lotuses, over;
Narrow and secret canals, that dimly gleaming and glooming
Under palace-walls and numberless arches of bridges,
List no sound but the dip of the gondolier's oar and his warning
Cried from corner to corner; the sad, superb Canalazzo
Mirroring marvellous grandeur and beauty, and dreaming of glory
Out of the empty homes of her lords departed; the footways
Wandering sunless between the walls of the houses, and stealing
Glimpses, through rusted cancelli, of lurking greenness of gardens,
Wild-grown flowers and broken statues and mouldering frescos;
Thoroughfares filled with traffic, and throngs ever ebbing and
flowing
To and from the heart of the city, whose pride and devotion,
Lifting high the bells of St. Mark's like prayers unto heaven,
Stretch a marble embrace of palaces toward the cathedral
Orient, gorgeous, and flushed with color and light, like the
morning!--
From the lingering waste that is not yet ruin in Venice,
And her phantasmal show, through all, of being and doing--
Came a strange joy to us, untouched by regret for the idle
Days without yesterdays that died into nights without morrows.
Here, in our paradise of love we reigned, new-created,
As in the youth of the world, in the days before evil and
conscience.
Ah! in our fair, lost world was neither fearing nor doubting,
Neither the sickness of old remorse nor the gloom of foreboding,--
Only the glad surrender of all individual being
Unto him whom I loved, and in whose tender possession,
Fate-free, my soul reposed from its anguish.
--Of these things I write you
As of another's experience; part of my own they no longer
Seem to me now, through the doom that darkens the past like the
future.
VI.
Golden the sunset gleamed, above the city behind us,
Out of a city of clouds as fairy and lovely as Venice,
While we looked at the fishing-tails of purple and yellow
Far on the rim of the sea, whose light and musical surges
Broke along the sands with a faint, reiterant sadness.
But, when the sails had darkened into black wings, through the
twilight
Sweeping away into night--past the broken tombs of the Hebrews
Homeward we sauntered slowly, through dew-sweet, blossomy alleys;
So drew near the boat by errant and careless approaches,
Entered, and left with indolent pulses the Lido behind us.
All the sunset had paled, and the campanili of Venice
Rose like the masts of a mighty fleet moored there in the water.
Lights flashed furtively to and fro through the deepening twilight.
Massed in one thick shade lay the Gardens; the numberless islands
Lay like shadows upon the lagoons. And on us as we loitered
By their enchanted coasts, a spell of ineffable sweetness
Fell and made us at one with them; and silent and blissful
Shadows we seemed, that drifted on through a being of shadow,
Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded by hope or remembrance.
Yet we knew the beautiful night, as it grew from the evening:
Far beneath us and far above us the vault of the heavens
Glittered and darkened; and now the moon, that had haunted the
daylight
Thin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her fulness of splendor,
And over all the lagoons fell the silvery rain of the moonbeams,
As in the song the young girls sang while their gondolas passed
us,--
Sang in the joy of love, or youth's desire of loving.
Balmy night of the South! O perfect night of the Summer!
Night of the distant dark, of the near and tender effulgence!--
How from my despair are thy peace and loveliness frightened!
For, while our boat lay there at the will of the light undulations,
Idle as if our mood imbued and controlled it, yet ever
Seeming to bear us on athwart those shining expanses
Out to shining seas beyond pursuit or returning--
There, while we lingered, and lingered, and would not break from our
rapture,
Down the mirrored night another gondola drifted
Nearer and slowly nearer our own, and moonlighted faces
Stared. And that sweet trance grew a rigid and dreadful possession,
Which, if no dream indeed, yet mocked with such semblance of
dreaming,
That, as it happens in dreams, when a dear face, stooping to kiss
us,
Takes, ere the lips have touched, some malign and horrible aspect,
_His_ face faded away, and the face of the Dead--of that other--
Flashed on mine, and writhing, through every change of emotion,--
Wild amaze and scorn, accusation and pitiless mocking,--
Vanished into the swoon whose blackness encompassed and hid me.
PHILIP--_To Bertha_.
I am not sure, I own, that if first I had seen my delusion
When I saw _you_, last night, I should be so ready to give you
Now your promises back, and hold myself nothing above you,
That it is mine to offer a freedom you never could ask for.
Yet, believe me, indeed, from no bitter heart I release you:
You are as free of me now as though I had died in the battle,
Or as I never had lived. Nay, if it is mine to forgive you,
Go without share of the blame that could hardly be all upon your
side.
Ghosts are not sensitive things; yet, after my death in the
papers,
Sometimes a harrowing doubt assailed this impalpable essence:
Had I done so well to plead my cause at that moment,
When your consent must be yielded less to the lover than soldier?
"Not so well," I was answered by that ethereal conscience
Ghosts have about them, "and not so nobly or wisely as might be."
--Truly, I loved you, then, as now I love you no longer.
I was a prisoner then, and this doubt in the languor of sickness
Came; and it clung to my convalescence, and grew to the purpose,
After my days of captivity ended, to seek you and solve it,
And, if I haply had erred, to undo the wrong, and release you.
Well, you have solved me the doubt. I dare to trust that you wept
me,
Just a little, at first, when you heard of me dead in the battle?
For we were plighted, you know, and even in this saintly humor,
I would scarce like to believe that my loss had merely relieved
you.
Yet, I say, it was prudent and well not to wait for my coming
Back from the dead. If it may be I sometimes had cherished a fancy
That I had won some right to the palm with the pang of the
martyr,--
Fondly intended, perhaps, some splendor of self-abnegation,--
Doubtless all that was a folly which merciful chances have spared
me.
No, I am far from complaining that Circumstance coolly has ordered
Matters of tragic fate in such a commonplace fashion.
How do I know, indeed, that the easiest isn't the best way?
Friendly adieux end this note, and our little comedy with it.
FANNY--_To Clara_.
I.