A HUNDRED POEMS 
 
 WILLIAM WATSON 
 
 
 m ■
 
 UBRART 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 A HUNDRED POEMS
 
 WILLIAM WATSON
 
 A Hundred Poems 
 
 by 
 
 Sir William Watson 
 
 Selected from his 
 various volumes 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED 
 
 London New York Toronto
 
 
 THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 
 
 411a HARROW ROAD 
 
 LONDON W
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THE only earlier volume of selections from Sir 
 William Watson's poetry is now, like the col- 
 lected editions that preceded and followed it, 
 out of print, and, like them, it will not be reprinted. It had 
 become less and less representative of his poetical work 
 as a whole, being a selection drawn from only six of 
 his separate books, whereas the present selection has 
 been drawn from seventeen. * 
 
 His longest poems of the narrative order have as a 
 matter of course been excluded from this volume, being 
 obviously outside its compass. On quite different grounds 
 everything has been banished that could be called political, 
 in the sense now most frequently given to that word. Two 
 short poems arising out of certain events which darkened 
 the 'nineties can hardly be accused of forming an excep- 
 tion to this rule, as they merely express common human 
 feeling, and indeed had their source in something alto- 
 gether distinct from party creeds and party passions. 
 
 The author has added to the main body of the volume 
 a few of his epigrams, quatrains, and kindred pieces, some 
 of them written more than forty years ago, others quite 
 recently. Apart from all question of merit or interest, a 
 reader might very well murmur if things of such extreme 
 brevity had been counted among the Hundred Poems 
 offered him. They have not, however, been so counted, 
 but are additional to that number. 
 
 In arranging the contents of this book no attempt has 
 been made at chronological sequence, except in the case 
 of a few short poems here and there, which for reasons
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 perhaps more interesting to the writer than to the reader 
 are grouped in the order in which they seem to have been 
 written. 
 
 In everything taken from the latest collected edition 
 of the author's poems the emendations which were a 
 feature of that edition have been followed, except once 
 or twice where he believes that they have been improved 
 upon. The poems selected from his subsequent volumes 
 appear, in at least two instances, with perhaps more than 
 slight revision. 
 
 VI
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Three Givers 
 
 i 
 
 The Earth's Desire 
 
 2 
 
 The Husbandman of Heaven 
 
 3 
 
 Uninhabited 
 
 4 
 
 The Lute-Player 
 
 5 
 
 The Sovereign Poet 
 
 6 
 
 Storm in Mid-Atlantic 
 
 7 
 
 To Licinius 
 
 9 
 
 Ode on the Coronation of Edward VII 
 
 ii 
 
 In Dreams 
 
 *7 
 
 Summer's Overthrow 
 
 18 
 
 The Churchyard in the Wold 
 
 l 9 
 
 The First Skylark of Spring 
 
 20 
 
 Lacrimal Musarum 
 
 23 
 
 Elusion 
 
 28 
 
 O like a Queen 
 
 29 
 
 The Playmates 
 
 3° 
 
 Sonnet — Night on Curbar Edge 
 
 3 1 
 
 Sonnet — The Slain in War 
 
 32 
 
 The Dragons 
 
 33 
 
 April 
 
 34 
 
 Sonnet — Christmas Day 
 
 35 
 
 Sonnet — The Real Reformer 
 
 36 
 
 Sonnet — Melancholia 
 
 37 
 
 The World in Armour (three Sonnets) 
 
 38 
 
 The Tomb of Burns 
 
 40 
 
 Song in an Archaic Manner 
 
 47 
 
 Vita Nuova 
 
 48 
 
 Sonnet — Peace and War 
 
 50 
 
 World- Strangeness 
 
 5 J 
 
 Wales : a Greeting 
 
 52 
 
 Leavetaking 
 
 54 
 
 Shelley's Centenary 
 
 55 
 
 Sonnet — Estrangement 
 
 00 
 
 vn
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Ballad of Semmerwater 
 
 61 
 
 To My Mother's Memory 
 
 63 
 
 The Cathedral Music 
 
 64 
 
 The Gems 
 
 65 
 
 The Wasted Lures 
 
 66 
 
 In Laleham Churchyard 
 
 67 
 
 Sonnet — Abdication 
 
 70 
 
 The Winter Sleep 
 
 7i 
 
 To a Strenuous Critic 
 
 72 
 
 Sonnet — The Frontier 
 
 73 
 
 England My Mother 
 
 74 
 
 The Father of the Forest 
 
 78 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 86 
 
 The Heart of the Rose 
 
 87 
 
 The Counsel of Pan 
 
 88 
 
 Wordsworth's Grave 
 
 89 
 
 To My Eldest Child 
 
 98 
 
 The Thundershower 
 
 100 
 
 Nature's Way 
 
 IOI 
 
 Lines read at the Dickens Centenary Celebration 
 
 
 in New York 
 
 103 
 
 A Riddle of the Thames 
 
 105 
 
 On the Death of Edward VII 
 
 107 
 
 The Eternal Search 
 
 108 
 
 Her Third Birthday 
 
 109 
 
 Dawn on the Headland 
 
 no 
 
 Sonnet — Power and Charm 
 
 III 
 
 Sonnet — A Dizzying Surmise 
 
 112 
 
 The Mighty Denier 
 
 "3 
 
 The Great Misgiving 
 
 114 
 
 Sonnet — His Splendid Defect 
 
 JI 5 
 
 Art's Riddle 
 
 116 
 
 Confidence 
 
 117 
 
 Tell me not now 
 
 118 
 
 V1U
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Tempest 
 
 [19 
 
 The Voice from Dreamland ] 
 
 120 
 
 Ode in May 
 
 [21 
 
 The Lost Eden ] 
 
 [2 4 
 
 The Unknown God ] 
 
 [2 5 
 
 England and her Colonies ] 
 
 [28 
 
 Alpha and Omega ] 
 
 129 
 
 Hymn to the Sea ] 
 
 [ 3 
 
 Apologia . ] 
 
 '3* 
 
 The Protest ] 
 
 [40 
 
 Retrogression ] 
 
 [41 
 
 The Mossgrown Porches ] 
 
 [44 
 
 Mastery ] 
 
 '45 
 
 Disclosure ] 
 
 [46 
 
 Edenhunger ] 
 
 '47 
 
 Part of My Story ] 
 
 [4 8 
 
 To a Privileged Thief ] 
 
 [49 
 
 The Fisher ] 
 
 '5° 
 
 Autumn ] 
 
 '5 1 
 
 An Inscription at Windermere ] 
 
 [ 53 
 
 Sonnet — A Trial of Orthodoxy ] 
 
 '54 
 
 Europe at the Play ] 
 
 =55 
 
 The Deathless Blacksmith ] 
 
 '57 
 
 Sonnet — France ] 
 
 l 5 8 
 
 The Warrior Lover ] 
 
 [60 
 
 The Hope of the World ] 
 
 [61 
 
 Whither Afar ? ] 
 
 [67 
 
 At a Burial ] 
 
 [68 
 
 Verses to H. C. Montgomery, Esq. ] 
 
 [69 
 
 The Sappers and Miners ] 
 
 [71 
 
 On a Portrait ] 
 
 173 
 
 Verses to the Duchess of Hamilton i 
 
 '74 
 
 To India's Guest ] 
 
 '75 
 
 Sonnet — On the Author's 55th Birthday i 
 
 '77 
 
 IX
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 EPIGRAMS 
 
 Thomas Hood 178 
 
 On Milton's Use of the Sonnet 178 
 
 Dominion 178 
 
 Blessedness 179 
 
 On the Conclusion of a War 179 
 
 To Christina Rossetti 179 
 
 Sculpture and Song 179 
 
 The Noble Anguish 180 
 
 The Wings of Eros 1 80 
 
 The Fatal Scrutiny 180 
 
 To 180 
 
 After reading " Tamburlaine " 181 
 
 Shelley and Harriet 181 
 
 Keats 181 
 
 To a Birkeleian Idealist 181 
 
 The Church To-Day 182 
 
 Byron the Voluptuary 182 
 To a Lady Recovered from a Dangerous Sickness 182 
 
 On a People's Poet 182
 
 E 
 
 THE THREE GIVERS 
 
 NGLAND gave me sun and storm, 
 The food whereon my spirit throve ; 
 
 America gave me hand-grasps warm, 
 And Ireland gave me her I love. 
 
 Heirs of unequal wealth they are, 
 
 These noble lands, these givers three ; 
 
 And it was the poorest one by far, 
 That gave the richest gift to me.
 
 w 
 
 THE EARTH'S DESIRE 
 
 HEN a sigh as of abdication is wrung from 
 
 lordly things 
 By the rumour of crumbling pride that the 
 
 eve of autumn brings ; 
 
 When the troubled splendours come, and the green per- 
 fections go, 
 Amid flitting of vagabond tempest irresolute to and fro ; 
 
 " Ask, ask thou a boon," say the Heavens to the wistful 
 
 Earth ; but in vain 
 She asks for the bliss of the Rose, and the pomp of the 
 
 Nightingale's pain.
 
 THE HUSBANDMAN OF HEAVEN 
 
 (Lines written near the burial-place of Burns) 
 
 POET, whose very dust, here shed, 
 Is as the quick among the dead, 
 Where revels thy carousing soul ? 
 What Hebe fills what mighty bowl, 
 Mantling with what immortal drink ? 
 
 Nay, great and blissful one ! I think 
 
 That, taught by Time himself to flee 
 
 The taverns of Eternity, 
 
 Amid yon constellations thou 
 
 Drivest all night the heavenly Plough, 
 
 Wooing with song some sky-nymph fair 
 
 Who sits in Cassiopeia's Chair, 
 
 Or half unravels on her knees 
 
 That tangled net, the Pleiades, 
 
 Or, at thy over amorous strain 
 
 Bridling with wrath she needs must feign, 
 
 Flits to a region pale and gray, 
 
 Shimmers through nebula away, 
 
 But wandering back, with starlike tears 
 
 Yields to the Ploughman of the Spheres.
 
 UNINHABITED 
 
 BEHOLD a sapless husk, in name a man, 
 That never shook with laughter at a jest, 
 Or flashed in anger at a hateful deed, 
 Or loved a woman, or sinned a headlong sin I 
 In two score years grown old and moribund, 
 His lean soul, arid as the childless sands, 
 Crumbles, and dustily disintegrates, 
 Dies piecemeal, less lamented than a tree. 
 
 It is not the well-warmed, well-peopled house 
 That soonest falls to wrack. 'Tis the disused 
 And empty dwelling, that with fireless hearth, 
 Pictureless walls, and shuttered window panes, 
 Coldly, untimely mopes into decay.
 
 THE LUTE-PLAYER 
 
 SHE was a lady great and splendid, 
 I was a minstrel in her halls. 
 A warrior like a prince attended 
 Stayed his steed by the castle walls. 
 
 Far had he fared to gaze upon her. 
 
 " O rest thee now, Sir Knight," she said. 
 The warrior wooed, the warrior won her ; 
 
 In time of snowdrops they were wed. 
 I made sweet music in his honour, 
 
 And longed to strike him dead. 
 
 I passed at midnight from her portal, 
 Throughout the world till death I rove : 
 
 Ah, let me make this lute immortal 
 With rapture of my hate and love !
 
 THE SOVEREIGN POET 
 
 HE sits above the clang and dust of Time, 
 With the world's secret trembling on his lip. 
 He asks not converse or companionship 
 In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb. 
 
 The undelivered tidings in his breast 
 Suffer him not to rest. 
 He sees afar the immemorable throng, 
 And binds the scattered ages with a song. 
 
 The glorious riddle of his rhythmic breath, 
 His might, his spell, we know not what they be : 
 We only feel, whate'er he uttereth, 
 This savours not of death, 
 This hath a relish of eternity. 
 

 
 STORM IN MID-ATLANTIC 
 
 MANY have sung of the terrors of Storm : 
 I will make me a song of its beauty, its graces 
 of hue and form : 
 A song of the loveliness gotten of Power, 
 Born of Rage in her blackest hour, 
 When never a wave repeats another, 
 But each is unlike his own twin brother, 
 Each is himself from base to crown, 
 Himself alone as he clambers up, 
 Himself alone as he crashes down ; — 
 When the whole sky drinks of the sea's mad cup, 
 And the ship is thrilled to her quivering core, 
 But amidst her pitching, amidst her rolling, 
 Amidst the clangour and boom and roar, 
 Is a Spirit of Beauty all-controlling ! 
 For here in the thick of the blinding weather 
 The great waves gather themselves together, 
 Shake out their creases, compose their folds, 
 As if each one knew that an eye beholds. 
 And look ! there rises a shape of wonder, 
 A moving menace, a mount of gloom, 
 But the moment ere he breaks asunder 
 His forehead flames into sudden bloom, 
 A burning rapture of nameless green, 
 That never on earth or in heaven was seen, 
 Never but where the midmost ocean 
 Greets and embraces the tempest in primal divine emotion.
 
 And down in a vale of the sea, between 
 
 Two roaring hills, is a wide smooth space, 
 
 Where the foam that blanches the ocean's face 
 
 Is woven in likeness of filmiest lace, 
 
 Delicate, intricate, fairy- fine, 
 
 Wrought by the master of pure design, 
 
 Storm, the matchless artist, lord of colour and line. 
 
 8
 
 TO LICINIUS 
 
 {Ode of Horace paraphrased) 
 
 LICINIUS, wouldst thou wisely steer 
 That barque which is thy soul, 
 Not always trust her without fear 
 Where deep-sea billows roll ; 
 Nor, to the sheltered beach too near, 
 Risk shipwreck on the shoal. 
 
 Who sees in fortune's golden mean 
 
 All his desires comprised, 
 Midway the cot and court between 
 
 Hath well his life devised ; 
 For riches, hath not envied been, 
 
 Nor, for their lack, despised. 
 
 Most rocks the pine that soars afar, 
 When leaves are tempest-whirled. 
 
 Direst the crash when turrets are 
 In dusty ruin hurled. 
 
 The thunder loveth best to scar 
 The white brows of the world. 
 
 The steadfast mind, that to the end 
 
 Is fortune's victor still, 
 Hath yet a fear, though Fate befriend, 
 
 A hope, though all seem ill. 
 Jove can at will the winter send, 
 
 Or call the spring at will. 
 
 9
 
 Full oft the darkest day may be 
 Of morrows bright the sire. 
 
 His bow not everlastingly 
 Apollo bends in ire. 
 
 At times the silent Muses he 
 Wakes with his dulcet lyre. 
 
 When stormy narrows round thee roar, 
 Be bold ; naught else avails. 
 
 But when thy canvas swells before 
 Too proudly prospering gales, 
 
 For once be wise with coward's lore, 
 And timely reef thy sails. 
 
 10
 
 ODE ON THE DAY OF THE CORONATION 
 OF KING EDWARD VII 
 
 SIRE, we have looked on many and mighty things 
 In these eight hundred summers of renown 
 Since the Gold Dragon of the Wessex Kings 
 On Hastings field went down ; 
 And slowly in the ambience of this crown 
 Have many crowns been gathered, till, to-day, 
 How many peoples crown thee, who shall say ? 
 Time, and the ocean, and some fostering star, 
 In high cabal have made us what we are, 
 Who stretch one hand to Huron's bearded pines, 
 And one on Kashmir's snowy shoulder lay, 
 And round the streaming of whose raiment shines 
 The iris of the Australasian spray. 
 For waters have connived at our designs, 
 And winds have plotted with us — and behold, 
 Kingdom in kingdom, sway in oversway, 
 Dominion fold in fold : 
 Like to that immemorial regal stone 
 Thy namesake from the northland reft away, 
 Symbol of sovereignty and spoil of fray, 
 And closed in England's throne. 
 So wide of girth this little cirque of gold, 
 So great we are, and old. 
 Proud from the ages are we come, O King ; 
 Proudly, as fits a nation that hath now 
 So many dawns and sunsets on her brow, 
 This duteous heart we bring. 
 
 ii
 
 II 
 
 The kings thy far forerunners ; he that came 
 
 And smote us into greatness ; he whose fame, 
 
 In dark armipotence and ivied pride, 
 
 Towers above Conway's tide, 
 
 And where Carnarvon ponders on the sea ; 
 
 He, that adventurous name, 
 
 Who left at Agincourt the knightly head 
 
 Of France and all its charging plumes o'erthrown, 
 
 But hath in Shakespeare's conquests merged his own ; 
 
 And she, a queen, yet fashioned king-like, she 
 
 Before whose prows, before whose tempests, fled 
 
 Spain on the ruining night precipitately ; 
 
 And that worn face, in camps and councils bred, 
 
 The guest who brought us law and liberty 
 
 Raised well-nigh from the dead ; 
 
 Yea, she herself, in whose immediate stead 
 
 Thou standest, in the shadow of her soul ; 
 
 All these, O King, from their seclusion dread, 
 
 And guarded palace of eternity, 
 
 Mix in thy pageant with phantasmal tread, 
 
 Hear the long waves of acclamation roll, 
 
 And with yet mightier silence marshal thee 
 
 To the awful throne thou hast inherited. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Lo, at the Earth's high feast, ere Autumn bring 
 His afterthoughts on greatness to her ear, 
 And with monitions of mortality 
 Perturb the revelling year, 
 
 12
 
 Thou goest forth and art anointed King. 
 
 Nature disdains not braveries : why should we 
 
 The sombre foil to all her splendours be ? 
 
 Let London rustle with rich apparelling, 
 
 And all the ways, with festal faces lined, 
 
 Casement and coign and fluttering balcony, 
 
 Wave welcome on the wind. 
 
 Now the loud land flames with imperial gear, 
 
 And life itself, so late in hues austere 
 
 And the cold reign of iron custom bound, 
 
 Puts off its gray subjection, and is here 
 
 One moment throned and crowned. 
 
 Now the long glories prance and triumph by : 
 
 And now the pomps have passed, and we depart 
 
 Each to the peace or strife of his own heart : 
 
 And now the day whose bosom was so high 
 
 Sinks billowing down : and twilight sorceries change 
 
 Into remote and strange 
 
 What is most known and nigh : 
 
 And changelessly the river sends his sigh 
 
 Down leagues of hope and fear, and pride and shame, 
 
 And life and death ; dim-journeying passionless 
 
 To where broad estuary and beaconing ness 
 
 Look toward the outlands whence our fathers came. 
 
 And high on Druid mountains hath the sun 
 
 Flamed valediction, as the last lights died 
 
 Beyond that fatal wave, that from our side 
 
 Sunders the lovely and the lonely Bride 
 
 Whom we have wedded but have never won. 
 
 13
 
 IV 
 
 And night falls on an isle whose vassal seas 
 
 Remember not her prone regalities, 
 
 So withered from belief, so far and faint, 
 
 In such abjection before Time they lie, 
 
 Kingdoms and thrones forgotten of the sky. 
 
 Deira with her sea-face to the morn, 
 
 And Cumbria sunset-gazing ; moist Dyvnaint, 
 
 A realm of coombs and tors ; old greatnesses 
 
 From Dee to Severn, where the bards were born 
 
 Whose songs are in the wind by Idris' chair, 
 
 Whose lips won battles ; and seats of puissance where, 
 
 With long grope of his desultory hand, 
 
 The ocean, prying deep into the land, 
 
 By Morven and the legends of wild Lorn, 
 
 Repents him, lost about Lochiel : all these 
 
 Have been, and 'stablisht on their dust we stand ; 
 
 Thy England ; with the northern sister fair, 
 
 That hath the heath-bells in her blowing hair ; 
 
 And the dark mountain maid 
 
 That dreams for ever in the wizard shade, 
 
 Hymning her heroes there. 
 
 V 
 
 O doom of overlordships ! to decay 
 
 First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all ; 
 
 Or perish of much cumber and array, 
 
 The burdening robe of empire, and its pall ; 
 
 Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey, 
 
 Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay ;
 
 Or, from insensate height, 
 
 With prodigies, with light 
 
 Of trailing angers on the monstrous night, 
 
 Magnificently fall. 
 
 Far off from her that hore us be such fate, 
 
 And vain against her gate 
 
 Its knocking. But by chinks and crannies, Death, 
 
 Forbid the doorways, oft-times entereth. 
 
 Let her drink deep of discontent, and sow 
 
 Abroad the troubling knowledge. Let her show 
 
 Whence glories come, and wherefore glories go, 
 
 And what indeed are glories, unto these 
 
 'Twixt labour and the rest that is not ease 
 
 Made blank and darksome ; who have hardly heard 
 
 Sound of her loftiest names, or any word 
 
 Of all that hath in gold been said and sung, 
 
 Since him of April heart and morning tongue, 
 
 Her ageless singing-bird. 
 
 For now the day is unto them that know, 
 
 And not henceforth she stumbles on the prize ; 
 
 And yonder maich the nations full of eyes. 
 
 Already is doom a-spinning, if unstirred 
 
 In leisure of ancient pathways she lose touch 
 
 Of the hour, and overmuch 
 
 Recline upon achievement, and be slow 
 
 To take the world arriving, and forget 
 
 How perilous are the stature and port that so 
 
 Invite the arrows, how unslumbering all 
 
 The hates that watch and crawl. 
 
 15
 
 Nor must she, like the others, yield up yet 
 The generous dreams ! but rather live to be 
 Saluted in the hearts of men as she 
 Of high and singular election, set 
 Benignant on the sea ; 
 That greatly loving freedom loved to free, 
 And was herself the bridal and embrace 
 Of strength and conquering grace. 
 
 16
 
 IN DREAMS 
 
 IN dreams the exile cometh home ; 
 In dreams the lost is found ; 
 In dreams the fettered slave may roam 
 The world around. 
 
 In dreams thou may'st a monarch be, 
 
 And sit upon a throne. 
 Give thanks, that this befalleth thee 
 
 In dreams alone. 
 
 17
 
 SUMMER'S OVERTHROW 
 
 SUMMER is fallen, is conquered, her greatness 
 ravished away. 
 We saw her broken with tempest on cliffs of the 
 Irish shore ; 
 We saw her flee like the wraith of a monstrous rose, before 
 The airy invisible hunters that hunted her night and day. 
 And once we believed them frustrate, believed them reft 
 
 of their prey, 
 For she suddenly flashed anew into violent splendour, 
 
 defied 
 The yelling pack of the storm, and turned, and held them 
 
 at bay. 
 In superb despair she faced them, she towered like June 
 
 once more, — 
 Then, sinking, shook on the world her golden ruins, and 
 died. 
 
 18
 
 THE CHURCHYARD IN THE WOLD 
 
 I 
 
 WANDERED far in the wold, 
 And after the heat and glare 
 
 I came at eve to a churchyard old 
 The yew-trees seemed at prayer, 
 
 And around me was dust in dust, 
 And the fleeting light, and Repose ; 
 
 And the infinite pathos of human trust 
 In a God whom no man knows. 
 
 «9
 
 THE FIRST SKYLARK OF SPRING 
 
 TWO worlds hast thou to dwell in, Sweet,- 
 The virginal untroubled sky, 
 And this vext region at my feet. — 
 Alas, but one have 1 1 
 
 To all my songs there clings the shade, 
 The dulling shade, of mundane care. 
 They amid mortal mists are made — 
 Thine in immortal air. 
 
 My heart is dashed with griefs and fears ; 
 My song comes fluttering, and is gone. 
 O high above the home of tears, 
 Eternal Joy, sing on ! 
 
 Not loftiest bard, of mightiest mind, 
 
 Shall ever chant a note so pure, 
 Till he can cast this earth behind 
 
 And breathe in heaven secure. 
 
 We sing of Life, with stormy breath 
 
 That shakes the lute's distempered string : 
 We sing of Love, and loveless Death 
 Takes up the song we sing. 
 
 And born in toils of Fate's control, 
 
 Insurgent from the womb, we strive 
 With proud unmanumitted soul 
 To burst the golden gyve. 
 
 20
 
 Thy spirit knows nor bounds nor bars ; 
 On thee no shreds of thraldom hang ; 
 Not more enlarged, the morning stars 
 Their great Te Deum sang. 
 
 But I am fettered to the sod, 
 
 And but forget my bonds an hour ; 
 In amplitude of dreams a god, 
 A slave in dearth of power. 
 
 And fruitless knowledge clouds my soul, 
 
 And fretful ignorance irks it more. 
 Thou sing'st as if thou knew'st the whole, 
 And lightly held'st thy lore ! 
 
 Somewhat as thou, Man once could sing, 
 
 In porches of the lucent morn, 
 Ere he had felt his lack of wing, 
 Or cursed his iron bourn. 
 
 The springtime bubbled in his throat, 
 The sweet sky seemed not far above, 
 And young and lovesome came the note ;— 
 Ah, thine is Youth and Love ! 
 
 Thou sing'st of what he knew of old, 
 
 And dreamlike from afar recalls ; 
 In flashes of forgotten gold 
 An orient glory falls. 
 
 21
 
 
 And as he listens, one by one 
 
 Life's utmost splendours blaze more nigh ; 
 Less inaccessible the sun, 
 Less alien grows the sky. 
 
 For thou art native to the spheres, 
 
 And of the courts of heaven art free, 
 And earnest to his temporal ears 
 News from eternity ; 
 
 And lead'st him to the dizzy verge, 
 
 And lur'st him o'er the dazzling line, 
 Where mortal and immortal merge, 
 And human dies divine. 
 
 22
 
 LACRIM^E MUSARUM 
 
 (The Death of Tennyson) 
 
 LOW, like another's, lies the laurelled head : 
 The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er : 
 Carry the last great bard to his last bed. 
 Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute. 
 Land that he loved, that loved him ! nevermore 
 Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild sea-shore, 
 Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit, 
 Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread, 
 The master's feet shall tread. 
 Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute : 
 The singer of undying songs is dead. 
 
 Lo, in this season pensive-hued and grave, 
 While fades and falls the doomed, reluctant leaf 
 From withered Earth's fantastic coronal, 
 With wandering sighs of forest and of wave 
 Mingles the murmur of a people's grief 
 For him whose leaf shall fade not, neither fall. 
 He hath fared forth, beyond these suns and showers. 
 For us, the autumn glow, the autumn flame, 
 And soon the winter silence shall be ours : 
 Him the eternal spring of fadeless fame 
 Crowns with no mortal flowers. 
 
 What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears, 
 To save from visitation of decay ? 
 
 23
 
 Not in this temporal light alone, that bay 
 
 Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears 
 
 Sings he with lips of transitory clay. 
 
 Rapt though he be from us, 
 
 Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus ; 
 
 Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each 
 
 Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach ; 
 
 Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach ; 
 
 Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home ; 
 
 Keats, on his lips the eternal rose of youth, 
 
 Doth in the name of Beauty that is Truth 
 
 A kinsman's love beseech ; 
 
 Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, 
 
 Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, 
 
 His equal friendship crave : 
 
 And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech 
 
 Of Athens, Florence, Weimar, Stratford, Rome. 
 
 Nay, he returns to regions whence he came. 
 Him doth the spirit divine 
 Of universal loveliness reclaim. 
 All nature is his shrine. 
 Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea, 
 In earth's and air's emotion or repose, 
 In every star's august serenity, 
 And in the rapture of the flaming rose. 
 There seek him if ye would not seek in vain, 
 There, in the rhythm and music of the Whole ; 
 Yea, and for ever in the human soul 
 Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain. 
 
 24
 
 For lo ! creation's self is one great choir, 
 And what is nature's order but the rhyme 
 Whereto, in holiest chime, 
 All things have moved with all things from their 
 
 prime ? 
 Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre ? 
 In far retreats of elemental mind 
 Obscurely comes and goes 
 
 The imperative breath of song, that as the wind 
 Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. 
 Demand of lilies wherefore they are white, 
 Extort her crimson secret from the rose, 
 But ask not of the Muse that she disclose 
 The meaning of the riddle of her might : 
 Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite, 
 Save the enigma of herself, she knows. 
 The master could not tell, with all his lore, 
 Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped 
 Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said : 
 Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale, 
 That held in trance the ancient Attic shore, 
 And charms the ages with the notes that o'er 
 All woodland chants immortally prevail ! 
 And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled, 
 He with diviner silence dwells instead, 
 And on no earthly sea with transient roar, 
 Unto no earthly airs, he sets his sail, 
 But far beyond our vision and our hail 
 Is heard for ever and is seen no more. 
 
 25
 
 
 No more, O never now, 
 Lord of the lofty and the tranquil brow, 
 Shall men behold those wizard locks where Time 
 Let fall no wintry rime. 
 Once, in his youth obscure, 
 The weaver of this verse, that shall endure 
 By splendour of its theme which cannot die. 
 Beheld thee eye to eye, 
 And touched through thee the hand 
 Of every hero of thy race divine, 
 Ev'n to the sire of all the laurelled line, 
 The sightless wanderer on the Ionian strand. 
 Yea, I beheld thee, and behold thee yet : 
 Thou hast forgotten, but can I forget ? 
 Are not thy words all goldenly impressed 
 On memory's palimpsest ? 
 I hear the utterance of thy sovereign tongue, 
 I tread the floor thy hallowing feet have trod ; 
 I see the hands a nation's lyre that strung, 
 The eyes that looked through life and gazed on God. 
 
 The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer ; 
 The grass of yesteryear 
 
 Is dead ; the birds depart, the groves decay : 
 Empires dissolve and peoples disappear : 
 Song passes not away. 
 Captains and conquerors leave a little dust, 
 And kings a dubious legend of their reign ; 
 The swords of Caesars, thev are less than rust : 
 The poet doth remain. 
 
 26
 
 Dead is Augustus, Maro is alive ; 
 
 And thou, the Mantuan of this age and soil, 
 
 With Virgil shalt survive, 
 
 Enriching Time with no less honeyed spoil, 
 
 The yielded sweet of every Muse's hive ; 
 
 Heeding no more the sound of idle praise 
 
 In that great calm our tumults cannot reach, — ■ 
 
 Master who crown 'st our immeiodious days 
 
 With flower of perfect speech. 
 
 27
 
 
 ELUSION 
 
 WHERE shall I find thee, Joy ? by what great 
 marge 1 
 
 With the strong seas exulting ? on what peaks 
 Rapt ? or astray within what forest bourn, 
 Thy light hands parting the resilient boughs ? 
 
 Hast thou no answer ? . . . Ah, in mine own breast 
 
 Except unsought thou spring, though I go forth 
 
 And tease the waves for news of thee, and make 
 
 Importunate inquisition of the woods 
 
 If thou didst pass that way, I shall but find 
 
 The brief print of thy footfall on sere leaves 
 
 And the salt brink, and woo thy touch in vain. 
 
 
 28
 
 o 
 
 O LIKE A QUEEN 
 
 LIKE a queen's her happy tread, 
 And like a queen's her golden head 1 
 But O, at last, when all is said, 
 Her woman's heart for me ! 
 
 We wandered where the river gleamed 
 'Neath oaks that mused and pines that dreamed. 
 A wild thing of the woods she seemed, 
 So proud, and pure, and free ! 
 
 All heaven drew nigh to hear her sing, 
 When from her lips her soul took wing ; 
 The oaks forgot their pondering, 
 The pines their reverie. 
 
 And O, her happy queenly tread, 
 And O, her queenly golden head ! 
 But O, her heart, when all is said, 
 Her woman's heart for me ! 
 
 29
 
 THE PLAYMATES 
 
 THE Wye and the Severn are offspring 
 Of dark Plinlimmon's side ; 
 And there they were nursed as playmates, 
 And then — they were sundered wide. 
 
 In ways far parted they travel, 
 
 By city and castled shore ; 
 And at last, after great adventures, 
 
 They meet — very old — once more. 
 
 They have long grown rich in homage ; 
 
 They are full of renown and pride ; 
 But they babble of how they were playmates 
 
 On dark Plinlimmon's side. 
 
 30
 
 NIGHT ON CURBAR EDGE 
 
 NO echo of man's life pursues my ears ; 
 Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign ; 
 Change comes not, this dread temple to profane, 
 Where time by aeons reckons, not by years. 
 Its patient form one crag, sole stranded, rears, 
 Type of whate'er is destined to remain 
 While yon still host encamped on night's waste plain 
 Keeps armed watch, a million quivering spears. 
 
 Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor ; 
 The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall, 
 Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled : 
 Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door ; 
 And there is built and 'stablisht over all, 
 Tremendous silence, older than the world. 
 
 31
 
 THE SLAIN IN WAR 
 
 PARTNERS at last ; sharers of noteless doom ; 
 Peers in oblivion's commonalty merged ; 
 Unto like deeds by differing mandates urged, 
 And equalled in the unrespective tomb ; 
 Leal or perfidious, cruel or ruthful, whom 
 Precipitate fate hath of your frailties purged ; 
 Whom duly the impartial winds have dirged, 
 In autumn or the glorying vernal bloom : 
 Already is your strife become as nought ; 
 Idle the bullet's flight, the bayonet's thrust, 
 The senseless cannon's dull, unmeaning word ; 
 Idle your feud ; and all for which ye fought 
 To this arbitrament of loam referred, 
 And cold adjudication of the dust. 
 
 1903. 
 
 V
 
 THE DRAGONS* 
 
 KING VORTIGERN— «o run the ancient tales— 
 A stronghold sought to build in wildest Wales ; 
 But some fell Power made frustrate each assay, 
 And nightly wrecked the labours of the day ; 
 Till Merlin came, and bade the builders all 
 Dig deep beneath the many-bastioned wall ; 
 And lo, two Dragons, o'er whose quaking lair 
 Nought could rise steadfast, lay and wallowed there. 
 
 Search the foundations, you that build a State : 
 For if the dragon forms of Wrath and Hate 
 Do couch below, and darkly bide their hour, 
 Fear walks the rampart, Fear ascends the tower. 
 And let it not content you that they sleep ! 
 Drive them with strong enchantments to the deep. 
 First of such charms is perfect justice : then 
 The rare right word that conquers beasts and men. 
 No subtler magic serves ; no spells but these 
 Drive the coiled dragons to the whelming seas. 
 
 * The legend here much condensed is found in Nennius 
 and later chroniclers. The poem was published in 1903. 
 
 33
 
 APRIL 
 
 APRIL, April, 
 Laugh thy girlish laughter 
 Then, the moment after, 
 Weep thy girlish tears 1 
 April, that mine ears 
 Like a lover greetest, 
 If I tell thee, sweetest, 
 All my hopes and fears, 
 April, April, 
 
 Laugh thy golden laughter, 
 But, the moment after, 
 Weep thy golden tears ! 
 
 34
 
 CHRISTMAS DAY 
 
 THE morn broke bright : the thronging people 
 wore 
 Their best ; but in the general face I saw 
 No touch of veneration or of awe. 
 Christ's natal day ? 'Twas merely one day more 
 On which the mart agreed to close its door ; 
 A lounging-time by usage and by law 
 Sanctioned ; nor recked they, beyond this, one straw 
 Of any meaning which for man it bore ! 
 
 Fated among Time's fallen leaves to stray, 
 We breathe an air that savours of the tomb, 
 Heavy with dissolution and decay ; 
 Waiting till some new world-emotion rise, 
 And with the might of the unchained simoom 
 Sweep hence this dying Past that never dies. 
 
 35
 
 THE REAL REFORMER 
 
 NOT he, the statesman, whatsoe'er his name, 
 Who would strip Life of all adventurousness, 
 Of all but arrow-proof and storm-proof dress, 
 Making it more and more ignobly tame, 
 Poorer in perils which they that overcame 
 Were braced and manned by, — making it less and less 
 The school of heroes armed for struggle and stress, — 
 Not he shall win hereafter radiant fame. 
 But when some dauntless teller of truth unsweet 
 Shall shake the slumberous People, with rude power, 
 To a vast New Birth of all the soul and mind, 
 Him, and none other, at the destined hour, 
 Him, quick or dead, the thunderous thanks shall greet, 
 Not of his country alone, but of his kind. 
 
 36
 
 MELANCHOLIA 
 
 IN the cold starlight, on the barren beach, 
 Where to the stones the rent sea-tresses clave, 
 I heard the long hiss of the backward wave 
 Down the steep shingle, and the hollow speech 
 Of murmurous cavern-lips, nor other breach 
 Of ancient silence. None was with me, save 
 Thoughts that were neither glad nor sweet nor brave, 
 But restless comrades, each the foe of each. 
 And I beheld the waters in their might 
 Writhe as a dragon by some great spell curbed 
 And foiled ; and one lone sail ; and over me 
 The everlasting taciturnity ; 
 The august, inhospitable, inhuman night, 
 Glittering magnificently unperturbed. 
 
 37
 
 
 THE WORLD IN ARMOUR* 
 
 UNDER this shade of crimson wings abhorred 
 That never wholly leaves the sky serene, — 
 While Vengeance sleeps a sleep so light, between 
 Dominions that acclaim Thee overlord, — 
 Sadly the blast of Thy tremendous word, 
 Whate'er its mystic purport may have been, 
 Echoes across the ages, Nazarene : 
 Not to bring peace Mine errand, but a sword. 
 
 For lo, Thy world uprises and lies down 
 
 In armour, and its Peace is War, in all 
 
 Save the great death that weaves War's dreadful crown : 
 
 War unennobled by heroic pain : 
 
 War without triumph, without glorious fall, 
 
 War that sits smiling, with the eyes of Cain. 
 
 II 
 
 When London's Plague, that day by day enrolled 
 
 His thousands dead, nor deigned his rage to abate 
 
 Till grass was green in silent Bishopsgate, 
 
 Had come and passed like thunder, — still, 'tis told, 
 
 The monster, driven to earth, in hovels old 
 
 And haunts obscure, though dormant, lingered late, 
 
 Till the dread Fire, one roaring wave of fate, 
 
 Rose, and swept clean his last retreat and hold. 
 
 * These three sonnets were first published in 1904, ten 
 years before the outbreak of the Great War. 
 
 38
 
 In Europe live the dregs of Plague to-day, 
 Dregs of full many an ancient Plague and dire, — 
 Old wrongs, old lies of ages blind and cruel. 
 What if alone the world-war's world-wide fire 
 Can purge the ambushed pestilence away ? 
 Yet woe to him that idly lights the fuel ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 A moment's fantasy, the vision came 
 Of Europe dipped in fiery death, and so 
 Mounting re-born, with vestal limbs aglow, 
 Splendid and fragrant from her bath of flame. 
 It fleeted ; and a phantom without name, 
 Sightless, dismembered, terrible, said : " Lo, 
 / am that ravished Europe men shall know 
 After the morn of blood and night of shame." 
 
 The spectre passed, and I beheld alone 
 The Europe of the present, as she stands, 
 Powerless from terror of her own vast power, 
 'Neath novel stars, beside a brink unknown ; 
 And round her the sad Kings, with sleepless hands, 
 Piling the fagots, hour by doomful hour. 
 
 39
 
 THE TOMB OF BURNS 
 
 WHAT woos the world to yonder shrine ? 
 What sacred clay, what dust divine ? 
 Was this some Master faultless-fine, 
 In whom we praise 
 The cunning of the jewelled line 
 And carven phrase ? 
 
 A searcher of our source and goal, 
 
 A reader of God's secret scroll ? 
 
 A Shakespeare, flashing o'er the whole 
 
 Of man's domain 
 The splendour of his cloudless soul 
 
 And perfect brain ? 
 
 Some Keats, to Grecian gods allied, 
 Clasping all beauty as his bride ? 
 Some Shelley, soaring dim-descried 
 
 Above Time's throng, 
 And heavenward hurling wild and wide 
 
 His spear of song ? 
 
 A lonely Wordsworth, from the crowd 
 Half hid in light, half veiled in cloud ? 
 A sphere-born Milton, cold and proud, 
 
 In hallowing dews 
 Dipt, and with gorgeous ritual vowed 
 
 Unto the Muse ? 
 
 40
 
 Nay, none of these, — and little skilled 
 On heavenly heights to sing and build ! 
 Thine, thine, O Earth, whose fields he tilled, 
 
 And thine alone, 
 Was he whose fiery heart lies stilled 
 
 'Neath yonder stone. 
 
 He came when poets had forgot 
 How rich and strange the human lot ; 
 How warm the tints of Life ; how hot 
 
 Are Love and Hate ; 
 And what makes Truth divine, and what 
 
 Makes Manhood great. 
 
 A ghostly troop, in pale amaze 
 
 They melted 'neath that living gaze, — 
 
 His in whose spirit's gusty blaze 
 
 We seem to hear 
 The crackling of their phantom bays 
 
 Sapless and sere ! 
 
 For, mid an age of dust and dearth, 
 Once more had bloomed immortal worth. 
 There, in the strong, splenetic North, 
 
 The Spring began. 
 A mighty mother had brought forth 
 
 A mighty man. 
 
 4i
 
 No mystic torch through Time he bore, 
 No virgin veil from Life he tore ; 
 His soul no bright insignia wore 
 
 Of starry birth ; 
 He saw what all men see — no more — 
 
 In heaven and earth : 
 
 But as, when thunder crashes nigh, 
 All darkness opes one naming eye, 
 And the world leaps against the sky, — 
 
 So fiery-clear 
 Did the old truths that we pass by 
 
 To him appear. 
 
 How could he 'scape the doom of such 
 As feel the airiest phantom-touch 
 Keenlier than others feel the clutch 
 
 Of iron powers, — 
 Who die of having lived so much 
 
 In their large hours ? 
 
 He erred, he sinned : and if there be 
 Who, from his hapless frailties free, 
 Rich in the poorer virtues, see 
 
 His faults alone, — 
 To such, O Lord of Charity, 
 
 Be mercy shown ! 
 
 
 42
 
 Singly he faced the bigot brood, 
 The meanly wise, the feebly good ; 
 He pelted them with pearl, with mud ; 
 
 He fought them well, — 
 But ah, the stupid million stood, 
 
 And he — he fell ! 
 
 All bright and glorious at the start, 
 'Twas his ignobly to depart, 
 Slain by his own too affluent heart, 
 
 Too generous blood ; 
 A voyager that lost life's chart 
 
 In midmost flood. 
 
 So closes the fantastic fray, 
 The duel of the spirit and clay ! 
 So come bewildering disarray 
 
 And blurring gloom, 
 The irremediable day 
 
 And final doom. 
 
 So passes, all confusedly 
 
 As lights that hurry, shapes that flee 
 
 About some brink we dimly see, 
 
 The trivial, great, 
 Squalid, majestic tragedy 
 
 Of human fate. 
 
 43
 
 Not ours to gauge the more or less, 
 The will's defect, the blood's excess, 
 The earthy humours that oppress 
 
 The radiant mind. 
 His greatness, not his littleness, 
 
 Concerns mankind. 
 
 A dreamer of the common dreams, 
 
 Here, 'mid the world that round us streams, 
 
 He chased the transitory gleams 
 
 That all pursue ; 
 But on his lips the eternal themes 
 
 Again were new. 
 
 With shattering ire or withering mirth 
 He smote each worthless claim to worth. 
 The barren fig-tree cumbering Earth 
 
 He would not spare. 
 Through ancient lies of proudest birth 
 
 He drove his share. 
 
 To him the Powers that formed him brave, 
 Yet weak to breast the fatal wave, 
 A mighty gift of Hatred gave, — 
 
 A gift, above 
 All other gifts, benefic, save 
 
 The gift of Love. 
 
 44
 
 He saw 'tis meet that Man possess 
 The will to curse as well as bless, 
 To pity — and be pitiless, 
 
 To make, and mar : 
 The fierceness that from tenderness 
 
 Is never far. 
 
 And so his fierce and tender strain 
 Lives, and his idlest words remain 
 To flout oblivion, that in vain 
 
 Strives to destroy 
 One lightest record of his pain 
 
 Or of his joy. 
 
 And though thrice statelier names decay, 
 
 His own can wither not away 
 
 While plighted lass and lad shall stray 
 
 Among the broom, 
 Where evening touches glen and brae 
 
 With rosy gloom ; 
 
 While Hope and Love with Youth abide ; 
 While Age sits at the ingleside ; 
 While yet there have not wholly died 
 
 The heroic fires, 
 The patriot passion, and the pride 
 
 In noble sires ; 
 
 45
 
 While, with the conquering Teuton breed 
 Whose fair estate of speech and deed 
 Heritors north and south of Tweed 
 
 Alike may claim, 
 The dimly mingled Celtic seed 
 
 Flowers like a flame ; 
 
 While nations see in holy trance 
 That vision of the world's advance 
 Which glorified his countenance 
 
 When from afar 
 He hailed the Hope that shot o'er France 
 
 Its crimson star ; 
 
 While, plumed for flight, the Soul deplores 
 The cage that foils the wing that soars ; 
 And while, through adamantine doors 
 
 In dreams flung wide, 
 We hear, around these mortal shores, 
 
 The immortal tide. 
 
 46
 
 SONG IN AN ARCHAIC MANNER 
 
 SWEETEST sweets that Time hath rifled 
 Live anew on lyric tongue — 
 Tresses with which Paris trifled, 
 Lips to Antony's that clung. 
 These surrender not their rose, 
 Nor their golden puissance those. 
 
 Vain the envious loam that covers 
 
 Her of Egypt, her of Troy : 
 Helen's, Cleopatra's lovers 
 
 Still desire them, still enjoy. 
 Fate but stole what Song restored : 
 Vain the aspic, vain the cord. 
 
 Idly clanged the sullen portal, 
 
 Idly the sepulchral door : 
 Fame the mighty, Love the immortal, 
 
 These than foolish dust are more : 
 Nor may captive Death refuse 
 Homage to the conquering Muse. 
 
 47
 
 VITA NUOVA 
 
 LONG hath she slept, forgetful of delight : 
 At last, at last, the enchanted princess, Earth, 
 Claimed with a kiss by Spring the adventurer, 
 In slumber knows the destined lips, and thrilled 
 Through all the deeps of her unageing heart 
 With passionate necessity of joy, 
 Wakens, and yields her loveliness to love. 
 
 O ancient streams, O far-descended woods 
 Full of the fluttering of melodious souls ; 
 
 hills and valleys that adorn yourselves 
 In solemn jubilation ; winds and clouds, 
 Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasped, 
 And all exuberant creatures that acclaim 
 The Earth's divine renewal : lo, I too 
 
 With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song. 
 
 1 too have come through wintry terrors, — yea, 
 Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul 
 Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring, 
 Me also, dimly with new life hath touched, 
 And with regenerate hope, the salt of life ; 
 
 And I would dedicate these thankful tears 
 
 To whatsoever Power beneficent, 
 
 Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his thought, 
 
 Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth 
 
 Into the gracious air and vernal morn, 
 
 48
 
 And suffers me to know my spirit a note 
 
 Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream 
 
 And voiceful mountain, — nay, a string, how jarred 
 
 And all but broken ! of that lyre of life 
 
 Whereon himself, the master harp-player, 
 
 Resolving all its mortal dissonance 
 
 To one immortal and most perfect strain, 
 
 Harps without pause, building with song the world. 
 
 18/A March, 1893. 
 
 49
 
 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 ^TT^HE sleek sea, gorged and sated, basking lies 
 The cruel creature fawns and blinks and 
 
 1 
 
 purrs ; 
 
 And almost we forget what fangs are hers, 
 And trust for once her emerald- golden eyes ; 
 Though haply on the morrow she shall rise 
 And summon her infernal ministers, 
 And charge her everlasting barriers, 
 With wild white fingers snatching at the skies. 
 
 So, betwixt Peace and War, man's life is cast ; 
 Yet hath he dreamed of perfect Peace at last 
 Shepherding all the nations ev'n as sheep. 
 The inconstant, moody ocean shall as soon, 
 At the cold dictates of the bloodless moon, 
 Swear an eternity of halcyon sleep. 
 
 1904. 
 
 50
 
 WORLD-STRANGENESS 
 
 STRANGE the world about me lies, 
 Never yet familiar grown — 
 Still disturbs me with surprise, 
 Haunts me like a face half known. 
 
 In this house with starry dome, 
 
 Floored with gemlike plains and seas, 
 
 Shall I never feel at home, 
 Never wholly be at ease ? 
 
 On from room to room I stray, 
 
 Yet my Host can ne'er espy, 
 And I know not to this day 
 
 Whether guest or captive I. 
 
 So, between the starry dome 
 And the floor of plains and seas, 
 
 I have never felt at home, 
 Never wholly been at ease. 
 
 1888. 
 
 5 1
 
 WALES : A GREETING* 
 
 IN that wild land beyond Sabrina's wave ; 
 In vales full of the voice of bards long mute, 
 From Gwent to far Demetia by the sea ; 
 Or northward unto cloud-roof 'd Gwynedd, where 
 The mountains sit together and talk with heaven, 
 While Mona pushing forth into the deep 
 Looks back for ever on their musing brows : 
 By silent mound and menhir, camp and cairn, 
 Leaf- hidden stream, and cataract's thunderous plunge ; 
 In summer calms, or when the storming North 
 Whitens Eryri's crest and Siabod's cone, — 
 Have I not roamed and lingered, from my youth, 
 An alien and a stranger, but amidst 
 A people gravely kind as suavely proud ? — 
 A people caring for old dreams and deeds, 
 Heroic story, and far-descended song ; 
 Honouring their poets, not in death alone, 
 But in life also, as is meet and well ; 
 An ancient folk, speaking an ancient speech, 
 And cherishing in their bosoms all their past, 
 Yet in whose fiery love of their own land 
 No hatred of another's finds a place. 
 
 Sons — daughters — of Wild Wales, whose kindred swayed 
 This island, ages ere an English word 
 Was breathed in Britain, — let an English voice 
 Hail and salute you here at England's heart. 
 
 * Published in June, 1909, during the holding of the 
 National Eisteddfod in London. 
 
 52
 
 On Europe, east and west, the dim clouds brood, 
 Disperse, and gather again ; and none can tell 
 What birth they hold within them. But we know 
 That should they break in tempest on these shores, 
 You, that with differing blood, with differing spirit, 
 Yet link your life with ours, with ours your fate, 
 Will stand beside us in the hurricane, 
 Steadfast, whatever peril may befall : 
 Will feel no separate heartbeats from our own, 
 Nor aught but oneness with this mighty Power, 
 This Empire, that despite her faults and sins 
 Loves justice, and loves mercy, and loves truth, 
 When truly she beholds them ; and who thus 
 Helps to speed on, through dark and difficult ways, 
 The ever -climbing footsteps of the world. 
 
 London, June 15, 1909. 
 
 53
 
 LEAVETAKING 
 
 PASS, thou wild light, 
 Wild light on peaks that so 
 Grieve to let go 
 The day. 
 
 Lovely thy tarrying, lovely too is night 
 Pass thou away. 
 
 Pass, thou wild heart, 
 
 Wild heart of youth that still 
 
 Hast half a will 
 
 To stay. 
 
 I grow too old a comrade, let us part. 
 
 Pass thou away. 
 
 54
 
 SHELLEY'S CENTENARY* 
 
 WITHIN a narrow span of time, 
 Three princes of the realm of rhyme, 
 At height of youth or manhood's prime 
 From earth took wing, 
 To join the fellowship sublime 
 Who, dead, yet sing. 
 
 He, first, his earliest wreath who wove 
 Of laurel grown in Latmian grove, 
 Conquered by pain and hapless love 
 
 Found calmer home, 
 Roofed by the heaven that glows above 
 
 Eternal Rome. 
 
 A fierier soul, its own fierce prey, 
 And cumbered more with mortal clay, 
 At Missolonghi flamed away, 
 
 And left the air 
 Reverberating to this day 
 
 Its loud despair. 
 
 Alike remote from Byron's scorn 
 And Keats 's magic as of morn 
 Bursting for ever newly-born 
 
 On forests old, 
 To wake a hoary world forlorn 
 
 With touch of gold, 
 
 * August 4, 1892 ; the centenary of his^birth. 
 
 55 e
 
 Shelley, the cloud-begot, who grew 
 Nourished on starbeams, air, and dew, 
 Into that Essence whence he drew 
 
 His life and lyre 
 Was fittingly resolved anew 
 
 Through wave and fire. 
 
 And it was strangely, wildly meet, 
 
 That he, who brooked not Time's slow feet, 
 
 With passage thus abrupt and fleet 
 
 Should hurry hence, 
 Eager the Great Perhaps to greet 
 
 With Why ? and Whence ? 
 
 Impatient of the world's fixed way, 
 He ne'er could suffer God's delay, 
 But all the future in a day 
 
 Would build divine, 
 And the whole past in ruins lay, 
 
 An emptied shrine. 
 
 Vain vision ! but the glow, the fire, 
 The passion of benign desire, 
 These peradventure lift him higher 
 
 Than many a soul 
 That mounts a million paces nigher 
 
 Its meaner goal. 
 
 56
 
 And power is his, if naught besides, 
 In that thin ether where he rides, 
 Above the roar of human tides 
 
 To ascend afar, 
 Lost in a storm of light that hides 
 
 His dizzy car. 
 
 Below, the unhasting world toils on, 
 And here and there are victories won, 
 Some dragon slain, some justice done, 
 
 While, 'mid the skies, 
 A meteor rushing on the sun, 
 
 He flares and dies. 
 
 But, as he cleaves yon ether clear, 
 Notes from the unattempted sphere 
 He scatters to the oft heedless ear 
 
 Of Earth's dim throng. 
 Nay, from the zenith he flings sheer 
 
 His torrent of song. 
 
 In other shapes than he forecast, 
 
 Fate moulds the Morrow. His fierce blast, - 
 
 His wild assault upon the Past, — 
 
 These things are vain. 
 Brief is Revolt, but born to last 
 
 Was the arrowy strain, 
 
 57
 
 That seems the wandering voices blent 
 
 Of every virgin element ; 
 
 A sound from ocean caverns sent ; 
 
 An airy call 
 From the Uranian firmament 
 
 O'erdoming all. 
 
 And in this world of worldlings, where 
 Souls rust in apathy, and ne'er 
 A great emotion shakes the air, 
 
 And life flags tame, 
 And rare is noble impulse, rare 
 
 The impassioned aim, 
 
 'Tis no mean fortune to have heard 
 A singer who, if errors blurred 
 His sight, had yet a spirit stirred 
 
 By vast desire, 
 And ardour fledging the swift word 
 
 With plumes of fire. 
 
 A creature of impetuous breath, 
 Our torpor deadlier than death 
 He knew not ; whatsoe'er he saith 
 
 Flashes with life : 
 He spurreth men, he quickeneth 
 
 To splendid strife. 
 
 58
 
 And in his gusts of song he brings 
 Wild odours shaken from strange wings, 
 And carries secret whisperings 
 
 From far lips blown, 
 While all the rapturous heart of things 
 
 Throbs through his own, — 
 
 His own that from the burning pyre 
 One who had loved his wind-swept lyre 
 Out of the sharp teeth of the fire 
 
 Unmolten drew, 
 Beside the sea that in her ire 
 
 Smote him and slew. 
 
 59
 
 ESTRANGEMENT 
 
 SO, without overt breach, we fall apart, 
 Tacitly sunder — neither you nor I 
 Conscious of one intelligible Why, 
 And both, from severance, winning equal smart. 
 So, with resigned and acquiescent heart, 
 Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie, 
 I seem to see an alien shade pass by, 
 A spirit wherein I have no lot or part. 
 Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim, 
 From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn 
 That June on her triumphal progress goes 
 Through arched and bannered woodlands ; while for 
 
 him 
 She is a legend emptied of concern, 
 And idle is the rumour of the rose. 
 
 
 60
 
 THE BALLAD OF SEMMERWATER 
 
 (North-Country Legend). 
 
 D 
 
 EEP asleep, deep asleep, 
 Deep asleep it lies, 
 The still lake of Semmenvater 
 Under the still skies. 
 
 And many a fathom,' many a fathom, 
 Many a fathom below, 
 In a king's tower and a queen's bower 
 The fishes come and go. 
 
 Once there stood by Semmenvater 
 A mickle town and tall ; 
 King's tower and queen's bower, 
 And the wakeman on the wall. 
 
 Came a beggar halt and sore : 
 " I faint for lack of bread." 
 King's tower and queen's bower 
 Cast him forth unfed. 
 
 He knocked at the door of the herdman's cot, 
 The herdman's cot in the dale. 
 They gave him of their oatcake, 
 They gave him of their ale. 
 
 61
 
 He has cursed aloud that city proud, 
 
 He has cursed it in its pride ; 
 
 He has cursed it into Semmerwater 
 
 Down the brant hillside ; 
 
 He has cursed it into Semmerwater, 
 
 There to bide. 
 
 King's tower and queen's bower, 
 And a mickle town and tall ; 
 By glimmer of scale and gleam of fin, 
 Folk have seen them all. 
 
 King's tower and queen's bower, 
 And weed and reed in the gloom ; 
 And a lost city in Semmerwater, 
 Deep asleep till Doom. 
 
 62
 
 TO MY MOTHER'S MEMORY 
 
 T 
 
 HIS is the summit, wild and lone. 
 Westward the loftier mountains stand. 
 Let me look eastward on mine own 
 Ancestral land. 
 
 O sing me songs, O tell me tales, 
 Of yonder valleys at my feet ! 
 She was a daughter of those dales, 
 A daughter sweet. 
 
 Oft did she speak of homesteads there, 
 And faces that her childhood knew. 
 She speaks no more ; and scarce I dare 
 To deem it true, 
 
 That somehow she can still behold 
 Sunlight and moonlight, earth and sea, 
 Which were among the gifts untold 
 She gave to me. 
 
 August, 1897. 
 
 63
 
 THE CATHEDRAL MUSIC 
 
 I ENTERED a dim minster, where 
 Aisles of praise and towers of prayer 
 Fenced me round from all the strife 
 Of this illegible, blurred life ; 
 And I put from me, one by one, 
 Riddles that bemuse the Sun, 
 And deep into oblivion hurled 
 The undecipherable world. 
 
 And through the rich and jewelled gloom 
 That rubied some crusader's tomb, 
 Rose and rolled a golden wave : 
 Surged reverberant down the nave : 
 Ravishingly, with violence sweet, 
 Stormed the earth from 'neath my feet : 
 Swept me as a leaf abroad 
 In great tides of billowing laud : 
 And left me, amid regions far, 
 Desolate — cast upon a star. 
 
 64
 
 THE GEMS 
 
 OW fair these stones, and with what deftness 
 
 graven ! 
 
 IT 
 
 M M Here Hermes binds Ixion to the wheel. 
 Here is the yet unfreed Andromeda. 
 There Theseus slays the Minotaur. There Daphne 
 Her great Pursuer flies. On this is figured 
 The moon-cold Goddess of the bow and quiver. 
 On this Medea drives her dragon team. 
 Lo, Psyche there, at last made one with Eros, 
 And all her sorrows over 1 And on this sard 
 You may behold Achilles, not in wrath, 
 But with a brow of pity, as when he mourned 
 Penthesilea. 
 
 Fair, fair gems indeed. 
 
 65
 
 THE WASTED LURES 
 
 YOU dwellers among semblances : you souls 
 That even to Life's end loved chiefly Life's 
 Habiliments and accoutrements and gear : 
 Resolved to its essence, reads not thus your story ? 
 Awaiting still the visit of Happiness, 
 And listening long for her light step, you made 
 Elaborate preparation to receive 
 A shy and simple guest, who, warned of all 
 The lavish, ceremonious entertainment 
 You purposed in her honour, never came. 
 
 66
 
 IN LALEHAM CHURCHYARD* 
 
 TWAS at this season, year by year, 
 The singer who lies songless here 
 Was wont to woo a less austere, 
 Less deep repose, 
 Where Rotha to Winandermere 
 Unresting flows, — 
 
 Flows through a land where torrents call 
 To far-off torrents as they fall, 
 And mountains in their cloudy pall 
 
 Keep ghostly state, 
 And Nature makes majestical 
 
 Man's lowliest fate. 
 
 There, 'mid the August glow, still came 
 He of the twice-illustrious name, 
 The loud impertinence of fame 
 
 Not loth to flee — 
 Not loth with brooks and fells to claim 
 
 Fraternity. 
 
 Linked with his happy youthful lot, 
 Is Loughrigg, then, at last forgot ? 
 Nor silent peak nor dalesman's cot 
 
 Looks on his grave. 
 Lulled by the Thames he sleeps, and not 
 
 By Rotha's wave. 
 
 • The burial-place of Matthew Arnold. 
 67
 
 'Tis fittest thus ! for though with skill 
 He sang of beck and tarn and ghyll, 
 The deep, authentic mountain-thrill 
 
 Ne'er shook his page ! 
 Somewhat of worldling mingled still 
 
 With bard and sage. 
 
 And 'twere less meet for him to lie 
 Guarded by summits lone and high 
 That traffic with the eternal sky 
 
 And hear, unawed, 
 The everlasting fingers ply 
 
 The loom of God, 
 
 Than, in this hamlet of the plain, 
 A less sublime repose to gain, 
 Where Nature, genial and urbane, 
 
 To man defers, 
 Yielding to us the right to reign, 
 
 Which yet is hers. 
 
 And nigh to where his bones abide, 
 The Thames with its unruffled tide 
 Seems like his genius typified, — 
 
 Its strength, its grace, 
 Its lucid gleam, its sober pride, 
 
 Its tranquil pace. 
 
 68
 
 But ah ! not his the eventual fate 
 Which doth the journeying wave await — 
 Doomed to resign its limpid state 
 
 And quickly grow 
 Turbid as passion, dark as hate, 
 
 And wide as woe. 
 
 Rather, it may be, overmuch 
 
 He shunned the common stain and smutch, 
 
 From soilure of ignoble touch 
 
 Too grandly free, 
 Too loftily secure in such 
 
 Cold purity. 
 
 But he preserved from chance control 
 The fortress of his 'stablisht soul ; 
 In all things sought to see the Whole ; 
 
 Brooked no disguise ; 
 And set his heart upon the goal, 
 
 Not on the prize ; 
 
 And with those few he shall survive 
 Who seem not to compete or strive, 
 Yet with the foremost still arrive, 
 
 Prevailing still : 
 The Elect with whom the stars connive 
 
 To work their will. 
 
 69
 
 ABDICATION 
 
 I THINK you never were of earthly frame, 
 O truant from some charmed world unknown ! 
 A fairy empress, you forsook your throne, 
 Fled your inviolate court, and hither came ; 
 Donned mortal vesture ; wore a woman's name ; 
 Like a mere woman, loved ; and so are grown 
 At last a little human, save alone 
 For the wild elvish heart not Love could tame. 
 And one day I believe you will return 
 To your far isle amid the enchanted sea, — 
 There, in your realm, perhaps remember me, 
 Perhaps forget : but I shall never learn ! 
 I, loveless dust within a dreamless urn, 
 Dead to your beauty's immortality. 
 
 70
 
 THE WINTER SLEEP 
 
 A MAIDEN o'erwearied 
 With dance and song, 
 The Earth, 
 The Earth, 
 The Earth sleeps long. 
 
 And her dreams are all 
 Of one mad sweet thing — 
 
 The kisses, 
 
 The kisses, 
 
 The kisses of Spring. 
 
 Awake, O maiden, 
 
 For joy draws near. 
 Thy lover, 
 Thy lover, 
 
 Thy lover is here. 
 
 7i
 
 TO A STRENUOUS CRITIC 
 
 YOU scorn as idle — you who praise 
 Each posturing hero of the herd — 
 The lofty bearing of a phrase, 
 The noble countenance of a word. 
 
 " This has no import for the age ! " 
 And so your votive wreaths you heap 
 
 On him who brought unto our Stage 
 A mightier dulness o'er the deep. 
 
 Great Heaven ! When these with clamour shrill 
 
 Drift out to Lethe's harbour bar, 
 A verse of Lovelace shall be still 
 
 As vivid as a pulsing star. 
 
 72
 
 THE FRONTIER 
 
 AT the hushed brink of twilight, — when, as 
 though 
 Some solemn journeying phantom paused to lay 
 An ominous finger on the awestruck day, 
 Earth holds her breath till that great presence go, — 
 A moment comes of visionary glow, 
 Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey, 
 Lovelier than these, more eloquent than they 
 Of memory, foresight, and life's ebb and flow. 
 
 So have I known, in some fair woman's face, 
 
 While viewless yet was Time's more gross imprint, 
 
 The first, faint, hesitant, elusive hint 
 
 Of that invasion of the vandal years 
 
 Seem deeper beauty than youth's cloudless grace, 
 
 Wake subtler dreams, and touch me nigh to tears. 
 
 73
 
 ENGLAND MY MOTHER 
 
 ENGLAND my mother, 
 Wardress of waters, 
 Builder of peoples, 
 Maker of men, — 
 
 Hast thou yet leisure 
 Left for the muses ? 
 Heed'st thou the songsmith 
 Forging the rhyme ? 
 
 Deafened with tumults, 
 How canst thou hearken ? 
 Strident is faction, 
 Demos is loud. 
 
 Lazarus, hungry, 
 Menaces Dives ; 
 Labour the giant 
 Chafes in his hold. 
 
 Yet do the songsmiths 
 Quit not their forges ; 
 Still on life's anvil 
 
 Forge they the rhyme. 
 
 Still the rapt faces 
 Glow from the furnace : 
 Breath of the smithy 
 Scorches their brows. 
 
 74
 
 Yea, and thou hear'st them ? 
 So shall the hammers 
 Fashion not vainly 
 Verses of gold. 
 
 II 
 
 Lo, with the ancient 
 Roots of man's nature. 
 Twines the eternal 
 Passion of song. 
 
 Ever Love fans it, 
 Ever Life feeds it ; 
 Time cannot age it, 
 Death cannot slay. 
 
 Deep in the world-heart 
 Stand its foundations, 
 Tangled with all things, 
 Twin-made with all. 
 
 Nay, what is Nature's 
 Self, but an endless 
 Strife toward music. 
 Euphony, rhyme ? 
 
 Trees in their blooming, 
 Tides in their flowing, 
 Stars in their circling, 
 Tremble with song. 
 
 75
 
 God on His throne is 
 Eldest of poets : 
 Unto His measures 
 Moveth the Whole. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Therefore deride not 
 Speech of the muses, 
 England my mother, 
 Maker of men. 
 
 Nations are mortal, 
 Fragile is greatness ; 
 Fortune may fly thee, 
 Song shall not fly. 
 
 Song the all-girdling, 
 Song cannot perish : 
 Men shall make music, 
 Man shall give ear. 
 
 Not while the choric 
 Chant of creation 
 Floweth from all things, 
 Poured without pause, 
 
 Cease we to echo 
 Faintly the descant 
 Whereto for ever 
 Dances the world. 
 
 76
 
 IV 
 
 So let the songsmith 
 Proffer his rhyme-gift, 
 England my mother, 
 Maker of men. 
 
 Grey grows thy count'nance, 
 Full of the ages ; 
 Time on thy forehead 
 Sits like a dream : 
 
 Song is the potion 
 All things renewing, 
 Youth's one elixir, 
 Fountain of morn. 
 
 Thou, at the world-loom 
 Weaving thy future, 
 Fitly may'st temper 
 Toil with delight. 
 
 Deemest thou, labour 
 Only is earnest ? 
 Grave is all beauty, 
 Solemn is joy. 
 
 Song is no bauble — 
 Slight not the songsmith, 
 England my mother, 
 Maker of men. 
 
 77
 
 THE FATHER OF THE FOREST 
 
 I 
 
 OLD emperor Yew, fantastic sire, 
 Girt with thy guard of dotard kings ,- 
 What ages hast thou seen retire 
 Into the dusk of alien things ? 
 What mighty news hath stormed thy shade, 
 Of armies perished, realms unmade ? 
 
 Already wast thou great and wise, 
 
 And solemn with exceeding eld, 
 On that proud morn when England's eyes, 
 
 Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld 
 Round her rough coasts the thundering main 
 Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain. 
 
 Hardly thou count'st them long ago, 
 The warring faiths, the wavering land, 
 
 The reddened sky's delirious glow, 
 
 And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand. 
 
 Wailed not the woods their task of shame, 
 
 Doomed to provide the insensate flame ? 
 
 Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she, 
 
 The sweet queen of a tragic hour, 
 Crowned with her snow-white memory 
 
 The crimson legend of the Tower ? 
 Or when a thousand witcheries lay 
 Felled without ruth, at Fotheringay ? 
 
 78
 
 Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread 
 And clang of many an armoured age, 
 
 And well recall 'st the famous dead, 
 Captains or counsellors brave or sage, 
 
 Kings that on kings their myriads hurled, 
 
 Ladies whose smile embroiled the world. 
 
 Rememberest thou the perfect knight, 
 The soldier, courtier, bard in one, 
 
 Sidney, that pensive Hesper-light 
 O'er Chivalry's departed sun ? 
 
 Knew'st thou the virtue, sweetness, lore, 
 
 Whose nobly hapless name was More ? 
 
 The roystering prince, that afterward 
 Belied his madcap youth, and proved 
 
 A greatly simple warrior lord 
 
 Such as our warrior fathers loved — 
 
 Lives he not still ? for Shakespeare sings 
 
 The last of our adventurer kings. 
 
 His battles o'er, he takes his ease, 
 Glory put by, and sceptred toil. 
 
 Round him the carven centuries 
 Like forest branches arch and coil. 
 
 In that dim fane, he is not sure 
 
 Who lost or won at Azincour ! 
 
 79
 
 Roofed by the mother minster vast 
 That guards Augustine's rugged throne, 
 
 The darling of a knightly Past 
 
 Sleeps in his bed of sculptured stone, 
 
 And flings, o'er many a warlike tale, 
 
 The shadow of his sable mail. 
 
 The monarch who, albeit his crown 
 Graced an august and sapient head, 
 
 Rode roughshod to a stained renown 
 O'er Wallace and Llewellyn dead, 
 
 And eased at last by Solway strand 
 
 His restless heart and ruthless hand ; 
 
 Or that disastrous king on whom 
 Fate, like a tempest, early fell, 
 
 And the dark secret of whose doom 
 The Keep of Pomfret kept full well ; 
 
 Or him whose lightly leaping words 
 
 On Becket drew the dastard swords ; 
 
 Or Eleanor's undaunted son, 
 
 That, starred with idle glory, came 
 
 Bearing from 'leagurered Ascalon 
 The barren splendour of his fame, 
 
 And, vanquished by a stripling's bow, 
 
 Lies vainly great at Fontevraud ; 
 
 8c
 
 Or him, the footprints of whose power 
 Made mightier whom he overthrew ; 
 
 A man built like a mountain-tower, 
 A fortress of heroic thew ; 
 
 The Conqueror, in our soil who set 
 
 This stem of Kinghood flowering yet ; — 
 
 These, or the living fame of these, 
 
 Perhaps thou minglest — who shall say ? — 
 
 With ev'n remoter memories, 
 
 And phantoms of the mistier day, 
 
 Long ere the tanner's daughter's son 
 
 From Harold's hands this realm had won. 
 
 What years are thine, not mine to guess ! 
 
 The stars look youthful, thou being by ; 
 Youthful the sun's glad-heartedness ; 
 
 Witless of time the unageing sky ! 
 And these dim-groping roots around 
 So deep a human Past are wound, 
 
 That, musing in thy shade, for me 
 
 The tidings scarce would strangely fall 
 
 Of pagan despots of the sea 
 
 Scaling fierce-eyed our ocean wall, 
 
 From their dark ships of norland pine, 
 
 Their surf-steeds, ridden o'er wilds of brine. 
 
 81
 
 Nay, hid by thee from Summer's gaze 
 That seeks in vain this couch of loam, 
 
 I should behold, without amaze, 
 
 Camped on yon down the hosts of Rome, 
 
 Nor start though these lulled woodlands heard 
 
 The self-same mandatory word 
 
 As by the Cataracts of the Nile 
 
 Marshalled the legions long ago, 
 Or where the lakes are one blue smile 
 
 'Neath pageants of Helvetian snow, 
 Or 'mid the Syrian sands that lie 
 Sick of the day's great tearless eye, 
 
 Or on barbaric plains afar, 
 
 Where, under Asia's fevering ray, 
 
 The long lines of imperial war 
 
 O'er Tigris passed, and with dismay 
 
 In fanged and iron deserts found 
 
 Embattled Persia closing round, 
 
 And 'mid their eagles watched on high 
 The vultures gathering for a feast, 
 
 Till, from the quivers of the sky, 
 The gorgeous star-flight of the East 
 
 Flamed, and the bow of darkness bent 
 
 O'er Julian dying in his tent. 
 
 82
 
 II 
 
 Was it the wind befooling me 
 With ancient echoes, as I lay ? 
 
 Was it the antic fantasy 
 
 Whose elvish mockeries cheat the day ? 
 
 Surely a hollow murmur stole 
 
 From wizard bough and ghostly bole : 
 
 " Who prates to me of. arms and kings, 
 Here in these courts of old repose ? 
 
 Thy babble is of transient things, 
 Broils, and the dust of foolish blows. 
 
 Thy sounding annals are at best 
 
 The witness of a world's unrest. 
 
 " Goodly the loud ostents to thee, 
 
 And pomps of time : to me more sweet 
 
 The vigils of Eternity, 
 
 And Silence patient at my feet ; 
 
 And dreams beyond the deadening range 
 
 And dull monotonies of Change. 
 
 " Often an air comes idling by 
 With news of cities and of men. 
 
 I hear a multitudinous sigh, 
 And lapse into my soul again. 
 
 Shall her great noons and sunsets be 
 
 Blurred with thine infelicity ? 
 
 83
 
 " Now from these sinews, year by year, 
 Strength and the lust of life depart ; 
 
 Full of mortality is here 
 The cavern that was once my heart ! 
 
 Me, with blind arm, in season due, 
 
 Let the aerial woodman hew. 
 
 " For not though mightiest mortals fall, 
 The starry chariot hangs delayed. 
 
 His axle is uncooled, nor shall 
 
 The thunder of His wheels be stayed. 
 
 A changeless pace His coursers keep, 
 
 And halt not at the wells of sleep. 
 
 " The South shall bless, the East shall blight, 
 The red rose of the Dawn shall blow ; 
 
 The million-lilied stream of Night 
 Wide in ethereal meadows flow ; 
 
 And Autumn mourn ; and everything 
 
 Dance to the wild pipe of the Spring. 
 
 " With oceans heedless round her feet, 
 And the indifferent heavens above, 
 
 Earth shall the ancient tale repeat 
 
 Of wars and tears, and death and love ; 
 
 And, wise from all the foolish Past, 
 
 Shall peradventure hail at last 
 
 
 84
 
 11 The advent of that morn divine 
 When nations may as forests grow, 
 
 Wherein the oak hates not the pine, 
 Nor beeches wish the cedars woe, 
 
 But all, in their unlikeness, blend 
 
 Confederate to one golden end — 
 
 " Beauty : the Vision whereunto, 
 
 In joy, with pantings, from afar, 
 Through sound and odour, form and hue, 
 And mind and clay, and worm and star- 
 Now touching goal, now backward hurled- 
 Toils the indomitable world." 
 
 1905. 
 
 85
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 OLET me leave the plains behind, 
 And let me leave the vales below 
 Into the highlands of the mind, 
 Into the mountains let me go. 
 
 My Keats, my Spenser, loved I well ; 
 
 Gardens and statued lawns were these ; 
 But not for ever would I dwell 
 
 In arbours and in pleasances. 
 
 Here are the heights, crest beyond crest, 
 Loftiest of all things cloud-encurled : 
 
 And I will watch from Everest 
 
 The onsweep of the surgeful world. 
 
 86
 
 THE HEART OF THE ROSE 
 
 THE Poet talked with the happy Rose, 
 And oft did the Rose repeat 
 How all her care was but to be fair, 
 And all her task to be sweet. 
 
 Ah, rash was the Rose — the tragic Rose ! 
 
 She hath bared to the Poet her heart ! 
 And now he can take it, and crush and break it, 
 
 And rich in its attar depart. 
 
 
 87 g
 
 THE COUNSEL OF PAN 
 
 VENUS, of her might being shorn, 
 Came to Pan for counsel wise. 
 In her hair was all the Morn : 
 All the Sea was in her eyes. 
 
 Brief his words were : " Let us twain 
 Earth's dominion 'twixt us part ; 
 
 I on her cool breast to reign — 
 Thou within her burning heart." 
 
 So her secret court she holds, 
 Deeper than Pan's eyes may see ; 
 
 He, in vales and dells and wolds, 
 Piping to eternity. 
 
 88
 
 WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE 
 
 THE old rude church, with bare, bald tower, is 
 here ; 
 Beneath its shadow high-born Rotha flows ; 
 Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near, 
 And with cool murmur lulling his repose. 
 
 Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near. 
 
 His hills, his lakes, his streams are with him yet. 
 Surely the heart that read her own heart clear 
 
 Nature forgets not soon : 'tis we forget. 
 
 We that with vagrant soul his fixity 
 
 Have slighted ; faithless, done his deep faith wrong ; 
 Left him for poorer loves, and bowed the knee 
 
 To misbegotten strange new gods of song. 
 
 Yet, led by hollow ghost or beckoning elf 
 
 Far from her homestead to the desert bourn, 
 
 The vagrant soul returning to herself, 
 Wearily wise, must needs to him return. 
 
 To him and to the powers that with him dwell : — 
 Inflowings that divulged not whence they came ; 
 
 And that secluded Spirit unknowable, 
 
 The mystery we make darker with a name ; 
 
 89
 
 The Somewhat which we name but cannot know, 
 
 Ev'n as we name a star and only see 
 His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show 
 
 And ever hide him, and which are not he. 
 
 II 
 
 Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave ! 
 
 When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then ? 
 To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave, 
 
 The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men ? 
 
 Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine ; 
 
 Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view ; 
 Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine ; 
 
 Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew. 
 
 What hadst thou that could make so large amends 
 For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed, 
 
 Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends ? — 
 Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest. 
 
 From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze, 
 From Byron's tempest-anger, tempest-mirth, 
 
 Men turned to thee and found — not blast and blaze, 
 Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth. 
 
 Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower, 
 There in white languors to decline and cease ; 
 
 But peace whose names are also rapture, power, 
 Clear sight, and love : for these are parts of peace. 
 
 90 

 
 Ill 
 
 I hear it vouched the Muse is with us still ;— 
 
 If less divinely frenzied than of yore, 
 In lieu of feelings she has wondrous skill 
 
 To simulate emotion felt no more. 
 
 Not such the authentic Presence pure, that made 
 This valley vocal in the great days gone ! — 
 
 In his great days, while yet the spring-time played 
 About him, and the mighty morning shone. 
 
 No word-mosaic artificer, he sang 
 
 A lofty song of lowly weal and dole. 
 Right from the heart, right to the heart it sprang, 
 
 Or from the soul leapt instant to the soul. 
 
 He felt the charm of childhood, grace of youth, 
 Grandeur of age, insisting to be sung. 
 
 The impassioned argument was simple truth 
 Half-wondering at its own melodious tongue. 
 
 Impassioned ? ay, to the song's ecstatic core ! 
 
 But far removed were clangour, storm and feud ; 
 For plenteous health was his, exceeding store 
 
 Of joy, and an impassioned quietude. 
 
 9*
 
 IV 
 
 A hundred years ere he to manhood came, 
 
 Song from celestial heights had wandered down, 
 
 Put off her robe of sunlight, dew and flame, 
 
 And donned a modish dress to charm the Town. 
 
 Thenceforth she but festooned the porch of things ; 
 
 Apt at life's lore, incurious what life meant. 
 Dextrous of hand, she struck her lute's few strings ; 
 
 Ignobly perfect, barrenly content. 
 
 Unflushed with ardour and unblanched with awe, 
 
 Her lips in profitless derision curled, 
 She saw with dull emotion — if she saw — 
 
 The vision of the glory of the world. 
 
 The human masque she watched, with dreamless eyes 
 In whose clear shallows lurked no trembling shade : 
 
 The stars, unkenned by her, might set and rise, 
 Unmarked by her, the daisies bloom and fade. 
 
 The age grew sated with her sterile wit. 
 
 Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne. 
 Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it, 
 
 And craved a living voice, a natural tone. 
 
 For none the less, though song was but half true, 
 The world lay common, one abounding theme. 
 
 Man joyed and wept, and fate was ever new, 
 And love was sweet, life real, death no dream. 
 
 92
 
 In sad, stern verse the rugged scholar-sage 
 
 Bemoaned his toil unvalued, youth uncheered. 
 
 His numbers wore the vesture of the age, 
 
 But, 'neath it beating, the great heart was heard. 
 
 From dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme, 
 
 A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day. 
 It wafted Collins' lonely vesper-chime, 
 
 It breathed abroad the frugal note of Gray. 
 
 » 
 
 It fluttered here and there, nor swept in vain 
 The dusty haunts where futile echoes dwell, — 
 
 Then, in a cadence soft as summer rain, 
 
 And sad from Auburn voiceless, drooped and fell. 
 
 It drooped and fell, and one 'neath northern skies, 
 With southern heart, who tilled his father's field, 
 
 Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise 
 
 And touch quick Nature's hem and go forth healed. 
 
 On life's broad plain the ploughman's conquering share 
 Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew, 
 
 And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre 
 The peasant's team a ruthless furrow drew. 
 
 Bright was his going forth, but clouds ere long 
 
 Whelmed him ; in gloom his radiance set, and those 
 
 Twin morning stars of the new century's song, 
 Those morning stars that sang together, rose. 
 
 93
 
 In elvish speech the Dreamer told his tale 
 Of marvellous oceans swept by fateful wings. — 
 
 The Seer strayed not from earth's human pale, 
 But the mysterious face of common things 
 
 He mirrored as the moon in Rydal Mere 
 
 Is mirrored, when the breathless night hangs blue 
 
 Strangely remote she seems and wondrous near, 
 And by some nameless difference born anew. 
 
 V 
 
 Peace — peace — and rest 1 Ah, how the lyre is loth, 
 Or powerless now, to give what all men seek ! 
 
 Either it deadens with ignoble sloth 
 
 Or deafens with shrill tumult, loudly weak. 
 
 Where is the singer whose large notes and clear 
 Can heal, and arm, and plenish, and sustain ? 
 
 Lo, one with empty music floods the ear, 
 
 And one, the heart refreshing, tires the brain. 
 
 And idly tuneful, the loquacious throng 
 
 Flutter and twitter, prodigal of time, 
 And little masters make a toy of song 
 
 Till grave men weary of the sound of rhyme. 
 
 And some go prankt in faded antique dress, 
 Abhorring to be hale and glad and free ; 
 
 And some parade a conscious naturalness, 
 The scholar's not the child's simplicity. 
 
 94
 
 Enough ; — and wisest who from words forbear. 
 
 The gentle river rails not as it glides ; 
 And suave and charitable, the winsome air 
 
 Chides not at all, or only him who chides. 
 
 VI 
 
 Nature 1 we storm thine ear with choric notes. 
 
 Thou answerest through the calm great nights and days, 
 " Laud me who will : not tuneless are your throats ; 
 
 Yet if ye paused I should not miss the praise." 
 
 We falter, half-rebuked, and sing again. 
 
 We chant thy desertness and haggard gloom, 
 Or with thy splendid wrath inflate the strain, 
 
 Or touch it with thy colour and perfume. 
 
 One, his melodious blood aflame for thee, 
 
 Wooed with fierce lust, his hot heart world-defiled. 
 
 One, with the upward eye of infancy, 
 
 Looked in thy face, and felt himself thy child. 
 
 Thee he approached without distrust or dread — 
 Beheld thee throned, an awesome queen, above — 
 
 Climbed to thy lap and merely laid his head 
 Against thy warm wild heart of mother-love. 
 
 He heard that vast heart beating — thou didst press 
 Thy child so close, and lov'dst him unaware. 
 
 Thy beauty gladdened him ; yet he scarce less 
 Had loved thee, had he never found thee fair I 
 
 95
 
 For thou wast not as legendary lands 
 
 To which with curious eyes and ears we roam. 
 
 Nor wast thou as a fane 'mid solemn sands, 
 
 Where palmers halt at evening. Thou wast home. 
 
 And here, at home, still bides he ; but he sleeps ; 
 
 Not to be wakened even at thy word ; 
 Though we, vague dreamers, dream he somewhere keeps 
 
 An ear still open to thy voice still heard, — ■ 
 
 Thy voice, as heretofore, about him blown, 
 
 For ever blown about his silence now ; 
 Thy voice, though deeper, yet so like his own 
 
 That almost, when he sang, we deemed 'twas thou 1 
 
 VII 
 
 Behind Helm Crag and Silver Howe the sheen 
 
 Of the retreating day is less and less. 
 Soon will the lordlier summits, here unseen, 
 
 Gather the night about their nakedness. 
 
 The half-heard bleat of sheep comes from the hill. 
 
 Faint sounds of childish play are in the air. 
 The river murmurs past. All else is still. 
 
 The very graves seem stiller than they were. 
 
 Afar though nation be on nation hurled, 
 
 And life with toil and ancient pain depressed, 
 
 Here one may scarce believe the whole wide world 
 Is not at peace, and all man's heart at rest. 
 
 96
 
 Rest ! 'twas the gift he gave ; and peace ! the shade 
 He spread, for spirits fevered with the sun 
 
 To him his bounties are come back— here laid 
 In rest, in peace, his labour nobly done. 
 
 1884-87. 
 
 97
 
 
 
 
 TO MY ELDEST CHILD 
 
 MY little firstborn daughter sweet — 
 My child, yet half of alien race- 
 England and Ireland surely meet, 
 Their feuds forgotten, in thy face. 
 
 To both these lands I'd have thee give 
 Thy maiden heart, surrendered free ; 
 
 For both alike I'd have thee live, 
 Since both alike do live in thee. 
 
 In thee they lay their strife aside, 
 That were so worn with dire unrest ; 
 
 These whom the waters parted wide, 
 But who commingle in thy breast. 
 
 These would I teach thee to revere, 
 To love, and serve, and understand ; 
 
 Nor would I have thee hold less dear 
 Thy mother's than thy father's land. 
 
 The English fields, in sun and rain, 
 Were round about thee at thy birth ; 
 
 But thou shalt ache with Ireland's pain, 
 And thou shalt laugh with Ireland's mirth. 
 
 Thou shalt be taught her noble songs, 
 And thou shalt grieve whene'er is told 
 
 The story of her ancient wrongs, 
 The story of her sorrows old. 
 
 98 

 
 And often, in thy English home, 
 Her voice will call, and thou obey. 
 
 Thy heart will cross the sundering foam, 
 Thy soul to Ireland sail away. 
 
 Ah, little flower ! in Irish ground 
 Thy roots are deeper than the sea, 
 
 Though English woodlands murmured round 
 The house of thy nativity. 
 
 Of both these peoples thou wert born ; 
 
 Of both these lands thou art the child ; 
 Surely a symbol of the morn 
 
 That shall behold them reconciled. 
 
 99
 
 THE THUNDERSHOWER 
 
 WE'LL home and take shelter, 
 While romps o'er the plain 
 Like a herd helter-skelter 
 The rioting rain. 
 For the thunderclouds blacken, 
 
 To drench, as they pass, 
 The deer in the bracken, 
 The kine in the grass. 
 
 II 
 
 It is gone. Let us follow. 
 
 The heavens breathe free. 
 In hurst and in hollow 
 
 How glistens each tree 1 
 And pure from the thunder 
 
 In sheen and in hue, 
 The world and its wonder 
 
 Are fashioned anew. 
 
 ioo
 
 NATURE'S WAY 
 
 F AULTILY faultless " may be ill— 
 " Carefully careless " is worse still. 
 I bought one day a book of rhyme- 
 One long, fierce flout at tune and time ; 
 Ragged and jagged by intent, 
 As if each line were earthquake-rent ; 
 Leagues on seismal leagues of it, 
 Not unheroically writ, 
 By one of whom I had been told 
 That he, in scorn of canons old, 
 Pedantic laws effete and dead, 
 Went fearless to the pure well-head 
 Of song's most ancient legislature — 
 Art's uncorrupted mother, Nature. 
 
 Nature ! whose lapidary seas 
 Labour a pebble without ease ; 
 Who never negligently yet 
 Fashioned an April violet, 
 Nor would forgive, did June disclose 
 Unceremoniously the rose ; 
 Who makes the toadstool in the grass 
 The carven ivory surpass, 
 So guiltless of a fault or slip 
 Is its victorious workmanship ; 
 Who suffers us pure Form to see 
 In a dead leaf's anatomy ; 
 
 101
 
 And pondering long where greenly sleep 
 The unravished secrets of the deep, 
 Bids the all-courted pearl express 
 Her final thoughts on flawlessness ; 
 But visibly aches when doomed to bring 
 Some inchoate amorphous thing 
 Into a world her curious wit 
 Would fain have shaped all-exquisite 
 As the acorn cup's simplicity, 
 Or the Moon's patience with the sea, 
 Or the superb, the golden grief 
 Of each October for each leaf, 
 Phrased in a rhetoric that excels 
 Isaiah's and Ezekiel's. 
 
 102
 
 LINES READ BY THE AUTHOR AT THE 
 DICKENS CENTENARY CELEBRATION IN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 WHERE, where was born the man 
 Whom here we are met to praise ? 
 Was it among the multitudinous ways 
 Where his loved London lifts her fevered brow 
 For cooling Night to fan ? 
 
 Nay, but at Portsmouth on the embattled tides, 
 Where ships of war stept out with lofty prow 
 And heaved their stormy sides, 
 And where, far heard across the gaunt sea wall, 
 Rises through silence the long bugle-call, — 
 There was he born amid the forts and guns, 
 One of the greatest of Earth's fighting sons ; 
 There, in that place of arms and battle-gear, 
 Where all the proud sea babbled Nelson's name, 
 Into the world this later hero came, 
 He, too, a man that knew all moods but fear, 
 He, too, a Warrior. 
 
 Yet not his the strife 
 That leaves dark scars on the fair face of Life ! 
 He fought to tie, fought not to hold apart, 
 The strings of the world's heart ; 
 And built a broad and noble bridge to span 
 The icy chasm that sunders man from man. 
 Wherever Wrong had fixed its bastions deep, 
 There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise 
 Some fortress girt with lucre or with lies ; 
 
 103 h
 
 There his light onset stormed some ponderous keep ; 
 
 There charged he up the steep — 
 
 A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell, 
 
 Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell. 
 
 And still undimmed his conquering weapons shine ; 
 
 On his bright sword no spot of rust appears ; 
 
 And still, across the years, 
 
 His soul goes forth to battle, and in the face 
 
 Of whatsoe'er is false, or cruel, or base, 
 
 He hurls his gage, and leaps among the spears, 
 
 Being armed with pity and love, and scorn divine, 
 
 Immortal laughter, and immortal tears. 
 
 
 104
 
 A RIDDLE OF THE THAMES 
 
 AT windows that from Westminster 
 Look southward to the Lollard's Tower, 
 She sat, my lovely friend. A blur 
 Of gilded mist, — ('twas morn's first hour), — 
 Made vague the world : and in the gleam 
 Shivered the half- awakened stream. 
 
 Through tinted vapour looming large, 
 
 Ambiguous shapes obscurely rode. 
 She gazed where many a laden barge 
 
 Like a dim-moving saurian showed. 
 And 'midst them, lo ! two swans appeared, 
 And proudly up the river steered. 
 
 Two stately swans ! What did they there ? 
 
 Whence came they ? Whither would they go ? 
 Think of them, — things so faultless fair, — 
 
 'Mid the black shipping down below ! 
 On through the rose and gold they passed, 
 And melted in the morn at last. 
 
 Ah, can it be, that they had come, 
 
 Where Thames in sullied glory flows, 
 Fugitive rebels, tired of some 
 
 Secluded lake's ornate repose, 
 Eager to taste the life that pours 
 Its muddier wave 'twixt mightier shores ? 
 
 !°5
 
 We ne'er shall know : our wonderment 
 No barren certitude shall mar. 
 
 They left behind them, as they went, 
 A dream than knowledge ampler far ; 
 
 And from our world they sailed away 
 
 Into some visionary day. 
 
 106
 
 ON THE DEATH OF EDWARD VII 
 
 HONOUR the happy dead with sober praise, 
 Who living would have scorned the fulsome 
 phrase, 
 Meet for the languorous Orient's jewelled ear. 
 This was the English King, that loved the English ways I 
 A man not too remote, or too august, 
 For other mortal children of the dust 
 To know and to draw r near. 
 Born with a nature that demanded joy, 
 He took full draughts of life, nor did the vintage cloy ; 
 But when she passed from vision, who so long 
 Had sat aloft — alone — 
 On the steep heights of an Imperial throne, 
 Then rose he large and strong, 
 Then spake his voice with new and grander tone, 
 Then, called to rule the State 
 Which he had only served, 
 
 He saw clear Duty plain, nor from that highway swerved, 
 And, unappalled by his majestic fate, 
 Pretended not to greatness, yet was great. 
 
 107
 
 THE ETERNAL SEARCH 
 
 MY little maiden two years old, just able 
 To tower full half a head above the table, 
 With inquisition keen must needs explore 
 Whatever in my dwelling hath a door, 
 Whatever is behind a curtain hid, 
 Or lurks, a rich enigma, 'neath a lid. 
 So soon is the supreme desire confessed, 
 To probe the unknown ! So soon begins the quest, 
 That never ends until asunder fall 
 The locks and bolts of the last door of all. 
 
 i9*5« 
 
 
 
 108
 
 HER THIRD BIRTHDAY 
 
 MY tiny lady, can it 
 Be true that you and I, 
 On something called a planet, 
 Are somewhere in the sky ? 
 
 Yes— and at such a tearing 
 
 And madcap speed we've spun, 
 
 That you, with dreadful daring, 
 Have thrice been round the sun. 
 
 Nay, it yet more amazes, 
 
 That my far-venturing girl 
 Can be as fresh as daisies 
 
 After so wild a whirl ! 
 
 And now 'neath western billow 
 
 The sun is put to bed, 
 And you, too, on your pillow 
 
 Must lay a golden head. 
 
 Ah, tears — they come so quickly, 
 
 For grief so quickly gone ! 
 Yet joys have rained as thickly, 
 
 For you to dream upon. 
 
 109
 
 DAWN ON THE HEADLAND 
 
 DAWN — and a magical stillness : on earth, 
 quiescence profound ; 
 On the waters a vast Content, as of hunger 
 appeased and stayed ; 
 In the heavens a silence that seems not mere privation of 
 sound, 
 But a thing with form and body, a thing to be touched 
 and weighed ! 
 
 Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of the 
 cosmic wheel, 
 In the hot collision of Forces, and clangour of bound- 
 less Strife, 
 Mid the sound of the speed of the worlds, the rushing 
 worlds, and the peal 
 Of the thunder of Life. 
 
 no
 
 POWER AND CHARM 
 
 A COT was ours, lone on a wooded fell 
 That gazed into a fairy Mere renowned. 
 Dark mountains on our right hand camped 
 around ; 
 Green, on our left, were copse and ferny dell. 
 Thus betwixt Power and Charm we abode ; and well 
 Loved we the brows of Power, with silence crowned ; 
 Yet many a time, when awsomely they frowned, 
 To Charm we turned, with Charm, with Charm to dwell. 
 
 So have I turned, when overbrooded long 
 
 By that great star-familiar peak austere, 
 
 My Milton's Sinai-Helicon divine, 
 
 To some far earthlier singer's earth-sweet song : 
 
 A song frail as the windflower, and as dear, 
 
 With no more purpose than the eglantine. 
 
 1 1 1
 
 A DIZZYING SURMISE 
 
 WHAT if that fieriest Substance — found so 
 late- 
 That cousin to the uranium of the sun — 
 Were proved a cause of all that we have done 
 And dreamed and been — a source of love and hate. 
 Virtue and valour, and beauty nobly great ? 
 What if all this, ere Nature had begun 
 Man's fashioning, lay closed and hidden in one 
 Miraculous God-sown seed of Life and Fate ? 
 
 Thus was the Genie of the Arabian tale 
 
 Sealed in a vial for a thousand years 
 
 Under the ocean, till a fisher's net 
 
 Drew forth the vial, and the fisher set 
 
 The captive free, — but shrank amazed and pale, 
 
 When the loosed Afreet towered against the Spheres. 
 
 1909. 
 
 112
 
 THE MIGHTY DENIER 
 
 WELL he slumbers, greatly slain, 
 Who in splendid battle dies ; 
 Deep his sleep in midmost main 
 Pillowed upon pearl who lies. 
 
 Ease, of all good gifts the best, 
 
 War and wave at last decree ; 
 Love alone denies us rest, 
 
 Crueller than sword or sea. 
 
 "3
 
 
 THE GREAT MISGIVING 
 
 OT ours,' say some, " the thought of death 
 to dread ; 
 Asking no heaven, we fear no fabled hell : 
 Life is a feast, and we have banqueted — 
 Shall not the worms as well ? 
 
 N 
 
 " The after-silence, when the feast is o'er, 
 
 And void the places where the minstrels stood, 
 
 Differs in nought from what hath been before, 
 And is nor ill nor good." 
 
 Ah, but the Apparition — the dumb sign — 
 The beckoning finger bidding me forgo 
 
 The fellowship, the converse, and the wine, 
 The songs, the festal glow ! 
 
 And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit, 
 And while the purple joy is passed about, 
 
 Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit 
 Or homeless night without ; 
 
 And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see 
 New prospects, or fall sheer — a blinded thing 1 
 
 There is, O grave, thy hourly victory, 
 And there, O death, thy sting. 
 
 114
 
 HIS SPLENDID DEFECT 
 
 '^ ■ ^AWAS said the gods, when they Porphyrion 
 slew, 
 M And vast Enceladus under Etna laid, 
 Could conquer only with a mortals aid 
 These mortal giants and their snakish crew. 
 Shelley, thou didst with radiant valour hew 
 At monsters old, but fought 'st them with a blade 
 Too wholly of celestial metal made, 
 And lacking help of mere gross human thew. 
 Therefore thou didst prevail not ! For to quell 
 Earth's mightiest evil things 'tis not enough 
 To array against them things of heavenly birth. 
 Earthly auxiliaries thou need'st as well : 
 Earth-founded powers, and earth-forged weapons tough, 
 And breastplate hard as the iron breast of the earth. 
 
 "5
 
 ART'S RIDDLE 
 
 COME, friend, I also would her skein unravel. 
 Art is not Nature lost in man's control, 
 But Nature's reminiscences of travel 
 Across an artist soul. 
 
 Or 'tis a tidal river, that, each day, 
 Ebbing and flowing under cliff and tree, 
 
 With mutual and eternal interplay 
 Takes and gives back the sea. 
 
 116
 
 CONFIDENCE 
 
 HEN criticasters of a day 
 Seem to have sneered me quite away ; 
 When with a pontiff's frown 
 Some dabbler puts me down ; 
 
 w 
 
 When up from out the nursery start 
 Sages to teach me mine own art — 
 Guides in a land my share 
 Did plough before they were ; 
 
 When gusts of fashion brief as vain 
 Sow wide a tasteless taste inane ; 
 When Folly, morn by morn, 
 Scatters on me her scorn ; 
 
 Then, draining mine appointed cup, 
 In patience do I gird me up, 
 
 Trusting that Time, one day, 
 All his arrears will pny. 
 
 117
 
 TELL ME NOT NOW 
 
 TELL me not now, if love for love 
 Thou canst return, — 
 Now while around us and above 
 Day's flambeaux burn. 
 Not in clear noon, with speech as clear, 
 
 Thy heart avow, 
 For every gossip wind to hear ; 
 Tell me not now ! 
 
 Tell me not now the tidings sweet, 
 
 The news divine ; 
 A little longer at thy feet 
 
 Leave me to pine. 
 I would not have the gadding bird 
 
 Hear from his bough ; 
 Nay, though I famish for a word, 
 
 Tell me not now ! 
 
 But when deep trances of delight 
 
 All Nature seal, 
 When round the world the arms of Night 
 
 Caressing steal, 
 When rose to dreaming rose says, " Dear, 
 
 Dearest," — and when 
 Heaven sighs her secret in Earth's ear, 
 
 Ah, tell me then ! 
 
 118
 
 TEMPEST 
 
 UNDER the dark and piny steep 
 We watched the storm crash by : 
 We saw the bright brand leap and leap 
 Out of the shattered sky. 
 
 The elements were minist'ring 
 
 To make one mortal blest ; 
 For, peal by peal, you did but cling 
 
 The closer to his breast. 
 
 119
 
 THE VOICE FROM DREAMLAND 
 
 THY voice from inmost dreamland calls ; 
 The wastes of sleep thou makest fair ; 
 Bright o'er the ridge of darkness falls 
 The cataract of thy hair. 
 
 The morn renews its golden birth : 
 
 Thou with the vanquished night dost fade ; 
 
 And leav'st the ponderable earth 
 Less real than thy shade. 
 
 
 1 20
 
 ODE IN MAY 
 
 LET me go forth, and share 
 The overflowing Sun 
 With one wise friend, or one 
 Better than wise, being fair, 
 Where the pewit wheels and dips 
 On heights of bracken and ling, 
 And Earth, unto her leaflet tips, 
 Tingles with the Spring. 
 
 What is so sweet and dear 
 As a prosperous morn in May, 
 The confident prime of the day, 
 And the dauntless youth of the year, 
 When nothing that asks for bliss, 
 Asking aright, is denied, 
 And half of the world a bridegroom is, 
 And half of the world a bride ? 
 
 The Song of Mingling flows, 
 
 Grave, ceremonial, pure, 
 
 As once, from lips that endure, 
 
 The cosmic descant rose, 
 
 When the temporal lord of life, 
 
 Going his golden way, 
 
 Had taken a wondrous maid to wife 
 
 That long had said him nay. 
 
 121
 
 For of old the Sun, our sire, 
 Came wooing the mother of men, 
 Earth, that was virginal then, 
 Vestal fire to his fire. 
 Silent her bosom and coy, 
 But the strong god sued and pressed ; 
 And born of their starry nuptial joy 
 Are all that drink of her breast. 
 
 And the triumph of him that begot, 
 And the travail of her that bore, 
 Behold, they are evermore 
 As warp and weft in our lot. 
 We are children of splendour and flame, 
 Of shuddering, also, and tears. 
 Magnificent out of the dust we came, 
 And abject from the Spheres. 
 
 
 O bright irresistible lord, 
 
 We are fruit of Earth's womb, each one, 
 
 And fruit of thy love, O Sun, 
 
 For this thy spouse, thy adored. 
 
 To thee as our Father we bow, 
 
 Forbidden thy Father to see, 
 
 Who is older and greater than thou, as thou 
 
 Art greater and older than we. 
 
 
 
 122
 
 Thou art but as a word of his speech, 
 
 Thou art but as a wave of his hand ; 
 
 Thou art brief as a glitter of sand 
 
 'Twixt tide and tide on his beach ; 
 
 Thou art less than a spark of his fire, 
 
 Or a moment's mood of his soul : 
 
 Thou art lost in the notes on the lips of his choir 
 
 That chant the chant of the Whole. 
 
 I2 3
 
 THE LOST EDEN 
 
 BUT yesterday was Man from Eden driven. 
 His dream, wherein he dreamed himself the first 
 Of creatures, fashioned for eternity — 
 This was the Eden that he shared with Eve. 
 
 Eve, the adventurous soul within his soul ! 
 The sleepless, the unslaked ! She showed him where 
 Amidst his garden hung the bough whose fruit 
 Is disenchantment and the perishing 
 Of many glorious errors. And he saw 
 His paradise how narrow : and he saw, — 
 He, who had well-nigh deemed the world itself 
 Of less significance and majesty 
 Than his own part and business in it ! — how 
 Little that part, and in how great a world. 
 And an imperative world-thirst drave him forth, 
 And the gold gates of Eden clanged behind. 
 
 Never shall he return : for he hath sent 
 His spirit abroad among the infinitudes, 
 And may no more to the ancient pales recall 
 The travelled feet. But oftentimes he feels 
 The intolerable vastness bow him down, 
 The awful homeless spaces daunt his soul ; 
 And half-regretful he remembers then 
 His Eden lost, as some grey mariner 
 May think of the far fields where he was bred, 
 And woody ways unbreathed-on by the sea, 
 Though more familiar now the ocean-paths 
 Gleam, and the stars his fathers never knew. 
 
 124
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
 WHEN, overarched by gorgeous night, 
 I wave my trivial self away ; 
 When all I was to all men's sight 
 Shares the erasure of the day ; 
 Then do I cast my cumbering load, 
 Then do I gain a sense of God. 
 
 Not him that with fantastic boasts 
 
 A sombre people dreamed they knew ; 
 
 The mere barbaric God of Hosts 
 
 That edged their sword and braced their thew 
 
 A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm 
 
 Of neighbour Gods less vast of arm ; 
 
 A God like some imperious king, 
 
 Wroth, were his realm not duly awed ; 
 
 A God for ever hearkening 
 
 Unto his self-commanded laud ; 
 
 A God for ever jealous grown 
 
 Of carven wood and graven stone ; 
 
 A God whose ghost, in arch and aisle, 
 Still haunts his temple — and his tomb ; 
 
 But follows in a little while 
 Odin and Zeus to equal doom ; 
 
 A God of kindred seed and line ; 
 
 Man's giant shadow, hailed divine. 
 
 *25
 
 streaming worlds, O crowded sky, 
 O Life, and mine own soul's abyss, 
 
 Myself am scarce so small that I 
 
 Should bow to Deity such as this ! 
 This my Begetter ? This was what 
 Man in his violent youth begot. 
 
 The God I know of, I shall ne'er 
 
 Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. 
 
 Raise thou the stone and find me there, 
 Cleave thou the wood and there am I. 
 
 Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, 
 
 Too near, too far, for me to know. 
 
 Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure 
 That I can pleasure him or vex : 
 
 1 that must use a speech so poor 
 
 It narrows the Supreme with sex. 
 Notes he the good or ill in man ? 
 To hope he cares is all I can. 
 
 I hope — with fear. For did I trust 
 This vision granted me at birth, 
 
 The sire of heaven would seem less just 
 Than many a faulty son of earth. 
 
 And so he seems indeed ! But then, 
 
 I trust it not, this bounded ken. 
 
 126
 
 And dreaming much, I never dare 
 To dream that in my prisoned soul 
 
 The flutter of a trembling prayer 
 
 Can move the Mind that is the Whole. 
 
 Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, 
 
 Does the primordial purpose turn ? 
 
 Best by remembering God, say some, 
 
 We keep our high imperial lot. 
 Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come 
 
 When we forgot — when we forgot ! 
 A lovelier faith their happier crown, 
 But history laughs and weeps it down ! 
 
 Know they not well, how seven times seven, 
 Wronging our mighty arms with rust, 
 
 We dared not do the work of heaven 
 Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust ? 
 
 The work of heaven ! 'Tis waiting still 
 
 The sanction of the heavenly will. 
 
 Unmeet to be profaned by praise 
 Is he whose coils the world enfold ; 
 
 The God on whom I ever gaze, 
 The God I never once behold : 
 
 Above the cloud, beneath the clod : 
 
 The Unknown God, the Unknown God. 
 
 127
 
 ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES 
 
 SHE stands a thousand-wintered tree, 
 By countless morns impearled ; 
 Her broad roots coil beneath the sea, 
 Her branches sweep the world ; 
 Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed, 
 
 Clothe the remotest strand 
 With forests from her scatterings made, 
 New nations fostered in her shade, 
 And linking land with land. 
 
 
 O ye by wandering tempest sown 
 
 'Neath every alien star, 
 Forget not whence the breath was blown 
 
 That wafted you afar ! 
 
 For ye are still her ancient seed 
 
 On younger soil let fall — 
 Children of Britain's island-breed, 
 To whom the Mother in her need 
 Perchance may one day call. 
 
 1890. 
 
 
 128 

 
 H 
 
 ALPHA AND OMEGA 
 
 E throned her in the gateways of the world, 
 He 'stablished her on high before the 
 peoples. 
 
 He raised her as a watch-tower from the wave, 
 He built her as a lighthouse on the waters. 
 
 He maketh and unmaketh without end, 
 
 And He alone, who is First and Last, shall judge her. 
 
 1903. 
 
 129
 
 HYMN TO THE SEA* 
 
 I 
 
 GRANT, O regal in bounty, a subtle and 
 delicate largess ; 
 Grant an ethereal alms, out of the wealth of 
 thy soul : 
 Suffer a tarrying minstrel, who finds, not fashions his 
 numbers, — 
 Who, from the commune of air, cages the volatile song, — 
 Lightly to capture and prison some fugitive breath of thy 
 descant, 
 Thine and his own as thy roar lisped on the lips of a 
 shell, 
 Now while the vernal impulsion makes lyrical all that 
 hath language, 
 While, through the veins of the Earth, riots the ichor 
 of spring, 
 While, amid throes, amid raptures, with loosing of bonds, 
 with unsealings, — 
 Arrowy pangs of delight, piercing the core of the 
 world, — 
 Tremors and coy unfoldings, reluctances, sweet agita- 
 tions, — 
 Youth, irrepressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose. 
 
 * In this poem the elegiac metre is obviously and of neces- 
 sity accentual, not quantitative. Tried by classical rules that 
 are altogether inapplicable to our poetry it would of course 
 sink under the ordeal. 
 
 130
 
 II 
 
 Lover whose vehement kisses on lips irresponsive are 
 squandered, 
 Lover that wooest in vain Earth's imperturbable heart ; 
 Athlete mightily frustrate, who pittest thy thews against 
 legions, 
 Locked with fantastical hosts, bodiless arms of the sky ; 
 Sea that breakest for ever, that breakest and never art 
 broken, 
 Like unto thine, from of old, springeth the spirit of 
 man, — 
 Nature's wooer and fighter, whose years are a suit and a 
 wrestling, 
 All their hours, from his birth, hot with desire and with 
 fray ; 
 Amorist agonist man, that, immortally pining and striving, 
 Snatches the glory of life only from love and from war ; 
 Man that, rejoicing in conflict, like thee when precipitate 
 tempest, 
 Charge after thundering charge, clangs on thy resonant 
 mail, 
 Seemeth so easy to shatter, and proveth so hard to be 
 cloven ; 
 Man whom the gods, in his pain, curse with a soul that 
 endures ; 
 Man whose deeds, to the doer, come back as thine own 
 exhalations 
 Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale ; 
 Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes 
 tangled, 
 
 131
 
 Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust 
 of its speed, 
 Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her 
 conquests 
 Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ivory car ; 
 Man with inviolate caverns, impregnable holds in his 
 nature, 
 Depths no storm can pierce, pierced with a shaft of the 
 sun : 
 Man that is galled with his confines, and burdened yet 
 more with his vastness, 
 Born too great for his ends, never at peace with his 
 goal ; 
 Man whom Fate, his victor, magnanimous, clement in 
 triumph, 
 Holds as a captive king, mewed in a palace divine : 
 Many its leagues of pleasance, and ample of purview its 
 windows ; 
 Airily falls, in its courts, laughter of fountains at play ; 
 Nought, when the harpers are harping, untimely reminds 
 him of durance ; 
 None, as he sits at the feast, utters Captivity's name ; 
 But, would he parley with Silence, withdraw for a while 
 unattended, 
 Forth to the beckoning world 'scape for an hour and be 
 free, 
 Lo, his adventurous fancy coercing at once and provoking, 
 Rise the unscalable walls, built with a word at the prime; 
 Lo, in unslumbering watch, and with pitiless faces of iron, 
 Armed at each obstinate gate, stand the impassable 
 guards. 
 
 132
 
 Ill 
 
 Miser whose coffered recesses the spoils of the ages 
 cumber, 
 Spendthrift foaming thy soul wildly in fury away, — ■ 
 We, self-amorous mortals, our own multitudinous image 
 
 Seeking in all we behold, seek it and find it in thee : 
 Seek it and find it when o'er us the exquisite fabric of 
 Silence 
 Perilous-turreted hangs, trembles and dulcetly falls ; 
 When the aerial armies engage amid orgies of music, 
 
 Braying of arrogant brass, whimper of querulous reeds; 
 When, at his banquet, the Summer is languid and drowsed 
 with repletion ; 
 When, to his anchorite board, taciturn Winter repairs ; 
 When by the tempest are scattered magnificent ashes of 
 Autumn ; 
 When, upon orchard and lane, breaks the white foam 
 of the Spring : 
 When, in extravagant revel, the Dawn, a bacchante up- 
 leaping, 
 Spills, on the tresses of Night, vintages golden and red; 
 When, as a token at parting, munificent Day, for remem- 
 brance, 
 Gives, unto men that forget, Ophirs of fabulous ore ; 
 When, irresistibly rushing, in luminous palpitant deluge, 
 Hot from the summits of Life, poured is the lava of 
 noon ; 
 When, as up yonder, thy mistress, at height of her 
 mutable glories, 
 Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale. 
 
 133
 
 Ah, she comes, she arises, — impassive, emotionless, blood- 
 less, 
 Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl. 
 Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses 
 abounding : 
 Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering 
 youth ! 
 Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough 
 serenading, 
 She, from the balconied night, unto her melodist 
 leaned, — 
 Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her 
 commandments , 
 All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it 
 lie. 
 
 IV 
 
 Yea, it is we, light perverts, that waver, and shift our 
 allegiance ; 
 We, whom insurgence of blood dooms to be barren and 
 waste. 
 Thou, with punctual service, fulfillest thy task, being 
 constant ; 
 Thine but to ponder the Law, labour and greatly obey : 
 Wherefore, with leapings of spirit, thou chantest the 
 chant of the faithful ; 
 Led by the chime of the worlds, linked with the league 
 of the stars ; 
 Thou thyself but a billow, a ripple, a drop of that Ocean, 
 Which, labyrinthine of arm, folding us meshed in its 
 coil, 
 
 '34
 
 Shall, as to-night, with elations, august exultations and 
 ardours, 
 Pour, in unfaltering tide, all its unanimous waves, 
 When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the 
 Presence, this precinct, 
 Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed, 
 Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error and 
 cancelled, 
 Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness of 
 God. 
 
 135
 
 APOLOGIA 
 
 (1895). 
 
 THUS much I know: what dues soe'er be mine, 
 Of fame or of oblivion, Time the just, 
 Punctiliously assessing, shall award. 
 This have I doubted never ; this is sure. 
 But one meanwhile shall chide me, — one shall curl 
 Superior lips, — because my handiwork, 
 The issue of my solitary toil, 
 The harvest of my spirit, even these 
 My numbers, are not something, good or ill, 
 Other than I have ever striven, in years 
 Lit by a conscious and a patient aim, 
 With hopes and with despairs, to fashion them ; 
 Or, it may be, because I have full oft 
 In singers' selves found me a theme of song, 
 Holding these also to be very part 
 Of Nature's greatness, and accounting not 
 Their descant least heroical of deeds ; 
 Or, yet again, because I bring nought new, 
 Save as each noontide or each Spring is new, 
 Into an old and iterative world, 
 And can but proffer unto whoso will 
 A cool and nowise turbid cup, from wells 
 Our fathers digged ; and have not thought it shame 
 To tread in nobler footprints than mine own, 
 And travel by the light of purer eyes. 
 Ev'n such offences am I charged withal, 
 Till, breaking silence, I am moved to cry, 
 
 136 

 
 What would ye, then, my masters ? Is the Muse 
 
 Fall'n to a thing of Mode, that must each year 
 
 Supplant her derelict self of yester-year ? 
 
 Or do the mighty voices of old days 
 
 At last so tedious grow, that one whose lips 
 
 Inherit some far echo of their tones — 
 
 How far, how faint, none better knows than he 
 
 Who hath been nourished on their utterance — can 
 
 But irk the ears of such as care no more 
 
 The accent of dead greatness to recall ? 
 
 If, with an ape's ambition, I rehearse 
 
 Their gestures, trick me in their stolen robes, 
 
 The sorry mime of their nobility, 
 
 Dishonouring whom I vainly emulate, 
 
 The poor imposture soon shall shrink revealed 
 
 In the ill grace with which their gems bestar 
 
 An abject brow : but if I be indeed 
 
 Their true descendant, as the veriest hind 
 
 May yet be sprung of kings, their lineaments 
 
 Will out, the signature of ancestry 
 
 Leap unobscured, and somewhat of themselves 
 
 In me, their lowly scion, live once more. 
 
 With grateful, not vainglorious joy, I dreamed 
 
 It did so live ; and ev'n such pride was mine 
 
 As is next neighbour to humility. 
 
 For he that claims high lineage yet may feel 
 
 How thinned in the transmission is become 
 
 The ancient blood he boasts ; how slight he stands 
 
 In the great shade of his majestic sires. 
 
 But it was mine endeavour so to sing 
 
 As if these lofty ones a moment stooped 
 
 137
 
 From their still spheres, and undisdainful graced 
 
 My note with audience, nor incurious heard 
 
 Whether, degenerate irredeemably, 
 
 The faltering minstrel shamed his starry kin. 
 
 And though I be to these but as a knoll 
 
 About the feet of the high mountains, scarce 
 
 Remarked at all save when a valley cloud 
 
 Holds the high mountains hidden, and the knoll 
 
 Against the cloud shows briefly eminent ; 
 
 Yet ev'n as they, I too, with constant heart, 
 
 And with no light or careless ministry, 
 
 Have served what seemed the Voice ; and unprofane, 
 
 Have dedicated to melodious ends 
 
 All of myself that least ignoble was. 
 
 For though of faulty and of erring walk, 
 
 I have not suffered aught in me of frail 
 
 To blur my song ; I have not paid the world 
 
 The evil and the insolent courtesy 
 
 Of offering it my baseness for a gift. 
 
 And unto such as think all Art is cold, 
 
 All music unimpassioned, if it breathe 
 
 An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow 
 
 With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast, 
 
 Be it enough to say, that in Man's life 
 
 Is room for great emotions unbegot 
 
 Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot 
 
 Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul ; 
 
 And one not pale of blood, to human touch 
 
 Not tardily responsive, yet may know 
 
 A deeper transport and a mightier thrill 
 
 Than comes of commerce with mortality, 
 
 138 

 
 When, rapt from all relation with his kind, 
 
 All temporal and immediate circumstance, 
 
 In silence, in the visionary mood 
 
 That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives 
 
 Order beyond this coil and errancy, 
 
 Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone 
 
 And hears the eternal movement, and beholds 
 
 Above him and around and at his feet, 
 
 In million-billowed consentaneousness, 
 
 The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world. 
 
 Such moments, are they not the peaks of life ? 
 Enough for me, if on these pages fall 
 The shadow of the summits, and an air 
 Not dim from human hearth-fires sometimes blow. 
 
 139
 
 THE PROTEST 
 
 BID me no more to other eyes 
 With wandering worship fare, 
 And weave my numbers garland-wise 
 To crown another's hair. 
 On me no more a mandate lay 
 Thou wouldst not have me to obey ! 
 
 Bid me no more to leave unkissed 
 That rose-wreathed porch of pearl. 
 
 Shall I, where'er the winds may list, 
 Give them my life to whirl ? 
 
 Perchance too late thou wilt be fain 
 
 Thy exile to recall — in vain. 
 
 Bid me no more from thee depart, 
 
 For in thy voice to-day 
 I hear the tremor of thy heart 
 
 Entreating me to stay ; 
 I hear . . . nay, silence tells it best, 
 O yielded lips, O captive breast ! 
 
 140
 
 RETROGRESSION 
 
 OUR daughters flower in vernal grace ; 
 In strength our striplings wax apace ; 
 Our cities teem ; our commerce rides 
 Sovereign upon the fawning tides. 
 But while, to this our stronghold — where 
 The North Wind's wandering children fair, 
 Like wild birds from the waters sprung, 
 Built their wild nest and reared their young — 
 The fleets of peace for ever pour 
 Fruitage and vintage, gems and ore ; 
 While here, within each ocean gate, 
 Long barricadoed against Fate, 
 We are served by all the alien seas, 
 And fed from the Antipodes, 
 Lo, everywhere the unplenished brain ! 
 Everywhere, dire as bondman's chain, 
 Or laws that crush, or creeds that blind, — 
 The leanness of the unnourished mind. 
 
 For few and fewer do they grow, 
 Who know, or ever cared to know, 
 The great things greatly said and sung 
 In this heroic English tongue, 
 This speech that is the rough-wrought key 
 To palaces of wizardry, 
 Our fathers' glory, and our despair ; 
 And many a fabric hung in air, 
 That firmer stands than boastful stone ; 
 
 141
 
 And many a tower of vigil lone, 
 
 Climbing whose stairway Wisdom viewed 
 
 The labyrinth of infinitude. 
 
 And shouldst thou have in thee to-day 
 Aught thou canst better sing than say, 
 Shun, if thou wouldst by men be heard, 
 The comely phrase, the wellborn word, 
 And use, as for their ears more meet, 
 The unlovely lingo of the street, 
 A language Milton's kin have long 
 Accounted good enough for song. 
 Or don that vesture not less vile, 
 The beaded and bespangled style — 
 Diction o'erloaded and impure, 
 Thy thought lost in its garniture, 
 Thy Muse, ev'n to her raiment's hem, 
 Huddling uncostly gem on gem, 
 Striving her lax form to bestar 
 With all crude ornaments that are : 
 An empty and a dreary strife, 
 Vulgar in Letters as in Life. 
 
 Nor look for praise, save here and there 
 From a fast-dwindling remnant rare, 
 If thou beget with happy pain 
 The ordered and the governed strain 
 That peradventure had not shamed 
 Masters felicitously famed ; 
 Dryden, the athlete large and strong, 
 Lord of the nerve and sinew of song ; 
 
 142
 
 A hewer and shaper who could see, 
 
 In adamant, plasticity ; 
 
 Who tore from the entrails of the mine 
 
 The metal of his iron line ; 
 
 Who, born beside the haughty tomb 
 
 Of that rank time of overbloom 
 
 When poets vied in gathering each 
 
 Full-bosomed apple and buxom peach 
 
 That odorous in the orchard burned, 
 
 Had, from their purple surfeit, learned 
 
 The truth in Hellas seen so plain, 
 
 That the art of arts is to refrain ; — 
 
 Or Gray, who on worn thoughts conferred 
 
 That second youth, the perfect word, 
 
 The elected and predestined phrase 
 
 That had lain bound, long nights and days, 
 
 To wear at last, when once set free, 
 
 Immortal pellucidity ; 
 
 And who, in that most mighty Ode, 
 
 That like a pageant streamed and glowed, 
 
 Called up anew mid breathing things 
 
 The great ghosts of our tragic Kings, 
 
 With doom-dark brows to come and go, 
 
 Trailing the folds of gorgeous woe. 
 
 143
 
 THE MOSSGROWN PORCHES 
 
 WHEN, as of old in Rome's imperial world, 
 Fair, conquered gods are from their temples 
 hurled, 
 And some rude, vehement Peter puts to flight 
 Some serene Phoebus, lord of lore and light ; 
 In wastes and wilds, by fount and caverned hill, 
 Secretly, furtively, are worshipped still, 
 With the sad zeal of vainly pious knees, 
 The ancient, the deposed divinities, 
 Heaven's outcasts, the great exiles of the sky, 
 Once mighty to do all things, save to die. 
 
 So, though in Kingdoms of the Lyre to-day 
 I see the new faiths push the old away — 
 See the hot hierophants of each strange shrine 
 Offer oblation to all gods but mine — 
 Yet, mid a revel of change, unchanged I turn 
 To the lorn haunts where older altars burn, 
 And seek, companioned by the lessening few 
 Whose faith is as mine own, the gods I knew ; 
 Nor ever doubt, that among wondering men 
 These deathless will in triumph come again, 
 As sure as the droop 'd year's remounting curve, 
 And reign anew, when I no more shall serve. 
 
 144
 
 MASTERY 
 
 GUARD me and save me, Muse, I pray, 
 From all who babble night and day 
 The doctrine that Intention high 
 Lifts Unachievement to the sky, 
 And that a mighty Will to sing 
 Makes the mere Power a needless thing ! 
 Trench me around from such as prate 
 That only he who fails is great. 
 
 O, the brave tourneys of the Lyre 
 Are won by prowess, not desire, 
 And Art is capture, not pursuit — 
 Capture and conquest absolute, 
 Bliss of possession without bar. 
 And they the trophied hunters are, 
 Who from their cloudless brows efface 
 The last motes of the dust of chase, 
 Ev'n as great Victors let us see 
 Nought in their eyes save Victory. 
 
 The steeds of Helios will obey 
 None other than the lord of dav. 
 They bear, delighted, the command 
 Of his inexorable hand ; 
 But if a meddler take the reins, 
 They rear, they toss their flaming manes, 
 Crash backward, or ramp wild anon, 
 In boundless scorn of Phaethon. 
 
 H5
 
 DISCLOSURE 
 
 BY western shores we sojourned, where, 
 Watching a hill that watched the wave, 
 We called him dull in pose and air, 
 A bulk not grand but merely grave ; 
 So many mountains had we seen, 
 Lordly of carriage, kingly of mien. 
 
 Then came a snowstorm in the night, 
 And all his ribs of rock, next morn, 
 
 All his anatomy, sprang to light, 
 
 With form and feature, carved and worn, 
 
 That rose out of the sea's abyss 
 
 Magnificent in emphasis. 
 
 Imagine not that thou canst know 
 
 Mountains or men in very truth, 
 Until the tempest and the snow 
 
 Strike them at midnight without ruth, 
 And publish clear, in morning's gaze, 
 The lineaments they strove to erase. 
 
 146
 
 EDENHUNGER 
 
 OTHAT a nest, my mate ! were once more ours, 
 Where we, by vain and barren change 
 untortured, 
 Could have grave friendships with wise trees and 
 flowers, 
 And live the great, green life of field and orchard ! 
 
 From the cold birthday of the daffodils, 
 
 Ev'n to that listening pause that is November, 
 
 O to confide in woods, confer with hills, 
 
 And then — then, to that palmland you remember, 
 
 Fly swift, where seas that brook not Winter's rule 
 
 Are one vast violet breaking into lilies : 
 There where we spent our first strange wedded Yule, 
 
 Far in the golden, fire-hearted Antilles. 
 
 147
 
 PART OF MY STORY 
 
 WE met when you were in the May of life, 
 And I had left its June behind me far. 
 Some barren victories, — much defeat and 
 strife, — 
 Had marked my soul with many a hidden scar. 
 
 I was a man hurt deep with blows that men 
 
 Ne'er guessed at ; strangely weak — more strangely 
 strong ; 
 
 Daring at times ; and uttering, now and then, 
 Out of a turbid heart a limpid song. 
 
 Fitful in effort, — fixed and clear in aim ; 
 
 Poor, but not envious of the wealth I lack ; 
 Ever half-scaling the hard hill of fame, 
 
 And ever by some evil fate flung back, — ■ 
 
 Such did you find me, in that city grey 
 
 Where we were plighted, O my comrade true : 
 
 My wife, now dearer far than on the day 
 When this our love was new. 
 
 148
 
 TO A PRIVILEGED THIEF 
 
 BLACKBIRD, that in our garden, here and there 
 Nibbling an apple or pear, 
 Hast marred so many, and slaked thyself on none — 
 If thou wouidst come and eat thy fill of one 
 Instead of ruining twenty, 
 Were it not kindlier done ? 
 Thou still wouidst have thy share 
 Of this our plenty, 
 This ruddy issue of the earth and sun. 
 
 But ah, thou dost for thine exemplar take 
 
 The loveless rake, 
 
 The shallow libertine, 
 
 Who wanders among maidens, leaving each 
 
 Like a peck'd apple or a bitten peach, 
 
 For other palates spoiled ; nor dares to win 
 
 One heart in rich completeness, 
 
 And banquet, all his days, on its upyielded sweetness. 
 
 149
 
 THE FISHER 
 
 THE Fisher is a warrior : 
 His camp is on the foam. 
 And he returns from victory, 
 Bringing his captives home. 
 
 Home he brings his captives, 
 
 Beauteous to behold, 
 Some in silver armour, 
 
 Some in mail of gold. 
 
 A brief truce, and to-morrow 
 
 Again the chanceful field ! — 
 Where the burnished legions all night long 
 
 Have glimmered, and flashed, and wheeled. 
 
 *S°
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 THOU burden of all songs the earth hath sung, 
 Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes, 
 Thou metaphor of everything that dies, 
 .That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young 
 
 And therefore blest and wise, — 
 O be less beautiful, or be less brief, 
 
 Thou tragic splendour, strange, and full of fear ! 
 In vain her pageant shall the Summer rear ? 
 At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf, 
 Crumbles the gorgeous year. 
 
 Ah, ghostly as remembered mirth, the tale 
 
 Of Summer's bloom, the legend of the Spring ! 
 
 And thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing, 
 Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail, 
 
 Thou most unbodied thing, 
 Whose very being is thy going hence, 
 
 And passage and departure all thy theme ; 
 
 Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem, 
 And thou at height of thy magnificence 
 A figment and a dream. 
 
 Stilled is the virgin rapture that was June, 
 And cold is August's panting heart of fire ; 
 And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir 
 
 For thine own elegy thy winds attune 
 Their wild and wizard lyre : 
 
 J5 1
 
 And poignant grows the charm of thy decay, 
 
 The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting, 
 
 Thou parable of greatness vanishing ! 
 For me, thy woods of gold and skies of grey 
 With speech fantastic ring. 
 
 For me, to dreams resigned, there come and go, 
 
 'Twixt mountains draped and hooded night and morn, 
 Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne, 
 
 From undiscoverable lips that blow 
 An immaterial horn ; 
 
 And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees, 
 Thy ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet — 
 O Past and Future in sad bridal met, 
 
 O voice of everything that perishes, 
 And soul of all regret ! 
 
 152
 
 AN INSCRIPTION AT WINDERMERE 
 
 GUEST of this fair abode, before thee rise 
 No summits vast, that icily remote 
 Cannot forget their own magnificence 
 Or once put off their kinghood ; but withal 
 A confraternity of stateliest brows, 
 As Alp or Atlas noble, in port and mien ; 
 Old majesties, that on their secular seats 
 Enthroned, are yet of affable access 
 And easy audience, not too great for praise, 
 Not arrogantly aloof from thy concerns, 
 Not vaunting their indifference to thy fate, 
 Nor so august as to contemn thy love. 
 Do homage to these suavely eminent ; 
 But privy to their bosoms wouldst thou be, 
 There is a vale, whose seaward-parted lips 
 Murmur eternally some half-divulged 
 Reluctant secret, where thou may'st o'erhear 
 The mountains interchange their confidences, 
 Peak with his federate peak, that think aloud 
 Their broad and lucid thoughts, in liberal day : 
 Thither repair alone : the mountain heart 
 Not two may enter : thence returning, tell 
 What thou hast heard ; and 'mid the immortal friends 
 Of mortals, the selectest fellowship 
 Of poets divine, place shall be found for thee. 
 
 *53
 
 A TRIAL OF ORTHODOXY* 
 
 THE clinging children at their mother's knee 
 Slain ; and the sire and kindred one by one 
 Flayed or hewn piecemeal ; and things nameless 
 done, 
 Not to be told : while imperturbably 
 The nations gaze, where Rhine unto the sea, 
 Where Volga and Danube, Thames and Tiber run, 
 And where great armies glitter in the sun, 
 And great kings rule, and man is boasted free ! 
 What wonder if yon torn and naked throng 
 Should doubt a Heaven that seems to wink and nod, 
 And having moaned at noontide, " Lord, how long ? " 
 Should cry, " Where hidest Thou ? " at evenfall, 
 At midnight, " Is He deaf and blind, our God ? " 
 And ere day dawn, " Is He indeed at all ? " 
 
 * From " The Purple East," a series of sonnets on the mas 
 sacres under Abdul Hamid II. 
 
 154
 
 EUROPE AT THE PLAY 
 
 (1896) 
 
 O LANGUID audience, met to see 
 The last act of the tragedy 
 On that terrific stage afar, 
 Where burning towns the footlights are, — 
 O listless Europe, day by day 
 Callously sitting out the play ! 
 
 So sat, with loveless count'nance cold, 
 Round the arena, Rome of old. 
 Pain, and the ebb of life's red tide, 
 So, with a calm regard, she eyed, 
 Her gorgeous vesture, million-pearled, 
 Splashed with the blood of half the world. 
 High was her glory's noon : as yet 
 She had not dreamed her sun could set ! 
 As yet she had not dreamed how soon 
 Shadows should vex her glory's noon. 
 Another's pangs she counted nought ; 
 Of human hearts she took no thought ; 
 But God, at nightfall, in her ear 
 Thundered His thought exceeding clear. 
 
 Perchance in tempest and in blight, 
 On Europe, too, shall fall the night ! 
 She sees the victim overborne, 
 By worse than ravening lions torn. 
 
 155
 
 She sees, she hears, with soul unstirred, 
 
 And lifts no hand, and speaks no word, 
 
 But vaunts a brow like theirs who deem 
 
 Men's wrongs a phrase, men's rights a dream. 
 
 Yet haply she shall learn, too late, 
 
 In some blind hurricane of Fate, 
 
 How fierily alive the things 
 
 She held as fool's imaginings, 
 
 And, though circuitous and obscure, 
 
 The feet of Nemesis how sure. 
 
 156
 
 THE DEATHLESS BLACKSMITH 
 
 rp 
 
 IS the Tamer of Iron, 
 
 Who smites from the prime, 
 And the clang of whose smiting 
 Hath thundered through time. 
 
 In a Splendour of Darkness 
 
 Encaverned he stands, 
 Amid Pow'rs, amid Terrors, 
 
 The slaves of his hands. 
 
 Is he human and mortal, 
 With frailties like mine, 
 
 Or a demigod rather, 
 Of lineage divine ? 
 
 For the feared things and ruthless 
 Grow meek in his gaze : 
 
 The Fire doth his bidding : 
 The Iron obeys. 
 
 He is kin to the Great One 
 
 Whose furnaces roared 
 As he wrought with enchantments 
 
 The shield and the sword. 
 
 " Whatsoever is mighty," 
 
 He sings in his glee, 
 " 'Twixt Hammer and Anvil 
 
 Is fashioned by me." 
 
 157
 
 And he smites with the fierceness 
 And moulds with the joy 
 
 Of the Gods that for pastime 
 Create and destroy : 
 
 The Gods at whose signal 
 
 The fuel was hurled 
 On the fires of the forges 
 
 Where shaped is the world. 
 
 158
 
 FRANCE* 
 
 LIGHT-HEARTED heroine of tragic story! 
 Nation whom storm on storm of ruining fate 
 Unruined leaves, — nay, fairer, more elate, 
 Hungrier for action, more athirst for glory ! 
 World-witching queen, from fiery floods and gory 
 Rising eternally regenerate, 
 Clothed with great deeds and crowned with dreams 
 
 more great. 
 Spacious as Fancy's boundless territory ! 
 Little thou lov'st our island, and perchance 
 Thou heed'st as little her reluctant praise ; 
 Yet let her, in these dark and bodeful days, 
 Sinking old hatreds 'neath the sundering brine, 
 Immortal and indomitable France, 
 Marry her tears, her alien tears, to thine. 
 
 * 25th June, 1894, the day after the murder of President 
 Carnot. 
 
 159
 
 SONG 
 THE WARRIOR LOVER 
 
 WHEN War's red tempest shall depart, 
 That long hath sundered me 
 From those sweet precincts of thy heart 
 And all that heaven of thee ; 
 If I return from where they rest 
 
 Whom battle's scythe hath mown, 
 Then in the fragrance of thy breast 
 I'll live for love alone. 
 
 But if, where warstorms wildest roll, 
 
 My life for her I yield — 
 That other empress of my soul, 
 
 Who called me to the field — 
 Though 'twixt you twain, with dying breath, 
 
 My homage I'll divide, 
 My heart will turn to thee in death, 
 
 To claim and cla:>p its bride. 
 
 1917 
 
 160
 
 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 
 
 H 
 
 IGHER than heaven they sit, 
 Life and her consort Law ; 
 And one whose countenance lit 
 In mine more perfect awe, 
 Fain had I deemed their peer, 
 
 Beside them throned above : 
 Ev'n him who casts out fear, 
 Unconquerable Love. 
 Ah, 'twas on earth alone that I his beauty saw. 
 
 II 
 
 On earth, in homes of men, 
 
 In hearts that crave and die ! 
 Dwells he not also, then, 
 
 With Godhead, throned on high ? 
 This and but this I know : 
 
 His face I see not there : 
 Here find I him below, 
 
 Nor find him otherwhere ; 
 Born of an aching world, Pain's bridegroom, Death's ally. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Did Heaven vouchsafe some sign 
 That through all Nature's frame 
 
 Boundless ascent benign 
 Is everywhere her aim, 
 
 161
 
 Such as man hopes it here, 
 Where he from beasts hath risen, — 
 
 Then might I read full clear, 
 Ev'n in my sensual prison, 
 That Life and Law and Love are one symphonious name. 
 
 IV 
 
 Such sign hath Heaven yet lent ? 
 
 Nay, on this earth, are we 
 So sure 'tis real ascent 
 
 And very gain we see ? 
 'Gainst Evil striving still, 
 
 Some spoils of war we wrest : 
 Not to discover 111 
 
 Were haply state as blest. 
 We vaunt, o'er doubtful foes, a dubious victory. 
 
 v 
 
 In cave and bosky dene 
 
 Of old there crept and ran 
 The gibbering form obscene 
 
 That was and was not man. 
 The desert beasts went by 
 
 In fairer covering clad ; 
 More speculative eye 
 
 The couchant lion had, 
 And goodlier speech the birds, than we when we began. 
 
 162
 
 VI 
 
 Was it some random throw 
 
 Of heedless Nature's die, 
 That from estate so low 
 
 Uplifted man so high ? 
 Through untold aeons vast 
 
 She let him lurk and cower : 
 'Twould seem he climbed at last 
 
 In mere fortuitous hour, 
 Child of a thousand chances 'neath the indifferent sky. 
 
 VII 
 
 A soul so long deferred 
 
 In his blind brain he bore, 
 It might have slept unstirred 
 
 Ten million noontides more. 
 Yea, round him Darkness might 
 
 Till now her folds have drawn, 
 O'er that enormous night 
 
 So casual came the dawn, 
 Such hues of hap and hazard Man's Emergence wore I 
 
 VIII 
 
 If, then, our rise from gloom 
 
 Hath this capricious air, 
 What ground is mine to assume 
 
 An upward process there, 
 
 163
 
 In yonder worlds that shine 
 From alien tracts of sky ? 
 
 Nor ground to assume is mine 
 Nor warrant to deny. 
 Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair. 
 
 IX 
 
 And though within me here 
 
 Hope lingers unsubdued, 
 'Tis because airiest cheer 
 
 Suffices for her food ! 
 As some adventurous flower, 
 
 On savage crag-side grown, 
 Seems nourished hour by hour 
 
 From its wild self alone, 
 So lives inveterate Hope, on her own hardihood. 
 
 X 
 
 She tells me, whispering low : 
 
 " Wherefore and whence thou wast, 
 Thou shalt behold and know, 
 
 When the Great Bridge is crossed. 
 For not in mockery He 
 
 Thy gift of wondering gave, 
 Nor bade thine answer be 
 
 The blank stare of the grave. 
 Thou shalt behold and know ; and find again thy lost." 
 
 164
 
 XI 
 
 With rapt eyes fixed afar, 
 
 She tells me : " Throughout Space, 
 Godward each peopled star 
 
 Runs with thy Earth a race. 
 Wouldst have the goal so nigh, 
 
 The course so smooth a field, 
 That Triumph should thereby 
 
 One half its glory yield ? 
 And can Life's pyramid soar all apex and no base ? ' 
 
 XII 
 
 She saith : " Old dragons lie 
 
 In bowers of pleasance curled ; 
 And dost thou ask me why ? 
 
 It is a Wizard's world ! 
 Enchanted princes these, 
 
 Who yet their scales shall cast, 
 And through his sorceries 
 
 Die into kings at last. 
 Ambushed in Winter's heart the rose of June is furled. ' 
 
 XIII 
 
 Such are the tales she tells : 
 
 Who trusts, the happier he : 
 But nought of virtue dwells 
 
 In that felicity ! 
 
 165
 
 I think the harder feat 
 Were his who should toithstand 
 
 A voice so passing sweet, 
 And so profuse a hand. — 
 Hope, I forgo the wealth thou fling'st abroad so free ! 
 
 XIV 
 
 Carry thy largess hence, 
 
 Light Giver ! Let me learn 
 To abjure the opulence 
 
 I have done nought to earn ; 
 And on this world no more 
 
 To cast ignoble slight, 
 Counting it but the door 
 
 Of other worlds more bright. 
 Here, where I fail or conquer, here is my concern : 
 
 XV 
 
 Here, where perhaps alone 
 
 I conquer or I fail. 
 Here, o'er the dark Deep blown, 
 
 I ask no perfumed gale ; 
 I ask the unpampering breath 
 
 That fits me to endure 
 Chance, and victorious Death, 
 
 Life, and my doom obscure, 
 Who know not whence I am sped, nor to what port I sail. 
 
 1 66
 
 I 
 
 WHITHER AFAR ? 
 
 N light, in night, in twilight, 
 
 I sought for very Thee ! 
 But my light, was it Thy light ? 
 I sought, and nought could see. 
 
 I strove by inward eyesight 
 To gaze on things to be : 
 
 But my sight, was it Thy sight ? 
 I gazed, and nought could see. 
 
 Along Thy starlit highway 
 
 Thou lead'st me, bound or free ! 
 
 If my way, then, be Thy way, 
 O whither lead'st Thou me ? 
 
 167 m
 
 AT A BURIAL 
 
 LORD of all Light and Darkness, 
 Lord of all Life and Death, 
 Behold, we lay in earth to-day 
 The flesh that perisheth. 
 Take to Thyself whatever may 
 Be not as dust and breath — 
 Lord of all Light and Darkness, 
 Lord of all Life and Death. 
 
 
 168
 
 VERSES TO HENRY C. MONTGOMERY, 
 OF BALLYHACKAMORE 
 
 Written near Windermere, at Christmas, 1917. 
 
 GOOD friend and true, who, for the gifts and 
 knowledge 
 That stead you well amid the clang and strife, 
 Are less in debt to yonder younger College 
 Than to the University of Life. 
 
 Take, at this time that opens the heart's fountains, 
 Take, at this Yuletide, from across the seas, 
 
 The greetings of the meres and of the mountains, 
 And of your friends who are the guests of these. 
 
 Nay, ere my rhyme, that must not halt or tarry, 
 Flits through the snowstorm like a battered dove, 
 
 My little firstborn daughter bids it carry, 
 To her big, bearded playfellow, her love. 
 
 Wild roars the blizzard. Wilder tempest rages 
 
 In Man's fierce breast, and hides from the world's eyes 
 
 The truthtellers and lightgivers and sages 
 That live when hatred and when fury dies. 
 
 In this ill day, what good wish shall I send you ? 
 
 Vain, when our fate yet hangs in quivering doubt, 
 To ask that all felicity attend you, 
 
 And bid you to forget the woe without 1 
 
 169
 
 I can but pray that in some happier morrow, 
 
 You, and we also, gazing from afar, 
 May look back on this vast, life-blinding sorrow 
 
 As on the occultation of a star, — 
 
 A fixed star, briefly hidden by the passing 
 
 Of a reposeless orb of bloodred glow : 
 Then bursting forth, where Night's bright hosts were 
 massing, 
 
 To pour its glory undimmed, as long ago. 
 
 170
 
 THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 
 
 IN lands that still the heirs of Othman sway, 
 There lives a legend, wild as wildest note 
 Of birds that haunt the Arabian waste, where rolls 
 Tigris through Baghdad to the Persian Sea. 
 'Tis fabled that the mighty sorcerer, 
 King Solomon, when he died, w r as sitting aloft, 
 Like one that mused, on his great lion-throne ; 
 Sitting with head bent forward o'er his staff, 
 Whereon with both his hands he leaned. And tribes 
 And peoples moved before him, in their awe 
 Not venturing nigh ; and tawny fiercenesses, 
 Panther and pard, at timorous distance couched ; 
 While Figures vast, Forms indeterminate, 
 Demons and Genii, the Enchanter's thralls, 
 Cloudily rose, and darkly went and came. 
 But so majestic sat he lifeless there, 
 And counterfeited life so perfectly, 
 That change of hue or feature was by none 
 Seen, and none guessed him dead, and every knee 
 Rendered him wonted homage, until worms 
 Gnawing his staff, made fall that last support, 
 And with it fell the unpropped Death, divulged 
 In gorgeous raiment to the wondering world. 
 
 So may an Empire, from whose body and limbs 
 The spirit hath wholly fled, still seem to breathe 
 And feel, still keep its living posture, still 
 Cheat with similitude of glory and power 
 The gazing Earth, until the evil things 
 
 171
 
 That burrow in secret, and by night destroy, 
 Unseat the grandiose Semblance, and man's heart 
 Hastes to forget the obeisances he made 
 To a jewelled corse, long ripe for sepulture. 
 
 172
 
 ON A PORTRAIT 
 
 AHEAD uplifted in noble grace 
 From stately shoulders and neck bepearled ; 
 And a countenance full of her soul — the face 
 Of one of the women that sweeten the world ! 
 
 Ah, riches are hers, and titles splendid, 
 
 But what would she be if in dust they were hurled ? 
 She would still be as now — what God intended — 
 
 One of the women that sweeten the world. 
 
 173
 
 VERSES TO THE DUCHESS OF HAMILTON 
 
 [After the Death of Admiral Lord Fisher] 
 
 yA T your Dungavel, solitary and high, 
 / 1 % That looks o'er vales of tilth to mountains 
 A m barren, 
 
 And faintly sees against the western sky 
 The far, dark brows of Arran, — 
 
 There first I heard his voice, 'mid moorsides lone, 
 And last in haunts of the soft southland weather, 
 
 Where daily your fair children and my own 
 Played on your lawns together. 
 
 His ageless eyes burned with unsquandered power ; 
 
 His countenance, when that magic smile came o'er it, 
 Was like a sea-crag breaking imto flower 
 
 Though all the tempests gore it. 
 
 Famed, reverenced, hated : with scant riches, save 
 A purer wealth than heaped and warded treasure ; 
 
 The great and noble friendship that you gave 
 In no begrudging measure ; — 
 
 Such did I see him, such did he stand forth, 
 Catching the light of your own gentler presence, 
 
 On those grave uplands of the stormy North, 
 Or 'mid your southern pleasance. 
 
 And I behold him still — though but in dream : 
 
 Fighting the thunderous battle his fate denied him : 
 
 Fighting for England her dread fight supreme, 
 With Nelson's soul beside him. 
 
 174
 
 TO INDIA'S GUEST* 
 
 YOUNG Heir to an old, old throne ! Your wan- 
 dering prow, 
 'Neath many a wandering star, 
 Hath carried you erenow 
 Far westward, southward far ; 
 And far into the hearts of men beside 
 Have been those voyagings wide. 
 At last, far eastward faring, you behold, 
 Under a heaven of vehement breath and hue, 
 Whose Day is fire of fire and gold of gold, 
 The home of all things ancient, all things new : 
 Great India, where, by mart and wharf and street, 
 By mosque or shrine, or mighty stream that pours 
 Its sacred waters between sacred shores, 
 Europe's and Asia's dreams so strangely meet ; 
 And where the never-mingling faiths, that make 
 In unlike temples an unchanged abode, 
 Show by what differing cups do mortals slake 
 The same deep thirst for God. 
 
 Guest of this ocean-seated, mountain-crowned 
 Mother of half Earth's tongues : on plain and hill, 
 Within her vast sea-bound, 
 So many are the peoples that did found 
 Famed cities, and so many and renowned 
 Are the proud princedoms, their inheritors still 
 Wearing magnificent vesture starred and pearled, 
 That as you tread this million-memoried ground 
 'Tis not a land salutes you but a world ! — 
 
 # Published in India during the visit of the Prince of Wales. 
 
 *75
 
 A world mysterious, bafflingly involved, 
 Multiplex, full of labyrinths obscure, 
 Full of enigmas not so wholly solved 
 As to be shorn of puissance to allure, 
 Yet from its cloistral bosom greeting now 
 You of the frank and the transparent brow, 
 You of the countenance like an open book, 
 Wherein, how curiously soe'er we look, 
 Nought may we read but things seemly and pure : 
 Kindliness, courtesy, honour and truth : the things 
 That, more than purple, adorn the sons of Kings, 
 And, more than arms, empower a throne to endure. 
 
 Ah, Heaven be thanked that suchlike things as these 
 Are the unponderous, the unmassive keys 
 That ope great doors with a most golden ease ! 
 And the great doors of India's soul, that are 
 Closed to mere Might as with a mystic bar, 
 If Charm draw nigh seem left at least ajar. 
 Within, what is't we see ? 
 Moods and emotions evermore apart 
 From all the way and wont o' the western heart ! 
 And as we look on deeps we have never spanned, 
 There comes the thought — Perhaps 'twere well if we 
 Loved less to overawe than to understand : 
 To have true sight and very touch at last 
 Of this that far in an unfathomed Past 
 Rose and had Dayspring for its ancestry, 
 This Soul of the East, majestic, grave, sedate, 
 Grandiose of mien : a Spirit from ours aloof, 
 Yet ravelled up for ever with the woof 
 Of all our wondrous fate. 
 
 176
 
 ON THE AUTHOR'S FIFTY-FIFTH 
 BIRTHDAY* 
 
 (i9 J 3) 
 
 FOR three things give I thanks this August morn. 
 Deep thanks, that there hath been vouchsafed 
 to me 
 A perfect spouse, pure as the perfect sea. 
 Deep thanks, that unto me of late was born 
 A daughter who, though perilously torn 
 Out of her mother's woeful agony, 
 Is joyous as the flowers that fill with glee 
 Her eyes, or as yon laughing fields of corn. 
 Deep, deepest thanks, that I have now regained 
 That faith in God which I did lose so long : 
 The God who oft-times with bewildering gloom 
 Muffled His beams : who darkly hath sustained 
 And guided, when I knew not : and from whom 
 I had at birth His heavenly gift of song. 
 
 * Hitherto published in America only. 
 177
 
 EPIGRAMS* 
 
 THOMAS HOOD 
 
 He saw wan Woman toil with famished eyes ; 
 
 He saw her bound, and strove to sing her free. 
 He saw her fall'n ; and wrote " The Bridge of 
 Sighs " ; 
 
 And on it crossed to immortality. 
 
 ON MILTON'S USE OF THE SONNET 
 
 A hundred Poets bend proud necks to bear 
 This yoke, this bondage. He alone could don 
 
 The badges of his thraldom with the air 
 Of one who puts a King's regalia on. 
 
 DOMINION 
 
 Imperial Power, that hungerest for the globe, 
 
 Restrain thy conquering feet, 
 Lest the same fates that spun thy purple robe 
 
 Should weave thy winding-sheet. 
 
 * As stated already (see Prefatory Note), these are not part 
 of, but supplementary to, the " hundred poems." 
 
 178
 
 BLESSEDNESS 
 
 Tis human fortune's happiest height, to be 
 A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole ; 
 
 Second in order of felicity, 
 To walk with such a soul. 
 
 ON THE CONCLUSION OF A WAR 
 
 The lyre, 'tis said, in ages long ago, 
 
 Sprang from the tense string of the warrior's bow. 
 
 If Music thus was born of hate and pain, 
 
 O Soul of Man, so be she born again ! 
 
 TO CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 
 
 Two songstresses have sung beneath the sun 
 As goldenly as thou dost — but not three ! 
 
 Of those sweet twain the grass is green o'er one 
 And blue above the other is the sea. 
 
 SCULPTURE AND SONG 
 
 The statue — Buonarroti said — doth wait, 
 Thrall'd in the block, for me to liberate. 
 The poem — saith the poet — wanders free 
 Till I betray it to captivity. 
 
 179
 
 THE NOBLE ANGUISH 
 
 To keep in sight Perfection, and adore 
 Her beauty, is the artist's best delight ; 
 
 His bitterest torture, that he can no more 
 Than keep her long'd-for loveliness in sight. 
 
 THE WINGS OF EROS 
 
 Love, like a bird, hath perched upon a spray 
 For thee and me to harken what he sings. 
 
 Contented, he forgets to fly away ; 
 
 But hush ! . . . remind not Eros of his wings. 
 
 THE FATAL SCRUTINY 
 
 The beasts in field are glad, and have not wit 
 
 To know why leapt their hearts when springtime shone. 
 
 Man looks at his own bliss, considers it, 
 
 Weighs it, with curious nicety ; and 'tis gone. 
 
 TO 
 
 Forget not, brother singer ! that though Prose 
 Can never be too truthful or too wise, 
 
 Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose 
 Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes. 
 
 1 80
 
 AFTER READING " TAMBURLAINE THE 
 
 GREAT "* 
 
 Your Marlowe's page I close, my Shakespeare's ope. 
 
 How welcome — after gong and cymbal's din — 
 The continuity, the long slow slope 
 
 And vast curves of the gradual violin I 
 
 SHELLEY AND HARRIET 
 
 A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower 
 Grown in Earth's garden — loved it for an hour. 
 Let eyes that trace his orbit in the Spheres 
 Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears. 
 
 KEATS 
 
 He dwelt with the bright gods of elder time, 
 On earth and in their cloudy haunts above. 
 
 He loved them : and in recompense sublime, 
 The gods, alas ! gave him their fatal love. 
 
 TO A BERKELEIAN IDEALIST 
 
 If Nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, 
 A mighty figment and prodigious dream, 
 
 To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, 
 More than content with worlds that only seem. 
 
 * No disparagement of the superb genius of Marlowe is 
 intended in this comment on his crudest production. 
 
 181
 
 THE CHURCH TO-DAY 
 
 Outwardly splendid as of old — 
 Inwardly sparkless, void and cold — 
 Her force and fire all spent and gone — 
 Like the dead moon, she still shines on. 
 
 BYRON THE VOLUPTUARY 
 
 Too avid of earth's bliss, he was of those 
 
 Whom Delight flies because they give her chase. 
 
 Only the odour of her wild hair blows 
 Back in their faces hungering for her face. 
 
 TO A LADY RECOVERED FROM A DANGEROUS 
 
 SICKNESS 
 
 Life plucks thee back as by the golden hair — 
 Life, who had feigned to let thee go but now. 
 
 Ah, wealthy is Death already, and can spare 
 Ev'n such a prey as thou ! 
 
 ON A PEOPLE'S POET 
 
 Yes, threadbare seem his songs, to lettered ken. 
 They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men. 
 
 182
 
 
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