THE SIS TINE EYE 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS 
 
 B. Y 
 
 PERCY MACKAYE 
 
POEMS 
 
BY PERCY MACKAYE 
 
 The Canterbury Pilgrims. A Comedy. 
 
 Ftiiris, the Wolf. A Tragedy. 
 
 Jeanne D 1 Arc. 
 
 Sappho and Phaon. 
 
 The Scarecrow. A Tragedy of the Ludicrous. 
 
 Mater. An American Study in Comedy. 
 
 The Playhouse and the Play. 
 
 Poems. 
 
 Uniform, i2mo. $1.25 net, each. 
 
 Lincoln: A Centenary Ode. izmo. 7$c. net 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS 
 
 BY 
 
 PERCY MACKAYE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE PRESENT HOUR," ETC. 
 
 gorfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1915 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
COPYBIOHT, 1909, 
 
 BT THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1909. Reprinted 
 February, 1915. 
 
 Norfajooto $rs 
 
 J. 8. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
Co 
 
 W. V. M. E. A. R. 
 & 
 
 K. T. 
 
 IN FELLOWSHIP 
 
 302321 
 
FOB permission to reprint certain poems in 
 this volume, the author makes his acknowledg 
 ments to the editors of the following journals : 
 The Century Magazine, The Outlook, Every 
 body s Magazine, Collier s Weekly, The Harvard 
 Graduates 9 Magazine. 
 
 vii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAKT ONE 
 POEMS CHIEFLY OCCASIONAL 
 
 PAGE 
 TlCONDEROGA . ... 4 ... 3 
 
 TENNYSON . . . . . . . .16 
 
 THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON ... 21 
 CHORAL SONG FOR THE NEW THEATRE . . 23 
 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES ... 24 
 PROLOGUE TO THE SAINT-GAUDENS MASQUE . 38 
 A CHRISTMAS CAROL . . . .42 
 THE DEATH OF VERESTCHAGIN ... 46 
 SHIRLEY COMMON . . . . . . . 47 
 
 ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE . . .49 
 THE SISTINE EVE . 51 
 
 PART TWO 
 POEMS LYRICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE 
 
 GROUP I . ... . , .89 
 GROUP II . . , * . . 141 
 GROUP III . . ... , . . 155 
 
 INDEX TO POEMS IN PART Two 185 
 
PART ONE 
 
 POEMS CHIEFLY OCCASIONAL 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 A BALLAD 
 I 
 
 What spirits conjure theefrom time, 
 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 On thy headland rock 
 Of history, 
 
 Who are these that knock 
 And summon thee 
 To move thine ancient lips in rhyme, 
 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 
 Where the wind-blown swallows 
 
 Veer and vary, 
 
 Where the shore and shallows 
 
 Lie visionary, 
 
 Titans three 
 
 Stand at my knee : 
 
 Each one is a century. 
 
 In their shadow, silently, 
 
 Sits the sibyl Memory. 
 
 And her silence questions me : 
 
 1 Read at the celebration of the three hundredth anni 
 versary of the discovery of Lake Champlain, at Fort 
 Ticonderoga, July 6, 1909. 
 3 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 II 
 
 Who glide so dim upon the lake 
 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 Over their dreaming prow 
 The morning star 
 Blazes their goal; but now 
 More dusk and far 
 What old world dwindles in their wake, 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 
 The fleur-de-lis, the fleur-de-lis ! 
 
 The White Chevalier lo, tis he ! 
 
 His pale canoe along the tide 
 
 The painted Huron paddles guide 
 
 With dumb, subdued elation; 
 
 The wild dawn stains their bodies bare, 
 
 The wild dawn gleams about his hair ; 
 
 Steeped in his soul s adventure, lie 
 
 The valleys of discovery 
 
 The peaks of expectation. 
 
 Midway the lake they pause : on high 
 
 His arm he raises solemnly. 
 
 Above the lilies, that emboss 
 
 His azure banner, and the pied 
 
 Algonquin plumes that float beside, 
 
 He holds the shining cross. 
 
TICONDEROGA < 
 
 " Champlain !" The placid word 
 
 The mute air hath not stirred. 
 
 Touched by the morning s wing, 
 
 The ruddied waters, quickening, 
 
 Alone are kindled by that christening. 
 
 Quaint splendors mass 
 
 Within the lake s clear glass, 
 
 And liquid lilies golden run 
 
 In rose gules of the rising sun. 
 
 Naught else there of acclaim 
 
 Greets the great Chevalier s name, 
 
 Save where the water-fowl s primeval broods 
 
 Awake Bulwagga s lone and echoing solitudes. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What strident horror breaks thy spell, 
 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 What long and ululating yell? 
 
 The Iroquois : in covert glade 
 
 They build their pine-bough palisade, 
 
 And weave in trance 
 
 Their sachem dance 
 
 With hawk-screams of their heathen wars, 
 
 Till naked on my shrilling shores 
 
 Mohawk and wild Algonquin meet 
 
 And taunt, with fleer and blown conceit, 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 Each other s painted ranks: 
 
 But, lo where now their flanks 
 
 Give way and reel ! 
 
 And mid the silent sagamores, 
 
 In shining cuish and casque of steel, 
 
 Before them all 
 
 Stands bright and tall, 
 
 With gauntlet clenched and helmet vised, 
 
 The calm knight-errant of the Christ; 
 
 Then, in sign miraculous, 
 
 Levels his arquebus 
 
 And, charged with bullets from his bandoleer, 
 
 Looses the bolt of preternatural thunder. 
 
 A sachem falls : the wild men stare in wonder 
 
 And mazed fear; 
 
 Once more his engine peals, and hurls the fire 
 
 Whose flash shall kindle continents to ire. 
 
 IV 
 
 Like sanguine clouds at sunset spread 
 The ages slumber round thy head, 
 
 Ticonderoga ! 
 Tremendous forms 
 Loom in their dreams: 
 Through levin-light of starless storms, 
 By giant fords of chartless streams, 
 Saxon and Gaul 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 Wrestle and rise and fall, 
 
 Conquering the region aboriginal. 
 
 Hark ! From the long tides of Lake George, 
 
 What rolling drum-beat rumbles through thy 
 
 gorge, 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 
 O why should woman weep for war ? 
 Or man why should it vex him more ? 
 Or why beside so sweet a shore 
 
 Dreadful should the drum be ? 
 O clear the snorting trumpets neigh, 
 And blithe the squealing bagpipes play ! 
 O red the redcoats on the bay, 
 
 Sailing with Abercromby ! 
 
 A thousand bateaux floating glide 
 And flaunt their banners sheen; 
 
 Calm isles swim by on the summer tide 
 Clad in their birchen green. 
 
 Lord Howe he lies on a rude bearskin 
 
 Beneath the pleasant sky; 
 Says : Never day hath fairer been 
 
 For one s dear land to die. 
 
 Says: Tell me true now, gallant Stark, 
 What trail may foil the Frenchmen ? 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 Where should our redcoats disembark 
 To rout Montcalm his henchmen? 
 
 A trout-brook once I fished, Lord Howe, 
 To fry my catch in bacon : 
 
 Along that trail, Sir, I ll allow 
 Ticonderoga s taken. 
 
 O what so wildly fair as war ! 
 From dancing skiff and dripping oar 
 Land down on yonder dreamy shore 
 
 And drowsy let the drum be. 
 O proud as life the far crag s flush ! 
 And sweet as youth the hermit-thrush ! 
 O deep as death the dark wood s hush, 
 
 Marching with Abercromby ! 
 
 Our trail grows blind, good Putnam : draw 
 More close your forest rangers. 
 
 By yonder balsam [hark !] I saw 
 
 Who calls there friends or strangers ? 
 
 A mile hence runs a mill, Lord Howe: 
 Might be the Frenchers sawing; 
 
 Or likely, Sir, ye heard yon crow 
 Round Roger s Rock a-cawing. 
 
TICONDEROGA 
 
 Qui vive ? Their muskets flare the wood ; 
 
 Franpais! Their wild cheers start: 
 Lord Howe is dropt down where he stood, 
 
 A hot ball through his heart. 
 
 They drive them back, they drown their boast 
 In blood and the rushing river, 
 
 But the heart of Abercromby s host 
 The Lord of Hosts deliver ! 
 
 Said is prayer and sung is psalm; 
 In the moonlight waits Montcalm. 
 Felled is tree and sunk is trench; 
 On their ramparts rest the French. 
 Moon is waned and night is gone, 
 And the plateau, in the dawn, 
 Strown with strange gigantic wrack, 
 Bristles like a wild boar s back, 
 Horrid shagg d with monstrous spines 
 Of splintered oaks and tangled pines. 
 Where last night the setting sun 
 Placid forest looked upon, 
 In its place the sunrise sees 
 Rubble heaps of writhen trees, 
 Boughs that hid the shy bird s nest 
 Sharpened for a soldier s breast. 
 
10 TICONDEROGA 
 
 Hot soars the sun : in dove-white swarms 
 Cluster the dazzling uniforms 
 Along the earthworks; distant shines 
 The vanguard of the English lines. 
 Scarlet from the sombre firs 
 They start like sudden tanagers, 
 And smoothly sweep the open glade 
 Toward the abatis. There, waylaid, 
 They flounder midst the galling heap 
 Of tumbled branches, where they leap 
 And crawl, as mid some huge morass. 
 Like locusts in storm-beaten grass. 
 The looming breastworks now they see 
 But still no foemen. Suddenly, 
 Blinding the noon, a dusk of smoke 
 Blooms, and the roaring air hath broke 
 In hurricanes of scorching hail, 
 Through which, to dying eyes that quail, 
 Falls the round sun a fiery grail. 
 
 Vive le Roi! rings from the wall 
 Of flame : Vive notre General I 
 
 Choked by the fury and the fire, 
 The rended English ranks suspire 
 A moment s pause, then maddened rush 
 Stifling through the giant brush 
 Where, trapped in pits of jagged spars, 
 
TICONDEROGA 11 
 
 Rangers and yelling regulars 
 Struggle to shoot and strain to see 
 The blithe and viewless enemy. 
 
 Vive le Roi! shrilly the call 
 Rings clear: Vive noire General! 
 
 Whirled from the zigzag bastion s scarp, 
 The hellish crossfire weaves its warp. 
 Thrice they return, and thrice again: 
 Image of God ! and are these men 
 With eyes upturned in sightless stare, 
 Glazed with the dead hate that they glare : 
 And one, with dumb mouth, shouts in death 
 To one the red blood strangleth, 
 And one, outstretched with woful brow, 
 Hangs spiked upon a greenwood bough, 
 Wrought in a sculptured agony 
 Like Him that died upon a tree. 
 
 The soul of Abercromby s host 
 
 Follows Lord Howe his shining ghost : 
 
 On stormy ridge and parapet 
 
 It rides in flame, it leads them yet; 
 
 Smiling, with wistful image wan, 
 
 A dead man leads the dying on. 
 
 And Campbell, Laird of Inverawe, 
 
 Hath met the doom his dream foresaw; 
 
12 TICONDEROGA 
 
 Pierced by his murdered kinsman s eyes, 
 His clansmen bear him where he dies. 
 
 Lord Howe, Lord Howe, why shouldst thou 
 
 fall! 
 
 Thy life it was the life of all ; 
 Thy death ten thousand hath undone. 
 England hath sunken with the sun. 
 Ticonderoga s lost and won ! 
 
 O women, weep ye yet for war? 
 Bugles and banners, flaunt no more ! 
 For some be sleeping by the shore 
 
 In slumber dark, and some be 
 Awake in fever s roaring gorge, 
 And some, in crowded keels that forge 
 Southward, curse heaven and Lake George, 
 
 Flying with Abercromby ! 
 
 V 
 
 Still round thy brow the riven war-clouds range, 
 
 Ticonderoga : 
 
 The conquest marches though the colors change. 
 And now, where revolution s lightnings run, 
 Beyond the battle-smoke, sublime and wan, 
 Quivers the patient star of Washington. 
 Ranger gainst regular, 
 
TICONDEROGA 13 
 
 Sundered in enmity, 
 Opens thine ancient scar 
 Newly for liberty. 
 Now with a rushing noise 
 Burst freedom s fountains 
 Where the green-forest boys 
 March from their mountains. 
 Listen! What wheedling fife 
 Quickens thy smouldering memories to Iife 9 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 
 We re marching for to take the fort 
 
 With Ethan Ethan Allen, 
 That when with fight he fills a quart 
 
 He ups and gulps a gallon. 
 Double-quick it ! faster ! hep ! 
 
 Lord ! his blood is brandy. 
 Mind the music and the step, 
 
 And hold your muskets handy. 
 
 Friends and fellow soldiers halt ! 
 
 Mind your P s, you noodle ! 
 What mother s son will earn his salt 
 
 And dance to Yankee Doodle? 
 There stands Ticonderoga: state 
 
 What now ye mean to do there. 
 Yon s the fortress wicket -gate: 
 
 How many will march through there ? 
 
14 TICONDEROGA 
 
 As many now as volunteer 
 
 Poise your firelocks ! Right, Sir ! 
 Each man has swung his musket clear, 
 
 Each man files off to fight, Sir. 
 The British sentry points his gun, 
 
 And Ethan hears him click it; 
 He fires : the Yankees yell * Come on ! 
 
 And thunder through the wicket. 
 
 They thunder through the barracks court 
 
 And ram the British mortars. 
 What rag-tail rebels make such sport 
 
 In great King George s quarters ? 
 King George s style is over, Sir ! 
 
 You redcoats wear the wrong dress: 
 Ground arms to the great Jehovah, Sir, 
 
 And the Continental Congress ! 
 
 VI 
 
 Thine eyes grow dreamy in the evening haze, 
 
 Ticonderoga. 
 Where, in mimic art 
 Ephemeral, 
 
 Thy pilgrims hold their part 
 In festival, 
 On what eternal pageants dost thou gaze, 
 
 Ticonderoga ? 
 
TICONDEROGA 15 
 
 Soldier and saint and sagamore 
 Are vanished from my tranquil shore. 
 The ripples that the summer breeze 
 Awakes they are my reveries ; 
 The day-fly dartles where below 
 The Royal Savage hides her woe, 
 And where the silver lake-trout ply 
 Arnold still grapples with Sir Guy. 
 On Mount Defiance, looming proud, 
 Glowers Burgoyne a twilight cloud, 
 In whose spent shower s radiance 
 Macdonough fights the Confiance. 
 
 Battles whose blood is liberty, 
 Heroes whose dreams are history, 
 Imagination hath them wrought, 
 Tempering all things to a thought, 
 Painting the land, the lake, the sky, 
 With pageants of the dreamer s eye. 
 
 So by my visionary shore, 
 
 Soldier and saint and sagamore 
 
 Live in my shadow evermore: 
 
 Where, rapt in beauty, sleeps Champlain, 
 
 Lulled are the passion and the pain; 
 
 The legend and the race remain. 
 
TENNYSON l 
 
 I 
 
 SONG keeps no dim centennial 
 
 Where one who sang lies hushed in earth, 
 And Beauty wears not death nor birth 
 
 Though lovers bring her flower and pall ; 
 
 While Life itself, in endless youth, 
 Is sown along sidereal deeps, 
 From darkness, where the dreamer sleeps, 
 
 Trembles the morning-star of Truth. 
 
 Not to the singer, but to Song 
 
 That lights with viewless finger-tips 
 Her flaming music at his lips, 
 
 Those immortalities belong. 
 
 Yet to the singer, for the sake 
 Of austere service lowly lent 
 To make his mind her instrument, 
 
 The flower and pall of song we take. 
 
 1 Written to be read before the Brooklyn Institute, 
 1909, in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary 
 of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 
 16 
 
TENNYSON 17 
 
 II 
 
 Among the mighty island-choir 
 
 His earliest pipe was faintly heard 
 When still the hearts of time were stirred 
 
 With revolutionary fire, 
 
 While lights and echoes still were blown 
 Across the darkening lyric sky 
 Of Shelley s shrilling ecstasy 
 
 And Byron s orphic organ-tone. 
 
 He watched the shuddering Age, aghast, 
 Behold the sphinx of Science grow 
 A lion vigilant, and throw 
 
 Its shadow o er the golden past, 
 
 Assuming slow an awful Shape 
 
 That stood impassive at the feast, 
 Revealing man a mystic beast 
 
 The evolution of an ape. 
 
 Still shy he sought his shunning Muse 
 Remote from sceptic clash and curse, 
 And mixed the palette of his verse 
 
 With nature s mellow gleams and hues, 
 
 c 
 
18 TENNYSON 
 
 And crowned his rhyme with bloom of fern 
 In fiery orchid palaces, 
 And caught in crystal chalices 
 
 Bright spillings from a Grecian urn; 
 
 Till, touched by human lover s hand, 
 The singer rose to larger thought 
 And took the spurs of Lancelot 
 
 And galloped into Fairyland. 
 
 But most of olden fair romance 
 
 Is rust on Reason s shining shield, 
 And Merlin s hand is weak to wield 
 
 The wand of Science necromance. 
 
 And soon the mage of modern rhyme 
 Poured all his alchemy of art 
 In newer purpose to impart 
 
 The noble doubtings of his time; 
 
 And sped the Mediaeval ghost 
 
 Of faith, and hailed the love of all, 
 The lessening individual, 
 
 The kingly * common sense of most ; 
 
TENNYSON 19 
 
 And watched, with keen prophetic scan, 
 
 Wild lightnings from the embattled crew 
 Of navies grappling in the blue 
 
 Quenched by the Parliament of Man. 
 
 Thus on his centenary page 
 
 The Muse has scrolled his name with hers: 
 
 A Prince of old Artificers, 
 Knight-errant of the Newest Age. 
 
 The poet pales in memory 
 
 Aloof and proud and book-bemused, 
 His Saxon plainness subtly fused 
 
 With pomp of Norman chivalry; 
 
 His ashes in the Abbey lie 
 Aristocratic in their place, 
 But all that lives of him has grace 
 
 Of beautiful democracy ; 
 
 Near mouldering glaive and oriflamme 
 His cerements rest, but he, unwound 
 From death, by human love is crowned 
 
 With friendship in memoriam; 
 
 By many a far and alien beach 
 
 He seeks the holy grail of song, 
 Hailed by the Saxon-thinking throng 
 
 The laureate of English speech. 
 
20 TENNYSON 
 
 m 
 
 O Song O Grail of man s desire ! 
 
 O living Splendor, never sped ! 
 
 Out of the ashes of the dead 
 Rise, rise once more in mystic fire ! 
 
 Reveal for us, for us, reveal 
 
 The Singer in his harness clad, 
 And gird him forth like Galahad 
 
 To smite, to chasten and to heal ; 
 
 To hallow spear and spade and hod, 
 To wrestle manhood from defeats, 
 To face the mighty in their seats 
 
 And humble greatness before God; 
 
 To be the bugle of his race 
 
 And blazon through the age again 
 Thy music in the hearts of men, 
 
 Thy beauty in the market-place. 
 
THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON 1 
 
 LIKE nothing earthly, on awful wings, 
 
 It burst on the staring million, 
 Like a dream of ancient dreadful things 
 
 In the dusk of the time reptilian. 
 
 Our hearts beat quick ; we spoke not aloud ; 
 
 Our minds our senses dissuaded ; 
 As we saw the bastions of bird and cloud 
 
 By the vision of man invaded. 
 
 We caught our breath, as we watched him bound 
 Where the air-billow swirls and serries, 
 
 And the shout of our straining hearts is drowned 
 In the din of the roaring ferries. 
 
 With sliding pinion and whizzing prow 
 His sky-ship the sea birds scaring 
 
 Like a thought from Liberty s looming brow, 
 He flashes and soars in his daring. 
 
 1 Stanzas written on witnessing, from Battery Park, 
 the first flight made by Wilbur Wright in his aeroplane 
 from Governor s Island to Grant s Tomb and back, on 
 the morning of October 4, 1909, during the Hudson- 
 Fulton celebrations. 
 
 21 
 
22 THE AIR VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON 
 
 He has flashed ; he is gone : only fancy aids 
 Our eyes where the haze grows hoarer : 
 
 The Ages look up from the Palisades, 
 
 That looked down on the Dutch explorer. 
 
 But what of their dreams those gray steel hulks 
 Deep-moored in the river below him, 
 
 With the loins of a nation girt in their bulks ? 
 In their iron hearts, do they know him ? 
 
 Do their deadly engines twinge with a doubt, 
 
 A dread of this thing ethereal, 
 That hides in its plumes the earliest scout 
 
 Of the armies and navies aerial ? 
 
 And what of their hearts that human throng ? 
 
 Do they hail in this creature regal 
 The harbinger of dirge, or of song? 
 
 A vulture, or an eagle ? 
 
 He tacks ; he returns : the news is blown 
 On the winds of a city s wonder: 
 
 He comes, in the braying megaphone, 
 He comes, on Manhattan s thunder; 
 
 He looms once more by the swarming bluffs 
 A bird of marshes gigantic 
 
 And slants on the slumbering mist, and luffs 
 To his nest by the booming Atlantic. 
 
CHORAL SONG FOR THE NEW 
 THEATRE l 
 
 (Written to be sung to music from Gounod s Redemption.) 
 
 AWAKE ! awake ! awake ! 
 
 Spirits of Aspiration ! 
 
 And hasten to renew 
 
 Your ministering vows : 
 
 For lo ! the Prince of Faery 
 
 Returns within your walls, 
 
 Back from his ancient bright dominions : 
 
 Awake ! awake ! awake ! 
 
 For he is crowned again. 
 
 But who is he, the Prince of Faery ? 
 
 Of Hellas he was god, a swan he was in Avon. 
 
 But who is he, the Prince of Faery ? 
 
 Of little children lord, of men and angels 
 
 master : 
 Within the human mind he rules the world. 
 
 1 Sung by members of the Metropolitan Opera Com 
 pany, at the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone 
 of the New Theatre, New York, December 15, 1908, and 
 also at the opening ceremonies, November 6, 1909. 
 23 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES J 
 
 HARVARD PHI BETA KAPPA POEM, 1908 
 
 I 
 
 ONCE more amid her mountains and her seas 
 American, dream-startled Liberty 
 Stares round her, listening. From her mystic 
 limbs 
 
 Sleep like a garment slips ; 
 
 Between her lips 
 Bright wonder trembles momentarily; 
 
 About her knees 
 
 Her ancient streams and shores, innumerable 
 With navies and strange peoples, raise new 
 
 hymns 
 
 In her immortal name. Once more she lifts 
 Her head in proud resistance, beautiful 
 Rebellion : yet not now with martial frown 
 
 To glare through scorching rifts 
 Of cannon smoke, smiting her foemen down, 
 
 1 Read in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 25, 1908. 
 24 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 25 
 
 But now, with gaze upturned in the deep sky 
 Whose timeless arc reveals each mortal blur 
 Of her bright image overhanging her, 
 To purify herself, for her least worshipper. 
 
 II 
 
 Ours is an age of mutability, 
 
 A threshold radiant yet sinister 
 
 Toward strange horizons, where the eternal hills 
 
 Of ancient law heave, and sink shuddering under, 
 
 Bursting in giant surf against the base 
 
 Of vastier summits, newly starred with wonder; 
 
 And though that portent thrills 
 Our thoughts with dread, or joy, here is our place; 
 Here we must look our common future in the face. 
 
 Necessity sounds no alarms, and time 
 No tocsin for his patient siege. To-day 
 No detonation of deep Sumter s gun, 
 Nor lightning musket-flash of Lexington, 
 
 Nor jangled steeple-chime, 
 Ushers our holy war; but silent-shod, 
 
 And in the secret way 
 
 Of human hearts, where in the sordid street 
 The modern slave and master dumbly meet 
 
 And in the other s eyes 
 
26 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Each, unaware, beholds the eyes of God, 
 
 That ever after burn and scrutinize 
 
 The vitals of his soul ; or where, defiled, 
 
 The starless miner barters his own child 
 
 For mordant drink to quench his questioning 
 
 mind; 
 
 Or where, behind 
 The squandered toil of millions, the impeach d 
 
 man 
 
 Puts out his life, to shut away the shame; 
 Still silent as the flame 
 Of serpent fire through autumn grass, 
 The radiant revolution creeps, 
 Impregnating the nation s prone morass 
 With seed Promethean 
 That, kindling, leaps 
 
 Forth on the peaks of life, aspiring whence it 
 came. 
 
 What is that seed ? that living fire ? 
 
 What mystic name, 
 
 What secret shrine, 
 
 Revealed, sets free 
 That sweet and awful Potency, 
 Which wears, neath blasphemy and ire, 
 Neath pain and sin and hate and blood, 
 The hallowed smile of brotherhood ? 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 27 
 
 A myriad names, a myriad 
 Shrines its worshippers have had, 
 
 Yet whatsoever god men call it by, 
 Still the divine 
 
 Democracy of man, while man is, cannot die. 
 
 Hearken how far 
 
 The high persuasion 
 
 Of our renascence thunders ! Groping, dumb, 
 Bowed with old burdens of a continent, 
 Branded with immemorial scar 
 Of sheik and king and khan and czar, 
 
 They come they come, 
 Filing, in vast and orderly invasion, 
 The planks of Ellis Island. Who shall tell 
 What numbers thronged the fields where great 
 
 Martel 
 
 Marshalled his hordes, or old Arminius 
 O erwhelmed the Roman legions ? Gaul and 
 
 Hun, 
 
 Vandal and Visigoth, behold, for us 
 To-day the humdrum agent, one by one, 
 
 By sex and ages, 
 
 Chalk-marks and checks, and down the bright 
 steel cages 
 
 Passes the hybrid clans, 
 Whose migratory hosts pour forth Americans. 
 
28 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 III 
 
 Presides et socii collegiorum ! 
 
 Masters and scholars of the chosen places ! 
 
 I ask of you to whom 
 Shall those inchoate freemen, dazzled races, 
 Turn in their promised land for leadership? 
 
 Who shall equip 
 
 Their hope with discipline, their nescience 
 With light, their sudden zeal with reverence ? 
 
 I ask of you to whom 
 The amazed Republic, gazing on this skein 
 
 And stuff of destiny, 
 
 Pied-shot with human passion, joy and pain, 
 Shall look to engineer the awful loom, 
 So that within the fabric of the state 
 The large ideal of the intricate 
 Design shall blazon, bold and beautiful, 
 The gracious lineaments of Liberty ? 
 
 Flower-sprung from mesas of the prairied land, 
 Star-strewn along the hills and by the seas 
 The quiet-bastioned citadels of peace 
 And gunless fortresses of freedom stand 
 The universities. No breastwork heaves 
 Its brow in menace near; the ivied gates 
 Rise moatless ; from the campus and the eaves 
 Perennial youthhood chimes; and all awaits 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 29 
 
 The coming conqueror. Yet inward shrined, 
 
 And panoplied 
 
 With arms more glorious than glaive of Cid 
 Or Charlemagne, the quenchless human mind 
 
 Sits inexpugnable; 
 While far around, from swarming cities and wide 
 
 swards, 
 
 Murmur the vague, aspiring, passion-driven 
 hordes. 
 
 Let us not vest with visionary seal 
 Of sanctity the individual. 
 
 Wherever among men 
 The brave and reasonable citizen 
 
 Thinks for the common weal 
 And speaks his thought, there the Republic speaks, 
 Yet, if unanswered, speaks in vain. 
 
 For ours is a day of coalition : this 
 
 Our people, viewed with the perspective eye 
 
 Of revery, appears a titan group 
 
 Of powers compositive, vast Dramatis 
 
 Personse, plying their immortal tasks, 
 
 Neath which their Atlantean sinews stoop, 
 
 In that high Comedy Serene 
 Wherein the Evolutionary will immasks; 
 And there, amid those titan forms of Man 
 
30 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Their torses poised proud 
 
 In athlete ease, their foreheads pensive-bow d 
 The Spirits of the Universities 
 Enact their corporate roles American. 
 
 Therefore to you, lords of the large demesne 
 Of learning, scholars of well-earned degrees, 
 To you, in your confederated power, 
 Preeminently, the Republic turns 
 And charges you, by your just love of her, 
 
 To lead, to pilot and uplift 
 Her generations, and administer, 
 
 With the most holy shrift 
 Of reason and Time s slow amassed dower, 
 Her bright communion to the multitude. 
 
 Toward you, in whose calm hands her chalice 
 
 burns 
 
 With beauty strange, how many thirst-imbued 
 Gaze, yearning ! Not alone on your own walls, 
 Wherein your chosen meet your shadow falls 
 Also on alien thresholds, thrown across 
 The nation s childhood, by the increasing glow 
 Of truth that flares beyond you. As you sow, 
 So shall the lesser seekers harvest dross 
 Or substance. In responsibility, 
 You are the true inheritors of kings 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 31 
 
 Whose sceptres now lie impotent, your halls 
 The sovran courts of the democracy; 
 
 And by the royalty 
 Conferred of patient high imaginings, 
 
 Your first prerogative 
 And prime efficiency is leadership. 
 
 IV 
 
 Who is the scholar-leader? What is he 
 
 Whose learning shows the unlearned best to live ? 
 
 There be, who finger hard on lip 
 Pore lifelong, with laborious glass, 
 On nature s enigmatic heart, 
 Dissecting shrewdly, part by part, 
 To store her secrets in their scrip, 
 Heedless of human love and art, 
 Or how the passionate generations pass. 
 
 Others there are who, moved no less 
 
 To explore that mute obscure abysm, 
 Make of their probing minds a prism 
 
 Whose many-sided radiance 
 Illumes with their own hearts the heart of Nature, 
 
 Touching her darkest feature 
 With revelation for man s happiness, 
 
 And with love s couched lance 
 Wresting from Science a new Humanism. 
 
32 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Such is the scholar liberal : for him, 
 
 Not knowledge which ignores the Whole, 
 But knowledge grafted in the soul 
 
 Is scholarship; to esteem 
 His calling justly is to see 
 
 That culture is proficient sympathy. 
 
 For all that issues beautiful 
 From dim retort and crucible, 
 And makes our modern day to seem 
 Arabian night or opiate dream : 
 Genii, that on the wireless air 
 Transport within imagined waves 
 The cosmic Echo from her caves 
 To work their will, or from the stars 
 Expound the mysteries of Mars, 
 Or in earth s rotting shale prepare 
 The alchemy of radium, 
 All powers, articulate or dumb, 
 Which scholars probe and sages scan, 
 Are meaningless except to Man 
 To urge his peace, to ease his pain, 
 
 And from his mind s domain 
 To exorcise the lurking Caliban. 
 
 To exorcise ! Not in the Middle Age, 
 With Faust s redemption, did the devils cease 
 To lure great doctors to their tutelage, 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 33 
 
 Whereby to lengthen their protracted lease 
 Of the lewd rabble s gaping ignorance : 
 Still, with incessant metamorphosis, 
 
 The monsters hatch and hiss 
 
 And, breeding, grow 
 
 To honor d stature in the imperiPd state, 
 Where the true scholar still is Prospero, 
 
 Making their misshaped natures dance 
 Attendance on his master vision : So 
 To humble monsters to the use of men, 
 The foremost scholar is first citizen. 
 
 He, when the rank broods teem and generate 
 
 Their giant seed, 
 
 That prowl the rich land with impunity, 
 Where corporate greatness stoops to cormorant 
 
 greed, 
 And that one bulk, much-mouth d and subtle- 
 
 gin d, 
 
 The unsated Minotaur, Monopoly, 
 Extorts his toll in the meek nation s blood 
 
 Of boys and maidenhood, 
 He then, the scholar-leader, pores not stale 
 Upon his book, nor peers where sits the wind 
 In the golden weathercock on Minos gate, 
 But prescient, girds his clear mind all in mail, 
 And gathering round the time s unperished youth, 
 
34 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Apportions his bright armory of truth 
 And points what right-aimed blow shall make the 
 beast disgorge. 
 
 So did that steadfast captain of our race 
 
 A storm-trained scholar stand at Valley Forge 
 
 With all the gales of England in his face, 
 
 And sharing forth his visionary arms 
 
 Of faith with his shorn comrades, smiled, and 
 
 hurled 
 
 Victory through disaster s blind alarms, 
 And wrought with fearless mind the future of a 
 
 world. 
 
 V 
 
 O beautiful and spacious one, 
 
 My Country ! Spirit free, 
 Who floatest wild on that lone eagle s wings 
 Fledged in the fiery heart of Washington, 
 And fed on heart s blood of each dauntless son 
 Of that strong father, how exceedingly 
 
 Fair is thine image, when 
 
 First the least-born of men 
 
 Burns with thy story ! Then 
 Thou art a presence never darkling: night 
 
 Shrouding thy solemn flight, 
 
 Sprinkles, with hoary rite, 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 35 
 
 Stars on thy plumage; morn, 
 
 Ere on the cottage thorn 
 
 Scarce the shy warbler sings, 
 
 Fills all familiar things 
 
 With thy far glory ; dreams 
 Of thee at evening haunt the hermit thrush, 
 And in his ecstasy s pure after-hush, 
 High and austerely sweet, thine immanent eagle 
 screams. 
 
 So by the large compulsion of that Presence 
 
 I make this invocation; 
 
 And by the might of that dear name, whose es 
 sence 
 
 The staling tongue of usage cannot taint 
 America I speak, that I may stir 
 You, her far-ranging universities, 
 
 Through glad constraint 
 
 Of love you owe to her, 
 Henceforward to conjoin your destinies 
 
 In grander federation. 
 
 VI 
 
 Not adversaries in the scrambling street 
 Of commerce, need your nobler wills compete 
 For numbers and for names. A saner law 
 Moves your cooperation, and the awe 
 
36 ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Of that shall fix a sound stability 
 At the base of civic freedom. Strong must be 
 The scholar in himself. Far better were it 
 Your halls stood empty and their corridors 
 Silent, than that the youth who from your doors 
 Go forth to breed the nation, should inherit 
 
 The sowings of that spirit 
 
 Which bows the mind to serve the vulgar mood, 
 Or truckles to the man that owns the multitude. 
 
 It cannot be. Never, till now, before 
 
 In age of Plato or of Abelard, 
 
 In empire or republic, linking shore 
 
 With shore by aspiration s viewless chain 
 
 Has your high calling held the fair regard 
 
 And faith of one vast people. Not in vain 
 
 Their faith abides in you. The taint which blinds 
 
 The weak shall not be yours. Your yards and 
 
 halls 
 
 Still with expanding splendor shall be filled 
 By the strong magnet of the sane ideal, 
 
 And to the common weal 
 Shall speed their generations of glad youth 
 Forth in the land alumni of the guild 
 Of leadership, the minute-men of truth, 
 Whose muskets are their uncorrupted minds, 
 Clean for their country where her service calls. 
 
ODE TO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 37 
 
 VII 
 
 Nobly our world renews, even as in ages gone. 
 Man s eras have their vernal equinox 
 No less than nature s : Still, on that wild dawn 
 When the high winds, unleashed, no longer fawn 
 At Winter s knees, but lift his sparse-blown locks 
 In haggard wrack there, on the looming hills, 
 Sharp with unearthly light, the sudden flocks 
 Show radiant, and on the vista d sills 
 Of Spring, earth s visionary beauty starts 
 Revealed : Not otherwise in human hearts 
 Recurrent, after seasons numb and blind, 
 Freshly the ancient Loveliness reveals 
 
 The love of our own kind, 
 Rekindling in our race the raptures of the mind. 
 
PROLOGUE TO THE SAINT-GAUDENS 
 MASQUE 1 
 
 PERFORMED AT ASPET IN CORNISH 
 
 Enter IRIS 
 
 IRIS 
 
 FRESH from the courts of dewy-colored eve 
 Jove summons me before you. Who I am 
 And why he bids me here I must declare. 
 
 1 In June, 1905, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary 
 of the founding of the Cornish Colony by Augustus Saint- 
 Gaudens, an outdoor masque was devised and performed 
 by his neighbors in a pine grove at Aspet, his New Hamp 
 shire home. In the Masque, written by Mr. Louis Evan 
 Shipman, more than seventy persons took part, among 
 whom were some forty artists and writers of craftsmanly 
 repute, who enacted r61es of Greek deities and demigods. 
 
 About twilight, the sculptor with his family and some 
 hundreds of guests were seated in front of a green-gray 
 curtain, suspended between two pines, on which hung 
 great gilded masks, executed by Mr. Maxfield Parrish. 
 Close by, secreted artfully behind evergreens, members 
 of the Boston Symphony Orchestra awaited the baton 
 signal of Mr. Arthur Whiting, conductor and composer 
 of the music. 
 
 Then, in the softened light, emerged from between the 
 folds of the curtain the tall maidenly figure of Iris, in 
 many-hued diaphanous veils, holding in one hand a staff 
 of living fleur-de-lis. Iris, enacted by Miss Frances 
 Grimes, the sculptress, spoke the accompanying Pro 
 logue. 
 
 The three allusions to works by Saint-Gaudens refer, 
 of course, to the Shaw Memorial Bas-relief, in Boston, the 
 Sherman Equestrian Statue, in New York, and the Adams 
 Memorial, in Washington. 
 
 38 
 
PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE 39 
 
 My home is half-light; you have watched me 
 
 oft 
 
 Through closing lids at noontide, or at dusk, 
 Moving between the daylight and your dreams, 
 A shape illusory. Whether I pause 
 Midway my quivering arc, that spans the roar 
 And tumbling prisms of sheer Niagara, 
 Or by the ferny banks of Blowmedown 
 Trellis my hair with braided fleur-de-lis, 
 Still I am Iris, and my mission is 
 To shatter the white beam of garish day 
 Into a thousand mellower tints of twilight, 
 Spinning across the sceptic eyes of reason 
 Fine rainbow-films of fancy. Such, then, I. 
 But whence, emerging from the curtained wood 
 Of Aspet, on this longest summer eve, 
 While yet the veerie rings his vesper chimes, 
 I have made journey hither, hearken ! 
 
 Late, 
 
 Below the gilded state-house by the bay, 
 Sitting his horse in proud simplicity, 
 I left a young commander; thronged beneath 
 His lifted brow, clouded with battle dreams, 
 The eager Ethiop faces onward surged ; 
 No sound arose from all their trampling feet, 
 But the imagined drum-beats rolled in bronze. 
 
40 PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE 
 
 From these I passed to where the human hives 
 Shadow the stars from the Metropolis, 
 Whence, turning homeward from the hell of war, 
 Another hero, scarr d and old, there rode; 
 And at his bridle-rein, in maiden awe, 
 Went Victory with pity in her eyes. 
 
 A third and Sibyl form, remote and mute, 
 
 Brooding alone beside a secret grave, 
 
 Asked with unopening eyes, " What means it all ? " 
 
 From these imagined and immortal forms 
 To him, O mortals, who imagined them, 
 And fixed his revery in stone and bronze, 
 I come to render tribute, not of praise 
 Superfluous, but playful badinage 
 And mock-Olympic mummery, whereby 
 If these shall cause the elvish Gallic smile 
 To twitch his lip, or stir his blarney laugh, 
 The mock-Olympians will die content. 
 
 Behold, then, by the enchantment of this staff 
 A magic transformation : not such change 
 As once my goddess sister Circe wrought 
 Circe, whose spell debased the forms divine 
 Of men to bristled shapes of snout and horn: 
 Mine is a charm reverse, that lifts, not lowers, 
 By power whereof all neighbor Jacks and Jills 
 
PROLOGUE TO A MASQUE 41 
 
 That tug their art-pails up these pasture slopes 
 Of Cornish are converted here to strut 
 In guise of antic gods and demigods. 
 
 [!RIS waves her staff, music sounds from the grove.] 
 
 Hark now ! Tis they, who clamor to begin 
 Their frolic masque of satyr, muse, and faun, 
 And on the shrine of mirth make sacrifice 
 In honor of their only pagan saint. 
 
 [!RIS withdraws between the curtains: the music 
 grows louder, then dies away. The curtains, 
 dividing, open upon the Masque.] 
 
A CHRISTMAS CAROL 
 
 KEEP closer to the wall ; stop crawling ; wait. 
 We have our orders. Hold the dynamite. 
 I hear their sentry cough. The moon burns white 
 Behind the battlements, and cuts each one 
 Turret and tower an inky silhouette, 
 Like paper castle-tops I used to trace 
 With scissors as a boy. Step softly ! Place 
 The bomb here, underneath the garrison. 
 Now if their souls are dreaming of hell-fire, 
 This will not wake them. Midnight! That s 
 
 the choir 
 Of children hailing the Nativity. 
 
 What are ye that walk the night 
 
 Heaven s will divining? 
 Shining are your mantles white 
 
 And your staffs are shining. 
 
 Shepherds, we have come from far 
 Dark and danger scorning: 
 
 We have seen our King His star 
 By the gates of morning. 
 42 
 
A CHRISTMAS CAROL 43 
 
 Come now, this is no time for hands to quake; 
 
 On this one breach depends the victory, 
 
 A nation s honor, and her destiny. 
 
 And these, who lie so unsuspectingly 
 
 In sleep, not one of them must ever wake 
 
 This side of 
 
 What is He whose star ye seek, 
 
 Toilsomely and slowly? 
 He is monarch of the meek. 
 
 Regent of the lowly. 
 
 Wise men, seek another land, 
 Shun our lord his greeting: 
 
 For we perish at his hand, 
 And our lambs are bleating. 
 
 What a devilish close call ! 
 There creeps the sentry on the shadow-wall 
 Like a black ant. Quick, now the fuse ! 
 
 What are ye who knock by night 
 
 On my palace portals? 
 Triple wreaths of silver light 
 
 Crown you like immortals. 
 
 Herod, from the east we bring 
 
 Fine and lordly treasure. 
 Where is He that born is King? 
 
 We would do him pleasure. 
 
44 A CHRISTMAS CAROL 
 
 These your gifts uncover them, 
 Myrrh and spice, before me. 
 
 Lo, I am Jerusalem! 
 Bow ye down, adore me! 
 
 King, your shepherds wretchedly 
 
 Starve without your city. 
 You Jerusalem may be, 
 
 But our Lord is Pity. 
 
 Quick, fool ! 
 
 This is our country s job, and you her tool. 
 What are you waiting for ? You want to think 
 Before you kill ? You dream that love may link 
 All born of woman ? Fool, are we the first 
 To live in mothers memories accurst, 
 Or in the little children s helplessness ? 
 These men, like us, know gentle eyes that bless 
 Their goings and homecomings, baby hands 
 That reach, fine feet that dart, at their commands. 
 What, then ? This is not murder ; this is war. 
 We are not men, but patriots. Think no more: 
 The fuse is lighted ; run ! Run for the shore ! 
 
 What are ye that screen your eyes 
 
 From the awful burning? 
 Look where neath His star He lies, 
 
 Nestled by her yeaming. 
 
A CHRISTMAS CAROL 45 
 
 Ye that saw His glory shine, 
 What were dark and danger? 
 
 Blessed ye that make your shrine 
 Mother, Child, and manger. 
 
 Now the Lord of Love 
 
 Look back ! Look back ! How the torn earth- 
 clouds blot 
 
 The stars, and the far hilltop heaves the roar ! 
 Ah, Merry Christmas! Almost I d forgot. 
 
THE DEATH OF VERESTCHAGIN l 
 
 WITH gaze serene and brow of silver rime, 
 
 He watched the up-staring sea and reeling 
 
 land 
 Converge, as limned beneath the veteran hand 
 
 That last, fell sketch of war was traced sublime ; 
 
 But even in the act his pencil ruthlessly 
 
 Was snatched away, where blasting all his 
 
 view 
 The inexorable Artist stood, and drew 
 
 The awful masterpiece reality. 
 
 And now the silver rime is on the wave, 
 And Verestchagin sleeps with Makarof, 
 And calm, above the red brine s eddying 
 trough, 
 
 The eyes of Christ and Buddha guard his grave. 
 
 1 Vassili Verestchagin, the Russian painter of war 
 themes, while sketching a naval battle off Port Arthur, 
 sank in the warship Petropavlovsk, with Admiral Makarof, 
 April 4, 1904. 
 
 46 
 
SHIRLEY COMMON 1 
 
 NOT ours, upon the house-tops, here to claim 
 Battles and heroes of historic scene, 
 A century and fifty years of fame : 
 Our boast is silence and this day s serene. 
 
 The loud circumference of jangling lands, 
 Conflict and craft and wrong surround us; still 
 Shy in her orchard-wildness Shirley stands: 
 A hushed spectator on her mapled hill. 
 
 Here to her simple festival she calls 
 Her folk home yet not all : Where are they now, 
 The Pilgrim race that piled her corn-field walls, 
 And served the Lord with patience and a plough ? 
 
 The hardy citizens that now are sod 
 They may not hear her summons home; and yet 
 The elm-hid belfry nestles toward their God, 
 And we, who gather here, do not forget. 
 
 1 Read at the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary 
 of the Town of Shirley, Massachusetts, July 30, 1903, in 
 the First Parish Meeting-House. 
 47 
 
48 SHIRLEY COMMON 
 
 For still the sights familiar to their eyes 
 Are dear to ours : the spires of Groton blaze 
 Their weathercocks from Gallows-Hill s sunrise, 
 And the long slopes of Harvard slant in haze; 
 
 And still, at night, the bittern booms to rest, 
 The secret whip-poor-will complains afar; 
 And still Wachusett marshals in the west 
 The sunset and his solitary star. 
 
 Here, then, let thoughts be memories; let our 
 
 pride 
 
 Be the untainted loveliness, which is 
 Our Shirley s dower on woods and pastures pied ; 
 Let our ambition, even as hers, be this : 
 
 Unenvious, to win the envied bays 
 Of nature s health and honest common sense; 
 And, by the peace of sane, inglorious days, 
 To earn the unrepute of innocence. 
 
ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE 
 
 IN that Manhattan alley long yclept, 
 
 With gentle olden music, Maiden Lane, 
 
 Where sick and sad-eyed Traffic scarce has slept 
 
 Even at midnight, in her lust for gain. 
 
 Rolling in restive pain 
 
 Through the stern vigil of a century, 
 
 There, mid the din of harsh reality 
 
 The newsboy s shriek, car s clang and huckster s 
 
 chaff, 
 
 The cobble s roar, and the loud drayman s laugh, 
 And the dull stare, 
 The inhuman, hunted glare 
 Of the faces the gray faces 
 Of Mammon s stark-mad races, 
 Sordid and slattern, 
 Modish and tattern, 
 Loveless in their misery 
 There, in the midst of all, 
 Seated upon a stall, 
 
 Musing on meadows, Isaak, I met thee ! 
 
 B 49 
 
50 ISAAK WALTON IN MAIDEN LANE 
 
 How my heart stopped for too much happiness, 
 To meet thee there in that maelstrom of men, 
 Benignant, wise and calm ! Ah, gently then 
 Came back, in fancy s dress, 
 All that of old was sweet, 
 Serene and fair, to grace the garish street. 
 Musing on meadows now in Maiden Lane, 
 The turbid current surging at my side 
 Became the flow of Thames sequestered tide, 
 The newsboy s cry waned to a curlew s call, 
 The jangling pedlar tended tinkling sheep 
 Along green hedgerows; even the drayman s 
 
 brawl 
 
 Sweetened to an old soliloquy, till all 
 That strident world has chastened to a sleep 
 Where, in a twilit eddy of my dream, 
 Thine image, Isaak, pored upon a bream. 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 FRAGMENTS OF AN ORATORIO 
 WRITTEN FOR THE BEGINNING 
 OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
PLAN 
 
 OVERTURE 
 
 PRELUDE 
 FIRST CANTO: The Birth of Eve 
 
 FIRST INTERLUDE 
 SECOND CANTO: The Temptation of Eve 
 
 SECOND INTERLUDE 
 THIRD CANTO : The Birth of Man 
 
 52 
 
PRESENCES * 
 
 SPEAKING PRESENCES : The Sistine Spirit 
 
 The Spirit of the Vatican 
 
 SOLO PRESENCES: Adam 
 
 The Persian Sibyl 
 
 The Cumcean Sibyl 
 
 The Delphic Sibyl 
 
 Judith 
 
 Goliath 
 
 Jonas 
 
 Jeremiah 
 
 Isaiah 
 
 The Expelling Angel 
 
 Eve 
 
 CHORAL PRESENCES : The Cornice Cherubim 
 Symbolic Figures 
 Botticelli s Women 
 Shapes in "The Last 
 Judgment " 
 
 SCENE 
 The Sistine Chapel, Rome 
 
 TIME 
 
 Midnight, before the Dawn of 1901 
 High pontifical mass is being celebrated. Car 
 dinals and prelates in splendid vestments, assembled. 
 
 1 These Dramatis Personce are figures in the paintings 
 by Michelangelo and Botticelli on the ceiling and walls of 
 the Sistine Chapel. 
 
 53 
 
"Laforza d* un bel volto al del mi sprona 
 [Ch altro in terra non e che mi diletti] 
 E vivo ascendo tra gli spirti eletti, 
 Grazia ch ad uom mortal raro si dona. 
 
 SI ben col suofattor V opra consuona, 
 Ch a lui mi levo per divin concetti, 
 E quivi informo i pensier tutti e i detti, 
 Ardendo, amando per gentil persona. 
 
 Onde, se mai da due begli occhi il guardo 
 Torcer non so, conosco in lor la luce 
 Che mi mosira la via ch a Dio mi guide. 
 E se nel lume loro acceso io ardo, 
 Nel nobil foco mio dolce riluce 
 La gioia che nel cielo eterna ride" 
 
 MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI; Sonetto III. 
 
 54 
 
OVERTURE 
 
 A VOICE FROM THE CHAPEL CEILING 
 
 SIBYLS and prophets of undying art, 
 Awake ! for Buonarrotti s golden dome 
 Is as an angel s passing-bell, to toll 
 On midnight s starry, tingling silentness 
 The interring of an Age. Wake and behold ! 
 They bear her toward the never-shutting doors 
 Which fearful mortals screen with draperies 
 To bar the eternal night. Lo, she has passed 
 With bead and psalm and solemn catafalque, 
 With mitred state, and pomp episcopal, 
 The latest of the sovereigns of time 
 Nineteenth among the entombed centuries 
 Has sealed forever her pregnant lips, and lies 
 Sculptured in the cold clay of history. 
 
 But thou, O live new-crowned Herculean Age, 
 Who clingest to the rugged breast of Labor, 
 Gazing with wonder in calm Science eyes, 
 While Poesie, with warm tears on her cheek, 
 Searches thy look, in passion lost of pathos, 
 Thou titan child of promise, hail to thee ! 
 55 
 
56 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 And while these spirits, with their serene eyes 
 Of strifeless beauty and strong consummation 
 [Spirits that pass not with the passing age] 
 Chant o er thine earliest breathing, may the hymn 
 Which they shall lift in prayer to the first Mother, 
 Be as an exhortation, to incite 
 Thy dreams to deeds in thy maturer days. 
 
 And now, while all the kneeling prelates pray, 
 Spirits, which are my voices, even as the stops 
 Are to the lute, awake your harmonies ! 
 And celebrate the pain and the desire, 
 The daring and the victory, of her 
 Who set love s seal upon the centuries. 
 
 A VOICE FROM THE ALTAR 
 
 Other? Of whom? 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING 
 Awake, Divinities! 
 
 CHORUS OF PRESENCES 
 
 Thou whose form crepuscular 
 
 Dawns through the Sistine heaven, as a star 
 
 Through autumn twilight, beautiful 
 
 Our mother Eve 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 57 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR 
 
 Peace, painted Forms ! Or if ye, who have sat 
 
 The mute spectators of my solemn Mass 
 
 For vague centennials of memory, 
 
 Now ope your lips inspired, let it not be 
 
 To chant amid these rites pontifical 
 
 A song of sacrilege. Peace, painted Forms ! 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING 
 
 What art thou there below, with taper eyes 
 Upraised from many a prostrate cardinal, 
 Who puffest, from thy vast, seclusive cowl, 
 Columnar storms of incense ? Whose are thine 
 Imponderous and gilded limbs, which show 
 Between the silky folds of surplices 
 Like pillars, sculptured in a pagan shrine 
 Or pillaged Coliseum ? 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR 
 
 Answer thou ! 
 
 What voice is thine, visible Aspiration, 
 Whose torse, half chiselled from cerulean cloud, 
 Outlifts the youthful arm indomitable 
 Of David, who at Florence guards the Palace, 
 While thy rapt brow hurls the time-piercing gaze 
 
58 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 Of Moses, in St. Peter s-of-the-Chains ? 
 What is thy name, majestic Grace of Power? 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE CEILING 
 I am the Sistine Spirit. What art thou ? 
 
 THE VOICE FROM THE ALTAR 
 
 The Spirit of the Vatican. My voice 
 Is the peal d organ of perennial Rome, 
 And even as those sibyls are thy stops 
 So all these red and golden reeds are mine: 
 But now, until this sacred mass be said, 
 Be silent, thou ! or let our requiem 
 Be sung in harmony. 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 What discord can 
 
 Arise, when Power prays to Innocence 
 And Beauty? 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN 
 
 None ; but these, thy sensuous choir, 
 Dare to uplift their ritual to her 
 To her, whose fluent and unstable mind, 
 Impregned with lust of new and gloss of beauty, 
 Became a fair conception-place for Satan; 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 59 
 
 To Eve, whose folly wrought the fall of Man, 
 Yea, all the dire resultance of his fall. 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 Man never fell. The inexorable blow 
 Of the Expelling Angel was the stroke 
 Which first conferred God s knighthood on his 
 
 nature, 
 
 Kindling that anguish, whereby first he rose 
 To the protective stature of his soul. 
 This Eve first knew was so, when she loved Adam. 
 For it was she who first, feeling herself 
 A child of God, yearned in her little Eden, 
 Yearned for herself and Adam, as true lovers, 
 For aims beyond their summer-day self-seeking; 
 And even while she grasped the fateful fruit, 
 Smiled in the dream of nobler mortal sons 
 Instead of an idle immortality, 
 Smiled, and then reached the fruit to Adam, so 
 To share with him the awful insurrection. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN 
 
 Preposterous Spirit ! does the fallen race 
 Of man fulfil her dream ? Reveal to me 
 A nobler mortal son, whose angel stature 
 Exceeds his father Adam s ere his fall. 
 
60 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 Spirit of earthward vision, even I ! 
 Yea, these and I and more than us are Man. 
 Our exaltation doth confute his fall, 
 And build again, in beauty, art and love, 
 Another and inviolable Eden. 
 
 Speak ! ye serene and lofty Presences, 
 Delineations of inspired Power ! 
 Awake ! ye children of a child of God, 
 And hymn, with your chromatic harmonies, 
 The prelude and the Trilogy austere, 
 Wherein the intuitive grace of Woman s love 
 Enacts the eternal Genesis of Man. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN 
 Strange spirit, they are silent. 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 Dost thou hear 
 
 No sound ? 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN 
 
 No sound ; save only the faint breath 
 Of cardinals, that tell their rosaries. 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 61 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 Hark ! Hearest thou no mural melody ? 
 
 The playing organ of an ocular sense, 
 
 The hidden choristers of lovely hues, 
 
 The chant of heavenly forms ? Once more, with 
 
 all 
 
 Thy breathess spirit listening in thine eyes 
 No music ? 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE VATICAN 
 None. 
 
PRELUDE 
 
 CHORUS OF PRESENCES 
 
 O ye wise, love Beauty ! All 
 
 Ye strong, revere her ! 
 Through passion s starry arches thrill 
 The echoes of her light footfall ; 
 The worlds, to do her deathless will, 
 
 Draw near her. 
 
 By ways divinely sensuous, 
 Her viewless form entices us 
 Mid visions pale and passionate 
 To kneel beside her awful gate; 
 Where, girt with song and silences, 
 The lonely mind her mansion is. 
 
 The innocent obey her call, 
 
 The happy know her dreamy face 
 
 And hear her; 
 
 Despair is softened by her grace, 
 And sorrow is her worshipper. 
 All things that love grow like to her. 
 O ye wise, love Beauty ! All 
 
 Ye strong, revere her. 
 62 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 63 
 
 FIRST SYMBOLIC FIGURE 
 
 Who draws his face beneath a cowl of cloud 
 And kneels beside the altar, dumb and bow d ? 
 
 SECOND FIGURE 
 
 That is the Spirit of the Vatican: 
 He meditates upon the Fall of Man. 
 
 THIRD FIGURE 
 
 But what is he, with countenance beguiPd, 
 That smiles upon the sleeping titan-child ? 
 
 FOURTH FIGURE 
 
 The Sistine Spirit. See ! he draws away 
 The incense-curtain from our holy play. 
 
 THE FIGURES 
 
 That all the enactments of our mural stage 
 May pass as dreams before the new-born Age. 
 
FIRST CANTO: THE BIRTH OF EVE 
 
 SEMICHORUS OF SYMBOLIC FIGURES 
 
 How like a garden lies the world 
 
 The day when love is born; 
 Strange beauty glows upon old boughs, 
 
 Strange flowers conceal the thorn; 
 And noon and night are tinged with light 
 
 Of unfamiliar morn. 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 While with a sense as though a god were near 
 
 it- 
 Of noble languor, droops the lover s spirit. 
 
 SEMICHORUS 
 
 So float the trembling hues around 
 
 This maid in Paradise. 
 A joy, a reticence, a prayer, 
 
 Clothe with bright poesies 
 Her meek limbs, where she worships there 
 
 In God the Father s eyes. 
 64 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 65 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 While, drawing deep from beauty s opiate springs 
 A sigh of power, recumbent Adam sings : 
 
 ADAM 
 
 As I lay in Eden, 
 Alone with Love and Lethargy, 
 An immortal maiden 
 Was conceived in heaven 
 And born to me. 
 
 All that I had dreamed 
 And sculptured from the cloud-lit skies, 
 
 All that loved and gleamed 
 And sang, in my encircling Paradise, 
 
 The summit s calm, 
 The flower s voluptuousness, 
 
 The forest s majesty, 
 Night s balm, 
 
 The morning s victory 
 And twilight s veiled melodiousness 
 
 Became a glowing fire 
 
 In me and my desire. 
 
 As I lay in Eden, 
 
 My bosom was unfolded; 
 
66 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 And an elemental Hand, 
 Swift, mysterious and grand, 
 
 Culled that perfect maiden 
 With all that my wild soul contained 
 Of passion peerless and unstained 
 
 As erst by heaven she was moulded. 
 
 And the maiden, in that place, 
 Grew before her Maker s face 
 To a form [methought I dreamed] 
 Which was what beauty only seemed. 
 And my lax arm limply pressed 
 To my warm and unnerved breast, 
 And my brow sank in a swoon, 
 And I smelt the scents of noon, 
 And I felt the faint winds straying, 
 And my heart could scarce conceive 
 What the Father s Voice was saying: 
 "Adam, behold thine Eve!" 
 
 A FIGURE 
 
 Hush ! He is silent. Spirits, he has swooned ; 
 And from his breast bright Eve has flowered forth ; 
 As when the passion of the nightingale 
 Thrills and expands through his eternal arches, 
 Recumbent Rome feels the faun-blood of Nature 
 Leap in his limbs, while an imponderous rib 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 67 
 
 Of marble sloth from his immortal heart 
 Vast and invisibly is plucked away, 
 And from that rent profuse of ecstasy, 
 Exhilarant of life and innocence, 
 Trailing bright incense for her naked glory 
 Outpours the Spring. 
 
FIRST INTERLUDE 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 How fair he sleeps this lordly child of Time ! 
 In sleep, the soul is in its infancy 
 And Power a babe again. But soon the dawn 
 Will break, and he will rise to titan-stature. 
 
 Meanwhile, within the crystal of his slumber, 
 O erhanging visions pass, as o er a lake 
 The hues of sunset, sweeping across heaven, 
 Lay down their splendors in its placid heart, 
 And passing, leave no tremor on its face. 
 
 68 
 
SECOND CANTO: THE TEMPTATION 
 OF EVE 
 
 CHORUS OF THE CORNICE CHERUBIM 
 
 The Tree ! Behold the curtain-cloud is cleft ! 
 The Tree, in all its pride and mystery ! 
 
 And smiling on its left 
 
 Content and Innocence, Self-love and Leth 
 argy; 
 
 And on its right, 
 Departing into night 
 Anguish, Sin, Death, Love and Eternity ! 
 
 A SYMBOLIC FIGURE 
 
 Sister of an Orient eld, 
 
 What read st thou from that parchment, held 
 
 Close to thine eyes, as if thou spelled 
 
 Secrets from all else withheld, 
 Or as, at twilight, thou should squint to see 
 A form, that moves or stands beyond thy scrutiny ? 
 
 THE PERSIAN SIBYL 
 
 I trace and read, in Time s obscure abysm, 
 Where cold Imagination, like a prism, 
 
70 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 Darts many-colored beams on the carved 
 
 walls, 
 The subtle sorceries of scepticism. 
 
 I seek and vainly through the centuries 
 I sought a fire, which kindled never dies, 
 
 Like that which yonder, neath the darkling 
 
 Tree 
 Of Knowledge, burns in Eve s uplifted eyes. 
 
 THE FIGURE 
 
 Thou, loosened from whose sea-green veil 
 The auburn tresses lightly trail, 
 While soft thy mantle s azure pale 
 Floats round thee, like a filling sail, 
 Where rests thy dreamy gaze, as though, unfurl d 
 On some Olympic height, it brooded o er the world ? 
 
 THE DELPHIC SIBYL 
 
 I dream (and in my dream, I smile) 
 Of a maid in Melos isle 
 
 How beautiful she was ! 
 She kept no slave, she wore no crown, 
 But all the gods from heaven looked down 
 
 To see her pass. 
 
 Her brow was calm, her limbs were free; 
 The might of her simplicity 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 71 
 
 To men seemed more than human : 
 A Deity ! they cried ; a new 
 Venus ! But one, who loved her, knew 
 
 That she was Woman. 
 
 He wrought her all of marble pure. 
 He cried : Thy beauty shall endure 
 
 When Hellas sleeps in clay. 
 Behold, O World, thy Womanhood ! 
 They smote the statue where she stood, 
 
 And hewed the arms away. 
 
 They buried her both dark and deep; 
 They bade their wives and sisters heap 
 
 Mould on her, with their hands : 
 She rose like light ! The centuries 
 Slipped like a garment to her knees, 
 
 And still she stands ! 
 
 THE FIGURE 
 
 Sibyl hoar, Enchantress holy, 
 Giantess of Melancholy, 
 Tell us - 
 
 CHORUS OF CHERUBIM 
 Hush! 
 
72 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 THE FIGURE 
 
 What awful book 
 (As when some rugged hill 
 Cleaves with a titan s look) 
 Opens beneath thy gaze, 
 Where thy vast, pagan face 
 
 Is darkened under 
 Night-hues of unreverberating thunder? 
 
 CHORUS OF CHERUBIM 
 
 Still ! O still ! 
 She is not such 
 As tone of mortal song can touch. 
 
 THE FIGURE 
 
 Speak, Prophetess ! 
 We fear we guess 
 What our hearts wait in breathlessness. 
 
 THE CU&LEAN SIBYL 
 "Tarquin ! Tarquin !" Thousand score 
 They hailed him god and emperor. 
 I entered at his palace door: 
 I looked at him 
 
 CHORUS OF CHERUBIM 
 
 No more ! No more ! 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 73 
 
 THE CUM^EAN SIBYL 
 
 I said : I bring thee volumes nine. 
 Men name thee lordly and divine: 
 Thou shall be but the price is mine ! 
 He said : I take no price of thine. 
 
 I hurled six volumes in the flame. 
 He cried : What price now dost thou name* 
 O Prophetess ? I said : The same ! 
 He frowned ; I went the way I came. 
 
 He sent for me at set of sun : 
 And hast thou burned them aU but one ? 
 And hast no other price ? Nay, none. 
 He answered : Then thy will be done ! 
 
 THE FIGURE 
 
 Speak, Sibyl, speak ! What was the price 
 Which asked so proud a sacrifice? 
 
 JUDITH 
 
 [Aside to her maid, who bears the head of Holo- 
 f ernes on a golden salver] 
 
 Hark what she saith ! 
 
 THE CUJVLEAN SIBYL 
 
 The same which yonder, of Eve s eyes, 
 The Serpent asks, in Paradise. 
 
74 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 JUDITH 
 I guessed it : death. 
 
 GOLIATH [to David] 
 
 Death! 
 ******* 
 
 FIRST CHERUB 
 
 Hark yonder, where from wall to wall, two 
 
 Prophets 
 
 Converse like oaks in storm across a grove, 
 One husht in the roar, one vocal in the lull. 
 
 SECOND CHERUB 
 Which one is silent ? 
 
 FIRST CHERUB 
 
 He who, browed benign, 
 Sits like the Prince of Death, soliloquizing 
 With the commanding genius of his soul. 
 
 SECOND CHERUB 
 
 But the other one: What beetling thoughts are 
 
 his 
 
 Where, like a crag o erclung by cataracts, 
 He murmurs deep in the tortuous folds of his 
 
 beard ? 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 75 
 
 FIRST CHERUB 
 Listen ! 
 
 JEREMIAH 
 
 I have likened the Daughter of Zion to a comely 
 
 and delicate woman: 
 The shepherds with their flocks shall come unto 
 
 her round about. 
 They shall pitch their tents against her ; they shall 
 
 feed every one in his place. 
 Yea, Eve, men are thy shepherds, and thou like 
 
 the Daughter of Zion. 
 
 Prepare ye war against her ! Arise ! let us go up 
 
 at noon. 
 Woe unto us ! for the day goeth away, and the 
 
 shadows of evening 
 Are stretched out and afar. Arise ! let us go up 
 
 by night, 
 And let us destroy her palaces. Let us smite the 
 
 city that fed us ! 
 Yea, Eve, men are thy shepherds, and thou like 
 
 the Daughter of Zion. 
 
 ISAIAH 
 
 Yet shall they not destroy her ! But their land 
 
 shall be named Ignorance. 
 It shall be no more inhabited, but wild beasts of 
 
 the desert shall lie there. 
 
76 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 Yea, satyrs shall dance on their hearths, and 
 dragons crouch in their palaces. 
 
 For the city is stablished, O Eve, where thy 
 dreaming shall have its fruition. 
 
 Where shall the Ignorant dwell ? Yea, where is 
 
 the land of their Eden ? 
 The grass thereof shall wither; their heavens be 
 
 closed as a scroll; 
 And all their host shall fall down, as the leaf fall- 
 
 eth off from the vine. 
 But the city is stablished in Man, where thy 
 
 dreaming, O Eve, hath fruition. 
 
 CHORUS OF CHERUBIM 
 
 The Tree ! The smiling, bitter Tree ! 
 The Tree, in all its pride and mystery ! 
 
 ADAM [beneath the Tree] 
 
 Where dost thou look, beloved, O my Bride ? 
 
 Where dost thou gaze beyond and far away ? 
 Dost thou not feel thy lover at thy side, 
 
 And the soft winds of this cerulean day ? 
 Why look st thou so, beloved, O my Bride ? 
 
 THE SNAKE 
 
 Lift up thine eyes to mine, daughter of God ! 
 Like birds into heaven let them enter in : 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 77 
 
 Behold an angel battling with a cloud; 
 
 The angel is Man ; the splendid cloud is Sin ; 
 The battle is Man s Soul, daughter of God. 
 
 ADAM 
 
 Let us go forth into our garden, love: 
 
 The birds are singing and the beasts awaken. 
 
 Dew-laden dreams fall round us from above, 
 
 Like almond-bloom, when breezy boughs are 
 shaken. 
 
 Let us go forth into our garden, love ! 
 
 THE SNAKE 
 
 Eat of the fruit of Knowledge, Child of Eden ! 
 Of bitter Knowledge, which hath roots in 
 
 death. 
 
 Dare with thy dreams yea, that which is for 
 bidden ! 
 
 For life is but a dream which conquereth 
 Its coil of slumber. Live, then, Child of Eden ! 
 
 ADAM 
 
 Love, there shall be no thought but Thee and Me 
 Forevermore. When our two spirits mate, 
 
 Time and the world shall do us ministry 
 And all the stars contribute to our state. 
 
 Love, there shall be no joy but Thee and Me. 
 
78 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 THE SNAKE 
 
 Behold the stars and Thee and Me forgotten ! 
 Time and the world and other lovers, trem 
 
 bling 
 At all the beauty still to be begotten; 
 
 Yea, hark to thine and Adam s sons assem 
 
 bling 
 To hymn thy deed, when Eden lies forgotten. 
 
 CHORUS OF MALE PRESENCES 
 
 We thirst for life, and the more we thirst 
 The swifter the rivers of love outpour 
 
 To quench us ; 
 
 Like the living, leaping waters that burst 
 From the Prophet s stroke on the desert s shore, 
 They uprise and drench us, 
 Yet we thirst the more 
 And we joy to thirst, 
 For we count the pain a joy to repay us, 
 When the power of love, which pants to allay us, 
 Quickens again 
 And again, as at first, 
 The infinite rapture the weak call pain. 
 
 And we know for we have sharpened the dull edge 
 Of sense on the sword of the Tree of Knowledge, 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 79 
 
 And we feel as Spring feels the sky in the 
 
 sod 
 
 That we are the sons of a son of God. 
 And we kindle from that a divine volition 
 The fire of more than a mortal ambition, 
 The love of a conflict deep and grand 
 Which only Manhood can understand, 
 And we bless the Apple, that erst was accurst, 
 And our Mother Eve, who bestowed the thirst, 
 Which vaults, like flame, through spirit and brain, 
 And courses like vigor through every vein, 
 In seeking the joys that the weak call pain. 
 
 CHORUS OF BOTTICELLI S WOMEN 
 
 We thirst for love, and the more we thirst 
 The deeper our spirits and limbs are immerst 
 
 In the beauty, that is love s radiance: 
 Out at our eyes, o er the tremulous brim 
 Of our hearts, it beams, as at heaven s rim 
 
 The moon brightens over a lake in a trance; 
 Till a peace, more lovely than morning light, 
 Makes us grow like lilies, tall and bright, 
 
 From the banks of Sin, which is Ignorance. 
 
 And we take an innocent, shy delight 
 
 In the flow of our maiden forms, and the sight 
 
 Of our faces, half glimpsed, half recondite, 
 
80 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 And the luminous coils of our looping dresses, 
 
 Which emulate the beauty of tresses, 
 
 And the flower-like grace of our hands; but 
 
 these 
 Are the symbols of inner serenities. 
 
 For we know [from that piercing intuition 
 Which takes from Eve its superb ignition] 
 And we feel by the light in each other s eyes 
 That we are the daughters of Paradise. 
 And this sense brings with it a certitude 
 Of the immortal aim of this mortal feud, 
 And makes us simply reconciled 
 With weakness of woman and birth of child, 
 And makes our souls, in largess, be 
 Self-renderers to futurity, 
 With a faith, miscalled fatuity 
 By those who love beauty less than we, 
 And a passive joy in the present s good, 
 And a self-forgetting, understood 
 By the heart alone of womanhood. 
 And therefore we bless the divinely human 
 Heart of Eve, that created us Woman, 
 And gave us that insight, which can prove 
 Its faith, that ours while the planets move 
 Are the worship and strength of the men we 
 love. 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 81 
 
 CHORUS OF SHAPES IN "THE LAST JUDGMENT" 
 
 We are the Phantoms, which the exceeding mad 
 ness 
 Of mortal Ignorance creates in sadness 
 
 Out of the clouds of conflict and of pain. 
 Horror and Hopelessness, amid the gnarring 
 And knotted tumult of our rabid warring, 
 
 Spawn us, and their own Dark devours us 
 again. 
 
 Hateful to others, to ourselves abhorrent, 
 We fume and wrestle, like a falling torrent 
 
 That, fearing, hastens its own overthrow; 
 Or bleakly blown upon by winds eternal, 
 Like shadowy spirits strewn on shores infernal, 
 
 Downcast, we file in diuturnity of woe. 
 
 Far from the lamps of Dawn and pure Orion, 
 We endure the anarch tortures of Ixion 
 
 Immortal anguish : misery ! O pain ! 
 Love, send thy light amid our dim abortions, 
 To show that we are evanescent portions 
 
 Of the Mind s mortal battling for the eternal 
 gain. 
 
82 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 JONAS 
 
 Awful and dazzling Loveliness ! 
 Immortal Render of our mystery ! 
 O World ! O orbed Time ! 
 
 Heaven ! And does my spirit climb 
 Beyond them all, beyond them all to thee, 
 Lady ineffable of Love ? This, this 
 
 It is to love, to dare and to achieve ! 
 
 Behold, O Eve, 
 
 The consummation of thy bitter Tree. 
 Look, mighty Mother! Even thou didst con 
 ceive 
 
 This son ! Thine insurrection leaps in me, 
 An effervescing fire, a piercing foison 
 Of keen effulgence ! Vision in mine eyes 
 Like clouded wine it pours, and in my limbs 
 
 Impenetrating joy, subtler than poison, 
 And in mine ears incomparable hymns ! 
 
 Yea, like a Charioteer, on whirling Time, 
 
 1 sit sublime, 
 
 And guide, with my majestical left hand, 
 The invisible reins of nameless black Despairs 
 And haughty Miseries a chafing band 
 That plunge and tremble, like enraged Night 
 mares, 
 
 In the dusk of the Last Judgment; these, like 
 steeds, 
 
THE SISTINE EVE 83 
 
 Propel the triumph of my viewless car, 
 And while the purple incense streams from under 
 The trampling fleetness of their muffled thunder, 
 And while their flanks froth terrors, in bright 
 beads, 
 
 To dare the goal 
 
 Of my imperious soul, 
 Still guiding them, as with a god s control, 
 Over my splendid shoulder turning 
 
 Mine eyes, in giant yearning, 
 Upward, my Mother, upward still to thee 
 I gaze for power and love and immortality. 
 
 THE SNAKE [to Eve] 
 
 Now canst thou doubt the beauty of thy dream 
 
 ing? 
 
 Now canst thou doubt the duty of thy deed ? 
 Eat of the fruit, O Eve ! Thou art redeeming 
 
 The race of Adam to their latest seed, 
 For Time shall prove the beauty of thy dream 
 ing. 
 
 EVE [taking the Apple from the Snake] 
 
 O ye Wise, love Beauty ! All 
 Ye Strong, revere Her ! 
 
SECOND INTERLUDE 
 
 THE SISTINE SPIRIT 
 
 Ha ! dost thou shake thy slumber off, young 
 
 titan ? 
 
 (Unconscious child no more, for now the dawn 
 Proclaims the awaking world.) Ah ! dost thou 
 
 seize 
 
 The shadow of my mantle, and in mine eyes 
 Gaze with an ecstasy of pain and power ? 
 Say, dost thou feel the immitigable blade, 
 Which sings in the light above the Tree of Knowl 
 edge, 
 
 Upscorch the loveless impotence within thee, 
 Ignite thy mind, and scorify thy heart ? 
 What ! dost thou reach thy hand thyself to swing 
 
 it? 
 
 Arise ! Go forth ! Youth of the centuries, 
 And wield thy sword in prayer to thy great 
 Mother ! 
 
 84 
 
THIRD CANTO: THE BIRTH OF MAN 
 
 CHORUS OF PRESENCES 
 
 Eden is fallen ! 
 Man is arisen ! 
 
 Like a knighted warrior, behold him arise. 
 Like a waker from slumber, 
 Like a captive from prison, 
 He bursts from the bondage of Paradise ! 
 For the Almighty s stroke 
 Has severed the yoke 
 Of the beast s contentment and earthward eyes. 
 
 SONG OF THE EXPELLING ANGEL 
 
 Mine is the stroke Promethean ! 
 
 The infinite love that burns like ire, 
 
 The impregnating might, the conceiving fire, 
 
 And the pang that delivers the Birth of Man. 
 
 I am the life, whose garment is Death, 
 
 And Truth like a lining within is laid, 
 
 And him who seeks me I singe with my 
 
 blade, 
 
 But he weareth the garment and triumpheth. 
 85 
 
86 THE SISTINE EVE 
 
 Adam, depart ! My sword s flame, like a torch s, 
 Reveals thy kingdom consumed and 
 
 wrecked, 
 
 But the pain that revolts in thine intellect 
 Is the love that heals in the lightning that 
 scorches. 
 
 CHORUS OF PRESENCES 
 
 Eden is fallen ! 
 
 Man is arisen ! 
 
 He is burst from the prison 
 Of Paradise ! 
 
 ADAM 
 
 Eve, crouch more close to me. I will protect thee. 
 The hailing fire my sense like anguish sears. 
 The goal is far but O ! how glorious, 
 For through the night thine eyes are still the stars. 
 
PART TWO 
 
 POEMS LYRICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE 
 
GROUP I 
 
Two song-birds build their nests within my 
 brain, 
 
 And hatch strange broods, each to his own re 
 frain ; 
 Ever one sings : " To-morrow, 
 
 Sweet Joy !" The other: "Yesterday, sweet sor 
 row!" 
 
 91 
 
FRAIL Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks 
 
 Of quiet, crystal pools, beside whose brink 
 The varicolored dreams, like cattle, come to 
 drink, 
 
 Cool Sleep, thy reeds, in solemn ranks, 
 
 That murmur peace to me by midnight s 
 
 streams, 
 
 At dawn I pluck, and dayward pipe my flock 
 of dreams. 
 
 92 
 
THE ARC LIGHT 
 
 I WATCHED an arc light under wind-stirr d trees 
 
 Sleep on the pale green grass, in tender 
 swoon, 
 
 And held my breath thinking the pensive 
 
 moon 
 
 Was telling there her lucent rosaries. 
 Light of the Arts ! no more by lonely seas 
 
 Wandering in naked glory art thou met; 
 
 From out our heaven Homer s moon has set, 
 That lit the love-bowers of the Dryades. 
 
 Yet neath the conscious vestments Time has 
 wrought, 
 
 The simple Graces love and act the same; 
 And through the subtle wires of labored thought 
 
 The world is lit by heaven s divinest flame, 
 Till, in the sordid midnight of the poor, 
 The lamp of Zeus illumes a workman s door. 
 
 93 
 
SHE stood before a florist s window-pane. 
 
 Roses peered forth and they were envious 
 pale, 
 
 And lilies, white as cloistered virgin s veil, 
 Vied with the deep carnations but in vain. 
 If at her beauty s heart a lethal stain 
 
 Were hid, to beauty s face it told no tale. 
 
 "Cut flowers [so she read the sign] for 
 
 sale;" 
 Half to herself she murmured it again. 
 
 One stopped within the sharp, electric light, 
 And threw his shadow on her and his eyes, 
 Nor read those sad concealed analogies 
 
 Of which her gorgeous, answering look 
 was full. 
 
 " Cut flowers," and to-morrow they shall blight, 
 But till to-morrow, God ! how beautiful. 
 
 94 
 
I DREAMED a thousand ages, armed with flint 
 And bone and bronze, were toiling in a mint, 
 
 And sculptured rude to see 
 On each rough coin they struck was " Poesie." 
 
 And now, in that same hall, a mighty wheel, 
 Revolved incessant by a mob in steel, 
 
 Showers the round gold thence 
 Stamped with the goddess s head "Conven 
 ience." 
 
 95 
 
LEISURE, kind Leisure, I require ! 
 
 Leisure, whose snood 
 
 Of quiethood 
 Conceals shy dreams of sage desire: 
 
 For Leisure, only Leisure, 
 Ripens young thought and brings work pleasure. 
 
 Dull toil is but a drudge at best; 
 
 Sloth has no profit, 
 
 Sleep still less of it ; 
 But idle brains are busiest 
 
 While Leisure, shyest Leisure, 
 Ripens young thought and brings work pleasure. 
 
 96 
 
HER eyes are casements clear as dew 
 For her kindness to look through; 
 There, behind their crystal, stray 
 Fairy fancies dressed in gray; 
 Through the trellis d lashes, till 
 Slumber draws the silken blind, 
 Her quick spirit peeps behind 
 The pane, or signals from the sill. 
 
 97 
 
IN VENICE 
 
 THE Lady of the Sunset, 
 
 The Bride of the New Moon, 
 She lifts her liquid garments 
 
 About her silvery shoon, 
 And as she sways their draperies 
 
 The dim stars interwoven 
 In their dark fabric swing and ripple 
 
 Like winds by music cloven. 
 
 The Princess of the Olden Isles, 
 
 The Enamored of the Sea, 
 She has glided from her throne of stars 
 
 And courtesied, Love, to thee: 
 Along her smooth and turquoise halls 
 
 She glides, and kneels with me 
 Before thy shrine, with clasped hands, 
 
 And bows and prays to thee ! 
 
 98 
 
A MATINADE 
 
 RISE, sweet signora of the sigh ! 
 
 The gondola is gliding by. 
 
 The queenly Adriatic Sea 
 
 Shall hold her mirror, dear, for thee, 
 
 Apollo be thy slave, to twine 
 
 A fillet for those locks of thine, 
 
 And lure the moonlight from thine eyes 
 
 To cool the day-star of his skies. 
 
 So lady dear, be fleet ! 
 
 And from your dreamy sighs, 
 Signora mine, signora sweet, 
 Arise ! 
 
TO A GONDOLA 
 
 SWAN of the silver beak and sable breast, 
 Stemming the night, 
 
 Art them a bird of song, or bark of quest, 
 Or heaven-wandered sprite, 
 That in the still moonlight 
 
 Makest in palace courts thy liquid nest? 
 
 If bird thou be, what swaying skies are these, 
 Between two heavens, 
 
 That lap thee in their starry lucencies, 
 
 Whilst thou toward unseen havens, 
 With plumage like the raven s 
 
 Glidest with pinions closed against the breeze ? 
 
 If bark thou be, what fairy argosies 
 
 Leadest thou on ? 
 What amber port of all the sunset s seas 
 
 Lures thee with music yon ? 
 
 What fetes of Oberon, 
 
 Tinkling husht joys, twinkling tranquillities ? 
 100 
 
TO A GONDOLA 101 
 
 A sprite thou art a spirit without peer ! 
 A lover s thought 
 
 Thou art, and Fancy is thy gondolier, 
 Whose gliding vision, fraught 
 With song and love, gleams but 
 
 An instant in life s dark, only to disappear. 
 
IN THE STILL CAMPAGNA. 
 
 IN the still campagna, 
 When no birds were singing, 
 Mid the undulating 
 Little hills and hollows 
 Pied with starred mosaic, 
 There I stopped and pondered. 
 
 Right against the azure 
 Of the Alban mountains, 
 Rose an overwhelming 
 Gaunt and eyeless ruin: 
 Eyeless, but the sockets 
 Stared on me in sadness. 
 
 Loneliness then clutched me 
 Like a chill at noonday; 
 Terrors of old Caesars 
 Taught me a new heartache 
 Where those walls still on me 
 Stared with a stark blindness. 
 
 " How ! old earthy phantom, 
 Hast thou, then, no solace 
 102 
 
IN THE STILL CAMPAGNA." 103 
 
 When the burning sunbeam 
 Chars thy skull like Cyclops ? 
 None? No inner vision, 
 Thoughts that hymn like Homer s ? " 
 
 Hardly had I ceased when 
 Sudden from the knollside, 
 Or perhaps from heaven, 
 Through that hollow, lidless 
 Ruin flying, rose a 
 Flock of songbirds, singing. 
 
 Love, you are my nature ! 
 When by lonely breedings 
 Long on mortal anguish 
 I stand blinded, swift and 
 Sweet from lyric fountains, 
 Dart then through my sadness 
 Songbirds of your soul ! 
 
EARLY MAY IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 STRAWBERRY-FLOWER and violet 
 Are come, but the wind blows coldly yet; 
 And robin s-egg skies brood sunny chill 
 Where hyacinth summer sleeps under the hill 
 And the frog is still. 
 
 Applebloom floats on the warm blue river, 
 But white shad-blossoms ripple and shiver, 
 And purple-grackle pipes till his blithe heart 
 
 grieves, 
 
 For his gladdest songs, through the little elm- 
 leaves, 
 Are but make-believes. 
 
 104 
 
EARLY APRIL IN ENGLAND 
 
 ACROSS the moist beam of the cloud-rimmed sun, 
 
 The larks run up in ecstasies of Spring, 
 
 And little feathered flutes of melody, 
 
 The yellow-ammers, pipe along the hedges. 
 
 The sheep, half basking in the golden blaze, 
 Half shivering in the gray, engulfing shadows, 
 Browse on the faint-green hills ; the chilly wind 
 Ruffles the white geese on the rippled pond. 
 
 105 
 
SONG 
 
 SPRING is Shakspere s garden ! 
 In May, to the lover s mind, 
 Every rose is a Rosalind 
 
 And every wood an Arden. 
 
 Hark! "Phoebe! Phoebe ! Phoebe!" 
 Sylvius ! Can it he be ? 
 
 106 
 
HOLIDAY 
 
 WHAT is so free 
 
 As a child in its glee, 
 
 Or a bird on the tree ! 
 
 A jumping boy 
 
 Is a wave of joy; 
 
 Little girls, 
 
 That gayly pass 
 
 With flying curls 
 
 Across the grass, 
 
 The soul unclog: 
 
 And oh a sight 
 
 Of rare delight 
 
 Is a running shepherd dog ! 
 
 107 
 
THE KATYDID 
 
 THOU husky raven of the insect race, 
 
 Who hintest hid by darkness from espial 
 
 Of some poor maid s disgrace, 
 
 Cease this asseveration and denial ! 
 
 Whatever the black blame, will it abate it 
 
 Thus to incessant rasp and iterate it? 
 
 If Katy did the dark deed, let her state it. 
 
 108 
 
THE CRICKET 
 
 HARK to the fairy linnet 
 How reticent he sings ! 
 Sings, stops; then, in a minute, 
 He ll re-begin it, 
 
 Then stop again. 
 
 The sunset is his dawn : 
 
 When day is over, 
 
 He pipes a delicate strain 
 Beneath the tiger-lilies, by the lawn, 
 
 Or, from the top boughs of the tallest clover, 
 Outpours his Lilliputian carollings. 
 
 109 
 
AT night, I prayed for sleep ; instead 
 The Muse came, rummaging my head 
 For rhymes. Again I craved the dews 
 Of sleep ; they fell upon the Muse. 
 
 110 
 
WITH A ROSE 
 
 TO S. A. D. 
 A ROSE 
 
 From lovely Rhodope s remotest time 
 
 The poets chose 
 To instil a lovelier meaning in their rhyme. 
 
 A friend 
 Is subtler than a poet. Friendship knows 
 
 A way to lend 
 A finer fragrance even to the rose. 
 
 Ill 
 
STANZAS 
 
 TO THE BUKNISHED GRAIN OF AN OLD-FASHIONED 
 MAHOGANY TABLE 
 
 AURORAL tempest on an auburn sea, 
 
 Scourged by the spectres of unmoving wind, 
 Still storm, dumb gale, immured immensity, 
 
 Dark thunderer upon the shores of mind, 
 
 Spirit of oceans ! here thou art confined 
 In beauty and in silence. Rive thy locks 
 
 Tumultuous, till thy bronze waves foam in 
 
 Writhe on till thou art hoary, 
 The hush-air d chamber shall not feel thy shocks, 
 Nor thy smooth polished shore thereby be under 
 mined. 
 
 Wild harrier of the mad atmospheres, 
 
 Whose looks are lightnings, who hath cap 
 
 tured thee 
 
 And poured in wood this sunny wrath of tears ? 
 Who else but mirror-cinctured Nature, she 
 That lurks by rivers and the placid sea 
 112 
 
STANZAS 113 
 
 To prison-in the silent-roaring thunders 
 
 With pomp pictorial. In such still state 
 
 Art thou incarcerate, 
 
 And Time, whose sitting worketh mellow won 
 ders, 
 Thy jailer sits, in cell of dark mahogany. 
 
 The terrors of the guessed invisible 
 
 Are worse than seen calamities ; the eye 
 Beholds not here the famine- screeching gull, 
 
 The ear knows not the night-wreck d sea 
 man s cry, 
 
 Yet may the fancy hear his monody 
 Sung by the mermaids of those amber deeps, 
 
 Beneath whose burnished and congealed 
 waves 
 
 A lurid dragon raves, 
 
 Whose dropping eye with ruddy tinctures steeps 
 That marvel-teeming world in strange mortality. 
 
 Tempestuous sea, dash on ! Roar on, dim tides, 
 That come, or go, or stay, we are not 
 stirred ; 
 
 The dark-descending simoon o er thee glides, 
 But to the wooden d sense it moans are surd. 
 
 Even while we gaze, our inward eyes grown 
 
 blurr d, 
 
 i 
 
114 STANZAS 
 
 Behold thee for illusion, that reproves 
 
 Our reason s folly, till we ask: why should 
 
 We sympathize with wood ? 
 Yea, thou art like a passionate heart that loves : 
 Wildly it beats upon the world, but is not heard. 
 
SUNSET 
 
 BEHOLD where Night clutches the cup of heaven 
 And quaffs the beauty of the world away ! 
 Lo, his first draught is all of dazzling day; 
 
 The next he fills with the red wine of even 
 
 And drinks ; then of the twilight s amber, seven 
 Deep liquid hues, seven times, superb in ray, 
 He fills and drinks; the last, a mead pale- 
 gray 
 
 Leaves the black beaker gemmed with starry 
 levin. 
 
 Even so does Time quaff our mortality ! 
 
 First, of the effervescing blood and blush 
 Of virgin years, then of maturity 
 
 The deeper glow, then of the pallid hush 
 Where only the eyes still glitter, till even they 
 After a pause melt in immenser day. 
 
 115 
 
FOR F. J. L. 
 
 THE flower shall fade, not the spirit 
 Which gave to it being; 
 
 That has finer forms to inherit 
 Beyond our mere seeing. 
 
 Oh, why does the lily seem fair? 
 
 For seeing ? for smelling ? 
 Or is it that Ariel there 
 
 Has found him a dwelling? 
 
 Stale flowers for me shall not sere, 
 If you do but give them ; 
 
 Slight thoughts for me shall be dear, 
 If you but conceive them. 
 
 116 
 
TO M. AND M. L. 
 
 I CANNOT think good-by; 
 
 How can I say it? 
 My heart s debt lies too nigh 
 
 For words to pay it. 
 
 Bright cloud, that flingest wide 
 The heaven s wonder, 
 
 Dark cloud, and dim hillside, 
 And far-voiced thunder, 
 
 Soft breeze, that ringest clear 
 The sweet day s knell, 
 
 Sad bird, that singest near, 
 Speak my farewell ! 
 
 117 
 
BALLAD 
 
 YOUNG rider and steed they dash on through the 
 
 dusk, 
 And the fog gathers gray as the mould on the 
 
 husk, 
 
 And the froth on the flank is like foam on the flood 
 Where the brown stream pours panting through 
 dark underwood. 
 
 "But what of the night, love, and what of the 
 
 miles, 
 When the morning shall break in my true love s 
 
 own smiles? 
 Oh, I d ride the white charger that neighs from the 
 
 sea 
 To the edge of the world, if she waited for me !" 
 
 Dim head in the doorway it hears him dash by, 
 And the cold smile curls keen, and the laugh 
 lights the eye : 
 
 118 
 
BALLAD 119 
 
 "Ye ll hae off wi your league-boots and love by 
 
 the sea 
 When your bonny hair s white and ye re wiser 
 
 like me." 
 
 n 
 
 The flare s in the chimney, the song s on the 
 
 crane, 
 And the maiden sits watching the fog on the 
 
 pane, 
 
 And the hot glowing hearthlight is cosey and dry, 
 But the warm light that s tender s the light in her 
 
 eye. 
 
 "Nay, granny, I ll just take a step from the sill, 
 For the twilight is cold, and the mist hides the 
 
 hill, 
 And fain would I warm the whole world with my 
 
 heart 
 To comfort thee O my dear love where thou 
 
 art!" 
 
 " Ye ve let the winds in, lass ; the candle is out ! 
 Now God send ye wisdom, whate er ye re about ! 
 The parritch is cold, lass, that erst was sae hot: 
 When ye re older ye ll be a deal wiser, I wot ! " 
 
120 BALLAD 
 
 III 
 
 There s a leap in the mist; there s a voice in the 
 
 night ; 
 
 There s a step that is heavy with one that is light : 
 "Ah, love, dear, is wisdom, and wisdom is this: 
 The seals of your sages they melt with a kiss !" 
 
EVEN as an infant fingers the crisp sheet 
 And crumples it, the more his milk is sweet, 
 So we, with restive hands, in happy sleep 
 Enact vague deeds on Nature s cover-slip. 
 
 121 
 
A CHILD 
 
 BRIEF Revelation of enduring Truth, 
 
 Frail snowflake in the silent storm of God, 
 
 Scarce lighting on the swallow-wing of youth 
 Ere wafting down to dew the pregnant sod, 
 
 Infant ! or Angel else thine innocence 
 
 Is as a crystal, wherethrough men may see 
 
 The seedling s might, the star s magnificence, 
 And of our common day the mystery. 
 
 More, it enkindles might; and like the pure 
 Polished convex of a bright burning-glass, 
 
 Binds the wild hues and lightnings, which perdure 
 In love as heaven, and in concentric mass 
 
 Ignites by them the unfeeling dross of nature 
 To conflagrations heavenly in stature. 
 
 122 
 
BABY PANTOMIME 
 
 SERENE, he sits on other shores 
 
 Than ours: with wide, unconscious lands 
 He holds strange speech, or, silent, pores 
 
 On denizens of viewless strands ; 
 On tablets of the air weird scores 
 
 He writes, and makes, with eager hands, 
 As strange erasements ; then, two-fisted, stores 
 
 An elfin hour-glass with heavenly sands. 
 
 123 
 
THE FIRST TOOTH 
 
 DEAR babe, that this should be ! Whence should 
 
 this come ? 
 
 This horny scutcheon of an eld orang, 
 Where through the tender coral of thy gum 
 
 The wee, sly beast has peeped his prying 
 fang: 
 
 Colossal meditation ! Can this be 
 
 The cropping of that seed which Cadmus 
 
 sowed ? 
 Or that gaunt emblem of mortality 
 
 Under the sickle, on our earth-abode ? 
 
 Forbid it, heaven ! Tis but the nursling thorn 
 That nestles near the bloom of every rose, 
 
 The curling holly-leaf s keen-sharded horn, 
 
 The stubborn shield of beauty s frail repose, 
 
 The official mace of angels : even as the Lord 
 Guarded the grace of Eden with a sword ! 
 
 124 
 
THE DESERTED STEEDS 
 
 MIDWAY the silent parlor plain 
 
 The iron horses stand, nor turn, 
 
 But like the yoke that Putnam left, 
 
 Await, mid-field, their lord s return. 
 
 There they have stood since yestereve 
 
 Nor champed, nor broke their traces till 
 
 The moon looked in the western blind, 
 Till morn peeped o er the eastern sill. 
 
 Then strides their lord to field again 
 
 To crack his whip and drive his teams, 
 
 Back from the far campaigns of sleep, 
 The baby Bunker Hill of dreams. 
 
 125 
 
THE CHILD AND SLEEP 
 
 THIS baby brow, like a smooth handkerchief, 
 Has in the night been ironed white and even, 
 
 And all these little limbs, beyond belief, 
 
 Are like sweet garments, fresh prepared in 
 heaven 
 
 To clothe the littlest angel loved by Mary. 
 
 Who was it smoothed these rose-habiliments 
 Of childhood ? Sleep, a gentle nurse, and fairy, 
 
 Who folds the crumplings of our discontents, 
 
 And lines Day s chest with viewless lavender 
 To sweeten all the vestments of our care. 
 
 All Nature s tired children turn to her 
 For renovation ; for she can repair 
 
 The outworn body, from her secret scrip, 
 
 And minds outworn seek her physicianship. 
 
 126 
 
SUMMER SONG 
 
 THE cricket is chirring, 
 
 The tree-toad is purring, 
 The busy frog pipes, 
 
 The beetle is whirring, 
 
 And curled in his nest, 
 Mid the night dew of rest, 
 
 My wee one is stirring. 
 
 Then quick, Fairy Hummer, 
 
 Lull my newcomer 
 Rosy and deep 
 In sleep, soft sleep, 
 
 9 Mid the sweets of the summer. 
 
 The stars at bo-peeping 
 Like white lambs are leaping 
 
 On the hills of the dark 
 In the Good Shepherd s keeping: 
 
 Their wool is like silk, 
 
 And they pour their bright milk 
 For my little one s sleeping. 
 127 
 
128 SUMMER SONG 
 
 Then hush, Fairy Hummer! 
 
 Kiss my newcomer, 
 
 And cradle him deep 
 In sleep, soft sleep, 
 
 9 Mid the sweets of the summer. 
 
FIRE WORSHIP 
 
 A POPPY, all on fire with beauty s beams, 
 
 Outburned the glamour of the liquid bar 
 Of sunlight where it swam, diffusing far 
 
 The brilliance of its spiritual streams: 
 
 A chalice, spilled on some blood-stained trireme s 
 Prow, in libation to the sanguine star, 
 The ritual cup of dread Dyauspitar, 
 
 Brimmed with the wine of its own opiate dreams. 
 
 Before that shrine, in mute idolatry, 
 
 A little Gangean god, an orient 
 
 Cupid, rose-flushed with infant wonder 
 ment 
 
 The baby gazed, and reached in rhapsody 
 His small, translucent hands, while silently 
 
 From flower to face a rubiate nimbus went. 
 
 129 
 
PLASTIC Fancies, form a mould: 
 
 Fill it, Heart, with burning gold : 
 Break it, Love, when life is cold. 
 
 When the shard is struck away, 
 
 There shall stand where once was clay 
 Beauty, till the Judgment-day ! 
 
 130 
 
THE UNSAID 
 
 THE forms sublime, the moods elate, 
 That rise within the poet s reach, 
 
 May never transubstantiate 
 
 Their glowing ardors into speech. 
 
 Yet sweet although we fail in words 
 To feel the changed, creative light 
 
 That gleams on nature s fields and herds, 
 Cast by a sun of inner sight, 
 
 While burst upon the exultant brain 
 Visions of grandeur and of grace. 
 
 He gazes more serene on men 
 
 Who looks the Muses in the face* 
 
 131 
 
I WATCHED a drama, sitting in the wings, 
 And heard the plaudits of eternal things: 
 
 But when the Prompter bawled 
 My name, I failed my cue nor was recalled. 
 
 132 
 
ALL joys, familiar and divine, 
 All satisfactions fail, save thine, 
 
 Contemplation ! 
 Ambitions climb and fall; 
 Love, and Hope, his thrall, 
 Pity, and our noblest passions pall; 
 Yea, one and all, 
 Each one. 
 
 Not Venus, wreathed with bloom and vine, 
 Glows with rapture like to thine 
 
 Meditation ! 
 The rose can never be 
 Sweet as our revery 
 About her. Lord, each deity 
 Bows down to thee, 
 
 Each one. 
 
 133 
 
WHEN subtle passion makes me slave 
 
 And leads me, in her golden chain, 
 Where dazzling legions of the grave 
 
 Troop in her spurious beauty s train, 
 Poetry, make then thy sign 
 Lord and Sovereign divine ! 
 
 The beast wears still his tusk and snout; 
 
 Man merely has dispensed with these. 
 The satyr leeringly looks out 
 
 Behind the mask of Socrates; 
 
 Thou only art of heavenly line, 
 Lord and Sovereign divine! 
 
 When, therefore, orient- vestured Sin 
 Holds her usurping court in me, 
 Set thy white torch aflame within 
 Her palace walls, O Poetry, 
 
 And on their ashes build thy shrine, 
 Lord and Sovereign divine ! 
 
 134 
 
THE SLINGER 
 
 A BOY, who stoops upon a green hillside, 
 Where he has climbed, exhilarant and flushed, 
 And picks up a flat stone, shell-shaped and 
 
 smooth 
 
 A piece of splitty slate, or curved feldspar 
 Scanned with the relish of an expert eye, 
 And fits it in the hollow of his hand, 
 And sways his body for the joyous fling 
 How wondrously he shoots it through the air ! 
 How pent with song it soars into the blue 
 Stored with the frenzy of his boyish whim, 
 Skims the sunk summit of the tallest pine, 
 Rounds, dips, tacks, turns, then, twirling, soars 
 
 again, 
 
 Catching the sunlight like a swallow s wing; 
 Then, like the last dip of a cellist s bow, 
 Or a ground-sparrow, slacking to its nest, 
 Slants the long slope, and dives in to the vale. 
 135 
 
136 THE SLINGER 
 
 Not more inspired the pebble David slung ! 
 A stone, a lump, a clot of hardened loam, 
 Yet, in an instant s metamorphosis, 
 It leaps to beauty like a work of God 
 A lyric thing, a fellow of the lark, 
 Breathing a moment s immortality 
 Then sinks to silence and the loam it left. 
 
 II 
 
 Whose was the hand which flung me into breath ? 
 Whose was the whim or purpose of that deed ? 
 Flung in the dizzy zenith of clear mind, 
 Whirled in the cloudy vortex of dark will, 
 On, on projectile of a deathless youth, 
 Poised with his sling upon the brow of heaven 
 Skimming, and skimmed by other whizzing clay, 
 Skipped in the sun to caper caracoles, 
 What is of man the ultimate Goliath, 
 Giant of 111, whom he must batter down 
 That Saul the Right may reign ? What is man s 
 
 goal? 
 
 Or mindful of the grim analogy 
 What stricken pine, forgotten in the forest 
 That skirts the valley underneath Time s hill, 
 Shall mark his accidental tumbling-tomb ? 
 
LIFE SAID TO DEATH 
 
 LIFE said to Death: * Brother, 
 Who was our mother ? 
 Did not One who bore us 
 Make the world for us: 
 Were we not twin-born ? 
 What hast thou, then, inborn 
 Lordlier, vaster, 
 That thou playest master? 
 By what right or merit 
 Dost thou inherit 
 Earth s beautiful riches? 
 
 Answer me : Which is 
 
 The world s more deserving 
 
 The served, or the serving? 
 
 Thou art a depender 
 
 On me, yet a spender 
 
 Of all my dear earnings, 
 
 Rhapsodies, yearnings. 
 
 I build, thou breakest; 
 I bring, and thou takes*; 
 I save, thou lavishest; 
 I love, and thou ravishest. 
 137 
 
138 LIFE SAID TO DEATH 
 
 Deaf and disdainful, 
 Thou leavest me baneful 
 Curst all I care for. 
 Answer me : Wherefore ? 
 
 O, say that thy spendings 
 Are used in befriendings ; 
 That neath barbarity 
 Thou workest in charity, 
 To joy givest feeling, 
 And a quick healing 
 To pain s slow cancer. 
 O, loosen the tied knot 
 Of silence, and answer ! 
 
 But Death replied not. 
 
OLD Age, the irrigator, 
 
 Digs our bosoms straighter, 
 
 More workable and deeper still 
 
 To turn the ever-running mill 
 
 Of nights and days. He makes a trough 
 
 To drain our passions off, 
 
 That used so beautiful to lie 
 
 Variegated to the sky, 
 
 On waste moorlands of the heart 
 
 Haunts of idleness, and art 
 
 Still half-dreaming. All their piedness, 
 
 Rank and wild and shallow wideness, 
 
 Desultory splendors, he 
 
 Straightens conscientiously 
 
 To a practicable sluice 
 
 Meant for workaday, plain use. 
 
 All the mists of early dawn, 
 
 Twilit marshes, being gone 
 
 With their glamour, and their stench, 
 
 There is left a narrow trench. 
 
 139 
 
As children fling bright silver in the sea 
 To watch it shine and sink there, so do we 
 
 Our treasures of wrought rhyme 
 And marble toss amid the surge of time. 
 
 140 
 
GROUP II 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 Our of the obscure wood and ominous way 
 Which are our life, to that obscurer sea 
 Whose margin glooms and gleams alter 
 nately 
 
 With storm and splendor of the shrouded spray 
 
 He has departed. Our familiar day, 
 
 His elm-hushed, ivied walks, no more shall 
 
 see 
 That radiant smile of austere courtesy: 
 
 On Shady Hill the mist hangs cold and gray. 
 
 He has departed hence, but not alone: 
 
 Still in his steps, where golden discourse 
 
 burns, 
 To Virgil now he speaks, and now he turns 
 
 Toward Allighieri in calm undertone, 
 
 Holding with modest tact his path between 
 The Mantuan and the mighty Florentine. 
 
 143 
 
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD 
 
 How fain we conjure back his face ! How fain 
 As, bowed with musings long on elvish lore, 
 He clutched his satchel at the class-room 
 door 
 
 And shot the quick " Good-morning, gentlemen," 
 
 From under the bronze curls, and entered. Then 
 For us that hour of quaint illusion wore 
 Such spell as when, beside the Breton shore, 
 
 The wizard clerk astounded Dorigen. 
 
 For we beheld the nine-and-twenty ride 
 
 Through those dim aisles their deathless pil 
 grimage, 
 
 Lady and monk and rascal laugh and chide, 
 Living and loving on the enchanted page, 
 
 Whilst, half apart, there murmured side by side 
 The master-poet and the scholar-mage. 
 
 144 
 
TO GEORGE PIERCE BAKER 
 
 THE ghosts of Praise-God Barebones and his 
 clan 
 
 Still walk, and with their old acerbity 
 
 Infect us ; even the University 
 Is haunted still, and the sparse Puritan, 
 Turned Prospero, has made a Caliban 
 
 Of human passion, and wild Poesie 
 
 Pinched in an oak to starve, and Mimicry 
 And all her kindred Muses put to ban. 
 
 Yet not so now at Harvard ; there betakes 
 
 Him now the scholar-player, with his Muse 
 (That deathless wench, the Mermaid) and 
 renews 
 
 His vows, and breaks his fast, and is 
 restored 
 By our own Baker. May the loaves he bakes 
 
 Soon pile a feast at Master Shakspere s 
 board ! 
 
 145 
 
TO WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
 
 MOODY, our time is glad of you ; tis given 
 (After exotic, ineffectual blows) 
 For you, a poet, with sure blade of prose 
 
 Keen from the artist s scabbard, to have riven 
 
 Our specious theatre from its roof-beam even 
 Unto the pit of smugness, to disclose 
 The emancipated desert s wild repose 
 
 The new-world gladness of our native heaven. 
 
 Henceforth we cannot be the same; for us 
 Americans, because of you, the tide 
 Dramatic turns to seek its heritage 
 Splendidly homeward to ourselves; our 
 stage 
 Is cleft: between its pusillanimous 
 
 And daring goals stands now the Great Divide. 
 
 146 
 
TO THE SAME, AFTER SEVERE ILL 
 NESS 
 
 Now that you are come up from the hush vale 
 Whose crumbling verge hugs close the dread- 
 named stream, 
 
 And we, for whom your sojourn there did 
 seem 
 
 A time intolerable, may inhale 
 
 Glad breath to greet you on the old firm trail 
 Of health again, still that suspense extreme 
 Pervades our deep thanksgiving, like a dream 
 
 Of Him whose thin hand felt the sanguine nail. 
 
 For not alone the sentient personal 
 
 Pang that was spared compels our gratitude, 
 But that contagious loss which would 
 have spread, 
 Unknown, to those who knew you not, through 
 
 all 
 
 The after-time; but now, that dread sub 
 dued, 
 
 With victory life girds you, garlanded. 
 147 
 
TO GEORGE GREY BARNARD 
 
 HEWER of visions from our human clay, 
 
 Hewer of man s strong soul in sentient stone, 
 Of maiden limbs, like breath of flowers new- 
 blown, 
 
 Of mighty loins, girded in giant fray, 
 
 Of hearts that wrestle, vanquish, fall and pray 
 Hail to you, dauntless Hewer ! Not alone 
 Your arm is raised to shape the vast un 
 known : 
 
 A nation s sinews hold that arm in sway. 
 
 Though from Carraran hills, by alien hands, 
 Those forms of plastic vision are unfurled, 
 
 Yet in their glowing, marble chastities 
 America in naked splendor stands 
 
 Inviolate, and looms across the world 
 Labor s impassioned apotheosis. 
 
 148 
 
TO AUGUSTUS FRANZEN 
 
 HAD poet Geoffrey been a painter then 
 
 In Richard s days, he would have painted 
 
 true, 
 Healthful and bold and beautiful, like you 
 
 Franzen, large-souled, sure-handed. Had Fran 
 zen, 
 
 Painter in oils, wielded an English pen 
 To-day as artist, he would limn anew 
 Even such a clear-eyed Canterbury view 
 
 As Chaucer limned of nature and of men. 
 
 So, when I watch, anew, my little son 
 
 Take breath beneath your brush, and pout 
 again 
 
 His arch and fresh-eyed innocence, I 
 stand 
 Silent, and take your hand in mine, as one 
 
 Who, in Old London, or Velasquez Spain, 
 Held in his own a living master s hand. 
 
 1 With a copy of "The Canterbury Pilgrims." 
 
 149 
 
TO J. E. F. 
 
 Is this our common world of weariness 
 
 The narrow stream we fume and struggle in ? 
 
 Soft as a sleeping ocean and serene 
 The quivering city slumbers, measureless 
 Under the moon : the roaring paths men press 
 
 By day, are sweet with silences, akin 
 
 To dying murmurs of a violin: 
 Such magic has the moon to calm and bless. 
 
 The mind, too, has its moonlight, which can 
 
 steep 
 Time s sordid commonplace in harmony 
 
 That heals pain with oblivion, and the 
 scar 
 
 Of garish strife with beauty, and the deep 
 Rebellions of the soul with sympathy : 
 
 Such might has quiet friendship s mystic 
 star. 
 
 150 
 
THE HILL-SPIRIT 
 
 TO R. B. 
 
 RIBBED like a conch and ruddy through the dark 
 The frail wedge of his horn-clear tepee glows 
 Above the pasture-cliff, warm with the rose 
 
 Light of its own live heart : outside the stark 
 
 Grove clinks the wampum of its frozen bark 
 Against the starry cold ; a shadow shows 
 Tall in the tepee s slit ; then in the snows 
 
 Valeward husht moccasins imprint their mark. 
 
 Blithe with the wonder of their home wood-fire 
 The hillside children, rapt in fairy lore, 
 
 Hark suddenly his footstep: giant- 
 geared, 
 
 He stands before them ; then upon the floor 
 Seated beside them, like an immortal sire, 
 
 Laughs with one great hand tangled 
 in his beard. 
 
 151 
 
TO R. E. F. 
 
 ARCH twinklings of the quaint wood-smile of Pan, 
 Far-trembling, golden lights from Jason s 
 
 fleece, 
 And lyric breathings from the lutes of Greece, 
 
 And gentle ardencies from old Japan, 
 
 With whatsoever blithe, Arcadian, 
 
 And simply wise accord with such as these, 
 Are blent in you to one true Yankee piece, 
 
 Keen, classic, laughter-brewing, Keatsian. 
 
 By forum, Alp and oriental fane 
 
 (As varied climes color the song-bird s 
 
 wings) 
 On you far paths and fair imaginings 
 
 Have traced their retrospects; yet, if 
 there be 
 
 One word by which to conjure you up plain, 
 That fine home-word is Hospitality. 
 
 152 
 
TO E. H. S. 
 
 BRIGHT in the dark of sleep all night till morn 
 The henchmen dreams about my bed did sit 
 And looked on me, with their strange torches 
 lit; 
 
 And one was passionate, and one was lorn, 
 
 And one, that fingered his bronze beard in scorn, 
 Scowled at another s smile of tranquil wit; 
 And all were dreams of heroes yet unwrit 
 
 In dramas high, and pageants yet unborn. 
 
 O happy knight ! immortal retinue ! 
 
 What may we not, when morning breaks, 
 
 achieve ! 
 The morning breaks ah, pale and strengthless 
 
 crew! 
 
 Who now shall in your mighty forms believe ? 
 Dear friend and host, even you ! My dreams 
 
 I leave, 
 (Those happy dreams) to serve and honor you. 
 
 153 
 
GROUP III 
 
FAIR is the foreground of her soul 
 With mirth and domesticity, 
 
 And vistas far, through cottage vines, 
 Of a storm-lit, pagan sea. 
 
 A bluebird nests beneath the porch, 
 A hidden song-sparrow, hard-by, 
 
 Sings near the ground ; but overhead 
 A gull s wing glitters high. 
 
 Rose-fragrance dreams along the hedge, 
 Wild sea-tangs drift from oif the wave, 
 
 And girlish trebles sweetly pierce 
 The eternal ocean-stave. 
 
 157 
 
MY love was freshly come from sea 
 The morning she first greeted me: 
 The salt mist s tang, the sunny blow 
 Had tinged her cheeks a ripening glow. 
 
 She bowed to me with all the ease 
 Of meadow-grasses in the breeze, 
 And yet her look seemed far away 
 Amid the splendors of the spray. 
 
 Her step was vigorous and free 
 
 As maiden s in the Odyssey; 
 
 And when she laughed, I heard the tunes 
 
 Of rushes in the windy dunes. 
 
 An air so limitless, an eye 
 
 So virgin in its royalty 
 
 Hers was a spirit and a form 
 
 That took my inland heart by storm. 
 
 I felt an impulse, an unrest, 
 And secret tides within my breast 
 Flowed up, with silent, glad control, 
 And drew the rivers of my soul. 
 158 
 
THE soft rains are falling 
 On wild rose and vine; 
 
 The far winds are calling 
 To foreland and pine; 
 
 The big wave is rocking 
 The gull on its breast; 
 
 The surges are knocking 
 With joyous unrest; 
 
 There s a spirit in the sky, love, 
 That pants for the sea, 
 
 But the heart that beats nigh, love, 
 Beats higher for thee ! 
 
 159 
 
SHE was a child of February, 
 
 Of tree-top gray and smother d stream, 
 Of cedar and the marsh rosemary, 
 
 Of snowbird and the sunset s dream. 
 
 A frozen brook that, April-eyed, 
 
 Sings soft beneath its silver fretting, 
 
 Her lyric spirit soon belied 
 
 The ice of her New England setting; 
 
 Till on a day when sudden thaw 
 
 Rent all her snowy chains asunder, 
 
 The impassioned sun beheld with awe 
 Her heart of deep Italian wonder. 
 
 Still Nature has described her best, 
 Veiled in those February skies, 
 With summer singing in her breast, 
 And April laughing in her eyes. 
 
 160 
 
I HEARD the waves exulting in their power, 
 
 Their unpaced leagues of dim immensity, 
 Their splendors and their thunders and their 
 dower 
 
 Of heaven s far glory, and I thought : the 
 sea, 
 
 The sea is mighty ! Yet, O Love, to me 
 Who sought a symbol, meagre was that might 
 
 Which was encliffed and shored, for vaster be 
 The tides of love ; not beach nor beacon-light 
 Marks where their surges clasp the misty infinite. 
 
 161 
 
MAID-MARINER 
 
 THE ragged clouds are all a-rout, 
 
 And the white gulls reel like swallows, 
 And the billowy herds, at Triton s shout, 
 
 Plunge snorting down the hollows, 
 And my heart is with the storms a-stir 
 For Marian, my maid-mariner. 
 
 The spray is whiffed by the sneezing wind 
 Where the dory s prow is ducking, 
 
 And soughing where the cliff is brined 
 The seaweed-cows are sucking, 
 
 And the wild-duck flocks begin to whir, 
 Marian, maid-mariner! 
 
 Then come with me to the green salt tides 
 
 When the storms have slipt their traces, 
 And the live blood vaults in our glowing sides, 
 
 And the winds flap in our faces, 
 And hearken to my heart s harbinger, 
 Marian, maid-mariner! 
 
 O, if the world were all a bark, 
 
 And wishes all were true, love, 
 With one blithe maiden I d embark 
 
 Her captain and her crew, love 
 And sail the world away with her: 
 My Marian, maid-mariner ! 
 162 
 
OUT of the drenched and leafless night, my dear, 
 Entering to you like hot-haste March I feel, 
 
 Who bows before the beauty of the year, 
 
 And spurns presumptuous Winter with his 
 heel. 
 
 163 
 
MY thoughts are like pied cattle on the hills, 
 
 Browsing the pale green slants, through silt 
 ing mist 
 That laps the verdant uplands, and far fills 
 
 The valleys where the parted woods have 
 kisst. 
 
 Scarce can I see them for the purpling rain 
 
 That drives across the pastures, where they 
 loom 
 
 Beyond the hedges of my shrouded brain, 
 Herding the solemn sunset of my gloom. 
 
 O Fancy, be my eager-lung d Boy-Blue, 
 And blow upon your dewy echo-horn 
 
 A blast to call them home to me and you 
 Out of the eerie meads and magic corn; 
 
 For they shall yield us white abundance of 
 Their milk, for me to bring unto my love. 
 
 164 
 
WHEN beauty ripens newly in old sheaves, 
 Wears purple mid the vine s cold penury, 
 
 And hides young blushes in age-altered leaves, 
 I take one more excuse to think of thee, 
 
 Conceiving this : the harvest s mellow gold 
 
 Shall gleam, though faded harvests feed the 
 
 swine ; 
 The sheafs bright glance shall shine in brandies 
 
 old, 
 The dark grape s splendor glisten in the wine. 
 
 So, too, when thou art withered from the earth, 
 And loveliness no habitation finds 
 
 In thy beloved form, yet shall thy worth 
 
 Still glow with living lustre in men s minds. 
 
 O then to be thy vintager I ask, 
 
 And every verse of mine thy beauty s flask ! 
 
 165 
 
WHEN first the pussy-willow shows 
 
 Her fairy muffs of gray, 
 While still amid the poplar tree 
 The blithe, familiar chickadee 
 His morning suet gratis gets, 
 When first the consternating crows 
 Break on the winter-keen repose 
 
 Of February day 
 
 Their strident cawings, 
 Startling with Stygian silhouettes 
 
 The virgin snows 
 
 To wake, and with faint thawings, 
 
 Like speech half-audible, 
 Murmur of spring, until we houslings feel 
 Or dream we feel the breath 
 Of blowing violets, 
 That start where the old oak-leaf floats to death, 
 
 At such a time 
 On this your birthday morning, winter-weary, 
 
 Once more the stealing rhyme 
 Runs up within my heart, to greet you, dearie. 
 
 For now through all of nature that we love 
 A vernal change, like love s, has late begun; 
 166 
 
The northing sun 
 That nightly from Ascutney shall remove 
 
 Farther its setting, fills 
 The valley-chalice of the Cornish hills 
 With wine of warmer splendors ; by woodways 
 
 Those spurting flames of blue, the jays, 
 
 Less oft the eye and ear amaze, 
 
 Mock musical, with gong-like throat, 
 
 Ringing the red-wing d blackbird s note ; 
 
 More seldom sounds the frosty axe, 
 
 And by the rabbit-run 
 Our quaint embroideries of snowshoe tracks 
 
 Grow softly blurred and charr d 
 On their south edgings, while the logging-bells 
 Tinkle less coldly through the hemlock dells, 
 Or cease, amid snow-muffled lumber-stacks, 
 Where sledges come to " Whoa ! " in the mill-yard. 
 
 Therefore, because this lovely season leaves, 
 
 Like all else, only memory to take 
 
 Joy of its vestiges, now for the sake 
 
 Of fleet delights that never may return, 
 
 Watch, dear, with me, where, neath the dropping 
 
 eaves 
 
 The iris-dewed icicles burn and burn, 
 Till beauty on our minds indelibly 
 Shall brand her image, bright with mutability. 
 167 
 
STEEP ran the hill-road out of the wood: 
 Lambent, below us 
 Flushed in the valley 
 Snow-colored twilight 
 Black isles of pine. 
 
 Hushed the cold tinklings, shuddered the sleigh 
 Round the horizon, 
 Keen and auroral, 
 Burned on the hill-lines 
 Inexpressible rose. 
 
 Snorted the silvery breath of the horse: 
 Into the silken 
 Quivering silence, 
 Slid like a snowflake 
 Saint Agnes moon. 
 
 168 
 
A BIRTHDAY 
 
 (FOR s. s. P.) 
 
 SEVENTY years ! 
 
 What memories are the peers 
 
 Of such a service ! Who shall send 
 
 Awed messengers into the vast of mind 
 
 To summon them ? Or who shall find 
 
 And herald their grand reticence ? If hours 
 
 Are sometimes epochs, if there are 
 
 Minutes, which rise like Babylonian towers 
 
 Above time s sordid plain, who shall declare 
 
 The grandeur of this life ? What angel compass 
 
 it? 
 
 Not words, but smiles and tears 
 Can hail, with homage fit, 
 Those seventy years. 
 
 169 
 
ONCE more Chopin and Mendelssohn 
 Have conjured you, sweet Mother ! 
 
 How playfully you charmed the one, 
 How pensively the other, 
 
 As, standing tiptoe on the stair, 
 
 I watched your waving golden hair ! 
 
 Again I watch the flashing keys 
 A dreamy boy, dear Mother, 
 
 Climbing to bed by slow degrees; 
 Again my sobs I smother 
 
 Where, hid beneath the muffling spread, 
 
 The heavenly music fills my head. 
 
 The heavenly music fills again 
 
 My heart with childhood, Mother, 
 
 And stirs with blended bliss and pain 
 Yearning I cannot smother: 
 
 A husht, tear-blinded ecstasy 
 
 Of mingled love and memory. 
 170 
 
Only Chopin, or Mendelssohn, 
 None holier, and none other, 
 
 Can paint for me, with magic tone, 
 Your portrait, lovely Mother: 
 
 That face, amid the golden hair, 
 
 Forever young and debonair ! 
 
 171 
 
FOR A CHILD CONVALESCENT 
 
 BITTER death, 
 Blind heart-ache, 
 
 Now that you are gone, 
 How distracting-dear you make 
 This soft breath, this ease-drawn breath 
 
 Of my beloved one. 
 Si?ig, Spring! 
 
 Be gracious, weather! 
 
 My love and I and you are together. 
 
 Budding boughs, 
 Pale blue skies, 
 
 What if you had come 
 Senseless to her sealed eyes, 
 Impotent her sleep to rouse, 
 
 A.11 your songbirds dumb ! 
 Sing, Spring! 
 
 Be grateful, weather! 
 
 My love and I and you are togetJier. 
 172 
 
FOR A CHILD CONVALESCENT 173 
 
 Mighty God, 
 Thou in grace 
 
 That didst Death deter: 
 Lovely is Thy tranquil face 
 In the sunlight or the sod, 
 
 Loveliest in her. 
 
 Sing, Spring! 
 Bring, wind, 
 
 Soft weather 
 Long and kind. 
 Sing, Spring! 
 Wing, Song, 
 
 On lark s feather 
 Silver-lined. 
 
 Bring along, 
 Wind, 
 
 Kind song and weather -, 
 Singing high 
 High on lark s wing 
 My love and I 
 
 In love and Spring 
 
 My love and I are together! 
 
HALFWAY the climbing rose of Infancy 
 
 With tears for dew-drops shining on its thorns, 
 Lit by the Mother-smile of peaceful morns, 
 
 All pink in bloom, with now a golden bee, 
 
 Burrowed in kisses, to hum lullaby, 
 
 And now a shower, that intermits and warns 
 The birds to carol twixt the thunder s horns, 
 
 Robin of babyhood, thy nest I see. 
 
 Babe of the birds, when from thy rosy source 
 Thou shalt upclimb to boyhood s ruddier 
 
 charm, 
 
 The brooks shall mock thy boisterous discourse, 
 The skies uplift thy shout, where, held from 
 
 harm, 
 Thou shalt disport on the big world s battered 
 
 torse 
 Like Bacchus on the Elgin Hermes arm. 
 
 174 
 
CATHLEEN 
 
 MY Cathleen of the wilding curl 
 And roguish yellow ringlet, 
 
 Oh, are you but a budding girl, 
 Or cherub clipt of winglet ? 
 
 I kissed you, clambering at my knee, 
 All dimpled, shy and darling, 
 
 When every glance you shot at me 
 Flew like a starling. 
 
 You sang to me from printless books 
 Of tree-top-boughs a secret 
 
 So hushed, that in my heart those looks 
 Of baby wonder speak yet. 
 
 Of pussy-cat the chucklehead ! 
 
 An epic you told after, 
 Till porch and lawn and garden-bed 
 
 Caught that clear laughter. 
 
 You kissed me then Ah, twinging joy ! 
 
 Cathleen, that I might hover 
 About your steps, a golden boy, 
 
 To grow your golden lover. 
 175 
 
17G CATHLEEN 
 
 Your lover ! Nay, I scorn his name, 
 Far rather, oh, far rather 
 
 1*11 live, to thwart him, what I am : 
 
 His someday sweetheart s father. 
 
A BABY it was, or a bird : 
 
 Twas hard to tell at a guessing; 
 For the only tidings I heard 
 
 Save a lullaby low and caressing 
 Was a bunting out on a bough 
 
 Calling: Quick, quick, quick, have you seen 
 
 her? 
 And a chickadee, perched on the mow, 
 
 Singing: Christy, Christy, Christina! 
 
 Not a bird, but a baby she is ! 
 
 So cuddly and quaint and surprising: 
 As fresh as sweet clover to kiss, 
 
 More rosy and blithe than sunrising. 
 And her brother he was the bird 
 
 Calling: Quick, quick, quick, have you seen 
 
 her? 
 And her sister the songster I heard 
 
 Singing: Christy, Christy, Christina! 
 
 177 
 
BE merry, dear, for merry is the while, 
 
 And let Mirth make a ladder of thy woes 
 
 Whereon thy thoughts may mount unto thy 
 
 smile 
 As fairies climb by briers to the rose. 
 
 178 
 
THOU art the still-renewing spring 
 For poesie s replenishing. 
 By thy brink, like Rachel, stands 
 Beauty pensive : in her hands 
 Poised, she holds her artless pitcher; 
 Her own reveries bewitch her 
 Where she bends, with maiden start, 
 To fill it faultless at thy heart. 
 
 But I poor stumbler with verse-vessels, 
 
 Worn rhyme-thin by fancy s pestles, 
 
 Stub my toe with too much longing 
 
 And break what I should catch the song in. 
 
 179 
 
I SAW white fields and shadows gray 
 
 And clouds the low sun lurked behind; 
 A quiet seemed to tint the day 
 
 With fainter colors of the mind, 
 For all of nature to my sight 
 Was tempered by an inner light. 
 
 The winter sun set clear as wine, 
 
 A silent star stole to its place, 
 And still, beneath a glooming pine, 
 She stood, with visionary grace 
 
 Watching the sky: I could not speak; 
 The words that faltered were too weak. 
 
 My voice was smothered in my eyes; 
 
 I gazed and what so changeless sweet 
 (Since Love has twined our destinies) 
 As when, in retrospection fleet, 
 All after-visions I forget, 
 And dream that I am gazing yet. 
 
 180 
 
THE perfect rose has but a paltry fruit; 
 
 The gracious summer but a garish end ; 
 And May s sweet choirs in August all are mute, 
 
 And youth s strong loins his largess soon 
 dispend. 
 
 The water-lily, at her ripening, 
 
 Hides in the muddied lake her beauty s 
 
 spores ; 
 Even in the tender calyx of the Spring 
 
 The icy-sharded worm of Winter bores. 
 
 But you, dear, are a flower of God s own isle, 
 Whose glamours ripen in the spirit s seed; 
 
 The Galilean lilies are your smile, 
 
 And in your aching heart the roses bleed ; 
 
 And wreathed of fire cold Time can never smother 
 The maiden yields her garland to the mother. 
 
 181 
 
ONLY the strong have right to reign in song 
 The strong of soul, that are the warriors 
 Of God. The weak-at-heart, he that out 
 pours 
 
 His coward pain, perpetuates a wrong. 
 
 Therefore I promised you I would be strong, 
 
 Or silent : But now hark ! Again the doors 
 Of heaven are wide, and on the palace floors 
 
 I greet the Nine, who wept for me full long. 
 
 Look up once more, my love ! The lark is risen ; 
 Not as of old, above the immaculate fields, 
 Remote, of May he chants, but now he builds 
 His nest of dew beneath the common prison 
 Of Workaday : O hark to him, dear one, 
 Rounding, of song and toil, a Pantheon ! 
 
 182 
 
REALIZING that the lives of men are rills 
 
 Coursing in lines consecutive and bright 
 
 Down the pied slopes of Time s * eternal hills, 
 Or flocks of mingling sea-birds, that alight 
 
 An hour upon the icebergs, there to strew 
 Wide Babel o er the pristine silences, 
 
 Then, soaring, blend in the universal blue: 
 Brooding an hundred analogues like these 
 
 That show how we, bright atom-points of thought 
 In this congested brain of being, reign 
 
 An instant and no longer in the plot 
 Of God ; realizing this, and then 
 
 Remembering I run my race with thee, 
 I grow in love with my mortality. 
 
 183 
 
As ripples widen where the stone is cast, 
 
 So we do wane toward the banks of death ; 
 As dips the summer grass before the breath 
 
 Of the west wind, so lightly we are passed : 
 
 Our lives are liquid ; even when Grief has massed 
 Their evanescent flowers to a mort-wreath, 
 They are such icy blooms as a frosty heath 
 
 Paints on the glass-pane, and as long they last. 
 
 Therefore, since joy is the acquiescent will 
 
 That blends our spirits limbs with all which 
 flows, 
 
 Since pain is the stagnant eddy and the chill 
 
 That lies congealed within the withered rose, 
 
 Let us, sweet friend, of beauty drink our fill, 
 And fix in natural change our soul s repose. 
 
 184 
 
INDEX TO POEMS IN PART 
 TWO 
 
INDEX TO FIRST LINES 
 
 OF THE POEMS IN PART TWO 
 
 Across the moist beam of the cloud-rimmed sun 105 
 
 A baby it was, or a bird 177 
 
 A boy, who stoops upon a green hillside 135 
 
 All joys, familiar and divine 133 
 
 A poppy, all on fire with beauty s beams 129 
 
 Arch twinklings of the quaint wood-smile of Pan 152 
 
 A rose 111 
 
 As children fling bright silver in the sea 140 
 
 As ripples widen where the stone is cast 184 
 
 At night, I prayed for sleep; instead 110 
 
 Auroral tempest on an auburn sea 112 
 
 Behold where Night clutches the cup of heaven 115 
 
 Be merry, dear, for merry is the while 178 
 
 Bitter death 172 
 
 Brief Revelation of enduring Truth 122 
 
 Bright in the dark of sleep all night till morn 153 
 
 Dear babe, that this should be ! Whence should 
 
 this come 124 
 
 Even as an infant fingers the crisp sheet 121 
 
 Fair is the foreground of her soul 157 
 
 Frail Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks 92 
 
 Had poet Geoffrey been a painter then 149 
 
 Hark to the fairy linnet 109 
 
 Halfway the climbing rose of infancy 174 
 
 187 
 
188 INDEX 
 
 Her eyes are casements clear as dew 97 
 
 Hewer of visions from our human clay 146 
 
 How fain we conjure back his face! How fain 144 
 
 I cannot think good-by 117 
 
 I dreamed a thousand ages, armed with flint 95 
 
 1 heard the waves exulting in their power 161 
 
 In the still campagna 102 
 
 1 saw white fields and shadows gray 180 
 
 Is this our common world of weariness 150 
 
 I watched an arc light under wind-stirr d trees 93 
 
 I watched a drama, sitting in the wings 132 
 
 Leisure, kind Leisure, I require 96 
 
 Life said to Death : Brother 137 
 
 Midway the silent parlor plain 125 
 
 Moody, our time is glad of you ; tis given 147 
 
 My Cathleen of the wilding curl 175 
 
 My love was freshly come from sea 158 
 
 My thoughts are like pied cattle on the hills 164 
 
 Now that you are come up from the hush vale 148 
 
 Old Age, the irrigator 139 
 
 Once more Chopin and Mendelssohn 170 
 
 Only the strong have right to reign in song 182 
 
 Out of the drenched and leafless night, my dear 163 
 
 Out of the obscure wood and ominous way 143 
 
 Plastic Fancies, form a mould 130 
 
 Realizing that the lives of men are rills 183 
 
 Ribbed like a conch and ruddy through the dark 151 
 
 Rise, sweet signora of the sigh 99 
 
 Serene, he sits on other shores 123 
 
 Seventy years 169 
 
INDEX 189 
 
 She stood before a florist s window-pane 94 
 
 She was a child of February 160 
 
 Spring is Shakspere s garden 106 
 
 Steep ran the hill -road out of the wood 168 
 
 Strawberry-flower and violet 104 
 
 Swan of the silver beak and sable breast 100 
 
 The cricket is chirring 127 
 
 The flower shall fade, not the spirit 116 
 
 The forms sublime, the moods elate 131 
 The ghosts of Praise-God Barebones and his clan 145 
 
 The Lady of the Sunset 98 
 
 The perfect rose has but a paltry fruit 181 
 
 The ragged clouds are all a-rout 162 
 
 The soft rains are falling 159 
 
 This baby brow, like a smooth handkerchief 126 
 
 Thou art the still-renewing spring 179 
 
 Thou husky raven of the insect race 108 
 Two song-birds build their nests within my brain 91 
 
 What is so free 107 
 
 When beauty ripens newly in old sheaves 165 
 
 When first the pussy-willow shows 166 
 
 When subtle passion makes me slave 134 
 
 Young rider and steed they dash on through the dusk 118 
 
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