SONG AND STORY 
 
 Xatec 
 
-0 
 
 Copyright, 1884, 
 BY EDGAR FAWCETT. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 ALAN ELIOT 7 
 
 THE REPUBLIC 5 1 
 
 THE SINGING OF LUIGI 66 
 
 THE RIVERS 74 
 
 A VENGEANCE ; 92 
 
 A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA . ...* ../,,. 96 
 
 THE GIRL AT THE CROSSING . . . .. .. . - r 104 
 
 IDEALS . 107 
 
 THE DOUBTER .,* II2 
 
 CYNICISM 120 
 
 PORTENT 123 
 
 YESTERDAY 125 
 
 NATURE IN BONDAGE . . 129 
 
 MYSTERIES 131 
 
 SELF-DENIAL 133 
 
 THE POET S MASQUE 135 
 
 A LEGEND OF HARVEST 139 
 
 A WHITE CAMELLIA 142 
 
 ROCKS 144 
 
 THE OLD GARDEN 146 
 
 A GERMAN CRADLE-SONG 149 
 
 CRICKET-CRIES . 151 
 
 M189011 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WOUNDS I5 5 
 
 REMEMBERED LOVE 150 
 
 THE PUNISHMENT 160 
 
 AN OLD BEAU 161 
 
 CONSOLATION 162 
 
 ENVY !6 3 
 
 MEISSONIER ^4 
 
 SONNETS. 
 
 BETROTHAL 167 
 
 CROWNS 168 
 
 SATIETY 169 
 
 THE HOURS 170 
 
 INTERREGNUM 171 
 
 THE DIAMOND 172, 
 
 AMOUR TERRESTRE 173 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 174 
 
 BEES 175 
 
 A TIGER-LILY 176 
 
 SLEEP S THRESHOLD 177 
 
 THE SPHINX OF ICE 178 
 
 ON THE NEWPORT CLIFFS 179 
 
 To MAURICE THOMPSON 180 
 
 To OSCAR WILDE 181 
 
SONG AND STORY. 
 
 ALAN ELIOT. 
 
 THE old house where Alan Eliot first saw light 
 Was hidden among dark intermingling pines, 
 A meadowy ramble from that savage coast 
 Against whose myriad-harbored ruggedness 
 The Atlantic, as if ired that Maine should be, 
 Tumbles his cold tempestuous emerald. Here 
 The spacious homestead rose, to its neighbor sea, 
 Through prim dull rooms and silent shadowed halls, 
 Grown murmurously kinned, like an upflung shell. 
 
 Child voices, in past years, had gayly rung 
 
 Out among these lone paths where now the weed 
 
 Pushed rank disfeaturing leafage ; in the dusk 
 
 Of these now desolate chambers brilliant smiles 
 
 From blooming mouths had burst ; these wordless walls 
 
SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Where grim occasional Eliots posed in paint, 
 Had heard the adoring vows of lover-lips 
 That now were dust ; and higher, in attic rooms, 
 Great odorous chests held fragments of the past, 
 Spicily buried there by buried hands, 
 The grandam s ancient neckerchief beside 
 The babe s robe and the yellowing bridal veil. 
 
 And yet the old homestead was not masterless, 
 
 For Alan Eliot dwelt here, loving well 
 
 The slow consecutive quietudes of days, 
 
 Linked like calm pools ; and blithely, now and then, 
 
 Like a sudden bright-clad butterfly in a wood, 
 
 His brother Adrian, fresh from college bonds, 
 
 Would speed, with shining eyes of larkspur-blue 
 
 And sunny locks and rich mellifluous laugh, 
 
 To the still shade of Alan s library, 
 
 Deep under spells of tome and globe and bust. 
 
 " Bat of the unwholesome book-shelf," he would cry, 
 " Profit by nature s courteous accident 
 That made you brother to the auroral lark ! 
 Come, blink and flutter awhile in open sun ! " 
 And Alan for he had loved with utter love 
 This boy, a decade younger than himself, 
 Since first his name left Adrian s lisping lips 
 
ALAN ELIOT. c 
 
 Would rise, and throwing down whate er he read, 
 
 Walk seaward o er the lawns at Adrian s side, 
 
 Heeding the lad s felicitous fluencies, 
 
 Watching him paint, with quick yet forceful brush, 
 
 On canvas of collegiate anecdote, 
 
 Pictures where many a sacred rule defied, 
 
 And many a foolish escapade, stood out 
 
 From backgrounds dark with professorial wrath. 
 
 And now when Adrian, having overswept 
 
 The full curriculum into seniorhood, 
 
 Came home with a small modest honor, won 
 
 Lightly, and worn yet lightlier, like a rose, 
 
 To Alan, as near the shore they strolled, he spoke 
 
 (While the deep blue of heaven, one summer morn, 
 
 Looked all its soul out into the bland sea), 
 
 With words whose hardy vehemence might have stung 
 
 But for the watchful love that instantly 
 
 Healed what it hurt ; and Adrian s words were these : 
 
 " O Alan, it is not well with you, not well ! 
 You have made the mind the body s sepulchre ; 
 You have thwarted manhood s genial equipoise ; 
 The alert red blood, that feeds on light and air, 
 You have thinned amid the darkness and the damp 
 Of those long murky vaults that history s hand 
 
10 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Paves with the whitening bones of dead men s thought. 
 
 Ah, brother, this grave paleness on your cheek 
 
 Meets dissonantly morning s radiant cheer, 
 
 And all this amethyst amplitude of sea 
 
 Can glass no flash of joy in your dulled eyes ! 
 
 Look you, I pluck one delicate dandelion ; 
 
 Touch to your nostril its cool feathery gold, 
 
 And tell me, does the aroma, faint and fresh 
 
 As though, days off, the ambrosial rosy foot 
 
 Of Hebe had softly touched it, thrilling it, 
 
 Bear to you no consolatory balm, 
 
 No chaste intangible spell that never hid 
 
 In all proud Alexandria s ruined scrolls? 
 
 But, Alan, if you are mindful of my love, 
 
 My brother-love that fondly looks to you 
 
 As sire and brother interblent in one, 
 
 Being like a vine too bounteous for its prop, 
 
 O erflowing this with deeps of lavish leaves, 
 
 O Alan, if you are mindful of such love, 
 
 Hereafter cloak yourself not all in gloom, 
 
 Forget your books for a little space each day, 
 
 Companion me in drive or walk or sail, 
 
 And let the alluring summer start your sap, 
 
 Till stubborn boughs with richer greenery 
 
 Welcome this love of mine that holds your love 
 
 As dearer boon than ever bough to bird ! " 
 
ALAN ELIOT. II 
 
 Then Adrian saw on Alan s firm lean face 
 
 A smile that wholly bathed it, as the sun 
 
 Bathes a dark sea-crag in aerial gold ; 
 
 And flinging an arm about his brother s neck, 
 
 While leisurely they sauntered seaward thus 
 
 (A wan-browed scholar with thought- furrowed face, 
 
 A merry-eyed athlete, deft at oar and ball), 
 
 Adrian made happy plans for future hours. 
 
 And " We shall see, next winter," he gayly said, 
 
 " No splintry icicles hang brittle spears 
 
 Among the shivering pines, nor hear the howl 
 
 Of wolfish winds at the jarred homestead-panes, 
 
 Nor the wild riotous clash of wave on strand. 
 
 But we shall sail the blue Neapolitan bay, 
 
 Or breathe the empurpled Roman air, or watch 
 
 From gondolas the Venetian moonlight clothe 
 
 Pale immemorial sculptured palaces. 
 
 For though we are thus dissimilar, we two, 
 
 Still there is that in cither s life which leans 
 
 Invisible arms toward those old storied lands. 
 
 Meanwhile t were best if I could win you forth 
 
 A little among those neighbor village-folk, 
 
 Our parents friends and in departed years 
 
 Kindliest of friends to us, but now estranged 
 
 By dumb discourtesy of neglect, though chilled 
 
 To ice that one full smile would quickly thaw." 
 
12 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And Alan answered then, with positiveness, 
 
 " Rome, Naples, all sweet Italy, if you will, 
 
 But not that garrulous village, packed with spite, 
 
 A-buzz with scandalous bees, a gossip-hive." 
 
 Yet Adrian pleaded hard, and gained at length 
 
 A part if not the entirety of his will. 
 
 For Alan went with him, on a near day, 
 
 To visit one whom their dead sire had loved, 
 
 Old Lemuel Lane, once village-minister, 
 
 But sitting now, at seventy years and five, 
 
 Tired out beside the toilful road of life, % 
 
 As laborers pause at evening ere they walk 
 
 Homeward to rest, and dreamily overhead 
 
 The twilight tinges heaven ; so Lemuel sat, 
 
 Calm in the dying twilight of his life, 
 
 Its peaceful glimmerings on his silver hair, 
 
 And voices from the far past calling him, 
 
 Vague as the tremulous night-breeze in deep -boughs. 
 
 He had been no gentle zealot, in his time, 
 
 For the rigid creed he clung to, Lemuel Lane. 
 
 From the prim altar of his plain-built church, 
 
 When the hardy biceps yet was in its prime, 
 
 He had pounded his good share of the " awful wrath 
 
 And scathing vengeance of eternal God." 
 
 Yet though he had preached for half a century 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 13 
 
 Apocalyptic swords and ruthless fire 
 
 To self-admitted worms, in the man s heart lay, 
 
 Close-gloomed with overtangling bigotries, 
 
 A limpid spring of love to his fellow-men ; 
 
 And from the placid waters of this love 
 
 (Which is the holiest any heart may feel, 
 
 Being so self-taintless) glad mouths might have drunk 
 
 Long balmy draughts of chaste philosophy. 
 
 As it was, he made his Christians, Lemuel Lane, 
 
 Much as old heathen Hadrian murdered his, 
 
 From a sense of duty. 
 
 Grown beneath his hand, 
 
 Lilian, his orphan grandchild, seemed to some 
 Cold as the silvery ice-flower on a pane, 
 A lily blossoming in the frosty air 
 Of a stern theology s bleak dogmatisms. 
 Yet to the spring of sweet spontaneous love 
 Within her grandsire s heart, this girl had found 
 Some shadowy secret spiritual path, 
 Some devious daisied byway, hers alone. 
 And for the coldness of her saintly face, 
 Whence in smooth waves the pale-gold hair flowed back 
 Above large serious eyes of starry gray, 
 Such coldness meant but youth s fresh purity, 
 Since Lilian s life was like the morning dew 
 That waits for a sun to thrill its crystal soul ! 
 
I 4 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And even as dew when touched by summer dawn, 
 She had sense of inward splendor and new warmth 
 In that sweet hour when Adrian Eliot s smile 
 First met her look as toward the rose-wound porch 
 Of Lemuel s cottage he and Alan came 
 Up through the hollyhocks red minarets, 
 One grave as twilight and one merry as noon. 
 
 And Adrian, sweeping with astonished eyes 
 Her beauty, grace by grace discovering it, 
 Was first to speak ; and Lilian loved his voice, 
 So mellow it rang with manly gentleness. 
 And while she answered diffidently low, 
 He noted with mute wonder each choice charm 
 Of deep bright eyelash, temple tender-veined, 
 Lip curling upward like an innocent child s, 
 Clear dainty dimple on the rounded chin, 
 And wide brow, candid as a stainless heaven ! 
 
 And now, because he had loved their father well, 
 
 Old Lemuel, coming later, staff in hand, 
 
 Gave to both guests warm greeting ; but his brow 
 
 Saddened at fitful whiles amid the talk, 
 
 When memories of neglect o erswept his heart 
 
 And thoughts of how his counsel once had served 
 
 As trusty guide to Alan s orphaned youth. 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 15 
 
 Nor could he stay his speech from wandering hints, 
 
 Pregnant with sad reproach. The world was changed, 
 
 Yes, mightily changed, he knew, of later years ! 
 
 Even here in quiet Maine there had been folk 
 
 Who had felt the social ripple, as one might say, 
 
 Rush broadening from the central turbulence. 
 
 Satan was at his own sly tricks again ! 
 
 (With raps of the stout stick in the withered hand.) 
 
 He had bottled that old hell-broth, atheism, 
 
 In fine new bottles branded . . . what was the name? 
 
 And made this modern monkey-theorist loose 
 
 A locust-plague of speculative doubts, 
 
 To light on Eden s green faith-watered sward 
 
 And leave it desolation ! Ah, for a time 
 
 To worship science in place of God might serve, 
 
 But soon or late must Ashtoreth and Baal 
 
 Be tumbled over in the iniquitous groves 
 
 By their own worshippers, while the wrath of Heaven 
 
 Thundered along the land . . . " Yet, Alan, lad 
 
 (For lad you still must seem to these dim eyes), 
 
 I cast no bitterness on your father s son ; 
 
 I am not your judge God knows I wish I were ! 
 
 They say you are grown right scholarly and wise, 
 
 Have had the old homestead-library well vamped, 
 
 Stored it with books in more than one strange tongue, 
 
 And set it round with marble and bronze Voltaires 
 
1 6 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And half the ungodly eminence of earth 
 
 Since Romulus. . . . Well, you come at last to see 
 
 The old man your father loved once, him who thinks 
 
 Full often, latterly, that he lives too long 
 
 Here in a world where newness fogs the past, 
 
 Where that which men call progress, he decay, 
 
 Gathers its thickening mildew o er all faith, 
 
 And flaps aloft its impious carrion-wings 
 
 Above the white inviolate shape of Christ, 
 
 Still gleaming from the imperishable Cross ! " 
 
 So Lemuel s warm polemic words boiled on, 
 Throwing off at intervals that ancient fume 
 Whose strong fanatic must yet stoutly clung 
 To many a tome on Alan s gloomy shelves, 
 Classic, mediaeval, heathen, Christian sort, 
 Monkish or Protestant, whatever shows 
 Mankind stanch-moored among conservatisms, 
 Or lighting reverent tripods at the foot 
 Of some adored idea, whose idol bulk 
 Clogs the fair fluent stream of onward thought 
 With might of damming prejudice. Alan heard 
 As one for whom the words were tales twice-told, 
 Smiling a little with his sombre lips, 
 Letting his eyes, more often than he knew, 
 Wander to Lilian s ethereal face. 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 17 
 
 But Lilian guessed not of these furtive looks, 
 For close within the spell of Adrian s voice, 
 His glowing smile and happy graciousness, 
 Heart-charmed she sat, and when he had gone, that 
 
 day, 
 
 Heart-charmed she dealt in memories of him still ; 
 Nor seemed herself through many an after-hour, 
 But moved about with absent eyes of dream, 
 Oblivious of small household offices, 
 Or now remembering her forgetfulness 
 With a rosy blush. 
 
 But on her life there fell 
 The sudden chilling grief, ere many weeks, 
 Of her loved grandsire s death : for Lilian stole 
 At dusk, one evening, to his half-shut door, 
 And called him, once, again, and yet again, 
 Till hearing but the clock s quick tick within, 
 She entered. There, by an open window, sat 
 Old Lemuel; breezes moved his silver hair; 
 A Bible on his still knee lay unclosed, 
 With fluttering leaves ; his head, fallen backward, told 
 Only of calm sleep ; on his faded cheek 
 A sunbeam smote from the dying west . . . vague fear 
 Laid its cold clasp round Lilian s heart . . . she sprang 
 Nearer, with a cry . . . through all that night till dawn 
 She lay and moaned beside the sheeted dead. 
 
1 8 SONG AND STOXY. 
 
 Forlornest shadow, with the expiring flame 
 
 Of Lemuel s life, wrapt Lilian s. He who went 
 
 Had been her last of kindred. Only a life 
 
 Deserted thus by one whole perished race 
 
 Can truly feel the sacred bond of blood ! 
 
 And he, the dead man, though he had often seemed 
 
 In other eyes a rigorous guard enough, 
 
 A seraph-martinet, at the gate of Heaven, 
 
 In hers wore tenderer traits ; for she had heard 
 
 Humanity s full-pulsed heart beat forcefully 
 
 Below the corselet of this paladin saint. 
 
 Loud-roared were his sulphureous prophecies 
 
 On Sabbath morns, yet often afterward, 
 
 She lingering by his arm-chair, he would drop 
 
 In silence on her curls, with delicate touch, 
 
 Benedictions. " Ah, I knew him, only I," 
 
 She sobbed to the kind neighbors when they came. 
 
 " I had his honey, if others felt his sting. 
 
 I loved him, knowing him what he was . . . and now 
 
 I am kinless and alone ! " 
 
 But Lilian found 
 
 Another trouble thwarting her young life ; 
 For with the old preacher died his wage, and she, 
 Left with no guard against the fangs of want 
 Save the frail needle she so deftly plied, 
 Fought with proud plaintless quiet her brave fight 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 19 
 
 For bread. And now, on a certain eve, it fell, 
 
 While passing homeward in the dubious blue 
 
 Of dusk to the village outskirts, quick of step 
 
 (Her gold hair lovelier for her darksome gear, 
 
 Her pale face glimmering paler), that she met 
 
 Adrian, and that with courtly gentleness, 
 
 Passing, he held a moment in his own 
 
 Her tremulous hand. " I came in search of you," 
 
 He murmured ; " at your door I left my horse ; 
 
 They had told me you would take this path ... I learned 
 
 But lately that your home was changed." Therewith, 
 
 Dropping her hand, he walked at Lilian s side, 
 
 Below the outflowering stars, in the cool dusk. 
 
 And Adrian further said, in gentlest way, 
 
 " You have need of help ; your grandsire was well-loved 
 
 Of our dead father. Alan and myself 
 
 Would hold it precious privilege to make 
 
 Your burden lighter for you . . . Sanction us ! " 
 
 And Lilian answered, with an upward look 
 
 And starrier from those great gray eyes of hers 
 
 Full into Adrian s own : " I give you thanks. 
 
 But see, I am decent-clad and well to do ; 
 
 I have need of neither lodgement, clothes, nor bread. 
 
 Work brings me all. It is my amulet, work, 
 
 And guards me from myself; for one s own thoughts 
 
20 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Are bitter visitants to a life that moves 
 Kinless, alone, through this unpitying world ! " 
 
 " Nay, kinless, if you will," said Adrian then, 
 
 Impetuously, " but therefore not alone ! " 
 
 His voice for an instant shook with one rich throb 
 
 Of feeling. Lilian s fluttered heart stood still, 
 
 But her deep shining eyes irresistibly 
 
 Were lifted up toward his, and there she read . . . 
 
 She knew not what ; and o er the shadowy land 
 
 A sweet wild wind, that sprang from the summer sea 
 
 And smelt of its waves, came floating ; and this wind 
 
 Bore to the ears of Lilian s soul a sound 
 
 Like trilling tinkles of many silver bells, 
 
 Joy-bells, and to her soul s pure lips it bore 
 
 A draught of that strange rich unearthly wine 
 
 Whose mellowing grape has bathed a magic globe 
 
 In sunlight of Hesperian valleylands ! 
 
 The heavens had long been whitened with their stars 
 
 When Adrian at the homestead-gate, that night, 
 
 Drew rein. And many another night he walked 
 
 With Lilian while the summer lived, nor thought 
 
 If Alan s brows were gloomier, or its word 
 
 Less frequent on the reticent scholar s lip. 
 
 For love, first love, that sweet blithe torch-bearer, 
 

 ALAN ELIOT. 21 
 
 Had waved his rosy torch through Adrian s soul, 
 Till every mood of it henceforth was clad 
 In gracious glory, and he beheld the world 
 With altered eye. The summer suns, for him, 
 Sank westward with a kinglier gorgeousness, 
 The daisy rocked to breeze of balmier touch, 
 And richlier orbed in reaches of dim pearl, 
 Nightly chaste Hesper trembled. 
 
 Through these days 
 An agony gnawed Alan Eliot s heart, 
 Though his brother dreamed it not. For since the hour 
 When Lilian stood upon the rose-wound porch, 
 Meeting himself and Adrian, Alan s thought 
 Had dwelt with secret fire of growing love 
 On her bright shape ; yet he had found this love 
 As strange a guest within his studious life 
 As a laughing child-face in some solemn vault. 
 Never till now he had known what live love meant, 
 Never till now had seen its fleshly form, 
 But always watched it, from cold critic heights, 
 In some Greek statuesque yEschyleart way, 
 Glide as a ghost amid the ghostly past. 
 
 But now its influence dragged him from his books, 
 
 Hollowed his faded cheek and glazed his eye, 
 
 And sent him wandering through the summer lands, 
 
22 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Goaded by sharp shame ; for he had willed, this man, 
 
 Always to sit aloof, exemptedly, 
 
 Like a Trojan elder on the Scaean tower, 
 
 And view that battle of souls, humanity, 
 
 With contemplating unparticipant look. 
 
 But a sudden shaft of fight had struck him down, 
 
 Mocking the arrogance that dared to claim 
 
 It might elude the ineludible doom 
 
 And miss the big wounds and deep aches of life, 
 
 Withdrawn in calms of intellectual ease. 
 
 Yet still he stoutly grasped the stubborn hope 
 
 That grave self-counsels would avail at last 
 
 Balsamically to assuage this hurt. 
 
 He swore that he would never look again, 
 
 Of his free act, on Lilian s face ; he swore 
 
 To tear this folly of feeling like a weed 
 
 From where it thrust such violative root. 
 
 And now for some brief while the man s great will 
 
 Seemed possible victor. With grim lips compressed, 
 
 Like one who sets heel on a serpent s head, 
 
 He whispered to his own strange heart, " I win." 
 
 Then came the abrupt news of old Lemuel s death. . . 
 
 He must not, he nor Adrian, miss to stand 
 
 At burial of their father s trusted friend. . . . 
 
 Arid so the brothers went, and Lilian s face, 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 23 
 
 With all its mute pale pathos, touched his soul, 
 
 O erthrowing his imperious resolve, 
 
 Unmanacling his passion, ruining all 
 
 The work of weeks. And Adrian, who had known 
 
 Nothing before, knew nothing now, but thought 
 
 His brother led by whim or heed of health 
 
 To roam for hours on long and lonely tramps. 
 
 Longer they grew, and less could study lure 
 
 The uneasy mind as new days glided on. 
 
 But now he had made avowal to himself, 
 
 Strange lover that he was, of full defeat. 
 
 First would he let one decorous mourning-month 
 
 Elapse, and then his wooing in good truth 
 
 Frankly should open, " I have failed," he said, 
 
 " I am despicably weak ; " yet while he spoke 
 
 A strong joy trembled in his breast, a light 
 
 As of some pure divine dawn seemed to make 
 
 His future wealthful with surpassing hope, 
 
 And vaguely on his haughty heart there fell 
 
 Delicious realization of how love 
 
 Finds in humility its own best pride, 
 
 And from ecstatic self-abasement plucks 
 
 A purple dignity. 
 
 In these same hours 
 
 It fell that Adrian from some village folk, 
 Riding one day past doors he had known a boy, 
 
24 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Learned of young Lilian s poverty and how 
 
 She had fought with want. In conference, that night, 
 
 Between himself and Alan it was planned 
 
 That Adrian should make offer of large help, 
 
 But delicately, not in way to wound. 
 
 And Adrian, little dreaming of the snare 
 
 Latent in those deep amiable eyes, 
 
 With Lilian had held converse, as we know. 
 
 And often again they met, and made at last 
 
 Betrayal and confession absolute, 
 
 Either to either, of undying love ! 
 
 And Alan, ignorant of these happy trysts, 
 
 Was murmuring to himself, " The time is ripe," 
 
 When suddenly, a thunderbolt of shock, 
 
 The appalling truth leapt forth and struck him dumb. 
 
 For Adrian joined him in a seaward walk, 
 
 One vaporous morning when the dewy leaves 
 
 Were garbed in gaudy omen of their death. 
 
 Autumn, now boldly dominant again, 
 
 Had woven her brilliant spells about the trees 
 
 And touched the distances with hazier blue, 
 
 Or brought the sweetly querulous winds from south 
 
 To search for the ruined rose they never found. 
 
 And then, with glad awakening from grave dreams 
 
 Of the flown summer, she had made her skies 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 25 
 
 Clear-cold, her breezes amply resonant, 
 Her flaky and rolling clouds a power to shed 
 Long tracts of shadow across the glowing slopes. 
 And then she had fallen to sleep again for days, 
 And through her dreams the bland winds moved once 
 more. 
 
 On such a languid morn the brothers went 
 
 By pastoral ways toward the misty sea. 
 
 A withering splendor of slim golden-rods 
 
 Plumed many a knoll, and rich imperial tints 
 
 Yet lingered in the clustering aster-sprays. 
 
 The encrimsoned sumachs lifted garnet knots 
 
 Of fruitage, and a murmurous maple-grove 
 
 Blazed as with blended scarlets, pinks and golds 
 
 Of some thick gaudy stuff from Orient looms. 
 
 Those plenteous vines, the ivies of our west, 
 
 Wrapt with their vivid and luxurious red 
 
 The yellowing hickory s trunk or the dark fringe 
 
 Of oval cedars ; heavy from lithe stems 
 
 Drooped the black lustrous beads of the elder-flower, 
 
 And roseate on their prickly girandoles 
 
 Burned the pale delicate thistles like dim flames. 
 
 Faint lazy airs went wandering o er the land, 
 
 Rustling the brittle pomp of low-fallen leaves, 
 
 And at the pale sky s limit, velvet-soft, 
 
 One stagnant ring of smoky purple drowsed. 
 
26 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And now it was that Adrian spoke, low-voiced, 
 
 Of how deep love had strengthened in his life 
 
 To sweet vitality through these late weeks. 
 
 And yet he had named no name when Alan said : 
 
 "What, boy! At your age? . . . You are young to 
 
 bear 
 
 This weightsome yoke you talk so glibly of. 
 Nay, now, be sure that what you take for gold, 
 True passionate gold, will turn, some future day, 
 Illusory glitter, transient flash of whim." 
 Then Adrian answered : " Alan, I should shame 
 To give so noble a girl so light a love ! 
 You know her ill indeed, or you would know 
 How whitely beams among all kindred sort 
 Her spirit, a holy lamp of womanhood ! 
 And yet you have beheld her face ere this, 
 For she is Lilian Lane, by Lemuel s death 
 Left poor and kinless, though incapable 
 To lean on any staff but brave self-help." 
 
 So Adrian proudly yet unwittingly 
 Spoke, and on Alan Eliot s soul there fell 
 The darkness of an anguish unforeseen, 
 Blackening the misty waters that he neared. 
 
 And Adrian further spoke of Lilian s love, 
 The rapture of remembrance blinding him 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 27 
 
 To Alan s fiery eyes and livid lips, 
 
 Both partly hidden from his own bright look. 
 
 " She is all sweet golden fealty and trust," 
 
 He murmured ; then, with lightsome laughter, said : 
 
 " But, Alan, you will smile when you have seen 
 
 The lofty pedestal she thrones me on ! 
 
 I am hero, prince, king, demigod to her, 
 
 Dear Lilian ! " . . . And in Alan a wild voice 
 
 Was mutely crying : " O God ! must I walk here 
 
 Beside this insolent urchin-thief who robs 
 
 My future of all hope, yet say no word? " 
 
 And still within the man tyrannic pride 
 Put vetoing silence on his mouth, and wove 
 A gradual mask about his tell-tale face, 
 And nerved him potently, erewhile, to speak 
 With tranquil voice and unimpassioned mien, 
 Of Adrian s love to Adrian. Hot flame raged 
 Below his calmness, yet it raged unseen ; 
 Hot curses leapt to his lips, but did not pass; 
 He smiled full often, though he had liefer groan, 
 Even laughed once, with superb hypocrisy; 
 So mighty a thing is pride in some men s souls. 
 
 But when he had escaped from Adrian s sight, 
 Close-shut within the cloistral library 
 
28 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 That teemed with memories of his peaceful past, 
 
 Then fiercely, in one burst of vehemence, 
 
 His great pain spoke aloud. He seemed to strike 
 
 Abruptly against a future that forbade 
 
 All prescience, dumb as a great bolted door ! 
 
 How must it fare with him in after time? 
 
 How might he live, thus maimed by a crushing blow? 
 
 Ah, fool, to have lingered, lingered ! Adrian s hand 
 
 Had plucked from out the field this daisy-star 
 
 For which he had waited in his egotism, 
 
 So certain, with insensate certainty, 
 
 That the mere wanting its pale fragile bloom 
 
 Ordained possession ! Had he strength to play 
 
 His needed role of smooth serenity 
 
 When the hour should come for clasping with his own 
 
 Lilian s complaisant hand, while wishing her 
 
 All earthly happiness in Adrian s love? 
 
 " Ah, how I have served as puppet," Alan moaned, 
 
 " For problematic and inscrutable fate ! 
 
 O fearful force of what we name events ! 
 
 Who dares to babble and prate of human will? 
 
 Nay, nay, we are all mere straws upon the brook, 
 
 Leaves in the wind, who dream we sail or fly 
 
 Whither each pleases, yet are borne along 
 
 Obedient always to some mighty law ! 
 
 We smile : it is a part of the awful scheme ! 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 29 
 
 We weep : some long vast sequence gains a link ! 
 And whence we move and toward what final bourne 
 We know not, burrowing sightless through the dark, 
 Like moles ! . . . " 
 
 He hugged this baleful fatalism 
 For days, and from its darkness gathered light, 
 As one that wins from a rank noisome herb 
 The salve of healing ; and he attained at length 
 Some sort of inward peace below a mask 
 Of outward calm, ere Lilian looked on him 
 And let his hand press hers with firm cool touch. 
 Then gravely but with easeful grace he said : 
 " Believe me, Adrian s choice of wife and mine 
 Of sister blend in happiest accord." 
 But Adrian, who stood near, called laughingly : 
 " Come, seal that pretty sentiment with a kiss ! " 
 Then soon did Lilian feel against her brow 
 Two lips of ice, and shivering ill could choke 
 Back into silence an affrighted cry. . . . 
 
 That night no sleep touched Alan Eliot s brain. 
 That night, and many another night, he lay 
 As wakeful as the turbulent autumn winds 
 That shook the towering pines on the chill lawns 
 And spoke the language of his own despair ! 
 And many a day the solemn library 
 
30 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Knew not his presence, but for hours he sat 
 Near a stern lonesome cliff whose bold wall verged 
 A tongue of bleak precipitous coastland, set 
 Jaggedly seaward, well aloof from home. 
 
 Now, under this wild cliff-line, as it chanced, 
 
 The silver chisels of the sea had wrought 
 
 A shallow cave, lined thick with beaded kelp. 
 
 But overhead the abrupt height backward fell, 
 
 And in the hollow, as though half-poised in air, 
 
 Jutted from out a bed of stolid earth 
 
 One ponderous rounded boulder that had hung 
 
 Above the cave for immemorial years. 
 
 To Alan, through his boyhood, this quaint cave 
 
 Had ever seemed a thing of wondrous craft ; 
 
 He had dreamed, in other days, that when the tide 
 
 Had filled its weedy void with foamful surge, 
 
 Here might some lissome gold-haired mermaid dwell, 
 
 Singing rich passionate songs on summer nights 
 
 To her gold lute ; for weeks no foot save his 
 
 Would haunt the bald acclivities above 
 
 Or the drab sands beneath, so drearily 
 
 Was this bleak shore to its own bleakness left. 
 
 But once, as Alan faithfully recalled, 
 
 His father and himself had wandered here 
 
 Below the boulder, close against the cave ; 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 3 1 
 
 And Alan s father musingly had said, 
 
 Not knowing if Alan heard, or caring not, 
 
 " Our stormy winters, with their vast sea-shocks, 
 
 Will drag that stone, one day, from where it clings." 
 
 Since then much earth had left the beetling stone, 
 
 But still it hung; and now, on a dull eve, 
 
 While Alan stared at the dull iron sea, 
 
 Sharp rain from an iron heaven fell chillingly 
 
 And drove him homeward in the teeth of the wind, 
 
 Shivering; and clear through one long fretful week, 
 
 Made captive by the incessant rain, he bode 
 
 Within the house ; but Adrian braved, each day, 
 
 Boreas in all his maddest moods to leave 
 
 The lover s kiss on Lilian s lifted mouth. 
 
 And Alan, knowing of where he went, would feel 
 
 New pangs of infinite envy ; and the peace 
 
 That latterly had ruled him disappeared, 
 
 Imperative unrest replacing it, 
 
 And dark wild fits when Adrian s face or voice, 
 
 Met suddenly, made him ache with hate. 
 
 Not lost 
 
 On Adrian was the sullen word or look. 
 For often his brother s mien would startle him, 
 And set him wondering "What can ail the man?" 
 And soon within his large and generous heart 
 
32 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Adrian mused sweetly: " Is he angered, then? 
 Perchance he has cause for anger : what know I ? 
 Perchance I may have wounded him with depth 
 By some light act ; for he is wise and good, 
 Learned beyond many a one deemed scholarly, 
 And shrewd in worldly ways though shunning them. 
 So were it best to frankly ask my fault, 
 And being assured of that, frankly to ask 
 His pardon." 
 
 On the morn that Adrian made 
 This high and pure resolve, the prisoning rain 
 In volumes of dark vapor densely rolled 
 Eastward and left the deep vast dome of heaven 
 With wintry pearl in its cold limpid blue. 
 And from the window of his room, that day, 
 It chanced that Adrian saw his brother go 
 (A dark tall shape, clear-seen in frosty air) 
 Forth where the distant promontory loomed. 
 And Adrian followed, saying inwardly : 
 " Now is my time. There will I meet with him 
 As though by accident, and ask my fault." 
 
 Meanwhile with bowed head, with determined step 
 And thoughts that fed on darkness, Alan passed 
 Right to the cliff s gray edge. The tide was low, 
 And not the loftiest wave that smote the beach 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 33 
 
 Could slip its rapid sheet of stealthy foam 
 Farther than midway of the sand s brown floor. 
 And now while Alan from the sheer cliff watched 
 The exultant and illimitable glow 
 Of autumn ocean, suddenly a bird 
 Soared from beneath him with one husky scream, 
 And near the spot whence the wild thing had leapt, 
 Amazed he looked on Adrian, who in turn 
 Gazed at the egress of the cave as one 
 Whom boyish memory quite enthralls ; and soon, 
 Drawn by this power of memory to explore 
 The weedy and darksome grotto, Adrian 
 Entered it, vanishing from him who watched. 
 
 Then stole a ghastly thought through Alan s mind 
 While he beheld the great o erbrowing stone, 
 And noted how the wash of recent rains 
 Had channelled its engirding earth and sent 
 Huge flakes below. . . . " One vigorous push," he thought, 
 " Just at the proper moment, when the boy 
 Emerges thence ... a single vigorous push, 
 And who shall say if the great stone, quite loosed, 
 Would tumble not to the underlying shore?" 
 So flashed the hideous thought through Alan s brain. 
 But the next instant, with astounded sight, 
 As though the horrid shadow of his own dream 
 
 3 
 
34 SONG AND STOJtY. 
 
 Had suddenly grown substance, he discerned 
 The lapsing of moist earth-clods round the stone, 
 Saw it sink slowly downward and then hang 
 Motionless, and at length with monstrous lurch 
 Fall crashing and thundering shoreward from the cliff. 
 
 Dizzied and horror-chilled he stood awhile, 
 
 Then dropped his look to where the vast mass lay. 
 
 The cave no more was visible ; its mouth 
 
 Was sealed with a dread seal that one man s strength 
 
 Were powerless to dissever as the touch 
 
 From ripple of risen tide were powerless. 
 
 And he who had gone within stood sepulchred, 
 
 Breathing dense darkness through his very blood, 
 
 Trapped in a fastness fronting dangerous reefs 
 
 That scared away all chance of aiding sails, 
 
 While imminent cliff and bouldered shore might meet 
 
 For long bluff windy days no visitant 
 
 Save some shrill feathered waif of the air and sea. 
 
 Such thought sprang up like fire in Alan s breast . . . 
 " And yet, by a mercy," cried his spirit, " fate 
 Allots that you shall see the dreadful sight ! 
 Deliverance breathes in you ! Go, shriek to him 
 Instantly through that great entombing mass 
 That you, his brother, have seen all ! Cry forth : 
 
ALAN ELIO1\ 35 
 
 Be of good cheer. You are safe as though you heard 
 
 Already scores of hands wrench, pry , and pierce / 
 
 Haste ! go to him now ! Each minute of duress 
 
 Is big with torture ere he knows you near ! 
 
 Let sixty such wild minutes clustering make 
 
 An hour, and liberty might find the man 
 
 With horror-whitened hair and gibbering lips ! " 
 
 Already Alan Eliot bent his steps 
 Down toward the cumbered cave; already, too, 
 His face was softening, and a piteous light 
 Burned in his gaze ; eager to save he looked, 
 Eager to melt by a cry of Adrian s name 
 The trance of mortal fear that now must wrap 
 His brother s heart. 
 
 Then suddenly all changed. 
 He paused beside a rough declivity, 
 Sank down in trembling heap, bowed his head low, 
 And stared with eyes of spectral fixity 
 At nothing ; then with dull strange hollow voice 
 He spoke, yet doubtless knew not if he spoke, 
 Muttering: 
 
 " I saw, I know it ! I alone ! 
 
 The man I have loathed as we loathe all that bars 
 Clear path toward those attainments we most love, 
 Waits for my will to crush him or to save ! 
 
36 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 My will? But will is choice between two acts, 
 
 And choice is minion of desire. Free will ! 
 
 Pah ! men with catchwords flatter their own fates ! 
 
 Effect forever spaniels at the heel 
 
 Of cause ; one mood begets the next ; and we, 
 
 Powerless to shape two simultaneous deeds, 
 
 Are choiceless through apparent power of choice. 
 
 What cause now governs me, to what effect? 
 
 Love s hand, grown steel, drags me to slake my hate ! 
 
 Within the unmeasured deeps of my own love 
 
 I am weak as some stray meteor wildly flung 
 
 Through starry and dark-blue altitudes of night, 
 
 Whither it knows not, knowing alone it serves 
 
 The radiant rapid slave of sovereign law. 
 
 So I serve now ! Let Adrian die ! . . . " 
 
 The words 
 
 Faltered upon his blanched lips, then ; he hid 
 His low face wholly from the sun, with hands 
 That showed the tremor storming his bowed frame. 
 He thought of Adrian sweating icy sweat 
 There in the awful bondage of his tomb. 
 He felt the agony, the keen despair 
 Of hours immense as years within that cave, 
 Black terrible hours of gropings and vain cries 
 That filled with fearful hoarseness the rasped throat 
 And tinged with blood the blind dilated eye. 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 37 
 
 He loathed himself that even his passing thought 
 Should take this murderous and infernal shape. 
 To his feet he sprang, sped downward a brief space, 
 And waved both arms high, as in helpful sign . . . 
 Then, with abrupt restraint, he paused once more. 
 His devil had caught him now in mastering grip ; 
 He clenched both hands to a knot, smiled a set smile, 
 Breathed hard, the blank look in his eyes again, 
 And then, at mad precipitate break-neck speed, 
 Fled from the shore. . . . 
 
 Up the drab sands the surf 
 With affluent or with refluent motion swung; 
 Dim veils of vapor, shreds of the late wrack, 
 Moved ghostly across the lucid blue of heaven ; 
 The austere cliffs bathed their rude granitic might 
 In the bold windy glow of the fresh morn, 
 And if above splashed waves or hurrying breeze, 
 Any vague strange cry haunted that far place, 
 Only the fleet gull heard it, glimmering past, 
 Or the wild white hawk on the jutting crag. 
 
 After three days a clouded morning brought 
 Lilian, alarmed and pale, to Alan s doors. 
 Pale and of marble calmness, Alan met 
 Her eager questions. No, he had heard, himself, 
 Nothing of Adrian, seen no trace of him, 
 
38 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Since, at an early hour, three morns ago, 
 
 His brother had departed, whither bound 
 
 He knew not, nor could find a soul that knew. 
 
 Then Lilian uttered a great plaintive cry. 
 
 " Missing three days ! Three days ! " A querulous fear 
 
 Shrilled in her voice. " Three days ! Yet have you made 
 
 No effort to discover if any harm 
 
 Has reached him?" "Nay," said Alan, colder- voiced, 
 
 " I have done the best I knew, and should have gone 
 
 This day to inquire of you concerning him, 
 
 Had you not sought me." Now poor Lilian s eyes 
 
 Glittered in tears. " I have been to blame," she cried, 
 
 " For thus impetuously chiding you ! " 
 
 She caught his hand . . . then, shivering as from pain, 
 
 Dropt it because its coldness pierced her heart. 
 
 The slow inevitable morrows came, 
 Widened their weeks to months immutably, 
 Their months to a year. Pangs of surpassing grief 
 Had racked poor Lilian, and her hope had ceased 
 Either that Adrian lived or that the dark 
 Mystery of his vanishment would clear. 
 And Alan now and then would visit her 
 Throughout this time ; solemn as death their talks, 
 Filled with low-murmured reference to the lost. 
 And often against her will would Lilian show, 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 39 
 
 In that white way of still persistent tears, 
 
 How a hurt heart will bleed. So one year went. 
 
 But in the year that followed Adrian s loss 
 It fell, one day, that Alan suddenly told 
 Lilian of his great love. For while they sat 
 Near the broad hearth where a big lurid log 
 Brightened its dreamy red as the blue dusk 
 Of drear December deepened, Alan spoke 
 His passion, saying, "I love you, Lilian 
 I love you from my soul ! God knows I do ! " 
 Strongly those grave words rang from his grave lips. 
 And Lilian trembled, there in the dim room, 
 Awed by the revelation of this love 
 Undreamed of till it flashed upon her now 
 From out the man s cold sombreness, as when 
 A cavernous cloud is drenched with elfin fire 
 For an instant, while it hangs in breezeless gloom, 
 And all its inward haunts of coast, peak, glen, 
 Viewed fleetingly, a new weird world in air, 
 Glimmer to die ; but as they die we have gazed 
 Into the cloud s wild soul : even thus with her, 
 Who seemed to have seen through Alan Eliot s soul. 
 
 Then she rose up and answered with slow words : 
 " I wonder you should tell me of such love ! " 
 
40 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And said no more, but stole away from him, 
 Leaving him quite alone in the dim room, 
 With ghastly firelit face, dark-shining eyes, 
 Mouth saturnine and rigid-folded arms. 
 
 They who abode with Alan in the old house 
 Where now he lived the old life of grim recluse, 
 Whispered that they had heard, through these same 
 
 months, 
 
 Keen cries or deep groans, in the middle night, 
 From Alan s chamber echoing ; and once 
 A wrinkled wreck of woman, she who served 
 As Alan s trusted nurse long years before, 
 Declared that going aloft to bed, one night, 
 She had met her master roaming the great hall, 
 And by the light of her dim lamp had seen 
 That he was clad as though of mind to fare 
 Into the sharp dark out of doors ; but soon 
 She had seen, moreover, from his vacant face, 
 His frigid sightless look, his stiff strange walk, 
 That the man slept, and crying had wakened him ; 
 And though he had borne himself in mindless way 
 When first awake, muttering and gesturing, 
 He presently became his old stern self, 
 Thanked her who roused him, and so passed to bed. 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 41 
 
 Though Lilian fled from Alan on that day 
 When, in the firelit dusk, he told his love, 
 She formed no hard resolve to break with him ; 
 But rather, when he came again, by signs 
 Her sensitive face made easy to discern 
 He read her pity and was ill-pleased with it, 
 Yet murmured to his heart that pity and love 
 Were often each to each like sire to child. 
 So more weeks passed, and Alan grew again 
 Lilian s close friend, her constant visitor. 
 And Lilian, whose girl-eyes had always seen 
 Learning at distance, like some town remote 
 That crowds a mist of towers against the blue, 
 Seemed with this man, by gradual paths of talk, 
 To wander nearer, till the glimmering grace 
 Of column, frieze and stately portico 
 From dim neutrality gleamed clear of shape. 
 And he could soften his voice with sweet accords, 
 Could soften his lean cold face, too, when with her, 
 And deft of phrase he was, by fluent tricks 
 That knew to hide the difficult prongs of fact 
 In all he uttered, as fleet streams will hide 
 With glassy oversweep some bulging stone. 
 Richly his dark eyes flashed, too, now and then, 
 And voice and eyes told Lilian more than once 
 Things that she found it meagre joy to know, 
 
42 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 While thrilled with growing pleasure when she thought 
 
 " This man, so intellectually a man, 
 
 So fmelier-fashioned both in mind and heart 
 
 Than other men, loves me who am cultureless, 
 
 Even ignorant." So the weeks went, and so 
 
 Alan still wooed, and after many days 
 
 Again he avowed his passion fervently, 
 
 And Lilian answered, " Nay, I am not worth 
 
 Such love as yours ! " (and while she spoke her breast 
 
 Was stirred with no sweet warmth, and equably 
 
 Throbbed her calm pulse ;) " but it is honor, still, 
 
 To have had this high love proffered." . . . Then he 
 
 spoke, 
 
 Persuasively because of his vast love, 
 And in a little while he had won his cause, 
 And girded her with worshipping arms, and put 
 His lips against her brow. . . . But quickly then, 
 Shivering she writhed from out his close embrace, 
 And crying aloud yet incoherently, 
 Sank on a couch, and with palm-shaded face 
 Burst into sobs. And bending over her, 
 Alan put question, " Lilian, what is this? "... 
 At first she would not answer, but at last 
 With face yet hid she moaned in plaintive way, 
 As though to herself, " Now am I sure indeed 
 That Adrian lives not, for I have seen his ghost ! " 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 43 
 
 And Alan Eliot, with fear-whitened cheek, 
 Started at this, then hastily went out 
 Into the cool Spring twilight where aloft 
 Hung a wan moon whose globe caught paler fire 
 As the day darkened. Lowered was his face, 
 But those who passed him, had they looked on it, 
 Would then have seen how all its lineaments 
 Had grown one horror. . . . 
 
 Simply these were wed 
 In a few weeks, and Alan Eliot gained 
 That which he had desired so boundlessly, 
 Yet gained it not, since Lilian, while she strove 
 To play her wifely part in wifeliest way, 
 Left from it that intangible delight 
 Which is to woman s hand-clasp, smile or kiss 
 As odor unto flower. She could not feign 
 That higher holier feeling, and he saw 
 Both that she tried and that she failed outright ; 
 And drearily, or sometimes passionately, 
 Or sometimes filled with haunting fear, he said 
 All low to himself, in guilty whisper, then : 
 " The dead man stands between us ..." 
 
 Gloomier grown, 
 
 When now their days of honeymoon were fled, 
 He yet would show for Lilian the same love 
 As always, though with feverish outbursts broken, 
 
44 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Or touched, it might be, with sharp petulance 
 No sooner shown than sternly self-condemned. 
 But now it fell that Lilian altered much, 
 Given to long gazings at her husband s face 
 When he observed her not, or, if he marked, 
 Prone to avert her eyes bewilderedly, 
 Like one surprised in some delinquent deed. 
 And Alan, wondering, questioned of himself 
 Wherefore this curious change had risen, and soon 
 Saw other signs in Lilian that aroused 
 Wonder, anxiety, he knew not what. . . . 
 
 One night, when all the house was deadly still, 
 And wholly dark, and clocks from room to room 
 Struck the small hours in doleful muffled throbs, 
 There went forth to the starlight of the lawn 
 A human shape, arrayed for open night. 
 Now this was Alan Eliot that went forth ; 
 And though he walked with firm and even pace, 
 He slept. . . . 
 
 The heavens looked one pale crust of stars, 
 The journeying breeze blew suave with latter May, 
 And night hung sparkling o er the drowsy sea. 
 
 Out toward the tongue of bleak precipitous land 
 Whose horrid secret he and no man else 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 45 
 
 Had known since fell that huge entombing rock, 
 
 Went Alan, and in wondrous manner found, 
 
 Although he slept, the old egress of the cave, 
 
 Still barred with the old enormous boulder. Here 
 
 He paused on sands left bare from fallen tides, 
 
 And laying both hands on the boulder, said, 
 
 With voice so hollow as to seem not his : 
 
 " Adrian, I saw it fall and shut you in ! 
 
 I saw it fall, and now I hurry away 
 
 For help. . . . What hideous thought was that? No, no ! 
 
 I hurry away for help ! Keep Lilian s love ! . . . 
 
 Turn murderer? steep myself in loathsome crime? 
 
 I, Alan Eliot, I who drank so deep 
 
 Of knowledge ! I, who have seen the roots of life 
 
 Coiling their toughness down amid the dark 
 
 Of the Unknowable, and traced the streams 
 
 Of good and evil to their uttermost urns, 
 
 / sink like this in vulgar mire of sin, 
 
 And all for a fern-frail creature, one slight girl ! 
 
 No ! no ! say what you please, philosophy ; 
 
 Man s will is wholly free will ; crime is crime, 
 
 Not a mere malady of the brain. We stand, 
 
 Whether God cares or not, for all our deeds 
 
 Accountable in sight of our own souls. 
 
 No ! no ! hark, Adrian, brother Adrian ! 
 
 The Adrian that I bore, a little lad, 
 
 
46 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Here on these shoulders, hark ! . . . I hurry away 
 
 For help " 
 
 A something plucked his sleeve and woke 
 Alan ; the starlight showed a livid face, 
 Lilian s ; for she had followed him by stealth, 
 Knowing he slept ; and now she had heard his words 
 That flashed their terrible torch on other words, 
 Dull mutterings heard while she in other nights 
 Had lain beside him. Never woman born 
 Was gentlier fashioned through and through her soul 
 Than Lilian ; but her lovely face was now 
 Imperious, her meek eyes were fired with hate. 
 Large loomed her stature by the starlit sea, 
 For untold wrath possessed her, and a sense 
 Of outrage in its grief-born might sublime. 
 And now her voice rang hoarsely on the night, 
 A voice where love met loathing, and where, too, 
 Transcendent anguish dashed itself on speech. 
 
 " God tears from all this horror the veil at last ! 
 
 I see you now the vile mean thing you are, 
 
 Monster abominable, hypocrite 
 
 Supreme ! . . . Ah, Heaven, though I was reared to trust 
 
 God utterly, my spirit falters now 
 
 In faith toward that high hand which seems to lay 
 
 Such heavy curse upon it; for I feel 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 47 
 
 My whole self, body and soul, at this wild hour, 
 
 One blackness of pollution from your love ! 
 
 How to your own foul heart you must have laughed, 
 
 Remembering that through pity I wedded you ! 
 
 What wonder Adrian left the dark of death 
 
 To warn me, when your first audacious kiss 
 
 Laid its unguessed corruption on my brow? 
 
 He should have struck you a great vengeful blow 
 
 Before your impious arms dared clasp this neck ! 
 
 Oh, my lost Adrian, my one only love, 
 
 *T is woe enough to learn your fearful fate, 
 
 But ah, worse woe that I have wived with him 
 
 Whose unconjectured baseness let you die ! 
 
 How could the very stone of your dread tomb 
 
 Not render you in mercy back to light? 
 
 How could the winds not bear me as they went 
 
 Echoes of your mad summons, or the sea 
 
 Not sap the bases of your ghastly tomb?" 
 
 She paused, and in the silence that ensued, 
 
 He heard her laboring breath sound short and strong. 
 
 " But now if I seem sport for a whim of God, 
 
 Oh, rest sure, Alan Eliot, none the less, 
 
 That somewhere lurks the atonement of your sin, 
 
 Stretched like the waiting rack that wrings men s frames. 
 
48 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 I love the old savage creed my grandsire taught, 
 
 The creed of endless penance in hot hell, 
 
 Yes, love it now, though once I hated it ! 
 
 From this dark hour I yearn to test its truth, 
 
 To feel that you in torment exquisite 
 
 Eternally shall writhe ! Oh, if my curse 
 
 Can send you swiftlier to that agony, 
 
 Then hear me, Thou that calling of old to Cain, 
 
 Didst ask of him a brother ! May this man, 
 
 For howsoever long he bides on earth, 
 
 Feel always round his heart a hand of steel 
 
 That slowly tears it from his breast, and yet 
 
 Never so tears it ; and may mighty pangs 
 
 Of self-contempt assail and crush him down ! 
 
 May deadly dreams clasp clammy hands with him 
 
 In the dusk halls of slumber, till he wakes 
 
 With shuddering cry and cold sweat-beaded skin ! 
 
 May all his life till death be misery, 
 
 And all his after-life infinitude 
 
 Of pain ! O God, may this man crawl to death 
 
 Panting for draughts of it yet find worse thirst, 
 
 Even as a soldier on some battle-field 
 
 May drag his bleeding gashes toward what looks 
 
 A stream s dear edge, and groaning thankfully, 
 
 With drought-cracked lips drink in sun-blistered clay ! " 
 
ALAN ELIOT. 49 
 
 Long ere she ceased he had covered with both hands 
 His face. And now between a shriek and sob 
 Her fierce words ended, and she dashed away, 
 Flying in madness of despair to friends 
 That dwelt amid the village : these she found, 
 Rousing them up from sleep and thrilling them 
 With her dark story ; some believed it not, 
 But thought she raved, so frantic was her mien. 
 
 Yet with the morrow s light her better self 
 
 Returned, and as a devil exorcised, 
 
 Her spirit of curseful vengeance passed away. 
 
 But no smile ever touched her gentle face, 
 From this until the hour, ten full years thence, 
 That saw her die; and all her lovely hair, 
 After that wild night by the starlit sea, 
 Was white as with the snows of seventy years. 
 
 Yet through her life thenceforward precious peace 
 
 Touched her with soft remedial balm ; she gained 
 
 Sweet quiet and the inestimable joy 
 
 Of pardoning him who wrought her such vast harm. 
 
 For at the last calm moment of her life, 
 
 A great smile lit her lips, and " Long ago," 
 
 She said, " I have forgiven him everything. . . . 
 
50 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And if he lives on earth I would he knew 
 
 That dying I have forgiven him everything. . . . 
 
 And if he is dead, may God be merciful 
 
 A little more to him because of this, 
 
 That Lilian Lane forgives him everything ! " 
 
 Then once she murmured " Adrian," and so died. 
 
 Yet though t is years since her poor bruised soul went, 
 No human eye, from that dire night till now, 
 Has knowingly seen Alan Eliot s face. 
 If he be live or dead it is not known ; 
 A mystery darker than young Adrian s tomb 
 Shadows him, and the old homestead, standing yet, 
 Hears through its empty chambers the long roar 
 Of winter ocean, or when summer blooms, 
 Looks from its dusty and cobwebbed panes to see 
 The rank grass deepen down the untended lawn, 
 Or on the untraversed paths green giant weeds 
 Throng insolent, and then rot themselves away. 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 
 
 Read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, 
 June, 1880. 
 
 I. 
 
 REPUBLIC, made at length 
 Splendid for stately strength, 
 O thou at once our glory and hope and pride, 
 Hear us, for at thy knee 
 Gathering, we thrill to be 
 
 Children of those that in thy lordly cause once died ! 
 Thou wert an ungrown power, in that far time 
 Of eager patriots, dying for the right ; 
 But now, with mien imperial and sublime, 
 No more a youngling weak and slight, 
 Thou standest, viewed by many a neighbor clime, 
 Clothed with a terrible majesty like light, 
 Awful yet strangely lovely in thy maiden might ! 
 
 II. 
 
 
 
 Now past its hundredth year, 
 Thy green youth bursts its bud, 
 
52 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Aloe-like blossoming into beauteous flower; 
 
 A bloom whose petals clear 
 
 Gleam with no stains of blood 
 
 From slaughterous Malvern s rout or hot Antietam s 
 
 hour. 
 
 All memories now of those distracted years 
 Are swept from thy sweet name, 
 And lo, the pureness of thy virginal fame 
 Radiantly white appears, 
 
 Washed clean from any shadow of soiling blame 
 By pitiful and penitential tears ! 
 From palm-plumed lands that tropic water laves 
 To where the Atlantic hurls on rugged Maine 
 The cold green turbulence of his massive waves, 
 Alike to South and North the unnumbered slain 
 Speak with soft eloquence of one common pain, 
 In the mute pathos of their multitudinous graves ! 
 
 III. 
 
 There are who name thee with a mournful sigh, 
 Our country, murmuring how that chaste ideal 
 Which great-souled dreamers loved in days gone by, 
 Is now substantiate in this earthy real ! 
 These point to many a fraud and loathsome lie ; 
 To ignorance throned where wisdom s word should rule ; 
 To gold s insatiate lust, 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 53 
 
 Or bribery s acrid poison, rotting trust, 
 
 Till the pure statesman turns the vulgar lobbyist s tool ; 
 
 To liberty in the slanderer s lawless pen ; 
 
 Equality in the plutocrat s curled lip, 
 
 And in the plunderous leagues of public men 
 
 Fraternity s millennial fellowship ! 
 
 These question where our leaders live, 
 
 Loftily representative, 
 
 Free in their reverent vassalage to right ; 
 
 Not making high responsibilities don 
 
 The liveried menial s plight; 
 
 Not following where brute avarice may bid, 
 
 That while their fleeting terms of power lapse on, 
 
 Gross personal booty may be well increased, 
 
 Like lacqueys among their master s pantries hid, 
 
 Guzzling the wine-lees of the feast ! 
 
 And other cavillers, honestly enough, 
 
 Ask if our popular order, civic worth, 
 
 The old strong heroic stuff, 
 
 Be evident in this regretful dearth, 
 
 While all the intrigues of greedy railroad kings 
 
 With steam are symbolling their own pompous puff, 
 
 Illusory credit, light repute on earth, 
 
 And virtues flung to the winds like weightless things ! 
 
 Yet others ask what welfare may abide 
 
 In desolate Southern homes where famine s creep 
 
54 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Grows stealthier toward the final leap ; 
 
 Where rusts the unnoted implement beside 
 
 The ungathered harvest s growth, 
 
 And where the famishing negro is not loath, 
 
 With poor brain fed on its new blood-bought pride, 
 
 To loll in his emancipated sloth ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Ah, cavillers, wherefore gaze 
 Only upon the shadow of that dear shape, 
 Our bright Republic, heir of the unborn days, 
 Nor look toward where the godlike tresses drape 
 A brow of luminous majesty and eyes 
 Unfathomable as deeps of dawn-bathed skies? 
 Nay, who shall solve the awful riddle of time ? 
 The veil of the inmost temple who shall rend? 
 If discords break the solemn centuries chime, 
 Why may not these, even these, divinely blend 
 Toward some serene and unimagined end, 
 To breathe some grander harmony that our ear 
 May no more hear 
 
 Than some slight shell, pale waif of the outer tide 
 Tossed lightly upon some shore, 
 Down in its fragile roseate whorl may hide 
 The resonance of all ocean s haughty roar ! 
 Nay, cavillers, for a moment pause . . . 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 55 
 
 Does liberty shine less brilliantly to-day 
 
 Because within man s breast that spark of the god 
 
 Would seem to prophesy its own decay? 
 
 Is slavery less of sacrilege because 
 
 His freedom finds the slave an indolent clod? 
 
 Or peace less beautiful because men still slay? 
 
 Ah ! let us not forget 
 
 That the effort once to grandly do is more 
 
 Than myriads of achievements aimed less high ; 
 
 And that when a people s purpose hath been set 
 
 Toward some end nobler yet, 
 
 Some loftier goal of good unsought before, 
 
 Then deeds and words that cannot utterly die 
 
 Leap into life with a flash whence men are shown 
 
 Eternal Truth calm-browed on her eternal throne ! 
 
 v. 
 
 America, thou art not to blame 
 
 If slow humanity crawls and will not run 
 
 Toward lands more golden, that the wealthful sun 
 
 Of freedom richlier warms and shines upon ! 
 
 America, in thy name 
 
 The best that men can do this hour is done ! 
 
 Of progress in its onward flight 
 
 Thine are the sinewy fearless eagle-wings ; 
 
 Thou art the foremost in the world s wide fight 
 
56 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 For royaller royalties than fleshly kings. 
 
 On Europe, numbed with tyranny s cold spell, 
 
 The auroral light of thy great sunrise fell, 
 
 And lo, as when some glacial polar sea 
 
 Is smitten of Spring down all its torpid deep, 
 
 And through it mighty lengthening fissures creep, 
 
 Or ominous rumbling throes begin to be, 
 
 So in the Old World s long-frozen breast awoke 
 
 Desires that seemed at first of faint degree, 
 
 But now become desires no power can choke 
 
 Till the ancient East like the young West is free ! 
 
 Yet not the mad mob, furious to be fed, 
 
 Groaning wild violent words of priest and tax, 
 
 Not flaming palaces, nor streets clogged with dead, 
 
 Nor white throats bared below the pitiless axe, 
 
 Not these, O liberty, are the potent means 
 
 Wherewith thy reverend cause is profited. 
 
 Thou valuest more than slaughtered kings and queens 
 
 The slaying of baser passions in men s blood ; 
 
 And more than jewelled crowns being flung in mud, 
 
 The glitter of self-love spurned by noble feet. 
 
 More than all ruinous fire to thee is sweet 
 
 That holy and never-flickering flame which feeds 
 
 Not on cathedral-spires nor monkish bones, 
 
 Nor fragments broken away from gilded thrones, 
 
 But whose pure outflow burns intense 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 57 
 
 With patient charity s myrrh and frankincense 
 And the rich sacred fuel of chaste unselfish deeds ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 For liberty, though her range be vastly wide, 
 
 Still moves in glorious orbit round some might 
 
 Unknowable, whose colossal satellite 
 
 She is and must perpetually abide. 
 
 That which we call being free is but to say 
 
 That we are free to obey, 
 
 That we are free to adore, to reverence right ! 
 
 Once swerve from that sublimer statelier way, 
 
 Once break the golden gyves of self-control, 
 
 And lo, a desolate freedom finds the soul, 
 
 A broad captivity whose realm begins 
 
 Where folly s vaporous air holds blinding sway, 
 
 But whose dark distance its wild boundary wins 
 
 Among the appalling glooms of unrestricted sins ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 So dreamed and taught the old noble Greeks, 
 
 Haters of manacle and yoke, 
 
 Dwellers on wisdom s mountain-peaks, 
 
 They that such grand philosophy spoke, 
 
 Making their nation s heart beat such magnificent stroke ! 
 
 Even so they taught and dreamed, 
 
58 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 While Athens, that clear lily of freedom, rose 
 
 A glorious martial flower 
 
 Where the blue ^Egean gleamed, 
 
 With precious odors flowing across the world 
 
 From petals whiter than Olympian snows ! 
 
 But lo, in an evil hour, 
 
 To the dust her bloom was hurled, 
 
 Still rich in beauty and grace, but not in power ! 
 
 Then liberty seemed alone to live, for a while, 
 
 In Rome s imperial smile, 
 
 Sweetening its pride, as though 
 
 Stern crags by some tumultuous sea should feel 
 
 Their jagged bleakness bathed in a rosy glow. 
 
 Then came libidinous times that saw men kneel 
 
 Before base rulers wallowing in lust, 
 
 To-day on luxury gorged, with bloated face 
 
 Brow-bound in festal flowers, to-morrow thrust 
 
 As strangled corpses from that purple place 
 
 They soiled with splendors of disgrace ! 
 
 Then liberty vanished wholly, and no more 
 
 Did palaces or lowlier homes less fair 
 
 Reveal her sculptural face and starry eyes, 
 
 Her timorous yet archangelic air. 
 
 But now with sinewy and sharp-taloned hand, 
 
 Fierce superstition, clutching at Europe s throat, 
 
 Dragged her to shadowy durance, and she lay 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 59 
 
 Loaded with fetters, far from liberal day, 
 
 In bigotry s dungeons, deep, remote, 
 
 While myriad martyrs died within her land 
 
 By stake and gibbet and rack ; for the sweet sway 
 
 Of Christ, who had come to save and not to slay, 
 
 Was turned a bloody despotism, a band 
 
 Of tigerish dogmas that lurked, leapt and smote, 
 
 Howling inquisitorial howls above their prey ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 So prospering, wrong abode ; 
 
 But her dark reign was broken at times with light, 
 
 For the star of Milton owed 
 
 Its lonely splendor to the age s night, 
 
 And later with clear silvery vigor glowed 
 
 The fire of Locke s pure wisdom, calmly bright ; 
 
 Or yet across the opaque heaven men saw go 
 
 The audacious meteor-spirit of Rousseau ! . . . 
 
 But not on Eastern lands, when the hour was ripe, 
 
 Nay, not in Eastern air, when the night was done, 
 
 Rose liberty s beauteous reascendant sun ! 
 
 Not Italy saw the dawn s fair damask stripe, 
 
 Nor yet the glory of that large dazzling glance 
 
 Had fallen upon pale hunger-maddened France. 
 
 America, thou alone wert chosen on earth 
 
 Out of all nations joyously to hold 
 
60 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 That dewy sunrise, of so noble a gold, 
 Which bathed thy meadowy slopes in lavish beams, 
 And made circuitous pomp of thy proud streams, 
 And turned thy solemn ocean to one scintillant mirth ! 
 
 IX. 
 
 But this glad generous glory did not fall 
 
 On ivied abbey or palatial stair, 
 
 On statued gallery or superb parterre, 
 
 On turreted castle or manorial hall ; 
 
 It fell on simple cottages, rude and spare ; 
 
 It fell on laboring lives low-bowed with care ; 
 
 It fell where drave the rigorous plough and where 
 
 The unrusted hay-fork glittered by the granary-wall. 
 
 A few brave spirits that long have passed away, 
 
 A few brave spirits, on that far April day, 
 
 Fought, lost, and losing still most royally won. 
 
 For from that hour, which was a world s dismay, 
 
 From that long-vanished hour s brief desperate fray, 
 
 Freedom s pure beautiful lips could smile and say : 
 
 " O men of all lands, look ! I have had my Lexington ! " 
 
 Preluded thus, how memorably rose 
 
 That bitter struggle of wrongers against wronged, 
 
 And with what peerless prominence largely glows 
 
 Out from the obscurer mass of these and those, 
 
 That soul in which all godlier gifts belonged ! 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 6 1 
 
 How loftily in this one life were seen 
 Simplicity, self-denial, truth austere, 
 While, like the enwreathing vine about the oak, 
 In delicate breeding and suave ease of mien, 
 In all fine courteous affability, spoke 
 The gallantry of an old-world cavalier ! 
 What stoic patience nerved his lightest breath 
 In that long arduous fight s ordeal severe, 
 And on the indomitable breadth and height 
 Of his supernal virtue, towering white, 
 How sightless calumny dashed itself to death ! 
 Sire of our dear Republic, and yet son, 
 True gentleman, blameless ruler, matchless man, 
 Our model and type, our first American, 
 Nay, all of lordlier meaning that no words have won 
 Till baffled eulogy pauses and says simply Wash 
 ington ! 
 
 X. 
 
 But others, honored warriors, men of steel, 
 Stood round him, ready and eager in devotion, 
 Strong hewers of that majestic commonweal 
 Wrought with great blows in battle s hot commotion. 
 Men following him, their stainless leader, gladly; 
 Men prompt to seize and use all valued chances ; 
 Men cunning and quick in feints, retreats, advances, 
 And yet, when the hour to fight came, fighting madly ! 
 
62 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Eternal gratitude unto these, who wrested 
 Our future fate from tyranny, lion-hearted ! 
 Eternal gratitude ! since for us they breasted 
 Red war s tempestuous worst in days departed ! 
 With fadeless reverence be their names invested, 
 And clothed with love as with a sheltering raiment, 
 And may the exalted work they grandly started 
 Render their memory its own sacred payment ! 
 Bluff Putnam, fresh from the plough, a brawny yeoman ; 
 Greene, lover of discipline, yet just, impartial ; 
 Proud Schuyler, courtliest friend and bitter foeman ; 
 Lee, faulty and yet fine-toned, with bearing martial ; 
 The valorous Lafayette, the dashing Marion ; 
 Tough Ethan Allen, with his grandiose phrases ; 
 Montgomery, name beloved by glory s clarion ; 
 Stark; Morgan; Wayne oh, let the bounteous praises 
 Of these whose patient bravery broke our fetters, 
 Of these who won the immortal aim they sought for, 
 Of these, our stanch progenitors and our betters, 
 Gleam out, above the applausive land they fought for, 
 From history s brazen shaft in sculptured letters ! 
 
 XL 
 
 Mighty Republic, intensely 
 To these men, by rich obligations, 
 Thy years adolescent thou owest, 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 63 
 
 Since only through these men thou glowest 
 
 To-day this divine star of nations ! 
 
 And yet how thy future immensely 
 
 Foretokens new splendors unbounded ! 
 
 Its deep, though an ocean not sounded 
 
 That infinite mystery urges 
 
 With movements of vast variations, 
 
 Will yet, on allegiant surges, 
 
 In billowy vassalage, bear thee 
 
 Great gifts for thy service and pleasure, 
 
 That thou, if God prosper and spare thee, 
 
 Shalt regally welcome and treasure ! 
 
 XII. 
 For lo, thou standest where the dolorous thunder 
 
 Of ruining wrong sweeps backward with the night, 
 Where deadly mists of ignorance, broken asunder, 
 
 Divide round wisdom s incontaminate height. 
 Thou seest, with brows of beautiful defiance 
 
 And eyes whose arrowy lightnings cleave or scorch, 
 The fearless and imperial shape of Science 
 
 Appall the darkness with her glorious torch 1 
 Thou seest some outrage her bold foot is spurning 
 
 Bring with its fall some hideous ill to light, 
 As, at some ponderous boulder s overturning, 
 
 Some venomous length may coil itself to smite. 
 
64 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Thou seest how all the crimes of perished ages, 
 
 Wrought in Christ s memory, her fine soul disdains ; 
 All terrible engines of old priestly rages, 
 
 Fierce torturing racks and blood-encrusted chains ; 
 Crusades and leagues and all the old dead defences 
 
 Of arrogant creeds now crumbling to decay, 
 From that wild massacre of the Albigenses 
 
 To the dark anguish of Bartholomew s day. 
 Thou seest and meetest her in proud alliance, 
 
 One old with knowledge, one in halcyon youth, 
 One our Republic, one invincible Science, 
 
 Arch-foe and fierce Apollyon to untruth. 
 And down the shadowy future s gleaming spaces, 
 
 Two stately goddesses, may you journey then, 
 Alike yet differing, as two sister Graces, 
 
 Knowledge and Freedom visible among men. 
 So may your influence turn the louder quarrels, 
 
 Or slumberous enmities of class and clime, 
 To lovelier manners and more lofty morals, 
 
 And virtues blossoming with the touch of time ! 
 Till slowly all humanity through the ample 
 
 Planet of its abiding feels at length, 
 Below your bright supremity of example, 
 
 Its genius broaden into kinglier strength. 
 And then, obedient to divine indenture, 
 
 Our destiny shall roll on, we dream not how, 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 65 
 
 Toward some Hesperian bourne where peradventure 
 
 The exultant souls of poets wait it now ! 
 And on the unmastered passions, heart-enslaving, 
 
 Shall intellect throne herself for royal sway, 
 And grosser lusts and all low sensual craving 
 
 From the white spirit of man shall drop away. 
 And charity s mother-life, with joy seraphic, 
 
 Shall nourish upon its bosom countless loves, 
 And commerce, freed from tyrannies of base traffic, 
 
 Shall send her strong ships forth, like carrier-doves. 
 And holier laws of health shall bring their sequel 
 
 Of shining bodily beauty, grace and might ; 
 And opposite to the man, yet nobly equal, 
 
 The woman shall achieve her loftiest right. 
 And then from perfect marriages whose calm sweetness 
 
 No glimmer of sorrow mars, no dream of strife, 
 Some perfect race being born, whose rich completeness 
 
 O ershadows utterly all precedent life, 
 For this, perchance, toward some last goal translated, 
 
 Which life and immortality meet to share, 
 In grand apocalypse, at the moment fated, 
 
 The mystery of all time shall be laid bare ! 
 
66 SO&TG AND STORY. 
 
 THE SINGING OF LUIGI. 
 
 VENICE, A.D. 1430. 
 
 FOR Luigi, Duke Foscari s high-born page, 
 The great court-ladies burned with tender rage. 
 
 But he, dark-clad, a shape of perfect mould, 
 With hair bushed outward, like a mist of gold, 
 
 Passed on, indifferent to their dainty grace, 
 Lowering unmoved his pale poetic face. 
 
 Yet sometimes, when the luminous lagoons 
 Drowsed in the mild Venetian afternoons, 
 
 The ducal gondola, brocaded fair, 
 
 Went slipping from the white palatial stair, 
 
 And ringed with dames and nobles, pensive, mute, 
 Young star-eyed Luigi leaned upon his lute. 
 
 Then some one, as the rich bark stole along, 
 Would plead with this grave minstrel for a song. 
 
THE SINGIA^G OF LUIGL 67 
 
 And he, from reverie lured by such request, 
 Would muse a moment ere he acquiesced. 
 
 Then soon his voice would soar with golden ease 
 Above imperial porch and sculptured frieze. 
 
 From many a lattice eager heads would peer ; 
 The oars were stayed by many a gondolier. 
 
 To hark the enchanting strains of this rare boy, 
 Half silver-streeted Venice paused with joy. 
 
 Through every tone sped passion s vibrant fire ; 
 In each bold cadence throbbed ideal desire. 
 
 Here pangs of grief that words had found too strong, 
 Failing in words, failed sweetlier still in song ; 
 
 Despair transcending speech here sought in vain 
 The melody to immortalize its pain ; 
 
 And thus from passion, grief, desire, despair, 
 A wondrous eloquence floated into air, 
 
 So wild, so keen, so plaintive, so profound, 
 Twas anguish, yearning, love, though still twas 
 sound ! . 
 
68 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 For Luigi long had felt his bosom glow 
 Toward Lisa Nani, named the Maid of Snow. 
 
 She, born from lineage of princely note, 
 With amber tresses and pure swan-like throat, 
 
 Wandered her palace on Giudecca s tide, 
 Careless of suitors in her lonely pride. 
 
 But when the songs of Luigi met her ear, 
 Listening as one deep-stirred by secret fear, 
 
 Behind the tapestries that hid her form 
 
 The cold maid trembled and her cheek grew warm. 
 
 And now, one evening, it befell at last, 
 That while the boat of Luigi glided past, 
 
 And while he made, with all accustomed zeal, 
 His lovely spirituality of appeal, 
 
 Quick from the armorial window of her bower 
 Lisa bent down and cast to him a flower . . . 
 
 That night, bewildered by the bliss he felt, 
 Within a lordly chamber Luigi knelt. 
 
THE SINGING OF LUIGI. 69 
 
 The two chaste hands that Lisa let him take 
 Fluttered like lilies on a windy lake. 
 
 The statue breathed ; no longer calm and proud, 
 The goddess had descended from her cloud ! 
 
 And kneeling thus, half doubtful if he dreamed, 
 To Luigi, in that sacred tryst, it seemed 
 
 That Fortune from her weird wheel sent the sound 
 Of marvellous music while she whirled it round ! 
 
 Tedious the brief betrothal proved for both, 
 Ere the glad lovers took their marriage-oath. 
 
 With twenty gondolas for escort gay, 
 
 To San Giovanni s church they sailed away. 
 
 Here, in the holy gloom about them shed, 
 With stately ceremonial they were wed. 
 
 And wlien the bridal band, to mirth released, 
 Tared lightly homeward for the nuptial-feast, 
 
 A full moon, wrapt with wan haze like a robe, 
 Poised in the early dusk her ghostly globe. 
 
SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And then to Luigi, seated near his bride, 
 Looking as one whom joy has deified, 
 
 The courtiers called, in many a merry row : 
 " Sing for us, Luigi, sing, carissimo ! " 
 
 And from vague balconies or casements high, 
 A watchful multitude caught up the cry, 
 
 Re-echoing it, in manner loud or low, 
 "Sing for us, Luigi, sing, carissimo /" 
 
 Then Luigi, as the flattering summons rang, 
 Looked in the face of his dear bride, and sang. 
 
 Once more upon the city, like a thrall, 
 Delicious expectation seemed to fall. 
 
 The breeze of night seemed lingering in the sky ; 
 Slower the wide canal seemed loitering by. 
 
 Below each bank in still more sombre mood 
 Its dull reduplication seemed to brood. . . . 
 
 So Luigi sang, and all the twilight dim 
 
 As though in reverent heed encompassed him. 
 
THE SINGING OF LUIGI. 71 
 
 But while his fine clear singing heavenward went, 
 In many a mind it woke bewilderment 
 
 Here throve the old brilliant art, unhurt by change, 
 The delicate energy, the ample range, 
 
 The unstudied skill, the facile rise and fall, 
 The power, the euphony, the freshness all ! 
 
 And yet what nameless magic had dispelled 
 The inspiring soul these harmonies once held? 
 
 Where was the beautiful entreaty flung 
 
 At tyrant fate from the deep heart it wrung? 
 
 Where the choice genius that made song expand 
 With agony, with rebellion, with demand? . . . 
 
 From lip to lip the murmured comment flew; 
 At melancholy speed the amazement grew. 
 
 Then, like a skyward bird that droops its wing, 
 Luigi s ascendant voice forbore to sing. 
 
 The goal was reached ; the attempted height was gained ; 
 Struggle had vanquished ; effort had attained. 
 
72 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 All storms of suffering that once filled his breast 
 Had yielded to serenity of rest. 
 
 Sharp was the misery, in that former time, 
 Which made his piercing threnody sublime. 
 
 Tumultuous longing, fervid sense of wrong, 
 Had shaped the angelic pathos of the song. 
 
 And now its piteous ardor, its fond strife, 
 
 Ceased when the woe ceased that had lent them life ! 
 
 In Luigi s heart a furtive whisper said : 
 
 " The singer yet lives on, the song is dead ! " 
 
 Silent he sat, and gazed in Lisa s eyes, 
 Where sympathy was blended with surprise, 
 
 And where the unshed tears that obscured her sight 
 Had filmed their shadowy blue with wistful light. 
 
 Then soft she gave the answer love should give : 
 " Let the song die, if still the singer live ! " 
 
 Again the bridal band, to mirth released, 
 Fared lightly homeward for the nuptial-feast. 
 
THE SINGING OF LUIGL 73 
 
 And this bright wedding, as years onward went, 
 Proved the sweet prelude of untold content. 
 
 But from that hour till his last hour was o er, 
 Luigi, the lord of Lisa, sang no more ! 
 
74 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE RIVERS. 
 
 HPHOSE powers of the air that silent vigil keep, 
 I Roaming the long dim-galleried halls of sleep, 
 Bore me on their mysterious wings, one night, 
 Where pale voluminous vapors, huge of height, 
 Wrapt with solemnity no eye could pierce, 
 A dialogue of deep voices, proud and fierce. 
 
 THE NILE. 
 
 IN Africa s midmost reaches, dumb and torrid, 
 
 Where virgin lakes their opulent crystal spread, 
 By wastes of tangled foliage rankly florid, 
 Of old I raised to the sun my shining forehead, 
 
 From cavernous earthy glooms that genii tread. 
 Here since primeval periods I have sundered 
 Hot banks that brute ferocity roamed and plundered, 
 Speeding, where turmoils of white cataract thundered, 
 Toward lands my rich benignities have fed. 
 
THE RIVERS. 75 
 
 To these I have brought all nutritive existence, 
 
 Alluvial benediction, priceless cheer ; 
 Against aridity, patient in resistance, 
 My current, with unconquerable persistence, 
 
 Has fought through many a prehistoric year. 
 The light, the life, the spirit of my dominion, 
 Alike I have lured the wild stork s wearied pinion, 
 Or in monotonous deserts Abyssinian 
 
 The yellow ensanguined lions that prowled near. 
 
 But journeying southward in strong exultation, 
 
 I attained that realm whose majesties are flown, 
 Egypt, with calm imperial sequestration 
 Uttering the genius of a mighty nation, 
 
 Gathering her massive grandeurs near my own. 
 Built by laborious droves of captives lowly, 
 I watched her dull magnificence greaten slowly 
 To shapes of grim sarcophagi looming holy, 
 Or grave miraculous palaces of stone. 
 
 I flowed by towering cities that have shaded 
 My stream remotelier than all record saith, 
 
 With walls where hieroglyphs clung interbraided, 
 
 And avenues of tall sphinxes colonnaded 
 
 Against the rainless heaven, serene of breath. 
 
 With temples reared by sovereignties tyrannic, 
 
76 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Gray mausoleums and monoliths titanic, 
 
 Frighting, in their tranquillity talismanic, 
 
 Oblivion from the retinue of death ! 
 
 I saw vast gods, for centuries unmolested, 
 
 With fluted beards and bestial forms below; 
 Quaint cornices where the sacred sparrow nested ; 
 Dense bands of ponderous pillars, lotus-crested, 
 
 Thick-scrolled with many a weird intaglio ; 
 Entablatures that showered among my sedges 
 The blood of quivering victims from their edges, 
 And those bold pyramids whose colossal wedges 
 Not even an earthquake s arm could overthrow ! 
 
 If fame might beam undimmed on history s pages, 
 Thus Karnak, Thebes, Alexandria, Memphis would ! 
 
 What dynasties that reached through shadowy ages ! 
 
 What learning among papyri of old sages ! 
 What warriors battling for the civil good ! 
 
 Yet in obscurity whence no hand releases, 
 
 How is that power and splendor fallen to pieces 
 
 Of lofty Ptolemies, lovely Berenices ! 
 
 Where is Cleopatra, star of womanhood ? 
 
 Mute are the bacchanal feasts that filled my valleys 
 With storms of dulcimers and with mirthful din ; 
 
THE RIVERS. 77 
 
 Dead are my blossoming citrons, my palm-alleys ; 
 Lost are the pomps of my luxurious galleys, 
 
 With Nubian oarsmen clad in panther-skin. 
 Fled are the beauteous herds for Isis fatted ; 
 In sandy burial or with moist weeds matted 
 Lie ruinous frieze or tumbled caryatid, 
 
 Once reared to Osiris and his awful kin ! 
 
 Propylons, grottos, hypogeums, medallions, 
 The marvel of all has vanished as it rose ; 
 
 Dusk armies glimmering in ornate battalions, 
 
 Monarchs who blazed with gems while sinewy stallions 
 Drew them in radiant cars to meet their foes 
 
 All, all have passed, and in their desolate places 
 
 The ironic present my domain disgraces ; 
 
 Yet, ah ! what land in rivalling wonder traces 
 Memories like these of my dead Pharaohs ! 
 
 THE EUPHRATES. 
 
 CEASE, impious boaster, with loud murmur lifted, 
 To rank your perished affluence as divine, 
 
 And vaunt the expanses of your stream as gifted 
 With lordlier reminiscences than mine ! 
 
78 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 For me, from Caucasus through bleak passes wending, 
 Gorgeous Assyria s rarest charms were shown, 
 
 In all their warm exuberance far transcending 
 Your stern monotonies of sepulchral stone. 
 
 I made no advent, whether speedy or gentle, 
 
 Through blanks of landscape that all greeneries miss, 
 Journeying like you where torpors monumental 
 
 Had girt you in one austere necropolis. 
 For me long prosperous decades brought their sequel, 
 
 That stateliest city born beneath the sun ! 
 How could your bulks of colorless granite equal 
 
 The dazzling eminences of Babylon? 
 
 There Asshur, first of deities, reigned supernal, 
 
 With shrines whose bright enormity overbrowed 
 The smoke of reverent sacrifice diurnal, 
 
 Where the mitred priests in snowy raiments bowed. 
 There luscious fruitages poured copious measures ; 
 
 There gifts were stored from tributary states ; 
 There camels, tottering under loads of treasures, 
 
 Trooped with swart conquerors through the brazen 
 gates. 
 
 To shawms and harps my revelling kings quaffed wassail, 
 Between the august winged bulls, grotesque, severe, 
 
THE RIVERS. 79 
 
 Where the rainbow-hued pavilions rose colossal 
 
 O er high aerial gardens, tier on tier. 
 And night, made scintillant with its tossing torches, 
 
 On silver and golden idols loved to shine, 
 On eunuchs lolling among the marble porches, 
 
 On roses wreathen above Damascus wine. 
 
 Like locust-clouds our multitudinous forces 
 
 Have swept with ravage along a thousand ways ; 
 Like meteors our swift white Nisaean horses 
 
 Have flashed with iron chariots through mad frays. 
 We smote our enemies, all who dared assail us, 
 
 With javelins that no prowess of man out-thrust; 
 Sargon, Sennacherib, or Sardanapalus, 
 
 Alike we have levelled kingdoms to the dust ! 
 
 How regally since old Nimrod have our races 
 
 Of stolid sovereigns waged their war-like harms, 
 With plumed tiaras above black-bearded faces 
 
 And bracelets glittering on bare tawny arms ! 
 How deep our cavalries ploughed slaughterous channels 
 
 Through shuddering hosts that heard the keen bolts 
 
 hiss! 
 How gloriously endures among our annals 
 
 The martial dominance of Semiramis ! 
 
8o SONG AND STORY. 
 
 To Baal or Merodach ceaseless praise was tendered, 
 
 Or Ashtaroth, sceptred with unearthly grace, 
 But haughtily fumed the frankincense we rendered 
 
 To Ishtar, terrible goddess of the chase. 
 For breaking our voluptuous Asian languor, 
 
 We rode as perilous pastime, without fear, 
 Where many a lion in his deadly anger 
 
 Roared challenge to the invulnerable spear ! 
 
 Nor paths of victory we alone have followed, 
 
 But seers were ours, unravelling like a skein 
 The brilliant secrets of those heavens that hollowed 
 
 Their dome above the immense Chaldean plain. 
 Here, though its fated edifice has been smitten, 
 
 We watch our immortality throne her claim ; 
 In stars our luminous epitaph is written ; 
 
 Eternity is custodian of our fame ! 
 
 THE RHINE. 
 
 NAY, chant no more from burning climes 
 Your sensuous and fantastic rhymes, 
 In praise of those barbaric times 
 Filled thick with rancorous legions. 
 
THE RIVERS. 8 1 
 
 How may such heathen deeds contrast, 
 Though once they have set the world aghast, 
 With that imperishable past 
 
 Hallowing my winsome regions? 
 
 What Christly influence wraps my stream 
 
 With delicate sanctity supreme, 
 
 Like slumberous mists that brood and gleam 
 
 When summer dawns are breathless ! 
 What songs my haunted bosom sings 
 Of reverend legendary things, 
 In soft mediaeval murmurings, 
 
 Melodiously deathless ! 
 
 Cologne, with what sublime consent 
 Have faith and poesy interblent 
 In smooth harmonious minglement, 
 
 To achieve thy sacred token ! 
 Behold the intense embodied prayer, 
 Whose words of stone are uttering there 
 One silent Credo in sculpture, where 
 
 The Amen is still unspoken ! 
 
 Within my broad mellifluous tide 
 Inveterate souvenirs abide 
 6 
 
82 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Of saintly trust, of knightly pride, 
 
 Going forth as dread invaders. 
 Continual visions crowd my banks 
 Of stalwart steeds with blazoned flanks, 
 That eastward bore in tireless ranks 
 The old hardy-thewed Crusaders ! 
 
 I saw wide monasteries crown 
 
 The crags that o er my waters frown, 
 
 Where nuns with pensive eyes looked down, 
 
 While evening dews fell moister ; 
 Or where the tonsured monks would bow, 
 Obedient to their priestly vow, 
 Before Our Lady s aureoled brow, 
 
 In many a lonesome cloister. 
 
 For me the fat bluff burgher quaffed 
 Brown ale when freed from toilful craft, 
 With many a gay jest, while he laughed, 
 
 That kind remembrance harbors ; 
 For me the Minnesingers made 
 Lyrics where halcyon fancies played, 
 Like variant sunbeams mixed with shade 
 
 Below their grape-hung arbors. 
 
 The aromas of romantic lore 
 Yet linger round my sacred shore, 
 
THE RIVERS. 83 
 
 Where ghostly nixies combed of yore 
 Blond locks that coiled and glistened ; 
 
 Where cold swan-maidens glided white, 
 
 Where elves held carnival by night, 
 
 Where the lone Lorelei on the height 
 Sang death to all who listened ! 
 
 Ah, still gold-haired Gunhilda tells 
 The undying tale of Drachenfels ; 
 Through Ziindorf still, by darksome spells, 
 
 The Wasserman spreads deep sadness ; 
 In vale or thicket still I note 
 The erl-kings and the fairies float, 
 Or that fleet will-o -the-wisp who smote 
 
 The Kreutzberg monk with madness ! 
 
 But dolorous deeds have stained me red 
 When feudal princes met and bled, 
 When troops of desperate peasants fled 
 
 While baron-thieves marauded ; 
 I saw dense fights round bastioned towers, 
 Meek maidens ravished from their bowers, 
 And insolent prelates mock the powers 
 
 Their soldieries defrauded. 
 
 Yet spite of hours thus dimmed with woe, 
 This heaven above me smiles to know 
 
84 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 That peerless among all kin I flow 
 
 Beneath its blue pavilions. 
 Dead Chivalry s dearest worth was mine ; 
 Unique, incomparable, I shine, 
 The old castle-skirted storied Rhine, 
 
 Beloved by bordering millions ! 
 
 THE AMAZON. 
 
 PAUSE in your resonant turmoil and patiently hearken 
 
 To me while I sing, 
 Rivers, whose fame I eclipse as a tempest will darken 
 
 The world with its wing. 
 Mine is the candid unmanacled liberty owning 
 
 No mortal s light sway; 
 Kindred am I to all winds in their moving and moaning, 
 
 And tameless as they. 
 One my circuitous roamings, my rhythmic pulsations, 
 
 With stars where they roll ; 
 Man cannot fathom the fire of those large inspirations 
 
 That warm my great soul ! 
 He that would utter my name in its meaning stupendous, 
 
 With all it enshrouds, 
 Must for the words that he uses take torrents tremendous, 
 
 Take mountains and clouds. 
 
THE RIVERS. 85 
 
 Lo, I am lifted above insubstantial traditions, 
 
 Nor heed while they pass ; 
 Less to my forest-clad pride are a kingdom s transitions 
 
 Than dewfalls on grass. 
 All the base multiform passion whose energy urges 
 
 The heart of mankind, 
 
 Shelters among the brute creatures that wander my 
 verges, 
 
 Thick-leaved, lavish-vined. 
 Here in my leopards and serpents are fostered and hidden 
 
 The crafts and the greeds 
 Wrought with coeval resemblance to longings forbidden 
 
 That sway human deeds. 
 Yet as the adequate symbol of virtues resultant 
 
 From aims that exalt, 
 
 Heaven at my summons will glass in these waters 
 exultant 
 
 Her uttermost vault. 
 
 Discords are mine that can drown all the trivial 
 dissensions 
 
 Of men far and near ; 
 
 Euphonies float from my surge whose harmonious 
 dimensions 
 
 Even gods could not hear. 
 Go where superb white audacity tells its defiance 
 
 In peaks robed with snows ; 
 
86 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 There shall you learn that infrangible bonds of alliance 
 
 Have bound me to those. 
 
 Go where the pinnacled ice rims the ghastly north 
 oceans 
 
 Through months of keen night ; 
 There, amid altitudes glacial and thunderlike motions, 
 
 Live moods of my might 
 Breaths of terrific simooms, making caravans tremble, 
 
 Possess, while they fly, 
 
 Onslaught and turbulence, courage and speed, that 
 resemble 
 
 This power that is I ! 
 Be it the vast winding cave, or the Alp lightnings blister, 
 
 Or the cliff huge, austere, 
 Each in its grandeur profound I accept as my sister, 
 
 Yet scorn as my peer ! 
 
 Whence, in my vigorous attainment, my visage resplen 
 dent, 
 
 Till time shall have flown, 
 I, of all rivers terrestrial, am chief and transcendent, 
 
 Elect and alone ! 
 
THE RIVERS. 87 
 
 THE THAMES. 
 
 RING on, dissentient cries, 
 Whose boisterous echoes rise 
 And fill with acrimonious vaunts the unsympathetic 
 
 skies ! 
 
 I neither praise nor blame 
 The lineage you proclaim ; 
 
 Not mine the arbitrament that seals your glory or your 
 shame. 
 
 Perchance I too might sing 
 Of army and court and king, 
 Of proud pictorial episodes where swords and helmets 
 
 ring. 
 
 Perchance my voice might tell 
 What happy memories dwell 
 
 Where England s meadowy distances like music fall and 
 swell. 
 
 But rather would I find 
 In the onward march of mind 
 
 Strong right to achieve supremacy and rule above my 
 kind. 
 
88 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 For me t was given to know 
 Gross prejudice flung low, 
 And science levelling fable in victorious overthrow. 
 
 Philosophy s full beam 
 
 Has bathed my honored stream, 
 
 And guided men toward nobler moods than superstitious 
 dream. 
 
 Here fact, crying out " I am," 
 
 Stripped sophistry of sham ; 
 Here throve the effulgent intellect of matchless Verulam. 
 
 Here temperate self-control 
 Calmed freedom s fiery soul, 
 
 Reversing her impetuous course toward wisdom s rug 
 ged goal ; 
 
 Here reason s lips have wound 
 The clarion whose clear sound 
 
 Sent dogma whimpering from the prey its greedy fangs 
 had found. 
 
 Tired out with guile, intrigue, 
 An irresistible league, 
 
 My people in fervid action showed their agonized 
 fatigue. 
 
THE RIVERS. 89 
 
 Not with the crimson reek 
 Of scaffolds did they speak, 
 
 But through the broadening girth of limbs that made 
 their fetters weak. 
 
 Lo, now the shadow is fled 
 Whose blackness overspread 
 The starry undaunted eyes of truth and her seraphic 
 
 head; 
 
 Lo, progress, harshly wroth, 
 Frights bigotry like a moth 
 
 When brushed from out the broideries of some ancient 
 arras-cloth. 
 
 The mightier minds no more 
 
 Waste effort to explore 
 Infinity s ocean, breaking on an unconjectured shore. 
 
 They turn from the empty task 
 
 Of tearing her close mask 
 
 Off the Isis whose oracular mouth denies them what 
 they ask. 
 
 Their impulse aims, instead, 
 With equal steps to tread 
 
 The arduous jeopardy called life, where many a foot has 
 bled; 
 
90 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 They heed the woful tone 
 Of crushed humanity s moan ; 
 
 They leave the unknowable to dwell at peace with God, 
 the unknown. 
 
 They hold as worthiest prayer 
 To assuage the long despair 
 That poverty s fell ubiquity makes drudging millions 
 
 bear; 
 
 They search, by pity taught, 
 All the arsenals of thought 
 
 For weapons murderous to the wrongs that ignorance 
 has wrought. 
 
 They see, like streaks of day 
 
 In heaven s far doubtful gray, 
 The auroral evidence of love, and hate s dark disarray. 
 
 They send toward purer things 
 
 Desires whose journeyings 
 
 Are larks that dare the unventured dusk with sweet 
 adventurous wings. 
 
 Yet while by stubborn deeds 
 Their fresh unfaltering creeds 
 
 Have reached through hollow pomps of cant reality s 
 vital needs, 
 
THE RIVERS. 91 
 
 Ah, where on the earth save here, 
 Co-operant in career, 
 Do all man s godliest attributes converge and persevere ? 
 
 THE SEA. 
 
 HAVE peace, be still, 
 
 O frivolous throngs, that feed me, rill by rill ! 
 Vex with contentious interludes no more 
 
 My sweeps of shore ! 
 
 Enough to know 
 
 Your duty as ye subserviently flow ; 
 Enough that ye were wrought to augment my waves, 
 
 Poor. clamoring slaves ! 
 
 Wedded to me 
 
 As limb to body or skin to flesh are ye, 
 And all your confluent lives, till this life die, 
 
 Behold they are I ! 
 
92 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 A VENGEANCE. 
 
 FROM savage pass and rugged shore 
 The noise of angry hosts had fled ; 
 The bitter battle raged no more. 
 Where fiery bolts had wrought their scars, 
 And where the dying and the dead 
 In many a woful heap were flung, 
 While night above the ^Egean hung 
 Its melancholy maze of stars. 
 
 One- boyish Greek, of princely line, 
 
 Lay splashed with blood and wounded sore ; 
 
 His wan face in its anguish bore 
 
 That delicate symmetry divine 
 
 Carved by the old sculptors of his land. 
 
 A broken blade was in his hand, 
 
 Half slipping from the forceless hold 
 
 That once had swayed it long and well ; 
 
 And round his form in tatters fell 
 
 The velvet raiment flowered with gold. 
 
A VENGEANCE. 93 
 
 But while the calm night later grew, 
 He heard a stealthy and rustling sound, 
 Like one who trailed on laggard knee 
 A shattered shape along the ground. 
 And soon with sharp surprise he knew 
 That in the encircling gloom profound 
 A fierce Turk crawled by slow degrees 
 To where in helpless pain he lay. 
 Then, too, he witnessed with dismay 
 That from the prone Turk s rancorous eye 
 Flashed the barbaric lurid trace 
 Of hate s indomitable hell, 
 Such hate as death alone could quell, 
 As death alone could satisfy. 
 
 Closer the loitering figure drew, 
 With naked bosom red from fight, 
 With ruthless fingers clutching tight 
 A dagger stained by murderous hue. 
 Till now, in one great lurch, he threw 
 His whole frame forward, aiming quick 
 A deadly inexorable blow, 
 That weakly faltering, missed its mark, 
 And left the assassin breathing thick, 
 Levelled by nerveless overthrow, 
 There near the Greek chief, in the dark. 
 
94 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Then he that saw the baffled crime, 
 Half careless of his life s release, 
 Since death must win him soon as prey, 
 Turned on his foe a smile sublime 
 With pity, and the stars of Greece 
 Beheld him smile, and only they. 
 
 All night the two lay side by side, 
 
 Each near to death, yet living each ; 
 
 All night the grim Turk moaned and cried, 
 
 Beset with pangs of horrid thirst, 
 
 Save when his dagger crept to reach, 
 
 By wandering ineffectual way, 
 
 The prostrate Greek he yearned to slay, 
 
 And failure stung him till he cursed. 
 
 But when soft prophecies of morn 
 Had wrapt the sea in wistful white, 
 A band of men, with faces worn, 
 Clomb inland past a beetling height, 
 To find the young chief they adored. 
 Sought eagerly since fall of sun 
 And now in ghastly change restored . . . 
 One raised a torch of ruddy shine, 
 And kneeling by their leader, one 
 Set to his mouth a gourd of wine. 
 
A VENGEANCE. 95 
 
 Then the young Greek, with wave of hand, 
 Showed the swart Pagan at his side, 
 So motioning to the gathered band 
 That none could choose but understand. 
 
 " Let this man drink ! " he said, and died. 
 
96 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA. 
 
 " Au temps de Cllopdtre . . . on eut fait venir six ou cinq es- 
 claves, mdles ou femelles, et Fon aurait essaye 1 le poison sur euxj 
 on aurait fait ce que les medecins appellent une experience in anima 
 vili. . . . Une douzaine de miser ables se seraient tordus comme des 
 anguilles couples en morceaux sur les beaux paves de porphyre et 
 les mosaiques ttincelantes, devant la mattresse . . . suivant de son 
 regard veloutt les dernttres crispations de leur agonie" 
 
 TH^OPHILE GAUTIER. 
 
 , when the chilling fear 
 Of ruin touched her soul at ease, 
 When turbid sounds, blown over seas, 
 Would speed on rumor s rapid path 
 From the hot lips of Roman wrath 
 Straight to her own Egyptian ear, 
 Then, even at some grand feast of hers, 
 Would seem to feel the joy struck dumb 
 Of citherns, harps and dulcimers, 
 With rumbling prelude, harsh to hear, 
 
A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA. 97 
 
 Of that which must in time become 
 Disaster, slavery, Actium ! 
 
 Then she, that mighty and mystic queen, 
 Round whom her vassals crawled in awe, 
 Whose lifted finger was a law, 
 Whose smile an edict, and whose frown 
 A darkness on the lands between 
 Arabian wave and Libyan dust, 
 Whose name, tyrannic and august, 
 From marbleful Syene s town 
 On wings of wonderment flew down 
 The old sacred Nile and serpentine 
 North to Canopus and the sea, 
 Cleopatra, couched at feast, even she, 
 In lovely sovereignty supine, 
 Would quiver with a sudden sigh, 
 And one imperious hand would raise 
 That bade the revel s music die, 
 And made, along its mighty maze 
 Of columned galleries grandly high, 
 A silence as of death to come 
 On all the vast triclinium ! 
 
 " If I must die," her thought would say, 
 "What way shall be the swiftest way? 
 7 
 
98 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 What subtle drug shall give release 
 With slightest pain before it slay, 
 And make my conqueror find me here 
 As one who thrids in cavernous night 
 Some hypogeum s halls austere, 
 Expecting when his steps shall cease 
 Beside the uncrumbled cryptic peace 
 Of still sarcophagi, and when 
 He shall behold, with sharp delight, 
 With thrills of greed he shall behold, 
 The royal mummies lying rolled 
 In lordliest wealth against his sight, 
 Richly embalmed, these kings renowned, 
 In naphtha and bitumen bound : 
 But now he gains their bourne of sleep, 
 And sees their gilded coffers rise, 
 Stript of all wealth to clutch and keep, 
 Plundered and spoiled ere this by those 
 Who have dared in violative wise 
 To assault with strong and impious blows 
 The old awful slumbering Pharaohs. 
 Thus even shall he that finds me here 
 Find ruin of what I was alone, 
 The dumb bulk left, the life outflown, 
 Beyond all shadow of shame or fear, 
 Since Death can do whatso he please 
 
A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA. 99 
 
 With whoso he shall choose to strive, 
 But Roman hands, though quick to seize, 
 Can never manacle alive, 
 With wrist-gyve or with ankle-gyve, 
 The daughter of the Ptolemies ! 
 
 " Wherefore, if I must die one day, 
 How fleetest shall this flesh get peace? 
 What way shall be the swiftest way? 
 What subtle drug shall give release 
 With slightest pain before it slay? " 
 
 Then would she clap her small swart hands, 
 And soon the obeisant slaves would bring 
 Rare cups and goblets, oddly wrought 
 With sculptured shapes in circling bands, 
 Or many a strange hieratic thing 
 Whereof these latter times and lands 
 Know either vaguely or know naught 
 With Athor, Isis, one-armed Khem, 
 Snake, scarab, ibis, winged ball, 
 Quaint Coptic anaglyph ; and all 
 These vessels, to the brims of them, 
 With deadliest poisons had been fraught. 
 
 Then slowly, through the hall s great space, 
 Where, statued in weird hybrid gloom, 
 With black claws crost in cold repose, 
 
100 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 The lofty basalt sphinxes loom, 
 
 Between the pillars huge of base 
 
 That might bear heaven, if so they chose, 
 
 On bulging chapiters that enthrone 
 
 Colossal lotos-leaves of stone, 
 
 Before the queen, with timorous pace, 
 
 With groundward brow and quivering limb, 
 
 With horror on each haggard face, 
 
 They come, the slaves that are to die 
 
 Beneath Cleopatra s critic eye, 
 
 And pleasure so her sovereign whim. 
 
 They dare not make one lightest moan, 
 
 While ranging in a dreadful file 
 
 Before their slayer s icy smile. 
 
 They dare alone to cower and shrink; 
 
 Alone they dare to obey, alone 
 
 To grasp their goblets and be dumb ; 
 
 For tortures worse than death might come, 
 
 Did they rebel in prayer and groan. 
 
 Some sweat with anguish as they drink ; 
 
 Some totter and have bristling hair; 
 
 Some choke their bitter sobs, and some 
 
 Roll eyeballs awful with despair ! 
 
 Poisons are here of taste and hue 
 Differing, yet each of baleful might; 
 
A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA. 101 
 
 For here is hellebore, aconite, 
 Henbane, euphorbia; these, and more 
 Known only in the years of yore. 
 
 And all are drunken to the lees 
 
 By those poor minion lips accurst. 
 
 A fearful quiet falls at first 
 
 Over the doomed ones where they stand, 
 
 Till now they sink by sure degrees, 
 
 Form after stricken form, beneath 
 
 The smile so fathomlessly bland 
 
 Of the calm queen who hears and sees 
 
 Their anguish of the stiff crooked hand, 
 
 The writhen body and gnashing teeth, 
 
 The blackening tongues, the crimsoned eyes, 
 
 The foaming bloated lips, the cries 
 
 That up those monstrous galleries ring 
 
 In mad debauch of suffering ! 
 
 Superb doth Queen Cleopatra sit, 
 The fragrant feast-flowers on her hair, 
 And o er the shadowy waves of it, 
 Her crown imperially fair 
 For spikes of gold about the brows. 
 The delicate schenti that allows 
 Glimpses of her voluptuous shape, 
 
102 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Doth her firm bend of bosom drape, 
 
 And lightlier lies on her brown limbs 
 
 Than on some moonlit mountain s base 
 
 The gauziest vapor-wreath that swims. 
 
 From either side her languorous face 
 
 The fringy calisiris flows ; 
 
 A gorget girds her olive throat, 
 
 Fantastic, beautiful to note, 
 
 Where clear-green chrysoberyl glows 
 
 Beside azedarach, in rows. 
 
 One marvellous arm supports her head, 
 With dull gold six times braceleted, 
 As backward on the empurpled case 
 Of her Greek couch she leans at rest. 
 Her deepening smile hath half confest 
 That one thing yet holds power to please 
 Her tired soul pleasure-surfeited. 
 One thing : this riot of death she sees, 
 This pomp of human pangs unblest, 
 This revel of ghastly agonies ! 
 
 And so, while at her feet they writhe, 
 While levelled of their torture sore 
 They grovel on the porphyry floor, 
 These slaves, whose life is almost less 
 
A MOOD OF CLEOPATRA. IO3 
 
 In Egypt than to crush a gnat, 
 Then (oh, strange change to wonder at ! ) 
 Cleopatra s smile turns bright and blithe, 
 Her eyelids lose their heaviness, 
 Her long deep eyes begin to shine, 
 And reaching one dark faultless hand 
 Where the gold festal goblets stand 
 Carved by Lysippus rare finesse 
 In sculptures worthy hands divine, 
 For veriest joy her red mouth laughs, 
 As now with back-flung head she quaffs 
 The odorous white Mareotic wine ! 
 
104 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE GIRL AT THE CROSSING, 
 
 OHE was just sixteen, that night, as she stood 
 ^ In her ragged dress and her rusty hood. 
 
 She had swept the crossing the same old way 
 You have seen the beggars do, any day, 
 
 With first a rush to the passer s side, 
 
 Then a dash ahead, and the broom well plied, 
 
 And then, as she gained the curb, you know, 
 The ancient professional moan of woe. 
 
 But now she is tired ; the night grows late ; 
 She leaves the crossing with laggard gait. 
 
 And as she passes the street lamp s glare, 
 You catch the sheen of her unkempt hair, 
 
 Falling to meet, with its tangled flow, 
 The two great weary black eyes below. 
 
THE GIRL AT THE CROSSING. 105 
 
 She goes from haunts of the rich and sleek 
 To dull-lit regions of murk and reek ; 
 
 And under a lamp that flickers frail, 
 
 In the sudden breath of the autumn gale, 
 
 Pausing she searches her dress, to drag 
 From its pocket a dingy twisted rag, 
 
 Her pennies, earned through the long day, all 
 Lumped into this unsightly ball. 
 
 With a feeble smile she counts them o er, 
 And is slipping them out of sight once more, 
 
 When a hand from the dimness, quick and bold, 
 Tears the rag from her careless hold. 
 
 She cries out sharply ; a form shoots fleet, 
 Yards beyond, through the vague void street. 
 
 She stands in the doorway ; she does not stir ; 
 While her drunken father scowls at her. 
 
 He has wondered long that she still should stay, 
 For he craved her earnings to drink away. 
 
106 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 With trembling voice, in her words uncouth, 
 She tells him simply the simple truth. 
 
 He lifts his hand, while his dull eyes glow, 
 And strikes her down with a brutal blow ! 
 
 You may see her now, any night that s fair, 
 In a certain street, by a certain square. . . . 
 
 See her well, if you wait for a little while, 
 In her silken dress, with her brazen smile ! . . 
 
IDEALS. 107 
 
 IDEALS. 
 
 O SCIENCE, whose footsteps wander, 
 Audacious and unafraid, 
 Where the mysteries that men ponder 
 
 Lie folded in awful shade, 
 Though you bring us, with calm defiance, 
 
 Dear gifts from the bournes you wing, 
 There is yet, O undaunted Science, 
 One gift that you do not bring ! 
 
 Shall you conquer the last restriction 
 
 That conceals it from you now, 
 And come back with its benediction 
 
 Like an aureole on your brow? 
 Shall you fly to us, roamer daring, 
 
 Past barriers of time and space, 
 And return from your mission bearing 
 
 The light of God on your face? 
 
108 SONG AND STOXY. 
 
 We know not, but still can treasure, 
 
 In the yearning of our suspense, 
 Consolation we may not measure 
 
 By the certitudes of sense ; 
 For life, as we long and question, 
 
 Seems to bear, while it hurries by, 
 Through undertones of suggestion, 
 
 Immortality s deep reply ! 
 
 To ears that await its token 
 
 Perpetually it strays 
 Indeterminate, fitful, broken 
 
 By the discords of our days ! 
 It pierces the grim disasters 
 
 Of clamorous human hate, 
 And its influence overmasters 
 
 All the ironies of fate ! 
 
 The icy laugh of the scorner 
 
 Cannot strike its echoes mute ; 
 It cleaves the moan of the mourner 
 
 Like a clear aeolian lute. 
 At its tone less keen and savage 
 
 Grows the anguish of farewell tears, 
 And its melody haunts the ravage 
 
 Of the desecrating years ! 
 
IDEALS. 109 
 
 Philosophy builds, and spares not 
 
 Her firm laborious power ; 
 But her lordly edifice wears not 
 
 Its last aerial tower, 
 For the quarries of reason fail her 
 
 Ere the structure s perfect scope, 
 And the stone that would now avail her 
 
 Must be hewn from heights of hope ! 
 
 But Art, at her noblest glory, 
 
 Can seem, to her lovers fond, 
 As divinely admonitory 
 
 Of infinitudes beyond. 
 She can beam upon earth s abasement 
 
 Like splendor flung down sublime 
 Through a vague yet exalted casement 
 
 From eternity into time ! 
 
 On the canvas of some great painter 
 
 We may trace, in its varied flame, 
 Now leaping aloft, now fainter, 
 
 As the mood uplifts the aim, 
 That impulse by whose rare presence 
 
 His venturing brush has drawn 
 Its hues from the efflorescence 
 
 Of a far Elysian dawn ! 
 
HO SONG AND STORY. 
 
 An impassioned watcher gazes 
 
 Where the faultless curves combine 
 That sculpture s mightier phases 
 
 Imperially enshrine, 
 And feels that by strange election 
 
 The artificer s genius wrought 
 From the marble a pale perfection 
 
 That is paramount over thought ! 
 
 So in music entranced we wonder, 
 
 If its charm the spirit seeks, 
 When with mellow voluminous thunder 
 
 A sovereign maestro speaks, 
 Till it seems that by ghostly aidance 
 
 Upraised above lesser throngs, 
 He has caught from the stars their cadence 
 
 And woven the winds into songs ! 
 
 More than all, if the stately brilliance 
 
 Of a poet s rapture rise, 
 Like a fountain whose full resilience 
 
 Is lovely against clear skies, 
 We are thrilled with a dream unbounded 
 
 Of deeps by no vision scanned, 
 That conjecture has never sounded 
 
 And conception has never spanned ! 
 
IDEALS. 1 1 1 
 
 So the harvest that knowledge misses 
 
 Intuition seems to reap ; 
 One pauses before the abysses 
 
 That one will delight to leap. 
 One balks the ruminant sages, 
 
 And one bids the world aspire, 
 While the slow processional ages 
 
 Irreversibly retire ! 
 
112 SOJVG AND STORY. 
 
 THE DOUBTER. 
 
 A stretch of low shore, on which the ocean breaks with large 
 noisy waves. A man and woman stand here. They clasp each 
 other s hands. Both faces are filled with agony. The man 
 speaks. 
 
 LOVE, your hair loosens, the winds have their will 
 with it, 
 
 Half its warm affluent amber dishevelling ; 
 Now they uplift it and now they lie still with it, 
 
 Salt from the sea on whose deeps they are revelling. 
 Stand with me, sweet, while the wave topples thunderous, 
 
 While the dim gull dares the morning s immensity, 
 O er us the sky s blue infinitude, under us 
 
 Reaches of swart shore and rocks in dark density. 
 
 Here we clasp hands with pale faces and pleasureless, 
 We with no heart for the light lapsing glorious 
 
 On till it dies among distances measureless, 
 On till it bathes among billows uproarious. 
 
THE DOUBTER. 113 
 
 Earth in her absolute happiness heeds us not, 
 
 Turned like some haughty implacable heart from us ; 
 
 Proud with supreme pride, she knows us not, needs us 
 
 not, 
 Laughs and is lovely aloof and apart from us. 
 
 Grief, like the scriptural angel imperial, 
 
 Points with stern finger the path for our feet to tread ; 
 Seen far away, rosy-robed and ethereal, 
 
 Love treads with weeping the ways we found sweet 
 
 to tread. 
 Oh the lost future, the doom dictatorial, 
 
 Dark with its curse of unchangeable severance ! 
 Ah, the fair past, the flown moments memorial, 
 
 Shrine where the sad thought pays passionate rev 
 erence ! 
 
 Fleetly indeed fades the joy life may hold for us, 
 
 Brief is our breath ere the end shall annihilate. 
 How can we guess what the future may hold for us, 
 
 Draped with a darkness no vision may violate? 
 Starless, opaque, irresponsive, inscrutable, 
 
 Who hath had eyes that might pierce the hard 
 
 mystery ? 
 Who of the prophets, the many, the mutable, 
 
 Crowding with creeds the long highways of history. 
 
 8 
 
114 SONG AND STOJtY. 
 
 This we have learned after questioning querulous, 
 
 This we have learned after longing importunate : 
 Life, whether painful or easeful or perilous, 
 
 Closes in death, whether woful or fortunate. 
 Not though the body and spirit both bleed for it, 
 
 More shall we learn while the centuries glide from us ; 
 Not though in awful ineffable need for it, 
 
 Praying we fling the last fragment of pride from us ! 
 
 Wherefore I say if a man hath loved urgently, 
 
 Given all his heart for a woman s dear pleasurement, 
 (Just as a wave with white worship insurgently 
 
 Rushes to mantle some crag s mighty measurement,) 
 How shall he tamely see fate in her dominance 
 
 Tear from his keeping what kings could not buy 
 
 from it? 
 See hope drop down, as in flame-shrouded prominence 
 
 Drops the doomed ship when the frighted throngs fly 
 from it? 
 
 You that are fair as a flower-stem is frangible, 
 
 Chaster than dawns with no shadow of night in them, 
 
 Filled with all graces intense though intangible, 
 
 Having the eyes with the deep dreamy light in them ! 
 
 More do I need you, my pure-browed, my beautiful, 
 Than the star needs the blue fathoms it burns within, 
 
THE DOUBTER. 115 
 
 More than the grove its bird-vassalage dutiful, 
 
 Or the mossed mill-wheel the stream that it turns 
 within \ 
 
 All things earth shows me, through years yet unborn 
 for me, 
 
 Lovely or lordly, in lineaments numberless, 
 Though they still wear the old charm they have worn 
 for me, 
 
 Yet shall wake yearning, unquenchable, slumberless. 
 Opulent pastures, or sun-fall s cloud-palaces 
 
 Clear purple mountains or meadowlands flowerful, 
 Riot of roses or chaste lily-chalices, 
 
 Each will bear sign of you, sacred and powerful. 
 
 Never an evening shall shape in the west of it 
 
 Any frail crescent s new silver fragility, 
 Never a sea-wave shall wreathe on the crest of it 
 
 Any full moonbeam s quick pale instability, 
 But, O my sweet, in the delicate thrall of these, 
 
 Luring my spirit s allegiance and loyalty, 
 Linked by mysterious kinship to all of these, 
 
 You shall still reign with unwavering royalty ! 
 
 Ah, could I trust that these farewells Tor each of us 
 Meant at the end but a fleet earthly vanishment, 
 
Il6 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 That an eternal delight were in reach of us, 
 
 Having flung down our dull burdens of banishment, 
 
 Then, though time smote me with savage hostilities, 
 How I would stand hardy-fronted and towerlike ! 
 
 Then, with a smile at all fate s possibilities, 
 
 How I would wear my worst agony flowerlike ! . . . 
 
 Still, O believers, if Christ could come down to you, 
 
 Come from the cross where they nailed him, disdain 
 ing him, 
 Come bloody-browed from the terrible crown to you, 
 
 Come with the insolent spear-wound yet staining him, 
 Half would desert his meek godhead denyingly, 
 
 Spurned like the corpse by the conqueror s chariot, 
 Half would forsake him, as lightly, as lyingly, 
 
 As the low soul of his own dead Iscariot ! 
 
 Seen as an image illusive and vapory, 
 
 Clad by the ages with blurring obscurity, 
 Reared statuesque o er some altar s dark drapery, 
 
 Love ye to praise your white Christ in his purity ! 
 This is not he that wrought bounty from slenderness, 
 
 Fed the large glad throng, while greater and lesser 
 
 eat; 
 This is not he that with voice full of tenderness 
 
 Called unto Peter at morn by Gennesaret ! 
 
THE DOUBTER. 117 
 
 This is no god that if raimented meagrely 
 
 Yet with meek love like a raiment enfolding him, 
 They that now worship would turn upon eagerly, 
 
 Turn with fond hearts that leapt high at beholding 
 
 him. 
 Nay, they would let the rough rains work their worst 
 
 on him, 
 Let the snows freeze him, the mountain pass swallow 
 
 him, 
 
 Leave the hot hate of the lightning to burst on him, 
 Ere they would dare to rise up and to follow him ! 
 
 Ah, were he stripped of the riches they gird him with, 
 
 Few then would serve him in silent humility, 
 Changed from the old haughty gods they would herd 
 him with, 
 
 Loving heaped altars and pompous docility ! 
 Oh, he is well, and his worship might never end 
 
 While upon rich easy cushions they kneel to him, 
 Daintily godlike, conveniently reverend, 
 
 Where the bland Pharisee legions appeal to him ! 
 
 Say that the north wind the tender grass nourishes, 
 Say that youth s hues are of all things the lividest, 
 
 Say of the rose that on frost-blight she flourishes, 
 Say of the star that by noon she is vividest, 
 
u8 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Say that all lives wear a touch of nobility, 
 
 Say that the oak may not crush the anemone, 
 
 But call not this god of mere church-gentility 
 
 Him that sweat blood in the glooms of Gethsemane ! 
 
 Look, the free sea, how it leaps on its sands to us, 
 
 Strong with a strength that no woes may emaciate, 
 Waving afar its pale splendors of hands to us, 
 
 Laughing with lips that no laughter may satiate. 
 Watch how the long surge goes wandering seeker-like, 
 
 Reared of this sea, the old arrogant leveller ; 
 Mark how the day seems to drink of it beaker-like, 
 
 Drink and be glad, as an infinite reveller. 
 
 Beautiful wild-throated sea, you are pitiless, 
 
 Proud in the power that we watch who are powerless, 
 Glad, though all earth should lie plundered and citiless, 
 
 So you still break on your bleak shores and flower- 
 less. 
 Sea, being free, being glad from the birth of you, 
 
 How shall we make our supreme despair known to you, 
 Hearing the old immemorial mirth of you, 
 
 Though in our greatness of anguish we moan to you? 
 
 Careless that sorrow should master and capture us, 
 Roll your broad luminous waters resiliently; 
 
THE DOUBTER. 119 
 
 Ah, for one tithe of the liberty rapturous 
 
 Born in their amplitudes, arching so brilliantly ! 
 
 Here by the sand where your billow breaks thunderful, 
 Fair as when first the old mighty Greek sang of it, 
 
 We, by your stately delights and your wonderful, 
 Take a last parting, with sobs at the pang of it ! 
 
120 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 CYNICISM. 
 
 FROM those who seize in sensual haste 
 Life s best of fruitage, day by day, 
 Who eat with greed, revile the taste, 
 Then cast the empty rind away ; 
 
 From those who crave the moment s ease 
 To miss the lifetime s larger cheer, 
 
 How false, how tame, from such as these, 
 How slight of worth, the ironic sneer ! 
 
 Off grave philosophy they steal 
 The classic robe her stature vaunts, 
 
 Dress her anew and praise with zeal 
 The bells and motley that she flaunts. 
 
 They carp at wisdom s gathered lore ; 
 
 They call her humblest maxims vain ; 
 Disdaining dogma, they ignore 
 
 The dogmas of their own disdain. 
 
CYNICISM. 121 
 
 Ah, fatuous idlers, if ye will, 
 
 Your lamps of banquet glitter bright, 
 
 But over them burn lovelier still 
 The pale pavilions of the night ! 
 
 Go, seek the man whose eyes have traced 
 
 Experience to her utmost ends, 
 Whose long vicissitudes have faced 
 
 Love s treachery and the loss of friends ; 
 
 Whose years have tested, while they fled, 
 How wrong may thrive with right low-flung ; 
 
 Whose tears have dropped upon his dead, 
 Hot from the anguish whence they sprung ; 
 
 The man whom life has racked and worn, 
 Yet mingled blessings with its blows 
 
 Pierced by the poignance of its thorn, 
 Yet given the richness of its rose ; 
 
 The man of temperate mind and tongue, 
 Who fairly met all change and chance, 
 
 Nor soothed caprice with pleasures wrung 
 From unconsenting circumstance ! 
 
122 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Go, seek this man, though cares enslave 
 The last slow term of his career, 
 
 And ask him if he dares to waive 
 The mighty problem with a sneer ! 
 
 Or if, through hours of toil and ache, 
 Has fluttered no mysterious breath, 
 
 Faint as a dream, yet strong to shake 
 The bastions of the gates of death ! 
 
PORTENT. 123 
 
 PORTENT. 
 
 1MUSE and read, from day to day, 
 Of human thought s far-widening sway. 
 Its gradual exodus I note 
 From shadowy periods remote. 
 
 I see false faiths in ruin lie, 
 Whose thronging towers once cleft the sky. 
 I mark, amid the past s renown, 
 Colossal bigotries flung down ! 
 
 And yet from history s feeblest youth 
 I watch in joy how deathless truth 
 Has striven to make, with stoic breast, 
 Her immortality manifest ! 
 
 And now, since they that love her strive 
 To strip the last barbaric gyve 
 Off limbs that such rude furrows mar, 
 A century s pain in every scar, 
 
124 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 At length from her glad lips may fall 
 Some holy oracle to appall ; 
 Some priceless utterance that shall cause 
 A world to tremble with applause ! . . . 
 
 Moments are mine when heaven s blue scope 
 Seems throbbing with mysterious hope, 
 And earth s great circuit seems no less 
 Thrilled by miraculous presages ! 
 
 I seem to hear, on each new breeze, 
 Vague yet stupendous prophecies . . . 
 Deep awe possesses me ... I feel 
 Stanch reason impotently reel. . . . 
 
 Where Science flies, with robes that shine, 
 Afar on embassies divine, 
 Dare we to dream her foot will press 
 Eternity s unknowableness? 
 
 Dare we to dream her hand will lay 
 Finality as bare as day, 
 And bring, for all dark doubts that brood, 
 Some lovely and mighty certitude? 
 
 Ah, who shall say? . . . The immense age waits ; 
 Veiled are the faces of the fates ; 
 While all things bode, in dread portent, 
 Some luminous and sublime event ! 
 
YESTERDAY. 125 
 
 w 
 
 YESTERDAY. 
 
 IE are met, with tearless eyes, 
 
 With variant sounds of sighs, 
 With souls that many memories fondly sway, 
 We are met, we two alone, 
 Where long winds move and moan, 
 We are met to make a grave for Yesterday. 
 
 See on his piteous face 
 
 The inalienable trace 
 Of morning and of youth s impetuous thrill ; 
 
 And wreathen amid his hair 
 
 The ruin of roses there, 
 And amaranths where the dim dews linger still ! 
 
 Let his low grave lie deep 
 
 For that sepulchral sleep 
 In glooms where blind oblivion loves to grope ! 
 
 Deep as our piercing care, 
 
 And hollow as our despair, 
 And dark as the smouldering torches of our hope ! 
 
126 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 About his rigid shape 
 
 What drapery shall we drape 
 Against the unholy hands decay would reach? 
 
 Let it be woven and wrought 
 
 Of many a mournful thought, 
 Yet white as the faith once plighted each to each ! 
 
 What requiem shall we raise, 
 
 Loveliest of Yesterdays, 
 Above the abasement of your brows divine? 
 
 What coronal of sweet sound, 
 
 In heavenly ways profound, 
 Shall music with aerial fingers twine? 
 
 Let her take sobs of waves 
 
 In void reverberant caves 
 Where the great sea s elegiac passion stirs ; 
 
 Let her take gales that go 
 
 With dreary adagio 
 Through lonely leafage of funereal firs ! 
 
 Let her take doleful cries 
 
 Of ominous birds in skies 
 That vaporous autumn twilights leave forlorn, 
 
 Or chimes of chill cascades 
 
 That plash through mountain-glades 
 From livid glaciers in the wintry morn ! 
 
YESTERDAY. 127 
 
 Let her blend strains with these, 
 
 Heard through the Italian trees, 
 Through olive and ilex when the moon floats pale ; 
 
 Strains rapturous and yet mild, 
 
 That glory of grief, that wild 
 Melodious anguish named the nightingale ! 
 
 O music, mix in one, 
 
 With eloquent unison, 
 All sorrowing chords that Nature s lyre can make, 
 
 Till your voluminous dirge 
 
 May echo and swell and surge, 
 And speak for the breaking hearts that mutely break ! 
 
 What lavish flowers and leaves, 
 
 Exequial crowns or sheaves, 
 On his austere tranquillity may we strew? 
 
 Pale violets dead for years, 
 
 Bathed by dead lovers tears, 
 With pathos lingering in their wistful blue ! 
 
 Chaplets that brides have worn 
 
 When tyrannous war has torn 
 Young heart from quivering heart, with tortures keen ; 
 
 Warm passion-flowers that show 
 
 Gethsemane in their glow, 
 And all the agony of the Nazarene ! 
 
128 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Dusk myrtles that have grown 
 
 Round statues overthrown, 
 Pitying the crumbled grandeurs where they creep ; 
 
 Poppies that softly bring 
 
 Opiates for suffering, 
 Red vassals in the shadowy courts of sleep ! 
 
 Ivy that wraps its bowers 
 Round gray disconsolate towers, 
 
 Where sombre tapestries wave in dusty state ; 
 Grasses that lean and drip 
 O er slumberous pools where slip 
 
 The stealthy and bloodless lives that sunbeams hate ! 
 
 Heap these above the clay 
 
 Of beauteous Yesterday, 
 Ere uncompassionate earth enfolds his head ; 
 
 While on through days to be, 
 
 With prescient eyes we see 
 Monotonous morrows their dull vista spread ! 
 
 Wandering wide-sundered here, 
 
 But one faint hope shall cheer 
 The spirits that falter as they journey thus : 
 
 That where death dares not stray, 
 
 Re-arisen, our Yesterday 
 In patient immortality waits for us ! 
 
NATURE IN BONDAGE. 129 
 
 NATURE IN BONDAGE. 
 
 1 SOMETIMES muse, in mournful way, 
 Since tyranny should make us mourn, 
 Of how the city s cruel sway 
 
 Chokes nature down with stony scorn ; 
 
 Of how, where traffic s noises rave, 
 
 Where dull roofs crowd and gray streets run, 
 The great primeval woods once gave 
 
 Their leafy laughters to the sun ; 
 
 Of how, in purlieus wrought for ease 
 
 And all that luxury enshrines, 
 Perchance a briery dell heard bees 
 
 Boom dreamy round its eglantines ; 
 
 Of how in slothful haunts of wrong, 
 Where vice and squalor darkly merge, 
 
 Perchance a crystal brook s pure song 
 Has thrilled the violet on its verge. 
 9 
 
130 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And yet, intolerant of thrall 
 Whose rigid rule she may not quell, 
 
 I mark, at many an interval, 
 
 How fettered Nature would rebel. 
 
 For clear in squares of courtyard space, 
 Or breaks of foliage rarely seen, 
 
 Or grass-rimmed pavements, I can trace 
 Her timorous episodes of green. 
 
 But where some fragrant park sweeps wide, 
 Her woful slavery gleams more plain, 
 
 As though its captive yearning cried, 
 With lovelier eloquence of pain. . . . 
 
 Ah, Nature, find your comfort here, 
 That still, for all man s power may do, 
 
 Your great heaven arches, year by year, 
 Its chaste unvanquishable blue. 
 
 And still, though art with garish light 
 Your duskier mood dismays and mars, 
 
 Pale o er the city, night by night, 
 Beam your undominated stars ! 
 
MYSTERIES. 131 
 
 MYSTERIES. 
 
 WARM calms of heaven o erbrood the earth; 
 On scented sward my feet are pressed; 
 Spring breezes make melodious mirth, 
 Yet silent awe pervades my breast ; 
 To-day by Nature I am shown 
 Her marvellous elements alone. 
 
 I linger where the daisies throng, 
 
 With golden disc on supple stem, 
 And careless of their beauty, long 
 
 To unveil the impulse guiding them ; 
 And wonderingly my soul receives 
 The resurrections of the leaves. 
 
 I cannot praise the emerald meads, 
 
 Where pomp of lengthening clover peers, 
 
 Nor that green radiance of the reeds 
 
 That cleave the marsh with slender spears. 
 
 My reverent heed alone I give 
 
 The miracle that has made them live. 
 
132 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Those blossoming trees whence odor floats, 
 The full-fed rivulet s joy intense, 
 
 The ecstatic trills from feathered throats, 
 Pierce me with strange bewilderments. 
 
 In all things lovely I would guess 
 
 The mystery of their loveliness. 
 
 But while I muse, the westering day 
 Drops from the horizon s damask air; 
 
 The pastoral distances turn gray ; 
 New mystery deepens everywhere. 
 
 And high night brings, released from thrall, 
 
 The mightiest mystery of all. 
 
SELF-DENIAL. 133 
 
 SELF-DENIAL 
 
 ABOUT her sweet majestic head 
 The locks are simply filleted ; 
 Serene she stands, with starry eyes, 
 Profoundly meek, sublimely wise ! 
 
 A goddess of surpassing fame, 
 She sees no stately altars flame ; 
 Within her grove there looms alone 
 A shrine of harsh Druidic stone. 
 
 But all the roads that hither wind 
 With splintry jeopardy are lined, 
 Where savage gales in shrouds of sleet 
 Like awful lovers wildly meet ! 
 
 And through the years, to reach her home 
 A few pale silent pilgrims come ; 
 On bleeding feet they bring to her 
 Their votive frankincense and myrrh ! 
 
134 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And then the goddess in return, 
 Above her altar cold and stern, 
 Rewards their patient love, they say, 
 Through some divinely mystic way. 
 
 None know the guerdon she confers 
 Except these tireless worshippers, 
 Who rather would its joys command 
 Than hold the world in their right hand 
 
THE POET S MASQUE. 135 
 
 THE POET S MASQUE. 
 
 r I X3-NIGHT the poet will give a masque, 
 A In his attic room, when the town is dumb, 
 And past a doubt it is surely true 
 That of all the multitude he will ask 
 Not any guest will refuse to come. 
 Grotesque in their contrasts, weird to view, 
 O er the bare plank floor they will glide along, 
 The ghosts of story, the ghosts of song, 
 And the ghosts of history, two by two ! . . . 
 Napoleon the Great, in rough array, 
 With forelock dark on his brow serene, 
 With the snows of Russia, in some odd way, 
 On his massive coat well buttoned up, 
 Will bring the famous Egyptian queen, 
 Who hands him wine in a jewelled cup, 
 Where may be melted, for all we know, 
 Some, marvellous pearl from tropic seas. 
 And after, closely following these, 
 Imperial Caesar, with laurelled head, 
 
136 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And purple toga of stately flow, 
 
 A grave majestic measure will tread 
 
 (Paganini himself, it should be said, 
 
 Will fiddle till morning, fast or slow) 
 
 Beside sweet Marie Stuart, that star 
 
 And flower of beauty, whose tender style 
 
 Of making her deep eyes vaguely smile 
 
 Was the ruin of poor dead Chastelard ! 
 
 And next, with crescent of gems half-hid 
 
 In his turban of splendid stuffs, behold 
 
 The illustrious Haroun Alraschid, 
 
 In silks of luxurious tinges clad ; 
 
 And at his side, with tresses of gold, 
 
 And robes that no gorgeous words can paint, 
 
 Languorous, gentle and somewhat sad, 
 
 The bloom on her pure cheek rich though faint, 
 
 Comes floating, with loveliness untold, 
 
 Lucretia Borgia, that well-known saint. 
 
 And next grim Richard, third of his name, 
 
 Who swam through blood for the English crown, 
 
 With bad lean face, in its chronic frown, 
 
 And humpbacked shape, walking very lame, 
 
 Will bring the Spartan queen on his arm 
 
 In her classic dress with its glowing zone, 
 
 Greek Helen, fatally, grandly fair, 
 
 In curve and coloring, eyes and hair, 
 
THE POETS MASQUE. 137 
 
 So touched with a strange Olympian charm 
 
 Divinely and dazzlingly her own ! 
 
 Then Faust, transformed to a gallant youth. 
 
 With velvet mantle and bending plume, 
 
 With curly blond beard and sword-hilt bright, 
 
 Will bring to the merry masque why, whom 
 
 But meek Cinderella, in ragged plight, 
 
 Barefooted, and looking, poor young maid, 
 
 Very pretty but very much afraid ! 
 
 And then, with solemn sculptural face, 
 
 That shows what his mournful heart broods o er. 
 
 With head bowed low and loitering pace, 
 
 Pale Hamlet will come from Elsinore. 
 
 And tripping near him, in rompish grace, 
 
 Still rubbing both eyes from her long sleep, 
 
 With gypsy hat and a ribboned crook 
 
 And petticoat made of twenty hues 
 
 But worn not in any wise too deep 
 
 For showing her small rosetted shoes, 
 
 Up here to this lofty attic-nook 
 
 Will come, in search of her missing sheep, 
 
 Beside grave Hamlet, little Bo-Peep ! 
 
 Then brave Godiva, clad in the light 
 
 Of her wondrous yellow hair, will appear 
 
 Beside Othello, as black as night, 
 
 With a great gold ear-ring in each ear 
 
138 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 And a gaudy raiment of cachemire. 
 
 And next the beautiful Guinevere 
 
 Will come with that Spaniard, droll and grim, 
 
 The lank Don Quixote, leaning to hear 
 
 While she murmurs gracious words to him, 
 
 As though in her memory were not 
 
 Any Arthur or any Launcelot ! 
 
 And so all night a crowd will stream 
 Through the poet s door, till rise of sun ; 
 And though these masquers, every one, 
 Are the children of unsubstantial dream, 
 Yet the soul of a poet often sees 
 Traits far more real in things that seem 
 Than in life s most firm realities. 
 And not the haughtiest king may deem 
 His pride or pleasurement half so strong 
 When courtiers in his palace throng, 
 As the poet s, when through his attic door 
 Come gliding over the bare plank floor, 
 Grotesque in their contrasts, weird to view, 
 The ghosts of story, the ghosts of song, 
 And the ghosts of history, two by two ! 
 
A LEGEND Of HARVEST. 139 
 
 A LEGEND OF HARVEST. 
 
 SO long ago that history pays 
 No heed nor record of how long, 
 Back in the lovely dreamy days, 
 The days of story and of song, 
 
 Before the world had crowded grown, 
 While wrong on earth was hard to find, 
 
 And half the lands had never known 
 The forms and faces of mankind, 
 
 When just as now the years would keep 
 Their terms of snows and suns and showers, 
 
 It chanced that Summer dropt asleep, 
 One morning, in a field of flowers. 
 
 And while the warm weeks came and fled, 
 In all their tender wealth of charm, 
 
 She slept, with beauteous golden head 
 Laid softly on her milky arm. 
 
140 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 She did not hear the waving trees, 
 The warbling brook she did not hear, 
 
 Nor yet the velvet-coated bees 
 That boomed about her rosy ear. 
 
 In many a yellow breezy mass, 
 The rich wheat ripened far away, 
 
 And glittering on the fragrant grass, 
 Her silver sickle idly lay. 
 
 But then at last, one noontide hour, 
 
 A bright moth, fluttering through the air, 
 
 Mistook her sweet mouth for a flower, 
 And waked her as he lighted there. 
 
 She rose in anxious wonder now, 
 To gaze upon the heightened wheat, 
 
 And saw its plenteous tassels bow 
 Dead ripe below the sultry heat. 
 
 Half crazed, she wandered east and west, 
 About the peaceful spacious clime, 
 
 Until at last, with panting breast, 
 She stood before old Father Time. 
 
A LEGEND OF HARVEST. 141 
 
 With tears of shame she told him all, 
 While pointing to the wheat unmown, 
 
 And said, " What power shall make it fall 
 Ere Autumn s bitter winds have blown?" 
 
 Then Father Time, with laughter gay, 
 
 Leaned low his frame and crooked his knees, 
 
 And tossed his white beard like the spray 
 That crowns the crests of wintry seas. 
 
 " Oh, daughter, cheer your heart," he cried ; 
 
 "The wheat shall fall ere falls the night; 
 We two shall mow it, side by side, 
 
 And reap it in the stars pale light." 
 
 So Summer cleared her brow of gloom, 
 And forth with Father Time she went, 
 
 And haggard age by youth in bloom, 
 Above the tawny wheat they bent 
 
 Ere fall of night the harvest fell ; 
 
 But since that season, fair and blithe, 
 As ancient annals love to tell, 
 
 Old Father Time has borne a scythe. 
 
1 42 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 A WHITE CAMELLIA. 
 
 IMPERIAL bloom, whose every curve we see 
 A So glacial a symmetry control, 
 Looking, in your pale odorless apathy, 
 
 Like the one earthly flower that has no soul, 
 
 With all sweet radiance bathed in chill eclipse, 
 Pure shape of colorless majesty, you seem 
 
 The rose that silence first laid on her lips, 
 Far back among the shadowy days of dream ! 
 
 By such inviolate calmness you are girt, 
 
 I doubt, while wondering at the spell it weaves, 
 
 If even decay s dark hand shall dare to hurt 
 The marble immobility of your leaves ! 
 
 For never sunbeam yet had power to melt 
 This virginal coldness, absolute as though 
 
 Diana s awful chastity still dwelt 
 
 Regenerate amid your blossoming snow. 
 
A WHITE CAMELLIA. 143 
 
 And while my silent reverie deeply notes 
 
 What arctic torpor in your bosom lies, 
 A wandering thought across my spirit floats 
 
 Like a new bird along familiar skies. 
 
 White ghost, in centuries past, has dread mischance 
 Thus ruined your vivid warmth, your fragrant breath, 
 
 While making you, by merciless ordinance, 
 The first of living flowers that gazed on death ? 
 
144 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 ROCKS. 
 
 THE whitening orchard scarcely stirs, 
 While through it roam and sing 
 Those mild melodious pillagers, 
 The breezes of late Spring. 
 
 In meadowy reaches, far and wide, 
 
 No balmier May was born ; 
 The expectant world is like a bride 
 
 Upon her wedding morn ! 
 
 All nature speaks its joy profuse, 
 
 To see chill hours retreat, 
 Save, in their lethargy obtuse, 
 
 These grim rocks at my feet. 
 
 Here timid mosses film their gray ; 
 
 Here starts the unfolding fern ; 
 But still they bide, from day to day, 
 
 Impenetrably stern. 
 
ROCKS. 145 
 
 Thus girt with life s exuberant grace, 
 
 Yet thus from life exempt, 
 In their stolidity I trace 
 
 The inertness of contempt. 
 
 With scorn they seem to brood, while these 
 
 Ephemeral changes pass, 
 The inconstant birds, the transient trees, 
 
 The perishable grass. 
 
 " Light waifs," perchance their souls avow, 
 
 " What kinship can you claim 
 With us that stood as we stand now 
 
 Ere Egypt had a name? " 
 
 10 
 
146 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE OLD GARDEN. 
 
 BEYOND the quiet homestead s lawn, 
 In drowsy peace it lies, 
 Well from the passing gaze withdrawn, 
 
 Its matted hedges rise. 
 Through solemn firs that veil the light, 
 
 To reach its gate we press, 
 Ere softly breaks upon our sight 
 Its halcyon loveliness. 
 
 Deep-rimmed with box, the paths we take 
 
 Through realms of plenty range, 
 Where summer s mellowing fervors wake 
 
 Perpetual charms of change, 
 And tender sounds, not told in words, 
 
 Forever haunt the breeze, 
 A sense of epicurean birds 
 
 And bacchanalian bees. 
 
THE OLD GARDEN. 147 
 
 For bloom and fruit, in blended way, 
 
 Here lightly gleam by turns ; 
 Beside the currant s crimson spray 
 
 The tiger-lily burns ; 
 Or roses raise their balmy lips 
 
 Near purple plums ; or yet 
 The gooseberry s rounded amber slips 
 
 Among the mignonette. 
 
 We see the ancient arbor loorn, 
 
 That bounteous vines enwrap, 
 And hear, within its fragrant gloom, 
 
 Pale-glancing foliage flap ; 
 Or when the wind of autumn grieves 
 
 Round pomps her power shall strew, 
 We watch the grapes from tarnished leaves 
 
 Hang dusty and dark-blue. 
 
 Shrewd wasps, in yonder jungle, haunt 
 
 The blackberry s beaded gloss ; 
 High stalks of maize in vigor flaunt 
 
 Green flags and silken floss ; 
 And here broad apple-boughs once more 
 
 Hesperian wealth unfold, 
 Whose dragon is the worm at core 
 
 That revels in their gold. 
 
1 48 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 Now emerald melons wax immense, 
 
 Or now with grandeur glows 
 The pumpkin s yellow corpulence, 
 
 In smooth rotund repose. 
 Here, too, all homelier life occurs 
 
 That household aims can please, 
 From curves of pimpled cucumbers 
 
 To bowers of tangled peas. 
 
 So, thronged by growths of many a grade, 
 
 The calm old garden lies, 
 Half mantled with monastic shade, 
 
 Half bared to altering skies ; 
 While sleepy spells are round it cast, 
 
 That gently brood and muse . . . 
 Dead songs and sunbeams of the past, 
 
 And immemorial dews ! 
 
A GERMAN CRADLE-SONG. 149 
 
 A GERMAN CRADLE-SONG. 
 
 OLEEP on, my baby, sleep in peace, while day to 
 
 S^ dusk is turning, 
 
 And o er the sunset s rosy calm one great white star is 
 
 burning. 
 Their glooms against pale deeps of sky bold castle-walls 
 
 are showing, 
 And through the shadowy valleyland the lovely Rhine 
 
 is flowing. 
 
 Oh, all the sweet babes in the bourg for soft repose are 
 
 weary ; 
 The sunshine only brings them joy, but night is grim 
 
 and eerie; 
 And, oh, I know that all night long, where reeds and 
 
 sedges quiver, 
 The deadly Lorelei combs her hair beside the starlit 
 
 river. 
 
150 SONG AND STOXV. 
 
 T is well through day for babes to play where sun 
 beams fling their lustre 
 
 Amid the arbor s yellowing leaves, and light the purple 
 cluster. 
 
 But, oh, I know, when suns are low and stealthy dark 
 ness follows, 
 
 With fiery eyes and streaming locks the mad gnome 
 haunts the hollows. 
 
 Oh, fair the river winds by day past towers and moss- 
 grown churches, 
 
 Past hamlets whence the fisher sails to draw the net he 
 searches ; 
 
 But there like phantoms float all night, while shrill the 
 owl rejoices, 
 
 Enchantresses in plumes of swans, that sing with angels 
 voices. 
 
 Sleep, baby, sleep; while mother-love your rest is 
 
 warmly screening, 
 Above your cradle, meek and pure, our Lady s brows 
 
 are leaning. 
 And, oh, I know that by her will some beauteous dream 
 
 has found you, 
 Some dream from heaven that stoops and wraps its 
 
 winsome wings around you ! 
 
CRICKET-CRIES. 1 5 1 
 
 CRICKET-CRIES. 
 
 IF the autumn winds are all 
 In a tender sort of swoon, 
 You can hear the cricket call, 
 Any autumn afternoon ; 
 And should you heed him, soon 
 You will hear, it may befall, 
 Dreamy language wing its way 
 Through his low and dreamy lay 
 
 " By the mist-empurpled skies, 
 By the red leaves lying sere, 
 
 I know that Summer dies 
 
 In the lands that held her dear. 
 And with his sparkling spear, 
 
 With his icy-brilliant eyes, 
 
 Snowy-bearded Winter speeds 
 On his whitest of white steeds ! 
 
152 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 11 Oh, the days will shortly be, 
 When here I must not cheep, 
 
 But in some black chink and wee 
 Of some old fireside creep, 
 To sleep and wake and sleep, 
 
 By the great log s yellow glee, 
 And slowly find, no doubt, 
 All the family-secrets out. 
 
 " From the hearth-fire s viewless flail 
 I can see the spark-chaff fly, 
 
 Ere that ashy film and pale 
 Furs the embers, by and by. 
 How much better taste have I 
 
 Than my relative the snail, 
 
 Toasting here, as fate appoints, 
 My extravagant hip-joints ! 
 
 " Hear the clock s quick tick, above 
 Even the bitter north-wind s roar; 
 
 Hear the old grandam, like a dove, 
 Coo her surreptitious snore ; 
 Hear the lovers laugh and more 
 
 See the lovers making love ! 
 And hear the purr of that 
 Tawny sybarite, our cat ! 
 
CRICKET-CRIES. 1 5 3 
 
 " How I hearken, while I bask, 
 
 To the hum the kettle wakes ! 
 In his dull prosaic task 
 
 How much merriment he takes ! 
 
 Ah, for me that kettle makes 
 All the nightingale I ask, 
 
 Except it be, mayhap, 
 
 The pine-log s bubbling sap ! 
 
 " Why does Mabel grow so pink 
 
 If she has not had a kiss? 
 It is fine, you lovers think, 
 
 To be making love like this ; 
 
 Yet a pleasant blaze, I wis, 
 And a cosey little chink, 
 
 Bring quite as much content 
 
 To the cricket temperament ! 
 
 " While the goldenrods, in seas, 
 
 Plume the lanes and dales with gold, 
 
 While a glory smites the trees 
 
 And the sumach-leaves burn bold, 
 In my longing heart I hold 
 
 These, and pictures sweet as these, 
 Waiting days more bleak and drear, 
 That my fireside voice can cheer ! 
 
154 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 " Oh for winds of solemn tune ! 
 Oh for chilly-lighted skies ! 
 
 Since she cannot die too soon, 
 Oh, too slow the summer dies ! " 
 Now in just this dreamy wise, 
 
 On an autumn afternoon, 
 
 If your faith be good and strong, 
 You can hear the cricket s song ! 
 
WOUNDS. 155 
 
 WOUNDS. 
 
 THE night-wind sweeps its viewless lyre, 
 And o er dim lands, at pastoral rest, 
 A single star s white heart of fire 
 Is throbbing in the amber west. 
 
 I track a rivulet, while I roam, 
 
 By banks that copious leafage cools, 
 
 And watch it roughening into foam, 
 Or deepening into glassy pools. 
 
 And where the shy stream gains a glade 
 That willowy thickets overwhelm, 
 
 I find a cottage in the shade 
 Of one high patriarchal elm. 
 
 Unseen, I mark, well bowered from reach, 
 A group the sloping lawn displays, 
 
 And more by gestures than by speech 
 I learn their converse while I gaze. 
 
156 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 In curious band, youth, maid, and dame, 
 About his chair they throng to greet 
 
 A gaunt old man of crippled frame, 
 Whose crutch leans idle at his feet. 
 
 Girt with meek twilight s calm and dew, 
 They hear this battered veteran say 
 
 How once the black guns roared and slew 
 On red Antietam s ghastly day ! 
 
 He tells of hurts that will not heal ; 
 
 Of aches that nerve and. sinew fret, 
 Where sting of shot and bite of steel 
 
 Have left their dull mementos yet ! 
 
 And touched by pathos, filled with praise, 
 His gathered hearers closer press, 
 
 To pay alike in glance or phrase 
 Response of pitying tenderness. 
 
 But I, who note their kindly will, 
 
 Look onward, past the box-edged walk, 
 
 Where stands a woman, grave and still, 
 Oblivious of their fleeting talk. 
 
WOUNDS. 157 
 
 Her listless arms droop either side ; 
 
 In pensive grace her brow is bent; 
 Her slender form leaves half descried 
 
 A sweet fatigued abandonment. 
 
 And while she lures my musing eye, 
 
 The mournful reverie of her air 
 Speaks to my thought, I know not why, 
 
 In the stern dialect of despair. 
 
 Lone wistful moods it seems to show 
 Of anguish borne through laggard years, 
 
 With outward calm, with secret flow 
 Of unalleviating tears. 
 
 It breathes of duty s daily strife 
 
 When jaded effort loathes to strive; 
 
 Of patience lingering firm when life 
 Is tired of being yet alive. 
 
 Enthralled by this fair piteous face, 
 While heaven is purpling overhead, 
 
 No more I heed the old soldier trace 
 How sword has cut or bullet sped. . . . 
 
158 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 I dream of sorrow s noiseless fight, 
 Where no blades ring, no cannon roll, 
 
 And where the shadowy blows that smite 
 Give bloodless wounds that scar the soul ! 
 
 Of fate unmoved by desperate prayers 
 
 From those its plunderous wrath lays low; 
 
 Of bivouacs where the spirit stares 
 At smouldering passion s faded glow ! 
 
 And last, of that sad armistice made 
 On the dark field whence hope has fled, 
 
 Ere yet, like some poor ghost unlaid, 
 Pale Memory glides to count her dead ! 
 
REMEMBERED LOVE. 159 
 
 REMEMBERED LOVE. 
 
 STILL as of old I seem to sit 
 Where gods convene, with brows that shine ; 
 The aroma still is exquisite ; 
 Still glows the unearthly wine ! 
 
 Yet Hebe, urging me to sup 
 
 With dimpled smile, no more I see . . . 
 But serving every golden cup, 
 
 Glides dark Mnemosyne ! 
 
160 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE PUNISHMENT. 
 
 rO haggard shades, in robes of mist, 
 For longer years than each could tell, 
 Joined by a stern gyve, wrist with wrist, 
 Have roamed the courts of hell. 
 
 Their blank eyes know each other not ; 
 
 Their cold hearts hate this union drear . . 
 Yet one poor ghost was Launcelot, 
 
 And one was Guinevere. 
 
THE OLD BEAU. 161 
 
 THE OLD BEAU. 
 
 HOW cracked and poor his laughter rings ! 
 How dulled his eye, once flashing warm ! 
 But still a courtly pathos clings 
 About his bent and withered form. 
 
 To-night, where mirth with music dwells, 
 His wrinkled cheek, his locks of snow 
 
 Gleam near the grandsons of the belles 
 He smiled on forty years ago ! 
 
 We watch him here, and half believe 
 Our gaze may witness, while he prates, 
 
 Death, like a footman, touch his sleeve 
 And tell him that the carriage waits. 
 
1 62 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 CONSOLATION. 
 
 WHEN all my life was wounded and forlorn, 
 It felt the sacred influence wrought by thee, 
 As when sweet airy couriers of the morn 
 Fling rosy prophecies o er shadowed sea ! 
 
 And now, though manlier force yet droop and fail, 
 Though deathless memories haunt me past control, 
 
 Dear spirit of peace, thou art the nightingale 
 That warbles amid the darkness of my soul ! 
 
ENVY. 163 
 
 ENVY. 
 
 WHERE spacious oak-trees thrive in rustling state, 
 No fragile saplings quiver with weak hate. 
 
 Where palaces loom proud in sculptured height, 
 No lowlier roofs desire the earthquake s might. 
 
 Where groups of chaste-urned lilies whitely blow, 
 Dark soilure does not crave their balmy snow. 
 
 Yet what life ever towered, sublimely sweet, 
 But sneers, like adders, hissed about its feet? 
 
1 64 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 MEISSONIER. 
 
 WATCHING your precious work, we vainly guess 
 What miracle creates as potent fact 
 Such height in brevity, width in narrowness, 
 And liberal vigor wed with cunning tact. 
 
 Your virile patience that no toil can crush, 
 The more we muse upon we prize the more, 
 
 O Liliput Angelo, whose wizard brush 
 Could paint a battle upon a louis d or! 
 
SONNETS. 
 
BETROTHAL. 167 
 
 BETROTHAL 
 
 MY life, till these rich hours of precious gage, 
 Was like that drowsy palace, vine-o ergrown, 
 Where down long shadowy corridors lay strown 
 The slumbering shapes of seneschal or page, 
 Where griffon-crested oriels, dim with age, 
 Viewed briery terraces and lawns unmown, 
 And where from solemn towers of massive stone 
 Drooped the dull silks of mouldering bannerage. 
 
 But now the enchanted halls break sleep s control, 
 With murmurous change, at fate s predestined stroke, 
 
 And while my fluttering pulses throb or fail, 
 I feel, in some deep silence of my soul, 
 New strange delight awakening, as awoke 
 The princess in the immortal fairy-tale ! 
 
1 68 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 CROWNS. 
 
 IT chanced that in the dubious dusk of sleep 
 I seemed to attain that realm where mortals throw 
 All gross mortality earthward ere they go 
 Forth as frail spirits amid death s hollow deep. 
 All folly and sin was here that life may reap, 
 All desperate fear and hope, all joy or woe; 
 And here all precious crowns the exalted know, 
 Lay gathered in superb tumultuous heap ! 
 
 Stooping toward these, I marked with silent awe 
 
 Their ponderous gold, or gems that beamed like day, 
 
 Or lovelier laurel that grand brows had worn ; 
 But hid below the beauty of each, I saw 
 Continually, in grim recurrent way, 
 
 The poignance of one small red-rusted thorn ! 
 
SONNETS. 169 
 
 SATIETY. 
 
 AS when among dense-clustering vines we sit, 
 Low-hidden from breezes round us, birds above, 
 Even so they bowered themselves with fervid love, 
 And scorned life s busy murmurs infinite. 
 Then silently, as though by stealth should flit 
 The expanded wings of some departing dove, 
 Did gradual time to either spirit prove 
 That passion had eternally flown from it. 
 
 Shocked by the ruin of their radiant dream, 
 With shuddering hearts that vaguely can divine 
 
 To what strange bourne their fated feet are drawn, 
 They stare in dumb fear each at each, and seem 
 Like two pale revellers on whose fruits and wine 
 Flares the white merciless irony of dawn. 
 
1 70 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE HOURS. 
 
 ONCE amid sleep I saw the twelve sweet Hours 
 Go lightly along, gay sisters, hand in hand, 
 Some with gold flexuous hair and faces bland, 
 Some dusky as night and wearing stars like flowers. 
 " Ah, lovely ! " I murmured, but the secret powers 
 Of slumber, issuing an occult command, 
 Changed these fair wanderers to a mournful band 
 That moved with earthward brows through leafless 
 bowers. 
 
 Then faintly across my dream a voice was borne . , . 
 " The forms you first beheld, so blithe of mien, 
 
 Look thus to eyes that hope s warm glory cheers ; 
 While they that walk funereal and forlorn, 
 
 Though still the same, by differing eyes are seen 
 Through shadow of anguish and cold mist of tears." 
 
SONNETS. 
 
 171 
 
 INTERREGNUM. 
 
 WHEN fevered piteously with deep unrest, 
 My heart through days of yearning drearier 
 
 feels 
 
 Than though in lands whence faded summer steals 
 It shivered among sere boughs, an empty nest, 
 Then, following her capricious mood s behest, 
 She at whose haughty feet my sad life kneels, 
 With rosy sorcery for one day reveals 
 The illusive smile that is her loveliest ! 
 
 Ah, then with happier change, I know not how, 
 This nest, my heart, whose vacant silence grieves, 
 Young carolling bird-throats charm, in sweet con 
 trol; 
 
 But soon the inconstant smile grows dim . . . and now 
 It is once more with me as though dead leaves 
 Were falling amid the autumn of my soul ! 
 
172 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE DIAMOND. 
 
 r shape my luminous life great ages went ; 
 For slowly its vivid fire had noiseless birth 
 Amid blank darkness of the old solemn earth, 
 Where long I abode in rayless discontent. 
 Then came at last discovery s dear event, 
 
 That showed the world my rarity and rich worth, 
 And made the light of my strange peerless mirth 
 Leap out to the loving sun, magnificent. 
 
 But now my cruel fate afflicts me sore ; 
 
 I, daughter of starshine, moonbeams, rain and dew, 
 
 I, that in kingliest keeping should endure, 
 I, that majestic centuries labored o er, 
 
 Am tossed one evening by an amorous Jew 
 In the lap of his luxurious paramour ! 
 
SONNETS. 173 
 
 AMOUR TERRESTRE. 
 
 WHEN, grieving that your loveless heart relents 
 By no compassionate sign, however shown, 
 I lull to quietude despair s chill tone 
 With tender dreams of Heavenly recompense, 
 Hope brings me, at these hours, no joy intense 
 That you, in habitations yet unknown, 
 Hereafter may at last become mine own, 
 To adore among divine encompassments ! 
 
 For should we meet where such far splendor lies, 
 I could not reverence in rapture warm 
 
 You dowered with chaste wings or the aureole s 
 
 wreath ; 
 
 But I should yearn to tear, like dark disguise, 
 The shining immortality from your form, 
 And find its earthlier womanhood beneath ! 
 
174 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER. 
 
 DULLED to a drowsy fire, one hardly sees 
 The sun in heaven, where this broad smoky round 
 Lies ever brooding at the horizon s bound ; 
 And through the gaunt knolls, on monotonous leas, 
 Or through the damp wood s troops of naked trees, 
 Rustling the brittle ruin along their ground, 
 Like sighs from souls of perished hours, resound 
 The melancholy melodies of the breeze ! 
 
 So ghostly and strange a look the blurred world wears, 
 Viewed from this flowerless garden s dreary squares, 
 
 That now, while these weird vaporous days exist, 
 It would not seem a marvel if where we walk, 
 We met. dim-glimmering on its thorny stalk, 
 
 Some pale intangible rose with leaves of mist ! 
 
SONNETS. 175 
 
 BEES. 
 
 TRADITION S favoring verdict would express 
 In you all duteous thrift and toil extreme, 
 Against gray wintry dearth, while summers beam, 
 Hoarding with zeal your honeyed bounteousness. 
 And yet in drowsy reverie I confess 
 
 That booming now where flowery vistas gleam, 
 Among these jubilant garden-paths you seem 
 The murmurous incarnations of idlesse ! 
 
 Nay, more, you are like those pages, clad of old 
 By pampering lords in velvet and in gold, 
 
 Who bore sweet amorous words, with cautious airs, 
 To delicate ladies in rich robes aglow, 
 Strolling down glades of shadowy Fontainebleau, 
 
 Or loitering at Versailles on marble stairs ! 
 
176 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 A TIGER-LILY. 
 
 STRANGE that in your dark-dappled sanguine flower 
 The sculpturesque repose can still endure 
 Of that celestial lily, wrought so pure 
 It lives as chastity s white type this hour ! 
 By what mysterious art, what baleful power, 
 Did you, Diana of all blooms, allure 
 From Nature s mood this Maenad vestiture, 
 And mock with gaudy tints your taintless dower? 
 
 Nay, long ago, I dream, through some warm dell 
 Of Asian lands a wearied tiger stole 
 
 Where you, in pale bud, felt your first dews cling ; 
 And while he slept beneath you, it befell 
 That all his deadly beauty pierced your soul 
 And made you this fantastic sultry thing ! 
 
SONNETS. 177 
 
 SLEEP S THRESHOLD. 
 
 WHAT footstep but has wandered free and far 
 Amid that Castle of Sleep \^Jiose walls were 
 
 planned 
 
 By no terrestrial craft, no human hand) 
 With towers that point to no recorded star? 
 Here sorrows, memories and remorses are, 
 
 Roaming the long dim rooms or galleries grand ; 
 Here the lost friends our spirits yet demand 
 Gleam through mysterious doorways left ajar. 
 
 But of the uncounted throngs that ever win 
 
 The halls where slumber s dusky witcheries rule, 
 
 Who, after wakening, may reveal aright 
 By what phantasmal means he entered in ? 
 What porch of cloud, what vapory vestibule, 
 
 What stairway quarried from the mines of night? 
 
i;8 SONG AND STORY. 
 
 THE SPHINX OF ICE. 
 
 WITH dark, with frost, with silence for her shrine, 
 Girt by her ghastly realms of dearth, despair, 
 She reigns in solitude, contented there, 
 A goddess beautiful and saturnine. 
 Round her vast huddling bergs of frozen brine 
 Jut spectral from the bitter North s gray air ; 
 Above her, weird auroras leap and flare, 
 And like swords points the acute stars ever shine. 
 
 And venturous mariners, through weary years, 
 Push up their bold barks, eager to discern 
 
 Her great pale shape, her secret to entice, 
 Till wrecked, numb, doomed, with half insensate ears 
 They hear long terrible laughter pealing stern 
 In arctic mockery from the Sphinx of Ice ! 
 
SONNETS 179 
 
 ON THE NEWPORT CLIFFS. 
 
 AT either hand, as far as eye can trace, 
 Lined with palatial dwellings, loom these heights, 
 Having old ocean s glory of tints and lights 
 To murmur mellow rhythms against their base ; 
 Or yet from many a porch of stately grace 
 
 Clear down to where the extreme cliffs verge affrights, 
 Having, through golden days and balmy nights, 
 Lawn after lawn to outroll its velvet space ! 
 
 Ah, cruelty of luxury ! . . . Dark for me, 
 
 Remembering, musing, all your splendor frowns, 
 
 Even here below this brilliant dome of sky ! 
 For pierced with untold pity, I can but see 
 Wan mothers, pent in rooms of torrid towns, 
 Lean over gasping babes and watch them die ! 
 
 NEWPORT, July, 1882. 
 
iSo SONG AND STORY. 
 
 TO MAURICE THOMPSON, 
 
 ON READING HIS " SONGS OF FAIR WEATHER." 
 
 LYRIST of woods and waters, loving best 
 Pure Nature s alterant charms, thou art to me 
 A new Theocritus, whose gaze can see 
 New joys in that wide Sicily of thy West ! 
 Yet now no longer thou companionest 
 
 Meek flocks on dewy lawns, but wieldest free 
 The bow of dead Diana, fallen to thee 
 By some divine and beautiful bequest ! 
 
 Thy words, that often are leafage to the sense, 
 
 Have strength like bark and grain of sturdy boughs, 
 
 And rhythm as of a wind that sweeps and veers, 
 Till by the sorcery of their influence 
 
 We steal down fragrant glooms where shy fawns 
 
 browse, 
 Or crouch where slim birds float from reedy meres ! 
 
SONNETS. 181 
 
 TO OSCAR WILDE, 
 
 ON RECEIVING FROM HIM A BOOK OF HIS POEMS. 
 
 YOUR volume like a Provence lute antique 
 Wed with a classic lyre were fitlier wrought, 
 So richly opposite its theme and thought, 
 Its art so Gothic and its aim so Greek. 
 Till now we had deemed that one alone might seek 
 From poetry what you with victory sought, 
 To blend those pure strains the Sicilian taught 
 With Spenser s line, luxurious and unique. 
 
 Nay, since your reverenced master dwells afar, 
 It has been given your spirit, I am sure, 
 
 To pass, deep-tranced by slumber s opiate sweets, 
 High up some white stair sheer to some white star, 
 And meet in its immortal vestiture 
 
 The splendor that men mean when they name Keats ! 
 
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