THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 /
 
 By Mr. W. E. HENLEY 
 
 A BOOK OF VERSES 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 Price 5s. nett 
 London : David Nutt 
 
 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 
 
 Essays in Appreciation 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 Price 5$. 
 London : David Nutt 
 
 Memorial Catalogue of the 
 
 FRENCH AND DUTCH 
 
 Loan Collection 
 
 EDINBURGH EXHIBITION, 1886 
 
 Price £3, 3s. 
 Edinburgh : David Douglas 
 
 A CENTURY OF ARTISTS 
 
 Price £2, zs. 
 
 Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons 
 
 (Edited) 
 
 LYRA HEROICA 
 
 A Book of Verse for Boys 
 
 Price 6s. School Edition, 2s. 
 
 London : David Nutt
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 
 
 AND OTHER VERSES 

 
 L O N D O N 
 VOLUNTARIES 
 
 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 
 
 AND OTHER VERSES 
 
 BY 
 
 W. E. HENLEY 
 
 1 
 
 LONDON 
 
 Published by DAVID NUTT 
 
 in the Strand 
 
 1893 
 
 Second Edition 
 Revised
 
 
 To R. T. Hamilton-Bruce 
 
 Edinburgh, Mar. 17, 1S92. 
 
 
 
 *o
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES- 
 PAGE 
 
 i. Andante con mofo, .... 3 
 
 ii. Scherzando, . . . . . 10 
 
 iii. Largo e mesto, . . . . . 15 
 
 iv. Allegro maestoso, .... 20 
 
 THE SONG OF THE SWORD, . . 25 
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' ENTERTAIN- 
 MENTS, 37 
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS— 
 
 i. Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade, 65 
 
 ii. We are the Choice of the Will : God, 
 
 when He gave the word, . 67 
 
 b 
 
 IX
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 iii. A desolate shore, . . . . 71 
 
 iv. It came with the threat of a waning 
 
 moon, ...... 74 
 
 v. Why, my heart, do we love her so ? . 76 
 
 vi. One with the ruined sunset, . . 78 
 
 vii. There 's a regret, .... 79 
 
 viii. Time and the Earth, . . . 81 
 
 ix. As like the Woman as you can. . 84 
 
 x. Midsummer midnight skies, . . 87 
 
 xi. Gulls in an aery morrice, . . 90 
 
 xii. Some starlit garden grey with dew, . 91 
 
 xiii. Under a stagnant sky, 93 
 
 xiv. Fresh from his fastnesses, . . 95 
 
 xv. You played and sang a snatch of 
 
 song, 98 
 
 xvi. Space and dread and the dark, . 100 
 
 x
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 xvii. Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook, 103 
 
 xviii. When you wake in your crib, . . 106 
 
 xix. O Time and Change, they range and 
 
 range, 109 
 
 xx. The shadow of Dawn, . . . 1 1 1 
 
 xxi. When the wind storms by with a 
 
 shout, and the stern sea-caves, . 113 
 
 xxii. Trees and the menace of night, . 115 
 
 xxiii. Here they trysted, here they strayed, 118 
 
 xxiv. Not to the staring Day, . . . 1 20 
 
 xxv. What have 1 done for you, . . 125 
 
 EPILOGUE, 129 
 
 
 XI
 
 With four exceptions, these numbers have appeared 
 
 in ' The National Observer,' by permission of 
 
 whose proprietors they are here reprinted.
 
 
 LONDON 
 VOLUNTARIES 
 
 (To Charles Whibley)
 
 Andante con moto 
 
 Forth from the dust and din, 
 
 The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare, 
 
 The odour and sense of life and lust aflare, 
 
 The wrangle and jangle of unrests, 
 
 Let us take horse, dear heart, take horse and 
 
 win — 
 As from swart August to the green lap of May — 
 To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts 
 Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware 
 In any of her innumerable nests 
 Of that first sudden plash of dawn, 
 Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large, 
 Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn 
 
 Forward and up, in wider and wider way 
 
 Shall float the sands and brim the shores 
 
 On this our haunch of Earth, as round she roars 
 
 And spins into the outlook of the Sun 
 
 (The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge), 
 
 With light, with living light, from marge to 
 
 marge 
 Until the course He set and staked be run. 
 
 Through street and square, through square and 
 
 street, 
 Each with his home-grown quality of dark 
 And violated silence, loud and fleet, 
 Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp, 
 The hansom wheels and plunges. Hark, O hark, 
 Sweet, how the old mare's bit and chain 
 
 4
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Ring back a rough refrain 
 
 Upon the marked and cheerful tramp 
 
 Of her four shoes ! Here is the Park, 
 
 And O the languid midsummer wafts adust 
 
 The tired midsummer blooms ! 
 
 O the mysterious distances, the glooms 
 
 Romantic, the august 
 
 And solemn shapes ! At night this City of 
 
 Trees 
 Turns to a tryst of vague and strange 
 And monstrous Majesties, 
 Let loose from some dim underworld to range 
 These terrene vistas till their twilight sets : 
 When, dispossessed of wonderfulness, they stand 
 Beggared and common, plain to all the land 
 For stooks of leaves ! And lo ! the wizard Hour 
 His silent, shining sorcery winged with power ! 
 Still, still the streets, between their carcanets 
 
 5
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep. 
 
 But see how gable ends and parapets 
 
 In gradual beauty and significance 
 
 Emerge ! And did you hear 
 
 That little twitter-and-cheep. 
 
 Breaking inordinately loud and clear 
 
 On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere ? 
 
 'Tis a first nest at matins ! And behold 
 
 A rakehell cat — how furtive and acold ! 
 
 A spent witch homing from some infamous 
 
 dance — 
 Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade 
 Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade ! 
 And now ! a little wind and shy, 
 The smell of ships (that earnest of romance), 
 A sense of space and water, and thereby 
 A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky, 
 And look, O look ! a tangle of silver gleams
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams, 
 His dreams that never save in our deaths can die. 
 
 What miracle is happening in the air, 
 
 Charging the very texture of the gray 
 
 With something luminous and rare ? 
 
 The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire, 
 
 And, as one lights a candle, it is day. 
 
 The extinguisher that perks it like a spire 
 
 On the little formal church is not yet green 
 
 Across the water : but the house-tops nigher, 
 
 The corner-lines, the chimneys — look how clean, 
 
 How new, how naked ! See the batch of boats, 
 
 Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung 
 
 beam ! 
 
 And those are barges that were goblin floats, 
 
 Black,hag-steered,fraughtwith devilry and dream ! 
 
 And in the piles the water frolics clear, 
 
 7
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 The ripples into loose rings wander and flee, 
 And we — we can behold that could but hear 
 The ancient River singing as he goes 
 New-mailed in morning to the ancient Sea. 
 The gas burns lank and jaded in its glass : 
 The old Ruffian soon shall yawn himself awake, 
 And light his pipe, and shoulder his tools, and take 
 His hobnailed way to work ! 
 
 Let us too pass : 
 Through these long blindfold rows 
 Of casements staring blind to right and left, 
 Each with his gaze turned inward on some piece 
 Of life in death's own likeness — Life bereft 
 Of living looks as by the Great Release 
 (Perchance of shadow-shapes from shadow-shows), 
 Whose upsnot all men know yet no man knows. 
 
 Reach upon reach of burial — so they feel, 
 
 8
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 These colonies of dreams ! And as we steal 
 Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze 
 Fitfully frolicking to heel 
 With news of dawn-drenched woods and tumbling 
 
 seas, 
 We might — thus awed, thus lonely that we 
 
 are — 
 Be wandering some depopulated star, 
 Some world of memories and unbroken graves, 
 So broods the abounding Silence near and far ■ 
 Till even your footfall craves 
 Forgiveness of the majesty it braves. 

 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 ii 
 
 Schtrzando 
 
 Down through the ancient Strand 
 
 The Spirit of October, mild and boon 
 
 And sauntering, takes his way 
 
 This golden end of afternoon, 
 
 As though the corn stood yellow in all the land 
 
 And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon. 
 
 Lo ! the round sun, half down the western slope — 
 
 Seen as along an unglazed telescope — 
 
 Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day : 
 
 Gifting the long, lean, lanky street 
 
 And its abounding confluences of being 
 
 With aspects generous and bland ; 
 
 Making a thousand harnesses to shine 
 
 10
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 As with new ore from some enchanted mine,. 
 
 And every horse's coat so full of sheen 
 
 He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus feels clean, 
 
 And never a hansom but is worth the feeing ; 
 
 And every jeweller within the pale 
 
 Offers a real Arabian Night for sale ; 
 
 And even the roar 
 
 Of the strong streams of toil that pause and pour 
 
 Eastward and westward sounds suffused — 
 
 Seems as it were bemused 
 
 And blurred and like the speech 
 
 Of lazy seas on a lotus-eating beach — 
 
 With this enchanted lustrousness, 
 
 This mellow magic, that as a man's caress 
 
 Brings back to some faded face beloved before 
 
 A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore 
 
 Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech) 
 
 Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless 
 
 ii
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more. 
 
 Till Clement's, angular and cold and staid, 
 
 Glimmers in glamour's very stuffs arrayed ; 
 
 And Bride's, her aery, unsubstantial charm, 
 
 Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone 
 
 Grown flushed and warm, 
 
 Laughs into life high-mooded and fresh-blown ; 
 
 And the high majesty of Paul's 
 
 Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls — 
 
 Calls to his millions to behold and see 
 
 How goodly this his London Town can be ! 
 
 For earth and sky and air 
 
 Are golden everywhere, 
 
 And golden with a gold so suave and fine 
 
 The looking on it lifts the heart like wine. 
 
 Trafalgar Square 
 
 (The fountains volleying golden glaze) 
 
 12
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Gleams like an angel-market. High aloft 
 Over his couchant Lions in a haze 
 Shimmering and bland and soft, 
 A dust of chrysoprase, 
 Our Sailor takes the golden gaze 
 Of the saluting sun, and flames superb 
 As once he flamed it on his ocean round. 
 The dingy dreariness of the picture-place, 
 Turned very nearly bright, 
 Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, 
 And shows no more a scandal to the ground. 
 The very blind man pottering on the kerb, 
 Among the posies and the ostrich feathers 
 And the rude voices touched with all the weathers 
 Of the long, varying year, 
 Shares in the universal alms of light. 
 The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, 
 The height and spread of frontage shining sheer, 
 
 1 3
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and 
 
 spires — 
 'Tis El Dorado — El Dorado plain, 
 The Golden City ! And when a girl goes by, 
 Look ! as she turns her glancing head, 
 A call of gold is floated from her ear ! 
 Golden, all golden ! In a golden glory, 
 Long lapsing down a golden coasted sky. 
 The day not dies but seems 
 Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed 
 Upon a past of golden song and story 
 And memories of gold and golden dreams. 
 
 14
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 S 
 
 in 
 
 Largo e mesto 
 
 Out of the poisonous East, 
 
 Over a continent of blight, 
 
 Like a maleficent Influence released 
 
 From the most squalid cellarage of hell, 
 
 The Wind-Fiend, the abominable — 
 
 The hangman wind that tortures temper and 
 
 light- 
 Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, 
 Hard on the skirts of the embittered night : 
 And in a cloud unclean 
 Of excremental humours, roused to strife 
 By the operation of some ruinous change 
 Wherever his evil mandate run and range 
 Into a dire intensity of life, 
 
 *5
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 A craftsman at his bench, he settles down 
 To the grim job of throttling London Town. 
 
 And, by a jealous lightlessness beset 
 
 That might have oppressed the dragons of old 
 
 time 
 Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime, 
 A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous 
 
 dreams, 
 
 Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet, 
 
 The afflicted city, prone from mark to mark 
 
 In shameful occultation, seems 
 
 A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, 
 
 With wavering gulfs and antic heights and shifting 
 
 Rent in the stuff of a material dark 
 
 Wherein the lamplight,scattered and sick and pale, 
 
 Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale : 
 
 Uncoiling monstrous into street on street 
 
 16
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, 
 Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread, 
 Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet 
 Somewhither in the hideousness ahead ; 
 Working through wicked airs and deadly dews 
 That make the laden robber grin askance 
 At the good places in his black romance, 
 And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose 
 Go pinched and pined to bed 
 Than lurk and shiver and curse her wretched way 
 From arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey. 
 
 Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows, 
 
 His green garlands and windy eyots forgot, 
 
 The old Father- River flows, 
 
 His watchfires cores of menace in the gloom, 
 
 As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore, 
 
 Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides, 
 b 17
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rot 
 
 In the squalor of the universal shore : 
 
 His voices sounding through the gruesome air 
 
 As from the ferry where the Boat of Doom 
 
 With her blaspheming cargo reels and rides : 
 
 The while his children, the brave ships, 
 
 No more adventurous and fair, 
 
 Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound 
 
 brides, 
 But infamously enchanted, 
 Huddle together in the foul eclipse, 
 Or feel their course by inches desperately, 
 As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted, 
 From sinister reach to reach out — out — to sea. 
 
 And Death the while — 
 
 Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile, 
 Death in his threadbare working trim — 
 
 18
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland, 
 
 And with expert, inevitable hand 
 
 Feels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung, 
 
 Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart : 
 
 Thus signifying unto old and young, 
 
 However hard of mouth or wild of whim, 
 
 'Tis time — 'tis time by his ancient watch — to part 
 
 With books and women and talk and drink and 
 
 art : 
 
 And you go humbly after him 
 
 To a mean suburban lodging : on the way 
 
 To what or where 
 
 Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say : 
 
 And you — how should you care 
 
 So long as, unreclaimed of hell, 
 
 The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable, 
 
 Thus vicious and thus patient sits him down 
 
 To the black job of burking London Town ? 
 
 19
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 IV 
 
 A llegro maestoso 
 
 Spring winds that blow 
 
 As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may ; 
 
 Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow, 
 
 Like matrons heavy-bosomed and aglow 
 
 With the mild and placid pride of increase ! Nay, 
 
 What makes this insolent and comely stream 
 
 Of appetence, this freshet of desire 
 
 (Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day !), 
 
 Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam 
 
 In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre ? 
 
 Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and 
 
 churn 
 
 The wealth of her enchanted urn 
 
 Till, over-billowing all between 
 
 20
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Her cheerful margents grey and living green, 
 
 It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing, 
 
 An estuary of the joy of being ? 
 
 Why should the buxom leafage of the Park 
 
 Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing ? 
 
 — Sure, sure my paramour, my bride of brides, 
 
 Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides 
 
 In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark, 
 
 Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade. 
 
 In the divine conviction robed and crowned 
 
 The globe fulfils his immemorial round 
 
 But as the marrying-place of all things made ! 
 
 There is no man, this deifying day, 
 But feels the primal blessing in his blood. 
 The sacred impulse of the May 
 Brightening like sex made sunshine through her 
 veins, 
 
 21
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 There is no woman but disdains 
 
 To vail the ensigns of her womanhood. 
 
 None but, rejoicing, flaunts them as she goes, 
 
 Bounteous in looks of her delicious best, 
 
 On her inviolable quest : 
 
 These with their hopes, with their sweet secrets 
 
 those, 
 
 But all desirable and frankly fair, 
 
 As each were keeping some most prosperous tryst, 
 
 And in the knowledge went imparadised. 
 
 For look ! a magical influence everywhere, 
 
 Look how the liberal and transfiguring air 
 
 Washes this inn of memorable meetings, 
 
 This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings, 
 
 Till, through its jocund loveliness of length 
 
 A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore, 
 
 A brimming reach of beauty met with strength, 
 
 It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream, 
 
 22
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 Some vision multitudinous and agleam, 
 Of happiness as it shall be evermore ! 
 
 Praise God for giving 
 
 Through this His messenger among the days 
 
 His word the life He gave is thrice-worth living ! 
 
 For Pan, the bountiful, imperious Pan — 
 
 Not dead, not dead, as dreamers feigned, 
 
 But the gay genius of a million Mays 
 
 Renewing his beneficent endeavour ! — 
 
 Still reigns and triumphs, as he hath triumphed 
 
 and reigned 
 Since in the dim blue dawn of time 
 The universal ebb-and-flow began, 
 To sound his ancient music, and prevails 
 By the persuasion of his mighty rhyme 
 Here in this radiant and immortal street 
 Lavishly and omnipotently as ever 
 
 23
 
 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
 
 4 
 
 In the open hills, the undissembling dales, 
 The laughing-places of the juvenile earth. 
 For lo ! the wills of man and woman meet, 
 Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared 
 As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befell, 
 To share his shameless, elemental mirth 
 In one great act of faith, while deep and strong, 
 Incomparably nerved and cheered, 
 The enormous heart of London joys to beat 
 To the measures of his rough, majestic song : 
 The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell 
 That keeps the rolling universe ensphered 
 And life and all for which life lives to long 
 Wanton and wondrous and for ever well. 
 
 24
 
 THE SONG 
 OF THE SWORD 
 
 (To Rudyard Kipling) 
 
 
 2 5
 
 The Sword 
 
 Singing- 
 
 The voice of the Sword from the heart 
 
 of the Sword 
 Clanging imperious 
 Forth from Time's battlements 
 His ancient and triumphing Song. 
 
 
 In the beginning, 
 Ere God inspired Himself 
 Into the clay thing 
 Thumbed to His image, 
 The vacant, the naked shell 
 Soon to be Man : 
 27
 
 THE SONG OF 
 
 Thoughtful He pondered it, 
 Prone there and impotent, 
 Fragile, inviting 
 Attack and discomfiture : 
 Then, with a smile — 
 As He heard in the Thunder 
 That laughed over Eden 
 The voice of the Trumpet, 
 The iron Beneficence, 
 Calling His dooms 
 To the Winds of the world — 
 Stooping, He drew 
 On the sand with His finger 
 A shape for a sign 
 Of His way to the eyes 
 That in wonder should waken, 
 For a proof of His will 
 To the breaking intelligence : 
 28
 
 THE SWORD 
 
 That was the birth of me : 
 I am the Sword. 
 
 Bleak and lean, gray and cruel, 
 
 Short-hilted, long-shafted, 
 
 I froze into steel : 
 
 And the blood of my elder, 
 
 His hand on the hafts of me, 
 
 Sprang like a wave 
 
 In the wind, as the sense 
 
 Of his strength grew to ecstasy ; 
 
 Glowed like a coal 
 
 In the throat of the furnace, 
 
 As he knew me and named me 
 
 The War-Thing, the Comrade, 
 
 Father of honour 
 
 And giver of kingship, 
 
 The fame-smith, the song-master,
 
 THE SONG OF 
 
 Bringer of women 
 
 On fire at his hands 
 
 For the pride of fulfilment, 
 
 Priest (saith the Lord) 
 
 Of his marriage with victory. 
 
 Ho ! then, the Trumpet, 
 
 Handmaid of heroes, 
 
 Calling the peers 
 
 To the place of espousals ! 
 
 Ho ! then, the splendour 
 
 And sheen of my ministry, 
 
 Clothing the earth 
 
 With a lively of lightnings .' 
 
 Ho ! then, the music 
 
 Of battles in onset 
 
 And ruining armours 
 
 And God's gift returning 
 
 In fury to God ! 
 
 3°
 
 THE SWORD 
 
 Thrilling and keen 
 
 As the song of the winter stars, 
 
 Ho ! then, the sound 
 
 Of my voice, the implacable 
 
 Angel of Destiny ! — 
 
 I am the Sword. 
 
 Heroes, my children, 
 Follow, O follow me, 
 Follow, exulting 
 In the great light that breaks 
 From the sacred Companionship : 
 Thrust through the fatuous, 
 Thrust through the fungous brood 
 Spawned in my shadow 
 And gross with my gift ! 
 Thrust through, and hearken, 
 O hark, to the Trumpet, 
 31
 
 THE SONG OF 
 
 The Virgin of Battles, 
 Calling, still calling you 
 Into the Presence, 
 Sons of the Judgment, 
 Pure wafts of the Will ! 
 Edged to annihilate, 
 Hilted with government, 
 Follow, O follow me 
 Till the waste places 
 All the gray globe over 
 Ooze, as the honeycomb 
 Drips, with the sweetness 
 Distilled of my strength : 
 And, teeming in peace 
 Through the wrath of my coming, 
 They give back in beauty 
 The dread and the anguish 
 They had of me visitant ! 
 32
 
 THE SWORD 
 
 Follow, O follow, then, 
 Heroes, my harvesters ! 
 Where the tall grain is ripe 
 Thrust in your sickles : 
 Stripped and adust 
 In a stubble of empire, 
 Scything and binding 
 The full sheaves of sovranty : 
 Thus, O thus gloriously, 
 Shall you fulfil yourselves : 
 Thus, O thus mightily, 
 Show yourselves sons of mine- 
 Yea, and win grace of me : 
 I am the Sword. 
 
 I am the feast-maker : 
 Hark, through a noise 
 Of the screaming of eagles, 
 33
 
 THE SONG OF 
 
 Hark how the Trumpet, 
 The mistress of mistresses. 
 Calls, silver-throated 
 And stern, where the tables 
 Are spread, and the work 
 Of the Lord is in hand ! 
 Driving the darkness, 
 Even as the banners 
 And spears of the Morning ; 
 Sifting the nations, 
 The slag from the metal, 
 The waste and the weak 
 From the fit and the strong j 
 Fighting the brute, 
 The abysmal Fecundity ; 
 Checking the gross, 
 Multitudinous blunders, 
 The groping, the purblind 
 34
 
 THE SWORD 
 
 Excesses in service 
 Of the Womb universal, 
 The absolute Drudge ; 
 Changing the charactry 
 Carved on the World, 
 The miraculous gem 
 In the seal-ring that burns 
 On the hand of the Master- 
 Yea ! and authority 
 Flames through the dim, 
 Unappeasable Grisliness 
 Prone down the nethermost 
 Chasms of the Void ; 
 Clear singing, clean slicing ; 
 Sweet spoken, soft finishing ; 
 Making death beautiful, 
 Life but a coin 
 To be staked in the pastime 
 35
 
 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 
 
 Whose playing is more 
 Than the transfer of being ; 
 Arch-anarch, chief builder, 
 Prince and evangelist, 
 I am the Will of God : 
 I am the Sword. 
 
 The Sword 
 
 Singing — 
 
 The voice of the Sword from the heart 
 
 of the Sword 
 Clanging majestical. 
 As from the starry-staired 
 Courts of the primal Supremacy, 
 His high, irresistible song. 
 
 36
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 (To Elizabeth Robins Pennell) 
 
 
 37
 
 'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits.' — Fantasio. 
 
 Once on a time 
 
 There was a little boy : a master-mage 
 By virtue of a Book 
 Of magic — O so magical it filled 
 His life with visionary pomps 
 Processional ! And Powers 
 
 Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones 
 And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, 
 Thronged in the criss-cross streets, 
 The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields, 
 Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, 
 Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul 
 Pavilioned jealously and hid 
 
 39
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 As in the dusk, profound, 
 
 Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere. 
 
 I shut mine eyes. . . . And lo ! 
 A nickering snatch of memory that floats 
 Upon the face of a pool of darkness five 
 And thirty dead years deep, 
 Antic in girlish broideries 
 And skirts and silly shoes with straps 
 And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks 
 Plain in the shadow of a church 
 (St. Michael's : in whose brazen call 
 To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed) 
 Sedate for all his haste 
 To be at home ; and, nestled in his arm, 
 Inciting still to quiet and solitude, 
 Boarded in sober drab, 
 With small, square, agitating cuts 
 
 40
 
 ENTERTA I NM ENTS 
 
 Let in atop of the double-columned, close, 
 
 Quakerlike print, a Book ! . . . 
 
 What but that blessed brief 
 
 Of what is gallantest and best 
 
 In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance ? 
 
 The Book of rocs, 
 
 Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, 
 
 Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calenders, 
 
 And ghouls, and genies — O so huge 
 
 They might have overed the tall Minster 
 
 Tower 
 Hands down, as schoolboys take a post ! 
 In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, 
 SchemselnihaT and Sindbad, Scheherezade 
 The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, 
 Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, 
 And Caspian, and the haunted bulk — 
 Ice-ribbed, tremendous, inaccessible — 
 
 4i
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 Of Kaf ! . . . That centre of miracles, 
 The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights ! 
 
 Old friends I had a-many — kindly and grim 
 Familiars, cronies quaint 
 And goblin ! Never a Wood but housed 
 Some morrice of dainty dapperlings : no Brook 
 But had his nunnery 
 Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites 
 To cabin in his grots and pace 
 His lilied margents : eveiy lone hillside 
 Might open upon Elf-Land : every Stalk 
 That curled about a Beanstick was of the breed 
 Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs 
 You climbed beyond the clouds, and found 
 The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged 
 And drowsy, from his great oak chair, 
 Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, 
 
 42
 
 ENTE RTAIN Al E NTS 
 
 Culled for his Faery Harp that came 
 
 And, perching on the kitchen table, sang 
 
 Jocund and jubilant, with a sound 
 
 Of those gay, golden-vowelled madrigals 
 
 The shy thrush at mid-May 
 
 Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the 
 
 triumphing dawn, 
 With blackbirds rioting as they listened still 
 In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world 
 
 spring 
 For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, 
 And mocked him call for call. 
 
 I could not pass 
 The half-door where the cobbler sat in view 
 Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun 
 In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes 
 Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know 
 Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched 
 
 43
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists 
 
 And elbows. In the rich June fields, 
 
 Where the ripe clover drew the bees, 
 
 And the tall quakers trembled, and the West 
 
 Wind 
 Lolled his half-holiday away beside 
 Me idling down my own, 
 'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest 
 
 Son 
 On his white horse along the leafy lanes ; 
 For at his stirrup linked and ran, 
 Not cynical and trapesing, as he lounged 
 From wall to wall above the espaliers, 
 But in the bravest tops 
 
 That market-town, a town of tops, could show, 
 Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail 
 A banner Haunted in disdain 
 Of human stratagems and shifts, 
 
 44
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 King over All the Catlands, present and past 
 
 And future, that moustached 
 
 Artificer of fortunes, Puss in Boots. 
 
 Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing 
 
 Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood, 
 
 And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases — 
 
 Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part 
 
 A faery chamber hazily seen 
 
 And hazily figured — on dark afternoons 
 
 And windy nights was visiting of the best. 
 
 Then, too, the pelt of hoofs 
 
 Out in the roaring darkness told 
 
 Of Heme the Hunter in his antlered helm 
 
 Galloping as with despatches from the Pit 
 
 Between his hell-born Hounds. 
 
 And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear 
 
 Outside the long, low timbered wall, 
 
 The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls 
 
 45
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS* 
 
 Down the lean plank before they fluttered the 
 
 pins : 
 For, listening so, myself could help him play 
 His wonderful game 
 With Hendrik Hudson deep in those haunted 
 
 hills. 
 
 But what were these so near, 
 
 So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought 
 
 The run of Ali Baba's Cave 
 
 Just for the saying 'Open Sesame/ 
 
 With gold to measure, peck by peck, 
 
 In round, brown wooden stoups 
 
 You borrowed at the chandler's ? . . . Or one 
 
 time 
 Made you Aladdin's friend at school 
 Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp 
 In perfect trim ? . . . Or Ladies fair, 
 
 46
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 But their white bosoms seamed with embrown- 
 ing scars, 
 Went labouring under some dread ordinance 
 Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the 
 
 while, 
 Strange Curs that wept as they, 
 Till there was never a Black Bitch of all 
 Your consorting but might have gone 
 Spell-driven miserably for crimes 
 Done in the pride of womanhood and desire , 
 Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night, 
 While you lay wondering and acold, 
 Your sense was fearfully purged, and soon 
 Queen Labe, abominable and dear, 
 Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom, 
 Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw 
 Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk) 
 And muttered certain words you could not hear : 
 
 47
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 And there ! a living stream. 
 
 The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags 
 And cresses, glittered and sang 
 Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness 
 Well-scrubbed and decent of your bedroom 
 floor ! . . . 
 
 I was — how many a time ! — 
 That Second Calender, Son of a King, 
 On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined, 
 Pausing at one mysterious door, 
 To pry no closer but content his soul 
 With his kind Forty. Yet 1 could not rest 
 For idleness and ungovernable Fate. 
 And the Black Horse, who fed on sesame 
 (That wonder-working word !), 
 Took me upon his back, and spread his vans, 
 And soaring, soaring on 
 
 48
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 From air to air, came charging to the ground 
 Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds, 
 And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I 
 
 sprawled 
 Flicked at me with his tail 
 And left me blinded, miserable, distraught 
 (Even as I was in deed 
 
 When doctors came and odious things were done 
 On my poor tortured eyes 
 With lancets, or some evil acid stung 
 And wrung them like hot sand, 
 And desperately from room to room 
 Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way) 
 To get to Bagdad how I might. But there 
 I met with Merry Ladies. O you three — 
 Safie, Amine, Zobei'de — when my heart 
 Forgets you all shall be forgot ! 
 And so we supped, we and the rest, 
 
 D 49
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates, 
 
 Almonds, pistachios, citrons. And Haroun 
 
 Laughed out of his lordly beard 
 
 On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three 
 
 For all their Mossoul habits !). And outside 
 
 The Tigris, flowing swift 
 
 Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed 
 
 With broken and wavering shapes of stranger 
 
 stars : 
 The vast blue night 
 Was murmurous with peris' plumes 
 And the leathern wings of genies : words of 
 
 power 
 Were whispering : and old fishermen, 
 Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to 
 
 shore 
 Dead loveliness ; or a prodigy in scales 
 Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold ; 
 
 5°
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 Or copper vessels stopped with lead 
 Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed, 
 In durance under the potent charactry 
 Graved by the seal of Solomon the King. . . . 
 
 Then, as the Book was glassed 
 
 In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint, 
 
 Bewildering angles, so would Life 
 
 Flash light on light back on the Book : and both 
 
 Were changed. Once in a house decayed 
 
 From better days, harbouring an errant show 
 
 (For all its stories of dry-rot 
 
 Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax, 
 
 Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes), 
 
 I wandered ; and no living soul 
 
 Was nearer than the pay-box ; and I stared 
 
 Upon them staring — staring. Till at last, 
 
 Three sets of rafters from the streets, 
 
 5 l 
 
 ,
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room 
 With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene, 
 Guarding the door : and there, in a bedroom-set, 
 Behind a fence of faded crimson cords, 
 With an aspect of frills 
 And dimities and dishonoured privacy 
 That made you hanker and hesitate to look, 
 A Woman with her litter of Babes — all slain, 
 All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes 
 Staring — still staring; so that I turned and ran 
 As for my neck. The same, it seemed, 
 And yet not all the same, I was to find, 
 As I went up. For afterward 
 Whenas I went my round alone — 
 All day alone — in long, stern, silent streets, 
 Where I might stretch my hand and take 
 Whatever I would : still there were Shapes of 
 Stone, 
 
 52
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 Motionless, lifelike, frightening — for the Wrath 
 
 Had smitten them ; but they watched, 
 
 This by her melons and figs, that by his rings 
 
 And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze, 
 
 The Painted Eyes insufferable, 
 
 Now, of those grisly images ; and I 
 
 Pursued my best-beloved quest 
 
 Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear. 
 
 So the night fell — with never a lamplighter; 
 
 And through the Palace of the King 
 
 I groped among the echoes, and I felt 
 
 That they were there, 
 
 Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes, 
 
 Hall after hall . . . Till lo ! from far 
 
 A Voice ! And in a little while 
 
 Two tapers burning ! And the Voice 
 
 Heard in the wondrous Word of God was — whose? 
 
 Whose but Zobeide's, 
 
 53
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 The lady of my heart, like me 
 A True Believer, and like me 
 An outcast leagues and leagues beyond the 
 pale ! . . . 
 
 Or, sailing to the Isles 
 
 Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall 
 
 A black blotch in the sunset ; and it grew 
 
 Swiftly . . . and grew. Teai-ing their beards, 
 
 The sailors wept and prayed ; but the grave ship, 
 
 Deep-laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad, 
 
 Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's 
 
 hand, 
 And, turning broadside on, 
 As the most iron would, was haled and sucked 
 Nearer, and nearer yet ; 
 And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps 
 Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now 
 
 54
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 That swallowed sea and sky ; and then 
 
 Anchors and nails and bolts 
 
 Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on 
 
 clang, 
 A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides 
 Of the Magnetic Mountain ; and she lay, 
 A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal 
 About the waters ; and her crew 
 Passed shrieking, one by one ; and I was left 
 To drown. All the long night I swam ; 
 ^ut in the morning, O the smiling coast 
 Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike, 
 Skirted with shelving sands ! And a great 
 
 wave 
 Cast me ashore ; and I was saved alive. 
 But, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes, 
 And, faring inland, in a desert place 
 I stumbled on an iron ring — 
 
 55
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 The fellow of fifty built into the Quays : 
 When, scenting a trap-door, 
 I dug, and dug ; until my biggest blade 
 Stuck into wood. And then, 
 The flight of smooth-hewn, easygoing stairs 
 Sunk in the naked rock ! The cool, clean vault, 
 So neat with niche on niche it might have been 
 Our beer-cellar but for the rows 
 Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars) 
 Full to the wide, squat throats 
 With gold-dust, but atop 
 A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things 
 I knew for olives ! And far, O far away, 
 The Princess of China languished ! Far away 
 Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief 
 Of Eunuchs and the privilege 
 Of going out at night 
 To play — unkenned, majestical, secure — 
 
 56
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped 
 
 Like Tigris shore for shore ! Haply a Ghoul 
 
 Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon, 
 
 A thighbone in his fist, and glared 
 
 At supper with a Lady : she who took 
 
 Her rice with tweezers grain by grain. 
 
 Or you might stumble, there by the iron gates — 
 
 Of the Pump Room — underneath the limes 
 
 Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers, 
 
 Just as the civil Genie laid him down. 
 
 Or those red-curtained panes, 
 
 Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily 
 
 Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes 
 
 Might turn a caravansery's, wherein 
 
 You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk, 
 
 And that Fair Persian, bathed in tears, 
 
 You 'd not have given away 
 
 For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous 
 
 57
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 You had that dark and disleaved afternoon 
 
 Escaped on a roc's claw, 
 
 Disguised like Sindbad — but in Christmas beef! 
 
 And all the blissful while 
 
 The schoolboy satchel at your hip 
 
 Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze 
 
 Gray-whiskered chapmen drawn 
 
 From over Caspian : yea, the Chief Jewellers 
 
 Of Tartary and the bazaars, 
 
 Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind ! 
 
 Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart 
 The magian East : thus the child eyes 
 Spelled out the wizard message by the light 
 Of the sober workaday hours 
 They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass 
 In the sleepy Minster City folded kind 
 In ancient Severn's arm, 
 
 58
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 Amongst her water-meadows and her docks 
 Whose floating populace of ships — 
 Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines, 
 Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters— 
 
 brought 
 To her very doorsteps and geraniums 
 The scents of the World's End, the calls 
 That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride 
 Like fire on some high errand of the race, 
 The irresistible appeals 
 For comradeship that sound 
 Steadily from the irresistible sea. 
 Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the 
 
 tale, 
 Telling itself anew 
 In terms of living labouring life, 
 Took on the colours, busked it in the wear, 
 Of life that lived and laboured : and Romance, 
 
 59
 
 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 
 
 The Angel-Playmate, raining down 
 
 His golden influences 
 
 On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did, 
 
 Walked with me arm and arm, 
 
 Or left me, as one bediademed with straws 
 
 And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart 
 
 Who had the gift to seek and feel and find 
 
 His fiery-hearted presence everywhere. 
 
 Even as dear Hesper, bringer of all good things, 
 
 Sends the same silver dews 
 
 Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies 
 
 On some poor collier-hamlet — (mound on mound 
 
 Of sifted squalor ; here a soot-throated stalk 
 
 Sullenly smoking over a row 
 
 Of flat-faced hovels ; black in the gritty air 
 
 A web of rails and wheels and beams ; with 
 
 strings 
 Of hurtling, tipping trams) — 
 
 60
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 As on the amorous nightingales 
 
 And roses of Shiraz or the walls and towers 
 
 Of Samai-cand — the Ineffable — whence you espy 
 
 The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears 
 
 Like listed summer lightnings. 
 
 Samarcand ! 
 That name of names ! That star-vaned belvedere 
 Builded against the Chambers of the South ! 
 That outpost on the Infinite ! 
 
 And, behold ! 
 Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide 
 Might overtake you : for one fringe, 
 One suburb, is stablished on firm earth ; but one 
 Floats founded vague 
 In lubberlands delectable — isles of palm 
 And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas, 
 The promise of wistful hills — 
 The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream. 
 
 61
 
 RHYMES 
 AND RHYTHMS 
 
 
 63
 
 Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade 
 
 On desolate sea and lonely sand, 
 Out of the silence and the shade 
 
 What is the voice of strange command 
 Calling you still, as friend calls friend 
 
 With love that cannot brook delay, 
 To rise and follow the ways that wend 
 
 Over the hills and far away ? 
 
 Hark in the city, street on street 
 
 A roaring reach of death and life, 
 
 Of vortices that clash and fleet 
 
 And ruin in appointed strife, 
 E 65
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Hark to it calling, calling clear, 
 
 Calling until you cannot stay 
 From dearer things than your own most dear 
 
 Over the hills and far away. 
 
 Out of the sound of ebb and flow, 
 
 Out of the sight of lamp and star, 
 It calls you where the good winds blow, 
 
 And the unchanging meadows are: 
 From faded hopes and hopes agleam, 
 
 It calls you, calls you night and day 
 Beyond the dark into the dream 
 
 Over the hills and far away. 
 
 66
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 ii 
 
 (To R F. B.) 
 
 We are the Choice of the Will : God, when He 
 
 gave the word 
 That called us into line, set in our hand a sword ; 
 
 Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and 
 
 draw, 
 And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet 
 
 of the Law. 
 
 East and west and north, wherever the battle 
 
 grew, 
 As men to a feast we fared, the work of the 
 
 Will to do. 
 
 67
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy 
 
 cease — 
 (Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a 
 
 place of peace !) — 
 
 Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire, 
 Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, 
 our sire. 
 
 Road was never so rough that we left its purpose 
 
 dark ; 
 Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet 
 
 more stark; 
 
 We tracked the winds of the world to the steps 
 
 of their veiy thrones ; 
 
 The secret parts of the world were salted with 
 
 our bones ; 
 
 68
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Till now the name of names, England, the name 
 
 of might, 
 Flames from, the austral bounds to the ends of 
 
 the boreal night ; 
 
 And the call of her morning drum goes in a 
 
 girdle of sound, 
 Like the voice of the sun in song, the great 
 
 globe round and round ; 
 
 And the shadow of her flag, when it shouts to the 
 
 mother-breeze, 
 Floats from shore to shore of the universal seas ; 
 
 And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of 
 
 her flowers, 
 
 And the end of the road to Hell with the sonse 
 
 of her dews and showers ! 
 69
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us 
 
 fade and die, 
 While the living stars fulfil their round in the 
 
 living sky ? 
 
 For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their 
 
 father's debt, 
 And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw 
 
 was set : 
 
 And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that 
 none shall brave, 
 
 Is but less strong than Time and the great, all- 
 whelming Grave.* 
 
 70
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 in 
 
 A desolate shore, 
 
 The sinister seduction of the Moon, 
 
 The menace of the irreclaimable Sea. 
 
 Flaunting, tawdry and grim, 
 From cloud to cloud along her beat, 
 Leering her battered and inveterate leer, 
 She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, 
 Her horrible old man, 
 Mumbling old oaths and warming 
 His villainous old bones with villainous talk — 
 The secrets of their grisly housekeeping 
 Since they went out upon the pad 
 
 7i
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 In the first twilight of self-conscious Time : 
 
 Growling, hideous and hoarse, 
 
 Tales of unnumbered Ships, 
 
 Goodly and strong, Companions of the Advance 
 
 In some vile alley of the night 
 
 Waylaid and bludgeoned — 
 
 Dead. 
 
 Deep cellared in primeval ooze, 
 
 Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled, 
 
 They lie where the lean water-worm 
 
 Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken 
 
 sides 
 Bulge with the slime of life. Thus they abide, 
 Thus fouled and desecrate, 
 The summons of the Trumpet, and the while 
 These Twain, their murderers, 
 
 Unravined, imperturbable unsubdued, 
 
 72
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Hang at the heels of their children — She aloft 
 
 As in the shining streets, 
 
 He as in ambush by some fetid stair. 
 
 The stalwart Ships, 
 
 The beautiful and bold adventurers ! 
 
 Stationed out yonder in the isle, 
 
 The tall Policeman, 
 
 Flashing his bull's-eye, as he peers 
 
 About him in the ancient vacancy, 
 
 Tells them this way is safety — this way home. 
 
 73
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHxMS 
 
 IV 
 
 It came with the threat of a waning moon 
 
 And the wail of an ebbing tide, 
 But many a woman has lived for less, 
 
 And many a man has died ; 
 For life upon life took hold and passed, 
 
 Strong in a fate set free, 
 Out of the deep into the dark 
 
 On for the years to be. 
 
 Between the gleam of a waning moon 
 And the song of an ebbing tide, 
 
 Chance upon chance of love and death 
 Took wing for the world so wide. 
 
 74
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Leaf out of leaf is the way of the land, 
 
 Wave out of wave of the sea 
 And who shall reckon what lives may live 
 
 In the life that we bade to be ? 
 
 75
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Why, my heart, do we love her so ? 
 
 (Geraldine, Geraldine !) — 
 Why does the great sea ebb and flow ? 
 
 Why does the round world spin ? 
 Geraldine, Geraldine, 
 
 Bid me my life renew, 
 What is it worth unless I win, 
 
 Love — love and you ? 
 
 Why, my heart, when we speak her name 
 
 (Geraldine, Geraldine !), 
 
 Throbs the word like a flinging flame ? — 
 
 Why does the Spring begin ? 
 76
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Geraldine, Geraldine, 
 
 Bid me indeed to be, 
 Open your heart and take us in, 
 
 Love — love and me. 
 
 77
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 VI 
 
 One with the ruined sunset, 
 The strange forsaken sands, 
 
 What is it waits and wanders 
 
 And signs with desperate hands ? 
 
 What is it calls in the twilight — 
 Calls as its chance were vain ? 
 
 The cry of a gull sent seaward 
 Or the voice of an ancient pain ? 
 
 The red ghost of the sunset, 
 
 It walks them as its own, 
 
 These dreary and desolate reaches . 
 
 But O that it walked alone ! 
 78
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 VII 
 
 There 's a regret 
 
 So grinding, so immitigably sad, 
 
 Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad. . . 
 
 Do you not know it yet ? 
 
 For deeds undone 
 
 Rankle and snarl and hunger for their due 
 Till there seems naught so despicable as you 
 In all the grin o' the sun. 
 
 Like an old shoe 
 
 The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie 
 About the beach of Time, till by-and-by 
 Death, that derides you too — 
 
 79
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Death, as he goes 
 
 His ragman's round, espies you where you stray 
 With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way ; 
 And then — and then, who knows 
 
 But the kind Grave 
 
 Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm, 
 In that black bridewell working out his term, 
 Hanker and grope and crave ? 
 
 ' Poor fool that might — 
 
 That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be. 
 Think of it, here and thus made over to me 
 In the implacable night ! ' 
 
 And writhing, fain 
 
 And like a triumphing lover, he shall take 
 His fill where no high memory lives to make 
 His obscene victory vain. 
 
 80
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 VIII 
 
 f 
 
 (To A. J. H.) 
 
 Time and the Earth — 
 
 The old Father and Mother — 
 
 Their teeming accomplished, 
 
 Their purpose fulfilled, 
 
 Close with a smile 
 
 For a moment of kindness 
 
 Ere for the winter 
 
 They settle to sleep. 
 
 Failing yet gracious, 
 Slow pacing, soon homing, 
 A patriarch that strolls 
 Through the tents of his children, 
 The Sun, as he journeys 
 His round on the lower 
 81
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Ascents of the blue, 
 
 Washes the roofs 
 
 And the hillsides with clarity ; 
 
 Charms the dark pools 
 
 Till they break into pictures ; 
 
 Scatters magnificent 
 
 Alms to the beggar trees ; 
 
 Touches the mist-folk 
 
 That crowd to his escort 
 
 Into translucencies 
 
 Radiant and ravishing, 
 
 As with the visible 
 
 Spirit of Summer 
 
 Gloriously vaporised, 
 
 Visioned in gold. 
 
 Love, though the fallen leaf 
 Mark, and the fleeting light 
 
 82
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 And the loud, loitering 
 
 Footfall of darkness 
 
 Sign to the heart 
 
 Of the passage of destiny, 
 
 Here is the ghost 
 
 Of a summer that lived for us, 
 
 Here is a promise 
 
 Of summers to be. 
 
 
 83
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 IX 
 
 'As like the Woman as you can' — 
 
 {Thus the New Adam was beguiled) — 
 ' So shall you touch the Perfect Man ' — 
 
 (God in the Garden heard and smiled). 
 ' Your father perished with his clay : 
 
 ' A clot of passions fierce and blind 
 ' He fought, he hacked, he crushed his way : 
 
 1 Your muscles, Child, must be of mind. 
 
 ' The Brute that lurks and irks within, 
 
 ' How, till you have him gagged and bound, 
 
 1 Escape the foullest form of Sin ? ' 
 
 {God in the Garden laughed and frowned). 
 84
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 ' So vile, so rank, the bestial mood 
 '- In which the race is bid to be, 
 
 ' It wrecks the Rarer Womanhood : 
 ' Live, therefore, you, for Purity ! 
 
 ' Take for your mate no gallant croup, 
 
 ' No girl all grace and natural will : 
 ' To work her mission were to stoop 
 
 c Maybe to lapse, from Well to 111. 
 'Choose one of whom your grosser make '- 
 
 (God in the Garden laughed outright) — 
 ' The' true refining touch may take 
 
 'Till both attain to Life's last height. 
 
 ' There, equal, purged of soul and sense, 
 ' Beneficent, high-thinking, just, 
 
 ' Beyond the appeal of Violence, 
 ' Incapable of common Lust, 
 85
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 ' In mental Marriage still prevail ' — 
 (God in the Garden hid His face) — 
 
 ' Till you achieve that Female-Male 
 ' In Which shall culminate the race' 
 
 86
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Midsummer midnight skies, 
 
 Midsummer midnight influences and airs. 
 
 The shining sensitive silver of the sea 
 
 Touched with the strange-hued blazonings of dawn : 
 
 And all so solemnly still I seem to hear 
 
 The breathing of Life and Death, 
 
 The secular Accomplices, 
 
 Renewing the visible miracle of the world. 
 
 The wistful stars 
 
 Shine like good memories. The young morning 
 
 wind 
 Blows full of unforgotten hours 
 
 87
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 As over a region of roses. Life and Death 
 
 Sound on — sound on. . . . And the night magical, 
 
 Troubled yet comforting, thrills 
 
 As if the Enchanted Castle at the heart 
 
 Of the wood's dark wonderment 
 
 Swung wide his valves and filled the dim sea 
 
 banks 
 With exquisite visitants : 
 Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires 
 With living looks intolerable, regrets 
 Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child 
 Heard from the grave : shapes of a Might-Have- 
 
 Been — 
 Beautiful, miserable, distraught — 
 The Law no man may baffle denied and slew. 
 
 The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze 
 
 To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms . . . 
 
 88
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O there 
 
 where it fades, 
 What grace, what glamour, what wild will, 
 Transfigure the shadows ? Whose, 
 Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours ? 
 
 Ghosts — ghosts — the sapphirine air 
 
 Teems with them even to the gleaming ends 
 
 Of the wild day-spring ! Ghosts, 
 
 Everywhere — everywhere — till I and you 
 
 At last — dear love, at last ! — 
 
 Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death, 
 
 Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will. 
 
 89
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XI 
 
 Gulls in an aery morrice 
 
 Gleam and vanish and gleam . . . 
 The full sea, sleepily basking, 
 
 Dreams under skies of dream. 
 
 Gulls in an aery morrice 
 
 Circle and swoop and close . . , 
 Fuller and ever fuller 
 
 The rose of the morning blows. 
 
 Gulls in an aery morrice 
 
 Frolicking float and fade . . . 
 O the way of a bird in the sunshine, 
 
 The way of a man with a maid ! 
 
 90
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XII 
 
 Some starlit garden grey with dew, 
 Some chamber flushed with wine and fire, 
 What matters where, so I and you 
 Are worthy our desire ? 
 
 Behind, a past that scolds and jeers 
 For ungirt loin and lamp unlit ; 
 In front the unmanageable years, 
 The trap upon the Pit ; 
 
 Think on the shame of dreams for deeds, 
 
 The scandal of unnatural strife, 
 
 The slur upon immortal needs, 
 
 The treason done to life : 
 9i
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Arise ! no more a living lie 
 And with me quicken and control 
 A memory that shall magnify 
 The universal Soul. 
 
 92
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XIII 
 
 (To James McNeill Whistler) 
 
 Under a stagnant sky, 
 
 Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom, 
 
 The Rivei*, jaded and forlorn, 
 
 Welters and wanders wearily — wretchedly — on ; 
 
 Yet in and out among the ribs 
 
 Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles 
 
 Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls, 
 
 Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, 
 
 Lingers to babble, to a broken tune 
 
 (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart !) 
 
 So melancholy a soliloquy 
 
 It sounds as it might tell 
 
 The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 The terror of Time and Change and Death, 
 That wastes this floating, transitory world. 
 
 What of the incantation 
 
 That forced the huddled shapes on yonder shore 
 
 To take and wear the night 
 
 Like a material majesty ? 
 
 That touched the shafts of wavering fire 
 
 About this miserable welter and wash — 
 
 (River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams !) — 
 
 Into long, shining signals from the panes 
 
 Of an enchanted pleasure-house 
 
 Where life and life might live life lost in life 
 
 For ever and evermore ? 
 
 O Death ! O Change ! O Time ! 
 Without you, O the insufferable eyes 
 Of these poor Might-Have-Beens, 
 These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays ! 
 
 94
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XIV 
 
 (To J. A. C.) 
 
 Fresh from his fastnesses 
 Wholesome and spacious, 
 
 The north wind, the mad huntsman, 
 Halloos on his white hounds 
 Over the grey, roaring 
 Reaches and ridges, 
 The forest of ocean, 
 The chace of the world. 
 Hark to the peal 
 Of the pack in full cry, 
 As he thongs them before him 
 Swarming voluminous, 
 Weltering, wide-wallowing, 
 95
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Till in a ruining 
 Chaos of energy, 
 Hurled on their quarry, 
 They crash into foam ! 
 
 Old Indefatigable, 
 
 Time's right-hand man, the sea 
 
 Laughs as in joy 
 
 From his millions of wrinkles : 
 
 Laughs that his destiny, 
 
 Great with the greatness 
 
 Of triumphing order, 
 
 Shows as a dwarf 
 
 By the strength of his heart 
 
 And the might of his hands. 
 
 Master of masters, 
 
 O maker of heroes, 
 96
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Thunder the brave, 
 Irresistible message : — 
 ' Life is worth living 
 Through every grain of it 
 From the foundations 
 To the last edge 
 Of the cornerstone, death. 5 
 
 97
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 xv 
 
 You played and sang a snatch of song, 
 
 A song that ail-too well we knew ; 
 But whither had flown the ancient wrong ; 
 
 And was it really I and you ? 
 O since the end of life 's to live 
 
 And pay in pence the common debt, 
 What should it cost us to forgive 
 
 Whose daily task is to forget ? 
 
 You babbled in the well-known voice — 
 Not new, not new, the words you said. 
 
 You touched me off that famous poise, 
 That old effect, of neck and head. 
 98
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Dear, was it really you and I ? 
 
 In truth the riddle 's ill to read, 
 So many are the deaths we die 
 
 Before we can be dead indeed. 
 
 99
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XVI 
 
 Space and dread and the dark — 
 Over a livid stretch of sky 
 Cloud-monsters crawling like a funeral 
 
 train 
 Of huge primeval presences 
 Stooping beneath the weight 
 Of some enormous, rudimentary grief ; 
 While in the haunting loneliness 
 The far sea waits and wanders with a 
 
 sound 
 As of the trailing skirts of Destiny 
 
 Passing unseen 
 
 ioo
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 To some immitigable end 
 
 With her grey henchman. Death. 
 
 What larve, what spectre is this 
 
 Thrilling the wilderness to life 
 
 As with the bodily shape of Fear ? 
 
 What but a desperate sense, 
 
 A strong foreboding of those dim, 
 
 Interminable continents, forlorn 
 
 And many-silenced in a dusk 
 
 Inviolable utterly and dead 
 
 As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and 
 
 styes 
 In hugger-mugger through eternity ? 
 
 Life — life — let there be life ! 
 
 Better a thousand times the roaring hours 
 
 When wave and wind, 
 
 IOI
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Like the Arch-Murderer in flight 
 From the Avenger at his heel, 
 Storm through the desolate fastnesses 
 And wild waste places of the world ! 
 
 Life — give me life until the end, 
 
 That at the very top of being, 
 
 The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, 
 
 Out of the reddest hell of the fight 
 
 I may be snatched and flung 
 
 Into the everlasting lull, 
 
 The immortal, incommunicable dream. 
 
 102
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XVII 
 
 CARMEN PATIBULARE 
 (ToH. S.) 
 
 Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook 
 
 And the rope of the Black Election, 
 'Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule 
 
 Can never achieve perfection : 
 So ' It's O for the time of the new Sublime 
 
 And the better than human way 
 When the Wolf (poor beast) shall come to his 
 own 
 
 And the Rat shall have his day ! ' 
 
 For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam 
 
 And the power of provocation, 
 103
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful 
 fruit 
 
 Till your thought is mere stupration : 
 And ' It 's how should we rise to be pure and wise, 
 
 And how can we choose but fall, 
 So long as the Hangman makes us dread 
 
 And the Noose floats free for all ? ' 
 
 So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign 
 And the trick there 's no recalling, 
 
 They will haggle and hew till they hack you 
 through 
 And at last they lay you sprawling : 
 
 When ' Hey ! for the hour of the race in flower 
 And the long good-bye to sin ! ' 
 
 And ' Ho ! for the fires of Hell gone out 
 
 For the want of keeping in ! ' 
 
 104
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough 
 
 And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, 
 Your growth began with the life of Man 
 
 And only his death can end you : 
 They may tug in line at your hempen twine, 
 
 They may flourish with axe and saw, 
 But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs 
 
 In the living rock of Law. 
 
 And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork, 
 
 When the spent sun reels and blunders 
 Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit 
 
 As it seethes in spate and thunders, 
 Stern on the glare of the tortured air 
 
 Your lines august shall gloom, 
 And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed 
 
 In the ruining roar of Doom. 
 
 i°5
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 xvm 
 
 (To M. E. H.) 
 
 When you wake in your crib, 
 
 You, an inch of experience — 
 
 Vaulted about 
 
 With the wonder of darkness ; 
 
 Wailing and striving 
 
 To reach from your feebleness 
 
 Something you feel 
 
 Will be good to and cherish you, 
 
 Something you know 
 
 And can rest upon blindly : 
 
 O then a hand 
 
 (Your mother's, your mother's !) 
 
 By the fall of its fingers 
 
 106
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 All knowledge, all power to you. 
 Out of the dreary, 
 Discouraging strangenesses 
 Comes to and masters you, 
 Takes you, and lovingly 
 Woos you and soothes you 
 Back, as you cling to it, 
 Back to some comforting 
 Corner of sleep. 
 
 So you wake in your bed, 
 Having lived, having loved : 
 But the shadows are there, 
 And the world and its kingdoms 
 Incredibly faded ; 
 And you grope through the Terror 
 Above you and under 
 
 For the light, for the warmth, 
 
 107
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 The assurance of life ; 
 But the blasts are ice-born, 
 And your heart is nigh burst 
 With the weight of the gloom 
 And the stress of your strangled 
 And desperate endeavour : 
 Sudden a hand — 
 Mother, O Mother ! — 
 God at His best to you, 
 Out of the roaring, 
 Impossible silences, 
 FaDs on and urges you, 
 Mightily, tenderly, 
 Forth, as you clutch at it, 
 Forth to the infinite 
 Peace of the Grave. 
 
 108
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XIX 
 
 O Time and Change, they range and range 
 
 From sunshine round to thunder ! — 
 They glance and go as the great winds blow, 
 
 And the best of our dreams drive under : 
 For Time and Change estrange, estrange — 
 
 And, now they have looked and seen us, 
 O we that were dear we are ail-too near 
 
 With the thick of the world between us. 
 
 O Death and Time, they chime and chime 
 
 Like bells at sunset falling ! — 
 
 They end the song, they right the wrong, 
 
 They set the old echoes calling: 
 109
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 For Death and Time bring on the prime 
 
 Of God's own chosen weather, 
 And we lie in the peace of the Great Release 
 
 As once in the grass together. 
 
 no
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 xx 
 
 The shadow of Dawn ; 
 
 Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams 
 
 Of Life and Death and Sleep ; 
 
 Heard over gleaming flats the old unchanging 
 
 sound 
 Of the old unchanging Sea. 
 
 My soul and yours — 
 
 O hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts, 
 
 Into the ghostliness, 
 
 The infinite and abounding solitudes, 
 
 Beyond — O beyond ! — beyond . . . 
 
 Hi
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Here in the porch 
 
 Upon the multitudinous silences 
 
 Of the kingdoms of the grave, 
 
 We twain are you and I — two ghosts Omnipotence 
 
 Can touch no more ... no more ! 
 
 112
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XXI 
 
 When the wind storms by with a shout, and the 
 
 stern sea-caves 
 Exult in the tramp and the roar of onsetting 
 
 waves, 
 Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the 
 
 top of life 
 Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of 
 
 strife — 
 Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet 
 
 graves. 
 
 But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog 
 
 before, 
 When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles 
 
 the shore, 
 
 h 113
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no 
 
 wrong, 
 Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your 
 
 sire's old song — 
 O you envy the blessed dead that can live no 
 
 more ! 
 
 114
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XXII 
 
 Trees and the menace of night ; 
 
 Then a long, lonely, leaden mere 
 
 Backed by a desolate fell 
 
 As by a spectral battlement ; and then, 
 
 Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, 
 
 A vast, grey, listless, inexpressive sky, 
 
 So beggared, so incredibly bereft 
 
 Of starlight and the song of racing worlds 
 
 It might have bellied down upon the Void 
 
 Where as in terror Light was beginning to be. 
 
 Hist ! In the trees fulfilled of night 
 (Night and the wretchedness of the sky) 
 
 "5
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Is it the hurry of the rain ? 
 Or the noise of a drive of the Dead 
 Streaming before the irresistible Will 
 Through the strange dusk of this, the 
 
 Debateable Land 
 Between their place and ours ? 
 
 Like the forgetfulness 
 
 Of the work-a-day world made visible, 
 
 A mist falls from the melancholy sky : 
 
 A messenger from some lost and loving 
 
 soul, 
 Hopeless, far wandered, dazed 
 Here in the provinces of life, 
 A great white moth fades miserably past. 
 
 Thro' the trees in the strange dead night, 
 
 Under the vast dead sky, 
 116
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead 
 Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom 
 
 fell, 
 And the unimagined vastitudes beyond. 
 
 117
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 xxm 
 (To P. A. G.) 
 
 Here they trysted, here they strayed 
 
 In the leafage dewy and boon, 
 Many a man and many a maid, 
 
 And the morn was merry June : 
 ' Death is fleet, Life is sweet,' 
 
 Sang the blackbird in the may ; 
 And the hour with flying feet 
 
 While they dreamed was yesterday. 
 
 Many a maid and many a man 
 
 Found the leafage close and boon ; 
 
 Many a destiny began — 
 
 O the morn was merry June. 
 nS
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Dead and gone, dead and gone, 
 (Hark the blackbird in the may !), 
 
 Life and Death went hurrying on, 
 
 Cheek on cheek — and where were they ? 
 
 Dust in dust engendering dust 
 
 In the leafage fresh and boon, 
 Man and maid fulfil their trust — 
 
 Still the morn turns merry June. 
 Mother Life, Father Death 
 
 (O the blackbird in the may !), 
 Each the other's breath for breath, 
 
 Fleet the times of the world away. 
 
 119
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XXIV 
 
 (To A. C.) 
 
 Not to the staring Day, 
 
 For all the importunate questionings he pursues 
 
 In his big, violent voice, 
 
 Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude, 
 
 God's foresters, the Trees, 
 
 Yield of their huge unutterable selves. 
 
 Midsummer-manifold, each one 
 
 Voluminous, a labyrinth of life, 
 
 They keep their greenest musings and the dim 
 
 dreams 
 That haunt their leaner privacies 
 
 I20
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Dissembled, baffling the random gapeseed still 
 
 With blank full-faces or the innocent ffiiile 
 
 Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade, 
 
 "And disappearances of homing birds, 
 
 And frolicsome freaks 
 
 Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs. 
 
 But at the word 
 
 Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night, 
 
 Night of the many secrets, whose effect — 
 
 Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread — 
 
 Themselves alone may fully apprehend, 
 
 They tremble and are changed : 
 
 In each, the uncouth individual soul 
 
 Looms forth and glooms 
 
 Essential, and, their bodily presences 
 
 Touched with inordinate significance, 
 
 Wearing the darkness like the livery 
 
 I2i
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Of some mysterious and tremendous guild, 
 
 They brood — they menace — they appal : 
 
 Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they 
 
 wring 
 Wild hands of warning in the face 
 Of some inevitable advance of doom : 
 Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing, 
 As in some monstrous market-place, 
 They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime, 
 In that old speech their forefathers 
 Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard 
 The troubled voice of Eve 
 Naming the wondering folk of Paradise. 
 
 Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them tell 
 
 The tale of their dim life and all 
 
 Its compost of experience : how the Sun 
 
 122
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Spreads them their daily feast, 
 
 Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine ; 
 
 Of the old Moon's fitful solicitude 
 
 And those mild messages the Stars 
 
 Descend in silver silences and dews ; 
 
 Or what the sweet-breathing West, 
 
 Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat, 
 
 Said, and their leafage laughed ; 
 
 And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain 
 
 Came whispering . . . whispering ; and the gifts 
 
 of the Year — 
 The sting of the stirring sap 
 Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring, 
 Their summer amplitudes of pomp 
 And rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill, 
 Embittered housewifery 
 Of the lean Winter : all such things, 
 
 And with them all the goodness of the Master 
 
 123
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 Whose right hand blesses with increase and 
 
 life, 
 Whose left hand honours with decay and death. 
 
 Thus under the constraint of Night 
 
 These gross and simple creatures, 
 
 Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years, 
 
 A servant of the Will. 
 
 And God, the Craftsman, as He walks 
 
 The floor of His workshop, hearkens, full of cheer 
 
 In thus accomplishing 
 
 The aims of His miraculous artistry. 
 
 124
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 XXV 
 
 What have I done for you, 
 
 England, my England ? 
 What is there I would not do, 
 
 England, my own ? 
 With your glorious eyes austere, 
 As the Lord were walking near, 
 Whispering terrible things and dear 
 
 As the Song on your bugles blown, 
 England — 
 
 Round the world on your bugles blown 
 
 Where shall the watchful Sun, 
 
 England, my England, 
 Match the master-work you 've done, 
 
 England, my own ? 
 I2 5
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 When shall he rejoice agen 
 Such a breed of mighty men 
 As come forward, one to ten, 
 
 To the Song on your bugles blown, 
 England — 
 
 Down the years on your bugles blown ? 
 
 Ever the faith endures, 
 
 England, my England : — 
 ' Take and break us : we are yours, 
 
 ' England, my own ! 
 ' Life is good, and joy runs high 
 ' Between English earth and sky : 
 ' Death is death ; but we shall die 
 
 ' To the Song on your bugles blown, 
 
 ' England — 
 
 ' To the stars on your bugles blown ! ' 
 126
 
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 They call you proud and hard, 
 
 England, my England : 
 You with worlds to watch and ward, 
 
 England, my own ! 
 You whose mailed hand keeps the keys 
 Of such teeming destinies 
 You could know nor dread nor ease 
 
 Were the Song on your bugles blown, 
 England, 
 
 Round the Pit on your bugles blown ! 
 
 Mother of Ships whose might, 
 
 England, my England, 
 Is the fierce old Sea's delight, 
 
 England, my own, 
 
 Chosen daughter of the Lord, 
 
 Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword, 
 
 J 27
 
 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 
 
 There's the menace of the Word 
 
 In the Song on your bugles blown, 
 
 England — 
 Out of heaven on your bugles blown ! 
 
 128
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 SOMETHING is dead . . . 
 
 The grace of sunset solitudes, the march 
 
 Of the solitary moon, the pomp and power 
 
 Of round on round of shining soldier-stars 
 
 Patrolling space, the bounties of the sun — 
 
 Sovran, tremendous, inaccessible — 
 
 The multitudinous friendliness of the sea, 
 
 Possess no more — no more. 
 
 Something is dead . . . 
 The autumn rain-rot deeper and wider soaks 
 And spreads, the burden of winter heavier weighs, 
 i 129
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 His melancholy close and closer yet 
 Cleaves, and those incantations of the Spring 
 That made the heart a centre of miracles 
 Grow formal, and the wonder-working hours 
 Arise no more — no more. 
 
 Something is dead . . . 
 
 ' Tis time to creep in close about the fire 
 
 And tell grey tales of what we were, and dream 
 
 Old dreams and faded, and as we may rejoice 
 
 In the young life that round us leaps and laughs, 
 
 A fountain in the sunshine, in the pride 
 
 Of God's best gift that to us twain returns, 
 
 Dear Heart, no more — no more. 
 
 130
 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable 
 Printers to Her Majesty
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 VIEWS and REVIEWS 
 
 ESSAYS IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 
 i6mo. xn. -235 pages. Printed by Constable 
 Cloth, top gilt 
 
 Price 5J. nett. 
 
 * # * Twenty Copies printed on Japanese vellum and bound 
 
 in half-morocco. Four Copies remain for 
 
 sale at Two Guineas each 
 
 The Spectator. — 'This is one of the most remarkable 
 volumes of literary criticism — in more senses than one it is the 
 most striking — that have appeared for a number of years. Mr. 
 Henley has been known for a considerable time as one of the 
 most fearless, if not also as one of the most uncompromising, of 
 art critics, the sworn foe of conventionality in " paint " and of
 
 flabby timidity in wiiting the truth about it. More recently he 
 published a volume of poems, full of character, and in which 
 " our lady of pain " figured as a reality of the writer's experience, 
 not as a mere Swinburnian phantom. And now in this volume 
 of Views and Reviews he figures as a prose critic in literature. . . . 
 His book is not so much one of literary criticism, in the ordin- 
 ary and proper sense of the word, as of brilliant table-talk. . . . 
 Taken altogether, Views and Reviews will provoke as much 
 censure as commendation, for whatever may be Mr. Henley's 
 faults, a commonplace habit of looking at men and things is 
 not one of them. He is a master of a most remarkable and 
 attractive style, — sometimes, indeed, he seems to be the servant 
 of it. His book, therefore, deserves to be read, and will be 
 read. And yet, unless we are much mistaken, it is but its 
 author's preliminary canter in the field of criticism.' 
 
 The National Observer. — 'This book, in many respects 
 brilliant, unsatisfactory in not a few, is remarkable in all. . . . 
 It is but rarely that you fall in with so choice and desirable an 
 example of the printer's craft. . . . The author's style, the 
 author's point of view, above all the author's ever present 
 personality, bind these fragments into a sufficiently perceptible 
 and intelligible whole. . . . Mr. Henley's style is not equable, 
 nor serene, nor classic. Rather is it full of surprises, restless 
 and capricious, with moments of immense power and dazzling 
 brilliance. ' 
 
 The Speaker. — 'A good book of criticism. . . . Mr. 
 Henley has much in common with modern French criticism. 
 There is something of the same robustness of tone, magisterial 
 finality of deliverance wicon: promising utterance of personal
 
 conviction, something also of the same strong and close grip of 
 his subject. . . . He claims for himself " an honest regard for 
 letters " ; we may concede to him also other good qualities — 
 sincerity, knowledge, and strength. His judgments are in the 
 main clear-sighted, sane, humane, and generous.' 
 
 The Athenaeum. — ' The exceeding liveliness of his style, his 
 fondness for epigram and antithesis, his love of paradox and 
 generalisation, his faculty of adapting old phrases to new uses, 
 and other characteristics of 'his, attract and delight the reader. 
 . . . He possesses a wide range of reading, real insight, a 
 hearty appreciation of good literature, and a genuine faculty of 
 making just comparisons. A collection of brilliant yet thought- 
 ful observations on authors and books in which there is not a 
 dull line, and which contains much that is at once original and 
 true.' 
 
 The Academy (signed Oliver Elton).— 'A rare and fine 
 critical perception. . . . It is crammed with good things, and 
 the good things are those of a man who can be both a wit and 
 a poet.' 
 
 The Book Gazette. — ' Mr. Henley is one of the most facile 
 and charming writers of prose and verse in some of their guises 
 that we possess. . . . The subjects he has preferred from all 
 others in this volume are in themselves gems, and Mr. Henley 
 has mounted them in a setting of his own design. This design 
 is chaste and elegant, though, indeed, simple and frae from 
 ostentation.' 
 
 Livre Moderne. — ' Un petit livre qui interessera beaucoup 
 tous les Francais qui sont familiers aveo la langue anglaise.'
 
 The Graphic. — 'A series of bright, witty, rapid characterisa- 
 tions of literary men, of the present and of the past of our own 
 and other countries.' 
 
 The British Weekly (signed J. M. Barrie). — ' Much wit, 
 and here and there aphorisms that one may remember to be 
 met before in newspapers, and wondered who made them. . . . 
 Written in poet's English. . . . The printing (by the Constables) 
 is a joy to the eye. ' 
 
 The Guardian. — ' Good criticism, that keenest spur to the 
 enjoyment of good literature, is none so common in this country 
 that we can afford to pass over an addition to it in silence. . . . 
 We cannot but acknowledge that he has put forth a real 
 scheme, that he has tested the writers who have passed before 
 him by real tests, that he has put results of candour and of true, 
 though perhaps not very broad toleration, down in language 
 which is for the most part at once dexterous and definite, at 
 once critical and picturesque, at once sober and yet full of 
 colour.' 
 
 The Church Reformer. — 'A more valuable contribution 
 *o literary criticism has not been given to the public for many 
 years. . . . The strength, boldness, and honesty of his judg- 
 ments are beyond all praise.' 
 
 The Tablet. — ' The book has something of the inimitable. 
 There is force, there is selection, there is simplicity without 
 blankness and elaboration without cramp. There is felicity 
 everywhere, and a cleverness which is welcomed the more
 
 keenly for its rare companion, an abiding respect for the 
 language in which it barters. . . . Throughout, moreover, 
 there is the distinction which Mr. Coventry Patmore has denied 
 as the attribute of any writer new in the last twenty years ; that 
 distinction which being of the aristocracy of letters is in- 
 describable (even by epigram), and is yet very secure.' 
 
 The Christian Leader characterises the volume as 
 'sparkling,' and Pearson's Weekly as 'charming,' while 
 The Star condemns it as ' much overrated.' 
 
 The St. James's Gazette. — ' Doubly welcome. It is good 
 in itself, and seems even better than it is by comparison with so 
 much that is eithei positively or negatively bad. He has some- 
 thing to say about forty authors, from Theocritus to Mr. Austin 
 Dobson, and from Shakespeare to Dickens and Thackeray. He 
 has read widely and well, he has thought for himself, he has 
 the courage of his opinions, and he has a genuine love for all 
 that is best and worthiest in literature. . . . Views and 
 Reviews is a book to be viewed and reviewed by the real lover 
 of literature, not once only, but again and again. ' 
 
 The Scotsman. — ' The pieces are homogeneous with one 
 another, mainly because of the sincerity of Mr. Henley's judg- 
 ments on literature. . . . They are always earnest and honest, 
 which is as much as to say that they are always interesting. . . . 
 Not only readable from beginning to end (as is rare in a book 
 of collected criticisms), but stimulating and suggestive in no 
 common degree.'
 
 The Glasgow Herald. — ' If Mr. Henley can be said to 
 belong to any school in literature, it is to the school of reaction 
 in favour of virility and action against namby-pambyism, 
 sentimentality and introspection. ... Of this school Mr. 
 Henley is out of sight the best all-round stylist.' 
 
 The North British Daily Mail.—' Mr. Henley has con- 
 structed a work well qualified by its intrinsic merits to take a 
 high place in the world of pure literature. The essays are a 
 delight to read, and they furnish a curriculum through which 
 all students of letters, old and young, may pass with profit.' 
 
 The Scottish Leader. — ' His prose technique presents 
 much of the merit, one may say the genius, of his verse ; it has 
 vividness, freshness, concision, boldness, and felicity in epithet. ' 
 
 The Liverpool Daily Post. — ' The author of these essays 
 claims for himself "an honest regard for letters." He has 
 more than this, being very much of a literary specialist. . . . 
 His utterances are characterised by a directness and a sureness 
 that are quite French in tone, and with him, as with the French 
 critics, the personal conviction is not unpleasantly obtruded.' 
 
 The North Metropolitan Press. — ' He who cares for 
 opinions, vigorous and heroic, set forth in a style at once 
 brilliant and convincing, must not miss Views and Reviews.'' 
 
 The Glasgow Evening Citizen. — ' The author has a fluent 
 and epigrammatic mode of expressing himself which makes 
 his book very readable.' 
 
 The Perthshire Advertiser. — ' Has no equal for brilliancy 
 of style, condensed genius of expression, and literary grasp.'
 
 The Australasian. — ' Exception may be taken to some of 
 Mr. Henley's judgments, but one is struck by their general 
 fairness, bonesty and sincerity. Moreover, his literary style 
 possesses a certain piquancy and point which are decidedly 
 attractive. ' 
 
 The Melbourne Argus.—* Bright, sparkling, and pointed, 
 in very good, clear, simple English.' 
 
 The European Mail. — ' Be his subject what it may, there 
 is a purity of artistic purpose pervading the whole. , . . His 
 readers will find that what he offers them from his stores is 
 deficient neither in savour nor in substance. ' 
 
 The Colonies and India. — 'A guide to common-sense in 
 the way of criticism ; and not only to common-sense, but to 
 style, to versatility of observation, and to truth in the dissection 
 of mental qualities.' 
 
 The New York Tribune. — 'Original, keen, and felicitous. 
 . . . Delicate and discriminating literary taste, and a happy 
 faculty for analysis and comparison.' 
 
 The Philadelphia Ledger. — ' He interfuses his criticism 
 with the thought, the expressions, the personal glow of the 
 author he is discussing.' 
 
 The Boston Times. — ' Keen analysis, clever characterisation, 
 and delightful expression." 
 
 The Chicago Times.— 'Thoughtful, vigorous, and stimu- 
 lative.' 
 
 The San Francisco Chronicle. — ' No more keen and 
 pungent criticism has been printed in these days.'
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 A Book of Verses 
 
 IN HOSPITAL : RHYMES AND RHYTHMS. 
 
 LIFE AND DEATH (ECHOES). 
 
 BRIC-A-BRAC : BALLADS, RONDELS, 
 
 SONNETS, QUATORZAINS, 
 
 AND RONDEAUS. 
 
 Fourth Edition. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth, 
 
 with Etched Title-page Vignette of the Old Infirmary, 
 
 Edinburgh, by W. Hole, A.R.S.A. 
 
 Price 5*. 
 
 The Spectator says ' the author is a genuine poet . . . 
 there is freshness in all he writes, and music in much of it, and, 
 what is perhaps rarer, a clear eye for outline and colour, and 
 character in a good deal of it. . . . Mr. Henley's keenness of 
 vision, freshness of feeling, and capacity for song are unmis- 
 takeable.'
 
 For the Saturday Review ' the ring of genuine and virile 
 humanity is more singular in this volume than its clever work- 
 manship." It further commends *his lusty vigour, his spirited 
 ring, his touch of wholesome plainness and freshness.' 
 
 The Athenaeum discusses at length his 'realism, that is 
 something more than pre-Raphaelite,' and notes his ' fine and 
 winning kind of Rabelaisian heartiness," and his ' manly and 
 heroic expression of the temper of the sufferer. ' 
 
 The Universal Review. — 'It \spoetry,wo\. merely measured 
 prose or successfully jangled verse. . . . Neither the fancy nor 
 the melody of the verse forms the charm of the book, though 
 there is enough of both to make the fortune of many a minor 
 poet. The real excellence rather consists in the kindly philo- 
 sophy, strong, yet tender withal, which breathes from these 
 pages — the words of a man who has seen both the gaiety and 
 the suffering of life, who has had his share in each, and who 
 now looks tolerantly or bravely at happiness or pain.' 
 
 The Academy. — ' Mr. Henley's treatment of the Hospital 
 theme . . . is powerful, genuine, and manly throughout. . . . 
 Through the Dantesque world of his infirmary the joy of a 
 strong life runs ever like a stream. . . . Most of the poems in 
 the Life and Death section are love-songs, warm and throbbing 
 from the heart.' 
 
 The St. James's Gazette describes the volume as ' whole- 
 some phantasy, wholesome feeling, wholesome human affection, 
 expressed in adequate form. . . . The Hospital section is the 
 literary picture of a section of human suffering which has not
 
 10 
 
 before found its artist. There is here the result of a direct 
 experience by one who knows what to say, what to indicate, 
 what to leave unsaid." 
 
 The Critic (New York) thinks ' Mr. Henley the easy 
 achiever of all he essays to do,' and signals out especially the 
 'jocosery, the grotesquery, and daintiness of form' of the Bric- 
 X-BRAC section. 
 
 The Scotsman says ' the collection is one over which the 
 lover of poetry will linger ... for its natural simplicity and 
 directness of feeling, its careful, choice, and harmonious 
 handling of language.' 
 
 The Weekly Register says of the Hospital poems, 'they 
 may be painful sometimes, but there is a tenderness in them 
 which is educative to the most fastidious.' 
 
 The Scottish Leader holds the book ' to combine that 
 realism of actual and detailed description with that obscure 
 essence of feeling, held captive by the right words, which is the 
 eternal distinction between prose and poetry. . . . Curiously 
 and memorably vivid, full of deft phrasing, and perfectly free 
 from prosaism.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald notes the ' terse and vivid suggestion 
 of landscape and natural features . . . the dignity and beauty 
 of the Rondeaus.' 
 
 The Scots Magazine commends the 'felicitous union of 
 vigorous thinking with artistic deftness . . . the robust and 
 spirited tone, the purity and grace of diction. '
 
 II 
 
 Merry England remarks that ' Mr. Henley, before writing 
 his verses, has made a great sweeping movement, which has 
 cleared out of his way all the methods and manners surrounding 
 the practice of poetry — not merely the weak and large old 
 traditions ostentatiously set aside by Wordsworth, but all the 
 smaller conventionalities that are so constantly and imper- 
 ceptibly accumulating. ... A poem which, as usual with 
 Mr. Henley, tells the truth, and tells it with vital sincerity.' 
 
 The Manchester Guardian observes : ' In a not incon- 
 siderable reading of contemporary verse the two difficulties 
 which we have observed as chiefly besetting the poet are — first, 
 the difficulty of being forcible without being extravagant or 
 grotesque, original without being far-fetched ; and, secondly, 
 the difficulty of feeling and showing the restraint and discipline 
 of literary sense and form without being mannered, bloodless, 
 and unreal. Mr. Henley appears to us to have mastered both 
 these in a very uncommon degree.' 
 
 Finally, the Pall Mall Gazette is of opinion that this 
 ' is a horrible, fascinating, and wrong, yet rightly done, little 
 book — a book which no one should be advised to read, and 
 which no one would be content to have missed.' 
 
 LONDON 
 
 Published by DAVID NUTT 
 
 IN the STRAND 
 
 1893
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 LYRA HEROICA 
 
 AN ANTHOLOGY SELECTED FROM THE BEST 
 
 ENGLISH VERSE OF THE SIXTEENTH, 
 
 SEVENTEENTH, EIGHTEENTH, AND 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURIES. 
 
 Library (Third) Edition. 
 
 Crown 8vo. xvm + 362 pp. cloth, uncut edges, 
 
 Stamped cover, 3^. 6d. ; or, School (Second) Edition, 
 
 i2mo, cloth, 2.s. 
 
 The Anti-Jacobin. — ' It is a body of poetry in which every- 
 thing that goes to make up human life is exhibited in a spa- 
 cious, lofty, noble, and therefore essentially heroic light. Its 
 ditties of " the camp, the court, the grove," — its songs of love 
 and war, of sorrow and gladness, of passion and devotion, of 
 country and religion, one and all are the product of a muse 
 that "nothing common does or mean," but that dwells habitu- 
 ally in presence of the larger aspects and issues of things. Mr. 
 Henley modestly christens his volume "A Book of Verse for 
 Boys " ; and, although there is nothing puerile about it, by all 
 means let boys read it, for it is the kind of reading which will 
 help to make them men. '
 
 13 
 
 The Spectator, November 21, 1891.— 'No higher aim 
 could well be than that which Mr. Henley has put before him- 
 self. His own words will best express it :— " To set forth, as 
 only art can, the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty and 
 the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the 
 dobility of devotion — to a cause, an ideal, a passion even— the 
 dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is 
 my ambition here." His selection is, on the whole, as good 
 as can be.' 
 
 The World, November 25, 1891.— ' When we had picked 
 all the holes we could in Mr. Henley's anthology, there would 
 still be enough left to stir all the boys' hearts in the kingdom as 
 by trumpet.' 
 
 The Guardian, November 18, 1891.— ' Mr. Henley's book, 
 if not without predecessors, is very markedly distinguished 
 from them. In part this distinction is one of form. The 
 author's dedication runs, "To Walter Blaikie, artist, printer, 
 my part in this book," and if Mr. Blaikie is a member of the 
 firm of T. & A. Constable, the printers of the book, and has 
 superintended the production of the volume, he certainly has 
 deserved Mr, Henley's gratitude. Print, paper, and arrange- 
 ment are all beautiful, and the book is the lightest in propor- 
 tion to its size which we have ever handled from any modern 
 press. All this we note with real pleasure, and yet it sinks into 
 insignificance beside the fact that Mr. Henley has brought to 
 the task of selection an instinct alike for poetry and for chivalry 
 which seems to us quite wonderfully, and even unerringly, 
 right. There is not a poem in the volume which sinks below 
 the level of true poetry considered as a work of art, and there
 
 14 
 
 is not a poem which does not breathe something of the spirit 
 of that fine verse of Scott's which Mr. Henley has taken as his 
 motto.' 
 
 The Saturday Review, November 7, 1891. — 'A very fine 
 book, which will, we hope, help to keep the blood of many 
 English boys from the wretched and morbid stagnation of 
 modernity.' 
 
 The Scottish Leader. — ' The ideal gift-book of the year.' 
 
 The National Observer. — ' On the whole the most re- 
 presentative and the most inspiring anthology with which we 
 are acquainted.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald. — ' Mr. Henley has done his work 
 admirably — we may even say perfectly.' 
 
 The Star, October 29, 1891. — ' This perfectly lovely volume. 
 Though Mr. Henley's selection is but another proof of his love 
 for battle (as of the Scriptural war-horse that crieth "Ha! 
 Ha ! " among the javelins), it is proof also that he loves good 
 poetry no less.' 
 
 The Dublin Evening Mail.—' Edited with admirable 
 critical judgment and conscientious care.' 
 
 The Daily Graphic. — 'A selection which all boys should 
 and most boys will appreciate.'
 
 15 
 
 The British Weekly, November 19, 1891.—' A collection 
 of the noblest verse in our language that has value for theme, 
 and beginning with Shakespeare, it does not leave off until it 
 has sampled Mr. Kipling. Lyra Heroica is a rare good book ; 
 there is nothing else of the kind in our language ; and the boy 
 tas to wait more than three calendar months for it ought 
 to tea them at the local bookshop to put it down to his father's 
 account. ' 
 
 Louise Chandler Moulton, in the Boston U.S.A. 
 Herald of Sunday, November 15.—' One of the best antholo- 
 gies by which literature has ever been enriched.' 
 
 The Educational Review.— ' This book should be looked 
 at by all who wish to make a handsome present to a boy ; they 
 will be persuaded to choose it.' 
 
 The Scotsman.—' Never was a better book of the kind put 
 together.' 
 
 The Leeds Mercury. — 'The book is one which all lovers 
 of poetry will appreciate.' 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette.— ' Mr. Henley has done the 
 work as well as anybody else could have done it, and perhaps 
 better than most. . . . Every boy ought to have this book, and 
 most men.' 
 
 The Manchester Guardian.— * New anthologies are 
 almost the most delightful of new books to cut and, in an
 
 i6 
 
 irresponsible fashion, to criticise. It is delightful to find one's 
 favourite lyrics valued as one would have them ; delightful also 
 to find the reverse, and to feel indignantly sure that one respect- 
 able man of letters at least has shown less taste than we. In 
 looking through Mr. Henley's Lyra Heroica, the former 
 delight is felt more than the latter, and that is the highest 
 praise that a critic made of flesh and blood and human dis- 
 likes and likings can give to a new collection of the kind. ' 
 
 The Edinburgh Medical Journal.— 'He has mixed 
 songs of battle, of love, constancy, and patriotism so well that 
 even those who are boys no longer may be stirred and 
 heartened.' 
 
 The Illustrated London News. — ' Worthy to be placed 
 on the same shelf as our "Golden Treasuries." . . . Though 
 admirably adapted to stimulate courage and patriotism in the 
 young, it will be equally welcome to the adult.' 
 
 The Speaker. — ' Mr. Henley's is a very fine ambition, and 
 it will hardly be denied that his is a splendid book of verse.' 
 
 The North British Daily Mail.— 'May be commended 
 unreservedly.' 
 
 The Tablet. — ' Take it all in all, as a present for boys, and 
 for men for that matter, Lyra Heroica, printed with perfection 
 and handsomely bound, is a book among books, an anthology 
 among anthologies.'
 
 17 
 
 The St. James's Gazette.— 'In the eyes of that curious 
 Rad :al section to whom all war, for whatever purpose, on 
 behalf of whatever principle, is a crime, this book must seem 
 the most dangerous and most immoral that was ever put into 
 the hands of youth ; for it sings the glory of noble and honour- 
 able war. Its note is a note of healthy and resolute defiance 
 — the defiance of liberty to bondage, of duty to disgrace, of 
 courage to misfortune.' 
 
 The Critic (New York), Decembers, 1891.— 'Selected with 
 the taste and judgment of a poet.' 
 
 The Northern Daily News, December 18, 1891.— 'Mr. 
 Henley's taste is robust and catholic, and offers a welcome 
 to many spirited lyrics that are not generally considered 
 classical.' 
 
 The Graphic, December 26, 1891.— ' By far the best of 
 the books of verse for boys. . . . The judgment shown 
 throughout in selection and editing is excellent. The volume 
 should be in the hands of every English boy.' 
 
 The National Review. — ' A manly book, which should 
 delight manly boys and manly men as well.' 
 
 The Irish Daily Independent, January 4, 1892.— 'Mr. 
 Henley's Lyra Heroica is like the blast of a trumpet, and it 
 would be hard indeed to make a milksop of a lad nourished on 
 these noble numbers.
 
 iS 
 
 Sylvia's Journal, March 1892. — ' Beyond comparison 
 the noblest anthology of stirring poems and ballads in the 
 English language — probably in any language. ... A more 
 nobly planned and excellently carried out volume it were hard 
 to name. Paper, binding, and print (the last a triumph of the 
 printer's art) are all that could be wished. If any of my 
 readers have brothers to whom they wish to give a book, let 
 me advise them to get Lyra Heroica. If the brothers do not 
 like it (though I go bail they will), the volume is one which any 
 English maiden will be glad enough to have upon her shelf.' 
 
 LONDON 
 
 Published by DAVID NUTT 
 
 in the STRAND 
 
 1893 

 
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