path: root/67069-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67069 ***




                          APOLLO AND MARSYAS,

                          _AND OTHER POEMS_.

                                  BY

                         EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON,
                               AUTHOR OF
                        ‘THE NEW MEDUSA,’ ETC.


                                LONDON:
                ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
                                 1884.
                       [_All Rights Reserved._]


                                  To

                            ARABELLA DUFFY.




                               CONTENTS.


POEMS.

                                                                    PAGE

INTRODUCTION                                                           1

APOLLO AND MARSYAS                                                     5

SISTER MARY OF THE PLAGUE                                             18

THE BRIDE OF PORPHYRION                                               35

HUNTING THE KING                                                      48

ABRAHAM CAREW                                                         58

AN ODE OF THE TUSCAN SHORE                                            69

SWORD AND SICKLE                                                      74

A PAGEANT OF SIENA                                                    81

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD                                               87

IPSISSIMUS                                                           108

AN ODE TO THE TRAVELLING THUNDER                                     114


SONNETS.

IDLE CHARON                                                          118

THE OBOL                                                             119

LETHE                                                                120

ACHERON                                                              121

ON SIGNORELLI’S FRESCO OF THE RESURRECTION                           122

ON SIGNORELLI’S FRESCO OF THE BINDING OF THE
LOST                                                                 123

MUSSET’S LOUIS D’OR                                                  124

THE PHANTOM SHIP                                                     125

SPRING                                                               126

TO V. P., ABOUT TO VISIT OXFORD                                      127

BY THE FIRE                                                          128

NIGHT                                                                129

RIVER BABBLE                                                         130

SUNKEN GOLD                                                          131

ON RAPHAEL’S ARCHANGEL MICHAEL                                       132

ON A SURF-ROLLED TORSO OF VENUS                                      133

ON MANTEGNA’S SEPIA DRAWING OF JUDITH                                134

STRANGLED                                                            136

PROMETHEAN FANCIES                                                   137




INTRODUCTION.


    The contest of the Satyr with the God,
      Oh who shall end it? Who shall end the strife
      That fills all Art, all Nature and all Life,
    And give the right of flaying with a nod?

    Oh who when radiant noontide’s last note dies,
      And darkness with its mystery draws near,
    Shall bid the strains of twilight not arise
      That fill the soul with wistfulness or fear?

    Man gives his love in turn, he knows not why,
      To sun or gloom according to his mood;
      His ear, his heart, alternately is woo’d
    By Nature’s carol or by Nature’s sigh.

    And Marsyas’ reed-pipe and Apollo’s lyre
      Make endless competition upon earth,
    As men prefer the charm of vague desire,
      Or charm of bright serenity and mirth.

    But not alone the wistful strains of eve
      Mean unseen Marsyas speaking to the heart;
      Nor is he near, in Nature and in Art,
    Alone where yearning makes the bosom heave.

    Often in tones more passionate he wails,
      Pensive no more but fiercely wild and shrill,
    And fills the soul with rapture as it quails,
      And charms us with the very fear of ill.

    Wherever lonely Nature claims her right
      Upon man’s love, and her wild fitful voice
      With flute-like wailings makes his ear rejoice
    In the wild music of a stormy night;

    Wherever haunting Fancy fills the gloom
      With ghostly sounds, with evil spirits’ sobs,
    And exiled souls seem to bewail their doom,
      And, half seduced, the heart with vague fear throbs;

    Wherever Poetry with magic word
      Lets Passion’s loosened elements fly free,
      And hiss and thunder like a storm-churned sea,
    And rave and howl--there Marsyas’ note is heard.

    Oh, I have felt his music in my soul
      Outwail the wailing wind when every tone
    Has made my fancy, bursting all control,
      Create new realms as wild as are his own,

    With shapes of fear, with dread fantastic spells,
      And sights more wondrous than the restless stream
      Of visions in a Haschish-eater’s dream,
    Where whirl and eddy countless heavens and hells.

    And yet I love the light, nor am I one
      Bred in the darkness of Cimmerian caves,
    Who shrinks with blinking eyelids from the sun,
      When with the dawn he leaps on laughing waves,

    The sounds which that great Dorian God, whose glance
      Kindles the blushes of the pale sea foam,
      Draws from his beam-stringed lyre come thrilling home,
    And make the ripples of my spirit dance.

    Outside, beyond my threshold, I can hear
      The hum of sun-ripe Nature’s million strings,
    The song of man’s frail happiness rise clear
      Above the mutability of things;

    And though I think, if you but listen well,
      That here, upon this many voiced earth
      There be less sounds of carol and of mirth
    Than sounds of sigh and moan and dirge and knell;

    And though what here I offer echoes less
      Apollo’s lyre than Marsyas’ reedy fife,
    Whose fitful wailing in the wilderness
      Sounds through the chinks and crannies of my life,

    Apollo’s name is sweet, and I were loth
      To let the name of Marsyas stand alone
      Engraven on this book, while I can own
    Allegiance to both lords and love them both.




APOLLO AND MARSYAS.


MARSYAS.

            Low, but far heard,
    Across the Phrygian forest goes a sound
    That seems to hush the pines that moan all round.
            Is it the weird
    Wail of a she-wolf plundered of her own?
    Or some maimed Satyr left to die alone?
      Or has great Pan, in lonely places feared,
    To some belated wretch his wild face shown?

            Oh strong rough Pan,
    God of lone spots where sudden awe o’erwhelms
    Weak souls, but never mine--I love thy realms!
            I love the wan
    Half-leafless glens, which Autumn’s plaint repeat
    From tree to tree; I love the shy fawn’s bleat;
      The cry of lynx and wood-cat safe from man;
    The fox’s short sharp bark from sure retreat.

            The deep lone woods
    Which men call silent teem with voice: I hear
    Vague wails, low calls, weird notes, now far, now near.
            The storm-born floods
    That sweep the glens, the gurgling hurrying springs
    Impart dim secrets, vague prophetic things;
      The whispering winds awake strange wistful moods.
    But hush, my flute! Apollo, strike thy strings!


APOLLO.

            The harvest-hymns
    Rise from the fields, where, in the setting sun,
    The reapers stretch by sheaves of golden dun
            Their weary limbs;
    While many a sunburnt lad or maiden weaves
    With every corn-flower that the sickle leaves
      Demeter’s harvest-crowns, or binds and trims
    For the Great Mother her allotted sheaves.

            The whole west glows
    Like a vast sea of rosy molten ore
    Where, here and there, great tracks of pearly shore
            Or gleaming rows
    Of crimson reefs and isles of amber blaze;
    And through the whole a mighty fan of rays
      Spreads as the sun approaches earth and throws
    A farewell glance before he goes his ways.

            A rich warm scent
    Of summer ripeness fills the fertile plain;
    The ox, unyoked, kneels chewing near the wain;
            In one sound blent
    The voices of the insect-swarms that fill
    Each furrow, indefatigably trill
      And chirp and hum; until the bright day spent,
    Invokes the dusk to make the lone fields still.


MARSYAS.

            What voice-like sounds
    Off the Trinacrian coast, low, plaintive, sweet,
    Blend with the breeze? or is it Fancy’s cheat?
            There seem no grounds
    For watch or fear: the waves have sunk to sleep
    In twilight on the bosom of the deep.
      The ship seems half becalmed, and eve surrounds
    The crew with dolphins in perpetual leap.

            But hark again!
    Now here, now there, now all around the ship
    The voices sound each from an unseen lip!
            Dost hear the strain?
    It charms, it lulls, it lures, yet seems to fill
    The soul with something ominous of ill,
      A strange vague song with which man strives in vain,
    Which melts the heart while it benumbs the will.

            The weird sounds float
    Across the waters from the rocky shore;
    The listless crew grow drowsy more and more.
            No signs denote
    A coming storm; but something slow and strong
    Sucks unperceived those spell-bound men along:
      Awake, awake! the whirlpool grasps the boat!
    It seethes, it roars, it drowns the Sirens’ song!


APOLLO.

            Out on thy strife
    Of winds and birds!--See, see the golden spears
    Gleam through the dust, and desperate charioteers
            And Death and Life
    Sweep by all wildly blent!--See, see how flash
    The helmets in the sun, as onward dash
      The waves of war! The very air seems rife
    With goading Gods who wield an unseen lash!

            O Sun, shine down
    On Freedom’s ranks; pour strength into their hearts,
    And blind the foe with thy resistless darts!
            On, on! the crown
    Is for you all, both those who live and die!
    See, see, they waver! now they turn and fly
      In wild mad rout and trample down their own,
    While thick as autumn leaves their strewn dead lie.

            And as decrease
    The rattle and the roar, the crash and cries,
    Triumphant hymns from all the vast plain rise,
            And never cease
    To shake the stars.--Sound high, sound high, my strings!
    For from the bloodstained dust the laurel springs;
      Ay, and the olive with its fruit of peace,
    And freedom’s garnered grain and earth’s best things!


MARSYAS.

            Right sweetly played!
    But oh, I love the caves where all is mute
    Save unseen dropping waters, or my flute,
            Whose tones are made
    So strange by echo, that, transformed, increased,
    They ape the voice of some wild wounded beast
      Or eager hounds; or wail in cavernous shade
    Like souls in Hades wailing unreleased.

            And not less well
    I love deep gorges, whether, in the spring,
    With crash of slipping snow their echoes ring;
            Or they compel
    A summer storm’s pent thunder, peal on peal,
    To roll along them; or their rent flanks feel
      Autumnal waters roar; or fierce howls tell
    Of captive wintry winds in wild appeal.

            Hark, hark! a scream
    Of battling eagles o’er a sheer abyss,
    And wind of wings above a torrent’s hiss.
            The rock-pent stream
    Catches the drops of blood, and whirls away
    The slow rotating feathers from the fray;
      While from the sky the smaller falcons seem
    To watch their kings and circle without stay.


APOLLO.

            The noon creeps slow,
    And wraps the windless world in heat and glare,
    And droning beetles stir alone the air;
            While, soft and low,
    A chant of women weaving at the loom
    Falls on the ear from some cool darkened room,
      Where flits the restless shuttle to and fro
    Beneath bare arms that glimmer in the gloom.

            A fresh clear chant
    About frail clouds that sea-sprites weave in vain,
    And woven rainbows, harbingers of rain
            For things that pant;
    About Arachne and her wondrous woof;
    About grim Time who weaves white hairs in proof
      That men grow old, and that life’s thread grows scant,
    Weave, women, weave! still Hesperus holds aloof;
            Still shoots the sun
    His random shafts through leafy shade to rouse
    The shepherd up, who seeks yet thicker boughs;
            Still peep and run
    The bright green lizard on the heated stones;
    Still through the glare the whirling beetle drones;
      Still noontide sleep may end sweet dreams begun.
    Marsyas, resume thy flute. What say its tones?


MARSYAS.

            Small lurid clouds
    Veil and unveil the moon; while, through the lone
    Wild Phrygian woods, hot gusts of storm-wind moan.
            Each shadow shrouds
    Some unknown conscious harm; and all around
    Glide unseen rustling things upon the ground.
      The air seems full of grabbing hands, and crowds
    Of evil fancies wake at every sound.

            Now in the night
    The sorceress prowls, while others slumber deep,
    Cursing the God who robs her of her sleep.
            The moon’s vague light
    Makes her knife gleam, as, muttering low,
    She seeks the thrice-curst mandrake which uprooted shrieks,
      Such shrieks as drive the unexpecting wight
    Who hears them, mad, and blanch her own white cheeks.

            Now sound strange sighs,
    If it be true that evil spirits love,
    And seek each other when the moon above
            Half veils her eyes;
    The woods repeat unhallowed coos and calls,
    Kisses and sobs of love whose sound appals
      Beyond all shrieks, all moanings and all cries,
    While passion grows as deeper shadow falls.


APOLLO.

            A golden haze
    Has made the bright sea dreamy; and near coasts
    Look far, and faint as sunshine-faded ghosts.
            From neighbouring bays
    A mingled sense of odoriferous wood
    And fallen blossoms floats upon the flood
      That scarcely heaves, save where the dolphins play;
    While some few sea-gulls motionlessly brood.

            And o’er that sea,
    Bright, tepid, calm, the sunset breezes waft
    A chant of sailors from a home-bound craft;
            The white gulls flee
    At its approach; while from the beach, where run
    The tidings of return and riches won,
      Come other chants to welcome distantly
    The ship that seems to sail from out the sun.

            Oh ply the oar,
    Ye sun-tanned youths! does patient love not wait
    With tight-strained heart, intent upon your fate?
            The old loved shore
    Is close, close, close! ye hear the lyre’s loud strings--
    Ye almost hear the words that gladness sings.
      Oh ply the oar with might, and each shall pour
    Into Love’s lap the treasures that he brings!


MARSYAS.

            Give ear--give ear!
    From yonder grove in sudden gusts there comes
    A sound of flutes, of cymbals and of drums;
            And now I hear
    Wild cries of Mænads who, with ivy crowned,
    Toss their mad heads and whirl and leap and bound,
      Brandishing snakes; while, in voluptuous fear,
    The pale ecstatic votaries press around.

            Whirl faster still,
    Ye fierce flushed Mænads, lither than the asp,
    Or gleaming adder writhing in your grasp!
            The wild flutes fill
    The air with madness! Let the hot shift slip,
    And show the panting breast, the glistening hip!
      Dance ever faster, though the dance should kill!
    Whirl on, with flaming eye and quivering lip!

            I come, I come,
    O Cybele, great Cybele, that hast
    Thy chief throne here, I come to thee at last!
            From my far home
    I bring at last to thy deep rustling grove
    The wild pent fire that in my bosom strove;
      I come to lift thy praise to heaven’s dome;
    Perchance to die, on tasting thy dread love.


APOLLO.

            Where sunshine clings
    To Parian columns, what chaste marshalled throng
    Brings thee, Athena, wreaths of flowers and song?
            Thy pure fane rings
    With measured chants; on horses small and fleet
    Come stalwart youths; while with restrainèd feet
      The troop of virgins climb the steps, that brings
    The sacred olive and the sacred wheat.

            Hark, never cease
    The pure chaste hymns to hail the mighty child
    Of the cleft brows of Zeus, all undefiled;
            Armed friend of peace
    From whose strong breastplate streams transcendent light,
    Whose spear makes dim the meteors of the night;
      Pure Patroness of plenty and increase,
    Mistress of sunny cities walled and white!

            And, oh, to-day,
    Thou armed and placid Pallas, deadly foe
    Of all things lewd and wild who once didst throw
            In scorn away
    The lewd wild flute, too base for thy pure breath,
    And doom whoe’er should find it to slow death,
      Come to my aid, and let my pure lyre play
    Such bright chaste sounds as shall deserve the wreath!




SISTER MARY OF THE PLAGUE.


I.

    In her work there is no flagging,
      And her slight frame seems of steel;
    And her face and eyes and motions,
    Tried by countless nights of watching,
      Nor fatigue nor pain reveal.

    Yet the Sisters say she eats not,
      Spurning food as ne’er did saint,
    And they murmur: “She is nourished
    By a miracle of Heaven;
      God allows not she should faint.”

    Through the darkened wards she passes
      On her round from bed to bed;
    And the sick who wait her coming
    Cease their groaning, smiling faintly
      As they hear her light quick tread.

    Through the gabled lanes she hurries;
      And the ribald men-at-arms
    Hush their mirth, and stepping backward
    Let her pass to soothe some death-bed,
      Safe from insults and alarms;

    And the priests and monks and townsfolk
      Whom she passes greet her sight
    With a strange respectful pleasure
    As she nears in dark blue flannel
      And huge cap of spotless white.

    Oh, the busy Flemish city
      Knows its Sister Mary well;
    And the very children show her
    To the stranger as she passes,
      And her story all can tell:

    How she won a lasting glory,
      Cleaving to the dread bedside
    When the Plague with livid pinions
    Lighted on the crowded alleys,
      And all others fled or died.

    How alone she made men listen
      In their fear, and do her will;
    Making help and making order
    When the customary rulers
      Trembled helpless, and stood still.

    How she had the corpses buried
      When they choked canal and street;
    When alone the shackled convicts,
    Goaded on with pike and halberd,
      Cared to near with quaking feet.

    But those days of fear are over,
      And the pure canal reflects
    Barges decked with pots of flowers
    And long rows of tile-faced gables
      Which no breeze of death infects.

    And once more the city prospers
      Through the cunning of its guilds;
    While the restless shuttles clatter,
    And in peace the busy Fleming
      Weaves and tans and brews and builds;
    And the bearded Spanish troopers,
      Sitting idly in the shade,
    Toss their dice with oath and rattle,
    Or crack jokes with girls that pass them,
      Laughing-eyed and unafraid.


II.

    Sister Mary, Sister Mary,
      In thy soul there is some change:
    For thy face the while thou watchest
    By a pale young Spanish soldier
      Works with struggle strong and strange.

    Thou hast watched a hundred death-beds
      Ever calm without dismay;
    Fighting like a steady fighter
    While the shade of Death pressed onward
      Night on night and day on day;

    And when Death had proved the stronger
      Thou wouldst heave one sigh at most,
    And then turn to some new moaner,
    Ready to resume the battle,
      Just as steady at thy post.

    Now thy soul is filled with anguish
      Strange and wild, thou know’st not why;
    While a voice unknown and inward
    Seems to whisper, far and faintly,
      “If he dies, thou too wilt die,”

    Many months has he been lying
      In thy ward and rises not;
    Youth and strength avail him nothing;
    Growing daily whiter, whiter;
      Dying of men know not what.

    And he murmurs: “Sister Mary,
      Now the end is nearing fast;
    Thou hast nursed me like God’s Angel,
    But the hand of God is on me
      And thy care must end at last.

    “I have few, few days remaining;
      Now I scarce can draw my breath;
    See my hand: no blood is in it;
    And I feel like one who slowly,
      Slowly, slowly, bleeds to death.”

    And his worn and heavy eyelids
      Close again as if in sleep;
    While thou lookest at his features
    With a long and searching anguish
      In thy eyes--that dare not weep.

    Sister Mary, Sister Mary,
      Watch him closer, closer still!
    There be things within the boundless
    Realm of Horror, unsuspected--
      Things that slowly, slowly, kill!

    In his face there is no colour,
      And his hand is ivory-white;
    But upon his throat is something
    Like a small red stain or puncture,
      Something like a leech’s bite.

    Sister Mary, Sister Mary,
      Dost thou see that small red stain?
    Hast thou never noticed something
    Like it on the throats of others
      Whom thy care has nursed in vain?

    Have no rumours reached thee, Sister,
      Of a Thing that haunts these wards
    When the scanty sleep thou takest
    Cheats the sick of the protection
      Which thy vigilance affords?

    When, at night, the ward is silent
      And the night-lamp’s dimness hides,
    And the nurse on duty slumbers
    In her chair with measured breathing,
      Then it glides, and glides, and glides,

    Like a woman’s form, new risen
      From the grave with soundless feet,
    Clad in something which the shadows
    Of the night-lamp render doubtful
      Whether robe or winding-sheet.

    And its eyes seem fixed and sightless,
      Like the eyeballs of the dead;
    But it gropes not and moves onward
    Sure and silent, seeking something,
      In the ward, from bed to bed.

    And if any, lying sleepless,
      Sees it, he becomes as stone;
    Terror glues his lips together,
    While his eyes are forced to follow
      All its movements, one by one.

    And he sees it stop, and hover
      Round a bed, with wavering will,
    Like a bat which, ere it settles,
    Flits in circles ever smaller,
      Nearer, nearer, nearer still.

    Then it bends across the sleeper
      Restless in the sultry night,
    And begins to fan him gently
    With its garment, till his slumber
      Groweth deep, and dreamless quite;

    And its corpse-like face unstiffens
      And its dead eyes seem to gloat
    As, approaching and approaching,
    It applies its mouth of horror
      Slowly, firmly, to his throat.

    Sister Mary, Sister Mary,
      Has no rumour told thee this?
    What if he whose life thou lovest
    Like thine own, and more, were dying
      Of that long terrific kiss?


III.

    From the Hospital’s arched window,
      Open to the summer air,
    You can see the monks in couples
    All returning home at sunset
      Through the old cathedral square.

    On the steps of the cathedral,
      In the weak declining sun
    Sit the beggars and the cripples;
    While faint gusts of organ-rolling
      Tell that vespers have begun.

    Slowly creeps the tide of shadow
      Up the steps of sculptured front,
    Driving back the yellow sunshine
    On each pinnacle and buttress
      Which the twilight soon makes blunt.

    Slowly evening grasps the city,
      And the square grows still and lone;
    No one passes save, it may be,
    Up the steps and through the portal,
      Some stray monk or tottering crone.

    In this room, which seems the study
      Of the Hospital’s chief leech,
    There is no one; but the twilight
    Makes all objects seem mysterious,
      Like a conscious watcher each.

    Here the snakes whose venom healeth
      Stand in jars in hideous file;
    While the skulls that crown the book-shelves
    Seem to grin; and from the ceiling
      Hangs the huge stuffed crocodile.

    Here be kept the drugs and cordials
      Which the Jew from Syria brings,
    And perchance drugs yet more precious,
    Melted topaz, pounded ruby
      Such as save the lives of kings.

    All is silent in the study;
      But the door-hinge creaks anon,
    And a woman enters softly
    Seeking something that seems hidden--
      One unnaturally wan.

    What she seeks is not in phials
      Nor in jars, but in a book;
    And she mutters as she searches
    Through the book-shelves with a kind of
      Brooding hurry in her look;

    And she finds the book, and takes it
      To the window for more light;
    And she reads a passage slowly
    With constrained and hissing breathing
      And dark brow contracted tight.

    “_Most of them_,” it says, “_are corpses
      That have lain beneath the moon,
    And that quit their graves at midnight,
    Prowling round to prey on sleepers;
      But the daybreak scares them soon_.

    “_But the worst, called soulless bodies,
      Plague the world but now and then;
    They have died in some great sickness;
    But reviving in the moonbeams
      Rise once more and mix with men_.

    “_And they act and feel like others,
      Never guessing they be dead,
    Common food of men they love not;
    But at night, impelled by hunger,
      In their sleep they quit their bed_;

    “_And they fasten on some sleeper,
      Feeding on his living blood;
    Who, when life has left his body,
    Must in turn arise, and, prowling,
      Seek the like accursed food_.”

    And the book slips from her fingers
      And she casts her down to pray;
    But convulsions seize and twist her,
    And delirious ramblings mingle
      With the prayers she tries to say.

    In her mouth there is a saltness,
      On her lips there is a stain;
    In her soul there is a horror;
    In her vitals there is something
      More like raging thirst than pain;

    And she cries, “O God, I knew it:
      Have I not, at dead of night,
    Waking up, looked round and found me
    On the ledge of roofs and windows
      In my shift, and shrunk with fright?

    “Have I not, O God of mercy,
      Passed by shambles in the street,
    And stopped short in monstrous craving
    For the crimson blood that trickled
      In the gutter at my feet?

    “Did I not, at last Communion,
      Cough the Holy Wafer out?
    Blood I suck, but Christ’s blood chokes me.
    O my God, my God, vouchsafe me
      Some strong light in this great doubt!”

    And she sinketh crushed and prostrate
      In the twilight on the floor,
    While the darkness grows around her,
    And her quick and laboured breathing
      Grows convulsive more and more.


IV.

    Sister Mary, all is quiet
      In thy wards, and midnight nears:
    Seek the scanty rest thou needest;
    Seek the scanty rest thou grudgest,
      All is hushed and no one fears.

    But, though midnight, Sister Mary
      Thinks it yet not time to go;
    And the night-lamps shining dimly
    Show her vaguely in the shadow
      Moving softly to and fro.

    What is it that she is doing,
      Flitting round one sleeper’s bed;
    Is she sprinkling something round it,
    Something white as wheaten flour,
      And on which she will not tread?

    And at last the work is over,
      And she goeth to her rest;
    And she sleeps at once, exhausted
    By long labour, and, it may be,
      By strong struggles in her breast.

    Nothing breaks upon the stillness
      Of the night, except, afar,
    Some faint shouts of ending revel
    Or of brawling, in the quarters
      Where the Spanish soldiers are.

    Time wades slowly through the darkness
      Till at last it reaches day,
    And the city’s many steeples
    Buried in the starless heaven
      Grow distinct in sunless grey.

    And the light wakes Sister Mary,
      And she dresses in strange haste,
    Giving God no prayer, and leaving
    On her bed the beads and crosses
      That should dangle from her waist.

    And with unheard steps she hurries
      Through the ward where all sleep on
    To the bed in which is lying
    He who day by day is growing
      More inexorably wan.

    All around the bed is sprinkled
      Something white, like thin fresh snow,
    Where a naked foot has printed
    In the night a many footprints,
      Sharp and clear from heel to toe:

    Sister Mary, Sister Mary,
      Dost thou know thy own small foot?
    Would it fit those marks which make thee
    Turn more pale than thy own paleness
      If upon them it were put?

    And the dying youth smiles faintly
      Pleasure’s last accorded smile;
    And he murmurs as he hears her,
    “Sister Mary, I am better;
      Let me hold thy hand awhile:

    “Sister Mary, I would tell thee
      Fain one thing before I die;
    For a dying man may utter
    What another must keep hidden
      In the fastness of a sigh.

    “Sister Mary, I have loved thee--
      Is it sin to tell thee this?
    And I dreamt--O God, be lenient
    If ’tis sin--that thou didst give me
      On the throat a long, long kiss.”




THE BRIDE OF PORPHYRION.


DIOCLEA.

    Pass on, pass on, and seek thy lair, lone man,
    If neighbouring lair thou hast. Night falls; and God
    For whom thou once didst snap all human ties
    Requires thy evening prayer.


PORPHYRION.

                            Oh, if I stop
    Upon my path and bandy words with woman--
    I who for years have shunned man, woman, child,
    But woman most--I would not have thee think
    In error that thy old familiar voice,
    Which seems to come from out the past, has called
    Emotion back to life, or that I care
    To take advantage of the freak of chance
    Which brings us face to face and makes us stand
    Each like a spectre in the other’s eyes.
    But I suspect thee of a rash design
    Abhorrent to the Christian; and I ask,
    Woman, once more, what brings thee here at dusk--
    Here by the deep lone Nile, when rise the mists
    Heavy with death, when prowl devouring beasts,
    And when God’s lonely dweller in the waste
    Alone has nought to fear?


DIOCLEA.

                            What brings me here?
    The Nile flower is closing with the day;
    The Nile bird hastens to her bulrush nest;
    All Nature that is not of night and evil
    Is seeking rest; and why should not I too,
    If I am weary, find repose at dusk
    Where rolls the deep dark stream?


PORPHYRION.

                                Because the Lord,
    Through my unworthy voice, has bid thee quit
    This perilous brink, and bear such heavy load
    As He, whom none shall judge, may choose to heap
    Upon thy head.


DIOCLEA.

                        Resume thy path, lone man--
    Resume thy path in peace. Oh, thou art rash
    To linger out this meeting of dead souls!
    Art thou not that Porphyrion who escaped
    Into the waste to shun the sight of woman,
    However pure and spotless she might be?
    Then leave me to myself; go seek thy lair,
    And leave me to the darkness and the night;
    Else will I tell thee in one monstrous word
    What she now is who once was Dioclea,
    And make thy desert-nurtured chastity
    Shrink back in fear as from a gust from hell!


PORPHYRION.

    Oh, I have wrestled with the Fiend too long
    And placed my heel too oft upon his neck
    To fear contamination from thy breath!
    I care not what thou wast, nor what thou art,
    Now that my soul is safe and that long years
    Of ruthless castigation of the flesh
    Have put me out of reach of woman’s snare;
    But, as a Christian servant of the Lord,
    I may not let thee do the thing thou wouldst,
    And which God hates. Thy soul is on the brink
    Of the abyss; and God now bids me stretch
    My hand to save it.


DIOCLEA.

                          Oh, not thine, not thine!
    The wanton hand that broke the precious vessel
    Shall not attempt to mend it.


PORPHYRION.

                                    What I did
    Upon that day, I did at God’s command.


DIOCLEA.

    Upon my bridal morn my father’s house
    Was full of song; my heart was full of sun;
    Yea, and of earnest love and brave intent:
    Less snowy was the linen I had woven
    With my own hands for thee; less fresh the wreaths
    The bridesmaids still were twining; and less pure
    The gold of bridal gifts which guest-friends brought,
    Than was the heart that waited to be thine.


PORPHYRION.

    Upon thy bridal morn my heart was filled
    With doubt and fear. My hounded spirit groped
    Like one who fears pursuers in the dark
    And knows no issue. Yea, within my breast,
    Like captive eagles in a cage too narrow,
    The love of God, the love of thee, did fight.
    I cursed the perilous lustre of thy eyes;
    I cursed thy smile and laugh; and cursed myself
    That loathed them not. The sounds of mirth and song
    That filled the house fell grating on my ear;
    The nuptial cakes smacked bitter in my mouth,
    Ay, worse than gall; the dewy bridal wreaths
    Stank in my nostrils, while an inner voice
    Kept thundering in my soul: “Away, away!
    The howling waste awaits thee. Not for thee
    Are care and kiss of woman; not for thee
    Are hearth and home, and kith and kin and friend;
    But scourge and shirt of hair!”


DIOCLEA.

                                  And like a thief,
    After the priest had blessed us and before
    The feast was over, thou didst skulk away,
    And all at once convert the sound of song
    Into the hum of pity and derision.
    I sat alone upon my empty bed,
    Wrapped in the double gloom of night and woe.
    The pillars of my faith in human good
    Had given way; the roof had fallen in
    Upon my life. Oh how I cursed the night
    For dragging out its black and silent creep!
    And when dawn came, oh how I cursed the dawn
    For its intrusive stare! And yet that night
    Was but the first of many equal nights;
    That dawn was but the first of many dawns
    In ushering in a loathed and lonely day.
    I held aloof from every happier woman,
    Suspiciously and silently to brood;
    Grudging to one her husband’s look of love,
    And to the next the infant at her breast;
    Grudging to all their house, their home, their hearth,
    Their dignity, their duties, and their cares:
    And shunning, I was shunned, and, as it were,
    Marked out for future shame.


PORPHYRION.

                                     If like a thief
    I stole away unseen, oh it was not
    To spend that night in any rival’s arms!
    Rock, hard and wind-swept, was my marriage bed;
    The wilderness my bride; the starry sky
    My roof; the distant, interrupted howl
    Of beasts of prey my nuptial lullaby.
    Before me lay the waste, strewn here and there
    With ribs of men and camels, or the wreck
    Of perished cities; yea, and thirst and pain
    In vaguely measured sum. But in my soul
    The voice of thunder cried: “Push on, push on
    Into the waste, Porphyrion! thou art still
    Too near to human haunts, too far from God!”
    And I pushed on; and in an empty tomb
    In a deserted city of the dead
    I made my lair, alone with stones and God;
    Living off locusts and such scanty herbs
    As grew in clefts of rock and empty wells.
    Oh what a silence, what a loneliness!
    The temple columns and the huge carved stones
    Cast long black shadows on the sun-baked sand
    In endless rows; and through the livelong day
    No moving shadow crossed them save my own,
    As, like a leper whom his sores have doomed
    To lead the lonely life, I prowled for food.
    Oh, it was hard! For knowing that the Fiend
    Would come ere long to scare and tempt me back
    To human haunts, I sought with prayer, and scourge,
    And thirst, and hunger, and restricted sleep
    To arm myself against him and his strength;
    And come he did. He prowled at first at night,
    Shaped as a roaring lion, round and round
    My lonely cell; but his re-echoing roar
    Deterred me not, nor stopped a single prayer.
    And then he came with soft insidious step
    During my sleep, and strove to tempt the flesh
    In woman’s guise--yea, in thy very shape--
    And sought to lure me to caress and kiss,
    Taking thy face, thy eyes, thy very voice
    In all their beauty and their blandishment;
    But I defied him, and he howling fled,
    And changed his plan. He made the solid ground
    Lurch ever and anon beneath my feet;
    He made me shiver in the blazing sun
    With mortal cold; and sometimes, in the dusk
    He made the huge stone heads of sphinxes nod
    And gibber as I passed them. Oh, for years
    I wrestled with him in the awful waste;
    But I o’ercame his strength.


DIOCLEA.

                                And dost thou think
    That I, in that worse waste, which was not strewn
    Like thine with stones, but with the wreck of hopes
    And wreck of love, was not sought out by fiends
    As well as thou? Ay, ay, they came, the fiends;
    They whispered in my ear that I was young,
    And that my youth was passing unenjoyed;
    They whispered in my ear that I was fair--
    Fairer than any other far or near,
    And that the beauty that a fool had spurned
    Would wane before its time. They said: “Look up!
    Thou mournest Love whom thou believest dead,
    And Love, hard by, is waiting for one word,
    One motion of encouragement, one glance.
    Give but the signal, and the lonely one
    Whom maid and matron scorn, and who now holds
    Suspiciously aloof from life and joy,
    Will be a very Empress new-enthroned,
    And waste her life no more.” But oh, I clung
    To the dull honour of my broken life;
    I struggled with the Tempter long and hard;
    I said unto myself that after all
    Thou mightst at last return to me; and strove
    With all my strength to keep me pure for thee.
    But years went by and still thou didst not come,
    And round and round my heart the Tempter prowled,
    Nearer and ever nearer with new arts,
    New wiles, new snares, new whispers, day by day,
    And proved at last the stronger of the two.
    I fled my father’s house for ever more;
    I loved; was loved; I saw luxurious cities
    Where pleasure triumphed--Alexandria,
    Antioch and Athens, ay, and even Rome--
    Courted where’er I went; until the day
    When he proved false, and when once more I sat
    Upon my lonely bed and prayed for dawn.
    And yet I loved again; yea, twice and thrice.
    Down, down the winding stair of love I went,
    Until the slippery and precipitous steps
    Became so dark and noisome all at once
    That I threw up my arms and shrieked in fear;
    But all my strength was gone, and heaven’s faint light
    Too far above my head. Oh, since we two
    Last saw each other’s eyes, not thou alone
    Hast felt the scourge alight upon thy back,
    Not thou alone hast known the howling waste;
    For I have felt that nine times knotted scourge
    Which makes the soul and not the body writhe.
    Descending on me fiercely; and have found
    In men’s embrace a loneliness more dread,
    A desert more terrific and more bare
    Than any which thy bruised unsandalled foot
    Has ever trodden yet.


PORPHYRION.

                            The worse for thee.
    I freed thee from the weight of human ties;
    I pointed out the path that leads to heaven
    Across life’s wreck; and if, instead of God,
    Thou chosest Satan, what is that to me?
    Thou mightst have built a mansion for thy soul
    Upon the ruins of an earthly home;
    Thou mightst like me have wrestled with the Fiend,
    And felt the pride of bruising with thy heel
    The Tempter’s head; thou mightst like me have felt
    The fierce voluptuous pleasure of the scourge;
    Nay, even, like myself thou mightst, with time,
    Have sought to snatch from Heaven’s hand the crown,
    The glorious crown of martyrdom: for if
    Upon this day thou meetest me so near
    The haunts of men, it is because I wait
    For some fresh outburst of the Pagan’s wrath
    Against our sect, to court the lingering death.
    But lo, we waste our words; for I have warned
    And summoned thee to leave the perilous brink
    Of this dark circling water; and if thou
    Still cleavest to thy heathenish design
    Of self-destruction, not upon my soul
    Shall fall the wrath of Heaven for the deed.
    Once more I bid thee, woman, leave the brink;
    For see, the night has come; and, as thou say’st,
    God needs my evening prayer.


DIOCLEA.

                          Ay, ay, the night
    Has wrapped us round: I scarce can see the flowers
    That glimmered on the current; though I hear
    The sweet faint rustling of the stream-bent reeds.
    Pass on thy way, lone man--pass on in peace;
    There is no link between us, and no love.
    Go, find thy rest, as I at last find mine;
    And leave me here, beside the deep lone Nile,
    Where woe will sink, and haply leave no trace.




HUNTING THE KING.

1792.


    And the two in the twilight spurred fiercely again,
      While behind them went trooping the trees,
    And the darkening rutty cross-roads of Champagne,
    With their patches of wood and their patches of grain,
      Grew more solemn and lone by degrees.

    Like the hurrying ghosts of two riders they rode,--
      For the few whom they met, indistinct;
    And the lights that sprang up few and far away showed
    Where, to right or to left, lay a human abode;
      And more stars overhead came and winked.

    Through the maze of cross-roads they went ever more fast,
      As if he who led on never doubted;
    Till the other by dint of hard spurring at last
    Brought his horse alongside, and between them there passed
      Hurried words that were broken and shouted.

    “Slacken pace! slacken pace!” “Spur him on without stay!
      What’s a horse to the saving of France?”
    “Art thou sure of the place where they change the relay?”
    “At Varennes, nigh on twelve. Trust to me for the way!
      France is saved if we get in advance!”

    And the postmaster Drouet once more shot ahead,
      Closely followed by Guillaume his friend;
    Never seeming to waver or doubt as he led,
    Or to see less distinct the invisible thread
      Of short-cut on short-cut without end.

    But the roads and the fields and the low hedges grew
      Every minute more lonely and dark,
    While his horse, nearly merged in the darkness, now drew
    From the flint of the road with its thundering shoe
      Every minute more brilliant a spark.

    But he thought in his heart: “If the moon does not rise
      When we get to the woods, I shall doubt;
    And he’ll get to the army and German allies,
    And the land, unprepared, will be caught by surprise,
      And the great revolution stamped out.”

    But a glow, faint at first, and then brighter, was spread
      In the sky, and the moon showed her face,
    And the plain and the hills were lit up far and wide;
    And a galloping shadow appeared at his side,
      And took part all at once in the race.

    Oh the moon that plays tricks with the shadows she throws
      Might have given that shadow the shape
    Of the Rider who rides us all down, friends and foes,
    And was now ere their time coming down upon those
      Who had trusted to God for escape.

    Hurry on, ye postillions, so royally paid,
      That suspect not a King and a Queen!
    Though ye never have heard in the course of your trade
    Of a thing that the doctors of Paris have made,
      Of a thing that they call Guillotine!

    Hurry on to the chopper-shaped square of Varennes
      Where your fellow-postillions await!
    Hurry on! hurry on, ye dull whip-cracking men!
    For each stride that ye take, there is one who takes ten,
      And who gallops like Death and like Fate!

    He caught sight of a face in the dark carriage-hood
      As ye rolled from his door and were gone,
    And he looked with a closeness that boded no good
    At the crumpled bank-note where that face graven stood--
      Hurry on! hurry on! hurry on!

    There were clouds near the moon, and they girt her about
      As if trying to screen and to save,
    And the darkness one moment filled Drouet with doubt;
    But she baffled them all and shone brilliantly out
      To abet with the light that she gave.

    And the stems of the corn flashed metallic and bright
      And like bayonets distantly blue,
    And the breeze-rippled patches of grain in the light
    Looked like distant battalions restrained from the fight
      That a thrill of impatience runs through.

    But the patches of grain grew more scanty anon,
      And the road grew more hard to discern;
    And they entered the lonely dark woods of Argonne
    Where the moon through the branches could ill help them on,
      And they trampled on brushwood and fern.

    As they galloped each oak with its black knotty arm
      Seemed to grab at the two like a claw;
    While the air seemed all full of destruction and harm,
    And the one who rode second felt vaguely alarm
      At each shadow and shape that he saw.

    But the other dashed on, as with hounds on the scent
      In his thundering, thundering speed;
    Giving neither a thought to his horse nearly spent
    Nor a look to his comrade, but solely intent
      On a prey that was royal indeed.

    Did no angel of life, as he spurred yet more fast,
      Cry, “O God, for a slip or a stumble
    That shall save from the block the heads sinking at last
    Into sleep, now that fear of pursuers is past,
      And the heads of a many more humble!

    “O Thou God for a doubt that shall bring to a stop,
      For a stone in the shoe to retard,
    Or more heads in the basket of sawdust will drop
    Than the bunches of grapes that the vintagers lop
      On a day that their labour is hard;
    “And the fields will be lashed not by tempests of rain,
      But by tempests of iron and lead;
    And manured year by year with fresh blood all in vain,
    And each summer will bring not a harvest of grain,
      But a harvest of cripples and dead;

    “And the nations in carnage will ceaselessly strive
      With a roar that disperses the clouds;
    Where the trains of artillery furiously drive
    And the gun-wheels make ruts through the dead and the live,
      And the balls make long lanes through the crowd.

    “Let his horse break a vein or his saddle a girth,
      Trip him up on the rough, hardened mud!
    For each drop from the rowel that falls to the earth
    If he reaches Varennes, O Thou God, will give birth
      To an ocean of innocent blood!”

    Or did spirits invisible fly by his side
      And in whispers excite him and goad
    And exulting foretell him the end of his ride,
    As his spur-mangled horse with his long fatal stride
      One by one killed the miles of the road.

    Did they cry: “Lash him on, as in lightness of heart
      They have ridden the people to death;
    Lash him on, as the Saviour of France that thou art;
    Lash him on, till the blood from his nostrils shall start;
      Lash him on! never think of his breath!”

    Did they cry: “Lash him on without mercy or stay!”
      As his arm, numb with lashing, desisted;
    “Lash him on, as the quarterers lashed on the day
    When their horses ’mid clapping of hands tugged away,
      And the live limbs of Damiens resisted!

    “Lash him on, for the freedom of nations depends
      On the flag which at last is unfurled!
    Lash him on, lash him on, till his very life ends!
    Lash him on, lash him on, for the breath that he spends
      Is for Freedom, and France, and the World!

    “So shall Kellermann’s steed at Marengo be spurred
      When the earth by his squadrons is shaken,
    And the thunder of man o’er God’s thunder is heard,
    And there runs from the Alps to the Tiber one word,
      And the lands from their torpor awaken!

    “So the couriers shall spur and the miles disappear
      From the Oder, the Elbe, and the Po,
    When the victories follow each other so near
    That the bearers of tidings are filled with a fear
      Lest another their tidings outdo!

    “Lash him on, lash him on! and the three-coloured flag
      That has sprung from the black Paris gutter
    Shall be carried by plain and by valley and crag
    And, all riddled by bullets, a mere tattered rag,
      From Alhambra to Kremlin shall flutter!”

    And he lashed, and he left his companion behind
      And sped furiously on all alone,
    With the sinister shadow the moon had designed
    Flitting on just in front of him, vaguely defined,
      At a pace that was wild as his own.

    And as midnight was nearing, at last there appeared
      The faint lights of Varennes far ahead,
    And then only it was, as he finally cleared
    The last miles of the road, that he suddenly feared
      That his horse might fall suddenly dead.

    But his horse did not drop; and with thundering feet
      He dashed on to the inn of the Post;
    While he shouted to all that his eye chanced to meet,
    “Sound the tocsin! the tocsin! all up the long street!
      Bar the Bridge! bar the Bridge! or all’s lost!”

    And the patriots crouched in the shade of the old
      Narrow archway, all holding their breath;
    Till a carriage and four was heard coming, and rolled
    Slowly, heavily, in; while the tocsin still tolled
      Like a knell that anticipates death.




ABRAHAM CAREW.


    Ye righteous Judges of this Christian state,
    Ye bid me speak; ye bid me show good cause
    Why I, whose hand is red with Christian blood,
    Yea, even with the blood of my own child,
    Of my own Edith, should not be condemned
    To die upon the scaffold, nor be locked
    For life within a mad-house: and I speak.
    I fear not death; for now that she is dead,
    Now that dull silence hath replaced her voice,
    Life hath but little charm; and were it not
    That to consent to ignominious death
    For having acted by command of God
    Would be unfit, and might call down His wrath
    Upon the land, I think I scarce should take
    The pains to plead; but strength hath narrow bounds,
    And I confess intolerable fear
    Lest ye condemn me to complete my years
    Among the mad. O Thou Almighty God
    Who for Thy purposes inscrutable
    Hast pushed me on and nerved my quaking arm
    To slay my child, preserve from such dread fate
    One who has offered up what most he loved
    Here upon earth, and give unto my tongue
    Such eloquence as may convince these men
    That I am sane!

                        I am a self-made man
    Grown rich by building engines for the rail,
    A man of little learning; one whose youth
    Was spent in striking sparks from reddened iron
    Amid the roar and clanging of a forge;
    Knowing no books except the Book of books,
    Whose sacred pages when my work was done
    I turned with grimy hands, therein to learn
    The will and orders of a jealous God,
    A God of wrath, a God whose unseen hand
    Falls heavily and chasteningly on all,
    And most on them He loveth. Little time
    Did I bestow on pleasure and those sports,
    Unseemly for the most part, which divert
    The spirit from obedience, and prevent
    The growth of labour’s fruit; and God allowed
    That I should prosper in my worldly wealth.
    And that the name of Abraham Carew
    Should hold high credit in the market-place,
    And that my fellow-townsmen one and all
    Should put their faith in my integrity,
    Electing me an Elder of the Church
    And civil Magistrate. But, as I say,
    The Lord doth love to chasten; and He laid,
    As years went by and multiplied my store,
    Great tribulations on me. One by one
    I saw the godly household which had grown
    Around me, fall as fell the summer flowers
    Around an aged tree when winter nears,
    And leave him in his listless loneliness.
    One child alone, one twining clinging flower--
    Edith, my latest born--remained unnipped,
    And in my rash presumption I believed
    That God would spare her; for upon her cheek
    The hectic spot appeared not which had marked
    Her mother and her brethren; and I saw
    With sinful joy how she increased in strength
    As grew her beauty and her loveliness--
    Yea, yea, a sinful joy which was to rouse
    The jealousy of God. But if my tongue
    Is to convince you of the thing I tell
    And justify His ways, oh let me speak--
    Oh let me tell you how I loved my child!
    I loved her as an old man loves the sun
    Which warms his limbs and keeps the palsy off;
    I loved her as the plundered miser loves
    The small secreted heap that yet remains;
    I loved her as the shipwrecked drowning wretch
    Loves the frail plank which each approaching wave
    May tear from his embrace.

                                No vain gold chain,
    No gaudy ribbon decked her nut-brown hair;
    But in such sober raiment as befits
    The virgin-mistress of a godly house
    She went the round of her domestic duties,
    In need of no adornment to enhance
    The chaste and holy beauty which she wore
    Unconscious to herself, and lived her life
    Of cheerfulness and thrift, beloved by all;
    Reading at morn and eve the Bible page
    To our assembled servants, in a clear
    And reverent voice; devoting patient hours
    To teaching little children; and by help
    Of her own needle, plied while others slept,
    Providing winter clothing for the poor
    Before the earliest chill of autumn came.
    A grave and gracious girl, whose smile of love
    Was as a light for my declining years;
    Who prized the walks which we were wont to take
    Together, through the lanes and ripening corn,
    Above all routs and shows. Too great, too great
    To please a jealous God, had grown the love
    For Edith in my bosom; and at times
    I felt a cruel tightening of the heart,
    And a prophetic something seem to say
    Unto my spirit: “Abraham, beware!
    The Lord will claim His rights, and ask again
    For that which He hath given unto thee.
    Thy love is given to an earthly thing;
    A common, natural instinct rules thy life,
    And not the love of God.” But on her cheek
    The ruddiness of health diminished not,
    And I loved on.

                      There came a Sabbath day,
    On which it chanced that at the Meeting House
    The Scripture page was read in which it said
    How he whose name I bear, in days of yore
    Obeyed the dire injunction of the Lord,
    And offered up his Isaac. By my side
    Edith was sitting listening to the words
    With fixed attention, as was e’er her wont.
    The light athwart the high and narrow window
    Streamed down upon her, lighting up her hair
    With golding streakings, just as rays of sun
    Light up the seaweed in a tide-left pool,
    And played upon her features--ne’er before
    Had she appeared so lovely. As my eyes
    Were resting thus upon her sitting there,
    A fear flashed through my spirit, and I thought:
    “What if the Lord were to demand her life,
    And bid thee offer up thy only child
    As Abraham did Isaac?” and I felt
    A strange and frightful struggle stir my soul--
    Yea, stir my nature to its inmost depths.
    I listened little to the words of prayer;
    And on our homeward way, when Edith asked
    What made my brow so suddenly o’ercast,
    I answered not.

                    Ye wise and upright men
    Who sit to-day deciding on my fate,
    Ye wonder at the measure of my speech
    Ye miss what ye expected ye would find,
    A madman’s incoherence, or the glare
    And desperate wild defence of guilt at bay?
    Confess, confess, I speak not like the mad.
    Oh, I have drilled and disciplined my tongue
    In these long months of prison; I
    From morn to eve within my narrow cell
    Taming my own excitement, so that if,
    When came the day of trial, God should make
    No outward revelation of the truth
    To save His servant, I might yet convince
    My judges and the world. He hath not deigned
    To make the attestation at my prayer.
    No thunder from the blue unclouded sky,
    No quaking of the earth hath helped my cause,
    And God hath left me only earthly means
    To prove to men that what they call a crime
    I did by His command.

                        It came, it came,
    That dread command! I had not long to wait;
    I seemed to feel it coming; day and night
    The frightful expectation filled my soul;
    And by a natural instinct, thrice accurst,
    The more I dreaded that an angry God,
    Roused by the sinful greatness of my love,
    Would claim her life, the more my love increased.
    It came, it came, the awful summons came!
    It was the dead of night: I lay awake;
    And in the soundless darkness, all at once,
    While on my flesh the hair from fear stood up,
    I heard the awful voice: it cried, “Arise,
    Take up thy knife, and sacrifice thy child
    Whom I bestowed; for I the Lord thy God,
    I am a jealous God, and bid thee strike.”

    Then came three days of human agony;
    The flesh contending with the will of God,
    And writhing upward like a trodden snake
    Beneath religion’s heel: for I believed
    That God would pardon me three days’ delay
    To conquer human nature. Once I thought
    To tell her all--to ask her for her life--
    To call on her obedience to submit--
    To shift upon her shoulders half the weight
    Of agony and horror; but I looked
    Upon her face and set aside the plan,
    Misdoubting woman’s strength. In Edith’s eyes
    I saw a strange suspicious look--a look
    Which told me that the tempest in my soul
    Was finding outward vent upon my face.
    I caught her watching me, and understood
    That if I struck not soon, perchance my arm
    Would be restrained by man; so I prepared.
    There was a spot beside the sedgy stream,
    A solitary spot, which in our walks
    We sometimes crossed. I led her out that way.
    It was a hot close day; no ray of sun
    Shone through the lowering clouds, and now and then
    The thunder’s distant rumble met the ear.
    We reached the lonely river-bank. I stopped,
    And was about to do it, when she laid
    Her hand upon my arm with a caress,
    And asked me in her sweet familiar voice
    To pluck a water-lily, which I did,
    And then walked on, for somehow I was balked;
    I could not do it.

                        With the fall of night
    The pent-up tempest burst; and in its roar
    I seemed to hear God’s formidable wrath.
    I heard it in the howling of the wind;
    I heard it in the pelting of the rain
    Against the windows; and each rattling peal,
    Each burst of rolling echo in the dark
    Which made me cower like a chastened hound
    Recalled me to obedience. But the flesh,
    The strong rebellious flesh, oh how it writhed
    Against the spirit! How the natural love,
    The common human instinct, fought and fought,
    And, backed by Satan’s whisper, held its own!
    At length the spirit conquered, and I rose
    To do the will of God; but, in my crushed
    And humbled anguish, I implored the Lord
    To stay my lifted arm, and at the last
    To save her life as Isaac’s had been saved.
    Then I went up the stairs, as if each step
    Were a delay, a respite, and a hope,
    And sought the chamber where my Edith slept.
    The walk had worn her limbs; her sleep was deep.
    The storm had not aroused her; nor did I.
    I kissed her, and I slew her; for the Lord
    Did not vouchsafe to stay His servant’s arm.
    For one short moment after she was dead,
    I thought perchance that He would bring her back
    To life. But all was silent there.

                                        And now,
    Ye righteous judges of this Christian land,
    Ye godly Elders, look me in the face.
    Ye know ye dare not hang me. Will ye dare
    To place me in the madhouse for a deed
    Which God Himself exacted--which ye teach
    Your children to revere in Abraham
    From year to year? Ye know ye dare not do it.
    And if ye ask me how I knew God’s voice,
    Ask of the shepherd’s watch-dog how he knows
    His master’s call when darkness girds the fold!
    Ye know that Abraham of old, if now
    He stood before you, could at your command
    Give you no other answer. It was God
    Who, putting to the test His servant’s faith,
    Impelled my hand. Ye may not judge this deed.




AN ODE OF THE TUSCAN SHORE.


    When the Spirits that are masters
      Of the ever-ready storm,
    And that love to hound the waters,
      To destroy and to deform,
    See a mortal in their power
    They prepare a joyous hour,
    Venting their primeval hatred
      Of the thing whose blood is warm.

    And they lay on ocean’s surface
      Their innumerable hands,
    And each hand creates a billow
      That advances and expands;
    Till, amid the petrel’s screaming,
    Rope and tattered sail are streaming
    High above the seething water
      From the mast that still withstands.

    But then hate is blind: they know not
      What each human prey is worth:
    Not more cruel than impartial
      Is their elemental mirth:
    And their fury is not keener
    O’er the greater than the meaner,
    Though their victim were a Shelley
      And the glory of the earth.

    Look around thee in the sunshine;
      Watch this satin-surfaced deep,
    Which alone some rolling dolphins
      Stir out yonder in its sleep,
    Till upon the sea shall settle
    Sunset hues of molten metal,
    Red and bright as crater gleamings,
      And the noon shall cease to creep.

    Here was washed ashore the greatest
      Of the victims snatched away
    By the Spirits that are masters
      Of the wind and of the spray;
    When the waves might have exulted
    O’er the body they insulted
    With a shriller wilder clamour
      Than since Nature’s earliest day!

    Cæsar braved the great Sea Spirits,
      And he bade his men row on;
    And he cried: “Ye carry Cæsar:
      Then why tremble and turn wan?”
    And the great waves roared more loudly;
    But his galley sailed out proudly
    From the peril of the tempest
      Like an onward-hurried swan.

    Yet the world would scarce have missed him--
      There be Cæsars more than one:
    But a poet like to Shelley,
      Where be such beneath the sun?
    And mankind had lost a treasure
    Past all mourning and all measure,
    When the beach-waves gently shelved him
      With a moan for what was done.

    For an English ear, the breakers
      On this fatal Tuscan shore
    Seemed to lisp the name of Shelley,
      And to mourn it evermore;
    And the name appears to mingle
    With the rolling of the shingle
    And with every sound of Nature
      Which he lived but to adore.

    Oh, I hear it in the murmur
      Of the fragrant woods of pine
    As the sea-breeze softly hurries
      Through their long-extended line;
    And I hear it faintly coming
    From the never-ending humming
    Of the world of busy insects
      That the undergrowths confine.

    ’Tis the spot; and nought discordant
      Mars its beauty and repose.
    All along the tideless margin
      Pine or bay or ilex grows,
    Filled with an eternal warble;
    While Carrara’s crags of marble,
    Bare and lofty, print the azure,
      And, to landward, all enclose.

    All is peace and glorious sunshine;
      Nature seems redeemed from war.
    Nothing stirs from beach to offing,
      Where a few feluccas are,
    Waiting for the breeze that’s lazy;
    While beyond, where all is hazy,
    Like the ghost of dwindled power
      Loometh Elba, faint and far.

    But his genius knew no Elba,
      And his star, without decline,
    Was extinguished at its zenith
      In the wild and tossing brine;
    Not war’s red and lurid planet
    As of incandescent granite,
    But a star of whiter radiance,
      Clear, effulgent and divine.

    Mighty treasures lie for ever
      In each slimy ocean cave;
    Galleons with their gold lie buried
      Where the dark depth knows no wave;
    But the total of their measure
    Matches not the matchless treasure
    That in yonder stretch of water
      Has for ever found a grave:

    There the great unwritten poems
      Of a mighty poet lie--
    Unborn children of a lineage
      Which, once born, may never die.
    But the water mirrors heaven
    With the smile of one forgiven,
    While the breakers in the sunshine
      Sing an endless lullaby.




SWORD AND SICKLE.


    “_’Mid the harvest-shining plain_
     _Where the peasant heaps his grain_
     _In the garner of his foe._”

    In the noontide, safe and free,
    Basks the plain of Lombardy.
    Never now, nor near nor far
    Looms the lurid form of War
    That to overspread it came
    With her wings of smoky flame.
    Unmanured with blood the plain
    Yields in peace its yearly grain;
    And the milk-white broad-browed pair
    Of huge bullocks in the glare
    Drag the fruit of Freedom’s tillage
    Through each straggling Lombard village
    Which no Croat thirsts to pillage.
    Not a foe, save where unseen
    In the rice-swamp’s treacherous green
    Fever lurks, while wade and reap
    Through the sparkling waters deep
    Girls ill-sheltered from the sun,
    Which shoots down to scorch and stun,
    By their crimson kerchiefs light,
    And who there in Fever’s spite
    Cheer their souls with laugh and song
    As the noontide creeps along;
    Not a foe, save when o’erflows
    Adige big with melted snows,
    Or when Po’s dark whirling foam
    Threatens many a thriving home,
    Rolling all its bridges under
    With a dull unceasing thunder,
    Till it sweeps ere close of day
    Bridge and dyke and home away.

    Through the broad Subalpine plain
    Peace and work and freedom reign.
    Here and there in monstrous heaps
    Some vast ossuary keeps
    For men’s wondering eyes the bones
    Of the nation’s slaughtered sons;
    But no other traces show
    Where a few short years ago
    Countless balls of iron ploughed
    Through the serried quivering crowd--
    Where the broadcast Austrian lead
    Fell on furrows live and dead--
    Where for miles and miles were heaped
    The human harvests freshly reaped--
    Where the routed fled like chaff
    At the canon’s thunderous laugh,
    While the gun-wheels made red mud
    Of men weltering in their blood.
    Times are changed, and memories hold
    In the breasts but of the old.
    On Custozza’s once red earth
    By the Lombard peasant’s hearth
    Now the Austrian may sit
    Where no brows with hate shall knit:
    Who would dream that there can be
    Such a thing as tyranny?
    Italy appeals no longer
    To God’s throne against the stronger;
    And the Poet loves her now
    For the beauty of her brow,
    Not for that great crown of woe
    Whence the blood-drops used to flow.

    Lands are freed, and lands enslaved;
    But your name is there engraved
    In the hearts of those now freed
    Ye who helped them in their need!
    Nor do they remember now
    Those who lent them all the glow
    Of their genius and their feeling,
    And Compassion’s balm that’s healing,
    And the thunder of their curse
    In a heaven-shaking verse.
    Reckon not on thanks for long,
    Ye who fight with sword or song
    For the weak against the strong:
    Give your help for justice’ sake,
    Caring no reward to take.
    Freedom’s face is not less fair
    For remembering not your share;
    And the sheaves of sacred wheat,
    Which spring up beneath her feet
    From the liberated plain,
    Not less full of golden grain.

    Years ago one day I stood,
    In the autumn’s sunset flood,
    Looking down with sweeping sight
    From a bastion’s terraced height
    On the then unconquered plain
    Of the fair and French Lorraine.
    Scarce was autumn’s first leaf yellow;
    Ripened Earth had made air mellow.
    Like a snake inert and blue,
    Winding slowly corn-fields through,
    Wound the broad Moselle afar
    To the horizon’s utmost bar,
    Catching on each burnished fold
    Restless gleams of molten gold
    Till the sun was near to sink,
    When it caught a flaming pink
    From the crimson clouds slow sailing
    Where the amber light was failing.
    And surveying that expanse,
    What, I thought, is fair as France?
    Now the Prussian sentries stand
    Where I stood, and scan the land,
    Which for ever seems their own,
    With their ugly Prussian frown;
    And the sullen land has nought
    But the freedom of its thought,
    Of its thought that hopes and hates
    And from year to year awaits.

    And what of thee upon whose head
    All evil’s phials have been shed--
    Thou whom those who now have gotten
    Their own freedom, have forgotten--
    Thou whose name is never heard,
    Thou whose hope is aye deferred,
    Thou whose tongue thy foes outroot,
    Thou whose sons they chain and shoot--
    Poland, heiress of the knout?
    Lo, the century grows old
    And thy hour has not yet tolled.
    On thy form benumbed and bruised,
    Whence the life-blood half has oozed,
    Lies the dark Colossus still
    Whom his own sons now would kill--
    Tormentors that like vipers start
    From his huge frame’s every part;
    But he holds thee all the tighter
    While thy bloodless face grows whiter,
    And his limbs that on thee weigh
    Grow more rotten day by day.

    Hark! I hear a muffled sound
    Deep beneath the frozen ground
    Where a buried Poland pines
    In the dark Siberian mines,
    In the sunless vaults that ape
    Those of Hell in gloom and shape,
    Where the gangs who death await
    Unlearn to think, but not to hate:
    Is’t a growl of joy that runs
    Where are chained half Poland’s sons?
    Ay, a growl of joy it is
    To each mine’s extremities,
    And for once Despair has laughed
    In each black pestiferous shaft:
    He who sent them there lies dead
    On his gory Imperial bed--
    He who made them walk in chains,
    In long goaded staggering trains,
    Through the endless snow-clad plains
    To the grave in which they lie,
    Not yet dead, but soon to die:
    Even he has found his hour,
    Murdered in his boundless power
    By his own, and rots in death
    As they rot who here draw breath.




A PAGEANT OF SIENA.


    The old red, towered walls climb round the hills
    On which Siena stands in lonely state,
    Scanning the ridgy plain, where gleam no rills
      And loom no towns, but only endless lines
    Of livid furrowed hillocks which the great
    White, ploughing bullocks speck. From gate to gate
    A few tall cypresses and scattered pines
    Climb too, where, guarding streets that silence fills,
    The old red, towered walls climb round the hills.

    Silent and empty in the August glare
    The old depopulated city sleeps;
    Its dizzy belfry climbs the fiery air
      Into the sky’s inexorable blue;
    Across its great scooped shell-shaped square there creeps
    No living soul, nor up the high paved steeps
      That be its streets; perhaps some carts sway through
    Its dusty gates, behind a huge-horned pair,
    Creaking and empty in the August glare.

    O for the pageantry of olden days,
    Thou silent square--ye palaces that wind
    Up to the still cathedral, where the rays,
      Now gentler, kiss the marble and the gold!
    O for the throngs that Time has left behind,
    Ye buttressed lanes, ye lofty archways lined
      With faded saints; show those ye used to hold
    When the strong prosperous city loved displays
    And gaudy pageantry in olden days.

    I hear a hum of men, a tramp and tread;
    The city’s Districts muster. First appears
    The District of the Panther--white and red
      Its men-at-arms and pages, fifes and drums;
    And next the yellow-liveried troop that bears
    The Ghibelline standard of the Eagle nears;
      Then Tortoise, Hedgehog, Snail and Glowworm come;
    And the Guelf She-Wolf, with her arms ahead
    All black and silver, comes with tramp and tread.

    The Districts muster for the August race,
    And take their glossy racers to be blessed,
    Each in its own rich church, where, held in trace
      Of gold, the startled barb with hoof-steps loud
    Is led through flaunting banner, shield and crest
    To the high altar’s rail, where kneel close pressed
      The pages and the soldiers and the crowd,
    Who scan the gleaming limbs that shall efface
    Last year’s defeat and win the August race.

    The huge old square scooped like a palmer’s shell,
    Siena’s forum and its hippodrome,
    Echoes a roar that drowns the mighty bell
      From battlemented belfry in the sky;
    The ring of olden palaces, become
    Ablaze with crimson hangings, looks like some
      Enchanted Coliseum, in which vie
    Scutcheon and standard; so you scarce could tell
    The strange old square scooped like a palmer’s shell.

    In bright procession ere the race is run
    The rival Districts wind around the course,
    Each with its banner in the evening sun,
      Its clarions, and its Captain capped with steel,
    Its pages and its men that lead the horse
    Caparisoned and guarded by a force
      Of gaudy pikemen; while the clarions peal
    And the crowd cheers the Panther that has won
    Its fickle favour ere the race is run.

    And as the standard-bearers one and all
    March by in motley blazonry, they cast
    Their standards high in air, and as they fall
      Catch them above the throng with rapid hand
    And twirl and twist them dexterously and fast
    In one unceasing play, until at last
      The whole vast square is by the bright silk fanned,
    And they have marched before the great Town Hall
    Where stand the city’s rulers one and all.

    Then comes, drawn by six bullocks of huge size
    All white as milk, with many-coloured strings
    About their horns, broad brows and large black eyes,
      The old Republic’s standard-bearing wain,
    With its great Martinella bell that rings
    Oft o’er the battle’s roar, and whose sound brings
      Fear to the heart of her who plots in vain,
    Perfidious Florence. From its high mast flies
    Siena’s She-Wolf’s standard of huge size.

    And now the course is clear, and those who don
    The colours of the Panther feel no fear;
    A hundred thousand partizans look on
      With inborn urban rivalry, and hail
    The horses one by one as they appear,
    And hoot the Shell, or Wave, or wildly cheer
      The Hedgehog, or the Dragon, or the Snail,
    Or the great Eagle that so oft has won,
    Whose knaves and rider yellow colours don.

    At last they start, and at terrific pace
    In dreadful crush adown the slope they tear,
    The Tortoise leading for a little space;
      Then from the crowd the Panther shooting out,
    Maintains the lead thrice round the perilous square;
    Then suddenly a great shout rends the air:
      “The Snail! The Snail!” all cry; and in hushed doubt
    All watch the two. The Snail has won the race,
    And slowly slackens its terrific pace.

    And in the District of the Snail to-night
    Is revelry and feasting in the street;
    From great wrought-iron torch-holders the light
      Falls red and flaring on grim palace walls
    Decked with bright banners; boards where all may eat
    Who care, are crowded; while the old repeat
      Many an oft-told story that recalls
    What things the Snail had done in race and fight.
    Sleep shuns the District of the Snail to-night.




THE WONDER OF THE WORLD.


    When this shall reach you I shall be no more;
    For do not men in presence of some score
    Too great for payment constantly prefer
    Quick death to base insolvency, and spur
    A trembling self across life’s brink. And yet
    They owe but gold--perhaps a paltry debt
    To some vile Jew; while I, alas, alas!
    Owe all mankind a thing which did surpass
    All other treasures; a grand peerless thing
    Beyond all pricing and all wondering,
    Which should be man’s, but which to save my own
    Mean life I sacrificed. And days have grown
    To be long months, and months to be long years;
    And with each year the frightful debt appears
    More insupportable. Oh, how immense
    Has grown its weight! How horrible the sense
    Of utter helplessness! But I have now
    To tell the fatal tale of when and how
    I lost it for the world, and not to speak
    Of these sad days when conscience loves to wreak
    Her retribution on me in such vast
    And unremitting anguish.

                                  I had passed
    Six idle years since taking my degree,
    When I fell in at Athens casually
    With one called Richard Strongclyffe, who had been
    My college friend, but whom I had not seen
    Since then, and who meanwhile had made a name
    Through study of Greek Art. We soon became
    As intimate as of old; and as no claim
    Of work or pleasure summoned me elsewhere,
    He let me roam through Greece with him, and share
    His own strong daily life--the sheer reverse
    Of my accustomed life of waste, and worse
    Than waste, the aimless life of which my soul
    Was more than sick; it had become so foul.
    He had an iron will; his hand was rough;
    His heart was gentle. God had used strong stuff
    In making him--weak stuff in making me.
    And yet I was not worthless utterly.
    Spite all my sins there were some better strings
    In my weak heart; the wind of angels’ wings
    Made them vibrate--but with faint echo, like
    Æolian chords that gusts too fitful strike.
    Mine is a double nature, which depends
    Wholly on its surroundings, and which blends
    With good or evil, with the low or high,
    With the same drifting weak facility.
    In Strongclyffe’s hands my nature’s worthier side
    Alone found vent; pure tastes that had not died
    Grew strong, while half-forgotten culture found
    A sudden use, and from all things around
    Increased its wealth. I think that he enjoyed
    His power over me; his strong soul toyed
    With my soft malleable mind, which had,
    In spite of degradations many and sad,
    Affinities of taste, and could admire
    And understand him. Oh what strength and fire
    Beneath his quiet ways! What scorn could burst
    From his cold lip! what ceaseless ceaseless thirst
    He had for knowledge! Even as my mind
    Grew intimate with his, new worlds defined
    Their shape on my horizon, like the grey
    Faint, shadowy Greek Isles which far away
    Loomed through the mists of dawn, but which became,
    As we approached them in the sunrise flame,
    Each minute more distinct.

                                We seldom stayed
    Long in one self-same spot; but we obeyed
    The needs of Strongclyffe’s studies, which entailed
    Research in many places; and we sailed
    From isle to isle, or rode from place to place,
    Now in the less-known parts of Greece and Thrace,
    And now in rocky Lydia. Oh, what fields
    Where men dig gold, what far Golconda yields
    Such wealth, such gems, as those impoverished plains
    In which the spade turns up the scant remains
    Of bygone genius; where the obedient earth,
    Summoned to yield her buried dead, gives birth,
    As if compelled by an enchanter’s rod,
    To what is ever young--now to some god
    In all his strength and beauty, now to some
    Fantastic child of Pan, who seems fresh come
    From dewy woods that long have ceased to be?
    And Strongclyffe had the art to make one see
    The hidden through the seen--to reconstruct
    Past life and loveliness, and to conduct
    The mind through perished worlds; and everywhere
    He showed the same keen interest and a rare
    Persistence of research. Yet what he did
    Seemed somehow trifling; oft I thought it hid
    Higher preoccupation--some great aim
    Which time was ripening; so that when there came
    One day a sudden change in him--when all
    Was thrown aside, and when I heard him call
    Upon my help, with triumph on his lips,
    In a great enterprise which should eclipse
    Even the greatest, I received his words
    Not wholly unprepared.

                              How my heart’s chords
    Vibrate as I recall them! ’Twas about
    The third year’s close; and we were sitting out
    Upon our terrace looking on the sea
    At Thyna, after sundown. Purposely,
    As I now fancy, Strongclyffe had led on
    Our idle talk to what might yet be won
    Back by mankind, of the great wreck we call
    Antiquity; and then we talked of all
    That splendid half of antique art which must
    From the materials used have turned to dust
    Almost as soon as did the artist’s hands.
    Where be thy works, Apelles? where now stands,
    Phidias, thy gold and ivory gems, renowned
    Through the broad world? and where stands she who owned
    As her fit seat the new-born Parthenon,
    Thy gold and ivory Pallas? What would man
    Not give to-day if only he could scan
    In one short glimpse the splendour of that shape
    Which Fancy’s restorations vainly ape,
    If he for one short minute could behold
    That ivory face, that drapery of gold
    As Phidias modelled it?

                              “And yet,” I said,
    “That Art was not so frail; for I have read
    That that same effigy of Pallas, spared
    From age to age, existed unimpaired
    Till the Crusaders, under Baldwin, took
    And sacked Constantinople.”

                                  A strange look
    Flashed out from Strongclyffe’s eyes. “There is no truth
    In that old tale,” he answered; “and Time’s tooth
    Still spared the statue when it many a year
    Had gnawed the bones of Baldwin in his bier,
    Ay, and of Baldwin’s sons.”

                              “How know you that?”
    I asked.

                He left the bench on which we sat,
    And with a strange excitement he began
    To pace the terrace. “I am not the man,”
    He cried, “to make rash statements; yet I say
    Deliberately, Percy, that to-day
    That Pallas still exists. Oh, Earth has still
    Surprises for mankind; and with God’s will
    And patient work, the world shall see her yet!
    Think not that I am mad: wait till I set
    My proofs before your eyes. When you behold
    The text in John Ionides, the old
    Byzantine Chronicler, which had defied
    All guesses to this day, and by its side
    A certain passage in the life of Paul
    Of Trebizond--and when you’ve counted all
    The links of evidence which year by year
    I have augmented both at home and here,
    Until I now have found the very spot--
    Then call me mad. ’Tis years since I have got
    The certainty that long ere Baldwin’s sack
    The Emperor, in fear of some attack
    Upon the palace, had her safe conveyed
    By vessel to a distance, and (by aid
    Of trusty workmen) carefully concealed
    In crypts beneath a temple. Nought revealed
    The secret at the time; the Emperor died
    Soon after; and, none caring to unhide
    The statue, men forgot her. But where lay
    The temple--or the ruins which to-day
    No doubt replace it? Here I seemed to lose
    My way and reach mere nothing. All my clues
    Led to one spot--Thelopis; and that spot,
    In spite of all my search, I found it not.
    Oh, with what patience in these three long years
    Have I not sought! Oh, with what hopes and fears
    Have I not searched the present and the past
    To find that place Thelopis! And at last
    I have found out. Thelopis was a town,
    If town it could be called, that was burnt down
    Ten centuries ago, and where has grown
    The present village Thos--the place that is
    Nearest the temple of Peripolis:
    The temple is Peripolis. And see,
    The distance and direction both agree:
    The passage says, ‘a five days’ eastward sail,
    And then three days of road.’ No clues now fail;
    There under Peripolis, girt round
    By solitude and silence, will be found
    The gold and ivory Pallas. Oh, I know
    That you will answer that she long ago
    Must have become mere shapeless mouldering dust--
    That after seven centuries she must
    Have blent with earth; and yet I say she stands
    As grand and splendid as when all Greek lands
    First hailed her beauty! Do you think that they
    Who used such pains, in safety to convey
    And hide her in that distant spot, would spare
    The slight pains needed to exclude the air
    And ward away the damp? Again I say
    She lives--she lives!”

                          And so the following day
    We started for Peripolis--a long
    And arduous journey; for it lies among
    Wild unfrequented mountains, in a small
    And fever-stricken plain. The hills are all
    Possessed by tribes which, though uncouth and wild,
    Are not unfriendly. When you once have toiled
    Through the last defiles, and behold the lone
    Still distant ruins below you, that seem thrown
    There to die slow, like those whom in its haste
    A routed host abandons in the waste,
    There creeps across your soul a sort of fear,
    A sense of isolation such as ne’er
    Has filled your heart. The broken columns throw
    Their shadows on bare shingle; nought will grow
    For miles around save thin scorched grass that feeds
    A few lean goats, and some few clumps of reeds
    Where there is water. Oh, the tract around
    Speaks utter desolation; and we found
    The task not easy even to collect
    The workmen we required. The heaps of wrecked
    And weed-grown marble where the spade was tried
    Had more than once been searched, and seemed to hide
    Nought worth men’s pains--at most some shattered bit
    Of Greco-Roman sculpture; but we lit
    On some strange crypts; and in a few more days
    We had discovered a bewildering maze
    Of subterranean chambers, large and small,
    And catacomb-like passages, which all
    Were cut in soft dry stone, and stretched away
    Far underground, beyond the ruins that lay
    In the sun’s light; and all were wholly bare.
    Strongclyffe at once, pretending not to care
    For empty crypts, employed the men elsewhere;
    While he and I, by torch-light and alone,
    Explored the maze. But sometimes, as loose stone
    Obstructed here and there the way, we had
    A boy to help--a dull half-witted lad
    Of whom we felt no fear. For days we sought
    With boundless care, but all our searching brought
    Nothing to light; we sounded every wall,
    We grew familiar with each inch of all
    The lonely crypts; and even Strongclyffe seemed
    To grow depressed. But suddenly there gleamed
    Fresh ardour in his eyes: “Look there!” he said,
    And showed me something like an arrow’s head
    Cut in the wall; a small, scarce visible mark
    Which led to others like it through the dark
    Perplexing crypt; and where the last marks were
    We scrutinized the wall with greater care,
    And found its surface rougher, as if there
    It had been tampered with. “This is the spot,”
    He whispered. “She is here;” and having got
    A pick, he struck. And as, beneath the stroke
    Of Vulcan’s hammer once, the aching brow
    Of Zeus was cleft for Pallas’ birth, so now
    The stricken cloven stone exposed to sight
    The long-sought Goddess; and the flickering light
    Of the red torch flashed in a tremulous flood
    Upon her golden breastplate as she stood
    Intact, in all the glory and the glow
    Of her incomparable beauty.

                                So
    Was she discovered; I must now compel
    My weak and miserable self to tell
    How she was lost. There was no time to lose,
    And we agreed, or rather Strongclyffe chose
    That he should start at once for the chief town
    Of that wild province, as he long had known
    The there commanding Pasha, to obtain
    A guard of men; while I was to remain
    To watch the workmen. He was to be back
    Within three days. Alas! I had no lack
    Of buoyant thoughts at first; my soul was filled
    With our immense success; my nerves still thrilled
    With triumph and delight; and the first day
    Of Strongclyffe’s absence lightly passed away.
    The men worked on as usual, and my mind
    Conceived no fear. But when the sun declined
    There crept across my spirit, with the tide
    Of slowly creeping shadow as day died,
    A vague uneasiness; and my hands felt
    For the revolver hanging at my belt,
    I thought; and I remembered that when we
    Had found the prize, we were not two but three.
    The boy had seen the whole; and though I knew
    That he was dull of wit and had no clue
    To find the spot again in that vast maze
    Of hidden crypts and subterranean ways,
    I wished he had not seen. The men had gone
    Back to their distant huts. I sat alone
    Upon a broken column; one by one
    The large stars twinkled forth from out the blue;
    The shattered standing columns dusky grew,
    And very solemn; and the wakening bat
    Began to flit around me. As I sat,
    I thought of Strongclyffe’s generosity;
    How he had said ere setting out that I,
    His faithful friend, must have an equal share
    In the world’s praise; that it would not be fair
    That I----

                O God!

                        I gave a strangled shout
    And fell, dragged backwards by a noose about
    My throat. Three men were kneeling on my chest
    Binding me tight with cords, while others pressed
    All round about me, uttering no sound
    As if all dumb. When I was firmly bound
    All save my feet, which, purposely let loose
    To let me walk, were in a running noose,
    One of the men addressed me: “Listen well
    To what I say,” he said. “If you rebel
    We take your life; and none can help you now.
    We have no wish to harm you; but we know
    That you have found a treasure, and have got
    The clue. Lead on.”

                        “I understand you not,”
    I said.
          He took a pistol from his sash
    And held it at my ear. “Come, be not rash,”
    He said, “but lead the way.” Oh, would to God
    That he had fired! But though like a mere clod
    I still moved not, he did not fire, but placed
    Once more the gleaming pistol in his waist,
    And whispered with the others; then they drew
    The cords still tighter round my limbs, and threw
    My unresisting body on the bed
    In my own hut hard by. “Mark well,” they said,
    “Ere dawn we come. Thy blood be on thy head!”

    At first I had no thoughts, nought but the sense
    Of cramped and swelling limbs, and an intense
    Desire to burst my bonds. But by-and-by
    A sense of infinite calamity
    Began to weigh upon me; and at last,
    The sense came home that time was slipping fast,
    That I was there to make an awful choice
    ’Twixt Life and Death; and then an inner voice
    Began to state the argument each way,
    Not clearly, coldly, as I may to-day
    Do in this letter, but confused, close-pressed,
    Repeated and repeated in my breast
    In every shape, until my weary brain,
    Exhausted by the conflict and the pain,
    Yielded to sleep. And even in my sleep
    The struggle still went on; I felt it keep
    Possession of my dreams, and take the shape
    Of shifting nightmare, leaving no escape.
    I saw the glorious Pallas, calm no more,
    But threatening and terrific, kneeling o’er
    My prostrate body, with red eyes that gleamed
    So fiery in the darkness, that it seemed
    As if one of the Furies had put on
    Her golden panoply. Then, wild and wan,
    I saw the face of Strongclyffe looming out
    From a black whirling gulf; and heard him shout
    Like some spent swimmer half sucked down.
        And there
    I think I woke, and with a vague despair
    Resumed the pleadings of each adverse side;
    While, ever louder, something in me cried:
    “Choose death, choose death! in fifty years from this,
    When thou art swallowed in the dark abyss
    Of Time, what will it be to thee or thine
    Whether thou diedst to-day at twenty-nine,
    Or knew’st old age? But man whom Time devours
    Not, and who lives by centuries, not hours,
    Will be possessed of one transcendent gift,
    To add to his small store of things that lift
    The soul to higher spheres--a gift from which
    Will flow perennial charm for poor and rich,
    For young and old. If but mankind could know
    That some great treasure lost long, long ago--
    A famed Greek play, for instance--had been lost
    Because a certain man had grudged the cost
    Of his brief life to save it, that man’s name,
    For ever handed down in scorn and shame,
    Would be all nations’ by-word. Who can say
    That some great work which man enjoys to-day--
    The Melos statue, Hamlet or Macbeth,
    Or the Gioconda--was not saved from death,
    In some great unknown peril that it ran,
    By some unknown, unthanked and nameless man
    Who gave his life instead? And then, in place
    Of something rarer yet, wouldst have the face
    To give the world thy mean half-wasted life
    With which it can do nought? Thou hast no wife,
    No child to need thy care. Choose death, choose death,
    While yet ’tis time!”

                          But oh the pleasant breath
    Of life; the strong, strong stream of youth and health
    That bounds along the veins; the unused wealth
    Of what we call the Future, with its schemes,
    Emotions, friendships, loves, surprises, dreams;
    The thing we call Identity, the I
    To which the wretched cling, they know not why,
    And which no evils press me to destroy;
    The simple pleasures which I now enjoy--
    What, give up all? What right has Fate, what right,
    To thrust me from Life’s hearth into the night,
    The darkness and the cold? What right or need
    Has Fate to come, and while I sit and read
    Life’s pleasant page, to summon me to shut
    The open book, and leave two thirds uncut?
    Who dares to tell me that a living man
    Whom God has made, who feels the cool winds fan
    His heated brow, is not in God’s sight worth
    A thing that is man’s work, upon this earth?
    My life is mended now; each passing day
    Now rolls, though idly, harmlessly away.
    The bright green fields, the flowers and the trees,
    The rippling streams, the sun, the passing breeze,
    The million things that in their life rejoice
    And gladden mine, call out with mighty voice,
    “Choose life, choose life!”

                      And when at dawn they came,
    And bade me show the spot--O shame! O shame!
    I nodded an assent. Oh let me now,
    With shame’s familiar brand upon my brow,
    For once spare my base self, and hurry by
    Those monstrous minutes! Slowly, silently,
    I led them to the spot. I saw their eyes
    With excusable rapture scan the prize
    To which their souls were dead. I saw them take
    Their hatchets in their impious hands, and break
    Into small fragments hideous to behold,
    And shapeless dust of ivory and of gold,
    The beauty which the world would have despaired
    To match, and twenty centuries had spared
    In vain--in vain! Awhile, I think, I heard
    Ferocious wrangling, oath and threatening word
    Over the booty; but my sickened brain
    Took little note. And when I sought again
    To see and hear and think, all sounds had ceased;
    I was alone, and free.

                             And--O mean beast,
    Mean coward that I was!--I dared not face
    The sight of Strongclyffe; but I fled the place,
    Leaving a letter; and in guilt and fear,
    Just like a thief, stole back to England here,
    Alone with my incomparable debt.
    He never saw me more; although we met
    In these o’er-crowded London streets one day,
    And oh how changed he was--how old and grey
    He had become, though scarce two years had passed
    Over his head since I had seen him last!
    He saw me not, but passed with vacant eye;
    While I, as if to vanish bodily
    Into the solid stones, shrank to the wall.
    He now is dead--and I? Oh, does not all
    Compel me too to die? What have I done,
    In these ten years of anguish, to atone
    For having chosen life? What use--what good
    Have I been to mankind since first I stood
    So fatally and wholly in its debt?
    What drops of compensation have I yet
    Wrung out of my weak worthless self, and cast
    Into the deep abyss? Oh, I have passed
    A cruel, cruel time! And year by year
    I feel less wish to live, less strength to bear
    The weight of my immense insolvency.
    And in the street as each man passes by
    I mutter to myself, “If he but knew
    What he has lost, would he not stop and sue
    For what can ne’er be paid, and cry, ‘Come forth!
    And show thyself to men, what thou art worth!
    Thou art the thing which men have got instead
    Of the Incomparable: raise thy head!’”




IPSISSIMUS.


    Thou Priest that art behind the screen
      Of this confessional, give ear:
    I need God’s help, for I have seen
      What turns my vitals limp with fear.
    O Christ, O Christ, I must have done
    More mortal sin than anyone
      Who says his prayers in Venice here!

    And yet by stealth I only tried
      To kill my enemy, God knows;
    And who on earth has e’er denied
      A man the right to kill his foes?
    He won the race of the Gondoliers;
    I hate him and the skin he wears--
      I hate him and the shade he throws.

    I hate him through each day and hour;
      All ills that curse me seem his fault:
    He makes my daily soup taste sour,
      He makes my daily bread taste salt;
    And so I hung upon his track
    At dusk to stab him in the back
      In some lone street or archway vault.

    But oh give heed! As I was stealing
      Upon his heels, with knife grasped tight,
    There crept across my soul a feeling
      That I myself was kept in sight;
    Each time I turned, dodge as I would,
    A masked and unknown watcher stood
      Who baffled all my plan that night.

    What mask is this, I thought and thought,
      Who dogs me thus when least I care?
    His figure is nor tall nor short,
      And yet has a familiar air.
    But oh, despite this watcher’s eye,
    I’ll reach my man yet by-and-by,
      And snuff his life out yet, elsewhere.

    And though compelled to still defer,
      I schemed another project soon;
    I armed my boat with a hidden spur
      To run him down in the lagoon.
    At dusk I saw him row one day
    Where lone and wide the waters lay,
      Reflecting scarce the dim white moon.

    No boat, as far as sight could strain,
      Loomed on the solitary sea;
    I saw my oar each minute gain
      Upon my death-doomed enemy,
    When lo, a black-masked gondolier,
    Silent and spectre-like, drew near,
      And stepped between my deed and me.

    He seemed from out the flood to rise,
      And hovered near to mar my game;
    I knew him and his cursed guise,
      His cursed mask: he was the same.
    So, balked once more, enraged and cowed,
    Back through the still lagoon I rowed
      In mingled wonder, wrath, and shame.

    Oh, were I not to come and pray
      Thee for thy absolution here
    In the Confessional, to-day
      My very ribs would burst with fear.
    Leave not, good Father, in the lurch
    A faithful son of Mother Church,
      Whose faith is firm and soul sincere.

    Behind St. Luke’s, as the dead men know,
      A pale apothecary dwells,
    Who deals in death both quick and slow,
      And baleful philters, withering spells;
    He sells alike to rich and poor,
    Who know what knocks to give his door,
      The yellow dust that rings the knells.

    Well, then, I went and knocked the knock
      With cautious hand, as I’d been taught;
    The door revolved with silent lock,
      And I went in, suspecting nought.
    But oh, the self-same form stood masked
    Behind the counter, and unasked
      In silence proffered what I sought.

    My knees and hands like aspens shook:
      I spilt the powder on the ground;
    I dared not turn, I dared not look;
      My palsied tongue would make no sound.
    Then through the door I fled at last
    With feet that seemed more slow than fast,
      And dared not even once look round.

    And yet I am an honest man
      Who only sought to kill his foe:
    Could I sit down to see each plan
      That I took up frustrated so,
    When as each plan was marred and balked,
    And in the sun my man still walked,
      I felt my hate still greater grow?

    I thought, “At dusk with stealthy tread
      I’ll seek his dwelling, and I’ll creep
    Upstairs and hide beneath his bed,
      And in the night I’ll strike him deep.”
    And so I went; but at his door
    The figure, masked just as before,
      Sat on the step as if asleep.

    Bent, spite all fear, upon my task,
      I tried to pass: there was no space.
    Then rage prevailed; I snatched the mask
      From off the baffling figure’s face,
    And oh, unutterable dread!
    The face was mine, mine white and dead,
      Stiff with some frightful death’s grimace.

    What sins are mine, O luckless wight,
      That doom should play me such a trick
    And make me see a sudden sight
      That turns both soul and body sick?
    Stretch out thy hands, thou priest unseen
    That sittest there behind the screen,
      And give me absolution, quick!

    O God, O God, his hands are dead!
      His hands are mine, O monstrous spell!
    I feel them clammy on my head.
      Is he my own dead self as well?
    Those hands are mine--their scars, their shape:
    O God, O God, there’s no escape,
      And seeking Heaven, I fall on Hell!




AN ODE TO THE TRAVELLING THUNDER.

(Suggested by a line in the magnificent opening description of Miss A.
MARY F. ROBINSON’S “Janet Fisher.”)


    God’s wrath is travelling overhead,
      God’s wrath upon the wing,
    Which makes man cower in his bed
    If he has heaven’s strength to dread,
      And hides some guilty thing.

    The booming peals of thunder shake
      These walls and the black night;
    They make the mountains thrill and quake:
    I listen as I lie awake,
      While Earth and Heaven fight.

    What seek’st thou with repeated stroke,
      Wrath, as thou hurriest past?
    Is it, through night’s scorched riven cloak,
    Some huge old solitary oak
      Or some doomed storm-bent mast?

    The mountains court thy blow and each
      Unfathomable abyss,
    Where thy white blasting stroke may reach
    Some Titan still unstruck whose speech
      Is the wild torrent’s hiss.

    There mayst thou, where presumptuous pines
      To climb God’s sky aspire,
    Do battle ’gainst their serried lines,
    And ere the lurid storm-dawn shines,
      Strike dead their kings with fire.

    There may thy peal, enclosed by rock,
      Long struggle and die slow;
    And while it seeks some gorge’s lock,
    Growl, laugh and roar, and fiercely mock
      Each sound of human woe.

    Along the backs of the mountain chain
      Where thou awhile mayst cling,
    O’er the boundless sea and the endless plain,
    With driven hail and sheeted rain
      Thick shaken from thy wing,
    Thou hurriest on, black cloud of wrath,
      Thou hater of human walls,
    Shaking men’s souls upon thy path
    As thou dost shake the beams, like lath,
      In battlemented halls;

    Or pausing, broodest o’er the night,
      In silence gathering strength;
    While, ever and anon, the light
    Quivers from out thee, dazzling bright,
      And shows earth’s breadth and length.

    So have I seen thee, dreaded Power,
      Show Venice in her sleep
    More vivid than at noon’s fierce hour,
    With every palace, dome, and tower
      That rises from the deep;

    Tinting the briny city pink,
      In one long quivering flash;
    Then snatching back, ere you could think,
    All into darkness black as ink--
      Dumb save the ceaseless plash.

    Then on, and on, black cloud of fire,
      Upon thy stormy ways,
    To vault the shaken sky with ire,
    To shatter the presumptuous spire,
      To make the forest blaze.

    To roll in folds of lurid steam
      O’er ocean’s rolling waves,
    With rolling peals of sound that seem
    To ask account for the dead that teem
      In all its oozy caves.

    By sea or land, by night or day,
      Thy savage booming voice
    Makes, as thou hurriest on thy way,
    And all earth’s shaken pillars sway,
      My awe-struck soul rejoice.

    Even as stormy passions here,
      Battling with God above,
    Revenge and wrath, despair and fear,
    Make glorious music to my ear,
      Beyond all songs of love.




SONNETS.

[Illustration]




IDLE CHARON.


    The shores of Styx are lone for evermore,
      And not one shadowy form upon the steep
      Looms through the dusk, far as the eye can sweep,
    To call the ferry over as of yore;
    But tintless rushes all about the shore
      Have hemmed the old boat in, where, locked in sleep,
      Hoar-bearded Charon lies; while pale weeds creep
    With tightening grasp all round the unused oar.
    For in the world of Life strange rumours run
      That now the Soul departs not with the breath,
    But that the Body and the Soul are one;
      And in the loved one’s mouth, now, after death,
    The widow puts no obol, nor the son,
      To pay the ferry in the world beneath.




THE OBOL.[A]


    Scarce have I rhymed of Charon looming grey
      Amid pale rushes through the dusky air,
      And of the obol we no longer care
    To put in dead men’s mouths as ferry-pay,
    When, lo, I find, amongst some pence, to-day
      Received as common change, I know not where,
      A stray Greek obol, seeming Charon’s fare
    To put between my lips when I be dead.
    Poor bastard Obol, even couldst thou cheat
      The shadowy Boatman, I should scarcely find
    The heart to cross: extinction seems so sweet.
      I need thee not; and thou shalt be consigned
    To some old whining beggar in the street,
      Whose soul shall cross, while mine shall stay behind.

[A] The coin referred to in this sonnet was a modern Greek piece of
five lepta, rather smaller than a halfpenny, and bearing the word
_Obolos_ on the reverse.




LETHE.


    I had a dream of Lethe, of the brink
      Of leaden waters, whither many bore
      Dead, pallid loves, while others, old and sore,
    Brought but their tottering selves, in haste to drink.
    And, having drunk, they plunged, and seemed to sink
      Their load of love or guilt for evermore,
      Reaching with radiant brow the sunny shore
    That lay beyond, no more to think and think.

    Oh, who will give me, chained to Thought’s dull strand,
      A draught of Lethe, salt with final tears,
    Were it no more than fills the hollow hand?
      Oh, who will rid me of the wasted years,
    The thought of Life’s fair structure vainly planned,
      And each false hope, that mocking re-appears?




ACHERON.


    Where rolls in silent speed through cave on cave
      Soul-freighted Acheron, and no other light
      Evokes the rocks from an eternal night
    Than the pale phosphorescence of the wave,
    Shall men not meet, and have one chance to crave
      Forgiveness for rash deeds--one chance to right
      Old earthly quarrels, and in Death’s despite
    Unsay the said, and kill the pang they gave?

    See, see! there looms from yonder soul-filled bark
      That passes ours, a long-loved, long-lost face,
    And with a cry we stretch our ghostly arms.
      But heeding not, they whirl into the dark,
    Bound for a sea beyond all time and space,
      Which neither life nor love nor sunlight warms.




ON SIGNORELLI’S FRESCO OF THE RESURRECTION.


    I saw a vast bare plain; with, overhead,
      A half-chilled sun, that shed a sickly light;
      And all around, till out of reach of sight,
    The earth’s thin crust heaved with the rising dead,
    Who, as they struggled from their dusty bed,
      At first mere bones, by countless years made white,
      Took gradual flesh, and stood all huddled tight
    In mute, dull groups, as yet too numb to dread.
    And all the while the summoning trump on high
      With rolling thunder never ceased to shake
    The livid vault of that unclouded sky,
      Calling fresh hosts of penitents to take
    Each his identity; until well-nigh
      The whole dry worn-out earth appeared to wake.




ON SIGNORELLI’S FRESCO OF THE BINDING OF THE LOST.


    In boundless caves, lit only by the glare
      Of pools of molten stone, the lost are pent
      In countless herds, inextricably blent,
    Yet each alone with his own black despair;
    While, through the thickness of the lurid air,
      The bat-winged fiends, from some far, unseen vent,
      Bring on their backs the damned in swift descent,
    To swell the crowds that wait in silence there.

    And then begins the binding of the lost
      With snaky thongs, before they be transferred
    To realms of utter flame or utter frost;
      And, like a sudden ocean boom, is heard,
    Uprising from the dim and countless host,
      Pain’s first vague roar, Hell’s first wild useless word.




MUSSET’S LOUIS D’OR.


    Asleep, a little fisher-girl one day
      Lay on the sands, within an old boat’s shade;
      Her skirt was tattered, and the sea-breeze played
    With her brown loosened hair a ceaseless play.
    A poet chanced to pass as there she lay;
      Her sun-burnt face, her tatters he surveyed;
      A golden coin between her lips he laid,
    And, letting her sleep on, he went his way.

    What came of that gold windfall? Did it breed
      Those long-loved coins which patient thrift can show
    With proud pure smile to meet the household need?
      Or stolen gold? or those curst coins which grow
    Each year more sought, more loathed, and are the meed
      Of women’s loveless kisses? Who can know?




THE PHANTOM SHIP.


    We touch Life’s shore as swimmers from a wreck
      Who shudder at the cheerless land they reach,
      And find their comrades gathered on the beach
    Watching a fading sail, a small white speck--
    The phantom ship, upon whose ample deck
      There seemed awhile a homeward place for each.
      The crowd still wring their hands and still beseech,
    But see, it fades, in spite of prayer and beck.

    Let those who hope for brighter shores no more
      Not mourn, but turning inland, bravely seek
    What hidden wealth redeems the shapeless shore.
      The strong must build stout cabins for the weak;
    Must plan and stint; must sow and reap and store;
      For grain takes root though all seems bare and bleak.




SPRING.


    For those who note the fate of earthly things
      There lurks a sadness in the April air,
    A dreamy sense of what the future brings
      To things too good, too hopeful, and too fair.
    The spring brings greenness to the recent grave,
      But brings no solace to the mourning heart;
    Nor will its rustling and its piping save
      A single pang to him who must depart.
    The ivy bloom is full of humming bees;
      The linnets whistle in the leaves on high;
    Around the stems of all the orchard trees
      In flaky heaps the fallen blossoms lie:
    But every leaf upon each new-clad tree
    Tells but of boundless mutability.




TO V. P.,

ABOUT TO VISIT OXFORD.


    So you will see what I can see no more:
      The broad quadrangles where the sunlit sward,
    At which you peep through some old oaken door,
      Is girt around by stone-work black and scarred;
    The sedgy Isis, which the swift Eight cleaves
      With mighty stroke, all rippled by the breeze;
    The narrow Cherwell, gliding under leaves;
      The City’s towers rising o’er the trees.
    All this, alas, for me is fading fast,
      And dimness seems descending on those walls
    While Cherwell slowly glides into the Past.
      The throng in cap and gown which filled those halls
    Is turning into ghosts, whose names at last
      I shall forget, as twilight round me falls.




BY THE FIRE.


    I sat beside the fire, ten years ago,
      And in the dusk wreathed fancies in its flare,
      Meting the Future out, to each his share,
    While danced the restless shadows to and fro.
    And when at last the yellow flame grew low
      And leapt and licked no more, I still sat there
      Watching with eyes fast fixed, but mind elsewhere
    The darkening crimson of the flameless glow.

    And lo, at dusk, I watch once more to-day
      The slowly-sinking flame, the faint dull crash
    Of crumbling embers deadening into grey;
      But see alone the Past, misspent and rash,
    And wasted gifts, and chances thrown away.
      The Present and the Future? All is ash.




NIGHT.


    Thou heedest not, inexorable Night,
      Whether besought from some lone prison cell
      To stay thy hours, by one whose scaffold-knell
    Will sound not later than return of light,
    Or prayed to urge them by some suffering wight
      Who notes their creep as wearily and well
      As men not for eternity in Hell
    May note the purging flames’ decreasing height.

    Hark! in the street I hear a distant sound
      Of music and of laughter and of song,
    As go a band of revellers their round:
      And under prison-walls it comes along,
    And under dull sick-rooms, where moans abound;
      For who shall grudge their strumming to the strong?




RIVER BABBLE.


    The wreathing of my rhymes has helped to chase
      Away despair from each untasted day,
      And, on my soul, I pray of Time to stay
    His hand, when I be dead, and not efface.
    Yet would I tear them all, could that replace
      The fly-rod in my hand, this day of May,
      And watch unmoved their fragments float away
    Into oblivion, on a trout-stream’s face.

    Alas, thou fool! thou weary, crippled fool!
      Thou never more wilt leap from stone to stone,
    Where rise the trout in every rocky pool!
      Thou never more wilt stand at dusk alone
    Girt round by gurgling waters, in the cool,
      While dance the flies, and make the trout thy own!




SUNKEN GOLD.


    In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships,
      While gold doubloons that from the drowned hand fell
      Lie nestled in the ocean-flower’s bell
    With Love’s gemmed rings once kissed by now dead lips.
    And round some wrought-gold cup the sea-grass whips
      And hides lost pearls, near pearls still in their shell,
      Where sea-weed forests fill each ocean dell,
    And seek dim sunlight with their countless tips.

    So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes,
      Beneath the now hushed surface of myself,
    In lonelier depths than where the diver gropes.
        They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold
      In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf,
        The gleam of irrecoverable gold.




ON RAPHAEL’S ARCHANGEL MICHAEL.


    From out the depths of crocus-coloured morn
      With rush of wings the strong Archangel came
      And glistening spear; and leapt as leaps a flame
    On Satan unprepared and earthward borne;
    And rolled the sunless Rebel, bruised and torn,
      Upon the earth’s bare plain, in dust and shame,
      Holding awhile his spear’s suspended aim
    Above the humbled head in radiant scorn.
    So leaps within the soul on Wrong or Lust
      The warrior Angel whom we deem not near,
    And rolls the rebel impulse in the dust,
      Scathing its neck with his triumphal tread,
    And holding high his bright coercing spear
      Above its inexterminable head.




ON A SURF-ROLLED TORSO OF VENUS,

FOUND AT TRIPOLI VECCHIO, AND NOW IN THE LOUVRE.


    One day in the world’s youth, long, long ago,
      Before the golden hair of Time grew grey,
      The bright warm sea, scarce stirred by the dolphins’ play,
    Was swept by sudden music soft and low;
    And rippling, as ’neath kisses, parted slow,
      And gave a new and dripping goddess birth,
      Who brought transcendent loveliness on earth,
    With limbs more pure than sunset-tinted snow.
    And lo, that self-same sea has now upthrown
      A mutilated Venus, rolled and rolled
    For ages by the surf, and that has grown
      More soft, more chaste, more lovely than of old,
    With every line made vague, so that the stone
      Seems seen as through a veil which ages hold.




ON MANTEGNA’S SEPIA DRAWING OF JUDITH.


I.

    What stony, bloodless Judith hast thou made,
      Mantegna? Draped in many a stony fold,
      What walking sleeper hast thou made, to hold
    A stony head and an unbloody blade?
    In thine own savage days, wast thou afraid
      To paint such Judiths as thou mightst behold
      In open street, and paint the heads that rolled
    Beneath the axe, in every square displayed?
    No, no; not such was Judith, on the night
      When, in the silent camp, she watched alone,
    Like some dumb tigress, in the tent’s dim light
      Her sleeping prey; nor, when her deed was done,
    She seized the head, and with intent delight
      Stared in a face as quivering as her own.


II.

    There was a gleam of jewels in the tent
      Which one dim cresset lit--a baleful gleam--
      And from his scattered armour seemed to stream
    A dusky, evil light that came and went.
    But from her eyes, as over him she bent,
      Watching the surface of his drunken dream,
      There shot a deadlier ray, a darker beam,
    A look in which her life’s one lust found vent.
    There was a hissing through her tightened teeth,
      As with her scimitar she crouched above
    His dark, doomed head, and held her perilous breath,
      While ever and anon she saw him move
    His red lascivious lips, and smile beneath
      His curled and scented beard, and mutter love.




STRANGLED.


    There is a legend in some Spanish book
      About a noisy reveller who, at night,
      Returning home with others, saw a light
    Shine from a window, and climbed up to look,
    And saw within the room, hanged to a hook,
      His own self-strangled self, grim, rigid, white,
      And who, struck sober by that livid sight,
    Feasting his eyes, in tongue-tied horror shook.

    Has any man a fancy to peep in
      And see, as through a window, in the Past,
    His nobler self, self-choked with coils of sin,
      Or sloth or folly? Round the throat whipped fast
    The nooses give the face a stiffened grin.
      ’Tis but thyself. Look well. Why be aghast?




PROMETHEAN FANCIES.


I.

    When on to shuddering Caucasus God pours
      The phials of his anger hoarded long,
      Plunging in each abyss his fiery prong
    As if to find a Titan; when loud roars
    The imprisoned thunder groping for the doors
      Of never-ending gorges; when, among
      The desperate pines, Storm howls his battle-song--
    Then wakes Prometheus, and his voice upsoars.

    Yea, when the midnight tempest hurries past,
      There sounds within its wail a wilder wail
    Than that which tells the anguish of the blast;
      And when the thunder thunders down the gale,
    A laugh within its laugh tells woe so vast
      That God’s own angels in the darkness quail.


II.

    Prometheus--none may see him. But at night
      When heaven’s bolt has made some forest flare
      On Caucasus, and when the broad red glare
    Rushing from crag to crag at infinite height
    Stains sleeping wastes of snow, or, ruby bright,
      Runs sparkling up the glacier crests to scare
      The screaming eagles out of black chasms, where
    But half dislodged the darkness still clings tight--
    Then on some lurid monstrous wall of rock
      The Titan’s shadow suddenly appears
    Gigantic, flickering, vague; and, storm-unfurled,
      Seems still to brave, with hand that dim chains lock,
    Midway in the unendingness of years,
      The Author of the miscreated world.


                               THE END.


               _Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London._

                   *       *       *       *       *

                         _BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

                 THE NEW MEDUSA, AND OTHER POEMS. 8s.


“We should have to go to great names among contemporary poets before we
found a volume of verse with a message so clear and so touching....
There is in the lines quoted a directness of speech due partly to the
situation of the writer and partly to the rare gift which, above all
others, makes a man a poet--a gift of truthful and sincere utterance. We
have quoted from the more personal parts of the book because we have
been greatly touched by them. But it is on the dramatic power displayed
in such poems as ‘The Raft’ that the writer’s position will have to
rest.”--_Athenæum._

“The power which every capable reader of Mr. Lee-Hamilton’s previous
work, must have recognised is still more apparent in the _New
Medusa_.... The imaginative power which reproduces and dramatises a
certain mood of mind is very noteworthy. It is in this faculty of what
may be called psychography, of drawing the landscape of moods with
atmosphere and environment suitable and complete, that Mr.
Lee-Hamilton’s poetic power chiefly consists.”--_Academy._



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67069 ***