Ibe Canterbury floods SHU MM mi ^B HP HI ■ 111 1/8 ■ ■HP d ■ ■ BBl ■■1 '/ fsr^ ftbe Canterbury fl>oete« Edited by William Sharp. POEMS OF THE HON. RODEN NOEL. «% FOK FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES. SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK. UVEA'S BY THE HON. ROD EN NOEL. down Svo, Price tis. SONGS OF THE HEIGHTS AND DEEPS. Small Crown Bvo, Cloth, 3s. Gd. A LITTLE CHILD'S MONUMENT. Small Crown Svo, Gs. THE HOUSE OF RAVENSBURG. Foolscap Svo, Cloth, 7s. BEATRICE, AND OTHER POEMS. Small Bvo, Cloth, 6s. THE RED FLAG, AND OTHER POEMS. Demj Bvo, cloth, 6s. ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. London; Walter Scott, Limited, 24 Warwick Law POEMS OF THE HON.^R* NOEL. A SELECTION. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. LONDON : WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, 24 WARWICK LANE. NEW YORK : 3 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET. L&, SRIE i URt ^R F>\\ \ t w CONTENTS. %W\cq. PAGE To a Child, who asked me for a Poem 3 Early April ..... 4 The Secret of the Nightingale 7 A Song of Nereids . IO Sea Slumber-Song .... 13 O Years! .... 14 Dying .... 16 Love— To A. .... 17 Was it Well? 19 A Song at a Waterfall 22 The Swimmer 25 The Old Piano 28 Ode to England 3i "The Pity of it" • 35 Lost Angel .... • 37 A. Casual Song . 40 The Merry-Go-Round . 41 Earth-Afflicted Children Singing in Heaven • 43 My Little Ones . 46 Mad Mother . 48 " Ah ! Love ye One Another Well ! " • 5i vi CONTENTS. PAGE " The Cloud may Sail There " 52 Alpine Hunter's Song 54 Early Love ..... 56 Love Hiding .... 59 From " The Water-Nymph and the Boy " . 61 /Rustical poems of "Mature. Tan ...... 65 The Sea, and the Living Creatures . 76 The Call of the Caves So The Spirit of Storm . 87 Suspiria 96 Monte Rosa . 104 In the Corsican Highlands 109 A Southern Spring Carol ii5 Under the Stars 121 Tintagel 365 poems of tbe people. Poor People's Christmas 127 The Children's Grass . ... 141 From "The Red Flag" 145 poems of Amman JBeautg. Ganymede ..... 155 Passion ..... 159 Azrael : A Dream of Pleasure 160 Siren Bowers, and the Triumph of Bacchus . 167 The Two Magdalenes 172 CONTENTS. vii narrative, HHamatic, an£> descriptive PAGE The Nile, Africa, and Egypt 177 The Explorer in Africa 187 Missionary and Savage I96 The Negro .... 20I Savage Life .... 206 The Dance .... 2IO The Rivers and the Cataract 212 Aspirations .... 214 The Lion .... 2l6 The Slave Trade 217 Mosi-oa-tunya • J 221 The Journey ; and Wife's Death 225 The Stars .... 23O The Caravan 233 The Death of Livingstone 235 London .... 241 The Coast of Cornwall 247 Ballad of the Dead Monk ; or, Brother Benedict 249 The Gemonian Stairs 258 The Polish Mother . 26o Jubilee, and the Good Emperor . 267 Gordon .... 271 The Lifeboat . 274 Sea Kings .... . 276 A Swan .... 2Sl IReflective, lpbilosopbical, anfc Bllegcre. De Profundis . . . . .285 " The Sea shall Give up her Dead" . . 301 Vlll CONTENTS. Beethoven . Byron's Grave A Vision of the Desert The Temple of Sorrow Elegiac. Lament Dark Spring Dead Early Primrose The Toy Cross " That They All may be One " In London Lead Me where the Lily Blows Nocturne Magic-Lantern Lost Lamb . To Eric from the Alps To My Mother Severn, Friend of Keats Notes PAGE . 306 • 3 IQ • 3 12 ■ 322 337 339 34i 343 344 345 347 35i 353 355 357 359 360 364 369 PREFATORY NOTICE. It is something, in this age of disillusion, when the Poet is a well-bred gentleman on easy terms of relationship with his publisher and his banker, to have come across one who wears, in good Hellenic fashion, the loose sing- ing robes of Apollo, who sings for singing's sake, and who is comparatively indifferent to the praise or blame of coterie critics and literary cicerones. Out of the portals of a Temple of white marble, glimmering through the fogs and clouds of contemporary literature, Roden Noel stept like a young god, with a message from the old Greek world which is ever new. The joy of earth was with him, the sunlight of a lost Divinity clung around him, and so light was his footstep that he seemed to walk on air. Even so I saw him approaching, many years ago, and my heart went out to meet him, in the full certainty that he could speak to me of the hidden things of Hellas, of the vanished Wonderland where gods were born. This he surely did, so that for me, as for Sainte-Beuve, Ganymede, Pan, and the Water-nymph lived again. Even then, however, there was something foreign, even uncouth, in his accent and expression, as if he were struggling with the idioms of an alien tongue. He had forgotten his native Greek, in which he could have expressed himself a* x PRE FA TOR V NO T/CE. so perfectly, and was stumbling through the intricacies of our savage English. This was a minor trouble; the greater and supreme trouble came when this young god, or poet of godlike breed, found himself out in the world and confronted with the carven Christs of the altar and the roadside. How could a poet sing the joy of earth with those piteous eyes upon him ! How could the lover of the mountains and the sea pass on merrily, singing of youth and godhead, when the spectres of Calvary gathered around him ! That he did continue to sing, that he still preserved much of the old swinging movement of human happiness, was little short of miraculous. Many a year has passed since then, and the poet, still living, exhibits both in life and song this striking incongruity, — the happy impulse and fervid animalism of ancient Greece mingled with the doubt, the mystery, the introspection of modern England. What will first strike a reader unfamiliar with these poems is the point to which I have already alluded, — the frequent inefficacy and barbarity of the expression. If the reader is one who assumes that in verse a spade must be called a spade, or that musical singsong is essential, he will doubtless turn elsewhere, to his own great subse- quent loss; but if, on the contrary, he is an idealist, seeking for the very soul of poetry and disdaining all mere tricks of popular patter, he will soon discover in Roden Noel one of those divine messengers whom the gods send now and then to "brighten the sunshine." Three qualities distinguish this poet from most, if not from all, of his contemporaries: — (i) a subtlety of sensuousness and of sensuous perception only to be found among pre-Christian singers ; (2) an ever-present mood of moral exaltation ; and (3) a phenomenal power of sympathising with and interpreting the most secret moods of Nature. And first, as to the quality of sensuousness PREFATORY NOTICE. xi and sensuous perception. In the majority of these poems it is tempered and chastened by the Welt-Schmertz of modern thought ; but in some, as in Ganymede^ it is frankly and fearlessly pagan, — interpenetrated, that is to say, with the joy and glory of mere life, with that sense of living beauty which is primitive and instinctive. Take this passage, opening the poem so loved by Sainte-Beuve, to which I have twice alluded : — GANYMEDE. Azure the heaven, with rare a feathery cloud ; Azure the sea, far-scintillating light, .Soft, rich, like velvet yielding to the eye ; Horizons haunted with soft dreamlike sails ; A temple hypsethral open to sweet air Nigh, on the height, columned with solid flame, Of flutings and acanthus-work instinct With lithe green lizards and the shadows sharp Slant, barring golden floor and inner wall. A locust-tree condensing all the light On glossy leaves, and flaky spilling some Sparkling among cool umbrage underneath ; There magically sobered, mellow, soft, At unaware beholding gently laid A youth barelimbed, the loveliest in the world, Gloatingly falling on his lily side, Smoothing one rounded arm and dainty hand, Whereon his head, conscious and conquering, All chestnut-curled, rests listless and superb ; Near him, and leaning on the chequered bole, Sits his companions gazing on him fond, A goat-herd, whose roujjh hand on bulky knee Holds a rude hollow reeden pipe of Pan, Tanned, clad with goatskin, rudely moulded, huge: While yonder, browsing in the rosemary And cytisus, you hear a bearded goat, Hear a fly humming, with a droning bee In yon wild thyme and in the myrtles low, That breathe in every feebly-blowing air ; Whose foamy bloom fair Ganymede anon Plucks with a royal motion and an aim PREFA TOR Y NO TICE. Towards his comrade's tolerant fond face. Far off cicada shrills among the pine, And one may hear low tinkling where a stream Yonder in planes and willows, from the beam Of day coy hiding, runs with many a pool, Where the twain bathe how often in the cool ! The expression is archaic, awkward even, but when we brush aside the mannerism, as one puts aside overhanging branches, what a picture comes before the vision, and what instances of verbal felicity, such as the magical line, " Horizons haunted with soft dreamlike sails ! " Here, and throughout the poem, the very atmosphere is loaded with Greek sunlight. Then, for supreme sensuous- ness, take the description of the beautiful boy in the eagle's grasp : — " So lightly lovingly those eagle talons Lock the soft yielding flesh of either flank, His back so tender, thigh and shoulder pillowed How warmly, whitely, in the tawny down Of that imperial eagle amorous !" We should have to search for a long time, out of Keats, for effects so close akin to those of pictorial Art. But in the inevitable nature of things the golden boy was to be left far behind,* while the poet, haunted still by the beauty of all the gods, full still of the old sunlight of the old landscape, came face to face with the Man of Sorrows who is not yet dumb. I do not know, I have not cared to inquire, to what extent and in what measure Roden Noel accepts the popular religion (to my thinking a poet's opinions are of little consequence, so long as they do not imply belief in baseness), but it is from popular religion * Ganymede is one of the author's early poems, and I have quoted from the poem as originally published. PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. xiii that he derives his second great quality as a poet, that of moral exaltation. No singer of our time is so eager to perceive, so quick to apprehend, the problem of Evil ; in poem after poem he shows himself alive, not merely to personal sorrow, but to the pain of Humanity at large ; yet no singer of our time, of equal gifts, is so stirred to exalted utterance by a spiritual message. Let it be noted that the poet's religious mood is as childlike and primitive, as direct and simple, as his former mood of pagan sensuousness. Nowhere in our language is personal sorrow more supremely expressed than in the noble series of poems called with touching tenderness A Little Child's Monument. This is a book for all loving souls, above all for the bereaven, and I am glad to know that its popularity with the great public has been in proportion to its merits as poetry. It is not only with his own suffering as an individual, however, that the poet has to deal. His personal sorrow is merely a key to the great heart of humanity. Just as surely as he felt the joy and sunlight of the pagan world, does he feel the storm and stress of the post-Christian. The same vivid keen- ness of perception, of insight, is brought to bear here as there — " On massy bridge, on broad-builfc quay, Tumultuous tides of hurrying wealth Sweep the marred sons of misery (Who thrid by sufferance, by stealth, Their faint way ; near the parapet Cower, dull aware of fume and fret,) Sweep them to where they may forget ! For riverward wan eyes are bowed ; Beside whom roars the traffic loud, And the many-nationed crowd." Everywhere in the poem from which these lines are quoted, Poor Peoples Christmas, there is the same haunting sense of the details of misery, the same xiv PRE FA TORY NO TICE. picturesqueness of chiaroscuro. And the eyes of the Christ look out upon us from the printed page. "The poor are Mine, that I may heal 1" says the voice from the Cross. Roden Noel's so-called spiritual poems have, moreover, one great merit to distinguish them from the latter-day poetry of Christian apology ; they are seldom or never rectangular and argumentative, like, e.g. , many of the poems of Browning. The poet approaches the truth in the frank, free spirit of the lost paganism, eager to see all, to learn all, to suffer and sympathise with all, and he finds his answer to the problem of Evil in his own heartbeats, by becoming (according to the precept) even as a little child. But it is when we turn to this writer's third great quality as a poet, his power of sympathising with and interpreting the most secret moods of Nature, that we realise to what extent and how wonderfully, in his genius, the pagan and the Christian blend. I have no hesitation in saying that no living poet whatsoever equals Roden Noel in wealth and variety, power and profundity, of natural description. It is quite true, of course, that no living poet has attempted so much in this direction. Beautiful transcripts of" Nature abound in modern verse, — they are our inheritance from Wordsworth and Byron, and to some extent from Shelley ; but seldom or never are they charged with the informing spirit of human passion, and still less seldom do they exhibit vital elemental sympathy as distinguished from merely curious observation. As observers of Nature, Virgil and Tenny- son are unsurpassed, but both these fine poets view it as spectators, as artists, rather than as sharers of its elemental joy. With the poet of Thalatta and Suspiria> it is altogether different. What a sea-swing and cadence there is in these mighty lines ! PREFA TOR Y NO TICE. xv "I bathe and wade in the pools, rich-wrought with flowers of the ocean, Or over the yellow sand run swift to meet the sea, Dive under the walls of foam, or float on a weariless motion Of the alive, clear wave, heaving undulant under me 1 " The tautological sound and cadence — "heaving undulant under me" — perfectly represent the monotonous move- ment of ocean-waves, and the newly-coined word "weari- less " is curiously felicitous. But it is not by verbal excel- lence that Mr. Noel's Nature-poems will win admirers. Some of them, indeed, are far from admirable in style. The poet, wrestling with his vocabulary, tries to express too much of what he feels and knows, and becomes inarticu- late from pure emotion. Yet in the main the Nature- poems are wonderful for their knowledge, their insight, and their natural passion. Even when most rugged, they are imposing and "elemental." I have just glanced at the three great qualities of the poet who came to me years ago full of youthful enthusiasm and fresh from wanderings in the far East. I was living, in somewhat Bohemian fashion, in a village on the Sussex coast, not far from Hastings ; and thither, one summer day, wended the author of Beatrice. We were three in number, a nest of young Radicals, and not much pre- disposed to one who put "honourable" before his name, and was an aristocrat by birth and education ; but before many days had passed the freemasonry of youth and poetry had bound me close to a new friend. It is a far cry to that time now, to the time when we swam together in the tumbling waters of the Channel, wandered in the Sussex lanes, and talked of the old poets and the old gods. I got one of my first lessons in toleration when I first met and talked with the aged Earl of Gainborough, simple, child-like, a Christian, and with that beautiful soul his Countess, a peerless woman and a loving mother. From xvi PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE this good and gracious stock came Roden Noel, fortunate in an inheritance of sane and gentle blood. His early youth had been spent at his father's seat in Rutlandshire and at the Irish seat of his maternal grandfather, the Earl of Roden. At twenty he went to Cambridge, with a view of studying for the Church, but religious scruples intervened and he never took orders. Soon after taking his degree he spent two long years in the East, visiting Egypt and the Holy Land, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey, and Palmyra, and gathering in the course of many romantic adventures the materials for some of his finest poetry. His marriage took place during this pilgrimage, and was a little romance in itself. Struck down with fever at Beyrout, he was nursed back to life by Madame de Broe, wife of the director of the Ottoman Bank, and he married her eldest daughter Alice shortly after his recovery. That marriage, I think, was the crown of a fortunate life ! It has kept this poet calm and happy, in times when most of us are troubled and storm-tossed ; and it has given to him the consecration of a faithful and pure domestic love. While others have been fighting with windmills and struggling for bread, peace and rest have dwelt with the young wayfarer from Hellas ; and if he has known, as all must know, the acute agonies of human sorrow, if his hearth has been darkened by the wings of the destroying Angel, the issue has still been holy, thanks to the faith that comes to us through Love alone. Often as his thoughts may wander back to Hellas, while the pagan stirs within his blood and he hears from afar the voices of the Dryad and the Naiad, the Satyr and Sylvanus, he has learnt by his own fire the one great modern lesson, — that the god of Humanity has conquered and subdued to his own likeness all the gods of the world that lies beneath his feet. In making the above remarks I have not attempted to PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. xvi i conceal that the writer of the following poems has been for many years my personal friend. I have little or no faith, as my readers possibly know, in the wisdom or the honesty of contemporary criticism, and I am well aware, moreover, that those who roll most logs for their acquaint- ances will protest most loudly against an Ishmaelite like myself following their example. Yet I am writing after due deliberation, with the full knowledge that I shall be confronted with my own folly if I overstep the mark. As a rule, friends, honest friends, are tricksy critics, presuming on their intimacy with the subject to anim- advert most strongly upon shortcomings; but after all, the best critics of literature are those who appreciate it, and my appreciation of the writer under review dates far back behind the time when I first was favoured with his companionship. In reality, the poems of Roden Noel required no introduction, and I need hardly say that any introduction from me would prejudice many readers against the subject. I shall nevertheless, in the present summary preface, as in all my writings to the public, say exactly what I think, without any sort of hesitation or apology. That Roden Noel will ever become, in any broad sense of the word, a popular poet, I do not for a moment believe. There is little or nothing in his writings to appeal to those who regard a poet as a manufacturer of pretty verses, and their marked mannerism, their com- posite structure, their often barbaric expression, are certain to awaken polite antagonism. Moreover, they are too intensely speculative, too wistful, and too problem - haunted, for all who, like our Cockneys, measure their masterpieces by rule of thumb. We must cut the fruit right down the middle, right through the rough and husky rind, to get at the heart of this pomegranate ! Having done this, and having xviii PREFA TOR Y NO TICE. rejected everything that is merely outward and super- ficial, we shall find here, what we miss in nearly all contemporary products — the very fruit and essence of original poetry. Spiritual in the very highest sense are nearly all these poems ; a few of them, like Pan and Summer Clouds to a Swan, are perfect in form, while many, though somewhat formless at first sight, have in reality a fine and masterly coherence. If we turn for a moment from them to the writer's efforts in simple prose, we shall be reminded that he possesses, besides his gifts as a poet, those of a very remarkable speculative philosopher ; so clearly is this the case that it is certain he might, had he chosen, have attained high rank as a metaphysician pure and simple. His articles on philosophical themes, and notably his masterly summary of the teachings of Schopenhauer, fully establish this position. No poet of our time surpasses him in extent of reasoning power on abstract subjects. This power, exhibited from time to time in prose, underlies all his poetry, — clouds and troubles it indeed not unfrequently, and makes it difficult reading. Fortunately, he never forgets for long that the crowning beauty of all great verse is absolute directness and simplicity. He never trifles with his art, or blows bubbles for the mere sake of prettiness. A deep and benign purpose, a fine if somewhat fitful inspiration, animates all his work, both the worst and the best. He is, in a word, as every real poet must be, a Thinker, a man whose business it is to help us to fathom the problems of life and thought. Fortunately for himself, all the shafts of modern doubt have failed to penetrate the white armour of his fully reasoned faith. He has passed his forty days in the wilderness of moral despair, only to return secure in insight and certain of his mission, which is to offer the good tidings of Hope to all men. PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. xix He is, in other words, the poet of Christian Thought. Surely a strange sight is here ; the young pagan, fresh from the woodlands of Pan, and from the dark, shadowy mountains of modern speculation, flinging himself down on his knees at the foot of the Cross ! If we miss this fact in Roden Noel's poetry, we shall miss its whole power and purpose. He is a Christian thinker, a Christian singer, or nothing. Not that I con- ceive for one moment that he accepts the whole impedi- menta of Christian orthodoxy, — he is far too much of a pagan still ever to arrive at that. But he believes, as so many of us have sought in vain to believe, in the absolute logic of the Christian message : that logic which is to me a miracle of clear reasoning raised on false premises, and which to others is false premises and false reasoning all through. To me the historical Christ, the Christ of popular teaching, is a Phantom, the Christ-God a very Spectre of the Brocken, cast by the miserable pigmy Man on the cloudland surrounding and environing him. I conceive only the ideal Christ, as an Elder Brother who lived and suffered and died as I have done and must do ; and while I love him in so far as he is human and my fellow-creature, I shrink from him in so far as he claims to be Divine. With Roden Noel, as with so many other favoured souls, it is different. Where we can find little comfort and no solution, he finds both. He embraces in full affluence of sympathy and love that ghostly godhead, and credits him with all the mercy, all the knowledge, all the love and power, which we believe to be the common birthright of Humanity, — the accumulation of spiritual ideals from century after century. But where I and those who think with me are at one with Roden Noel is in the absolute moral certainty that, in the estimate of the Supreme Intelligence, what we believe counts for nothing, in so far as it merely represents what we know. xx PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. The atheist and the Christian, the believer and the unbeliever, meet on the same platform of a common beneficence. Faith in Love is all-sufficient, without faith in any supernatural or godlike form of Love. There is nothing nebulous, however, about Roden Noel's religious belief. It is clear, direct, and logically reasoned out. He is, moreover, in the highest sense of the word, a spiritualist, as all true poets must be. The pessimism of Schopenhauer and Leopardi is as far away from his sympathy as the gross materialism of Holbach and Zola. Even disease transmutes itself, under his tender gaze, into images of loveliness and hope. At the present epoch of our progress, thinkers of this kind are sadly wanted. The history of our poetry for the last twenty years has been a melancholy record of mere artificiality and verbalism ; and in spite of the splendid flashes of power shown by one or two of our prosperous poets, there has been little or no effort to touch the quick of human life. True, the miasmic cloud of Realism, which is darkening and destroying all literature by robbing it of sunshine and fresh air, has not yet reached our poetry ; the majority of those who write in verse being neither realists nor idealists — only triflers, who imagine verse to be a schoolboy's exercise or an idle man's amusement. Hence the utter neglect of Verse ; and the attitude of in- difference towards verse-products, shown by the reading public ; hence the decadence of original thought, and the preponderance of dilettante criticism. If Poetry is ever to resume again its old prophetic function, and to regain any influence over the lives and thoughts of men, it will be through the help of such writers as Mr. Noel, — men who believe with Novalis that Poetry is the only absolute Reality, the only living Truth, who sound in their verse the highest and solemnest notes of life and thought, and who reject with all their soul the fatal tricks and trivialities PREFA TOR Y NO TICE. xxi of the poetaster, or mocking-bird. Let it be said in this connection that Mr. Noel's work, however variously it may be estimated by various minds, is absolutely and entirely his own. The thought, the feeling, the style, the merits and the blemishes, are invariably sui generis. No living poet of equal power appears so free from the influence of any school, past or present. This in itself is something, but taking cognisance of the intrinsic value of the utterance, it is much. In these poems we are offered no mild Tennysonian infusion, no decoction of Browning and commonplace, no dilution of Byron's strong tipple or of Shelley's etherealised dillwater. It was right that the task of making the following selection should be assigned to the poet himself; he alone was the judge of what should be submitted, as samples of his quality, to the general public. The result, it appears to me, is a happy one, affording the most occasional reader an opportunity of estimating, as far as lies in his power, the extent and range of the poet's accomplishment. At the same time, it should be clearly explained that much of the writer's work is injured, rather than helped, by detachment from its context, since it is by total strength and coherence, rather than by occasional felicity, that such a poet as Mr. Noel should be judged. A Little Child' 's Monument, for example, suffers greatly through being represented by detached poems. To be thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated, it must be read in sequence, poem by poem ; for although it assumes no continuity in form, it is as homogeneous a production as In Memoriam. From the simplest murmurs of natural hardly-articulate anguish, up to the highest cadence of spiritual utterance, it passes musically on. The keynote of passionate pain and sympathy for all weak created things is struck again and again, as in the following lines of most child-like simplicity : — xxii PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. "THAT THEY ALL MAY BE ONE." Whene'er there comes a little child, My darling comes with him ; Whene'er I hear a birdie wild Who sings his merry whim, Mine sings with him : If a low strain of music sails Among melodious hills and dales, When a white lamb or kitten leaps, Or star, or vernal flower peeps, When rainbow dews are pulsing joy, Or sunny waves, or leaflets toy, Then ho who sleeps Softly wakes within my heart ; With a kiss from him I start ; He lays his head upon my breast, Tho' I may not see my guest, Dear bosom-guest ! In all that's pure and fair and good, I feel the spring-time of thy blood, Hear thy whispered accents flow To lighten woe, Feel them blend, Although I fail to comprehend. And if one woundeth with harsh word, Or deed, a child, or beast, or bird, It seems to strike weak Innocence Through him, who hath for his defence Thunder of the All-loving Sire, And mine, to whom He gave the Are. But from mere pain and sympathy we rise again and again to inspiration, and to insight. It is not until we have read the entire book that we fully understand the varied wisdom and wide catholicity of the writer. For- tunately for purposes of selection, however, Mr. Noel has written few poems of any great length. A Modern Faust is the longest, and even that is in reality a series of poems linked together by an elastic theme, rather than a single poem of one shape and form. If a fault is to be found with the last-named poem, it is a little formless and PRE FA TOR V NO TICE. xxiii inchoate, exhibiting far more lyrical and emotional, than shaping and dramatic, faculty. The House of Ravensburg, with all its moral grandeur, shows conclusively that the poet's genius is not dramatic. His business is to phrase his own fine thoughts and intuitions, not than to express the moods and passions of other men. His sympathy with humanity is wide and far-reaching, but it is seldom or never specialised in the way of individual characterisa- tion. He is no more a dramatist than Shelley, to whose genius that of Mr. Noel is in many respects closely akin. My present purpose, however, is not to criticise the works I have enjoyed, but to draw attention to their general importance as contributions to literature. The office of literary cicerone, so eagerly filled by many in those days of ciceroneship, is distasteful to me, and I decline to imitate the performances of the many holders of the office, who glibly pass judgment on the rank of dead and living writers. It is enough, I think, to know that a man is a poet by natural sight and prerogative, without deciding how far he falls short of or excels pre- decessors or contemporaries. In the republic of Poetry, there is no aristocracy ; all the citizens are equal by right of a common gift ; and it is only those who have never learned what Poetry is, or what the poetic power and temperament mean, who presume to distinguish impertin- ently between poet and poet, and to throw around one the purple they deny to the other. That Roden Noel is a poet, no reader of these selections will doubt. That he is a very remarkable and original poet, I personally believe. My personal belief and bias, however, can be nothingwhat- ever to those whose sympathies he may fail to touch, and who may prefer lighter styles and less difficult methods. The only true critic of all good literature is he who understands and enjoys it. With this preamble I must leave the reader to the perusal of the following selections, merely xxi v PRE FA TOR Y NO TICE. hoping that he may be able to share my own enjoyment of them. Whatever final judgment he may pass on individual merits, he will be certain to recognise several qualities not too common in English verse, — deep earnest- ness, ever-present sympathy, and fully reasoned-out faith in the divine destiny of Man. ROBERT BUCHANAN. LYRICS. L YRICS. TO A CHILD, WHO ASKED ME FOR A POEM. You ask me for a poem, dear, You want from me a lay, Who are a music blithe and clear Sung sweetly day by day ! You, child, have songs within your heart More pure than aught of mine ; For Life, my dear, is more than Art, Who sings you is Divine. EARLY APRIL. EARLY APRIL. Is it sweet to look into one another's faces Over where the clear laughing water races, Where the herbs are all like delicate laces ? Are ye in love with one another's faces? Flowers of the wildwood, tell me ! Virginal purity of pale primroses ! Petal on petal of a sister reposes, And the shadow of either on either dozes ; Wildwood flowers, we hail you ! Many daintily-formed green leaves have met, Strawberry leaf and violet, 'Tis a little too cold for the nightingale yet ; Philomel, he'll not fail you ! Fairy windflower, wood anemones, Delicate company under the trees, Snowflake ruffled by a merryfoot breeze, Frolicsome singing aerial glees, Frail white stars of the wildwood ! EARLY APRIL Every frail face looking a different way, O'er you arriveth a silver ray ; Bronze boughs embroider a pearly grey, Luminous air in the wildwood. O white windflower with the purple dyes, Your candour of innocence meets mine eyes, And bids the bowed heart in me arise ; You are kin to the little ones, humble and wise, Young, newly-born in the wildwood. The joy of our Earth-mother thrills through the groves ; A long cooing sound of woodland doves ! Feathered folk serenade the fair nest-lying loves, Call young flowers in the wildwood. We are glad you are here again lovely and gay, Dull was the winter when you were away ; We never have had any heart to play, While you were afar from the wildwood ; And now we are off to the woodland ! Come along, little children ! blithe birds are singing, Budding leaves with a magical melody ringing, Flowers faint censers of odour swinging ; Come along, little loves, to the wildwood ! We may find fairy forms in the woodland ! EARLY APRIL. All the boughs are alive with a luminous green, Leaflets uncurl fairy frills to the sheen, Wings dip and dart over the woodland scene ; We listen and lighten, we know what they mean Spring has arrived in the wildwood ! Sing heigh ! sing ho ! for the woodland ! SECRET OF THE NIGHTINGALE. 7 THE SECRET OF THE NIGHTINGALE. The ground I walked on felt like air, Airs buoyant with the year's young mirth ; Far, filmy, undulating fair, The down lay, a long wave of earth ; And a still green foam of woods rose high Over the hill-line into the sky. In meadowy pasture browse the kine, Thin wheat-blades colour a brown plough-line Fresh rapture of the year's young joy Was in the unfolded luminous leaf, And birds that shower as they toy Melodious rain that knows not grief, A song-maze where my heart in bliss Lay folded, like a chrysalis. They allured my feet far into the wood, Down a winding glade with leaflets walled, With an odorous dewy dark imbued ; Rose, and maple, and hazel called Me into the shadowy solitude ; Wild blue germander eyes enthralled, 8 SECRET OF THE NIGHTINGALE. Made me free of the balmy bowers, Where a wonderful garden-party of flowers, Laughing sisterhood under the trees, Dancing merrily, played with the bees ; Anemone, starwort, bands in white, Like girls for a first communion dight, And pale yellow primrose ere her flight, Ushered me onward wondering To a scene more fair than the court of a king. Ah ! they were very fair themselves, Sweet maids of honour, woodland elves ! Frail flowers that arrive with the cuckoo, Pale lilac, hyacinth purple of hue, And the little pink geranium, All smiled and nodded to see me come ; All gave me welcome ; " No noise," they said, " For we will show you the bridal bed, Where Philomel, our queen, was wed ; Hush ! move with a tender, reverent foot, Like a shy light over bole and root ; " And they blew in the delicate air for flute. Into the heart of the verdure stole My feet, and a music enwound my soul ; Zephyr flew over a cool bare brow — I am near, very near to the secret now ! For the rose-covers, all alive with song, Flash with it, plain now low and long ; SECRET OF THE NIGHTINGALE. Sprinkle a holy water of notes ; On clear air melody leans and floats ; The blithe-winged minstrel merrily moves, Dim bushes burn with mystical loves ! Lo ! I arrive ! immersed in green, Where the wood divides, though barely seen, A nest in one of the blue leaf-rifts ! There over the border a bird uplifts Her downy head, billed, luminous-eyed ; Behold the chosen one, the bride ! And the singer, he singeth by her side. Leap, heart i be aflame with them ! loud, not dumb, Give a voice to their epithalamium ! Whose raptures wax not pale nor dim Beside the fires of seraphim. These are glorious, glowing stairs, In gradual ascent to theirs ; With human loves acclaim and hail The holy lore of the nightingale ! io A SONG OF NEREIDS. A SONG OF NEREIDS. Ding, dong, bell ! We breathe you a sea-spell ! While we leap into the blue, Link hands with ours, dear mortal, do. Away ! away ! away ! Our clear green waters are at play With a wave-bewildered ray, Where the billow-bathed shell-floor Looks a fantasy unsure Through the fluctuating billow, Where will be your pillow ! Fish float there in opal mail ; Ere your senses wholly fail, We will tell you a wondrous tale, We alone may truly tell Of what befell Before the mournful years began For mind-beclouded, wildered man ; With our rhythmic rise and fall We will ring your funeral ! Cease the civil war of life ; For the turmoil and the strife A SONG OF NEREIDS. 1 1 Of a human heart and mind Are more than toil of wave or wind ! You who lay in Love's white bosom Shall find more fair our cool sea-blossom ; Leander homing to his love, And lipping the fond seas he clove, We lured to our still coral grove, Where years might ne'er deflower his youth, Nor wither slowly with no ruth ; While our kind fair Hylas took From his lover's longing look. You who late could climb the rocks, Where the tidal water shocks, You who dared to breast the wave That yields wild rapture to the brave, Life at full, or glassy grave, Come and sleep, and be at rest ; We will lull you on our breast ! Never weep, nor strive, nor cry, Nor wait till age shall strand you high Afar from our sweet revelry, And our wild, aerial glee ! But plunge into our gulfs, and cease, Finding there a sweet release ! Foam, like lace illumined, smiles Round the feet of granite piles ; O'er sunny sands for miles and miles, Along the breezy briny bay, Melodiously we plash and play ; Our wild joy's tumultuous sound 12 A SONG OF NEREIDS. Fills the air and all around ; You are young, and you are old, You are warm, and you are cold, Never wearying we sing, All our foamy bells we ring ; Away ! away ! away ! Link hands with ours in play, While we leap into the blue, Link hands with ours, dear mortal, do ! We are breathing a sea-spell ; Ding, dong, bell ! {Porthcurno. ) SEA SLUMBER-SONG. 13 SEA SLUMBER-SONG. Sea-birds are asleep, The world forgets to weep, Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song On the shadowy sand Of this elfin land ; "I, the Mother mild, Hush thee, O my child, Forget the voices wild ! Isles in elfin light Dream, the rocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves, Veil their marbles bright, Foam glimmers faintly white Upon the shelly sand Of this elfin land ; Sea-sound, like violins, To slumber woos and wins, I murmur my soft slumber-song, Leave woes, and wails, and sins, Ocean's shadowy might Breathes good-night, Good-night ! " {Kynance Cove.) 14 O YEARS/ O YEARS! O years, years, years ! Would ye were rolled away, And I, 'mid April smiles and tears, With my true love at play. O years, years, years, Who were all one May ! Ah ! the fragrant pine, The fountain's pure, low bubble ; Flowers fondle her feet and mine ; Air-and-bird-wings trouble Lightly light young leaves Of our enchanted wood, While the season weaves Around our vernal mood A beautiful silk sheath Of sight and scent and sound, Where we lie warm and breathe, Softly folded round, And our young pulses bound. O years, years, years ! That have nor warmth nor sun, O YEARS! 15 And little else that cheers, We are drifting on With other things that were Rose-red once and fair. O years, years, years ! Drooping bowed to earth With sorrows, wrongs, and fears, Radiant your birth, All one morning-mirth ! Now feeble, faint, in tears, Wings low trailed in dust, On your mail the rust, Years, years, years ! 1 6 DYING. DYING. They are waiting on the shore For the bark to take them home ; They will toil and grieve no more ; The hour for release hath come. All their long life lies behind, Like a dimly blending dream ; There is nothing left to bind To tke realms that only seem. They are waiting for the boat, There is nothing left to do ; What was near them grows remote, Happy silence falls like dew ; Now the shadowy bark is come, And the weary may go home. By still water they would rest, In the shadow of the tree ; After battle sleep is best, After noise tranquillity. LOVE. 17 LOVE— TO A. As of old the wildered dove, Wandering over waters dark, Finding neither fount nor grove, Sought shelter in her home, the ark, So my little one, my love, Turns my restless heart to thee, Weary, wheresoe'er she rove O'er the inhospitable sea. Time hath linked us heart to heart With links of mutual memory, Of gentle power if aught would part To bind us close until we die. If the world arise to sever, Steals a tiny spirit-hand, Glides to reunite us ever, From the holy silent land. 18 LOVE. Find the birthplace of sweet Love ; All our fairest gifts may go, Yet will He immortal prove, Fairest of all gods we know ! Find his nest within the grove Of mystic manifold delight, Though all the summer leaves remove, He will abide through winter's night ; Unsearchable the ways of Love ! Though all the singing choirs be gone, Love himself will linger on. Discover hidden paths of love, Explain the common miracle, Dear abundant treasure-trove, Celestial springs in earthly well, In human vase Heaven's oenomel ! IV AS IT WELL? 19 WAS IT WELL? Was it well ? was it well ? When at evening shadow fell In the great cathedral square, With a gable-roofing fair, And the only glimmer there Was a flutter of a dress, Ever waning less and less, As my gaze enamoured clung, Till the moving masses wrung It earthward and it fell ; Was it well ? was it well ? Was it well ? was it well ? Where a fragrant azure fume Pervades a Gothic gloom, And jewelled gleams illume, With a melody of lights, Marble slumber of the knights, Till their stony bosoms bloom Warm to flowers on the tomb : 20 WAS IT WELL? There the morrow at a shrine On thy kneeling form Divine Mine eyes to worship fell : Was it well ? was it well ? Was it well ? was it well ? Where a bubbling water fell From the snakes in carven stone, Grasses fine about them blown ; In the greenwood lying prone At thy feet, a boy in love Murmured idle rhymes he wove ; While we mingled flame of eyes, In leaf-lattices the skies With soft suffusion fell : Was it well ? was it well ? Was it well ? was it well ? Now the holy glamour fell Upon every living thing From the spirit of the spring : Birds in yielding sweetly sing : Flowers have innocent confest Soft allurements of the West ; Leaves and herbs benumbed in death Feel and bless the living breath, Gladden hill and dale and dell : Was it well ? was it well ? WAS IT WELL? 21 Was it well ? was it well ? Only we defied the spell : We were timid, we were wise, Maimed the wings of Love that flies, Putting out his dove-like eyes, Tamed with prudence hearts that yearned, Cooled with caution breasts that burned ; Bosoms dreams of love made tingle, Limbs afever till they mingle, Only they defied the spell : Was it well ? was it well ? Was it well ? was it well ? Ask no more ! I cannot tell. Spring confused her lovers all, Each obeyed the sacred call ; Only we refused to fall, Sanely, calmly self-incurled 'Mid such sweet madness of the world ! O'er twain that trembled into one Love's own sweet mouth hath vainly blown, Futile his golden tide hath flown, Henceforth for ever passing on, And we are still apart, alone ! Might our clashing kindle Hell ? Ask no more, I cannot tell ; Was it well ? was it well ? A SONG AT A WATERFALL. A SONG AT A WATERFALL. Athwart the voice of a wild water, Falling for ever, Do I hear some song of the foam's daughter Fairily quiver ? Is it song of a naiad, or bee, Or a breeze from the tree, Haunting the cave of the wild water ? For evermore leapeth the fall plashing Into a pool, And nigh me, away from the foam flashing, Quiet and cool, Lies a hyaline gulf olive-green, Where ferns overlean, And boughs embower the wave-washing. In a clear hyaline, lo ! the leaves waver, While, as a cloud, Stones below melt in the pool-quaver : And with the loud A SONG AT A WATERFALL. Shout of the waters blithe Mingles, airy and lithe, A tune, like a lingering flower-savour. Fearless fronteth the sound-ocean, Even as a bird Breasting the resonant storm-motion, Low is it heard, Sundering soft the cold Roar, like a gleam of gold, Wandering warm with a mild motion ; Visiting every flower-blossom, A humming-bird ; Floats and falls on the wind's bosom Many a word. 'Tis ne'er a naiad who sings, Nor aught with wings, But a maiden fair as the foam blossom ! For now, disentangling the tree-cover, Resteth she fair On a stone, a mere child ; and her own lover, All unaware Of a heaven in her, laughs free ; While blithe as a bee Singing she roameth the world over. 24 A SONG AT A WA TERFALL. Ah ! sweeter far than the fall roaring, Or any wild sound, Is the carol of thy young life pouring Joyance around ! Yet a vanishing voice of the spring, With a fleeting wing, Is thine in the realm of the long roaring ! For the bee will go from the wild water, With blossom and breeze ; And thou, more fair than the foam's daughter, Even as these, Wilt fade with the hours away From the weary play, And the wildering roar of the wild water ! THE SWIMMER. 25 THE SWIMMER. Yonder, lo ! the tide is flowing ; Clamber, while the breeze is blowing, Down to where a soft foam flusters Dulse and fairy feathery clusters ! While it fills the shelly hollows, A swift sister billow follows, Leaps in hurrying with the tide, Seems the lingering wave to chide ; Both push on with eager life, And a gurgling show of strife. O the salt, refreshing air Shrilly blowing in the hair ! A keen, healthful savour haunts Sea-shell, sea-flower, and sea-plants. Innocent billows on the strand Leave a crystal over sand, Whose thin ebbing soon is crossed By a crystal foam-enmossed, Variegating silver-grey Shell- empetalled sand in play : When from sand dries off the brine, Vanishes swift shadow fine ; 26 THE SWIMMER. But a wet sand is a glass Where the plumy cloudlets pass, Floating islands of the blue, Tender, shining, fair, and true. Who would linger idle, Dallying would lie, When wind and wave, a bridal Celebrating, fly? Let him plunge among them, Who hath wooed enough, Flirted with them, sung them, In the salt sea-trough He may win them, onward On a buoyant crest, Far to seaward, sunward, Ocean-borne to rest ! Wild wind will sing over him, And the free foam cover him, Swimming seaward, sunward, On a blithe sea-breast ! On a blithe sea-bosom Swims another too, Swims a live sea-blossom, A grey-winged sea-mew ! Grape-green all the waves are, By whose hurrying line Half of ships and caves are Buried under brine ; THE SWIMMER. 27 Supple, shifting ranges Lucent at the crest, With pearly surface-changes Never laid to rest : Now a dipping gunwale Momently he sees, Now a fuming funnel, Or red flag in the breeze ; Arms flung open wide, Lip the laughing sea ; For playfellow, for bride, Claim her impetuously ! Triumphantly exult with all the free, Buoyant bounding splendour of the sea ! And if while on the billow Wearily he lay, His awful wild playfellow Filled his mouth with spray, Reft him of his breath, To some far realms away He would float with Death ; Wild wind would sing over him, And the free foam cover him, Waft him sleeping onward, Floating seaward, sunward, All alone with Death ; In a realm of wondrous dreams, And shadow-haunted ocean gleams ! 28 THE OLD PIANO. THE OLD TIANO. In the twilight, in the twilight, Sounding softly, sounding low, Float some cadences enchanted, Eerie songs of long ago. In the gloaming, in the gloaming, Sits our child with lips apart Near her mother who is singing, Near the woman of my heart. O how thinly, O how feebly Rings the ancient instrument ! When it opened, slowly yielding, What a weird, unwonted scent ! Plaining wildered all forlornly, As it were surprised from death : On a plate of faded ivory Some lost name faint wavereth. THE OLD PIANO. 29 Wildered sorely, wildered sorely, In oblivion mouldering, To be challenged now for music That the dead were wont to sing ! Are they rising, are they rising, As I gaze through mist of tears, In the savour, in the music, Vanished visions of the years ? Stilly stealing, stilly stealing, Glide the dead in companies ; Thinly flow their words and laughter. Faintly radiant their eyes. And they mingle, lo ! they mingle, With my living wife and child, Seem to thrust them from their places And confuse their presence mild. See a maiden, a fair maiden, Vestured in a garb of yore, Singing yonder while her lover Pleads with longing eyes for more ! Then a mother, a young mother, With her child, in guise of eld, She appears ; full blown to woman Now the maid whom I beheld. 30 THE OLD PIANO. Then a widow, a grey widow, See her now ! before he died Love lay withered — worn and faded, Lo ! she plays where played the bride. . . . In a moan of wind they vanish. Dead and living ; I alone Hear old Time insanely mumble In the sea's low monotone ! ODE TO ENGLAND. ODE TO ENGLAND.* Arm ! England, arm ! for all men point the finger Toward thee with scorn they little care to veil : "Doth not the mouldering hull of England linger Upon her sea of gold, with idle sail ? Once she was other ! once we shrank dismayed Before the lightning of her baring blade ; Once through the storm her ocean glory burst, She, stormy petrel, she the ocean-nurst, Upon her foes, who pale beheld the stream Of her bright ensign, like Aurora, gleam Over foam-billows bounding wild : hurrah ! England is drowsier than at Trafalgar ! " Arm ! England, arm ! the halcyon hour must wait When Love and Righteousness shall vanquish Hate. Jesus of old was royal hailed in scorn : Now the world crowns Him — still it is with thorn ! Nobles and kings go armed to the teeth : Lo ! where thy loving sister bleeds beneath * Written at the time of the Franco-German War. 32 ODE TO ENGLAND. Their haughty feet : she calls thee to her side : They clank their swords at thee with insolent pride. "Old England, mumbling, paralysed, and cold, Shrinks closer clutching at her hoards of gold ! " Why should the mailed sons of tyranny taunt Thee, champion of the free, with windy vaunt ? Arm ! England, arm ! they mouth at Liberty, Who with a mother's impulse turns to thee ! Fair is our dream of universal peace ; But there be wolves, and lambs of tender fleece. Tyranny summons all her swarms of slaves, Horrent with weapons : daughter of the waves ! Is it a time for thee to loll and bask, And murmur at the burden of thy casque ? Yea, thou art sedulous to nurse thy health, Resentful of a menace to thy wealth : But in the hour of thine extremity, Look for no pitying tear to cloud one eye Among the sister nations loitering by ! Now that thy faithful friend is in the dust, Whose features fair may next inflame the lust Of her inexorable conqueror, Or of his mailed kinsman emperor? If thou, the hope of Freedom, lie supine, Indifferent beyond thy belt of brine, While Freedom wrestles with a libertine, Beware for thine ! Shall not God judge the race that cannot feel Itself a member of one living commonweal ? That nation dies ; elects to be alone ; ODE TO ENGLAND. 33 Severed in sooth, dead lumber, shall be thrown Among bare buried piles of bone ! Canst thou, then, fear to arm thy children free, Who cradled lay upon the bosom of Liberty ? Whom from herself she nourished, whom with motion And lullabies of the everlasting ocean She soothed from earliest infancy, While, in loud winds and waves careering, she Sings to her mariners who rule the sea ! Arm all thy children ! not a caste of drones : Then shalt thou sec those anarchs on their thrones Abase their domineering front — behold Helvetia, splendid, blithe, and bold ! The sons who breathe her liberal mountain air, The men who scale her precipice and dare All dangers of her bleak eternal snows, A race of hardy hunters, who repose Fearless beneath her sparkling stars, nor blanch To dream their bed may prove a thunderous avalanche, Whose spirits with their native eagle soar, Whose kindred souls dilating love the roar Of icy cataracts, the Aar, the Rhine, The Rhone that foams among the murmuring pine — Are these not armed ? Yea, every man will bleed For the fair land of Arnold Winkelried ! France waved the banner of the free, When it fell from the hands of Italy : 34 ODE TO ENGLAND. Alas ! she fails — but England, thou Hast a Daughter of starry brow, Whose arms receive thy setting sun ; She, in a forest vast and lone, With awful gladness hears intone Niagara, and the Amazon ! Freedom before her mountain citadel Placed you, two giants, each her wakeful sentinel ! " THE PITY OF IT" 35 "THE PITY OF IT." If our love may fail, Lily, If our love may fail, What will mere life avail, Lily, Mere life avail ? Seed that promised blossom, Withered in the mould, Pale petals overblowing, Failing from the gold ! When the fervent fingers Listlessly unclose, May the life that lingers Find repose, Lily, Find repose ! Who may dream of all the music Only a lover hears, Hearkening to hearts triumphant Bearing down the years ? 36 " THE PITY OF IT." Ah ! may eternal anthems dwindle To a low sound of tears ? Room in all the ages For our love to grow, Prayers of both demanded A little while ago : And now a few poor moments, Between life and death, May be proven all too ample For love's breath ! Seed that promised blossom, Withered in the mould ! Pale petals overblowing, Failing from the gold ! I well believe the fault lay More with me than you, But I feel the shadow closing Cold about us two. An hour may yet be yielded us, Or a very little more — Then a few tears, and silence For evermore, Lily, For evermore ! LOST ANGEL, LOST ANGEL. Lost angel of a holier youth, maiden fair beyond compare ! Young dream of joy, return for ruth, Dawn, breathe around a holier air ) Evanished where ? Dear naiad, in a shadowy grot, Fair nymph, who lave within the cave, 1 yearn for you, and find you not, O freshness of the early wave ! The river rolleth broad and strong, Great vessels glide upon the tide, High storied tower and temple throng With human toil, and pain, and pride. But where the purple light of morn, And thou, fair queen of what hath been ? Ah ! holy land where Hope was born, Ah ! freshness of the early green ! O shrined within the lucent air, Where Youth hath bn f h with morning mirth, Clear-welling crystal blithe and fair, Leaf-mirror from the loins of earth ! 38 LOST ANGEL. But I am drifting far away, With many a stain, with many a pain, I near the shadowy death of day, And youth may never dawn again. O grand cathedral where you prayed, Divinely dight with jewelled light, Soft woodland water where we played, Low music in the summer night ! Melodiously flowing river ! Ah ! blithe sunshine upon the Rhine, We would have leaned, and looked for ever, Your eyes more luminous, lady mine ! Dark as a russet forest pool, With many a dream within their gleam, Now glancing mirth, now veiled and full ; Were they, or did they only seem ? . . . There is no grove like yonder grove, No water clear as our mild mere, No dawn is like the dawn of love, Nor any later flower so dear As are the earliest of the year. . . . Evanished where ? . . . Holds life, or death, immense and still, Thee darkly fair beyond compare ? May Love her silver orb fulfil Unhindered there, Where Honour may not fetter will, Nor Love himself bid love despair ? And you were one long vernal kiss, Immingling glows of lovelit rose, LOST ANGEL. 39 Perfume, rare amber, ambergris, And all the fervid Orient knows ! Ah ! mellow-ripe-of-autumn hue, Young, willowy, warm, impassioned form, Tone gentler than the turtle-coo, Brown eyes that took the heart by storm, And lovelier inward grace that drew My soul with all-compelling charm I 4o A CASUAL SONG. A CASUAL SONG. She sang of lovers met to play " Under the may bloom, under the may," But when I sought her face so fair, I found the set face of Despair. She sang of woodland leaves in spring, And joy of young love dallying ; But her young eyes were all one moan, And Death weighed on her heart like stone. I could not ask, I know not now, The story of that mournful brow ; It haunts me as it haunted then, A flash from fire of hell-bound men. THE MERRY-GO-ROUND. 41 THE MERRY-GO-ROUND. The merry-go-round, the merry-go-round, the merry-go- round at Fowey ! * They whirl around, they gallop around, man, woman, and girl, and boy ; They circle on wooden horses, white, black, brown, and bay, To a loud monotonous tune that hath a trumpet bray. All is dark where the circus stands on the narrow quay, Save for its own yellow lamps, that illumine it brilliantly : Painted purple and red, it pours a broad strong glow Over an old-world house, with a pillared place below ; For the floor of the building rests on bandy columns small, And the bulging pile may, tottering, suddenly bury all. But there upon wooden benches, hunched in the summer night, Sit wrinkled sires of the village arow, whose hair is white ; They sit like the mummies of men, with a glare upon them cast From a rushing flame of the living, like their own mad past ; * Pronounce Foy. 42 THE MERRY-GO-ROUND. They are watching the merry-make, and their face is very grave ; Over all are the silent stars ! beyond, the cold grey wave. And while I gaze on the galloping horses circling round, The men caracoling up and down to a weird, mono- tonous sound, I pass into a bewilderment, and marvel why they go ; It seems the earth revolving, with our vain to and fro ! For the young may be glad and eager, but some ride listlessly, And the old look on with a weary, dull, and lifeless eye ; I know that in an hour the fair will all be gone, Stars shining over a dreary void, the Deep have sound alone. I gaze with orb suffused at human things that fly, And I am lost in the wonder of our dim destiny. . . . The merry-go-round, the merry-go-round, the merry-go- round at Fowey ! They whirl around, they gallop around, man, woman, and girl, and boy. CHILDREN SINGING IN HEA VEN. 43 EARTH-AFFLICTED CHILDREN SINGING IN HEAVEN.* Then, with a fountain's delicate rain noises (A silver moss leaps plashing where it poises), I heard afar melodious young tones Of children, warbling limpid antiphons, Of singing children, sister answering brother, And flying, flying after one another. THE FOUNTAIN SONG. First. ' Where is the rainbow ? Where may I find it ? ' Second. ' In a fountain falling With the sun behind it ! ' First. ' Where the flying silver Falls loose, dishevelled ? ' Second. ' At an airier fountain Your look be levelled ! Where gems enhancing Aerial blue Are glimmering, glancing, A delicate dew ! ' * From •' A Modern Faust." 44 CHILDREN SINGING IN HE A VEN First. ' Come you, and show ! I never shall find ! ' Second. ' Wait till he blow ! Ah ! whims of the wind ! ' First. ' Silent in airy dew Playfully wafted, Rainbow, the fairy, flew Swift from the shafted Watery column ! He will beguile Old over-solemn Faces to smile ! ' Second. * Here, over the leafage Glowing to golden, Not for a moment Will he be holden ; A glamour of glory Over the trees ! Ever murmuring story, Low melodies ! ' First. ' Now he is laving Clear in the pool ! Wavelets are waving Delicate, cool ! He is all azure, Purple and yellow, Following pleasure, Beautiful fellow ! Awhile appearing, Now here, now there ! CHILDREN SINGING IN HE A VEN. 45 Vanishing, veering A Glendoveer ! Everywhere ! ' Second. ' A bird who is washing In a water-lily bath A very fine flashing Leaf-laver hath ! The young jet of joyance, Clear with no colour, Will yield all her buoyance In a ruffling corolla, Fall, a resolving Soft silvery flower, Woven water involving Heaven-hues in a shower ! Deliciously dying is Dear as the fleet Swift thrill of flying Morning to meet ! ' 46 MY LITTLE ONES. MY LITTLE ONES. Ah ! little ones ! my little ones ! When will your sorrows end? We deemed you daughters, deemed you sons Of our Eternal Friend ! Yet ever tears of blood we bleed Above your bitter mortal need ! I deem that it may be your part To break, and melt the world's hard heart : And when ye know, ye will rejoice ; In Heaven, will you give your voice For earthly pain, your own free choice ? In the life that follows this, Will you, with your forgiving kiss, Pile the saving coals of fire On cruel mother, cruel sire ? Little ones, my little ones, Ah ! when will be the end ! We deemed you daughters, deemed you sons Of more than earthly Friend ! We want you fair, and hale, and strong, Full of laughter, mirth, and song ; MY LITTLE ONES. 4 7 For when we hear you weep and moan. Our Lord is shaken on His throne ! If later years be dull and sad, Leave, O leave the children glad ! Little ones, my little ones, However all may end, Earth may fail, with moons and suns, But never, Love, your friend ! For Jesus was a little child, And God Himself is meek and mild. 4 8 MAD MOTHER. MAD MOTHER. After moonrise in autumn, By a wandering water, When a half-muffled moon, Dazed in a cloudland Of wandering grey, Looked pale from the cloud, Dim branches uncoloured, In a line with the moon, Under, over the moon, Faintly repeated, A dark woven lacework In the wan wave . . . I heard a low singing, Thin, shadowy singing, Unwordable woe, A wail from the ruin Of a heart desolated, A mind out of tune, As a wail from the wind : A thin faded form by the pale flying moon, A face with the youth faded out from the eyes, From the wan, weary eyes, MAD MOTHER. 49 Save for her not a soul ! Save for her, and a child, Whom she held by the hand, In the shadowy silence ; But she ceaseth her singing, Low saith to the child — " Come along, dear, with mammy Under the water, The soft flying water, The sheltering water, The kind, hiding water ; You are going with me ! " Then they went from the shelving Low shore together Into the water : And the child little knew Where he was going, Only clung to the mother, Deeming her wise. Was she not ever Wise for her little one, Love for her little one ? Yea, Love is wise ! Ah ! she was true ; But the woes of the world, Driven home by the devil, Had maddened her mind, And the child little knew, Knew not the mother Herself little knew, 50 MAD MOTHER. Even she, even she Herself little knew ! So they went in together, Mother and child, Awaking the cloudland In the wan water, Awaking the moon. " O mammy, how cold it is ! ' " Yea, very cold, dear ! Only 'tis colder Yonder on earth, love, Yonder on land ! " A gurgle, a silence, Low wind in the rushes, Never note more of song now Nor mother, nor child knew ; Ah 1 none of us know ! LOVE YE ONE ANOTHER WELL!" 51 "AH! LOVE YE ONE ANOTHER WELL! Ah ! love ye one another well, For the hour will come When one of you is lying dumb ; Ye would give worlds then for a word, That never may be heard ; Ye would give worlds then for a glance, That may be yours by ne'er a chance ; Ah ! love ye one another well ! For if ye wrung a tear, Like molten iron it will sear ; The look that proved you were unkind With hot remorse will be blind ; And though you pray to be forgiven, How will ye know that ye are shriven? Ah ! love ye one another well ! 52 "THE CLOUD MAY SAIL THERE." THE CLOUD MAY SAIL THERE." The cloud may sail there, Day flow and fail there, And the eagle fly, Haze overshadow A smooth snow meadow, And gleams of silver Fleeting fly From yon cloud-delver Of gleaming eye ! The moon may tarry with Her pale bow, And moonrise marry with Virgin snow, Blue heavens abide, Or solemn-eyed Stars by night, who gaze and go : Ah ! ne'er pollute With a mortal foot Yon realms of spirits aerial ; All but the lute Of air be mute From rosy morn to evening fall, THE CLOUD MAY SAIL THERE:' 53 While flowerets blue, Fair with dew, Laugh to the azure over all ; Let a music mazy, Born of the hazy Play of a tender light and shade, On hallowed ground Dance with the sound Fairy horns have faintly made ; A cloud of snow Softly blow On the blue verge of the form so white, Delicate curl In a windy whirl ; But man, be far from the holy height, Soil no fair fields of frosty light ! 54 ALPINE HUNTER'S SONG. ALPINE HUNTER'S SONG. The hunter sings, as he strides along : Halloo ! The paths are perilous and long ; But a hunter's heart is light and strong He jodles, and the ice crags jodle too : Halloo! halloo! Hark to the clang of his iron heel ! Halloo! He grapples granite with grip of steel ; The mountains echo to his merry peal ; He splinters, and he mounts the ice wall blue Halloo ! halloo ! Who spies a gem from the top of a bluff? Halloo ! A shaft hath tumbled him sure enough ; Though hunter's fare be scant and rough, 1 Ie quaffs for wine the air, the stream, the dew: Halloo ! halloo ! ALPINE HUNTER'S SONG. 55 His seasoned frame is hard as a rock : Halloo ! He doth indomitable mock Lauwine, red lightning, rolling block ; He springeth over icy chasms blue : Halloo ! halloo ! He lies out under a cave by night : Halloo ! He communeth with still starlight, And snow-peaks in their shrouds of white : In far ravines hoar torrents roaring go : Halloo! halloo! The hunter peers from a stony jag : Halloo ! A Lammergeyer unfurls the flag Of vans, that shadow all the crag ! He shouts ! death hovers ! hurls him down below ! Halloo! halloo! And as he falls, falls in the deep : Halloo ! With him the rocks rebounding leap ; Rouse all the demons out of their sleep, Who laugh, as he lies cold in snow : Halloo! halloo! 56 EARLY LOVE. EARLY LOVE. Our early love was only dream ! Still a dream too fair for earth, Hallowed in a faint far gleam, Where the fairest flowers have birth, Let it rest ! no stain e'er trouble Magic murmur, limpid bubble ! There two spirits in the calm Of moonlight memory may go, Finding pure refreshing balm, When life traileth wounded, slow Along dim ways of common dust, As dull lives of mortals must. Early love, fair fount of waters, Ever by enchantment flowing, Where two snakes, her innocent daughters, Were wont to swim among the blowing, Wilding flowers thou knowest well, In the wood of our sweet spell ! EARLY LOVE. 57 Never Fear found out the place, Never eyes nor feet profane ! Of our innocent youth and grace Love was born ; if born to wane, We will keep remembrance holy From the soil of care and folly. No weariness of life made wise, No canker in the youngling bud, No lustre failing from our eyes, Nor ardour paling in the blood ! Neither ever seemed less fair To the other playing there. Still asleep, we drift asunder, Who met and loved but in a dream Nor kissing closely, woke to wonder Why we are not what we seem ! Fairy bloom dies when we press Wings young zephyr may caress. Fare you well ! more might have been Nay, we know more might not be ! A moment only I may lean On your bosom, ere you flee, Ere the weary sultry day Hide my morning and my May ! 58 EARLY LOVE. Yet a fairy fountain glistens Under soft moon-lighted leaves, And my wistful spirit listens For a voice that glows and grieves, Breathing, when my heart would fail, Youth from yonder fairy vale, Where sings a nightingale. LOVE HIDING. 59 LOVE HIDING. I.OVE was playing hide-and-seek, And we deemed that he was gone, Tears were on my withered cheek For the setting of our sun ; Dark it was around, above, But he came again, my love ! Chill and drear in wan November, We recall the happy spring, While bewildered we remember When the woods began to sing, All alive with leaf and wing, Leafless lay the silent grove ; But he came again, my love ! And our melancholy frost Woke to radiance in his rays, Who wore the look of one we lost In the far-away dim days ; No prayer, we sighed, the dead may move, Yet he came again, my love ! 6o LOVE HIDING. Love went to sleep, but not for ever, And we deemed that he was dead ; Nay, shall aught avail to sever Hearts who once indeed were wed ? Garlands for his grave we wove, But he came again, my love 1 THE WATER-NYMPH AND THE BOY. 61 FROM "THE WATER-NYMPH AND THE BOY. 1 I flung me rc.ind him, I drew him under ; I clung, I drowned him, My own white wonder ! . . . Father and mother, Weeping and wild, Came to the forest, Calling the child, Came from the palace, Down to the pool, Calling my darling, My beautiful ! Under the water, Cold and so pale ! Could it be love made Beauty to fail ? Ah ! me for mortals : In a few moons, If I had left him, After some Junes 62 THE WATER-NYMPH AND THE BOY. He would have faded, Faded away, He, the young monarch, whom All would obey, Fairer than day ; Alien to springtime, Joyless and grey, He would have faded, Faded away, Moving a mocker)', Scorned of the day ! Now I have taken him All in his prime, Saved from slow poisoning Pitiless Time, Filled with his happiness, One with the prime, Saved from the cruel Dishonour of Time, Laid him, my beautiful, Laid him to rest, Loving, adorable, Softly to rest, Here in my crystalline, Here in my breast ! MYSTICAL POEMS OF NATURE. MYSTICAL POEMS OF NATURE PAN. Pan is not dead, he lives for ever ! Mere and mountain, forest, seas, Ocean, thunder, rippling river, All are living Presences ; Yea, though alien language sever, We hold communion with these ! Hail ! ever young and fair Apollo ! Large-hearted, earth-enrapturing Sun ! Navigating night's blue hollow, Cynthia, Artemis, O Moon, Lady Earth you meekly follow, Till your radiant race be run ; Pan is not dead ! Earth, Cybele, the crowned with towers, Lion-haled, with many a breast, Mother-Earth, dispensing powers To every creature, doth invest 5 66 PAN. With life and strength, engendering showers Health, wealth, beauty, or withholds; Till at length she gently folds Every child, and lays to rest ! Pan is not dead ! Hearken ! rhythmic ocean-thunder ! Wind, wild anthem in the pines ! When the lightning rends asunder Heavens, to open gleaming mines, Vasty tones with mountains under Talk where ashy cloud inclines Over hoar brows of the heights ; Ware the swiftly flaming lights ! Pan is not dead ! Whence the ' innumerable laughter, 1 All the dancing, all the glees Of blithely buoyant billowed seas, If it be not a sweet wafture From joy of Oceanides ? Whence the dancing and the glees, In the boughs of woodland trees, When they clap their hands together, 1 lold up flowers in the warm weather ? Gentle elfins of the fur, Flowers, Venus' stomacher, Grey doves who belong to her, PAN. Singing birds, or peeping bud. Lucid lives in limpid flood, ~ishes, shells, a rai If Pan be dead ? 1 Naiads of the willowy water ! Sylvans in the warbling wood ! Oreads, many a mountain daughter Of the shadowy solitude ! Whence the silence of green leaves, Where young zephyr only heaves Sighs in a luxurious mood, Or a delicate whisper fell From light lips of Ariel, If Pan be dead ? ' Wave-illumined ocean palaces, Musically waterpaven, Whose are walls enchased like chalices, Gemmed with living gems, a haven For foamy, wandering emerald, Where the waterlights are called To mazy play upon the ceiling, Thrills of some delicious feeling ! Sylph-like wonders here lie hid In dim dome of Nereid ; Tender tinted, richly hucd, Fair sea-flowers disclose their feelers 67 68 PAN. With a pearly morn imbued, While to bather's open lid Water fairies float, revealers Of all the marvels in the flood, And Pan not dead ! We are nourished upon science; Will ye pay yourselves with words ? Gladly will we yield affiance To what grand order she affords For use, for wonder ; yet she knows No whit whence all the vision flows ! Ah ! sister, brother, poets, ye Thrill to a low minstrelsy, Never any worldling heard, Ye who cherish the password, Allowing you, with babes, to go Within the Presence-chamber so Familiarly to meet your queen ; For she is of your kith and kin ! Ye are like him of old who heard In convent garden the white bird ; A hundred years flew over him Unheeding ! All the world was dim ; At length, unknown, he homeward came To brethren, now no more the same; Then, at evening of that day, Two white birds heavenward flew away ; Pan is not dead ! PAN. 69 ; ' Spirit only talks with spirit, Converse with the ordered whole, However alien language blur it, May only be of soul with soul. In our image-moulding sense We order varied influence From the World- Intelligence ; And if Nature feed our frame, She may nourish pride or shame, Holy, or unholy flame ; Real forms the maniac sees, Whom he cherisheth, or flees ; Real souls the sleeper kens In dreamland's eerie shadowed glens. Pan is not dead ! " Every star and every planet Feed the fire of Destiny ; Or for good, or evil fan it, Here, Hermes, Hecate ; By ruling bias, and career, To all hath been assigned a sphere, In realms invisible and here, Obedience, administration For individual or nation. Ceres, Pluto, Proserpine Are the years' youth, and decline, Seasonable oil or wine, Phantasmagory yours or mine ; 7 o PAN. And if sense be fed by Nature, With ne'er a show of usurpature She may feed our spirit too, And with hers our own imbue, Ruling influence from her, Tallied with our character ; Dionysus, Fauns may move To revel, or the lower love, Unrisen Ariel control, Undine of yet unopened soul, Fallen ghost invite to fall ; Or she, who is the heart of all, Uranian Aphrodite, whom The world laid in a Syrian tomb Under the name of Jesus, She May dominate victoriously, And Tan be dead ! ; ' Whence are plague, fog, famine, fevers, Blighting winds, and ' weather harms ' ? Are sorceries malign the weavers, Through inaudible ill charms ? Disease, confusion, haunting sadness, Lust, delirium, murder, madness, Cyclone, grim earthquake, accident, In some witch-cauldron brewed and blent ? Now I see the open pit ; Abaddon flamelh forth from it I PAN. Like lurid smoke the fiends are hurled Abroad now to confound the world ! Disordered minds Howl, shriek, wail in the wailing winds Pan i.j not dead ! Whence the gentle thought unbidden, Resolve benign, heroic, just, Lovely image of one hidden, Higher cherished, lower chidden, Self down-trodden in the dust ? Silent hand of consolation On the brows of our vexation, On the burning brows of sorrow ? Much of all, be sure, we borrow For that Profound of ours within From our holy kith and kin ! Pan is not dead ! Warmth and light from shielding, sheeny Wings of angels, or Athene, Call the Guardian what you will, Impelling, or consoling still ! While if to Christ, or Virgin mother, Hate, greed, offer prayer, no other Than Belial, Mammon, Ashtaroth Draw nigh to hear, and answer both : When lurid-eyed priest waves the cross 72 PAN. For slaughter, gain that is but loss Demons contemptuously toss ! What though ye name the evil clan Tvphon, Satan, Ahriman, Tan is not dead ! Their bodies are the shows of nature, Their spirits far withdrawn from ours ; We vary in our nomenclature For the Demiurgic Powers, To whom high duties are assigned In our economy of mind, As in our mortal order ; they Lead souls upon their endless way ; From whom the tender, sweet suggestion Arrives uncalled, unheralded, Illumination, haunting question, Approval, blame from some one hid, Terchance from one we count as dead ; Our eyes are holden ; they are near, Who oftenwhile may see and hear ! By the auroral gate of birth, In the youthful morning mirth, At the portal of dim death Their guardianship continueth ; Pan is not dead ! . . . 1 Ah ! why then shrilled in the Egrcan The choral wail, the loud lament, PAN. 73 Confusion of the gods Ida?an, Dire defeat, and banishment ? When the lowly young Judsean Dying head on cross had bent, ' Great Pan is dead ! ' Sun, and Moon, and Earth, and Stars, Serene behind our cloudy bars, With the Magi from the East, Yield glad homage to the Least, Offer myrrh, and gold, and gem Before the Babe of Bethlehem, Now Pan is dead ! Yea, before the wondrous story Of loving, self-surrendering Man Paled the world's inferior glory, Knelt the proud Olympian ; Then the darkness of the cross Enthroned supreme Love's utter 1< Then Ambition, Pride, and Lust Into nether hell were thrust, And Pan was dead ! The loveliness of Aphrodite Waned before a lovelier far, Fainting in the rays more mighty Of the bright and Morning Star ; (Lovely will to give and bless 74 PAN. Maketh form and feature less) Young-eyed Eros will sustain His triumph, following in His train ; Kings conquered by One more Divine In the courts imperial shine, Thralls owing fealty to Him, Who dying left their glory dim ; Feudatories, ranged in splendour, Sworn high services to render, With lions, leopards, fawning mild, And drawn swords round a Little Child Pan, Pan is dead ! ' ' For while the dawn expands, and heightens, Greater gods arrive to reign, Jupiter dethrones the Titans, Osiris rules the world again, But in a more majestic guise ; Sinai thunders not, nor lightens, Eagle, sun-confronting eyes Veils before mild mysteries ! Balder, Gautama, full-fain Pay humble tribute while they wane ; All the earlier Beauty prone is Before a lovelier than Adonis ! Till even the Person of our Lord, In yonder daylight of the Spirit, On all the people to be poured By the dear influence of II u merit, PAN. 75 Will fade in the full summer-shine Of all grown Human, and Divine, And every mode of worship fall, Eternal God be all in all ; Pan lives, 76 THE SEA. THE SEA, AND THE LIVING CREATURES. "Then I thought, in the bosom of Nature, whom I love so, who has revealed herself to me from a boy, will I forget now the misery caused by human sin, hardness, indifference, and mad cruelty — forget these confusions also of poor human understanding, vainly endeavouring to pierce the darkness of a night unassuageable by any star, troubled only, not illuminated, with sinister tires of wreckers along the shore, where human ravage lies tossing in the wild surge, ground to fragments on the iron rocks. And now I found myself by the sea." The cliffs resemble a roll of long reverberate thunder, Dark solid-bodied form of some rock-crashing peal, Long reverberate roll of a loud tumultuous peal ; They are a rampart round the pylon rent asunder From the mainland by the might of yonder waves that steal Slowly and surely in from where they roar in the distance ; I hasten over the sand that paves the lonely court, Pass through the giant pylon, and with a swift insistence Climb rocks in front of the cave that is the Sea's resort. Only lie for awhile hath left His grand Sea-palace, And I may enter, daring for a moment to explore, Until anon beneath the Titan arch He dallies, Ere He arrive to play with the boulders on the floor ; THE SEA. 77 Arch He hath hewn for Himself in scorn of our rondure of arches, Tall, irregular, huge, in outline lightning forked, While day and night He moved in four great moon-led marches, And mouths of the foaming surge with the hollow mountain talked. Was not the Architect Chaos ? the storm's abraded edges, Gloom-model after which He set Himself to mould, Or the journeying billows' beetling, mountain-rupturing ridges ? Old Chaos hath a genius primeval, vast and bold, Who tints the windy walls with dim red rust and gold ! When the Main is here at home his lucid halls are paven With a foamy-veined, and shifting shadowed emerald ; When he leaves, the ponderous purple boulders are engraven With fairy tales of the water by the mighty scald. I bathe and wade in the pools, rich-wrought with flowers of the ocean, Or over the yellow sand run swift to meet the sea, Dive under the falls of foam, or float on a weariless motion Of the alive, clear wave, heaving undulant under me ! The grey gull wails aloft ; he floats on the breast of the billow, And a wet seal flounders flippered on a shelf of the cave ; He knows well I'll not hurt him, brother of mine, dear fellow ; His mild brown eye beholds confidingly and suave. 78 THE SEA. Yonder the mouth of the dark long subterranean hollow, Where with a light in my hat I drove the birds one day, Who seeing the narrowing end, and a swimmer per- sistently follow, Dived unexpectedly under, and rose up far away ! But the cavern hath awful tones, dull crimson hues of the henbane, Blood-red, as ancient Murder had been hiding here, So old and unremembered, gory tints of the den wane ; Nay, for a smell of slaughter haunts the antres drear ! I will not remember, I thought ! forget by the brine that I love so All the terror of human sin that made me grieve ! All ! refreshed for a moment, how may I hope to remove so From the wrongs of those, my brethren ? 'tis but a brief reprieve ! I deem some Horror hides in yonder gloom of the hollows, The surge returns to glut them somewhere near my lair ; And while the sullen sound my lone ear gloomily follows, With some foreboding cold to gaze around I dare. Oh! what are these at my feet? Ship-timbers, masts that are shattered, In the howl of the hurricane, crunched on the iron of rocks — And lo ! 'tis a corpse in the corner, swollen, sodden, and battered, Nodding, and tossing its arms with the swirl against the blocks ! THE SEA. 79 For the Sea hath returned already, He enters the outer- most portal ; Let a man begone, or drown, by the crag-walled vestibule ; Let him begone, or drown, by the echoing vestibule ! Ah ! 'tis the corpse of a boy there — hear the wail of a mortal Who weeps by a fire in a far land, and waits for her beautiful ! The sea hath returned already ; He laughs in the outer- most portal ; He washeth over the boulders, thundering to and fro ! Who are they that inhabit here aloof from the mortal ? What awful Powers, indifferent to human joy or woe ? Of Demiurgic Powers, afar from the man and the woman, Are these dim echoing chambers the mystical veiled thought, Indifferent, aloof, or enemy to the human? . . . How, then, are they a haven for minds and hearts o'er- wrought ? Ah ! many and many an hour in your sublime communion I pass, O gods unknown, of ocean, wind, and cloud ; I find, profound repose, refreshment flow from the union . . . Yet, O my soul, divorce no sufferers in the crowd ! Nay, for I hear in the air that pestilence of the voices — And it is not all the gale, nor cry of the wild sea-mew ! " Say what sinister joy, not man's this time, rejoices, The loud, shipwrecking, murderous tempest-whirl to brew?" 8o THE CALL OF THE CA VES. THE CALL OF THE CAVES. " We allure you, lo ! we call Into our storm-moulded hall, Where the emerald water-pulse Moves the laver and the dulse, Where swim cloud- white living gems Of dream-born form ; jade, amber stems Bud living flowers ; we liberal fling Live jewels o'er drowned queen and king, While the haughty heads of them With some consuming diadem Of clinging life we crown ; white limbs Our oozy robe corroding dims ; Ship timbers jammed between great stones Are mixed with fish-peeled human bones ; Grotesque mailed creatues sidle athwart From some dark cranny of their fort. Here the yellow sands arc silling Over lips how lately lilting, Here the shadowy waters moving Over hearts how lately loving ! Our lilac and our purple dye, THE CALL OF THE CAVES. 81 Our shelly incrustations vie With gold embossed, rich broidery, Fair spoil washed here from precious freight Of that fair ship which bore the state Of royal pilgrim, guard and priest, Tourneying to a marriage feast, And here by winds and billows broken, When the fatal word was spoken ; Where now in lordly isolation Our waters, after devastation, Wander with their wild, free voice, Causing wild hearts to rejoice, Wander through the lordly halls Echoing their lone foot-falls, Singing songs that charm and cheer, Warbled for no mortal ear ; Yet if one surprise their scope, He will be blessed beyond all hope. Beyond the demon-guarded portal, Fashioned by no hands of mortal, Where towering monsters still as stone Hear old ocean's monotone Sound and resound for evermore, Watch the restless entrance-floor By rude purple rock roofed o'er, Whose rippled surface-hues invoke Memories of woodland smoke — Beyond where twilit water reaches, 82 THE CALL OF THE CAVES. There be dim mysterious beaches, Whence should put forth some elfin bark To ferry pilgrims toward the dark Under a storm-wrought architecture, That fills the soul with strange conjecture, Where a courage-conquering sound Travels from the gulf profound, Like muffled thunder murmureth, As though some sea-god threatened death, Drowsy-souled, with bated breath, To whosoever dared intrude Upon his awful solitude ! Here unhuman consciousnesses Inhabit green sea-drowned recesses, Clothed in a fantastic form, Native to the realms of storm, And ocean calm, the mystic deep, Where many thrilling secrets sleep. Come and swim, or wade, or float, Bring the light, oar-dripping boat ! Here's rare fretwork, hued like wine, More richly gemmed than storied shrine, Or monstrance ; clear piscina pool With fairy lives made beautiful, Finely frilled, and delicate tinted, Or shyer beauties only hinted ; Here landwater ceaseth not Dropping from the groined grot, Whose tender fresh green ferns above Look like a dream of virgin love. THE CALL OF THE CAVES. 83 We allure you, lo ! we call Into our storm-moulded hall ; Where the shadowy wave is still, If you who are so weary will, Crooning, we will rock to rest In the twilight of our breast ; In sleep we would all ills disperse, Crooning like some ancient nurse, And dissolve the ancestral curse ! Yet there is one private gate, Consecrate to royal state Of ocean billows ; there they dance Buoyant under the sun's glance, Clear-green, hilarious, in and out, Foam-laughing, ever-fluctuant rout ; Fair traces of their blithe swift feet In heaved long floating lines you meet, Long loose lines of silver foam Round high rock-ramparts of their home O'er these faint shadows of the clouds Slowly mount, like welcome shrouds ; Within the surges hold high revel, All unaware of good or evil, But what they do in that dim court Is known to them who there resort, And to none other ; the rude arch, Sacred to their sounding march, 84 THE CALL OF THE CAVES. So hewn as though the forked levin Had been the norm for walls uneven, Leans back upon the sheer grey crag, Loud haunt of sea-bird, mer, and shag, Or gulls that gleam in poised flight About the grey cathedral height. A herb-sown pentroof crowns the pile, That doth the soaring eyes beguile Aloft o'er what seems window vast, Which Time, the old Iconoclast, While the centuries rolled by, Slow-fashioned there in irony Of Gothic minster, Gothic creed, Human worship, human need ; For there the wind sings all the psalms, With the wave in storms and calms, Whose congregations pouring in Know nor penitence, nor sin ; There unseen they hold high revel, No thralls to righteousness or evil. Rich traceries on the cliff were wrought By subtle hands with tempest fraught, O'er that great Eastern front rust-red, Grey or golden, high and dread, Shagged with byssus like a beard, Where the wild bird broods are reared, Ere they assay their glorious flight Round the blue-imbathed hoar height. But that rude mimicry of fanes The mocking mountain ill sustains, THE CALL OF THE CAVES. S5 With his huge protending flanks, And the maned sea-surge in ranks Chafing round his iron feet ; For such a part he's all unmeet ! Bastion, buttress, battered, bruised, Spire with pinnacle confused Were ne'er for human worship used ; Rough-hewn battlements and towers Bewray the Elemental Powers ! Lawless, abrupt, their lines have nought Of human ; but the Genii wrought Jamb, sofEt, frieze, and architrave, For giant porches of the wave. The huge pile leans to view the sky, And all his mighty lines awry Reveal the mountain-irony ; So some huge Pagan, masked as priest At a solemn Christian feast, Might leer, and reel, disguise let fall ; Stand revealed a Bacchanal ! . . . Here a boy who sought a nest Was laid by reverent hands to rest ; In winter he was prisoned here, Away from all who held him dear, By ravening waves the loud winds churn To humble home they barred return. Though he and his with longing eye One another could descry 86 THE CALL OF THE CA VES. Beyond the maniac revelry, Of cold and drought they saw him die. Surge batteries had availed to sever By long, implacable endeavour This arid isle from the mainland, Save for one causeway ; none might stand There when it was tempest-swept, And the wild billows o'er it leapt. Still they allure me, still they call Into their storm-moulded hall ! THE SPIRIT OF S70RM. S7 THE SPIRIT OF STORM. Hail, royal ocean ! in thy presence-chamber Arrived, I feel thy deep abounding life Transfused into my blood, replenishing My dwindling store ; alone, and at thy feet, Dear as are human hearts, I am at home ! Sheltered within a cleft of the tall crag, Granite of many delicate tints, I hear The wind's vast voice make chorus with the sea's, Broken upon grim, dark rock-teeth below, Ruins of the mainland ; neighbouring which the shoals Are green as beryl, wine-stained with the weed Of stone submerged ; one wrinkled indigo Watery wastes aloof from shore, inlaid With devious lines, like branching mercury. The groundswell, sullen heaving, shows the sea Perturbed by rumours of far water- war. Atlantic reigns immeasurable, alone, Far as the weary wandering eyes can range, Save for one ghostlike, mist-enshrouded isle There in the offing, and more nigh at hand, Yon brown sail of the bark that brought me hither, And bears dear comrades, great-limbed fishermen, Whose grave reserve derives from the stern sea. THE SPIRIT OF STORM. But westward from my lair the crags are shattered Into the semblance of a palace-fort, Or temple hypacthral, tower and battlement, Pinnacle, buttress, gurgoyled arch and spire. Chasms yawn between twin walls ; one longs to know Where, and how far, into the mountain heart They labyrinthine wander ; one would fain Ask of the restless surge, or the wild bird, Who are made free of them, who wander ever Unchallenged in and out the sombre halls, And corridors roofed over with wan cloud, Ceiled with the storm-drift ! — Hurrying vapours gleam Anon with slant pale shafts from the veiled sun, Watery rays, that faintly fitful pour A ruffled silver lustre on the deep, Irradiating the white wings of mews, That hover o'er the abysses ; but more bright And warm this ardent beam from forth my heart, That blesseth and illumineth with love, Beloved birds ! your multitudinous cry, Music I dearly cherish ; far inland Erewhile I heard the wail of one of you Imprisoned ; mine eyes melted ; for there flashed, As though revealed in a dark night by lightning, Flashed unaware upon my sense within, The vision of the glory of the sea ! Ye weave delightful motions in the air, Passing, repassing ; call to one another, And cherish in the abysses your brown young. THE SPIRIT OF STORM. I Now one alights upon the bounding wave A moment ; now he cleaves the darkling air. How the unfettered sweep of his poised pinion Vies in majestic freedom with the fall Of a blown billow in mid-ocean, driven, Fierce-hounded by the blast ! the roller bows With large, deliberate, imperial bend Of haughty crest, and massy-muscled neck, Neck clothed with thunder, as the Roman fell, Who in the Curia, at the feet of Pompey, By treachery struck, fell, royal-robed, a king. So swings, so falls, the Atlantic wave to ruin, Smitten by immense vans of the strong south-west : For all is noble and grand about the sea. O hymn sublime, confounded, infinite Of Tempest, how the chaos in my soul Responds to your appeal, and drifts with cloud ! I too am worn with many moods at war, Wind thwarting tide ; stern duty, passion, love, W T restle while, unresolved to harmony, They urge me blindly, violent, confused. The old-world order passeth, and the new Delaying dawns, one crimson, loud with voices We know not, with wild wars in earth and heaven The fountains of the great Deep are broken up, Threatening deluge ; our firm earth goes under ; Even as well-beloved familiar stars Beneath the dusk horizon disappear For him who journeys over alien seas, So the ideals of our childhood change ; 90 THE SPIRIT OF STORM. And as for such lone wanderers there rise Clear constellations all unknown, for us Ideas undivined of common weal ; New duties are the children of new needs, And wider wants ; yet in the onward way Stand venerable godlike forms opposed, Reverend from usage and dear memory. Young-faced ideals, rosy like the dawn, Beckoning promise joy, then eagerly We hurtle old familiars, while we wound Hearts well beloved, responsive to their call, And full-mouthed ardours of their warm embrace. Then Conscience bleeds, for Virtue shocks with Virtue And sweet Affection, on the embattled plain, While Passion raving more embroils the strife. And what is duty, what is only pleasure, In the uncertain glimmer who can tell ? Tumultuous conflicts in the elements Have counterparts more terrible within ; Those rend the body, these lay waste the soul. One sees his brethren crushed to earth and maimed, Tortured, and slowly ground to powder, starved, Harried by hard Vicissitude, or Man More cruel ; then he questions, doubts, denies The omnipotent God of justice and of love, To whom he lifted childish hands in prayer, Taught by a sainted mother ; whom she trusted Through a long life, and, dying, leaned upon. We may not find the wholly excellent THE SPIRIT OF STORM. 91 In frail mortality ; we vainly seek Or in ourselves, or others for the type, Which hides within the Heart of the Most High, — Foundation-stone of this inferior sphere. More loudly roars the tempest in my soul ! For all the creeds make shipwreck on grim reel's Of iron Fact before mine eyes ; no charts Of olden time have laid them down ; discovered But yesterday, the ravening surge for prey Claims the pale crews, who have embarked their all On such frail planks, firm Faith, aspiring Hope, High confidence that all will yet be well. Sheltered a little in the rude cliff-cleft, I sit and hear the turmoil of the storm, Where strange small fissures in the lofty crag Suggest dwarf homes of some weird troglodyte, Or dim cave-tombs of a long buried race ; While round white boulders near high-water mark Lie under ; rain flings full athwart the stone. I send my spirit adrift upon the storm, Careering along the triumph of the blast, Exultant ! well I know the living God, God the creator, for destroyer too ; Who purifies by hurricane, evolves From birth-throes of rebellion, fraught with fear, Perplexity and pain, the common weal, Raised to a higher excellence : wise measures, With blind experiment, crude theory Of men who deem that they initiate, Yea, feel in them the mystical free-will, 92 THE SPIRIT OF STORM. Though whirled in broad winds of aeonian motion, Wheeled in predestined orbits round their sun, All issue in the nobler type of Man. Lo ! the World-Soul commandeth to emerge From dead, resolved, more simple forms the higher Through pain, defect, death, folly, sorrow, sin, Compelleth all to be themselves, through all. From thee, O mystic Mother, deeply dark, From thee, O mother Nature, impulse floweth, Urging mankind to launch, like wintering bird, Upon the unknown dim airs, by faith to find Fair undiscovered realms beyond the dawn ! From thee the whisper, never disobeyed, "Advance a pace into the Infinite ; Claim young dominions from the formless Deep ! " For Man is child of Nature ; on her breast He lieth ; she feeds him ; body feeds and mind From her more large, her all-involving soul. Change wells from dark unfathomable Founts Of Love and Wisdom other, more than ours ; Ours a poor rill from these ; and therefore we Must fail to comprehend them ; yet we know Wisdom and Love are by the Antagonist, Absorbed, assimilated in far worlds Beyond our knowledge ; though we travel thither. But who of us that loved would murder one Child by slow torture ? worse the Highest doth Through Man, through Nature ! or say that he permits, Who could prevent ! nay, freely choose your horn ! THE SPIRIT OF STORM. 93 Yet Reason proves Intelligence supreme ; Not Force ; nor Chance ; unfathomable then That all-wise Will, that moral character By the plumb-line of our intelligence. I fling my heart abroad on waves of pleasure, For pleasure is a very friend of man ; And yet would moderate, would guide my course, A calm, strong swimmer ; with a modern mind Float in the turbulence of revolution, Challenge outworn, intolerable Wrong, That may have been for olden times fair Right, And still, amid the clash of swords and sounds, Forehear, enraptured, heavenly harmonies ; In tattered, streaming banners of the cloud, Marching to battle, would divine, foreknow The vision of the firmly founded State, The calm, eternal City of the Lord. . . . . . . Huge purple phantoms, ash-pale wings, wan, wide, Are marshalled as for conflict ; and they move Momently changing their weird outline ; deep Growls a far thunder ; lo ! a sudden glare Within them tells of angers ; while the main Reflects pearl, Tyrian dyes, chalcedony, And opal, from the interspaces, clear A moment, shining, delicately veiled. The peoples now begin to reach warm hands Of fellowship athwart the estranging bounds Of sea and land, for mutual defence Against the common tyrant, who can crush 94 THE SPIRIT OF STORM. Them jealous, disunited, one by one. For mutual service are the countries linked By thrilling nerves electric ; how they flash With human feeling, swift intelligence ! While great fire-breathing vessels, throbbing trains, Hurry the many-languaged throngs from home, With bales of produce for exchange, fair wrought By whirling-limbed machines ; thus arteries Are highways for the transport of supplies To every several organ ; and the frame Yields to imaginative informing thought, That moulds a many-functioned manifold Into one body from an embryo. Confusion reigns for eyes that only view Cells moving blindly through a tiny tract Of tissue, seeming at cross-purposes ; And so the Race, through varying minds and wills, And clashing ends of personality, Grows to one Body, after that fair Type, In the eternal mind of the Most High. For me, I would be faithful, point the way To heights communing with ethereal worlds, Though I myself should stumble on the spurs Far under ; yet in face of all their clamour Would save the Good uninjured ; but the Ark Is God's, not mine ; the whole wide world His own, How should He lose one single creature in it? All are in Him, and He abides in all. THE SPIRIT OF STOAWf. 95 Will not the Soul, in Her immortal flight Along the ages, change Her loss to gain ? But Virtue pushes from Her sepal-sheath, Proving a prison, though it sheltered well ; And in Her alien habit of the flower Men may mistake Her for Her fallen fair sister. I, when I dared presumptuous to ascend The perilous heights of contemplation, left Void windows of the outer sense ; but now Keen glances filled them ; gazing, I beheld The Empyrean wholly clear of cloud, All azure, save for what appeared the wing Of a great Angel, guardian over all, Plumy, and soft, and full-irradiate, Reaching athwart wide heaven ; until it grew To some celestial armour, like chain-mail ; Only the links were tender down, with blue Between the interstices ; mild ocean under Mirrored blue air, and alabaster cloud ; It seemed as calm indeed as when of old One stilled the angry waves on Galilee ! And all the storm was hushed within my heart. 96 SUSPIRIA. SUSPIRIA. Lines addressed to II. F. B. Do you remember the billowy roar of tumultuous ocean, Darkling, emerald, eager under vaults of the cave, Shattered to simmer of foam on a boulder of delicate lilac, Disenchantless youth of the clear, immortal wave ? Labyrinths begemmed with fairy lives of the water, Sea-sounding palace halls far statelier than a King's, Seethe of illumined floor with a never-wearying motion, Oozy enchased live walls, where a sea-music rings ? Do you remember the battle our brown-winged arrowy vessel Waged with wind and tide, a foaming billowy night, To a sound as of minute guns, when gloomy hearts of the hollows With sullen pride rebuffed invading Ocean's might ? Do you remember the Allarlet towers that front the cathedral, Dark and scarred sheer crag, flashed o'er by the wild sea-mews ? SU SPIRT A. 97 How they wheel aloft lamenting, souls of the ululant tempest ! And the lightning billows clash in the welter Odin brews ! A sinister livid glare from under brows of the Storm-Sun ! Brows of piled-up cloud, threatening grim Brechou, Bleaching to ghastly pale the turbulent trouble of water, While the ineffable burden of grey world o'er me grew ! Yea, all the weary waste of cloud confused with the ocean Fell full-charged with Doom on a foundering human heart : Dur souls were moved asunder, away to an infinite distance, While all the love that warmed me waned, and will depart. Fiends of the whirlwind howl for a wild carousal of slaughter Of all that is holy and fair, so shrills the demon wail ; Ruin of love and youth, with all we have deemed immortal ! My child lies dead in the dark, and I begin to fail ! Wonderful visions wane, tall towers of phantasy tumble ; I shrink from the frown without me, there is no smile within ; I cower by the fireless hearth of an uninhabited chamber^ Alone with Desolation, and the dumb, ghost of my sin, 7 98 SUSPIRTA. I have conversed with the aged ; once their souls were a furnace ; Now they are gleams in mouldered vaults of the memory : All the long sound of the Human wanes to wails of a shipwreck, Drowned in the terrible roar of violent sons of the sea ! In the immense storm-chaunt of winds and waves of the sea ! And if we have won some way in our weary toil to the summit, Do we not slidder ever back to the mouth of the pit ? When I behold the random doom that engulfs the creature, I wonder, is the irony of God perchance in it ? 'Tis a hideous spectacle to shake the sides of fiends with laughter, Where in the amphitheatre of our red world they sit ! Yea, and the rosiest Love in a songful heart of a lover, Child of Affinity, Joy, Occasion, beautiful May, May sour to a wrinkled Hate, may wear and wane to Indifference, Ah ! Love an' thou be mortal, all will soon go grey ! O when our all on earth is wrecked on reefs of disaster, May the loud Night that whelms be found indeed God's Day ! Our aims but half our own, we are drifted hither and thither ; The quarry so fiercely hunted rests unheeded now ; SUSPIRIA. 99 And if we seized our bauble, it is fallen to ashes, But a fresh illusion haunts the ever-aching brow. Is the world a welter of dream, with ne'er an end, nor an issue, Or doth One weave Dark Night, with Morning's golden strand, To a Harmony with sure hand ? Ah ! for a vision of God ! for a mighty grasp of the real, Feet firm based on granite in place of crumbling sand ! O to be face to face, and heart to heart with our dearest, Lost in mortal mists of the unrevealing land ! Oh ! were we disenthralled from casual moods of the outward, Slaves to the smile or frown of tyrant, mutable Time ! Might we abide unmoved in central deeps of the Spirit, Where the mystic jewel Calm glows evermore sublime ! The dizzying shows of the world, that fall and tumble to chaos, Dwell irradiate there in everlasting prime. But the innermost spirit of man, who is one with the Universal, Yearns to exhaust, to prove, the Immense of Ex- perience, Explores, recedes, makes way, distils a food from a poison, From strife with Death wrings power, and seasoned confidence. O'er the awakening infant, drowsing eld, and the mind- less, Their individual Spirit glows enthroned in Heaven, too SUSPIRIA. Albeit at dawn, or even, or from confusion of cloudland, Earth of their full radiance may remain bereaven : Yea, under God's grand eyes all souls lie pure and shriven. Nay ! friend beloved ! remember purple robes of the cavern, And all the wonderful dyes in dusky halls of the sea, When a lucid lapse of the water lent thrills of exquisite pleasure, A tangle of living lights all over us tenderly, When our stilly bark lay floating, or we were lipping the water, Breast to breast with the glowing, ardent heart of the deep ! That was a lovelier hour, whispering hope to the spirit, Breathing a halcyon calm, that lulled despair to sleep ; Fairy flowers of the ocean, opening innermost wonder, Kindle a rosy morn impearled in the waterways, A myriad tiny diamond founts arise in the coralline, Anemones love to be laved in the life of the chrysoprase : The happy heart of the water in many unknown recesses Childly babbled, and freely to glad companions: We will be patient, friend, through all the moods of the terror, Waiting in solemn hope resurrection of our suns ! Cherish loves that are left, pathetic stars in the gloaming ; Howc'er they may wax and wane, they are with us to the end ; SUSPJRIA. 101 The Past is all secure, the happy hours and the mournful Involved i' the very truth of God Himself, my friend ! It is well to wait in the darkness for the Deliverer's moment, With a hand in the hand of God, strong Sire of the universe ; It is well to work our work, with cheering tones for a brother, Whose poor bowed soul, like ours, the horrible gulfs immerse ; Then dare all gods to the battle ! Who of them all may shame us ? The very shows of the world have fleeting form from thee : Discover but thy task, embrace it firm with a purpose; Find, and hold by Love, for Love is Eternity. O to be sure for ever ! weary of hopes and guesses, I would the film might fall that veils our orbs in night ! At eve grey phantom armies guard the mighty mountain, Denying free approach to wistful wondering sight : A Presence dim divined through blind impalpable motion, An awful formless Form, i' the core of change unmoved, No more was ours, until the grand invincible Angel, The clear-eyed North blew bare Heaven's azure heights, and proved Hope's heavenliest flight weak-winged; his breath with clangorous challenge Dissolved the cloud-battalions, withering shamed away : Behold, in sunrise dyed, a wondrous vision of high crag, 102 SUSPIR1A. Spires of leaping flame arrested in mid-play; Peak, rock-tower, and dome; huge peals of an ocean of thunder Assumed a bodily form in yonder wild array ! And the long continuous roll of cloudy storm subsiding Was tranced to awful slopes of smooth grey precipice, While over all up-soared, retiring into the heavens, Ever higher and higher, snows and gleaming ice ! Plain beyond plain, the strophes of a glorious poem, Voyaging stately and calm to heights of the argu- ment .... How to be sure for ever ? deepening all our being, And emptying self of self, with Truth we shall be blent. Yon hierarchy sublime of calm ethereal mountain Was born of earth's fierce passion, world-confounding throes, Fire, and battle, and gloom; the livid demon of lightning Flashed his zigzag blaze to be a norm for those; Birth and death, monotonous toil in deeps of the ocean, Co-operant blind to fashion a far-off repose. Whose brief earth-hour may taste ripe future fruit of the ages? Gauge with a life's one pace the march of the armies of God? Forestall results of time, flash all the sun from a dew- drop? But where the Sire hath willed, there every footstep trod. SUSPIR/A. 103 'Tis only a little we know ; but ah ! the Saviour knoweth ; I will lay the head of a passionate child on His gentle breast, I poured out with the wave, He founded firm with the mountain ; In the calm of His infinite eyes I have sought and found my rest. O to be still on the heart of the God we know in the Saviour, Feeling Him more than all the noblest gifts He gave ! To-be is more than to know; we near the Holy of Holies In coming home to Love; we shall know beyond the grave. Ah ! the peace of the beautiful realm, like dew, sinks into my spirit ; True and tender friend, I love to be here with thee. The pines, tall fragrant columns of a magnificent temple, Are ranged before the ethereal mountain majesty : While a dove-coloured lapse of the water merrily murmurs a confidence Into a quiet ear of twilit beautiful bowers; Sweet breath of the pyrola woos us, white waxen elf of the woodland, And two tired hearts may play awhile with the innocent flowers. {Sark and San Marino. ) io4 MONTE ROSA MONTE ROSA. Rosa ! thy battlement of beaming ice Burns, like the battlement of Paradise ! One block of long white light unsulliable Glows in deep azure, Heaven's cathedral wall, Gleams, a pure loveliness of angel thought, With Heaven's inviolable ardour fraught. A myriad flowers play fearless at thy feet, And many a flying fairy sips their sweet, While with the Sun of souls, the Paraclete, Thou communest up yonder, rapt from earth, Robed in the evening-gold, or morning-mirth. One cloudy surge from thy tremendous steep Recoils, and hangs a warder o'er thy sleep, Whose awful spirit in deep reverie Above the world abides eternally : While seraphs roam around thy silver slope, Nestle in thy hollows, and with fair-flying hope Temper the intolerable severity Of holiest Purpose ; many a floweret blows In the unearthly Honour of thy snows, Like innocent loves in souls erect, sublime, Who breathe above the tainted air of time : MONTE ROSA. 105 While many a falling water kisses Tinkling emerald abysses Of shadowy cavern with cool rain, Clear gliding rills in polished porcelain Channels descending o'er a crystal plain From the Frost-Spirit's palace bowers Of sea green pinnacles, and toppling towers, And grim white bastion defiled With rocky ruin of the wild : .While over all thy luminous pure ice Rears the stupendous radiant precipice, High terraces the seraphim have trod, Stairs dwindling fainter, as they near the abode, Where in light unimaginable dwells God. But now around thee sullen, murmuring Storm Flings his dark mantle ; such around the form Of awful Samuel, summoned from the tomb, At Endor rose : then all is rayless gloom About thy Presence for a little while ; Until God draws in His cathedral aisle The folding shroud from thy dread countenance. Behold ! above the storm, as in a trance, Thy grand, pale Face abides, regarding us, As from Death's realm afar, like risen Lazarus ! Isled in dusk blue, one star thrills faintly shining Over thy crest in mournful day's declining : 106 MONTE ROSA. Far away glens deep solitary blanch With snow fresh fallen of the avalanche ; Forested prowls the haggard wolf, the craven, While o'er me croaking weirdly wheels the raven Yonder in twilight, fretted with fierce fire, Lower vast vans of hungering lammergeyer ! Dark vassal crags, who guard thine awful throne, Wearing dim forests for a sounding zone, Divide to let thy torrent coursers flee With thunderous embassage to the great Sea. Behold ! on grand long summits bowed A huge ghost-cataract of cloud ! Niagara motionless, unvoiced, In dim rapt air portentous poised ! But ruffled plumes of Tempest lower Where the giant cliffs uptower, While their impregnable fort frowns Defiant, and their haughty crowns Their vapoury veils, Livid ice-ribs, and wolf-fangcd teeth Threaten implacable with death Rash mortal who assails ! Beneath them the heart fails. One rayless wilderness of stone Upreared, they warn from their bleak throne Ruined halls of lonely storms, Whose are weird dishevelled forms, MONTE ROSA. 107 Dark as eerie crags that loom, Brooding haggard in the gloom, Assuming semblance of rent thunder, While they wait expectant under. Lo ! one wide ocean of tumultuous sound Terrific bursts ! flooding Heaven's profound, Shatters the concave ! hark ! how, one by one, Each monarch mountain on his far white throne, Shocked, buffeted by that infernal word, His own portentous utterance hath roared, Tearing night, startled with flame-sweep of sword, And bellowing fierce frantic wrath Into the steam of that hell-broth Around : white fires flash swift unfurled Over dim ruin of a watery world ! Hark ! huge war-standards ponderous unrolling Over wild surges of tempestuous blast ! While storm-stifled bells are tolling For souls of pilgrims who have passed Home at last ! But here amid earthquaking shocks, Whirlwinds rave around the rocks : Great pines, agonising horrent O'er the white terror of the torrent, In wild lightning-fits leap out From death's womb, a ghostly rout, And all wild demon-chariots roll, Hurtling, chaotic, blind, reft from control; 108 MONTE ROSA. Until the elemental rage subsides; Ebbs the fell fury of ethereal tides ; Atlantic billows of slow sullen sound Subsiding wander o'er the immeasurable Profound. .... Rosa ! the Moon soothes thine unearthly rest, And Peace pervades the snows upon thy breast ! {Afacugnaga. ) IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. 109 IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. Cloud-chaos surges o'er a crest sublime, That seems forked lightning spell-bound into stone Abruptly steep flame-pointed precipices, Dark as the night, dissolve to opaline In phantom foldings of circumfluent sea. Their natures blend confused ; the mists assume A semblance of impenetrable rock ; Stern rock relents to luminous faint cloud. Their banners rent as in uproarious war, Behold ! the vaporous battalions Unclose, dispelled and routed of loud winds, That drive them scared, and scattered ; so Jehovah Clove that astounded sea for Israel. Yonder beneath me, the enormous crag Reveals, between grey ghostly robes of them, Solid, and rude, and perpendicular, A mighty front of Titans grandly piled, Umber, and gory red, and pallid green, Reared in some alien world beyond the cloud, Stronghold stupendous of immortal gods. no IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. The rude, immense, straight pillars of grey pine Scale heaven, sustaining tempest-writhen roofs Of scant, green, level umbrage ; they are built Athwart yon vaporous and vasty walls Of far-off mountain : over them arise Ruinous tower, fantastic pinnacle, And icy spire in a blue burning air. They overhang deep, forest-filled ravines Wandering seawards ; whose dim serpentine Night ever hears a solemn utterance Of torrents, with deep monotone attuned To these wind-oracles of ancient pine. Yonder a gaunt trunk- Skeleton upbraids With blasted arms the Bolt that shattered it. Tusky black monsters reign within the gloom Of forest, and dead waters desolate : Dim mists drive blindly through portentous trees While a weird Sun blinks dwarfed within the drift Legions of shadowy shaggy ilex climb Yon narrow-cloven hollows of the crag. Now evening falls : an aromatic breath Of amber oozing from a dun-red bark, And mountain herb, and many a mountain flower Pervades the air slow clearing from the cloud : A vaselike cleft between two snowy peaks Glowingly fills with a pale violet ; Beneath appears fair Ocean's purple line, Far away from far portals of the pass. IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. 1 1 1 Lower, a surge of huge dun purple rock, Tumultuously contorted, rolls a rude And shadowy chaos interposed between Dark peaks and me : Night's ever-deepening gloom Engulfs the gorges : all is mighty Music, Phantasmal symphony of ghostly Form, A visionary Chorus with no sound ! Stern-visaged Isle ! upon thy rocky breast Two sons were nurtured, heritors of fame. The one drew pride and ruin from thy veins, Towering portentous, terrible, alone, A scourge of God ; Napoleon drew power To desolate the world ; while Paoli Drank from dark fountains of thy resolute blood The patriot's unshamed integrity. Behold ! I stand within a place of graves, Low wooden crosses o'er the lonely dead. Within the wondrous amphitheatre Of mountains overshadowing they rest ; Watched, warded, in those awful arms they lie. Ah ! Nature here hath roused herself to robe Her oft unheeded royalty in robes Of godlike splendour, that our eyes may see ; Hath sounded, as with trumpet-blast of doom, That our dull ears may slumber not, but hear ! Brands with fierce fire upon the heedless heart Her names of wonder ! yea, I know ye now : 112 IN THE CORSICA N HIGHLANDS. I bow my head in worship : yea, I feel Your majesty of godlike Presences ; Stand here abashed, with mortal head bowed low Before you, Angels, Demons of the Lord ! Yet with no rapture of strong youth's acclaim I hail you, as a lowlier brother may Hail a liege lord, a hero, or a king. But I have come into your awful courts, A poor blind broken pilgrim from afar, Who faltering chances upon some august Assembly of dread princes, and bows low, Yet only craves to learn if haply he, Who used to lead his poor blind footsteps on With such clear-seeing love, a little child, Who has been lost to him, alas ! for long, And whom he vainly seeks about the world, About the dreary, barren world, be here ? But meeting no response to his demand, He can but idly weep a moment, ere He grope his weary way abroad again. These are but void and ruined courts to me Of faded splendour, unremembered Power ! I cannot see aright, I cannot feel. And while men prate of knowing all the laws, The mortal cold possessing human hearts Weighs down their eyes in deep sepulchral gloom. But if some Angel's sword from forth the night, IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. 113 With vasty voice of Doom, by human tongues Called thunder, leapt, and smote me out of all These evil dreams named living, might I find My little child, and with him find the Lord ? We journey ever higher, through a grove Of moonlit chestnut, where a babbling stream, At intervals, in open forest glades, Flashes with ruffled, wandering, pale flame. The air is richly laden with sweet spoil From fragrant flower, and foliage faint-green ; Shadowy-folded hills and dells involved Whisper of verdure lush, luxuriant, Known to fair elves, or rills who tinkling glide, Telling sweet secrets, haunted of shy beams, Whene'er the whims of leafy Ariels, And cloudy gossamer, aloft allow Their gentle wandering ; tall asphodel, And flowery fennel, either side our way, Often we dim discern ; but where the woods No longer in their colonnades of gloom Involve our path, beyond the precipice, Behold ! how all the regions of the north, Height, depth, and breadth, are held, filled, < nated By one supreme pale presence, Monte d'Oro ! His spirit-robes far floating, a dim grey, Sombre with forest, pallid with the moon, His kingly crest snow-gleaming to the stars. ii4 IN THE CORSICAN HIGHLANDS. Pan is not dead ! He lives ! He lives for ever ! These awful Demiurgic Powers named Nature Nourish, involve a half-alive, blind soul, A human soul, who fondly deems them dead. Surely the Lord is making us alive ! Mine aching wound shall heal ; for I shall find My lost, for whom I long ; from thee, my friend, The weary burden of thy doubt shall pass. Sorrow and Wrong are pangs of a new birth : All we who suffer bleed for one another ; No life may live alone, but all in all ; We lie within the tomb of our dead selves, Waiting till One command us to arise. A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. 115 A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. O Spring ! O Spring ! O Southern Spring ! What a triumphant song you sing ! All the valley sings ! Nor only warblers who have wings ; All the peach and almond blossom Seems young carol from their bosom In the form of flowers, Wandering every way On many a spray, Rills in the blue day, Very bird-notes in a spray, Filling all the valley. And I deem that, as they dally In the summer light intense, In the deep Italian blue, A subtle spirit influence May re-enchant them to a dew Of melody pure-hearted, Hither and thither parted, From the bosom of the birds, From the gaily-feathered herds, And they would be songs again, One rich rain ! n6 A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. A peach-petal flutters down, A white moth hath softly flown, And we hardly know sweet note From fair vision as they float. All the valley sings ! An angel kindles when he dips The fig's candelabra tips To chrysolite, while many a vine Amorously will incline O'er vistas of a golden trellis, Where a cool and shadowy well is, All overgrown with mosses wet And maiden-hair and violet. O'er many a shrine Roses twine ! Light green fountains of the palm Fall in a blue crystal calm ; Delicate flushing lady tulips Close their lanceolate dim dew-lips, Their soft satiny repose By a light hand flecked with rose ; Golden jonquils, white narcissus, Whisper softly, " Come, and kiss us 1 Fart us not from the sweet brood Of our companions in the wood ! " Earth's fair features, every one Instinct with spirit of the sun, Radiate well-married hues, Blent with air and ocean blues. Verily I seem to stand A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. 117 In a realm of fairyland, Or I take my dazzled station In some intense illumination Of a missal mediaeval Yonder on the hill's upheaval, Where we hear the convent chime, Wrought by monk of olden time, Whom the cloister heard intone, And many a sun-bleached river stone, Or the darkling cypress cone. Cool grey clouds of olive fill All the foldings of the hill, While fair dawn-empetalled peaches Gleam athwart the bloomy reaches Of quiet harebell-mantled mountain Gemmed with rivulet or fountain, Shadowy evening robes, whose hem Shines with many a water gem : While rich oranges all golden, In a darkling foliage holden, Are a foil to the pale gleaming Of oval lemon, and the beaming Ampler cherry trees, one snow Of blossom in the fading glow ! In pale blue evening, Ah ! the cherry seems to sing, With a fairy bridal dower ! Pure white chalices of flower, Pendent in a pale blue sky, Shadowy blossom with soft eye ! nS A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. Dimlit amber mysteries We faint surmise, Where bees hover, And a soft moth-lover ! Oh, I would that I might know The secret of your bridal snow, Soul of the pure ecstasy Softly haunting a grey sky With such a grace Of spirit-lace ! For it seems a happy ghost From the seraph host ! Never bride dissolved in love, Never saint in realms above, Nor lark on his own music tost, Hath more joy than this, embossed, Shadowy, rare, On pale blue air ; White cloud a-flower, A very shower Of still rapture unalloyed, Too overjoyed For sound of singing ! All the valley sings ! A clear rivulet is flinging Warbled songs to the pure air, Laughing, a young infant fair, Ruffling softly, swiftly passes Green-illumined among grasses, Or red anemone to wander, A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. 119 Where are violet, germander ; Child pursued in play, to ramble, After such a sweet preamble, Among myrtle bowers and bramble. Green-pennoned canebrakes in the river All around grey arches quiver ; While westering Apollo dulls Delved loam, and vivid pulse, A swart red-vestured toiler waters From rills, who are the river's daughters. All the valley sings ! And rings, and rings ! Ah ! Nature never would have power To breathe such ecstasy of flower, Vernal songs of happy birds, The young rill's delicious words, No iris hues might bring to birth, No heart were hers for any mirth, If he were turned to common earth ! If a child so fair, so good, Were a waif on Lethe's flood, If one soul-source of feeling, seeing, Were blotted from the realms of being ! She from all delight would start, With such a horror at her heart, She would reel dissolved, and faint With deep dishonour of the taint ! The very girders of her hall Crushed, her stately floor would fall. Ourselves are the foundation-stone ; 2o A SOUTHERN SPRING CAROL. If thought fail, the world is gone ; All were ruined, wanting one. But all the valley sings ! Nature rises on immortal wings ! And soaring, lo ! she sings ! she sings ! There is no death ! She saith. O Spring ! O Spring ! O Southern Spring ! What a triumphal song you sing ! UNDER THE STARS. 121 UNDER THE STARS. Ah ! what little hearts are ours To hold the miseries of the world ! Behind our private belts of flowers We play, nor view to ruin hurled Our kindred ; till for us Death lowers, And summons from the pleasant bowers. Dare not forecast the Future — know The doom that Fate reserves for you I Look no World-Gorgons in the face ! Grisly madness waits that way : Only help as help ye may ! We have to pass the loathly place To reach yon heights of holy day, Serenely shining far away. So we justify the Lord, And kiss the terrible red sword ! For throned in hidden eternal state, Though wingless, desolate she roam, The Soul hath chosen all her fate, Now remembering not the Home, Whereunto wealthier she will come. If One who bore the wide world's pain UNDER THE STARS. Heartbroken, blest and trusted God, I may look up and smile again, Kiss the plague-enravelled rod, And follow where the Master trod. Surely each is kin to all, And man, a mirror of the whole ; Should worlds, gods, demons, aught appal Who knows himself a conscious soul ? Give me but time, no bounds may thrall One who hath God Himself for goal ! Ah, solitudes, immense, profound ! And lonelier solitudes within ! Ye shine, O worlds, in solemn swound ; All the discord, all the din Of a city's moil and sin Heard from a tower or higher ground, Blend to one grand ocean-sound ; So from memories are lost All we gladly would forget ; Faces white with Death's deep frost Lose the fever and the fret ; So yonder orbs in darkness met, Each a silver tranquil ghost, Lose all of vext and tempest-tost ; By mortal eyes undreamed in day, Revealed alone to darkling night, They rest so far, so far away, I deem their calm and gentle light For our consoling seems to say, "Absorbed within the Infinite, UNDER THE STARS. 123 Deforming evils fallen away, No dishonouring care may stain, The Ideal only rule and reign ! " Dear places, feelings, thoughts, will go, Calm revolving worlds will fail, But when the stars have ceased to glow, Abideth One who ne'er may pale, And all in Him immortal, hale, Our life, abide; whate'er remove, Remaineth the Eternal Love; And surely Love will reunite Who wander sundered here in night ! Surely Love will lead them home, However far afield they roam ! POEMS OF THE PEOPLE. POEMS OF THE PEOPLE. POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Hark ! the Christmas bells ring round Many light hearts with joy abound ! They come and go upon the wind, " Peace and goodwill to all mankind ! " Where bleared faces of mean houses Lean as if to touch each other, Where idle, ugly vice carouses, And the brown fogs choke and smother. In a room confined, dun, damp, Sits a woman scantly clad, Sewing by a feeble lamp Some lovely raiment deftly made, Rich apparel to be worn In splendid halls by laughing wealth, Whose pale sister here forlorn Leaves in it all her youth and health— 128 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Ah ! I wonder, can it bless, Such living lining to a dress ? . . . Take the lovely raiment off ! Hell hath given it with a scoff ! For she must toil ere day dawn dim, Long after winter suns have set, And even so, the Hunger grim Slow feeds on lives she fights for yet — Three tattered little ones who play Faint-hearted on the mouldy floor : She fought for other two ; but they Have gone where want can hurt no more. Vile fumes, with subtle poison-breath, That fouls the throat, killed one young child Roofs bulge in this abode of death, Walls totter and tumble, damp-defiled ; While on the too scant space intrude Rats, hustling the young human brood. A mean bed, table, broken chair, Furnish the degraded room ; A print, some delf, one flower fair, Are fain to mitigate the gloom. Bitter winter wind shrilled through Rotten door and window when it blew. She, working early, working late, Breathes no impatient word nor wail : Her heavy task may ne'er abate, Though eyesight fade and strength may fail. POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 129 Her husband, long through accident Disabled, might no more endure To watch her, burden-bowed and bent, The wife, whom these dark dens immure, Whom no longing love may cure, Nor help, though she be bruised and rent. Confused, heartbroken, he will hide His eyes for ever under tide Of deeply, darkly rolling Thames, That quenches hottest human flames. Merry Christmas bells ring round ! Many light hearts with joy abound ; They come and go upon the wind, " Peace and goodwill to all mankind ! " Merry Christmas chimes rang round, When he sought the river's bank, Rang over him the while he drowned, And in the depths a third time sank, While laughing youth's swift-flying feet To music danced in yonder street, And in gay halls glad masquers meet. Now the flickering lamplights float Idly over corpse and boat ; From tower and temple London frowns On all this ruin of her sons ; 9 30 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. On her huge dome the cross of gold Gleams in winter starlight cold ; Nor storied old-world obelisk, Nor the illumined horal disk High orbed on stately Westminster, Where the Parliaments confer, Take any heed of the black spot That doth the silver moonlight blot, A human shape unhearing hours, Pealed now from modern, ancient towers, That dark on turbid water ridges Rocks in reflected flame from bridges Where steam-lit trains, with living freight, Going to glad homes elate, Near ships laden with merchandise, Spice, or silk of gorgeous dyes, Where men from far realms of sunrise Wait, forgetting care and sorrow, In hope to greet dear friends to-morrow, While their paddle-wheel foams over The swaying corse, a senseless rover. lie turned from life, but left some words Dyed in the anguish of his soul ; Deep anguish the brief page records, Before dull waters o'er him roll. " Upon the bed, or broken chair, I sit and brood in my despair. POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 131 At times my brain seems all confused — To watch my Mary's failing eyes, And youth consumed with too much toil, While patient at her task she dies ! I, pinioned, helpless, may not foil Slow deaths that round my dear ones coil ! Over a new dress sits she bowed ? — I thought it was her own white shroud ;— Our wee Willie, like a weed, Thrown into a nameless grave — I am but one more mouth to feed ! They starve here, and I cannot save. . . . I am but one more mouth to feed ! . . . We could not even put a stone, To show where Willie lies alone ! When I left home, my love would write That, ere our Willie went to bed, He, wishing father a good-night, Kissed the written words, she said, Ere softly slept the curly head. Ah ! and now the boy is gone ! — We could not even put a stone ! {Bells peal) "... Well loved those chimes In happier times. . . . Once more we have our cheerful home, Around the window roses blow ; I see my Mary fair as foam, }2 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Blithely singing, come and go, While rosed with health the children roam. Now we are ground 'twixt two millstones — The man that wrings the murderous rent, Yet shelters not the naked bones Cooped in his plague-fraught tenement, — And vampires who suck sleek content From human anguish, tears, and groans, Clutch the fruit of our life's toil, And batten upon the unholy spoil, Throwing a wage-scrap back for fuel, Lest man-mills stop the labour cruel, And cease with Death unequal duel. Shall we, chained starvelings, go, buy law, To save us from the robber's claw ? Law is a cumbrous thing to move ; It will not come and help for love ! Buy women to starve at ' market-price,' Gallio-Law, with looks of ice, Smiles placid ; poor man, steal a crust, To feed them, Jefferies, judge most just, Thee, wrath-red, into gyves will thrust. ' Church and State will guard,' saith he, ' The sacred rights of property 1 ' England wrestles for the slave Enthralled beyond the alien wave ; Why doth this mother of the free Let her strong sons with cruel glee Crush weak sisters at her knee ? Set thine own house in order — then POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 133 Go and preach to evil men ! In feudal dungeons underground They buried their live victims bound, And we in our vile vaults immure These whose crime is to be poor, Starve babes and women innocent, Tortured, in black prisons pent. Feudal lords would feed the slave ; But Capital from his despair Extorts more toil than flesh can bear, Keeps him half-living in his grave, That serf may earn, and master have, Till kindlier Death arrive to save. " True men devise large schemes to heal This gangrene of the Commonweal, This prime injustice of the world, That drones, who waste the wealth, may steal From makers, to the dunghill hurled. . . . . . . What use to watch slow murder done On wife, and babe, and little son — When near me glides Oblivion ? " So, while the indifferent body rolls, With other things that have no souls, On the blind tide to random goals, In lustred lordly palace hall Radiant boys and maidens play; On whose cold doorstep women fall Starved, numbed, and naked, life gone grey; 134 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Within, youth's agile feet to sound Of music flying, bells ring round, Come and go upon the wind, " Peace and goodwill to all mankind ! " On massy bridge, on broad-built quay, Tumultuous tides of hurrying wealth Sweep the marred sons of misery, (Who thrid by sufferance, by stealth, Their faint way; near the parapet Cower, dull aware of fume and fret,) Sweep them to where they may forget ! For riverward wan eyes are bowed ; Beside whom roars the traffic loud, And the many-nationed crowd. See grimed and haggard him or her, Amid the animated stir Of throngs that leave a theatre ; Well-dressed men cab and carriage call, Round white shoulders fold the shawl, Praise or blame what box or stall Observed of acted joy or grief, Carelessly, with comment brief — Civic, or military pomp, Massed colour, banner, drum and trump* Court dames in well-appointed carriages* Fair-favoured, fashionable marriages Wolf-lean Hunger's eye disparages ! Wherein, as in some magic glass, POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 135 Ye may foresee your triumph pass, Learning's vaunted vast appliances Shattered in terrible defiances, Flinging to the wild winds all affiances ! Do ye not hear low thunders rumble, Ere, lightning-struck, the fabric crumble ? Your marts are thronged, luxurious, bright, Your magic moons confound the night, Yet marbled warehouse, palace height, Grey minster that hath borne the brunt Of Time's long battle, all confront Shame, grim Nakedness, and Want ! While close-shut doors of secret sin Open upon hell-flames within ! Hearken ! how grand organ-strains Shake the emblazoned window-panes, Where priest and gorgeous ritual blesseth Whoso prayeth, or confesseth, In holy twilight of hushed fanes ! Yet Christmas carols from the church Mock those dim figures by the porch, Huddled, famished in their rags Drink-sodden these from alehouse lurch, And those lie numbed upon the flags, Till, passing, a policeman drags To ward or workhouse, " moves them on : Somewhere, while they make low moan, Pale spectres of dread Babylon ! But the flaunting harlot's ditty Striketh even a deeper pity, Cruel Want's degraded daughter, On her way to the dark water, Where horror-breathing, dense brown air Grimly shrouds a dumb despair. . . . ... Is there a worse hell over there ? The holly and the mistletoe Cheer our banquet, wine-cups flow, Light laughter bubbles o'er the bowl, And we forget no Christmas dole ; Yet our grief-burdened sisters die Around us in slow agony, While we are ringing in the morn When man's Deliverer was born ; . . . . . . Ah ! but our Brother too wore thorn Pale Mary toils ; her hollow eyes Are patient, mild, of heavenly blue ; Hourly repeats the sacrifice That all the world to Calvary drew; " Father, forgive their cruelties ; For they know not what they do." . . . . . . She murmurs, " Now I feel Thee near ! My little ones I leave to Thee : Do what thou wilt, — I trust, not fear. ■ . . Thy Birthday bells ring merrily ! POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 137 I am weary, and would rest, Gentle Jesus, on Thy breast ! I shall see Willie, — yes, and Jim, My heart's own husband ; turbid, dim, His mind was from our suffering so ; Therefore the Lord forgave, I know, The unbelief that conquered him. Ah ! but I wonder much how long He will endure their cruel wrong ! " A high-born sister who had left Her vantage-ground to help the weak, Supplying unto these bereft From her full store whate'er they seek, Came that night, a nurse, to tend The dying woman ; and she heard Near the poor pallet, ere the end, Low song as from some heavenly bird, Although no human lips were stirred ! Christ came, in vision, to the dying, Led by the hand their own lost child ; He saith : " Love justifies relying On him, daughter ! " and she smiled ! Near the boy a Christmas tree Laughed with lights full merrily ! " Love justifieth your relying, And heareth ever bitter crying Of those whom the hard world hath spurned : My martyrs high estate have earned." A common workman seemed the Lord, Standing by the poor bedside ; 138 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Yet she knew He was the Word, That Jesus who was crucified, And poured contempt on human pride. " My servants fashion even now Justice for the commonweal ; From toilers with the hand, the brow, Idle men no more may steal ; My servants seek ; I whisper how They may find the remedy, Save My little ones who cry : For I am poor Myself, you know ; The poor are Mine, and I will heal ! — Already dawns millennium ; Soon My holy reign will come. The man who loved you, whom you love, Was of the faithful band I move. Awhile I hid My face from him, For awhile his ways were dim ; Baser, carthlier passion jars With spheral music of the stars ; Yet in the end all makes, not mars ! I vindicate his human place For every member of My race ; Let every manhood find free scope ! Now, beasts of burden, with no hope, Men ripen not peculiar grain, Given to each for general gain, The social body to sustain. POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 139 Your Churches rarely worship Me, Who am the incarnate Charity : They call indeed upon My name ; But their proud Christ with crown and flame Is another, not the same. I made known a suffering God ; I consecrated Pain's abode. Yet are they refuges for faith, Though she be faded to a wraith, Though driven from the altar, she Oft in the world find sanctuary. Strong men, refrain from legal greed ! Hear the fate-smitten when they plead ! — Justice, not almsgiving, they need. God with conscience dowered you, With more than in mere Nature grew ; All are brethren, all are one ; Wound other hearts, ye wound your own ! Strong men ! poor weak worms ! whenj^ fall, On whom, in trouble, will ye call ? When God hath changed your countenance, And sends you feeble, fainting, hence ? " Then that gentle Face grew stern ; Sun-blazing eyes confront and burn All the Temple-shadowed lies, The marble-tomb proprieties Of our later Pharisees, 140 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. Pious, proud, decorous, hard ; He blasted base content, and marred. They shrinking wither up, nor linger — Even as when, writing with His finger, In the old Syrian garden, He Shamed with a God-word quietly Phylacteried fathers of the men, Whose race hath the hard heart, as then. " My birthday bells chime merrily ! Come, dear child, more close to me ! My best is evermore the prize Of souls who nobly agonise ! " No feeble glimmer in the room, Heaven's own effulgence doth illume Her spirit ; the poor sempstress died, And Love immortal claimed a bride. Hark ! the Christmas bells ring round I Many light hearts with joy abound ; They come and go upon the wind : " Peace and goodwill to all mankind ! M THE CHILDREN'S GRASS. 141 THE CHILDREN'S GRASS. Where the twinkling river pushes 'Thwart the dipping swan, All his ruffling down Very softly blown, Lustrous blue reflects the rushes Where the coot is gone ; Thames, an innocent heart of childhood, Buoying lovers from the wild wood, Hearing boyish laughter chime Where the flashing oars keep time, Where they quiver In the river : In a sunshine sown with song Of many a merry bird, Three sunny children bound along, With many a merry word. Their eyes blue fountains of delight, And every cheek a rose, Their dimpled hands with grasses light So full, they hardly close. r 4 2 THE CHILDREN'S GRASS. One fawn-like little maiden falls Breathless upon her mother, Telling how yonder elf who calls, Her tiny wavering brother, Chose to pull the tender stems Where the dew-drop lingers, And marvelled when the limpid gems Fell upon his fingers. She tells a soft-eyed rabbit brown Near a wimpling runnel Eyed them askance, then hurried down Through a plantain tunnel. In the woodland sweetly smell Fairy grass and clover, Sensitive in the woodland dell, Where the bees hum over ; *' O ! I love the summer well ; Mother, will it soon be over ? " Where the unholy river gleameth, Deep, and cold, and dun, Hiding secrets from the sun, As an awful dream one dreameth, As Oblivion : Three little children in the reek Of the monster town, THE CHILDREN'S GRASS. 143 With a woman worn and weak, Ere the sun goes down, Toil by flare of ghastly light In a dingy fume : Two young children carry bright Grasses in the room : An elder sister with her mother Decks the blades with glass, Sprinkles one and then another, As with dews of grass. How the vivid verdure gleams In the child's old face ! Starved and very pale she seems, With a hollow place Dark beneath her eyes, how wearied, Lashless looking on the bleared Mimic grass, Dewed with glass ! Hark ! she gives a feeble cough, And the withered mother Glances where some paces off A coffin holds another Maiden very cold and white, Not yet hidden out of sight. " Mother, I am very weary ! " So she moans with accents dreary : " Mother, make my bed ! " " Child," the woman answers, " finish ! Dare not from your task diminish Aught, for fear a watchful neighbour, 144 THE CHILDREN'S GRASS. Bidding lower for the labour, Seize our bitter bread ! " Ladies in a lustred hall Wear them gaily for a ball In their fair Wavy hair. " Mother, I can toil no longer ; After sleep I shall be stronger ! " .... After sleep, the child was dead. There the unholy river gleameth, Deep, and cold, and dun, Hiding secrets from the sun, As an awful dream one dreameth, As Oblivion : Are not these thy children, Father ? These — or only those ? Are we all lost orphans rather Of whom — none knows? FROM " THE RED FLAG." 145 FROM "THE RED FLAG." Your grand colossal edifice to-day- Rests on a yawning darkness and decay ; Beware ! for it is ready to vanish away ! Yea, is it founded on the people's backs ? Behold ! how as ye walk the sanguine tracks Ye leave are slippery with human gore, The life, the health, the souls of men your floor. Glance not below ; yield to the organ's pealing ; Explore the lonely grandeurs of the ceiling ! Ah ! but your tyrannous structure is atremble — I who behold it dare no more dissemble : God breathes upon it with the breath of doom : Phantoms of empire summon from the tomb ! Dominant o'er us glares the cross of gold, And haughty hierarchies manifold Brandish the symbol for a flaming sword, Kneel to the cross, and crucify the Lord ! Friend of the lowly, fainting on the wood, Behold thy poor upon a golden rood ! .... The lonely toiler, gasping for some air, Listens in shadowy poison of the stair, 10 [46 FROM " THE RED FLAG." Listens, a wounded beast within his lair. . .... And there is Peace in London ! Now trips a dame who lifts her skirt for fear Of many a foul contamination here, Revealing delicate ankles to the friend, Who (to assist) his manly arm may lend. " Think what a desperate misery may slink In these low neighbourhoods from whence w shrink?" In silver tones she whispers : " Look ! there prowl Two terrible ragged ruffians with a scowl." " Near our town-houses ! who could fancy it ?" Drawls out the dandy with more birth than wit. She, with a slight, quick shiver, half a sigh : " One's heart aches even to dream such poverty ! " (It jarred her nervous sensibility.) "And yet, as Mister Glozeman said in church, To make the vessel of the State to lurch, To shake our ancient Order is the worst Crime : it deserves the torture, 'tis accurst Of God and man — he meant the Communist Canaille in Paris." Then the dandy hissed With panic fury, " Shoot the draff by millions ! So may our scum here learn to make rebellions ! " To clear some stray defilement from her dress, Bending she slightly on his arm may press ; Then, as if breeding were a little at fault In that last ardour of her friend's assault FROM " THE RED FLAG?" 147 Even on hereditary foes, the mob, On swarms unclean, who sweat and starve and rob, She waved aside the subject she had lent Her glance in passing, drawling as she went, " They say the poor are so improvident ! " Half absently she spoke, to weightier themes Turning anon — to cunning, lordly schemes For stifling noxious popular low measures : Then of refined aristocratic pleasures They babbled — Hurlingham — the ducal ball — Of a monstrous nobleman turned Radical, Of latest fashions out, a novel tie, Or the last sweet thing in adultery. The lonely toiler, gasping for some air, Listens in shadowy poison of the stair, Listens, a hunted beast within his lair .... And there is Peace in London ! It happened once two gentlemen were stayed Here, waiting some companion delayed. Sauntering to and fro they smoking walked, Or leant against the house-wall while they talked. One was an oldish man ; the other, he Spake as one claiming great authority. His dust-hued head was growing grey in part — From tardy fellow-feeling with his heart. "Not to admire" the only art he knew To keep him comfortable as he grew. 148 FROM " THE RED FLAG? What might have moved the vulgar to distraction Moved him to limp distaste or satisfaction. But he had taken honours at his college, And deemed himself a microcosm of knowledge. A sort of sour old maid the man was born ; He could secrete but weak incontinent scorn; Sterile to foster, organise, produce — Aught but sophistic pleas for some abuse. He could be lively only when he hated : Pungent aromas all evaporated, When he with heavy hand, with heavier face, Apotheosised English commonplace; A Rubens' cherub cumbersomely squat, Labouring to upheave some royal fat Skyward — the whole falls marvellously flat ! With ponderous platitude his smart review Lumbers along when it proclaims the true Plethoric gospel of the well-to-do. Man of a petite culture, whose college culture Is but a whited sepulchre sepulture Of living manhood — his in sooth was small : Only a castrate creature's after all. Ah ! though they give two fingers to the Saviour, Best clothes on Sunday and demure behaviour, Men of the world on every working day Put the old creed with childish things away. Measure the infinite God on pain of hell ; But do not heed Him when you buy or sell. FROM " THE RED FLAG." 149 Call Jesus Lord decorously on Sunday, But treat Him as a genial fool on Monday. Lift up your pious eyes at Darwin's creed ; And try to prove him right about your breed, Dear fellow-Christians ! who live as though Not even yet you'd struggled from below. For beasts of prey with all their savage strife Are still the cherished models of your life. Ye war with all your fellows for existence, And when you've thrown them, still with fierce insistence Grind them beneath you, crush them all to death, That you may breathe a more luxurious breath. Hail ! weaponed man of grand expanding brain, Most formidable beast of all that stain Our mother-earth with fratricidal blood ! Tigers but raven hungry for their food ; But thou, to fling one shining bauble more In coffers bursting with thy gold before, Starvest the babes and women at thy door ! Ah ! what if some unshamed iconoclast, Crumbling old fetish-raiments of the past, Rouse from dead cerements the Christ at last ? What if men take to following where He leads, Weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds ? How these two friends congenial conversed Here, as the listener heard it is rehearsed, As from his slightly varied point of view It might have sounded to the speakers too. 150 FROM " THE RED FLAG:' " Self-interest enlightened is our rule : Perish the pauper, and the general fool ! — Well for the luckier or shrewder man ! For he, by Heaven's especial favour, can Lodge duller rivals in foul dens like these, And feed them with rank garbage if he please. Mercy is an exploded superstition; Men are but brutes in bloodier competition. "The State ! what call has that to interfere? Are we not free-born Britons living here ? If these like not their scrofulous dens, you know, They're free to change their quarters; let them go. Why one of these may struggle uppermost ! Himself may trample on the writhing host, They cursing him, he cursing from above — Hatred and Hell are finer things than Love ! The State forbids that paupers should be slain With knives and guns ; but as for stench and drain, And putrefying styes they build so small, 'Tis suicide to breathe in them at all, Breath turns to poison — that's another thing — See Malthus on prolific littering ! Children are luxuries — let these dispense With offspring — we ourselves to save expense Lop off the babes, and the benevolence. Mother ! with murderous unflinching eye Gaze on your moaning babe about to die ; Ring in the rich man's child with jubilation, And ring the poor man's out, O happy nation ! FROM " THE RED FLAG." 151 Woman, your babe is ' surplus population !' Why take such constant thought about the body ? Man shall not live by bread" — " but by his toddy, Margeaux, and Bisque-soup rather," quoth the wag. " Don't chaff, nor let your rapt attention flag," Resumed the Gigadibs, who seemed offended, " My arguments will be the sooner ended. What was I saying ? well, these Radicals Pamper the carnal part of pauper pals Unduly ; why not teach them to endure With fortitude these ills they cannot cure ? Throw them a sop of wholesome moral saws — (Ah ! pestilent ' education' — that's the cause, Which makes them carp at our existing laws) The dogs are always yelping for a bone : Fling them to bite a weighty moral stone ! " A man must grab whatever he can get ; We human creatures are not angels yet. You must not stab, nor strangle, a poor neighbour ; For, if you did, why you would lose his labour. No ; take advantage of his cramped position To mangle him with your cruellest condition. Rob soul and body by superior wit And fortune ; ignorant hunger will submit. If he should gash you, that were ugly murder : Dribble his life-blood slowly — you're in order. Nay, surely 'tis a very venial vice To buy one's workman at the market price." 152 FROM "THE RED FLAG." .... The lonely toiler, gasping for some air, Listens in shadowy poison of the stair, Listens, a wounded beast within his lair. . . . .... And there is Peace in London ! A Man grew God upon the shadowy cross, And taught the world to triumph in love's loss. Following Him they took for great and holy, Men helped the weak, forbore to insult the lowly ; The mighty made them ministers of woe, Because the Lord had served us high and low : Now Love and Chivalry lie done to death ; Stony-eyed monsters feed on human breath : In Christ's forgotten grave we have buried weakness, Justice, and Mercy, and Righteousness, and Meekness ! What ! shall Wealth kneel upon the fainting forms Of millions whom scarce a raiment warms, Draining their very heart's blood leisurely, And shall we wonder when with frenzied cry, Beyond endurance urged, at last they leap To murder gorged wealth where it lies asleep ? The legal armed oppressor of his neighbour, He who hath goaded overdriven labour, A peaceful tyrant, the Red Flag unfurled : He stands accurst of God, and of the world ! .... There is War in London. POEMS OF HUMAN BEAUTY. POEMS OF HUMAN BEAUTY. GANYMEDE. An azure heaven, where floats a feathery cloud, An azure sea, far-scintillating light, Soft, rich, like velvet, yielding to the eye ; Horizons haunted with some dreamlike sails ; A temple hypsethral open to sweet air Nigh, on the height, columned with solid flame, Whose flutings and acanthus- work are quick With lithe green lizards, and whose shadows sharp Bar slantwise inner wall and golden floor. A locust-tree condensed the hazeless light On glossy leaves, and let some trickle low Among the cooler umbrage underneath ; Subdued there to a mellower quiet key, Beholding unaware a lovely youth Bare-limbed reclining, statue-moulded, white, Whose dainty hand and rounded arm support His chestnut-curled head, conscious, conquering. 156 GANYMEDE. Near by him, leaning on the chequered bole, Sits his companion gazing on him fond, A goat-herd, whose rough hand on bulky knee Holds a rude hollow reeden pipe of Pan, Tanned, clad with goatskin, rudely-moulded, large ; While yonder, browsing in the rosemary And cytisus, you hear a bearded goat, Hear a fly humming, with a droning bee In yon wild thyme and in the myrtles low, That breathe in every feebly-blowing air ; Whose foamy bloom fair Ganymede anon Plucks with a royal motion and an aim Toward his comrade's tolerant fond face. Far off cicada shrills among the pine, And one may hear low tinkling where a stream Yonder in planes and willows, from the blaze Of day coy hiding, runs with many a pool Where the twain bathe how often in the cool ! And so they know not of the gradual cloud That stains the zenith with a little stain, Then grows expansive, nearing one would say The happy earth — until at last a noise As of a rushing wind invades the ear, Gathering volume, and the shepherd sees, Amazed forth-peering, dusking, closing all Startled and tremulous rock-roses nigh, Portentous shadow ; and before he may Rise to explore the open, like a bolt GANYMEDE. 157 From heaven a prodigy descends at hand, Absorbing daylight ; some tremendous bird, An eagle, yet in plumage as in form And stature far transcending any bird Imperial inhabiting lone clefts And piny crags of this Idaean range. But lo ! the supernatural dread thing, Creating wind from cavernous vast vans, Now slanting swoops toward them, hovering Over the fair boy, smitten dumb with awe. A moment more, and how no mortal knows, The bird hath seized him, if it be a bird, And he though wildered hardly seems afraid, So lightly lovingly those eagle talons Lock the soft yielding flesh of either flank, His back so tender, thigh and shoulder pillowed How warmly, whitely in the tawny down Of that imperial eagle amorous ! Whose beaked head with eyes of burning flame Nestles along the tremulous sweet heave Of his fair bosom budding with a blush, So that one arm droops pensile all aglow Over the neck immense, and hangs a hand Frail like a shell, pink like an apple bloom ; While shadowy wings expansive causing wind Jealously hide some beauty from the sun. Poor hind ! who fancied as the pinions clanged In their ascent, he looking open-mouthed 58 GANYMEDE. Distraught yet passive, that the boy's blue eye Sought him in soaring ! his own gaze be sure Wearied not famished feeding upon all The youth's dear charms for ever vanishing From his love-longing, hungered for in heaven- Took his last fill of delicate flushed face, And sculptured limb, with rosy pendent foot Slim-ankled, body dimpled, while he went. Behold ! he fades receding evermore From straining vision misting dim with tears, Gleaming aloft swan- white into the blue Relieved upon the dusky ravisher, Deeper and deeper glutting amorous light, That cruel swallows all for evermore. PASSION. 159 PASSION. O pale my lady, where shall we ride ? Into the forest dark and wide, Into the roaring deep sea-tide, You and I only, side by side ? Your eyes, like stars in a well's clear gloom, May be sinister orbs imposing doom, Gates of life, or doors of the tomb, Yet mellower than moonlit foam, Your burning beauty warms the room. Cling to me, cling to me, lady mine, Your lips are more than the red red wine, Your flower white glows in the rosy shine, We quaff to-day from a draught divine, And still I pine, I pine, I pine ! pale my lady, and were you death, Kissing away the soul's own breath, 1 would follow, for all cold Reason saith, Even where Ruin raveneth ! [6o AZRAEL. AZRAEL : A DREAM OF PLEASURE. " Azrael, the angel of death." Mourn for Annabel ! The village bell is tolling, and she will Never arise from where she lieth still, Cold and so lovely, flowers white and red, Old dames and tender damozels have shed Tearful, all over her, in shadowy air Alive with perfume curling blue and rare, Jewels and gold and jasper glowing deep As in a dreamland of a solemn sleep, With solemn music plaining while the mourners weep. Fair Azrael, with Annabel the child Of Southern suns, a panther supple and wild, Mellow and beautiful, the while one tarried Far hence, a man she never loved but married, Wandered in sweet communion day and night Within her garden, shielded from the light Of suns too violent, under pensile palm, AZRAEL. 161 And aromatic, glossy-leaved calm Orange, with lemon wedding boughs above ; In whose green twilight bridal blooms of love Bud, and expand their petals, till they shed Lavish white coronals on either head, On lustrous ebony and golden head. They wandered where a soft yEolian sea Fills far off with profound tranquillity Half of the interval, which lies between Shadowy cypresses and pines that lean Over the sunlight ; half is filled with air Azure as ocean ; near, a fountain fair Singing springs ever thwart blue air and main, A shifting snowcloud, twinkling into rain, Drifting to fume that feeds earth's emerald : Anon their dreamy vision is enthralled With scintillating of a ruffled ocean Among thin olive-foliage in motion : Seaward from flowers around their feet a lawn Slopes ; all the greenery's a haunt of fawn, Or nymph marmoreal : from shade to shade On the sea-lustre glows and glides to fade, Swiftly and silent, many a wing-like sail Of bark aerial ; never seems to fail Some new surprise of freshly-flowing joy, Wafting young lives afar from all annoy. Eros and Psyche in white marble embrace, Whom lustrous-leaved camellias enlace : In light and shadow of a terebinth, Elsewhere, upon a myrtle-inwoven plinth, II 1 62 AZRAEL. Heavenly Hebe her perennial charm Unfolds ; young Dionysos a lithe arm Curls over love-locks, and a rounded form, In fair profusion of lit vine-leaves warm. When either Phidian image glows in roses Lavish around them, or at eve reposes Flushed with a glory, breatheth every one Alive, a new bride of Pygmalion- Sweet Mitylene, isle of love and song, Two fair young lovers for an hour prolong Reverberate modulations from the lyre, Whose soul still haunts thee with voluptuous fire Sappho, Arion, and Terpander breathe O'er hill and valley ; lawny mists enwreathe Faintly before all lovers oversea A mountain, hued like flowers of memory ; Where Aphrodite, born of Paphian foam, Found the fair shepherd in his piny home, And where, on Ida, an imperial Bird Ravished a fairer from his pipes and herd. They read or sang sweet songs, and oft a star Thrilled in a roseate eve to her guitar. She wore pomegranate crimson in her hair, Around her waist and shoulders only rare Silk from Olympian looms, like gossamer ; While languid pearls lay heavingly on her Virginal bosom ; ambergris and myrrh Enkindling breathe from ocean-blue enamel, AZRAEL. 163 Whose misty fervours golden lids entrammel : And while they taste a bright Methymnian wine, Amber-inhaled ambrosial fumes entwine Delicious dream around them : fingers fine Fill often his half-laughing, amorous lips With pleasant, garnet-hued pomegranate pips, Or luscious, lucent dainties that her skill Can from sweet, crimson-hearted fruits distil. If with his wanton mouth he gently bite, But very gently will she feign to smite. Three interlaced half-moons of diamond Thrill for rich ecstasy to link, with frond Of fern-wrought rubies, on her balmy breast Her silk translucency of filmy vest. He wore a slumbrous oriental gold Dusky with silk inwoven, half unrolled From a white bosom of ideal mould. Once when a silver-clanging chime Told the stealthy flight of time, They left a cedar-raftered chamber, Where oil in opaline and amber Gleamed, as mildest lamps are able, Over furs of lynx and sable ; Crimson wools, Iranian fur Of panther, pard, or minever. And while they went, some drowsy doves In holm and laurel flew like loves Over them ; the mild fire-flies Gleamed before their happy eyes. 164 AZRAEL. Fair was the night when youth and lady stept From where their lemon-tinted villa slept, With balustrade and roofing palely grey, Laved of the moon, beneath a grove that lay Under enchantment, to a hushful bower Of bay and asphodel, with passion flower Inwoven : it was warm and dusk therein, And delicate foliage made a shadowy thin Lacework suspended in aerial blue Silvery twilight, over where they two, Muffled in mossful secrecy, reclined Nigh one another, Azrael behind. " In the tree A murmur, as of indolent shed sea On sands at midnight ceasing slumbrously ! Through dim, uncoloured leaves An elfin glimmer cleaves A varying way from realms of mystery." So sang she softly to her soft guitar, And ceased ; and both were silent, hearing far The bubbling fountain, and a nightingale, That seemed to flow at intervals and fail. Her face for him was pencilled pure and fine Athwart the gloaming; and, " O lady mine," He whispered, "how adorable are you To-night ! forgive me ! " till there softly grew A tender arm around her form, and she Yielded and leaned on him responsively, Until his blood ran fire when she pressed AZRAEL. 165 Her dewy, ripe young lips upon his breast, Moonwhite in moonlight ; for a ray had come To nestle in the fair, congenial home. Then mouth burned mouth, her undulating charms Yielding to his luxurious young arms. Later, in sweet confusion's disarray, Hand in hand stole they to a little bay, Where a pale foam stole out of a grey sea, And kissed the pale rock ever murmurously. Cypress leaned mournful over, and a throng Of hushful moonwhite houses lay along Yon circling shoreside, minarets, how fair ! Arising tall and slender into air : A chaunt was wafted from a fisher's boat, Dozing upon the pearl with nets afloat. Shadowy, folding mountains from the sea Rise to enclose the bay's chalcedony : Ida beyond, dim silvered of the moon, Soars with her snow in some enchanted swoon : Delicate shells with 'whorl, and valve, and spire Gleam in a rhythmic phosphorescent fire. Silently dreams near yonder myrtle brake An egret, plumed as with a soft snowflake, Like a pure soul by some celestial lake. Lo ! now the lovers dainty limbs will lave In the delicious coolness of the wave. " I with thee, By fringes of the pale, enamoured sea, On the shore's bosom dying dreamfully, 1 66 AZRAEL. Singing in the leaves, Love it is who weaves Around our hearts a heavenly mystery ! " Then as they neared their villa, in a tunnel Of oranges where purls a crystal runnel, A rustle in the trees she thought she heard, And deemed she saw a shadow ; " 'Tis a bird," He whispered, after pausing : "all's a dream ! " She murmured, "Ah ! how heavenly a dream !" . . . . . . Out of the shadow flashed a steely gleam : Her own death-shriek awoke her, and she fell At the feet of her angel Azrael. Mourn for Annabel ! The village bell is tolling, and she will Never arise from where she lieth still, Cold and so lovely, flowers white and red, Old dames and tender damozels have shed Tearful, all over her, in shadowy air Alive with perfume curling blue and rare, Jewels and gold and jasper glowing deep As in a dreamland of a solemn sleep, With solemn music plaining while the mourners weep. TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS. 167 SIREN BOWERS, AND THE TRIUMPH OE BACCHUS. " Here are bovvers In halls of pleasure, Flushed with flowers For love or leisure ; Breathes no pain here, Theirs, nor yours, All are fain here Of honeyed hours ; Here in pleasure Hide we pain, None may measure, Nor refrain ; Beauty blooming, And flowing wine ! Yonder glooming, Here Love-shine ! Breathes no pain here, Theirs nor thine, O remain here ! Low recline ! In Love's illuming 1 68 TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS. Woes all wane, Of beauty blooming All are fain ! O remain here ! Lo ! Love shining After rain ! The air faints with aroma of sweet flowers, Marrying many-tendrilled labyrinths Dew-diamonded, a harmony of hues ; And some are flushed like delicate fair flesh Of smooth, soft texture ; delicate love-organs Impetalled hide, depend their fairy forms ; Ruffled corolla, pitcher, salver, cell, Dim haunts of humming-bird, or velvet moth ; Doves pulsate with white wings, and make soft sound. Such was the floral roof; flowers overran In lovely riot ample, mounting pillars, Emergent from full bowers of greenery, Water and marble, lily, water-lily, Columns of alabaster, and soft stone, That hath the moon's name, alternating far, Innumerable, feebly luminous. A mellow chime dividing the lulled hours Embroiders them with fairy tone fourfold ; And we were soothed with ever-raining sound Of fountains flying in the warm, low light Of pendent lamp, wrought silver, gold, and gem, TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS. 169 Rich with adventure of immortal gods. Fair acolyte waved censer, whence the curled Perfume-cloud made the languid air one blue, And linen-robed priest on marble altar Made offering of fruit to Queen Astarte. Behind half-open broidery of bloom The eye won often glimpse of an alcove In floral bower, ceiled over with dim gold ; There velvet pile lay on the floor inlaid From looms of India, or Ispahan, With lace from Valenciennes, with silk or satin For coverlid ; they, with the downy pillow, Have tint of purple plums, or apricot, Of waning woods autumnal, Salvia, moth-fan, plume of orient bird. And here the storied walls luxuriant Are mellow-limned ; for lo ! Pompeianwise, All the young world feigned of a wanton joy, Of Eros, lo, Hebe, Ganymede, And all the poets tell of Aphrodite, Or her who lulled Ulysses in her isle, The idle lake, the garden of Armida, And more, what grave historian hath told Of Rosamund, Antinous, Cleopatra. Here forms of youthful loveliness recline, I know not whether only tinted marble, Or breathing amorous warm flesh and blood. Now from a grove of laurel and oleander, Plum, fragrant fig, vine, myrtle, fern, pomegranate, Recalling Daphne, or Byblos, where the Queen 170 TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS. Hath cave and fane anear the falling water, And where she wooed, won, tended her Adonis, A masque of Beauty shone ; young Dionysus I le seemed, the leader of the company, Who lolled in a Chryselephantine car Upon a pillow's damson velvet pile ; An undulating form voluptuous, All one warm waved and breathing ivory, Aglow with male and female lovelihood, The yellow panther fur worn negligent Fondling one shoulder ; stealthy-footed these That hale the chariot, one a lithe, large tiger, Blackbarred, and fulvous, eyed with furnace-flame, A tawny lion one, his mane a jungle. The face was fair and beardless like a maid's, The soft waved hair vine-filleted ; he held Aloft with one white arm's rare symmetry A crystal brimmed with blood of grape that hath I leart like a lucid carbuncle ; some fallen Over his form envermeiled more the rose Of ample bosom, and love-moulded flank ; The fir-coned thyrsus lying along the shoulder, And listless fingered by a delicate hand, The languid eyes dim-dewy with desire. Some foam-fair, and some amber of deep tone The company to rear of him, yet nigh, Fawn-youths and maidens robed in woven wind Of that fine alien fabric, hiding only As lucid wave hides, or a vernal haze ; But some were rough and red, and rudely hewn, TRIUMPH OF BA CCH US 1 7 1 Goat-shagged, satyric ; all high-held the vine, (Or quaffed it reeling), and the fir-cone rod ; The fairer filleted with violet, Anemone, or rose, Adonis-flower, The rude with vine, or ivy ; syrinx, flute, Sweetly they breathed into ; anon they pause, Till Dionysus, from his car descending, Tipsily leaned on one who may have been That swart and swollen comrade, old Silenus, Fain to enfold the yielding and flushed form, Even as when the god wooed Ariadne ; So one may see them on a vase, or gem. 172 THE TWO MAGDALENES. THE TWO MAGDALENES.* Art thou indeed repentant ? though thy look Be concentrated on the holy book ? Thy glowing wave of bosom makes it warm ! Thine oval face-flower leaneth on an arm Luxuriantly moulded, negligent. A Mediterranean-blue robe hath lent Disclosure to the undulating form, Reclining languid in a shadowy place 'Mid murmuring leaves, and there thy mellow grace The Sun divines, who, passing through the grove, Illumines throat, and bosom with still love. Art thou indeed repentant ? all thy youth Mantling within thee, doth the perfect mouth Weary of kissing ? Here 'tis cool and fresh For musing on the frailty of the flesh, For shadowy contemplation, and sweet sorrow ! But who may prophesy of thy to-morrow ? The seven devils in thee, did they go ? Or do they only sleep that they may grow ? Smouldering slumberous in thine almond white, They may awake with renovated might ! * The paintings by Correggio and D. Q. Rossetti. THE TWO MAGDALENES. 173 Thou, blessing the brown earth with bare light foot ! I think they only parted to recruit. When the world leaves you, worn with use, ye turn ; Nay, rule the world-illusion while ye burn ! A later painter showed her otherwise. Under the domination of deep eyes, She knows no more these lovers, for the wings Of lovelier life new-born in her ; she flings The jewels from her, for the Pearl He brings. In presence of her Lord, no fair and sweet She knoweth, save to lay them at His feet. Our splendid world dies, very dull and dim ; The woman in her seeth only Him ! NARRATIVE, DRAMATIC, AND DESCRIPTIVE. NARRATIVE, DRAMATIC, AND DESCRIP1IVE. THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT.* Livingstone soliloquises. The sun is sinking over Africa ; And under shadowy native eaves reclines A traveller upon a fur-strewn floor; One whom no years' ignoble rust, but high And holy toil have wasted; bearded grey, In wayworn English garb he seems array'd; His shoulders bow'd as from a life's long burden ; His rude wan countenance profoundly scarr'd With noble ruin wrought by Love and Sorrow. Reclined against the dwelling's clay-built wall, His falcon eyes explore the mooned East. Athwart a wondrous land that lies before Slow shadow steals ; o'er all the fervid palms, Broad-leaved banana, leaf-seas infinite, Hoar unfamiliar stupendous forms Of that primceval forest African: * The poems from here to " The Caravan," p. 233, are from ' Livingstone in Africa." 12 178 THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. Slowly the shadow with declining day Fades rainbow splendour of the forest far, And drowns imperial purple of the hills In one phantasmal all-confounding gloom. Ye mountains, hiding undiscover'd worlds, So mused in spirit the lone wanderer, I hunger till I pass your mighty doors, And lay my hand upon the Mystery ! African Andes, vast, inviolate, Crown'd with the cloud, robed round with sombre forest, Whose virgin snow no human feet profane Have swept, but only the wild eagle's wing, Of old your ghost on Rumour's shadowy breath Wander'd abroad, O Mountains of the Moon ! And still ye are no more than a dim name : Of old the Egyptian from your loins, that loom Large in far realms of Rumour, drew the Nile. Ye, couchant o'er the sultry continent, Seem the great guardian Lion of Africa, Who, from primaeval ages all alone, Silently stern, confronts a crimson dawn Over fair Indian seas, with face that towers Sunward, supreme ; feeling a warm moist breath, Faint with perfume, turn crystals of soft snow Among the terrors of his icy mane; Or, where the stature of his giant frame Declines to westward, feeling the breath change To rain within the hollows of his heart. THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. 179 All, thundering down abrupt convulsed ravines, Scarr'd in precipitous rugged flanks of stone, Feed wide Nyanzas ; whether there be twain, Or many waters, these engender thee, Wonderful Nile ! And yet I deem that I Shall find thy parent springs remoter still. Lualaba, with his tributary rivers, And lilied lakes his loving bounty fills ! Yea, some have told me, and I well believe, There are four fountains clear and deep as day, Welling unfathomable, perennial Among low hills as yet unseen, the last Subsiding roll, it may be, of one range Named of old Rumour, Mountains of the Moon. Behold the shrine of living waters ! Here From one immense rock-temple stream the Souls Of many lands and nations, whispering In dim enchanted caverns; East and North, And West emerging, sunny wings unfold : Shouting they plunge in joyous waterfalls, To roll a priceless silver all abroad, Each to his Ocean, whose illustrious names Are Congo, Nile, and long Leeambayee ! Whom Mother Ocean, in her awful arms Absorbing, ever engendereth anew, Gendering a holy Cycle evermore. When royal Sun his Oriental bride, India's Ocean, fiercely fervent woos, 1S0 THE NILE, AERTCA, AND EGYPT. While She dissolves in his delightful love, What time He fronts earth's equatorial zone On his way North to Cancer, then the waters Rise in a tide of life upon the lands, Lying athirst and barren in his blaze. .... My soul, unbow'd in face of failing years, Though Hope may falter from unwearying Hindrance of blind baseborn vicissitude, Swears to resolve the alluring Mystery, At whose cold feet our mightiest have fallen, Yearning to find the sacred Source, and die ; Nor have prevail'd ; but if the Lord allow, I and my fellow-labourers will prevail ! I seek the birth of that immortal River, Who bears great Egypt in her watery womb, Who nursed the world's prime empire on her bosom And Moses, more illustrious than all Pharaohs, her earth-enthralling conquerors, Throned in their golden hundred-gated Thebes, Tomb'd in hoar wonder of the pyramids. At thy most holy source, primaeval Nile ! The Greek drank wisdom ; yea, in solemn halls Of Memphis, in columnar stone forests Of mighty Kamac, rich with hieroglyph, And pictured symbol and weird shapes of Gods. Only the solar beam, the Obelisk, THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. i8r Now from green palms and verdure and pure rills, As then from sacred fountains of the Sun, In olden time, in Heliopolis, Still points with mystic granite flame to Heaven ! This mighty gnomon of a sun-dial Moved then a shadow, lengthening among signs Upon a porphyry or a brazen floor, Among blithe forms of Pharaonic time ; Now o'er young corn and red anemone ! There came Pythagoras to learn the lore Of stars, and suns, and gods, and human souls ; There Moses mused, well nourish'd on rich stores Of priests and sages ; communing with truth, And in his spirit sifting dust from gold. Only this one most ancient monument Stands of thy glory, Heliopolis ! Earliest seat of learning, where the seer, Illustrious Plato, came from Academe, And sweet Ilissus ; fairest star of all The fair young band who followM one wise master. Here a stone astrolabe explored the night, Measuring solemn wanderings of stars ; Laboratory fires were glowing heie; While some astrologer with mystic rites Drew horoscopes, or cast nativities : But then our Earth, who in her equable And proud obeisant motion round the sun Hath in twice ten millennial periods Her inclined axle measurably perturb'd, Lean'd otherwise her pole among the skies; 182 THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. Another Polestar ruled the mariner; Another Ocean shrined thy radiance, Christian constellation of the Cross ! While otherwhere in every tranquil night, Among cool calm abysses of pure space, Shone Sirius, Arcturus, and Orion. Here too the holiest Child of mortal race Rested in humble guise with a pure Mother. At thy most holy source, primaeval Nile ! The Greek drank wisdom ; learn'd a Daedal art, That in his pure white light of genius, In that pellucid aether of his clime, Among pure breezes of Castalian hills, And delicate unrobed consummate forms Of radiant heroes, bloom'd in glorious Marble immortal gods for all the world. Here he beheld the blazon'd Zodiac On loftiest firmaments of broad hewn stone Within dim fanes, or solemn tombs of kings; Stupendous vaulted chambers in the heart Of flame-hued mountain, silently aware With populous imagery of men and gods, Hawk or ram-headed ; on wide wall and ceiling Beheld a constellate celestial river Meandering around a crystal sphere, And navigated in twelve lives of Moons THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. 183 By that resplendent Father of the Kings ; Kings lying here in glory, all embalm'd, And jewell'd o'er with slumbering talisman, Asleep in their immense sarcophagi. Yonder, on burning sands of Libya, Unmoved the tranquil-featured Sphinx beheld Abraham, Homer, Solon, all the wise Of every clime, who came, and saw, and wonder'd Who pass'd, leaving a heritage to man; Beheld dissolving dynasties of Kings, And all their people, pageant-like unroll'd Before His face ; they, with o'erwhelming pillars Of desert sand before the whirlwind's breath, Pass'd in loud pomp, and were not any more ; The silent Sphinx regarding, as to-day, Beyond them all, serene Eternity ! There that colossal Memnon, while the Nile Pour'd like another morning all around Sweet life-engendering waters musical, Murmur'd melodious salutation, When first Aurora, his celestial mother, Smiled blandly on him from the Orient. Fresh from fierce thunder of the cataracts, Tortured among dark demon-blocks of stone Fireborn, divine Nile smoothes his ruffled flow ; Lingers a tranquil, a celestial lake 1 84 THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. To embrace fair Philse, Philse, fairest isle Of all earth's islands ! fringed with mirror'd palm, And lotos blossom on the crystalline Laving her bosom ; she hath lotos blossom For capitals of her hypsethral fane, Quiet in heaven, tremulous in the river : Where, sundering flowing phantoms of the stars, Boats glide by night, aslant on broider'd sail, Freighted with youth, and love and loveliness : Balmy night breezes, all alive with song, Laughter, and rhythmic plashing of light oars, (While coloured lamp-lights lambent on the ripple Stream from fair vessel, or embower'd shore) ; Wave slender-fountain'd palms among the stars; As strange slim forms of a most ancient age Land on pale quays of that so stately temple, Sonorous with a gorgeous ritual. — Now on a roofless column builds the stork ! Here, they believe, slumbers a mighty god, Osiris, Love incarnate, and the Judge ; Also the Solar orb, and sacred Nile ; Who, with moon'd Isis and her little child, Shadoweth forth a triune Deity. His awful name none dare to breathe aloud : An oath avails to bind for evermore One who hath sworn "by Him that sleeps in Phila?. Most ancient realm of all this ancient earth, Thought faints to sound thy hoar antiquity ! Europe and Asia were not when thy form THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. 185 Brooded in solemn grandeur, as to-day, Over dark ocean ! when Dicynodon, Ancestor of thy huge Leviathan, Ruled over mightier seas and estuaries; When melancholy vapours veil'd strange stars, Ere man's wan yearning unavailing eyes Awoke to wonder ! ere the cataclysm Rent all thy rocks, and summon'd forth the rivers . . . . . When came the Negro? — and the dwindlin:; Dwarf? I have found bones of immemorial age : Their living families surround me now ! Wilds more unknown than yonder ghostly Moon. Beyond the bounds of Earth ! whose ruin huge Of awful mountain, Albategnius. Or Doerfel, whose abysses of dead gloom Herschel in his enchanter's glass reveaFd ! Africa ! vast immeasurable Void, Where no imperial march of History Solemn resounds from echoing age to age ! Haunt of light-headed fable and dim dream ! To whose fierce strand the Heaven-shadowing bird, Enormous Roc, long deemed a wild romance, Was wont to fly of old from Madagascar ! — In whose blue wave floats fragrant ambergris ; Whose shores are blushing corallines most rare, 1 86 THE NILE, AFRICA, AND EGYPT. Where ocean-fairies wander mailed in gems, Silently gliding through the branching bowers, While far inland strange palaces are piled Profusely with pure ivory and gold — No lynx-eyed peril-affronting pioneer, Since the beginning, until yesterday, Dared violate thy sultry somnolence, Couch'd, a grim lion in thine ancient lair ; Sullenly self-involved, impenetrable ! Or if one ever bearded and aroused, Thy winds have spurn'd his unrevealing dust ! Yea, in thy fiery deserts, in the pomp Of lurid evenings, crimson, warm, like blood, Thou dost devour thine own dark children, crouch'd About thy cruel knees, dark Africa I THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. 187 THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. Yet mine are higher, holier purposes ; For I will cleave this darkling continent, As with a sword of intellectual light ; Lead these lost children to a living Father, And tell them of a Brother who has died. Yea, if my nature's weakness have rebell'd Against what seems the world's indifference ; Men treading their unarduous wonted round Of common care, oblivious of mine, Who battle alone, afar from all ; who waste, Ignobly sinking here in sight of goal, For bitter need of help I hoped from men, At leisure in their calm abounding homes ; Bales for exchange or tribute ; healing herbs Wherewith to calm this fire within my veins, And tame the ravening, hungry heathendom- Thou knowest, O Lord, my prime solicitude Was for the work thou hast to me unworthy Confided in Thy Providence unachieved, — And yet I know the Holiest never fails For lack of service ; but allows to each The measure He in wisdom hath ordain'd. THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. For all the land is foul with monstrous wrong, And desolation of the sons of Hell. Surely the long, long wail of human woe Ever ascends from all our earth to heaven ! But here the mist of blind unending tears Hangs undissolving, and abolishes Yon very Life-Light from His shining halls, And hides the Father from His orphan'd sons. Hell is let loose ; and jubilant cruelty Tortures a feeble, lowly-witted race, Poor fallen outcast of humanity ; Inflames the lurking, savage brute that haunts A wilding blood to fratricidal war, To thrall its very kindred, for the sport Of paler, large-brain'd fiends, the common foe, And glut their markets with the flesh of men. Shoot them and drown them ! from convulsive arms Tear small sweet clinging babes, and fainting brides From lovers, who with unavailing life Stain them in falling, or themselves enslaved, Yoked, goaded, pinioned, tramp the burning wilds, To bleach with beast-gnawn bones the wilderness ; Or huddled in a slaver's pestilent hold, Writhing and raving, rotting while alive, Are flung to gorge sleek monsters of the sea ! Lo ! in dusk offings of ensanguined seas, At sunset doth the torpid slaver droop Her guilty sail ; while evil strangers brand Dark women on a golden strand with fire ; Who are mute with endless woes unutterable 1 THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. 1S9 Nay ! the long wail of wounded innocence Hath ne'er been squander'd on a voiceless Void ! But every tear of every helpless child Sinks in a warm, unfathomable Love : And armed Righteousness awaits her hour, Albeit Her lightning slumber in the cloud. These human shambles shall be purged from blood : This charnel of the world shall reek no more, Plague-spot of all the starry universe ! For I will flash the light of Europe's eyes Full on the tyrant, till he quail and cower, And vanish, a mere snowfiake in the sun. England, inviolate Ark of Freedom, launch Thy thunder as of old ; and hurl them low ! Fulfil thy mission ! fallen heroes want Yonder in heaven their crown of blessedness, Till the last bondsman clasp unfetter'd hands O'er the last slaver, whelm'd beneath the wave ! But I abide until my task be done. And if they slay their mortal enemy, It is the Lord who calls, and it is well — When they had thought to murder ; reft from me All I most cherish'd on a former day ; Killing my converts, even the little ones, Or sweeping them into captivity ; I said, " I am not less resolved than they : They do but save me wills and codicils ! " T turn my face indeed, as they intend, 190 THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. From this my labour of long years o'erthrown ; And yet not homeward, baffled as they deem — For lo ! my face is toward the world unknown, That seem'd almost the very world in sooth, " From whose dark bourne no traveller returns." I take the plunge, and I am lost in night ! Lost to the life and tumult of mankind : No voice may reach me from the homes of men ; No voice of mine may penetrate to them. Five times twelve moons have filled their horns and waned ; My memory is failing from the world ; Only a ghostly rumour murmurs low How one has seen a strange white wanderer, Somewhere inland ; none certainly known where ; And once more rumour whispers, he is dead. Empires may rise and fall ; great wars may thunder ; And peace may follow war ; and I not know, More than the drown'd who slumber in the sea — Yea, have they ruin'd me at Kolobeng ? Behold I wrest from them all Africa ! For I will never cease from journeying, Until the length and breadth of all the land Shine forth illuminate from shore to shore ! My life is one long journey ; and I love Peril, and toil, and strange vicissitude ; Exploring all the wonder of the world On sea and land ; wonder for evermore ; And all the marvellous miracle of man. THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. 191 I am urged ever by a restless ghost, And may not fold my hands in tranquil sleep. Yet when we have grown old, we want the glow Of our own generous children in their prime, Warming our twilight ; they love thought for us, As we of old for them ; their little ones Play, like a dear last dawn, around our age ; And I too long to be at home again By the sweet firelight of my northern land ! At Christmas-time, the room is bright with green, And far bells faintly peal athwart the snow : Then quiet firelight, wavering with soft sound, Pleasantly ruddies gold and silver hair : But in the summer, little children sing Anear a shimmer of slim aspen leaves, Fluttering with sound of summer rain. Ah ! shall I never cease from journeying? Urged ever onward by a restless ghost, I may not fold my hands in pleasant sleep ! When I surmount some unfamiliar height, Behold ! an alien realm mysterious Unroll'd in twilight ! ghostly, drear, and wan ; Stain'd with what seem huge bombs of shatter'd iron, Hurl'd from a weird infernal enginery. And then I muse what eerie living things Dwell far beyond among the mists of night — Whether the wanderer may wander on For ever in the waste, hearing no sound, Save of his own footfall ; or yonder dwell i 9 2 THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. Dark unimaginable human lives ; Wearing what uncouth forms, allied to some Misshapen horrors of the forest wild — Weird startling mockery of immortal man ; Shocking the soul with chill mistrustful fear, And doubt of her pre-eminent destiny — ■ Brute-brow'd, brute-maw'd, huge hirsute prodigies, Challenging with a vast appalling roar Whoso disturbs their monstrous monarchy ! Dark unimaginable human lives, Ever alone in this most ancient realm, Immured in a stupendous sepulchre, Afar from man's tumultuous chariot-race Of sounding splendour ; somnolent aware How the dull tide of dim inglorious years Moves ever foul and lurid with the scurf Of ruin'd blood, and gold, and scalding tears ! Some veer small restless, rambling, apelike eyes ; Their clicking gibber mimics flittermice ; A skeleton people plucking roots and berries For starved subsistence, grubbing shallow holes, Or sheltering in borrow'd dens disused. . . . What people lies before me ? some affirm That there be men sepulchred verily In subterranean chambers like the dead ; Burrowing human moles, fleeing from light, By their free choice, and immemorial Usage ; though Rumour murmurs her wild tale Ever with a light head confusedly. THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. 193 Shall I behold some dark terrific cave, Reeking with bats, and owls, and doleful things, High among crags of a precipitous mountain, Strewn with fresh bones of men, that hideous ghouls In human form, foul anthropophagi, Have gnawn for food ; a loathsome den defiled With dripping human members, torn for meat ? A desolate wind howls ever dolefully Around the dismal open mouth of hell, Howls like a murdered man's avenging soul ! While among boulder-ruins of the mountain Climb beasts obscene, scenting a horrid feast ! At night a thunder of great lions rolls, Rebellowing from basalt precipices : At night a fervour of infernal flame, With cruel yells of hellish revelry, Affronts pale stars ; what time the unearthly fiends Grimy, and gash'd with knives, and foul with earth, Squat mumbling bodies of lost travellers, Whom they decoying fell'd with monstrous clubs. But underneath the floor of their black vault Deepens a hollow murmur, far withdrawn Within the haunted heart of the dread mountain. It may be mutter'd wrath of slumbering fires ; It may be secret waters wandering ; But they believe it of another world ; And shuddering pour libation to the god. Sometimes by night a mightier thunder even Than thunder of roaring lions, like an ocean, 13 194 THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA, Bursts all the boundaries of ruinous heaven In one wild flood of universal flame, With sound as of upheaval of adamant ; Towering wrath of Powers immeasurable, And roll'd war-chariots of tremendous cloud : Sound the great mountains in their chasms and craters, Bastions, and inviolable towers, Rebellow ; hurl abroad ; mutter in gloom ; Brood over in their dim and sullen souls. Perpetual seas of broad purpureal flame, With intervals of momentary night, Dark as the darkness of a man born blind, Possess the sky's unfathomable concave ; Wherein appalling growths of more intense Fire with seven branches, like gigantic trees, Spring up and vanish ! . . . Behold yon perpendicular crags, like flame, Whose melaphyre and porphyry condor crests Threaten the valleys ! their profound ravines Of deadly twilight ne'er a sun may see, Unsoften'd of a tiniest herb or flower ! Now furious torrents toss white manes of foam Down their long solitudes ; the firmament Sunders, and pours dense watery deluges, Illuminate with deluges of light ; Howls the tornado ; 'tis the reign of chaos ! Clreat lions lashing tails in grim despair, Mingling their roar with elemental thunder, Climb from the floods, or struggling drown therein ! THE EXPLORER IN AFRICA. 195 Ah ! would the blinding falchion of swift lightning, That crimson wounds the mountain flank, but hurl One of those loosen'd bounding blocks of rock, So as to stop for ever the black mouth Of that infernal cavern of the fiends, Where still a madden' d laughter peals among Commotions of Divine wrath flying abroad, Reiterate from all their haunted halls ! Lo ! the tornado, and the levinbolt Have fallen upon yon tree's enormous bulk, Hard by the cave ; blasting, and wrenching it Loose from a cleft it grappled for centuries With serpentine huge roots ! it creaks and crashes ! Headlong it topples to the gulf that boils ! Some even tell a marvellous dim tale Of a tribe buried somewhere in the wild ; A satyr-race of clovenfooted men, Hairy and tail'd, with cloven feet like swine ! Where are the Pigmies ? Homer sang of old Their yearly war with southward-flying cranes ! They wear enormous heads upon their shoulders ; They build their pigmy booths in dim recesses Of some impenetrable forest world ! Two travellers lately came upon their traces.