429951
THE WORKS OF
THEOPHILE GAUTIER
IN TWE NTY-F OUR VOLUMES
LIMITED EDITION
Limited, for sale in America,
J TO ONE THOUSAND N UMBERED
AND REGISTERED SET S, OF WHICH
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THE WORKS OF
VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR
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X TH EO P HI LE
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E N A M E L S
C A M E O S
AND OTHER POEMS
Translated by AGNES LEE
NEW YORK • Publish ed. for Subscriber s only
*«• by GEORGE D. SPROUL • M D CCCC III
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Translated and Edited by
PROFESSOR F. C. de SUMICHRAST
Department of French, Harvard University
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Copyright, irjoy, by
George D. Sproul
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UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
429951
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Contents
Introduction Page 3
The God and the Opal—To Theophile Gautier “ 33
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Preface . €€ 37
Affinity—A Pantheistic Madrigal .... “ 38
The Poem of Woman — Marble of Paros . . “ 42
A Study of Hands :
I Imperia “ 46
II Lacenaire “ 49
Variations on the Carnival of Venice :
I On the Street €€ 52
II On the Lagoons . „ . €e 54
III Carnival “ 56
IV Moonlight “ 58
Symphony in White Major “ 60
CoQUETRY IN DEATH iC 64
Heart’s Diamond .......... <€ 66
Spring’s First Smile ee 68
Contralto “ 70
Eyes of Blue €t 74
The Toreador* s Serenade “ 77
Nostalgia of the Obelisks :
I The Obelisk in Paris €€ 80
II The Obelisk in Luxor €t 84
vii
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CONTENTS
Veterans of the Old Guard, December 15 . Page 88
Sea-Gloom te 94
To a Rose-coloured Gown <€ 97
The World’s Malicious ....... “ 99
InES DE LAS SlERRAS To PeTRA CaMARA. . . €C lOI
Odelet, after Anacreon “ 105
Smoke “ 106
Apollonia “107
The Blind Man €€ 108
Song ..... “ no
Winter Fantasies “ 111
The Brook “ 116
Tombs and Funeral Pyres 118
Bjorn*s Banquet “ 124
The Watch “ 130
The Mermaids . • . . “132
Two Love-Locks “ 135
The Tea-Rose “ 136
Carmen **138
What the Swallows Say—An Autumn Song . “ 140
Christmas “ 144
The Dead Child*s Playthings “ 145
After Writing my Dramatic Review . . . c< 147
The Castle of Remembrance “ 149
Camellia and Meadow Daisy “ 160
The Fellah — A Water-Colour by Princess
Mathilde €< 162
The Garret “ 163
The Cloud . . . . “ 166
CONTENTS
The Blackbird Page 168
The Flower that makes the Springtime ... €€ 170
A Last Wish “ 173
The Dove ............ “ 174
A Pleasant Evening “ 176
Art “ i8<x
SELECTED POEMS
The Middle Ages “185
The Captive Bird “ 187
On a Thought of Wordsworth’s c< 189
Caryatides c< 190
The Chimera “ 191
The Encounter <c 192
Versailles “ 193
Barcarolle . . . 194
The Portal “196
The Escorial “ 203
A King’s Solitude “ 204
The Laurel in the Generalife Garden . . . “ 206
Farewell to Poetry “ 207
The Tulip “ 208
Touch not the Marble “ 209
ALBERTUS, or THE SOUL AND SIN . “215
THE COMEDY OF DEATH “283
ix
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List of Illustrations
The Procession of the Sacred Bull “ Apis-Osiris.”
A photogravure from the original painting by
F, A. Bridgman in the Corcoran Gallery of
Arty Washington Frontispiece
The Crossing of the Beresina. A photogravure
from a painting by J. Fa lat Page 93
Scene in a Smyrna Coffee-House. A photogravure
from a painting by F. A. Bridgman . . . cs 142
The Ball at the Embassy. A photogravure from a
painting by F. A. Bridgman ** 179
Intro duction
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ENAMELS and CAMEOS
and OTHER P 0 E M S
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Introduction
THE divine gift of verse having been denied
to the translator and editor of this English
edition of Theophile Gautier’s works, he
has secured the collaboration, for this part
of his task, of Mrs. Agnes Lee, who has undertaken
and carried it out with care and skill.
To translate any author satisfactorily, that is, in
such a manner that his literary quality shall become
apparent to the reader, is, in all conscience, a sufficiently
difficult matter when prose alone is in question. But
when to the obstacles to be overcome are added the
peculiarly characteristic features of verse, the difficulty
becomes wellnigh insurmountable.
In the case of French verse in general it may be
possible occasionally to render, with fair approach to
accuracy combined with retention of the poetic form,
the meaning of the author, and with it the more strik-
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
ing features of the style. It never can be an easy
task, or one that when accomplished satisfies fully the
exacting demands of the cultured reader, more partic¬
ularly of the translator, if the latter, as is at times the
case, is endowed with a literary and artistic conscience.
The very character of French verse presents in itself
an obstacle that can but rarely be overcome. The
total lack of accent, as generally understood, and the
consequent dependence upon rime, increase the ardu-
ousness of the- task.
Then, with all poetry, it is impossible to retain in
a version, however skilful and loving, that flower, that
essence, subtle, delicate, magical, which, like the down
on butterfly’s wing, vanishes the instant it is touched.
It is impossible, or wellnigh so, to reproduce in one
tongue the mysterious and deep harmony, the sweet,
elusive melody of another. It is impossible to preserve
that peculiar warmth of colour, that flushing of hue
which charm in the original, and the loss of which,
while it may not be noted by the reader unacquainted
with the language in which the original is written,
nevertheless so far disfigures the translation and makes
it perforce unfaithful. With the best intentions in
the world, with the liveliest desire to reproduce in
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INTRODUCTION
English the characteristics of the French, with the
most thorough knowledge of the idioms and turns of
the one and the other tongue, the artist who seeks to
transpose from the one language into the other must
fain confess that it is after all but a paraphrase —
however excellent, however accurate — that has been
produced.
More especially must this be true of Theophile
Gautier’s work in verse. An artist himself in the most
precise sense of the word, he was a believer in and an
apostle of form. Words were not mere aggregations
of letters or syllables, having each and all a definite
meaning attached to them and nothing more. They
were not simply a means, when assembled, of com¬
municating ideas. They had qualities and properties
of their own — intimately, essentially their own — which
gave them a value wholly apart from any usefulness
they might possess as replacing the primitive language
of signs. They were full of colour, they were colour ;
they were full of music, they were music’s self; they
were sculpture and they were architecture; they were
metal, and they were stuffs of richest loom, — silk and
satin, gauze and lawn, velvet and brocade ; they were
gem s and stones of purest ray serene; they blazed with
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
internal fires; they were refulgent with inward glow;
they burned with dull flame and shone with scintillation
resplendent. No precious metal, no pearl of finest
orient but was to be found among them. Every shade
and hue of colour, every sound and note of music was
given out by them. They had properties of their own
that naught could destroy, and the poet’s business it
was to discover these, to turn them to use. Baude¬
laire, whose talent Gautier so thoroughly understood
and so well described, said in his poem entitled
u Correspondences ” : —
“ Like long-drawn echoes that in the distance mingle in dark,
abysmal harmony, vast as night’s self and vast as the light, per-
fumes and colours and sounds correspond.”
Gautier did not go so far; he was not a Symbolist,
though he did believe in cc correspondences,” without
the feeling for and gift of which, he maintained, no
man could be a true poet. Words did possess a music
of their own, in his belief, and he has many a time
proved the fact in his own verse ; they also possessed
a colour of their own, and painter as he was he utilised
this property over and over again ; they had a sono¬
rousness of their own, and like Hugo, he knew how to
avail himself of it. But it cannot be said of him that
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INTRODUCTION
he used words in the way in which the Symbolists and
Decadents used them ; he did not force them to the
same extent, and was content to bring out that which
was plainly or subtly visible or audible in them to the
artistic eye and ear. It was the sense of vision which
he especially cultivated, never having forgotten his early
training in that line when he studied painting. He
beheld particularly the exterior world, and no one has
surpassed him in his descriptions of it. Here again it
it was his painter sense that stood him in such good
stead. He had learned to look, and having seen to
reproduce. His poems are full of admirable examples
of vivid descriptions of scenery and landscape ; of vast
prospects and of “bits.” He has what Brunetiere
called “ intense impressions of art; ” he paints in
words to a degree and with a power and skill un¬
surpassed in any other works of the period. One has
to come down to Leconte de Lisle, one of his own dis-
ciples, to meet with any word paintings equalling his
in perfection and strength and vividness.
Now these very qualities make the translation of his
poems into any other tongue an exceedingly difficult
and arduous task. It is not possible, simply, to say in
another language just what he says in his rich, ample,
7
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
varied French. It is not possible to reproduce the
effects he sought and attained, for English is so dif¬
ferent from Gautier’s mother-tongue that not the
greatest poet could render in it just the effects that he
obtained, and obtained by most diligent labour and con¬
tinual polishing and repolishing of the form in which he
cast his thought.
“ Form is everything,” he say s in an article on one
of Hugo’s dramas, “no matter what may have been
prated on the subject.” And to the cult of form he
applied himself with singular diligence and perseverance,
attaining effects so remarkable as to be the delight of
the ear attuned to the melody and beauteousness of
French verse. It is always beauty he is in search
of, for he holds it superior to all else on earth — and
possibly in heaven. He admires Baudelaire largely
because that poet is a worshipper of the beautiful and
succeeds in finding it even in the horrible and the
repulsive. He holds that beauty is an end in itself,
and he repels the proposition that every piece of literary
or artistic work should have a practical or at least a
moral purpose.
Poetry, to him, was not meant to be used as a
vehicle for instruction in morals, in science, in aught
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INTRODUCTION
that was positive, utilitarian, workaday, commonplace.
It was a divine tongue in which beauteous things
were to be said; a tongue which the vulgar could not
and need not understand, but which was comprehended
of all in whom burned, however faintly, the sacred fire.
He was at one with Alfred de Musset when the latter
exclaimed : —
“ It is verse I love above all — the language immortal.
Perchance ’t is blasphemy, so let me whisper it low : I love
it to madness. It has this great advantage, that never were
fools able to appreciate it; that it comes to us from God, —
that it is limpid and beauteous ; that the world hears it, but
speaks it not.”
He thoroughly endorsed every word in the following
passage from Baudelaire, who looked upon him as his
master: —
“If a man will only take the trouble to examine himself,
. . . he will perceive that poetry can have no other end
than itself; it cannot have any other, and no poem can be so
great, so noble, so truly worthy of being called a poem, as
that which has been written solely for the pleasure of writing
a poem.
“ I do not mean to imply that poetry does not ennoble
manners, — I desire to be correctly understood, — or that its
final result is not the elevation of man above sordid interests:
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
that would be plainly absurd. What I say is that if the poet
has sought to attain a moral end, he has lessened his poetic
force, and it is not imprudent to wager that his work will be
poor. Poetry cannot assimilate itself to science or morals,
under pain of death or forfeiture. Itself, not truth, is its end.
“ The principle of poetry is strictly and simply human
aspiration to a higher beauty, and the principle manifests itself
in enthusiasm, in rapture of the soul, — an enthusiasm which
is wholly independent of passion, the intoxication of the heart,
and of truth, the food of reason. For passion is a natural
thing, too natural indeed not to introduce an unpleasant, a dis¬
cordant tone into the domain of pure beauty ; too familiar
and too violent not to scandalise the pure desires, the gracious
melancholy, and the noble despair that inhabit the supernatural
regions of poetry.**
Poems of passion are not to be met with in Gautier’s
work. He has none that recall the cries of despair
and ardour that burst forth from de Musset, the tender
regrets and lamentations of Lamartine. He has writ¬
ten some love poems; he has indulged, as young
Romanticists all did, in addresses to fair female forms,
often as not purely ideal; he has talked love, but it has
never swayed and tossed him about on the ocean of
passion. For him no Graziella, no Elvira, no Julia
appears to have existed; in his heart there was little
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INTRODUCTION
room for aught else than the worship of beauty under
its various forms; women appealed to him in so far
as they were partial incarnations of that divine prin¬
ciple, but they do not appear to have affected him as
much as the beauty of statues or paintings, the glory
of landscapes, or the majesty of architecture. Music
moved him, but the artist herself was of secondary
importance. Dancing delighted him, but the dancer
was subordinate to the performance itself.
So he never sang woman as woman 5 he has written
that incomparable poem: uThe Poem of Woman,”
but he makes clear his inmost thought in the sub-title:
tc Marble of Paros.” He preferred, we know, the
statue to the living form ; the statue was more perfect,
approached more nearly to the ideal of beauty, it was
more idealised, and therefore, in his view, truer to the
fact. This he dwells on in his account of Baudelaire: —
<€ Baudelaire . . . believed art should be absolutely auton¬
omous, and refused to admit that poetry had any end other
than itself, or any mission to fulfil other than that of exciting in
the reader’s mind the sensation of the Beautiful, in the strict-
est meaning of the word. . . . He banished from poetry,
to the utmost of his power, eloquence, passion, and the too
accurate representation of truth. Just as one must not use in
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
sculpture parts cast directly from the living model, so he insisted
that before being admitted into the sphere of art every object
should undergo a metamorphosis that should fit it for that
subtle realm, by idealising it and removing it from trivial truth.* ’
That is his own creed, put into practice by an
admirer and a follower. It is the cult of Art for
Art’s own sake, without utilitarian or moral motive. It
is the worship of pure beauty, and it is the thought
that inspired Leconte de Lisle, the impeccable poet,
equally with Gautier, when he sang the wondrous song
of “ Hypatia ” : —
“ Sleep, O fair victim, within our souls’ closed depths,
Wrapped in thy virgin shroud and with lotus crowned.
Sleep! For hideous ugliness of the world is queen,
And no longer we know the road that to Paros leads.
“ The gods are turned to dust j the earth is mute 5
No sound from thy deserted heav’n shall e’er be heard.
Sleep! But, living within him, sing to the poet’s heart
Of sacred Beauty the melodious hymn.
“ For it alone survives, unchanged, eternal.
Scattered by Death the quaking worlds may be —
But forth doth Beauty flame, and all in her revives 5
Under her white feet still the worlds revolve.”
This conception, this purpose Gautier faithfully ad-
hered to throughout his career, and in face of the reproach,
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INTRODUCTION
addressed to him even during his lifetime, that he lost
sight of great moral notions. He disclaimed being
a moralist, a student of manners, an inquirer into the
possibilities of elevating the human race by spreading
the principles of philosophy, total abstinence, religion,
or anything akin thereto, and desired simply to be an
artist, to sing melodiously of beauty, and to reproduce
it as fully as he might in all his works.
Poetry was a thing apart; the gift of writing verse
was not merely, in his opinion, the power of expressing
admirably and feelingly, of imparting the sense of
colour and melody, of communicating rhythm and
number to the phrase, or, on the other hand, the
mere power of riming, a gift possessed, as he has truly
remarked, by very mediocre people. It is not enough
to align words, to make the final letters of each line
repeat a given sound. There is more than this in real
poetry, and it was real poetry alone that he eared for
or wrote. It involved, not necessarily ideas — com¬
monplace or original — but the bringing out of the
subject the fullest measure of perfection of form of
which it was susceptible. Form is indispensable, in his
theory of poetry. It is the very touchstone of merit;
the very test of existence. The careful working out
J3
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
of the form, at least the producing of perfect form
with or without labour, alone marked out the man
as a poet. Without form he was only a poetaster;
with it, a true singer.
This view gives, apparently, over-importance to verse.
Whether it do so or not, it is unquestionably the view
held by Gautier. “ It is the commonest thing in the
world, at the present time,” he says, ct to assume that
what is poetical is poetry. The two have nothing
in common. Fenelon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ber-
nardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, George Sand are
poetical, but they are not poets; that is to say, they
are incapable of writing verse, even mediocre verse,
a special gift possessed by people greatly inferior in
merit to these illustrious masters. To attempt to sepa¬
rate verse from poetry is a modern piece of folly that
tends to nothing less than the destruction of art itself.”
It is curious that Gautier, once the contemner of
Boileau, had become, by the time he penned these
words, almost a champion of the critic’s or at least
a defender and advocate of one of the principles upon
which Boileau laid most stress : the absolute necessity
of improving the form until perfection has been attained.
Not every kind of verse satisfied his exacting taste;
H
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INTRODUCTION
it had to be the very best, wrought out with infinite
care, for it is not given to every one to produce
superb, perfect lines without an effort, as was the case
with Victor Hugo, who uttered them as naturally and
as easily as he breathed. Gautier held to the need of
improving the work, and the first cast of the form was
not necessarily the best. So the poet must work over
his verse until he attained perfection. This meant
verse of a higher quality than the average verse of
Lamartine and Alfred de Musset, neither of whom
troubled much about the minutiae upon which Gautier
lays stress. w When a poet is in question,” he says
again, “ the manner in which his verse is wrought is
a matter of considerable importance and worth study-
ing, for it constitutes in great part the intrinsic value
of his verse. It is the stamp with which he mints his
gold, his silver or copper.” That amounts to saying
that, while the value of the poem, outside its form,
must necessarily vary with the variation in the talent,
genius, and inspiration of the writer, in no case can
the writer dispense with seeking excellence of form,
which is to constitute a great part of the worth of his
work. “ No doubt,” he continues, “ these minutiae
will seem very frivolous to utilitarian s, progressive and
15
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
practical, or simply clever men, who think with Stend¬
hal, that verse is a childish form that was good enough
for the primitive ages, but who insist that poetry should
be written in prose, as beseems an age of common-
sense. Yet it is precisely these minutiae that cause
verse to be good or bad, and that distinguish the true
poet from the sham.”
The instrument of verse, words, with their infinite
capabilities, was therefore a matter of importance to
him, and on the study of words and the resources they
offer to the poet he bestowed infinite time and thought.
Gifted with a vivid sense of colour, with an intense
sense of form, with a delicate appreciation of sound,
he naturally enough sought to turn to account every
word that could be made to yield an effect in any one of
these ways. It was herein he differed from Boileau,
to whom the separation of the nobler from the more
common words was a matter of moment. To Gautier
all words were good, if only they rendered his thought.
He wished to attain accuracy in expression; to
produce just the effect he sought, and not another,
or one merely analogous to it. Hence his vocabulary
was enriched with many term s drawn from the most
varied sources. There are numberless examples of
16
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INTRODUCTION
this in “ Enamels and Cameos,” though the reader un¬
acquainted with the correct, restrained, stilted mode of
speech of the pseudo-classicists may not notice them.
And indeed in English these words would not attract
attention.
In one of his conversation, reported by Emile
Bergerat, — cc Theophile Gautier : Entretiens, Souve-
nirs et Correspondance,” — Gautier discussed the
nature and value of his work in enriching the language
of French poetry, and claimed the “ modest praise of
being a philologist.” He believed he had fashioned, for
the poets who were coming after him, a remarkable
instrument capable of rendering every shade of feeling,
every gradation of hue and colour, every sound of music
and melody. He dilated on the importance, on the
necessity which exists for thought to be possessed of
a garment of words suited to itself: —
“ So soon as it finds in words a garment fitted to it, it
straightway goes along easily; and if the words be elegant of
cut and rich in colour, it grows holder and triumphant, for
when beauteous and fitly attired, it feels that it is more wel¬
come and is received into better society. Then if so be
a poet fastens to its feet the two sonorous wings of rime, it
takes its flight and soars on high.”
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
This view recalls that set forth by Victor Hugo in
the interesting and highly personal poem entitled
a Reply to an Indictment,55 in which he relates the
part he played in the linguistic revolution:
“Then, a brigand I, —I came ; I shouted : Why should
these ever go before and those behind ever be? Then, upon
the Academy, the old beldame, spreading her skirts to shelter
the terrified tropes, and upon the battalions of alexandrines
in squares, I blew a blast of revolt. The old dictionary I
crowned with Liberty5s red cap. ... I stormed and de-
molished the Bastile of rimes. I did more : I smashed every
iron fetter that bound the common words, and I drew forth from
hell the old ones, long damned, legions of the nether depths.
I pulled down the spirals of peripfirases, and mingled, con¬
founded, laid flat under heaven5s vault, the alphabet, that sombre
tower which uprose out of Babel; for well I knew that the
wrathful hand that sets the words free, to thought restores its
liberty.55
Gautier had this in mind when he said further, in
that same conversation: cc My share in that literary
revolution was plainly indicated. I was the painter of
the company. I hurried forth to conquer adjectives ; I
dug up lovely, even admirable ones, that henceforth
man cannot do without. I foraged on all hands in the
sixteenth century, to the horror of the subscribers to
18
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INTRODUCTION
the Theatre-Fran^ais, of members of the French
Academy, of Touquet-snuff-boxes and wan-faced bour¬
geois, as Petrus hath it. I returned with my basket
full, with sheaves and splendours. I put upon the
palette of style every hue of dawn and every tint of
sunset; I have given you back red, dishonoured by
political wire-pullers ; I have written poems in white
major, and when I saw that the result was good,
that the writers of my kith and kin were hastening
after me and that the professors were yowling in their
chairs, I formulated my famous axiom: c He whom
a thought, even the most complex, a vision, were it
the most apocalyptical, surprises unprovided with words
to render it, is not a writer.’ And the goats were
separated from the sheep, and the minions of Scribe
from the disciples of Hugo, in whom all genius re-
sides. Such was my part in the conquest.”
Never was Gautier surprised without a word.
Never did he lack just the right expression to pro¬
duce the effect he sought, whether of colour, of sound,
or of form. Two poems, among others, in this vol¬
ume, may be cited as examples of his marvellous
command of language, his keen discernment of the
exact value of each word, and his intensity of vision.
*9
*!*
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
They are the 44 Symphony in White Major ” and
44 The Obelisk in Luxor.” These may also serve as
instances of the absolute impossibility of rendering
into any other language the exquisite impression made
by the originals and the perfection of form which
marks them. The exigencies of English verse are
not compatible with the beauties of the French, and
the utmost artistic effort must fail to reproduce exactly
the infinitely strong yet delicate fashioning of the
stanzas, the wondrous variety of whiteness in the one,
the glow of intensest colour and light in the other.
The rhythm is perfect, so also the rime, and the music
of each poem is marvellous. Take these stanzas from
44 The Obelisk in Luxor” : —
“ Je veille, unique sentinelle
De ce grand palais devaste,
Dans la solitude eternelle,
En face de l'immensite.
“ A T horizon que rien ne borne,
Sterile, muet, infini,
Le desert sous le soleil morne,
Deroule son linceul jauni.
“ Au-dessus de la terre nue,
Le ciel, autre desert d’azur,
Ou jamais ne flotte une nue,
S’etale implacablement pur.
20
•i« <M» wi »£• tt? m? Tr? 4*
INTRODUCTION
“ Le Nil, dont Peau morte s’etame
D’une pellicule de plomb,
Luit, ride par l’hippopotame,
Sous un jour mat tombant d’aplomb ;
“ Et les crocodiles rapaces,
Sur le sable en feu des ilots,
Demi-cuits dans leurs carapaces,
Se pament avec des sanglots.
“Immobile sur son pied grele,
L’ibis, le bee dans son jabot,
Dechiffre au bout de quelque stele
Le cartouche sacre de Thot.”
How is it possible to reproduce by a translation into
any other European tongue just the effect attained here ?
Undoubtedly the meaning, the general idea, the im¬
pression of tremendous loneliness and sufFocating heat
may be, is conveyed, but the form escapes the most
skilful treatment and vanishes as the morning mist
before the hot sun of summer.
It is plain that the effort to translate a poet into
another tongue than his own is to court defeat at the
outset, yet it was impossible to present an edition of
Gautier to the public without including in it some part,
at least, of his verse.
One advantage the translation possesses: it proves
21
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
that Gautier was not so wholly devoid of ideas as
hostile critics, mayhap deaf to the singular charm of
his verse, have maintained. The poems in their Eng¬
lish dress interest; Gautier has delightful comparisons,
novel views of things, unexpected contrasts, and these
are not lost. Further, it is interesting to note how
subjects that would never strike the average mind as
susceptible of being turned into a vehicle for beautiful
verse are after all susceptible of poetic treatment if only
a thorough artist takes hold of them. u The Watch,”
“ Love Locks,” “ After Writing my Dramatic Review,”
and u A Pleasant Evening,” do not appear to be poeti¬
cal subjects, yet, in French at least, there is an un¬
deniable charm about every one of these poems, and
each is a splendid instance of difficulties surmounted,
apparently, with the greatest ease.
Gautier’s production in verse is comparatively limited.
His w Farewell to Poetry ” gives us the reason. The
incessant demands of the newspaper upon his time and
talent, the need of turning out a daily supply of copy
that increased instead of lessening, left him no leisure
for the worship of the Muse. Ere he entered upon
his career as a journalist, he had written more than one
graceful and even striking poem. These earlier pro-
22
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mms ms* fff mms mm mm mm mms mms ms mss mms ms mm mm mm mm ms ms mss mms mms mms
INTRODUCTION
ductions were necessarily in the purest Romanticist
taste, and the characteristics of that school are markedly
evident in this part of his work. Yet, already the
great artist that he was manifested himself, and there
are numerous passages of infinite beauty, wrought out
with utmost care. The subjects are drawn from the
plethoric storehouse of the new school — landscapes,
reminiscences of the beloved Middle Ages, so much in
fashion just then, dreams and reveries, sentimental
recollections, sunsets and picturesque effects, shudders
and orgies, ghastly contemplations of skeletons and
death’s-heads, paeans in honour of comrades or masters,
— in a word, all the stock in trade with which any
reader of the literature of that period is familiar.
The Preface is interesting, and deserves to be tran-
scribed in part, for already, in 1832, he holds to the
theory of Art for Art’s sake, and maintains the useful¬
ness of Beauty: —
€t To the utilitarian s, utopists, economists, Saint-Simonists
and others who may ask him what is the use of it all, he will
answer : What is the use of it ? It is beautiful. Is not that
sufficient ? It is beautiful, like flowers, and scents, and birds;
like everything man has been unable to divert to his own use
and to deprave.
23
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
(< As a general rule, the moment a thing becomes useful, it
ceases to be beautiful. It becomes merged in positive life;
it turns to prose from poetry; having been free, it becomes a
slave, — that is art, all art really. Art is liberty, luxury,
efflorescence ; it is the blossoming out of the soul in idleness.
Painting, sculpture, and music subserve no useful purpose what¬
ever. Gems carefully cut, unique trifles, uncommon orna-
ments are mere superfluities. Yet who would deliberately do
without them ? Happiness does not consist in the possession
of the indispensable ; enjoyment does not mean not suffering,
and the things one least needs are those that charm one most.
There are and there always will be artistic souls to whom the
paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, and the water-colours of
Boulanger and Decamps will appear more useful than railways
and steamships.”
He described the contents himself, and in so pic¬
turesque, so attractive a manner that the reader of the
present day is fain to read every one of the poems thus
announced:
“ There are, to begin with, little home scenes, sweet and
peaceful effects, small landscapes after the manner of the
Flemish, quiet in touch, somewhat subdued in tone, without
mighty mountains, boundless horizons, torrents, or cataracts.
Level plains, with cobalt blue distances; lowly hills up which
winds a path ; the smoke from a cot; a brook babbling under
the water-lilies; a bush covered with red berries; an ox-eye
24
«• «lw ^ 4y 4« 4^ *4* «4j
INTRODUCTION
daisy quivering dew-laden ; a passing cloud casting a wave of
shadow over the wheat; a stork settling on roof of Gothic
donjon. That is all; then, by way of imparting life to the
scene, a frog leaping through the reeds, a dragon-fly disport-
ing itself in a sunbeam, a lizard toasting itself in the sunshine,
a lark upspringing from the furrow, a thrush singing in the
hedgerow, a bee buzzing and garnering, — the remembrances
of six months spent in a lovely country district. Here and
there, as it were a dawning of budding youth, a longing, a
tear, a few words of love, a chaste sketch of a girl’s profile;
a purely childlike poetry, plump and dimpled, on which the
muscles do not as yet show.’ *
The poems themselves are already very well written
verse, with the feeling for colour, picturesqueness,
sonority, which is to become characteristic of Theo-
phile Gautier. The opening piece, u Meditation,”
is full of youthful freshness and of the sentiment, still
immature, of the brief life of all things on earth.
<c The Middle Ages ” reveals the strong hold which
that period had taken upon the imagination of the
writer and his contemporaries. “ A Landscape ” is
marked by the qualities of vividness and accurate de¬
scription which are to be still more evident in the
Spanish poems. In “ Wishes,” the sensation of colour
is almost overpowering, and Hugo himself had not
25
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MW •'W «M VIV III VIV MW *f« MW M* V|V MW VfV V«W VIV MV MW VIV MW V«V «|W WM *W W»
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
then anything more brilliant and powerful in this line.
u The Nightmare ” is interesting as an example of the
literature of putridity which had adepts and admirers,
but which did not long detain the poet, who has made
great fun of it in his u Daniel Jovard,” in which be
used by way of epigraph, the last four lines of this
composition. cc Sunset ” may well have inspired
Zola’s superb descriptions of the sunsets in Paris, in
cc l’GEuvre \ 99 and ccThe View,” together with other
poems in the same order, is an admirable bit of descrip¬
tive poetry well worthy of the writer who was to de¬
pict so truly and strikingly scenes in many lands.
“ Debauch ” is peculiar, but very Romanticist. It
should be taken in conjunction with the tale entitled
u The Bowl of Punch,” of which it is a sort of justifi¬
cation, while the last lines expressly declare Gautier’s
reasons for what may shock many people: —
“ It is poetry at least, a palette on which glow innumerable
different hues; something clear, unmistakable; something in
itself complete. It is colour, song, and verse ! ”
In later years, in the fulness of his talent and in the
deliberate proclamation of his views and beliefs, he will
repeat: u I am quite ready at times to have what is
26
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INTRODUCTION
rare at the cost of its being shocking, fantastic, and
e^ggerated.”
The most important of his earlier poetical works is
the “ semi-diabolical, semi-fashionable legend ” entitled
“ Albertus, or The Soul and Sin; a Theological
Legend,” written in 1831 and published the following
year. It is a strange, weird, and at the close, repulsive
story, purely imaginative, and in the same line of
thought as the famous “ Vampire,” which has appeared
in this edition. An old hag, a sorceress, a compounder
of philters and poisons, a caster of spells, a servant of
the devil, Veronica by name, dwells within a wood-
covered, ruinous hut, in the neighbourhood of a town
admirably painted in verse by Gautier. The descrip¬
tion of the beldame’s den is superb. Within this den
she rubs herself all over, at the witching hour of mid¬
night, with an unguent that removes wrinkles and every
mark of senility, and restores to her the bloom and
loveliness of youth. Thus transformed, she repairs to
Leyden, and there leads the life of the splendid courte-
sans of the Renaissance, which Gautier always de¬
lighted in portraying and referring to. She falls in
love with a genuinely Romanticist hero, Albertus,
whose portrait is thus limned for the reader: —
27
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«•* *•» mm *w •«• «m w* «r> w**i*«i»<S*»r»«**w****~«»*«*w«r*w*«nM «•
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
“ Foreign suns had shone upon his brow and gilded with a
layer of sunburn his naturally pale Italian skin. His hair,
rumpled by his fingers, fell on either side a forehead which
Gall would have ecstatically felt for six months, and on which
he would have written no less than a dozen treatises. It was
an imperial brow, an artist’s, a poet’s, and of itself made up
half the head ; ’t was broad and ample, borne down by inspi¬
ration, which, in every wrinkle furrowed not by age, conceals
some superhuman hope, some mighty thought, and it plainly
bore these words inscribed upon it: Force and Conviction.
The rest of the features corresponded with this grand brow.
Yet was there somewhat unpleasant about them, and though
faultless, one could have wished them different. Irony and
sarcasm rather than genius gleamed from them, and the lower
part of the face seemed to mock the upper. This combination
produced the strangest effect; one would have said a demon
writhing under an angel’s tread ; hell beneath the heavens.
Although he had fine eyes, Jong dark eyebrows growing finer
towards the temples, over the skin gliding as crawls a snake, a
fringe of quivering silky lashes, the lion-like glance, the fiery
flash that shot forth at times from the depths of those orbs,
made one involuntarily shudder and turn pale. The boldest
would have looked down when meeting the petrifying Medusa
glance he sought to make gentle. Over his stern lip, shadowed
at each end with a small mustache daintily waxed, a mocking
smile at times flitted; but his customary expression was one of
deep disdain.’ ’
28
4» *1+ Ty? tf? **1? Tr? TrT tf?Tv?
INTRODUCTION
It is with this darksome dandy that Veronica falls
desperately in love, and though at first he proves re¬
calcitrant, she manages to attract him to her house.
He yields to her desires, but as-midnight strikes, the
glorious beauty. resumes her hag shape and carries him
off on a broomstick to the witches5 sabbath, where the
most monstrous diversions are indulged in under the
presidency of Satan in person. The Devil sneezes.
cc God bless you,” unconsciously utters Albertus. And
straightway devil, witches, demons, sorcerers vanish
into thin air, and on the Appian Way peasants repair¬
ing to Rome in the early morn find the dead body of a
man, his back broken, his neck twisted. It is all that
is left of Albertus, and the poem ends with a mocking
reference to the morality which is not clearly discern¬
ible. But the poet has had his fun at the reader’s
expense; he has startled and possibly shocked him —
he has certainly tried to do so — he has introduced ex¬
quisite descriptions, he has indulged in witty moralising
that recalls Musset’s in cc Namouna,” he has written
much beautiful verse — and he is satisfied. If the
reader is not — no matter. The object of poetry is
not to satisfy the wan-faced, smooth-shaven bourgeois,
the stupid Philistine.
29
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
“The Comedy of Death ” appeared in 1838, but
parts of it had been composed as early as 1831.
There was prefixed to it the piece entitled “ The
Portal/’ and the poem itself is divided into two parts,
“ Life in Death/’ and “ Death in Life.” The poet
has wandered into a graveyard on All Saints’ Day, and
hears a conversation between a dead woman and the
worm that has started to devour her flesh. Returning
home, Raphael Sanzio appears to him, and bewails the
disappearance of art from the world. Gautier then
proceeds into the depths, and Faust tells him that
science ends in nothingness, and that naught is worth
having on earth save love. There then appears
Don Juan, who has known all the joy s that love and
voluptuousness can bestow upon man, and his conclu¬
sion is that love is deadly, and that man should rather
seek knowledge if he desires to enjoy real life. Thus
the poet is left in uncertainty.
Here again are fine passages, and admirable examples
of Gautier’s powers as a writer of verse. The subject
itself is not new, nor is the mode of treatment particu¬
larly striking. The main preoccupation of the author
is already to turn out beautiful lines, and in this he
succeeds.
3°
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INTRODUCTION
The Spanish poems contain many superb pieces,
and here one may revel in the perfection of the descrip¬
tion, in the glow and splendour of colour, in the
sharpness and accuracy of line and contour, in the
faithful and intense reproduction of effects. They are
followed by a number of poems written at different
intervals and bearing upon a variety of subjects ; every
one of them a model of prosody. And finally come
the u Enamels and Cameos.”
This is the typical collection of Gautier’s verse. It
first appeared in 1852, and subsequently passed through
several editions. It is the authoris most characteristic
work; that on which he has bestowed most pains,
fashioning each poem with infinite care, until he had
wrought out a perfect form. In his account of the
a Progress of French Poetry since 1830,” he thus
states the end he sought to attain : —
<e The title, * Enamels and Cameos,’ indicates my intention
to treat slight subjects within a restricted space, sometimes with
the brilliant colours of enamel upon a plate of gold or copper,
sometimes by using the cutter’s wheel upon gems such as agate,
cornelian, or onyx. Every poem was to be a medallion fit to
be set in the cover of a casket, or a seal to be worn on the
finger — something recalling the copies of antique medals one
■§* d!» db w*tf* w tf» ^ mJb tf? tir tl? tf? tl? tl? tf? fl? fl? fl?
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
sees in the studios of painters or sculptors. But I did not
intend to deny myself the pleasure of carving on the whitish
or reddish layers of the gems a clean modern profile, or of
dressing the hair of Parisian Greek women seen at a recent
ball after the fashions of Syracusan medals. The Alexandrine
verse being too mighty for such modest ambition, I re-used
the octosyllabic verse only, which I made over, polished and
chiselled with all possible care. This form, by no means a
new one, but renewed by the rhythm, the richness of the
rimes, and the accuracy to which any workman may attain
when he patiently and leisurely works out some small task,
was rather well received, and octosyllabic verse in quatrains
became for a time a favourite subject for practice by young
poets.”
It has been found impossible to preserve in the
translation the form itself, for the reasons enunciated in
another part of this introduction. Nor was it possible
to reproduce the delicacy of the work in French so
that the reader might judge for himself of the merit
of Gautier as an artist. Mrs. Lee, indeed, considers
her work simply a free translation, and it is in this
light that it should be judged.
F. C. DE SlJMICHRAST.
32
•I**!* *1* 4* 4* 4* 41* 4* 4* *f« «§••£• 4«4»4*4«4* 4* 4*4«
THE GOD AND T H E OPAL
TO TH E 0 P HIL E GAUTIER
Grat caught he from the cloud, and green from earthy
And from a human breast the fire he drewy
And life and death were blended in one dew.
A sunbeam golden with the morning9s mirth,
A iv any salt phantom from the seay a girth
Of silver from the moony shot colour through
The soul invisibley until it grew
To fulnessy and the Opal Song had birth.
And then the god became the artisan.
With rarest skill he made his gem to gloWy
Carving and shaping it to beauty such
That down the cycles it shall gleam to many
And evermore man9s wonderment shall know
The perfect finishy the immortal touch.
Agnes Lee.
En am e I s and Cameos
and Other Poems
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ENAMELS and CAMEOS
and 0 THE R P 0 E M S
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PREFACE
When empires lay riven apart,
Fared Goethe at battle time’s thunder
To fragrant oases of art,
To weave his Divan into wonder.
Leaving Shakespeare, he pondered the note
Of Nisami, and heard in his leisure
The hoopoe’s weird monody float,
And set it to soft Orient measure.
As Goethe at Weimar delayed
And dreamed in the fair garden closes,
And, questing in sun or in shade,
With Hafiz plucked redolent roses, —
I, closed from the tempest that shook
My window with fury impassioned,
Sat dreaming, and, safe in my nook,
Enamels and Cameos fashioned.
37
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
AFFINITY
A PANTHEISTIC MADRIGAL
On an ancient temple gleaming,
Two great blocks of marble high
Thrice a thousand years lay dreaming
Dreams against an Attic sky.
Set within one silver whiteness,
Two wave-tears for Venus shed,
Two fair pearls of orient brightness,
Through the waste of water sped.
In the Generalife’s fresh closes,
By a Moorish light illumed,
Two delicious, tender roses
By a fountain met and bloomed.
In the balm of May’s bright weather,
Where the domes of Venice rise,
Lighted on Love’s nest together
Two pale doves from azure skies.
38
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AFFINITY
All things vanish into wonder,
Marble, pearl, dove, rose on tree,
Pearl shall melt and marble sunder,
Flower shall fade and bird shall flee !
Not a smallest part but lowly
Through the crucible must pass,
Where all shapes are molten slowly
In the universal mass.
Then as gradual Time discloses
Marbles melt to whitest skin,
Roses red to lips of roses,
And anew the lives begin.
And again the doves are plighted
In the hearts of lovers, while
Ocean pearls are reunited,
Set within a coral smile.
Thus aifinity comes welling;
By its beauty everywhere
Soul a sister-soul foretelling,
All awakened and aware.
39
^ 4» 4«4*
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Quickened by a zephyr sunny,
Or a perfume, subtlewise,
As the bee unto the honey,
Atom unto atom flies.
And remembered are the hours
In the temple, down the blue,
And the talks amid the flowers,
Near the fount of crystal dew,
Kisses warm, and on the royal
Golden domes the wings that beat;
For the atoms all are loyal,
And again must love and greet.
Love forgotten wakes imperious,
For the past is never dead,
And the rose with joy delirious
Breathes again from lips of red.
Marble on the flesh of maiden
Feels its own white bloom, and faint
Knows the dove a murmur laden
With the echo of its plaint,
40
*4* *4* 4* 4* 4* 4* 4*4*^4*4*4*4»4«>|<4«4y4* 4* *|y »|«
AFFINITY
Till resistance giveth over,
And the barriers fall undone,
And the stranger is the lover,
And aflinity hath won !
You before whose face I tremble,
Say — what past we know not of
Called our fates to reassemble,—
Pearl or marble, rose or dove ?
#4* 4» *4* *4* *4* 4* «4* 4»4»4»4»4*4*4«4»>l«4»4* 4* 4j4j
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE POEM OF WOMAN
MARBLE OF PAROS
Unto the dreamer once whose heart she had,
As she was showing forth her treasures rare,
Minded she was to read a poem fair,
The poem of her form with beauty glad.
First stately and superb she swept before
His gazing eyes, with high, Infanta mien,
Trailing behind her all the splendid sheen
Of nacarat floods of velvet that she wore.
Thus at the opera had he watched her bend
From out her box, her body one bright flame,
When all the air was ringing with her name,
And every song made her fair praise ascend.
Then had her art another way, for look!
The weighty velvet dropped, and in its place
A pale and cloudy fabric proved the grace
Of every line her glowing body took;
42
THE POEM OF WOMAN
Till softly from her shoulder marble-sweet
The veil diaphanous fell, the folds whereof
Came fluttering downward like a snowy dove,
To nestle in the wonder of her feet.
She posed as for Apelles pridefully,
A lovely flesh and marble womanhood: —
Anadyomene, she upright stood
Naked upon the margent of the sea.
Fairer than anv foam-drops crystalline,
Great pearls of Venice lay upon her breast,
Jewels of milky wonder lightly pressed
Upon the cool, fresh satin of her skin.
Exhaustless as the waves that kiss the brim,
Under the gleaming moon of many moods,
Were all the strophes of her attitudes.
What fascination sang her beauty’s hymn!
But soon, grown weary of an art antique,
Of Phidias and of Venus, lo ! again
Within another new and plastic strain
She grouped her charms un veiled and unique.
43
'k^s & i: & •k & 4? sfesS:
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Upon a cashmere opulently spread,
Sultana of Seraglio then she lay,
Laughing unto her little mirror gay,
That laughed again with lips of coral red;
The indolent, soft Georgian, posturing
With her long, supple narghile at lip,
Showing the glorious fashion of her hip,
One foot upon the other languishing.
And, like to Ingres’ Odalisque, supine,
Defying prurient modesty turned she,
Dlsplaying in her beauty candidly
Wonder of curve and purity of line.
But hence, thou idle Odalisque ! for life
Hath now its own fair picture to display —
The diamond in its rare effulgent ray, —
Beauty in Love hath reached its blossom rife.
She sways her body, bendeth back her head.
Her breathing comes more subtle and more fast.
Rocked in her dream’s alluring arms, at last
Down hath she fallen upon her costly bed.
44
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THE POEM OF WOMAN
Her eyelids beat like fluttering pinions lit
Upon the darkened silver of her eyes.
Her bright, voluptuous glances upward rise
Intothe vague and nacreous infinite.
Deck her with sweet, lush violets, instead
Of death-flowers with their every pearl a tear;
Scatter their purple clusters on her bier,
Who of her being’s ecstasy lies dead.
*
And bear her very gently to her tomb —
Her bed of white. There let the poet stay,
Long hours upon his bended knees to pray,
When night shall close around the funeral room.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
A STUDY OF H A N D S
I
IMPERIA
A sculptor showed to me one day
A hand, a Cleopatra’s lure,
Or an Aspasia’s, cast in clay,
Of masterwork a fragment pure,
Seized in a snowy kiss, and fair
As lily in the argent rise
Of dawn, like whitest poem there
Its beauty lay before mine eyes,
Bright in its pallor lustreless,
Reposing on a velvet bed,
Its fingers, weighted with their dress
Of jewels, delicately spread.
A little parted lay the thumb,
Showing the undulating line,
Beautiful, graceful, subtlesome,
Of its proud contour Florentine.
46
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A STUDY OF HANDS
Strange hand ! I wonder if it toyed
In silken locks of Don Juan,
Or on a gem-bright caftan joyed
To stroke the beard of some soldanj
Whether, as courtesan or queen,
Within its fingers fair and slight
Was pleasure’s gilded sceptre seen,
Or sceptre of a royal might!
But sweet and firm it must have lain
Full oft its touch of power rare *
Upon the curling lion-mane
Of some chimera caught in air.
Imperial, idle fantasy,
And love of soft, luxurious things,
Frenzies of passion, wondrous, free,
Impossible dream-flutterings !
Romances wild, and poesy
Of hasheech and of wine, vain speeds
Beneath Bohemia’s brilliant slcy
On unrestrained and maddened steeds!
47
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
All these were in the lines of it,
Of that white book with magic scrolled,
Where ciphers stood, by Venus writ,
That Love had trembled to behold.
48
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A STUDY OF HANDS
II
LACENAIRE
Strange contrast was the severed hand
Of Lacenaire, the murderer dead,
Soaked in a powerful essence, and
Near by upon a cushion spread.
Letting a morbid fancy win,
I touched, despite my loathing sane,
The cold, hair-covered, slimy skin,
Not yet washed clean of deathly stain.
Yellow, uncanny, mummified,
Like to a Pharaoh’s hand it lay,
And stretched its faun-shaped fingers wide,
Crisp with temptation’s awful play;
As though an itch for flesh and gold
Lured them to horrors yet to be,
Twisting them roughly as of old,
Teasing their immobility.
4
49
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
There every vice and passion’s whim
Had seamed the flesh abundantly
With hideous hieroglyphs and grim,
That headsmen read with fluency.
There plainly writ in furrows fell,
I saw the deeds of sin and soil,
Scorchings from every fiery hell
Wherein corruptions seethe and boil.
There was a track of Capri’s vice,
Of lupanars and gaming-scores,
Fretted with wine and blood and dice,
Like ennui of old emperors.
Supple and fierce, it had some dower
Of grace unto the searching eye,
Some brutal fascination’s power,
A gladiator’s mastery.
Cold aristocracy of crime !
No plane inured, no hammer spent
The hand whose task for every time
Had but the knife for implement.
50
A STUD Y OF H AN D S
The hand of Lacenaire ! No clue
Therein to labour’s honest pride !
False poet, and assassin true,
The Manfred of the gutter died !
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
YARIATIONS ON THE CAR¬
NIVAL OF VENICE
I
ON THE STREET
There is a popular old air
That every fiddler loves to scrape.
’T is wrung from organs everywhere,
To barking dog with wrath agape.
The music-box has registered
Its phrases garbled and reviled.
’T is classic to the household bird;
Grandmother learned it as a child.
The trumpet and the clarinet,
In dusty gardens of the dance,
Blow it to clerk and gay grisette,
In shrill, unlovely resonance.
And of a Sunday swarm the folk
Under the honeysuckle vine,
Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke,
The sun, the melody, the wine.
52
VARIATIONS, CARNIVAL OF VENICE
It lurks within the wry bassoon
The blind man plays, the porch beneath.
His poodle whimpers low the tune,
And holds the cup between its teeth.
The players of the light guitar,
Decked with their flimsy tartans, pale,
With voices sad, where feasters are,
Through coffee-houses fling its wail.
Great Paganini at a sign,
One night, as with a needle* s gleam,
Picked up with end of bow divine
The little antiquated theme,
And, threading it with fingers deft,
He broidered it with colours bright,
Till up and down the faded weft
Ran golden arabesques of light.
53
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
II
ON THE LAGOONS
Tra la, tra la, la, la, la, — who
Knows not the theme’s soft spell ?
Or sad or light or mock or true,
Our mothers loved it well.
The Carnival of Venice! Long
Adown canals it came,
Till, wafted on a zephyr’s song,
The ballet kept its fame.
I seem, whene’er its phrase I hear,
A gondola to view,
With prow voluted, black and clear,
Slip o’er the water blue;
To see, her bosom covered o’er
With pearls, her body suave,
The Adriatic Venus soar
On sound’s chromatic wave.
54
VARIATIONS, CARNIVAL OF VENICE
The domes that on the water dwell
Pursue the melody
In clear-drawn cadences, and swell
Like breasts of love that sigh.
My chains around a pillar cast,
I land before a fair
And rosy-pale facade at last,
Upon a marble stair.
Oh ! all dear Venice with her towers,
Her boats, her masquers boon,
Her sweet chagrins, her mad, gay hours,
Throbs in that ancient tune.
The tenuous, vibrant chords that smite,
Rebuild in subtle way
The city joyous, free and light
Of Canaletto’s day !
55
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
III
CARNIVAL
Venice robes her for the ball;
Decked with spangles bright,
Multi-coloured Carnival
Teems with laughter light.
Harlequin with negro mask,
Tights of serpent hue,
Beateth with a note fantasque
His Cassander true.
Flapping loose his long, white sleeve,
Like a penguin spread,
Through a subtle semibreve
Pierrot thrusts his head.
Sleek Bologna’s doctor goes
Maundering on a bass.
Punchinello finds for nose
Quaver on his face.
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VARIATIONS, CARNIVAL OF VENICE
Hurtling Trivellino fine,
On a trill intent,
Scaramouch to Columbine
Gives the fan she lent.
Gliding to the tune, I mark
One veiled figure rise,
While through satin lashes dark
Luring gleam her eyes.
Tender little edge of lace,
Heaving with her breath !
w Under is her own dear face ! ”
An arpeggio saith.
And beneath the mask I know
Bloom of rosy lips,
And the patch on chin of snow,
As she by me trips !
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
IV
MOONLIGHT
Amid the chatter gay and mad
Saint Mark to Lido wafts, a tune
Like as a rocket riseth glad
As fountain riseth to the moon.
But in that air with laughter stirred,
That shakes its bells far out to sea,
Regret, a little stifled bird,
Mingles its frail sob audibly.
And in a mist of memory clad,
Like dream well-nigh effaced, I view
The sweet Beloved, fair and sad,
Of dear, long-vanished days I knew.
Ah, pale she is ! My soul in tears
An April day remembers yet: —
We sought the violets by the meres,
And in the grass our fingers met.
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VARIATIONS, CARNIVAL OF VENICE
The vibrant note of violin
Is the child voice that struck my heart,
Exquisite, plaintive, argentine,
With all the anguish of its dart.
So sweetly, falsely, doth it steal,
So cruel, yet so tender, too,
So cold, so burning, that I feel
A deadly pleasure pierce me through;
Until my heart, an archway deep
Whose waters feed the fountain’s lip,
Lets tears of blood in silence weep
Into my bosom drip by drip.
O Carnival of Venice ! — theme
So chilling sad, yet ever warm!
Where laughter toucheth tears supreme, —
How hast thou hurt me with thy charm !
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
SYMPHONY IN WHITE
MAJOR
In the Northern tales of eld,
From the Rhine’s escarpments high
Swan-women radiant were beheld,
Singing and floating by,
Or, leaving their plumage bright
On a bough that was bending low,
Displaying skin more gleaming white
Than the white of their down of snow.
At times one comes our way, —
Of all she is pallidest,
White as the moonbeam’s shivering ray
On a glacier’s icy crest.
Her boreal bloom doth win
Our eyes to feasting rare
On rich delight of nacreous skin,
And a wealth of whiteness fair.
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SYMPHONY IN WHITE MAJOR
Her rounded breasts, pale globes
Of snow, wage insolent war
With her camellias and her robes
> Of whiteness nebular.
In such white wars supreme
She wins, and weft and flower
Leave their revenge’s right, and seem
Yellowed with envy’s hour.
On the white of her shoulder bare,
Whose marble Paros lends,
As through the Polar twilight fair,
Invisible frost descends.
What beaming virgin snow,
What pith a reed within,
What Host, what taper, did bestow
The white of her matchless skin ?
Was she made of a milky drop
On the blue of a winter heaven ?
The lily-blow on the stem’s green top ?
The foam of the sea at even ?
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Of the marble still and cold,
Wherein the great gods dwell ?
Of creamy opal gems that hold
Faint fires of mystic spell ?
Or the organ’s ivory keys ?
Her winged fingers oft
Like butterflies flit over these,
With kisses pending soft.
Of the ermine’s stainless fold,
Whose white, warm touches fall
On shivering shoulders and on bold,
Bright shields armorial ?
Of the phantom flowers of frost
Enscrolled on the window clear ?
Of the fountain drop in the chill air lost,
An Undine’s frozen tear ?
Of May bent low with the sweets
Of her bountiful white-thorn bloom ?
Of alabaster that repeats
The pallor of grief and gloom ?
62
SYMPHONY IN WHITE MAJOR
Of the feathers of doves that slip
And snow on the gable steep ?
Of slow stalactite’s tear-white drip
In cavernous places deep ?
Came she from Greenland floes
With Seraphita forth ?
Is she Madonna of the Snows ?
A sphinx of the icy North,
Sphinx buried by avalanche,
The glacier’s guardian ghost,
Whose frozen secrets hide and blanch
In her white heart innermost ?
What magic of what far name
Shall this pale soul ignite ?
Ah! who shall flush with rose’s flame
This cold, implacable white ?
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
COQUETRY IN DEATH
I beg ye grant, when low I lie,
Before ye close my coffin-bed,
A little black beneath mine eye,
And on my cheek a touch of red !
Ah, make me beautiful as now !
For I would be upon my bier,
As on the night of his avow
Charming and bloom ful, gay and dear.
For me no linen winding-sheet!
But gown me very grand and bright.
Bring forth my frock of muslin sweet,
With many ruffles soft and white.
My favourite frock ! I wore it well,
Who wore it at love’s flowering.
And since his look upon it fell,
I Ve kept it as a sacred thing.
For me no funeral coronet,
No tear-embroidered cushion place;
But o ’er my fair lace pillow let
My hair droop free about my face.
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COQUETRY IN DEATH
Dear pillow ! Often did it mark,
In mad, sweet nights our brows unlit,
And, all within the gondola dark,
Did count our kisses infinite.
About my waxen hands supine,
Folded in prayer at life’s deep gloam,
My rosary of opals twine,
Blessed by His Holiness at Rome.
I ’ll finger it, when bedded cold
Where never one shall rise. How oft
His lips upon my lips have told
A Pater and an Ave soft!
5 65
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
HEART’S DIAMOND
Every lover deep hath set
In a sacred nook apart
Some dear token for the heart
In its hope or its regret.
One hath nested safe away
Blackest ringlet ever seen,
Over which an azure sheen
Lieth, as on wing of jay.
One from shoulder pale as milk
Took a tress more golden-fine
Than the threads that softly shine
In the silk-worm’s wonder-silk.
In its hiding mystical,
Memory’s reliquary sweet,
Glances of another greet
Gloves with fingers white and small.
And another yet may list
To inhale a faint perfume
Of the violets from her room,
Freshly given — faded, kissed.
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HEART’S DIAMOND
Here a slipper’s curving grace
One with sighing treasureth.
There another guards a breath
In a mask’s light edge of lace.
I’ve no slipper to revere,
Neither glove nor tress nor flower;
But I cherish for love’s dower
A divine, adored tear, —
Fallen from the blue above,
Clearest dew, heaven’s drop for me,
Pearl dissolved secretly
In the chalice of my love.
To mine eyes the dim-worn dew
Beam s, a gem of Orient worth,
Standing from the parchment forth,
Diamond of a sapphire blue, —
Steadfast, lustreful and deep !
Tear that fell unhoped, unsought,
On a song my soul once wrought,
From an eye unused to weep.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
SPRING’S FIRST SMILE
While up and down the earth men pant and plod,
March, laughing at the showers and days unsteady,
And whispering secret orders to the sod,
For Spring makes ready.
And slyly when the world is sleeping yet,
He smooths out collars for the Easter daisies,
And fashions golden buttercups to set
In woodland mazes.
Coif-maker fine, he worketh well his plan.
Orchard and vineyard for his touch are prouder.
From a white swan he hath a down to fan
The trees with powder.
While Nature still upon her couch doth lean,
Stealthily hies he to the garden closes,
And laces in their bodices of green
Pale buds of roses.
Composing his solfeggios in the shade,
He whistles them to blackbirds as he treadeth,
And violets in the wood, and in the glade
Snowdrops, he spreadeth.
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SPRING’S FIRST SMILE
Where for the restless stag the fountain wells,
His hidden hand glides soft amid the cresses,
And scatters lily-of-the-valley bells,
In silver dresses.
He sinks the sweet, vermilion strawberries
Deep in the grasses for thy roving fingers,
And garlands leaflets for thy forehead’s ease,
When sunshine lingers.
When, labour done, he must away, turns he
On April’s threshold from his fair creating,
And calleth unto Spring: wCome,Spring — for see,
The woods are waiting ! ”
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
CONTRALTO
There lies within a great museum’s hall,
Upon a snowy bed of carven stone,
A statue ever strange and mystical,
With some fair fascination all its own.
And is it youth or is it maiden sweet,
A goddess or a god come down to sway ?
Love fearful, hesitating, turns his feet,
Nor any word’s avowal will betray.
Sideways it lieth, with averted face,
Stretching its lovely limbs, half mischievous,
Unto the curious crowd, an idle grace
Lighting its marble form luxurious.
For fashioning of its evil beauty brought
The sexes twain each one its magic dower.
Man whispers “ Aphrodite! ” in his thought,
And woman u Eros! ” wondering at its power.
Uncertain sex and certain grace, that seem
To melt forever in a fountain’s kiss,
Waters that whelm the body as they gleam
And merge, and it is one with Salmacis.
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CONTRALTO
Ardent chimera, effort venturesome
Of Art and Pleasure — figure fanciful!
Into thy presence with delight I come,
Loving thy beauty strange and multiple.
Though I may never close to thee draw nigh,
How often have my glances pierced the taut,
Straight fold of thine austerest drapery,
Fast at the end about thine ankle caught!
O dream of poet passing every bound!
My thought hath built a fancy of thy form,
Till it is molten into silver sound,
And boy and girl are one in cadence warm.
O tone divine, O richest tone of earth,
The beautiful, bright statue’s counterpart!
Contralto, thou fantastical of birth,
The voice’s own Hermaphrodite thou art!
Thou art the plaintive dove, the linnet rare,
Perched on one rose tree, mellow in one note.
Thou art fair Juliet and Romeo fair,
Singing across the night with one warm throat.
71
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Thou art the young wife of the castellan,
Chaffing an amorous page below her bower, —
Upon her bal cony the lady wan,
The lover at the base of her high tower.
Thou art the yellow butterfly that swings,
Pursuing soft a butterfly of snow,
In spiral flights and subtle traversings,
One winging high, the other winging low ;
The angel Sitting up and down the gold
. Of the bright stair’s aerial extent,
The bell in whose alloy of mighty mould
Are voice of bronze and voice of silver blent
Yea, melody and harmony art thou,
Song with its true accompaniment, and grace
Matched unto force, — the woman plighting vow
To her Beloved with a close embrace;
Or thou art Cinderella doomed to spend
Her night before the embers of the fire,
Deep in a conversation with her friend,
The cricket, as the latter hours expire;
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CONTRALTO
Or Arsaces, the great and valorous,
Waging his righteous battle for a realm,
Or Tancred with his breastplate luminous,
Cuirassed and splendid with his sword and helm;
Or Desdemona with her willow song,
Zerlina laughing at Mazetto, or
Malcolm, his plaid upon his shoulder strong.
Thee, O thou dear Contralto, I adore!
For these thou art, thou dearest charm of each,
O fair Contralto, double-throated dove!
The Kaled of a Lara, for thy speech,
Thou mightest, like the lost Gulnare, prove, —
In whose heart-stirring, passionate caress
In one wild, tremulous note there blend and mount
A woman’s sigh of plaintive tenderness,
And virile accents from a firmer fount.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
EYES OF BLUE
A woman, mystic, sweet,
Whose beauty draws my soul,
Stands silent where the fleet
And singing waters roll.
Her eyes, the mirrored note
Of heaven, merge heaven’s blue
Bestarred of lights remote,
With the sea’s glaucous hue.
Within their languor set,
Smiles sadness infinite.
Tears make the sparkles wet,
And tender grows the light.
Like sea-gulls from aloft
That graze the ocean free,
Her lashes flutter soft
Upon an azure sea.
As slumbering treasures drowned
Send shimmers lightly up,
Gleams through the tide profound
The King of Thule’s cup.
74
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EYES OF BLUE
Athwart the weedy swirl
Brilliant, the waves upon,
Shine Cleopatra’s pearl,
And ring of Solomon.
The crown to ocean cast,
That Schiller showed to us,
Still under sea caught fast,
Beams clear and luminous.
A magic in that gaze
Draws me, mad venturer!
Thus mermaid’s magic ways
Drew Harold Haarfager.
And all my soul unquelled
Adown the gulf betrayed
Dives, to the quest impelled
Of some elusive shade.
The siren fitfully
Displays her body’s gleam,
Her breast and arms that ply
Through waves of amorous dream.
75
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
The water heaves and falls,
Like breasts with passion’s breath.
The breeze insistent calls
To me, and murmureth:
Come to my pearly bed !
My ocean arms shall slip
About thee : salt shall spread
To honey on thy lip !
Oh, let the billows link
Above us ! Thou shalt, warm,
From cup of kisses drink
Oblivion of the storm ! ”
Thus sighs the glance that sweeps
From out those sea-blue gates,
Till heart down treacherous deeps
The hymen consummates.
76
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THE TOREADOR’S SERENADE
THE TOREADOR’S SERENADE
RONDALLA
Child with airs imperial,
Dove with falcon’s eyes for me
Whom thou hatest, — come I shall
Underneath thy balcony !
There, my foot upon the stone,
I shall twang my chords with grace,
Till thy window-pane hath shone
With thy lamplight and thy face.
Let no lad with his guitar
Strum adown the bordering ways.
Mine the road to watch and bar,
Mine alone to sing thy praise.
Let the first my courage brave.
He shall lose his ears, egad !
Who shall howl his love and rave
In a couplet good or bad.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Restless doth my dagger lie.
Come ! who’ll venture its rebuff?
Who would wear for every sigh
Blood’s red flower upon his ruff?
Blood grows weary of its veins ;
For it yearns to be displayed.
Night is ominous with rains.
Haste, ye cowards, back to shade !
On, thou braggart, else aroint!
Well thy forearm cover thou.
On ! and with my dagger’s point
Let me write upon thy brow.
Let them come, alone, in mass:
Firm of foot I hide my place.
For thy glory, as they pass,
Would I slit each paltry face.
O’er the gutter ere thy clear,
Snowy feet shall be defiled,
By the Rood ! a bridge I ’ll rear
With the bones of gallants wild.
—
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THE TOREADOR*S SERENADE
I would slay, thy love to wear,
Any foe, yea, even proud
Satan’s very self to dare,
So thy sheets became my shroud.
Sightless window, deafened door!
Wilt thou never heed my sounds ?
Like a wounded bull I roar,
Maddening the haying hounds.
Drive at least a poor nail then,
Where my heart may hang inert.
For I want it not again,
With its madness and its hurt!
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
NOSTALGIA OF THE OBELISKS
THE OBELISK IN PARIS
Distant from my native land,
Ever dull with ennui’s pain,
Lonely monolith I stand,
In the snow and frost and rain.
And my shaft, once burnt to red
In a flaming heaven’s glare,
Taketh on a pallor dead
In this never azure air.
Oh, to stand again before
Luxor’s pylons, and the dear,
Grim Colossi! — be once more
My vermilion brother near !
Oh, to pierce the changeless blue,
Where of old my peak upwon,
With my shadow sharp and true
Trace the footsteps of the sun !
—
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NOSTALGIA OF THE OBELISKS
Once, O Rameses ! my tall mass
Not the ages could destroy.
But it fell cut down like grass.
Paris took it for a toy.
Now my granite form behold:
Sentinel the livelong day
Twixt a spurious temple old,
And the Chambre des Deputes !
On the spot where Louis Seize
Died, they set me, meaningless,
With my secret which outweighs
Cycles of forgetfulness.
Sparrows lean defile my head,
Where the ibis used to light,
And the fierce gypaetus spread
Talons gold and plumage white.
And the Seine, the drip of street,
Unclean river, crime’s abyss,
Now befouls mine ancient feet,
Which the Nile was wont to kiss:
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Hoary Nile that, crowned and stern,
To its lotus-Iaden shores
From its ever bended urn
Crocodiles for gudgeon pours!
Golden chariots gem-belit
Of the Pharaohs’ pageanting
Grazed my side the cab-wheels hit,
Bearing out the last poor king.
By my granite shape of yore
Passed the priests, with stately pschent,
And the mystic boat upbore,
Emblemed and magnificent.
But to-day, profane and wan,
Camped between two fountains wide,
I behold the courtesan
In her carriage lounge with pride*
From the first of year to last
I must see the vulgar show —
Solons to the Council passed,
Lovers to the woods that go!
82
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NOSTALGIA OF THE OBELISKS
Oh, what skeletons abhorred,
Hence, an hundred years, this race!
Couched, unbandaged, on a board,
In a nailed coffin’s place.
Never hypogeum kind,
Safe from foul corruption’s fear;
Never hall where century-lined
Generations disappear!
Sacred soil of hieroglyph,
And of sacerdotal laws,
Where the Sphinx is waiting stiff,
Sharpening on the stone its claws,—
Soil of crypt where echoes part,
Where the vulture swoopeth free,
All my being, — all my heart,
, O mine Egypt, weeps for thee!
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE OBELISK IN LUXOR
Where the wasted columns brood,
Lonely sentinel stand I,
In eternal solitude
Facing all infinity.
Dumb, with beauty unendowed,
To the horizon limitless
Spreads earth’s desert like a shroud
Stained by yellow suns that press.
While above it, blue and clean,
Is another desert cast —
Sky where cloud is never seen,
Pure, implacable, and vast.
And the Nile’s great water-course
Glazed with leaden pellicle
Wrinkled by the river-horse
Gleameth dead, unlustreful.
All about the flaming isles,
By a turbid water spanned,
Hot, rapacious crocodiles
Swoon and sob upon the sand.
_
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NOSTALGIA OF THE OBELISKS
Perching motionless, alone,
Ibis, bird of classic fame,
From a carven slab of stone
Reads the moon-god’s sacred name.
Jackals howl, hyenas grin,
Famished hawks descend and cry.
Down the heavy air they spin,
Commas black against the sky.
These the sounds of solitude,
Where the sphinxes yawn and doze,
Dull and passionless of mood,
Weary of their endless pose.
Child of sand’s reflected shine,
And of sun-rays fiercely bent,
Is there ennui like to thine,
Spleen of luminous Orient ?
Thou it was cried “ Halt! ” of yore
To satiety of kings.
Thou hast crushed me more and more
With thine awful weight of wings.
85
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Here no zephyr of the sea
Wipes the tears from skies that fill.
Time himself leans wearily
On the palaces long still.
Naught shall touch the features terse
Of this dull, eternal spot.
In this changing universe,
Only Egypt changeth not!
When the ennui never ends,
And I yearn a friend to hold,
I’ve the fellahs, mummies, friends,
Of the dynasties of old.
I behold a pillar pale,
Ora chipped Colossus note,
Watch a distant, gleaming sail
Up and down the Nile afloat.
Oh, to seek my brothers side,
In a Paris wondrous, grand,
With his stately form to bide,
In the public place to stand!
86
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NOSTALGIA OF THE OBELISKS
For he looks on living men,
And th ey scan his pictures wrought
By an hieratic pen,
To be read by vision-thought.
Fountains fair as amethyst
On his granite lightly pour
All their irisated mist.
He is growing young once more.
Ah! yet he and I had birth
From Syene’s veins of red.
But I keep my spot of earth.
He is living. I am dead.
87
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
VETERANS OF THE OLD
GUARD
(December 15)
Driven by ennui from my room,
I walked along the Boulevard.
’T was in December’s mist and gloom.
A bitter wind was blowing hard.
And there I saw — strange thing to see! —
In drizzle and in daylight drear,
From out their dark abodes let free,
Dim, spectral shadow-shapes appear.
Yet ’t is by night’s uncanny hours,
By pallid German moonbeams cast
On old dilapidated towers,
That ghosts are wont to wander past.
It is by night’s effulgent star
In dripping robes that elves intrigue
To bear beneath the nenuphar
Their dancer dead of his fatigue.
88
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VETERANS OF THE OLD GUARD
At night’s mysterious tide hath been
The great review — of ballad writs —
Wherein the Emperor, dimly seen,
Numbered the shades of Austerlitz.
But phantoms near the Gymnase ? — yea,
And wet and miry phantoms, too,
And close to the Varietes,
And not a shroud to trick the view !
With yellow teeth and stained dress,
And mossy skull and pierced shoon,
Paris—Montmartre — behold it press,—
Death in the very light of noon !
Ah, ’t is a picture to be seen !
Three veteran ghosts in uniform
Of the Old Guard, and, spare and lean,
Two ghost-hussars in daylight’s storm.
The lithograph, you would surmise,
Wherein one ray shines down upon
The dead, that Raffet deifies,
That pass and shout u Napoleon !99
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
No dead are these, whom nightly drum
May rouse to battle fires that burn,
But stragglers of the Old Guard, come
To celebrate the grand return !
Since fighting in the fight supreme,
One has grown thin, another stout;
The coats that fitted once now seem
Too small, too loose, or draggled out.
O epic rags ! O tatters light,
Starred with a cross ! Heroic things
Of ridicule, ye gleam more bright,
More beautiful than robes of kings!
Limp feathers fluttering adorn
The tawny colbacks worn and grim.
The bullet and the moth have torn
And riddled well the dolmans dim.
Their leathern breeches loosely hang
In furrows on their lank thigh-bones,
Their rusty sabres drag and clang,
As heavily they scrape the stones.
90
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VETERANS OF THE OLD GUARD
Or some round belly firm and fat,
Squeezed tight in tether labour-donned,
Makes mirth and jest to chuckle at —
Old hero quaint and cheveroned !
But do not mock and jeer, my lad.
Salute him, rather, and, believe,
Achilles he, of Iliad
That Homer5 s self could not conceive.
Respect these men with battle signs
That twenty skies have painted brown;
Their scars that lengthen out the lines
Of wrinkles age has written down;
Their skin whose colour deep and dun,
Bared to the fronts of many foes,
Tells us of Egypt’s burning sun;
Their locks that tell of Russia’s snows.
And if they shake, no longer strong ?
Ah ! Beresina’s wind was cold.
And if they limp ? The way was long,
From Cairo unto Vilna told.
91
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
If they be stiff? They’d but a flag
For sheet to hold their bodies warm.
And if a sleeve be loose, poor rag ?
’T is that a bullet tore an arm.
Mock not these veteran shapes bizarre,
At whom the urchin laughs and gapes.
They were the day, of which we are
The evening, and the night, perhaps, —
Remembering if we forget —
Red lancer, grenadier in blue,
With faces to the Column set,
As to their only altar true.
There, proud of pain each scar denotes,
And of long miseries gone by,
They feel beneath their shabby coats
The heart of France beat mightily.
And so our smiles are steeped in tears,
Seeing this holy carnival,
This picture wan that reappears,
Like morning after midnight’s ball.
92
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VETERANS OF THE OLD GUARD
And, cleaving heaven its own to claim,
Wide the Grand Army’s eagle spreads
Its golden wings, like glory’s flame,
Above their dear and hallowed heads.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
SEA-GLOOM
The sea-gulls restless gleam and glance,
The mad white coursers cleave the length
Of ocean as they rear and prance
And toss their manes in stormy strength.
The day is ending. Raindrops choke
The sunset furnaces. The gloom
Brings the great steamboat spitting smoke,
And beating down its long black plume.
And I, more wan than heaven wide,
For land of soot and fog am bound,
For land of smoke and suicide —
And right good weather have I found !
How eagerly I now would pierce
The gulf that groweth wild and hoar !
The vessel rocks. The waves are fierce.
The salt wind freshens more and more.
Ah ! bitter is my souPs unrest.
The very ocean sighing heaves
In pity its unhopeful breast,
Like some good friend that knows and grieves.
94
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SEA-GLOOM
Let be — lost love’s despair supreme !
Let be — illusions fair that rose
And fell from pedestals of dream !
One leap ! The dark wet ridges close.
Away ! ye sufferings gone by,
That evermore returning brood,
And press the wounds that sleeping lie,
To make them weep afresh their blood.
Away ! regret, whose crimson heart
Hath seven swords. Yea, One, maybe,
Doth know the anguish and the smart —
Mother of Seven Sorrows, She !
Each ghostly grief sinks down the vast,
And struggles with the waves that throb
To close about it, and at last
Drown it forever with a sob.
Soul’s ballast, treasures of life’s hand,
Sink ! and we ’ll wreck together down.
Pale on the pillow of the sand
I ’ll rest me well at evening brown.
95
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
But, now, a woman, as I gaze,
Sits in the bridge’s darker nook,
A woman, who doth sweetly raise
Her eyes to mine in one long look.
’T is Sympathy with outstretched arms,
Who smileth to me through the gray
Of dusk with all her thousand charms.
Hail, azure eyes ! Green sea, away !
The sea-gulls restless gleam and glance.
The mad white coursers cleave the length
Of Ocean as they rear and prance
And toss their manes in stormy strength.
96
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TO A ROSE-COLOURED GOWN
TO A ROSE-COLOURED GOWN
How I love you in the robes
That disrobe so well your charms !
Your dear breasts, twin ivory globes,
And your bare sweet pagan arms.
Frail as frailest wing of bee,
Fresher than the heart of rose,
All the fabric delicate, free,
Round your body gleams and glows,
Till from skin to silken thread,
Silver shivers lightly win,
And the rosy gown have shed
Roses on the creamy skin.
Whence have you the mystic thing,
Made of very flesh of you,
Living mesh to mix and cling
With your glorious body’s hue ?
Did you take it from the rud
Of the dawn ? From Venus’ shell ?
From a breast-flower nigh to bud ?
From a rose about to swell ?
7
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Doth the texture have its dye
From some blushing bashfulness ?
No — your portraits do not lie —
Beauty beauty’s form shall guess !
Down you cast your garment fair,
Art-dreamed, sweet Reality,
Like Borghese’s princess, rare
For Canova’s mastery!
Ah! the folds are lips of fire
Sweeping round your lovely form
In a folly of desire,
With a weft of kisses warm !
42
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THE WORLD’S MALICIOUS
THE WORLD’S MALICIOUS
Ah, little one, the world ’s malicious !
With mocking smiles thy beauty greeting.
It says that in thy breast capricious
A watch, and not a heart, is beating.
Yet like the sea thy breast is swelling
With all the wild, tumultuous power
A tide of blood sends pulsing, welling,
Beneath thy flesh in life’s young hour.
Ah, little one, the world is spiteful!
It says thy vivid eyes are fooling,
And that they have their charm delightful
From faithful, diplomatic schooling.
Yet on thy lashes’ shifting curtain
An iridescent tear-drop trembles,
Like dew unbidden and uncertain,
That no well-water’s gleam resembles.
Ah, little one, the world reviles thee!
It says thou hast no spirit’s favour,
That verse, which seemingly beguiles thee,
Hath unto thee a Sanskrit savour.
99
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Yet to thy crimson lips inviting,
Intelligence^ bee of laughter,
At every flash of wit alighting,
Allures and gleams, and lingers after.
Ah, little one, I know the trouble!
Thou lovest me. The world, it guesses.
Leave me, and hear its praises bubble: —
u What heart, what spirit, she possesses ! 99
100
INES DE LAS SIERRAS
INES DE LAS SIERRAS
To PETRA CAMARA
In Spain, as Nodier’s pen has told,
Three officers in night’s mid hours
Came on a castle dark and old,
With sunken eaves and mouldering towers,
A true Anne RadclifFe type it was,
With ruined halls and crumbling rooms
And Windows graven by the claws
Of Goya’s bats that ranged the glooms.
Now while they feasted, gazed upon
By ancient portraits standing guard
In their ancestral frames, anon
A sudden cry rang thitherward.
Forth from a distant corridor
That many a moonbeam’s pallid hue
Fretted fantastically o’er,
A wondrous phantom sped in view.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
With bodice high and hair comb-tipped,
A woman, running, dancing, hied.
Adown the dappled gloom she dipped,—
An iridescent form descried.
A languid, dead, voluptuous mood
Filled every act’s abandon brief,
Till at the door she stopped, and stood
Sinister, lovely past belief.
Her raiment crumpled in the tomb
Showed here and there a spangle’s foil.
At every start a faded bloom
Dropped petals in her hair’s black coil.
A dull scar crossed her bloodless throat,
As of a knife. Like rattle chill
Of teeth, her castanets she smote
Full in their faces awed and still.
Ah, poor bacchante, sad of grace!
So wild the sweetness of her spell,
The curved lips in her white face
Had lured a saint from heaven to hell V
102
INES DE LAS SIERRAS
Like darkling birds her eyelashes
Upon her cheek lay fluttering light.
Her kirtle’s swinging cadences
Displayed her limbs of lustrous white.
She bowed amid a mist of gyres,
And with her hand, as dancers may,
Like flowers she gathered up desires,
And grouped them in a bright bouquet.
Was it a wraith or woman seen,
A thing of dreams, or blood and flesh,
The flame that burst from out the sheen
Of beauty’s undulating mesh?
It was a phantom of the past,
It was the Spain of olden keep,
Who, at the sound of cheer at last,
Upbounded from her icy sleep,
In one bolero mad, supreme,
Rough-resurrected, powerful,
Showing beneath her kirtle’s gleam
The ribbon wrested from the bull.
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
About her throat the scar of red
The deathblow was, dealt silently
Unto a generation dead
By every new-born century.
I saw this self-same phantom fleet,
All Paris ringing with her praise,
When soft, diaphanous, mystic, sweet,
La Petra Camara held its gaze,—
Closing her eyes with languor rare,
Impassive, passionate of art,
And, like the murdered Ines fair,
Dancing, a dagger in her heart.
104
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O D E LET
ODELET
After ANACREON
Poet of her face divine,
Curb this over-zeal of thine!
Doves wing frighted from the ground
At a step’s too sudden sound,
And her passion is a dove,
Frighted by too bold a love.
Mute as marble Hermes wait
By the blooming hawthorn-gate.
Thou shalt see her wings expand,
She shall flutter to thy hand.
On thy forehead thou shalt know
Something like a breath of snow,
Or of pinions pure that beat
In a whirl of whiteness sweet.
And the dove, grown venturesome,
Shall upon thy shoulder come,
And its rosy beak shall sip
From the nectar of thy lip.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
SMOKE
Beneath yon tree sits humble
A squalid, hunchbacked house,
With roof precipitous,
And mossy walls that crumble.
Bolted and barred the shanty.
But from its must and mould,
Like breath of lips in cold,
Comes respiration scanty.
A vapour upward welling,
A slender, silver streak,
To God bears tidings meek
Of the soul in the little dwelling.
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APOLLONIA
APO LL ON IA
Fair Apollonia, name august,
Greek echo of the sacred vale,
Great name whose harmonies robust
Thee as Apollo’s sister hail!
Struck with the plectrum on the lyre,
And in melodious beauty sung,
Brighter than love’s and glory’s fire,
It resonant rings upon the tongue.
At such a classic sound as this,
The elves plunge down their German lake.
Alone the Delphian worthy is
So lustreful a name to take, —
Pythia ! when in her flowing dress
She mounts her place with feet unshod,
And, priestess white and prophetess,
Wistful awaits the tardy god.
107
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE BLIND MAN
A blind man walks without the gate,
Wild-staring as an owl by day,
Fumbling his flute betimes and late,
Along the way.
He pipeth, weary wretch and worn,
A roundel shrill and obsolete.
The spectre of a dog forlorn
Attends his feet.
i
For him the day s go lustreless.
Invisible life with beat and roar
He heareth like a torrent press
Around, before.
What strange chimeras haunt his head ?
And on his mind’s bedarkened space,
What characters unheard, unread,
Doth fancy trace ?
Thus down Venetian leads of doom,
Wan prisoners ensepulchred
In palpable, undying gloom
Have graven their word.
108
THE BLIND MAN
And yet perchance when life’s last spark
Death speeds unto eternal night,
The tomb-bred soul, within the dark,
Shall see the light.
109
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
SONG
In April earth is white and rose
Like youth and love, now tendering
Her smiles, now fearful to disclose
Her virgin heart unto the Spring.
In June, a little pale and worn,
And full at heart of vague desire,
She hideth in the yellow corn,
With sunburned Summer to respire.
In August, wild Bacchante, she
Her bosom bares to Autumn shapes,
And on the tiger-skin flung free,
Draws forth the purple blood of grapes.
And in December, shrivelled, old,
Bepowdered white from foot to head,
In dream she wakens Winter cold,
That sleeps beside her in her bed.
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WINTER FANTASIES ’
WINTER FANTASIES
I
Red of nose and white of face,
Bent his desk of ice before,
Winter doth his theme retrace
In the season’s quatuor,—
Beating measure and the ground
With a frozen foot for us,
Singing with uncertain sound
Olden tunes and tremulous.
And as HaendeFs wig sublime
Trembling shook its powder, oft
Flutter as he taps his time
Snow-flakes in a flurry soft.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
II
In the Tuileries fount the swan
Meets the ice, and all the trees,
As in land of fairies wan,
Are bedecked with filigrees.
Flowers of frost in vases low
Stand unquickened and unstirred,
And we trace upon the snow
Starred footsteps of a bird.
Where with lightest raiment spanned,
Venus was with Phocion met,
Now has Winter’s hoary hand
Clodion's u Chilly Maiden ” set.
112
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WINTER FANTASIES
III
Women pass in ermine dress,
Sable, too, and miniver,
And the shivering goddesses
Haste to don the fashion’s fur.
Venus of the Brine comes forth,
In her hooded mantle’s fluff.
Flora, blown by breezes North,
Hides her fingers in her muff.
And the shepherdesses round
Of Coustou and Coysevox,
Finding scarves too light have wound
Furs about their throats of snow.
8
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
IV
Heavy doth the North bedrape
Paris mode from foot to top,
As o’er fair Athenian shape
Scythian should a bearskin drop.
Over winter’s garments meet,
Everywhere we see the fur,
Flung with Russian pomp, and sweet
With the fragrant vetiver.
Pleasure’s laughing glances feast
Far amid the statues, where
From the bristles of a beast
Bursts a Venus torso fair !
114
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WINTER FANTASIES
V
If you venture hitherward,
With a tender veil to cheat
Glances over-daring, guard
Well your Andalusian feet!
Snow shall fashion like a frame
On your foot’s impression rare,
Signing with each step your name
On the carpet soft and vair.
Thus were surly master led
To the hidden trysting-place,
Where his Psyche, faintly red,
Were beheld in Love* s embrace.
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ENAMELS* AND CAMEOS
THE BROOK
Near a great water’s waste
A brook mid rock and spar
Came bubbling up in haste,
As though to travel far.
It sang : “ What joy to rise!
’T was dismal under ground.
I mirror now the skies.
My banks with green abound.
u Forget-me-nots — how fair !
Beseech me from the grass;
Wings frolic in the air,
And graze me as they pass.
u I yet shall be — who knows ? —
A river winding down,
And greeting as it flows
Valley and cliff and town.
cc I ’ll broider with my spray
Stone bridge and granite quay,
And bear great ships away
Unto the long wide sea.”
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THE BROOK
So planned it, babbling by,
As water boiling fast
Within a basin high,
To top its brim at last.
Cradle by tomb is crossed.
Giants are early dead.
Scarce born, the brook was lost
Within a lake’s deep bed.
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
TOMBS AND FUNERAL
PYRES
No grim cadaver set its flaw
In happy days of pagan art,
And man, content with what he saw,
Stripped not the veil from beauty’s heart.
No form once loved that buried lay,
A hideous spectre to appal,
Dropped bit by bit its flesh away,
As one by one our garments fall;
Or, when the days had drifted by
And sundered shrank the vaulted stones,
Showed naked to the daring eye
A motley heap of rattling bones.
But, rescued from the funeral pyre,
Life’s ashen, light residuum
Lay soft, and, spent the cleansing fire,
The urn held sweet the body’s sum, —
—
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TOMBS AND FUNERAL PYRES
The sum of all that earth may claim
Of the soul’s butterfly, soul passed, —
All that is left of spended flame
Upon the tripod at the last.
Between acanthus leaves and flowers
In the white marble gaily went
Loves and bacchantes all the hours,
Dancing about the monument.
At most, a little Genius wild
Trampled a flame out in the gloom,
And art’s harmonious flowering smiled
Upon the sadness of the tomb. t
The tomb was then a pleasant place.
As bed of child that slumbereth,
With many a fair and laughing grace
The joy of life surrounded death.
Then death concealed its visage gaunt,
Whose sockets deep, and sunken nose,
And railing mouth our spirits haunt,
Past any dream that horror shows.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
The monster in flesh raiment clad
Hid deep its spectral form uncouth,
And virgin glances, beauty-glad,
Sped frankly to the naked youth.
Twas only at Trimalchio’s board
A little skeleton made sign,
An ivory plaything unabhorred,
To bid the feasters to the wine.
Gods, whom Art ever must avow,
Ruled the marmoreal sky’s demesne.
Olympus yields to Calvary, now;
Jupiter to the Nazarene !
Voices are calling, u Pan is dead!
Dusk deepeneth within, without.
On the black sheet of sorrow spread,
The whitened skeleton gleams out.
It glideth to the headstone bare,
And signs it with a paraph wild,
And hangs a wreath of bones to glare
Upon the charnel death-defiled.
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TOMBS AND FUNERAL PYRES
It lifts the coffin-lid and quaffs
The musty air, and peers within,
Displays a ring of ribs, and laughs
Forever with its awful grin.
It urges unto Death’s fleet dance
The Emperor, the Pope, the King,
And makes the pallid steed to prance,
And low the doughty warrior fling; —
Behind the courtesan steals up,
And makes wry faces in her glass;
Drinks from the sick man’s trembling cup;
Delves in the miser’s golden mass.
Above the team it whirls the thong,
With bone for goad to hurry it,
Follows the plowman’s way alofig,
And guides the furrows to a pit.
It comes, the uninvited guest,
And lurks beneath the banquet chair,
Unseen from the pale bride to wrest
Her little silken garter fair.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
The number swells: the young give hand
Unto the old, and none may flee.
The irresistible saraband
Compelleth all humanity.
Forth speeds the tall, ungainly fright,
Playing the rebeck, dancing mad,
Against the dark a frame of white,
As Holbein drew it — horror-sad ; —
Or if the times be frivolous,
Trusses the shroud about its hips:
Then like a Cupid mischievous,
Across the ballet-room it skips,
And unto carven tombs it flies,
Where marchionesses rest demure,
Weary of love, in exquisite guise,
In chapels dim and pompadour.
But hide thy hideous form at last,
Worm-eaten actor ! Long enough
In death’s wan melodrama cast,
Thou ’st played thy part without rebuff.
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TOMBS AND FUNERAL PYRES
Come back, come back, O ancient Art !
And cover with thy marble’s gleam
This Gothic skeleton! Each part
Consume, ye flames of fire supreme !
If man be then a creature made
In God’s own image, to aspire,
When shattered must the image fade,
Let the lone fragments feed the fire!
Immortal form ! Rise thou in flame
Again to beauty’s fount of bloom
Let not thy clay endure the shame,
The degradation of the tomb!
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
BJORN’S BANQUET
Bjorn, odd and lonely cenobite,
High on a barren rock’s plateau,
Far out of time’s and the world’s sight,
Dwells in a castle none may know.
No modern thought may violate
His darkened and secluded hall.
Bj'orn bolts with care his postern-gate,
And barricades his castle wall.
When others wait the rising sun,
He from his mouldering parapet
Still contemplates the valley dun,
Where he beheld the red sun set.
Securely doth the past enlock
His retrospective spirit lone.
The pendulum within his clock
' Was broken centuries agone.
Waking the echoes wanders he
Beneath his feudal arches drear,
His ringing footsteps seemingly
Followed by other footsteps clear.
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BJ ORN’S BANQUET
Nor priests nor friends with him make bold,
Nor burghers plain nor gentlemen;
But his ancestral portraits hold
A parley with him now and then.
And of a midnight, sparing him
The ennui of a lonely cup,
Bjorn, harbouring a gloomy whim,
Invites his ancestors to sup.
Forth stepping at the hour’s grim stroke,
Come phantoms armed from foot to head.
Bjorn, quaking, to the solemn folk
Proffers with state the goblet red.
To seat itself each panoply
With joints that grumble in revolt
Maketh an angle with its knee,
That creaketh like a rusty bolt;
Till all at once the suit of mail,
Rude coffin of an absent bulk,
Cleaving the silence with a wail,
Falls in its chair, a clanking hulk.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Landgraves and burgraves, spare and stout,
Come down from heaven or up from hell,
The iron guests of many a bout,
Are bound within the midnight spell.
Their blow-indented helmets bear
Heraldic beasts that bay and grin,
Athwart the shades the red lights glare
On crest and ancient lambrequin.
Each empty, open casque now seems
Like to the helms of heraldries,
Save for two strange and livid gleams
That issue forth in threatening wise.
Seated is each old combatant
In the vast hall, at Bjorn’s behest,
And the uncertain shadows grant
A swarthy page to every guest.
The liquors in the candle-shine
Take on suspicious purples. All
The viands in their gravy’s wine
Grow lurid and fantastical.
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BJORN’S BANQUET
Sometimes a breastplate glitters bright,
A morion speeds its flashes wroth,
A rondelle from a hand of might
Drops heavily upon the cloth.
Heard are the softly flapping wings
Of unseen bats. The shimmer flicks
Upon the carven panellings
The banners of the heretics.
The stiffly bended gauntlets play
In the dull glow incarnadine,
And, creaking, to the helmets gray
Pour bumpers full of Rhenish wine;
Or with their daggers keen of blade
Carve boars upon the plates of gold.
The corridor’s uncanny shade
Hath clamours vague and manifold.
The orgy waxes riotsome —
One could not hear God’s voice for it —
For when a phantom sups from home,
What wrong if he carouse a bit ?
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Now every ghostly care they drown
With jokes and jeers and loud guffaws.
A wine-cascade is running down
Each rusty helmet’s iron jaws.
The full and rounded hauberks bulge,
And to the neck the river mounts.
Their eyes with liquid fire eifulge.
They ’re howling drunk, these valiant counts !
One through the salad idly wields
A foot; another scolds the sick.
Some like the lions on their shields
With gaping mouths the fancy trick.
In voice still hoarse from silence long
In the tomb’s dampness and restraint,
Max playfully intones a song
Of thirteen hundred, crude and quaint.
Albrecht, of quarrelsome repute,
Stirs right and left a war intense,
And drubs about with fist and foot,
As once he drubbed the Saracens.
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BJORN’S BANQUET
And heated Fritz his helmet doffs,
Not deeming he’s a headless trunk.
Then down pell-mell mid roars and scoffs
Together roll the phantoms drunk.
Ah ! ’T is a hideous battle-ground,
Where pots and weapons bang and scud,
Where every dead man through some wound
Doth vomit victuals up for blood.
And Bjorn observes them, sad of eye,
And haggard, while athwart the panes
The dawn comes creeping stealthily,
With blue, thin lights, and darkness wanes.
The prostrate mass of rusty brown
Pales like a torch in day light’s room,
Until the drunkest pours him down
At last the stirrup-cup of doom.
The cock crows loud. And with the day
Once more with haughty mien and bold,
Their revel-weary heads they lay
Upon their marble pillows cold.
9
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE WATCH
Now twice my watch have I taken,
And twice as I’ve gazing sat,
The hand has pointed unshaken
To one — and it ’s long past that!
The clock’s light cadences linger.
The sun-dial laughs from the lawn,
And points with a long, gaunt finger
The path that its shade has drawn.
A steeple ironically
Calls the true time to me.
The belfry bell makes tally
And taunts me with accents free.
Ah, dead is the wretch ! I sought not,
Last night, to my reverie sold,
Its ruby circle! I thought not
Of glimmering key of gold !
No longer I see with pleasure
The spring of the balance-wheel
Flit hither and there at measure,
Like a butterfly form of steel.
*30
THE WATCH
When Hippogriff bears me, yearning,
Through skies of another sphere,
My soul-reft bo dy goes turning
Wherever the steed may veer.
Eternity still is giving
Its gaze to the lifeless face.
Time seeketh the heart once living,
His ear at the old watch-case, —
That heart whose regular motion
Was followed within my breast
By wave-beats of life’s full ocean !
Ah well! the watch is at rest.
But its brother is beating ever,
Steadfast and sturdy kept
By One Who forgetteth never, —
Who wound it the while I slept.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE MERMAIDS
There’s a sketch you may discover
By an artist of degree
Rime and metre quarrel over —
Theophile Kniatowski.
On the snowy foam that fringes
All the mantle of the brine,
Radiant with the sunlight’s tinges,
Three mermaidens softly shine.
Like the drowned lilies dancing
Turn they, as the spiral wave
Buoys their bodies hiding, glancing,
As they sink and rise and lave.
In their golden hair for dowers
They have twined with beauteous hands
Shells for diadems, and flowers
From the deep wild under sands.
Oysters pour a pearly hoarding
Their enrapturing throats to gem,
And the wave, its wealth according,
Tosses other pearls to them.
132
THE MERMAIDS
Borne above the crest of ocean
By a Triton hand and strong,
Twine they, beautiful of motion,
Under gleaming tresses long.
And the crystal water under,
Down the blue the glories pale
Of each lovely form of wonder,
Tapered to a shimmering tail.
Ah ! But who the scaly swimmers
Would behold in modern day —
When a bust of ivory glimmers,
Cool from kisses of the spray ?
Look! Oh, mingled truth and fable !
O’er the horizon steady plied,
Comes a vessel proud and stable,
Toward the mermaids terrified !
Tricoloured its flag is flaunted,
And it vomits vapour red,
And it beats the billows daunted,
Till the nymphs dive low for dread.
*33
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Fearlessly they did beleaguer
Triremes immemorial,
And the dolphins arched and eager
Waited for Arion’s call.
This of old. But now the steamer —
Vulcan hurtling Venus’ charms,—
Would destroy the siren gleamer,
With her fair, nude tail and arms.
Farewell myth ! The boat that passes
Thinks to see on silver bar,
Where the widening billow glasses,
Porpoises that plunge afar.
TWO LOVE-LOCKS
TWO LOVE-LOCKS
Reviving languorous dreaming
Of conquered, conquering eye,
Upon thy forehead gleaming,
Two fairest love-locks lie.
I see them softly nesting,
Of wondrous, golden sheen,
Like little wheels come resting
From car of Mab the Queen;
Or bows of Cupid ready
To let the arrows fly,
Bent circlewise and steady
For archer’s mastery.
One heart have I of passion.
Yet two love-locks are thine!
O brow of fickle fashion !
Whose heart is caught with mine ?
*35
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE TEA-ROSE
Most beautiful of all the roses
Is this half-open bud, whose bare,
Unpetalled heart a dream discloses
Of carmine very faint and fair.
I wonder, was it once a white rose,
Till butterfly too ardent spoke
A language soft, and in the light rose
A shyer, warmer tint awoke ?
Its delicate fabric hath the colour
Of lovely and velutinous skin.
Its perfect freshness maketh duller
Environing hues incarnadine.
For as some rare patrician features
Eclipse the brows of ruddier gleam,
So masquerade as rustic creatures
Gay sisters of this rose supreme.
But, dear one, if your hand caress it,
And raise it for its sweet perfume,
Ere yet your velvet cheek shall press it,
’T will fade before a fairer bloom.
136
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THE TEA-ROSE
No rose in all the world so tender,
That gloweth in the springtime fleet*
But shall its every charm surrender
Unto your seventeen years, my sweet.
A face hath more than petal’s power:
A pure heart’s blood that blushing flows
O’er youth’s nobility, is flower
High sovereign over every rose.
*37
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
CARMEN
Slender is Carmen, of lissome guise,
Her hair is black as the midnight’s heart;
Dark circles are under her gypsy eyes,
Her swarthy skin is the devil’s art.
The women will mock at her form and face;
But the men will follow her all the day.
Toledo’s Archbishop (now save His Grace!)
Tones his mass at her knees, they say.
Nestled in warmth of her amber neck
Lies a massive coil, till she fling it down
To be a raiment to frame and deck
Her delicate body from foot to crown.
Then out from her pallid face with power
Her witching, terrible smiles compel.
Her mouth is a mystical poison-flower
That hath drawn its crimson from hearts in hell.
The haughtiest beauty must yield her fame,
When this strange vision shall dusk her sky.
For Carmen rules, and her glance’s flame
Shall set the torch to satiety.
i38
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CARMEN
Wild, graceless Carmen ! — Though yet this be,
Savour she hath of a world undreamt,
Of a world of wonder, whose salt young sea
Provoked a Venus to rise and tempt.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
WHAT THE SWALLOWS SAY
AN AUTUMN SONG
The dry, brown leaves have dropped forlorn,
And lie amid the golden grass.
The wind is fresh both eve and morn.
But where are summer days, alas!
The tardy flowers the autumn stayed
For latter treasures now unfold.
The dahlia dons its gay cockade,
Its flaming cap the marigold.
Rain stirs the pool with pelt and shock.
The swallows to the roof repair,
Confabulating as they flock
And feel the winter in the air.
By hundreds gather they to vow
Their little yearnings and intents.
Saith one : w ’T is fair in Athens now,
Upon the sun-warm battlements !
140
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WHAT THE SW AL L O W S SAY
a Thither I go to take my nap
Upon the Parthenon high and free.
My cornice nest is in the gap
A cannon-ball made there for me.”
And one: w A ceiling meets my needs
Within a Smyrna coffee-house,
Where Hadjis tell their amber beads
Upon the threshold luminous.
“ I go and come above the folk,
While their chibouques their clouds upfling.
I skim along through silver smoke,
And graze the turbans with my wing.”
Another: “ There ’s a triglyph gray
On one of Baalbec’s temples high.
’T is there I go to brood all day
Above my little family.”
Another calleth, u My address
Is settled : c At the Knights of Rhodes.’
In a dark colonnade’s recess
I ’ll make the snuggest of abodes.”
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ENAMELS AND GAMEOS
“ Old age hath made me slow for flight,”
Declares a fifth; “ I 'll rest at even
On Malta’s terraces of white,
Where blue sea melts to blue of heaven.”
A sixth: “In Cairo is my home,
Up in a minaret’s retreat:
A twig or two, a bit of loam —
My winter lodgings are complete.”
A last: “ The Second Cataract
Shall mark my place — the nest of brown
A granite king doth hold intact
Within the circle of his crown.”
And all together sing: “ What miles
To-morrow shall have stretched beneath
Our fleeing swarm: — remembered isles,
Snow peaks, vast waters, lands of heath ! ”
With calls and cries and beat of wings,
Grown eager now and venturesome,
The swallows hold their twitterings,
To see the blight of winter come.
142
IV’rere Hadjis tell their amber beadi,
[ 'pon the threshold luminous.'''
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WHAT THE SWALLOWS SAY
And I — I understand them all,
Because the poet is a bird,—
Oh ! but a sorry bird, and thrall
To a great lack, pressed heavenward.
It ’s Oh for wings ! to seek the star,
To count the seas when day is done,
To breast the air with swallows far,
To verdant spring, to golden sun !
J43
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
CHRISTMAS
Black is the sky and white the ground.
O ring, ye bells, your caroPs grace !
The Child is born! A love profound
Beams o’er Him from His Mother’s face.
No silken woof of costly show
Keeps off the bitter cold from Him.
But spider-webs have drooped them low,
To be His curtain soft and dim.
Now trembles on the straw downspread
The Little Child, the Star beneath.
To warm Him in His holy bed,
Upon Him ox and ass do breathe.
Snow hangs its fringes on the byre.
The roof stands open to the tryst
Of aureoled saints, that sweetly choir
To shepherds, “ Come, behold the Christ! ”
THE DEAD CHILD’S PLAYTHINGS
THE DEAD CHILD’S PLAY¬
THINGS
Marie comes no more at call.
She has wandered from her play.
Ah, how pitifully small
Was the coffin borne away !
See — about the nursery floor
All her little heritage:
Rubber ball and battledore,
Tattered book and coloured page.
Poor forsaken doll! in vain
Stretch your arms. She will not come.
Stopped forever is the train,
And the music-box is dumb.
Some one touched it soft, apart,
Where the silence is her name.
And what sinking of the heart
At the plaintive note that came!
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Ah, the anguish ! when the tomb
Robs the cradle; when bereft
We discover in the gloom
Child toys that an angel left.
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AFTER WRITING MY REVIEW
AFTER WRITING MY
DRAMATIC REVIEW
My columns are ranged and steady,
Upbearing, though sad forespent,
The newspaper pediment,
And my review is ready.
Now for a week, poetaster,
My door is bolted. Away,
Thou still-born masterpiece, — aye,
Till Monday I am my master.
No melodrama shall whiten
My labour with threadbare leaves.
The warp that my fancy weaves
With silken flowers shall brighten.
Brief moment my spirit’s warder,
Ye voices of soul that float,
I ’ll hearken your sorrow’s note,
Nor verses evoke to order.
*47
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Then deep in my glass regaining
The health of a day gone by, —
Old visions for company —
The bloom of my vintage draining,
The wine of my thought I ’ll measure,
Wine virgin of alien glow,
Grapes trodden by life, that flow
From my heart at my heart’s own pleasure!
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
THE CASTLE O F
REMEMBRANCE
Before my hearth with head low-bowed
I dream, and strive to reach again,
Across the misty past’s gray cloud,
Unto Remembrance’s domain,
Where tree and house and upland way
Are blurred and blue like passing ghosts,
And the eye, ponder though it may,
Consults in vain the guiding-posts.
Now gropingly to gain a sight
Of all the buried world, I press
Through mystic marge of shade and light
And limbo of forgetfulness.
But white, diaphanous Memoiy stands,
Where many roadways meet and spread,
Like Ariadne, in my hands
Thrusting her little ball of thread.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Henceforth the way is all secure.
The shrouded sun hath reappeared,
And o’er the trees with vision sure
I see the castle tower upreared.
Beneath the boughs where day grows dark
With shower on shower of leaves down-poured
The dear old path through moss and bark
Still lengthens far its narrow cord.
But creeping-plant and bramble-spray
Have wrought a net to daunt me now.
The stubborn branch I force away
Swings fiercely back to lash my brow.
I come upon the house at last.
No window lit with lamp or face,
No breath of smoke from gables vast,
To touch with life the mouldering place!
Bridges are crumbling. Moats are still,
And slimed with rank, green refuse-flowers,
And tortuous waves of ivy fill
The crevices and choke the towers.
150
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
The portico in moonlight wanes.
Time sculptures it to suit his whim.
And with the wash of many rains
My coloured coat of arms is dim.
The door I open eagerly.
The ancient hinges creak and halt.
A breath of dampness wafts to me
The musty odour of the vault.
The hairy nettle sharp of sting,
The coarse and broad-leafed burdock weed
In court-yard nooks are prospering,
By spreading hemlocks canopied.
Upon two marble monsters near,
That guard the mossy steps of stone,
The shadow of a tree falls clear,
That in my absence has upgrown.
Sudden the lion sentinels raise
Their paws, aggressive and malign,
And challenge me with their white gaze;
But soft I breathe the countersign.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
I pass. The old dog menaceth,
But falls back hushed, the shades amid.
My resonant footstep wakeneth
Crouched echoes in their corners hid.
Through yellow panes of glass a ray
Of dubious light creeps down the hall
Where ancient tapestries display
Apollo’s fortunes from the wall.
Fair tree-bound Daphne still with grace
Stretches her tufted fingers green.
But in the amorous god’s embrace
She fades, a formless phantom seen.
I watch divine Apollo stand,
Herdsman to acarus-riddled sheep,
The Muses Nine, a haggard band,
Upon a faded Pindus weep;
While Solitude in scanty gown
Traces u Desertion ” in the dust
That through the air she sifteth down
Upon a marble stand august.
152
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
And now, among forgotten things,
I find, like sleepers manifold,
Pastels bedimmed, dark picturings,
Young beauties, and the friends of old.
My faltering fingers lift a crape, —
. And lo, my love with look and lure !
With puffing skirts and prisoned shape !
Cidalise a la Pompadour!
A tender, blossoming rose she feels
Against her ribboned bodice pressed,
Whose lace half hides and half reveals
A snowy, azure-veined breast.
Within her eyes gleam sparkles lush,
As on the rime-kissed, deadened leaves.
Upon her cheek a purple flush —
Death’s own cosmetic hue ! —deceives.
She startles as T come before,
And fixeth soft on me her eyes,
Reproachfully forevermore,
Yet with a charm and witching wise.
153
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Life bore me from thee at its will,
Yet on my heart thy name is laid,
Thou dead delight, that lingereth still,
Bedizened for the masquerade !
Envious of Art, fair Nature wrought
To overpass Murillo’s fame,—
From Andalusia here she brought
The face that lights the second frame.
By some poetical caprice,
Our atmosphere of mist and cloud,
With rare exotic charm’s increase
This other Petra Camara dowed.
Warm orange tones are gilding yet
Her lovely skin of roseate hue.
Her eyelids fair have lashes jet
That beams of sunshine filter through.
There shimmers fine a pearly gleam
Between her scarlet lips elate;
Her beauty flashes forth supreme —
A bright south summer pomegranate.
x54
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
Long to the sound of Spain’s guitar,
I told her praise ’mid song and glass.
She came alone one evenstar,
And all my room Alhambra was.
Farther I see a robust Fair,
With strong and gem-beladen arms.
In pearls of price and velvet rare
Are set her ivory bosom’s charms.
Her ennui is a weary queen’s,
An adulating court amid.
Superb, aloof, her hand she leans
Upon a casket’s jewelled lid.
Her sensuous lips their crimes confess,
As crimson with the blood of hearts.
With brutal, mad voluptuousness
Her conquering eye a challenge darts.
Here dwells, in lieu of tender grace,
Vertiginous allure, whereof
A cruel Venus ruled a race,
Presiding o’er malignant love.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Unnatural mother to her child,
This Venus all imperative !
O thou, my bitter joy and wild, —
Farewell forever ! I forgive !
Within its frame in shadow fine,
The misty glass that still endures
Reveals another face than mine,—
The earliest of my portraitures.
A retrospective ghost, with face
Of vanished type, steps from the vast
Dim mirror of his hiding-place
In tenebrous, forgotten past.
Gay in his doublet satin-rose,
Coloured in bold and vivid way,
He seems as if about to pose
For Deveria or Boulanger.
Terror of glabrous commoner,
His flowing locks in royal guise,
Like mane of lion, or sinister
King’s hair, fall heavy to his thighs.
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
Romanticist of bold conceit,
Knight of an art which strives anew,
He hurled himself at Drama’s feet,
When erst Hernani’s trumpet blew.
Night falls. The corners are astir
With many shapes and shadows tall.
The Unknown — grim stage-carpenter —
Sets up its darksome frights o’er all.
A sudden burst of candles, weird
With aureoles, like lamps of death !
The room is populous, and bleared
With folk brought hither by a breath !
Down step the portraits from the wall, —
A ruddy-litten company!
Circling the fireplace in the hall,
Where the wood blazes suddenly.
The figures wrested from the tombs
Have lost their rigid, frozen mien,
The gradual glow of life illumes
The Past with flush incarnadine.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
A colour lights the faces pale,
As in the days of old delight.
Friends whom my thought shall never fail,
I thank ye, that ye came to-night!
Now eighteen-thirty shows to me
Its great and valiant-hearted men.
(Ah, like Otranto’s pirates, we
Who were an hundred, are but ten !)
And one his reddish beard spreads out,
Like Barbarossa in his cave.
Another his mustachio stout
Curls at the ends in fashion suave.
Under the ample fold that cloaks
An ever unrevealed ill,
Petrus a cigarette now smokes,
Naming it w papelito ” still.
Another cometh, fain to tell
His visions and his hopes supreme.
Like Icarus on the sands he fell,
Where lie all broken shafts of dream.
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THE CASTLE OF REMEMBRANCE
And one a drama hath begot,
Planned after some new modePs freak,
Which, merging all things in its plot,
Makes Calderon with Moliere speak.
Tom, late forsaken by his Dear,
Love’s Labour ’s Lost must low recite 5
And Fritz to Cidalise makes clear
Faust’s vision of Walpurgis Night.
But dawn comes through the window free.
Diaphanous the phantoms grow.
The objects of reality
Strike through their shapes that merge and go.
The candles are consumed away.
The ember-lights no longer gleam
Upon the hearth. No thing shall stay.
Farewell, O castle of my dream !
December gray shall turn once more
The glass of Time, for all we fret!
The present enters at my door,
And vainly bids me to forget.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
CAMELLIA AND MEADOW-
DAISY
We praise the hot-house flowers that loom
Far from their native sun and shade,
The flaring forms that flaunt their bloom,
Like jewels under glass displayed.
With never breeze to kiss their heads,
They have their birth and live and die
On costly, artificial beds,
Beneath an ever-crystal sky.
For whomsoever idly scans,
Baring their treasures to entice,
Like fair and sumptuous courtesans,
They stand for sale at golden price.
Fine porcelain holds their gathered groups,
Or glove-clad fingers fondle them
Between the dances, till each droops
Upon a limp or broken stem.
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CAMELLIA AND MEADOW-DAISY
But down amid the grass unreaped,
Shunning the curious, in repose
And silence all the long day steeped,
. A little woodland daisy blows.
A butterfly upon the wing
To point the place, a casual look,
And you surprise the sweet, shy thing,
Within its calm, sequestered nook.
Beneath the blue it openeth,
Rising on slender, vernal rod,
Spreading its soul in fragrant breath
For solitude and for its God. *
And proud camellias tall and white,
Red tulips in a flaming mass,
Are all at once forgotten quite, ^
For the small flower amid the grass.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE FELLAH
0?z seeing a Water-Colour by Princess Mathilde
Caprice of brush fantastical,
And of imperial idleness,
Your fellah-sphinx presents us all
With an enigma worth the guess.
A rigid fashion, verily,
This mask, this garment, seem to us,
Intriguing with its mysteiy
The ball-room’s every CEdipus.
Isis bequeathed her veil of old
To modern daughters of the Nile.
But through this band austere, behold,
Two stars of radiance beam and smile,—
Two stars, two eyes, two poems that spring,
The soft, voluptuous fires whereof
Resolve the riddle, murmuring:
44 Lo, I am Beauty ! Be thou Love ! ”
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THE GARRET
THE GARRET
From balcony tiles where casual eats
Sit low in wait for birds unwise,
I see the worn and riven slats
Of a poor, humble garret rise.
Now could I as an author lie,
To give you comfort as you think,
Its window I would falsify,
And frame with flowers refined and pink,
And place within it Rigolette
With her cheap looking-glass, somehow,
Whose broken glazing mirrors yet
A portion of her pretty brow;
Or Margery, her dress undone,
Her hair blown free, her tie forgot,
Watering in the pleasant sun
Her pail-encompassed garden-plot;
Or poet-youth whom fame awaits,
Who scans his verse and eyes the hills,
Or in a reverie contemplates
Montmartre with its distant mills.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Alas ! my garret is no feint.
There climbeth no convolvulus.
The window with its nibbled paint
Leers filmy and unluminous.
Alike for artist and grisette,
Alike for widower and lad,
A garret — save to music set —
Is never otherwise than sad.
Of old, beneath an angle pent,
That forced the forehead to a kiss,
Love, with a folding-couch content,
To chat with Susan deemed it bliss.
But we must wad our bliss about
With cushioned walls and laces wide,
And silks that flutter in and out,
O’er beds by Monbro canopied.
This evening, to Mount Breda fled
Is Rigolette, to linger there,
And Margery, well clothed and fed,
No longer tends her garden fair.
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THE GARRET
The poet, tired of catching rimes
Upon the wing, has turned to cull
Reporter’s bays, and left betimes
A heaven for an entresol.
And in the window this is all:
An ancient goody chattering,
And railing at a kitten small
That toys forever with a string.
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ENA M ELS AND CAMEOS
THE CLOUD
Lightly in the azure air
Soars a cloud, emerging free
Like a virgin from the fair
Blue sea;
Or an Aphrodite sweet,
Floating upright and empearled
In the shell, about its feet
Foam-curled.
Undulating overhead,
How its changing body glows!
On its shoulder dawn hath spread
A rose.
Marble, snow, blend amorously
In that form by sunlight kissed —
Slumbering Antiope
Of mist!
Sailing unto distant goal,
Over Alps and Apennines,
Sister of the woman-soul,
It shines;
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THE CLOUD
Till my heart flies forth at last
On the wings of passion warm,
And I yearn to gather fast
Its form.
Reason saith : 44 Mere vapour thing !
Bursting bubble ! Yet, we deem,
Holds this wind-distorted ring
Our dream.”
Faith declareth : 44 Beauty seen,
Like a cloud, is but a thought,
Or a breath, that, having been,
Is naught.
44 Have thy vision. Build it proud.
Let thy soul be full thereof.
Love a woman — love a cloud —
But love! ”
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE BLACKBIRD
A bird from yonder branch at dawn
Is trilling forth a joyful note,
Or hopping o’er the frozen lawn,
In yellow boots and ebon coat.
It is the blackbird credulous.
Little of calendar knows he,
Whose soul, with sunbeams luminous,
Sings April to the snows that be.
Rain sweeps in torrents unrepressed.
The Arve makes dull the Rhone with mire.
The pleasant hall retains its guest
In goodly cheer before the fire.
The mountains have their ermine on,
Each one a mighty magistrate,
And hold grave conference upon
A case of Winter lasting late.
The bird dries well his wing, and long,
Despite the rains, the mists that roll,
Insists upon his little song,
Believes in Spring with all his soul.
168
THE BLACKBIRD
He softly chides the slumberous morn
For dailying so long abed,
And bids the shivering flower forlorn
Be bold, and raise aloft its head;
Behind the dark sees day that smiles,
Even as behind the Holy Rod,
When bare the altar, dim the aisles,
The child of faith beholds his God.
He trusts to Nature’s purpose high,
Sure of her laws for here and now.
Who laughs at thy philosophy,
Dear blackbird, is less wise than thou!
169
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE FLOWER THAT M A K E S
THE SPRINGTIME
The chestnut trees are soon to flower
At fair Saint Jean, the villa dipped
In sun, before whose viny tower
Stretch purple mountains silver-tipped.
The little leaves that yesterday
Pressed in their bodices were seen
Have put their sober garb away,
And touched the tender twigs with green.
But vainly do the sunbeams fill
The branches with a flood of light.
The shy bud hesitateth still
To show the secret thyrse of white.
And yet the rosy peach-tree blooms,
Like some faint blush of first desire.
The apple waves a wealth of plumes,
And laughs in all its fresh attire.
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FLOWER THAT MAKES SPRING
To bask amid the buttercups
The timid speedwell ventures out.
Nature calls every earthling up,
And reassures each tiny sprout.
Yet I must off to other sphere!
Then please your poet, chestnuts tall,
Yea, spread ye forth without a fear
Your firework bloom fantastical!
I know your summer splendour’s pride.
I’ve seen you standing sumptuous
In autumn’s tunics purple-dyed,
With golden circlets luminous.
In winter white and crystal-crossed
Your delicate boughs I saw again,—
Like lovely traceries the frost
Limns lightly on the window-pane.
Your every garment I have known,
Ye chestnuts grand that loom aloft,—
Save one to me you’ve never shown,
Of young green fabric first and soft.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Ah, well, good-bye, for I must go!
Keep, then, your flowers, where’er they be.
There is another flower I know,
That makes the springtime fair for me.
Let May with all her blooms arise,
Let May with all her blooms depart!
That flower sufliceth for mine eyes,
And hath pure honey in its heart.
Let be the season where it waits,
And blue or dull be heaven’s dome —
It smiles and charms and captivates, —
The precious violet of my home!
172
A LAST WISH
A LAST WISH
How long my soul has loved thee, love!
It is full many a year agone.
Thy spring — what charm of flowers thereof,
My winter — what wild snows thereon !
White lilacs from the land of graves
Blow near my temples. Soon enow
Thou ’It mark the pallid mass that waves
Enshadowing my withered brow.
My westering sun must speedy drop,
And disappear behind the road.
Already on the dim hill-top,
There gleams and waits my last abode.
Then from thy rosy lips let fall
Upon my lips a tardy kiss,
That in my tomb, when comes the call,
My heart may rest, remembering this.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
THE DOVE
O tender, beauteous dove,
Calling such plaintive things !
Wilt serve unto my love,
And be my love’s own wings ?
O, but we ’re like, poor heart!
Thy dear one, too, is far.
Remembering, apart,
Each weeps beneath the star.
Let not thy rosy feet
Stay once on any tower, —
I am so fain, my sweet,—
So weary turns the hour!
Forswear the palm’s repose
That spreadeth over all,
And gables where the snows
Of other pinions fall.
Now fail me not, nor fear!
He dwelleth near the king.
Give him this letter, dear,
These kisses on thy wing.
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THE DOVE
Then seek again my breast,
This flaming, throbbing goal,
Then come, my dove, and rest —
But bring me back his soul!
175
ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
A PLEASANT EVENING
What flurrying of rains and snows !
Now every coachman, blue of nose,
In fur and ire
Sits petrified. Oh, it were right
To spend this wild December night
Before one’s fire!
The cosy chimney-corner chair
Assumes its most persuasive air.
I seem to see
Its arms held out, its voice to hear,
Beseeching like a mistress dear:
“ Ah, stay with me ! ”
A gauze reveals the orbed lamp,
Like a fair breast beneath a guimpe,
And drowsily
The shimmer of its light ascends,
Flushing with gold and crimson blends
The ceiling high.
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A PLEASANT EVENING
The silence frames no sound of things,
Save for the pendulum that swings
Its golden disk,
And many winds that roam and weep,
Or stealthy to the hall-way sweep,
To dance and frisk.
It ’s ball-night at the Embassy.
My coat’s limp sleeves are signalling me
To dress anon.
My waistcoat yawns. My shirt obtuse
Seems raising high its wristbands loose,
To be put on.
A narrow boot’s abundant glaze
Reflects the ruddy firelight’s blaze.
Have I forgot ?
A glove’s flat fingers span the shelf.
A thin cravat protrudes itself,
And begs a knot.
Then must I forth ? But what a bore —
To seek the over-crowded door !
To fall in line
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
Of coaches bearing coats of arms
And haughty beauties with their charms,
Superb and fine!
To stand against a portal wide
And see the surging mass inside
Bear form on form :
Old faces, faces fresh and young,
Black coats low bodices among, —
A motley swarm!
And puffy backs that hide their red
With laces fine of costly thread
Aerial,
Dandies, diplomatists, that press,
With features dull, expressionless,
At fashion’s call.
What! Brave, to win a glance of hers,
The rows of lynx-eyed dowagers !
Try undeterred
To speak the dear name of my dear,
And whisper softly in her ear
Love’s little word !
—
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A PLEASANT EVENING
Nay, but I ’ll not! Her eye shall heed
A letter in the flowers I ’ll speed.
No ball-room now!
Let Parma violets make good
Whatever be her passing mood.
They hold my vow.
Ensconced with Heine or with Taine,
Or, if I like, the Goncourts twain,
The time will go.
I ’ll dream, until the hour shall stir
Reality, and wait for her.
She ’ll come, I know.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
ART
More fair the work, more strong,
Stamped in resistance long,—
Enamel, marble, song.
Poet, no shackles bear,
Yet bid thy Muse to wear
The "buskin bound with care.
A fashion loose forsake, —
A shoe of sloven make,
That any foot may take.
Sculptor, the clay withstand,
That yieldeth to the hand,
Though listless heart command.
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Contend till thou have wrought,
Till the hard stone have caught
The beauty of thy thought.
With Paros match thy might,
And with Carrara bright,
That guard the line of light.
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ART ,
Borrow from Syracuse
The bronze’s stubborn use,
Wherein thy form to choose.
And with a delicate grace
In the veined onyx trace
Apollo’s perfect face.
Painter, put thou aside
The transient. Be thy pride
The colour furnace-tried.
Limn thou, fantastic, free
Blue sirens of the sea,
And beasts of heraldry.
Before a nimbus gold
Transcendently uphold
The Child, the Cross foretold.
Things perish. Gods have passed.
But song sublimely cast
Shall citadels outlast.
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ENAMELS AND CAMEOS
And the forgotten seal
Turned by the plowman’s steel
An emperor may reveal.
For Art alone is great:
The bust survives the state,
The crown the potentate.
Carve, burnish, build thy theme, —
But fix thy wavering dream
In the stern rock supreme.
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Selected Poems
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THE MIDDLE A GES
Whenever I follow my fancy away,
I love near the old Gothic castles to stray,
Where tower the roofs azure-slated and high
And crowned with low shrubs, green against the pale
sky.
I love the dear gables, the walls turreted,
The window-panes crossed with their networks of
lead,—
The legended olden-time valiant and saint
Under ogival arch wrought with fantasy quaint,
The chapel with pinnacle piercing the air,
Whose bell rings the summons to worship and prayer.
I love the mossed stone where the rain-water files,
The courts where the grasses peep up mid the tiles,
The keep to whose summit the weather-vane clings,
Grazed oft by the stately ciconia’s white wings,
The trembling drawbridges of gates blazoned bold
With fabulous monsters and griffins of gold,
185
SELECTED POEMS
The stairways colossal, the halls dim and vast,
Thfi corridors endless that gather the past,
Where faint as faint voices winds whisper and weep,
Where I wander at will, sunk in reveries deep,
And through hours of enchantment and mystery move,—
In the bright Middle Ages of knighthood and love!
186
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THE CAPTIVE BIRD
THE CAPTIVE BIRD
Long time a prisoner, thou little bird,
These many days naught hast thou seen or heard,
Save inexhaustible, eternal rain,—
Gray threads against a grayer sky’s domain, —
And cloud-bathed roofs. Amid the roar and chase
Of Winter dragging Storm about through space,
I know, dear heart, thou darest not to sing.
But let the bright sun of the lovely spring
Touch with its glance the blue-enamelled dome,
Over the silver seas bring swallows home,
Cast o’er the woods its trailing garments long,
And, little bird, thou shak regain thy song.
But if, to memory bound, thou still regret,
Being unable ever to forget
The hill, the thicket, and the high elm-top,
The country golden with its golden crop,
The brimming river-sweep that wideneth,
Rippled by passing zephyrs sweet of breath,
I shall delight in all thy joys elate.
For linked we are together in one fate.
187
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SELECTED POEMS
My soul, like thine, is caged with sufferings,
Against the mortal bars it beats its wings,
And fain would pierce the heaven’s azure spell,
Itself an angel, track Ithuriel,
Inebriate with love and light and force,
And so ascend unto the Primal Source.
But ah, what hand shall break the barriers dun,
Or open up the pathway to the sun!
188
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ON A THOUGHT OF WORDSWORTH’S
ON A THOUGHT OF WORDS¬
WORTH’S
I’ve read no line of Wordsworth whom the steven
Of Byron hath assailed with bitterest gall,
Save this I came upon, a fragment small
In a romance pseudonymously given,
From Apuleius filched, “Louisa,”— leaven
Of thought impure and pictures passional.
How well the flash of beauty I recall,
The cc Spires w hose silent finger points to heaven ! ”
A white dove’s feather down the darkness strayed,
A lovely flower abloom in some foul nook.
And now when riming halts and fancy tires,
And Prospero is of Ariel unobeyed,
I over all the margin of my book
Trace group on group of heavenward-pointing
spires.
189
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SELECTED POEMS
CARY ATIDES
I looked on Michael Angelo’s wrought folk,
Sistine’s great frescoes, the Last Judgment saw,—
Speechless, the while the wonder in me woke.
And as I looked my spirit bowed with awe.
A mass of shapes of every attitude,
Lion-like faces, necks of oxen strength,
Flesh firm as marble, muscles taut and rude,
With force to break a cable’s iron length!
No stony arch upon their forms was set;
But all their sinews to some task were steeled.
Meseemed their tensioned arms were dripping sweat.
What, then, the invisible load their power revealed ?
They bore a weight to weary Hercules,
The weight, O master, of thy mighty thought!
And never noble Caryatides
Their shoulders to more massive burden brought!
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THE CHIMERA
THE CHIMERA
A young chimera at my goblet’s brim
Gave sweetest kiss amid the orgy’s spell.
Emerald her eyes, and to her haunches slim
The golden torrent of her tresses fell.
Her shoulders fluttering pinions did bedeck.
I sprang upon her back, for travel fain,
And toward me bending firm her lovely neck,
I plunged my tightening fingers in her mane.
She struggled madly ; but I clung, austere,
With iron knees I crushed her flanks to me.
Then softly came her voice, and silver-clear:
u Whither, then, master, shall I carry thee ? ”
To farthest edge of all eternal things,
Beyond the sunf beyond the bounds of space.
But weary ere the end shall be thy wing s, —
For I would see my vision face to face !
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SELECTED POEMS
THE ENCOUNTER
Yester morning it was I beheld as I dreamed
On the arch of a bridge an encounter of horse.
Cuirassed and caparisoned, truly it seemed
The charging of splendid and passionate force.
Fierce dragons crouched low on the helmets of light,
And haggard-eyed, brazen Medusas peered out
From the bucklers. The imbricate brassarts were
bright
With knotted wild serpents which girt them about.
Oft from the gigantical arch’s tall brim
A knight, losing balance, a mad frighted steed,
Reeled down to the depth of the water whose grim,
Cruel jaws waited wide in their crocodile greed.
It was you, O my thoughts, my desires ! battling well —
Hard-pressing, down-beating, the bridgeway to keep.
And your mutilate bodies that hurtled and fell,
Engulfed in the wave, are forever asleep.
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VERSAILLES
VERSAILLES
To be a city’s ghost, Versailles, thy fate !
Like Venus in her Adriatic, how
Thy paralytic form doth trembling bow
Under a carven mantle’s sumptuous weight!
Ah, what impoverishment, what fallen state, —
Olden, yet not antique! No vine hast thou,
About thy portico upspringing now
To veil thy nudeness wan and unelate.
And like a sorrowful, forsaken one,
Thou waitest for thy royal paramour,
Dreaming his bright return the livelong hours.
Beneath his tomb the Rival of the Sun
Now slumbers. Mute thy garden streams endure,
And but a statue people fills thy bowers.
13
193
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BARCAROLLE
Tell me, beautiful maiden,
Whither wouldst thou away,
To what shore blossom-laden,
Through the wind and the spray ?
Oars of ivory are gleaming,
Silken banners are streaming,
Golden-bright is the prow.
I Ve a page fair and minion,
For a sail a saint’s pinion,
And for ballast a bough.
Tell me, beautiful maiden,
Whither wouldst thou away,
To what shore blossom-laden,
Through the wind and the spray ?
Tell me, what is thy pleasure,
A wide ocean to measure ?
A far island to claim ?
Wreaths of snow-flowers to fashion,
Or to linger with passion
Near the flower of the flame ?
194
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BARCAROLLE
Tell me, beautiful maiden,
Whither wouldst thou away,
To what shore blossom-laden,
Through the wind and the spray ?
“To the land ever vernal,
Where love liveth eternal,
Ah, take me !” she sighs.
Sweet, this land of thy seeing
Hath no place and no being,
Under any love skies /
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SELECTED POEMS
THE PORTAL
O artist, man, whoever thou mayst be,
Marvel not through so sad a gate to see
This new-born volume fatally unfold!
Alas ! all monument built high, complete,
Before it raise its head must plunge its feet:
The skyward tower hath felt the secret mould.
Below, the night-bird and the tomb. Above,
Rose of the sun and whiteness of the dove,
Carols and bells on every arch of gold.
Above, the minarets, the window’s charm,
Where birdlings fret their wings in sunbeams warm —.
The carved escutcheons borne by angels tall,
Acanthus leaves and lotus flowers of stone,
Like lilies in Elysian gardens blown.
Below, rude shaft and vault elliptical,
Knights rigid on their biers the deathlong day s,
With folded hands and helpless upward gaze,
And oozing drips from cavern roofs that fall.
196
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THE PORTAL
My book is builded thus, with narrow line
Of stratum stone, embossed with many a sign,
And carven words the creeping mosses fill.
God grant that, passing o’er this humble place,
The pilgrim foot shall never quite effac e
Its poor inscription and its work’s unskill.
My ghostly dead ! That ye might walk the shades,
With patience have I wrought your colonnades,
And in my Campo-Santo couched you still.
There watcheth at your side an angel true,
To make a curtain of his wing for you,
Pillow of marble, cloth of leaden fold.
Yea, Righteousness and Peace have kissed in stone,
Mercy and Truth are met together, one
In flowing raiment, fair and aureoled.
A sculptured greyhound lieth at your heels.
A beauteous child eternally appeals
From out the shadow of the tomb enscrolled.
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SELECTED POEMS
Upon the pillars arabesques arise
Of blooming vines that flutter circlewise,
As o’er espalier twines the dappled green.
And the dark tomb appears a gladsome thing,
With all this bright, perpetual flowering,
And looks on sorrow with a smile serene.
Death play s coquette. Only her forehead fair
Hath pallor still beneath her ebon hair.
She seeks to charm, and hath a royal mien.
A burst of colour fires the blazons clear;
The alabaster melts to whitest tear;
Less hard uplooms the bronze-built sepulture.
The consorts lie upon their beds of state;
Their pillows seem to soften with their weight,
Their love to flower within the marble pure;
Till with her garlands, traceries, and festoons,
Trefoils, pendentives, pillars wrought with runes,
Fantasia at her will may laugh and lure.
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THE PORTAL
The tomb becomes a thing of bright parade,
A throne, a holy altar, an estrade,
For it is wish fulfilled of sight at last.
But if, by some capricious thought impelled,
Your hand should peradventure wonder-spelled
Upraise a cover rich with carven cast,
Under the heavy vault and architrave,
You still would find within the mouldering grave,
The stiff and white cadaver sheeted fast,
With never glimmer of a ray without,
Nor inner light to flood the bier about,
As in the pictures of the Holy Tomb.
Between her thin arms, like a tender spouse
Death binds her chosen to her, nor shall rouse
Them ever, nor let go her grasp of doom.
Scarce at the Judgment Hour their heads shall stir,
When at the trumpet blast the stars shall err,
And a strange wind blow out the torch’s plume.
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SELECTED POEMS
An angel shall discern them in his quest,
Upon the ruins of the world at rest,
For they shall sleep and sleep, the cycles long.
And if the Christ Himself should raise His hand,
As unto Lazarus, to bid them stand,
The grave would loosen not its fetter strong.
A tomb enwrought with sculpture is my verse,
That hides a body under leaf and thyrse,
And breaks its weeping heart to seem a song.
My poems are graves of mine illusions dead,
Where many a wild and luckless form I bed
When a ship founders in the tempest’s peal! —
Abortive dream, ambition’s eagerness,
All secret ardours, passions issueless, —
All bitter, intimate things that life can feel.
Each day the sea devours a goodly ship.
Close to the shore there hides a reef to rip
Her copper-sheathed flanks and iron keel.
200
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THE PORTAL
How many have I launched, with what fair names!
With silken streamers coloured like the flames,—
Never to cleave the harbour sun’s reflex!
Ah, what dear passengers, what faces sweet, —
Desires with heaving breasts, hopes, visions fleet, —
O my heart’s children swarming to the decks!
The sea hath shrouded them with glaucous taint:
The red of rose, the alabaster faint,
The star, the flower, lie floating in the wrecks.
Fearful and masterful, the hurtling tide
Dashes from drifting spar to dolphin side
My stark and drowned dreams that sink and part.
For these inglorious travellers distant-bound,
Pale seekers of Americas unfound,
Curve into hollow caverns, O mine Art!
Then rise in towers and cupolas of fire,
Press upward in a bold cathedral spire,
And fix your peak in heaven’s open heart!
201
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SELECTED POEMS
Ye little birds of love and fantasy,
Sonnets, white doves of heaven’s poetry,
Light softly on my gables argentine.
And swallows, April messengers that pass,
Beat not your tender wings against the glass, —
My marbles have their rifts where you may win.
My virgin saint shall hide you in her robe,
For you the emperor shall let fall his globe,
The lotus heart spread wide to nest you in.
I’ve reared mine azure arch, mine organ grand,
I Ve carved my pillars, placed with loving hand
In each recess a saint of martydom ;
I Ve begged a chalice of Elygius, — spice
And frankincense for holy sacrifice
Of Kaspar, and have drawn the sweet therefrom.
The people kneel at prayer. The radiant priest
In orphreyed chasuble prepares the Feast.
The church is builded, Lord! Then wilt Thou come ?
202
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THE ESCORIAL
THE ESCORIAL
Set in defiance by a mountain crest,
There rises far across the country’s breast
The great Escorial towered and tenebrous,
Upon its shoulder bearing in the gloam,
Like a huge elephant, a massive dome,
The granite whim of Spain’s Tiberius.
Never did Pharaoh where the sad cliffs loom
Make for his mummy any darker tomb;
Never had Sphinx more dulness in the vast,
Long desert where no thing of life resorts.
The mould o’ercovers the forsaken courts.
Priests, friars, and flatterers have wrought and passed.
And all were dead, if from the hands of kings
Ensculptured, and from nooks and panellings
There fluttered not a swarm of swallows free,
Playfully winging in a wild carouse,
To flick and tease and waken from its drowse
The giant form that dream s eternity.
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SELECTED POEMS
A KING’S SOLITUDE
Encloistered I live in a tenebrous place
At the depth of my soul, with no love and no friend,
Alone like a god, with no equal to face,
Save mine ancestors sleeping their sleep without end.
For grandeur is solitude! All the long day
A changeless, an indolent idol I stand ;
Superhuman and cold in my castle I stay,
The purple upon me, the world in my hand.
Crown of thorns like to Christ’s they have set on my
hair.
Under weight of my terrible splendour I bow,
And the sharp, golden rays of the nimbus I wear;
Bright drops of blood-royal I bear on my brow.
Heraldical vultures come tearing my side.
Prometheus chained to his mountain and cast
To the tempest of heaven, the wrath of the tide,
Was only a king to his glory made fast.
Throned high on my mystic Olympus, I note
But the voices of flatterers flocking in line,—
Sole cadences counted as worthy to float
Unto summit so lofty, so distant, as mine.
204
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A KING’S SOLITUDE
If wild with oppression my people upswarm,
And rattle their irons and moan in their fear, —
44 Sleep, Sire,” they tell me, 44 it is but the storm.
The thunder shall slacken, the sky shall be clear.”
I’ve power for all things, and pleasure for none.
Ah, would I might know one deep wish in my heart,
Feel life in its warmth flood my bosom of stone,
Share one true delight, in one feast have a part!
But lonely the sun in its circle must go.
High peaks are the coldest, and never a spring,
And never a summer can soften the snow
On height of Sierra, in heart of a king!
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SELECTED POEMS
THE LAUREL IN THE GENE¬
RALIT E GARDEN
In the Generalife a lovely laurel,
Gay as victory and glad as love,
Bathes its boughs in fountain mists auroral,
Hides a pearl within each bloom of coral.
And the green earth smiles to heaven above.
Like a blushing girl elate and slender,
Tint of flesh it taketh with the spring;
Like an odalisk in her nude splendour,
Waiting by the water, flushed and tender,
Ready for her fair apparelling.
Beauteous laurel! Many a mystic hour
Have I rested me beside its form,
Sealed my lips upon its precious flower —
Sweet red mouth ! — and, thrilling to its power,
Felt it give me back my kisses warm.
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FAREWELL TO POETRY
FAREWELL TO POETRY
Come, fallen angel, fold thy wings of rose,
Doff thy white garment and thy golden ray!
Piercing the ambient ether of thy way,
A star, thou couldst but hurtling fall to prose.
Upon the ground thy dove-like feet unclose —
Walk — for thy soaring-time is not to-day.
Within thy bosom bid thy treasure stay,
And let thy lyre a moment now repose.
O thou poor child of heaven, thy song was vain !
Earth’s ears were deaf to thy most subtle chord,
Nor could it guess the language of thy spell.
But ere thou leave me, O fair angel mine,
Go seek me out my pale sweet love adored,
And on her lips imprint a long farewell!
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SELECTED POEMS
THE TULIP
I am the tulip, Holland’s choicest flower.
The thrifty Fleming — such my loveliness —
Pays for my perfect bulb a price no less
Than diamond. Lordly lineage is my dower.
Like to a proud Yolande in her young hour
Of pomp and kirtle bright, upon my dress
Of dewy crimson crossed with silver fess,
I bear the painted blazon of my power.
The gardener divine with fingers deft
Spun golden beams of iridescent noon,
And liquid depths of purple fashioned up,
To make for me a robe of royal weft.
Peerless I stand — yet grieve that Nature boon
Poured never perfume in my shining cup!
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TOUCH NOT THE MARBLE
TOUCH NOT THE MA R B L E
Yea, one may love a statue, so it be
Some subtle dream of Phidias. Tall and still,
From her bright self to man there may distil
An intimacy — for he comes, and she,
The goddess waits his coming secretly.
And he forgetteth that her form is chill,
That her white glances fascinate and kill,
Bound fast before her fair divinity.
She seems to smile, and he, grown holder, cries :
u Immortal one, a woman, then, art thou ? ”
A fiery touch is on the marble wan;
Straightway it trembles ; thunder shakes the skies, —
Well knoweth all-indulgent Venus how
A god’s desire may flame the heart of man!
14
209
A L B E R T U S
or THE SOUL AND SIN
A 'Tbeological Legend
THE C 0 M E D T
OF DEATH
Translated into English Prose
By F. C. de SUMICHRAST
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Albertusy or Lhe Soul and Sin
A Rheologic al Legend
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A L B E R T U S
or THE SOUL AND SIN
A Theological Legend
«SW «U»
POEM
You shall see anon ; ’t Is a knavish piece of work.
Hamlet, Hi, 2.
I
By the side of a deep canal whose greenish, silent
tide with water-lilies and boats is covered, rises, with
pointed gables, granaries vast, slate-roofed towers on
which storks their nests do build, and noisy pot-houses
with topers filled, an old Flemish town such as Teniers
loves to paint. Surely the place you know ? — Look,
there stands the willow, its dull green leaves on its
shoulders spreading, as spreads the hair of a girl as
she bathes; there the church and its steeple too; the
pond, where bravely duck armadas do disport. In
truth, all the picture lacks is a frame and nail where¬
from to hang it on the wall.
215
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
II
Comfort and far niente! A world of poetic calm
and satisfaction that wellnigh might the fancy excite
thither to go and Flemish turn; to own a well-
coloured pipe, and a stoup with painted flowers adorned,
a tankard huge enough four pints to hold, such as
Brawer’s topers grasp. And at night, close by the
stove with hissing, crackling logs, amid a cloud of to¬
bacco smoke, hands on stomach folded, vague thoughts
idly to pursue, to doze or digest, to sing some old
refrain, to drink a health, within one of those warm
interiors which Ostade knows so well how to light up
with soft luminousness.
Ill
So that even you, poet and painter, would come
to forget that fairy land of which Goethe’s Mignon,
of cold abhorrent, remembering, oft to her Wilhelm
speaks, — the land of sunshine where the citron ripens,
where the jessamine ever freshly blows; to make you
forget Naples for Amsterdam’s sake, Claude Lorrain
for Berghem; to make you willing to exchange, for
these mossy-green walls between which Rembrandt,
216
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SELECTED POEMS
within the dun darkness, brings gleaming forth Faust
in dress of olden days, the fair marble palaces with
their white colonnades, the dark-hued women, the
langourous serenades, and all the azure Venetian air!
IV
Of yore within this town, so tradition tells, there
dwelt a woman wicked, Veronica by name. Feared
she was by one and all, and it was whispered low that
round her home had murmurs strange been heard arise,
and that angels of evil there in darksome night their
pleasure took. — The sounds were nameless sounds,
till then unheard by human ears, like unto the voice
of dead within the tomb, by magic spell from sleep
awaked ; faint plaints from underground arising; distant
rumours, songs, cries, tears, the clank of chains, and
terrifying howls.
V
One stormy day, indeed, had dame Gertrude with
her own eyes seen emerge from out a cloud a black
fiend on lightning-bolt astride, who shot across the
blood-red sky, and within the chimney, whence sudden
rose vapours bluish, dash down head first with hideous
217
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
yell. The barn of Justus van Eyck, the farmer, broke
into flames, that none might quench, and in its fall,
an avalanche of lire, crushed to death four of the
workers. And people worthy of belief do declare that
Veronica stood there, laughing sardonic laughter and
muttering sarcastic words.
VI
The wife of Cornelius, the brewer, before her time
did bring into the world a child all covered o’er with
loathsome hair, and of ugliness such that gladly would
the father have seen it dead. ’T was said that on the
woman brought to bed, and since that day sick con¬
tinuously and in her bed lying, Veronica, by some
foul, mysterious means, had cast an evil spell. — And
truth to tell, her grim and treacherous mien more than
justified these reports. Her eyes were green, her
mouth a cave, black her teeth, wrinkled her brow, her
fingers knotty, bowed her back, her foot misshapen
and her legs yet worse, harsh her voice, and her soul
more repulsive even than her frame. The Devil
himself more hideous could not be.
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SELECTED POEMS
VII
This ancient witch did a hut inhabit that crouched
at the foot of a barren mound, exposed, in summer’s
heat as in winter’s cold, to the four winds of heaven.
The long-prickled thistle, the nettle and ivy spread
around in mass irregular; upon it the grass luxuriant
its swaying plumes did hang, while through cracks
in roof and rifts in ceiling the rain, by obstacles un¬
hindered, with its great drops the mouldy, rotten floors
did flood. Within the window frame scarce one pane
out of three might one note that unbroke was, and
never could the door fast be closed.
VIII
Slimy slugs silver-traced the walls, the stones of
which were cracked; the plaster kept breaking away.
Lizards green and gray within the holes did lodge, and
when night fell a high, piercing note was heard, that
of the leaping frog, while the dun-eyed toads did
hoarsely groan. — Thus it was that, on winter nights,
once the dark had fallen, and especially when a fleecy
cloud shrouded the horn of the crescent moon in mass
of vapour, no one — not even Eisenbach the preacher
219
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
himself — dared to pass in front of the sinister den
without shudder and pallor of fear.
IX
The interior worthy was of the exterior alluring: it
was a pandemonium, wherein on one and the same
row were jumbled together innumerable fantastic
articles. There were lean bats with wings diaphanous,
clinging to the walls with their four slight clav^s;
broken-necked bottles, cracked earthen dishes, croco-
diles, serpents stuffed, rare plants, alembics,. twisted
into shapes of the strangest, old manuscripts open lying
upon limping chairs, ill-preserved fceti offending the
nose from a mile away; their yellow, blue faces
plastered against the glass of the jar.
X
It was a downright witches’ sabbath of colours and
form s, amid which the paunchy jar, with its huge
sides, loomed like a river-horse, and the long-necked
vial seemed to be an Egyptian ibis perched upon the
edge of the sarcophagus of some Pharaoh or long-dead
Magi king. It was a vision like unto a madman’s
d ream s, or wrought in brain by opium, in which re-
220
SELECTED POEMS
ceivers, matrasses, syphons, and pumps, long-drawn
like a phallus or twisted like trumps, assumed the
appearance of elephant and rhinoceros; in which the
monsters traced around the zodiac, bearing on their
brows their name in Syrian, together boleros danced.
XI
A dusty heaping up of apparatus strange, of which
the eye the baffling contours could trace, and of old
volumes, with not one title in the Christian tongues.
A medley, a chaos in which everything grimaced, was
deformed, twisted, changed its shape; a mirror reversed,
in which nought could be known, for all was trans-
posed — red turned dun, white black became, and
black to blue did turn. Never under an alcove did
Smarra more hideous phantoms crowd: it was the
realising of fantastic tales, the living embodiment of
visions queer, Hoffmann at once and Rabelais.
XII
•
To make the picture complete, from the edge of
shelves there grinned whitened skulls, with polished
crowns, long teeth, triangular noses, and empty sockets
which seemed to glare with hungry look. A skeleton
221
A db &tSr^?4r
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
upright, its arms hanging limp, cast, as willed the
light that streamed through the network of its ribs —
scarce deserted by the inhabitants of the grave—its
shadow in straight lines upon the wall. Had Satan’s
self entered there, heretic though he be, such ice-cold
terror upon him would have fallen that, like a good
Catholic, he’d have crossed himself.
XIII
Yet to an artist a hell like this is a paradise. ’T was
thence Teniers his “Alchemist” drew, and Callot
many a motive for his “ Temptation.” ’T was thence
Goethe got all that scene in which Mephistopheles
leads Faust, eager his youth to renew, to the witch’s
den the potion to swallow. The illustrious baronet,
Sir Walter Scott himself (Jedediah Cleishbotham), found
in it more than one theme. The character he re-
peats constantly, Meg, in “Guy Mannering,” is as
like as two peas to our Veronica. All he did was to
take her and to conceal her dress.
XIV
The chequered tartan plaid and the bonnet hide the
skirt and the coif. Scotland has taken the place of
222
SELECTED POEMS
Flanders — that is all. Then he has stolen from me,
the infamous plagiarist, this description (compare “The
Antiquary ”), the black cat — Marius on the ruins stand¬
ing ! —and many another touch. And I would almost
swear that he who to the sublime the grotesque did
wed, who created Bug, Han, Cromwell, Notre-Dame,
Hernani, within this very hovel those masks did mould
that, when one looks at their features fantastic, seem
to have been done by Benvenuto Cellini.
XV
The cat, of which I have spoken in the preceding
stanza, was the great grandsire of Murr, the philoso¬
pher, whose story, intertwined with that of Kreissler,
more than once has made me forget that the logs were
putting on, as the fire died down, their robe of plush,
that midnight was striking, and that it was winter time.
My poor Childebrand, truest of friends, of eats the
most tender-hearted, and endowed with the whitest
soul that could be found under fur so black, that friend
of mine whose death I so sorely mourned that since
that day I have life hated, one of his heirs also was.
223
4*4*4«4^^ 4* 4*
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
XVI
For the matter of that, this worthy cat was the one
and only creature allowed within the den; the sole and
only one for whom Veronica felt any love. And it
may be that he alone in all the world her did love; for,
indeed, old, ugly, and poor as she was, who else would
have done so ? Those we hate are wicked — that is
excuse enough for us. — It is night; all is silence ; a
red light flickers and gleams on the hovel’s pane.
The cat, curled up on the broken-legged chair, watches
with serious, intelligent gaze, the old woman who
moves about and hastes to prepare some shameful
mystery.
XVII
Or else, on his whiskers stiff his paw rubbing,
smooths his coat, lustrous as ermine’s, with the help
of his rough, harsh tongue, and feeling chilly, between
the andirons, close to the logs, his head under his tail,
artistically himself curls up. — Meanwhile the wind
without still moans, and with the strident sounds of
the storm the orfrey mingles its screams. The roof
creaks and groans ; the logs crackle sharp; the flames
swirl on high, and within the great caldron, under a
224
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foam of flakes, dark, stinking water bubbles and boils,
its sound accompanying the kettle and the feline’s
purr.
XVIII
Midnight is the hour appointed for the evil deed.
Midnight now sounds. — Forthwith the infamous Ver¬
onica a circle on the floor draws with her wand, and in
the centre stands. Outside the magic ring, phantoms
innumerable, luminous dots against the hangings dark,
tremble, like motes a sunbeam in the shadow reveals.
— Meanwhile the hag her incantation mutters, utters
fierce cries, speaks words the sound of which pains
the ear as sledge-hammers wielded in a forge, and
which scrape the throat like potions evil.
XIX
But this is not enough. To fulfil the mystery, she
one by one her garments to the ground doth cast, and
naked stands. A terrifying sight! A whitened skeleton
swaying in the wind, and which has grinned for six
months from the gibbet at the crows, is a cheerful
spectacle by comparison with this carcass with its
flaccid breasts, its yellow, sunken belly, wrinkled with
large folds, its arms red as lobsters. a Horror! hor-
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
ror! horror! ” as Shakespeare would say ; a nameless
thing, impossible to describe; the very ideal of nightmare
grim.
XX
Within her palm the water dark she takes and thrice
her bosom with it she doth anoint. Now, no human
tongue can truly tell what then befell! — The flaccid
breasts, that hung as hangs the skirt of well-worn coat,
miraculously swell and round become; the cloud of tan
is cleared away, and they might be an opal globe parted
in twain, so fair the form and fair the tint. The blood
courtes in them in azure veins, life gleams in them so
that even a maid of fifteen could scarce more blooming
Her eyes she rubs, her whole face next. Roses
bloom once more; smallest wrinkles go, as vanish
ripples when the breeze doth fail; her mouth with
enamels gleams, and brilliant light, a fiery diamond,
within her eyes doth flash; her hair is jet, her frame
no longer bowed — she is beauteous now ; so fair that
she would envy excite. Many a gallant swain his life
would peril merely to touch her fingers’ tips, and no
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SELECTED POEMS
one would dream, on seeing the lovely head, the body
fair, the figure sweet, to what she owes them.
XXII
A very pearl of love ! Great eyes, almond-shaped,
at times most German in their sweetness tender, at
times flaming with Spanish heat; two glorious mirrors
of jet that make one wish to gaze within them one’s
whole life long. Her voice’s tone more sweet than
nightingale’s lay; Sontag and Malibran, whose every
note doth thrill and in the heart awake a secret note;
Puck’s roguishness, ArieFs grace, a winsome mouth
whereon the smile mingles with Esmeralda’s pout and
mingling plays — a miracle, a dream of Heaven !
XXIII
Reader, hyperbole apart, she was truly beautiful —
most beautiful! That is, she seemed so, and that the
same thing is. Enough that the eye be deceived; it
ever is by love; happiness due to fancy is the same
as if mathematics proved it true. For what is happi¬
ness, if not to believe in and caress one’s dream, with
prayer to God that here below it may never wane ?
For faith alone heaven to us shows in our terrestrial
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
exile, and this desert of the world, in which felicity on
nothingness is based as on reality is woe.
XXIV
The lambent flame upsprings once more. Forth
from the circle Veronica steps, a tunic white slips on,
and over that a purple robe. Upon her head, in place
of the black cap she wore erstwhile, an ermine hood
she sets, and a mirror in her hand taking, looks long
within and with pleasure smiles at the sight she
sees. The moon just then, through a break in the
clouds, upon her cast her fond, chaste light. The
door open stood, so that one might from without look
straight within; and, haply, had any at this time
strayed along the road, he would have made sure he
dreamed awake.
XXV
Veronica, with the tip of her wand, touches the cat,
which gazes upon her with bright, treacherous glance,
and rolls at her feet, its back curling. Thrice she
spins around, makes mystic signs, and whispers low,
cabalistic words. Then is seen a sight that makes the
blood run cold. In place of the cat, appears a hand-
228
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SELECTED POEMS
some youth, — aquiline nose, forehead high, black mous¬
tache, — a youth such as maidens see in their dreams
of love. His mantle is red and his doublet of silk,
his Toledo blade has a sparkling hilt,—he undoubtedly
is a sprightly lad.
XXVI
“’Tis well,” said Veronica, holding out her white
hand to the young cavalier, who, hand on hip, in
silence waited. “Escort me, Don Juan.” — Juan
bowed. — “ Whither may I take you, madame ? ”
— The lady bowed and whispered in his ear a syllable
or two. Don Juan understood. — “ Here, Leporello,”
said he in a loud, ringing voice. “ Her ladyship goes
forth. Take a torch and light her on her way.” —
Instantly, torch in hand, Leporello appears. — “ Bring
up the carriage.” — They enter it, the whip cracks, the
coachman swears, and they ’re off.
XXVII
Off, but which way ? That is a profound mystery.
It was pitch-dark, and besides, in so dark a place who
the devil could have seen them ? No one, for all were
asleep. The moon had bound a cloud across its eyes
of blue lest they indiscreet should prove. So the
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND~SIN
carriage reached the end of its way without any one
suspecting whom it contained. Not a single splash of
mud defaced the panels broad and blazoned ; the wheels,
as if the stones had been covered with velvet and with'
silk, rolled on, silent, noiseless, through the fields straight
on, and so lightly that they made no mark, that they
nowhere the wheat bowed down.
XXVIII
For the nonce, the scene to Leyden is shifted.
That petticoated monkey, that hag, hideous enough to
make Beelzebub himself turn on his heel, now young
and beautiful, incarnate poetry, treasure of graces,
makes the fashionable beauties and middle-class Venuses
of the place with jealousy wither, under their ample
skirts, overladen with galloons, and their lofty caps, full
six feet high. Empty are the rooms of Lady Barbara
Von Altenhorff; empty are the halls of the young
Countess Cecilia Wilmot; there is no sign of a crush
at the Landgravine of Gotha’s.
XXIX
Young and old, lawyers in dusty wigs, dandies shed-
ding around them the scent of amber, officers in gay
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uniforms dragging their swords across the sounding
floors, painters and musicians, all crowd to the stranger’s
rooms 5 and, although it was far from proper, as vinegary
ancient prudes remark, thus to keep all men to one’s
self, especially when' one had no other attraction than
a piquant face and the beauty of youth, none the less
men kept running there. The sole topic of talk in
town was Veronica. Never was any name more fre¬
quently spoken.
XXX
When she appeared it was impossible to hear one’s self
for the enthusiasm, the delirium, the excitement, ex-
pressing itself in peals of applause and bravos and noise.
Never did dilettanti from their theatre-boxes rain down
more abundant praise, flowers, and verse on a prima
donna than at every step fair Veronica at the dance, at
the play, everywhere, received from her adoring admirers.
The poets wrote sonnets to her eyes and called her
u Sun ” or cc Moon ” in acrostics; painters painted her
face, and the rich ruined themselves in their rivalry.
XXXI
She gave the tone, the keynote of fashion. She was
adored like an idol. In naught would any have dared
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
her to contradict. The shape of bonnets and the form
of sleeves; which was better, flowers or feathers white ;
which the right jewels, which the most becoming,
especially the important matter whether one should
rouge or not, — she it was who decided all. The lady
of the Margrave Tielemann Van Horn and the old
Duke’s daughter in vain protested by their heretical
dress; scarce was there to be seen within their old-
fashioned rooms a broken-down admirer ancient.
XXXII
Young would have become cheerful. Heraclites the
weeper, wiping his eyes, would have laughed louder
than Democritus at the comical sight of the efforts
made by the ladies of the place, short and stout Irises,
to dress as she did and to copy her grace. Maidens,
the slimmest of whom weighed three or four hundred,—
rubicund faces, with flowers, lots of ribbons and laces,
masses of flesh (after Rubens’ manner), — wearing in¬
stead of rich velvet and great pattern brocades, thin
tissues, gauze, fleece-like stuff. Ye gods, what a
masquerade!
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SELECTED POEMS
XXXIII
But as for our heroine, she was invariably charming,
whether adorned or not ; whether veiled or cloaked;
whether cape wearing or a hood. In short, in every
way everything she had seemed endowed with life.
The folds appeared to understand when they ought
to flutter and when they ought to hang; the in¬
telligent silk hushed its chatter or kept it up to
warble her praise; the breeze blew just on purpose
to make her fringes shimmer, and her feathers flut-
tered like birds about to take to flight, while an in¬
visible hand her laces separated and played within
their maze,
XXXIV
Her hair was always well dressed. Whatever she
wore, — a mere trifle, the first thing she took, every
bit of ribbon, every flower, — fairy like seemed to
be; whatever touched her at once precious became;
everything was in perfect taste and indicated quality.
Whatever her dress, grand, rich, or quaint, she alone
was noticed. Her eyes made the flash of diamond’s self
grow pale; her teeth were fairer than pearls, and
satin lost its gloss when near her skin. With her port
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
so free, her teasing wit, her charm both coy and arch,
she was in turns Camargo, Manon Lescaut, Philine,
— in short, a ravishing wretch !
XXXV
Hans, Aulic counsellor, and Master Philip for her
sake their gin, their pipe renounced. It was positively
jolly to see these worthy Flemings, so perfect of their
kind, stout, squat, their faces beaming, actually forget¬
ful of their tulips, blooming at last, transform them¬
selves into dandies and posture round the diva. Wives
and mothers certes did not spare her bitter remarks,
but serenely she kept on her way, none of her adorers
losing, and, caring little for the empty talk, welcomed
every one, and accepted the homage and the cash of
each.
XXXVI
Two months have passed. On this day, like a
queen, Veronica a headache boasts or pretends to
have. Her door is closed. Her courtiers in numbers
great are vainly waiting. Within a rich boudoir in
which amber pastiles sweet perfume shed, and where
every footfall upon the handsome Turkish rugs is
noiseless as on sward, in which a silver lamp and the
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hissing logs alone break silence with their shrill sound,
our beauty in her morning wrapper, pale and white as
pearl, bends over a table, a paper crushing within her
hand.
XXXVII
She sulks. Ye gods, how bewitching is a woman
when she sulks ! Her hand under her chin, her elbow
softly pressing one knee like the jasper rich, her body
willowy bending, like a buttercup with a drop of dew
o’er full. Her hair undone, that in a moment shows, or
hides, perchance, as the zephyr through it blows, or the
restless fingers through it move, the cheek, pearl-pink,
transparent, the brow azure-veined; just as in great
gardens the limbs of trees with their foliage veil or
uncover the statues fair that stand under their summer
shade.
XXXVIII
Whence, then, her grief? When she rose this morn
and in her glass did look did she herself discover older
or less fair to be ? Did she find within her jet black
hair one single pale silvery thread, or on her dazzling
teeth a single stain ? Did the two ends of the ribbon,
when her hands drew them, prove too short for the
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
stouter frame? Has a dress she expected and on
which she reckoned to take away the Count from
Lady Wilmot,— has that dress been torn or crushed
on its way ? Is it her dog that has sickened ? Or,
after three nights at the dance, has fever paled the pure
carmine of her lovely lips ?
XXXIX
Is her glance less bright, her neck less fair, the form
of her Greek face less pure ? Has some rival, in
greater youth or diamonds richer rejoicing, .turned
more heads at the last assembly ? Nay, still, as ever,
the queen of the feast she is. All at her knees do
fall. But yesterday one of her lovers, filled with empty
despair on finding her unfaithful, within the Rhine
himself did headlong cast. This very morn for her
sake did Ludwig Von SiegendorfF a duel fight; his
adversary ’s dead; himself is wounded. Surely this is
a great success; all Leyden is talking about it now.
Why, then, her gloomy brow ?
XL
Why do her brows tremble and bend ? Why do
her long, black lashes, as, half closed, between them
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SELECTED POEMS
tears now slip, flutter and cast upon the satiny skin
a brown aureole, a velvety shade such as Lawrence
paints ? Why do her troubled breasts within their
gauze press and under the thin nets rise and fall,
like snow when blows the storm ? What strange
thought imparts so dreamy an air to her lightsome
face ? Is it the remembrance of her first love and
the voice of infancy ? Is it regret that she has lost
her fair innocence, or of the future is it dread ?
XLI
Nay, it is not that. Too thoroughly corrupt is she
not to forget, and broken is the chain that her past to
her present linked. Besides, I do not believe there be
in any recess of her soul a single one of those remem-
brances which in every woman’s heart, howe’er depraved
she may be, are left of better days, and remain spot¬
less within the memory’s depths like pearls within the
waters black. She is but a coquette, she has never
loved. A ball, a supper, a party, an entertainment to
be given, pleasure, — these are the things that take
her out of herself and prevent her hearing the voice of
her oppressed heart.
237
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
XLII
Here is the trouble. The night before at the play
was given Mozart’s “Don Juan.” Surrounded by her
lightsome crowd of dandies young, — drawing-room
butterflies whose wings by some Leyden tailor have
been made,—Veronica was present, the cynosure of all
eyes, coquetting within her box and radiant to behold.
All women else under their rouge with rage turned
pale, their lips did bite, but she, sure to please, like a
peacock its tail spreading, her fan opened out, chatted,
laughed aloud, let fall her glass, her glove took off, her
scent bottle passed, or made its rich enamel flash and
gleam.
XLIII
In vain the actors wrought with might and main,
spun out their finest notes. They made no gain.
Leporello step by step behind Don Juan walked in
vain; in vain the Commander thundered with his
boots, Zerlina warbled playing with the notes, and
Donna Anna wept. They might have kept it up for
a livelong year without any taking note. The stalls
were inattentive. They talked, they looked, but looked
another way. Through the gold-mounted glasses all
238
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SELECTED POEMS
desires in the same direction turned. ' Veronica smiled.
The joy of being beautiful made her ten times more
beauteous yet.
XLIV
Alone a man, by a pillar standing, undisturbed, un-
amazed by the sensation great, from the forgotten
stage his glance never taking, in a secret ecstasy deeply
drank those wondrous chords, those glorious harmonies,
which make thy name, O Mozart, shine over all!
Thy genius his had seized and on its wings borne it
to the eternal spheres. Of time, or place, or world, he
unconscious was. Into music he was turned and his
heart as it beat, fluttered and sang with purest voice,
for he alone thy meaning caught.
XLV
At most, between the acts, upon the fair he coldly
glanced; his eye flashed not, as if the look had struck
against a wall.— Yet, like a bullet, swift-sped, that
glance across the house to Veronica’s heart shot true,
and unconscious all, a grievous wound on her inflicted
— a deadly wound. So falls the brave, by bosky
corner slain, all gloryless, laid low by shot perchance at
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
some hare aimed; or killed by falling slate, or taken
off by fever, as he to his home returns.
XLVI
She who, till then, like the salamander cold amid
the flames, scarce deigned to give a passing caprice in
return for passion, and made it her delight — for such
is woman’s pleasure, — hearts to torture and souls to
damn; she who pitiless trifled with love as a cruel
child with its plaything trifles, forgetting it and far
away casting it so soon as it wearies, — she now was
suffering the pains that yesterday she caused. She
made men love her, and now she loved, and she
who captured at last in her snare was caught. Her
haughty heart at last was bowed.
XLVII
That is just the way of life, of fate. When on the
fatal dial strikes the hour, none may his end for
a day put off. No matter how virtuous, whether one
flee or stay, all must yield to that power,* infernal
or celestial. Two things unavoidable are, — one’s
fate and love. Love, the joy and scourge of earth!
sweet pain; sorrow one regrets, and so full of charms.
240
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Laughter and tears ; pallid, lovely care ; ill, that all
seek ! A paradise, a hell; a dream, in heaven begun,
on earth prolonged; an enchantment mysterious !
XLVIII
Oh, voluptuousness intense ! Pleasure which, may¬
hap, of man God’s equal makes ! Who would not
know you, if yet unknown, moments delicious and yet
so short, that are a whole life worth, and which the
angel that envies them would gladly pay for with an
eternity of happiness in heaven. Oh, sea of felicity,
ravishment, ecstasy, of which no words on earth can
convey the bliss, whether in prose or eke in verse!
Oh, hours of trysting! Oh, ye glorious sleepless
nights, delirious sobs intoxicate ! Sighs, strange words,
lost in a caress ! Kisses mad and wild desires!
XLIX
Love, thou art the only sin worth while incurring
hell for ! In vain in his sermons the priest condemns
thee. In vain within her arm-chair, spectacles on
nose, the mother to her daughter as a monster paints
thee. In vain does jealous Orgon his door close and
to his Windows bars doth ’ place. In vain, in still-
16
241
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
born tomes, do moralists endlessly cry out against thee.
In vain coquettes thy power flout. When thou art
named, the novice herself doth cross. Young or
old, handsome or ugly, rosy-faced or pale, English or
French, pagan or Christian, every one loves at least
once in life.
L
As for me, ’t was last year the frenzy of love fell
upon me. Good-bye then to poetry. I’d not time
enough to use it to compass words. Four months
and a half not another thing I did save worship my
idol, adore her, wonder at her glorious hair, ebony
waves in which my hands loved to lose themselves ;
listen to her breathing, watch her live, and smile when
she smiled to me, drink deeper intoxication from the
sight; read her nascent desires within her eyes, on
her sleeping face note her dreams, and from her rosy
lips sip her breath within a kiss.
LI
But for that the world would have had this poem
in eighteen nine and twenty; nay, earlier yet; but, as
I have said, I had not leisure to string words upon a
verse like pearls upon a string. With her I was
242
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SELECTED PQEMS
wont to go into the great, deep woods to hear the
thrushes sing, — for the time was spring. She, like
a child, scampered through the dew in quest of
butterflies; her ankles wet with silvery shower, she
went singing on, as under her footsteps every flower
its calyx gently bowed, and I upon her gazed.
LII
Within the rich green sward May the strawberry did
crimson, and when she found one, happy and laughing
for joy, quickly she ran to me that I might with her share,
but I would not. Then came the battle. With one
arm I seized her two wrists and her waist, and with my
other hand forced her of the fruit to eat. At first she
resisted, but soon wearying of the unequal struggle, for
mercy begged, promising to pay a ransom of kisses;
then, like the bird whose cage is opened, she’d take to
flight and escape, the witch, to conceal herself behind
a bush.
Lill
Next I’d hear her laugh amid the leaves at having
tricked me thus.—Some busy bee emerging from
a bell, a lizard, a grasshopper on its long slender legs
springing, a caterpillar caught upon her lace, soon
243
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
brought her back uttering dreadful shrieks. Then
she’d hide her head upon my breast, quite pale, trem¬
bling when the branches in the wind did move. Her
beauteous breasts with the beating of her heart trembled
and fluttered like two little turtle-doves caught in their
nest, and which flutter their wings lightly in the hands
of the fowler.
LIV
While reassuring her, with practised hand the mon¬
ster I would seize, and, her fear now gone, she’d turn
to laughter again, and, nestling on me anew, laugh at
herself and kiss me as she said, “ Ye heavens, how I
love him! ” Then when I kissed her back, dreamy
she leaned her head upon my shoulder and closed her
eyes, as if to sleep away. The long beam of light
pressing through the leaves gilded her lovely brow.
The nightingale sang its pearly trills, and the scent-per-
fumed breeze softly breathed under the arches green.
LV
Never a word we spake and sad we both did seem,
and yet if anywhere on earth happiness doth exist, we
twain most happy were. But what could speech have
served ? On ruddy lips the words we stayed; the
244
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SELECTED POEMS
thoughts we knew. We had but one mind, but one
soul for the pair of us, and, as it were, in Paradise in
one another’s embrace locked, we could not dream
other heaven than ours might be. Our veins, our
hearts in harmony pulsed ; in the ravishment of ecstasy
profound the very world was well forgot; nor before
our eyes did horizon spread. «
LVI
Gone is all that happiness. Who’d have believed
it ? Each to the other now a stranger is, for ’t is the
way of men, — whose Ever is never greater than a six
months’ span ? Our love has flown, — Heaven knows
whither. My goddess, like painted butterfly that flies
and leaves but bloom of red and white upon the finger
tips, her flight has taken, leaving in my heart naught
but mistrust of the present and bitter remembrance of
the past. But what of that ? Love is a strange thing.
In those bygone days I loved, and now I set my loves
so fair in wretched verse.
LVII
Thus, gentle reader, is my whole story told most
faithfully to you, so far as my memory (an ill-kept
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
register) can recall to my thoughts trifles that mean so
much, for they make up love, and by and by we laugh
at them. — Forgive this pause. The bubble I took
pleasure in blowing and which floated in the air, gor¬
geous with prismatic fires, has suddenly faded out into
mere drop of water, bursting when it touched the gable-
roof’s angle. Even so, when it met reality, my glorious
dream was spent, and now for mother only have I love.
All other affection in me has died out.
LVIII
Except love for thee, O Poesy, that speakest ever
loud in chosen souls ! Poesy! O golden-haloed angel,
who, passing from one world to another without fear
of soiling thy white form by contact with ours for
a moment* within the gloom of our night thy flight
dost stay; whisperest words to us, and with the tip of
thy wing driest our bitter tears. And thou, Po'esy’s
twin sister, Painting, God rivalling, and His equal,
sublime deception, wondrous imposture, that life re-
storest and nature doublest, to you twain I do not bid
farewell.
4»4*4»4*4» •!* 4* 4* 4« #l«4*4*4*4«4*4«4*4*4*4* 4*4*4*
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SELECTED POEMS
LIX
Let me to my theme return. The young enthusiast
a handsome cavalier was in very truth, and certes a
maid more chaste than Veronica might well for him
love have felt. But before I go farther it might be
well to sketch his portrait, for the outer form helps one
to know what is within. Foreign suns had shone upon
him and enriched with hue of tan his Italian skin,
naturally pale. His hair, wildered by his hands’ agita¬
tion, fell over a brow which Gall ecstatically would
have felt for six months, and taken for base for a dozen
treatises.
LX
An imperial brow of artist and poet; that of itself
the half of the head did form. Broad and full, bending
under inspiration which in each wrinkle untimely
drawn, concealed superhuman power, great thoughts;
and it bore written these words, “ Belief and Power.”
The rest of the face corresponded with this noble brow,
yet was there something in it unpleasant, and, faultless
though it was, one wished it might have different been.
Irony and sarcasm gleamed over it, rather than genius.
The lower part the upper seemed to mock.
247
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
LXI
Strange the effect of this combination. It was like
a demon under angel’s tread writhing; hell under
heaven opened. Though he had glorious eyes, long
ebony brows towards the temples fining, over the skin
gliding as a serpent crawls, a fringe of fluttering silken
lashes, yet his lion-like glance and the fatal flash that
shot at times from his eyes made one shudder and
turn pale in spite of all. The boldest look must, per¬
force, be cast down before that Medusa glance which
could change to stone, though gentle he strove to make
it seem.
I
LXII
On his stern lip, shadowed at each end with a slight
mustache, elegantly waxed, a mechanical smile at times
rested, but, in general, his expression deepest disdain* did
plain betray. In vain the fair, having again in society
met him, did all that in such case coquette may do to
draw him to her feet. To her amazement, nothing
could touch his adamantine heart. Glances from be¬
hind her fan, sighs, simperings, half-spoken avowals,
teasing arch, — all failed, and utterly.
248
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SELECTED POEMS
LXIII
He was not the man to let himself be caught in the
nets Veronica tried to set for him. A great eagle
scarce sacrifices a feather to the lime which a sparrow
holds. The foolish fly is caught by the wing within
the web the spider spins in corner dark, but the wasp
the whole with her bears away, and Gulliver, with
single effort, breaks the Liliputians’ silken chains. Yet
so fine a prey was well worth troubling for, so, if she
did not plainly speak the wofds, u I love you,” she tried
every art. But he, unchanging still, on her bestowed
no thought.
LXIV
This was the reason why her door to comers all was
closed. For, indeed, what eared her anxious heart for
her courtier train ? These handsome fellows, these dan-
dies, who before now delighted her, seemed at this
time affected or vulgar, their perfumed madrigals wearied
her. Noise and light to her brought pain ; all things
troubled and annoyed her. On her dainty hand she
rests her brow; her dimpled arm upon her chair hangs
limp. Poor girl! just see the pallor of her cheeks!
249
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
Grief her roses to pearls has changed ; within her eyes
the tears begin to well.
LXV
The paper which the fair, with anguished mien,
with rosy-nailed fingers crushes and crumples, unques¬
tionably a love-letter is on azure vellum, which through
the room sheds sweet and fashionable scent of amber.
— I know all about it. — Yet the handwriting and the
turn of phrase have something about them that tell of
woman. Is it, then, a note intercepted from a rival, or
does the lady on her own account to some young beau
now write ? The latter fact seems proved by the black
spot upon the white finger tip, by the inkstand, and by
the raven’s quill.
LXVI
Suddenly, bird-like looking up, and throwing back a
curl astray, her indolent pose she leaves, and begins,
before calling for light and wax to seal her note, to
read again quite low, as if afraid the echo might under¬
stand. “ I will not send it. I *ve written it ill,” she
says, the paper tearing. Low is her voice. “ It is only
fit within the fire to go.” It was very cold, the flames
250
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SELECTED POEMS
were hot. The paper, like the damned in hell, flashed
up in blaze of blue,
LXVII
And disappeared.— While the sheet is being consumed,
the girl another takes, a moment thinks, and then begins.
Her hand, as swift as race-horse at Newmarket, scarce
the paper touches. She ’s filled her page while yet the
ink of the first words undried is.—“Don Juan!” —
With uncovered head, Don Juan before the lady stands.
— Veronica agitated, with her eyes burning bright:
cc This note to my lord Albertus.” — “ The painter
who lives at the inn of the Monkey Green ? ” — “ The
same; and within an hour at farthest, Don Juan, see
that you are back.”
LXVIII
Albertus, I need not tell you, is the handsome swain
I’ve just described a few stanzas above. An artist
was he, loving with passion fanatical painting and
verse, to the full as much as music. Nor could he
have told, had God the choice given him, which he
would rather be, Mozart or Dante. But I who knew
him as well as he did himself, — better perhaps, — I
251
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
believe that he would have said Raphael. For, of these
three sisters equal in merit, at bottom painting was his
favorite and his truest talent.
LXIX
He considered the world an infamous pot-house.
What he believed about woman and man was what
Hamlet thought, — he would not have given a copper
for the pair. Womankind delighted him not, save in
painting, and having since birth inquired the why and
wherefore, he was pessimistic as the oldest of men
might be; consequently, more generally sad than other¬
wise. Love was but an empty word to him; although
quite young, still, for long years past, of belief in it he
had still none. Thus within his days moved many
hours of weariness.
LXX
All the same, his ills he patient bore. Great knowl¬
edge a very great scourge is sure to be; a child into an
old man it makes. At the very outset of life, novice
though one be, there is nothing new in what one feels ;
when the cause appears the effect is already known ;
existence is burdensome; all is savourless. To the
252
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SELECTED POEMS
sick man’s palate pimento tasteless is; the much-tried
nostrils scarce can ether smell: love becomes a mere
spasm; glory an empty phrase; like a squeezed lemon
arid the heart becomes. Behind Werther Don Juan
ever stalks.
LXXI
Our hero, like Eve his ancestress, had, by the ser¬
pent urged, tasted the bitter fruit. A god he desired to
be. When naked he beheld himself and possessed in
full of knowledge human, he longed for death, but his
courage failed him, and as one tires of treading the
well-known path, he sought a new road to discover.
Now, did he find the world of his dreams ? I doubt it,
for in the search his passions he had outworn. He had
lifted up the veil and glanced behind. At twenty he
might have been laid in his coffin dark, of all illusions
bereft.
LXXII
Woe! Woe! unto him who the fathomless ocean
of man’s heart imprudently seeks to sound! Too oft
the sounding lead, instead of golden sand and pearly
shells that lovely shine, brings up but foul and stinking
mud. — If I could live another life again, certes I
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
should not within it all search out as hitherto I have
done. What matters after all, whether the cause be
sad, if the effect produced be sweet ? Let us be merry ;
let us outwardly be happy. A handsome mask is bet¬
ter than an ugly face. Then why, poor fools, do we
snatch it off?
LXXIII
If he had been the arbiter of his fate you may be
sur6 that many a chapter of life’s novel he would have
skipped, and passed at once to the conclusion of this
most foolish tale. But uncertain whether he ought to
doubt, deny, believe, or seek in death the riddle’s
answer, like down wind-driven he let his life drift
on as chance itself did will. The affairs of the world
troubled him but little: the things of heaven interested
him still less. As far as his soul went, I must tell you,
even at the risk of your blame incurring, that he did
not believe in its existence any more than in God’s.
LXXIV
That was the way he was made — a nature strange
— and yet his soul, which he disbelieved in, was pure*
What he sought was nothingness ; nothing would he
have gained if hell had been suppressed. A strange
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SELECTED POEMS
man indeed! He possessed every virtue he ridiculed,
and the angel who, above, in his record indignant wrote
some gross heresy, some damnable sophistry, when it
came to deeds found him less guilty, and as he beheld
within his nature the good and holy, once more the
anathema withheld. For a fallen tear the blasphemy
had blotted from the fatal page.
LXXV
Now, for a change of scene. — At present we are
at the Green Monkey Inn, the abode of my lord
Albertus, and in his studio. Tell me, most ordinary
reader, do you know what a painter’s studio is ? — A
tempered light from above falling gives everything an
aspect strange. It is like a picture by Rembrandt, in
which the canvas shows a white dot shining through
the dark. — In the centre of the room by the easel,
under the brilliant beam in which atoms whirl, stands
a lay figure that might a phantom be. Everything half
shadow and reflection is.
LXXVI
The shadows grow deeper within the corners than
even under the old arches of a nave. It is a world,
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
a universe apart, in no wise resembling the world we
live in; a fantastic world in which everything to the
eyes doth speak; everything is poetic; in which
modern art shines by the side of that of old. Beautiful
things of every time and every land : a sample page,
from the book out torn; weapons, furniture, drawings,
casts, marbles, pictures, Giotto, Cimabue, Ghirlandajo,
and I know not whom; Reynolds by Hemskerk’s side,
Watteau by Correggio’s, and Perugino between the Van
Loos twain.
LXXVII
Lacquered ware and vases of Japan, monsters and
porcelain ware, pagodas golden with little bells all hung,
glorious Chinese fans it would take too long to describe;
Spanish knives, Malay creeses, with wavy blades;
khandjars, yataghans with rich-wrought sheaths; lin¬
stock arquebusses, matchlocks, blunderbusses; helms
and corslets, battle-maces, bassinets, damaged, in holes,
rusted, stained; innumerable objects, good for nothing,
but glorious to behold; Oriental caftans, doublets
mediaeval; rebecs and psalteries, instruments outworn:
a den, a museum, and a boudoir in one!
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SELECTED POEMS
LXXVIII
Around the walls many canvases hanging, untouched
for the most part, others just begun ; a chaos of colours
but half alive. — Leonora on horseback, Macbeth and
the witches, Lara’s children, Marguerite at prayer;
sketches of portraits, among which one framed, of
a young girl, light on a dark background, stands out
and sparkles; so fair that one knows not by what name
to call it, whether peri, fairy, or sylph, — a graceful,
delicate being; an angel from heaven whose wings have
been clipped to prevent its flying away.
LXXIX
With her beautiful head and her thoughtful, resigned
look, she seemed to be a Mater Dei, after Masaccio,
yet it was only the portrait of a former mistress, the
one he best and most loved ; a Venetian, who, in her
gondola one night on the Canaleio had been stabbed to
death. The beauty’s husband, knowing her unfaithful,
had planned the deed. The story was a regular romance.
Albertus to the dead had drawn near, the black stuff
pulled away, sketched the portrait, which he finished
from memory, and then never again after of her spoke.
17
257
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
LXXX
Only when his eyes fell upon the canvas, concealed
from indifferent glances by a curtain thick, a furtive
tear, forthwith dried up, gleamed in them. A sigh from
out his breast softly rose, his brows he bent, but ne’er
a word did say. At Venice an Englishman dared make
an offer; he would have emptied his purse the master¬
piece to own, but that would have been to profane —
il Santo Ritratto — and as he persisted and offered yet
more wealth, Albertus raging sought to drown the man
below the Rialto.
LXXXI
Albertus was painting. It was a landscape. Salva¬
tor would have named it Selve selvagge. Rocks in the
foreground, in the middle distance the towers of a castle
showing their sharp vanes against a blood-red sky filled
with islands of clouds. The mighty oaks were bending
like the lightest trees, leaves up in the air did whirl,
the faded grass, like the rolling billows of a midnight
sea, under its gusts did rise and fall; while incessant
lightning with its ted light lit up the tops of the blown
pines, bending o’er the depths as over the mouth of
hell.
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SELECTED POEMS
LXXXII
A man came in. It was Juan. A blue light shone
in the studio, and though he had no tail, nor horns, nor
cloven foot, although he did not smell of pitch or
sulphur, his eagle glance, his lip by grin sardonic curled,
his gesture stiff, his voice, his gait, would have made
any man at all prudent hasten quick to his Bible and
sprinkle him with holy water. None of these things
did Albertus do. He looked and saw him not, for his
soul and his eyes on his painting were fixed.— “My
lord, a note,” said this devil Mercury as he pulled at his
doublet.
LXXXIII
The painter the note opened, looked for a signature,
and none did find. — “ Base wretch,” between his teeth
he muttered. — “ Will you go ? ” — “I will.” —
“ When ? ” asked Don Juan in softened tone. — “ Im¬
mediately.”— “ By Jupiter, that is the way to speak.
The lady lives but a step from here. I shall lead
you thither.” — “ It is well,” said Albertus, taking
down his sword, an Andrea Ferrara, a trusty blade
tempered with the blood of many a brave. “ I am
with you. Pietro ! ” — A sunburnt face at the door
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
appeared and said: u What doth my lord will ? ”
u Quick, bring here to me my cloak and hat.”
LXXXIV
In less time than it takes to tell, the man was back.
In a moment the young cavalier’s toilet was done, and
the valet having brought a mirror, he smiled, and with
himself seemed well content. But suddenly, his com¬
plexion, always pale, a paler white did turn. Whether
he saw it or merely fancied it — he’d seen within the
frame the Venetian lady’s head move, and her mute lips
ope as if she sought to speak. u Well, my lord ? ”
said Don Juan. —cc Dear one,” the painter said, the
portrait kissing with a sad, soft smile, cc it is too late
to draw back now.”
LXXXV
The pair went out. Deserted was the town. Scarce
here and there some open window. The rain with
swift-falling drops the dark sky rayed; the north wind
made every vane shriek and scream as in heavy weather
scream the gulls. A belated toper went by, pitching up
against the walls; a street girl at her corner waited.
Albertus, silent and gloomy, followed Juan. Surely he
260
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SELECTED POEMS
had neither the mien nor the gait of a lover; a thief to
the gibbet led, or schoolboy on his way to punishment,
never stepped more slow than he.
LXXXVI
He might to his place have returned, but the adven¬
ture after all was really strange and such as ardently to
pique his curiosity; so our hero meant to see the end.
The house was reached. Don Juan seized the brazen
knocker of the postern door and knocked a master’s
knock. Black eyes, white brows, gleamed behind the
panes. The house was illumined, and light flashed
upon the darkened walls; from landing to landing the
light came down; the bronze door oped, and the
splendid, vast interior to the young cavalier’s gaze was
revealed.
LXXXVII
A little negro boy, a torch of perfumed wax holding,
under the porch was standing, in rich and gallant livery
of scarlet trimmed with gold. —u Here,” said Juan,
“ fair page, lead his lordship by the secret passage.” —
Albertus followed. At the end of the corridor a cur¬
tain rich half drawn back behind him closed. Scenting
his approach, two great white greyhounds on the carpet
261
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
lying, snuffed the air, raised their long heads, uttered
low and anxious whimper, and then fell back and
dozed.
LXXXVIII
Upon my word, it looked like the room of a duchess.
Everything was to be found in it, — comfort, elegance,
and wealth. On a handsome citron-wood table shone
an alabaster lamp that cast around a soft and bluish
light. Pearls, silks, a casket with steel knobs, rich
sepias, bright water-colours, albums, screens delicately
wrought; the latest review, the most recent novel,
a black mask broken; innumerable fashionable trifles
cast pell-mell were strewn upon chairs and tables in
attractive disorder.
LXXXIX
Our inamorata, half seated, half lying upon a divan
soft, uttered, as if surprised, a little cry when Albertus
entered; then, her glance the mirror gaining, puffed out
her sleeve and rearranged a disorderly ribbon. Never
had the signora been better dressed. Shewas adorable,
just fit to make recruits for the devil — as fit as society
lady, nay, more. Her black and brilliant eyes showed
262
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SELECTED POEMS
under their long eyelids such morbide%%a, her manner,
her gestures, such graceful abandon.
XC
For a moment Albertus thought he saw his Venetian
fair. The strange head-dress, adorned in the Italian
fashion with great golden balls and sequins pierced ;
the coral necklace, the cross, the amulet, the knots of
ribbons, the whole dress ; the rich-coloured skin with
its warm, deep tones; the dreamy look, the lazy atti¬
tude ; the glance identical, the speech the same. She
resembled her so that he was deceived. Knowing
Albertus and his temper eccentric, the witch had
thought it well to assume this mask to slake her
lust.
XCI
Veronica rang. The golden portiere parted. A
little page, a rich livery wearing, entered, trays in his
hands bearing — a genuine Flemish page, a fair and
rosy head like that seen in Terburg’s painting in the
Louvre. Upon the table he placed flagons and cakes,
silver cups and silverware, poured the wine into glasses
iofty, bowed to the lovers, and then withdrew. The
wine was Rhine wine, whose golden robe was turning
263
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
yellow with age, a wine bottled at least an hundred
years ago, or two.
XCII
Within the tankards it glowed like gold. . A single
glass would have sufficed a man to daze; with the
second Albertus quite tipsy was. To his fascinated
glance all things did double show, floating contourless
in vapour dim; the floor uprose, the walls appeared
to spin. As for the beauty, all shame behind her cast¬
ing, and letting her lust a free hand have, with her
passionate arms she clasped him round the neck, clung
to his body in heat and madness, clutched at his head
and tried to make him bend until her lips he met.
XCIII
Albertus was neither of ice nor stone ; and even had
he been, under the dark eyelids of the lady shone a
sun whose fire would stone have vivified and melted
ice. An angel, a son of heaven, to be in his place
would have sold his stall in the paradise of God.—
“ Oh ! ” said he, tc my heart burns with the strange
flame that in your glance flashes, and my soul I’d give
to possess you alone, wholly and forever. A single
264
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SELECTED POEMS
word of your lips would make me,renounce life eternal,
for is eternity worth a single minute of your days ? ”
XCIV
— “ Is that the truth ? ” answered Veronica, a smile
on her lips and with an ironic look. “ And will you
repeat what you just have said ? ” u That to possess
you, to the devil I’d give my soul, if have it the devil
would ? Yea, madam, I’ve said it.” —u Then forever
accursed be! ” cried the young man’s guardian angel.
cc From you I go, for no longer are you God’s.” — The
painter in his madness heard not the voice, and the
angel flew away. A glow of sulphur filled the room,
and Mephistophelian laughter indescribable suddenly
sounded in the air.
xcv
For an instant Veronica’s eyes shone with darksome
fire like those of orfreys in darkness hid. Albertus
saw it not, for certes, had he beheld the glance, great
though his courage, he would have crossed himself
for fear, on beholding the wild and grim look, — for
it was indeed a glance that spoke of unending evil,
a glance of the damned, of the devil the time inquiring.
265
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
It read : “ Ever, Forever, Eternity ! ” Most horrible,
truly. The eye of man blasted by such a glance would
die and melt as melts the pitch within the furnace cast.
XCVI
Her lips trembled. It seemed as if some blasphemy
were about to escape, when suddenly she said, “I
love you,” springing like a maddened tiger. u But
know you well what is woman’s love ? When you
asked for mine did you test your soul ? Did you
estimate aright the strength of your heart ? What
mighty power within you do you feel capable of
bearing such burden without fail ? c Ever, forever!9
Think again! Within the wide universe but one
being is capable of love eternal. That being is God,
for He unchanging is. Man, creature of a day, but
for a day doth love.”
XCVII
Within the room, a beam from the lamp, stealing
pale and faint upon the gilded walls, behind the curtains,
discreetly drawn, a bed suggests. — Albertus, no word
answering (the best reply, after all), thither draws her,
and to the edge of the bed doth her gently push. . . .
266
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SELECTED POEMS
Here in his shame-faced style a classical narrator, with
embarrassment blushing, does not fail to stop. — What
are not these worthy points made to say ? Basilio
never strikes them out on the ground that they are
immoral, and in a novel chaste they stand as the
hieroglyph of what is not particularly chaste, or not
at all.
XCVIII
But I, who am no prude, and have no gauze or
vine-leaf on my sentence to stick, not one thing shall
I omit. — The ladies who this moral tale may read
I beg will be indulgent to a few warm details 5 the
wisest of them, I trow, will note them without a blush ;
the others will scream. Besides — and mothers of
families will please take notice, —what I am writing
is not intended for maidens young whose bread and
butter is cut in slices for them. My lines are a young
man’s lines, and not a catechism. Emasculate them
I will not; in their decent cynicism they go on,
straight or crooked.
XCIX
Little reck I, provided my lady Poesy, their mistress
absolute, finds them tickle her fancy; so, chaste like
267
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
Adam before the Fall, they onward freely go in their
sainted nudity, free from all vice, and showing without
fear all that the hypocrite world so carefully conceals. —
I am not of those whom a bosom bared or a skirt
rather short compels aside to look; my gaze on these
things does not rest by preference. — Why declaim so
much against an artist’s work? What he does is
sacred. — Pray, ye rigorous critics, do you see naught
else than that ?
C
The stay-lace the painter had cut. Veronica’s
lovely frame for sole vestment her Flanders linen now
had on ; a mere cloud of lawn; spun air; a breath ; a
mist of gauze, that under its network allowed the gaze
to wander with delight; in a word, the flimsiest stuff
you can think of. — It did not take Albertus long to
tear away this rampart frail, and in a hand’s turn he
had his beauty nude.—He was wrong; it is spoiling
one’s own pleasure; this sort of thing is killing one’s
own love and its grave digging, alas ! for too oft with
the veil illusion and desire both fall away.
268
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Cl
Not thus this time; the lady was so fair that a
saint in heaven would for her sake damnation have
welcomed, A poet in love could not have thought
out an ideal more perfect.—O Nature! Nature! by
the side of thy work what is painting worth ? What
becomes of Raphael, of beauty the lord ? What of
Correggio, Guido, and Giorgione, Titian and all the
names whose praise one age to the other sings ? O
Raphael, believe me, thy brushes cast away, and thou,
Titian, thy palette. God alone the mighty Master is;
His secret well he keeps, and none may make it out;
in vain we strive.
CII
Oh, the lovely picture! — Blushing rosy red with
shame, red as berry in May, upon her heaving breasts
her head she bows and her arms doth cross — with her
arch, roguish look, her little pout, her long fluttering
lashes her cheeks caressing, her skin, browner showing
’gainst the white sheets, her long hair naturally curling,
her eyes flashing with carbuncle’s glow, her fair, golden
neck, her coral lips, her Cinderella foot and her limbs
269
ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
divine, and what the shadow hides and what may be
guessed, — in her own self she more than a seraglio
well was worth.
CIII
The curtains have closed again. — Frantic laugh,
shrieks of voluptuousness, ecstatic moans, long-drawn
sighs, sobs and tears, — Idolo del mio cor! Anima mia !
my angel, my life ! and all the words in that language
strange which love delirious invents in its heat, these
were the sounds one heard. — Wrecked was the alcove;
the bed creaked and groaned; pleasure a very rage
became. Showers of kisses and storm of movements
lascivious; arms round bodies grappling and clutching;
eyes flaming, teeth meeting and biting, breasts that
convulsive bound.
CIV
The lamp flared up, and in the alcove’s depths flashed,
lightning-like, a red and tawny light. ’T was but for
an instant, yet Albertus saw Veronica, her skin by
burning marks all rayed, pale as though dead, and so
disfigured that he shuddered at the sight. Then all
once more dark became. The witch her lips to the
young cavalier’s glued again, and anew the couch bent
270
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SELECTED POEMS
and creaked under love’s bounds. — Midnight struck.
— The sound mingled its shrill falsetto with the low
lashing of the rain upon the window pane, and in the
near-by tower hooted the owl.
CV
Suddenly, within his very grasp, — a prodigy fit
to confound the strongest brain, — Albertus felt the
charms of the fair melt away, and vanish the very flesh.
Broken was the prism. It was no longer the woman
whom all adored, but a foul hag with great green eyes
rolling under eyebrows thick, and, to seize her prey, at
full length stretching her long, thin arms, like hooks.
Satan himself would have drawn back. A few white
hairs hung stiff down her skinny neck$ her bones
showed plain under withered breasts, and her ribs stuck
out of her sides so foul.
CVI
When he beheld himself so close to this living death,
with terror the blood in his veins ran cold. His hair
upon his head did stand, and his teeth chattered as
though they would break. Meanwhile, the hideous
skeleton her blue lips to his cheek pressing, everywhere
271
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
with strident laugh pursued him. Within the shadow
at the foot of the bed climbed shapes most strange.
Incubus, nightmares, ghastly, deformed spectres, deathly
multitude of Goya’s brains! Horned snails issued
from beneath the bricks and silvered the old walls with
phosphorescent slime; the lamp smoked and sputtered.
CVII
Instead of the gilded bedstead, a filthy couch ; in
place of the boudoir rose a little room of aspect
wretched, with an old window frame of panes badly
cracked; the walls, green with damp, were wet with
rain, the great drops falling upon the grimy floor.
Juan, a cat again, cast innumerable sparks, and fas¬
cinated Albertus with the gleam of his glance, and
like the dog in Faust, waving around him magic bands,
traced a brilliant circlet with his tail upon the hearth,
upon which flickered a blue flame.
CVIII
Hop! Hop ! cried the old woman; and down the
chimney, suddenly ablaze with golden fires, two broom-
sticks, bridled and saddled, entered the room, in every
direction kicking, caracoling, prancing, rolling, and leap-
272
SELECTED POEMS
ing as do horses by their master called. — u These be my
English mare and my Arab steed/’ said the witch,
opening her crablike hands and patting on the neck the
broomsticks both. — A swollen toad with long slender
paws the stirrup held. — Housch ! housch! like grass-
hoppers swift the two broomsticks their flight do take.
CIX
Trap! trap! they go as goes the north wind. ’Neath
them the earth shadows pass in long, grey lines ; above,
the cloudy sky hurries by ; on the dim horizon strange
shadows pass. The mill turns around and pirouettes.
The moon, now full, shows her light like lantern dim;
a curious donjon underneath gazes; a tree its black
limbs outstretches far; a gibbet haggard shakes its
fists and follows, its corpses bearing; a crow, croaking
as it scents the dead, flaps heavily through the air, and
with its wing strikes the brow of the young man
dazed.
CX
Bats and owls, orfreys and vultures bald, great owls
and birds of night with dun, flaming eyes; monsters
of all kinds yet unknown, strygae with hooked beaks,
ghouls, larvae, harpies, vampires, and were-wolves,
18 273
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
impious spectres, mammoths and leviathans, crocodiles
and boas, growling and snarling, hissing, laughing and
chattering, swarming and gleaming, flying, crawling,
leaping, till the ground is covered and darkened the air.
— Less swift is the speed of the breathless brooms,
and with her gnarled fingers the bridle drawing,
“This is the place,” the old hag cried.
CXI
The place was lighted by a flame, a blue light cast¬
ing like that of blazing punch. It was an open spot
within the forest’s depth. Wizards in their gowns and
witches nude astride upon their goats adown the four
avenues from the four corners of the world arrived at
once. Investigators into sciences occult, Fausts of
every land, magi of every rite, dark-faced gypsies, and
rabbis red-haired, cabalists, diviners, hermeceutists
black as ink and asthmatically gasping, — not one of
them all failed at the meeting-place.
CXII
Skeletons preserved in dissecting rooms, stuffed ani-
mals, monsters, greenish foeti, yet dripping all from
their spirit bath, cripples and lamesters on slugs
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SELECTED POEMS
mounted ; man hanged to death with protruding tongue
grimacing; pale faces beheaded, with red-circled neck,
with one hand staying their tottering heads; every
creature ever put to death (a dreadful blood-stained
crowd) ; handless parricides in black veils shrouded;
heretics grouped in tunics sulphurous; wretches on the
wheel broken, contused and blue; drowned ones with
marbled flesh — a sight most dismal to behold !
CXIII
The president in great black chair seated, with
taloned fingers the leaves of his book turning, was busy
backward spelling God’s sacred names. The light
that gleamed from his orbs of green the book illumined,
and on the open page made the words flash out in lines
of fire. They were waiting for the Master ere the fun
began. All were growing impatient. He was slow
in coming, and to the evocations seemed a deaf ear to
turn. Albertus fancied he saw a tail, a pair of horns,
goat’s feet, great round eyes in lustre lacking, — an
apparition horrid.
CXIV
At 4ast he came; but no devil of sulphur stinking
and of aspect terrific; no devil old-fashioned, but the
275
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
dandiest of fiends, wearing imperial and slight moustache, â– 
twirling his cane as well as could have done a Boule¬
vard swell. You could have sworn he’d just come
from a performance of u Robert the Devil,” or “ The
Temptation,” or had been attending some assembly
fashionable. He limped like Byron (but not worse
than he), and with his haughty mien, his aristocratic
looks, and his exquisite talent tying for his cravat,
in every drawing-room a sensation he would have
made.
cxv
This dandy Beelzebub made a sign, and the company
drew together the concert to hear. Neither Ludwig
Beethoven, nor Gluck, nor Meyerbeer, nor Theodore
Hoffmann, Hoffmann the fantastic, nor stout Rossini, of
music king, nor Chevalier Karl Maria von Weber,
could surely with all their genius have invented and
written the wondrous symphony which these black
dilettanti played at first. Boucher and Beriot, Paganini
himself could not have embroidered a stranger theme
with more brilliant pizzicati.
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SELECTED POEMS
CXVI
Virtuosi with their dried, thin fingers made the strings
of the Stradivarii sing again. Souls seemed to sound in
the voices of the grave; cavernous gongs like thunder
rumbled ; a jolly sprite, his round face swelling funnily,
blew in two horns at once; here, one strikes on a bone;
the other, for a lark takes his belly for a drum, two
bones for sticks; four little demons with iron bows
make four giant double-basses roar and moan; while a
stout soprano opes wide his gaping jaws. The result:
a hellish row.
CXVII
The concert finished, began the dances. Hands
with hands the chains did form. Within the great
black chair the devil seated himself and the signal
gave. — Hurrah ! hurrah! The crowd, spurning the
ground, howling and mad, dashed along like bridleless
steed. The heavens, the sight to shun, closed their
starry eyes, and the moon, in cloudlets twain her face
now veiling, with fear from the horizon fled. Terri¬
fied the waters stayed, and the echoes’ selves silent
became, dreading the blasphemies to repeat which on
that night they heard.
277
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
CXVIII
It was as though there whirled, aflame, through the
dark, the monstrous signs of a zodiac sombre. The
heavy hippopotamus, four-footed FalstafF, awkward rose
upon its massive legs and broke out in lascivious gam-
badoes. The crippled, truncated and lame, leaped like
toads, and the goats, livelier, performed entrechats and,
graceful, kicked; a death’s-head, with long, lean legs,
trotted along like spider huge; in every corner swarmed
some hideous thing; worms slimed over the trodden
ground.
CXIX
Loose in the wind their hair, their cheeks aflame, the
women twisted their bodies nude into postures infamous,
whereat Aretino’s self would have blushed. Hot kisses
marked the bruised breasts and shoulders white; black
hairy fingers touched the hips; sounds of lustful embrace
over all arose; eyes flashed with electric glance; lips
burned in lascivious pressure; fierce laughter, shrieks,
guttural sounds rose in the air. Never did Sodom,
never did Gomorrah loathsome darken the sky and soil
this earth with more hideous unions foul.
278
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CXX
The devil sneezed. To fashionable nostrils the
odour of the company unbearable was. “ God bless
you/’ said Albertus politely. Scarce had he uttered
that sacred name when phantoms, wizards and witches,
sprites and gnomes, as by enchantment, into thin air
vanlshed. With terror he felt sharp claws, fierce teeth
strike at his flesh, from him torn. He shrieked, but his
cry by none was heard. — On that morn, near Rome,
peasants found upon the Appian Way the body of
a man stone dead, his back broken, his neck twisted.
CXXI
Happy as a boy who has finished his task at last I Ve
got to the end of my poem so moral. — Are you as glad
as I am, reader dear ? In vain for two months past to
bring this volume to a close my hand upon the sheet
the pen did screeching drive; the unwilling theme
but slowly went; the stanzas, lazily rocking on their
golden wings, together came like swarm of bees, or else
disorderly by the wayside idly fluttered. The num-
bers grew, one sheet upon another, — the ink undried
still, — was laid, and I, all courage losing, to myself
279
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ALBERTUS, OR THE SOUL AND SIN
kept repeating: tc To-morrow, to-morrow ’t will be
done.”
CXXII
This Homeric poem, in the world unequalled, pre-
sents a wondrous allegory profound. But if you the
marrow wish, the bone you must break; to enjoy the
scent the vase must needs be oped; the curtain be
drawn from the painting it hides ; and when the ball is
done the domino’s mask be cast away. I could have
explained clearly every part, and to each word attached
some learned gloss. But I take it, reader gentle, you ?ve
brains enough to follow me. So, good-night. Close
the door. Give me the tongs, and tell my man to bring
me a volume of Pantagruel.
'T* h e Come dy of Death
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THE COMEDT
OF DEATH
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LIFE IN DEATH
I
’T was All Saints’ Day. A drizzle cold along the
horizon’s gloom like a thick woof spread its network
gray; cold the north wind blew; scattered russet
leaves fell fluttering from the branches bare of the
stunted elms.
And each and all went into the cemetery vast and
lone to kneel by the stone placed over the dead; there
to pray to Almighty God for the rest of their souls,
and with fresh flowers tearfully to replace" the ' pale
immortelles and withered wreaths.
I, who knew not the bitter grief of having buried
either my mother or my sire under the withered turf,
at chance I walked gazing at the tombs, or, through
283
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THE CO M ED Y OF DEATH
an opening between the branches of the trees, at the
city’s swelling domes.
And as I noted many a leafless cross, many a grave
on which the grass grew tall, where none to pray knelt
down, with pity I was filled ; with pity great, for the
poor forsaken tombs which none on earth within his
heart did bear.
No trace of green upon these slabs; and yet the
names of widows desolate, or husbands in despair, their
falsehood bare displayed to every passer’s eye, with
ne’er a trace of moss to veil their huge letters black.
And, as I gazed, within my heart uprose a thought
which ever since has my soul possessed. Suppose it
were true that the dead raging within their biers do
twist about their knotty arms and strive to throw off
their covers of stone with efforts incredible ?
Perchance the tomb no refuge is where on pillow
hard man may in peace at last forever sleep, forgetful
of all worldly things, pleasure nor pain feeling, remem¬
bering not being or having been.
Perchance for sleep there is no desire; and when
the rain filters downward to the corpse come the cold,
284
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SELECTED POEMS
the weariness, and the lonesomeness of the grave.
Oh! how sadly one must dream within that place,
where neither moan nor breath can move the shroud’s
long, stiff folds!
Perchance, alive to the passions in us that once did
blaze, the ashes of our hearts still feel and move
within the tomb, and some remembrance of this world
within the next bears with it a remnant of a life of
yore with ours mingled.
These lonesome dead ! No doubt they wives did
have, some one both near and dear; some one to
whom their thoughts they told. But, oh! the horror
of their grief if ever they did awake within the
depths of their tomb on which never a tear nor a flower
doth fall!
To feel that one has passed away without leaving
more trace than does the ship’s wake on ocean’s face ;
that one is dead to all; to see that the best beloved
have one so soon forgot; and that the weeping willow
with its long, bending boughs alone over one’s grave
mourns.
At least if one could, when the pale, wan moon
opes its calm eyes with silvery glance, and earthward
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THE CO MED Y OF DEATH
looks and casts a bluish light, — if one could, within
the cemetery’s range, between the white tombs, the
will o’ the wisp o’er the grass Sitting, under the
branches stroll a while at least!
If one could home return within the house, the
stage of the former life, and, chilled, by the fireside
within the arm-chair sit; glance the old books over;
within the desk rummage until the time when dawn
the window lighting drove one back to coffin cold.
But no. Upon the mortuary bed one must remain,
with covering none but the sheeted shroud; no sound
the silence breaking save crawl of worm that slowly
drags towards its prey, cutting its secret mine; no
sight but night.
Then, if they be jealous, the dead, all that Dante
has told of torments in his burning spiral would pleas¬
ant be to that they suffer. Lovers, who know what
jealousy is, what tortures that frenzy means, imagine
a jealous corpse!
Powerless and wroth! He is there, in his grave,
while she, who was loved with heart’s deep love, false
to the oaths she swore, now in another’s arms repeats
—
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SELECTED POEMS
what she blushing whispered, when nestling close, with
sacred words.
And to be unable to come, on a December night,
while she is dancing, to cower in her room, and when
she ’s back, and slowly, smilingly, before the glass her
dress undoes, to show within the mirror’s depths one’s
skeleton and bared ribs.
To laugh hideously with toothless laugh; to mark
with cold kisses her heaving breast; and clutching
her white and rosy hand with bony fingers, to moan
these words, with hollow voice that human no longer
is: —
cc Woman, you made me promises numberless.
Have you forgot them all ? I, in my sombre grave, —
I remember still. You told me, at the hour when
death came to me, that soon you would follow.
Weary of waiting, now am I here to fetch you! ”
Within my mind’s depths a strange thought, cancer-
like gnaws and wears me out. Mine eyes sunken
become; upon my brow are wrinkles new; my hair,
my very flesh, from off my temples drop, — for hideous
is the thought.
287
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THE COMEDY OF DEATH
For death no longer, then, the great Consoler is.
Man, even in the tomb, ’gainst fate has no recourse,
and one may no longer cease to grieve for life by
caressing the blessed hope of calm and peace after the
storm and stress of life.
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SELECTED POEMS
II
Within my brain these thoughts revolving, thought¬
ful I stood, with deep-bowed head against a tombstone
leaning. Brand-new it was, and on the white marble
shoulder of the weeping figure the willow’s long
branches like a cloak did fall.
The north wind leaf by leaf stripped the wreath,
the remnants of which on the column’s top did lie.
They seemed like tears which their flowers shed upon
the maid in life’s springtime removed; a gentle morn¬
ing bloom withered before noon.
The crescent moon betwixt the yews did shine;
great black clouds the wan sky crossed and drove still
on; the will o’ the wisps flashed around the graves,
and the weeping willow its plumes did shake.
Plain in the night sounds I heard from the nether
world arising! Moans of terror and agony deep;
voices entreating new flowers upon their tombs; ask¬
ing how went the world, and why the widows left
behind so long delayed them to join.
19 289
THE COM E DY OF DEATH
Suddenly — scarce could I credit my own ears, —
from under the gaping marble, oh, terror! oh, wonder!
I heard the sound of. speech. A dialogue it was, and
from the depths of the grave sharp, shrill tones mingled
with another voice.
Chilled with fear I was. With terror my teeth
chattered; my trembling limbs almost gave way, for
I understood the worm with the dead girl, of a sudden
awaked upon this winter night within her icy cage,
its hymen was celebrating.
The Dead Girl
Is this an illusion ? Has the night so long dreamed
of, the wedding night, come at last ? Is this my
nuptial bed ? Surely this the hour when the groom,
young and scented, enjoys the beauty of the bride and
from her brows removes the maiden orange-flower.
The Worm
A long, long night ’t will be, O fair dead girl!
To me for ever Death hath thee betrothed. Thy bed
is but the tomb. Now is the time when bays the
watch-dog at the moon; when the foul vampire sails
forth in search of prey; when downward swoops the
crow.
290
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The Dead Girl
Oh! beloved, quickly come; long since the hour is
passed. Oh ! draw me to thy heart, within thine arms
close pressed, for cold I am and full of dreadful fears.
Warm with thy kisses my mouth which icy feels.
Oh ! come to my side; and room I ’ll make for thee,
though narrow is our couch.
The Worm
Five feet in length by two in width; the size was
ta’en with care. The couch too hard is;.the groom
will never come. Thy cries he hears not; at a feast
he is. Come, upon thy pillow quietly lay thy head and
cross thine arms again.
The Dead Girl
What is the damp and breathless kiss I feel ? That
lipless mouth, is it a human one ? Is this a living
kiss ? Oh, wonder! none to right or left of me !
With horror my bones do quake; my whole flesh
quivers as quakes the aspen when blows the wind.
The Worm
Mine is the kiss; the earth-worm I, here to fulfil
the solemn mystery. Possession now I take. Thy
291
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THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
husband I ?ve become, and faithful sure will be. The
gladsome owl, with strong wing the air beating, sings
our wedding song.
The Dead Girl
Oh ! if only some one by the cemetery would pass !
In vain I strike my brow against the coffinboards; the
lid too heavy is. Sounder than the dead he buries deep
the grave-digger sleeps. The silence is profound ; de¬
serted is the road, and echo’s self to my cries is deaf!
The Worm
Mine are thine ivory arms ; mine thy fair white
breasts; mine thy polished waist and glorious hips
luxuriant swelling; mine thy little feet; thy hands so
soft; thy lips, and that first kiss which thy maidenly
shame to love refused.
The Dead Girl
’T is over! ’T is over ! The worm is here. Its
bite makes in my side a deep, broad wound ; my heart
it gnaws. Oh, torture ! Oh, my God ! the cruel
pain! Mother, sister mine, why come you not unto
my call ?
292
SELECTED POEMS
The Worm
Within their hearts the thought of thee even now is
gone; and yet upon thy grave, poor deserted one, the
orange flowers still brilliant are. The funeral pall
scarce folded is, yet like yester’s dream they have
forgot — forgot thee and for ever.
The Dead Girl
Grass faster grows within the heart than even on the
grave, and soon the cross and lowly mound alone recall
the presence of the dead. But where the cross that
tells of tomb within the soul? Forgetfulness, second
death, annihilation which I seek, come unto me! I
call for you.
The Worm
Be now consoled, for Death gives Life. Upspring-
ing under the shadow of the cross the eglantine more
rosy is, more green the sward. The flower’s roots
within thy frame shall plunge, and where thou sleepest,
tall shall wave the grass; for in God’s hands is nothing
lost.
One of the dead their speech had wakened for silence
called. Lightning, not from heaven, but from earth,*
293
THE CO M ED Y OF DEATH
showed me within their tombs all the dead; skeletons
of bodies with yellowed bones, or purplish flesh in
tatters falling away.
Both young and old the graveyard’s inhabitants, poor
forgotten dead, hearing upon their tombs but the roar
of the gale, and to weariness a prey within their
dwelling cold, sought with sightless eyes to read the
hour upon Eternity’s mighty dial.
Then all to darkness turned, and on my way I went,
pale at having seen so much; with doubt and horror
filled; weary in mind and body both. And, ever
following me, countless cracked bells like the voices
of the dead swung out to me the moans they tolled.
294
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SELECTED POEMS
III
To my home I returned.—Gloomy thoughts swarmed
and swept before mine eyes, with icy-cold wings my
brow touching, just as at eventide around cathedral
spire the flocks of crows their spirals wind, and circle
ever round.
Within my room, where quivered a yellow light, all
things assumed forms horrible and weird, and aspects
passing strange. My bed a coffin seemed ; my lamp a
funeral light; my cloak outspread the darksome pall,
with holy water oft bestrewed within the doorway while
a prayer is breathed.
Within its frame enclosed the ivory Christ, nailed
with outstretched arms upon the sombre stuff, more
pallid still became, and as on Golgotha in last keen
agony, the muscles on the yellowed face stood out in
anguish writhing.
All the paintings, their faded hues illumed by the
hearth-fire’s gleam, strange tones assumed, and with
inquisitive air, like spectators within stage-box seated,
295
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THE CO M E DY OF DEATH
all the smoky old portraits, and dull-toned pastels their
eyes now opened wide.
A death’s-head, from the skull well cast, white stood
out, grimacing, garish under a bluish beam. I saw it
to the bracket’s edge advance ; the jaws seemed striving
speech to use, the eyes to light with glance.
From the dark orbs (where were no orbs) flashed
sudden sparklings dun, as from a living eye. A breath
came forth from ’twixt its shaking teeth. ’T was
not the wind, for straight the folds of curtains by the
window fell.
i
Then, like the voice one hears in dreams, sad as the
moan of waves upon the shore, I heard a voice; and
as that day so many things I’d seen — so many effects
marvellous of unknown cause — my dread was less
this time : —
Raphael
I am Raphael Sanzio, the mighty Master. Oh!
brother, tell me, can you my features know in this
hideous skull ? For there is nothing ’mid the casts and
masks — these shining skulls polished like helms of
steel — that makes me different from them all.
296
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SELECTED POEMS
And yet, ’t is I, ’t is I, indeed : the youth divine,
the angel of beauty and the light of Rome, — Raphael
of Urbino, — the brown-haired lad you see in museums,
idly leaning, dreaming, resting his head upon his
hand.
Oh ! my Fornarina, my fair beloved ! who took with
a kiss my soul in ecstasy to heaven ascending. This,
then, is your lover — the handsome angel-named painter
— this head with its strange grimace. Well,’t is
Raphael!
If e’er, asleep within the chapel’s depth, she were to
wake and corrje when calls my voice, with fear she filled
would be. Nay, let the half-raised stone upon her
head fall again. Oh ! come not, come not ! but keep
within your tomb the dream within your heart.
Accursed analysers! Race most vile! Hyenas
that track the funeral step by step the body to dig up !
When will you be done breaking open biers to measure
our bones and our dust to weigh ? Let the dead sleep
in peace.
My masters! Do you know — but . who could
have told you ? — what one feels when the saw’s teeth
297
THE COMEDY OF
DEATH
tear our palpitating heart ? Do you know whether
death is not another life ? And if, when their remains
from the tomb are dragged, the dead are satisfied ?
So you come to search with hands profane our tombs
which you violate, and to steal our skulls ! How bold
you are! Do you never fear that some day, pale and
wan, the dead may rise and curse you there just as I
curse you ?
So you fancy that in the rottenness you shall sur¬
prise the secrets of mother Nature and the work of
God ? It is not by the body the soul can be learned;
the body but an altar is; genius is the flame; and you
the fire put out.
Oh ! Child Christs of mine ! Oh ! my dark-haired
Madonnas ! Oh! you who owe to me your fairest
crowns, saints in Paradise ! The learned cast my skull
upon the ground, and you suffer it, nor hurl thunder-
bolts at these wretches accurst.
So ’t is true : Heaven its power has lost; Christ is
dead indeed ! The age Science for its God has ta’en ;
for faith, Liberty. Farewell to the perfume sweet of
298
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SELECTED POE MS
the mystic rose; to love, farewell. Farewell to poesy
of old; to sacred beauty a long farewell.
In vain our painters, to see how shaped it was,
within their hands shall turn and turn my head again ;
mine, mine alone my secret is. Copy they may my
tones; copy they may the pose; but two things had I
that shall fail them ever, — Love and Faith.
Tell me, which of you, of this age infamous the off¬
spring mean, can saintly render woman’s adored
beauty ? None, alas! not one. For your boudoirs,
the haunts of lust, lascivious scenes you need. Who
e’er glances at you, virgins mine, so draped ? Oh !
my sainted ones, no man.
The time has come. Your task is done. Like a
wan old man the dying age bewails and struggles on.
The Angel of Judgment to his lips the trumpet sets,
and the voice is about to call: aLet justice be done;
mankind is dead ! ”
No more I heard. Dawn with opal lips, quite sleepy
yet, upon the dullish window-pane a chill beam cast,
and I saw vanish the vision strange as vanishes the
orfrey, by sudden gleam startled, under a Gothic arch.
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THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
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DEATH IN LIFE
IV
Death is multiform : its face, its vesture changes
oftener than actress lightsome. Beauteous it can make
itself, and is not ever a sickening carcass that groans
toothless and makes grimace most hideous to behold.
Its subjects do not all within the graveyard dwell;
they sleep not all on pillows stony under the shadow
of the vaults; they wear not all her pallid livery; not
upon all has the gate been closed in the gloom of the
grave.
Dead there are of kinds most various. To some
stench befalls, and corruption, palpable nothingness, hor¬
ror and disgust, night profound and dark, and the avid
bier, its jaws wide opening like gaping monster.
Others, whom one sees unfearful go to and fro in
the sight of the living under their shroud of flesh, have
the invisible nothingness, the inner death which none
300
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SELECTED POEMS
suspects, which none doth mourn, not even nearest and
dearest.
For when one goes into the cities of the dead to visit
the tombs of the unknown or famous, the monuments
or the mounds, whether or not there lie asleep forever
under the sombre shadows of the yews some friend
beloved, — whether one weep or not,
One says : — Behold, dead are these. Moss has
spread its veil over their names ; fast the worm its web
doth spin in the sockets of their eyes; their hair has
made its way through the boards of their biers, and
their flesh in dust doth fall upon the bones of their
forbears.
At night their heirs fear not they shall return ; even
their dogs now scarce remember them. Their por-
traits, with smoke befogged, with dust thickly covered
o’er, in shops are strown away; those who once envy
fierce to them did bear, their praises now gladly sing
— for they are dead and gone for good and all.
The Angel of Sorrow praying on their tomb alone
for them mourns with tears of stone, and as the worm
301
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THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
their body gnaws, so gnaws forgetfulness their name
with silent tooth. For tester they six feet of heavy
mould do own. Dead are they; of the dead they
are.
Perchance a tear, from your heart escaped, upon
their dust, snow-strewn, rain-soaked, slowly filters
down, which joy will bring them in their sad home;
and their dried up hearts, feeling they are mourned,
faintly beat once more.
But no one says, on seeing the man who bears
death within his soul, u Rest and peace be thine ! ” —
What to the sheath is given, to the blade is denied.
The body is wept for and the wound is soothed, but the
soul may break and die without any feeling dread or
giving it a tomb.
And yet there is an agony horrible that none can ever
guess; there is grief incredible that eye can never see;
there is more than one cross on the Calvary of the soul,
without the golden halo ; without the woman white ever
prostrate below.
Every soul is a sepulchre wherein things innumerable
lie; hideous cadavers buried asleep within rosy faces.
302
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SELECTED POEMS
Tears are always found beneath the living smile; the
dead behind the living are, and truth to tell, mankind
is a cemetery.
The unburied tombs of old cities dead, the halls and
wells of Hundred-gated Thebes not so populous are;
nor are there to be seen skeletons more dread, or a
greater mass of bones and skulls with ruins mingled.
Some there are with no epitaphs on their tombs, who
of the dead as in the catacombs build up a mighty
mound; whose hearts are but a level field, where no
cross shows, nor memorial stone, and which blind
Death with divers dusts confusedly doth fill.
Others, less forgetful, have funeral vaults wherein
are ranged their dead, as in the vaults of Ghebers and
Egyptians; around their hearts their mummies stand,
the pallid features recalling of all their former loves.
Lovingly embalmed in remembrance pure, within
themselves they guard the soul they loved, — a treas¬
ure sad and charming both. Death dwells in them in
the midst of life; they ever seek the dear soul lost,
which on them smileth still.
303
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THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
Where, if one searches, will a skeleton not be
found ? What hearth is there that every night beholds
the family circle unbroken yet ? Where is the thresh¬
old, smiling and fair though it be, that has not beheld
the owner outward pass under the black pall, never
again homeward to turn ?
The little flower which joys now, offering its bloom¬
ing lips to kisses of the snow, the daughter is of Death.
Perchance its roots into the ground from some loved
dust have caught the scent divine that charms so
much.
Oh ! betrothed of yesterday, that are lovers still,
the place where nest your loves has served like you
some old man grim. Before your soft sighs had waked
its echoes his death-rattle it heard, and the remem¬
brance an odour sepulchral mingles with the sweet
bridal perfumes.
Where shall we tread and not a tomb profane ?
Even if we had the wings of the dove, were swift-footed
like the deer, and the waves traversed like the flashing
fish, everywhere would be found the hostess, black and
white, ready to receive us.
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SELECTED POEMS
Oh ! cease then, ye mothers young, to cradle your
sons in the arms of bright imaginings; cease to dream
of brilliant future for them. Spin them a shroud with
the thread of their swaddling-clothes; for your sons,
were they pure as angels and fair as they, to death are
all condemned.
THE CO M ED Y OF DEATH
V
Amid sighs and moans and groans let us descend to
its very depths the gloomy spiral and all its accursed
turns. Our guide is no Vergil, the master poet; no
Beatrix towards us her lovely head doth bend from
distant Paradise.
For guide we have a wan-faced virgin, who never
was kissed by golden tan from lips of sun. Colourless
her cheeks, bluish her lips; alabaster white the nipples
of her breasts, but rosy never.
A mere breath sways her delicate form; her arms,
more translucent than jasper or agate, languidly hang by
her side. From her hand escapes a withering flower,
and folded on her back her diaphanous wings motionless
remain.
More sombre than night, more staring than stone,
under her ebony brows and her lashes long shine her
two great eyes. Like the waves of Lethe, dark and
silent flowing, her loosened hair her ivoiy flesh enfolds
with silent clasp.
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SELECTED POEMS
Upon her brow, the linen bands — chaste and
simple ornament — with hemlock leaves and violets
are twined. For the rest she is nude, and one laughs
and trembles on seeing her approach; for her look
sinister and alluring at the same time is.
Although she has lain in every bed on earth, under
her wreath of white barren she still remains since
eternity began. The burning kiss dies out upon her
fatal lips, and of her virginity, the pallid rose has none
e’er plucked.
She is the one that leads to tears and to despair;
she is the one who from mother’s lap doth take away
her burden sweet and dear ; she is the one who jealous
lies between lovers twain and wills that in her turn
she wedded be.
Bitter she is, and sweet; wicked she is, and good.
On each illustrious brow she sets a crown, fearless
and passionless. Bitter to fortunate ones; to the
wretched sweet; alone she brings to mighty grief its
consolation.
She gives a bed to those who, through the world,
like Wandering Jew, are walking night and day and
3°7
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THE CO M E DY OF DEATH
sleep have never known. To all pariahs she opes her
inn, and Phryne welcomes as she does the virgin ; foe
and friend as cordially receives.
Following the steps of this guide with face impassi¬
ble, onward we go adown the spiral terrible towards
the bourne unknown, through a living hell that knows
not cave nor gulf, nor burning pitch, nor seas with
sulphurous waves, nor great horned devil.
Here against a pane there is a light as of a lamp,
with the shadow of a man. Let us the stairs ascend,
draw near and see. “Ah! 91 is you, Dr. Faustus! in
the same attitude as Rembrandt’s wizard in the sombre
painting that gleams with light.
“What! have you not broken your alchemist’s vials?
Do you still bend your great, bald, sad brow over some
manuscript old ? Do you still seek within your book,
by the light of that sun mystical, the word cabalistic
that makes the Spirit rise ?
“Tell me, has Science, your mistress adored, to your
chaste desires yielded at last ? Or, as when you first
3°8
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SELECTED POEMS
met, do you kiss of her dress but the hem or eke her
slipper ? Is there yet in your breast asthmatic breath
enough for a sigh of love ?
a What sand or what coral has your lead brought up ?
Have you sounded the depths of this world’s wisdom ?
Or as you drew from your well did you in your pail
bring up nude, fair Truth, until now ignored ? If you
are a tree, where then are your fruits ? ”
Faust
I have plunged within the sea, under the vault of the
waves. The great fishes cast their fleeting shadows
down to the water’s depths. Leviathan lashed the
abyss with its tail, and their lovely blue hair the sirens
combed upon the coral reefs.
The hideous cuttle-fish and the monstrous polyp
their tentacles all out-stretched; the shark and the ore
enormous their great green eyes on me did turn; but to
the surface I came again, for my breath failed me. A
heavy mantle for aged shoulders is the mantle of the
seas.
THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
From my well limpid water alone have I drawn; the
Sphinx, as I question, still silent is. Pallid and broken
down, alas ! I am still at perhaps and I know not, and
the flowers of my brow are fallen like snow on the
place where I have passed.
Oh! woe is me, that I, unguarded, tasted the golden
apples of the tree of Science, for Science is Death.
Not the upas of Java’s isle, nor Afric’s euphorbias,
nor the manchineel that gives magnetic sleep, a stronger
poison hold.
In nothing, now, do I believe. And when you
came, for very weariness my study I was renouncing
and ready my furnace was to break. Within my
being not a fibre now thrills, and like a pendulum my
heart alone doth beat with movement unchanging.
Nothingness! This, then, is what at the end one
finds. As the tomb doth hold the dead, so doth my
soul a living cadaver contain. It is to reach this point
that I such pains have taken, and that, profitless, my
soul to the winds I’ve scattered as scattered is the
grain.
310
db ^ 4«
SELECTED POEMS
A single kiss, oh! fair and gentle Marguerite,
snatched from thy blooming mouth, so fresh, so small,
is better worth than all of this. Seek not for the Word
which in the Book has never been, but know how to
live, forget not that you must live. Love, for that is
all!
t
311
THE COMEDY OF DEATH
VI
The endless spiral within the depths doth plunge.
All around, waiting but for the wrong answer ere your
blood they suck, upon their great pedestals with hiero-
glyphs strewn, sphinxes with pointed breasts, with
fingers armed with claws, roll their glittering eyes.
As one passes before them, at each step one stumbles
on old bones, on carrion remains, on skulls that hollow
sound. From every hole there issue stiffened limbs;
and monstrous apparitions hideous flash through the
darksome air.
It is here that Oedipus the riddle yet must solve,
and that still is awaited the beam that shall dispel the
darkness of eld. It is here that Death its problem doth
propose, and that the traveller, her pallid face perceiving,
draws back in affright.
Ah! how many noble hearts and souls so great in
vain through every poesy and every passion all have
sought the answer to the fatal page. Their own bones
lie there with no sepulchral stone, with no inscription
carved.
312
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SELECTED POEMS
How many, Don Juans unknown, have filled their
lists and still seek on ! How many lips turn pale
under kisses sweetest, which have never pressed their
fancy’s lips ! How many desires to heaven from earth
have returned, forever unappeased !
Students there are who would all things know, hut
who for valet and teacher never Mephistopheles find.
In attic rooms are Fausts without their Marguerites,
whom Hell repels and God casts out. Pity these,
oh ! pity them all.
For they suffer, alas ! from ill incurable, and a tear
they mingle with every grain of sand that Time lets
fall. Their heart, like the orfrey within the ruins’
depths, moans within their weakened breasts a hymn
to despair.
Their life is like the woods when autumn ends.
Every passing wind from their crown doth strip the
last touch of green, and their weeping dreams go silent,
floating through the clouds like flock of storks when
winter draweth nigh.
Their torments never in poets’ songs are told.
Martyrs of thought, they bear not round their heads
3*3
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THE COMEDY OF DEATH
the shining aureole; and on the ways of earth they
lonely march, and on the frozen ground they fall as
snow doth fall when in the night it comes.
As on I went, my thoughts turning over, sad and
speechless, under the icy vault, along the narrow way,
stopping suddenly my companion said, as she stretched
out her hand so frail: —u Look whither my finger
points.”
It was a horseman with a waving plume, long curl¬
ing hair and black moustache, and spurs of gold. He
wore a mantle, a rapier, and a ruff, like the ruffling
blades in days of Louis Treize,and seemed still young.
But on looking close I saw that his wig, under the
false brown hair upon the neck, allowed to show the
whitened hair. His brow like face of ruffled sea was
wrinkled; his cheek so hollow that all his teeth did
show.
In spite of the thick rouge with which it was
covered, — as marble is o’erlaid with rosy gauze, —
his pallor was plain to see; and through the carmine
his lips that coloured, under his forced laugh ’t was
plain that every night hot fever did him kiss.
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SELECTED POEMS
His staring eyes seemed eyes of glass ; they nothing
had of earthly look — nor tear, nor glance. Diamonds
they were, set within his gloomy lids, and shone with
cold gleam and unchanging brilliancy. An old man
in truth he was.
His back was bowed, as bowed as arch of bridge;
his feet were sore and swollen by the gout, his weight
able scarce to bear; his pale hands trembled as tremble
the waves under the North wind’s kiss, and let slip the
rings too big for his fingers grown.
All this luxury, all this rouge upon the sunken face
formed a combination monstrous both and strange, and
dark was the sight and uglier yet than coffin in cour-
tesan’s home; than skeleton adorned with robe of
silk; than old hag in a mirror glancing.
Entrusting to night his amorous plaint he stood ‘
below a darkened pane beneath a lonesome balcony.
No white brow against the glass did press; no sun of
beauty did its face unveil within the open depth of
heaven.
“Tell me, what do you there, old man, in the dark¬
ness ; on a night when the funeral swarms fly forth
3*5
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THE C O M E DY OF DEATH
from but the tombs ? Pageless and without torch,
whom seek you so late, so far, at the hour when the
Angel of Midnight in the belfry sings and weeps ?
“ You are no longer at the age when all smiled and
welcomed you ; when, petal by petal, virgins scattered
at your feet the flower of their beauty; it is no longer
for you that Windows are oped. You are fit for naught
but by your ancestors to sleep under the carven marble
tomb.
“ Hear you not the owl its shrill cry uttering ? Hear
you not in the woods the great, hungry wolves howl ?
Oh ! foolish old man, return; it is the moment when
the moon wakes the pallid vampire upon its golden
couch. Return to your home, return !
“ The mocking wind your song on its wing away
hath borne; none to you is listening, and adown your
mantle stream the tears of the gale.” — He answers
nothing. — “ Oh ! Death, tell me who this man may
be, and know you the name by which he is called ? ”
— “That man is Don Juan.”
316
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SELECTED POEMS
VII
Don Juan
Oh! happy youths whose heart scarce opes as
doth the violet to the first breath of smiling spring;
milk-white souls like maybloom sweet, where, in the
welcome sunshine and in the silver rain, all warbles and
all blows.
Oh! all ye who your mother’s arms do leave with¬
out knowing life and knowledge bitter and who seek
all things to learn, — poets and dreamers, more than
once, no doubt, on edge of woods, as your road you
took in sunset’s splendour;
At that lovely hour when on branches swaying the
white doves bill and the bullfinches nest; when weary
nature sighs and falls asleep; when, like a lyre when
the strain is done, the leaf in the breeze quivers;
When calm and forgetfulness on all things fall;
when the sylph returns to its pavilion of rose under
the perfumes nestling, — moved by these things and of
restless ardour full, you have longed for my lists and
my conquests all. You have envied me
3T7
THE COMEDY OF DEATH
The feasts, and the kisses on shoulders nude, all the
sensuous pleasures to your age unknown; exquisite
torments dear! Zerlina, Elvira, Anna, the jealous
Roman girls, England’s fair lilies, Andalusians brown,
all that lovely flock of mine.
And then the voice of your souls did ask of you:
“How did you do to have more women than Sultan
ever owned ? How did you manage, in spite of bolts
and bars, within the bed of lovely maids to sleep ? You
happy, happy Don Juan !
“You forgetful victor, a single one of those, whose
name you put not down, one of your least fair, your
most modest flower; oh ! how well, how long, we
should have adored her. She would have adorned,
as within an urn of gold, the altar of our heart.
“ She would have scented, that humble violet whose
head your foot within the grass did bow, our own pale
springtime. We should have picked up, and wet with
our tears the blue-eyed star, that in the ball-room had
fallen from your inconstant hand.
“ Oh ! wondrous tremors of the fever of love; doves
that from heaven upon the lips alight; kisses so bitter-
3^8
SELECTED POEMS
sweet; last veils falling; and you, glorious waves of
golden hair, flowing over shoulders brown, when shall
we know you ? ”
Ye children! I have known all these pleasures you
dream of; round the fatal tree Eve’s serpent of eld did
not more closely twine. To mortal eyes never did
human-headed dragon the fruit of that forbidden tree
make shine with greater brilliancy.
For, like nests of finches tame, ready their flight to
take, on lips I’ve caught nests of timid loves; within
my arms phantoms ravishing I’ve pressed; many a
blooming virgin upon me has outpoured the purest
balm of her calyx white.
The truth to find, ye cunning courtesans, I’ve pressed
under the rouge your lips more worn than stones upon
the road. Ye loathsome sewers, to which flow the whole
world’s streams, within your depths I’ve plunged; and
thou, Debauch so foul, thy morrows I have known.
I’ve seen the purest brows prostrate sink, once the
orgy done, amid the outpoured wine upon the cloth red-
stained. I have seen the close of balls, and arms per-
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THE CO M ED Y OF DEATH
spiring, and pallid faces more wan than death under
their rumpled hair when rose the sun.
Like the miner who works an oreless vein, by day,
by night the depths of life I’ve searched, and never
struck the lead. I’ve asked of love the life it gives,
but all in vain; and ne’er on earth have I affection felt
for one who bore a name.
Many a heart I’ve burned, and on its ashes trod;
but like the salamander, cold amid the flames I did
remain. I had mine own ideal — fresh as dew, a
vision golden, an opal, by God’s own glance iridescent
made;
A woman, such as sculptor never wrought; herself
a Cleopatra and a Mary too, in modesty, grace, and
beauty all; a mystic rose, wherein no worm did lurk;
a burning volcano to stainless purity of snow allied !
At the fateful parting of the ways, Pythagoras’ Y,
the left road ’t was I took; and though onward I travel,
yet the bourne I never reach. Deceitful Sensuality!
’t was thou I followed, and it may be that the riddle of
life could be solved, O Virtue, by thee alone!
320
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SELECTED POEMS
Why did I not, like Faust, within my cell so dark,
gaze on the wall at trembling shadow of microcosm
golden ? Why did I not, books of old and magic
works reading, by my furnace pass the darkness’ hours
in seeking pleasure ?
Strong was my mind: I could have read thy book
and drunk thy bitter wine, O Science, without being
intoxicate, as young student well may. I should have
forced Isis her veil to remove, and from heaven’s
heights brought down the stars within my sombre
room.
Listen not to Love, an evil teacher he. To love is
not to know; to live is to know. So learn, and learn
still more. Cast and cast again the lead, and plunge
yet deeper down within the depths profound than did
your elders e’er.
Let Leviathan through its nostrils blow; let the
weight of the seas within your breasts your lungs sharp
pierce. Hunt through the black reefs that no man yet
has known, and in its casket golden the ring of Solomon
perchance you ’ll find.
2i 321
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THE COMEDY OF DEATH
VIII
Thus spake Don Juan, and under the icy arch,
wearied, but resolved the end to reach, I took my
way again. At last I entered on a gloomy plain which
a fiery sky on the boundless horizon closed with circle
of carmine.
The soil of the plain was ivory white, and cut by
a river like a silken band of richest red. It was level
all; nor wood, nor church, nor tower; and the weary
wind swept it with its wings and uttered plaintive
moans.
A first I thought the tint so strange, the blood-red
hue with which the stream thus'flushed was but some
reflection faint; that chalk and tufa formed that ivory
white. But as I bent to drink, I saw it was real blood
indeed that flowed.
I saw that with whitened bones the earth was
covered o’er, a chill snow-fall of death, where no green
plant, no flower, did grow; that the soil was made of
the dust of men, and that people enough Thebes, Pal¬
myra, and Rome to fill were sleeping there.
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SELECTED POEMS
A shadow with bowed back, bent brow, passed with
the wind. He it was unmistakably, with coat of gray
and little hat. An eagle golden over his head did soar,
seeking, thereon to rest, anxious, bewildered, the
standard’s staff.
The skeletons sought to put on their heads; the
spectral drummer its sticks rattled in time with His
sovereign step; a clamour vast rose as he passed, and
cannons countless roared in the storm their triumphal
brazen blast.
He seemed not the tumult to hear, and like a marble
god, of its worship careless, walked on in silence sunk.
Sometimes only, as if by stealth, his eyes looked up
and sought in heaven his star now fallen.
But the heavens, purple with the conflagration^
light, showed never a star, and the growing flames
kept rising and rising higher. —*• Then, paler still than
when in the St. Helena of old, his arms upon his
breast he crossed, full of muttered moans.
When he came before us, cc Mighty Emperor,”
said I, cc the mysterious word which fate compels me
here below to seek; the last word which Faust of his
323
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THE CO M E DY OF DEATH
books did ask, as Don Juan of love, the word of Death
or Life, can it be you know ? ”
— “ Oh! wretched child,” said the imperial shade,
w return above. ley cold is the wind and chilled
through am I. Along this road no hostelry you will
find where you may warm your feet, for Death alone
receives those who this way pass.
u Look, ’t is all over. The star eclipsed is. Black
blood falls in showers from my eagle’s side, wounded
in its flight, and with the white flecks of the eternal
snow from the depths of the sombre skies the feathers
of its wings downward flutter to the ground.
“ Alas! your desire I can never satisfy. In vain
the word of Life have I sought, like Faust and Don
Juan. I know no more than on the day of my birth,
and yet, in the heyday of my power, it was I that
made the calm and storm.
u Everywhere I was called above all men, The
Man. Before me the eagle and the fasces were borne
as before the old Roman Caesars; there were ten kings
that bore my train; I was a Charlemagne within a single
hand the globe embracing.
324
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SELECTED POEMS
“ No more have I seen from the top of that column
where my glory, a tri-coloured rainbow, gleams than
you can see from below. In vain with my heel I
spurred on the world; ever rose the sound of camps
and the roar of the guns, of the stress of battle and
storm.
“ Ever came on salvers the keys of the towns, ever
a concert of bugles and servile cheers, of laurels and
speeches ; a black sky, with rain of shot, dead men
to salute upon the battlefield, — thus were spent my
days.
u How bitterly did your sweet honey name, oh ! my
mother, Laetitia, belie my fortune woeful! How
wretched I! Everywhere I bore my wandering pain;
I had dreamed of Empire, and the globe of earth did
hollow sound within my palm.
“ Oh ! for the lot of a shepherd, and the beech
under which Tityrus during the heat of the day with^
draws and sings of Amaryllis. Oh ! for the twinkling
bell and the bleating flock, the pure milk flowing from
the udder white between the fingers fair.
325
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THE CO M ED Y OF DEATH
cc Oh ! for the scent of the new-mown hay and the
smell of the stable; for the brown bread of the herd
and for nuts on the table, and a platter of wood !
For a seven-hole flute put together with wax, and of
goats half a dozen — that the sum of my desire; I who
have been the conqueror of kings.
44 A sheepskin my shoulders shall cover; Galatea
laughing shall flee to the reeds and I pursue her.
Sweeter than ambrosia shall be my verse, and
Daphnis shall with jealousy pale at the sound of the
airs I shall play.
44 Oh! I long to go to my Corsican home; through
the wood where the goats, as they roam, the bark of
trees nibble; down the gullies deep, along the hollow
way where cicada shrilly sings, careless in its wander¬
ing, my ranging flock following.
44 Pitiless the Sphinx to whomsoever fails. Impru¬
dent youth, do you mean that it shall slay you and
drink the purest blood of your heart ? The only one
the fatal riddle who guessed slew his father Laius, and
incest committed. Such the victor’s sad reward! ”
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SELECTED POEMS
IX
Now I have returned from that sombre voyage,
where through the darkness for torch and for star one
has but the eyes of the owl; and, as after a day’s plough-
ing the buffalo returns with slow steps and worn, and
head bowed down, I go with shoulders bowed.
From the land of phantoms I have returned, but still
to wear, far from the speechless realms, the pallid hue
of death. My vestments, like the funeral crape cast
upon an urn, hang limp adown my frame unto the
ground.
I have escaped from the hands of a Death greedier
far than that by Lazarus’ tomb which watched, for
what it takes it keeps: with the body parts, but the
soul retains; the torch returns, but the flame puts out;
and Christ Himself would powerless prove.
I am no more, alas ! but the shadow of myself; the
living tomb wherein lies all I love; and alone, for 1
survive myself. I bear about with me the ice-cold
remains of my illusions — lovely dead for whom I
make a shroud.
THE CO M E DY OF DEATH
I am yet too young; I must love and live, O
Death ! I cannot yet resolve to follow thee adown the
darksome way. I have not had time to build the
column on which Glory my crown to-morrow morn
shall hang. O Death, do thou later return !
Oh ! white-breasted virgin, thy poet spare ! Remem¬
ber, I the first did thee make more beautiful than day.
Thy greenish hue, to diaphanous pallor have I changed;
under glorious dark hair thine old skull concealed; and
thee have I courted.
Oh! let me live a while and thy praise I ’ll sing:
thy palaces to adorn, angels I shall carve and crosses
forge. Within the church and within the graveyard
the marble I ’ll make weep, and the stones shall moan
as upon a regal monument.
I shall devote to thee my loveliest songs; ever for
thee bouquets of immortelles and scentless flowers I ’ll
have. My garden, O Death, with thine own trees
is planted, — the yew, the box, the cypress, over the
marbles twine their green-brown boughs.
I tell the handsome flowers, sweet glories of the beds,
the lily majestic its white cup opening, the tulip golden,
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SELECTED POEMS
the rose of May the nightingale doth love, I tell the
chrysanthemum, too, and many another still,—
Grow ye not here; another soil now seek, ye fresh
springtime loves; for this garden austere your brilliancy
is too great. The holly’s painted leaves would wound
you and in the air the hemlock’s poison you’d imbibe,
and bitter scent of yew.
Forsake me not, O Mother, O Nature ! A time of
youth thou owest to every creature; a season of love to
every soul. I still am young and yet feel the chill
of age; I cannot love. Let me have my youth if
but for a single day.
Be no stepmother to me, O Nature beloved. Let
some sap return to the faded plant that hates to die.
The torrent from mine eyes with its tears has drowned
its worm-eaten bud which sunshine does not dry and
which fails to bloom.
O virgin air, O crystal air, O water, principle of
this world ! Earth, that feedest all! and thou, fertile
flame, a beam from God’s own eye ! let not die yet, ye
who life bestow, the poor drooping flower that seeks no
more than for a brief time to blow.
329
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THE CO M E DY OF DEATH
Stars that from above behold the whirling worlds,
rain down on me from your lashes golden your diamond
tears! Moon, lily of the night, flower of the garden
divine, pour thy rays upon me, O fair solitary, from
the uttermost depths of heaven !
Eye ever open in the centre of space, do thou pierce,
O mighty Sun, the passing cloud, and that I may see
thee once more let the eagles through the heavens that
swoop on mighty wing, the griflins that fiery fly, the
swallows swift, to me their wings now lend!
Ye Winds! that from the flowers their souPs per¬
fume steal and avowals of love from lips beloved ; pure
Air of the Mountains, still full of the scent of the
balsam; Breeze of the Ocean which one breathes so
free, my lungs now fill!
April has made for me a grassy carpet whereon to
lie ; above my brow the lilac blooms in clusters great,
for now is springtime come. Take me within your
arms, sweet poet’s dreams; between your polished
breasts my poor head rest, and cradle me long.
Be far from me, nightmares, spectres of the nights !
Roses, women, songs, — all things fair and loves glori-
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SELECTED POEMS
ous, — these are what I want. Hail! O Antiquity’s
Muse, Muse with the fresh green bays and tunic white,
that younger art every day !
Brown with lotus eyes; fair with eyelash black, O
Grecian girl of Miletus, upon the ivory stool place thy
fair bare feet, and with golden nectar let the cup be
filled. To thy beauty first I drink, Theone white, and
then to the gods unknown.
More lascivious and yielding than the wave, thy
bosom is! Milk is not whiter, nor apple rounder.
Come, one sweet kiss! Make haste, make haste, for
our life, O Theone, is a winged steed by Time
spurred on. Let us hasten our life to use.
Shout, Io, Paean ! * . . But who is this woman under
her veil so pale ? Why, ’t is thou, infamous hag ! I
can see thy skull so bare, thy great orbless sockets,
loathsome prostitute! eternal courtesan ! clasping the
world with thine arms so lean.
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