Betrayal

Io son sì stanco sotto 'l fascio antico.

HE CONFESSES HIS ERRORS, AND THROWS HIMSELF ON THE MERCY OF GOD.


    Evil by custom, as by nature frail,
I am so wearied with the long disgrace,
That much I dread my fainting in the race
Should let th' original enemy prevail.
Once an Eternal Friend, that heard my cries,
Came to my rescue, glorious in his might,
Arm'd with all-conquering love, then took his flight,
That I in vain pursued Him with my eyes.
But his dear words, yet sounding, sweetly say,
"O ye that faint with travel, see the way!
Hopeless of other refuge, come to me."
What grace, what kindness, or what destiny
Will give me wings, as the fair-feather'd dove,
To raise me hence and seek my rest above?

BASIL KENNET.

I list your prattle, baby boy,
    And hear your pattering feet
With feelings more of pain than joy
    And thoughts of bitter-sweet.

While touching your soft hands in play
    Such passionate longings rise
For my wee boy who strayed away
    So soon to Paradise.

You win me with your infant art;
    But when our play is o'er,
The empty cradle in my heart
    Seems lonelier than before.

Sweet baby boy, you do not guess
    How oft mine eyes are dim,
Or that my lingering caress
    Is sometimes meant for HIM.

    "And when the Summer Heat is great,
    And every hour intense,
    The Moghra, with its subtle flowers,
    Intoxicates the sense."

The Coco palms stood tall and slim, against the golden-glow,
And all their grey and graceful plumes were waving to and fro.

She lay forgetful in the boat, and watched the dying Sun
Sink slowly lakewards, while the stars replaced him, one by one.

She saw the marble Temple walls long white reflections make,
The echoes of their silvery bells were blown across the lake.

The evening air was very sweet; from off the island bowers
Came scents of Moghra trees in bloom, and Oleander flowers.

    "The Moghra flowers that smell so sweet
    When love's young fancies play;
    The acrid Moghra flowers, still sweet

And Pushkin's exile had begun right here,
And Lermontov's expulsion had been "canceled."
There is the easy grasses' scent on highland.
And only once it chanced to me to see it --
Near the lake, where shades of plane-trees hover,
In that doom hour before the evening thrusts,--
The dazzling light of the desirous eyes
Of Tamara's forever living lover.

    She loved me.
    Oh! how she loved me I never had a chance to escape
    From the day she first saw me.
    But then after we were married I thought
    She might prove her mortality and let me out,
    Or she might divorce me. But few die, none resign.
    Then I ran away and was gone a year on a lark.
    But she never complained. She said all would be well
    That I would return. And I did return.
    I told her that while taking a row in a boat
    I had been captured near Van Buren Street
    By pirates on Lake Michigan,
    And kept in chains, so I could not write her.
    She cried and kissed me, and said it was cruel,
    Outrageous, inhuman! I then concluded our marriage
    Was a divine dispensation
    And could not be dissolved,
    Exce...

Merry, merry sparrow!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Sees you, swift as arrow,
Seek your cradle narrow,
Near my bosom.
Pretty, pretty robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, pretty robin,
Near my bosom.

I dreamed we both were in a bed
Of roses, almost smothered:
The warmth and sweetness had me there
Made lovingly familiar,
But that I heard thy sweet breath say,
Faults done by night will blush by day.
I kissed thee, panting, and, I call
Night to the record! that was all.
But, ah! if empty dreams so please,
Love give me more such nights as these.

The ocean heaves around us still
With long and measured swell,
The autumn gales our canvas fill,
Our ship rides smooth and well.
The broad Atlantic’s bed of foam
Still breaks against our prow;
I shed no tears at quitting home,
Nor will I shed them now!

Against the bulwarks on the poop
I lean, and watch the sun
Behind the red horizon stoop,
His race is nearly run.
Those waves will never quench his light,
O’er which they seem to close,
To-morrow he will rise as bright
As he this morning rose.

How brightly gleams the orb of day
Across the trackless sea!
How lightly dance the waves that play
Like dolphins in our lee!
The restless waters seem to say,
In smothered tones to me,
How many thousand miles away
My native land...

Hope provides wings to thought, and love to hope.
Rise up to Cynthia, love, when night is clearest,
And say, that as on high her figure changeth,
So, upon earth, my joy decays and grows.
And whisper in her ear with modest softness,
How doubt oft hung its head, and truth oft wept.
And oh ye thoughts, distrustfully inclined,
If ye are therefore by the loved one chided,
Answer: 'tis true ye change, but alter not,
As she remains the same, yet changeth ever.
Doubt may invade the heart, but poisons not,
For love is sweeter, by suspicion flavour'd.
If it with anger overcasts the eye,
And heaven's bright purity perversely blackens,
Then zephyr-sighs straight scare the clouds away,
And, changed to tears, dissolve them into rain.
Thought, hope, and love remain there as ...

Ah, often do I wait and watch,
And look up, straining through the Real
With longing eyes, my friend, to catch
Faint glimpses of your white Ideal.

I know she loved to rest her feet
By slumbrous seas and hidden strand;
But mostly hints of her I meet
On moony spots of mountain land.

I’ve never reached her shining place,
And only cross at times a gleam;
As one might pass a fleeting face
Just on the outside of a Dream.

But you may climb, her happy Choice!
She knows your step, the maiden true,
And ever when she hears your voice,
She turns and sits and waits for you.

How sweet to rest on breezy crest
With such a Love, what time the Morn
Looks from his halls of rosy rest,
Across green miles of gleaming corn!

How sweet ...

    O the waiting in the watches of the night!
    In the darkness, desolation, and contrition and affright;
    The awful hush that holds us shut away from all delight:
    The ever weary memory that ever weary goes
    Recounting ever over every aching loss it knows -
    The ever weary eyelids gasping ever for repose -
    In the dreary, weary watches of the night!

    Dark - stifling dark - the watches of the night!
    With tingling nerves at tension, how the blackness flashes white
    With spectral visitations smitten past the inner sight! -
    What shuddering sense of wrongs we've wrought that may not be redressed -
    Of tears we did not brush away - of lips we left unpressed,
    And hands that we let fall, with all their loyalty unguessed!
    Ah! the empt...

I wandered o'er the vast green plains of youth,
And searched for Pleasure.    On a distant height
Fame's silhouette stood sharp against the skies.
Beyond vast crowds that thronged a broad highway
I caught the glimmer of a golden goal,
While from a blooming bower smiled siren Love.

Straight gazing in her eyes, I laughed at Love
With all the haughty insolence of youth,
As past her bower I strode to seek my goal.
"Now will I climb to glory's dizzy height,"
I said, "for there above the common way
Doth pleasure dwell companioned by the skies."

But when I reached that summit near the skies,
So far from man I seemed, so far from Love -
"Not here," I cried, "doth Pleasure find her way."
Seen from the distant borderland of youth,
Fame smiles upon us from he...

Ten miles down Reedy River
A pool of water lies,
And all the year it mirrors
The changes in the skies.
Within that pool's broad bosom
Is room for all the stars:
It's bed of sand has drifted
O'er countless rocky bars.

Around the lower edges
There waves a bed of reeds,
Where water-rats are hidden
And where the wild duck breeds;
And grassy slopes rise gently
To ridges long and low,
Where groves of wattle flourish
And native bluebells grow.

Beneath the granite ridges
The eye may just discern
Where Rocky Creek emerges
From deep green banks of fern;
And standing tall between them,
The drooping she-oaks cool
The hard blue tinted waters
Before they reach the pool.

Ten miles down Reedy River
One Sunday afte...

Sing us the Land of the Southern Sea,
The land we have called our own;
Tell us what harvest there shall be
From the seed that we have sown.

We love the legends of olden days,
The songs of the wind and wave;
And border ballads and minstrel lays,
And the poems Shakespeare gave,

The fireside carols and battle rhymes,
And romaunt of the knightly ring;
And the chant with hint of cathedral chimes,
Of him “made blind to sing.”

The tears they tell of our brethren wept,
Their praise is our fathers’ fame;
They sing of the seas our navies swept,
Of the shrines that lent us flame.

But the Past is past, with all its pride,
And its ways are not our ways.
We watch the flow of a fresher tide
And the dawn of newer days.

Sing us...

From the candles and dumb shadows,
And the house where love had died,
I stole to the vast moonlight
And the whispering life outside.
But I found no lips of comfort,
No home in the moon's light
(I, little and lone and frightened
In the unfriendly night),
And no meaning in the voices. . . .
Far over the lands and through
The dark, beyond the ocean,
I willed to think of YOU!
For I knew, had you been with me
I'd have known the words of night,
Found peace of heart, gone gladly
In comfort of that light.

Oh! the wind with soft beguiling
Would have stolen my thought away;
And the night, subtly smiling,
Came by the silver way;
And the moon came down and danced to me,
And her robe was white and flying;
And trees bent their heads to me...

Amid the flowers of a garden glade
    A lovely rose tree smiled,
And the sunbeams shone, the zephyrs played,
    'Round the gardens favorite child;
And the diamond dew-drops glistening fell
    On each rose's silken vest,
Whilst light winged bee and butterfly gay
    On the soft leaves loved to rest.

But one morn while a sunbeam bright
    Lit up its delicate bloom,
And a zephyr lightly hovered 'round,
    On wings of sweet perfume,
A strong hand came, and ruthlessly
    Tore up the parent tree,
And bore it off, with each fair young rose,
    From butterfly, zephyr and bee.

What mattered it that an antique vase
    Of Sèvres costly and old,
Was destined, henceforth, in royal State,
    Its fair young form to hold?
What m...

The Season speaks this year of life
Confusing words of strife,
Suggesting weeds instead of fruits and flowers
In all Earth's bowers.
With heart of Jael, face of Ruth,
She goes her way uncouth
Through hills and fields, where fog and sunset seem
Wild smoke and steam.
Around her, spotted as a leopard skin,
She draws her cloak of whin,
And through the dark hills sweeps dusk's last red glare
Wild on her hair.
Her hands drip leaves, like blood, and burn
With frost; her moony urn
She lifts, where Death, 'mid driving stress and storm,
Rears his gaunt form.
And all night long she seems to say
"Come forth, my Winds, and slay!
And everywhere is heard the wailing cry
Of dreams that die.

Gray lonely rocks about thee stand,
Ignored of sun and dew,
Yet is thy breath upon the land,
To thy vocation true.

So come they character to me
That works in sunless ways,
And I shall learn to give with thee
Dark hills a constant praise.