Happiness

Above her, pearl and rose the heavens lay;
Around her, flowers scattered earth with gold,
Or down the path in insolence held sway--
Like cavaliers who ride the elves' highway--
Scarlet and blue, within a garden old.

Beyond the hills, faint-heard through belts of wood,
Bells, Sabbath-sweet, swooned from some far-off town;
Gamboge and gold, broad sunset colors strewed
The purple west as if, with God imbued,
Her mighty pallet Nature there laid down.

Amid such flowers, underneath such skies,
Embodying all life knows of sweet and fair,
She stood; love's dreams in girlhood's face and eyes,
White as a star that comes to emphasize
The mingled beauty of the earth and air.

Behind her, seen through vines and orchard trees,
Gray with its twinkling window...

Above, below, in sky and sod,
In leaf and spar, in star and man,
Well might the wise Athenian scan
The geometric signs of God,
The measured order of His plan.

And India's mystics sang aright
Of the One Life pervading all,
One Being's tidal rise and fall
In soul and form, in sound and sight,
Eternal outflow and recall.

God is: and man in guilt and fear
The central fact of Nature owns;
Kneels, trembling, by his altar-stones,
And darkly dreams the ghastly smear
Of blood appeases and atones.

Guilt shapes the Terror: deep within
The human heart the secret lies
Of all the hideous deities;
And, painted on a ground of sin,
The fabled gods of torment rise!

And what is He? The ripe grain nods,
The sweet dews fall, the swe...

I

That was a great night we spied upon
See-sawing home,
Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars
Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze...
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...
Lights dwindling to shining slits
In the wet asphalt...
Purring lights... red and green and golden-whiskered...
Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud...
... But you did not know...
As the trains made golden augers
Boring in the darkness...
How my heart kept racing out along the rails,
As a spider runs along a thread
And hauls him in again
To some drawing point...
You did not know
How wild ducks' wings
Itch at dawn...
How at dawn the necks of wild ducks
Arch to the sun
And new-mown air
Trickles sweet in their gullets.

II

Change and chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
Wrought us fellow-like, and despite divergence,
Friends interlinked us.

"Cherish him can I while the true one forthcome -
Come the rich fulfiller of my prevision;
Life is roomy yet, and the odds unbounded."
So self-communed I.

Thwart my wistful way did a damsel saunter,
Fair, the while unformed to be all-eclipsing;
"Maiden meet," held I, "till arise my forefelt
Wonder of women."

Long a visioned hermitage deep desiring,
Tenements uncouth I was fain to house in;
"Let such lodging be for a breath-while," thought I,
"Soon a more seemly.

"Then, high handiwork will I make my life-deed,
Truth and Light outshow; but the ripe time pending,
Inter...

Try we life long, we can never
Straighten out life's tangled skein,
Why should we, in vain endeavor,
Guess and guess and guess again?
Life's a pudding full of plums;
Care's a canker that benumbs.
Wherefore waste our elocution
On impossible solution?
Life's a pleasant institution,
Let us take it as it comes!

Set aside the dull enigma,
We shall guess it all too soon;
Failure brings no kind of stigma
Dance we to another tune!
String the lyre and fill the cup,
Lest on sorrow we should sup.
Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle,
Hands across and down the middle
Life's perhaps the only riddle
That we shrink from giving up!

From where I lingered in a lull in march
outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
I called the fireman with a careful voice
And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:
'O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.'
I thought a few might tangle, as they did,
Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare
Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,
And so be added to the moon up there.
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

To watch the storms, and hear the sky
Give all our almanacks the lie;
To shake with cold, and see the plains
In autumn drown’d with wintry rains;
‘Tis thus I spend my moments here,
And wish myself a Dutch mynheer;
I then should have no need of wit;
For lumpish Hollander unfit!
Nor should I then repine at mud,
Or meadows deluged with a flood;
But in a bog live well content,
And find it just my element;
Should be a clod, and not a man;
Nor wish in vain for sister Ann,
With charitable aid to drag
My mind out of its proper quag;
Should have the genius of a boor,
And no ambition to have more.

My old Welsh neighbor over the way
Crept slowly out in the sun of spring,
Pushed from her ears the locks of gray,
And listened to hear the robin sing.

Her grandson, playing at marbles, stopped,
And, cruel in sport as boys will be,
Tossed a stone at the bird, who hopped
From bough to bough in the apple-tree.

"Nay!" said the grandmother; "have you not heard,
My poor, bad boy! of the fiery pit,
And how, drop by drop, this merciful bird
Carries the water that quenches it?

"He brings cool dew in his little bill,
And lets it fall on the souls of sin
You can see the mark on his red breast still
Of fires that scorch as he drops it in.

"My poor Bron rhuddyn! my breast-burned bird,
Singing so sweetly from limb to limb,
Very dear to the ...

Your picture smiles as first it smiled;
The ring you gave is still the same;
Your letter tells, O changing child!
No tidings since it came.

Give me an amulet
That keeps intelligence with you,--
Red when you love, and rosier red,
And when you love not, pale and blue.

Alas! that neither bonds nor vows
Can certify possession;
Torments me still the fear that love
Died in its last expression.

Many things the garden shows,
And pleased I stray
From tree to tree
Watching the white pear-bloom,
Bee-infested quince or plum.
I could walk days, years, away
Till the slow ripening, secular tree
Had reached its fruiting-time,
Nor think it long.



Solar insect on the wing
In the garden murmuring,
Soothing with thy summer horn
Swains by winter pinched and worn.

I


What wood-god, on this water's mossy curb,
Lost in reflections of earth's loveliness,
Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb?
I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess,
Came on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame
Of buds and blooms, the season writes its name.--
Ah, me! could I have seen him ere alarm
Of my approach aroused him from his calm!
As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap,
Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm
As wildwood rose, and filled the air with balm
Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap.


II


Does not the moss retain some vague impress,
Green dented in, of where he lay or trod?
Do not the flow'rs, so reticent, confess
With conscious looks the contact of a god?
Does not the very water garrulou...

    O the South Wind and the Sun
    How each loved the other one -
Full of fancy - full of folly -
    Full of jollity and fun!
    How they romped and ran about,
    Like two boys when school is out,
With glowing face, and lisping lip,
    Low laugh, and lifted shout!

    And the South Wind - he was dressed
    With a ribbon round his breast
That floated, flapped and fluttered
    In a riotous unrest;
    And a drapery of mist,
    From the shoulder and the wrist
Flowing backward with the motion
    Of the waving hand he kissed.

    And the Sun had on a crown
    Wrought of gilded thistledown,
And a scarf of velvet vapor,
    And a raveled-rainbow gown;
    And his tinsel-tangled hair,
    Tossed and lost upon the air,

Come, Death, I'd have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And Love - a lad with broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing.

Aye, music hath small sense.
And a time's soon told,
And Earth is old,
And my poor wits are dense;
Yet I have secrets, - dark, my dear,
To breathe you all: Come near.
And lest some hideous listener tells,
I'll ring the bells.

They're all at war!
Yes, yes, their bodies go
'Neath burning sun and icy star
To chaunted songs of woe,
Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!

Hush!... I use words
I hardly know the meaning of;
And the mute birds
Are glancing ...

Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white;
And reigns the winter's pregnant silence still;
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill,
And willow stems grow daily red and bright.
These are the days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year's ill,
And prayer to purify the new year's will:
Fit days, ere yet the spring rains blur the sight,
Ere yet the bounding blood grows hot with haste,
And dreaming thoughts grow heavy with a greed
The ardent summer's joy to have and taste;
Fit days, to give to last year's losses heed,
To reckon clear the new life's sterner need;
Fit days, for Feast of Expiation placed!

When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wove with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such gray clouds of incense rose
That only the gods’ eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew
But flame on flame, deep under deep,

    There shall be a song for both of us that day
    Though fools say you have long outlived your songs,
    And when, perhaps, because your hair is grey,
    You go unsung, to whom all praise belongs,
    And no men kiss your hands - your fragile hands
    Folded like empty shells on sea-spurned sands.
    And you that were dawn whereat men shouted once
    Are sunset now, with but one worshipper,
    Then to your twilight heart this song shall be
    Sweeter than those that did your youth announce
    For your brave beautiful spirit is lovelier
    Than once your lovely body was to me.
    Your folded hands and your shut eyelids stir
    A passion that Time has crowned with sanctity.
    Young fools shall wonder why, your youth being over,
    You are so sung st...

    I tramped among the townward throng
        A sultry summer's morn:
    They mocked me loud, they mocked me long,
        They laughed my pack to scorn.
    But a likely pedlar holds his peace
        Until the reckoning's told:--
    Merrily I to market went, tho' songs were all my gold.

    At weary noon I left the town,
        I left the highway straight,
    I climbed the silent, sunlit down
        And stood by a castle gate.
    Never yet was a house too high
        When the pedlar's heart was bold:--
    Merrily I to market went, tho' songs were all my gold.

    A lady leaned from her window there
        And asked my wares to see;
    Her voice made rich the summer air,
        Richer my soul in me.
    She gave me only four...

L' aspettata virtù che 'n voi fioriva.

TO PAUDOLFO MALATESTA, LORD OF RIMINI.


    Sweet virtue's blossom had its promise shed
Within thy breast (when Love became thy foe);
Fair as the flower, now its fruit doth glow,
And not by visions hath my hope been fed.
To hail thee thus, I by my heart am led,
That by my pen thy name renown should know;
No marble can the lasting fame bestow
Like that by poets' characters is spread.
Dost think Marcellus' or proud Cæsar's name,
Or Africanus, Paulus--still resound,
That sculptors proud have effigied their deed?
No, Pandolph, frail the statuary's fame,
For immortality alone is found
Within the records of a poet's meed.

WOLLASTON.


    The flower, in youth which virtue's promise b...