Sadness

From out the hills where twilight stands,
Above the shadowy pasture lands,
With strained and strident cry,
Beneath pale skies that sunset bands,
The bull-bats fly.

A cloud hangs over, strange of shape,
And, colored like the half-ripe grape,
Seems some uneven stain
On heaven's azure; thin as crape,
And blue as rain.

By ways, that sunset's sardonyx
O'erflares, and gates the farm-boy clicks,
Through which the cattle came,
The mullein-stalks seem giant wicks
Of downy flame.

From woods no glimmer enters in,
Above the streams that, wandering, win
To where the wood pool bids,
Those haunters of the dusk begin, -
The katydids.

Adown the dark the firefly marks
Its flight in gold and emerald sparks;
And, loosened from...

He knows the sweet vexation in the strife
Of Love with Time, this bard who fain would stray
To fairer place beyond the storms of life,
With astral faces near him day by day.
In deep-mossed dells the mellow waters flow
Which best he loves; for there the echoes, rife
With rich suggestions of his long ago,
Astarte, pass with thee! And, far away,
Dear southern seasons haunt the dreamy eye:
Spring, flower-zoned, and Summer, warbling low
In tasselled corn, alternate come and go,
While gypsy Autumn, splashed from heel to thigh
With vine-blood, treads the leaves; and, halting nigh,
Wild Winter bends across a beard of snow.

Music in Italy.--Disappointed by it.--Recollections or other Times and Friends.--Dalton.--Sir John Stevenson.--His Daughter.--Musical Evenings together.


If it be true that Music reigns,
    Supreme, in ITALY'S soft shades,
'Tis like that Harmony so famous,
Among the spheres, which He of SAMOS
Declared had such transcendent merit
That not a soul on earth could hear it;
For, far as I have come--from Lakes,
Whose sleep the Tramontana breaks,
Thro' MILAN and that land which gave
The Hero of the rainbow vest[1]--
By MINCIO'S banks, and by that wave,
Which made VERONA'S bard so blest--
Places that (like the Attic shore,
Which rung back music when the sea
Struck on its marge) should be all o'er
Thrilling alive with melody--
I've hea...

"Come, surly fellow, come!    A song!"
    What, madmen?    Sing to you?
Choose from the clouded tales of wrong
    And terror I bring to you.

Of a night so torn with cries,
    Honest men sleeping
Start awake with glaring eyes,
    Bone-chilled, flesh creeping.

Of spirits in the web hung room
    Up above the stable,
Groans, knockings in the gloom,
    The dancing table.

Of demons in the dry well
    That cheep and mutter,
Clanging of an unseen bell,
    Blood choking the gutter.

Of lust frightful, past belief,
    Lurking unforgotten,
Unrestrainable endless grief
    From breasts long rotten.

A song?    What laughter or what song
    Can this house remember?
Do flowers and butterflies belong
  ...

Dark spirit! who through every age
    Hast cast a baleful gloom;
Stern lord of strife and civil rage,
    The dungeon and the tomb!
What homage should men pay to thee,
Spirit of woe and anarchy?

Yet there are those who in thy train
    Can feel a fierce delight;
Who rush, exulting, to the plain,
    And triumph in the fight,
Where the red banner floats afar
Along the crimson tide of war.

Who is the knight on sable steed,
    That comes with thundering tread?
Dark warrior, slack thy furious speed,
    Nor trample on the dead:
A youthful chief before thee lies,
Struggling in life's last agonies.

Oh pause one moment in thy course,
    Those lineaments to trace;
Dost thou not feel a strange remorse,
    Whilst gazing on ...

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame -
No, no, not that, - it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand,
Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,
And you're as right as rain...
    Why won't it rain? ...
I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,
With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,
And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves...

If it so befalls that the midnight hovers
In mist no moonlight breaks,
The leagues of the years my spirit covers,
And my self myself forsakes.

And I live in a land of stars and flowers,
White cliffs by a silvery sea;
And the pearly points of her opal towers
From the mountains beckon me.

And I think that I know that I hear her calling
From a casement bathed with light
Through music of waters in waters falling
Mid palms from a mountain height.

And I feel that I think my love's awaited
By the romance of her charms;
That her feet are early and mine belated
In a world that chains my arms.

But I break my chains and the rest is easy
In the shadow of the rose,
Snow-white, that blooms in her garden breezy,
We meet and no one knows...

Voi, ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono.

HE CONFESSES THE VANITY OF HIS PASSION


    Ye who in rhymes dispersed the echoes hear
Of those sad sighs with which my heart I fed
When early youth my mazy wanderings led,
Fondly diverse from what I now appear,
Fluttering 'twixt frantic hope and frantic fear,
From those by whom my various style is read,
I hope, if e'er their hearts for love have bled,
Not only pardon, but perhaps a tear.
But now I clearly see that of mankind
Long time I was the tale: whence bitter thought
And self-reproach with frequent blushes teem;
While of my frenzy, shame the fruit I find,
And sad repentance, and the proof, dear-bought,
That the world's joy is but a flitting dream.

CHARLEMONT.


    O...

The yesterday doth never smile,
The day goes drudging through the while,
Yet, in the name of Godhead, I
The morrow front, and can defy;
Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,
Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ah me! it was my childhood's thought,
If He should make my web a blot
On life's fair picture of delight,
My heart's content would find it right.
But O, these waves and leaves,--
When happy stoic Nature grieves,
No human speech so beautiful
As their murmurs mine to lull.
On this altar God hath built
I lay my vanity and guilt;
Nor me can Hope or Passion urge
Hearing as now the lofty dirge
Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,
Nature's funeral high and dim,--
Sable pageantry of clouds,
Mourning summer laid in shrouds.
Many...

When I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree,
All seem to gaze at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school;

Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn,
As though the master's ways
Through the long teaching days
Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

And on them stirs, in lippings mere
(As if once clear in call,
But now scarce breathed at all) -
"We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!

"Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

"Or come we of an Automaton
Unconscious of our pains? . . .
Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

"Or is it that som...

Sorrows our portion are: ere hence we go,
Crosses we must have; or, hereafter woe.

Great streets of silence led away
To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.

By clocks 't was morning, and for night
The bells at distance called;
But epoch had no basis here,
For period exhaled.

Mild the mist upon the hill
Telling not of storms tomorrow;
No, the day has wept its fill,
Spent its store of silent sorrow.

O, I'm gone back to the days of youth,
I am a child once more,
And 'neath my father's sheltering roof
And near the old hall door

I watch this cloudy evening fall
After a day of rain;
Blue mists, sweet mists of summer pall
The horizon's mountain chain.

The damp stands on the long green grass
As thick as morning's tears,
And dreamy scents of fragrance pass
That breathe of other years.

The world to-day is radiant, as I ne'er
Could picture it in wildest dreaming, when
For long, long hours I lay in flowery glen
Or wooded copse, and tried in vain to tear
The glamour from my eyes, and face the glare
And tumult of the busy world of men.
I staked my all, and won! and ne'er again
Can my blest spirit know a heart's despair.

And yet - and yet - why should it be that now,
When all my heart has longed for is at last
    Within my grasp, and I should be at rest,
A ghostly Something rising in the glow
    Of Love's own fire, an uninvited guest,
Taunts me with just one memory of the past!

Strange Sea! why is it that you never rest?
And tell me why you never go to sleep?
Thou art like one so sad and sin-oppressed --
(And the waves are the tears you weep) --
And thou didst never sin -- what ails the sinless deep?

To-night I hear you crying on the beach,
Like a weary child on its mother's breast --
A cry with an infinite and lonesome reach
Of unutterably deep unrest;
And thou didst never sin -- why art thou so distressed?

But, ah, sad Sea! the mother's breast is warm,
Where crieth the lone and the wearied child;
And soft the arms that shield her own from harm;
And her look is unutterably mild --
But to-night, O Sea! thy cry is wild, so wild!

What ails thee, Sea? The midnight stars are bright --
How safe they lean on heaven's sinl...

Only a little more
I have to write:
Then I'll give o'er,
And bid the world good-night.

'Tis but a flying minute,
That I must stay,
Or linger in it:
And then I must away.

O Time, that cut'st down all,
And scarce leav'st here
Memorial
Of any men that were;

How many lie forgot
In vaults beneath,
And piece-meal rot
Without a fame in death?

Behold this living stone
I rear for me,
Ne'er to be thrown
Down, envious Time, by thee.

Pillars let some set up
If so they please;
Here is my hope,
And my Pyramides.

Why should we sigh o'er a summer that's dead -
    Let us think of the summer to be.
It always better to look ahead,
For the rose will come again just as red
    And just as fair to see.

Why should we weep o'er a pleasure past -
        Let us look for the pleasure to be.
New shells on the shore by new waves are cast;
Let us prize each new joy more than the last,
    And laugh if the old joy flee.

What folly to die for a love that was -
    Let us live for the one to be.
For time is passing, and will not pause;
How foolish the shore were it sad because
    One wave ebbed out to sea.

Then let us not sing of a year that is fled -
    Though dear its memory be:
For though summer and pleasure and love seem dead,
Love will be sweet, and ...

Darkness like midnight from the sobbing woods
Clamours with dismal tidings of the rain,
Roaring as rivers breaking loose in floods
To spread and foam and deluge all the plain.
The cotter listens at his door again,
Half doubting whether it be floods or wind,
And through the thickening darkness looks afraid,
Thinking of roads that travel has to find
Through night's black depths in danger's garb arrayed.
And the loud glabber round the flaze soon stops
When hushed to silence by the lifted hand
Of fearing dame who hears the noise in dread
And thinks a deluge comes to drown the land;
Nor dares she go to bed until the tempest drops.