Between the two perplexed I go,
A shuttlecock, tossed to and fro.
I gaze on one, and know that she
Is all that womankind can be;
I seek the other, and she seems
The perfect idol of my dreams;
And so between the charming pair
My heart is ever in the air.
And yet, although it be my fate
To hover indeterminate,
I rest content, nor ask for more
Than this sweet game of battledore.

        Only until this cigarette is ended,
        A little moment at the end of all,
        While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
        And in the firelight to a lance extended,
        Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
        The broken shadow dances on the wall,
        I will permit my memory to recall
        The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
        And then adieu,--farewell!--the dream is done.
        Yours is a face of which I can forget
        The color and the features, every one,
        The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
        But in your day this moment is the sun
        Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children’s children shall say they have lied.

How comes it that, at even-tide,
When level beams should show most truth,
Man, failing, takes unfailing pride
In memories of his frolic youth?

Venus and Liber fill their hour;
The games engage, the law-courts prove;
Till hardened life breeds love of power
Or Avarice, Age's final love.

Yet at the end, these comfort not
Nor any triumph Fate decrees
Compared with glorious, unforgot
Ten innocent enormities

Of frontless days before the beard,
When, instant on the casual jest,
The God Himself of Mirth appeared
And snatched us to His heaving breast

And we not caring who He was
But certain He would come again
Accepted all He brought to pass
As Gods accept the lives of men...

Then He withdrew from sight and speech,

Thou hast entered the land without shadows,
    Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long
Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded,
    And lips that could utter no song;
Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant,
    Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore,
And Earth with its gloom was forgotten,
    And Heaven is thine own evermore!

We see not the glorious vision,
    Nor the welcoming melodies hear,
That, from bowers of beauty Elysian,
    Float tenderly sweet to thine ear;
Round us, lie Earth's desolate midnight,
    Her winter-plains bare and untrod, -
Round thee, is the glad, morning sunlight
    That beams from the City of God!

Our eyes have grown heavy with weeping, -
    Thine, "the King in his beauty" behold
And thou leanest th...

Over the rocks she trails her locks,
Her mossy locks that drip, drip, drip;
Her sparkling eyes smile at the skies
In friendship-wise and fellowship;
While the gleam and glance of her countenance
Lull into trance the woodland places,
As over the rocks she trails her locks,
Her dripping locks that the long fern graces.

She pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse,
Its crystal cruse that drips, drips, drips;
And all the day its diamond spray
Is heard to play from her finger-tips;
And the slight soft sound makes haunted ground
Of the woods around that the sunlight laces,
As she pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse,
Its dripping cruse that no man traces.

She swims and swims with glimmering limbs,
With lucid limbs that drip, drip, drip;<...

Return, they cry, ere yet your day
Set, and the sky grow stern:
Return, strayed souls, while yet ye may
Return.
But heavens beyond us yearn;
Yea, heights of heaven above the sway
Of stars that eyes discern.
The soul whose wings from shoreward stray
Makes toward her viewless bourne
Though trustless faith and unfaith say,
Return.

I.

Years upon years, as a course of clouds that thicken
Thronging the ways of the wind that shifts and veers,
Pass, and the flames of remembered fires requicken
Years upon years.

Surely the thought in a man's heart hopes or fears
Now that forgetfulness needs must here have stricken
Anguish, and sweetened the sealed-up springs of tears.

Ah, but the strength of regrets that strain and sicken,
Yearning for love that the veil of death endears,
Slackens not wing for the wings of years that quicken
Years upon years.

II.

Years upon years, and the flame of love's high altar
Trembles and sinks, and the sense of listening ears
Heeds not the sound that it heard of love's blithe psalter
Years upon years.

Only the sense of a heart t...

Inspiration.

All who have toiled for Art, who've won or lost,
Sat equal priests at her high Pentecost;
Only the chrism and sacrament of flame,
Anointing all, inspired not all the same.


Apportionment.

How often in our search for joy below
Hoping for happiness we chance on woe.

Victory.

They who take courage from their own defeat
Are victors too, no matter how much beat.

Preparation.

How often hope's fair flower blooms richest where
The soul was fertilized with black despair.

Disillusion.

Those unrequited in their love who die
Have never drained life's chief illusion dry.

Success.

Success allures us in the earth and skies:
We seek to win her, but, too amorous,
Mocking, sh...

There was a Boy, long years ago,
Who hour by hour awake would lie,
And watch the white moon gliding slow
Along her pathway in the sky.

And every night as thus he lay
Entranced in lonely fantasy,
Borne swiftly on a bright moon-ray
There came to him a Golden Key.

And with that Golden Key the Boy
Oped every night a magic door
That to a melody of Joy
Turned on its hinges evermore.

Then, trembling with delight and awe,
When he the charmèd threshold crossed,
A radiant corridor he saw,
Its end in dazzling distance lost.

Great windows shining in a row
Lit up the wondrous corridor,
And each its own rich light did throw
In stream resplendent on the floor.

One window showed the Boy a scene
Within a forest old and dim...

A lonely sail in the vast sea-room,
I have put out for the port of gloom.

The voyage is far on the trackless tide,
The watch is long, and the seas are wide.

The headlands blue in the sinking day
Kiss me a hand on the outward way.

The fading gulls, as they dip and veer,
Lift me a voice that is good to hear.

The great winds come, and the heaving sea,
The restless mother, is calling me.

The cry of her heart is lone and wild,
Searching the night for her wandered child.

Beautiful, weariless mother of mine,
In the drift of doom I am here, I am thine.

Beyond the fathom of hope or fear,
From bourn to bourn of the dusk I steer,

Swept on in the wake of the stars, in the stream
Of a roving tide, from dream to dream.

Proud music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains!
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature's rhythmus, all the tongues of nations;
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses!
You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient!
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts;
You sounds from distant guns, with galloping cavalry!
Echoes of camps, with all the different bugle-calls!
Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,
Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber Why have you seiz'd me?

Come forward, O my Soul, and let the rest retire;
Listen lose not it is t...

I

The Sphinx

The spires of sand spring up at every gust
That bids them dance and scatter and lays them low:
He sits impassive, as the ages flow
And bear superbly the mirage of lust.
The moonbright steel he has witnessed redden and rust,
He has seen storm-proud deep-rooted empires grow,
And watched victorious gods flash forth and go;
And still before him spins the aspiring dust.
What has he seen in that hoar-centuried land
More strange and dreadful in its long delight
Of vain hope-haunted ever-starting quest
Than I can follow across this burning sand
Wherefrom the dizzying phantoms take their flight
Within the compass of a wanderer’s breast?


II

Nicholson Museum: Exhibit 32

The curious look and pass, be...

1.
That time is dead for ever, child!
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past
And stare aghast
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.

2.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life's dim morning.

To appease the Gods; or public thanks to yield;
Or to solicit knowledge of events,
Which in her breast Futurity concealed;
And that the past might have its true intents
Feelingly told by living monuments
Mankind of yore were prompted to devise
Rites such as yet Persepolis presents
Graven on her cankered walls, solemnities
That moved in long array before admiring eyes.

The Hebrews thus, carrying in joyful state
Thick boughs of palm, and willows from the brook,
Marched round the altar to commemorate
How, when their course they through the desert took,
Guided by signs which ne'er the sky forsook,
They lodged in leafy tents and cabins low;
Green boughs were borne, while, for the blast that shook
Down to the earth the walls of Jericho,
Shouts rise, and s...

Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land,
And can no more, thou camest, O my child,
Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,
Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb,
With passing thro' at once from state to state,
Until I brought thee hither, that the day,
When here thy hands let fall the gather'd flower,
Might break thro' clouded memories once again
On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale
Saw thee, and flash'd into a frolic of song
And welcome; and a gleam as of the moon,
When first she peers along the tremulous deep,
Fled wavering o'er thy face, and chased away
That shadow of a likeness to the king
Of shadows, thy dark mate. Persephone!
Queen of the dead no more -...

I have no riches but my thoughts,
Yet these are wealth enough for me;
My thoughts of you are golden coins
Stamped in the mint of memory;

And I must spend them all in song,
For thoughts, as well as gold, must be
Left on the hither side of death
To gain their immortality.

"You were weeping in the night," said the Emperor,
    "Weeping in your sleep, I am told."
"It was nothing but a dream," said the Empress;
    But her face grew gray and old.
"You thought you saw our German God defeated?"
    "Oh, no!" she said. "I saw no lightnings fall.
I dreamed of a whirlpool of green water,
    Where something had gone down. That was all.

"All but the whimper of the sea gulls flying,
    Endlessly round and round,
Waiting for the faces, the faces from the darkness,
    The dreadful rising faces of the drowned.

"It was nothing but a dream," said the Empress.
    "I thought I was walking on the sea;
And the foam rushed up in a wild smother,
    And a crowd of little faces looked at me.

They were drowning! They were ...