To G. E. M.

    'Tis a little room, my friend--
Baby walks from end to end;
All the things look sadly real
This hot noontide unideal;
Vaporous heat from cope to basement
All you see outside the casement,
Save one house all mud-becrusted,
And a street all drought-bedusted!
There behold its happiest vision,
Trickling water-cart's derision!
Shut we out the staring space,
Draw the curtains in its face!

    Close the eyelids of the room,
Fill it with a scarlet gloom:
Lo, the walls with warm flush dyed!
Lo, the ceiling glorified,
As when, lost in tenderest pinks,
White rose on the red rose thinks!
But beneath, a hue right rosy,
Red as a geranium-posy,
Stains the air with power estranging,
Known with unknown clouding, changin...

Yes, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom,
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of timid,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumph...

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
And the vague terrors of the fearful night
That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
And makes herself the captain of our fate,
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?

Angel of health, did you ever know pain,
Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain?

Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
Of read...

I


Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers
Breathed on the eyelids of love by music that slumbers,
Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow,
Thou comest mysterious,
In beauty imperious,
Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know.
Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken,
Helplessly shaken and tossed,
And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken,
My lips, unsatisfied, thirst;
Mine eyes are accurst
With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken;
And mine ears, in listening lost,
Yearn, yearn for the note of a chord that will never awaken.


II


Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,--
Resonant bar upon bar,--
The vibrating lyre
Of the spirit respond...

There's the dragon banner, says Old King Cole,
And the tiger banner, he cries.
Pantagruel breaks into a laugh
As the monarch dries his eyes. - The Search

"The tiger banyer, that is what you call much
Bad men in China, Amelica. The dragon banyer.
That is storm, leprosy, no rice, what you call
Nature. See! Nature!" - King Joy

        *        *        *        *        *

Said Old King Cole I know the banner
Of dragon and tiger too,
But I would know the vagrant fellows
Who came to my castle with you.

        *        *        *        *        *

And I would know why they rise in the morning
And never take bread or scrip;
And why they hasten over the mountain
In a sorrowed fellowship.

        *        *        *...

We shall see her no more
On the balcony,
Smiling, while hurt, at the roar
As of surging sea
From the stormy sturdy band
Who have doomed her lord's cause,
Though she waves her little hand
As it were applause.

Here will be candidates yet,
And candidates' wives,
Fervid with zeal to set
Their ideals on our lives:
Here will come market-men
On the market-days,
Here will clash now and then
More such party assays.

And the balcony will fill
When such times are renewed,
And the throng in the street will thrill
With to-day's mettled mood;
But she will no more stand
In the sunshine there,
With that wave of her white-gloved hand,
And that chestnut hair.

January 1906.

Because a steadfast flame of clear intent
Gave force and beauty to full-actioned life;
Because his way was one of firm ascent,
Whose stepping-stones were hewn of change and strife;
Because as husband loveth noble wife
He loved fair Truth; because the thing he meant
To do, that thing he did, nor paused, nor bent
In face of poor and pale conclusions; yea!
Because of this, how fares the Leader dead?
What kind of mourners weep for him to-day?
What golden shroud is at his funeral spread?
Upon his brow what leaves of laurel, say?
About his breast is tied a sackcloth grey,
And knots of thorns deface his lordly head.

Ah! if my voice is heard in vain,
This fond, this falling, tear
May yet thy dire intent restrain,
May yet dissolve my fear.

Th' unsparing wound that lays thee low
Will bend thy Julia too:
Could she survive the fatal blow
Who only lives in you?

    The world upheld their pillars for awhile -
    Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood,
    The hot wind sifts across the solitude
    The sand that once was wall and peristyle,
    Or furrows like the main each desert mile,
    Where ocean-deep above its ancient food
    Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude,
    Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.

    Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last,
    When the devouring earth, in ruin one
    With royal walls and palaces undone,
    And sunk within the desolated past,
    Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast
    Immingle it with ashes of the sun.

I live, I move, I know not how, nor why,
    Float as a transient bubble on the air,
As fades the eventide I, too, must die;
    I came, I know not whence; I journey, where?

B.C. 570

(Macmillan's Magazine, October 1866.)


Here where I dwell I waste to skin and bone;
    The curse is come upon me, and I waste
    In penal torment powerless to atone.
The curse is come on me, which makes no haste
    And doth not tarry, crushing both the proud
    Hard man and him the sinner double-faced.
Look not upon me, for my soul is bowed
    Within me, as my body in this mire;
    My soul crawls dumb-struck, sore-bested and cowed.
As Sodom and Gomorrah scourged by fire,
    As Jericho before God's trumpet-peal,
    So we the elect ones perish in His ire.
Vainly we gird on sackcloth, vainly kneel
    With famished faces toward Jerusalem:
    His heart is shut against us not to feel,
His ears against our cry He shutte...

(With what truth may I say -
Roma! Roma! Roma!
Non e piu come era prima!)

1.
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid, -
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art not - if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

2.
Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild; -
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion -

Oh, boastful, wicked land, that once was beautiful and great,
How bitter and how black must be your self-invited fate,
While Time goes down the centuries and sings his hymn of hate!

Time's voice is just.    His words ring true.    For as the past recedes,
The clear-eyed Future slowly writes the story of its deeds;
And as Time toward the Infinite his ceaseless flight is winging
    He shall go singing
The hymn of hate, of men and gods, for all your deeds of lust,
For all your acts of cruelty and hell-concocted schemes
(More hideous than the darkest plot of which a devil dreams)
Which sprang from your Medusa head before it touched the dust.

Beneath the strangling hand of Fate
That strident voice of yours
Shall hush to silence, soon or late
That Justice that en...

    On yonder heap of earth forlorn,
Where Ken his place of burial chose,
Peacefully shine, O Sabbath morn!
And, eve, with gentlest hush, repose.

    To him is reared no marble tomb,
Within the dim cathedral fane;
But some faint flowers, of summer bloom,
And silent falls the wintry rain.

    No village monumental stone
Records a verse, a date, a name -
What boots it? when thy task is done,
Christian, how vain the sound of fame!

    Oh! far more grateful to thy God,
The voices of poor children rise,
Who hasten o'er the dewy sod,
"To pay their morning sacrifice."[207]

    And can we listen to their hymn,
Heard, haply, when the evening knell
Sounds, where the village brow is dim,
As if to bid the world farewell!

 ...

The wild pear whispers, and the ivy crawls,
Along the circuit of thine ancient walls,
Lone city of the dead! and near this mound,[200]
The buried coins of mighty men are found,
Silent remains of Cæsars and of kings,
Soldiers of whose renown the world yet rings,
In its sad story! These have had their day
Of glory, and have passed, like sounds, away!

And such their fame! While we the spot behold,
And muse upon the tale that Time has told,
We ask where are they? - they whose clarion brayed,
Whose chariot glided, and whose war-horse neighed;
Whose cohorts hastened o'er the echoing way,
Whose eagles glittered to the orient ray!

Ask of this fragment, reared by Roman hands,
That, now, a lone and broken column stands!
Ask of that road - whose track alone r...

I

Phantasmal fears,
And the flap of the flame,
And the throb of the clock,
And a loosened slate,
And the blind night's drone,
Which tiredly the spectral pines intone!

II

And the blood in my ears
Strumming always the same,
And the gable-cock
With its fitful grate,
And myself, alone.

III

The twelfth hour nears
Hand-hid, as in shame;
I undo the lock,
And listen, and wait
For the Young Unknown.

IV

In the dark there careers -
As if Death astride came
To numb all with his knock -
A horse at mad rate
Over rut and stone.

V

No figure appears,
No call of my name,
No sound but "Tic-toc"
Without check. Past the gate
It clatters - is gone.

...

Set not thy foot on graves;
Hear what wine and roses say;
The mountain chase, the summer waves,
The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.

Set not thy foot on graves;
Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable Time
And Nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.

Set not thy foot on graves;
Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament,
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,

His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried:
Go, get them where he earned them when alive;
As resolutely dig or dive.

Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
'T will soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!

    Heaven and the sea attend the dying day,
    And in their sadness overflow and blend--
    Faint gold, and windy blue, and green and gray:
    Far out amid them my pale soul I send.

    For, as they mingle, so mix life and death;
    An hour draws near when my day too will die;
    Already I forecast unheaving breath,
    Eviction on the moorland of yon sky.

    Coldly and sadly lone, unhoused, alone,
    Twixt wind-broke wave and heaven's uncaring space!
    At board and hearth from this time forth unknown!
    Refuge no more in wife or daughter's face!

    Cold, cold and sad, lone as that desert sea!
    Sad, lonely, as that hopeless, patient sky!
    Forward I cannot go, nor backward flee!
    I am not dead; I live, and cannot die!