Gold or silver, every day,
Dies to gray.
There are knots in every skein.
Hours of work and hours of play
Fade away
Into one immense Inane.
Shadow and substance, chaff and grain,
Are as vain
As the foam or as the spray.
Life goes crooning, faint and fain,
One refrain:
'If it could be always May!'

Though the earth be green and gay,
Though, they say,
Man the cup of heaven may drain;
Though, his little world to sway,
He display
Hoard on hoard of pith and brain:
Autumn brings a mist and rain
That constrain

Him and his to know decay,
Where undimmed the lights that wane
Would remain,
If it could be always May.

YEA, alas, must turn to NAY,
Flesh to clay.
Chance and Time are ever twain.
Men may sc...

Before a midnight breaks in storm,
Or herded sea in wrath,
Ye know what wavering gusts inform
The greater tempest's path;
Till the loosed wind
Drive all from mind,
Except Distress, which, so will prophets cry,
O'ercame them, houseless, from the unhinting sky.

Ere rivers league against the land
In piratry of flood,
Ye know what waters steal and stand
Where seldom water stood.
Yet who will note,
Till fields afloat,
And washen carcass and the returning well,
Trumpet what these poor heralds strove to tell?

Ye know who use the Crystal Ball
(To peer by stealth on Doom),
The Shade that, shaping first of all,
Prepares an empty room.
Then doth It pass
Like breath from glass,
But, on the extorted Vision bowed intent,
No man...

    I had fiddled all day at the county fair.
    But driving home "Butch" Weldy and Jack McGuire,
    Who were roaring full, made me fiddle and fiddle
    To the song of Susie Skinner, while whipping the horses
    Till they ran away. Blind as I was, I tried to get out
    As the carriage fell in the ditch,
    And was caught in the wheels and killed.
    There's a blind man here with a brow
    As big and white as a cloud.
    And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,
    Writers of music and tellers of stories
    Sit at his feet,
    And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.

Praise of the knights of old
May sleep: their tale is told,
And no man cares:
The praise which fires our lips is
A knight’s whose fame eclipses
All of theirs.

The ruddiest light in heaven
Blazed as his birth-star seven
Long years ago:
All glory crown that old year
Which brought our stout small soldier
With the snow!

Each baby born has one
Star, for his friends a sun,
The first of stars:
And we, the more we scan it,
The more grow sure your planet,
Child, was Mars.

For each one flower, perchance,
Blooms as his cognizance:
The snowdrop chill,
The violet unbeholden,
For some: for you the golden
Daffodil

Erect, a fighting flower,
It breasts the breeziest hour
That ever blew,
And bent or ...

As a pale phantom with a lamp
    Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,
So glides the moon along the damp
    Mysterious chambers of the air.

Now hidden in cloud, and now revealed,
    As if this phantom, full of pain,
Were by the crumbling walls concealed,
    And at the windows seen again.

Until at last, serene and proud
    In all the splendor of her light,
She walks the terraces of cloud,
    Supreme as Empress of the Night.

I look, but recognize no more
    Objects familiar to my view;
The very pathway to my door
    Is an enchanted avenue.

All things are changed.    One mass of shade,
    The elm-trees drop their curtains down;
By palace, park, and colonnade
    I walk as in a foreign town.

The very ground b...

Gray towers make me think of thee,
Thou girl of olden minstrelsy,
Young as the sunlight of to-day,
Silent as tasselled boughs in May!

A wind-flower in a world of harm,
A harebell on a turret's arm,
A pearl upon the hilt of fame
Thou wert, fair child of some high name.

The velvet page, the deep-eyed knight,
The heartless falcon, poised for flight,
The dainty steed and graceful hound,
In thee their keenest rapture found.

But for old ballads, and the rhyme
And writ of genius o'er the time
When keeps had newly reared their towers,
The winning scene had not been ours.

O Chivalry! thy age was fair,
When even knaves set out to dare
Their heads for any barbarous crime,
And hate was brave, and love sublime.

The bugle-no...

As sunbeams stream through liberal space
And nothing jostle or displace,
So waved the pine-tree through my thought
And fanned the dreams it never brought.

'Whether is better, the gift or the donor?
Come to me,'
Quoth the pine-tree,
'I am the giver of honor.
My garden is the cloven rock,
And my manure the snow;
And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer's scorching glow.
He is great who can live by me:
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;
God fills the script and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.
The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Founde...

They came, the brothers, and took two chairs
In their usual quiet way;
And for a time we did not think
They had much to say.

And they began and talked awhile
Of ordinary things,
Till spread that silence in the room
A pent thought brings.

And then they said: "The end has come.
Yes: it has come at last."
And we looked down, and knew that day
A spirit had passed.

    Thou singest by the gleaming isles,
    By woods, and fields of corn,
    Thou singest, and the sunlight smiles
    Upon my birthday morn.


    But I within a city, I,
    So full of vague unrest,
    Would almost give my life to lie
    An hour upon upon thy breast.


    To let the wherry listless go,
    And, wrapt in dreamy joy,
    Dip, and surge idly to and fro,
    Like the red harbor-buoy;


    To sit in happy indolence,
    To rest upon the oars,
    And catch the heavy earthy scents
    That blow from summer shores;


    To see the rounded sun go down,
    And with its parting fires
    Light up the windows of the town
    And burn the tapering spires;


    And then to hear...

    Bowing adorers of the gale,
    Ye cowslips delicately pale,
    Upraise your loaded stems;
    Unfold your cups in splendour; speak!
    Who decked you with that ruddy streak
    And gilt your golden gems?

    Violets, sweet tenants of the shade,
    In purple's richest pride arrayed,
    Your errand here fulfil;
    Go, bid the artist's simple stain
    Your lustre imitate--in vain--
    And match your Maker's skill.

    Daisies, ye flowers of lowly birth,
    Embroiderers of the carpet earth,
    That stud the velvet sod,
    Open to Spring's refreshing air,
    In sweetest smiling bloom declare
    Your Maker and your God.

I

He is to weet a melancholy carle:
Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
As hath the seeded thistle when in parle
It holds the Zephyr, ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air;
Therto his beard had not begun to bloom,
No brush had touch'd his chin or razor sheer;
No care had touch'd his cheek with mortal doom,
But new he was, and bright, as scarf from Persian loom.

II

Ne cared he for wine, or half-and-half;
Ne cared he for fish or flesh, or fowl;
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He 'sdeigned the swine-head at the wassail-bowl;
Ne with lewd ribbalds sat he cheek by jowl;
Ne with sly Lemans in the scorner's chair;
But after water-brooks this Pilgrim's soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air;

I

I met thee like the morning, though more fair,
And hopes 'gan travel for a glorious day;
And though night met them ere they were aware,
Leading the joyous pilgrims all astray,
Yet know I not, though they did miss their way,
That joyed so much to meet thee, if they are
To blame or bless the fate that bade such be.
Thou seem'dst an angel when I met thee first,
Nor has aught made thee otherwise to me:
Possession has not cloyed my love, nor curst
Fancy's wild visions with reality.
Thou art an angel still; and Hope, awoke
From the fond spell that early raptures nurst,
Still feels a joy to think that spell ne'er broke.

II

The flower that's gathered beauty soon forsakes;
The bliss grows feeble as we gain the prize;
Love dreams of joy, an...

Out of that high pavilion
Where the sick, wind-harassed sun
In the whiteness of the day
Ghostly shone and stole away -
Parchèd with the utter thirst
Of unnumbered Libyan sands,
Thou, cloud-gathering spirit, burst
Out of arid Africa
To the tideless sea, and smote
On our pale, moon-coolèd lands
The hot breath of a lion's throat.

And that furnace-heated breath
Blew into my placid dreams
The heart of fire from whence it came:
Haunt of beauty and of death
Where the forest breaks in flame
Of flaunting blossom, where the flood
Of life pulses hot and stark,
Where a wing'd death breeds in mud
And tumult of tree-shadowed streams -
Black waters, desolately hurled
Through the uttermost, lost, dark,
Secret places of the world.

Lost Youth, come back again!
Laugh at weariness and pain.
Come not in dreams, but come in truth,
            Lost Youth.

Sweetheart of long ago,
Why do you haunt me so?
Were you not glad to part,
            Sweetheart?

Still Death, that draws so near,
Is it hope you bring, or fear?
Is it only ease of breath,
            Still Death?

        Not quite the same the spring-time seems to me,
    Since that sad season when in separate ways
    Our paths diverged. There are no more such days
        As dawned for us in that lost time when we
    Dwelt in the realm of dreams, illusive dreams;
    Spring may be just as fair now, but it seems
    Not quite the same.

        Not quite the same is life, since we two parted,
    Knowing it best to go our ways alone.
    Fair measures of success we both have known,
        And pleasant hours, and yet something departed
    Which gold, nor fame, nor anything we win
    Can all replace. And either life has been
    Not quite the same.

        Love is not quite the same, although each heart
    Has formed new ties that are both sweet and true,

My Anna, summer laughs in mirth,
And we will of the party be,
And leave the crickets in the hearth
For green fields' merry minstrelsy.

I see thee now with little hand
Catch at each object passing bye,
The happiest thing in all the land
Except the bee and butterfly.

*    *    *    *    *

And limpid brook that leaps along,
Gilt with the summer's burnished gleam,
Will stop thy little tale or song
To gaze upon its crimping stream.

Thou'lt leave my hand with eager speed
The new discovered things to see--
The old pond with its water weed
And danger-daring willow tree,
Who leans an ancient invalid
Oer spots where deepest waters be.

In sudden shout and wild surprise
I hear thy simple wonderment,
As new things meet...

(December, 1899)



I - THE TRAGEDY

She sits in the tawny vapour
That the City lanes have uprolled,
Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly,
Flashed news is in her hand
Of meaning it dazes to understand
Though shaped so shortly:
He - has fallen - in the far South Land . . .

II - THE IRONY

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,
The postman nears and goes:
A letter is brought whose lines disclose
By the firelight flicker
His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh - firm - penned in highest feather -
Page-full of his hoped return,
And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn
In the summer weather,
And of new love ...

One musician is sure,
His wisdom will not fail,
He has not tasted wine impure,
Nor bent to passion frail.
Age cannot cloud his memory,
Nor grief untune his voice,
Ranging down the ruled scale
From tone of joy to inward wail,
Tempering the pitch of all
In his windy cave.
He all the fables knows,
And in their causes tells,--
Knows Nature's rarest moods,
Ever on her secret broods.
The Muse of men is coy,
Oft courted will not come;
In palaces and market squares
Entreated, she is dumb;
But my minstrel knows and tells
The counsel of the gods,
Knows of Holy Book the spells,
Knows the law of Night and Day,
And the heart of girl and boy,
The tragic and the gay,
And what is writ on Table Round
Of Arthur and his peers;
Wh...