("A quoi bon entendre les oiseaux?")

[RUY BLAS, Act II.]


Oh, why not be happy this bright summer day,
'Mid perfume of roses and newly-mown hay?
Great Nature is smiling - the birds in the air
Sing love-lays together, and all is most fair.
    Then why not be happy
    This bright summer day,
    'Mid perfume of roses
    And newly-mown hay?

The streamlets they wander through meadows so fleet,
Their music enticing fond lovers to meet;
The violets are blooming and nestling their heads
In richest profusion on moss-coated beds.
    Then why not be happy
    This bright summer day,
    When Nature is fairest
    And all is so gay?

LEOPOLD WRAY.

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

Does pleasant spring return once more?
Does earth her happy youth regain?
Sweet suns green hills are shining o'er;
Soft brooklets burst their icy chain:
Upon the blue translucent river
Laughs down an all-unclouded day,
The winged west winds gently quiver,
The buds are bursting from the spray;
While birds are blithe on every tree;
The Oread from the mountain-shore
Sighs, "Lo! thy flowers come back to thee
Thy child, sad mother, comes no more!"

Alas! how long an age it seems
Since all the earth I wandered over,
And vainly, Titan, tasked thy beams
The loved the lost one to discover!
Though all may seek yet none can call
Her tender presence back to me
The sun, with eyes detecting all,
Is blind one vanished form to see.
Hast thou, O Zeus! ...

Come with me, little maid,
Nay, shrink not, thus afraid
I'll harm thee not!
Fly not, my love, from me
I have a home for thee
A fairy grot,
Where mortal eye
Can rarely pry,
There shall thy dwelling be!

List to me, while I tell
The pleasures of that cell,
Oh, little maid!
What though its couch be rude,
Homely the only food
Within its shade?
No thought of care
Can enter there,
No vulgar swain intrude!

Come with me, little maid,
Come to the rocky shade
I love to sing;
Live with us, maiden rare
Come, for we "want" thee there,
Thou elfin thing,
To work thy spell,
In some cool cell
In stately Pentonville!

How has New England's romance fled,
Even as a vision of the morning!
Its rites foredone, its guardians dead,
Its priestesses, bereft of dread,
Waking the veriest urchin's scorning!
Gone like the Indian wizard's yell
And fire-dance round the magic rock,
Forgotten like the Druid's spell
At moonrise by his holy oak!
No more along the shadowy glen
Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men;
No more the unquiet churchyard dead
Glimpse upward from their turfy bed,
Startling the traveller, late and lone;
As, on some night of starless weather,
They silently commune together,
Each sitting on his own head-stone
The roofless house, decayed, deserted,
Its living tenants all departed,
No longer rings with midnight revel
Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil;

For there were nights . . . my love to him whose brow
Has glistened with the spoils of nights like those,
Home turning as a conqueror turns home,
What time green dawn down every street uprears
Arches of triumph! He has drained as well
Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried:
Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by.
This only matters: from some flowery bed,
Laden with sweetness like a homing bee,
If one have known what bliss it is to come,
Bearing on hands and breast and laughing lips
The fragrance of his youth's dear rose. To him
The hills have bared their treasure, the far clouds
Unveiled the vision that o'er summer seas
Drew on his thirsting arms. This last thing known,
He can court danger, laugh at perilous odds,
And, pillowed on a memory so sweet,...

The bridle reins hang loose in the hold of his lean left hand;
As the tether gives, the horse bends browsing down to the sand,
On the pommel the right hand rests with a smoking briar black,
Whose thin rings rise and break as he gazes from the track.

Already the sun is aslope, high still in a pale hot sky,
And the afternoon is fierce, in its glare the wide plains lie
Empty as heaven and silent, smit with a vast despair,
The face of a Titan bound, for whom is no hope nor care.

Hoar are its leagues of bush, and tawny brown is its soil,
In that immensity lost are human effort and toil,
A few scattered sheep in the scrub hardly themselves to be seen;
One man in the wilderness lone; beside, a primaeval scene.

Firm and upright in his saddle as a soldier upon parade,

God scatters beauty as he scatters flowers
O’er the wide earth, and tells us all are ours.
A hundred lights in every temple burn,
And at each shrine I bend my knee in turn.

We met on "Boston Common" -
    Of course it was by chance -
A sudden, unexpected,
    But happy circumstance
That gave the dull October day
A beautiful, refulgent ray.

Like wandering refugees from
    A city of renown,
Impelled to reconnoiter
    This Massachusetts town,
Each by a common object urged,
Upon the park our paths converged.

Good nature, bubbling over
    In healthy, hearty laughs,
And little lavish speeches
    Like pleasant paragraphs,
The kind regard, unstudied joke,
His true felicity bespoke.

A bit of doleful knowledge
    Confided unto me,
About the way the doctors -
    Who never could agree -
His knees had tortured, softly drew
My sympathy and humor, too.

I hoped he wouldn't los...

All my mind has sat in state,
Pond'ring on the deathless Soul:
What must be the Perfect Whole,
When the atom is so great!

God!    I fall in spirit down,
Low as Persian to the sun;
All my senses, one by one,
In the stream of Thought must drown.

On the tide of mystery,
Like a waif, I'm seaward borne,
Ever looking for the morn
That will yet interpret Thee,

Opening my blinded eyes,
That have strove to look within,
'Whelmed in clouds of doubt and sin,
Sinking where I dared to rise:

Could I trace one Spirit's flight,
Track it to its final goal,
Know that 'Spirit' meant 'the Soul,'
I must perish in the light.

All in vain I search, and cry:
"What, O Soul, and whence art thou?"
Lower than the earth I bow,

If one poor burdened toiler o'er life's road,
    Who meets us by the way,
Goes on less conscious of his galling load,
    Then life, indeed, does pay.

If we can show one troubled heart the gain
    That lies alway in loss,
Why, then, we too are paid for all the pain
    Of bearing life's hard cross.

If some despondent soul to hope is stirred,
    Some sad lip made to smile,
By any act of ours, or any word,
    Then, life has been worth while.

Whilst I in prison or in court look down,
Nor beg thy favour nor deserve thy frown,
In vain malicious Fortune hast thou tried
By taking from my state to quell my pride:
Insulting girl, thy present rage abate,
And wouldst thou have my humbled, make me great.

Now the Four-way Lodge is opened, now the Hunting Winds are loose,
Now the Smokes of Spring go up to clear the brain;
Now the Young Men's hearts are troubled for the whisper of the Trues,
Now the Red Gods make their medicine again!
Who hath seen the beaver busied?
Who hath watched the black-tail mating?
Who hath lain alone to hear the wild-goose cry?
Who hath worked the chosen water where the ouananiche is waiting,
Or the sea-trout's jumping-crazy for the fly?
He must go, go, go away from here!
On the other side the world he's overdue.
'Send your road is clear before you when the old
Spring-fret comes o'er you,
And the Red Gods call for you!
So for one the wet sail arching through the rainbow round the bow,
And for one the creak of snow-shoes on the crust;
And...

    Love is the part, and love is the whole;
    Love is the robe, and love is the pall;
    Ruler of heart and brain and soul,
    Love is the lord and the slave of all!
    I thank thee, Love, that thou lov'st me;
    I thank thee more that I love thee.

    Love is the rain, and love is the air,
    Love is the earth that holdeth fast;
    Love is the root that is buried there,
    Love is the open flower at last!
    I thank thee, Love all round about,
    That the eyes of my love are looking out.

    Love is the sun, and love is the sea;
    Love is the tide that comes and goes;
    Flowing and flowing it comes to me;
    Ebbing and ebbing to thee it flows!
    Oh my sun, and my wind, and tide!
    My sea, and my shore, and all beside!

FIRST CUPBEARER.

Drink of this cup--Osiris sips
    The same in his halls below;
And the same he gives, to cool the lips
    Of the dead, who downward go.

Drink of this cup--the water within
    Is fresh from Lethe's stream;
'Twill make the past, with all its sin,
    And all its pain and sorrows, seem
    Like a long forgotten dream;
The pleasure, whose charms
    Are steeped in woe;
The knowledge, that harms
    The soul to know;

The hope, that bright
    As the lake of the waste,
Allures the sight
    And mocks the taste;

The love, that binds
    Its innocent wreath,
Where the serpent winds
    In venom beneath!--

All that of evil or false, by thee
    Hath ever been known or seen,
Shalt ...

Safe in the magic of my woods
I lay, and watched the dying light.
Faint in the pale high solitudes,
And washed with rain and veiled by night,

Silver and blue and green were showing.
And the dark woods grew darker still;
And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;
And quietness crept up the hill;

And no wind was blowing

And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.

And there I waited breathlessly,
Alone; and slowly the holy three,
The three that I loved, together grew
One, in the hour of kn...

Gourd was taken to task when she understood the limitations the garden patch had placed upon her people.

It was early fall and the dancers of the vegetable kingdom paraded their charms in bright, full regalia. Across the earth in splotches of colour, the tomatoes scented a good fall. So, too, the kingly husks of corn and the melons, spinach and cucumber in turn eyed the approaching season in growing faith. Each had a succulent function and dangled their inviting flesh to the beholder.

But, alas, what did gourd promise? She was deeply conscious of lacking the forward brightness of tomato and pumpkin. She lacked leafy greens so evidently prized and when her fellow vegetables covered the brown soil in preparation for the fine day they would bask across a kitchen table, it was almost too much for the sensitive gourd to s...

Now, when the moon slid under the cloud
And the cold clear dark of starlight fell,
He heard in his blood the well-known bell
Tolling slowly in heaves of sound,
Slowly beating, slowly beating,
Shaking its pulse on the stagnant air:
Sometimes it swung completely round,
Horribly gasping as if for breath;
Falling down with an anguished cry . . .
Now the red bat, he mused, will fly;
Something is marked, this night, for death . . .
And while he mused, along his blood
Flew ghostly voices, remote and thin,
They rose in the cavern of his brain,
Like ghosts they died away again;
And hands upon his heart were laid,
And music upon his flesh was played,
Until, as he was bidden to do,
He walked the wood he so well knew.
Through the cold dew he moved his feet,...