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...

Pomp of Egypt's elder day,
Shade of the mighty passed away,
Whose giant works still frown sublime
'Mid the twilight shades of Time;
Fanes, of sculpture vast and rude,
That strew the sandy solitude,
Lo! before our startled eyes,
As at a wizard's wand, ye rise,
Glimmering larger through the gloom!
While on the secrets of the tomb,
Rapt in other times, we gaze,
The Mother Queen of ancient days,
Her mystic symbol in her hand,
Great Isis, seems herself to stand.

From mazy vaults, high-arched and dim,
Hark! heard ye not Osiris' hymn?
And saw ye not in order dread
The long procession of the dead?
Forms that the night of years concealed,
As by a flash, are here revealed;
Chiefs who sang the victor song;
Sceptred kings, - a shadowy throng...

While at her bedroom window once,
Learning her task for school,
Little Louisa lonely sat
In the morning clear and cool,
She slanted her small bead-brown eyes
Across the empty street,
And saw Death softly watching her
In the sunshine pale and sweet.
His was a long lean sallow face,
He sat with half-shut eyes,
Like an old sailor in a ship
Becalmed 'neath tropic skies.
Beside him in the dust he'd set
His staff and shady hat;
These, peeping small, Louisa saw
Quite clearly where she sat -
The thinness of his coal-black locks,
His hands so long and lean
They scarcely seemed to grasp at all
The keys that hung between:
Both were of gold, but one was small,
And with this last did he
Wag in the air, as if to say,
'Come hither, child, t...

Through the cracks in these battlements loud the winds whistle,
For the hall of my fathers is gone to decay;
And in yon once gay garden the hemlock and thistle
Have choak'd up the rose, which late bloom'd in the way.

Of the barons of old, who once proudly to battle
Led their vassals from Europe to Palestine's plain;
The escutcheon and shield, which with ev'ry blast rattle,
Are the only sad vestiges now that remain.

No more does old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers,
Raise a flame in the breast, for the war laurell'd wreath,
Near Askalon's Towers John of Horiston[1] slumbers,
Unnerv'd is the hand of his minstrel by death.

Paul and Hubert too sleep in the valley of Cressy,
For the safety of Edward and ENGLAND they fell,
My fathers! the tears...

I took a year out of my life and story -
A dead year, and said, "I will hew thee a tomb!
'All the kings of the nations lie in glory;'
Cased in cedar, and shut in a sacred gloom;
Swathed in linen, and precious unguents old;
Painted with cinnabar, and rich with gold.

"Silent they rest, in solemn salvatory,
Sealed from the moth and the owl and the flitter-mouse -
    Each with his name on his brow.
'All the kings of the nations lie in glory,
Every one in his own house:'
    Then why not thou?

"Year," I said, "thou shalt not lack
Bribes to bar thy coming back;
Doth old Egypt wear her best
In the chambers of her rest?
Doth she take to her last bed
Beaten gold, and glorious red?
Envy not! for thou wilt wear
In the dark a shroud as fair;

Quod adest, memento
Componere æquus. Cætera fluminis
Ritu feruntur.—Horace.


Improve the present hour, for all beside
Is a mere feather on a torrent’s tide.


Could I, from heaven inspired, as sure presage
To whom the rising year shall prove his last,
As I can number in my punctual page,
And item down the victims of the past;


How each would trembling wait the mournful sheet,
On which the press might stamp him next to die;
And, reading here his sentence, how replete
With anxious meaning, heavenward turn his eye!


Time then would seem more precious than the joys
In which he sports away the treasure now;
And prayer more seasonable than the noise
Of drunkards, or the music-drawing bow.


Then doubtless man...

AFTER READING A LIFE AND LETTERS


‘Cursed be he that moves my bones.’

Shakespeare’s Epitaph.



You might have won the Poet’s name,
If such be worth the winning now,
And gain’d a laurel for your brow
Of sounder leaf than I can claim;

But you have made the wiser choice,
A life that moves to gracious ends
Thro’ troops of unrecording friends,
A deedful life, a silent voice.

And you have miss’d the irreverent doom
Of those that wear the Poet’s crown;
Hereafter, neither knave nor clown
Shall hold their orgies at your tomb.

For now the Poet cannot die,
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:

‘Proclaim the faults he would not show;
Br...

I never cared for Life: Life cared for me,
And hence I owed it some fidelity.
It now says, "Cease; at length thou hast learnt to grind
Sufficient toll for an unwilling mind,
And I dismiss thee not without regard
That thou didst ask no ill-advised reward,
Nor sought in me much more than thou couldst find."

They stand confronting, the coffin between,
His wife of old, and his wife of late,
And the dead man whose they both had been
Seems listening aloof, as to things past date.
"I have called," says the first. "Do you marvel or not?"
"In truth," says the second, "I do somewhat."

"Well, there was a word to be said by me! . . .
I divorced that man because of you -
It seemed I must do it, boundenly;
But now I am older, and tell you true,
For life is little, and dead lies he;
I would I had let alone you two!
And both of us, scorning parochial ways,
Had lived like the wives in the patriarchs' days."

Tie the strings to my life, my Lord,
Then I am ready to go!
Just a look at the horses --
Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side,
So I shall never fall;
For we must ride to the Judgment,
And it's partly down hill.

But never I mind the bridges,
And never I mind the sea;
Held fast in everlasting race
By my own choice and thee.

Good-by to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go!

Plain Tales From the Hills

Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three?Not so!
To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
- Lispeth.

When the earth was sick and the skies were grey,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.

His love she neither saw nor heard,
So heavy was her shame;
And tho' the babe within her stirred
She knew not that he came.
- The Other Man.

Cry "Murder" in the market-place, and each
Will turn upon his neighbour anxious eyes
Asking: "Art thou the man?" We hunted Cain
Some centuries ago across the world.
This ...

The Season speaks this year of life
Confusing words of strife,
Suggesting weeds instead of fruits and flowers
In all Earth's bowers.
With heart of Jael, face of Ruth,
She goes her way uncouth
Through hills and fields, where fog and sunset seem
Wild smoke and steam.
Around her, spotted as a leopard skin,
She draws her cloak of whin,
And through the dark hills sweeps dusk's last red glare
Wild on her hair.
Her hands drip leaves, like blood, and burn
With frost; her moony urn
She lifts, where Death, 'mid driving stress and storm,
Rears his gaunt form.
And all night long she seems to say
"Come forth, my Winds, and slay!
And everywhere is heard the wailing cry
Of dreams that die.

Sailor.

You, who have compassed land and sea
Now all unburied lie;
All vain your store of human lore,
For you were doomed to die.
The sire of Pelops likewise fell,
Jove's honored mortal guest--
So king and sage of every age
At last lie down to rest.
Plutonian shades enfold the ghost
Of that majestic one
Who taught as truth that he, forsooth,
Had once been Pentheus' son;
Believe who may, he's passed away
And what he did is done.
A last night comes alike to all--
One path we all must tread,
Through sore disease or stormy seas
Or fields with corpses red--
Whate'er our deeds that pathway leads
To regions of the dead.


Shade.

The fickle twin Illyrian gales
O'erwhelmed me on the wave--
But ...

Hear me, Brother, gently met;
Just a little, turn not yet,
Thou shalt laugh, and soon forget:
Now the midnight draweth near.
I have little more to tell;
Soon with hollow stroke and knell,
Thou shalt count the palace bell,
Calling that the hour is here.

Burdens black and strange to bear,
I must tell, and thou must share,
Listening with that stony stare,
Even as many a man before.
Years have lightly come and gone
In their jocund unison.
But the tides of life roll on -    -
They remember now no more.

Once upon a night of glee,
In an hour of revelry,
As I wandered restlessly,
I beheld with burning eye,
How a pale procession rolled
Through a quarter quaint and old,
With its banners and its gold,
And the crucifix went b...

They come to ev'ry life -- sad, sunless days,
With not a light all o'er their clouded skies;
And thro' the dark we grope along our ways
With hearts fear-filled, and lips low-breathing sighs.

What is the dark? Why cometh it? and whence?
Why does it banish all the bright away?
How does it weave a spell o'er soul and sense?
Why falls the shadow where'er gleams the ray?

Hast felt it? I have felt it, and I know
How oft and suddenly the shadows roll
From out the depths of some dim realm of woe,
To wrap their darkness round the human soul.

Those days are darker than the very night;
For nights have stars, and sleep, and happy dreams;
But these days bring unto the spirit-sight
The mysteries of gloom, until it seems

The light is gone forever, and...

Over that morn hung heaviness, until,
Near sunless noon, we heard the ship's bell beating
A melancholy staccato on dead metal;
Saw the bare-footed watch come running aft;
Felt, far below, the sudden telegraph jangle
Its harsh metallic challenge, thrice repeated:
'Stand to. Half-speed ahead. Slow. Stop her!'
                                                            They stopped.
The plunging pistons sank like a stopped heart:
She held, she swayed, a hulk, a hollow carcass
Of blistered iron that the grey-green, waveless,
Unruffled tropic waters slapped languidly.

And, in that pause, a sinister whisper ran:
Burial at Sea! a Portuguese official ...
Poor fever-broken devil from Mozambique:
Came on half tight: the doctor calls it heat-stroke.
Why do they tra...

Thee, whose refulgent staff and summons clear,
Minerva's flock longtime was wont t'obey,
Although thyself an herald, famous here,
The last of heralds, Death, has snatch'd away.
He calls on all alike, nor even deigns
To spare the office that himself sustains.

Thy locks were whiter than the plumes display'd
By Leda's paramour2 in ancient time,
But thou wast worthy ne'er to have decay'd,
Or, Aeson-like,3 to know a second prime,
Worthy for whom some Goddess should have won
New life, oft kneeling to Apollo's son.4

Commission'd to convene with hasty call
The gowned tribes, how graceful wouldst thou stand!
So stood Cyllenius5 erst in Priam's hall,
Wing-footed messenger of Jove's command,
And so, Eurybates6<...

    "An honest man's the noblest work of God."

Pope.


    Has auld Kilmarnock seen the deil?
    Or great M'Kinlay[2] thrawn his heel?
    Or Robinson[3] again grown weel,
        To preach an' read?
    "Na, waur than a'!" cries ilka chiel,
        Tam Samson's dead!

    Kilmarnock lang may grunt an' grane,
    An' sigh, an' sob, an' greet her lane,
    An' cleed her bairns, man, wife, an wean,
        In mourning weed;
    To death, she's dearly paid the kane,
        Tam Samson's dead!

    The brethren o' the mystic level
    May hing their head in woefu' bevel,
    While by their nose the tears will revel,
        Like ony bead;
    Death's gien the lodge an unco devel,
        Tam Samson's ...