Poetry

A Hidden Life

Proudly the youth, sudden with manhood crowned,
Went walking by his horses, the first time,
That morning, to the plough. No soldier gay
Feels at his side the throb of the gold hilt
(Knowing the blue blade hides within its sheath,
As lightning in the cloud) with more delight,
When first he belts it on, than he that day
Heard still the clank of the plough-chains against
His horses’ harnessed sides, as to the field
They went to make it fruitful. O’er the hill
The sun looked down, baptizing him for toil.

A farmer’s son, a farmer’s grandson he;
Yea, his great-grandsire had possessed those fields.
Tradition said they had been tilled by men
Who bore the name long centuries ago,
And married wives, and reared a stalwart race,
And died, and went where all had followed them,
Save one old man, his daughter, and the youth
Who ploughs in pride, nor ever doubts his toil;
And death is far from him this sunny morn.
Why should we think of death when life is high?
The earth laughs all the day, and sleeps all night.
The daylight’s labour and the night’s repose
Are very good, each better in its time.

The boy knew little; but he read old tales
Of Scotland’s warriors, till his blood ran swift
As charging knights upon their death-career.
He chanted ancient tunes, till the wild blood
Was charmed back into its fountain-well,
And tears arose instead. That poet’s songs,
Whose music evermore recalls his name,
His name of waters babbling as they run,
Rose from him in the fields among the kine,
And met the skylark’s, raining from the clouds.
But only as the poet-birds he sang⁠—
From rooted impulse of essential song;
The earth was fair⁠—he knew not it was fair;
His heart was glad⁠—he knew not it was glad;
He walked as in a twilight of the sense⁠—
Which this one day shall turn to tender morn.

Long ere the sun had cleared the feathery tops
Of the fir-thicket on the eastward hill,
His horses leaned and laboured. Each great hand
Held rein and plough-stilt in one guiding grasp⁠—
No ploughman there would brook a helper. Proud
With a true ploughman’s pride⁠—nobler, I think,
Than statesman’s, ay, or poet’s, or painter’s pride,
For little praise will come that he ploughs well⁠—
He did plough well, proud of his work itself,
And not of what would follow. With sure eye,
He saw his horses keep the arrow-track;
He saw the swift share cut the measured sod;
He saw the furrow folding to the right,
Ready with nimble foot to aid at need:⁠—
Turning its secrets upward to the sun,
And hiding in the dark the sun-born grass,
And daisies dipped in carmine, lay the tilth⁠—
A million graves to nurse the buried seed,
And send a golden harvest up the air.

When the steep sun had clomb to his decline,
And pausing seemed, at edge of slow descent,
Upon the keystone of his airy bridge,
They rested likewise, half-tired man and horse,
And homeward went for food and courage new.
Therewith refreshed, they turned again to toil,
And lived in labour all the afternoon;
Till, in the gloaming, once again the plough
Lay like a stranded bark upon the lea,
And home with hanging neck the horses went,
Walking beside their master, force by will:
Then through the lengthening shades a vision came.

It was a lady mounted on a horse,
A slender girl upon a mighty steed,
That bore her with the pride horses must feel
When they submit to women. Home she went,
Alone, or else her groom lagged far behind.
Scarce had she bent simple acknowledgment
Of the hand in silent salutation lifted
To the bowed head, when something faithless yielded:
The saddle slipped, the horse stopped, and the girl
Stood on her feet, still holding fast the reins.

Three paces bore him bounding to her side;
Her radiant beauty almost fixed him there;
But with main force, as one that grapples fear,
He threw the fascination off, and saw
The work before him. Soon his hand and knife
Had set the saddle firmer than before
Upon the gentle horse; and then he turned
To mount the maiden. But bewilderment
A moment lasted; for he knew not how,
With stirrup-hand and steady arm, to throne,
Elastic, on her steed, the ascending maid:
A moment only; for while yet she thanked,
Nor yet had time to teach her further will,
About her waist he put his brawny hands,
That all but zoned her round; and like a child
Lifting her high, he set her on the horse;
Whence like a risen moon she smiled on him,
Nor turned aside, although a radiant blush
Shone in her cheek, and shadowed in her eyes.
And he was never sure if from her heart
Or from the rosy sunset came the flush.
Again she thanked him, while again he stood
Bewildered in her beauty. Not a word
Answered her words that flowed, folded in tones
Round which dissolving lambent music played,
Like dropping water in a silver cup;
Till, round the shoulder of the neighbouring hill,
Sudden she disappeared. And he awoke,
And called himself hard names, and turned and went
After his horses, bending like them his head.

Ah God! when Beauty passes from the door,
Although she came not in, the house is bare:
Shut, shut the door; there’s nothing in the house!
Why seems it always that she should be ours?
A secret lies behind which thou dost know,
And I can partly guess. But think not then,
The holder of the plough sighed many sighs
Upon his bed that night; or other dreams
Than pleasant rose upon his view in sleep;
Nor think the airy castles of his brain
Had less foundation than the air admits.
But read my simple tale, scarce worth the name,
And answer, if he had not from the fair
Beauty’s best gift; and proved her not, in sooth,
An angel vision from a higher world.

Not much of her I tell. Her glittering life,
Where part the waters on the mountain-ridge,
Ran down the southern side, away from his.
It was not over-blessed; for, I know,
Its tale wiled many sighs, one summer eve,
From her who told, and him who, in the pines
Walking, received it from her loving lips;
But now she was as God had made her, ere
The world had tried to spoil her; tried, I say,
And half succeeded, failing utterly.
Fair was she, frank, and innocent as a child
That looks in every eye; fearless of ill,
Because she knew it not; and brave withal,
Because she led a simple country life,
And loved the animals. Her father’s house⁠—
A Scottish laird was he, of ancient name⁠—
Was distant but two miles among the hills;
Yet oft as she had passed his father’s farm,
The youth had never seen her face before,
And should not twice. Yet was it not enough?
The vision tarried. She, as the harvest moon
That goeth on her way, and knoweth not
The fields of corn whose ripening grain she fills
With strength of life, and hope, and joy for men,
Went on her way, and knew not of the virtue
Gone out of her; yea, never thought of him,
Save at such times when, all at once, old scenes
Return uncalled, with wonder that they come.
Soon was she orphaned of her sheltering hills,
And rounded with dead glitter, not the shine
Of leaves and waters dancing in the sun;
While he abode in ever breaking dawns,
Breathed ever new-born winds into his soul;
And saw the aurora of the heavenly day
Still climb the hill-sides of the heapy world.

Again I say, no fond romance of love,
No argument of possibilities,
If he were some one, and she sought his help,
Turned his clear brain into a nest of dreams.
As soon he had sat down and twisted cords
To snare, and carry home for household help,
Some woman-angel, wandering half-seen
On moonlight wings, o’er withered autumn fields.
But when he rose next morn, and went abroad,
(The exultation of his new-found rank
Already settling into dignity,)
Behold, the earth was beautiful! The sky
Shone with the expectation of the sun.
Only the daisies grieved him, for they fell
Caught in the furrow, with their innocent heads
Just out, imploring. A gray hedgehog ran,
With tangled mesh of rough-laid spikes, and face
Helplessly innocent, across the field:
He let it run, and blessed it as it ran.
Returned at noon-tide, something drew his feet
Into the barn: entering, he gazed and stood.
For, through the rent roof lighting, one sunbeam
Blazed on the yellow straw one golden spot,
Dulled all the amber heap, and sinking far,
Like flame inverted, through the loose-piled mound,
Crossed the keen splendour with dark shadow-straws,
In lines innumerable. ’Twas so bright,
His eye was cheated with a spectral smoke
That rose as from a fire. He had not known
How beautiful the sunlight was, not even
Upon the windy fields of morning grass,
Nor on the river, nor the ripening corn!
As if to catch a wild live thing, he crept
On tiptoe silent, laid him on the heap,
And gazing down into the glory-gulf,
Dreamed as a boy half sleeping by the fire⁠—
Half dreaming rose, and got his horses out.

God, and not woman, is the heart of all.
But she, as priestess of the visible earth,
Holding the key, herself most beautiful,
Had come to him, and flung the portals wide.
He entered: every beauty was a glass
That gleamed the woman back upon his view.
Shall I not rather say: each beauty gave
Its own soul up to him who worshipped her,
For that his eyes were opened now to see?

Already in these hours his quickened soul
Put forth the white tip of a floral bud,
Ere long to be a crown-like, aureole flower.
His songs unbidden, his joy in ancient tales,
Had hitherto alone betrayed the seed
That lay in his heart, close hidden even from him,
Yet not the less mellowing all his spring:
Like summer sunshine came the maiden’s face,
And in the youth’s glad heart the seed awoke.
It grew and spread, and put forth many flowers,
Its every flower a living open eye,
Until his soul was full of eyes within.
Each morning now was a fresh boon to him;
Each wind a spiritual power upon his life;
Each individual animal did share
A common being with him; every kind
Of flower from every other was distinct,
Uttering that for which alone it was⁠—
Its something human, wrapt in other veil.

And when the winter came, when thick the snow
Armed the sad fields from gnawing of the frost,
When the low sun but skirted his far realms,
And sank in early night, he drew his chair
Beside the fire; and by the feeble lamp
Read book on book; and wandered other climes,
And lived in other lives and other needs,
And grew a larger self by other selves.
Ere long, the love of knowledge had become
A hungry passion and a conscious power,
And craved for more than reading could supply.
Then, through the night (all dark, except the moon
Shone frosty o’er the heath, or the white snow
Gave back such motes of light as else had sunk
In the dark earth) he bent his plodding way
Over the moors to where the little town
Lay gathered in the hollow. There the student
Who taught from lingering dawn to early dark,
Had older scholars in the long fore-night;
For youths who in the shop, or in the barn,
Or at the loom, had done their needful work,
Came gathering there through starlight, fog, or snow,
And found the fire ablaze, the candles lit,
And him who knew waiting for who would know.
Here mathematics wiled him to their heights;
And strange consent of lines to form and law
Made Euclid a profound romance of truth.
The master saw with wonder how he seized,
How eagerly devoured the offered food,
And longed to give him further kinds. For Knowledge
Would multiply like Life; and two clear souls
That see a truth, and, turning, see at once
Each the other’s face glow in that truth’s delight,
Are drawn like lovers. So the master offered
To guide the ploughman through the narrow ways
To heights of Roman speech. The youth, alert,
Caught at the offer; and for years of nights,
The house asleep, he groped his twilight way
With lexicon and rule, through ancient story,
Or fable fine, embalmed in Latin old;
Wherein his knowledge of the English tongue,
Through reading many books, much aided him⁠—
For best is like in all the hearts and tongues.

At length his progress, through the master’s pride
In such a pupil, reached the father’s ears.
Great gladness woke within him, and he vowed,
If caring, sparing might accomplish it,
He should to college, and there have his fill
Of that same learning. To the plough no more,
All day to school he went; and ere a year,
He wore the scarlet gown with the closed sleeves.

Awkward at first, but with a dignity
Soon finding fit embodiment in speech
And gesture and address, he made his way,
Unconscious all, to the full-orbed respect
Of students and professors; for whose praise
More than his worth, society, so called,
To its rooms in that great city of the North,
Invited him. He entered. Dazzled at first
By brilliance of the shining show, the lights,
The mirrors, gems, white necks, and radiant eyes,
He stole into a corner, and was quiet
Until the vision too had quieter grown.
Bewildered next by many a sparkling word,
Nor knowing the light-play of polished minds,
Which, like rose-diamonds cut in many facets,
Catch and reflect the wandering rays of truth
As if they were home-born and issuing new,
He held his peace, and silent soon began
To see how little fire it needs to shimmer.
Hence, in the midst of talk, his thoughts would wander
Back to the calm divine of homely toil;
While round him still and ever hung an air
Of breezy fields, and plough, and cart, and scythe⁠—
A kind of clumsy grace, in which gay girls
Saw but the clumsiness⁠—another sort
Saw the grace too, yea, sometimes, when he spoke,
Saw the grace only; and began at last,
For he sought none, to seek him in the crowd,
And find him unexpected, maiden-wise.
But oftener far they sought him than they found,
For seldom was he drawn away from toil;
Seldomer stinted time held due to toil;
For if one night his panes were dark, the next
They gleamed far into morning. And he won
Honours among the first, each session’s close.

Nor think that new familiarity
With open forms of ill, not to be shunned
Where many youths are met, endangered much
A mind that had begun to will the pure.
Oft when the broad rich humour of a jest
With breezy force drew in its skirts a troop
Of pestilential vapours following⁠—
Arose within his sudden silent mind
The maiden face that once blushed down on him⁠—
That lady face, insphered beyond his earth,
Yet visible as bright, particular star.
A flush of tenderness then glowed across
His bosom⁠—shone it clean from passing harm:
Should that sweet face be banished by rude words?
It could not stay what maidens might not hear!
He almost wept for shame, that face, such jest,
Should meet in his house. To his love he made
Love’s only worthy offering⁠—purity.

And if the homage that he sometimes met,
New to the country lad, conveyed in smiles,
Assents, and silent listenings when he spoke,
Threatened yet more his life’s simplicity;
An antidote of nature ever came,
Even Nature’s self. For, in the summer months,
His former haunts and boyhood’s circumstance
Received him to the bosom of their grace.
And he, too noble to despise the past,
Too proud to be ashamed of manly toil,
Too wise to fancy that a gulf gaped wide
Betwixt the labouring hand and thinking brain,
Or that a workman was no gentleman
Because a workman, clothed himself again
In his old garments, took the hoe, the spade,
The sowing sheet, or covered in the grain,
Smoothing with harrows what the plough had ridged.
With ever fresher joy he hailed the fields,
Returning still with larger powers of sight:
Each time he knew them better than before,
And yet their sweetest aspect was the old.
His labour kept him true to life and fact,
Casting out worldly judgments, false desires,
And vain distinctions. Ever, at his toil,
New thoughts would rise, which, when God’s night awoke,
He still would seek, like stars, with instruments⁠—
By science, or by truth’s philosophy,
Bridging the gulf betwixt the new and old.
Thus laboured he with hand and brain at once,
Nor missed due readiness when Scotland’s sons
Met to reap wisdom, and the fields were white.

His sire was proud of him; and, most of all,
Because his learning did not make him proud:
He was too wise to build upon his lore.
The neighbours asked what he would make his son:
“I’ll make a man of him,” the old man said;
“And for the rest, just what he likes himself.
He is my only son⁠—I think he’ll keep
The old farm on; and I shall go content,
Leaving a man behind me, as I say.”

So four years long his life swung to and fro,
Alternating the red gown and blue coat,
The garret study and the wide-floored barn,
The wintry city and the sunny fields:
In every change his mind was well content,
For in himself he was the growing same.

In no one channel flowed his seeking thoughts;
To no profession did he ardent turn:
He knew his father’s wish⁠—it was his own.
“Why should a man,” he said, “when knowledge grows,
Leave therefore the old patriarchal life,
And seek distinction in the noise of men?”
He turned his asking face on every side;
Went reverent with the anatomist, and saw
The inner form of man laid skilful bare;
Went with the chymist, whose wise-questioning hand
Made Nature do in little, before his eyes,
And momently, what, huge, for centuries,
And in the veil of vastness and lone deeps,
She labours at; bent his inquiring eye
On every source whence knowledge flows for men:
At some he only sipped, at others drank.

At length, when he had gained the master’s right⁠—
By custom sacred from of old⁠—to sit
With covered head before the awful rank
Of black-gowned senators; and each of those,
Proud of the scholar, was ready at a word
To speed him onward to what goal he would,
He took his books, his well-worn cap and gown,
And, leaving with a sigh the ancient walls,
Crowned with their crown of stone, unchanging gray
In all the blandishments of youthful spring,
Chose for his world the lone ancestral farm.

With simple gladness met him on the road
His gray-haired father⁠—elder brother now.
Few words were spoken, little welcome said,
But, as they walked, the more was understood.
If with a less delight he brought him home
Than he who met the prodigal returned,
It was with more reliance, with more peace;
For with the leaning pride that old men feel
In young strong arms that draw their might from them,
He led him to the house. His sister there,
Whose kisses were not many, but whose eyes
Were full of watchfulness and hovering love,
Set him beside the fire in the old place,
And heaped the table with best country-fare.

When the swift night grew deep, the father rose,
And led him, wondering why and where they went,
Thorough the limpid dark, by tortuous path
Between the corn-ricks, to a loft above
The stable, where the same old horses slept
Which he had guided that eventful morn.
Entering, he saw a change-pursuing hand
Had been at work. The father, leading on
Across the floor, heaped high with store of grain
Opened a door. An unexpected light
Flashed on him cheerful from a fire and lamp,
That burned alone, as in a fairy-tale:
Behold! a little room, a curtained bed,
An easy chair, bookshelves, and writing-desk;
An old print of a deep Virgilian wood,
And one of choosing Hercules! The youth
Gazed and spoke not. The old paternal love
Had sought and found an incarnation new!
For, honouring in his son the simple needs
Which his own bounty had begot in him,
He gave him thus a lonely thinking space,
A silent refuge. With a quiet good night,
He left him dumb with love. Faintly beneath,
The horses stamped, and drew the lengthening chain.

Three sliding years, with slowly blended change,
Drew round their winter, summer, autumn, spring,
Fulfilled of work by hands, and brain, and heart.
He laboured as before; though when he would,
And Nature urged not, he, with privilege,
Would spare from hours of toil⁠—read in his room,
Or wander through the moorland to the hills;
There on the apex of the world would stand,
As on an altar, burning, soul and heart⁠—
Himself the sacrifice of faith and prayer;
Gaze in the face of the inviting blue
That domed him round; ask why it should be blue;
Pray yet again; and with love-strengthened heart
Go down to lower things with lofty cares.

When Sundays came, the father, daughter, son
Walked to the church across their own loved fields.
It was an ugly church, with scarce a sign
Of what makes English churches venerable.
Likest a crowing cock upon a heap
It stood⁠—but let us say⁠—St. Peter’s cock,
Lacking not many a holy, rousing charm
For one with whose known self it was coeval,
Dawning with it from darkness of the unseen!
And its low mounds of monumental grass
Were far more solemn than great marble tombs;
For flesh is grass, its goodliness the flower.
Oh, lovely is the face of green churchyard
On sunny afternoons! The light itself
Nestles amid the grass; and the sweet wind
Says, “I am here⁠—” no more. With sun and wind
And crowing cocks, who can believe in death?
He, on such days, when from the church they Came,
And through God’s ridges took their thoughtful way,
The last psalm lingering faintly in their hearts,
Would look, inquiring where his ridge would rise;
But when it gloomed or rained, he turned aside:
What mattered it to him? And as they walked
Homeward, right well the father loved to hear
The fresh rills pouring from his son’s clear well.
For the old man clung not to the old alone,
Nor leaned the young man only to the new;
They would the best, they sought, and followed it.
“The Pastor fills his office well,” he said,
In homely jest; “⁠—the Past alone he heeds!
Honours those Jewish times as he were a Jew,
And Christ were neither Jew nor northern man!
He has no ear for this poor Present Hour,
Which wanders up and down the centuries,
Like beggar-boy roaming the wintry streets,
With witless hand held out to passers-by;
And yet God made the voice of its many cries.
Mine be the work that comes first to my hand!
The lever set, I grasp and heave withal.
I love where I live, and let my labour flow
Into the hollows of the neighbour-needs.
Perhaps I like it best: I would not choose
Another than the ordered circumstance.
This farm is God’s as much as yonder town;
These men and maidens, kine and horses, his;
For them his laws must be incarnated
In act and fact, and so their world redeemed.”

Though thus he spoke at times, he spake not oft;
Ruled chief by action: what he said, he did.
No grief was suffered there of man or beast
More than was need; no creature fled in fear;
All slaying was with generous suddenness,
Like God’s benignant lightning. “For,” he said,
“God makes the beasts, and loves them dearly well⁠—
Better than any parent loves his child,
It may be,” would he say; for still the may be
Was sacred with him no less than the is⁠—
“In such humility he lived and wrought⁠—
Hence are they sacred. Sprung from God as we,
They are our brethren in a lower kind,
And in their face we see the human look.”
If any said: “Men look like animals;
Each has his type set in the lower kind;”
His answer was: “The animals are like men;
Each has his true type set in the higher kind,
Though even there only rough-hewn as yet.
The hell of cruelty will be the ghosts
Of the sad beasts: their crowding heads will come,
And with encircling, slow, pain-patient eyes,
Stare the ill man to madness.” When he spoke,
His word behind it had the force of deeds
Unborn within him, ready to be born;
But, like his race, he promised very slow.
His goodness ever went before his word,
Embodying itself unconsciously
In understanding of the need that prayed,
And cheerful help that would outrun the prayer.

When from great cities came the old sad news
Of crime and wretchedness, and children sore
With hunger, and neglect, and cruel blows,
He would walk sadly all the afternoon,
With head down-bent, and pondering footstep slow;
Arriving ever at the same result⁠—
Concluding ever: “The best that I can do
For the great world, is the same best I can
For this my world. What truth may be therein
Will pass beyond my narrow circumstance,
In truth’s own right.” When a philanthropist
Said pompously: “It is not for your gifts
To spend themselves on common labours thus:
You owe the world far nobler things than such;”
He answered him: “The world is in God’s hands,
This part of it in mine. My sacred past,
With all its loves inherited, has led
Hither, here left me: shall I judge, arrogant,
Primaeval godlike work in earth and air,
Seed-time and harvest⁠—offered fellowship
With God in nature⁠—unworthy of my hands?
I know your argument⁠—I know with grief!⁠—
The crowds of men, in whom a starving soul
Cries through the windows of their hollow eyes
For bare humanity, nay, room to grow!⁠—
Would I could help them! But all crowds are made
Of individuals; and their grief and pain,
Their thirst and hunger⁠—all are of the one,
Not of the many: the true, the saving power
Enters the individual door, and thence
Issues again in thousand influences
Besieging other doors. I cannot throw
A mass of good into the general midst,
Whereof each man may seize his private share;
And if one could, it were of lowest kind,
Not reaching to that hunger of the soul.
Now here I labour whole in the same spot
Where they have known me from my childhood up
And I know them, each individual:
If there is power in me to help my own,
Even of itself it flows beyond my will,
Takes shape in commonest of common acts,
Meets every humble day’s necessity:
—I would not always consciously do good,
Not always work from full intent of help,
Lest I forget the measure heaped and pressed
And running over which they pour for me,
And never reap the too-much of return
In smiling trust and beams from kindly eyes.
But in the city, with a few lame words,
And a few wretched coins, sore-coveted,
To mediate ’twixt my cannot and my would,
My best attempts would never strike a root;
My scattered corn would turn to wind-blown chaff;
I should grow weak, might weary of my kind,
Misunderstood the most where almost known,
Baffled and beaten by their unbelief:
Years could not place me where I stand this day
High on the vantage-ground of confidence:
I might for years toil on, and reach no man.
Besides, to leave the thing that nearest lies,
And choose the thing far off, more difficult⁠—
The act, having no touch of God in it,
Who seeks the needy for the pure need’s sake,
Must straightway die, choked in its selfishness.”
Thus he. The world-wise schemer for the good
Held his poor peace, and went his trackless way.

What of the vision now? the vision fair
Sent forth to meet him, when at eve he went
Home from his first day’s ploughing? Oft he dreamed
She passed him smiling on her stately horse;
But never band or buckle yielded more;
Never again his hands enthroned the maid;
He only worshipped with his eyes, and woke.
Nor woke he then with foolish vain regret;
But, saying, “I have seen the beautiful,”
Smiled with his eyes upon a flower or bird,
Or living form, whate’er, of gentleness,
That met him first; and all that morn, his face
Would oftener dawn into a blossomy smile.

And ever when he read a lofty tale,
Or when the storied leaf, or ballad old,
Or spake or sang of woman very fair,
Or wondrous good, he saw her face alone;
The tale was told, the song was sung of her.

He did not turn aside from other maids,
But loved their faces pure and faithful eyes.
He may have thought, “One day I wed a maid,
And make her mine;” but never came the maid,
Or never came the hour: he walked alone.

Meantime how fared the lady? She had wed
One of the common crowd: there must be ore
For the gold grains to lie in: virgin gold
Lies in the rock, enriching not the stone.
She was not one who of herself could be;
And she had found no heart which, tuned with hers,
Would beat in rhythm, growing into rime.
She read phantasmagoric tales, sans salt,
Sans hope, sans growth; or listlessly conversed
With phantom-visitors⁠—ladies, not friends,
Mere spectral forms from fashion’s concave glass.
She haunted gay assemblies, ill-content⁠—
Witched woods to hide in from her better self,
And danced, and sang, and ached. What had she felt,
If, called up by the ordered sounds and motions,
A vision had arisen⁠—as once, of old,
The minstrel’s art laid bare the seer’s eye,
And showed him plenteous waters in the waste;⁠—
If the gay dance had vanished from her sight,
And she beheld her ploughman-lover go
With his great stride across a lonely field,
Under the dark blue vault ablaze with stars,
Lifting his full eyes to the radiant roof,
Live with our future; or had she beheld
Him studious, with space-compelling mind
Bent on his slate, pursue some planet’s course;
Or reading justify the poet’s wrath,
Or sage’s slow conclusion?⁠—If a voice
Had whispered then: This man in many a dream,
And many a waking moment of keen joy,
Blesses you for the look that woke his heart,
That smiled him into life, and, still undimmed,
Lies lamping in the cabinet of his soul;⁠—
Would her sad eyes have beamed with sudden light?
Would not her soul, half-dead with nothingness,
Have risen from the couch of its unrest,
And looked to heaven again, again believed
In God and life, courage, and duty, and love?
Would not her soul have sung to its lone self:
“I have a friend, a ploughman, who is wise.
He knows what God, and goodness, and fair faith
Mean in the words and books of mighty men.
He nothing heeds the show of worldly things,
But worships the unconquerable truth.
This man is humble and loves me: I will
Be proud and very humble. If he knew me,
Would he go on and love me till we meet!”?

In the third year, a heavy harvest fell,
Full filled, before the reaping-hook and scythe.
The heat was scorching, but the men and maids
Lightened their toil with merry jest and song;
Rested at mid-day, and from brimming bowl,
Drank the brown ale, and white abundant milk.
The last ear fell, and spiky stubble stood
Where waved the forests of dry-murmuring corn;
And sheaves rose piled in shocks, like ranged tents
Of an encamping army, tent by tent,
To stand there while the moon should have her will.

The grain was ripe. The harvest carts went out
Broad-platformed, bearing back the towering load,
With frequent passage ’twixt homeyard and field.
And half the oats already hid their tops,
Their ringing, rustling, wind-responsive sprays,
In the still darkness of the towering stack;
When in the north low billowy clouds appeared,
Blue-based, white-crested, in the afternoon;
And westward, darker masses, plashed with blue,
And outlined vague in misty steep and dell,
Clomb o’er the hill-tops: thunder was at hand.
The air was sultry. But the upper sky
Was clear and radiant. Downward went the sun,
Below the sullen clouds that walled the west,
Below the hills, below the shadowed world.
The moon looked over the clear eastern wall,
And slanting rose, and looked, rose, looked again,
And searched for silence in her yellow fields,
But found it not. For there the staggering carts,
Like overladen beasts, crawled homeward still,
Sped fieldward light and low. The laugh broke yet,
That lightning of the soul’s unclouded skies⁠—
Though not so frequent, now that toil forgot
Its natural hour. Still on the labour went,
Straining to beat the welkin-climbing heave
Of the huge rain-clouds, heavy with their floods.
Sleep, old enchantress, sided with the clouds,
The hoisting clouds, and cast benumbing spells
On man and horse. One youth who walked beside
A ponderous load of sheaves, higher than wont,
Which dared the lurking levin overhead,
Woke with a start, falling against the wheel,
That circled slow after the slumbering horse.
Yet none would yield to soft-suggesting sleep,
And quit the last few shocks; for the wild storm
Would catch thereby the skirts of Harvest-home,
And hold her lingering half-way in the rain.

The scholar laboured with his men all night.
He did not favour such prone headlong race
With Nature. To himself he said: “The night
Is sent for sleep; we ought to sleep in the night,
And leave the clouds to God. Not every storm
That climbeth heavenward overwhelms the earth;
And when God wills, ’tis better he should will;
What he takes from us never can be lost.”
But the father so had ordered, and the son
Went manful to his work, and held his peace.

When the dawn blotted pale the clouded east,
The first drops, overgrown and helpless, fell
On the last home-bound cart, oppressed with sheaves;
And by its side, the last in the retreat,
The scholar walked, slow bringing up the rear.
Half the still lengthening journey he had gone,
When, on opposing strength of upper winds
Tumultuous borne, at last the labouring racks
Met in the zenith, and the silence ceased:
The lightning brake, and flooded all the world,
Its roar of airy billows following it.
The darkness drank the lightning, and again
Lay more unslaked. But ere the darkness came,
In the full revelation of the flash,
Met by some stranger flash from cloudy brain,
He saw the lady, borne upon her horse,
Careless of thunder, as when, years agone,
He saw her once, to see for evermore.
“Ah, ha!” he said, “my dreams are come for me!
Now shall they have me!” For, all through the night,
There had been growing trouble in his frame,
An overshadowing of something dire.
Arrived at home, the weary man and horse
Forsook their load; the one went to his stall,
The other sought the haven of his bed⁠—
There slept and moaned, cried out, and woke, and slept:
Through all the netted labyrinth of his brain
The fever shot its pent malignant fire.
’Twas evening when to passing consciousness
He woke and saw his father by his side:
His guardian form in every vision drear
That followed, watching shone; and the healing face
Of his true sister gleamed through all his pain,
Soothing and strengthening with cloudy hope;
Till, at the weary last of many days,
He woke to sweet quiescent consciousness,
Enfeebled much, but with a new-born life⁠—
His soul a summer evening after rain.

Slow, with the passing weeks, he gathered strength,
And ere the winter came, seemed half restored;
And hope was busy. But a fire too keen
Burned in his larger eyes; and in his cheek
Too ready came the blood at faintest call,
Glowing a fair, quick-fading, sunset hue.

Before its hour, a biting frost set in.
It gnawed with icy fangs his shrinking life;
And that disease bemoaned throughout the land,
The smiling, hoping, wasting, radiant death,
Was born of outer cold and inner heat.

One morn his sister, entering while he slept,
Spied in his listless hand a handkerchief
Spotted with red. Cold with dismay, she stood,
Scared, motionless. But catching in the glass
The sudden glimpse of a white ghostly face,
She started at herself, and he awoke.
He understood, and said with smile unsure,
“Bright red was evermore my master-hue;
And see, I have it in me: that is why.”
She shuddered; and he saw, nor jested more,
But smiled again, and looked Death in the face.

When first he saw the red blood outward leap,
As if it sought again the fountain-heart
Whence it had flowed to fill the golden bowl,
No terror seized⁠—an exaltation swelled
His spirit: now the pondered mystery
Would fling its portals wide, and take him in,
One of the awful dead! Them, fools conceive
As ghosts that fleet and pine, bereft of weight,
And half their valued lives: he otherwise;⁠—
Hoped now, and now expected; and, again,
Said only, “I await the thing to come.”
So waits a child the lingering curtain’s rise,
While yet the panting lamps restrained burn
At half-height, and the theatre is full.

But as the days went by, they brought sad hours,
When he would sit, his hands upon his knees,
Drooping, and longing for the wine of life.
For when the ninefold crystal spheres, through which
The outer light sinks in, are cracked and broken,
Yet able to keep in the ’piring life,
Distressing shadows cross the chequered soul:
Poor Psyche trims her irresponsive lamp,
And anxious visits oft her store of oil,
And still the shadows fall: she must go pray!
And God, who speaks to man at door and lattice,
Glorious in stars, and winds, and flowers, and waves,
Not seldom shuts the door and dims the pane,
That, isled in calm, his still small voice may sound
The clearer, by the hearth, in the inner room⁠—
Sound on until the soul, fulfilled of hope,
Look undismayed on that which cannot kill;
And saying in the dark, “I will the light,”
Glow in the gloom the present will of God:
Then melt the shadows of her shaken house.

He, when his lamp shot up a spiring flame,
Would thus break forth and climb the heaven of prayer:
“Do with us what thou wilt, all-glorious heart!
Thou God of them that are not yet, but grow!
We trust thee for the thing we shall be yet;
We too are ill content with what we are.”
And when the flame sank, and the darkness fell,
He lived by faith which is the soul of sight.

Yet in the frequent pauses of the light,
When all was dreary as a drizzling thaw,
When sleep came not although he prayed for sleep,
And wakeful-weary on his bed he lay,
Like frozen lake that has no heaven within;
Then, then the sleeping horror woke and stirred,
And with the tooth of unsure thought began
To gnaw the roots of life:⁠—What if there were
No truth in beauty! What if loveliness
Were but the invention of a happier mood!
“For, if my mind can dim or slay the Fair,
Why should it not enhance or make the Fair?”
“Nay,” Psyche answered; “for a tired man
May drop his eyelids on the visible world,
To whom no dreams, when fancy flieth free,
Will bring the sunny excellence of day.
’Tis easy to destroy; God only makes.
Could my invention sweep the lucid waves
With purple shadows⁠—next create the joy
With which my life beholds them? Wherefore should
One meet the other without thought of mine,
If God did not mean beauty in them and me,
But dropped them, helpless shadows, from his sun?
There were no God, his image not being mine,
And I should seek in vain for any bliss!
Oh, lack and doubt and fear can only come
Because of plenty, confidence, and love!
Those are the shadow-forms about the feet
Of these⁠—because they are not crystal-clear
To the all-searching sun in which they live:
Dread of its loss is Beauty’s certain seal!”
Thus reasoned mourning Psyche. Suddenly
The sun would rise, and vanish Psyche’s lamp,
Absorbed in light, not swallowed in the dark.

It was a wintry time with sunny days,
With visitings of April airs and scents,
That came with sudden presence, unforetold,
As brushed from off the outer spheres of spring
In the great world where all is old and new.
Strange longings he had never known till now,
Awoke within him, flowers of rooted hope.
For a whole silent hour he would sit and gaze
Upon the distant hills, whose dazzling snow
Starred the dim blue, or down their dark ravines
Crept vaporous; until the fancy rose
That on the other side those rampart walls,
A mighty woman sat, with waiting face,
Calm as that life whose rapt intensity
Borders on death, silent, waiting for him,
To make him grand for ever with a kiss,
And send him silent through the toning worlds.

The father saw him waning. The proud sire
Beheld his pride go drooping in the cold,
Like snowdrop on its grave; and sighed deep thanks
That he was old. But evermore the son
Looked up and smiled as he had heard strange news
Across the waste, of tree-buds and primroses.
Then all at once the other mood would come,
And, like a troubled child, he would seek his father
For father-comfort, which fathers all can give:
Sure there is one great Father in the world,
Since every word of good from fathers’ lips
Falleth with such authority, although
They are but men as we! This trembling son,
Who saw the unknown death draw hourly nigher,
Sought solace in his father’s tenderness,
And made him strong to die. One shining day,
Shining with sun and snow, he came and said,
“What think you, father⁠—is death very sore?”
“My boy,” the father answered, “we will try
To make it easy with the present God.
But, as I judge, though more by hope than sight,
It seems much harder to the lookers on
Than to the man who dies. Each panting breath
We call a gasp, may be in him the cry
Of infant eagerness; or, at worst, the sob
With which the unclothed spirit, step by step.
Wades forth into the cool eternal sea.
I think, my boy, death has two sides to it⁠—
One sunny, and one dark⁠—as this round earth
Is every day half sunny and half dark.
We on the dark side call the mystery death;
They on the other, looking down in light,
Wait the glad birth, with other tears than ours.”
“Be near me, father, when I die,” he said.
“I will, my boy, until a better Father
Draws your hand out of mine. Be near in turn,
When my time comes⁠—you in the light beyond,
And knowing well the country⁠—I in the dark.”

The days went by, until the tender green
Shone through the snow in patches. Then the hope
Of life, reviving faintly, stirred his heart;
For the spring drew him⁠—warm, soft, budding spring,
With promises, and he went forth to meet her.

But he who once had strode a king on the fields,
Walked softly now; lay on the daisied grass;
And sighed sometimes in secret, that so soon
The earth, with all its suns and harvests fair,
Must lie far off, an old forsaken thing.

But though I lingering listen to the old,
Ere yet I strike new chords that seize the old
And lift their lost souls up the music-stair⁠—
Think not he was too fearful-faint of heart
To look the blank unknown full in the void;
For he had hope in God⁠—the growth of years,
Of ponderings, of childish aspirations,
Of prayers and readings and repentances;
For something in him had ever sought the peace
Of other something deeper in him still⁠—
A faint sound sighing for a harmony
With other fainter sounds, that softly drew
Nearer and nearer from the unknown depths
Where the Individual goeth out in God:
The something in him heard, and, hearing, listened,
And sought the way by which the music came,
Hoping at last to find the face of him
To whom Saint John said “Lord” with holy awe,
And on his bosom fearless leaned the while.

As his slow spring came on, the swelling life,
The new creation inside of the old,
Pressed up in buds toward the invisible.
And burst the crumbling mould wherein it lay.
Not once he thought of that still churchyard now;
He looked away from earth, and loved the sky.
One earthly notion only clung to him:⁠—
He thanked God that he died not in the cold;
“For,” said he, “I would rather go abroad
When the sun shines, and birds are singing blithe.⁠—It
may be that we know not aught of place,
Or any sense, and only live in thought;
But, knowing not, I cling to warmth and light.
I may pass forth into the sea of air
That swings its massy waves around the earth,
And I would rather go when it is full
Of light, and blue, and larks, than when gray fog
Dulls it with steams of old earth winter-sick.
Now in the dawn of summer I shall die⁠—
Sinking asleep ere sunset, I will hope,
And going with the light. And when they say,
‘He’s dead; he rests at last; his face is changed;’
I shall be saying: Yet, yet, I live, I love!’ ”

The weary nights did much to humble him;
They made the good he knew seem all ill known:
He would go by and by to school again!
“Father,” he said, “I am nothing; but Thou art!”
Like half-asleep, whole-dreaming child, he was,
Who, longing for his mother, has forgot
The arms about him, holding him to her heart:
“Mother” he murmuring moans; she wakes him up
That he may see her face, and sleep indeed.

Father! we need thy winter as thy spring;
We need thy earthquakes as thy summer showers;
But through them all thy strong arms carry us,
Thy strong heart bearing large share in our grief.
Because thou lovest goodness more than joy
In them thou lovest, thou dost let them grieve:
We must not vex thee with our peevish cries,
But look into thy face, and hold thee fast,
And say “O Father, Father!” when the pain
Seems overstrong. Remember our poor hearts:
We never grasp the zenith of the time!
We have no spring except in winter-prayers!
But we believe⁠—alas, we only hope!⁠—That
one day we shall thank thee perfectly
For every disappointment, pang, and shame,
That drove us to the bosom of thy love.

One night, as oft, he lay and could not sleep.
His spirit was a chamber, empty, dark,
Through which bright pictures passed of the outer world:
The regnant Will gazed passive on the show;
The magic tube through which the shadows came,
Witch Memory turned and stayed. In ones and troops,
Glided across the field the things that were,
Silent and sorrowful, like all things old:
Even old rose-leaves have a mournful scent,
And old brown letters are more sad than graves.

At length, as ever in such vision-hours,
Came the bright maiden, high upon her horse.
Will started all awake, passive no more,
And, necromantic sage, the apparition
That came unbid, commanded to abide.

Gathered around her form his brooding thoughts:
How had she fared, spinning her history
Into a psyche-cradle? With what wings
Would she come forth to greet the aeonian summer?
Glistening with feathery dust of silver? or
Dull red, and seared with spots of black ingrained?
“I know,” he said, “some women fail of life!
The rose hath shed her leaves: is she a rose?”

The fount of possibilities began
To gurgle, threatful, underneath the thought:
Anon the geyser-column raging rose;⁠—
For purest souls sometimes have direst fears
In ghost-hours when the shadow of the earth
Is cast on half her children, and the sun
Is busy giving daylight to the rest.
“Oh, God!” he cried, “if she be such as those!⁠—
Angels in the eyes of poet-boys, who still
Fancy the wavings of invisible wings,
But, in their own familiar, chamber-thoughts,
Common as clay, and of the trodden earth!⁠—
It cannot, cannot be! She is of God!⁠—
And yet things lovely perish! higher life
Gives deeper death! fair gifts make fouler faults!⁠—
Women themselves⁠—I dare not think the rest!”
Such thoughts went walking up and down his soul
But found at last a spot wherein to rest,
Building a resolution for the day.

The next day, and the next, he was too worn
To clothe intent in body of a deed.
A cold dry wind blew from the unkindly east,
Making him feel as he had come to the earth
Before God’s spirit moved on the water’s face,
To make it ready for him. But the third
Morning rose radiant. A genial wind
Rippled the blue air ’neath the golden sun,
And brought glad summer-tidings from the south.

He lay now in his father’s room; for there
The southern sun poured all the warmth he had.
His rays fell on the fire, alive with flames,
And turned it ghostly pale, and would have slain⁠—
Even as the sunshine of the higher life,
Quenching the glow of this, leaves but a coal.
He rose and sat him down ’twixt sun and fire;
Two lives fought in him for the mastery;
And half from each forth flowed the written stream

“Lady, I owe thee much. Stay not to look
Upon my name: I write it, but I date
From the churchyard, where it shall lie in peace,
Thou reading it. Thou know’st me not at all;
Nor dared I write, but death is crowning me
Thy equal. If my boldness yet offend,
Lo, pure in my intent, I am with the ghosts;
Where when thou comest, thou hast already known
God equal makes at first, and Death at last.”

“But pardon, lady. Ere I had begun,
My thoughts moved toward thee with a gentle flow
That bore a depth of waters: when I took
My pen to write, they rushed into a gulf,
Precipitate and foamy. Can it be
That Death who humbles all hath made me proud?”

“Lady, thy loveliness hath walked my brain,
As if I were thy heritage bequeathed
From many sires; yet only from afar
I have worshipped thee⁠—content to know the vision
Had lifted me above myself who saw,
And ta’en my angel nigh thee in thy heaven.
Thy beauty, lady, hath overflowed, and made
Another being beautiful, beside,
With virtue to aspire and be itself.
Afar as angels or the sainted dead,
Yet near as loveliness can haunt a man,
Thy form hath put on each revealing dress
Of circumstance and history, high or low,
In which, from any tale of selfless life,
Essential womanhood hath shone on me.”

“Ten years have passed away since the first time,
Which was the last, I saw thee. What have these
Made or unmade in thee?⁠—I ask myself.
O lovely in my memory! art thou
As lovely in thyself? Thy glory then
Was what God made thee: art thou such indeed?
Forgive my boldness, lady⁠—I am dead:
The dead may cry, their voices are so small.”

“I have a prayer to make thee⁠—hear the dead.
Lady, for God’s sake be as beautiful
As that white form that dwelleth in my heart;
Yea, better still, as that ideal Pure
That waketh in thee, when thou prayest God,
Or helpest thy poor neighbour. For myself
I pray. For if I die and find that she,
My woman-glory, lives in common air,
Is not so very radiant after all,
My sad face will afflict the calm-eyed ghosts,
Unused to see such rooted sorrow there.
With palm to palm my kneeling ghost implores
Thee, living lady⁠—justify my faith
In womanhood’s white-handed nobleness,
And thee, its revelation unto me.”

“But I bethink me:⁠—If thou turn thy thoughts
Upon thyself, even for that great sake
Of purity and conscious whiteness’ self,
Thou wilt but half succeed. The other half
Is to forget the former, yea, thyself,
Quenching thy moonlight in the blaze of day,
Turning thy being full unto thy God.
Be thou in him a pure, twice holy child,
Doing the right with sweet unconsciousness⁠—
Having God in thee, thy completing soul.”

“Lady, I die; the Father holds me up.
It is not much to thee that I should die;
It may be much to know he holds me up.”

“I thank thee, lady, for the gentle look
Which crowned me from thine eyes ten years ago,
Ere, clothed in nimbus of the setting sun,
Thee from my dazzled eyes thy horse did bear,
Proud of his burden. My dull tongue was mute⁠—
I was a fool before thee; but my silence
Was the sole homage possible to me then:
That now I speak, and fear not, is thy gift.
The same sweet look be possible to thee
For evermore! I bless thee with thine own,
And say farewell, and go into my grave⁠—
No, to the sapphire heaven of all my hopes.”

Followed his name in full, and then the name
Of the green churchyard where his form should lie.

Back to his couch he crept, weary, and said:
“O God, I am but an attempt at life!
Sleep falls again ere I am full awake.
Light goeth from me in the morning hour.
I have seen nothing clearly; felt no thrill
Of pure emotion, save in dreams, ah⁠—dreams!
The high Truth has but flickered in my soul⁠—
Even at such times, in wide blue midnight hours,
When, dawning sudden on my inner world,
New stars came forth, revealing unknown depths,
New heights of silence, quelling all my sea,
And for a moment I saw formless fact,
And knew myself a living lonely thought,
Isled in the hyaline of Truth alway!
I have not reaped earth’s harvest, O my God;
Have gathered but a few poor wayside flowers,
Harebells, red poppies, daisies, eyebrights blue⁠—
Gathered them by the way, for comforting!
Have I aimed proudly, therefore aimed too low,
Striving for something visible in my thought,
And not the unseen thing hid far in thine?
Make me content to be a primrose-flower
Among thy nations, so the fair truth, hid
In the sweet primrose, come awake in me,
And I rejoice, an individual soul,
Reflecting thee⁠—as truly then divine
As if I towered the angel of the sun.
Once, in a southern eve, a glowing worm
Gave me a keener joy than the heaven of stars:
Thou camest in the worm nearer me then!
Nor do I think, were I that green delight,
I would change to be the shadowy evening star.
Ah, make me, Father, anything thou wilt,
So be thou will it! I am safe with thee.
I laugh exulting. Make me something, God⁠—
Clear, sunny, veritable purity
Of mere existence, in thyself content.
And seeking no compare. Sure I have reaped
Earth’s harvest if I find this holy death!⁠—
Now I am ready; take me when thou wilt.”

He laid the letter in his desk, with seal
And superscription. When his sister came,
He told her where to find it⁠—afterwards.

As the slow eve, through paler, darker shades,
Insensibly declines, until at last
The lordly day is but a memory,
So died he. In the hush of noon he died.
The sun shone on⁠—why should he not shine on?
Glad summer noises rose from all the land;
The love of God lay warm on hill and plain:
’Tis well to die in summer. When the breath,
After a hopeless pause, returned no more,
The father fell upon his knees, and said:
“O God, I thank thee; it is over now!
Through the sore time thy hand has led him well.
Lord, let me follow soon, and be at rest.”
Therewith he rose, and comforted the maid,
Who in her brother had lost the pride of life,
And wept as all her heaven were only rain.

Of the loved lady, little more I know.
I know not if, when she had read his words,
She rose in haste, and to her chamber went,
And shut the door; nor if, when she came forth,
A dawn of holier purpose gleamed across
The sadness of her brow. But this I know,
That, on a warm autumnal afternoon,
When headstone-shadows crossed three neighbour graves,
And, like an ended prayer, the empty church
Stood in the sunshine, or a cenotaph,
A little boy, who watched a cow near by
Gather her milk where alms of clover-fields
Lay scattered on the sides of silent roads,
All sudden saw, nor knew whence she had come,
A lady, veiled, alone, and very still,
Seated upon a grave. Long time she sat
And moved not, weeping sore, the watcher said⁠—
Though how he knew she wept, were hard to tell.
At length, slow-leaning on her elbow down,
She hid her face a while in the short grass,
And pulled a something small from off the mound⁠—
A blade of grass it must have been, he thought,
For nothing else was there, not even a daisy⁠—
And put it in a letter. Then she rose,
And glided silent forth, over the wall,
Where the two steps on this side and on that
Shorten the path from westward to the church.⁠—
The clang of hoofs and sound of light, swift wheels
Arose and died upon the listener’s ear.

The Homeless Ghost

Through still, bare streets, and cold moonshine
His homeward way he bent;
The clocks gave out the midnight sign
As lost in thought he went
Along the rampart’s ocean-line,
Where, high above the tossing brine,
Seaward his lattice leant.

He knew not why he left the throng,
Why there he could not rest,
What something pained him in the song
And mocked him in the jest,
Or why, the flitting crowd among,
A moveless moonbeam lay so long
Athwart one lady’s breast!

He watched, but saw her speak to none,
Saw no one speak to her;
Like one decried, she stood alone,
From the window did not stir;
Her hair by a haunting gust was blown,
Her eyes in the shadow strangely shown,
She looked a wanderer.

He reached his room, he sought a book
His brooding to beguile;
But ever he saw her pallid look,
Her face too still to smile.
An hour he sat in his fireside nook,
The time flowed past like a silent brook,
Not a word he read the while.

Vague thoughts absorbed his passive brain
Of love that bleeding lies,
Of hoping ever and hoping in vain,
Of a sorrow that never dies⁠—
When a sudden spatter of angry rain
Smote against every window-pane,
And he heard far sea-birds’ cries.

He looked from the lattice: the misty moon
Hardly a glimmer gave;
The wind was like one that hums a tune,
The first low gathering stave;
The ocean lay in a sullen swoon,
With a moveless, monotonous, murmured croon
Like the moaning of a slave.

Sudden, with masterful, angry blare
It howled from the watery west:
The storm was up, he had left his lair!
The night would be no jest!
He turned: a lady sat in his chair!
Through her loose dim robe her arm came bare,
And it lay across her breast.

She sat a white queen on a ruined throne,
A lily bowed with blight;
In her eyes the darkness about was blown
By flashes of liquid light;
Her skin with very whiteness shone;
Back from her forehead loosely thrown
Her hair was dusk as night.

Wet, wet it hung, and wept like weeds
Down her pearly shoulders bare;
The pale drops glistened like diamond beads
Caught in a silken snare;
As the silver-filmy husk to its seeds
Her dank robe clings, and but half recedes
Her form so shadowy fair.

Doubting she gazed in his wondering face,
Wonder his utterance ties;
She searches, like one in forgetful case,
For something within his eyes,
For something that love holds ever in chase,
For something that is, and has no place,
But away in the thinking lies.

Speechless he ran, brought a wrap of wool,
And a fur that with down might vie;
Listless, into the gathering pool
She dropped them, and let them lie.
He piled the hearth with fagots so full
That the flames, as if from the log of Yule,
Up the chimney went roaring high.

Then she spoke, and lovely to heart and ear
Was her voice, though broke by pain;
Afar it sounded, though sweet and clear,
As if from out of the rain;
As if from out of the night-wind drear
It came like the voice of one in fear
Lest she should no welcome gain.

“I am too far off to feel the cold,
Too cold to feel the fire;
It cannot get through the heap of mould
That soaks in the drip from the spire:
Cerement of wax ’neath cloth of gold,
’Neath fur and wool in fold on fold,
Freezes in frost so dire.”

Her voice and her eyes and her cheek so white
Thrilled him through heart and brain;
Wonder and pity and love unite
In a passion of bodiless pain;
Her beauty possessed him with strange delight:
He was out with her in the live wan night,
With her in the blowing rain!

Sudden she rose, she kneeled, she flung
Her loveliness at his feet:
“I am tired of being blown and swung
In the rain and the snow and the sleet!
But better no rest than stillness among
Things whose names would defile my tongue!
How I hate the mouldy sheet!

“Ah, though a ghost, I’m a lady still!”
The youth recoiled aghast.
Her eyes grew wide and pale and chill
With a terror that surpassed.
He caught her hand: a freezing thrill
Stung to his wrist, but with steadfast will
He held it warm and fast.

“What can I do to save thee, dear?”
At the word she sprang upright;
On tiptoe she stood, he bent his ear,
She whispered, whispered light.
She withdrew; she gazed with an asking fear:
Like one that looks on his lady’s bier
He stood, with a face ghost-white.

“Six times⁠—in vain, oh hapless maid!⁠—
I have humbled myself to sue!
This is the last: as the sunset decayed,
Out with the twilight I grew,
And about the city flitted and strayed,
A wandering, lonely, forsaken shade:
No one saw me but you.”

He shivered, he shook, he had turned to clay,
Vile fear had gone into his blood;
His face was a dismal ashy gray,
Through his heart crept slime and mud;
The lady stood in a still dismay,
She drooped, she shrank, she withered away
Like a half-blown frozen bud.

“Speak once more. Am I frightful then?
I live, though they call it death;
I am only cold! Say ‘dear’ again.”
But scarce could he heave a breath;
Over a dank and steaming fen
He floated astray from the world of men,
A lost, half-conscious wraith.

“Ah, ’tis the last time! Save me!” Her cry
Entered his heart, and lay.
But he loved the sunshine, the golden sky,
And the ghosts’ moonlight is gray!⁠—
As feverous visions flit and fly
And without a motion elude the eye,
She stood three steps away.

But oh, her eyes!⁠—refusal base
Those live-soul-stars had slain!
Frozen eyes in an icy face
They had grown. Like a ghost of the brain,
Beside the lattice, thought-moved in space,
She stood with a doleful despairing grace:
The fire burned! clanged the rain!

Faded or fled, she had vanished quite!
The loud wind sank to a sigh;
Pale faces without paled the face of night,
Sweeping the window by;
Some to the glass pressed a cheek of fright,
Some shot a gleam of decaying light
From a flickering, uncertain eye.

Whence did it come, from the sky or the deep,
That faint, long-cadenced wail?
From the closing door of the down-way steep,
His own bosom, or out of the gale?
From the land where dead dreams, or dead maidens sleep?
Out of every night to come will creep
That cry his heart to quail!

The clouds had broken, the wind was at rest,
The sea would be still ere morn,
The moon had gone down behind its breast
Save the tip of one blunt horn:
Was that the ghost-angel without a nest⁠—
Across the moonset far in the west
That thin white vapour borne?

He turned from the lattice: the fire-lit room
With its ghost-forsaken chair
Was cold and drear as a rifled tomb,
Shameful and dreamless and bare!
Filled it was with his own soul’s gloom,
With the sense of a traitor’s merited doom,
With a lovely ghost’s despair!

He had driven a lady, and lightly clad,
Out in the stormy cold!
Was she a ghost?⁠—Divinely sad
Are the people of Hades old!
A wandering ghost? Oh, self-care bad,
Caitiff and craven and cowering, which had
Refused her an earthly fold!

Ill had she fared, his lovely guest!⁠—
A passion of wild self-blame
Tore the heart that failed in the test
With a thousand hooks of shame,
Bent his proud head on his heaving breast,
Shore the plume from his ancient crest,
Puffed at his ancient name.

He sickened with scorn of a fallen will,
With love and remorse he wept;
He sank and kissed her footprints chill
And the track by her garment swept;
He kneeled by her chair, all ice-cold still,
Dropped his head in it, moaned until
For weariness he slept.

He slept until the flaming sun
Laughed at the by-gone dark:
“A frightful dream!⁠—but the night is done,”
He said, “and I hear the lark!”
All day he held out; with the evening gun
A booming terror his brain did stun,
And Doubt, the jackal, gan bark.

Followed the lion, Conviction, fast,
And the truth no dream he knew!
Night after night raved the conscience-blast,
But stilled as the morning grew.
When seven slow moons had come and passed
His self-reproach aside he cast,
And the truth appeared untrue.

A lady fair⁠—old story vile!⁠—
Would make his heart her boast:
In the growing glamour of her smile
He forgot the lovely ghost:
Forgot her for bitterness wrapt in wile,
For the lady was false as a crocodile,
And her heart was a cave of frost.

Then the cold white face, with its woe divine,
Came back in the hour of sighs:
Not always with comfort to those that pine
The dear true faces arise!
He yearned for her, dreamed of her, prayed for a sign;
He wept for her pleading voice, and the shine
Of her solitary eyes.

“With thy face so still, which I made so sad⁠—
Ah me! which I might have wooed⁠—
Thou holdest my heart in a love not glad,
Sorrowful, shame-subdued!
Come to me, lady, in pardon clad;
Come to my dreams, white Aidead,
For on thee all day I brood!”

She came not. He sought her in churchyards old,
In churchyards by the sea;
And in many a church, when the midnight tolled
And the moon shone eerily,
Down to the crypt he crept, grown bold,
Sat all night in the dead men’s cold,
And called to her: never came she.

Praying forgiveness more and more,
And her love at any cost,
Pining and sighing and longing sore
He grew like a creature lost;
Thin and spectral his body wore,
He faded out at the ghostly door,
And was himself a ghost.

But if he found the lady then,
So sorrowfully lost
For lack of the love ’mong earthly men
That was ready to brave love’s cost,
I know not till I drop my pen,
Wander away from earthly ken,
And am myself a ghost.

Abu Midjan

“If I sit in the dust
For lauding good wine,
Ha, ha! it is just:
So sits the vine!”

Abu Midjan sang as he sat in chains,
For the blood of the grape ran the juice of his veins.
The Prophet had said, “O Faithful, drink not!”
Abu Midjan drank till his heart was hot;
Yea, he sang a song in praise of wine,
He called it good names⁠—a joy divine,
The giver of might, the opener of eyes,
Love’s handmaid, the water of Paradise!
Therefore Saad his chief spake words of blame,
And set him in irons⁠—a fettered flame;
But he sings of the wine as he sits in his chains,
For the blood of the grape runs the juice of his veins:

“I will not think
That the Prophet said
‘Ye shall not drink
Of the flowing red!’ ”

“ ’Tis a drenched brain
Whose after-sting
Cries out, ‘Refrain:
’Tis an evil thing!’

“But I will dare,
With a goodly drought,
To drink, nor spare
Till my thirst be out.

“I do not laugh
Like a Christian fool
But in silence quaff
The liquor cool

“At door of tent
’Neath evening star,
With daylight spent,
And Uriel afar!

“Then, through the sky,
Lo, the emerald hills!
My faith swells high,
My bosom thrills:

“I see them hearken,
The Houris that wait!
Their dark eyes darken
The diamond gate!

“I hear the float
Of their chant divine,
And my heart like a boat
Sails thither on wine!

“Can an evil thing
Make beauty more?
Or a sinner bring
To the heavenly door?

“The sun-rain fine
Would sink and escape,
But is drunk by the vine,
Is stored in the grape:

“And the prisoned light
I free again:
It flows in might
Through my shining brain

“I love and I know;
The truth is mine;
I walk in the glow
Of the sun-bred wine.

“I will not think
That the Prophet said
‘Ye shall not drink
Of the flowing red!’

“For his promises, lo,
Sevenfold they shine
When the channels o’erflow
With the singing wine!

“But I care not, I!⁠—’tis a small annoy
To sit in chains for a heavenly joy!”

Away went the song on the light wind borne;
His head sank down, and a ripple of scorn
Shook the hair that flowed from his curling lip
As he eyed his brown limbs in the iron’s grip.

Sudden his forehead he lifted high:
A faint sound strayed like a moth-wing by!
Like beacons his eyes burst blazing forth:
A dust-cloud he spied in the distant north!
A noise and a smoke on the plain afar?
’Tis the cloud and the clang of the Muslim war!
He leapt aloft like a tiger snared;
The wine in his veins through his visage flared;
He tore at his fetters in bootless ire,
He called the Prophet, he named his sire;
From his lips, with wild shout, the Tecbir burst;
He danced in his irons; the Giaours he cursed;
And his eyes they flamed like a beacon dun,
Or like wine in the crystal twixt eye and sun.

The lady of Saad heard him shout,
Heard his fetters ring on the stones about
The heart of a warrior she understood,
And the rage of the thwarted battle-mood:
Her name, with the cry of an angry prayer,
He called but once, and the lady was there.

“The Giaour!” he panted, “the Godless brute!
And me like a camel tied foot to foot!
Let me go, and I swear by Allah’s fear
At sunset I don again this gear,
Or lie in a heaven of starry eyes,
Kissed by moon-maidens of Paradise!
O lady, grant me the death of the just!
Hark to the hurtle! see the dust!”

With ready fingers the noble dame
Unlocked her husband’s iron blame;
Brought his second horse, his Abdon, out,
And his second hauberk, light and stout;
Harnessed the warrior, and hight him go
An angel of vengeance upon the foe.

With clank of steel and thud of hoof
Away he galloped; she climbed the roof.

She sees the cloud and the flashes that leap
From the scythe-shaped swords inside it that sweep
Down with back-stroke the disordered swath:
Thither he speeds, a bolt of wrath!
Straight as an arrow she sees him go,
Abu Midjan, the singer, upon the foe!
Like an eagle he vanishes in the cloud,
And the thunder of battle bursts more loud,
Mingled of crashes and blows and falls,
Of the whish that severs the throat that calls,
Of neighing and shouting and groaning grim:
Abu Midjan, she sees no more of him!
Northward the battle drifts afar
On the flowing tide of the holy war.

Lonely across the desert sand,
From his wrist by its thong hung his clotted brand,
Red in the sunset’s level flame
Back to his bonds Abu Midjan came.

“Lady, I swear your Saad’s horse⁠—
The Prophet himself might have rode a worse!
Like the knots of a serpent the play of his flesh
As he tore to the quarry in Allah’s mesh!
I forgot him, and mowed at the traitor weeds,
Which fell before me like rushes and reeds,
Or like the tall poppies that sudden drop low
Their heads to an urchin’s unstrung bow!
Fled the Giaour; the faithful flew after to kill;
I turned to surrender: beneath me still
Was Abdon unjaded, fresh in force,
Faithful and fearless⁠—a heavenly horse!
Give him water, lady, and barley to eat;
Then haste thee and fetter the wine-bibber’s feet.”

To the terrace he went, and she to the stall;
She tended the horse like guest in hall,
Then to the warrior unhasting returned.
The fire of the fight in his eyes yet burned,
But he sat in a silence that might betoken
One ashamed that his heart had spoken⁠—
Though where was the word to breed remorse?
He had lauded only his chief’s brave horse!
Not a word she spoke, but his fetters locked;
He watched with a smile that himself bemocked;
She left him seated in caitiff-plight,
Like one that had feared and fled the fight.

But what singer ever sat lonely long
Ere the hidden fountain burst in song!
The battle wine foamed in the warrior’s veins,
And he sang sword-tempest who sat in chains.

“Oh, the wine
Of the vine
Is a feeble thing!
In the rattle
Of battle
The true grapes spring!

“When on whir
Of Tecbir
Allah’s wrath flies,
And the power
Of the Giaour
A blasted leaf lies!

“When on force
Of the horse
The arm flung abroad
Is sweeping,
And reaping
The harvest of God!

“Ha! they drop
From the top
To the sear heap below!
Ha! deeper,
Down steeper,
The infidels go!

“Azrael
Sheer to hell
Shoots the foul shoals!
There Monker
And Nakir
Torture their souls!

“But when drop
On their crop
The scimitars red,
And under
War’s thunder
The faithful lie dead,

“Oh, bright
Is the light
On hero slow breaking!
Rapturous faces
Bent for embraces
Watch for his waking!

“And he hears
In his ears
The voice of Life’s river,
Like a song
Of the strong,
Jubilant ever!

“Oh, the wine
Of the vine
May lead to the gates,
But the rattle
Of battle
Wakes the angel who waits!

“To the lord
Of the sword
Open it must!
The drinker,
The thinker
Sits in the dust!

“He dreams
Of the gleams
Of their garments of white;
He misses
Their kisses,
The maidens of light!

“They long
For the strong
Who has burst through alarms⁠—
Up, by the labour
Of stirrup and sabre,
Up to their arms!

“Oh, the wine of the grape is a feeble ghost!
The wine of the fight is the joy of a host!”

When Saad came home from the far pursuit,
An hour he sat, and an hour was mute.
Then he opened his mouth: “Ah, wife, the fight
Had been lost full sure, but an arm of might
Sudden rose up on the crest of the battle,
Flashed blue lightnings, thundered steel rattle,
Took up the fighting, and drove it on⁠—
Enoch sure, or the good Saint John!
Wherever he leaped, like a lion he,
The battle was thickest, or soon to be!
Wherever he sprang with his lion roar,
In a minute the battle was there no more!
With a headlong fear, the sinners fled,
And we swept them down the steep of the dead:
Before us, not from us, did they flee,
They ceased in the depths of a new Red Sea!
But him who saved us we saw no more;
He went as he came, by a secret door!
And strangest of all⁠—nor think I err
If a miracle I for truth aver⁠—
I was close to him thrice⁠—the holy Force
Wore my silver-ringed hauberk, rode Abdon my horse!”

The lady rose up, withholding her word,
And led to the terrace her wondering lord,
Where, song-soothed, and weary with battle strain,
Abu Midjan sat counting the links of his chain:
“The battle was raging, he raging worse;
I freed him, harnessed him, gave him thy horse.”

“Abu Midjan! the singer of love and of wine!
The arm of the battle, it also was thine?
Rise up, shake the irons from off thy feet:
For the lord of the fight are fetters meet?
If thou wilt, then drink till thou be hoar:
Allah shall judge thee; I judge no more!”

Abu Midjan arose; he flung aside
The clanking fetters, and thus he cried:
“If thou give me to God and his decrees,
Nor purge my sin with the shame of these,
Wrath against me I dare not store:
In the name of Allah, I drink no more!”

An Old Story

A Book of Dreams

To Aurelio Saffi

To God and man be simply true;
Do as thou hast been wont to do;
Bring out thy treasures, old and new⁠—
Mean all the same when said to you.

I love thee: thou art calm and strong;
Firm in the right, mild to the wrong;
Thy heart, in every raging throng,
A chamber shut for prayer and song.

Defeat thou know’st not, canst not know,
Although thy aims so lofty go
They need as long to root and grow
As infant hills to reach the snow.

Press on and prosper, holy friend!
I, weak and ignorant, would lend
A voice, thee, strong and wise, to send
Prospering onward without end.

A. M. D.

Methinks I see thee, lying straight and low,
Silent and darkling, in thy earthy bed,
The mighty strength in which I trusted, fled,
The long arms lying careless of kiss or blow;
On thy tall form I see the night-robe flow
Down from the pale, composed face⁠—thy head
Crowned with its own dark curls: though thou wast dead,
They dressed thee as for sleep, and left thee so!
My heart, with cares and questionings oppressed,
Not oft since thou didst leave us turns to thee;
But wait, my brother, till I too am dead,
And thou shalt find that heart more true, more free,
More ready in thy love to take its rest,
Than when we lay together in one bed.

A Memorial of Africa

A Gift

My gift would find thee fast asleep,
And arise a dream in thee;
A violet sky o’er the roll and sweep
Of a purple and pallid sea;
And a crescent moon from my sky should creep
In the golden dream to thee.

Thou shouldst lay thee down, and sadly list
To the wail of our cold birth-time;
And build thee a temple, glory-kissed,
In the heart of the sunny clime;
Its columns should rise in a music-mist,
And its roofs in a spirit-rhyme.

Its pillars the solemn hills should bind
’Neath arches of starry deeps;
Its floor the earth all veined and lined;
Its organ the ocean-sweeps;
And, swung in the hands of the grey-robed wind,
Its censers the blossom-heaps.

And ’tis almost done; for in this my rhyme,
Thanks to thy mirror-soul,
Thou wilt see the mountains, and hear the chime
Of the waters after the roll;
And the stars of my sky thy sky will climb,
And with heaven roof in the whole.

The Man of Songs

“Thou wanderest in the land of dreams,
O man of many songs!
To thee what is, but looks and seems;
No realm to thee belongs!”

“Seest thou those mountains, faint and far,
O spirit caged and tame?”
“Blue clouds like distant hills they are,
And like is not the same.”

“Nay, nay; I know each mountain well,
Each cliff, and peak, and dome!
In that cloudland, in one high dell,
Nesteth my little home.”

Better Things

Better to smell the violet
Than sip the glowing wine;
Better to hearken to a brook
Than watch a diamond shine.

Better to have a loving friend
Than ten admiring foes;
Better a daisy’s earthy root
Than a gorgeous, dying rose.

Better to love in loneliness
Than bask in love all day;
Better the fountain in the heart
Than the fountain by the way.

Better be fed by mother’s hand
Than eat alone at will;
Better to trust in God, than say,
My goods my storehouse fill.

Better to be a little wise
Than in knowledge to abound;
Better to teach a child than toil
To fill perfection’s round.

Better to sit at some man’s feet
Than thrill a listening state;
Better suspect that thou art proud
Than be sure that thou art great.

Better to walk the realm unseen
Than watch the hour’s event;
Better the “Well done, faithful slave!”
Than the air with shoutings rent.

Better to have a quiet grief
Than many turbulent joys;
Better to miss thy manhood’s aim
Than sacrifice the boy’s.

Better a death when work is done
Than earth’s most favoured birth;
Better a child in God’s great house
Than the king of all the earth.

The Journey

Prayer

We doubt the word that tells us: Ask,
And ye shall have your prayer;
We turn our thoughts as to a task,
With will constrained and rare.

And yet we have; these scanty prayers
Yield gold without alloy:
O God, but he that trusts and dares
Must have a boundless joy!

Rest

I walked all night: the darkness did not yield.
Around me fell a mist, a weary rain,
Enduring long. At length the dawn revealed

A temple’s front, high-lifted from the plain.
Closed were the lofty doors that led within;
But by a wicket one might entrance gain.

’Twas awe and silence when I entered in;
The night, the weariness, the rain were lost
In hopeful spaces. First I heard a thin

Sweet sound of voices low, together tossed,
As if they sought some harmony to find
Which they knew once, but none of all that host

Could wile the far-fled music back to mind.
Loud voices, distance-low, wandered along
The pillared paths, and up the arches twined

With sister arches, rising, throng on throng,
Up to the roof’s dim height. At broken times
The voices gathered to a burst of song,

But parted sudden, and were but single rimes
By single bells through Sabbath morning sent,
That have no thought of harmony or chimes.

Hopeful confusion! Who could be content
Looking and hearkening from the distant door?
I entered further. Solemnly it went⁠—

Thy voice, Truth’s herald, walking the untuned roar,
Calm and distinct, powerful and sweet and fine:
I loved and listened, listened and loved more.

May not the faint harp, tremulous, combine
Its ghostlike sounds with organ’s mighty tone?
Let my poor song be taken in to thine.

Will not thy heart, with tempests of its own,
Yet hear aeolian sighs from thin chords blown?

Light

First-born of the creating Voice!
Minister of God’s Spirit, who wast sent
Waiting upon him first, what time he went
Moving about mid the tumultuous noise
Of each unpiloted element
Upon the face of the void formless deep!
Thou who didst come unbodied and alone
Ere yet the sun was set his rule to keep,
Or ever the moon shone,
Or e’er the wandering star-flocks forth were driven!
Thou garment of the Invisible, whose skirt
Sweeps, glory-giving, over earth and heaven!
Thou comforter, be with me as thou wert
When first I longed for words, to be
A radiant garment for my thought, like thee!

We lay us down in sorrow,
Wrapt in the old mantle of our mother Night;
In vexing dreams we strive until the morrow;
Grief lifts our eyelids up⁠—and Lo, the light!
The sunlight on the wall! And visions rise
Of shining leaves that make sweet melodies;
Of wind-borne waves with thee upon their crests;
Of rippled sands on which thou rainest down;
Of quiet lakes that smooth for thee their breasts;
Of clouds that show thy glory as their own;
O joy! O joy! the visions are gone by!
Light, gladness, motion, are reality!

Thou art the god of earth. The skylark springs
Far up to catch thy glory on his wings;
And thou dost bless him first that highest soars.
The bee comes forth to see thee; and the flowers
Worship thee all day long, and through the skies
Follow thy journey with their earnest eyes.
River of life, thou pourest on the woods,
And on thy waves float out the wakening buds;
The trees lean toward thee, and, in loving pain,
Keep turning still to see thee yet again;
South sides of pines, haunted all day by thee,
Bear violins that tremble humanly.
And nothing in thine eyes is mean or low:
Where’er thou art, on every side,
All things are glorified;
And where thou canst not come, there thou dost throw
Beautiful shadows, made out of the dark,
That else were shapeless; now it bears thy mark.

And men have worshipped thee.
The Persian, on his mountain-top,
Waits kneeling till thy sun go up,
God-like in his serenity.
All-giving, and none-gifted, he draws near,
And the wide earth waits till his face appear⁠—
Longs patient. And the herald glory leaps
Along the ridges of the outlying clouds,
Climbing the heights of all their towering steeps.
Sudden, still multitudinous laughter crowds
The universal face: Lo, silently,
Up cometh he, the never-closing eye!
Symbol of Deity, men could not be
Farthest from truth when they were kneeling unto thee!

Thou plaything of the child,
When from the water’s surface thou dost spring,
Thyself upon his chamber ceiling fling,
And there, in mazy dance and motion wild,
Disport thyself⁠—etherial, undefiled.
Capricious, like the thinkings of the child!
I am a child again, to think of thee
In thy consummate glee.
How I would play with thee, athirst to climb
On sloping ladders of thy moted beams,
When through the gray dust darting in long streams!
How marvel at the dusky glimmering red,
With which my closed fingers thou hadst made
Like rainy clouds that curtain the sun’s bed!
And how I loved thee always in the moon!
But most about the harvest-time,
When corn and moonlight made a mellow tune,
And thou wast grave and tender as a cooing dove!
And then the stars that flashed cold, deathless love!
And the ghost-stars that shimmered in the tide!
And more mysterious earthly stars,
That shone from windows of the hill and glen⁠—
Thee prisoned in with lattice-bars,
Mingling with household love and rest of weary men!
And still I am a child, thank God!⁠—to spy
Thee starry stream from bit of broken glass
Upon the brown earth undescried,
Is a found thing to me, a gladness high,
A spark that lights joy’s altar-fire within,
A thought of hope to prophecy akin,
That from my spirit fruitless will not pass.

Thou art the joy of age:
Thy sun is dear when long the shadow falls.
Forth to its friendliness the old man crawls,
And, like the bird hung out in his poor cage
To gather song from radiance, in his chair
Sits by the door; and sitteth there
His soul within him, like a child that lies
Half dreaming, with half-open eyes,
At close of a long afternoon in summer⁠—
High ruins round him, ancient ruins, where
The raven is almost the only comer⁠—
Half dreams, half broods, in wonderment
At thy celestial ascent
Through rifted loop to light upon the gold
That waves its bloom in some high airy rent:
So dreams the old man’s soul, that is not old,
But sleepy mid the ruins that infold.

What soul-like changes, evanescent moods,
Upon the face of the still passive earth,
Its hills, and fields, and woods,
Thou with thy seasons and thy hours art ever calling forth!
Even like a lord of music bent
Over his instrument,
Giving to carol, now to tempest birth!
When, clear as holiness, the morning ray
Casts the rock’s dewy darkness at its feet,
Mottling with shadows all the mountain gray;
When, at the hour of sovereign noon,
Infinite silent cataracts sheet
Shadowless through the air of thunder-breeding June;
When now a yellower glory slanting passes
’Twixt longer shadows o’er the meadow grasses;
And now the moon lifts up her shining shield,
High on the peak of a cloud-hill revealed;
Now crescent, low, wandering sun-dazed away,
Unconscious of her own star-mingled ray,
Her still face seeming more to think than see,
Makes the pale world lie dreaming dreams of thee!
No mood, eternal or ephemeral,
But wakes obedient at thy silent call!

Of operative single power,
And simple unity the one emblem,
Yet all the colours that our passionate eyes devour,
In rainbow, moonbow, or in opal gem,
Are the melodious descant of divided thee.
Lo thee in yellow sands! Lo thee
In the blue air and sea!
In the green corn, with scarlet poppies lit,
Thy half-souls parted, patient thou dost sit.
Lo thee in dying triumphs of the west!
Lo thee in dew-drop’s tiny breast!
Thee on the vast white cloud that floats away,
Bearing upon its skirt a brown moon-ray!
Gold-regent, thou dost spendthrift throw
Thy hoardless wealth of gleam and glow!
The thousand hues and shades upon the flowers
Are all the pastime of thy leisure hours;
The jewelled ores in mines that hidden be,
Are dead till touched by thee.

Everywhere,
Thou art lancing through the air!
Every atom from another
Takes thee, gives thee to his brother;
Continually,
Thou art wetting the wet sea,
Bathing its sluggish woods below,
Making the salt flowers bud and blow;
Silently,
Workest thou, and ardently,
Waking from the night of nought
Into being and to thought;
Influences
Every beam of thine dispenses,
Potent, subtle, reaching far,
Shooting different from each star.
Not an iron rod can lie
In circle of thy beamy eye,
But its look doth change it so
That it cannot choose but show
Thou, the worker, hast been there;
Yea, sometimes, on substance rare,
Thou dost leave thy ghostly mark
Even in what men call the dark.
Ever doing, ever showing,
Thou dost set our hearts a glowing⁠—
Universal something sent
To shadow forth the Excellent!

When the firstborn affections⁠—
Those winged seekers of the world within,
That search about in all directions,
Some bright thing for themselves to win⁠—
Through pathless woods, through home-bred fogs,
Through stony plains, through treacherous bogs,
Long, long, have followed faces fair,
Fair soul-less faces, vanished into air,
And darkness is around them and above,
Desolate of aught to love,
And through the gloom on every side,
Strange dismal forms are dim descried,
And the air is as the breath
From the lips of void-eyed Death,
And the knees are bowed in prayer
To the Stronger than despair⁠—
Then the ever-lifted cry,
“Give us light, or we shall die,”
Cometh to the Father’s ears,
And he hearkens, and he hears:⁠—
As some slow sun would glimmer forth
From sunless winter of the north,
We, hardly trusting hopeful eyes,
Discern and doubt the opening skies.
From a misty gray that lies on
Our dim future’s far horizon,
It grows a fresh aurora, sent
Up the spirit’s firmament,
Telling, through the vapours dun,
Of the coming, coming sun!
’Tis Truth awaking in the soul!
His Righteousness to make us whole!
And what shall we, this Truth receiving,
Though with but a faint believing,
Call it but eternal Light?
’Tis the morning, ’twas the night!

All things most excellent
Are likened unto thee, excellent thing!
Yea, he who from the Father forth was sent,
Came like a lamp, to bring,
Across the winds and wastes of night,
The everlasting light.
Hail, Word of God, the telling of his thought!
Hail, Light of God, the making-visible!
Hail, far-transcending glory brought
In human form with man to dwell⁠—
Thy dazzling gone; thy power not less
To show, irradiate, and bless;
The gathering of the primal rays divine
Informing chaos, to a pure sunshine!

Dull horrid pools no motion making!
No bubble on the surface breaking!
The dead air lies, without a sound,
Heavy and moveless on the marshy ground.

Rushing winds and snow-like drift,
Forceful, formless, fierce, and swift!
Hair-like vapours madly riven!
Waters smitten into dust!
Lightning through the turmoil driven,
Aimless, useless, yet it must!

Gentle winds through forests calling!
Bright birds through the thick leaves glancing!
Solemn waves on sea-shores falling!
White sails on blue waters dancing!
Mountain streams glad music giving!
Children in the clear pool laving!
Yellow corn and green grass waving!
Long-haired, bright-eyed maidens living!
Light, O radiant, it is thou!
Light!⁠—we know our Father now!

Forming ever without form;
Showing, but thyself unseen;
Pouring stillness on the storm;
Breathing life where death had been!
If thy light thou didst draw in,
Death and Chaos soon were out,
Weltering o’er the slimy sea,
Riding on the whirlwind’s rout,
In wild unmaking energy!
God, be round us and within,
Fighting darkness, slaying sin.

Father of Lights, high-lost, unspeakable,
On whom no changing shadow ever fell!
Thy light we know not, are content to see;
Thee we know not, and are content to be!⁠—
Nay, nay! until we know thee, not content are we!
But, when thy wisdom cannot be expressed,
Shall we imagine darkness in thy breast?
Our hearts awake and witness loud for thee!
The very shadows on our souls that lie,
Good witness to the light supernal bear;
The something ’twixt us and the sky
Could cast no shadow if light were not there!
If children tremble in the night,
It is because their God is light!
The shining of the common day
Is mystery still, howe’er it ebb and flow⁠—
Behind the seeing orb, the secret lies:
Thy living light’s eternal play,
Its motions, whence or whither, who shall know?⁠—
Behind the life itself, its fountains rise!
In thee, the Light, the darkness hath no place;
And we have seen thee in the Saviour’s face.

Enlighten me, O Light!⁠—why art thou such?
Why art thou awful to our eyes, and sweet?
Cherished as love, and slaying with a touch?
Why in thee do the known and unknown meet?
Why swift and tender, strong and delicate?
Simple as truth, yet manifold in might?
Why does one love thee, and another hate?
Why cleave my words to the portals of my speech
When I a goodly matter would indite?
Why mounts my thought of thee beyond my reach?
—In vain to follow thee, I thee beseech,
For God is light.

When, long ago, the daring of my youth
Drew nigh thy greatness with a little thing,
Thou didst receive me; and thy sky of truth

Has domed me since, a heaven of sheltering,
Made homely by the tenderness and grace
Which round thy absolute friendship ever fling

A radiant atmosphere. Turn not thy face
From that small part of earnest thanks, I pray,
Which, spoken, leaves much more in speechless case.

I see thee far before me on thy way
Up the great peaks, and striding stronger still;
Thy intellect unrivalled in its sway,

Upheld and ordered by a regnant will;
Thy wisdom, seer and priest of holy fate,
Searching all truths its prophecy to fill;

But this my joy: throned in thy heart so great,
High Love is queen, and sits without a mate.

Were I a Skilful Painter

Were I a skilful painter,
My pencil, not my pen,
Should try to teach thee hope and fear,
And who would blame me then?⁠—
Fear of the tide of darkness
That floweth fast behind,
And hope to make thee journey on
In the journey of the mind.

Were I a skilful painter,
What should I paint for thee?⁠—
A tiny spring-bud peeping out
From a withered wintry tree;
The warm blue sky of summer
O’er jagged ice and snow,
And water hurrying gladsome out
From a cavern down below;

The dim light of a beacon
Upon a stormy sea,
Where a lonely ship to windward beats
For life and liberty;
A watery sun-ray gleaming
Athwart a sullen cloud
And falling on some grassy flower
The rain had earthward bowed;

Morn peeping o’er a mountain,
In ambush for the dark,
And a traveller in the vale below
Rejoicing like a lark;
A taper nearly vanished
Amid the dawning gray,
And a maiden lifting up her head,
And lo, the coming day!

I am no skilful painter;
Let who will blame me then
That I would teach thee hope and fear
With my plain-talking pen!⁠—
Fear of the tide of darkness
That floweth fast behind,
And hope to make thee journey on
In the journey of the mind.

If I Were a Monk, and Thou Wert a Nun

If I were a monk, and thou wert a nun,
Pacing it wearily, wearily,
Twixt chapel and cell till day were done⁠—
Wearily, wearily⁠—
How would it fare with these hearts of ours
That need the sunshine, and smiles, and flowers?

To prayer, to prayer, at the matins’ call,
Morning foul or fair!⁠—
Such prayer as from weary lips might fall⁠—
Words, but hardly prayer⁠—
The chapel’s roof, like the law in stone,
Caging the lark that up had flown!

Thou, in the glory of cloudless noon,
The God-revealing,
Turning thy face from the boundless boon⁠—
Painfully kneeling;
Or, in brown-shadowy solitude,
Bending thy head o’er the legend rude!

I, in a bare and lonely nook,
Gloomily, gloomily,
Poring over some musty book,
Thoughtfully, thoughtfully;
Or painting pictures of things of old
On parchment-margin in purple and gold!

Perchance in slow procession to meet,
Wearily, wearily,
In antique, narrow, high-gabled street,
Wearily, wearily;
Thine eyes dark-lifted to mine, and then
Heavily sinking to earth again!

Sunshine and air! bird-music and spring!
Merrily, merrily!⁠—
Back to its cell each weary thing,
Wearily, wearily!
Our poor hearts, withered and dry and old,
Most at home in the cloister cold!

Thou slow rising at vespers’ call,
Wearily, wearily;
I looking up on the darkening wall,
Wearily, wearily;
The chime so sweet to the boat at sea,
Listless and dead to thee and me!

At length for sleep a weary assay,
On the lone couch wearily!
Rising at midnight again to pray,
Wearily, wearily!
And if through the dark dear eyes looked in,
Sending them far as a thought of sin!

And at last, thy tired soul passing away,
Dreamily, dreamily⁠—
Its worn tent fluttering in slow decay,
Sleepily, sleepily⁠—
Over thee held the crucified Best,
But no warm cheek to thy cold cheek pressed!

And then my passing from cell to clay,
Dreamily, dreamily!
My gray head lying on ashes gray,
Sleepily, sleepily!
But no woman-angel hovering above,
Ready to clasp me in deathless love!

Now, now, ah, now! thy hand in mine,
Peacefully, peacefully;
My arm round thee, and my lips on thine,
Lovingly, lovingly⁠—
Oh! is not a better thing to us given
Than wearily going alone to heaven?

Blessed Are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth

A quiet heart, submissive, meek,
Father, do thou bestow,
Which more than granted, will not seek
To have, or give, or know.

Each little hill then holds its gift
Forth to my joying eyes;
Each mighty mountain then doth lift
My spirit to the skies.

Lo, then the running water sounds
With gladsome, secret things!
The silent water more abounds,
And more the hidden springs.

Live murmurs then the trees will blend
With all the feathered song;
The waving grass low tribute lend
Earth’s music to prolong.

The sun will cast great crowns of light
On waves that anthems roar;
The dusky billows break at night
In flashes on the shore.

Each harebell, each white lily’s cup,
The hum of hidden bee,
Yea, every odour floating up,
The insect revelry⁠—

Each hue, each harmony divine
The holy world about,
Its soul will send forth into mine,
My soul to widen out.

And thus the great earth I shall hold,
A perfect gift of thine;
Richer by these, a thousandfold,
Than if broad lands were mine.

The Hills

Behind my father’s cottage lies
A gentle grassy height
Up which I often ran⁠—to gaze
Back with a wondering sight,
For then the chimneys I thought high
Were down below me quite!

All round, where’er I turned mine eyes,
Huge hills closed up the view;
The town ’mid their converging roots
Was clasped by rivers two;
From, one range to another sprang
The sky’s great vault of blue.

It was a joy to climb their sides,
And in the heather lie!
A joy to look at vantage down
On the castle grim and high!
Blue streams below, white clouds above,
In silent earth and sky!

And now, where’er my feet may roam,
At sight of stranger hill
A new sense of the old delight
Springs in my bosom still,
And longings for the high unknown
Their ancient channels fill.

For I am always climbing hills,
From the known to the unknown⁠—
Surely, at last, on some high peak,
To find my Father’s throne,
Though hitherto I have only found
His footsteps in the stone!

And in my wanderings I did meet
Another searching too:
The dawning hope, the shared quest
Our thoughts together drew;
Fearless she laid her band in mine
Because her heart was true.

She was not born among the hills,
Yet on each mountain face
A something known her inward eye
By inborn light can trace;
For up the hills must homeward be,
Though no one knows the place.

Clasp my hand close, my child, in thine⁠—
A long way we have come!
Clasp my hand closer yet, my child,
Farther we yet must roam⁠—
Climbing and climbing till we reach
Our heavenly father’s home.

I Know What Beauty Is

I know what beauty is, for thou
Hast set the world within my heart;
Of me thou madest it a part;
I never loved it more than now.

I know the Sabbath afternoons;
The light asleep upon the graves:
Against the sky the poplar waves;
The river murmurs organ tunes.

I know the spring with bud and bell;
The hush in summer woods at night;
Autumn, when trees let in more light;
Fantastic winter’s lovely spell.

I know the rapture music gives,
Its mystery of ordered tones:
Dream-muffled soul, it loves and moans,
And, half-alive, comes in and lives.

And verse I know, whose concord high
Of thought and music lifts the soul
Where many a glimmering starry shoal
Glides through the Godhead’s living sky.

Yea, Beauty’s regnant All I know⁠—
The imperial head, the thoughtful eyes;
The God-imprisoned harmonies
That out in gracious motions go.

But I leave all, O Son of man,
Put off my shoes, and come to thee!
Most lovely thou of all I see,
Most potent thou of all that can!

As child forsakes his favourite toy,
His sisters’ sport, his new-found nest,
And, climbing to his mother’s breast,
Enjoys yet more his late-left joy⁠—

I lose to find. On fair-browed bride
Fair pearls their fairest light afford;
So, gathered round thy glory, Lord,
All glory else is glorified.

I Would I Were a Child

I would I were a child,
That I might look, and laugh, and say, My Father!
And follow thee with running feet, or rather
Be led through dark and wild!

How I would hold thy hand,
My glad eyes often to thy glory lifting!
Should darkness ’twixt thy face and mine come drifting,
My heart would but expand.

If an ill thing came near,
I would but creep within thy mantle’s folding,
Shut my eyes close, thy hand yet faster holding,
And soon forget my fear.

O soul, O soul, rejoice!
Thou art God’s child indeed, for all thy sinning;
A poor weak child, yet his, and worth the winning
With saviour eyes and voice.

Who spake the words? Didst Thou?
They are too good, even for such a giver:
Such water drinking once, I should feel ever
As I had drunk but now.

Yet sure the Word said so,
Teaching our lips to cry with his, Our Father!
Telling the tale of him who once did gather
His goods to him, and go!

Ah, thou dost lead me, God!
But it is dark and starless, the way dreary;
Almost I sleep, I am so very weary
Upon this rough hill-road.

Almost! Nay, I do sleep;
There is no darkness save in this my dreaming;
Thy fatherhood above, around, is beaming;
Thy hand my hand doth keep.

With sighs my soul doth teem;
I have no knowledge but that I am sleeping;
Haunted with lies, my life will fail in weeping;
Wake me from this my dream.

How long shall heavy night
Deny the day? How long shall this dull sorrow
Say in my heart that never any morrow
Will bring the friendly light?

Lord, art thou in the room?
Come near my bed; oh, draw aside the curtain!
A child’s heart would say “Father,” were it certain
That it would not presume.

But if this dreary sleep
May not be broken, help thy helpless sleeper
To rest in thee; so shall his sleep grow deeper⁠—
For evil dreams too deep.

Father! I dare at length;
My childhood sure will hold me free from blaming:
Sinful yet hoping, I to thee come, claiming
Thy tenderness, my strength.

The Lost Soul

Look! look there!
Send your eyes across the gray
By my finger-point away
Through the vaporous, fumy air.
Beyond the air, you see the dark?
Beyond the dark, the dawning day?
On its horizon, pray you, mark
Something like a ruined heap
Of worlds half-uncreated, that go back:
Down all the grades through which they rose
Up to harmonious life and law’s repose,
Back, slow, to the awful deep
Of nothingness, mere being’s lack:
On its surface, lone and bare,
Shapeless as a dumb despair,
Formless, nameless, something lies:
Can the vision in your eyes
Its idea recognize?

’Tis a poor lost soul, alack!⁠—
Half he lived some ages back;
But, with hardly opened eyes,
Thinking him already wise,
Down he sat and wrote a book;
Drew his life into a nook;
Out of it would not arise
To peruse the letters dim,
Graven dark on his own walls;
Those, he judged, were chance-led scrawls,
Or at best no use to him.
A lamp was there for reading these;
This he trimmed, sitting at ease,
For its aid to write his book,
Never at his walls to look⁠—
Trimmed and trimmed to one faint spark
Which went out, and left him dark.⁠—
I will try if he can hear
Spirit words with spirit ear!

Motionless thing! who once,
Like him who cries to thee,
Hadst thy place with thy shining peers,
Thy changeful place in the changeless dance
Issuing ever in radiance
From the doors of the far eternity,
With feet that glitter and glide and glance
To the music-law that binds the free,
And sets the captive at liberty⁠—
To the clang of the crystal spheres!
O heart for love! O thirst to drink
From the wells that feed the sea!
O hands of truth, a human link
’Twixt mine and the Father’s knee!
O eyes to see! O soul to think!
O life, the brother of me!
Has Infinitude sucked back all
The individual life it gave?
Boots it nothing to cry and call?
Is thy form an empty grave?

It heareth not, brothers, the terrible thing!
Sounds no sense to its ear will bring!
Let us away, ’tis no use to tarry;
Love no light to its heart will carry!
Sting it with words, it will never shrink;
It will not repent, it cannot think!
Hath God forgotten it, alas!
Lost in eternity’s lumber-room?
Will the wind of his breathing never pass
Over it through the insensate gloom?
Like a frost-killed bud on a tombstone curled,
Crumbling it lies on its crumbling world,
Sightless and deaf, with never a cry,
In the hell of its own vacuity!

See, see yon angel crossing our flight
Where the thunder vapours loom,
From his upcast pinions flashing the light
Of some outbreaking doom!
Up, brothers! away! a storm is nigh!
Smite we the wing up a steeper sky!
What matters the hail or the clashing winds,
The thunder that buffets, the lightning that blinds!
We know by the tempest we do not lie
Dead in the pits of eternity!

A Dream Within a Dream