THE KING.
"Hearken, O Counsellor, thy king's desire:
Ere next thou blow ablaze the sullen fire
That smoulders in him, see that thou provide
Withal a secret place in which to hide,
Lest the king's darkened days on darkness fall
And miss for aye a bright face at his side;
For, be it truth thou sayest—yea, and truth
Is the sharp sword and javelin of youth—
That every merciful and smiling lie
Shall come to smile and curse us ere we die,
That the king standeth as a massive wall
Which leans to ruin, if it lean at all
Out of the upright line of equity;
Yet, ah, my bitter counsellor," said the king,
"When thou wouldst speak some truth that bears a sting,
I pray thee, speak as bearing love to me,
Who am of such as, lonely for their kind,
In dusty deserts of the spirit find
A naked penitence which no man sees.
My cup of life is drunken to the lees,
And thine hath still its bead along the brim;
And therefore, as in halls empty and dim,
Wakens thy step the echoes in my heart,
And all thy heady ways and reckless tongue,
That splits the marrow like a Kalmuck's dart,
Seem like my very own when first I flung
A challenge in the teeth of life. God knows,
The stars will not again look down on me
With their old radiant intensity;
Only I seem to see, as by the gleam
Of boatmen's torches mirrored in the stream
That bears them on, a faith that not alone
He builds His temple of enduring stone,
But sends the flowers that in its crannies creep,
And in His very scales of justice throws
The young man's dreams, the tears of them that weep,
The words the maiden murmurs to the rose."
The king was still. A passing boatman's oars
Sent the lit ripples to the shadowed shores.
A near muézzin's long, high-towered call
Went yearning up to star-lit architraves,
And dying left a silence over all,
Saving the grassy whisper of small waves.