IV
O thou unalterable sea! how vast
Thine utterance! What portent in thy tone,
As here thy giant choirs, august, alone,
Roll forth their diapason to the blast!—
Great waters hurled and broken and upcast
In timeless splendour and immeasured moan,
As tho’ Eternity to years unknown
Bore witness of the sorrows of the Past.
Thou callest to a deep within my soul—
Untraversed and unsounded; at thy voice
Abysses move with phantoms unbegot.
What paeans haunt me and what pangs control!—
Thunders wherewith the seraphim rejoice,
And mighty hunger for I know not what.
AUTUMN
Now droops the troubled year
And now her tiny sunset stains the leaf.
A holy fear,
A rapt, elusive grief,
Make imminent the swift, exalting tear.
The long wind’s weary sigh—
Knowest, O listener! for what it wakes?
Adown the sky
What star of Time forsakes
Her pinnacle? What dream and dreamer die?
A presence half-divine
Stands at the threshold, ready to depart
Without a sign.
Now seems the world’s deep heart
About to break. What sorrow stirs in mine?
A mist of twilight rain
Hides now the orange edges of the day.
In vain, in vain
Wi10hou stay,
Beauty who wast, and shalt not be again!
STARS OF THE NOON
Untaught, I meet the question of the hours—
Travail and prayer and call;
But ye, with stillness deeper than the flow’rs’,
O stars! can answer all.
Now, tho’ the sapphire walls of noon forbid
Your beams compassionate,
Witheld by light, as love by silence hid,
Unchanging ye await,
Till Day, whom all the swords of sunset bar
From Edens daily lost,
Pass, and your lonely armies sink afar
To oceans nightly crost.
Ah! when, ere long, I watch your kingdoms reach
Past the departed sun,
Will ye, in silence holier than speech,
Tell that our ways are one?—
That I, as ye, vanish awhile in day
(The day we reckon night),
Till dusks of birth reveal the backward way
To darkness reckoned light?
Come! for the ancient Altar waits your flame,
The seas of shadow call,
And, exile of a land I cannot name,
Homesick, I question all.
THE APOTHECARY’S
Its red and emerald beacons from the night
Draw human moths in melancholy flight,
With beams whose gaudy glories point the way
To safety or destruction—choose who may!
Crystal and powder, oils or tincture clear,
Such the dim sight of man beholds, but here
Await, indisputable in their pow’r,
Great Presences, abiding each his hour;
And for a little price rash man attains
This council of the perils and the pains—
This parliament of death, and brotherhood
Omniponent for evil and for good.
Venoms of vision, myrrh of splendid swoons,
They wait us past the green and scarlet moons.
Here prisoned rest the tender hands of Peace,
And there an angel at whose bidding cease
The clamors of the tortured sense, the strife
Of nerves confounded in the war of life.
Within this vial pallid Sleep is caught,
In that, the sleep eternal. Here are sought
Such webs as in their agonizing mesh
Draw back from doom the half-reluctant flesh.
There beck the traitor joys to him who buys,
And Death sits panoplied in gorgeous guise.
The dusts of hell, the dews of heavenly sods,
Water of Lethe or the wine of gods,
Purchase who will, but, ere his task begin,
Beware the service that you set the djinn!
Each hath his mercy, each his certain law,
And each his Lord behind the veil of awe;
But ponder well the ministry you crave,
Lest he be final master, you the slave.
Each hath a price, and each a tribute gives
To him who turns from life and him who lives.
If so you win from Pain a swift release,
His face shall haunt you in the house of Peace;
If so from Pain you scorn an anodyne,
Peace shall repay you with a draft divine.
Tho’ toil and time be now by them surpast,
Exact the recompense they take at last—
These genii of the vials, wreaking still
Their sorceries on human sense and will.
THE SWIMMERS
We were eight fishers of the western sea,
Who sailed our craft beside a barren land,
Where harsh with pines the herdless mountains stand
And lonely beaches be.
There no man dwells, and ships go seldom past;
Yet sometimes there we lift our keels ashore,
To rest in safety ’mid the broken roar
And mist of surges vast.
One strand we know, remote from all the rest,
For north and south the cliffs are high and steep,
Whose naked leagues of rock repel the deep,
Insurgent from the west.
Tawny it lies, untrodden e’er by man,
Save when from storm we sought its narrow rift
To beach our craft and light a fire of drift
And sleep till day began.
Along its sands no flower nor bird has home.
Abrupt its breast, girt by no splendor save
The whorled and curving emerald of the wave
And scarves of rustling foam—
A place of solemn beauty; yet we swore,
By all the ocean stars’ unhasting flight,
To seek no refuge for another night
Upon that haunted shore.
That year a sombre autumn held the earth.
At dawn we sailed from out our village bay;
We sang; a taut wind leapt along the day;
The sea-birds mocked our mirth.
Southwest we drave, like arrows to a mark;
Ere set of sun the coast was far to lee,
Where thundered over by the white-hooved sea
The reefs lie gaunt and dark.
But when we would have cast our hooks, the main
Grew wroth a-sudden, and our captains said:
“Seek we a shelter.” And the west was red;
God gave his winds the rein.
And eastward lay the sands of which I told;
Thither we fled, and on the narrow beach
Drew up our keels beyond the lessening reach
Of waters green and cold.
Then set the wounded sun. The wind blew clean
The skies. A wincing star came forth at last.
We heard like mighty tollings on the blast
The shock of waves unseen.
The wide-winged Eagle hovered overhead;
The Scorpion crept slowly in the south
To pits below the horizon; in its mouth
Lay a young moon that bled.
And from our fire the ravished flame swept back,
Like yellow hair of one who flies apace,
Compelled in lands barbarian to race
With lions on her track.
Then from the maelstroms of the surf arose
Wild laughter, mystical, and up the sands
Came Two that walked with intertwining hands
Amid those ocean snows.
Ghostly they shone before the lofty spray—
Fairer than gods and naked as the moon,
The foamy fillets at their ankles strewn
Less marble-white than they.
Laughing they stood, then to our beacon’s glare
Drew nearer, as we watched in mad surprise
The scarlet-flashing lips, the sea-green eyes,
The red and tangled hair.
Then spoke the god (goddess and god they seemed),
In harplike accents of a tongue unknown—
About his brows the dripping locks were blown;
Like wannest gold he gleamed.
Staring we sat; again the Vision spoke.
Beyond his form we saw the billows rave,—
The leap of those white leopards in the wave,—
The spume of seas that broke.
Yet sat we mute, for then a human word
Seemed folly’s worst. And scorn began to trace
Its presence on the wild, imperious face;
Again the red lips stirred,
But spoke not. In an instant we were free
From that enchantment: fleet as deer they turned
And sudden amber leapt the sands they spurned.
We saw them meet the sea.
We heard the seven-chorded surf, unquelled,
Call in one thunder to the granite walls;
But over all, like broken clarion-calls,
Disdainful laughter welled.
Then silence, save for cloven wave and wind.
Our fire had faltered on its little dune.
Far out a fog-wall reared, and hid the moon.
The night lay vast and blind.
Silent, we waited the assuring morn,
Which rose on angered waters. But we set
Our hooded prows to sea, and, tempest-wet,
Beat up the coast forlorn.
And no man scorned our tale, for well they knew
Had mystery befallen: in our eyes
Were alien terrors and unknown surmise.
Men saw the tale was true.
And no man seeks a refuge on that shore,
Tho tempests gather in impelling skies;
Unseen, unsolved, unhazarded it lies,
Forsaken evermore.
For on those sands immaculate and lone
Perchance They list the sea’s immeasured lyre,
When sunset casts an evanescent fire
Thro billows thunder-sown.
BENEATH THE REDWOODS
O trees! so vast, so calm!
Softly ye lay
On heart and mind today
The unpurchaseable balm.
Ere yet the wind can cease,
Your mighty sigh
Is spirit of the sky—
Half sorrow and half peace.
Mourn ye your brothers slain,
That now afar
From hush and dews and star
Man barters for his gain?
Mourn them with all your boughs,
For I must mourn,
In seasons yet unborn,
The cares that they will house.
MUSIC AT DUSK
O Twilight, Twilight! evermore to hear
The wounded viols pleading to thy heart!
To dream we watch thy purple wings depart;
To wake, and know thy presence alway near!
What dost thou on the pathway of the sun?
Abide thy sister Night, while strains so pure
Make heaven and all its beauty seem too sure,
And all too certain her oblivion.
One star awakes to turn thee from the south.
Oh, linger in the shadows thou hast drawn,
Ere Night cast dew before the feet of Dawn,
Or Silence lay her kiss on Music’s mouth!
THE TIDES OF CHANGE
Wherewith is Beauty fashioned? Canst thou deem
Her evanescent roses bourgeon save
Within the sunlight tender on her grave?
Awake no winds but bear her dust, a gleam
In morning’s prophecy or sunset’s dream;
And every cry that ever Sirens gave
From islands mournful with the quiring wave
Was echo of a music once supreme.
All æons, conquests, excellencies, stars,
All pain and peril of seraphic wars,
Were met to shape thy soul’s divinity.
Pause, for the breath of gods is on thy face!
The ghost of dawns forgotten and to be
Abides a moment in the twilight’s grace.
MORNING TWILIGHT
An early thrush acclaims the light—
The wide, low-billowing day
O’er dews and grasses chill with night
Upcasts its foam of grey.
Now end the darkness and its dreams.
The ashen moon is low;
Like petal-drift on placid streams
We watch her sink and go.
And like a dryad to her tree
The morning star hath sped—
Gone ere an eye essayed to see
The path whereon she fled.
Hark how, as here we stand the wards
Of woodlands newly green,
The pine’s innumerable chords
Are touched by hands unseen!
Hearing, the forest seems forlorn
And all the air a sigh
Of things that seek a vaster morn,
And find it not, and die.
O tranquil hour! the haggard noon
Shall make a ghost of thee
Soon to be memory’s, and soon
Not even of memory.
AN ALTAR OF THE WEST
(Point Lobos, the southern boundary of Carmel Bay.)
Beauty, what dost thou here?
Why hauntest thou this empery of pain
Where men in vain
Long for another sphere?
Art not an exile shy,
A dreamer ’mid the swords,
Upon this iron world where men defy
Time and its hidden lords?
Thou waitest with a splendor on thy brow.
And seem’st to watch with compensating eyes
Each jest our dwarfing Fates devise;
And after all the strife,
’Tis thou
Who standest where the slayers’ feet have trod—
Perchance a portion of this dream of God
That will not go from life.
All that man’s yearning finds beyond its reach
Thou hast in promise, giving to his heart
A rapturous sadness all too wild for speech,—
A glory past the thresholds of his art,
Tho Nature tell it with the wind
And beckon him to find.
Thou dost reward our barren years:
Our very tears—
The dews of memory—
Were lovely as the dew, could Grief but see.
What marvel fills
Thine evenings, dawns and noons!—
The dryad-haunted hills
And gold of reeds that wait the lips of Pan;
Silence and silver one in wasting moons;
The stains
Of mornings beautiful ere Time began,
And wine-souled Autumn and the ghostly rains;
A bird
In moonlit valleys of enchantment heard;
The fall of sunsets past the sea,
And shadow of celestial pearls to be
Where meet in day
The night’s last star, the morning’s youngest ray.
On thine incarnate face could we but look,
Would not we die,
Desiring overmuch?
And yet we sigh,
Who find on land and sea thy radiant touch
And dream thou hast on earth a secret nook—
A glade supremely blest
In woodlands where thou wanderest unseen.
Hath not the snowy North
Or star-concealing ocean of the West
A court wherein thou sittest queen,
A temple whence thou goest forth,
An altar for our quest?
Goddess, one such I know,
And fain would praise,
Tho less the gift my words bestow
Than tapers ’mid the blaze
Of peaceless stars that gather at thy throne.
Yet seems it most thine own.
Past Carmel lies a headland that the deep—
A Titan at his toil—
Has graven with the measured surge and sweep
Of waves that broke ten thousand years ago.
Here winds assoil
That blow
From unfamiliar skies
And isolating waters of the West.
Deep-channelled by the billows’ rage it lies,
As tho the land
Thrust forth a vast, tree-shaggy hand
To bar the furious ocean from its breast.
Here Beauty would I seek,
For this I deem her home,
And surely here
The sea-adoring Greek,
Poseidon, unto thee
Thy loftiest temple had been swift to rear,
Of chosen marble and chalcedony,
Pure as the irrecoverable foam.
Ere evening from this granite bulwark gaze,
Above the deeper sapphire that the winds
Drag to and fro.
A zone
Of coldest chrysoprase
Tells where the sunlight finds
The glimmering shoal.
How slow
Yon clouds, like giants overthrown
Sink to the ocean’s western verge,
From whence incessant roll
Thro unresponding years
The waves whose anthem challenges the soul—
The everlasting surge
Whose ancient salt is in our blood and tears.
Listen, with sight made blind,
And dream thou hearest on the according wind
The music of the gods again,
The murmur of their slain
And firmamental echo of great wars.
See how the wave in sudden anger flings
White arms about a rock to drag it down!
No siren sings,
But in that pool of crystal gleams her crown,
Flung on a rocky shelf—
Grey jewels cold and agates of the elf
That in yon scarlet cavern still is hid,
’Mid shells that mock the dawn.
Here, where the northern surge is swayed
Upon a beach of amber where a faun
Might clasp the beauty of a Nereid,
Translucent waters cover loops of jade.
Beyond, the sea-scourged walls uphold
A mount of granite, steep and harsh, where cling
Along its rugged length
The cypress legions, melancholy, old.
O’er wasting cliff and strand
In terraced emerald they stand
Against the sky,
Each elder tree a king
Whose fame the wordless billows magnify.
A thousand winters of achieving storm
Moulded each mighty form
To beauty and to strength:
A thousand more shall raven ere they die.
But wander to the verge again
Where the immeasurable main
Below the red horizon rears its wall,
The day’s enormous pyre
Whence oft, in mighty sunsets of the West,
The world seems menaced by invading fire.
Dost hear no call
From these hesperian Islands of the Blest
That wait the quest
Of galleys of adventure, launched at dawn
And seaward on the tides of peril drawn?
The sky-line’s crimson harbors seem to hold,
At dusk, their prows of gold.
Now, ere the stars come out along the wind,
The veering sea-birds find
The refuge that they crave
On cliffs above the weedy mouth
Of some reverberant cave
In which the ocean’s monstrous chuckle wakes.
Fast comes the night;
The west witholds at last
Those last red relics of departing light
That once were noon.
Hark how the billow breaks,
Forever cast
On reefs round which wild waters and the moon
Weave silver garlands—foamy fillets strewn
Along her shining pathway to the South!
The stars arise,
And westward now the Eagle holds their van.
See how the Pleiades,
Like hounds in leash before Aldebaran,
Strain up the shifting skies!
The cypress trees,
Drenched in the milk o’ the moon, conspirant seem,
The surf a chant of giants heard afar,
While seaward gleam
The lamps of Lyra and the evening star....
The midnight hushes all;
The winds are dumb;
Eastward, Orion treads the mountain-wall.
But lo! what visitant is on the gloom?
Beauty and mystery and terror meet
At this her chosen seat:
The writhing fog is come,
White as the moon’s cold hands
Laid on a marble tomb.
Slow swarm the dragon-bands—
Those pallid monsters of the mist that nose
The granite bare
And glide along the flanks
Of hill and headland where the cypress ranks
Are crouched like silent foes,
Relentless and aware.
Far to the sombre hills they roam
Like winds that have no home,
And creep,
Unhasting and intent,
Along the muffled deep,
As tho malignly sent
From Lethe’s murmur and the starless foam.
They pass, and now again the moon is free,
Slow pacing with the Signs about her head;
Soon shall the dawn arise and find her fled
From yon blue battlement,
As tho a pearl were hidden by the sea.
THE FAUN
Now in the noontide peace I lie
Where waving grass is green,
With bosom open to the sky
And not a cloud between;
At dawn, one cast from out the blue
A shadow on my lanes,
Then vanished with the dwindling dew
And not a wisp remains.
An hour ago I watched an ant
Haste homeward with her spoil;
She had, by Jove his covenant,
No quittance of her toil;
Doubtless they be a thrifty race,
Whose works shall not depart:
O Jove, who grantest each his place,
Teach not to me their art!
I and my kin shall pass ere long,
And ants shall ever be;
But better now the linnet’s song
Than their eternity.
What tho my people perish soon?
Awhile the dews we crush
Where nights of summer mould the moon
And laughters wake the thrush.
From yonder hill I spy on man
And marvel at his need,
Who fashions, in a season’s span,
A thousand fanes to Greed;
Perchance from each, his worship done,
He ventures forth repaid,
But grant thou me the spendthrift sun
And berries of the glade.
At noon great Caesar’s chariot past,
A poison on the air,
But drive he slow or drive he fast,
The journey’s end is Care—
Care, at whose throne all mortals stand
With tinsel crowns put by,
Too weak to rove the billowed land,
Too sad to watch the sky.
Mid ivied trunks I see her gleam,
The nymph, my forest-mate;
She wanders by the lyric stream,
To us articulate.
A golden house let Caesar build,
To hold his ghosts and gods—
For me the summer eves are stilled,
For me the flower nods.
THE VOICES
Last night the granite headland loomed
A Titan on the night,
About whose knees the billows boomed,
Enormous, baffled, white.
And now to morning’s throne of gold
Murmurs the chastened sea:
Its thunder and its whispers hold
The selfsame mystery.
A CHARACTER
Blunt as a child, since child he was at heart,
And sun-sincere, my friend to many seemed
Dull, rude, aggressive, tactless. Add to all
His bulk and hairiness and stormy laugh,
And one can find them some excuse for that.
’Twas seeming only. We, who found his soul
Thro friendship’s crystal, saw beyond the glass
The elusive seraph. In his mind were met
The faun, the cynic, the philosopher,
But first of all, the poet. Give to such
Apollo’s guise, and matters were not well.
Too glad to pose, ofttimes he held his peace
Before the jest that sought his heart; but let
The whim appeal, and all his mind took fire—
The shifted diamond’s instant shock of light.
Beauty to him (as wine’s ecstatic draught,
Richer than blood, and every drop a dream)
Was like a wind some hidden world put forth
To baffle, madden, lure—at times, betray,
Then win him back to worship with a breath
Of Edens never trodden. Yet he stood
No dupe to Nature in her harlotry,
Her guile, her blind injustice and the abrupt
Ferocities of chance, but swift to face
The unkempt fact, and swift no less to snatch
Its honey from illusion’s stinging hive—
No moth that beat upon Time’s enginery.
Yet loved he Nature well, as one might love
A half-tamed leopardess, for beauty’s grace
Alone. Within his enigmatic soul
Sorrow and Art made Love their servitor,
For he would have no master but himself.
To what best liken him? Some singer must
Have used the star-souled geode’s rind and heart,
Telling of such as he. Let me compare
His rugged aspect and auroral mind
To that wide shell our western ocean grants—
Without, all harsh and hueless, with, perhaps,
A group of barnacles or tattered weed;
Within, such splendor as would make one guess
That once a score of dawnings and a troop
Of royal sunsets had condensed their pomp
To rainbow lacquer which the ocean pow’rs
Had lavished, godlike, on the gorgeous bowl.
THE GUERDON OF THE SUN
Of all the fonts from which man’s heart has drawn
Some essence of the majesty of earth,
Some intimation of the human worth,
I reckon first the sunset and the dawn.
For those were fires whose splendor smote his clay
With witness of a light beyond the clod;
Enshrined, he made of radiance a god,
And found his benediction in the day.
And all his eager hands have found to do,
And all his tireless hope and love unite,
In some wise take their symbol from the light,
Our very Heaven based on heaven’s blue.
Tilth beyond tilth, he waits upon the sun,
The first to goad, the last to calm his breast,
With dawns that like a clarion break his rest,
And after-glows that crown his labor done.
THE GARDENS OF THE SEA
Beneath the ocean’s sapphire lid
We gazed far down, and who had dreamed,
Till pure and cold its treasures gleamed,
What lucent jewels there lay hid?—
Opal and jacinth, orb and shell,
Calice and filament of jade,
And fonts of malachite inlaid
With lotus and with asphodel,—
Red sparks that give the dolphin pause,
Lamps of the ocean-elf, and gems
Long lost from crystal diadems,
And veiled in shrouds of glowing gauze.
Below, the sifted sunlight passed
To twilight, where the azure blaze
Of scentless flowers from the haze
About their dim pavilions cast
Betrayed what seemed forgotten pearls,
As shimmering weeds alert with light
Enticed the half-reluctant sight
To caverns where the sea-kelp swirls.
Splendid and chill those gardens shone,
Where sound is not, and tides are winds,—
Where, fugitive, the naiad finds
Eternal autumn, hushed and lone;
Till one had said that in her bow’rs
Were mixt the nacres of the dawn,
That thence the sunset’s dyes were drawn,
And there the rainbow sank its tow’rs.
Where gorgeous flowers of chrysoprase
In songless meadows bared their blooms,
The deep’s unweariable looms
With shifting splendors lured the gaze.
And zoned on iridescent sands,
Pellucid glories came and went—
Silver and scarlet madly blent
In living stars and blazoned bands.
Hydras of emerald and blue
Were part of swaying tapestries
Whose woof from ivies of the seas
Stole each inquietude of hue.
And in those royal halls lay lost
The oriflammes and golden oars
Of argosies from lyric shores—
’Mid glimmering crowns and croziers tost.
And purple poppies vespertine
Glowed on the weird and sunken ledge,
Beyond whose rich, vermillion edge
Rose tentacles from shapes unseen—
Undulant bronze and glossy toils
That shuddered in the lustrous tide
And forms in restless crimson dyed
That caught the light in stealthy coils....
Far down we gazed, nor dared to dream
What final sorceries would be
When in those gardens of the sea
The lilies of the moon should gleam.
THE SIBYL OF DREAMS
The rose she gathers is invisible,
But ah! its fragrance on the visioned air—
The scent of Paphian flowers warm and fair;
The breath of blossoms delicate and chill,
By Dian tended on her vestal hill,
And soul of that wan orchid of despair
Found by Persephone, when, unaware,
She bent to pluck, and hell and heaven grew still.
Oh! in what lily’s deep and splendid cup
Shall ever evening dryads hope to find
So marvellous a nectar of delight—
In valleys of enchantment gathered up
By hesitating spirits of the wind,
And borne in rapture to the lips of Night?
THE MUSIC OF SLEEP
What crown of dews and opals Morning wore
I knew not, taken in the toils of Sleep;
For mine it was the ways profound to keep
Where seas of dream break on a phantom shore
To mysteries of music evermore.
There shone no star on headland nor on steep,
And past the vague horizon of that deep
On isles unknown I heard its billows roar.
Eastward the everlasting fountains welled
Till o’er my rest the dayspring’s golden tide
On hills that are and nearer seas was whirled;
But sealed within my haunted brows I held
The forms that pass, the shadows that abide,
And music of the soul’s dim under-world.
DUTY
White on its road we saw her chariot shine,
And she, unturning, passed with lifted gaze,
As Pleasure stood in arrogant amaze
And looked in question on his scornéd wine;
Love from her steeds leapt back with frightened eyne,
Indignant, splendid, and the hostile blaze
Of Pain’s effulgence from his hidden ways
Seemed but her beacon to a goal divine.
Then fell intensest shadow on her path,
Whereat one cried, “Behold! the sword of Death!
Shall mortal face unfaltering the Wrath?”
And silence held our multitude. But she
Passed on as to a thing of spectral breath,—
A fantasy that was not nor could be.
THE ECHO AND THE QUEST
Now, as the west is red, O birds!
My clumsy arts you bring to naught:
A victim of the curse of thought,
I tell its pain in trammeling words—
Your music mocks the bitter lay!
Idle as any song of mine
The melody from copse or pine—
Born at the dying of the day;
But oh! the full accomplishment!
Reproach unplanned but exquisite!
Hark how the unpurchased throats transmit
The tidings of a world content!
To you the tale is all of joy,
But we from rapture ask its pang;
And tho’ an angel came and sang,
Our hearts would worship—and destroy.
And tho for ecstasy you sing,
Our dim dissent awaits your tale,
And in the song there seems to wail
Another message than you bring:
Unmastered still by disbelief,
You tell our doubts in twilight strain;
Untouched by man’s perennial pain,
You give some echo of his grief;
Or so we dream. The very wind
Serves at the soul’s aeolian chords;
Rulers dismayed, uncertain lords,
In all we find, ourselves we find.
But you escape the nets of care.
Whither at last my feet shall go
I know not: from your song I know
You find the truth, and find it fair.
JUSTICE
Nila the youth, first-born, whose father’s name
Was honored in his market-place of Ind,
Loved Unda, and the dreaming twain, betrothed,
Waited the springtide and their marriage-rites.
The springtide came, but Nila’s joy came not,
For she, the girl that was to be his bride,
Was ravished from her lover, kin and home—
Prey to the bull-necked Rajah on the hill.
Then Nila, heedless of his father’s hope,
Vanished. Anon before the palace gate
That looked across the palm-tops to the south,
And whence the road ran eastward to the town,
There sat one cowled, a grey and mournful shape,
Who spoke not, and was deemed, for silence, saint,—
Who lived upon the offerings of the poor,
And gave no sign, nor vision of his face,
To slave nor councillor. “For,” said the youth,
“It well may be that on some day she fare
Forth to the temple, or to other ends:
And I, shall I not know her as she goes,
Tho’ jewelled curtains hide the loyal face?
Aye! but to be as near to her as now
And do her service once in all my days
Were better than despair. Yet if men find
That I am Nila, they may well discern
Wherefore I wait, and so the Rajah know,
Or, at the least, my kindred draw me hence.”
He waiting, season after season came
With weal and woe unto the sons of men—
The time of sowing and the time to reap,
Summer, and crashing of the winter rain,
And plague and famine, gods that slew unseen.
He heard the stars plot evil unto man,
And saw the baleful meteor float to light
And many suns look down upon man’s pain.
The days had each their will of him. The years
Wrought as with cunning chisels. Gaunt he grew,
A silent watcher by the carven gate,
And saw his kind go in and forth again,
But never one whose coming, with a thrill,
Sang to his heart: “Lo! I am even she!”
Hooded, unknown, so sat he ’mid the crows—
Sear as the summer, grey as any rain—
And watched the flowers’ birth and death, and heard
The sparrows’ song of mating, or the din
Where the shrill apes held council in the grove.
Often, in dreams that broke his daytime’s dream,
He somehow, somewhere, found the long-betrothed,
Far-wandered too in sleep’s Elysium,
And clasped her form, and kissed her deathless lips,
Hushed, in some garden of eternal dews;
Then woke to silence and the dark, save where
In one lean tower gleamed a shrouded lamp,
Like some red planet still among the stars,
Or, hung above the temple to the south,
The failing lanthorn of the moon ... Far off
A jackal barked ... A whisper touched the wind.
So for two score of years his vigil ran,
Unbroken save for slumber, till his hope,
More faint at last, for all his hungering,
Than shadows cast by firstling moons, was fled.
But in the dust and detriments of noon,
And in the midnight, still he longed for her,
As, day by day, the marring seasons passed,
Heedless of his despair. And yet he dreamt,
Sustained by that which man must find at last—
Patience, his answer to the sneer of Hell.
Often he whispered prayer, and, in his age,
Spoke unto children and to ancient men,
But craved no word of her he loved, in dread
Lest he be told her death. Then broke a day
Whereon a hush seemed come to mortal things.
A scarlet flower opened, near at hand,
Scentless. Far up, he saw a lonely cloud,
Cold-purple, like a bruise upon the sky.
A restless wind plucked at the parent dust,
And all the apes were silent in the grove.
And Nila knew his end was near, and felt
His soul rise wearily and welcome Death.
Then one came forth from out the palace gate—
Broken and desolate with foul-eyed age,
And sat near by, nor held at all her peace,
Lamenting o’er some matter of a hen.
Whereat said Nila: “Woman, hast thou word
Of one whom, long ago, the Rajah tore
From lover and from kin—of her whose name
Was Unda?” Then the crone bent low her head
And pondered, reaching back to years agone,
As one that in the darkness of the sea
Gropes for a sunken gem. At last she spoke,
Saying, “So long! So long ago! And yet
Do I remember Unda, for alone
Of all her band she mourned, nor would be still;
Wherefore our lord at last was wroth with her
And put her forth, for that she ever wept,
By the northern gate, forbidding that she turn
Again unto her kindred. And some say
That she within the jungle perished, some
That to a city of the west she fared
And dwelt in shame. Doubtless she long is dead.”
And Nila gazed upon the land and sky,
Woven for man’s illusion, and beheld
The scarlet petals fallen from their stem.
The cloud had gone; the wind was fled away.
And Nila turned him from the veils of Time,
And bowed his head, and murmured: “God is just.”
THE FLEET
Stand fast! Though steel on clanging steel
Make the contending turret reel;
Though stern as Hell the battle-blast,
From merciless horizons cast—
Annihilation’s breath—
Thunder no word but “Death!”
Yea! though the blind sea rave
And all its gulfs gape eager as the grave,
Sure of your flesh at last,
O human hearts! stand fast!
And though untested nerve and sinew shrink,
Trapped and astounded at the final brink—
Tho’ hostile guns the march to silence toll,
Beyond it lies the goal,
And past the moment’s tremor smiles the soul.
O brother hearts and brave,
We know you strong to save,
And strong to serve the Star
That past the dusk of war
Imperishable gleams.
And O! how little seems
The price of death men wait so glad to pay
To hold undesecrated every ray!
To serve thro’ many nights
The youngest of the Lights
Until it burns sublime
From uncontested heights—
The whitest beacon on the coasts of Time!
Behold her, our dear country, where she stands
Beneath the unconquered skies,
The sword and trumpet in her sheathéd hands,
But mercy in her eyes!
Behold before her gates
That bar the loyal sea,
Foaming upon her threshholds ceaselessly,
Each messenger that waits
Armed for conclusive fates—
Angels of death made mighty to fulfil
’Mid thunderings her will!
Behold all these and know her wisdom’s length,
Her beauty and her strength,
And know that farther skies
Age-hence shall see her rise,
Hesperus of the high and starry plan
When nations sit unarmored at the feast,
Of freedom, West and East,
Leagued in the deathless faith of men with Man.
REMORSE
At the sea’s verge, near Cypress Point, in Monterey County, the rain, wind, sun and sea have shaped a crag of the Santa Lucian granite into the form of a cowled or crowned figure, bent above the surf.
Prelate or king (the twilight tells not which),
Thou crouchest, silent, by the bitter sea.
Immovable, immortal and alone,
Abidest thou, and in thy stony ears
The changeless moaning of the ancient deep
Is less than prayer to Fate. The flaming noon
Warms, and the spectral mists of evening chill:
Thou heedest not, lapt in granitic dreams,
Nor hast a glance for setting moon or star.
What was thy crime? How long thy bleak remorse?
For never venial sin had strength to bind
In trance so grim despair so terrible.
Gaze! but the stainless wave shall not assoil!
Listen! but ever in thy soul must ring
The ghostly death-cry of a Cause betrayed,—
An empire lost, a people cast to doom!
So might the Spirit of our tragic orb
Behold, aghast with years, its fell result,
And, blinded with the vision he had wrought,
And dumb with clamors frozen at his heart,
Ponder, unpitied by Eternity,
Above the rising sea of human tears.
MOONLIGHT IN THE PINES
Full-starred, seraphic Night arose,
Lifting the Pleiades’ dim lyre
Above that solitude where glows
Rose-red Aldebaran’s fire.
Mute, ere the darkness could forget
The crystal hour of evening’s trance,
I felt the little winds that set
The mirrored stars a-dance
On restless leaves I heard them pass
To touch the yellow vines that lay
Like paler pythons in the grass,
Beside a lonely way.
To forest glades at last it led,
By Silence chosen as her own:
The pines’ soft sighing overhead
Seemed but her whispers flown.
Scarcely it seemed to cross the bound
Where she, aloof, stood sorceress—
That twilight where the feet of sound
Pass unto nothingness.
A little weary of the speech
Of burdened man and troubled sea,
I stood and dreamed that time would teach
Her dream of peace to me,
And, awed by the communing night,
Forgot the haggard world withdrawn,
Ere on my face there fell a light
As of a spectral dawn.
It gleamed beyond the barring pine—
That shattered silver of the moon—
The midnight’s asphodels divine
On field and woodland strewn.
Among the lesser trees it lay
Like veiled and pallid ghosts that slept,
About whose forms, as in dismay,
The fearful shadows crept.
But o’er the dale where Silence stood,
With tranquil dews austerely crowned,
A wilder glory touched the wood,—
A sense of things profound.
And subtlier on the enchanted air
The moonlight’s nacre seemed to melt,
While mosses like a witch’s hair
Stirred to a wind unfelt.
And, like a messenger of night,
Mystical, ominous and slow,
A fragile moth, in purposed flight,
Went past on wings of snow.
It may have been that elder pow’rs
Stood, immaterial, in the glade;
Perchance the moon’s phantasmal flow’rs
At shrines unseen were laid.
For in those isles it seemed there shone
Forsaken marbles, pure and cold—
The gleam of altars overthrown
And ghostly fanes of old.
And since that hour the night can thrill
With haunting chords by day unstirred,
And Beauty’s lips, refusing still,
Move with a secret word.
AT THE GRAVE OF SERRA
’Tis midnight, and the Eagle seeks the sea,
Which, near at hand, eternally intones
Its woe immeasurable. Thro the pane
Of yonder casement giving on the south,
The moonlight holds a chill and gleaming shaft
Above the grave where Serra sleeps. O heart!
Flaming, audacious heart, so long in dust!
’Twas thy reward to die ere died thy works,
To perish, ere the Vision too was fled.
The vineyard and the orchard and the fold
Have passed, and passed as well that other Flock
Thy tenderest concern, O spirit pure!
Who, in an age of infamy and gold
Saw souls alone. The timbers of thy fane
Have men at last renewed; but where are they,
The humble, dusky thousands of thy care?
One mould with thee! About thy place of sleep
The futile, peering pleasure-seekers come,
Glance, and forget. Thy kin in Christ draw near,
Little in numbers now, and less in faith;
For where the faith that grasped thee like a hand
And led thee on to peril and to pain?
The lamp burns low. They ask for them a sign.
Thou Power unseen whose hands implacable
Close in despair what man begins in hope,—
Unto what end, O Fate! unto what end
Dost thou hale forth on quests irradiant
Thy nobler sons? Is duty but a jest,
Seeing its guerdon given? In thy sight
Is Goodness even as Evil? Shall she find
Her wages also death? Wilt thou deride
Our ancient search for justice in thy ways?
With bitter viands evermore appease
Our hunger and our thirst for righteousness?
Dost fashion beauty for a moth’s desire,
And sow thee life to garner thee but dust?
The soundless grave is not more still than Thou,
The moon less husht in heaven ... About my feet
The shadows change ... I hear the unchanging sea.
WHITE MAGIC
Keep ye her brow with starshine crost
And bind with ghostly light her hair,
O powers benign, lest I accost
Song’s peaceless angel unaware!
One eve her whisper came to earth,
As eastward woke a thorny star,
To tell me of her kingdom’s worth
And what her liberations are:
She hath the Edens in her gift
And songs of sovereignties unborn;
In realms agone her turrets lift,
Wrought from the purples of the morn.
Where swings to foam the dusky sea,
She waits with sapphires in her hand
Whose light shall make thy spirit be
Lost in a still, enchanted land.
Musing, she hears the subtle tunes
From chords where faery fingers stray—
A rain of pearl from crumbling moons
Less clear and delicate than they.
The strain we lost and could not find
Think we her haunted heart forgets?
She weaves it with a troubled wind
And twilight music that regrets.
Often she stands, unseen, aloof,
To watch beside an ocean’s brink
The gorgeous, evanescent woof
Cast from the loom of suns that sink.
Often, in eyries of the West,
She waits a lover from afar—
Frailties of blossom on her breast
And o’er her brow the evening star.
She stands to greet him unaware,
Who cannot find her if he seek:
A sigh, a scent of heavenly hair—
And oh, her breath is on his cheek!