XV.
For even now the dawn doth give
Some promissory gleams,
Tho’ most ’tis ours in night to live,
Participant in dreams
Of some broad-beamed and brighter morn,
Some elemental balm,
Some purer peace, of battle born,
Some tempest-cradled calm!
I wonder if there still remain
Some echoes from the songs of old;
Or what the measure of the strain
The future shall unfold?
The voice that breathed across the years,
And came, and went, and passed the bar,
And sang the battle song of tears,
Sounds small, and faint, and far;
And men have found another chord,
An offspring, not of heart, but head;
And gold is God, and lust is Lord,
And Love lies stricken dead!
Ah, me! the race goes blindly on
And leaves the old familiar ways;
And still, earth-weighted, flowers the dawn
To still ignoble days;
And men, as sheep within their folds,
Grope round their world with great sad eyes;
And hate the hand that still withholds
The secret of the skies;
Or, deeming God an idle tale
Withdrawn from lore of ancient shelves,
Themselves would reckon by the scale
And measure of themselves!
How mean the stature of the song
Of our inglorious—glorious time,
Attenuating, as along
It moves from that great prime
When Milton, in the midnight hours,
Lay waiting for the mystic breath
Of God to touch his soul to flowers
Of song that smile at Death.
O singers of the years to come!
Be yours the large and liberal scope:
Sing sweetly—or for aye be dumb—
Of God, and Love, and Hope,
Encircled by no little line
Of gain or loss, of time or sense,
Nor, bent at Mammon’s soulless shrine,
Your birth-right part for pence;
But bend an arm across the past,
And finger all the vibrant years,
Till sunlight, on our shadows cast,
Makes rainbows of our tears.
There it stands, as it has stood—
Theme for bards, and theme for seers—
Mute to sun and tempests rude,
To the swift express of years;
Stretched across from bank to bank
Where the rabbits flash and go,
Where the fir-trees, rank by rank,
Gaze upon the track below
As the train, at man’s behest,
In the calm or tempest’s teeth,
Speeds with lightning in its breast,
And the thunder underneath.
There in many a rift and rent,
Many a bird finds friendly cover;
And the toiler, homeward bent,
Whistles as he passes over;
And the children from the town
Climb its parapets and strain
Half a hundred throats to drown
With a cheer the passing train.
Yet how many children, toilers,
List’ to what that arch would say
To the thousands of earth’s moilers?—
Dull of ear and listless they!
Ah! adown the track of time,
In the world’s great sidings lying,
Many a theme for many a rhyme
Is unmarked by thousands, flying
After all the fen-fires, darting
In the damps and swamps of life;
Fires of meeting and of parting,
Hate and love, and strain and strife!
There it stands—O! how I love it;
For it speaks of weal, and woe,
For the thousands pass above it;
For the thousands rush below;
And, attune to whirr and clatter,
Wide and wider does it span,
High o’er time and sense and matter,
High o’er life and death and man,
Stretched from age to age unborn;
And above it in a stream
Pass, unceasing, night and morn,
Shapes like those in Jacob’s dream
All the souls of all the ages,
All the ghosts of all the years,
Priests and prophets, saints and sages,
Sweet-breathed bards and broad-browed seers,
Who from many a cloudy station
List’ the whirring of the wheels
Bounding on without cessation,
Dragging progress at their heels;
Who, as children from the town,
Throng the parapets, and strain
Form and voice in flashing down
Warning signals to the train
Speeding on, at man’s behest,
In the calm, or tempest’s teeth,
With the lightning in its breast,
And the thunder underneath!
(A Ballad of Armenia.)
They had fought, they had failed, those women and now, in a wild-eyed throng,
They fled from the red destroyer, and they cried: “O Lord, how long?—
How long, O Lord, till the ending of the ghastly sounds and sights,
Till the dripping days be finished, and the thrice red-running nights,—
Till the last cold corpse falls, severed from the last Armenian head,
Till the last maid be dishonoured, and the last hot tear be shed?”
They had fled from the red destroyer, but he hastens around their track,
Till the fate they had flown is before them, and they turn in their pathway back.
But, Northward and Southward and Eastward and Westward, and round and round,
Come the gleam of the steely lightning, and the wild, soul-harrowing sound,
As mother and sister and daughter, and the child at its mother’s breast
Go down in the surge of slaughter and the wreck of the great Opprest.
And now they are huddled together, as the death-cries rise and swell,
Where the rock runs up to Heaven, and the gulf goes down to Hell,—
On the edge of a beetling hillock; when, lo! from the ’wildered crowd,
On a peak of the rock steps Schakhe, and calls to her sisters, loud:—
“O sisters in nameless sorrow, baptised in a life of tears;
Before you two paths lie open: behind you a thousand years
Fade far in the dusky distance, one long, broad stream of blood,
That flows by the wreck and ruin of sword and fire and flood!
Before you two paths lie open: one leads where dangers lurk,
And the pain and the dumb dishonour from the merciless hand of the Turk.
Choose ye! Will ye thread that pathway, prove false to the men ye love;
Prove false to the children ye bore them; prove false to the God above?
Will ye sell yourselves to the spoilers of father and mother and child,
Who butchered and then, like devils, at their cries for mercy smiled?
Do ye think of the thousands rotting, flung down in a ghastly heap
Unblessed; whose dust commingles in their last unhallowed sleep?
Do ye think of the blood, the sorrow, the wild, sky-rending cries,
As the scarce-born babe was mangled to feast their fiendish eyes?
Do you think of the brute defilement when, full in the flare of day,
Ye were robbed of your dear-prized honour, and made the Moslem’s prey?
Will ye choose that path, O sisters? ’Tis a path ye have often trod;
Or throw yourselves on the mercy of the great, all-powerful God?
What though He is veiled in silence, and behind our clouds grown dim;
If He come not down to help us, then we will go to Him.
See! there is the other pathway, down, down to the home of Night.
Jump! long ere the body be broken, the soul will have taken flight.
He will give His charge to His angels: in their hands they will bear thee up,
As ye tread the Saviour’s pathway, and drink the Saviour’s cup.
There,—lean on my breast, sweet infant, and good-bye to Earth and woe.
Now, sisters, the way lies open: I am weary and long to go!”
They had fought: they had failed; and they followed brave Schakhe, a martyr throng;—
And soft o’er the corpse-strewn valley the winds sigh: “Lord, how long?”
No Shakespeare girdle this, whose girth
Would compass with its arms
The sounding seas and snows of earth,
The fruitful fields and farms.[A]
Here priestly power has thrown around
A circuit wide and high,
A bar where waves of human sound
Beat vainly, drop, and die.
“Who dreams of war in such a scene
Of undisturbed repose?
Who babbles here of spite and spleen?
Who rhymes of human woes?
Nought here is heard of mingling cries,
Of life’s unlovely jars
Nought here is seen but yonder skies,
And circling suns and stars!”
O wise in wisdom of the fool!
O warped in sight and soul!
O Arctic spirit, icy cool
As passions of the Pole!
Is ’t but a dream of babe or bard
That conjures grief and groans?
Or is thy shrunken heart more hard
Than those three standing stones?
I dreamed a dream when last I stood
Within their sombre shade:
Time took my hand full many a rood
Beyond the tides of trade,
Beyond the sacerdotal rite,
And soul-absorbing creeds,
Beyond the narrow skirts of sight
And despicable deeds.
I soared above the brimming Earth;
I peered beneath its breast;
I saw the founts of joy and mirth,
And seats of life’s unrest.
But in the ocean of its thought
One current swelled and grew
And on to seas with blessing fraught
A thousand others drew.
’Twas Love: and Time stood by, and said:
“Behold! a thousand spires
Speak gilded words from hearts as dead
As those old Druid fires.
But love lives on and leavens all
In Earth’s expanding range,
The height and depth, the rise and fall,
The first and last of Change.
“Kings pale and perish, dogmas die,
The world goes slowly on
To greet an all-unclouded sky,
To kiss a purer dawn.
Stript of the garb of mimic worth,
Freed from his brothers’ ban
And circumscribing creeds, steps forth
A newer, nobler man.
“’Twas thus God’s chosen race was bent
Beneath a tyrant yoke:
’Twas thus the hated chains were rent,
The conqueror’s sceptre broke.
Thus Babylon to Persia bowed,
Thus Persia bent to Greece,
Thus Greece gave place to Rome the proud,
The Goth broke Roman peace.”
These mighty stones, this giant ring
Give token of a day
That died, as dies a dreamt-of thing,
And passed in dust away,
Save these, for you—dear heart—and me
To gaze on, muse, and rhyme:
“Time conquers all, both bond and free,
But Love shall conquer Time!”
