Basil Moss
Sing, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song—
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,
The grand, austere, imperial utterance.
Which drives my soul before it back to days
In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high
Past broken hills, and when the polar gale
Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath
That speaks for ever of the White South Land
Alone with God and Silence in the cold,
I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss,
A story shining with a woman's love!
And who that knows that love can ever doubt
How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;
For while the tale of Basil Moss was one
Not blackened with those stark, satanic sins
Which call for superhuman sacrifice,
Still, from the records of the world's sad life,
This great, sweet, gladdening fact at length we've learned,
There's not a depth to which a man can fall,
No slough of crime in which such one can lie
Stoned with the scorn and curses of his kind,
But that some tender woman can be found
To love and shield him still.
What was the fate
Of Basil Moss who, thirty years ago,
A brave, high-minded, but impetuous youth,
Left happy homesteads in the sweetest isle
That wears the sober light of Northern suns?
What happened him, the man who crossed far, fierce
Sea-circles of the hoarse Atlantic—who,
Without a friend to help him in the world,
Commenced his battle in this fair young land,
A Levite in the Temple Beautiful
Of Art, who struggled hard, but found that here
Both Bard and Painter learn, by bitter ways,
That they are aliens in the working world,
And that all Heaven's templed clouds at morn
And sunset do not weigh one loaf of bread!
This was his tale. For years he kept himself
Erect, and looked his troubles in the face
And grappled them; and, being helped at last
By one who found she loved him, who became
The patient sharer of his lot austere,
He beat them bravely back; but like the heads
Of Lerna's fabled hydra, they returned
From day to day in numbers multiplied;
And so it came to pass that Basil Moss
(Who was, though brave, no mental Hercules,
Who hid beneath a calmness forced, the keen
Heart-breaking sensibility—which is
The awful, wild, specific curse that clings
Forever to the Poet's twofold life)
Gave way at last; but not before the hand
Of sickness fell upon him—not before
The drooping form and sad averted eyes
Of hectic Hope, that figure far and faint,
Had given all his later thoughts a tongue—
"It is too late—too late!"
There is no need
To tell the elders of the English world
What followed this. From step to step, the man—
Now fairly gripped by fierce Intemperance—
Descended in the social scale; and though
He struggled hard at times to break away,
And take the old free, dauntless stand again,
He came to be as helpless as a child,
And Darkness settled on the face of things,
And Hope fell dead, and Will was paralysed.
Yet sometimes, in the gloomy breaks between
Each fit of madness issuing from his sin,
He used to wander through familiar woods
With God's glad breezes blowing in his face,
And try to feel as he was wont to feel
In other years; but never could he find
Again his old enthusiastic sense
Of Beauty; never could he exorcize
The evil spell which seemed to shackle down
The fine, keen, subtle faculty that used
To see into the heart of loveliness;
And therefore Basil learned to shun the haunts
Where Nature holds her chiefest courts, because
They forced upon him in the saddest light
The fact of what he was, and once had been.
So fared the drunkard for five awful years—
The last of which, while lighting singing dells,
With many a flame of flowers, found Basil Moss
Cooped with his wife in one small wretched room;
And there, one night, the man, when ill and weak—
A sufferer from his latest bout of sin—
Moaned, stricken sorely with a fourfold sense
Of all the degradation he had brought
Upon himself, and on his patient wife;
And while he wrestled with his strong remorse
He looked upon a sweet but pallid face,
And cried, "My God! is this the trusting girl
I swore to love, to shield, to cherish so
But ten years back? O, what a liar I am!"
She, shivering in a thin and faded dress
Beside a handful of pale, smouldering fire,
On hearing Basil's words, moved on her chair,
And turning to him blue, beseeching eyes,
And pinched, pathetic features, faintly said—
"O, Basil, love! now that you seem to feel
And understand how much I've suffered since
You first gave way—now that you comprehend
The bitter heart-wear, darling, that has brought
The swift, sad silver to this hair of mine
Which should have come with Age—which came with Pain,
Do make one more attempt to free yourself
From what is slowly killing both of us;
And if you do the thing I ask of you,
If you but try this once, we may indeed—
We may be happy yet."
Then Basil Moss,
Remembering in his marvellous agony
How often he had found her in the dead
Of icy nights with uncomplaining eyes,
A watcher in a cheerless room for him;
And thinking, too, that often, while he threw
His scanty earnings over reeking bars,
The darling that he really loved through all
Was left without enough to eat—then Moss,
I say, sprang to his feet with sinews set
And knotted brows, and throat that gasped for air,
And cried aloud—"My poor, poor girl, I will."
And so he did; and fought this time the fight
Out to the bitter end; and with the help
Of prayers and unremitting tenderness
He gained the victory at last; but not—
No, not before the agony and sweat
Of fierce Gethsemanes had come to him;
And not before the awful nightly trials,
When, set in mental furnaces of flame,
With eyes that ached and wooed in vain for sleep,
He had to fight the devil holding out
The cup of Lethe to his fevered lips.
But still he conquered; and the end was this,
That though he often had to face the eyes
Of that bleak Virtue which is not of Christ
(Because the gracious Lord of Love was one with Him
Who blessed the dying thief upon the cross),
He held his way with no unfaltering steps,
And gathered hope and light, and never missed
To do a thing for the sake of good.
And every day that glided through the world
Saw some fine instance of his bright reform,
And some assurance he would never fall
Into the pits and traps of hell again.
And thus it came to pass that Basil's name
Grew sweet with men; and, when he died, his end
Was calm—was evening-like, and beautiful.
Here ends the tale of Basil Moss. To wives
Who suffer as the Painter's darling did,
I dedicate these lines; and hope they'll bear
In mind those efforts of her lovely life,
Which saved her husband's soul; and proved that while
A man who sins can entertain remorse,
He is not wholly lost. If such as they
But follow her, they may be sure of this,
That Love, that sweet authentic messenger
From God, can never fail while there is left
Within the fallen one a single pulse
Of what the angels call humanity.
Hunted Down
Two years had the tiger, whose shape was that of a sinister man,
Been out since the night of escape—two years under horror and ban.
In a time full of thunder and rain, when hurricanes hackled the tree,
He slipt through the sludge of a drain, and swam a fierce fork of the sea.
Through the roar of the storm, and the ring
and the wild savage whistle of hail,
Did this naked, whipt, desperate thing
break loose from the guards of the gaol.
And breasting the foam of the bay, and facing the fangs of the bight,
With a great cruel cry on his way, he dashed through the darkness of night.
But foiled was the terror of fin, and baffled the strength of the tide,
For a devil supported his chin and a fiend kept a watch at his side.
And hands of iniquity drest the hellish hyena, and gave
Him food in the hills of the west—in cells of indefinite cave.
Then, strengthened and weaponed, this peer
of the brute, on the track of its prey,
Sprang out, and shed sorrow and fear through the beautiful fields of the day.
And pillage and murder, and worse, swept peace from the face of the land—
The black, bitter work of this curse with the blood on his infamous hand.
But wolf of the hills at the end—chased back to the depths of his lair—
Had horror for neighbour and friend—he supped in the dark with despair.
A whisper of leaf or a breath of the wind in the watch of the night
Was ever as message of death to this devil bent double with fright.
For now were the hunters abroad; and the fiend like an adder at bay,
Cast out of the sight of the Lord, in the folds of his fastnesses lay.
Yea, skulking in pits of the slime—in venomous dens of eclipse—
He cowered and bided his time, with the white malice set on his lips.
Two years had his shadow been cast in forest, on highway, and run;
But Nemesis tracked him at last, and swept him from under the sun.
Foul felons in chains were ashamed to speak of the bloodthirsty thing
Who lived, like a panther inflamed, the life that no singer can sing—
Who butchered one night in the wild three women, a lad, and a maid,
And cut the sweet throat of a child—its mother's pure blood on his blade!
But over the plains and away by the range and the forested lake,
Rode hard, for a week and a day, the terrible tracker, Dick Blake.
Dick Blake had the scent of a hound, the eye of a lynx, and could track
Where never a sign on the ground or the rock could be seen by the black.
A rascal at large, when he heard that Blake was out hard at his heels,
Felt just as the wilderness bird, in the snare fettered hopelessly, feels.
And, hence, when the wolf with the brand of Cain written thrice on his face,
Knew terrible Dick was at hand, he slunk like a snake to his place—
To the depths of his kennel he crept, far back in the passages dim;
But Blake and his mates never slept; they hunted and listened for him.
The mountains were many, but he who had captured big Terrigal Bill,
The slayer of Hawkins and Lee, found tracks by a conical hill.
There were three in the party—no more: Dick Blake and his brother, and one
Who came from a far-away shore, called here by the blood of his son.
Two nights and two days did they wait on the trail of the curst of all men;
But on the third morning a fate led Dick to the door of the den;
And a thunder ran up from the south and smote all the woods into sound;
And Blake, with an oath on his mouth, called out for the fiend underground.
But the answer was blue, bitter lead, and the brother of Dick, with a cry,
Fell back, and the storm overhead set night like a seal on the sky;
And the strength of the hurricane tore asunder hill-turrets uphurled;
And a rushing of rain and a roar made wan the green widths of the world.
The flame, and the roll, and the ring, and the hiss of the thunder and hail
Set fear on the face of the Spring laid bare to the arrow of gale.
But here in the flash and the din, in the cry of the mountain and wave,
Dick Blake, through the shadow, dashed in and strangled the wolf in his cave.
Wamberal
Just a shell, to which the seaweed glittering yet with greenness clings,
Like the song that once I loved so, softly of the old time sings—
Softly of the old time speaketh—bringing ever back to me
Sights of far-off lordly forelands—glimpses of the sounding sea!
Now the cliffs are all before me—now, indeed, do I behold
Shining growths on wild wet hillheads, quiet pools of green and gold.
And, across the gleaming beaches, lo! the mighty flow and fall
Of the great ingathering waters thundering under Wamberal!
Back there are the pondering mountains; there the dim, dumb ranges loom—
Ghostly shapes in dead grey vapour—half-seen peaks august with gloom.
There the voice of troubled torrents, hidden in unfathomed deeps,
Known to moss and faint green sunlight, wanders down the oozy steeps.
There the lake of many runnels nestles in a windless wild
Far amongst thick-folded forests, like a radiant human child.
And beyond surf-smitten uplands—high above the highest spur—
Lo! the clouds like tents of tempest on the crags of Kincumber!
Wamberal, the home of echoes! Hard against a streaming strand,
Sits the hill of blind black caverns, at the limits of the land.
Here the haughty water marches—here the flights of straitened sea
Make a noise like that of trumpets, breaking wide across the lea!
But behold, in yonder crescent that a ring of island locks
Are the gold and emerald cisterns shining moonlike in the rocks!
Clear, bright cisterns, zoned by mosses, where the faint wet blossoms dwell
With the leaf of many colours—down beside the starry shell.
Friend of mine beyond the mountains, here and here the perished days
Come like sad reproachful phantoms, in the deep grey evening haze—
Come like ghosts, and sit beside me when the noise of day is still,
And the rain is on the window, and the wind is on the hill.
Then they linger, but they speak not, while my memory roams and roams
Over scenes by death made sacred—other lands and other homes!
Places sanctified by sorrow—sweetened by the face of yore—
Face that you and I may look on (friend and brother) nevermore!
Seasons come with tender solace—time lacks neither light nor rest;
But the old thoughts were such dear ones, and the old days seem the best.
And to those who've loved and suffered, every pulse of wind or rain—
Every song with sadness in it, brings the peopled Past again.
Therefore, just this shell yet dripping, with this weed of green and grey,
Sets me thinking—sets me dreaming of the places far away;
Dreaming of the golden rockpools—of the foreland and the fall;
And the home behind the mountains looming over Wamberal.