"What, chorus! are you dumb? you should have cried,
'So good comes out of evil;'" and with that,
As if all pauses it was natural
To seize for songs, his voice broke out again:
Coo, dove, to thy married mate—
She has two warm eggs in her nest:
Tell her the hours are few to wait
Ere life shall dawn on their rest;
And thy young shall peck at the shells, elate
With a dream of her brooding breast.
Coo, dove, for she counts the hours,
Her fair wings ache for flight:
By day the apple has grown in the flowers,
And the moon has grown by night,
And the white drift settled from hawthorn bowers,
Yet they will not seek the light.
Coo, dove; but what of the sky?
And what if the storm-wind swell,
And the reeling branch come down from on high
To the grass where daisies dwell,
And the brood beloved should with them lie
Or ever they break the shell?
Coo, dove; and yet black clouds lower,
Like fate, on the far-off sea:
Thunder and wind they bear to thy bower,
As on wings of destiny.
Ah, what if they break in an evil hour,
As they broke over mine and me?
What next?—we started like to girls, for lo!
The creaking voice, more harsh than rusty crane,
Of one who stooped behind us, cried aloud
"Good lack! how sweet the gentleman does sing—
So loud and sweet, 'tis like to split his throat.
Why, Mike's a child to him, a two years child—
Chrisom child."
"Who's Mike?" my brother growled
A little roughly. Quoth the fisherman—
"Mike, Sir? he's just a fisher lad, no more;
But he can sing, when he takes on to sing,
So loud there's not a sparrow in the spire
But needs must hear. Sir, if I might make bold,
I'd ask what song that was you sung. My mate,
As we were shoving off the mackerel boats,
Said he, 'I'll wager that's the sort o' song
They kept their hearts up with in the Crimea,'"
"There, fisherman," quoth I, "he showed his wit,
Your mate; he marked the sound of savage war—
Gunpowder, groans, hot-shot, and bursting shells,
And 'murderous messages,' delivered by
Spent balls that break the heads of dreaming men."
"Ay, ay, Sir!" quoth the fisherman. "Have done!"
My brother. And I—"The gift belongs to few
Of sending farther than the words can reach
Their spirit and expression;" still—"Have done!"
He cried; and then "I rolled the rubbish out
More loudly than the meaning warranted,
To air my lungs—I thought not on the words."
Then said the fisherman, who missed the point,
"So Mike rolls out the psalm; you'll hear him, Sir,
Please God you live till Sunday."
"Even so:
And you, too, fisherman; for here, they say,
You are all church-goers."
"Surely, Sir," quoth he,
Took off his hat, and stroked his old white head
And wrinkled face; then sitting by us said,
As one that utters with a quiet mind
Unchallenged truth—"'Tis lucky for the boats."
The boats! 'tis lucky for the boats! Our eyes
Were drawn to him as either fain would say,
What! do they send the psalm up in the spire,
And pray because 'tis lucky for the boats?