It was Mr. Howells,—ever as generous in discovering new native talent as he is unflinching in reproof of the effeteness of European taste,—who first drew attention to the originality and beauty of Mr. Cawein's poetry. The Kentucky poet had, at that time, published but one tentative volume, the Blooms of the Berry, of 1887. This was followed, in 1888, by The Triumph of Music, and since then hardly a year has passed without a slender sheaf of verse from Mr. Cawein's garden. Among these (if a single volume is to be indicated), the quality which distinguishes him from all other poets,—the Kentucky flavour, if we may call it so,—is perhaps to be most agreeably detected in Intimations of the Beautiful. But it is time that I should leave the American lyrist to make his own appeal to English ears, with but one additional word of explanation, namely, that in this selection Mr. Cawein's narrative poems on mediæval themes, and in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been neglected in favour of such lyrics as would present him most vividly in his own native landscape, no visitor in spirit to Europe, but at home in that bright and exuberant West—
Where, in the hazy morning, runs
The stony branch that pools and drips,
Where red-haws and the wild-rose hips
Are strewn like pebbles; where the sun's
Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
To see, through scintillating seeds,
The hunters steal with glimmering guns.
To stand within the dewy ring
Where pale death smites the bone-set blooms,
And everlasting's flowers, and plumes
Of mint, with aromatic wing!
And hear the creek,—whose sobbing seems
A wild man murmuring in his dreams,—
And insect violins that sing!
So sweet a voice, so consonant with the music of the singers of past times, heard in a place so fresh and strange, will surely not pass without its welcome from the lovers of genuine poetry.
EDMUND GOSSE.
PROLOGUE
There is a poetry that speaks
Through common things: the grasshopper,
That in the hot weeds creaks and creaks,
Says all of summer to my ear:
And in the cricket's cry I hear
The fireside speak, and feel the frost
Work mysteries of silver near
On country casements, while, deep lost
In snow, the gatepost seems a sheeted ghost.
And other things give rare delight:
Those guttural harps the green-frogs tune,
Those minstrels of the falling night,
That hail the sickle of the moon
From grassy pools that glass her lune:
Or,—all of August in its loud
Dry cry,—the locust's call at noon,
That tells of heat and never a cloud
To veil the pitiless sun as with a shroud.
The rain,—whose cloud dark-lids the moon,
The great white eyeball of the night,—
Makes music for me; to its tune
I hear the flowers unfolding white,
The mushroom growing, and the slight
Green sound of grass that dances near;
The melon ripening with delight;
And in the orchard, soft and clear,
The apple redly rounding out its sphere.
The grigs make music as of old,
To which the fairies whirl and shine
Within the moonlight's prodigal gold,
On woodways wild with many a vine:
When all the wilderness with wine
Of stars is drunk, I hear it say—
'Is God restricted to confine
His wonders only to the day,
That yields the abstract tangible to clay?'
And to my ear the wind of Morn,—
When on her rubric forehead far
One star burns big,—lifts a vast horn
Of wonder where all murmurs are:
In which I hear the waters war,
The torrent and the blue abyss,
And pines,—that terrace bar on bar
The mountain side,—like lovers' kiss,
And whisper words where naught but grandeur is.