“Only to Lie—”
Only to lie in the evening,
Watching the drifting clouds,
O’er the blue heavens sailing;
Mystical, dreamlike shrouds.
Watching the purple shadows
Filling the woodland glades,
Only to lie in the twilight
Deep in the gathering shade.
Only to lie at midnight,
Climbing the pitch-dark stairs;
Wife at the top of them waiting;
Upwards are rising our hairs.
Only to lie as she asks us—
“Where have you been so late?”
Only to lie with judgment—
“Cars blocked; I had to wait.”
The Pewee
In the hush of the drowsy afternoon.
When the very mind on the breast of June
Lies settled, and hot white tracery
Of the shattered sunlight flitters free
Through the unstinted leaves to the pied cool sward,
On a dead tree branch sings the saddest bard
Of the birds that be.
’Tis the lone pewee;
Its note is a sob, and its song is pitched
In a single key like a soul bewitched
To a mournful minstrelsy.
“Pewee, Pewee,” doth it ever cry;
A sad, sweet, minor threnody
That threads the aisles of the dim hot grove
Like a tale of a wrong or a vanished love,
And the fancy comes that the wee dun bird
Perchance was a maid, and her heart was stirred
By some lover’s rhyme
In a golden time,
And broke when the world turned false and old;
And her dreams grew dark and her faith grew cold,
In some fairy far-off clime.
And her soul crept into the pewee’s breast;
And forever she cries with a strange unrest
For something lost, in the afternoon;
For something missed from the lavish June;
For the heart, that died in the long ago;
For the livelong pain that pierceth so;
Thus the pewee cries,
While the evening lies
Steeped in the languorous still sunshine,
Rapt, to the leaf and the bough and the vine,
Of some hopeless paradise.
The Sunday Excursionist
Somebody—who it was doesn’t make any difference—has said something like the following: “There is something grand in the grief of the Common People, but there is no sadder sight on earth than that of a Philistine enjoying himself.”
If a man would realize the truth of this, let him go on a Sunday excursion. The male Sunday excursionist enjoys himself, as the darkies say, “a gwine and a cornin’.” No other being on earth can hold quite so much bubbling and vociferous joy. The welkin that would not ring when the Sunday excursionist opens his escape valve is not worth a cent. Six days the Sunday excursionist labors and does his work, but he does his best to refute the opponents of the theory of the late Charles Darwin. He occupies all the vacant seats in the car with his accomplices, and lets his accursed good nature spray over the rest of the passengers. He is so infernally happy that he wants everybody, to the brakeman on the rear car, to know it. He is so devilish agreeable, so perniciously jolly and so abominably entertaining that people who were bom with or have acquired brains love him most vindictively.
People who become enamored of the Sunday excursionist are apt to grow insanely jealous, and have been known to rise up and murder him when a stranger enters the car and he proceeds to repeat his funny remarks for the benefit of a fresh audience.