(Begun April 1.)
Sweet month of blue-eyed violets and fools,
I’m glad to see you, dear. Take off your bonnet,
While to your praise I pen a flowing sonnet.
A thousand misses in the boarding-schools
Now do the same on gilt-edged, scented paper,
And bite their nails and trim the midnight taper.
The clear lake like a polished mirror glows
In the seraphic loveliness of morn;
The speckled trout leap from their crystal pools,
Waking the startled skylark’s mellow horn;
On every hand new beauties still are born,
Till lingering sunset’s amethystine blaze
Illumes the vault of heaven with its far-streaming rays.
(Finished April 10.)
Thus far without impediment I got,
My sleek Pegasus on an easy gallop,
Or ambling steady or on cosy trot
Smooth-scudding o’er the airy fields of thought,
As a Venetian gondola or shallop.
To halt with sudden bump my pencil’s brought.
“I can not tell a lie!” (Spring poems are “rot.”)
Now all my pretty phrases come to naught.
It’s just a shame! But then who would have thought—
Wild polar blizzards, snow and blinding sleet
Beat my Pegasus and benumbed his feet?
And, most unlucky mishap for a poet,
The brute has got the studs and will not go it.
One solid hour of labor have I lost—
I can’t write summer songs in winter’s frost.
O April, sure you did not count the cost
Of your confounded jag! I think you’re drunk!
Well, bluster if you want to show your spunk.
The Weather Bureau’s all turned inside out—
But pray clear up, Miss April, or clear out!
ODE ON THE DEATH OF LEO XIII.
Dedicated to Mrs. Mary Anderson Navarro, London.
I see before me the Gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony.
—Childe Harold.
The Eternal City, shrine of many lands,
Slow fades; before his dying gaze expands
The Golden-streeted City, not made with hands;
Hail him with waving palms and loving eyes,
Heaven’s solemn choirs and sweet societies,
While sobs below him the great church he trod—
“To Cæsar, Cæsar’s; God’s we yield to God.”
Life’s duty done, he ends his manly part,
Stop the great throbbings of that true, pure heart;
Amid a sorrowing people’s prayers and tears,
God greets the saint of two-and-ninety years.
Not for the lust of luxury and beauty,
Not for the miser’s or the conqueror’s booty,
But for the still small voice of duty
Bravely did all temptation spurn
The immortal Lion of Lucerne.