Chapter III: Fancy

UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES.

What mean these banners spread, These paths with royal red So gaily carpeted? Comes there a prince to-day? Such footing were too fine For feet less argentine Than Dian’s own or thine, Queen whom my tides obey.

Surely for thee are meant These hues so orient That with a sultan’s tent Each tree invites the sun; Our Earth such homage pays, So decks her dusty ways, And keeps such holidays, For one, and only one.

My brain shapes form and face, Throbs with the rhythmic grace And cadence of her pace To all fine instincts true; Her footsteps, as they pass, Than moonbeams over grass Fall lighter,--and, alas, More insubstantial too!

LOVE’S CLOCK.

A PASTORAL.

DAPHNIS _waiting_.

“O Dryad feet, Be doubly fleet, Timed to my heart’s expectant beat While I await her! 'At four,' vowed she; ’Tis scarcely three, Yet by _my_ time it seems to be A good hour later!”

CHLOE.

“Bid me not stay! Hear reason, pray! ’Tis striking six! Sure never day Was short as this is!”

DAPHNIS.

“Reason nor rhyme Is in the chime! It can’t be five; I’ve scarce had time To beg two kisses!”

BOTH.

“Early or late, When lovers wait, And Love’s watch gains, if Time a gait So snail-like chooses, Why should his feet Become more fleet Than cowards' are, when lovers meet And Love’s watch loses?”

ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS.

Light of triumph in her eyes,
Eleanor her apron ties;
As she pushes back her sleeves,
High resolve her bosom heaves.
Hasten, cook! impel the fire
To the pace of her desire;
As you hope to save your soul,
Bring a virgin casserole,
Brightest bring of silver spoons,--
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Almond-blossoms, now adance
In the smile of Southern France,
Leave your sport with sun and breeze,
Think of duty, not of ease;
Fashion, ’neath their jerkins brown,
Kernels white as thistle-down,
Tiny cheeses made with cream
From the Galaxy’s mid-stream,
Blanched in light of honeymoons,--
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Now for sugar,--nay, our plan
Tolerates no work of man.
Hurry, then, ye golden bees;
Fetch your clearest honey, please,
Garnered on a Yorkshire moor,
While the last larks sing and soar,
From the heather-blossoms sweet
Where sea-breeze and sunshine meet,
And the Augusts mask as Junes,--
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Next the pestle and mortar find,
Pure rock-crystal,--these to grind
Into paste more smooth than silk,
Whiter than the milkweed’s milk:
Spread it on a rose-leaf, thus,
Cate to please Theocritus;
Then the fire with spices swell,
While, for her completer spell,
Mystic canticles she croons,--
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Perfect! and all this to waste
On a graybeard’s palsied taste!
Poets so their verses write,
Heap them full of life and light,
And then fling them to the rude
Mumbling of the multitude.
Not so dire her fate as theirs,
Since her friend this gift declares
Choicest of his birthday boons,--
Eleanor’s dear macaroons!

_February 22, 1884._

TELEPATHY.

“And how could you dream of meeting?”
Nay, how can you ask me, sweet?
All day my pulse had been beating
The tune of your coming feet.

And as nearer and ever nearer
I felt the throb of your tread,
To be in the world grew dearer,
And my blood ran rosier red.

Love called, and I could not linger,
But sought the forbidden tryst,
As music follows the finger
Of the dreaming lutanist.

And though you had said it and said it,
“We must not be happy to-day,”
Was I not wiser to credit
The fire in my feet than your Nay?

SCHERZO.

When the down is on the chin And the gold-gleam in the hair, When the birds their sweethearts win And champagne is in the air, Love is here, and Love is there, Love is welcome everywhere.

Summer’s cheek too soon turns thin, Days grow briefer, sunshine rare; Autumn from his cannekin Blows the froth to chase Despair: Love is met with frosty stare, Cannot house ’neath branches bare.

When new red is in the rose And new life is in the leaf, Though Love’s Maytime be as brief As a dragon-fly’s repose, Never moments come like those, Be they Heaven or Hell: who knows?

All too soon comes Winter’s grief, Spendthrift Love’s false friends turn foes; Softly comes Old Age, the thief, Steals the rapture, leaves the throes: Love his mantle round him throws,-- “Time to say Good-bye; it snows.”

“FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC COGITAVIT.”

That’s a rather bold speech, my Lord Bacon,
For, indeed, is’t so easy to know
Just how much we from others have taken,
And how much our own natural flow?

Since your mind bubbled up at its fountain,
How many streams made it elate,
While it calmed to the plain from the mountain,
As every mind must that grows great?

While you thought ’twas You thinking as newly
As Adam still wet with God’s dew,
You forgot in your self-pride that truly
The whole Past was thinking through you.

Greece, Rome, nay, your namesake, old Roger,
With Truth’s nameless delvers who wrought
In the dark mines of Truth, helped to prod your
Fine brain with the goad of their thought.

As mummy was prized for a rich hue
The painter no elsewhere could find,
So ’twas buried men’s thinking with which you
Gave the ripe mellow tone to your mind.

I heard the proud strawberry saying,
“Only look what a ruby I’ve made!”
It forgot how the bees in their maying
Had brought it the stuff for its trade.

And yet there’s the half of a truth in it,
And my Lord might his copyright sue;
For a thought’s his who kindles new youth in it,
Or so puts it as makes it more true.

The birds but repeat without ending
The same old traditional notes,
Which some, by more happily blending,
Seem to make over new in their throats;

And we men through our old bit of song run,
Until one just improves on the rest,
And we call a thing his, in the long run,
Who utters it clearest and best.

AUSPEX.

My heart, I cannot still it, Nest that had song-birds in it; And when the last shall go, The dreary days, to fill it, Instead of lark or linnet, Shall whirl dead leaves and snow.

Had they been swallows only, Without the passion stronger That skyward longs and sings,-- Woe’s me, I shall be lonely When I can feel no longer The impatience of their wings!

A moment, sweet delusion, Like birds the brown leaves hover; But it will not be long Before their wild confusion Fall wavering down to cover The poet and his song.

THE PREGNANT COMMENT.

Opening one day a book of mine, I absent, Hester found a line Praised with a pencil-mark, and this She left transfigured with a kiss.

“When next upon the page I chance, Like Poussin’s nymphs my pulses dance, And whirl my fancy where it sees Pan piping ’neath Arcadian trees, Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse, Still young and glad as Homer’s verse. “What mean,” I ask, “these sudden joys? This feeling fresher than a boy’s? What makes this line, familiar long, New as the first bird’s April song? I could, with sense illumined thus, Clear doubtful texts in Æschylus!”

Laughing, one day she gave the key, My riddle’s open-sesame; Then added, with a smile demure, Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure, “If what I left there give you pain, You--you--can take it off again; ’Twas for _my_ poet, not for him, Your Doctor Donne there!”

Earth grew dim And wavered in a golden mist, As rose, not paper, leaves I kissed. Donne, you forgive? I let you keep Her precious comment, poet deep.

THE LESSON.

I sat and watched the walls of night With cracks of sudden lightning glow, And listened while with clumsy might The thunder wallowed to and fro.

The rain fell softly now; the squall, That to a torrent drove the trees, Had whirled beyond us to let fall Its tumult on the whitening seas.

But still the lightning crinkled keen, Or fluttered fitful from behind The leaden drifts, then only seen, That rumbled eastward on the wind.

Still as gloom followed after glare, While bated breath the pine-trees drew, Tiny Salmoneus of the air, His mimic bolts the firefly threw.

He thought, no doubt, “Those flashes grand, That light for leagues the shuddering sky, Are made, a fool could understand, By some superior kind of fly.

“He’s of our race’s elder branch His family-arms the same as ours, Both born the twy-forked flame to launch, Of kindred, if unequal, powers.”

And is man wiser? Man who takes His consciousness the law to be Of all beyond his ken, and makes God but a bigger kind of Me?

SCIENCE AND POETRY.

He who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire Over the land and through the sea-depths still, Thought only of the flame-winged messenger As a dull drudge that should encircle earth With sordid messages of Trade, and tame Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse Not long will be defrauded. From her foe Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch, The Age of Wonder is renewed again, And to our disenchanted day restores The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought, The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore, Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR’S GREETING.

The century numbers fourscore years; You, fortressed in your teens, To Time’s alarums close your ears, And, while he devastates your peers, Conceive not what he means.

If e’er life’s winter fleck with snow Your hair’s deep shadowed bowers, That winsome head an art would know To make it charm, and wear it so As ’twere a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come, May yours fall soft and slow As, shaken by a bee’s low hum, The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb, Down to their mates below!

THE DISCOVERY.

I watched a moorland torrent run Down through the drift itself had made, Golden as honey in the sun, Of darkest amber in the shade.

In this wild glen at last, methought, The magic’s secret I surprise; Here Celia’s guardian fairy caught The changeful splendors of her eyes.

All else grows tame, the sky’s one blue, The one long languish of the rose, But these, beyond prevision new, Shall charm and startle to the close.

WITH A SEASHELL.

Shell, whose lips, than mine more cold, Might with Dian’s ear make bold, Seek my Lady’s; if thou win To that portal, shut from sin, Where commissioned angels' swords Startle back unholy words, Thou a miracle shalt see Wrought by it and wrought in thee; Thou, the dumb one, shalt recover Speech of poet, speech of lover. If she deign to lift you there, Murmur what I may not dare; In that archway, pearly-pink As the Dawn’s untrodden brink, Murmur, “Excellent and good, Beauty’s best in every mood, Never common, never tame, Changeful fair as windward flame”-- Nay, I maunder; this she hears Every day with mocking ears, With a brow not sudden-stained With the flush of bliss restrained, With no tremor of the pulse More than feels the dreaming dulse In the midmost ocean’s caves, When a tempest heaps the waves. Thou must woo her in a phrase Mystic as the opal’s blaze, Which pure maids alone can see When their lovers constant be. I with thee a secret share, Half a hope, and half a prayer, Though no reach of mortal skill Ever told it all, or will; Say, “He bids me--nothing more-- Tell you what you guessed before!”

THE SECRET.

I have a fancy: how shall I bring it Home to all mortals wherever they be? Say it or sing it? Shoe it or wing it, So it may outrun or outfly ME, Merest cocoon-web whence it broke free?

Only one secret can save from disaster, Only one magic is that of the Master: Set it to music; give it a tune,-- Tune the brook sings you, tune the breeze brings you, Tune the wild columbines nod to in June!

This is the secret: so simple, you see! Easy as loving, easy as kissing, Easy as--well, let me ponder--as missing, Known, since the world was, by scarce two or three.