Chapter VII: Epilogue: 321 (5)

Warm in their mantles wrapped, the three stood there,
Under the hollies, in the clear still air,--
Mantles with those rich furs deep glistering
Which Venice ships do from swart Egypt bring.
Long they stayed still, then, pacing at their ease,
Moved up and down under the glossy trees;
But still, as they pursued their warm dry road,
From Iseult’s lips the unbroken story flowed,
And still the children listened, their blue eyes
Fixed on their mother’s face in wide surprise.
Nor did their looks stray once to the sea-side,
Nor to the brown heaths round them, bright and wide,
Nor to the snow, which, though ’twas all away
From the open heath, still by the hedgerows lay,
Nor to the shining sea-fowl, that with screams
Bore up from where the bright Atlantic gleams,
Swooping to landward; nor to where, quite clear,
The fell-fares settled on the thickets near.
And they would still have listened, till dark night
Came keen and chill down on the heather bright;
But when the red glow on the sea grew cold,
And the gray turrets of the castle old
Looked sternly through the frosty evening-air,
Then Iseult took by the hand those children fair,
And brought her tale to an end, and found the path,
And led them home over the darkening heath.
And is she happy? Does she see unmoved
The days in which she might have lived and loved
Slip without bringing bliss slowly away,
One after one, to-morrow like to-day?
Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will:
Is it this thought which makes her mien so still,
Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet,
So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet
Her children’s? She moves slow; her voice alone
Hath yet an infantine and silver tone,
But even that comes languidly; in truth,
She seems one dying in a mask of youth.
And now she will go home, and softly lay
Her laughing children in their beds, and play
A while with them before they sleep; and then
She’ll light her silver lamp,--which fishermen
Dragging their nets through the rough waves afar,
Along this iron coast, know like a star,--
And take her broidery-frame, and there she’ll sit
Hour after hour, her gold curls sweeping it;
Lifting her soft-bent head only to mind
Her children, or to listen to the wind.
And when the clock peals midnight, she will move
Her work away, and let her fingers rove
Across the shaggy brows of Tristram’s hound,
Who lies, guarding her feet, along the ground;
Or else she will fall musing, her blue eyes
Fixed, her slight hands clasped on her lap; then rise,
And at her prie-dieu kneel, until she have told
Her rosary-beads of ebony tipped with gold;
Then to her soft sleep--and to-morrow’ll be
To-day’s exact repeated effigy.
Yes, it is lonely for her in her hall.
The children, and the gray-haired seneschal,
Her women, and Sir Tristram’s aged hound,
Are there the sole companions to be found.
But these she loves; and noisier life than this
She would find ill to bear, weak as she is.
She has her children, too, and night and day
Is with them; and the wide heaths where they play,
The hollies, and the cliff, and the sea-shore,
The sand, the sea-birds, and the distant sails,
These are to her dear as to them; the tales
With which this day the children she beguiled
She gleaned from Breton grandames, when a child,
In every hut along this sea-coast wild;
She herself loves them still, and, when they are told,
Can forget all to hear them, as of old.

Dear saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear,
Not suffering, which shuts up eye and ear
To all that has delighted them before,
And lets us be what we were once no more.
No: we may suffer deeply, yet retain
Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain,
By what of old pleased us, and will again.
No: ’tis the gradual furnace of the world,
In whose hot air our spirits are upcurled
Until they crumble, or else grow like steel,
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring;
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel,
But takes away the power: this can avail,
By drying up our joy in every thing,
To make our former pleasures all seem stale.
This, or some tyrannous single thought, some fit
Of passion, which subdues our souls to it,
Till for its sake alone we live and move,--
Call it ambition, or remorse, or love,--
This too can change us wholly, and make seem
All which we did before, shadow and dream.
And yet, I swear, it angers me to see
How this fool passion gulls men potently;
Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest,
And an unnatural overheat at best.
How they are full of languor and distress
Not having it; which when they do possess,
They straightway are burnt up with fume and care,
And spend their lives in posting here and there
Where this plague drives them; and have little ease,
Are furious with themselves, and hard to please.
Like that bald Cæsar, the famed Roman wight,
Who wept at reading of a Grecian knight
Who made a name at younger years than he;
Or that renowned mirror of chivalry,
Prince Alexander, Philip’s peerless son,
Who carried the great war from Macedon
Into the Soudan’s realm, and thundered on
To die at thirty-five in Babylon.

What tale did Iseult to the children say,
Under the hollies, that bright winter’s day?

She told them of the fairy-haunted land
Away the other side of Brittany,
Beyond the heaths, edged by the lonely sea;
Of the deep forest-glades of Broce-liande,
Through whose green boughs the golden sunshine creeps,
Where Merlin by the enchanted thorn-tree sleeps.
For here he came with the fay Vivian,
One April, when the warm days first began.
He was on foot, and that false fay, his friend,
On her white palfrey; here he met his end,
In these lone sylvan glades, that April-day.
This tale of Merlin and the lovely fay
Was the one Iseult chose, and she brought clear
Before the children’s fancy him and her.

Blowing between the stems, the forest-air
Had loosened the brown locks of Vivian’s hair,
Which played on her flushed cheek, and her blue eyes
Sparkled with mocking glee and exercise.
Her palfrey’s flanks were mired and bathed in sweat,
For they had travelled far and not stopped yet.
A brier in that tangled wilderness
Had scored her white right hand, which she allows
To rest ungloved on her green riding-dress;
The other warded off the drooping boughs.
But still she chatted on, with her blue eyes
Fixed full on Merlin’s face, her stately prize.
Her ’havior had the morning’s fresh clear grace,
The spirit of the woods was in her face;
She looked so witching fair, that learned wight
Forgot his craft, and his best wits took flight,
And he grew fond, and eager to obey
His mistress, use her empire as she may.

They came to where the brushwood ceased, and day
Peered ’twixt the stems; and the ground broke away
In a sloped sward down to a brawling brook.
And up as high as where they stood to look
On the brook’s farther side was clear; but then
The underwood and trees began again.
This open glen was studded thick with thorns
Then white with blossom; and you saw the horns,
Through last year’s fern, of the shy fallow-deer
Who come at noon down to the water here.
You saw the bright-eyed squirrels dart along
Under the thorns on the green sward; and strong
The blackbird whistled from the dingles near,
And the weird chipping of the woodpecker
Rang lonelily and sharp; the sky was fair,
And a fresh breath of spring stirred everywhere.
Merlin and Vivian stopped on the slope’s brow,
To gaze on the light sea of leaf and bough
Which glistering plays all round them, lone and mild,
As if to itself the quiet forest smiled.
Upon the brow-top grew a thorn, and here
The grass was dry and mossed, and you saw clear
Across the hollow; white anemones
Starred the cool turf, and clumps of primroses
Ran out from the dark underwood behind.
No fairer resting-place a man could find.
“Here let us halt,” said Merlin then; and she
Nodded, and tied her palfrey to a tree.

They sate them down together, and a sleep
Fell upon Merlin, more like death, so deep.
Her finger on her lips, then Vivian rose,
And from her brown-locked head the wimple throws,
And takes it in her hand, and waves it over
The blossomed thorn-tree and her sleeping lover.
Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground.
And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner till the judgment-day;
But she herself whither she will can rove--
For she was passing weary of his love.

_SAINT BRANDAN._

Saint Brandan sails the northern main;
The brotherhoods of saints are glad.
He greets them once, he sails again;
So late! such storms! The saint is mad!

He heard, across the howling seas,
Chime convent-bells on wintry nights;
He saw, on spray-swept Hebrides,
Twinkle the monastery-lights;

But north, still north, Saint Brandan steered;
And now no bells, no convents more!
The hurtling Polar lights are neared,
The sea without a human shore.

At last (it was the Christmas-night;
Stars shone after a day of storm)
He sees float past an iceberg white,
And on it--Christ!--a living form.

That furtive mien, that scowling eye,
Of hair that red and tufted fell,
It is--oh, where shall Brandan fly?--
The traitor Judas, out of hell!

Palsied with terror, Brandan sate;
The moon was bright, the iceberg near.
He hears a voice sigh humbly, “Wait!
By high permission I am here.

“One moment wait, thou holy man!
On earth my crime, my death, they knew;
My name is under all men’s ban:
Ah! tell them of my respite too.

“Tell them, one blessed Christmas-night
(It was the first after I came,
Breathing self-murder, frenzy, spite,
To rue my guilt in endless flame),--

“I felt, as I in torment lay
’Mid the souls plagued by heavenly power,
An angel touch mine arm, and say,--
_Go hence, and cool thyself an hour!_

“‘Ah! whence this mercy, Lord?’ I said.
_The leper recollect_, said he,
_Who asked the passers-by for aid,_
_In Joppa, and thy charity_.

“Then I remembered how I went,
In Joppa, through the public street,
One morn when the sirocco spent
Its storms of dust with burning heat;
“And in the street a leper sate,
Shivering with fever, naked, old;
Sand raked his sores from heel to pate,
The hot wind fevered him fivefold.

“He gazed upon me as I passed,
And murmured, _Help me, or I die!_
To the poor wretch my cloak I cast,
Saw him look eased, and hurried by.

“O Brandan! think what grace divine,
What blessing must full goodness shower,
When fragment of it small, like mine,
Hath such inestimable power!

“Well-fed, well-clothed, well-friended, I
Did that chance act of good, that one!
Then went my way to kill and lie,
Forgot my good as soon as done.

“That germ of kindness, in the womb
Of mercy caught, did not expire;
Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,
And friends me in the pit of fire.

“Once every year, when carols wake,
On earth, the Christmas-night’s repose,
Arising from the sinner’s lake,
I journey to these healing snows.

“I stanch with ice my burning breast,
With silence balm my whirling brain.
O Brandan! to this hour of rest,
That Joppan leper’s ease was pain.”

Tears started to Saint Brandan’s eyes;
He bowed his head, he breathed a prayer,
Then looked--and lo, the frosty skies!
The iceberg, and no Judas there!

_THE NECKAN._

In summer, on the headlands,
The Baltic Sea along,
Sits Neckan with his harp of gold,
And sings his plaintive song.

Green rolls, beneath the headlands,
Green rolls the Baltic Sea;
And there, below the Neckan’s feet,
His wife and children be.

He sings not of the ocean,
Its shells and roses pale:
Of earth, of earth, the Neckan sings,
He hath no other tale.

He sits upon the headlands,
And sings a mournful stave
Of all he saw and felt on earth,
Far from the kind sea-wave.

Sings how, a knight, he wandered
By castle, field, and town;
But earthly knights have harder hearts
Than the sea-children own.

Sings of his earthly bridal,
Priest, knights, and ladies gay.
“And who art thou,” the priest began,
“Sir Knight, who wedd’st to-day?”

“I am no knight,” he answered;
“From the sea-waves I come.”
The knights drew sword, the ladies screamed,
The surpliced priest stood dumb.

He sings how from the chapel
He vanished with his bride,
And bore her down to the sea-halls,
Beneath the salt sea-tide.

He sings how she sits weeping
’Mid shells that round her lie.
“False Neckan shares my bed,” she weeps;
“No Christian mate have I.”

He sings how through the billows
He rose to earth again,
And sought a priest to sign the cross,
That Neckan heaven might gain.

He sings how, on an evening,
Beneath the birch-trees cool,
He sate and played his harp of gold,
Beside the river-pool.

Beside the pool sate Neckan,
Tears filled his mild blue eye.
On his white mule, across the bridge,
A cassocked priest rode by.

“Why sitt’st thou there, O Neckan,
And play’st thy harp of gold?
Sooner shall this my staff bear leaves,
Than thou shalt heaven behold.”

But, lo! the staff, it budded;
It greened, it branched, it waved.
“O ruth of God!” the priest cried out,
“This lost sea-creature saved!”

The cassocked priest rode onwards,
And vanished with his mule;
And Neckan in the twilight gray
Wept by the river-pool.

He wept, “The earth hath kindness,
The sea, the starry poles;
Earth, sea, and sky, and God above,--
But, ah! not human souls!”

In summer, on the headlands,
The Baltic Sea along,
Sits Neckan with his harp of gold,
And sings this plaintive song.

_THE FORSAKEN MERMAN._

Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away!
This way, this way!

Call her once before you go,--
Call once yet!
In a voice that she will know,--
“Margaret! Margaret!”
Children’s voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother’s ear;
Children’s voices, wild with pain,--
Surely she will come again!
Call her once, and come away;
This way, this way!
“Mother dear, we cannot stay!
The wild white horses foam and fret.”
Margaret! Margaret!

Come, dear children, come away down;
Call no more!
One last look at the white-walled town,
And the little gray church on the windy shore;
Then come down!
She will not come, though you call all day;
Come away, come away!

Children dear, was it yesterday
We heard the sweet bells over the bay,--
In the caverns where we lay,
Through the surf and through the swell,
The far-off sound of a silver bell?
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye?
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?

Children dear, was it yesterday
(Call yet once) that she went away?
Once she sate with you and me,
On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sate on her knee.
She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sighed, she looked up through the clear green sea;
She said, “I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
’Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, merman! here with thee.”
I said, “Go up, dear heart, through the waves;
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!”
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.

Children dear, was it yesterday?
Children dear, were we long alone?
“The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan;
Long prayers,” I said, “in the world they say;
Come!” I said; and we rose through the surf in the bay.
We went up the beach, by the sandy down
Where the sea-stocks bloom, to the white-walled town;
Through the narrow paved streets, where all was still,
To the little gray church on the windy hill.
From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers,
But we stood without in the cold blowing airs.
We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with rains,
And we gazed up the aisle through the small leaded panes.
She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear:
“Margaret, hist! come quick, we are here!
Dear heart,” I said, “we are long alone;
The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.”
But, ah! she gave me never a look,
For her eyes were sealed to the holy book.
Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more!
Come away, come down, call no more!

Down, down, down!
Down to the depths of the sea!
She sits at her wheel in the humming town,
Singing most joyfully.
Hark what she sings: “O joy, O joy,
For the humming street, and the child with its toy!
For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;
For the wheel where I spun,
And the blessed light of the sun!”
And so she sings her fill,
Singing most joyfully,
Till the spindle drops from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands still.
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
And over the sand at the sea;
And her eyes are set in a stare;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh,
For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.

Come away, away, children;
Come, children, come down!
The hoarse wind blows colder;
Lights shine in the town.
She will start from her slumber
When gusts shake the door:
She will hear the winds howling,
Will hear the waves roar.
We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,
A pavement of pearl.
Singing, “Here came a mortal,
But faithless was she!
And alone dwell forever
The kings of the sea.”

But, children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low;
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starred with broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanched sands a gloom;
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side,
And then come back down,
Singing, “There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely forever
The kings of the sea.”

SONNETS.

_AUSTERITY OF POETRY._

That son of Italy who tried to blow,[8]
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.

Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong,--
Gay raiment sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! Lo,

Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay!
Shuddering, they drew her garments off--and found
A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.

Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.

_A PICTURE AT NEWSTEAD._

What made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell?--
’Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry
Stormily sweet, his Titan-agony;
It was the sight of that Lord Arundel
Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well,
And his child’s reason flickered, and did die.
Painted (he willed it) in the gallery
They hang; the picture doth the story tell.

Behold the stern, mailed father, staff in hand!
The little fair-haired son, with vacant gaze,
Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!

Methinks the woe, which made that father stand
Baring his dumb remorse to future days,
Was woe than Byron’s woe more tragic far.

_RACHEL._

I.

In Paris all looked hot and like to fade;
Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,
Sere with September, drooped the chestnut-trees; was dawn,
a brougham rolled through the streets, and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade
Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,
Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls surveyed.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled
To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;
Why stops she by this empty playhouse drear?

Ah! where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!

II.

Unto a lonely villa, in a dell
Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore,
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,--
The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia,--full on her death-bed. ’Twas well!

The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns,

Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease:
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

III.

Sprung from the blood of Israel’s scattered race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renewed, old classic grace;
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place,--

Ah! not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had--one power, which made her breast its home.
In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers,

Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.

_WORLDLY PLACE._

_Even in a palace, life may be led well!_
So spake the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,

Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master’s ken
Who rates us if we peer outside our pen,--
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell?

_Even in a palace!_ On his truth sincere,
Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came;
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame

Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
I’ll stop, and say, “There were no succor here!
The aids to noble life are all within.”

_EAST LONDON._

’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.

I met a preacher there I knew, and said,--
“Ill and o’erworked, how fare you in this scene?”
“Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_.”

O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,--
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.

_WEST LONDON._

Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square,
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.

Some laboring-men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.

Thought I, “Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.

She turns from that cold succor, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.”

_EAST AND WEST._

In the bare midst of Anglesey they show
Two springs which close by one another play;
And, “Thirteen hundred years agone,” they say,
“Two saints met often where those waters flow.

One came from Penmon westward, and a glow
Whitened his face from the sun’s fronting ray;
Eastward the other, from the dying day,
And he with unsunned face did always go.”

_Seiriol the Bright, Kybi the Dark!_ men said.
The seer from the East was then in light,
The seer from the West was then in shade.
Ah! now ’tis changed. In conquering sunshine bright
The man of the bold West now comes arrayed:
He of the mystic East is touched with night.

_THE BETTER PART._

Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!
“Christ,” some one says, “was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more, when we have done our span.”
“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?
From sin which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!”

So answerest thou; but why not rather say,--
“Hath man no second life? _Pitch this one high!_
Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?

_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_
Was Christ a man like us? _Ah! let us try_
_If we then, too, can be such men as he!_”

THE DIVINITY.

“Yes, write it in the rock,” Saint Bernard said,
“Grave it on brass with adamantine pen!
’Tis God himself becomes apparent, when
God’s wisdom and God’s goodness are displayed;

For God of these his attributes is made.”--
Well spake the impetuous saint, and bore of men
The suffrage captive: now not one in ten
Recalls the obscure opposer he outweighed.[9]

_God’s wisdom and God’s goodness!_ Ay, but fools
Mis-define these till God knows them no more.
_Wisdom and goodness, they are God!_--what schools

Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore?
This no saint preaches, and this no Church rules;
’Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

_IMMORTALITY._

Foiled by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, _Patience! in another life_, we say,
_The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne_.

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world’s poor, routed leavings? or will they
Who failed under the heat of this life’s day
Support the fervors of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing,--only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

_THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID._

_He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save._
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried,[10]
“Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave.”
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church! of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head ’mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew--
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

_MONICA’S LAST PRAYER._[11]

“Ah! could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be!”
_Care not for that, and lay me where I fall!
Everywhere heard will be the judgment-call;
But at God’s altar, oh! remember me._

Thus Monica, and died in Italy.
Yet fervent had her longing been, through all
Her course, for home at last, and burial
With her own husband, by the Libyan sea.

Had been! but at the end, to her pure soul
All tie with all beside seemed vain and cheap,
And union before God the only care.

Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole.
Yet we her memory, as she prayed, will keep,
Keep by this: _Life in God, and union there!_

LYRIC AND DRAMATIC POEMS.

_SWITZERLAND._

I. MEETING.

Again I see my bliss at hand,
The town, the lake, are here;
My Marguerite smiles upon the strand,[12]
Unaltered with the year.

I know that graceful figure fair,
That cheek of languid hue;
I know that soft, enkerchiefed hair,
And those sweet eyes of blue.

Again I spring to make my choice;
Again in tones of ire
I hear a God’s tremendous voice,--
“Be counselled, and retire.”

Ye guiding Powers who join and part,
What would ye have with me?
Ah, warn some more ambitious heart,
And let the peaceful be!

II. PARTING.

Ye storm-winds of autumn!
Who rush by, who shake
The window, and ruffle
The gleam-lighted lake;
Who cross to the hillside
Thin-sprinkled with farms,
Where the high woods strip sadly
Their yellowing arms,--
Ye are bound for the mountains!
Ah! with you let me go
Where your cold, distant barrier,
The vast range of snow,
Through the loose clouds lifts dimly
Its white peaks in air.
How deep is their stillness!
Ah! would I were there!

But on the stairs what voice is this I hear,
Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear?
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Or was it from some sun-flecked mountain brook
That the sweet voice its upland clearness took?
Ah! it comes nearer--
Sweet notes, this way!

Hark! fast by the window
The rushing winds go,
To the ice-cumbered gorges,
The vast seas of snow!
There the torrents drive upward
Their rock-strangled hum;
There the avalanche thunders
The hoarse torrent dumb.
--I come, O ye mountains!
Ye torrents, I come!

But who is this, by the half-opened door,
Whose figure casts a shadow on the floor?
The sweet blue eyes--the soft, ash-colored hair--
The cheeks that still their gentle paleness wear--
The lovely lips, with their arched smile that tells
The unconquered joy in which her spirit dwells--
Ah! they bend nearer--
Sweet lips, this way!

Hark! the wind rushes past us!
Ah! with that let me go
To the clear, waning hill-side,
Unspotted by snow,
There to watch, o’er the sunk vale,
The frore mountain wall,
Where the niched snow-bed sprays down
Its powdery fall.
There its dusky blue clusters
The aconite spreads;
There the pines slope, the cloud-strips
Hung soft in their heads.
No life but, at moments,
The mountain bee’s hum.
--I come, O ye mountains!
Ye pine-woods, I come!

Forgive me! forgive me!
Ah, Marguerite, fain
Would these arms reach to clasp thee!
But see! ’tis in vain.

In the void air, towards thee,
My stretched arms are cast;
But a sea rolls between us,--
Our different past!

To the lips, ah! of others
Those lips have been prest,
And others, ere I was,
Were strained to that breast.

Far, far from each other
Our spirits have grown.
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?

Blow, ye winds! lift me with you!
I come to the wild.
Fold closely, O Nature!
Thine arms round thy child.

To thee only God granted
A heart ever new,--
To all always open,
To all always true.

Ah! calm me, restore me;
And dry up my tears
On thy high mountain platforms,
Where morn first appears;

Where the white mists, forever,
Are spread and upfurled,--
In the stir of the forces
Whence issued the world.

III. A FAREWELL.

My horse’s feet beside the lake,
Where sweet the unbroken moonbeams lay,
Sent echoes through the night to wake
Each glistening strand, each heath-fringed bay.

The poplar avenue was passed,
And the roofed bridge that spans the stream;
Up the steep street I hurried fast,
Led by thy taper’s starlike beam.

I came! I saw thee rise! the blood
Poured flushing to thy languid cheek.
Locked in each other’s arms we stood,
In tears, with hearts too full to speak.

Days flew; ah, soon I could discern
A trouble in thine altered air!
Thy hand lay languidly in mine,
Thy cheek was grave, thy speech grew rare.

I blame thee not! This heart, I know,
To be long loved was never framed;
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.

And women,--things that live and move
Mined by the fever of the soul,--
They seek to find in those they love
Stern strength, and promise of control.

They ask not kindness, gentle ways;
These they themselves have tried and known:
They ask a soul which never sways
With the blind gusts that shake their own.

I too have felt the load I bore
In a too strong emotion’s sway;
I too have wished, no woman more,
This starting, feverish heart away.

I too have longed for trenchant force,
And will like a dividing spear;
Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course,
Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

But in the world I learnt, what there
Thou too wilt surely one day prove,--
That will, that energy, though rare,
Are yet far, far less rare than love.

Go, then! till time and fate impress
This truth on thee, be mine no more!
They will! for thou, I feel, not less
Than I, wast destined to this lore.

We school our manners, act our parts;
But He, who sees us through and through,
Knows that the bent of both our hearts
Was to be gentle, tranquil, true.

And though we wear out life, alas!
Distracted as a homeless wind,
In beating where we must not pass,
In seeking what we shall not find;

Yet we shall one day gain, life past,
Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole;
Shall see ourselves, and learn at last
Our true affinities of soul.

We shall not then deny a course
To every thought the mass ignore;
We shall not then call hardness force,
Nor lightness wisdom any more.

Then, in the eternal Father’s smile,
Our soothed, encouraged souls will dare
To seem as free from pride and guile,
As good, as generous, as they are.

Then we shall know our friends! Though much
Will have been lost,--the help in strife,
The thousand sweet, still joys of such
As hand in hand face earthly life,--

Though these be lost, there will be yet
A sympathy august and pure;
Ennobled by a vast regret,
And by contrition sealed thrice sure.

And we, whose ways were unlike here,
May then more neighboring courses ply;
May to each other be brought near,
And greet across infinity.

How sweet, unreached by earthly jars,
My sister! to maintain with thee
The hush among the shining stars,
The calm upon the moonlit sea!

How sweet to feel, on the boon air,
All our unquiet pulses cease!
To feel that nothing can impair
The gentleness, the thirst for peace,--

The gentleness too rudely hurled
On this wild earth of hate and fear;
The thirst for peace, a raving world
Would never let us satiate here.

IV. ISOLATION. TO MARGUERITE.

We were apart: yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be.
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee;
Nor feared but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.

The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas! I learned,--
The heart can bind itself alone,
And faith may oft be unreturned.
Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell.
Thou lov’st no more. Farewell! Farewell!

Farewell!--And thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and spherèd course
To haunt the place where passions reign,--
Back to thy solitude again!

Back! with the conscious thrill of shame
Which Luna felt, that summer-night,
Flash through her pure immortal frame,
When she forsook the starry height
To hang o’er Endymion’s sleep
Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.

Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved
How vain a thing is mortal love,
Wandering in heaven, far removed;
But thou hast long had place to prove
This truth,--to prove, and make thine own:
“Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”

Or, if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things,--
Ocean and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;
And life, and others’ joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.

Of happier men; for they, at least,
Have _dreamed_ two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end
Prolonged; nor knew, although not less
Alone than thou, their loneliness.

V. TO MARGUERITE. CONTINUED.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour,--

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain:
Oh, might our marges meet again!

Who ordered that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?--
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

VI. ABSENCE.

In this fair stranger’s eyes of gray,
Thine eyes, my love! I see.
I shiver; for the passing day
Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life! that not
A nobler, calmer train
Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot
Our passions from our brain;

But each day brings its petty dust,
Our soon-choked souls to fill;
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.

I struggle towards the light; and ye,
Once-longed-for storms of love!
If with the light ye cannot be,
I bear that ye remove.

I struggle towards the light; but oh,
While yet the night is chill,
Upon time’s barren, stormy flow,
Stay with me, Marguerite, still!

VII. THE TERRACE AT BERNE.

(COMPOSED TEN YEARS AFTER THE PRECEDING.)

Ten years! and to my waking eye
Once more the roofs of Berne appear;
The rocky banks, the terrace high,
The stream! and do I linger here?

The clouds are on the Oberland,
The Jungfrau snows look faint and far;
But bright are those green fields at hand,
And through those fields comes down the Aar,

And from the blue twin-lakes it comes,
Flows by the town, the churchyard fair;
And ’neath the garden-walk it hums,
The house! and is my Marguerite there

Ah! shall I see thee, while a flush
Of startled pleasure floods thy brow,
Quick through the oleanders brush,
And clap thy hands, and cry, _’Tis thou!_

Or hast thou long since wandered back,
Daughter of France! to France, thy home;
And flitted down the flowery track
Where feet like thine too lightly come?

Doth riotous laughter now replace
Thy smile, and rouge, with stony glare,
Thy cheek’s soft hue, and fluttering lace
The kerchief that inwound thy hair?

Or is it over? art thou dead?--
Dead!--and no warning shiver ran
Across my heart, to say thy thread
Of life was cut, and closed thy span!

Could from earth’s ways that figure slight
Be lost, and I not feel ’twas so?
Of that fresh voice the gay delight
Fail from earth’s air, and I not know?

Or shall I find thee still, but changed,
But not the Marguerite of thy prime?
With all thy being re-arranged,--
Passed through the crucible of time;

With spirit vanished, beauty waned,
And hardly yet a glance, a tone,
A gesture--any thing--retained
Of all that was my Marguerite’s own?

I will not know! For wherefore try,
To things by mortal course that live,
A shadowy durability,
For which they were not meant, to give?

Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass
Upon the boundless ocean-plain,
So on the sea of life, alas!
Man meets man,--meets, and quits again.

I knew it when my life was young;
I feel it still now youth is o’er.
--The mists are on the mountain hung,
And Marguerite I shall see no more.

_THE STRAYED REVELLER._

_THE PORTICO OF CIRCE’S PALACE. EVENING._

A YOUTH.

CIRCE.

THE YOUTH.

Faster, faster,
O Circe, goddess,
Let the wild, thronging train,
The bright procession
Of eddying forms,
Sweep through my soul!

Thou standest, smiling
Down on me! thy right arm,
Leaned up against the column there,
Props thy soft cheek;
Thy left holds, hanging loosely,
The deep cup, ivy-cinctured,
I held but now.

Is it then evening
So soon? I see, the night-dews,
Clustered in thick beads, dim
The agate brooch-stones
On thy white shoulder;
The cool night-wind, too,
Blows through the portico,
Stirs thy hair, goddess,
Waves thy white robe!

CIRCE.

Whence art thou, sleeper?

THE YOUTH.

When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks
Of my hut, by the chestnuts,
Up at the valley-head,
Came breaking, goddess!
I sprang up, I threw round me
My dappled fawn-skin;
Passing out, from the wet turf,
Where they lay, by the hut door,
I snatched up my vine-crown, my fir-staff,
All drenched in dew,--
Came swift down to join
The rout early gathered
In the town, round the temple,
Iacchus’ white fane
On yonder hill.

Quick I passed, following
The woodcutters’ cart-track
Down the dark valley. I saw
On my left, through the beeches,
Thy palace, goddess,
Smokeless, empty!
Trembling, I entered; beheld
The court all silent,
The lions sleeping,
On the altar this bowl.
I drank, goddess!
And sank down here, sleeping,
On the steps of thy portico.

CIRCE.

Foolish boy! Why tremblest thou?
Thou lovest it, then, my wine?
Wouldst more of it? See how glows,
Through the delicate, flushed marble,
The red creaming liquor,
Strewn with dark seeds!
Drink, then! I chide thee not,
Deny thee not my bowl.
Come, stretch forth thy hand, then--so!
Drink--drink again!

THE YOUTH.

Thanks, gracious one!
Ah, the sweet fumes again!
More soft, ah me!
More subtle-winding,
Than Pan’s flute-music!
Faint--faint! Ah me,
Again the sweet sleep!

CIRCE.

Hist! Thou--within there!
Come forth, Ulysses!
Art tired with hunting?
While we range the woodland,
See what the day brings.

ULYSSES.

Ever new magic!
Hast thou then lured hither,
Wonderful goddess, by thy art,
The young, languid-eyed Ampelus,
Iacchus’ darling,
Or some youth beloved of Pan,
Of Pan and the nymphs;
That he sits, bending downward
His white, delicate neck
To the ivy-wreathed marge
Of thy cup; the bright, glancing vine-leaves
That crown his hair,
Falling forward, mingling
With the dark ivy-plants;
His fawn-skin, half untied,
Smeared with red wine-stains? Who is he,
That he sits, overweighed
By fumes of wine and sleep,
So late, in thy portico?
What youth, goddess,--what guest
Of gods or mortals?

CIRCE.

Hist! he wakes!
I lured him not hither, Ulysses.
Nay, ask him!

THE YOUTH.

Who speaks? Ah! who comes forth
To thy side, goddess, from within?
How shall I name him,--
This spare, dark-featured,
Quick-eyed stranger?
Ah! and I see too
His sailor’s bonnet,
His short coat, travel-tarnished,
With one arm bare!--
Art thou not he, whom fame
This long time rumors
The favored guest of Circe, brought by the waves?
Art thou he, stranger,--
The wise Ulysses,
Laertes’ son?

ULYSSES.

I am Ulysses.
And thou too, sleeper?
Thy voice is sweet.
It may be thou hast followed
Through the islands some divine bard,
By age taught many things,--
Age, and the Muses;
And heard him delighting
The chiefs and people
In the banquet, and learned his songs,
Of gods and heroes,
Of war and arts,
And peopled cities,
Inland, or built
By the gray sea. If so, then hail!
I honor and welcome thee.

THE YOUTH.

The gods are happy.
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see below them
The earth and men.

They see Tiresias
Sitting, staff in hand,
On the warm, grassy
Asopus bank,
His robe drawn over
His old sightless head,
Revolving inly
The doom of Thebes.

They see the centaurs
In the upper glens
Of Pelion, in the streams
Where red-berried ashes fringe
The clear-brown shallow pools,
With streaming flanks, and heads
Reared proudly, snuffing
The mountain wind.

They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to
A floating isle thick-matted
With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants,
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting--drifting; round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them.

They see the Scythian
On the wide steppe, unharnessing
His wheeled house at noon.
He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal,--
Mares’ milk, and bread
Baked on the embers. All around,
The boundless, waving grass-plains stretch, thick-starred
With saffron and the yellow hollyhock
And flag-leaved iris-flowers.
Sitting in his cart
He makes his meal; before him, for long miles,
Alive with bright green lizards,
And the springing bustard-fowl,
The track, a straight black line,
Furrows the rich soil; here and there
Clusters of lonely mounds
Topped with rough-hewn,
Gray, rain-bleared statues, overpeer
The sunny waste.

They see the ferry
On the broad, clay-laden
Lone Chorasmian stream; thereon,
With snort and strain,
Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
To either bow
Firm-harnessed by the mane; a chief,
With shout and shaken spear,
Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern
The cowering merchants in long robes
Sit pale beside their wealth
Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
Of gold and ivory,
Of turquoise-earth, and amethyst,
Jasper and chalcedony,
And milk-barred onyx-stones.
The loaded boat swings groaning
In the yellow eddies;
The gods behold them.

They see the heroes
Sitting in the dark ship
On the foamless, long-heaving,
Violet sea,
At sunset nearing
The Happy Islands.

These things, Ulysses,
The wise bards also
Behold, and sing.
But oh, what labor!
O prince, what pain!

They too can see
Tiresias; but the gods,
Who gave them vision,
Added this law:
That they should bear too
His groping blindness,
His dark foreboding,
His scorned white hairs;
Bear Hera’s anger
Through a life lengthened
To seven ages.

They see the centaurs
On Pelion: then they feel,
They too, the maddening wine
Swell their large veins to bursting; in wild pain
They feel the biting spears
Of the grim Lapithæ, and Theseus, drive,
Drive crashing through their bones; they feel,
High on a jutting rock in the red stream,
Alcmena’s dreadful son
Ply his bow. Such a price
The gods exact for song:
To become what we sing.

They see the Indian
On his mountain lake; but squalls
Make their skiff reel, and worms
In the unkind spring have gnawn
Their melon-harvest to the heart. They see
The Scythian; but long frosts
Parch them in winter-time on the bare steppe,
Till they too fade like grass; they crawl
Like shadows forth in spring.

They see the merchants
On the Oxus-stream; but care
Must visit first them too, and make them pale:
Whether, through whirling sand,
A cloud of desert robber-horse have burst
Upon their caravan; or greedy kings,
In the walled cities the way passes through,
Crushed them with tolls; or fever-airs,
On some great river’s marge,
Mown them down, far from home.

They see the heroes
Near harbor; but they share
Their lives, and former violent toil in Thebes,--
Seven-gated Thebes, or Troy;
Or where the echoing oars
Of Argo first
Startled the unknown sea.

The old Silenus
Came, lolling in the sunshine,
From the dewy forest-coverts,
This way, at noon.
Sitting by me, while his fauns
Down at the water-side
Sprinkled and smoothed
His drooping garland,
He told me these things.

But I, Ulysses,
Sitting on the warm steps,
Looking over the valley,
All day long, have seen,
Without pain, without labor,
Sometimes a wild-haired mænad,
Sometimes a faun with torches,
And sometimes, for a moment,
Passing through the dark stems
Flowing-robed, the beloved,
The desired, the divine,
Beloved Iacchus.

Ah, cool night-wind, tremulous stars!
Ah, glimmering water,
Fitful earth-murmur,
Dreaming woods!
Ah, golden-haired, strangely smiling goddess,
And thou, proved, much-enduring,
Wave-tossed wanderer!
Who can stand still?
Ye fade, ye swim, ye waver before me--
The cup again!

Faster, faster,
O Circe, goddess,
Let the wild, thronging train,
The bright procession
Of eddying forms,
Sweep through my soul!

_FRAGMENT OF AN “ANTIGONE.”_

THE CHORUS.

Well hath he done who hath seized happiness!
For little do the all-containing hours,
Though opulent, freely give,--
Who, weighing that life well
Fortune presents unprayed,
Declines her ministry, and carves his own;
And, justice not infringed,
Makes his own welfare his unswerved-from law.

He does well too, who keeps that clew the mild
Birth-goddess and the austere Fates first gave.
For, from the day when these
Bring him, a weeping child,
First to the light, and mark
A country for him, kinsfolk, and a home,
Unguided he remains,
Till the Fates come again, this time with death.

In little companies,
And, our own place once left,
Ignorant where to stand, or whom to avoid,
By city and household grouped, we live; and many shocks
Our order heaven-ordained
Must every day endure,--
Voyages, exiles, hates, dissensions, wars.
Besides what waste _he_ makes,
The all-hated, order-breaking,
Without friend, city, or home,--
Death, who dissevers all.

Him then I praise, who dares
To self-selected good
Prefer obedience to the primal law
Which consecrates the ties of blood; for these, indeed,
Are to the gods a care:
That touches but himself.
For every day man may be linked and loosed
With strangers; but the bond
Original, deep-inwound,
Of blood, can he not bind,
Nor, if fate binds, not bear.

But hush! Hæmon, whom Antigone,
Robbing herself of life in burying,
Against Creon’s law, Polynices,
Robs of a loved bride,--pale, imploring,
Waiting her passage,
Forth from the palace hitherward comes.

HÆMON.

No, no, old men, Creon I curse not!
I weep, Thebans,
One than Creon crueller far!
For he, he, at least, by slaying her,
August laws doth mightily vindicate;
But thou, too bold, headstrong, pitiless!--
Ah me!--honorest more than thy lover,
O Antigone!
A dead, ignorant, thankless corpse.

THE CHORUS.

Nor was the love untrue
Which the Dawn-Goddess bore
To that fair youth she erst,
Leaving the salt sea-beds,
And coming flushed over the stormy frith
Of loud Euripus, saw,--
Saw and snatched, wild with love,
From the pine-dotted spurs
Of Parnes, where thy waves,
Asopus! gleam rock-hemmed,--
The Hunter of the Tanagræan Field.[13]

But him, in his sweet prime,
By severance immature,
By Artemis’ soft shafts,
She, though a goddess born,
Saw in the rocky isle of Delos die.
Such end o’ertook that love.
For she desired to make
Immortal mortal man,
And blend his happy life,
Far from the gods, with hers;
To him postponing an eternal law.

HÆMON.

But like me, she, wroth, complaining,
Succumbed to the envy of unkind gods;
And, her beautiful arms unclasping,
Her fair youth unwillingly gave.

THE CHORUS.

Nor, though enthroned too high
To fear assault of envious gods,
His beloved Argive seer would Zeus retain
From his appointed end

In this our Thebes; but when
His flying steeds came near
To cross the steep Ismenian glen,
The broad earth opened, and whelmed them and him,
And through the void air sang
At large his enemy’s spear.

And fain would Zeus have saved his tired son,
Beholding him where the Two Pillars stand
O’er the sun-reddened western straits,[14]
Or at his work in that dim lower world.
Fain would he have recalled
The fraudulent oath which bound
To a much feebler wight the heroic man.

But he preferred fate to his strong desire.
Nor did there need less than the burning pile
Under the towering Trachis crags,
And the Spercheios vale, shaken with groans,
And the roused Maliac gulf,
And scared Œtæan snows,
To achieve his son’s deliverance, O my child!

_FRAGMENT OF CHORUS OF A “DEJANEIRA.”_

O frivolous mind of man,
Light ignorance, and hurrying, unsure thoughts!
Though man bewails you not,
How _I_ bewail you!

Little in your prosperity
Do you seek counsel of the gods.
Proud, ignorant, self-adored, you live alone.
In profound silence stern,
Among their savage gorges and cold springs,
Unvisited remain
The great oracular shrines.

Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer’s holy robe,
And purged, considerate minds.