Chapter XIII: Part IV: Who Shall Command the Heart (2)

The little Cow-wheat they call it, with its slender yellow blossoms in pairs, and its faint-tinged lips.

* * * * *

And now in the woods each year—in the silent beautiful woods, so calm, so sweet—though the same flowers spring by hundreds—

Not a word do they utter of that awful scene, not a word of all that carnage,

Of the splintered trees, the blood-smeared corpses, the devilish noises and the sights and smells,

Or of the livid face and faint-blue lips of him I loved as never another I could love.

* * * * *

O how can you grow so careless, little flowers, and yet continue ages to grow under the trees the same—

And all the light gone out of the world for me?

Each year when summer comes and July suns,

To the woods I must go like one drawn by a fatal dread and fascination,

To see the sight I most abhor to see—

The patch of blood, and the unharmed flower in the midst,

And faint in death the lips I love so well.

PHILOLÄUS TO DIOCLES

How often at dusk, dear friend, when thou art absent,

Sitting alone I wonder of what thou doest,

And dream, and wait of thee.

* * * * *

All the sweet noons and moons we have spent together;

All the glad interchange of laughter and love,

And thoughts, so grave, or fanciful:

What can compare with these, or what surpass them?

All the unbroken faith and steadfast reliance—nigh twenty years twining the roots of life far down;

And not a mistrustful hour between us—or moment of anger:

What can surpass all this, or what compare?

Could riches or fame?

Or if the Thebans honor me for their law-giver,

Or thou, Diocles, in Olympic fields art victor beloved and crowned,

What are these things to that?

* * * * *

And still thou growest upon me, as a mountain,

Seen from another mountain-summit, rises

Clearer, more grand, more beautiful than ever;

And still within thine eyes, and ever plainer,

I see my own soul sleeping.

* * * * *

Say, did not Love, the Olympian blacksmith, find us,

Æons ago, in heaven,

And weld our souls together before all worlds?

II.

When thou art far, and the days go by without thee,

Strangely I suffer.

Perhaps even so in winter suffer the plants and the trees, when the Sun withdraws his life-ray;

Thin runs the blood in my limbs, sucked out of the arteries;

The heart shrinks closed and painful—I lose command and vigor;

At times like these, methinks, I too have strayed from my body,

Afar, in pursuit of thee, my sun and my savior.

III.

Thou art so beautiful to me, sweet friend,

Years bring no shadow between us;

Always I praise the very ground beneath thy feet,

That leads thee toward me,

And give my unbelieving hands free leave to hold thee,

For still to assure myself that thou art there

Is my first need.

* * * * *

Love, that entwined our souls before all worlds,

Binds the great orbs of heaven too in their courses,

But by no bond more lasting.

IV.

And sweeter far to suffer is it, dear one, being sometimes absent,

Than (if indeed ’twere possible) to feel the opposite pain

Of too much nearness, and love dying so

Down to mere slackness.

* * * * *

Now, as it is, the harp is firmly strung;

A tender tension animates the strings;

And every thought of Thee, and all the winds which blow along the world,

Wake a sweet áccord underneath the din,

And harmonize life’s wilderness for me.

V.

Therefore I say, stay, comrade, lover mine,

Nor wander far from me while life remains,

But let us rather, and if it may be, hand in hand,

Pass to that last strange change, therein perhaps to know each other

Nearer even than now.

VI.

Indeed, thou art so deep within my heart,

I fear not Death. And though I die, and fail,

Falling through stupors, senselessness, oblivion,

Down to the roots of being; still, thou art there.

I shall but sleep as I have slept before,

So oft, in dreamless peace, close-linked with thee.

HAFIZ TO THE CUP-BEARER

Dear Son, that out of the crowded footways of Shiráz,

With hesitant step emerging,

Camest and laid thy life down at my feet,

Faint and ashamed, like one by some divine wine vanquished:

* * * * *

I take thy gift, so gracious and sparkling clear,

Thy naïve offering, as of a simple Nature-child,

Wondering, like one who sees a rose in winter blooming, or cypress ’mid a wilderness of rocks;

Or finds among the marl and clay beneath his feet

A ruby fair embedded—and stops and takes it.

* * * * *

[The Earth, so dead and gross, and yet to points of finest light

Still working in the silence of her unseen chambers!

And thou, great common People, slavish still and brute and ignorant, in alley and tavern,

Yet in thy rugged mass fair hearts of finest glow

Infallibly condensing!]

* * * * *

Come, son (since thou hast said it), out of all Shiráz

Háfiz salutes thee comrade. Let us go

A spell of life along the road together.

IN THE STONE-FLOORED WORKSHOP

There in the stone-floored workshop in the middle of a great dirty city—the windows half made up with dust—

Three men, astraddle on their horsings, and over their grinding wheels bending.

* * * * *

The drum that brings the power from the engine-room pounds and thumps, the belting slaps and crackles, whizz go the wheels so steady in their sockets, and the streams of sparks fly rustling.

All is so old-fashioned, perhaps much as it was four or five centuries ago;

The old stone trows half full of water, in which the wheels run; the puddles, the mud, the wheelswarf spattered and crusting the walls and even the clothes of the grinders with yellow dirt;

The rude wooden bearings for the axles, soused with water when they get too hot; the drawing-up stones, emery wheels, polishers, glazers;

The little wheels, made out of fragments of larger ones, for hollow grinding, and (more modern) the fan for drawing and expelling the dust.

* * * * *

There astraddle, in their rough clothes, with clogs on their feet, and faces yellow-splashed, hour by hour bending over, the men sit—

With careful grasp of one hand and pressure of the other, holding the blades to the stone—the pads of their finger-tips worn through to the very quick where they now and then and unavoidably touch it in its swift career.

* * * * *

Very careful and responsible is the work—the least slip may cause an accident.

A man comes in from the hardening shop, puts down a bundle of rough-shaped blades, and goes out again.

And still the heads sway rhythmically from side to side as eye and hand follow their work across the wheel.

Very careful is the testing and examining of a new stone and the fitting it on its axle: a single flaw and in the great speed it will fly, bringing danger to all around it.

Now and then one pauses and takes a swipe out of a can; or throws his band off, to change his wheel for another; or goes to the fire to examine some blades which are heating in a tray over it.

Curt is the talk (of fancy-backs, rattlers, sours and wasters, tangs and heels and shoulders), for the noise is too great, and the strain, for much beyond monosyllables.

Dingy the den and dense the grit that settles thick upon everything.

* * * * *

Yet at last out of it all, out of this primitive scene, emerges something so finished, so subtly perfect—

A razor, keen and brilliant, a very focus of light in the whole shop, with swift invisible edge running true from heel to point, and ringing so clear to the twang of the thumb-nail on it—

Emerges (his work done) a figure with dusty cap and light curls escaping from under it, large dove-grey eyes and Dutch-featured face of tears and laughter,

(So subtle, so rare, so finished a product,)

A man who understands and accepts all human life and character,

Keen and swift of brain, heart tender and true, and low voice ringing so clear,

And my dear comrade.

THE TRYSTING

Far over the hills, ten miles, in the cloudless summer morning,

By grassy slopes and flowering wheatfields, and over the brooks, he strides—

A young man, slender, wistful-eyed—with a great bouquet of flowers in his hand.

* * * * *

Great roses, red and white (in the cottage-home garden gathered),

And sweet-scented ladslove and rich marigolds and mignonette and lilies,

All trembling in the glimmer of brimming eyes, and steeped in fragrant memories,

With full full heart he carries;

And calls in spirit, the while he goes, to her so loved—

More than all other women on earth beloved—

His mother who bore him.

Till at length by the town arriving,

On her grave in the cemetery ground he faithfully lays them.

* * * * *

And this the trysting.

This the trysting for which in the little garden, with tears, he gathered the flowers,

For which o’er the hills he hastened.—

And this, what means, what boots it?

* * * * *

There truly, below, with head fallen on one side, a shapeless indistinguishable mass, her body lies—

Three years already from this life departed—

Nor hears nor sees, nor understands at all,

Senseless as any clod.

Above, the flowers he has brought lie wilting in the sun;

Around, the common-place dingy scene extends—the dreary cemetery,

The stones, the walls, the houses.—

What boots it all?

These senseless things that neither see nor hear,

To senseless things what message can they bear?

* * * * *

Yet he, he hears and sees.

A natural child, untaught, reckless of custom and what they call religion,

He hears and sees things hidden from the learnéd;

He glimpses forms beyond the walls of Time.

Of bibles, creeds and churches he knows nothing,

And all that science has said about life and death and atom-dances and the immutable laws of matter,

And all the impassable lines and barriers that the professors and specialists have built up out of their own imaginations—

These simply exist not, for him.

He only knows she comes, the loved and worshiped—

Comes, takes the flowers,

Stands like a thin mist in the sun beside him,

Looks in his eyes, and touches him again.

* * * * *

And to its depth his heart shakes, breaking backward,

Tears rise once more, earth reels, the sun is splintered,

Stones, houses, and the solid sky dissolve,

And that far marvelous vibration of the soul,

Swifter than light, more powerful than sound,

Flies through the world, pierces the rocks and tombs,

And gains her Presence at the feet of God.

THE LOVER FAR ON THE HILLS

Here on this high top far above the world—

This mute and glorious scene, earth’s panorama:

[The swelling mountains, all in green and gold,

Round-topped, or broken into savage crags;

The valleys scarcely shown, like narrow rifts;

The slate-dark shadows, and the tarns and lakes,

And vistas over them to sunny lands

Of tiny patchwork, with quaint fields and farms,

White sails on waters, and the sun-splashed sea:]

Here on this high top dreaming, to it all

I find but one fit likeness—

Namely the gracious form of her I love.

The limbs and hair, the lips, the eyes, I love—

Twin heavenlit lakes—

And undulant lines that run from hips to shoulder;

Fair world of hollow and rondure, hill and plain,—

So solid-fair like this, so dewy-fragrant,

And all inwrought with that dear life that holds me.

* * * * *

How calm this air! this silence here in heaven

Calm blue, and tender hanging clouds delaying

To kiss their shadows on the hills’ deep breasts;

And far around this dream of human presence—

Nature, and my sweet Helpmate whom I worship,

With the dear god that dwells behind them both.

THE BABE

The trio perfect: the man, the woman, and the babe:

And herein all Creation.

* * * * *

The two, with wonder in their eyes, from opposite worlds

Of sex, of ancestry, pursuits, traditions,

Each other suddenly, amazed, confronting—

A nameless glory each in each surmising.

* * * * *

A frenzy as of Gods—

Imperial rage, flinging the goods of the world aside as dross, to reach to a priceless treasure:

[He madly invasive,

She deeply wise, and drawing farther back

Even to the gates of Paradise as he approaches:]

Strange ecstasy of warfare!

Seisin and ravishment of souls and bodies,

Veils rent asunder,

Heaven opening measureless, overhead, in splendor,

And all life changed, transfigured!

* * * * *

And then a calm.

Weeks of humdrum and mortal commonplace,

And months perchance in monotone of toil,

But still behind it all some deep remembrance,

Some sure reliance,

And sweet and secret knowledge in each other.

* * * * *

And then the Babe:

A tiny perfect sea-shell on the shore

By the waves gently laid (the awful waves!)—

By trembling hands received—a folded message—

A babe yet slumbering, with a ripple on its face

Remindful of the ocean.

* * * * *

And two twined forms that overbend it, smiling,

And wonder to what land Love must have journeyed,

Who brought this back—this word of sweetest meaning:

_Two lives made one, and visible as one_.

* * * * *

And herein all Creation.

_O gracious Mother, in thy vast eternal sunlight
Heal us, thy foolish children, from our sins;
Who heed thee not, but careless of thy Presence
Turn our bent backs on thee, and scratch and scrabble
In ash-heaps for salvation._

I SAW A FAIR HOUSE

I saw a fair house standing in a garden, but no one moved about it;

And I said to some who stood by, Who is the owner or dweller here?

And they said, We know not. Sometimes we see a form at a window, but it is for a moment only, and then it is gone.

* * * * *

Then I went up to the door of the house, and turned the handle very softly, and went in.

And the house was like a place deserted, yet was there a kind of order as if it might be used; and the tables were laid with victuals, and there was no lack of necessaries or of comforts;

And servants passed along the corridors; so I asked one of them, Where is the mistress of your house?

And he said, I know not.

* * * * *

Then I went on again, and passed softly through many rooms, and peeped into others;

And at last in a far chamber I came upon the figure of a woman, alone, and seated on a chair, with her head on her knees, and buried in her hands;

And I said, Are you the mistress of this house?

And when she lifted her face I saw it was very beautiful, and her eyes were glorious as the eyes of Love himself, but they were stained with weeping.

And she said, This is not my house, it is my prison.

And I said, Are not these servants here to minister to you?

She answered, Yes——but what is that if they are only here to minister to me?

But these rooms, I said, and well-set tables?

Yes—but what is that if they are only swept and garnished for me?

And this garden, and the fair outlook from it?

Yes—but since I may not even go my own errands beyond the gate?

And I said, How is that?

And she answered, Indeed I long to go down into the world, but I may not; no sooner do I show the face of Love than I am execrated as one forbidden and an outcast. For in this city so long as one remains within one’s house one may do there what meanness and selfishness one will, provided one keeps fair the front of the house; but to go forth openly and share one’s life and the gladness of life with others, that is not permitted.

* * * * *

And I said, It is a strange city.

And I went out and walked through the streets; but gloom and sadness reigned, and only in some houses the noise of feasting and debauchery, and in others a sound of weeping.

A DREAM OF HUMAN LIFE

I dreamed that I saw a wild and lonely promontory on which the sea beat; and the waves dashed against rocky cliffs and bastions, and flew in spray over the edges of them, and clouds drifted on overhead, mingling with the seamist below in one veil which wrapped and shadowed all, save where now and then a watery beam from the sun glanced through.

And in the midst among the rocks and crags was (it seemed to me) an ancient ancient fane, like some far forgotten Abbey Church built in an elder world—nor was it easy to say whether it was indeed built up of ordinary masonry, or whether by some rude art it had been shapen from the very crags themselves. But round about it and over the promontory on all sides the rocks and cliffs were carven in strange forms—sea-monsters half submerged beneath the waves, and serpents stretching along the bases of the cliffs, and evil shapes thrown up on land and grasping at the rocks with iron claws; and beside them forms heroic of men and women on ledges here and there and pinnacles, through the mist half-shown—as it might have been S. George against the dragon, or Andromeda to the rock-face chained, or Perseus with the Gorgon’s head in hand.

But who they really were I could not well see. Only ever as the spray and wind wreathed by, the figures as in mortal combat seemed to move and menace each other, and serpents writhed and sea-beasts plunged through waves. And from the ancient fane came the sound of music continually—now low and distant, now rising with the storm and mingling with the ocean-roar and wild cry of the wind: while overhead amid the breaking lights was a fluttering as of Wings.

* * * * *

And presently a change came over my dream; and looking again I saw that the storm had ceased, and the promontory was lying there in the sunshine, calm and peaceful; and the rocks were black no more, but full of color and glory; and the hero figures were in their places, at rest and beautiful to look on; and even the monsters that had seemed so terrible had a grace of their own, transformed in the peaceful light to harmless grotesque things. And the whole land seemed to thrill with a subterranean music, and on a high crag brooding over all was a figure with arms outstretched.

* * * * *

And once more my dream changed; and I looked, and the rocks had become like ordinary rocks and sea-cliffs, and grasses and wild flowers grew, and little habitations nestled, in the hollows of them; and the sea crawled about the boulders lying below them; and the promontory ran out into the ocean, and ships went past it to all parts of the world.

THE COAST OF LIGURIA

A thousand years are nothing.

Once the Ligurian, sturdy and thickset, scaled these rocks,

And built his beehive huts of unhewn stone on the limestone terraces,

And gathered snails for food, and fought his tribal battles.

Now the Greek wanders along the shore, and oleander and rosemary

Shine in the moon for him, or Daphne hides

Among the laurel groves, or Heracles

Drives his red cattle home along the coast-line.

Later, the Roman makes great roads, and marches columns of soldiers through the dust,

Where overhead some temple of Castor and Pollux on the height

Gives omen of good fortune. The Christian follows,

Peacefully toiling in his olive-garden,

Hymning the gentle god,

And turns the Temple to a shrine of Michael—rechristens Mars, St. Martin.

But presently the Moor with fire and rapine sweeps the coast,

Or in his mountain-fastness, for a moment resting, watches the shining scimitar of the sea

Sheathed in the bay, its scabbard. Then, in their turn,

Bishops and Barons rule the land, and rage against each other. In the end the Modern

Buries it all in a big Hotel’s foundations

Or the embankment of a Railroad.

* * * * *

Yet still beneath the surface all is alive.

Still the old peasant-woman—grin-faced, big-mouthed, with big-palmed hands, short fingers, and bandy climbing legs—among the rocks

Goes foraging for snails. The people still

Dimly athwart the mists of time remember,

Of Heracles the Savior,

How on this Plain, that Promontory, he rested

From his great labors in the West returning.

Still the little Church of St. Michael on the rock

Stands dearer to the folk for being pagan;

And still provençal songs and dances gladden the vintage;

And Moorish faces, and Greek, and old Phœnician,

Stir in the villages a stones-throw from the rail.

* * * * *

And still old names and festivals and customs

Linger along the coast and country side;

And still the hills stand, still the herbs diffuse

From the warm ground the old intoxication

Of aromatic sweetness. The waters still

Lap blue against the rocks. The snowy Alps

Look o’er the foot-hills and far out to sea,

To where and when perchance a worthier race

Than all that yet has been at length shall come

And gaze with grateful eyes upon their beauty,

And crown their slopes with gladness.

EASTER DAY ON MT. MOUNIER

(_In the Alpes Maritimes_)

Silence.—

Here on a rock in blue mid-air nine thousand feet,

The whole encircling sky flooded with light—the sun an unfaceable point in the dazzling zenith,

Warm, windless, basking—the snow at our feet a million bright points glittering;

And far around a multitudinous sea of peaks,

Frozen, of rock and ice, and fields of rounded whiteness,

And jutting shoulders, and slopes of shale, and walls,

Behind each other rising:

All drenched, dissolved, in light,

And waiting, silent, rapt, as if to break into song.

* * * * *

But not a sound.

Buried in invisible valleys—’mid pine and larch and torrent-beds below—

Villages ply their daily round of labor;

The peasant hacks deep the soil around his vine-roots, or with his long pole beats the boughs of olive;

Far by the sea, mid garden-terraces, hotels and villas, the great town keeps its carnival of Easter—

Unseen, unthought-of, here.

* * * * *

Here only rests the stillness of the Earth, waiting upon the glory of the Sun; or here and there in some calm lakelet imaged.

Ages fly by, and almost without change; dim lines of floating cloud just fringe the horizon; vistas of far lands, distant times, unfold;

And the silence of centuries holds the secret of history

Lost in the light of heaven.

AT MENTONE

Why speak ye not, ye beautiful lands and seas,

Hung like a magic curtain in the light?

What dumbness holds you, O divine vast Earth?

* * * * *

Ye stretches of smooth bare rock, dotted with cactus and aloe,

Rising so bold in the sun, from your deep dark gorges below;

Ye pine woods on the mountain flanks;

And ye, ye terraces of endless labor, planted with vine and lemon and the abounding olive,

With peasant cots and cabins here and there, and cisterns where the frogs croak night and day;

Why speak ye not, why speak ye not?

Why with that strange prophetic glance of yours

Hang ye in heaven there, magic lands and seas,

Nor say the word we wait for?

* * * * *

The Campanile and red roof of the village church show out seaward against the sky-line; and the cypresses stand sentinel in the cemetery on the hill above;

The borage-flowers beneath the lemon branches catch the hues of sea and sky; runnels of water sparkle through the grass by the pathside; the scent of orange-bloom is in the air;

Far back into the valleys stretch the gray shade and gloom of the olive-yards; and the narrow tumbled alleys of the mountain-villages are like huge rock-burrows of human beings;

The grizzled wrinkled old man on his little plot of ground, and the young man beside him, work doggedly on with their mattocks through the heat of the day;

The broad-bosomed placid-eyed girl tends her flock of goats on the higher ledges.

* * * * *

Ye leafing fig-trees, like silver candelabra of green flame!

And ye, pale-blossoming peaches, dainty bright!

And ye, ye immemorial aromatic herbs and bushes— arbutus, myrtle, lavender, rosemary, thyme—trampled to perfume by the feet of long-forgotten races;

And thou, blue bay, with myriad points of light, and sky above with subtle answering quiver,

And high far crests of gleaming purple crag, and snows beyond,

Flaming, all flaming in the light!

Why speak ye not?

* * * * *

Cave men and women and children, on your sides by the sea-shore,

Your long skulls resting still in the palms of your bony hands,

A score millenniums lying in the same position—

Why wake and speak ye not?

Why utter not the thoughts that were, for you, the world?

Ye dead that build the rocks, and are the Earth, and fill, without a void, the crystal air!

And Thou one dead (for each and all of us)—one dead for whom our life we’ld gladly give—

[Thou whose remembrance passes through all sights and sounds, transforming and transforming them]—

Why through the veil of this material texture showest thou not, dear soul of things, thy face?

What dumbness holds you?

O divine vast Earth,

Why utterest not the voice we long to hear?

MONTE CARLO

All the long afternoon in a cloudless sky, slowly towards its setting the sinking sun

Looks on a scene of wonderful beauty.

Deep below over the rocks, through luscious tangles of geranium and rose and heliotrope in flower, the sea sparkles a rich turquoise blue;

Palms mingle with mimosa and myrtle amid the gardens;

The little cape of Monaco stands out, a stone’s-throw across the harbour—the mountains of Mentone run down to the sea—and overhead in the clear air rise (two thousand feet) the great frowning rocks of Turbia, with their ancient Roman tower.

* * * * *

In front of the Casino, on a gravelled space, dazzling in light, a throng of all nationalities—Germans, Russians, French, Italians, English, Americans—goes to and fro,

Or sits at the Café tables, sipping coffee and cognac and maraschino:

The puffy fussy Germans, the dull-eyed English, the feverish Russians and French.

The band, beneath its awning, plays; carriages drive up, and automatic cars with dusty occupants arrive; the newcomers alight and ascend the steps of the Casino; fashionable women are in evidence, some carrying long roulette-purses with chains;

Girls walk about singly or in pairs—pale, with carefully set profiles, lips, hair, and with immense hats and choice-colored costumes, orange-red or primrose or lavender or dead-white;

The knots, the groups, form and re-form; the waiters hurry to and fro; while in a corner with easel and palette an artist takes a sketch of the whole scene.

* * * * *

And still the sun nears its setting.

The air floats over, with the delicious scent of orange-blossom and mimosa from the gardens; the shadows form in blue folds on the distant mountains, the rocks overhead stand sturdier, more and more bastion-like, as though an earth-shock might tumble them on the crowd;

In the little harbour the wharf-men, with dusty sashes round their waists, are coaling a great white yacht, already half lost in shadow;

Along the shore in a green high-prowed boat some fishermen row and drop their seine net in the same old fashion of centuries;

The peasant climbs his terraces of olive, the goatherd looks down from his high perch among the rocks, and hears the faint strains of the band and catches the glance of the dresses.

And still the sun nears its setting.

And still, within, as all day since noon, the feverish crowd sits or stands round the tables;

Nigh twenty tables—well nigh a thousand people, for the most part bent on business—all but a few by the glitter dazed of the eyes of the great god Chance.

Hats doffed, a hush reigns; tiptoe they move about that huge saloon, as in some Temple.

* * * * *

And now the great shaded lamps are lighted, hanging close over the green cloth.

See! how beautiful is the face of this little old lady, with tiny shrunken body and trembling mittened hands—the deep eyes, and dark shades in the eye sockets, and pitiful tender mouth!

Each round she carefully places a gold piece on some compartment, and watches for the result—nor seems to doubt her occupation for a moment.

Next her a young girl of eighteen or nineteen, aristocratic-featured, sits intent, and hides her hot eyes and straight somewhat pinched mouth under the brim of a broad white hat.

Close by again, see, a woman in black, of clear frank simple-minded type, almost a rustic, standing behind a chair and trying one or two throws;

And here a man, faultlessly attired and with absurdly unconcerned manner, sitting close by a croupier, and every now and then changing a thousand-franc note for gold—which he dots about the board in the most casual way, and apparently with complete want of success;

And there, an old man with bald hot-veined forehead and grey hair, deeply thinking, pencilling, computing, doubles his stakes with determination as he steadily loses.

Two demi-mondaines in waved and fretted hair, with long kid gloves covered with bracelets, push somewhat petulantly a little pile of gold across the board—then rake together their winnings and walk away.

There again, in the shade of many standing behind her, sits a strange Sibyll-like woman, with bat-wing trimmings in her hat. A half-formed smile dwells on her impassive face. She always wins, they say; and not a few furtively follow her lead in the chances.

Here is a young German student with old scars across his face; there, a Dundreary-whiskered yellow-haired Englishman of a type almost extinct at home; there, a business-like woman in mourning, with sharp nose and decided manner, evidently retrieving the fortunes of her family;

And there behind her an elderly respectable English matron, most anxious to speculate, but looking carefully round first to see if anyone recognises her;

And here again a big-chinned, flabby French youth with a suppressed boil on his neck.

* * * * *

Curious, the suppressed feverish sentiment of the whole scene, the quiet, the politeness; the occasional sharp glances, or hurried retirement from the table, the swift self-satisfactions, and the inward gnashings of teeth;

The many faces seamed with wrinkles spreading fanshaped upwards from the bridge of the nose, or with twirled goat’s-horn mustachios;

The little bald director on his high chair, white-skinned and white-haired, with big head, and quick beady eyes glancing through strong spectacles, watching closely the croupiers and the public;

The detectives among the throng;

The arrival at one of the tables of a roll of notes for a hundred thousand francs, to support the failing bank—the little stir of excitement among the gamblers, and the added stakes in consequence.

* * * * *

And now, outside, the sun has sunk.

Light-blue and white the calm sea lies beyond the palm-fronds, white sails speck the horizon, and the blue shadows on the silent hills are beautiful.

The fishermen have finished their haul, and stand chatting on the beach as they thumb from the meshes of the net and store in baskets the fish, which bring them a few pence for their day’s labor, presently to be served up at fabulous prices in the restaurants.

The goatherds drive their goats homeward, with tinkling bells, and peering over the rocks look downward on the Eden which they may not enter.

The primitive peasant-woman, with great mouth and ears unlearned of aught so modern as French or Italian, returns to the arched streets of her hill-top village—Roccabruna or Eza or Turbia—and ere the glow of sunset dies from the sky is fast asleep.

But the lights of the Casino shine reflected in the water, and the strains of the band, through the scented air, vibrate, and from the gaming-tables the crowd drifts to its supper-tables—while late through the night the telegrams flash to Vienna or London or Paris.

INDIA, THE WISDOM-LAND

Here also in India—wonderful, hidden—over thousands of miles,

Through thousands of miles of coco-nut groves, by the winding banks of immense rivers, over interminable areas of rice-fields,

On the great Ghauts and Himálayas, through vast jungles tenanted by wild beasts,

Under the cloudless glorious sky—the sun terrible in strength and beauty—the moon so keen and clear among the tree-tops,

In vast and populous cities, behind colors and creeds and sects and races and families,

Behind the interminable close-fitting layers of caste and custom,

Here also, hidden away, the secret, the divine knowledge.

* * * * *

Ages back, thousands of years lost in the dim past,

A race of seers over the northern mountains, with flocks and herds,

Into India, the Wisdom-land, descended;

The old men leading—not belated in the rear—

Eagle-eyed, gracious-eyed old men, with calm faces, resolute calm mouths,

Active, using their bodies with perfect command and power—retaining them to prolonged age, or laying them down in death at will.

* * * * *

These men, retiring rapt—also at will—in the vast open under the sun or stars,

Having circled and laid aside desire, having lifted and removed from themselves the clinging veils of thought and oblivion,

Saw, and became what they saw, the imperishable universe.

Within them, sun and moon and stars, within them past and future,

Interiors of objects and of thoughts revealed—one with all being—

Life past, death past—the calm and boundless sea

Of deep, of changeless incommunicable Joy.

* * * * *

And now to-day, under the close-fitting layers of caste and custom, hidden away,

The same seers, the same knowledge.

All these thousands of years the long tradition kept intact,

Handed down, the sacred lore, from one to another, carefully guarded;

Beneath the outer conventional shows, beneath all the bonds of creed and race, gliding like a stream which nothing can detain,

Dissolving in its own good time all bonds, all creeds,

The soul’s true being—the cosmic vast emancipated life—Freedom, Equality—

The precious semen of Democracy.

TANZBÖDELI

High on a rock that juts above the Lauterbrunnen valley,

Seven thousand feet in air, a little floor of grass,

Even and smooth, with flowers—

The little dancing-ground, they call it (and have called, how many centuries?)—

And then across the gorge, and again some seven thousand feet higher,

In slopes of rock and ice, the Jungfrau towering over, Proud and magnificent; and in her train seven mountains—

(Roth-thalhorn, Gletscherhorn, Ebne Fluh, Mittaghorn, Grosshorn, Breithorn and Tschingelhorn)—

Standing there like a wall and sending their glaciers to the valley.

* * * * *

[And far behind the wall, far miles and miles, but invisible from here,

Great rivers of ice between the glistening black and scarred crags

Flow, tossing and twisted, with sea-green escarpments and fissures, and scaly snaky moraines, and glittering snowfields above them, sharp on the dark blue sky,

All stretching, far as the eye may see, in endless silence,

Save for the fitful rattle of falling rocks, or muffled roar of an avalanche.]

* * * * *

But at the end of the train, and closing it and the valley,

Rises a huge bare cliff, the frowning G’spaltenhorn,

Diabolic and dark, an inferno of crags and pinnacles.

* * * * *

This on one side; on the other the landscape opens

To lower valleys and pastures—the huts of Gimmelwald and Mürren,

Lying serene in the sunlight, with herds of cows just visible,

And the blue-vista’d gorge of Lauterbrunnen running down to the distant hills of the twin lakes,

And tiny villages and towns, half seen and half imagined,

All folded in light and glory—as the peaks above are folded.

* * * * *

And there below us, in the huts of the upper pastures, the herdsmen gather and milk the cows, and in their great cauldrons warm the milk, and strain and press the cheeses;

Staying a few weeks in one spot till the feed is exhausted, and then leading the tinkling-belled herd by precipitous paths to other huts and pastures,

All summer long, till the autumnal return to the lowlands;

And in the little chalets the daily life goes on, with knitting and spinning and beating of flax, and storage of winter fuel and fodder;

And men with small short scythes mow the slopes of grass almost too steep to stand on, or carry their heavy wooden brantes of milk, braced to their shoulders, down the mountain-bases;

And for a brief season the stream of visitors arrives, and the hotels wake from sleep, and distant music is heard;

And guides and climbers sally forth with lanterns in the dark, and are glad if they may remain for a few minutes at early morning in the thin icy wind of some silent summit;

And even tiny invisible trains attempt to ascend the unimaginable mountains.

* * * * *

But here on this little palm of grass, Earth’s hand uplifted,

All is the same as though the centuries moved not;

And the peaks stand round and wreathe themselves in clouds, and take the colors and the lights of morning and evening;

And the moon sails, and an occasional eagle, overhead;

And the valleys plunge below in depths and darks invisible;

And the butterflies and flowers quiver and leap in the light and living air;

And we, in our turn, on the little dancing-ground of centuries,

Forming a circle, dance—till the mountains too wheel round us.

A VILLAGE CHURCH

A stump of oak—a huge old ruin of a tree, shored up with props;

And close beside it a vast and splendid Yew—still flourishing though fully a thousand years of age—

With congregated stems upstanding, straight as a gothic pillar, and mighty outspread arms on every side—a home for birds for countless generations;

And almost underneath the branches of the yew, sunk somewhat in the ground,

A tiny little Church—squat roof and belfry—with Saxon walling and low dark Norman doorway.

* * * * *

And evening falls, and to us sitting in the lane

From the low door as from some cavern-mouth of the Earth

Come sounds of old old chants and murmur of ancient prayers, and the wailing of responses,

Wafted—and a faint faint odor of incense (for High Church is the service),

And dimly seen, as through the mists of time, the glint of candles on the altar-table.

* * * * *

Voices indeed of Time and the Earth, like some strange incantation,

Issuing from the gloom beneath the Yew-tree,

Coming adown forgotten centuries—

Voices and echoes of ages of Christianity, borne onward with the sound of Norman and Saxon chisels:

Phrases that Chrysostom wrote, or good St. Basil; or borrowed from primitive liturgies of the earliest Christians;

Scraps of antiphonies sung within the Catacombs; tags, litanies and Kyrie Eleisons, adapted from pagan rituals;

Fragments of Creeds and Glorias from the days of Athanasius and the Councils; or sanctioned by the use of Sarum;

Gregorian chants, and quaint melodic strains from far Greek sources:

These blent together,

And laden with hopes and fears of hearts long buried,

Come issuing from the doorway.

* * * * *

And all the while under the evening sky

The landscape stretches, so fair, so calm, so actual,

And in the air the delicious waft of hawthorn-blossom

Floats, and the red June sunset hangs in the West,

And high in the branches of the Yew, a peacock,

Preening its feathers, sits.

* * * * *

How strange!

To think of the old old life for a thousand years that has gathered round these stones, and since the yew was a seedling planted,

Of the generations of men and women to whom the Church has been the centre of their days—their first and latest home;

The old clock striking the hours and the quarters through years and decades,

The old bell tolling its way through the centuries, with pendulum-swing of life-times;

The infants and wide-eyed children brought in for baptism; and after eighty years brought in again—mere broken husks of aged folk—for burial;

And their children the same, and theirs again the same, and theirs, and theirs;

Till at length by the font where the monk once muttered his Latin blessing, a smug young curate stands and lisps the service;

The marriages, the festivals, the long tradition of the mass and the holy communion from that last supper in Jerusalem;

The glow of religious adoration, and the pain of broken hearts, age after age; the hopes of Heaven, the nightmare doubts of Hell;

And the trio of Gods aloft, looking on all the time,

The Father, the Son, and the Ghost,

And the dear Mother Mary, a little aside, apart,

And the crowd of Saints in the background—

The council-chamber of heaven.

* * * * *

And the terrestrial councils held in the Church,

The conferences of the local Barons with the clergy, the visitations of Bishops,

The stormy scenes in the vestry, while the congregation is waiting in the pews;

The Folk-motes called in the Churchyard, the preparations for defence in time of civil war;

The fierce fights on occasions all round the building and amongst the tomb-stones; and up the stone stairs of the Tower—the monks and priests laying about them with heavy candlesticks.

* * * * *

To think of it all:

Of the images that have stood in those niches and been cast down and broken to shards;

And of the tapestries and altar-cloths that have been woven and stitched with pious care, and that have long since faded away—

And the little church still standing!

And still the old vague-toned Gregorian phrases wandering down, and still the golden voice of Chrysostom sounding from afar over the hubbub of the ages,

Floating on the waft of incense, and mingling with the breath of the hawthorn, this June night, 1900.

* * * * *

How wonderful!

The romance, the poetry, the heart-yearnings—

As once perhaps they gathered round some Greek Temple:

[Where the young man, having washed his body and offered a sacrifice before the laurel-crowned priest, poured out his heart in prayer to Apollo, touching the knees of the god with a leafy olive-wand;

Or the expectant mother came to Juno Lucina with a branch of palm in her hands;

Or the old man at midnight, with a propitiatory offering, to the shrine of Proserpine:]

So, all these centuries and round the village church,

A like romance has gathered.

* * * * *

And presently an alien folk will come, with alien thoughts and customs;

And this little shrine half-buried in the ground, with its candles and incense and stuffy dingy interior,

And its three Gods sitting up aloft, and its doubtful glances at Mary,

Will seem as far back and strange as anything Greek or Egyptian.

* * * * *

Thus as I dreamed, wandering away in thought through the long long past and future,

The service ended, and in the last glow of sunset

Out came a crowd of gaily-colored girls in silks and muslin, and village youths, and a top-hat squire or two—all modern as modern—

And knowing or recking nothing of Chrysostom and Basil:

Into the sweet evening air and dusk they came, with cheerful babble,

Discussing the local fashions or last event in politics,

When sudden a yell rang out in the sky, like the yell of a monstrous cat,

And with a great rush of wings, and to a chorus of exclamations,

The peacock flew from its tree overhead to the East and into the Night.

SHEFFIELD

Where a spur of the moors runs forward into the great town,

And above the squalid bare steep streets, over a deserted quarry, the naked rock lifts itself into the light,

There, lifted above the smoke, I stood,

And below lay Sheffield.

* * * * *

The great wind blew over the world,

The great soft Southwest, making a clear light along the far horizon;

The sky overhead was serenest blue, and here and there a solitary white cloud scudded swiftly below it.

The great soft wind! How it blew in gusts as it would unroot the very rocks, eddying and whistling round the angles!

The great autumnal wind! bearing from the valley below clouds of paper and rubbish instead of dead leaves.

* * * * *

Yet the smoke still lay over Sheffield.

Sullenly it crawled and spread;

Round the bases of the tall chimneys, over the roofs of the houses, in waves—and the city was like a city of chimneys and spires rising out of a troubled sea—

From the windward side where the roads were shining wet with recent rain,

Right across the city, gathering, mounting, as it went,

To the Eastward side where it stood high like a wall, blotting the land beyond,

Sullenly it crawled and spread.

* * * * *

Dead leaden sound of forge-hammers,

Gaping mouths of chimneys,

Lumbering and rattling of huge drays through the streets,

Pallid faces moving to and fro in myriads,

The sun, so brilliant here, to those below like a red ball just visible, hanging;

The drunkard reeling past; the file-cutter humped over his bench, with ceaseless skill of chisel and hammer cutting his hundred thousand file-teeth per day—lead-poison and paralysis slowly creeping through his frame;

The gaunt woman in the lens-grinding shop, preparing spectacle-glasses without end for the grindstone—in eager dumb mechanical haste, for her work is piecework;

Barefoot skin-diseased children picking the ash-heaps over, sallow hollow-cheeked young men, prematurely aged ones,

The attic, the miserable garret under the defective roof,

The mattress on the floor, the few coals in the corner,

White jets of steam, long ribbons of black smoke,

Furnaces glaring through the night, beams of lurid light thrown obliquely up through the smoke,

Nightworkers returning home wearied in the dismal dawn—

Ah! how long? how long?

* * * * *

And as I lifted my eyes, lo! across the great wearied throbbing city the far unblemished hills,

Hills of thick moss and heather,

Coming near in the clear light, in the recent rain yet shining.

And over them along the horizon moving, the gorgeous procession of shining clouds,

And beyond them, lo! in fancy, the sea and the shores of other lands,

And the great globe itself curving with its land and its sea and its clouds in supreme beauty among the stars.

A LANCASHIRE MILL-HAND

She died at the age of sixty-three, mother of a family of four children, and having during that time worked for fifty-three years in a Lancashire cotton-mill!

You know the scene: the great oblong ugly factory, in five or six tiers, all windows, alive with lights on a dark winter’s morning, and again with the same lights in the evening; and all day within, the thump and scream of the machinery, and the thick smell of hot oil and cotton fluff, and the crowds of drab-faced drab-dressed men and women and children—the mill-hands—going to and fro or serving the machines;

And, outside, the sad smoke-laden sky, and rows of dingy streets, and waste tracks where no grass grows, and tall chimneys belching dirt, and the same same outlook for miles.

Here she had grown up a bright-eyed strenuous girl, to blushing maidenhood, and had become a young woman, and in time married; and here she lived, and bore her family, and died.

* * * * *

In those days—it happens even now—whole families, father, mother and children, would go out (locking up the house behind them) to work in the Mills; thus to earn perhaps a decent combined wage.

And in this instance it was so. But the mother worked hardest of all: her one idea—her blind religion—being work: to bring up her children to work—never to give in.

During the last twenty-four years of her life she never missed a single work-morning being at the mill at 6 a.m.

Even before that, on each occasion of her confinement, she would only allow herself three weeks off. When she returned to the mill she would leave the new-born babe every morning at the house of a nursing woman on the way.

The youngest-born—and he it was who told it all—said he remembered very well as a child being picked out of bed in the early dawn, wrapped in a shawl, and carried through the streets, just as he was, to the house of an old woman.

Here his mother would just pop him down, and hurry on to _work_.

* * * * *

At the last, after her half-century of toil, she was terribly broken with bronchitis. Often, after going out at 5.30 a.m. into the cutting winds of winter, the gas-lamps would reveal her leaning for a while, wheezing and coughing, in the shelter of a doorway to get her breath and strength.

Nevertheless she never missed a single day, or even a quarter.

She never gave in till the very last.

Then one day at dinner-time she came home and went to bed.

But at 9 p.m. the youngest son going up found her dressed!—“O yes, the house wanted tidying, and she would attend to it, as she was going to work in the morning, and there was no one else to do so!”

But in the morning there _was_ someone else, and the house was tidied without her;

For she lay in her chamber, dead.

A TRADE

In a little stinking shop, hardly seven feet square—

Just one room in a London back street, where nearly every room lodges a family—

With two or three little paraffin stoves in, and bowls and pots horribly steaming, for dyeing gloves—

A man, some forty years old, burly and well-brained but broken down and bloated with drink, plying a trade.

“Do you see?” he says, “I buy these white evening kids, what have been cast off, from the slop-dealers, at so much a score. Then I gets a woman to mend ’em and put buttons on, and then I dyes ’em black, in these ’ere pots.

[As good as new, d’you see? See how they shine when they’re got up—and the black’ll never come orf.]

Then I goes out into the markets—Leather Lane and the street-markets I mean—and sells them at sixpence a pair.

[Yes, and I mean to get a stamp and stamp ’em inside; then they’ll be _just_ like new.]

O it aint so bad in mild weather, but when it’s like this, cold and rainy, folk won’t stop to buy nothing, they won’t.”

* * * * *

And there were the gloves, shriveled, black, and hanging in rows on stretched strings, like the corpses of weasels and moles strung by gamekeepers in the woods;

And there was the filthy suffocating odor of the den and the chemicals, and the intelligent eye of the man wavering in slavery to his protruding lower lip.

“Lor!” he said, “I often stay here at nights as well as days. I don’t live with my wife now. She’s a regular bad ’un!”

THE PLOUGHBOY

The blackbirds sing so sweetly in the morning;

They are building a nest yonder in the hedgerow, where I pass at sunrise: and I think their song is sweeter then than else at any time of day.

I take care not to disturb them: they work as hard as anybody for their living.

And I think they know me now, they are that bold. But they do not follow in the furrow, like the wagtails and robins; they seem to hang to the grass-lands.

* * * * *

It is pleasant then, in the morning: the air is so sweet.

And the smell of the earth—and I like the warm smell of the horses.

Jeannie goes in the furrow, and Rob on the fallow: they go very steady;

And when the ground is soft-like, it’s good enough going, but when it’s stiff it stretches your arms a bit:

Lord! it does make you sweat!

THE JACKDAW

Chork! chork!

The white sea-cliff, the crawling waves, the fringe of weed between,

Midway a cleft in the rock—from above, from below, unseen.

* * * * *

Chork! chork!

The sun alone looks in where my nest is; the moon shines in the blinking eyes of my children.

Sweet is the warm night nestling all together, sweet the dawn by the fresh air fanned,

Sweet to arise and soar into the blue weather—to see the brown fields and pastures inland!

* * * * *

To sail inland, a dozen together, to the feeding grounds, and unearth the fat white slugs, (chork! chork!)

To roam and range with the others—how sweet!—and yet not with them,

Forgetting never

My own particular cleft in the rock and the tuft of sea-poppies beside it—like yellow flames burning—