Chapter II: In Ulster

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

’Tis the time o’ the year the marsh is full of sound,
And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground.
The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars,
The daisy takes the middle field, and spangles it with stars,
And down the bank into the lane the primroses do crowd,
All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!

’Tis the time o’ the year, in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The downs are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for little lambs to sleep.

’Tis the time o’ the year I turn upon the height
To watch from my harrow the dance of going light;
And if before the sun be hid, come slowly up the vale
Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,
Hey, but there’s many a March for me, and many and many a lass!
I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.

IN A RUIN, AFTER A THUNDERSTORM.

Keep of the Norman, old to flood and cloud!
Thou dost reproach me with thy sunset look,
That in our common menace, I forsook
Hope, the last fear, and stood impartial proud:
Almost, almost, while ether spake aloud,
Death, from the smoking stones, my spirit shook
Into thy hollow as leaves into a brook,
No more than they by heaven’s assassins cowed.
But now thy thousand-scarrèd steep is flecked
With the calm kisses of the light delayed,
Breathe on me better valour: to subject
My soul to greed of life, and grow afraid
Lest, ere her fight’s full term, the Architect
See downfall of the stronghold that He made.

TO A CHILD.

Dear Owain, when you are minded
To gather the perfect thing,
Over Abergavenny
Climb in the evening!—
I have seen where orchis dances
A saraband with the Spring;

Where samphire leans to ocean,
And shakes in the word he saith;
Or the brood of the peasant ragweed,
Innocent, sweet of breath,
Runs with a wild Welsh river
That never has heard of death;

Where thrift, with a foot shell-tinted,
On the dark coast-road delays;
And foxglove flames in a ruin;
And campion meekly lays
On a crag’s uneven shoulder
Her satiny cheek, for days.

Well: these in their mortal beauty,
And these in their youth, abound.
But over Abergavenny,
Past sunset-hour, I found
(O Holy Grail of a flower!)
The sun on the hilltop ground.

IN A PERPENDICULAR CHURCH.

The slackened arches never lose their beauty of alarm;
The tall lines frown along the wall, like angels, sword in arm;
And where the vaults diverge, a grove with fancied snow o’erspread,
Goes light among a myriad panes, with dust upon her head.

England of old most innocent, whose flower of skill achieved
Failed quick as Lammas lilies, when thy hand no more believed,
What hast thou here, beloved but dead, held to thy childless heart?
Alas, thy human all of heaven: thine own and only Art.

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SONG.

She alone of Shepherdesses
With her blue disdayning eyes,
Wo’d not hark a Kyng that dresses
All his lute in sighes:
Yet to winne
Katheryn,
I elect for mine Emprise.

None is like her, none above her,
Who so lifts my youth in me,
That a little more to love her
Were to leave her free!
But to winne
Katheryn,
Is mine utmost love’s degree.

Distaunce, cold, delay, and danger,
Build the four walles of her bower;
She’s noe Sweete for any stranger,
She’s noe valley flower:
And to winne
Katheryn,
To her height my heart can Tower!

Uppe to Beautie’s promontory
I will climb, nor loudlie call
Perfect and escaping glory
Folly, if I fall:
Well to winne
Katheryn!
To be worth her is my all.

COLUMBA AND THE STORK.

The cliffs of Iona were red, with the moon to lee,
A finger of rock in the infinite wind and the sea;
And white on the cliffs as a volley of spray down-flying,
The beautiful stork of Eiré indriven and dying.

I stole from the choir; I fed him, I bathed his breast,
Till in late sunshine he lifted his wing to the west.
Oh, the bells of the Abbey were calling clearer and bolder,
And I feared the pale admonishing face at my shoulder.

Columb the saint’s! but I said, with mine arm in air,
(Of that banished body and homesick spirit aware,)
“The bird is of Eiré; out of the storm I bore him;
And lo, he is free, with the valleys of Eiré before him.”

Of the man that was Eiré-born, and in exile yet,
This the reproach I had, and cannot forget,
This the reproach I had, and never another:
“Blessed art thou, to have lightened the heart of my brother!”

THE CHANTRY.

A loyal lady young; a knight for honour slain:
All beauty and all quiet sealed of old upon
Their images that lie in coif and morion.
A moment since, through rifts and pauses of the rain,
The day shot in; the lancet window showered again
Its moth-like play of silver, rose, and sapphire; shone
What arms of warring duchies glorious, bygone:
Lombardy, Desmond, Malta, suitored Aquitaine!
The while, aloft in Art’s immortal summertide,
Fair is the carven hostel, fortunate either guest,
And men of moodier England pass, and hear outside
Fury of toil alone, and fate’s diurnal storm,
Hearts with the King of Saints, hearts beating light and warm!
To these your courage give, that these attain your rest.

APRIL IN GOVILON.

Slowly, slowly darken
Primrose and pimpernel;
Heather of the rock, a-shake
On delicious air;
Slanted seas of spreading grass,
(Green glow and tidal swell,)
Under wind and pausing light how variably fair!

Larks from heaven descending
Hush; not a cloud-shadow,
Where so late the romping lambs
Chased it, in a ring;
High along a little wood
Quick rain-sparkles go;
Blorenge walls the faëry world: the sole substantial thing.

April in Govilon,
Filled with a bright heart-break;
Evenfall on dying wing,
Swanlike and supreme!
Soon, unheard, the Hyades
Run up the hills to take
Seven lamps, and trail the seven all night in Isca stream.

ON LEAVING WINCHESTER.

A palmer’s kiss on thy familiar marge,
My oriel city, whence the soul hath sight
Of passional yesterdays, all gold and large,
Arising to enrich our narrow night:
Though others bless thee, who so blest before
Hath pastured, from the violent time apart,
And laved in supersensual light the heart
Alone with thy magnificent No More?

Sweet court of roses now, sweet camp of bees!
The hills that lean to thy white bed at dawn,
Hear, for the clash of raging dynasties,
Laughter of boys about a branchy lawn.
Hast thou a stain? Let ivy cover all;
Nor seem of greatness disinhabited,
While spirits in their wonted splendour tread
From close to close, by Wolvesey’s idle wall.

Bright fins against thy lucid water leap,
And nigh thy towers the nesting wood-dove dwell;
Be lenient winter, and long moons, and sleep
Upon thee, but on me the sharp Farewell.
Happy art thou, O clad and crowned with rest!
Happy the shepherd (would that I were he!)
Whose early way is step for step with thee,
Whose old brow fades on thine immortal breast.

ON THE CENOTAPH OF THE PRINCE IMPERIAL IN SAINT GEORGE’S CHAPEL.

No young and exiled dust beneath is laid
In sole entail of high inheritance,
Though once compassion softly came, and made
A sleep at Windsor for the Son of France:
And sleep so long hath kept his image clear
Of pain’s pollution, and the Zulu spear,
It seems his piteous self at last that lies
In prayer’s old heart built to the island skies,
Low as the sifted snow is, and meek as Paradise.

Thus passeth all ye dream of might and grace!
Wherefore, beside the stones that cry it loud,
Let every musing spirit pause to trace
The cloud-burst of that Empire like a cloud;
And, looking on these stainless brows, proclaim
Peace unto Corsica’s portentous name,
And peace to her, who in a sculptured boy,
Mould of her martyred beauty and her joy,
Reads here the end of Helen, the end of Helen’s Troy.

OF JOAN’S YOUTH.

I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
By Severn shore,
The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooded grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose;
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

PASSING THE MINSTER.

Praise to thine awful beauty, praise
And peace, O warden of my ways!
Bid o’er the brow to thee I raise,
Eternal unction fall.
Nobly and equally thou must
Take adoration of my dust,
And unto altitudes august
Thy low-born lover call.
Bless me; forget me not: a lone
Clear _Amen_ through thine arches blown,
A heartstring of that Hope, a stone
Fixed also in that Wall.

THE YEW-TREE.

As I came homeward
At merry Christmas,
By the old church tower,
Through the churchyard grass,

And saw there, circled
With graves all about,
The yew-tree paternal,
The yew-tree devout,

Then this hot life-blood
Was hard to endure,
O Death! so I loved thee,
The sole love sure.

For stars slip in heaven,
They wander, they break:
But under the yew-tree
Not one heartache.

And ours, what failure
Renewed and avowed!
But ah, the long-buried
Is leal, and is proud.

Now I came homeward
At merry Christmas,
By the wise gray tower,
Through the green kind grass.

SHROPSHIRE LANDSCAPE.

Vague, in a silver sheen
Rayed from their armour green,
Some aged limes upstand;
Nigh fields kindle and shine:
Beauty incarnadine!
What thrill of what Uranian wine
So flushed the placid land?

All tints of a broken wave
Light the leafy architrave,
Far up the cloudy spring;
And the ploughed soil ruddier glows
Than the ruby or the rose,
Or the moon, when the harvest goes
Beneath her blazing wing.

Trees keep the broad outpost;
Dusk, by their dusky host,
Long-loved Severn glides.
Thence, towards the hilly south,
Like a queen, battle-wroth,
Upon a vermeil saddle-cloth,
The three-spired city rides.

THE GRAHAM TARTAN TO A GRAHAM.

Use me in honour: cherish me
As ivy from a sacred tree.
Mine in the winds of war to close
Around the armour of Montrose,
And kiss the death-wound of Dundee.

Yet fear not me, nor such estate
Heroic and inviolate;
But green-and-white-and-azure wind
About thy body and thy mind,
And by that length enlarge thy fate!

IN A LONDON STREET.

Though sea and mount have beauty, and this but what it can,
Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,
The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,
The dread endearing stain of time,
The sullied heart of man.

Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,
That where it dare not enter, steals in shrouded passion by;
And mine the saffron river-sails,
And every plane-tree that avails
To rest an urban eye;

The bells, the dripping gables, the tavern’s corner glare
The cabs in firefly dartings, the barrel-organ’s air,
Where one by one, or two by two,
The hatless babes are dancing through
The gutters of the square.

Not on Sicilian headlands of song and old desire,
My spirit chose her pleasure-house, but in the London mire:
Long, long alone she loves to pace,
And find a music in the place
As in a minster choir.

O deeds of awe and rapture! O names of legendry!
Still is it most of joy within your altered pale to be,
Whose very ills I fain would slake,
Mine angels are, and help to make
In hell, a heaven for me.

ATHASSEL ABBEY.

Folly and Time have fashioned
Of thee a songless reed;
O not-of-earth-impassioned!
Thy music’s mute indeed.

Red from the chantry crannies
The orchids burn and swing,
And where the arch began is
Rest for a raven’s wing;

And up the dinted column
Quick tails of squirrels wave,
And black, prodigious, solemn,
A forest fills the nave.

Still faith fuller, still faster,
To ruin give thy heart:
Perfect before the Master
Aye as thou wert, thou art.

But I am wind that passes
In ignorance and tears,
Uplifted from the grasses,
Blown to the void of years,

Blown to the void, yet sighing
In thee to merge and cease,
Last breath of beauty’s dying,
Of sanctity, of peace!

Though use nor place forever
Unto my soul befall,
By no belovèd river
Set in a saintly wall,

Do thou by builders given
Speech of the dumb to be,
Beneath thine open heaven,
Athassel! pray for me.

ROMANS IN DORSET. (TO A. B.)

A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath,
The flat and treeless wold for us, with darkest noon on high.

Sullen quiet below,
But storm in upper air!
A wind from long ago,
In mouldy chambers of the cloud, had ripped an arras there,

And singed the triple gloom,
And let through, in a flame,
Crowned faces of old Rome:
Regnant, o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came.

Uprisen like any sun,
Through vistas hollow gray,
Aloft, and one by one,
In brazen casque, the Emperors loomed large, and sank away.

In ovals of wan light,
Each warrior eye and mouth:
A pageant brutal bright,
As if, once over, loudly passed Jove’s laughter in the south;

And dimmer, these among,
Some cameo’d head aloof,
With ringlets heavy-hung,
As golden stone-crop comely grows around the castle roof.

An instant; gusts again,
Then heaven’s impacted wall,
The hot insistent rain,
The thunder-shock: and of the Past, mirage no more at all.

No more the alien dream
Pursuing, as we went,
With glory’s cursèd gleam;
Nor sins of Cæsar’s ruined line engulphed us, innocent.

The vision, great and dread,
Corroded; sole in view
Was empty Egdon spread,
Her crimson summer weeds a-shake in tempest: but we knew

What Tacitus had borne
In that wrecked world we saw;
And what, thine heart uptorn,
My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.

LINES ON VARIOUS FLY-LEAVES.

_TO GWENLLIAN E. F. MORGAN._

TO HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.

Young father-poet! much in you I praise
Adventure high, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honour sealed and blent,
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays:
Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;
And, most, your verse, with strict imperious bent,
Heard sweetly as from some old harper’s tent,
And surging in the listener’s brain for days.
At Framlingham to-night, if there should be
No guest, beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,
No guard, save moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears,
And I, your pilgrim, call you, O let me
In at the gate! and smile into the eyes
That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.

FOR IZAAK WALTON.

Can trout allure the rod of yore
In Itchen stream to dip?
Or lover of her banks restore
That sweet Socratic lip?
Old fishing and wishing
Are over many a year.
O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Again the foamy shallows fill,
The quiet clouds amass,
And soft as bees, by Catherine Hill
At dawn the anglers pass,
And follow the hollow,
In boughs to disappear.
O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Nay, rise not now, nor with them take
One golden-freckled fool!
Thy sons to-day bring each an ache
For ancient arts to cool.
But, father, lie rather
Unhurt and idle near:
O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

While thought of thee to men is yet
A sylvan playfellow,
Ne’er by thy marble they forget
In pious cheer to go.
As air falls, the prayer falls
O’er kingly Winchester:
O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

A FOOT-NOTE TO A FAMOUS LYRIC.

True love’s own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
Gave to our Saxon speech:

Chief miracle of theme and touch
That many envy and adore:
_I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more_.

No critic born since Charles was king,
But sighed in smiling, as he read:
“Here’s theft of the supremest thing
A poet might have said!”

Young knight and wit and beau, who won
Mid war’s upheaval, ladies’ praise,
Was’t well of you, ere you had done,
To blight our modern bays?

O yet to you, whose random hand
Struck from the dark whole gems like these,
(Archaic beauty, never planned
Nor reared by wan degrees,

Which leaves an artist poor, and Art
An earldom richer all her years;)
To you, dead on your shield apart,
Be _Ave_! passed in tears.

’Twas virtue’s breath inflamed your lyre;
Heroic from the heart it ran;
Nor for the shedding of such fire
Lives, since, a manlier man.

And till your strophe sweet and bold
So lovely aye, so lonely long,
Love’s self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold
The parapets of song.

A MEMORY OF A BRECONSHIRE VALLEY.

—“_Patulis ubi vallibus errans,
Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater._”
_Ad Posteros._

I.

I followed thee, wild stream of Paradise,
White Usk, forever showering the sunned bee
In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;
And, all along, had magical surmise
Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,
As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,
Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly
The giant rollers form, and fall, and rise.
Above thy poet’s dust, by yonder yew,
Ere distance perished, ere a star began,
His clear monastic measure, heard of few,
Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;
And thou to me wert dear, because I knew
The God who made thee gracious, and the man.

II.

If, by that second lover’s power controlled,
In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o’erfills
Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,
From distance unto distance trailing gold;
If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,
Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills
Gray hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
Diviner run thy shallows than of old;—
If intellectual these, O name thy Vaughan
Creator too: and close his memory keep,
Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn
Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;
A play of thought more mystic than the dawn;
And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.

WRIT IN MY LORD CLARENDON’S “HISTORY OF THE REBELLION.”

How life hath cheapened, and how blank
The Worlde is! like a fen
Where long ago unstainèd sank
The starrie gentlemen:
Since Marston Moor and Newbury drank
King Charles his gentlemen.

If Fate in any air accords
What Fate denied, O then
I ask to be among your Swordes,
My joyous gentlemen;
Towards Honour’s heaven to goe, and towards
King Charles his gentlemen!

A LAST WORD ON SHELLEY.

Each great inrolling wave, a league of sound,
All night, all day, the hostile crags confound
To merest snow and smoke. The crags remain.

Smile at the storm for our safe poet’s sake!
Not ever this ordainèd world shall break
That mounting, foolish, foam-bright heart again.

AN EPITAPH FOR WILLIAM HAZLITT.

Between the wet trees and the sorry steeple,
Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;

Beauty’s a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.

Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
Some one love worth the ages and the nations!

Nothing falls under, to thine eyes eternal.
Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining;
Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches.

EMILY BRONTË.

What sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things,
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
’Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man’s delight
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.

PAX PAGANICA.

Good oars, for Arnold’s sake,
By Laleham lightly bound,
And near the bank, O soft,
Darling swan!
Let not the o’erweary wake
Anew from natal ground,
But where he slumbered oft,
Slumber on.

Be less than boat or bird,
The pensive stream along;
No murmur make, nor gleam,
At his side.
Where was it he had heard
Of warfare and of wrong?—
Not there, in any dream
Since he died.

VALEDICTION (R. L. S., 1894).

When from the vista of the Book I shrink,
From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage,
Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage,
Nor keep with Shakespeare’s use one golden link;
When heavily my sanguine spirits sink,
To read too plain on each impostor page
Only of kings the broken lineage,
Well for my peace if then on thee I think,
Louis: our priest of letters, and our knight
With whose familiar baldric hope is girt,
From whose young hands she bears the Grail away.
All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert,
I am and must be; and in thy known light
Go down to dust, content with this my day.

CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

Some of Grant Richards’s Publications in Belles Lettres.

By A. E. HOUSMAN.

A SHROPSHIRE LAD. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

By KATHARINE TYNAN (Mrs. Hinkson).

THE WIND IN THE TREES: A BOOK OF COUNTRY VERSE. Fcap.
8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

By ALICE MEYNELL.

THE FLOWER OF THE MIND: A CHOICE AMONG THE BEST POEMS.
With Cover designed by LAURENCE HOUSMAN. Crown 8vo,
yapped parchment, 7_s._ 6_d._

By EDWARD VERRALL LUCAS.

A BOOK OF VERSES FOR CHILDREN. With Cover, Title-page,
and End-papers designed in colours by F. D. BEDFORD.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._ [_Third Edition._

By LAURENCE HOUSMAN.

SPIKENARD: A BOOK OF DEVOTIONAL LOVE POEMS. With Cover
designed by the Author. Small 4to, boards, 3_s._
6_d._ net.

By LAURENCE BINYON.

PORPHYRION AND OTHER POEMS. Crown 8vo, buckram, 5_s._
net.

By WALTER LEAF, LL.D.

VERSIONS FROM THE DIVAN OF HAFIZ. Pott 4to, 5_s._ net.

By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE.

RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYĀM: A PARAPHRASE FROM SEVERAL
LITERAL TRANSLATIONS. Long fcap. 8vo, parchment
cover, 5_s._

By LAURENCE ALMA-TADEMA.

REALMS OF UNKNOWN KINGS: POEMS. Fcap. 8vo, buckram,
3_s._ net; paper covers, 2_s._ net.

By ARABELLA and LOUISA SHORE.

POEMS BY A. AND L. Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._ net.

By LOUISA SHORE.

HANNIBAL: A DRAMA IN TWO PARTS. With Photogravure
Portrait of the Author. Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._ net.

By EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON.

THE INFERNO OF DANTE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE.
Fcap. 8vo, half parchment, 5_s._ net.

By MAURICE MAETERLINCK.

AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE: A DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS.
Translated by ALFRED SUTRO. With an Introduction
by W. J. MACKAIL, and Title-page designed by W. H.
MARGETSON. Globe 8vo, half buckram, 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

————————
GRANT RICHARDS,
9, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

End of Project Gutenberg's "England and Yesterday", by Louise Imogen Guiney