Chapter II

Oh, import deep as life is, deep as time!
There is a Something sacred and sublime,
Moving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,
Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.

Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong:
There is One greater than the whole world’s wrong.
Be hushed before the high benignant Power
That goes untarrying to the reckoning hour.

O men that forge the fetter, it is vain:
There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.
‘Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,
And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.

_October, 1899._

Memory of Good Deeds

The memory of good deeds will ever stay,
A lamp to light us on the darkened way,
A music to the ear on clamoring street,
A cooling well amid the noonday heat,
A scent of green boughs blown through narrow walls,
A feel of rest when quiet evening falls.

The New Century

While cities rose and blossomed into dust,
While shadowy lines of kings were blown to air,
What was the Purpose brooding on the world,
Through the large leisure of the centuries?
And what the end—failure or victory?

Lo, man has laid his sceptre on the stars,
And sent his spell upon the continents.
The heavens confess their secrets, and the stones,
Silent as God, publish their mystery.
Man calls the lightning from its secret place,
That he may shrink the spaces of the world,
And eavesdrop at the latched Antipodes.
The wild, white, smoking horses of the sea
Are startled by his thunders. The World-Powers
Crowd round to be the lackeys of the king.

His hand has torn the veil of the Great Law,
The law that was before the worlds—before
That far First Whisper on the ancient deep,
The law that swings Arcturus on the North,
And hurls the soul of man upon the way.
But what avail, O builders of the world,
Unless ye build a safety for the soul?
Man has put harness on Leviathan,
And hooks in his incorrigible jaws;
And yet the Perils of the Street remain.
Out of the whirlwind of the cities rise
Lean Hunger and the Worm of Misery,
The heartbreak and the cry of mortal tears.

But hark, the bugles blowing on the peaks;
And hark, a murmur as of many feet,
The cry of captains, the divine alarm!
Look! the last son of Time comes hurrying on,
The strong young Titan of Democracy!
With swinging step he takes the open road,
In love with the winds that beat his hairy breast.

Baring his sunburnt strength to all the world,
He casts his eyes abroad with Jovian glance—
Searches the tracks of old Tradition; scans
With rebel heart the Book of Pedigree;
Peers into the face of Privilege and cries,
“Why are you halting in the path of man?
Is it your shoulder bears the human load?
Do you draw down the rains of the sweet heaven,
And keep the green things growing? Back to hell!”

God is descending from eternity,
And all things, good and evil, build the road.
Yea, down in the thick of things, the men of greed
Are thumping the inhospitable clay.
By wondrous toils the men without the Dream,
Led onward by a something unawares,
Are laying the foundations of the Dream,
The Kingdom of Fraternity foretold.

The Need of the Hour

Fling forth the triple-colored flag to dare
The bright, untraveled highways of the air.
Blow the undaunted bugles, blow, and yet
Let not the boast betray us to forget.
Lo, there are high adventures for this hour—
Tourneys to test the sinews of our power.
For we must parry—as the years increase—
The hazards of success, the risks of peace!

What do we need to keep the nation whole,
To guard the pillars of the State? We need
The fine audacities of honest deed;
The homely old integrities of soul;
The swift temerities that take the part
Of outcast right—the wisdom of the heart;
Brave hopes that Mammon never can detain,
Nor sully with his gainless clutch for gain.

We need the Cromwell fire to make us feel
The common burden and the public trust
To be a thing as sacred and august
As the white vigil where the angels kneel.
We need the faith to go a path untrod,
The power to be alone and vote with God.

The Lizard

I sit among the hoary trees
With Aristotle on my knees,
And turn with serious hand the pages,
Lost in the cobweb-hush of ages;
When suddenly with no more sound
Than any sunbeam on the ground,
The little hermit of the place
Is peering up into my face—
The slim gray hermit of the rocks,
With bright inquisitive, quick eyes,
His life a round of harks and shocks,
A little ripple of surprise.

Now lifted up, intense and still,
Sprung from the silence of the hill
He hangs upon the ledge a-glisten,
And his whole body seems to listen!
My pages give a little start,
And he is gone! to be a part
Of the old cedar’s crumpled bark,
A mottled scar, a weather-mark!

How halt am I, how mean of birth,
Beside this darting pulse of earth!
I only have the wit to look
Into a big presumptuous book,
To find some sage’s rigid plan
To tell me how to be a man.
Tradition lays its dead hand cold
Upon our youth—and we are old.
But this wise hermit, this gray friar,
He has no law but heart’s desire.
He somehow touches higher truth,
The circle of eternal youth.

The Humming Bird

A sudden whir of eager sound—
And now a something throbs around
The flowers that watch the fountain. Look!
It touched the rose, the green leaves shook,
I think, and yet so lightly tost
That not a spark of dew was lost.

Tell me, O Rose, what thing it is
That now appears, now vanishes?
Surely it took its fire-green hue
From daybreaks that it glittered through;
Quick, for this sparkle of the dawn
Glints through the garden and is gone.

What was the message, Rose, what word;
Delight foretold, or hope deferred?

The Round-Up

Down, down the wild canyons we go in a flurry;
The cedars sweep by in their mystical hurry;
Gone into the wind are the languor and worry—
Gone into the west with the phantom moon.
Ho! there is the lord of the hills and the valleys;
It is he that leads in the midsummer sallies
High into the steeps where the gray chaparral is;
It is he that leads to the low lagoon.

Where the wild mustard splashes the slope with yellow,
He has turned at bay—ah, the powerful fellow!
See the toss of his head—hear the breath and the bellow;
How he tears the ground with his angry hoofs!
Now he breaks a wild path through the deep, plumy rushes,
(A loud bird high on a tamarack hushes)
Right on through a glory of crimson he crushes,
On into the gloom under leafy roofs.

Oh, the joy of the wind in our faces! We follow
The cattle—we shout down the poppy-hung hollow.
Lo! out of the cliff we have startled a swallow,
And startled the echoes on rocky fells.
Ho! what was it passed? Were they leaves—were they sparrows
That whispered away like a hurtle of arrows?
The rose-odor thickens—the deep gorge narrows;
Now the herd takes down through the scented dells.

Speed, speed, leave the brooks to their potter and prattle;
Sweep on with the thunder and surge of the cattle,
The hurry, the voices, the keen joy of battle—
The hills and the wind and the open light.
Now on into camp by the sycamores yonder;
Now o’er the guitar let the light fingers wander;
Let thoughts in the high heart grow pensive and fonder;
Then stars and the dream of a summer night.

Song of the Fay

My life is a dream, a dream,
In the moon’s cool beam;
Some day I shall wake and desire
A touch of the infinite fire.
But now ‘tis enough that I be
In the light on the sea;
Enough that I climb with the cloud
When the winds of the morning are loud;
Enough that I fade with my star
When the doors of the East unbar.

My life is a long delight
In the wonder of night.
I quiet the heart of the rose
When she quakes at the thought of the snows;
I count the blown leaves of the Fall,
And I comfort them all.
Sometimes I awake with a start
In the song of a poet’s heart.
Some day I shall know life whole—
Shall suffer and find me a soul.

The World-Purpose

Men sadly say that Love’s high dream is vain,
That one force holds the heart—the hope of gain.
Are, then, the August Powers behind the veil
Weary of watch and powerless to prevail?
Have they grown palsied with the creep of age,
And do they burn no more with pallid rage?
Are the shrines empty and the altars cold,
Where once the saints and heroes knelt of old?

Not so: the vast in-brothering of man—
The glory of the universe—began
When first the heart of the Mother Darkness heard
The Whisper, and the ancient chaos stirred.
Ever the feet of Christ were in events,
Bridging the seas, shaking the continents.

His feet are heard in the historic march
Under the whirlwind, under the starry arch.
Forever the Great Purpose presses on,
From darkness unto darkness, dawn to dawn,
Resolved to lay the rafter and the beam
Of Justice—the imperishable Dream.

This is the voice of Time against the Hours;
This is the witness of the Cosmic Powers;
This is the Music of the Ages—this
The song whose first note broke the First Abyss.

All that we glory in was once a dream;
The World-Will marches onward, gleam by gleam.
New voices speak, dead paths begin to stir:
Man is emerging from the sepulchre!
Let no man dare, let no man ever dare
To mark on Time’s great way, “No Thoroughfare!”

To Young America

In spite of the stare of the wise and the world’s derision,
Dare travel the star-blazed road, dare follow the Vision.

It breaks as a hush on the soul in the wonder of youth;
And the lyrical dream of the boy is the kingly truth.

The world is a vapor, and only the Vision is real—
Yea, nothing can hold against Hell but the Wingèd Ideal.

The Brown o’ the Year

What would you speak with that visage old,
O cliff by the windy shore?
What passion that never a song could hold—
What word of the Nevermore?

What would you tell with that silent look,
O bleak, bare oak by the way?
Earth’s grief is all in that bough that shook,
That leaf that could not stay.

Wind of the Fall

I hear that wail in the windy pine
And I suddenly know:
It wakes in my heart a dream divine
And a sacred woe.

I heard that cry from your spirit then,
O wind of the Fall!
I, too, have carried the grief of men;
I have felt it all.

The Free Press

Hail, young Prometheus, risen again to Time,
The friend of man and foeman of man’s Foe!
Climb the new heavens and seize the nobler fire.
Still teach the wisdom of the plough and loom,
The sweetness of the threshold and the hearth.
Be to the sower of the field a sign
To point the circuits of the frost, a voice
To cry the coming of the hurricane.
Be to the scholar, by his waning lamp,
A bringer of the tidings of the stars,
News of the forces and the frame of things.
Be to the poet, leagued with Death and Eld,
A Memnon whisper of the Mystery,
Life’s lofty joy and immemorial grief.
Be to the calm historian a glass
Where, through the rush of phantoms, he can see
The majesty and quietness of Truth,
The craft of God, the lure and threat of Time.
Hail, Titan, with the hair upon your breast!
Be terrible in battle to throw down
The stronghold of the traitors and their crew.
Flash down the sky-born lightnings of the Pen;
Let loose the cramped-up thunders of the Types.
Hurl on the Jupiter of Greed enthroned
Defiance, endless challenge, fire of scorn.
Stand out upon the walls of darkness—stand
A young god with a bugle at his lips
To rouse the watchmen sleeping on their towers.
Fling out the banner of the People’s Right—
A flag in love with all the winds of heaven;
Plunge your dread sword into the Spoiler’s den;
Hurl down into the faces of the thieves
The blaze of its intolerable light....
Fail not, for in your failure Freedom fails!

A Bargain

Scoffer, you cry, “Where is your ‘other world,’
Your fabled heaven in far eternities?”
Well said, but first, before your lip is curled,
Tell (’tis a little thing) where _this_ world is!

“Inasmuch....”

Wild tempest swirled on Moscow’s castled height;
Wild sleet shot slanting down the wind of night;
Quick snarling mouths from out the darkness sprang
To strike you in the face with tooth and fang.
Javelins of ice hung on the roofs of all;

The very stones were aching in the wall,
Where Ivan stood a watchman on his hour,
Guarding the Kremlin by the northern tower,
When, lo! a half-bare beggar tottered past,
Shrunk up and stiffened in the bitter blast.
A heap of misery he drifted by,
And from the heap came out a broken cry.

At this the watchman straightened with a start;
A tender grief was tugging at his heart,
The thought of his dead father, bent and old
And lying lonesome in the ground so cold.
Then cried the watchman starting from his post:
“Little father, this is yours; you need it most!”
And tearing off his hairy coat, he ran
And wrapt it warm around the beggar man.

That night the piling snows began to fall,
And the good watchman died beside the wall.
But waking in the Better Land that lies
Beyond the reaches of these cooping skies,
Behold, the Lord came out to greet him home,
Wearing the coat he gave by Moscow’s dome—
Wearing the hairy heavy coat he gave
By Moscow’s tower before he felt the grave!

And Ivan, by the old Earth-memory stirred,
Cried softly with a wonder in his word:
“And where, dear Lord, found you this coat of mine,
A thing unfit for glory such as Thine?”
Then the Lord answered with a look of light:
“This coat, My son, you gave to Me last night.”

“The Father’s Business”

Who puts back into place a fallen bar,
Or flings a rock out of a traveled road,
His feet are moving toward the central star,
His name is whispered in the God’s abode.

A Guard of the Sepulchre

_Behold, some of the watch came into the city and told unto the Chief Priests all the things that were come to pass, and ... they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying: Say, His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we slept._—MATTHEW.

I was a Roman soldier in my prime;
Now age is on me and the yoke of time.
I saw your Risen Christ, for I am he
Who reached the hyssop to Him on the tree;
And I am one of two who watched beside
The Sepulchre of Him we crucified.

All that last night I watched with sleepless eyes;
Great stars arose and crept across the skies.
The world was all too still for mortal rest,
For pitiless thoughts were busy in the breast.
The night was long, so long, it seemed at last
I had grown old and a long life had passed.
Far off the hills of Moab, touched with light,
Were swimming in the hollow of the night.
I saw Jerusalem all wrapped in cloud,
Stretched like a dead thing folded in a shroud.

Once in the pauses of our whispered talk,
I heard a something on the garden walk.
Perhaps it was a crisp leaf lightly stirred—
Perhaps the dream-note of a waking bird.
Then suddenly an angel burning white
Came down with earthquake in the breaking light,
And rolled the great stone from the Sepulchre,
Mixing the morning with a scent of myrrh.
And lo, the Dead had risen with the day:
The Man of Mystery had gone His way!

Years have I wandered, carrying my shame;
Now let the Tooth of Time eat out my name.
For we, who all the Wonder might have told,
Kept silence, for our mouths were stopt with gold.

The Song of the Shepherds

_And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen._—LUKE.

It was near the first cock-crowing,
And Orion’s wheel was going,
When an angel stood before us and our hearts were sore afraid.
Lo, his face was like the lightning,
When the walls of heaven are whitening,
And he brought us wondrous tidings of a joy that shall not fade.

Then a Splendor shone around us,
In the still field where he found us,
A-watch upon the Shepherd Tower and waiting for the light;
There where David as a stripling,
Saw the ewes and lambs go rippling
Down the little hills and hollows at the falling of the night.

Oh, what tender, sudden faces
Filled the old familiar places,
The barley-fields where Ruth of old went gleaning with the birds!
Down the skies the host came swirling,
Like sea-waters white and whirling,
And our hearts were strangely shaken by the wonder of their words.

Haste, O people: all are bidden—
Haste from places, high or hidden:
In Mary’s Child the Kingdom comes, the heaven in beauty bends!
He has made all life completer:
He has made the Plain Way sweeter,
For the stall is His first shelter and the cattle His first friends.

He has come! the skies are telling:
He has quit the glorious dwelling;
And first the tidings came to us, the humble shepherd folk.
He has come to field and manger,
And no more is God a Stranger:
He comes as Common Man at home with cart and crookèd yoke.

As the shadow of a cedar
To a traveller in gray Kedar
Will be the kingdom of His love, the kingdom without end.
Tongues and Ages may disclaim Him,
Yet the Heaven of heavens will name Him
Lord of peoples, Light of nations, elder Brother, tender Friend.

The Prince of Whim

Borne on like a bubble
In bright little trouble
My elf child glimmers and goes;
As glad as a throstle
Whose tremolos jostle
The rain on the leaf of a rose.

He comes in a twinkling,
With never an inkling
That law is not one with his word;
But gives me good wages,
The penny of ages—
Love wild as the heart of a bird.

He laughs down my quiet,
This lord of the riot,
This Prince of the Kingdom of Whim;
The world is his castle,
And I am his vassal
To trumpet the triumphs of him!

The Plowman

His furrows are darkening into the hollow,
Lightly behind him the blackbirds follow—
By quick little journeys they follow and whistle.
Now a gossamer ship breaks away to the blue
(Who stands by the railing and waves adieu?)
All night it was moored to a thistle.

Who knows the glad business afoot on the by-way?
Who know the bold hopes sent adrift on the skyway?

Song’s Eternity

Into the song of the Poet are builded the things that endure: The Pillars of Karnak will crumble but the song of Shelley is sure.

It will hold through the ages of ages, like the heavens steadied in air: The hoofs that trample the kingdoms down that miracle must spare.

The God of Song and Mirth

‘Twas the God of Song and Mirth
Who descended to the Earth.
It was He who veiled His face
In the sorrow of the race;
He who toiled at Nazareth,
Going with us down to death;
He who bowed the heavens for men,
And arose to light again.

‘Twas the First-born Son of Light
Shone upon the human night,
Bringing down the Final Truth
In His deep, eternal youth.
God was reconciled to man
When the ages first began;
But that man be reconciled
God became a little child.

So appeared the God of Song
In the planet going wrong;
So appeared the God of Light,
God of Passion still and white;
Came to help us lift the weight
Of the planetary fate;
Came and taught the one relief
For the gray primeval grief—
Taught that Love, though deified,
Could not set the Law aside.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary

I think of that friend of the people that lady of long ago, That high-born dame of Hungary who felt the common woe— Who loved the work-worn multitude whose pillow is a stone, And felt beat in upon her heart their sorrow as her own. She bent to lift, for in her blood ran some heroic strain Of simple serving majesty strayed down from Charlemagne. Queen of a hundred legends, star of a misty past, While cities rise and cities fade, her memory will last.

It was upon a Christmas eve, and all the world was white With snow that sent an awesome hush on hollow and on height;

And green boughs bended with hoar weight, and under them the birds Huddled together, making friends with little hornèd herds. And far from soundless gorges in the soundless forest deep, The wild boar humped up closer in the hollow of his heap; And workers huddled in their huts among the stiffened trees, The doorstones blue with ice, the eaves with frosty filigrees.

And Horsel’s peak hung ghostly still upon the wintry sky, But Wartburg’s castle-hall was filled with many a joyous cry, With hurrying feet and merry fleer of scullion, churl, and maid,

For now within a happy hour the banquet must be laid. Pert pages in their purfled shoes went twinkling in and out, And from the towers came snatch of song and many a ruddy shout. Elizabeth was there above, among her maiden band, Spinning the new-cut wool to warm the naked of her land. (O serving queen, I honor thee—queen of a day gone down, Who carried dimly in thy heart the meaning of the crown!)

And now the steward gave a sign, and on the frosty moats The sceptered heralds blew again their crisp and crinkling notes. There fell a momentary hush upon the corridors;

Then stir of feet, then whisper of silk gowns across the floors Came onward like the tumult of white barley in the breeze; Then young Elizabeth the Moon, leading her Pleiades! Their robes were shot with thread of gold that into blossom broke, And jewels darkling in their hair at every motion woke—

Yolinda, Bertrade, Thekla, Brune, Bertilla, Hildegarde, And Kinga, tallest of the seven, and by her side the bard, Gray Vogelweide, the lyric swan, telling with flash of youth, How once he stood against the world for Hungary and truth—

How singing in this knightly hall, circled by courtly throng, He fought the star of Austria in Wartburg’s War of Song.

Then the young sovereign Lewis and his guests swept glowing in— Lord, liegeman, shaggy baron, gallant knight and paladin, Each with a winsome lady and a wreath of storied days: Dark Rudolph home from Holy War with Lion Richard’s praise; Walter the Falconer, and Franz, the flower of Hesse’s men, Who brought Elizabeth a sword torn from a Saracen; Hellgraf with jewelled glove agleam high in his helmet’s hold,

A glove she gave a beggar once and he bought back with gold. And so the throng came eddying in, and with the splendor went Ripple of silver laughter and of whispered compliment.

The torches flamed and faltered, sending up white whirls of smoke, To hang as twilight in the roof raftered with crookèd oak. Up from the chimney log the notes of many woodlands sang; Quick through the flame the colors of a hundred summers sprang. The blaze threw on the arrased wall a gush of golden light, Where hung Saint Stephen’s shield between two angels in still flight,

Forever moving upward toward the cherubs overhead, Now sinking into shade and now breaking to rosy red.

A swinging door, a spicy smell, and beaming Hugolin With smoking boar’s head lifted high came proudly panting in. And as the sparkling feast went on the board began to stir With talk of knightly valor and the Holy Sepulchre, With prattle of the tidings from Jerusalem and Rome; But sweet Elizabeth, her thoughts were not so far from home. In spite of rosy radiance, in spite of trumpet calls, The Sorrow of the People sent its shadow through the walls.

For sitting there beside her lord a sudden silence came Upon her soul, and all the voices and the horn’s acclaim Died; and the glowing pageant broke and faded into air, And only the faces of the poor whose tables are so bare Pressed in upon her soul that night, pressed in that gala night; Only the toilers’ cheerless homes rose on her inward sight.

And then a graver thought let in a darkness on her heart— A thought of all the feasts they spread of which they have no part— A thought, too, of this splendor on this holy Christmas eve,

A splendor wrung from toiling hands by those that tax and thieve. Of all those fragrant dishes only two would not profane; Only the bread and water there had come of honest gain; These only were not pilfered from the toiler’s lean supply; And these she took with happy hands, but let the rest go by.

And so the table roared away into the winter night, Until the toasts went round the board with laughter at the height. They drank to saints and prophets old, to Peter and Isadore, To Stephen, Vincent, Boniface, and to a dozen more. Then valiant Wolfram in his turn upstarted with a cry:

“Drink to Archangel Michael, that good fighter in the sky, That prince of God that all the hosts of Satan could not tame!” Up to their feet the feasters sprang at that great angel’s name. Clinking their cups from side to side, they made, in the torches’ flare, The sign of the cross with their jewelled cups high flashing in the air.

Now cried the duke: “Not all the saints have felt the wind of death; Come, drink to one who walks the Earth, my wife Elizabeth; And I will pledge her beauty with this water in her cup.” So stooping down he caught and swung her golden goblet up,

And tasted—paused—tasted again, for lo, it was rare wine! More strangely sweet than any juice pressed from an earthly vine. “Ho, varlet, from what pipe this wine and from what cellar shelf?” “From good Saint Kilian’s well, sire, and I drew it up myself!” She flushed; the table stared; the duke looked foolishly about, The hall so still they heard far bells breaking the night without.

Then up spake Helias the Seer: “I saw the water poured— Saw, too, an angel bending by our lady at the board, Pouring with courteous gesture from a flagon of red wine,

Then fading in the brightness of the firelight’s dancing shine.” She heard in glad amaze: he wins God’s favor unawares Who, self-forgot in brother love, a brother’s burden bears.

* * * * *

And this seven centuries ago. And now her sainted feet Are on the fields of Paradise, making its old paths sweet. And there she has her fill of love where the Friendly City is, Her warm hands white with labor in God’s busy palaces.

The Joy-Maker

Time’s touch can dim our sorrows and destroy,
But only Art can turn them into joy.

The Face of Life

_An Adaptation._

Life cried to Youth, “I bear the cryptic key:
I grant you two desires, but only two.
What gifts have I to crown and comfort you?”
Youth answered, “I am blind and I would see;
Open my eyes and let me look on thee.”
‘Twas done: he saw the face of Life, and then
Cried brokenly, “Now make me blind again!”

The Story of Bacchus

_A Grecian legend_

What boy with his face to the Ægean Sea Went threading his way over mountain and plain, With a spirit as glad as a blossoming tree? It was Bacchus, now pure as the wild white rain, But soon to be worshiped by mortals, with passion and sorrow and pain.

He had found a vine on the forest ways, And a skeleton bird in a rocky pass To shelter the leaf from the sunny rays; But it grew till he sheltered them both, alas, In the hollow skull of a lion, and then in the skull of an ass!

As he lay at noon in a mossy rest, The vine had shot up all a-tremble with light. Now he bears it home—(O the doom unguessed!)

On, on, while the hills swing away out of sight— Till the misty far mountains rise dimly, and pass in a silent flight.

At last when his garden was furrowed, he found That the bones were all twined by the lusty root; So he planted the whole in the deep-stirred ground, And lightly danced to his Lydian flute, While the leafy depths of the eerie vine purpled with clustering fruit.

Then he made him wine—for it was the grape— And darkened its depths with a perilous spell, And gave it to man with the angel shape, When lo! a wonder and terror befell— Was it a wonder from Heaven—was it a terror from Hell?

For he drinks—and he carols and sings like a bird! And drinking again of the magical glass, He is proud as a lion when passion-stirred! But drinking once more of the liquor, alas, He loses the shape of the angel, and takes on the shape of an ass!

Lost Lands

I mind me once in boyhood when the mist
Swirled round me, ash of pearl and amethyst,
How, in an unknown, difficult, high place,
I pushed the green boughs backward from my face,
And with a fire along the blood, a cry,
Rode out upon a headland in the sky.

I know not in what world it was—Mirak
Or Algol, or some further Zodiac!
I looked down on a sea of fog below;
Saw strange lands rise, strange waters furl and flow,
Breaking on newly lifted reefs and shores—
New Africas, new Indies, new Azores—
Lands that allured me to illustrious deed,
Past Roland’s fame, and all his knightly breed—
Fringes of lands no foot had ever found,
Where billows climbed and burst without a sound;
While further still, on dim untraveled seas,
Gleamed lost Atlantis, lost Hesperides.

Poet-Lore

The poet is forever young
And speaks the one immortal tongue.
To him the wonder never dies,
For youth is looking through his eyes.
Pale listener at the heart of things,
He hears the voices and the wings:
He hears the skylark overhead—
Hears the far footfalls of the dead.

When the swift Muses seize their child,
Then God has gladness rich and wild;
For when the bard is caught and hurled,
A splendor breaks across the world.
His song distils a saving power
From foot-worn stone, from wayside flower.

He knows the gospel of the trees,
The whispered message of the seas;
Finds in some beetle on the road
A power to lift the human load;
Sees, in some dead leaf dried and curled,
The deeper meaning of the world;
Hears through the roar of mortal things
The God’s immortal whisperings;
Sees the world-wonder rise and fall,
And knows that Beauty made it all.

He walks the circle of the sun,
And sees the bright Powers laugh and run.
He feels the motion of the sphere,
And builds his song in sacred fear.
He finds the faithful witness hid
In poppy-head and Pyramid.
The Golden Heaven or the Pit—
He shakes the music out of it.
All things yield up their souls to him
From dateless dust to seraphim.

The Hindered Guest

Friar Hilary, of Barbizon,
(Rest to his soul where his soul has gone!)
Was a man whose life was long perplexed
By pious juggles with the text.
The logic of St. Thomas’ books
Was fastened to his mind with hooks.
He knew Tertullian’s work complete—
That treatise on the Paraclete.
He knew the words Chrysostom hurled
In golden thunder on the world;
And he could commentate and quote
The thirteen books Saint Cyril wrote.
The controversies of Jerome,
He could recite them, tome by tome.

The friar was tall and spare and spent,
Like a cedar of Lebanon bare and bent.
His eyes were sunken and burned too bright,
Like restless stars in the pit of night.

The friar had built a tower of stone,
And dwelt far up in a cell alone;
And from the turret, gray in air,
He called to God with psalm and prayer,
To come as he did to the wise of old—
To come as the ancient voice foretold.
All day the hawk swung overhead;
All day the holy page was read.

One bleak December he fasted sore,
That Christ might knock at his low door—
Lord Jesus shine across the floor.
For he was hungry to be fed
With the holy love, with the mystic bread.
Yet Christ came not to sup with him,
And Christmas Eve fell chilly and dim.
“Where art Thou?” he would cry and hark,
While echoes answered in the dark....
Where was the Lord—was he afar,
Throned calmly on the central star?

Now suddenly there came a cry
As of a mortal like to die.
Up sprang the friar, the doors of oak
He flung asunder at a stroke.
Down stair by stair his quick feet flew,
Startling the owls that the rafters knew,
Breaking the webs that barred the way,
Crushing the mosses that fear the day.
Into the pitiless street he ran
To find a stricken fellow-man,
And carry him in upon his breast,
With many a halt on the stairs for rest.

He washed the feet and stroked the hair,
And for the once forgot his prayer.
He gave him wine that the Pope had sent
For some great day of the Sacrament;
And looking up, behold, at his side
Was bending also the Crucified!
He had come at last to the lonesome place,
And standing there with a courteous grace,
Threw sainted light on the friar’s face.

And then the Master said: “My son,
My children on my errands run;
And when you flung the psalter by
And hurried to a brother’s cry,
You turned at last your rusty key,
And left the door ajar for Me.”

Supplication

Give me heart-touch with all that live,
And strength to speak my word;
But if that is denied me, give
The strength to live unheard.

[THE END]

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors. 2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.