Chapter I: DANCED at your ball a year ago,

To-night I pay for your bread and cheese, “And a glass of bitters, if you please, For you drank my best champagne, you know!”

Madcap ever, you laugh the while,
As you drink your bitters and munch your bread;
The face is the same, and the same old smile
Came up at a word I said.

A year ago I danced at your ball,
I sit by your side in the bar to-night;
And the luck has changed, you say: that’s all!
And the luck will change, you say: all right!

For the men go by, and the rent’s to pay,
And you haven’t a friend in the world to-day;
And the money comes and the money goes:
And to-night, who cares? and to-morrow, who knows?

AT THE LYCEUM.

HER eyes are brands that keep the angry heat
Of fire that crawls and leaves an ashen path.
The dust of this devouring flame she hath
Upon her cheeks and eyelids. Fresh and sweet
In days that were, her sultry beauty now
Is pain transfigured, love’s impenitence,
The memory of a maiden innocence,
As a crown set upon a weary brow.

She sits, and fain would listen, fain forget;
She smiles, but with those tragic, waiting eyes,
Those proud and piteous lips that hunger yet
For love’s fulfilment. Ah, when Landry cries
“My heart is dead!” with what a wild regret
Her own heart feels the throb that never dies!

THE BLIND BEGGAR.

HE stands, a patient figure, where the crowd
Heaves to and fro beside him. In his ears
All day the Fair goes thundering, and he hears
In darkness, as a dead man in his shroud.
Patient he stands, with age and sorrow bowed,
And holds a piteous hat of ancient yean;
And in his face and gesture there appears
The desperate humbleness of poor men proud.

What thoughts are his, as, with the inward sight,
He sees those mirthful faces pass him by?
Is the long darkness darker for that light.
The misery deeper when that joy is nigh?
Patient, alone, he stands from morn to night,
Pleading in his reproachful misery.

THE OLD LABOURER.

HIS fourscore years have bent a back of oak,
His earth-brown cheeks are full of hollow pits;
His gnarled hands wander idly as he sits
Bending above the hearthstone’s feeble smoke.
Threescore and ten slow years he tilled the land;
He wrung his bread from out the stubborn soil;
He saw his masters flourish through his toil;
He held their substance in his horny hand.

Now he is old: he asks for daily bread:
He who has sowed the bread he may not taste
Begs for the crumbs: he would do no man wrong.
The Parish Guardians, when his case is read,
Will grant him (yet with no unseemly haste)
Just seventeen pence to starve on, seven days long.

THE ABSINTHE DRINKER.

GENTLY I wave the visible world away.
Far off, I hear a roar, afar yet near,
Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear,
And is the voice my own? the words I say
Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day;
And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear,
New as the world to lovers’ eyes, appear
The men and women passing on their way!

The world is very fair. The hours are all
Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness.
I am at peace with God and man. O glide,
Sands of the hour-glass that I count not, fall
Serenely: scarce I feel your soft caress.
Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide.

JAVANESE DANCERS,

TWITCHED strings, the clang of metal, beaten drums.
Dull, shrill, continuous, disquieting;
And now the stealthy dancer comes
Undulantly with cat-like steps that cling;

Smiling between her painted lids a smile,
Motionless, unintelligible, she twines
Her fingers into mazy lines,
Twining her scarves across them all the while.

One, two, three, four step forth, and, to and fro,
Delicately and imperceptibly,
Now swaying gently in a row,
Now interthreading slow and rhythmically,

Still with fixed eyes, monotonously still,
Mysteriously, with smiles inanimate,
With lingering feet that undulate,
With sinuous fingers, spectral hands that thrill,

The little amber-coloured dancers move,
Like little painted figures on a screen,
Or phantom-dancers haply seen
Among the shadows of a magic grove.

LOVE’S DISGUISES.

LOVE IN SPRING.

GOOD to be loved and to love for a little, and then Well to forget, be forgotten, ere loving grow life! Dear, you have loved me, but was I the man among men? Sweet, I have loved you, but scarcely as mistress or wife.

Message of Spring in the hearts of a man and a maid,
Hearts on a holiday: ho! let us love: it is Spring.
Joy in the birds of the air, in the buds of the glade,
Joy in our hearts in the joy of the hours on the wing.

Well, but to-morrow? To-morrow, good-bye: it is over.
Scarcely with tears shall we part, with a smile who had met.
Tears? What is this? But I thought we were playing at lover.
Play-time is past. I am going. And you love me yet!

GIPSY LOVE.

THE gipsy tents are on the down,
The gipsy girls are here;
And it’s O to be off and away from the town
With a gipsy for my dear!

We’d make our bed in the bracken
With the lark for a chambermaid;
The lark would sing us awake in the mornings
Singing above our head.

We’d drink the sunlight all day long
With never a house to bind us;
And we’d only flout in a merry song
The world we left behind us.

We would be free as birds are free
The livelong day, the livelong day;
And we would lie in the sunny bracken
With none to say us nay.

The gipsy tents are on the down,
The gipsy girls are here;
And it’s O to be off and away from the town
With a gipsy for my dear!

IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.

UNDER the almond tree, Room for my love and me! Over our heads the April blossom; April-hearted are we.

Under the pink and white, Love in her eyes alight; Love and the Spring and Kensington Gardens: Hey for the heart’s delight!

REWARDS.

BECAUSE you cried, I kissed you, and, Ah me! how should I understand That piteous little you were fain To cry and to be kissed again?

Because you smiled at last, I thought That I had found what I had sought. But soon I found, without a doubt, No man can find a woman out.

I kissed your tears, and did not stay Till I had kissed them all away. Ah, hapless me! ah, heartless child! She would not kiss me when she smiled.

PERFUME.

SHAKE out your hair about me, so,
That I may feel the stir and scent
Of those vague odours come and go
The way our kisses went.

Night gave this priceless hour of love,
But now the dawn steals in apace,
And amorously bends above
The wonder of your face.

“Farewell” between our kisses creeps,
You fade, a ghost, upon the air;
Yet, ah! the vacant place still keeps
The odour of your hair.

SOUVENIR.

HOW you haunt me with your eyes! Still that questioning persistence, Sad and sweet, across the distance Of the days of love and laughter, Those old days of love and lies.

Not reproaching, not reproving, Only, always, questioning, Those divinest eyes can bring Memories of certain summers, Nights of dreaming, days of loving,

When I loved you, when your kiss, Shyer than a bird to capture, Lit a sudden heaven of rapture; When we neither dreamt that either Could grow old in heart like this.

Do you still, in love’s December, Still remember, still regret That sweet unavailing debt? Ah, you haunt me, to remind me You remember, I forget!

TO MARY.

IF, Mary, that imperious face,
And not in dreams alone,
Come to this shadow-haunted place
And claim dominion;

If, for your sake, I do unqueen
Some well-remembered ghost,
Forgetting much of what hath been
Best loved, remembered most;

It is your witchery, not my will,
Your beauty, not my choice:
My shadows knew me faithful, till
They heard your living voice.

TO A GREAT ACTRESS.

SHE has taken my heart, though she knows not, would care not.
It thrills at her voice like a reed in the wind;
I would taste all her agonies, have her to spare not,
Sin deep as she sinned,

To be tossed by the storm of her love, as the ocean
Rocks vessels to wreck; to be hers, though the cost
Were the loss of all else: for that moment’s emotion
Content to be lost!

To be, for a moment, the man of all men to her,
All the world, for one measureless moment complete;
To possess, be possessed! To be mockery then to her,
Then to die at her feet!

LOVE IN DREAMS.