Chapter IV

The blue night’s sweetness settles--
Like hyacinth petals,
Bowed by their weight of rain-drops--
Around me: pain drops
From off my heart, the sadness
Of life to gladness
Of beauty turns, that was not born to die;
That whispers in my soul and tells me why
I, too, was born--to render
Her worship: feel her splendor
Expand me like a rose beneath God’s eye.

WORLD’S ATTAINMENT

A Lorelei full fair she sits
Above the Stream of Life that rolls;
And, hope-thrilled, with her wild harp knits
To her from year to year men’s souls.

They hear her harp, they hear her song,
Behold her beauty throned on high,
And gazing on her, sweep along,
Strike on the rocks and sink and die.

A BLOWN ROSE

Lay but a finger on
Its pallid petals sweet,
They flutter, gray and wan,
Beneath the passing feet.

But, soft! blown rose, although
Departed is thy bloom,--
Thy bud, thy youth, I know,
Had no such sweet perfume.

Thou art like one whose page
Of life is beauty-fraught,
Who grays to ripe old-age,
Sweet-mellowed through with thought:

Who, when his hoary head
Is wept into the tomb,
With dreams, that are not dead,
Still gives his name perfume.

NEPENTHE

Ah, it is well for men to strain
And strive and yearn to rise;
The soul’s salvation is in pain,
In toil and sacrifice.

The grandest souls that rose above,
Thought’s noblest heights to tread,
Found consolation in their love,
And life behind the dead.

A living glory in the tomb,
Whose night shall end in light;
An intense splendor veiled with gloom,
Too blinding for earth’s sight.

Nepenthe of this struggling world,
Whose knowledge comforts care,
And in the heart, where it is curled,
Conquers the snake, despair.

ON A DIAL

Look on my face: to-morrow
I am to-day.
From me you may not borrow
Or take away.
I mark life’s mirth and sorrow,
Birth and decay.

I know nor joy nor sadness:
I go, yet stay:
And men in me find gladness
And grief, they say:
I stay not for their madness,
Nor pass away.

UNUTTERABLE

There is a sorrow in the wind to-night
That haunteth me; she, like a penitent,
Heaps on rent hair the snow’s thin ashes white,
And moans and moans, her swaying body bent.

And Superstition, gliding softly, shakes
With wasted hands, that vainly grope and seek,
The rustling curtains; of each cranny makes
Wild, ghostly lips that, wailing, fain would speak.

QUESTIONINGS

Now that wan sunsets, wintery
With icy gold, paint bleak the sky;
Now nights are starless utterly,
And snow and sleet cut moaning by,
One’s memory keeps one company,
And sorrow puts its “when” and “why.”

Such inquisition, when alone,
Leads on to ways of doubt and dread,
Despair has miled with many a stone,
Carved with the faces of our dead,
Stamped on whose brows we read, “Unknown!
No further look, nor seek to tread.”

And, oh! that weariness of soul
That leans upon our dead, the clod
And air have taken, as a whole,
Through some mysterious period!--
Life! with its questions of control!
Death! with its unguessed laws of God!

FRAGMENTS

I

The curtains of my couch sway heavily:
’Tis death, who parts the curtains of my soul.--
Sleep, like a gray expression of ghost lips
Heard through the moonlight of a haunted room,
Seems near yet far away. Would God ’twere day!

II

“Stay not too long, love, stay not long away!”
Lightly my heart said when we kissed farewell.
But now my heart is heavy with hard news--
Oh! bitterness of kisses that were sweet!

III

Tear from my heart and under furious feet
Trample the golden record of our love,
Love’s book of golden days, despair! despair!

IV

Night is a grave physician, who contrives
The drug of sleep to heal day’s bruises with,
The drug of death for life’s delirium.--

V

On lost expanses of a phantom land
Life stands; and, overhead, one sinister star,
A baleful beacon, burns: heav’n seems a hand
Of jeweled darkness pointing her her way,
Mournful, through shadows of lugubrious hills
And rising tempest, to a house, a shape
Placid and pale and silent utterly.