{"collection":"myth-cosmogony","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_16535/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_16535","id":"gutenberg_16535","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16535","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Mythology, Legends & Folklore","Category: Poetry","Poetry"],"text":"Produced by Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan State\nUniversity Libraries, Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Sankar\nViswanathan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team\nat https://www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                           Myth and Romance\n\n\n                        Being a Book of verses\n\n                           By MADISON CAWEIN\n\n\n\n\n                          G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS\n\n                          New York and London\n\n                        The Knickerbocker Press\n\n                                 1899\n\n\n\n\n\nTO\n\nMY FRIEND\n\nWILLIAM WARWICK THUM\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n\n\nVISIONS AND VOICES\n\n\nMyth and Romance\n\nGenius Loci\n\nThe Rain-Crow\n\nThe Harvest Moon\n\nThe Old Water-Mill\n\nAnthem of Dawn\n\nDithyrambics\n\nHymn to Desire\n\nMusic\n\nJotunheim\n\nDionysia\n\nThe Last Song\n\nRomaunt of the Oak\n\nMorgan le Fay\n\nThe Dream of Roderick\n\nZyps of Zirl\n\nThe Glowworm\n\nGhosts\n\nThe Purple Valleys\n\nThe Land of Illusion\n\nSpirit of Dreams\n\n\nLINES AND LYRICS\n\n\nTo a Wind-Flower\n\nMicrocosm\n\nFortune\n\nDeath\n\nThe Soul\n\nConscience\n\nYouth\n\nLife's Seasons\n\nOld Homes\n\nField and Forest Call\n\nMeeting in Summer\n\nSwinging\n\nRosemary\n\nGhost Stories\n\nDolce far Niente\n\nWords\n\nReasons\n\nEvasion\n\nIn May\n\nWill you Forget?\n\nClouds of the Autumn Night\n\nThe Glory and the Dream\n\nSnow and Fire\n\nRestraint\n\nWhy Should I Pine?\n\nWhen Lydia Smiles\n\nThe Rose\n\nA Ballad of Sweethearts\n\nHer Portrait\n\nA Song for Yule\n\nThe Puritans' Christmas\n\nSpring\n\nLines\n\nWhen Ships put out to Sea\n\nThe \"Kentucky\"\n\nQuatrains\n\nProcessional\n\n\n\n\n_PROEM._\n\n\n_There is no rhyme that is half so sweet\nAs the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;\nThere is no metre that's half so fine\nAs the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;\nAnd the loveliest lyric I ever heard\nWas the wildwood strain of a forest bird.--\nIf the wind and the brook and the bird would teach\nMy heart their beautiful parts of speech.\nAnd the natural art that they say these with,\nMy soul would sing of beauty and myth\nIn a rhyme and a metre that none before\nHave sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,\nAnd the world would be richer one poet the more._\n\n\n\n\nVISIONS AND VOICES\n\n\n\n\n_Myth and\nRomance_\n\nI\n\n\nWhen I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring,\n  Just at the time of opening apple-buds,\nWhen brooks are laughing, winds are whispering,\n  On babbling hillsides or in warbling woods,\n  There is an unseen presence that eludes:--\nPerhaps a Dryad, in whose tresses cling\n  The loamy odors of old solitudes,\nWho, from her beechen doorway, calls; and leads\n  My soul to follow; now with dimpling words\n  Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds;\nWhile here and there--is it her limbs that swing?\nOr restless sunlight on the moss and weeds?\n\n\nII\n\n\nOr, haply, 't is a Naiad now who slips,\n  Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass,\nWhile from her dripping hair and breasts and hips,\n  The moisture rains cool music on the grass.\n  Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas!\nHave seen no more than the wet ray that dips\n  The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass;\nBut, in the liquid light, where she doth hide,\n  I have beheld the azure of her gaze\n  Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays,\nAmong her minnows I have heard her lips,\nBubbling, make merry by the waterside.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nOr now it is an Oread--whose eyes\n  Are constellated dusk--who stands confessed,\nAs naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise,\n  Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast:\n  She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed\nStands for a startled moment ere she flies,\n  Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest,\nWild as a mist that trails along the dawn.\n  And is't her footfalls lure me? or the sound\n  Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground?\nAnd is't her body glimmers on yon rise?\nOr dog-wood blossoms snowing on the lawn?\n\n\nIV\n\n\nNow't is a Satyr piping serenades\n  On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance\nBeneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades,\n  Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance,\n  Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance\nThe Nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades\n  Of sun-embodied perfume.--Myth, Romance,\nWhere'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms,\n  Compelling me to follow. Day and night\n  I hear their voices and behold the light\nOf their divinity that still evades,\nAnd still allures me in a thousand forms.\n\n\n\n\n_Genius\nLoci_\n\nI\n\n\nWhat wood-god, on this water's mossy curb,\n  Lost in reflections of earth's loveliness,\nDid I, just now, unconsciously disturb?\n  I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess,\nCame on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame\nOf buds and blooms, the season writes its name.--\nAh, me! could I have seen him ere alarm\n  Of my approach aroused him from his calm!\n  As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap,\nPart Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm\n  As wildwood rose, and filled the air with balm\n  Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap.\n\n\nII\n\n\nDoes not the moss retain some vague impress,\n  Green dented in, of where he lay or trod?\nDo not the flow'rs, so reticent, confess\n  With conscious looks the contact of a god?\nDoes not the very water garrulously\nBoast the indulgence of a deity?\nAnd, hark! in burly beech and sycamore\n  How all the birds proclaim it! and the leaves\n  Rejoice with clappings of their myriad hands!\nAnd shall not I believe, too, and adore,\n  With such wide proof?--Yea, though my soul perceives\n  No evident presence, still it understands.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nAnd for a while it moves me to lie down\n  Here on the spot his god-head sanctified:\nMayhap some dream he dreamed may lingert brown\n  And young as joy, around the forestside;\nSome dream within whose heart lives no disdain\nFor such as I whose love is sweet and sane;\nThat may repeat, so none but I may hear--\n  As one might tell a pearl-strung rosary--\n  Some epic that the trees have learned to croon,\nSome lyric whispered in the wild-flower's ear,\n  Whose murmurous lines are sung by bird and bee,\n  And all the insects of the night and noon.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nFor, all around me, upon field and hill,\n  Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes;\nAs if the music of a god's good-will\n  Had taken on material attributes\nIn blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam,\nThat runs its silvery scales from stream to stream;\nIn sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly,\n  A golden note, vibrates then flutters on--\n  Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of Pan,\nThat have assumed a visible entity,\n  And drugged the air with beauty so, a Faun,\n  Behold, I seem, and am no more a man.\n\n\n\n\n_The\nRain-Crow_\n\nI\n\n\nCan freckled August,--drowsing warm and blonde\n  Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,\nIn her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,--\n  O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed\n  To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather'd seed\nBlows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,\n  That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,\n  Through which the dragonfly forever passes\n           Like splintered diamond.\n\n\nII\n\n\nDrouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves\n  The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,\nThrobs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves\n  Limp with the heat--a league of rutty way--\n  Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay\nBreathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves--\n  Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain,\n  In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,\n           That thy keen eye perceives?\n\n\nIII\n\n\nBut thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.\n  For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,\nWhen, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,\n  Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring\n  Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring\nAnd flash and rumble! lavishing dark dew\n  On corn and forestland, that, streaming wet,\n  Their hilly backs against the downpour set,\n           Like giants vague in view.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nThe butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,\n  Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;\nThe bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,\n  Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;\n  While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,\nBrood-hens have housed.--But I, who scorned thy power,\n  Barometer of the birds,--like August there,--\n  Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,\n           Like some drenched truant, cower.\n\n\n\n\n_The\nHarvest Moon_\n\nI\n\n\nGlobed in Heav'n's tree of azure, golden mellow\n  As some round apple hung\nHigh in hesperian boughs, thou hangest yellow\n  The branch-like mists among:\nWithin thy light a sunburnt youth, named Health,\n  Rests 'mid the tasseled shocks, the tawny stubble;\nAnd by his side, clad on with rustic wealth\n  Of field and farm, beneath thy amber bubble,\nA nut-brown maid, Content, sits smiling still:\n  While through the quiet trees,\n  The mossy rocks, the grassy hill,\nThy silvery spirit glides to yonder mill,\n  Around whose wheel the breeze\nAnd shimmering ripples of the water play,\nAs, by their mother, little children may.\n\n\nII\n\n\nSweet spirit of the moon, who walkest,--lifting\n  Exhaustless on thy arm,\nA pearly vase of fire,--through the shifting\n  Cloud-halls of calm and storm,\nPour down thy blossoms! let me hear them come,\n  Pelting with noiseless light the twinkling thickets,\nMaking the darkness audible with the hum\n  Of many insect creatures, grigs and crickets:\nUntil it seems the elves hold revelries\n  By haunted stream and grove;\n  Or, in the night's deep peace,\nThe young-old presence of Earth's full increase\n  Seems telling thee her love,\nEre, lying down, she turns to rest, and smiles,\nHearing thy heart beat through the myriad miles.\n\n\n\n\n_The Old\nWater-Mill_\n\n\nWild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise,\nBetween whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies\nPilot great clouds like towering argosies,\nAnd hawk and buzzard breast the azure breeze.\nWith many a foaming fall and glimmering reach\nOf placid murmur, under elm and beech,\nThe creek goes twinkling through long glows and glooms\nOf woodland quiet, poppied with perfumes:\nThe creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools\nGlitter or dart; and by whose deeper pools\nThe blue kingfishers and the herons haunt;\nThat, often startled from the freckled flaunt\nOf blackberry-lilies--where they feed and hide--\nTrail a lank flight along the forestside\nWith eery clangor. Here a sycamore,\nSmooth, wave-uprooted, builds from shore to shore\nA headlong bridge; and there, a storm-hurled oak\nLays a long dam, where sand and gravel choke\nThe water's lazy way. Here mistflower blurs\nIts bit of heaven; there the oxeye stirs\nIts gloaming hues of bronze and gold; and here,\nA gray cool stain, like dawn's own atmosphere,\nThe dim wild-carrot lifts its crumpled crest:\nAnd over all, at slender flight or rest,\nThe dragon-flies, like coruscating rays\nOf lapis-lazuli and chrysoprase,\nDrowsily sparkle through the summer days;\nAnd, dewlap-deep, here from the noontide heat\nThe bell-hung cattle find a cool retreat:\nAnd through the willows girdling the hill,\nNow far, now near, borne as the soft winds will,\nComes the low rushing of the water-mill.\nAh, lovely to me from a little child,\nHow changed the place! wherein once, undefiled,\nThe glad communion of the sky and stream\nWent with me like a presence and a dream.\nWhere once the brambled meads and orchardlands\nPoured ripe abundance down with mellow hands\nOf summer; and the birds of field and wood\nCalled to me in a tongue I understood;\nAnd in the tangles of the old rail-fence\nEven the insect tumult had some sense,\nAnd every sound a happy eloquence;\nAnd more to me than wisest books can teach,\nThe wind and water said; whose words did reach\nMy soul, addressing their magnificent speech,\nRaucous and rushing, from the old mill-wheel,\nThat made the rolling mill-cogs snore and reel,\nLike some old ogre in a fairy-tale\nNodding above his meat and mug of ale.\n\nHow memory takes me back the ways that lead--\nAs when a boy--through woodland and through mead!\nTo orchards fruited; or to fields in bloom;\nOr briary fallows, like a mighty room,\nThrough which the winds swing censers of perfume,\nAnd where deep blackberries spread miles of fruit;--\nA splendid feast, that stayed the ploughboy's foot\nWhen to the tasseling acres of the corn\nHe drove his team, fresh in the primrose morn;\nAnd from the liberal banquet, nature lent,\nTook dewy handfuls as he whistling went.--\nA boy once more I stand with sunburnt feet\nAnd watch the harvester sweep down the wheat;\nOr laze with warm limbs in the unstacked straw\nNearby the thresher, whose insatiate maw\nDevours the sheaves, hot drawling out its hum--\nLike some great sleepy bee, above a bloom,\nMade drunk with honey--while, grown big with grain,\nThe bulging sacks receive the golden rain.\nAgain I tread the valley, sweet with hay,\nAnd hear the bob-white calling far away,\nOr wood-dove cooing in the elder-brake;\nOr see the sassafras bushes madly shake\nAs swift, a rufous instant, in the glen\nThe red-fox leaps and gallops to his den;\nOr, standing in the violet-colored gloam,\nHear roadways sound with holiday riding home\nFrom church, or fair, or bounteous barbecue,\nWhich the whole country to some village drew.\n\nHow spilled with berries were its summer hills,\nAnd strewn with walnuts were its autumn rills--\nAnd chestnut burs! fruit of the spring's long flowers,\nWhen from their tops the trees seemed streaming showers\nOf slender silver, cool, crepuscular,\nAnd like a nebulous radiance shone afar.\nAnd maples! how their sappy hearts would gush\nBroad troughs of syrup, when the winter bush\nSteamed with the sugar-kettle, day and night,\nAnd all the snow was streaked with firelight.\nThen it was glorious! the mill-dam's edge,\nOne slant of frosty crystal, laid a ledge\nOf pearl across; above which, sleeted trees\nTossed arms of ice, that, clashing in the breeze,\nTinkled the ringing creek with icicles,\nThin as the peal of Elfland's Sabbath bells:\nA sound that in my city dreams I hear,\nThat brings before me, under skies that clear,\nThe old mill in its winter garb of snow,\nIts frozen wheel, a great hoar beard below,\nAnd its West windows, two deep eyes aglow.\n\nAh, ancient mill, still do I picture o'er\nThy cobwebbed stairs and loft and grain-strewn floor;\nThy door,--like some brown, honest hand of toil,\nAnd honorable with labor of the soil,--\nForever open; through which, on his back\nThe prosperous farmer bears his bursting sack.\nAnd while the miller measures out his toll,\nAgain I hear, above the cogs' loud roll,--\nThat makes stout joist and rafter groan and sway,--\nThe harmless gossip of the passing day:\nGood country talk, that tells how so-and-so\nHas died or married; how curculio\nAnd codling-moth have ruined half the fruit,\nAnd blight plays mischief with the grapes to boot;\nOr what the news from town; next county fair;\nHow well the crops are looking everywhere:\nNow this, now that, on which their interests fix,\nProspects for rain or frost, and politics.\nWhile, all around, the sweet smell of the meal\nFilters, warm-pouring from the grinding wheel\nInto the bin; beside which, mealy white,\nThe miller looms, dim in the dusty light.\n\nAgain I see the miller's home, between\nThe crinkling creek and hills of beechen green:\nAgain the miller greets me, gaunt and brown,\nWho oft o'erawed me with his gray-browed frown\nAnd rugged mien: again he tries to reach\nMy youthful mind with fervid scriptural speech.--\nFor he, of all the country-side confessed,\nThe most religious was and happiest;\nA Methodist, and one whom faith still led,\nNo books except the Bible had he read--\nAt least so seemed it to my younger head.--\nAll things in earth and heav'n he'd prove by this,\nBe it a fact or mere hypothesis;\nFor to his simple wisdom, reverent,\n\"_The Bible says_\" was all of argument.--\nGod keep his soul! his bones were long since laid\nAmong the sunken gravestones in the shade\nOf those black-lichened rocks, that wall around\nThe family burying-ground with cedars crowned;\nWhere bristling teasel and the brier combine\nWith clambering wood-rose and the wild-grape vine\nTo hide the stone whereon his name and dates\nNeglect, with mossy hand, obliterates.\n\n\n\n\n_Anthem\nof Dawn_\n\nI\n\n\nThen up the orient heights to the zenith, that balanced the crescent,--\nUp and far up and over,--the heaven grew erubescent,\nVibrant with rose and with ruby from the hands of the harpist Dawn,\nSmiting symphonic fire on the firmament's barbiton:\nAnd the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold and of gems,\nAnd a wonderful carpet unrolled for the inaccessible hems\nOf the glistening robes of her limbs; that, lily and amethyst,\nSwept glorying on and on through temples of cloud and mist.\n\n\nII\n\n\nThen out of the splendor and richness, that burned like a magic stone,\nThe torrent suffusion that deepened and dazzled and broadened and shone,\nThe pomp and the pageant of color, triumphal procession of glare,\nThe sun, like a king in armor, breathing splendor from feet to hair,\nStood forth with majesty girdled, as a hero who towers afar\nWhere the bannered gates are bristling hells and the walls are roaring war:\nAnd broad on the back of the world, like a Cherubin's fiery blade,\nThe effulgent gaze of his aspect fell in glittering accolade.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nThen billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of morn to even:\nAnd the stars, like rafts, went down: and the moon, like a ghost-ship, driven,\nA feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles that dotted,\nWith pearl and cameo, bays of the day, her canvas webbed and rotted,\nLay lost in the gulf of heaven: while over her mixed and melted\nThe beautiful children of Morn, whose bodies are opal-belted;\nThe beautiful daughters of Dawn, who, over and under, and after\nThe rivered radiance, wrestled; and rainbowed heaven with laughter\nOf halcyon sapphire.--O Dawn! thou visible mirth,\nAnd hallelujah of Heaven! hosanna of Earth!\n\n\n\n\n_Dithyrambics_\n\nI\n\nTEMPEST\n\n\nWrapped round of the night, as a monster is wrapped of the ocean,\nDown, down through vast storeys of darkness, behold, in the tower\nOf the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion,\nColossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour\nGoes striding in rattling armor ...\nThe Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer\nOf foam; and the Sylvan--green-housed--at her window of leaves appears;\n--As a listening woman, who hears\nThe approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night;\nAnd, loosening the loops of her locks,\nWith eyes full of love and delight,\nFrom the couch of her rest in ardor and haste arises.--\nThe Nymph, as if breathed of the tempest, like fire surprises\nThe riotous bands of the rocks,\nThat face with a roar the shouting charge of the seas.\nThe Sylvan,--through troops of the trees,\nWhose clamorous clans with gnarly bosoms keep hurling\nThemselves on the guns of the wind,--goes wheeling and whirling.\nThe Nymph, of the waves' exultation upheld, her green tresses\nKnotted with flowers of the hollow white foam, dives screaming;\nThen bounds to the arms of the storm, who boisterously presses\nHer hair and wild form to his breast that is panting and streaming.\nThe Sylvan,--hard-pressed by the wind, the Pan-footed air,--\nOn the violent backs of the hills,--\nLike a flame that tosses and thrills\nFrom peak to peak when the world of spirits is out,--\nIs borne, as her rapture wills,\nWith glittering gesture and shout:\nNow here in the darkness, now there,\nFrom the rain-like sweep of her hair,--\nBewilderingly volleyed o'er eyes and o'er lips,--\nTo the lambent swell of her limbs, her breasts and her hips,\nShe flashes her beautiful nakedness out in the glare\nOf the tempest that bears her away,--\nThat bears me away!\nAway, over forest and foam, over tree and spray,\nFar swifter than thought, far swifter than sound or than flame.\nOver ocean and pine,\nIn arms of tumultuous shadow and shine ...\nThough Sylvan and Nymph do not\nExist, and only what\nOf terror and beauty I feel and I name\nAs parts of the storm, the awe and the rapture divine\nThat here in the tempest are mine,--\nThe two are the same, the two are forever the same.\n\n\nII\n\nCALM\n\n\nBeautiful-bosomed, O night, in thy noon\nMove with majesty onward! bearing, as lightly\nAs a singer may bear the notes of an exquisite tune,\nThe stars and the moon\nThrough the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament's halls;\nUnder whose sapphirine walls,\nJune, hesperian June,\nRobed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly\nThe turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star,\nThe silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are,\nFill the land with languorous light and perfume.--\nIs it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom?\nThe music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloom\nImmaterial hosts\nOf spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their keep,\nThat I hear, that I hear?\nInvisible ghosts,--\nWho whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hover\nIn color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep\nWorld-soul of the mother,\nNature;--who, over and over,\nBoth sweetheart and lover,\nGoes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other,--\nThat appear, that appear?\nIn forest and field, on hill-land and lea,\nAs crystallized harmony,\nMaterialized melody,\nAn uttered essence peopling far and near\nThe hyaline atmosphere?...\nBehold how it sprouts from the grass and blooms from flower and tree!\nIn waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist,\nIn fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst,\nAround me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster,\nLike symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.--\n--O music of Earth! O God who the music inspired!\nLet me breathe of the life of thy breath!\nAnd so be fulfilled and attired\nIn resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death!\n\n\n\n\n_Hymn to\nDesire_\n\nI\n\n\nMother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers\nBreathed on the eyelids of love by music that slumbers,\nSecretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow,\nThou comest mysterious,\nIn beauty imperious,\nClad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know.\nDeep to my innermost soul am I shaken,\nHelplessly shaken and tossed,\nAnd of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken,\nMy lips, unsatisfied, thirst;\nMine eyes are accurst\nWith longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken;\nAnd mine ears, in listening lost,\nYearn, yearn for the note of a chord that will never awaken.\n\n\nII\n\n\nLike palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,--\nResonant bar upon bar,--\nThe vibrating lyre\nOf the spirit responds with melodious fire,\nAs thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake,\nWith flame and with flake,\nThe chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung.\nWhose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded from mire.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nVested with vanquishment, come, O Desire, Desire!\nBreathe in this harp of my soul the audible angel of love!\nMake of my heart an Israfel burning above,\nA lute for the music of God, that lips, which are mortal, but stammer!\nSmite every rapturous wire\nWith golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor,\nCrying--\"Awake! awake!\nToo long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamour,\nWith its mountains of magic, its fountains of Faery, the spar-sprung,\nHast thou wandered away, O Heart!\nCome, oh, come and partake\nOf necromance banquets of beauty; and slake\nThy thirst in the waters of art,\nThat are drawn from the streams\nOf love and of dreams.\"\n\n\nIV\n\n\n\"Come, oh, come!\nNo longer shall language be dumb!\nThy vision shall grasp--\nAs one doth the glittering hasp\nOf a dagger made splendid with gems and with gold--\nThe wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely.\nAnd out of the stark\nEternity, awful and dark,\nImmensity silent and cold,--\nUniverse-shaking as trumpets, or thunderous metals\nThat cymbal; yet pensive and pearly\nAnd soft as the rosy unfolding of petals,\nOr crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,--\nThe majestic music of Death, where he plays\nOn the organ of eons and days.\"\n\n\n\n\n_Music_\n\n\nThou, oh, thou!\nThou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou\nOf the dark eyes and pale pacific brow!\nMusic, who by the plangent waves,\nOr in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves,\nOr on God's mountains, lonely as the stars,\nTouchest reverberant bars\nOf immemorial sorrow and amaze;--\nKeeping regret and memory awake,\nAnd all the immortal ache\nOf love that leans upon the past's sweet days\nIn retrospection!--now, oh, now,\nInterpreter and heart-physician, thou,\nWho gazest on the heaven and the hell\nOf life, and singest each as well,\nTouch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips,\nOr thy melodious lips,\nThis sickness named my soul,\nMaking it whole,\nAs is an echo of a chord,\nOr some symphonic word,\nOr sweet vibrating sigh,\nThat deep, resurgent still doth rise and die\nOn thy voluminous roll;\nPart of the beauty and the mystery\nThat axles Earth with song; and as a slave,\nSwings it around and 'round on each sonorous pole,\n'Mid spheric harmony,\nAnd choral majesty,\nAnd diapasoning of wind and wave;\nAnd speeds it on its far elliptic way\n'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.--\nO cosmic cry\nOf two eternities, wherein we see\nThe phantasms, Death and Life,\nAt endless strife\nAbove the silence of a monster grave.\n\n\n\n\n_Jotunheim_\n\nI\n\n\nBeyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted\nOf twilight, where the world is glacier planted,\nAnd pale as Loki in his cavern when\nThe serpent's slaver burns him to the bones,\nI saw the phantasms of gigantic men,\nThe prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones;\nGreat blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's\nAnd evening's colors,--wild prismatic tones\nOf boreal beauty.--Like the three gray Norns,\nSilence and solitude and terror loomed\nAround them where they labored. Walls arose,\nVast as the Andes when creation boomed\nInsurgent fire; and through the rushing snows\nEnormous battlements of tremendous ice,\nBastioned and turreted, I saw arise.\n\n\nII\n\n\nBut who can sing the workmanship gigantic\n  That reared within its coruscating dome\nThe roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic\n  Of streaming ice that flashed with flame and foam?\nAn opal spirit, various and many formed,--\nIn whose clear heart reverberant fire stormed,--\n  Seemed its inhabitant; and through pale halls,\n      And deep diaphanous walls,\n      And corridors of whiteness.\n      Auroral colors swarmed,\n      As rosy-flickering stains,\nOr lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed\nThe pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins\n      With ever-changing brightness.\nAnd through the Arctic night there went a voice,\nAs if the ancient Earth cried out, \"Rejoice!\n      My heart is full of lightness!\"\n\n\nIII\n\n\nHere well might Thor, the god of war,\nHarness the whirlwinds to his car,\nWhile, mailed in storm, his iron arm\nHeaves high his hammer's lava-form,\nAnd red and black his beard streams back,\nLike some fierce torrent scoriac,\nWhose earthquake light glares through the night\nAround some dark volcanic height;\nAnd through the skies Valkyrian cries\nTrumpet, as battleward he flies,\nDeath in his hair and havoc in his eyes.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nStill in my dreams I hear that fountain flowing;\nBeyond all seeing and beyond all knowing;\nStill in my dreams I see those wild walls glowing\n  With hues, Aurora-kissed;\nAnd through huge halls fantastic phantoms going.\n  Vast shapes of snow and mist,--\nSonorous clarions of the tempest blowing,--\n  That trail dark banners by,\n  Cloudlike, underneath the sky\n  Of the caverned dome on high,\n  Carbuncle and amethyst.--\n  Still I hear the ululation\n  Of their stormy exultation,\n  Multitudinous, and blending\n  In hoarse echoes, far, unending;\n  And, through halls of fog and frost,\n  Howling back, like madness lost\n  In the moonless mansion of\n  Its own demon-haunted love.\n\n\nV\n\n\nStill in my dreams I hear the mermaid singing;\nThe mermaid music at its portal ringing;\nThe mermaid song, that hinged with gold its door,\n  And, whispering evermore,\n  Hushed the ponderous hurl and roar\n  And vast aeolian thunder\n  Of the chained tempests under\n  The frozen cataracts that were its floor.--\nAnd, blinding beautiful, I still behold\nThe mermaid there, combing her locks of gold,\nWhile, at her feet, green as the Northern Seas,\nGambol her flocks of seals and walruses;\nWhile, like a drift, her dog--a Polar bear--\nLies by her, glowering through his shaggy hair.\n\n\nVI\n\n\nO wondrous house, built by supernal hands\n  In vague and ultimate lands!\nThy architects were behemoth wind and cloud,\n  That, laboring loud,\nMountained thy world foundations and uplifted\n  Thy skyey bastions drifted\nOf piled eternities of ice and snow;\n  Where storms, like ploughmen, go,\nPloughing the deeps with awful hurricane;\n  Where, spouting icy rain,\nThe huge whale wallows; and through furious hail\n  Th' explorer's tattered sail\nDrives like the wing of some terrific bird,\n  Where wreck and famine herd.--\nHome of the red Auroras and the gods!\nHe who profanes thy perilous threshold,--where\n  The ancient centuries lair,\nAnd, glacier-throned, thy monarch, Winter, nods,--\n  Let him beware!\nLest, coming on that hoary presence there,\n  Whose pitiless hand,\n  Above that hungry land,\nAn iceberg wields as sceptre, and whose crown\n  The North Star is, set in a band of frost,\nHe, too, shall feel the bitterness of that frown,\n  And, turned to stone, forevermore be lost.\n\n\n\n\n_Dionysia_\n\n\nThe day is dead; and in the west\nThe slender crescent of the moon--\nDiana's crystal-kindled crest--\nSinks hillward in a silvery swoon.\nWhat is the murmur in the dell?\nThe stealthy whisper and the drip?--\nA Dryad with her leaf-light trip?\nOr Naiad o'er her fountain well?--\nWho, with white fingers for her comb,\nSleeks her blue hair, and from its curls\nShowers slim minnows and pale pearls,\nAnd hollow music of the foam.\nWhat is it in the vistaed ways\nThat leans and springs, and stoops and sways?--\nThe naked limbs of one who flees?\nAn Oread who hesitates\nBefore the Satyr form that waits,\nCrouching to leap, that there she sees?\nOr under boughs, reclining cool,\nA Hamadryad, like a pool\nOf moonlight, palely beautiful?\nOr Limnad, with her lilied face,\nMore lovely than the misty lace\nThat haunts a star and gives it grace?\nOr is it some Leimoniad,\nIn wildwood flowers dimly clad?\nOblong blossoms white as froth;\nOr mottled like the tiger-moth;\nOr brindled as the brows of death;\nWild of hue and wild of breath.\nHere ethereal flame and milk\nBlent with velvet and with silk;\nHere an iridescent glow\nMixed with satin and with snow:\nPansy, poppy and the pale\nSerpolet and galingale;\nMandrake and anemone,\nHoney-reservoirs o' the bee;\nCistus and the cyclamen,--\nCheeked like blushing Hebe this,\nAnd the other white as is\nBubbled milk of Venus when\nCupid's baby mouth is pressed,\nRosy, to her rosy breast.\nAnd, besides, all flowers that mate\nWith aroma, and in hue\nStars and rainbows duplicate\nHere on earth for me and you.\n\nYea! at last mine eyes can see!\n'Tis no shadow of the tree\nSwaying softly there, but she!--\nMaenad, Bassarid, Bacchant,\nWhat you will, who doth enchant\nNight with sensuous nudity.\nLo! again I hear her pant\nBreasting through the dewy glooms--\nThrough the glow-worm gleams and glowers\nOf the starlight;--wood-perfumes\nSwoon around her and frail showers\nOf the leaflet-tilted rain.\nLo, like love, she comes again,\nThrough the pale, voluptuous dusk,\nSweet of limb with breasts of musk.\nWith her lips, like blossoms, breathing\nHoneyed pungence of her kiss,\nAnd her auburn tresses wreathing\nLike umbrageous helichrys,\nThere she stands, like fire and snow,\nIn the moon's ambrosial glow,\nBoth her shapely loins low-looped\nWith the balmy blossoms, drooped,\nOf the deep amaracus.\nSpiritual yet sensual,\nLo, she ever greets me thus\nIn my vision; white and tall,\nHer delicious body there,--\nRaimented with amorous air,--\nTo my mind expresses all\nThe allurements of the world.\nAnd once more I seem to feel\nOn my soul, like frenzy, hurled\nAll the passionate past.--I reel,\nGreek again in ancient Greece,\nIn the Pyrrhic revelries;\nIn the mad and Maenad dance\nOnward dragged with violence;\nPan and old Silenus and\nFaunus and a Bacchant band\nRound me. Wild my wine-stained hand\nO'er tumultuous hair is lifted;\nWhile the flushed and Phallic orgies\nWhirl around me; and the marges\nOf the wood are torn and rifted\nWith lascivious laugh and shout.\nAnd barbarian there again,--\nShameless with the shameless rout,\nBacchus lusting in each vein,--\nWith her pagan lips on mine,\nLike a god made drunk with wine,\nOn I reel; and, in the revels,\nHer loose hair, the dance dishevels,\nBlows, and 'thwart my vision swims\nAll the splendor of her limbs....\n\nSo it seems. Yet woods are lonely.\nAnd when I again awake,\nI shall find their faces only\nMoonbeams in the boughs that shake;\nAnd their revels, but the rush\nOf night-winds through bough and brush.\nYet my dreaming--is it more\nThan mere dreaming? Is some door\nOpened in my soul? a curtain\nRaised? to let me see for certain\nI have lived that life before?\n\n\n\n\n_The Last\nSong_\n\n\nShe sleeps; he sings to her. The day was long,\nAnd, tired out with too much happiness,\nShe fain would have him sing of old Provence;\nQuaint songs, that spoke of love in such soft tones,\nHer restless soul was straight besieged of dreams,\nAnd her wild heart beleagured of deep peace,\nAnd heart and soul surrendered unto sleep.--\nLike perfect sculpture in the moon she lies,\nIts pallor on her through heraldic panes\nOf one tall casement's guled quarterings.--\nBeside her couch, an antique table, weighed\nWith gold and crystal; here, a carven chair,\nWhereon her raiment,--that suggests sweet curves\nOf shapely beauty,--bearing her limbs' impress,\nIs richly laid: and, near the chair, a glass,\nAn oval mirror framed in ebony:\nAnd, dim and deep,--investing all the room\nWith ghostly life of woven women and men,\nAnd strange fantastic gloom, where shadows live,--\nDark tapestry,--which in the gusts--that twinge\nA grotesque cresset's slender star of light--\nSeems moved of cautious hands, assassin-like,\nThat wait the hour.\n                    She alone, deep-haired\nAs rosy dawn, and whiter than a rose,\nDivinely breasted as the Queen of Love,\nLies robeless in the glimmer of the moon,\nLike Danae within the golden shower.\nSeated beside her aromatic rest,\nIn rapture musing on her loveliness,\nHer knight and troubadour. A lute, aslope\nThe curious baldric of his tunic, glints\nWith pearl-reflections of the moon, that seem\nThe silent ghosts of long-dead melodies.\nIn purple and sable, slashed with solemn gold,\nLike stately twilight o'er the snow-heaped hills,\nHe bends above her.--\n                    Have his hands forgot\nTheir craft, that they pause, idle on the strings?\nHis lips, their art, that they cease, speechless there?--\nHis eyes are set.... What is it stills to stone\nHis hands, his lips? and mails him, head and heel,\nIn terrible marble, motionless and cold?--\nBehind the arras, can it be he feels,\nBlack-browed and grim, with eyes of sombre fire,\nDeath towers above him with uplifted sword?\n\n\n\n\n_Romaunt of\nthe Oak_\n\n\n\"I rode to death, for I fought for shame--\nThe Lady Maurine of noble name,\n\n\"The fair and faithless!--Though life be long\nIs love the wiser?--Love made song\n\n\"Of all my life; and the soul that crept\nBefore, arose like a star and leapt:\n\n\"Still leaps with the love that it found untrue,\nThat it found unworthy.--Now run me through!\n\n\"Yea, run me through! for meet and well,\nAnd a jest for laughter of fiends in hell,\n\n\"It is that I, who have done no wrong,\nShould die by the hand of Hugh the Strong,\n\n\"Of Hugh her leman!--What else could be\nWhen the devil was judge twixt thee and me?\n\n\"He splintered my lance, and my blade he broke--\nNow finish me thou 'neath the trysting oak!\" ...\n\nThe crest of his foeman,--a heart of white\nIn a bath of fire,--stooped i' the night;\n\nStooped and laughed as his sword he swung,\nThen galloped away with a laugh on his tongue....\n\nBut who is she in the gray, wet dawn,\n'Mid the autumn shades like a shadow wan?\n\nWho kneels, one hand on her straining breast,\nOne hand on the dead man's bosom pressed?\n\nHer face is dim as the dead's; as cold\nAs his tarnished harness of steel and gold.\n\nO Lady Maurine! O Lady Maurine!\nWhat boots it now that regret is keen?\n\nThat his hair you smooth, that you kiss his brow\nWhat boots it now? what boots it now?...\n\nShe has haled him under the trysting oak,\nThe huge old oak that the creepers cloak.\n\nShe has stood him, gaunt in his battered arms,\nIn its haunted hollow.--\"Be safe from storms,\"\n\nShe laughed as his cloven casque she placed\nOn his brow, and his riven shield she braced.\n\nThen sat and talked to the forest flowers\nThrough the lonely term of the day's pale hours.\n\nAnd stared and whispered and smiled and wept,\nWhile nearer and nearer the evening crept.\n\nAnd, lo, when the moon, like a great gold bloom\nAbove the sorrowful trees did loom,\n\nShe rose up sobbing, \"O moon, come see\nMy bridegroom here in the old oak-tree!\n\n\"I have talked to the flowers all day, all day,\nFor never a word had he to say.\n\n\"He would not listen, he would not hear,\nThough I wailed my longing into his ear.\n\n\"O moon, steal in where he stands so grim,\nAnd tell him I love him, and plead with him.\n\n\"Soften his face that is cold and stern\nAnd brighten his eyes and make them burn,\n\n\"O moon, O moon, so my soul can see\nThat his heart still glows with love for me!\" ...\n\nWhen the moon was set, and the woods were dark,\nThe wild deer came and stood as stark\n\nAs phantoms with eyes of fire; or fled\nLike a ghostly hunt of the herded dead.\n\nAnd the hoot-owl called; and the were-wolf snarled;\nAnd a voice, in the boughs of the oak-tree gnarled,--\n\nLike the whining rush of the hags that ride\nTo the witches' sabboth,--crooned and cried.\n\nAnd wrapped in his mantle of wind and cloud\nThe storm-fiend stalked through the forest loud.\n\nWhen she heard the dead man rattle and groan\nAs the oak was bent and its leaves were blown,\n\nAnd the lightning vanished and shimmered his mail,\nThrough the swirling sweep of the rain and hail,\n\nShe seemed to hear him, who seemed to call,--\n\"Come hither, Maurine, the wild leaves fall!\n\n\"The wild leaves rustle, the wild leaves flee;\nCome hither, Maurine, to the hollow tree!\n\n\"To the trysting tree, to the tree once green;\nCome hither, Maurine! come hither, Maurine!\" ...\n\nThey found her closed in his armored arms--\nHad he claimed his bride on that night of storms?\n\n\n\n\n_Morgan le\nFay_\n\n\nIn dim samite was she bedight,\n  And on her hair a hoop of gold,\nLike fox-fire in the tawn moonlight,\n    Was glimmering cold.\n\nWith soft gray eyes she gloomed and glowered;\n  With soft red lips she sang a song:\nWhat knight might gaze upon her face,\n    Nor fare along?\n\nFor all her looks were full of spells,\n  And all her words of sorcery;\nAnd in some way they seemed to say\n    \"Oh, come with me!\n\n\"Oh, come with me! oh, come with me!\n  Oh, come with me, my love, Sir Kay!\"--\nHow should he know the witch, I trow,\n    Morgan le Fay?\n\nHow should he know the wily witch,\n  With sweet white face and raven hair?\nWho by her art bewitched his heart\n    And held him there.\n\nFor soul and sense had waxed amort\n  To wold and weald, to slade and stream;\nAnd all he heard was her soft word\n    As one adream.\n\nAnd all he saw was her bright eyes,\n  And her fair face that held him still;\nAnd wild and wan she led him on\n    O'er vale and hill.\n\nUntil at last a castle lay\n  Beneath the moon, among the trees;\nIts Gothic towers old and gray\n    With mysteries.\n\nTall in its hall an hundred knights\n  In armor stood with glaive in hand;\nThe following of some great King,\n    Lord of that land.\n\nSir Bors, Sir Balin, and Gawain,\n  All Arthur's knights, and many mo;\nBut these in battle had been slain\n    Long years ago.\n\nBut when Morgan with lifted hand\n  Moved down the hall, they louted low;\nFor she was Queen of Shadowland,\n    That woman of snow.\n\nThen from Sir Kay she drew away,\n  And mocking at him by her side,--\n\"Behold, Sir Knights, the knave who slew\n    Your King,\" she cried.\n\nThen like one man those shadows raised\n  Their swords, whereon the moon glanced gray;\nAnd clashing all strode from the wall\n    Against Sir Kay.\n\nAnd on his body, bent and bowed,\n  The hundred blades like one blade fell;\nWhile over all rang long and loud\n    The mirth of Hell.\n\n\n\n\n_The Dream\nof Roderick_\n\n\nBelow, the tawny Tagus swept\nPast royal gardens, breathing balm;\nUpon his couch the monarch slept;\nThe world was still; the night was calm.\n\nGray, Gothic-gated, in the ray\nOf moonrise, tower-and castle-crowned,\nThe city of Toledo lay\nBeneath the terraced palace-ground.\n\nAgain, he dreamed, in kingly sport\nHe sought the tree-sequestered path,\nAnd watched the ladies of his Court\nWithin the marble-basined bath.\n\nIts porphyry stairs and fountained base\nShone, houried with voluptuous forms,\nWhere Andalusia vied in grace\nWith old Castile, in female charms.\n\nAnd laughter, song, and water-splash\nRang round the place, with stone arcaded,\nAs here a breast or limb would flash\nWhere beauty swam or beauty waded.\n\nAnd then, like Venus, from the wave\nA maiden came, and stood below;\nAnd by her side a woman slave\nBent down to dry her limbs of snow.\n\nThen on the tesselated bank,\nRobed on with fragrance and with fire,--\nLike some exotic flower--she sank,\nThe type of all divine desire.\n\nThen her dark curls, that sparkled wet,\nShe parted from her perfect brows,\nAnd, lo, her eyes, like lamps of jet\nWithin an alabaster house.\n\nAnd in his sleep the monarch sighed,\n\"Florinda!\"--Dreaming still he moaned,\n\"Ah, would that I had died, had died!\nI have atoned! I have atoned!\" ...\n\nAnd then the vision changed: O'erhead\nTempest and darkness were unrolled,\nFull of wild voices of the dead,\nAnd lamentations manifold.\n\nAnd wandering shapes of gaunt despair\nSwept by, with faces pale as pain,\nWhose eyes wept blood and seemed to glare\nFierce curses on him through the rain.\n\nAnd then, it seemed, 'gainst blazing skies\nA necromantic tower sate,\nCrag-like on crags, of giant size;\nOf adamant its walls and gate.\n\nAnd from the storm a hand of might\nRed-rolled in thunder, reached among\nThe gate's huge bolts--that burst; and night\nClanged ruin as its hinges swung.\n\nThen far away a murmur trailed,--\nAs of sad seas on cavern'd shores,--\nThat grew into a voice that wailed,\n\"They come! they come! the Moors! the Moors!\"\n\nAnd with deep boom of atabals\nAnd crash of cymbals and wild peal\nOf battle-bugles, from its walls\nAn army rushed in glimmering steel.\n\nAnd where it trod he saw the torch\nOf conflagration stalk the skies,\nAnd in the vanward of its march\nThe monster form of Havoc rise.\n\nAnd Paynim war-cries rent the storm,\nAthwart whose firmament of flame,\nDestruction reared an earthquake form\nOn wreck and death without a name ...\n\nAnd then again the vision changed:\nWhere flows the Guadalete, see,\nThe warriors of the Cross are ranged\nAgainst the Crescent's chivalry.\n\nWith roar of trumpets and of drums\nThey meet; and in the battle's van\nHe fights; and, towering towards him, comes\nFlorinda's father, Julian;\n\nAnd one-eyed Taric, great in war:\nAnd where these couch their burning spears,\nThe Christian phalanx, near and far,\nGoes down like corn before the shears.\n\nThe Moslem wins: the Christian flies:\n\"Allah il Allah,\" hill and plain\nReverberate: the rocking skies,\n\"Allah il Allah,\" shout again.\n\nAnd then he dreamed the swing of swords\nAnd hurl of arrows were no more;\nBut, louder than the howling hordes,\nStrange silence fell on field and shore.\n\nAnd through the night, it seemed, he fled,\nUpon a white steed like a star,\nAcross a field of endless dead,\nBeneath a blood-red scimitar.\n\nOf sunset: And he heard a moan,\nBeneath, around, on every hand--\n\"Accursed! Yea, what hast thou done\nTo bring this curse upon thy land?\"\n\nAnd then an awful sense of wings:\nAnd, lo! the answer--\"'Twas his lust\nThat was his crime. Behold! E'en kings\nMust reckon with Me. All are dust.\"\n\n\n\n\n_Zyps of\nZirl_\n\n\nThe Alps of the Tyrol are dark with pines,\nWhere, foaming under the mountain spines,\nThe Inn's long water sounds and shines.\n\nBeyond, are peaks where the morning weaves\nAn icy rose; and the evening leaves\nThe glittering gold of a thousand sheaves.\n\nDeep vines and torrents and glimmering haze,\nAnd sheep-bells tinkling on mountain ways,\nAnd fluting shepherds make sweet the days.\n\nThe rolling mist, like a wandering fleece,\nThe great round moon in a mountain crease,\nAnd a song of love make the nights all peace.\n\nBeneath the blue Tyrolean skies\nOn the banks of the Inn, that foams and flies,\nThe storied city of Innsbruck lies.\n\nWith its mediaeval streets, that crook,\nAnd its gabled houses, it has the look\nOf a belfried town in a fairy-book.\n\nSo wild the Tyrol that oft, 'tis said,\nWhen the storm is out and the town in bed,\nThe howling of wolves sweeps overhead.\n\nAnd oft the burgher, sitting here\nIn his walled rose-garden, hears the clear\nShrill scream of the eagle circling near.\n\nAnd this is the tale that the burghers tell:--\nThe Abbot of Wiltau stood at his cell\nWhere the Solstein lifts its pinnacle.\n\nA mighty summit of bluffs and crags\nThat frowns on the Inn; where the forest stags\nHave worn a path to the water-flags.\n\nThe Abbot of Wiltau stood below;\nAnd he was aware of a plume and bow\nOn the precipice there in the morning's glow.\n\nA chamois, he saw, from span to span\nHad leapt; and after it leapt a man;\nAnd he knew 't was the Kaiser Maxmilian.\n\nBut, see! though rash as the chamois he,\nHis foot less sure. And verily\nIf the King should miss ... \"Jesu, Marie!\n\n\"The King hath missed!\"--And, look, he falls!\nRolls headlong out to the headlong walls.\nWhat saint shall save him on whom he calls?\n\nWhat saint shall save him, who struggles there\nOn the narrow ledge by the eagle's lair,\nWith hooked hands clinging 'twixt earth and air?\n\nThe Abbot, he crosses himself in dread--\n\"Let prayers go up for the nearly dead,\nAnd the passing-bell be tolled,\" he said.\n\n\"For the House of Hapsburg totters; see,\nHow raveled the thread of its destiny,\nSheer hung between cloud and rock!\" quoth he.\n\nBut hark! where the steeps of the peak reply,\nIs it an eagle's echoing cry?\nAnd the flitting shadow, its plumes on high?\n\nNo voice of the eagle is that which rings!\nAnd the shadow, a wiry man who swings\nDown, down where the desperate Kaiser clings.\n\nThe _crampons_ bound to his feet, he leaps\nLike a chamois now; and again he creeps\nOr twists, like a snake, o'er the fearful deeps.\n\n\"By his cross-bow, baldrick, and cap's black curl,\"\nQuoth the Abbot below, \"I know the churl!\n'T is the hunted outlaw Zyps of Zirl.\n\n\"Upon whose head, or dead or alive,\nThe Kaiser hath posted a price.--Saints shrive\nThe King!\" quoth Wiltau. \"Who may contrive\n\n\"To save him now that his foe is there?\"--\nBut, listen! again through the breathless air\nWhat words are those that the echoes bear?\n\n\"Courage, my King!--To the rescue, ho!\"\nThe wild voice rings like a twanging bow,\nAnd the staring Abbot stands mute below.\n\nAnd, lo! the hand of the outlaw grasps\nThe arm of the King--and death unclasps\nIts fleshless fingers from him who gasps.\n\nAnd how he guides! where the clean cliffs wedge\nThem flat to their faces; by chasm and ledge\nHe helps the King from the merciless edge.\n\nThen up and up, past bluffs that shun\nThe rashest chamois; where eagles sun\nFierce wings and brood; where the mists are spun.\n\nAnd safe at last stand Kaiser and churl\nOn the mountain path where the mosses curl--\nAnd this the revenge of Zyps of Zirl.\n\n\n\n\n_The\nGlowworm_\n\n\nHow long had I sat there and had not beheld\nThe gleam of the glow-worm till something compelled!...\n\nThe heaven was starless, the forest was deep,\nAnd the vistas of darkness stretched silent in sleep.\n\nAnd late 'mid the trees had I lingered until\nNo thing was awake but the lone whippoorwill.\n\nAnd haunted of thoughts for an hour I sat\nOn a lichen-gray rock where the moss was a mat.\n\nAnd thinking of one whom my heart had held dear,\nLike terrible waters, a gathering fear.\n\nCame stealing upon me with all the distress\nOf loss and of yearning and powerlessness:\n\nTill the hopes and the doubts and the sleepless unrest\nThat, swallow-like, built in the home of my breast,\n\nNow hither, now thither, now heavenward flew,\nWild-winged as the winds are: now suddenly drew\n\nMy soul to abysses of nothingness where\nAll light was a shadow, all hope, a despair:\n\nWhere truth, that religion had set upon high,\nThe darkness distorted and changed to a lie:\n\nAnd dreams of the beauty ambition had fed\nLike leaves of the autumn fell blighted and dead.\n\nAnd I rose with my burden of anguish and doom,\nAnd cried, \"O my God, had I died in the womb!\n\n\"Than born into night, with no hope of the morn,\nAn heir unto shadows, to live so forlorn!\n\n\"All effort is vain; and the planet called Faith\nSinks down; and no power is real but death.\n\n\"Oh, light me a torch in the deepening dark\nSo my sick soul may follow, my sad heart may mark!\"--\n\nAnd then in the darkness the answer!--It came\nFrom Earth not from Heaven--a glimmering flame,\n\nBehold, at my feet! In the shadow it shone\nMysteriously lovely and dimly alone:\n\nAn ember; a sparkle of dew and of glower;\nLike the lamp that a spirit hangs under a flower:\n\nAs goldenly green as the phosphorus star\nA fairy may wear in her diadem's bar:\n\nAn element essence of moonlight and dawn\nThat, trodden and trampled, burns on and burns on.\n\nAnd hushed was my soul with the lesson of light\nThat God had revealed to me there in the night:\n\nThough mortal its structure, material its form,\nThe spiritual message of worm unto worm.\n\n\n\n\n_Ghosts_\n\n\nWas it the strain of the waltz that, repeating\n\"Love,\" so bewitched me? or only the gleam\nThere of the lustres, that set my heart beating,\nFeeling your presence as one feels a dream?\n\nFor, on a sudden, the woman of fashion,\nSoft at my side in her diamonds and lace,\nVanished, and pale with reproach or with passion,\nYou, my dead sweetheart, smiled up in my face.\n\nMusic, the nebulous lights, and the sifting\nFragrance of women made amorous the air;\nBorn of these three and my thoughts you came drifting,\nClad in dim muslin, a rose in your hair.\n\nThere in the waltz, that followed the lancers,\nHard to my breast did I crush you and hold;\nFar through the stir and the throng of the dancers\nOnward I bore you as often of old.\n\nPale were your looks; and the rose in your tresses\nPaler of hue than the dreams we have lost;--\n\"Who,\" then I said, \"is it sees or who guesses,\nHere in the hall, that I dance with a ghost?\"\n\nGone! And the dance and the music are ended.\nGone! And the rapture dies out of the skies.\nAnd, on my arm, in her elegance splendid,\nThe woman of fashion smiles up in my eyes.\n\nHad I forgotten? and did you remember?--\nYou, who are dead, whom I cannot forget;\nYou, for whose sake all my heart is an ember\nCovered with ashes of dreams and regret.\n\n\n\n\n_The Purple\nValleys_\n\n\nFar in the purple valleys of illusion\nI see her waiting, like the soul of music,\nWith deep eyes, lovelier than cerulean pansies,\nShadow and fire, yet merciless as poison;\nWith red lips, sweeter than Arabian storax,\nYet bitterer than myrrh.--O tears and kisses!\nO eyes and lips, that haunt my soul forever!\n\nAgain Spring walks transcendent on the mountains:\nThe woods are hushed: the vales are blue with shadows:\nAbove the heights, steeped in a thousand splendors,\nLike some vast canvas of the gods, hangs burning\nThe sunset's wild sciography: and slowly\nThe moon treads heaven's proscenium,--night's stately\nWhite queen of love and tragedy and madness.\n\nAgain I know forgotten dreams and longings;\nIdeals lost; desires dead and buried\nBeside the altar sacrifice erected\nWithin the heart's high sanctuary. Strangely\nAgain I know the horror and the rapture,\nThe utterless awe, the joy akin to anguish,\nThe terror and the worship of the spirit.\n\nAgain I feel her eyes pierce through and through me;\nHer deep eyes, lovelier than imperial pansies,\nVelvet and flame, through which her fierce will holds me,\nPowerless and tame, and draws me on and onward\nTo sad, unsatisfied and animal yearnings,\nWild, unrestrained--the brute within the human--\nTo fling me panting on her mouth and bosom.\n\nAgain I feel her lips like ice and fire,\nHer red lips, odorous as Arabian storax,\nFragrance and fire, within whose kiss destruction\nLies serpent-like. Intoxicating languors\nResistlessly embrace me, soul and body;\nAnd we go drifting, drifting--she is laughing--\nOutcasts of God, into the deep's abysm.\n\n\n\n\n_The Land\nof Illusion_\n\nI\n\n\nSo we had come at last, my soul and I,\n  Into that land of shadowy plain and peak,\n  On which the dawn seemed ever about to break\nOn which the day seemed ever about to die.\n\n\nII\n\n\nLong had we sought fulfillment of our dreams,\n  The everlasting wells of Joy and Youth;\n  Long had we sought the snow-white flow'r of Truth,\nThat blooms eternal by eternal streams.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nAnd, fonder still, we hoped to find the sweet\n  Immortal presence, Love; the bird Delight\n  Beside her; and, eyed with sidereal night,\nFaith, like a lion, fawning at her feet.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nBut, scorched and barren, in its arid well,\n  We found our dreams' forgotten fountain-head;\n  And by black, bitter waters, crushed and dead,\nAmong wild weeds, Truth's trampled asphodel.\n\n\nV\n\n\nAnd side by side with pallid Doubt and Pain,\n  Not Love, but Grief did meet us there: afar\n  We saw her, like a melancholy star,\nOr pensive moon, move towards us o'er the plain.\n\n\nVI\n\n\nSweet was her face as song that sings of home;\n  And filled our hearts with vague, suggestive spells\n  Of pathos, as sad ocean fills its shells\nWith sympathetic moanings of its foam.\n\n\nVII\n\n\nShe raised one hand and pointed silently,\n  Then passed; her eyes, gaunt with a thirst unslaked,\n  Were worlds of woe, where tears in torrents ached,\nYet never fell. And like a winter sea,--\n\n\nVIII\n\n\nWhose caverned crags are haunts of wreck and wrath,\n  That house the condor pinions of the storm,--\n  My soul replied; and, weeping, arm in arm,\nTo'ards those dim hills, by that appointed path,\n\n\nIX\n\n\nWe turned and went. Arrived, we did discern\n  How Beauty beckoned, white 'mid miles of flowers,\n  Through which, behold, the amaranthine Hours\nLike maidens went each holding up an urn;\n\n\nX\n\n\nWherein, it seemed--drained from long chalices\n  Of those slim flow'rs--they bore mysterious wine;\n  A poppied vintage, full of sleep divine\nAnd pale forgetting of all miseries.\n\n\nXI\n\n\nThen to my soul I said, \"No longer weep.\n  Come, let us drink; for hateful is the sky,\n  And earth is full of care, and life's a lie.\nSo let us drink; yea, let us drink and sleep.\"\n\n\nXII\n\n\nThen from their brimming urns we drank sweet must,\n  While, all around us, rose-crowned faces laughed\n  Into our eyes; but hardly had we quaffed\nWhen, one by one, these crumbled into dust.\n\n\nXIII\n\n\nAnd league on league the eminence of blooms,\n  That flashed and billowed like a summer sea,\n  Rolled out a waste of thorns and tombs; where bee\nAnd butterfly and bird hung dead in looms\n\n\nXIV\n\n\nOf worm and spider. And through tomb and brier,\n  A thin wind, parched with thirsty dust and sand,\n  Went wailing as if mourning some lost land\nOf perished empire, Babylon or Tyre.\n\n\nXV\n\n\nLong, long with blistered feet we wandered in\n  That land of ruins, through whose sky of brass\n  Hate's Harpy shrieked; and in whose iron grass\nThe Hydra hissed of undestroyable Sin.\n\n\nXVI\n\n\nAnd there at last, behold, the House of Doom,--\n  Red, as if Hell had glared it into life,\n  Blood-red, and howling with incessant strife,--\nWith burning battlements, towered in the gloom.\n\n\nXVII\n\n\nAnd throned within sat Darkness.--Who might gaze\n  Upon that form, that threatening presence there,\n  Crowned with the flickering corpse-lights of Despair,\nAnd yet escape sans madness and amaze?\n\n\nXVIII\n\n\nAnd we had hoped to find among these hills\n  The House of Beauty!--Curst, yea, thrice accurst,\n  The hope that lures one on from last to first\nWith vain illusions that no time fulfills!\n\n\nXIX\n\n\nWhy will we struggle to attain, and strive,\n  When all we gain is but an empty dream?--\n  Better, unto my thinking, doth it seem\nTo end it all and let who will survive;\n\n\nXX\n\n\nTo find at last all beauty is but dust;\n  That love and sorrow are the very same;\n  That joy is only suffering's sweeter name;\nAnd sense is but the synonym of lust.\n\n\nXXI\n\n\nFar better, yea, to me it seems to die;\n  To set glad lips against the lips of Death--\n  The only thing God gives that comforteth,\nThe only thing we do not find a lie.\n\n\n\n\n_Spirit of\nDreams_\n\nI\n\n\nWhere hast thou folded thy pinions,\n  Spirit of Dreams?\nHidden elusive garments\n  Woven of gleams?\nIn what divine dominions,\n  Brighter than day,\nFar from the world's dark torments,\n  Dost thou stay, dost thou stay?--\nWhen shall my yearnings reach thee\n  Again?\nNot in vain let my soul beseech thee!\n  Not in vain! not in vain!\n\n\nII\n\n\nI have longed for thee as a lover\n  For her, the one;\nAs a brother for a sister\n  Long dead and gone.\nI have called thee over and over\n  Names sweet to hear;\nWith words than music trister,\n  And thrice as dear.\nHow long must my sad heart woo thee,\n  Yet fail?\nHow long must my soul pursue thee,\n  Nor avail, nor avail?\n\n\nIII\n\n\nAll night hath thy loving mother,\n  Beautiful Sleep,\nLying beside me, listened\n  And heard me weep.\nBut ever thou soughtest another\n  Who sought thee not;\nFor him thy soft smile glistened--\n  I was forgot.\nWhen shall my soul behold thee\n  As before?\nWhen shall my heart infold thee?--\n  Nevermore? nevermore?\n\n\n\n\nLINES AND LYRICS\n\n\n\n\n_To a Wind-Flower_\n\nI\n\n\nTeach me the secret of thy loveliness,\n  That, being made wise, I may aspire to be\nAs beautiful in thought, and so express\n  Immortal truths to earth's mortality;\nThough to my soul ability be less\n  Than 't is to thee, O sweet anemone.\n\n\nII\n\n\nTeach me the secret of thy innocence,\n  That in simplicity I may grow wise;\nAsking from Art no other recompense\n  Than the approval of her own just eyes;\nSo may I rise to some fair eminence,\n  Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nTeach me these things; through whose high knowledge, I,--\n  When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,\nAnd brought me home, as all are brought, to lie\n  In that vast house, common to serfs and Thanes,--\nI shall not die, I shall not utterly die,\n  For beauty born of beauty--_that_ remains.\n\n\n\n\n_Microcosm_\n\n\nThe memory of what we've lost\nIs with us more than what we've won;\nPerhaps because we count the cost\nBy what we could, yet have not done.\n\n'Twixt act and purpose fate hath drawn\nInvisible threads we can not break,\nAnd puppet-like these move us on\nThe stage of life, and break or make.\n\nLess than the dust from which we're wrought,\nWe come and go, and still are hurled\nFrom change to change, from naught to naught,\nHeirs of oblivion and the world.\n\n\n\n\n_Fortune_\n\n\nWithin the hollowed hand of God,\nBlood-red they lie, the dice of fate,\nThat have no time nor period,\nAnd know no early and no late.\n\nPostpone you can not, nor advance\nSuccess or failure that's to be;\nAll fortune, being born of chance,\nIs bastard-child to destiny.\n\nBow down your head, or hold it high,\nConsent, defy--no smallest part\nOf this you change, although the die\nWas fashioned from your living heart.\n\n\n\n\n_Death_\n\n\nThrough some strange sense of sight or touch\nI find what all have found before,\nThe presence I have feared so much,\nThe unknown's immaterial door.\n\nI seek not and it comes to me:\nI do not know the thing I find:\nThe fillet of fatality\nDrops from my brows that made me blind.\n\nPoint forward now or backward, light!\nThe way I take I may not choose:\nOut of the night into the night,\nAnd in the night no certain clews.\n\nBut on the future, dim and vast,\nAnd dark with dust and sacrifice,\nDeath's towering ruin from the past\nMakes black the land that round me lies.\n\n\n\n\n_The\nSoul_\n\n\nAn heritage of hopes and fears\nAnd dreams and memory,\nAnd vices of ten thousand years\nGod gives to thee.\n\nA house of clay, the home of Fate,\nHaunted of Love and Sin,\nWhere Death stands knocking at the gate\nTo let him in.\n\n\n\n\n_Conscience_\n\n\nWithin the soul are throned two powers,\nOne, Love; one, Hate. Begot of these,\nAnd veiled between, a presence towers,\nThe shadowy keeper of the keys.\n\nWith wild command or calm persuasion\nThis one may argue, that compel;\nVain are concealment and evasion--\nFor each he opens heaven and hell.\n\n\n\n\n_Youth_\n\nI\n\n\nMorn's mystic rose is reddening on the hills,\nDawn's irised nautilus makes glad the sea;\nThere is a lyre of flame that throbs and fills\nFar heaven and earth with hope's wild ecstasy.--\n          With lilied field and grove,\n          Haunts of the turtle-dove,\n            Here is the land of Love.\n\n\nII\n\n\nThe chariot of the noon makes blind the blue\nAs towards the goal his burning axle glares;\nThere is a fiery trumpet thrilling through\nWide heaven and earth with deeds of one who dares.--\n          With peaks of splendid name,\n          Wrapped round with astral flame,\n            Here is the land of Fame.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nThe purple priesthood of the evening waits\nWith golden pomp within the templed skies;\nThere is a harp of worship at the gates\nOf heaven and earth that bids the soul arise.--\n          With columned cliffs and long\n          Vales, music breathes among,\n            Here is the land of Song.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nMoon-crowned, the epic of the night unrolls\nIts starry utterance o'er height and deep;\nThere is a voice of beauty at the souls\nOf heaven and earth that lulls the heart asleep.--\n          With storied woods and streams,\n          Where marble glows and gleams,\n            Here is the land of Dreams.\n\n\n\n\n_Life's\nSeasons_\n\nI\n\n\nWhen all the world was Mayday,\n  And all the skies were blue,\nYoung innocence made playday\n  Among the flowers and dew;\nThen all of life was Mayday,\n  And clouds were none or few.\n\n\nII\n\n\nWhen all the world was Summer,\n  And morn shone overhead,\nLove was the sweet newcomer\n  Who led youth forth to wed;\nThen all of life was Summer,\n  And clouds were golden red.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nWhen earth was all October,\n  And days were gray with mist,\nOn woodways, sad and sober,\n  Grave memory kept her tryst;\nThen life was all October,\n  And clouds were twilight-kissed.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nNow all the world's December,\n  And night is all alarm,\nAbove the last dim ember\n  Grief bends to keep him warm;\nNow all of life's December,\n  And clouds are driven storm.\n\n\n\n\n_Old\nHomes_\n\n\nOld homes among the hills! I love their gardens,\nTheir old rock-fences, that our day inherits;\nTheir doors, 'round which the great trees stand like wardens;\nTheir paths, down which the shadows march like spirits;\nBroad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens.\n\nI see them gray among their ancient acres,\nSevere of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled,--\nLike gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers,\nGrave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled,--\nSerene among their memory-hallowed acres.\n\nTheir gardens, banked with roses and with lilies--\nThose sweet aristocrats of all the flowers--\nWhere Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies,\nAnd Autumn coins her marigolds in showers,\nAnd all the hours are toilless as the lilies.\n\nI love their orchards where the gay woodpecker\nFlits, flashing o'er you, like a winged jewel;\nTheir woods, whose floors of moss the squirrels checker\nWith half-hulled nuts; and where, in cool renewal,\nThe wild brooks laugh, and raps the red woodpecker.\n\nOld homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever\nTheir peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter;\nLike love they touch me, through the years that sever,\nWith simple faith; like friendship, draw me after\nThe dreamy patience that is theirs forever.\n\n\n\n\n_Field and\nForest Call_\n\n\nThere is a field, that leans upon two hills,\nFoamed o'er with flowers and twinkling with clear rills;\nThat in its girdle of wild acres bears\nThe anodyne of rest that cures all cares;\nWherein soft wind and sun and sound are blent\nAnd fragrance--as in some old instrument\nSweet chords--calm things, that nature's magic spell\nDistils from heaven's azure crucible,\nAnd pours on Earth to make the sick mind well.\n          There lies the path, they say--\n          Come, away! come, away!\n\nThere is a forest, lying 'twixt two streams,\nSung through of birds and haunted of dim dreams;\nThat in its league-long hand of trunk and leaf\nLifts a green wand that charms away all grief;\nWrought of quaint silence and the stealth of things,\nVague, whispering touches, gleams and twitterings,\nDews and cool shadows--that the mystic soul\nOf nature permeates with suave control,\nAnd waves o'er earth to make the sad heart whole.\n          There lies the road, they say--\n          Come, away! come, away!\n\n\n\n\n_Meeting in\nSummer_\n\n\n      A tranquil bar\nOf rosy twilight under dusk's first star.\n\n      A glimmering sound\nOf whispering waters over grassy ground.\n\n      A sun-sweet smell\nOf fresh-reaped hay from dewy field and dell.\n\n      A lazy breeze\nJostling the ripeness from the apple-trees.\n\n      A vibrant cry,\nPassing, then gone, of bullbats in the sky.\n\n      And faintly now\nThe katydid upon the shadowy bough.\n\n      And far-off then\nThe little owl within the lonely glen.\n\n      And soon, full soon,\nThe silvery arrival of the moon.\n\n      And, to your door,\nThe path of roses I have trod before.\n\n      And, sweetheart, you!\nAmong the roses and the moonlit dew.\n\n\n\n\n_Swinging_\n\n\nUnder the boughs of spring\nShe swung in the old rope-swing.\n\nHer cheeks, with their happy blood,\nWere pink as the apple-bud.\n\nHer eyes, with their deep delight,\nWere glad as the stars of night.\n\nHer curls, with their romp and fun,\nWere hoiden as wind and sun.\n\nHer lips, with their laughter shrill,\nWere wild as a woodland rill.\n\nUnder the boughs of spring\nShe swung in the old rope-swing.\n\nAnd I,--who leaned on the fence,\nWatching her innocence,\n\nAs, under the boughs that bent,\nNow high, now low, she went,\n\nIn her soul the ecstasies\nOf the stars, the brooks, the breeze,--\n\nHad given the rest of my years,\nWith their blessings, and hopes, and fears,\n\nTo have been as she was then;\nAnd, just for a moment, again\n\nA boy in the old rope-swing\nUnder the boughs of spring.\n\n\n\n\n_Rosemary_\n\n\nAbove her, pearl and rose the heavens lay;\nAround her, flowers scattered earth with gold,\nOr down the path in insolence held sway--\nLike cavaliers who ride the elves' highway--\nScarlet and blue, within a garden old.\n\nBeyond the hills, faint-heard through belts of wood,\nBells, Sabbath-sweet, swooned from some far-off town;\nGamboge and gold, broad sunset colors strewed\nThe purple west as if, with God imbued,\nHer mighty pallet Nature there laid down.\n\nAmid such flowers, underneath such skies,\nEmbodying all life knows of sweet and fair,\nShe stood; love's dreams in girlhood's face and eyes,\nWhite as a star that comes to emphasize\nThe mingled beauty of the earth and air.\n\nBehind her, seen through vines and orchard trees,\nGray with its twinkling windows--like the face\nOf calm old-age that sits and smiles at ease--\nPorched with old roses, haunts of honey-bees,\nThe homestead loomed dim in a glimmering space.\n\nAh! whom she waited in the afterglow,\nSoft-eyed and dreamy 'mid the lily and rose,\nI do not know, I do not wish to know;--\nIt is enough I keep her picture so,\nHung up, like poetry, o'er my life's dull prose.\n\nA fragrant picture, where I still may find\nHer face untouched of sorrow or regret,\nUnspoiled of contact, ever young and kind,\nGlad spiritual sweetheart of my soul and mind,\nShe had not been, perhaps, if we had met.\n\n\n\n\n_Ghost\nStories_\n\n\nWhen the hoot of the owl comes over the hill,\nAt twelve o'clock when the night is still,\nAnd pale on the pools, where the creek-frogs croon,\nGlimmering gray is the light o' the moon;\nAnd under the willows, where waters lie,\nThe torch of the firefly wanders by;\nThey say that the miller walks here, walks here,\nAll covered with chaff, with his crooked staff,\nAnd his horrible hobble and hideous laugh;\nThe old lame miller hung many a year:\nWhen the hoot of the owl comes over the hill,\nHe walks alone by the rotting mill.\n\nWhen the bark of the fox comes over the hill,\nAt twelve o'clock when the night is shrill,\nAnd faint, on the ways where the crickets creep,\nThe starlight fails and the shadows sleep;\nAnd under the willows, that toss and moan,\nThe glow-worm kindles its lanthorn lone;\nThey say that a woman floats dead, floats dead,\nIn a weedy space that the lilies lace,\nA curse in her eyes and a smile on her face,\nThe miller's young wife with a gash in her head:\nWhen the bark of the fox comes over the hill,\nShe floats alone by the rotting mill.\n\nWhen the howl of the hound comes over the hill,\nAt twelve o'clock when the night is ill,\nAnd the thunder mutters and forests sob,\nAnd the fox-fire glows like the lamp of a Lob;\nAnd under the willows, that gloom and glance,\nThe will-o'-the-wisps hold a devils' dance;\nThey say that that crime is re-acted again,\nAnd each cranny and chink of the mill doth wink\nWith the light o' hell or the lightning's blink,\nAnd a woman's shrieks come wild through the rain:\nWhen the howl of the hound comes over the hill,\nThat murder returns to the rotting mill.\n\n\n\n\n_Dolce far\nNiente_\n\nI\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nFar to the East lay the ocean paling\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nThere, in the boat as we sat together,\nSoft in the glow of the turquoise weather,\nLight as the foam or a seagull's feather,\nFair of form and of face serene,\nSweet at my side I felt you lean,\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\nII\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nPine and palm, to the West, hung, trailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nWas it the wind that sighed above you?\nWas it the wave that whispered of you?\nWas it my soul that said \"I love you\"?\nWas it your heart that murmured between,\nAnswering, shy as a bird unseen?\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nGray and low flew the heron wailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nNaught was spoken. We watched the simple\nGulls wing past. Your hat's white wimple\nShadowed your eyes. And your lips, a-dimple,\nSmiled and seemed from your soul to wean\nAn inner beauty, an added sheen,\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nRed on the marshes the day flared, failing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nWas it your thought, or the transitory\nGold of the West, like a dreamy story,\nBright on your brow, that I read? the glory\nAnd grace of love, like a rose-crowned queen\nPictured pensive in mind and mien?\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\nV\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nWan on the waters the mist lay veiling\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nWas it the joy that begot the sorrow?--\nJoy that was filled with the dreams that borrow\nPrescience sad of a far To-morrow,--\nThere in the Now that was all too keen,\nThat shadowed the fate that might intervene?\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\nVI\n\n\nOver the bay as our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine,\nThe marsh-hen cried and the tide was ailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.--\nAnd so we parted. No vows were spoken.\nNo faith was plighted that might be broken.\nBut deep in our hearts each bore a token\nOf life and of love and of all they mean,\nBeautiful, thornless and ever green,\nAs over the bay our boat went sailing\n  Under the skies of Augustine.\n\n\n_St. Augustine, Fla_.\n\n\n\n\n_Words_\n\n\nI cannot tell what I would tell thee,\n  What I would say, what thou shouldst hear:\nWords of the soul that should compell thee,\n  Words of the heart to draw thee near.\n\nFor when thou smilest, thou, who fillest\n  My life with joy, and I would speak,\n'T is then my lips and tongue are stillest,\n  Knowing all language is too weak.\n\nLook in my eyes: read there confession:\n  The truest love has least of art:\nNor needs it words for its expression\n  When soul speaks soul and heart speaks heart.\n\n\n\n\n_Reasons_\n\nI\n\n\nYea, why I love thee let my heart repeat:\n  I look upon thy face and then divine\n  How men could die for beauty, such as thine,--\n          Deeming it sweet\nTo lay my life and manhood at thy feet,\n  And for a word, a glance,\n  Do deeds of old romance.\n\n\nII\n\n\nYea, why I love thee let my heart unfold:\n  I look into thy heart and then I know\n  The wondrous poetry of the long-ago,\n          The Age of Gold,\nThat speaks strange music, that is old, so old,\n  Yet young, as when 't was born,\n  With all the youth of morn.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nYea, why I love thee let my heart conclude:\n  I look into thy soul and realize\n  The undiscovered meaning of the skies,--\n          That long have wooed\nThe world with far ideals that elude,--\n  Out of whose dreams, maybe,\n  God shapes reality.\n\n\n\n\n_Evasion_\n\n\nWhy do I love you, who have never given\n  My heart encouragement or any cause?\nIs it because, as earth is held of heaven,\n  Your soul holds mine by some mysterious laws?\nPerhaps, unseen of me, within your eyes\n    The answer lies, the answer lies.\n\n\nII\n\n\nFrom your sweet lips no word hath ever fallen\n  To tell my heart its love is not in vain--\nThe bee that wooes the flow'r hath honey and pollen\n  To cheer him on and bring him back again:\nBut what have I, your other friends above,\n    To feed my love, to feed my love?\n\n\nIII\n\n\nStill, still you are my dream and my desire;\n  Your love is an allurement and a dare\nSet for attainment, like a shining spire,\n  Far, far above me in the starry air:\nAnd gazing upward, 'gainst the hope of hope,\n    I breast the slope, I breast the slope.\n\n\n\n\n_In\nMay_\n\nI\n\n\nWhen you and I in the hills went Maying,\n  You and I in the sweet May weather,\n  The birds, that sang on the boughs together,\nThere in the green of the woods, kept saying\n  All that my heart was saying low,\n  Love, as glad as the May's glad glow,--\n          And did you know?\nWhen you and I in the hills went Maying.\n\n\nII\n\n\nThere where the brook on its rocks went winking,\n  There by its banks where the May had led us,\n  Flowers, that bloomed in the woods and meadows,\nAzure and gold at our feet, kept thinking\n  All that my soul was thinking there,\n  Love, as pure as the May's pure air,--\n          And did you care?\nThere where the brook on its rocks went winking.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nWhatever befalls through fate's compelling,\n  Should our paths unite or our pathways sever,\n  In the Mays to come I shall feel forever\nThe wildflowers thinking, the wildbirds telling\n  The same fond love that my heart then knew,\n  Love unspeakable, deep and true,--\n          But what of you?\nWhatever befalls through fate's compelling.\n\n\n\n\n_Will You\nForget?_\n\n\nIn years to come, will you forget,\nDear girl, how often we have met?\nAnd I have gazed into your eyes\nAnd there beheld no sad regret\nTo cloud the gladness of their skies,\nWhile in your heart--unheard as yet--\nLove slept, oblivious of my sighs?--\nIn years to come, will you forget?\n\nAh, me! I only pray that when,\nIn other days, some man of men\nHas taught those eyes to laugh and weep\nWith joy and sorrow, hearts must ken\nWhen love awakens in their deep,--\nI only pray some memory then,\nOr sad or sweet, you still will keep\nOf me and love that might have been.\n\n\n\n\n_Clouds of the\nAutumn Night_\n\n\nClouds of the autumn night,\n  Under the hunter's moon,--\nGhostly and windy white,--\n  Whither, like leaves wild strewn,\nTake ye your stormy flight?\n\nOut of the west, where dusk,\n  From her rich windowsill,\nLeaned with a wand of tusk,\n  Witch-like, and wood and hill\nPhantomed with mist and musk.\n\nInto the east, where morn\n  Sleeps in a shadowy close,\nShut with a gate of horn,\n  'Round which the dreams she knows\nFlutter with rose and thorn.\n\nBlow from the west, oh, blow,\n  Clouds that the tempest steers!\nAnd with your rain and snow\n  Bear of my heart the tears,\nAnd of my soul the woe.\n\nInto the east then pass,\n  Clouds that the night winds sweep!\nAnd on her grave's sear grass,\n  There where she lies asleep.\nThere let them fall, alas!\n\n\n\n\n_The Glory\nand the Dream_\n\n\nThere in the past I see her as of old,\nBlue-eyed and hazel-haired, within a room\nDim with a twilight of tenebrious gold;\nHer white face sensuous as a delicate bloom\nNight opens in the tropics. Fold on fold\nPale laces drape her; and a frail perfume,\nAs of a moonlit primrose brimmed with rain,\nBreathes from her presence, drowsing heart and brain.\n\nHer head is bent; some red carnations glow\nDeep in her heavy hair; her large eyes gleam;--\nBright sister stars of those twin worlds of snow,\nHer breasts, through which the veined violets stream;--\nI hold her hand; her smile comes sweetly slow\nAs thoughts of love that haunt a poet's dream;\nAnd at her feet once more I sit and hear\nWild words of passion--dead this many a year.\n\n\n\n\n_Snow\nand Fire_\n\n\nDeep-hearted roses of the purple dusk\nAnd lilies of the morn;\nAnd cactus, holding up a slender tusk\nOf fragrance on a thorn;\nAll heavy flowers, sultry with their musk,\nHer presence puts to scorn.\n\nFor she is like the pale, pale snowdrop there,\nScentless and chaste of heart;\nThe moonflower, making spiritual the air,\nLike some pure work of art;\nDivine and holy, exquisitely fair,\nAnd virtue's counterpart.\n\nYet when her eyes gaze into mine, and when\nHer lips to mine are pressed,--\nWhy are my veins all fire then? and then\nWhy should her soul suggest\nVoluptuous perfumes, maddening unto men,\nAnd prurient with unrest?\n\n\n\n\n_Restraint_\n\n\nDear heart and love! what happiness to sit\nAnd watch the firelight's varying shade and shine\nOn thy young face; and through those eyes of thine--\nAs through glad windows--mark fair fancies flit\nIn sumptuous chambers of thy soul's chaste wit\nLike graceful women: then to take in mine\nThy hand, whose pressure brims my heart's divine\nHushed rapture as with music exquisite!\nWhen I remember how thy look and touch\nSway, like the moon, my blood with ecstasy,\nI dare not think to what fierce heaven might lead\nThy soft embrace; or in thy kiss how much\nSweet hell,--beyond all help of me,--might be,\nWhere I were lost, where I were lost indeed!\n\n\n\n\n_Why Should\nI Pine_?\n\n\nWhy should I pine? when there in Spain\nAre eyes to woo, and not in vain;\nDark eyes, and dreamily divine:\nAnd lips, as red as sunlit wine;\n\nSweet lips, that never know disdain:\nAnd hearts, for passion over fain;\nFond, trusting hearts that know no stain\n  Of scorn for hearts that love like mine.--\n      Why should I pine?\n\nBecause all dreams I entertain\nOf beauty wear thy form, Elain;\n  And e'en their lips and eyes are thine:\n  So though I gladly would resign\nAll love, I love, and still complain,\n      \"Why should I pine?\"\n\n\n\n\n_When Lydia\nSmiles_\n\n\nWhen Lydia smiles, I seem to see\nThe walls around me fade and flee;\n  And, lo, in haunts of hart and hind\n  I seem with lovely Rosalind,\nIn Arden 'neath the greenwood tree:\nThe day is drowsy with the bee,\nAnd one wild bird flutes dreamily,\n  And all the mellow air is kind,\n          When Lydia smiles.\n\nAh, me! what were this world to me\nWithout her smile!--What poetry,\n  What glad hesperian paths I find\n  Of love, that lead my soul and mind\nTo happy hills of Arcady,\n          When Lydia smiles!\n\n\n\n\n_The\nRose_\n\n\nYou have forgot: it once was red\nWith life, this rose, to which you said,--\n  When, there in happy days gone by,\n  You plucked it, on my breast to lie,--\n\"Sleep there, O rose! how sweet a bed\nIs thine!--And, heart, be comforted;\nFor, though we part and roses shed\n  Their leaves and fade, love cannot die.--\"\n          You have forgot.\n\nSo by those words of yours I'm led\nTo send it you this day you wed.\n  Look well upon it. You, as I,\n  Should ask it now, without a sigh,\nIf love can lie as it lies dead.--\n          You have forgot.\n\n\n\n\n_A Ballad\nof Sweethearts_\n\n\nSummer may come, in sun-blonde splendor,\nTo reap the harvest that Springtime sows;\nAnd Fall lead in her old defender,\n  Winter, all huddled up in snows:\n  Ever a-south the love-wind blows\nInto my heart, like a vane asway\n  From face to face of the girls it knows--\nBut who is the fairest it's hard to say.\n\nIf Carrie smile or Maud look tender,\n  Straight in my bosom the gladness glows;\nBut scarce at their side am I all surrender\n  When Gertrude sings where the garden grows:\n  And my heart is a bloom, like the red rose shows\nFor her hand to gather and toss away,\n  Or wear on her breast, as her fancy goes--\nBut who is the fairest it's hard to say.\n\nLet Laura pass, as a sapling slender,\n  Her cheek a berry, her mouth a rose,--\nOr Blanche or Helen,--to each I render\n  The worship due to the charms she shows:\n  But Mary's a poem when these are prose;\nHere at her feet my life I lay;\n  All of devotion to her it owes--\nBut who is the fairest it's hard to say.\n\nHow _can_ my heart of my hand dispose?\n  When Ruth and Clara, and Kate and May,\nIn form and feature no flaw disclose--\n  But who is the fairest it's hard to say.\n\n\n\n\n_Her\nPortrait_\n\n\nWere I an artist, Lydia, I\n  Would paint you as you merit,\nNot as my eyes, but dreams, descry;\n  Not in the flesh, but spirit.\n\nThe canvas I would paint you on\n  Should be a bit of heaven;\nMy brush, a sunbeam; pigments, dawn\n  And night and starry even.\n\nYour form and features to express,\n  Likewise your soul's chaste whiteness,\nI'd take the primal essences\n  Of darkness and of brightness.\n\nI'd take pure night to paint your hair;\n  Stars for your eyes; and morning\nTo paint your skin--the rosy air\n  That is your limbs' adorning.\n\nTo paint the love-bows of your lips,\n  I'd mix, for colors, kisses;\nAnd for your breasts and finger-tips,\n  Sweet odors and soft blisses.\n\nAnd to complete the picture well,\n  I'd temper all with woman,--\nSome tears, some laughter; heaven and hell,\n  To show you still are human.\n\n\n\n\n_A Song\nfor Yule_\n\nI\n\n\nSing, Hey, when the time rolls round this way,\nAnd the bells peal out, _'Tis Christmas Day_;\nThe world is better then by half,\n      For joy, for joy;\nIn a little while you will see it laugh--\nFor a song's to sing and a glass to quaff,\n      My boy, my boy.\nSo here's to the man who never says nay!--\nSing, Hey, a song of Christmas-Day!\n\n\nII\n\n\nSing, Ho, when roofs are white with snow,\nAnd homes are hung with mistletoe;\nOld Earth is not half bad, I wis--\n      What cheer! what cheer!\nHow it ever seemed sad the wonder is--\nWith a gift to give and a girl to kiss,\n      My dear, my dear.\nSo here's to the girl who never says no!\nSing, Ho, a song of the mistletoe!\n\n\nIII\n\n\nNo thing in the world to the heart seems wrong\nWhen the soul of a man walks out with song;\nWherever they go, glad hand in hand,\n      And glove in glove,\nThe round of the land is rainbow-spanned,\nAnd the meaning of life they understand\n      Is love, is love.\nLet the heart be open, the soul be strong,\nAnd life will be glad as a Christmas song.\n\n\n\n\n_The Puritans'\nChristmas_\n\n\nTheir only thought religion,\n  What Christmas joys had they,\nThe stern, staunch Pilgrim Fathers who\n  Knew naught of holiday?--\n\nA log-church in the clearing\n  'Mid solitudes of snow,\nThe wild-beast and the wilderness,\n  And lurking Indian foe.\n\nNo time had they for pleasure,\n  Whom God had put to school;\nA sermon was their Christmas cheer,\n  A psalm their only Yule.\n\nThey deemed it joy sufficient,--\n  Nor would Christ take it ill,--\nThat service to Himself and God\n  Employed their spirits still.\n\nAnd so through faith and prayer\n  Their powers were renewed,\nAnd souls made strong to shape a World,\n  And tame a solitude.\n\nA type of revolution,\n  Wrought from an iron plan,\nIn the largest mold of liberty\n  God cast the Puritan.\n\nA better land they founded,\n  That Freedom had for bride,\nThe shackles of old despotism\n  Struck from her limbs and side.\n\nWith faith within to guide them,\n  And courage to perform,\nA nation, from a wilderness,\n  They hewed with their strong arm.\n\nFor liberty to worship,\n  And right to do and dare,\nThey faced the savage and the storm\n  With voices raised in prayer.\n\nFor God it was who summoned,\n  And God it was who led,\nAnd God would not forsake the love\n  That must be clothed and fed.\n\nGreat need had they of courage!\n  Great need of faith had they!\nAnd lacking these--how otherwise\n  For us had been this day!\n\n\n\n\n_Spring_\n\n  (After the German of Goethe, _Faust_, II)\n\n\nWhen on the mountain tops ray-crowned Apollo\nTurns his swift arrows, dart on glittering dart,\nLet but a rock glint green, the wild goats follow\nGlad-grazing shyly on each sparse-grown part.\n\nRolled into plunging torrents spring the fountains;\nAnd slope and vale and meadowland grow green;\nWhile on ridg'd levels of a hundred mountains,\nFar fleece by fleece, the woolly flocks convene.\n\nWith measured stride, deliberate and steady,\nThe scattered cattle seek the beetling steep,\nBut shelter for th' assembled herd is ready\nIn many hollows that the walled rocks heap:\n\nThe lairs of Pan; and, lo, in murmuring places,\nIn bushy clefts, what woodland Nymphs arouse!\nWhere, full of yearning for the azure spaces,\nTree, crowding tree, lifts high its heavy boughs.\n\nOld forests, where the gnarly oak stands regnant\nBristling with twigs that still repullulate,\nAnd, swoln with spring, with sappy sweetness pregnant,\nThe maple blushes with its leafy weight.\n\nAnd, mother-like, in cirques of quiet shadows,\nMilk flows, warm milk, that keeps all things alive;\nFruit is not far, th' abundance of the meadows,\nAnd honey oozes from the hollow hive.\n\n\n\n\n_Lines_\n\n\nWithin the world of every man's desire\nThree things have power to lift his soul above,\nThrough dreams, religion, and ecstatic fire,\nThe star-like shapes of Beauty, Truth, and Love.\n\nI never hoped that, this side far-off Heaven,\nThese three,--whom all exalted souls pursue,--\nI e'er should see; until to me 't was given,\nLady, to meet the three, made one, in you.\n\n\n\n\n_When Ships put\nout to Sea_\n\nI\n\n\nIt's \"Sweet, good-bye,\" when pennants fly\n  And ships put out to sea;\nIt's a loving kiss, and a tear or two\nIn an eye of brown or an eye of blue;--\n  And you'll remember me,\n        Sweetheart,\n  And you'll remember me.\n\n\nII\n\n\nIt's \"Friend or foe?\" when signals blow\n  And ships sight ships at sea;\nIt's clear for action, and man the guns,\nAs the battle nears or the battle runs;--\n  And you'll remember me,\n        Sweetheart,\n  And you'll remember me.\n\n\nIII\n\n\nIt's deck to deck, and wrath and wreck\n  When ships meet ships at sea;\nIt's scream of shot and shriek of shell,\nAnd hull and turret a roaring hell;--\n  And you'll remember me,\n        Sweetheart,\n  And you'll remember me.\n\n\nIV\n\n\nIt's doom and death, and pause a breath\n  When ships go down at sea;\nIt's hate is over and love begins,\nAnd war is cruel whoever wins;--\n  And you'll remember me,\n        Sweetheart,\n  And you'll remember me.\n\n\n\n\n_The\n\"Kentucky\"_\n\n  (Battleship, launched March 24, 1898.)\n\nI\n\n\nHere's to her who bears the name\n    Of our State;\nMay the glory of her fame\n    Be as great!\nIn the battle's dread eclipse,\nWhen she opens iron lips,\nWhen our ships confront the ships\n    Of the foe,\nMay each word of steel she utters carry woe!\n    Here's to her!\n\n\nII\n\n\nHere's to her, who, like a knight\n    Mailed of old,\nFrom far sea to sea the Right\n    Shall uphold.\nMay she always deal defeat,--\nWhen contending navies meet,\nAnd the battle's screaming sleet\n    Blinds and stuns,--\nWith the red, terrific thunder of her guns.\n    Here's to her!\n\n\nIII\n\n\nHere's to her who bears the name\n    Of our State;\nMay the glory of her fame\n    Be as great!\nLike a beacon, like a star,\nMay she lead our squadrons far,--\nWhen the hurricane of war\n    Shakes the world,--\nWith her pennant in the vanward broad unfurled.\n    Here's to her!\n\n\n\n\n_Quatrains_\n\nI\n\nMOTHS AND FIREFLIES\n\n\nSince Fancy taught me in her school of spells\nI know her tricks--These are not moths at all,\nNor fireflies; but masking Elfland belles\nWhose link-boys torch them to Titania's ball.\n\n\nII\n\nAUTUMN WILD-FLOWERS\n\n\nLike colored lanterns swung in Elfin towers,\nWild morning-glories light the tangled ways,\nAnd, like the rosy rockets of the Fays,\nBurns the sloped crimson of the cardinal-flowers.\n\n\nIII\n\nTHE WIND IN THE PINES\n\n\nWhen winds go organing through the pines\nOn hill and headland, darkly gleaming,\nMeseems I hear sonorous lines\nOf Iliads that the woods are dreaming.\n\n\nIV\n\nOPPORTUNITY\n\n\nBehold a hag whom Life denies a kiss\nAs he rides questward in knighterrant-wise;\nOnly when he hath passed her is it his\nTo know, too late, the Fairy in disguise.\n\n\nV\n\nDREAMS\n\n\nThey mock the present and they haunt the past,\nAnd in the future there is naught agleam\nWith hope, the soul desires, that at last\nThe heart pursuing does not find a dream.\n\n\nVI\n\nTHE STARS\n\n\nThese--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame,\nIn which he reads his blessing or his curse--\nAre syllables with which God speaks His name\nIn the vast utterance of the universe.\n\n\nVII\n\nBEAUTY\n\n\nHigh as a star, yet lowly as a flower,\nUnknown she takes her unassuming place\nAt Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour\nStrikes, and, behold, the marvel of her face.\n\n\n\n\n_Processional_\n\n\nUniverses are the pages\nOf that book whose words are ages;\nOf that book which destiny\nOpens in eternity.\n\nThere each syllable expresses\nSilence; there each thought a guess is;\nIn whose rhetoric's cosmic runes\nRoll the worlds and swarming moons.\n\nThere the systems, we call solar,\nEquatorial and polar,\nWrite their lines of rushing light\nOn the awful leaves of night.\n\nThere the comets, vast and streaming,\nPunctuate the heavens' gleaming\nScroll; and suns, gigantic, shine,\nPeriods to each starry line.\n\nThere, initials huge, the Lion\nLooms and measureless Orion;\nAnd, as 'neath a chapter done,\nBurns the Great-Bear's colophon.\n\nConstellated, hieroglyphic,\nNumbering each page terrific,\nFiery on the nebular black,\nFlames the hurling zodiac.\n\nIn that book, o'er which Chaldean\nWisdom pored and many an eon\nOf philosophy long dead,\nThis is all that man has read:--\n\nHe has read how good and evil,--\nIn creation's wild upheaval,--\nWarred; while God wrought terrible\nAt foundations red of Hell.\n\nHe has read of man and woman;\nLaws and gods, both beast and human;\nThrones of hate and creeds of lust,\nVanished now and turned to dust.\n\nArts and manners that have crumbled;\nCities buried; empires tumbled:\nTime but breathed on them its breath;\nEarth is builded of their death.\n\nThese but lived their little hour,\nFilled with pride and pomp and power;\nWhat availed them all at last?\nWe shall pass as they have past.\n\nStill the human heart will dream on\nLove, part angel and part demon;\nYet, I question, what secures\nOur belief that aught endures?\n\nIn that book, o'er which Chaldean\nWisdom pored and many an eon\nOf philosophy long dead,\nThis is all that man has read.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOTHER BOOKS OF VERSE BY MADISON CAWEIN\n\n\n\nDays and Dreams            Cloth, gilt top,    $1.00\nMoods and Memories            \"       \"         1.00\nRed Leaves and Roses          \"       \"         1.00\nPoems of Nature and Love      \"       \"         1.00\nIntimations of the Beautiful  \"       \"         1.00\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nPUBLISHED BY\n\nG.P. PUTNAM'S SONS,\n\n27 & 29, West Twenty-third Street, New York, N. Y\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n_Sent by mail, postpaid, to any address on receipt of price._\n\n\n\n\nSOME NOTICES OF MR. CAWEIN'S VERSES\n\n\n\"I should like to praise the poetry of Madison Cawein, of Kentucky,\nwhich is as remote as Greece from the actual everyday life of his\nregion; as remote from it as the poetry of Keats was from the England\nof his day, and which is yet so richly, so passionately true to the\npresence and essence of nature as she can be known only in the\nSouthern West. I named Keats with no purpose of likening this young\npoet to him, but since he is named it is impossible not to recognize\nthat they are of the same Hellenic race; full of like rapture in sky\nand field and stream, and of a like sensitive reluctance from whatever\nchills the joy of sense in youth, in love, in melancholy. I know Mr.\nCawein has faults, and very probably he knows it, too; his delight in\ncolor sometimes plunges him into mere paint; his wish to follow a\nsubtle thought or emotion sometimes lures him into empty dusks; his\ndevotion to nature sometimes contents him with solitudes bereft of the\nhuman interest by which alone the landscape lives. But he is, to my\nthinking, a most genuine poet, and one of these few Americans, who,\neven in their over-refinement, could never be mistaken for Europeans;\nwho perhaps by reason of it are only the more American.\"--WILLIAM\nDEAN HOWELLS in _Literature_.\n\n\"From the poetry of our day I select that of Madison Cawein as an\nexample of conspicuous merit. Many American readers have enjoyed Mr.\nCawein's productions.... But the appreciation of his poetry has never\nbeen as great as its merits would indicate. His poems are rather _too\ngood_ to be caught up on the babbling tongue and cast forth into mere\npopularity. They are caviare to the general; and yet they have in them\nthe best elements of popular favor.\n\n\"Cawein is a classicist. He will have it that poems, however humble\nthe theme, however tender the sentiment, shall wear a tasteful Attic\ndress. I do not intimate that Mr. Cawein's mind has been too much\nsaturated with the classical spirit or that his native instincts have\nbeen supplanted with Greek exotics and flowers out of the renaissance,\nbut rather that his own mental constitution is of a classical as well\nas a romantic mould.\n\n\"The themes of Cawein's poetry are generally taken from the world of\nromance. If there be any modern bard who can recreate a mediaeval\ncastle and give to its inhabitants the sentiments which were theirs in\nthe twelfth century, Cawein is the poet who can. He takes delight in\nthe East. He is the Omar Khayyam of the Ohio Valley. He is as much of\na Mohammedan as a Christian. He knows the son of Abdallah better than\nhe knows Cromwell; and has more sympathy with a Khalif than with a\nColonel. He dwells in the romantic regions of life; but the romance is\nreal. The hope is a true hope. The dream is a true dream. The picture\nis a painting, and not a chromo. The love is a passion, and not a\ndilettante episode. Cawein's art is a genuine art. His verse is\nexquisite. Out of the three hundred and thirteen poems in the five\nvolumes under consideration there may be found hardly a false or\nbroken harmony....\"--JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, LL.D., in _The\nArena_.\n\n\"The rattlesnake-weed and the bluet-bloom were unknown to Herrick and\nto Wordsworth, but such art as Mr. Cawein's makes them at home in\nEnglish poetry. There is passion, too, and thought in his\nequipment....\"--WILLIAM ARCHER in the _Pall Mall Magazine_.\n\n\"I find in the best pieces an intoxicating sense of beauty, a\nrichness, that is rarely achieved, although every young poet nowadays\nstrives after it. I find, too, a daring use of language which\nsometimes, nay often, conducts to genuine and startling\nfelicities.\"--EDMUND GOSSE.","title":"Myth and Romance: Being a Book of Verses","tradition":"myth-cosmogony","translated_text":null,"word_count":16339}