Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure Part 2

Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue alone revives beyond the grave."

[Footnote A: "Every man is born dead in sin. Virtue alone brings life eternal."]

STANCHEZZA.

EARLY LINES

Lo Zephyr floats, on pinions delicate, Past the dark belfry, where a deep-toned bell Sways back and forth, Grief tolling out the knell For thee, my friend, so young and yet so great.

Dead--thou art dead. The destiny of men Is ever thus, like waves upon the main To rise, grow great, fall with a crash and wane, While still another grows to wane again, Dead--thou art dead. Would that I too were gone And that the gra.s.s which rustles on thy grave Might also over mine forever wave Made living by the death it grew upon.

I ask not Orpheus-like, that Pluto give Thy soul to earth. I would not have thee live.

PRaeTERITA EX INSTANTIBUS.

How strange it is that, in the after age,-- When Time's clepsydra will be nearer dry-- That all the accustomed things we now pa.s.s by Unmarked, because familiar, shall engage The antique reverence of men to be; And that quaint interest which prompts the sage The silent fathoms of the past to gauge Shall keep alive our own past memory, Making all great of ours--the garb we wear-- Our voiceless cities, reft of roof and spire-- The very skull whence now the eye of fire Glances bright sign of what the soul can dare.

So shall our annals make an envied lore, And men will say, 'Thus did the men of yore.'

SUNRISE.

EARLY LINES

I saw the shining-limbed Apollo stand, Exultant, on the rim of Orient, And well and mightily his bow he bent, And unseen-swift the arrow left his hand.

Far on it sped, as did those elder ones That long ago shed plague upon the Greek-- Far on--and pierced the side of Night, who weak And out of breath with fright, fled to his sons, The nether ghosts; and lo! his jewelled robe No more did shade a sleep-encircled world; And thereupon the faery legions furled The silk of silence, and the wheeling globe Spun freer on its grand, accustomed way, While all things living rose to hail the day.

REALITY.

A FANCY

Fade lesser dreams, that, built of tenderness, Young trust and tinted hopes, have led me long.

These jagged ways ye whiled will pain me less Than hath your falsity. Your spirit song Sent magic wafted up and down along The waves of wind to me. Your world was real.

There was no ruder world that I could feel.

I lived in dreams and thought you all I would, Nor knew what dread, bare truth is doomed to rise, When love and hope and all but one far Good, Like sunset lands feel the cold night of lies.

Go, sweetest visions, die amid my tears, For hence, nor cheered, nor blinded, must I seek That larger dream that cannot fade; though years Of leaden days and leagues of by-path bleak Must intervene, with austere sadness gray, Fade dimmer! lest in agony I turn, And heartsick seek ye, though the Fates shriek "Nay!"

And the wroth heavens with judgment lightnings burn.

Go useless lesser dreams. And where they were, Rise, grave aerial Good! Thy texture's true.

There is no good can die. "No ill," says Time, "can bear, However beautiful, my long, long earnest view."

SEARCHINGS.

(EARLY LINES.)

Soul, thou hast lived before. Thy wing Hath swept the ancient folds of light Which once wrapt stilly everything, Before the advent of a Night.

O thou art blind and thou art dead Unto the knowledge that was thine.

A longing and a dreamy dread Alone oft shadow the divine.

Full loud calls past eternity, But Lethe's murmur stills its roar, The one vague truth that reaches thee Is this--that thou hast lived before.

Home often comes some voice of eld Confused and low--a broken surge By fate and distance half withheld-- Rich in linked sadness like a dirge.

The m.u.f.fled, great bell Silence clangs His solemn call, and thou, O soul!

Dost stir in sense's torpid fangs, Like the blind magnet, toward a pole.

The deep, vast, swelling organ-sound; The cadence of an evening flute, Bring oft those ancient joys around To linger till the notes are mute.

And when thy hushed breathing fills The shrine of quiet reverence, Then, too, a freeing angel stills The clanking of the chains of sense.

But nearest to that former life Another power calleth thee, Away from care, away from strife, Toward what thou wast--infinity.

And in thee, soul, the deepest chord Thrills to a strain rung from above; That strain is bound within a word, A sole, sweet word, and it is--Love.

Love--yet it cannot set thee free To sweep again those folds of light, It torches but a part to thee And dim, though fair. The rest is night.

As the fine structure of a man Fits into life's great world, foremade, So too it shadoweth the plan Of ages hidden in the shade.

And thou hast lived before; hast known The depth of every mystery, Has dwelt in Nature, hid, alone And winged the blue aetherial sea;

Hast looked upon the ends of s.p.a.ce; Hast visited each rolling star,-- Before Time measured forth his pace, Scythe-armed, on a terrestrial war.

HOMER.

(EARLY LINES.)

Time, with his constant touch, has half erased The memory, but he cannot dim the fame Of one who best of all has paraphrased The tale of waters with a tale of flame, Yet left us but his accents and his name.

Upon that life, the sun of history Shines not, but Legend, like a moon in mist, Sheds over it a weird uncertainty, In which all figures wave and actions twist, So that a man may read them as he list.

We know not if he trod some Theban street, And sought compa.s.sion on his aged woe, We know not if on Chian sand his feet Left footprints once; but only this we know, How the high ways of fame those footprints show.

Along the border of the restless sea, The lonely thinker must have loved to roam, We feel his soul wrapt in its majesty, And he can speak in words that drip with foam, As though himself a deep, and depths his home.

Hark! under all and through and over all, Runs on the cadence of the changeful sea; Now pleasantly the graceful surges fall, And now they mutter in an angry key Ever, throughout their changes, grand and free.

How sternly sang he of Achilles' might, How sweetly of the sweet Andromache, How low his lyre when Ajax prays for light; (Well might he bend that lyre in sympathy For also great, and also blind was he.)

We almost see the nod of sternbrowed Jove, And feel Olympus shake; we almost hear The melodies that Greek youths interwove In paean to Apollo, and the clear, Full voice of Nestor, sounding far and near.