After long weary days I stood again And waited at the Parting of the Ways; Again the figure of a woman veiled Stood forth and beckoned, and I followed now: Down to no bower of roses led the path. But through the streets of towns where chattering Cold Hewed wood for fires whose glow was owned and fenced, Where Nakedness wove garments of warm wool Not for itself; - or through the fields it led Where Hunger reaped the unattainable grain, Where Idleness enforced saw idle lands, Leagues of unpeopled soil, the common earth, Walled round with paper against God and Man. "I cannot look," I groaned, "at only these ; The heart grows hardened with perpetual wont, And palters with a feigned necessity, The Form replied: "Men follow Duty, never overtake; Duty nor lifts her veil nor looks behind." But, as she spake, a loosened lock of hair Slipped from beneath her hood, and I, who looked To see it gray and thin, saw amplest gold; Not that dull metal dug from sordid earth, But such as the retiring sunset flood Leaves heaped on bays and capes of island cloud. "O Guide divine," I prayed, "although not yet may repair the virtue which I feel. Gone out at touch of untuned things and foul With draughts of Beauty, yet declare how soon!" "Faithless and faint of heart," the voice returned, "Thou see'st no beauty save thou make it first; Man, Woman, Nature, each is but a glass Where the soul sees the image of herself, Visible echoes, offsprings of herself. But, since thou need'st assurance of how soon, Wait till that angel comes who opens all, The reconciler, he who lifts the veil, The reuniter, the rest-bringer, Death." I waited, and methought he came; but how, Or in what shape, I doubted, for no sign, By touch or mark, he gave me as he passed: Only I know a lily that I held Snapt short below the head and shrivelled up; Then turned my Guide and looked at me unveiled, And I beheld no face of matron stern, But that enchantment I had followed WHEN I was a beggarly boy, But I had Aladdin's lamp; My beautiful castles in Spain ! Since then I have toiled day and night, I have money and power good store, But I'd give all my lamps of silver bright, For the one that is mine no more; Take, Fortune, whatever you choose, You gave, and may snatch again; I have nothing 't would pain me to lose, For I own no more castles in Spain ! AN INVITATION. NINE years have slipt like hour-glass sand From life's still-emptying globe away, Since last, dear friend, I clasped your hand, And stood upon the impoverished land, Watching the steamer down the bay. I held the token which you gave, While slowly the smoke-pennon curled O'er the vague rim 'tween sky and wave, And shut the distance like a grave, Leaving me in the colder world. The old worn world of hurry and heat, The young, fresh world of thought and scope, While you, where beckoning billows fleet Climb far sky-beaches still and sweet, You sought the new world in the old, He needs no ship to cross the tide, Whatever moulds of various brain Come back our ancient walks to tread, sped The nights to proctor-haunted ends. Constant are all our former loves, Unchanged the icehouse-girdled pond, Its hemlock glooms, its shadowy coves, Where floats the coot and never moves, Its slopes of long-tamed green beyond. Our old familiars are not laid, Though snapt our wands and sunk our books; They beckon, not to be gainsaid, Where, round broad meads that mowers wade, The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks. Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow, From glow to gloom the hillsides shift Their plumps of orchard-trees arow, Their lakes of rye that wave and flow, Their snowy whiteweed's summer drift. There have we watched the West unfurl A cloud Byzantium newly born, With flickering spires and domes of pearl, And vapory surfs that crowd and curl There, as the flaming occident Where a twin sky but just before swallows Hung visioned trees, that, more and Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray, As upon Adam, red like blood, Or whether, under skies full flown, Against the beach's yellow zone, And, as we watch those canvas towers hours Convoy you from this land of ours, Since from my side you bear not him!" For years thrice three, wise Horace said, A poem rare let silence bind ; Come back! Not ours the Old World's good, The Old World's ill, thank God, not ours; But here, far better understood, Kindlier to me the place of birth Thence climbs an influence more benign Through pulse and nerve, through heart and brain; Sacred to me those fibres fine That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine The alien sun and alien rain! These nourish not like homelier glows Than where Italian earth receives And, in dark firmaments of leaves, THE NOMADES. WHAT Nature makes in any mood I, who take root and firmly cling, At noon the slumberous poppies over,) Clearer it grew than winter sky Scythians, with Nature not at strife, 390 SELF-STUDY. - PICTURES FROM APPLEDORE. SELF-STUDY. A PRESENCE both by night and day, And yet I felt it everywhere; How sweet it was! A buttercup Who was the nymph? Nay, I will see, So every magic art I tried, Gasping under titanic ferns; Granite shoulders and boulders and snags, Round which, though the winds in heaven be shut, The nightmared ocean murmurs and yearns, Welters, and swashes, and tosses, and turns, And the dreary black sea-weed lolls and wags; Only rock from shore to shore, Only a moan through the bleak clefts blown, With sobs in the rifts where the coarse kelp shifts, Falling and lifting, tossing and drifting, And the dread of some nameless thing unknown, These make Appledore. These make Appledore by night: There they lie for half a mile, If you look long, they seem to be moving Just as plainly as plain can be, Crushing and crowding, wading and shoving Out into the awful sea, Where you can hear them snort and |