The King was shaken with holy fear;
"The Gods," he said, "would have chosen well; Yet both are near, and both are dear,
And which the dearest I cannot tell!"
But the Priest was happy,
His victim won:
"We have his dearest,
His only son!"
The rites prepared, the victim bared,
The knife uprising toward the blow,
To the altar-stone she sprang alone,
"Me, not my darling, no!"
He caught her away with a sudden cry;
Suddenly from him brake his wife,
And shrieking "I am his dearest, I—
I am his dearest!" rush'd on the knife.
And the Priest was happy,
"O, Father Odin,
We give you a life.
Which was his nearest ?
Who was his dearest?
The Gods have answer'd;
We give them the wife!"
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with
Spirit can meet —
Closer is He thau breathing, and nearer than hands
and feet.
God is law, say the wise, O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His
voice.
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fooi:
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent
in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man
cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision-were it
not He?
FLOWER in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies; —
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
GLORY of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an end-
Glory of Virtue, tc dght, to struggle, to right the
LUCILIA, wedded to Lucretius, found
Her master cold; for when the morning flusa
Of passion and the first embrace had died
Between them, tho' he loved her none the less,
Yet often when the woman heard his foot
Return from pacings in the field, and ran
To greet him with a kiss, the master took
The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue Small notice, or austerely, for- his mind
be dust,
Half buried in some weightier argument,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the Or fancy-borne perhaps upon the rise
And long roll of the Hexameter-he past She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of To turn and ponder those three hundred scrolls the just,
Left by the Teacher whom he held divine.
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a sum- She brook'd it not; but wrathful, petulant, mer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
the stars, the seas, the hills and
Dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch
Who brew'd the philter which had power, they said,
To lead an errant passion home again.
And this, at times, she mingled with his drink,
And this destroy'd him; for the wicked broth
Confused the chemic labor of the blood,
And tickling the brute brain within the man's,
Made havoc among those tender cells, and check'd
His power to shape: he loath'd himself; and once
THE sun, the moon,
the plains-
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? After a tempest woke upon a morn
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel Just ere the waking: terrible! for it seem'd
A void was made in Nature; all her bonds
Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atom-streams
Glory about thee, without thee: and thou fulfillest And torrents of her myriad universe,
thy doom,
Ruining along the illimitable inane,
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendor Fly on to clash together again, and make
Forever: that was mine, my dream, I knew it
Of and belonging to me, as the dog
With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies
His function of the woodland: but the next!
I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed
Came driving rainlike down again on earth,
And where it dashed the reddening meadow, sprang
No dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth,
For these I thought my dream would show to me,
But girls, Hetairai, curious in their art,
Hired animalisms, vile as those that made
The mulberry-faced Dictator's orgies worse
Than aught they fable of the quiet Gods.
If all be atoms, how then should the Gods
Being atomic not be dissoluble,
Not follow the great law? My master held
That Gods there are, for all men so believe.
I press'd my footsteps into his, and meant
Surely to lead my Memmius in a train
Of flowery clauses onward to the proof
That Gods there are, and deathless.
meant?
I have forgotten what I meant: my mind
Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed.
"Look where another of our Gods, the Sun,
And hands they mixt, and yell'd and round me drove Apollo, Delius, or of older use
In narrowing circles till I yell'd again
Half suffocated, and sprang up, and saw —
Was it the first beam of my latest day?
All-seeing Hyperion-what you will-
Has mounted yonder; since he never sware,
Except his wrath were wreak'd on wretched man,
That he would only shine among the dead
"Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the Hereafter, tales! for never yet on earth
The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword
Now over and now under, now direct,
Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed
At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire,
The fire that left a roofless Ilion,
Shot out of them, and scorch'd me that I woke.
"Is this thy vengeance, holy Venus, thine,
Because I would not one of thine own doves,
Not ev'n a rose, were offer'd to thee? thine,
Forgetful how my rich proœmion makes
Thy glory fly along the Italian field,
In lays that will outlast thy Deity?
"Deity? nay, thy worshippers. My tongue
Trips, or I speak profanely. Which of these
Angers thee most, or angers thee at all?
Not if thon be'st of those who far aloof
From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,
Live the great life which all our greatest fain
Would follow, centred in eternal calm.
Nay, if thou canst, O Goddess, like ourselves
Touch, and be touched, then would I cry to thee
To kiss thy Mavors, roll thy tender arms
Round him, and keep him from the lust of blood
That makes a steaming slaughter-house of Rome.
"Ay, but I meant not thee: I meant not her,
Whom all the pines of Ida shook to see
Slide from that quiet heaven of hers, and tempt
The Trojan, while his neat-herds were abroad;
Nor her that o'er her wounded hunter wept
Her Deity false in human-amorous tears;
Nor whom her beard.ess apple-arbiter
Decided fairest. Rather, O ye Gods,
Poet-like, as the great Sicilian called
Calliope to grace his golden verse-
Ay, and this Kypris also- did I take
That popular name of thine to shadow forth
The all-generating powers and genial heat
Of Nature, when she strikes through the thick blood
Of cattle, and light is large and lambs are glad
Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird
Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers
Which things appear the work of mighty Gods.
"The Gods! and if I go my work is left
Unfinish'd-if I go. The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm! and such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain
Letting his own life go. The Gods, the Gods!
Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox
Moan round the spit-nor knows he what he sees;
King of the East altho' he seem, and girt
With song and flame and fragrance, slowly lifts
His golden feet on those empurpled stairs
That climb into the windy halls of heaven.
And here he glances on an eye new-born,
And gets for greeting but a wail of pain;
And here he stays upon a freezing orb
That fain would gaze upon him to the last:
And here upon a yellow eyelid fall'n
And closed by those who mourn a friend in vain,
Not thankful that his troubles are no more.
And me, altho' his fire is on my face
Blinding, he sees not, nor at all can tell
Whether I mean this day to end myself,
Or lend an ear to Plato where he says,
That men like soldiers may not quit the post
Allotted by the Gods: but he that holds
The Gods are careless, wherefore need he care
Greatly for them, nor rather plunge at once,
Being troubled, wholly out of sight, and sink
Past earthquake- ay, and gout and stone, that break
Body toward death, and palsy, death-in-life,
And wretched age- and worst disease of all,
Those prodigies of myriad nakednesses,
And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable,
Abominable, strangers at my hearth
Not welcome, harpies miring every dish,
The phantom husks of something foully done,
And fleeting through the boundless universe,
And blasting the long quiet of my breast
With animal heat and dire insanity.
"How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp These idols to herself? or do they fly
Now thinner, and now thicker, like the flakes
In a fall of snow, and so press in, perforce
Of multitude, as crowds that in an hour
Of civic tumult jam the doors, and bear
The keepers down, and throng, their rags and they,
The basest, far into that council-hall
Where sit the best and stateliest of the land?
"Can I not fling this horror off me again,
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile,
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,
At random ravage? and how easily
The mountain there has cast his cloudy slough,
Now towering o'er him in serenest air,
A mountain o'er a mountain, ay, and within
All hollow as the hopes and fears of men.
"But who was he, that in the garden snared
Picus and Faunus, rustic Gods? a tale
To langh at-more to laugh at in myself-
For look! what is it? there? yon arbutus
Totters: a noiseless riot underneath
Strikes through the wood, sets all the tops quiver
ing-
The mountain quickens into Nymph and Faun;
And here an Oread-how the sun delights
To glance and shift about her slippery sides,
And rosy knees and supple roundedness,
And budded bosom-peaks-who this way runs
Before the rest - A satyr, a satyr, see-
Follows; but him I proved impossible;
Twy-natured is no nature; yet he draws
Nearer and nearer, and I scan him now
Beastlier than any phantom of his kind
That ever butted his rough brother-brute
For lust or lusty blood or provender:
I hate, abhor, spit, sicken at him; and she
Loathes him as well; such a precipitate heel,
Fledged as it were with Mercury's ankle-wing,
Whirls her to me: but will she fling herself,
Shameless upon me? Catch her, goatfoot: nay,
Hide, hide them, million-myrtled wilderness,
And cavern-shadowing laurels, hide! do I wish --
What?-that the bush were leafless? or to whelm
All of them in one massacre? O ye Gods,
I know you careless, yet, behold, to you
From childly wont and ancient use I call-
I thought I lived securely as yourselves—
No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite,
No madness of ambition, avarice, none:
No larger feast that under plane or pine
With neighbors laid along the grass, to take
Only such cups as left us friendly warm,
Affirming each his own philosophy —
Nothing to mar the sober majesties
Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life.
But now it seems some unseen monster lays
His vast and filthy hands upon my will,
Wrenching it backward into his; and spoils
My bliss in being; and it was not great;
For save when shutting reasons up in rhythm,
Or Heliconian honey in living words,
To make a truth less harsh, I often grew
Tired of so much within our little life,
Or of so little in our little life-
Poor little life that toddles half an hour
Crown'd with a flower or two, and there an end
And since the nobler pleasure seems to fade,
Why should I, beastlike as I find myself,
Not manlike end myself?-our privilege-
What beast has heart to do it? And what man,
What Roman would be dragged in triumph thus?
Not I; not he, who bears one name with her,
Whose death-blow struck the dateless doom of kings,
When brooking not the Tarquin in her veins,
She made her blood in sight of Collatine
And all his peers, flushing the guiltless air,
Spout from the maiden fountain in her heart.
And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks
As I am breaking now!
"And therefore now Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all, Great Nature, take, and 1orcing far apart Those blind beginnings that have made me man, Dash them anew together at her will Through all her cycles-into man once more Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower— But till this cosmic order everywhere Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day Cracks all to pieces, and that hour perhaps Is not so far when momentary man Shall seem no more a something to himself, But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes, And even his bones long laid within the grave, The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, Into the unseen forever, till that hour, My golden work in which I told a truth That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel, And numbs the Fury's ringlet-snake, and plucks The mortal soul from out immortal hell,
Shall stand: ay, surely: then it fails at last,
And perishes as I must; for O Thou,
Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity,
Yearned after by the wisest of the wise,
Who fail to find thee, being as thou art
Without one pleasure and without one pain,
Howbeit I know thou surely must be mine
Or soon or late, yet out of season, thus
I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not
How roughly men may woo thee so they win-
Thus thus: the soul flies out and dies in the air.
With that he drove the knife into his side: She heard him raging, heard him fall: ran in, Beat breast, tore hair, cried ont upon herself As having failed in duty to him, shriek'd That she but meant to win him back, fell on hh, Clasp'd, kiss'd him, wail'd: he answer'd, "Care not thou
What matters? All is over: Fare thee well!"
THE GOLDEN SUPPER.
[This poem is founded upon a story in Boccaccio.
A young lover, Julian, whose cousin and foster sister, Camilla, has been wedded to his friend and rival, Lionel, endeavors to narrate the story of his own love for her, and the strange sequel of it. He speaks of having been haunted in delirium by visions and the sound of bella, sometimes tolling for a funeral, and at last ringing for a marriage, but be breaks away, overcome, as he approaches the Event, and a witness to it completes the tale.]
HE flies the event: he leaves the event to me:
Poor Julian-how he rush'd away; the bells,
Those marriage-bells, echoing in ear and heart-
But cast a parting glance at me, you saw,
As who should say "continue." Well, he had
One golden hour-of triumph shall I say?
Solace at least-before he left his home.
Would you had seen him in that hour of his! He moved thro' all of it majesticallyRestrain'd himself quite to the close-but now →
Whether they were his lady's marriage-bells,
Or prophets of them in his fantasy,
I never ask'd: but Lionel and the girl
Were wedded, and our Julian came again
Back to his mother's house among the pines.
But there, their gloom, the Mountains and the Bay
The whole land weigh'd him down as Etna does
The Giant of Mythology: he would go,
Would leave the land forever, and had gone
Surely, but for a whisper "Go not yet,"
Some warning, and divinely as it seem'd
By that which follow'd - but of this I deem
As of the visions that he told - the event
Glanced back upon them in his after life,
And partly made them - tho' he knew it not.
And thus he stay'd and would not look at herNo, not for months: but, when the eleventh moon After their marriage lit the lover's Bay, Heard yet once more the tolling bell, and said, Would you could toll me out of life, but foundAll softly as his mother broke it to him — A crueller reason than a crazy car, For that low knell tolling his lady deadDead- and had lain three days without a puise: All that look'd on her had pronounced her dead. And so they bore her (for in Julian's land They never nail a dumb head up in elm), Bore her free-faced to the free airs of heaven, And laid her in the vault of her own kin.
What did he then? not die: he is here and haleNot plunge headforemost from the mountain there,
When he returns, and then will I return, And I will make a solemn offering of you
And leave the name of Lover's Leap: not he:
He knew the meaning of the whisper now,
Thought that he knew it. "This, I stay'd for this; To him you love." And faintly she replied,
O love, I have not seen you for so long.
Now, now, will I go down into the grave,
I will be all alone with all I love,
And kiss her on the lips. She is his no more:
The dead returns to me, and I go down
To kiss the dead."
The fancy stirr'd him so
He rose and went, and entering the dim vault,
And, making there a sudden light, beheld
All round about him that which all will be.
The light was but a flash, and went again.
Then at the far end of the vault he saw
His lady with the moonlight on her face;
Her breast as in a shadow-prison, bars
Of black and bands of silver, which the moon
Struck from an open grating overhead
High in the wall, and all the rest of her
Drown'd in the gloom and horror of the vault.
"It was my wish," he said, "to pass, to sleep,
To rest, to be with her-till the great day
Peal'd on us with that music which rights all,
And raised us hand in hand." And kneeling there
Down in the dreadful dust that once was man,
Dust, as he said, that once was loving hearts,
Hearts that had beat with such a love as mine-
Not such as mine, no, nor for such as her -
He softly put his arm about her neck
And kiss'd her more than once, till helpless death
And silence made him bold nay, but I wrong him,
He reverenced his dear lady even in death;
But, placing his true hand upon her heart,
"O, you warm heart," he moaned, "not even death
Can chill you all at once :" then starting, thought
His dreams had come again. "Do I wake or sleep?
Or am I made immortal, or my love
Mortal once more ?" It beat - the heart - it beat:
Faint-but it beat: at which his own began
To pulse with such a vehemence that it drown'd
The feebler motion underneath his hand.
But when at last his doubts were satisfied,
He raised her softly from the sepulchre,
And, wrapping her all over with the cloak
He came in, and now striding fast, and now
Sitting awhile to rest, but evermore
Holding his golden burden in his arms,
So bore her thro' the solitary land
Back to the mother's house where she was born.
There the good mother's kindly ministering, With half a night's appliances, recall'd Her fluttering life: she raised an eye that ask'd "Where?" till the things familiar to her youth Had made a silent answer: then she spoke, "Here! and how came I here?" and learning it (They told her somewhat rashly as I think), At once began to wander and to wail, "Ay, but you know that you must give me back: Send bid him come;" but Lionel was away, Stung by his loss had vanish'd, none knew where. "He casts me out," she wept, "and goes"— a wail That seeming something, yet was nothing, born Not from believing miud, but shatter'd nerve, Yet haunting Julian, as her own reproof At some precipitance in her burial. Then, when her own true spirit had return'd, "O yes, and you," she said, "and none but you. For you have given me life and love again, And none but you yourself shall tell him of it, And you shall give me back when he returns." "Stay then a little," answer'd Julian, “here, And keep yourself, none knowing, to yourself: And I will do your will. I may not stay, No, not an hour: but send me notice of him
"And I will do your will, and none shall know."
Not know? with such a secret to be known. But all their house was old and loved them both, And all the house had known the loves of both · Had died almost to serve them any way, And all the land was waste and solitary; And then he rode away; but after this, An hour or two, Camilla's travail came Upon her, and that day a boy was born, Heir of his face and land, to Lionel.
And thus our lonely lover rode away, And pausing at a hostel in a marsh, There fever seized upon him: myself was then Travelling that land, and meant to rest an hour And sitting down to such a base repast, It makes me angry yet to speak of itI heard a groaning overhead, and climb'd The moulder'd stairs (for everything was vile), And in a loft, with none to wait on him, Found, as it seem'd, a skeleton alone, Raving of dead men's dust and beating hearts.
A dismal hostel in a dismal land,
A flat malarian world of reed and rush!
But there from fever and my care of him
Sprang up a friendship that may help us yet.
For while we roam'd along the dreary coast,
And waited for her message, piece by piece
I learnt the drearier story of his life;
And, tho' he loved and honor'd Lionel,
Found that the sudden wail his lady made
Dwelt in his fancy: did he know her worth,
Her beauty even? should he not be taught,
Ev'n by the price that others set upon it,
The value of that jewel he had to guard?
Suddenly came her notice and we past,
I with our lover to his native Bay.
This love is of the brain, the mind, the sou: That makes the sequel pure; tho' some of us Beginning at the sequel know no more. Not such am I: and yet I say, the bird That will not hear my call, however sweet, But if my neighbor whistle answers him What matter ? there are others in the wood. Yet when I saw her (and I thought hit crazed, Tho' not with such a craziness as needs A cell and keeper), those dark eyes of hers — Oh! such dark eyes ! and not her eyes alone, But all from these two where she touch'd or earth, For such a craziness as Julian's seem'd No less than one divine apology.
So sweetly and so modestly she came To greet us, her young hero in her arms! "Kiss him," she said. "You gave me life again. He, but for you, had never seen it once. His other father you! Kiss him, and then Forgive him, if his name be Julian too."
Talk of lost hopes and broken heart! his own Sent such a flame into his face, I knew Some sudden vivid pleasure hit him there.
But he was all the more resolved to go, And sent at once to Lionel, praying him By that great love they both had borne the dead, To come and revel for one hour with him Before he left the land forevermore;
And then to friends - they were not many-who lived
|