The Little Book of Modern Verse
 A Selection from the Work of Contemporaneous American Poets

Biographical Notes

Sincere thanks are due to my friend Thomas S. Jones, Jr.,

who, during my absence in Europe, has kindly taken charge of all details

incident to putting "The Little Book of Modern Verse" through the press.

The Little Book of Modern Verse

Lord of my Heart's Elation. [Bliss Carman]

Lord of my heart's elation,

Spirit of things unseen,

Be thou my aspiration

Consuming and serene!

Bear up, bear out, bear onward,

This mortal soul alone,

To selfhood or oblivion,

Incredibly thine own, --

As the foamheads are loosened

And blown along the sea,

Or sink and merge forever

In that which bids them be.

I, too, must climb in wonder,

Uplift at thy command, --

Be one with my frail fellows

Beneath the wind's strong hand,

A fleet and shadowy column

Of dust or mountain rain,

To walk the earth a moment

And be dissolved again.

Be thou my exaltation

Or fortitude of mien,

Lord of the world's elation,

Thou breath of things unseen!

Gloucester Moors. [William Vaughn Moody]

A mile behind is Gloucester town

Where the fishing fleets put in,

A mile ahead the land dips down

And the woods and farms begin.

Here, where the moors stretch free

In the high blue afternoon,

Are the marching sun and talking sea,

And the racing winds that wheel and flee

On the flying heels of June.

Jill-o'er-the-ground is purple blue,

Blue is the quaker-maid,

The wild geranium holds its dew

Long in the boulder's shade.

Wax-red hangs the cup

From the huckleberry boughs,

In barberry bells the grey moths sup

Or where the choke-cherry lifts high up

Sweet bowls for their carouse.

Over the shelf of the sandy cove

Beach-peas blossom late.

By copse and cliff the swallows rove

Each calling to his mate.

Seaward the sea-gulls go,

And the land-birds all are here;

That green-gold flash was a vireo,

And yonder flame where the marsh-flags grow

Was a scarlet tanager.

This earth is not the steadfast place

We landsmen build upon;

From deep to deep she varies pace,

And while she comes is gone.

Beneath my feet I feel

Her smooth bulk heave and dip;

With velvet plunge and soft upreel

She swings and steadies to her keel

Like a gallant, gallant ship.

These summer clouds she sets for sail,

The sun is her masthead light,

She tows the moon like a pinnace frail

Where her phosphor wake churns bright.

Now hid, now looming clear,

On the face of the dangerous blue

The star fleets tack and wheel and veer,

But on, but on does the old earth steer

As if her port she knew.

God, dear God! Does she know her port,

Though she goes so far about?

Or blind astray, does she make her sport

To brazen and chance it out?

I watched when her captains passed:

She were better captainless.

Men in the cabin, before the mast,

But some were reckless and some aghast,

And some sat gorged at mess.

By her battened hatch I leaned and caught

Sounds from the noisome hold, --

Cursing and sighing of souls distraught

And cries too sad to be told.

Then I strove to go down and see;

But they said, "Thou art not of us!"

I turned to those on the deck with me

And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be:

Our ship sails faster thus."

Jill-o'er-the-ground is purple blue,

Blue is the quaker-maid,

The alder-clump where the brook comes through

Breeds cresses in its shade.

To be out of the moiling street

With its swelter and its sin!

Who has given to me this sweet,

And given my brother dust to eat?

And when will his wage come in?

Scattering wide or blown in ranks,

Yellow and white and brown,

Boats and boats from the fishing banks

Come home to Gloucester town.

There is cash to purse and spend,

There are wives to be embraced,

Hearts to borrow and hearts to lend,

And hearts to take and keep to the end, --

O little sails, make haste!

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,

What harbor town for thee?

What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,

Shall crowd the banks to see?

Shall all the happy shipmates then

Stand singing brotherly?

Or shall a haggard ruthless few

Warp her over and bring her to,

While the many broken souls of men

Fester down in the slaver's pen,

And nothing to say or do?

On a Subway Express. [Chester Firkins]

I, who have lost the stars, the sod,

For chilling pave and cheerless light,

Have made my meeting-place with God

A new and nether Night --

Have found a fane where thunder fills

Loud caverns, tremulous; -- and these

Atone me for my reverend hills

And moonlit silences.

A figment in the crowded dark,

Where men sit muted by the roar,

I ride upon the whirring Spark

Beneath the city's floor.

In this dim firmament, the stars

Whirl by in blazing files and tiers;

Kin meteors graze our flying bars,

Amid the spinning spheres.

Speed! speed! until the quivering rails

Flash silver where the head-light gleams,

As when on lakes the Moon impales

The waves upon its beams.

Life throbs about me, yet I stand

Outgazing on majestic Power;

Death rides with me, on either hand,

In my communion hour.

You that 'neath country skies can pray,

Scoff not at me -- the city clod; --

My only respite of the Day

Is this wild ride -- with God.

The Automobile. [Percy MacKaye]

Fluid the world flowed under us: the hills

Billow on billow of umbrageous green

Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen

One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills

And silver-rising storms and dewy stills

Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine

Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene

Coverts grew loud with our tumultuous wills.

Then all of Nature's old amazement seemed

Sudden to ask us: "Is this also Man?

This plunging, volant, land-amphibian

What Plato mused and Paracelsus dreamed?

Reply!" And piercing us with ancient scan,

The shrill, primeval hawk gazed down -- and screamed.

The Black Vulture. [George Sterling]

Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome,

He holds unshared the silence of the sky.

Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry

The eagle's empire and the falcon's home --

Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;

His hazards on the sea of morning lie;

Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh

Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.

And least of all he holds the human swarm --

Unwitting now that envious men prepare

To make their dream and its fulfillment one,

When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,

Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare

His roads between the thunder and the sun.

Chavez. [Mildred McNeal Sweeney]

So hath he fallen, the Endymion of the air,

And so lies down in slumber lapped for aye.

Diana, passing, found his youth too fair,

His soul too fleet and willing to obey.

She swung her golden moon before his eyes --

Dreaming, he rose to follow -- and ran -- and was away.

His foot was winged as the mounting sun.

Earth he disdained -- the dusty ways of men

Not yet had learned. His spirit longed to run

With the bright clouds, his brothers, to answer when

The airs were fleetest and could give him hand

Into the starry fields beyond our plodding ken.

All wittingly that glorious way he chose,

And loved the peril when it was most bright.

He tried anew the long-forbidden snows

And like an eagle topped the dropping height

Of Nagenhorn, and still toward Italy

Past peak and cliff pressed on, in glad, unerring flight.

Oh, when the bird lies low with golden wing

Bruised past healing by some bitter chance,

Still must its tireless spirit mount and sing

Of meadows green with morning, of the dance

On windy trees, the darting flight away,

And of that last, most blue, triumphant downward glance.

So murmuring of the snow: "THE SNOW, AND MORE,

O GOD, MORE SNOW!" on that last field he lay.

Despair and wonder spent their passionate store

In his great heart, through heaven gone astray,

And early lost. Too far the golden moon

Had swung upon that bright, that long, untraversed way.

Now to lie ended on the murmuring plain --

Ah, this for his bold heart was not the loss,

But that those windy fields he ne'er again

Might try, nor fleet and shimmering mountains cross,

Unfollowed, by a path none other knew:

His bitter woe had here its deep and piteous cause.

Dear toils of youth unfinished! And songs unwritten, left

By young and passionate hearts! O melodies

Unheard, whereof we ever stand bereft!

Clear-singing Schubert, boyish Keats -- with these

He roams henceforth, one with the starry band,

Still paying to fairy call and far command

His spirit heed, still winged with golden prophecies.

The Sea Gypsy. [Richard Hovey]

I am fevered with the sunset,

I am fretful with the bay,

For the wander-thirst is on me

And my soul is in Cathay.

There's a schooner in the offing,

With her topsails shot with fire,

And my heart has gone aboard her

For the Islands of Desire.

I must forth again to-morrow!

With the sunset I must be

Hull down on the trail of rapture

In the wonder of the sea.

At Gibraltar. [George Edward Woodberry]

I

England, I stand on thy imperial ground,

Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,

I feel within my blood old battles flow --

The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found

Still surging dark against the Christian bound

Wide Islam presses; well its peoples know

Thy heights that watch them wandering below;

I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.

I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.

England, 't is sweet to be so much thy son!

I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;

Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-day

Gibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gun

Startles the desert over Africa!

II

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seas

Between the East and West, that God has built;

Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,

While run thy armies true with His decrees.

Law, justice, liberty -- great gifts are these;

Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,

Lest, mixed and sullied with his country's guilt,

The soldier's life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!

Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,

Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, one

Rejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.

American I am; would wars were done!

Now westward, look, my country bids good-night --

Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

Euchenor Chorus. [Arthur Upson]

(From "The City")

Of old it went forth to Euchenor, pronounced of his sire --

Reluctant, impelled by the god's unescapable fire --

To choose for his doom or to perish at home of disease

Or be slain of his foes, among men, where Troy surges down to the seas.

Polyides, the soothsayer, spake it, inflamed by the god.

Of his son whom the fates singled out did he bruit it abroad;

And Euchenor went down to the ships with his armor and men

And straightway, grown dim on the gulf, passed the isles

he passed never again.

Why weep ye, O women of Corinth? The doom ye have heard

Is it strange to your ears that ye make it so mournful a word?

Is he who so fair in your eyes to his manhood upgrew,

Alone in his doom of pale death -- are of mortals the beaten so few?

O weep not, companions and lovers! Turn back to your joys:

The defeat was not his which he chose, nor the victory Troy's.

Him a conqueror, beauteous in youth, o'er the flood his fleet brought,

And the swift spear of Paris that slew completed the conquest he sought.

Not the falling proclaims the defeat, but the place of the fall;

And the fate that decrees and the god that impels through it all

Regard not blind mortals' divisions of slayer and slain,

But invisible glories dispense wide over the war-gleaming plain.

He whom a Dream hath possessed. [Shaemas O Sheel]

He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of doubting,

For mist and the blowing of winds and the mouthing of words he scorns;

Not the sinuous speech of schools he hears, but a knightly shouting,

And never comes darkness down, yet he greeteth a million morns.

He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of roaming;

All roads and the flowing of waves and the speediest flight he knows,

But wherever his feet are set, his soul is forever homing,

And going, he comes, and coming he heareth a call and goes.

He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of sorrow,

At death and the dropping of leaves and the fading of suns he smiles,

For a dream remembers no past and scorns the desire of a morrow,

And a dream in a sea of doom sets surely the ultimate isles.

He whom a dream hath possessed treads the impalpable marches,

From the dust of the day's long road he leaps to a laughing star,

And the ruin of worlds that fall he views from eternal arches,

And rides God's battlefield in a flashing and golden car.

The Kings. [Louise Imogen Guiney]

A man said unto his Angel:

"My spirits are fallen low,

And I cannot carry this battle:

O brother! where might I go?

"The terrible Kings are on me

With spears that are deadly bright;

Against me so from the cradle

Do fate and my fathers fight."

Then said to the man his Angel:

"Thou wavering, witless soul,

Back to the ranks! What matter

To win or to lose the whole,

"As judged by the little judges

Who hearken not well, nor see?

Not thus, by the outer issue,

The Wise shall interpret thee.

"Thy will is the sovereign measure

And only events of things:

The puniest heart, defying,

Were stronger than all these Kings.

"Though out of the past they gather,

Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,

And pallid Thirst of the Spirit

That is kin to the other twain,

"And Grief, in a cloud of banners,

And ringletted Vain Desires,

And Vice, with the spoils upon him

Of thee and thy beaten sires, --

"While Kings of eternal evil

Yet darken the hills about,

Thy part is with broken sabre

To rise on the last redoubt;

"To fear not sensible failure,

Nor covet the game at all,

But fighting, fighting, fighting,

Die, driven against the wall."

Mockery. [Louis Untermeyer]

God, I return to You on April days

When along country roads You walk with me,

And my faith blossoms like the earliest tree

That shames the bleak world with its yellow sprays --

My faith revives, when through a rosy haze

The clover-sprinkled hills smile quietly,

Young winds uplift a bird's clean ecstasy . . .

For this, O God, my joyousness and praise!

But now -- the crowded streets and choking airs,

The squalid people, bruised and tossed about;

These, or the over-brilliant thoroughfares,

The too-loud laughter and the empty shout,

The mirth-mad city, tragic with its cares . . .

For this, O God, my silence -- and my doubt.

An Ode in Time of Hesitation. [William Vaughn Moody]

I

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made

To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe,

And set here in the city's talk and trade

To the good memory of Robert Shaw,

This bright March morn I stand,

And hear the distant spring come up the land;

Knowing that what I hear is not unheard

Of this boy soldier and his Negro band,

For all their gaze is fixed so stern ahead,

For all the fatal rhythm of their tread.

The land they died to save from death and shame

Trembles and waits, hearing the spring's great name,

And by her pangs these resolute ghosts are stirred.

II

Through street and mall the tides of people go

Heedless; the trees upon the Common show

No hint of green; but to my listening heart

The still earth doth impart

Assurance of her jubilant emprise,

And it is clear to my long-searching eyes

That love at last has might upon the skies.

The ice is runneled on the little pond;

A telltale patter drips from off the trees;

The air is touched with Southland spiceries,

As if but yesterday it tossed the frond

Of pendant mosses where the live-oaks grow

Beyond Virginia and the Carolines,

Or had its will among the fruits and vines

Of aromatic isles asleep beyond

Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

III

Soon shall the Cape Ann children shout in glee,

Spying the arbutus, spring's dear recluse;

Hill lads at dawn shall hearken the wild goose

Go honking northward over Tennessee;

West from Oswego to Sault Sainte-Marie,

And on to where the Pictured Rocks are hung,

And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young,

Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,

With restless violent hands and casual tongue

Moulding her mighty fates,

The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen;

And like a larger sea, the vital green

Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung

Over Dakota and the prairie states.

By desert people immemorial

On Arizonan mesas shall be done

Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun;

Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice

More splendid, when the white Sierras call

Unto the Rockies straightway to arise

And dance before the unveiled ark of the year

Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms,

Unrolling rivers clear

For flutter of broad phylacteries;

While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas

That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep

To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep,

And Mariposa through the purple calms

Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms

Where East and West are met, --

A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set

To say that East and West are twain,

With different loss and gain:

The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet.

IV

Alas! what sounds are these that come

Sullenly over the Pacific seas, --

Sounds of ignoble battle, striking dumb

The season's half-awakened ecstasies?

Must I be humble, then,

Now when my heart hath need of pride?

Wild love falls on me from these sculptured men;

By loving much the land for which they died

I would be justified.

My spirit was away on pinions wide

To soothe in praise of her its passionate mood

And ease it of its ache of gratitude.

Too sorely heavy is the debt they lay

On me and the companions of my day.

I would remember now

My country's goodliness, make sweet her name.

Alas! what shade art thou

Of sorrow or of blame

Liftest the lyric leafage from her brow,

And pointest a slow finger at her shame?

V

Lies! lies! It cannot be! The wars we wage

Are noble, and our battles still are won

By justice for us, ere we lift the gage.

We have not sold our loftiest heritage.

The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat

And scramble in the market-place of war;

Her forehead weareth yet its solemn star.

Here is her witness: this, her perfect son,

This delicate and proud New England soul

Who leads despised men, with just-unshackled feet,

Up the large ways where death and glory meet,

To show all peoples that our shame is done,

That once more we are clean and spirit-whole.

VI

Crouched in the sea-fog on the moaning sand

All night he lay, speaking some simple word

From hour to hour to the slow minds that heard,

Holding each poor life gently in his hand

And breathing on the base rejected clay

Till each dark face shone mystical and grand

Against the breaking day;

And lo, the shard the potter cast away

Was grown a fiery chalice crystal-fine,

Fulfilled of the divine

Great wine of battle wrath by God's ring-finger stirred.

Then upward, where the shadowy bastion loomed

Huge on the mountain in the wet sea light,

Whence now, and now, infernal flowerage bloomed,

Bloomed, burst, and scattered down its deadly seed, --

They swept, and died like freemen on the height,

Like freemen, and like men of noble breed;

And when the battle fell away at night

By hasty and contemptuous hands were thrust

Obscurely in a common grave with him

The fair-haired keeper of their love and trust.

Now limb doth mingle with dissolved limb

In nature's busy old democracy

To flush the mountain laurel when she blows

Sweet by the Southern sea,

And heart with crumbled heart climbs in the rose: --

The untaught hearts with the high heart that knew

This mountain fortress for no earthly hold

Of temporal quarrel, but the bastion old

Of spiritual wrong,

Built by an unjust nation sheer and strong,

Expugnable but by a nation's rue

And bowing down before that equal shrine

By all men held divine,

Whereof his band and he were the most holy sign.

VII

O bitter, bitter shade!

Wilt thou not put the scorn

And instant tragic question from thine eye?

Do thy dark brows yet crave

That swift and angry stave --

Unmeet for this desirous morn --

That I have striven, striven to evade?

Gazing on him, must I not deem they err

Whose careless lips in street and shop aver

As common tidings, deeds to make his cheek

Flush from the bronze, and his dead throat to speak?

Surely some elder singer would arise,

Whose harp hath leave to threaten and to mourn

Above this people when they go astray.

Is Whitman, the strong spirit, overworn?

Has Whittier put his yearning wrath away?

I will not and I dare not yet believe!

Though furtively the sunlight seems to grieve,

And the spring-laden breeze

Out of the gladdening west is sinister

With sounds of nameless battle overseas;

Though when we turn and question in suspense

If these things be indeed after these ways,

And what things are to follow after these,

Our fluent men of place and consequence

Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase,

Or for the end-all of deep arguments

Intone their dull commercial liturgies --

I dare not yet believe! My ears are shut!

I will not hear the thin satiric praise

And muffled laughter of our enemies,

Bidding us never sheathe our valiant sword

Till we have changed our birthright for a gourd

Of wild pulse stolen from a barbarian's hut;

Showing how wise it is to cast away

The symbols of our spiritual sway,

That so our hands with better ease

May wield the driver's whip and grasp the jailer's keys.

VIII

Was it for this our fathers kept the law?

This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth?

Are we the eagle nation Milton saw

Mewing its mighty youth,

Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth,

And be a swift familiar of the sun

Where aye before God's face his trumpets run?

Or have we but the talons and the maw,

And for the abject likeness of our heart

Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?

Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?

Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?

IX

Ah, no!

We have not fallen so.

We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know!

'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry

Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!"

Then Alabama heard,

And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho

Shouted a burning word.

Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred,

And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth,

East, west, and south, and north,

Beautiful armies. Oh, by the sweet blood and young

Shed on the awful hill slope at San Juan,

By the unforgotten names of eager boys

Who might have tasted girl's love and been stung

With the old mystic joys

And starry griefs, now the spring nights come on,

But that the heart of youth is generous, --

We charge you, ye who lead us,

Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!

Turn not their new-world victories to gain!

One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays

Of their dear praise,

One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,

The implacable republic will require;

With clamor, in the glare and gaze of noon,

Or subtly, coming as a thief at night,

But surely, very surely, slow or soon

That insult deep we deeply will requite.

Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!

For save we let the island men go free,

Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts

Will curse us from the lamentable coasts

Where walk the frustrate dead.

The cup of trembling shall be drained quite,

Eaten the sour bread of astonishment,

With ashes of the hearth shall be made white

Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent;

Then on your guiltier head

Shall our intolerable self-disdain

Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;

For manifest in that disastrous light

We shall discern the right

And do it, tardily. -- O ye who lead,

Take heed!

Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.

Candlemas. [Alice Brown]

O hearken, all ye little weeds

That lie beneath the snow,

(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low!)

The sun hath risen for royal deeds,

A valiant wind the vanguard leads;

Now quicken ye, lest unborn seeds

Before ye rise and blow.

O furry living things, adream

On winter's drowsy breast,

(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)

Arise and follow where a gleam

Of wizard gold unbinds the stream,

And all the woodland windings seem

With sweet expectance blest.

My birds, come back! the hollow sky

Is weary for your note.

(Sweet-throat, come back! O liquid, mellow throat!)

Ere May's soft minions hereward fly,

Shame on ye, laggards, to deny

The brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,

The tawny, shining coat!

The Unreturning. [Bliss Carman]

The old eternal spring once more

Comes back the sad eternal way,

With tender rosy light before

The going-out of day.

The great white moon across my door

A shadow in the twilight stirs;

But now forever comes no more

That wondrous look of Hers.

A Song in Spring. [Thomas S. Jones, Jr.]

O little buds all bourgeoning with Spring,

You hold my winter in forgetfulness;

Without my window lilac branches swing,

Within my gate I hear a robin sing --

O little laughing blooms that lift and bless!

So blow the breezes in a soft caress,

Blowing my dreams upon a swallow's wing;

O little merry buds in dappled dress,

You fill my heart with very wantonness --

O little buds all bourgeoning with Spring!

May is building her House. [Richard Le Gallienne]

May is building her house. With apple blooms

She is roofing over the glimmering rooms;

Of the oak and the beech hath she builded its beams,

And, spinning all day at her secret looms,

With arras of leaves each wind-swayed wall

She pictureth over, and peopleth it all

With echoes and dreams,

And singing of streams.

May is building her house. Of petal and blade,

Of the roots of the oak, is the flooring made,

With a carpet of mosses and lichen and clover,

Each small miracle over and over,

And tender, traveling green things strayed.

Her windows, the morning and evening star,

And her rustling doorways, ever ajar

With the coming and going

Of fair things blowing,

The thresholds of the four winds are.

May is building her house. From the dust of things

She is making the songs and the flowers and the wings;

From October's tossed and trodden gold

She is making the young year out of the old;

Yea: out of winter's flying sleet

She is making all the summer sweet,

And the brown leaves spurned of November's feet

She is changing back again to spring's.

Here is the Place where Loveliness keeps House. [Madison Cawein]

Here is the place where Loveliness keeps house,

Between the river and the wooded hills,

Within a valley where the Springtime spills

Her firstling wind-flowers under blossoming boughs:

Where Summer sits braiding her warm, white brows

With bramble-roses; and where Autumn fills

Her lap with asters; and old Winter frills

With crimson haw and hip his snowy blouse.

Here you may meet with Beauty. Here she sits

Gazing upon the moon, or all the day

Tuning a wood-thrush flute, remote, unseen:

Or when the storm is out, 't is she who flits

From rock to rock, a form of flying spray,

Shouting, beneath the leaves' tumultuous green.

Water Fantasy. [Fannie Stearns Davis]

O brown brook, O blithe brook, what will you say to me

If I take off my heavy shoon and wade you childishly?

O take them off, and come to me.

You shall not fall. Step merrily!

But, cool brook, but, quick brook, and what if I should float

White-bodied in your pleasant pool, your bubbles at my throat?

If you are but a mortal maid,

Then I shall make you half afraid.

The water shall be dim and deep,

And silver fish shall lunge and leap

About you, coward mortal thing.

But if you come desiring

To win once more your naiadhood,

How you shall laugh and find me good --

My golden surfaces, my glooms,

My secret grottoes' dripping rooms,

My depths of warm wet emerald,

My mosses floating fold on fold!

And where I take the rocky leap

Like wild white water shall you sweep;

Like wild white water shall you cry,

Trembling and turning to the sky,

While all the thousand-fringed trees

Glimmer and glisten through the breeze.

I bid you come! Too long, too long,

You have forgot my undersong.

And this perchance you never knew:

E'en I, the brook, have need of you.

My naiads faded long ago, --

My little nymphs, that to and fro

Within my waters sunnily

Made small white flames of tinkling glee.

I have been lonesome, lonesome; yea,

E'en I, the brook, until this day.

Cast off your shoon; ah, come to me,

And I will love you lingeringly!

O wild brook, O wise brook, I cannot come, alas!

I am but mortal as the leaves that flicker, float, and pass.

My body is not used to you; my breath is fluttering sore;

You clasp me round too icily. Ah, let me go once more!

Would God I were a naiad-thing whereon Pan's music blew;

But woe is me! you pagan brook, I cannot stay with you!

Bacchus. [Frank Dempster Sherman]

Listen to the tawny thief,

Hid beneath the waxen leaf,

Growling at his fairy host,

Bidding her with angry boast

Fill his cup with wine distilled

From the dew the dawn has spilled:

Stored away in golden casks

Is the precious draught he asks.

Who, -- who makes this mimic din

In this mimic meadow inn,

Sings in such a drowsy note,

Wears a golden-belted coat;

Loiters in the dainty room

Of this tavern of perfume;

Dares to linger at the cup

Till the yellow sun is up?

Bacchus 't is, come back again

To the busy haunts of men;

Garlanded and gaily dressed,

Bands of gold about his breast;

Straying from his paradise,

Having pinions angel-wise, --

'T is the honey-bee, who goes

Reveling within a rose!

Da Leetla Boy. [Thomas Augustine Daly]

Da spreeng ees com'! but oh, da joy

Eet ees too late!

He was so cold, my leetla boy,

He no could wait.

I no can count how manny week,

How manny day, dat he ees seeck;

How manny night I seet an' hold

Da leetla hand dat was so cold.

He was so patience, oh, so sweet!

Eet hurts my throat for theenk of eet;

An' all he evra ask ees w'en

Ees gona com' da spreeng agen.

Wan day, wan brighta sunny day,

He see, across da alleyway,

Da leetla girl dat's livin' dere

Ees raise her window for da air,

An' put outside a leetla pot

Of -- w'at-you-call? -- forgat-me-not.

So smalla flower, so leetla theeng!

But steell eet mak' hees hearta seeng:

"Oh, now, at las', ees com' da spreeng!

Da leetla plant ees glad for know

Da sun ees com' for mak' eet grow.

So, too, I am grow warm and strong."

So lika dat he seeng hees song.

But, Ah! da night com' down an' den

Da weenter ees sneak back agen,

An' een da alley all da night

Ees fall da snow, so cold, so white,

An' cover up da leetla pot

Of -- w'at-you-call? -- forgat-me-not.

All night da leetla hand I hold

Ees grow so cold, so cold, so cold!

Da spreeng ees com'; but oh, da joy

Eet ees too late!

He was so cold, my leetla boy,

He no could wait.

Agamede's Song. [Arthur Upson]

Grow, grow, thou little tree,

His body at the roots of thee;

Since last year's loveliness in death

The living beauty nourisheth.

Bloom, bloom, thou little tree,

Thy roots around the heart of me;

Thou canst not blow too white and fair

From all the sweetness hidden there.

Die, die, thou little tree,

And be as all sweet things must be;

Deep where thy petals drift I, too,

Would rest the changing seasons through.

Why. [Bliss Carman]

For a name unknown,

Whose fame unblown

Sleeps in the hills

For ever and aye;

For her who hears

The stir of the years

Go by on the wind

By night and day;

And heeds no thing

Of the needs of Spring,

Of Autumn's wonder

Or Winter's chill;

For one who sees

The great sun freeze,

As he wanders a-cold

From hill to hill;

And all her heart

Is a woven part

Of the flurry and drift

Of whirling snow;

For the sake of two

Sad eyes and true,

And the old, old love

So long ago.

The Wife from Fairyland. [Richard Le Gallienne]

Her talk was all of woodland things,

Of little lives that pass

Away in one green afternoon,

Deep in the haunted grass;

For she had come from fairyland,

The morning of a day

When the world that still was April

Was turning into May.

Green leaves and silence and two eyes --

'T was so she seemed to me,

A silver shadow of the woods,

Whisper and mystery.

I looked into her woodland eyes,

And all my heart was hers,

And then I led her by the hand

Home up my marble stairs;

And all my granite and my gold

Was hers for her green eyes,

And all my sinful heart was hers

From sunset to sunrise;

I gave her all delight and ease

That God had given to me,

I listened to fulfill her dreams,

Rapt with expectancy.

But all I gave, and all I did,

Brought but a weary smile

Of gratitude upon her face;

As though a little while,

She loitered in magnificence

Of marble and of gold

And waited to be home again

When the dull tale was told.

Sometimes, in the chill galleries,

Unseen, she deemed, unheard,

I found her dancing like a leaf

And singing like a bird.

So lone a thing I never saw

In lonely earth or sky,

So merry and so sad a thing,

One sad, one laughing, eye.

There came a day when on her heart

A wildwood blossom lay,

And the world that still was April

Was turning into May.

In the green eyes I saw a smile

That turned my heart to stone:

My wife that came from fairyland

No longer was alone.

For there had come a little hand

To show the green way home,

Home through the leaves, home through the dew,

Home through the greenwood -- home.

Life. [John Hall Wheelock]

Life burns us up like fire,

And Song goes up in flame:

The radiant body smoulders

To the ashes whence it came.

Out of things it rises

With a mouth that laughs and sings,

Backward it fades and falters

Into the char of things.

Yet soars a voice above it --

Love is holy and strong;

The best of us forever

Escapes in Love and Song.

Song is so old. [Hermann Hagedorn]

Song is so old,

Love is so new --

Let me be still

And kneel to you.

Let me be still

And breathe no word,

Save what my warm blood

Sings unheard.

Let my warm blood

Sing low of you --

Song is so fair,

Love is so new!

That Day you came. [Lizette Woodworth Reese]

Such special sweetness was about

That day God sent you here,

I knew the lavender was out,

And it was mid of year.

Their common way the great winds blew,

The ships sailed out to sea;

Yet ere that day was spent I knew

Mine own had come to me.

As after song some snatch of tune

Lurks still in grass or bough,

So, somewhat of the end o' June

Lurks in each weather now.

The young year sets the buds astir,

The old year strips the trees;

But ever in my lavender

I hear the brawling bees.

Song. "For me the jasmine buds unfold". [Florence Earle Coates]

For me the jasmine buds unfold

And silver daisies star the lea,

The crocus hoards the sunset gold,

And the wild rose breathes for me.

I feel the sap through the bough returning,

I share the skylark's transport fine,

I know the fountain's wayward yearning,

I love, and the world is mine!

I love, and thoughts that sometime grieved,

Still well remembered, grieve not me;

From all that darkened and deceived

Upsoars my spirit free.

For soft the hours repeat one story,

Sings the sea one strain divine;

My clouds arise all flushed with glory --

I love, and the world is mine!

Mother. [Theresa Helburn]

I have praised many loved ones in my song,

And yet I stand

Before her shrine, to whom all things belong,

With empty hand.

Perhaps the ripening future holds a time

For things unsaid;

Not now; men do not celebrate in rhyme

Their daily bread.

Songs for my Mother. [Anna Hempstead Branch]

I

Her Hands

My mother's hands are cool and fair,

They can do anything.

Delicate mercies hide them there

Like flowers in the spring.

When I was small and could not sleep,

She used to come to me,

And with my cheek upon her hand

How sure my rest would be.

For everything she ever touched

Of beautiful or fine,

Their memories living in her hands

Would warm that sleep of mine.

Her hands remember how they played

One time in meadow streams, --

And all the flickering song and shade

Of water took my dreams.

Swift through her haunted fingers pass

Memories of garden things; --

I dipped my face in flowers and grass

And sounds of hidden wings.

One time she touched the cloud that kissed

Brown pastures bleak and far; --

I leaned my cheek into a mist

And thought I was a star.

All this was very long ago

And I am grown; but yet

The hand that lured my slumber so

I never can forget.

For still when drowsiness comes on

It seems so soft and cool,

Shaped happily beneath my cheek,

Hollow and beautiful.

II

Her Words

My mother has the prettiest tricks

Of words and words and words.

Her talk comes out as smooth and sleek

As breasts of singing birds.

She shapes her speech all silver fine

Because she loves it so.

And her own eyes begin to shine

To hear her stories grow.

And if she goes to make a call

Or out to take a walk

We leave our work when she returns

And run to hear her talk.

We had not dreamed these things were so

Of sorrow and of mirth.

Her speech is as a thousand eyes

Through which we see the earth.

God wove a web of loveliness,

Of clouds and stars and birds,

But made not any thing at all

So beautiful as words.

They shine around our simple earth

With golden shadowings,

And every common thing they touch

Is exquisite with wings.

There's nothing poor and nothing small

But is made fair with them.

They are the hands of living faith

That touch the garment's hem.

They are as fair as bloom or air,

They shine like any star,

And I am rich who learned from her

How beautiful they are.

The Daguerreotype. [William Vaughn Moody]

This, then, is she,

My mother as she looked at seventeen,

When she first met my father. Young incredibly,

Younger than spring, without the faintest trace

Of disappointment, weariness, or tean

Upon the childlike earnestness and grace

Of the waiting face.

Those close-wound ropes of pearl

(Or common beads made precious by their use)

Seem heavy for so slight a throat to wear;

But the low bodice leaves the shoulders bare

And half the glad swell of the breast, for news

That now the woman stirs within the girl.

And yet,

Even so, the loops and globes

Of beaten gold

And jet

Hung, in the stately way of old,

From the ears' drooping lobes

On festivals and Lord's-day of the week,

Show all too matron-sober for the cheek, --

Which, now I look again, is perfect child,

Or no -- or no -- 't is girlhood's very self,

Moulded by some deep, mischief-ridden elf

So meek, so maiden mild,

But startling the close gazer with the sense

Of passions forest-shy and forest-wild,

And delicate delirious merriments.

As a moth beats sidewise

And up and over, and tries

To skirt the irresistible lure

Of the flame that has him sure,

My spirit, that is none too strong to-day,

Flutters and makes delay, --

Pausing to wonder on the perfect lips,

Lifting to muse upon the low-drawn hair

And each hid radiance there,

But powerless to stem the tide-race bright,

The vehement peace which drifts it toward the light

Where soon -- ah, now, with cries

Of grief and giving-up unto its gain

It shrinks no longer nor denies,

But dips

Hurriedly home to the exquisite heart of pain, --

And all is well, for I have seen them plain,

The unforgettable, the unforgotten eyes!

Across the blinding gush of these good tears

They shine as in the sweet and heavy years

When by her bed and chair

We children gathered jealously to share

The sunlit aura breathing myrrh and thyme,

Where the sore-stricken body made a clime

Gentler than May and pleasanter than rhyme,

Holier and more mystical than prayer.

God, how thy ways are strange!

That this should be, even this,

The patient head

Which suffered years ago the dreary change!

That these so dewy lips should be the same

As those I stooped to kiss

And heard my harrowing half-spoken name,

A little ere the one who bowed above her,

Our father and her very constant lover,

Rose stoical, and we knew that she was dead.

Then I, who could not understand or share

His antique nobleness,

Being unapt to bear

The insults which time flings us for our proof,

Fled from the horrible roof

Into the alien sunshine merciless,

The shrill satiric fields ghastly with day,

Raging to front God in his pride of sway

And hurl across the lifted swords of fate

That ringed Him where He sat

My puny gage of scorn and desolate hate

Which somehow should undo Him, after all!

That this girl face, expectant, virginal,

Which gazes out at me

Boon as a sweetheart, as if nothing loth

(Save for the eyes, with other presage stored)

To pledge me troth,

And in the kingdom where the heart is lord

Take sail on the terrible gladness of the deep

Whose winds the gray Norns keep, --

That this should be indeed

The flesh which caught my soul, a flying seed,

Out of the to and fro

Of scattering hands where the seedsman Mage,

Stooping from star to star and age to age

Sings as he sows!

That underneath this breast

Nine moons I fed

Deep of divine unrest,

While over and over in the dark she said,

"Blessed! but not as happier children blessed" --

That this should be

Even she . . .

God, how with time and change

Thou makest thy footsteps strange!

Ah, now I know

They play upon me, and it is not so.

Why, 't is a girl I never saw before,

A little thing to flatter and make weep,

To tease until her heart is sore,

Then kiss and clear the score;

A gypsy run-the-fields,

A little liberal daughter of the earth,

Good for what hour of truancy and mirth

The careless season yields

Hither-side the flood of the year and yonder of the neap;

Then thank you, thanks again, and twenty light good-byes. --

O shrined above the skies,

Frown not, clear brow,

Darken not, holy eyes!

Thou knowest well I know that it is thou

Only to save me from such memories

As would unman me quite,

Here in this web of strangeness caught

And prey to troubled thought

Do I devise

These foolish shifts and slight;

Only to shield me from the afflicting sense

Of some waste influence

Which from this morning face and lustrous hair

Breathes on me sudden ruin and despair.

In any other guise,

With any but this girlish depth of gaze,

Your coming had not so unsealed and poured

The dusty amphoras where I had stored

The drippings of the winepress of my days.

I think these eyes foresee,

Now in their unawakened virgin time,

Their mother's pride in me,

And dream even now, unconsciously,

Upon each soaring peak and sky-hung lea

You pictured I should climb.

Broken premonitions come,

Shapes, gestures visionary,

Not as once to maiden Mary

The manifest angel with fresh lilies came

Intelligibly calling her by name;

But vanishingly, dumb,

Thwarted and bright and wild,

As heralding a sin-defiled,

Earth-encumbered, blood-begotten, passionate man-child,

Who yet should be a trump of mighty call

Blown in the gates of evil kings

To make them fall;

Who yet should be a sword of flame before

The soul's inviolate door

To beat away the clang of hellish wings;

Who yet should be a lyre

Of high unquenchable desire

In the day of little things. --

Look, where the amphoras,

The yield of many days,

Trod by my hot soul from the pulp of self,

And set upon the shelf

In sullen pride

The Vineyard-master's tasting to abide --

O mother mine!

Are these the bringings-in, the doings fine,

Of him you used to praise?

Emptied and overthrown

The jars lie strown.

These, for their flavor duly nursed,

Drip from the stopples vinegar accursed;

These, I thought honied to the very seal,

Dry, dry, -- a little acid meal,

A pinch of mouldy dust,

Sole leavings of the amber-mantling must;

These, rude to look upon,

But flasking up the liquor dearest won,

Through sacred hours and hard,

With watching and with wrestlings and with grief,

Even of these, of these in chief,

The stale breath sickens reeking from the shard.

Nothing is left. Aye, how much less than naught!

What shall be said or thought

Of the slack hours and waste imaginings,

The cynic rending of the wings,

Known to that froward, that unreckoning heart

Whereof this brewage was the precious part,

Treasured and set away with furtive boast?

O dear and cruel ghost,

Be merciful, be just!

See, I was yours and I am in the dust.

Then look not so, as if all things were well!

Take your eyes from me, leave me to my shame,

Or else, if gaze they must,

Steel them with judgment, darken them with blame;

But by the ways of light ineffable

You bade me go and I have faltered from,

By the low waters moaning out of hell

Whereto my feet have come,

Lay not on me these intolerable

Looks of rejoicing love, of pride, of happy trust!

Nothing dismayed?

By all I say and all I hint not made

Afraid?

O then, stay by me! Let

These eyes afflict me, cleanse me, keep me yet,

Brave eyes and true!

See how the shrivelled heart, that long has lain

Dead to delight and pain,

Stirs, and begins again

To utter pleasant life, as if it knew

The wintry days were through;

As if in its awakening boughs it heard

The quick, sweet-spoken bird.

Strong eyes and brave,

Inexorable to save!

Tears. [Lizette Woodworth Reese]

When I consider Life and its few years --

A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;

A call to battle, and the battle done

Ere the last echo dies within our ears;

A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;

The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat;

The burst of music down an unlistening street, --

I wonder at the idleness of tears.

Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight,

Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep,

By every cup of sorrow that you had,

Loose me from tears, and make me see aright

How each hath back what once he stayed to weep:

Homer his sight, David his little lad!

The Sea-Lands. [Orrick Johns]

Would I were on the sea-lands,

Where winds know how to sting;

And in the rocks at midnight

The lost long murmurs sing.

Would I were with my first love

To hear the rush and roar

Of spume below the doorstep

And winds upon the door.

My first love was a fair girl

With ways forever new;

And hair a sunlight yellow,

And eyes a morning blue.

The roses, have they tarried

Or are they dun and frayed?

If we had stayed together,

Would love, indeed, have stayed?

Ah, years are filled with learning,

And days are leaves of change!

And I have met so many

I knew . . . and found them strange.

But on the sea-lands tumbled

By winds that sting and blind,

The nights we watched, so silent,

Come back, come back to mind.

I mind about my first love,

And hear the rush and roar

Of spume below the doorstep

And winds upon the door.

Bag-Pipes at Sea. [Clinton Scollard]

Above the shouting of the gale,

The whipping sheet, the dashing spray,

I heard, with notes of joy and wail,

A piper play.

Along the dipping deck he trod,

The dusk about his shadowy form;

He seemed like some strange ancient god

Of song and storm.

He gave his dim-seen pipes a skirl

And war went down the darkling air;

Then came a sudden subtle swirl,

And love was there.

What were the winds that flailed and flayed

The sea to him, the night obscure?

In dreams he strayed some brackened glade,

Some heathery moor.

And if he saw the slanting spars,

And if he watched the shifting track,

He marked, too, the eternal stars

Shine through the wrack.

And so amid the deep sea din,

And so amid the wastes of foam,

Afar his heart was happy in

His highland home!

The Heart's Country. [Florence Wilkinson]

Hill people turn to their hills;

Sea-folk are sick for the sea:

Thou art my land and my country,

And my heart calls out for thee.

The bird beats his wings for the open,

The captive burns to be free;

But I -- I cry at thy window,

For thou art my liberty.

Joyous-Gard. [Thomas S. Jones, Jr.]

Wind-washed and free, full-swept by rain and wave,

By tang of surf and thunder of the gale,

Wild be the ride yet safe the barque will sail

And past the plunging seas her harbor brave;

Nor care have I that storms and waters rave,

I cannot fear since you can never fail --

Once have I looked upon the burning grail,

And through your eyes have seen beyond the grave.

I know at last -- the strange, sweet mystery,

The nameless joy that trembled into tears,

The hush of wings when you were at my side --

For now the veil is rent and I can see,

See the true vision of the future years,

As in your face the love of Him who died!

The Secret. [George Edward Woodberry]

Nightingales warble about it,

All night under blossom and star;

The wild swan is dying without it,

And the eagle crieth afar;

The sun he doth mount but to find it,

Searching the green earth o'er;

But more doth a man's heart mind it,

Oh, more, more, more!

Over the gray leagues of ocean

The infinite yearneth alone;

The forests with wandering emotion

The thing they know not intone;

Creation arose but to see it,

A million lamps in the blue;

But a lover he shall be it

If one sweet maid is true.

The Nightingale unheard. [Josephine Preston Peabody]

Yes, Nightingale, through all the summer-time

We followed on, from moon to golden moon;

From where Salerno day-dreams in the noon,

And the far rose of Paestum once did climb.

All the white way beside the girdling blue,

Through sun-shrill vines and campanile chime,

We listened; -- from the old year to the new.

Brown bird, and where were you?

You, that Ravello lured not, throned on high

And filled with singing out of sun-burned throats!

Nor yet Minore of the flame-sailed boats;

Nor yet -- of all bird-song should glorify --

Assisi, Little Portion of the blest,

Assisi, in the bosom of the sky,

Where God's own singer thatched his sunward nest,

That little, heavenliest!

And north and north, to where the hedge-rows are,

That beckon with white looks an endless way;

Where, through the fair wet silverness of May,

A lamb shines out as sudden as a star,

Among the cloudy sheep; and green, and pale,

The may-trees reach and glimmer, near or far,

And the red may-trees wear a shining veil.

And still, no nightingale!

The one vain longing, -- through all journeyings,

The one: in every hushed and hearkening spot, --

All the soft-swarming dark where you were not,

Still longed for! Yes, for sake of dreams and wings,

And wonders, that your own must ever make

To bower you close, with all hearts' treasurings;

And for that speech toward which all hearts do ache; --

Even for Music's sake.

But most, his music whose beloved name

Forever writ in water of bright tears,

Wins to one grave-side even the Roman years,

That kindle there the hallowed April flame

Of comfort-breathing violets. By that shrine

Of Youth, Love, Death, forevermore the same,

Violets still! -- When falls, to leave no sign,

The arch of Constantine.

Most for his sake we dreamed. Tho' not as he,

From that lone spirit, brimmed with human woe,

Your song once shook to surging overflow.

How was it, sovran dweller of the tree,

His cry, still throbbing in the flooded shell

Of silence with remembered melody,

Could draw from you no answer to the spell?

-- O Voice, O Philomel?

Long time we wondered (and we knew not why): --

Nor dream, nor prayer, of wayside gladness born,

Nor vineyards waiting, nor reproachful thorn,

Nor yet the nested hill-towns set so high

All the white way beside the girdling blue, --

Nor olives, gray against a golden sky,

Could serve to wake that rapturous voice of you!

But the wise silence knew.

O Nightingale unheard! -- Unheard alone,

Throughout that woven music of the days

From the faint sea-rim to the market-place,

And ring of hammers on cathedral stone!

So be it, better so: that there should fail

For sun-filled ones, one blessed thing unknown.

To them, be hid forever, -- and all hail!

Sing never, Nightingale.

Sing, for the others! Sing; to some pale cheek

Against the window, like a starving flower.

Loose, with your singing, one poor pilgrim hour

Of journey, with some Heart's Desire to seek.

Loose, with your singing, captives such as these

In misery and iron, hearts too meek,

For voyage -- voyage over dreamful seas

To lost Hesperides.

Sing not for free-men. Ah, but sing for whom

The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade,

The windows take no heed of light nor shade, --

The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom.

Sing near! So in that golden overflowing

They may forget their wasted human bloom;

Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing, --

Reck not of life's bright going!

Sing not for lovers, side by side that hark;

Nor unto parted lovers, save they be

Parted indeed by more than makes the Sea,

Where never hope shall meet -- like mounting lark --

Far Joy's uprising; and no memories

Abide to star the music-haunted dark:

To them that sit in darkness, such as these,

Pour down, pour down heart's-ease.

Not in Kings' gardens. No; but where there haunt

The world's forgotten, both of men and birds;

The alleys of no hope and of no words,

The hidings where men reap not, though they plant;

But toil and thirst -- so dying and so born; --

And toil and thirst to gather to their want,

From the lean waste, beyond the daylight's scorn,

-- To gather grapes of thorn!

. . . . .

And for those two, your pilgrims without tears,

Who prayed a largess where there was no dearth,

Forgive it to their human-happy ears:

Forgive it them, brown music of the Earth,

Unknowing, -- though the wiser silence knew!

Forgive it to the music of the spheres

That while they walked together so, the Two

Together, -- heard not you.

Only of thee and me. [Louis Untermeyer]

Only of thee and me the night wind sings,

Only of us the sailors speak at sea,

The earth is filled with wondered whisperings

Only of thee and me.

Only of thee and me the breakers chant,

Only of us the stir in bush and tree;

The rain and sunshine tell the eager plant

Only of thee and me.

Only of thee and me, till all shall fade;

Only of us the whole world's thoughts can be --

For we are Love, and God Himself is made

Only of thee and me.

When the Wind is low. [Cale Young Rice]

When the wind is low, and the sea is soft,

And the far heat-lightning plays

On the rim of the west where dark clouds nest

On a darker bank of haze;

When I lean o'er the rail with you that I love

And gaze to my heart's content;

I know that the heavens are there above --

But you are my firmament.

When the phosphor-stars are thrown from the bow

And the watch climbs up the shroud;

When the dim mast dips as the vessel slips

Through the foam that seethes aloud;

I know that the years of our life are few,

And fain as a bird to flee,

That time is as brief as a drop of dew --

But you are Eternity.

Love Triumphant. [Frederic Lawrence Knowles]

Helen's lips are drifting dust;

Ilion is consumed with rust;

All the galleons of Greece

Drink the ocean's dreamless peace;

Lost was Solomon's purple show

Restless centuries ago;

Stately empires wax and wane --

Babylon, Barbary, and Spain; --

Only one thing, undefaced,

Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste

And the heavens are overturned.

Dear, how long ago we learned!

There's a sight that blinds the sun,

Sound that lives when sounds are done,

Music that rebukes the birds,

Language lovelier than words,

Hue and scent that shame the rose,

Wine no earthly vineyard knows,

Silence stiller than the shore

Swept by Charon's stealthy oar,

Ocean more divinely free

Than Pacific's boundless sea, --

Ye who love have learned it true.

Dear, how long ago we knew!

Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream. [Trumbull Stickney]

Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream

That over Persian roses flew to kiss

The curled lashes of Semiramis.

Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream.

Provence and Troubadour are merest lies,

The glorious hair of Venice was a beam

Made within Titian's eye. The sunsets seem,

The world is very old and nothing is.

Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,

Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,

But patter in the darkness of thy heart.

Thy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl

Blind with the light of life thou'ldst not forsake,

And Error loves and nourishes thy soul.

The Tears of Harlequin. [Theodosia Garrison]

To you he gave his laughter and his jest,

His words that of all words were merriest,

His glad, mad moments when the lights flared high

And his wild song outshrilled the plaudits' din.

For you that memory, but happier I --

I, who have known the tears of Harlequin.

Not mine those moments when the roses lay

Like red spilled wine on his triumphant way,

And shouts acclaimed him through the music's beat,

Above the voice of flute and violin.

But I have known his hour of sore defeat --

I -- I have known the tears of Harlequin.

Light kisses and light words, they were not mine --

Poor perquisites of many a Columbine

Bought with his laughter, flattered by his jest;

But when despair broke through the painted grin,

His tortured face has fallen on my breast --

I -- I have known the tears of Harlequin.

You weep for him, who look upon him dead,

That joy and jest and merriment are fled;

You weep for him, what time my eyes are dry,

Knowing what peace a weary soul may win

Stifled by too much masking -- even I --

I, who have known the tears of Harlequin.

The Buried City. [George Sylvester Viereck]

My heart is like a city of the gay

Reared on the ruins of a perished one

Wherein my dead loves cower from the sun,

White-swathed like kings, the Pharaohs of a day.

Within the buried city stirs no sound,

Save for the bat, forgetful of the rod,

Perched on the knee of some deserted god,

And for the groan of rivers underground.

Stray not, my Love, 'mid the sarcophagi --

Tempt not the silence, for the fates are deep,

Lest all the dreamers, deeming doomsday nigh,

Leap forth in terror from their haunted sleep;

And like the peal of an accursed bell

Thy voice call ghosts of dead things back from hell.

The Ride to the Lady. [Helen Gray Cone]

"Now since mine even is come at last, --

For I have been the sport of steel,

And hot life ebbeth from me fast,

And I in saddle roll and reel, --

Come bind me, bind me on my steed!

Of fingering leech I have no need!"

The chaplain clasped his mailed knee.

"Nor need I more thy whine and thee!

No time is left my sins to tell;

But look ye bind me, bind me well!"

They bound him strong with leathern thong,

For the ride to the lady should be long.

Day was dying; the poplars fled,

Thin as ghosts, on a sky blood-red;

Out of the sky the fierce hue fell,

And made the streams as the streams of hell.

All his thoughts as a river flowed,

Flowed aflame as fleet he rode,

Onward flowed to her abode,

Ceased at her feet, mirrored her face.

(Viewless Death apace, apace,

Rode behind him in that race.)

"Face, mine own, mine alone,

Trembling lips my lips have known,

Birdlike stir of the dove-soft eyne

Under the kisses that make them mine!

Only of thee, of thee, my need!

Only to thee, to thee, I speed!"

The Cross flashed by at the highway's turn;

In a beam of the moon the Face shone stern.

Far behind had the fight's din died;

The shuddering stars in the welkin wide

Crowded, crowded, to see him ride.

The beating hearts of the stars aloof

Kept time to the beat of the horse's hoof.

"What is the throb that thrills so sweet?

Heart of my lady, I feel it beat!"

But his own strong pulse the fainter fell,

Like the failing tongue of a hushing bell.

The flank of the great-limbed steed was wet

Not alone with the started sweat.

Fast, and fast, and the thick black wood

Arched its cowl like a black friar's hood;

Fast, and fast, and they plunged therein, --

But the viewless rider rode to win.

Out of the wood to the highway's light

Galloped the great-limbed steed in fright;

The mail clashed cold, and the sad owl cried,

And the weight of the dead oppressed his side.

Fast, and fast, by the road he knew;

And slow, and slow, the stars withdrew;

And the waiting heaven turned weirdly blue,

As a garment worn of a wizard grim.

He neighed at the gate in the morning dim.

She heard no sound before her gate,

Though very quiet was her bower.

All was as her hand had left it late:

The needle slept on the broidered vine,

Where the hammer and spikes of the passion-flower

Her fashioning did wait.

On the couch lay something fair,

With steadfast lips and veiled eyne;

But the lady was not there.

On the wings of shrift and prayer,

Pure as winds that winnow snow,

Her soul had risen twelve hours ago.

The burdened steed at the barred gate stood,

No whit the nearer to his goal.

Now God's great grace assoil the soul

That went out in the wood!

Evensong. [Ridgely Torrence]

Beauty calls and gives no warning,

Shadows rise and wander on the day.

In the twilight, in the quiet evening,

We shall rise and smile and go away.

Over the flaming leaves

Freezes the sky.

It is the season grieves,

Not you, not I.

All our spring-times, all our summers,

We have kept the longing warm within.

Now we leave the after-comers

To attain the dreams we did not win.

O we have wakened, Sweet, and had our birth,

And that's the end of earth;

And we have toiled and smiled and kept the light,

And that's the end of night.

Witchery. [Frank Dempster Sherman]

Out of the purple drifts,

From the shadow sea of night,

On tides of musk a moth uplifts

Its weary wings of white.

Is it a dream or ghost

Of a dream that comes to me,

Here in the twilight on the coast,

Blue cinctured by the sea?

Fashioned of foam and froth --

And the dream is ended soon,

And lo, whence came the moon-white moth

Comes now the moth-white moon!

Golden Pulse. [John Myers O'Hara]

Golden pulse grew on the shore,

Ferns along the hill,

And the red cliff roses bore

Bees to drink their fill;

Bees that from the meadows bring

Wine of melilot,

Honey-sups on golden wing

To the garden grot.

But to me, neglected flower,

Phaon will not see,

Passion brings no crowning hour,

Honey nor the bee.

Sappho. [Sara Teasdale]

The twilight's inner flame grows blue and deep,

And in my Lesbos, over leagues of sea,

The temples glimmer moonwise in the trees.

Twilight has veiled the little flower face

Here on my heart, but still the night is kind

And leaves her warm sweet weight against my breast.

Am I that Sappho who would run at dusk

Along the surges creeping up the shore

When tides came in to ease the hungry beach,

And running, running, till the night was black,

Would fall forespent upon the chilly sand

And quiver with the winds from off the sea?

Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides

Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me

Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.

I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands

And cried to Love, from whom the sea is sweet,

From whom the sea is bitterer than death.

Ah, Aphrodite, if I sing no more

To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God,

It is that thou hast made my life too sweet

To hold the added sweetness of a song.

There is a quiet at the heart of love,

And I have pierced the pain and come to peace.

I hold my peace, my Cleis, on my heart;

And softer than a little wild bird's wing

Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth.

Ah, never any more when spring like fire

Will flicker in the newly opened leaves,

Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude

Beyond the lure of light Alcaeus' lyre,

Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna's voice.

Ah, never with a throat that aches with song,

Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring,

Shall I go forth to hide awhile from Love

The quiver and the crying of my heart.

Still I remember how I strove to flee

The love-note of the birds, and bowed my head

To hurry faster, but upon the ground

I saw two winged shadows side by side,

And all the world's spring passion stifled me.

Ah, Love, there is no fleeing from thy might,

No lonely place where thou hast never trod,

No desert thou hast left uncarpeted

With flowers that spring beneath thy perfect feet.

In many guises didst thou come to me;

I saw thee by the maidens while they danced,

Phaon allured me with a look of thine,

In Anactoria I knew thy grace,

I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes;

But never wholly, soul and body mine,

Didst thou bid any love me as I loved.

Now I have found the peace that fled from me;

Close, close, against my heart I hold my world.

Ah, Love that made my life a lyric cry,

Ah, Love that tuned my lips to lyres of thine,

I taught the world thy music, now alone

I sing for one who falls asleep to hear.

Harps hung up in Babylon. [Arthur Colton]

The harps hung up in Babylon,

Their loosened strings rang on, sang on,

And cast their murmurs forth upon

The roll and roar of Babylon:

"~Forget me, Lord, if I forget

Jerusalem for Babylon,

If I forget the vision set

High as the head of Lebanon

Is lifted over Syria yet,

If I forget and bow me down

To brutish gods of Babylon.~"

Two rivers to each other run

In the very midst of Babylon,

And swifter than their current fleets

The restless river of the streets

Of Babylon, of Babylon,

And Babylon's towers smite the sky,

But higher reeks to God most high

The smoke of her iniquity:

"~But oh, betwixt the green and blue

To walk the hills that once we knew

When you were pure and I was true,~" --

So rang the harps in Babylon --

"~Or ere along the roads of stone

Had led us captive one by one

The subtle gods of Babylon.~"

The harps hung up in Babylon

Hung silent till the prophet dawn,

When Judah's feet the highway burned

Back to the holy hills returned,

And shook their dust on Babylon.

In Zion's halls the wild harps rang,

To Zion's walls their smitten clang,

And lo! of Babylon they sang,

They only sang of Babylon:

"~Jehovah, round whose throne of awe

The vassal stars their orbits draw

Within the circle of Thy law,

Canst thou make nothing what is done,

Or cause Thy servant to be one

That has not been in Babylon,

That has not known the power and pain

Of life poured out like driven rain?

I will go down and find again

My soul that's lost in Babylon.~"

Live blindly. [Trumbull Stickney]

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,

Who was the Future, died full long ago.

Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,

Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.

Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow

And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;

The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord

And the long strips of river-silver flow:

Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.

Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight

About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.

Thou art divine, thou livest, -- as of old

Apollo springing naked to the light,

And all his island shivered into flowers.

Love's Springtide. [Frank Dempster Sherman]

My heart was winter-bound until

I heard you sing;

O voice of Love, hush not, but fill

My life with Spring!

My hopes were homeless things before

I saw your eyes;

O smile of Love, close not the door

To paradise!

My dreams were bitter once, and then

I found them bliss;

O lips of Love, give me again

Your rose to kiss!

Springtide of Love! The secret sweet

Is ours alone;

O heart of Love, at last you beat

Against my own!

Wanderers. [George Sylvester Viereck]

Sweet is the highroad when the skylarks call,

When we and Love go rambling through the land.

But shall we still walk gayly, hand in hand,

At the road's turning and the twilight's fall?

Then darkness shall divide us like a wall,

And uncouth evil nightbirds flap their wings;

The solitude of all created things

Will creep upon us shuddering like a pall.

This is the knowledge I have wrung from pain:

We, yea, all lovers, are not one, but twain,

Each by strange wisps to strange abysses drawn;

But through the black immensity of night

Love's little lantern, like a glowworm's, bright,

May lead our steps to some stupendous dawn.

Ballade of my Lady's Beauty. [Joyce Kilmer]

Squire Adam had two wives, they say,

Two wives had he, for his delight,

He kissed and clypt them all the day

And clypt and kissed them all the night.

Now Eve like ocean foam was white

And Lilith roses dipped in wine,

But though they were a goodly sight

No lady is so fair as mine.

To Venus some folk tribute pay

And Queen of Beauty she is hight,

And Sainte Marie the world doth sway

In cerule napery bedight.

My wonderment these twain invite,

Their comeliness it is divine,

And yet I say in their despite,

No lady is so fair as mine.

Dame Helen caused a grievous fray,

For love of her brave men did fight,

The eyes of her made sages fey

And put their hearts in woeful plight.

To her no rhymes will I indite,

For her no garlands will I twine,

Though she be made of flowers and light

No lady is so fair as mine.

L'Envoi

Prince Eros, Lord of lovely might,

Who on Olympus dost recline,

Do I not tell the truth aright?

No lady is so fair as mine.

Grieve not, Ladies. [Anna Hempstead Branch]

Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night

Ye wake to feel your beauty going.

It was a web of frail delight,

Inconstant as an April snowing.

In other eyes, in other lands,

In deep fair pools, new beauty lingers,

But like spent water in your hands

It runs from your reluctant fingers.

Ye shall not keep the singing lark

That owes to earlier skies its duty.

Weep not to hear along the dark

The sound of your departing beauty.

The fine and anguished ear of night

Is tuned to hear the smallest sorrow.

Oh, wait until the morning light!

It may not seem so gone to-morrow!

But honey-pale and rosy-red!

Brief lights that made a little shining!

Beautiful looks about us shed --

They leave us to the old repining.

Think not the watchful dim despair

Has come to you the first, sweet-hearted!

For oh, the gold in Helen's hair!

And how she cried when that departed!

Perhaps that one that took the most,

The swiftest borrower, wildest spender,

May count, as we would not, the cost --

And grow more true to us and tender.

Happy are we if in his eyes

We see no shadow of forgetting.

Nay -- if our star sinks in those skies

We shall not wholly see its setting.

Then let us laugh as do the brooks

That such immortal youth is ours,

If memory keeps for them our looks

As fresh as are the spring-time flowers.

Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night

Ye wake, to feel the cold December!

Rather recall the early light

And in your loved one's arms, remember.

Of Joan's Youth. [Louise Imogen Guiney]

I would unto my fair restore

A simple thing:

The flushing cheek she had before!

Out-velveting

No more, no more,

On our sad shore,

The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass

Unmoor the rose;

Or guileful ways the salmon pass

To sea, disclose:

For so, alas,

With Love, alas,

With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

I shall not care. [Sara Teasdale]

When I am dead and over me bright April

Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,

Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,

I shall not care.

I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful,

When rain bends down the bough,

And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted

Than you are now.

Love came back at Fall o' Dew. [Lizette Woodworth Reese]

Love came back at fall o' dew,

Playing his old part;

But I had a word or two

That would break his heart.

"He who comes at candlelight,

That should come before,

Must betake him to the night

From a barred door."

This the word that made us part

In the fall o' dew;

This the word that brake his heart --

Yet it brake mine, too.

There's Rosemary. [Olive Tilford Dargan]

O love that is not Love, but dear, so dear!

That is not love because it goes full soon,

Like flower born and dead within one moon,

And yet is love, for that it comes too near

The guarded fane where love alone may peer,

Ere, like young spring by summer soon outshone,

It trembles into death; yet comes anon

As thoughts of spring will come though summer's here.

O star prelusive to a dream more fair,

Within my heart I'll keep a heaven for thee

Where thou mayst freely come and freely go,

Touching with thy faint gold ere I am 'ware

A twilight hope -- a dawn I did not see --

O love that is not Love, but nearly so!

Love's Ritual. [Charles Hanson Towne]

Breathe me the ancient words when I shall find

Your spirit mine; if, seeking you, life wins

New wonder, with old splendor let us bind

Our hearts when Love's high sacrament begins.

Exalt my soul with pomp and pageantry,

Sing the eternal songs all lovers sing;

Yea, when you come, gold let our vestments be,

And lamps of silver let us softly swing.

But if at last, (hark how I whisper, Love!)

You from my temple and from me should turn,

I pray you chant no psalm my grief above,

Over the body of Pain let no light burn.

Go forth in silence, quiet as a dove,

Drift, with no sign, from our exultant place;

We need no `Ite' at the death of Love,

And none should come to look on Love's white face.

Grey Rocks, and Greyer Sea. [Charles G. D. Roberts]

Grey rocks, and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore --

And in my heart a name

My lips shall speak no more.

The high and lonely hills

Endure the darkening year --

And in my heart endure

A memory and a tear.

Across the tide a sail

That tosses, and is gone --

And in my heart the kiss

That longing dreams upon.

Grey rocks, and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore --

And in my heart the face

That I shall see no more.

"Grandmither, think not I forget". [Willa Sibert Cather]

Grandmither, think not I forget, when I come back to town,

An' wander the old ways again, an' tread them up and down.

I never smell the clover bloom, nor see the swallows pass,

Wi'out I mind how good ye were unto a little lass;

I never hear the winter rain a-pelting all night through

Wi'out I think and mind me of how cold it falls on you.

An' if I come not often to your bed beneath the thyme,

Mayhap 't is that I'd change wi' ye, and gie my bed for thine,

Would like to sleep in thine.

I never hear the summer winds among the roses blow

Wi'out I wonder why it was ye loved the lassie so.

Ye gave me cakes and lollipops and pretty toys a score --

I never thought I should come back and ask ye now for more.

Grandmither, gie me your still white hands that lie upon your breast,

For mine do beat the dark all night and never find me rest;

They grope among the shadows an' they beat the cold black air,

They go seekin' in the darkness, an' they never find him there,

They never find him there.

Grandmither, gie me your sightless eyes, that I may never see

His own a-burnin' full o' love that must not shine for me.

Grandmither, gie me your peaceful lips, white as the kirkyard snow,

For mine be tremblin' wi' the wish that he must never know.

Grandmither, gie me your clay-stopped ears, that I may never hear

My lad a-singin' in the night when I am sick wi' fear;

A-singin' when the moonlight over a' the land is white --

Ah, God! I'll up and go to him, a-singin' in the night,

A-callin' in the night.

Grandmither, gie me your clay-cold heart, that has forgot to ache,

For mine be fire wi'in my breast an' yet it cannot break.

Wi' every beat it's callin' for things that must not be, --

So can ye not let me creep in an' rest awhile by ye?

A little lass afeard o' dark slept by ye years agone --

An' she has found what night can hold 'twixt sunset an' the dawn:

So when I plant the rose an' rue above your grave for ye,

Ye'll know it's under rue an' rose that I would like to be,

That I would like to be.

When I am dead and Sister to the Dust. [Elsa Barker]

When I am dead and sister to the dust;

When no more avidly I drink the wine

Of human love; when the pale Proserpine

Has covered me with poppies, and cold rust

Has cut my lyre-strings, and the sun has thrust

Me underground to nourish the world-vine, --

Men shall discover these old songs of mine,

And say: This woman lived -- as poets must!

This woman lived and wore life as a sword

To conquer wisdom; this dead woman read

In the sealed Book of Love and underscored

The meanings. Then the sails of faith she spread,

And faring out for regions unexplored,

Went singing down the River of the Dead.

Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph's. [Grace Fallow Norton]

I

With cassock black, baret and book,

Father Saran goes by;

I think he goes to say a prayer

For one who has to die.

Even so, some day, Father Saran

May say a prayer for me;

Myself meanwhile, the Sister tells,

Should pray unceasingly.

They kneel who pray: how may I kneel

Who face to ceiling lie,

Shut out by all that man has made

From God who made the sky?

They lift who pray -- the low earth-born --

A humble heart to God:

But O, my heart of clay is proud --

True sister to the sod.

I look into the face of God,

They say bends over me;

I search the dark, dark face of God --

O what is it I see?

I see -- who lie fast bound, who may

Not kneel, who can but seek --

I see mine own face over me,

With tears upon its cheek.

II

If my dark grandam had but known,

Or yet my wild grandsir,

Or the lord that lured the maid away

That was my sad mother,

O had they known, O had they dreamed

What gift it was they gave,

Would they have stayed their wild, wild love,

Nor made my years their slave?

Must they have stopped their hungry lips

From love at thought of me?

O life, O life, how may we learn

Thy strangest mystery?

Nay, they knew not, as we scarce know;

Their souls, O let them rest;

My life is pupil unto pain --

With him I make my quest.

III

My little soul I never saw,

Nor can I count its days;

I do not know its wondrous law

And yet I know its ways.

O it is young as morning-hours,

And old as is the night;

O it has growth of budding flowers,

Yet tastes my body's blight.

And it is silent and apart,

And far and fair and still,

Yet ever beats within my heart,

And cries within my will.

And it is light and bright and strange,

And sees life far away,

Yet far with near can interchange

And dwell within the day.

My soul has died a thousand deaths,

And yet it does not die;

My soul has broke a thousand faiths,

And yet it cannot lie;

My soul -- there's naught can make it less;

My soul -- there's naught can mar;

Yet here it weeps with loneliness

Within its lonely star.

My soul -- not any dark can bind,

Nor hinder any hand,

Yet here it weeps -- long blind, long blind --

And cannot understand.

Irish Peasant Song. [Louise Imogen Guiney]

I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.

Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;

Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,

Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall?

The shower-sodden earth, the earth-colored streams,

They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,

And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,

It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill,

And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;

But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call,

The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

The Prince. [Josephine Dodge Daskam]

My heart it was a cup of gold

That at his lip did long to lie,

But he hath drunk the red wine down,

And tossed the goblet by.

My heart it was a floating bird

That through the world did wander free,

But he hath locked it in a cage,

And lost the silver key.

My heart it was a white, white rose

That bloomed upon a broken bough,

He did but wear it for an hour,

And it is withered now.

Four Winds. [Sara Teasdale]

"Four winds blowing thro' the sky,

You have seen poor maidens die,

Tell me then what I shall do

That my lover may be true."

Said the wind from out the south,

"Lay no kiss upon his mouth,"

And the wind from out the west,

"Wound the heart within his breast,"

And the wind from out the east,

"Send him empty from the feast,"

And the wind from out the north,

"In the tempest thrust him forth;

When thou art more cruel than he,

Then will Love be kind to thee."

A West-Country Lover. [Alice Brown]

Then, lady, at last thou art sick of my sighing.

Good-bye!

So long as I sue, thou wilt still be denying?

Good-bye!

Ah, well! shall I vow then to serve thee forever,

And swear no unkindness our kinship can sever?

Nay, nay, dear my lass! here's an end of endeavor.

Good-bye!

Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee.

Good-bye!

The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee.

Good-bye!

The gorse is enkindled, there's bloom on the heather,

And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather;

I still ride abroad though we ride not together.

Good-bye!

My horse is my mate; let the wind be my master.

Good-bye!

Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster.

Good-bye!

The red deer's a-tremble in coverts unbroken.

He hears the hoof-thunder; he scents the death-token.

Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken?

Good-bye!

The brown earth's my book, and I ride forth to read it.

Good-bye!

The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it.

Good-bye!

I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow.

As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow,

So I'll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow!

Good-bye!

A Winter Ride. [Amy Lowell]

Who shall declare the joy of the running!

Who shall tell of the pleasures of flight!

Springing and spurning the tufts of wild heather,

Sweeping, wide-winged, through the blue dome of light.

Everything mortal has moments immortal,

Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright.

So with the stretch of the white road before me,

Shining snow crystals rainbowed by the sun,

Fields that are white, stained with long, cool, blue shadows,

Strong with the strength of my horse as we run.

Joy in the touch of the wind and the sunlight!

Joy! With the vigorous earth I am one.

Sic Vita. [William Stanley Braithwaite]

Heart free, hand free,

Blue above, brown under,

All the world to me

Is a place of wonder.

Sun shine, moon shine,

Stars, and winds a-blowing,

All into this heart of mine

Flowing, flowing, flowing!

Mind free, step free,

Days to follow after,

Joys of life sold to me

For the price of laughter.

Girl's love, man's love,

Love of work and duty,

Just a will of God's to prove

Beauty, beauty, beauty!

Across the Fields to Anne. [Richard Burton]

How often in the summer-tide,

His graver business set aside,

Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed,

As to the pipe of Pan,

Stepped blithesomely with lover's pride

Across the fields to Anne.

It must have been a merry mile,

This summer stroll by hedge and stile,

With sweet foreknowledge all the while

How sure the pathway ran

To dear delights of kiss and smile,

Across the fields to Anne.

The silly sheep that graze to-day,

I wot, they let him go his way,

Nor once looked up, as who should say:

"It is a seemly man."

For many lads went wooing aye

Across the fields to Anne.

The oaks, they have a wiser look;

Mayhap they whispered to the brook:

"The world by him shall yet be shook,

It is in nature's plan;

Though now he fleets like any rook

Across the fields to Anne."

And I am sure, that on some hour

Coquetting soft 'twixt sun and shower,

He stooped and broke a daisy-flower

With heart of tiny span,

And bore it as a lover's dower

Across the fields to Anne.

While from her cottage garden-bed

She plucked a jasmine's goodlihede,

To scent his jerkin's brown instead;

Now since that love began,

What luckier swain than he who sped

Across the fields to Anne?

The winding path whereon I pace,

The hedgerow's green, the summer's grace,

Are still before me face to face;

Methinks I almost can

Turn poet and join the singing race

Across the fields to Anne!

The House and the Road. [Josephine Preston Peabody]

The little Road says, Go,

The little House says, Stay:

And O, it's bonny here at home,

But I must go away.

The little Road, like me,

Would seek and turn and know;

And forth I must, to learn the things

The little Road would show!

And go I must, my dears,

And journey while I may,

Though heart be sore for the little House

That had no word but Stay.

Maybe, no other way

Your child could ever know

Why a little House would have you stay,

When a little Road says, Go.

The Path to the Woods. [Madison Cawein]

Its friendship and its carelessness

Did lead me many a mile,

Through goat's-rue, with its dim caress,

And pink and pearl-white smile;

Through crowfoot, with its golden lure,

And promise of far things,

And sorrel with its glance demure

And wide-eyed wonderings.

It led me with its innocence,

As childhood leads the wise,

With elbows here of tattered fence,

And blue of wildflower eyes;

With whispers low of leafy speech,

And brook-sweet utterance;

With bird-like words of oak and beech,

And whisperings clear as Pan's.

It led me with its childlike charm,

As candor leads desire,

Now with a clasp of blossomy arm,

A butterfly kiss of fire;

Now with a toss of tousled gold,

A barefoot sound of green,

A breath of musk, of mossy mold,

With vague allurements keen.

It led me with remembered things

Into an old-time vale,

Peopled with faery glimmerings,

And flower-like fancies pale;

Where fungous forms stood, gold and gray,

Each in its mushroom gown,

And, roofed with red, glimpsed far away,

A little toadstool town.

It led me with an idle ease,

A vagabond look and air,

A sense of ragged arms and knees

In weeds grown everywhere;

It led me, as a gypsy leads,

To dingles no one knows,

With beauty burred with thorny seeds,

And tangled wild with rose.

It led me as simplicity

Leads age and its demands,

With bee-beat of its ecstasy,

And berry-stained touch of hands;

With round revealments, puff-ball white,

Through rents of weedy brown,

And petaled movements of delight

In roseleaf limb and gown.

It led me on and on and on,

Beyond the Far Away,

Into a world long dead and gone, --

The world of Yesterday:

A faery world of memory,

Old with its hills and streams,

Wherein the child I used to be

Still wanders with his dreams.

Sometimes. [Thomas S. Jones, Jr.]

Across the fields of yesterday

He sometimes comes to me,

A little lad just back from play --

The lad I used to be.

And yet he smiles so wistfully

Once he has crept within,

I wonder if he hopes to see

The man I might have been.

Renascence. [Edna St. Vincent Millay]

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I'd started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;

These were the things that bounded me;

And I could touch them with my hand,

Almost, I thought, from where I stand.

And all at once things seemed so small

My breath came short, and scarce at all.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;

Miles and miles above my head;

So here upon my back I'll lie

And look my fill into the sky.

And so I looked, and, after all,

The sky was not so very tall.

The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,

And -- sure enough! -- I see the top!

The sky, I thought, is not so grand;

I 'most could touch it with my hand!

And, reaching up my hand to try,

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity

Came down and settled over me;

And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass

Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound

Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence

But could not, -- nay! But needs must suck

At the great wound, and could not pluck

My lips away till I had drawn

All venom out. -- Ah, fearful pawn!

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

All sin was of my sinning, all

Atoning mine, and mine the gall

Of all regret. Mine was the weight

Of every brooded wrong, the hate

That stood behind each envious thrust,

Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,

Each suffering, I craved relief

With individual desire, --

Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire

About a thousand people crawl;

Perished with each, -- then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;

He moved his eyes and looked at me;

I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,

And knew his hunger as my own.

I saw at sea a great fog-bank

Between two ships that struck and sank;

A thousand screams the heavens smote;

And every scream tore through my throat.

No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath

That, crying, met an answering cry

From the compassion that was I.

All suffering mine, and mine its rod;

Mine, pity like the pity of God.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite Me!

My anguished spirit, like a bird,

Beating against my lips I heard;

Yet lay the weight so close about

There was no room for it without.

And so beneath the Weight lay I

And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,

When quietly the earth beneath

Gave way, and inch by inch, so great

At last had grown the crushing weight,

Into the earth I sank till I

Full six feet under ground did lie,

And sank no more, -- there is no weight

Can follow here, however great.

From off my breast I felt it roll,

And as it went my tortured soul

Burst forth and fled in such a gust

That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;

Cool is its hand upon the brow

And soft its breast beneath the head

Of one who is so gladly dead.

And all at once, and over all,

The pitying rain began to fall;

I lay and heard each pattering hoof

Upon my lowly, thatched roof,

And seemed to love the sound far more

Than ever I had done before.

For rain it hath a friendly sound

To one who's six feet underground;

And scarce the friendly voice or face:

A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come

And speak to me in my new home.

I would I were alive again

To kiss the fingers of the rain,

To drink into my eyes the shine

Of every slanting silver line,

To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze

From drenched and dripping apple-trees.

For soon the shower will be done,

And then the broad face of the sun

Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth

Until the world with answering mirth

Shakes joyously, and each round drop

Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.

How can I bear it; buried here,

While overhead the sky grows clear

And blue again after the storm?

O, multi-colored, multiform,

Beloved beauty over me,

That I shall never, never see

Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,

That I shall never more behold!

Sleeping your myriad magics through,

Close-sepulchred away from you!

O God, I cried, give me new birth,

And put me back upon the earth!

Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd

And let the heavy rain, down-poured

In one big torrent, set me free,

Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and, through the breathless hush

That answered me, the far-off rush

Of herald wings came whispering

Like music down the vibrant string

Of my ascending prayer, and -- crash!

Before the wild wind's whistling lash

The startled storm-clouds reared on high

And plunged in terror down the sky,

And the big rain in one black wave

Fell from the sky and struck my grave.

I know not how such things can be

I only know there came to me

A fragrance such as never clings

To aught save happy living things;

A sound as of some joyous elf

Singing sweet songs to please himself,

And, through and over everything,

A sense of glad awakening.

The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,

Whispering to me I could hear;

I felt the rain's cool finger-tips

Brushed tenderly across my lips,

Laid gently on my sealed sight,

And all at once the heavy night

Fell from my eyes and I could see, --

A drenched and dripping apple-tree,

A last long line of silver rain,

A sky grown clear and blue again.

And as I looked a quickening gust

Of wind blew up to me and thrust

Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, --

I know not how such things can be! --

I breathed my soul back into me.

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I

And hailed the earth with such a cry

As is not heard save from a man

Who has been dead, and lives again.

About the trees my arms I wound;

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;

I raised my quivering arms on high;

I laughed and laughed into the sky,

Till at my throat a strangling sob

Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb

Sent instant tears into my eyes;

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e'er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass

But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,

Nor speak, however silently,

But my hushed voice will answer Thee.

I know the path that tells Thy way

Through the cool eve of every day;

God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky, --

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That cannot keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat -- the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

Souls. [Fannie Stearns Davis]

My Soul goes clad in gorgeous things,

Scarlet and gold and blue;

And at her shoulder sudden wings

Like long flames flicker through.

And she is swallow-fleet, and free

From mortal bonds and bars.

She laughs, because Eternity

Blossoms for her with stars!

O folk who scorn my stiff gray gown,

My dull and foolish face, --

Can ye not see my Soul flash down,

A singing flame through space?

And folk, whose earth-stained looks I hate,

Why may I not divine

Your Souls, that must be passionate,

Shining and swift, as mine!

Fiat Lux. [Lloyd Mifflin]

Then that dread angel near the awful throne,

Leaving the seraphs ranged in flaming tiers,

Winged his dark way through those unpinioned spheres,

And on the void's black beetling edge, alone,

Stood with raised wings, and listened for the tone

Of God's command to reach his eager ears,

While Chaos wavered, for she felt her years

Unsceptered now in that convulsive zone.

Night trembled. And as one hath oft beheld

A lamp within a vase light up its gloom,

So God's voice lighted him, from heel to plume:

"Let there be light!" It said, and Darkness, quelled,

Shrunk noiseless backward in her monstrous womb

Through vasts unwinnowed by the wings of eld!

The Dreamer. [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay]

"~Why do you seek the sun,

In your Bubble-Crown ascending?

Your chariot will melt to mist,

Your crown will have an ending.~"

"Nay, sun is but a Bubble,

Earth is a whiff of Foam --

To my caves on the coast of Thule

Each night I call them home.

Thence Faiths blow forth to angels

And Loves blow forth to men --

They break and turn to nothing

And I make them whole again:

On the crested waves of chaos

I ride them back reborn:

New stars I bring at evening

For those that burst at morn:

My soul is the wind of Thule

And evening is the sign,

The sun is but a Bubble,

A fragile child of mine."

A Caravan from China comes. [Richard Le Gallienne]

(After Hafiz)

A caravan from China comes;

For miles it sweetens all the air

With fragrant silks and dreaming gums,

Attar and myrrh --

A caravan from China comes.

O merchant, tell me what you bring,

With music sweet of camel bells;

How long have you been travelling

With these sweet smells?

O merchant, tell me what you bring.

A lovely lady is my freight,

A lock escaped of her long hair, --

That is this perfume delicate

That fills the air --

A lovely lady is my freight.

Her face is from another land,

I think she is no mortal maid, --

Her beauty, like some ghostly hand,

Makes me afraid;

Her face is from another land.

The little moon my cargo is,

About her neck the Pleiades

Clasp hands and sing; Hafiz, 't is this

Perfumes the breeze --

The little moon my cargo is.

As I came down from Lebanon. [Clinton Scollard]

As I came down from Lebanon,

Came winding, wandering slowly down

Through mountain passes bleak and brown,

The cloudless day was well-nigh done.

The city, like an opal set

In emerald, showed each minaret

Afire with radiant beams of sun,

And glistened orange, fig, and lime,

Where song-birds made melodious chime,

As I came down from Lebanon.

As I came down from Lebanon,

Like lava in the dying glow,

Through olive orchards far below

I saw the murmuring river run;

And 'neath the wall upon the sand

Swart sheiks from distant Samarcand,

With precious spices they had won,

Lay long and languidly in wait

Till they might pass the guarded gate,

As I came down from Lebanon.

As I came down from Lebanon,

I saw strange men from lands afar,

In mosque and square and gay bazar,

The Magi that the Moslem shun,

And grave Effendi from Stamboul,

Who sherbet sipped in corners cool;

And, from the balconies o'errun

With roses, gleamed the eyes of those

Who dwell in still seraglios,

As I came down from Lebanon.

As I came down from Lebanon,

The flaming flower of daytime died,

And Night, arrayed as is a bride

Of some great king, in garments spun

Of purple and the finest gold,

Outbloomed in glories manifold,

Until the moon, above the dun

And darkening desert, void of shade,

Shone like a keen Damascus blade,

As I came down from Lebanon.

The Only Way. [Louis V. Ledoux]

I

Memphis and Karnak, Luxor, Thebes, the Nile:

Of these your letters told; and I who read

Saw loom on dim horizons Egypt's dead

In march across the desert, mile on mile,

A ghostly caravan in slow defile

Between the sand and stars; and at their head

From unmapped darkness into darkness fled

The gods that Egypt feared a little while.

There black against the night I saw them loom

With captive kings and armies in array

Remembered only by their sculptured doom,

And thought: What Egypt was are we to-day.

Then rose obscure against the rearward gloom

The march of Empires yet to pass away.

II

I looked in vision down the centuries

And saw how Athens stood a sunlit while

A sovereign city free from greed and guile,

The half-embodied dream of Pericles.

Then saw I one of smooth words, swift to please,

At laggard virtue mock with shrug and smile;

With Cleon's creed rang court and peristyle,

Then sank the sun in far Sicilian seas.

From brows ignoble fell the violet crown.

Again the warning sounds; the hosts engage:

In Cleon's face we fling our battle gage,

We win as foes of Cleon loud renown;

But while we think to build the coming age

The laurel on our brows is turning brown.

III

We top the poisonous blooms that choke the state,

At flower and fruit our flashing strokes are made,

The whetted scythe on stalk and stem is laid,

But deeper must we strike to extirpate

The rooted evil that within our gate

Will sprout again and flourish, branch and blade;

For only from within can ill be stayed

While Adam's seed is unregenerate.

With zeal redoubled let our strength be strained

To cut the rooted causes where they hold,

Nor spend our sinews on the fungus mold

When all the breeding marshes must be drained.

Be this our aim; and let our youth be trained

To honor virtue more than place and gold.

IV

A hundred cities sapped by slow decay,

A hundred codes and systems proven vain

Lie hearsed in sand upon the heaving plain,

Memorial ruins mounded, still and gray;

And we who plod the barren waste to-day

Another code evolving, think to gain

Surcease of man's inheritance of pain

And mold a state immune from evil's sway.

Not laws; but virtue in the soul we need,

The old Socratic justice in the heart,

The golden rule become the people's creed

When years of training have performed their part

For thus alone in home and church and mart

Can evil perish and the race be freed.

The Dust Dethroned. [George Sterling]

Sargon is dust, Semiramis a clod!

In crypts profaned the moon at midnight peers;

The owl upon the Sphinx hoots in her ears,

And scant and sear the desert grasses nod

Where once the armies of Assyria trod,

With younger sunlight splendid on the spears;

The lichens cling the closer with the years,

And seal the eyelids of the weary god.

Where high the tombs of royal Egypt heave,

The vulture shadows with arrested wings

The indecipherable boast of kings,

As Arab children hear their mother's cry

And leave in mockery their toy -- they leave

The skull of Pharaoh staring at the sky.

Kinchinjunga. [Cale Young Rice]

(Which is the next highest of mountains)

I

O white Priest of Eternity, around

Whose lofty summit veiling clouds arise

Of the earth's immemorial sacrifice

To Brahma in whose breath all lives and dies;

O Hierarch enrobed in timeless snows,

First-born of Asia whose maternal throes

Seem changed now to a million human woes,

Holy thou art and still! Be so, nor sound

One sigh of all the mystery in thee found.

II

For in this world too much is overclear,

Immortal Ministrant to many lands,

From whose ice-altars flow to fainting sands

Rivers that each libation poured expands.

Too much is known, O Ganges-giving sire!

Thy people fathom life and find it dire,

Thy people fathom death, and, in it, fire

To live again, though in Illusion's sphere,

Behold concealed as Grief is in a tear.

III

Wherefore continue, still enshrined, thy rites,

Though dark Thibet, that dread ascetic, falls

In strange austerity, whose trance appalls,

Before thee, and a suppliant on thee calls.

Continue still thy silence high and sure,

That something beyond fleeting may endure --

Something that shall forevermore allure

Imagination on to mystic flights

Wherein alone no wing of Evil lights.

IV

Yea, wrap thy awful gulfs and acolytes

Of lifted granite round with reachless snows.

Stand for Eternity while pilgrim rows

Of all the nations envy thy repose.

Ensheath thy swart sublimities, unscaled.

Be that alone on earth which has not failed.

Be that which never yet has yearned or ailed,

But since primeval Power upreared thy heights

Has stood above all deaths and all delights.

V

And though thy loftier Brother shall be King,

High-priest art thou to Brahma unrevealed,

While thy white sanctity forever sealed

In icy silence leaves desire congealed.

In ghostly ministrations to the sun,

And to the mendicant stars and the moon-nun,

Be holy still, till East to West has run,

And till no sacrificial suffering

On any shrine is left to tell life's sting.

Scum o' the Earth. [Robert Haven Schauffler]

I

At the gate of the West I stand,

On the isle where the nations throng.

We call them "scum o' the earth";

Stay, are we doing you wrong,

Young fellow from Socrates' land? --

You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong

Fresh from the Master Praxiteles' hand?

So you're of Spartan birth?

Descended, perhaps, from one of the band --

Deathless in story and song --

Who combed their long hair at Thermopylae's pass?

Ah, I forget the straits, alas!

More tragic than theirs, more compassion-worth,

That have doomed you to march in our "immigrant class"

Where you're nothing but "scum o' the earth".

II

You Pole with the child on your knee,

What dower bring you to the land of the free?

Hark! does she croon

That sad little tune

That Chopin once found on his Polish lea

And mounted in gold for you and for me?

Now a ragged young fiddler answers

In wild Czech melody

That Dvorak took whole from the dancers.

And the heavy faces bloom

In the wonderful Slavic way;

The little, dull eyes, the brows a-gloom,

Suddenly dawn like the day.

While, watching these folk and their mystery,

I forget that they're nothing worth;

That Bohemians, Slovaks, Croatians,

And men of all Slavic nations

Are "polacks" -- and "scum o' the earth".

III

Genoese boy of the level brow,

Lad of the lustrous, dreamy eyes

A-stare at Manhattan's pinnacles now

In the first sweet shock of a hushed surprise;

Within your far-rapt seer's eyes

I catch the glow of the wild surmise

That played on the Santa Maria's prow

In that still gray dawn,

Four centuries gone,

When a world from the wave began to rise.

Oh, it's hard to foretell what high emprise

Is the goal that gleams

When Italy's dreams

Spread wing and sweep into the skies.

Caesar dreamed him a world ruled well;

Dante dreamed Heaven out of Hell;

Angelo brought us there to dwell;

And you, are you of a different birth? --

You're only a "dago", -- and "scum o' the earth"!

IV

Stay, are we doing you wrong

Calling you "scum o' the earth",

Man of the sorrow-bowed head,

Of the features tender yet strong, --

Man of the eyes full of wisdom and mystery

Mingled with patience and dread?

Have not I known you in history,

Sorrow-bowed head?

Were you the poet-king, worth

Treasures of Ophir unpriced?

Were you the prophet, perchance, whose art

Foretold how the rabble would mock

That shepherd of spirits, erelong,

Who should carry the lambs on his heart

And tenderly feed his flock?

Man -- lift that sorrow-bowed head.

Lo! 't is the face of the Christ!

The vision dies at its birth.

You're merely a butt for our mirth.

You're a "sheeny" -- and therefore despised

And rejected as "scum o' the earth".

V

Countrymen, bend and invoke

Mercy for us blasphemers,

For that we spat on these marvelous folk,

Nations of darers and dreamers,

Scions of singers and seers,

Our peers, and more than our peers.

"Rabble and refuse", we name them

And "scum o' the earth", to shame them.

Mercy for us of the few, young years,

Of the culture so callow and crude,

Of the hands so grasping and rude,

The lips so ready for sneers

At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers.

Mercy for us who dare despise

Men in whose loins our Homer lies;

Mothers of men who shall bring to us

The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss;

Children in whose frail arms shall rest

Prophets and singers and saints of the West.

Newcomers all from the eastern seas,

Help us incarnate dreams like these.

Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.

Help us to father a nation, strong

In the comradeship of an equal birth,

In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth.

Da Boy from Rome. [Thomas Augustine Daly]

To-day ees com' from Eetaly

A boy ees leeve een Rome,

An' he ees stop an' speak weeth me --

I weesh he stay at home.

He stop an' say "Hallo," to me.

An' w'en he standin' dere

I smal da smal of Eetaly

Steell steeckin' een hees hair,

Dat com' weeth heem across da sea,

An' een da clo'es he wear.

Da peopla bomp heem een da street,

Da noise ees scare heem, too;

He ees so clumsy een da feet

He don't know w'at to do,

Dere ees so many theeng he meet

Dat ees so strange, so new.

He sheever an' he ask eef here

Eet ees so always cold.

Den een hees eye ees com' a tear --

He ees no vera old --

An', oh, hees voice ees soun' so queer

I have no heart for scold.

He look up een da sky so gray,

But oh, hees eye ees be

So far away, so far away,

An' w'at he see I see.

Da sky eet ees no gray to-day

At home een Eetaly.

He see da glada peopla seet

Where warma shine da sky --

Oh, while he eesa look at eet

He ees baygeen to cry.

Eef I no growl an' swear a beet

So, too, my frand, would I.

Oh, why he stop an' speak weeth me,

Dees boy dat leeve een Rome,

An' com' to-day from Eetaly?

I weesh he stay at home.

The Fugitives. [Florence Wilkinson]

We are they that go, that go,

Plunging before the hidden blow.

We run the byways of the earth,

For we are fugitive from birth,

Blindfolded, with wide hands abroad

That sow, that sow the sullen sod.

We cannot wait, we cannot stop

For flushing field or quickened crop;

The orange bow of dusky dawn

Glimmers our smoking swath upon;

Blindfolded still we hurry on.

How we do know the ways we run

That are blindfolded from the sun?

We stagger swiftly to the call,

Our wide hands feeling for the wall.

Oh, ye who climb to some clear heaven,

By grace of day and leisure given,

Pity us, fugitive and driven --

The lithe whip curling on our track,

The headlong haste that looks not back!

The Song of the Unsuccessful. [Richard Burton]

We are the toilers from whom God barred

The gifts that are good to hold.

We meant full well and we tried full hard,

And our failures were manifold.

And we are the clan of those whose kin

Were a millstone dragging them down.

Yea, we had to sweat for our brother's sin,

And lose the victor's crown.

The seeming-able, who all but scored,

From their teeming tribe we come:

What was there wrong with us, O Lord,

That our lives were dark and dumb?

The men ten-talented, who still

Strangely missed of the goal,

Of them we are: it seems Thy will

To harrow some in soul.

We are the sinners, too, whose lust

Conquered the higher claims,

We sat us prone in the common dust,

And played at the devil's games.

We are the hard-luck folk, who strove

Zealously, but in vain;

We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,

And still we lost again.

We are the doubles of those whose way

Was festal with fruits and flowers;

Body and brain we were sound as they,

But the prizes were not ours.

A mighty army our full ranks make,

We shake the graves as we go;

The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,

They both have brought us low.

And while we are laying life's sword aside,

Spent and dishonored and sad,

Our epitaph this, when once we have died:

"The weak lie here, and the bad."

We wonder if this can be really the close,

Life's fever cooled by death's trance;

And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,

"God, give us another chance!"

They went forth to Battle, but they always fell. [Shaemas O Sheel]

They went forth to battle, but they always fell;

Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;

Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,

And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.

They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,

They were not weak, as one who vainly wields

A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell

How on the hard-fought field they always fell.

It was a secret music that they heard,

A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;

And that which pierced the heart was but a word,

Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword

Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease

On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.

Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,

And died for hearing what no foeman heard.

They went forth to battle but they always fell;

Their might was not the might of lifted spears;

Over the battle-clamor came a spell

Of troubling music, and they fought not well.

Their wreaths are willows and their tribute, tears;

Their names are old sad stories in men's ears;

Yet they will scatter the red hordes of Hell,

Who went to battle forth and always fell.

The Eagle that is forgotten. [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay]

(John P. Altgeld)

Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone.

Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.

"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.

They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day.

Now you were ended. They praised you . . . and laid you away.

The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,

The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,

The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,

That should have remembered forever, . . . remember no more.

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,

The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?

They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,

A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons.

The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,

The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.

Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone.

Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.

Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame --

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,

To live in mankind, far, far more than to live in a name! --

A Memorial Tablet. [Florence Wilkinson]

Oh, Agathocles, fare thee well!

Naked and brave thou goest

Without one glance behind!

Hast thou no fear, Agathocles,

Or backward grief of mind?

The dreamy dog beside thee

Presses against thy knee;

He, too, oh, sweet Agathocles,

Is deaf and visioned like thee.

Thou art so lithe and lovely

And yet thou art not ours.

What Delphic saying compels thee

Of kings or topless towers?

That little blowing mantle

Thou losest from thine arm --

No shoon nor staff, Agathocles,

Nor sword, to fend from harm!

Thou hast the changed impersonal

Awed brow of mystery --

Yesterday thou wast burning,

Mad boy, for Glaucoe.

Philis thy mother calls thee:

Mine eyes with tears are dim,

Turn once, look once, Agathocles --

(~The gods have blinded him.~)

Come back, Agathocles, the night --

Brings thee what place of rest?

Wine-sweet are Glaucoe's kisses,

Flower-soft her budding breast.

He seems to hearken, Glaucoe,

He seems to listen and smile;

(~Nay, Philis, but a god-song

He follows this many a mile.~)

Come back, come back, Agathocles!

(~He scents the asphodel;

Unearthly swift he runneth.~)

Agathocles, farewell!

To-Day. [Helen Gray Cone]

Voice, with what emulous fire thou singest free hearts of old fashion,

English scorners of Spain, sweeping the blue sea-way,

Sing me the daring of life for life, the magnanimous passion

Of man for man in the mean populous streets of To-day!

Hand, with what color and power thou couldst show, in the ring hot-sanded,

Brown Bestiarius holding the lean tawn tiger at bay,

Paint me the wrestle of Toil with the wild-beast Want, bare-handed;

Shadow me forth a soul steadily facing To-day!

The Man with the Hoe. [Edwin Markham]

(Written after seeing Millet's world-famous painting)

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave

To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;

To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this --

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed --

More filled with signs and portents for the soul --

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

What the long reaches of the peaks of song,

The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;

Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the World,

A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;

Touch it again with immortality;

Give back the upward looking and the light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;

Make right the immemorial infamies,

Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the Future reckon with this Man?

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings --

With those who shaped him to the thing he is --

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,

After the silence of the centuries?

Exordium. [George Cabot Lodge]

Speak! said my soul, be stern and adequate;

The sunset falls from Heaven, the year is late,

Love waits with fallen tresses at thy gate

And mourns for perished days.

Speak! in the rigor of thy fate and mine,

Ere these scant, dying days, bright-lipped with wine,

All one by one depart, resigned, divine,

Through desert, autumn ways.

Speak! thou art lonely in thy chilly mind,

With all this desperate solitude of wind,

The solitude of tears that make thee blind,

Of wild and causeless tears.

Speak! thou hast need of me, heart, hand and head,

Speak, if it be an echo of thy dread,

A dirge of hope, of young illusions dead --

Perchance God hears!

The Frozen Grail. [Elsa Barker]

(To Peary and his men, before the last expedition)

Why sing the legends of the Holy Grail,

The dead crusaders of the Sepulchre,

While these men live? Are the great bards all dumb?

Here is a vision to shake the blood of Song,

And make Fame's watchman tremble at his post.

What shall prevail against the spirit of man,

When cold, the lean and snarling wolf of hunger,

The threatening spear of ice-mailed Solitude,

Silence, and space, and ghostly-footed Fear

Prevail not? Dante, in his frozen hell

Shivering, endured no bleakness like the void

These men have warmed with their own flaming will,

And peopled with their dreams. The wind from fierce

Arcturus in their faces, at their backs

The whip of the world's doubt, and in their souls

Courage to die -- if death shall be the price

Of that cold cup that will assuage their thirst;

They climb, and fall, and stagger toward the goal.

They lay themselves the road whereby they travel,

And sue God for a franchise. Does He watch

Behind the lattice of the boreal lights?

In that grail-chapel of their stern-vowed quest,

Ninety of God's long paces toward the North,

Will they behold the splendor of His face?

To conquer the world must man renounce the world?

These have renounced it. Had ye only faith

Ye might move mountains, said the Nazarene.

Why, these have faith to move the zones of man

Out to the point where All and Nothing meet.

They catch the bit of Death between their teeth,

In one wild dash to trample the unknown

And leap the gates of knowledge. They have dared

Even to defy the sentinel that guards

The doors of the forbidden -- dared to hurl

Their breathing bodies after the Ideal,

That like the heavenly kingdom must be taken

Only by violence. The star that leads

The leader of this quest has held the world

True to its orbit for a million years.

And shall he fail? They never fail who light

Their lamp of faith at the unwavering flame

Burnt for the altar service of the Race

Since the beginning. He shall find the strange --

The white immaculate Virgin of the North,

Whose steady gaze no mortal ever dared,

Whose icy hand no human ever grasped.

In the dread silence and the solitude

She waits and listens through the centuries

For one indomitable, destined soul,

Born to endure the glory of her eyes,

And lift his warm lips to the frozen Grail.

The Unconquered Air. [Florence Earle Coates]

I

Others endure Man's rule: he therefore deems

I shall endure it -- I, the unconquered Air!

Imagines this triumphant strength may bear

His paltry sway! yea, ignorantly dreams,

Because proud Rhea now his vassal seems,

And Neptune him obeys in billowy lair,

That he a more sublime assault may dare,

Where blown by tempest wild the vulture screams!

Presumptuous, he mounts: I toss his bones

Back from the height supernal he has braved:

Ay, as his vessel nears my perilous zones,

I blow the cockle-shell away like chaff

And give him to the Sea he has enslaved.

He founders in its depths; and then I laugh!

II

Impregnable I held myself, secure

Against intrusion. Who can measure Man?

How should I guess his mortal will outran

Defeat so far that danger could allure

For its own sake? -- that he would all endure,

All sacrifice, all suffer, rather than

Forego the daring dreams Olympian

That prophesy to him of victory sure?

Ah, tameless courage! -- dominating power

That, all attempting, in a deathless hour

Made earth-born Titans godlike, in revolt! --

Fear is the fire that melts Icarian wings:

Who fears nor Fate, nor Time, nor what Time brings,

May drive Apollo's steeds, or wield the thunderbolt!

The Happiest Heart. [John Vance Cheney]

Who drives the horses of the sun

Shall lord it but a day;

Better the lowly deed were done,

And kept the humble way.

The rust will find the sword of fame,

The dust will hide the crown;

Ay, none shall nail so high his name

Time will not tear it down.

The happiest heart that ever beat

Was in some quiet breast

That found the common daylight sweet,

And left to Heaven the rest.

To a New York Shop-Girl dressed for Sunday. [Anna Hempstead Branch]

To-day I saw the shop-girl go

Down gay Broadway to meet her beau.

Conspicuous, splendid, conscious, sweet,

She spread abroad and took the street.

And all that niceness would forbid,

Superb, she smiled upon and did.

Let other girls, whose happier days

Preserve the perfume of their ways,

Go modestly. The passing hour

Adds splendor to their opening flower.

But from this child too swift a doom

Must steal her prettiness and bloom,

Toil and weariness hide the grace

That pleads a moment from her face.

So blame her not if for a day

She flaunts her glories while she may.

She half perceives, half understands,

Snatching her gifts with both her hands.

The little strut beneath the skirt

That lags neglected in the dirt,

The indolent swagger down the street --

Who can condemn such happy feet!

Innocent! vulgar -- that's the truth!

Yet with the darling wiles of youth!

The bright, self-conscious eyes that stare

With such hauteur, beneath such hair!

~Perhaps the men will find me fair!~

Charming and charmed, flippant, arrayed,

Fluttered and foolish, proud, displayed,

Infinite pathos of parade!

The bangles and the narrowed waist --

The tinsled boa -- forgive the taste!

Oh, the starved nights she gave for that,

And bartered bread to buy her hat!

She flows before the reproachful sage

And begs her woman's heritage.

Dear child, with the defiant eyes,

Insolent with the half surmise

We do not quite admire, I know

How foresight frowns on this vain show!

And judgment, wearily sad, may see

No grace in such frivolity.

Yet which of us was ever bold

To worship Beauty, hungry and cold!

Scorn famine down, proudly expressed

Apostle to what things are best.

Let him who starves to buy the food

For his soul's comfort find her good,

Nor chide the frills and furbelows

That are the prettiest things she knows.

Poet and prophet in God's eyes

Make no more perfect sacrifice.

Who knows before what inner shrine

She eats with them the bread and wine?

Poor waif! One of the sacred few

That madly sought the best they knew!

Dear -- let me lean my cheek to-night

Close, close to yours. Ah, that is right.

How warm and near! At last I see

One beauty shines for thee and me.

So let us love and understand --

Whose hearts are hidden in God's hand.

And we will cherish your brief Spring

And all its fragile flowering.

God loves all prettiness, and on this

Surely his angels lay their kiss.

A Faun in Wall Street. [John Myers O'Hara]

What shape so furtive steals along the dim

Bleak street, barren of throngs, this day of June;

This day of rest, when all the roses swoon

In Attic vales where dryads wait for him?

What sylvan this, and what the stranger whim

That lured him here this golden afternoon;

Ways where the dusk has fallen oversoon

In the deep canyon, torrentless and grim?

Great Pan is far, O mad estray, and these

Bare walls that leap to heaven and hide the skies

Are fanes men rear to other deities;

Far to the east the haunted woodland lies,

And cloudless still, from cyclad-dotted seas,

Hymettus and the hills of Hellas rise.

The Mystic. [Witter Bynner]

By seven vineyards on one hill

We walked. The native wine

In clusters grew beside us two,

For your lips and for mine,

When, "Hark!" you said, -- "Was that a bell

Or a bubbling spring we heard?"

But I was wise and closed my eyes

And listened to a bird;

For as summer leaves are bent and shake

With singers passing through,

So moves in me continually

The winged breath of you.

You tasted from a single vine

And took from that your fill --

But I inclined to every kind,

All seven on one hill.

The Cloud. [Josephine Preston Peabody]

The islands called me far away,

The valleys called me home.

The rivers with a silver voice

Drew on my heart to come.

The paths reached tendrils to my hair

From every vine and tree.

There was no refuge anywhere

Until I came to thee.

There is a northern cloud I know,

Along a mountain crest;

And as she folds her wings of mist,

So I could make my rest.

There is no chain to bind her so

Unto that purple height;

And she will shine and wander, slow,

Slow, with a cloud's delight.

Would she begone? She melts away,

A heavenly joyous thing.

Yet day will find the mountain white,

White-folded with her wing.

As you may see, but half aware

If it be late or soon,

Soft breathing on the day-time air,

The fair forgotten Moon.

And though love cannot bind me, Love,

-- Ah no! -- yet I could stay

Maybe, with wings forever spread,

-- Forever, and a day.

The Thought of her. [Richard Hovey]

My love for thee doth take me unaware,

When most with lesser things my brain is wrought,

As in some nimble interchange of thought

The silence enters, and the talkers stare.

Suddenly I am still and thou art there,

A viewless visitant and unbesought,

And all my thinking trembles into nought

And all my being opens like a prayer.

Thou art the lifted Chalice in my soul,

And I a dim church at the thought of thee;

Brief be the moment, but the mass is said,

The benediction like an aureole

Is on my spirit, and shuddering through me

A rapture like the rapture of the dead.

Song. "If love were but a little thing --". [Florence Earle Coates]

If love were but a little thing --

Strange love, which, more than all, is great --

One might not such devotion bring,

Early to serve and late.

If love were but a passing breath --

Wild love -- which, as God knows, is sweet --

One might not make of life and death

A pillow for love's feet.

The Rosary. [Robert Cameron Rogers]

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,

Are as a string of pearls to me;

I count them over, every one apart,

My rosary.

Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,

To still a heart in absence wrung;

I tell each bead unto the end -- and there

A cross is hung.

Oh, memories that bless -- and burn!

Oh, barren gain -- and bitter loss!

I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn

To kiss the cross,

Sweetheart,

To kiss the cross.

Once. [Trumbull Stickney]

That day her eyes were deep as night.

She had the motion of the rose,

The bird that veers across the light,

The waterfall that leaps and throws

Its irised spindrift to the sun.

She seemed a wind of music passing on.

Alone I saw her that one day

Stand in the window of my life.

Her sudden hand melted away

Under my lips, and without strife

I held her in my arms awhile

And drew into my lips her living smile, --

Now many a day ago and year!

Since when I dream and lie awake

In summer nights to feel her near,

And from the heavy darkness break

Glitters, till all my spirit swims

And her hand hovers on my shaking limbs.

If once again before I die

I drank the laughter of her mouth

And quenched my fever utterly,

I say, and should it cost my youth,

'T were well! for I no more should wait

Hammering midnight on the doors of fate.

Love knocks at the Door. [John Hall Wheelock]

In the pain, in the loneliness of love,

To the heart of my sweet I fled.

I knocked at the door of her living heart,

"Let in -- let in --" I said.

"What seek you here?" the voices cried,

"You seeker among the dead" --

"Herself I seek, herself I seek,

Let in -- let in!" I said.

They opened the door of her living heart,

But the core thereof was dead.

They opened the core of her living heart --

A worm at the core there fed.

"Where is my sweet, where is my sweet?"

"She is gone away, she is fled.

Long years ago she fled away,

She will never return," they said.

The Candle and the Flame. [George Sylvester Viereck]

Thy hands are like cool herbs that bring

Balm to men's hearts, upon them laid;

Thy lovely-petalled lips are made

As any blossom of the spring.

But in thine eyes there is a thing,

O Love, that makes me half afraid.

For they are old, those eyes . . . They gleam

Between the waking and the dream

With antique wisdom, like a bright

Lamp strangled by the temple's veil,

That beckons to the acolyte

Who prays with trembling lips and pale

In the long watches of the night.

They are as old as Life. They were

When proud Gomorrah reared its head

A new-born city. They were there

When in the places of the dead

Men swathed the body of the Lord.

They visioned Pa-wak raise the wall

Of China. They saw Carthage fall

And marked the grim Hun lead his horde.

There is no secret anywhere

Nor any joy or shame that lies

Not writ somehow in those child-eyes

Of thine, O Love, in some strange wise.

Thou art the lad Endymion,

And that great queen with spice and myrrh

From Araby, whom Solomon

Delighted, and the lust of her.

The legions marching from the sea

With Caesar's cohorts sang of thee,

How thy fair head was more to him

Than all the land of Italy.

Yea, in the old days thou wast she

Who lured Mark Antony from home

To death and Egypt, seeing he

Lost love when he lost Rome.

Thou saw'st old Tubal strike the lyre,

Yea, first for thee the poet hurled

Defiance at God's starry choir!

Thou art the romance and the fire,

Thou art the pageant and the strife,

The clamour, mounting high and higher,

From all the lovers in the world

To all the lords of love and life.

. . . . .

Perhaps the passions of mankind

Are but the torches mystical

Lit by some spirit-hand to find

The dwelling of the Master-Mind

That knows the secret of it all,

In the great darkness and the wind.

We are the Candle, Love the Flame,

Each little life-light flickers out,

Love bides, immortally the same:

When of life's fever we shall tire

He will desert us and the fire

Rekindle new in prince or lout.

Twin-born of knowledge and of lust,

He was before us, he shall be

Indifferent still of thee and me,

When shattered is life's golden cup,

When thy young limbs are shrivelled up,

And when my heart is turned to dust.

Nay, sweet, smile not to know at last

That thou and I, or knave, or fool,

Are but the involitient tool

Of some world-purpose vague and vast.

No bar to passion's fury set,

With monstrous poppies spice the wine:

For only drunk are we divine,

And only mad shall we forget!

Stains. [Theodosia Garrison]

The three ghosts on the lonesome road

Spake each to one another,

"Whence came that stain about your mouth

No lifted hand may cover?"

"From eating of forbidden fruit,

Brother, my brother."

The three ghosts on the sunless road

Spake each to one another,

"Whence came that red burn on your foot

No dust nor ash may cover?"

"I stamped a neighbor's hearth-flame out,

Brother, my brother."

The three ghosts on the windless road

Spake each to one another,

"Whence came that blood upon your hand

No other hand may cover?"

"From breaking of a woman's heart,

Brother, my brother."

"Yet on the earth clean men we walked,

Glutton and Thief and Lover;

White flesh and fair it hid our stains

That no man might discover."

"Naked the soul goes up to God,

Brother, my brother."

De Massa ob de Sheepfol'. [Sarah Pratt McLean Greene]

De massa ob de sheepfol'

Dat guard de sheepfol' bin,

Look out in de gloomerin' meadows

Whar de long night rain begin --

So he call to de hirelin' shephe'd:

"Is my sheep -- is dey all come in?"

Oh den, says de hirelin' shephe'd,

"Dey's some, dey's black and thin,

And some, dey's po' ol' wedda's --

But de res', dey's all brung in.

But de res', dey's all brung in."

Den de massa ob de sheepfol'

Dat guard de sheepfol' bin,

Goes down in de gloomerin' meadows

Whar de long night rain begin --

So he le' down de ba's ob de sheepfol',

Callin' sof': "Come in! Come in!"

Callin' sof': "Come in! Come in!"

Den up t'ro de gloomerin' meadows,

T'ro de col' night rain an' win',

An' up t'ro de gloomerin' rain-paf

Whar de sleet fa' piercin' thin --

De po' los' sheep ob de sheepfol'

Dey all comes gadderin' in.

De po' los' sheep ob de sheepfol',

Dey all comes gadderin' in!

Black Sheep. [Richard Burton]

From their folded mates they wander far,

Their ways seem harsh and wild;

They follow the beck of a baleful star,

Their paths are dream-beguiled.

Yet haply they sought but a wider range,

Some loftier mountain-slope,

And little recked of the country strange

Beyond the gates of hope.

And haply a bell with a luring call

Summoned their feet to tread

Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall

And the lurking snare are spread.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days

Of outcast liberty,

They're sick at heart for the homely ways

Where their gathered brothers be.

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark

And the hills loom large and dim,

For the Shepherd's voice they mutely hark,

And their souls go out to him.

Meanwhile, "Black sheep! Black sheep!" we cry,

Safe in the inner fold;

And maybe they hear, and wonder why,

And marvel, out in the cold.

Let me no more a Mendicant. [Arthur Colton]

Let me no more a mendicant

Without the gate

Of the world's kingly palace wait;

Morning is spent,

The sentinels change and challenge in the tower,

Now slant the shadows eastward hour by hour.

Open the door, O Seneschal! Within

I see them sit,

The feasters, daring destiny with wit,

Casting to win

Or lose their utmost, and men hurry by

At offices of confluent energy.

Let me not here a mendicant

Without the gate

Linger from dayspring till the night is late,

And there are sent

All homeless stars to loiter in the sky,

And beggared midnight winds to wander by.

Lincoln, the Man of the People. [Edwin Markham]

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour

Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,

She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down

To make a man to meet the mortal need.

She took the tried clay of the common road --

Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth,

Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy;

Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears;

Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff.

Into the shape she breathed a flame to light

That tender, tragic, ever-changing face.

Here was a man to hold against the world,

A man to match the mountains and the sea.

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;

The smack and tang of elemental things;

The rectitude and patience of the cliff;

The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves;

The friendly welcome of the wayside well;

The courage of the bird that dares the sea;

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;

The pity of the snow that hides all scars;

The secrecy of streams that make their way

Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock;

The tolerance and equity of light

That gives as freely to the shrinking flower

As to the great oak flaring to the wind --

To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn

That shoulders out the sky.

Sprung from the West,

The strength of virgin forests braced his mind,

The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul.

Up from log cabin to the Capitol,

One fire was on his spirit, one resolve --

To send the keen ax to the root of wrong,

Clearing a free way for the feet of God.

And evermore he burned to do his deed

With the fine stroke and gesture of a king:

He built the rail-pile as he built the State,

Pouring his splendid strength through every blow,

The conscience of him testing every stroke,

To make his deed the measure of a man.

So came the Captain with the mighty heart;

And when the judgment thunders split the house,

Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest,

He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again

The rafters of the Home. He held his place --

Held the long purpose like a growing tree --

Held on through blame and faltered not at praise.

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down

As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,

Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,

And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

The Master. [Edwin Arlington Robinson]

(Lincoln)

A flying word from here and there

Had sown the name at which we sneered,

But soon the name was everywhere,

To be reviled and then revered:

A presence to be loved and feared,

We cannot hide it, or deny

That we, the gentlemen who jeered,

May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous

And hearts of men were sore beguiled;

And having made his note of us,

He pondered and was reconciled.

Was ever master yet so mild

As he, and so untamable?

We doubted, even when he smiled,

Not knowing what he knew so well.

He knew that undeceiving fate

Would shame us whom he served unsought;

He knew that he must wince and wait --

The jest of those for whom he fought;

He knew devoutly what he thought

Of us and of our ridicule;

He knew that we must all be taught

Like little children in a school.

We gave a glamour to the task

That he encountered and saw through,

But little of us did he ask,

And little did we ever do.

And what appears if we review

The season when we railed and chaffed?

It is the face of one who knew

That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels

Again the venom that we flung,

Transfigured to the world reveals

The vigilance to which we clung.

Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among

The mysteries that are untold,

The face we see was never young,

Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we have applied

Our shopman's test of age and worth,

Was elemental when he died,

As he was ancient at his birth:

The saddest among kings of earth,

Bowed with a galling crown, this man

Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,

Laconic -- and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame

Are bounded by the world alone;

The calm, the smouldering, and the flame

Of awful patience were his own:

With him they are forever flown

Past all our fond self-shadowings,

Wherewith we cumber the Unknown

As with inept Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men:

'T was ours to soar and his to see.

But we are coming down again,

And we shall come down pleasantly;

Nor shall we longer disagree

On what it is to be sublime,

But flourish in our perigee

And have one Titan at a time.

On the Building of Springfield. [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay]

Let not our town be large -- remembering

That little Athens was the Muses' home;

That Oxford rules the heart of London still,

That Florence gave the Renaissance to Rome.

Record it for the grandson of your son --

A city is not builded in a day:

Our little town cannot complete her soul

Till countless generations pass away.

Now let each child be joined as to a church

To her perpetual hopes, each man ordained;

Let every street be made a reverent aisle

Where music grows, and beauty is unchained.

Let Science and Machinery and Trade

Be slaves of her, and make her all in all --

Building against our blatant restless time

An unseen, skillful, mediaeval wall.

Let every citizen be rich toward God.

Let Christ, the beggar, teach divinity --

Let no man rule who holds his money dear.

Let this, our city, be our luxury.

We should build parks that students from afar

Would choose to starve in, rather than go home --

Fair little squares, with Phidian ornament --

Food for the spirit, milk and honeycomb.

Songs shall be sung by us in that good day --

Songs we have written -- blood within the rhyme

Beating, as when old England still was glad,

The purple, rich, Elizabethan time.

Say, is my prophecy too fair and far?

I only know, unless her faith be high,

The soul of this our Nineveh is doomed,

Our little Babylon will surely die.

Some city on the breast of Illinois

No wiser and no better at the start,

By faith shall rise redeemed -- by faith shall rise

Bearing the western glory in her heart --

The genius of the Maple, Elm and Oak,

The secret hidden in each grain of corn --

The glory that the prairie angels sing

At night when sons of Life and Love are born --

Born but to struggle, squalid and alone,

Broken and wandering in their early years.

When will they make our dusty streets their goal,

Within our attics hide their sacred tears?

When will they start our vulgar blood athrill

With living language -- words that set us free?

When will they make a path of beauty clear

Between our riches and our liberty?

We must have many Lincoln-hearted men --

A city is not builded in a day --

And they must do their work, and come and go

While countless generations pass away.

The Poet's Town. [John G. Neihardt]

I

'Mid glad green miles of tillage

And fields where cattle graze,

A prosy little village,

You drowse away the days.

And yet -- a wakeful glory

Clings round you as you doze;

One living lyric story

Makes music of your prose.

Here once, returning never,

The feet of song have trod;

And flashed -- Oh, once forever! --

The singing Flame of God.

II

These were his fields Elysian:

With mystic eyes he saw

The sowers planting vision,

The reapers gleaning awe.

Serfs to a sordid duty,

He saw them with his heart,

Priests of the Ultimate Beauty,

Feeding the flame of art.

The weird, untempled Makers

Pulsed in the things he saw;

The wheat through its virile acres

Billowed the Song of Law.

The epic roll of the furrow

Flung from the writing plow,

The dactyl phrase of the green-rowed maize

Measured the music of Now.

III

Sipper of ancient flagons,

Often the lonesome boy

Saw in the farmers' wagons

The chariots hurled at Troy.

Trundling in dust and thunder

They rumbled up and down,

Laden with princely plunder,

Loot of the tragic Town.

And once when the rich man's daughter

Smiled on the boy at play,

Sword-storms, giddy with slaughter,

Swept back the ancient day!

War steeds shrieked in the quiet,

Far and hoarse were the cries;

And Oh, through the din and the riot,

The music of Helen's eyes!

Stabbed with the olden Sorrow,

He slunk away from the play,

For the Past and the vast To-morrow

Were wedded in his To-day.

IV

Rich with the dreamer's pillage,

An idle and worthless lad,

Least in a prosy village,

And prince in Allahabad;

Lover of golden apples,

Munching a daily crust;

Haunter of dream-built chapels,

Worshipping in the dust;

Dull to the worldly duty,

Less to the town he grew,

And more to the God of Beauty

Than even the grocer knew!

V

Corn for the buyers, and cattle --

But what could the dreamer sell?

Echoes of cloudy battle?

Music from heaven and hell?

Spices and bales of plunder

Argosied over the sea?

Tapestry woven of wonder,

And myrrh from Araby?

None of your dream-stuffs, Fellow,

Looter of Samarcand!

Gold is heavy and yellow,

And value is weighed in the hand!

VI

And yet, when the years had humbled

The Kings in the Realm of the Boy,

Song-built bastions crumbled,

Ash-heaps smothering Troy;

Thirsting for shattered flagons,

Quaffing a brackish cup,

With all of his chariots, wagons --

He never could quite grow up.

The debt to the ogre, To-morrow,

He never could comprehend:

Why should the borrowers borrow?

Why should the lenders lend?

Never an oak tree borrowed,

But took for its needs -- and gave.

Never an oak tree sorrowed;

Debt was the mark of the slave.

Grass in the priceless weather

Sucked from the paps of the Earth,

And the hills that were lean it fleshed with green --

Oh, what is a lesson worth?

But still did the buyers barter

And the sellers squint at the scales;

And price was the stake of the martyr,

And cost was the lock of the jails.

VII

Windflowers herald the Maytide,

Rendering worth for worth;

Ragweeds gladden the wayside,

Biting the dugs of the Earth;

Violets, scattering glories,

Feed from the dewy gem:

But dreamers are fed by the living and dead --

And what is the gift from them?

VIII

Never a stalk of the Summer

Dreams of its mission and doom:

Only to hasten the Comer --

Martyrdom unto the Bloom.

Ever the Mighty Chooser

Plucks when the fruit is ripe,

Scorning the mass and letting it pass,

Keen for the cryptic type.

Greece in her growing season

Troubled the lands and seas,

Plotted and fought and suffered and wrought --

Building a Sophocles!

Only a faultless temple

Stands for the vassal's groan;

The harlot's strife and the faith of the wife

Blend in a graven stone.

Ne'er do the stern gods cherish

The hope of the million lives;

Always the Fact shall perish

And only the Truth survives.

Gardens of roses wither,

Shaping the perfect rose:

And the poet's song shall live for the long,

Dumb, aching years of prose.

IX

King of a Realm of Magic,

He was the fool of the town,

Hiding the ache of the tragic

Under the grin of the clown.

Worn with the vain endeavor

To fit in the sordid plan;

Doomed to be poet forever,

He longed to be only a man;

To be freed from the god's enthralling,

Back with the reeds of the stream;

Deaf to the Vision calling,

And dead to the lash of the Dream.

X

But still did the Mighty Makers

Stir in the common sod;

The corn through its awful acres

Trembled and thrilled with God!

More than a man was the sower,

Lured by a man's desire,

For a triune Bride walked close at his side --

Dew and Dust and Fire!

More than a man was the plowman,

Shouting his gee and haw;

For a something dim kept pace with him,

And ever the poet saw;

Till the winds of the cosmic struggle

Made of his flesh a flute,

To echo the tune of a whirlwind rune

Unto the million mute.

XI

Son of the Mother of mothers,

The womb and the tomb of Life,

With Fire and Air for brothers

And a clinging Dream for a wife;

Ever the soul of the dreamer

Strove with its mortal mesh,

And the lean flame grew till it fretted through

The last thin links of flesh.

Oh, rending the veil asunder,

He fled to mingle again

With the dred Orestean thunder,

The Lear of the driven rain!

XII

Once in a cycle the comet

Doubles its lonesome track.

Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,

Aeschylus wanders back.

Ever inweaving, returning,

The near grows out of the far;

And Homer shall sing once more in a swing

Of the austere Polar Star.

Then what of the lonesome dreamer

With the lean blue flame in his breast?

And who was your clown for a day, O Town,

The strange, unbidden guest?

XIII

~'Mid glad green miles of tillage

And fields where cattle graze;

A prosy little village,

You drowse away the days.

And yet -- a wakeful glory

Clings round you as you doze;

One living, lyric story

Makes music of your prose!~

The New Life. [Witter Bynner]

Perhaps they laughed at Dante in his youth,

Told him that truth

Had unappealably been said

In the great masterpieces of the dead: --

Perhaps he listened and but bowed his head

In acquiescent honour, while his heart

Held natal tidings, -- that a new life is the part

Of every man that's born,

A new life never lived before,

And a new expectant art;

It is the variations of the morn

That are forever, more and more,

The single dawning of the single truth.

So answers Dante to the heart of youth!

Martin. [Joyce Kilmer]

When I am tired of earnest men,

Intense and keen and sharp and clever,

Pursuing fame with brush or pen

Or counting metal disks forever,

Then from the halls of shadowland

Beyond the trackless purple sea

Old Martin's ghost comes back to stand

Beside my desk and talk to me.

Still on his delicate pale face

A quizzical thin smile is showing,

His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace,

His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing.

He wears a brilliant-hued cravat,

A suit to match his soft gray hair,

A rakish stick, a knowing hat,

A manner blithe and debonair.

How good, that he who always knew

That being lovely was a duty,

Should have gold halls to wander through

And should himself inhabit beauty.

How like his old unselfish way

To leave those halls of splendid mirth

And comfort those condemned to stay

Upon the bleak and sombre earth.

Some people ask: What cruel chance

Made Martin's life so sad a story?

Martin? Why, he exhaled romance

And wore an overcoat of glory.

A fleck of sunlight in the street,

A horse, a book, a girl who smiled, --

Such visions made each moment sweet

For this receptive, ancient child.

Because it was old Martin's lot

To be, not make, a decoration,

Shall we then scorn him, having not

His genius of appreciation?

Rich joy and love he got and gave;

His heart was merry as his dress.

Pile laurel wreaths upon his grave

Who did not gain, but was, success.

As in the Midst of Battle there is Room. [George Santayana]

As in the midst of battle there is room

For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;

As gossips whisper of a trinket's worth

Spied by the death-bed's flickering candle-gloom;

As in the crevices of Caesar's tomb

The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:

So in this great disaster of our birth

We can be happy, and forget our doom.

For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy

Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,

And evening gently woos us to employ

Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth;

Till from that summer's trance we wake, to find

Despair before us, vanity behind.

Ex Libris. [Arthur Upson]

In an old book at even as I read

Fast fading words adown my shadowy page,

I crossed a tale of how, in other age,

At Arqua, with his books around him, sped

The word to Petrarch; and with noble head

Bowed gently o'er his volume that sweet sage

To Silence paid his willing seigniorage.

And they who found him whispered, "He is dead!"

Thus timely from old comradeships would I

To Silence also rise. Let there be night,

Stillness, and only these staid watchers by,

And no light shine save my low study light --

Lest of his kind intent some human cry

Interpret not the Messenger aright.

The Poet. [Mildred McNeal Sweeney]

Himself is least afraid

When the singing lips in the dust

With all mute lips are laid.

For thither all men must.

Nor is the end long stayed.

But he, having cast his song

Upon the faithful air

And given it speed -- is strong

That last strange hour to dare,

Nor wills to tarry long.

Adown immortal time

That greater self shall pass,

And wear its eager prime

And lend the youth it has

Like one far blowing chime.

He has made sure the quest

And now -- his word gone forth --

May have his perfect rest

Low in the tender earth,

The wind across his breast.

When I have gone Weird Ways. [John G. Neihardt]

When I have finished with this episode,

Left the hard, uphill road,

And gone weird ways to seek another load,

Oh, friends, regret me not, nor weep for me,

Child of Infinity!

Nor dig a grave, nor rear for me a tomb

To say with lying writ: "Here in the gloom

He who loved bigness takes a narrow room,

Content to pillow here his weary head,

For he is dead."

But give my body to the funeral pyre,

And bid the laughing fire,

Eager and strong and swift, like my desire,

Scatter my subtle essence into space,

Free me of time and place.

And sweep the bitter ashes from the hearth,

Fling back the dust I borrowed from the earth

Into the chemic broil of death and birth,

The vast alembic of the cryptic scheme,

Warm with the master-dream.

And thus, O little house that sheltered me,

Dissolve again in wind and rain, to be

Part of the cosmic weird economy.

And, Oh, how oft with new life shalt thou lift

Out of the atom-drift!

Trumbull Stickney. [George Cabot Lodge]

I

In silence, solitude and stern surmise

His faith was tried and proved commensurate

With life and death. The stone-blind eyes of Fate

Perpetually stared into his eyes,

Yet to the hazard of the enterprise

He brought his soul, expectant and elate,

And challenged, like a champion at the Gate,

Death's undissuadable austerities.

And thus, full-armed in all that Truth reprieves

From dissolution, he beheld the breath

Of daybreak flush his thought's exalted ways,

While, like Dodona's sad, prophetic leaves,

Round him the scant, supreme, momentous days

Trembled and murmured in the wind of Death.

II

There moved a Presence always by his side,

With eyes of pleasure and passion and wild tears,

And on her lips the murmur of many years,

And in her hair the chaplets of a bride;

And with him, hour by hour, came one beside,

Scatheless of Time and Time's vicissitude,

Whose lips, perforce of endless solitude,

Were silent and whose eyes were blind and wide.

But when he died came One who wore a wreath

Of star-light, and with fingers calm and bland

Smoothed from his brows the trace of mortal pain;

And of the two who stood on either hand,

"This one is Life," he said, "And this is Death,

And I am Love and Lord over these twain!"

Sentence. [Witter Bynner]

Shall I say that what heaven gave

Earth has taken? --

Or that sleepers in the grave

Reawaken?

One sole sentence can I know,

Can I say:

You, my comrade, had to go,

I to stay.

Comrades. [George Edward Woodberry]

Where are the friends that I knew in my Maying,

In the days of my youth, in the first of my roaming?

We were dear; we were leal; O, far we went straying;

Now never a heart to my heart comes homing! --

Where is he now, the dark boy slender

Who taught me bare-back, stirrup and reins?

I loved him; he loved me; my beautiful, tender

Tamer of horses on grass-grown plains.

Where is he now whose eyes swam brighter,

Softer than love, in his turbulent charms;

Who taught me to strike, and to fall, dear fighter,

And gathered me up in his boyhood arms;

Taught me the rifle, and with me went riding,

Suppled my limbs to the horseman's war;

Where is he now, for whom my heart's biding,

Biding, biding -- but he rides far!

O love that passes the love of woman!

Who that hath felt it shall ever forget,

When the breath of life with a throb turns human,

And a lad's heart is to a lad's heart set?

Ever, forever, lover and rover --

They shall cling, nor each from other shall part

Till the reign of the stars in the heavens be over,

And life is dust in each faithful heart!

They are dead, the American grasses under;

There is no one now who presses my side;

By the African chotts I am riding asunder,

And with great joy ride I the last great ride.

I am fey; I am fain of sudden dying;

Thousands of miles there is no one near;

And my heart -- all the night it is crying, crying

In the bosoms of dead lads darling-dear.

Hearts of my music -- them dark earth covers;

Comrades to die, and to die for, were they;

In the width of the world there were no such rovers --

Back to back, breast to breast, it was ours to stay;

And the highest on earth was the vow that we cherished,

To spur forth from the crowd and come back never more,

And to ride in the track of great souls perished

Till the nests of the lark shall roof us o'er.

Yet lingers a horseman on Altai highlands,

Who hath joy of me, riding the Tartar glissade;

And one, far faring o'er orient islands

Whose blood yet glints with my blade's accolade;

North, west, east, I fling you my last hallooing,

Last love to the breasts where my own has bled;

Through the reach of the desert my soul leaps pursuing

My star where it rises a Star of the Dead.

Comrades. [Richard Hovey]

Comrades, pour the wine to-night

For the parting is with dawn!

Oh, the clink of cups together,

With the daylight coming on!

Greet the morn

With a double horn,

When strong men drink together!

Comrades, gird your swords to-night,

For the battle is with dawn!

Oh, the clash of shields together,

With the triumph coming on!

Greet the foe,

And lay him low,

When strong men fight together!

Comrades, watch the tides to-night,

For the sailing is with dawn!

Oh, to face the spray together,

With the tempest coming on!

Greet the sea

With a shout of glee,

When strong men roam together!

Comrades, give a cheer to-night,

For the dying is with dawn!

Oh, to meet the stars together,

With the silence coming on!

Greet the end

As a friend a friend,

When strong men die together!

Calverly's. [Edwin Arlington Robinson]

We go no more to Calverly's,

For there the lights are few and low;

And who are there to see by them,

Or what they see, we do not know.

Poor strangers of another tongue

May now creep in from anywhere,

And we, forgotten, be no more

Than twilight on a ruin there.

We two, the remnant. All the rest

Are cold and quiet. You nor I,

Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid,

May ring them back from where they lie.

No fame delays oblivion

For them, but something yet survives:

A record written fair, could we

But read the book of scattered lives.

There'll be a page for Leffingwell,

And one for Lingard, the Moon-calf;

And who knows what for Clavering,

Who died because he couldn't laugh?

Who knows or cares? No sign is here,

No face, no voice, no memory;

No Lingard with his eerie joy,

No Clavering, no Calverly.

We cannot have them here with us

To say where their light lives are gone,

Or if they be of other stuff

Than are the moons of Ilion.

So, be their place of one estate

With ashes, echoes, and old wars, --

Or ever we be of the night,

Or we be lost among the stars.

Uriel. [Percy MacKaye]

(In memory of William Vaughn Moody)

I

Uriel, you that in the ageless sun

Sit in the awful silences of light,

Singing of vision hid from human sight, --

Prometheus, beautiful rebellious one!

And you, Deucalion,

For whose blind seed was brought the illuming spark,

Are you not gathered, now his day is done,

Beside the brink of that relentless dark --

The dark where your dear singer's ghost is gone?

II

Imagined beings, who majestic blend

Your forms with beauty! -- questing, unconfined,

The mind conceived you, though the quenched mind

Goes down in dark where you in dawn ascend.

Our songs can but suspend

The ultimate silence: yet could song aspire

The realms of mortal music to extend

And wake a Sibyl's voice or Seraph's lyre --

How should it tell the dearness of a friend?

III

The simplest is the inexpressible;

The heart of music still evades the Muse,

And arts of men the heart of man suffuse,

And saddest things are made of silence still.

In vain the senses thrill

To give our sorrows glorious relief

In pyre of verse and pageants volatile,

And I, in vain, to speak for him my grief

Whose spirit of fire invokes my waiting will.

IV

To him the best of friendship needs must be

Uttered no more; yet was he so endowed

That Poetry because of him is proud

And he more noble for his poetry,

Wherefore infallibly

I obey the strong compulsion which this verse

Lays on my lips with strange austerity --

Now that his voice is silent -- to rehearse

For my own heart how he was dear to me.

V

Not by your gradual sands, elusive Time,

We measure your gray sea, that never rests;

The bleeding hour-glasses in our breasts

Mete with quick pangs the ebbing of our prime,

And drip, like sudden rime

In March, that melts to runnels from a pane

The south breathes on -- oblivion of sublime

Crystallizations, and the ruthless wane

Of glittering stars, that scarce had range to climb.

VI

Darkling those constellations of his soul

Glimmered, while racks of stellar lightning shot

The white, creative meteors of thought

Through that last night, where -- clad in cloudy stole --

Beside his ebbing shoal

Of life-blood, stood Saint Paul, blazing a theme

Of living drama from a fiery scroll

Across his stretched vision as in dream --

When Death, with blind dark, blotted out the whole.

VII

And yet not all: though darkly alien

Those uncompleted worlds of work to be

Are waned; still, touched by them, the memory

Gives afterglow; and now that comes again

The mellow season when

Our eyes last met, his kindling currents run

Quickening within me gladness and new ken

Of life, that I have shared his prime with one

Who wrought large-minded for the love of men.

VIII

But not alone to share that large estate

Of work and interchange of communings --

The little human paths to heavenly things

Were also ours: the casual, intimate

Vistas, which consecrate --

With laughter and quick tears -- the dusty noon

Of days, and by moist beams irradiate

Our plodding minds with courage, and attune

The fellowship that bites its thumb at fate.

IX

Where art thou now, mine host Guffanti? -- where

The iridescence of thy motley troop!

Ah, where the merry, animated group

That snuggled elbows for an extra chair,

When space was none to spare,

To pour the votive Chianti for a toast

To dramas dark and lyrics debonair,

The while, to `Bella Napoli', mine host

Exhaled his Parmazan, Parnassan air!

X

Thy Parmazan, immortal laird of ease,

Can never mold, thy caviare is blest,

While still our glowing Uriel greets the rest

Around thy royal board of memories,

Where sit, the salt of these,

He of the laughter of a Hundred Lights,

Blithe Eldorado of high poesies,

And he -- of enigmatic gentle knights

The kindly keen -- who sings of `Calverly's'.

XI

Because he never wore his sentient heart

For crows and jays to peck, ofttimes to such

He seemed a silent fellow, who o'ermuch

Held from the general gossip-ground apart,

Or tersely spoke, and tart:

How should they guess what eagle tore, within,

His quick of sympathy for humblest smart

Of human wretchedness, or probed his spleen

Of scorn against the hypocritic mart!

XII

Sometimes insufferable seemed to come

That wrath of sympathy: One windy night

We watched through squalid panes, forlornly white, --

Amid immense machines' incessant hum --

Frail figures, gaunt and dumb,

Of overlabored girls and children, bowed

Above their slavish toil: "O God! -- A bomb,

A bomb!" he cried, "and with one fiery cloud

Expunge the horrible Caesars of this slum!"

XIII

Another night dreams on the Cornish hills:

Trembling within the low moon's pallid fires,

The tall corn-tassels lift their fragrant spires;

From filmy spheres, a liquid starlight fills --

Like dew of daffodils --

The fragile dark, where multitudinous

The rhythmic, intermittent silence thrills,

Like song, the valleys. -- "Hark!" he murmurs, "Thus

May bards from crickets learn their canticles!"

XIV

Now Morning, not less lavish of her sweets,

Leads us along the woodpaths -- in whose hush

The quivering alchemy of the pure thrush

Cools from above the balsam-dripping heats --

To find, in green retreats,

'Mid men of clay, the great, quick-hearted man

Whose subtle art our human age secretes,

Or him whose brush, tinct with cerulean,

Blooms with soft castle-towers and cloud-capped fleets.

XV

Still to the sorcery of August skies

In frilled crimson flaunt the hollyhocks,

Where, lithely poised along the garden walks,

His little maid enamoured blithe outvies

The dipping butterflies

In motion -- ah, in grace how grown the while,

Since he was wont to render to her eyes

His knightly court, or touch with flitting smile

Her father's heart by his true flatteries!

XVI

But summer's golden pastures boast no trail

So splendid as our fretted snowshoes blaze

Where, sharp across the amethystine ways,

Iron Ascutney looms in azure mail,

And, like a frozen grail,

The frore sun sets, intolerably fair;

Mute, in our homebound snow-tracks, we exhale

The silvery cold, and soon -- where bright logs flare --

Talk the long indoor hours, till embers fail.

XVII

Ah, with the smoke what smouldering desires

Waft to the starlight up the swirling flue! --

Thoughts that may never, as the swallows do,

Nest circling homeward to their native fires!

Ardors the soul suspires

The extinct stars drink with the dreamer's breath;

The morning-song of Eden's early choirs

Grows dim with Adam; close at the ear of death

Relentless angels tune our earthly lyres!

XVIII

Let it be so: More sweet it is to be

A listener of love's ephemeral song,

And live with beauty though it be not long,

And die enamoured of eternity,

Though in the apogee

Of time there sit no individual

Godhead of life, than to reject the plea

Of passionate beauty: loveliness is all,

And love is more divine than memory.

Azrael. [Robert Gilbert Welsh]

The angels in high places

Who minister to us,

Reflect God's smile, -- their faces

Are luminous;

Save one, whose face is hidden,

(The Prophet saith),

The unwelcome, the unbidden,

Azrael, Angel of Death.

And yet that veiled face, I know

Is lit with pitying eyes,

Like those faint stars, the first to glow

Through cloudy winter skies.

That they may never tire,

Angels, by God's decree,

Bear wings of snow and fire, --

Passion and purity;

Save one, all unavailing,

(The Prophet saith),

His wings are gray and trailing,

Azrael, Angel of Death.

And yet the souls that Azrael brings

Across the dark and cold,

Look up beneath those folded wings,

And find them lined with gold.

The Flight. [Lloyd Mifflin]

Upon a cloud among the stars we stood.

The angel raised his hand and looked and said,

"Which world, of all yon starry myriad,

Shall we make wing to?" The still solitude

Became a harp whereon his voice and mood

Made spheral music round his haloed head.

I spake -- for then I had not long been dead --

"Let me look round upon the vasts, and brood

A moment on these orbs ere I decide . . .

What is yon lower star that beauteous shines

And with soft splendour now incarnadines

Our wings? -- THERE would I go and there abide."

Then he as one who some child's thought divines:

"That is the world where yesternight you died."

The Rival. [James Whitcomb Riley]

I so loved once, when Death came by I hid

Away my face,

And all my sweetheart's tresses she undid

To make my hiding-place.

The dread shade passed me thus unheeding; and

I turned me then

To calm my love -- kiss down her shielding hand

And comfort her again.

And lo! she answered not: and she did sit

All fixedly,

With her fair face and the sweet smile of it,

In love with Death, not me.

A Rhyme of Death's Inn. [Lizette Woodworth Reese]

A rhyme of good Death's inn!

My love came to that door;

And she had need of many things,

The way had been so sore.

My love she lifted up her head,

"And is there room?" said she;

"There was no room in Bethlehem's inn

For Christ who died for me."

But said the keeper of the inn,

"His name is on the door."

My love then straightway entered there:

She hath come back no more.

The Outer Gate. [Nora May French]

Life said: "My house is thine with all its store:

Behold I open shining ways to thee --

Of every inner portal make thee free:

O child, I may not bar the outer door.

Go from me if thou wilt, to come no more;

But all thy pain is mine, thy flesh of me;

And must I hear thee, faint and woefully,

Call on me from the darkness and implore?"

Nay, mother, for I follow at thy will.

But oftentimes thy voice is sharp to hear,

Thy trailing fragrance heavy on the breath;

Always the outer hall is very still,

And on my face a pleasant wind and clear

Blows straitly from the narrow gate of Death.

The Ashes in the Sea. [George Sterling]

N. M. F.

Whither, with blue and pleading eyes, --

Whither, with cheeks that held the light

Of winter's dawn in cloudless skies,

Evadne, was thy flight?

Such as a sister's was thy brow;

Thy hair seemed fallen from the moon --

Part of its radiance, as now,

Of shifting tide and dune.

Did Autumn's grieving lure thee hence,

Or silence ultimate beguile?

Ever our things of consequence

Awakened but thy smile.

Is it with thee that ocean takes

A stranger sorrow to its tone?

With thee the star of evening wakes

More beautiful, more lone?

For wave and hill and sky betray

A subtle tinge and touch of thee;

Thy shadow lingers in the day,

Thy voice in winds to be.

Beauty -- hast thou discovered her

By deeper seas no moons control?

What stars have magic now to stir

Thy swift and wilful soul?

Or may thy heart no more forget

The grievous world that once was home,

That here, where love awaits thee yet,

Thou seemest yet to roam?

For most, far-wandering, I guess

Thy witchery on the haunted mind,

In valleys of thy loneliness,

Made clean with ocean's wind.

And most thy presence here seems told,

A waif of elemental deeps,

When, at its vigils unconsoled,

Some night of winter weeps.

We needs must be divided in the Tomb. [George Santayana]

We needs must be divided in the tomb,

For I would die among the hills of Spain,

And o'er the treeless, melancholy plain

Await the coming of the final gloom.

But thou -- O pitiful! -- wilt find scant room

Among thy kindred by the northern main,

And fade into the drifting mist again,

The hemlocks' shadow, or the pines' perfume.

Let gallants lie beside their ladies' dust

In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;

Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,

The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,

For they were wedded without bond of lust,

And nothing of our heart to earth returned.

Departure. [Hermann Hagedorn]

My true love from her pillow rose

And wandered down the summer lane.

She left her house to the wind's carouse,

And her chamber wide to the rain.

She did not stop to don her coat,

She did not stop to smooth her bed --

But out she went in glad content

There where the bright path led.

She did not feel the beating storm,

But fled like a sunbeam, white and frail,

To the sea, to the air, somewhere, somewhere --

I have not found her trail.

Song. [Richard Le Gallienne]

She's somewhere in the sunlight strong,

Her tears are in the falling rain,

She calls me in the wind's soft song,

And with the flowers she comes again.

Yon bird is but her messenger,

The moon is but her silver car;

Yea! Sun and moon are sent by her,

And every wistful, waiting star.

The Invisible Bride. [Edwin Markham]

The low-voiced girls that go

In gardens of the Lord,

Like flowers of the field they grow

In sisterly accord.

Their whispering feet are white

Along the leafy ways;

They go in whirls of light

Too beautiful for praise.

And in their band forsooth

Is one to set me free --

The one that touched my youth --

The one God gave to me.

She kindles the desire

Whereby the gods survive --

The white ideal fire

That keeps my soul alive.

Now at the wondrous hour,

She leaves her star supreme,

And comes in the night's still power,

To touch me with a dream.

Sibyl of mystery

On roads unknown to men,

Softly she comes to me,

And goes to God again.

The Inverted Torch. [Edith M. Thomas]

Threading a darksome passage all alone,

The taper's flame, by envious current blown,

Crouched low, and eddied round, as in affright,

So challenged by the vast and hostile night,

Then down I held the taper; -- swift and fain

Up climbed the lovely flower of light again!

Thou Kindler of the spark of life divine,

Be henceforth the Inverted Torch a sign

That, though the flame beloved thou dost depress,

Thou wilt not speed it into nothingness;

But out of nether gloom wilt reinspire,

And homeward lift the keen empyreal fire!

Night's Mardi Gras. [Edward J. Wheeler]

Night is the true democracy. When day

Like some great monarch with his train has passed,

In regal pomp and splendor to the last,

The stars troop forth along the Milky Way,

A jostling crowd, in radiant disarray,

On heaven's broad boulevard in pageants vast,

And things of earth, the hunted and outcast,

Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea,

Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind

Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start,

And specters of dead joy, that shun the light,

And impotent regrets and terrors blind,

Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part

In the fantastic Mardi Gras of Night.

The Mystic. [Cale Young Rice]

There is a quest that calls me,

In nights when I am lone,

The need to ride where the ways divide

The Known from the Unknown.

I mount what thought is near me

And soon I reach the place,

The tenuous rim where the Seen grows dim

And the Sightless hides its face.

~I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the sea,

I have ridden the moon and stars.

I have set my feet in the stirrup seat

Of a comet coursing Mars.

And everywhere

Thro' the earth and air

My thought speeds, lightning-shod,

It comes to a place where checking pace

It cries, "Beyond lies God!"~

It calls me out of the darkness,

It calls me out of sleep,

"Ride! ride! for you must, to the end of Dust!"

It bids -- and on I sweep

To the wide outposts of Being,

Where there is Gulf alone --

And thro' a Vast that was never passed

I listen for Life's tone.

~I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the night,

I have ridden the ghosts that flee

From the vaults of death like a chilling breath

Over eternity.

And everywhere

Is the world laid bare --

Ether and star and clod --

Until I wind to its brink and find

But the cry, "Beyond lies God!"~

It calls me and ever calls me!

And vainly I reply,

"Fools only ride where the ways divide

What Is from the Whence and Why"!

I'm lifted into the saddle

Of thoughts too strong to tame

And down the deeps and over the steeps

I find -- ever the same.

~I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the stars,

I have ridden the force that flies

With far intent thro' the firmament

And each to each allies.

And everywhere

That a thought may dare

To gallop, mine has trod --

Only to stand at last on the strand

Where just beyond lies God.~

I would I might forget that I am I. [George Santayana]

I would I might forget that I am I,

And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,

Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.

What in the body's tomb doth buried lie

Is boundless; 't is the spirit of the sky,

Lord of the future, guardian of the past,

And soon must forth, to know his own at last.

In his large life to live, I fain would die.

Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,

But calling not his suffering his own;

Blessed the angel, gazing on all good,

But knowing not he sits upon a throne;

Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,

And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

To William Sharp. [Clinton Scollard]

(Fiona Macleod)

The waves about Iona dirge,

The wild winds trumpet over Skye;

Shrill around Arran's cliff-bound verge

The gray gulls cry.

Spring wraps its transient scarf of green,

Its heathery robe, round slope and scar;

And night, the scudding wrack between,

Lights its lone star.

But you who loved these outland isles,

Their gleams, their glooms, their mysteries,

Their eldritch lures, their druid wiles,

Their tragic seas,

Will heed no more, in mortal guise,

The potent witchery of their call,

If dawn be regnant in the skies,

Or evenfall.

Yet, though where suns Sicilian beam

The loving earth enfolds your form,

I can but deem these coasts of dream

And hovering storm

Still thrall your spirit -- that it bides

By far Iona's kelp-strewn shore,

There lingering till time and tides

Shall surge no more.

The Quiet Singer. [Charles Hanson Towne]

(Ave! Francis Thompson)

He had been singing -- but I had not heard his voice;

He had been weaving lovely dreams of song,

O many a morning long.

But I, remote and far,

Under an alien star,

Listened to other singers, other birds,

And other silver words.

But does the skylark, singing sweet and clear,

Beg the cold world to hear?

Rather he sings for very rapture of singing,

At dawn, or in the blue, mild Summer noon,

Knowing that, late or soon,

His wealth of beauty, and his high notes, ringing

Above the earth, will make some heart rejoice.

He sings, albeit alone,

Spendthrift of each pure tone,

Hoarding no single song,

No cadence wild and strong.

But one day, from a friend far overseas,

As if upon the breeze,

There came the teeming wonder of his words --

A golden troop of birds,

Caged in a little volume made to love;

Singing, singing,

Flinging, flinging

Their breaking hearts on mine, and swiftly bringing

Tears, and the peace thereof.

How the world woke anew!

How the days broke anew!

Before my tear-blind eyes a tapestry

I seemed to see,

Woven of all the dreams dead or to be.

Hills, hills of song, Springs of eternal bloom,

Autumns of golden pomp and purple gloom

Were hung upon his loom.

Winters of pain, roses with awful thorns,

Yet wondrous faith in God's dew-drenched morns --

These, all these I saw,

With that ecstatic awe

Wherewith one looks into Eternity.

And then I knew that, though I had not heard

His voice before,

His quiet singing, like some quiet bird

At some one's distant door,

Had made my own more sweet; had made it more

Lovely, in one of God's miraculous ways.

I knew then why the days

Had seemed to me more perfect when the Spring

Came with old bourgeoning;

For somewhere in the world his voice was raised,

And somewhere in the world his heart was breaking;

And never a flower but knew it, sweetly taking

Beauty more high and noble for his sake,

As a whole wood grows lovelier for the wail

Of one sad nightingale.

Yet if the Springs long past

Seemed wonderful before I heard his voice,

I tremble at the beauty I shall see

In seasons still to be,

Now that his songs are mine while Life shall last.

O now for me

New floods of vision open suddenly . . .

Rejoice, my heart! Rejoice

That you have heard the Quiet Singer's voice!

After a Dolmetsch Concert. [Arthur Upson]

Out of the conquered Past

Unravishable Beauty;

Hearts that are dew and dust

Rebuking the dream of Death;

Flower o' the clay downcast

Triumphant in Earth's aroma;

Strings that were strained in rust

A-tremble with Music's breath!

Wine that was spilt in haste

Arising in fumes more precious;

Garlands that fell forgot

Rooting to wondrous bloom;

Youth that would flow to waste

Pausing in pool-green valleys --

And Passion that lasted not

Surviving the voiceless Tomb!

On a Fly-Leaf of Burns' Songs. [Frederic Lawrence Knowles]

These are the best of him,

Pathos and jest of him;

Earth holds the rest of him.

Passions were strong in him, --

Pardon the wrong in him;

Hark to the song in him! --

Each little lyrical

Grave or satirical

Musical miracle!

Miniver Cheevy. [Edwin Arlington Robinson]

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold

Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam's neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town,

And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediaeval grace

Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

And kept on drinking.

At the End of the Day. [Richard Hovey]

There is no escape by the river,

There is no flight left by the fen;

We are compassed about by the shiver

Of the night of their marching men.

Give a cheer!

For our hearts shall not give way.

Here's to a dark to-morrow,

And here's to a brave to-day!

The tale of their hosts is countless,

And the tale of ours a score;

But the palm is naught to the dauntless,

And the cause is more and more.

Give a cheer!

We may die, but not give way.

Here's to a silent morrow,

And here's to a stout to-day!

God has said: "Ye shall fail and perish;

But the thrill ye have felt to-night

I shall keep in my heart and cherish

When the worlds have passed in night."

Give a cheer!

For the soul shall not give way.

Here's to the greater to-morrow

That is born of a great to-day!

Now shame on the craven truckler

And the puling things that mope!

We've a rapture for our buckler

That outwears the wings of hope.

Give a cheer!

For our joy shall not give way.

Here's in the teeth of to-morrow

To the glory of to-day!

The Joy of the Hills. [Edwin Markham]

I ride on the mountain tops, I ride;

I have found my life and am satisfied.

Onward I ride in the blowing oats,

Checking the field-lark's rippling notes --

Lightly I sweep

From steep to steep:

Over my head through the branches high

Come glimpses of a rushing sky;

The tall oats brush my horse's flanks;

Wild poppies crowd on the sunny banks;

A bee booms out of the scented grass;

A jay laughs with me as I pass.

I ride on the hills, I forgive, I forget

Life's hoard of regret --

All the terror and pain

Of the chafing chain.

Grind on, O cities, grind:

I leave you a blur behind.

I am lifted elate -- the skies expand:

Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand.

Let them weary and work in their narrow walls:

I ride with the voices of waterfalls!

I swing on as one in a dream -- I swing

Down the airy hollows, I shout, I sing!

The world is gone like an empty word:

My body's a bough in the wind, my heart a bird!

The Lesser Children. [Ridgely Torrence]

A Threnody at the Hunting Season

In the middle of August when the southwest wind

Blows after sunset through the leisuring air,

And on the sky nightly the mythic hind

Leads down the sullen dog star to his lair,

After the feverous vigil of July,

When the loud pageant of the year's high noon

Passed up the ways of time to sing and part,

Grief also wandered by

From out the lovers and the leaves of June,

And by the wizard spices of his hair

I knew his heart was very Love's own heart.

Deep within dreams he led me out of doors

As from the upper vault the night outpours,

And when I saw that to him all the skies

Yearned as a sea asleep yearns to its shores,

He took a little clay and touched my eyes.

What saw I then, what heard?

Multitudes, multitudes, under the moon they stirred!

The weaker brothers of our earthly breed;

Watchmen of whom our safety takes no heed;

Swift helpers of the wind that sowed the seed

Before the first field was or any fruit;

Warriors against the bivouac of the weed;

Earth's earliest ploughmen for the tender root,

All came about my head and at my feet

A thousand, thousand sweet,

With starry eyes not even raised to plead;

Bewildered, driven, hiding, fluttering, mute!

And I beheld and saw them one by one

Pass and become as nothing in the night.

Clothed on with red they were who once were white;

Drooping, who once led armies to the sun,

Of whom the lowly grass now topped the flight:

In scarlet faint, who once were brave in brown;

Climbers and builders of the silent town,

Creepers and burrowers all in crimson dye,

Winged mysteries of song that from the sky

Once dashed long music down.

O who would take away music from the earth?

Have we so much? Or love upon the hearth?

No more -- they faded;

The great trees bending between birth and birth

Sighed for them, and the night wind's hoarse rebuff

Shouted the shame of which I was persuaded.

Shall Nature's only pausing be by men invaded?

Or shall we lay grief's fagots on her shoulders bare?

Has she not borne enough?

Soon will the mirroring woodland pools begin to con her,

And her sad immemorial passion come upon her;

Lo, would you add despair unto despair?

Shall not the Spring be answer to her prayer?

Must her uncomforted heavens overhead,

Weeping, look down on tears and still behold

Only wings broken or a fledgling dead,

Or underfoot the meadows that wore gold

Die, and the leaves go mourning to the mould

Beneath poor dead and desperate feet

Of folk who in next summer's meadows shall not meet?

Who has not seen in the high gulf of light

What, lower, was a bird, but now

Is moored and altered quite

Into an island of unshaded joy?

To whom the mate below upon the bough

Shouts once and brings him from his high employ.

Yet speeding he forgot not of the cloud

Where he from glory sprang and burned aloud,

But took a little of the day,

A little of the colored sky,

And of the joy that would not stay

He wove a song that cannot die.

Then, then -- the unfathomable shame;

The one last wrong arose from out the flame,

The ravening hate that hated not was hurled

Bidding the radiant love once more beware,

Bringing one more loneliness on the world,

And one more blindness in the unseen air.

Nor may the smooth regret, the pitying oath

Shed on such utter bitter any leaven.

Only the pleading flowers that knew them both

Hold all their bloody petals up to heaven.

Winds of the fall that all year to and fro

Somewhere upon the earth go wandering,

You saw, you moaned, you know:

Withhold not then unto all time to tell

Lest unborn others of us see this thing.

Bring our sleek, comfortable reason low:

Recount how souls grown tremulous as a bell

Came forth each other and the day to greet

In morning air all Indian-Summer sweet,

And crept upstream, through wood or field or brake,

Most tremblingly to take

What crumbs that from the Master's table fell.

Cry with what thronging thunders they were met,

And hide not how the least leaf was made wet.

Cry till no watcher says that all is well

With raucous discord through the leaning spheres.

But tell

With tears, with tears

How the last man is harmed even as they

Who on these dawns are fire, at dusk are clay.

Record the dumb and wise,

No less than those who lived in singing guise,

Whose choric hearts lit each wild green arcade.

Make men to see their eyes,

Forced to suspect behind each reed or rose

The thorn of lurking foes.

And O, before the daylight goes,

After the deed against the skies,

After the last belief and longing dies,

Make men again to see their eyes

Whose piteous casements now all unafraid

Peer out to that far verge where evermore,

Beyond all woe for which a tear atones,

The likeness of our own dishonor moans,

A sea that has no bottom and no shore.

What shall be done

By you, shy folk who cease thus heart by heart?

You for whose fate such fate forever hovers?

O little lovers,

If you would still have nests beneath the sun

Gather your broods about you and depart,

Before the stony forward-pressing faces

Into the lands bereft of any sound;

The solemn and compassionate desert places.

Give unto men no more the strong delight

To know that underneath the frozen ground

Dwells the warm life and all the quick, pure lore.

Take from our eyes the glory of great flight.

Let us behold no more

People untroubled by a Fate's veiled eyes,

Leave us upon an earth of faith forlorn.

No more wild tidings from the sweet far skies

Of love's long utmost heavenward endeavor.

So shall the silence pour on us forever

The streaming arrows of unutterable scorn.

Nor shall the cry of famine be a shield

The altar of a brutish mood to hide.

Stains, stains, upon the lintels of our doors

Wail to be justified.

Shall there be mutterings at the seasons' yield?

Has eye of man seen bared the granary floors?

Are the fields wasted? Spilled the oil and wine?

Is the fat seed under the clod decayed?

Does ever the fig tree languish or the vine?

Who has beheld the harvest promise fade?

Or any orchard heavy with fruit asway

Withered away?

No, not these things, but grosser things than these

Are the dim parents of a guilt not dim;

Ancestral urges out of old caves blowing,

When Fear watched at our coming and our going

The horror of the chattering face of Whim.

Hates, cruelties new fallen from the trees

Whereto we clung with impulse sad for love,

Shames we have had all time to rid us of,

Disgraces cold and sorrows long bewept,

Recalled, revived, and kept,

Unmeaning quarrels, blood-compelling lust,

And snarling woes from our old home, the dust.

Yet even of these one saving shape may rise;

Fear may unveil our eyes.

For know you not what curse of blight would fall

Upon a land lorn of the sweet sky races

Who day and night keep ward and seneschal

Upon the treasury of the planted spaces?

Then would the locust have his fill,

And the blind worm lay tithe,

The unfed stones rot in the listless mill,

The sound of grinding cease.

No yearning gold would whisper to the scythe,

Hunger at last would prove us of one blood,

The shores of dream be drowned in tides of need,

Horribly would the whole earth be at peace.

The burden of the grasshopper indeed

Weigh down the green corn and the tender bud,

The plague of Egypt fall upon the wheat,

And the shrill nit would batten in the heat.

But you, O poor of deeds and rich of breath,

Whose eyes have made our eyes a hue abhorred,

Red, eager aids of aid-unneeding Death,

Hunters before the Lord,

If on the flinted marge about your souls

In vain the heaving tide of mourning rolls,

If from your trails unto the crimson goals

The weeper and the weeping must depart,

If lust of blood come on you like a fiery dart

And darken all the dark autumnal air,

Then, then -- be fair.

Pluck a young ash tree or a sapling yew

And at the root end fix an iron thorn,

Then forth with rocking laughter of the horn

And passing, with no belling retinue,

All timorous, lesser sippers of the dew,

Seek out some burly guardian of the hills

And set your urgent thew against his thew.

Then shall the hidden wisdoms and the wills

Strive, and bear witness to the trees and clods

How one has dumb lore of the rocks and swales

And one has reason like unto the gods.

Then shall the lagging righteousness ensue,

The powers at last be equal in the scales,

And the man's club and the beast's claw be flails

To winnow the unworthy of the two.

Then on the earth, in the sky and the heavenly court

That broods behind it,

Justice shall be awakened and aware,

Then those who go forth greatly, seeking sport,

Shall doubtless find it,

And all things be fair.

A Vagabond Song. [Bliss Carman]

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood --

Touch of manner, hint of mood;

And my heart is like a rhyme,

With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry

Of bugles going by.

And my lonely spirit thrills

To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;

We must rise and follow her,

When from every hill of flame

She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

Somewhere. [John Vance Cheney]

The weasel thieves in silver suit,

The rabbit runs in gray;

And Pan takes up his frosty flute

To pipe the cold away.

The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,

The salmon take the sea;

And O my fair, would I somewhere

Might house my heart with thee!

"Frost To-Night". [Edith M. Thomas]

Apple-green west and an orange bar,

And the crystal eye of a lone, one star . . .

And, "Child, take the shears and cut what you will,

Frost to-night -- so clear and dead-still."

Then, I sally forth, half sad, half proud,

And I come to the velvet, imperial crowd,

The wine-red, the gold, the crimson, the pied, --

The dahlias that reign by the garden-side.

The dahlias I might not touch till to-night!

A gleam of the shears in the fading light,

And I gathered them all, -- the splendid throng,

And in one great sheaf I bore them along.

. . . . .

In my garden of Life with its all-late flowers

I heed a Voice in the shrinking hours:

"Frost to-night -- so clear and dead-still" . . .

Half sad, half proud, my arms I fill.

Under Arcturus. [Madison Cawein]

I

"I belt the morn with ribboned mist;

With baldricked blue I gird the noon,

And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed,

White-buckled with the hunter's-moon.

"These follow me," the Season says:

"Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs

Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways,

With gypsy gold that weighs their backs."

II

A daybreak horn the Autumn blows,

As with a sun-tanned hand he parts

Wet boughs whereon the berry glows;

And at his feet the red fox starts.

The leafy leash that holds his hounds

Is loosed; and all the noonday hush

Is startled; and the hillside sounds

Behind the fox's bounding brush.

When red dusk makes the western sky

A fire-lit window through the firs,

He stoops to see the red fox die

Among the chestnut's broken burrs.

Then fanfaree and fanfaree,

His bugle sounds; the world below

Grows hushed to hear; and two or three

Soft stars dream through the afterglow.

III

Like some black host the shadows fall,

And blackness camps among the trees;

Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall,

Grows populous with mysteries.

Night comes with brows of ragged storm,

And limbs of writhen cloud and mist;

The rain-wind hangs upon his arm

Like some wild girl who cries unkissed.

By his gaunt hands the leaves are shed

In headlong troops and nightmare herds;

And, like a witch who calls the dead,

The hill-stream whirls with foaming words.

Then all is sudden silence and

Dark fear -- like his who cannot see,

Yet hears, lost in a haunted land,

Death rattling on a gallow's-tree.

IV

The days approach again; the days

Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag,

When in the haze by puddled ways

The gnarled thorn seems a crooked hag.

When rotting orchards reek with rain;

And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;

And in the drizzling yard again

The gourd is tagged with points of fog.

Now let me seat my soul among

The woods' dim dreams, and come in touch

With melancholy, sad of tongue

And sweet, who says so much, so much.

The Recessional. [Charles G. D. Roberts]

Now along the solemn heights

Fade the Autumn's altar-lights;

Down the great earth's glimmering chancel

Glide the days and nights.

Little kindred of the grass,

Like a shadow in a glass

Falls the dark and falls the stillness;

We must rise and pass.

We must rise and follow, wending

Where the nights and days have ending, --

Pass in order pale and slow

Unto sleep extending.

Little brothers of the clod,

Soul of fire and seed of sod,

We must fare into the silence

At the knees of God.

Little comrades of the sky,

Wing to wing we wander by,

Going, going, going, going,

Softly as a sigh.

Hark, the moving shapes confer,

Globe of dew and gossamer,

Fading and ephemeral spirits

In the dusk astir.

Moth and blossom, blade and bee,

Worlds must go as well as we,

In the long procession joining

Mount and star and sea.

Toward the shadowy brink we climb

Where the round year rolls sublime,

Rolls, and drops, and falls forever

In the vast of time.

Like a plummet plunging deep

Past the utmost reach of sleep,

Till remembrance has no longer

Care to laugh or weep.

I know not why. [Morris Rosenfeld]

I lift mine eyes against the sky,

The clouds are weeping, so am I;

I lift mine eyes again on high,

The sun is smiling, so am I.

Why do I smile? Why do I weep?

I do not know; it lies too deep.

I hear the winds of autumn sigh,

They break my heart, they make me cry;

I hear the birds of lovely spring,

My hopes revive, I help them sing.

Why do I sing? Why do I cry?

It lies so deep, I know not why.

Winter Sleep. [Edith M. Thomas]

I know it must be winter (though I sleep) --

I know it must be winter, for I dream

I dip my bare feet in the running stream,

And flowers are many, and the grass grows deep.

I know I must be old (how age deceives!)

I know I must be old, for, all unseen,

My heart grows young, as autumn fields grow green,

When late rains patter on the falling sheaves.

I know I must be tired (and tired souls err) --

I know I must be tired, for all my soul

To deeds of daring beats a glad, faint roll,

As storms the riven pine to music stir.

I know I must be dying (Death draws near) --

I know I must be dying, for I crave

Life -- life, strong life, and think not of the grave,

And turf-bound silence, in the frosty year.

Tryste Noel. [Louise Imogen Guiney]

The Ox he openeth wide the Doore,

And from the Snowe he calls her inne,

And he hath seen her Smile therefor,

Our Ladye without Sinne.

Now soon from Sleep

A Starre shall leap,

And soone arrive both King and Hinde:

~Amen, Amen:~

But O, the Place co'd I but finde!

The Ox hath hush'd his voyce and bent

Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,

And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,

The Blessed layes her Browe.

Around her feet

Full Warme and Sweete

His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell:

~Amen, Amen:~

But sore am I with Vaine Travel!

The Ox is host in Judah stall

And Host of more than onelie one.

For close she gathereth withal

Our Lorde her littel Sonne.

Glad Hinde and King

Their Gyfte may bring,

But wo'd to-night my Teares were there,

~Amen, Amen:~

Between her Bosom and His hayre!

Hora Christi. [Alice Brown]

Sweet is the time for joyous folk

Of gifts and minstrelsy;

Yet I, O lowly-hearted One,

Crave but Thy company.

On lonesome road, beset with dread,

My questing lies afar.

I have no light, save in the east

The gleaming of Thy star.

In cloistered aisles they keep to-day

Thy feast, O living Lord!

With pomp of banner, pride of song,

And stately sounding word.

Mute stand the kings of power and place,

While priests of holy mind

Dispense Thy blessed heritage

Of peace to all mankind.

I know a spot where budless twigs

Are bare above the snow,

And where sweet winter-loving birds

Flit softly to and fro;

There with the sun for altar-fire,

The earth for kneeling-place,

The gentle air for chorister,

Will I adore Thy face.

Loud, underneath the great blue sky,

My heart shall paean sing,

The gold and myrrh of meekest love

Mine only offering.

Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me;

And for Thy pain and dole

Tears are but vain, so I will keep

The silence of the soul.

A Parting Guest. [James Whitcomb Riley]

What delightful hosts are they --

Life and Love!

Lingeringly I turn away,

This late hour, yet glad enough

They have not withheld from me

Their high hospitality.

So, with face lit with delight

And all gratitude, I stay

Yet to press their hands and say,

"Thanks. -- So fine a time! Good night."

====

Biographical Notes

[The format of these notes has been slightly altered. Most notably,

dates (hopefully correct, but not very certain for the lesser known poets)

have been added -- when available -- in square brackets after each name,

and the number of poems by that author in this anthology is in parentheses.

These notes (first included in 1917, whereas the selections were made in 1913)

combined with the searchability of electronic texts,

renders the original Indexes of Authors and of First Lines obsolete,

and so both have been dropped. Occasionally, further information follows

in angled brackets. -- A. L., 1998.]

Barker, Elsa. [1869-1954] (2)

Born at Leicester, Vermont. Received her early education in that State.

After a short period of teaching, she became a newspaper writer

and contributed to various periodicals and syndicates.

Her journalistic period closed with editorial work upon "Hampton's Magazine"

in 1909 and 1910. Since that date she has published several books

in different fields of literature: "The Son of Mary Bethel",

a novel, putting the character of Christ in modern setting; "Stories from

the New Testament, for Children"; "Letters of a Living Dead Man",

psychic communications which have attracted much attention;

and in poetry, "The Frozen Grail, and Other Poems", 1910;

"The Book of Love", 1912; and "Songs of a Vagrom Angel", 1916.

Mrs. Barker's poem, "The Frozen Grail", addressed to Peary, the explorer,

did much, as he has testified, to inspire him, and was upon his person

when he finally achieved the North Pole.

Braithwaite, William Stanley. [1878-1962] (1)

Born at Boston, December 6, 1878. Educated in the public schools

of that city. He has published two volumes of his own verse,

"Lyrics of Life and Love", 1904, and "The House of Falling Leaves", 1908,

but has given his time chiefly to editorial and critical work.

Mr. Braithwaite edited three excellent anthologies:

"The Book of Elizabethan Verse", "The Book of Restoration Verse",

and "The Book of Georgian Verse", but has turned his entire attention,

for several years past, to contemporary American poetry,

having founded and edited "The Poetry Journal of Boston",

"The Poetry Review of America", etc. Mr. Braithwaite summarizes each year

for the "Boston Transcript" the poetic output of the American magazines,

and publishes, in an "Anthology of Magazine Verse", what he regards

as the best poems printed in our periodicals during the year.

Branch, Anna Hempstead. [1875-1937] (3)

Born at Hempstead House, New London, Connecticut. Graduated from

Smith College in 1897 and from the American Academy of Dramatic Art

in New York City in 1900. While at college she began writing poetry,

and the year after her graduation won the first prize awarded

by the "Century Magazine" for a poem written by a college graduate.

This poem, "The Road 'Twixt Heaven and Hell", was printed in

the "Century Magazine" for December, 1898, and was followed soon after by

the publication of Miss Branch's first volume, "The Heart of the Road", 1901.

She has since published two volumes, "The Shoes that Danced", 1902,

and "Rose of the Wind", 1910, both marked by imagination and beauty

of a high order.

Brown, Alice. [1857-1948] (3)

Born at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, December 5, 1857.

Educated at Robinson Seminary, Exeter. She is chiefly known as a novelist,

having written with great art of the life of New England. Among her

best-known volumes are "Meadow Grass", a collection of short stories;

"Tiverton Tales"; "The Mannerings"; "Margaret Warrener"; "Rose MacLeod";

"My Love and I", etc. In 1915 Miss Brown received a prize of $10,000,

given by Winthrop Ames, for the best play submitted to him

by an American writer. This drama, "Children of Earth",

was produced the following season at the Booth Theater in New York.

In poetry Miss Brown has done but one volume, "The Road to Castaly", 1896,

reprinted with new poems in 1917, but this is so fine in quality

as to give her a distinct place among American poets.

Burton, Richard. [1861-1940] (3)

Born at Hartford, Connecticut, March 14, 1859 [sic]. Received the degree

of A.B. from Trinity College in 1883 and of Ph.D. from John Hopkins University

in 1888. He entered journalism and became for a short time

managing editor of "The Churchman", leaving this position to become

literary editor of the "Hartford Courant", where he remained

from 1890 to 1897. During this period he was also associate editor

of the "Warner Library of the World's Best Literature". In 1902

he went to Boston as literary editor of the Lothrop Publishing Company,

remaining until 1904. Previous to this time, Dr. Burton had been

lecturing widely upon poetry and the drama and spent the succeeding two years

chiefly engaged in this work. In 1906 he became the head

of the English Department of the University of Minnesota,

which position he still holds, although the scholastic year

is broken annually by a lecture tour through the East.

Dr. Burton has published many volumes of poetry and several upon the drama.

Among the former one may cite as most representative: "Dumb in June", 1895;

"Lyrics of Brotherhood", 1899; "Message and Melody", 1903;

"Rahab: A Poetic Drama", 1906; "From the Book of Life", 1909;

and "A Midsummer Memory", an elegy upon the untimely death

of Arthur Upson, 1910.

Bynner, Witter. [1881-1968] (3)

Born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 1881. Graduated at Harvard University

in 1902. After his graduation he became assistant editor

of "McClure's Magazine" and literary editor of McClure, Phillips & Company

until 1906. Since that period he has devoted himself chiefly

to the writing of poetry and poetic drama. His first volume,

"An Ode to Harvard, and Other Poems", was published in 1907.

This has been followed by the poetic dramas, "Tiger", 1913,

and "The Little King", 1917, both of which have had stage presentation,

and by "The New World", 1915, amplified from his Phi Beta Kappa Poem

delivered at Harvard in 1911.

Carman, Bliss. [1861-1929] (4)

Although so long a resident of America that he belongs among our poets,

Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, April 15, 1861.

He received the degree of A.B. from the University of New Brunswick in 1881

and of A.M. in 1884. He studied also at Harvard and at

the University of Edinburgh. Like most poets, Mr. Carman served his period

in journalism, being office editor of "The Independent" from 1890 to 1892,

and editor of "The Chap-Book" in 1894. He has, however,

given almost his sole allegiance to poetry and has published many books,

chiefly of nature, interspersed now and then with volumes dealing with

myth or mysticism. His first volume was "Low Tide on Grand Pre",

which appeared in 1893, and revealed at the outset his remarkable lyric gift

and his sensitive feeling for nature. In collaboration with Richard Hovey

he did the well-known "Vagabondia Books", -- "Songs from Vagabondia", 1894;

"More Songs from Vagabondia", 1896; and "Last Songs from Vagabondia", 1900, --

which introduced a new note into American poetry, and appearing, as they did,

in the nineties, formed a wholesome contrast to some of the work

then emanating from the "Decadent School" in England.

Among the finest of Mr. Carman's volumes, aside from his work

with Richard Hovey, are "Behind the Arras: A Book of the Unseen", 1895;

"Ballads of Lost Haven", 1897; "By the Aurelian Wall, and Other Elegies",

1899; "The Green Book of the Bards", 1898; "Pipes of Pan", 5 volumes,

first number in 1902; "Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics", 1903.

Among his later books may be cited "Echoes from Vagabondia", 1912,

and "April Airs", 1916.

Cather, Willa Sibert. [1873-1947] (1)

Born at Winchester, Virginia, December 7, 1875 [sic]. During her childhood

the family moved to Nebraska, and in 1895 Miss Cather was graduated from

the University of that State. Coming East to engage in newspaper work,

she became associated with the staff of the "Pittsburgh Daily Leader",

where she remained from 1897 to 1901. Soon after, she became

one of the editors of "McClure's Magazine", doing important feature articles

until 1912. Miss Cather is now writing fiction, and has published

three novels, "Alexander's Bridge", "O Pioneers!" and "The Song of the Lark".

In poetry, she has done but one small volume, "April Twilight", 1903,

but several poems from this collection seem likely to make for themselves

a permanent place.

Cawein, Madison. [1865-1914] (3)

Born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 23, 1865. Educated in the public schools

of that city. He began writing very early and published his first

book of verse, "Blooms of the Berry", 1887, when but twenty-two years of age.

From that time until his death, December 7, 1915 [sic],

he published many volumes of poetry inspired chiefly by the theme of nature.

As most of these volumes are out of print, it is unnecessary to list them all,

but among the more important may be cited: "Intimations of the Beautiful",

1894; "Undertones", 1896; "The Garden of Dreams", 1896;

"Myth and Romance", 1899; "Weeds by the Wall", 1901;

"Kentucky Poems", with an Introduction by Edmund Gosse, London, 1902;

"A Voice on the Wind", 1902; "The Vale of Tempe", 1905;

"Complete Poetical Works", 5 volumes, 1907; "New Poems", London, 1909;

"Poems -- A Selection from the Complete Work", 1911;

"The Poet, the Fool, and the Fairies", 1912; "Minions of the Moon", 1913;

"The Poet and Nature", 1914; and "The Cup of Comus", posthumous publication,

1915. Mr. Cawein was distinctly the creator of his own field.

From the publication of his first little volume, "Blooms of the Berry",

he had made himself the intimate, almost the mystic, comrade of nature.

He had an ecstatic sense of the visible world. Beauty was his religion,

and he spent his life learning the ways and moods of nature and declaring them

in poetry rich in imagination. He had the naturalist's eagerness for truth,

and one might explore the Kentucky woods and fields

with a volume of his poetry as a handbook and find the least regarded flower

minutely celebrated. In his most affluent fancy his eye never left the fact,

and the accuracy of his observation gives his nature work a background

which adds greatly to its value.

Cheney, John Vance. [1848-1922] (2)

Born at Groveland, New York, December 29, 1848. Received his early education

at Temple Hill Academy in Geneseo, New York. After a short period

of teaching and of practicing law, he became the librarian

of the Free Public Library of San Francisco and held this position

from 1887 to 1894, when he accepted a similar one at the Newberry Library

in Chicago, where he remained until 1899. Since that date

he has resided in California, where he devotes his time to literary work.

His volumes of poetry are: "Thistle Drift", 1887; "Woodblooms", 1888;

"Out of the Silence", 1897; "Lyrics", 1901; "Poems", 1905;

"The Time of Roses", 1908; "At the Silver Gate", 1911.

Coates, Florence Earle. [1850-1927] (3)

Born at Philadelphia and educated at private schools in that city

and in France. She studied also at Brussels. Her volumes of poetry

in their order are, "Poems", 1898; "Mine and Thine", 1904;

"Lyrics of Life", 1909; "The Unconquered Air", 1912;

"Poems", Collected Edition, in two volumes, 1916.

Colton, Arthur. [1868-1943] (2)

Born at Washington, May 22, 1868. Received the degree of A.B.

at Yale University in 1890 and of Ph.D. in 1893. He was also instructor

in English at Yale for two years following the taking of his last degree.

Since 1906 he has been librarian of the University Club of New York City.

Mr. Colton has published several volumes of essays and but one volume

of poetry: "Harps Hung up in Babylon", 1907.

Cone, Helen Gray. [1859-1934] (2)

Born in New York City, March 8, 1859. Graduated at

the Normal College of New York City in 1876. She has been

Professor of English Literature at her Alma Mater, now called Hunter College,

since 1899. Her volumes of verse are: "Oberon and Puck", 1885;

"The Ride to the Lady", 1893; "Soldiers of the Light", 1911;

"A Chant of Love for England, and Other Poems", 1915.

Daly, Thomas Augustine. [1871-1948] (2)

Born at Philadelphia, May 28, 1871, and educated at Fordham University.

He was for some time reporter and editorial writer on

the "Philadelphia Record", and is now the general manager of

the "Catholic Standard and Times". Mr. Daly has put the Italian immigrant

into poetry and written several volumes of delightful verse in this field.

He has not pursued this exclusively, however, but has done some excellent work

in other themes. His volumes are: "Canzoni", 1906; "Carmina", 1909;

"Madrigali", 1912; and "Songs of Wedded Love", 1916.

Dargan, Olive Tilford. [1869-1968] (1)

Born in Grayson County, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Nashville

and at Radcliffe College. She became a teacher and was connected with

various schools in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas until her marriage.

Mrs. Dargan's first work was in poetic drama in which she revealed gifts of

a high order. Her dramatic volumes are: "Semiramis, and Other Plays", 1904;

"Lords and Lovers", 1906; and "The Mortal Gods", 1912. Mrs. Dargan

has also written a collection of lyric verse called "Path Flower", 1914,

and a sonnet sequence, "The Cycle's Rim", 1916.

Daskam, Josephine Dodge (Mrs. Selden Bacon). [1876-1961] (1)

Born at Stamford, Connecticut, February 17, 1876. Graduated at Smith College

in 1898. She is chiefly known as a novelist and writer of short stories

in which field she has had conspicuous success. Among her

volumes of fiction are: "The Madness of Philip"; "Whom the Gods Destroyed";

"Margherita's Soul"; and "Open Market". Miss Daskam has done

but one volume of verse: "Poems", 1903.

Davis, Fannie Stearns (Mrs. Augustus McKinstrey Gifford). [1884-?] (2)

Born at Cleveland, Ohio, March 6, 1884. Educated at Smith College,

from which she graduated in 1904. She is the author of two volumes of poetry:

"Myself and I", 1913, and "Crack O' Dawn", 1915, both marked

by sensitive poetic feeling and delicate artistry.

Firkins, Chester. [1882-1915] (1)

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 30, 1882. Received his education

in the public schools of that city and at the University of Minnesota.

He was an active journalist, having been associated with the press

of Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, and of Chicago before coming to New York,

where he served on the staff of the "New York American" until his death,

March 1, 1915. He was a contributor of stories and verse

to well-known magazines, but his volume of poems was brought out posthumously

in 1916.

French, Nora May. [1881-1907] (1)

Born in East Aurora, New York, and died at Carmel, California, on November 14,

1907, when twenty-six years of age. A small volume of her poems,

edited by her friend, George Sterling, was brought out after her death.

Garrison, Theodosia (Mrs. Frederick J. Faulks). [1874-1944] (2)

Born at Newark, New Jersey. Educated at private schools in New York.

She was for several years a constant contributor of poetry to the magazines,

though she has written less of late. Her two published volumes of verse are:

"Joy O' Life", 1908, and "The Earth Cry", 1910.

Greene, Sarah Pratt McLean. [1856-1935] (1)

Born at Simsbury, Connecticut, July 3, 1856 and educated at

McLean Academy and at Mount Holyoke College. She is chiefly known

as the author of "Cape Cod Folks", "Vesty of the Basins", and other volumes

dealing with the life of the Cape Cod fishermen, but Mrs. Greene has written

one poem destined to hold a permanent place not only in our literature, but in

the larger body of enduring poetry. This is "De Massa ob de Sheepfol'",

contained in this collection.

Guiney, Louise Imogen. [1861-1920] (4)

Born at Boston, January 7, 1861. Educated in the private schools of Boston

and the Sacred Heart Convent in Providence, Rhode Island.

Her father, Patrick Guiney, was a brigadier-general in our Civil War,

and having been born during the period of the conflict and her early youth

having been spent almost before the echo of the guns had died,

Miss Guiney's work was much influenced by this background of association.

The symbolism of her poetry is frequently drawn from battle

or from knight-errantry, as in "The Wild Ride", "The Kings",

"The Vigil-at-Arms", "The Knight Errant", "Memorial Day", etc.

Valor, transmuted to a spiritual quality, may, indeed, be said to be

the keynote of Miss Guiney's work. Add to this a mystical element,

best illustrated in her poem, "Beati Mortui", a Celtic note,

shown so exquisitely in her "Irish Peasant Song", and one has

the more obvious characteristics of poetry that, whatever its theme,

is always distinguished and individual. Miss Guiney has

a crisp economy of phrase, a pungency and tang, that invest her style

with an unusual degree of personality. Her volumes in their order have been:

"The White Sail", 1887; "A Roadside Harp", 1893; "Nine Sonnets

Written at Oxford", 1895; "The Martyr's Idyl", 1899; and "Happy Ending",

her collected poems, 1909.

Hagedorn, Hermann. [1882-1964] (2)

Born July 18, 1882. Educated at Harvard University

and the University of Berlin and served as instructor in English

at Harvard from 1909 to 1911. Mr. Hagedorn is the author of

"The Silver Blade: A Play in Verse", 1907; "The Woman of Corinth", 1908;

"A Troop of the Guard", 1909; "Poems and Ballads", 1911;

and "The Great Maze and the Heart of Youth: A Poem and a Play", 1916.

Helburn, Theresa. [1887-1959] (1)

Born in New York City. Educated at Bryn Mawr College and at Radcliffe.

She has not yet published a collection of poetry, but has contributed

to the leading magazines.

[Theresa Helburn is best known for her work in theatre. -- A. L., 1998.]

Hovey, Richard. [1864-1900] (4)

Born at Normal, Illinois, May 4, 1864, died February 24, 1900.

He received his early education at Dartmouth College,

which he afterward celebrated in several of his best-known poems.

In collaboration with Bliss Carman he did the well known "Vagabondia Books",

-- "Songs from Vagabondia", 1894; "More Songs from Vagabondia", 1896;

"Last Songs from Vagabondia", 1900, -- books whose freshness and charm

immediately won them a place in public favor that time has not lessened.

Aside from his work with Mr. Carman and his lyric collection,

"Along the Trail", 1898, Hovey had done a remarkable group of poetic dramas

built upon the Arthurian legend and issued separately under the titles,

"The Quest of Merlin: A Masque", 1898; "The Marriage of Guenevere:

A Tragedy", 1898; "The Birth of Galahad: A Romantic Drama", 1898;

"Taliesin: A Masque", 1899. These were but part of the dramas

projected in the cycle and a fragment of the next to be issued,

"The Holy Grail", was published, with explanatory notes of the whole series,

in 1907. The dramas stand for a dramatic achievement of a high order,

and contain poetry of great beauty, reaching at times,

in the lyric masque of "Taliesin", an almost consummate expression.

Richard Hovey was, indeed, both in lyric and dramatic work,

a poet of rare endowment and his early death was a distinct loss

to American letters.

Johns, Orrick. [1887-1946] (1)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887. Educated at the University of Missouri

and Washington University in St. Louis. He was associated for a short time

with "Reedy's Mirror". In 1912 he received the first prize,

of five hundred dollars, for a poem entitled "Second Avenue",

contributed to the prize contest of "The Lyric Year", and afterwards published

in that volume.

Jones, Thomas S., Jr. [1882-1932] (3)

Born at Boonville, New York, November 6, 1882. Graduated at

Cornell University in 1904. He was on the dramatic staff

of the "New York Times", from 1904 to 1907, and associate editor

of "The Pathfinder", in 1911. His published volumes are:

"Path of Dreams", 1904; "From Quiet Valleys", 1907; "Interludes", 1908;

"Ave Atque Vale" (In Memoriam Arthur Upson), 1909; "The Voice in the Silence",

with a Foreword by James Lane Allen, 1911; and "The Rose-Jar",

originally published in 1906, but taken over in 1915

by Thomas B. Mosher and made the initial volume of "Lyra Americana",

his first series of American poetry.

Kilmer, Joyce. [1886-1918] (2)

Born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, December 6, 1886, and graduated

at Columbia University in 1908. After a short period of teaching

he became associated with Funk and Wagnalls Company, where he remained

from 1909 to 1912, when he assumed the position of literary editor

of "The Churchman". In 1913 Mr. Kilmer became a member of the staff

of the "New York Times", a position which he still occupies.

His volumes of poetry are: "A Summer of Love", 1911,

and "Trees, and Other Poems", 1914.

Knowles, Frederick Lawrence. [1869-1905] (2)

Born at Lawrence, Massachusetts, September 8, 1869, and graduated

at Wesleyan University in 1894 and Harvard University in 1896.

He was connected for a short time with the editorial department

of Houghton Mifflin Company and with the staff of L. C. Page and Company

as literary adviser. In 1900 he accepted a similar position

with Dana Estes and Company where he remained until his death

in September, 1905. Mr. Knowles was the author of two volumes of verse:

"On Life's Stairway", 1900, and "Love Triumphant", 1904. In addition to

his own work in poetry he was the editor of several excellent anthologies,

such as "The Golden Treasury of American Lyrics", 1897;

"A Treasury of Humorous Poetry", 1902; and "A Year-Book of Famous Lyrics".

Mr. Knowles was a poet of fine gifts and his early death was a loss

to American poetry.

Ledoux, Louis V. [1880-1948] (1)

Born at New York City, June 6, 1880. Educated at Columbia University,

where he graduated in 1902. He is the author of "Songs from the Silent Land",

1905; "The Soul's Progress", 1907; "Yzdra: A Poetic Drama", 1909;

"The Shadow of Etna", 1914; "The Story of Eleusis: A Lyrical Drama", 1916.

Le Gallienne, Richard. [1866-1947] (4)

Born at Liverpool, England, January 20, 1866. He was already

a well-known poet, novelist, and critic when he took up his residence

in the United States. In each of these fields Mr. Le Gallienne

has achieved conspicuous success and it would be difficult to say

what phase of his literary work should take precedence of the others.

Among the best known of his prose works are: "The Quest of the Golden Girl",

"Book Bills of Narcissus", "An Old Country House", "Little Dinners

with the Sphinx", etc. In criticism he has done particularly fine work

in his study of George Meredith and in his volume, "Attitudes and Avowals".

In poetry, with which we are chiefly concerned, he has given us

several volumes distinguished by that delicacy and sensitive feeling

for beauty which characterize all of his work. These are:

"English Poems", 1892; "Stevenson, and Other Poems", 1895;

"New Poems", 1909; "The Lonely Dancer", 1913. In addition to these volumes,

Mr. Le Gallienne has made an admirable paraphrase of the "Rubaiyat"

of Omar Khayyam and of a group of odes from the "Divan" of Hafiz.

Lindsay, Vachel. [1879-1931] (3)

Born November 10, 1879. Educated at Hiram College, Ohio.

He took up the study of art and studied at the Art Institute,

Chicago, 1900-03 and at the New York School of Art, 1904-05.

For a time after his technical study, he lectured upon art

in its practical relation to the community, and returning to his home

in Springfield, Illinois, issued what one might term his manifesto

in the shape of "The Village Magazine", divided about equally

between prose articles, pertaining to beautifying his native city,

and poems, illustrated by his own drawings. Soon after this,

Mr. Lindsay, taking as scrip for the journey, "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread",

made a pilgrimage on foot through several Western States going as far afield

as New Mexico. The story of this journey is given in his volume,

"Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty". Mr. Lindsay first

attracted attention in poetry by "General William Booth Enters into Heaven",

a poem which became the title of his first volume, in 1913. His second volume

was "The Congo", published in 1914. He is attempting to restore to poetry

its early appeal as a spoken art, and his later work differs greatly

from the selections contained in this anthology.

Lodge, George Cabot. [1873-1909] (2)

Born at Boston, October 12, 1873. Educated at Harvard University

and the University of Paris. He did his first work in poetry at Harvard

in the stimulating companionship of a little group of poets

including Trumbull Stickney, William Vaughn Moody, and Philip Henry Savage,

all of whom, by a strange fatality, died within a few years after leaving

the University. Mr. Lodge was a poet whose gift followed classical lines,

but was none the less individual and sincere. His complete work

in lyric and dramatic poetry has been gathered into two volumes:

"Poems and Dramas", 1911. He died at Boston in 1909.

Lowell, Amy. [1874-1925] (1)

Born at Boston, February 9, 1874. Educated at private schools.

She has been prominently identified with the "Imagist" movement in poetry

and with the technical use of `vers libre'. These movements, however,

were not yet influencing poetry when "The Little Book of Modern Verse"

was edited, and Miss Lowell is, therefore, represented by a lyric

in her earlier and less characteristic manner. Her volumes

in their order are: "A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass", 1912;

"Sword Blades and Poppy Seed", 1914; "Men, Women, and Ghosts", 1916.

Miss Lowell is also the editor of "Some Imagist Poets", 1915;