And, when flood or foeman shakes the sleeper In his moment’s lapse from pain, Bids us fold our tents, and flee our kin, and deeper Drive into the wilderness again.
THE OLD POLE STAR
BEFORE the clepsydra had bound the days Man tethered Change to his fixed star, and said: “The elder races, that long since are dead, Marched by that light; it swerves not from its base Though all the worlds about it wax and fade.”
When Egypt saw it, fast in reeling spheres, Her Pyramids shaft-centred on its ray She reared and said: “Long as this star holds sway In uninvaded ether, shall the years Revere my monuments—” and went her way.
The Pyramids abide; but through the shaft That held the polar pivot, eye to eye, Look now—blank nothingness! As though Change laughed At man’s presumption and his puny craft, The star has slipped its leash and roams the sky.
Yet could the immemorial piles be swung A skyey hair’s-breadth from their rooted base, Back to the central anchorage of space, Ah, then again, as when the race was young, Should they behold the beacon of the race!
Of old, men said: “The Truth is there: we rear Our faith full-centred on it. It was known Thus of the elders who foreran us here, Mapped out its circuit in the shifting sphere, And found it, ‘mid mutation, fixed alone.”
Change laughs again, again the sky is cold, And down that fissure now no starbeam glides. Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old Still at the central point of space behold Another pole-star: for the Truth abides.
A GRAVE
THOUGH life should come With all its marshalled honours, trump and drum, To proffer you the captaincy of some Resounding exploit, that shall fill Man’s pulses with commemorative thrill, And be a banner to far battle days For truths unrisen upon untrod ways, What would your answer be, O heart once brave? Seek otherwhere; for me, I watch beside a grave.
Though to some shining festival of thought The sages call you from steep citadel Of bastioned argument, whose rampart gained Yields the pure vision passionately sought, In dreams known well, But never yet in wakefulness attained, How should you answer to their summons, save: I watch beside a grave?
Though Beauty, from her fane within the soul Of fire-tongued seers descending, Or from the dream-lit temples of the past With feet immortal wending, Illuminate grief’s antre swart and vast With half-veiled face that promises the whole To him who holds her fast, What answer could you give? Sight of one face I crave, One only while I live; Woo elsewhere; for I watch beside a grave.
Though love of the one heart that loves you best, A storm-tossed messenger, Should beat its wings for shelter in your breast, Where clung its last year’s nest, The nest you built together and made fast Lest envious winds should stir, And winged each delicate thought to minister With sweetness far-amassed To the young dreams within— What answer could it win? The nest was whelmed in sorrow’s rising wave, Nor could I reach one drowning dream to save; I watch beside a grave.
NON DOLET!
AGE after age the fruit of knowledge falls To ashes on men’s lips; Love fails, faith sickens, like a dying tree Life sheds its dreams that no new spring recalls; The longed-for ships Come empty home or founder on the deep, And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.
So weary a world it lies, forlorn of day, And yet not wholly dark, Since evermore some soul that missed the mark Calls back to those agrope In the mad maze of hope, “Courage, my brothers—I have found the way!”
The day is lost? What then? What though the straggling rear-guard of the fight Be whelmed in fear and night, And the flying scouts proclaim That death has gripped the van— Ever the heart of man Cheers on the hearts of men!
“It hurts not!” dying cried the Roman wife; And one by one The leaders in the strife Fall on the blade of failure and exclaim: “The day is won!”
A HUNTING-SONG
HUNTERS, where does Hope nest? Not in the half-oped breast, Nor the young rose, Nor April sunrise—those With a quick wing she brushes, The wide world through, Greets with the throat of thrushes, Fades from as fast as dew.
But, would you spy her sleeping, Cradled warm, Look in the breast of weeping, The tree stript by storm; But, would you bind her fast, Yours at last, Bed-mate and lover, Gain the last headland bare That the cold tides cover, There may you capture her, there, Where the sea gives to the ground Only the drift of the drowned. Yet, if she slips you, once found, Push to her uttermost lair In the low house of despair. There will she watch by your head, Sing to you till you be dead, Then, with your child in her breast, In another heart build a new nest.
SURVIVAL
WHEN you and I, like all things kind or cruel, The garnered days and light evasive hours, Are gone again to be a part of flowers And tears and tides, in life’s divine renewal,
If some grey eve to certain eyes should wear A deeper radiance than mere light can give, Some silent page abruptly flush and live, May it not be that you and I are there?
USES
AH, from the niggard tree of Time How quickly fall the hours! It needs no touch of wind or rime To loose such facile flowers.
Drift of the dead year’s harvesting, They clog tomorrow’s way, Yet serve to shelter growths of spring Beneath their warm decay,
Or, blent by pious hands with rare Sweet savours of content, Surprise the soul’s December air With June’s forgotten scent.
A MEETING
ON a sheer peak of joy we meet; Below us hums the abyss; Death either way allures our feet If we take one step amiss.
One moment let us drink the blue Transcendent air together— Then down where the same old work’s to do In the same dull daily weather.
We may not wait … yet look below! How part? On this keen ridge But one may pass. They call you—go! My life shall be your bridge.
Note.—Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris, and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human body, and his great work “The Structure of the Human Body” was an open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such violent opposition, not only in the Church but in the University, that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and afterward of his son, Philip II, of Spain. This closed his life of free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research, and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius led for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician, but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561 they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius, sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape from Spain.
Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.
Autres Temps…
I
Mrs. Lidcote, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive of the screws.
She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,—in