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   2 Aberjhani
   1 Kobayashi Issa

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   24 Anonymous
   11 Dave Barry
   10 Robert T Kiyosaki
   8 Rick Riordan
   7 Nat Hentoff
   7 Carl Hiaasen
   6 Tucker Carlson
   6 Terry Pratchett
   5 Gabriel Garc a M rquez
   5 Dan Savage
   5 Allan Sloan
   4 Thomas L Friedman
   4 Mark Steyn
   4 Joel Stein
   4 Henry David Thoreau
   4 Dorothy Parker
   3 Victor Hugo
   3 Thomas Sowell
   3 Stephen King
   3 Sayed Kashua

1:across the river a column of lightning flashes ~ Kobayashi Issa, @BashoSociety

2:Worthy The Name Of Sir Knight Sir Knight of the world's oldest order, Sir Knight of the Army of God, You have crossed the strange mystical border, The ground floor of truth you have trod; You have entered the sanctum sanctorum, Which leads to the temple above, Where you come as a stone, and a Christ-chosen one, In the kingdom of Friendship and Love. II As you stand in this new realm of beauty, Where each man you meet is your friend, Think not that your promise of duty In hall, or asylum, shall end; Outside, in the great world of pleasure, Beyond, in the clamor of trade, In the battle of life and its coarse daily strife Remember the vows you have made. III Your service, majestic and solemn, Your symbols, suggestive and sweet, Your uniformed phalanx in column On gala days marching the street; Your sword and your plume and your helmet, Your 'secrets' hid from the world's sight; These things are the small, lesser parts of the all Which are needed to form the true Knight. IV The martyrs who perished rejoicing In Templary's glorious laws, Who died 'midst the fagots while voicing The glory and worth of their cause- 935 They honored the title of 'Templar' No more than the Knight of to-day Who mars not the name with one blemish of shame, But carries it clean through life's fray. To live for a cause, to endeavor To make your deeds grace it, to try And uphold its precepts forever, Is harder by far than to die. For the battle of life is unending, The enemy, Self, never tires, And the true Knight must slay that sly foe every day Ere he reaches the heights he desires. VI Sir Knight, have you pondered the meaning Of all you have heard and been told? Have you strengthened your heart for its weaning From vices and faults loved of old? Will you honor, in hours of temptation, Your promises noble and grand? Will your spirit be strong to do battle with wrong, 'And having done all, to stand?' VII Will you ever be true to a brother In actions as well as in creed? Will you stand by his side as no other Could stand in the hour of his need? Will you boldly defend him from peril, And lift him from poverty's curseWill the promise of aid which you willingly made, Reach down from your lips to your purse? VIII The world's battle field is before you! Let Wisdom walk close by your side, 936 Let Faith spread her snowy wings o'er you, Let Truth be your comrade and guide; Let Fortitude, Justice and Mercy Direct all your conduct aright, And let each word and act tell to men the proud fact, You are worthy the name of 'Sir Knight'. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

3:How can one awaken his Yoga-shakti? It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That's all. Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that's not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one's life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that's enough. One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes. Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must find one's own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before. If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn't have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing - how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about - if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one's being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it - afterwards. Like that it is sure. One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 211-212,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:A broken fortune is like a falling column; the lower it sinks, the greater weight it has to sustain. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove

2:I get up every morning and read the obituary column. If my name's not there, I eat breakfast. ~ george-burns, @wisdomtrove

3:Make an extensive table of project &

4:But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove

5:I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928] ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove

6:Brethren, do something; do something, do something! While societies and unions make constitutions, let us win souls. I pray you, be men of action all of you. Get to work and quit yourselves like men. Old Suvarov's idea of war is mine: `Forward and strike! No theory! Attack! Form a column! Charge bayonets! Plunge into the center of the enemy! Our one aim is to win souls; and this we are not to talk about, but do in the power of God!' ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove

7:You see, if the height of the mercury [barometer] column is less on the top of a mountain than at the foot of it (as I have many reasons for believing, although everyone who has so far written about it is of the contrary opinion), it follows that the weight of the air must be the sole cause of the phenomenon, and not that abhorrence of a vacuum, since it is obvious that at the foot of the mountain there is more air to have weight than at the summit, and we cannot possibly say that the air at the foot of the mountain has a greater aversion to empty space than at the top. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:my advice column is going ~ Rachel Ren e Russell,

2:I don't write about my life in my column. ~ Dan Savage,

3:One should always dress like a marble column. ~ Jackie Kennedy,

4:He did a very good impression of a stone column. ~ Shannon Hale,

5:I love sushi, but I'm not going to write a column about it. ~ Joel Stein,

6:Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days. ~ Edward Hoagland,

7:He did a stunning impression of a stone column," said Miri. ~ Shannon Hale,

8:We could write an etiquette column for the gangbanger set. ~ Pepper Winters,

9:Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space. ~ Jeremy Clarkson,

10:I can’t …” Then, beside Mother Dyeth’s silent personality column, ~ Samuel R Delany,

11:Now I'm instantly nervous about the demands of doing a weekly column. ~ Rory Bremner,

12:The astrological prediction for Libra in the "Your Stars Today" column ~ Terry Pratchett,

13:The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card. ~ Dennis Ritchie,

14:It scarcely made a column of newspaper space, but it wrote headlines in their lives. ~ Erich Segal,

15:I am here to win at life, love, and career. I dwell in the plus column, where I belong. ~ Anonymous,

16:Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became. ~ Louis Kahn,

17:I write a syndicated column for The Washington Post that goes to about 200, 250 papers. ~ Nat Hentoff,

18:Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! ~ Ray Bradbury,

19:My novel is about the history of the world, told from the point of view of a column of stone. ~ Kit Reed,

20:On reason build resolve,  that column of true majesty in man. ~ Edward Young, Night-Thoughts (1742–1745),

21:Wiley wrote a daily column for the Sun and probably was the best-known journalist in Miami. ~ Carl Hiaasen,

22:A broken fortune is like a falling column; the lower it sinks, the greater weight it has to sustain. ~ Ovid,

23:Where London's column, pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies. ~ Alexander Pope,

24:Go for the gold: better one great column and some undistinguished ones than constant mediocrity. ~ Allan Sloan,

25:The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,

26:I would encourage people to go to NYTIMES.com and read this column and you can see for yourself. ~ Tucker Carlson,

27:Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine. ~ Walter Cronkite,

28:What a fantastic honour to be given the opportunity to write a column in the first ever 'Sunday Sun.' ~ John Sentamu,

29:There's the obituary to look for the next week, six column inches about nothing that really mattered ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

30:But he was like that column of water he had told me of once, cold and straight, sufficient to himself. ~ Madeline Miller,

31:Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house. ~ Dick Cavett,

32:Colm Feore. Newspaper column, Norwegian water. Column of steel, column of virtue, just for God's sake, Colm. ~ Colm Feore,

33:His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. ~ Carson McCullers,

34:When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column. ~ George Bernard Shaw,

35:...age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could. ~ Meg Wolitzer,

36:I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column. ~ Don Marquis,

37:It wasn’t that I truly felt bad that I’d upset my mother—it was more that I hated any debits in her column. ~ Gillian Flynn,

38:Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column. ~ Dave Barry,

39:One grip shy of a steering column? Grimm suggested. Ten degrees short of a compass? Aviating without goggles? ~ Jim Butcher,

40:I still do a weekly opinion column for the Miami Herald, and it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Rotten fish. ~ Carl Hiaasen,

41:I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen. ~ Maureen Dowd,

42:I sometimes mistake my typewriter for my teeth, because the more I bite the more my column will be read. ~ Sheilah Graham Westbrook,

43:I try not to have personal goals. Personal numbers is a mind-set. The only numbers I care about are in the win column. ~ Troy Glaus,

44:Goo-goo goo-goo goo-goo goo Goo-goo goo-goo goo-goo Googly, googly, googly goo: That’s how we fill a column. ~ G K Chesterton,

45:Don't move to Seattle and write a stupid sex advice column. That's a waste of time and you need to grow up and get serious. ~ Dan Savage,

46:The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down. ~ Philip K Dick,

47:When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit. ~ Maureen Dowd,

48:I am not who I was,' he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, 'but I know who I am.'... 'And I won't give up. ~ Christopher Paolini,

49:Each dollar in my asset column was a great employee, working hard to make more employees and buy the boss a new Porsche. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

50:I am not who I was,' he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, 'but I know who I am.'... 'And I won't give up. ~ Christopher Paolini,

51:I’m a Horseman of the Apocalypse,” she snarled. “That’s not something you put into the rainbows-and-sunshine column of life! ~ Jackie Kessler,

52:Leigh [Bowery] obviously loved having me in the club because I would attract media, and he loved and lived for his column inches. ~ Boy George,

53:This meant his plus column was growing. So far there were only four things on it but yesterday there were none so I had hope. ~ Kristen Ashley,

54:He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn. ~ Robertson Davies,

55:I have no interest in non-fiction. I don't read it and don't watch it and don't write it, other than a little journalistic column. ~ W P Kinsella,

56:Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better. ~ D H Lawrence,

57:Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved. ~ David Plotz,

58:So you [Nicholas Kristof] have got this new column out, 12 steps for people who say are traumatized by the [ Donald Trump] election. ~ Tucker Carlson,

59:Im pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column. ~ Robert Mankoff,

60:Kundalini energy passes through the shushumna, which is a Sanskrit name for an astral nerve channel that runs along the spinal column. ~ Frederick Lenz,

61:He considered shooting a column of fire at the nearest tour bus and blowing up the gas tank, but he decided that might be a tad dramatic. ~ Rick Riordan,

62:That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead. ~ Stephen King,

63:I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it! ~ Ken Thompson,

64:...what time actually is--nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating. ~ Thomas Mann,

65:I sometimes read in a gossip column that I was at a party when I was in Europe at the time. It sometimes feels I've got a Doppelganger somewhere. ~ Candace Bushnell,

66:Miraculously, by the 10 P.M. deadline the paper had filled every line down every column, no matter the last-minute heart palpitations and blaspheming. ~ Tom Rachman,

67:My type of humor is almost pure identification. A housewife reads my column and says, 'But that's happened to ME! I know just what she's talking about! ~ Erma Bombeck,

68:His fingers caressed the column of my tense throat. I shivered in fear. I hated not being able to see what was happening, it forced me to feel everything. ~ C J Roberts,

69:Whoever becomes the head of the National Theater finds himself in a position like that of Nelson's Column - pigeons dump on you because you're there. ~ Peter Gavin Hall,

70:The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis. ~ Phillip Lopate,

71:It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written. ~ Ferdinand Mount,

72:Ever building, building to the clouds, still building higher, and never reflecting that the poor narrow basis cannot sustain the giddy tottering column. ~ Friedrich Schiller,

73:Well, I refer to Celebrity Jeopardy as the short-bus Jeopardy, because it is a lot easier. Like, there was a whole column basically naming stores in New York. ~ Andy Richter,

74:I am deeply devoted to the 27,000 songs I can take anywhere on my iPod Classic as well as the exquisitely engineered MacBook Air on which I typed this column. ~ Eric Alterman,

75:At last I have drawn a firm line under the truly astounding great column of figures and am done with pursuing that for which I am not sufficiently intelligent. ~ Robert Walser,

76:Make an extensive table of project 'deliverables'. Label one column 'as requested'. Create another column labeled 'could be'. Make each 'could be' wild and woolly! ~ Tom Peters,

77:For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again. ~ Bobby Fischer,

78:How unusually beautiful the forest was in the morning without anyone walking through it but him, column after column of spruce, a vast hall with a blue-green vault. ~ Hermann Hesse,

79:What was the one thing you wish you had known? Please post it as a comment on the column (and check the comment thread in a few days to see if I’m trying to reach you). ~ Anonymous,

80:CG: I AM BEING PLEASANT AND AGREEABLE, AND I WILL GENTLY LOWER A MAGNIFICENT, CORUSCATING COLUMN OF HOT FUCK YOU DOWN THE PROTEIN CHUTE OF ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE. ~ Andrew Hussie,

81:So I went down to their office and I said, “Well, I'll write a column for you.” So the first year I didn't get paid anything, but I wrote a little column every month ~ Robert Greene,

82:rather than highlighting certain data points as questionable, you should include an additional column that indicates which measurements are questionable and which are not. ~ Anonymous,

83:The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the astrology column seem factual by comparison. ~ John Allen Paulos,

84:In one column is the list of ideas. In the other column is the list of “First Steps”—only the first step, because you have no idea where that first step will take you. ~ James Altucher,

85:I lost my spinal column a good many years ago. There ain't no surgery can put it back. Even if there was, I wouldn't want it. I like it better this way. More comfortable. ~ David Goodis,

86:A good column 3 entry also shows how column 2 behaviors productively accomplish some form of self-protection (while simultaneously working against the initial commitment). ~ Robert Kegan,

87:Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,

88:There are three kinds of forms in the human figure: Ovoid forms - egg, ball and barrel masses; Column forms - cylinder, cone; Spatulate forms - box, slab and wedge blocks. ~ Burne Hogarth,

89:A wife is her husband’s richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,”’ he quoted, ~ Donna Leon,

90:Aureliano Segundo saw himself in the mirrors on the ceiling, saw Petra Cotes's spinal column like a row of spools strung together along a cluster of withered nerves. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,

91:I don't notice any sympathy for them in [ Nicholas Kristof] column. If you're writing a column saying the people for Trump are Nazis and Klansman and North Korean dictators. ~ Tucker Carlson,

92:Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column. ~ Spiro T Agnew,

93:The sand stretched out gray and ghostlike and illuminated, a column of light leading forward. It was like something a dead person would see, a tunnel leading toward heaven. ~ Lucy Christopher,

94:Oh, Leo thought, we’re showing off now? He considered shooting a column of fire at the nearest tour bus and blowing up the gas tank, but he decided that might be a tad dramatic. ~ Rick Riordan,

95:When I lose my column again, I'm sure I'll get hungry again. Maybe it's having a kid, but it's probably just getting to do what I always wanted to do - I'm really not that hungry. ~ Joel Stein,

96:I've just been writing a column about the way in which Fallujah and New Orleans are looking to be twin towns in effect. They're both been worked over by the Bush Administration. ~ Martin Walker,

97:Out there do'in it in the mountains... I might not be a notable author for my quote, but the column I write is just that... surviving all Mother Nature can throw at you. ~ Abrams Elliott,

98:If you're doing a column, you kind of have to. Like in the back of Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly has to find something to be mad about. It's not really the way I approach things. ~ P J O Rourke,

99:Narasimha Varmar, who single-handedly crushed Pulikesi, a man who ruled an Empire from Narmadha in the north to Thungabhadhra in the south—and even erected a column of victory in Vathapi? ~ Kalki,

100:I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column. ~ David Plotz,

101:I think genocide happens every day in some part of the world and it is easier for us to pretend that it is not happening, easier to turn off the TV or skip that column in the newspaper. ~ Liz Nugent,

102:They passed it late in the afternoon, their single sail stretched to bursting, clinker-built hull heeling well over, bow slicing up a column of spray that salted mouths, eyes and bodies. ~ Garth Nix,

103:One column of truth cannot hold an institution of ideas from falling into ignorance. It is wiser that a person of prudence and purpose save his strength for battles that can be won. ~ Bryant H McGill,

104:Can the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness, as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? ~ Victor Hugo,

105:We live in a time where everybody has an opinion and everyone's opinion can be featured somewhere, whether it's an online column and everybody has their form because of the internet. ~ Charlie Benante,

106:Oldendorf’s fleet would hold its position astride the northern end of the strait and devour Nishimura’s column like a log thrust into the business end of a U.S. Navy wood chipper. ~ James D Hornfischer,

107:I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles. ~ Nat Hentoff,

108:Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world. ~ James Fenton (b. 1949), English poet, journalist and literary critic. From his column in The Times (UK) newspaper, 21st February 1985,

109:They went to the column, where they stole a few more quiet minutes together, listening to the river wear its way deeper into the earth, the way people wear grooves into each other's hearts. ~ Jeff Zentner,

110:When I'm arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I'm going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. "This is *really* who I am," I'll tell him. ~ Nick Hornby,

111:I don't go for the so-called "intimate" stuff. Column items that report: "Minerva Ferncroft sleeps in pink dusting powder between puce-colored sheets in a heart-shaped bed." It leaves me cold. ~ Paul Newman,

112:I came in the league as not a shooter, not a scorer. My game was to play defense and make my teammates better. The most important stat to me was that left column - winning. Nothing else matters. ~ Jason Kidd,

113:According to the Yogis, there are three principal nerve currents: one they call the Ida, the other the Pingala, and the middle one the Sushumna, and all these are inside the spinal column. ~ Swami Vivekananda,

114:But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. The whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down. ~ Philip K Dick,

115:Let the radiance of my enthusiasms envelop the poor courtyard and the bare classroom. Let my heart be a stronger column and my goodwill purer gold than the columns and gold of rich schools. ~ Gabriela Mistral,

116:I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read. ~ Carrie Fisher,

117:Something about our names all in a column on the family computer struck me. It was a good hit. So good, I wondered why anyone on earth would need drugs. You could get high just having a family. ~ Kristen Ashley,

118:He thought the column was magnificent, everything it said about old age was the best he had ever read, and it made no sense to end it with a decision that seemed more like a civil death. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,

119:Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . . ~ Graham Greene,

120:When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion. ~ Carl Hiaasen,

121:It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it. ~ Robert Scheer,

122:But even writing the column for the 'Telegraph,' that idea of working to deadlines, which as an actor that's not something you have to do in the same way. It's excited me into wanting to do a bit more. ~ Dan Stevens,

123:But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr,

124:And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there. ~ Robert Scheer,

125:Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary). ~ T R Reid,

126:In my column series 'The Main Thing,' I often talk about how Internet technology can improve the way people communicate - both within a business and between a business and its customers and partners. ~ James L Barksdale,

127:The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing. ~ Robert Pinsky,

128:I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions ~ Tina Brown,

129:For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy. ~ Charles Kuralt,

130:It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't. ~ P G Wodehouse,

131:My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. ~ Pat Conroy,

132:When I write my annual tax column, some ex-IRS agent will complain, "There you go IRS bashing again." They're always saying that they're just doing their job. Someone I know once said, "You could get another job." ~ Dave Barry,

133:We do have, I'm sad to say, a fifth column that is living within our own countries that is utterly opposed to our values, we're going to have to be a lot braver... in standing up for our Judaeo-Christian culture. ~ Nigel Farage,

134:My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,

135:Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step, so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt. ~ Kenneth Roberts,

136:The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column. ~ Andrew Sullivan,

137:You read the Miss Bea Haven column?” She sounded pleasantly surprised, almost flattered. “Of course not. A column where the sexiest woman on earth pleasures herself with sex toys and then writes about it? Gross. ~ Tiffany Reisz,

138:In a belated moment of inspiration, I decided to finish it with the announcement that with this column I was bringing to a happy conclusion a long and worthy life without the sad necessity of having to die. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,

139:Do you think I could write an advice column?” Ash strove to find a diplomatic way to say No, definitely not. “Well, perhaps of the more bracing sort. Some people do like being flogged. Specialized interest, you know. ~ Cat Sebastian,

140:I once recommended [in a San Francisco Chronicle column] that a third arm - a plastic arm - be sewn at the base of the spine so that people could have a tripod to sit on while waiting in line, and it was taken seriously. ~ Alan Abel,

141:It was a late afternoon in the month of October—the "Column of the Year" as the robots called it, the month's thick almost substantive yellow light holding the rest of the year aloft above darkness lapping at its feet. ~ Kathryn Davis,

142:The presence of a column named id in every table is so common that this has become synonymous with a primary key. Programmers learning SQL get the false idea that a primary key always means a column defined in this manner. ~ Anonymous,

143:If all your money is tied up in your house, you may be forced to work harder because your money continues blowing out of the expense column, instead of adding to the asset column, the classic middle class cash flow pattern. ~ Anonymous,

144:When the sunlight hit the trees, all the beauty and wonder come together. Soul unfolds its petals. Flowering and fruiting of plants starts. The birds song light up the spinal column and harmonize the hippocampal functioning. ~ Amit Ray,

145:Don't assume you're always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that 'the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted. ~ Heloise,

146:If you're trying to get a bit of attention, you can smash up your hotel room or spend all your time going to openings or doing the gossip column thing. I just decided to do gigs in French, German, Spanish, and in America. ~ Eddie Izzard,

147:Oh, and I spend a lot of time on The Walking Dead reddit. Too much time. Last night I stayed up until two a.m. arguing with some neckbeard about whether or not you could kill a zombie with another zombie’s spinal column. ~ Sierra Simone,

148:When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it. ~ Joel Stein,

149:But we must not forget the effort undertaken by the ruling elite in Russia to manipulate Western politicians, businessmen as well as journalists. That's why [Vladimir] Putin's "fifth column" is that powerful in the West. ~ Garry Kasparov,

150:By the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, "I'm done. I'm never going to be a missionary," because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood. ~ Patti Smith,

151:But I think maybe it’s more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake – the point where you would have had a different outcome. ~ Donna Tartt,

152:For now Valkyrie remembered where she had seen that name before. In the Book of Names, in that final column. Next to Stephanie Edgley, next to Valkyrie Cain. Her true name. The only name that ever really mattered. Darquesse. ~ Derek Landy,

153:The transformation of disease, as exemplified by the case of diabetes, is a valuable and elegant concept that serves to remind us that the tally sheet for medical science must carry a column for debit as well as credit. ~ Deborah Butterfield,

154:Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip [of Jules Feiffer]. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that. ~ Nat Hentoff,

155:I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel. ~ Ian Bogost,

156:My column’s not political, it’s human-interest stuff. But if you had to put a political label on yourself, what would it say?” “Disgusted.” He laughed, making notes. “Might be the biggest political party of all. Where are you from? ~ Dean Koontz,

157:I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward. ~ Carl Andre,

158:The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things. ~ Terry Pratchett,

159:For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart. ~ Pericles,

160:If a man exists who is immune to force, even if he's the most blameless anchorite living on top of a column in the middle of the desert, he is beyond government, beyond authority, and cannot be controlled; and that would be intolerable. ~ K J Parker,

161:The world is divided into two classes of people: the few people who make good on their promises (even if they don't promise as much), and the many who don't. Get in Column A and stay there. You'll be very valuable wherever you are. ~ Robert Townsend,

162:Equal and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward which mankind is moving. If we cannot be at the head of the column leading to such a civilization, there is certainly no need for us to be at is tail. ~ Slobodan Milosevic,

163:How do we help people (whether individuals or groups) to make their third column commitments visible? We begin by surfacing the biggest fears that arise in considering doing the opposite of any or all of the second-column behaviors. In ~ Robert Kegan,

164:Only a few hours later, watching another such column go by, he stared right into the face of Monsieur Arlanc—who stared right back at him. He had no hair, his cheeks were grizzly and sucked-in from hunger, but Monsieur Arlanc it was. ~ Neal Stephenson,

165:I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.' ~ Candace Bushnell,

166:Jake Green isn't just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film's world of cons and games. ~ Guy Ritchie,

167:I'm so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It's an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever. ~ David Plotz,

168:Often, the truly great and valuable lessons we learn in life are learned through pain. That's why they call it "growing pains." It's all about yin and yang. And that's not something you order off column A at your local Chinese restaurant. ~ Fran Drescher,

169:Reality offered unvarnished truths, especially now, the two of them separated by an insurmountable yet perfectly ordinary arrangement of rock, and yet bound together still by a column of air and, for a short while longer, refracted sunlight. ~ Sonja Yoerg,

170:Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn’t you know it? Now I’ve got a topic for next month’s column. . . ~ Lawrence Block,

171:I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column. ~ Daniel Alarcon,

172:The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

173:I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts. ~ Stephen Fry,

174:That's new.” His gaze was hot and fierce. “My cock? I'm fairly certain it's always been there.” His grin flashed briefly. “No Lio, you've been cut. Circumcised.” “Oh.” I stared at the smooth column of my shaft. “That must have hurt. ~ Belinda McBride,

175:If a female fainted easily, could not abide spiders, feared thunderstorms, ghosts, and highwaymen, ate only tiny portions, collapsed after a brief walk, and wept when she had to add a column of numbers, she was considered the feminine ideal. ~ Charlotte Gordon,

176:Some lasting terms of military organization owe their origin to Spain: colonel comes from cabo de colunela, or head of a column; infantry most likely comes from infante, the name for a Spanish prince, who often led these formations of foot soldiers. ~ Max Boot,

177:You're not worried about principles."Gabriel leaned closer, crowding her gently back against the column. His taunting whisper curled in her right ear like a wisp of smoke. "You're worried that you might do something naughty with me and enjoy it. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

178:I could write an epic poem about your thighs.” “That would amuse polite society rather too much, and I wouldn’t like that.” “I wouldn’t either.” She pressed her cheek to his belly. “I can’t think of a word to rhyme with marble column. ~ Christina Dodd,

179:You can remember which one is which by thinking that stalactites cling tight to the ceiling, while stalagmites might rise up from the floor. Over time, the stalagmites and stalactites will meet and form a column, just like they did with old Cupid here. ~ Lori Wilde,

180:I have a computational quality to my mind, I suppose. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games. I reprogrammed games, and this eventually landed me a column in a magazine. That's how I got into print journalism: writing about video games. ~ David Mccandless,

181:When a heart breaks a substance spills out like cement and pours through the bloodstream, hardening everything. In time, I know my heart will mend and the rock inside will crack and crumble away. But for now I’m as solid as a column. And alone I stand. ~ Sarah Noffke,

182:Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local Rhinoceros Times and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons on the patio. ~ L Ron Hubbard,

183:Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that. ~ John Vianney,

184:The obituary column in the Times of India, Bombay, regretted the demise of ‘D’Ocracy, DEM beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, Justice [who] expired on 26th June’. The obituary became a popular Emergency joke. ~ Coomi Kapoor,

185:In 1938... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit. ~ Laura Hillenbrand,

186:It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade. ~ Russell Baker,

187:Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;Though yet no marble column cravesThe pilgrim here to pause.Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!There is no holier spot of groundThan where defeated valor lies,By mourning beauty crowned! ~ Henry Timrod,

188:The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee, And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were Vacancy? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,

189:When I started writing a business column 15 years ago, I knew I'd found the perfect job for myself. As a columnist I could pick my own topic, do my own analysis, say what I wanted to say and attribute it to myself. Best of all, I could write in my own voice. ~ Allan Sloan,

190:Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. ~ T S Eliot,

191:This is terrific,” Arthur thought to himself, “Nelson’s Column has gone, McDonald’s has gone, all that’s left is me and the words Mostly harmless. Any second now all that will be left is Mostly harmless. And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well.” A ~ Douglas Adams,

192:according to N.L.R.B. rules, which forbid mandatory meetings the day before unionization votes. Then, the players will have their say. Why Chocolate Is Good for Us By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS This column appears in the April 27, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine. ~ Anonymous,

193:Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa around, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in ~ William Cowper,

194:Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,

195:I am not a vine, to twist my life and twine about a strong column like yourself. Rather we have been as two strong trees that grew side by side, but must eventually lean apart from one another. You would not have me in your shade, would you, stunted and misshapen? ~ Megan Lindholm,

196:This hype word bothers me though It always sounds like an accusation, what does it mean, advertising, column inches in the press? Bands themselves are never really responsible for all of that. That is something that happens to you when you sell millions of records. ~ Holly Johnson,

197:I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired. ~ Nat Hentoff,

198:Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense. ~ Dan Savage,

199:Donald Trump announced his no Muslims are allowed to come to the United States plan and that led to one of the greatest tweets of all time from New York Times columnist. Quote, "OK, I concede I picked the wrong day to modestly walk back my Trumpism as fascism column." ~ Rachel Maddow,

200:That night's dream: a narrow column of dark liquid in a tall glass; a blue-black waterspout plunging from the sky; a swirl of black-fruit icing piped over a pastry hot from the oven; a long, feminine finger laid over lips; a torrent of whispers that that finger cannot hush. ~ J J Abrams,

201:It just amazing to me that Timeless is a bubble show, that it's just not solidly in the renew column. I think that would only happen today when we're in this golden era of television, where there's so much to watch, it's just hard to capture an audience in the first place. ~ Misha Collins,

202:I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year. ~ Salman Rushdie,

203:Men, you are in a battle. You are in a war. The stakes of this war and its casualties are higher than a checkmark in the win or loss column. Lives will be lost. Eternities will be shaped. Destinies will either be discovered or dismissed. Dreams will be attained or relinquished. ~ Tony Evans,

204:Be grateful. Find something to be grateful for. Don't do too many things that make you feel like you deserve to lose because we do program our own computers. I believe there is a plus and a minus column and if you end up on the minus column, your own conscience will make you lose. ~ Jim Carrey,

205:Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up? ~ Evangelista Torricelli,

206:So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream. ~ Terence McKenna,

207:I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928] ~ Dorothy Parker,

208:This was another subject of criticism. She was being paid, as I recall, during the 1940's, what was then a princely sum, something like a dollar a word. I don't say that for the column, but for articles that she would write and things like that. And she made lots of speeches. ~ William A Rusher,

209:We all sought affirmation. That’s why, as a species, we were such hypercritical assholes. We wanted proof we’d picked the right career or married the right person, even if said proof was of the at least we’re not them variety. We wanted our lives to tally in the positives column. ~ Deborah Wilde,

210:The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. ~ Heinrich Heine,

211:I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928] ~ Dorothy Parker,

212:That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. ~ Nat Hentoff,

213:The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. ~ Heinrich Heine,

214:I used to give her [my wife] to read the column every week before I sent it to the editors. And sometimes she was so mad - are you crazy? You're not going to send that, or, you're not going to write that about me. So I would go, OK. You have five hours. Go ahead, write the column yourself. ~ Sayed Kashua,

215:Whatever column you fall in - Christian, gay, straight, Black, White - there is no world where people exist that are exactly like you. No one group of people can righteously rule the world. There will be people who differ in opinion, and even in that difference of opinion, we must respect each other. ~ T I,

216:In terms of column writing, with the exception of one or two others, I am probably paid as well as you can be as a journalist. I attribute some of this success to my ability to haggle. The main thing in this game is to ask for money and when they tell you the amount you say, "no, I want more". ~ Giles Coren,

217:Have you finished your column for tomorrow's headline?" It was Vee. She came up beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere. "I'm thinking of writing mine on the injustice of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,

218:She held herself straight, moving slowly, making her way towards the head of the column. And of all the journeys she had undertaken, since the very beginning, this one – from the back of the column to its head – was the longest one she had ever travelled. And, as ever, she travelled it alone. ~ Steven Erikson,

219:But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler “was the first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He ~ William L Shirer,

220:On the road, they join the bedraggled remnants of a column of exhausted Confederate soldiers evacuating burning Atlanta. Rhett makes her take note of the scene: "Take a good look, my dear. It's a historic moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the Old South disappear one night." ~ Vivien Leigh,

221:His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors' house. If I'd really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness, ~ Leah Stewart,

222:Oh, and I spend a lot of time on The Walking Dead reddit. Too much time. Last night I stayed up until two a.m. arguing with some neckbeard about whether or not you could kill a zombie with another zombie’s spinal column. Which you can’t, obviously, given the rate of bone decay among the walkers. ~ Sierra Simone,

223:The different steps and degrees of education may be compared to the artificer's operations upon marble; it is one thing to dig it out of the quarry, and another to square it, to give it gloss and lustre, call forth every beautiful spot and vein, shape it into a column, or animate it into a statue. ~ Thomas Gray,

224:If a young couple would put more money into their asset column early on, their later years would be easier. Their assets would have grown and would be available to help cover expenses. All too often, a house only serves as a vehicle for incurring a home-equity loan to pay for mounting expenses. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

225:We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff — the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them. ~ John Keegan,

226:A bee zipped overhead. Dozens more followed. They swarmed around a column, then hovered over the opening of the pit. ‘Say hi to Frank, everybody,’ Annabeth said. Piper waved. The cloud of bees zipped away. ‘How does that even work?’ Percy said. ‘Like … one bee is a finger? Two bees are his eyes? ~ Rick Riordan,

227:This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation “theory” is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs “chimeras” rather than theories. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

228:You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B? ~ Will Ferguson,

229:I continue coupling a plate of silver with one of zinc, and always in the same order... and place between each of these couples a moistened disk. I continue to form a column. If the column contains about twenty of these couples of metal, it will be capable of giving to the fingers several small shocks. ~ Alessandro Volta,

230:Interested in the origin of mammals? Go to rocks from the period called the Early Mesozoic; geochemistry tells us that these rocks are likely about 210 million years old. Interested in the origin of primates? Go higher in the rock column, to the Cretaceous period, where rocks are about 80 million years old. ~ Neil Shubin,

231:One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

232:How long had it had been since she'd thought back on the evenings around the fire, number games at the kitchen table, or listening to her father sing? Too long. Yes, there had been bad times. And she had tallied them like figures in a column, not remembering to factor in the good. She had doctored the books. ~ Julie Klassen,

233:When I did get married, and specifically after I got married and the New York Times style section featured my wedding in the vows column, which is really traditionally kind of seen as an elitist column, and it is, but I was happy to be in it. I thought it was good that they were covering a feminist wedding. ~ Jessica Valenti,

234:I once had someone swerve her tank out of our column and straight into a house. With a very large basement. Because she was too sleep-deprived to think. It's funny now, but it wasn't funny then. – Oh, who am I kidding, it was HILARIOUS, even if it was kind of a disaster. I laughed so hard my aide almost shot me. ~ Yoon Ha Lee,

235:The column hung above the middle of the pentacle, bubbling ever upward against the ceiling like the cloud of an erupting volcanoe. There was a barely perceptible pause. Then two yellow staring eyes materialized in the heart of the smoke. Hey, it was his first time. I wanted to scare him. And it did, too. ~ Jonathan Stroud,

236:Although the TV and radio work were nice supplements, the newspaper had been my lifeline, my oxygen; when I saw my stories in print each morning, I knew that, in at least one way, I was alive. I had grown used to thinking readers somehow needed my column. I was stunned at how easily things went on without me. ~ Mitch Albom,

237:Probably also due to the political situation getting just worse and more extreme, but also this distance and this sadness of this feeling that I gave up - that I surrendered, that I felt that I lost my small war. So the whole column is different than the columns that I used to write back home, back in Jerusalem. ~ Sayed Kashua,

238:You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column. This how-to stuff isn't in any history book. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

239:harbor warehouses interspersed by thirty minutes, organized in three separate fighting columns, likely for their own protection, because moving in one long column would have made them more vulnerable to air reconnaissance and air attack. Unit by unit, in tactically ordered clumps, they seemed mainly centered around ~ Mark Greaney,

240:Really, Rachel. It’s old news. And Alex won’t be interested. She’s not even a proper journalist. She does the animal column, obsessed with dogs. I remember her seeing the story. She said she had no time for the man. He’d raised some ludicrous idea about people not being allowed to have more than one dog or something. ~ Mary Grand,

241:But tonight wasn't all bad." There was something sly in her voice. "Really? I mean, nobody spontaneously combusted so I guess that goes in the win column, but it wasn't one for the record books." "Kissing you raises the evening's score by quite a bit." "But I haven't…" "Cormac, shut up and kiss me." "Yes, ma'am. ~ Jeanette Battista,

242:...here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on. ~ Anthony Doerr,

243:Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible—so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore—drew nearly a full column in the New York Times. ~ Erik Larson,

244:Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't. ~ Cheryl Strayed,

245:He fell away into the column before Isolfr could blink the thought of thanking him into his bleary mind, and Isolfr looked up at Frithulf in supplication. “What was that about?” “Stay pretty,” Frithulf advised, through a mouthful of meat. Isolfr would have kicked him if he hadn’t been out of reach on the horse. ~ Sarah Monette,

246:She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash. ~ Harper Lee,

247:The optimists claim that through the course of evolution the nervous system has become adept at “chunking” bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expanded. Simple functions like adding a column of numbers or driving a car grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

248:David Brooks’s “moral bucket list” column is meant to explore how “deeply good people got that way.” But little in the column helps to explain this. One way to understand why people become more moral is to explore “moral opportunity.” What types of societal structures and personality variables help to create a very moral person? ~ Anonymous,

249:Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old. ~ Zadie Smith,

250:When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?" ~ Roger Ebert,

251:Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything. ~ Orson Scott Card,

252:It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression. ~ Christopher Hitchens,

253:I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this. ~ Dan Savage,

254:More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke. ~ Matt Chandler,

255:When I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, "and I don't want to read that in your magazine!" In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject. ~ Simon Hoggart,

256:The greatest gift a couple can give their baby is a loving relationship, because that relationship nourishes Baby’s development. The stronger the connection between parents, the healthier the child can grow, both emotionally and intellectually. Children can’t thrive in stormy seas. No family wants to end up in the disaster column. ~ John M Gottman,

257:It's nice to know that if you've worked really hard at something, it gets recognised with a tick in the success column - however you define that, be it making a bunch of dough, which the actors never see much of, or whether it's a piece that's enlightening or stays with the audience maybe six, seven or even eight or 10 years later. ~ Brendan Fraser,

258:Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are beautiful things in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them." He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled up to the ceiling. ~ James Gleick,

259:Confederates in Jackson’s column reported seeing a Yankee balloon—it was the Eagle—and assumed that if they could see it, it could see them. Yet such were conditions aloft that not a single report reached General Hooker that day from the aeronautical corps that an enemy column was marching to the south and west of Chancellorsville. ~ Stephen W Sears,

260:When the column of light on the waters is glassed, As blent in one glow seem the shine and the stream; But wave after wave through the glory has passed, Just catches, and flies as it catches, the beam So honors but mirror on mortals their light; Not the man but the place that he passes is bright. ~ Friedrich Schiller, Honors ,

261:look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

262:If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back). ~ Joseph E LeDoux,

263:The exact science of human regeneration is the Lost Key of Masonry, for when the Spirit Fire is lifted up through the thirty-three degrees, or segments of the spinal column, and enters into the domed chamber of the human skull, it finally passes into the pituitary body (Isis), where it invokes Ra (the pineal gland) and demands the Sacred Name. ~ David Wilcock,

264:Now, seen from a palm plantation high on a green hillside, Krakatoa looks peaceful and serene, with just a thin column of white or gray or on occasion black smoke easing up from its summit. But looks are deceptive: All the while the child-mountain is growing steadily and rapidly, as the elemental fires that created the world rage deep inside. ~ Simon Winchester,

265:You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! ~ Dave Barry,

266:What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name. ~ Anthony Doerr,

267:Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers. ~ Fareed Zakaria,

268:You remember Vietnam veterans being spat upon, incidents that were called an “urban myth” by liberals, until Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene asked in his newspaper column if any Vietnam veterans were personally spat upon when they returned to the United States. He received more than a thousand replies, sixty of which are included in his book Homecoming.51 ~ Ann Coulter,

269:Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist. ~ Louis Kahn,

270:What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance ... He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg,

271:She sniffed again. "If I become a vampire, will I stop crying every time I get pissed off? Because that would be definite mark in the plus column." Carwyn chuckled. "I've no idea, but your tears would be kind of pink. Very...cute." "Great," she swiped at her cheeks that were dusted with salty frost. "So I'd look stupid and I'd stain my clothes. ~ Elizabeth Hunter,

272:To become financially secure, a person needs to mind their own business. Your business revolves around your asset column, not your income column. As stated earlier, the number-one rule is to know the difference between an asset and a liability, and to buy assets. The rich focus on their asset columns, while everyone else focuses on their income statements. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

273:In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed. Or maybe not. ~ James Lee Burke,

274:Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? ~ Victor Hugo,

275:Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

276:APOPHYGE  (APO'PHYGE)   n.s.[  flight, or escape.]Is, in architecture, that part of a column, where it begins to spring out of its base; and was originally no more than the ring or ferrel, which anciently bound the extremities of wooden pillars, to keep them from splitting, and were afterward imitated in stone work. We sometimes call it the spring of the column.Chambers. ~ Samuel Johnson,

277:He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what— Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen. “A rust bomb,” he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before. Karl ~ Gregory Benford,

278:most rudimentary conclusions. The left column was arranged in ascending order, but the other three weren’t. The left-middle column ranged from eighty-five to ninety-five and didn’t seem to have any discernible pattern. The right-middle column started at fifty and increased in value, with one exception — the third row. And the fourth column’s parenthetical numbers looked ~ Andrew Peterson,

279:How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost. ~ Richard Ford,

280:At meals Mama and Papa would observe each other from opposite ends of the long table, and Mama's grey eyes would fly angry silences at Papa, who would catch them in his enormous mustache. Their marriage was a tall column of pain, like a fluted vase. Balanced precariously on the fricative point at which Mama's personality met Papa's chin, it was always about to fall over and smash. ~ Sam Savage,

281:I remember a dinner party when he spent the whole time writing an article. At a requiem concert in the cathedral, he spent his whole time writing notes. At a wedding disco, Boris was going round interviewing people for his column while Marina was breast-feeding. He is completely driven. He has an ability to focus on one thing, no matter what human beings may be in the way.’ Boris ~ Sonia Purnell,

282:He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won’t let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he’s been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida’s. ~ Jojo Moyes,

283:Monday night I had to go out of town, up to Boston for a quick meeting early Tuesday morning. My flight was delayed, and I was sitting in the airport reading the paper. Before Soraya, I started with the business section first. These days, I turned to Ask Ida, before catching up on the market watch. Between soap operas and now reading an advice column daily, I was fast becoming a pussy. ~ Vi Keeland,

284:There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants. ~ Henry David Thoreau,

285:something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass ~ Mike McCormack,

286:In 1996, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire published a column, 'Blizzard of lies,' in which he laid out a series of falsehoods by Hillary Rodham Clinton and declared 'Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -€” a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -€” is a congenital liar.' ~ Marc Thiessen,

287:Well, let me see. He stole a bicycle and rode it, not using his hands at any point, through Trafalgar Square. He attempted to climb Nelson’s Column and fight with Nelson. Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpentine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, ‘Ducks, embrace me as your king!’”  ~ Cassandra Clare,

288:When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity. ~ Adrienne Rich,

289:Dov Seidman likes to remind me of the Talmudic saying “What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy. You also can’t have an effective column without some “take” on the biggest forces shaping the world in which we live and how to influence them. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

290:First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it’s fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It’s not? Whew. ~ Sarah Vowell,

291:...The CDC has also said that it’s virtually impossible to tell a murder victim killed by a shot to the head or spinal column from an infected individual put down legally in the same fashion. What is your answer to critics of the relaxed gun control laws who hold that gun-related violence has actually increased, but has been masked by the postmortem amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus? ~ Mira Grant,

292:In which building is the pope?” one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair. “The pope is not here, madame,” the guard said. “Where is he?” “In Italy, Europe, madame.” The woman frowned. “Which way is that?” Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, “Three blocks under the lagoon.” She said, “How do I get there? ~ Erik Larson,

293:And this is the truth. Because I may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. The Lulus and the Allysons. It never occurred to me that by pretending to be Lulu, I might slip into that other column, even for just a day. ~ Gayle Forman,

294:The rich does not work for money, but money work for them...., While the poor work for money.Illiteracy, both in word and numbers, is the foundation of financial struggle....,Wealth is a person's ability to survive so many number of days forward... or if i stopped working today, how could i survive?...,Wealth is the measure of cash flow from to asset column compared with the expense column. ~ Robert Kiyosaki,

295:Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. ~ Sara Maitland,

296:That isn’t always enough. I had written a piece for the Wall Street Journal’s weekly column called the Manager’s Journal. The editor liked the piece but kept pushing it back so he could publish other pieces that were timelier. So I began to rewrite the intros to my piece each week to relate to something that was in the news at the time. In short order, the article finally saw the light of day. ~ Keith Ferrazzi,

297:Why would an editor at The New York Times making, let’s see”—the middle-aged man behind the mahogany desk glanced at Brad’s letter and some notes he’d scribbled on it—”making seventy-three thousand dollars a year want to work for a newspaper where a cat stuck in a tree overnight once was page one news with a banner headline and a three-column photo? For barely a third of what he’s earning now? ~ Chet Williamson,

298:In 1993 he lightened his touch with a satire, Merrie England—2,000, which paints a droll Orwellian view of a Britain at the end of the twentieth century dominated by the race-relations police, reeducation for the bigoted elderly, tax relief for mixed marriages, ritual obeisance for the guilty white population and in place of Nelson’s Column a statue of Nelson Mandela in “Harmony Square. ~ Nicholas Goodrick Clarke,

299:The Life Cube Burn is cathartic, fun, exciting, and even reverent. It's a spectacular opportunity to put a sense of finality to the event. And when those thousands of written "wish-sticks" inserted into the Cube from all kinds of people combine with the art and shared messaging from the write boards in a blaze of flame and a column of smoke and ashes, it becomes a communal and very spiritual moment. ~ Scott Cohen,

300:The rich does not work for money, but money work for them...., While the poor work for money.Illiteracy, both in word and numbers, is the foundation of financial struggle....,Wealth is a person's ability to survive so many number of days forward... or if i stopped working today, how could i survive?...,Wealth is the measure of cash flow from to asset column compared with the expense column..., ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

301:Krugman has been a columnist for the Times for a long enough time, covering a sufficient variety of political events, for us to deduce that he is a political nitwit. Other Nobel laureates have been nitwits, for instance, Bertrand Russell. There are a lot of political nitwits in this world. Perhaps the Times could give Krugman a cooking column. He would be its Nobel Prise-winning cooking columnist. ~ Bob Tyrrell,

302:The more we follow the turns of her journey, the more we realize that she is not quite the champion we would normally sing; she is not the heroine who wields the great sword; she is not the bearer of wisdom and light; she does not head the growing column, leading a new march. She is one of the ranks, this perfectly ordinary, exquisitely tiny person in whom we will reside, via both living and dreaming. ~ Chang rae Lee,

303:We live in a time where everybody has an opinion and everyone's opinion can be featured somewhere, whether it's an online column and everybody has their form because of the internet. I just find it really shitty that someone who never really produced anything, musically speaking, can just say, "I don't really like it." It just sucks because you put so much work into a record and someone disapproves. ~ Charlie Benante,

304:I was very pleased to get a Supreme Court justice suggesting a column, so I went and did a column about Beano. I went with my wife and another guy to a Mexican restaurant, which we thought would be the ultimate test for an antiflatulance product. There's a reason most of Mexico is located out of doors. And it worked. Several newspapers refused to run that column. But they did run advertisements for Beano. ~ Dave Barry,

305:Of course, like all the informal inhabitants of the University the roaches were a little unusual, but there was something particularly unpleasant about the sound of billions of very small feet hitting the stones in perfect time. Rincewind stepped gingerly over the marching column. The Librarian jumped it. The Luggage, of course, followed them with a noise like someone tapdancing over a bag of crisps. ~ Terry Pratchett,

306:It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic—a fascinating spectacle of dread. ~ Jack London,

307:After September 11, I wondered rhetorically midway through a column what we in the West are prepared to die for, and got a convoluted e-mail back from a French professor explaining that the fact that Europeans weren't prepared to die for anything was the best evidence of their superiority: they were building a post-historical utopia - a Europe it would not be necessary to die for. But sometimes you die anyway. ~ Mark Steyn,

308:After all, this is the same homicide unit in which the diagnosis of Gene Constantine’s diabetes was greeted by a coffee room chalkboard divided by two headings: “Those who give a shit if Constantine dies” and “Those who don’t.” Sergeant Childs, Lieutenant Stanton, Mother Teresa and Barbara Constantine topped the latter list. The shorter column featured Gene himself, followed by the city employees’ credit union. ~ David Simon,

309:I jump to my feet in this dream within a dream. Although I am quite dry, I discover that the trees of the forest in which I have slept stand rooted in water. Beyond them, at the forest's edge, stretches a tarn. From the steely face of the tarn rises a mist, and there, where the mist swirls thickest, shimmering like a pale column risen from its depths, dripping tarn water and rotted rose petals, stands Gunther. ~ Dalton Trumbo,

310:Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office. ~ Gail Collins,

311:Divide the Kongor lord's house by six. A house that is by a room, with an arch door, and walls of clay and mortar. Now put another room on top of that one, then another, then another, and another, then one more and one more on top of that, with a roof that curves like when the moon cuts herself in half. That was this man's house, a house that looked like just one column was cut off and sent to the Dolingo savannah. ~ Marlon James,

312:Of course, like all the informal inhabitants of the University the roaches were a little unusual, but there was something particularly unpleasant about the sound of billions of very small feet hitting the stones in perfect time. Rincewind stepped gingerly over the marching column. The Librarian jumped it. The Luggage, of course, followed them with a noise like someone tapdancing over a bag of crisps. ~ Terry Pratchett,

313:That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. But ~ Thomas L Friedman,

314:The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the begining. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war. ~ Stanislaw Lem,

315:Between the key ages of fourteen and twenty-four, numerous Americans will form their views based on the popularity of the current president. A popular Republican or unpopular Democrat will influence many young adults to become Republicans. An unpopular Republican or popular Democrat puts this impressionable group in the Democratic column. And those views, in these key years, will, on average, last a lifetime. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz,

316:And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan’s and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10). 70. ~ Mary Beard,

317:I got a letter one day from somebody saying, `You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper [The Voice]?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, `You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper. ~ Nat Hentoff,

318:Wine has been to me a firm friend and a wise counsellor. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace. Wine has made me bold, but not foolish; has induced me to say silly things, but not do them. If such small indiscretions standing in the debit column of wine's account were added up, they would amount to nothing in comparison with the vast accumulation on the credit side. ~ Duff Cooper,

319:But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write “no wedges”? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges. ~ Chris Anderson,

320:I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture. ~ Danny Glover,

321:The opening line of her last column was: You know you really don’t fit in with the other housewives you meet when the only way you can contribute to a discussion about babies is by saying, “Yes, that’s what my mother used to do.” It went on to talk about how a woman could climb Everest, teach schoolchildren in Cambodia and win the Booker Prize but some people would still think she had good news only when she produced progeny. ~ Shweta Ganesh Kumar,

322:But here is a confession, which I also happily shared with him at our last meeting, which happened as I was completing this book: I had never thought this deeply about my own craft and what makes a column work until our chance encounter prompted me to do so. Had I not paused to engage him, I never would have taken apart, examined, and then reassembled my own framework for making sense of the world in a period of rapid change. Not ~ Thomas L Friedman,

323:Some years ago, in my syndicated column, I challenged anyone to name any economist, of any school of thought, who had actually advocated a “trickle down” theory. No one quoted any economist, politician or person in any other walk of life who had ever advocated such a theory, even though many readers named someone who claimed that someone else had advocated it, without being able to quote anything actually said by that someone else. 2 ~ Thomas Sowell,

324:This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself. ~ Steven Moffat,

325:Brethren, do something; do something, do something! While societies and unions make constitutions, let us win souls. I pray you, be men of action all of you. Get to work and quit yourselves like men. Old Suvarov's idea of war is mine: `Forward and strike! No theory! Attack! Form a column! Charge bayonets! Plunge into the center of the enemy! Our one aim is to win souls; and this we are not to talk about, but do in the power of God!' ~ Charles Spurgeon,

326:His face blazed, and his eyes began to glitter. “Fine!” he replied. “I despise myself, and I hate you. If you don’t kill me, I’ll cut your throat one night around some corner. There isn’t room on this earth for both of us.” I fired. When the smoke had cleared, Grushnitsky was not on the ledge. Only a light column of dust was still whirling on the edge of the precipice. Everyone shouted in unison. “Finita la comedia!”25 I told the doctor. ~ Mikhail Lermontov,

327:what’s a buckle-bunny?” She grinned. “It used to be a description of the girls who hung around rodeo cowboys looking to hook up. Now it means any Texas gold digger who’s looking for a sugar daddy.” “I’m not a gold digger.” “No, you advise them in your column. You tell them to support themselves and get their priorities straight.” “Everyone should listen to me,” I said, and Haven laughed, lifting her glass. -Ella & Haven ~ Lisa Kleypas,

328:he took a cable which had been service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare . . . so the women's heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long. ~ Homer,

329:I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like. ~ Dan Savage,

330:The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies and the little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it. ~ John Steinbeck,

331:After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m. ~ David Sedaris,

332:She slid open the box, extracted a match, and struck it with a flourish. The flame flared up in the gloom of the unlit room, a tiny golden beacon. For a moment, Oma Kristel held it aloft, then the unthinkable happened. The match slipped out of her fingers and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a whooomph! like the sounds of a gas furnace firing up, the hairspray with which Oma Kristel had doused herself ignited, obliterating her in a column of flames. ~ Helen Grant,

333:Skip, that’s one of about forty things on my list. It isn’t funny anymore. You’re fucking up on a regular basis. You miss deadlines, you libel people, you invent ludicrous facts and put them in the paper. I’ve got a lawyer downstairs who does nothing but fight off litigation against your column. We’ve had to print seven retractions in the last four months—that’s a new record, by the way. No other managing editor in the history of this newspaper can make that claim. ~ Carl Hiaasen,

334:There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills, blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting, because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it. ~ Hunter S Thompson,

335:I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were. ~ Bob Colacello,

336:I felt ugly, chubby, and stupid until I talked to my mom about it and she had me do a very good exercise that I recommend to every girl. She had me take a piece of paper and write down everything I liked and everything that I didn't like about my body and my life. By the end of the exercise, I realized that I had so many more things in my likes column. It showed me that while there are a few things in my dislikes column, I was giving ALL my attention to those few things! ~ Coco Rocha,

337:My next goal would be to have the excess cash flow from my assets reinvested into the asset column. The more money that goes into my asset column, the more my asset column grows. The more my assets grow, the more my cash flow grows. And as long as I keep my expenses less than the cash flow from these assets, I grow richer with more and more income from sources other than my physical labor. As this reinvestment process continues, I am well on my way to becoming rich. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

338:The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow. But she never forgets that Resistance is using criticism against her on a far more diabolical level. Resistance enlists criticism to reinforce the fifth column of fear already at work inside the artist's head, seeking to break her will and crack her dedication. The professional does not fall for this. Her resolution, before all others, remains: No matter what, I will never let Resistance beat me. ~ Steven Pressfield,

339:Without missing a beat, Andrews passes out a mimeographed worksheet. In one column are faces of boys and girls, each displaying one of the six basic emotions—happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, disgusted—and a description of the facial muscle activity underlying each, for example: AFRAID: • The mouth is open and drawn back. • The eyes are open and the inner corners go up. • The eyebrows are raised and drawn together. • There are wrinkles in the middle of the forehead.3 ~ Daniel Goleman,

340:REMEMBER! said the three-column ad in Indian newspapers, TODAY is A DINNERLESS DAY. Thus the government one day last week began its campaign to prepare Indians for what has become an annual food crisis. It was bad enough last year when India harvested 88 million tons of grain, far short of the nation’s need. This year the harvest is expected to fall below 75 million tons. What with some 12 million more mouths to feed, India faces its severest food crisis in two decades. ~ Tamal Bandyopadhyay,

341:People ask why I do monochromatic clothes; the reason is because I'm thinking in proportion to the world. In this room, your head is going to look so much more interesting if it's on a monochromatic column. Whereas I think people think of outfits and gets a little too fussy, a little too detailed. I'm always thinking of the line of a person standing with their head in a room and I always feel like a stalk, or a stem, or a pillar is nicer. I always think of everything architecturally. ~ Rick Owens,

342:it, Leo had no idea. Coach Hedge was too miserable to help. He kept pacing the deck with tears in his eyes, pulling at his goatee and slapping the side of his head, muttering, “I should have saved them! I should have blown up more stuff!” Finally Leo told him to go belowdecks and secure everything for departure. He wasn’t doing any good beating himself up. The six demigods gathered on the quarterdeck and gazed at the distant column of dust still rising from the site of the implosion. ~ Rick Riordan,

343:Typographical The Editor wrote his political screed In ink that was fainter and fainter; He rose to the call of his country's need, And in spiderish characters wrote with speed, A column on "Cutting the Painter". The "reader" sat in his high-backed chair, For literals he was a hunter; But he stared aghast at the column long Of the editorial hot and strong, For the comp. inspired by some sense of wrong Had headed it "Gutting the Punter". ~ Banjo Paterson,

344:If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them." [Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992] ~ Stephen King,

345:I guess what I'm looking for here is empathy. So you [Nicholas Kristof] have traveled all around the world, famously to the worse places of the world. Darfur. Mogadishu, Ouagadougou. Probably those places much more than Modesto or Lewiston.I never read a column by you that suggest the people in those places, who support dictators oftentimes, are racists or bad people. You would never write that about a poor person in the third world but you are implying that about your fellow Americans. ~ Tucker Carlson,

346:Every year I write a tax advice column and I used to always make fun of that. One year, one of my favorite IRS commissioners, I think his name was Roscoe somebody, wrote that one of the most often-asked questions by taxpayers was, "How can I contribute more?" Well, I tell ya, ol' Roscoe's really been doing situps under parked cars again. I've heard a lot of people ask a lot of questions about taxes, but I never heard anybody say, "How can I, the ordinary person, send more money for no reason?" ~ Dave Barry,

347:Not once did the column recognise that China has moved over 300m people out of poverty within 30 years, an achievement unprecedented in human history. Let’s get real and learn how we can relieve widespread human suffering from what has worked. If our economic models do not fit, we should get out of the game. The overwhelming concerns of the poor are finding work, food, health services and education for their children. Like it or not, the Chinese model has satisfied these. CORNELIUS CACHO Naples, Florida ~ Anonymous,

348:Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise. ~ M John Harrison,

349:column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When ~ Thomas L Friedman,

350:Ever since the Reformation, the case of legislation confining Catholics had been constructed primarily to protect a nervously Protestant against what was assumed to be a fifth column in its midst... Ministers believedm with some justice, that Catholics retained an attachment to their exiled co-religionists, the princes of the House of Stuart. After the Battle of Culloden had confirmed Jacobitism's insignificance, however, government attitudes towards Catholicism began perceptibly and logically to relax. ~ Linda Colley,

351:I had written a lot about my dog dying before. I wrote a newspaper column about it and it turned out to be the most popular column I'd ever written. That and the lame Joni Mitchell column I did. But the dog column, my god! People love dogs. Anybody who writes regularly should know, when in doubt: dogs! If you're a columnist, when in doubt, write a column about the culture of narcissism - like a scolding column about the culture of narcissism - or write something about dogs. That's the homerun in my take. ~ Meghan Daum,

352:I think blogging and the ability to instantaneously respond to news items has changed the way we approach all media. We're seeing people talking back to columnists, and going much further in the sexual realm than most papers, even alternative weeklies, will publish. I'm surprised more papers aren't having people do what you're doing with an online only column, and to be honest, I read almost all the media I do read online, and plenty of other people do, too, so I don't know what's stopping them. ~ Rachel Kramer Bussel,

353:Some Western politicians are already threatening us with not just sanctions, but also the prospect of increasingly serious problems on the domestic front. I would like to know what it is they have in mind exactly: action by a fifth column, this disparate bunch of 'national traitors', or are they hoping to put us in a worsening social and economic situation so as to provoke public discontent? We consider such statements irresponsible and clearly aggressive in tone, and we will respond to them accordingly. ~ Vladimir Putin,

354:People who sell their house on their own must not value their time much. Why would I want to save a few bucks when I could use that time to make more money or spend it with those I love? What I find funny is that so many poor and middle-class people insist on tipping restaurant help 15 to 20 percent, even for bad service, but complain about paying a broker three to seven percent. They enjoy tipping people in the expense column and stiffing people in the asset column. That is not financially intelligent. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

355:See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia. ~ Henry David Thoreau,

356:The dorsal root ganglia are located all along the spinal column, at the level of each vertebra, one on each side of the spine, linking the body’s periphery with the spinal cord, that is, connecting peripheral nerve fibers to the central nervous system. This is one of the routes for conveying sensory signals from limbs and torso to the central nervous system. Information about the face is also transmitted centrally by two large but lonely ganglia: the trigeminal ganglia, one on each side of the brain stem. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,

357:You are Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first. Specifically, you are a spinal column with a small bone box at one end, the head, and with reproductive equipment at the other end. Inside the bone box you have a small portion of material which resembles stiff, bloody lard. With that you think—you think better than I do, even though I have over five hundred million synaptic connections. You are a wonderful object, Rod McBan. I can understand what you are made of. I cannot share your human, animal side of life. ~ Cordwainer Smith,

358:I Was 37 Years Old at the Time”—August 7, 1976 For years, you’ve watched everyone else do it. The children who sat on the curb eating their lunches while waiting for their bus. The husband you put through school who drank coffee standing up and slept with his hand on the alarm. And you envied them and said, “Maybe next year I’ll go back to school.” And the years went by and this morning you looked into the mirror and said, “You blew it. You’re too old to pick it up and start a new career.” This column is for you. ~ Erma Bombeck,

359:About thirty minutes later, I noticed that Bill was now digging a second hole, his first one having been carefully refilled and smoothed over at its top. I picked up his clipboard and saw that his soil evaluation had been completed meticulously and that he had also included his second-best answers in a separate column down the right side of the page. At the very top of his report, suitability for “infrastructure” was checked, and a specification of “juvenile detention center” had been added in careful handwriting. I ~ Hope Jahren,

360:For months, people in Harlem and in other black communities across the country had been warning that they were fed up with fighting for democracy in Europe and being denied democracy at home. The media, as usual, labeled the explosion a “riot.” CLR, who wrote the column “One Tenth of a Nation” for Labor Action, the Workers Party’s weekly paper, was assigned to write the lead article. I was working with him. We decided that our headline, splashed across the top of the front page, would be MASS DEMONSTRATION IN HARLEM. ~ Grace Lee Boggs,

361:The world’s mission in the Middle East is not to defeat ISIS, which is just a barbaric roadblock. It’s to reassert the primacy of pluralism, freedom and democracy. It’s to tamp down zeal and cultivate self-doubt. The world has to destroy the Islamic State with hard power, but only as a means to that higher moral end. Many people have lost faith in that democratic mission, but without that mission we’re just one more army in a contest of barbarism. Our acts are nothing but volleys in a status war. In this column, I’ve tried ~ Anonymous,

362:To me, the fun part of both jobs is to always try to push the discussion and debate forward in some way. The most fun part of being a theater critic for the Times was always to try and champion something that maybe other people didn't like, or that was produced under obscure circumstances or had to fight for its life. And I would say in the column what I try to do is in some ways related in that I'm trying to fight for a point of view. I'm not trying to be a kingmaker in either job, and don't want to be, and shouldn't be. ~ Frank Rich,

363:I was looking, a piece in the "L.A. Times" about a paper called "The Menace" back in 1915, that was railing against Catholics and it said all sorts of things about them. They are essentially a fifth column. They are crypto fascists, that they said if we were compelled to live in this term with Romanists, that`s their term of Catholics, the Romanists will have to be taught their place in. Was that bigotry or were they correct back then to look at Catholicism as fundamentally alien and threatening to the American way of life? ~ Chris Hayes,

364:his growling by coughing with the effort. It was, after all, very early for him. ‘Do you realise I just about keep that place afloat? There are not one but two champagne cocktails named after me.’ ‘Well, I haven’t seen the papers yet myself, but if you look in this morning’s Daily Mail,’ I said serenely, ‘you will see a story in the gossip column thing, all about how Prince Nicolas of Hollenberg has been banned from the notorious society—’ ‘The Daily Mail?’ demanded Nicky. ‘Hang on, there’s a copy here.’ I heard scrabbling. ~ Hester Browne,

365:The pain of losing Deborah still brings tears. And I cannot mask my profound disappointment that God did not answer yes to our prayers for healing. I think He's okay with that. One of the phrases we evangelicals like to throw around is that Christianity is 'not a religion; it's a relationship.' I believe that, which is why I know that when my faith was shattered and raged against Him, He still accepted me. And even though I have penciled a black mark in His column, I can be honest about it. That's what a relationship is all about. ~ Ron Hall,

366:And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We won't know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there's a lot of work to be done. ~ Adam Parfrey,

367:Three quotes from the same column: Self-reliance --"work"-- is intimately connected to human dignity --"purpose." "Work" and "purpose" are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one's family. If you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. ~ Mark Steyn,

368:Solar Plexus the “Abdominal Brain.” The Solar Plexus is situated in the Epigastric region, just back of the “pit of the stomach” on either side of the spinal column. It is composed of white and gray brain matter, similar to that composing the other brains of man. It has control of the main internal organs of man, and plays a much more important part than is generally recognized. We will not go into the Yogi theory regarding the Solar Plexus, further than to say that they know it as the great central store-house of Prana. ~ William Walker Atkinson,

369:Sometime this week, make a list of all the things you spend significant amounts of time doing. Place the things you regret doing in one column and the things you do not regret in another. When you feel bored or compelled to spend your time doing something, see if you can substitute something from the first list with something from the second. It’s not easy, but the exercise may prove illuminating. It doesn’t matter if you fail; what matters is that you think about your decisions, rather than pressing switches with no curiosity at all. ~ Hugh Howey,

370:The language of distinction ceases to be available; is no longer available. We must search CD Rom for meanings which once were clear, but now are obscure. The words are too big for the narrow column of the contemporary newspaper. We are all one-syllable people now, two at most. So we mumble and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our reward to scavenge through the universe , picking up the detritus of lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away. ~ Fay Weldon,

371:The Warrior looks at the column of Fear, where he reads: “you are about to enter an unknown and dangerous world where all that you have learned up to now will be of no use whatsoever.” The Warrior of Light looks at the column of Desire, where he reads: “you are about to leave a known world where all the things you always wanted and all that you have fought so hard for are kept.” The Warrior smiles, because nothing can frighten him and nothing can hold him. With the confidence of those who know what they want, he opens the door. ~ Paulo Coelho,

372:This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you're a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your self-esteem to undetectable levels by the end of the first week. ~ Mark Steyn,

373:If one were to stand on a street corner at 9 A.M. and watch the spirits of the British dead march by four abreast, the column would be 97 miles long and would take twenty hours, or until five the next morning, to pass. The French dead would take an additional fifty-one hours and the Germans another fifty-nine hours. Considering all the dead on the western front, this parade would last from 9 A.M. Monday to 4 P.M. Saturday and stretch 386 miles, roughly the distance from Paris halfway through Switzerland or from New York to Cleveland. ~ Joseph E Persico,

374:The man from lunch - Derek - stood leaning against the column by the steps. The way his arms crossed his chest made his biceps and shoulders appear huge, which made her notice that he'd changed clothes since lunch. The minute his playful gaze landed on her, he pushed off the column. "Hi," he said, looking sheepish and way sexier than any man had the right to look. From the way his blue jeans hung on his lean hips to the way his navy button-down hugged the muscles of his shoulders and chest to how tall he was, this guy was sex on legs. ~ Laura Kaye,

375:You’re absolutely gorgeous! Hideously gorgeous! I hate to break it to you, Mick, but gorgeous men aren’t afraid of asking clever women out on dates. Quite the opposite.” “Did you work that out in your giant alien brain?” he says. Completely deadpan. See—not only is he gorgeous, he’s also funny enough to make me laugh in the middle of indignation. “No, but—” “Were there lots of equations involved? If X has a tight bum and Y has big knockers, do they intersect in column Z?” “I’ll intersect your column, in a minute. ~ Charlotte Stein,

376:That was only my second time doing that. But I watched some videos last night, so I was hoping it would be okay.” “Firstly—again, it was far, far better than okay. Secondly—what kind of videos?” I wiggle my brows suggestively. “You mean porn?” Her blush spreads from her cheeks down the pale column of her throat. “Instructional videos.” “By which you mean porn.” She rolls her eyes with a huff. “Fine. Yes. Porn, but it was good porn. There was a story line.” “Because that’s why we all watch porn. For the story line. ~ Lili Valente,

377:Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything—-how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there—one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?)... ~ Nick Hornby,

378:The 112th Infantry Regiment of Cota’s 28th Division found that ‘on the morning of the initial assault, there were strong indications that the German infantry had imbibed rather freely of alcoholic beverage . . . They were laughing and shouting and telling our troops not to open fire, as it disclosed our positions. We obliged until the head of the column was 25 yards to our front. Heavy casualties were inflicted. Examination of the canteens on several of the bodies gave every indication that the canteen had only a short time before contained cognac. ~ Antony Beevor,

379:Briefly, the Long Count consists of a tabulation of days elapsed since the supposed inception of the calendar, the total being expressed as so many cycles of differing magnitudes. The largest of these cycles is the baktun, containing 144,000 days; next, the katun, 7,200 days; then the tun, with 360 days; the uinal, with 20; and the smallest of all, always at the bottom of the column, the kin of one day. Each of these in the days of Maya ascendancy was shown with its own hieroglyph, while to its left stood the coefficient by which it was to be multiplied. ~ Michael D Coe,

380:I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. ~ Pat Conroy,

381:Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate. ~ Leigh Newman,

382:We drive because we forget, he decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies. We forget about our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column – the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those minuscule threads of nerve tissue that, once severed, remove all sensation from the legs, and introduce the wheezing apparatus that will stand sentinel at our white-sheeted beds. ~ Adam Nevill,

383:It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom to act which never made for romance. The strident setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of the "Riviera Notes," emphasized the ideals of a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame. ~ Edith Wharton,

384:The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding... ~ William Gibson,

385:You see, if the height of the mercury [barometer] column is less on the top of a mountain than at the foot of it (as I have many reasons for believing, although everyone who has so far written about it is of the contrary opinion), it follows that the weight of the air must be the sole cause of the phenomenon, and not that abhorrence of a vacuum, since it is obvious that at the foot of the mountain there is more air to have weight than at the summit, and we cannot possibly say that the air at the foot of the mountain has a greater aversion to empty space than at the top. ~ Blaise Pascal,

386:What lofty subject are you addressing in Tuesday’s column?” she asked. “Pencils! I’ve just discovered a source for the fat yellow pencils with thick soft leads that were standard equipment on my first newspaper job. I’ve ordered a gross. More and more I draft my copy longhand while sitting with my feet up.” “Don’t I remember old movies in which reporters loafed around the office with their hats on and their feet on the desk?” “They weren’t loafing, Polly! They were thinking. Words and ideas flow more easily in that position. It has something to do with blood flow. ~ Lilian Jackson Braun,

387:We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden his who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of his country. Let it rise! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and the parting day linger and play on its summit! ~ Daniel Webster,

388:Keep expenses low, reduce liabilities, and diligently build a base of solid assets. For young people who have not yet left home, it is important for parents to teach them the difference between an asset and a liability. Get them to start building a solid asset column before they leave home, get married, buy a house, have kids, and get stuck in a risky financial position, clinging to a job, and buying everything on credit. I see so many young couples who get married and trap themselves into a lifestyle that will not let them get out of debt for most of their working years. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

389:...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused. ~ Bruce Feiler,

390:The Cook Political Report now predicting senate democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats, which would give them the majority. Pointing out the history shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle, one party tends to win the lion`s share of them. With two weeks to Election Day, there`s not enough time for republicans to recover toss-up seats in states where Hillary Clinton is currently leading, considering this, early voting is under way, and [Donald]Trump won`t be any help especially since his campaign doesn`t really have a ground game to speak of. ~ Chris Hayes,

391:action. He looks like Lurch among the ballerinas. The man has, Rafferty finally recognizes, a clubfoot, so put a check in the physical-anomaly column after all. The clubfoot is housed in a black architectural structure half the size of a tuk-tuk, the three-wheeled taxis so ubiquitous in Bangkok. So here’s Black Shirt, aka Tuk-Tuk Foot; him, Rafferty can spot. Okay, he can spot him. So what? Thought One is to lose Black Shirt first. Reduce the opposition numbers and then worry about the others. Thought Two is to stay with Black Shirt and try to lose the others, on the assumption that ~ Timothy Hallinan,

392:I want to take you home, strip these clothes off your beautiful body, and have my way with you,” I say. Then, because some things change but some things stay the same, I brush my lips against the column of her throat and kiss a hot trail to her ear, like she used to crave.” … “I want that. You know I want that.” “Me, too.” My voice is rough with need. “But I was really enjoying our awkward first date banter, too,” she says with a twitch of her lips, that makes me grin as well. “We were rocking the I-have-no-clue-what-to-say chitchat, weren’t we?” “Like nobody’s business. ~ Lauren Blakely,

393:When you execute a program that retrieves a small subset of rows from a large table, it can be time-consuming for PROC SQL to read the rows sequentially. In some situations, using an index on a table allows PROC SQL to access a subset of rows more efficiently. An index stores unique values for a specified column or columns in ascending value order, and includes information about the location of those values in the table. That is, an index is composed of value/identifier pairs that enable you to access a row directly, by value. For example, suppose you have created an index on your table that is based ~ Anonymous,

394:COLACHEL, TAMIL NADU This is the coastal town where Martanda Varma, ruler of the tiny kingdom of Venad (later Travancore) decisively defeated the Dutch East India Company in 1741. This was a major feat as the Dutch were then the world’s leading maritime power and controlled what is now South Africa, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The Dutch never recovered and went into decline. No Asian would again defeat a European power decisively till the Japanese navy defeated the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. A commemorative column still stands at the spot where Martanda Varma accepted Dutch surrender. ~ Sanjeev Sanyal,

395:Right after women got the vote, the measure of their social progress can be seen in an advice column written by Dorthy Dix that appeared in newspapers all over the country. The woman should not merely be a domestic drudge, she said: . . . .a man's wife is the show window where he exhibits the measure of his achievement. . . . The biggest deals are put across over luncheon tables; . . . we meet at dinner the people who can push our fortunes. . . . The woman who cultivates a circle of worthwhile people, who belongs to clubs, who makes herself interesting and agreeable. . . . is a help to her husband. ~ Howard Zinn,

396:When I arrived at St. Louis Park High in September 1968, I took journalism as a sophomore from our then legendary high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. People often speak about the teachers who changed their lives. Hattie changed mine. I took her introductory journalism course in tenth grade, in room 313, and have never needed, or taken, another course in journalism since. It was not that I was that good. It was that she was that good. As I wrote in a column about her after she died, Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret of success in life was getting the fundamentals right. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

397:...Can human nature be so entirely transformed inside and out? Can man, created by God, be made wicked by man? Can a soul be so completely changed by its destiny, and turn evil when its fate is evil? Can the heart become distorted, contract incurable deformities and incurable infirmities, under the pressure of disproportionate grief, like the spinal column under a low ceiling? Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish. ~ Victor Hugo,

398:The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round. ~ Paul Krugman,

399:I've wandered as far west as I can go. Sitting now on the sand, I watch the sun blur into an aftermath. Reds finally marrying blues. Soon night will enfold us all. But the light is still not gone, not yet, and by it I can dimly see here my own dark hallway, or maybe it was just a foyer and maybe not dark at all, not in fact brightly lit, an afternoon sun blazing through the lead panes, now detected amidst what amounts to a long column of my yesterdays, towards the end, though not the very end of course, where I had stood at the age of seven, gripping my mother's wrists, trying as hard as I could to keep her from going. ~ Mark Z Danielewski,

400:As your cash flow grows, you can indulge in some luxuries. An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first. The poor and the middle class often buy luxury items like big houses, diamonds, furs, jewelry, or boats because they want to look rich. They look rich, but in reality they just get deeper in debt on credit. The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

401:There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it. ~ Henry David Thoreau,

402:My dear man,’ said Lymond, ‘he was keeping the numbers down. If we hadn’t taken precautions the whole of the noble Order of St John would be disporting itself at St Mary’s under the delusion that it was earning merit by converting us to the Cross. As it is, another half dozen are due any day. Alec, now you’ve kept us right, I’d be grateful if you would see if the head of the column knows what the hell it’s doing without you. Jerott, it won’t help us in an ambush if the rearguard is agonizing silently over Joleta’s jeopardized soul. Forget the brat. Remember, we’re common, coarse fighting-men, not a heavenly host in our shifts. ~ Dorothy Dunnett,

403:At last he stopped, and she stared down at the printed column of words, unable to comprehend a single one. His hand, warm and steady, wound its way around hers, wrapping it like a spider would its prey. She surrendered it to him, unable to watch even as his thumb traced the place, just above her knuckles, where he had once written his number in deep violet. Isobel ceased to breathe. Her heart pounded in her chest, her thoughts shattering into senseless fragments. All the while, her eyes remained trained and unblinking on the open page. Lines without meaning stared up at her, little more than black sticks in an otherwise white world. ~ Kelly Creagh,

404:I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read. I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later. ~ Carrie Fisher,

405:Her hair was up, tucked into a horrid lace cap, but a few auburn curls had escaped and were brushing against the nape of her neck, drawing his attention to the lovely, straight column, flushed with excitement. For a fleeting moment, he considered what it would be like to kiss the skin there. The scene at the Allendale ball earlier in the evening had confirmed his suspicions that Lady Calpurnia Hartwell was an eager and passionate woman. Her responses were irresistibly uninhibited- so different from those of the women he usually partnered- he couldn't help but wonder how she would react to his touch in other, more scandalous places. ~ Sarah MacLean,

406:Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity. ~ Steve L pez,

407:What were Hank and Atticus up to? What was going on? She did not know, but before the sun went down she would find out. It had something to do with that pamphlet she found in the house—sitting there before God and everybody—something to do with citizens’ councils. She knew about them, all right. New York papers full of it. She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash. ~ Harper Lee,

408:The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. ~ Flannery O Connor,

409:Another analogy he made was comparing the way that light, sound, magnetism, and the percussion reverberations caused by a hammer blow all disseminate in a radiating pattern, often in waves. In one of his notebooks he made a column of small drawings showing how each force field spreads. He even illustrated what happened when each type of wave hits a small hole in the wall; prefiguring the studies done by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens almost two centuries later, he showed the diffraction that occurs as the waves go through the aperture.17 Wave mechanics were for him merely a passing curiosity, but even in this his brilliance is breathtaking. ~ Walter Isaacson,

410:context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life. I mean, lets face it:when you're eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion's face, you realize that in half an hour you're proably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better ~ Anthony Bourdain,

411:He looked behind him at the unadorned outer walls of the Septizodium. He stood in an alley, one of the many unmarked and unmemorable gaps between buildings in Rome. The door through which he had stumbled wasn’t a real door, but a clever panel of stone. Any other time, he would never have noticed it against the mottled background of the surrounding stone, but it hung open now, and a column of black smoke spiraled up from it. There were other spires of smoke rising over the rooftop; clearly, there were other exits from the Septizodium. They might not have been plain to those who were sequestered inside, but smoke had a talent for finding a way out. ~ Neal Stephenson,

412:In Romans 11:34 God becomes terrifying: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” The answer is nobody. We find this aspect of God’s sovereignty terrifying. More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke. His glory is blinding. It undoes people. It takes people out. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). ~ Matt Chandler,

413:Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship’s wake. ~ Richard Hughes,

414:Alhambra Welcome, the water’s voice To one whom black sand overwhelmed, Welcome, to the curved hand The smooth column of the marble, Welcome, slender labyrinths of water Between the lemon trees, Welcome the melodious zéjel, Welcome is love, welcome the prayer Offered to a God who is One, Welcome the jasmine. Vain the scimitar Against the long lances of the host, Vain to be the best. Good to know, foreknow, grieving king, That your courtesies are farewells, That the key will be denied you, The infidels’ cross eclipse the moon, The afternoon you gaze on prove your last. Granada, 1976. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,

415:It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. ~ Joseph Mitchell,

416:Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness, as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish? ~ Victor Hugo,

417:As he wrote, the candle in the window kept flickering, and despite his desk lamp the flickering distracted him. He sat back in the old wooden school chair he'd had since college and heard the reassuring squeak of the wood under him. At the firm he was failing to even register what was needed of him. Daily now he faced column after of column of meaningless numbers he was supposed to make square with company claims. He was making mistakes with a frequency that was frightening, and he feared, more than he had in the first days following my disappearance, that he would not be able to support his remaining children. ~ Alice Seboldpgs 135-136; Susie's father on death ~ Alice Sebold,

418:Nixon was finding enemies everywhere: among liberals, the bureaucracy, on Capitol Hill, and in the press. “We can have peace. We can have prosperity. We can have all the blacks screwing the whites,” and still not get credit from the liberal establishment, he complained. His orders sometimes sounded like the mutterings of a paranoid. He had his staff comb through the microfilm at the D.C. public library and compile every Drew Pearson column dating back to 1946 that mentioned his name. “Agnew must be warned,” Nixon had told Haldeman and others, back during the campaign. “A candidate has no friends in the press—they are all enemies.” He underlined the word no four times. ~ John A Farrell,

419:And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him the service was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them away with a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and the noise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked in succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life was sucked away into this one poem in praise of death. ~ John Dos Passos,

420:two stratigraphers asked, “Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?” In part, they argued that our presence is as yet too brief a perturbation to merit a named place in the stratigraphic column. The amount of ocean sediments laid down since World War II is less than a millimeter. And, of course, nobody knows how long the Anthropocene will last. That depends crucially on how we, collectively, respond to the novel realization that we’re now in such a time. Our presence, however, is already indelibly inscribed in Earth’s stratigraphic history, and as long as (or whenever) there are geologists, it will be identifiable. Whether or not it becomes “official, ~ David Grinspoon,

421:You're probably wondering why there's never any good news. I mean, I've been doing this job a few months now. I've been soaking up the paper every week, same as you, and watching the same newsfeeds as you. I got the same list burned into the front of my head as you. Death. Horror. Bad sex. Living nightmares. Each day a little further down the spiral. There's never any good news because they know you. I mean, here's the top of today's column that I discarded: I had a really good time last night down the bar with my assistant and some cheerfully doomed sex fiends of our acquaintance. No one ever sold newspapers by telling you the truth; life just ain't that bad. ~ Warren Ellis,

422:U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you ~ John Dos Passos,

423:The dead bring us to life, vivify us, give us scale. We are the unjoined part of them and at their graves we stand at our own. In Ruby Park Cemetery, in the once-famous silver lands of Colorado, the graves are unmarked. There is a single column of marble above a miner's daughter who died at the age of seventeen. The town of Irwin drew thousands of people in the 1870s, some from as far away as England and Scotland. The cemetery is abandoned. The mines have vanished. All but the silent warning, 'My good people as you pass by, As you are now so once was I As I am now you soon must be Prepare yourselves to follow me.' The dust of the pathway whitens our shoes. ~ James Salter,

424:A.D. 19—? AS in some quiet city bathed in sleep, Where like a kiss the twilight lingereth, When suddenly the earth stirs far beneath— Just moves, then pauses—and a silence deep Falls on all ere the second shock should sweep Spire, column, pinnacle to shapeless death! And white face peers at white face, and no breath Is drawn, and every heart forgets to leap! So now across this quiet, dreaming world The first faint shock has thrilled; and men, aghast, Wait for the second, whose blind forces pent Shall in one last convulsion find their vent; And all the builded fabrics of the past Shall be in ruins on their builders hurled. ~ Arthur Henry Adams,

425:Adin looked up at Donte, who was then in the middle of taking a sip of his wine. He took in Donte’s demonically beautiful face, long and angular, with its hooded eyes and high cheekbones, its wine-darkened lips. He watched as Donte savored it, imagining the warmth of the wine on the inside of Donte’s mouth and against his tongue. He could almost feel it as it slid down the column of Donte’s throat, teasing his Adam’s apple into a subtle bob, and suddenly Adin was the wine, slipping down that throat, and just as inexplicably, Adin felt Donte’s mouth on him everywhere at once, biting…licking…sucking. Adin’s breath sped up; his skin warmed with the beginnings of a flush brought on by arousal. ~ Z A Maxfield,

426:It’s actually entertaining.” “You say that like you’re surprised.” He looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler, and I realized I’d really put him on the spot. What could he say to that? Based on our numerous conversations, I was under the impression communication wasn’t your strong suit? “Never mind,” I said, taking the steam kettle off the stove and filling it with water. I was a British-breakfast-tea-in-the-morning girl, and I made it using a real teapot and everything. “I’m not fishing for compliments.” Okay, I was a little. “I just…I just didn’t expect it to be so funny,” Jason said. “You wanted a serious column about hot dogs? ~ Rachel Hawthorne,

427:A Thunderstorm A moment the wild swallows like a flight Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high, Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky. The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight, The hurrying centres of the storm unite And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe, Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge, Tower darkening on. And now from heaven's height, With the long roar of elm-trees swept and swayed, And pelted waters, on the vanished plain Plunges the blast. Behind the wild white flash That splits abroad the pealing thunder-crash, Over bleared fields and gardens disarrayed, Column on column comes the drenching rain. ~ Archibald Lampman,

428:I’ll bet he misses it.” “Almost as much as I miss him being on the road.” She frowned. “You don’t really mean that.” “Mostly not.” “Good. But I do sort of get it,” she said slowly. “The siblings-driving-you-crazy thing. My sisters . . . well, they’re perfect. As far as my parents are concerned.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. They’re married.” “And that’s perfect, huh? What about you? You’re successful, right? Your column is pretty big.” “Oh, it’s huge,” she said, her tone overdramatic, earning a chuckle from Cole. “I’m kind of a big deal. But I don’t have a husband, so . . . my parents think maybe I’m not such a big deal.” “So, you’re the black sheep.” “Baaaaa.” “Nice.” “Thanks. ~ Maisey Yates,

429:The Temple Between us leapt a gold and scarlet flame. Into the hollow of the cupped, arched blue Of Heaven it rose. Its flickering tongues up-drew And vanished in the sunshine. How it came We guessed not, nor what thing could be its name. From each to each had sprung those sparks which flew Together into fire. But we knew The winds would slap and quench it in their game. And so we graved and fashioned marble blocks To treasure it, and placed them round about. With pillared porticos we wreathed the whole, And roofed it with bright bronze. Behind carved locks Flowered the tall and sheltered flame. Without, The baffled winds thrust at a column's bole. ~ Amy Lowell,

430:Batalha IN this still cloister where the roses grow Waist-high between the arches and the well, You would have walked a thousand years ago, So faithful, who are now so infidel; You would have fancied your wild heart's emotion Over the beauty of a scene like this, A mystic piety, a pure devotion ­ And so, perhaps, it is. Under the shade of column and of tracing, Here in the dusk, where swallows dart and fly, Barefoot and cowled, I think I see you pacing, Brooding o'er thoughts of subtle mystery; Fasting and prayer, and music and desire Weaving a mood that men no longer know Oh, yes, my dear, you would have been a friar, A thousand years ago. ~ Alice Duer Miller,

431:partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all over the place. At least, I’m presuming they’re lying all over the place; I seem to have temporarily lost most of them. When the World Cup is over, and we clear away the piles of betting slips and wall charts, some of them will, presumably, reappear. I wrote in this column recently about Muriel Spark’s novels, their genius and their attractive brevity, but there is an obvious disadvantage to her concision: her books tend to get buried under things. I can put my hands on Dennis Lehane’s historical novel The Given Day whenever I want, simply because it is seven hundred pages long. ~ Nick Hornby,

432:In order to find out more about this, experimenters have gone on to study phenomena at very high energy. They hit neutrons and protons together at very high energy to produce peculiar things, and by studying these peculiar things we hope to understand better the forces between neutrons and protons. Pandora’s box has been opened by these experiments! Although all we really wanted was to get a better idea of the forces between neutrons and protons, when we hit these things together hard we discovered that there are more particles in the world. In fact more than four dozen other particles have been dredged up in an attempt to understand these forces; we will put these four dozen others into the neutron/proton column ~ Anonymous,

433:It depends what you mean by ‘really good’,” said Mrs. Millard thoughtfully. “If you mean is it a work of art which will enrol you in the annals of fame it isn’t good at all. Alas, my poor Jane, you will never see your sculptured bust displayed on a marble column in the British Museum — or wherever it is that they display sculptured busts of the famous — but, unless I am very much mistaken, you will see a great many copies of The Mulberry Coach on the shelves of libraries and the counters of bookstalls all over the country — and probably in America as well if you have the temerity to cross the Atlantic Ocean. You see, my dear Jane, The Mulberry Coach provides an escape from the drabness of the modern world.” She ~ D E Stevenson,

434:A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbol means nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not. As I wrote that farewell column to Marley, I realized it was all right there in front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Sometimes it took a dog with bad breath, worse manners, and pure intentions to help us see. ~ John Grogan,

435:But it is quite possible that, even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the ‘Paris column’ says to us of an event, of a work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her ‘crowded hour’: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?” overleaf does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions speak often of a fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in its entirety? ~ Marcel Proust,

436:I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was so pissed off at what happened, at myself, I didn’t think.” He stroked a hand down her hair first, then gave the choppy ends a quick tug. “I’m not angry with you.” “I know. You could be, but you’re not. So I have to be even sorrier.” “Your logic is fascinating, and elusive.” “I can’t pay you back with sex or salt-crusted sea bass or whatever because you’re too busy taking care of me. So now I’ve got this black mark in my column against the bright shiny star in yours, and—” He tipped her head up. “Are we keeping score?” “No. Maybe. Shit.” “How am I doing?” “Undisputed champ.” “Good. I like to win.” He brushed her bangs back to study the injury himself. “You’ll do. Let’s eat. ~ J D Robb,

437:One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began. ~ Nick Hornby,

438:Sonnet Xxxi: Her Gifts High grace, the dower of queens; and therewithal Some wood-born wonder's sweet simplicity; A glance like water brimming with the sky Or hyacinth-light where forest-shadows fall; Such thrilling pallor of cheek as doth enthral The heart; a mouth whose passionate forms imply All music and all silence held thereby; Deep golden locks, her sovereign coronal; A round reared neck, meet column of Love's shrine To cling to when the heart takes sanctuary; Hands which for ever at Love's bidding be, And soft-stirred feet still answering to his sign:— These are her gifts, as tongue may tell them o'er. Breathe low her name, my soul; for that means more. ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

439:When I’m in the right frame of mind, I start to create a list of dreams and goals. Some are preposterous; others are overly pragmatic. I don’t attempt to censor or edit the nature of the list—I put anything and everything down. Next to that first list, I write down in a second column all the things that bring me joy and pleasure: the achievements, people, and things that move me. The clues can be found in the hobbies you pursue and the magazines, movies, and books you enjoy. Which activities excite you the most, where you don’t even notice the hours that pass? When I’m done, I start to connect these two lists, looking for intersections, that sense of direction or purpose. It’s a simple exercise, but the results can be profound. ~ Keith Ferrazzi,

440:I.   The Gothic looks solemn,   The plain Doric column Supports an old Bishop and Crosier;   The mouldering arch,   Shaded o'er by a larch Stands next door to Wilson the Hosier. II.   Vice--that is, by turns,--   O'er pale faces mourns The black tassell'd trencher and common hat;   The Chantry boy sings,   The Steeple-bell rings, And as for the Chancellor--dominat. III.   There are plenty of trees,   And plenty of ease, And plenty of fat deer for Parsons;   And when it is venison,   Short is the benison,-- Then each on a leg or thigh fastens. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes ~ John Keats, Lines Rhymed In A Letter From Oxford ,

441:You read Salinger in Italian? Molto chic’ ‘I was told a good way to learn a language was to read translations of books you know by heart’ ‘That’s interesting.’ But Isabelle wasn’t at all interested. She had just discovered a new expression. She savoured it amorously. From now on everything that once has been "sublime" – a film, a Worth gown, a Coromandel screen – would be "molto chic". Like those devotees of the increase-your-word-power column in the Reader’s Digest who stake their conversational reputation on the number of times in a single day they find room for "plethora" and "infelicity" and "quintessential", dropping these words the way other people drop names, she hated to let any amusing phrase go once it had caught her fancy. ~ Gilbert Adair,

442:Weary Rings There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear, and there are desires to die, fought by two opposing waters that have never isthmused. There are desires for a great kiss that would shroud Life, one that ends in the Africa of a fiery agony, a suicide! There are desires to. . .have no desires, Lord; I point my deicidal finger at you: there are desires to not have had a heart. Spring returns, returns and will depart. And God, bent in time, repeats himself, and passes, passes with the spinal column of the Universe on his back. When my temples beat their lugubrious drum, when the dream engraved on a dagger aches me, there are desires to be left standing in this verse! ~ Cesar Vallejo,

443:Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your conscience or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them. ~ Victor Hugo,

444:Conservatism is far from what I’m aiming at in proclaiming the establishment of a Sethian left-hand path tradition in the West as one of the first missions of the SLM. In fact, in establishing such a tradition, true to the spirit of sacred transgression and holy subversion that is essential to both Seth and the left-hand path, we are opening a door that enlightens through endangerment, that awakens through risk and peril: this is a radical (from Latin radix, root, implying how deep a change is required) enterprise that is the very opposite of conservatism.” --“From the Eye of the Storm” (Zeena's column as Hemet-Neter Tepi Seth for the SLM), Volume I - Summer Solstice issue (2003): "Building a Sethian Left-Hand Path Tradition in the West. ~ Zeena Schreck,

445:Lord Of My Heart's Elation 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! ~ Bliss William Carman,

446:Toward nightfall, Khrenov’s temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle’s wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window—her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly—all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,

447:In May 2012—a year after the Arab awakening erupted—the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? ~ Thomas L Friedman,

448:a recent column for Asia Times, Spengler argued that cultures facing their own imminent demise implode or lash out. They operate under a different standard of rationality, like a man who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Our modern idea of rational behavior fails to comprehend that kind of spiritual crisis. He wrote: “Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.”[52] ~ Jack Donovan,

449:I need to devour you." Those words manage to knock the air right back out of my lungs, and my head spinsas one of his hands skims around my body. He splays it across the small of my back, pulling me closer to him, and leaning over until his lips are a centimeter from my collarbone. "Sienna?" he growls, and I murmur to acknowledge him. "I'm going to taste you." He wasn't asking me, he was flat out telling me what was going to happen between us, and yet I felt myself nod, felt my body mold against his the moment his warm lips sought out the center of my throat. "You smell like apples." he wispers harshly before his tongue darts out to trace the column of my thorat. I moan, letting my head fall all the way back. "And you taste like the best kind of sin. ~ Emily Snow,

450:Beyond, he could glimpse high, tumescent hills of unnaturally perfect smoothness, each crowned with an ivory-coloured column of stone. Between the hills ran valleys dense with pallid vegetation. Bank upon bank of cloud hung frozen in a still, pale sky. Though his vantage point commanded great distance, some curious distortion of perspective rendered everything - near and far - equally sharp to the eye. And nowhere could he see a shadow. It was as if he had stepped over the border of a wonderful and subtly disturbing illustration in some long-forgotten, childhood book. The land lay before him like a vast and awful glyph, waiting to be read, and he knew at once that he must go on, just a little further, or regret it all the days of his life. "The White Road ~ Ron Weighell,

451:Those eyes. So pale, so startling, so different. His breath was hot against my face, and we stared at each other. I was stunned to see I was looking into the face of the austere young man, not Der Erlkönig, not the wolf, and suddenly I understood what he had been pleading. Don't leave me. A warmth spread from my center, turning my limbs liquid. But when that warmth reached my heart, it turned into pain. "Never," I breathed. At my word, his eyes transformed. Hardening into jewels, the mask of Der Erlkönig returned. He lowered his mouth to the column of my neck, a light touch of teeth, his hand moving to rest lightly against my collarbone. "Good," he growled. And then with one swift motion, he tore the fabric of my dress from the neck down. ~ S Jae Jones,

452:I have not yet described to you the most singular part. About six years ago—to be exact, upon the 4th of May, 1882—an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward. There was no name or address appended. I had at that time just entered the family of Mrs. Cecil Forrester in the capacity of governess. By her advice I published my address in the advertisement column. The same day there arrived through the post a small card-board box addressed to me, which I found to contain a very large and lustrous pearl. No word of writing was enclosed. Since then every year upon the same date there has always appeared a similar box, containing a similar pearl, without any clue as to the sender. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,

453:Making a decision to own a house that is too expensive in lieu of starting an investment portfolio impacts an individual in at least the following three ways: 1.​Loss of time, during which other assets could have grown in value. 2.​Loss of additional capital, which could have been invested instead of paying high home maintenance expenses. 3.​Loss of education. Too often, people count their house and savings and retirement plans as all they have in their asset column. Because they have no money to invest, they simply don’t invest. This costs them investment experience. Most never become what the investment world calls “a sophisticated investor.” And the best investments are usually first sold to sophisticated investors, who then turn around and sell them to the people playing it safe. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

454:When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry. ~ Brian Christian,

455:The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not changed. It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-towards rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column. ~ Bruce Catton,

456:A few Grik lunged at them, but the vast majority only wanted to get out of their way. These they left alone, conserving ammunition. It was a little disconcerting. They’d never seen so many “civilian” Grik before, and it was stunning how little fight they had in them. “What a buncha pansies!” Silva panted, still having trouble with the heavy, wretched air. Three Grik had nearly fallen over themselves trying to clear his path when he menaced them with the Thompson. Its barrel was still smoking after a long burst he fired down a congested alley where another column of warriors was struggling to get at them. Those that followed fired into the writhing mass as well, the heavy booming of their rifles much louder than the stutter of the Thompson. “Pansies!” Petey cawed. “Pansies! Ack! Goddamn! ~ Taylor Anderson,

457:You can’t run away from your fears. Isn’t that what you always tell your readers?” I was an advice columnist for Vibe, a magazine about relationships and sex and urban culture. My column, called “Ask Miss Independent,” had started at a student-run publication, and I had quickly developed a following. Upon graduating, I’d taken Miss Independent to Vibe, and they offered me a weekly feature. Most of my advice was posted publicly, but I also sent private paid-for replies to those who requested it. To supplement my income, I also did occasional freelancing for women’s magazines. “I’m not running away from my fears,” I told Dane. “I’m running away from my relatives.” Ring. “Just pick it up, Ella. You always tell people to face their problems.” “Yes, but I prefer to ignore mine and let them fester. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

458:One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw the tire; for example, “I’m so stupid—I should have gotten a new tire this last month,” or “Oh, hell! This is just my rotten luck!” Then you can substitute rational responses such as “It might have been better to get a new tire, but I’m not stupid and no one can predict the future with certainty.” This process won’t put air in the tire, but at least you won’t have to change it with a deflated ~ David D Burns,

459:In front marched Egypt. The Duke of Egypt at their head, on horseback, with his counts on foot, holding his bridle and stirrups; behind them the Egyptians, men and women, in any order, with their young children yelling on their shoulders; all of them, duke, counts, common people, in rags and tinsel. Then came the kingdom of the argot, that is to say, every thief in France, graded in order of rank, the lowest going in front. Thus there filed past in column of four, in the various insignia of their grades in this strange academy, the majority crippled, some of them lame, others with only one arm, the upright men, the counterfeit cranks, the rufflers, the kinchincoves, the Abraham-men, the fraters, the dommerars, the trulls, the whipjacks, the prygges, the drawlatches, the robardesmen, the clapper-dogens; an enumeration to weary Homer. ~ Victor Hugo,

460:might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl finished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you ~ Margot Lee Shetterly,

461:It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul to particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you would wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sills in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the trail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it. ~ Vivek Shanbhag,

462:Another unexpected problem in emergency planning became apparent during the exercise: The wives of the cabinet leaders rebelled—the first in what would be a long line of spouses who realized that the government had planned for their partners’ survival but not their own. As syndicated columnist Doris Fleeson wrote in a column entitled “Men First; Women, Children Last,” “Apparently it had not dawned on those ladies until they actually saw their husbands pack a suitcase for a three-day stay that no such plans had been made for them or their children. Their wives’ farewell embraces were described by some of the men as rather lacking in warmth.” Adding to the domestic chill was the realization that 200 of the cabinet leaders’ secretaries—“Government Girls,” as the newspapers referred to them—had been afforded space in the relocation planning.II ~ Garrett M Graff,

463:The great issue with us males is our frailty," he went on. "When our awareness begins to grow, it grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from the ground up. That column has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it. At this time in your life, as a sorcerer, you easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you forget everything you have done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path because your consciousness shifts back to the awareness of your everyday life. I have explained to you that the task of every male sorcerer is to reclaim everything he has done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path while he was on new levels of awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets because his awareness loses its new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat. ~ Carlos Castaneda,

464:Trees In The Garden Ah in the thunder air how still the trees are! And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent hardly looses even a last breath of perfume. And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves white, ivory white among the rambling greens how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass as if, in another moment, she would disappear with all her grace of foam! And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see: and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of things from the sea, and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends how still they are together, they stand so still in the thunder air, all strangers to one another as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden. ~ David Herbert Lawrence,

465:He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.” An affirmative murmur. “I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.” He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?” “Please, ~ Jandy Nelson,

466:There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,

467:Entering by a wide gateway, but without gates, into an inner court, surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleries above, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwing up a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusion of all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it ran into a single channel towards the interior of the building. Although the moon was by this time so low in the west, that not a ray of her light fell into the court, over the height of the surrounding buildings; yet was the court lighted by a second reflex from the sun of other lands. For the top of the column of water, just as it spread to fall, caught the moonbeams, and like a great pale lamp, hung high in the night air, threw a dim memory of light (as it were) over the court below. ~ George MacDonald,

468:nerve currents: one they call the Ida, the other the Pingala, and the middle one the Sushumna, and all these are inside the spinal column. The Ida and the Pingala, the left and the right, are clusters of nerves, while the middle one, the Sushumna, is hollow and is not a cluster of nerves. This Sushumna is closed, and for the ordinary man is of no use, for he works through the Ida and the Pingala only. Currents are continually going down and coming up through these nerves, carrying orders all over the body through other nerves running to the different organs of the body. The task before us is vast; and first and foremost, we must seek to control the vast mass of sunken thoughts which have become automatic with us. The evil deed is, no doubt, on the conscious plane; but the cause which produced the evil deed was far beyond in the realms of the unconscious, ~ Swami Vivekananda,

469:Some Hindus have an elephant to show. No one here has ever seen an elephant. They bring it at night to a dark room. One by one, we go in the dark and come out saying how we experience the animal. One of us happens to touch the trunk. A water-pipe kind of creature. Another, the ear. A strong, always moving back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg. I find it still, like a column on a temple. Another touches the curve back. A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain. He is proud of his description. Each of us touches one place and understands the whole in that way. The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant. If each of us held a candle there, and if we went in together, we could see it. ~ Rumi,

470:terms. The net effect is that I have created $30,000 in my asset column for which I am paid interest, just like a bank gets paid interest for the loans it makes. I was beginning to be a bank, and I loved it. Remember that rich dad said, “Be careful when you take on debt. If you take on debt personally, make sure it’s small. If you take on large debt, make sure someone else is paying for it.” In the language of the B and I side, I “laid off” my risk, or “hedged” my risk to another buyer. That is the game in the world of finance. This type of transaction is done all over the world. Yet wherever I go, people come up to me and say those magic words: “You can’t do that here.” What most small investors fail to realize is that many large commercial buildings are bought and sold exactly in the manner described above. Sometimes they go through a bank, but many times ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

471:And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?” “I think so.” Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. ~ Ray Bradbury,

472:Do you consider your work to be good? I consider my work good. I enjoy doing it, which helps a lot. Unfortunately, I get a lot of feedback, constantly, from people who write me about my work. But I know when I’m “giving one from column A, one from column B.” Overall, I think my work is pretty good, but I don’t think it’s great. What do you mean by “giving one from column A and one from column B”? The rule here is there are jobs you do for “god,” and there are jobs you do for money. I try to approach everything as a “god job”—lowercase g. At the beginning of a project, I ask, “What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? How are we going to make a person fall in love?” And when we start getting questionable feedback about what we’ve done, we have to realize it’s not always possible to do the god job. That’s when I know we just have to get it done and get paid. ~ Debbie Millman,

473:Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the master-stroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six. ~ James Joyce,

474:There - the chandelier, choked with dust and webs. A single rivulet of red had trickled from the ceiling, down the central column, and out along a curving crystal arm. At its lowest point, a new pendant of blood was slowly building. 'It - it can't do that,' I stammered. 'We're inside the iron.' 'Move out of the way!' Lockwood pushed me back just as the drop fell, spattering on the floor in the center of the circle. We were all standing almost atop the iron chains. 'We've made it too big,' he said. 'The power of the iron doesn't extend into the very center. It's weak there, and this Visitor's strong enough to overcome it.' 'Adjust the chains inward-' George began. 'If we make the circle smaller,' Lockwood said, 'we'll be squeezed in a tiny space. It's scarcely midnight; we've seven hours till dawn and this thing's just gotten started. No, we've got to break out ~ Jonathan Stroud,

475:His hands glided from her waist to her back, his fingers touching the skin exposed by the straps of her dress, and Mollie shivered. “Cold?” he murmured. She shook her head. “Ah. Let’s see what happens if I…” His words trailed off as he dipped his head to her neck, slipping beneath her hair to drag his lips along the column of her neck. She gave a soft moan as his mouth opened there, softly sucking the skin between his teeth before soothing it with his tongue. “I love the way you taste right here,” he said, his hand coming up and trailing a finger along the side of her neck. “You taste clean. And sweet. You taste like Mollie.” Mollie’s eyes closed as he dipped his head again, pressing hot kisses to the sensitive skin of her neck. He pulled back, framing her face with his big hands, waiting until she opened her eyes and met his gaze. ~ Lauren Layne,

476:At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It’s great to be an Intrepid Voyager. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

477:English Thornton Here! You sons of the men Who fought with Washington at Valley Forge, And whipped Black Hawk at Starved Rock, Arise! Do battle with the descendants of those Who bought land in the loop when it was waste sand, And sold blankets and guns to the army of Grant, And sat in legislatures in the early days, Taking bribes from the railroads! Arise! Do battle with the fops and bluffs, The pretenders and figurantes of the society column And the yokel souls whose daughters marry counts; And the parasites on great ideas, And the noisy riders of great causes, And the heirs of ancient thefts. Arise! And make the city yours, And the State yours -You who are sons of the hardy yeomanry of the forties! By God! If you do not destroy these vermin My avenging ghost will wipe out Your city and your state. ~ Edgar Lee Masters,

478:He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow… This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening—had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover."… In ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,

479:BERLIN, September 27 A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious. ~ William L Shirer,

480:Jude,” she whispered as she touched his face. “I’m so frightened of this. This bind that links us. It whispers to me to take what you’re offering, but I fear the consequences. I have lived the consequences.” His fingertips traced the column of her throat down over the swells of her breasts where they lingered until her breath caught. “I am not your father, Isabella, and you are not your mother.” “I know, but—” “There are no certainties in life,” he murmured as he lowered his head and kissed the apex of her breast where her heart hammered so hard. “But I can give you this certainty. I love you. And I want you. I have wanted you for so long, and that feeling has only grown. There must be trust between us, Isabella. Passion is not enough for me. I want more from you.” “You ask for so much,” she said, then trailed off. “Not any more than I am offering you. ~ Charlotte Featherstone,

481:According to the Yogis, there are three principal nerve currents: one they call the Ida, the other the Pingala, and the middle one the Sushumna, and all these are inside the spinal column. The Ida and the Pingala, the left and the right, are clusters of nerves, while the middle one, the Sushumna, is hollow and is not a cluster of nerves. This Sushumna is closed, and for the ordinary man is of no use, for he works through the Ida and the Pingala only. Currents are continually going down and coming up through these nerves, carrying orders all over the body through other nerves running to the different organs of the body. The task before us is vast; and first and foremost, we must seek to control the vast mass of sunken thoughts which have become automatic with us. The evil deed is, no doubt, on the conscious plane; but the cause which produced the evil deed was far beyond in the realms of the unconscious, ~ Swami Vivekananda,

482:Mill. It was a battle which took half a century to win, but Mill’s rallying-cry is still impressive: I know there is an obscure feeling, a feeling which is ashamed to express itself openly – as if women had no right to care about anything, except how they may be the most useful servants of some men … This claim to confiscate the whole existence of one half of the species for the supposed convenience of the other appears to me, independently of its injustice, particularly silly.16 He ended on a dark note: I should like to have a return laid before this House of the number of women who are actually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors; and in an opposite column, the amount of the sentences passed, in those cases where the dastardly criminals did not get off altogether. As the Norton case had made clear thirty years earlier, these cases were not limited to the poorer classes. ~ A N Wilson,

483:A Critic That from _you_, neighbor! to whose vacant lot Each rhyming literary knacker scourges His cart-compelling Pegasus to trot, As folly, fame or famine smartly urges? Admonished by the stimulating goad, How gaily, lo! the spavined crow-bait prances Its cart before it-eager to unload The dead-dog sentiments and swill-tub fancies. Gravely the sweating scavenger pulls out The tail-board of his curst imagination, Shoots all his rascal rubbish, and, no doubt, Thanks Fortune for so good a dumping-station. To improve your property, the vile cascade Your thrift invites-to make a higher level. In vain: with tons of garbage overlaid, Your baseless bog sinks slowly to the devil. 'Rubbish may be shot here'-familiar sign! I seem to see it in your every column. You have your wishes, but if I had mine 'Twould to your editor mean something solemn. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

484:This truth was hammered home to me after I wrote a column expressing frustration with how hard it is to use the classroom experience to learn how to be good. A veterinarian named Dave Jolly sent me an email that cut to the chase: The heart cannot be taught in a classroom intellectually, to students mechanically taking notes…. Good, wise hearts are obtained through lifetimes of diligent effort to dig deeply within and heal lifetimes of scars…. You can’t teach it or email it or tweet it. It has to be discovered within the depths of one’s own heart when a person is finally ready to go looking for it, and not before. The job of the wise person is to swallow the frustration and just go on setting an example of caring and digging and diligence in their own lives. What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted. ~ David Brooks,

485:That went well," Christina murmured to him. "Pffaww," he agreed. "They're a pair! They don't like anything. They don't even like the dachshund. Who doesn't like dachshunds? They're little parcels of dog-shaped goodness. I've known Jalabite Hegemon ships give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithomorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund supersoldiers fleeing the destruction of their homeworld. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town - two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defence systems fired on them. There's a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine." He shrugged, and she found herself nodding: schoolboy error. ~ Nick Harkaway,

486:When you learn the rules and the vocabulary of investing and begin to build your asset column, I think you’ll find that it’s as fun a game as you’ve ever played. Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. But have fun. Most people never win because they’re more afraid of losing. That is why I found school so silly. In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. The same is true for learning to ride a bike. I still have scars on my knees, but today I can ride a bike without thinking. The same is true for getting rich. Unfortunately, the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

487:Orchid Anatomy This evening's study the anatomy of the orchid, the greenhouse glows—jut of glass at the third story of the science building—a small, tended jungle thriving in its humid room. Wearing identical lab aprons, they lean over the misting table or peer into the daintier air-orchids in order to name and sketch the parts, committing to memory the sepials, inner whorl of petals, the column where male and female fuse, and the sticky, stigmatic surface of the pouting lip where birds, moths, and bees would land if allowed this sterile world. Each wall even the vaulted roof a canvas, all their breathing dissolves into the ordered atmosphere of this one, sustained season—until, if seen from the outside, the glass's weeping would render them recognizable but changed, their bodies, braids, aprons, the green leaves running into a pleasing, impressionistic bleed. ~ Claudia Emerson,

488:The moonlight was still floating on the waters, when men, looking from numberless decks towards the east, were able to hail the dawn. There was a summer breeze blowing fair from the land. At a quarter before five a gun from the Britannia gave the signal to weigh. The air was obscured by the busy smoke of the engines, and it was hard to see how and whence due order would come; but presently the Agamemnon moved through, and with signals at all her masts – for Lyons was on board her, and was governing and ordering the convoy. The French steamers of war went out with their transports in tow, and their great vessels formed the line. The French went out more quickly than the English, and in better order. Many of their transports were vessels of very small size; and of necessity they were a swarm. Our transports went out in five columns of only thirty each. Then – guard over all – the English war-fleet, in single column, moved slowly out of the bay.50 ~ Orlando Figes,

489:...in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust. ~ Victor Hugo,

490:We may also conceive of the evolution of humanity as a vast army, toiling slowly along its line of march in a great column; and, scouting far ahead of the main body, solitary outriders, swift-mounted, light-armed and without baggage, exploring the way for the rest; spiritual guerrillas, whom Paul referred to as those born out of due season. From time to time we shall see some swift-footed soul draw ahead of the great army of mankind and push on alone into the wilderness. For a period his path is solitary, but presently he catches up with the far-flung line of the scouts, and if able to give the password that proves him to be of their body, is given his place in the ranks of that adventurous company, a boundary-rider of evolution, alone on patrol, yet not out of touch with his comrades, for there are signaling-points along the line, and at certain seasons all gather in to the council. ~ Dion Fortune,

491:The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: Government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible—except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle. This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and “reporters”—call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis. This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists. Through multiple overlapping outlets covering radio, television, and the Internet, they relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultraconservative dogma disguised as news and infotainment—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. ~ Al Gore,

492:going on? She did not know, but before the sun went down she would find out. It had something to do with that pamphlet she found in the house—sitting there before God and everybody—something to do with citizens’ councils. She knew about them, all right. New York papers full of it. She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash. Atticus and Hank were pulling something, they were there merely to keep an eye on things—Aunty said Atticus was on the board of directors. She was wrong. It was all a mistake; Aunty got mixed up on her facts sometimes. . . . She slowed up when she came to the town. It was deserted; only two cars were in front of the drugstore. The old courthouse stood white in the afternoon glare. A black hound ~ Harper Lee,

493:Wishing for someone to talk to, some warm human hand to cling to, she walked across the giant chessboard, searching blindly through the crowd of immobile figures... until she saw a dark form leaning indolently against a white marble column. Her heart began to hammer, and her steps slowed as she was filled with a rush of excitement that heated her skin and made her pulse beat in urgent rhythm. It was Simon Hunt, walking toward her with a slight smile on his face. He caught her before she could retreat, and bent to whisper in her ear. "Will you dance with me now?" "I can't," she said breathlessly, struggling in his tightening embrace. "Yes, you can," he urged gently, his mouth hot and tender as it moved across her face. "Put your arms around me..." As she writhed in his embrace, he laughed softly and kissed her until she was limp and helpless against him. "Queen is now subject to capture," he murmured, drawing back to stare at her with deviltry in his eyes. "You're in danger, Annabelle... ~ Lisa Kleypas,

494:The Yoga system of Patanjali is known as the Eightfold Path.9 The first steps are (1) yama (moral conduct), and (2) niyama (religious observances). Yama is fulfilled by noninjury to others, truthfulness, nonstealing, continence, and noncovetousness. The niyama prescripts are purity of body and mind, contentment in all circumstances, self-discipline, self-study (contemplation), and devotion to God and guru. The next steps are (3) asana (right posture); the spinal column must be held straight, and the body firm in a comfortable position for meditation; (4) pranayama (control of prana, subtle life currents); and (5) pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from external objects). The last steps are forms of yoga proper: (6) dharana (concentration), holding the mind to one thought; (7) dhyana (meditation); and (8) samadhi (superconscious experience). This Eightfold Path of Yoga leads to the final goal of Kaivalya (Absoluteness), in which the yogi realizes the Truth beyond all intellectual apprehension. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,

495:How the moon triumphs through the endless nights! How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel Their thick processions of supernal lights Around the blue vault obdurate as steel! And men regard with passionate awe and yearning The mighty marching and the golden burning, And think the heavens respond to what they feel. Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream Are glorified from vision as they pass The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream; Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass To restless crystals; cornice dome and column Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn; Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass. With such a living light these dead eyes shine, These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze We read a pity, tremulous, divine, Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays: Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender; There is no heart or mind in all their splendour, They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze. ~ James Thomson,

496:If there was a moment that determined the course of my future, I'm pretty sure this was it. I had two somewhat simple choices. I could make a run for it and go back to Uncle Al's. Back to the bonfire where my cousins and dear sister would be drinking and revel in the normalcy of a Saturday night and forget I ever went to this horrid place and ran into this weirdo. Or I could go with said weirdo up the stairs in this decrepit old lighthouse, which was most likely condemned and unsafe, towards some unknown person (or thing) that was walking around, potentially waiting to murder us in horrific ways. It didn't seem like a very hard decision to make. In fact, I think 99.7% of people in the right frame of mind would have picked from column A and gone on with their merry lives. But for some freaking crazy reason, I thought that maybe, just maybe I should go with this stranger up those kelp-ridden stairs and toward the lair of unimaginable horror. You know, because it was the more interesting alternative. ~ Karina Halle,

497:It had begun to dawn on him that this same sweet pretty little head was a “good head for figures.” In fact, a much better one than his own and the knowledge was disquieting. He was thunderstruck to discover that she could swiftly add a long column of figures in her head when he needed a pencil and paper for more than three figures. And fractions presented no difficulties to her at all. He felt there was something unbecoming about a woman understanding fractions and business matters and he believed that, should a woman be so unfortunate as to have such unladylike comprehension, she should pretend not to. Now he disliked talking business with her as much as he had enjoyed it before they were married. Then he had thought it all beyond her mental grasp and it had been pleasant to explain things to her. Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual masculine indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain. ~ Margaret Mitchell,

498:As the uneasiness and reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures the vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo...you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say...'I now see that I spent most my life doing in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked. ~ C S Lewis,

499:Athena stood in the middle of the road with her arms crossed and a look on her face that made me think Uh-oh. She'd changed out of her armor, into jeans and a white blouse, but she didn't look any less warlike. Her gray eyes blazed. "Well, Percy," she said. "You will stay mortal." "Um, yes, ma'am." "I would know your reasons." "I want to be a regular guy. I want to grow up. Have, you know, a regular high school experience." "And my daughter?" "I couldn't leave her," I admitted, my throat dry. "Or Grover," I added quickly. "Or-" "Spare me." Athena stepped close to me, and I could feel her aura of power making my skin itch. "I once warned you, Percy Jackson, that to save a friend you would destroy the world. Perhaps I was mistaken. You seem to have saved both your friends and the world. But think very carefully about how you proceed from here. I have given you the benefit of the doubt. Don't mess up." Just to prove her point, she erupted in a column of flame, charring the front of my shirt. ~ Rick Riordan,

500:It's true," He whispered. Suddenly, I was aware of how close we were standing, so close I could touch the square of his jaw or the chiseled planes of his face. "What's true?" "You are as beautiful as I remembered. Nefer," he said, and his breath came quickly. "Perhaps you want to simply remain my friend, but when I was gone, all I could think about was you. When I was supposed to be thinking about the rebellion, or how my men would find fresh water in the desert, all I could think of was how you wanted to be hidden away in the Temple of Hathor. Nefer," he said passionately, "you can't be a priestess." I wanted to close my eyes and step into the shelter of his embrace, but beyond the column the entire court was gathering. "But if I'm not to be a priestess," I asked him, "where will my place be in Thebes?" I held my breath, waiting for the right answer to come, willing it into his heart. Then he took me in his arms and brushed his lips against mine. "With me," he said firmly. "As my queen. ~ Michelle Moran,

501:Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective. This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle. ~ Marilyn French,

502:Interesting outfit.” Clearly unabashed, she merely glanced down at herself, slicked long-fingered, bloodred-tipped hands over her hips and thighs. Then laughed low in her throat. “I know. It’s a little over the top, isn’t it? But I’ve got a hot date tonight and zero time to go home to change.” Shock reverberated in his gut and zinged down the nerve rich column of his spinal cord. Taking a hot step forward, he demanded before he could stop himself, “With who?” She gave him a cool look, clearly wondering what the hell business he thought it was of his. Still, she answered him, which he hadn’t actually expected. “Eduardo,” she said, drawing the syllables out, her lips caressing them as if they were made of Godiva chocolates. “He’s an—” Cutting herself off, she shook her head. “Well. You don’t give a rat’s rear end who he is.” “Sure I do,” he forced himself to say in a bored tone, dismayed to discover that part of him was seriously tempted to grab those spandex- wrapped arms and shake the information out of her. ~ Susan Andersen,

503:Self proclamation of authoritative titles is a common phenomenon among religious and/or occult sect leaders. A cursory survey of this primarily 20th century phenomenon will instantly reveal a multitude of self-declared Masters, High Priests, gurus, Ipsissimi, Bhaghwani, etc.. I am pleased that I cannot count myself among such types. Legitimate religious teachers and scholars know that a genuine spiritual leader is one whose calling to lead is first noticed by those outside of him or herself based on certain qualities, abilities, and actions and then must subsequently be accepted by the individual in question as his or her destiny. This contrasts with those whose will to lead is born simply out of the mundane wish to be a leader. In such cases the goal being to reap the rewards a title brings without the hard work and the innate, manifest qualities which validate the position; in short what might be considered a 'false prophet'." --“From the Eye of the Storm” (Zeena's column for the SLM) Volume II – Winter Issue (2003): “One Year Later... ~ Zeena Schreck,

504:Not in the mood for pasta?” He narrowed those bold blue eyes to give her a critical study. “You must’ve hit your head harder than we thought.” “I was going to do it—get dinner, I mean. One of the fancy things you like, because—Hell.” She gave up, hurried to him to wrap her arms around him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was so pissed off at what happened, at myself, I didn’t think.” He stroked a hand down her hair first, then gave the choppy ends a quick tug. “I’m not angry with you.” “I know. You could be, but you’re not. So I have to be even sorrier.” “Your logic is fascinating, and elusive.” “I can’t pay you back with sex or salt-crusted sea bass or whatever because you’re too busy taking care of me. So now I’ve got this black mark in my column against the bright shiny star in yours, and—” He tipped her head up. “Are we keeping score?” “No. Maybe. Shit.” “How am I doing?” “Undisputed champ.” “Good. I like to win.” He brushed her bangs back to study the injury himself. “You’ll do. Let’s eat. ~ J D Robb,

505:On the other hand, if what you really want to get out of the trip is a nice, slow, meandering crawl through an endless column of bumper-to-bumper traffic that winds through a garish wonderland of T-shirt stores and fast-food joints, and you like to stop in the middle of the road now and then so you can gape at some roadside sign and memorize the words to tell all your friends back in Ohio, while everyone in all the cars behind you swelters in the July sun that no air-conditioning can ever overcome, and all the drivers of those other cars stare anxiously at the needle on the temperature gauge of their car as it climbs steadily into the red and they snarl at you through the blinding glare of the windshield and wish you would simply burst into flames and disappear from the face of the earth even though there are a thousand cars filled with people just like you on the road ahead waiting to take your place and start the whole hideously slow crawl all over again—if that is your idea of a dream vacation in the Promised Land, come to the Keys! Paradise awaits! ~ Jeff Lindsay,

506:The Fathers Our fathers all were poor, Poorer our fathers' fathers; Beyond, we dare not look. We, the sons, keep store Of tarnished gold that gathers Around us from the night, Record it in this book That, when the line is drawn, Credit and creditor gone, Column and figure flown, Will open into light. Archaic fevers shake Our healthy flesh and blood Plumped in the passing day And fed with pleasant food. The fathers' anger and ache Will not, will not away And leave the living alone, But on our careless brows Faintly their furrows engrave Like veinings in a stone, Breathe in the sunny house Nightmare of blackened bone, Cellar and choking cave. Panics and furies fly Through our unhurried veins, Heavenly lights and rains Purify heart and eye, Past agonies purify And lay the sullen dust. The angers will not away. We hold our fathers' trust, Wrong, riches, sorrow and all Until they topple and fall, And fallen let in the day. 24 ~ Edwin Muir,

507:If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” or Martin Luther King’s statement that “our scientific power has outgrown our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men,” or Malcolm’s “We can work together with all other leaders and organizations, in harmony and unity, to eliminate evil in our community.” The saying “It takes a whole village to raise a child” (which I had seen in a little newsletter identifying it as an African proverb) really caught on. After about a year organizations all over the country began using it, and Hillary Rodham Clinton recently adapted it for the title of her book. Jimmy also began writing a regular column for the newsletter, raising all sorts of questions, such as, “Why are we at war with one another.?” “How will we make a living?” “What Time is it in Detroit and the World?”1 Clementine’s deeply felt appeals, Jimmy’s challenging questions, and my inclusion of news of community-building activities all helped to create the image of SOSAD as not just another organization but the spearhead of a new movement. ~ Grace Lee Boggs,

508:Do you repent?” asked a deep, solemn voice, which caused Danglars’ hair to stand on end. His feeble eyes endeavored to distinguish objects, and behind the bandit he saw a man enveloped in a cloak, half lost in the shadow of a stone column. “Of what must I repent?” stammered Danglars. “Of the evil you have done,” said the voice. “Oh, yes; oh, yes, I do indeed repent.” And he struck his breast with his emaciated fist. “Then I forgive you,” said the man, dropping his cloak, and advancing to the light. “The Count of Monte Cristo!” said Danglars, more pale from terror than he had been just before from hunger and misery. “You are mistaken—I am not the Count of Monte Cristo.” “Then who are you?” “I am he whom you sold and dishonored—I am he whose betrothed you prostituted—I am he upon whom you trampled that you might raise yourself to fortune—I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger—I am he whom you also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you, because he hopes to be forgiven—I am Edmond Dantes! ~ Alexandre Dumas fils,

509:When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

510:Burning Off They're burning off at the Rampadells, The tawny flames uprise, With greedy licking around the trees; The fierce breath sears our eyes. From cores already grown furnace-hot The logs are well alight! We fling more wood where the flameless heart Is throbbing red and white. The fire bites deep in that beating heart, The creamy smoke-wreaths ooze From cracks and knot-holes along the trunk To melt in greys and blues. The young horned moon has gone from the sky, And night has settled down; A red glare shows from the Rampadells, Grim as a burning town. Full seven fathoms above the rest A tree stands, great and old, A red-hot column whence fly the sparks, One ceaseless shower of gold. All hail the king of the fire before He sway and crack and crash To earth - for surely tomorrow's sun Will see him white fine ash. The king in his robe of falling stars, No trace shall leave behind, And where he stood with his silent court, The wheat shall bow to the wind. ~ Dorothea Mackellar,

511:...had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies: a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,

512:I began shopping at the bankruptcy attorney’s office, or the courthouse steps. In these shopping places, a $75,000 house could sometimes be bought for $20,000 or less. For $2,000, which was loaned to me from a friend for 90 days for $200, I gave an attorney a cashier’s check as a down payment. While the acquisition was being processed, I ran an ad advertising a $75,000 house for only $60,000 and no money down. The phone rang hard and heavy. Prospective buyers were screened and once the property was legally mine, all the prospective buyers were allowed to look at the house. It was a feeding frenzy. The house sold in a few minutes. I asked for a $2,500 processing fee, which they gladly handed over, and the escrow and title company took over from there. I returned the $2,000 to my friend with an additional $200. He was happy, the home buyer was happy, the attorney was happy, and I was happy. I had sold a house for $60,000 that cost me $20,000. The $40,000 was created from money in my asset column in the form of a promissory note from the buyer. Total working time: five hours. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

513:He lifted an eyebrow at his self-indulgence, made a note to himself to spend a little extra time in the Disciplines that evening, and moved to the terminal. Its chiming stopped as he touched it: another second and the terminal had read his EEG through his skin, recognizing the pattern. The screen filled with column on column of blue symbology, a list of calls to the flat since he left. Most of them were unimportant compared to the one name and commcode at the far right-hand side of the list, the most recent, the one message that had caused the “urgent” chime. He had rather been hoping that the embassy would not need him further today: but hope was illogical. Life was about dealing with what was. He touched the screen, and the computer dialed the code. He waited a moment or so before speaking. The link was scrambled, and before communications began, the computer had to agree with the one on the other end as to the eighty-digit “satchel” crypton they would use to keep the link secure. He had the utmost confidence in the ciphering process. Ninety-six standard years before, he had invented it. He ~ Diane Duane,

514:Sudden Movements My father's head has become a mystery to him. We finally have something in common. When he moves his head his eyes get big as roses filled with the commotion of spring. Not long ago he was a man who had tomato soup for lunch and dusted with the earnestness of a gun fight. Now he's a man who sits at the table trying to breathe in tiny bites. When they told him his spinal column is closing, I thought of all the branches he's cut with loppers and piled and burned in the fall, the pinch of the blades on the green and vital pulp. Surgeons can fuse vertebrae, a welders art, and scrape the ring through which the soul-wires flow as a dentist would clean your teeth. And still it could happen, one turn of his head toward a hummingbird, wings keeping that brittle life afloat, working hard against the fall, and he might freeze in that pose of astonishment, a man estranged from the neck down, who can only share with his body the silence he's pawned on his children as love. ~ Bob Hicok,

515:There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction.He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him. He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. ~ Douglas Adams,

516:There’s an old wooden sign in the church my dad grew up in. It still hangs on the left wall behind the pulpit. Maybe you’ve seen one like it. The sign has slats that display numbers announcing the church’s critical statistics. There is a column for “Last Week” and a column for “This Week.” Every Sunday you can check out how things are progressing in three areas: attendance, the number of visitors, and total offerings. I can remember, as a kid, looking up at the numbers and thinking, Things are getting better. Or during some weeks, Things are getting worse. That sign has been hanging there for at least thirty years, but I’m not sure it truly communicates whether or not the church is actually winning. Most churches do not have a reliable system for defining and measuring what success looks like at every level of the organization. Instead they post some general statistics that give them a vague sense of progress or failure as a church, and they go through the motions of continuing to do ministry the way they always have, productive or not. Thus it is possible for a church to become very efficient at doing ministry ineffectively. ~ Andy Stanley,

517:Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.” Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters. Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy. The eighteenth-century ~ Gregory Benford,

518:When I find a pair of pants I like, I buy a lot of them. Really a lot. Perhaps there’s something genetic here; I collect pants like my Uncle Morris collected meat. I do this because pants wear out. Is this part of a plot by the clothing manufacturers to keep us buying more? Some people think so. In my Sound and Fury file, I find an old (September 20, 1982) Ann Landers column about pantyhose manufacturers who deliberately create products that self-destruct after a week instead of a year because “the no-run nylons, which they know how to make, would put a serious crimp in their sales.” Ann concludes that she and her readers are “at the mercy of a conspiracy of self-interest.” One wonders whose self-interest Ann has in mind. Surely it’s not the manufacturers’. If there were a cost-justified way to do it, any self-interested manufacturer would switch from selling one-week nylons at $1 to selling one-year nylons at $52. That pleases the customers (whose pantyhose budget doesn’t change but who make fewer trips to the store), maintains the manufacturer’s revenue, and—because he produces about 98 percent fewer nylons—cuts his costs considerably. ~ Steven E Landsburg,

519:You could fall suddenly into the void the dead go to: I would be comforted if you would bequeath me your hands. Only your hands would continue to exist, detached from you, unexplainable like those of marble gods turned into the dust and the limestone of their own tomb. They would survive your actions, the wretched bodies they caressed. They would no longer serve as intermediaries between you and things: they themselves would be changed into things. Innocent again now, since you would no longer be there to turn them into your accomplices, sad like greyhounds without masters, disconcerted like archangels to whom no god gives orders, your useless hands would rest on the lap of darkness. Your open hands incapable of giving or taking the slightest joy would have let me slump like a broken doll. I kiss the wrists of these indifferent hands you will no longer pull away from mine: I stroke the blue artery, the blood column that once spurted continuously like a fountain from the ground of your heart. With little sobs of contentment, I rest my head like a child between these palms filled with the stars, the crosses, the precipices of my previous fate. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar,

520:Today’s computers use transistors. When used in computers, transistors basically function the same way relays do, but (as we’ll see) they’re much faster and much smaller and much quieter and use much less power and are much cheaper. Building an 8-Bit Adder still requires 144 transistors (more if you replace the ripple carry with a look-ahead carry), but the circuit is microscopic. Chapter 13. But What About Subtraction? After you’ve convinced yourself that relays can indeed be wired together to add binary numbers, you might ask, “But what about subtraction?” Rest assured that you’re not making a nuisance of yourself by asking questions like this; you’re actually being quite perceptive. Addition and subtraction complement each other in some ways, but the mechanics of the two operations are different. An addition marches consistently from the rightmost column of digits to the leftmost column. Each carry from one column is added to the next column. We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. For example, let’s look at a typical borrow-laden subtraction ~ Charles Petzold,

521:My friends,” he began with good cheer, “how do you like this way of coming back into the Union?” He went on to explain that he and his fellow soldiers had felt the need of a summer outing, “and thought we would take it at the North.” They might be conquerors, he said—“this part of Pennsylvania is ours today; we’ve got it, we hold it, we can destroy it, or do what we please with it”—but they were also Christian gentlemen and would act accordingly. “You are quite welcome to remain here and to make yourselves entirely at home—so long as you behave yourselves pleasantly and agreeably as you are doing now. Are we not a fine set of fellows?” With his honeyed words he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, only to be interrupted by a querulous, impatient Jubal Early. Old Jube forced his way through the onlookers to confront Extra Billy and snarled, “General Smith, what the devil are you about? Stopping the head of this column in this cursed town!” Not the least taken aback, Extra Billy replied, “Having a little fun, General, which is good for all of us, and at the same time teaching these people something that will be good for them and won’t do us any harm. ~ Stephen W Sears,

522:The Spring Equinox Now is the pause between asleep and awake: Two seasons take A colour and quality each from each as yet. The new stage-set Spandril, column and fan of spring is raised against the winter backdrop Murrey and soft; Now aloft The sun swings on the equinoctial line. Few flowers yet shine: The hellebore hangs a clear green bell and opulent leaves above dark mould; The light is cold In arum leaves, and a primrose flickers Here and there; the first cool bird-song flickers in the thicket. Clouds arc pale as the pollen from sallows; March fallows are white with lime like frost. This is the pause between asleep and awake: The pause of contemplation and of peice, Before the earth must teem and the heart ache. This is the child's pause, before it sees That the choice of one way has denied the other ; Must choose the either, or both, of to care and not to care; Before the light or darkness shall discover Irreparable loss; before it must take Blame for the creature caught in the necessary snare: Receiving a profit, before it holds a snare. ~ Anne Barbara Ridler,

523:Fame If I should die, to-day, To-morrow, maybe, the world would see Would waken from sleep, and say, "Why here was talent! why here was worth! Why here was a luminous light o' the earth. A soul as free As the winds of the sea: To whom was given A dower of heaven. And fame, and name, and glory belongs To this dead singer of living songs. Bring hither a wreath, for the bride of death!" And so they would praise me, and so they would raise me Mayhap, a column, high over the bed Where I should be lying, all cold and dead. But I am a living poet! Walking abroad in the sunlight of God, Not lying asleep, where the clay worms creep, And the cold world will not show it, E'en when it sees that my song should please; But sneering says: "Avaunt, with thy lays Do not sing them, and do not bring them Into this rustling, bustling life. We have no time, for a jingling rhyme, In this scene of hurrying, worrying strife." And so I say, there is but one way To win me a name, and bring me fame. And that is, to die, and be buried low, When the world would praise me, an hour or so. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

524:The term "stood" descriptively represents their obstinacy, and stiff-neckedness, wherein they harden themselves and make their excuses in words of malice, having become incorrigible in their ungodliness. For "to stand," in the figurative manner of Scripture expression, signifies to be firm and fixed: as in Romans 14:4, "To his own master he standeth or falleth: yea, he shall be holden up, for God is able to make him stand." Hence the word "column" is by the Hebrew derived from their verb "to stand," as is the word statue among the Latins. For this is the very self-excuse and self-hardening of the ungodly—their appearing to themselves to live rightly, and to shine in the eternal show of works above all others. With respect to the term "seat," to sit in the seat, is to teach, to act the instructor and teacher; as in Matthew 23:2, "The scribes sit in Moses' chair." They sit in the seat of pestilence, who fill the church with the opinions of philosophers, with the traditions of men, and with the counsels of their own brain, and oppress miserable consciences, setting aside, all the while, the word of God, by which alone the soul is fed, lives, and is preserved. Martin Luther, 1536-1546. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,

525:The Wise And Good 'O father, I saw at the church as I passed The populace gathered in numbers so vast That they couldn't get in; and their voices were low, And they looked as if suffering terrible woe.' ''Twas the funeral, child, of a gentleman dead For whom the great heart of humanity bled.' 'What made it bleed, father, for every day Somebody passes forever away? Do the newspaper men print a column or more Of every person whose troubles are o'er?' 'O, no; they could never do that-and indeed, Though printers might print it, no reader would read. To the sepulcher all, soon or late, must be borne, But 'tis only the Wise and the Good that all mourn.' 'That's right, father dear, but how can our eyes Distinguish in dead men the Good and the Wise?' 'That's easy enough to the stupidest mind: They're poor, and in dying leave nothing behind.' 'Seest thou in mine eye, father, anything green? And takest thy son for a gaping marine? Go tell thy fine tale of the Wise and the Good Who are poor and lamented to babes in the wood.' And that horrible youth as I hastened away Was building a wink that affronted the day. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

526:roughly divided in half between a column of vertebral bodies and a column of arches.Functionally, this arrangement very clearly evolved to contend with the dual requirements of stability and plasticity. The anterior column of vertebral bodies deals with weight-bearing, compressive forces, whereas the posterior column of arches deals with the tensile forces generated by movement. Within each column, in the dynamic relationship of bone to soft tissue, there is a balance of sthira and sukha. The vertebral bodies transmit compressive forces to the discs, which resist compression by pushing back. The column of arches transmits tension forces to all the Figure 2.7 Viewed from the side, attached ligaments (figure 2.8), which resist stretching the spine divided into an anterior by pulling back. In short, the structural elements column of vertebral bodies and of the spinal column are involved in an intricate dance discs, and a posterior column of arches and processes. that protects the central nervous system by neutralizing the forces of tension and compression. Discs and Ligaments If you look deeper, you can also see how sthira and sukha are revealed in the components of an intervertebral disc: The tough, fibrous layers ~ Anonymous,

527:But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what? ~ Jojo Moyes,

528:Dear Amy: Eighteen years ago, I left my career to stay home. Now, I have two seniors heading to college and too much free time. I am happily married to a man who has a successful business and works from home. I have friends and volunteer, but I'm bored. I don't want to return to work full time because my youngest is still in school. I spend time thinking about small businesses I could start or jobs to apply for, but I can't seem to pick one and get going. How can I decide what to do and actually make it happen? In the Doldrums You don't need to map out the rest of your life right now; you need only to get unstuck. Start by applying for part-time jobs, any part-time job. It might take you a while to get something because you've been out of the workforce. If it were me, I'd try to work the lunch shift at a busy diner. The tiring workday, responsibilities and glancing interaction with people from all walks of life could be good for you and might inspire your next phase. Read "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It," by Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith (Dell). The authors offer thoughtful and practical suggestions for getting unstuck. Amy's column appears seven days a ~ Anonymous,

529:First, let’s focus on those critical first steps. Define three steps for each dream that will get you closer to its actualization. Set actions—simple, well-defined actions—for now, tomorrow (complete before 11 A.M.) and the day after (again completed before 11 A.M.). Once you have three steps for each of the four goals, complete the three actions in the “now” column. Do it now. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes or less. If not, rachet it down. If it’s the middle of the night and you can’t call someone, do something else now, such as send an e-mail, and set the call for first thing tomorrow. If the next stage is some form of research, get in touch with someone who knows the answer instead of spending too much time in books or online, which can turn into paralysis by analysis. The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same. It’s not hard. Other options include setting a meeting or phone call with a trainer, mentor, or salesperson to build momentum. Can you schedule a private class or a commitment that you’ll feel bad about canceling? Use guilt to your advantage. Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now! ~ Timothy Ferriss,

530:The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over there faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a mono-toned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes. When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the make up artist fug through a suite case of brushes and plowed through hundreds of tubes of flesh colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed with a needle and thread strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light brown locks, creating a thick full mane of shimmering gold. The model had brought her own chef, who cooked her spinach soup from scratch. The soup was fed to her by one of her lackeys, who existed solely for this purpose. The blond boy stood in front of her, blowing on the soup and then feeding it to her from a small silver child's spoon, just big enough to fit between her lips. the model's mouth was barely open, maybe a quarter of an inch wide, so that she would not crack the flesh colored paint. ~ Margot Berwin,

531:Everything and anything is raw fodder for creating heat or light. It all depends on the connections you make and insights you surface to buttress your opinion. More broadly speaking, though, I told Bojia, column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When I say your own values, priorities, and aspirations, I mean the things that you care about most and aspire to see implemented most intensely. That value set helps you determine what is important and worth opining about, as well as what you will say. It is okay to change your mind as an opinion writer; what is not okay is to have no mind—to stand for nothing, or for everything, or only for easy and safe things. An opinion writer has to emerge from some framework of values that shapes his or her thinking about what should be supported or opposed. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

532:By midafternoon soft snow is falling, muffling four voices that rise from the cardinal points around the circle, north, south, east, and west,intoning names from registration lists obtained by Rainer from museum archives in Berlin--long lists that represent but tiny fractions of that fraction of new prisoners who survived, however briefly, the first selections on this platform and were tattooed with small blue numbers. The impeccable lists include city and country of origin, arrival date, and date of death, not infrequently on that same day or the next. Column after column, page after page, of the more common family names ascend softly from the circle of still figures to be borne away on gusts of wind-whirled snow. Schwartz, Herschel; Schwartz, Isaac A.; Schwartz, Isaac D.; Schwartz, Isidor--Who? Isidor? You too? The voices are all but inaudible as befits snuffed-out identities that exist only on lists, with no more reality than forgotten faces in old photo albums--Who's this bald guy in the back? Stray faces of no more significance than wind fragments of these names of long ago, of no more substance than this snowflake poised one moment on his pen before dissolving into voids beyond all Knowing. In Paradise 87-88 ~ Peter Matthiessen,

533:As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.” “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!” “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. ~ Thomas Pynchon,

534:With a loud whoosh he stretched his wings out,and then deftly wrapped them tight around her, a cradle of soft white holding the two of them fast. "You really believe it?" she whispered. "That someday I'll live through this?" "With all my heart and soul," he said, cupping her face in his hands, pulling his wings tighter around them both. "I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time." By then,Luce was broiling hot. She cried out from the pain,thrashing in Daniel's arms as the heat overwhelmed her. She was burning his skin, but he never let her go. The moment had come. The starshot was tucked inside her dress,and this-right now-was when she would have used it.But she was never going to give up.Not on Daniel. Not when she knew,no matter how hard it got,that he would never give up on her. Her skin began to blister.The heat was so brutal,she could do nothing but shiver. And then she could only scream. Layla combusted,and as the flames engulfed her body,Luce felt her own body and the soul they were sharing untwine,seeking the fastest escape from the unforgiving heat. The column of fire grew taller and wider until it filled the room and the world,until it was everything,and Layla was nothing at all. ~ Lauren Kate,

535:Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited? Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”? I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth. In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense. ~ Norman Spinrad,

536:The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious, incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright, dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and the Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either hand. I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue, like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest--the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered races--how could they count? My heels were iron as I gazed on them in their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil of our will. ~ Jack London,

537:Don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending one form of love over another. I don’t know if prudent or reckless love is the better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the sexier, married or unmarried love the stronger. I may be tempted towards didacticism, but this isn’t an advice column. I can’t tell you whether or not you’re in love. If you need ask, then you probably aren’t, that’s my only advice… But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world (that nonsense about Cleopatra’s nose is strictly for sentimentalists), but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don’t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don’t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you’re wearing. Of course, we don’t fall in love to help out with the world’s ego problem; yet this is one of love’s surer effects.’ Love and truth, that's the vital connection, love and truth. [. . .] How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. ~ Julian Barnes,

538:May Seventeenth Wergeland's statue on May seventeenth Saw the procession. And as its rear-guard, Slow marching masses, Strong men, and women with flower-decked presence; Come now the peasants, come now the peasants. Österdal's forest's magnificent chieftain Bore the old banner. Soon as we see it Blood-red uplifted, Greet it the thousands in thought of its story: That is our glory, that is our glory! Never that lion bore crown that was foreign, Never that cloth was by Dannebrog cloven. I saw the future When with that banner by Wergeland's column Peasants stood solemn, peasants stood solemn. Most of our loss in the times that have vanished, Most of our victories, most of our longing, Most that is vital: Deeds of the past and the future's bold daring Peasants are bearing, peasants are bearing. Sorely they suffered for sins once committed, But they arise now. Here in the Storting Stalwart they prove it, All, as they come from our land's every region, Peasants Norwegian, peasants Norwegian. Hold what they won, with a will to go farther; Whole we must have independence and honor! All of us know it: Wergeland's summer bears soon its best flower,Power in peasants, peasants in power. 81 ~ Bjornstjerne Bjornson,

539:Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog. ~ Clive Barker,

540:It isn’t so terrible. You did a good job of stitching.” She continued to examine his work. “There will be a scar, of course, but not much of one I think.” “I regret there will be any,” he said gruffly. With a fresh length of cloth, he rebandaged her arm. By the time he was done, she felt oddly shaky yet unwilling to move away from him. He dropped his hands but continued standing very close to her, so near that she could feel the warmth of his body. She tried not to stare at his chest but that left her to focus on the powerful column of his throat and above to the chiseled line of his jaw, which appeared to be clenched. “This may not have been a good idea,” he murmured. Their eyes met. Her toes curled, as though they clung to the very edge of a precipice. On a thread of sound, she said, “Which part? My coming to London, trying to see you, stowing away, getting hurt? Or perhaps we can say it was not a good idea for Royce to set out for Akora to begin with? We could lay all this at his door.” Alex tried very hard not to smile. She watched the struggle he waged and knew the moment he lost. His grin, for all that it was reluctant, was also quite devastating. She wondered if he knew it. Quietly, he said, “It seems we will have to find your brother and tell him how badly he has behaved.” “Now that is a very good idea. ~ Josie Litton,

541:A few more years of the same, though, and I got used to it: I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morroco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars, off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown of convertible currency, and nobody blinked an eye, nobody shed a tear, not even I myself, no, all I did was stand there smiling as I watched the train hauling those priceless libraries off to Switzerland and Austria for one crown in convertible currency a kilo. By then I had mustered the strength to look upon misfortune with composure, to still my emotions, by then I had begun to understand the beauty of destruction and I loaded more and more freight cars, and more and more trains left the station heading west at one crown per kilogram, and as I stood there staring after the red lantern hanging from the last car, as I stood there leaning on a lamppost like Leonardo da Vinci, who stood leaning on a column and looking on while French soldiers used his statue for target practice, shooting away horse and rider bit by bit, I thought how Leonardo, like me, standing and witnessing such horrors with complete composure, had realized even than that neither the heavens are humane nor is any man with a head on his shoulders. ~ Bohumil Hrabal,

542:In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi. Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise. Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis’ mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay. ~ M John Harrison,

543:What have I done? What have I become? I am a monster.” “Mary,” whispered Jesus, “you are forgiven.” A wave of peace came over her like nothing she had ever felt before. In the cave, she had experienced release. But now she felt the tendrils of healing gently digging deeper into her, like a new tree planting its roots into her heart, the true Tree of Life. But there was so much darkness in her. It was as if her soul was stuck in deep sludge. She looked up at him and thought, “How could this be? How could I be cleansed from so vile a heart and life?” As if he heard her thoughts, he said, “Let us go. It is time you were baptized, so you can finally believe what is already true of you.” “But what about Gaia? What about the angels?” Jesus looked over at the colossal tree, a good hundred feet away from them. He said to her, “I have two baptisms I perform. Water and fire.” He looked up into the heavens. Mary saw a column of fire pour out from the sky onto the mighty tree and engulf it in flames. She heard the crackling sounds of burning timber, felt the wave of hot air blow over her. As it burned, she thought she heard the spiritual piercing shrieks with wailing and gnashing of teeth. It felt more inside her head than from the tree, which she knew was the source of the pain. She understood at that moment that the baptism of water was salvation and the baptism of fire was judgment. ~ Brian Godawa,

544:The articles were true,” Myron said. “And you’ve known it all along.” “What we did or did not know is not your concern.” Myron shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So let me see if I got this straight. You have a serial psycho out there who snatches people out of the blue and torments their families. You want to keep a lid on it because if word got out to the public, you’d have a panic situation. Then the psycho goes directly to Stan Gibbs and suddenly the story is in the public domain …” Myron’s voice died off, seeing that his logic trail had hit a major pothole. He frowned and forged ahead. “I don’t know how that old novel or the plagiarism charges tie in. But either way, you decided to ride it. You let Gibbs get fired and disgraced, probably in part because you were pissed off that he upset your investigation. But mostly”—he spotted what he thought was a clearing—“but mostly you did it so you could watch him. If the psycho contacted him once, you figured, he’d probably do it again—especially if the articles had been discredited.” Kimberly Green said, “Wrong.” “But close.” “No.” “The kidnappings Gibbs wrote about took place, right?” She hesitated, gave Ford an eye check. “We can’t verify all of his facts.” “Jesus, I’m not taking a deposition here,” Myron said. “Was his column true, yes or no?” “We’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn.” “You haven’t told me squat. ~ Harlan Coben,

545:Magnus,” he said. “What on earth happened to James?” “What happened?” Magnus asked musingly. “Well, let me see. He stole a bicycle and rode it, not using his hands at any point, through Trafalgar Square. He attempted to climb Nelson’s Column and fight with Nelson. Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpentine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, ‘Ducks, embrace me as your king!’” “Dear God,” said Will. “He must have been vilely drunk. Tessa, I can bear it no longer. He is taking awful risks with his life and rejecting all the principles I hold most dear. If he continues making an exhibition of himself throughout London, he will be called to Idris and kept there away from the mundanes. Does he not realize that?” Magnus shrugged. “He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, an innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself. I will add that I do not believe his admiration of my person, dazzling though I am, to be sincere. He told me I was a beautiful, sparkling lady. Then he abruptly collapsed, naturally in the path of an oncoming train from Dover, and I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in the bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand. ~ Cassandra Clare,

546:He skimmed his knuckles over her jaw before roaming lower to the satiny column of her neck, then back up again. "Surely you could stay for dinner? You said yourself your aunt is away. I can't believe you would prefer eating alone." Her frown increased. "No, but-" "Then stay. My cook sets an excellent table. Delicious fare designed to tempt any palate. Tell me your favorites and I'll send word to her to make them especially for you." Sliding his arm around her back, he bent and pressed his mouth to the base of her throat. "Do you like roast beef?" "Ahh, I..." "Too heavy, you're right," he stated, dropping kisses against her skin in a leisurely pattern. "What about venison? Unless you are worried it might be gamey. Hmm, I agree." Her eyelids fluttered, one hand coming up to catch in the fabric of his coat. Working his way up, he paused and breathed a gentle gust of warm, brandy-scented air into her ear. She shuddered, a tiny moan escaping her lips. "Partridge, perhaps? In a sweet vermouth with plump raisins and orange peel. How does that sound?" "Delightful." He smiled, wondering if she was referring to the food or his kisses. He definitely hoped the latter. "Or I know," he whispered, brushing his mouth ever so lightly against hers. "Lobster and oysters. Light and delicate, with a taste as fresh as the sea. Shall we try that? I could feed them to you bite by delectable bite. ~ Tracy Anne Warren,

547:The Cenotaph Not yet will those measureless fields be green again Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed; There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain, Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread. But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled, We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head. And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, tinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs, From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred. In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers To lovers—to mothers Here, too, lies he: Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed! Only, when all is done and said, God is not mocked and neither are the dead For this will stand in our Marketplace— Who’ll sell, who’ll buy (Will you or I Lie each to each with the better grace)? While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face As they drive their bargains, is the Face Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face. ~ Charlotte Mary Mew,

548:An 'Exhibit' Goldenson hanged! Well, Heaven forbid That I should smile above him: Though truth to tell, I never did Exactly love him. It can't be wrong, though, to rejoice That his unpleasing capers Are ended. Silent is his voice In all the papers. No longer he's a show: no more, Bear-like, his den he's walking. No longer can he hold the floor When I'd be talking. The laws that govern jails are bad If such displays are lawful. The fate of the assassin's sad, But ours is awful! What! shall a wretch condemned to die In shame upon the gibbet Be set before the public eye As an 'exhibit'? His looks, his actions noted down, His words if light or solemn, And all this hawked about the town So much a column? The press, of course, will publish news However it may get it; But blast the sheriff who'll abuse His powers to let it! Nay, this is not ingratitude; I'm no reporter, truly, Nor yet an editor. I'm rude Because unruly 156 Because I burn with shame and rage Beyond my power of telling To see assassins in a cage And keepers yelling. 'Walk up! Walk up!' the showman cries: 'Observe the lion's poses, His stormy mane, his glooming eyes. His-hold your noses!' How long, O Lord, shall Law and Right Be mocked for gain or glory, And angels weep as they recite The shameful story? ~ Ambrose Bierce,

549:And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. ~ Victor Hugo,

550:At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that's all the little procession amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections. Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen. ~ Arundhati Roy,

551:George, who are you seeing these days?” “Well, let’s see. I’ve been dating around, you might call it. There’s a visiting professor at the college I see when she’s in town. She travels quite a lot. And a neighbor lady and I like to have dinner in the city. She writes an ‘about town’ column for the paper and we enjoy some of the best restaurants, all on her tab, but that’s not the best part about her. There’s a waitress in Tacoma I like, a music teacher out on Bainbridge Island and a professor of veterinary medicine. She’s the most trouble and I think I like her best.” Noah’s eyes were round. He swallowed. “You’re seeing five women?” “Well, on and off. Each one of them is completely irresistible in her own way.” “Don’t any of them want more of you than an occasional date? Like a serious relationship?” George sighed and looked upward. “I’m not opposed to the idea of marrying again, Noah. But, as of this moment, the only woman I’m seeing I would consider is the vet, Sharon. But she’s forty-four. I think that might be a tad risky, don’t you?” Then he grinned. “Although we do jog together on Sunday mornings. She’s keeping up very well.” Noah burst out laughing. This was what he loved about George and always had—he was so unafraid to live life. He held nothing back. “They used to call men like you rogues,” Noah said. “Not men like me,” he protested. “I care very much for these ladies. They are, each one, wonderful women. I treat them with genuine affection and respect.” Noah ~ Robyn Carr,

552:I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I'd reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from which I could coast out of gear to a soft stop. Now I wonder why not. Why not? But then duty drove me forward like a soldier. I said it was time for "the Big Book," the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky. Duty drove me the way it drives men into marriage. Begetting is expected of us, and in those days of heavy men in helmets the seed was certain, and wanted only the wind for a womb, or any slit; yet what sprang up out of those foxholes we fucked with our fists but our own frightened selves? with a shout of pure terror, too. That too—that too was expected; it was expected even of flabby maleless men like me. And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?...my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn't been said as repeatedly as I dreamed by dream of glory, unless it was what I've said? What could I have explained where no reason exists and no cause is adequate; what body burned to a crisp could I have rebelieved was bacon, if I had not taken the tack I took? ~ William H Gass,

553:There is a question that has been haunting me,’ he replied over the sound of the first horns announcing column formation. ‘How does a mortal win over a god? Has it ever happened before, even? Has the old order been overturned? Or is this just … special circumstance? A moment unique in all of history?’ ‘You have won the Worm of Autumn to her cause, Priest?’ At Lostara’s question, Banaschar frowned. He studied her for a moment, and then glanced at Ruthan Gudd. ‘You look shocked,’ he said to him. ‘Is it that I somehow possessed that power? Or is it the very idea that what we do in this mortal world – with our lives, with our will – could make a god kneel before us?’ Then he shook his head. ‘But you both misunderstood me. I was not speaking of myself at all. I cannot win over a god, even when I am the last priest in that god’s House. Don’t you understand? It’s her. She did it. Not me.’ ‘She spoke to your god?’ Banaschar grunted. ‘No, Lostara. She rarely speaks at all – you of all people should know that by now. No. Instead, she simply refused to waver from her path, and by that alone she has humbled the gods. Do you understand me? Humbled them.’ Ruthan Gudd shook his head. ‘The gods are too arrogant to ever be humbled.’ ‘A year ago, lying drunk on my cot, I would have agreed with you, Captain. So tell me now, will you fight for her?’ His eyes were thinned as he studied Banaschar, and then he said, ‘With all my heart.’ The gasp that came from Lostara was almost a sob. ~ Steven Erikson,

554:The Yoga system of Patanjali is known as the Eightfold Path. 9 The first steps are (1) yama (moral conduct), and (2) niyama (religious observances). Yama is fulfilled by noninjury to others, truthfulness, nonstealing, continence, and noncovetousness. The niyama prescripts are purity of body and mind, contentment in all circumstances, self-discipline, self-study (contemplation), and devotion to God and guru. The next steps are (3) asana (right posture); the spinal column must be held straight, and the body firm in a comfortable position for meditation; (4) pranayama (control of prana, subtle life currents); and (5) pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from external objects). The last steps are forms of yoga proper: (6) dharana (concentration), holding the mind to one thought; (7) dhyana (meditation); and (8) samadhi (superconscious experience). This Eightfold Path of Yoga leads to the final goal of Kaivalya (Absoluteness), in which the yogi realizes the Truth beyond all intellectual apprehension. “Which is greater,” one may ask, “a swami or a yogi?” If and when oneness with God is achieved, the distinctions of the various paths disappear. The Bhagavad Gita, however, has pointed out that the methods of yoga are all-embracing. Its techniques are not meant only for certain types and temperaments, such as those few persons who incline toward the monastic life; yoga requires no formal allegiance. Because the yogic science satisfies a universal need, it has a natural universal appeal. A true yogi may remain dutifully in the world; ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,

555:Yes, I'll marry you." And then his hands were in her hair, scattering her hairpins, and his lips were on hers, stealing her breath, and she was touching him- this remarkable man whom she'd loved for so long and who was finally, finally hers. Callie sighed into Ralston's mouth- noting that he tasted of scotch and something more exotic, more male- and a feeling of complete and utter elation coursed through her. This was Ralston, her future husband, and he was making her feel so warm and wonderful and alive. And then he was kissing down the column of her neck, whispering her name like a litany as he lifted her arms over his shoulders and set his lips to the expanse of white skin above the neck of her gown. Callie gasped as his strong hands spread wide across her torso, stealing up to cup her breasts in a gesture of complete and utter possession. "This gown," he said, the words coming thick and liquid, "is sinful." Callie couldn't help her smile as he leaned back to watch her breasts lift against the satin edge of the dress. "Do you think so?" "Indeed. It is made to drive men crazy... to reveal all your luscious curves"- he ran a finger beneath the satin lazily, just far enough to graze the edge of a nipple- "without showing off anything. It's a torturous viewing experience," he added, wickedly, as he pulled the edge of the gown lower, exposing the straining tip of one breast to the cool air and his hot mouth. He suckled briefly, until Callie was writhing against him, then, releasing her, he said, "When we are married, I shall buy you one in every color. ~ Sarah MacLean,

556:P lanning a wedding can be murder. Planning weddings for a living is nothing short of suicide. “Is there a patron saint for wedding consultants? Because I think after this wedding, I just might meet the requirements.” I stood near the top of the wide marble staircase that swept down the middle of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s central foyer. Below me, dozens of tuxedo-clad waiters scurried around the enormous hall filled end to end with tables and gold ladder-backed chairs. After having draped ivory chiffon into swags on all forty tables, I massaged the red indentations left on my fingers by the heavy pins. “Annabelle, darling, I may be a lapsed Catholic, but I’m pretty sure you have to be dead to qualify for sainthood.” Richard Gerard has been one of my closest friends since I arrived in Washington, D.C. three years ago and started “Wedding Belles.” At the time he’d been the only top caterer who’d bother talking to a new wedding planner. Now I worked with him almost exclusively. “The wedding isn’t over yet.”“At least your suffering hasn’t been in vain.” Richard motioned at the room below us. “It’s divine.” The museum’s enormous hall did look magical. The side railings of the staircase were draped with a floral garland, leading to a pair of enormous white rose topiaries flanking the bottom of the stairs. Amber light washed each of the three-story limestone columns bordering the room, and white organza hung from the ceiling, creating sheer curtains that were tied back at each column with clusters of ivory roses. “I just hope the MOB is happy.” My smile disappeared as I thought ~ Laura Durham,

557:According to a renowned expert on mourning etiquette, even though attending a play or a dance is out of the question, it’s permissible to go to a concert, museum exhibition, or private art gallery.” Devon proceeded to read aloud from the letter. “This learned lady writes, One fears that the prolonged seclusion of young persons may encourage a lasting melancholy in such malleable natures. While the girls must pay appropriate respect to the memory of the late earl, it would be both wise and kind to allow them a few innocent recreations. I would recommend the same for Lady Trenear, whose lively disposition, in my opinion, will not long tolerate a steady diet of monotony and solitude. Therefore you have my encouragement to--” “Who wrote that?” Kathleen demanded, snatching the letter from his hand. “Who could possibly presume to--” She gasped, her eyes widening as she saw the signature at the conclusion of the letter. “Dear God. You consulted Lady Berwick?” Devon grinned. “I knew you would accept no one’s judgment but hers.” He bounced Kathleen a little on his knee. The slim, supple weight of her was anchored amid the rustling layers of skirts and underskirts, the pretty curves of her body corseted into a narrow column. With every movement she made, little whiffs of soap and roses floated around them. She reminded him of one of those miniature sweet-smelling bundles that women tucked into dressers and wardrobes. “Come,” he said, “London isn’t such an appalling idea, is it? You’ve never stayed at Ravenel House--and it’s in far better condition than this heap of ruins. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

558:Charlie sat beside Spider on the edge of the cliff, in the moonlight, his legs dangling over the side. "You know," he said, "you used to be a part of me. When we were kids." Spider put his head on one side. "Really?" "I think so." "Well, that would explain a few things." He held out his hand: a seven-legged clay spider sat on the back of his fingers, tasting the air. "So what now? Are you going to take me back or something?" Charlie's brow crinkled. "I think you've turned out better than you would have done if you were part of me. And you've had a lot more fun." Spider said, "Rosie. Tiger knows about Rosie. We have to do something." "Of course we do," said Charlie. It was like bookkeeping, he thought: you put entries in one column, deduct them from another, and if you've done it correctly, everything should come out right at the bottom of the page. He took his brother's hand. They stood up and took a step forward, off the cliff – –and everything was bright– A cold wind blew between the worlds. Charlie said, "You're not the magical bit of me, you know." "I'm not?" Spider took another step. Stars were falling now by the dozen, streaking their way across the dark sky. Someone, somewhere, was playing high sweet music on a flute. Another step, and now distant sirens were blaring. "No," said Charlie. "You're not. Mrs. Dunwiddy thought you were, I think. She split us apart, but she never really understood what she was doing. We're more like two halves of a starfish. You grew up into a whole person. And so," he said, realizing it was true as he said it, "did I. ~ Neil Gaiman,

559:What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone. Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never get much farther that that. Let be, let be. ~ Annie Proulx,

560:Night-time, regarded as a separate sphere of creation, is a universe in itself. The material nature of man, upon which philosophers tell us that a column of air forty-five miles in height continually presses, is wearied out at night, sinks into lassitude, lies down, and finds repose. The eyes of the flesh are closed; but in that drooping head, less inactive than is supposed, other eyes are opened. The unknown reveals itself. The shadowy existences of the invisible world become more akin to man; whether it be that there is a real communication, or whether things far off in the unfathomable abyss are mysteriously brought nearer, it seems as if the impalpable creatures inhabiting space come then to contemplate our natures, curious to comprehend the denizens of the earth. Some phantom creation ascends or descends to walk beside us in the dim twilight: some existence altogether different from our own, composed partly of human consciousness, partly of something else, quits his fellows and returns again, after presenting himself for a moment to our inward sight; and the sleeper, not wholly slumbering, nor yet entirely conscious, beholds around him strange manifestations of life—pale spectres, terrible or smiling, dismal phantoms, uncouth masks, unknown faces, hydra-headed monsters, undefined shapes, reflections of moonlight where there is no moon, vague fragments of monstrous forms. All these things which come and go in the troubled atmosphere of sleep, and to which men give the name of dreams, are, in truth, only realities invisible to those who walk about the daylight world. The dream-world is the Aquarium of Night. ~ Victor Hugo,

561:The Cost Of Praise THIS morning came a man to me, his smile was wonderful to see, He shook my hand and doffed his hat then promptly took a chair; Said he, ' I read your stuff each day, and I have just dropped in to say You have a line of humor that delightful is and rare. My dear wife reads it through and through, my aunts and uncles like it, too, The little children cry for it when they get out of bed, Your column's full of common sense, your childhood verses are immense, The equal of them, I am sure I've never, never read. 'Now, you 're a man of great renown, your name is known in every town From Boston unto 'Frisco, from Atlanta to Duluth; I've met some of our famous men, I wish to grasp your hand again; Don't think I flatter you, O no, I 'm telling you the truth. 'I let him once more take my hand, the while I felt my chest expand, My head began to bulge until I couldn't wear my hat; 'Ah me,' I sighed, ' through all my days, I've never heard such words of praise, I wish I knew a hundred men who 'd talk to me like that.' ' And now,' said he, ' ere I forget, I want to show a Balzac set That Jolliers have printed just especially for you; There are but twenty-six of these, observe this small prospectus, please, This is the finest work that any publisher can do. For you we make this sacrifice, just sixty dollars is the price, Five dollars down and three a month—you will not miss the ' mon.'' I signed away my salary. Henceforth, when men come praising me I 'm going to grab my hat and coat and exit on the run. ~ Edgar Albert Guest,

562:The second project is in the field of metaphysics: with the aim of showing that, in the words of Professor H. M. Tooten, “evolution is a hoax”, Olivier Gratiolet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of all the imperfections and inadequacies to which the human organism is heir: vertical posture, for example, gives man only a precarious balance: muscular tension alone keeps him upright, thus causing constant fatigue and discomfort in the spinal column, which, although sixteen times stronger than it would have been were it straight, does not allow man to carry a meaningful weight on his back; feet ought to be broader, more spread out, more specifically suited to locomotion, whereas what he has are only atrophied hands deprived of prehensile ability; legs are not sturdy enough to bear the body’s weight, which makes them bend, and moreover they are a strain on the heart, which has to pump blood about three feet up, whence come swollen feet, varicose veins, etc.; hip joints are fragile and constantly prone to arthrosis or serious fractures; arms are atrophied and too slender; hands are frail, especially the little finger, which has no use, the stomach has no protection whatsoever, no more than the genitals do; the neck is rigid and limits rotation of the head, the teeth do not allow food to be grasped from the sides, the sense of smell is virtually nil, night vision is less than mediocre, hearing is very inadequate; man’s hairless and unfurred body affords no protection against cold, and, in sum, of all the animals of creation, man, who is generally considered the ultimate fruit of evolution, is the most naked of all. ~ Georges Perec,

563:Yet . . . why can’t we all just walk at the same pace as Ron and stay together? I’m watching the line when something up ahead catches my eye. I see Davey slow down for a few seconds. He’s adjusting his packstraps. In front of him, Ron continues onward, oblivious. A gap of ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty feet opens up. Which means the entire line has grown by 20 feet. That’s when I begin to understand what’s happening. Ron is setting the pace. Every time someone moves slower than Ron, the line lengthens. It wouldn’t even have to be as obvious as when Dave slowed down. If one of the boys takes a step that’s half an inch shorter than the one Ron took, the length of the whole line could be affected. But what happens when someone moves faster than Ron? Aren’t the longer or faster steps supposed to make up for the spreading? Don’t the differences average out? Suppose I walk faster. Can I shorten the length of the line? Well, between me and the kid ahead of me is a gap of about five feet. If he continues walking at the same rate, and if I speed up, I can reduce the gap—and maybe reduce the total length of the column, depending upon what’s happening up ahead. But I can only do that until I’m bumping the kid’s rucksack (and if I did that he’d sure as hell tell his mother). So I have to slow down to his rate. Once I’ve closed the gap between us, I can’t go any faster than the rate at which the kid in front of me is going. And he ultimately can’t go any faster than the kid in front of him. And so on up the line to Ron. Which means that, except for Ron, each of our speeds depends upon the speeds of those in front of us in the line. ~ Eliyahu M Goldratt,

564:May I help you?" She did not look up. "You've miscalculated column F." What in hell? "I have not." She pushed her glasses up her nose and tucked a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear, entirely focused on the ledger. "You have. The proper calculation should be one hundred and twelve thousand, three hundred forty-six and seventeen pence." Impossible. He stood, moving to look over her shoulder. "That's what it says." She shook her head, placing one long finger on the tabulation line. He noticed the tip of the finger was slightly crooked, leaning a touch to the right. "You've written one hundred twelve thousand, three hundred, forty-five and seventeen pence. You-" She looked up at him, eyes owl-like behind her spectacles as she took in his height and his bare chest. "You- you've lost a quid." He bent over her, deliberately crowding her and enjoying the way her breath caught at his nearness. "That is a six." She cleared her throat and looked again. "Oh." She leaned in and checked the number again. "I suppose you've lost your handwriting skills, instead," she said dryly, and he chuckled as she reached for a pencil and repaired the number. He watched, riveted to the callus at the tip of her second finger, before he whispered low in her ear, "Are you an accounting fairy sent in the dead of night to check my figures?" She leaned away from the whisper and and turned to look at him. "It's one o'clock in the afternoon," she said, matter-of-factly, and he had an intense desire to take her spectacles from her face and kiss her senseless, just to see what this odd young woman would say. ~ Sarah MacLean,

565:Jubilo To Arthur Mizener Hit mus be now de Kingdom comiri And de year of Jubilo . . . Tail-spinning from the shelves of sky See how it dips and tacks and tosses To cast a beam in the mind's eye: Who will count the gains and the losses On the Day of Jubilo? Public accountant with double entry Enter in red war's final cast In the black column the pacing sentry, Old women picking the hogs' mast For the Day of Jubilo Lean to the crowded air and hear, Eavesdropper, how it goes inside Your own deaf and roaring ear: Boys caress the machines they ride On the Day of Jubilo After the dry and sticking tongue After our incivility Who will inflate the poet's lung Gone flat of this indignity Till the Day of Jubilo? Scholar, no dog will have your day For all your capital's run out, Wry baby in wet disarrayScholar, prepare your meagre clout For the Day of Jubilo Under the slip and slide of day Think, at the end you'll never be Trapped in a fox-hole of decay Nor snip nor glide of history 36 After the Day of Jubilo All our jubilant eyes are raised, Jubilo. Over the barbican On the great Day pure and dazed, Empty of heart the empty man Of the Day of Jubilo Then for the Day of Jubilo The patient bares his arm at dawn To suck the blood's transfusing glow And then when all the blood is gone (For the Day of Jubilo) Salt serum stays his arteries Sly tide threading the ribs of sand, Till his lost being dries, and cries For that unspeakable salt land Beyond the Day of Jubilo. ~ Allen Tate,

566:The Ladder [Dedicated to ] "I will arise and go unto my father" MALKUTH Dark, dark all dark! I cower, I cringe. Only ablove me is a citron tinge As if some echo of red, gold and lue Chimed on the night and let its shadow through. Yet I who am thus prisoned and exiled Am the right heir of glory, the crowned child. I match my might against my Fate's I gird myself to reach the ultimate shores, I arm myself the war to win:Lift up your heads, O mighty gates! Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors! The King of Glory shall come in. TAU I pass from the citrine:deep indigo Is this tall column. Snakes and vultures bend Their hooted hate on him that would ascend. O may the Four avail me ! Ageless woe, Fear, torture, throng the treshold. LO1 The end Of Matter ! The immensity of things Let loose -new laws, new beings, new conditions;Dire chaos; see ! these new-fledged wings Fail in its vagueness and initiations. Only my circle saves me from the hate Of all these monsters dead yet animate. I match, &c. YESOD 80 Hail, thou full moon, O flame of Amethyst ! Stupendous mountain on whose shoulders rest The Eight Above. More stable is my crest Than thine -and now I pierce thee, veil of mist! Even as an arrow from the war-bow springs I leap -my life is set with loftier things. I match, & c. SAMECH ( and the crossing of the Path of Pe) Now swift, thou azure shaft of fading fire, Pierce through the rainbow! Swift, O swift! how streams The world by! Let Sandalphon and his quire Of Angels ward me! Ho! what ~ Aleister Crowley,

567:Man embarks upon old age unprepared. For as long as childhood, adolescence, youth and maturity last, man dwells on this earth with his own generation, with those who are a little older and a little younger than he is, as if they are all traveling together in one company. At school, at work, in the street, in a meeting, in a shop, in the bathhouse and the movie theater, by and large he always meets the same people–some he knows well, some he knows to say hello to and some he has simply seen somewhere at some time or other. And some are older than he is, some are younger, and yet others are just like him. A man can be imagined as walking along in the middle of a long column: there are still plenty of people ahead of him and people keep joining in behind. The man walks on and on, and suddenly he realizes that he has reached the front and there is no one left ahead of him. There are no more people who are twenty years older, ten years older, five years older, and even most of his contemporaries have died. And no matter which way he turns, everywhere he is the oldest. He looks back over his shoulder and there are many people who are younger, but they have grown up after the man glancing back has already stopped working; he has never associated with them and does not know them. And so it turns out that an old man, although he still has other people around him, is alone. Surrounded by the buzz of other people’s lives. Other people’s ways, passions, interests. And he doesn’t even completely understand the way they speak. And the old man begins to feel as if he has been transported to a foreign country even though he has stayed put in the same place all his life. ~ Vladimir Voinovich,

568:[Dedicated to K.M.Ward] "I will arise and go unto my father" MALKUTH Dark, dark all dark! I cower, I cringe. Only above me is a citron tinge As if some echo of red, gold and lue Chimed on the night and let its shadow through. Yet I who am thus prisoned and exiled Am the right heir of glory, the crowned child. I match my might against my Fate's I gird myself to reach the ultimate shores, I arm myself the war to win:- Lift up your heads, O mighty gates! Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors! The King of Glory shall come in. TAU I pass from the citrine eep indigo Is this tall column. Snakes and vultures bend Their hooted hate on him that would ascend. O may the Four avail me ! Ageless woe, Fear, torture, throng the threshold. LO1 The end Of Matter ! The immensity of things Let loose -new laws, new beings, new conditions;- Dire chaos; see ! these new-fledged wings Fail in its vagueness and initiations. Only my circle saves me from the hate Of all these monsters dead yet animate. I match, &c. YESOD Hail, thou full moon, O flame of Amethyst ! Stupendous mountain on whose shoulders rest The Eight Above. More stable is my crest Than thine -and now I pierce thee, veil of mist! Even as an arrow from the war-bow springs I leap -my life is set with loftier things. I match, & c. SAMECH ( and the crossing of the Path of Pe) Now swift, thou azure shaft of fading fire, Pierce through the rainbow! Swift, O swift! how streams The world by! Let Sandalphon and his quire Of Angels ward me! Ho! what ~ Aleister Crowley, The Ladder ,

569:March 31 MORNING “With His stripes we are healed.” — Isaiah 53:5 PILATE delivered our Lord to the lictors to be scourged. The Roman scourge was a most dreadful instrument of torture. It was made of the sinews of oxen, and sharp bones were inter-twisted every here and there among the sinews; so that every time the lash came down these pieces of bone inflicted fearful laceration, and tore off the flesh from the bone. The Saviour was, no doubt, bound to the column, and thus beaten. He had been beaten before; but this of the Roman lictors was probably the most severe of His flagellations. My soul, stand here and weep over His poor stricken body. Believer in Jesus, can you gaze upon Him without tears, as He stands before you the mirror of agonizing love? He is at once fair as the lily for innocence, and red as the rose with the crimson of His own blood. As we feel the sure and blessed healing which His stripes have wrought in us, does not our heart melt at once with love and grief? If ever we have loved our Lord Jesus, surely we must feel that affection glowing now within our bosoms. “See how the patient Jesus stands, Insulted in His lowest case! Sinners have bound the Almighty’s hands, And spit in their Creator’s face.” “With thorns His temples gor’d and gash’d Send streams of blood from every part; His back’s with knotted scourges lash’d. But sharper scourges tear His heart.” We would fain go to our chambers and weep; but since our business calls us away, we will first pray our Beloved to print the image of His bleeding self upon the tablets of our hearts all the day, and at nightfall we will return to commune with Him, and sorrow that our sin should have cost Him so dear. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,

570:In my two memos to Bojia I explained that there is no set formula for writing a column, no class you attend, and that everyone does it differently to some degree. But there were some general guidelines I could offer. When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. But how do you go about generating heat or light? Where do opinions come from? I am sure every opinion writer would offer a different answer. My short one is that a column idea can spring from anywhere: a newspaper headline that strikes you as odd, a simple gesture by a stranger, the moving speech of a leader, the naïve question of a child, the cruelty of a school shooter, the wrenching tale of a refugee. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

571:Clear, With Light, Variable Winds The fountain bent and straightened itself In the night wind, Blowing like a flower. It gleamed and glittered, A tall white lily, Under the eye of the golden moon. From a stone seat, Beneath a blossoming lime, The man watched it. And the spray pattered On the dim grass at his feet. The fountain tossed its water, Up and up, like silver marbles. Is that an arm he sees? And for one moment Does he catch the moving curve Of a thigh? The fountain gurgled and splashed, And the man's face was wet. Is it singing that he hears? A song of playing at ball? The moonlight shines on the straight column of water, And through it he sees a woman, Tossing the water-balls. Her breasts point outwards, And the nipples are like buds of peonies. Her flanks ripple as she plays, And the water is not more undulating Than the lines of her body. 'Come,' she sings, 'Poet! Am I not more worth than your day ladies, Covered with awkward stuffs, Unreal, unbeautiful? What do you fear in taking me? Is not the night for poets? I am your dream, 63 Recurrent as water, Gemmed with the moon!' She steps to the edge of the pool And the water runs, rustling, down her sides. She stretches out her arms, And the fountain streams behind her Like an opened veil. ***** In the morning the gardeners came to their work. 'There is something in the fountain,' said one. They shuddered as they laid their dead master On the grass. 'I will close his eyes,' said the head gardener, 'It is uncanny to see a dead man staring at the sun.' ~ Amy Lowell,

572:Well, I’d say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then – motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.’ Montag sat in bed, not moving. ‘And because they had mass, they became simpler,’ said Beatty. ‘Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?’ ‘I think so.’ Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. ‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.’ ‘Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded. ‘Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary résumé. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. ~ Ray Bradbury,

573:My old friend, what are you looking for? After years abroad you’ve come back with images you’ve nourished under foreign skies far from you own country.’ ‘I’m looking for my old garden; the trees come to my waist and the hills resemble terraces yet as a child I used to play on the grass under great shadows and I would run for hours breathless over the slopes.’ ‘My old friend, rest, you’ll get used to it little by little; together we will climb the paths you once knew, we will sit together under the plane trees’ dome. They’ll come back to you little by little, your garden and your slopes.’ ‘I’m looking for my old house, the tall windows darkened by ivy; I’m looking for the ancient column known to sailors. How can I get into this coop? The roof comes to my shoulders and however far I look I see men on their knees as though saying their prayers.’ ‘My old friend, don’t you hear me? You’ll get used to it little by little. Your house is the one you see and soon friends and relatives will come knocking at the door to welcome you back tenderly.’ ‘Why is your voice so distant? Raise your head a little so that I understand you. As you speak you grow gradually smaller as though you’re sinking into the ground.’ ‘My old friend, stop a moment and think: you’ll get used to it little by little. Your nostalgia has created a non-existent country, with laws alien to earth and man.’ ‘Now I can’t hear a sound. My last friend has sunk. Strange how from time to time they level everything down. Here a thousand scythe-bearing chariots go past and mow everything down ~ George Seferis,

574:ON HER WAY home from the restaurant, Rylann’s cell phone rang. For a moment, as she dug around in her purse to find it, she wondered if it would be Kyle, calling her about the Scene and Heard column. She could practically hear his low, teasing voice already. Just calling to check up on my favorite brunette bombshell, counselor. Thought I’d see if you’d be up for round four tonight. Rylann finally found her phone. Oh. Just her mother. “Mom…hi,” she answered. “Looks like I was right to warn you about that Kyle Rhodes.” Rylann stopped at a four-way intersection, immediately on high alert. How could her mother, down in Florida, possibly know anything? So she played it cool. “Not sure what you mean, Mom.” “I was just reading the Trib online,” Helen said. “The Twitter Terrorist made the Scene and Heard column again.” “You read Scene and Heard?” Rylann asked. “Sure. How else am I supposed to keep up with all the local gossip while we’re down here for the winter?” And by winter, she meant early May. “I haven’t seen this morning’s column,” Rylann said. And technically, that was true—she’d only heard it. “I was busy this morning, then went to lunch with Rae. I’m just walking home now.” “Apparently, he was spotted at some hot new nightclub. Leaving with a mysterious brunette bombshell in a red dress. Probably some skank he met that night.” Then her mother changed the subject, cheerfully moving on. “Anyway, what’s new with you, sweetie? Did you do anything exciting last night?” Yes. Kyle Rhodes. “Um, nothing special. Rae and I went out for a few drinks.” Rylann figured it was best to gloss over the rest of the details, seeing how her mother had just called her a skank. ~ Julie James,

575:Dude, what're you waiting for?" Carlos calls. "Plant one on her." I lift my eyes and am shocked to see Brandon is staring at my mouth. He swallows audibly and flicks his gaze to mine. the emotions darkening the soft green color are too confusing to name. Does he want to back out? An exhale of breath leaves Brandon's lips, almost like a laugh, and he scoots closer to me on the blanket. I twist my legs under myself, sitting tall as I face him. He cups my chin and tilts it toward him, drowning me in the now dark-green depths of his eyes, the cologne I gave him for his birthday filling my head. It's woodsy and yummy and I always loved how it smelled on the store testers, but on Brandon, it's even sexier. My eyes flutter closed, and I inhale again, this time slowly. Goose bumps prickle my arms, and my head gets fuzzy. Brandon slides his hand down the column of my neck and brings the other up, threading his fingers through the hair at my nape. His breath fans across my cheek, and everything south of my bellybutton squeezes tight. When his mouth first meets mine, it's hesitant, questioning. But as I move my lips with his, he quickly grows bolder, coaxing them apart. Desire, pure and raw, electrifies my veins as his tongue sweeps my mouth. A whimpering sound springs from my chest, and instinctively, I wrap my arms around his neck, tugging him closer. Needing more. My teeth graze his full bottom lip, and I pull it, sucking on it gently. He moans and knots his fingers in my hair, and a thrill dances down my back. Brandon is an amazing kisser, just as I knew he would be. I have no control over my body's reactions. I lose myself in his lips, his tongue, and his strong arms, forgetting time and space and even my surroundings... ~ Rachel Harris,

576:The time has come for us to become madmen in your chain, to burst our bonds and become estranged from all; To yield up our souls, no more to bear the disgrace of such a soul, to set fire to our house, and run like fire to the tavern. Until we ferment, we shall not escape from this vat of the world- how then shall we become intimate with the lip of that flagon and bowl? Listen to the words from a madman: do not suppose that we become true men until we die. It is necessary that we should become more inverted than the tip of a comb in the top of the twisted tress of felicity; Spread our wings and pinions like a tree in the orchard, if like a seed we are to be scattered on this road of annihilation. Though we are of stone, we shall become like wax for you seal; though we be candles, we shall become a moth in the track of your light. Though we are kings, we shall travel straight as rocks for your sake, that we may become blessed through your queen on this chessboard. In the face of the mirror of love we must not breathe a word of ourselves; we must become intimate with your treasure when we are changed to waste. Like the tale of the heart we must be without bread or ending, that we may become dwellers in the heart of lovers like a tale. If he acts like the seeker, we shall attain to being sought; if he acts the key, we shall become all the wards of the lock. If Mostafa does not make his way and couch in our hearts, it is meet that we should lament and become like the Wailing Column. No, be silent; for one must observe silence towards the watch- man when we go towards the pavilion by night. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, The Time Has Come For Us To Become Madmen In Your Chain ,

577:It’s a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to something else. The pebble in the stream, the warp in the weft; countless aeons ago a bubble formed in a flow of molten mineral within Father Earth. Within that pocket, nurtured by incomprehensible pressures and bathed in water and fire, crystals grew. This one’s the size of a city. Which is probably why someone built a city in this one. You stand before a vast, vaulted cavern that is full of glowing crystal shafts the size of tree trunks. Big tree trunks. Or buildings. Big buildings. They jut forth from the walls in an utterly haphazard jumble: different lengths, different circumferences, some white and translucent and a few smoky or tinged with purple. Some are stubby, their pointed tips ending only a few feet away from the walls that grew them—but many stretch from one side of the vast cavern into the indistinct distance. They form struts and roads too steep to climb, going in directions that make no sense. It is as if someone found an architect, made her build a city out of the most beautiful materials available, then threw all those buildings into a box and jumbled them up for laughs. And they’re definitely living in it. As you stare, you notice narrow rope bridges and wooden platforms everywhere. There are dangling lines strung with electric lanterns, ropes and pulleys carrying small lifts from one platform to another. In the distance a man walks down a wooden stairway built around a titanic slanted column of white; two children play on the ground far below, in between stubby crystals the size of houses. Actually, some of the crystals are houses. They have holes cut in them—doors and windows. You can see people moving around inside some of them. Smoke curls from chimney holes cut in pointed crystal tips. ~ N K Jemisin,

578:Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite. This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers. These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me. ~ Charles de Lint,

579:The ancient rishi Patanjali6 defines yoga as “neutralization of the alternating waves in consciousness.”7 His short and masterly work, Yoga Sutras, forms one of the six systems of Hindu philosophy. In contradistinction to Western philosophies, all six Hindu systems8 embody not only theoretical teachings but practical ones also. After pursuing every conceivable ontological inquiry, the Hindu systems formulate six definite disciplines aimed at the permanent removal of suffering and the attainment of timeless bliss. The later Upanishads uphold the Yoga Sutras, among the six systems, as containing the most efficacious methods for achieving direct perception of truth. Through the practical techniques of yoga, man leaves behind forever the barren realms of speculation and cognizes in experience the veritable Essence. The Yoga system of Patanjali is known as the Eightfold Path.9 The first steps are (1) yama (moral conduct), and (2) niyama (religious observances). Yama is fulfilled by noninjury to others, truthfulness, nonstealing, continence, and noncovetousness. The niyama prescripts are purity of body and mind, contentment in all circumstances, self-discipline, self-study (contemplation), and devotion to God and guru. The next steps are (3) asana (right posture); the spinal column must be held straight, and the body firm in a comfortable position for meditation; (4) pranayama (control of prana, subtle life currents); and (5) pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from external objects). The last steps are forms of yoga proper: (6) dharana (concentration), holding the mind to one thought; (7) dhyana (meditation); and (8) samadhi (superconscious experience). This Eightfold Path of Yoga leads to the final goal of Kaivalya (Absoluteness), in which the yogi realizes the Truth beyond all intellectual apprehension. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,

580:the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment, ~ Walter Isaacson,

581:Veni Creator LORD of the grass and hill, Lord of the rain, White Overlord of will, Master of pain, I who am dust and air Blown through the halls of death, Like a pale ghost of prayer,— I am thy breath. Lord of the blade and leaf, Lord of the bloom, Sheer Overlord of grief, Master of doom, Lonely as wind or snow, Through the vague world and dim, Vagrant and glad I go; I am thy whim. Lord of the storm and lull, Lord of the sea, I am thy broken gull, Blown far alee. Lord of the harvest dew, Lord of the dawn, Star of the paling blue Darkling and gone, Lost on the mountain height Where the first winds are stirred, Out of the wells of night I am thy word. Lord of the haunted hush, Where raptures throng, 214 I am thy hermit thrush, Ending no song. Lord of the frost and cold, Lord of the North, When the red sun grows old And day goes forth, I shall put off this girth,— Go glad and free, Earth to my mother earth, Spirit to thee. II 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, 215 Lord of the world’s elation Thou breath of things unseen! ~ Bliss William Carman,

582:After tying Albert’s leash to a slender porch column, Christopher knocked at the door and waited tensely. He reared back as the portal was flung open by a frantic-faced housekeeper. “I beg your pardon, sir, we’re in the middle of--” She paused at the sound of porcelain crashing from somewhere inside the house. “Oh, merciful Lord,” she moaned, and gestured to the front parlor. “Wait there if you please, and--” “I’ve got her,” a masculine voice called. And then, “Damn it, no I don’t. She’s heading for the stairs.” “Do not let her come upstairs!” a woman screamed. A baby was crying in strident gusts. “Oh, that dratted creature has woken the baby. Where are the housemaids?” “Hiding, I expect.” Christopher hesitated in the entryway, blinking as he heard a bleating noise. He asked the housekeeper blankly, “Are they keeping farm animals in here?” “No, of course not,” she said hastily, trying to push him into the parlor. “That’s…a baby crying. Yes. A baby.” “It doesn’t sound like one,” he said. Christopher heard Albert barking from the porch. A three-legged cat came streaking through the hallway, followed by a bristling hedgehog that scuttled a great deal faster than one might have expected. The housekeeper hastened after them. “Pandora, come back here!” came a new voice--Beatrix Hathaway’s voice--and Christopher’s senses sparked in recognition. He twitched uneasily at the commotion, his reflexes urging him to take some kind of action, although he wasn’t yet certain what the bloody hell was going on. A large white goat came leaping and capering and twisting through the hallway. And then Beatrix Hathaway appeared, tearing around the corner. She skidded to a halt. “You might have tried to stop her,” she exclaimed. As she glanced up at Christopher, a scowl flitted across her face. “Oh. It’s you. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

583:Orpheus chose to be the leader of mankind. Ah, not even Orpheus had attained such a goal, not even his immortal greatness had justified such vain and presumptuous dreams of grandeur, such flagrant overestimation of poetry! Certainly many instances of earthly beauty--a song, the twilit sea, the tone of the lyre, the voice of a boy, a verse, a statue, a column, a garden, a single flower--all possess the divine faculty of making man hearken unto the innermost and outermost boundaries of his existence, and therefore it is not to be wondered at that the lofty art of Orpheus was esteemed to have the power of diverting the streams from their beds and changing their courses, of luring the wild beasts of the forest with tender dominance, of arresting the cattle a-browse upon the meadows and moving them to listen, caught in the dream and enchanted, the dreamwish of all art: the world compelled to listen, ready to receive the song and its salvation. However, even had Orpheus achieved his aim, the help lasts no longer than the song, nor does the listening, and on no account might the song resound too long, otherwise the streams would return to their old courses, the wild beasts of the forest would again fall upon and slay the innocent beasts of the field, and man would revert again to his old, habitual cruelty; for not only did no intoxication last long, and this was likewise true of beauty's spell, but furthermore, the mildness to which men and beasts had yielded was only half of the intoxication of beauty, while the other half, not less strong and for the most part far stronger, was of such surpassing and terrible cruelty--the most cruel of men delights himself with a flower--that beauty, and before all the beauty born of art, failed quickly of its effect if in disregard of the reciprocal balance of its two components it approached man with but one of them. ~ Hermann Broch,

584:Then the day came when a new column was spotted riding up behind Debegri’s force. We almost missed them, for we had also begun staying in a tight group. But luckily Khesot, cautious since his days in the terrible Pirate Wars, still sent pairs of scouts on rounds in all four directions twice a day. It was Seliar, of my group, who spotted them first. She reported to me, and the rest of us crept down the hillside to watch the camp below. We saw at the head of the column a man wearing a long black cloak. Debegri emerged, bowed. The newcomer bowed in return and handed the Baron a rolled paper. They went inside Debegri’s tent, and when they emerged, the stranger had the white plume of leadership on his helm. Debegri’s glower was plain even at the distance we watched from. Backing up from our vantage, we retreated to our camp. Bran and Khesot and the other riding leaders were all gathered under our old, patched rain cover when we reached them. Seliar blurted out what we’d seen. Branaric grinned all through the story. At the end I said, “This is obviously no surprise. What news had you?” Bran nodded to where a mud-covered young woman sat in front of one of the tents, attacking a bowl of stew as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. “Messenger just arrived from Azmus, or it would have been a surprise. Galdran has taken his cousin off the command. He’d apparently expected us to last two weeks at most.” “Well, who is this new commander? Ought we to be afraid?” Bran’s grin widened until he laughed. “Here’s the jest: He’s none other than the Marquis of Shevraeth, heir to the Renselaeus principality. According to Azmus, all he ever thinks about are clothes, horse racing, and gambling. And did I mention clothes?” Everyone roared with laughter. “We’ll give him two weeks,” I crowed. “And then we’ll send him scurrying back to his tailor. ~ Sherwood Smith,

585:golden opportunity to learn to cope with criticism and anger effectively. This came as a complete surprise to me; I hadn't realized what good fortune I had. In addition to urging me to use cognitive techniques to reduce and eliminate my own sense of irritation. Dr. Beck proposed I try out an unusual strategy for interacting with Hank when he was in an angry mood. The essence of this method was: (1) Don't turn Hank off by defending yourself. Instead, do the opposite—urge him to say all the worst things he can say about you. (2) Try to find a grain of truth in all his criticisms and then agree with him. (3) After this, point out any areas of disagreement in a straightforward, tactful, nonargumentative manner. (4) Emphasize the importance of sticking together, in spite of these occasional disagreements. I could remind Hank that frustration and fighting might slow down our therapy at times, but this need not destroy the relationship or prevent our work from ultimately becoming fruitful. I applied this strategy the next time Hank started storming around the office screaming at me. Just as I had planned, I urged Hank to keep it up and say all the worst things he could think of about me. The result was immediate and dramatic. Within a few moments, all the wind went out of his sails—all his vengeance seemed to melt away. He began communicating sensibly and calmly, and sat down. In fact, when I agreed with some of his criticisms, he suddenly began to defend me and say some nice things about me! I was so impressed with this result that I began using the same approach with other angry, explosive individuals, and I actually did begin to enjoy his hostile outbursts because I had an effective way to handle them. I also used the double-column technique for recording and talking back to my automatic thoughts after one of Hank's midnight calls (see Figure 16–1, page 415). ~ David D Burns,

586:Celeste was finally looking at Victor—at the beast he had become—and I could see the terror and disbelief on her face. “No,” she breathed as he lifted her, his scarlet animal eyes glaring into hers. “No, it can’t be. The curse—it’s not true. It’s all superstition and nonsense!” Victor raised her higher and growled, deep in his throat. Celeste screamed and tried to break his grip but she couldn’t get free. She looked like a doll in his massive hands, a tiny blonde doll that kicked and shrieked as he brought her closer and closer to his gaping jaws. “Get back! Get away!” Celeste reached out with one hand and clawed at his eyes. She got the side of his face instead—the side she’d so recently branded. Victor’s beast snarled in pain and anger. He grabbed her arm and I heard a low popping sound as her shoulder disconnected from the socket. Then he simply yanked the arm off, like a hungry man twisting off a chicken drumstick. Celeste shrieked in mingled pain and disbelief, staring at the bloody socket where her arm had been. I understood her confusion—Victor shouldn’t have been able to tear her apart like this. She was a three-star vampire—one of the strongest beings on the planet. But clearly the beast inside him was stronger. “You can’t do this to me!” she screamed, lashing out with her other arm and baring her fangs. “I have lived for centuries and soon I will have the power to—” The beast’s jaws opened wide and I saw teeth as long as my hand glitter in the moonlight. He clamped down hard and bit into the slender white column of her throat. Celeste shrieked again, a high, terrified sound that ended abruptly in a dull, crunching—the bones of her neck being crushed, I realized. As I watched, the beast’s jaws met completely and I saw that he had bitten clean through her throat and spinal column. Her eyes were still wide with horror as her head toppled off and rolled to the ground at his feet. ~ Evangeline Anderson,

587:Two Travellers In The Place Vendome Reign of Louis Philippe A great tall column spearing at the sky With a little man on top. Goodness! Tell me why? He looks a silly thing enough to stand up there so high. What a strange fellow, like a soldier in a play, Tight-fitting coat with the tails cut away, High-crowned hat which the brims overlay. Two-horned hat makes an outline like a bow. Must have a sword, I can see the light glow Between a dark line and his leg. Vertigo I get gazing up at him, a pygmy flashed with sun. A weathercock or scarecrow or both things in one? As bright as a jewelled crown hung above a throne. Say, what is the use of him if he doesn't turn? Just put up to glitter there, like a torch to burn, A sort of sacrificial show in a lofty urn? But why a little soldier in an obsolete dress? I'd rather see a Goddess with a spear, I confess. Something allegorical and fine. Why, yes I cannot take my eyes from him. I don't know why at all. I've looked so long the whole thing swims. I feel he ought to fall. Foreshortened there among the clouds he's pitifully small. What do you say? There used to be an Emperor standing there, With flowing robes and laurel crown. Really? Yet I declare Those spiral battles round the shaft don't seem just his affair. A togaed, laurelled man's I mean. Now this chap seems to feel As though he owned those soldiers. Whew! How he makes one reel, Swinging round above his circling armies in a wheel. Sweeping round the sky in an orbit like the sun's, 432 Flashing sparks like cannon-balls from his own long guns. Perhaps my sight is tired, but that figure simply stuns. How low the houses seem, and all the people are mere flies. That fellow pokes his hat up till it scratches on the skies. Impudent! Audacious! But, by Jove, he blinds the eyes! ~ Amy Lowell,

588:There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]“it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed “in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity. ~ Marcel Proust,

589:The old woman sat in her leather recliner, the footrest extended, a dinner tray on her lap. By candlelight, she turned the cards over, halfway through a game of Solitaire. Next door, her neighbors were being killed. She hummed quietly to herself. There was a jack of spades. She placed it under the queen of hearts in the middle column. Next a six of diamonds. It went under the seven of spades. Something crashed into her front door. She kept turning the cards over. Putting them in their right places. Two more blows. The door burst open. She looked up. The monster crawled inside, and when it saw her sitting in the chair, it growled. “I knew you were coming,” she said. “Didn’t think it’d take you quite so long.” Ten of clubs. Hmm. No home for this one yet. Back to the pile. The monster moved toward her. She stared into its small, black eyes. “Don’t you know it’s not polite to just walk into someone’s house without an invitation?” she asked. Her voice stopped it in its tracks. It tilted its head. Blood—from one of her neighbor’s no doubt—dripped off its chest onto the floor. Belinda put down the next card. “I’m afraid this is a one-player game,” she said, “and I don’t have any tea to offer you.” The monster opened its mouth and screeched a noise out of its throat like the squawk of a terrible bird. “That is not your inside voice,” Belinda snapped. The abby shrunk back a few steps. Belinda laid down the last card. “Ha!” She clapped. “I just won the game.” She gathered up the cards into a single deck, split it, then shuffled. “I could play Solitaire all day every day,” she said. “I’ve found in my life that sometimes the best company is your own.” A growl idled again in the monster’s throat. “You cut that right out!” she yelled. “I will not be spoken to that way in my own home.” The growl changed into something almost like a purr. “That’s better,” Belinda said as she dealt a new game. “I apologize for yelling. My temper sometimes gets the best of me. ~ Blake Crouch,

590:Gifts 'O World-God, give me Wealth!' the Egyptian cried. His prayer was granted. High as heaven, behold Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold. Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet, World-circling traffic roared through mart and street, His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined, Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep. Seek Pharaoh's race to-day and ye shall find Rust and the moth, silence and dusty sleep. 'O World-God, give me beauty!' cried the Greek. His prayer was granted. All the earth became Plastic and vocal to his sense; each peak, Each grove, each stream, quick with Promethean flame, Peopled the world with imaged grace and light. The lyre was his, and his the breathing might Of the immortal marble, his the play Of diamond-pointed thought and golden tongue. Go seek the sun-shine race, ye find to-day A broken column and a lute unstrung. 'O World-God, give me Power!' the Roman cried. His prayer was granted. The vast world was chained A captive to the chariot of his pride. The blood of myriad provinces was drained To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart. Invulnerably bulwarked every part With serried legions and with close-meshed Code, Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home, A roofless ruin stands where once abode The imperial race of everlasting Rome. 'O Godhead, give me Truth!' the Hebrew cried. His prayer was granted; he became the slave Of the Idea, a pilgrim far and wide, Cursed, hated, spurned, and scourged with none to save. The Pharaohs knew him, and when Greece beheld, His wisdom wore the hoary crown of Eld. 85 Beauty he hath forsworn, and wealth and power. Seek him to-day, and find in every land. No fire consumes him, neither floods devour; Immortal through the lamp within his hand. ~ Emma Lazarus,

591:I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation. In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event. Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way. Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual. ~ Martin Buber,

592:Death! where is thy victory? To triumph whilst I die, To triumph whilst thine ebon wing Enfolds my shuddering soul? O Death! where is thy sting? Not when the tides of murder roll, When nations groan, that kings may bask in bliss, Death! canst thou boast a victory such as this-- When in his hour of pomp and power His blow the mightiest murderer gave, Mid Natures cries the sacrifice Of millions to glut the grave; When sunk the Tyrant Desolations slave; Or Freedoms life-blood streamed upon thy shrine; Stern Tyrant, couldst thou boast a victory such as mine? To know in dissolutions void That mortals baubles sunk decay; That everything, but Love, destroyed Must perish with its kindred clay,-- Perish Ambitions crown, Perish her sceptred sway: From Deaths pale front fades Prides fastidious frown. In Deaths damp vault the lurid fires decay, That Envy lights at heaven-born Virtues beam-- That all the cares subside, Which lurk beneath the tide Of lifes unquiet stream;-- Yes! this is victory! And on yon rock, whose dark form glooms the sky, To stretch these pale limbs, when the soul is fled; To baffle the lean passions of their prey, To sleep within the palace of the dead! Oh! not the King, around whose dazzling throne His countless courtiers mock the words they say, Triumphs amid the bud of glory blown, As I in this cold bed, and faint expiring groan! Tremble, ye proud, whose grandeur mocks the woe Which props the column of unnatural state! You the plainings, faint and low, From Miserys tortured soul that flow, Shall usher to your fate. Tremble, ye conquerors, at whose fell command The war-fiend riots oer a peaceful land! You Desolations gory throng Shall bear from Victory along To that mysterious strand. Published (without title) by Hogg, Life of Shelley, 1858; dated 1810. Included (under the title, To Death) in the Esdaile manuscript book.    ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Death ,

593:To Miss R.: On Her Attendance On Her Mother At Buxton When blooming beauty in the noon of power, While offered joys demand each sprightly hour, With all that pomp of charms and winning mien Which sure to conquer needs but to be seen; When she, whose name the softest love inspires, To the hushed chamber of Disease retires, To watch and weep beside a parent's bed, Catch the faint voice, and raise the languid head, What mixt delight each feeling heart must warm!— An angel's office suits an angel's form. Thus the tall column graceful rears its head To prop some mouldering tower with moss o'erspread, Whose stately piles and arches yet display The venerable graces of decay: Thus round the withered trunk fresh shoots are seen To shade their parent with a cheerful green. More health, dear maid! thy soothing presence brings Than purest skies, or salutary springs. That voice, those looks such healing virtues bear, Thy sweet reviving smiles might cheer despair; On the pale lips detain the parting breath, And bid hope blossom in the shades of death. Beauty, like thine, could never reach a charm So powerful to subdue, so sure to warm. On her loved child behold the mother gaze, In weakness pleased, and smiling through decays, And leaning on that breast her cares assuage;— How soft a pillow for declining age! For this, when that fair frame must feel decay,— Ye Fates protract it to a distant day,— When thy approach no tumults shall impart, Nor that commanding glance strike through the heart, When meaner beauties shall have leave to shine, And crowds divide the homage lately thine, 164 Not with the transient praise those charms can boast Shall thy fair fame and gentle deeds be lost: Some pious hand shall thy weak limbs sustain, And pay thee back these generous cares again; Thy name shall flourish, by the good approved, Thy memory honoured, and thy dust beloved, ~ Anna Laetitia Barbauld,

594:The Coliseum Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary Of lofty contemplation left to Time By buried centuries of pomp and power! At length- at length- after so many days Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst, (Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie,) I kneel, an altered and an humble man, Amid thy shadows, and so drink within My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory! Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld! Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! I feel ye now- I feel ye in your strengthO spells more sure than e'er Judaean king Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane! O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee Ever drew down from out the quiet stars! Here, where a hero fell, a column falls! Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold, A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat! Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle! Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled, Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home, Lit by the wan light of the horned moon, The swift and silent lizard of the stones! But stay! these walls- these ivy-clad arcadesThese moldering plinths- these sad and blackened shaftsThese vague entablatures- this crumbling friezeThese shattered cornices- this wreck- this ruinThese stones- alas! these grey stones- are they allAll of the famed, and the colossal left By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me? 'Not all'- the Echoes answer me- 'not all! Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise, 83 As melody from Memnon to the Sun. We rule the hearts of mightiest men- we rule With a despotic sway all giant minds. We are not impotent- we pallid stones. Not all our power is gone- not all our fameNot all the magic of our high renownNot all the wonder that encircles usNot all the mysteries that in us lieNot all the memories that hang upon And cling around about us as a garment, Clothing us in a robe of more than glory.' ~ Edgar Allan Poe,

595:The travelers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colorful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth. People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented -home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself. Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man's feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core. In the same way, a child's song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn't the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul. ~ Vasily Grossman,

596:Why are you single? There isn't exactly a surplus of eligible men in town. The single women must be throwing themselves at you." I realized that comment was a mistake pretty much the second after it was out of my mouth. Because his smile went wicked; his eyes danced. I knew exactly what was going to follow. "Think I'm hot shit, huh?" he asked, leaning back in his chair, looking way too self-satisfied. "I mean... by small town standards," I shrugged, hoping I was coming off as casual and collected plates to bring to the kitchen. I had scraped the plate and was standing at the sink running water over it when I suddenly felt his entire body press up behind mine, making my hips push against the cabinet as my breath whooshed out of me. I hadn't even heard him follow me in. But there he was, touching me from feet to shoulder. One of his hands moved out and settled on my hip, fingers pressing into the hipbone hollow as his other hand slid gently up my arm and brushed my hair from one side of my neck to the other. Before I could guess his intention, I felt his lips press in to the column of my neck, making my entire body do a shiver at the unexpected contact that shot from the touch to directly between my legs. My head tipped to the side, giving him more access as his mouth moved slowly upward, the hint of his tongue tracing over the skin he kissed as I shamelessly leaned back into him. His arm on my hip slid across my lower belly, anchoring me to him as his lips went around my earlobe, his tongue tracing the outer edge and ripping an almost pained moan from between my lips. My skin felt electric, buzzy, humming, begging for more of the sensation. But he wasn't in the mind to give it to me. Instead, his lips left my skin entirely and I felt the side of his face press into my hair. When he spoke, his voice low and rumbling, causing another rush of desire so strong it was borderline painful; his breath was warm on my ear. "By small town standards, how wet are your panties right now? ~ Jessica Gadziala,

597:Did I tell you about what happened last week with Marco?” Cass shook her head. “Well,” Mada began coyly, leaning in close to Cass and speaking quietly, “Father was out of town, you know, on business. But still, I can’t just have Marco over to the house, because one of the servants will tattle on me, guaranteed.” “So what did you do?” Cass played with a strand of hair that had escaped from her bonnet. Madalena lowered her voice even more. “I didn’t do anything. It was all Marco. He climbed the ivy vines from the canal to my window. I’m lucky he didn’t fall and drown.” She smiled dreamily. “I woke up in the middle of the night. I don’t know why. I just did. And Marco was sitting next to my bed, watching me sleep.” Madalena giggled. “At first I was mad at him for scaring me.” Cass couldn’t keep her jaw from dropping a little. She tried to imagine a boy sneaking into her own room to watch her sleep. Immediately, it was the face of the artist Falco she saw. Bright blue eyes. Crooked smile. She struggled to push his image from her mind. “And then?” Mada paused just long enough to allow the suspense to build. “And then he sat down next to me and took me in his arms. And we kissed until sunrise.” “Madalena Rambaldo! In your father’s house?” Cass made a pretend-scandalized face. Madalena giggled again. “Marco snuck back out--through the house, thankfully--just before first light, when the servants begin to go about their chores. A few minutes later and he might have gotten caught.” At that moment, the gardener, a stern-faced old man, appeared around a column in the courtyard with a large pot of water in his arms. Ignoring the girls, he began to water the rosebushes, which were still awaiting their first buds. Madalena and Cass bent their heads close together and laughed. “Let’s just say last week’s confession was interesting,” Madalena finished. “I think I made the priest blush.” Cass took a sip of her wine, savoring its sweetness. She wondered what it would feel like to kiss someone all night. Falco’s face materialized in her head again and she felt her cheeks redden. ~ Fiona Paul,

598:The Old Tin Hat In the good old days when the Army's ways were simple and unrefined, With a stock to keep their chins in front, and a pigtail down behind, When the only light in the barracks at night was a candle of grease or fat, When they put the extinguisher on the light, they called it the Old Tin Hat. Now, a very great man is the C. in C., for he is the whole of the show -The reins and the whip and the driver's hand that maketh the team to go -But the road he goes is a lonely road, with ever a choice to make, When he comes to a place where the roads divide, which one is the road to take. For there's one road right, and there's one road wrong, uphill, or over the flat, And one road leads to the Temple of Fame, and one to the Old Tin Hat. And a very great man is the man who holds an Army Corps command, For he hurries his regiments here and there as the C. in C. has planned. By day he travels about in state and stirreth them up to rights, He toileth early and toileth late, and sitteth up half the nights; But the evening comes when the candle throws twin shadows upon the mat, And one of the shadows is like a wreath, and one like an Old Tin Hat. And a very proud man is the Brigadier at the sound of the stately tread Of his big battalions marching on, as he rides with his staff ahead. There's never a band to play them out, and the bugle's note is still, But he hears two tunes in the gentle breeze that blows from over the hill. And one is a tune in a stirring key, and the other is faint and flat, For one is the tune of "My new C.B." and the other, "My Old Tin Hat." And the Colonel heading his regiment is life and soul of the show, It's "Column of route", "Form troops", "Extend", and into the fight they go; He does not duck when the air is full of the "wail of the whimpering lead", He does not scout for the deep dugout when the 'planes are overhead; He fears not hog, nor devil, nor dog, and he'd scrap with a mountain cat, But he goeth in fear of the Brigadier, and in fear of the Old Tin Hat. ~ Banjo Paterson,

599:I feel shock splinter through him, his body going rigid. Then he relaxes, melting into me, stepping forward until I am caught between him and the wall, the torch crackling beside me. His hands slide down my back, over my hips and thighs, leaving a trail of fire. His heart beats fast enough for the both of us, its thunderous pulse echoing through me. I bury my hands in his dark hair, fingers knotting around those thick locks. Desire pulls at my stomach, and I lean into him, lifting one leg and wrapping it around his waist. He lifts me, and my other leg coils around him, my skirts sliding up my thighs, my back pressed against the column. His lips are soft and warm and gentle, underlined with barely restrained urgency. I cannot get enough of him. I pull his kurta over his head and let it fall on the floor. I press my hands against his bared chest, feel his heart against my palm, his lungs rising and falling. His shoulder is knotted with the scar from the arrow he took for me. He kisses me again, this time more strongly, and I run my hands down his jaw and neck, over his shoulders, the taut muscles of his back. He turns, without letting me go or breaking our kiss, and we tumble onto the soft divan. Aladdin holds himself over me, his abdomen clenched and his hair hanging across his forehead. His lips wander downward, to my chin, to the curve of my jaw, to my neck. My hands are ravenous, exploring the planes and angles of his body. His fingers find mine, and our hands knit together. He raises them over my head, pressing them into the pillow beneath my hair, as his kisses trace my collarbone, and then he sinks lower, parting the buttons of my dress and pressing his lips to my bare stomach. I gasp and open my eyes wide, my borrowed body coursing with sensations I have never felt, never dared to feel, never thought I could feel. “Aladdin,” I murmur. “We shouldn’t . . .” “Sh.” He silences me with a kiss, and I lift my chin to meet him. A warm wind rushes through my body, stirring embers and setting them aflame. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to think about consequences. I only want Aladdin, everywhere. ~ Jessica Khoury,

600:I'm talking about your lovely long arms and your perfectly shaped legs... I find I am quite jealous of those stockings for knowing the feel of you, the warmth of you." She shifted, unable to keep still beneath the onslaught of his words. "I'm talking about that corset that hugs you where you are lovely and soft... is it uncomfortable?" She hesitated. "Not usually." "And now?" She heard the knowledge in the question. She nodded once. "It's rather- constricting." He tutted once, and she opened her eyes, instantly meeting his, hot and focused on her. "Poor Pippa. Tell me, with your knowledge of the human body, why do you think that is?" She swallowed, tried for a deep breath. Failed. "It's because my heart is threatening to beat out of my chest." The smile again. "Have you overexerted yourself?" She shook her head. "No." "What, then?" She was not a fool. He was pushing her. Attempting to see how far she would go. She told the truth. "I think it is you." He closed his eyes then, hands fisting again, and pressed his head back against the side of the desk, exposing the long column of his neck and his tightly clenched jaw. Her mouth went dry at the movement, at the way the tendons there bunched and rippled, and she was quite desperate to touch him. When he returned his gaze to hers, there was something wild in those pewter depths... something she was at once consumed and terrified by. "You shouldn't be so quick with the truth," he said. "Why?" "It gives me too much control." "I trust you." "You shouldn't." He leaned forward, bracing his arm against his raised knee. "You are not safe with me." She had never once felt unsafe with him. "I don't think that's correct." He laughed, low and dark, and the sound rippled through her, a wave of pleasure and temptation. "You have no idea what I could do to you, Philippa Marbury. The ways I could touch you. The wonders I could show you. I could ruin you without thought, sink with you into the depths of sin and not once regret it. I could lead you right into temptation and never ever look back." The words stole her breath. She wanted it. Every bit of it. ~ Sarah MacLean,

601:By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot. ~ Anonymous,

602:HEART OF TEA DEVOTION Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urn Throws up a steamy column and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful ev ning in. WILLIAM COWPER Perhaps the idea of a tea party takes you back to childhood. Do you remember dressing up and putting on your best manners as you sipped pretend tea out of tiny cups and shared pretend delicacies with your friends, your parents, or your teddy bears? Were you lucky enough to know adults who cared enough to share tea parties with you? And are you lucky enough to have a little person with whom you could share a tea party today? Is there a little girl inside you who longs for a lovely time of childish imagination and "so big" manners? It could be that the mention of teatime brings quieter memories-cups of amber liquid sipped in peaceful solitude on a big porch, or friendly confidences shared over steaming cups. So many of my own special times of closeness-with my husband, my children, my friends-have begun with putting a kettle on to boil and pulling out a tea tray. But even if you don't care for tea-if you prefer coffee or cocoa or lemonade or ice water, or if you like chunky mugs better than gleaming silver or delicate china, or if you find the idea of traditional tea too formal and a bit intimidating-there's still room for you at the tea table, and I think you would love it there! I have shared tea with so many people-from business executives to book club ladies to five-year-old boys. And I have found that few can resist a tea party when it is served with the right spirit. You see, it's not tea itself that speaks to the soul with such a satisfying message-although I must confess that I adore the warmth and fragrance of a cup of Earl Grey or Red Zinger. And it's not the teacups themselves that bring such a message of beauty and serenity and friendship-although my teacups do bring much pleasure. It's not the tea, in other words, that makes teatime special, it's the spirit of the tea party. It's what happens when women or men or children make a place in their life for the ~ Emilie Barnes,

603:He won’t have long, daughter.’ ‘Who won’t?’ she replies, puzzled. Without another word, the entity’s eyes close and Eight’s body begins to tremble. To my surprise, the energy actually recedes from his body. The cracks along the backs of his hands stop glowing and close up, as does the one that opened across his forehead. After a few seconds, the only thing left glowing on Eight is the wound over his heart. He floats out of the column of energy and ends up right in front of Marina. When Eight opens his eyes, they don’t glow. They’re green, just like I remember them, serene, but with a spark of that old mischief. Eight’s lips curl into a slow smile as he sees Marina. ‘Wow, hi,’ Eight says, and when he speaks it’s with his own voice. It’s him. It’s really him. Marina nearly doubles over with a delighted sob. She collects herself quickly, though, and grabs Eight first by the shoulders, then on the sides of his face. She pulls him in close. ‘You’re warm,’ she says in wonder. ‘You’re so warm.’ Eight laughs easily. He puts his hand over Marina’s and gently kisses the side of it. ‘You’re warm, too,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry, Eight. I’m sorry I couldn’t heal you.’ Eight shakes his head. ‘Stop, Marina. It’s okay. You brought me here. It’s – I can’t even describe it. It’s amazing in there.’ Already, I see the energy spreading outward from Eight’s heart. It races through his body, fissures opening on his arms and legs. He doesn’t seem to be in any pain. He just smiles at Marina and looks at her like he’s trying to memorize her face. ‘Can I kiss you?’ Marina asks him. ‘I really wish you would.’ Marina kisses him, pressing in close, squeezing him. As she does, the energy swells up from within Eight and, slowly, his body begins to break apart. It’s different from when a Mogadorian disintegrates. It’s as if, for a moment, I can see every cell in Eight’s body and see how the energy from the well glows in between each of them. One by one, those pieces of Eight dissolve, and he becomes one with the light. Marina tries to cling to him, but her fingers pass right through the energy. And then, he’s gone. ~ Pittacus Lore,

604:He had no desire to eke out a living from the land as his family had during his childhood. He and Saphira were a Rider and dragon; their doom and their destiny was to fly at the forefront of history, not to sit before a fire and grow fat and lazy. And then there was Arya. If he and Saphira lived in Palancar Valley, he would see her rarely, if at all. “No,” said Eragon, and the word was like a hammerblow in the silence. “I don’t want to go back.” A cold tingle crawled down his spine. He had known he had changed since he, Brom, and Saphira had set out to track down the Ra’zac, but he had clung to the belief that, at his core, he was still the same person. Now he understood that this was no longer true. The boy he had been when he first set foot outside of Palancar Valley had ceased to exist; Eragon did not look like him, he did not act like him, and he no longer wanted the same things from life. He took a deep breath and then released it in a long, shuddering sigh as the truth sank into him. “I am not who I was.” Saying it aloud seemed to give the thought weight. Then, as the first rays of dawn brightened the eastern sky over the ancient island of Vroengard, where the Riders and dragons had once lived, he thought of a name--a name such as he had not thought of before--and as he did, a sense of certainty came over him. He said the name, whispered it to himself in the deepest recesses of his mind, and all his body seemed to vibrate at once, as if Saphira had struck the pillar beneath him. And then he gasped, and he found himself both laughing and crying--laughing that he had succeeded and for the sheer joy of comprehension; crying because all his failings, all the mistakes he had made, were now obvious to him, and he no longer had any delusions to comfort himself with. “I am not who I was,” he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, “but I know who I am.” The name, his true name, was weaker and more flawed than he would have liked, and he hated himself for that, but there was also much to admire within it, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to accept the true nature of his self. He was not the best person in the world, but neither was he the worst. ~ Christopher Paolini,

605:Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? ~ Ray Bradbury,

606:How was your journey?" he asked. "You don't have to make small talk with me," she said. "I don't like it, and I'm not very good at it." They paused at the shade of portico, beside a sweet-scented bower of roses. Casually Lord St. Vincent leaned a shoulder against a cream-painted column. A lazy smile curved his lips as he looked down at her. "Didn't Lady Berwick teach you?" "She tried. But I hate trying to make conversation about weather. Who cares what the temperature is? I want to talk about things like... like..." "Yes?" he prompted as she hesitated. "Darwin. Women's suffrage. Workhouses, war, why we're alive, if you believe in séances or spirits, if music has ever made you cry, or what vegetable you hate most..." Pandora shrugged and glanced up at him, expecting the familiar frozen expression of a man who was about to run for his life. Instead she found herself caught by his arrested stare, while the silence seemed to wrap around them. After a moment, Lord St. Vincent said softly, "Carrots." Bemused, Pandora tried to gather her wits. "That's the vegetable you hate most? Do you mean cooked ones?" "Any kind of carrots." "Out of all vegetables?" At his nod, she persisted, "What about carrot cake?" "No." But it's cake." A smile flickered across his lips. "Still carrots." Pandora wanted to argue the superiority of carrots over some truly atrocious vegetable, such as Brussels sprouts, but heir conversation was interrupted by a silky masculine voice. "Ah, there you are. I've been sent out to fetch you." Pandora shrank back as she saw a tall msn approach in a graceful stride. She knew instantly that he must be Lord Sy. Vincent's father- the resemblance was striking. His complexion was tanned and lightly time-weathered, with laugh-lines at the outer corners of his blue eyes. He had a full head of tawny-golden hair, handsomely silvered at the sides and temples. Having heard of his reputation as a former libertine, Pandora had expected an aging roué with coarse features and a leer... not this rather gorgeous specimen who wore his formidable presence like an elegant suit of clothes. "My son, what can you be thinking, keeping this enchanting creature out in the heat of midday? ~ Lisa Kleypas,

607:The National Socialist Movement has, besides its delivery from the Jewishcapitalist shackles imposed by a plutocratic-democratic, dwindling class of exploiters at home, pronounced its resolve to free the Reich from the shackles of the Diktat of Versailles abroad. The German demands for a revision were an absolute necessity, a matter of course for the existence and the honor of any great people. Posterity will some day come to regard them as exceedingly modest. All these demands had to be carried through, in practice against the will of the British French potentates. Now more than ever we all see it as a success of the leadership of the Third Reich that the realization of these revisions was possible for years without resort to war. This was not the case-as the British and French demagogues would have it-because we were not then in a position to wage war. When it finally appeared as though, thanks to a gradually awakening common sense, a peaceful resolution of the remaining problems could be reached through international cooperation, the agreement concluded in this spirit on September 29, 1938, at Munich by the four great states predominantly involved, was not welcomed by public opinion in London and Paris, but was condemned as a despicable sign of weakness. The Jewish capitalist warmongers, their hands covered with blood, saw in the possible success of such a peaceful revision the vanishing of plausible grounds for the realization of their insane plans. Once again that conspiracy of pitiful, corrupt political creatures and greedy financial magnates made its appearance, for whom war is a welcome means to bolster business. The international Jewish poison of the peoples began to agitate against and to coroode healthy minds. Men of letters set out to portray decent men who desired peace as weaklings and traitors, to denounce opposition parties as a “fifth column,” in order to eliminate internal resistance to their criminal policy of war. Jews and Freemasons, armament industrialists and war profiteers, international traders and stockjobbers, found political blackguards: desperados and glory seekers who represented war as something to be yearned for and hence wished for. Adolf Hitler - speech to the Reichstag Berlin, July 19, 1940 ~ Adolf Hitler,

608:A Flight Of Wild Ducks Far up the River-hark! 'tls the loud shock Deadened by distance, of some Fowler's gun: And as into the stillness of the scene It wastes now with a dull vibratory boom, Look where, fast widening up at either end Out of the sinuous valley of the waters, And o'er the intervenient forest, - up Against the open heaven, a long dark line Comes hitherward stretching-a vast Flight of Ducks! Following the windings of the vale, and still Enlarging lengthwise, and in places too Oft breaking into solitary dots, How swiftly onwards comes it - till at length, The River, reaching through a group of hills, Off leads it, - out of sight. But not for long: For, wheeling ever with the water's course, Here into sudden view it comes again Sweeping and swarming round the nearest point! And first now, a swift airy rush is heard Approaching momently; - then all at once There passes a keen-cutting, gusty tumult Of strenuous pinions, with a streaming mass Of instantaneous skiey streaks; each streak Evolving with a lateral flirt, and thence Entangling as it were, - so rapidly A thousand wings outpointingly dispread In passing tiers, seem, looked at from beneath, With rushing intermixtures to involve Each other as they beat. Thus seen o'erhead Even while we speak-ere we have spoken, - lo! The living cloud is onward many a rood. Tracking as 'twere in the smooth stream below The multifarious shadow of itself Far coming-present-and far gone at once! The senses vainly struggle to retain The impression of an Image (as the same) So swift and manifold: For now again A long dark line upon the utmost verge Of the horizon, steeping still, it sinks 13 At length into the landscape; where yet seen Though dimly, with a wide and scattering sweep It fetches eastward, and in column so Dapples along the steep face of the ridge There banking the turned River. Now it drops Below the fringing oaks - but to arise Once more, with a quick circling gleam, as touched By the slant sunshine, and then disappear As instantaneously, - there settling down Upon the reedy bosom of the water. ~ Charles Harpur,

609:CHANGING YOUR LIFE TO ACCOMMODATE THE SIXTH SECRET The sixth secret is about the choiceless life. Since we all take our choices very seriously, adopting this new attitude requires a major shift. Today, you can begin with a simple exercise. Sit down for a few minutes and reassess some of the important choices you’ve made over the years. Take a piece of paper and make two columns labeled “Good Choice” and “Bad Choice.” Under each column, list at least five choices relating to those moments you consider the most memorable and decisive in your life so far—you’ll probably start with turning points shared by most people (the serious relationship that collapsed, the job you turned down or didn’t get, the decision to pick one profession or another), but be sure to include private choices that no one knows about except you (the fight you walked away from, the person you were too afraid to confront, the courageous moment when you overcame a deep fear). Once you have your list, think of at least one good thing that came out of the bad choices and one bad thing that came out of the good choices. This is an exercise in breaking down labels, getting more in touch with how flexible reality really is. If you pay attention, you may be able to see that not one but many good things came from your bad decisions while many bad ones are tangled up in your good decisions. For example, you might have a wonderful job but wound up in a terrible relationship at work or crashed your car while commuting. You might love being a mother but know that it has drastically curtailed your personal freedom. You may be single and very happy at how much you’ve grown on your own, yet you have also missed the growth that comes from being married to someone you deeply love. No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads. So break out of the mindset that your life consists of good and bad choices that set your destiny on an unswerving course. Your life is the product of your awareness. Every choice follows from that, and so does every step of growth. ~ Deepak Chopra,

610:The Night Of The Lion '_And that a reply be received before midnight._' _British Ultimatum_. Their Day was at twelve of the night, When the graves give up their dead. And still, from the City, no light Yellows the clouds overhead. Where the Admiral stands there's a star, But his column is lost in the gloom; For the brazen doors are ajar, And the Lion awakes, and the doom. _He is not of a chosen race. His strength is the strength of the skies, In whose glory all nations have place, In whose downfall Liberty dies. He is mighty, but he is just. He shall live to the end of years. He shall bring the proud to the dust. He shall raise the weak to the spheres._ It is night on the world's great mart, But the brooding hush is awake With the march of a steady heart That calls like the drum of Drake, _Come!_ And a muttering deep As the pulse of the distant guns, Or the thunder before the leap Thro' the rolling thoroughfare runs. And the wounded men go by Like thoughts in the Lion's brain. And the clouds lift on high Like the slow waves of his mane And the narrowing lids conceal The furnaces of his eyes. Their gold is gone out. They reveal Only two search-lights of steel 139 Steadily sweeping the skies. And we hoped he had peace in his lair Where the bones of old tyrannies lay, And the skulls that his cubs have stripped bare, The old skulls they still toss in their play. But the tyrants are risen again, And the last light dies from their path; For the midnight of his mane Lifts to the stars with his wrath. From the East to the West he is crouching. He snuffs at the North-East wind. His breast upon Britain is couching. His haunches quiver on Ind. It is night, black night, where he lies; But a kingdom and a fleet Shall burn in his terrible eyes When he leaps, and the darkness dies With the War-gods under his feet. _Till the day when a little child, Shall lay but a hand on his mane, And his eyes grow golden and mild And he stands in the heavens again; Till the day of the seventh seal, Which the Lion alone shall rend, When the stars from their courses reel, His Freedom shall not end._ ~ Alfred Noyes,

611:From an interview with Susie Bright: SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What's their spin versus your own observations? [Note: Here's the article Susie mentions: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/nat... ] CQ: Lots of people have seen the little NY Times article, which was about an event we did, the Belle Bizarre Bazaar -- a holiday shopping fair where most of the vendors were sex workers selling sexy stuff. Proceeds went to our Exotic Dancers' Education Project, providing dancers with skills that will help them maximize their potential and choices. This event got into the Times despite the worries of its author, a journalist who'd been posted over by her editor. She thought the Times was way too conservative for the likes of us, which may be true, except they now have so many column inches to fill with distracting stuff that isn't about Judith Miller! The one thing the Times article does not do is present the spectrum of the Center for Sex & Culture's work, especially the academic and serious side of what we do. This, I think, points to the real answer to your question: mainstream media culture remains quite nervous and touchy about sex-related issues, especially those that take sex really seriously. A frivolous take (or a good, juicy, shocking angle) on a sex story works for the mainstream press: a sex-positive and serious take, not so much. When the San Francisco Chronicle did its article about us a year ago, the writer focused just on our porn collection. Now, we very much value that, but we also collect academic journals and sex education materials, and not a word about those! I think this is one really essential linchpin of sex-negative or erotophobic culture, that sex is only allowed to be either light or heavy, and when it's heavy, it's about really heavy issues like abuse. Recently I gave some quotes about something-or-other for a Cosmo story and the editors didn't want to use the term "sexologist" to describe me, saying that it wasn't a real word! You know, stuff like that from the Times would not be all that surprising, but Cosmo is now policing the language? Please! ~ Carol Queen,

612:From an interview with Susie Bright: SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What's their spin versus your own observations? [Note: Here's the article Susie mentions: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/nat... ] CQ: Lots of people have seen the little NY Times article, which was about an event we did, the Belle Bizarre Bazaar -- a holiday shopping fair where most of the vendors were sex workers selling sexy stuff. Proceeds went to our Exotic Dancers' Education Project, providing dancers with skills that will help them maximize their potential and choices. This event got into the Times despite the worries of its author, a journalist who'd been posted over by her editor. She thought the Times was way too conservative for the likes of us, which may be true, except they now have so many column inches to fill with distracting stuff that isn't about Judith Miller! The one thing the Times article does not do is present the spectrum of the Center for Sex & Culture's work, especially the academic and serious side of what we do. This, I think, points to the real answer to your question: mainstream media culture remains quite nervous and touchy about sex-related issues, especially those that take sex really seriously. A frivolous take (or a good, juicy, shocking angle) on a sex story works for the mainstream press: a sex-positive and serious take, not so much. When the San Francisco Chronicle did its article about us a year ago, the writer focused just on our porn collection. Now, we very much value that, but we also collect academic journals and sex education materials, and not a word about those! I think this is one really essential linchpin of sex-negative or erotophobic culture, that sex is only allowed to be either light or heavy, and when it's heavy, it's about really heavy issues like abuse. Recently I gave some quotes about something-or-other for a Cosmo story and the editors didn't want to use the term "sexologist" to describe me, saying that it wasn't a real word! You know, stuff like that from the Times would not be all that surprising, but Cosmo is now policing the language? Please! ~ Carol Queen,

613:Mid-August From the upland hidden, Where the hill is sunny Tawny like pure honey In the August heat, Memories float unbidden Where the thicket serries Fragrant with ripe berries And the milk-weed sweet. Like a prayer-mat holy Are the patterned mosses Which the twin-flower crosses With her flowerless vine; In fragile melancholy The pallid ghost flowers hover As if to guard and cover The shadow of a shrine. Where the pine-linnet lingered The pale water searches, The roots of gleaming birches Draw silver from the lake; The ripples, liquid-fingered, Plucking the root-layers, Fairy like lute players Lulling music make. O to lie here brooding Where the pine-tree column Rises dark and solemn To the airy lair, Where, the day eluding, Night is couched dream laden, Like a deep witch-maiden Hidden in her hair. In filmy evanescence Wraithlike scents assemble, Then dissolve and tremble 62 A little until they die; Spirits of the florescence Where the bees searched and tarried Till the blossoms all were married In the days before July. Light has lost its splendour, Light refined and sifted, Cool light and dream drifted Ventures even where, (Seeping silver tender) In the dim recesses, Trembling mid her tresses, Hides the maiden hair. Covered with the shy-light, Filling in the hushes, Slide the tawny thrushes Calling to their broods, Hoarding till the twilight The song that made for noon-days Of the amorous June days Preludes and interludes. The joy that I am feeling Is there something in it Unlike the warble the linnet Phrases and intones? Or is a like thought stealing With a rapture fine, free Through the happy pine tree Ripening her cones? In some high existence In another planet Where their poets cannot Know our birds and flowers, Does the same persistence Give the dreams they issue Something like the tissue Of these dreams of ours? 63 O to lie athinking-Moods and whims! I fancy Only necromancy Could the web unroll, Only somehow linking Beauties that meet and mingle In this quiet dingle With the beauty of the whole. ~ Duncan Campbell Scott,

614:My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy’s artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn’t accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: “They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, ‘You made it, Ivan!’ ” My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn’t understand why they were so cheerful… The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. “Brothers! Friends!” they threw themselves on their comrades. “Halt! Another step and we’ll shoot!” The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…“How were you taken prisoner?” the interrogator asked my father. “The Finns pulled me out of a lake.” “You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.” My father also considered himself guilty. That’s how they’d been trained…There was no trial. They marched everyone out on the quad and read the entire division their sentence: six years in the camps for betraying the Motherland. Then they shipped them off to Vorkuta to build a railway over the permafrost. My God! It was 1941…The Germans were moving in on Moscow…No one even told them that war had broken out—after all, they were enemies, it would only make them happy. Belarus was occupied by the Nazis. They took Smolensk. When they finally heard about it, all of them wanted to go to the front, they all wrote letters to the head of the camp…to Stalin…And in response, they were told, “Work for the victory on the home front, you bastards. We don’t need traitors like you at the front.” They all…Papa…he told me…All of them wept ~ Svetlana Alexievich,

615:I made up my mind I was going to learn something about IBM computers. So I enrolled in an IBM school for retailers in Poughkeepsie, New York. One of the speakers was a guy from the National Mass Retailers’ Institute (NMRI), the discounters’ trade association, a guy named Abe Marks. ABE MARKS, HEAD OF HARTFIELD ZODY’S, AND FIRST PRESIDENT, NMRI: “I was sitting there at the conference reading the paper, and I had a feeling somebody was standing over me, so I look up and there’s this grayish gentleman standing there in a black suit carrying an attaché case. And I said to myself, ‘Who is this guy? He looks like an undertaker.’ “He asks me if I’m Abe Marks and I say, ‘Yes, I am.’ “ ‘Let me introduce myself, my name is Sam Walton,’ he says. ‘I’m only a little fellow from Bentonville, Arkansas, and I’m in the retail business.’ “I say, ‘You’ll have to pardon me, Sam, I thought I knew everybody and every company in the retail business, but I never heard of Sam Walton. What did you say the name of your company is again?’ “ ‘Wal-Mart Stores,’ he says. “So I say, ‘Well, welcome to the fraternity of discount merchants. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the conference and getting acquainted socially with everyone.’ “ ‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mr. Marks, I didn’t come here to socialize, I came here to meet you. I know you’re a CPA and you’re able to keep confidences, and I really wanted your opinion on what I am doing now.’ So he opens up this attaché case, and, I swear, he had every article I had ever written and every speech I had ever given in there. I’m thinking, This is a very thorough man.’ Then he hands me an accountant’s working column sheet, showing all his operating categories all written out by hand. “Then he says: ‘Tell me what’s wrong. What am I doing wrong?’ “I look at these numbers—this was in 1966—and I don’t believe what I’m seeing. He’s got a handful of stores and he’s doing about $10 million a year with some incredible margin. An unbelievable performance! “So I look at it, and I say, ‘What are you doing wrong? Sam—if I may call you Sam—I’ll tell you what you are doing wrong.’ I handed back his papers and I closed his attaché case, and I said to him, ‘Being here is wrong, Sam. Don’t unpack your bags. Go down, catch a cab, go back to the airport and go back to where you came from and keep doing exactly what you are doing. There is nothing that can possibly improve what you are doing. You are a genius.’ That’s how I met Sam Walton.” Abe ~ Sam Walton,

616:I thought I'd never find you," Luce heard her past self say. "We will always find each other," Daniel answered, lifting her off the ground and squeezing her closer. "Always." "Hey,you two!" A voice shouted from a doorway in a neighboring building. "Are you coming?" Across the square from the empty lot, a small group of people were being herded into a solid stone building by a guy whose face Luce couldn't make out. That was where Luschka and Daniel were headed. It must have been their plan all along, to take shelter from the bombs together. "Yes," Luschka called to the others. She looked at Daniel. "Let's go with them." "No." His voice was curt. Nervous. Luce knew that tone all too well. "We'll be safer off the street. Isn't this why we agreed to meet here?" Daniel turned to look back behind them, his eyes sweeping right past the place where Luce was hiding. When the sky lit up with another round of golden-red explosions, Luschka screamed and buried her face in Daniel's chest. So Luce was the only one who saw his expression. Something was weighing on him. Something greater than fear of the bombs. Oh no. "Daniil!" A boy near the building was still holding open the door to the shelter. "Luschka! Daniil!" Everyone else was already inside. That was when Daniil spun Luschka around, pulled her ear close to his lips. In her shadowy hiding place, Luce ached to know what he was whispering. If he was saying any of the things Daniel ever told her when she was upset or overwhelmed. She wanted to run to them, to pull Luschka away-but she couldn't. Something deep inside her would not budge. She fixed on Luschka's expression as if her whole life depended on it. Maybe it did. Lsuchka nodded as Daniil spoke, and her face changed from terrified to calm, alost peaceful. She closed her eyes. She nodded one more time. Then she tipped back her head, and a smile spread slowly across her lips. A smile? But why? How? It was almost like she knew what was about to happen? Daniil held her in his arms and dipped her low. He leaned in for another kiss, pressing his lips firmly against hers, running his hands through her hair, then down her sides, across every inch of her. It was so passionate that Luce blushed, so intimate she couldn't breathe, so gorgeous that she couldn't tear her eyes away.Not for a second. Not even when Luschka screamed. And burst into a column of searing white flame. ~ Lauren Kate,

617:There were no such stipulations made when we discussed the agreement." "Nor were they expressly not made. I am making them now. You received what you requested. Or, have you forgotten?" The words sent a shiver down her spine. He was standing behind her, and she could feel the warm kiss of his breath on her bare neck, sending a river of heat through her. "I have not forgotten." The words came unbidden, and she closed her eyes. He laid a hand on her arm and, with virtually no pressure, turned her face to him. When he met her eyes, the anger that had been there was gone, replaced by something much more complex. "Neither have I. And not for lack of trying." Before she could begin to consider the meaning behind his words, he settled his mouth upon hers, robbing her of thought. "I've tried to forget that kiss... and the carriage ride... and the fencing club... but you seem to have taken up residence... in my memory." As he spoke between long, drugging kisses that consumed her senses, he guided Callie across the study and into a large chair near the fireplace. Kneeling in front of her, he cupped one cheek in a strong, warm hand, and met her gaze with a searing look. Shaking his head as though he couldn't quite understand what had come over him, he kissed her again, growling low in the back of his throat. Her hands found their way into his thick, dark hair as he caught her bottom lip in his teeth, nibbling and licking at it until she thought she might perish from the intensity of the feeling. She whimpered at the sensation, and he rewarded the sound by deepening the kiss, giving her everything she desired. He broke off the kiss as one of his hands found its way under her skirts, caressing up the inside of her leg. He shifted her against him, running his lips across her cheek to the curl of her ear, sucking and nibbling and licking as he spoke to her, the scandalous words more sensation than sound. "Such soft skin..." he said, as his fingers played along the inside of her thighs, driving her mad with desire as heat pooled at their juncture. "I've been wondering what you felt like here..." He shifted to gain better access to the skin high on the inside of her thighs, so close to the spot where she most wanted him. "Now that I know... I'm going to be consumed with thoughts of how this soft, lovely skin will feel against me..." He placed a soft, lush kiss on the column of her neck as his hand moved higher, closer to the center of her. ~ Sarah MacLean,

618:Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she’d also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he’d pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid’s ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, ‘She married me to carry her daughter’s harp! That’s why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!’ “On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn’t when Eve was around. He’d ask her about being a movie star’s child. He’d say to her, ‘When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn’t the way everyone grew up?’ She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents’ movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid’s life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars’ kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, ‘This is Carlton Pennington’s house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.’ “She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars’ kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse’s uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids. ~ Philip Roth,

619:Episode 37 'TWAS now, men say, in his sovran's need that the earl made known his noble strain, craft and keenness and courage enduring. Heedless of harm, though his hand was burned, hardy-hearted, he helped his kinsman. A little lower the loathsome beast he smote with sword; his steel drove in bright and burnished; that blaze began to lose and lessen. At last the king wielded his wits again, war-knife drew, a biting blade by his breastplate hanging, and the Weders'-helm smote that worm asunder, felled the foe, flung forth its life. So had they killed it, kinsmen both, athelings twain: thus an earl should be in danger's day! -- Of deeds of valor this conqueror's-hour of the king was last, of his work in the world. The wound began, which that dragon-of-earth had erst inflicted, to swell and smart; and soon he found in his breast was boiling, baleful and deep, pain of poison. The prince walked on, wise in his thought, to the wall of rock; then sat, and stared at the structure of giants, where arch of stone and steadfast column upheld forever that hall in earth. Yet here must the hand of the henchman peerless lave with water his winsome lord, the king and conqueror covered with blood, with struggle spent, and unspan his helmet. Beowulf spake in spite of his hurt, his mortal wound; full well he knew his portion now was past and gone of earthly bliss, and all had fled of his file of days, and death was near: "I would fain bestow on son of mine this gear of war, were given me now that any heir should after me come of my proper blood. This people I ruled 212 fifty winters. No folk-king was there, none at all, of the neighboring clans who war would wage me with 'warriors'-friends' and threat me with horrors. At home I bided what fate might come, and I cared for mine own; feuds I sought not, nor falsely swore ever on oath. For all these things, though fatally wounded, fain am I! From the Ruler-of-Man no wrath shall seize me, when life from my frame must flee away, for killing of kinsmen! Now quickly go and gaze on that hoard 'neath the hoary rock, Wiglaf loved, now the worm lies low, sleeps, heart-sore, of his spoil bereaved. And fare in haste. I would fain behold the gorgeous heirlooms, golden store, have joy in the jewels and gems, lay down softlier for sight of this splendid hoard my life and the lordship I long have held." ~ Anonymous Olde English,

620:When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one. ~ Jodi Picoult,

621:Australia Today 1916 They came from the lower levels Deep down in the Brilliant mine; From the wastes where the whirlwind revels, Whirling the leaves of pine. On the western plains, where the Darling flows, And the dust storms wheel and shift, The teamster loosened his yokes and bows, And turned his team adrift. On the western stations, far and wide, There's many an empty pen, For the "ringers" have cast the machines aside And answered the call for men. On the lucerne flats where the stream runs slow, And the Hunter finds the sea, The women are driving the mowers now, With the children at their knee. For the men have gone, as a man must go, At the call of the rolling drums; For the men have sworn that the Turks shall know When the old battalion comes. Column of companies by the right, Steady in strong array, With the sun on the bayonets gleaming bright, The battalion marched away. They battled, the old battalion, Through the toil of the training camps, Sweated and strove at lectures, By the light of the stinking lamps. Marching, shooting, and drilling; Steady and slow and stern; Awkward and strange, but willing All of their job to learn. 65 Learning to use the rifle; Learning to use the spade; Deeming fatigue a trifle During each long parade. Till at last they welded Into a concrete whole, And there grew in the old battalion A kind of battalion's soul. Brotherhood never was like it; Friendship is not the word; But deep in that body of marching men The soul of a nation stirred. And like one man with a single thought Cheery and confident; Ready for all that the future brought, The old battalion went. Column of companies by the right, Steady in strong array, With the sun on the bayonets gleaming bright, The battalion marched away. How shall we tell of the landing By the hills where the foe were spread, And the track of the old battalion Was marked by the Turkish dead? With the dash that discipline teaches, Though the hail of the shrapnel flew, And the forts were raking the beaches, And the toll of the dead men grew. They fixed their grip on the gaunt hillside With a pluck that has won them fame; And the home-folks know that the dead men died For the pride of Australia's name. Column of companies by the right, To the beat of the rolling drums; 66 With honours gained in a stirring fight The old battalion comes! ~ Banjo Paterson,

622:Invocation To The Social Muse Señora, it is true the Greeks are dead. It is true also that we here are Americans: That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual: That more people have more thoughts: that there are Progress and science and tractors and revolutions and Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous And music in every home: there is also Hoover. Does the lady suggest we should write it out in The Word? Does Madame recall our responsibilities? We are Whores, Fräulein: poets, Fräulein, are persons of Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with Stragglers from either prince and of both views. The rules permit them to further the business of neither. It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers. Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas— Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers. Preferring life with the sons to death with the fathers, We also doubt on the record whether the sons Will still be shouting around with the same huzzas— For we hope Lady to live to lie with the youngest. There are only a handful of things a man likes, Generation to generation, hungry or Well fed: the earth’s one: life’s One: Mister Morgan is not one. There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. He that goes naked goes further at last than another. Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they’ll jimmy his Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month: 25 (Who recalls the address now of the Imagists?) But the naked man has always his own nakedness. People remember forever his live limbs. They may drive him out of the camps but one will take him. They may stop his tongue on his teeth with a rope’s argument— He will lie in a house and be warm when they are shaking. Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army? How to take to one’s chamber a million souls? How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers? The things of the poet are done to a man alone As the things of love are done—or of death when he hears the Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only. Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him There where he lies on his left arm and will die, Nor his class nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering And his knee’s in the soft of the bed where his love lies. I remind you, Barinya, the life of the poet is hard— A hardy life with a boot as quick as a fiver: Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms? ~ Archibald MacLeish,

623:So Callie is a rake." She blushed. "I don't think so." Silence fell between them as he watched the wash of pink across her cheeks. He lifted her wounded arm in his hand, placing a soft kiss on the back of her hand. She breathed deeply at the feel of his lips on her skin, so warm and soft, and her eyes flew to his, intently focused on her. He held her gaze, and she felt a shock of liquid heat as his tongue circled one of her knuckles. He registered her surprise, smiling against her and turning her hand palm up, then setting his tongue and lips to work on the soft, sensitive spot at its center. Her breath quickened, and she closed her eyes to the sensation, unable to watch the erotic movement of his mouth across her skin. He lifted his lips from her hand and, when she opened her eyes again, it was to find him watching her, a wicked smile on his lips. Reaching out, he traced one finger along the line of her jaw, sending a shiver through her. When he spoke, his voice was thick and liquid, and it sent a shock of heat down her spine. "I shouldn't give up on that part of her just yet, Empress." She caught her breath at the endearment, which brought with it a hazy memory from long ago. He chased the vision away with the vivid present as he clasped her chin, bringing her face closer to his. "You forget, I've met the women several times... In carriages..." His lips hovered just above hers, sending a tremor of anticipation through her, "And in theatres..." She tried to close the distance between them and he pulled back just enough to drive her slightly mad. "And in bedchambers. In fact," he added, his words a caress along the sensitive skin of her lips, "I rather like the rakish side of her." And then he settled his lips upon hers, and she was lost. She was consumed by the softness of his mouth, the gentleness of the caress- so very different than the kisses they had shared before. This kiss consumed her, made her forget herself, their surroundings, everything but the magnificent pressure of his lips on hers. His thumb stroked her jaw as his mouth ate at hers, sending waves of pulsing pleasure through her. She gasped at the feeling, and he took advantage of her open lips to plunder her mouth with deep, drugging kisses that made her dizzy. She reached for him, her anchor in a sea of sensuality, wrapping her arms around his neck and plunging her fingers into his heavy, soft hair. He made a deep, satisfied sound at the feeling of her wrapped around him, and traced a path across her cheek and down the column of her throat with soft, moist kisses that sent explosions of pleasure through her. ~ Sarah MacLean,

624:The Scottish Engineer With eyes that searched in the dark, Peering along the line, Stood the grim Scotsman, Hector Clark, Driver of "Forty-nine". And the veldt-fire flamed on the hills ahead, Like a blood-red beacon sign. There was word of a fight to the north, And a column too hardly pressed, So they started the Highlanders forth. Heedless of food or rest. But the pipers gaily played, Chanting their fierce delight, And the armoured carriages rocked and swayed. Laden with men of the Scots Brigade, Hurrying up to the fight, And the grim, grey Highland engineer Driving them into the night. Then a signal light glowed red, And a picket came to the track. "Enemy holding the line ahead; Three of our mates we have left for dead, Only we two got back." And far to the north through the still night air They heard the rifles crack. And the boom of a gun rang out, Like the sound of a deep appeal, And the picket stood in doubt By the side of the driving-wheel. But the engineer looked down, With his hand on the starting-bar, "Ride ye back to the town, Ye know what my orders are, Maybe they're wanting the Scots Brigade Up on those hills afar. 465 "I am no soldier at all, Only an engineer; But I could not bear that the folk should say Over in Scotland -- Glasgow way -That Hector Clark stayed here With the Scots Brigade till the foe was gone, With ever a rail to run her on. Ready behind! Stand clear! "Fireman, get you gone Into the armoured train -I will drive her alone; One more trip -- and perhaps the last -With a well-raked fire and an open blast; Hark to the rifles again!" On through the choking dark, Never a lamp nor a light, Never an engine spark Showing her hurried flight, Over the lonely plain Rushed the great armoured train, Hurrying up to the fight. Then with her living freight On to the foe she came, And the rides snapped their hate. And the darkness spouted flame. Over the roar of the fray The hungry bullets whined, As she dashed through the foe that lay Loading and firing blind, Till the glare of the furnace, burning clear, Showed them the form of the engineer Sharply and well defined. Through! They are safely through! Hark to the column's cheer! Surely the driver knew He was to halt her here; 466 But he took no heed of the signals red, And the fireman found, when he climbed ahead, There on the door of his engine -- dead -The Scottish Engineer! ~ Banjo Paterson,

625:Egypt, Tobago There is a shattered palm on this fierce shore, its plumes the rusting helmet of a dead warrior. Numb Antony, in the torpor stretching her inert sex near him like a sleeping cat, knows his heart is the real desert. Over the dunes of her heaving, to his heart's drumming fades the mirage of the legions, across love-tousled sheets, the triremes fading. Ar the carved door of her temple a fly wrings its message. He brushes a damp hair away from an ear as perfect as a sleeping child's. He stares, inert, the fallen column. He lies like a copper palm tree at three in the afternoon by a hot sea and a river, in Egypt, Tobago Her salt marsh dries in the heat where he foundered without armor. He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat, the uproar of arenas, the changing surf of senators, for this silent ceiling over silent sand - 16 this grizzled bear, whose fur, moulting, is silvered for this quick fox with her sweet stench. By sleep dismembered, his head is in Egypt, his feet in Rome, his groin a desert trench with its dead soldier. He drifts a finger through her stiff hair crisp as a mare's fountaining tail. Shadows creep up the palace tile. He is too tired to move; a groan would waken trumpets, one more gesture war. His glare, a shield reflecting fires, a brass brow that cannot frown at carnage, sweats the sun's force. It is not the turmoil of autumnal lust, its treacheries, that drove him, fired and grimed with dust, this far, not even love, but a great rage without clamor, that grew great because its depth is quiet; it hears the river of her young brown blood, it feels the whole sky quiver with her blue eyelid. She sleeps with the soft engine of a child, 17 that sleep which scythes the stalks of lances, fells the harvest of legions with nothing for its knives, that makes Caesars, sputtering at flies, slapping their foreheads with the laurel's imprint, drunkards, comedians. All-humbling sleep, whose peace is sweet as death, whose silence has all the sea's weight and volubility, who swings this globe by a hair's trembling breath. Shattered and wild and palm-crowned Antony, rusting in Egypt, ready to lose the world, to Actium and sand, everything else is vanity, but this tenderness for a woman not his mistress but his sleeping child. The sky is cloudless. The afternoon is mild. ~ Derek Walcott,

626:What’s wrong?” Jake’s voice, deep as thunder, unsettled her. Why did he have to be so handsome? She wanted to fall right inside those brown eyes. “I saw you in the living room with Ben . . . earlier.” His lips pulled upward, no doubt remembering Ben’s belly laughs. “He’s a fun kid.” She hated to wipe the smile from his face. “I know you mean well, Jake, but I think it’s best if you avoid spending time with the children.” The smile slid south. “We were just playing around.” “The children are getting attached to you. I don’t think it’s healthy.” His jaw flexed, his shoulders squared. “They need relationships now more than ever.” “Not from someone who’ll soon exit their lives.” He flinched. She hated to hurt his feelings, had a physical ache from wounding him. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said finally. “I don’t want to exit their lives. I don’t want to exit your life.” Maybe he thought they could be some happy family or something. It was time to tell him everything. “I’m selling Summer Place. We’ll be leaving the island soon. The Goldmans—our guests over the daffodil weekend—made an offer, and I accepted. I haven’t told the children yet, so I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t mention it. We’ll stay through closing in late June.” Jake’s lips parted. A second later they pressed together. He walked to the end of the porch and back. He reminded her of a caged tiger, constricted by the boundary of the porch. She hadn’t expected him to be so upset. When he passed, she set her hand on his bare arm, stopping him. The muscles flexed beneath her palm. He was so strong. She had the sudden image of him hitting Sean, using those muscles to protect her. She pulled her hand away as if his skin burned her. “They’ve had enough loss. They’ve already become attached to you, and that’s only going to hurt them more when we leave.” His face softened as he stared, his lips slackening, his eyes growing tender. His face had already darkened under the sun. Faint lines fanned the corner of his eyes. He reached toward her and ran his finger down the side of her face. “Don’t leave.” His touch left a trail of fire. She pressed her spine to the column. How could she want to dive into his arms and run away at the same time? Inside a riot kicked up. She was back in the apartment on Warren Street, coming home from school, slipping in the door, unsure if she’d find her mom racing around the kitchen, slumped on the bathroom tile, or just gone. The same uncertainty roiled in her now. “I have to.” “This is their home. Your engagement is over,” he said gently. “Is what you’re going back to as important as what you’re leaving?” He didn’t have to say he meant them. Us. She shook her head, dislodging his hand. How had he turned this all around? She ~ Denise Hunter,

627:Hear I the creaking gate unclose? The gleaming latch uplifted? No'twas the wind that, whirring, rose, Amidst the poplars drifted! Adorn thyself, thou green leaf-bowering roof, Destined the bright one's presence to receive, For her, a shadowy palace-hall aloof With holy night, thy boughs familiar weave. And ye sweet flatteries of the delicate air, Awake and sport her rosy cheek around, When their light weight the tender feet shall bear, When beauty comes to passion's trysting-ground. Hush! what amidst the copses crept So swiftly by me now? No-'twas the startled bird that swept The light leaves of the bough! Day, quench thy torch! come, ghostlike, from on high, With thy loved silence, come, thou haunting Eve, Broaden below thy web of purple dye, Which lulled boughs mysterious round us weave. For love's delight, enduring listeners none, The froward witness of the light will flee; Hesper alone, the rosy silent one, Down-glancing may our sweet familiar be! What murmur in the distance spoke, And like a whisper died? No'twas the swan that gently broke In rings the silver tide! Soft to my ear there comes a music-flow; In gleesome murmur glides the waterfall; To zephyr's kiss the flowers are bending low; Through life goes joy, exchanging joy with all. Tempt to the touch the grapesthe blushing fruit, [15] Voluptuous swelling from the leaves that bide; And, drinking fever from my cheek, the mute Air sleeps all liquid in the odor-tide! Hark! through the alley hear I now A footfall? Comes the maiden? No,'twas the fruit slid from the bough, With its own richness laden! Day's lustrous eyes grow heavy in sweet death, And pale and paler wane his jocund hues, The flowers too gentle for his glowing breath, Ope their frank beauty to the twilight dews. The bright face of the moon is still and lone, Melts in vast masses the world silently; Slides from each charm the slowly-loosening zone; And round all beauty, veilless, roves the eye. What yonder seems to glimmer? Her white robe's glancing hues? No,'twas the column's shimmer Athwart the darksome yews! O, longing heart, no more delight-upbuoyed Let the sweet airy image thee befool! The arms that would embrace her clasp the void This feverish breast no phantom-bliss can cool, O, waft her here, the true, the living one! Let but my hand her hand, the tender, feel The very shadow of her robe alone! So into life the idle dream shall steal! As glide from heaven, when least we ween, The rosy hours of bliss, All gently came the maid, unseen: He waked beneath her kiss! ~ Friedrich Schiller, The Assignation ,

628:Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world? It’s not the greatest country in the world. That’s my answer… [turns to a panelist] Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck, but he gets to hit you with it anytime he wants. It doesn’t cost money, it costs votes. It costs airtime and column inches. You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always? [turns to another panelist] And with a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom! So, 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom. [turns to the student who asked the question] And yeah, you… sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know. One of them is: there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are, without a doubt, a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! Yosemite?! [Silence] It sure used to be… We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reason. We passed laws, struck down laws, for moral reason. We waged wars on poverty, not on poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great, big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists AND the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it. It didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didn’t scare so easy. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed… by great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

629:At The Movie: Virginia, 1956 This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor's their own waiting room, in the Tribune a column for their news, in the village a neighborhood called Sugar Hill, uneven rows of unresponsive houses that took the maids back in each afternoon— in our homes used the designated door, on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs. Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids as the town bulged, families surfacing for groceries, medicine and wine, the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard, around the stone soldier and the flag, and still I never saw them on the street. It seemed a chivalric code laced the milk: you'd try not to look and they would try to be invisible. Once, on my way to the creek, I went without permission to the tenants' log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square, leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior, Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught the terrifying smell of sweat and grease, smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress— This was rural Piedmont, upper south; we lived on a farm but not in poverty. When finally we got our own TV, the evening news with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan seemed like another movie—King Solomon's Mines, the serial of Atlantis in the sea. By then I was thirteen, and no longer went to movies to see movies. The downstairs forged its attentions forward, toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little to one side or the other, arranging the pairs that would own the county, stores and farms, everything but easy passage out of there— and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film sputtered on the reel, when the music died and the lights came on, I swiveled my face up to where they whooped and swore, to the smoky blue haze and that tribe of black and brown, licorice, coffee, taffy, red oak, sweet tea— wanting to look, not knowing how to see, I thought it was a special privilege to enter the side door, climb the stairs and scan the even rows below—trained bears in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, while they were free, lounging above us, their laughter pelting down on us like trash. ~ Ellen Bryant Voigt,

630:The Princess's Finger-Nail: A Tale Of Nonsense Land All through the Castle of High-bred Ease, Where the chief employment was do-as-you-please, Spread consternation and wild despair. The queen was wringing her hands and hair; The maids of honor were sad and solemn; The pages looked blank as they stood in column; The court-jester blubbered, 'Boo-hoo, boo-hoo'; The cook in the kitchen dropped tears in the stew; And all through the castle went sob and wail, For the princess had broken her finger-nail: The beautiful Princess Red-as-a-Rose, Bride-elect of the Lord High-Nose, Broken her finger-nail down to the quickNo wonder the queen and her court were sick. Never sorrow so dread before Had dared to enter that castle door. Oh! what would my Lord His-High-Nose say When she took off her glove on her wedding-day? The fairest princess in Nonsense Land, With a broken finger-nail on her hand! 'Twas a terrible, terrible accident, And they called a meeting of parliament; And never before that royal Court Had come such question of grave import As 'How could you hurry a nail to grow?' And the skill of the kingdom was called to show. They sent for Monsieur File-'em-off; He smoothed down the corners so ragged and rough. They sent for Madame la Diamond-Dust, Who lived on the fingers of upper-crust; They sent for Professor de Chamois-Skin, Who took her powder and rubbed it in; They sent for the pudgy nurse Fat-on-the-bone To bathe her finger in eau de Cologne; And they called the Court surgeon, Monsieur Red-Tape, To hear what he thought of the new nail's shape. Over the kingdom the telegrams flew Which told how the finger-nail thrived and grew; And all through the realm of Nonsense Land 659 They offered up prayers for the princess's hand. At length the glad tidings were heard with a shout That the princess's finger-nail had grown out: Pointed and polished and pink and clean, Befitting the hand of a some-day queen. Salutes were fired all over the land By the home-guard battery pop-gun band; And great was the joy of my Lord High-Nose, Who straightway ordered his wedding clothes, And paid his tailor, Don Wait-for-aye, Who died of amazement the self-same day. My lord by a jury was judged insane; For they said, and the truth of the saying was plain, That a lord of such very high pedigree Would never be paying his bills, you see, Unless he was out of his head; and so They locked him up without more ado. And the beautiful Princess Red-as-a-Rose Pined for her lover, my Lord High-Nose, Till she entered a convent and took the veilAnd this is the end of my nonsense tale. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

631:Worthy The Name Of Sir Knight Sir Knight of the world's oldest order, Sir Knight of the Army of God, You have crossed the strange mystical border, The ground floor of truth you have trod; You have entered the sanctum sanctorum, Which leads to the temple above, Where you come as a stone, and a Christ-chosen one, In the kingdom of Friendship and Love. II As you stand in this new realm of beauty, Where each man you meet is your friend, Think not that your promise of duty In hall, or asylum, shall end; Outside, in the great world of pleasure, Beyond, in the clamor of trade, In the battle of life and its coarse daily strife Remember the vows you have made. III Your service, majestic and solemn, Your symbols, suggestive and sweet, Your uniformed phalanx in column On gala days marching the street; Your sword and your plume and your helmet, Your 'secrets' hid from the world's sight; These things are the small, lesser parts of the all Which are needed to form the true Knight. IV The martyrs who perished rejoicing In Templary's glorious laws, Who died 'midst the fagots while voicing The glory and worth of their cause- 935 They honored the title of 'Templar' No more than the Knight of to-day Who mars not the name with one blemish of shame, But carries it clean through life's fray. To live for a cause, to endeavor To make your deeds grace it, to try And uphold its precepts forever, Is harder by far than to die. For the battle of life is unending, The enemy, Self, never tires, And the true Knight must slay that sly foe every day Ere he reaches the heights he desires. VI Sir Knight, have you pondered the meaning Of all you have heard and been told? Have you strengthened your heart for its weaning From vices and faults loved of old? Will you honor, in hours of temptation, Your promises noble and grand? Will your spirit be strong to do battle with wrong, 'And having done all, to stand?' VII Will you ever be true to a brother In actions as well as in creed? Will you stand by his side as no other Could stand in the hour of his need? Will you boldly defend him from peril, And lift him from poverty's curseWill the promise of aid which you willingly made, Reach down from your lips to your purse? VIII The world's battle field is before you! Let Wisdom walk close by your side, 936 Let Faith spread her snowy wings o'er you, Let Truth be your comrade and guide; Let Fortitude, Justice and Mercy Direct all your conduct aright, And let each word and act tell to men the proud fact, You are worthy the name of 'Sir Knight'. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

632:Worthy The Name Of Sir Knight Sir Knight of the world's oldest order, Sir Knight of the Army of God, You have crossed the strange mystical border, The ground floor of truth you have trod; You have entered the sanctum sanctorum, Which leads to the temple above, Where you come as a stone, and a Christ-chosen one, In the kingdom of Friendship and Love. II As you stand in this new realm of beauty, Where each man you meet is your friend, Think not that your promise of duty In hall, or asylum, shall end; Outside, in the great world of pleasure, Beyond, in the clamor of trade, In the battle of life and its coarse daily strife Remember the vows you have made. III Your service, majestic and solemn, Your symbols, suggestive and sweet, Your uniformed phalanx in column On gala days marching the street; Your sword and your plume and your helmet, Your 'secrets' hid from the world's sight; These things are the small, lesser parts of the all Which are needed to form the true Knight. IV The martyrs who perished rejoicing In Templary's glorious laws, Who died 'midst the fagots while voicing The glory and worth of their cause- 935 They honored the title of 'Templar' No more than the Knight of to-day Who mars not the name with one blemish of shame, But carries it clean through life's fray. To live for a cause, to endeavor To make your deeds grace it, to try And uphold its precepts forever, Is harder by far than to die. For the battle of life is unending, The enemy, Self, never tires, And the true Knight must slay that sly foe every day Ere he reaches the heights he desires. VI Sir Knight, have you pondered the meaning Of all you have heard and been told? Have you strengthened your heart for its weaning From vices and faults loved of old? Will you honor, in hours of temptation, Your promises noble and grand? Will your spirit be strong to do battle with wrong, 'And having done all, to stand?' VII Will you ever be true to a brother In actions as well as in creed? Will you stand by his side as no other Could stand in the hour of his need? Will you boldly defend him from peril, And lift him from poverty's curseWill the promise of aid which you willingly made, Reach down from your lips to your purse? VIII The world's battle field is before you! Let Wisdom walk close by your side, 936 Let Faith spread her snowy wings o'er you, Let Truth be your comrade and guide; Let Fortitude, Justice and Mercy Direct all your conduct aright, And let each word and act tell to men the proud fact, You are worthy the name of 'Sir Knight'. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

633:Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away. ~ Tessa Dare,

634:How can one awaken his Yoga-shakti? It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That's all. Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that's not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one's life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that's enough. One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes. Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must find one's own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before. If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn't have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing - how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about - if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one's being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it - afterwards. Like that it is sure. One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 211-212,

635:her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances. ~ Grace Lee Boggs,

636:Suddenly, the man was thrown off her. Darcy looked around, but saw nothing. She rose up on her elbows to see the man climbing to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. His four comrades were looking up to the sky nervously. A huge, dark shape descended from the sky, vanishing quickly. Along with one of her attackers. Darcy was afraid to move and be taken as well. She remained still, her chest heaving. Another shape formed out of the dark sky. She could only stare openmouthed at the dragon coming right for her. Just before he touched down, the dragon shifted, taking the form of a man—a man that left her breathless and awestruck. There was no denying she was looking at a Dragon King. He stood naked, his hands at his sides while his gaze was riveted on the men who accosted her. The shadows kept much of him out of sight, but the streetlamps shed enough light of the hard sinew of his body that she wanted to see more. His lips peeled back in a snarl as he fought the four remaining men. He moved quickly, as if it were as effortless as breathing. The men began to throw huge bubbles of magic at the Dragon King. He dodged many of them. The few that hit him barely made an impact other than to infuriate him, if his bared teeth were any indication. The man—or whatever he was—who had stopped her in the pub was struck down with lethal force by the Dragon King. Darcy almost cheered, but it got lodged in her throat when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Had she not turned right then, Darcy would never have seen the second dragon swoop from the sky and wrap its talons around another of the men before flying away, crushing him. That left just two of her attackers. They and the Dragon King circled each other on the street. “She’s ours,” one of the red-eyed men said. The Dragon King merely raised a brow. “Think again, Dark.” More globes of magic flew from the two Dark, but the Dragon King was too fast. He came up behind one of the Dark and ripped out his spinal column. The same instant the dragon grabbed the other. Both Dark fell lifeless to the ground a moment later. Darcy hadn’t moved a muscle in the few minutes that had passed. The need that had assaulted her earlier with the Dark was now gone. But she wasn’t alone. The Dragon King’s gaze turned to her. Darcy watched him standing in the glow of the streetlight, completely mesmerized by the dragon tat that ran from the King’s right shoulder, under his armpit, and down his side to the top of his right thigh. The dragon’s head was at the front of the man’s shoulder and had his mouth open as if on a roar. He was rearing with his wings up and out. It was his long tail that stopped at the King’s thigh. The King glistened with sweat that made his muscles gleam in the light. Darcy had the absurd notion to run her hands all over his body, learning the feel of his hard muscles and warm skin. Her gaze traveled down his wide chest to his washboard stomach and narrow waist. Then lower... ~ Donna Grant,

637:Into Her Lying Down Head Into her lying down head His enemies entered bed, Under the encumbered eyelid, Through the rippled drum of the hair-buried ear; And Noah's rekindled now unkind dove Flew man-bearing there. Last night in a raping wave Whales unreined from the green grave In fountains of origin gave up their love, Along her innocence glided Jaun aflame and savagely young King Lear, Queen Catherine howling bare And Samson drowned in his hair, The colossal intimacies of silent Once seen strangers or shades on a stair; There the dark blade and wanton sighing her down To a haycock couch and the scythes of his arms Rode and whistled a hundred times Before the crowing morning climbed; Man was the burning England she was sleep-walking, and the enamouring island Made her limbs blind by luminous charms, Sleep to a newborn sleep in a swaddling loin-leaf stroked and sang And his runaway beloved childlike laid in the acorned sand. II There where a numberless tongue Wound their room with a male moan, His faith around her flew undone And darkness hung the walls with baskets of snakes, A furnace-nostrilled column-membered Super-or-near man Resembling to her dulled sense The thief of adolescence, Early imaginary half remembered Oceanic lover alone 101 Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes, Made his bad bed in her good Night, and enjoyed as he would. Crying, white gowned, from the middle moonlit stages Out to the tiered and hearing tide, Close and far she announced the theft of the heart In the taken body at many ages, Trespasser and broken bride Celebrating at her side All blood-signed assailing and vanished marriages in which he had no lovely part Nor could share, for his pride, to the least Mutter and foul wingbeat of the solemnizing nightpriest Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast. III Two sand grains together in bed, Head to heaven-circling head, Singly lie with the whole wide shore, The covering sea their nightfall with no names; And out of every domed and soil-based shell One voice in chains declaims The female, deadly, and male Libidinous betrayal, Golden dissolving under the water veil. A she bird sleeping brittle by Her lover's wings that fold to-morrow's flight, Within the nested treefork Sings to the treading hawk Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk. A blade of grass longs with the meadow, A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill. Open as to the air to the naked shadow O she lies alone and still, Innocent between two wars, With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds to perpetuate the stars, A man torn up mourns in the sole night. And the second comers, the severers, the enemies from the deep Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their dead in her faithless sleep. 102 ~ Dylan Thomas,

638:THE NIGHTGOWN was only the first of the garments in the box. There were seven nightgowns, in fact—one for each day of the week—of delicate silk, lovely georgette, and beautiful tiffany. As Alexandra pulled them out, she draped them on the bed. She’d never seen a nightgown that wasn’t white, but these were almond and pale blush pink, powder blue and soft peach, with delicate edgings of lace and intricate, exquisite embroidery. “They’re stunning,” she said. “Madame Rodale has nothing like them in her book of fashion plates.” Tris just grinned. He seemed different tonight. More relaxed, less worried. She didn’t know what had prompted his sudden good humor, but she didn’t want to question it. She’d rather enjoy it instead. After the afternoon she’d had—starting with Elizabeth’s letter and ending with three fruitless interviews—she wasn’t about to risk the one thing that seemed to be going right. “Are you going to try one on for me?” he asked. Her face heated. He chose a nightgown off the bed, palest lavender with black lace and violet embroidery. “This one,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you require assistance with your dress?” “Just the buttons,” she said, and turned to let him unfasten them. She shifted the nightgown in her hands. It felt so light. “There,” he said when the back of her green dress gaped open. He kissed her softly on the nape of her neck, then settled on one of the striped chairs, sipping from the glass of port he’d brought upstairs with him. “Use the dressing room. I’ll be waiting.” In the dressing room, she shakily stripped out of her frock, chemise, shoes, and stockings, then dropped the nightgown over her head and smoothed it down over her hips. The fabric whispered against her legs. She turned to see herself in the looking glass. Sweet heaven. She’d never imagined nightgowns like this existed. Her nightgowns all had high collars that tied at the throat. This one had a wide, low neckline. Her nightgowns all had long, full sleeves. This one had tiny puffed sleeves that began halfway off her shoulders. Her nightgowns were made of yards and yards of thick, billowing fabric. This one was a slender column that left no curve to the imagination. It was wicked. “Are you ready yet?” Tris called. Alexandra swallowed hard, reminding herself that he’d seen her in less clothing. And he was her husband. Still, wearing the nightgown for him somehow felt more intimate than wearing nothing at all. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Drawing a deep breath, she exited the dressing room, walked quickly through the sitting room, and paused in the bedroom’s doorway. She dropped her gaze, then raised her lashes, giving him the look—the one Juliana had said would make men fall at her feet. Judging from the expression on Tris’s face, it was a good thing he was sitting. The way he looked at her made her heartbeat accelerate. He rose and moved toward her. She met him halfway, licking suddenly dry lips. “Will you kiss me?” she asked softly, reaching up to sweep that always unruly lock off his forehead. It worked this time. He kissed her but good. ~ Lauren Royal,

639:On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he ~ Joshua Green,

640:He had a rough idea where he was going, since Rylann had previously mentioned that she lived in Roscoe Village. At the stoplight at Belmont Avenue, he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts. The beauty of text messaging, he realized, was in its simplicity. He didn’t have to try to explain things, nor did he have to attempt to parse through all the banter in an attempt to figure out what she might be thinking. Instead, he could keep things short and sweet. I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU. He hit send. To kill time while he waited for her response, he drove in the direction of his sister’s wine shop, figuring he could always drop in and harass Jordan about something. This time, however, she beat him to the punch. “So who’s the brunette bombshell?” Jordan asked as soon as he walked into the shop and took a seat at the main bar. Damn. He’d forgotten about the stupid Scene and Heard column. Kyle helped himself to a cracker and some Brie cheese sitting on the bar. “I’m going to say…Angelina Jolie. Actually, no—Megan Fox.” “Megan Fox is, like, twenty-five.” “And this is a problem why, exactly?” Jordan slapped his hand as he reached for more crackers. “Those are for customers.” She put her hand on her hip. “You know, after reading the Scene and Heard column, I’d kind of hoped it was Rylann they were talking about. And that maybe, just maybe, my ne’er-do-well twin had decided to stop playing around and finally pursue a woman of quality.” He stole another cracker. “Now, that would be something.” She shook her head. “Why do I bother? You know, one day you’re going to wake up and…” Kyle’s cell phone buzzed, and he tuned out the rest of Jordan’s lecture—he could probably repeat the whole thing word for word by now—as he checked the incoming message. It was from Rylann, her response as short and sweet as his original text. 3418 CORNELIA, #3. He had her address. With a smile, he looked up and interrupted his sister. “That’s great, Jordo. Hey, by any chance do you have any bottles of that India Ink cabernet lying around?” She stopped midrant and stared at him. “I’m sure I do. Why, what made you think of that?” Then her face broke into a wide grin. “Wait a second…that was the wine Rylann talked about when she was here. She said it was one of her favorites.” “Did she? Funny coincidence.” Jordan put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God, you’re trying to impress her. That is so cute.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle scoffed. “I just thought, since I’ve heard such good things about the wine, that I would give it a shot.” Jordan gave him a look, cutting through all the bullshit. “Kyle. She’s going to love it.” Okay, whatever. Maybe he was trying to impress Rylann a little. “You don’t think it’s too much? Like I’m trying too hard?” Jordan put her hand over her heart again. “Oh. It’s like watching Bambi take his first steps.” “Jordo…” he growled warningly. With a smile, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “It’s perfect. Trust me. ~ Julie James,

641:God’s Acre In Memory Of. In Fondest Recollection Of. In Loving Memory Of. In Fond Remembrance. Died in October. Died at Sea. Who died at sea? The name of the seaport Escapes her, gone, blown with the eastwind, over The tombs and yews, into the apple orchard, Over the road, where gleams a wagon-top, And gone. The eastwind gallops up from sea Bringing salt and gulls. The marsh smell, too, Strong in September; mud and reeds, the reeds Rattling like bones. She shifts the grass-clipper From right to left hand, clips and clips the grass. The broken column, carefully broken, on which The blackbird hen is laughing—in fondest memory. Burden! Who was this Burden, to be remembered? Or Potter? The Potter rejected by the Pot. ‘Here lies Josephus Burden, who departed This life the fourth of August, nineteen hundred. “And He Said Come.” ’ Josephus Burden, forty, Gross, ribald, with strong hands on which grew hair, And red ears kinked with hair, and northblue eyes, Held in one hand a hammer, in the other A nail. He drove the nail . . . This was enough? Or—also—did he love? She changes back The clipper. The blades are dull. The grass is wet And gums the blades. In Loving Recollection. Four chains, heavy, hang round the vault. What chance For skeletons? The dead men rise at night, Rattle the links. ‘Too heavy! can’t be budged . . . Try once again—together—NOW! . . . no use.’ They sit in moonless shadow, gently talking. ‘Old Jones it must have been, who made those chains. I’d like to see him lift them now!’ . . . The owl 42 That hunts in Wickham Wood comes over, mewing. ‘An owl,’ says one. ‘Most likely,’ says another. They turn grey heads. The seawind brings a breaking Bell sound among the yews and tombstones, ringing The twisted whorls of bronze on sunlit stones. Sacred . . . memory . . . affectionate . . . O God What travesty is this—the blackbird soils The broken column; the worm at work in the skull Feasts on medulla; and the lewd thrush cracks A snailshell on the vault. He died on shipboard— Sea-burial, then, were better? On her knees She clips and clips, kneeling against the sod, Holding the world between her two knees, pondering Downward, as if her thought, like men or apples, Fell ripely into earth. Seablue, her eyes Turn to the sea. Sea-gulls are scavengers, Cruel of face, but lovely. By the dykes The reeds rattle, leaping in eastwind, rattling Like bones. In Fond Remembrance Of. O God, That life is what it is, and does not change. You there in earth, and I above you kneeling. You dead, and I alive. She prods a plantain Of too ambitious root. That largest yew-tree, Clutching the hill— She rises from stiff knees, Stiffly, and treads the pebble path, that leads Downward, to sea and town. The marsh smell comes Healthy and salt, and fills her nostrils. Reeds Dance in the eastwind, rattling; warblers dart Flashing, from swaying reed to reed, and sing. 43 ~ Conrad Potter Aiken,

642:I remember." I nod. Wanting to say: I remember everything-all of it-the question is: Do you? But instead, I stare down at my feet, smiling stupidly. Everything I do around him is stupid. Some Seeker I've turned out to be. Attempting to redeem myself,say something normal,not let on that I already know he's employed here-thanks to the raven who allowed me to spy on him earlier,I say, "So,I guess you hang out here a lot then?" He pushes a hand through his hair, as his eyes-the color of aquamarines-glide down the length of me.And damn if I can't feel their trajectory. It's like showering in a stream of warm, molten honey-dripping from the top of my forehead all the way down to my feet. "I guess you could say that," he says,voicelow and deep. "More than most, anyway." He waves a damp towel, tugs on the string of his apron, and I blush in reply. The sight of it reminding me of what I saw in the alleyway-watching him lean against the wall,his face so soft anddreamy I longed to touch him-kiss him-like I did in the dream. I study him closely,seeking traces of recognition, remembrance-some small token of evidence to assure me that, as odd as it seems,that kiss in the cave was as real as it felt-but coming up empty. "So,how long have you worked here?" I ask, returning to the topic at hand. My gaze drifting over the black V-necked T-shirt skimming the sinuous line of his body-telling myself it's all part of my reconnaissance,my need to gather as uch information as I can about him and his kin. But knowing that's not really it.The truth is,I like looking at him, being near him. "I guess you could say somewhere between too long and not long enough-depending on the state of my wallet." His laugh is good-natured and easy-the kid that starts at the belly and trips all the way up. "It's pretty much the only decent game in town." He shrugs. "One way or another,you end up working for the Richters,and believe me, this is one of the better gigs." I peer at him closely,remembering what Cade said when I was here via the raven. How he referred to him by another name. "You're not a Richter?" I ask,holding my breath in my cheeks.Despite what Paloma told me, I need to hear it from him,confirm that he doesn't identify with their clan. "I go by Whitefeather," he says,gaze steady and serious. "I was raised by my mom,didn't even know the Richters when I was a kid." Despite getting the answer I wanted, I frown in return. His being a Richter was a good reason to avoid him-without it,I'm out of excuses. "Is that okay?" He dips his head toward mine,his mouth tugging at the side. "You seem a little upset by the news." I shake my head,break free of my reverie, and say, "No-not at all. Believe me,it's more like a relief." I meet his gaze,seeing the way it narrows in question. "Guess I'm not a big fan of your brother," I add,watching as he throws his head back and laughs,the sight of that long,glorious column of neck forcing me to look away,it's too much to take. "If it makes you feel any better, most of the time I'd have to agree." He returns to me,the warmth of his gaze solely reponsible for the wave of comfort that flows through me. ~ Alyson Noel,

643:He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every cut on her soft skin. But he couldn’t, not yet. He needed to get her, and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site. It also meant he would have to drive. In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he had come was watching various assistants through the years as they chauffeured him. He wasn’t sure he could even remember how to start the car, but right now he had no choice. Grudgingly, he got into the driver’s seat, and finding the lever underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into the ignition. From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far more keen than a human man. How difficult could it be? He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went silent. The engine wasn’t running. What was he doing wrong? He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive itself. He had to keep a cool head. Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his feet to the floor and turned the key again. This time the car didn’t move, and it roared to life. Grasping the gearshift, he jammed it into the first position and glanced over at Kate. Why couldn’t she have owned a car with an automatic transmission? Shaking his head, he put some pressure on the gas pedal and slowly released the clutch. Thankfully the car rolled a few feet, but without warning it jumped forward. He pressed the clutch back to the floor before the engine lost power again. Calisto slammed his hand against the wheel, muttering under his breath in Spanish. At this rate it would take him all night to drive her home. The faded yellow convertible pitched forward again, threatening to stall as he continued out of the parking lot, thankful it was late. The streets were fairly empty. At least he wouldn’t get into an accident with another car. Her car staggered ahead, lurching each time he tried to release the clutch, bouncing and jostling them both until Kate finally stirred and woke up. § “Are we out of gas or something?” Calisto watched her with a tight smile. “Not exactly.” Kate winced in pain when she laughed. “You can’t drive a stickshift, can you?” “Does it show?” Calisto pulled over, finally allowing the engine to stall. She nodded her head slowly to avoid more pain. “Just a little. What happened?” “You don’t remember?” “I remember being mugged. And I remember seeing you, but everything after that is blank.” She watched his eyes as Calisto reached over to brush her hair back from her face, and his touch sent shivers through her body. This wasn’t how she had hoped she would run into him, but she learned a long time ago fate didn’t always work out the way you expected. ~ Lisa Kessler,

644:The English Revolution Of 1848 HO ye that nothing have to lose! ho rouse ye, one and all! Come from the sinks of the New Cut, the purlieus of Vauxhall! Did ye not hear the mighty sound boom by ye as it went— The Seven Dials strike the hour of man's enfranchisement? Ho cock your eyes, my gallant pals, and swing your heavy staves: Remember—Kings and Queens being out, the great cards will be Knaves. And when the pack is ours—oh then at what a slapping pace Shall the tens be trodden down to five, and the fives kicked down to ace! It was but yesterday the Times and Post and Telegraph Told how from France King Louy-Phil. was shaken out like chaff; To-morrow, boys, the National, the Siècle, and the Débats, Shall have to tell the self-same tale of “La Reine Victoria.” What! shall our incomes we've not got be taxed by puny John? Shall the policeman keep Time back by bidding us move on? Shall we too follow in the steps of that poor sneak Cochrane? Shall it be said, “They came, they saw,—and bolted back again”? Not so! albeit great men have been among us, and are floor'd— (Frost, Williams, Jones, and other ones who now reside abroad)— Among the master-spirits of the age there still are those Who'll pick up fame—even though, when smelt, it makes men hold the nose. What ho there! clear the way! make room for him, the “fly” and wise, Who wrote in mystic grammar about London's “Mysteries,”— For him who takes a proud delight to wallow in our kennels,— For Mr. A. B. C. D. E. F. G. M. W. Reynolds! Come, hoist him up! his pockets will afford convenient hold To grab him by; and, if inside there silver is or gold, And should it be found sticking to our hands when they're drawn out, Why, 'twere a chance not fair to say ill-natured things about. Silence! Hear, hear! He says that we're the sovereign people, we! And now? And now he states the fact that one and one make three! Now he makes casual mention of a certain Miscellany! He says that he's the editor! He says it costs a penny! O thou great Spirit of the World! shall not the lofty things He saith be borne unto all time for noble lessonings? Shall not our sons tell to their sons what we could do and dare In this the great year Forty-eight and in Trafalgar Square? Swathed in foul wood, yon column stood 'mid London's thousand marts; And at their wine Committeemen grinned as they drank “The Arts”: But our good flint-stones have bowled down each poster-hidden board, 412 And from their hoarded malice our strong hands have stript the hoard. Yon column is a prouder thing than Cæsar's triumph-arch! It shall be called “The Column of the Glorious Days of March!” And stonemasons' apprentices shall grow rich men therewith, By contract-chiselling the names of Jones and Brown and Smith. Upon what point of London, say, shall our next vengeance burst? Shall the Exchange, or Parliament, be immolated first? Which of the Squares shall we burn down?—which of the Palaces? (The speaker is nailed by a policeman) Oh please sir, don't! It isn't me. It's him. Oh don't, sir, please! ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

645:The Forsaken Once in the winter Out on a lake In the heart of the north-land, Far from the Fort And far from the hunters, A Chippewa woman With her sick baby, Crouched in the last hours Of a great storm. Frozen and hungry, She fished through the ice With a line of the twisted Bark of the cedar, And a rabbit-bone hook Polished and barbed; Fished with the bare hook All through the wild day, Fished and caught nothing; While the young chieftain Tugged at her breasts, Or slept in the lacings Of the warm tikanagan. All the lake-surface Streamed with the hissing Of millions of iceflakes Hurled by the wind; Behind her the round Of a lonely island Roared like a fire With the voice of the storm In the deeps of the cedars. Valiant, unshaken, She took of her own flesh, Baited the fish-hook, Drew in a gray-trout, Drew in his fellows, Heaped them beside her, Dead in the snow. 105 Valiant, unshaken, She faced the long distance, Wolf-haunted and lonely, Sure of her goal And the life of her dear one: Tramped for two days, On the third in the morning, Saw the strong bulk Of the Fort by the river, Saw the wood-smoke Hand soft in the spruces, Heard the keen yelp Of the ravenous huskies Fighting for whitefish: Then she had rest. II Years and years after, When she was old and withered, When her son was an old man And his children filled with vigour, They came in their northern tour on the verge of winter, To an island in a lonely lake. There one night they camped, and on the morrow Gathered their kettles and birch-bark Their rabbit-skin robes and their mink-traps, Launched their canoes and slunk away through the islands, Left her alone forever, Without a word of farewell, Because she was old and useless, Like a paddle broken and warped, Or a pole that was splintered. Then, without a sigh, Valiant, unshaken, She smoothed her dark locks under her kerchief, Composed her shawl in state, Then folded her hands ridged with sinews and corded with veins, Folded them across her breasts spent with the nourishment of children, Gazed at the sky past the tops of the cedars, Saw two spangled nights arise out of the twilight, Saw two days go by filled with the tranquil sunshine, 106 Saw, without pain, or dread, or even a moment of longing: Then on the third great night there came thronging and thronging Millions of snowflakes out of a windless cloud; They covered her close with a beautiful crystal shroud, Covered her deep and silent. But in the frost of the dawn, Up from the life below, Rose a column of breath Through a tiny cleft in the snow, Fragile, delicately drawn, Wavering with its own weakness, In the wilderness a sign of the spirit, Persisting still in the sight of the sun Till day was done. Then all light was gathered up by the hand of God and hid in His breast, Then there was born a silence deeper than silence, Then she had rest. ~ Duncan Campbell Scott,

646:Heavy and solemn, A cloudy column, Through the green plain they marching came! Measure less spread, like a table dread, For the wild grim dice of the iron game. The looks are bent on the shaking ground, And the heart beats loud with a knelling sound; Swift by the breasts that must bear the brunt, Gallops the major along the front "Halt!" And fettered they stand at the stark command, And the warriors, silent, halt! Proud in the blush of morning glowing, What on the hill-top shines in flowing, "See you the foeman's banners waving?" "We see the foeman's banners waving!" "God be with yechildren and wife!" Hark to the musicthe trump and the fife, How they ring through the ranks which they rouse to the strife! Thrilling they sound with their glorious tone, Thrilling they go through the marrow and bone! Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er, In the life to come that we meet once more! See the smoke how the lightning is cleaving asunder! Hark the guns, peal on peal, how they boom in their thunder! From host to host, with kindling sound, The shouting signal circles round, Ay, shout it forth to life or death Freer already breathes the breath! The war is waging, slaughter raging, And heavy through the reeking pall, The iron death-dice fall! Nearer they closefoes upon foes "Ready!"From square to square it goes, Down on the knee they sank, And fire comes sharp from the foremost rank. Many a man to the earth it sent, Many a gap by the balls is rent O'er the corpse before springs the hinder man, That the line may not fail to the fearless van, To the right, to the left, and around and around, Death whirls in its dance on the bloody ground. God's sunlight is quenched in the fiery fight, Over the hosts falls a brooding night! Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er In the life to come that we meet once more! The dead men lie bathed in the weltering blood And the living are blent in the slippery flood, And the feet, as they reeling and sliding go, Stumble still on the corpses that sleep below. "What, Francis!" "Give Charlotte my last farewell." As the dying man murmurs, the thunders swell "I'll giveOh God! are their guns so near? Ho! comrades!yon volley!look sharp to the rear! I'll give thy Charlotte thy last farewell, Sleep soft! where death thickest descendeth in rain, The friend thou forsakest thy side shall regain!" Hitherwardthitherward reels the fight, Dark and more darkly day glooms into night Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er In the life to come that we meet once more! Hark to the hoofs that galloping go! The adjutant flying, The horsemen press hard on the panting foe, Their thunder booms in dying Victory! The terror has seized on the dastards all, And their colors fall! Victory! Closed is the brunt of the glorious fight And the day, like a conqueror, bursts on the night, Trumpet and fife swelling choral along, The triumph already sweeps marching in song. Farewell, fallen brothers, though this life be o'er, There's another, in which we shall meet you once more! ~ Friedrich Schiller, The Battle ,

647:The Two Armies Once over the ocean in distant lands, In an age long past, were two hostile bandsTwo armies of men, both brave, both strong, And their hearts beat high as they marched along To fight the battle of right and wrong. Never, I think, did the Eye of heaven Look down on two armies so nearly even In well-trained soldiers, in strength and might. But one was the Wrong , and one was the Right And the last was the stronger in heaven's sight. And these hostile armies drew near, one night, And pitched their tents on two hill-sides green, With only the brow of a hill between. With the first red beams of the morning light Both knew would open the awful fight, And one of the armies lay hushed and still, And slept in the tents on the green side-hill. Heart beat with heart: and they all were as one In the thought of the battle to be begun With the first bright glance of the morning sun. Their aim was ignoble, their cause was wrong, But they were united , and so they were strong. Not so the army just over the hill: While the ranks of the foe were hushed and still, The ranks of the Right were torn with strife, 709 And with noise and confusion the air was rife. Disputes and quarrels, dissensions and jars, And the sound of fighting, and civil wars; And, ere the morning, brother and brother, Instead of the enemy, fought with each other. Over the hill, the foe, in glee, Listened and laughed. 'Ho ho!' quoth he. 'There is strife in the enemy's ranks, I see, And the bright red beams of the rising sun Will see a victory easily won. It matters little how strong the foe, This is a truth we all do know: There is no success without unity, However noble the cause may be. The day is ours before it's begun. Ho! for the triumph so easily won.' And on the morrow, the ranks of the Right Were routed and beaten, and put to flight, And the Wrong was the victor, and gained the fight. There are two armies abroad to-day, As in the age that has passed away. The makers, and venders, and patrons, and all Who aid in the traffic of Alcohol, These are the warriors, bold and strong, Who swell the ranks of the army of Wrong. And we are the soldiers, true and brave, Who are striving with heart and hand to save The youths of our land from the deep, dark grave That the foe is digging by day and by night. Only one thing can defeat the Right. There is nothing but triumph for us, unless 710 Dissension , that crafty foe to success, Creeps into our ranks. Oh! let us unite Let heart beat with heart as we enter the fight; Let the whole mighty army be one for the time, And sweep on the foe in a column sublime In its unity, earnestness, oneness, and might, Till the foe stands aghast at the wonderful sight, Till the enemy cowers and shivers, afraid Of the awful approach of the grand cavalcade. Close up the ranks, brothers! sisters, draw near, We are fighting one fight, we are all kinsmen here. Closer, still closer! in nearness lies might. Love is our watchword-on to the fight! ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

648:The House Of Clouds I would build a cloudy House For my thoughts to live in; When for earth too fancy-loose And too low for Heaven! Hush! I talk my dream aloud--I build it bright to see,--I build it on the moonlit cloud, To which I looked with thee. Cloud-walls of the morning's grey, Faced with amber column,--Crowned with crimson cupola From a sunset solemn! May mists, for the casements, fetch, Pale and glimmering; With a sunbeam hid in each, And a smell of spring. Build the entrance high and proud, Darkening and then brightening,--If a riven thunder-cloud, Veined by the lightning. Use one with an iris-stain, For the door within; Turning to a sound like rain, As I enter in. Build a spacious hall thereby: Boldly, never fearing. Use the blue place of the sky, Which the wind is clearing; Branched with corridors sublime, Flecked with winding stairs--Such as children wish to climb, Following their own prayers. In the mutest of the house, I will have my chamber: Silence at the door shall use 231 Evening's light of amber, Solemnising every mood, Softemng in degree,--Turning sadness into good, As I turn the key. Be my chamber tapestried With the showers of summer, Close, but soundless,---glorified When the sunbeams come here; Wandering harpers, harping on Waters stringed for such,--Drawing colours, for a tune, With a vibrant touch. Bring a shadow green and still From the chestnut forest, Bring a purple from the hill, When the heat is sorest; Spread them out from wall to wall, Carpet-wove around,--Whereupon the foot shall fall In light instead of sound. Bring the fantasque cloudlets home From the noontide zenith Ranged, for sculptures, round the room,--Named as Fancy weeneth: Some be Junos, without eyes; Naiads, without sources Some be birds of paradise,--Some, Olympian horses. Bring the dews the birds shake off, Waking in the hedges,--Those too, perfumed for a proof, From the lilies' edges: From our England's field and moor, Bring them calm and white in; Whence to form a mirror pure, For Love's self-delighting. 232 Bring a grey cloud from the east, Where the lark is singing; Something of the song at least, Unlost in the bringing: That shall be a morning chair, Poet-dream may sit in, When it leans out on the air, Unrhymed and unwritten. Bring the red cloud from the sun While he sinketh, catch it. That shall be a couch,---with one Sidelong star to watch it,--Fit for poet's finest Thought, At the curfew-sounding,--- ; Things unseen being nearer brought Than the seen, around him. Poet's thought,----not poet's sigh! 'Las, they come together! Cloudy walls divide and fly, As in April weather! Cupola and column proud, Structure bright to see--Gone---except that moonlit cloud, To which I looked with thee! Let them! Wipe such visionings From the Fancy's cartel--Love secures some fairer things Dowered with his immortal. The sun may darken,---heaven be bowed--But still, unchanged shall be,--Here in my soul,---that moonlit cloud, To which I looked with THEE! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

649:Please tell me we don’t have to go all the way upstairs for a condom,” she said. “Back pocket.” She leaned with him as he fished it out, then tried to help him get his jeans down over his hips. Her foot hit the coffee table, which snagged on the throw rug and sent the Scrabble tiles sliding all over the board. She laughed as he tore open the condom packet. “Now nobody wins.” “I was ahead.” He put one hand on her hip, using the other to guide himself into her. “So I win.” Emma moaned as he filled her, bracing herself against the couch with a hand on either side of his head. “The game wasn’t over. It’s a draw.” He pulled down on her hips as he drove up into her, making her gasp. “Ties are for pussies. Admit I won.” She looked down into his blue eyes, crinkled with amusement as he grinned at her. God, she loved…having sex with this man. “One good word isn’t a victory.” “That’s not what the score sheet said.” He stopped moving, and when she tried to rock against him, he held down on her hips so she couldn’t move, either. Then he had the nerve to chuckle at her growl of sexual frustration. “Admit it. I can sit here all night.” “Oh, really?” She went straight for a known weak spot—nipping at his earlobe before sucking it into her mouth. He let go of her hips with one hand, intending to push her mouth away, but she rocked her hips. He groaned and put his hand back. She breathed softly against his ear and then ran her tongue along the outside. “Admit I was going to win,” she whispered, “because I can do this all night.” With one leg, he kicked at the table, sending it over and the letter tiles flying. Before Emma could react, she was on her back on the throw rug with Sean between her legs and her hands held over her head. “I don’t lose.” He crossed her wrists so he could hold them with one hand, then used the other to pull her leg up over his hip so he was totally buried in her. “Give up?” She shook her head, but couldn’t hold back the sigh as he oh, so slowly withdrew almost completely and then just as slowly filled her again. “You’re cheating.” He did it again and again, the slow friction delicious and frustrating, until they were both trembling and on the edge. Then, as he was pulling out of her once again with a self-control that made her want to scream, it became a matter of life or death, because she was going to die if she didn’t get what her body was looking for. “Okay, fine. You win.” He drove into her hard, his fingers biting into her wrists before he released them so he could lift her legs to her shoulder. She cried his name as his fingers dug into her hips and he gave them what they both wanted. When he collapsed on top of her, breathing hard against her neck, she wrapped her legs and arms around him, holding him close. “Another one for the win column,” he said once they’d caught their breath. “It has an asterisk, though, because you totally cheated.” “All’s fair in sex and Scrabble, baby.” He propped his head on his hand and smiled down at her. “What should we play next?” “I’ve still got clothes on. You’ve still got clothes on. Maybe we should break out a deck of cards.” “You’re my kinda girl, Emma Shaw,” he said, and thankfully, he was in the process of getting up off the floor, because she didn’t think she did a good job of hiding how happy those words made her. ~ Shannon Stacey,

650:A Vision Of Twilight By a void and soundless river On the outer edge of space, Where the body comes not ever, But the absent dream hath place, Stands a city, tall and quiet, And its air is sweet and dim; Never sound of grief or riot Makes it mad, or makes it grim. And the tender skies thereover Neither sun, nor star, behold-Only dusk it hath for cover,-But a glamour soft with gold, Through a mist of dreamier essence Than the dew of twilight, smiles On strange shafts and domes and crescents, Lifting into eerie piles. In its courts and hallowed places Dreams of distant worlds arise, Shadows of transfigured faces, Glimpses of immortal eyes, Echoes of serenest pleasure, Notes of perfect speech that fall, Through an air of endless leisure, Marvellously musical. And I wander there at even, Sometimes when my heart is clear, When a wider round of heaven And a vaster world are near, When from many a shadow steeple Sounds of dreamy bells begin, And I love the gentle people That my spirit finds therein. Men of a diviner making Than the sons of pride and strife, Quick with love and pity, breaking 17 From a knowledge old as life; Women of a spiritual rareness, Whom old passion and old woe Moulded to a slenderer fairness Than the dearest shapes we know. In its domed and towered centre Lies a garden wide and fair, Open for the soul to enter, And the watchful townsmen there Greet the stranger gloomed and fretting From this world of stormy hands, With a look that deals forgetting And a touch that understands. For they see with power, not borrowed From a record taught or told, But they loved and laughed and sorrowed In a thousand worlds of old; Now they rest and dream for ever, And with hearts serene and whole See the struggle, the old fever, Clear as on a painted scroll. Wandering by that grey and solemn Water, with its ghostly quays-Vistas of vast arch and column, Shadowed by unearthly trees-Biddings of sweet power compel me, And I go with bated breath, Listening to the tales they tell me, Parables of Life and Death. In a tongue that once was spoken, Ere the world was cooled by Time, When the spirit flowed unbroken Through the flesh, and the Sublime Made the eyes of men far-seeing, And their souls as pure as rain, They declare the ends of being, And the sacred need of pain. 18 For they know the sweetest reasons For the products most malign-They can tell the paths and seasons Of the farthest suns that shine. How the moth-wing's iridescence By an inward plan was wrought, And they read me curious lessons In the secret ways of thought. When day turns, and over heaven To the balmy western verge Sail the victor fleets of even, And the pilot stars emerge, Then my city rounds and rises, Like a vapour formed afar, And its sudden girth surprises, And its shadowy gates unbar. Dreamy crowds are moving yonder In a faint and phantom blue; Through the dusk I lean, and wonder If their winsome shapes are true; But in veiling indecision Come my questions back again-Which is real? The fleeting vision? Or the fleeting world of men? ~ Archibald Lampman,

651:War By the Nile, the sacred river, I can see the captive hordes, Strain beneath the lash and quiver At the long papyrus cords, While in granite rapt and solemn, Rising over roof and column, Amen-hotep dreams, or Ramses, Lord of Lords. I can hear the trumpets waken For a victory old and far– Carchemish or Kadesh taken– I can see the conqueror's car Bearing down some Hittite valley, Where the bowmen break and sally, Sargina or Esarhaddon, Grim with war! From the mountain streams that sweeten Indus, to the Spanish foam, I can feel the broad earth beaten By the serried tramp of Rome; Through whatever foes environ Onward with the might of iron– Veni, vidi; veni vici– Crashing home! I can see the kings grow pallid With astonished fear and hate, As the hosts of Amr or Khaled On their cities fall like fate; Like the heat-wind from its prison In the desert burst and risen– La ilaha illah 'llahu– God is great! I can hear the iron rattle, I can see the arrows sting In some far-off northern battle, 260 Where the long swords sweep and swing; I can hear the scalds declaiming, I can see their eyeballs flaming, Gathered in a frenzied circle Round the king. I can hear the horn of Uri Roaring in the hills enorm; Kindled at its brazen fury, I can see the clansmen form; In the dawn in misty masses, Pouring from the silent passes Over Granson or Morgarten Like the storm. On the lurid anvil ringing To some slow fantastic plan, I can hear the sword-smith singing In the heart of old Japan– Till the cunning blade grows tragic With his malice and his magic– Tenka tairan! Tenka tairan! War to man! Where a northern river charges From the murky forest marges, Round a broken palisade, I can see the red men leaping, See the sword of Daulac sweeping, And the ghostly forms of heroes Fall and fade. I can feel the modern thunder Of the cannon beat and blaze, When the lines of men go under On your proudest battle-days; Through the roar I hear the lifting Of the bloody chorus drifting Round the burning mill at Valmy– Marseillaise! I can see the ocean rippled 261 With the driving shot like rain, While the hulls are crushed and crippled, And the guns are piled with slain; O'er the blackened broad sea-meadow Drifts a tall and titan shadow, And the cannon of Trafalgar Startle Spain. Still the tides of fight are booming, And the barren blood is spilt; Still the banners are up-looming, And the hands are on the hilt; But the old world waxes wiser, From behind the bolted visor It descries at last the horror And the guilt. Yet the eyes are dim, nor wholly Open to the golden gleam, And the brute surrenders slowly To the godhead and the dream. From his cage of bar and girder, Still at moments mad with murder, Leaps the tiger, and his demon Rules supreme. One more war with fire and famine Gathers–I can hear its cries– And the years of might and Mammon Perish in a world's demise; When the strength of man is shattered, And the powers of earth are scattered, From beneath the ghastly ruin Peace shall rise! ~ Archibald Lampman,

652:I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,

653:3 INCIDENT IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL Not long afterwards, a Belgian ferry, the Oudenbourg, was steaming its way from Ostende to Ramsgate. In the straits of Dover the duty officer noticed that half a mile south of its usual course there was something going on in the water. He could not be sure that there was no-one drowning there and so he ordered a change of course down to where the perturbance was taking place. Two hundred passengers on the windward side of the ship were shown a very strange spectacle: in some places a vertical jet of water shot out from the surface, and in some of those vertical jets there could be seen something like a black body thrown up with it; the surface of the sea for one or two hundred yards all around was tossing and seething wildly while, from the depths, a loud rattling and humming could be heard. "It was as if there was a small volcano erupting under the sea." As the Oudenbourg slowly approached the place an enormous wave rose about ten yards ahead of it and a terrible noise thundered out like an explosion. The entire ship was lifted violently and the deck was showered with a rain of water that was nearly boiling hot; and landing on the deck with the water was a strong black body which writhed and let out a sharp loud scream; it was a newt that had been injured and burnt. The captain ordered the ship full steam astern so that the ship would not steam straight into the middle of this turbulent Hell; but the water all around had also begun to erupt and the surface of the sea was strewn with pieces of dismembered newts. The ship was finally able to turn around and it fled northwards as fast as possible. Then there was a terrible explosion about six hundred yards to the stern and a gigantic column of water and steam, perhaps a hundred yards high, shot out of the sea. The Oudenbourg set course for Harwich and sent out a radio warning in all directions: "Attention all shipping, attention all shipping! Severe danger on Ostende-Ramsgate lane. Underwater explosion. Cause unknown. All shipping advised avoid area!" All this time the sea was thundering and boiling, almost as if military manoeuvres had been taking place under the water; but apart from the erupting water and steam there was nothing to see. From both Dover and Calais, destroyers and torpedo boats set out at full steam and squadrons of military aircraft flew to the site of the disturbance; but by the time they got there all they found was that the surface was discoloured with something like a yellow mud and covered with startled fish and newts that had been torn to pieces. At first it was thought that a mine in the channel must have exploded; but once the shores on both sides of the Straits of Dover had been ringed off with a chain of soldiers and the English prime-minister had, for the fourth time in the history of the world, interrupted his Saturday evening and hurried back to London, there were those who thought the incident must be of extremely serious international importance. The papers carried some highly alarming rumours, but, oddly enough, this time remained far from the truth; nobody had any idea that Europe, and the whole world with it, stood for a few days on the brink of a major war. It was only several years later that a member of the then British cabinet, Sir Thomas Mulberry, failed to be re-elected in a general election and published his memoirs setting out just what had actually happened; but by then, though, nobody was interested. ~ Karel apek,

654:A Song Of Trafalgar LIKE an angry sun, like a splendid star, War gleams down the long years' track; They strain at the leash, the dogs of war, And who shall hold them back? 'Let loose the pack: we are English bred, We will meet them full and fair With the flag of England over our head, And his hand to keep it there!' So spake our fathers. Our flag, unfurled, Blew brave to the north and south; An iron answer we gave the world, For we spoke by the cannon's mouth. But he who taught us the word to say Grew dumb as his Victory sang, And England mourned on her triumph day, And wept while her joy-bells rang. Long hour by hour, and long day by day, The swift years crept apace, The patient, the coral-insect way, To cover the dear dead face. O foolish rabble of envious years, Who wist not the dead must rise, His name is music still in our ears, His face a light to our eyes! Bring hither your laurels, the fading sign Of a deathless love and pride; These cling more close than the laurels twine, They are strong as the world is wide: At the feet of Virtue in Valour clad Shall glory and love be laid, While Glory sings to an English lad, Or Love to an English maid. 32 Wherever the gleams of an English fire On an English roof-tree shine, Wherever the fire of a youth's desire Is laid upon Honour's shrine, Wherever brave deeds are treasured and told, In the tale of the deeds of yore Like jewels of price in a chain of gold Are the name and the fame he bore. Wherever the track of our English ships Lies white on the ocean foam, His name is sweet to our English lips As the names of the flowers at home; Wherever the heart of an English boy Grows big with a deed of worth, Such names as his name have begot the same, Such hearts will bring it to birth. They say that his England, grown tired and old, Lies drunk by her heavy hoard; They say her hands have the grasp of the gold But not the grip of the sword, That her robe of glory is rent and shred, And that winds of shame blow through: Speak for your England, O mighty Dead, In the deeds you would have her do! Small skill have we to fight with the pen Who fought with the sword of old, For the sword that is wielded of Englishmen Is as much as one hand can hold. Yet the pen and the tongue are safe to use, And the coward and the wise choose these; But fools and brave were our English crews When Nelson swept the seas. 'Tis the way of a statesman to fear and fret, 33 To ponder and pause and plan, But the way of Nelson was better yet, For that was the way of a man; They would teach us smoothness, who once were rough, They have bidden us palter and pray, But the way of Nelson was good enough, For that was the fighting way. If Nelson's England must stoop to bear What never honour should brook, In vain does the tomb of her hero wear The laurel his brow forsook; In vain was the speech from the lips of her guns, If now must her lips refrain; In vain has she made us, her living sons, Her dead have made her in vain. So here with your bays be the dear head crowned, Lay flowers where the dear dust lies, And wreathe his column with laurel round To point his fame to the skies; But the greenest laurel that ever grew Is the laurel that's yet to win; Crowned with his laurels he waits for You To bring Your laurels in! ~ Edith Nesbit,

655:I made it three days before the text messages started one afternoon while I was trying to finish warming up before our afternoon session. I had gotten to the LC later than usual and had gone straight to the training room, praising Jesus that I’d decided to change my clothes before leaving the diner once I’d seen what time it was and had remembered lunchtime traffic was a real thing. I was in the middle of stretching my hips when my phone beeped from where I’d left it on top of my bag. I took it out and snickered immediately at the message after taking my time with it. Jojo: WHAT THE FUCK JASMINE I didn’t need to ask what my brother was what-the-fucking over. It had only been a matter of time. It was really hard to keep a secret in my family, and the only reason why my mom and Ben—who was the only person other than her who knew—had kept their mouths closed was because they had both agreed it would be more fun to piss off my siblings by not saying anything and letting them find out the hard way I was going to be competing again. Life was all about the little things. So, I’d slipped my phone back into my bag and kept stretching, not bothering to respond because it would just make him more mad. Twenty minutes later, while I was still busy stretching, I pulled my phone out and wasn’t surprised more messages appeared. Jojo: WHY WOULD YOU NOT TELL ME Jojo: HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME Jojo: DID THE REST OF YOU KEEP THIS FROM ME Tali: What happened? What did she not tell you? Tali: OH MY GOD, Jasmine, did you get knocked up? Tali: I swear, if you got knocked up, I’m going to beat the hell out of you. We talked about contraception when you hit puberty. Sebastian: Jasmine’s pregnant? Rubes: She’s not pregnant. Rubes: What happened, Jojo? Jojo: MOM DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS Tali: Would you just tell us what you’re talking about? Jojo: JASMINE IS SKATING WITH IVAN LUKOV Jojo: And I found out by going on Picturegram. Someone at the rink posted a picture of them in one of the training rooms. They were doing lifts. Jojo: JASMINE I SWEAR TO GOD YOU BETTER EXPLAIN EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW Tali: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IS THIS TRUE? Tali: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Jojo: I’m going on Lukov’s website right now to confirm this Rubes: I just called Mom but she isn’t answering the phone Tali: She knew about this. WHO ELSE KNEW? Sebastian: I didn’t. And quit texting Jas’s name over and over again. It’s annoying. She’s skating again. Good job, Jas. Happy for you. Jojo: ^^ You’re such a vibe kill Sebastian: No, I’m just not flipping my shit because she got a new partner. Jojo: SHE DIDN’T TELL US FIRST THO. What is the point of being related if we didn’t get the scoop before everybody else? Jojo: I FOUND OUT ON PICTUREGRAM Sebastian: She doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t tell you either. Tali: I can’t find anything about it online. Jojo: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Jojo: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Tali: Tell us everything or I’m coming over to Mom’s today. Sebastian: You’re annoying. Muting this until I get out of work. Jojo: Party pooper Tali: Party pooper Jojo: Jinx Tali: Jinx Sebastian: Annoying ... I typed out a reply, because knowing them, if I didn’t, the next time I looked at my phone, I’d have an endless column of JASMINE on there until they heard from me. That didn’t mean my response had to be what they wanted. Me: Who is Ivan Lukov? ~ Mariana Zapata,

656:Instead, the thing that had captured my attention was this big metal column topped by…absolutely nothing. It was doing this in the parking lot of what I had to figure was the main supplier of off-campus food: a retro-fifties fast-food joint. Maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of art, I thought as I stared at the column. I was living in the big city now, after all. Public art happened. Not only that, it didn’t have to make sense. In fact, having it not make sense was probably a requirement. “They took it down for repairs,” a voice beside my suddenly said. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but the truth is, I jumped about a mile. I’d been so mesmerized by the sight of that column extending upward into space, supporting empty air, that I’d totally lost track of all my soon-to-be-fellow students rushing by me. To this day, I can’t quite explain the fascination. But I’ve promised to tell you the 100 percent truth, which means I’ve got to include even the parts which make me appear less than impressive. “Huh?” Yes, all right, I know. Nowhere even near the list of incredibly clever replies. “They took it down for repairs,” the voice said again. “Took it down,” I echoed. By this time, I knew I was well on my way to breaking my own blending-in rule, big time. Sounding like a total idiot can generally be considered a foolproof method of getting yourself noticed. “The car that’s usually up there.” The guy--it was a guy; I’d calmed down enough to realize that--said. I snuck a quick glance at him out of the corner of my eye. First fleeting impression: tall and blond. The kind of muscular-yet-lanky build I’ve always been a sucker for. Faded jeans. Letterman jacket with just about every sport there was represented on it. Gotcha! I thought. BMOC. Big Man on Campus. This made me feel a little better for a couple of reasons. The first was that it showed my skills hadn’t abandoned me completely after all. I could still identify the players pretty much on sight. The second was that in my vast, though admittedly from-a-distance, experience of them, BMOCs have short attention spans for anyone less BOC than they are. Disconcerting and intense as it was at the moment, I could nevertheless take comfort in the fact that this guy’s unexpected and unnatural interest in me was also unlikely to last very long. “An old Chevy, I think,” he was going on now. “It’s supposed to be back soon, though. Not really the same without it, is it?” He actually sounded genuinely mournful. I was surprised to find myself battling back a quick, involuntary smile. He did seem to be more interesting than your average, run-of-the-mill BMOC. I had to give him that. Get a grip, O’Connor, I chastised myself. “Absolutely not,” I said, giving my head a semi-vigorous nod. That ought to move him along, I thought. You may not be aware of this fact, but agreeing with people is often an excellent way of getting them to forget all about you. After basking in the glow of agreement, most people are then perfectly content to go about their business, remembering only the fact that someone agreed and allowing the identity of the person who did the actual agreeing to fade into the background. This technique almost always works. In fact, I’d never known it not to. There was a moment of silence. A silence in which I could feel the BMOC’s eyes upon me. I kept my own eyes fixed on the top of the carless column. But the longer the silence went on, the more strained it became. At least it did on my side. This guy was simply not abiding by the rules. He was supposed to have basked and moved on by now. ~ Cameron Dokey,

657:The Wardens Of The Seas Like star points in the ether to guide a homing soul Towards God's Eternal Haven; above the wash and roll, Across and o'er the oceans, on all the coasts they stand Tall seneschals of commerce, High Wardens of the Strand -The white lights slowly turning Their kind eyes far and wide, The red and green lights burning Along the waterside. When Night with breath of aloes, magnolia, spice, and balm Creeps down the darkened jungles and mantles reef and palm, By velvet waters making soft music as they surge The shore lights of dark Asia will one by one emerge -Oh, Ras Marshig by Aden Shows dull on hazy nights; And Bombay Channel's laid in Its "In" and "Outer" lights. When Night, in rain-wet garments comes sobbing cold and grey Across the German Ocean and South from Stornoway, Thro' snarling darkness slowly, some fixed and some a-turn, The bright shore-lights of Europe like welcome tapers burn, -From fierce Fruholmen streaming O'er Northern ice and snow, To Cape St. Vincent gleaming, -These lamps of danger glow. The dark Etruscan tending his watchfires by the shore, On sacred altars burning, the world shall know no more; His temple's column standing against the ancient stars Is gone; Now bright catoptrics flash out electric bars, -Slow swung his stately Argos Unto the Tiber's mouth; But now the Tuscan cargoes Screw-driven, stagger South. The lantern of Genoa guides home no Eastern fleets As when the boy Columbus played in its narrow streets: No more the Keltic `dolmens' their fitful warnings throw 13 Across the lone Atlantic, so long, so long ago -No more the beaked prows dashing Shall dare a shoreward foam; No more will great oars threshing Sweep Dorian galleys home. No more the Vikings roaring their sagas wild and weird Proclaim that Rome has fallen; no more a consul feared Shall quench the Roman pharos lest Northern pirates free Be pointed to their plunder on coasts of Italy -Nor shall unwilling lovers, From Lethean pleasures torn, Fare nor'ward with those rovers, To frozen lands forlorn. The bale-fires and the watch-fires, the wrecker's foul false lure No more shall vex the shipmen; and on their course secure Past Pharos in the starlight the tow'ring hulls of Trade Race in and out from Suez in iron cavalcade, -So rode one sunset olden Across the dark'ning sea, With banners silk and golden, The Barge of Antony! They loom along the foreshores; they gleam across the Straits; They guide the feet of Commerce unto the harbor gates. In nights of storm and thunder, thro' fog and sleet and rain, Like stars on angels' foreheads, they give man heart again, -Oh, hear the high waves smashing On Patagonia's shore! Oh, hear the black waves threshing Their weight on Skerryvore! He searches night's grim chances upon his bridge alone And seeks the distant glimmer of hopeful Eddystone: And thro' a thick fog creeping, with chart and book and lead, The homeward skipper follows their green and white and red -By day his lighthouse wardens In sunlit quiet stand, But in the night the burdens Are theirs of Sea and Land. 14 They fill that night with Knowledge. A thousand ships go by, A thousand captains bless them, so bright and proud and high: The world's dark capes they glamour; or low on sand banks dread, They, crouching, mark a pathway between the Quick and Dead -Like star points in the ether They bring the seamen ease, These Lords of Wind and Weather These Wardens of the Seas! ~ Edwin James Brady,

658:Evening,” Zane said. It was a pretty wordy opening for him. Phoebe debated inviting him in, then decided it would be too much like an offer to sleep with him. Instead of stepping back and pointing to the bed, which was really what she wanted to do, she moved down the hallway, shutting the door behind her, and did her best to look unimpressed. “Hi, Zane. How are the preparations coming?” He gave her one of his grunts, then shrugged. She took that to mean, “Great. And thanks so much for asking.” They weren’t standing all that close, but she was intensely aware of him. Despite the fact that he’d probably been up at dawn and that it was now close to ten, he still smelled good. He wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat, so she could see his dark hair. Stubble defined his jaw. She wanted to rub her hands over the roughness, then maybe hook her leg around his hip and slide against him like the sex-starved fool she was turning out to be. “Maya’ll be here tomorrow,” he said. “Elaine Mitchell is bringing her out to the ranch with all of the greenhorns in her tourist bus.” She had to clear her throat before speaking. “Maya called me about an hour ago to let me know she’d be getting here about three.” He folded his arms across his broad chest, then leaned sideways against the doorjamb beside her. So very close. Her attention fixed on the strong column of his neck, and a certain spot just behind his jaw that she had a sudden urge to kiss. Would it be warm? Would she feel his pulse against her lips? “She doesn’t need to know what happened,” Zane said. Phoebe couldn’t quite make sense of his words, and he must have read the confusion in her eyes. They were alone, it was night and the man seemed to be looming above her in the hallway. She’d never thought she would enjoy being loomed over, but it was actually very nice. She had the feeling that if she suddenly saw a mouse or something, she could shriek and jump, and he would catch her. Of course he would think she was an idiot, but that was beside the point. “Between us,” he explained. “Outside. She doesn’t need to know about the kiss.” A flood of warmth rushed to her face as she understood that he regretted kissing her. She instinctively stepped backward, only to bump her head against the closed bedroom door. Before she had time to be embarrassed about her lack of grace or sophistication, he groaned, reached for her hips and drew her toward him. “She doesn’t need to know about this one, either.” His lips took hers with a gentle but commanding confidence. Her hands settled on either side of the strong neck she’d been eyeing only seconds ago. His skin was as warm as she’d imagined it would be. The cords of his muscles moved against her fingers as he lifted his head to a better angle. His hands were still, except his thumbs, which brushed her hip bones, slow and steady. His fingers splayed over the narrowest part of her waist and nearly met at the small of her back. She wished she could feel his fingertips against her skin, but her thin cotton top got in the way. He kept her body at a frustrating distance from his. In fact, when she tried to move closer, he held her away even as he continued the kiss. Lips on lips. Hot and yielding. She waited for him to deepen the kiss, but he didn’t. And she couldn’t summon the courage to do it herself. Finally, he drew back and rested his forehead against hers for a long moment. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Try to be a little more resistible. I don’t think I can take a week of this.” Then he turned on his heel, walked to a door at the end of the long hallway, and went inside. She stood in place, her fingers pressed against her still-tingling lips. More than a minute passed before she realized she was smiling. ~ Susan Mallery,

659:An old Chevy, I think,” he was going on now. “It’s supposed to be back soon, though. Not really the same without it, is it?” He actually sounded genuinely mournful. I was surprised to find myself battling back a quick, involuntary smile. He did seem to be more interesting than your average, run-of-the-mill BMOC. I had to give him that. Get a grip, O’Connor, I chastised myself. “Absolutely not,” I said, giving my head a semi-vigorous nod. That ought to move him along, I thought. You may not be aware of this fact, but agreeing with people is often an excellent way of getting them to forget all about you. After basking in the glow of agreement, most people are then perfectly content to go about their business, remembering only the fact that someone agreed and allowing the identity of the person who did the actual agreeing to fade into the background. This technique almost always works. In fact, I’d never known it not to. There was a moment of silence. A silence in which I could feel the BMOC’s eyes upon me. I kept my own eyes fixed on the top of the carless column. But the longer the silence went on, the more strained it became. At least it did on my side. This guy was simply not abiding by the rules. He was supposed to have basked and moved on by now. “You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?” he said at last. I laughed before I quite realized what I’d done. “Not a clue,” I said, turning to give him my full attention for the very first time, an action I could tell right away spelled trouble. You just had to do it, didn’t you? I thought. He was even better looking when I took a better look. He flashed me a smile, and I felt my pulse kick up several notches. My brain knew perfectly well that that smile had not been invented just for me. My suddenly-beating-way-too-fast heart wasn’t paying all that much attention to my brain, though. “You must be new, then,” he commented. “I’d remember you if we’d met before.” All of a sudden, his face went totally blank. “I cannot believe I just said that,” he said. “That is easily the world’s oldest line.” “If it isn’t, it’s the cheesiest,” I said. He winced. “I’d ask you to let me make it up to you, but I’m thinking that would make things even worse.” “You’d be thinking right.” This time he was the one who laughed, the sound open and easy, as if he was genuinely enjoying the joke on himself. In retrospect I think it was that laugh that did it. That finished the job his smile had started. You just didn’t find all that many guys, all that many people, who were truly willing to laugh at themselves. “I’m Alex Crawford,” he said. “Jo,” I said. “Jo O’Connor.” At this Alex actually stuck out his hand. His eyes, which I probably don’t need to tell you were this pretty much impossible shade of blue, focused directly on my face. “Pleased to meet you, Jo O’Connor.” I watched my hand move forward to meet his, as if it belonged to a stranger and was moving in slow motion. At that exact moment, an image of the robot from the movie Lost in Space flashed through my mind. Arms waving frantically in the air, screaming, “Danger! Danger!” at the top of its inhuman lungs. My hand kept moving anyhow. Our fingers connected. I felt the way Alex’s wrapped around mine, then tightened. Felt the way that simple action caused a flush to spread across my cheeks and a tingle to start in the palm of my hand and slowly begin to work its way up my arm. To this day, I’d swear I heard him suck in a breath, saw his impossibly blue eyes widen. As if, at the exact same moment I looked up at him, he’d discovered something as completely unexpected as I had, gazing down. He released me. I stuck my hand behind my back. “Pleased to meet you, Jo O’Connor,” he said again. Not quite the way he had the first time. ~ Cameron Dokey,

660:Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la ~ Anonymous,

661:With French To Kimberley The Boers were down on Kimberley with siege and Maxim gun; The Boers were down on Kimberley, their numbers ten to one! Faint were the hopes the British had to make the struggle good -Defenceless in an open plain the Diamond City stood. They built them forts with bags of sand, they fought from roof and wall, They flashed a message to the south, "Help! or the town must fall!" Then down our ranks the order ran to march at dawn of day, And French was off to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. He made no march along the line; he made no front attack Upon those Magersfontein heights that held the Seaforths back; But eastward over pathless plains, by open veldt and vley. Across the front of Cronje's force his troopers held their way. The springbuck, feeding on the flats where Modder River runs, Were startled by his horses' hoofs, the rumble of his guns. The Dutchman's spies that watched his march from every rocky wall Rode back in haste: "He marches East! He threatens Jacobsdal!" Then north he wheeled as wheels a hawk, and showed to their dismay That French was off to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. His column was five thousand strong -- all mounted men -- and guns: There met, beneath the world-wide flag, the world-wide Empire's sons; They came to prove to all the earth that kinship conquers space, And those who fight the British Isles must fight the British race! From far New Zealand's flax and fern, from cold Canadian snows, From Queensland plains, where hot as fire the summer sunshine glows -And in front the Lancers rode that New South Wales had sent: With easy stride across the plain their long, lean Walers went. Unknown, untried, those squadrons were, but proudly out they drew Beside the English regiments that fought at Waterloo. From every coast, from every clime, they met in proud array To go with French to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. He crossed the Reit and fought his way towards the Modder bank. The foemen closed behind his march, and hung upon the flank. The long, dry grass was all ablaze (and fierce the veldt fire runs); He fought them through a wall of flame that blazed around the guns! Then limbered up and drove at speed, though horses fell and died; We might not halt for man nor beast on that wild, daring ride. Black with the smoke and parched with thirst, we pressed the livelong day 533 Our headlong march to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. We reached the drift at fall of night, and camped across the ford. Next day from all the hills around the Dutchman's cannon roared. A narrow pass ran through the hills, with guns on either side; The boldest man might well turn pale before that pass he tried, For, if the first attack should fail, then every hope was gone: Bur French looked once, and only once, and then he siad, "Push on!" The gunners plied their guns amain; the hail of shrapnel flew; With rifle fire and lancer charge their squadrons back we threw; And through the pass between the hills we swept in furious fray, And French was through to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. Ay, French was through to Kimberley! And ere the day was done We saw the Diamond City stand, lit by the evening sun: Above the town the heliograph hung like an eye of flame: Around the town the foemen camped -- they knew not that we came; But soon they saw us, rank on rank; they heard our squadrons' tread; In panic fear they left their tents, in hopeless rout they fled -And French rode into Kimberley; the people cheered amain, The women came with tear-stained eyes to touch his bridle rein, The starving children lined the streets to raise a feeble cheer, The bells rang out a joyous peal to say "Relief is here!" Ay! we that saw that stirring march are proud that we can say We went with French to Kimberley to drive the Boers away. ~ Banjo Paterson,

662:Jennifer Johnson: Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world? Sharon: Diversity and opportunity. Moderator: Lewis? Lewis: Freedom and freedom... so let's keep it that way. Moderator: Will? Will McAvoy: The New York Jets. Moderator: No, I'm going to hold you to an answer on that. What makes America the greatest country in the world? Will McAvoy: Well, Lewis and Sharon said it. Diversity and opportunity and freedom and freedom. Moderator: I'm not letting you go back to the airport without answering the question. Will McAvoy: Well, our Constitution is a masterpiece. James Madison was a genius. The Declaration of Independence is, for me, the single greatest piece of American writing... [Professor keeps staring] Will McAvoy: You don't look satisfied. Moderator: One's a set of laws and the other's a declaration of war. I want a human moment from you... what about the people? Why is America... Will McAvoy: It's not the greatest country in the world, professor. That's my answer. Moderator: You're saying... Will McAvoy: Yes. Moderator: Let's talk about... Will McAvoy: Fine. [Turns to Sharon] Will McAvoy: Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck, but he [gestures to Lewis] Will McAvoy: gets to hit you with it anytime he wants. It doesn't cost money, it costs votes. It costs airtime and column inches. You know why people don't like liberals? Cause they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so god damn always? Sharon: Hey! Will McAvoy: [Turns to Louis] And with a straight face, you're gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK. France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia... Belgium! has freedom... 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of 'em have freedom. Moderator: Alright... Will McAvoy: [Looks at Jenny] And, yeah, you... sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know. One of them is: There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the FUCK you're talking about!... Yosemite? [Stunned silence] Will McAvoy: ... It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws - for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not on poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great, big things, made ungodly technological advanced, explored the universe, cured diseases and we cultivated the world's greatest artists AND the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it. It didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didn't scare so easy. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed... by great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

663:Roosters At four o'clock in the gun-metal blue dark we hear the first crow of the first cock just below the gun-metal blue window and immediately there is an echo off in the distance, then one from the backyard fence, then one, with horrible insistence, grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch, flares,and all over town begins to catch. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rusting wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens' lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town. A rooster gloats 75 over our beds from rusty irons sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally's: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, "This is where I live!" Each screaming "Get up! Stop dreaming!" Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled "Very combative..." what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry "Here!" and "Here!" and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood Yes, that excrescence 76 makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence Now in mid-air by two they fight each other. Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying. And one has fallen but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. St. Peter's sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter's, falling, beneath the flares, among the "servants and officers." Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed. But in between a little cock is seen 77 carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it, There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter's tears run down our chanticleer's sides and gem his spurs. Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that event the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that "Deny deny deny" is not all the roosters cry. In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? 78 gilding the tiny floating swallow's belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day's preamble like wandering lines in marble, The cocks are now almost inaudible. The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend. ~ Elizabeth Bishop,

664:Mickey Mollynoo A mile-long panto dragon ploddin' 'opeless all the day, Stuffed out with kits, 'n' spiked with rifles, steamin' in its sweat, A-heavin' down the misty road, club-footed through the clay, By waggons bogged 'n' buckin' guns, the wildest welter yet, Like 'arf creation's tenants shiftin' early in the wet. We're marchin' out, we dunno where, to meet we dunno who; But here we lights eventual, 'n' sighs 'n' slips the kit, 'N', 'struth, the first to take us on is Mickie Mollynoo! A copper of the Port he was, when 'istory was writ. Sez I : “We're sent to face the foe, 'n', selp me, this is It.” A shine John. Hop is Mollynoo. A mix-up with the push Is all his joy. One evenin' when his baton's flyin' free I takes a baby brick, 'n' drives it hard agin the cush, 'N' Privit Mick is scattered out fer all the world to see, But not afore indelible he's put his mark on me. I got the signs Masonic all inlaid along me lug Where Molly, P.C., swiped me in them 'appy, careless days. He's sargin' now, a vet'ran; I'm a newchum and a mug, 72 'N' when he sorter fixes me there's somethin' in his gaze That's pensive like. “Move on!” sez he. “Keep movin' there!” he says. If after this I dreams of scraps promiscuous and crool, The mills in Butcher's Alley when the watch is on the wine, Those nights he raided Wylie's shed to break the two-up school, I takes a screw at Molly. With a grin that ain't divine He's toyin' with a scar of old I reckernise as mine. 'N' so I'm layin' for it, 'n' I'm wonderin' how 'n' what. We're signed on with the Germans, 'n' there ain't a vacant date; But sure it's comin' to me, 'n' it's comin' 'ard 'n' 'ot. Me lurk is patient waitin', but I'm trimmin' while I wait A brick to jab or swing with, in a willin' tatertate. Oh, judge me wonder! There's a scrim that follers on a raid. I'm roughin' it all-in with Hans. He sock me such a bat I slides on somethin' narsty, 'n' me little grave is made; But Molly butts my Hun, 'n' leaves no face beneath his hat, 'N', “'Scuse me, Mister Herr,” sez he, “I have a lien on that!” He helps me under cover, 'n' he 'ands me somethin' wet (I've got a lick or two that leaves me feelin' pretty sick). “Lor love yeh, ole John Hop,” sez I, “yiv 73 buried me in debt.” “Don't minton ut at all,” he sez, 'n' eyes me arf-a-tick. 'N' back there in the trench I sits, 'n' trims another brick. 'Tis all this how a month or more; then Mollynoo sez he: “Come aisy, Jumm, yeh loafer, little hell 'n' all to view. A job most illegant is on, cut out fer you 'n' me. The damnedest, dirtiest fighter on the Continent is you, Bar one, yeh gougin' thafe, 'n' that is Sargin' Mollynoo!” I take, with knife 'n' pistol, arf a brick to line me shirt. We creeps a thousan' yards or so to jigger up a gun Which seven Huns is workin' on the Irish like a squirt. We gets across them, me 'n' him. I pots the extra one; Mick chokes his third in comfort, 'n', be'old, the thing is done! He stands above me, rakin' sweat from off his gleamin' nut. “Me dipper's leakin', Mick,” sez I; “me leg is bit in two.” Sez he: “Bleed there in comfort, I'm for bringin' help, ye scut.” He's back in twenty minutes, with a dillied German crew. “Three'll carry in the gun,” sez he, “the rest will carry you.” I dunno how he got 'em, but he made them barrer me. They lugged the gun before him, 'n' he 74 yarded them like geese. Then Mickie s'lutes the Major. “They're in custody,” sez he, “Fer conduc' calculated to provoke a breach iv peace, A-tearin' iv me uniform, 'n' 'saultin' the po-lice.” Then down he dumped. His wounds would make a 'arf a column list. When hack to front I chucks me bricks 'n' smiles the best I can. He grins at me: “Yer right,” sez he, “Hold out yer bla'-guard fist, I couldn't fight yeh, blarst yeh, if yeh dinted in me pan. This messin' round wid Germans makes a chicken iv a man.” ~ Edward George Dyson,

665: ON THOSE WHO ARE SUBLIME Still is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it harbors sportive monsters? Imperturbable is my depth, but it sparkles with swimming riddles and laughters. One who was sublime I saw today, one who was solemn, an ascetic of the spirit; oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness! With a swelled chest and like one who holds in his breath, he stood there, the sublime one, silent, decked out with ugly truths, the spoil of his 117 hunting, and rich in torn garments; many thorns too adorned him-yet I saw no rose. As yet he has not learned laughter or beauty. Gloomy this hunter returned from the woods of knowledge. He came home from a fight with savage beasts; but out of his seriousness there also peers a savage beast-one not overcome. He still stands there like a tiger who wants to leap; but I do not like these tense souls, and my taste does not favor all these who withdraw. And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing of taste and tasting? But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting. Taste-that is at the same time weight and scales and weigher; and woe unto all the living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighersi If he grew tired of his sublimity, this sublime one, only then would his beauty commence; and only then will I taste him and find him tasteful. And only when he turns away from himself, will he jump over his shadow-and verily, into his sun. All-too-long has he been sitting in the shadow, and the cheeks of this ascetic of the spirit have grown pale; he almost starved to death on his expectations. Contempt is still in his eyes, and nausea hides around his mouth. Though he is resting now, his rest has not yet lain in the sun. He should act like a bull, and his happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth. I would like to see him as a white bull, walking before the plowshare, snorting and bellowing; and his bellowing should be in praise of everything earthly. His face is still dark; the shadow of the hand plays upon him. His sense of sight is still in shadows. His deed itself still lies on him as a shadow: the hand still darkens the doer. As yet he has not overcome his deed. 118 Though I love the bull's neck on him, I also want to see the eyes of the angel. He must still discard his heroic will; he shall be elevated, not merely sublime: the ether itself should elevate him, the will-less one. He subdued monsters, he solved riddles: but he must still redeem his own monsters and riddles, changing them into heavenly children. As yet his knowledge has not learned to smile and to be without jealousy; as yet his torrential passion has not become still in beauty. Verily, it is not in satiety that his desire shall grow silent and be submerged, but in beauty. Gracefulness is part of the graciousness of the great-souled. His arm placed over his head: thus should the hero rest; thus should he overcome even his rest. But just for the hero the beautiful is the most difficult thing. No violent will can attain the beautiful by exertion. A little more, a little less: precisely this counts for much here, this matters most here. To stand with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will: that is most difficult for all of you who are sublime. When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible-such descent I call beauty. And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest. Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws. You shall strive after the virtue of the column: it grows more and more beautiful and gentle, but internally harder and more enduring, as it ascends. Indeed, you that are sublime shall yet become beautiful one day and hold up a mirror to your own beauty. 119 Then your soul will shudder with godlike desires, and there will be adoration even in your vanity. For this is the soul's secret: only when the hero has abandoned her, she is approached in a dream by the overhero. Thus spoke Zarathustra. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THOSE WHO ARE SUBLIME ,

666:Many of you out there will have encountered a world of calamity and ruin with one last gasp at the end of it and clearly labelled the instructions: “this Day the Suprise Transport” “port Saild from this” and so on. Not on our planet yet still that destination lingers – terminus, “animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected, and accordingly was projected – ” as detritus, cast “from the depth of a shipwreck” floundering in the blast of an abandoned broadcast – “Sudden effluvial aftermath here. Have encountered daze without number...” – doomed emission, vast dump “which departs from itself” as a wheezed, unavoidable, looming exhalation – insidious galactic bloom whose drift is a swift mutation aboard that soundtrack lumbering in the background, strange clank or muffled boom heralding a dank impending cloudbank possibly or black-and-white photograph taken on the moon, featuring I, quaint blip, feinted relic ’mid dim reverberations e.g. ghost in portalled tomb whose blundered destination plunges on – old death throes rattle in the deep, where the dice cup heaves up sleep I’m leaving. Denizens, sensitive as always, I remain captain of the spaceship “Isle of Destolation” creepily dotted about my photo – where it roams, approximations of despair breathing malice pass by in the wake of an interest I no longer maintain, who fondly recall how to comb myself and shave my hair and park my coat and hat in the hall. Sincerely I resemble all those who have written to me with letters of condolence, whether edifice or orifice, bit or whole. “Though alien drones and foreign hums within me thrive... ” strange feeling of sudden distinction was creeping upon me convinced of its authenticity, spurting up like a hideous gas and the whole mass imploding into its own brief fumes. Oddly, I began my radio career as a swarm of bees. Some still speak of it and I go on and on about it, as befits my condition. For example, this transmission explains why someone of approximately my own age and intelligence suddenly led me across the large laboratory, Firkon, Zuhl and the others all following. Frankly I could have disintegrated in a pilot’s suit of the same style “whereby hangs an immense bridge” chomping away at the background as we reached the platform. Firkon suggested looking down into the elevator shaft “Notice anything? ” and when I did, saw three more floors or deck levels below. “At each level a bridge or balcony...” projected into the shaft contra-indicating the gap dome of saucer between “analogy of the abyss” and his tautology hovered outrageously above it. “We use rudder-post technology to detach the post and reinser it on a short staff carried by a frame – Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimetres.” At once, I clambered aboard and found that taste of his butthole strangely hypnotic whine of the motor gained in pitch like a twanging ’cello string. Spike took up the “How long must I wait? I mean – ” ... A tremor ran through the hull of the Moonraker... A pencil fell from the instrument ta... “I – I’m not sure... Always together in this darned silence, midground hard to determine between both and neither, column and house.” (I could see right away what these things had in common: they were all crap. I decided to demonstrate this by tying strings between various objects.) “My first close-up shot of the moon filled me with cold foreboding” – i.e. stillness, a lack of “Thank you” amid the harsh glare of remnants, bright greys and sooty blacks, the jagged, razor-sharp outlines of the crags – and no living thing but me, crater. “I? But I am an expert! I have so much to discover! My ‘shallow cell’ theory – ” a twelve-foot cylinder mounted on two pairs of caterpillar tracks glanced to the left, in the direction of the pit. From this I could disappear into a narrow, walled valley several miles away. Suddenly, there I was, ethereal vapour trails cut deep between the intermittent static dispatched amid stygian fumes his only glue then split. ~ Chris Edwards,

667:Just as day began to dawn Gilgamesh addressed his friend, saying: "Enkidu, your mother, the gazelle, and your father, the wild donkey, engendered you, four wild asses raised you on their milk, and the herds taught you all the grazing lands. May the Roads of Enkidu to the Cedar Forest mourn you and not fall silent night or day. May the Elders of the broad city of Uruk-Haven mourn you. May the peoples who gave their blessing after us mourn you. May the men of the mountains and hills mourn you. May the May the pasture lands shriek in mourning as if it were your mother. May the, the cypress, and the cedar which we destroyed (?) in our anger mourn you. May the bear, hyena, panther, tiger, water buffalo(?), jackal, lion, wild bull, stag, ibex, all the creatures of the plains mourn you. May the holy River Ulaja, along whose banks we grandly used to stroll, mourn you. May the pure Euphrates, to which we would libate water from our waterskins, mourn you. May the men of Uruk-Haven, whom we saw in our battle when       we killed the Bull of Heaven, mourn you. May the farmer,who extols your name in his sweet work song, mourn you. May the of the broad city, who exalted your name,                mourn you. May the herder, who prepared butter and light beer for your mouth, mourn you. May, who put ointments on your back, mourn you. May, who prepared fine beer for your mouth, mourn you. May the harlot, you rubbed yourself with oil and felt good,            mourn you. May, of the wife placed(!) a ring on you, mourn you May the brothers go into mourning over you like sisters;   the lamentation priests, may their hair be shorn off on                your behalf. Enkidu, your mother and your father are in the wastelands, I mourn you" "Hear me, O Elders of Uruk, hear me, O men! I mourn for Enkidu, my friend, I shriek in anguish like a mourner. You, axe at my side, so trusty at my hand you, sword at my waist, shield in front of me, you, my festal garment, a sash over my loins an evil demon!) appeared and took him away from me! My friend, the swift mule, fleet wild **** of the mountain, panther of the wilderness, Enkidu, my friend, the swift mule, fleet wild **** of the mountain, panther of the wilderness, after we joined together and went up into the mountain, fought the Bull of Heaven and killed it, and overwhelmed Humbaba, who lived in the Cedar Forest, now what is this sleep which has seized you? You have turned dark and do not hear me!" But his (Enkidu's) eyes do not move, he touched his heart, but it beat no longer. He covered his friend's face like a bride, swooping down over him like an eagle, and like a lioness deprived of her cubs he keeps pacing to and fro. He shears off his curls and heaps them onto the ground, ripping off his finery and casting it away as an abomination. Just as day began to dawn, Gilgamesh and issued a call to the land: "You, blacksmith! You, lapidary! You, coppersmith! You, goldsmith! You, jeweler! Create 'My Friend,' fashion a statue of him.   he fashioned a statue of his friend. His features ,your chest will be of lapis lazuli, your skin will be of gold." [10 lines are missing here.'] "I had you recline on the great couch, indeed, on the couch of honor I let you recline, 1 had you sit in the position of ease, the seat at the left, so the        princes of the world kissed your feet. I had the people of Uruk mourn and moan for you, I filled happy people with woe over you, and after you (died) I let a filthy mat of hair grow over my body, and donned the skin of a lion and roamed the wilderness." Just as day began to dawn, he undid his straps I carnelian, [85 lines are missing here.'] to my friend. your dagger to Bibbi" [40 lines are missing here.] " the judge of the Anunnaki." When Gilgamesh heard this the zikru of the river(!) he created' Just as day began to dawn Gilgamesh opened(!) and brought out a big table of sissoo wood. A carnelian bowl he filled with honey, a lapis lazuli bowl he filled with butter. He provided and displayed it before Shamash. [All of the last column, some 40-50 lines, is missing.] ~ Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet VIII ,

668:The Angel In The House. Book Ii. Canto I. Preludes. I The Song of Songs The pulse of War, whose bloody heats Sane purposes insanely work, Now with fraternal frenzy beats, And binds the Christian to the Turk, And shrieking fifes and braggart flags, Through quiet England, teach our breath The courage corporate that drags The coward to heroic death. Too late for song! Who henceforth sings, Must fledge his heavenly flight with more Song-worthy and heroic things Than hasty, home-destroying war. While might and right are not agreed, And battle thus is yet to wage, So long let laurels be the meed Of soldier as of poet sage; But men expect the Tale of Love, And weary of the Tale of Hate; Lift me, O Muse, myself above, And let the world no longer wait! II The Kites I saw three Cupids (so I dream'd), Who made three kites, on which were drawn, In letters that like roses gleam'd, ‘Plato,’ ‘Anacreon,’ and ‘Vaughan.’ The boy who held by Plato tried His airy venture first; all sail, It heav'nward rush'd till scarce descried, Then pitch'd and dropp'd, for want of tail. Anacreon's Love, with shouts of mirth That pride of spirit thus should fall, To his kite link'd a lump of earth, And, lo, it would not soar at all. Last, my disciple freighted his 124 With a long streamer made of flowers, The children of the sod, and this Rose in the sun, and flew for hours. III Orpheus The music of the Sirens found Ulysses weak, though cords were strong; But happier Orpheus stood unbound, And shamed it with a sweeter song. His mode be mine. Of Heav'n I ask, May I, with heart-persuading might, Pursue the Poet's sacred task Of superseding faith by sight, Till ev'n the witless Gadarene, Preferring Christ to swine, shall know That life is sweetest when it's clean. To prouder folly let me show Earth by divine light made divine; And let the saints, who hear my word, Say, ‘Lo, the clouds begin to shine ‘About the coming of the Lord!’ IV Nearest the Dearest Till Eve was brought to Adam, he A solitary desert trod, Though in the great society Of nature, angels, and of God. If one slight column counterweighs The ocean, 'tis the Maker's law, Who deems obedience better praise Than sacrifice of erring awe. V Perspective What seems to us for us is true. The planet has no proper light, And yet, when Venus is in view, No primal star is half so bright. Accepted. 125 I What fortune did my heart foretell? What shook my spirit, as I woke, Like the vibration of a bell Of which I had not heard the stroke? Was it some happy vision shut From memory by the sun's fresh ray? Was it that linnet's song; or but A natural gratitude for day? Or the mere joy the senses weave, A wayward ecstasy of life? Then I remember'd, yester-eve I won Honoria for my Wife. II Forth riding, while as yet the day Was dewy, watching Sarum Spire, Still beckoning me along my way, And growing every minute higher, I reach'd the Dean's. One blind was down, Though nine then struck. My bride to be! And had she rested ill, my own, With thinking (oh, my heart!) of me? I paced the streets; a pistol chose, To guard my now important life When riding late from Sarum Close; At noon return'd. Good Mrs. Fife, To my, ‘The Dean, is he at home?’ Said, ‘No, Sir; but Miss Honor is;’ And straight, not asking if I'd come, Announced me, ‘Mr. Felix, Miss,’ To Mildred, in the Study. There We talk'd, she working. We agreed The day was fine; the Fancy-Fair Successful; ‘Did I ever read ‘De Genlis?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Do! She heard ‘I was engaged.’ ‘To whom?’ ‘Miss Fry.’ ‘Was it the fact?’ ‘No!’ ‘On my word?’ ‘What scandal people talk'd!’ ‘Would I ‘Hold out this skein of silk.’ So pass'd I knew not how much time away. ‘How were her sisters?’ ‘Well.’ At last 126 I summon'd heart enough to say, ‘I hoped to see Miss Churchill too.’ ‘Miss Churchill, Felix! What is this? ‘I said, and now I find 'tis true, ‘Last night you quarrell'd! Here she is.’ III She came, and seem'd a morning rose When ruffling rain has paled its blush; Her crown once more was on her brows; And, with a faint, indignant flush, And fainter smile, she gave her hand, But not her eyes, then sate apart, As if to make me understand The honour of her vanquish'd heart. But I drew humbly to her side; And she, well pleased, perceiving me Liege ever to the noble pride Of her unconquer'd majesty, Once and for all put it away; The faint flush pass'd; and, thereupon, Her loveliness, which rather lay In light than colour, smiled and shone, Till sick was all my soul with bliss; Or was it with remorse and ire Of such a sanctity as this Subdued by love to my desire? ~ Coventry Patmore,

669:WANDERER. YOUNG woman, may God bless thee, Thee, and the sucking infant Upon thy breast! Let me, 'gainst this rocky wall, Neath the elm-tree's shadow, Lay aside my burden, Near thee take my rest. WOMAN. What vocation leads thee, While the day is burning, Up this dusty path? Bring'st thou goods from out the town Round the country? Smil'st thou, stranger, At my question? WANDERER. From the town no goods I bring. Cool is now the evening; Show to me the fountain 'Whence thou drinkest, Woman young and kind! WOMAN. Up the rocky pathway mount; Go thou first! Across the thicket Leads the pathway tow'rd the cottage That I live in, To the fountain Whence I drink. WANDERER. Signs of man's arranging hand See I 'mid the trees! Not by thee these stones were join'd, Nature, who so freely scatterest! WOMAN. Up, still up! WANDERER. Lo, a mossy architrave is here! I discern thee, fashioning spirit! On the stone thou hast impress'd thy seal. WOMAN. Onward, stranger! WANDERER. Over an inscription am I treading! 'Tis effaced! Ye are seen no longer, Words so deeply graven, Who your master's true devotion Should have shown to thousand grandsons! WOMAN. At these stones, why Start'st thou, stranger? Many stones are lying yonder Round my cottage. WANDERER. Yonder? WOMAN. Through the thicket, Turning to the left, Here! WANDERER. Ye Muses and ye Graces! WOMAN. This, then, is my cottage. WANDERER. 'Tis a ruin'd temple! WOMAN. Just below it, see, Springs the fountain Whence I drink. WANDERER. Thou dost hover O'er thy grave, all glowing, Genius! while upon thee Hath thy master-piece Fallen crumbling, Thou Immortal One! WOMAN. Stay, a cup I'll fetch thee Whence to drink. WANDERER. Ivy circles thy slender Form so graceful and godlike. How ye rise on high From the ruins, Column-pair And thou, their lonely sister yonder,-- How thou, Dusky moss upon thy sacred head,-- Lookest down in mournful majesty On thy brethren's figures Lying scatter'd At thy feet! In the shadow of the bramble Earth and rubbish veil them, Lofty grass is waving o'er them Is it thus thou, Nature, prizest Thy great masterpiece's masterpiece? Carelessly destroyest thou Thine own sanctuary, Sowing thistles there? WOMAN. How the infant sleeps! Wilt thou rest thee in the cottage, Stranger? Wouldst thou rather In the open air still linger? Now 'tis cool! take thou the child While I go and draw some water. Sleep on, darling! sleep! WANDERER. Sweet is thy repose! How, with heaven-born health imbued, Peacefully he slumbers! Oh thou, born among the ruins Spread by great antiquity, On thee rest her spirit! He whom it encircles Will, in godlike consciousness, Ev'ry day enjoy. Full, of germ, unfold, As the smiling springtime's Fairest charm, Outshining all thy fellows! And when the blossom's husk is faded, May the full fruit shoot forth From out thy breast, And ripen in the sunshine! WOMAN. God bless him!--Is he sleeping still? To the fresh draught I nought can add, Saving a crust of bread for thee to eat. WANDERER. I thank thee well. How fair the verdure all around! How green! WOMAN. My husband soon Will home return From labour. Tarry, tarry, man, And with us eat our evening meal. WANDERER. Is't here ye dwell? WOMAN. Yonder, within those walls we live. My father 'twas who built the cottage Of tiles and stones from out the ruins. 'Tis here we dwell. He gave me to a husbandman, And in our arms expired.-- Hast thou been sleeping, dearest heart How lively, and how full of play! Sweet rogue! WANDERER. Nature, thou ever budding one, Thou formest each for life's enjoyments, And, like a mother, all thy children dear, Blessest with that sweet heritage,--a home The swallow builds the cornice round, Unconscious of the beauties She plasters up. The caterpillar spins around the bough, To make her brood a winter house; And thou dost patch, between antiquity's Most glorious relics, For thy mean use, Oh man, a humble cot,-- Enjoyest e'en mid tombs!-- Farewell, thou happy woman! WOMAN. Thou wilt not stay, then? WANDERER. May God preserve thee, And bless thy boy! WOMAN. A happy journey! WANDERER. Whither conducts the path Across yon hill? WOMAN. To Cuma. WANDERER. How far from hence? WOMAN. 'Tis full three miles. WANDERER. Farewell! Oh Nature, guide me on my way! The wandering stranger guide, Who o'er the tombs Of holy bygone times Is passing, To a kind sheltering place, From North winds safe, And where a poplar grove Shuts out the noontide ray! And when I come Home to my cot At evening, Illumined by the setting sun, Let me embrace a wife like this, Her infant in her arms! ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Wanderer ,

670: ON THE TARANTULAS Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula. Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, that it tremble! There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge. Thus I speak to you in a parable-you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. 100 "What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge"-thus they speak to each other. "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not"-thus do the tarantulahearts vow. "And 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamorl" You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy -perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers-erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge. What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father. They are like enthusiasts, yet it is not the heart that fires them-but revenge. And when they become elegant and cold, it is not the spirit but envy that makes them elegant and cold. Their jealousy leads them even on the paths of thinkers; and this is the sign of their jealousy: they always go too far, till their weariness must in the end lie down to sleep in the snow. Out of, every one of their complaints sounds revenge; in their praise there is always a sting, and to be a judge seems bliss to them. But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power. My friends, I do not want to be mixed up and confused with others. Some preach my doctrine of life and are at the same time preachers of equality and tarantulas. Although they are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they speak in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt. They wish to hurt those who now have power, for among these the preaching of death is still most at home. If it were otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise; they themselves were once the foremost slanderers of the world and burners of heretics. I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. For, to me justice speaks thus: "Men are not equal." Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise? On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and ever more war and inequality shall divide them: thus does my great love make me speak. In their hostilities they shall become inventors of images and ghosts, and with their images and ghosts they shall yet fight the highest fight against one another. Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all the names of values-arms shall they be and clattering signs that life must overcome itself again and again. Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers. Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing. And behold, my friends: here where the tarantula has its hole, the ruins of an ancient temple rise; behold it with enlightened eyes Verily, the man who once piled his thoughts to the sky in these stones-he, like the wisest, knew the secret of all life. That struggle and inequality are present even in beauty, and also war for power and more power: that is what he teaches us here in the plainest parable. How divinely vault and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers-with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends Let us strive against one another like gods. Alas, then the tarantula, my old enemy, bit me. With godlike assurance and beauty it bit my finger. "Punishment there must be and justice," it thinks; "and here he shall not sing songs in honor of enmity in vain." Indeed, it has avenged itself. And alas, now it will make my soul, too, whirl with revenge. But to keep me from whirling, my friends, tie me tight to this column. Rather would I be a stylite even, than a whirl of revenge. Verily, Zarathustra is no cyclone or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, he will never dance the tarantella. Thus spoke Zarathustra. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE TARANTULAS ,

671:The Last Battle Of The Cid Low he lay upon his dying couch, the knight without a stain, The unconquered Cid Campeadór, the bright breast-plate of Spain, The incarnate honour of Castille, of Aragon and Navarre, Very crown of Spanish chivalry, Rodrigo of Bivar! Sick he lay, and grieved in spirit, for that Paynim dogs should dare Camp around his knightly citadel, Valencia the fair! For that he no more should face them, in his beauteous armour dight, To whom God and Santiago aye gave victory in the fight. Faintly rising o'er the ramparts came the murmur of the siege, And he could but pray for Christendom, his country and his liege; For his well-belovèd city, granite-girdled, pennon-starred, And the royal wealth of treasure that its stately portals barred. “Santiago, at whose altar I did watch mine armour bright, And was girt with golden spur and brand, a consecrated knight!— Santiago, by my vow redeemed at Compostela's shrine, Let the Paynim life-blood only touch these blessed walls of mine! “Santiago, warrior saintly, who with Don Fernando's host Stormed and won the gates of Coimbra, guard my fortress on the coast! Keep the holy leper's blessing, though the snow is on my hair;— Strike the base-born unbelievers!—save Valencia the fair!” Lo, a sudden cloud of glory filled his chamber as he prayed! Lo, San Pedro stood beside him, all in shining robes arrayed! “For thy love, Rodrigo Diaz, to Cardeña's house,” said he, “I have offered intercessions, and the Lord hath answered me. “Thou must die, O well-beloved!—thirty days, and thou must die! Yet in death shall Santiago grant thee still a victory. Thou shalt ride forth to the battle—Santiago shall be there— For the Faith and Don Alfonso and Valencia the fair.” Silence reigned within the chamber; none stood near the hero's bed; All that dazzling flood of glory slowly, softly vanishèd. He could only hear the murmur from the ramparts rise and fall; He could only see the cross-bars stretching dimly on the wall. 206 In San Pedro's chapel lay the Cid, his eyes with rapture dim, And proclaimed the wondrous favour that the Lord had granted him. Then he parted from his vassals, and went humbly to confess; And the warrior-bishop clothed his soul in its baptismal dress. 'Twas the holy day of Pentecost that saw Ruy Diaz die— Evermore the spotless mirror of Castillian chivalry! They, in whom his will was shrinèd, Alvar Fanez and his knights, Stood to watch the hero vanquished who had won a thousand fights. DoXimena, the faithful, with her tears bedewed his feet, And anointed all his body with pure incense, rich and sweet. Then in silence and in sorrow the twelve days of waiting fled; And the warders on the ramparts dared not whisper, “He is dead.” In the midnight, dark and quiet, fell the torches' lurid glare On the palaces and portals of Valencia the fair; And a solemn, slow procession, mounted all in royal state, Like the spectre of an army, passed beneath the city gate. In the van was borne the ensign, known and dreaded far and wide, With four hundred noblest knights ranged proudly by its side. Toward Castille and Cardeña were those haughty faces set,— And that banner never more did crown Valencia's parapet. Then came mules, with treasure laden, stepping softly on before, Compassed round with knights in armour—to the full four hundred more. Then a band of belted nobles, stern and silent; and amid Their levelled lances, he of Bivar—the Campeadór—the Cid. On his milk-white steed, Babieca, whom none else did e'er bestride, Clad in all his princely trappings, did the lifeless warrior ride; Girt with helm and spur and blazoned shield, and grasping in his hand The bright crosslet of Tizona, his thrice-consecrated brand. Geronymo and Gil Diaz held the slackened bridlerein— His true bishop and true vassal—as they moved on to the plain; And Ximena and her maidens, 'mid the torchlight weird and dim, With six hundred knights in harness, followed slowly after him. In the solemn hush and darkness, with no joyful clarion-cry, 207 And no clash and clank of weapons, riding all so silently;— Thus they passed out from the city e'er the summer morning broke, And were found arrayed for battle when the infidels awoke. Great and mighty was the Moorish host, by thirty monarchs led, But a greater was the army with Rodrigo at the head; For, behold! came Santiago to the bloody battle-plain— Santiago, with a hundred thousand warriors in his train. Each in robe of shining whiteness, with a red cross on his breast,— Each with fiery sword uplifted or with golden lance at rest; Santiago, saintly leader, on a charger white as snow— Sent to aid the Cid Campeadór in vanquishing the foe. All the Paynims looked amazèd on the dreadful beauteous sight, As the tender light of morning softly crept out from the night; Then they harnessed them in silence, sternly grasping shield and spear, And pressed on in serried column, full of wonder, full of fear. There was one loud shock of battle, then they wildly turned to flee, And the Cid and Santiago swept their hosts into the sea. Twenty kings and twenty armies in that bloody fight were slain, And were left, with upturned faces, stiff and stark upon the plain. Fair and shining came the daylight, all in liquid summer sheen— But no more was Santiago, or his white-robed warriors, seen; Only one small train of nobles, riding on, with stately pace, To San Pedro de Cardeña and the great Cid's resting-place. By the altar in the chapel, where the monarch's throne doth stand, Sat the dead Cid, robed in purple, with his good sword in his hand. And again the Moorish ensign fluttered proudly in the air, Lifted high above the ramparts of Valencia the fair. ~ Ada Cambridge,

672:At Delphi Apollo! Apollo! Apollo! II Where hast thou, Apollo, gone? I have wandered on and on, Through the shaggy Dorian gorges, Down from where Parnassus forges Thunder for the Phocian valleys; Where the Pleistus springs and sallies Past ravines and caverns dread, Have, like it, meanderëd; But I cannot see thee, hear thee, Find thee, feel thee, get anear thee. Though in quest of thee I go where Thou didst haunt, I find thee nowhere, Apollo! Apollo! Apollo! III Still no answer comes. . . . Apollo! Vainly do I call and holloa Into each Crissoean cleft Where the last year's leaves are left. Deem not I have pushed my way But from stony Amphissà. I have come from far-off land, Traversed foam, traversed sand, From green pastures sea-surrounded, Where thy phorminx never sounded; O'er the broad and barren acres Of the vainly furrowed breakers, Across mountains loftier far Than the peaks of Pindus are; Skirted groves of pine and fir Denser than lone Tempe's were, With no selfish tread, but only I might find thee, lovely, lonely, Lingering by thy sacred city: On me wilt thou not have pity? 152 Sun-god! Song-god! I implore thee! Glow, and let me pale before thee, Apollo! Apollo! Apollo! IV Fallen tablet, prostrate column, Solitude and silence solemn! Half-tilled patches, squalid hovels, Where life multiplies and grovelsIs this Delphi, this the shrine Of the Musagete divine? This the cavern, this the cell, Of the Pythian oracle! Where the tripod, where the altar, Incense, embassy, and psalter? Can this pool of cresses be Cradle of pure Castaly? From the rock though still it bubbles, Travels onwards, halts, and doubles, Where the Muses wont to lave Limbs as vestal as its wave, 'Mong the flashing waters flashing,Gaunt and withered crones are washing. Not a note of lyre or zittern, But, below, the booming bittern Waits his quarry to inveigle, While o'erhead the silent eagle, Blinking, stares at the blank sunAll of thee that is not gone, Apollo! Apollo! Who art thou, intruder weird! With the fine and flowing beard? Whom no snowy robes encumber, But a habit black and sombre, Yet in whose composëd eyes Lurks the light of mysteries. Priest thou seemest, but not one Of the loved Latona's son. In thy aspect is no gladness, Glance nor gleam of joyous madness, 153 Only gloom, only sadness. Underneath thy knotted girdle Thoughts congeal and passions curdle, And about thy brow ascetic Lives nor light nor line prophetic. Priest, but priest not of Apollo, Whither wouldst thou have me follow? Lead but onward, I will enter Where thy cold gaze seems to centre, Underneath yon portal dismal, Into dusk and chill abysmal. Hast thou pent him? Is He lying There within, dethroned and dying? If thou breathest, hear me crying, ``Apollo! Apollo! Apollo!'' VI No, but here He cannot be, God of light and poesy! What are these I see around, Gloomy upon gloomy ground, Making wall and roof to seem Sepulchre of morbid dream? Visages with aspect stony, Bodies lean, and lank, and bony, In whose lineaments I trace Neither love, nor joy, nor grace: Youth with limbs disused and old, Maidens pale, contorted, cold, Flames devouring, pincers wrenching Muscles naked but unblenching, Writhing snakes forked venom darting Into flesh-wounds, gaping, smarting, Furies shagged with tresses fell, Ghouls and ghosts of nether hell! Priest of beauty! Priest of song! Aid me, if thou still art strong! See me! save me! bear me whither Glows thy light that brought me hither, Apollo! Apollo! Apollo! VII 154 O the sunshine once again! O to stand a man 'mong men! Lo! the horrid nightmare pales In the light of flowing vales, In the gaze of steadfast mountains, Sidelong runnels, forward fountains, Spacious sky, receding air, Breadth and bounty everywhere. What if all the gods be dead, Nature reigneth in their stead. Let me dream the noon away Underneath this full-blown bay, Where the yellow bees are busy, Till they stagger, drowsy, dizzy, From the honeyed wine that wells Up the branches to the cells Of the myriad-clustered flowers Dropping golden flakes in showers. Here reclined, I will surrender Sense and soul unto the tender Mingling of remote and close: Gods voluptuous, gods morose; Altars at whose marble meet Downcast eyes and dancing feet; Awful dirges, glad carouse, Unveiled bosoms, shaded brows, Wreathëd steer and tonsured skull, Shapes austere with beautiful; Till the past and present swim In an ether distant, dim, And the Delphic fumes rise denser From a silver-swinging censer, And in one harmonious dream, Through a heavenly nimbus, gleam Lovely limbs and longings saintly, And pale virgins murmur faintly, ``Apollo! Apollo! Apollo!'' VIII Priest, but priest not of Apollo, Why dost thou my footsteps follow From the deep dark shrine down there 155 To this temple of the air? What, profaner! wouldst thou lay Hands upon the sacred bay, Tearing Daphne limb from limb! Hast thou, then, no dread of Him? How? For me? Avaunt, and pass! I am not fool Marsyas. Stay! Then to my forehead bind it, Round my temples wreathe and wind it; 'Chance the Avenger then will come, Haunt and grot no more be dumb, But the rills and steeps be ringing, And a long array come singing, ``Apollo! Apollo! Apollo!'' IX All in vain! Nor prayer nor taunt Tempts him back to his loved haunt. Fretted tablet, fallen column, Solitude and silence solemn! He again from Peneus ne'er Will to Castaly repair; Never more in cavern dread Will his oracles be read; Now I know that Thou art dead, Apollo! Then like fountain in mine ear Spake the god aloud and clear: ``Take it! Wear it! Tis for thee, Singer from the Northern Sea. If the least, not last of those, Suckled 'mong the genial snows. Though the Muses may have left Tempe's glen and Delphi's cleft, Wanderer! they have only gone Hence to murmuring Albion. Need was none to travel hither: Child of England, go back thither. Traverse foam, traverse sand; Back, and in thy native land 156 Thou wilt find what thou dost seek. There the oracles still speak; There the mounting fumes inspire Glowing brain and living lyre. There the Muses prompt the strain, There they renovate my reign; There thou wilt not call in vain, `Apollo! Apollo! Apollo!''' ~ Alfred Austin,

673:Part I: Visions In The Smoke Rest, and be thankful ! On the verge Of the tall cliff rugged and grey, But whose granite base the breakers surge, And shiver their frothy spray, Outstretched, I gaze on the eddying wreath That gathers and flits away, With the surf beneath, and between my teeth The stem of the 'ancient clay'. With the anodyne cloud on my listless eyes, With its spell on my dreamy brain, As I watch the circling vapours rise From the brown bowl up to the sullen skies. My vision becomes more plain, Till a dim kaleidoscope succeeds Through the smoke-rack drifting and veering, Like ghostly riders on phantom steeds To a shadowy goal careering. In their own generation the wise may sneer, They hold our sports in derision ; Perchance to sophist, or sage, or seer, Were allotted a graver vision. Yet if man, of all the Creator plann'd, His noblest work is reckoned, Of the works of His hand, by sea or by land, The horse may at least rank second. Did they quail, those steeds of the squadrons light, Did they flinch from the battle's roar, When they burst on the guns of the Muscovite, By the echoing Black Sea shore ? On ! on ! to the cannon's mouth they stride, With never a swerve nor a shy, Oh ! the minutes of yonder maddening ride, Long years of pleasure outvie ! No slave, but a comrade staunch, in this, Is the horse, for he takes his share, 207 Not in peril alone, but in feverish bliss, And in longing to do and dare. Where bullets whistle, and round shot whiz, Hoofs trample, and blades flash bare, God send me an ending as fair as his Who died in his stirrups there ! The wind has slumbered throughout the day, Now a fitful gust springs over the bay, My wandering thoughts no longer stray, I'll fix my overcoat buttons ; Secure my old hat as best I may (And a shocking bad one it is, by the way), Blow a denser cloud from my stunted clay, And then, friend Bell, as the Frenchmen say, We'll 'go back again to our muttons'. There's a lull in the tumult on yonder hill, And the clamour has grown less loud, Though the Babel of tongues is never still, With the presence of such a crowd. The bell has rung. With their riders up At the starting post they muster, The racers stripp'd for the 'Melbourne Cup', All gloss and polish and lustre ; And the course is seen, with its emerald sheen, By the bright spring-tide renew'd, Like a ribbon of green, stretched out between The ranks of the multitude. The flag is lowered. 'They're off !' 'They come !' The squadron is sweeping on ; A sway in the crowd—a murmuring hum ! 'They're here !' 'They're past !' 'They're gone !' They came with the rush of the southern surf, On the bar of the storm-girt bay ; And like muffled drums on the sounding turf Their hoof-strokes echo away. The rose and black draws clear of the ruck, And the murmur swells to a roar, As the brave old colours that never were struck, 208 Are seen with the lead once more. Though the feathery ferns and grasses wave O'er the sod where Lantern sleeps, Though the turf is green on Fisherman's grave, The stable its prestige keeps. Six lengths in front she scours along, She's bringing the field to trouble ; She's tailing them off, she's running strong, She shakes her head and pulls double. Now Minstrel falters and Exile flags, The Barb finds the pace too hot, And Toryboy loiters, and Playboy lags, And the bolt of Ben Bolt is shot. That she never may be caught this day, Is the worst that the public wish her. She won't be caught ; she comes right away ; Hurrah for Seagull and Fisher ; See, Strop falls back, though his reins are slack, Sultana begins to tire, And the top-weight tells on the Sydney crack, And the pace on 'the Gippsland flyer'. The rowels, as round the turn they sweep, Just graze Tim Whiffler's flanks ; Like the hunted deer that flies through the sheep, He strides through the beaten ranks. Daughter of Omen, prove your birth, The colt will take lots of choking ; The hot breath steams at your saddle girth, From his scarlet nostril smoking. The shouts of the Ring for a space subside, And slackens the bookmaker's roar ; Now, Davis, rally ; now, Carter, ride, As man never rode before. When Sparrowhawk's backers cease to cheer, When Yattendon's friends are dumb, When hushed is the clamour for Volunteer— Alone in the race they come ! 209 They're neck and neck ; they're head and head ; They're stroke for stroke in the running ; The whalebone whistles, the steel is red, No shirking as yet nor shunning. One effort, Seagull, the blood you boast Should struggle when nerves are strained ;— With a rush on the post, by a neck at the most, The verdict for Tim is gained. Tim Whiffler wins. Is blood alone The sine qua non for a flyer ? The breed of his dam is a myth unknown, And we've doubts respecting his sire. Yet few (if any) those proud names are, On the pages of peerage or stud, In whose 'scutcheon lurks no sinister bar, No taint of the base black blood. Aye, Shorthouse, laugh—laugh loud and long, For pedigree you're a sticker ; You may be right, I may be wrong, Wiseacres both ! Let's liquor. Our common descent we may each recall To a lady of old caught tripping, The fair one in fig leaves, who d——d us all For a bite at a golden pippin. When first on this rocky ledge I lay, There was scarce a ripple in yonder bay, The air was serenely still ; Each column that sailed from my swarthy clay Hung loitering long ere it passed away, Though the skies wore a tinge of leaden grey, And the atmosphere was chill. But the red sun sank to his evening shroud, Where the western billows are roll'd Behind a curtain of sable cloud, With a fringe of scarlet and gold ; There's a misty glare in the yellow moon, And the drift is scudding fast, There'll be storm, and rattle, and tempest soon, When the heavens are overcast. 210 The neutral tint of the sullen sea Is fleck'd with the snowy foam, And the distant gale sighs drearilie, As the wanderer sighs for his home. The white sea-horses toss their manes On the bar of the southern reef, And the breakers moan, and—by Jove, it rains (I thought I should come to grief) ; Though it can't well damage my shabby hat, Though my coat looks best when it's damp ; Since the shaking I got (no matter where at), I've a mortal dread of the cramp. My matches are wet, my pipe's put out, And the wind blows colder and stronger ; I'll be stiff, and sore, and sorry, no doubt, If I lie here any longer. ~ Adam Lindsay Gordon,

674:Chione Scarcely a breath about the rocky stair Moved, but the growing tide from verge to verge, Heaving salt fragrance on the midnight air, Climbed with a murmurous and fitful surge. A hoary mist rose up and slowly sheathed The dripping walls and portal granite-stepped, And sank into the inner court, and crept From column unto column thickly wreathed. In that dead hour of darkness before dawn, When hearts beat fainter, and the hands of death Are strengthened,--with lips white and drawn And feverish lids and scarcely moving breath, The hapless mother, tender Chione, Beside the earth-cold figure of her child, After long bursts of weeping sharp and wild Lay broken, silent in her agony. At first in waking horror racked and bound She lay, and then a gradual stupor grew About her soul and wrapped her round and round Like death, and then she sprang to life anew Out of a darkness clammy as the tomb; And, touched by memory or some spirit hand, She seemed to keep a pathway down a land Of monstrous shadow and Cimmerian gloom. A waste of cloudy and perpetual night-And yet there seemed a teeming presence there Of life that gathered onward in thick flight, Unseen, but multitudinous. Aware Of something also on her path she was That drew her heart forth with a tender cry. She hurried with drooped ear and eager eye, And called on the foul shapes to let her pass. For down the sloping darkness far ahead She saw a little figure slight and small, With yearning arms and shadowy curls outspread, Running at frightened speed; and it would fall 73 And rise, sobbing; and through the ghostly sleet The cry came: 'Mother! Mother!' and she wist The tender eyes were blinded by the mist, And the rough stones were bruising the small feet. And when she lifted a keen cry and clave Forthright the gathering horror of the place, Mad with her love and pity, a dark wave Of clapping shadows swept about her face, And beat her back, and when she gained her breath, Athwart an awful vale a grizzled steam Was rising from a mute and murky stream, As cold and cavernous as the eye of death. And near the ripple stood the little shade, And many hovering ghosts drew near him, some That seemed to peer out of the mist and fade With eyes of soft and shadowing pity, dumb; But others closed him round with eager sighs And sweet insistence, striving to caress And comfort him; but grieving none the less, He reached her heartstrings with his tender cries. And silently across the horrid flow, The shapeless bark and pallid chalklike arms Of him that oared it, dumbly to and fro, Went gliding, and the struggling ghosts in swarms Leaped in and passed, but myriads more behind Crowded the dismal beaches. One might hear A tumult of entreaty thin and clear Rise like the whistle of a winter wind. And still the little figure stood beside The hideous stream, and toward the whispering prow Held forth his tender tremulous hands, and cried, Now to the awful ferryman, and now To her that battled with the shades in vain. Sometimes impending over all her sight The spongy dark and the phantasmal flight Of things half-shapen passed and hid the plain. And sometimes in a gust a sort of wind Drove by, and where its power was hurled, 74 She saw across the twilight, jarred and thinned, Those gloomy meadows of the under world, Where never sunlight was, nor grass, nor trees, And the dim pathways from the Stygian shore, Sombre and swart and barren, wandered o'er By countless melancholy companies. And farther still upon the utmost rim Of the drear waste, whereto the roadways led, She saw in piling outline, huge and dim, The walled and towered dwellings of the dead And the grim house of Hades. Then she broke Once more fierce-footed through the noisome press; But ere she reached the goal of her distress, Her pierced heart seemed to shatter, and she woke. It seemed as she had been entombed for years, And came again to living with a start. There was an awful echoing in her ears And a great deadness pressing at her heart. She shuddered and with terror seemed to freeze, Lip-shrunken and wide-eyed a moment's space, And then she touched the little lifeless face, And kissed it, and rose up upon her knees. And round her still the silence seemed to teem With the foul shadows of her dream beguiled-No dream, she thought; it could not be a dream, But her child called for her; her child, her child!-She clasped her quivering fingers white and spare, And knelt low down, and bending her fair head Unto the lower gods who rule the dead, Touched them with tender homage and this prayer: O gloomy masters of the dark demesne, Hades, and thou whom the dread deity Bore once from earthly Enna for his queen, Beloved of Demeter, pale Persephone, Grant me one boon; 'Tis not for life I pray, Not life, but quiet death; and that soon, soon! Loose from my soul this heavy weight of clay, 75 This net of useless woe. O mournful mother, sad Persephone, Be mindful, let me go! How shall he journey to the dismal beach, Or win the ear of Charon, without one To keep him and stand by him, sure of speech? He is so little, and has just begun To use his feet And speak a few small words, And all his daily usage has been sweet As the soft nesting ways of tender birds. How shall he fare at all Across that grim inhospitable land, If I too be not by to hold his hand, And help him if he fall? And then before the gloomy judges set, How shall he answer? Oh, I cannot bear To see his tender cheeks with weeping wet, Or hear the sobbing cry of his despair! I could not rest, Nor live with patient mind, Though knowing what is fated must be best; But surely thou art more than mortal kind, And thou canst feel my woe, All-pitying, all-observant, all-divine; He is so little, mother Proserpine, He needs me, let me go! Thus far she prayed, and then she lost her way, And left the half of all her heart unsaid, And a great languor seized her, and she lay, Soft fallen, by the little silent head. Her numbed lips had passed beyond control, Her mind could neither plan nor reason more, She saw dark waters and an unknown shore, And the grey shadows crept about her soul. Again through darkness on an evil land She seemed to enter but without distress. A little spirit led her by the hand, 76 And her wide heart was warm with tenderness. Her lips, still moving, conscious of one care, Murmured a moment in soft mother-tones, And so fell silent. From their sombre thrones Already the grim gods had heard her prayer. ~ Archibald Lampman,

675:To Count Carlo Pepoli This wearisome and this distressing sleep That we call life, O how dost thou support, My Pepoli? With what hopes feedest thou Thy heart? Say in what thoughts, and in what deeds, Agreeable or sad, dost thou invest The idleness thy ancestors bequeathed To thee, a dull and heavy heritage? All life, indeed, in every walk of life, Is idleness, if we may give that name To every work achieved, or effort made, That has no worthy aim in view, or fails That aim to reach. And if you idle call The busy crew, that daily we behold, From tranquil morn unto the dewy eve, Behind the plough, or tending plants and flocks, Because they live simply to keep alive, And life is worthless for itself alone, The honest truth you speak. His nights and days The pilot spends in idleness; the toil And sweat in workshops are but idleness; The soldier's vigils, perils of the field, The eager merchant's cares are idle all; Because true happiness, for which alone Our mortal nature longs and strives, no man, Or for himself, or others, e'er acquires Through toil or sweat, through peril, or through care. Yet for this fierce desire, which mortals still From the beginning of the world have felt, But ever felt in vain, for happiness, By way of soothing remedy devised, Nature, in this unhappy life of ours, Had manifold necessities prepared, Not without thought or labor satisfied; So that the days, though ever sad, less dull Might seem unto the human family; And this desire, bewildered and confused, Might have less power to agitate the heart. So, too, the various families of brutes, Who have, no less than we, and vainly, too, 123 Desire for happiness; but they, intent On that which is essential to their life, Consume their days more pleasantly, by far, Nor chide, with us, the dulness of the hours. But _we_, who unto other hands commit The furnishing of our immediate wants, Have a necessity more grave to meet, For which no other ever can provide, With ennui laden, and with suffering; The stern necessity of killing time; That cruel, obstinate necessity, From which, nor hoarded gold, nor wealth of flocks, Nor fertile fields, nor sumptuous palaces, Nor purple robes, the race of man can save. And if one, scorning such a barren life, And hating to behold the light of day, Turns not a homicidal hand upon Himself, anticipating sluggish Fate, For the sharp sting of unappeased desire, That vainly calls for happiness, he seeks, In desperate chase, on every side, in vain, A thousand inefficient remedies, In lieu of that, which Nature gives to all. One to his dress devotes himself, and hair, His gait and gesture and the learned lore Of horses, carriages, to crowded halls, To thronged piazzas, and to gardens gay; Another gives his nights and days to games, And feasts, and dances with the reigning belles: A smile perpetual is on his lips; But in his breast, alas, stern and severe, Like adamantine column motionless, Eternal ennui sits, against whose might Avail not vigorous youth, nor prattle fond That falls from rosy lips, nor tender glance That trembles in two dark and lustrous eyes; The most bewildering of mortal things, Most precious gift of heaven unto man. Another, as if hoping to escape Sad destiny, in changing lands and climes 124 His days consuming, wandering o'er sea And hills, the whole earth traverses; each spot That Nature, in her infinite domain, To restless man hath made accessible, He visits in his wanderings. Alas, Black care is seated on the lofty prow; Beneath each clime, each sky, he asks in vain For happiness; sadness still lives and reigns. Another in the cruel deeds of war Prefers to pass his hours, and dips his hand, For his diversion, in his brother's blood: Another in his neighbor's misery His comfort finds, and artfully contrives To kill the time, in making others sad. _This_ man still walks in wisdom's ways, or art Pursues; _that_ tramples on the people's rights, At home, abroad; the ancient rest disturbs Of distant shores, on fraudful gain intent, With cruel war, or sharp diplomacy; And so his destined part of life consumes. Thee a more gentle wish, a care more sweet Leads and controls, still in the flower of youth, In the fair April of thy days, to most A time so pleasant, heaven's choicest gift; But heavy, bitter, wearisome to _him_ Who has no country. Thee the love of song Impels, and of portraying in thy speech The beauty, that so seldom in the world Appears and fades so soon, and _that_, more rare Which fond imagination, kinder far Than Nature, or than heaven, so bounteously For our entranced, deluded souls provides. Oh, fortunate a thousand-fold is he, Who loses not his fancy's freshness as The years roll by; whom envious Fate permits To keep eternal sunshine in his heart, Who, in his ripe and his declining years, As was his custom in his glorious youth, In his deep thought enhances Nature's charms, Gives life to death, and to the desert, bloom. 125 May heaven this fortune give to thee; and may The spark that now so warms thy breast, make thee In thy old age a votary of song! _I_ feel no more the sweet illusions of That happy time; those charming images Have faded from my eyes, that I so loved, And which, unto my latest hour, will be Remembered still, with hopeless sighs and tears. And when this breast to all things has become Insensible and cold, nor the sweet smile And rest profound of lonely sun-lit plains, Nor cheerful morning song of birds in spring, Nor moonlight soft, that rests on hills and fields, Beneath the limpid sky, will move my heart; When every beauty, both of Nature, and Of Art, to me will be inanimate And mute; each tender feeling, lofty thought, Unknown and strange; my only comfort, then, Poor beggar, must I find in studies more Severe; to them, thenceforward, must devote The wretched remnant of unhappy life: The bitter truth must I investigate, The destinies mysterious, alike Of mortal and immortal things; For what was suffering humanity, Bowed down beneath the weight of misery, Created; to what final goal are Fate And Nature urging it; to whom can our Great sorrow any pleasure, profit give; Beneath what laws and orders, to what end, The mighty Universe revolves--the theme Of wise men's praise, to _me_ a mystery? I in these speculations will consume My idleness; because the truth, when known, Though sad, has yet its charms. And if, at times, The truth discussing, my opinions should Unwelcome be, or not be understood, I shall not grieve, indeed, because in me The love of fame will be extinguished quite; Of fame, that idol frivolous and blind; More blind by far than Fortune, or than Love. 126 ~ Count Giacomo Leopardi,

676:Pilate's Wife's Dream I've quenched my lamp, I struck it in that start Which every limb convulsed, I heard it fall­ The crash blent with my sleep, I saw depart Its light, even as I woke, on yonder wall; Over against my bed, there shone a gleam Strange, faint, and mingling also with my dream. It sunk, and I am wrapt in utter gloom; How far is night advanced, and when will day Retinge the dusk and livid air with bloom, And fill this void with warm, creative ray ? Would I could sleep again till, clear and red, Morning shall on the mountain-tops be spread! I'd call my women, but to break their sleep, Because my own is broken, were unjust; They've wrought all day, and well-earned slumbers steep Their labours in forgetfulness, I trust; Let me my feverish watch with patience bear, Thankful that none with me its sufferings share. Yet, Oh, for light ! one ray would tranquilise My nerves, my pulses, more than effort can; I'll draw my curtain and consult the skies: These trembling stars at dead of night look wan, Wild, restless, strange, yet cannot be more drear Than this my couch, shared by a nameless fear. All black­one great cloud, drawn from east to west, Conceals the heavens, but there are lights below; Torches burn in Jerusalem, and cast On yonder stony mount a lurid glow. I see men stationed there, and gleaming spears; A sound, too, from afar, invades my ears. Dull, measured, strokes of axe and hammer ring From street to street, not loud, but through the night Distinctly heard­and some strange spectral thing 45 Is now upreared­and, fixed against the light Of the pale lamps; defined upon that sky, It stands up like a column, straight and high. I see it all­I know the dusky sign­ A cross on Calvary, which Jews uprear While Romans watch; and when the dawn shall shine Pilate, to judge the victim will appear, Pass sentence­yield him up to crucify; And on that cross the spotless Christ must die. Dreams, then, are true­for thus my vision ran; Surely some oracle has been with me, The gods have chosen me to reveal their plan, To warn an unjust judge of destiny: I, slumbering, heard and saw; awake I know, Christ's coming death, and Pilate's life of woe. I do not weep for Pilate­who could prove Regret for him whose cold and crushing sway No prayer can soften, no appeal can move; Who tramples hearts as others trample clay, Yet with a faltering, an uncertain tread, That might stir up reprisal in the dead. Forced to sit by his side and see his deeds; Forced to behold that visage, hour by hour, In whose gaunt lines, the abhorrent gazer reads A triple lust of gold, and blood, and power; A soul whom motives, fierce, yet abject, urge Rome's servile slave, and Judah's tyrant scourge. How can I love, or mourn, or pity him ? I, who so long my fettered hands have wrung; I, who for grief have wept my eye-sight dim; Because, while life for me was bright and young, He robbed my youth­he quenched my life's fair ray­ He crushed my mind, and did my freedom slay. 46 And at this hour­although I be his wife­ He has no more of tenderness from me Than any other wretch of guilty life; Less, for I know his household privacy­ I see him as he is­without a screen; And, by the gods, my soul abhors his mien ! Has he not sought my presence, dyed in blood­ Innocent, righteous blood, shed shamelessly ? And have I not his red salute withstood ? Aye,­when, as erst, he plunged all Galilee In dark bereavement­in affliction sore, Mingling their very offerings with their gore. Then came he­in his eyes a serpent-smile, Upon his lips some false, endearing word, And, through the streets of Salem, clanged the while, His slaughtering, hacking, sacrilegious sword­ And I, to see a man cause men such woe, Trembled with ire­I did not fear to show. And now, the envious Jewish priests have brought Jesus­whom they in mockery call their king­ To have, by this grim power, their vengeance wrought; By this mean reptile, innocence to sting. Oh ! could I but the purposed doom avert, And shield the blameless head from cruel hurt! Accessible is Pilate's heart to fear, Omens will shake his soul, like autumn leaf; Could he this night's appalling vision hear, This just man's bonds were loosed, his life were safe, Unless that bitter priesthood should prevail, And make even terror to their malice quail. Yet if I tell the dream­but let me pause. What dream ? Erewhile the characters were clear, Graved on my brain­at once some unknown cause Has dimmed and rased the thoughts, which now appear, Like a vague remnant of some by-past scene;­ Not what will be, but what, long since, has been. 47 I suffered many things, I heard foretold A dreadful doom for Pilate,­lingering woes, In far, barbarian climes, where mountains cold Built up a solitude of trackless snows, There, he and grisly wolves prowled side by side, There he lived famished­there methought he died; But not of hunger, nor by malady; I saw the snow around him, stained with gore; I said I had no tears for such as he, And, lo ! my cheek is wet­mine eyes run o'er; I weep for mortal suffering, mortal guilt, I weep the impious deed­the blood self-spilt. More I recall not, yet the vision spread Into a world remote, an age to come­ And still the illumined name of Jesus shed A light, a clearness, through the enfolding gloom­ And still I saw that sign, which now I see, That cross on yonder brow of Calvary. What is this Hebrew Christ ? To me unknown, His lineage­doctrine­mission­yet how clear, Is God-like goodness, in his actions shewn ! How straight and stainless is his life's career ! The ray of Deity that rests on him, In my eyes makes Olympian glory dim. The world advances, Greek, or Roman rite Suffices not the inquiring mind to stay; The searching soul demands a purer light To guide it on its upward, onward way; Ashamed of sculptured gods­Religion turns To where the unseen Jehovah's altar burns. Our faith is rotten­all our rites defiled, Our temples sullied, and methinks, this man, With his new ordinance, so wise and mild, Is come, even as he says, the chaff to fan 48 And sever from the wheat; but will his faith Survive the terrors of to-morrow's death ? ***** I feel a firmer trust­a higher hope Rise in my soul­it dawns with dawning day; Lo ! on the Temple's roof­on Moriah's slope Appears at length that clear, and crimson ray, Which I so wished for when shut in by night; Oh, opening skies, I hail, I bless your light ! Part, clouds and shadows ! glorious Sun appear ! Part, mental gloom ! Come insight from on high ! Dusk dawn in heaven still strives with daylight clear, The longing soul, doth still uncertain sigh. Oh ! to behold the truth­that sun divine, How doth my bosom pant, my spirit pine ! This day, time travails with a mighty birth, This day, Truth stoops from heaven and visits earth, Ere night descends, I shall more surely know What guide to follow, in what path to go; I wait in hope­I wait in solemn fear, The oracle of God­the sole­true God­to hear. ~ Charlotte Brontë,

677:Epistles To Several Persons: Epistle Iv, To Richard Boyle, Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures: Et sermone opus est modo tristi, saepe jocoso, Defendente vicem modo Rhetoris atque Poetae, Interdum urbani, parcentis viribus, atque Extenuantis eas consulto. (Horace, Satires, I, x, 17-22) 'Tis strange, the miser should his cares employ To gain those riches he can ne'er enjoy: Is it less strange, the prodigal should waste His wealth to purchase what he ne'er can taste? Not for himself he sees, or hears, or eats; Artists must choose his pictures, music, meats: He buys for Topham, drawings and designs, For Pembroke, statues, dirty gods, and coins; Rare monkish manuscripts for Hearne alone, And books for Mead, and butterflies for Sloane. Think we all these are for himself? no more Than his fine wife, alas! or finer whore. For what his Virro painted, built, and planted? Only to show, how many tastes he wanted. What brought Sir Visto's ill got wealth to waste? Some daemon whisper'd, "Visto! have a taste." Heav'n visits with a taste the wealthy fool, And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule. See! sportive fate, to punish awkward pride, Bids Bubo build, and sends him such a guide: A standing sermon, at each year's expense, That never coxcomb reach'd magnificence! You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse, And pompous buildings once were things of use. Yet shall (my Lord) your just, your noble rules Fill half the land with imitating fools; Who random drawings from your sheets shall take, And of one beauty many blunders make; Load some vain church with old theatric state, 86 Turn arcs of triumph to a garden gate; Reverse your ornaments, and hang them all On some patch'd dog-hole ek'd with ends of wall; Then clap four slices of pilaster on't, That lac'd with bits of rustic, makes a front. Or call the winds through long arcades to roar, Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door; Conscious they act a true Palladian part, And, if they starve, they starve by rules of art. Oft have you hinted to your brother peer, A certain truth, which many buy too dear: Something there is more needful than expense, And something previous ev'n to taste--'tis sense: Good sense, which only is the gift of Heav'n, And though no science, fairly worth the sev'n: A light, which in yourself you must perceive; Jones and Le Notre have it not to give. To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the column, or the arch to bend, To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot; In all, let Nature never be forgot. But treat the goddess like a modest fair, Nor overdress, nor leave her wholly bare; Let not each beauty ev'rywhere be spied, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul, Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole, Spontaneous beauties all around advance, 87 Start ev'n from difficulty, strike from chance; Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow A work to wonder at--perhaps a Stowe. Without it, proud Versailles! thy glory falls; And Nero's terraces desert their walls: The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make, Lo! Cobham comes, and floats them with a lake: Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain, You'll wish your hill or shelter'd seat again. Ev'n in an ornament its place remark, Nor in an hermitage set Dr. Clarke. Behold Villario's ten years' toil complete; His quincunx darkens, his espaliers meet; The wood supports the plain, the parts unite, And strength of shade contends with strength of light; A waving glow his bloomy beds display, Blushing in bright diversities of day, With silver-quiv'ring rills meander'd o'er-Enjoy them, you! Villario can no more; Tir'd of the scene parterres and fountains yield, He finds at last he better likes a field. Through his young woods how pleas'd Sabinus stray'd, Or sat delighted in the thick'ning shade, With annual joy the redd'ning shoots to greet, Or see the stretching branches long to meet! His son's fine taste an op'ner vista loves, Foe to the dryads of his father's groves; One boundless green, or flourish'd carpet views, With all the mournful family of yews; The thriving plants ignoble broomsticks made, Now sweep those alleys they were born to shade. At Timon's villa let us pass a day, Where all cry out, "What sums are thrown away!" So proud, so grand of that stupendous air, Soft and agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, 88 His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole, a labour'd quarry above ground. Two cupids squirt before: a lake behind Improves the keenness of the Northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On ev'ry side you look, behold the wall! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suff'ring eye inverted Nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; With here a fountain, never to be play'd; And there a summerhouse, that knows no shade; Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bow'rs; There gladiators fight, or die in flow'rs; Unwater'd see the drooping sea horse mourn, And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn. My Lord advances with majestic mien, Smit with the mighty pleasure, to be seen: But soft--by regular approach--not yet-First through the length of yon hot terrace sweat; And when up ten steep slopes you've dragg'd your thighs, Just at his study door he'll bless your eyes. His study! with what authors is it stor'd? In books, not authors, curious is my Lord; To all their dated backs he turns you round: These Aldus printed, those Du Sueil has bound. Lo, some are vellum, and the rest as good For all his Lordship knows, but they are wood. For Locke or Milton 'tis in vain to look, These shelves admit not any modern book. And now the chapel's silver bell you hear, That summons you to all the pride of pray'r: Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven. 89 On painted ceilings you devoutly stare, Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre, On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie, And bring all paradise before your eye. To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite, Who never mentions Hell to ears polite. But hark! the chiming clocks to dinner call; A hundred footsteps scrape the marble hall: The rich buffet well-colour'd serpents grace, And gaping Tritons spew to wash your face. Is this a dinner? this a genial room? No, 'tis a temple, and a hecatomb. A solemn sacrifice, perform'd in state, You drink by measure, and to minutes eat. So quick retires each flying course, you'd swear Sancho's dread doctor and his wand were there. Between each act the trembling salvers ring, From soup to sweet wine, and God bless the King. In plenty starving, tantaliz'd in state, And complaisantly help'd to all I hate, Treated, caress'd, and tir'd, I take my leave, Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve; I curse such lavish cost, and little skill, And swear no day was ever pass'd so ill. Yet hence the poor are cloth'd, the hungry fed; Health to himself, and to his infants bread The lab'rer bears: What his hard heart denies, His charitable vanity supplies. Another age shall see the golden ear Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre, Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann'd, And laughing Ceres reassume the land. Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil? Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle. 'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense, And splendour borrows all her rays from sense. His father's acres who enjoys in peace, 90 Or makes his neighbours glad, if he increase: Whose cheerful tenants bless their yearly toil, Yet to their Lord owe more than to the soil; Whose ample lawns are not asham'd to feed The milky heifer and deserving steed; Whose rising forests, not for pride or show, But future buildings, future navies, grow: Let his plantations stretch from down to down, First shade a country, and then raise a town. You too proceed! make falling arts your care, Erect new wonders, and the old repair; Jones and Palladio to themselves restore, And be whate'er Vitruvius was before: Till kings call forth th' ideas of your mind, Proud to accomplish what such hands design'd, Bid harbours open, public ways extend, Bid temples, worthier of the God, ascend; Bid the broad arch the dang'rous flood contain, The mole projected break the roaring main; Back to his bounds their subject sea command, And roll obedient rivers through the land; These honours, peace to happy Britain brings, These are imperial works, and worthy kings. ~ Alexander Pope,

678:If solitude hath ever led thy steps    To the wild ocean's echoing shore,    And thou hast lingered there,    Until the sun's broad orb   Seemed resting on the burnished wave,    Thou must have marked the lines   Of purple gold that motionless    Hung o'er the sinking sphere;   Thou must have marked the billowy clouds,   Edged with intolerable radiancy,    Towering like rocks of jet    Crowned with a diamond wreath;    And yet there is a moment,    When the sun's highest point Peeps like a star o'er ocean's western edge, When those far clouds of feathery gold,   Shaded with deepest purple, gleam   Like islands on a dark blue sea; Then has thy fancy soared above the earth    And furled its wearied wing    Within the Fairy's fane.    Yet not the golden islands    Gleaming in yon flood of light,      Nor the feathery curtains    Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch,    Nor the burnished ocean-waves      Paving that gorgeous dome,   So fair, so wonderful a sight As Mab's ethereal palace could afford. Yet likest evening's vault, that fary Hall! As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread      Its floors of flashing light,      Its vast and azure dome,      Its fertile golden islands      Floating on a silver sea; Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted Through clouds of circumambient darkness,   And pearly battlements around   Looked o'er the immense of Heaven.   The magic car no longer moved.    The Fairy and the Spirit    Entered the Hall of Spells.     Those golden clouds    That rolled in glittering billows    Beneath the azure canopy, With the ethereal footsteps trembled not;      The light and crimson mists, Floating to strains of thrilling melody    Through that unearthly dwelling, Yielded to every movement of the will; Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned, And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,   Used not the glorious privilege    Of virtue and of wisdom.    'Spirit!' the Fairy said,   And pointed to the gorgeous dome,    'This is a wondrous sight    And mocks all human grandeur; But, were it virtue's only meed to dwell In a celestial palace, all resigned To pleasurable impulses, immured Within the prison of itself, the will Of changeless Nature would be unfulfilled. Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come! This is thine high reward:the past shall rise; Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach      The secrets of the future.'      The Fairy and the Spirit Approached the overhanging battlement.    Below lay stretched the universe!    There, far as the remotest line    That bounds imagination's flight,     Countless and unending orbs    In mazy motion intermingled,    Yet still fulfilled immutably      Eternal Nature's law.      Above, below, around,      The circling systems formed      A wilderness of harmony;    Each with undeviating aim, In eloquent silence, through the depths of space      Pursued its wondrous way.      There was a little light That twinkled in the misty distance.      None but a spirit's eye      Might ken that rolling orb.      None but a spirit's eye,      And in no other place But that celestial dwelling, might behold Each action of this earth's inhabitants.      But matter, space, and time, In those arial mansions cease to act; And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds Those obstacles of which an earthly soul    Fears to attempt the conquest.    The Fairy pointed to the earth.    The Spirit's intellectual eye    Its kindred beings recognized. The thronging thousands, to a passing view,    Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens.      How wonderful! that even   The passions, prejudices, interests, That sway the meanest beingthe weak touch      That moves the finest nerve      And in one human brain Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link    In the great chain of Nature!    'Behold,' the Fairy cried,    'Palmyra's ruined palaces!    Behold where grandeur frowned!    Behold where pleasure smiled!   What now remains?the memory    Of senselessness and shame.    What is immortal there?    Nothingit stands to tell    A melancholy tale, to give    An awful warning; soon   Oblivion will steal silently    The remnant of its fame.    Monarchs and conquerors there   Proud o'er prostrate millions trod   The earthquakes of the human race;   Like them, forgotten when the ruin    That marks their shock is past.    'Beside the eternal Nile    The Pyramids have risen.   Nile shall pursue his changeless way;     Those Pyramids shall fall.   Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell     The spot whereon they stood;   Their very site shall be forgotten,     As is their builder's name!    'Behold yon sterile spot,   Where now the wandering Arab's tent     Flaps in the desert blast!   There once old Salem's haughty fane Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes,   And in the blushing face of day    Exposed its shameful glory. Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed The building of that fane; and many a father, Worn out with toil and slavery, implored The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth And spare his children the detested task Of piling stone on stone and poisoning     The choicest days of life     To soothe a dotard's vanity. There an inhuman and uncultured race Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God; They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb The unborn childold age and infancy Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms Left not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends! But what was he who taught them that the God Of Nature and benevolence had given A special sanction to the trade of blood? His name and theirs are fading, and the tales Of this barbarian nation, which imposture Recites till terror credits, are pursuing   Itself into forgetfulness. 'Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,   There is a moral desert now.   The mean and miserable huts,   The yet more wretched palaces,   Contrasted with those ancient fanes   Now crumbling to oblivion,   The long and lonely colonnades   Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,    Seem like a well-known tune, Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear,    Remembered now in sadness.    But, oh! how much more changed,    How gloomier is the contrast    Of human nature there! Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave, A coward and a fool, spreads death around    Then, shuddering, meets his own.   Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,   A cowled and hypocritical monk     Prays, curses and deceives.    'Spirit! ten thousand years    Have scarcely passed away, Since in the waste, where now the savage drinks His enemy's blood, and, aping Europe's sons,    Wakes the unholy song of war,      Arose a stately city, Metropolis of the western continent.   There, now, the mossy column-stone, Indented by time's unrelaxing grasp,    Which once appeared to brave    All, save its country's ruin,    There the wide forest scene, Rude in the uncultivated loveliness    Of gardens long run wild, Seems, to the unwilling sojourner whose steps   Chance in that desert has delayed, Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.   Yet once it was the busiest haunt, Whither, as to a common centre, flocked   Strangers, and ships, and merchandise;    Once peace and freedom blest    The cultivated plain;    But wealth, that curse of man, Blighted the bud of its prosperity; Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty, Fled, to return not, until man shall know   That they alone can give the bliss    Worthy a soul that claims    Its kindred with eternity. 'There 's not one atom of yon earth    But once was living man;   Nor the minutest drop of rain,   That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,    But flowed in human veins;    And from the burning plains    Where Libyan monsters yell,    From the most gloomy glens    Of Greenland's sunless clime,    To where the golden fields    Of fertile England spread    Their harvest to the day,    Thou canst not find one spot    Whereon no city stood.    'How strange is human pride!   I tell thee that those living things,   To whom the fragile blade of grass    That springeth in the morn    And perisheth ere noon,    Is an unbounded world;   I tell thee that those viewless beings,   Whose mansion is the smallest particle    Of the impassive atmosphere,    Think, feel and live like man;   That their affections and antipathies,    Like his, produce the laws    Ruling their moral state;    And the minutest throb   That through their frame diffuses    The slightest, faintest motion,    Is fixed and indispensable    As the majestic laws    That rule yon rolling orbs.'    The Fairy paused. The Spirit, In ecstasy of admiration, felt All knowledge of the past revived; the events    Of old and wondrous times, Which dim tradition interruptedly Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded   In just perspective to the view;   Yet dim from their infinitude.    The Spirit seemed to stand High on an isolated pinnacle; The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe    Above, and all around   Nature's unchanging harmony.       ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab - Part II. ,

679:HOW wonderful is Death,    Death, and his brother Sleep!   One, pale as yonder waning moon    With lips of lurid blue;    The other, rosy as the morn   When throned on ocean's wave      It blushes o'er the world;   Yet both so passing wonderful!    Hath then the gloomy Power Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres    Seized on her sinless soul?    Must then that peerless form Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, those azure veins Which steal like streams along a field of snow,   That lovely outline which is fair    As breathing marble, perish?    Must putrefaction's breath   Leave nothing of this heavenly sight    But loathsomeness and ruin?   Spare nothing but a gloomy theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize?    Or is it only a sweet slumber    Stealing o'er sensation,   Which the breath of roseate morning      Chaseth into darkness?      Will Ianthe wake again,    And give that faithful bosom joy   Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch   Light, life and rapture, from her smile?      Yes! she will wake again, Although her glowing limbs are motionless,      And silent those sweet lips,      Once breathing eloquence   That might have soothed a tiger's rage Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.      Her dewy eyes are closed,   And on their lids, whose texture fine   Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,      The baby Sleep is pillowed;      Her golden tresses shade      The bosom's stainless pride,    Curling like tendrils of the parasite      Around a marble column.    Hark! whence that rushing sound?      'T is like the wondrous strain    That round a lonely ruin swells,    Which, wandering on the echoing shore,      The enthusiast hears at evening;    'T is softer than the west wind's sigh;    'T is wilder than the unmeasured notes    Of that strange lyre whose strings    The genii of the breezes sweep;      Those lines of rainbow light    Are like the moonbeams when they fall Through some cathedral window, but the tints      Are such as may not find      Comparison on earth. Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen! Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air; Their filmy pennons at her word they furl, And stop obedient to the reins of light;   These the Queen of Spells drew in;   She spread a charm around the spot, And, leaning graceful from the ethereal car,   Long did she gaze, and silently,      Upon the slumbering maid. Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams, When silvery clouds float through the wildered brain, When every sight of lovely, wild and grand   Astonishes, enraptures, elevates,    When fancy at a glance combines    The wondrous and the beautiful,--   So bright, so fair, so wild a shape      Hath ever yet beheld, As that which reined the coursers of the air   And poured the magic of her gaze      Upon the maiden's sleep.    The broad and yellow moon    Shone dimly through her form--   That form of faultless symmetry;   The pearly and pellucid car    Moved not the moonlight's line.    'T was not an earthly pageant.   Those, who had looked upon the sight    Passing all human glory,    Saw not the yellow moon,    Saw not the mortal scene,    Heard not the night-wind's rush,    Heard not an earthly sound,    Saw but the fairy pageant,    Heard but the heavenly strains    That filled the lonely dwelling. The Fairy's frame was slight--yon fibrous cloud, That catches but the palest tinge of even, And which the straining eye can hardly seize When melting into eastern twilight's shadow, Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star That gems the glittering coronet of morn, Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful, As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form, Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,    Yet with an undulating motion,    Swayed to her outline gracefully.    From her celestial car    The Fairy Queen descended,    And thrice she waved her wand   Circled with wreaths of amaranth;    Her thin and misty form    Moved with the moving air,    And the clear silver tones,    As thus she spoke, were such   As are unheard by all but gifted ear. FAIRY   'Stars! your balmiest influence shed!   Elements! your wrath suspend!   Sleep, Ocean, in the rocky bounds    That circle thy domain!   Let not a breath be seen to stir   Around yon grass-grown ruin's height!    Let even the restless gossamer    Sleep on the moveless air!    Soul of Ianthe! thou, Judged alone worthy of the envied boon That waits the good and the sincere; that waits Those who have struggled, and with resolute will Vanquished earth's pride and meanness, burst the chains, The icy chains of custom, and have shone The day-stars of their age;--Soul of     Ianthe!      Awake! arise!'      Sudden arose    Ianthe's Soul; it stood   All beautiful in naked purity, The perfect semblance of its bodily frame; Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace--     Each stain of earthliness    Had passed away--it reassumed    Its native dignity and stood     Immortal amid ruin.    Upon the couch the body lay,    Wrapt in the depth of slumber; Its features were fixed and meaningless,    Yet animal life was there,    And every organ yet performed    Its natural functions; 'twas a sight Of wonder to behold the body and the soul.    The self-same lineaments, the same    Marks of identity were there; Yet, oh, how different! One aspires to Heaven, Pants for its sempiternal heritage, And, ever changing, ever rising still,    Wantons in endless being: The other, for a time the unwilling sport Of circumstance and passion, struggles on; Fleets through its sad duration rapidly; Then like an useless and worn-out machine,    Rots, perishes, and passes. FAIRY    'Spirit! who hast dived so deep;    Spirit! who hast soared so high;    Thou the fearless, thou the mild,   Accept the boon thy worth hath earned,    Ascend the car with me!' SPIRIT    'Do I dream? Is this new feeling    But a visioned ghost of slumber?      If indeed I am a soul,    A free, a disembodied soul,      Speak again to me.' FAIRY   'I am the Fairy MAB: to me 'tis given   The wonders of the human world to keep;   The secrets of the immeasurable past,   In the unfailing consciences of men,   Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find;   The future, from the causes which arise   In each event, I gather; not the sting   Which retributive memory implants   In the hard bosom of the selfish man,   Nor that ecstatic and exulting throb   Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up   The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day,   Are unforeseen, unregistered by me;   And it is yet permitted me to rend   The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit,   Clothed in its changeless purity, may know   How soonest to accomplish the great end   For which it hath its being, and may taste   That peace which in the end all life will share.   This is the meed of virtue; happy Soul,     Ascend the car with me!'   The chains of earth's immurement    Fell from Ianthe's spirit; They shrank and brake like bandages of straw   Beneath a wakened giant's strength.    She knew her glorious change,   And felt in apprehension uncontrolled    New raptures opening round;   Each day-dream of her mortal life,   Each frenzied vision of the slumbers    That closed each well-spent day,    Seemed now to meet reality.   The Fairy and the Soul proceeded;    The silver clouds disparted;   And as the car of magic they ascended,    Again the speechless music swelled,    Again the coursers of the air Unfurled their azure pennons, and the Queen,    Shaking the beamy reins,    Bade them pursue their way.    The magic car moved on.   The night was fair, and countless stars   Studded heaven's dark blue vault;    Just o'er the eastern wave   Peeped the first faint smile of morn.    The magic car moved on    From the celestial hoofs   The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew,    And where the burning wheels   Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak,    Was traced a line of lightning.    Now it flew far above a rock,    The utmost verge of earth,   The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow    Lowered o'er the silver sea.    Far, far below the chariot's path,     Calm as a slumbering babe,     Tremendous Ocean lay.    The mirror of its stillness showed     The pale and waning stars,     The chariot's fiery track,     And the gray light of morn     Tinging those fleecy clouds     That canopied the dawn.   Seemed it that the chariot's way Lay through the midst of an immense concave Radiant with million constellations, tinged    With shades of infinite color,    And semicircled with a belt    Flashing incessant meteors.    The magic car moved on.    As they approached their goal,   The coursers seemed to gather speed; The sea no longer was distinguished; earth   Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere;    The sun's unclouded orb    Rolled through the black concave;    Its rays of rapid light Parted around the chariot's swifter course,   And fell, like ocean's feathery spray    Dashed from the boiling surge    Before a vessel's prow.    The magic car moved on.    Earth's distant orb appeared The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;    Whilst round the chariot's way    Innumerable systems rolled    And countless spheres diffused    An ever-varying glory.   It was a sight of wonder: some   Were hornd like the crescent moon;   Some shed a mild and silver beam   Like Hesperus o'er the western sea;   Some dashed athwart with trains of flame,   Like worlds to death and ruin driven; Some shone like suns, and as the chariot passed,    Eclipsed all other light.      Spirit of Nature! here    In this interminable wilderness    Of worlds, at whose immensity      Even soaring fancy staggers,      Here is thy fitting temple!       Yet not the lightest leaf     That quivers to the passing breeze      Is less instinct with thee;      Yet not the meanest worm   That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead,    Less shares thy eternal breath!     Spirit of Nature! thou,    Imperishable as this scene--     Here is thy fitting temple!         ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab - Part I. ,

680:Œnone . There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning: but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas. Hither came at noon Mournful Œnone, wandering forlorn Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills. Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck Floated her hair or seem'd to float in rest. She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine, Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff. 'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life. 'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Hear me, O Earth, hear me, O Hills, O Caves That house the cold crown'd snake! O mountain brooks, I am the daughter of a River-God, 514 Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed, A cloud that gather'd shape: for it may be That, while I speak of it, a little while My heart may wander from its deeper woe. 'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine: Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat white-horn'd, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. 'O mother Ida, harken ere I die. Far-off the torrent call'd me from the cleft: Far up the solitary morning smote The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes I sat alone: white-breasted like a star Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair Cluster'd about his temples like a God's: And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came. 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold, That smelt ambrosially, and while I look'd And listen'd, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. `My own Œnone, Beautiful-brow'd Œnone, my own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav'n 'For the most fair,' would seem to award it thine, As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace Of movement, and the charm of married brows.' 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 515 He prest the blossom of his lips to mine, And added 'This was cast upon the board, When all the full-faced presence of the Gods Ranged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon Rose feud, with question unto whom 'twere due: But light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve, Delivering that to me, by common voice Elected umpire, Herè comes to-day, Pallas and Aphroditè, claiming each This meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods.' 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. It was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud Had lost his way between the piney sides Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower, And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, Lotos and lilies: and a wind arose, And overhead the wandering ivy and vine, This way and that, in many a wild festoon Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. 'O mother Ida, harken ere I die. On the tree-tops a crested peacock lit, And o'er him flow'd a golden cloud, and lean'd Upon him, slowly dropping fragrant dew. Then first I heard the voice of her, to whom Coming thro' Heaven, like a light that grows Larger and clearer, with one mind the Gods Rise up for reverence. She to Paris made Proffer of royal power, ample rule Unquestion'd, overflowing revenue Wherewith to embellish state, 'from many a vale And river-sunder'd champaign clothed with corn, Or labour'd mine undrainable of ore. Honour,' she said, 'and homage, tax and toll, 516 From many an inland town and haven large, Mast-throng'd beneath her shadowing citadel In glassy bays among her tallest towers.' 'O mother Ida, harken ere I die. Still she spake on and still she spake of power, 'Which in all action is the end of all; Power fitted to the season; wisdom-bred And throned of wisdom-from all neighbour crowns Alliance and allegiance, till thy hand Fail from the sceptre-staff. Such boon from me, From me, Heaven's Queen, Paris, to thee king-born, A shepherd all thy life but yet king-born, Should come most welcome, seeing men, in power Only, are likest Gods, who have attain'd Rest in a happy place and quiet seats Above the thunder, with undying bliss In knowledge of their own supremacy.' 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. She ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit Out at arm's-length, so much the thought of power Flatter'd his spirit; but Pallas where she stood Somewhat apart, her clear and bared limbs O'erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear Upon her pearly shoulder leaning cold, The while, above, her full and earnest eye Over her snow-cold breast and angry cheek Kept watch, waiting decision, made reply. '`Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.' 517 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Again she said: 'I woo thee not with gifts. Sequel of guerdon could not alter me To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am, So shalt thou find me fairest. Yet, indeed, If gazing on divinity disrobed Thy mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair, Unbias'd by self-profit, oh! rest thee sure That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee, So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood, Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God's, To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks, Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will, Circled thro' all experiences, pure law, Commeasure perfect freedom.' Here she ceas'd And Paris ponder'd, and I cried, 'O Paris, Give it to Pallas!' but he heard me not, Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me! 'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Italian Aphroditè beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells, With rosy slender fingers backward drew From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And shoulder: from the violets her light foot Shone rosy-white, and o'er her rounded form Between the shadows of the vine-bunches Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved. 'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes, The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh Half-whisper'd in his ear, 'I promise thee The fairest and most loving wife in Greece.' She spoke and laugh'd: I shut my sight for fear: But when I look'd, Paris had raised his arm, And I beheld great Herè's angry eyes, 518 As she withdrew into the golden cloud, And I was left alone within the bower; And from that time to this I am alone, And I shall be alone until I die. 'Yet, mother Ida, harken ere I die. Fairest-why fairest wife? am I not fair? My love hath told me so a thousand times. Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday, When I past by, a wild and wanton pard, Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail Crouch'd fawning in the weed. Most loving is she? Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest Close, close to thine in that quick-falling dew Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains Flash in the pools of whirling Simois! 'O mother, hear me yet before I die. They came, they cut away my tallest pines, My tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Foster'd the callow eaglet-from beneath Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat Low in the valley. Never, never more Shall lone Œnone see the morning mist Sweep thro' them; never see them overlaid With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud, Between the loud stream and the trembling stars. 'O mother, hear me yet before I die. I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds, Among the fragments tumbled from the glens, Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her The Abominable, that uninvited came Into the fair Pele{:i}an banquet-hall, And cast the golden fruit upon the board, 519 And bred this change; that I might speak my mind, And tell her to her face how much I hate Her presence, hated both of Gods and men. 'O mother, hear me yet before I die. Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times, In this green valley, under this green hill, Ev'n on this hand, and sitting on this stone? Seal'd it with kisses? water'd it with tears? O happy tears, and how unlike to these! O happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face? O happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight? O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud, There are enough unhappy on this earth, Pass by the happy souls, that love to live: I pray thee, pass before my light of life, And shadow all my soul, that I may die. Thou weighest heavy on the heart within, Weigh heavy on my eyelids: let me die. 'O mother, hear me yet before I die. I will not die alone, for fiery thoughts Do shape themselves within me, more and more, Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills, Like footsteps upon wool. I dimly see My far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother Conjectures of the features of her child Ere it is born: her child!-a shudder comes Across me: never child be born of me, Unblest, to vex me with his father's eyes! 'O mother, hear me yet before I die. Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone, Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me Walking the cold and starless road of death Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love With the Greek woman. I will rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth 520 Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says A fire dances before her, and a sound Rings ever in her ears of armed men. What this may be I know not, but I know That, wheresoe'er I am by night and day, All earth and air seem only burning fire.' ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,

681:Fragmentary Scenes From The Road To Avernus Scene I 'Discontent' LAURENCE RABY. Laurence: I said to young Allan M'Ilveray, Beside the swift swirls of the North, When, in lilac shot through with a silver ray, We haul'd the strong salmon fish forth Said only, 'He gave us some trouble To land him, and what does he weigh? Our friend has caught one that weighs double, The game for the candle won't pay Us to-day, We may tie up our rods and away.' I said to old Norman M'Gregor, Three leagues to the west of Glen Dhu I had drawn, with a touch of the trigger, The best BEAD that ever I drew Said merely, 'For birds in the stubble I once had an eye-I could swear He's down-but he's not worth the trouble Of seeking. You once shot a bear In his lair'Tis only a buck that lies there.' I said to Lord Charles only last year, The time that we topp'd the oak rail Between Wharton's plough and Whynne's pasture, And clear'd the big brook in Blakesvale We only-at Warburton's double He fell, then I finish'd the run And kill'd clean-said, 'So bursts a bubble That shone half an hour in the sun What is won? Your sire clear'd and captured a gun.' 159 I said to myself, in true sorrow, I said yestere'en, 'A fair prize Is won, and it may be to-morrow 'Twill not seem so fair in thine eyes Real life is a race through sore trouble, That gains not an inch on the goal, And bliss an intangible bubble That cheats an unsatisfied soul, And the whole Of the rest an illegible scroll.' Scene VII 'Two Exhortations' A Shooting-box in the West of Ireland. A Bedchamber. LAURENCE RABY and MELCHIOR. Night. Melchior: Surely in the great beginning God made all things good, and still That soul-sickness men call sinning entered not without His will. Nay, our wisest have asserted that, as shade enhances light, Evil is but good perverted, wrong is but the foil of right. Banish sickness, then you banish joy for health to all that live; Slay all sin, all good must vanish, good being but comparative. Sophistry, you say-yet listen: look you skyward, there 'tis known Worlds on worlds in myriads glisten-larger, lovelier than our own This has been, and this still shall be, here as there, in sun or star; These things are to be and will be, those things were to be and are. Man in man's imperfect nature is by imperfection taught: Add one cubit to your stature if you can by taking thought. Laurence: Thus you would not teach that peasant, though he calls you 'father'. Melchior: True, I should magnify this present, mystify that future, too We adapt our conversation always to our hearer's light. Laurence: 160 I am not of your persuasion. Melchior: Yet the difference is but slight. Laurence: I, EVEN I, say, 'He who barters worldly weal for heavenly worth He does well'-your saints and martyrs were examples here on earth. Melchior: Aye, in earlier Christian ages, while the heathen empire stood, When the war 'twixt saints and sages cried aloud for saintly blood, Christ was then their model truly. Now, if all were meek and pure, Save the ungodly and the unruly, would the Christian Church endure? Shall the toiler or the fighter dream by day and watch by night, Turn the left cheek to the smiter, smitten rudely on the right? Strong men must encounter bad men-so-called saints of latter days Have been mostly pious madmen, lusting after righteous praise Or the thralls of superstition, doubtless worthy some reward, Since they came by their condition hardly of their free accord. 'Tis but madness, sad and solemn, that these fakir-Christians feel Saint Stylites on his column gratified a morbid zeal. Laurence: By your showing, good is really on a par (of worth) with ill. Melchior: Nay, I said not so; I merely tell you both some ends fulfil Priestly vows were my vocation, fast and vigil wait for me. You must work and face temptation. Never should the strong man flee, Though God wills the inclination with the soul at war to be. (Pauses.) In the strife 'twixt flesh and spirit, while you can the spirit aid. Should you fall not less your merit, be not for a fall afraid. Whatsoe'er most right, most fit is you shall do. When all is done Chaunt the noble Nunc Dimittis-Benedicimur, my son. [Exit MELCHIOR.] Laurence (alone): Why do I provoke these wrangles? Melchior talks (as well he may) With the tongues of men and angels. (Takes up a pamphlet.) What has this man got to say? (Reads.) Sic sacerdos fatur (ejus nomen quondam erat Burgo.) Mala mens est, caro pejus, anima infirma, ergo 161 I nunc, ora, sine mora-orat etiam Sancta Virgo. (Thinks.) (Speaks.) So it seems they mean to make her wed the usurer, Nathan Lee. Poor Estelle! her friends forsake her; what has this to do with me? Glad I am, at least, that Helen still refuses to discard Her, through tales false gossips tell in spite or heedlessness.-'Tis hard! Lee, the Levite!-some few years back Herbert horsewhipp'd him-the cur Show'd his teeth and laid his ears back. Now his wealth has purchased her. Must his baseness mar her brightness? Shall the callous, cunning churl Revel in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl? (Thinks and smokes.) (Reads.) Cito certe venit vitae finis (sic sacerdos fatur), Nunc audite omnes, ite, vobis fabula narratur Nunc orate et laudate, laudat etiam Alma Mater. (Muses.) Such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star; These things are to be and will be, those things were to be and are. If I thought that speech worth heeding I should-Nay, it seems to me More like Satan's special pleading than like Gloria Domine. (Lies down on his couch.) (Reads.) Et tuquoque frater meus facta mala quod fecisti Denique confundit Deus omnes res quas tetegisti. Nunc si unquam, nunc aut nunquam, sanguine adjuro Christi. Scene IX 'In the Garden' Aylmer's Garden, near the Lake. LAURENCE RABY and ESTELLE. He: Come to the bank where the boat is moor'd to the willow-tree low; Bertha, the baby, won't notice, Brian, the blockhead, won't know. She: Bertha is not such a baby, sir, as you seem to suppose; Brian, a blockhead he may be, more than you think for he knows. He: This much, at least, of your brother, from the beginning he knew Somewhat concerning that other made such a fool of by you. 162 She: Firmer those bonds were and faster, Frank was my spaniel, my slave. You! you would fain be my master; mark you! the difference is grave. He: Call me your spaniel, your starling, take me and treat me as these, I would be anything, darling! aye, whatsoever you please. Brian and Basil are 'punting', leave them their dice and their wine, Bertha is butterfly hunting, surely one hour shall be mine. See, I have done with all duty; see, I can dare all disgrace, Only to look at your beauty, feasting my eyes on your face. She: Look at me, aye, till your eyes ache! How, let me ask, will it end? Neither for your sake, nor my sake, but for the sake of my friend? He: Is she your friend then? I own it, this is all wrong, and the rest, Frustra sed anima monet, caro quod fortius est. She: Not quite so close, Laurence Raby, not with your arm round my waist; Something to look at I may be, nothing to touch or to taste. He: Wilful as ever and wayward; why did you tempt me, Estelle? She: You misinterpret each stray word, you for each inch take an ell. Lightly all laws and ties trammel me, I am warn'd for all that. He (aside): Perhaps she will swallow her camel when she has strained at her gnat. She: Therefore take thought and consider, weigh well, as I do, the whole, You for mere beauty a bidder, say, would you barter a soul? He: Girl! THAT MAY happen, but THIS IS; after this welcome the worst; Blest for one hour by your kisses, let me be evermore curs'd. Talk not of ties to me reckless, here every tie I discard 163 Make me your girdle, your necklace She: Laurence, you kiss me too hard. He: Aye, 'tis the road to Avernus, n'est ce pas vrai donc, ma belle? There let them bind us or burn us, mais le jeu vaut la chandelle. Am I your lord or your vassal? Are you my sun or my torch? You, when I look at you, dazzle, yet when I touch you, you scorch. She: Yonder are Brian and Basil watching us fools from the porch. Scene X 'After the Quarrel' Laurence Raby's Chamber. LAURENCE enters, a little the worse for liquor. Laurence: He never gave me a chance to speak, And he call'd her-worse than a dog The girl stood up with a crimson cheek, And I fell'd him there like a log. I can feel the blow on my knuckles yet He feels it more on his brow. In a thousand years we shall all forget The things that trouble us now. Scene XI 'Ten Paces Off' An open country. LAURENCE RABY and FORREST, BRIAN AYLMER and PRESCOT. Forrest: I've won the two tosses from Prescot; Now hear me, and hearken and heed, And pull that vile flower from your waistcoat, And throw down that beast of a weed; I'm going to give you the signal I gave Harry Hunt at Boulogne, The morning he met Major Bignell, And shot him as dead as a stone; For he must look round on his right hand To watch the white flutter-that stops His aim, for it takes off his sight, and 164 I COUGH WHILE THE HANDKERCHIEF DROPS. And you keep both eyes on his figure, Old fellow, and don't take them off. You've got the sawhandled hair trigger You sight him and shoot when I cough. Laurence (aside): Though God will never forgive me, Though men make light of my name, Though my sin and my shame outlive me, I shall not outlast my shame. The coward, does he mean to miss me? His right hand shakes like a leaf; Shall I live for my friends to hiss me, Of fools and of knaves the chief? Shall I live for my foes to twit me? He has master'd his nerve again He is firm, he will surely hit me Will he reach the heart or the brain? One long look eastward and northward One prayer-'Our Father which art' And the cough chimes in with the fourth word, And I shoot skyward-the heart. Last Scene 'Exeunt' HELEN RABY. Where the grave-deeps rot, where the grave-dews rust, They dug, crying, 'Earth to earth' Crying, 'Ashes to ashes and dust to dust' And what are my poor prayers worth? Upon whom shall I call, or in whom shall I trust, Though death were indeed new birth. And they bid me be glad for my baby's sake That she suffered sinless and young Would they have me be glad when my breasts still ache 165 Where that small, soft, sweet mouth clung? I am glad that the heart will so surely break That has been so bitterly wrung. He was false, they tell me, and what if he were? I can only shudder and pray, Pouring out my soul in a passionate prayer For the soul that he cast away; Was there nothing that once was created fair In the potter's perishing clay? Is it well for the sinner that souls endure? For the sinless soul is it well? Does the pure child lisp to the angels pure? And where does the strong man dwell, If the sad assurance of priests be sure, Or the tale that our preachers tell? The unclean has follow'd the undefiled, And the ill MAY regain the good, And the man MAY be even as the little child! We are children lost in the wood Lord! lead us out of this tangled wild, Where the wise and the prudent have been beguil'd, And only the babes have stood. ~ Adam Lindsay Gordon,

682:The House Of Dust: Part 03: 12: Witches' Sabbath Now, when the moon slid under the cloud And the cold clear dark of starlight fell, He heard in his blood the well-known bell Tolling slowly in heaves of sound, Slowly beating, slowly beating, Shaking its pulse on the stagnant air: Sometimes it swung completely round, Horribly gasping as if for breath; Falling down with an anguished cry . . . Now the red bat, he mused, will fly; Something is marked, this night, for death . . . And while he mused, along his blood Flew ghostly voices, remote and thin, They rose in the cavern of his brain, Like ghosts they died away again; And hands upon his heart were laid, And music upon his flesh was played, Until, as he was bidden to do, He walked the wood he so well knew. Through the cold dew he moved his feet, And heard far off, as under the earth, Discordant music in shuddering tones, Screams of laughter, horrible mirth, Clapping of hands, and thudding of drums, And the long-drawn wail of one in pain. To-night, he thought, I shall die again, We shall die again in the red-eyed fire To meet on the edge of the wood beyond With the placid gaze of fed desire . . . He walked; and behind the whisper of trees, In and out, one walked with him: She parted the branches and peered at him, Through lowered lids her two eyes burned, He heard her breath, he saw her hand, Wherever he turned his way, she turned: Kept pace with him, now fast, now slow; Moving her white knees as he moved . . . This is the one I have always loved; This is the one whose bat-soul comes 271 To dance with me, flesh to flesh, In the starlight dance of horns and drums . . . The walls and roofs, the scarlet towers, Sank down behind a rushing sky. He heard a sweet song just begun Abruptly shatter in tones and die. It whirled away. Cold silence fell. And again came tollings of a bell. This air is alive with witches: the white witch rides Swifter than smoke on the starlit wind. In the clear darkness, while the moon hides, They come like dreams, like something remembered . . Let us hurry! beloved; take my hand, Forget these things that trouble your eyes, Forget, forget! Our flesh is changed, Lighter than smoke we wreathe and rise . . . The cold air hisses between us . . . Beloved, beloved, What was the word you said? Something about clear music that sang through water . . . I cannot remember. The storm-drops break on the leaves. Something was lost in the darkness. Someone is dead. Someone lies in the garden and grieves. Look how the branches are tossed in this air, Flinging their green to the earth! Black clouds rush to devour the stars in the sky, The moon stares down like a half-closed eye. The leaves are scattered, the birds are blown, Oaks crash down in the darkness, We run from our windy shadows; we are running alone. The moon was darkened: across it flew The swift grey tenebrous shape he knew, Like a thing of smoke it crossed the sky, The witch! he said. And he heard a cry, And another came, and another came, 272 And one, grown duskily red with blood, Floated an instant across the moon, Hung like a dull fantastic flame . . . The earth has veins: they throb to-night, The earth swells warm beneath my feet, The tips of the trees grow red and bright, The leaves are swollen, I feel them beat, They press together, they push and sigh, They listen to hear the great bat cry, The great red bat with the woman's face . . . Hurry! he said. And pace for pace That other, who trod the dark with him, Crushed the live leaves, reached out white hands And closed her eyes, the better to see The priests with claws, the lovers with hooves, The fire-lit rock, the sarabands. I am here! she said. The bough he broke— Was it the snapping bough that spoke? I am here! she said. The white thigh gleamed Cold in starlight among dark leaves, The head thrown backward as he had dreamed, The shadowy red deep jasper mouth; And the lifted hands, and the virgin breasts, Passed beside him, and vanished away. I am here! she cried. He answered 'Stay!' And laughter arose, and near and far Answering laughter rose and died . . . Who is there? in the dark? he cried. He stood in terror, and heard a sound Of terrible hooves on the hollow ground; They rushed, were still; a silence fell; And he heard deep tollings of a bell. Look beloved! Why do you hide your face? Look, in the centre there, above the fire, They are bearing the boy who blasphemed love! They are playing a piercing music upon him With a bow of living wire! . . . The virgin harlot sings, She leans above the beautiful anguished body, 273 And draws slow music from those strings. They dance around him, they fling red roses upon him, They trample him with their naked feet, His cries are lost in laughter, Their feet grow dark with his blood, they beat and beat, They dance upon him, until he cries no more . . . Have we not heard that cry before? Somewhere, somewhere, Beside a sea, in the green evening, Beneath green clouds, in a copper sky . . . Was it you? was it I? They have quenched the fires, they dance in the darkness, The satyrs have run among them to seize and tear, Look! he has caught one by the hair, She screams and falls, he bears her away with him, And the night grows full of whistling wings. Far off, one voice, serene and sweet, Rises and sings . . . 'By the clear waters where once I died, In the calm evening bright with stars. . . .' Where have I heard these words? Was it you who sang them? It was long ago. Let us hurry, beloved! the hard hooves trample; The treetops tremble and glow. In the clear dark, on silent wings, The red bat hovers beneath her moon; She drops through the fragrant night, and clings Fast in the shadow, with hands like claws, With soft eyes closed and mouth that feeds, To the young white flesh that warmly bleeds. The maidens circle in dance, and raise From lifting throats, a soft-sung praise; Their knees and breasts are white and bare, They have hung pale roses in their hair, Each of them as she dances by Peers at the blood with a narrowed eye. See how the red wing wraps him round, 274 See how the white youth struggles in vain! The weak arms writhe in a soundless pain; He writhes in the soft red veiny wings, But still she whispers upon him and clings. . . . This is the secret feast of love, Look well, look well, before it dies, See how the red one trembles above, See how quiet the white one lies! . . . . Wind through the trees. . . .and a voice is heard Singing far off. The dead leaves fall. . . . 'By the clear waters where once I died, In the calm evening bright with stars, One among numberless avatars, I wedded a mortal, a mortal bride, And lay on the stones and gave my flesh, And entered the hunger of him I loved. How shall I ever escape this mesh Or be from my lover's body removed?' Dead leaves stream through the hurrying air And the maenads dance with flying hair. The priests with hooves, the lovers with horns, Rise in the starlight, one by one, They draw their knives on the spurting throats, They smear the column with blood of goats, They dabble the blood on hair and lips And wait like stones for the moon's eclipse. They stand like stones and stare at the sky Where the moon leers down like a half-closed eye. . . In the green moonlight still they stand While wind flows over the darkened sand And brood on the soft forgotten things That filled their shadowy yesterdays. . . . Where are the breasts, the scarlet wings? . . . . They gaze at each other with troubled gaze. . . . And then, as the shadow closes the moon, Shout, and strike with their hooves the ground, And rush through the dark, and fill the night With a slowly dying clamor of sound. 275 There, where the great walls crowd the stars, There, by the black wind-riven walls, In a grove of twisted leafless trees. . . . Who are these pilgrims, who are these, These three, the one of whom stands upright, While one lies weeping and one of them crawls? The face that he turned was a wounded face, I heard the dripping of blood on stones. . . . Hooves had trampled and torn this place, And the leaves were strewn with blood and bones. Sometimes, I think, beneath my feet, The warm earth stretches herself and sighs. . . . Listen! I heard the slow heart beat. . . . I will lie on this grass as a lover lies And reach to the north and reach to the south And seek in the darkness for her mouth. Beloved, beloved, where the slow waves of the wind Shatter pale foam among great trees, Under the hurrying stars, under the heaving arches, Like one whirled down under shadowy seas, I run to find you, I run and cry, Where are you? Where are you? It is I. It is I. It is your eyes I seek, it is your windy hair, Your starlight body that breathes in the darkness there. Under the darkness I feel you stirring. . . . Is this you? Is this you? Bats in this air go whirring. . . . And this soft mouth that darkly meets my mouth, Is this the soft mouth I knew? Darkness, and wind in the tortured trees; And the patter of dew. Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance till the brain is red with speed! Dance till you fall! Lift your torches! Kiss your lovers until they bleed! Backward I draw your anguished hair 276 Until your eyes are stretched with pain; Backward I press you until you cry, Your lips grow white, I kiss you again, I will take a torch and set you afire, I will break your body and fling it away. . . . Look, you are trembling. . . .Lie still, beloved! Lock your hands in my hair, and say Darling! darling! darling! darling! All night long till the break of day. Is it your heart I hear beneath me. . . . Or the far tolling of that tower? The voices are still that cried around us. . . . The woods grow still for the sacred hour. Rise, white lover! the day draws near. The grey trees lean to the east in fear. 'By the clear waters where once I died . . . .' Beloved, whose voice was this that cried? 'By the clear waters that reach the sun By the clear waves that starward run. . . . I found love's body and lost his soul, And crumbled in flame that should have annealed. . . How shall I ever again be whole, By what dark waters shall I be healed?' Silence. . . .the red leaves, one by one, Fall. Far off, the maenads run. Silence. Beneath my naked feet The veins of the red earth swell and beat. The dead leaves sigh on the troubled air, Far off the maenads bind their hair. . . . Hurry, beloved! the day comes soon. The fire is drawn from the heart of the moon. The great bell cracks and falls at last. The moon whirls out. The sky grows still. Look, how the white cloud crosses the stars And suddenly drops behind the hill! Your eyes are placid, you smile at me, 277 We sit in the room by candle-light. We peer in each other's veins and see No sign of the things we saw this night. Only, a song is in your ears, A song you have heard, you think, in dream: The song which only the demon hears, In the dark forest where maenads scream . . . 'By the clear waters where once I died . . . In the calm evening bright with stars . . . ' What do the strange words mean? you say,— And touch my hand, and turn away. ~ Conrad Potter Aiken,

683:Morte D'Arthur So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord, King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land. On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "The sequel of to-day unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep They sleep--the men I loved. I think that we Shall never more, at any future time, Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, Walking about the gardens and the halls Of Camelot, as in the days that were. I perish by this people which I made,-Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more--but let what will be, be, I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm That without help I cannot last till morn. Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how In those old days, one summer noon, an arm Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, Holding the sword--and how I row'd across And took it, and have worn it, like a king: And, wheresoever I am sung or told In aftertime, this also shall be known: But now delay not: take Excalibur, And fling him far into the middle mere: Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word." 392 To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere: "It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm. A little thing may harm a wounded man. Yet I thy hest will all perform at full, Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word." So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake. There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long That both his eyes were dazzled, as he stood, This way and that dividing the swift mind, In act to throw: but at the last it seem'd Better to leave Excalibur conceal'd There in the many-knotted water-flags, That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. So strode he back slow to the wounded King. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Hast thou perform'd my mission which I gave? What is it thou hast seen, or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag." To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale: "Thou hast betray'd thy nature and thy name, Not rendering true answer, as beseem'd 393 Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight: For surer sign had follow'd, either hand, Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word." Then went Sir Bedivere the second time Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought; But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, How curiously and strangely chased, he smote His palms together, and he cried aloud, "And if indeed I cast the brand away, Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, Should thus be lost forever from the earth, Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt? but were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, Saying, 'King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake; Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. 394 Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: "What is it thou hast seen, or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds." To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath: "Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, Laid widow'd of the power in his eye That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence: But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands." Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere. And lightly went the other to the King. Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath: "Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?" 395 And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die, Not tho' I live three lives of mortal men, So great a miracle as yonder hilt. Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him; But when I look'd again, behold an arm, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, That caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere." And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: "My end draws nigh; 't is time that I were gone. Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, And bear me to the margin; yet I fear My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die." So saying, from the pavement he half rose, Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm, And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere Remorsefully regarded thro' his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words, Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. But, as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based 396 His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels-And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon. Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these Three Queens with crowns of gold--and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmur'd Arthur, "Place me in the barge," And to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And call'd him by his name, complaining loud And dropping bitter tears against his brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the wither'd moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls-That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the daïs-throne--were parch'd with dust; Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. So like a shatter'd column lay the King; Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot thro' the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: "Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? 397 Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world; And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds." And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seëst--if indeed I go-(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, 398 Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,

684:I. Hamlin Town's in Brunswick, By famous Hanover city; The river Weser, deep and wide, Washes its wall on the southern side; A pleasanter spot you never spied; But, when begins my ditty, Almost five hundred years ago, To see the townsfolk suffer so From vermin, was a pity. II. Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats   By drowning their speaking   With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats. III. At last the people in a body To the Town Hall came flocking: ``'Tis clear,'' cried they, ``our Mayor's a noddy; ``And as for our Corporation-sh ocking. ``To think we buy gowns lined with ermine ``For dolts that can't or won't determine ``What's best to rid us of our vermin! ``You hope, because you're old and obese, ``To find in the furry civic robe ease? ``Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking ``To find the remedy we're lacking, ``Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'' At this the Mayor and Corporation Quaked with a mighty consternation. IV. An hour they sat in council, At length the Mayor broke silence: ``For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell, ``I wish I were a mile hence! ``It's easy to bid one rack one's brain- ``I'm sure my poor head aches again, ``I've scratched it so, and all in vain. ``Oh for a trap, a trap, a trap!'' Just as he said this, what should hap At the chamber door but a gentle tap? ``Bless us,'' cried the Mayor, ``what's that?'' (With the Corporation as he sat, Looking little though wondrous fat; Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister Than a too-long-opened oyster, Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous For a plate of turtle green and glutinous) ``Only a scraping of shoes on the mat? ``Anything like the sound of a rat ``Makes my heart go pit-a-pat!'' V. ``Come in!''-the Mayor cried, looking bigger: And in did come the strangest figure! His queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow and half of red, And he himself was tall and thin, With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smiles went out and in; There was no guessing his kith and kin: And nobody could enough admire The tall man and his quaint attire. Quoth one: ``It's as my great-grandsire, ``Starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone, ``Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!'' VI. He advanced to the council-table And, ``Please your honours,'' said he, ``I'm able, ``By means of a secret charm, to draw ``All creatures living beneath the sun, ``That creep or swim or fly or run, ``After me so as you never saw! ``And I chiefly use my charm ``On creatures that do people harm, ``The mole and toad and newt and viper; ``And people call me the Pied Piper.'' (And here they noticed round his neck A scarf of red and yellow stripe, To match with his coat of the self-same cheque; And at the scarf's end hung a pipe; And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing Upon this pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) ``Yet,'' said he, ``poor piper as I am, ``In Tartary I freed the Cham, ``Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats; ``I eased in Asia the Nizam ``Of a monstrous brood of vampyre-bats: ``And as for what your brain bewilders, ``If I can rid your town of rats ``Will you give me a thousand guilders?'' ``One? fifty thousand!''-wa s the exclamation Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation. VII. Into the street the Piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magic slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then, like a musical adept, To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled, Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled; And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives- Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser, Wherein all plunged and perished! -Save one who, stout as Julius Csar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he, the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary: Which was, ``At the first shrill notes of the pipe, ``I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, ``And putting apples, wondrous ripe, ``Into a cider-press's gripe: ``And a moving away of pickle-tub-board s, ``And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboar ds, ``And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks , ``And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks: ``And it seemed as if a voice ``(Sweeter far than b harp or b psaltery ``Is breathed) called out, `Oh rats, rejoice! `` `The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! `` `So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, `` `Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!' ``And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon, ``All ready staved, like a great sun shone ``Glorious scarce an inch before me, ``Just as methought it said, `Come, bore me!' ``-I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'' VIII. You should have heard the Hamelin people ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple. ``Go,'' cried the Mayor, ``and get long poles, ``Poke out the nests and block up the holes! ``Consult with carpenters and builders, ``And leave in our town not even a trace ``Of the rats!''-when suddenly, up the face Of the Piper perked in the market-place, With a, ``First, if you please, my thousand guilders!'' IX. A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue; So did the Corporation too. For council dinners made rare havoc With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock; And half the money would replenish Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish. To pay this sum to a wandering fellow With a gipsy coat of red and yellow! ``Beside,'' quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink, ``Our business was done at the river's brink; ``We saw with our eyes the vermin sink, ``And what's dead can't come to life, I think. ``So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink ``From the duty of giving you something for drink, ``And a matter of money to put in your poke; ``But as for the guilders, what we spoke ``Of them, as you very well know, was in joke. ``Beside, our losses have made us thrifty. ``A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'' X. The Piper's face fell, and he cried ``No trifling! I can't wait, beside! ``I've promised to visit by dinnertime ``Bagdat, and accept the prime ``Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in, ``For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen, ``Of a nest of scorpions no survivor: ``With him I proved no bargain-driver, ``With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver! ``And folks who put me in a passion ``May find me pipe after another fashion.'' XI. ``How?'' cried the Mayor, ``d'ye think I brook ``Being worse treated than a Cook? ``Insulted by a lazy ribald ``With idle pipe and vesture piebald? ``You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, ``Blow your pipe there till you burst!'' XII. Once more he stept into the street And to his lips again Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane; And ere he blew three notes (such sweet Soft notes as yet musician's cunning Never gave the enraptured air) There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling, Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering, And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering, Out came the children running. All the little boys and girls, With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after The wonderful music with shouting and laughter. XIII. The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood As if they were changed into blocks of wood, Unable to move a step, or cry To the children merrily skipping by, -Could only follow with the eye That joyous crowd at the Piper's back. But how the Mayor was on the rack, And the wretched Council's bosoms beat, As the Piper turned from the High Street To where the Weser rolled its waters Right in the way of their sons and daughters! However be turned from South to West, And to Koppelberg Hill his steps addressed, And after him the children pressed; Great was the joy in every breast. ``He never can cross that mighty top! ``He's forced to let the piping drop, ``And we shall see our children stop!'' When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side, A wondrous portal opened wide, As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed; And the Piper advanced and the children followed, And when all were in to the very last, The door in the mountain-side shut fast. Did I say, all? No! One was lame, And could not dance the whole of the way; And in after years, if you would blame His sadness, he was used to say,- ``It's dull in our town since my playmates left! ``I can't forget that I'm bereft ``Of all the pleasant sights they see, ``Which the Piper also promised me. ``For he led us, he said, to a joyous land, ``Joining the town and just at hand, ``Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew ``And flowers put forth a fairer hue, ``And everything was strange and new; ``The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here, ``And their dogs outran our fallow deer, ``And honey-bees had lost their stings, ``And horses were born with eagles' wings: ``And just as I became assured ``My lame foot would be speedily cured, ``The music stopped and I stood still, ``And found myself outside the hill, ``Left alone against my will, ``To go now limping as before, ``And never hear of that country more!'' XIV. Alas, alas for Hamelin! There came into many a burgher's pate A text which says that heaven's gate Opes to the rich at as easy rate As the needle's eye takes a camel in! The mayor sent East, West, North and South, To offer the Piper, by word of mouth, Wherever it was men's lot to find him, Silver and gold to his heart's content, If he'd only return the way he went, And bring the children behind him. But when they saw 'twas a lost endeavour, And Piper and dancers were gone for ever, They made a decree that lawyers never Should think their records dated duly If, after the day of the month and year, These words did not as well appear, ``And so long after what happened here ``On the Twenty-second of July, ``Thirteen hundred and seventy-six:'' And the better in memory to fix The place of the children's last retreat, They called it, the Pied Piper's Street- Where any one playing on pipe or tabor Was sure for the future to lose his labour. Nor suffered they hostelry or tavern To shock with mirth a street so solemn; But opposite the place of the cavern They wrote the story on a column, And on the great church-window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away, And there it stands to this very day. And I must not omit to say That in Transylvania there's a tribe Of alien people who ascribe The outlandish ways and dress On which their neighbours lay such stress, To their fathers and mothers having risen Out of some subterraneous prison Into which they were trepanned Long time ago in a mighty band Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land, But how or why, they don't understand. XV. So, Willy, let me and you be wipers Of scores out with all men-especially pipers! And, whether they pipe us free frm rats or frm mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise! A CHILD'S STORY. ( Written for, and inscribed to, W. M. the Younger. ) ~ Robert Browning, The Pied Piper Of Hamelin ,

685:Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of Misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on - Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's track: Whilst above the sunless sky, Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, He is ever drifted on O'er the unreposing wave To the haven of the grave. What, if there no friends will greet; What, if there no heart will meet His with love's impatient beat; Wander wheresoe'er he may, Can he dream before that day To find refuge from distress In friendship's smile, in love's caress? Then 'twill wreak him little woe Whether such there be or no: Senseless is the breast, and cold, Which relenting love would fold; Bloodless are the veins and chill Which the pulse of pain did fill; Every little living nerve That from bitter words did swerve Round the tortured lips and brow, Are like sapless leaflets now Frozen upon December's bough. On the beach of a northern sea Which tempests shake eternally, As once the wretch there lay to sleep, Lies a solitary heap, One white skull and seven dry bones, On the margin of the stones, Where a few grey rushes stand, Boundaries of the sea and land: Nor is heard one voice of wail But the sea-mews, as they sail O'er the billows of the gale; Or the whirlwind up and down Howling, like a slaughtered town, When a king in glory rides Through the pomp and fratricides: Those unburied bones around There is many a mournful sound; There is no lament for him, Like a sunless vapour, dim, Who once clothed with life and thought What now moves nor murmurs not. Ay, many flowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony: To such a one this morn was led, My bark by soft winds piloted: 'Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean With which the legioned rooks did hail The sun's uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Through the dewy mist they soar Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, Flecked with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning's fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail, And the vapours cloven and gleaming Follow, down the dark steep streaming, Till all is bright, and clear, and still, Round the solitary hill. Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath Day's azure eyes Ocean's nursling, Venice, lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline; And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies; As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. Sea-girt City, thou hast been Ocean's child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day, And thou soon must be his prey, If the power that raised thee here Hallow so thy watery bier. A less drear ruin then than now, With thy conquest-branded brow Stooping to the slave of slaves From thy throne, among the waves Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew Flies, as once before it flew, O'er thine isles depopulate, And all is in its ancient state, Save where many a palace gate With green sea-flowers overgrown Like a rock of Ocean's own, Topples o'er the abandoned sea As the tides change sullenly. The fisher on his watery way, Wandering at the close of day, Will spread his sail and seize his oar Till he pass the gloomy shore, Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o'er the starlight deep, Lead a rapid masque of death O'er the waters of his path. Those who alone thy towers behold Quivering through aereal gold, As I now behold them here, Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourished worms, To the corpse of greatness cling, Murdered, and now mouldering: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence and shake From the Celtic Anarch's hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou ldering: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence and shake From the Celtic Anarch's hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou and they! - Clouds which stain truth's rising day By her sun consumed away - Earth can spare ye; while like flowers, In the waste of years and hours, From your dust new nations spring With more kindly blossoming. Perish -let there only be Floating o'er thy heartless sea As the garment of thy sky Clothes the world immortally, One remembrance, more sublime Than the tattered pall of time, Which scarce hides thy visage wan; - That a tempest-cleaving Swan Of the sons of Albion, Driven from his ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams, Found a nest in thee; and Ocean Welcomed him with such emotion That its joy grew his, and sprung From his lips like music flung O'er a mighty thunder-fit, Chastening terror: -what though yet Poesy's unfailing River, Which through Albion winds forever Lashing with melodious wave Many a sacred Poet's grave, Mourn its latest nursling fled? What though thou with all thy dead Scarce can for this fame repay Aught thine own? oh, rather say Though thy sins and slaveries foul Overcloud a sunlike soul? As the ghost of Homer clings Round Scamander's wasting springs; As divinest Shakespeare's might Fills Avon and the world with light Like omniscient power which he Imaged 'mid mortality; As the love from Petrarch's urn, Yet amid yon hills doth burn, A quenchless lamp by which the heart Sees things unearthly; -so thou art, Mighty spirit -so shall be The City that did refuge thee. Lo, the sun floats up the sky Like thought-winged Liberty, Till the universal light Seems to level plain and height; From the sea a mist has spread, And the beams of morn lie dead On the towers of Venice now, Like its glory long ago. By the skirts of that gray cloud Many-domed Padua proud Stands, a peopled solitude, 'Mid the harvest-shining plain, Where the peasant heaps his grain In the garner of his foe, And the milk-white oxen slow With the purple vintage strain, Heaped upon the creaking wain, That the brutal Celt may swill Drunken sleep with savage will; And the sickle to the sword Lies unchanged, though many a lord, Like a weed whose shade is poison, Overgrows this region's foison, Sheaves of whom are ripe to come To destruction's harvest-home: Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow, Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. Padua, thou within whose walls Those mute guests at festivals, Son and Mother, Death and Sin, Played at dice for Ezzelin, Till Death cried, "I win, I win!" And Sin cursed to lose the wager, But Death promised, to assuage her, That he would petition for Her to be made Vice-Emperor, When the destined years were o'er, Over all between the Po And the eastern Alpine snow, Under the mighty Austrian. She smiled so as Sin only can, And since that time, ay, long before, Both have ruled from shore to shore, - That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, As Repentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time. In thine halls the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, It gleams betrayed and to betray: Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame, When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth: Now new fires from antique light Spring beneath the wide world's might; But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by Tyranny. As the Norway woodman quells, In the depth of piny dells, One light flame among the brakes, While the boundless forest shakes, And its mighty trunks are torn By the fire thus lowly born: The spark beneath his feet is dead, He starts to see the flames it fed Howling through the darkened sky With a myriad tongues victoriously, And sinks down in fear: so thou, O Tyranny, beholdest now Light around thee, and thou hearest The loud flames ascend, and fearest: Grovel on the earth; ay, hide In the dust thy purple pride! Noon descends around me now: 'Tis the noon of autumn's glow, When a soft and purple mist Like a vapourous amethyst, Or an air-dissolved star Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curved horizon's bound To the point of Heaven's profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath the leaves unsodden Where the infant Frost has trodden With his morning-winged feet, Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines, Piercing with their trellised lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness; The dun and bladed grass no less, Pointing from this hoary tower In the windless air; the flower Glimmering at my feet; the line Of the olive-sandalled Apennine In the south dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; And of living things each one; And my spirit which so long Darkened this swift stream of song, - Interpenetrated lie By the glory of the sky: Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of all Which from Heaven like dew doth fall, Or the mind which feeds this verse Peopling the lone universe. Noon descends, and after noon Autumn's evening meets me soon, Leading the infantine moon, And that one star, which to her Almost seems to minister Half the crimson light she brings From the sunset's radiant springs: And the soft dreams of the morn (Which like winged winds had borne To that silent isle, which lies Mid remembered agonies, The frail bark of this lone being) Pass, to other sufferers fleeing, And its ancient pilot, Pain, Sits beside the helm again. Other flowering isles must be In the sea of Life and Agony: Other spirits float and flee O'er that gulf: even now, perhaps, On some rock the wild wave wraps, With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark, to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove, Where for me, and those I love, May a windless bower be built, Far from passion, pain, and guilt, In a dell mid lawny hills, Which the wild sea-murmur fills, And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round, And the light and smell divine Of all flowers that breathe and shine: We may live so happy there, That the Spirits of the Air, Envying us, may even entice To our healing Paradise The polluting multitude; But their rage would be subdued By that clime divine and calm, And the winds whose wings rain balm On the uplifted soul, and leaves Under which the bright sea heaves; While each breathless interval In their whisperings musical The inspired soul supplies With its own deep melodies; And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood: They, not it, would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again. Composed at Este, October, 1818. Published with Rosalind and Helen, 1819. Amongst the late Mr. Fredk. Locker-Lampsons collections at Rowfant there is a manuscript of the lines (167-205) on Byron, interpolated after the completion of the poem. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lines Written Among The Euganean Hills ,

686:Custer: Book Third As in the long dead days marauding hosts Of Indians came from far Siberian coasts, And drove the peaceful Aztecs from their grounds, Despoiled their homes (but left their tell-tale mounds), So has the white man with the Indians done. Now with their backs against the setting sun The remnants of a dying nation stand And view the lost domain, once their beloved land. II Upon the vast Atlantic's leagues of shore The happy red man's tent is seen no more; And from the deep blue lakes which mirror heaven His bounding bark canoe was long since driven. The mighty woods, those temples where his God Spoke to his soul, are leveled to the sod; And in their place tall church spires point above, While priests proclaim the law of Christ, the King of Love. III The avaricious and encroaching rail Seized the wide fields which knew the Indians' trail. Back to the reservations in the West The native owners of the land were pressed, And selfish cities, harbingers of want, Shut from their vision each accustomed haunt. Yet hungry Progress, never satisfied, Gazed on the western plains, and gazing, longed and sighed. IV As some strange bullock in a pasture field Compels the herds to fear him, and to yield The juicy grass plots and the cooling shade Until, despite their greater strength, afraid, 200 They huddle in some corner spot and cower Before the monarch's all controlling power, So has the white man driven from its place By his aggressive greed, Columbia's native race. Yet when the bull pursues the herds at bay, Incensed they turn, and dare dispute his sway. And so the Indians turned, when men forgot Their sacred word, and trespassed on the spot, The lonely little spot of all their lands, The reservation of the peaceful bands. But lust for gold all conscience kills in man, 'Gold in the Black Hills, gold!' the cry arose and ran VI From lip to lip, as flames from tree to tree Leap till the forest is one fiery sea, And through the country surged that hot unrest Which thirst for riches wakens in the breast. In mighty throngs the fortune hunters came, Despoiled the red man's lands and slew his game, Broke solemn treaties and defied the law. And all these ruthless acts the Nation knew and saw. VII Man is the only animal that kills Just for the wanton love of slaughter; spills The blood of lesser things to see it flow; Lures like a friend, to murder like a foe The trusting bird and beast; and, coward like, Deals covert blows he dare not boldly strike. The brutes have finer souls, and only slay When torn by hunger's pangs, or when to fear a prey. VIII The pale-faced hunter, insolent and bold, Pursued the bison while he sought for gold. 201 And on the hungry red man's own domains He left the rotting and unused remains To foul with sickening stench each passing wind And rouse the demon in the savage mind, Save in the heart where virtues dominate Injustice always breeds its natural offspring-hate. IX The chieftain of the Sioux, great Sitting Bull, Mused o'er their wrongs, and felt his heart swell full Of bitter vengeance. Torn with hate's unrest He called a council and his braves addressed. 'From fair Wisconsin's shimmering lakes of blue Long years ago the white man drove the Sioux. Made bold by conquest, and inflamed by greed, He still pursues our tribes, and still our ranks recede. 'Fair are the White Chief's promises and words, But dark his deeds who robs us of our herds. He talks of treaties, asks the right to buy, Then takes by force, not waiting our reply. He grants us lands for pastures and abodes To devastate them by his iron roads. But now from happy Spirit Lands, a friend Draws near the hunted Sioux, to strengthen and defend. XI 'While walking in the fields I saw a star; Unconsciously I followed it afarIt led me on to valleys filled with light, Where danced our noble chieftains slain in fight. Black Kettle, first of all that host I knew, He whom the strong armed Custer foully slew. And then a spirit took me by the hand, The Great Messiah King who comes to free the land. XII 202 'Suns were his eyes, a speaking tear his voice, Whose rainbow sounds made listening hearts rejoice And thus he spake: 'The red man's hour draws near When all his lost domains shall reappear. The elk, the deer, the bounding antelope, Shall here return to grace each grassy slope.' He waved his hand above the fields, and lo! Down through the valleys came a herd of buffalo. XIII 'The wondrous vision vanished, but I knew That Sitting Bull must make the promise true. Great Spirits plan what mortal man achieves, The hand works magic when the heart believes. Arouse, ye braves! let not the foe advance. Arm for the battle and begin the danceThe sacred dance in honor of our slain, Who will return to earth, ere many moons shall wane.' XIV Thus Sitting Bull, the chief of wily knaves, Worked on the superstitions of his braves. Mixed truth with lies; and stirred to mad unrest The warlike instinct in each savage breast. A curious product of unhappy times, The natural offspring of unnumbered crimes, He used low cunning and dramatic arts To startle and surprise those crude untutored hearts. XV Out from the lodges pour a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains, So swells and dies away, the ghostly graveyard strains. 203 XVI Like worded wine is music to the ear, And long indulged makes mad the hearts that hear. The dancers, drunken with the monotone Of oft repeated notes, now shriek and groan And pierce their ruddy flesh with sharpened spears; Still more excited when the blood appears, With warlike yells, high in the air they bound, Then in a deathlike trance fall prostrate on the ground. XVII They wake to tell weird stories of the dead, While fresh performers to the ring are led. The sacred nature of the dance is lost, War is their cry, red war, at any cost. Insane for blood they wait for no command, But plunge marauding through the frightened land. Their demon hearts on devils' pleasures bent, For each new foe surprised, new torturing deaths invent. XVIII Staked to the earth one helpless creature lies, Flames at his feet and splinters in his eyes. Another groans with coals upon his breast, While 'round the pyre the Indians dance and jest. A crying child is brained upon a tree, The swooning mother saved from death, to be The slave and plaything of a filthy knave, Whose sins would startle hell, whose clay defile a grave. XIX Their cause was right, their methods all were wrong. Pity and censure both to them belong. Their woes were many, but their crimes were more. The soulless Satan holds not in his store Such awful tortures as the Indians' wrath Keeps for the hapless victim in his path. And if the last lone remnants of that race 204 Were by the white man swept from off the earth's fair face, XX Were every red man slaughtered in a day, Still would that sacrifice but poorly pay For one insulted woman captive's woes. Again great Custer in his strength arose, More daring, more intrepid than of old. The passing years had touched and turned to gold The ever widening aureole of fame That shone upon his brow, and glorified his name. XXI Wise men make laws, then turn their eyes away, While fools and knaves ignore them day by day; And unmolested, fools and knaves at length Induce long wars which sap a country's strength. The sloth of leaders, ruling but in name, Has dragged full many a nation down to shame. A word unspoken by the rightful lips Has dyed the land with blood, and blocked the sea with ships. XXII The word withheld, when Indians asked for aid, Came when the red man started on his raid. What Justice with a gesture might have done Was left for noisy war with bellowing gun. And who save Custer and his gallant men Could calm the tempest into peace again? What other hero in the land could hope With Sitting Bull, the fierce and lawless one to cope? XXIII What other warrior skilled enough to dare Surprise that human tiger in his lair? Sure of his strength, unconscious of his fame Out from the quiet of the camp he came; 205 And stately as Diana at his side Elizabeth, his wife and alway bride, And Margaret, his sister, rode apace; Love's clinging arms he left to meet death's cold embrace. XXIV As the bright column wound along its course, The smiling leader turned upon his horse To gaze with pride on that superb command. Twelve hundred men, the picked of all the land, Innured to hardship and made strong by strife Their lithe limbed bodies breathed of out-door life; While on their faces, resolute and brave, Hope stamped its shining seal, although their thoughts were grave. XXV The sad eyed women halted in the dawn, And waved farewell to dear ones riding on. The modest mist picked up her robes and ran Before the Sun god's swift pursuing van. And suddenly there burst on startled eyes, The sight of soldiers, marching in the skies; That phantom host, a phantom Custer led; Mirage of dire portent, forecasting days ahead. XXVI The soldiers' children, flaunting mimic flags, Played by the roadside, striding sticks for nags. Their mothers wept, indifferent to the crowd Who saw their tears and heard them sob aloud. Old Indian men and squaws crooned forth a rhyme Sung by their tribes from immemorial time; And over all the drums' incessant beat Mixed with the scout's weird rune, and tramp of myriad feet. XXVII So flawless was the union of each part The mighty column (moved as by one heart) 206 Pulsed through the air, like some sad song well sung, Which gives delight, although the soul is wrung. Farther and fainter to the sight and sound The beautiful embodied poem wound; Till like a ribbon, stretched across the land Seemed the long narrow line of that receding band. XXVIII The lot of those who in the silence wait Is harder than the fighting soldiers' fate. Back to the lonely post two women passed, With unaccustomed sorrow overcast. Two sad for sighs, too desolate for tears, The dark forebodings of long widowed years In preparation for the awful blow Hung on the door of hope the sable badge of woe. XXIX Unhappy Muse! for thee no song remains, Save the sad miséréré of the plains. Yet though defeat, not triumph, ends the tale, Great victors sometimes are the souls that fail. All glory lies not in the goals we reach, But in the lessons which our actions teach. And he who, conquered, to the end believes In God and in himself, though vanquished, still achieves. XXX Ah, grand as rash was that last fatal raid The little group of daring heroes made. Two hundred and two score intrepid men Rode out to war; not one came back again. Like fiends incarnate from the depths of hell Five thousand foemen rose with deafening yell, And swept that vale as with a simoon's breath, But like the gods of old, each martyr met his death. XXXI 207 Like gods they battled and like gods they died. Hour following hour that little band defied The hordes of red men swarming o'er the plain, Till scarce a score stood upright 'mid the slain. Then in the lull of battle, creeping near, A scout breathed low in Custer's listening ear: 'Death lies before, dear life remains behind Mount thy sure-footed steed, and hasten with the wind.' XXXII A second's silence. Custer dropped his head, His lips slow moving as when prayers are saidTwo words he breathed-'God and Elizabeth,' Then shook his long locks in the face of death, And with a final gesture turned away To join that fated few who stood at bay. Ah! deeds like that the Christ in man reveal Let Fame descend her throne at Custer's shrine to kneel. XXXIII Too late to rescue, but in time to weep, His tardy comrades came. As if asleep He lay, so fair, that even hellish hate Withheld its hand and dared not mutilate. By fiends who knew not honor, honored still, He smiled and slept on that far western hill. Cast down thy lyre, oh Muse! thy song is done! Let tears complete the tale of him who failed, yet won. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

687:Tasker Norcross “Whether all towns and all who live in them— So long as they be somewhere in this world That we in our complacency call ours— Are more or less the same, I leave to you. I should say less. Whether or not, meanwhile, We’ve all two legs—and as for that, we haven’t— There were three kinds of men where I was born: The good, the not so good, and Tasker Norcross. Now there are two kinds.” “Meaning, as I divine, Your friend is dead,” I ventured. Ferguson, Who talked himself at last out of the world He censured, and is therefore silent now, Agreed indifferently: “My friends are dead— Or most of them.” “Remember one that isn’t,” I said, protesting. “Honor him for his ears; Treasure him also for his understanding.” Ferguson sighed, and then talked on again: “You have an overgrown alacrity For saying nothing much and hearing less; And I’ve a thankless wonder, at the start, How much it is to you that I shall tell What I have now to say of Tasker Norcross, And how much to the air that is around you. But given a patience that is not averse To the slow tragedies of haunted men— Horrors, in fact, if you’ve a skilful eye To know them at their firesides, or out walking,—” “Horrors,” I said, “are my necessity; And I would have them, for their best effect, Always out walking.” Ferguson frowned at me: 265 “The wisest of us are not those who laugh Before they know. Most of us never know— Or the long toil of our mortality Would not be done. Most of us never know— And there you have a reason to believe In God, if you may have no other. Norcross, Or so I gather of his infirmity, Was given to know more than he should have known, And only God knows why. See for yourself An old house full of ghosts of ancestors, Who did their best, or worst, and having done it, Died honorably; and each with a distinction That hardly would have been for him that had it, Had honor failed him wholly as a friend. Honor that is a friend begets a friend. Whether or not we love him, still we have him; And we must live somehow by what we have, Or then we die. If you say chemistry, Then you must have your molecules in motion, And in their right abundance. Failing either, You have not long to dance. Failing a friend, A genius, or a madness, or a faith Larger than desperation, you are here For as much longer than you like as may be. Imagining now, by way of an example, Myself a more or less remembered phantom— Again, I should say less—how many times A day should I come back to you? No answer. Forgive me when I seem a little careless, But we must have examples, or be lucid Without them; and I question your adherence To such an undramatic narrative As this of mine, without the personal hook.” “A time is given in Ecclesiastes For divers works,” I told him. “Is there one For saying nothing in return for nothing? If not, there should be.” I could feel his eyes, And they were like two cold inquiring points Of a sharp metal. When I looked again, To see them shine, the cold that I had felt Was gone to make way for a smouldering 266 Of lonely fire that I, as I knew then, Could never quench with kindness or with lies. I should have done whatever there was to do For Ferguson, yet I could not have mourned In honesty for once around the clock The loss of him, for my sake or for his, Try as I might; nor would his ghost approve, Had I the power and the unthinking will To make him tread again without an aim The road that was behind him—and without The faith, or friend, or genius, or the madness That he contended was imperative. After a silence that had been too long, “It may be quite as well we don’t,” he said; “As well, I mean, that we don’t always say it. You know best what I mean, and I suppose You might have said it better. What was that? Incorrigible? Am I incorrigible? Well, it’s a word; and a word has its use, Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave. It’s a good word enough. Incorrigible, May be, for all I know, the word for Norcross. See for yourself that house of his again That he called home: An old house, painted white, Square as a box, and chillier than a tomb To look at or to live in. There were trees— Too many of them, if such a thing may be— Before it and around it. Down in front There was a road, a railroad, and a river; Then there were hills behind it, and more trees. The thing would fairly stare at you through trees, Like a pale inmate out of a barred window With a green shade half down; and I dare say People who passed have said: ‘There’s where he lives. We know him, but we do not seem to know That we remember any good of him, Or any evil that is interesting. There you have all we know and all we care.’ They might have said it in all sorts of ways; And then, if they perceived a cat, they might Or might not have remembered what they said. 267 The cat might have a personality— And maybe the same one the Lord left out Of Tasker Norcross, who, for lack of it, Saw the same sun go down year after year; All which at last was my discovery. And only mine, so far as evidence Enlightens one more darkness. You have known All round you, all your days, men who are nothing— Nothing, I mean, so far as time tells yet Of any other need it has of them Than to make sextons hardy—but no less Are to themselves incalculably something, And therefore to be cherished. God, you see, Being sorry for them in their fashioning, Indemnified them with a quaint esteem Of self, and with illusions long as life. You know them well, and you have smiled at them; And they, in their serenity, may have had Their time to smile at you. Blessed are they That see themselves for what they never were Or were to be, and are, for their defect, At ease with mirrors and the dim remarks That pass their tranquil ears.” “Come, come,” said I; “There may be names in your compendium That we are not yet all on fire for shouting. Skin most of us of our mediocrity, We should have nothing then that we could scratch. The picture smarts. Cover it, if you please, And do so rather gently. Now for Norcross.” Ferguson closed his eyes in resignation, While a dead sigh came out of him. “Good God!” He said, and said it only half aloud, As if he knew no longer now, nor cared, If one were there to listen: “Have I said nothing— Nothing at all—of Norcross? Do you mean To patronize him till his name becomes A toy made out of letters? If a name Is all you need, arrange an honest column Of all the people you have ever known 268 That you have never liked. You’ll have enough; And you’ll have mine, moreover. No, not yet. If I assume too many privileges, I pay, and I alone, for their assumption; By which, if I assume a darker knowledge Of Norcross than another, let the weight Of my injustice aggravate the load That is not on your shoulders. When I came To know this fellow Norcross in his house, I found him as I found him in the street— No more, no less; indifferent, but no better. ‘Worse’ were not quite the word: he was not bad; He was not… well, he was not anything. Has your invention ever entertained The picture of a dusty worm so dry That even the early bird would shake his head And fly on farther for another breakfast?” “But why forget the fortune of the worm,” I said, “if in the dryness you deplore Salvation centred and endured? Your Norcross May have been one for many to have envied.” “Salvation? Fortune? Would the worm say that? He might; and therefore I dismiss the worm With all dry things but one. Figures away, Do you begin to see this man a little? Do you begin to see him in the air, With all the vacant horrors of his outline For you to fill with more than it will hold? If so, you needn’t crown yourself at once With epic laurel if you seem to fill it. Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks Of a new hell—if one were not enough— I doubt if a new horror would have held him With a malignant ingenuity More to be feared than his before he died. You smile, as if in doubt. Well, smile again. Now come into his house, along with me: The four square sombre things that you see first Around you are four walls that go as high As to the ceiling. Norcross knew them well, 269 And he knew others like them. Fasten to that With all the claws of your intelligence; And hold the man before you in his house As if he were a white rat in a box, And one that knew himself to be no other. I tell you twice that he knew all about it, That you may not forget the worst of all Our tragedies begin with what we know. Could Norcross only not have known, I wonder How many would have blessed and envied him! Could he have had the usual eye for spots On others, and for none upon himself, I smile to ponder on the carriages That might as well as not have clogged the town In honor of his end. For there was gold, You see, though all he needed was a little, And what he gave said nothing of who gave it. He would have given it all if in return There might have been a more sufficient face To greet him when he shaved. Though you insist It is the dower, and always, of our degree Not to be cursed with such invidious insight, Remember that you stand, you and your fancy, Now in his house; and since we are together, See for yourself and tell me what you see. Tell me the best you see. Make a slight noise Of recognition when you find a book That you would not as lief read upside down As otherwise, for example. If there you fail, Observe the walls and lead me to the place, Where you are led. If there you meet a picture That holds you near it for a longer time Than you are sorry, you may call it yours, And hang it in the dark of your remembrance, Where Norcross never sees. How can he see That has no eyes to see? And as for music, He paid with empty wonder for the pangs Of his infrequent forced endurance of it; And having had no pleasure, paid no more For needless immolation, or for the sight Of those who heard what he was never to hear. To see them listening was itself enough 270 To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes, On other days, of strangers who forgot Their sorrows and their failures and themselves Before a few mysterious odds and ends Of marble carted from the Parthenon— And all for seeing what he was never to see, Because it was alive and he was dead— Here was a wonder that was more profound Than any that was in fiddles and brass horns. “He knew, and in his knowledge there was death. He knew there was a region all around him That lay outside man’s havoc and affairs, And yet was not all hostile to their tumult, Where poets would have served and honored him, And saved him, had there been anything to save. But there was nothing, and his tethered range Was only a small desert. Kings of song Are not for thrones in deserts. Towers of sound And flowers of sense are but a waste of heaven Where there is none to know them from the rocks And sand-grass of his own monotony That makes earth less than earth. He could see that, And he could see no more. The captured light That may have been or not, for all he cared, The song that is in sculpture was not his, But only, to his God-forgotten eyes, One more immortal nonsense in a world Where all was mortal, or had best be so, And so be done with. ‘Art,’ he would have said, ‘Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;’ And with a few profundities like that He would have controverted and dismissed The benefit of the Greeks. He had heard of them, As he had heard of his aspiring soul— Never to the perceptible advantage, In his esteem, of either. ‘Faith,’ he said, Or would have said if he had thought of it, ‘Lives in the same house with Philosophy, Where the two feed on scraps and are forlorn As orphans after war. He could see stars, On a clear night, but he had not an eye 271 To see beyond them. He could hear spoken words, But had no ear for silence when alone. He could eat food of which he knew the savor, But had no palate for the Bread of Life, That human desperation, to his thinking, Made famous long ago, having no other. Now do you see? Do you begin to see?” I told him that I did begin to see; And I was nearer than I should have been To laughing at his malign inclusiveness, When I considered that, with all our speed, We are not laughing yet at funerals. I see him now as I could see him then, And I see now that it was good for me, As it was good for him, that I was quiet; For Time’s eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him, Or so I chose to fancy more than once Before he told of Norcross. When the word Of his release (he would have called it so) Made half an inch of news, there were no tears That are recorded. Women there may have been To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing, The few there were to mourn were not for love, And were not lovely. Nothing of them, at least, Was in the meagre legend that I gathered Years after, when a chance of travel took me So near the region of his nativity That a few miles of leisure brought me there; For there I found a friendly citizen Who led me to his house among the trees That were above a railroad and a river. Square as a box and chillier than a tomb It was indeed, to look at or to live in— All which had I been told. “Ferguson died,” The stranger said, “and then there was an auction. I live here, but I’ve never yet been warm. Remember him? Yes, I remember him. I knew him—as a man may know a tree— For twenty years. He may have held himself A little high when he was here, but now … Yes, I remember Ferguson. Oh, yes.” 272 Others, I found, remembered Ferguson, But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross. ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,

688: ON THE HIGHER MAN 1 The first time I came to men I committed the folly of hermits, the great folly: I stood in the market place. And as I spoke to all, I spoke to none. But in the evening, tightrope walkers and corpses were my companions; and I myself was almost a corpse. But with the new morning a new truth came to me: I learned to say, "Of what concern to me are market and mob and mob noise and long mob ears?" You higher men, learn this from me: in the market place nobody believes in higher men. And if you want to speak there, very well! But the mob blinks: "We are all equal." "You higher men"-thus blinks the mob-"there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is man; before God we are all equal." Before God! But now this god has died. And before the mob we do not want to be equal. You higher men, go away from the market place! 2 Before God! But now this god has died. You higher men, this god was your greatest danger. It is only since he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected. Only now the great noon comes; only now the higher man becomes-lord. Have you understood this word, 0 my brothers? You are startled? Do your hearts become giddy? Does the 287 abyss yawn before you? Does the hellhound howl at you? Well then, you higher men! Only now is the mountain of man's future in labor. God died: now we want the overman to live. 3 The most concerned ask today: "How is man to be preserved?" But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: "How is man to be overcome?" I have the overman at heart, that is my first and only concern-and not man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the most ailing, not the best. O my brothers, what I can love in man is that he is an overture and a going under. And in you too there is much that lets me love and hope. That you despise, you higher men, that lets me hope. For the great despisers are the great reveres. That you have despaired, in that there is much to revere. For you did not learn how to surrender, you did not learn petty prudences. For today the little people lord it: they all preach surrender and resignation and prudence and industry and consideration and the long etcetera of the small virtues. What is womanish, what derives from the servile, and especially the mob hodgepodge: that would now become master of all human destiny. 0 nausea Nauseal Nausea! That asks and asks and never grows weary: "How is man to be preserved best, longest, most agreeably?" With that-they are the masters of today. Overcome these masters of today, 0 my brothers these, small people, they are the overman's greatest danger. You higher men, overcome the small virtues, the small prudences, the grain-of-sand consideration, the ants' riffraff, the wretched contentment, the "happiness of the 288 greatest number"! And rather despair than surrender. And verily, I love you for not knowing how to live today, you higher men! For thus you live best. 4 Do you have courage, 0 my brothers? Are you brave? Not courage before witnesses but the courage of hermits and eagles, which is no longer watched even by a god. Cold souls, mules, the blind, and the drunken I do not call brave. Brave is he who knows fear but conquers fear, who sees the abyss, but with pride. Who sees the abyss but with the eyes of an eagle; who grasps the abyss with the talons of an eagle-that man has courage. 5 "Man is evil"-thus said all the wisest to comfort me. Alas, if only it were still true today! For evil is man's best strength. "Man must become better and more evil"-thus I teach. The greatest evil is necessary for the overman's best. It may have been good for that preacher of the little people that he suffered and tried to bear man's sin. But I rejoice over great sin as my great consolation. But this is not said for long ears. Not every word belongs in every mouth. These are delicate distant matters: they should not be reached for by sheeps' hoofs. 6 You higher men, do you suppose I have come to set right what you have set wrong? Or that I have come to you that suffer to bed you more comfortably? Or to you that are restless, have gone astray or climbed astray, to show you new and easier paths? No! Nol Three times no! Ever more, ever better ones 289 of your kind shall perish-for it shall be ever worse and harder for you. Thus alone-thus alone, man grows to the height where lightning strikes and breaks him: lofty enough for lightning. My mind and my longing are directed toward the few, the long, the distant; what are your many small short miseries to me? You do not yet suffer enough to suit mel For you suffer from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man. You would lie if you claimed otherwise! You all do not suffer from what I have suffered. 7 It is not enough for me that lightning no longer does any harm. I do not wish to conduct it away: it shall learn to work for me. My wisdom has long gathered like a cloud; it is becoming stiller and darker. Thus does every wisdom that is yet to give birth to lightning bolts. For these men of today I do not wish to be light, or to be called light. These I wish to blind. Lightning of my wisdom! put out their eyes! 8 Will nothing beyond your capacity: there is a wicked falseness among those who will beyond their capacity. Especially if they will great things For they arouse mistrust against great things, these subtle counterfeiters and actors-until finally they are false before themselves, squinters, whited worm-eaten decay, cloaked with strong words, with display-virtues, with splendid false deeds. Take good care there, you higher menl For nothing today is more precious to me and rarer than honesty. Is this today not the mob's? But the mob does not 290 know what is great, what is small, what is straight and honest: it is innocently crooked, it always lies. 9 Have a good mistrust today, you higher men, you stouthearted ones, you openhearted ones And keep your reasons secretly For this today is the mob's. What the mob once learned to believe without reasons -who could overthrow that with reasons? And in the market place one convinces with gestures. But reasons make the mob mistrustful. And if truth was victorious for once, then ask yourself with good mistrust: "What strong error fought for it?" Beware of the scholars! They hate you, for they are sterile. They have cold, dried-up eyes; before them every bird lies unplumed. Such men boast that they do not lie: but the inability to lie is far from the love of truth. Bewarel Freedom from fever is not yet knowledge by any means I do not believe chilled spirits. Whoever is unable to lie does not know what truth is. 10 If you would go high, use your own legs. Do not let yourselves be carried up; do not sit on the backs and heads of others. But you mounted a horse? You are now riding quickly up to your goal? All right, my friend! But your lame foot is sitting on the horse too. When you reach your goal, when you jump off your horse-on your very height, you higher man, you will stumble. 11 You creators, you higher men! One is pregnant only with one's own child. Do not let yourselves be gulled and beguiled! Who, after all, is your neighbor? And 291 even if you act "for the neighbor"-you still do not create for him. Unlearn this "for," you creators! Your very virtue wants that you do nothing "for" and "in order" and "because." You shall plug up your ears against these false little words. "For the neighbor" is only the virtue of the little people: there one says "birds of a feather" and "one hand washes the other." They have neither the right nor the strength for your egoism. In your egoism, you creators, is the caution and providence of the pregnant. What no one has yet laid eyes on, the fruit: that your whole love shelters and saves and nourishes. Where your whole love is, with your child, there is also your whole virtue. Your work, your will, that is your "neighbor": do not let yourselves be gulled with false values 12 You creators, you higher menl Whoever has to give birth is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean. Ask women: one does not give birth because it is fun. Pain makes hens and poets cackle. You creators, there is much that is unclean in you. That is because you had to be mothers. A new child: oh, how much new filth has also come into the world Go aside! And whoever has given birth should wash his soul clean. 13 Do not be virtuous beyond your strength! And do not desire anything of yourselves against probability. Walk in the footprints where your fathers' virtue walked before you. How would you climb high if your fathers' will does not climb with you? But whoever would be a firstling should beware lest 292 he also become a lastling. And wherever the vices of your fathers are, there you should not want to represent saints. If your fathers consorted with women, strong wines, and wild boars, what would it be if you wanted chastity of yourself? It would be folly! Verily, it seems much to me if such a man is the husb and of one or two or three women. And if he founded monasteries and wrote over the door, "The way to sainthood," I should yet say, What for? It is another folly. He founded a reformatory and refuge for himself: may it do him good! But I do not believe in it. In solitude, whatever one has brought into it growsalso the inner beast. Therefore solitude is inadvisable for many. Has there been anything filthier on earth so far than desert saints? Around them not only was the devil loose, but also the swine. 14 Shy, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed: thus I have often seen you slink aside, you higher men. A throw had failed you. But, you dicethrowers, what does it matter? You have not learned to gamble and jest as one must gamble and jest. Do we not always sit at a big jesting-and-gaming table? And if something great has failed you, does it follow that you yourselves are failures? And if you yourselves are failures, does it follow that man is a failure? But if man is a failure-well then! 15 The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds. You higher men here, have vou not all failed? Be of good cheer, what does it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh! 293 Is it any wonder that you failed and only half succeeded, being half broken? Is not something thronging and pushing in you-man's future? Man's greatest distance and depth and what in him is lofty to the stars, his tremendous strength-are not all these frothing against each other in your pot? Is it any wonder that many a pot breaks? Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh! You higher men, how much is still possible And verily, how much has already succeeded! How rich is the earth in little good perfect things, in what has turned out well! Place little good perfect things around you, 0 higher menl Their golden ripeness heals the heart. What is perfect teaches hope. i6 What has so far been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said, "Woe unto those who laugh here"? Did he himself find no reasons oln earth for laughing? Then he searched very badly. Even a child could find reasons here. He did not love enough: else he would also have loved us who laugh. But he hated and mocked us: howling and gnashing of teeth he promised us. Does one have to curse right away, where one does not love? That seems bad taste to me. But thus he acted, being unconditional. He came from the mob. And he himself simply did not love enough: else he would not have been so wroth that one did not love him. All great love does not want love: it wants more. Avoid all such unconditional people! They are a poor sick sort, a sort of mob: they look sourly at this life, they have the evil eye for this earth. Avoid all such unconditional people! They have heavy feet and sultry 294 hearts: they do not know how to dance. How should the earth be light for them? 17 All good things approach their goal crookedly. Like cats, they arch their backs, they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness: all good things laugh. A man's stride betrays whether he has found his own way: behold me walking! But whoever approaches his goal dances. And verily, I have not become a statue: I do not yet stand there, stiff, stupid, stony, a column; I love to run swiftly. And though there are swamps and thick melancholy on earth, whoever has light feet runs even over mud and dances as on swept ice. Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads 38 This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today. Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light, waves with his wings, ready for flight, waving at all birds, ready and heady, happily lightheaded; Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, not impatient, not unconditional, one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown! 19 Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads In happiness too there are heavy animals; there are 295 pondrous-pedes through and through. Curiously they labor, like an elephant laboring to stand on its head. But it is still better to be foolish from happiness than foolish from unhappiness; better to dance ponderously than to walk lamely. That you would learn my wisdom from me: even the worst thing has two good reverse sides-even the worst thing has good dancing legs; that you would learn, you higher men, to put yourselves on your right legsl That you would unlearn nursing melancholy and all mob-sadnessl Oh, how sad even the mob's clowns seem to me today But this today is the mob's. 20 Be like the wind rushing out of his mountain caves: he wishes to dance to his own pipe; the seas tremble and leap under his feet. What gives asses wings, what milks lionessespraised be this good intractable spirit that comes like a cyclone to all today and to all the mob. What is averse to thistle-heads and casuists' heads and to all wilted leaves and weeds-praised be this wild, good, free storm spirit that dances on swamps and on melancholy as on meadows. What hates the mob's blether.cocks and all the bungled gloomy brood-praised be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing gale that blows dust into the eyes of all the black-sighted, soreblighted. You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance--dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you are failures? How much is still possible! So learn to laugh away over yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher And do not forget good laughter. This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laugh- 296 ter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to, laugh ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE HIGHER MAN ,

689:. Fast, in its prison-walls of earth, Awaits the mould of baked clay. Up, comrades, up, and aid the birth The bell that shall be born to-day! Who would honor obtain, With the sweat and the pain, The praise that man gives to the master must buy. But the blessing withal must descend from on high! And well an earnest word beseems The work the earnest hand prepares; Its load more light the labor deems, When sweet discourse the labor shares. So let us pondernor in vain What strength can work when labor wills; For who would not the fool disdain Who ne'er designs what he fulfils? And well it stamps our human race, And hence the gift to understand, That man within the heart should trace Whate'er he fashions with the hand. From the fir the fagot take, Keep it, heap it hard and dry, That the gathered flame may break Through the furnace, wroth and high. When the copper within Seeths and simmersthe tin, Pour quick, that the fluid that feeds the bell May flow in the right course glib and well. Deep hid within this nether cell, What force with fire is moulding thus, In yonder airy tower shall dwell, And witness wide and far of us! It shall, in later days, unfailing, Rouse many an ear to rapt emotion; Its solemn voice with sorrow wailing, Or choral chiming to devotion. Whatever fate to man may bring, Whatever weal or woe befall, That metal tongue shall backward ring, The warning moral drawn from all. See the silvery bubbles spring! Good! the mass is melting now! Let the salts we duly bring Purge the flood, and speed the flow. From the dross and the scum, Pure, the fusion must come; For perfect and pure we the metal must keep, That its voice may be perfect, and pure, and deep. That voice, with merry music rife, The cherished child shall welcome in; What time the rosy dreams of life, In the first slumber's arms begin. As yet, in Time's dark womb unwarning, Repose the days, or foul or fair; And watchful o'er that golden morning, The mother-love's untiring care! And swift the years like arrows fly No more with girls content to play, Bounds the proud boy upon his way, Storms through loud life's tumultuous pleasures, With pilgrim staff the wide world measures; And, wearied with the wish to roam, Again seeks, stranger-like, the father-home. And, lo, as some sweet vision breaks Out from its native morning skies With rosy shame on downcast cheeks, The virgin stands before his eyes. A nameless longing seizes him! From all his wild compassions flown; Tears, strange till then, his eyes bedim; He wanders all alone. Blushing, he glides where'er she move; Her greeting can transport him; To every mead to deck his love, The happy wild flowers court him! Sweet hopeand tender longingye The growth of life's first age of gold; When the heart, swelling, seems to see The gates of heaven unfold! O love, the beautiful and brief! O prime, Glory, and verdure, of life's summer time! Browning o'er, the pipes are simmering, Dip this wand of clay [45] within; If like glass the wand be glimmering, Then the casting may begin. Brisk, brisk now, and see If the fusion flow free; If(happy and welcome indeed were the sign!) If the hard and the ductile united combine. For still where the strong is betrothed to the weak, And the stern in sweet marriage is blent with the meek, Rings the concord harmonious, both tender and strong So be it with thee, if forever united, The heart to the heart flows in one, love-delighted; Illusion is brief, but repentance is long. Lovely, thither are they bringing. With the virgin wreath, the bride! To the love-feast clearly ringing, Tolls the church-bell far and wide! With that sweetest holiday, Must the May of life depart; With the cestus loosedaway Flies illusion from the heart! Yet love lingers lonely, When passion is mute, And the blossoms may only Give way to the fruit. The husband must enter The hostile life, With struggle and strife To plant or to watch. To snare or to snatch, To pray and importune, Must wager and venture And hunt down his fortune! Then flows in a current the gear and the gain, And the garners are filled with the gold of the grain, Now a yard to the court, now a wing to the centre! Within sits another, The thrifty housewife; The mild one, the mother Her home is her life. In its circle she rules, And the daughters she schools And she cautions the boys, With a bustling command, And a diligent hand Employed she employs; Gives order to store, And the much makes the more; Locks the chest and the wardrobe, with lavender smelling, And the hum of the spindle goes quick through the dwelling; And she hoards in the presses, well polished and full, The snow of the linen, the shine of the wool; Blends the sweet with the good, and from care and endeavor Rests never! Blithe the master (where the while From his roof he sees them smile) Eyes the lands, and counts the gain; There, the beams projecting far, And the laden storehouse are, And the granaries bowed beneath The blessed golden grain; There, in undulating motion, Wave the cornfields like an ocean. Proud the boast the proud lips breathe: "My house is built upon a rock, And sees unmoved the stormy shock Of waves that fret below!" What chain so strong, what girth so great, To bind the giant form of fate? Swift are the steps of woe. Now the casting may begin; See the breach indented there: Ere we run the fusion in, Haltand speed the pious prayer! Pull the bung out See around and about What vapor, what vaporGod help us!has risen? Ha! the flame like a torrent leaps forth from its prison! What friend is like the might of fire When man can watch and wield the ire? Whate'er we shape or work, we owe Still to that heaven-descended glow. But dread the heaven-descended glow, When from their chain its wild wings go, When, where it listeth, wide and wild Sweeps free Nature's free-born child. When the frantic one fleets, While no force can withstand, Through the populous streets Whirling ghastly the brand; For the element hates What man's labor creates, And the work of his hand! Impartially out from the cloud, Or the curse or the blessing may fall! Benignantly out from the cloud Come the dews, the revivers of all! Avengingly out from the cloud Come the levin, the bolt, and the ball! Harka wail from the steeple!aloud The bell shrills its voice to the crowd! Looklookred as blood All on high! It is not the daylight that fills with its flood The sky! What a clamor awaking Roars up through the street, What a hell-vapor breaking. Rolls on through the street, And higher and higher Aloft moves the column of fire! Through the vistas and rows Like a whirlwind it goes, And the air like the stream from the furnace glows. Beams are cracklingposts are shrinking Walls are sinkingwindows clinking Children crying Mothers flying And the beast (the black ruin yet smouldering under) Yells the howl of its pain and its ghastly wonder! Hurry and skurryawayaway, The face of the night is as clear as day! As the links in a chain, Again and again Flies the bucket from hand to hand; High in arches up-rushing The engines are gushing, And the flood, as a beast on the prey that it hounds With a roar on the breast of the element bounds. To the grain and the fruits, Through the rafters and beams, Through the barns and garners it crackles and streams! As if they would rend up the earth from its roots, Rush the flames to the sky Giant-high; And at length, Wearied out and despairing, man bows to their strength! With an idle gaze sees their wrath consume, And submits to his doom! Desolate The place, and dread For storms the barren bed. In the blank voids that cheerful casements were, Comes to and fro the melancholy air, And sits despair; And through the ruin, blackening in its shroud Peers, as it flits, the melancholy cloud. One human glance of grief upon the grave Of all that fortune gave The loiterer takesthen turns him to depart, And grasps the wanderer's staff and mans his heart Whatever else the element bereaves One blessing more than all it reftit leaves, The faces that he loves!He counts them o'er, Seenot one look is missing from that store! Now clasped the bell within the clay The mould the mingled metals fill Oh, may it, sparkling into day, Reward the labor and the skill! Alas! should it fail, For the mould may be frail And still with our hope must be mingled the fear And, ev'n now, while we speak, the mishap may be near! To the dark womb of sacred earth This labor of our hands is given, As seeds that wait the second birth, And turn to blessings watched by heaven! Ah, seeds, how dearer far than they, We bury in the dismal tomb, Where. hope and sorrow bend to pray That suns beyond the realm of day May warm them into bloom! From the steeple Tolls the bell, Deep and heavy, The death-knell! Guiding with dirge-notesolemn, sad, and slow, To the last home earth's weary wanderers know. It is that worshipped wife It is that faithful mother! Whom the dark prince of shadows leads benighted, From that dear arm where oft she hung delighted Far from those blithe companions, born Of her, and blooming in their morn; On whom, when couched her heart above, So often looked the mother-love! Ah! rent the sweet home's union-band, And never, never more to come She dwells within the shadowy land, Who was the mother of that home! How oft they miss that tender guide, The carethe watchthe facethe mother And where she sate the babes beside, Sits with unloving looksanother! While the mass is cooling now, Let the labor yield to leisure, As the bird upon the bough, Loose the travail to the pleasure. When the soft stars awaken, Each task be forsaken! And the vesper-bell lulling the earth into peace, If the master still toil, chimes the workman's release! Homeward from the tasks of day, Through the greenwood's welcome way Wends the wanderer, blithe and cheerly, To the cottage loved so dearly! And the eye and ear are meeting, Now, the slow sheep homeward bleating Now, the wonted shelter near, Lowing the lusty-fronted steer; Creaking now the heavy wain, Reels with the happy harvest grain. While with many-colored leaves, Glitters the garland on the sheaves; For the mower's work is done, And the young folks' dance begun! Desert street, and quiet mart; Silence is in the city's heart; And the social taper lighteth; Each dear face that home uniteth; While the gate the town before Heavily swings with sullen roar! Though darkness is spreading O'er earththe upright And the honest, undreading, Look safe on the night Which the evil man watches in awe, For the eye of the night is the law! Bliss-dowered! O daughter of the skies, Hail, holy order, whose employ Blends like to like in light and joy Builder of cities, who of old Called the wild man from waste and wold. And, in his hut thy presence stealing, Roused each familiar household feeling; And, best of all the happy ties, The centre of the social band, The instinct of the Fatherland! United thuseach helping each, Brisk work the countless hands forever; For naught its power to strength can teach, Like emulation and endeavor! Thus linked the master with the man, Each in his rights can each revere, And while they march in freedom's van, Scorn the lewd rout that dogs the rear! To freemen labor is renown! Who worksgives blessings and commands; Kings glory in the orb and crown Be ours the glory of our hands. Long in these wallslong may we greet Your footfalls, peace and concord sweet! Distant the day, oh! distant far, When the rude hordes of trampling war Shall scare the silent vale; And where, Now the sweet heaven, when day doth leave The air, Limns its soft rose-hues on the veil of eve; Shall the fierce war-brand tossing in the gale, From town and hamlet shake the horrent glare! Now, its destined task fulfilled, Asunder break the prison-mould; Let the goodly bell we build, Eye and heart alike behold. The hammer down heave, Till the cover it cleave: For not till we shatter the wall of its cell Can we lift from its darkness and bondage the bell. To break the mould, the master may, If skilled the hand and ripe the hour; But woe, when on its fiery way The metal seeks itself to pour. Frantic and blind, with thunder-knell, Exploding from its shattered home, And glaring forth, as from a hell, Behold the red destruction come! When rages strength that has no reason, There breaks the mould before the season; When numbers burst what bound before, Woe to the state that thrives no more! Yea, woe, when in the city's heart, The latent spark to flame is blown; And millions from their silence start, To claim, without a guide, their own! Discordant howls the warning bell, Proclaiming discord wide and far, And, born but things of peace to tell, Becomes the ghastliest voice of war: "Freedom! Equality!"to blood Rush the roused people at the sound! Through street, hall, palace, roars the flood, And banded murder closes round! The hyena-shapes (that women were!), Jest with the horrors they survey; They houndthey rendthey mangle there As panthers with their prey! Naught rests to hollowburst the ties Of life's sublime and reverent awe; Before the vice the virtue flies, And universal crime is law! Man fears the lion's kingly tread; Man fears the tiger's fangs of terror; And still the dreadliest of the dread, Is man himself in error! No torch, though lit from heaven, illumes The blind!Why place it in his hand? It lights not himit but consumes The city and the land! Rejoice and laud the prospering skies! The kernel bursts its huskbehold From the dull clay the metal rise, Pure-shining, as a star of gold! Neck and lip, but as one beam, It laughs like a sunbeam. And even the scutcheon, clear-graven, shall tell That the art of a master has fashioned the bell! Come income in My merry menwe'll form a ring The new-born labor christening; And "Concord" we will name her! To union may her heartfelt call In brother-love attune us all! May she the destined glory win For which the master sought to frame her Aloft(all earth's existence under), In blue-pavillioned heaven afar To dwellthe neighbor of the thunder, The borderer of the star! Be hers above a voice to rise Like those bright hosts in yonder sphere, Who, while they move, their Maker praise, And lead around the wreathed year! To solemn and eternal things We dedicate her lips sublime! As hourly, calmly, on she swings Fanned by the fleeting wings of time! No pulseno heartno feeling hers! She lends the warning voice to fate; And still companions, while she stirs, The changes of the human state! So may she teach us, as her tone But now so mighty, melts away That earth no life which earth has known From the last silence can delay! Slowly now the cords upheave her! From her earth-grave soars the bell; Mid the airs of heaven we leave her! In the music-realm to dwell! Upupwards yet raise She has risenshe sways. Fair bell to our city bode joy and increase, And oh, may thy first sound be hallowed to peace! ~ Friedrich Schiller, The Lay Of The Bell ,

690:Al Aaraaf PART I O! nothing earthly save the ray (Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye, As in those gardens where the day Springs from the gems of CircassyO! nothing earthly save the thrill Of melody in woodland rillOr (music of the passion-hearted) Joy's voice so peacefully departed That like the murmur in the shell, Its echo dwelleth and will dwellOh, nothing of the dross of oursYet all the beauty- all the flowers That list our Love, and deck our bowersAdorn yon world afar, afarThe wandering star. 'Twas a sweet time for Nesace- for there Her world lay lolling on the golden air, Near four bright suns- a temporary restAn oasis in desert of the blest. Away- away- 'mid seas of rays that roll Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soulThe soul that scarce (the billows are so dense) Can struggle to its destin'd eminence,To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode And late to ours, the favor'd one of GodBut, now, the ruler of an anchor'd realm, She throws aside the sceptre- leaves the helm, And, amid incense and high spiritual hymns, Laves in quadruple light her angel limbs. Now happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth, Whence sprang the 'Idea of Beauty' into birth, (Falling in wreaths thro' many a startled star, Like woman's hair 'mid pearls, until, afar, It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt) She looked into Infinity- and knelt. 15 Rich clouds, for canopies, about her curledFit emblems of the model of her worldSeen but in beauty- not impeding sight Of other beauty glittering thro' the lightA wreath that twined each starry form around, And all the opal'd air in color bound. All hurriedly she knelt upon a bed Of flowers: of lilies such as rear'd the head On the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang So eagerly around about to hang Upon the flying footsteps of- deep prideOf her who lov'd a mortal- and so died. The Sephalica, budding with young bees, Upreared its purple stem around her knees:And gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam'dInmate of highest stars, where erst it sham'd All other loveliness:- its honied dew (The fabled nectar that the heathen knew) Deliriously sweet, was dropp'd from Heaven, And fell on gardens of the unforgiven In Trebizond- and on a sunny flower So like its own above that, to this hour, It still remaineth, torturing the bee With madness, and unwonted reverie: In Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf And blossom of the fairy plant in grief Disconsolate linger- grief that hangs her head, Repenting follies that full long have Red, Heaving her white breast to the balmy air, Like guilty beauty, chasten'd and more fair: Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light She fears to perfume, perfuming the night: And Clytia, pondering between many a sun, While pettish tears adown her petals run: And that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth, And died, ere scarce exalted into birth, Bursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing Its way to Heaven, from garden of a king: And Valisnerian lotus, thither flown' From struggling with the waters of the Rhone: And thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante! 16 Isola d'oro!- Fior di Levante! And the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever With Indian Cupid down the holy riverFair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given To bear the Goddess' song, in odors, up to Heaven: 'Spirit! that dwellest where, In the deep sky, The terrible and fair, In beauty vie! Beyond the line of blueThe boundary of the star Which turneth at the view Of thy barrier and thy barOf the barrier overgone By the comets who were cast From their pride and from their throne To be drudges till the lastTo be carriers of fire (The red fire of their heart) With speed that may not tire And with pain that shall not partWho livest- that we knowIn Eternity- we feelBut the shadow of whose brow What spirit shall reveal? Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace, Thy messenger hath known Have dream'd for thy Infinity A model of their ownThy will is done, O God! The star hath ridden high Thro' many a tempest, but she rode Beneath thy burning eye; And here, in thought, to theeIn thought that can alone Ascend thy empire and so be A partner of thy throneBy winged Fantasy, My embassy is given, Till secrecy shall knowledge be In the environs of Heaven.' 17 She ceas'd- and buried then her burning cheek Abash'd, amid the lilies there, to seek A shelter from the fervor of His eye; For the stars trembled at the Deity. She stirr'd not- breath'd not- for a voice was there How solemnly pervading the calm air! A sound of silence on the startled ear Which dreamy poets name 'the music of the sphere.' Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call 'Silence'- which is the merest word of all. All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wingsBut ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high The eternal voice of God is passing by, And the red winds are withering in the sky:'What tho 'in worlds which sightless cycles run, Linked to a little system, and one sunWhere all my love is folly and the crowd Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud, The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?) What tho' in worlds which own a single sun The sands of Time grow dimmer as they run, Yet thine is my resplendency, so given To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven! Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly, With all thy train, athwart the moony skyApart- like fire-flies in Sicilian night, And wing to other worlds another light! Divulge the secrets of thy embassy To the proud orbs that twinkle- and so be To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man!' Up rose the maiden in the yellow night, The single-mooned eve!- on Earth we plight Our faith to one love- and one moon adoreThe birth-place of young Beauty had no more. As sprang that yellow star from downy hours Up rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers, 18 And bent o'er sheeny mountains and dim plain Her way, but left not yet her Therasaean reign. PART II High on a mountain of enamell'd headSuch as the drowsy shepherd on his bed Of giant pasturage lying at his ease, Raising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees With many a mutter'd 'hope to be forgiven' What time the moon is quadrated in HeavenOf rosy head that, towering far away Into the sunlit ether, caught the ray Of sunken suns at eve- at noon of night, While the moon danc'd with the fair stranger lightUprear'd upon such height arose a pile Of gorgeous columns on th' unburthen'd air, Flashing from Parian marble that twin smile Far down upon the wave that sparkled there, And nursled the young mountain in its lair. Of molten stars their pavement, such as fall Thro' the ebon air, besilvering the pall Of their own dissolution, while they dieAdorning then the dwellings of the sky. A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down, Sat gently on these columns as a crownA window of one circular diamond, there, Look'd out above into the purple air, And rays from God shot down that meteor chain And hallow'd all the beauty twice again, Save, when, between th' empyrean and that ring, Some eager spirit Flapp'd his dusky wing. But on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen The dimness of this world: that greyish green That Nature loves the best Beauty's grave Lurk'd in each cornice, round each architraveAnd every sculptur'd cherub thereabout That from his marble dwelling peered out, Seem'd earthly in the shadow of his nicheAchaian statues in a world so rich! Friezes from Tadmor and PersepolisFrom Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss 19 Of beautiful Gomorrah! O, the wave Is now upon thee- but too late to save! Sound loves to revel in a summer night: Witness the murmur of the grey twilight That stole upon the ear, in Eyraco, Of many a wild star-gazer long agoThat stealeth ever on the ear of him Who, musing, gazeth on the distance dim, And sees the darkness coming as a cloudIs not its form- its voice- most palpable and loud? But what is this?- it cometh, and it brings A music with it- 'tis the rush of wingsA pause- and then a sweeping, falling strain And Nesace is in her halls again. From the wild energy of wanton haste Her cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart; And zone that clung around her gentle waist Had burst beneath the heaving of her heart. Within the centre of that hall to breathe, She paused and panted, Zanthe! all beneath, The fairy light that kiss'd her golden hair And long'd to rest, yet could but sparkle there. Young flowers were whispering in melody To happy flowers that night- and tree to tree; Fountains were gushing music as they fell In many a star-lit grove, or moon-lit dell; Yet silence came upon material thingsFair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wingsAnd sound alone that from the spirit sprang Bore burthen to the charm the maiden sang: ''Neath the blue-bell or streamerOr tufted wild spray That keeps, from the dreamer, The moonbeam awayBright beings! that ponder, With half closing eyes, On the stars which your wonder Hath drawn from the skies, 20 Till they glance thro' the shade, and Come down to your brow Like- eyes of the maiden Who calls on you nowArise! from your dreaming In violet bowers, To duty beseeming These star-litten hoursAnd shake from your tresses Encumber'd with dew The breath of those kisses That cumber them too(O! how, without you, Love! Could angels be blest?) Those kisses of true Love That lull'd ye to rest! Up!- shake from your wing Each hindering thing: The dew of the nightIt would weigh down your flight And true love caressesO, leave them apart! They are light on the tresses, But lead on the heart. Ligeia! Ligeia! My beautiful one! Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss? Or, capriciously still, Like the lone Albatros, Incumbent on night (As she on the air) To keep watch with delight On the harmony there? Ligeia! wherever Thy image may be, No magic shall sever Thy music from thee. 21 Thou hast bound many eyes In a dreamy sleepBut the strains still arise Which thy vigilance keepThe sound of the rain, Which leaps down to the flowerAnd dances again In the rhythm of the showerThe murmur that springs From the growing of grass Are the music of thingsBut are modell'd, alas!Away, then, my dearest, Oh! hie thee away To the springs that lie clearest Beneath the moon-rayTo lone lake that smiles, In its dream of deep rest, At the many star-isles That enjewel its breastWhere wild flowers, creeping, Have mingled their shade, On its margin is sleeping Full many a maidSome have left the cool glade, and Have slept with the beeArouse them, my maiden, On moorland and leaGo! breathe on their slumber, All softly in ear, Thy musical number They slumbered to hearFor what can awaken An angel so soon, Whose sleep hath been taken Beneath the cold moon, As the spell which no slumber Of witchery may test, The rhythmical number Which lull'd him to rest?' Spirits in wing, and angels to the view, 22 A thousand seraphs burst th' Empyrean thro', Young dreams still hovering on their drowsy flightSeraphs in all but 'Knowledge,' the keen light That fell, refracted, thro' thy bounds, afar, O Death! from eye of God upon that star: Sweet was that error- sweeter still that deathSweet was that error- even with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joyTo them 'twere the Simoom, and would destroyFor what (to them) availeth it to know That Truth is Falsehood- or that Bliss is Woe? Sweet was their death- with them to die was rife With the last ecstasy of satiate lifeBeyond that death no immortalityBut sleep that pondereth and is not 'to be'!And there- oh! may my weary spirit dwellApart from Heaven's Eternity- and yet how far from Hell! What guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim, Heard not the stirring summons of that hymn? But two: they fell: for Heaven no grace imparts To those who hear not for their beating hearts. A maiden-angel and her seraph-loverO! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over) Was Love, the blind, near sober Duty known? Unguided Love hath fallen- 'mid 'tears of perfect moan.' He was a goodly spirit- he who fell: A wanderer by moss-y-mantled wellA gazer on the lights that shine aboveA dreamer in the moonbeam by his love: What wonder? for each star is eye-like there, And looks so sweetly down on Beauty's hairAnd they, and ev'ry mossy spring were holy To his love-haunted heart and melancholy. The night had found (to him a night of woe) Upon a mountain crag, young AngeloBeetling it bends athwart the solemn sky, And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie. Here sat he with his love- his dark eye bent With eagle gaze along the firmament: Now turn'd it upon her- but ever then It trembled to the orb of EARTH again. 23 'Ianthe, dearest, see- how dim that ray! How lovely 'tis to look so far away! She seem'd not thus upon that autumn eve I left her gorgeous halls- nor mourn'd to leave. That eve- that eve- I should remember wellThe sun-ray dropp'd in Lemnos, with a spell On th' arabesque carving of a gilded hall Wherein I sate, and on the draperied wallAnd on my eyelids- O the heavy light! How drowsily it weigh'd them into night! On flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran With Persian Saadi in his Gulistan: But O that light!- I slumber'd- Death, the while, Stole o'er my senses in that lovely isle So softly that no single silken hair Awoke that slept- or knew that he was there. 'The last spot of Earth's orb I trod upon Was a proud temple call'd the Parthenon; More beauty clung around her column'd wall Than ev'n thy glowing bosom beats withal, And when old Time my wing did disenthral Thence sprang I- as the eagle from his tower, And years I left behind me in an hour. What time upon her airy bounds I hung, One half the garden of her globe was flung Unrolling as a chart unto my viewTenantless cities of the desert too! Ianthe, beauty crowded on me then, And half I wish'd to be again of men.' 'My Angelo! and why of them to be? A brighter dwelling-place is here for theeAnd greener fields than in yon world above, And woman's loveliness- and passionate love.' 'But, list, Ianthe! when the air so soft Fail'd, as my pennon'd spirit leapt aloft, Perhaps my brain grew dizzy- but the world I left so late was into chaos hurl'dSprang from her station, on the winds apart. And roll'd, a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart. 24 Methought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar And fell- not swiftly as I rose before, But with a downward, tremulous motion thro' Light, brazen rays, this golden star unto! Nor long the measure of my falling hours, For nearest of all stars was thine to oursDread star! that came, amid a night of mirth, A red Daedalion on the timid Earth.' 'We came- and to thy Earth- but not to us Be given our lady's bidding to discuss: We came, my love; around, above, below, Gay fire-fly of the night we come and go, Nor ask a reason save the angel-nod She grants to us, as granted by her GodBut, Angelo, than thine grey Time unfurl'd Never his fairy wing O'er fairier world! Dim was its little disk, and angel eyes Alone could see the phantom in the skies, When first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be Headlong thitherward o'er the starry seaBut when its glory swell'd upon the sky, As glowing Beauty's bust beneath man's eye, We paused before the heritage of men, And thy star trembled- as doth Beauty then!' Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away The night that waned and waned and brought no day. They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts Who hear not for the beating of their hearts. ~ Edgar Allan Poe,

691:The Deserted Garden I know a village in a far-off land Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain With tinted walls a space on either hand And fed by many an olive-darkened lane The high-road mounts, and thence a silver band Through vineyard slopes above and rolling grain, Winds off to that dim corner of the skies Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies. Here, among trees whose overhanging shade Strews petals on the little droves below, Pattering townward in the morning weighed With greens from many an upland garden-row, Runs an old wall; long centuries have frayed Its scalloped edge, and passers to and fro Heard never from beyond its crumbling height Sweet laughter ring at noon or plaintive song at night. But here where little lizards bask and blink The tendrils of the trumpet-vine have run, At whose red bells the humming bird to drink Stops oft before his garden feast is done; And rose-geraniums, with that tender pink That cloud-banks borrow from the setting sun, Have covered part of this old wall, entwined With fair plumbago, blue as evening heavens behind. And crowning other parts the wild white rose Rivals the honey-suckle with the bees. Above the old abandoned orchard shows And all within beneath the dense-set trees, Tall and luxuriant the rank grass grows, That settled in its wavy depth one sees Grass melt in leaves, the mossy trunks between, Down fading avenues of implicated green; Wherein no lack of flowers the verdurous night With stars and pearly nebula o'erlay; Azalea-boughs half rosy and half white 94 Shine through the green and clustering apple-spray, Such as the fairy-queen before her knight Waved in old story, luring him away Where round lost isles Hesperian billows break Or towers loom up beneath the clear, translucent lake; And under the deep grass blue hare-bells hide, And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet, Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied, Sometime on pathway borders neatly set, Now blossom through the brake on either side, Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette, With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees, Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze, That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave In some blue rampart of the curving West, Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave, Ravels the cloud about the mountain crest, Breathes on the lake till gentle ripples pave Its placid floor; at length a long-loved guest, He steals across this plot of pleasant ground, Waking the vocal leaves to a sweet vernal sound. Here many a day right gladly have I sped, Content amid the wavy plumes to lie, And through the woven branches overhead Watch the white, ever-wandering clouds go by, And soaring birds make their dissolving bed Far in the azure depths of summer sky, Or nearer that small huntsman of the air, The fly-catcher, dart nimbly from his leafy lair; Pillowed at case to hear the merry tune Of mating warblers in the boughs above And shrill cicadas whom the hottest noon Keeps not from drowsy song; the mourning dove Pours down the murmuring grove his plaintive croon That like the voice of visionary love Oft have I risen to seek through this green maze (Even as my feet thread now the great world's garden-ways); 95 And, parting tangled bushes as I passed Down beechen allies beautiful and dim, Perhaps by some deep-shaded pool at last My feet would pause, where goldfish poise and swim, And snowy callas' velvet cups are massed Around the mossy, fern-encircled brim. Here, then, that magic summoning would cease, Or sound far off again among the orchard trees. And here where the blanched lilies of the vale And violets and yellow star-flowers teem, And pink and purple hyacinths exhale Their heavy fume, once more to drowse and dream My head would sink, from many an olden tale Drawing imagination's fervid theme, Or haply peopling this enchanting spot Only with fair creations of fantastic thought. For oft I think, in years long since gone by, That gentle hearts dwelt here and gentle hands Stored all this bowery bliss to beautify The paradise of some unsung romance; Here, safe from all except the loved one's eye, 'Tis sweet to think white limbs were wont to glance, Well pleased to wanton like the flowers and share Their simple loveliness with the enamored air. Thrice dear to them whose votive fingers decked The altars of First Love were these green ways, These lawns and verdurous brakes forever flecked With the warm sunshine of midsummer days; Oft where the long straight allies intersect And marble seats surround the open space, Where a tiled pool and sculptured fountain stand, Hath Evening found them seated, silent, hand in hand. When twilight deepened, in the gathering shade Beneath that old titanic cypress row, Whose sombre vault and towering colonnade Dwarfed the enfolded forms that moved below, Oft with close steps these happy lovers strayed, Till down its darkening aisle the sunset glow 96 Grew less and patterning the garden floor Faint flakes of filtering moonlight mantled more and more. And the strange tempest that a touch imparts Through the mid fibre of the molten frame, When the sweet flesh in early youth asserts Its heyday verve and little hints enflame, Disturbed them as they walked; from their full hearts Welled the soft word, and many a tender name Strove on their lips as breast to breast they strained And the deep joy they drank seemed never, never drained. Love's soul that is the depth of starry skies Set in the splendor of one upturned face To beam adorably through half-closed eyes; Love's body where the breadth of summer days And all the beauty earth and air comprise Come to the compass of an arm's embrace, To burn a moment on impassioned lips And yield intemperate joy to quivering finger-tips, They knew; and here where morning-glories cling Round carven forms of carefullest artifice, They made a bower where every outward thing Should comment on the cause of their own bliss; With flowers of liveliest hue encompassing That flower that the beloved body is That rose that for the banquet of Love's bee Has budded all the æons of past eternity. But their choice seat was where the garden wall, Crowning a little summit, far and near, Looks over tufted treetops onto all The pleasant outer country; rising here From rustling foliage where cuckoos call On summer evenings, stands a belvedere, Buff-hued, of antique plaster, overrun With flowering vines and weatherworn by rain and sun. Still round the turrets of this antique tower The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown, Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower, 97 Wreathing the lower surface further down, Hide the old plaster in a very shower Of motley blossoms like a broidered gown. Outside, ascending from the garden grove, A crumbling stairway winds to the one room above. And whoso mounts by this dismantled stair Finds the old pleasure-hall, long disarrayed, Brick-tiled and raftered, and the walls foursquare Ringed all about with a twofold arcade. Backward dense branches intercept the glare Of afternoon with eucalyptus shade; Eastward the level valley-plains expand, Sweet as a queen's survey of her own Fairyland. For through that frame the ivied arches make, Wide tracts of sunny midland charm the eye, Frequent with hamlet grove, and lucent lake Where the blue hills' inverted contours lie; Far to the east where billowy mountains break In surf of snow against a sapphire sky, Huge thunderheads loom up behind the ranges, Changing from gold to pink as deepening sunset changes; And over plain and far sierra spread The fulgent rays of fading afternoon, Showing each utmost peak and watershed All clarified, each tassel and festoon Of floating cloud embroidered overhead, Like lotus-leaves on bluest waters strewn, Flushing with rose, while all breathes fresh and free In peace and amplitude and bland tranquillity. Dear were such evenings to this gentle pair; Love's tide that launched on with a blast too strong Sweeps toward the foaming reef, the hidden snare, Baffling with fond illusion's siren-song, Too faint, on idle shoals, to linger there Far from Youth's glowing dream, bore them along, With purple sail and steered by seraph hands To isles resplendent in the sunset of romance. 98 And out of this old house a flowery fane, A bridal bower, a pearly pleasure-dome, They built, and furnished it with gold and grain, And bade all spirits of beauty hither come, And wingéd Love to enter with his train And bless their pillow, and in this his home Make them his priests as Hero was of yore In her sweet girlhood by the blue Dardanian shore. Tree-ferns, therefore, and potted palms they brought, Tripods and urns in rare and curious taste, Polychrome chests and cabinets inwrought With pearl and ivory etched and interlaced; Pendant brocades with massive braid were caught, And chain-slung, oriental lamps so placed To light the lounger on some low divan, Sunken in swelling down and silks from Hindustan. And there was spread, upon the ample floors, Work of the Levantine's laborious loom, Such as by Euxine or Ionian shores Carpets the dim seraglio's scented gloom. Each morn renewed, the garden's flowery stores Blushed in fair vases, ochre and peach-bloom, And little birds through wicker doors left wide Flew in to trill a space from the green world outside. And there was many a dainty attitude, Bronze and eburnean. All but disarrayed, Here in eternal doubt sweet Psyche stood Fain of the bath's delight, yet still afraid Lest aught in that palatial solitude Lurked of most menace to a helpless maid. Therefore forever faltering she stands, Nor yet the last loose fold slips rippling from her hands. Close by upon a beryl column, clad In the fresh flower of adolescent grace, They set the dear Bithynian shepherd lad, The nude Antinous. That gentle face, Forever beautiful, forever sad, Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze, 99 Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile. And there were shapes of Beauty myriads more, Clustering their rosy bridal bed around, Whose scented breadth a silken fabric wore Broidered with peacock hues on creamiest ground, Fit to have graced the barge that Cydnus bore Or Venus' bed in her enchanted mound, While pillows swelled in stuffs of Orient dyes, All broidered with strange fruits and birds of Paradise. 'Twas such a bower as Youth has visions of, Thither with one fair spirit to retire, Lie upon rose-leaves, sleep and wake with Love And feast on kisses to the heart's desire; Where by a casement opening on a grove, Wide to the wood-winds and the sweet birds' choir, A girl might stand and gaze into green boughs, Like Credhe at the window of her golden house. Or most like Vivien, the enchanting fay, Where with her friend, in the strange tower they planned, She lies and dreams eternity away, Above the treetops in Broceliande, Sometimes at twilight when the woods are gray And wolf-packs howl far out across the lande, Waking to love, while up behind the trees The large midsummer moon lifts-even so loved these. For here, their pleasure was to come and sit Oft when the sun sloped midway to the west, Watching with sweet enjoyment interknit The long light slant across the green earth's breast, And clouds upon the ranges opposite, Rolled up into a gleaming thundercrest, Topple and break and fall in purple rain, And mist of summer showers trail out across the plain. Whereon the shafts of ardent light, far-flung Across the luminous azure overhead, Ofttimes in arcs of transient beauty hung 100 The fragmentary rainbow's green and red. Joy it was here to love and to be young, To watch the sun sink to his western bed, And streaming back out of their flaming core The vesperal aurora's glorious banners soar. Tinging each altitude of heaven in turn, Those fiery rays would sweep. The cumuli That peeped above the mountain-tops would burn Carmine a space; the cirrus-whorls on high, More delicate than sprays of maiden fern, Streak with pale rose the peacock-breasted sky, Then blanch. As water-lilies fold at night, Sank back into themselves those plumes of fervid light. And they would watch the first faint stars appear, The blue East blend with the blue hills below, As lovers when their shuddering bliss draws near Into one pulse of fluid rapture grow. New fragrance on the freshening atmosphere Would steal with evening, and the sunset glow Draw deeper down into the wondrous west Round vales of Proserpine and islands of the blest. So dusk would come and mingle lake and shore, The snow-peaks fade to frosty, opaline, To pearl the doméd clouds the mountains bore, Where late the sun's effulgent fire had been Showing as darkness deepened more and more The incandescent lightnings flare within, And Night that furls the lily in the glen And twines impatient arms would fall, and then---and then . . . Sometimes the peasant, coming late from town With empty panniers on his little drove Past the old lookout when the Northern Crown Glittered with Cygnus through the scented grove, Would hear soft noise of lute-strings wafted down And voices singing through the leaves above Those songs that well from the warm heart that woos At balconies in Merida or Vera Cruz. 101 And he would pause under the garden wall, Caught in the spell of that voluptuous strain, With all the sultry South in it, and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again. Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come. O lyre that Love's white holy hands caress, Youth, from thy bosom welled their passionate lays Sweet opportunity for happiness So brief, so passing beautiful---O days, When to the heart's divine indulgences All earth in smiling ministration pays Thine was the source whose plenitude, past over, What prize shall rest to pluck, what secret to discover! The wake of color that follows her when May Walks on the hills loose-haired and daisy-crowned, The deep horizons of a summer's day, Fair cities, and the pleasures that abound Where music calls, and crowds in bright array Gather by night to find and to be found; What were these worth or all delightful things Without thine eyes to read their true interpretings! For thee the mountains open glorious gates, To thee white arms put out from orient skies, Earth, like a jewelled bride for one she waits, Decks but to be delicious in thine eyes, Thou guest of honor for one day, whose fêtes Eternity has travailed to devise; Ah, grace them well in the brief hour they last! Another's turn prepares, another follows fast. Yet not without one fond memorial Let my sun set who found the world so fair! Frail verse, when Time the singer's coronal Has rent, and stripped the rose-leaves from his hair, Be thou my tablet on the temple wall! Among the pious testimonials there, 102 Witness how sweetly on my heart as well The miracles of dawn and starry evening fell! Speak of one then who had the lust to feel, And, from the hues that far horizons take, And cloud and sunset, drank the wild appeal, Too deep to live for aught but life's sweet sake, Whose only motive was the will to kneel Where Beauty's purest benediction spake, Who only coveted what grove and field And sunshine and green Earth and tender arms could yield--A nympholept, through pleasant days and drear Seeking his faultless adolescent dream, A pilgrim down the paths that disappear In mist and rainbows on the world's extreme, A helpless voyager who all too near The mouth of Life's fair flower-bordered stream, Clutched at Love's single respite in his need More than the drowning swimmer clutches at a reed--That coming one whose feet in other days Shall bleed like mine for ever having, more Than any purpose, felt the need to praise And seek the angelic image to adore, In love with Love, its wonderful, sweet ways Counting what most makes life worth living for, That so some relic may be his to see How I loved these things too and they were dear to me. I sometimes think a conscious happiness Mantles through all the rose's sentient vine When summer winds with myriad calyces Of bloom its clambering height incarnadine; I sometimes think that cleaving lips, no less, And limbs that crowned desires at length entwine Are nerves through which that being drinks delight, Whose frame is the green Earth robed round with day and night. And such were theirs: the traveller without, Pausing at night under the orchard trees, Wondered and crossed himself in holy doubt, 103 For through their song and in the murmuring breeze It seemed angelic choirs were all about Mingling in universal harmonies, As though, responsive to the chords they woke, All Nature into sweet epithalamium broke. And still they think a spirit haunts the place: 'Tis said, when Night has drawn her jewelled pall And through the branches twinkling fireflies trace Their mimic constellations, if it fall That one should see the moon rise through the lace Of blossomy boughs above the garden wall, That surely would he take great ill thereof And famish in a fit of unexpressive love. But this I know not, for what time the wain Was loosened and the lily's petal furled, Then I would rise, climb the old wall again, And pausing look forth on the sundown world, Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain, The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled, The poplar-bordered roads, and far away Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray. Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar Faint song and preludes of the summer night; Deep in the cloudless west the evening star Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light; From the dark vale where shades crepuscular Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white, Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell, Came the sweet invocation of the evening bell. ~ Alan Seeger,

692:Upon a time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, Before King Oberon's bright diadem, Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem, Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns, The ever-smitten Hermes empty left His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft: From high Olympus had he stolen light, On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight Of his great summoner, and made retreat Into a forest on the shores of Crete. For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt; At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured Pearls, while on land they witherd and adored. Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont, And in those meads where sometime she might haunt, Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse, Though Fancys casket were unlockd to choose. Ah, what a world of love was at her feet! So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat Burnt from his winged heels to either ear, That from a whiteness, as the lily clear, Blushd into roses mid his golden hair, Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare. From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew, Breathing upon the flowers his passion new, And wound with many a river to its head, To find where this sweet nymph prepard her secret bed: In vain; the sweet nymph might nowhere be found, And so he rested, on the lonely ground, Pensive, and full of painful jealousies Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees. There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice, Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake: When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake! When move in a sweet body fit for life, And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me! The God, dove-footed, glided silently Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed, The taller grasses and full-flowering weed, Until he found a palpitating snake, Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake. She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barrd; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolvd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries So rainbow-sided, touchd with miseries, She seemd, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demons mistress, or the demons self. Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadnes tiar: Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a womans mouth with all its pearls complete: And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair? As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air. Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake Came, as through bubbling honey, for Loves sake, And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay, Like a stoopd falcon ere he takes his prey. Fair Hermes, crownd with feathers, fluttering light, I had a splendid dream of thee last night: I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold, Among the Gods, upon Olympus old, The only sad one; for thou didst not hear The soft, lute-fingerd Muses chaunting clear, Nor even Apollo when he sang alone, Deaf to his throbbing throats long, long melodious moan. I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes, Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks, And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart, Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art! Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid? Whereat the star of Lethe not delayd His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired: Thou smooth-lippd serpent, surely high inspired! Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise, Telling me only where my nymph is fled, Where she doth breathe! Bright planet, thou hast said, Returnd the snake, but seal with oaths, fair God! I swear, said Hermes, by my serpent rod, And by thine eyes, and by thy starry crown! Light flew his earnest words, among the blossoms blown. Then thus again the brilliance feminine: Too frail of heart! for this lost nymph of thine, Free as the air, invisibly, she strays About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet; From weary tendrils, and bowd branches green, She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: And by my power is her beauty veild To keep it unaffronted, unassaild By the love-glances of unlovely eyes, Of Satyrs, Fauns, and bleard Silenus sighs. Pale grew her immortality, for woe Of all these lovers, and she grieved so I took compassion on her, bade her steep Her hair in weird syrops, that would keep Her loveliness invisible, yet free To wander as she loves, in liberty. Thou shalt behold her, Hermes, thou alone, If thou wilt, as thou swearest, grant my boon! Then, once again, the charmed God began An oath, and through the serpents ears it ran Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian. Ravishd, she lifted her Circean head, Blushd a live damask, and swift-lisping said, I was a woman, let me have once more A womans shape, and charming as before. I love a youth of CorinthO the bliss! Give me my womans form, and place me where he is. Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow, And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now. The God on half-shut feathers sank serene, She breathd upon his eyes, and swift was seen Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green. It was no dream; or say a dream it was, Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. One warm, flushd moment, hovering, it might seem Dashd by the wood-nymphs beauty, so he burnd; Then, lighting on the printless verdure, turnd To the swoond serpent, and with languid arm, Delicate, put to proof the lythe Caducean charm. So done, upon the nymph his eyes he bent, Full of adoring tears and blandishment, And towards her stept: she, like a moon in wane, Faded before him, cowerd, nor could restrain Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower That faints into itself at evening hour: But the God fostering her chilled hand, She felt the warmth, her eyelids opend bland, And, like new flowers at morning song of bees, Bloomd, and gave up her honey to the lees. Into the green-recessed woods they flew; Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do. Left to herself, the serpent now began To change; her elfin blood in madness ran, Her mouth foamd, and the grass, therewith besprent, Witherd at dew so sweet and virulent; Her eyes in torture fixd, and anguish drear, Hot, glazd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flashd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colours all inflamd throughout her train, She writhd about, convulsd with scarlet pain: A deep volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder-mooned bodys grace; And, as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars, Eclipsd her crescents, and lickd up her stars: So that, in moments few, she was undrest Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst, And rubious-argent: of all these bereft, Nothing but pain and ugliness were left. Still shone her crown; that vanishd, also she Melted and disappeard as suddenly; And in the air, her new voice luting soft, Cried, Lycius! gentle Lycius!Borne aloft With the bright mists about the mountains hoar These words dissolvd: Cretes forests heard no more. Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright, A full-born beauty new and exquisite? She fled into that valley they pass oer Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas shore; And rested at the foot of those wild hills, The rugged founts of the Peraean rills, And of that other ridge whose barren back Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, South-westward to Cleone. There she stood About a young birds flutter from a wood, Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, By a clear pool, wherein she passioned To see herself escapd from so sore ills, While her robes flaunted with the daffodils. Ah, happy Lycius!for she was a maid More beautiful than ever twisted braid, Or sighd, or blushd, or on spring-flowered lea Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy: A virgin purest lippd, yet in the lore Of love deep learned to the red hearts core: Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain; Define their pettish limits, and estrange Their points of contact, and swift counterchange; Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art; As though in Cupids college she had spent Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent, And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment. Why this fair creature chose so fairily By the wayside to linger, we shall see; But first tis fit to tell how she could muse And dream, when in the serpent prison-house, Of all she list, strange or magnificent: How, ever, where she willd, her spirit went; Whether to faint Elysium, or where Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair Wind into Thetis bower by many a pearly stair; Or where God Bacchus drains his cups divine, Stretchd out, at ease, beneath a glutinous pine; Or where in Plutos gardens palatine Mulcibers columns gleam in far piazzian line. And sometimes into cities she would send Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend; And once, while among mortals dreaming thus, She saw the young Corinthian Lycius Charioting foremost in the envious race, Like a young Jove with calm uneager face, And fell into a swooning love of him. Now on the moth-time of that evening dim He would return that way, as well she knew, To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew The eastern soft wind, and his galley now Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle Fresh anchord; whither he had been awhile To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare. Jove heard his vows, and betterd his desire; For by some freakful chance he made retire From his companions, and set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk: Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eves star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calmd twilight of Platonic shades. Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green; So neighbourd to him, and yet so unseen She stood: he passd, shut up in mysteries, His mind wrappd like his mantle, while her eyes Followd his steps, and her neck regal white Turndsyllabling thus, Ah, Lycius bright, And will you leave me on the hills alone? Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown. He did; not with cold wonder fearingly, But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice; For so delicious were the words she sung, It seemd he had lovd them a whole summer long: And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, And still the cup was full,while he afraid Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid Due adoration, thus began to adore; Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure: Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! For pity do not this sad heart belie Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, Alone they can drink up the morning rain: Though a descended Pleiad, will not one Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine? So sweetly to these ravishd ears of mine Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade Thy memory will waste me to a shade: For pity do not melt!If I should stay, Said Lamia, here, upon this floor of clay, And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough, What canst thou say or do of charm enough To dull the nice remembrance of my home? Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam Over these hills and vales, where no joy is, Empty of immortality and bliss! Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know That finer spirits cannot breathe below In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth, What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe My essence? What serener palaces, Where I may all my many senses please, And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease? It cannot beAdieu! So said, she rose Tiptoe with white arms spread. He, sick to lose The amorous promise of her lone complain, Swoond, murmuring of love, and pale with pain. The cruel lady, without any show Of sorrow for her tender favourites woe, But rather, if her eyes could brighter be, With brighter eyes and slow amenity, Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh The life she had so tangled in her mesh: And as he from one trance was wakening Into another, she began to sing, Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing, A song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres, While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting fires And then she whisperd in such trembling tone, As those who, safe together met alone For the first time through many anguishd days, Use other speech than looks; bidding him raise His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt, For that she was a woman, and without Any more subtle fluid in her veins Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his. And next she wonderd how his eyes could miss Her face so long in Corinth, where, she said, She dwelt but half retird, and there had led Days happy as the gold coin could invent Without the aid of love; yet in content Till she saw him, as once she passd him by, Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully At Venus temple porch, mid baskets heapd Of amorous herbs and flowers, newly reapd Late on that eve, as twas the night before The Adonian feast; whereof she saw no more, But wept alone those days, for why should she adore? Lycius from death awoke into amaze, To see her still, and singing so sweet lays; Then from amaze into delight he fell To hear her whisper womans lore so well; And every word she spake enticd him on To unperplexd delight and pleasure known. Let the mad poets say whateer they please Of the sweets of Fairies, Peris, Goddesses, There is not such a treat among them all, Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall, As a real woman, lineal indeed From Pyrrhas pebbles or old Adams seed. Thus gentle Lamia judgd, and judgd aright, That Lycius could not love in half a fright, So threw the goddess off, and won his heart More pleasantly by playing womans part, With no more awe than what her beauty gave, That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save. Lycius to all made eloquent reply, Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh; And last, pointing to Corinth, askd her sweet, If twas too far that night for her soft feet. The way was short, for Lamias eagerness Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease To a few paces; not at all surmised By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized. They passd the city gates, he knew not how So noiseless, and he never thought to know. As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, Throughout her palaces imperial, And all her populous streets and temples lewd, Mutterd, like tempest in the distance brewd, To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, Shuffled their sandals oer the pavement white, Companiond or alone; while many a light Flared, here and there, from wealthy festivals, And threw their moving shadows on the walls, Or found them clusterd in the corniced shade Of some archd temple door, or dusky colonnade. Muffling his face, of greeting friends in fear, Her fingers he pressd hard, as one came near With curld gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown, Slow-steppd, and robed in philosophic gown: Lycius shrank closer, as they met and past, Into his mantle, adding wings to haste, While hurried Lamia trembled: Ah, said he, Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully? Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew? Im wearied, said fair Lamia: tell me who Is that old man? I cannot bring to mind His features:Lycius! wherefore did you blind Yourself from his quick eyes? Lycius replied, Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide And good instructor; but to-night he seems The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams. While yet he spake they had arrived before A pillar'd porch, with lofty portal door, Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow Reflected in the slabbed steps below, Mild as a star in water; for so new, And so unsullied was the marble hue, So through the crystal polish, liquid fine, Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine Could e'er have touch'd there. Sounds Aeolian Breath'd from the hinges, as the ample span Of the wide doors disclos'd a place unknown Some time to any, but those two alone, And a few Persian mutes, who that same year Were seen about the markets: none knew where They could inhabit; the most curious Were foil'd, who watch'd to trace them to their house: And but the flitter-winged verse must tell, For truth's sake, what woe afterwards befel, 'Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus, Shut from the busy world of more incredulous. (line 48): Originally, "Cerulean-spotted." Leigh Hunt says of this passage, "The admiration, pity, and horror, to be excited by humanity in a brute shape, were never perhaps called upon by a greater mixture of beauty and deformity than in the picture of this creature. Our pity and suspicions are begged by the first word: the profuse and vital beauties with which she is covered seem proportioned to her misery and natural rights; and lest we should lose sight of them in this gorgeousness, the 'woman's mouth' fills us at once with shuddering and compassion." (line 158): The manuscript reads "vulcanian," the first edition "volcanian." It seems to me more likely that the manuscript accords with the poet's intention than that printed text does, for this old orthography is the more characteristic of the vocabulary of this particular poem, as introducing the more conspicuously the mythic personal origin of the common noun "volcano" or "vulcano." ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes ~ John Keats, Lamia. Part I ,

693:How gracefully, O man, with thy palm-bough, Upon the waning century standest thou, In proud and noble manhood's prime, With unlocked senses, with a spirit freed, Of firmness mild,though silent, rich in deed, The ripest son of Time, Through meekness great, through precepts strong, Through treasures rich, that time had long Hid in thy bosom, and through reason free, Master of Nature, who thy fetters loves, And who thy strength in thousand conflicts proves, And from the desert soared in pride with thee! Flushed with the glow of victory, Never forget to prize the hand That found the weeping orphan child Deserted on life's barren strand, And left a prey to hazard wild, That, ere thy spirit-honor saw the day, Thy youthful heart watched over silently, And from thy tender bosom turned away Each thought that might have stained its purity; That kind one ne'er forget who, as in sport, Thy youth to noble aspirations trained, And who to thee in easy riddles taught The secret how each virtue might be gained; Who, to receive him back more perfect still, E'en into strangers' arms her favorite gave Oh, may'st thou never with degenerate will, Humble thyself to be her abject slave! In industry, the bee the palm may bear; In skill, the worm a lesson may impart; With spirits blest thy knowledge thou dost share, But thou, O man, alone hast art! Only through beauty's morning gate Didst thou the land of knowledge find. To merit a more glorious fate, In graces trains itself the mind. What thrilled thee through with trembling blessed, When erst the Muses swept the chord, That power created in thy breast, Which to the mighty spirit soared. When first was seen by doting reason's ken, When many a thousand years had passed away, A symbol of the fair and great e'en then, Before the childlike mind uncovered lay. Its blessed form bade us honor virtue's cause, The honest sense 'gainst vice put forth its powers, Before a Solon had devised the laws That slowly bring to light their languid flowers. Before Eternity's vast scheme Was to the thinker's mind revealed, Was't not foreshadowed in his dream, Whose eyes explored yon starry field? Urania,the majestic dreaded one, Who wears a glory of Orions twined Around her brow, and who is seen by none Save purest spirits, when, in splendor shrined, She soars above the stars in pride, Ascending to her sunny throne, Her fiery chaplet lays aside, And now, as beauty, stands alone; While, with the Graces' girdle round her cast, She seems a child, by children understood; For we shall recognize as truth at last, What here as beauty only we have viewed. When the Creator banished from his sight Frail man to dark mortality's abode, And granted him a late return to light, Only by treading reason's arduous road, When each immortal turned his face away, She, the compassionate, alone Took up her dwelling in that house of clay, With the deserted, banished one. With drooping wing she hovers here Around her darling, near the senses' land, And on his prison-walls so drear Elysium paints with fond deceptive hand. While soft humanity still lay at rest, Within her tender arms extended, No flame was stirred by bigots' murderous zest, No guiltless blood on high ascended. The heart that she in gentle fetters binds, Views duty's slavish escort scornfully; Her path of light, though fairer far it winds, Sinks in the sun-track of morality. Those who in her chaste service still remain, No grovelling thought can tempt, no fate affright; The spiritual life, so free from stain, Freedom's sweet birthright, they receive again, Under the mystic sway of holy might. The purest among millions, happy they Whom to her service she has sanctified, Whose mouths the mighty one's commands convey, Within whose breasts she deigneth to abide; Whom she ordained to feed her holy fire Upon her altar's ever-flaming pyre, Whose eyes alone her unveiled graces meet, And whom she gathers round in union sweet In the much-honored place be glad Where noble order bade ye climb, For in the spirit-world sublime, Man's loftiest rank ye've ever had! Ere to the world proportion ye revealed, That every being joyfully obeys, A boundless structure, in night's veil concealed, Illumed by naught but faint and languid rays, A band of phantoms, struggling ceaselessly, Holding his mind in slavish fetters bound, Unsociable and rude as be, Assailing him on every side around, Thus seemed to man creation in that day! United to surrounding forms alone By the blind chains the passions had put on, Whilst Nature's beauteous spirit fled away Unfelt, untasted, and unknown. And, as it hovered o'er with parting ray, Ye seized the shades so neighborly, With silent hand, with feeling mind, And taught how they might be combined In one firm bond of harmony. The gaze, light-soaring, felt uplifted then, When first the cedar's slender trunk it viewed; And pleasingly the ocean's crystal flood Reflected back the dancing form again. Could ye mistake the look, with beauty fraught, That Nature gave to help ye on your way? The image floating on the billows taught The art the fleeting shadow to portray. From her own being torn apart, Her phantom, beauteous as a dream, She plunged into the silvery stream, Surrendering to her spoiler's art. Creative power soon in your breast unfolded; Too noble far, not idly to conceive, The shadow's form in sand, in clay ye moulded, And made it in the sketch its being leave. The longing thirst for action then awoke, And from your breast the first creation broke. By contemplation captive made, Ensnared by your discerning eye, The friendly phantom's soon betrayed The talisman that roused your ecstasy. The laws of wonder-working might, The stores by beauty brought to light, Inventive reason in soft union planned To blend together 'neath your forming hand. The obelisk, the pyramid ascended, The Hermes stood, the column sprang on high, The reed poured forth the woodland melody, Immortal song on victor's deeds attended. The fairest flowers that decked the earth, Into a nosegay, with wise choice combined, Thus the first art from Nature had its birth; Into a garland then were nosegays twined, And from the works that mortal hands had made, A second, nobler art was now displayed. The child of beauty, self-sufficient now, That issued from your hands to perfect day, Loses the chaplet that adorned its brow, Soon as reality asserts its sway. The column, yielding to proportion's chains, Must with its sisters join in friendly link, The hero in the hero-band must sink, The Muses' harp peals forth its tuneful strains. The wondering savages soon came To view the new creation's plan "Behold!"the joyous crowds exclaim, "Behold, all this is done by man!" With jocund and more social aim The minstrel's lyre their awe awoke, Telling of Titans, and of giant's frays And lion-slayers, turning, as he spoke, Even into heroes those who heard his lays. For the first time the soul feels joy, By raptures blessed that calmer are, That only greet it from afar, That passions wild can ne'er destroy, And that, when tasted, do not cloy. And now the spirit, free and fair, Awoke from out its sensual sleep; By you unchained, the slave of care Into the arms of joy could leap. Each brutish barrier soon was set at naught, Humanity first graced the cloudless brow, And the majestic, noble stranger, thought, From out the wondering brain sprang boldly now. Man in his glory stood upright, And showed the stars his kingly face; His speaking glance the sun's bright light Blessed in the realms sublime of space. Upon the cheek now bloomed the smile, The voice's soulful harmony Expanded into song the while, And feeling swam in the moist eye; And from the mouth, with spirit teeming o'er, Jest, sweetly linked with grace, began to pour. Sunk in the instincts of the worm, By naught but sensual lust possessed, Ye recognized within his breast Love-spiritual's noble germ; And that this germ of love so blest Escaped the senses' abject load, To the first pastoral song he owed. Raised to the dignity of thought, Passions more calm to flow were taught From the bard's mouth with melody. The cheeks with dewy softness burned; The longing that, though quenched, still yearned, Proclaimed the spirit-harmony. The wisest's wisdom, and the strongest's vigor, The meekest's meekness, and the noblest's grace, By you were knit together in one figure, Wreathing a radiant glory round the place. Man at the Unknown's sight must tremble, Yet its refulgence needs must love; That mighty Being to resemble, Each glorious hero madly strove; The prototype of beauty's earliest strain Ye made resound through Nature's wide domain. The passions' wild and headlong course, The ever-varying plan of fate, Duty and instinct's twofold force, With proving mind and guidance straight Ye then conducted to their ends. What Nature, as she moves along, Far from each other ever rends, Become upon the stage, in song, Members of order, firmly bound. Awed by the Furies' chorus dread, Murder draws down upon its head The doom of death from their wild sound. Long e'er the wise to give a verdict dared, An Iliad had fate's mysteries declared To early ages from afar; While Providence in silence fared Into the world from Thespis' car. Yet into that world's current so sublime Your symmetry was borne before its time, When the dark hand of destiny Failed in your sight to part by force. What it had fashioned 'neath your eye, In darkness life made haste to die, Ere it fulfilled its beauteous course. Then ye with bold and self-sufficient might Led the arch further through the future's night: Then, too, ye plunged, without a fear, Into Avernus' ocean black, And found the vanished life so dear Beyond the urn, and brought it back. A blooming Pollux-form appeared now soon, On Castor leaning, and enshrined in light The shadow that is seen upon the moon, Ere she has filled her silvery circle bright! Yet higher,higher still above the earth Inventive genius never ceased to rise: Creations from creations had their birth, And harmonies from harmonies. What here alone enchants the ravished sight, A nobler beauty yonder must obey; The graceful charms that in the nymph unite, In the divine Athene melt away; The strength with which the wrestler is endowed, In the god's beauty we no longer find: The wonder of his timeJove's image proud In the Olympian temple is enshrined. The world, transformed by industry's bold hand, The human heart, by new-born instincts moved, That have in burning fights been fully proved, Your circle of creation now expand. Advancing man bears on his soaring pinions, In gratitude, art with him in his flight, And out of Nature's now-enriched dominions New worlds of beauty issue forth to light. The barriers upon knowledge are o'erthrown; The spirit that, with pleasure soon matured, Has in your easy triumphs been inured To hasten through an artist-whole of graces, Nature's more distant columns duly places. And overtakes her on her pathway lone. He weighs her now with weights that human are, Metes her with measures that she lent of old; While in her beauty's rites more practised far, She now must let his eye her form behold. With youthful and self-pleasing bliss, He lends the spheres his harmony, And, if he praise earth's edifice, 'Tis for its wondrous symmetry. In all that now around him breathes, Proportion sweet is ever rife; And beauty's golden girdle wreathes With mildness round his path through life; Perfection blest, triumphantly, Before him in your works soars high; Wherever boisterous rapture swells, Wherever silent sorrow flees, Where pensive contemplation dwells, Where he the tears of anguish sees, Where thousand terrors on him glare, Harmonious streams are yet behind He sees the Graces sporting there, With feeling silent and refined. Gentle as beauty's lines together linking, As the appearances that round him play, In tender outline in each other sinking, The soft breath of his life thus fleets away. His spirit melts in the harmonious sea, That, rich in rapture, round his senses flows, And the dissolving thought all silently To omnipresent Cytherea grows. Joining in lofty union with the Fates, On Graces and on Muses calm relying, With freely-offered bosom he awaits The shaft that soon against him will be flying From the soft bow necessity creates. Favorites beloved of blissful harmony, Welcome attendants on life's dreary road, The noblest and the dearest far that she, Who gave us life, to bless that life bestowed! That unyoked man his duties bears in mind, And loves the fetters that his motions bind, That Chance with brazen sceptre rules him not, For this eternity is now your lot, Your heart has won a bright reward for this. That round the cup where freedom flows, Merrily sport the gods of bliss, The beauteous dream its fragrance throws, For this, receive a loving kiss! The spirit, glorious and serene, Who round necessity the graces trains, Who bids his ether and his starry plains Upon us wait with pleasing mien, Who, 'mid his terrors, by his majesty gives joy, And who is beauteous e'en when seeking to destroy, Him imitate, the artist good! As o'er the streamlet's crystal flood The banks with checkered dances hover, The flowery mead, the sunset's light, Thus gleams, life's barren pathway over, Poesy's shadowy world so bright. In bridal dress ye led us on Before the terrible Unknown, Before the inexorable fate, As in your urns the bones are laid, With beauteous magic veil ye shade The chorus dread that cares create. Thousands of years I hastened through The boundless realm of vanished time How sad it seems when left by you But where ye linger, how sublime! She who, with fleeting wing, of yore From your creating hand arose in might, Within your arms was found once more, When, vanquished by Time's silent flight, Life's blossoms faded from the cheek, And from the limbs all vigor went, And mournfully, with footstep weak, Upon his staff the gray-beard leant. Then gave ye to the languishing, Life's waters from a new-born spring; Twice was the youth of time renewed, Twice, from the seeds that ye had strewed. When chased by fierce barbarian hordes away, The last remaining votive brand ye tore From Orient's altars, now pollution's prey, And to these western lands in safety bore. The fugitive from yonder eastern shore, The youthful day, the West her dwelling made; And on Hesperia's plains sprang up once more Ionia's flowers, in pristine bloom arrayed. Over the spirit fairer Nature shed, With soft refulgence, a reflection bright, And through the graceful soul with stately tread Advanced the mighty Deity of light. Millions of chains were burst asunder then, And to the slave then human laws applied, And mildly rose the younger race of men, As brethren, gently wandering side by side, With noble inward ecstasy, The bliss imparted ye receive, And in the veil of modesty, With silent merit take your leave. If on the paths of thought, so freely given, The searcher now with daring fortune stands, And, by triumphant Paeans onward driven, Would seize upon the crown with dauntless hands If he with grovelling hireling's pay Thinks to dismiss his glorious guide Or, with the first slave's-place array Art near the throne his dream supplied Forgive him!O'er your head to-day Hovers perfection's crown in pride, With you the earliest plant Spring had, Soul-forming Nature first began; With you, the harvest-chaplet glad, Perfected Nature ends her plan. The art creative, that all-modestly arose From clay and stone, with silent triumph throws Its arms around the spirit's vast domain. What in the land of knowledge the discoverer knows, He knows, discovers, only for your gain The treasures that the thinker has amassed, He will enjoy within your arms alone, Soon as his knowledge, beauty-ripe at last. To art ennobled shall have grown, Soon as with you he scales a mountain-height, And there, illumined by the setting sun, The smiling valley bursts upon his sight. The richer ye reward the eager gaze The higher, fairer orders that the mind May traverse with its magic rays, Or compass with enjoyment unconfined The wider thoughts and feelings open lie To more luxuriant floods of harmony. To beauty's richer, more majestic stream, The fair members of the world's vast scheme, That, maimed, disgrace on his creation bring, He sees the lofty forms then perfecting The fairer riddles come from out the night The richer is the world his arms enclose, The broader stream the sea with which he flows The weaker, too, is destiny's blind might The nobler instincts does he prove The smaller he himself, the greater grows his love. Thus is he led, in still and hidden race, By poetry, who strews his path with flowers, Through ever-purer forms, and purer powers, Through ever higher heights, and fairer grace. At length, arrived at the ripe goal of time, Yet one more inspiration all-sublime, Poetic outburst of man's latest youth, Andhe will glide into the arms of truth! Herself, the gentle Cypria, Illumined by her fiery crown, Then stands before her full-grown son Unveiledas great Urania; The sooner only by him caught, The fairer he had fled away! Thus stood, in wonder rapture-fraught, Ulysses' noble son that day, When the sage mentor who his youth beguiled; Herself transfigured as Jove's glorious child! Man's honor is confided to your hand, There let it well protected be! It sinks with you! with you it will expand! Poesy's sacred sorcery Obeys a world-plan wise and good; In silence let it swell the flood Of mighty-rolling harmony. By her own time viewed with disdain, Let solemn truth in song remain, And let the Muses' band defend her! In all the fullness of her splendor, Let her survive in numbers glorious, More dread, when veiled her charms appear, And vengeance take, with strains victorious, On her tormentor's ear! The freest mother's children free, With steadfast countenance then rise To highest beauty's radiancy, And every other crown despise! The sisters who escaped you here, Within your mother's arms ye'll meet; What noble spirits may revere, Must be deserving and complete. High over your own course of time Exalt yourselves with pinion bold, And dimly let your glass sublime The coming century unfold! On thousand roads advancing fast Of ever-rich variety, With fond embraces meet at last Before the throne of harmony! As into seven mild rays we view With softness break the glimmer white, As rainbow-beams of sevenfold hue Dissolve again in that soft light, In clearness thousandfold thus throw Your magic round the ravished gaze, Into one stream of light thus flow, One bond of truth that ne'er decays! ~ Friedrich Schiller, The Artists ,

694:A Veteran Cavalryman's Tale LOW in the fertile vale by Tunstall’s Run A rainy rifle skirmish closed the day. Beyond the April-swollen, narrow stream, Lee’s stubborn rearguard veteran raggedies Lay prone amid last year’s tobacco stalks, Shooting hot Enfields straight from red-mud pools, While from their rear four angry howitzers, High set on Armistead’s Plantation Hill, Flamed shrieking shell o’erhead across the bridge That Custer raged to seize before black night Should close his daylong toil in mud and rain. Thrice did we gallop vainly at the planks, Then vainly strove on foot the pass to win, Till through the drizzling dark but flashes showed The points where sullen rifles opposite rang, And back we straggled, stumbling up the slope Where Union buglers shrilled the bivouac. Ninety unanswering voices told our loss, While silence ruled so deep we heard the rain’s Small rataplan on ponchos and on hats, Until the crackling rail-fence Company fires Lighted the piney length of Custer’s Ridge. That night John Woolston served as orderly, The John who strokes to-day his white old beard And sees himself, scarce downy of the lips, Eyeing young long-haired Custer through the smoke Across a flaming pyre, that steaming slaves Of Tunstall fed afresh with Tunstall rails. Down in the shrouded vale about the Run Three score of boys John Woolston knew in life Lay scattered round an old-hoed, red-mud field, Peaceful with scores of veteran boys in gray, Whose bodily particles were resurrect As corn for bread, and leaf for smokers’ pipes, Before the Americans of now were born To share, through common-soldier sacrifice, The comrade Union of the States to-day. A rail-heap seated Custer with his aide, Their drowsing bugler opposite leaned on John, While overhead the swaying boughs of pine Creaked in an upward-rushing draught of warmth, And from our solitary surgeons’ tent Came smothered ecstasies of mortal pain, And in the outer darkness horses stamped And bit and squealed and enviously eyed The huddling regiments about the fires, Pipes lit, hats slouched to fend the rain and glare. As Woolston watched lean Custer’s martial face, It seemed the hero heard not flame nor bough, Nor marked the groans, nor knew at what he stared, So deep intent his mind ranged o’er the Run And up the opposite-sloping Arm’stead hill, As questioning if the murderous howitzers Would hold the bridge at dawn, or march by night, And so, perchance, next eve, afar repeat The dusky fight, and cost him ninety more He would fain range about the field of fields Where lion Lee, enringed, must stand at bay, Choosing to greatly die, or greatlier yield. At last he shook his aide. “Get up! Go bring A prisoner here.” And when the head-hurt man In butternut stood boldly to his eyes, He asked one word alone: “Your general’s name?” “My general’s name!” stared Butternut, then proud, As ’t were a cubit added to his height, He spoke,—“My general’s name is R. E. Lee!” “I mean who fights Lee’s rearguard?” Custer said, “Who held the bridge to-night? His name alone.” And then the bitter man in butternut Smiled ghastly grim, and smacked as tasting blood; “It’s General Henry Tunstall, his own self, And if you find our ‘Fighting Tunce’ alive When daylight comes, there’ll be red hell to pay For every plank that spans that trifling bridge.” “Good man!” said Custer. “Spoke right soldierly! Here—take this cloak—to save your wound from rain”: And gave the brave the poncho that he wore. Then up flamed Butternut: “Say, General, You’re Yank, and yet, by God, you’re white clean through. And so I kind of feel to tell you why Them planks will cost you so almighty dear. You’re camped to-night on ‘Fighting Tunce’s’ land; Cross yonder, on the hill his guns defend, Is where his lady lives, his promised wife,— God bless her heart!—Miss Mary Armistead. She’s there herself to-night—she’d never run. Her widowed father fell at Fredericksburg, Three brothers died in arms, one limps with Lee. Herself has worked their darkies right along Four years, to raise our army pork and pone, And she herself not twenty-four to-day! Will Tunstall fight for her? Say, General, Your heart can guess what hell you’ll face at day.” “You’re right, my man,” said Custer. “That will do.” And off they marched the ponchoed prisoner. “By heaven!” spoke Custer then, and faced his aide, “I know why Tunstall’s gunners spared the bridge. It’s ten to one he means to swarm across, After his hungry Johnnies get some rest, To strike us here and hard before the dawn. His heart was forged in fire and enterprise! His bully-boys will back his wildest dare! Lieutenant—pick me out two first-rate men— Morton for one, if ‘Praying Mort’ ’s alive— Tell them I go myself to post vedettes. Now—mind—I want a pair of wideawakes.— You, Orderly, go saddle up my bay.” “I want to go with Morton,” blurted John. “You! Call yourself a wideawake, my lad?” “Yes, sir,” said Woolston.— “But you’re just a boy.” “Well, General, Uncle Sam enlisted me For man, all right.” Then Custer smiled, and mused. “Farm boy?” he asked.— “Exactly what I am.” “All right,” he said. “If once I see he’s keen, A likely farm boy’s just the man for me. When back his aide returned the General spoke: “It’s barely possible we march to-night. You’ll see that every man about the fires Splits torch stuff plenty from the pitchy rails.” And with the words he reined toward Arm’stead’s Hill. Down hill, beyond the flares, beyond the pines, Beyond his foothill pickets, through the rain, He led as if his eyes beheld the way; Yet they, who followed close his bay’s fast walk By sound alone, saw not their horses’ heads, Saw not the hand held up to blotch the gloom. No breath of wind. The ear heard only hoofs Splashing and squattering in the puddle field, Or heard the saddle-leathers scarcely creak, Or little clanks of curbing bit and chain. Scattered about whatever way they trod Must be the clay that marched but yesterday, And nervously John listened, lest some soul Faint lingering in the dark immensity Might call its longing not to die alone. Sudden a crash, a plunge, a kicking horse, Then “Praying Morton” whispering cautiously: “A post-hole, General! My horse is done. His off fore-leg is broke, as sure as faith! Oh, what a dispensation of the Lord—” “Hish-sh. Save the rest!” said Custer. “Broke is broke! Get back to camp whatever way you can.” “Me, General! What use to post the boy? You, Woolston, you get back. I’ll take your horse.” “Not much, you won’t,” said Woolston angrily. And Custer chuckled crisply in the dark. “Enough,” he ordered. “Morton, get you back! Be cautious when you near my picket post, Or else they’ll whang to hit your pious voice, And I may lose a first-rate soldier man.” Then Morton, prayerful, mild, and mollified: “The merciful man would end a beast in pain— One shot.” “No, too much noise. You get right back! Horses, like men, must bear the luck of war.” III Again the plashing hoofs through endless drip, Until the solid footing of their beasts Bespoke them trampling in a turnpike road, And Custer reined with: “Hish-sh, my man—come here. Now listen.” Then John’s ears became aware Of small articulations in the dark, Queer laughters, as of countless impish glee, And one pervasive, low, incessant hum, All strange till Custer spoke: “You hear the Run? All right! Now, mind exactly what I say. But no. First hold my horse. I’ll feel the bridge. Maybe I’ll draw their fire; but stay right here.” On foot he went, and came, so stealthily John could not hear the steps ten feet away. “All right!” He mounted. “Not one plank removed.” Then, communing rather with himself than John: “No picket there! It’s strange! But surely Tunce Would smash the bridge unless he meant to cross And rip right back at me in dark or dawn. Now, private—mind exactly what I say; You’ll listen here for trampers on the bridge, And if you hear them reach the mud this side, With others following on the planks behind, You’ll get right back—stick to the turnpike, mind— And tell my challenging road-guard picket post They’re coming strong. That’s all you’ve got to do Unless—” he paused—“unless some negro comes Bringing the news they’re falling back on Lee; Then—if he’s sure—you’ll fire four carbine shots Right quick—and stay until you see me come. You understand?” “I do. I’m not to shoot In case they’re coming on. But if they’re off, I’ll fire four shots as fast as I can pull.” “That’s right. Be sure you keep your wits awake. Listen for prowlers—both your ears well skinned.” John heard the spattering bay’s fast-walking hoofs Fainter and fainter through the steady pour, And then no sound, except the beating rain’s Small pit-a-pat on poncho, and the Run Drifting its babbling through the blinding mirk. How long he sat, no guessing in the slow Monotony of night, that never changed Save when the burdened horse replaced his hoofs, Or seemed to raise or droop his weary head, Or when some shiver shook the weary boy, Though sheltered dry from aching neck to spurs: A shiver at the dream of dead men nigh, Beaten with rain, and merging with the mud, And staring up with open, sightless eyes That served as little cups for tiny pools That trickled in and out incessantly; A shiver at the thought of home and bed, And mother tucking in her boy at night, And how she’d shiver could she see him there— Longing more sore than John to wrap him warm; A shiver from the tense expectancy Of warning sounds, while yet no sound he heard 10 Save springtime water lapping on the pier, Or tumbling often from the clayey banks Lumps that splashed lifelike in the turbid flood. His aching ears were strained for other sounds, And still toward Arm’stead’s Hill they ached and strained, While, in the evening fight of memory, Again he saw the broad Plantation House Whene’er a brassy howitzer spouted flame, Suddenly lighting up its firing men, Who vanished dim again in streaking rain; And then, once more, the Enfields in the vale Thrust cores of fire, until some lightning piece Again lit all the Arm’stead buildings clear. From visioning swift that wide Plantation House John’s mind went peering through its fancied rooms. And who were there? And did they sleep, or wake? Until he found Miss Mary Armistead And General Henry Tunstall in the dream. It seemed those lovers could not, could not part, But murmured low of parting in the dawn, Since he must march and fight, and she must stay To hold the home, whatever war might send— And they might never, never meet again. So good she looked, described by Butternut’s “God bless her heart,” and he so soldier bold In “fire and enterprise,” by Custer’s words,— So true and sorrowful they talked in dream, Of Love and Life that walk the ways of Death,— The dreamer’s under lip went quivering. Until the startled horse put up his head And stood, John knew, stark stiff with listening 11 To that kalatta-klank beyond the Run, As if some cowbell clattered far away Once, twice, and thrice, to cease as suddenly. Then John, once more keen Yankee soldier boy, Gathered his rein, half threw his carbine breech, Made sure again of cartridge ready there, Felt for the flap of holster at his thigh, Listened alert for that most dubious bell,— Thinking of bushwhackers in campfire tales Impressively related to recruits; How, in deep night, some lone vedette might hear An innocent-seeming klatta-klatta-klank, And never dream but that some roaming cow Ranged through the covering woodland nigh his post,— Till—suddenly—a bullet laid him low! Or, perhaps, guerillas crept before the bell, Their footsteps deadened by its klatta-klank, Till, rushing in, they clubbed the youngster down, So “gobbling” him unheard, a prisoner, Then, sneaking through the gap, on sleeping posts, They killed, and killed, and killed—so horridly That green recruities’ hairs would stand on end. John, shrewdly discounting the veteran yarns, Yet knew full well that klatta-klatta-klank, Which came again, might mean the enemy Intent on stratagem to search the dark, Tempting some shot or challenge to reveal If any Union picket held the bridge. Or else the steady-coming, clanging knell Might signify some party far advanced, Creeping all noiselessly, and listening keen For any sound of Custer, horse or man. 12 Even it might be that the ridgy road Ten yards, or five, or three from where he sat, Concealed some foeman hungry for a move That might betray precisely where their rush Should be, to seize his tightened bridle-rein, Or grasp the poncho’s skirt to pull him down. John half inclined to lift the neck-yoke off And lay the armless cloak on saddle-bow, Lest it encumber him in sudden fight, Or give the foremost foe a strangling hold. Yet sat he motionless, since such a sound As slicking glaze might guide an enemy. And still the klatta-klatta-klank came on. It surely neared the bridge! Yet John sat still, With Custer’s orders clearly in his brain, Waiting to learn the meaning of the thing. It trod the planks. It moved with solid hoofs, Hoofs that declared to farm-bred Woolston’s ear Most unmistakably an actual cow! But then! Oh, mystery! For rolling wheels Rumbled upon the planking of the Run! As up went Woolston’s horse’s head asnort, Upon the bridge the other beast stood still. The clanking ceased. Again no mortal sound Blent with the tittering tumult of the stream. Until a clear young voice of lady tone Inquired in startled accents,—“Who goes there?” Yet John, in utter wonder, spoke no word. “If there’s a Yankee cavalry picket there,” The voice proclaimed, “I wish to pass the line.” And still the Yankee knew not what to say, Since Custer’s orders covered not the case, 13 And since, alas, the wondrous lady voice Might possibly denote some stratagem. And yet—suppose ’t was only just a girl! John sickened with a sense of foolishness. “Go on,” she cried, and seemed to slap her beast, Which moved some doubtful steps, and stopped again. Then calmly scornful came the lady tones:— “Oh, Mister Yankee picket, have no fear To speak right up. No dangerous man am I. Only a woman. And she’s got no gun, No pistol, bayonet, knife, or anything. And all she asks is just to pass your line, A prisoner if you like.” But there she broke, Or choked, and wailed, “O God, it’s life or death! Oh, soldier, soldier, let me pass the line.” So John, half desperate, called, “Young lady, come. I don’t care what the orders are. Come on.” “Get up,” she slapped again. But then she called:— “My cow won’t move! She sees you, I suppose, All armed and threatening in the middle road. Please go away. Or ride a bit aside; Perhaps then she’ll come. Yes, now she moves along. You’ll pass me through?—But are there surgeons there Where, hours ago, I saw your campfires glow? If not, I may as well turn back again.” “No need,” said John. “We’ve got a surgeon there. But what’s the trouble, Miss? Yourself been hurt?” “The trouble is I’ve got a soldier here With desperate wounds—if still alive he be. Oh, help me save him.” And she broke again. 14 “Why, Miss,” said Woolston, melting at the heart, “Was there no surgeon on the Arm’stead Hill To help your wounded live?” “No, none,” she said, “No man remained. At eve the negroes fled, Or followed close behind the wagon train He urged, with every soldier, back toward Lee. We two were left alone. I thought you’d come. For hours and hours I waited, all in vain. His life was flowing fast. One chance remained. We women placed him in our best barouche, The only vehicle our rearguard spared. Alone I hitched this cow, the only beast I kept from rations for our starving men. I led her here. Oh, soldier, help me soon To pass your lines, and reach a surgeon’s care.” Then Custer’s orders flashed again to John;— “Hold hard one moment, Miss, I’ve got to shoot.” The carbine rang. “Thank God, that’s done,” said John. “We’ll wait right here. A surgeon’s sure to come With Custer’s march, for march I guess he will. He’ll turn you round, I think, and see you home. I s’pose your name’s Miss Mary Armistead? I hope that’s not your General wounded there.” She could but choke, or weep, and spoke no word. It seemed long hours they waited silently, Save once John heard the hidden carriage creak, And guessed she rose beside the dying man Beneath the drumlike pattering, sheltering hood. At last, the bugles blared on Custer’s Ridge. Then, far away, a lengthening stream of flare Came round the distant, curtaining screen of pines, And down the hill the torches, borne on high 15 By fifteen hundred horsemen, formed a slope Of flame that moved behind the bugles’ call, Till on the level road a fiery front Tossing, yet solid-seeming, walked along. And in the van rode Custer, beardless, tall, His long hair dabbled in the streaming rain. John rode to meet him. There he called the halt, And came, with twenty torches, round the chaise. Then first they saw Miss Mary Armistead, Her honorable, fearless, lifted eyes Gazing on Custer’s bare and bended head, While General Henry Tunstall’s countenance, Supported close within her sheltering arm, Leaned unto hers in pallid soldier death. “Madam,” said Custer, “would that I had known The bravest of the brave lay needing aid. Lady, the great heroic name he won Held me from marching onward to your hill, Held me expecting from him night attack, Till now in vain we bring a surgeon’s help,— And words are useless. Yet again I say— Because a soldier’s heart compels the due— He lived the bravest of the bravest brave That ever faced the odds of mighty war. May God sustain yourself for years and years The living shrine of Tunstall’s memory.” She bowed her noble head, but answered naught. Then past the chariot streamed our wondering men Behind tall Custer in the foremost front, Trampling as thunder on the bridging planks, Their torches gleaming on the swirling Run; 16 A tossing, swaying column o’er the flat, A fiery slope of fours abreast the hill, And on, unresting on, through night and rain, Remorseless, urgent, yet most merciful, Because the Nation’s life demanded war, Relentless, hurrying swift to force an end, And banish night, and bring a peaceful dawn. But old John Woolston sees across the years, Beneath the black, cavernous carriage hood, Flaring in torchlight, Tunstall’s face of death Beside a lovely, living, haloed face, Heroic, calm, ineffably composed With pride unconquerable in valiant deeds, With trust in God our Lord unspeakable— The sainted Woman of the Perished Cause, The chastened soul of that Confederacy Which marches on, no less than John Brown’s soul, Inspiring, calling on the Nation’s heart, Urging it dauntlessly to front stark death For what ideals the Nation’s heart holds true. Straight rain streaks downward through the torches’ flare, And solemn through the ancient darkness sound The small, bewildered, lingering, million tones Of atoms streaming to the eternal sea. ~ Edward William Thomson,

695:The Passing Of Arthur That story which the bold Sir Bedivere, First made and latest left of all the knights, Told, when the man was no more than a voice In the white winter of his age, to those With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds. For on their march to westward, Bedivere, Who slowly paced among the slumbering host, Heard in his tent the moanings of the King: 'I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of His fields, But in His ways with men I find Him not. I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. O me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond, And enter it, and make it beautiful? Or else as if the world were wholly fair, But that these eyes of men are dense and dim, And have not power to see it as it is: Perchance, because we see not to the close;-For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain; And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death; Nay--God my Christ--I pass but shall not die.' Then, ere that last weird battle in the west, There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling, 'Hollow, hollow all delight! Hail, King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away. Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind, 706 And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.' And fainter onward, like wild birds that change Their season in the night and wail their way From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream Shrilled; but in going mingled with dim cries Far in the moonlit haze among the hills, As of some lonely city sacked by night, When all is lost, and wife and child with wail Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and called, 'Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind, Thine, Gawain, was the voice--are these dim cries Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?' This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake: 'O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man; And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise-I hear the steps of Modred in the west, And with him many of thy people, and knights Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee. Right well in heart they know thee for the King. Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.' Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: 'Far other is this battle in the west Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth, And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome, Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall, And shook him through the north. Ill doom is mine To war against my people and my knights. The king who fights his people fights himself. And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke That strikes them dead is as my death to me. Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way Through this blind haze, which ever since I saw 707 One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world.' Then rose the King and moved his host by night, And ever pushed Sir Modred, league by league, Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse-A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea. There the pursuer could pursue no more, And he that fled no further fly the King; And there, that day when the great light of heaven Burned at his lowest in the rolling year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, And chance and craft and strength in single fights, And ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn, Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks After the Christ, of those who falling down Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist; And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights, Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead. 708 Last, as by some one deathbed after wail Of suffering, silence follows, or through death Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore, Save for some whisper of the seething seas, A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field Of battle: but no man was moving there; Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Brake in among dead faces, to and fro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome, And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere, And whiter than the mist that all day long Had held the field of battle was the King: 'Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world, And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move, And beats upon the faces of the dead, My dead, as though they had not died for me?-O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King. Behold, I seem but King among the dead.' Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: 'My King, King everywhere! and so the dead have kings, There also will I worship thee as King. Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought The heathen back among us, yonder stands, Modred, unharmed, the traitor of thine house.' Then spake the King: 'My house hath been my doom. 709 But call not thou this traitor of my house Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me. My house are rather they who sware my vows, Yea, even while they brake them, owned me King. And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, When all the purport of my throne hath failed, That quick or dead thou holdest me for King. King am I, whatsoever be their cry; And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see Yet, ere I pass.' And uttering this the King Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow, Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell. So all day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land: On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: 'The sequel of today unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep They sleep--the men I loved. I think that we Shall never more, at any future time, Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, Walking about the gardens and the halls Of Camelot, as in the days that were. I perish by this people which I made,-Though Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more; but, let what will be, be, I am so deeply smitten through the helm That without help I cannot last till morn. 710 Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how In those old days, one summer noon, an arm Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, Holding the sword--and how I rowed across And took it, and have worn it, like a king; And, wheresoever I am sung or told In aftertime, this also shall be known: But now delay not: take Excalibur, And fling him far into the middle mere: Watch what thou se st, and lightly bring me word.' To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere: 'It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, Aidless, alone, and smitten through the helm-A little thing may harm a wounded man; Yet I thy hest will all perform at full, Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.' So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept, And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake. There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long That both his eyes were dazzled as he stood, This way and that dividing the swift mind, In act to throw: but at the last it seemed Better to leave Excalibur concealed There in the many-knotted waterflags, That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. So strode he back slow to the wounded King. 711 Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: 'Hast thou performed my mission which I gave? What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: 'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag.' To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale: 'Thou hast betrayed thy nature and thy name, Not rendering true answer, as beseemed Thy f alty, nor like a noble knight: For surer sign had followed, either hand, Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again, As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.' Then went Sir Bedivere the second time Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought; But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, How curiously and strangely chased, he smote His palms together, and he cried aloud: 'And if indeed I cast the brand away, Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, Should thus be lost for ever from the earth, Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt? But were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, 712 Saying, "King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills." So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost.' So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: 'What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: 'I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds.' To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath: 'Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, Laid widowed of the power in his eye That bowed the will. I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence: But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands.' Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush beds, and clutched the sword, And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, 713 Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the Northern Sea. So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him Three times, and drew him under in the mere. And lightly went the other to the King. Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath: 'Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?' And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: 'Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die, Not though I live three lives of mortal men, So great a miracle as yonder hilt. Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him; But when I looked again, behold an arm, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, That caught him by the hilt, and brandished him Three times, and drew him under in the mere.' And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: 'My end draws nigh; 'tis time that I were gone. Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, And bear me to the margin; yet I fear My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.' So saying, from the pavement he half rose, Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm, And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere Remorsefully regarded through his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words; Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him through the place of tombs. But, as he walked, King Arthur panted hard, 714 Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sighed the King, Muttering and murmuring at his ear, 'Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die.' But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked, Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armd heels-And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon. Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge, Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms, Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose A cry that shivered to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmured Arthur, 'Place me in the barge.' So to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she, that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shattered casque, and chafed his hands, And called him by his name, complaining loud, And dropping bitter tears against a brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the withered moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dashed with drops 715 Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls-That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the das-throne--were parched with dust; Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, Mixed with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. So like a shattered column lay the King; Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot through the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: 'Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole Round Table is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world, And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.' And slowly answered Arthur from the barge: 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 716 But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou se st--if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)-To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.' So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away. But when that moan had past for evermore, The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn Amazed him, and he groaned, 'The King is gone.' And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, 'From the great deep to the great deep he goes.' Whereat he slowly turned and slowly clomb The last hard footstep of that iron crag; Thence marked the black hull moving yet, and cried, 'He passes to be King among the dead, And after healing of his grievous wound He comes again; but--if he come no more-O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat, Who shrieked and wailed, the three whereat we gazed On that high day, when, clothed with living light, They stood before his throne in silence, friends Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?' Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars. 717 Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb Even to the highest he could climb, and saw, Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, Down that long water opening on the deep Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go From less to less and vanish into light. And the new sun rose bringing the new year. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,

696:Idylls Of The King: The Passing Of Arthur (Excerpt) That story which the bold Sir Bedivere, First made and latest left of all the knights, Told, when the man was no more than a voice In the white winter of his age, to those With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds. For on their march to westward, Bedivere, Who slowly paced among the slumbering host, Heard in his tent the moanings of the King: "I found Him in the shining of the stars, I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields, But in His ways with men I find Him not. I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. O me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond, And enter it, and make it beautiful? Or else as if the world were wholly fair, But that these eyes of men are dense and dim, And have not power to see it as it is: Perchance, because we see not to the close;-For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain; And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death: Nay--God my Christ--I pass but shall not die." Then, ere that last weird battle in the west, There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling, "Hollow, hollow all delight! Hail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind, And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight." And fainter onward, like wild birds that change 218 Their season in the night and wail their way From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream Shrill'd; but in going mingled with dim cries Far in the moonlit haze among the hills, As of some lonely city sack'd by night, When all is lost, and wife and child with wail Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd, "Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind, Thine, Gawain, was the voice--are these dim cries Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?" This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake: "O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man; And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise-I hear the steps of Modred in the west, And with him many of thy people, and knights Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee. Right well in heart they know thee for the King. Arise, go forth and conquer as of old." Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Far other is this battle in the west Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth, And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome, Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall, And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine To war against my people and my knights. The king who fights his people fights himself. And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke That strikes them dead is as my death to me. Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I saw One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world." 219 Then rose the King and moved his host by night, And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league, Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse-A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea. There the pursuer could pursue no more, And he that fled no further fly the King; And there, that day when the great light of heaven Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, And chance and craft and strength in single fights, And ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn, Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist; And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights, Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead. 220 Last, as by some one deathbed after wail Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore, Save for some whisper of the seething seas, A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field Of battle: but no man was moving there; Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Brake in among dead faces, to and fro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome, And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere, And whiter than the mist that all day long Had held the field of battle was the King: "Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world, And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move, And beats upon the faces of the dead, My dead, as tho' they had not died for me?-O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fall'n Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King. Behold, I seem but King among the dead." Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: "My King, King everywhere! and so the dead have kings, There also will I worship thee as King. Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought 221 The heathen back among us, yonder stands, Modred, unharm'd, the traitor of thine house." Then spake the King: "My house hath been my doom. But call not thou this traitor of my house Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me. My house are rather they who sware my vows, Yea, even while they brake them, own'd me King. And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, When all the purport of my throne hath fail'd, That quick or dead thou hottest me for King. King am I, whatsoever be their cry; And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see Yet, ere I pass." And uttering this the King Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow, Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell. So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land: On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "The sequel of to-day unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep They sleep--the men I loved. I think that we Shall never more, at any future time, Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, 222 Walking about the gardens and the halls Of Camelot, as in the days that were. I perish by this people which I made,-Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more; but, let what will be, be, I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm That without help I cannot last till morn. Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how In those old days, one summer noon, an arm Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, Holding the sword--and how I row'd across And took it, and have worn it, like a king; And, wheresoever I am sung or told In aftertime, this also shall be known: But now delay not: take Excalibur, And fling him far into the middle mere: Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word." To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere: "It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm-A little thing may harm a wounded man; Yet I thy hest will all perform at full, Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word." So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept, And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake. There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: 223 For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long That both his eyes were dazzled as he stood, This way and that dividing the swift mind, In act to throw: but at the last it seem'd Better to leave Excalibur conceal'd There in the many-knotted waterflags, That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. So strode he back slow to the wounded King. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Hast thou perform'd my mission which I gave? What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag." To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale: "Thou hast betray'd thy nature and thy name, Not rendering true answer, as beseem'd Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight: For surer sign had follow'd, either hand Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again, As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word." Then went Sir Bedivere the second time Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, Counting the dewy pebbles, fix'd in thought; But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, How curiously and strangely chased, he smote His palms together, and he cried aloud: 224 "And if indeed I cast the brand away, Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, Should thus be lost for ever from the earth, Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt? But were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, Saying, 'King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: "What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds." To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath: "Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, 225 Laid widow'd of the power in his eye That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence: But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands." Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges, lightly, plunged Among the bulrush beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the Northern Sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere. And lightly went the other to the King. Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath: "Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die, Not tho' I live three lives of mortal men, So great a miracle as yonder hilt. Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him; 226 But when I look'd again, behold an arm, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, That caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere." And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: "My end draws nigh; 'tis time that I were gone. Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, And bear me to the margin; yet I fear My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die." So saying, from the pavement he half rose, Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm, And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere Remorsefully regarded thro' his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words; Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. But, as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels-And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon. 227 Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge, Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms, Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmur'd Arthur, "Place me in the barge." So to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she, that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And call'd him by his name, complaining loud, And dropping bitter tears against a brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the wither'd moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls-That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the daïs-throne--were parch'd with dust Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. So like a shatter'd column lay the King; Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot thro' the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: "Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, 228 When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole Round Table is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world, And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds." And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seëst--if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)-To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, 229 Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away. But when that moan had past for evermore, The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn Amazed him, and he groan'd, ``The King is gone.'' And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, "From the great deep to the great deep he goes." Whereat he slowly turn'd and slowly clomb The last hard footstep of that iron crag; Thence mark'd the black hull moving yet, and cried, "He passes to be King among the dead, And after healing of his grievous wound He comes again; but--if he come no more-O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat, Who shriek'd and wail'd, the three whereat we gazed On that high day, when, clothed with living light, They stood before his throne in silence, friends Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?" Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars. Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb Ev'n to the highest he could climb, and saw, Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, Down that long water opening on the deep Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go From less to less and vanish into light. And the new sun rose bringing the new year. 230 ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,

697:Amours De Voyage, Canto Ii Is it illusion? or does there a spirit from perfecter ages, Here, even yet, amid loss, change, and corruption abide? Does there a spirit we know not, though seek, though we find, comprehend not, Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide? Lives in the exquisite grace of the column disjointed and single, Haunts the rude masses of brick garlanded gaily with vine, E'en in the turret fantastic surviving that springs from the ruin, E'en in the people itself? is it illusion or not? Is it illusion or not that attracteth the pilgrim transalpine, Brings him a dullard and dunce hither to pry and to stare? Is it illusion or not that allures the barbarian stranger, Brings him with gold to the shrine, brings him in arms to the gate? I. Claude to Eustace. What do the people say, and what does the government do?--you Ask, and I know not at all. Yet fortune will favour your hopes; and I, who avoided it all, am fated, it seems, to describe it. I, who nor meddle nor make in politics,--I who sincerely Put not my trust in leagues nor any suffrage by ballot, Never predicted Parisian millenniums, never beheld a New Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride out of heaven Right on the Place de la Concorde,--I, nevertheless, let me say it, Could in my soul of souls, this day, with the Gaul at the gates shed One true tear for thee, thou poor little Roman Republic; What, with the German restored, with Sicily safe to the Bourbon, Not leave one poor corner for native Italian exertion? France, it is foully done! and you, poor foolish England,-You, who a twelvemonth ago said nations must choose for themselves, you Could not, of course, interfere,--you, now, when a nation has chosen---Pardon this folly! The Times will, of course, have announced the occasion, Told you the news of to-day; and although it was slightly in error When it proclaimed as a fact the Apollo was sold to a Yankee, You may believe when it tells you the French are at Civita Vecchia. 16 II. Claude to Eustace. Dulce it is, and decorum, no doubt, for the country to fall,--to Offer one's blood an oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause; yet Still, individual culture is also something, and no man Finds quite distinct the assurance that he of all others is called on, Or would be justified even, in taking away from the world that Precious creature, himself. Nature sent him here to abide here; Else why send him at all? Nature wants him still, it is likely; On the whole, we are meant to look after ourselves; it is certain Each has to eat for himself, digest for himself, and in general Care for his own dear life, and see to his own preservation; Nature's intentions, in most things uncertain, in this are decisive; Which, on the whole, I conjecture the Romans will follow, and I shall. So we cling to our rocks like limpets; Ocean may bluster, Over and under and round us; we open our shells to imbibe our Nourishment, close them again, and are safe, fulfilling the purpose Nature intended,--a wise one, of course, and a noble, we doubt not. Sweet it may be and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but, On the whole, we conclude the Romans won't do it, and I sha'n't. III. Claude to Eustace. Will they fight? They say so. And will the French? I can hardly, Hardly think so; and yet----He is come, they say, to Palo, He is passed from Monterone, at Santa Severa He hath laid up his guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,--The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. Alas! 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!--Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,--tell it not in St. James's, Whisper it not in thy courts, O Christ Church!--yet did I, waking, Dream of a cadence that sings, Si tombent nos jeunes héros, la Terre en produit de nouveaux contre vous tous prêts à se battre; Dreamt of great indignations and angers transcendental, Dreamt of a sword at my side and a battle-horse underneath me. 17 IV. Claude to Eustace. Now supposing the French or the Neapolitan soldier Should by some evil chance come exploring the Maison Serny (Where the family English are all to assemble for safety), Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till, little by little, All the natural heat has escaped of the chivalrous spirit. Oh, one conformed, of course; but one doesn't die for good manners, Stab or shoot, or be shot, by way of graceful attention. No, if it should be at all, it should be on the barricades there; Should I incarnadine ever this inky pacifical finger, Sooner far should it be for this vapour of Italy's freedom, Sooner far by the side of the d----d and dirty plebeians. Ah, for a child in the street I could strike; for the full-blown lady---Somehow, Eustace, alas! I have not felt the vocation. Yet these people of course will expect, as of course, my protection, Vernon in radiant arms stand forth for the lovely Georgina, And to appear, I suppose, were but common civility. Yes, and Truly I do not desire they should either be killed or offended. Oh, and of course, you will say, 'When the time comes, you will be ready.' Ah, but before it comes, am I to presume it will be so? What I cannot feel now, am I to suppose that I shall feel? Am I not free to attend for the ripe and indubious instinct? Am I forbidden to wait for the clear and lawful perception? Is it the calling of man to surrender his knowledge and insight, For the mere venture of what may, perhaps, be the virtuous action? Must we, walking our earth, discerning a little, and hoping Some plain visible task shall yet for our hands be assigned us,-Must we abandon the future for fear of omitting the present, Quit our own fireside hopes at the alien call of a neighbour, To the mere possible shadow of Deity offer the victim? And is all this, my friend, but a weak and ignoble refining, Wholly unworthy the head or the heart of Your Own Correspondent? V. Claude to Eustace. Yes, we are fighting at last, it appears. This morning as usual, Murray, as usual, in hand, I enter the Caffè Nuovo; 18 Seating myself with a sense as it were of a change in the weather, Not understanding, however, but thinking mostly of Murray, And, for to-day is their day, of the Campidoglio Marbles; Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter,--and Non c'è latte, This is the answer he makes me, and this is the sign of a battle. So I sit: and truly they seem to think any one else more Worthy than me of attention. I wait for my milkless nero, Free to observe undistracted all sorts and sizes of persons, Blending civilian and soldier in strangest costume, coming in, and Gulping in hottest haste, still standing, their coffee,--withdrawing Eagerly, jangling a sword on the steps, or jogging a musket Slung to the shoulder behind. They are fewer, moreover, than usual, Much and silenter far; and so I begin to imagine Something is really afloat. Ere I leave, the Caffe is empty, Empty too the streets, in all its length the Corso Empty, and empty I see to my right and left the Condotti. Twelve o'clock, on the Pincian Hill, with lots of English, Germans, Americans, French,--the Frenchmen, too, are protected,-So we stand in the sun, but afraid of a probable shower; So we stand and stare, and see, to the left of St. Peter's, Smoke, from the cannon, white,--but that is at intervals only,-Black, from a burning house, we suppose, by the Cavalleggieri; And we believe we discern some lines of men descending Down through the vineyard-slopes, and catch a bayonet gleaming. Every ten minutes, however,--in this there is no misconception,-Comes a great white puff from behind Michel Angelo's dome, and After a space the report of a real big gun,--not the Frenchman's!-That must be doing some work. And so we watch and conjecture. Shortly, an Englishman comes, who says he has been to St. Peter's, Seen the Piazza and troops, but that is all he can tell us; So we watch and sit, and, indeed, it begins to be tiresome.-All this smoke is outside; when it has come to the inside, It will be time, perhaps, to descend and retreat to our houses. Half-past one, or two. The report of small arms frequent, Sharp and savage indeed; that cannot all be for nothing: So we watch and wonder; but guessing is tiresome, very. Weary of wondering, watching, and guessing, and gossiping idly, Down I go, and pass through the quiet streets with the knots of National Guards patrolling, and flags hanging out at the windows, English, American, Danish,--and, after offering to help an Irish family moving en masse to the Maison Serny, After endeavouring idly to minister balm to the trembling 19 Quinquagenarian fears of two lone British spinsters, Go to make sure of my dinner before the enemy enter. But by this there are signs of stragglers returning; and voices Talk, though you don't believe it, of guns and prisoners taken; And on the walls you read the first bulletin of the morning.-This is all that I saw, and all that I know of the battle. VI. Claude to Eustace. Victory! Victory!--Yes! ah, yes, thou republican Zion, Truly the kings of the earth are gathered and gone by together; Doubtless they marvelled to witness such things, were astonished, and so forth. Victory! Victory! Victory!--Ah, but it is, believe me, Easier, easier far, to intone the chant of the martyr Than to indite any paean of any victory. Death may Sometimes be noble; but life, at the best, will appear an illusion. While the great pain is upon us, it is great; when it is over, Why, it is over. The smoke of the sacrifice rises to heaven, Of a sweet savour, no doubt, to Somebody; but on the altar, Lo, there is nothing remaining but ashes and dirt and ill odour. So it stands, you perceive; the labial muscles that swelled with Vehement evolution of yesterday Marseillaises, Articulations sublime of defiance and scorning, to-day colLapse and languidly mumble, while men and women and papers Scream and re-scream to each other the chorus of Victory. Well, but I am thankful they fought, and glad that the Frenchmen were beaten. VII. Claude to Eustace. So, I have seen a man killed! An experience that, among others! Yes, I suppose I have; although I can hardly be certain, And in a court of justice could never declare I had seen it. But a man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw Something; a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something. I was returning home from St. Peter's; Murray, as usual, Under my arm, I remember; had crossed the St. Angelo bridge; and Moving towards the Condotti, had got to the first barricade, when Gradually, thinking still of St. Peter's, I became conscious 20 Of a sensation of movement opposing me,--tendency this way (Such as one fancies may be in a stream when the wave of the tide is Coming and not yet come,--a sort of noise and retention); So I turned, and, before I turned, caught sight of stragglers Heading a crowd, it is plain, that is coming behind that corner. Looking up, I see windows filled with heads; the Piazza, Into which you remember the Ponte St. Angelo enters, Since I passed, has thickened with curious groups; and now the Crowd is coming, has turned, has crossed that last barricade, is Here at my side. In the middle they drag at something. What is it? Ha! bare swords in the air, held up? There seem to be voices Pleading and hands putting back; official, perhaps; but the swords are Many, and bare in the air. In the air? they descend; they are smiting, Hewing, chopping--At what? In the air once more upstretched? And-Is it blood that's on them? Yes, certainly blood! Of whom, then? Over whom is the cry of this furor of exultation? While they are skipping and screaming, and dancing their caps on the points of Swords and bayonets, I to the outskirts back, and ask a Mercantile-seeming bystander, 'What is it?' and he, looking always That way, makes me answer, 'A Priest, who was trying to fly to The Neapolitan army,'--and thus explains the proceeding. You didn't see the dead man? No;--I began to be doubtful; I was in black myself, and didn't know what mightn't happen,-But a National Guard close by me, outside of the hubbub, Broke his sword with slashing a broad hat covered with dust,--and Passing away from the place with Murray under my arm, and Stooping, I saw through the legs of the people the legs of a body. You are the first, do you know, to whom I have mentioned the matter. Whom should I tell it to else?--these girls?--the Heavens forbid it!-Quidnuncs at Monaldini's--Idlers upon the Pincian? If I rightly remember, it happened on that afternoon when Word of the nearer approach of a new Neapolitan army First was spread. I began to bethink me of Paris Septembers, Thought I could fancy the look of that old 'Ninety-two. On that evening Three or four, or, it may be, five, of these people were slaughtered Some declared they had, one of them, fired on a sentinel; others Say they were only escaping; a Priest, it is currently stated, Stabbed a National Guard on the very Piazza Colonna: History, Rumour of Rumours, I leave to thee to determine! But I am thankful to say the government seems to have strength to Put it down; it has vanished, at least; the place is most peaceful. Through the Trastevere walking last night, at nine of the clock, I 21 Found no sort of disorder; I crossed by the Island-bridges, So by the narrow streets to the Ponte Rotto, and onwards Thence by the Temple of Vesta, away to the great Coliseum, Which at the full of the moon is an object worthy a visit. VIII. Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa ----. Only think, dearest Louisa, what fearful scenes we have witnessed!-**************** George has just seen Garibaldi, dressed up in a long white cloak, on Horseback, riding by, with his mounted negro behind him: This is a man, you know, who came from America with him, Out of the woods, I suppose, and uses a lasso in fighting, Which is, I don't quite know, but a sort of noose, I imagine; This he throws on the heads of the enemy's men in a battle, Pulls them into his reach, and then most cruelly kills them: Mary does not believe, but we heard it from an Italian. Mary allows she was wrong about Mr. Claude being selfish; He was most useful and kind on the terrible thirtieth of April. Do not write here any more; we are starting directly for Florence: We should be off to-morrow, if only Papa could get horses; All have been seized everywhere for the use of this dreadful Mazzini P.S. Mary has seen thus far.--I am really so angry, Louisa,-Quite out of patience, my dearest! What can the man be intending? I am quite tired; and Mary, who might bring him to in a moment, Lets him go on as he likes, and neither will help nor dismiss him. IX. Claude to Eustace. It is most curious to see what a power a few calm words (in Merely a brief proclamation) appear to possess on the people. Order is perfect, and peace; the city is utterly tranquil; And one cannot conceive that this easy and nonchalant crowd, that Flows like a quiet stream through street and market-place, entering Shady recesses and bays of church, osteria, and caffè, Could in a moment be changed to a flood as of molten lava, 22 Boil into deadly wrath and wild homicidal delusion. Ah, 'tis an excellent race,--and even in old degradation, Under a rule that enforces to flattery, lying, and cheating, E'en under Pope and Priest, a nice and natural people. Oh, could they but be allowed this chance of redemption!--but clearly That is not likely to be. Meantime, notwithstanding all journals, Honour for once to the tongue and the pen of the eloquent writer! Honour to speech! and all honour to thee, thou noble Mazzini! X. Claude to Eustace. I am in love, meantime, you think; no doubt you would think so. I am in love, you say; with those letters, of course, you would say so. I am in love, you declare. I think not so; yet I grant you It is a pleasure indeed to converse with this girl. Oh, rare gift, Rare felicity, this! she can talk in a rational way, can Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking, Yet in perfection retain her simplicity; never, one moment, Never, however you urge it, however you tempt her, consents to Step from ideas and fancies and loving sensations to those vain Conscious understandings that vex the minds of mankind. No, though she talk, it is music; her fingers desert not the keys; 'tis Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded, Syllabled singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning. I am in love, you say; I do not think so, exactly. XI. Claude to Eustace. There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction: One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy, And another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you. I have no doubt, for myself, in giving my voice for the latter. I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing, There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished. I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious, Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process; We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty. 23 XII. Claude to Eustace. Ah, let me look, let me watch, let me wait, unhurried, unprompted! Bid me not venture on aught that could alter or end what is present! Say not, Time flies, and Occasion, that never returns, is departing! Drive me not out yet, ye ill angels with fiery swords, from my Eden, Waiting, and watching, and looking! Let love be its own inspiration! Shall not a voice, if a voice there must be, from the airs that environ, Yea, from the conscious heavens, without our knowledge or effort, Break into audible words? And love be its own inspiration? XIII. Claude to Eustace. Wherefore and how I am certain, I hardly can tell; but it is so. She doesn't like me, Eustace; I think she never will like me. Is it my fault, as it is my misfortune, my ways are not her ways? Is it my fault, that my habits and modes are dissimilar wholly? 'Tis not her fault; 'tis her nature, her virtue, to misapprehend them: 'Tis not her fault; 'tis her beautiful nature, not ever to know me. Hopeless it seems,--yet I cannot, though hopeless, determine to leave it: She goes--therefore I go; she moves,--I move, not to lose her. XIV. Claude to Eustace. Oh, 'tisn't manly, of course, 'tisn't manly, this method of wooing; 'Tisn't the way very likely to win. For the woman, they tell you, Ever prefers the audacious, the wilful, the vehement hero; She has no heart for the timid, the sensitive soul; and for knowledge,-Knowledge, O ye Gods!--when did they appreciate knowledge? Wherefore should they, either? I am sure I do not desire it. Ah, and I feel too, Eustace, she cares not a tittle about me! (Care about me, indeed! and do I really expect it?) But my manner offends; my ways are wholly repugnant; Every word that I utter estranges, hurts, and repels her; Every moment of bliss that I gain, in her exquisite presence, 24 Slowly, surely, withdraws her, removes her, and severs her from me. Not that I care very much!--any way I escape from the boy's own Folly, to which I am prone, of loving where it is easy. Not that I mind very much! Why should I? I am not in love, and Am prepared, I think, if not by previous habit, Yet in the spirit beforehand for this and all that is like it; It is an easier matter for us contemplative creatures, Us upon whom the pressure of action is laid so lightly; We, discontented indeed with things in particular, idle, Sickly, complaining, by faith, in the vision of things in general, Manage to hold on our way without, like others around us, Seizing the nearest arm to comfort, help, and support us. Yet, after all, my Eustace, I know but little about it. All I can say for myself, for present alike and for past, is, Mary Trevellyn, Eustace, is certainly worth your acquaintance. You couldn't come, I suppose, as far as Florence to see her? XV. Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa ----. . . . . . . To-morrow we're starting for Florence, Truly rejoiced, you may guess, to escape from republican terrors; Mr. C. and Papa to escort us; we by vettura Through Siena, and Georgy to follow and join us by Leghorn. Then---- Ah, what shall I say, my dearest? I tremble in thinking! You will imagine my feelings,--the blending of hope and of sorrow. How can I bear to abandon Papa and Mamma and my Sisters? Dearest Louise, indeed it is very alarming; but, trust me Ever, whatever may change, to remain your loving Georgina. P.S. by Mary Trevellyn. . . . . . . . 'Do I like Mr. Claude any better?' I am to tell you,--and, 'Pray, is it Susan or I that attract him?' This he never has told, but Georgina could certainly ask him. All I can say for myself is, alas! that he rather repels me. There! I think him agreeable, but also a little repulsive. So be content, dear Louisa; for one satisfactory marriage Surely will do in one year for the family you would establish Neither Susan nor I shall afford you the joy of a second. 25 P.S. by Georgina Trevellyn. Mr. Claude, you must know, is behaving a little bit better; He and Papa are great friends; but he really is too shilly-shally,-So unlike George! Yet I hope that the matte is going on fairly. I shall, however, get George, before he goes, to say something. Dearest Louise, how delightful to bring young people together! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is it Florence we follow, or are we to tarry yet longer, E'en amid clamour of arms, here in the city of old, Seeking from clamour of arms in the Past and the Arts to be hidden, Vainly 'mid Arts and the Past seeking one life to forget? Ah, fair shadow, scarce seen, go forth! for anon he shall follow,-He that beheld thee, anon, whither thou leadest must go! Go, and the wise, loving Muse, she also will follow and find thee! She, should she linger in Rome, were not dissevered from thee! ~ Arthur Hugh Clough,

698:The Botanic Garden (Part Viii) THE LOVES OF THE PLANTS CANTO IV. Now the broad Sun his golden orb unshrouds, Flames in the west, and paints the parted clouds; O'er heaven's wide arch refracted lustres flow, And bend in air the many-colour'd bow.-The tuneful Goddess on the glowing sky Fix'd in mute extacy her glistening eye; And then her lute to sweeter tones she strung, And swell'd with softer chords the Paphian song. Long ailes of Oaks return'd the silver sound, And amorous Echoes talk'd along the ground; Pleas'd Lichfield listen'd from her sacred bowers, Bow'd her tall groves, and shook her stately towers. 'Nymph! not for thee the radiant day returns, Nymph! not for thee the golden solstice burns, Refulgent CEREA!-at the dusky hour She seeks with pensive step the mountain-bower, Bright as the blush of rising morn, and warms The dull cold eye of Midnight with her charms. There to the skies she lifts her pencill'd brows, Opes her fair lips, and breathes her virgin vows; Eyes the white zenyth; counts the suns, that roll Their distant fires, and blaze around the Pole; Or marks where Jove directs his glittering car O'er Heaven's blue vault,-Herself a brighter star. -There as soft Zephyrs sweep with pausing airs Thy snowy neck, and part thy shadowy hairs, Sweet Maid of Night! to Cynthia's sober beams Glows thy warm cheek, thy polish'd bosom gleams. In crowds around thee gaze the admiring swains, And guard in silence the enchanted plains; Drop the still tear, or breathe the impassion'd sigh, And drink inebriate rapture from thine eye. Thus, when old Needwood's hoary scenes the Night 66 Paints with blue shadow, and with milky light; Where MUNDY pour'd, the listening nymphs among, Loud to the echoing vales his parting song; With measured step the Fairy Sovereign treads, Shakes her high plume, and glitters o'er the meads; Round each green holly leads her sportive train, And little footsteps mark the circled plain; Each haunted rill with silver voices rings, And Night's sweet bird in livelier accents sings. Ere the bright star, which leads the morning sky, Hangs o'er the blushing east his diamond eye, The chaste TROPAEO leaves her secret bed; A saint-like glory trembles round her head; Eight watchful swains along the lawns of night With amorous steps pursue the virgin light; O'er her fair form the electric lustre plays, And cold she moves amid the lambent blaze. So shines the glow-fly, when the sun retires, And gems the night-air with phosphoric fires; Thus o'er the marsh aërial lights betray, And charm the unwary wanderer from his way. So when thy King, Assyria, fierce and proud, Three human victims to his idol vow'd; Rear'd a vast pyre before the golden shrine Of sulphurous coal, and pitch-exsuding pine;-Loud roar the flames, the iron nostrils breathe, And the huge bellows pant and heave beneath; Bright and more bright the blazing deluge flows, And white with seven-fold heat the furnace glows. And now the Monarch fix'd with dread surprize Deep in the burning vault his dazzled eyes. 'Lo! Three unbound amid the frightful glare, Unscorch'd their sandals, and unsing'd their hair! And now a fourth with seraph-beauty bright Descends, accosts them, and outshines the light! Fierce flames innocuous, as they step, retire! And slow they move amid a world of fire!' He spoke,-to Heaven his arms repentant spread, And kneeling bow'd his gem-incircled head. 67 Two Sister-Nymphs, the fair AVENAS, lead Their fleecy squadrons on the lawns of Tweed; Pass with light step his wave-worn banks along, And wake his Echoes with their silver tongue; Or touch the reed, as gentle Love inspires, In notes accordant to their chaste desires. I. 'Sweet ECHO! sleeps thy vocal shell, 'Where this high arch o'erhangs the dell; 'While Tweed with sun-reflecting streams 'Chequers thy rocks with dancing beams?- II. 'Here may no clamours harsh intrude, No brawling hound or clarion rude; Here no fell beast of midnight prowl, And teach thy tortured cliffs to howl! III. 'Be thine to pour these vales along Some artless Shepherd's evening song; While Night's sweet bird, from yon high spray Responsive, listens to his lay. IV. 'And if, like me, some love-lorn maid 'Should sing her sorrows to thy shade, 'Oh, sooth her breast, ye rocks around! 'With softest sympathy of sound.' From ozier bowers the brooding Halcyons peep, The Swans pursuing cleave the glassy deep, On hovering wings the wondering Reed-larks play, And silent Bitterns listen to the lay.- 68 Three shepherd-swains beneath the beechen shades Twine rival garlands for the tuneful maids; On each smooth bark the mystic love-knot frame, Or on white sands inscribe the favour'd name. From Time's remotest dawn where China brings In proud succession all her Patriot-Kings; O'er desert-sands, deep gulfs, and hills sublime, Extends her massy wall from clime to clime; With bells and dragons crests her Pagod-bowers, Her silken palaces, and porcelain towers; With long canals a thousand nations laves; Plants all her wilds, and peoples all her waves; Slow treads fair CANNABIS the breezy strand, The distaff streams dishevell'd in her hand; Now to the left her ivory neck inclines, And leads in Paphian curves its azure lines; Dark waves the fringed lid, the warm cheek glows, And the fair ear the parting locks disclose; Now to the right with airy sweep she bends, Quick join the threads, the dancing spole depends. Five Swains attracted guard the Nymph, by turns Her grace inchants them, and her beauty burns; To each She bows with sweet assuasive smile, Hears his soft vows, and turns her spole the while. So when with light and shade, concordant strife! Stern CLOTHO weaves the chequer'd thread of life; Hour after hour the growing line extends, The cradle and the coffin bound its ends; Soft cords of silk the whirling spoles reveal, If smiling Fortune turn the giddy wheel; But if sweet Love with baby-fingers twines, And wets with dewy lips the lengthening lines, Skein after skein celestial tints unfold, And all the silken tissue shines with gold. Warm with sweet blushes bright GALANTHA glows, And prints with frolic step the melting snows; O'er silent floods, white hills, and glittering meads Six 69 rival swains the playful beauty leads, Chides with her dulcet voice the tardy Spring, Bids slumbering Zephyr stretch his folded wing, Wakes the hoarse Cuckoo in his gloomy cave, And calls the wondering Dormouse from his grave, Bids the mute Redbreast cheer the budding grove, And plaintive Ringdove tune her notes to love. Spring! with thy own sweet smile, and tuneful tongue, Delighted BELLIS calls her infant throng. Each on his reed astride, the Cherub-train Watch her kind looks, and circle o'er the plain; Now with young wonder touch the siding snail, Admire his eye-tipp'd horns, and painted mail; Chase with quick step, and eager arms outspread, The pausing Butterfly from mead to mead; Or twine green oziers with the fragrant gale, The azure harebel, and the primrose pale, Join hand in hand, and in procession gay Adorn with votive wreaths the shrine of May. -So moves the Goddess to the Idalian groves, And leads her gold-hair'd family of Loves. These, from the flaming furnace, strong and bold Pour the red steel into the sandy mould; On tinkling anvils (with Vulcanian art), Turn with hot tongs, and forge the dreadful dart; The barbed head on whirling jaspers grind, And dip the point in poison for the mind; Each polish'd shaft with snow-white plumage wing, Or strain the bow reluctant to its string. Those on light pinion twine with busy hands, Or stretch from bough to bough the flowery bands; Scare the dark beetle, as he wheels on high, Or catch in silken nets the gilded fly; Call the young Zephyrs to their fragrant bowers, And stay with kisses sweet the Vernal Hours. Where, as proud Maffon rises rude and bleak, And with mishapen turrets crests the Peak, Old Matlock gapes with marble jaws, beneath, And o'er fear'd Derwent bends his flinty teeth; Deep in wide caves below the dangerous soil Blue sulphurs flame, imprison'd waters boil. Impetuous steams in spiral colums rise 70 Through rifted rocks, impatient for the skies; Or o'er bright seas of bubbling lavas blow, As heave and toss the billowy fires below; Condensed on high, in wandering rills they glide From Maffon's dome, and burst his sparry side; Round his grey towers, and down his fringed walls, From cliff to cliff, the liquid treasure falls; In beds of stalactite, bright ores among, O'er corals, shells, and crystals, winds along; Crusts the green mosses, and the tangled wood, And sparkling plunges to its parent flood. -O'er the warm wave a smiling youth presides, Attunes its murmurs, its meanders guides, (The blooming FUCUS), in her sparry coves To amorous Echo sings his secret loves, Bathes his fair forehead in the misty stream, And with sweet breath perfumes the rising steam. -So, erst, an Angel o'er Bethesda's springs, Each morn descending, shook his dewy wings; And as his bright translucent form He laves, Salubrious powers enrich the troubled waves. Amphibious Nymph, from Nile's prolific bed Emerging TRAPA lifts her pearly head; Fair glows her virgin cheek and modest breast, A panoply of scales deforms the rest; Her quivering fins and panting gills she hides But spreads her silver arms upon the tides; Slow as she sails, her ivory neck she laves, And shakes her golden tresses o'er the waves. Charm'd round the Nymph, in circling gambols glide Four Nereid-forms, or shoot along the tide; Now all as one they rise with frolic spring, And beat the wondering air on humid wing; Now all descending plunge beneath the main, And lash the foam with undulating train; Above, below, they wheel, retreat, advance, In air and ocean weave the mazy dance; Bow their quick heads, and point their diamond eyes, 71 And twinkle to the sun with ever-changing dyes. Where Andes, crested with volcanic beams, Sheds a long line of light on Plata's streams; Opes all his springs, unlocks his golden caves, And feeds and freights the immeasurable waves; Delighted OCYMA at twilight hours Calls her light car, and leaves the sultry bowers;Love's rising ray, and Youth's seductive dye, Bloom'd on her cheek, and brighten'd in her eye; Chaste, pure, and white, a zone of silver graced Her tender breast, as white, as pure, as chaste;-By four fond swains in playful circles drawn, On glowing wheels she tracks the moon-bright lawn, Mounts the rude cliff, unveils her blushing charms, And calls the panting zephyrs to her arms. Emerged from ocean springs the vaporous air, Bathes her light limbs, uncurls her amber hair, Incrusts her beamy form with films saline, And Beauty blazes through the crystal shrine.So with pellucid studs the ice-flower gems Her rimy foliage, and her candied stems. So from his glassy horns, and pearly eyes, The diamond-beetle darts a thousand dyes; Mounts with enamel'd wings the vesper gale, And wheeling shines in adamantine mail. Thus when loud thunders o'er Gomorrah burst, And heaving earthquakes shook his realms accurst, An Angel-guest led forth the trembling Fair With shadowy hand, and warn'd the guiltless pair; 'Haste from these lands of sin, ye Righteous! fly, Speed the quick step, nor turn the lingering eye!'-Such the command, as fabling Bards indite, When Orpheus charm'd the grisly King of Night; Sooth'd the pale phantoms with his plaintive lay, And led the fair Assurgent into day.Wide yawn'd the earth, the fiery tempest flash'd, And towns and towers in one vast ruin crash'd;Onward they move,--loud horror roars behind, And shrieks of Anguish bellow in the wind. With many a sob, amid a thousand fears, 72 The beauteous wanderer pours her gushing tears; Each soft connection rends her troubled breast, -She turns, unconscious of the stern behest!'I faint!-I fall!-ah, me!-sensations chill Shoot through my bones, my shuddering bosom thrill! I freeze! I freeze! just Heaven regards my fault, Numbs my cold limbs, and hardens into salt!Not yet, not yet, your dying Love resign!This last, last kiss receive!-no longer thine!'She said, and ceased,-her stiffen'd form He press'd, And strain'd the briny column to his breast; Printed with quivering lips the lifeless snow, And wept, and gazed the monument of woe.So when Aeneas through the flames of Troy Bore his pale fire, and led his lovely boy; With loitering step the fair Creusa stay'd, And Death involved her in eternal shade.Oft the lone Pilgrim that his road forsakes, Marks the wide ruins, and the sulphur'd lakes; On mouldering piles amid asphaltic mud Hears the hoarse bittern, where Gomorrah stood; Recalls the unhappy Pair with lifted eye, Leans on the crystal tomb, and breathes the silent sigh.. With net-wove sash and glittering gorget dress'd, And scarlet robe lapell'd upon her breast, Stern ARA frowns, the measured march assumes, Trails her long lance, and nods her shadowy plumes; While Love's soft beams illume her treacherous eyes, And Beauty lightens through the thin disguise. So erst, when HERCULES, untamed by toil, Own'd the soft power of DEJANIRA'S smile;His lion-spoils the laughing Fair demands, And gives the distaff to his awkward hands; O'er her white neck the bristly mane she throws, And binds the gaping whiskers on her brows; Plaits round her slender waist the shaggy vest, And clasps the velvet paws across her breast. Next with soft hands the knotted club she rears, Heaves up from earth, and on her shoulder bears. Onward with loftier step the Beauty treads, And trails the brinded ermine o'er the meads; Wolves, bears, and bards, forsake the affrighted groves, 73 And grinning Satyrs tremble, as she moves. CARYO'S sweet smile DIANTHUS proud admires, And gazing burns with unallow'd desires; With sighs and sorrows her compassion moves, And wins the damsel to illicit loves. The Monster-offspring heirs the father's pride, Mask'd in the damask beauties of the bride. So, when the Nightingale in eastern bowers On quivering pinion woos the Queen of flowers; Inhales her fragrance, as he hangs in air, And melts with melody the blushing fair; Half-rose, half-bird, a beauteous Monster springs, Waves his thin leaves, and claps his glossy wings; Long horrent thorns his mossy legs surround, And tendril-talons root him to the ground; Green films of rind his wrinkled neck o'espread, And crimson petals crest his curled head; Soft-warbling beaks in each bright blossom move, And vocal Rosebuds thrill the enchanted grove!Admiring Evening stays her beamy star, And still Night listens from his ebon ear; While on white wings descending Houries throng, And drink the floods of odour and of song. When from his golden urn the Solstice pours O'er Afric's sable sons the sultry hours; When not a gale flits o'er her tawny hills, Save where the dry Harmattan breathes and kills; -Fair CHUNDA smiles amid the burning waste, Her brow unturban'd, and her zone unbrac'd; Ten brother-youths with light umbrella's shade, Or fan with busy hands the panting maid; Loose wave her locks, disclosing, as they break, The rising bosom and averted cheek; Clasp'd round her ivory neck with studs of gold Flows her thin vest in many a gauzy fold; O'er her light limbs the dim transparence plays, And the fair form, it seems to hide, betrays. Where leads the northern Star his lucid train High o'er the snow-clad earth, and icy main, With milky light the white horizon streams, 74 And to the moon each sparkling mountain gleams.Slow o'er the printed snows with silent walk Huge shaggy forms across the twilight stalk; And ever and anon with hideous sound Burst the thick ribs of ice, and thunder round.There, as old Winter slaps his hoary wing, And lingering leaves his empire to the Spring, Pierced with quick shafts of silver-shooting light Fly in dark troops the dazzled imps of night'Awake, my Love!' enamour'd MUSCHUS cries, 'Stretch thy fair limbs, resulgent Maid! arise; Ope thy sweet eye-lids to the rising ray, And hail with ruby lips returning day. Down the white hills dissolving torrents pour, Green springs the turf, and purple blows the flower; His torpid wing the Rail exulting tries, Mounts the soft gale, and wantons in the skies; Rise, let us mark how bloom the awaken'd groves, And 'mid the banks of roses hide our loves.' Night's tinsel beams on smooth Lock-lomond dance, Impatient ÆGA views the bright expanse;In vain her eyes the parting floods explore, Wave after wave rolls freightless to the shore. -Now dim amid the distant foam she spies A rising speck,-''tis he! 'tis he!' She cries; As with firm arms he beats the streams aside, And cleaves with rising chest the tossing tide, With bended knee she prints the humid sands, Up-turns her glistening eyes, and spreads her hands; -''Tis he, 'tis he!-My Lord, my life, my love!Slumber, ye winds; ye billows, cease to move! beneath his arms your buoyant plumage spread, Ye Swans! ye Halcyons! hover round his head!'-With eager step the boiling surf she braves, And meets her refluent lover in the waves; Loose o'er the flood her azure mantle swims, And the clear stream betrays her snowy limbs. So on her sea-girt tower fair HERO stood At parting day, and mark'd the dashing flood; While high in air, the glimmering rocks above, 75 Shone the bright lamp, the pilot-star of Love. -With robe outspread the wavering flame behind She kneels, and guards it from the shifting wind; Breathes to her Goddess all her vows, and guides Her bold LEANDER o'er the dusky tides; Wrings his wet hair, his briny bosom warms, And clasps her panting lover in her arms. Deep, in wide caverns and their shadowy ailes, Daughter of Earth, the chaste TRUFFELIA smiles; On silvery beds, of soft asbestus wove, Meets her Gnome-husband, and avows her love. High o'er her couch impending diamonds blaze, And branching gold the crystal roof inlays; With verdant light the modest emeralds glow, Blue sapphires glare, and rubies blush, below Light piers of lazuli the dome surround, And pictured mochoes tesselate the ground; In glittering threads along reflective walls The warm rill murmuring twinkles, as it falls; Now sink the Eolian strings, and now they swell, And Echoes woo in every vaulted cell; While on white wings delighted Cupids play, Shake their bright lamps, and shed celestial day. Closed in an azure fig by fairy spells, Bosom'd in down, fair CAPRI-FICA dwells;So sleeps in silence the Curculio, shut In the dark chambers of the cavern'd nut, Erodes with ivory beak the vaulted shell, And quits on filmy wings its narrow cell. So the pleased Linnet in the moss-wove nest, Waked into life beneath its parent's breast, Chirps in the gaping shell, bursts forth erelong, Shakes its new plumes, and tries its tender song.-And now the talisman she strikes, that charms Her husband-Sylph,-and calls him to her arms.Quick, the light Gnat her airy Lord bestrides, With cobweb reins the flying courser guides, From crystal steeps of viewless ether springs, 76 Cleaves the soft air on still expanded wings; Darts like a sunbeam o'er the boundless wave, And seeks the beauty in her secret cave. So with quick impulse through all nature's frame Shoots the electric air its subtle flame. So turns the impatient needle to the pole, Tho' mountains rise between, and oceans roll. Where round the Orcades white torrents roar, Scooping with ceaseless rage the incumbent shore, Wide o'er the deep a dusky cavern bends Its marble arms, and high in air impends; Basaltic piers the ponderous roof sustain, And steep their massy sandals in the main; Round the dim walls, and through the whispering ailes Hoarse breathes the wind, the glittering water boils. Here the charm'd BYSSUS with his blooming bride Spreads his green sails, and braves the foaming tide; The star of Venus gilds the twilight wave, And lights her votaries to the secret cave; Light Cupids flutter round the nuptial bed, And each coy sea-maid hides her blushing head. Where cool'd by rills, and curtain'd round by woods, Slopes the green dell to meet the briny floods, The sparkling noon-beams trembling on the tide, The PROTEUS-LOVER woos his playful bride, To win the fair he tries a thousand forms, Basks on the sands, or gambols in the storms. A Dolphin now, his scaly sides he laves, And bears the sportive damsel on the waves; She strikes the cymbal as he moves along, And wondering Ocean listens to the song. -And now a spotted Pard the lover stalks, Plays round her steps, and guards her favour'd walks; As with white teeth he prints her hand, caress'd, And lays his velvet paw upon her breast, O'er his round face her snowy fingers strain The silken knots, and fit the ribbon-rein. -And now a Swan, he spreads his plumy sails, 77 And proudly glides before the fanning gales; Pleas'd on the flowery brink with graceful hand She waves her floating lover to the land; Bright shines his sinuous neck, with crimson beak He prints fond kisses on her glowing cheek, Spreads his broad wings, elates his ebon crest, And clasps the beauty to his downy breast. hundred virgins join a hundred swains, And fond ADONIS leads the sprightly trains; Pair after pair, along his sacred groves To Hymen's fane the bright procession moves; Each smiling youth a myrtle garland shades, And wreaths of roses veil the blushing maids; Light joys on twinkling feet attend the throng, Weave the gay dance, or raise the frolic song; -Thick, as they pass, exulting Cupids fling Promiscuous arrows from the sounding string; On wings of gossamer soft Whispers fly, And the sly Glance steals side-long from the eye. -As round his shrine the gaudy circles bow, And seal with muttering lips the faithless vow, Licentious Hymen joins their mingled hands, And loosely twines the meretricious bands.Thus where pleased VENUS, in the southern main, Sheds all her smiles on Otaheite's plain, Wide o'er the isle her silken net she draws, And the Loves laugh at all, but Nature's laws.' Here ceased the Goddess,-o'er the silent strings Applauding Zephyrs swept their fluttering wings; Enraptur'd Sylphs arose in murmuring crowds To air-wove canopies and pillowy clouds; Each Gnome reluctant sought his earthy cell, And each bright Floret clos'd her velvet bell. Then, on soft tiptoe, NIGHT approaching near Hung o'er the tuneless lyre his sable ear; Gem'd with bright stars the still etherial plain, And bad his Nightingales repeat the strain. 78 ~ Erasmus Darwin,

699:Custer: Book Second Oh, for the power to call to aid, of mine Own humble Muse, the famed and sacred nine. Then might she fitly sing, and only then, Of those intrepid and unflinching men Who knew no homes save ever moving tents, And who 'twixt fierce unfriendly elements And wild barbarians warred. Yet unfraid, Since love impels thy strains, sing, sing, my modest maid. II Relate how Custer in midwinter sought Far Washita's cold shores; tell why he fought With savage nomads fortressed in deep snows. Woman, thou source of half the sad world's woes And all its joys, what sanguinary strife Has vexed the earth and made contention rife Because of thee! For, hidden in man's heart, Ay, in his very soul, of his true self a part, III The natural impulse and the wish belongs To win thy favor and redress thy wrongs. Alas! for woman, and for man, alas! If that dread hour should ever come to pass, When, through her new-born passion for control, She drives that beauteous impulse from his soul. What were her vaunted independence worth If to obtain she sells her sweetest rights of birth? IV God formed fair woman for her true estateMan's tender comrade, and his equal mate, Not his competitor in toil and trade. While coarser man, with greater strength was made 183 To fight her battles and her rights protect. Ay! to protect the rights of earth's elect (The virgin maiden and the spotless wife) From immemorial time has man laid down his life. And now brave Custer's valiant army pressed Across the dangerous desert of the West, To rescue fair white captives from the hands Of brutal Cheyenne and Comanche bands, On Washita's bleak banks. Nine hundred strong It moved its slow determined way along, Past frontier homes left dark and desolate By the wild Indians' fierce and unrelenting hate; VI Past forts where ranchmen, strong of heart and bold, Wept now like orphaned children as they told, With quivering muscles and with anguished breath, Of captured wives, whose fate was worse than death; Past naked bodies whose disfiguring wounds Spoke of the hellish hate of human hounds; Past bleaching skeleton and rifled grave, On pressed th' avenging host, to rescue and to save. VII Uncertain Nature, like a fickle friend, (Worse than the foe on whom we may depend) Turned on these dauntless souls a brow of wrath And hurled her icy jav'lins in their path. With treacherous quicksands, and with storms that blight, Entrapped their footsteps and confused their sight. 'Yet on,' urged Custer, 'on at any cost, No hour is there to waste, no moment to be lost.' VIII Determined, silent, on they rode, and on, Like fabled Centaurs, men and steeds seemed one. 184 No bugle echoed and no voice spoke near, Lest on some lurking Indian's list'ning ear The sound might fall. Through swift descending snow The stealthy guides crept, tracing out the foe; No fire was lighted, and no halt was made From haggard gray-lipped dawn till night lent friendly shade. IX Then, by the shelt'ring river's bank at last, The weary warriors paused for their repast. A couch of ice and falling shows for spread Made many a suffering soldier's chilling bed. They slept to dream of glory and delight, While the pale fingers of the pitying night Wove ghostly winding sheets for that doomed score Who, ere another eve, should sleep to wake no more. But those who slept not, saw with startled eyes Far off, athwart dim unprotecting skies, Ascending slowly with majestic grace, A lustrous rocket, rising out of space. 'Behold the signal of the foe,' cried one, The field is lost before the strife's begun. Yet no! for see! yon rays spread near and far; It is the day's first smile, the radiant morning star. XI The long hours counting till the daylight broke, In whispered words the restless warriors spoke. They talked of battles, but they thought of home (For hearts are faithful though the feet may roam). Brave Hamilton, all eager for the strife, Mused o'er that two-fold mystery-death and life; 'And when I die,' quoth he, 'mine be the part To fall upon the field, a bullet in my heart.' XII 185 At break of dawn the scouts crept in to say The foe was camped a rifle shot away. The baying of a dog, an infant's cry Pierced through the air; sleep fled from every eye. To horse! to arms! the dead demand the dead! Let the grand charge upon the lodge be led! Let the Mosaic law, life for a life Pay the long standing debt of blood. War to the knife! XIII So spake each heart in that unholy rage Which fires the brain, when war the thoughts engage. War, hideous war, appealing to the worst In complex man, and waking that wild thirst For human blood which blood alone can slake. Yet for their country's safety, and the sake Of tortured captives moaning in alarm The Indian must be made to fear the law's strong arm. XIV A noble vengeance burned in Custer's breast, But, as he led his army to the crest, Above the wigwams, ready for the charge He felt the heart within him, swelling large With human pity, as an infant's wail Shrilled once again above the wintry gale. Then hosts of murdered children seemed to rise; And shame his halting thought with sad accusing eyes, XV And urge him on to action. Stern of brow The just avenger, and the General now, He gives the silent signal to the band Which, all impatient, waits for his command. Cold lips to colder metal press; the air Echoes those merry strains which mean despair For sleeping chieftain and for toiling squaw, But joy to those stern hearts which glory in the law 186 XVI Of murder paying murder's awful debt. And now four squadrons in one charge are met. From east and west, from north and south they come, At call of bugle and at roll of drum. Their rifles rain hot hail upon the foe, Who flee from danger in death's jaws to go. The Indians fight like maddened bulls at bay, And dying shriek and groan, wound the young ear of day. XVII A pallid captive and a white-browed boy Add to the tumult piercing cries of joy, As forth they fly, with high hope animate. A hideous squaw pursues them with her hate; Her knife descends with sickening force and sound; Their bloody entrails stain the snow-clad ground. She shouts with glee, then yells with rage and falls Dead by her victims' side, pierced by avenging balls. XVIII Now war runs riot, carnage reigns supreme. All thoughts of mercy fade from Custer's scheme. Inhuman methods for inhuman foes, Who feed on horrors and exult in woes. To conquer and subdue alone remains In dealing with the red man on the plains. The breast that knows no conscience yields to fear, Strike! let the Indian meet his master now and here. XIX With thoughts like these was Custer's mind engaged. The gentlest are the sternest when enraged. All felt the swift contagion of his ire, For he was one who could arouse and fire The coldest heart, so ardent was his own. His fearless eye, his calm intrepid tone, Bespoke the leader, strong with conscious power, 187 Whom following friends will bless, while foes will curse and cower. XX Again they charge! and now among the killed Lies Hamilton, his wish so soon fulfilled, Brave Elliott pursues across the field The flying foe, his own young life to yield. But like the leaves in some autumnal gale The red men fall in Washita's wild vale. Each painted face and black befeathered head Still more repulsive seems with death's grim pallor wed. XXI New forces gather on surrounding knolls, And fierce and fiercer war's red river rolls. With bright-hued pennants flying from each lance The gayly costumed Kiowas advance. And bold Comanches (Bedouins of the land) Infuse fresh spirit in the Cheyenne band. While from the ambush of some dark ravine Flash arrows aimed by hands, unerring and unseen. XXIII The hours advance; the storm clouds roll away; Still furious and more furious grows the fray. The yellow sun makes ghastlier still the sight Of painted corpses, staring in its light. No longer slaves, but comrades of their griefs, The squaws augment the forces of their chiefs. They chant weird dirges in a minor key, While from the narrow door of wigwam and tepee XXIII Cold glittering eyes above cold glittering steel Their deadly purpose and their hate reveal. The click of pistols and the crack of guns Proclaim war's daughters dangerous as her sons. She who would wield the soldier's sword and lance 188 Must be prepared to take the soldier's chance. She who would shoot must serve as target, too; The battle-frenzied men, infuriate now pursue. XXIV And blood of warrior, woman and papoose, Flow free as waters when some dam breaks loose; Consuming fire, the wanton friend of war (Whom allies worship and whom foes abhor) Now trails her crimson garments through the street, And ruin marks the passing of her feet. Full three-score lodges smoke upon the plain, And all the vale is strewn with bodies of the slain. XXV And those who are not numbered with the dead Before all-conquering Custer now are led. To soothe their woes, and calm their fears he seeks; An Osage guide interprets while he speaks. The vanquished captives, humbled, cowed and spent Read in the victor's eye his kind intent. The modern victor is as kind as brave; His captive is his guest, not his insulted slave. XXVI Mahwissa, sister of the slaughtered chief Of all the Cheyennes, listens; and her grief Yields now to hope; and o'er her withered face There flits the stealthy cunning of her race. Then forth she steps, and thus begins to speak: 'To aid the fallen and support the weak Is man's true province; and to ease the pain Of those o'er whom it is his purpose now to reign. XXVII 'Let the strong chief unite with theirs his life, And take this black-eyed maiden for a wife.' Then, moving with an air of proud command, 189 She leads a dusky damsel by the hand, And places her at wondering Custer's side, Invoking choicest blessings on the bride And all unwilling groom, who thus replies. 'Fair is the Indian maid, with bright bewildering eyes, XXVIII 'But fairer still is one who, year on year, Has borne man's burdens, conquered woman's fear; And at my side rode mile on weary mile, And faced all deaths, all dangers, with a smile, Wise as Minerva, as Diana brave, Is she whom generous gods in kindness gave To share the hardships of my wandering life, Companion, comrade, friend, my loved and loyal wife. XXIX 'The white chief weds but one. Take back thy maid.' He ceased, and o'er Mahwissa's face a shade Of mingled scorn and pity and surprise Sweeps as she slow retreats, and thus replies: 'Rich is the pale-faced chief in battle fame, But poor is he who but one wife may claim. Wives are the red-skinned heroes' rightful spoil; In war they prove his strength, in times of peace they toil.' XXX But hark! The bugle echoes o'er the plains And sounds again those merry Celtic strains Which oft have called light feet to lilting dance, But now they mean the order to advance. Along the river's bank, beyond the hill Two thousand foemen lodge, unconquered still. Ere falls night's curtain on this bloody play, The army must proceed, with feint of further fray. XXXI The weary warriors mount their foam-flecked steeds, 190 With flags unfurled the dauntless host proceeds. What though the foe outnumbers two to one? Boldness achieves what strength oft leaves undone; A daring mein will cause brute force to cower, And courage is the secret source of power. As Custer's column wheels upon their sight The frightened red men yield the untried field by flight. XXXII Yet when these conquering heroes sink to rest, Dissatisfaction gnaws the leader's breast, For far away across vast seas of snows Held prisoners still by hostile Arapahoes And Cheyennes unsubdued, two captives wait. On God and Custer hangs their future fate. May the Great Spirit nerve the mortal's arm To rescue suffering souls from worse than death's alarm. XXXIII But ere they seek to rescue the oppressed, The valiant dead, in state, are laid to rest. Mourned Hamilton, the faithful and the brave, Nine hundred comrades follow to the grave; And close behind the banner-hidden corse All draped in black, walks mournfully his horse; While tears of sound drip through the sunlit day. A soldier may not weep, but drums and bugles may. XXXIV Now, Muse, recount, how after long delays And dangerous marches through untrodden ways, Where cold and hunger on each hour attend, At last the army gains the journey's end. An Indian village bursts upon the eye; Two hundred lodges, sleep-encompassed lie, There captives moan their anguished prayers through tears, While in the silent dawn the armied answer nears. XXXV 191 To snatch two fragile victims from the foe Nine hundred men have traversed leagues of snow. Each woe they suffered in a hostile land The flame of vengeance in their bosoms fanned. They thirst for slaughter, and the signal wait To wrest the captives from their horrid fate. Each warrior's hand upon his rifle falls, Each savage soldier's heart for awful bloodshed calls. XXXVI And one, in years a youth, in woe a man, Sad Brewster, scarred by sorrow's blighting ban, Looks, panting, where his captive sister sleeps, And o'er his face the shade of murder creeps. His nostrils quiver like a hungry beast Who scents anear the bloody carnal feast. He longs to leap down in that slumbering vale And leave no foe alive to tell the awful tale. XXXVII Not so, calm Custer. Sick of gory strife, He hopes for rescue with no loss of life; And plans that bloodless battle of the plains Where reasoning mind outwits mere savage brains. The sullen soldiers follow where he leads; No gun is emptied, and no foeman bleeds. Fierce for the fight and eager for the fray They look upon their Chief in undisguised dismay. XXXVIII He hears the murmur of their discontent, But sneers can never change a strong mind's bent. He knows his purpose and he does not swerve. And with a quiet mien and steady nerve He meets dark looks where'er his steps may go, And silence that is bruising as a blow, Where late were smiles and words of ardent praise. So pass the lagging weeks of wearying delays. 192 XXXIX Inaction is not always what it seems, And Custer's mind with plan and project teems. Fixed in his peaceful purpose he abides With none takes counsel and in none confides; But slowly weaves about the foe a net Which leaves them wholly at his mercy, yet He strikes no fateful blow; he takes no life, And holds in check his men, who pant for bloody strife. XL Intrepid warrior and skilled diplomate, In his strong hands he holds the red man's fate. The craftiest plot he checks with counterplot, Till tribe by tribe the tricky foe is brought To fear his vengeance and to know his power. As man's fixed gaze will make a wild beast cower, So these crude souls feel that unflinching will Which draws them by its force, yet does not deign to kill. XLI And one by one the hostile Indians send Their chiefs to seek a peaceful treaty's end. Great councils follow; skill with cunning copes And conquers it; and Custer sees his hopes So long delayed, like stars storm hidden, rise To radiate with splendor all his skies. The stubborn Cheyennes, cowed at last by fear, Leading the captive pair, o'er spring-touched hills appear. XLII With breath suspended, now the whole command Waits the approach of that equestrian band. Nearer it comes, still nearer, then a cry, Half sob, half shriek, goes piercing God's blue sky, And Brewster, like a nimble-footed doe, Or like an arrow hurrying from a bow, 193 Shoots swiftly through the intervening space And that lost sister clasps, in sorrowing love's embrace. XLIII And men who leaned o'er Hamilton's rude bier And saw his dead dear face without a tear, Strong souls who early learned the manly art Of keeping from the eye what's in the heart, Soldiers who look unmoved on death's pale brow, Avert their eyes, to hide their moisture now. The briny flood forced back from shores of woe, Needs but to touch the strands of joy to overflow. XLIV About the captives welcoming warriors crowd, All eyes are wet, and Brewster sobs aloud. Alas, the ravage wrought by toil and woe On faces that were fair twelve moons ago. Bronzed by exposure to the heat and cold, Still young in years, yet prematurely old, By insults humbled and by labor worn, They stand in youth's bright hour, of all youth's graces shorn. XLV A scanty garment rudely made of sacks Hangs from their loins; bright blankets drape their backs; About their necks are twisted tangled strings Of gaudy beads, while tinkling wire and rings Of yellow brass on wrists and fingers glow. Thus, to assuage the anger of the foe The cunning Indians decked the captive pair Who in one year have known a lifetime of despair. XLVI But love can resurrect from sorrow's tomb The vanished beauty and the faded bloom, As sunlight lifts the bruised flower from the sod, Can lift crushed hearts to hope, for love is God. 194 Already now in freedom's glad release The hunted look of fear gives place to peace, And in their eyes at thought of home appears That rainbow light of joy which brightest shines through tears. XLVII About the leader thick the warriors crowd; Late loud in censure, now in praises loud, They laud the tactics, and the skill extol Which gained a bloodless yet a glorious goal. Alone and lonely in the path of right Full many a brave soul walks. When gods requite And crown his actions as their worth demands, Among admiring throngs the hero always stands. XLVIII Back to the East the valorous squadrons sweep; The earth, arousing from her long, cold sleep, Throws from her breast the coverlet of snow, Revealing Spring's soft charms which lie below. Suppressed emotions in each heart arise, The wooer wakens and the warrior dies. The bird of prey is vanquished by the dove, And thoughts of bloody strife give place to thoughts of love. XLIX The mighty plains, devoid of whispering trees, Guard well the secrets of departed seas. Where once great tides swept by with ebb and flow The scorching sun looks down in tearless woe. And fierce tornadoes in ungoverned pain Mourn still the loss of that mysterious main. Across this ocean bed the soldiers flyHome is the gleaming goal that lures each eager eye. Like some elixir which the gods prepare, 195 They drink the viewless tonic of the air, Sweet with the breath of startled antelopes Which speed before them over swelling slopes. Now like a serpent writhing o'er the moor, The column curves and makes a slight detour, As Custer leads a thousand men away To save a ground bird's nest which in the footpath lay. LI Mile following mile, against the leaning skies Far off they see a dull dark cloud arise. The hunter's instinct in each heart is stirred, Beholding there in one stupendous herd A hundred thousand buffaloes. Oh great Unwieldy proof of Nature's cruder state, Rough remnant of a prehistoric day, Thou, with the red man, too, must shortly pass away. LII Upon those spreading plains is there not room For man and bison, that he seals its doom? What pleasure lies and what seductive charm In slaying with no purpose but to harm? Alas, that man, unable to create, Should thirst forever to exterminate, And in destruction find his fiercest joy. The gods alone create, gods only should destroy. LIII The flying hosts a straggling bull pursue; Unerring aim, the skillful Custer drew. The wounded beast turns madly in despair And man and horse are lifted high in air. The conscious steed needs not the guiding rein; Back with a bound and one quick cry of pain He springs, and halts, well knowing where must fall In that protected frame, the sure death dealing ball. LIV 196 With minds intent upon the morrow's feast, The men surround the carcass of the beast. Rolled on his back, he lies with lolling tongue, Soon to the saddle savory steaks are hung. And from his mighty head, great tufts of hair Are cut as trophies for some lady fair. To vultures then they leave the torn remains Of what an hour ago was monarch of the plains. LV Far off, two bulls in jealous war engage, Their blood-shot eye balls roll in furious rage; With maddened hoofs they mutilate the ground And loud their angry bellowings resound; With shaggy heads bent low they plunge and roar, Till both broad bellies drip with purple gore. Meanwhile, the heifer, whom the twain desire, Stands browsing near the pair, indifferent to their ire. LVI At last she lifts her lazy head and heeds The clattering hoofs of swift advancing steeds. Off to the herd with cumb'rous gait she runs And leaves the bulls to face the threatening guns. No more for them the free life of the plains, Its mating pleasures and its warring pains. Their quivering flesh shall feed unnumbered foes, Their tufted tails adorn the soldiers' saddle bows. LVII Now into camp the conquering hosts advance; On burnished arms the brilliant sunbeams glance. Brave Custer leads, blonde as the gods of old; Back from his brow blow clustering locks of gold, And, like a jewel in a brook, there lies, Far in the depths of his blue guarded eyes, The thought of one whose smiling lips upcurled, Mean more of joy to him than plaudits of the world. 197 LVIII The troops in columns of platoons appear Close to the leader following. Ah, here The poetry of war is fully seen, Its prose forgotten; as against the green Of Mother Nature, uniformed in blue, The soldiers pass for Sheridan's review. The motion-music of the moving throng, Is like a silent tune, set to a wordless song. LIX The guides and trailers, weird in war's array, Precede the troops along the grassy way. They chant wild songs, and with loud noise and stress, In savage manner savage joy express. The Indian captives, blanketed in red, On ponies mounted, by the scouts are led. Like sumach bushes, etched on evening skies, Against the blue-clad troops, this patch of color lies. LX High o'er the scene vast music billows bound, And all the air is liquid with the sound Of those invisible compelling waves. Perchance they reach the low and lonely graves Where sleep brave Elliott and Hamilton, And whisper there the tale of victory won; Or do the souls of soldiers tried and true Come at the bugle call, and march in grand review? LXI The pleased Commander watches in surprise This splendid pageant surge before his eyes. Not in those mighty battle days of old Did scenes like this upon his sight unfold. But now it passes. Drums and bugles cease To dash war billows on the shores of Peace. 198 The victors smile on fair broad bosomed Sleep While in her soothing arms, the vanquished cease to weep ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

700:A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS DRAMATIS PERSONS OTHO THE GREAT, Emperor of Germany. LUDOLPH, his Son. CONRAD, Duke of Franconia. ALBERT, a Knight, favoured by Otho. SIGIFRED, an Officer, friend of Ludolph. THEODORE, an Officer GONFRED, an Officer ETHELBERT. an Abbot. GERSA, Prince of Hungary. An Hungarian Captain. Physician. Page. Nobles, Knights, Attendants, and Soldiers. ERMINIA, Niece of Otho. AURANTHE, Conrad's Sister. Ladies and Attendants. SCENE. The Castle of Friedburg, its vicinity, and the Hungarian Camp. TIME. One Day. SCENE I. An Apartment in the Castle. Enter CONRAD. Conrad. So, I am safe emerged from these broils! Amid the wreck of thousands I am whole; For every crime I have a laurel-wreath, For every lie a lordship. Nor yet has My ship of fortune furl'd her silken sails, Let her glide on! This danger'd neck is saved, By dexterous policy, from the rebel's axe; And of my ducal palace not one stone Is bruised by the Hungarian petards. Toil hard, ye slaves, and from the miser-earth Bring forth once more my bullion, treasured deep, With ah my jewell'd salvers, silver and gold, And precious goblets that make rich the wine. But why do I stand babbling to myself? Where is Auranthe? I have news for her Shall- Enter AURANTHE. Auranthe. Conrad! what tidings? Good, if I may guess From your alert eyes and high-lifted brows. What tidings of the battle? Albert? Ludolph? Otho? Conrad. You guess aright. And, sister, slurring o'er Our by-gone quarrels, I confess my heart Is beating with a child's anxiety, To make our golden fortune known to you. Auranthe. So serious? Conrad. Yes, so serious, that before I utter even the shadow of a hint Concerning what will make that sin-worn cheek Blush joyous blood through every lineament, You must make here a solemn vow to me. Auranthe. I prythee, Conrad, do not overact The hypocrite what vow would you impose? Conrad. Trust me for once, that you may be assured 'Tis not confiding to a broken reed, A poor Court-bankrupt, outwitted and lost, Revolve these facts in your acutest mood, In such a mood as now you listen to me: A few days since, I was an open rebel Against the Emperor, had suborn'd his son, Drawn off his nobles to revolt, and shown Contented fools causes for discontent Fresh hatch'd in my ambition's eagle nest So thrived I as a rebel, and behold Now I am Otho's favourite, his dear friend, His right hand, his brave Conrad. Auranthe. I confess You have intrigued with these unsteady times To admiration; but to be a favourite Conrad. I saw my moment. The Hungarians, Collected silently in holes and corners, Appeared, a sudden host, in the open day. I should have perish'd in our empire's wreck, But, calling interest loyalty, swore faith To most believing Otho; and so helped His blood-stained ensigns to the victory In yesterday's hard fight, that it has turn'd The edge of his sharp wrath to eager kindness. Auranthe. So far yourself. But what is this to me More than that I am glad? I gratulate you. Conrad. Yes, sister, but it does regard you greatly, Nearly, momentously, aye, painfully! Make me this vow Auranthe. Concerning whom or what? Conrad. Albert! Auranthe. I would inquire somewhat of him: You had a letter from me touching him? No treason 'gainst his head in deed or word! Surely you spar'd him at my earnest prayer? Give me the letter it should not exist! Conrad. At one pernicious charge of the enemy, I, for a moment-whiles, was prisoner ta'en And rifled, stuff! the horses' hoofs have minc'd it! Auranthe. He is alive? Conrad. He is! but here make oath To alienate him from your scheming brain, Divorce him from your solitary thoughts, And cloud him in such utter banishment, That when his person meets again your eye, Your vision shall quite lose its memory, And wander past him as through vacancy. Auranthe. I'll not be perjured. Conrad. No, nor great, nor mighty; You would not wear a crown, or rule a kingdom. To you it is indifferent. Auranthe. What means this? Conrad. You'll not be perjured! Go to Albert then, That camp-mushroom dishonour of our house. Go, page his dusty heels upon a march, Furbish his jingling baldric while he sleeps, And share his mouldy ration in a siege. Yet stay, perhaps a charm may call you back, And make the widening circlets of your eyes Sparkle with healthy fevers. The Emperor Hath given consent that you should marry Ludolph! Auranthe. Can it be, brother? For a golden crown With a queen's awful lips I doubly thank you! This is to wake in Paradise ! Farewell Thou clod of yesterday 'twas not myself! Not till this moment did I ever feel My spirit's faculties! I'll flatter you For this, and be you ever proud of it; Thou, Jove-like, struck'dst thy forehead, And from the teeming marrow of thy brain I spring complete Minerva! But the prince His highness Ludolph where is he? Conrad. I know not: When, lackeying my counsel at a beck, The rebel lords, on bended knees, received The Emperor's pardon, Ludolph kept aloof, Sole, in a stiff, fool-hardy, sulky pride; Yet, for all this, I never saw a father In such a sickly longing for his son. We shall soon see him, for the Emperor He will be here this morning. Auranthe. That I heard Among the midnight rumours from the camp. Conrad. You give up Albert to me? Auranthe. Harm him not! E'en for his highness Ludolph's sceptry hand, I would not Albert suffer any wrong. Conrad. Have I not laboured, plotted ? Auranthe. See you spare him: Nor be pathetic, my kind benefactor, On all the many bounties of your hand, 'Twas for yourself you laboured not for me! Do you not count, when I am queen, to take Advantage of your chance discoveries Of my poor secrets, and so hold a rod Over my life? Conrad. Let not this slave this villain Be cause of feud between us. See! he comes! Look, woman, look, your Albert is quite safe! In haste it seems. Now shall I be in the way, And wish'd with silent curses in my grave, Or side by side with 'whelmed mariners. Enter ALBERT. Albert. Fair on your graces fall this early morrow! So it is like to do, without my prayers, For your right noble names, like favourite tunes, Have fallen full frequent from our Emperor's lips, High commented with smiles. Auranthe. Noble Albert! Conrad (aside). Noble! Auranthe. Such salutation argues a glad heart In our prosperity. We thank you, sir. Albert. Lady! O, would to Heaven your poor servant Could do you better service than mere words! But I have other greeting than mine own, From no less man than Otho, who has sent This ring as pledge of dearest amity; 'Tis chosen I hear from Hymen's jewel'ry, And you will prize it, lady, I doubt not, Beyond all pleasures past, and all to come. To you great duke Conrad. To me! What of me, ha? Albert. What pleas'd your grace to say? Conrad. Your message, sir! Albert. You mean not this to me? Conrad. Sister, this way; For there shall be no '''gentle Alberts" now, [Aside. No "sweet Auranthes!" [Exeunt CONRAD and AURANTHE. Albert (solus). The duke is out of temper; if he knows More than a brother of a sister ought, I should not quarrel with his peevishness. Auranthe Heaven preserve her always fair! Is in the heady, proud, ambitious vein; I bicker not with her, bid her farewell! She has taken flight from me, then let her soar, He is a fool who stands at pining gaze! But for poor Ludolph, he is food for sorrow: No levelling bluster of my licens'd thoughts, No military swagger of my mind, Can smother from myself the wrong I've done him, Without design, indeed, yet it is so, And opiate for the conscience have I none! [Exit. SCENE II. The Court-yard of the Castle. Martial Music. Enter, from the outer gate, OTHO, Nobles, Knights, and Attendants. The Soldiers halt at the gate, with Banners in sight. Otho. Where is my noble herald? Enter CONRAD, from the Castle, attended by two Knights and Servants. ALBERT following. Well, hast told Auranthe our intent imperial? Lest our rent banners, too o' the sudden shown, Should fright her silken casements, and dismay Her household to our lack of entertainment. A victory! Conrad. God save illustrious Otho! Otho. Aye, Conrad, it will pluck out all grey hairs; It is the best physician for the spleen; The courtliest inviter to a feast; The subtlest excuser of small faults; And a nice judge in the age and smack of wine. Enter, from the Castle, AURANTHE, followed by Pages holding up her robes, and a tram of Women. She kneels. Hail my sweet hostess! I do thank the stars, Or my good soldiers, or their ladies' eyes, That, after such a merry battle fought, I can, all safe in body and in soul, Kiss your fair hand and lady fortune's too. My ring! now, on my life, it doth rejoice These lips to feel 't on this soft ivory! Keep it, my brightest daughter; it may prove The little prologue to a line of kings. I strove against thee and my hot-blood son, Dull blockhead that I was to be so blind, But now my sight is clear; forgive me, lady. Auranthe. My lord, I was a vassal to your frown, And now your favour makes me but more humble; In wintry winds the simple snow is safe, But fadeth at the greeting of the sun: Unto thine anger I might well have spoken, Taking on me a woman's privilege, But this so sudden kindness makes me dumb. Otho. What need of this? Enough, if you will be A potent tutoress to my wayward boy, And teach him, what it seems his nurse could not To say, for once, I thank you. Sigifred! Albert. He has not yet return'd, my gracious liege. Otho. What then! No tidings of my friendly Arab? Conrad. None, mighty Otho. [To one of his Knights, who goes out. Send forth instantly An hundred horsemen from my honoured gates, To scour the plains and search the cottages. Cry a reward, to him who shall first bring News of that vanished Arabian, A full-heap'd helmet of the purest gold. Otho. More thanks, good Conrad; for, except my son's, There is no face I rather would behold Than that same quick-eyed pagan's. By the saints, This coming night of banquets must not light Her dazzling torches; nor the music breathe Smooth, without clashing cymbal, tones of peace And in-door melodies; nor the ruddy wine Ebb spouting to the lees; if I pledge not In my first cup, that Arab! Albert. Mighty Monarch, I wonder not this stranger's victor-deeds So, hang upon your spirit. Twice in the fight It was my chance to meet his olive brow, Triumphant in the enemy's shatter 'd rhomb; And, to say truth, in any Christian arm I never saw such prowess. Otho. Did you ever? O, 'tis a noble boy! tut! what do I say? I mean a triple Saladin, whose eyes, When in the glorious scuffle they met mine, Seem'd to say "Sleep, old man, in safety sleep; I am the victory!" Conrad. Pity he's not here. Otho. And my son too, pity he is not here. Lady Auranthe, I would not make you blush, But can you give a guess where Ludolph is? Know you not of him? Auranthe. Indeed, my liege, no secret Otho. Nay, nay, without more words, dost know of him? Auranthe. I would I were so over-fortunate, Both for his sake and mine, and to make glad A father's ears with tidings of his son. Otho. I see 'tis like to be a tedious day. Were Theodore and Gonfred and the rest Sent forth with my commands? Albert. Aye, my lord. Otho. And no news! No news! 'Faith! 'tis very strange He thus avoids us. Lady, is't not strange? Will he be truant to you too? It is a shame. Conrad. Will 't please your highness enter, and accept The unworthy welcome of your servant's house? Leaving your cares to one whose diligence May in few hours make pleasures of them all. Otho. Not so tedious, Conrad. No, no, no, I must see Ludolph or the What's that shout! Voices without. Huzza! huzza! Long live the Emperor! Other Voices. Fall back! Away there! Otho. Say, what noise is that? [ALBERT advancing from the bark of the Stage, whither he had hastened on hearing the cheers of the soldiery. Albert. It is young Gersa, the Hungarian prince, Pick'd like a red stag from the fallow herd Of prisoners. Poor prince, forlorn he steps, Slow, and demure, and proud in his despair. If I may judge by his so tragic bearing, His eye not downcast, and his folded arm, He doth this moment wish himself asleep Among his fallen captains on yon plains. Enter GERSA, in chains, and guarded, Otho. Well said, Sir Albert. Gersa. Not a word of greeting. No welcome to a princely visitor, Most mighty Otho? Will not my great host Vouchsafe a syllable, before he bids His gentlemen conduct me with all care To some securest lodgings? cold perhaps! Otho. What mood is this? Hath fortune touch'd thy brain? Gersa. kings and princes of this fev'rous world, What abject things, what mockeries must ye be, What nerveless minions of safe palaces! When here, a monarch, whose proud foot is used To fallen princes' necks, as to his stirrup, Must needs exclaim that I am mad forsooth, Because I cannot flatter with bent knees My conqueror! Otho. Gersa, I think you wrong me: I think I have a better fame abroad. Gersa. I prythee mock me not with gentle speech, But, as a favour, bid me from thy presence; Let me no longer be the wondering food Of all these eyes; prythee command me hence! Otho. Do not mistake me, Gersa. That you may not, Come, fair Auranthe, try if your soft hands Can manage those hard rivets to set free So brave a prince and soldier. Auranthe (sets him free). Welcome task! Gersa. I am wound up in deep astonishment! Thank you, fair lady. Otho! emperor! You rob me of myself; my dignity Is now your infant; I am a weak child. Otho. Give me your hand, and let this kindly grasp Live in our memories. Gersa. In mine it will. I blush to think of my unchasten'd tongue; But I was haunted by the monstrous ghost Of all our slain battalions. Sire, reflect, And pardon you will grant, that, at this hour, The bruised remnants of our stricken camp Are huddling undistinguish'd my dear friends, With common thousands, into shallow graves. Otho. Enough, most noble Gersa. You are free To cheer the brave remainder of your host By your own healing presence, and that too, Not as their leader merely, but their king; For, as I hear, the wily enemy, Who eas'd the crownet from your infant brows, Bloody Taraxa, is among the dead. Gersa. Then I retire, so generous Otho please, Bearing with me a weight of benefits Too heavy to be borne. Otho. It is not so; Still understand me, King of Hungary, Nor judge my open purposes awry. Though I did hold you high in my esteem For your self's sake, I do not personate The stage-play emperor to entrap applause, To set the silly sort o' the world agape, And make the politic smile; no, I have heard How in the Council you condemn 'd this war, Urging the perfidy of broken faith, For that I am your friend. Gersa. If ever, sire, You are mine enemy, I dare here swear 'Twill not be Gersa's fault. Otho, farewell! Otho. Will you return, Prince, to our banqueting? Gersa. As to my father's board I will return. Otho. Conrad, with all due ceremony, give The prince a regal escort to his camp; Albert, go thou and bear him company. Gersa, farewell! Gersa. All happiness attend you! Otho. Return with what good speed you may; for soon We must consult upon our terms of peace. [Exeunt GERSA and ALBERT with others. And thus a marble column do I build To prop my empire's dome. Conrad, in thee I have another stedfast one, to uphold The portals of my state; and, for my own Pre-eminence and safety, I will strive To keep thy strength upon its pedestal. For, without thee, this day I might have been A show-monster about the streets of Prague, In chains, as just now stood that noble prince: And then to me no mercy had been shown, For when the conquered lion is once dungeon'd, Who lets him forth again? or dares to give An old lion sugar-cates of mild reprieve? Not to thine ear alone I make confession, But to all here, as, by experience, I know how the great basement of all power Is frankness, and a true tongue to the world; And how intriguing secrecy is proof Of fear and weakness, and a hollow state. Conrad, I owe thee much. Conrad. To kiss that hand, My emperor, is ample recompense, For a mere act of duty. Otho. Thou art wrong; For what can any man on earth do more? We will make trial of your house's welcome, My bright Auranthe! Conrad. How is Friedburg honoured! Enter ETHELBERT and six Monks. Ethelbert. The benison of heaven on your head, Imperial Otho! Otho. Who stays me? Speak! Quick! Ethelbert. Pause but one moment, mighty conqueror Upon the threshold of this house of joy. Otho. Pray, do not prose, good Ethelbert, but speak What is your purpose. Ethelbert. The restoration of some captive maids, Devoted to Heaven's pious ministries, Who, being driven from their religious cells, And kept in thraldom by our enemy, When late this province was a lawless spoil, Still weep amid the wild Hungarian camp, Though hemm'd around by thy victorious arms. Otho. Demand the holy sisterhood in our name From Gersa's tents. Farewell, old Ethelbert. Ethelbert. The saints will bless you for this pious care. Otho. Daughter, your hand; Ludolph's would fit it best. Conrad. Ho ! let the music sound ! [Music. ETHELBERT raises his hands, as in benediction of OTHO. Exeunt severally. The scene closes on them. SCENE III. The Country, with the Castle in the distance. Enter LUDOLPH and SIGIFRED. Ludolph. You have my secret; let it not be breath 'd. Sigifred. Still give me leave to wonder that the Prince Ludolph and the swift Arab are the same ; Still to rejoice that 'twas a German arm Death doing in a turban'd masquerade. Ludolph. The Emperor must not know it, Sigifred. Sigifred. I prythee, why? What happier hour of time Could thy pleasd star point down upon from heaven With silver index, bidding thee make peace? Ludolph. Still it must not be known, good Sigifred; The star may point oblique. Sigifred. If Otho knew His son to be that unknown Mussulman After whose spurring heels he sent me forth, With one of his well-pleas'd Olympian oaths, The charters of man's greatness, at this hour He would be watching round the castle walls, And, like an anxious warder, strain his sight For the first glimpse of such a son return 'd Ludolph, that blast of the Hungarians, That Saracenic meteor of the fight, That silent fury, whose fell Scymitar Kept danger all aloof from Otho's head, And left him space for wonder. Ludolph. Say no more. Not as a swordsman would I pardon claim, But as a son. The bronz'd centurion, Long toil'd in foreign wars, and whose high deeds Are shaded in a forest of tall spears, Known only to his troop, hath greater plea Of favour with my sire than I can have. Sigifred. My lord, forgive me that I cannot see How this proud temper with clear reason squares. What made you then, with such an anxious love, Hover around that life, whose bitter days You vext with bad revolt? Was 't opium, Or the mad-fumed wine? Nay, do not frown, I rather would grieve with you than upbraid. Ludolph. I do believe you. No, 'twas not to make A father his son's debtor, or to heal His deep heart-sickness for a rebel child. Twas done in memory of my boyish days, Poor cancel for his kindness to my youth, For all his calming of my childish griefs, And all his smiles upon my merriment. No, not a thousand foughten fields could sponge Those days paternal from my memory, Though now upon my head he heaps disgrace. Sigifred. My Prince, you think too harshly Ludolph. Can I so? Hath he not gall'd my spirit to the quick? And with a sullen rigour obstinate Pour'd out a phial of wrath upon my faults? Hunted me as the Tartar does the boar, Driven me to the very edge o' the world, And almost put a price upon my head? Sigifred. Remember how he spar'd the rebel lords. Ludolph. Yes, yes, I know he hath a noble nature That cannot trample on the fallen. But his Is not the only proud heart in his realm. He hath wrong'd me, and I have done him wrong; He hath lov'd me, and I have shown him kindness; We should be almost equal. Sigifred. Yet, for all this, I would you had appear 'd among those lords, And ta'en his favour. Ludolph. Ha! till now I thought My friend had held poor Ludolph's honour dear. What ! would you have me sue before his throne And kiss the courtier's missal, its silk steps? Or hug the golden housings of his steed, Amid a camp, whose steeled swarms I dar'd But yesterday? And, at the trumpet sound, Bow like some unknown mercenary's flag, And lick the soiled grass? No, no, my friend, I would not, I, be pardon'd in the heap, And bless indemnity with all that scum, Those men I mean, who on my shoulders propped Their weak rebellion, winning me with lies, And pitying forsooth my many wrongs; Poor self-deceived wretches, who must think Each one himself a king in embryo, Because some dozen vassals cry'd my lord! Cowards, who never knew their little hearts, Till flurried danger held the mirror up, And then they own'd themselves without a blush, Curling, like spaniels, round my father's feet. Such things deserted me and are forgiven, While I, least guilty, am an outcast still, And will be, for I love such fair disgrace. Sigifred. I know the clear truth; so would Otho see, For he is just and noble. Fain would I Be pleader for you Ludolph. He'll hear none of it; You know his temper, hot, proud, obstinate; Endanger not yourself so uselessly. I will encounter his thwart spleen myself, To-day, at the Duke Conrad's, where he keeps His crowded state after the victory. There will I be, a most unwelcome guest, And parley with him, as a son should do, Who doubly loathes a father's tyranny; Tell him how feeble is that tyranny; How the relationship of father and son Is no more valid than a silken leash Where lions tug adverse, if love grow not From interchanged love through many years. Aye, and those turreted Franconian walls, Like to a jealous casket, hold my pearl My fair Auranthe! Yes, I will be there. Sigifred. Be not so rash; wait till his wrath shall pass, Until his royal spirit softly ebbs Self-influenced ; then, in his morning dreams He will forgive thee, and awake in grief To have not thy good morrow. Ludolph. Yes, to-day I must be there, while her young pulses beat Among the new-plum'd minions of the war. Have you seen her of late? No? Auranthe, Franconia's fair sister, 'tis I mean. She should be paler for my troublous days And there it is my father's iron lips Have sworn divorcement 'twixt me and my right. Sigifred (aside). Auranthe! I had hop'd this whim had pass'd. Ludolph. And, Sigifred, with all his love of justice, When will he take that grandchild in his arms, That, by my love I swear, shall soon be his? This reconcilement is impossible, For see but who are these? Sigifred. They are messengers From our great emperor; to you, I doubt not, For couriers are abroad to seek you out. Enter THEODORE and GONFRED. Theodore. Seeing so many vigilant eyes explore The province to invite your highness back To your high dignities, we are too happy. Gonfred. We have no eloquence to colour justly The emperor's anxious wishes. Ludolph. Go. I follow you. [Exeunt THEODORE and GONFRED. I play the prude : it is but venturing Why should he be so earnest? Come, my friend, Let us to Friedburg castle. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes ~ John Keats, Otho The Great - Act I ,

701:The Temple Of Fame In that soft season, when descending show'rs Call forth the greens, and wake the rising flow'rs; When op'ning buds salute the welcome day, And earth relenting feels the genial day, As balmy sleep had charm'd my cares to rest, And love itself was banish'd from my breast, (What time the morn mysterious visions brings, While purer slumbers spread their golden wings) A train of phantoms in wild order rose, And, join'd, this intellectual sense compose. I stood, methought, betwixt earth, seas, and skies; The whole creation open to my eyes: In air self-balanc'd hung the globe below, Where mountains rise and circling oceans flow; Here naked rocks, and empty wastes were seen, There tow'ry cities, and the forests green: Here sailing ships delight the wand'ring eyes: There trees, and intermingled temples rise; Now a clear sun the shining scene displays, The transient landscape now in clouds decays. O'er the wide Prospect as I gaz'd around, Sudden I heard a wild promiscuous sound, Like broken thunders that at distance roar, Then gazing up, a glorious pile beheld, Whose tow'ring summit ambient clouds conceal'd. High on a rock of Ice the structure lay, Steep its ascent, and slipp'ry was the way; The wond'rous rock like Parian marble shone, And seem'd, to distant sight, of solid stone. Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd, The greater part by hostile time subdu'd; Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past, And Poets once had promis'd they should last. Some fresh engrav'd appear'd of Wits renown'd; I look'd again, nor could their trace be found. Critics I saw, that other names deface, And fix their own, with labour, in their place: Their own, like others, soon their place resign'd, Or disappear'd, and left the first behind. 245 Nor was the work impair'd by storms alone, But felt th' approaches of too warm a sun; For Fame, impatient of extremes, decays Not more by Envy than excess of Praise. Yet part no injuries of heav'n could feel, Like crystal faithful to th' graving steel: The rock's high summit, in the temple's shade, Nor heat could melt, nor beating storm invade. Their names inscrib'd, unnumber'd ages past From time's first birth, with time itself shall last; These ever new, nor subject to decays, Spread, and grow brighter with the length of days. So Zembla's rocks (the beauteous work of frost) Rise white in air, and glitter o'er the coast; Pale suns, unfelt, at distance roll away, And on th' impassive ice the light'nings play; Eternal snows the growing mass supply, Till the bright mountains prop th' incumbent sky: As Atlas fix'd, each hoary pile appears, The gather'd winter of a thousand years. On this foundation Fame's high temple stands; Stupendous pile! not rear'd by mortal hands. Whate'er proud Rome or artful Greece beheld, Or elder Babylon, its frame excell'd. Four faces had the dome, and ev'ry face Of various structure, but of equal grace: Four brazen gates, on columns lifted high, Salute the diff'rent quarters of the sky. Here fabled Chiefs in darker ages born, Or Worthies old, whom arms or arts adorn, Who cities rais'd, or tam'd a monstrous race; The walls in venerable order grace: Heroes in animated marble frown, And Legislators seem to think in stone. Westward, a sumptuous frontispiece appear'd, On Doric pillars of white marble rear'd, Crown'd with an architrave of antique mold, And sculpture rising on the roughen'd mold, In shaggy spoils here Theseus was beheld, And Perseus dreadful with Minerva's shield: There great Alcides stooping with his toil, Rests on his club, and holds th' Hesperian spoil. 246 Here Orpheus sings; trees moving to the sound Start from their roots, and form a shade around: Amphion there the loud creating lyre Strikes, and beholds a sudden Thebes aspire! Cithaeron's echoes answer to his call, And half the mountain rolls into a wall: There might you see the length'ning spires ascend, The domes swell up, the wid'ning arches bend, The growing tow'rs, like exhalations rise, And the huge columns heave into the skies. The Eastern front was glorious to behold, With di'mond flaming, and Barbaric gold. There Ninus shone, who spread th' Assyrian fame, And the great founder of the Persian name: There in long robes the royal Magi stand, Grave Zoroaster waves the circling wand, The sage Chaldaeans rob'd in white appear'd, And Brahmans, deep in desert woods rever'd. These stop'd the moon, and call'd th' unbody'd shades To midnight banquets in the glimm'ring glades; Made visionary fabrics round them rise, And airy spectres skim before their eyes; Of Talismans and Sigils knew the pow'r, And careful watch'd the Planetary hour. Superior, and alone, Confucius stood, Who taught that useful science, to be good. But on the South, a long majestic race Of AEgypt's Priests the gilded niches grace, Who measur'd earth, describ'd the starry spheres, And trac'd the long records of lunar years. High on his car Sesostris struck my view, Whom scepter'd slaves in golden harness drew: His hands a bow and pointed javelin hold; His giant limbs are arm'd in scales of gold. Between the statues Obelisks were plac'd, And the learn'd walls with Hieroglyphics grac'd. Of Gothic structure was the Northern side, O'erwrought with ornaments of barb'rous pride. There huge Colosses rose, with trophies crown'd, And Runic characters were grav'd around. There sate Zamolxis with erected eyes, And Odin here in mimic trances dies. 247 There on rude iron columns, smear'd with blood, The horrid forms of Scythian heroes stood, Druids and Bards (their once loud harps unstrung) And youths that died to be by Poets sung. These and a thousand more of doubtful fame, To whom old fables gave a lasting name, In ranks adorn'd the Temple's outward face; The wall in lustre and effect like Glass, Which o'er each object casting various dyes, Enlarges some, and others multiplies: Nor void of emblem was the mystic wall, For thus romantic Fame increases all. The Temple shakes, the sounding gates unfold, Wide vaults appear, and roofs of fretted gold: Rais'd on a thousand pillars, wreath'd around With laurel-foliage, and with eagles crown'd: Of bright, transparent beryl were the walls, The friezes gold, an gold the capitals: As heav'n with stars, the roof with jewels glows, And ever-living lamps depend in rows. Full in the passage of each spacious gate, The sage Historians in white garments wait; Grav'd o'er their seats the form of Time was found, His scythe revers'd, and both his pinions bound. Within stood Heroes, who thro' loud alarms In bloody fields pursu'd renown in arms. High on a throne with trophies charg'd, I view'd The Youth that all things but himself subdu'd; His feet on sceptres and tiara's trod, And his horn'd head bely'd the Libyan God. There Caesar, grac'd with both Minerva's, shone; Unmov'd, superior still in ev'ry state, And scarce detested in his Country's fate. But chief were those, who not for empire fought, But with their toils their people's safety bought: High o'er the rest Epaminondas stood; Timoleon, glorious in his brother's blood; Bold Scipio, saviour of the Roman state; Great in his triumphs, in retirement great; And wise Aurelius, in whose well-taught mind With boundless pow'r unbounded virtue join'd, His own strict judge, and patron of mankind. 248 Much-suff'ring heroes next their honours claim, Those of less noisy, and less guilty fame, Fair Virtue's silent train: supreme of these Here ever shines the godlike Socrates: He whom ungrateful Athens could expell, At all times just, but when he sign'd the Shell: Here his abode the martyr'd Phocion claims, With Agis, not the last of Spartan names: Unconquered Cato shews the wound he tore, And Brutus his ill Genius meets no more. But in the centre of the hallow'd choir, Six pompous columns o'er the rest aspire; Around the shrine itself of Fame they stand, Hold the chief honours, and the fane command. High on the first, the mighty Homer shone; Eternal Adamant compos'd his throne; Father of verse! in holy fillets drest, His silver beard wav'd gently o'er his breast; Tho' blind, a boldness in his looks appears; In years he seem'd, but not impair'd by years. The wars of Troy were round the Pillar seen: Here fierce Tydides wounds the Cyprian Queen; Here Hector glorious from Patroclus' fall, Here dragg'd in triumph round the Trojan wall, Motion and life did ev'ry part inspire, Bold was the work, and prov'd the master's fire; A strong expression most he seem'd t' affect, And here and there disclos'd a brave neglect. A golden column next in rank appear'd, On which a shrine of purest gold was rear'd; Finish'd the whole, and labour'd ev'ry part, With patient touches of unweary'd art: The Mantuan there in sober triumph sate, Compos'd his posture, and his look sedate; On Homer still he fix'd a rev'rend eye, Great without pride, in modest majesty. In living sculpture on the sides were spread The Latian Wars, and haughty Turnus dead; Eliza stretch'd upon the fun'ral pyre, AEneas ending with his aged sire: Troy flam'd in burning gold, and o'er the throne 249 Arms of the Man in golden cyphers shone. Four swans sustain a car of silver bright, With heads advanc'd, and pinions stretch'd for flight: Here, like some furious prophet, Pindar rode, And seem'd to labour with th' inspiring God. Across the harp a careless hand he flings, And boldly sinks into the sounding strings. The figur'd games of Greece the column grace, Neptune and Jove survey the rapid race. The youths hand o'er their chariots as they run; The fiery steeds seem starting from the stone; The champions in distorted postures threat; And all appear'd irregularly great. Here happy Horace tun'd th' Ausonian lyre To sweeter sounds, and temper'd Pindar's fire: Pleas'd with Alcaeus' manly rage t' infuse The softer spirit of the Sapphic Muse. The polish'd pillar diff'rent sculptures grace; A work outlasting monumental brass. Here smiling Loves and Bacchanals appear, The Julian star, and great Augustus here, The Doves that round the infant poet spread Myrtles and bays, hung hov'ring o'er his head. Here in a shrine that cast a dazzling light, Sate fix'd in thought the mighty Stagirite; His sacred head a radiant Zodiac crown'd, And various Animals his sides surround; His piercing eyes, erect, appear to view Superior worlds, and look all Nature through. With equal rays immortal Tully shone, The Roman Rostra deck'd the Consul's throne: Gath'ring his flowing robe, he seem'd to stand In act to speak, and graceful stretch'd his hand. Behind, Rome's Genius waits with Civic crowns, And the great Father of his country owns. These massy columns in a circle rise, O'er which a pompous dome invades the skies: Scarce to the top I stretch'd my aching sight, So large it spread, and swell'd to such a height. Full in the midst proud Fame's imperial seat, With jewels blaz'd, magnificently great; The vivid em'ralds there revive the eye, 250 The flaming rubies shew their sanguine dye, Bright azure rays from lively sapphrys stream, And lucid amber casts a golden gleam. With various-colour'd light the pavement shone, And all on fire appear'd the glowing throne; The dome's high arch reflects the mingled blaze, And forms a rainbow of alternate rays. When on the Goddess first I cast my sight, Scarce seem'd her stature of a cubit's height; But swell'd to larger size, the more I gaz'd, Till to the roof her tow'ring front she rais'd. With her, the Temple ev'ry moment grew, And ampler Vista's open'd to my view: Upward the columns shoot, the roofs ascend, And arches widen, and long aisles extend. Such was her form as ancient bards have told, Wings raise her arms, and wings her feet infold; A thousand busy tongues the Goddess bears, And thousand open eyes, and thousand list'ning ears. Beneath, in order rang'd, the tuneful Nine (Her virgin handmaids) still attend the shrine: With eyes on Fame for ever fix'd, they sing; For Fame they raise the voice, and tune the string; With time's first birth began the heav'nly lays, And last, eternal, thro' the length of days. Around these wonders as I cast a look, The trumpet sounded, and the temple shoo, And all the nations, summon'd at the call, From diff'rent quarters fill the crowded hall: Of various tongues the mingled sounds were heard; In various garbs promiscuous throngs appear'd; Thick as the bees, that with the spring renew Their flow'ry toils, and sip the fragrant dew, When the wing'd colonies first tempt the sky, O'er dusky fields and shaded waters fly, Or settling, seize the sweets the blossoms yield, And a low murmur runs along the field. Millions of suppliant crowds the shrine attend, And all degrees before the Goddess bend; The poor, the rich, the valiant and the sage, And boasting youth, and narrative old-age. 251 Their pleas were diff'rent, their request the same: For good and bad alike are fond of Fame. Some she disgrac'd, and some with honours crown'd; Unlike successes equal merits found. Thus her blind sister, fickle Fortune, reigns, And, undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains. First at the shrine the Learned world appear, And to the Goddess thus prefer their play'r. 'Long have we sought t' instruct and please mankind, With studies pale, with midnight vigils blind; But thank'd by few, rewarded yet by none, We here appeal to thy superior throne: On wit and learning the just prize bestow, For fame is all we must expect below.' The Goddess heard, and bade the Muses raise The golden Trumpet of eternal Praise: From pole to pole the winds diffuse the sound, That fills the circuit of the world around; Not all at once, as thunder breaks the cloud; The notes at first were rather sweet than loud: By just degrees they ev'ry moment rise, Fill the wide earth, and gain upon the skies. At ev'ry breath were balmy odours shed, Which still grew sweeter as they wider spread; Less fragrant scents th' unfolding rose exhales, Or spices breathing in Arabian gales. Next these the good and just, an awful train, Thus on their knees address the sacred fane. 'Since living virtue is with envy curs'd, And the best men are treated like the worst, Do thou, just Goddess, call our merits forth, And give each deed th' exact intrinsic worth.' 'Not with bare justice shall your act be crown'd' (Said Fame) 'but high above desert renown'd: Let fuller notes th' applauding world amaze, And the full loud clarion labour in your praise.' This band dismiss'd, behold another croud The constant tenour of whose well-spent days No less deserv'd a just return of praise. But strait the direful Trump of Slander sounds; Thro' the big dome the doubling thunder bounds; Loud as the burst of cannon rends the skies, 252 The dire report thro' ev'ry region flies, In ev'ry ear incessant rumours rung, And gath'ring scandals grew on ev'ry tongue. From the black trumpet's rusty concave broke Sulphureous flames, and clouds of rolling smoke: The pois'nous vapour blots the purple skies, And withers all before it as it flies. A troop came next, who crowns and armour wore, And proud defiance in their looks they bore: 'For thee' (they cry'd) 'amidst alarms and strife, We sail'd in tempests down the stream of life; For thee whole nations fill'd with flames and blood, And swam to empire thro' the purple flood. Those ills we dar'd, thy inspiration own, What virtue seem'd, was done for thee alone.' 'Ambitious fools!' (the Queen reply'd, and frown'd) 'Be all your acts in dark oblivion drown'd; There sleep forgot, with mighty tyrants gone, Your statues moulder'd, and your names unknown!' A sudden cloud straight snatch'd them from my sight, And each majestic phantom sunk in night. Then came the smallest tribe I yet had seen; Plain was their dress, and modest was their mien. 'Great idol of mankind! we neither claim The praise of merit, nor aspire to fame! But safe in deserts from th' applause of men, Would die unheard of, as we liv'd unseen, 'Tis all we beg thee, to conceal from sight Those acts of goodness, which themselves requite. To follow virtue ev'n for virtue's sake.' 'And live there men, who slight immortal fame? Who then with incense shall adore our name? But mortals! know, 'tis still our greatest pride To blaze those virtues, which the good would hide. Rise! Muses, rise; add all your tuneful breath, These must not sleep in darkness and in death.' She said: in air the trembling music floats, And on the winds triumphant swell the notes; So soft, tho' high, so loud, and yet so clear, Ev'n list'ning Angels lean'd from heav'n to hear: To farthest shores th' Ambrosial spirit flies, Sweet to the world, and grateful to the skies. 253 Next these a youthful train their vows express'd, With feathers crown'd, with gay embroid'ry dress'd: 'Hither,' they cry'd, 'direct your eyes, and see The men of pleasure, dress, and gallantry; Ours is the place at banquets, balls, and plays, Sprightly our nights, polite are all our days; Courts we frequent, where 'tis our pleasing care To pay due visits, and address the fair: In fact, 'tis true, no nymph we could persuade, But still in fancy vanquish'd ev'ry maid; Of unknown Duchesses lewd tales we tell, Yet, would the world believe us, all were well. The joy let others have, and we the name, And what we want in pleasure, grant in fame.' The Queen assents, the trumpet rends the skies, And at each blast a Lady's honour dies. Pleas'd with the strange success, vast numbers prest Around the shrine, and made the same request: 'What? you,' (she cry'd) 'unlearn'd in arts to please, Slaves to yourselves, and ev'n fatigu'd with ease, Who lose a length of undeserving days, Would you usurp the lover's dear-bought praise? To just contempt, ye vain pretenders, fall, The people's fable, and the scorn of all.' Straight the black clarion sends a horrid sound, Loud laughs burst out, and bitter scoffs fly round, Whispers are heard, with taunts reviling loud, And scornful hisses run thro' the crowd. Last, those who boast of mighty mischiefs done, Enslave their country, or usurp a throne; Or who their glory's dire foundation lay'd On Sov'reigns ruin'd, or on friends betray'd; Calm, thinking villains, whom no faith could fix, Of crooked counsels and dark politics; Of these a gloomy tribe surround the throne, And beg to make th' immortal treasons known. The trumpet roars, long flaky flames expire, With sparks, that seem'd to set the world on fire. At the dread sound, pale mortals stood aghast, And startled nature trembled with the blast. This having heard and seen, and snatch'd me from the throne. Before my view appear'd a structure fair, 254 Its site uncertain, if in earth or air; With rapid motion turn'd the mansion round; With ceaseless noise the ringing walls resound; Not less in number were the spacious doors, Than leaves on trees, or sand upon the shores; Which still unfolded stand, by night, by day, Pervious to winds, and open ev'ry way. As flames by nature to the skies ascend, As weighty bodies to the centre tend, As to the sea returning rivers toll, And the touch'd needle trembles to the pole; Hither, as to their proper place, arise All various sounds from earth, and seas, and skies, Or spoke aloud, or whisper'd in the ear; Nor ever silence, rest, or peace is here. As on the smooth expanse of crystal lakes The sinking stone at first a circle makes; The trembling surface by the motion stir'd, Spreads in a second circle, then a third; Wide, and more wide, the floating rings advance, Fill all the wat'ry plain, and to the margin dance: Thus ev'ry voice and sound, when first they break, On neighb'ring air a soft impression make; Another ambient circle then they move; That, in its turn, impels the next above; Thro' undulating air the sounds are sent, And spread o'er all the fluid element. There various news I heard of love and strife, Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life, Of loss and gain, of famine and of store, Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore, Of prodigies, and portents seen in air, Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair, Of turns of fortune, changes in the state, The falls of fav'rites, projects of the great, Of old mismanagements, taxations new: All neither wholly false, nor wholly true. Above, below, without, within, around. Confus'd, unnumber'd multitudes are found, Who pass, repass, advance, and glide away; Hosts rais'd by fear, and phantoms of a day: Astrologers, that future fates foreshew, 255 Projectors, quacks, and lawyers not a few; And priests, and party-zealots, num'rous bands With home-born lies, or tales from foreign lands; Each talk'd aloud, or in some secret place, And wild impatience star'd in ev'ry face. The flying rumours gather'd as they roll'd, Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who heard it, made enlargements too, In ev'ry ear it spread, on ev'ry tongue it grew. Thus flying east and west, and north and south, News travel'd with increase from mouth to mouth. So from a spark, that kindled first by chance, With gath'ring force the quick'ning flames advance; Till to the clouds their curling heads aspire, And tow'rs and temples sink in floods of fire. When thus ripe lies are to perfection sprung, Full grown, and fit to grace a mortal tongue, Thro' thousand vents, impatient, forth they flow, And rush in millions on the world below. Fame sits aloft, and points them out their course, Their date determines, and prescribes their force: Some to remain, and some to perish soon; Or wane and wax alternate like the moon. Around, a thousand winged wonders fly, Borne by the trumpet's blast, and scatter'd thro' the sky. There, at one passage, oft you might survey A lie and truth contending for the way; And long 'twas doubtful, both so closely pent, Which first should issue thro' the narrow vent: At last agreed, together out they fly, Inseparable now, the truth and lie; The strict companions are for ever join'd, And this or that unmix'd, no mortal e'er shall find. While thus I stood, intent to see and hear, One came, methought, and whisper'd in my ear: What could thus high thy rash ambition raise? Art thou, fond youth, a candidate for praise? 'Tis true, said I, not void of hopes I came, For who so fond as youthful bards of Fame? But few, alas! the casual blessing boast, So hard to gain, so easy to be lost. 256 How vain that second life in others breath, Th' estate which wits inherit after death! Ease, health, and life, for this they must resign, (Unsure the tenure, but how vast the fine!) The great man's curse, without the gains endure, Be envy'd, wretched, and be flatter'd, poor; All luckless wits their enemies profest, And all successful, jealous friends at best. Nor Fame I slight, nor for her favours call; She comes unlook'd for, if she comes at all. But if the purchase costs so dear a price, As soothing Folly, or exalting Vice: Oh! if the Muse must flatter lawless sway, And follow still where fortune leads the way; Or if no basis bear my rising name, But the fall'n ruin of another's fame; Then teach me, heav'n! to scorn the guilty bays, Drive from my breast that wretched lust of praise, Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown; Oh grant an honest fame, or grant me none! ~ Alexander Pope,

702:A FRAGMENT PART I Nec tantum prodere vati, Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus. Lucan, Phars. v. 176. How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! One pale as yonder wan and hornd moon, With lips of lurid blue, The other glowing like the vital morn, When throned on ocean's wave It breathes over the world: Yet both so passing strange and wonderful! Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton, Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form, Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, whose azure veins Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed In light of some sublimest mind, decay? Nor putrefaction's breath Leave aught of this pure spectacle But loathsomeness and ruin? Spare aught but a dark theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it but that downy-wingd slumbers Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids To watch their own repose? Will they, when morning's beam Flows through those wells of light, Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave? Ianthe doth not sleep The dreamless sleep of death: Nor in her moonlight chamber silently Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb, Or mark her delicate cheek With interchange of hues mock the broad moon. Outwatching weary night, Without assured reward. Her dewy eyes are closed; On their translucent lids, whose texture fine Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below With unapparent fire, The baby Sleep is pillowed: Her golden tresses shade The bosom's stainless pride, Twining like tendrils of the parasite Around a marble column. Hark! whence that rushing sound? 'Tis like a wondrous strain that sweeps Around a lonely ruin When west winds sigh and evening waves respond In whispers from the shore: 'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes Which from the unseen lyres of dells and groves The genii of the breezes sweep. Floating on waves of music and of light, The chariot of the Daemon of the World Descends in silent power: Its shape reposed within: slight as some cloud That catches but the palest tinge of day When evening yields to night, Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue Its transitory robe. Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold Their wings of braided air: The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car Gazed on the slumbering maid. Human eye hath ne'er beheld A shape so wild, so bright, so beautiful, As that which o'er the maiden's charmd sleep Waving a starry wand, Hung like a mist of light. Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds Of wakening spring arose, Filling the chamber and the moonlight sky. Maiden, the world's supremest spirit Beneath the shadow of her wings Folds all thy memory doth inherit From ruin of divinest things, Feelings that lure thee to betray, And light of thoughts that pass away. For thou hast earned a mighty boon, The truths which wisest poets see Dimly, thy mind may make its own, Rewarding its own majesty, Entranced in some diviner mood Of self-oblivious solitude. Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest; From hate and awe thy heart is free; Ardent and pure as day thou burnest, For dark and cold mortality A living light, to cheer it long, The watch-fires of the world among. Therefore from nature's inner shrine, Where gods and fiends in worship bend, Majestic spirit, be it thine The flame to seize, the veil to rend, Where the vast snake Eternity In charmd sleep doth ever lie. All that inspires thy voice of love, Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes, Or through thy frame doth burn or move, Or think or feel, awake, arise! Spirit, leave for mine and me Earth's unsubstantial mimicry! It ceased, and from the mute and moveless frame A radiant spirit arose, All beautiful in naked purity. Robed in its human hues it did ascend, Disparting as it went the silver clouds, It moved towards the car, and took its seat Beside the Daemon shape. Obedient to the sweep of ary song, The mighty ministers Unfurled their prismy wings. The magic car moved on; The night was fair, innumerable stars Studded heaven's dark blue vault; The eastern wave grew pale With the first smile of morn. The magic car moved on. From the swift sweep of wings The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew; And where the burning wheels Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak Was traced a line of lightning. Now far above a rock the utmost verge Of the wide earth it flew, The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow Frowned o'er the silver sea. Far, far below the chariot's stormy path, Calm as a slumbering babe, Tremendous ocean lay. Its broad and silent mirror gave to view The pale and waning stars, The chariot's fiery track, And the grey light of morn Tingeing those fleecy clouds That cradled in their folds the infant dawn. The chariot seemed to fly Through the abyss of an immense concave, Radiant with million constellations, tinged With shades of infinite colour, And semicircled with a belt Flashing incessant meteors. As they approached their goal, The wingd shadows seemed to gather speed. The sea no longer was distinguished; earth Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere, suspended In the black concave of heaven With the sun's cloudless orb, Whose rays of rapid light Parted around the chariot's swifter course, And fell like ocean's feathery spray Dashed from the boiling surge Before a vessel's prow. The magic car moved on. Earth's distant orb appeared The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens, Whilst round the chariot's way Innumerable systems widely rolled, And countless spheres diffused An ever varying glory. It was a sight of wonder! Some were horned. And like the moon's argentine crescent hung In the dark dome of heaven; some did shed A clear mild beam like Hesperus, while the sea Yet glows with fading sunlight; others dashed Athwart the night with trains of bickering fire, Like spherd worlds to death and ruin driven; Some shone like stars, and as the chariot passed Bedimmed all other light. Spirit of Nature! here In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose involved immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple. Yet not the lightest leaf That quivers to the passing breeze Is less instinct with thee, Yet not the meanest worm, That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead, Less shares thy eternal breath. Spirit of Nature! thou Imperishable as this glorious scene, Here is thy fitting temple. If solitude hath ever led thy steps To the shore of the immeasurable sea, And thou hast lingered there Until the sun's broad orb Seemed resting on the fiery line of ocean, Thou must have marked the braided webs of gold That without motion hang Over the sinking sphere: Thou must have marked the billowy mountain clouds, Edged with intolerable radiancy, Towering like rocks of jet Above the burning deep: And yet there is a moment When the sun's highest point Peers like a star o'er ocean's western edge, When those far clouds of feathery purple gleam Like fairy lands girt by some heavenly sea: Then has thy rapt imagination soared Where in the midst of all existing things The temple of the mightiest Daemon stands. Yet not the golden islands That gleam amid yon flood of purple light, Nor the feathery curtains That canopy the sun's resplendent couch, Nor the burnished ocean waves Paving that gorgeous dome, So fair, so wonderful a sight As the eternal temple could afford. The elements of all that human thought Can frame of lovely or sublime, did join To rear the fabric of the fane, nor aught Of earth may image forth its majesty. Yet likest evening's vault that fary hall, As heaven low resting on the wave it spread Its floors of flashing light, Its vast and azure dome; And on the verge of that obscure abyss Where crystal battlements o'erhang the gulf Of the dark world, ten thousand spheres diffuse Their lustre through its adamantine gates. The magic car no longer moved; The Daemon and the Spirit Entered the eternal gates. Those clouds of ary gold That slept in glittering billows Beneath the azure canopy, With the ethereal footsteps trembled not; While slight and odorous mists Floated to strains of thrilling melody Through the vast columns and the pearly shrines. The Daemon and the Spirit Approached the overhanging battlement, Below lay stretched the boundless universe! There, far as the remotest line That limits swift imagination's flight, Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion, Immutably fulfilling Eternal Nature's law. Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony, Each with undeviating aim In eloquent silence through the depths of space Pursued its wondrous way. Awhile the Spirit paused in ecstasy. Yet soon she saw, as the vast spheres swept by, Strange things within their belted orbs appear. Like animated frenzies, dimly moved Shadows, and skeletons, and fiendly shapes, Thronging round human graves, and o'er the dead Sculpturing records for each memory In verse, such as malignant gods pronounce, Blasting the hopes of men, when heaven and hell Confounded burst in ruin o'er the world: And they did build vast trophies, instruments Of murder, human bones, barbaric gold, Skins torn from living men, and towers of skulls With sightless holes gazing on blinder heaven, Mitres, and crowns, and brazen chariots stained With blood, and scrolls of mystic wickedness, The sanguine codes of venerable crime. The likeness of a thrond king came by, When these had passed, bearing upon his brow A threefold crown; his countenance was calm, His eye severe and cold; but his right hand Was charged with bloody coin, and he did gnaw By fits, with secret smiles, a human heart Concealed beneath his robe; and motley shapes, A multitudinous throng, around him knelt, With bosoms bare, and bowed heads, and false looks Of true submission, as the sphere rolled by. Brooking no eye to witness their foul shame, Which human hearts must feel, while human tongues Tremble to speak, they did rage horribly, Breathing in self-contempt fierce blasphemies Against the Daemon of the World, and high Hurling their armd hands where the pure Spirit, Serene and inaccessibly secure, Stood on an isolated pinnacle, The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe Above, and all around Necessity's unchanging harmony. PART II O happy Earth! reality of Heaven! To which those restless powers that ceaselessly Throng through the human universe aspire; Thou consummation of all mortal hope! Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will! Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time, Verge to one point and blend for ever there: Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place! Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime, Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come: O happy Earth, reality of Heaven! Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams, And dim forebodings of thy loveliness, Haunting the human heart, have there entwined Those rooted hopes, that the proud Power of Evil Shall not for ever on this fairest world Shake pestilence and war, or that his slaves With blasphemy for prayer, and human blood For sacrifice, before his shrine for ever In adoration bend, or Erebus With all its banded fiends shall not uprise To overwhelm in envy and revenge The dauntless and the good, who dare to hurl Defiance at his throne, girt tho' it be With Death's omnipotence. Thou hast beheld His empire, o'er the present and the past; It was a desolate sightnow gaze on mine, Futurity. Thou hoary giant Time, Render thou up thy half-devoured babes, And from the cradles of eternity, Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep By the deep murmuring stream of passing things, Tear thou that gloomy shroud.Spirit, behold Thy glorious destiny!            The Spirit saw The vast frame of the renovated world Smile in the lap of Chaos, and the sense Of hope thro' her fine texture did suffuse Such varying glow, as summer evening casts On undulating clouds and deepening lakes. Like the vague sighings of a wind at even, That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea And dies on the creation of its breath, And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits, Was the sweet stream of thought that with wild motion Flowed o'er the Spirit's human sympathies. The mighty tide of thought had paused awhile, Which from the Daemon now like Ocean's stream Again began to pour.            To me is given The wonders of the human world to keep Space, matter, time and mindlet the sight Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope. All things are recreated, and the flame Of consentaneous love inspires all life: The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck To myriads, who still grow beneath her care, Rewarding her with their pure perfectness: The balmy breathings of the wind inhale Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad: Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere, Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream; No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven, Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride The foliage of the undecaying trees; But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair, And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace, Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring, Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit Reflects its tint and blushes into love. The habitable earth is full of bliss; Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled By everlasting snow-storms round the poles, Where matter dared not vegetate nor live, But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed; And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand, Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves And melodise with man's blest nature there. The vast tract of the parched and sandy waste Now teems with countless rills and shady woods, Corn-fields and pastures and white cottages; And where the startled wilderness did hear A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood, Hymning his victory, or the milder snake Crushing the bones of some frail antelope Within his brazen foldsthe dewy lawn, Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles To see a babe before his mother's door, Share with the green and golden basilisk That comes to lick his feet, his morning's meal. Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen, above the illimitable plain, Morning on night and night on morning rise, Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea, Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves So long have mingled with the gusty wind In melancholy loneliness, and swept The desert of those ocean solitudes, But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek, The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm. Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds Of kindliest human impulses respond: Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem, With lightsome clouds and shining seas between, And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss, Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave, Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore, To meet the kisses of the flowerets there. Man chief perceives the change, his being notes The gradual renovation, and defines Each movement of its progress on his mind. Man, where the gloom of the long polar night Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night: Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease, Was man a nobler being; slavery Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust. Even where the milder zone afforded man A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, Blighting his being with unnumbered ills, Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth availed Till late to arrest its progress, or create That peace which first in bloodless victory waved Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime: There man was long the train-bearer of slaves, The mimic of surrounding misery, The jackal of ambition's lion-rage, The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal. Here now the human being stands adorning This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind: Blest from his birth with all bland impulses, Which gently in his noble bosom wake All kindly passions and all pure desires. Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing, Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness gift With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks The unprevailing hoariness of age, And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene Swift as an unremembered vision, stands Immortal upon earth: no longer now He slays the beast that sports around his dwelling And horribly devours its mangled flesh, Or drinks its vital blood, which like a stream Of poison thro' his fevered veins did flow Feeding a plague that secretly consumed His feeble frame, and kindling in his mind Hatred, despair, and fear and vain belief, The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. No longer now the wingd habitants, That in the woods their sweet lives sing away, Flee from the form of man; but gather round, And prune their sunny feathers on the hands Which little children stretch in friendly sport Towards these dreadless partners of their play. All things are void of terror: man has lost His desolating privilege, and stands An equal amidst equals: happiness And science dawn though late upon the earth; Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame; Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here, Reason and passion cease to combat there; Whilst mind unfettered o'er the earth extends Its all-subduing energies, and wields The sceptre of a vast dominion there. Mild is the slow necessity of death: The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp, Without a groan, almost without a fear, Resigned in peace to the necessity, Calm as a voyager to some distant land, And full of wonder, full of hope as he. The deadly germs of languor and disease Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts With choicest boons her human worshippers. How vigorous now the athletic form of age! How clear its open and unwrinkled brow! Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care, Had stamped the seal of grey deformity On all the mingling lineaments of time. How lovely the intrepid front of youth! How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy. Within the massy prison's mouldering courts, Fearless and free the ruddy children play, Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows With the green ivy and the red wall-flower, That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom; The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron, There rust amid the accumulated ruins Now mingling slowly with their native earth: There the broad beam of day, which feebly once Lighted the cheek of lean captivity With a pale and sickly glare, now freely shines On the pure smiles of infant playfulness: No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair Peals through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds And merriment are resonant around. The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more The voice that once waked multitudes to war Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond To the death dirge of the melancholy wind: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing! Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall. A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death To-day, the breathing marble glows above To decorate its memory, and tongues Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms In silence and in darkness seize their prey. These ruins soon leave not a wreck behind: Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe, To happier shapes are moulded, and become Ministrant to all blissful impulses: Thus human things are perfected, and earth, Even as a child beneath its mother's love, Is strengthened in all excellence, and grows Fairer and nobler with each passing year. Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene Closes in steadfast darkness, and the past Fades from our charmd sight. My task is done: Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own. With all the fear and all the hope they bring. My spells are past: the present now recurs. Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand. Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course, Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue The gradual paths of an aspiring change: For birth and life and death, and that strange state Before the naked powers that thro' the world Wander like winds have found a human home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge The restless wheels of being on their way, Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life, Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal: For birth but wakes the universal mind Whose mighty streams might else in silence flow Thro' the vast world, to individual sense Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe; Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth, To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile. Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand, So welcome when the tyrant is awake, So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch flares; 'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep. For what thou art shall perish utterly, But what is thine may never cease to be; Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom, Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there, And presaging the truth of visioned bliss. Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene Of linked and gradual being has confirmed? Hopes that not vainly thou, and living fires Of mind as radiant and as pure as thou, Have shone upon the paths of menreturn, Surpassing Spirit, to that world, where thou Art destined an eternal war to wage With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot The germs of misery from the human heart. Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe The thorny pillow of unhappy crime, Whose impotence an easy pardon gains, Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease: Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will, When fenced by power and master of the world. Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind, Free from heart-withering custom's cold control, Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued. Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee. And therefore art thou worthy of the boon Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod, And many days of beaming hope shall bless Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love. Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch Light, life and rapture from thy smile. The Daemon called its wingd ministers. Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car, That rolled beside the crystal battlement, Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness. The burning wheels inflame The steep descent of Heaven's untrodden way. Fast and far the chariot flew: The mighty globes that rolled Around the gate of the Eternal Fane Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs That ministering on the solar power With borrowed light pursued their narrower way. Earth floated then below: The chariot paused a moment; The Spirit then descended: And from the earth departing The shadows with swift wings Speeded like thought upon the light of Heaven. The Body and the Soul united then, A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame: Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed; Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained: She looked around in wonder and beheld Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love, And the bright beaming stars That through the casement shone. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Daemon Of The World ,

703:The Manuscript Of Saint Alexius There came a child into the solemn hall where great Pope Innocent sat throned and heard angry disputings on Free-Will in man, Grace, Purity, and the Pelagian creed-an ignorantly bold poor child, who stood shewing his rags before the Pope's own eyes, and bade him come to shrive a beggar man he found alone and dying in a shed, who sent him for the Pope, "not any else but the Pope's self." And Innocent arose and hushed the mockers "Surely I will go: servant of servants, I." So he went forth to where the man lay sleeping into death, and blessed him. Then, with a last spurt of life, the dying man rose sitting, "Take," he said, and placed a written scroll in the Pope's hand, and so fell back and died. Thus said the scroll: Alexius, meanest servant of the Lord, son of Euphemianus, senator, and of Aglaia, writes his history, God willing it, which, if God so shall will, shall be revealed when he is fallen asleep. Spirit of Truth, Christ, and all saints of Heaven, and Mary, perfect dove of guilelessness, make his mind clear, that he write utter truth. That which I was all know: that which I am God knows, not I, if I stand near to Him because I have not yielded, or, by curse of recreant longings, am to Him a wretch it needs Such grace to pardon: but I know that one day soon I, dead, shall see His face with that great pity on it which is ours who love Him and have striven and then rest, that I shall look on Him and be content. For what I am, in my last days, to men, 'tis nothing; scarce a name, and even that 164 known to be not my own; a wayside wretch battening upon a rich lord's charity and praying, (some say like the hypocrites), a wayside wretch who, harboured for a night, is harboured still, and, idle on the alms, prays day and night and night and day, and fears lest, even praying, he should suddenly undo his prayer and perish and be great and rich and happy. Jesu, keep me Thine. Father and mother, when ye hear of me, (for I shall choose so sure a messenger whom God will shew me), when ye hear these words, and Claudia, whom I dead will dare count mine, bidding her pray she be Christ's more than mine, believe I loved you; know it; but, beloved, you never will know how much till at length God bids you know all things in the new life. Alas, you have had little joy of me: beloved, could I have given drops of blood in place of your shed tears, the cruellest wounds had been my perfect joys: but both my love and your distress needs were my cross to bear. Forgive me that you sorrowed. And be glad because you sorrowed and your sorrow was holy to God, a sacrifice to Him. Know now, all men who read or hear my words, that I, Alexius, lived in much delights of a dear home where they who looked on me looked with a smile, and where I did but smile to earn sweet praises as for some good deed: I was the sunlight to my mother's eyes, that waked their deepest blueness and warm glow, I was my father's joy, ambition, boast, his hope and his fulfilment. It may be I grew too strong a link betwixt their hearts and this poor world whose best gifts seemed to them destined for me, grew, when they looked on Heaven, a blur upon their sight, too largely near, as any trivial tiny shape held close will make eclipse against the eye it fills: 165 and so, maybe. for their sake, not for mine, God took me from them, me, their only son, for whom they prayed, and trebled pious deeds, and took thought in this life. I grew by them, learning all meet for my estate on earth, but learning more, what they taught more, of God, and loving most that learning. And at times, even from childhood, would my heart grow still and seem to feel Him, hear Him, and I knew, but not with ears, a voice that spoke no words yet called me. And, as ignorant children choose "I will be emperor when I am big," my foolish wont was "I will be a saint:" later, when riper sense brought humbleness, I said "When I am grown a man, my lot Shall be with those who vow their lives to Christ." But, when my father thought my words took shape of other than boy's prattle, he grew grave, and answered me "Alexius, thou art young, and canst not judge of duties; but know this thine is to serve God, living in the world." And still the days went on, and still I felt the silent voice that called me: then I said "My father, now I am no more a child, and I can know my heart; give me to God:" but he replied "God gives no son save thee to keep our fathers' name alive, and thus He shews thy place and duty:" and, with tears, my mother said "God gives no child save thee; make me not childless." And their words seemed God's more than my heart's, theirs who had rule on me. But still my longing grew, and still the voice: and they both answered "Had God need of thee to leave thy natural place none else can fill, there would be signs which none could doubt, nor we nor thou thyself." And I received that word; knowing I doubted since they bade me doubt. 166 And still the days went on, and still the voice and then my father said "The bride is chosen, if thou wilt have her; if not, choose thyself." And more and more I prayed "Give me to God:" and more and more they urged "Whom gives He us save thee to keep our name alive? whom else to stay us from a desolate old age, and give us children prattling at our knees?" and more and more they answered "Shew to us how He has called thee from thy certain path where He has set thy feet?" Wherefore I said "I will obey, and will so serve my God as you have bidden me serve Him, honouring you:" and they two blessed me, and we were agreed. And afterwards Euphemianus laughed "He asks not of the bride; but, boy, art pleased? 'tis thy fair playmate Claudia, fair and good." I, who asked not because I nothing cared, was glad in afterthinking: for the girl lad been my playmate, and of later time knew her beauty with familiar eyes and no more feared it than I feared the grace of useless goddesses perfect in stone, lingering dishonoured in unholy nooks where comes no worship more; so that I mused "The damsel brings no perilous wedding gift of amorous unknown fetters for my soul; my soul shall still be spared me, consecrate, virgin to God until the better days when I may live the life alone with Him:" so was I comforted. But, in the hour when all the rite was done and the new bride come to her home, I sitting half apart, my mother took her fondly by the hand and drew her, lagging timidly, to me, and spoke "Look up my daughter, look on him: Alexius, shall I tell what I have guessed, how this girl loves you?" Then she raised her head 167 a moment long, and looked: and I grew white, and sank back sickly. For I suddenly knew that I might know that which men call love. And through the tedious feast my mind was torn with reasonings and repentance. For I said "But I may love her," and kept marshalling forth such scriptures as should seem to grant it me: then would an anguish hurl my fabric down, while I discerned that he who has put hand upon the plough must never turn again to take the joyaunce granted easy lives. And bye and bye I stole away and went, half conscious, through the darkling garden groves, amid the evening silence, till I came to a small lonely chapel, little used, left open by I know not what new chance, where there was patterned out in polished stones Peter denying Christ. I hastened in, and threw me on the floor, and would have prayed; but, in a rush of tears, I fell asleep. And there I dreamed: meseemed the easy years had slipped along, and I sat, pleased and proud, among my ruddy children, and I held my wife's smooth hand, who but so much had changed as to grow fairer in her womanhood; and, facing us, a carved and marble Christ hung on a Cross and gazed with Its dumb eyes, I looking on It: and I turned my head to smile to Claudia, and then looked again; behold Its right arm moved, and then was still, And a low voice came forth "Alexius, come." And I replied "Oh Lord I am content; but lo my father." Then my father stood, meseemed, beside me, leading in his hand a sturdy urchin, copy of himself, and answered "Son, my ears do hear thee called; and now I have this son of thine: go forth." 168 And once again the voice, "Alexius, come." And I replied "My Lord, I am content; but lo my mother." Then my mother stood, meseemed, beside me, and her arm was wound round my wife's neck, and clinging to her skirt a baby boy and girl that teased and played and clamoured for her kisses: so she stood, and answered "Son, my ears do hear thee called; and now this daughter hast thou given me, and now I have these babes of thine: go forth." And louder then the voice, "Alexius, come." And I replied "Dear Lord, I am content; I come." Then Claudia's hand grew tight in mine, and I looked on her face and saw it so as when my mother bade her look on me, and I replied "Oh Lord I were content, but lo my wife." And still again the voice; and still again her hand that drew mine back; and I replied "My wife: I cannot come." And still again the voice, "Alexius, come," loud and in wrath. And I replied "My wife: I will not come." And with that word I woke. I was in darkness, and the door was locked, (doubtless while I, asleep or tranced, lay dumb some one had sought me there and had not found, and so had gone, unconscious, prisoning me); 169 I groped my way toward the altar steps, and thanked my God, and prayed. When morning broke I heard without two voices, as it seemed of holy pilgrims talking, and one said "The youth Alexius surely has fled forth to serve God safelier;" the other said "Then doth he well; for now that better part shall none take from him, he shall be all God's and only God's, not father's, mother's, son's, nor any fond fair woman's." Then they went. But I was still there prisoned. Day moved on, and brightened, and then waned, and darkness came, broken by one white moonbeam, for an hour, that seemed a promise, and, in that good hope, I prayed, then slept. But when morn grew again, and no deliverance came, but frequent steps, and voices passing, I grew scared with doubts if, keeping silence, as from enemies, and by my silence dying, I should be self-murdered or God's martyr; and I thought how, maybe, at the last my fainting voice should vainly cry too late, and I should pass with none to give God's comfort. But I thought "If God wills even that, then let it be." But when the noon sun glowed I heard a hand touch at the door, and crouched me in a nook, and scarce had crouched when Claudia passed by me with slow steps to the altar: she prayed long; praying, poor child, to have me given back, claiming me back of Heaven, as if her right could equal That right, crying out for me by loving names, and weeping, that my heart went out of me towards her, wondering, and yearned for her. But God was pitiful, so that I swerved not. 170 When I heard her vow to pray there daily, I perceived through her deliverance should come shortly: and I planned to stand within the shadow the noon light threw from a massive column by the door, and, when she had passed in and hid her face, get me forth softly. But the flesh was weak, and when I waked again the noon beams fell full on the face of Peter where he wept repenting; Claudia was already there. I thought a moment should I not come forth, and charge her let none know, and go my way; but, did she give one startled sudden cry, womanlike, I had been betrayed: and then I feared her if she wept. May God forgive my weak heart then, my weak heart all my days, which never has been so strong as not feel always the fall at hand, but then so weak that some few urgent tears and soft sad words might, haply might, have bought me from my God. So she went forth, unconscious: and I prayed death should not come at night, with none at hand to minister beside me, and in faith I laid me down to wait what God should send. And in a little while she came again, and sought and found a gold and emerald pin, (one of the gifts they made me give to her), dropped from her loosened hair, then, kissing it, passed out, and, for a moment long, forgot to make the door fast, turned back to the task, then, murmuring "Why? For it is better thus, when whoso wills can enter in and pray," left it and went. 171 Then free, I made my vow to live unknown, unhonoured, with no ties, no certain home, no aims, no rights, no name, an unregarded wanderer, whose steps, by whichsoever road they passed, but passed to travel nearer Heaven. And, for a sign, I made a secret place and hid my ring under the altar. You will find it there: at the right hand a cross upon an A cut on the floor, so small you must look well, and near it, at the altar-base, a crack I found there in the chiselling, (just behind a cherub's wing), is closed with dust and earth; there lies the ring. Give it me mine again, it and my name I take back for my grave, as I take back my kinsfolk and my friends to pray and mourn for me and give God thanks. That done, I got me forth, and saw none nigh, (the search near home being over, as it seemed), and with my best poor speed I found a copse whose green thick tangles hid me: there I lay till the cool nightfall came and patient stars watched Earth asleep, as if they prayed for her; and other eyes saw not save theirs, and those that look from Heaven, when I came sickly forth and dragged my limp and failing limbs along. I made my clothes in tatters; thus I went and begged food at a convent for my life that else were flickered out: so they gave food, and they gave shelter: and at dawn I went, while none who could have known had looked on me, and, hastening on my journey, followed forth my fellow-Roman Tiber's seaward strides, and reached the port. There, as I since have learned, Euphemianus had left men in wait while he searched otherwhere: but God ruled all. A little ship was just launched out to sea, 172 her heel still caught upon the grating beach, the men were good and took the pilgrim in who at the farewell moment called to them, and, in what while I know not, but it seemed as short as in a dream are days and years, I saw my shores grown narrow purple clouds, and then (for I write truth though shaming me) I broke into such weeping that the men felt whiteness in their cheeks, and, marvelling, sent whispers to and fro, in doubt of me lest witchcraft held me or my some deep crime had set a curse demoniac; and they schemed if they should put back to be rid of me, but one said "Tush! the youth weeps for his home; at his age, maybe, some of us could weep; let him alone." A rough and grizzled man, who after, at the haven, came and clapped a great hand on my shoulder, "Look, my boy, you keep your secrets safer: for I heard of a hot hunt after a great man's son, and when I saw you weep ...... Well go your way, my tongue shall earn no wages by its blab. Maybe at your age I should have fled too, if yoked against my will; but I am old and preach go home again. Some say she's fair; and a fair woman, love her or not love, is a fair woman: but, or fair or foul, be wise, young sir, be wise; never go starve because your cake's not candied to your taste." I said "Kind friend, I have no home to seek; God gives me not a home till bye and bye," and left him. So my pilgrimage began. But, oh vain heart of man! can this be true which I remember, that I, plodding on, whither I did not ask me, as God willed, undoubting and ungrieving, yea, puffed up to feel my heart was numb of all regret, carrying upon my lips (as men will burr a day long some persistent measured strain) 173 for refrain-catch "Now all and only God's," drew from my bosom, with my crucifix, a withered crumpled weed, a clinging thing that, green and dainty, new brushed from its root, with one white flower-speck on it, trailed its sprays athwart the purple hem of Claudia's veil the last time in the chapel while she prayed; it lay upon the floor when she was gone. A worthless grass, what good was it to me? and, lo, made fellow with my crucifix! yet surely I had done it scarce aware, for now I gazed on it so stupidly as though a secret hand had placed it there to set a riddle so, nor could recall what thought I took it with. But see what snares I fled from, flying Claudia; suddenly the thing was at my lips, in such a kiss as, maybe, lovers kiss on women's mouths, in such a kiss howbeit as brought forth shame almost in its own birth. I hurled the weed, the viperous thing, into the battling surf that dragged and sucked the booming shingles down, lashing the beach before a coming storm; I hurled it forth and went. It seems to me, looking back now, as if that made an end. I think I had no temptings afterwards. Natheless my grief was bitter many times remembering home: but that I felt not sin, because 'twas as a soul among the dead might sorrow, never wishing to come back. And Claudia was not of my memories: scarcely at all: a stray bad dream at night would bring her to me, make me dream I wept because I might not love her, but not dream that I did love; in daytime she came not. Ten years I wandered: who cares know the whither? a pilgrim and alone I trod my way, no man regarding me. Alone with God: 174 whether in deserts or the throng of towns; whether upon the mountain-tops, whence earth shows sometimes so too exquisite for man as though the devil had leave to fashion it and cozen us with its beauty; or below, where in the valleys one beholds the hills grow nearer Heaven at sunset; or my ears full of the hymn of waters, where the sea breaks at one's feet among the rough brown rocks; whether in pain, in weariness, in fear, or, thankful, taking comfortable rest; always alone with God. So for ten years: and in the later of them I had peace: so for ten years, and then, by what degrees I know not, (for the stupor crept like sleep, slowly yet sudden on one at the last), my peace became a blankness. And one day I sought to rouse me, questioning "Where is God?" and could not weep because I found him not, yea, could not rouse me. And my prayers were words, like trite goodmorrows when two gossips meet and never look for answers; and my praise was rounded like the song the poet makes to one who never lived for him to love. I was my Pharisee to cheat myself and make myself believe me that God's friend I had forgotten what it felt to be. So, when I saw this plainly, I took thought, pondering how it should be that when I pined for thirst of human love I loved God more and felt His love more near me than when now my heart was swept and garnished, void for Him: at last I saw my need of quickening pain to stir the sluggish soul awake in me, and knew I offered nothing to my Lord, offering Him that it cost me nought to give; what good to turn to Him, "Lord I leave all," if all be noway precious? 175 I arose and set my face to Rome, making all haste. On the forty-seventh day I saw the sun droop to the hills behind my father's house, and lo, while I toiled up the rude ascent, our last slope of the Aventine, there came, riding apart and grave, from the far side, Euphemianus. When he reached the gate he entered not, but seemed to point me out to the servitors that followed with his hawks, and watched me coming upwards painfully. And when he saw me footsore and so spent he had compassion: ere my prayer was done, "Food, my good lord, and rest, for charity," he bade them take me in. Six years ago: and now I die here. No one bade depart; they gave me daily scraps, and let me live in the shed for harbouring squalid wanderers that sleep a night, and take their alms, and go. None knew me; who should know me? Gone away, past ten years since, a comely petted boy, and now a half decrepit sickly wretch, a lean and shrivelled carcase, the ten years writ twenty on my leathery wrinkled face, how was I their Alexius? Nay, they looked and saw the stranger in the beggar's shed they called, for want of name, Old Lazarus. In the beggar's shed with God: with God again! Oh exquisite pain that brought so exquisite joy! even by instant peril to be lost lo I was saved. Oh blessed exquisite pain! my heart awoke, for anguish, and felt God. I saw my father pass out and pass in; sometimes he noted me and spoke a word or looked a careless greeting, oftenest not; I saw him daily, and I learned his face 176 how stern long sorrow made it and how still, and, when some days he could not make a smile, I heard the servants whisper "Do you see? this is his lost son's birthday," or "the day his son fled forth," or else "his baptism," "confirming," "going to school," all such home dates as parents count who watch their children grow: and he was changed, they said, cared not to see friends' faces greeting him, nor join in talk, but would be solitary; changed, they said, since that strange losing of his only child. My mother I saw not in the first days, for she came never forth, but sat and slept, and wakened querulous, and slept again. And Claudia tended her: I had not thought to find her here; I looked she'd count me dead and marry her, ('tis known what women are), and was all startled when I saw her first: but only for the strangeness, after that she was no more to me than I to her, she might have smiled to me, or in my sight, that dangerous smile and I be no more moved than if a babe had laughed as I passed by. Then a day came, a still and sultry day when one might take count of each leaf that stirred and think the one shrill grasshopper too loud, my mother waked and heard a hymn I sang, and took a whim to have the singer brought: only a whim, belike, for could my voice bring back the stripling's voice she had thought sweet? they fetched me, I stood by her: ah my mother! and she so changed! nothing of her old self; the goodliness, the sweetness, the delight, gone, waned out from her, as the light of day was waning from her eyes long dulled by tears. Ah, could I but have clung about her feet, crying out "Mother, take thy son again!" But yet for her it would have been too late. She talked to me, inconsequent grave talk like children's, whispered after when I prayed, 177 and made me sing her hymns, so was content longer than was her wont, then bade me go and come again to-morrow: ever since she calls me every day. And every day is Claudia there. More than two thousand days, and every day I look on Claudia's face grown wistful and more sweet, and every day behold her patience, hear her wise grave words, and better know her all she is. What then? Have I not striven? have I not prevailed? And now death is at hand: some few days more and I shall lay me down and be at rest. There will be no farewell at last, I think;' they will not know of me that I lie sick and pass away; and, even if they knew, why should they come to close my dying eyes? the beggar Lazarus can die alone, as he has lived alone. My mother, though, will lack me, ask for me, Claudia will send to bid me hasten, then the word will come "He died this morning," and she will not weep but say "Poor wretch: God rest the parted soul," and turn to soothe my mother with some wile to make her never miss me: and may be Euphemianus will not hear the news, or will not note it if he ever hears. So I shall lie in the grave and they not care, but wait for lost Alexius to come home, and mourn for him, half hating him for their grief. Give me fruit, give me fruit, oh Christ give my earned fruit, for all my sufferings: I have mine for me, but I claim theirs, give fruit for them I smote. Have I written wildly? I will cancel nought. for I have written looking death in face, thinking God bade me write: and words come so 178 must stand untouched. But surely this much grace my Lord hath given me, that they shall know. Behold, I make this paper, being forced as by the Spirit, and it comes on me that God doth choose his highest in the world to be the beggar's messenger: he first, and I the last, so thereto he is called; servant of servants. This, which I have witten, do I entrust to him, my testament: some shall learn patience from it and to do what God bids and not doubt; for all is good, all happy, if it be to do His will, the suffering ye may guess, but not the bliss till ye have tasted it. And I desire that, having scanned the scroll, he shall, or then or later, as seems to his wisdom wise, deliver all its words to them and her, my father and my mother and my wife, (lo, this once in my life I call her so). I pray Thee, Lord, give the poor words the power to comfort them and strengthen; and, I pray, give the words power to strengthen and stir souls which hear Thee call and pause to count with Thee. And now, oh Lord, let earth be dim to me, and Heaven come near mine eyes: the time is short, and I am fain for thee. Lord Jesus come. Now, when Pope Innocent had read the scroll, he bade one with him enter in the house and call the lord Euphemianus thither, and Claudia, and Aglaia. So they came, Aglaia feebly leaning on the two, and questioning them who knew not; so they came; and the Pope pointed them to the dead man, "Behold, for this is one whom you should know." Euphemianus gazed and was perplexed: and the poor purblind mother gazed and peered, "Old Lazarus? no, yes, old Lazarus; 179 asleep or dead? Why is it? is he dead?" but Claudia answered softly "Yes I know; I knew it;" and then, suddenly, borne down by one strong gust of passion, flung herself beside the corpse, her head upon its breast, her arms clasped straining round it, weeping out. And Innocent answered the father's eyes, "This was Alexius, thy long lost son." But yet the father, stricken dumb, looked doubt: Aglaia cried "My boy, where is he then?" and fretfully "This is old Lazarus: where is my boy? show me Alexius." Then Innocent bade peace, and read the scroll: Euphemianus, with his face hid down between his hands, listened and never stirred; and Claudia listened, weeping silently; but Aglaia whispered always "Is it true? is the tale of Lazarus or of my boy? I cannot understand." And, when 'twas read, Euphemianus gazed upon his son, "Yet did he well?" he said "he was our son, he was her husband: how could it be well? for look upon his mother, what she is." But Claudia rose up tearless, and replied "Alexius did all well: he knew God called:" and Innocent, not tearless, raised his hand and spoke "She answers wisely: he obeyed; he knew, being a very saint of God: let us bless God for him." And they all knelt. But still Aglaia could not understand. ~ Augusta Davies Webster,

704:The Botanic Garden( Part Iii) The Economy Of Vegetation Canto III AGAIN the GODDESS speaks!-glad Echo swells The tuneful tones along her shadowy dells, Her wrinkling founts with soft vibration shakes, Curls her deep wells, and rimples all her lakes, Thrills each wide stream, Britannia's isle that laves, Her headlong cataracts, and circumfluent waves. -Thick as the dews, which deck the morning flowers, Or rain-drops twinkling in the sun-bright showers, Fair Nymphs, emerging in pellucid bands, Rise, as she turns, and whiten all the lands. I. 'YOUR buoyant troops on dimpling ocean tread, Wafting the moist air from his oozy bed, AQUATIC NYMPHS!-YOU lead with viewless march The winged vapours up the aerial arch, On each broad cloud a thousand sails expand, And steer the shadowy treasure o'er the land, Through vernal skies the gathering drops diffuse, Plunge in soft rains, or sink in silver dews.YOUR lucid bands condense with fingers chill The blue mist hovering round the gelid hill; In clay-form'd beds the trickling streams collect, Strain through white sands, through pebbly veins direct; Or point in rifted rocks their dubious way, And in each bubbling fountain rise to day. 'NYMPHS! YOU then guide, attendant from their source, The associate rills along their sinuous course; Float in bright squadrons by the willowy brink, Or circling slow in limpid eddies sink; Call from her crystal cave the Naiad-Nymph, Who hides her fine form in the passing lymph, And, as below she braids her hyaline hair, 111 Eyes her soft smiles reflected in the air; Or sport in groups with River-Boys, that lave Their silken limbs amid the dashing wave; Pluck the pale primrose bending from its edge, Or tittering dance amid the whispering sedge.'Onward YOU pass, the pine-capt hills divide, Or feed the golden harvests on their side; The wide-ribb'd arch with hurrying torrents fill, Shove the slow barge, or whirl the foaming mill. OR lead with beckoning hand the sparkling train Of refluent water to its parent main, And pleased revisit in their sea-moss vales Blue Nereid-forms array'd in shining scales, Shapes, whose broad oar the torpid wave impels, And Tritons bellowing through their twisted shells. 'So from the heart the sanguine stream distils, O'er Beauty's radiant shrine in vermil rills, Feeds each fine nerve, each slender hair pervades, The skins bright snow with living purple shades, Each dimpling cheek with warmer blushes dyes, Laughs on the lips, and lightens in the eyes. -Erewhile absorb'd, the vagrant globules swim From each fair feature, and proportion'd limb, Join'd in one trunk with deeper tint return To the warm concave of the vital urn. II. 1.'AQUATIC MAIDS! YOU sway the mighty realms Of scale and shell, which Ocean overwhelms; As Night's pale Queen her rising orb reveals, And climbs the zenith with refulgent wheels, Car'd on the foam your glimmering legion rides, Your little tridents heave the dashing tides, Urge on the sounding shores their crystal course, Restrain their fury, or direct their force. 2.'NYMPHS! YOU adorn, in glossy volumes roll'd, The gaudy conch with azure, green, and gold. You round Echinus ray his arrowy mail, Give the keel'd Nautilus his oar and sail; 112 Firm to his rock with silver cords suspend The anchor'd Pinna, and his Cancer-friend; With worm-like beard his toothless lips array, And teach the unwieldy Sturgeon to betray.Ambush'd in weeds, or sepulcher'd in sands, In dread repose He waits the scaly bands, Waves in red spires the living lures, and draws The unwary plunderers to his circling jaws, Eyes with grim joy the twinkling shoals beset, And clasps the quick inextricable net. You chase the warrior Shark, and cumberous Whale, And guard the Mermaid in her briny vale; Feed the live petals of her insect-flowers, Her shell-wrack gardens, and her sea-fan bowers; With ores and gems adorn her coral cell, And drop a pearl in every gaping shell. 3. 'YOUR myriad trains o'er stagnant ocean's tow, Harness'd with gossamer, the loitering prow; Or with fine films, suspended o'er the deep, Of oil effusive lull the waves to sleep. You stay the flying bark, conceal'd beneath, Where living rocks of worm-built coral breathe; Meet fell TEREDO, as he mines the keel With beaked head, and break his lips of steel; Turn the broad helm, the fluttering canvas urge From MAELSTROME'S fierce innavigable surge. -'Mid the lorn isles of Norway's stormy main, As sweeps o'er many a league his eddying train, Vast watery walls in rapid circles spin, And deep-ingulph'd the Demon dwells within; Springs o'er the fear-froze crew with Harpy-claws, Down his deep den the whirling vessel draws; Churns with his bloody mouth the dread repast, The booming waters murmuring o'er the mast. III. 'Where with chill frown enormous ALPS alarms A thousand realms, horizon'd in his arms; While cloudless suns meridian glories shed From skies of silver round his hoary head, Tall rocks of ice refract the coloured rays, 113 And Frost sits throned amid the lambent blaze; NYMPHS! YOUR thin forms pervade his glittering piles, His roofs of chrystal, and his glasy ailes; Where in cold caves imprisoned Naiads sleep, Or chain'd on mossy couches wake and weep; Where round dark crags indignant waters bend Through rifted ice, in ivory veins descend, Seek through unfathom'd snows their devious track, Heave the vast spars, the ribbed granites crack, Rush into day, in foamy torrents shine, And swell the imperial Danube or the Rhine.Or feed the murmuring TIBER, as he laves His realms inglorious with diminish'd waves, Hears his lorn Forum sound with Eunuch-strains, Sees dancing slaves insult his martial plains; Parts with chill stream the dim religious bower, Time-mouldered bastion, and dismantled tower; By alter'd fanes and nameless villas glides, And classic domes, that tremble on his sides; Sighs o'er each broken urn, and yawning tomb, And mourns the fall of LIBERTY and ROME. IV. 'Sailing in air, when dark MONSOON inshrouds His tropic mountains in a night of clouds; Or drawn by whirlwinds from the Line returns, And showers o'er Afric all his thousand urns; High o'er his head the beams of SIRIUS glow, And, Dog of Nile, ANUBIS barks below. NYMPHS! YOU from cliff to cliff attendant guide In headlong cataracts the impetuous tide; Or lead o'er wastes of Abyssinian sands The bright expanse to EGYPT'S shower-less lands. -Her long canals the sacred waters fill, And edge with silver every peopled hill; Gigantic SPHINX in circling waves admire; And MEMNON bending o'er his broken lyre; O'er furrow'd glebes and green savannas sweep, And towns and temples laugh amid the deep. V. 1. 'High in the frozen North where HECCLA glows, 114 And melts in torrents his coeval snows; O'er isles and oceans sheds a sanguine light, Or shoots red stars amid the ebon night; When, at his base intomb'd, with bellowing sound Fell GIESAR roar'd, and struggling shook the ground; Pour'd from red nostrils, with her scalding breath, A boiling deluge o'er the blasted heath; And, wide in air, in misty volumes hurl'd Contagious atoms o'er the alarmed world; NYMPHS! YOUR bold myriads broke the infernal spell, And crush'd the Sorceress in her flinty cell. 2. 'Where with soft fires in unextinguish'd urns, Cauldron'd in rock, innocuous Lava burns; On the bright lake YOUR gelid hands distil In pearly mowers the parsimonious rill; And, as aloft the curling vapours rise Through the cleft roof, ambitious for the skies, In vaulted hills condense the tepid steams, And pour to HEALTH the medicated streams. -So in green vales amid her mountains bleak BUXTONIA smiles, the Goddess-Nymyh of Peak; Deep in warm waves, and pebbly baths she dwells, And calls HYGEIA to her sainted wells. 'Hither in sportive bands bright DEVON leads Graces and Loves from Chatsworth's flowery meads.Charm'd round the NYMPH, they climb the rifted rocks; And steep in mountain-mist their golden locks; On venturous step her sparry caves explore, And light with radiant eyes her realms of ore; -Oft by her bubbling founts, and shadowy domes, In gay undress the fairy legion roams, Their dripping palms in playful malice fill, Or taste with ruby lip the sparkling rill; Croud round her baths, and, bending o'er the side, Unclasp'd their sandals, and their zones untied, Dip with gay fear the shuddering foot undress'd, And quick retract it to the fringed vest; Or cleave with brandish'd arms the lucid stream, And sob, their blue eyes twinkling in the steam. -High o'er the chequer'd vault with transient glow 115 Bright lustres dart, as dash the waves below; And Echo's sweet responsive voice prolongs The dulcet tumult of their silver tongues.O'er their flush'd cheeks uncurling tresses flow, And dew-drops glitter on their necks of snow; Round each fair Nymph her dropping mantle clings, And Loves emerging shake their showery wings. 'Here oft her LORD surveys the rude domain, Fair arts of Greece triumphant in his train; LO! as he steps, the column'd pile ascends, The blue roof closes, or the crescent bends; New woods aspiring clothe their hills with green, Smooth slope the lawns, the grey rock peeps between; Relenting Nature gives her hand to Taste, And Health and Beauty crown the laughing waste. VI. 'NYMPHS! YOUR bright squadrons watch with chemic eyes The cold-elastic vapours, as they rise; With playful force arrest them as they pass, And to pure AIR betroth the flaming GAS. Round their translucent forms at once they fling Their rapturous arms, with silver bosoms cling; In fleecy clouds their fluttering wings extend, Or from the skies in lucid showers descend; Whence rills and rivers owe their secret birth, And Ocean's hundred arms infold the earth. 'So, robed by Beauty's Queen, with softer charms SATURNIA woo'd the Thunderer to her arms; O'er her fair limbs a veil of light she spread, And bound a starry diadem on her head; Long braids of pearl her golden tresses grac'd, And the charm'd CESTUS sparkled round her waist. -Raised o'er the woof, by Beauty's hand inwrought, Breathes the soft Sigh, and glows the enamour'd Thought; Vows on light wings succeed, and quiver'd Wiles, Assuasive Accents, and seductive Smiles. 116 -Slow rolls the Cyprian car in purple pride, And, steer'd by LOVE, ascends admiring Ide; Climbs the green slopes, the nodding woods pervades, Burns round the rocks, or gleams amid the shades. -Glad ZEPHYR leads the train, and waves above The barbed darts, and blazing torch of Love; Reverts his smiling face, and pausing flings Soft showers of roses from aurelian wings. Delighted Fawns, in wreathes of flowers array'd, With tiptoe Wood-Boys beat the chequer'd glade; Alarmed Naiads, rising into air, Lift o'er their silver urns their leafy hair; Each to her oak the bashful Dryads shrink, And azure eyes are seen through every chink. -LOVE culls a flaming shaft of broadest wing, And rests the fork upon the quivering string; Points his arch eye aloft, with fingers strong Draws to his curled ear the silken thong; Loud twangs the steel, the golden arrow flies, Trails a long line of lustre through the skies; ''Tis done!' he shouts, 'the mighty Monarch feels!' And with loud laughter shakes the silver wheels; Bends o'er the car, and whirling, as it moves, His loosen'd bowstring, drives the rising doves. -Pierced on his throne the slarting Thunderer turns, Melts with soft sighs, with kindling rapture burns; Clasps her fair hand, and eyes in fond amaze The bright Intruder with enamour'd gaze. 'And leaves my Goddess, like a blooming bride, 'The fanes of Argos for the rocks of Ide? 'Her gorgeous palaces, and amaranth bowers, 'For cliff-top'd mountains, and aerial towers?' He said; and, leading from her ivory seat The blushing Beauty to his lone retreat, Curtain'd with night the couch imperial shrouds, And rests the crimson cushions upon clouds.Earth feels the grateful influence from above, Sighs the soft Air, and Ocean murmurs love; Etherial Warmth expands his brooding wing, And in still showers descends the genial Spring. 117 VII. 'NYMPHS OF AQUATIC TASTE! whose placid smile Breathes sweet enchantment o'er BRITANNIA'S isle; Whose sportive touch in showers resplendent flings Her lucid cataracts, and her bubbling springs; Through peopled vales the liquid silver guides, And swells in bright expanse her freighted tides. YOU with nice ear, in tiptoe trains, pervade Dim walks of morn or evening's silent shade; Join the lone Nightingale, her woods among, And roll your rills symphonious to her song; Through fount-full dells, and wave-worn valleys move, And tune their echoing waterfalls to love; Or catch, attentive to the distant roar, The pausing murmurs of the dashing shore; Or, as aloud she pours her liquid strain, Pursue the NEREID on the twilight main. -Her playful Sea-horse woos her soft commands, Turns his quick ears, his webbed claws expands, His watery way with waving volutes wins, Or listening librates on unmoving fins. The Nymph emerging mounts her scaly seat, Hangs o'er his glossy sides her silver feet, With snow-white hands her arching veil detains, Gives to his slimy lips the slacken'd reins, Lifts to the star of Eve her eye serene, And chaunts the birth of Beauty's radiant Queen.O'er her fair brow her pearly comb unfurls Her beryl locks, and parts the waving curls, Each tangled braid with glistening teeth unbinds And with the floating treasure musks the winds.Thrill'd by the dulcet accents, as she sings, The rippling wave in widening circles rings; Night's shadowy forms along the margin gleam With pointed ears, or dance upon the stream; The Moon transported stays her bright career, And maddening Stars shoot headlong from the sphere. VIII. 'NYMPHS! whose fair eyes with vivid lustres glow For human weal, and melt at human woe; Late as YOU floated on your silver shells, Sorrowing and slow by DERWENT'S willowy dells; Where by tall groves his foamy flood he steers 118 Through ponderous arches o'er impetuous wears, By DERBY'S shadowy towers reflective sweeps, And gothic grandeur chills his dusky deeps; You pearl'd with Pity's drops his velvet sides, Sigh'd in his gales, and murmur'd in his tides, Waved o'er his fringed brink a deeper gloom, And bow'd his alders o'er MILCENA'S tomb. 'Oft with sweet voice She led her infant-train, Printing with graceful step his spangled plain, Explored his twinkling swarms, that swim or fly, And mark'd his florets with botanic eye.'Sweet bud of Spring! how frail thy transient bloom, 'Fine film,' she cried, 'of Nature's fairest loom! 'Soon Beauty fades upon its damask throne!'-Unconscious of the worm, that mined her own!-Pale are those lips, where soft caresses hung, Wan the warm cheek, and mute the tender tongue, Cold rests that feeling heart on Derwent's shore, And those love-lighted eye-balls roll no more! -HERE her sad Consort, stealing through the gloom Of Hangs in mute anguish o'er the scutcheon'd hearse, Or graves with trembling style the votive verse. 'Sexton! oh, lay beneath this sacred shrine, When Time's cold hand shall close my aching eyes, Oh, gently lay this wearied earth of mine, Where wrap'd in night my loved MILCENA lies. 'So shall with purer joy my spirit move, When the last trumpet thrills the caves of Death, Catch the first whispers of my waking love, And drink with holy kiss her kindling breath. 'The spotless Fair, with blush ethereal warm, Shall hail with sweeter smile returning day, Rise from her marble bed a brighter form, And win on buoyant step her airy way. 'Shall bend approved, where beckoning hosts invite, 119 On clouds of silver her adoring knee, Approach with Seraphim the throne of light, -And BEAUTY plead with angel-tongue for Me!' IX. 'YOUR virgin trains on BRINDLEY'S cradle smiled, And nursed with fairy-love the unletter'd child, Spread round his pillow all your secret spells, Pierced all your springs, and open'd all your wells.As now on grass, with glossy folds reveal'd, Glides the bright serpent, now in flowers conceal'd; Far shine the scales, that gild his sinuous back, And lucid undulations mark his track; So with strong arm immortal BRINDLEY leads His long canals, and parts the velvet meads; Winding in lucid lines, the watery mass Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass, With rising locks a thousand hills alarms, Flings o'er a thousand streams its silver arms, Feeds the long vale, the nodding woodland laves, And Plenty, Arts, and Commerce freight the waves. -NYMPHS! who erewhile round BRINDLEY'S early bier On show-white bosoms shower'd the incessant tear, Adorn his tomb!-oh, raise the marble bust, Proclaim his honours, and protect his dust! With urns inverted, round the sacred shrine Their ozier wreaths let weeping Naiads twine; While on the top MECHANIC GENIUS stands, Counts the fleet waves, and balances the lands. X. 'NYMPHS! YOU first taught to pierce the secret caves Of humid earth, and lift her ponderous waves; Bade with quick stroke the sliding piston bear The viewless columns of incumbent air;Press'd by the incumbent air the floods below, Through opening valves in foaming torrents flow, Foot after foot with lessen'd impulse move, And rising seek the vacancy above.So when the Mother, bending o'er his charms, Clasps her fair nurseling in delighted arms; Throws the thin kerchief from her neck of snow, And half unveils the pearly orbs below; With sparkling eye the blameless Plunderer owns 120 Her soft embraces, and endearing tones, Seeks the salubrious fount with opening lips, Spreads his inquiring hands, and smiles, and sips. 'CONNUBIAL FAIR! whom no fond transport warms To lull your infant in maternal arms; Who, bless'd in vain with tumid bosoms, hear His tender wailings with unfeeling ear; The soothing kiss and milky rill deny To the sweet pouting lip, and glistening eye!Ah! what avails the cradle's damask roof, The eider bolster, and embroider'd woof!Oft hears the gilded couch unpity'd plains, And many a tear the tassel'd cushion stains! No voice so sweet attunes his cares to rest, So soft no pillow, as his Mother's breast!-Thus charm'd to sweet repose, when twilight hours Shed their soft influence on celestial bowers, The Cherub, Innocence, with smile divine Shuts his white wings, and sleeps on Beauty's shrine. XI. 'From dome to dome when flames infuriate climb, Sweep the long street, invest the tower sublime; Gild the tall vanes amid the astonish'd night, And reddening heaven returns the sanguine light; While with vast strides and bristling hair aloof Pale Danger glides along the falling roof; And Giant Terror howling in amaze Moves his dark limbs across the lurid blaze. NYMPHS! you first taught the gelid wave to rise Hurl'd in resplendent arches to the skies; In iron cells condensed the airy spring, And imp'd the torrent with unfailing wing; -On the fierce flames the shower impetuous falls, And sudden darkness shrouds the shatter'd walls; Steam, smoak, and dust in blended volumes roll, And Night and Silence repossess the Pole.'Where were ye, NYMPHS! in those disasterous hours, Which wrap'd in flames AUGUSTA'S sinking towers? Why did ye linger in your wells and groves, 121 When sad WOODMASON mourn'd her infant loves? When thy fair Daughters with unheeded screams, Ill-fated MOLESWORTH! call'd the loitering streams?The trembling Nymph on bloodless fingers hung Eyes from the tottering wall the distant throng, With ceaseless shrieks her sleeping friends alarms, Drops with singed hair into her lover's arms.The illumin'd Mother seeks with footsteps fleet, Where hangs the safe balcony o'er the street, Wrap'd in her sheet her youngest hope suspends, And panting lowers it to her tiptoe friends; Again she hurries on affection's wings, And now a third, and now a fourth, she brings; Safe all her babes, she smooths her horrent brow, And bursts through bickering flames, unscorch'd, below. So, by her Son arraign'd, with feet unshod O'er burning bars indignant Emma trod. 'E'en on the day when Youth with Beauty wed, The flames surprized them in their nuptial bed;Seen at the opening sash with bosom bare, With wringing hands, and dark dishevel'd hair, The blushing Beauty with disorder'd charms Round her fond lover winds her ivory arms; Beat, as they clasp, their throbbing hearts with fear, And many a kiss is mix'd with many a tear;Ah me! in vain the labouring engines pour Round their pale limbs the ineffectual shower!-Then crash'd the floor, while shrinking crouds retire, And Love and Virtue sunk amid the fire!With piercing screams afflicted strangers mourn, And their white ashes mingle in their urn. XII. 'PELLUCID FORMS! whose crystal bosoms show The shine of welfare, or the shade of woe; Who with soft lips salute returning Spring, And hail the Zephyr quivering on his wing; Or watch, untired, the wintery clouds, and share With streaming eyes my vegetable care; Go, shove the dim mist from the mountain's brow, Chase the white fog, which floods the vale below; Melt the thick snows, that linger on the lands, 122 And catch the hailstones in your little hands; Guard the coy blossom from the pelting shower, And dash the rimy spangles from the bower; From each chill leaf the silvery drops repel, And close the timorous floret's golden bell. 'So should young SYMPATHY, in female form, Climb the tall rock, spectatress of the storm; Life's sinking wrecks with secret sighs deplore, And bleed for others' woes, Herself on shore; To friendless Virtue, gasping on the strand, Bare her warm heart, her virgin arms expand, Charm with kind looks, with tender accents cheer, And pour the sweet consolatory tear; Grief's cureless wounds with lenient balms asswage, Or prop with firmer staff the steps of Age; The lifted arm of mute Despair arrest, And snatch the dagger pointed to his breast; Or lull to slumber Envy's haggard mien, And rob her quiver'd shafts with hand unseen. -Sound, NYMPHS OF HELICON! the trump of Fame, And teach Hibernian echoes JONES'S name; Bind round her polish'd brow the civic bay, And drag the fair Philanthropist to day.So from secluded springs, and secret caves, Her Liffy pours his bright meandering waves, Cools the parch'd vale, the sultry mead divides, And towns and temples star his shadowy sides. XIII. 'CALL YOUR light legions, tread the swampy heath, Pierce with sharp spades the tremulous peat beneath; With colters bright the rushy sward bisect, And in new veins the gushing rills direct;So flowers shall rise in purple light array'd, And blossom'd orchards stretch their silver shade; Admiring glebes their amber ears unfold, And Labour sleep amid the waving gold. 'Thus when young HERCULES with firm disdain Braved the soft smiles of Pleasure's harlot train; To valiant toils his forceful limbs assign'd, 123 And gave to Virtue all his mighty mind, Fierce ACHELOUS rush'd from mountain-caves, O'er sad Etolia pour'd his wasteful waves, O'er lowing vales and bleating pastures roll'd, Swept her red vineyards, and her glebes of gold, Mined all her towns, uptore her rooted woods, And Famine danced upon the shining floods. The youthful Hero seized his curled crest, And dash'd with lifted club the watery Pest; With waving arm the billowy tumult quell'd, And to his course the bellowing Fiend repell'd. 'Then to a Snake the finny Demon turn'd His lengthen'd form, with scales of silver burn'd; Lash'd with restless sweep his dragon-train, And shot meandering o'er the affrighted plain. The Hero-God, with giant fingers clasp'd Firm round his neck, the hissing monster grasp'd; With starting eyes, wide throat, and gaping teeth, Curl his redundant folds, and writhe in death. 'And now a Bull, amid the flying throng The grisly Demon foam'd, and roar'd along; With silver hoofs the flowery meadows spurn'd, Roll'd his red eye, his threatening antlers turn'd. Dragg'd down to earth, the Warrior's victor-hands Press'd his deep dewlap on the imprinted sands; Then with quick bound his bended knee he fix'd High on his neck, the branching horns betwixt, Strain'd his strong arms, his sinewy shoulders bent, And from his curled brow the twisted terror rent. -Pleased Fawns and Nymphs with dancing step applaud, And hang their chaplets round the resting God; Link their soft hands, and rear with pausing toil The golden trophy on the furrow'd soil; Fill with ripe fruits, with wreathed flowers adorn, And give to PLENTY her prolific horn. XIV. 'On Spring's fair lap, CERULEAN SISTERS! pour From airy urns the sun-illumined shower, Feed with the dulcet drops my tender broods, Mellifluous flowers, and aromatic buds; 124 Hang from each bending grass and horrent thorn The tremulous pearl, that glitters to the morn; Or where cold dews their secret channels lave, And Earth's dark chambers hide the stagnant wave, O, pierce, YE NYMPHS! her marble veins, and lead Her gushing fountains to the thirsty mead; Wide o'er the shining vales, and trickling hills Spread the bright treasure in a thousand rills. So shall my peopled realms of Leaf and Flower Exult, inebriate with the genial shower; Dip their long tresses from the mossy brink, With tufted roots the glassy currents drink; Shade your cool mansions from meridian beams, And view their waving honours in your streams. 'Thus where the veins their confluent branches bend, And milky eddies with the purple blend; The Chyle's white trunk, diverging from its source, Seeks through the vital mass its shining course; O'er each red cell, and tissued membrane spreads In living net-work all its branching threads; Maze within maze its tortuous path pursues, Winds into glands, inextricable clues; Steals through the stomach's velvet sides, and sips The silver surges with a thousand lips; Fills each fine pore, pervades each slender hair, And drinks salubrious dew-drops from the air. 'Thus when to kneel in Mecca's awful gloom, Or press with pious kiss Medina's tomb, League after league, through many a lingering day, Steer the swart Caravans their sultry way; O'er sandy wastes on gasping camels toil, Or print with pilgrim-steps the burning soil; If from lone rocks a sparkling rill descend, O'er the green brink the kneeling nations bend, Bathe the parch'd lip, and cool the feverish tongue, And the clear lake reflects the mingled throng.' The Goddess paused,-the listening bands awhile Still seem to hear, and dwell upon her smile; Then with soft murmur sweep in lucid trains 125 Down the green slopes, and o'er the pebbly plains, To each bright stream on silver sandals glide, Reflective fountain, and tumultuous tide. So shoot the Spider-broods at breezy dawn Their glittering net-work o'er the autumnal lawn; From blade to blade connect with cordage fine The unbending grass, and live along the line; Or bathe unwet their oily forms, and dwell With feet repulsive on the dimpling well. So when the North congeals his watery mass, Piles high his snows, and floors his seas with glass; While many a Month, unknown to warmer rays, Marks its slow chronicle by lunar days; Stout youths and ruddy damsels, sportive train, Leave the white soil, and rush upon the main; From isle to isle the moon-bright squadrons stray, And win in easy curves their graceful way; On step alternate borne, with balance nice Hang o'er the gliding steel, and hiss along the ice. ~ Erasmus Darwin,

705: Book VI: The Book of the Chieftains Then as from common hills great Pelion rises to heaven So from the throng uprearing a brow that no crown could ennoble, Male and kingly of front like a lion conscious of puissance Rose a form august, the monarch great Agamemnon. Wroth he rose yet throwing a rein on the voice of his passion, Governing the beast and the demon within by the god who is mighty. Happy thy life and my fame that thou comst with the aegis of heaven Shadowing thy hoary brows, thou herald of pride and of insult. Well is it too for his days who sent thee that other and nobler Heaven made my heart than his who insults and a voice of the immortals Cries to my soul forbidding its passions. O hardness of virtue, Thus to be seized and controlled as in fetters by Zeus and Athene. Free is the peasant to smite in the pastures the mouth that has wronged him, Chained in his soul is Atrides. Bound by their debt to the fathers, Curbed by the god in them painfully move the lives of the noble, Forced to obey the eye that watches within in their bosoms. Ever since Zeus Cronion turned in our will towards the waters, Scourged by the heavens in my dearest, wronged by men and their clamours, Griefs untold I have borne in Argos and Aulis and Troas, Yoked to this sacred toil of the Greeks for their children and country, Bound by the gods to a task that is heavy, a load that is bitter. Seeing the faces of foes in the mask of friends I was silent. Hateful I hold him who sworn to a cause that is holy and common Broods upon private wrongs or serving his lonely ambition Studies to reap his gain from the labour and woe of his fellows. Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. Grief and wrath I coerced nor carried my heart to its record All that has hurt its chords and wounded the wings of my spirit. Nobler must kings be than natures of earth on whom Zeus lays no burden. Other is Peleus son than the race of his Aeacid fathers, Nor like his sire of the wise-still heart far-sighted and patient Bearing the awful rein of the gods, but hastes to his longings, Dire in his wrath and pursued by the band of his giant ambitions. Measure and virtue forsake him as Ate grows in his bosom. Yet not for tyrant wrong nor to serve as a sword for our passions Zeus created our strength, but that earth might have help from her children. Not of our moulding its gifts to our soul nor were formed by our labour! When did we make them, where were they forged, in what workshop or furnace? Found in what aeon of Time, that pride should bewilder the mortal? Bowed to our will are the folk and our prowess dreadful and godlike? Shadows are these of the gods which the deep heavens cast on our spirits. Transient, we made not ourselves, but at birth from the first we were fashioned Valiant or fearful and as was our birth by the gods and their thinkings Formed, so already enacted and fixed by their wills are our fortunes. What were the strength of Atrides and what were the craft of Odysseus Save for their triumphing gods? They would fail and be helpless as infants. Stronger a woman, wiser a child were favoured by Heaven. Ceased not Sarpedon slain who was son of Zeus and unconquered? Not to Achilles he fell, but Fate and the gods were his slayers. Kings, to the arrogant shaft that was launched, the unbearable insult, Armoured wisdoms oppose, let not Ate seize on your passions. Be not as common souls, O you who are Greece and her fortunes, Nor of your spirits of wrath take counsel but of Athene. Merit the burden laid by Zeus, his demand from your natures Suffer, O hearts of his seed, O souls who are chosen and mighty, All forgetting but Greece and her good; resolve what is noble. I will not speak nor advise, for tis known we are rivals and foemen. Calmed by his words and his will he sat down mighty and kinglike; But Menelaus arose, the Spartan, the husb and of Helen, Atreus younger son from a lesser womb, in his brilliance Dwarfed by the others port, yet tall was he, gracile and splendid, As if a panther might hunt by a lions side in the forest. Smiting his thigh with his firm-clenched hand he spoke mid the Argives: Woe to me, shameless, born to my country a cause of affliction, Since for my sake all wrongs must be borne and all shames be encountered; And for my sake you have spun through the years down the grooves of disaster Bearing the shocks of the Trojans and ravaged by Zeus and by Hector, Slaughtered by Rhesus and Memnon, Sarpedon and Penthesilea; Or by the Archer pierced, the hostile dreadful Apollo, Evilly end the days of the Greeks remote from their kindred Slain on an alien soil by Asian Xanthus and Ida. Doomed to the pyre we have toiled for a woman ungracious who left us Passing serenely my portals to joy in the chambers of Troya. Here let it cease, O my brother! how much wilt thou bear for this graceless Child of thy sire, cause still of thy griefs and never of blessing? Easily Zeus afflicts who trouble their hearts for a woman; But in our ships that sailed close-fraught with this dolorous Ate Worse was the bane they bore which King Peleus begot on white Thetis. Evil ever was sown by the embrace of the gods with a mortal! Alien a portent is born and a breaker of men and their labours, One who afflicts with his light or his force mortalitys weakness Stripping for falsehoods their verities, shaking the walls they erected. Hostile all things the scourge divine overbears or, if helpful, Neither without him his fellows can prosper, nor will his spirit Fit in the frame of things earthly but shatters their rhythm and order Rending the measures just that the wise have decreed for our growing. So have our mortal plannings broken on this fateful Achilles And with our blood and our anguish Heaven has fostered his greatness. It is enough; let the dire gods choose between Greece and their offspring. Even as he bids us, aloof let our hosts twixt the ships and the Xanthus Stand from the shock and the cry where Hellene meets with Eoan, Troy and Phthia locked, Achilles and Penthesilea, Nor any more than watchers care who line an arena; Calm like the impartial gods, approve the bravest and swiftest. Sole let him fight! The fates shall preserve him he vaunts of or gather, Even as death shall gather us all for memorys clusters, All in their day who were great or were little, heroes or cowards. So shall he slay or be slain, a boon to mankind and his country. Since if he mow down this flower of bale, this sickle by Hades Whirled if he break,for the high gods ride on the hiss of his spear-shaft, Ours is the gain who shall break rejoicing through obdurate portals Praising Pallas alone and Hera daughter of Heaven. But if he sink in this last of his fights, as they say it is fated, Nor do I deem that the man has been born in Asia or Hellas Who in the dreadful field can prevail against Penthesilea, If to their tents the Myrmidons fleeing cumber the meadows Slain by a girl in her speed and leaving the corpse of their leader, Ours is the gain, we are rid of a shame and a hate and a danger. True is it, Troy shall exultant live on in the shadow of Ida, Yet shall our hearts be light because earth is void of Achilles. And for the rest of the infinite loss, what we hoped, what we suffered, Let it all go, let the salt floods swallow it, fate and oblivion Bury it out in the night; let us sail oer the waves to our country Leaving Helen in Troy since the gods are the friends of transgressors. So Menelaus in anger and grief miscounselled the Argives. Great Idomeneus next, the haughty king of the Cretans, Raised his brow of pride in the lofty Argive assembly. Tall like a pine that stands up on the slope of Thessalian mountains Overpeering a cascades edge and is seen from the valleys, Such he seemed to their eyes who remembered Greece and her waters, Heard in their souls the torrents leap and the wind on the hill-tops. Oft have I marvelled, O Greeks, to behold in this levy of heroes Armies so many, chieftains so warlike suffer in silence Pride of a single man when he thunders and lightens in Troas. Doubtless the nations that follow his cry are many and valiant, Doubtless the winds of the north have made him a runner and spearman. Shall not then force be the King? is not strength the seal of the Godhead? This my soul replies, Agamemnon the Atreid only Choosing for leader and king I have come to the toil and the warfare. Wisdom and greatness he owns and the wealth and renown of his fathers. But for this whelp of the northlands, nursling of rocks and the sea-cliff Who with his bleak and rough-hewn Myrmidons hastes to the carnage, Leader of wolves to their prey, not the king of a humanised nation, Not to such head of the cold-drifting mist and the gloom-vigilled Chaos, Crude to our culture and light and void of our noble fulfilments Minos shall bend his knee nor Crete, a barbarians vassal, Stain her old glories. Oh, but he boasts of a goddess for mother Born in the senseless seas mid the erring wastes of the Ocean, White and swift and foam-footed, vast Oceanus daughter. Gods we adore enough in the heavens, and if from us Hades Claim one more of this breed, we can bear that excess of his glories, Not upon earth these new-born deities huge-passioned, sateless Who with their mouth as of Orcus and stride of the ruinous Ocean Sole would be seen mid her sons and devour all lifes joy and its greatness. Millions must empty their lives that a man may oershadow the nations, Numberless homes must weep, but his hunger of glory is sated! Troy shall descend to the shadow; gods and men have condemned her, Weary, hating her fame. Her dreams, her grandeur, her beauty, All her greatness and deeds that now end in miserable ashes, Ceasing shall fade and be as a tale that was forged by the poets. Only a name shall go down from her past and the woe of her ending Naked to hatred and rapine and punished with rape and with slaughter. Never again must marble pride high-domed on her hill-top Look forth dominion and menace over the crested Aegean Shadowing Achaia. Fire shall abolish the fame of her ramparts, Earth her foundations forget. Shall she stand affronting the azure? Dire in our path like a lioness once again must we meet her, Leap and roar of her led by the spear of Achilles, not Hector? Asia by Peleus guided shall stride on us after Antenor? Though one should plan in the night of his thoughts where no eye can pursue him, Instincts of men discover their foe and like hounds in the darkness Bay at a danger hid. No silence of servitude trembling Trains to bondage sons of the race of whom Aeolus father Storm-voiced was and free, nor like other groupings of mortals Moulded we were by Zeus, but supremely were sifted and fashioned. Other are Danaus sons and other the lofty Achaians: Chainless like Natures tribes in their many-voiced colonies founded They their god-given impulse shall keep and their natures of freedom. Only themselves shall rule them, only their equal spirits Bowed to the voice of a law that is just, obeying their leaders, Awed by the gods. So with order and balance and harmony noble Life shall move golden, free in its steps and just in its measure, Glad of a manhood complete, by excess and defect untormented. Freedom is life to the Argive soul, to Aeolias peoples. Dulled by a yoke our nations would perish, or live but as shadows, Changed into phantoms of men with the name of a Greek for a byword. Not like the East and her sons is our race, they who bow to a mortal. Gods there may be in this flesh that suffers and dies; Achaia Knows them not. Need if he feels of a world to endure and adore him, Hearts let him seek that are friends with the dust, overpowered by their heavens, Here in these Asian vastnesses, here where the heats and the perfumes Sicken the soul and the sense and a soil of indolent plenty Breeds like the corn in its multitudes natures accustomed to thraldom. Here let the northern Achilles seek for his slaves and adorers, Not in the sea-ringed isles and not in the mountains Achaian. Ten long years of the shock and the war-cry twixt rampart and ocean Hurting our hearts we have toiled; shall they reap not their ease in the vengeance? Troas is sown with the lives of our friends and with ashes remembered; Shall not Meriones slain be reckoned in blood and in treasure? Cretan Idomeneus girt with the strength of his iron retainers Slaying and burning will stride through the city of music and pleasure, Babes of her blood borne high on the spears at the head of my column, Wives of her princes dragged through her streets in its pomp to their passion, Gold of Troy stream richly past in the gaze of Achilles. Then let him threaten my days, then rally the might of his triumphs, Yet shall a Cretan spear make search in his heart for his godhead. Limbs of this god can be pierced; not alone shall I fleet down to Hades. After him rose from the throng the Locrian, swift-footed Ajax. Kings of the Greeks, throw a veil on your griefs, lay a curb on your anger. Moved mans tongue in its wrath looses speech that is hard to be pardoned, Afterwards stilled we regret, we forgive. If all were resented, None could live on this earth that is thick with our stumblings. Always This is the burden of man that he acts from his heart and his passions, Stung by the goads of the gods he hews at the ties that are dearest. Lust was the guide they sent us, wrath was a whip for his coursers, Madness they made the hearts comrade, repentance they gave for its scourger. This too our hearts demand that we bear with our friend when he chides us. Insult forgive from the noble embittered soul of Achilles! When with the scorn and the wrath of a lover our depths are tormented, Who shall forbid the cry and who shall measure the anguish? Sharper the pain that looses the taunt than theirs who endure it. Rage has wept in my blood as I lived through the flight oer the pastures, Shame coils a snake in my back when thought whispers of Penthesilea. Bright shine his morns if he mows down this hell-bitch armed by the Furies! But for this shaft of his pity it came from a lesser Pelides, Not from the slayer of Hector, not from the doom of Sarpedon, Memnons mighty oerthrower, the blood-stained splendid Achilles. These are the Trojan snares and the fateful smile of a woman! This thing the soul of a man shall not bear that blood of his labour Vainly has brought him victory leaving life to the hated; This is a wound to our race that a Greek should whisper of mercy. Who can pardon a foe though a god should descend to persuade him? Justice is first of the gods, but for Pity twas spawned by a mortal, Pity that only disturbs Gods measures and false and unrighteous Holds man back from the joy he might win and troubles his bosom. Troy has a debt to our hearts; she shall pay it all down to the obol, Blood of the fall and anguish of flight when the heroes are slaughtered, Days without joy while we labour and see not the eyes of our parents, Toil of the war-cry, nights that drag past upon alien beaches, Helen ravished, Paris triumphant, endless the items Crowd on a wrath in the memory, kept as in bronze the credit Stretches out long and blood-stained and savage. Most for the terror Graved in the hearts of our fathers that still by our youth is remembered, Hellas waiting and crouching, dreading the spear of the Trojan, Flattering, sending gifts and pale in her mortal anguish, Agony long of a race at the mercy of iron invaders, This she shall pay most, the city of pride, the insolent nation, Pay with her temples charred and her golden mansions in ruins, Pay with the shrieks of her ravished virgins, the groans of the aged Burned in their burning homes for our holiday. Music and dancing Shall be in Troy of another sort than she loved in her greatness Merry with conquered gold and insulting the world with her flutings. All that she boasted of, statue and picture, all shall be shattered; Out of our shame she chiselled them, rich with our blood they were coloured. This not the gods from Olympus crowding, this not Achilles, This not your will, O ye Greeks, shall deny to the Locrian Ajax. Even though Pallas divine with her aegis counselling mercy Cumbered my path, I would push her aside to leap on my victims. Learn shall all men on that day how a warrior deals with his foemen. Darting flames from his eyes the barbarian sate, and there rose up Frowning Tydeus son, the Tirynthian, strong Diomedes. Ajax Oileus, thy words are foam on the lips of a madman. Cretan Idomeneus, silence the vaunt that thy strength can fulfil not. Strong art thou, fearless in battle, but not by thy spear-point, O hero, Hector fell, nor Sarpedon, nor Troilus leading the war-cry. These were Achilles deeds which a god might have done out of heaven. Him we upbraid who saved, nor would any now who revile him Still have a living tongue for ingratitude but for the hero. Much to the man forgive who has saved his race and his country: Him shall the termless centuries praise when we are forgotten. Curb then your speech, crush down in your hearts the grief and the choler; Has not Atrides curbed who is greatest of all in our nations Wrath in the heart and the words that are winged for our bale from our bosoms? For as a load to be borne were these passions given to mortals. Honour Achilles, conquer Troy by his god-given valour. Now of our discords and griefs debate not for joy of our foemen! First over Priams corpse stand victors in Ilions ramparts; Discord then let arise or concord solder our nations. Rugged words and few as fit for the soul that he harboured Great Tydides spoke and ceased; and there rose up impatient Tall from the spears of the north the hero king Prothonor, Prince in Cadmeian Thebes who with Leitus led on his thousands. Loudly thou vauntest thy freedom Ionian Minos recalling, Lord of thy southern isles who gildst with tri bute Mycenae. We have not bowed our neck to Pelops line, at Argos Iron heel have not crouched, nor clasped like thy time-wearied nations, Python-befriended, gripped in the coils of an iron protection, Bondage soothed by a name and destruction masked as a helper. We are the young and lofty and free-souled sons of the Northland. Nobly Peleus, the Aeacid, seer of a vaster Achaia, Pride of his strength and his deeds renouncing for joy of that vision, Yielded his hoary right to the sapling stock of Atrides. Noble, we gave to that nobleness freely our grandiose approval. Not as a foe then, O King, who angered sharpens his arrows, Fits his wrath and hate to the bow and aims at the heart-strings But from the Truth that is seated within me compelling my accents, Taught by my fathers stern not to lie nor to hide what I harbour, Truth the goddess I speak, nor constrain the voice in my bosom. Monarch, I own thee first of the Greeks save in valour and counsel, Brave, but less than Achilles, wise, but not as Odysseus, First still in greatness and calm and majesty. Yet, Agamemnon, Love of thy house and thy tribe disfigures the king in thy nature; Thou thy brother preferrest, thy friends and thy nations unjustly, Even as a common man whose heart is untaught by Athene, Beastlike favours his brood forgetting the law of the noble. Therefore Ajax grew wroth and Teucer sailing abandoned Over the angry seas this fierce-locked toil of the nations; Therefore Achilles has turned in his soul and gazed towards the Orient. Yet are we fixed in our truth like hills in heaven, Atrides; Greece and her safety and good our passions strive to remember. Not of this stamp was thy brothers speech; such words Lacedaemon Hearing may praise in her kings; we speak not in Thebes what is shameful. Shamefuller thoughts have never escaped from lips that were high-born. We will not send forth earths greatest to die in a friendless battle, Nor will forsake the daughter of Zeus and white glory of Hellas, Helen the golden-haired Tyndarid, left for the joy of our foemen, Chained to Paris delight, earths goddess the slave of the Phrygian, Though Menelaus the Spartan abandon his wife to the Trojans And from the field where he lavished the unvalued blood of his people Flee to a hearth dishonoured. Not the Atreids sullied grandeurs, Greece to defend we have toiled through the summers and lingering autumns Blind with our blood; for our country we bleed repelling her foemen. Dear is that loss to our veins and still that expense we would lavish Claiming its price from the heavens, though thou sail with thy brother and cohorts. Weakling, flee! take thy southern ships, take thy Spartan levies. Still will the Greeks fight on in the Troad helped by thy absence. For though the beaches vast grow empty, the tents can be numbered Standing friendless and few on the huge and hostile champaign, Always a few will be left whom the threatenings of Fate cannot conquer, Always souls are born whose courage waits not on fortune; Hellas heart will be firm confronting the threat of the victor, Sthenelus war and Tydides, Odysseus and Locrian Ajax, Thebes unconquered sons and the hero chiefs of the northland. Stern and persistent as Time or the seas and as deaf to affliction We will clash on in the fight unsatisfied, fain of the war-cry, Helped by the gods and our cause through the dawns and the blood-haunted evenings, Rising in armour with morn and outstaying the red of the sunset, Till in her ashes Troy forgets that she lusted for empire Or in our own the honour and valour of Greece are extinguished. So Prothonor spoke nor pleased with his words Agamemnon; But to the northern kings they were summer rain on the visage. Last Laertes son, the Ithacan, war-wise Odysseus, Rose up wide-acclaimed; like an oak was he stunted in stature, Broad-shouldered, firm-necked, lone and sufficient, as on some island Regnant one peak whose genial streams flow down to the valley, Dusk on its slopes are the olives, the storms butt in vain at its shoulders, Such he stood and pressed the earth with his feet like one vanquished, Striving, but held to his will. So Atlas might seem were he mortal, Atlas whose vastness free from impatience suffers the heavens, Suffering spares the earth, the thought-haunted motionless Titan, Bearer of worlds. In those jarring tribes no man was his hater; For as the Master of all guides humanity, so this Odysseus Dealt with men and helped and guided them, careful and selfless, Crafty, tender and wise,like the Master who bends oer His creatures, Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening the guidance; Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. Princes of Argolis, chiefs of the Locrians, spears of the northland, Warriors vowed to a sacred hate and a vengeance thats holy, Sateless still is that hate, that vengeance cries for its victims, Still is the altar unladen, the priest yet waits with the death-knife. Who while the rites are unfinished, the god unsatisfied, impious Turns in his heart to the feuds of his house and his strife with his equals? None will approve the evil that fell from the younger Atrides; But it was anger and sorrow that spoke, it was not Menelaus. Who would return from Troy and arrive with his war-wasted legions Back to his home in populous city or orcharded island; There from his ships disembarked look round upon eyes that grow joyless Seeking a father or husb and slain, a brother heart-treasured, Mothers in tears for their children, and when he is asked, O our chieftain, What dost thou bring back in place of our dead to fill hearts that are empty? Who then will say, I bring back my shame and the shame of my nation; Troy yet stands confronting her skies and Helen in Troya? Not for such foil will I go back to Ithaca or to Laertes, Rather far would I sail in my ships past southern Cythera, Turning away in silence from waters where on some headland Gazing south oer the waves my father waits for my coming, Leaving Sicilys shores and on through the pillars of Gades. Far I would sail whence sound of me never should come to Achaia Out into tossing worlds and weltering reaches of tempest Dwarfing the swell of the wide-wayed Aegean,Oceans unbounded Either by cliff or by sandy margin, only the heavens Ever receding before my keel as it ploughs on for ever Frail and alone in a world of waves. Even there would I venture Seeking some island unknown, not return with shame to my fathers. Well might they wonder how souls like theirs begot us for their offspring. Fighters war-afflicted, champions banded by heaven, Wounds and defeat you have borne; bear too their errors who lead you. Mortals are kings and have hearts; our leaders too have their passions. Then if they err, yet still obey lest anarchy fostered, Discord and deaf rebellion that speed like a poison through kingdoms, Break all this army in pieces while Ate mocking at mortals Trails to a shameful end this lofty essay of the nations. Who among men has not thoughts that he holds for the wisest, though foolish? Who, though feeble and nought, esteems not his strength oer his fellows? Therefore the wisest and strongest choose out a king and a leader, Not as a perfect arbiter armed with impossible virtues Far oer our heads and our ken like a god high-judging his creatures, But as a man among men who is valiant, wise and far-seeing, One of ourselves and the knot of our wills and the sword of our action. Him they advise and obey and cover his errors with silence. Not Agamemnon the Atreid, Greeks, we obey in this mortal; Greece we obey; for she walks in his gait and commands by his gestures. Evil he works then who loosens this living knot of Achaia; Falling apart from his nation who, wed to a solitary virtue, Deeming he does but right, renounces the yoke of his fellows, Errs more than hearts of the mire that in blindness and weakness go stumbling. Man when he spurns his kind, when he equals himself with the deathless, Even in his virtues sins and, erring, calls up Ate: For among men we were born, not as wild-beasts sole in a fastness. Oft with a name are misled the passionate hearts of the noble; Chasing highly some image of good they trample its substance. Evil is worked, not justice, when into the mould of our thinkings God we would force and enchain to the throb of our hearts the immortals, Justice and Virtue, her sister,for where is justice mid creatures Perfectly? Even the gods are betrayed by our clay to a semblance. Evil not good he sows who lifted too high for his fellows, Dreams by his light or his force to compel this deity earth-born, Evil though his wisdom exceeded the gathered light of the millions, Evil though his single fate were vaster than Troy and Achaia. Less is our gain from gods upon earth than from men in our image; Just is the slow and common march, not a lonely swiftness Far from our human reach that is vowed to impossible strivings. Better the stumbling leader of men than inimitable paces. If he be Peleus son and his name the Phthian Achilles, Worse is the bane: lo, the Ilian battlefield strewn with his errors! Yet, O ye Greeks, if the heart returns that was loved, though it wandered, Though with some pride it return and reproaching the friends that it fled from, Be not less fond than heart-satisfied parents who yearn oer that coming, Smile at its pride and accept the wanderer. Happier music Never has beat on my grief-vexed ears than the steps of Achilles Turning back to this Greece and the cry of his strength in its rising. Zeus is awake in this man who his dreadful world-slaying puissance Gave in an hour of portentous birth to the single Achilles. Taken today are Ilions towers, a dead man is Priam. Cross not the heros will in his hour, Agamemnon Atrides, Cross not the man whom the gods have chosen to work out their purpose Then when he rises; his hour is his, though thine be all morrows. First in the chambers of Paris delight let us stable our horses, Afterwards bale that is best shall be done persuading Achilles; Doubt not the gods decisions, awful, immutable, ruthless. Flame shall lick Troys towers and the limbs of her old men and infants. O not today nor now remember the faults of the hero! Follow him rather bravely and blindly as children their leader, Guide your fate through the war-surge loud in the wake of his exploits. Rise, O ye kings of the Greeks! leave debate for the voices of battle. Peal forth the war-shout, pour forth the spear-sleet, surge towards Troya. Ilion falls today; we shall turn in our ships to our children. So Odysseus spoke and the Achaians heard him applauding; Ever the pack by the voice of the mighty is seized and attracted! Then from his seat Agamemnon arising his staff to the herald Gave and around him arose the Kings of the west and its leaders, Loud their assembly broke with a stern and martial rumour. *** ~ Sri Aurobindo, 6 - The Book of the Chieftains ,

706:The Botanic Garden (Part Iv) The Economy Of Vegetation Canto IV As when at noon in Hybla's fragrant bowers CACALIA opens all her honey'd flowers; Contending swarms on bending branches cling, And nations hover on aurelian wing; So round the GODDESS, ere she speaks, on high Impatient SYLPHS in gawdy circlets fly; Quivering in air their painted plumes expand, And coloured shadows dance upon the land. I. 'SYLPHS! YOUR light troops the tropic Winds confine, And guide their streaming arrows to the Line; While in warm floods ecliptic breezes rise, And sink with wings benumb'd in colder skies. You bid Monsoons on Indian seas reside, And veer, as moves the sun, their airy tide; While southern gales o'er western oceans roll, And Eurus steals his ice-winds from the Pole. Your playful trains, on sultry islands born, Turn on fantastic toe at eve and morn; With soft susurrant voice alternate sweep Earth's green pavilions and encircling deep. OR in itinerant cohorts, borne sublime On tides of ether, float from clime to clime; O'er waving Autumn bend your airy ring, Or waft the fragrant bosom of the Spring. II. 'When Morn, escorted by the dancing Hours, O'er the bright plains her dewy lustre showers; Till from her sable chariot Eve serene Drops the dark curtain o'er the brilliant scene; You form with chemic hands the airy surge, Mix with broad vans, with shadowy tridents urge. SYLPHS! from each sun-bright leaf, that twinkling shakes O'er Earth's green lap, or shoots amid her lakes, Your playful bands with simpering lips invite, 10 And wed the enamour'd OXYGENE to LIGHT.Round their white necks with fingers interwove, Cling the fond Pair with unabating love; Hand link'd in hand on buoyant step they rise, And soar and glisten in unclouded skies. Whence in bright floods the VITAL AIR expands, And with concentric spheres involves the lands; Pervades the swarming seas, and heaving earths, Where teeming Nature broods her myriad births; Fills the fine lungs of all that breathe or bud Warms the new heart, and dyes the gushing blood; With Life's first spark inspires the organic frame, And, as it wastes, renews the subtile flame. 'So pure, so soft, with sweet attraction shone Fair PSYCHE, kneeling at the ethereal throne; Won with coy smiles the admiring court of Jove, And warm'd the bosom of unconquer'd LOVE.Beneath a moving shade of fruits and flowers Onward they march to HYMEN'S sacred bowers; With lifted torch he lights the festive train, Sublime, and leads them in his golden chain; Joins the fond pair, indulgent to their vows, And hides with mystic veil their blushing brows. Round their fair forms their mingling arms they fling, Meet with warm lip, and clasp with rustling wing.-Hence plastic Nature, as Oblivion whelms Her fading forms, repeoples all her realms; Soft Joys disport on purple plumes unfurl'd, And Love and Beauty rule the willing world. III. 1. 'SYLPHS! Your bold myriads on the withering heath Stay the fell SYROC'S suffocative breath; Arrest SIMOOM in his realms of sand, The poisoned javelin balanced in his hand;Fierce on blue streams he rides the tainted air, Points his keen eye, and waves his whistling hair; While, as he turns, the undulating soil Rolls in red waves, and billowy deserts boil. 11 You seize TORNADO by his locks of mist, Burst his dense clouds, his wheeling spires untwist; Wide o'er the West when borne on headlong gales, Dark as meridian night, the Monster sails, Howls high in air, and shakes his curled brow, Lashing with serpent-train the waves below, Whirls his black arm, the forked lightning flings, And showers a deluge from his demon-wings. 2. 'SYLPHS! with light shafts YOU pierce the drowsy FOG, That lingering slumbers on the sedge-wove bog, With webbed feet o'er midnight meadows creeps, Or flings his hairy limbs on stagnant deeps. YOU meet CONTAGION issuing from afar, And dash the baleful conqueror from his car; When, Guest of DEATH! from charnel vaults he steals, And bathes in human gore his armed wheels. 'Thus when the PLAGUE, upborne on Belgian air, Look'd through the mist and shook his clotted hair, O'er shrinking nations steer'd malignant clouds, And rain'd destruction on the gasping crouds. The beauteous AEGLE felt the venom'd dart, Slow roll'd her eye, and feebly throbb'd her heart; Each fervid sigh seem'd shorter than the last, And starting Friendship shunn'd her, as she pass'd. -With weak unsteady step the fainting Maid Seeks the cold garden's solitary shade, Sinks on the pillowy moss her drooping head, And prints with lifeless limbs her leafy bed. -On wings of Love her plighted Swain pursues, Shades her from winds, and shelters her from dews, Extends on tapering poles the canvas roof, Spreads o'er the straw-wove matt the flaxen woof, Sweet buds and blossoms on her bolster strows, And binds his kerchief round her aching brows; Sooths with soft kiss, with tender accents charms, And clasps the bright Infection in his arms.With pale and languid smiles the grateful Fair Applauds his virtues, and rewards his care; Mourns with wet cheek her fair companions fled On timorous step, or number'd with the dead; Calls to its bosom all its scatter'd rays, And pours on THYRSIS the collected blaze; 12 Braves the chill night, caressing and caress'd, And folds her Hero-lover to her breast.Less bold, LEANDER at the dusky hour Eyed, as he swam, the far love-lighted tower; Breasted with struggling arms the tossing wave, And sunk benighted in the watery grave. Less bold, TOBIAS claim'd the nuptial bed, Where seven fond Lovers by a Fiend had bled; And drove, instructed by his Angel-Guide, The enamour'd Demon from the fatal bride.-SYLPHS! while your winnowing pinions fan'd the air, And shed gay visions o'er the sleeping pair; LOVE round their couch effused his rosy breath, And with his keener arrows conquer'd DEATH. IV. 1. 'You charm'd, indulgent SYLPHS! their learned toil, And crown'd with fame your TORRICELL, and BOYLE; Taught with sweet smiles, responsive to their prayer, The spring and pressure of the viewless air. -How up exhausted tubes bright currents flow Of liquid silver from the lake below, Weigh the long column of the incumbent skies, And with the changeful moment fall and rise. -How, as in brazen pumps the pistons move, The membrane-valve sustains the weight above; Stroke follows stroke, the gelid vapour falls, And misty dew-drops dim the crystal walls; Rare and more rare expands the fluid thin, And Silence dwells with Vacancy within.So in the mighty Void with grim delight Primeval Silence reign'd with ancient Night. 2. 'SYLPHS! your soft voices, whispering from the skies, Bade from low earth the bold MONGULFIER rise; Outstretch'd his buoyant ball with airy spring, And bore the Sage on levity of wing;Where were ye, SYLPHS! when on the ethereal main Young ROSIERE launch'd, and call'd your aid in vain? Fair mounts the light balloon, by Zephyr driven, Parts the thin clouds, and sails along the heaven; Higher and yet higher the expanding bubble flies, Lights with quick flash, and bursts amid the skies.Headlong He rushes through the affrighted air 13 With limbs distorted, and dishevel'd hair, Whirls round and round, the flying croud alarms, And DEATH receives him in his sable arms!So erst with melting wax and loosen'd strings Sunk hapless ICARUS on unfaithful wings; His scatter'd plumage danced upon the wave, And sorrowing Mermaids deck'd his watery grave; O'er his pale corse their pearly sea-flowers shed, And strew'd with crimson moss his marble bed; Struck in their coral towers the pausing bell, And wide in ocean toll'd his echoing knell. V. 'SYLPHS! YOU, retiring to sequester'd bowers, Where oft your PRIESTLEY woos your airy powers, On noiseless step or quivering pinion glide, As sits the Sage with Science by his side; To his charm'd eye in gay undress appear, Or pour your secrets on his raptured ear. How nitrous Gas from iron ingots driven Drinks with red lips the purest breath of heaven; How, while Conferva from its tender hair Gives in bright bubbles empyrean air; The crystal floods phlogistic ores calcine, And the pure ETHER marries with the MINE. 'So in Sicilia's ever-blooming shade When playful PROSERPINE from CERES stray'd, Led with unwary step her virgin trains O'er Etna's steeps, and Enna's golden plains; Pluck'd with fair hand the silver-blossom'd bower, And purpled mead,-herself a fairer flower; Sudden, unseen amid the twilight glade, Rush'd gloomy DIS, and seized the trembling maid.Her starting damsels sprung from mossy seats, Dropp'd from their gauzy laps the gather'd sweets, Clung round the struggling Nymph, with piercing cries, Pursued the chariot, and invoked the skies;Pleased as he grasps her in his iron arms, Frights with soft sighs, with tender words alarms, The wheels descending roll'd in smoky rings, Infernal Cupids flapp'd their demon wings; Earth with deep yawn received the Fair, amaz'd, And far in Night celestial Beauty blaz'd. 14 VI. 'Led by the Sage, Lo! Britain's sons shall guide Huge SEA-BALLOONS beneath the tossing tide; The diving castles, roof'd with spheric glass, Ribb'd with strong oak, and barr'd with bolts of brass, Buoy'd with pure air shall endless tracks pursue, And PRIESTLEY'S hand the vital flood renew.Then shall BRITANNIA rule the wealthy realms, Which Ocean's wide insatiate wave o'erwhelms; Confine in netted bowers his scaly flocks, Part his blue plains, and people all his rocks. Deep, in warm waves beneath the Line that roll, Beneath the shadowy ice-isles of the Pole, Onward, through bright meandering vales, afar, Obedient Sharks shall trail her sceptred car, With harness'd necks the pearly flood disturb, Stretch the silk rein, and champ the silver curb; Pleased round her triumph wondering Tritons play, And Seamaids hail her on the watery way. -Oft shall she weep beneath the crystal waves O'er shipwreck'd lovers weltering in their graves; Mingling in death the Brave and Good behold With slaves to glory, and with slaves to gold; Shrin'd in the deep shall DAY and SPALDING mourn, Each in his treacherous bell, sepulchral urn!Oft o'er thy lovely daughters, hapless PIERCE! Her sighs shall breathe, her sorrows dew their hearse.With brow upturn'd to Heaven, 'WE WILL NOT PART!' He cried, and clasp'd them to his aching heart,-Dash'd in dread conflict on the rocky grounds, Crash the mock'd masts, the staggering wreck rebounds; Through gaping seams the rushing deluge swims, Chills their pale bosoms, bathes their shuddering limbs, Climbs their white shoulders, buoys their streaming hair, And the last sea-shriek bellows in the air.Each with loud sobs her tender sire caress'd, And gasping strain'd him closer to her breast!-Stretch'd on one bier they sleep beneath the brine, And their white bones with ivory arms intwine! 'VII. SYLPHS OF NICE EAR! with beating wings you guide The fine vibrations of the aerial tide; 15 Join in sweet cadences the measured words, Or stretch and modulate the trembling cords. You strung to melody the Grecian lyre, Breathed the rapt song, and fan'd the thought of fire, Or brought in combinations, deep and clear, Immortal harmony to HANDEL'S ear.YOU with soft breath attune the vernal gale, When breezy evening broods the listening vale; Or wake the loud tumultuous sounds, that dwell In Echo's many-toned diurnal shell. YOU melt in dulcet chords, when Zephyr rings The Eolian Harp, and mingle all its strings; Or trill in air the soft symphonious chime, When rapt CECILIA lifts her eye sublime, Swell, as she breathes, her bosoms rising snow, O'er her white teeth in tuneful accents slow, Through her fair lips on whispering pinions move, And form the tender sighs, that kindle love! 'So playful LOVE on Ida's flowery sides With ribbon-rein the indignant Lion guides; Pleased on his brinded back the lyre he rings, And shakes delirious rapture from the strings; Slow as the pausing Monarch stalks along, Sheaths his retractile claws, and drinks the song; Soft Nymphs on timid step the triumph view, And listening Fawns with beating hoofs pursue; With pointed ears the alarmed forest starts, And Love and Music soften savage hearts. VIII. 'SYLPHS! YOUR bold hosts, when Heaven with justice dread Calls the red tempest round the guilty head, Fierce at his nod assume vindictive forms, And launch from airy cars the vollied storms.From Ashur's vales when proud SENACHERIB trod, Pour'd his swoln heart, defied the living GOD, Urged with incessant shouts his glittering powers; And JUDAH shook through all her massy towers; Round her sad altars press'd the prostrate crowd, Hosts beat their breasts, and suppliant chieftains bow'd; Loud shrieks of matrons thrill'd the troubled air, And trembling virgins rent their scatter'd hair; High in the midst the kneeling King adored, 16 Spread the blaspheming scroll before the Lord, Raised his pale hands, and breathed his pausing sighs, And fixed on Heaven his dim imploring eyes,'Oh! MIGHTY GOD! amidst thy Seraph-throng 'Who sit'st sublime, the Judge of Right and Wrong; 'Thine the wide earth, bright sun, and starry zone, 'That twinkling journey round thy golden throne; 'Thine is the crystal source of life and light, 'And thine the realms of Death's eternal night. 'Oh, bend thine ear, thy gracious eye incline, 'Lo! Ashur's King blasphemes thy holy shrine, 'Insults our offerings, and derides our vows,-'Oh! strike the diadem from his impious brows, 'Tear from his murderous hand the bloody rod, 'And teach the trembling nations, 'THOU ART GOD!'-SYLPHS! in what dread array with pennons broad Onward ye floated o'er the ethereal road, Call'd each dank steam the reeking marsh exhales, Contagious vapours, and volcanic gales, Gave the soft South with poisonous breath to blow, And rolled the dreadful whirlwind on the foe!Hark! o'er the camp the venom'd tempest sings, Man falls on Man, on buckler buckler rings; Groan answers groan, to anguish anguish yields, And DEATH'S loud accents shake the tented fields! -High rears the Fiend his grinning jaws, and wide Spans the pale nations with colossal stride, Waves his broad falchion with uplifted hand, And his vast shadow darkens all the land. IX. 1. 'Ethereal cohorts! Essences of Air! Make the green children of the Spring your care! Oh, SYLPHS! disclose in this inquiring age One GOLDEN SECRET to some favour'd sage; Grant the charm'd talisman, the chain, that binds, Or guides the changeful pinions of the winds! -No more shall hoary Boreas, issuing forth With Eurus, lead the tempests of the North; Rime the pale Dawn, or veil'd in flaky showers Chill the sweet bosoms of the smiling Hours. By whispering Auster waked shall Zephyr rise, Meet with soft kiss, and mingle in the skies, 17 Fan the gay floret, bend the yellow ear, And rock the uncurtain'd cradle of the year; Autumn and Spring in lively union blend, And from the skies the Golden Age descend. 2. 'Castled on ice, beneath the circling Bear, A vast CAMELION spits and swallows air; O'er twelve degrees his ribs gigantic bend, And many a league his leathern jaws extend; Half-fish, beneath, his scaly volutes spread, And vegetable plumage crests his head; Huge fields of air his wrinkled skin receives, From panting gills, wide lungs, and waving leaves; Then with dread throes subsides his bloated form, His shriek the thunder, and his sigh the storm. Oft high in heaven the hissing Demon wins His towering course, upborne on winnowing fins; Steers with expanded eye and gaping mouth, His mass enormous to the affrighted South; Spreads o'er the shuddering Line his shadowy limbs, And Frost and Famine follow as he swims.SYLPHS! round his cloud-built couch your bands array, And mould the Monster to your gentle sway; Charm with soft tones, with tender touches check, Bend to your golden yoke his willing neck, With silver curb his yielding teeth restrain, And give to KIRWAN'S hand the silken rein. -Pleased shall the Sage, the dragon-wings between, Bend o'er discordant climes his eye serene, With Lapland breezes cool Arabian vales, And call to Hindostan antarctic gales, Adorn with wreathed ears Kampschatca's brows, And scatter roses on Zealandic snows, Earth's wondering Zones the genial seasons share, And nations hail him 'MONARCH OF THE AIR.' X. 1. 'SYLPHS! as you hover on ethereal wing, Brood the green children of parturient Spring!Where in their bursting cells my Embryons rest, I charge you guard the vegetable nest; Count with nice eye the myriad SEEDS, that swell Each vaulted womb of husk, or pod, or shell; Feed with sweet juices, clothe with downy hair, 18 Or hang, inshrined, their little orbs in air. 'So, late descry'd by HERSCHEL'S piercing sight, Hang the bright squadrons of the twinkling Night; Ten thousand marshall'd stars, a silver zone, Effuse their blended lustres round her throne; Suns call to suns, in lucid clouds conspire, And light exterior skies with golden fire; Resistless rolls the illimitable sphere, And one great circle forms the unmeasured year. -Roll on, YE STARS! exult in youthful prime, Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time; Near and more near your beamy cars approach, And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach;Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield, Frail as your silken sisters of the field! Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush, Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush, Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all! -Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal NATURE lifts her changeful form, Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same. 2. 'Lo! on each SEED within its slender rind Life's golden threads in endless circles wind; Maze within maze the lucid webs are roll'd, And, as they burst, the living flame unfold. The pulpy acorn, ere it swells, contains The Oak's vast branches in its milky veins; Each ravel'd bud, fine film, and fibre-line Traced with nice pencil on the small design. The young Narcissus, in it's bulb compress'd, Cradles a second nestling on its breast; In whose fine arms a younger embryon lies, Folds its thin leaves, and shuts its floret-eyes; Grain within grain successive harvests dwell, And boundless forests slumber in a shell. -So yon grey precipice, and ivy'd towers, Long winding meads, and intermingled bowers, Green files of poplars, o'er the lake that bow, And glimmering wheel, which rolls and foams below, In one bright point with nice distinction lie 19 Plan'd on the moving tablet of the eye. -So, fold on fold, Earth's wavy plains extend, And, sphere in sphere, its hidden strata bend;Incumbent Spring her beamy plumes expands O'er restless oceans, and impatient lands, With genial lustres warms the mighty ball, And the GREAT SEED evolves, disclosing ALL; LIFE buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles, And the vast surface kindles, as it rolls! 3. 'Come, YE SOFT SYLPHS! who sport on Latian land, Come, sweet-lip'd Zephyr, and Favonius bland! Teach the fine SEED, instinct with life, to shoot On Earth's cold bosom its descending root; With Pith elastic stretch its rising stem, Part the twin Lobes, expand the throbbing Gem; Clasp in your airy arms the aspiring Plume, Fan with your balmy breath its kindling bloom, Each widening scale and bursting film unfold, Swell the green cup, and tint the flower with gold; While in bright veins the silvery Sap ascends, And refluent blood in milky eddies bends; While, spread in air, the leaves respiring play, Or drink the golden quintessence of day. -So from his shell on Delta's shower-less isle Bursts into life the Monster of the Nile; First in translucent lymph with cobweb-threads The Brain's fine floating tissue swells, and spreads; Nerve after nerve the glistening spine descends, The red Heart dances, the Aorta bends; Through each new gland the purple current glides, New veins meandering drink the refluent tides; Edge over edge expands the hardening scale, And sheaths his slimy skin in silver mail. -Erewhile, emerging from the brooding sand, With Tyger-paw He prints the brineless strand, High on the flood with speckled bosom swims, Helm'd with broad tail, and oar'd with giant limbs; Rolls his fierce eye-balls, clasps his iron claws, 20 And champs with gnashing teeth his massy jaws; Old Nilus sighs along his cane-crown'd shores, And swarthy Memphis trembles and adores. XI. 'Come, YE SOFT SYLPHS! who fan the Paphian groves, And bear on sportive wings the callow Loves; Call with sweet whisper, in each gale that blows, The slumbering Snow-drop from her long repose; Charm the pale Primrose from her clay-cold bed, Unveil the bashful Violet's tremulous head; While from her bud the playful Tulip breaks, And young Carnations peep with blushing cheeks; Bid the closed Petals from nocturnal cold The virgin Style in silken curtains fold, Shake into viewless air the morning dews, And wave in light their iridescent hues; While from on high the bursting Anthers trust To the mild breezes their prolific dust; Or bend in rapture o'er the central Fair, Love out their hour, and leave their lives in air. So in his silken sepulchre the Worm, Warm'd with new life, unfolds his larva-form; Erewhile aloft in wanton circles moves, And woos on Hymen-wings his velvet loves. XII. 1. 'If prouder branches with exuberance rude Point their green gems, their barren shoots protrude; Wound them, ye SYLPHS! with little knives, or bind A wiry ringlet round the swelling rind; Bisect with chissel fine the root below, Or bend to earth the inhospitable bough. So shall each germ with new prolific power Delay the leaf-bud, and expand the flower; Closed in the Style the tender pith shall end, 21 The lengthening Wood in circling Stamens bend; The smoother Rind its soft embroidery spread In vaulted Petals o'er their fertile bed; While the rough Bark, in circling mazes roll'd, Forms the green Cup with many a wrinkled fold; And each small bud-scale spreads its foliage hard, Firm round the callow germ, a Floral Guard 2. 'Where cruder juices swell the leafy vein, Stint the young germ, the tender blossom stain; On each lop'd shoot a softer scion bind, Pith press'd to pith, and rind applied to rind, So shall the trunk with loftier crest ascend, And wide in air its happier arms extend; Nurse the new buds, admire the leaves unknown, And blushing bend with fruitage not its own. 'Thus when in holy triumph Aaron trod, And offer'd on the shrine his mystic rod; First a new bark its silken tissue weaves, New buds emerging widen into leaves; Fair fruits protrude, enascent flowers expand, And blush and tremble round the living wand. XIII. 1. 'SYLPHS! on each Oak-bud wound the wormy galls, With pigmy spears, or crush the venom'd balls; Fright the green Locust from his foamy bed, Unweave the Caterpillar's gluey thread; Chase the fierce Earwig, scare the bloated Toad, Arrest the snail upon his slimy road; Arm with sharp thorns the Sweet-brier's tender wood, And dash the Cynips from her damask bud; Steep in ambrosial dews the Woodbine's bells, And drive the Night-moth from her honey'd cells. So where the Humming-bird in Chili's bowers On murmuring pinions robs the pendent flowers; 22 Seeks, where fine pores their dulcet balm distill, And sucks the treasure with proboscis-bill; Fair CYPREPEDIA with successful guile Knits her smooth brow, extinguishes her smile; A Spiders bloated paunch and jointed arms Hide her fine form, and mask her blushing charms; In ambush sly the mimic warrior lies, And on quick wing the panting plunderer flies. 2. 'Shield the young Harvest from devouring blight, The Smut's dark poison, and the Mildew white; Deep-rooted Mould, and Ergot's horn uncouth, And break the Canker's desolating tooth. First in one point the festering wound confin'd Mines unperceived beneath the shrivel'd rin'd; Then climbs the branches with increasing strength, Spreads as they spread, and lengthens with their length; -Thus the slight wound ingraved on glass unneal'd Runs in white lines along the lucid field; Crack follows crack, to laws elastic just, And the frail fabric shivers into dust. XIV. 1. 'SYLPHS! if with morn destructive Eurus springs, O, clasp the Harebel with your velvet wings; Screen with thick leaves the Jasmine as it blows, And shake the white rime from the shuddering Rose; Whilst Amaryllis turns with graceful ease Her blushing beauties, and eludes the breeze.SYLPHS! if at noon the Fritillary droops, With drops nectareous hang her nodding cups; Thin clouds of Gossamer in air display, And hide the vale's chaste Lily from the ray; Whilst Erythrina o'er her tender flower Bends all her leaves, and braves the sultry hour;Shield, when cold Hesper sheds his dewy light, Mimosa's soft sensations from the night; Fold her thin foilage, close her timid flowers, And with ambrosial slumbers guard her bowers; O'er each warm wall while Cerea flings her arms, And wastes on night's dull eye a blaze of charms. 2. Round her tall Elm with dewy fingers twine The gadding tendrils of the adventurous Vine; From arm to arm in gay festoons suspend 23 Her fragrant flowers, her graceful foliage bend; Swell with sweet juice her vermil orbs, and feed Shrined in transparent pulp her pearly seed; Hang round the Orange all her silver bells, And guard her fragrance with Hesperian spells; Bud after bud her polish'd leaves unfold, And load her branches with successive gold. So the learn'd Alchemist exulting sees Rise in his bright matrass DIANA'S trees; Drop after drop, with just delay he pours The red-fumed acid on Potosi's ores; With sudden flash the fierce bullitions rise, And wide in air the gas phlogistic flies; Slow shoot, at length, in many a brilliant mass Metallic roots across the netted glass; Branch after branch extend their silver stems, Bud into gold, and blossoms into gems. So sits enthron'd in vegetable pride Imperial KEW by Thames's glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow'd bring For her the unnam'd progeny of spring; Attendant Nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o'er his tides; Drinks the new tints, the sweets unknown inhales, And calls the sons of science to his vales. In one bright point admiring Nature eyes The fruits and foliage of discordant skies, Twines the gay floret with the fragrant bough, And bends the wreath round GEORGE'S royal brow. -Sometimes retiring, from the public weal One tranquil hour the ROYAL PARTNERS steal; Through glades exotic pass with step sublime, Or mark the growths of Britain's happier clime; With beauty blossom'd, and with virtue blaz'd, Mark the fair Scions, that themselves have rais'd; Sweet blooms the Rose, the towering Oak expands, 24 The Grace and Guard of Britain's golden lands. XV. SYLPHS! who, round earth on purple pinions borne, Attend the radiant chariot of the morn; Lead the gay hours along the ethereal hight, And on each dun meridian shower the light; SYLPHS! who from realms of equatorial day To climes, that shudder in the polar ray, From zone to zone pursue on shifting wing, The bright perennial journey of the spring; Bring my rich Balms from Mecca's hallow'd glades, Sweet flowers, that glitter in Arabia's shades; Fruits, whose fair forms in bright succession glow Gilding the Banks of Arno, or of Po; Each leaf, whose fragrant steam with ruby lip Gay China's nymphs from pictur'd vases sip; Each spicy rind, which sultry India boasts, Scenting the night-air round her breezy coasts; Roots whose bold stems in bleak Siberia blow, And gem with many a tint the eternal snow; Barks, whose broad umbrage high in ether waves O'er Ande's steeps, and hides his golden caves; -And, where yon oak extends his dusky shoots Wide o'er the rill, that bubbles from his roots; Beneath whose arms, protected from the storm A turf-built altar rears it's rustic form; SYLPHS! with religious hands fresh garlands twine, And deck with lavish pomp HYGEIA'S shrine. 'Call with loud voice the Sisterhood, that dwell On floating cloud, wide wave, or bubbling well; Stamp with charm'd foot, convoke the alarmed Gnomes From golden beds, and adamantine domes; Each from her sphere with beckoning arm invite, Curl'd with red flame, the Vestal Forms of light. Close all your spotted wings, in lucid ranks Press with your bending knees the crowded banks, Cross your meek arms, incline your wreathed brows, And win the Goddess with unwearied vows. 'Oh, wave, HYGEIA! o'er BRITANNIA'S throne Thy serpent-wand, and mark it for thy own; Lead round her breezy coasts thy guardian trains, Her nodding forests, and her waving plains; 25 Shed o'er her peopled realms thy beamy smile, And with thy airy temple crown her isle!' The GODDESS ceased,-and calling from afar The wandering Zephyrs, joins them to her car; Mounts with light bound, and graceful, as she bends, Whirls the long lash, the flexile rein extends; On whispering wheels the silver axle slides, Climbs into air, and cleaves the crystal tides; Burst from its pearly chains, her amber hair Streams o'er her ivory shoulders, buoy'd in air; Swells her white veil, with ruby clasp confined Round her fair brow, and undulates behind; The lessening coursers rise in spiral rings, Pierce the slow-sailing clouds, and stretch their shadowy wings. ~ Erasmus Darwin,

707: Book II: The Book of the Statesman Now from his cycle sleepless and vast round the dance of the earth-globe Gold Hyperion rose in the wake of the dawn like the eyeball Flaming of God revealed by his uplifted luminous eyelid. Troy he beheld and he viewed the transient labour of mortals. All her marble beauty and pomp were laid bare to the heavens. Sunlight streamed into Ilion waking the voice of her gardens, Amorous seized on her ways, lived glad in her plains and her pastures, Kissed her leaves into brightness of green. As a lover the last time Yearns to the beauty desired that again shall not wake to his kisses, So over Ilion doomed leaned the yearning immense of the sunrise. She like a wordless marble memory dreaming for ever Lifted the gaze of her perishable immortality sunwards. All her human past aspired in the clearness eternal, Temples of Phryx and Dardanus touched with the gold of the morning, Columns triumphant of Ilus, domes of their greatness enamoured, Stones that intended to live; and her citadel climbed up to heaven White like the soul of the Titan Laomedon claiming his kingdoms, Watched with alarm by the gods as he came. Her bosom maternal Thrilled to the steps of her sons and a murmur began in her high-roads. Life renewed its ways which death and sleep cannot alter, Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not, Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour. Chained is their gaze to the span in front, to the gulfs they are blinded Meant for their steps. The seller opened his shop and the craftsman Bent oer his instruments handling the work he never would finish, Busy as if their lives were for ever, today in its evening Sure of tomorrow. The hammers clanged and the voice of the markets Waking desired its daily rumour. Nor only the craftsman, Only the hopes of the earth, but the hearts of her votaries kneeling Came to her marble shrines and upraised to our helpers eternal Missioned the prayer and the hymn or silent, subtly adoring Ventured upwards in incense. Loud too the clash of the cymbals Filled all the temples of Troy with the cry of our souls to the azure. Prayers breathed in vain and a cry that fell back with Fate for its answer! Children laughed in her doorways; joyous they played, by their mothers Smiled on still, but their tender bodies unknowing awaited Grecian spearpoints sharpened by Fate for their unripe bosoms, Tasks of the slave in Greece. Like bees round their honey-filled dwellings Murmuring swarmed to the well-heads the large-eyed daughters of Troya, Deep-bosomed, limbed like the gods,glad faces of old that were sentient Rapturous flowers of the soul, bright bodies that lived under darkness Nobly massed of their locks like day under night made resplendent, Daughters divine of the earth in the ages when heaven was our father. They round Troys well-heads flowerlike satisfied morn with their beauty Or in the river baring their knees to the embrace of the coolness Dipped their white feet in the clutch of his streams, in the haste of Scamander, Lingering this last time with laughter and talk of the day and the morrow Leaned to the hurrying flood. All his swiftnesses raced down to meet them, Crowding his channel with dancing billows and turbulent murmurs. Xanthus primaeval met these waves of our life in its passing Even as of old he had played with Troys ancient fair generations Mingling his deathless voice with the laughter and joy of their ages, Laughter of dawns that are dead and a joy that the earth has rejected. Still his whispering trees remembered their bygone voices. Hast thou forgotten, O river of Troy? Still, still we can hear them Now, if we listen long in our souls, the bygone voices. Earth in her fibres remembers, the breezes are stored with our echoes. Over the stone-hewn steps for their limpid orient waters Joyous they leaned and they knew not yet of the wells of Mycenae, Drew not yet from Eurotas the jar for an alien master, Mixed not Peneus yet with their tears. From the clasp of the current Now in their groups they arose and dispersed through the streets and the byways, Turned from the freedom of earth to the works and the joy of the hearthside, Lightly they rose and returned through the lanes of the wind-haunted city Swaying with rhythmical steps while the anklets jangled and murmured. Silent temples saw them passing; you too, O houses Built with such hopes by mortal man for his transient lodging; Fragrant the gardens strewed on dark tresses their white-smiling jasmines Dropped like a silent boon of purity soft from the branches: Flowers by the wayside were budding, cries flew winged round the tree-tops. Bright was the glory of life in Ilion city of Priam. Thrice to the city the doom-blast published its solemn alarum; Blast of the trumpets that call to assembly clamoured through Troya Thrice and were still. From garden and highway, from palace and temple Turned like a steed to the trumpet, rejoicing in war and ambition, Gathered alert to the call the democracy hated of heaven. First in their ranks upbearing their age as Atlas his heavens, Eagle-crested, with hoary hair like the snow upon Ida, Ilions senators paced, Antenor and wide-browed Anchises, Athamas famous for ships and the war of the waters, Tryas Still whose name was remembered by Oxus the orient river, Astyoches and Ucalegon, dateless Pallachus, Aetor, Aspetus who of the secrets divine knew all and was silent, Ascanus, Iliones, Alcesiphron, Orus, Aretes. Next from the citadel came with the voice of the heralds before him Priam and Priams sons, Aeneas leonine striding, Followed by the heart of a nation adoring her Penthesilea. All that was noble in Troy attended the regal procession Marching in front and behind and the tramp of their feet was a rhythm Tuned to the arrogant fortunes of Ilion ruled by incarnate Demigods, Ilus and Phryx and Dardanus, Tros of the conquests, Tros and far-ruling Laomedon who to his souls strong labour Drew down the sons of the skies and was served by the ageless immortals. Into the agora vast and aspirant besieged by its columns Bathed and anointed they came like gods in their beauty and grandeur. Last like the roar of the winds came trampling the surge of the people. Clamorous led by a force obscure to its ultimate fatal Session of wrath the violent mighty democracy hastened; Thousands of ardent lives with the heart yet unslain in their bosoms Lifted to heaven the voice of man and his far-spreading rumour. Singing the young men with banners marched in their joyous processions, Trod in martial measure or dancing with lyrical paces Chanted the glory of Troy and the wonderful deeds of their fathers. Into the columned assembly where Ilus had gathered his people, Thousands on thousands the tramp and the murmur poured; in their armoured Glittering tribes they were ranked, an untameable high-hearted nation Waiting the voice of its chiefs. Some gazed on the greatness of Priam Ancient, remote from their days, the last of the gods who were passing, Left like a soul uncompanioned in worlds where his strength shall not conquer: Sole like a column gigantic alone on a desolate hill-side Older than mortals he seemed and mightier. Many in anger Aimed their hostile looks where calm though by heaven abandoned, Left to his soul and his lucid mind and its thoughts unavailing, Leading the age-chilled few whom the might of their hearts had not blinded, Famous Antenor was seated, the fallen unpopular statesman, Wisest of speakers in Troy but rejected, stoned and dishonoured. Silent, aloof from the people he sat, a heart full of ruins. Low was the rumour that swelled like the hum of the bees in a meadow When with the thirst of the honey they swarm on the thyme and the linden, Hundreds humming and flitting till all that place is a murmur. Then from his seat like a tower arising Priam the monarch Slowly erect in his vast tranquillity silenced the people: Lonely, august he stood like one whom death has forgotten, Reared like a column of might and of silence over the assembly. So Olympus rises alone with his snows into heaven. Crowned were his heights by the locks that swept like the mass of the snow-swathe Clothing his giant shoulders; his eyes of deep meditation, Eyes that beheld now the end and accepted it like the beginning Gazed on the throng of the people as on a pomp that is painted: Slowly he spoke like one who is far from the scenes where he sojourns. Leader of Ilion, hero Deiphobus, thou who hast summoned Troy in her people, arise; say wherefore thou callest us. Evil Speak thou or good, thou canst speak that only: Necessity fashions All that the unseen eye has beheld. Speak then to the Trojans; Say on this dawn of her making what issue of death or of triumph Fate in her suddenness puts to the unseeing, what summons to perish Send to this nation men who revolt and gods who are hostile. Rising Deiphobus spoke, in stature less than his father, Less in his build, yet the mightiest man and tallest whom coursers Bore or his feet to the fight since Ajax fell by the Xanthus. People of Ilion, long have you fought with the gods and the Argives Slaying and slain, but the years persist and the struggle is endless. Fainting your helpers cease from the battle, the nations forsake you. Asia weary of strenuous greatness, ease-enamoured Suffers the foot of the Greek to tread on the beaches of Troas. Yet have we striven for Troy and for Asia, men who desert us. Not for ourselves alone have we fought, for our life of a moment! Once if the Greeks were triumphant, once if their nations were marshalled Under some far-seeing chief, Odysseus, Peleus, Achilles, Not on the banks of Scamander and skirts of the azure Aegean Fainting would cease the audacious emprise, the Titanic endeavour; Tigris would flee from their tread and Indus be drunk by their coursers. Now in these days when each sun goes marvelling down that Troy stands yet Suffering, smiting, alive, though doomed to all eyes that behold her, Flinging back Death from her walls and bronze to the shock and the clamour, Driven by a thought that has risen in the dawn from the tents on the beaches Grey Talthybius chariot waits in the Ilian portals, Voice of the Hellene demigod challenges timeless Troya. Thus has he said to us: Know you not Doom when she walks in your heavens? Feelst thou not then thy set, O sun who illuminedst Nature? Stripped of helpers you stand alone against Doom and Achilles, Left by the earth that served you, by heaven that helped you rejected: Death insists at your gates and the flame and the sword are impatient. None can escape the wheel of the gods and its vast revolutions! Fate demands the joy and pride of the earth for the Argive, Asias wealth for the lust of the young barbarian nations. City divine, whose fame overroofed like heaven the nations, Sink eclipsed in the circle vast of my radiance; Troya, Joined to my northern realms deliver the East to the Hellene; Ilion, to Hellas be yoked; wide Asia, fringe thou Peneus. Lay down golden Helen, a sacrifice lovely and priceless Cast by your weakness and fall on immense Necessitys altar; Yield to my longing Polyxena, Hecubas deep-bosomed daughter, Her whom my heart desires. She shall leave with you peace and her healing Joy of mornings secure and death repulsed from your hearthsides. Yield these and live, else I leap on you, Fate in front, Hades behind me. Bound to the gods by an oath I return not again from the battle Till from high Ida my shadow extends to the Mede and Euphrates. Let not your victories deceive you, steps that defeat has imagined; Hear not the voice of your heroes; their fame is a trumpet in Hades: Only they conquer while yet my horses champ free in their stables. Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen; Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. High rings the Hellene challenge, earth waits for the Ilian answer. Always mans Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment; Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then tis graven, tis granite. Speak! by what gesture high shall the stern gods recognise Troya? Sons of the ancients, race of the gods, inviolate city, Firmer my spear shall I grasp or cast from my hand and for ever? Search in your hearts if your fathers still dwell in them, children of Teucer. So Deiphobus spoke and the nation heard him in silence, Awed by the shadow vast of doom, indignant with Fortune. Calm from his seat Antenor arose as a wrestler arises, Tamer of beasts in the cage of the lions, eyeing the monsters Brilliant, tawny of mane, and he knows if his courage waver, Falter his eye or his nerve be surprised by the gods that are hostile, Death will leap on him there in the crowded helpless arena. Fearless Antenor arose, and a murmur swelled in the meeting Cruel and threatening, hoarse like the voice of the sea upon boulders; Hisses thrilled through the roar and one man cried to another, Lo he will speak of peace who has swallowed the gold of Achaia! Surely the people of Troy are eunuchs who suffer Antenor Rising unharmed in the agora. Are there not stones in the city? Surely the steel grows dear in the land when a traitor can flourish. Calm like a god or a summit Antenor stood in the uproar. But as he gazed on his soul came memory dimming the vision; For he beheld his past and the agora crowded and cheering, Passionate, full of delight while Antenor spoke to the people, Troy that he loved and his fatherl and proud of her eloquent statesman. Tears to his eyes came thick and he gripped at the staff he was holding. Mounting his eyes met fully the tumult, mournful and thrilling, Conquering mens hearts with a note of doom in its sorrowful sweetness. People of Ilion, blood of my blood, O race of Antenor, Once will I speak though you slay me; for who would shrink from destruction Knowing that soon of his city and nation, his house and his dear ones All that remains will be a couch of trampled ashes? Athene, Slain today may I join the victorious souls of our fathers, Not for the anguish be kept and the irremediable weeping. Loud will I speak the word that the gods have breathed in my spirit, Strive this last time to save the death-destined. Who are these clamour Hear him not, gold of the Greeks bought his words and his throat is accursd? Troy whom my counsels made great, hast thou heard this roar of their frenzy Tearing thy ancient bosom? Is it thy voice, heaven-abandoned, my mother? O my country, O my creatress, earth of my longings! Earth where our fathers lie in their sacred ashes undying, Memoried temples shelter the shrines of our gods and the altars Pure where we worshipped, the beautiful children smile on us passing, Women divine and the men of our nation! O land where our childhood Played at a mothers feet mid the trees and the hills of our country, Hoping our manhood toiled and our youth had its seekings for godhead, Thou for our age keepst repose mid the love and the honour of kinsmen, Silent our relics shall lie with the city guarding our ashes! Earth who hast fostered our parents, earth who hast given us our offspring, Soil that created our race where fed from the bosom of Nature Happy our children shall dwell in the storied homes of their fathers, Souls that our souls have stamped, sweet forms of ourselves when we perish! Once even then have they seen thee in their hearts, or dreamed of thee ever Who from thy spirit revolt and only thy name make an idol Hating thy faithful sons and the cult of thy ancient ideal! Wake, O my mother divine, remember thy gods and thy wisdom, Silence the tongues that degrade thee, prophets profane of thy godhead. Madmen, to think that a man who has offered his life for his country, Served her with words and deeds and adored with victories and triumphs Ever could think of enslaving her breast to the heel of a foeman! Surely Antenors halls are empty, he begs from the stranger Leading his sons and his childrens sons by the hand in the market Showing his rags since his need is so bitter of gold from the Argives! You who demand a reply when Laocoon lessens Antenor, Hush then your feeble roar and your ear to the past and the distance Turn. You fields that are famous for ever, reply for me calling, Fields of the mighty mown by my swords edge, Chersonese conquered, Thrace and her snows where we fought on the frozen streams and were victors Then when they were unborn who are now your delight and your leaders. Answer return, you columns of Ilus, here where my counsels Made Troy mightier guiding her safe through the shocks of her foemen. Gold! I have heaped it up high, I am rich with the spoils of your haters. It was your fathers dead who gave me that wealth as my guerdon, Now my reproach, your fathers who saw not the Greeks round their ramparts: They were not cooped by an upstart race in the walls of Apollo, Saw not Hector slain and Troilus dragged by his coursers. Far over wrathful Jaxartes they rode; the shaken Achaian Prostrate adored your strength who now shouts at your portals and conquers Then when Antenor guided Troy, this old man, this traitor, Not Laocoon, nay, not even Paris nor Hector. But I have changed, I have grown a niggard of blood and of treasure, Selfish, chilled as old men seem to the young and the headstrong, Counselling safety and ease, not the ardour of noble decisions. Come to my house and behold, my house that was filled once with voices. Sons whom the high gods envied me crowded the halls that are silent. Where are they now? They are dead, their voices are silent in Hades, Fallen slaying the foe in a war between sin and the Furies. Silent they went to the battle to die unmourned for their country, Die as they knew in vain. Do I keep now the last ones remaining, Sparing their blood that my house may endure? Is there any in Troya Speeds to the front of the mellay outstripping the sons of Antenor? Let him arise and speak and proclaim it and bid me be silent. Heavy is this war that you love on my heart and I hold you as madmen Doomed by the gods, abandoned by Pallas, by Hera afflicted. Who would not hate to behold his work undone by the foolish? Who would not weep if he saw Laocoon ruining Troya, Paris doomed in his beauty, Aeneas slain by his valour? Still you need to be taught that the high gods see and remember, Dream that they care not if justice be done on the earth or oppression! Happy to live, aspire while you violate man and the immortals! Vainly the sands of Time have been strewn with the ruins of empires, Signs that the gods had left, but in vain. For they look for a nation, One that can conquer itself having conquered the world, but they find none. None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered, All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. All have been thrust from their heights, say the fools; we shall live and for ever. We are the people at last, the children, the favourites; all things Only to us are permitted. They too descend to the silence, Death receives their hopes and the void their stirrings of action. Eviller fate there is none than life too long among mortals. I have conversed with the great who have gone, I have fought in their war-cars; Tros I have seen, Laomedons hand has dwelt on my temples. Now I behold Laocoon, now our greatest is Paris. First when Phryx by the Hellespont reared to the cry of the ocean Hewing her stones as vast as his thoughts his high-seated fortress, Planned he a lair for a beast of prey, for a pantheress dire-souled Crouched in the hills for her bound or self-gathered against the avenger? Dardanus shepherded Asias coasts and her sapphire-girt islands. Mild was his rule like the blessing of rain upon fields in the summer. Gladly the harried coasts reposed confessing the Phrygian, Caria, Lycias kings and the Paphlagon, strength of the Mysian; Minos Crete recovered the sceptre of old Rhadamanthus. Ilus and Tros had strength in the fight like a far-striding Titans: Troy triumphant following the urge of their souls to the vastness, Helmeted, crowned like a queen of the gods with the fates for her coursers Rode through the driving sleet of the spears to Indus and Oxus. Then twice over she conquered the vanquished, with peace as in battle; There where discord had clashed, sweet Peace sat girded with plenty, There where tyranny counted her blows, came the hands of a father. Neither had Teucer a soul like your chiefs who refounded this nation. Such was the antique and noble tradition of Troy in her founders, Builders of power that endured; but it perishes lost to their offspring, Trampled, scorned by an arrogant age, by a violent nation. Strong Anchises trod it down trampling victorious onwards Stern as his sword and hard as the silent bronze of his armour. More than another I praise the man who is mighty and steadfast, Even as Ida the mountain I praise, a refuge for lions; But in the council I laud him not, he who a god for his kindred, Lives for the rest without bowels of pity or fellowship, lone-souled, Scorning the world that he rules, who untamed by the weight of an empire Holds allies as subjects, subjects as slaves and drives to the battle Careless more of their wills than the coursers yoked to his war-car. Therefore they fought while they feared, but gladly abandon us falling. Yet had they gathered to Teucer in the evil days of our nation. Where are they now? Do they gather then to the dreaded Anchises? Or has Aeneas helped with his counsels hateful to wisdom? Hateful is this, abhorred of the gods, imagined by Ate When against subjects murmuring discord and faction appointed Scatter unblest gold, the heart of a people is poisoned, Virtue pursued and baseness triumphs tongued like a harlot, Brother against brother arrayed that the rule may endure of a stranger. Yes, but it lasts! For its hour. The high gods watch in their silence, Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. Hast thou then lasted, O Troy? Lo, the Greeks at thy gates and Achilles. Dream, when Virtue departs, that Wisdom will linger, her sister! Wisdom has turned from your hearts; shall Fortune dwell with the foolish? Fatal oracles came to you great-tongued, vaunting of empires Stretched from the risen sun to his rest in the occident waters, Dreams of a city throned on the hills with her foot on the nations. Meanwhile the sword was prepared for our breasts and the flame for our housetops. Wake, awake, O my people! the fire-brand mounts up your doorsteps; Gods who deceived to slay, press swords on your childrens bosoms. See, O ye blind, ere death in pale countries open your eyelids! Hear, O ye deaf, the sounds in your ears and the voices of evening! Young men who vaunt in your strength! when the voice of this aged Antenor Governed your fathers youth, all the Orient was joined to our banners. Macedon leaned to the East and her princes yearned to the victor, Scythians worshipped in Ilions shrines, the Phoenician trader Bartered her tokens, Babylons wise men paused at our thresholds; Fair-haired sons of the snows came rapt towards golden Troya Drawn by the song and the glory. Strymon sang hymns unto Ida, Hoarse Chalcidice, dim Chersonesus married their waters Under the oerarching yoke of Troy twixt the term-posts of Ocean. Meanwhile far through the world your fortunes led by my counsels Followed their lure like women snared by a magical tempter: High was their chant as they paced and it came from continents distant. Turn now and hear! what voice approaches? what glitter of armies? Loud upon Trojan beaches the tread and the murmur of Hellas! Hark! tis the Achaians paean rings oer the Pergaman waters! So wake the dreams of Aeneas; reaped is Laocoons harvest. Artisans new of your destiny fashioned this far-spreading downfall, Counsellors blind who scattered your strength to the hooves of the Scythian, Barren victories, trophies of skin-clad Illyrian pastors. Who but the fool and improvident, who but the dreamer and madman Leaves for the far and ungrasped earths close and provident labour? Children of earth, our mother gives tokens, she lays down her signposts, Step by step to advance on her bosom, to grow by her seasons, Order our works by her patience and limit our thought by her spaces. But you had chiefs who were demigods, souls of an earth-scorning stature, Minds that saw vaster than life and strengths that Gods hour could not limit! These men seized upon Troy as the tool of their giant visions, Dreaming of Africas suns and bright Hesperian orchards, Carthage our mart and our feet on the sunset hills of the Latins. Ilions hinds in the dream ploughed Libya, sowed Italys cornfields, Troy stretched to Gades; even the gods and the Fates had grown Trojan. So are the natures of men uplifted by Heaven in its satire. Scorning the bit of the gods, despisers of justice and measure, Zeus is denied and adored some shadow huge of their natures Losing the shape of man in a dream that is splendid and monstrous. Titans, vaunting they stride and the world resounds with their footsteps; Titans, clanging they fall and the world is full of their ruin. Children, you dreamed with them, heard the roar of the Atlantic breakers Welcome your keels and the Isles of the Blest grew your wonderful gardens. Lulled in the dream, you saw not the black-drifting march of the storm-rack, Heard not the galloping wolves of the doom and the howl of their hunger. Greece in her peril united her jarring clans; you suffered Patient, preparing the north, the wisdom and silence of Peleus, Atreus craft and the Argives gathered to King Agamemnon. But there were prophecies, Pythian oracles, mutterings from Delphi. How shall they prosper who haste after auguries, oracles, whispers, Dreams that walk in the night and voices obscure of the silence? Touches are these from the gods that bewilder the brain to its ruin. One sole oracle helps, still armoured in courage and prudence Patient and heedful to toil at the work that is near in the daylight. Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain! Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. If thou hadst bowed not thy mane, O Troy, to the child and the dreamer, Hadst thou been faithful to Wisdom the counsellor seated and ancient, Then would the hour not have dawned when Paris lingered in Sparta Led by the goddess fatal and beautiful, white Aphrodite. Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy natures abysms! Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! Therefore the black deed was done and the hearth that welcomed was sullied. Sin-called the Fury uplifted her tresses of gloom oer the nations Maddening the earth with the scream of her blood-thirst, bowelless, stone-eyed, Claiming her victims from God and bestriding the hate and the clamour. Yet midst the stroke and the wail when mens eyes were blind with the blood-mist, Still had the high gods mercy recalling Teucer and Ilus. Just was the heart of their anger. Discord flaming from Ida, Hundred-voiced glared from the ships through the camp of the victor Achaians, Love to that discord added her flowerlike lips of Briseis; Faltering lids of Polyxena conquered the strength of Pelides. Vainly the gods who pity open the gates of salvation! Vainly the winds of their mercy brea the on our fevered existence! Man his passions prefers to the voice that guides from the heavens. These too were here whom Hera had chosen to ruin this nation: Charioteers cracking the whips of their speed on the paths of destruction, Demigods they! they have come down from Heaven glad to that labour, Deaf is the world with the fame of their wheels as they race down to Hades. O that alone they could reach it! O that pity could soften Harsh Necessitys dealings, sparing our innocent children, Saving the Trojan women and aged from bonds and the sword-edge! These had not sinned whom you slay in your madness! Ruthless, O mortals, Must you be then to yourselves when the gods even faltering with pity Turn from the grief that must come and the agony vast and the weeping? Say not the road of escape sinks too low for your arrogant treading. Pride is not for our clay; the earth, not heaven was our mother And we are even as the ant in our toil and the beast in our dying; Only who cling to the hands of the gods can rise up from the earth-mire. Children, lie prone to their scourge, that your hearts may revive in their sunshine. This is our lot! when the anger of heaven has passed then the mortal Raises his head; soon he heals his heart and forgets he has suffered. Yet if resurgence from weakness and shame were withheld from the creature, Every fall without morrow, who then would counsel submission? But since the height of mortal fortune ascending must stumble, Fallen, again ascend, since death like birth is our portion, Ripening, mowed, to be sown again like corn by the farmer, Let us be patient still with the gods accepting their purpose. Deem not defeat I welcome. Think not to Hellas submitting Death of proud hope I would seal. Not this have I counselled, O nation, But to be even as your high-crested forefa thers, greatest of mortals. Troya of old enringed by the hooves of Cimmerian armies Flamed to the heavens from her plains and her smoke-blackened citadel sheltered Mutely the joyless rest of her sons and the wreck of her greatness. Courage and wisdom survived in that fall and a stern-eyed prudence Helped her to live; disguised from her mightiness Troy crouched waiting. Teucer descended whose genius worked at this kingdom and nation, Patient, scrupulous, wise, like a craftsman carefully toiling Over a helmet or over a breastplate, testing it always, Toiled in the eye of the Masters of all and had heed of its labour. So in the end they would not release him like souls that are common; They out of Ida sent into Ilion Pallas Athene; Secret she came and he went with her into the luminous silence. Teucers children after their sire completed his labour. Now too, O people, front adversity self-gathered, silent. Veil thyself, leonine mighty Ilion, hiding thy greatness! Be as thy father Teucer; be as a cavern for lions; Be as a Fate that crouches! Wordless and stern for your vengeance Self-gathered work in the night and secrecy shrouding your bosoms. Let not the dire heavens know of it; let not the foe seize a whisper! Ripen the hour of your stroke, while your words drip sweeter than honey. Sure am I, friends, you will turn from death at my voice, you will hear me! Some day yet I shall gaze on the ruins of haughty Mycenae. Is this not better than Ilion cast to the sword of her haters, Is this not happier than Troya captured and wretchedly burning, Time to await in his stride when the southern and northern Achaians Gazing with dull distaste now over their severing isthmus Hate-filled shall move to the shock by the spur of the gods in them driven, Pelops march upon Attica, Thebes descend on the Spartan? Then shall the hour now kept in heaven for us ripen to dawning, Then shall Victory cry to our banners over the Ocean Calling our sons with her voice immortal. Children of Ilus, Then shall Troy rise in her strength and stride over Greece up to Gades. So Antenor spoke and the mind of the hostile assembly Moved and swayed with his words like the waters ruled by Poseidon. Even as the billows rebellious lashed by the whips of the tempest Curvet and rear their crests like the hooded wrath of a serpent, Green-eyed under their cowls sublime,unwilling they journey, Foam-bannered, hoarse-voiced, shepherded, forced by the wind to the margin Meant for their rest and can turn not at all, though they rage, on their driver, Last with a sullen applause and consenting lapse into thunder, Where they were led all the while they sink down huge and astonished, So in their souls that withstood and obeyed and hated the yielding, Lashed by his censure, indignant, the Trojans moved towards his purpose: Sometimes a roar arose, then only, weakened, rarer, Angry murmurs swelled between sullen stretches of silence; Last, a reluctant applause broke dull from the throats of the commons. Silent raged in their hearts Laocoons following daunted; Troubled the faction of Paris turned to the face of their leader. He as yet rose not; careless he sat in his beauty and smiling, Gazing with brilliant eyes at the sculptured pillars of Ilus. Doubtful, swayed by Antenor, waited in silence the nation. *** ~ Sri Aurobindo, 2 - The Book of the Statesman ,

708:Earth, Ocean, Air, belovd brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If Autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And Winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs; If Spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses,have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, belovd brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted favor now! Mother of this unfathomable world! Favor my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchemist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears, Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmd night To render up thy charge; and, though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness: A lovely youth,no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep: Gentle, and brave, and generous,no lorn bard Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung in solitude.   Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. By solemn vision and bright silver dream His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt And knew. When early youth had passed, he left His cold fireside and alienated home To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where'er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes On black bare pointed islets ever beat With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves, Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. Nor had that scene of ampler majesty Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven And the green earth, lost in his heart its claims To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous band his bloodless food, Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend Her timid steps, to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own. His wandering step, Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange, Sculptured on alabaster obelisk Or jasper tomb or mutilated sphinx, Dark thiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble daemons watch The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth: through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes; nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food, Her daily portion, from her father's tent, And spread her matting for his couch, and stole From duties and repose to tend his steps, Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe To speak her love, and watched his nightly sleep, Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath Of innocent dreams arose; then, when red morn Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned. The Poet, wandering on, through Arabie, And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the arial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way; Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower, Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veild maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-colored woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire; wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp Strange symphony, and in their branching veins The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently endured Its bursting burden; at the sound he turned, And saw by the warm light of their own life Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, Her dark locks floating in the breath of night, Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs, and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom:she drew back awhile, Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course, Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain. Roused by the shock, he started from his trance The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled The hues of heaven that canopied his bower Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep, The mystery and the majesty of Earth, The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven. The spirit of sweet human love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas! Were limbs and breath and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, forever lost In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake Lead only to a black and watery depth, While death's blue vault with loathliest vapors hung, Where every shade which the foul grave exhales Hides its dead eye from the detested day, Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart; The insatiate hope which it awakened stung His brain even like despair. While daylight held The sky, the Poet kept mute conference With his still soul. At night the passion came, Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, And shook him from his rest, and led him forth Into the darkness. As an eagle, grasped In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast Burn with the poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight O'er the wide ary wilderness: thus driven By the bright shadow of that lovely dream, Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night, Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, Startling with careless step the moon-light snake, He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight, Shedding the mockery of its vital hues Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame. And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair, Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand Hung like dead bone within its withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone, As in a furnace burning secretly, From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers, Who ministered with human charity His human wants, beheld with wondering awe Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer, Encountering on some dizzy precipice That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of Wind, With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused In its career; the infant would conceal His troubled visage in his mother's robe In terror at the glare of those wild eyes, To remember their strange light in many a dream Of after times; but youthful maidens, taught By nature, would interpret half the woe That wasted him, would call him with false names Brother and friend, would press his pallid hand At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path Of his departure from their father's door. At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main. His eyes pursued its flight:'Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?' A gloomy smile Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips. For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly Its precious charge, and silent death exposed, Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure, With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. Startled by his own thoughts, he looked around. There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind. A little shallop floating near the shore Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. It had been long abandoned, for its sides Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of the populous deep. The day was fair and sunny; sea and sky Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. Following his eager soul, the wanderer Leaped in the boat; he spread his cloak aloft On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat, And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea Like a torn cloud before the hurricane. As one that in a silver vision floats Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly Along the dark and ruffled waters fled The straining boat. A whirlwind swept it on, With fierce gusts and precipitating force, Through the white ridges of the chafd sea. The waves arose. Higher and higher still Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest's scourge Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven With dark obliterating course, he sate: As if their genii were the ministers Appointed to conduct him to the light Of those belovd eyes, the Poet sate, Holding the steady helm. Evening came on; The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray That canopied his path o'er the waste deep; Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of Day; Night followed, clad with stars. On every side More horribly the multitudinous streams Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock The calm and spangled sky. The little boat Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam Down the steep cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean; safely fled As if that frail and wasted human form Had been an elemental god. At midnight The moon arose; and lo! the ethereal cliffs Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight, and around Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves Bursting and eddying irresistibly Rage and resound forever.Who shall save? The boat fled on,the boiling torrent drove, The crags closed round with black and jagged arms, The shattered mountain overhung the sea, And faster still, beyond all human speed, Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave, The little boat was driven. A cavern there Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths Ingulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on With unrelaxing speed.'Vision and Love!' The Poet cried aloud, 'I have beheld The path of thy departure. Sleep and death Shall not divide us long.' The boat pursued The windings of the cavern. Daylight shone At length upon that gloomy river's flow; Now, where the fiercest war among the waves Is calm, on the unfathomable stream The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven, Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm; Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, Circling immeasurably fast, and laved With alternating dash the gnarld roots Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms In darkness over it. I' the midst was left, Reflecting yet distorting every cloud, A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm. Seized by the sway of the ascending stream, With dizzy swiftness, round and round and round, Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose, Till on the verge of the extremest curve, Where through an opening of the rocky bank The waters overflow, and a smooth spot Of glassy quiet 'mid those battling tides Is left, the boat paused shuddering.Shall it sink Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress Of that resistless gulf embosom it? Now shall it fall?A wandering stream of wind Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail, And, lo! with gentle motion between banks Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, Beneath a woven grove, it sails, and, hark! The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods. Where the embowering trees recede, and leave A little space of green expanse, the cove Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers Forever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task, Which naught but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, But on his heart its solitude returned, And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame, Had yet performed its ministry; it hung Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods Of night close over it. The noonday sun   Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves, Scooped in the dark base of their ary rocks, Mocking its moans, respond and roar forever. The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as, led By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, He sought in Nature's dearest haunt some bank, Her cradle and his sepulchre. More dark And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs, Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make network of the dark blue light of day And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine A soul-dissolving odor to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades, Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well, Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave, Images all the woven boughs above, And each depending leaf, and every speck Of azure sky darting between their chasms; Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star, Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, Or gorgeous insect floating motionless, Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld Their own wan light through the reflected lines Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth Of that still fountain; as the human heart, Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave, Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard The motion of the leavesthe grass that sprung Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel An unaccustomed presenceand the sound Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed To stand beside himclothed in no bright robes Of shadowy silver or enshrining light, Borrowed from aught the visible world affords Of grace, or majesty, or mystery; But undulating woods, and silent well, And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming, Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was; onlywhen his regard Was raised by intense pensivenesstwo eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed with their serene and azure smiles To beckon him. Obedient to the light That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing The windings of the dell. The rivulet, Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell Among the moss with hollow harmony Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones It danced, like childhood laughing as it went; Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, Reflecting every herb and drooping bud That overhung its quietness.'O stream! Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, Thy searchless fountain and invisible course, Have each their type in me; and the wide sky And measureless ocean may declare as soon What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud Contains thy waters, as the universe Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste I' the passing wind!' Beside the grassy shore Of the small stream he went; he did impress On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one Roused by some joyous madness from the couch Of fever, he did move; yet not like him Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame Of his frail exultation shall be spent, He must descend. With rapid steps he went Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now The forest's solemn canopies were changed For the uniform and lightsome evening sky. Gray rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed The struggling brook; tall spires of windlestrae Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, And nought but gnarld roots of ancient pines Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away, The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes Had shone, gleam stony orbs:so from his steps Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds And musical motions. Calm he still pursued The stream, that with a larger volume now Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there Fretted a path through its descending curves With its wintry speed. On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, Lifted their black and barren pinnacles In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, 'Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves, Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems with its accumulated crags To overhang the world; for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-colored even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. The near scene, In naked and severe simplicity,   Made contrast with the universe. A pine, Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response at each pause In most familiar cadence, with the howl, The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path, Fell into that immeasurable void, Scattering its waters to the passing winds. Yet the gray precipice and solemn pine And torrent were not all;one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks, It overlooked in its serenity The dark earth and the bending vault of stars. It was a tranquil spot that seemed to smile Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped The fissured stones with its entwining arms, And did embower with leaves forever green   And berries dark the smooth and even space Of its inviolated floor; and here The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore In wanton sport those bright leaves whose decay, Red, yellow, or ethereally pale, Rivals the pride of summer. 'T is the haunt Of every gentle wind whose breath can teach The wilds to love tranquillity. One step, One human step alone, has ever broken The stillness of its solitude; one voice   Alone inspired its echoes;even that voice Which hither came, floating among the winds, And led the loveliest among human forms To make their wild haunts the depository Of all the grace and beauty that endued Its motions, render up its majesty, Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm, And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould, Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss, Commit the colors of that varying cheek, That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes. The dim and hornd moon hung low, and poured A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fulness; not a star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace.O storm of death, Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night!   And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world! from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee! Ruin calls His brother Death! A rare and regal prey He hath prepared, prowling around the world;   Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms, Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine The unheeded tribute of a broken heart. When on the threshold of the green recess The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled, Did he resign his high and holy soul To images of the majestic past, That paused within his passive being now,         Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk Of the old pine; upon an ivied stone Reclined his languid head; his limbs did rest, Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink Of that obscurest chasm;and thus he lay, Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. Hope and Despair, The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear     Marred his repose; the influxes of sense And his own being, unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there At peace, and faintly smiling. His last sight Was the great moon, which o'er the western line Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended, With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills It rests; and still as the divided frame     Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood, That ever beat in mystic sympathy With Nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still; And when two lessening points of light alone Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night:till the minutest ray Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. It pausedit fluttered. But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved   An image silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a vapor fed with golden beams That ministered on sunlight, ere the west Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame No sense, no motion, no divinity A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wandera bright stream Once fed with many-voicd wavesa dream Of youth, which night and time have quenched forever   Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. Oh, for Medea's wondrous alchemy, Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! Oh, that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now, Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders forever,   Lone as incarnate death! Oh, that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled, Like some frail exhalation, which the dawn Robes in its golden beams,ah! thou hast fled! The brave, the gentle and the beautiful, The child of grace and genius. Heartless things     Are done and said i' the world, and many worms And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, In vesper low or joyous orison, Lifts still its solemn voice:but thou art fled Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee Been purest ministers, who are, alas! Now thou art not! Upon those pallid lips So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes That image sleep in death, upon that form Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear Be shednot even in thought. Nor, when those hues Are gone, and those divinest lineaments, Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone In the frail pauses of this simple strain, Let not high verse, mourning the memory Of that which is no more, or painting's woe Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. It is a woe "too deep for tears," when all Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. Composed at Bishopsgate Heath, near Windsor Park, 1815 (autumn). Note by Mrs. Shelley: 'Alastor is written in a very different tone from Queen Mab. In the latter, Shelley poured out all the cherished speculations of his youth -- all the irrepressible emotions of sympathy, censure, and hope, to which the present suffering, and what he considers the proper destiny, of his fellow-creatures, gave birth. Alastor, on the contrary, contains an individual interest only. A very few years, with their attendant events, had checked the ardour of Shelley's hopes, though he still thought them well grounded, and that to advance their fulfilment was the noblest task man could achieve. This is neither the time nor the place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends brought home to him the sad realities of life. Physical suffering had also considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward; inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul than to glance abroad, and to make, as in Queen Mab, the whole universe the object and subject of his song. In the Spring of 1815 an eminent physician pronounced that he was dying rapidly of a consumption; abscesses were formed on his lungs, and he suffered acute spasms. suddenly a complete change took place; and, though through life he was a martyr to pain and debility, every symptom of pulmonary disease vanished. His nerves, which nature had formed sensitive to an unexampled degree, were rendered still more susceptible by the state of his health. As soon as the peace of 1814 had opened the Continent, he went abroad. He visited some of the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England from Lucerne, by the Reuss and the Rhine. The river-navigation enchanted him. In his favourite poem of Thalaba, his imagination had been excited by a description of such a voyage. In the summer of 1815, after a tour along the southern coast of Devonshire and a visit to Clifton, he rented a house on Bishopgate Heath, on the borders of Windsor Forest, where he enjoyed several months of comparative health and tranquil happiness. The later summer months were warm and dry. Accompanied by a few friends, he visited the source of the Thames, making a voyage in a wherry from Winsdor to Crickdale. His beautiful stanzas in the churchyard of Lechlade were written on that occasion. Alastor was composed on his return. He spent his days under the oak-shades of Windsor Great Park; and the magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest-scenery we find in the poem. None of Shelley's poems is more characteristic than this. The solemn spirit that reigns throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature, the broodings of a poet's heart in solitude -- the mingling of the exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe inspires with the sad and struggling pangs which human passion imparts -- give a touching interest to the whole. The death which he had often contemplated during the last months as certain and near he here represented in such colours as had, in his lonely musings, soothed his soul to peace. The versification sustains the solemn spirit which breathes throughout: it is peculiarly melodious. The poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative: it was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and softened by the recent anticipation of death.' ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor - or, the Spirit of Solitude ,

709:The Marriage Of Geraint The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court, A tributary prince of Devon, one Of that great Order of the Table Round, Had married Enid, Yniol's only child, And loved her, as he loved the light of Heaven. And as the light of Heaven varies, now At sunrise, now at sunset, now by night With moon and trembling stars, so loved Geraint To make her beauty vary day by day, In crimsons and in purples and in gems. And Enid, but to please her husband's eye, Who first had found and loved her in a state Of broken fortunes, daily fronted him In some fresh splendour; and the Queen herself, Grateful to Prince Geraint for service done, Loved her, and often with her own white hands Arrayed and decked her, as the loveliest, Next after her own self, in all the court. And Enid loved the Queen, and with true heart Adored her, as the stateliest and the best And loveliest of all women upon earth. And seeing them so tender and so close, Long in their common love rejoiced Geraint. But when a rumour rose about the Queen, Touching her guilty love for Lancelot, Though yet there lived no proof, nor yet was heard The world's loud whisper breaking into storm, Not less Geraint believed it; and there fell A horror on him, lest his gentle wife, Through that great tenderness for Guinevere, Had suffered, or should suffer any taint In nature: wherefore going to the King, He made this pretext, that his princedom lay Close on the borders of a territory, Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights, Assassins, and all flyers from the hand Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law: And therefore, till the King himself should please To cleanse this common sewer of all his realm, 661 He craved a fair permission to depart, And there defend his marches; and the King Mused for a little on his plea, but, last, Allowing it, the Prince and Enid rode, And fifty knights rode with them, to the shores Of Severn, and they past to their own land; Where, thinking, that if ever yet was wife True to her lord, mine shall be so to me, He compassed her with sweet observances And worship, never leaving her, and grew Forgetful of his promise to the King, Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt, Forgetful of the tilt and tournament, Forgetful of his glory and his name, Forgetful of his princedom and its cares. And this forgetfulness was hateful to her. And by and by the people, when they met In twos and threes, or fuller companies, Began to scoff and jeer and babble of him As of a prince whose manhood was all gone, And molten down in mere uxoriousness. And this she gathered from the people's eyes: This too the women who attired her head, To please her, dwelling on his boundless love, Told Enid, and they saddened her the more: And day by day she thought to tell Geraint, But could not out of bashful delicacy; While he that watched her sadden, was the more Suspicious that her nature had a taint. At last, it chanced that on a summer morn (They sleeping each by either) the new sun Beat through the blindless casement of the room, And heated the strong warrior in his dreams; Who, moving, cast the coverlet aside, And bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it. And Enid woke and sat beside the couch, Admiring him, and thought within herself, 662 Was ever man so grandly made as he? Then, like a shadow, past the people's talk And accusation of uxoriousness Across her mind, and bowing over him, Low to her own heart piteously she said: 'O noble breast and all-puissant arms, Am I the cause, I the poor cause that men Reproach you, saying all your force is gone? I AM the cause, because I dare not speak And tell him what I think and what they say. And yet I hate that he should linger here; I cannot love my lord and not his name. Far liefer had I gird his harness on him, And ride with him to battle and stand by, And watch his mightful hand striking great blows At caitiffs and at wrongers of the world. Far better were I laid in the dark earth, Not hearing any more his noble voice, Not to be folded more in these dear arms, And darkened from the high light in his eyes, Than that my lord through me should suffer shame. Am I so bold, and could I so stand by, And see my dear lord wounded in the strife, And maybe pierced to death before mine eyes, And yet not dare to tell him what I think, And how men slur him, saying all his force Is melted into mere effeminacy? O me, I fear that I am no true wife.' Half inwardly, half audibly she spoke, And the strong passion in her made her weep True tears upon his broad and naked breast, And these awoke him, and by great mischance He heard but fragments of her later words, And that she feared she was not a true wife. And then he thought, 'In spite of all my care, For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains, She is not faithful to me, and I see her Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur's hall.' Then though he loved and reverenced her too much To dream she could be guilty of foul act, 663 Right through his manful breast darted the pang That makes a man, in the sweet face of her Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable. At this he hurled his huge limbs out of bed, And shook his drowsy squire awake and cried, 'My charger and her palfrey;' then to her, 'I will ride forth into the wilderness; For though it seems my spurs are yet to win, I have not fallen so low as some would wish. And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress And ride with me.' And Enid asked, amazed, 'If Enid errs, let Enid learn her fault.' But he, 'I charge thee, ask not, but obey.' Then she bethought her of a faded silk, A faded mantle and a faded veil, And moving toward a cedarn cabinet, Wherein she kept them folded reverently With sprigs of summer laid between the folds, She took them, and arrayed herself therein, Remembering when first he came on her Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it, And all her foolish fears about the dress, And all his journey to her, as himself Had told her, and their coming to the court. For Arthur on the Whitsuntide before Held court at old Caerleon upon Usk. There on a day, he sitting high in hall, Before him came a forester of Dean, Wet from the woods, with notice of a hart Taller than all his fellows, milky-white, First seen that day: these things he told the King. Then the good King gave order to let blow His horns for hunting on the morrow morn. And when the King petitioned for his leave To see the hunt, allowed it easily. So with the morning all the court were gone. But Guinevere lay late into the morn, Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love For Lancelot, and forgetful of the hunt; But rose at last, a single maiden with her, Took horse, and forded Usk, and gained the wood; 664 There, on a little knoll beside it, stayed Waiting to hear the hounds; but heard instead A sudden sound of hoofs, for Prince Geraint, Late also, wearing neither hunting-dress Nor weapon, save a golden-hilted brand, Came quickly flashing through the shallow ford Behind them, and so galloped up the knoll. A purple scarf, at either end whereof There swung an apple of the purest gold, Swayed round about him, as he galloped up To join them, glancing like a dragon-fly In summer suit and silks of holiday. Low bowed the tributary Prince, and she, Sweet and statelily, and with all grace Of womanhood and queenhood, answered him: 'Late, late, Sir Prince,' she said, 'later than we!' 'Yea, noble Queen,' he answered, 'and so late That I but come like you to see the hunt, Not join it.' 'Therefore wait with me,' she said; 'For on this little knoll, if anywhere, There is good chance that we shall hear the hounds: Here often they break covert at our feet.' And while they listened for the distant hunt, And chiefly for the baying of Cavall, King Arthur's hound of deepest mouth, there rode Full slowly by a knight, lady, and dwarf; Whereof the dwarf lagged latest, and the knight Had vizor up, and showed a youthful face, Imperious, and of haughtiest lineaments. And Guinevere, not mindful of his face In the King's hall, desired his name, and sent Her maiden to demand it of the dwarf; Who being vicious, old and irritable, And doubling all his master's vice of pride, Made answer sharply that she should not know. 'Then will I ask it of himself,' she said. 'Nay, by my faith, thou shalt not,' cried the dwarf; 'Thou art not worthy even to speak of him;' And when she put her horse toward the knight, Struck at her with his whip, and she returned Indignant to the Queen; whereat Geraint 665 Exclaiming, 'Surely I will learn the name,' Made sharply to the dwarf, and asked it of him, Who answered as before; and when the Prince Had put his horse in motion toward the knight, Struck at him with his whip, and cut his cheek. The Prince's blood spirted upon the scarf, Dyeing it; and his quick, instinctive hand Caught at the hilt, as to abolish him: But he, from his exceeding manfulness And pure nobility of temperament, Wroth to be wroth at such a worm, refrained From even a word, and so returning said: 'I will avenge this insult, noble Queen, Done in your maiden's person to yourself: And I will track this vermin to their earths: For though I ride unarmed, I do not doubt To find, at some place I shall come at, arms On loan, or else for pledge; and, being found, Then will I fight him, and will break his pride, And on the third day will again be here, So that I be not fallen in fight. Farewell.' 'Farewell, fair Prince,' answered the stately Queen. 'Be prosperous in this journey, as in all; And may you light on all things that you love, And live to wed with her whom first you love: But ere you wed with any, bring your bride, And I, were she the daughter of a king, Yea, though she were a beggar from the hedge, Will clothe her for her bridals like the sun.' And Prince Geraint, now thinking that he heard The noble hart at bay, now the far horn, A little vext at losing of the hunt, A little at the vile occasion, rode, By ups and downs, through many a grassy glade And valley, with fixt eye following the three. At last they issued from the world of wood, And climbed upon a fair and even ridge, And showed themselves against the sky, and sank. And thither there came Geraint, and underneath 666 Beheld the long street of a little town In a long valley, on one side whereof, White from the mason's hand, a fortress rose; And on one side a castle in decay, Beyond a bridge that spanned a dry ravine: And out of town and valley came a noise As of a broad brook o'er a shingly bed Brawling, or like a clamour of the rooks At distance, ere they settle for the night. And onward to the fortress rode the three, And entered, and were lost behind the walls. 'So,' thought Geraint, 'I have tracked him to his earth.' And down the long street riding wearily, Found every hostel full, and everywhere Was hammer laid to hoof, and the hot hiss And bustling whistle of the youth who scoured His master's armour; and of such a one He asked, 'What means the tumult in the town?' Who told him, scouring still, 'The sparrow-hawk!' Then riding close behind an ancient churl, Who, smitten by the dusty sloping beam, Went sweating underneath a sack of corn, Asked yet once more what meant the hubbub here? Who answered gruffly, 'Ugh! the sparrow-hawk.' Then riding further past an armourer's, Who, with back turned, and bowed above his work, Sat riveting a helmet on his knee, He put the self-same query, but the man Not turning round, nor looking at him, said: 'Friend, he that labours for the sparrow-hawk Has little time for idle questioners.' Whereat Geraint flashed into sudden spleen: 'A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk! Tits, wrens, and all winged nothings peck him dead! Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg The murmur of the world! What is it to me? O wretched set of sparrows, one and all, Who pipe of nothing but of sparrow-hawks! Speak, if ye be not like the rest, hawk-mad, Where can I get me harbourage for the night? And arms, arms, arms to fight my enemy? Speak!' 667 Whereat the armourer turning all amazed And seeing one so gay in purple silks, Came forward with the helmet yet in hand And answered, 'Pardon me, O stranger knight; We hold a tourney here tomorrow morn, And there is scantly time for half the work. Arms? truth! I know not: all are wanted here. Harbourage? truth, good truth, I know not, save, It may be, at Earl Yniol's, o'er the bridge Yonder.' He spoke and fell to work again. Then rode Geraint, a little spleenful yet, Across the bridge that spanned the dry ravine. There musing sat the hoary-headed Earl, (His dress a suit of frayed magnificence, Once fit for feasts of ceremony) and said: 'Whither, fair son?' to whom Geraint replied, 'O friend, I seek a harbourage for the night.' Then Yniol, 'Enter therefore and partake The slender entertainment of a house Once rich, now poor, but ever open-doored.' 'Thanks, venerable friend,' replied Geraint; 'So that ye do not serve me sparrow-hawks For supper, I will enter, I will eat With all the passion of a twelve hours' fast.' Then sighed and smiled the hoary-headed Earl, And answered, 'Graver cause than yours is mine To curse this hedgerow thief, the sparrow-hawk: But in, go in; for save yourself desire it, We will not touch upon him even in jest.' Then rode Geraint into the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He looked and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern; And here had fallen a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems 668 Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms, And sucked the joining of the stones, and looked A knot, beneath, of snakes, aloft, a grove. And while he waited in the castle court, The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang Clear through the open casement of the hall, Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird, Heard by the lander in a lonely isle, Moves him to think what kind of bird it is That sings so delicately clear, and make Conjecture of the plumage and the form; So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint; And made him like a man abroad at morn When first the liquid note beloved of men Comes flying over many a windy wave To Britain, and in April suddenly Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red, And he suspends his converse with a friend, Or it may be the labour of his hands, To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;' So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, 'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me.' It chanced the song that Enid sang was one Of Fortune and her wheel, and Enid sang: 'Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud; Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. 'Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; With that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. 'Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands; For man is man and master of his fate. 'Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd; Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.' 669 'Hark, by the bird's song ye may learn the nest,' Said Yniol; 'enter quickly.' Entering then, Right o'er a mount of newly-fallen stones, The dusky-raftered many-cobwebbed hall, He found an ancient dame in dim brocade; And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white, That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath, Moved the fair Enid, all in faded silk, Her daughter. In a moment thought Geraint, 'Here by God's rood is the one maid for me.' But none spake word except the hoary Earl: 'Enid, the good knight's horse stands in the court; Take him to stall, and give him corn, and then Go to the town and buy us flesh and wine; And we will make us merry as we may. Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.' He spake: the Prince, as Enid past him, fain To follow, strode a stride, but Yniol caught His purple scarf, and held, and said, 'Forbear! Rest! the good house, though ruined, O my son, Endures not that her guest should serve himself.' And reverencing the custom of the house Geraint, from utter courtesy, forbore. So Enid took his charger to the stall; And after went her way across the bridge, And reached the town, and while the Prince and Earl Yet spoke together, came again with one, A youth, that following with a costrel bore The means of goodly welcome, flesh and wine. And Enid brought sweet cakes to make them cheer, And in her veil enfolded, manchet bread. And then, because their hall must also serve For kitchen, boiled the flesh, and spread the board, And stood behind, and waited on the three. And seeing her so sweet and serviceable, Geraint had longing in him evermore To stoop and kiss the tender little thumb, That crost the trencher as she laid it down: But after all had eaten, then Geraint, 670 For now the wine made summer in his veins, Let his eye rove in following, or rest On Enid at her lowly handmaid-work, Now here, now there, about the dusky hall; Then suddenly addrest the hoary Earl: 'Fair Host and Earl, I pray your courtesy; This sparrow-hawk, what is he? tell me of him. His name? but no, good faith, I will not have it: For if he be the knight whom late I saw Ride into that new fortress by your town, White from the mason's hand, then have I sworn From his own lips to have it--I am Geraint Of Devon--for this morning when the Queen Sent her own maiden to demand the name, His dwarf, a vicious under-shapen thing, Struck at her with his whip, and she returned Indignant to the Queen; and then I swore That I would track this caitiff to his hold, And fight and break his pride, and have it of him. And all unarmed I rode, and thought to find Arms in your town, where all the men are mad; They take the rustic murmur of their bourg For the great wave that echoes round the world; They would not hear me speak: but if ye know Where I can light on arms, or if yourself Should have them, tell me, seeing I have sworn That I will break his pride and learn his name, Avenging this great insult done the Queen.' Then cried Earl Yniol, 'Art thou he indeed, Geraint, a name far-sounded among men For noble deeds? and truly I, when first I saw you moving by me on the bridge, Felt ye were somewhat, yea, and by your state And presence might have guessed you one of those That eat in Arthur's hall in Camelot. Nor speak I now from foolish flattery; For this dear child hath often heard me praise Your feats of arms, and often when I paused Hath asked again, and ever loved to hear; So grateful is the noise of noble deeds 671 To noble hearts who see but acts of wrong: O never yet had woman such a pair Of suitors as this maiden: first Limours, A creature wholly given to brawls and wine, Drunk even when he wooed; and be he dead I know not, but he past to the wild land. The second was your foe, the sparrow-hawk, My curse, my nephew--I will not let his name Slip from my lips if I can help it--he, When that I knew him fierce and turbulent Refused her to him, then his pride awoke; And since the proud man often is the mean, He sowed a slander in the common ear, Affirming that his father left him gold, And in my charge, which was not rendered to him; Bribed with large promises the men who served About my person, the more easily Because my means were somewhat broken into Through open doors and hospitality; Raised my own town against me in the night Before my Enid's birthday, sacked my house; From mine own earldom foully ousted me; Built that new fort to overawe my friends, For truly there are those who love me yet; And keeps me in this ruinous castle here, Where doubtless he would put me soon to death, But that his pride too much despises me: And I myself sometimes despise myself; For I have let men be, and have their way; Am much too gentle, have not used my power: Nor know I whether I be very base Or very manful, whether very wise Or very foolish; only this I know, That whatsoever evil happen to me, I seem to suffer nothing heart or limb, But can endure it all most patiently.' 'Well said, true heart,' replied Geraint, 'but arms, That if the sparrow-hawk, this nephew, fight In next day's tourney I may break his pride.' And Yniol answered, 'Arms, indeed, but old 672 And rusty, old and rusty, Prince Geraint, Are mine, and therefore at thy asking, thine. But in this tournament can no man tilt, Except the lady he loves best be there. Two forks are fixt into the meadow ground, And over these is placed a silver wand, And over that a golden sparrow-hawk, The prize of beauty for the fairest there. And this, what knight soever be in field Lays claim to for the lady at his side, And tilts with my good nephew thereupon, Who being apt at arms and big of bone Has ever won it for the lady with him, And toppling over all antagonism Has earned himself the name of sparrow-hawk.' But thou, that hast no lady, canst not fight.' To whom Geraint with eyes all bright replied, Leaning a little toward him, 'Thy leave! Let ME lay lance in rest, O noble host, For this dear child, because I never saw, Though having seen all beauties of our time, Nor can see elsewhere, anything so fair. And if I fall her name will yet remain Untarnished as before; but if I live, So aid me Heaven when at mine uttermost, As I will make her truly my true wife.' Then, howsoever patient, Yniol's heart Danced in his bosom, seeing better days, And looking round he saw not Enid there, (Who hearing her own name had stolen away) But that old dame, to whom full tenderly And folding all her hand in his he said, 'Mother, a maiden is a tender thing, And best by her that bore her understood. Go thou to rest, but ere thou go to rest Tell her, and prove her heart toward the Prince.' So spake the kindly-hearted Earl, and she With frequent smile and nod departing found, Half disarrayed as to her rest, the girl; 673 Whom first she kissed on either cheek, and then On either shining shoulder laid a hand, And kept her off and gazed upon her face, And told them all their converse in the hall, Proving her heart: but never light and shade Coursed one another more on open ground Beneath a troubled heaven, than red and pale Across the face of Enid hearing her; While slowly falling as a scale that falls, When weight is added only grain by grain, Sank her sweet head upon her gentle breast; Nor did she lift an eye nor speak a word, Rapt in the fear and in the wonder of it; So moving without answer to her rest She found no rest, and ever failed to draw The quiet night into her blood, but lay Contemplating her own unworthiness; And when the pale and bloodless east began To quicken to the sun, arose, and raised Her mother too, and hand in hand they moved Down to the meadow where the jousts were held, And waited there for Yniol and Geraint. And thither came the twain, and when Geraint Beheld her first in field, awaiting him, He felt, were she the prize of bodily force, Himself beyond the rest pushing could move The chair of Idris. Yniol's rusted arms Were on his princely person, but through these Princelike his bearing shone; and errant knights And ladies came, and by and by the town Flowed in, and settling circled all the lists. And there they fixt the forks into the ground, And over these they placed the silver wand, And over that the golden sparrow-hawk. Then Yniol's nephew, after trumpet blown, Spake to the lady with him and proclaimed, 'Advance and take, as fairest of the fair, What I these two years past have won for thee, The prize of beauty.' Loudly spake the Prince, 'Forbear: there is a worthier,' and the knight With some surprise and thrice as much disdain 674 Turned, and beheld the four, and all his face Glowed like the heart of a great fire at Yule, So burnt he was with passion, crying out, 'Do battle for it then,' no more; and thrice They clashed together, and thrice they brake their spears. Then each, dishorsed and drawing, lashed at each So often and with such blows, that all the crowd Wondered, and now and then from distant walls There came a clapping as of phantom hands. So twice they fought, and twice they breathed, and still The dew of their great labour, and the blood Of their strong bodies, flowing, drained their force. But either's force was matched till Yniol's cry, 'Remember that great insult done the Queen,' Increased Geraint's, who heaved his blade aloft, And cracked the helmet through, and bit the bone, And felled him, and set foot upon his breast, And said, 'Thy name?' To whom the fallen man Made answer, groaning, 'Edyrn, son of Nudd! Ashamed am I that I should tell it thee. My pride is broken: men have seen my fall.' 'Then, Edyrn, son of Nudd,' replied Geraint, 'These two things shalt thou do, or else thou diest. First, thou thyself, with damsel and with dwarf, Shalt ride to Arthur's court, and coming there, Crave pardon for that insult done the Queen, And shalt abide her judgment on it; next, Thou shalt give back their earldom to thy kin. These two things shalt thou do, or thou shalt die.' And Edyrn answered, 'These things will I do, For I have never yet been overthrown, And thou hast overthrown me, and my pride Is broken down, for Enid sees my fall!' And rising up, he rode to Arthur's court, And there the Queen forgave him easily. And being young, he changed and came to loathe His crime of traitor, slowly drew himself Bright from his old dark life, and fell at last In the great battle fighting for the King. But when the third day from the hunting-morn Made a low splendour in the world, and wings 675 Moved in her ivy, Enid, for she lay With her fair head in the dim-yellow light, Among the dancing shadows of the birds, Woke and bethought her of her promise given No later than last eve to Prince Geraint-So bent he seemed on going the third day, He would not leave her, till her promise given-To ride with him this morning to the court, And there be made known to the stately Queen, And there be wedded with all ceremony. At this she cast her eyes upon her dress, And thought it never yet had looked so mean. For as a leaf in mid-November is To what it is in mid-October, seemed The dress that now she looked on to the dress She looked on ere the coming of Geraint. And still she looked, and still the terror grew Of that strange bright and dreadful thing, a court, All staring at her in her faded silk: And softly to her own sweet heart she said: 'This noble prince who won our earldom back, So splendid in his acts and his attire, Sweet heaven, how much I shall discredit him! Would he could tarry with us here awhile, But being so beholden to the Prince, It were but little grace in any of us, Bent as he seemed on going this third day, To seek a second favour at his hands. Yet if he could but tarry a day or two, Myself would work eye dim, and finger lame, Far liefer than so much discredit him.' And Enid fell in longing for a dress All branched and flowered with gold, a costly gift Of her good mother, given her on the night Before her birthday, three sad years ago, That night of fire, when Edyrn sacked their house, And scattered all they had to all the winds: For while the mother showed it, and the two Were turning and admiring it, the work To both appeared so costly, rose a cry 676 That Edyrn's men were on them, and they fled With little save the jewels they had on, Which being sold and sold had bought them bread: And Edyrn's men had caught them in their flight, And placed them in this ruin; and she wished The Prince had found her in her ancient home; Then let her fancy flit across the past, And roam the goodly places that she knew; And last bethought her how she used to watch, Near that old home, a pool of golden carp; And one was patched and blurred and lustreless Among his burnished brethren of the pool; And half asleep she made comparison Of that and these to her own faded self And the gay court, and fell asleep again; And dreamt herself was such a faded form Among her burnished sisters of the pool; But this was in the garden of a king; And though she lay dark in the pool, she knew That all was bright; that all about were birds Of sunny plume in gilded trellis-work; That all the turf was rich in plots that looked Each like a garnet or a turkis in it; And lords and ladies of the high court went In silver tissue talking things of state; And children of the King in cloth of gold Glanced at the doors or gamboled down the walks; And while she thought 'They will not see me,' came A stately queen whose name was Guinevere, And all the children in their cloth of gold Ran to her, crying, 'If we have fish at all Let them be gold; and charge the gardeners now To pick the faded creature from the pool, And cast it on the mixen that it die.' And therewithal one came and seized on her, And Enid started waking, with her heart All overshadowed by the foolish dream, And lo! it was her mother grasping her To get her well awake; and in her hand A suit of bright apparel, which she laid Flat on the couch, and spoke exultingly: 677 'See here, my child, how fresh the colours look, How fast they hold like colours of a shell That keeps the wear and polish of the wave. Why not? It never yet was worn, I trow: Look on it, child, and tell me if ye know it.' And Enid looked, but all confused at first, Could scarce divide it from her foolish dream: Then suddenly she knew it and rejoiced, And answered, 'Yea, I know it; your good gift, So sadly lost on that unhappy night; Your own good gift!' 'Yea, surely,' said the dame, 'And gladly given again this happy morn. For when the jousts were ended yesterday, Went Yniol through the town, and everywhere He found the sack and plunder of our house All scattered through the houses of the town; And gave command that all which once was ours Should now be ours again: and yester-eve, While ye were talking sweetly with your Prince, Came one with this and laid it in my hand, For love or fear, or seeking favour of us, Because we have our earldom back again. And yester-eve I would not tell you of it, But kept it for a sweet surprise at morn. Yea, truly is it not a sweet surprise? For I myself unwillingly have worn My faded suit, as you, my child, have yours, And howsoever patient, Yniol his. Ah, dear, he took me from a goodly house, With store of rich apparel, sumptuous fare, And page, and maid, and squire, and seneschal, And pastime both of hawk and hound, and all That appertains to noble maintenance. Yea, and he brought me to a goodly house; But since our fortune swerved from sun to shade, And all through that young traitor, cruel need Constrained us, but a better time has come; So clothe yourself in this, that better fits Our mended fortunes and a Prince's bride: For though ye won the prize of fairest fair, And though I heard him call you fairest fair, 678 Let never maiden think, however fair, She is not fairer in new clothes than old. And should some great court-lady say, the Prince Hath picked a ragged-robin from the hedge, And like a madman brought her to the court, Then were ye shamed, and, worse, might shame the Prince To whom we are beholden; but I know, That when my dear child is set forth at her best, That neither court nor country, though they sought Through all the provinces like those of old That lighted on Queen Esther, has her match.' Here ceased the kindly mother out of breath; And Enid listened brightening as she lay; Then, as the white and glittering star of morn Parts from a bank of snow, and by and by Slips into golden cloud, the maiden rose, And left her maiden couch, and robed herself, Helped by the mother's careful hand and eye, Without a mirror, in the gorgeous gown; Who, after, turned her daughter round, and said, She never yet had seen her half so fair; And called her like that maiden in the tale, Whom Gwydion made by glamour out of flowers And sweeter than the bride of Cassivelaun, Flur, for whose love the Roman Csar first Invaded Britain, 'But we beat him back, As this great Prince invaded us, and we, Not beat him back, but welcomed him with joy And I can scarcely ride with you to court, For old am I, and rough the ways and wild; But Yniol goes, and I full oft shall dream I see my princess as I see her now, Clothed with my gift, and gay among the gay.' But while the women thus rejoiced, Geraint Woke where he slept in the high hall, and called For Enid, and when Yniol made report Of that good mother making Enid gay In such apparel as might well beseem His princess, or indeed the stately Queen, He answered: 'Earl, entreat her by my love, 679 Albeit I give no reason but my wish, That she ride with me in her faded silk.' Yniol with that hard message went; it fell Like flaws in summer laying lusty corn: For Enid, all abashed she knew not why, Dared not to glance at her good mother's face, But silently, in all obedience, Her mother silent too, nor helping her, Laid from her limbs the costly-broidered gift, And robed them in her ancient suit again, And so descended. Never man rejoiced More than Geraint to greet her thus attired; And glancing all at once as keenly at her As careful robins eye the delver's toil, Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall, But rested with her sweet face satisfied; Then seeing cloud upon the mother's brow, Her by both hands she caught, and sweetly said, 'O my new mother, be not wroth or grieved At thy new son, for my petition to her. When late I left Caerleon, our great Queen, In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet, Made promise, that whatever bride I brought, Herself would clothe her like the sun in Heaven. Thereafter, when I reached this ruined hall, Beholding one so bright in dark estate, I vowed that could I gain her, our fair Queen, No hand but hers, should make your Enid burst Sunlike from cloud--and likewise thought perhaps, That service done so graciously would bind The two together; fain I would the two Should love each other: how can Enid find A nobler friend? Another thought was mine; I came among you here so suddenly, That though her gentle presence at the lists Might well have served for proof that I was loved, I doubted whether daughter's tenderness, Or easy nature, might not let itself Be moulded by your wishes for her weal; Or whether some false sense in her own self Of my contrasting brightness, overbore 680 Her fancy dwelling in this dusky hall; And such a sense might make her long for court And all its perilous glories: and I thought, That could I someway prove such force in her Linked with such love for me, that at a word (No reason given her) she could cast aside A splendour dear to women, new to her, And therefore dearer; or if not so new, Yet therefore tenfold dearer by the power Of intermitted usage; then I felt That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows, Fixt on her faith. Now, therefore, I do rest, A prophet certain of my prophecy, That never shadow of mistrust can cross Between us. Grant me pardon for my thoughts: And for my strange petition I will make Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day, When your fair child shall wear your costly gift Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees, Who knows? another gift of the high God, Which, maybe, shall have learned to lisp you thanks.' He spoke: the mother smiled, but half in tears, Then brought a mantle down and wrapt her in it, And claspt and kissed her, and they rode away. Now thrice that morning Guinevere had climbed The giant tower, from whose high crest, they say, Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset, And white sails flying on the yellow sea; But not to goodly hill or yellow sea Looked the fair Queen, but up the vale of Usk, By the flat meadow, till she saw them come; And then descending met them at the gates, Embraced her with all welcome as a friend, And did her honour as the Prince's bride, And clothed her for her bridals like the sun; And all that week was old Caerleon gay, For by the hands of Dubric, the high saint, They twain were wedded with all ceremony. And this was on the last year's Whitsuntide. 681 But Enid ever kept the faded silk, Remembering how first he came on her, Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it, And all her foolish fears about the dress, And all his journey toward her, as himself Had told her, and their coming to the court. And now this morning when he said to her, 'Put on your worst and meanest dress,' she found And took it, and arrayed herself therein. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,

710:Rose Mary Of her two fights with the Beryl-stone Lost the first, but the second won. PART I “MARY mine that art Mary's Rose Come in to me from the garden-close. The sun sinks fast with the rising dew, And we marked not how the faint moon grew; But the hidden stars are calling you. “Tall Rose Mary, come to my side, And read the stars if you'd be a bride. In hours whose need was not your own, While you were a young maid yet ungrown You've read the stars in the Beryl-stone. “Daughter, once more I bid you read; But now let it be for your own need: Because to-morrow, at break of day, To Holy Cross he rides on his way, Your knight Sir James of Heronhaye. “Ere he wed you, flower of mine, For a heavy shrift he seeks the shrine. Now hark to my words and do not fear; Ill news next I have for your ear; But be you strong, and our help is here. “On his road, as the rumour's rife, An ambush waits to take his life. He needs will go, and will go alone; Where the peril lurks may not be known; But in this glass all things are shown.” Pale Rose Mary sank to the floor:— “The night will come if the day is o'er!” “Nay, heaven takes counsel, star with star, And help shall reach your heart from afar: A bride you'll be, as a maid you are.” The lady unbound her jewelled zone And drew from her robe the Beryl-stone. Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,— World of our world, the sun's compeer, 219 That bears and buries the toiling year. With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon: Freaked it was as the bubble's ball, Rainbow-hued through a misty pall Like the middle light of the waterfall. Shadows dwelt in its teeming girth Of the known and unknown things of earth; The cloud above and the wave around,— The central fire at the sphere's heart bound, Like doomsday prisoned underground. A thousand years it lay in the sea With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly; Deep it lay 'mid the coiled sea-wrack, But the ocean-spirits found the track: A soul was lost to win it back. The lady upheld the wondrous thing:— “Ill fare”(she said) “with a fiend's-faring: But Moslem blood poured forth like wine Can hallow Hell, 'neath the Sacred Sign; And my lord brought this from Palestine. “Spirits who fear the Blessed Rood Drove forth the accursed multitude That heathen worship housed herein,— Never again such home to win, Save only by a Christian's sin. “All last night at an altar fair I burnt strange fires and strove with prayer; Till the flame paled to the red sunrise, All rites I then did solemnize; And the spell lacks nothing but your eyes.” Low spake maiden Rose Mary:— “O mother mine, if I should not see!” “Nay, daughter, cover your face no more, But bend love's heart to the hidden lore, And you shall see now as heretofore.” Paler yet were the pale cheeks grown As the grey eyes sought the Beryl-stone: Then over her mother's lap leaned she, And stretched her thrilled throat passionately, And sighed from her soul, and said, “I see.” Even as she spoke, they two were 'ware 220 Of music-notes that fell through the air; A chiming shower of strange device, Drop echoing drop, once, twice, and thrice, As rain may fall in Paradise. An instant come, in an instant gone, No time there was to think thereon. The mother held the sphere on her knee:— “Lean this way and speak low to me, And take no note but of what you see.” “I see a man with a besom grey That sweeps the flying dust away.” “Ay, that comes first in the mystic sphere; But now that the way is swept and clear, Heed well what next you look on there.” “Stretched aloft and adown I see Two roads that part in waste-country: The glen lies deep and the ridge stands tall; What's great below is above seen small, And the hill-side is the valley-wall.” “Stream-bank, daughter, or moor and moss, Both roads will take to Holy Cross. The hills are a weary waste to wage; But what of the valley-road's presage? That way must tend his pilgrimage.” “As 'twere the turning leaves of a book, The road runs past me as I look; Or it is even as though mine eye Should watch calm waters filled with sky While lights and clouds and wings went by.” “In every covert seek a spear; They'll scarce lie close till he draws near.” “The stream has spread to a river now; The stiff blue sedge is deep in the slough, But the banks are bare of shrub or bough.’ “Is there any roof that near at hand Might shelter yield to a hidden band?” “On the further bank I see but one, And a herdsman now in the sinking sun Unyokes his team at the threshold-stone.” “Keep heedful watch by the water's edge,— Some boat might lurk 'neath the shadowed sedge.” “One slid but now 'twixt the winding shores, 221 But a peasant woman bent to the oars And only a young child steered its course. “Mother, something flashed to my sight!— Nay, it is but the lapwing's flight.— What glints there like a lance that flees?— Nay, the flags are stirred in the breeze, And the water's bright through the dart-rushes. “Ah! vainly I search from side to side:— Woe's me! and where do the foemen hide? Woe's me! and perchance I pass them by, And under the new dawn's blood-red sky Even where I gaze the dead shall lie.” Said the mother: “For dear love's sake, Speak more low, lest the spell should break.” Said the daughter: “By love's control, My eyes, my words, are strained to the goal; But oh! the voice that cries in my soul!” “Hush, sweet, hush! be calm and behold.” “I see two floodgates broken and old: The grasses wave o'er the ruined weir, But the bridge still leads to the breakwater; And—mother, mother, O mother dear!” The damsel clung to her mother's knee, And dared not let the shriek go free; Low she crouched by the lady's chair, And shrank blindfold in her fallen hair, And whispering said, “The spears are there!” The lady stooped aghast from her place, And cleared the locks from her daughter's face. “More's to see, and she swoons, alas! Look, look again, ere the moment pass! One shadow comes but once to the glass. “See you there what you saw but now?” “I see eight men 'neath the willow bough. All over the weir a wild growth's spread: Ah me! it will hide a living head As well as the water hides the dead. “They lie by the broken water-gate As men who have a while to wait. The chief's high lance has a blazoned scroll,— He seems some lord of tithe and toll With seven squires to his bannerole. 222 “The little pennon quakes in the air, I cannot trace the blazon there:— Ah! now I can see the field of blue, The spurs and the merlins two and two;— It is the Warden of Holycleugh!” “God be thanked for the thing we know! You have named your good knight's mortal foe. Last Shrovetide in the tourney-game He sought his life by treasonous shame; And this way now doth he seek the same. “So, fair lord, such a thing you are! But we too watch till the morning star. Well, June is kind and the moon is clear: Saint Judas send you a merry cheer For the night you lie in Warisweir! “Now, sweet daughter, but one more sight, And you may lie soft and sleep to-night. We know in the vale what perils be: Now look once more in the glass, and see If over the hills the road lies free.” Rose Mary pressed to her mother's cheek, And almost smiled but did not speak; Then turned again to the saving spell, With eyes to search and with lips to tell The heart of things invisible. “Again the shape with the besom grey Comes back to sweep the clouds away. Again I stand where the roads divide; But now all's near on the steep hillside, And a thread far down is the rivertide.” “Ay, child, your road is o'er moor and moss, Past Holycleugh to Holy Cross. Our hunters lurk in the valley's wake, As they knew which way the chase would take: Yet search the hills for your true love's sake.” “Swift and swifter the waste runs by, And nought I see but the heath and the sky; No brake is there that could hide a spear, And the gaps to a horseman's sight lie clear; Still past it goes, and there's nought to fear.” “Fear no trap that you cannot see,— They'd not lurk yet too warily. 223 Below by the weir they lie in sight, And take no heed how they pass the night Till close they crouch with the morning light.” “The road shifts ever and brings in view Now first the heights of Holycleugh: Dark they stand o'er the vale below, And hide that heaven which yet shall show The thing their master's heart doth know. “Where the road looks to the castle steep, There are seven hill-clefts wide and deep: Six mine eyes can search as they list, But the seventh hollow is brimmed with mist: If aught were there, it might not be wist.” “Small hope, my girl, for a helm to hide In mists that cling to a wild moorside: Soon they melt with the wind and sun, And scarce would wait such deeds to be done God send their snares be the worst to shun.” “Still the road winds ever anew As it hastens on towards Holycleugh; And ever the great walls loom more near, Till the castle-shadow, steep and sheer, Drifts like a cloud, and the sky is clear.” “Enough, my daughter,” the mother said, And took to her breast the bending head; “Rest, poor head, with my heart below, While love still lulls you as long ago: For all is learnt that we need to know. “Long the miles and many the hours From the castle-height to the abbey-towers; But here the journey has no more dread; Too thick with life is the whole road spread For murder's trembling foot to tread.” She gazed on the Beryl-stone full fain Ere she wrapped it close in her robe again: The flickering shades were dusk and dun And the lights throbbed faint in unison Like a high heart when a race is run. As the globe slid to its silken gloom, Once more a music rained through the room; Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray, And sobbed like tears at the heart of May, 224 And died as laughter dies away. The lady held her breath for a space, And then she looked in her daughter's face: But wan Rose Mary had never heard; Deep asleep like a sheltered bird She lay with the long spell minister'd. “Ah! and yet I must leave you, dear, For what you have seen your knight must hear. Within four days, by the help of God, He comes back safe to his heart's abode: Be sure he shall shun the valley-road.” Rose Mary sank with a broken moan, And lay in the chair and slept alone, Weary, lifeless, heavy as lead: Long it was ere she raised her head And rose up all discomforted. She searched her brain for a vanished thing, And clasped her brows, remembering; Then knelt and lifted her eyes in awe, And sighed with a long sigh sweet to draw:— “Thank God, thank God, thank God I saw!” The lady had left her as she lay, To seek the Knight of Heronhaye. But first she clomb by a secret stair, And knelt at a carven altar fair, And laid the precious Beryl there. Its girth was graved with a mystic rune In a tongue long dead 'neath sun and moon: A priest of the Holy Sepulchre Read that writing and did not err; And her lord had told its sense to her. She breathed the words in an undertone:— “None sees here but the pure alone.” “And oh!” she said, “what rose may be In Mary's bower more pure to see Than my own sweet maiden Rose Mary?” BERYL-SONG We whose home is the Beryl, Fire-spirits of dread desire, 225 Who entered in By a secret sin, 'Gainst whom all powers that strive with ours are sterile,— We cry, Woe to thee, mother! What hast thou taught her, the girl thy daughter, That she and none other Should this dark morrow to her deadly sorrow imperil? What were her eyes But the fiend's own spies, O mother, And shall We not fee her, our proper prophet and seër? Go to her, mother, Even thou, yea thou and none other, Thou, from the Beryl: Her fee must thou take her, Her fee that We send, and make her, Even in this hour, her sin's unsheltered avower. Whose steed did neigh, Riderless, bridleless, At her gate before it was day? Lo! where doth hover The soul of her lover? She sealed his doom, she, she was the sworn approver,— Whose eyes were so wondrous wise, Yet blind, ah! blind to his peril! For stole not We in Through a love-linked sin, 'Gainst whom all powers at war with ours are sterile,— Fire-spirits of dread desire, We whose home is the Beryl? PART II “PALE Rose Mary, what shall be done With a rose that Mary weeps upon?” “Mother, let it fall from the tree, And never walk where the strewn leaves be Till winds have passed and the path is free.” “Sad Rose Mary, what shall be done With a cankered flower beneath the sun?” “Mother, let it wait for the night; 226 Be sure its shame shall be out of sight Ere the moon pale or the east grow light.” “Lost Rose Mary, what shall be done With a heart that is but a broken one?” “Mother, let it lie where it must; The blood was drained with the bitter thrust, And dust is all that sinks in the dust.” “Poor Rose Mary, what shall I do,— I, your mother, that lovèd you?” “O my mother, and is love gone? Then seek you another love anon: Who cares what shame shall lean upon?” Low drooped trembling Rose Mary, Then up as though in a dream stood she. “Come, my heart, it is time to go; This is the hour that has whispered low When thy pulse quailed in the nights we know. “Yet O my heart, thy shame has a mate Who will not leave thee desolate. Shame for shame, yea and sin for sin: Yet peace at length may our poor souls win If love for love be found therein. “O thou who seek'st our shrift to-day,” She cried, “O James of Heronhaye— Thy sin and mine was for love alone; And oh! in the sight of God 'tis known How the heart has since made heavy moan. “Three days yet!” she said to her heart; “But then he comes, and we will not part. God, God be thanked that I still could see! Oh! he shall come back assuredly, But where, alas! must he seek for me? “O my heart, what road shall we roam Till my wedding-music fetch me home? For love's shut from us and bides afar, And scorn leans over the bitter bar And knows us now for the thing we are.” Tall she stood with a cheek flushed high And a gaze to burn the heart-strings by. 'Twas the lightning-flash o'er sky and plain Ere labouring thunders heave the chain From the floodgates of the drowning rain. 227 The mother looked on the daughter still As on a hurt thing that's yet to kill. Then wildly at length the pent tears came; The love swelled high with the swollen shame, And their hearts' tempest burst on them. Closely locked, they clung without speech, And the mirrored souls shook each to each, As the cloud-moon and the water-moon Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon. They swayed together, shuddering sore, Till the mother's heart could bear no more. 'Twas death to feel her own breast shake Even to the very throb and ache Of the burdened heart she still must break. All her sobs ceased suddenly, And she sat straight up but scarce could see. “O daughter, where should my speech begin? Your heart held fast its secret sin: How think you, child, that I read therein?” “Ah me! but I thought not how it came When your words showed that you knew my shame: And now that you call me still your own, I half forget you have ever known. Did you read my heart in the Beryl-stone?” The lady answered her mournfully:— “The Beryl-stone has no voice for me: But when you charged its power to show The truth which none but the pure may know, Did naught speak once of a coming woe?” Her hand was close to her daughter's heart, And it felt the life-blood's sudden start: A quick deep breath did the damsel draw, Like the struck fawn in the oakenshaw: “O mother,” she cried, “but still I saw!” “O child, my child, why held you apart From my great love your hidden heart? Said I not that all sin must chase From the spell's sphere the spirits of grace, And yield their rule to the evil race? “Ah! would to God I had clearly told How strong those powers, accurst of old: 228 Their heart is the ruined house of lies; O girl, they can seal the sinful eyes, Or show the truth by contraries!” The daughter sat as cold as a stone, And spoke no word but gazed alone, Nor moved, though her mother strove a space To clasp her round in a close embrace, Because she dared not see her face. “Oh!” at last did the mother cry, “Be sure, as he loved you, so will I! Ah! still and dumb is the bride, I trow; But cold and stark as the winter snow Is the bridegroom's heart, laid dead below! “Daughter, daughter, remember you That cloud in the hills by Holycleugh? 'Twas a Hell-screen hiding truth away: There, not i' the vale, the ambush lay, And thence was the dead borne home to-day.” Deep the flood and heavy the shock When sea meets sea in the riven rock: But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea To the prisoned tide of doom set free In the breaking heart of Rose Mary. Once she sprang as the heifer springs With the wolf's teeth at its red heart-strings. First 'twas fire in her breast and brain, And then scarce hers but the whole world's pain, As she gave one shriek and sank again. In the hair dark-waved the face lay white As the moon lies in the lap of night; And as night through which no moon may dart Lies on a pool in the woods apart, So lay the swoon on the weary heart. The lady felt for the bosom's stir, And wildly kissed and called on her; Then turned away with a quick footfall, And slid the secret door in the wall, And clomb the strait stair's interval. There above in the altar-cell A little fountain rose and fell: She set a flask to the water's flow, And, backward hurrying, sprinkled now 229 The still cold breast and the pallid brow. Scarce cheek that warmed or breath on the air, Yet something told that life was there. “Ah! not with the heart the body dies!” The lady moaned in a bitter wise; Then wrung her hands and hid her eyes. “Alas! and how may I meet again In the same poor eyes the selfsame pain? What help can I seek, such grief to guide? Ah! one alone might avail,” she cried— “The priest who prays at the dead man's side.” The lady arose, and sped down all The winding stairs to the castle-hall. Long-known valley and wood and stream, As the loopholes passed, naught else did seem Than the torn threads of a broken dream. The hall was full of the castle-folk; The women wept, but the men scarce spoke. As the lady crossed the rush-strewn floor, The throng fell backward, murmuring sore, And pressed outside round the open door. A stranger shadow hung on the hall Than the dark pomp of a funeral. 'Mid common sights that were there alway, As 'twere a chance of the passing day, On the ingle-bench the dead man lay. A priest who passed by Holycleugh The tidings brought when the day was new. He guided them who had fetched the dead; And since that hour, unwearièd, He knelt in prayer at the low bier's head. Word had gone to his own domain That in evil wise the knight was slain: Soon the spears must gather apace And the hunt be hard on the hunters' trace; But all things yet lay still for a space. As the lady's hurried step drew near, The kneeling priest looked up to her. “Father, death is a grievous thing; But oh! the woe has a sharper sting That craves by me your ministering. “Alas for the child that should have wed 230 This noble knight here lying dead! Dead in hope, with all blessed boon Of love thus rent from her heart ere noon, I left her laid in a heavy swoon. “O haste to the open bower-chamber That's topmost as you mount the stair: Seek her, father, ere yet she wake; Your words, not mine, be the first to slake This poor heart's fire, for Christ's sweet sake! “God speed!” she said as the priest passed through, “And I ere long will be with you.” Then low on the hearth her knees sank prone; She signed all folk from the threshold-stone, And gazed in the dead man's face alone. The fight for life found record yet In the clenched lips and the teeth hard-set; The wrath from the bent brow was not gone, And stark in the eyes the hate still shone Of that they last had looked upon. The blazoned coat was rent on his breast Where the golden field was goodliest; But the shivered sword, close-gripped, could tell That the blood shed round him where he fell Was not all his in the distant dell. The lady recked of the corpse no whit, But saw the soul and spoke to it: A light there was in her steadfast eyes,— The fire of mortal tears and sighs That pity and love immortalize. “By thy death have I learnt to-day Thy deed, O James of Heronhaye! Great wrong thou hast done to me and mine; And haply God hath wrought for a sign By our blind deed this doom of thine. “Thy shrift, alas! thou wast not to win; But may death shrive thy soul herein! Full well do I know thy love should be Even yet—had life but stayed with thee— Our honour's strong security.” She stooped, and said with a sob's low stir,— “Peace be thine,—but what peace for her?” But ere to the brow her lips were press'd, 231 She marked, half-hid in the riven vest, A packet close to the dead man's breast. 'Neath surcoat pierced and broken mail It lay on the blood-stained bosom pale. The clot hung round it, dull and dense, And a faintness seized her mortal sense As she reached her hand and drew it thence. 'Twas steeped in the heart's flood welling high From the heart it there had rested by: 'Twas glued to a broidered fragment gay,— A shred by spear-thrust rent away From the heron-wings of Heronhaye. She gazed on the thing with piteous eyne:— “Alas, poor child, some pledge of thine! Ah me! in this troth the hearts were twain, And one hath ebbed to this crimson stain, And when shall the other throb again?” She opened the packet heedfully; The blood was stiff, and it scarce might be. She found but a folded paper there, And round it, twined with tenderest care, A long bright tress of golden hair. Even as she looked, she saw again That dark-haired face in its swoon of pain: It seemed a snake with a golden sheath Crept near, as a slow flame flickereth, And stung her daughter's heart to death. She loosed the tress, but her hand did shake As though indeed she had touched a snake; And next she undid the paper's fold, But that too trembled in her hold, And the sense scarce grasped the tale it told. “My heart's sweet lord,” ('twas thus she read,) “At length our love is garlanded. At Holy Cross, within eight days' space, I seek my shrift; and the time and place Shall fit thee too for thy soul's good grace. “From Holycleugh on the seventh day My brother rides, and bides away: And long or e'er he is back, mine own, Afar where the face of fear's unknown We shall be safe with our love alone. 232 “Ere yet at the shrine my knees I bow, I shear one tress for our holy vow. As round these words these threads I wind, So, eight days hence, shall our loves be twined, Says my lord's poor lady, JOCELIND.” She read it twice, with a brain in thrall, And then its echo told her all. O'er brows low-fall'n her hands she drew:— “O God!” she said, as her hands fell too,— “The Warden's sister of Holycleugh!” She rose upright with a long low moan, And stared in the dead man's face new-known. Had it lived indeed? She scarce could tell: 'Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,— A mask that hung on the gate of Hell. She lifted the lock of gleaming hair And smote the lips and left it there. “Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll! Full well hath thy treason found its goal, O thou dead body and damnèd soul!” She turned, sore dazed, for a voice was near, And she knew that some one called to her. On many a column fair and tall A high court ran round the castle-hall; And thence it was that the priest did call. “I sought your child where you bade me go, And in rooms around and rooms below; But where, alas! may the maiden be? Fear nought,—we shall find her speedily,— But come, come hither, and seek with me.” She reached the stair like a lifelorn thing, But hastened upward murmuring, “Yea, Death's is a face that's fell to see; But bitterer pang Life hoards for thee, Thou broken heart of Rose Mary!” BERYL-SONG We whose throne is the Beryl, Dire-gifted spirits of fire, Who for a twin 233 Leash Sorrow to Sin, Who on no flower refrain to lour with peril,— We cry,—O desolate daughter! Thou and thy mother share newer shame with each other Than last night's slaughter. Awake and tremble, for our curses assemble! What more, that thou know'st not yet,— That life nor death shall forget? No help from Heaven,—thy woes heart-riven are sterile! O once a maiden, With yet worse sorrow can any morrow be laden? It waits for thee, It looms, it must be, O lost among women,— It comes and thou canst not flee. Amen to the omen, Says the voice of the Beryl. Thou sleep'st? Awake,— What dar'st thou yet for his sake, Who each for other did God's own Future imperil? Dost dare to live `Mid the pangs each hour must give? Nay, rather die,— With him thy lover 'neath Hell's cloud-cover to fly,— Hopeless, yet not apart, Cling heart to heart, And beat through the nether storm-eddying winds together? Shall this be so? There thou shalt meet him, but mayst thou greet him? ah no ! He loves, but thee he hoped nevermore to see,— He sighed as he died, But with never a thought for thee. Alone! Alone, for ever alone,— Whose eyes were such wondrous spies for the fate foreshown! Lo! have not We leashed the twin Of endless Sorrow to Sin,— Who on no flower refrain to lour with peril,— Dire-gifted spirits of fire, We whose throne is the Beryl? 234 PART III A SWOON that breaks is the whelming wave When help comes late but still can save. With all blind throes is the instant rife,— Hurtling clangour and clouds at strife,— The breath of death, but the kiss of life. The night lay deep on Rose Mary's heart, For her swoon was death's kind counterpart: The dawn broke dim on Rose Mary's soul,— No hill-crown's heavenly aureole, But a wild gleam on a shaken shoal. Her senses gasped in the sudden air, And she looked around, but none was there. She felt the slackening frost distil Through her blood the last ooze dull and chill: Her lids were dry and her lips were still. Her tears had flooded her heart again; As after a long day's bitter rain, At dusk when the wet flower-cups shrink, The drops run in from the beaded brink, And all the close-shut petals drink. Again her sighs on her heart were rolled; As the wind that long has swept the wold,— Whose moan was made with the moaning sea,— Beats out its breath in the last torn tree, And sinks at length in lethargy. She knew she had waded bosom-deep Along death's bank in the sedge of sleep: All else was lost to her clouded mind; Nor, looking back, could she see defin'd O'er the dim dumb waste what lay behind. Slowly fades the sun from the wall Till day lies dead on the sun-dial: And now in Rose Mary's lifted eye 'Twas shadow alone that made reply To the set face of the soul's dark sky. Yet still through her soul there wandered past Dread phantoms borne on a wailing blast,— Death and sorrow and sin and shame; And, murmured still, to her lips there came Her mother's and her lover's name. 235 How to ask, and what thing to know? She might not stay and she dared not go. From fires unseen these smoke-clouds curled; But where did the hidden curse lie furled? And how to seek through the weary world? With toiling breath she rose from the floor And dragged her steps to an open door: 'Twas the secret panel standing wide, As the lady's hand had let it bide In hastening back to her daughter's side. She passed, but reeled with a dizzy brain And smote the door which closed again. She stood within by the darkling stair, But her feet might mount more freely there,— 'Twas the open light most blinded her. Within her mind no wonder grew At the secret path she never knew: All ways alike were strange to her now,— One field bare-ridged from the spirit's plough, One thicket black with the cypress-bough. Once she thought that she heard her name; And she paused, but knew not whence it came. Down the shadowed stair a faint ray fell That guided the weary footsteps well Till it led her up to the altar-cell. No change there was on Rose Mary's face As she leaned in the portal's narrow space: Still she stood by the pillar's stem, Hand and bosom and garment's hem, As the soul stands by at the requiem. The altar-cell was a dome low-lit, And a veil hung in the midst of it: At the pole-points of its circling girth Four symbols stood of the world's first birth,— Air and water and fire and earth. To the north, a fountain glittered free; To the south, there glowed a red fruit-tree; To the east, a lamp flamed high and fair; To the west, a crystal casket rare Held fast a cloud of the fields of air. The painted walls were a mystic show Of time's ebb-tide and overflow; 236 His hoards long-locked and conquering key, His service-fires that in heaven be, And earth-wheels whirled perpetually. Rose Mary gazed from the open door As on idle things she cared not for,— The fleeting shapes of an empty tale; Then stepped with a heedless visage pale, And lifted aside the altar-veil. The altar stood from its curved recess In a coiling serpent's life-likeness: Even such a serpent evermore Lies deep asleep at the world's dark core Till the last Voice shake the sea and shore. From the altar-cloth a book rose spread And tapers burned at the altar-head; And there in the altar-midst alone, 'Twixt wings of a sculptured beast unknown, Rose Mary saw the Beryl-stone. Firm it sat 'twixt the hollowed wings, As an orb sits in the hand of kings: And lo! for that Foe whose curse far-flown Had bound her life with a burning zone, Rose Mary knew the Beryl-stone. Dread is the meteor's blazing sphere When the poles throb to its blind career; But not with a light more grim and ghast Thereby is the future doom forecast, Than now this sight brought back the past. The hours and minutes seemed to whirr In a clanging swarm that deafened her; They stung her heart to a writhing flame, And marshalled past in its glare they came,— Death and sorrow and sin and shame. Round the Beryl's sphere she saw them pass And mock her eyes from the fated glass: One by one in a fiery train The dead hours seemed to wax and wane, And burned till all was known again. From the drained heart's fount there rose no cry, There sprang no tears, for the source was dry. Held in the hand of some heavy law, Her eyes she might not once withdraw, 237 Nor shrink away from the thing she saw. Even as she gazed, through all her blood The flame was quenched in a coming flood: Out of the depth of the hollow gloom On her soul's bare sands she felt it boom,— The measured tide of a sea of doom. Three steps she took through the altar-gate, And her neck reared and her arms grew straight: The sinews clenched like a serpent's throe, And the face was white in the dark hair's flow, As her hate beheld what lay below. Dumb she stood in her malisons,— A silver statue tressed with bronze: As the fabled head by Perseus mown, It seemed in sooth that her gaze alone Had turned the carven shapes to stone. O'er the altar-sides on either hand There hung a dinted helm and brand: By strength thereof, 'neath the Sacred Sign, That bitter gift o'er the salt sea-brine Her father brought from Palestine. Rose Mary moved with a stern accord And reached her hand to her father's sword; Nor did she stir her gaze one whit From the thing whereon her brows were knit; But gazing still, she spoke to it. “O ye, three times accurst,” she said, “By whom this stone is tenanted! Lo! here ye came by a strong sin's might; Yet a sinner's hand that's weak to smite Shall send you hence ere the day be night. “This hour a clear voice bade me know My hand shall work your overthrow: Another thing in mine ear it spake,— With the broken spell my life shall break. I thank Thee, God, for the dear death's sake! “And he Thy heavenly minister Who swayed erewhile this spell-bound sphere,— My parting soul let him haste to greet, And none but he be guide for my feet To where Thy rest is made complete.” Then deep she breathed, with a tender moan:— 238 “My love, my lord, my only one! Even as I held the cursed clue, When thee, through me, these foul ones slew,— By mine own deed shall they slay me too! “Even while they speed to Hell, my love, Two hearts shall meet in Heaven above. Our shrift thou sought'st, but might'st not bring: And oh! for me 'tis a blessed thing To work hereby our ransoming. “One were our hearts in joy and pain, And our souls e'en now grow one again. And O my love, if our souls are three, O thine and mine shall the third soul be,— One threefold love eternally.” Her eyes were soft as she spoke apart, And the lips smiled to the broken heart: But the glance was dark and the forehead scored With the bitter frown of hate restored, As her two hands swung the heavy sword. Three steps back from her Foe she trod:— “Love, for thy sake! In Thy Name, O God!” In the fair white hands small strength was shown; Yet the blade flashed high and the edge fell prone, And she cleft the heart of the Beryl-stone. What living flesh in the thunder-cloud Hath sat and felt heaven cry aloud? Or known how the levin's pulse may beat? Or wrapped the hour when the whirlwinds meet About its breast for a winding-sheet? Who hath crouched at the world's deep heart While the earthquake rends its loins apart? Or walked far under the seething main While overhead the heavens ordain The tempest-towers of the hurricane? Who hath seen or what ear hath heard The secret things unregister'd Of the place where all is past and done, And tears and laughter sound as one In Hell's unhallowed unison? Nay, is it writ how the fiends despair In earth and water and fire and air? Even so no mortal tongue may tell 239 How to the clang of the sword that fell The echoes shook the altar-cell. When all was still on the air again The Beryl-stone lay cleft in twain; The veil was rent from the riven dome; And every wind that's winged to roam Might have the ruined place for home. The fountain no more glittered free; The fruit hung dead on the leafless tree; The flame of the lamp had ceased to flare; And the crystal casket shattered there Was emptied now of its cloud of air. And lo! on the ground Rose Mary lay, With a cold brow like the snows ere May, With a cold breast like the earth till Spring, With such a smile as the June days bring When the year grows warm with harvesting. The death she had won might leave no trace On the soft sweet form and gentle face: In a gracious sleep she seemed to lie; And over her head her hand on high Held fast the sword she triumphed by. 'Twas then a clear voice said in the room:— “Behold the end of the heavy doom. O come,—for thy bitter love's sake blest; By a sweet path now thou journeyest, And I will lead thee to thy rest. “Me thy sin by Heaven's sore ban Did chase erewhile from the talisman: But to my heart, as a conquered home, In glory of strength thy footsteps come Who hast thus cast forth my foes therefrom. “Already thy heart remembereth No more his name thou sought'st in death: For under all deeps, all heights above,— So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,— Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love. “Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer To blessed Mary's rose-bower: Warmed and lit is thy place afar With guerdon-fires of the sweet Love-star Where hearts of steadfast lovers are:— 240 “Though naught for the poor corpse lying here Remain to-day but the cold white bier, But burial-chaunt and bended knee, But sighs and tears that heaviest be, But rent rose-flower and rosemary.” BERYL-SONG We, cast forth from the Beryl, Gyre-circling spirits of fire, Whose pangs begin With God's grace to sin, For whose spent powers the immortal hours are sterile,— Woe! must We behold this mother Find grace in her dead child's face, and doubt of none other But that perfect pardon, alas! hath assured her guerdon? Woe! must We behold this daughter, Made clean from the soil of sin wherewith We had fraught her, Shake off a man's blood like water? Write up her story On the Gate of Heaven's glory, Whom there We behold so fair in shining apparel, And beneath her the ruin Of our own undoing! Alas, the Beryl! We had for a foeman But one weak woman; In one day's strife, Her hope fell dead from her life; And yet no iron, Her soul to environ, Could this manslayer, this false soothsayer imperil! Lo, where she bows In the Holy House! Who now shall dissever her soul from its joy for ever While every ditty Of love and plentiful pity Fills the White City, And the floor of Heaven to her feet for ever is given? Hark, a voice cries “Flee!” Woe! woe! what shelter have We, 241 Whose pangs begin With God's grace to sin, For whose spent powers the immortal hours are sterile, Gyre-circling spirits of fire, We, cast forth from the Beryl? ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

711:I. You're my friend: I was the man the Duke spoke to; I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too; So here's the tale from beginning to end, My friend! II. Ours is a great wild country: If you climb to our castle's top, I don't see where your eye can stop; For when you've passed the cornfield country, Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed, And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract, And cattle-tract to open-chase, And open-chase to the very base Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace, Round about, solemn and slow, One by one, row after row, Up and up the pine-trees go, So, like black priests up, and so Down the other side again To another greater, wilder country, That's one vast red drear burnt-up plain, Branched through and through with many a vein Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt; Look right, look left, look straight before,- Beneath they mine, above they smelt, Copper-ore and iron-ore, And forge and furnace mould and melt, And so on, more and ever more, Till at the last, for a bounding belt, Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore, -And the whole is our Duke's country. III. I was born the day this present Duke was- (And O, says the song, ere I was old!) In the castle where the other Duke was- (When I was happy and young, not old!) I in the kennel, he in the bower: We are of like age to an hour. My father was huntsman in that day; Who has not heard my father say That, when a boar was brought to bay, Three times, four times out of five, With his huntspear he'd contrive To get the killing-place transfixed, And pin him true, both eyes betwixt? And that's why the old Duke would rather He lost a salt-pit than my father, And loved to have him ever in call; That's why my father stood in the hall When the old Duke brought his infant out To show the people, and while they passed The wondrous bantling round about, Was first to start at the outside blast As the Kaiser's courier blew his horn Just a month after the babe was born. ``And,'' quoth the Kaiser's courier, ``since ``The Duke has got an heir, our Prince ``Needs the Duke's self at his side: '' The Duke looked down and seemed to wince, But he thought of wars o'er the world wide, Castles a-fire, men on their march, The toppling tower, the crashing arch; And up he looked, and awhile he eyed The row of crests and shields and banners Of all achievements after all manners, And ``ay,'' said the Duke with a surly pride. The more was his comfort when he died At next year's end, in a velvet suit, With a gilt glove on his hand, his foot In a silken shoe for a leather boot, Petticoated like a herald, In a chamher next to an ante-room, Where he breathed the breath of page and groom, What he called stink, and they, perfume: -They should have set him on red Berold Mad with pride, like fire to manage! They should have got his cheek fresh tannage Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine! Had they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin! (Hark, the wind's on the heath at its game! Oh for a noble falcon-lanner To flap each broad wing like a banner, And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!) Had they broached a white-beer cask from Berlin -Or if you incline to prescribe mere wine Put to his lips, when they saw him pine, A cup of our own Moldavia fine, Cotnar for instance, green as May sorrel And ropy with sweet,-we shall not quarrel. IV. So, at home, the sick tall yellow Duchess Was left with the infant in her clutches, She being the daughter of God knows who: And now was the time to revisit her tribe. Abroad and afar they went, the two, And let our people rail and gibe At the empty hall and extinguished fire, As loud as we liked, but ever in vain, Till after long years we had our desire, And back came the Duke and his mother again. V. And he came back the pertest little ape That ever affronted human shape; Full of his travel, struck at himself. You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways? -Not he! For in Paris they told the elf Our rough North land was the Land of Lays, The one good thing left in evil days; Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time, And only in wild nooks like ours Could you taste of it yet as in its prime, And see true castles, with proper towers, Young-hearted women, old-minded men, And manners now as manners were then. So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it, This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; 'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it, Nor for the pride's self, but the pride of our seeing it, He revived all usages thoroughly worn-out, The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out: And chief in the chase his neck he perilled On a lathy horse, all legs and length, With blood for bone, all speed, no strength; -They should have set him on red Berold With the red eye slow consuming in fire, And the thin stiff ear like an abbey-spire! VI. Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard: And out of a convent, at the word, Came the lady, in time of spring. -Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling! That day, I know, with a dozen oaths I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes Fit for the chase of urochs or buffle In winter-time when you need to muffle. But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure, And so we saw the lady arrive: My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger! She was the smallest lady alive, Made in a piece of nature's madness, Too small, almost, for the life and gladness That over-filled her, as some hive Out of the bears' reach on the high trees Is crowded with its safe merry bees: In truth, she was not hard to please! Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead, Straight at the castle, that's best indeed To look at from outside the walls: As for us, styled the ``serfs and thralls,'' She as much thanked me as if she had said it, (With her eyes, do you understand?) Because I patted her horse while I led it; And Max, who rode on her other hand, Said, no bird flew past but she inquired What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired- If that was an eagle she saw hover, And the green and grey bird on the field was the plover. When suddenly appeared the Duke: And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed On to my hand,-as with a rebuke, And as if his backbone were not jointed, The Duke stepped rather aside than forward, And welcomed her with his grandest smile; And, mind you, his mother all the while Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor'ward; And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis; And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies, The lady's face stopped its play, As if her first hair had grown grey; For such things must begin some one day. VII. In a day or two she was well again; As who should say, ``You labour in vain! ``This is all a jest against God, who meant ``I should ever be, as I am, content `` And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be.'' So, smiling as at first went she. VIII. She was active, stirring, all fire- Could not rest, could not tire- To a stone she might have given life! (I myself loved once, in my day) -For a shepherd's, miner's, huntsman's wife, (I had a wife, I know what I say) Never in all the world such an one! And here was plenty to be done, And she that could do it, great or small, She was to do nothing at all. There was already this man in his post, This in his station, and that in his office, And the Duke's plan admitted a wife, at most, To meet his eye, with the other trophies, Now outside the hall, now in it, To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen, At the proper place in the proper minute, And die away the life between. And it was amusing enough, each infraction Of rule-(but for after-sadness that came) To hear the consummate self-satisfaction With which the young Duke and the old dame Would let her advise, and criticise, And, being a fool, instruct the wise, And, child-like, parcel out praise or blame: They bore it all in complacent guise, As though an artificer, after contriving A wheel-work image as if it were living, Should find with delight it could motion to strike him! So found the Duke, and his mother like him: The lady hardly got a rebuff- That had not been contemptuous enough, With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause, And kept off the old mother-cat's claws. IX. So, the little lady grew silent and thin, Paling and ever paling, As the way is with a hid chagrin; And the Duke perceived that she was ailing, And said in his heart, ``'Tis done to spite me, ``But I shall find in my power to right me!'' Don't swear, friend! The old one, many a year, Is in hell, and the Duke's self . . . you shall hear. X. Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning, When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning, A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice, Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold, And another and another, and faster and faster, Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled: Then it so chanced that the Duke our master Asked himself what were the pleasures in season, And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty, He should do the Middle Age no treason In resolving on a hunting-party. Always provided, old books showed the way of it! What meant old poets by their strictures? And when old poets had said their say of it, How taught old painters in their pictures? We must revert to the proper channels, Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels, And gather up woodcraft's authentic traditions: Here was food for our various ambitions, As on each case, exactly stated- To encourage your dog, now, the properest chirrup, Or best prayer to Saint Hubert on mounting your stirrup- We of the house hold took thought and debated. Blessed was he whose back ached with the jerkin His sire was wont to do forest-work in; Blesseder he who nobly sunk ``ohs'' And ``ahs'' while he tugged on his grand-sire's trunk-hose; What signified hats if they had no rims on, Each slouching before and behind like the scallop, And able to serve at sea for a shallop, Loaded with lacquer and looped with crimson? So that the deer now, to make a short rhyme on't, What with our Venerers, Prickers and Yerderers, Might hope for real hunters at length and not murderers, And oh the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't! XI. Now you must know that when the first dizziness Of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots subsided, The Duke put this question, ``The Duke's part provided, ``Had not the Duchess some share in the business?'' For out of the mouth of two or three witnesses Did he establish all fit-or-unfitnesses: And, after much laying of heads together, Somebody's cap got a notable feather By the announcement with proper unction That he had discovered the lady's function; Since ancient authors gave this tenet, ``When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege, ``Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet, ``And, with water to wash the hands of her liege ``In a clean ewer with a fair toweling, `` Let her preside at the disemboweling.'' Now, my friend, if you had so little religion As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner, And thrust her broad wings like a banner Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon; And if day by day and week by week You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes, And clipped her wings, and tied her beak, Would it cause you any great surprise If, when you decided to give her an airing, You found she needed a little preparing? -I say, should you be such a curmudgeon, If she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon? Yet when the Duke to his lady signified, Just a day before, as he judged most dignified, In what a pleasure she was to participate,- And, instead of leaping wide in flashes, Her eyes just lifted their long lashes, As if pressed by fatigue even he could not dissipate, And duly acknowledged the Duke's forethought, But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught, Of the weight by day and the watch by night, And much wrong now that used to be right, So, thanking him, declined the hunting,- Was conduct ever more affronting? With all the ceremony settled- With the towel ready, and the sewer Polishing up his oldest ewer, And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald, Black-barred, cream-coated and pink eye-balled,- No wonder if the Duke was nettled And when she persisted nevertheless,- Well, I suppose here's the time to confess That there ran half round our lady's chamber A balcony none of the hardest to clamber; And that Jacynth the tire-woman, ready in waiting, Stayed in call outside, what need of relating? And since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, a fervent Adorer of Jacynth of course was your servant; And if she had the habit to peep through the casement, How could I keep at any vast distance? And so, as I say, on the lady's persistence, The Duke, dumb-stricken with amazement, Stood for a while in a sultry smother, And then, with a smile that partook of the awful, Turned her over to his yellow mother To learn what was held decorous and lawful; And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct, As her cheek quick whitened thro' all its quince-tinct. Oh, but the lady heard the whole truth at once! What meant she?Who was she?-Her duty and station, The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once, Its decent regard and its fitting relation- In brief, my friend, set all the devils in hell free And turn them out to carouse in a belfry And treat the priests to a fifty-part canon, And then you may guess how that tongue of hers ran on! Well, somehow or other it ended at last And, licking her whiskers, out she passed; And after her,-making (he hoped) a face Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin, Stalked the Duke's self with the austere grace Of ancient hero or modern paladin, From door to staircase-oh such a solemn Unbending of the vertebral column! XII. However, at sunrise our company mustered; And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel, And there 'neath his bonnet the pricker blustered, With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel; For the court-yard walls were filled with fog You might have cut as an axe chops a log- Like so much wool for colour and bulkiness; And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness, Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily, And a sinking at the lower abdomen Begins the day with indifferent omen. And lo, as he looked around uneasily, The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder This way and that from the valley under; And, looking through the court-yard arch, Down in the valley, what should meet him But a troop of Gipsies on their march? No doubt with the annual gifts to greet him. XIII. Now, in your land, Gipsies reach you, only After reaching all lands beside; North they go, South they go, trooping or lonely, And still, as they travel far and wide, Catch they and keep now a trace here, trace there, That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there. But with us, I believe they rise out of the ground, And nowhere else, I take it, are found With the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned: Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on The very fruit they are meant to feed on. For the earth-not a use to which they don't turn it, The ore that grows in the mountain's womb, Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb, They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it- Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle With side-bars never a brute can baffle; Or a lock that's a puzzle of wards within wards; Or, if your colt's fore-foot inclines to curve inwards, Horseshoes they hammer which turn on a swivel And won't allow the hoof to shrivel. Then they cast bells like the shell of the winkle That keep a stout heart in the ram with their tinkle; But the sand-they pinch and pound it like otters; Commend me to Gipsy glass-makers and potters! Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear, Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear, As if in pure water you dropped and let die A bruised black-blooded mulberry; And that other sort, their crowning pride, With long white threads distinct inside, Like the lake-flower's fibrous roots which dangle Loose such a length and never tangle, Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters, And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters: Such are the works they put their hand to, The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to. And these made the troop, which our Duke saw sally Toward his castle from out of the valley, Men and women, like new-hatched spiders, Come out with the morning to greet our riders. And up they wound till they reached the ditch, Whereat all stopped save one, a witch That I knew, as she hobbled from the group, By her gait directly and her stoop, I, whom Jacynth was used to importune To let that same witch tell us our fortune. The oldest Gipsy then above ground; And, sure as the autumn season came round, She paid us a visit for profit or pastime, And every time, as she swore, for the last time. And presently she was seen to sidle Up to the Duke till she touched his bridle, So that the horse of a sudden reared up As under its nose the old witch peered up With her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes Of no use now but to gather brine, And began a kind of level whine Such as they used to sing to their viols When their ditties they go grinding Up and down with nobody minding: And then, as of old, at the end of the humming Her usual presents were forthcoming -A dog-whistle blowing the fiercest of trebles, (Just a sea-shore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles,) Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end,- And so she awaited her annual stipend. But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe A word in reply; and in vain she felt With twitching fingers at her belt For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt, Ready to ptlt what he gave in her pouch safe,- Till, either to quicken his apprehension, Or possibly with an after-intention, She was come, she said, to pay her duty To the new Duchess, the youthful beauty. No sooner had she named his lady, Than a shine lit up the face so shady, And its smirk returned with a novel meaning- For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning; If one gave her a taste of what life was and sorrow, She, foolish to-day, would be wiser tomorrow; And who so fit a teacher of trouble As this sordid crone bent well-nigh double? So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture, (If such it was, for they grow so hirsute That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit) He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture, The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate With the loathsome squalor of this helicat. I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned From out of the throng, and while I drew near He told the crone-as I since have reckoned By the way he bent and spoke into her ear With circumspection and mystery- The main of the lady's history, Her frowardness and ingratitude: And for all the crone's submissive attitude I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening, And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening, As though she engaged with hearty good-will Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil, And promised the lady a thorough frightening. And so, just giving her a glimpse Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw, He bade me take the Gipsy mother And set her telling some story or other Of hill or dale, oak-wood or fernshaw, To wile away a weary hour For the lady left alone in her bower, Whose mind and body craved exertion And yet shrank from all better diversion. XIV. Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter, Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor, And back I turned and bade the crone follow. And what makes me confident what's to be told you Had all along been of this crone's devising, Is, that, on looking round sharply, behold you, There was a novelty quick as surprising: For first, she had shot up a full head in stature, And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered, As if age had foregone its usurpature, And the ignoble mien was wholly altered, And the face looked quite of another nature, And the change reached too, whatever the change meant, Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement: For where its tatters hung loose like sedges, Gold coins were glittering on the edges, Like the band-roll strung with tomans Which proves the veil a Persian woman's. And under her brow, like a snail's horns newly Come out as after the rain he paces, Two unmistakeable eye-points duly Live and aware looked out of their places. So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry Of the lady's chamber standing sentry; I told the command and produced my companion, And Jacynth rejoiced to admit any one, For since last night, by the same token, Not a single word had the lady spoken: They went in both to the presence together, While I in the balcony watched the weather. XV. And now, what took place at the very first of all, I cannot tell, as I never could learn it: Jacynth constantly wished a curse to fall On that little head of hers and burn it If she knew how she came to drop so soundly Asleep of a sudden and there continue The whole time sleeping as profoundly As one of the boars my father would pin you 'Twixt the eyes where life holds garrison, -Jacynth forgive me the comparison! But where I begin asy own narration Is a little after I took my station To breathe the fresh air from the balcony, And, having in those days a falcon eye, To follow the hunt thro' the open country, From where the bushes thinlier crested The hillocks, to a plain where's not one tree. When, in a moment, my ear was arrested By-was it singing, or was it saying, Or a strange musical instrument playing In the chamber?-and to be certain I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain, And there lay Jacynth asleep, Yet as if a watch she tried to keep, In a rosy sleep along the floor With her head against the door; While in the midst, on the seat of state, Was a queen-the Gipsy woman late, With head and face downbent On the lady's head and face intent: For, coiled at her feet like a child at ease, The lady sat between her knees And o'er them the lady's clasped hands met, And on those hands her chin was set, And her upturned face met the face of the crone Wherein the eyes had grown and grown As if she could double and quadruple At pleasure the play of either pupil -Very like, by her hands' slow fanning, As up and down like a gor-crow's flappers They moved to measure, or bell-clappers. I said ``Is it blessing, is it banning, ``Do they applaud you or burlesque you- ``Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?'' But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue, At once I was stopped by the lady's expression: For it was life her eyes were drinking From the crone's wide pair above unwinking, -Life's pure fire received without shrinking, Into the heart and breast whose heaving Told you no single drop they were leaving, -Life, that filling her, passed redundant Into her very hair, back swerving Over each shoulder, loose and abundant, As her head thrown back showed the white throat curving; And the very tresses shared in the pleasure, Moving to the mystic measure, Bounding as the bosom bounded. I stopped short, more and more confounded, As still her cheeks burned and eyes glistened, As she listened and she listened: When all at once a hand detained me, The selfsame contagion gained me, And I kept time to the wondrous chime, Making out words and prose and rhyme, Till it seemed that the music furled Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped From under the words it first had propped, And left them midway in the world: Word took word as hand takes hand, I could hear at last, and understand, And when I held the unbroken thread, The Gipsy said:- ``And so at last we find my tribe. ``And so I set thee in the midst, ``And to one and all of them describe ``What thou saidst and what thou didst, ``Our long and terrible journey through, ``And all thou art ready to say and do ``In the trials that remain: ``I trace them the vein and the other vein ``That meet on thy brow and part again, ``Making our rapid mystic mark; ``And I bid my people prove and probe ``Each eye's profound and glorious globe ``Till they detect the kindred spark ``In those depths so dear and dark, ``Like the spots that snap and burst and flee, ``Circling over the midnight sea. ``And on that round young cheek of thine ``I make them recognize the tinge, ``As when of the costly scarlet wine ``They drip so much as will impinge ``And spread in a thinnest scale afloat ``One thick gold drop from the olive's coat ``Over a silver plate whose sheen ``Still thro' the mixture shall be seen. ``For so I prove thee, to one and all, ``Fit, when my people ope their breast, ``To see the sign, and hear the call, ``And take the vow, and stand the test ``Which adds one more child to the rest- ``When the breast is bare and the arms are wide, ``And the world is left outside. ``For there is probation to decree, ``And many and long must the trials be ``Thou shalt victoriously endure, ``If that brow is true and those eyes are sure; ``Like a jewel-finder's fierce assay ``Of the prize he dug from its mountain-tomb- ``Let once the vindicating ray ``Leap out amid the anxious gloom, ``And steel and fire have done their part ``And the prize falls on its finder's heart; `'So, trial after trial past, ``Wilt thou fall at the very last ``Breathless, half in trance ``With the thrill of the great deliverance, ``Into our arms for evermore; ``And thou shalt know, those arms once curled ``About thee, what we knew before, ``How love is the only good in the world. ``Henceforth be loved as heart can love, ``Or brain devise, or hand approve! ``Stand up, look below, ``It is our life at thy feet we throw ``To step with into light and joy; ``Not a power of life but we employ ``To satisfy thy nature's want; ``Art thou the tree that props the plant, ``Or the climbing plant that seeks the tree- ``Canst thou help us, must we help thee? ``If any two creatures grew into one, ``They would do more than the world has done. ``Though each apart were never so weak, ``Ye vainly through the world should seek ``For the knowledge and the might ``Which in such union grew their right: ``So, to approach at least that end, ``And blend,-as much as may be, blend ``Thee with us or us with thee,- ``As climbing plant or propping tree, ``Shall some one deck thee, over and down, ``Up and about, with blossoms and leaves? ``Fix his heart's fruit for thy garland crown, ``Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves, ``Die on thy boughs and disappear ``While not a leaf of thine is sere? ``Or is the other fate in store, ``And art thou fitted to adore, ``To give thy wondrous self away, ``And take a stronger nature's sway? ``I foresee and could foretell ``Thy future portion, sure and well: ``But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, ``Let them say what thou shalt do! ``Only be sure thy daily life, ``In its peace or in its strife, ``Never shall be unobserved: ``We pursue thy whole career, ``And hope for it, or doubt, or fear,- ``Lo, hast thou kept thy path or swerved, ``We are beside thee in all thy ways, ``With our blame, with our praise, ``Our shame to feel, our pride to show, ``Glad, angry-but indifferent, no! ``Whether it be thy lot to go, ``For the good of us all, where the haters meet ``In the crowded city's horrible street; ``Or thou step alone through the morass ``Where never sound yet was ``Save the dry quick clap of the stork's bill, ``For the air is still, and the water still, ``When the blue breast of the dipping coot ``Dives under, and all is mute. ``So, at the last shall come old age, ``Decrepit as befits that stage; ``How else wouldst thou retire apart ``With the hoarded memories of thy heart, ``And gather all to the very least ``Of the fragments of life's earlier feast, ``Let fall through eagerness to find ``The crowning dainties yet behind? ``Ponder on the entire past ``Laid together thus at last, ``When the twilight helps to fuse ``The first fresh with the faded hues, ``And the outline of the whole, ``As round eve's shades their framework roll, ``Grandly fronts for once thy soul. ``And then as, 'mid the dark, a glean ``Of yet another morning breaks, ``And like the hand which ends a dream, ``Death, with the might of his sunbeam, ``Touches the flesh and the soul awakes, ``Then'' Ay, then indeed something would happen! But what? For here her voice changed like a bird's; There grew more of the music and less of the words; Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen To paper and put you down every syllable With those clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering -More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks! But to return from this excursion,- Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap- And the charm vanished! And my sense returned, so strangely banished, And, starting as from a nap, I knew the crone was bewitching my lady, With Jacynth asleep; and but one spring made I Down from the casement, round to the portal, Another minute and I had entered,- When the door opened, and more than mortal Stood, with a face where to my mind centred All beauties I ever saw or shall see, The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy. She was so different, happy and beautiful, I felt at once that all was best, And that I had nothing to do, for the rest, But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful. Not that, in fact, there was any commanding; I saw the glory of her eye, And the brow's height and the breast's expanding, And I was hers to live or to die. As for finding what she wanted, You know God Almighty granted Such little signs should serve wild creatures To tell one another all their desires, So that each knows what his friend requires, And does its bidding without teachers. I preceded her; the crone Followed silent and alone; I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered In the old style; both her eyes had slunk Back to their pits; her stature shrunk; In short, the soul in its body sunk Like a blade sent home to its scabbard. We descended, I preceding; Crossed the court with nobody heeding, All the world was at the chase, The courtyard like a desert-place, The stable emptied of its small fry; I saddled myself the very palfrey I remember patting while it carried her, The day she arrived and the Duke married her. And, do you know, though it's easy deceiving Oneself in such matters, I can't help believing The lady had not forgotten it either, And knew the poor devil so much beneath her Would have been only too glad for her service To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise, But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it, Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it: For though the moment I began setting His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting, (Not that I meant to be obtrusive) She stopped me, while his rug was shifting, By a single rapid finger's lifting, And, with a gesture kind but conclusive, And a little shake of the head, refused me,- I say, although she never used me, Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind her, And I ventured to remind her, I suppose with a voice of less steadiness Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me, -Something to the effect that I was in readiness Whenever God should please she needed me,- Then, do you know, her face looked down on me With a look that placed a crown on me, And she felt in her bosom,-mark, her bosom- And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom, Dropped me . . . ah, had it been a purse Of silver, my friend, or gold that's worse, Why, you see, as soon as I found myself So understood,-that a true heart so may gain Such a reward,-I should have gone home again, Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself! It was a little plait of hair Such as friends in a convent make To wear, each for the other's sake,- This, see, which at my breast I wear, Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment), And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment. And then,-and then,-to cut short,-this is idle, These are feelings it is not good to foster,- I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle, And the palfrey bounded,-and so we lost her. XVI. When the liquor's out why clink the cannikin? I did think to describe you the panic in The redoubtable breast of our master the mannikin, And what was the pitch of his mother's yellowness, How she turned as a shark to snap the spare-rib Clean off, sailors say, from a pearl-diving Carib, When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness -But it seems such child's play, What they said and did with the lady away! And to dance on, when we've lost the music, Always made me-and no doubt makes you-sick. Nay, to my mind, the world's face looked so stern As that sweet form disappeared through the postern, She that kept it in constant good humour, It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do more. But the world thought otherwise and went on, And my head's one that its spite was spent on: Thirty years are fled since that morning, And with them all my head's adorning. Nor did the old Duchess die outright, As you expect, of suppressed spite, The natural end of every adder Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder: But she and her son agreed, I take it, That no one should touch on the story to wake it, For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery, So, they made no search and small inquiry- And when fresh Gipsies have paid us a visit, I've Noticed the couple were never inquisitive, But told them they're folks the Duke don't want here, And bade them make haste and cross the frontier. Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it, And the old one was in the young one's stead, And took, in her place, the household's head, And a blessed time the household had of it! And were I not, as a man may say, cautious How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous, I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess Heightened the mellowness of her cheek's yellowness (To get on faster) until at last her Cheek grew to be one master-plaster Of mucus and focus from mere use of ceruse: In short, she grew from scalp to udder Just the object to make you shudder. XVII. You're my friend- What a thing friendship is, world without end! How it gives the heart and soul a stir-up As if somebody broached you a glorious runlet, And poured out, all lovelily, sparklingly, sunlit, Our green Moldavia, the streaky syrup, Cotnar as old as the time of the Druids- Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids; Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle, Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets, Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle, And genially floats me about the giblets. I'll tell you what I intend to do: I must see this fellow his sad life through- He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall. My father was born here, and I inherit His fame, a chain he bound his son with; Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it, But there's no mine to blow up and get done with: So, I must stay till the end of the chapter. For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter, Be it a thing to be glad on or sorry on, Some day or other, his head in a morion And breast in a hauberk, his heels he'll kick up, Slain by an onslaught fierce of hiccup. And then, when red doth the sword of our Duke rust, And its leathern sheath lie o'ergrown with a blue crust, Then I shall scrape together my earnings; For, you see, in the churchyard Jacynth reposes, And our children all went the way of the roses: It's a long lane that knows no turnings. One needs but little tackle to travel in; So, just one stout cloak shall I indue: And for a stall, what beats the javelin With which his boars my father pinned you? And then, for a purpose you shall hear presently, Taking some Cotnar, a tight plump skinful, I shall go journeying, who but I, pleasantly! Sorrow is vain and despondency sinful. What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold. When we mind labour, then only, we're too old- What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul? And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees, (Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil) I hope to get safely out of the turmoil And arrive one day at the land of the Gipsies, And find my lady, or hear the last news of her From some old thief and son of Lucifer, His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an thiop. And when my Cotnar begins to operate And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, I shall drop in with-as if by accident- ``You never knew, then, how it all ended, ``What fortune good or bad attended ``The little lady your Queen befriended?'' -And when that's told me, what's remaining? This world's too hard for my explaining. The same wise judge of matters equine Who still preferred some slim four-year-old To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold, And, fur strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine, He also umst be such a lady's scorner! Smooth Jacob still rubs homely Esau: Now up, now down, the world's one see-saw. -So, I shall find out some snug corner Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight, Turn myself round and bid the world good night; And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen) To a world where will be no furtiner throwing Pearls befare swine that Can't value them. Amen! ~ Robert Browning, The Flight Of The Duchess ,

712:I. In midmost Ind, beside Hydaspes cool, There stood, or hover'd, tremulous in the air, A faery city 'neath the potent rule Of Emperor Elfinan; fam'd ev'rywhere For love of mortal women, maidens fair, Whose lips were solid, whose soft hands were made Of a fit mould and beauty, ripe and rare, To tamper his slight wooing, warm yet staid: He lov'd girls smooth as shades, but hated a mere shade. II. This was a crime forbidden by the law; And all the priesthood of his city wept, For ruin and dismay they well foresaw, If impious prince no bound or limit kept, And faery Zendervester overstept; They wept, he sin'd, and still he would sin on, They dreamt of sin, and he sin'd while they slept; In vain the pulpit thunder'd at the throne, Caricature was vain, and vain the tart lampoon. III. Which seeing, his high court of parliament Laid a remonstrance at his Highness' feet, Praying his royal senses to content Themselves with what in faery land was sweet, Befitting best that shade with shade should meet: Whereat, to calm their fears, he promis'd soon From mortal tempters all to make retreat,-- Aye, even on the first of the new moon, An immaterial wife to espouse as heaven's boon. IV. Meantime he sent a fluttering embassy To Pigmio, of Imaus sovereign, To half beg, and half demand, respectfully, The hand of his fair daughter Bellanaine; An audience had, and speeching done, they gain Their point, and bring the weeping bride away; Whom, with but one attendant, safely lain Upon their wings, they bore in bright array, While little harps were touch'd by many a lyric fay. V. As in old pictures tender cherubim A child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear, So, thro' a real heaven, on they swim With the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair, Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair; And so she journey'd, sleeping or awake, Save when, for healthful exercise and air, She chose to "promener l'aile," or take A pigeon's somerset, for sport or change's sake. VI. "Dear Princess, do not whisper me so loud," Quoth Corallina, nurse and confidant, "Do not you see there, lurking in a cloud, Close at your back, that sly old Crafticant? He hears a whisper plainer than a rant: Dry up your tears, and do not look so blue; He's Elfinan's great state-spy militant, His running, lying, flying foot-man too,-- Dear mistress, let him have no handle against you! VII. "Show him a mouse's tail, and he will guess, With metaphysic swiftness, at the mouse; Show him a garden, and with speed no less, He'll surmise sagely of a dwelling house, And plot, in the same minute, how to chouse The owner out of it; show him a" --- "Peace! Peace! nor contrive thy mistress' ire to rouse!" Return'd the Princess, "my tongue shall not cease Till from this hated match I get a free release. VIII. "Ah, beauteous mortal!" "Hush!" quoth Coralline, "Really you must not talk of him, indeed." "You hush!" reply'd the mistress, with a shinee Of anger in her eyes, enough to breed In stouter hearts than nurse's fear and dread: 'Twas not the glance itself made nursey flinch, But of its threat she took the utmost heed; Not liking in her heart an hour-long pinch, Or a sharp needle run into her back an inch. IX. So she was silenc'd, and fair Bellanaine, Writhing her little body with ennui, Continued to lament and to complain, That Fate, cross-purposing, should let her be Ravish'd away far from her dear countree; That all her feelings should be set at nought, In trumping up this match so hastily, With lowland blood; and lowland blood she thought Poison, as every staunch true-born Imaian ought. X. Sorely she griev'd, and wetted three or four White Provence rose-leaves with her faery tears, But not for this cause; -- alas! she had more Bad reasons for her sorrow, as appears In the fam'd memoirs of a thousand years, Written by Crafticant, and published By Parpaglion and Co., (those sly compeers Who rak'd up ev'ry fact against the dead,) In Scarab Street, Panthea, at the Jubal's Head. XI. Where, after a long hypercritic howl Against the vicious manners of the age, He goes on to expose, with heart and soul, What vice in this or that year was the rage, Backbiting all the world in every page; With special strictures on the horrid crime, (Section'd and subsection'd with learning sage,) Of faeries stooping on their wings sublime To kiss a mortal's lips, when such were in their prime. XII. Turn to the copious index, you will find Somewhere in the column, headed letter B, The name of Bellanaine, if you're not blind; Then pray refer to the text, and you will see An article made up of calumny Against this highland princess, rating her For giving way, so over fashionably, To this new-fangled vice, which seems a burr Stuck in his moral throat, no coughing e'er could stir. XIII. There he says plainly that she lov'd a man! That she around him flutter'd, flirted, toy'd, Before her marriage with great Elfinan; That after marriage too, she never joy'd In husband's company, but still employ'd Her wits to 'scape away to Angle-land; Where liv'd the youth, who worried and annoy'd Her tender heart, and its warm ardours fann'd To such a dreadful blaze, her side would scorch her hand. XIV. But let us leave this idle tittle-tattle To waiting-maids, and bed-room coteries, Nor till fit time against her fame wage battle. Poor Elfinan is very ill at ease, Let us resume his subject if you please: For it may comfort and console him much, To rhyme and syllable his miseries; Poor Elfinan! whose cruel fate was such, He sat and curs'd a bride he knew he could not touch. XV. Soon as (according to his promises) The bridal embassy had taken wing, And vanish'd, bird-like, o'er the suburb trees, The Emperor, empierc'd with the sharp sting Of love, retired, vex'd and murmuring Like any drone shut from the fair bee-queen, Into his cabinet, and there did fling His limbs upon a sofa, full of spleen, And damn'd his House of Commons, in complete chagrin. XVI. "I'll trounce some of the members," cry'd the Prince, "I'll put a mark against some rebel names, I'll make the Opposition-benches wince, I'll show them very soon, to all their shames, What 'tis to smother up a Prince's flames; That ministers should join in it, I own, Surprises me! -- they too at these high games! Am I an Emperor? Do I wear a crown? Imperial Elfinan, go hang thyself or drown! XVII. "I'll trounce 'em! -- there's the square-cut chancellor, His son shall never touch that bishopric; And for the nephew of old Palfior, I'll show him that his speeches made me sick, And give the colonelcy to Phalaric; The tiptoe marquis, mortal and gallant, Shall lodge in shabby taverns upon tick; And for the Speaker's second cousin's aunt, She sha'n't be maid of honour,-- by heaven that she sha'n't! XVIII. "I'll shirk the Duke of A.; I'll cut his brother; I'll give no garter to his eldest son; I won't speak to his sister or his mother! The Viscount B. shall live at cut-and-run; But how in the world can I contrive to stun That fellow's voice, which plagues me worse than any, That stubborn fool, that impudent state-dun, Who sets down ev'ry sovereign as a zany,-- That vulgar commoner, Esquire Biancopany? XIX. "Monstrous affair! Pshaw! pah! what ugly minx Will they fetch from Imaus for my bride? Alas! my wearied heart within me sinks, To think that I must be so near ally'd To a cold dullard fay,--ah, woe betide! Ah, fairest of all human loveliness! Sweet Bertha! what crime can it be to glide About the fragrant plaintings of thy dress, Or kiss thine eyes, or count thy locks, tress after tress?" XX. So said, one minute's while his eyes remaind' Half lidded, piteous, languid, innocent; But, in a wink, their splendour they regain'd, Sparkling revenge with amorous fury blent. Love thwarted in bad temper oft has vent: He rose, he stampt his foot, he rang the bell, And order'd some death-warrants to be sent For signature: -- somewhere the tempest fell, As many a poor fellow does not live to tell. XXI. "At the same time, Eban," -- (this was his page, A fay of colour, slave from top to toe, Sent as a present, while yet under age, From the Viceroy of Zanguebar, -- wise, slow, His speech, his only words were "yes" and "no," But swift of look, and foot, and wing was he,--) "At the same time, Eban, this instant go To Hum the soothsayer, whose name I see Among the fresh arrivals in our empery. XXII. "Bring Hum to me! But stay -- here, take my ring, The pledge of favour, that he not suspect Any foul play, or awkward murdering, Tho' I have bowstrung many of his sect; Throw in a hint, that if he should neglect One hour, the next shall see him in my grasp, And the next after that shall see him neck'd, Or swallow'd by my hunger-starved asp,-- And mention ('tis as well) the torture of the wasp." XXIII. These orders given, the Prince, in half a pet, Let o'er the silk his propping elbow slide, Caught up his little legs, and, in a fret, Fell on the sofa on his royal side. The slave retreated backwards, humble-ey'd, And with a slave-like silence clos'd the door, And to old Hun thro' street and alley hied; He "knew the city," as we say, of yore, And for short cuts and turns, was nobody knew more. XXIV. It was the time when wholesale dealers close Their shutters with a moody sense of wealth, But retail dealers, diligent, let loose The gas (objected to on score of health), Convey'd in little solder'd pipes by stealth, And make it flare in many a brilliant form, That all the powers of darkness it repell'th, Which to the oil-trade doth great scaith and harm, And superseded quite the use of the glow-worm. XXV. Eban, untempted by the pastry-cooks, (Of pastry he got store within the palace,) With hasty steps, wrapp'd cloak, and solemn looks, Incognito upon his errand sallies, His smelling-bottle ready for the allies; He pass'd the Hurdy-gurdies with disdain, Vowing he'd have them sent on board the gallies; Just as he made his vow; it 'gan to rain, Therefore he call'd a coach, and bade it drive amain. XXVI. "I'll pull the string," said he, and further said, "Polluted Jarvey! Ah, thou filthy hack! Whose springs of life are all dry'd up and dead, Whose linsey-woolsey lining hangs all slack, Whose rug is straw, whose wholeness is a crack; And evermore thy steps go clatter-clitter; Whose glass once up can never be got back, Who prov'st, with jolting arguments and bitter, That 'tis of modern use to travel in a litter. XXVII. "Thou inconvenience! thou hungry crop For all corn! thou snail-creeper to and fro, Who while thou goest ever seem'st to stop, And fiddle-faddle standest while you go; I' the morning, freighted with a weight of woe, Unto some lazar-house thou journeyest, And in the evening tak'st a double row Of dowdies, for some dance or party drest, Besides the goods meanwhile thou movest east and west. XXVIII. "By thy ungallant bearing and sad mien, An inch appears the utmost thou couldst budge; Yet at the slightest nod, or hint, or sign, Round to the curb-stone patient dost thou trudge, School'd in a beckon, learned in a nudge, A dull-ey'd Argus watching for a fare; Quiet and plodding, thou dost bear no grudge To whisking Tilburies, or Phaetons rare, Curricles, or Mail-coaches, swift beyond compare." XXIX. Philosophizing thus, he pull'd the check, And bade the Coachman wheel to such a street, Who, turning much his body, more his neck, Louted full low, and hoarsely did him greet: "Certes, Monsieur were best take to his feet, Seeing his servant can no further drive For press of coaches, that to-night here meet, Many as bees about a straw-capp'd hive, When first for April honey into faint flowers they dive." XXX. Eban then paid his fare, and tiptoe went To Hum's hotel; and, as he on did pass With head inclin'd, each dusky lineament Show'd in the pearl-pav'd street, as in a glass; His purple vest, that ever peeping was Rich from the fluttering crimson of his cloak, His silvery trowsers, and his silken sash Tied in a burnish'd knot, their semblance took Upon the mirror'd walls, wherever he might look. XXXI. He smil'd at self, and, smiling, show'd his teeth, And seeing his white teeth, he smil'd the more; Lifted his eye-brows, spurn'd the path beneath, Show'd teeth again, and smil'd as heretofore, Until he knock'd at the magician's door; Where, till the porter answer'd, might be seen, In the clear panel more he could adore,-- His turban wreath'd of gold, and white, and green, Mustachios, ear-ring, nose-ring, and his sabre keen. XXXII. "Does not your master give a rout to-night?" Quoth the dark page. "Oh, no!" return'd the Swiss, "Next door but one to us, upon the right, The Magazin des Modes now open is Against the Emperor's wedding;--and, sir, this My master finds a monstrous horrid bore; As he retir'd, an hour ago I wis, With his best beard and brimstone, to explore And cast a quiet figure in his second floor. XXXIII. "Gad! he's oblig'd to stick to business! For chalk, I hear, stands at a pretty price; And as for aqua vitae -- there's a mess! The dentes sapientiae of mice, Our barber tells me too, are on the rise,-- Tinder's a lighter article, -- nitre pure Goes off like lightning, -- grains of Paradise At an enormous figure! -- stars not sure! -- Zodiac will not move without a slight douceur! XXXIV. "Venus won't stir a peg without a fee, And master is too partial, entre nous, To" -- "Hush -- hush!" cried Eban, "sure that is he Coming down stairs, -- by St. Bartholomew! As backwards as he can, -- is't something new? Or is't his custom, in the name of fun?" "He always comes down backward, with one shoe"-- Return'd the porter -- "off, and one shoe on, Like, saving shoe for sock or stocking, my man John!" XXXV. It was indeed the great Magician, Feeling, with careful toe, for every stair, And retrograding careful as he can, Backwards and downwards from his own two pair: "Salpietro!" exclaim'd Hum, "is the dog there? He's always in my way upon the mat!" "He's in the kitchen, or the Lord knows where,"-- Reply'd the Swiss, -- "the nasty, yelping brat!" "Don't beat him!" return'd Hum, and on the floor came pat. XXXVI. Then facing right about, he saw the Page, And said: "Don't tell me what you want, Eban; The Emperor is now in a huge rage,-- 'Tis nine to one he'll give you the rattan! Let us away!" Away together ran The plain-dress'd sage and spangled blackamoor, Nor rested till they stood to cool, and fan, And breathe themselves at th' Emperor's chamber door, When Eban thought he heard a soft imperial snore. XXXVII. "I thought you guess'd, foretold, or prophesy'd, That's Majesty was in a raving fit?" "He dreams," said Hum, "or I have ever lied, That he is tearing you, sir, bit by bit." "He's not asleep, and you have little wit," Reply'd the page; "that little buzzing noise, Whate'er your palmistry may make of it, Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor's choice, From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys." XXXVIII. Eban then usher'd in the learned Seer: Elfinan's back was turn'd, but, ne'ertheless, Both, prostrate on the carpet, ear by ear, Crept silently, and waited in distress, Knowing the Emperor's moody bitterness; Eban especially, who on the floor 'gan Tremble and quake to death,-- he feared less A dose of senna-tea or nightmare Gorgon Than the Emperor when he play'd on his Man-Tiger-Organ. XXXIX. They kiss'd nine times the carpet's velvet face Of glossy silk, soft, smooth, and meadow-green, Where the close eye in deep rich fur might trace A silver tissue, scantly to be seen, As daisies lurk'd in June-grass, buds in green; Sudden the music ceased, sudden the hand Of majesty, by dint of passion keen, Doubled into a common fist, went grand, And knock'd down three cut glasses, and his best ink-stand. XL. Then turning round, he saw those trembling two: "Eban," said he, "as slaves should taste the fruits Of diligence, I shall remember you To-morrow, or next day, as time suits, In a finger conversation with my mutes,-- Begone! -- for you, Chaldean! here remain! Fear not, quake not, and as good wine recruits A conjurer's spirits, what cup will you drain? Sherry in silver, hock in gold, or glass'd champagne?" XLI. "Commander of the faithful!" answer'd Hum, "In preference to these, I'll merely taste A thimble-full of old Jamaica rum." "A simple boon!" said Elfinan; "thou may'st Have Nantz, with which my morning-coffee's lac'd." "I'll have a glass of Nantz, then," -- said the Seer,-- "Made racy -- (sure my boldness is misplac'd!)-- With the third part -- (yet that is drinking dear!)-- Of the least drop of crme de citron, crystal clear." XLII. "I pledge you, Hum! and pledge my dearest love, My Bertha!" "Bertha! Bertha!" cry'd the sage, "I know a many Berthas!" "Mine's above All Berthas!" sighed the Emperor. "I engage," Said Hum, "in duty, and in vassalage, To mention all the Berthas in the earth;-- There's Bertha Watson, -- and Miss Bertha Page,-- This fam'd for languid eyes, and that for mirth,-- There's Bertha Blount of York, -- and Bertha Knox of Perth." XLIII. "You seem to know" -- "I do know," answer'd Hum, "Your Majesty's in love with some fine girl Named Bertha; but her surname will not come, Without a little conjuring." "'Tis Pearl, 'Tis Bertha Pearl! What makes my brain so whirl? And she is softer, fairer than her name!" "Where does she live?" ask'd Hum. "Her fair locks curl So brightly, they put all our fays to shame!-- Live? -- O! at Canterbury, with her old grand-dame." XLIV. "Good! good!" cried Hum, "I've known her from a child! She is a changeling of my management; She was born at midnight in an Indian wild; Her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent, While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent Into the jungles; and her palanquin, Rested amid the desert's dreariment, Shook with her agony, till fair were seen The little Bertha's eyes ope on the stars serene." XLV. "I can't say," said the monarch; "that may be Just as it happen'd, true or else a bam! Drink up your brandy, and sit down by me, Feel, feel my pulse, how much in love I am; And if your science is not all a sham. Tell me some means to get the lady here." "Upon my honour!" said the son of Cham, "She is my dainty changeling, near and dear, Although her story sounds at first a little queer." XLVI. "Convey her to me, Hum, or by my crown, My sceptre, and my cross-surmounted globe, I'll knock you" -- "Does your majesty mean -- down? No, no, you never could my feelings probe To such a depth!" The Emperor took his robe, And wept upon its purple palatine, While Hum continued, shamming half a sob,-- "In Canterbury doth your lady shine? But let me cool your brandy with a little wine." XLVII. Whereat a narrow Flemish glass he took, That since belong'd to Admiral De Witt, Admir'd it with a connoisseuring look, And with the ripest claret crowned it, And, ere the lively bead could burst and flit, He turn'd it quickly, nimbly upside down, His mouth being held conveniently fit To catch the treasure: "Best in all the town!" He said, smack'd his moist lips, and gave a pleasant frown. XLVIII. "Ah! good my Prince, weep not!" And then again He filled a bumper. "Great Sire, do not weep! Your pulse is shocking, but I'll ease your pain." "Fetch me that Ottoman, and prithee keep Your voice low," said the Emperor; "and steep Some lady's-fingers nice in Candy wine; And prithee, Hum, behind the screen do peep For the rose-water vase, magician mine! And sponge my forehead, -- so my love doth make me pine. XLIX. "Ah, cursed Bellanaine!" "Don't think of her," Rejoin'd the Mago, "but on Bertha muse; For, by my choicest best barometer, You shall not throttled be in marriage noose; I've said it, Sire; you only have to choose Bertha or Bellanaine." So saying, he drew From the left pocket of his threadbare hose, A sampler hoarded slyly, good as new, Holding it by his thumb and finger full in view. L. "Sire, this is Bertha Pearl's neat handy-work, Her name, see here, Midsummer, ninety-one." Elfinan snatch'd it with a sudden jerk, And wept as if he never would have done, Honouring with royal tears the poor homespun; Whereon were broider'd tigers with black eyes, And long-tail'd pheasants, and a rising sun, Plenty of posies, great stags, butterflies Bigger than stags,-- a moon,-- with other mysteries. LI. The monarch handled o'er and o'er again Those day-school hieroglyphics with a sigh; Somewhat in sadness, but pleas'd in the main, Till this oracular couplet met his eye Astounded -- Cupid, I do thee defy! It was too much. He shrunk back in his chair, Grew pale as death, and fainted -- very nigh! "Pho! nonsense!" exclaim'd Hum, "now don't despair; She does not mean it really. Cheer up, hearty -- there! LII. "And listen to my words. You say you won't, On any terms, marry Miss Bellanaine; It goes against your conscience -- good! Well, don't. You say you love a mortal. I would fain Persuade your honour's highness to refrain From peccadilloes. But, Sire, as I say, What good would that do? And, to be more plain, You would do me a mischief some odd day, Cut off my ears and limbs, or head too, by my fay! LIII. "Besides, manners forbid that I should pass any Vile strictures on the conduct of a prince Who should indulge his genius, if he has any, Not, like a subject, foolish matters mince. Now I think on't, perhaps I could convince Your Majesty there is no crime at all In loving pretty little Bertha, since She's very delicate,-- not over tall, -- A fairy's hand, and in the waist why -- very small." LIV. "Ring the repeater, gentle Hum!" "'Tis five," Said the gentle Hum; "the nights draw in apace; The little birds I hear are all alive; I see the dawning touch'd upon your face; Shall I put out the candles, please your Grace?" "Do put them out, and, without more ado, Tell me how I may that sweet girl embrace,-- How you can bring her to me." "That's for you, Great Emperor! to adventure, like a lover true." LV. "I fetch her!" -- "Yes, an't like your Majesty; And as she would be frighten'd wide awake To travel such a distance through the sky, Use of some soft manoeuvre you must make, For your convenience, and her dear nerves' sake; Nice way would be to bring her in a swoon, Anon, I'll tell what course were best to take; You must away this morning." "Hum! so soon?" "Sire, you must be in Kent by twelve o'clock at noon." LVI. At this great Caesar started on his feet, Lifted his wings, and stood attentive-wise. "Those wings to Canterbury you must beat, If you hold Bertha as a worthy prize. Look in the Almanack -- Moore never lies -- April the twenty- fourth, -- this coming day, Now breathing its new bloom upon the skies, Will end in St. Mark's Eve; -- you must away, For on that eve alone can you the maid convey." LVII. Then the magician solemnly 'gan to frown, So that his frost-white eyebrows, beetling low, Shaded his deep green eyes, and wrinkles brown Plaited upon his furnace-scorched brow: Forth from his hood that hung his neck below, He lifted a bright casket of pure gold, Touch'd a spring-lock, and there in wool or snow, Charm'd into ever freezing, lay an old And legend-leaved book, mysterious to behold. LVIII. "Take this same book,-- it will not bite you, Sire; There, put it underneath your royal arm; Though it's a pretty weight it will not tire, But rather on your journey keep you warm: This is the magic, this the potent charm, That shall drive Bertha to a fainting fit! When the time comes, don't feel the least alarm, But lift her from the ground, and swiftly flit Back to your palace. * * * * * * * * * * LIX. "What shall I do with that same book?" "Why merely Lay it on Bertha's table, close beside Her work-box, and 'twill help your purpose dearly; I say no more." "Or good or ill betide, Through the wide air to Kent this morn I glide!" Exclaim'd the Emperor. "When I return, Ask what you will, -- I'll give you my new bride! And take some more wine, Hum; -- O Heavens! I burn To be upon the wing! Now, now, that minx I spurn!" LX. "Leave her to me," rejoin'd the magian: "But how shall I account, illustrious fay! For thine imperial absence? Pho! I can Say you are very sick, and bar the way To your so loving courtiers for one day; If either of their two archbishops' graces Should talk of extreme unction, I shall say You do not like cold pig with Latin phrases, Which never should be used but in alarming cases." LXI. "Open the window, Hum; I'm ready now!" Zooks!" exclaim'd Hum, as up the sash he drew. "Behold, your Majesty, upon the brow Of yonder hill, what crowds of people!" "Whew! The monster's always after something new," Return'd his Highness, "they are piping hot To see my pigsney Bellanaine. Hum! do Tighten my belt a little, -- so, so, -- not Too tight, -- the book! -- my wand! -- so, nothing is forgot." LXII. "Wounds! how they shout!" said Hum, "and there, -- see, see! Th' ambassador's return'd from Pigmio! The morning's very fine, -- uncommonly! See, past the skirts of yon white cloud they go, Tinging it with soft crimsons! Now below The sable-pointed heads of firs and pines They dip, move on, and with them moves a glow Along the forest side! Now amber lines Reach the hill top, and now throughout the valley shines." LXIII. "Why, Hum, you're getting quite poetical! Those 'nows' you managed in a special style." "If ever you have leisure, Sire, you shall See scraps of mine will make it worth your while, Tid-bits for Phoebus! -- yes, you well may smile. Hark! hark! the bells!" "A little further yet, Good Hum, and let me view this mighty coil." Then the great Emperor full graceful set His elbow for a prop, and snuff'd his mignonnette. LXIV. The morn is full of holiday; loud bells With rival clamours ring from every spire; Cunningly-station'd music dies and swells In echoing places; when the winds respire, Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire; A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm; While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm. LXV. And now the fairy escort was seen clear, Like the old pageant of Aurora's train, Above a pearl-built minister, hovering near; First wily Crafticant, the chamberlain, Balanc'd upon his grey-grown pinions twain, His slender wand officially reveal'd; Then black gnomes scattering sixpences like rain; Then pages three and three; and next, slave-held, The Imaian 'scutcheon bright, -- one mouse in argent field. LXVI. Gentlemen pensioners next; and after them, A troop of winged Janizaries flew; Then slaves, as presents bearing many a gem; Then twelve physicians fluttering two and two; And next a chaplain in a cassock new; Then Lords in waiting; then (what head not reels For pleasure?) -- the fair Princess in full view, Borne upon wings, -- and very pleas'd she feels To have such splendour dance attendance at her heels. LXVII. For there was more magnificence behind: She wav'd her handkerchief. "Ah, very grand!" Cry'd Elfinan, and clos'd the window-blind; "And, Hum, we must not shilly-shally stand,-- Adieu! adieu! I'm off for Angle-land! I say, old Hocus, have you such a thing About you, -- feel your pockets, I command,-- I want, this instant, an invisible ring,-- Thank you, old mummy! -- now securely I take wing." LXVIII. Then Elfinan swift vaulted from the floor, And lighted graceful on the window-sill; Under one arm the magic book he bore, The other he could wave about at will; Pale was his face, he still look'd very ill; He bow'd at Bellanaine, and said -- "Poor Bell! Farewell! farewell! and if for ever! still For ever fare thee well!" -- and then he fell A laughing! -- snapp'd his fingers! -- shame it is to tell! LXIX. "By'r Lady! he is gone!" cries Hum, "and I -- (I own it) -- have made too free with his wine; Old Crafticant will smoke me. By-the-bye! This room is full of jewels as a mine,-- Dear valuable creatures, how ye shine! Sometime to-day I must contrive a minute, If Mercury propitiously incline, To examine his scutoire, and see what's in i, For of superfluous diamonds I as well may thin it. LXX. "The Emperor's horrid bad; yes, that's my cue!" Some histories say that this was Hum's last speech; That, being fuddled, he went reeling through The corridor, and scarce upright could reach The stair-head; that being glutted as a leech, And us'd, as we ourselves have just now said, To manage stairs reversely, like a peach Too ripe, he fell, being puzzled in his head With liquor and the staircase: verdict -- found stone dead. LXXI. This as a falsehood Crafticanto treats; And as his style is of strange elegance, Gentle and tender, full of soft conceits, (Much like our Boswell's,) we will take a glance At his sweet prose, and, if we can, make dance His woven periods into careless rhyme; O, little faery Pegasus! rear -- prance -- Trot round the quarto -- ordinary time! March, little Pegasus, with pawing hoof sublime! LXXII. Well, let us see, -- tenth book and chapter nine,-- Thus Crafticant pursues his diary:-- "'Twas twelve o'clock at night, the weather fine, Latitude thirty-six; our scouts descry A flight of starlings making rapidly Towards Thibet. Mem.: -- birds fly in the night; From twelve to half-past -- wings not fit to fly For a thick fog -- the Princess sulky quite; Call'd for an extra shawl, and gave her nurse a bite. LXXIII. "Five minutes before one -- brought down a moth With my new double-barrel -- stew'd the thighs And made a very tolerable broth -- Princess turn'd dainty, to our great surprise, Alter'd her mind, and thought it very nice; Seeing her pleasant, try'd her with a pun, She frown'd; a monstrous owl across us flies About this time, -- a sad old figure of fun; Bad omen -- this new match can't be a happy one. LXXIV. "From two to half-past, dusky way we made, Above the plains of Gobi, -- desert, bleak; Beheld afar off, in the hooded shade Of darkness, a great mountain (strange to speak), Spitting, from forth its sulphur-baken peak, A fan-shap'd burst of blood-red, arrowy fire, Turban'd with smoke, which still away did reek, Solid and black from that eternal pyre, Upon the laden winds that scantly could respire. LXXV. "Just upon three o'clock a falling star Created an alarm among our troop, Kill'd a man-cook, a page, and broke a jar, A tureen, and three dishes, at one swoop, Then passing by the princess, singed her hoop: Could not conceive what Coralline was at, She clapp'd her hands three times and cry'd out 'Whoop!' Some strange Imaian custom. A large bat Came sudden 'fore my face, and brush'd against my hat. LXXVI. "Five minutes thirteen seconds after three, Far in the west a mighty fire broke out, Conjectur'd, on the instant, it might be, The city of Balk -- 'twas Balk beyond all doubt: A griffin, wheeling here and there about, Kept reconnoitring us -- doubled our guard -- Lighted our torches, and kept up a shout, Till he sheer'd off -- the Princess very scar'd -- And many on their marrow-bones for death prepar'd. LXXVII. "At half-past three arose the cheerful moon-- Bivouack'd for four minutes on a cloud -- Where from the earth we heard a lively tune Of tambourines and pipes, serene and loud, While on a flowery lawn a brilliant crowd Cinque-parted danc'd, some half asleep reposed Beneath the green-fan'd cedars, some did shroud In silken tents, and 'mid light fragrance dozed, Or on the opera turf their soothed eyelids closed. LXXVIII. "Dropp'd my gold watch, and kill'd a kettledrum-- It went for apoplexy -- foolish folks! -- Left it to pay the piper -- a good sum -- (I've got a conscience, maugre people's jokes,) To scrape a little favour; 'gan to coax Her Highness' pug-dog -- got a sharp rebuff -- She wish'd a game at whist -- made three revokes -- Turn'd from myself, her partner, in a huff; His majesty will know her temper time enough. LXXIX. "She cry'd for chess -- I play'd a game with her -- Castled her king with such a vixen look, It bodes ill to his Majesty -- (refer To the second chapter of my fortieth book, And see what hoity-toity airs she took). At half-past four the morn essay'd to beam -- Saluted, as we pass'd, an early rook -- The Princess fell asleep, and, in her dream, Talk'd of one Master Hubert, deep in her esteem. LXXX. "About this time, -- making delightful way,-- Shed a quill-feather from my larboard wing -- Wish'd, trusted, hop'd 'twas no sign of decay -- Thank heaven, I'm hearty yet! -- 'twas no such thing:-- At five the golden light began to spring, With fiery shudder through the bloomed east; At six we heard Panthea's churches ring -- The city wall his unhiv'd swarms had cast, To watch our grand approach, and hail us as we pass'd. LXXXI. "As flowers turn their faces to the sun, So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze, And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run, With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze; Sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays, And progresses through its own labyrinth; Buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days, They scatter'd, -- daisy, primrose, hyacinth,-- Or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth. LXXXII. "Onward we floated o'er the panting streets, That seem'd throughout with upheld faces paved; Look where we will, our bird's-eye vision meets Legions of holiday; bright standards waved, And fluttering ensigns emulously craved Our minute's glance; a busy thunderous roar, From square to square, among the buildings raved, As when the sea, at flow, gluts up once more The craggy hollowness of a wild reefed shore. LXXXIII. "And 'Bellanaine for ever!' shouted they, While that fair Princess, from her winged chair, Bow'd low with high demeanour, and, to pay Their new-blown loyalty with guerdon fair, Still emptied at meet distance, here and there, A plenty horn of jewels. And here I (Who wish to give the devil her due) declare Against that ugly piece of calumny, Which calls them Highland pebble-stones not worth a fly. LXXXIV. "Still 'Bellanaine!' they shouted, while we glide 'Slant to a light Ionic portico, The city's delicacy, and the pride Of our Imperial Basilic; a row Of lords and ladies, on each hand, make show Submissive of knee-bent obeisance, All down the steps; and, as we enter'd, lo! The strangest sight -- the most unlook'd for chance -- All things turn'd topsy-turvy in a devil's dance. LXXXV. "'Stead of his anxious Majesty and court At the open doors, with wide saluting eyes, Conges and scrape-graces of every sort, And all the smooth routine of gallantries, Was seen, to our immoderate surprise, A motley crowd thick gather'd in the hall, Lords, scullions, deputy-scullions, with wild cries Stunning the vestibule from wall to wall, Where the Chief Justice on his knees and hands doth crawl. LXXXVI. "Counts of the palace, and the state purveyor Of moth's-down, to make soft the royal beds, The Common Council and my fool Lord Mayor Marching a-row, each other slipshod treads; Powder'd bag-wigs and ruffy-tuffy heads Of cinder wenches meet and soil each other; Toe crush'd with heel ill-natur'd fighting breeds, Frill-rumpling elbows brew up many a bother, And fists in the short ribs keep up the yell and pother. LXXXVII. "A Poet, mounted on the Court-Clown's back, Rode to the Princess swift with spurring heels, And close into her face, with rhyming clack, Began a Prothalamion; -- she reels, She falls, she faints! while laughter peels Over her woman's weakness. 'Where!' cry'd I, 'Where is his Majesty?' No person feels Inclin'd to answer; wherefore instantly I plung'd into the crowd to find him or die. LXXXVIII. "Jostling my way I gain'd the stairs, and ran To the first landing, where, incredible! I met, far gone in liquor, that old man, That vile impostor Hum. ----" So far so well,-- For we have prov'd the Mago never fell Down stairs on Crafticanto's evidence; And therefore duly shall proceed to tell, Plain in our own original mood and tense, The sequel of this day, though labour 'tis immense! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 'Lord Houghton first gave this composition in the Life, Letters &c. (1848), and in Volume II, page 51, refers to it as "the last of Keats's literary labours." The poet says in a letter to Brown, written after the first attack of blood-spitting, "I shall soon begin upon 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd.' I do not begin composition yet, being willing, in case of a relapse, to have nothing to reproach myself with." I presume, therefore, that the composition may be assigned to the Spring or Summer of 1820. In August of that year, Leigh Hunt seems to have had the manuscript in his hands, for, in the first part of his article on Coaches, which fills The Indicator for the 23rd of August 1820, he quotes four stanzas and four lines from the poem, as by "a very good poetess, of the name of Lucy V---- L----, who has favoured us with a sight of a manuscript poem," &c. The stanzas quoted are XXV to XXIX. Lord Houghton gives, in the Aldine Edition of 1876, the following note by Brown: -- "This Poem was written subject to future amendments and omissions: it was begun without a plan, and without any prescribed laws for the supernatural machinery." His Lordship adds an interesting passage from a letter written to him by Lord Jeffrey: -- "There are beautiful passages and lines of ineffable sweetness in these minor pieces, and strange outbursts of individual fancy and felicitous expressions in the 'Cap and Bells,' though the general extravagance of the poetry is more suited to an Italian than to an English taste." The late Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to me of this poem as "the only unworthy stuff Keats ever wrote except an early trifle or two," and again as "the to me hateful Cap and Bells." I confess that it seems to me entirely unworthy of Keats, though certainly a proof, if proof were needed, of his versatility. It has the character of a mere intellectual and mechanical exercise, performed at a time when those higher forces constituting the mainspring of poetry were exhausted; but even so I find it difficult to figure Keats as doing anything so aimless as this appears when regarded solely as an effort of the fancy. He probably had a satirical under-current of meaning; and it needs no great stretch of the imagination to see the illicit passion of Emperor Elfinan, and his detestation for his authorized bride-elect, an oblique glance at the martial relations of George IV. It is not difficult to suggest prototypes for many of the faery-land statesmen against whom Elfinan vows vengeance; and there are many particulars in which earthly incidents are too thickly strewn to leave one in the settled belief that the poet's programme was wholly unearthly.--- H. B. F.' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes ~ John Keats, The Cap And Bells; Or, The Jealousies - A Faery Tale .. Unfinished ,

713:Custer BOOK FIRST. I. ALL valor died not on the plains of Troy. Awake, my Muse, awake! be thine the joy To sing of deeds as dauntless and as brave As e'er lent luster to a warrior's grave. Sing of that noble soldier, nobler man, Dear to the heart of each American. Sound forth his praise from sea to listening seaGreece her Achilles claimed, immortal Custer, we. II. Intrepid are earth's heroes now as when The gods came down to measure strength with men. Let danger threaten or let duty call, And self surrenders to the needs of all; Incurs vast perils, or, to save those dear, Embraces death without one sigh or tear. Life's martyrs still the endless drama play Though no great Homer lives to chant their worth to-day. III. And if he chanted, who would list his songs, So hurried now the world's gold-seeking throngs? And yet shall silence mantle mighty deeds? Awake, dear Muse, and sing though no ear heeds! Extol the triumphs, and bemoan the end Of that true hero, lover, son and friend Whose faithful heart in his last choice was shownDeath with the comrades dear, refusing flight alone. IV. He who was born for battle and for strife Like some caged eagle frets in peaceful life; 152 So Custer fretted when detained afar From scenes of stirring action and of war. And as the captive eagle in delight, When freedom offers, plumes himself for flight And soars away to thunder clouds on high, With palpitating wings and wild exultant cry, V. So lion-hearted Custer sprang to arms, And gloried in the conflict's loud alarms. But one dark shadow marred his bounding joy; And then the soldier vanished, and the boy, The tender son, clung close, with sobbing breath, To her from whom each parting was new death; That mother who like goddesses of old, Gave to the mighty Mars, three warriors brave and bold, VI. Yet who, unlike those martial dames of yore, Grew pale and shuddered at the sight of gore. A fragile being, born to grace the hearth, Untroubled by the conflicts of the earth. Some gentle dove who reared young eaglets, might, In watching those bold birdlings take their flight, Feel what that mother felt who saw her sons Rush from her loving arms, to face death-dealing guns. VII. But ere thy lyre is strung to martial strains Of wars which sent our hero o'er the plains, To add the cypress to his laureled brow, Be brave, my Muse, and darker truths avow. Let Justice ask a preface to thy songs, Before the Indian's crimes declare his wrongs; Before effects, wherein all horrors blend, Declare the shameful cause, precursor of the end. VIII. 153 When first this soil the great Columbus trod, He was less like the image of his God Than those ingenuous souls, unspoiled by art, Who lived so near to Mother Nature's heart; Those simple children of the wood and wave, As frank as trusting, and as true as brave; Savage they were, when on some hostile raid (For where is he so high, whom war does not degrade?) . IX. But dark deceit and falsehood's shameless shame They had not learned, until the white man came. He taught them, too, the lurking devil's joy In liquid lies, that lure but to destroy. With wily words, as false as they were sweet, He spread his snares for unsuspecting feet; Paid truth with guile, and trampled in the dust Their gentle childlike faith and unaffected trust. X. And for the sport of idle kings and knaves Of Nature's greater noblemen, made slaves. Alas, the hour, when the wronged Indian knows His seeming benefactors are but foes. His kinsmen kidnapped and his lands possessed, The demon woke in that untutored breast. Four hundred years have rolled upon their wayThe ruthless demon rules the red man to this day. XI. If, in the morning of success, that grand Invincible discoverer of our land Had made no lodge or wigwam desolate To carry trophies to the proud and great; If on our history's page there were no blot Left by the cruel rapine of Cabot, Of Verrazin, and Hudson, dare we claim The Indian of the plains, to-day had been same? 154 XII. For in this brief existence, not alone Do our lives gather what our hands have sown, But we reap, too, what others long ago Sowed, careless of the harvests that might grow. Thus hour by hour the humblest human souls Inscribe in cipher on unending scrolls, The history of nations yet to be; Incite fierce bloody wars, to rage from sea to sea, XIII. Or pave the way to peace. There is no past, So deathless are events-results so vast. And he who strives to make one act or hour Stand separate and alone, needs first the power To look upon the breaking wave and say, 'These drops were bosomed by a cloud to-day, And those from far mid-ocean's crest were sent.' So future, present, past, in one wide sea are blent. BOOK SECOND. I. Oh, for the power to call to aid, of mine Own humble Muse, the famed and sacred nine. Then might she fitly sing, and only then, Of those intrepid and unflinching men Who knew no homes save ever moving tents, And who 'twixt fierce unfriendly elements And wild barbarians warred. Yet unfraid, Since love impels thy strains, sing, sing, my modest maid. II. Relate how Custer in midwinter sought Far Washita's cold shores; tell why he fought With savage nomads fortressed in deep snows. Woman, thou source of half the sad world's woes 155 And all its joys, what sanguinary strife Has vexed the earth and made contention rife Because of thee! For, hidden in man's heart, Ay, in his very soul, of his true self a part, III. The natural impulse and the wish belongs To win thy favor and redress thy wrongs. Alas! for woman, and for man, alas! If that dread hour should ever come to pass, When, through her new-born passion for control, She drives that beauteous impulse from his soul. What were her vaunted independence worth If to obtain she sells her sweetest rights of birth? IV. God formed fair woman for her true estateMan's tender comrade, and his equal mate, Not his competitor in toil and trade. While coarser man, with greater strength was made To fight her battles and her rights protect. Ay! to protect the rights of earth's elect (The virgin maiden and the spotless wife) From immemorial time has man laid down his life. V. And now brave Custer's valiant army pressed Across the dangerous desert of the West, To rescue fair white captives from the hands Of brutal Cheyenne and Comanche bands, On Washita's bleak banks. Nine hundred strong It moved its slow determined way along, Past frontier homes left dark and desolate By the wild Indians' fierce and unrelenting hate; VI. Past forts where ranchmen, strong of heart and bold, Wept now like orphaned children as they told, 156 With quivering muscles and with anguished breath, Of captured wives, whose fate was worse than death; Past naked bodies whose disfiguring wounds Spoke of the hellish hate of human hounds; Past bleaching skeleton and rifled grave, On pressed th' avenging host, to rescue and to save. VII. Uncertain Nature, like a fickle friend, (Worse than the foe on whom we may depend) Turned on these dauntless souls a brow of wrath And hurled her icy jav'lins in their path. With treacherous quicksands, and with storms that blight, Entrapped their footsteps and confused their sight. 'Yet on, ' urged Custer, 'on at any cost, No hour is there to waste, no moment to be lost.' VIII. Determined, silent, on they rode, and on, Like fabled Centaurs, men and steeds seemed one. No bugle echoed and no voice spoke near, Lest on some lurking Indian's list'ning ear The sound might fall. Through swift descending snow The stealthy guides crept, tracing out the foe; No fire was lighted, and no halt was made From haggard gray-lipped dawn till night lent friendly shade. IX. Then, by the shelt'ring river's bank at last, The weary warriors paused for their repast. A couch of ice and falling shows for spread Made many a suffering soldier's chilling bed. They slept to dream of glory and delight, While the pale fingers of the pitying night Wove ghostly winding sheets for that doomed score Who, ere another eve, should sleep to wake no more. X. 157 But those who slept not, saw with startled eyes Far off, athwart dim unprotecting skies, Ascending slowly with majestic grace, A lustrous rocket, rising out of space. 'Behold the signal of the foe, ' cried one, The field is lost before the strife's begun. Yet no! for see! yon rays spread near and far; It is the day's first smile, the radiant morning star. XI. The long hours counting till the daylight broke, In whispered words the restless warriors spoke. They talked of battles, but they thought of home (For hearts are faithful though the feet may roam) . Brave Hamilton, all eager for the strife, Mused o'er that two-fold mystery-death and life; 'And when I die, ' quoth he, ' mine be the part To fall upon the field, a bullet in my heart.' XII. At break of dawn the scouts crept in to say The foe was camped a rifle shot away. The baying of a dog, an infant's cry Pierced through the air; sleep fled from every eye. To horse! to arms! the dead demand the dead! Let the grand charge upon the lodge be led! Let the Mosaic law, life for a life Pay the long standing debt of blood. War to the knife! XIII. So spake each heart in that unholy rage Which fires the brain, when war the thoughts engage. War, hideous war, appealing to the worst In complex man, and waking that wild thirst For human blood which blood alone can slake. Yet for their country's safety, and the sake Of tortured captives moaning in alarm The Indian must be made to fear the law's strong arm. 158 XIV. A noble vengeance burned in Custer's breast, But, as he led his army to the crest, Above the wigwams, ready for the charge He felt the heart within him, swelling large With human pity, as an infant's wail Shrilled once again above the wintry gale. Then hosts of murdered children seemed to rise; And shame his halting thought with sad accusing eyes, XV. And urge him on to action. Stern of brow The just avenger, and the General now, He gives the silent signal to the band Which, all impatient, waits for his command. Cold lips to colder metal press; the air Echoes those merry strains which mean despair For sleeping chieftain and for toiling squaw, But joy to those stern hearts which glory in the law XVI. Of murder paying murder's awful debt. And now four squadrons in one charge are met. From east and west, from north and south they come, At call of bugle and at roll of drum. Their rifles rain hot hail upon the foe, Who flee from danger in death's jaws to go. The Indians fight like maddened bulls at bay, And dying shriek and groan, wound the young ear of day. XVII. A pallid captive and a white-browed boy Add to the tumult piercing cries of joy, As forth they fly, with high hope animate. 159 A hideous squaw pursues them with her hate; Her knife descends with sickening force and sound; Their bloody entrails stain the snow-clad ground. She shouts with glee, then yells with rage and falls Dead by her victims' side, pierced by avenging balls. XVIII. Now war runs riot, carnage reigns supreme. All thoughts of mercy fade from Custer's scheme. Inhuman methods for inhuman foes, Who feed on horrors and exult in woes. To conquer and subdue alone remains In dealing with the red man on the plains. The breast that knows no conscience yields to fear, Strike! let the Indian meet his master now and here, XIX. With thoughts like these was Custer's mind engaged. The gentlest are the sternest when enraged. All felt the swift contagion of his ire, For he was one who could arouse and fire The coldest heart, so ardent was his own. His fearless eye, his calm intrepid tone, Bespoke the leader, strong with conscious power, Whom following friends will bless, while foes will curse and cower. XX. Again they charge! and now among the killed Lies Hamilton, his wish so soon fulfilled, Brave Elliott pursues across the field The flying foe, his own young life to yield. But like the leaves in some autumnal gale The red men fall in Washita's wild vale. Each painted face and black befeathered head Still more repulsive seems with death's grim pallor wed. 160 XXI. New forces gather on surrounding knolls, And fierce and fiercer war's red river rolls. With bright-hued pennants flying from each lance The gayly costumed Kiowas advance. And bold Comanches (Bedouins of the land) Infuse fresh spirit in the Cheyenne band. While from the ambush of some dark ravine Flash arrows aimed by hands, unerring and unseen. XXIII. The hours advance; the storm clouds roll away; Still furious and more furious grows the fray. The yellow sun makes ghastlier still the sight Of painted corpses, staring in its light. No longer slaves, but comrades of their griefs, The squaws augment the forces of their chiefs. They chant weird dirges in a minor key, While from the narrow door of wigwam and tepee XXIII. Cold glittering eyes above cold glittering steel Their deadly purpose and their hate reveal. The click of pistols and the crack of guns Proclaim war's daughters dangerous as her sons. She who would wield the soldier's sword and lance Must be prepared to take the soldier's chance. She who would shoot must serve as target, too; The battle-frenzied men, infuriate now pursue. XXIV. And blood of warrior, woman and papoose, Flow free as waters when some dam breaks loose; Consuming fire, the wanton friend of war (Whom allies worship and whom foes abhor) 161 Now trails her crimson garments through the street, And ruin marks the passing of her feet. Full three-score lodges smoke upon the plain, And all the vale is strewn with bodies of the slain. XXV. And those who are not numbered with the dead Before all-conquering Custer now are led. To soothe their woes, and calm their fears he seeks; An Osage guide interprets while he speaks. The vanquished captives, humbled, cowed and spent Read in the victor's eye his kind intent. The modern victor is as kind as brave; His captive is his guest, not his insulted slave. XXVI. Mahwissa, sister of the slaughtered chief Of all the Cheyennes, listens; and her grief Yields now to hope; and o'er her withered face There flits the stealthy cunning of her race. Then forth she steps, and thus begins to speak: 'To aid the fallen and support the weak Is man's true province; and to ease the pain Of those o'er whom it is his purpose now to reign. XXVII. 'Let the strong chief unite with theirs his life, And take this black-eyed maiden for a wife.' Then, moving with an air of proud command, She leads a dusky damsel by the hand, And places her at wondering Custer's side, Invoking choicest blessings on the bride And all unwilling groom, who thus replies. 'Fair is the Indian maid, with bright bewildering eyes, 162 XXVIII. 'But fairer still is one who, year on year, Has borne man's burdens, conquered woman's fear; And at my side rode mile on weary mile, And faced all deaths, all dangers, with a smile, Wise as Minerva, as Diana brave, Is she whom generous gods in kindness gave To share the hardships of my wandering life, Companion, comrade, friend, my loved and loyal wife. XXIX. 'The white chief weds but one. Take back thy maid.' He ceased, and o'er Mahwissa's face a shade Of mingled scorn and pity and surprise Sweeps as she slow retreats, and thus replies: 'Rich is the pale-faced chief in battle fame, But poor is he who but one wife may claim. Wives are the red-skinned heroes' rightful spoil; In war they prove his strength, in times of peace they toil.' XXX. But hark! The bugle echoes o'er the plains And sounds again those merry Celtic strains Which oft have called light feet to lilting dance, But now they mean the order to advance. Along the river's bank, beyond the hill Two thousand foemen lodge, unconquered still. Ere falls night's curtain on this bloody play, The army must proceed, with feint of further fray. XXXI. The weary warriors mount their foam-flecked steeds, With flags unfurled the dauntless host proceeds. What though the foe outnumbers two to one? Boldness achieves what strength oft leaves undone; A daring mein will cause brute force to cower, 163 And courage is the secret source of power. As Custer's column wheels upon their sight The frightened red men yield the untried field by flight. XXXII. Yet when these conquering heroes sink to rest, Dissatisfaction gnaws the leader's breast, For far away across vast seas of snows Held prisoners still by hostile Arapahoes And Cheyennes unsubdued, two captives wait. On God and Custer hangs their future fate. May the Great Spirit nerve the mortal's arm To rescue suffering souls from worse than death's alarm. XXXIII. But ere they seek to rescue the oppressed, The valiant dead, in state, are laid to rest. Mourned Hamilton, the faithful and the brave, Nine hundred comrades follow to the grave; And close behind the banner-hidden corse All draped in black, walks mournfully his horse; While tears of sound drip through the sunlit day. A soldier may not weep, but drums and bugles may. XXXIV. Now, Muse, recount, how after long delays And dangerous marches through untrodden ways, Where cold and hunger on each hour attend, At last the army gains the journey's end. An Indian village bursts upon the eye; Two hundred lodges, sleep-encompassed lie, There captives moan their anguished prayers through tears, While in the silent dawn the armied answer nears. XXXV. 164 To snatch two fragile victims from the foe Nine hundred men have traversed leagues of snow. Each woe they suffered in a hostile land The flame of vengeance in their bosoms fanned. They thirst for slaughter, and the signal wait To wrest the captives from their horrid fate. Each warrior's hand upon his rifle falls, Each savage soldier's heart for awful bloodshed calls. XXXVI. And one, in years a youth, in woe a man, Sad Brewster, scarred by sorrow's blighting ban, Looks, panting, where his captive sister sleeps, And o'er his face the shade of murder creeps. His nostrils quiver like a hungry beast Who scents anear the bloody carnal feast. He longs to leap down in that slumbering vale And leave no foe alive to tell the awful tale. XXXVII. Not so, calm Custer. Sick of gory strife, He hopes for rescue with no loss of life; And plans that bloodless battle of the plains Where reasoning mind outwits mere savage brains. The sullen soldiers follow where he leads; No gun is emptied, and no foeman bleeds. Fierce for the fight and eager for the fray They look upon their Chief in undisguised dismay. XXXVIII. He hears the murmur of their discontent, But sneers can never change a strong mind's bent. He knows his purpose and he does not swerve, And with a quiet mien and steady nerve He meets dark looks where'er his steps may go, And silence that is bruising as a blow, 165 Where late were smiles and words of ardent praise. So pass the lagging weeks of wearying delays. XXXIX. Inaction is not always what it seems, And Custer's mind with plan and project teems. Fixed in his peaceful purpose he abides With none takes counsel and in none confides; But slowly weaves about the foe a net Which leaves them wholly at his mercy, yet He strikes no fateful blow; he takes no life, And holds in check his men, who pant for bloody strife. XL. Intrepid warrior and skilled diplomate, In his strong hands he holds the red man's fate. The craftiest plot he checks with counterplot, Till tribe by tribe the tricky foe is brought To fear his vengeance and to know his power. As man's fixed gaze will make a wild beast cower, So these crude souls feel that unflinching will Which draws them by its force, yet does not deign to kill. XLI. And one by one the hostile Indians send Their chiefs to seek a peaceful treaty's end. Great councils follow; skill with cunning copes And conquers it; and Custer sees his hopes So long delayed, like stars storm hidden, rise To radiate with splendor all his skies. The stubborn Cheyennes, cowed at last by fear, Leading the captive pair, o'er spring-touched hills appear. XLII. 166 With breath suspended, now the whole command Waits the approach of that equestrian band. Nearer it comes, still nearer, then a cry, Half sob, half shriek, goes piercing God's blue sky, And Brewster, like a nimble-footed doe, Or like an arrow hurrying from a bow, Shoots swiftly through the intervening space And that lost sister clasps, in sorrowing love's embrace. XLIII. And men who leaned o'er Hamilton's rude bier And saw his dead dear face without a tear, Strong souls who early learned the manly art Of keeping from the eye what's in the heart, Soldiers who look unmoved on death's pale brow, Avert their eyes, to hide their moisture now. The briny flood forced back from shores of woe, Needs but to touch the strands of joy to overflow. XLIV. About the captives welcoming warriors crowd, All eyes are wet, and Brewster sobs aloud. Alas, the ravage wrought by toil and woe On faces that were fair twelve moons ago. Bronzed by exposure to the heat and cold, Still young in years, yet prematurely old, By insults humbled and by labor worn, They stand in youth's bright hour, of all youth's graces shorn. XLV. A scanty garment rudely made of sacks Hangs from their loins; bright blankets drape their backs; About their necks are twisted tangled strings Of gaudy beads, while tinkling wire and rings Of yellow brass on wrists and fingers glow. Thus, to assuage the anger of the foe The cunning Indians decked the captive pair 167 Who in one year have known a lifetime of despair. XLVI. But love can resurrect from sorrow's tomb The vanished beauty and the faded bloom, As sunlight lifts the bruised flower from the sod, Can lift crushed hearts to hope, for love is God. Already now in freedom's glad release The hunted look of fear gives place to peace, And in their eyes at thought of home appears That rainbow light of joy which brightest shines through tears. XLVII. About the leader thick the warriors crowd; Late loud in censure, now in praises loud, They laud the tactics, and the skill extol Which gained a bloodless yet a glorious goal. Alone and lonely in the path of right Full many a brave soul walks. When gods requite And crown his actions as their worth demands, Among admiring throngs the hero always stands. A row of six asterisks is on the page at this point XLVIII. Back to the East the valorous squadrons sweep; The earth, arousing from her long, cold sleep, Throws from her breast the coverlet of snow, Revealing Spring's soft charms which lie below. Suppressed emotions in each heart arise, The wooer wakens and the warrior dies. The bird of prey is vanquished by the dove, And thoughts of bloody strife give place to thoughts of love. XLIX. 168 The mighty plains, devoid of whispering trees, Guard well the secrets of departed seas. Where once great tides swept by with ebb and flow The scorching sun looks down in tearless woe. And fierce tornadoes in ungoverned pain Mourn still the loss of that mysterious main. Across this ocean bed the soldiers flyHome is the gleaming goal that lures each eager eye. L. Like some elixir which the gods prepare, They drink the viewless tonic of the air, Sweet with the breath of startled antelopes Which speed before them over swelling slopes. Now like a serpent writhing o'er the moor, The column curves and makes a slight detour, As Custer leads a thousand men away To save a ground bird's nest which in the footpath lay. LI. Mile following mile, against the leaning skies Far off they see a dull dark cloud arise. The hunter's instinct in each heart is stirred, Beholding there in one stupendous herd A hundred thousand buffaloes. Oh great Unwieldy proof of Nature's cruder state, Rough remnant of a prehistoric day, Thou, with the red man, too, must shortly pass away. LII. Upon those spreading plains is there not room For man and bison, that he seals its doom? What pleasure lies and what seductive charm In slaying with no purpose but to harm? Alas, that man, unable to create, Should thirst forever to exterminate, And in destruction find his fiercest joy. 169 The gods alone create, gods only should destroy. LIII. The flying hosts a straggling bull pursue; Unerring aim, the skillful Custer drew. The wounded beast turns madly in despair And man and horse are lifted high in air. The conscious steed needs not the guiding rein; Back with a bound and one quick cry of pain He springs, and halts, well knowing where must fall In that protected frame, the sure death dealing ball. LIV. With minds intent upon the morrow's feast, The men surround the carcass of the beast. Rolled on his back, he lies with lolling tongue, Soon to the saddle savory steaks are hung. And from his mighty head, great tufts of hair Are cut as trophies for some lady fair. To vultures then they leave the torn remains Of what an hour ago was monarch of the plains. LV. Far off, two bulls in jealous war engage, Their blood-shot eye balls roll in furious rage; With maddened hoofs they mutilate the ground And loud their angry bellowings resound; With shaggy heads bent low they plunge and roar, Till both broad bellies drip with purple gore. Meanwhile, the heifer, whom the twain desire, Stands browsing near the pair, indifferent to their ire. LVI. At last she lifts her lazy head and heeds 170 The clattering hoofs of swift advancing steeds. Off to the herd with cumb'rous gait she runs And leaves the bulls to face the threatening guns. No more for them the free life of the plains, Its mating pleasures and its warring pains. Their quivering flesh shall feed unnumbered foes, Their tufted tails adorn the soldiers' saddle bows. LVII. Now into camp the conquering hosts advance; On burnished arms the brilliant sunbeams glance. Brave Custer leads, blonde as the gods of old; Back from his brow blow clustering locks of gold, And, like a jewel in a brook, there lies, Far in the depths of his blue guarded eyes, The thought of one whose smiling lips upcurled, Mean more of joy to him than plaudits of the world. LVIII. The troops in columns of platoons appear Close to the leader following. Ah, here The poetry of war is fully seen, Its prose forgotten; as against the green Of Mother Nature, uniformed in blue, The soldiers pass for Sheridan's review. The motion-music of the moving throng, Is like a silent tune, set to a wordless song. LIX. The guides and trailers, weird in war's array, Precede the troops along the grassy way. They chant wild songs, and, with loud noise and stress, In savage manner savage joy express. The Indian captives, blanketed in red, On ponies mounted, by the scouts are led. Like sumach bushes, etched on evening skies, 171 Against the blue-clad troops, this patch of color lies. LX. High o'er the scene vast music billows bound, And all the air is liquid with the sound Of those invisible compelling waves. Perchance they reach the low and lonely graves Where sleep brave Elliott and Hamilton, And whisper there the tale of victory won; Or do the souls of soldiers tried and true Come at the bugle call, and march in grand review? LXI. The pleased Commander watches in surprise This splendid pageant surge before his eyes. Not in those mighty battle days of old Did scenes like this upon his sight unfold. But now it passes. Drums and bugles cease To dash war billows on the shores of Peace. The victors smile on fair broad bosomed Sleep While in her soothing arms, the vanquished cease to weep. BOOK THIRD. There is an interval of eight years between Books Second and Third. I. As in the long dead days marauding hosts Of Indians came from far Siberian coasts, And drove the peaceful Aztecs from their grounds, Despoiled their homes (but left their tell-tale mounds) , So has the white man with the Indians done. Now with their backs against the setting sun The remnants of a dying nation stand And view the lost domain, once their beloved land. 172 II. Upon the vast Atlantic's leagues of shore The happy red man's tent is seen no more; And from the deep blue lakes which mirror heaven His bounding bark canoe was long since driven. The mighty woods, those temples where his God Spoke to his soul, are leveled to the sod; And in their place tall church spires point above, While priests proclaim the law of Christ, the King of Love. III. The avaricious and encroaching rail Seized the wide fields which knew the Indians' trail. Back to the reservations in the West The native owners of the land were pressed, And selfish cities, harbingers of want, Shut from their vision each accustomed haunt. Yet hungry Progress, never satisfied, Gazed on the western plains, and gazing, longed and sighed. IV. As some strange bullock in a pasture field Compels the herds to fear him, and to yield The juicy grass plots and the cooling shade Until, despite their greater strength, afraid, They huddle in some corner spot and cower Before the monarch's all controlling power, So has the white man driven from its place By his aggressive greed, Columbia's native race. V. Yet when the bull pursues the herds at bay, Incensed they turn, and dare dispute his sway. And so the Indians turned, when men forgot Their sacred word, and trespassed on the spot. 173 The lonely little spot of all their lands, The reservation of the peaceful bands. But lust for gold all conscience kills in man, 'Gold in the Black Hills, gold! ' the cry arose and ran VI. From lip to lip, as flames from tree to tree Leap till the forest is one fiery sea, And through the country surged that hot unrest Which thirst for riches wakens in the breast. In mighty throngs the fortune hunters came, Despoiled the red man's lands and slew his game, Broke solemn treaties and defied the law. And all these ruthless acts the Nation knew and saw. VII. Man is the only animal that kills Just for the wanton love of slaughter; spills The blood of lesser things to see it flow; Lures like a friend, to murder like a foe The trusting bird and beast; and, coward like, Deals covert blows he dare not boldly strike. The brutes have finer souls, and only slay When torn by hunger's pangs, or when to fear a prey. VIII. The pale-faced hunter, insolent and bold, Pursued the bison while he sought for gold. And on the hungry red man's own domains He left the rotting and unused remains To foul with sickening stench each passing wind And rouse the demon in the savage mind, Save in the heart where virtues dominate Injustice always breeds its natural offspring- hate. 174 IX. The chieftain of the Sioux, great Sitting Bull, Mused o'er their wrongs, and felt his heart swell full Of bitter vengeance. Torn with hate's unrest He called a council and his braves addressed. 'From fair Wisconsin's shimmering lakes of blue Long years ago the white man drove the Sioux. Made bold by conquest, and inflamed by greed, He still pursues our tribes, and still our ranks recede. X. 'Fair are the White Chief's promises and words, But dark his deeds who robs us of our herds. He talks of treaties, asks the right to buy, Then takes by force, not waiting our reply. He grants us lands for pastures and abodes To devastate them by his iron roads. But now from happy Spirit Lands, a friend Draws near the hunted Sioux, to strengthen and defend. XI. 'While walking in the fields I saw a star; Unconsciously I followed it afarIt led me on to valleys filled with light, Where danced our noble chieftains slain in fight. Black Kettle, first of all that host I knew, He whom the strong armed Custer foully slew. And then a spirit took me by the hand, The Great Messiah King who comes to free the land. XII. 'Suns were his eyes, a speaking tear his voice, .Whose rainbow sounds made listening hearts rejoice And thus he spake: 'The red man's hour draws near When all his lost domains shall reappear. The elk, the deer, the bounding antelope, 175 Shall here return to grace each grassy slope.' He waved his hand above the fields, and lo! Down through the valleys came a herd of buffalo. XIII. 'The wondrous vision vanished, but I knew That Sitting Bull must make the promise true. Great Spirits plan what mortal man achieves, The hand works magic when the heart believes. Arouse, ye braves! let not the foe advance. Arm for the battle and begin the danceThe sacred dance in honor of our slain, Who will return to earth, ere many moons shall wane.' XIV. Thus Sitting Bull, the chief of wily knaves, Worked on the superstitions of his braves. Mixed truth with lies; and stirred to mad unrest The warlike instinct in each savage breast. A curious product of unhappy times, The natural offspring of unnumbered crimes, He used low cunning and dramatic arts To startle and surprise those crude untutored hearts. XV. Out from the lodges pour a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains, So swells and dies away, the ghostly graveyard strains. 176 XVI. Like worded wine is music to the ear, And long indulged makes mad the hearts that hear. The dancers, drunken with the monotone Of oft repeated notes, now shriek and groan And pierce their ruddy flesh with sharpened spears; Still more excited when the blood appears, With warlike yells, high in the air they bound, Then in a deathlike trance fall prostrate on the ground. XVII. They wake to tell weird stories of the dead, While fresh performers to the ring are led. The sacred nature of the dance is lost, War is their cry, red war, at any cost. Insane for blood they wait for no command, But plunge marauding through the frightened land. Their demon hearts on devils' pleasures bent, For each new foe surprised, new torturing deaths invent. XVIII. Staked to the earth one helpless creature lies, Flames at his feet and splinters in his eyes. Another groans with coals upon his breast, While 'round the pyre the Indians dance and jest. A crying child is brained upon a tree, The swooning mother saved from death, to be The slave and plaything of a filthy knave, Whose sins would startle hell, whose clay defile a grave. XIX. Their cause was right, their methods all were wrong. Pity and censure both to them belong. Their woes were many, but their crimes were more. The soulless Satan holds not in his store Such awful tortures as the Indians' wrath 177 Keeps for the hapless victim in his path. And if the last lone remnants of that race Were by the white man swept from off the earth's fair face, XX. Were every red man slaughtered in a day, Still would that sacrifice but poorly pay For one insulted woman captive's woes. Again great Custer in his strength arose, More daring, more intrepid than of old. The passing years had touched and turned to gold The ever widening aureole of fame That shone upon his brow, and glorified his name. XXI. Wise men make laws, then turn their eyes away, While fools and knaves ignore them day by day; And unmolested, fools and knaves at length Induce long wars which sap a country's strength. The sloth of leaders, ruling but in name, Has dragged full many a nation down to shame. A word unspoken by the rightful lips Has dyed the land with blood, and blocked the sea with ships. XXII. The word withheld, when Indians asked for aid, Came when the red man started on his raid. What Justice with a gesture might have done Was left for noisy war with bellowing gun. And who save Custer and his gallant men Could calm the tempest into peace again? What other hero in the land could hope With Sitting Bull, the fierce and lawless one to cope? 178 XXIII. What other warrior skilled enough to dare Surprise that human tiger in his lair? Sure of his strength, unconscious of his fame Out from the quiet of the camp he came; And stately as Diana at his side Elizabeth, his wife and alway bride, And Margaret, his sister, rode apace; Love's clinging arms he left to meet death's cold embrace. XXIV. As the bright column wound along its course, The smiling leader turned upon his horse To gaze with pride on that superb command. Twelve hundred men, the picked of all the land, Innured to hardship and made strong by strife Their lithe limbed bodies breathed of out-door life; While on their faces, resolute and brave, Hope stamped its shining seal, although their thoughts were grave. XXV. The sad eyed women halted in the dawn, And waved farewell to dear ones riding on. The modest mist picked up her robes and ran Before the Sun god's swift pursuing van. And suddenly there burst on startled eyes, The sight of soldiers, marching in the skies; That phantom host, a phantom Custer led; Mirage of dire portent, forecasting days ahead. XXVI. The soldiers' children, flaunting mimic flags, Played by the roadside, striding sticks for nags. Their mothers wept, indifferent to the crowd Who saw their tears and heard them sob aloud. Old Indian men and squaws crooned forth a rhyme 179 Sung by their tribes from immemorial time; And over all the drums' incessant beat Mixed with the scout's weird rune, and tramp of myriad feet. XXVII. So flawless was the union of each part The mighty column (moved as by one heart) Pulsed through the air, like some sad song well sung, Which gives delight, although the soul is wrung. Farther and fainter to the sight and sound The beautiful embodied poem wound; Till like a ribbon, stretched across the land Seemed the long narrow line of that receding band. XXVIII. The lot of those who in the silence wait Is harder than the fighting soldiers' fate. Back to the lonely post two women passed, With unaccustomed sorrow overcast. Two sad for sighs, too desolate for tears, The dark forebodings of long widowed years In preparation for the awful blow Hung on the door of hope the sable badge of woe. XXIX. Unhappy Muse! for thee no song remains, Save the sad miséréré of the plains. Yet though defeat, not triumph, ends the tale, Great victors sometimes are the souls that fail. All glory lies not in the goals we reach, But in the lessons which our actions teach. And he who, conquered, to the end believes In God and in himself, though vanquished, still achieves. 180 XXX. Ah, grand as rash was that last fatal raid The little group of daring heroes made. Two hundred and two score intrepid men Rode out to war; not one came back again. Like fiends incarnate from the depths of hell Five thousand foemen rose with deafening yell, And swept that vale as with a simoon's breath, But like the gods of old, each martyr met his death. XXXI. Like gods they battled and like gods they died. Hour following hour that little band defied The hordes of red men swarming o'er the plain, Till scarce a score stood upright 'mid the slain. Then in the lull of battle, creeping near, A scout breathed low in Custer's listening ear: 'Death lies before, dear life remains behind Mount thy sure-footed steed, and hasten with the wind.' XXXII. A second's silence. Custer dropped his head, His lips slow moving as when prayers are saidTwo words he breathed-'God and Elizabeth, ' Then shook his long locks in the face of death And with a final gesture turned away To join that fated few who stood at bay. Ah! deeds like that the Christ in man reveal Let Fame descend her throne at Custer's shrine to kneel. XXXIII. Too late to rescue, but in time to weep, His tardy comrades came. As if asleep He lay, so fair, that even hellish hate Withheld its hand and dared not mutilate. By fiends who knew not honor, honored still, 181 He smiled and slept on that far western hill. Cast down thy lyre, oh Muse! thy song is done! Let tears complete the tale of him who failed, yet won. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

714:Leszko The Bastard ``Why do I bid the rising gale To waft me from your shore? Why hail I, as the vultures hail, The scent of far-off gore? Why wear I with defiant pride The Paynim's badge and gear, Though I am vowed to Christ that died, And fain would staunch the gaping side That felt the sceptic spear? And why doth one in whom there runs The blood of Sclavic sires and sons, In those but find a foe, That onward march with sword and flame, To vindicate the Sclavic name, From the fringe of Arctic snows, To the cradle of the rose, Where the Sweet Waters flow? Strange! But 'twere stranger yet if I, When Turk and Tartar splinters fly, Lagged far behind the van. While the wind dallies with my sail, Listen! and you shall hear my tale; Then marvel, if you can! ``Nothing but snow! A white waste world, Far as eye reached, or voice could call! Motion within itself slept furled; The earth was dead, and Heaven its pall! Now nothing lived except the wind, That, moaning round with restless mind, Seemed like uncoffined ghost to flit O'er vacant tracts, that it might find Some kindred thing to speak with it. Nothing to break the white expanse! No far, no near, no high, no low! Nothing to stop the wandering glance! One smooth monotony of snow! I lifted the latch, and I shivered in; My mother stood by the larch-log blaze, 298 My mother, stately, and tall, and thin, With the shapely head and the soft white skin, And the sweetly-sorrowing gaze. She was younger than you, aye, you who stand In matron prime by your household fire, A happy wife in a happy land, And with all your heart's desire. But though bred, like you, from the proud and brave, Her hair was blanched and her voice was grave. If you knew what it is to be born a slave, And to feel a despot's ire! ``She turned her round from the hearth like one That hath waited long, and said, `Come hither, and sit by me, my son! For somehow to-night doth remembrance run Back to the days that are dead. And you are tall and stalwart now, And coming manhood o'er your brow Its shadow 'gins to shed. Sit by me close!' and as I sate Close, close as I could sit, She took my hand and placed it flat On hers, and fondled it. Then with the same soft palm she brushed My wind-tossed locks apart, And, kissing my bared temples, hushed The flow of love that else had gushed, Love-loosened, from my heart. ```Listen! you often have questioned why Here 'neath this pale Siberian sky, You scarcely live, I slowly die. That we dwell on, but exiles here, In regions barren, sunless, drear, And have no more the power to fly To brighter lands and bluer sky, Than some poor bird whom man's caprice Hath tethered by a clanking chain, And leaves upon its perch in pain To pine for, ne'er to find release,This do you know, and still have known 299 Since first I taught your mouth to frame The syllables of Poland's name, Even before my own. But how could I to childhood's ears, Or boyhood's, tell the tale of tears That links me with the bygone years?Tale steeped in rapture, drenched with woe, A tale of wrong, and loss, and love, That opens in the heavens above, And ends in worse than hell below?A tale I only could impart To mind mature and full-grown heart; A tale to fill your larger life With hissing waters of distress And overflowing bitterness, And set you with yourself at strife? But you must hear it now. The down Of manhood fringes lip and cheek; Your temples take a richer brown, And on your forehead buds the crown Of kingly thought that yet will speak. Listen! and let no faintest word Of all I utter fall unheard Upon your ear or heart! 'Twill wring your youth, but nerve it too:And what have I now left to do, But unveil tyranny to view, And wing the avenging dart? ```So like to you! The same blue eye, Same lavish locks, same forehead high, But of a manlier majesty! His limbs, like yours, were straight and strong, Yet supple as the bough in bud; For tyrants cannot tame the blood, Or noble lineage lose, through wrong Its heritage of hardihood. And maybe since his years were more, And partly that you needs must bear In every filial vein and pore With his pure strain the base alloy Of that in you which is my share, 300 Though you are tall and comely, boy! Yet he was taller, comelier. In days that now but live in song, When Rurik's hinds felt Poland's heel, And Poland's horsemen, cased in steel, To Volo's plain were wont to throng, A hundred thousand manes in strength, And vowed, if Heaven let fall the sky, To uphold it on their lance's length As 'twere a silken canopy; His sires were there in gallant trim, Haught of mien and hard of limbVisors up and foreheads gashed, Swords that poised, and swooped, and flashed, Like the wings of the flaming Cherubim! And when Imperial vultures tore With banded beaks Sarmatia's breast, And wallowed in Sarmatia's gore, His fathers by their fathers swore Ne'er to recede nor rest, Till they had pushed the watchful points Of vengeance in between the joints Of armour dear to tyrants pricked Of conscience never hushed nor tricked, And made them feel what they inflict. Vow sternly kept, but kept in vain! For ninety hoping, hopeless years, Poland hath known no couch save pain, No mate except the dull cold chain, Hath felt the lash, and fed on jeers, While Heaven, it seems, no longer hears The wail of prayers, the drip of tears, Or the voices of the slain. Thrice have her sons, despite their gyves, Essayed to sell their worthless lives At least against the price Of ruin on their gaolers brought; But each brave stroke hath come to nought, And blood, and wounds, and death, have brought, Only fresh bootless sacrifice. No blow was struck they did not share, No banner raised, but straight they flew 301 For one more tussle with despair; And ever as they fought, they fell, Waxing still fewer and more few, Till only one remained to tell How they had passed away, and dare With front erect and unquelled stare Those earthly ministers of hell. One only of that kindred bandLike some last column gazing lone Across the bare and brackish sand, In a depopulated land, Telling of times and temples flown! ```He loved me. Love in every clime, Through all vicissitudes of time, Is life's climacteric and prime. Matched against it, all boons that bless, All joys we chase, all good we prize, All that of tender and sublime Expands the heart and fills the eyes, Tastes pitiful and savourless. It glorifies the common air, It clothes with light the mountains bare, And shows the heavens all shining there. It lifts our feet from off the ground, It lets us walk along the skies; It makes the daily silence sound With transcendental harmonies. It rules the seasons. Linnets sing As loud in winter as in spring, When hearts are leal, and love is king. Bathed in its light, the distance glows With all the colours of the rose. Its vivid gaze blends far and near In one delicious atmosphere, Projects the future from the past, And hugs the faith, without a fear, Since love is all, that all will last. The peevish voice of doubt grows dumb; The demons of dejection flee; And even sordid cares become But a divine anxiety. 302 Hope sails no more in far-off skies, But makes its nest upon the ground; And happiness, coy wing that flies Too oft when mortal yearning woos, At love's sweet summons circling round, Sits on the nearest bough, and coos. ```Yes! such is love in every land, If blest or curst, enslaved or free. But how can they whose chainless hand May stretch towards all they dream or see, Whose lungs exult, whose lives expand, In air of bracing liberty, Feel love's delirium like to those Who, of all other bliss bereft, And cooped from each hale wind that blows, Fondle, amid a world of foes, The solitary friend that's left? Through whatso regions freemen roam, They find a hearth, they make a home. Their unfenced energies embrace All realms of thought, all fields of space, At each fresh step fresh prospects find, Larger than any left behind, And mount with still rewarded stress From happiness to happiness. E'en love itself for such can bring To life's tuned lyre but one more string, Or but with fingers subtly straying Among the chords, and softly playing, Make more harmonious everything. But when to him whose hopes are bound Within a dismal prison round, Whose thoughts, suspected, must not soar Beyond his straitened dungeon floor, Who may not speak, nor groan, nor sigh, Nor lend sharp agony a vent, Lest those should hear him who are nigh, And catch, perchance, in passing by, Contagion from his discontent; Who dwells an exile in his home, And cannot rest and may not roam; 303 Whom even hope doth not delude; Who vainly lives, in vain would die, And, hemmed in close, alike would fly, Society and solitude;Oh! when to such as he love brings Message of heaven upon its wings, It fills his heart, it floods his brain, Riots in every pulse and vein, And turns to paradise his pain. Body, and soul, and sense conspire To feed the rising, rushing fire. The passions which are wont to share Love's empire o'er distracted man, Denied their outlet, in him fan The exclusive fury of desire. As one who faints of thirst, he takes Swiftly what should be slowly quaffed, With ravenous lips his fever slakes, Then dies, delirious, of the draught! ```He loved me. Do you ask if I His love returned? Go, ask the sky If it in vain pours sun and shower On herb and leaf, on tree and flower. Go, ask of echo if it wakes When voice in lonely places calls; Ask of the silence if it takes The sound of plashing waterfalls: Ask the parched plains if they refuse The solace of descending dews; Ask the unrippled lake that lies Under faint fleecy clouds that flit, If it reflects with tender eyes The heavenly forms that gaze on it; But ask not me if I returned The love with which his being burned. His passion such, in any heart It straight had worked its counterpart, Woke its own echo, roused a tone In perfect concert with its own, And made, the instant that it shone, Mirror of what it gazed upon. 304 ```We loved, as few have loved before, 'Chance none; and lo! the hour drew nigh To ratify the vows we swore One night beneath the sky, Before the solemn altar-rails O'er which He hangs, pierced through with nails, Who for our sins did die. Oh! why is woman doomed to bear The love, or lust, she cannot share; And hear from alien lips the sighs She fain herself would waken ne'er, Save within kindred hearts and eyes? Never by word, nor glance, nor e'en That barren courtesy we give Unto well nigh all things that live, Did his detested rival glean That I another's homage should Not greet, as evil is by good. But, had my heart been free as air, Fickle as wind, as quick to take Impression as some limpid lake That every wanton breath can stir, How had it ruffled been by one Who wore the livery of the brood By whom, with hands in blood imbrued, Thrice had my country been undone? But I, nor free, nor false, nor light, Bound both to Poland, and to him Who yearned for Poland's wrongs to fight, Had rather torn been limb from limb, Than share with such love's last delight! I answered softly, not in scorn; For in what guise soe'er it come, Because of gentle longings born, Love should leave indignation dumb. But he was, like his shifty race, Disloyal, cunning, vengeful, base, And when he heard the lips of fate, Love in him straightway turned to hate, Even before my face! He menaced me with vengeance dire. 305 He knew my lover, brother, sire, All rebels to the core. And in the rush of lustful ire, By his schismatic saints he swore, That ruin, exile, death, should fall With speedy stroke upon them all, Unless I fed his foul desire. I knew it was no idle boast; He had the power to fetter, slay, Abetted by a servile host, Perjured, suborned by bribes to say Whatever falsehood pleased him most. Yet then I bridled not my scorn, But poured upon his dastard head All that by woman can be said, When she confronts, before her eyes, Creature created to despise, And, since of manlier weapons shorn, Can only wish him dead. ``Beware!'' he croaked, with passion hoarse, ``Within your patriot arms shall lie, Repelled or welcomed, none but I; And what you now to love deny, You yet shall yield to fear or force.'' With scorn yet fiercer than at first I flashed, and bade him work his worst. ``Before to-morrow's sun hath set,'' He answered, ``I shall pay the debt Of vengeance, never baffled yet. Think not to foil me or to fly! I ever do the thing I would.'' Then laughing loud, he went; and I Hated the ground where late he stood. ```The Night lay encamped in the summer sky, And the burning stars kept watch; All were asleep upon earth save I, Who had waited the hour and lifted the latch, And crept out noiselessly. The air was as silent as love or death, Except for the beat of my quickened breath, And once the lonely belated wail 306 Of an answered nightingale. I dared not quicken my steps, for fear The silence should listening be, and hear. Slowly, stealthily, foot by foot. Girding my garments tightly round, Lest they should touch and tell the ground, I threaded the laurel-walk and passed On to the latchet-gate, and put My hand on the creaking key, aghast Lest the first stage of flight should prove the last. Through! and out in the meadows beyond, With the cooling grass-dews round my feet, Which would tell the tale of my journey fond, But too late to hinder its purpose sweet; Over the narrow and swaying planks That span the neck of the marish pool Where the tall spear-lilies close their ranks, And the water-hens nestle safe and cool. Then into the gloomy, darksome wood Where the trunks seemed ghosts, and the big boughs stood As though they would block my way. Woman's love is stronger than woman's fright, And though dogged by dread, yet I faced that night What I ne'er had faced by day. O the blessëd break, and the blank without, From each grinning bole and each staring leaf! I clutched my temples, and gave a shout; It was mad, but it brought relief. And then with a saner fear I stopped To know if my foolish cry was heard. But, like to a stream where a stone is dropped, The silence was only a moment stirred, And stillness closed over the hazard word. ```I was there! in the garden where first I lent My ear to the trembling music of love, And my soul succumbed to its blandishment. I was there! I could smell the syringa's scent And the lilac plumes that loomed dark above, But, like to the heart that keeps alway True to its friends, when friends betray, Was lending the night that hid from view 307 Its delicate tufts and tender hue, Odours sweeter than e'en by day. The laburnum tassels brushed my cheek, And the tangled clematis clutched my hair; But I hurried along; though my limbs were weak, I was strengthened by despair. A moment more, and I should be Hard by the window where he slept. How should I wake him? how should flee, If another o'erheard my voice? I crept Softly, silently, over the sward. The walls were dark, and the windows barred, All saving-Yes, 'twas he! 'twas he! Leaning out of his casement, lowly Singing a love-song, sweetly, slowly, That he first had sung to me. He saw me not. He was gazing free Across the dark, mysterious air, At the shining stars, at the solemn sky, At the unattainable far and fair, The infinite something around, above, With which, when alone, we identify The finite thing we love. I stood, and listened, and drank each note Of love that came from the yearning throat, As it rose, as it fell, as it floated and died; And then with that courage that oft will spring, When we have not time to think, And impulse whispers the blessëd thing From which resolve would shrink, I with the song replied. ```One instant, and the echoed song, The night, the dark, the heavens bare, And all that was of far and fair, And all that was of sweet and strong, Seemed gathered into one embrace, And showered their magic on my face. His arms were round me, and his breath As close to mine as life to death. He murmured things I could not hear, For I was deaf with bliss and fear. 308 Dumb, too; in vain I strove to speak; I could but lean on breast and cheek, And prove my passion wildly weak. He drew me in. I still was dumb, Panting for words that would not come, But only tears instead, and sobs, And broken syllables, and throbs, With which hearts beat, whom rapture robs Of all save love's delirium. ``Why hast thou come?'' I heard him say. ``There is no hour of night or day, The coming of thy worshipped feet Would not make richer or more sweet. O come! come! come! Yes, come alway! Nay, never come, love! rather, stay! I must or miss you, or not meet; Absence is long, and presence fleet. And I am dead, when thou away! But why to-night, and here?'' I saw Love's brightness overcast by awe; And terror in his face o'ercame The terror in my weakened frame; Till listening to his voice, I caught Contagion from his steadier thought, And found at length the words I sought. With rapid lips I told him all, What had befallen-might befallThe hateful lust, the lustful hate, The threats of one who, well he knew, If false in love, in wrath was true, And our impending fate. ``'Twas this alone I came to tell, And, Leszko! now 'tis told, farewell!'' I murmured with a faltering tongue. Round me his arms he tightly flung, And ``Never!'' cried. ``Thy faith shall foil The base assassins of our soil. By the harmonious orbs that shine, To-night, within that dome divine, What thou hast promised me, must be mine! Before to-morrow's sun can sink, May deeds be done I would not name, 309 And vengeance wreaked I dare not think. If thus you went, 'twere vain you came! To-night is ours, and, seized, will be Ours, ours, through all eternity. The dawn shall find us kneeling where Passion is purified by prayer; And hands of patriot priest shall bless And bind our premature caress. If we are parted then, we part, One, one in body, breast, and heart. Hate, lust, and tyranny, in vain Will strive to snap the cherished chain That we around ourselves have bound. Vanda! my love! my wife! my more! If more be in love's language found, Let them not baulk the troth we swore! Wed me with bonds not fiends can sever, And be thou mine-if once-for ever!'' The winds of the morn began to stir, And the stars began to pale; We could feel the chill of the moving air, And the lifting of the veil That covers the face of the shrinking night, Its dreams, its dangers, its delight. We started up. We listened, heard The pipe of an awaking bird; Another-then another stillLouder and longer, and more shrill, Till every copse began to fill With music piercing bitter, fell, The discord of our forced farewell. We clung one moment, panted, kissed, Then bravely rending us, he cried``Back through the curling morning mist, Vanda! my love! my life! my bride! A few brief hours, and side by side Before Heaven's altar we shall stand, As now in heart, then one in hand, Then-be the future blest or curstLet Poland's tyrants wreak their worst! One-one more kiss!'' 310 ```We leaned, to give The richest of all boons that live, But paused, half given!. . .We each had heard A sound that was no waking bird, Nor stealthy footfall of the night, Scudding the unseen tracks of flight. The noise of human voices broke Upon our ears; the words they spoke Came nearer and more near. We clung in silence; 'twas too late To more than bide the feet of fate, And face them without fear. Loudest among them I could trace The voice I hated most on earth; Another moment, and his face, Lit with vindictiveness and mirth, Was gazing on our checked embrace. His myrmidons were at his heel: I did not shrink, I did not reel, But closer clung, to make him feel I loathed him and his alien race. I know no more. Unarmed we stood. I heard the clank of ordered steel, Then suddenly a blinding hood Over my head was flung, and I, Powerless to struggle, see, or cry, Felt myself wrenched from arms that fain Had fenced my freedom, but in vain, And, doubtful did he live or die, Borne through the chilly morning air, Bound, stifled, cooped with dumb despair!' ``She paused, and strove for breath, as though The mere remembrance of that hour, Though fled and faded long ago, Retained the never-dying power To choke and stifle her again, And leave her dumb and dark, as then. But mute no less I sate; and she The horror in my stare could see, The speechless, open-mouthed suspense, That kept me gazing there, to know 311 If I had heard the worst from woe, Or if I must prepare my sense For outrage deeper, more intense, And from extremity of wrong Become invulnerably strong. `O no!' she cried, for swift she guessed The hell of anguish in my breast; `O no! not that! My boy! thou art The child of love and not of hate, Memento of my only mate! The birth of heart convulsed on heart With rapture pure and passionate! Though never more upon my breast His breast did beat, his head did rest; Though I no more beheld his eye Beaming above me like the sky When all is bright and all is high, And by which gazed on, one is blest; Though ne'er again his touch, his breath, Was blent with mine, to make me feel That something betwixt life and death, When the converging senses reel, And, through devotedness divine, Joy knows not what it suffereth;No other hand has soiled the shrine; And, Leszko lost! though lost, yet mine, My senses, as my soul, kept thine!' ``She saw the shadow quit my brow; But, as it crept away, the light Seemed to desert her temples now. The hand she had imprisoned tight In hers, while travelling wildly back To passion's bourne o'er sorrow's track, She loosed, and half let go. `Hast heard, Hast drunk, hast understood, each word,' Slowly she asked, `my lips have said? Ours was no sanctioned marriage-bed. No priestly blessing, altar's rite, Confirmed the nuptials of that night. Leszko! thou art-' 312 ``'Twas not her tongue That paused upon the bitter word, But that before the name I heard I shrink not from, my arms I flung Around her sainted neck and showered The love with which my soul was stirred. I kissed her knees, her hands devoured, I hushed her mouth, I sealed her eyes, With kisses blent with broken cries, Such as from baffled lips arise When bursting hearts are overpowered With sense of sublime sacrifice. `Mother!' I cried, `I'd sooner be The child of love, and him, and thee, Than bear or boast the tightest ties Altars can knit or priests devise! If love, faith, country cannot bind Two souls through love already blent, Where among mortals shall we find Solemnity or Sacrament? And were aught wanting to complete In face of God's just judgment-seat, Thy snapped-off love and life, The tyrant's outrage, years of wrong, Have weaved thee wedlock doubly strong, And made thee more than wife!' ``She smoothed my hair, caressed my brow; Consoling tears coursed down her cheek, Furrowed by sorrow's barren plough: She stroked my hand, she strove to speak: `Yes, Leszko! Holier bond was ne'er Sanctioned by heaven or sealed by prayer. Let others deem that formal vows Breathed between kneeling spouse and spouse, Can sanctify a link where each Is but the slave of ordered speech; Where vanity, ambition, greed, Are the base instincts that precede The purest of the passions, sent Life's desolate low steps to lead Up to the star-thronged firmament; 313 Let others fancy, if they will, That pomp, and compliment, and smile, Are sacramental bonds, though guile And calculating coldness fill The hollows of the heart the while; Let those, too, scorn me who have knelt In fancied faithfulness, and sworn The eternal troth they thought they felt, But, soon as they were left to mourn One to whose flesh their flesh they vowed Not more in marriage-sheet than shroud, After a few short trappings worn To silence the censorious crowd, Have let their facile feelings melt Unto some second fancy, nursed In the same lap where burned the first! Let them!-Nor pomp nor pandars gave Me unto him! 'Twas love alone Anointed us; and not the grave, Not life, not death, shall e'er deprave The body that remains his own. Not mine a fault for which to crave By Heaven or mortal to be shriven. If I a suppliant need to be To any, 'tis, my boy, to thee! And I by thee am all forgiven! ```Yet-yet-that night of shining joy Its shadow flings athwart thy life; I am not, I can ne'er be wife, And thou art no one's son, our boy! His name I gave thee, and despite Their jugglery of wrong and right, It shall thou bear, whate'er betide. But who can give thee aught beside? Bastard thou art! and thou canst claim, It boots not what thy blood, thy fame, Thy father's features, manly age, Only a bastard's heritage. But, Leszko! who would care to boast All that the rightful covet most; Who, who would wish to clutch and hold Honour, or rank, or lands, or gold, 314 When lands, and gold, and rank, but be A brighter badge of slavery? They who have nothing may excuse Submission to the tyrant's beck; Too bare and beggared to refuse Unsavoury morsel from the hand That plants the heel upon the neck Of their assassinated land. But they who yet have aught to lose, Base must they be if they can use What still is left to them, to deck The mourning of their country's wreck. Be sure thy sire doth not retain What would but aggravate his pain. Of me, of love, when dispossessed, How would he care to keep the rest? Robbed of my arms, his arms would find But emptiness in all behind, Vacuous air and moaning wind. Who tore me from him, must have torn With it long since the worldly dregs Easy resigned by him who begs That death at least to him be kind, And bans the day that he was born! ```Nay, ask not if he lives. I know Nothing, since that cold dawn of woe. Once more I had to hear, and bear, The vengeful menace, lustful prayer, Of one who sued, but would not spare. He threatened he would blazen wide That which he dared to call my shame. Guess how I answered! I defied, Exulted, and with patriot pride Told him that I myself to fame Would trumpet forth the deed that I Had done to foil the treachery Already hatching, and by whom! He cursed me. That was his reply. But mine, alas! had sealed my doom. ```'Twas over, quick. I saw no more 315 Familiar face, or roof, or floor, Or anything I knew before. My eyes were bandaged, limbs were bound, As through rough distance on we wound, Aware but of the unseen ground We traversed ever, day and night. At length they gave me back my sight; And lo! there stretched before, around, The desert steppe, inhuman, bare, That answered me with stare for stare. I gazed around me for some face, Some answering look, some kindred guise, Some woe that I might recognize Even in this desert place. But none of all I saw, I knew; And never one among them threw A pitying glance on me. So desolate it seemed, I should Have thankful been if there had stood Before me even he Who thuswise had my ruin wrought. I vow to you, his face I sought, Among the convoy, early, late. No face, no fiend, my exiled fate Could now or better make or worse: And it to me relief had brought Could I have seen him, but to hate, And greeted, but to curse! ```A mute and melancholy band, For days and weeks we journeyed on, Across a bare and level land, On which the fierce sun ever shone, But whence all life and growth were gone, Utterly, as from salt-steeped strand. Dawn after dawn, the steppe stretched round: It seemed to have no halt, no end, Centre, circumference, nor bound, No sight, no shade, no scent, no sound; But ever we appeared to wend Into eternal exile, doomed To make the endless track we trod, 316 Now over sand, now scanty sod, Where nought save blight and canker bloomed. Though on we gasped, no goal was gained; Further we went, further remained, As when thought struggles after God: Save that, instead, we seemed to go Towards infinity of woe. Many we were, but each alone. We durst not with each other speak, And but exchanged a tear or groan. The strong might not assist the weak, And to be child or woman gave No privilege or power, save To suffer more and be more brave. So wretched were we, we could bless A lighter load of wretchedness; And when at last the cruel sun Began to pity us, and leave In sleep our pain a short reprieve, We almost felt our griefs were done. We knew not they had scarce begun. Into another land we passed, Drearier and deader than the last, That knows no future and no past, But only one fixed present!-land Where nothing waxeth more or less, Nothing is born and nothing dies, And where, 'neath never-changing skies, E'en frozen time itself doth stand Immutable and motionless! A land of snow and snow-fed wind, Which freeze the blood, congeal the mind, And harden man against mankind: Region of death that is not dead, But ever on its icy bed Lies dying, and must ever lie, Forbid to live, forbid to die! ```And, as its doom, such too seemed mine, The doom of deathlessness in death. In vain I used to pray and pine The greedy cold would suck my breath, 317 And leave my empty husk to bleach On the untrodden waste of white, And draw the prowling jackal's screech, Or give the wolf one foul delight. ```One night, as, prostrate in despair At each unanswered tear and prayer, I blasphemed God, and wildly sware That if at least He would not give Me death, I would no longer live, But would myself the torture end, That had nor change, nor hope, nor friend, Sudden I started, gave a cry; I seemed as changed to flesh from stone: Oh! joy! I was no more alone. And then for worlds I would not die! 'Twas thou! 'twas thou! my babe! my boy! In joylessness my more than joy! My more than heaven 'mid more than hell! Weeping, upon my knees I fell, And prayed forgiveness for my sin. What now to me or cold or heat, My shivering head, my burning feet, Hunger or ache? I held within The memory of that midnight sweet. I had no thought for things without: Sensation, suffering, struggle, doubt, Each sense wherewith we feel, hear, see, Was concentrated inwardly. My aim was how to feed the root That in the silence 'gan to shoot, And pulsed with promise of the fruit. Sometimes, in fresh access of woe, Hope veered, and longed that thou and I Lay underneath the snug, warm snow, Together, and with none to know; But swung back ever, true and high, From desperation's gusty strife,Pointing from love and set towards life! ```You lived!'. . .`O mother!' here I cried, `Tell me no more! I cannot bear 318 The tale of love, and grief, and pride. Is't not enough that now we share Pride, love, and exile, side by side? And, let what will of wrong betide, No wrong my youth, at least, shall tear, From your soft hand and silvery hair!' ```What, Leszko! Leszko's son!' she said, Her voice was grave, her tears were fled: `Think you I told this tale of woe, To stir your love for me, I know, Will hold you living, haunt you dead? Not quit my side, luxurious boy! Share anguish that is almost joy, To shrink from pain without alloy! By all my hopes of husband fled, My interrupted marriage-bed, I charge you, bid you, not to cling, To me, to love, to anything! Not leave me! What is this I hear? The mawkish kiss, the vapid tear, Not flashing eye and springing spear!' She pushed me off. `It cannot be His patriot seed and mine I see. Thou art some changeling! Go, then, go! And hunt the lynx across the snow, And when the blue-eyed scyllas blow, Gather thereof a dainty bunch, To woo some daughter of the foe, While jackals and hyenas crunch Thy country's flesh and bones, and bloom No flowers, of all Spring used to know, Save such as mourn o'er Poland's tomb! For Poland, I from him was torn, For Poland, he from me! But thouThou, thou forsooth, must cling on now, Like infant that, from threatened hurt Flies whimpering, to thy mother's skirt, Dead unto duty as to scorn! Bastard, indeed, thou doubly wert, And both are shamed that thou wast born!' ``I knelt me down; towards the ground 319 I bowed my head in lowly guise. I did not dare to raise my eyes, But when at last my voice I found, `Mother!' I cried, `I am not base, Nor bastard, and his blood is mine; But gazing on thy holy face, I all forgot a woe, a wrong, Sadder, more sacred, e'en than thine. But now thy strength hath made me strong, And in my features thou shalt trace, And in my soul, that I belong Unto a noble name and race.' I stood up straight. There was no sign Of melting in my voice or gaze. `When shall I go?' I said, `The ways Are not more ready stretched than I To start at once, to run, to fly, Whither thy sharp reproaches point. Mother, farewell! In every joint I feel the blood of Poland stir. She is my mother! I for her Can lonely live, will lonely die.' ```Kneel then once more!' she said. I knelt, But this time with unbending brow. Her face fawned towards me, and I felt Her lips upon me, tender now. She took the cross from off her breast, Passed its cord softly o'er my head: `I have no sword to give,' she said, `But you will find one 'mong the dead That now lie thick-though baffled, blestAmong the forests where, once more, Poland renews the hopeless strife, And liberates with lavish gore, Awhile, the fever of its life. Listen! There shortly start from hence Two fresh battalions of the foe, For Poland bound. They doubtless go To aid their kindred's violence. You must march with them o'er the snow. Nay, start not! must their colours wear, 320 Aye, boy! must false allegiance swear To their detested Pontiff-Czar! Such perjuries, I tell thee, are Not heard at Heaven's just judgment-bar. And if thy lips abhor the lie, Poland absolves thee-so do I!' ``The hour had come, and face to face We stood, my mother, there, and I. We did not fondle nor embrace; She did not weep, I did not sigh. I wore the trappings of the race That battens upon Poland's heart; So, well I knew that uncaressed, Unfolded to her craving breast, I from her must depart. `Have you the cross?' she asked. I laid My hand where 'gainst my heart it lay, But did not speak. `Both night and day, Brood on it, as a constant maid Broods on the face that cannot fade, When he who loves her is away! It was the one dumb thing on earth That spoke to me; the only one, Dead, that was eloquent of birth; So have I given it thee, my son! I have no gift of his, no toy, No trinket, trifle, leaf, nor flower, Naught to remind me of my joy. But it was on my breast that hour, That night, when it, and it alone, Was 'twixt his bosom and my own. Go, now! And I will nightly pray The Queen of Poland, we may meet, When bitter has been turned to sweet, And earthly dark to heavenly day!' I bent. She raised her hands to bless; And then I went without caress, And left her to her loneliness. ``Why tell the rest? Too well you know, Ah! you, free child of Freedom's shore, 321 That spurred our hopes, but lent no blow In aid of all our wasted gore, How Poland, maddened, rose once more, And blindly struck at friend and foe. Why should I tell-the tale, too long!Of the weak writhing 'gainst the strong, Pricked by reiterated wrong? The orphaned pillows, rifled roofs, The sudden rush of trampling hoofs, The reeking village, blazing town; The perjured charge, the traitor's mesh, The virgin's lacerated flesh; The wail of childhood, helpless fair, Frenzy itself had stopped to spare; Priests at the altar stricken down, Mingling their blood with that of Christ, While sacrificing, sacrificed; Chaste spouses of the cloister, weaned From earth, and from Earth's passions screened, Shrieking beneath the clutch of fiend, And outraged, less from lust than hate, In refuges inviolate.Enough! Had Hell broke loose, and sent Its demons forth, on man to vent The tortures God's maligners feign Heaven vents on them, they would in vain Have striven to paragon the pain Poland's oppressors knew to wreak Upon the sensitive and weak, When we, the strong, their strength defied, And Freedom, foiling despots, died. ``I was too late. 'Twas nearly o'er; But straight I sloughed the garb I wore, And joined one last determined band, Who to the border forests clung That sever from the Tartar's hand That share of our partitioned land Which owns a rule more just and bland, Keeping at least its creed and tongue. We did not think with fate to cope; No! vengeance was our only hope, 322 And vengeance to me came. We were pursued by one who gave No mercy or to faint or brave: I heard, and knew his name. 'Twas he, whose lust had torn apart For ever loving heart from heart, As far as hatred can. We lay in ambush; they were caught, And could not fly, so mercy sought. We slew them, to a man! He fell to me! One thrust I made, And at my feet I saw him laid: I sucked the blood from off my blade: Christ! it was sweet! aye, sweeter far Than the smile of home, than the kiss of maid, Or the glow of the evening star! ``It was the last blow struck. We fled Across the frontier, each as best A gap could gain, and left the dead To stock the unclean raven's nest. Exile once more, though all the earth Henceforth lay open to my tread, All save the one that gave me birth, I saw no goal except the one Where, sitting mute in deepest dearth, The mother waited for the son. But how? I donned the pedlar's pack, And started on the trackless track, Day after day, league after league, Fatigue slow-linked with slow fatigue, But ever getting nearer back Unto the larch-log fire where she Sat patiently, awaiting me. And there was yet another sight Behind, to spur my flagging tread: The foe, the fiend, I felled in fight, And gloated over, dead! Could I have borne his hated head, And laid it at my mother's feet! The very thought fresh vigour gave, And made my final footsteps fleet. 323 I raved. You deem that still I rave. What think you that they found? Her grave. ``Back, back across the cruel waste, Her tomb behind, my life before;An ebbing wave that raced and raced, But ne'er could hope to find a shore, Not e'en a rock 'gainst which to break: A vista of unending ache, Trod and endured for no one's sake! Rather than live without some end, Such misery fresh woe will make, And woo misfortune for a friend. And I, since it was vain to hope That I could find, where'er I ran, Solace or happiness, began For further wretchedness to grope. Now other object had I none, From rise of day to set of sun, Except to seek my sire; Though well I knew I should not find, Or finding, curse the fate unkind That baulked not my desire. And fate was ruthless to the last. Five years of bootless search had passed, And still I sought. But when on fire, Her roofs delirious Paris saw, I found him stretched on sordid straw. He had not fought for crowd or law: Sooth, had he wished, he could not draw A sword from scabbard now, nor lift His body from its borrowed bed. His brackish life was ebbing swift. He who had eaten beggar's bread, And known each sad and sordid shift That just sustains the exile's tread, Needed no more the stranger's gift. I knelt me down beside his head, And breathed her name into his ear. There came no start, no word, no tear: His brain was deaf; he did not know The difference now 'twixt joy and woe, 324 'Twixt love and hate, 'twixt friend and foe, 'Twixt me and any other! Vain My years of search and sought-for pain. Yet not quite vain. Upon his breast A silver locket hung; and when I stretched my hand to it, he pressed 'Gainst it his own, nor loosed again, Until he passed away to rest. I took it when his grasp grew cold, And lo! it was my mother's face! Not as I knew her, blanched and old, But in the glow of youth and grace, With eyes of heaven and hair of gold, And all the passion of her race. I wear it and its rusted chain. I put her cross there in its place: The iron cross; yes, cross indeed! And iron, too! the fitting meed Of those who for wronged Poland bleed, And ever bleed in vain! ``Rise quick, ye winds! Race swift, ye waves! And bear me where blue Danube rolls, Past Orsova's loud-foaming caves, On 'twixt armed hosts of rival slaves, To scatter among Euxine shoals. Now, do you ask why hence I fly To join the Moslem camp, and hurl My poor weak life, foredoomed to die, On those who Freedom's flag unfurl For Christian boor and Sclavic churl?Out on the sacrilegious lie! Robbers, assassins, liars, slaves! Whose feet are fresh from outraged graves! Let those among you, dupes, or worse, Sucklings of falsehood, or its nurse, Believe that Russian arms can bear To others aught except a share In chains themselves consent to wear! Let them! But I! Did Tartar swords Storm hell, and Turkish steel defend, I would the infernal Cause befriend 325 Against the worse than demon hordes Who to the damned would bring fresh curse, And enter Hell, to make it worse!'' ~ Alfred Austin,

715:Is it the same Sordello in the dusk As at the dawn?merely a perished husk Now, that arose a power fit to build Up Rome again? The proud conception chilled So soon? Ay, watch that latest dream of thine A Rome indebted to no Palatine Drop arch by arch, Sordello! Art possessed Of thy wish now, rewarded for thy quest To-day among Ferrara's squalid sons? Are this and this and this the shining ones Meet for the Shining City? Sooth to say, Your favoured tenantry pursue their way After a fashion! This companion slips On the smooth causey, t' other blinkard trips At his mooned sandal. "Leave to lead the brawls "Here i' the atria?" No, friend! He that sprawls On aught but a stibadium . . . what his dues Who puts the lustral vase to such an use? Oh, huddle up the day's disasters! March, Ye runagates, and drop thou, arch by arch, Rome!    Yet before they quite disbanda whim Study mere shelter, now, for him, and him, Nay, even the worst,just house them! Any cave Suffices: throw out earth! A loophole? Brave! They ask to feel the sun shine, see the grass Grow, hear the larks sing? Dead art thou, alas, And I am dead! But here's our son excels At hurdle-weaving any Scythian, fells Oak and devises rafters, dreams and shapes His dream into a door-post, just escapes The mystery of hinges. Lie we both Perdue another age. The goodly growth Of brick and stone! Our building-pelt was rough, But that descendant's garb suits well enough A portico-contriver. Speed the years What 's time to us? At last, a city rears Itself! nay, enterwhat's the grave to us? Lo, our forlorn acquaintance carry thus The head! Successively sewer, forum, cirque Last age, an aqueduct was counted work, But now they tire the artificer upon Blank alabaster, black obsidion, Careful, Jove's face be duly fulgurant, And mother Venus' kiss-creased nipples pant Back into pristine pulpiness, ere fixed Above the baths. What difference betwixt This Rome and oursresemblance what, between That scurvy dumb-show and this pageant sheen These Romans and our rabble? Use thy wit! The work marched: step by step,a workman fit Took each, nor too fit,to one task, one time, No leaping o'er the petty to the prime, When just the substituting osier lithe For brittle bulrush, sound wood for soft withe, To further loam-and-roughcast-work a stage, Exacts an architect, exacts an age: No tables of the Mauritanian tree For men whose maple log 's their luxury! That way was Rome built. "Better" (say you) "merge "At once all workmen in the demiurge, "All epochs in a lifetime, every task "In one!" So should the sudden city bask I' the daywhile those we 'd feast there, want the knack Of keeping fresh-chalked gowns from speck and brack, Distinguish not rare peacock from vile swan, Nor Mareotic juice from Ccuban. "Enough of Rome! 'T was happy to conceive "Rome on a sudden, nor shall fate bereave "Me of that credit: for the rest, her spite "Is an old storyserves my folly right "By adding yet another to the dull "List of abortionsthings proved beautiful "Could they be done, Sordello cannot do." He sat upon the terrace, plucked and threw The powdery aloe-cusps away, saw shift Rome's walls, and drop arch after arch, and drift Mist-like afar those pillars of all stripe, Mounds of all majesty. "Thou archetype, "Last of my dreams and loveliest, depart!" And then a low voice wound into his heart: "Sordello!" (low as some old Pythoness Conceding to a Lydian King's distress The cause of his long errorone mistake Of her past oracle) "Sordello, wake! "God has conceded two sights to a man "One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, "The other, of the minute's work, man's first "Step to the plan's completeness: what's dispersed "Save hope of that supreme step which, descried "Earliest, was meant still to remain untried "Only to give you heart to take your own "Step, and there stay, leaving the rest alone? "Where is the vanity? Why count as one "The first step, with the last step? What is gone "Except Rome's ary magnificence, "That last step you 'd take first?an evidence "You were God: be man now! Let those glances fall! "The basis, the beginning step of all, "Which proves you just a manis that gone too? "Pity to disconcert one versed as you "In fate's ill-nature! but its full extent "Eludes Sordello, even: the veil rent, "Read the black writingthat collective man "Outstrips the individual. Who began "The acknowledged greatnesses? Ay, your own art "Shall serve us: put the poet's mimes apart "Close with the poet's self, and lo, a dim "Yet too plain form divides itself from him! "Alcamo's song enmeshes the lulled Isle, "Woven into the echoes left erewhile "By Nina, one soft web of song: no more "Turning his name, then, flower-like o'er and o'er! "An elder poet in the younger's place; "Nina's the strength, but Alcamo's the grace: "Each neutralizes each then! Search your fill; "You get no whole and perfect Poetstill "New Ninas, Alcamos, till time's mid-night "Shrouds allor better say, the shutting light "Of a forgotten yesterday. Dissect "Every ideal workman(to reject "In favour of your fearful ignorance "The thousand phantasms eager to advance, "And point you but to those within your reach) "Were you the first who brought(in modern speech) "The Multitude to be materialized? "That loose eternal unrestwho devised "An apparition i' the midst? The rout "Was checked, a breathless ring was formed about "That sudden flower: get round at any risk "The gold-rough pointel, silver-blazing disk "O' the lily! Swords across it! Reign thy reign "And serve thy frolic service, Charlemagne! "The very child of over-joyousness, "Unfeeling thence, strong therefore: Strength by stress "Of Strength comes of that forehead confident, "Those widened eyes expecting heart's content, "A calm as out of just-quelled noise; nor swerves "For doubt, the ample cheek in gracious curves "Abutting on the upthrust nether lip: "He wills, how should he doubt then? Ages slip: "Was it Sordello pried into the work "So far accomplished, and discovered lurk "A company amid the other clans, "Only distinct in priests for castellans "And popes for suzerains (their rule confessed "Its rule, their interest its interest, "Living for sake of livingthere an end, "Wrapt in itself, no energy to spend "In making adversaries or allies) "Dived you into its capabilities "And dared create, out of that sect, a soul "Should turn a multitude, already whole, "Into its body? Speak plainer! Is 't so sure "God's church lives by a King's investiture? "Look to last step! A staggeringa shock "What 's mere sand is demolished, while the rock "Endures: a column of black fiery dust "Blots heaventhat help was prematurely thrust "Aside, perchance!but air clears, nought 's erased "Of the true outline. Thus much being firm based, "The other was a scaffold. See him stand "Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand "Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply "As in a forge; it buries either eye "White and extinct, that stupid brow; teeth clenched, "The neck tight-corded, too, the chin deep-trenched, "As if a cloud enveloped him while fought "Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought "At dead-lock, agonizing he, until "The victor thought leap radiant up, and Will, "The slave with folded arms and drooping lids "They fought for, lean forth flame-like as it bids. "Call him no flowera mandrake of the earth, "Thwarted and dwarfed and blasted in its birth, "Rather,a fruit of suffering's excess, "Thence feeling, therefore stronger: still by stress "Of Strength, work Knowledge! Full three hundred years "Have men to wear away in smiles and tears "Between the two that nearly seemed to touch, "Observe you! quit one workman and you clutch "Another, letting both their trains go by "The actors-out of either's policy, "Heinrich, on this hand, Otho, Barbaross, "Carry the three Imperial crowns across, "Aix' Iron, Milan's Silver, and Rome's Gold "While Alexander, Innocent uphold "On that, each Papal keybut, link on link, "Why is it neither chain betrays a chink? "How coalesce the small and great? Alack, "For one thrust forward, fifty such fall back! "Do the popes coupled there help Gregory "Alone? Harkfrom the hermit Peter's cry "At Claremont, down to the first serf that says "Friedrich 's no liege of his while he delays "Getting the Pope's curse off him! The Crusade "Or trick of breeding Strength by other aid "Than Strength, is safe. Harkfrom the wild harangue "Of Vimmercato, to the carroch's clang "Yonder! The Leagueor trick of turning Strength "Against Pernicious Strength, is safe at length. "Yet harkfrom Mantuan Albert making cease "The fierce ones, to Saint Francis preaching peace "Yonder! God's Truceor trick to supersede "The very Use of Strength, is safe. Indeed "We trench upon the future. Who is found "To take next step, next agetrail o'er the ground "Shall I say, gourd-like?not the flower's display "Nor the root's prowess, but the plenteous way "O' the plantproduced by joy and sorrow, whence "Unfeeling and yet feeling, strongest thence? "Knowledge by stress of merely Knowledge? No "E'en were Sordello ready to forego "His life for this, 't were overleaping work "Some one has first to do, howe'er it irk, "Nor stray a foot's breadth from the beaten road. "Who means to help must still support the load "Hildebrand lifted'why hast Thou,' he groaned, "`Imposed on me a burthen, Paul had moaned, "'And Moses dropped beneath?' Much doneand yet "Doubtless that grandest task God ever set "On man, left much to do: at his arm's wrench, "Charlemagne's scaffold fell; but pillars blench "Merely, start back againperchance have been "Taken for buttresses: crash every screen, "Hammer the tenons better, and engage "A gang about your work, for the next age "Or two, of Knowledge, part by Strength and part "By Knowledge! Then, indeed, perchance may start "Sordello on his racewould time divulge "Such secrets! If one step's awry, one bulge "Calls for correction by a step we thought "Got over long since, why, till that is wrought, "No progress! And the scaffold in its turn "Becomes, its service o'er, a thing to spurn. "Meanwhile, if your half-dozen years of life "In store dispose you to forego the strife, "Who takes exception? Only bear in mind "Ferrara 's reached, Goito 's left behind: "As you then were, as half yourself, desist! "The warrior-part of you may, an it list, "Finding real faulchions difficult to poise, "Fling them afar and taste the cream of joys "By wielding such in fancy,what is bard "Of you may spurn the vehicle that marred "Elys so much, and in free fancy glut "His sense, yet write no versesyou have but "To please yourself for law, and once could please "What once appeared yourself, by dreaming these "Rather than doing these, in days gone by. "But all is changed the moment you descry "Mankind as half yourself,then, fancy's trade "Ends once and always: how may half evade "The other half? men are found half of you. "Out of a thousand helps, just one or two "Can be accomplished presently: but flinch "From these (as from the faulchion, raised an inch, "Elys, described a couplet) and make proof "Of fancy,then, while one half lolls aloof "I' the vines, completing Rome to the tip-top "See if, for that, your other half will stop "A tear, begin a smile! The rabble's woes, "Ludicrous in their patience as they chose "To sit about their town and quietly "Be slaughtered,the poor reckless soldiery, "With their ignoble rhymes on Richard, how "'Polt-foot,' sang they, 'was in a pitfall now,' "Cheering each other from the engine-mounts, "That crippled spawling idiot who recounts "How, lopped of limbs, he lay, stupid as stone, "Till the pains crept from out him one by one, "And wriggles round the archers on his head "To earn a morsel of their chestnut bread, "And Cino, always in the self-same place "Weeping; beside that other wretch's case, "Eyepits to ear, one gangrene since he plied "The engine in his coat of raw sheep's hide "A double watch in the noon sun; and see "Lucchino, beauty, with the favours free, "Trim hacqueton, spruce beard and scented hair, "Campaigning it for the first timecut there "In two already, boy enough to crawl "For latter orpine round the southern wall, "Tom, where Richard 's kept, because that **** "Marfisa, the fool never saw before, "Sickened for flowers this wearisomest siege: "And Tiso's wifemen liked their pretty liege, "Cared for her least of whims once,Berta, wed "A twelvemonth gone, and, now poor Tiso's dead, "Delivering herself of his first child "On that chance heap of wet filth, reconciled "To fifty gazers!"(Here a wind below Made moody music augural of woe From the pine barrier)"What if, now the scene "Draws to a close, yourself have really been "You, plucking purples in Goito's moss "Like edges of a trabea (not to cross "Your consul-humour) or dry aloe-shafts "For fasces, at Ferrarahe, fate wafts, "This very age, her whole inheritance `Of opportunities? Yet you advance "Upon the last! Since talking is your trade, "There 's Salinguerra left you to persuade: "Fail! then"        "Nonowhich latest chance secure!" Leaped up and cried Sordello: "this made sure, "The past were yet redeemable; its work "Washelp the Guelfs, whom I, howe'er it irk, "Thus help!" He shook the foolish aloe-haulm Out of his doublet, paused, proceeded calm To the appointed presence. The large head Turned on its socket; "And your spokesman," said The large voice, "is Elcorte's happy sprout? "Few such"(so finishing a speech no doubt Addressed to Palma, silent at his side) "My sober councils have diversified. "Elcorte's son! good: forward as you may, "Our lady's minstrel with so much to say!" The hesitating sunset floated back, Rosily traversed in the wonted track The chamber, from the lattice o'er the girth Of pines, to the huge eagle blacked in earth Opposite,outlined sudden, spur to crest, That solid Salinguerra, and caressed Palma's contour; 't was day looped back night's pall; Sordello had a chance left spite of all. And much he made of the convincing speech Meant to compensate for the past and reach Through his youth's daybreak of unprofit, quite To his noon's labour, so proceed till night Leisurely! The great argument to bind Taurello with the Guelf Cause, body and mind, Came the consummate rhetoric to that? Yet most Sordello's argument dropped flat Through his accustomed fault of breaking yoke, Disjoining him who felt from him who spoke. Was 't not a touching incidentso prompt A rendering the world its just accompt, Once proved its debtor? Who 'd suppose, before This proof, that he, Goito's god of yore, At duty's instance could demean himself So memorably, dwindle to a Guelf? Be sure, in such delicious flattery steeped, His inmost self at the out-portion peeped, Thus occupied; then stole a glance at those Appealed to, curious if her colour rose Or his lip moved, while he discreetly urged The need of Lombardy becoming purged At soonest of her barons; the poor part Abandoned thus, missing the blood at heart And spirit in brain, unseasonably off Elsewhere! But, though his speech was worthy scoff, Good-humoured Salinguerra, famed for tact And tongue, who, careless of his phrase, ne'er lacked The right phrase, and harangued Honorius dumb At his accession,looked as all fell plumb To purpose and himself found interest In every point his new instructor pressed Left playing with the rescript's white wax seal To scrutinize Sordello head and heel. He means to yield assent sure? No, alas! All he replied was, "What, it comes to pass "That poesy, sooner than politics, "Makes fade young hair?" To think such speech could fix Taurello!      Then a flash of bitter truth: So fantasies could break and fritter youth That he had long ago lost earnestness, Lost will to work, lost power to even express The need of working! Earth was turned a grave: No more occasions now, though he should crave Just one, in right of superhuman toil, To do what was undone, repair such spoil, Alter the pastnothing would give the chance! Not that he was to die; he saw askance Protract the ignominious years beyond To dream intime to hope and time despond, Remember and forget, be sad, rejoice As saved a trouble; he might, at his choice, One way or other, idle life out, drop No few smooth verses by the wayfor prop, A thyrsus, these sad people, all the same, Should pick up, and set store by,far from blame, Plant o'er his hearse, convinced his better part Survived him. "Rather tear men out the heart "O' the truth!"Sordello muttered, and renewed His propositions for the Multitude. But Salinguerra, who at this attack Had thrown great breast and ruffling corslet back To hear the better, smilingly resumed His task; beneath, the carroch's warning boomed; He must decide with Tito; courteously He turned then, even seeming to agree With his admonisher"Assist the Pope, "Extend Guelf domination, fill the scope "O' the Church, thus based on All, by All, for All "Change Secular to Evangelical" Echoing his very sentence: all seemed lost, When suddenly he looked up, laughingly almost, To Palma: "This opinion of your friend's "For instance, would it answer Palma's ends? "Best, were it not, turn Guelf, submit our Strength" (Here he drew out his baldric to its length) "To the Pope's Knowledgelet our captive slip, "Wide to the walls throw ope our gates, equip "Azzo with . . . what I hold here! Who 'll subscribe "To a trite censure of the minstrel tribe "Henceforward? or pronounce, as Heinrich used, "'Spear-heads for battle, burr-heads for the joust!' "When Constance, for his couplets, would promote "Alcamo, from a parti-coloured coat, "To holding her lord's stirrup in the wars. "Not that I see where couplet-making jars "With common sense: at Mantua I had borne "This chanted, better than their most forlorn "Of bull-baits,that 's indisputable!"                      Brave! Whom vanity nigh slew, contempt shall save! All 's at an end: a Troubadour suppose Mankind will class him with their friends or foes? A puny uncouth ailing vassal think The world and him bound in some special link? Abrupt the visionary tether burst. What were rewarded here, or what amerced If a poor drudge, solicitous to dream Deservingly, got tangled by his theme So far as to conceit the knack or gift Or whatsoe'er it be, of verse, might lift The globe, a lever like the hand and head Of"Men of Action," as the Jongleurs said, "The Great Men," in the people's dialect? And not a moment did this scorn affect Sordello: scorn the poet? They, for once, Asking "what was," obtained a full response. Bid Naddo think at Mantuahe had but To look into his promptuary, put Finger on a set thought in a set speech: But was Sordello fitted thus for each Conjecture? Nowise; since within his soul, Perception brooded unexpressed and whole. A healthy spirit like a healthy frame Craves aliment in plentyall the same, Changes, assimilates its aliment. Perceived Sordello, on a truth intent? Next day no formularies more you saw Than figs or olives in a sated maw. 'T is Knowledge, whither such perceptions tend; They lose themselves in that, means to an end, The many old producing some one new, A last unlike the first. If lies are true, The Caliph's wheel-work man of brass receives A meal, munched millet grains and lettuce leaves Together in his stomach rattle loose; You find them perfect next day to produce: But ne'er expect the man, on strength of that, Can roll an iron camel-collar flat Like Haroun's self! I tell you, what was stored Bit by bit through Sordello's life, outpoured That eve, was, for that age, a novel thing: And round those three the People formed a ring, Of visionary judges whose award He recognised in fullfaces that barred Henceforth return to the old careless life, In whose great presence, therefore, his first strife For their sake must not be ignobly fought; All these, for once, approved of him, he thought, Suspended their own vengeance, chose await The issue of this strife to reinstate Them in the right of taking itin fact He must be proved king ere they could exact Vengeance for such king's defalcation. Last, A reason why the phrases flowed so fast Was in his quite forgetting for a time Himself in his amazement that the rhyme Disguised the royalty so much: he there And Salinguerra yet all-unaware Who was the lord, who liegeman!                  "Thus I lay "On thine my spirit and compel obey "His lord,my liegeman,impotent to build "Another Rome, but hardly so unskilled "In what such builder should have been, as brook "One shame beyond the charge that I forsook "His function! Free me from that shame, I bend "A brow before, suppose new years to spend, "Allow each chance, nor fruitlessly, recur "Measure thee with the Minstrel, then, demur "At any crowd he claims! That I must cede "Shamed now, my right to my especial meed "Confess thee fitter help the world than I "Ordained its champion from eternity, "Is much: but to behold thee scorn the post "I quit in thy behalfto hear thee boast "What makes my own despair!" And while he rung The changes on this theme, the roof up-sprung, The sad walls of the presence-chamber died Into the distance, or embowering vied With far-away Goito's vine-frontier; And crowds of faces(only keeping clear The rose-light in the midst, his vantage-ground To fight their battle from)deep clustered round Sordello, with good wishes no mere breath, Kind prayers for him no vapour, since, come death Come life, he was fresh-sinewed every joint, Each bone new-marrowed as whom gods anoint Though mortal to their rescue. Now let sprawl The snaky volumes hither! Is Typhon all For Hercules to tramplegood report From Salinguerra only to extort? "So was I" (closed he his inculcating A poet must be earth's essential king) "So was I, royal so, and if I fail, "'T is not the royalty, ye witness quail, "But one deposed who, caring not exert "Its proper essence, trifled malapert "With accidents insteadgood things assigned "As heralds of a better thing behind "And, worthy through display of these, put forth "Never the inmost all-surpassing worth "That constitutes him king precisely since "As yet no other spirit may evince "Its like: the power he took most pride to test, "Whereby all forms of life had been professed "At pleasure, forms already on the earth, "Was but a means to power beyond, whose birth "Should, in its novelty, be kingship's proof. "Now, whether he came near or kept aloof "The several forms he longed to imitate, "Not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. "Those forms, unalterable first as last, "Proved him her copier, not the protoplast "Of nature: what would come of being free, "By action to exhibit tree for tree, "Bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore "One veritable man or woman more? "Means to an end, such proofs are: what the end? "Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend "Never contract. Already you include "The multitude; then let the multitude "Include yourself; and the result were new: "Themselves before, the multitude turn you. "This were to live and move and have, in them, "Your being, and secure a diadem "You should transmit (because no cycle yearns "Beyond itself, but on itself returns) "When, the full sphere in wane, the world o'erlaid "Long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed "Some orb still prouder, some displayer, still "More potent than the last, of human will, "And some new king depose the old. Of such "Am Iwhom pride of this elates too much? "Safe, rather say, 'mid troops of peers again; "I, with my words, hailed brother of the train "Deeds once sufficed: for, let the world roll back, "Who fails, through deeds howe'er diverse, retrack "My purpose still, my task? A teeming crust "Air, flame, earth, wave at conflict! Then, needs must "Emerge some Calm embodied, these refer "The brawl toyellow-bearded Jupiter? "No! Saturn; some existence like a pact "And protest against Chaos, some first fact "I' the faint of time. My deep of life, I know "Is unavailing e'en to poorly show" . . . (For here the Chief immeasurably yawned) . . . "Deeds in their due gradation till Song dawned "The fullest effluence of the finest mind, "All in degree, no way diverse in kind "From minds about it, minds which, more or less, "Lofty or low, move seeking to impress "Themselves on somewhat; but one mind has climbed "Step after step, by just ascent sublimed. "Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage, "Soul is from body still to disengage "As tending to a freedom which rejects "Such help and incorporeally affects "The world, producing deeds but not by deeds, "Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds, "Assigning them the simpler tasks it used "To patiently perform till Song produced "Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind: divest "Mind of e'en Thought, and, lo, God's unexpressed "Will draws above us! All then is to win "Save that. How much for me, then? where begin "My work? About me, faces! and they flock, "The earnest faces. What shall I unlock "By song? behold me prompt, whate'er it be, "To minister: how much can mortals see "Of Life? No more than so? I take the task "And marshal you Life's elemental masque, "Show Men, on evil or on good lay stress, "This light, this shade make prominent, suppress "All ordinary hues that softening blend "Such natures with the level. Apprehend "Which sinner is, which saint, if I allot "Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, a blaze or blot, "To those you doubt concerning! I enwomb "Some wretched Friedrich with his red-hot tomb; "Some dubious spirit, Lombard Agilulph "With the black chastening river I engulph! "Some unapproached Matilda I enshrine "With languors of the planet of decline "These, fail to recognize, to arbitrate "Between henceforth, to rightly estimate "Thus marshalled in the masque! Myself, the while, "As one of you, am witness, shrink or smile "At my own showing! Next agewhat 's to do? "The men and women stationed hitherto "Will I unstation, good and bad, conduct "Each nature to its farthest, or obstruct "At soonest, in the world: light, thwarted, breaks "A limpid purity to rainbow flakes, "Or shadow, massed, freezes to gloom: behold "How such, with fit assistance to unfold, "Or obstacles to crush them, disengage "Their forms, love, hate, hope, fear, peace make, war wage, "In presence of you all! Myself, implied "Superior now, as, by the platform's side, "I bade them do and suffer,would last content "The world . . . nothat 's too far! I circumvent "A few, my masque contented, and to these "Offer unveil the last of mysteries "Man's inmost life shall have yet freer play: "Once more I cast external things away, "And natures composite, so decompose "That" . . . Why, he writes Sordello!                     "How I rose, "And how have you advanced! since evermore "Yourselves effect what I was fain before "Effect, what I supplied yourselves suggest, "What I leave bare yourselves can now invest. "How we attain to talk as brothers talk, "In half-words, call things by half-names, no balk "From discontinuing old aids. To-day "Takes in account the work of Yesterday: "Has not the world a Past now, its adept "Consults ere he dispense with or accept "New aids? a single touch more may enhance, "A touch less turn to insignificance "Those structures' symmetry the past has strewed "The world with, once so bare. Leave the mere rude "Explicit details! 't is but brother's speech "We need, speech where an accent's change gives each "The other's soulno speech to understand "By former audience: need was then to expand, "Expatiatehardly were we brothers! true "Nor I lament my small remove from you, "Nor reconstruct what stands already. Ends "Accomplished turn to means: my art intends "New structure from the ancient: as they changed "The spoils of every clime at Venice, ranged "The horned and snouted Libyan god, upright "As in his desert, by some simple bright "Clay cinerary pitcherThebes as Rome, "Athens as Byzant rifled, till their Dome "From earth's reputed consummations razed "A seal, the all-transmuting Triad blazed "Above. Ah, whose that fortune? Ne'ertheless "E'en he must stoop contented to express "No tithe of what 's to saythe vehicle "Never sufficient: but his work is still "For faces like the faces that select "The single service I am bound effect, "That bid me cast aside such fancies, bow "Taurello to the Guelf cause, disallow "The Kaiser's comingwhich with heart, soul, strength, "I labour for, this eve, who feel at length "My past career's outrageous vanity, "And would, as its amends, die, even die "Now I first estimate the boon of life, "If death might win compliancesure, this strife "Is right for oncethe People my support." My poor Sordello! what may we extort By this, I wonder? Palma's lighted eyes Turned to Taurello who, long past surprise, Began, "You love himwhat you 'd say at large "Let me say briefly. First, your father's charge "To me, his friend, peruse: I guessed indeed "You were no stranger to the course decreed. "He bids me leave his children to the saints: "As for a certain project, he acquaints "The Pope with that, and offers him the best "Of your possessions to permit the rest "Go peaceablyto Ecelin, a stripe "Of soil the cursed Vicentines will gripe, "To Alberic, a patch the Trevisan "Clutches already; extricate, who can, "Treville, Villarazzi, Puissolo, "Loria and Cartiglione!all must go, "And with them go my hopes. 'T is lost, then! Lost "This eve, our crisis, and some pains it cost "Procuring; thirty yearsas good I'd spent "Like our admonisher! But each his bent "Pursues: no question, one might live absurd "Oneself this while, by deed as he by word "Persisting to obtrude an influence where "'T is made account of, much as . . . nay, you fare "With twice the fortune, youngster!I submit, "Happy to parallel my waste of wit "With the renowned Sordello's: you decide "A course for me. Romano may abide "Romano,Bacchus! After all, what dearth "Of Ecelins and Alberics on earth? "Say there 's a prize in prospect, must disgrace "Betide competitors, unless they style "Themselves Romano? Were it worth my while "To try my own luck! But an obscure place "Suits methere wants a youth to bustle, stalk "And attitudinizesome fight, more talk, "Most flaunting badgeshow, I might make clear "Since Friedrich's very purposes lie here "Here, pity they are like to lie! For me, "With station fixed unceremoniously "Long since, small use contesting; I am but "The liegemanyou are born the lieges: shut "That gentle mouth now! or resume your kin "In your sweet self; were Palma Ecelin "For me to work with! Could that neck endure "This bauble for a cumbrous garniture, "She should . . . or might one bear it for her? Stay "I have not been so flattered many a day "As by your pale friendBacchus! The least help "Would lick the hind's fawn to a lion's whelp: "His neck is broad enougha ready tongue "Beside: too writhledbut, the main thing, young "I could . . . why, look ye!"                And the badge was thrown Across Sordello's neck: "This badge alone "Makes you Romano's Headbecomes superb "On your bare neck, which would, on mine, disturb "The pauldron," said Taurello. A mad act, Nor even dreamed about beforein fact, Not when his sportive arm rose for the nonce But he had dallied overmuch, this once, With power: the thing was done, and he, aware The thing was done, proceeded to declare (So like a nature made to serve, excel In serving, only feel by service well!) That he would make Sordello that and more. "As good a scheme as any. What 's to pore "At in my face?" he asked"ponder instead "This piece of news; you are Romano's Head! "One cannot slacken pace so near the goal, "Suffer my Azzo to escape heart-whole "This time! For you there 's Palma to espouse "For me, one crowning trouble ere I house "Like my compeer."          On which ensued a strange And solemn visitation; there came change O'er every one of them; each looked on each: Up in the midst a truth grew, without speech. And when the giddiness sank and the haze Subsided, they were sitting, no amaze, Sordello with the baldric on, his sire Silent, though his proportions seemed aspire Momently; and, interpreting the thrill, Night at its ebb,Palma was found there still Relating somewhat Adelaide confessed A year ago, while dying on her breast, Of a contrivance, that Vicenza night When Ecelin had birth. "Their convoy's flight, "Cut off a moment, coiled inside the flame "That wallowed like a dragon at his game "The toppling city throughSan Biagio rocks! "And wounded lies in her delicious locks "Retrude, the frail mother, on her face, "None of her wasted, just in one embrace "Covering her child: when, as they lifted her, "Cleaving the tumult, mighty, mightier "And mightiest Taurello's cry outbroke, "Leapt like a tongue of fire that cleaves the smoke, "Midmost to cheer his Mantuans onwarddrown "His colleague Ecelin's clamour, up and down "The disarray: failed Adelaide see then "Who was the natural chief, the man of men? "Outstripping time, her infant there burst swathe, "Stood up with eyes haggard beyond the scathe "From wandering after his heritage "Lost once and lost for aye: and why that rage, "That deprecating glance? A new shape leant "On a familiar shapegloatingly bent "O'er his discomfiture; 'mid wreaths it wore, "Still one outflamed the resther child's before "'T was Salinguerra's for his child: scorn, hate, "Rage now might startle her when all too late! "Then was the moment!rival's foot had spurned "Never that House to earth else! Sense returned "The act conceived, adventured and complete, "They bore away to an obscure retreat "Mother and childRetrude's self not slain" (Nor even here Taurello moved) "though pain "Was fled; and what assured them most 't was fled, "All pain, was, if they raised the pale hushed head "'T would turn this way and that, waver awhile, "And only settle into its old smile "(Graceful as the disquieted water-flag "Steadying itself, remarked they, in the quag "On either side their path)when suffered look "Down on her child. They marched: no sign once shook "The company's close litter of crossed spears "Till, as they reached Goito, a few tears "Slipped in the sunset from her long black lash, "And she was gone. So far the action rash; "No crime. They laid Retrude in the font, "Taurello's very gift, her child was wont "To sit beneathconstant as eve he came "To sit by its attendant girls the same "As one of them. For Palma, she would blend "With this magnific spirit to the end, "That ruled her first; but scarcely had she dared "To disobey the Adelaide who scared "Her into vowing never to disclose "A secret to her husband, which so froze "His blood at half-recital, she contrived "To hide from him Taurello's infant lived, "Lest, by revealing that, himself should mar "Romano's fortunes. And, a crime so far, "Palma received that action: she was told "Of Salinguerra's nature, of his cold "Calm acquiescence in his lot! But free "To impart the secret to Romano, she "Engaged to repossess Sordello of "His heritage, and hers, and that way doff "The mask, but after years, long years: while now, "Was not Romano's sign-mark on that brow?" Across Taurello's heart his arms were locked: And when he did speak 't was as if he mocked The minstrel, "who had not to move," he said, "Nor stirshould fate defraud him of a shred "Of his son's infancy? much less his youth!" (Laughingly all this)"which to aid, in truth, "Himself, reserved on purpose, had not grown "Old, not too old't was best they kept alone "Till now, and never idly met till now;" Then, in the same breath, told Sordello how All intimations of this eve's event Were lies, for Friedrich must advance to Trent, Thence to Verona, then to Rome, there stop, Tumble the Church down, institute a-top The Alps a Prefecture of Lombardy: "That 's now!no prophesying what may be "Anon, with a new monarch of the clime, "Native of Gesi, passing his youth's prime "At Naples. Tito bids my choice decide "On whom . . ."         "Embrace him, madman!" Palma cried, Who through the laugh saw sweat-drops burst apace, And his lips blanching: he did not embrace Sordello, but he laid Sordello's hand On his own eyes, mouth, forehead.                  Understand, This while Sordello was becoming flushed Out of his whiteness; thoughts rushed, fancies rushed; He pressed his hand upon his head and signed Both should forbear him. "Nay, the best 's behind!" Taurello laughednot quite with the same laugh: "The truth is, thus we scatter, ay, like chaff "These Guelfs, a despicable monk recoils "From: nor expect a fickle Kaiser spoils "Our triumph!Friedrich? Think you, I intend "Friedrich shall reap the fruits of blood I spend "And brain I waste? Think you, the people clap "Their hands at my out-hewing this wild gap "For any Friedrich to fill up? 'T is mine "That 's yours: I tell you, towards some such design "Have I worked blindly, yes, and idly, yes, "And for another, yesbut worked no less "With instinct at my heart; I else had swerved, "While nowlook round! My cunning has preserved "Samminiatothat 's a central place "Secures us Florence, boy,in Pisa's case. "By land as she by sea; with Pisa ours, "And Florence, and Pistoia, one devours "The land at leisure! Gloriously dispersed "Brescia, observe, Milan, Piacenza first "That flanked us (ah, you know not!) in the March; "On these we pile, as keystone of our arch, "Romagna and Bologna, whose first span "Covered the Trentine and the Valsugan; "Sofia's Egna by Bolgiano 's sure!" . . . So he proceeded: half of all this, pure Delusion, doubtless, nor the rest too true, But what was undone he felt sure to do, As ring by ring he wrung off, flung away The pauldron-rings to give his sword-arm play Need of the sword now! That would soon adjust Aught wrong at present; to the sword intrust Sordello's whiteness, undersize: 't was plain He hardly rendered right to his own brain Like a brave hound, men educate to pride Himself on speed or scent nor aught beside, As though he could not, gift by gift, match men! Palma had listened patiently: but when 'T was time expostulate, attempt withdraw Taurello from his child, she, without awe Took off his iron arms from, one by one, Sordello's shrinking shoulders, and, that done, Made him avert his visage and relieve Sordello (you might see his corslet heave The while) who, loose, rosetried to speak, then sank: They left him in the chamber. All was blank. And even reeling down the narrow stair Taurello kept up, as though unaware Palma was by to guide him, the old device Something of Milan"how we muster thrice "The Torriani's strength there; all along "Our own Visconti cowed them"thus the song Continued even while she bade him stoop, Thrid somehow, by some glimpse of arrow-loop, The turnings to the gallery below, Where he stopped short as Palma let him go. When he had sat in silence long enough Splintering the stone bench, braving a rebuff She stopped the truncheon; only to commence One of Sordello's poems, a pretence For speaking, some poor rhyme of "Elys' hair "And head that 's sharp and perfect like a pear, "So smooth and close are laid the few fine locks "Stained like pale honey oozed from topmost rocks "Sun-blanched the livelong summer"from his worst Performance, the Goito, as his first: And that at end, conceiving from the brow And open mouth no silence would serve now, Went on to say the whole world loved that man And, for that matter, thought his face, tho' wan, Eclipsed the Count'she sucking in each phrase As if an angel spoke. The foolish praise Ended, he drew her on his mailed knees, made Her face a framework with his hands, a shade, A crown, an aureole: there must she remain (Her little mouth compressed with smiling pain As in his gloves she felt her tresses twitch) To get the best look at, in fittest niche Dispose his saint. That done, he kissed her brow, "Lauded her father for his treason now," He told her, "only, how could one suspect "The wit in him?whose clansman, recollect, `Was ever Salinguerrashe, the same, "Romano and his ladyso, might claim "To know all, as she should"and thus begun Schemes with a vengeance, schemes on schemes, "not one "Fit to be told that foolish boy," he said, "But only let Sordello Palma wed, "Then!"      'T was a dim long narrow place at best: Midway a sole grate showed the fiery West, As shows its corpse the world's end some split tomb A gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom, Faced Palmabut at length Taurello set Her free; the grating held one ragged jet Of fierce gold fire: he lifted her within The hollow underneathhow else begin Fate's second marvellous cycle, else renew The ages than with Palma plain in view? Then paced the passage, hands clenched, head erect, Pursuing his discourse; a grand unchecked Monotony made out from his quick talk And the recurring noises of his walk; Somewhat too much like the o'ercharged assent Of two resolved friends in one danger blent, Who hearten each the other against heart; Boasting there 's nought to care for, when, apart The boaster, all 's to care for. He, beside Some shape not visible, in power and pride Approached, out of the dark, ginglingly near, Nearer, passed close in the broad light, his ear Crimson, eyeballs suffused, temples full-fraught, Just a snatch of the rapid speech you caught, And on he strode into the opposite dark, Till presently the harsh heel's turn, a spark I' the stone, and whirl of some loose embossed throng That crashed against the angle aye so long After the last, punctual to an amount Of mailed great paces you could not but count, Prepared you for the pacing back again. And by the snatches you might ascertain That, Friedrich's Prefecture surmounted, left By this alone in Italy, they cleft Asunder, crushed together, at command Of none, were free to break up Hildebrand, Rebuild, he and Sordello, Charlemagne But garnished, Strength with Knowledge, "if we deign "Accept that compromise and stoop to give "Rome law, the Csar's Representative." Enough, that the illimitable flood Of triumphs after triumphs, understood In its faint reflux (you shall hear) sufficed Young Ecelin for appanage, enticed Him on till, these long quiet in their graves, He found 't was looked for that a whole life's braves Should somehow be made good; so, weak and worn, Must stagger up at Milan, one grey morn Of the to-come, and fight his latest fight. But, Salinguerra's prophecy at height He voluble with a raised arm and stiff, A blaring voice, a blazing eye, as if He had our very Italy to keep Or cast away, or gather in a heap To garrison the betteray, his word Was, "run the cucumber into a gourd, "Drive Trent upon Apulia"at their pitch Who spied the continents and islands which Grew mulberry leaves and sickles, in the map (Strange that three such confessions so should hap To Palma, Dante spoke with in the clear Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere, Cunizza, as he called her! Never ask Of Palma more! She sat, knowing her task Was done, the labour of it,for, success Concerned not Palma, passion's votaress.) Triumph at neight, and thus Sordello crowned Above the passage suddenly a sound Stops speech, stops walk: back shrinks Taurello, bids With large involuntary asking lids, Palma interpret. "'T is his own foot-stamp "Your hand! His summons! Nay, this idle damp "Befits not!" Out they two reeled dizzily. "Visconti 's strong at Milan," resumed he, In the old, somewhat insignificant way (Was Palma wont, years afterward, to say) As though the spirit's flight, sustained thus far, Dropped at that very instant.                Gone they are Palma, Taurello; Eglamor anon, Ecelin,only Naddo 's never gone! Labours, this moonrise, what the Master meant: "Is Squarcialupo speckled?purulent, "I 'd say, but when was Providence put out? "He carries somehow handily about "His spite nor fouls himself!" Goito's vines Stand like a cheat detectedstark rough lines, The moon breaks through, a grey mean scale against The vault where, this eve's Maiden, thou remain'st Like some fresh martyr, eyes fixedwho can tell? As Heaven, now all 's at end, did not so well, Spite of the faith and victory, to leave Its virgin quite to death in the lone eve. While the persisting hermit-bee . . . ha! wait No longer: these in compass, forward fate! ~ Robert Browning, Sordello - Book the Fifth ,

716:ROSALIND, HELEN, and her Child. SCENE. The Shore of the Lake of Como. HELEN    Come hither, my sweet Rosalind.    'T is long since thou and I have met;    And yet methinks it were unkind    Those moments to forget.    Come, sit by me. I see thee stand    By this lone lake, in this far land,    Thy loose hair in the light wind flying,    Thy sweet voice to each tone of even    United, and thine eyes replying    To the hues of yon fair heaven.      Come, gentle friend! wilt sit by me?    And be as thou wert wont to be    Ere we were disunited?    None doth behold us now; the power    That led us forth at this lone hour    Will be but ill requited    If thou depart in scorn. Oh, come,    And talk of our abandoned home!    Remember, this is Italy,    And we are exiles. Talk with me    Of that our land, whose wilds and floods,    Barren and dark although they be,    Were dearer than these chestnut woods;    Those heathy paths, that inland stream,    And the blue mountains, shapes which seem    Like wrecks of childhood's sunny dream;    Which that we have abandoned now,    Weighs on the heart like that remorse    Which altered friendship leaves. I seek    No more our youthful intercourse.    That cannot be! Rosalind, speak,    Speak to me! Leave me not! When morn did come,    When evening fell upon our common home,    When for one hour we parted,do not frown;    I would not chide thee, though thy faith is broken;    But turn to me. Oh! by this cherished token    Of woven hair, which thou wilt not disown,    Turn, as 't were but the memory of me,    And not my scornd self who prayed to thee! ROSALIND    Is it a dream, or do I see      And hear frail Helen? I would flee    Thy tainting touch; but former years    Arise, and bring forbidden tears;    And my o'erburdened memory    Seeks yet its lost repose in thee.    I share thy crime. I cannot choose    But weep for thee; mine own strange grief    But seldom stoops to such relief;    Nor ever did I love thee less,    Though mourning o'er thy wickedness    Even with a sister's woe. I knew    What to the evil world is due,    And therefore sternly did refuse    To link me with the infamy    Of one so lost as Helen. Now,    Bewildered by my dire despair,    Wondering I blush, and weep that thou    Shouldst love me stillthou only!There,    Let us sit on that gray stone    Till our mournful talk be done. HELEN    Alas! not there; I cannot bear    The murmur of this lake to hear.    A sound from there, Rosalind dear,    Which never yet I heard elsewhere    But in our native land, recurs,    Even here where now we meet. It stirs    Too much of suffocating sorrow!    In the dell of yon dark chestnut wood    Is a stone seat, a solitude    Less like our own. The ghost of peace    Will not desert this spot. To-morrow,    If thy kind feelings should not cease,    We may sit here. ROSALIND             Thou lead, my sweet,    And I will follow. HENRY              'T is Fenici's seat    Where you are going? This is not the way,    Mamma; it leads behind those trees that grow    Close to the little river. HELEN                  Yes, I know;    I was bewildered. Kiss me and be gay,    Dear boy; why do you sob? HENRY                 I do not know;    But it might break any one's heart to see      You and the lady cry so bitterly. HELEN    It is a gentle child, my friend. Go home,    Henry, and play with Lilla till I come.    We only cried with joy to see each other;    We are quite merry now. Good night.                      The boy    Lifted a sudden look upon his mother,    And, in the gleam of forced and hollow joy    Which lightened o'er her face, laughed with the glee    Of light and unsuspecting infancy,    And whispered in her ear, 'Bring home with you    That sweet strange lady-friend.' Then off he flew,    But stopped, and beckoned with a meaning smile,    Where the road turned. Pale Rosalind the while,    Hiding her face, stood weeping silently.    In silence then they took the way    Beneath the forest's solitude.    It was a vast and antique wood,    Through which they took their way;    And the gray shades of evening    O'er that green wilderness did fling    Still deeper solitude.    Pursuing still the path that wound    The vast and knotted trees around,    Through which slow shades were wandering,    To a deep lawny dell they came,    To a stone seat beside a spring,    O'er which the columned wood did frame    A roofless temple, like the fane    Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain,    Man's early race once knelt beneath      The overhanging deity.    O'er this fair fountain hung the sky,    Now spangled with rare stars. The snake,    The pale snake, that with eager breath    Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake,    Is beaming with many a mingled hue,    Shed from yon dome's eternal blue,    When he floats on that dark and lucid flood    In the light of his own loveliness;    And the birds, that in the fountain dip    Their plumes, with fearless fellowship    Above and round him wheel and hover.    The fitful wind is heard to stir    One solitary leaf on high;    The chirping of the grasshopper    Fills every pause. There is emotion    In all that dwells at noontide here;    Then through the intricate wild wood    A maze of life and light and motion    Is woven. But there is stillness now    Gloom, and the trance of Nature now.    The snake is in his cave asleep;    The birds are on the branches dreaming;    Only the shadows creep;    Only the glow-worm is gleaming;    Only the owls and the nightingales    Wake in this dell when daylight fails,    And gray shades gather in the woods;    And the owls have all fled far away    In a merrier glen to hoot and play,    For the moon is veiled and sleeping now.    The accustomed nightingale still broods    On her accustomed bough,    But she is mute; for her false mate    Has fled and left her desolate.    This silent spot tradition old    Had peopled with the spectral dead.    For the roots of the speaker's hair felt cold    And stiff, as with tremulous lips he told    That a hellish shape at midnight led    The ghost of a youth with hoary hair,    And sate on the seat beside him there,    Till a naked child came wandering by,    When the fiend would change to a lady fair!    A fearful tale! the truth was worse;    For here a sister and a brother    Had solemnized a monstrous curse,    Meeting in this fair solitude;    For beneath yon very sky,    Had they resigned to one another      Body and soul. The multitude,    Tracking them to the secret wood,    Tore limb from limb their innocent child,    And stabbed and trampled on its mother;    But the youth, for God's most holy grace,    A priest saved to burn in the market-place.    Duly at evening Helen came    To this lone silent spot,    From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow    So much of sympathy to borrow    As soothed her own dark lot.    Duly each evening from her home,    With her fair child would Helen come    To sit upon that antique seat,    While the hues of day were pale;    And the bright boy beside her feet    Now lay, lifting at intervals    His broad blue eyes on her;    Now, where some sudden impulse calls,    Following. He was a gentle boy    And in all gentle sorts took joy.    Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,    With a small feather for a sail,    His fancy on that spring would float,    If some invisible breeze might stir    Its marble calm; and Helen smiled    Through tears of awe on the gay child,    To think that a boy as fair as he,    In years which never more may be,    By that same fount, in that same wood,    The like sweet fancies had pursued;    And that a mother, lost like her,    Had mournfully sate watching him.    Then all the scene was wont to swim    Through the mist of a burning tear.    For many months had Helen known    This scene; and now she thither turned    Her footsteps, not alone.    The friend whose falsehood she had mourned    Sate with her on that seat of stone.    Silent they sate; for evening,    And the power its glimpses bring,    Had with one awful shadow quelled    The passion of their grief. They sate    With linkd hands, for unrepelled    Had Helen taken Rosalind's.    Like the autumn wind, when it unbinds    The tangled locks of the nightshade's hair    Which is twined in the sultry summer air    Round the walls of an outworn sepulchre,      Did the voice of Helen, sad and sweet,    And the sound of her heart that ever beat    As with sighs and words she breathed on her,    Unbind the knots of her friend's despair,    Till her thoughts were free to float and flow;    And from her laboring bosom now,    Like the bursting of a prisoned flame,    The voice of a long-pent sorrow came. ROSALIND    I saw the dark earth fall upon    The coffin; and I saw the stone    Laid over him whom this cold breast    Had pillowed to his nightly rest!    Thou knowest not, thou canst not know    My agony. Oh! I could not weep.    The sources whence such blessings flow    Were not to be approached by me!    But I could smile, and I could sleep,    Though with a self-accusing heart.    In morning's light, in evening's gloom,    I watchedand would not thence depart    My husband's unlamented tomb.    My children knew their sire was gone;    But when I told them, 'He is dead,'    They laughed aloud in frantic glee,    They clapped their hands and leaped about,    Answering each other's ecstasy    With many a prank and merry shout.    But I sate silent and alone,    Wrapped in the mock of mourning weed.    They laughed, for he was dead; but I    Sate with a hard and tearless eye,    And with a heart which would deny    The secret joy it could not quell,    Low muttering o'er his loathd name;    Till from that self-contention came    Remorse where sin was none; a hell    Which in pure spirits should not dwell.    I 'll tell thee truth. He was a man    Hard, selfish, loving only gold,    Yet full of guile; his pale eyes ran      With tears which each some falsehood told,    And oft his smooth and bridled tongue    Would give the lie to his flushing cheek;    He was a coward to the strong;    He was a tyrant to the weak,    On whom his vengeance he would wreak;    For scorn, whose arrows search the heart,    From many a stranger's eye would dart,    And on his memory cling, and follow    His soul to its home so cold and hollow.    He was a tyrant to the weak,    And we were such, alas the day!    Oft, when my little ones at play    Were in youth's natural lightness gay,    Or if they listened to some tale    Of travellers, or of fairyland,    When the light from the wood-fire's dying brand    Flashed on their faces,if they heard    Or thought they heard upon the stair    His footstep, the suspended word    Died on my lips; we all grew pale;    The babe at my bosom was hushed with fear    If it thought it heard its father near;    And my two wild boys would near my knee    Cling, cowed and cowering fearfully.    I 'll tell thee truth: I loved another.    His name in my ear was ever ringing,    His form to my brain was ever clinging;    Yet, if some stranger breathed that name,    My lips turned white, and my heart beat fast.    My nights were once haunted by dreams of flame,    My days were dim in the shadow cast    By the memory of the same!    Day and night, day and night,    He was my breath and life and light,    For three short years, which soon were passed.    On the fourth, my gentle mother    Led me to the shrine, to be    His sworn bride eternally.    And now we stood on the altar stair,    When my father came from a distant land,    And with a loud and fearful cry    Rushed between us suddenly.    I saw the stream of his thin gray hair,    I saw his lean and lifted hand,    And heard his wordsand live! O God!    Wherefore do I live?'Hold, hold!'    He cried, 'I tell thee 't is her brother!    Thy mother, boy, beneath the sod    Of yon churchyard rests in her shroud so cold;    I am now weak, and pale, and old;    We were once dear to one another,    I and that corpse! Thou art our child!'    Then with a laugh both long and wild    The youth upon the pavement fell.    They found him dead! All looked on me,    The spasms of my despair to see;    But I was calm. I went away;    I was clammy-cold like clay.    I did not weep; I did not speak;    But day by day, week after week,    I walked about like a corpse alive.    Alas! sweet friend, you must believe    This heart is stoneit did not break.    My father lived a little while,    But all might see that he was dying,    He smiled with such a woful smile.    When he was in the churchyard lying    Among the worms, we grew quite poor,    So that no one would give us bread;      My mother looked at me, and said    Faint words of cheer, which only meant    That she could die and be content;    So I went forth from the same church door    To another husband's bed.    And this was he who died at last,    When weeks and months and years had passed,    Through which I firmly did fulfil    My duties, a devoted wife,    With the stern step of vanquished will    Walking beneath the night of life,    Whose hours extinguished, like slow rain    Falling forever, pain by pain,    The very hope of death's dear rest;    Which, since the heart within my breast    Of natural life was dispossessed,    Its strange sustainer there had been.    When flowers were dead, and grass was green    Upon my mother's gravethat mother    Whom to outlive, and cheer, and make    My wan eyes glitter for her sake,    Was my vowed task, the single care    Which once gave life to my despair    When she was a thing that did not stir,    And the crawling worms were cradling her    To a sleep more deep and so more sweet    Than a baby's rocked on its nurse's knee,    I lived; a living pulse then beat    Beneath my heart that awakened me.    What was this pulse so warm and free?    Alas! I knew it could not be    My own dull blood. 'T was like a thought    Of liquid love, that spread and wrought    Under my bosom and in my brain,    And crept with the blood through every vein,    And hour by hour, day after day,    The wonder could not charm away    But laid in sleep my wakeful pain,    Until I knew it was a child,    And then I wept. For long, long years    These frozen eyes had shed no tears;    But now't was the season fair and mild    When April has wept itself to May;    I sate through the sweet sunny day    By my window bowered round with leaves,    And down my cheeks the quick tears ran    Like twinkling rain-drops from the eaves,    When warm spring showers are passing o'er.    O Helen, none can ever tell    The joy it was to weep once more!    I wept to think how hard it were    To kill my babe, and take from it    The sense of light, and the warm air,    And my own fond and tender care,    And love and smiles; ere I knew yet    That these for it might, as for me,    Be the masks of a grinning mockery.    And haply, I would dream, 't were sweet    To feed it from my faded breast,    Or mark my own heart's restless beat      And watch the growing soul beneath    Dawn in faint smiles; and hear its breath,    Half interrupted by calm sighs,    And search the depth of its fair eyes    For long departed memories!    And so I lived till that sweet load    Was lightened. Darkly forward flowed    The stream of years, and on it bore    Two shapes of gladness to my sight;    Two other babes, delightful more,    In my lost soul's abandoned night,    Than their own country ships may be    Sailing towards wrecked mariners    Who cling to the rock of a wintry sea.    For each, as it came, brought soothing tears;    And a loosening warmth, as each one lay    Sucking the sullen milk away,    About my frozen heart did play,    And weaned it, oh, how painfully    As they themselves were weaned each one    From that sweet foodeven from the thirst    Of death, and nothingness, and rest,    Strange inmate of a living breast,    Which all that I had undergone    Of grief and shame, since she who first    The gates of that dark refuge closed    Came to my sight, and almost burst    The seal of that Lethean spring    But these fair shadows interposed.    For all delights are shadows now!    And from my brain to my dull brow    The heavy tears gather and flow.    I cannot speakoh, let me weep!    The tears which fell from her wan eyes    Glimmered among the moonlight dew.    Her deep hard sobs and heavy sighs    Their echoes in the darkness threw.    When she grew calm, she thus did keep    The tenor of her tale:                 He died;      I know not how; he was not old,    If age be numbered by its years;    But he was bowed and bent with fears,    Pale with the quenchless thirst of gold,    Which, like fierce fever, left him weak;    And his strait lip and bloated cheek    Were warped in spasms by hollow sneers;    And selfish cares with barren plough,    Not age, had lined his narrow brow,    And foul and cruel thoughts, which feed    Upon the withering life within,    Like vipers on some poisonous weed.    Whether his ill were death or sin    None knew, until he died indeed,    And then men owned they were the same.    Seven days within my chamber lay    That corse, and my babes made holiday.    At last, I told them what is death.    The eldest, with a kind of shame,    Came to my knees with silent breath,      And sate awe-stricken at my feet;    And soon the others left their play,    And sate there too. It is unmeet    To shed on the brief flower of youth    The withering knowledge of the grave.    From me remorse then wrung that truth.    I could not bear the joy which gave    Too just a response to mine own.    In vain. I dared not feign a groan;    And in their artless looks I saw,      Between the mists of fear and awe,    That my own thought was theirs; and they    Expressed it not in words, but said,    Each in its heart, how every day    Will pass in happy work and play,    Now he is dead and gone away!    After the funeral all our kin    Assembled, and the will was read.    My friend, I tell thee, even the dead    Have strength, their putrid shrouds within,    To blast and torture. Those who live    Still fear the living, but a corse    Is merciless, and Power doth give    To such pale tyrants half the spoil    He rends from those who groan and toil,    Because they blush not with remorse    Among their crawling worms. Behold,    I have no child! my tale grows old    With grief, and staggers; let it reach    The limits of my feeble speech,    And languidly at length recline    On the brink of its own grave and mine.    Thou knowest what a thing is Poverty    Among the fallen on evil days.    'T is Crime, and Fear, and Infamy,    And houseless Want in frozen ways    Wandering ungarmented, and Pain,    And, worse than all, that inward stain,    Foul Self-contempt, which drowns in sneers    Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears    First like hot gall, then dry forever!    And well thou knowest a mother never    Could doom her children to this ill,    And well he knew the same. The will    Imported that, if e'er again    I sought my children to behold,    Or in my birthplace did remain    Beyond three days, whose hours were told,    They should inherit nought; and he,    To whom next came their patrimony,    A sallow lawyer, cruel and cold,    Aye watched me, as the will was read,    With eyes askance, which sought to see    The secrets of my agony;    And with close lips and anxious brow    Stood canvassing still to and fro    The chance of my resolve, and all    The dead man's caution just did call;    For in that killing lie 't was said    'She is adulterous, and doth hold    In secret that the Christian creed    Is false, and therefore is much need    That I should have a care to save    My children from eternal fire.'    Friend, he was sheltered by the grave,    And therefore dared to be a liar!    In truth, the Indian on the pyre    Of her dead husband, half consumed,    As well might there be false as I    To those abhorred embraces doomed,    Far worse than fire's brief agony.    As to the Christian creed, if true    Or false, I never questioned it;    I took it as the vulgar do;    Nor my vexed soul had leisure yet    To doubt the things men say, or deem    That they are other than they seem.    All present who those crimes did hear,    In feigned or actual scorn and fear,    Men, women, children, slunk away,    Whispering with self-contented pride    Which half suspects its own base lie.    I spoke to none, nor did abide,    But silently I went my way,    Nor noticed I where joyously    Sate my two younger babes at play    In the courtyard through which I passed;    But went with footsteps firm and fast    Till I came to the brink of the ocean green,    And there, a woman with gray hairs,    Who had my mother's servant been,    Kneeling, with many tears and prayers,    Made me accept a purse of gold,    Half of the earnings she had kept    To refuge her when weak and old.    With woe, which never sleeps or slept,    I wander now. 'T is a vain thought    But on yon Alp, whose snowy head    'Mid the azure air is islanded,    (We see ito'er the flood of cloud,    Which sunrise from its eastern caves    Drives, wrinkling into golden waves,    Hung with its precipices proud    From that gray stone where first we met)    Therenow who knows the dead feel nought?    Should be my grave; for he who yet    Is my soul's soul once said: ''T were sweet    'Mid stars and lightnings to abide,    And winds, and lulling snows that beat    With their soft flakes the mountain wide,    Where weary meteor lamps repose,    And languid storms their pinions close,    And all things strong and bright and pure,    And ever during, aye endure.    Who knows, if one were buried there,    But these things might our spirits make,    Amid the all-surrounding air,    Their own eternity partake?'    Then 't was a wild and playful saying    At which I laughed or seemed to laugh.    They were his wordsnow heed my praying,    And let them be my epitaph.    Thy memory for a term may be    My monument. Wilt remember me?    I know thou wilt; and canst forgive,    Whilst in this erring world to live    My soul disdained not, that I thought    Its lying forms were worthy aught,    And much less thee. HELEN              Oh, speak not so!    But come to me and pour thy woe    Into this heart, full though it be,    Aye overflowing with its own.    I thought that grief had severed me    From all beside who weep and groan,    Its likeness upon earth to be    Its express image; but thou art    More wretched. Sweet, we will not part    Henceforth, if death be not division;    If so, the dead feel no contrition.    But wilt thou hear, since last we parted,    All that has left me broken-hearted? ROSALIND    Yes, speak. The faintest stars are scarcely shorn    Of their thin beams by that delusive morn    Which sinks again in darkness, like the light    Of early love, soon lost in total night. HELEN    Alas! Italian winds are mild,    But my bosom is coldwintry cold;    When the warm air weaves, among the fresh leaves,    Soft music, my poor brain is wild,    And I am weak like a nursling child,    Though my soul with grief is gray and old. ROSALIND    Weep not at thine own words, though they must make    Me weep. What is thy tale? HELEN                  I fear 't will shake    Thy gentle heart with tears. Thou well    Rememberest when we met no more;    And, though I dwelt with Lionel,    That friendless caution pierced me sore    With grief; a wound my spirit bore    Indignantlybut when he died,    With him lay dead both hope and pride.    Alas! all hope is buried now.    But then men dreamed the aged earth    Was laboring in that mighty birth    Which many a poet and a sage    Has aye foreseenthe happy age    When truth and love shall dwell below    Among the works and ways of men;    Which on this world not power but will    Even now is wanting to fulfil.    Among mankind what thence befell    Of strife, how vain, is known too well;    When Liberty's dear pan fell    'Mid murderous howls. To Lionel,    Though of great wealth and lineage high,    Yet through those dungeon walls there came    Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!    And as the meteor's midnight flame    Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth    Flashed on his visionary youth,    And filled him, not with love, but faith,    And hope, and courage mute in death;    For love and life in him were twins,    Born at one birth. In every other    First life, then love, its course begins,    Though they be children of one mother;    And so through this dark world they fleet    Divided, till in death they meet;    But he loved all things ever. Then    He passed amid the strife of men,    And stood at the throne of armd power    Pleading for a world of woe.    Secure as one on a rock-built tower    O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro,    'Mid the passions wild of humankind    He stood, like a spirit calming them;    For, it was said, his words could bind    Like music the lulled crowd, and stem    That torrent of unquiet dream    Which mortals truth and reason deem,    But is revenge and fear and pride.    Joyous he was; and hope and peace    On all who heard him did abide,    Raining like dew from his sweet talk,    As where the evening star may walk    Along the brink of the gloomy seas,    Liquid mists of splendor quiver.    His very gestures touched to tears    The unpersuaded tyrant, never    So moved before; his presence stung    The torturers with their victim's pain,    And none knew how; and through their ears    The subtle witchcraft of his tongue    Unlocked the hearts of those who keep    Gold, the world's bond of slavery.    Men wondered, and some sneered to see    One sow what he could never reap;    For he is rich, they said, and young,    And might drink from the depths of luxury.    If he seeks fame, fame never crowned    The champion of a trampled creed;      If he seeks power, power is enthroned    'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed    Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil    Those who would sit near power must toil;    And such, there sitting, all may see.    What seeks he? All that others seek    He casts away, like a vile weed    Which the sea casts unreturningly.    That poor and hungry men should break    The laws which wreak them toil and scorn    We understand; but Lionel,    We know, is rich and nobly born.    So wondered they; yet all men loved    Young Lionel, though few approved;    All but the priests, whose hatred fell    Like the unseen blight of a smiling day,    The withering honey-dew which clings    Under the bright green buds of May    Whilst they unfold their emerald wings;    For he made verses wild and queer    On the strange creeds priests hold so dear    Because they bring them land and gold.    Of devils and saints and all such gear    He made tales which whoso heard or read    Would laugh till he were almost dead.    So this grew a proverb: 'Don't get old    Till Lionel's Banquet in Hell you hear,    And then you will laugh yourself young again.'    So the priests hated him, and he    Repaid their hate with cheerful glee.    Ah, smiles and joyance quickly died,    For public hope grew pale and dim    In an altered time and tide,    And in its wasting withered him,    As a summer flower that blows too soon    Droops in the smile of the waning moon,    When it scatters through an April night    The frozen dews of wrinkling blight.    None now hoped more. Gray Power was seated    Safely on her ancestral throne;    And Faith, the Python, undefeated    Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on    Her foul and wounded train; and men    Were trampled and deceived again,    And words and shows again could bind    The wailing tribes of humankind    In scorn and famine. Fire and blood    Raged round the raging multitude,    To fields remote by tyrants sent    To be the scornd instrument    With which they drag from mines of gore    The chains their slaves yet ever wore;    And in the streets men met each other,    And by old altars and in halls,    And smiled again at festivals.    But each man found in his heart's brother    Cold cheer; for all, though half deceived,    The outworn creeds again believed,    And the same round anew began    Which the weary world yet ever ran.    Many then wept, not tears, but gall,    Within their hearts, like drops which fall    Wasting the fountain-stone away.    And in that dark and evil day    Did all desires and thoughts that claim    Men's careambition, friendship, fame,    Love, hope, though hope was now despair    Indue the colors of this change,    As from the all-surrounding air    The earth takes hues obscure and strange,    When storm and earthquake linger there.    And so, my friend, it then befell    To many,most to Lionel,    Whose hope was like the life of youth    Within him, and when dead became    A spirit of unresting flame,    Which goaded him in his distress    Over the world's vast wilderness.    Three years he left his native land,    And on the fourth, when he returned,    None knew him; he was stricken deep    With some disease of mind, and turned    Into aught unlike Lionel.    On himon whom, did he pause in sleep,    Serenest smiles were wont to keep,    And, did he wake, a wingd band    Of bright Persuasions, which had fed    On his sweet lips and liquid eyes,    Kept their swift pinions half outspread    To do on men his least command    On him, whom once 't was paradise    Even to behold, now misery lay.    In his own heart 't was merciless    To all things else none may express    Its innocence and tenderness.    'T was said that he had refuge sought    In love from his unquiet thought    In distant lands, and been deceived    By some strange show; for there were found,    Blotted with tearsas those relieved    By their own words are wont to do    These mournful verses on the ground,    By all who read them blotted too.    'How am I changed! my hopes were once like fire;     I loved, and I believed that life was love.    How am I lost! on wings of swift desire     Among Heaven's winds my spirit once did move.    I slept, and silver dreams did aye inspire     My liquid sleep; I woke, and did approve    All Nature to my heart, and thought to make    A paradise of earth for one sweet sake.    'I love, but I believe in love no more.     I feel desire, but hope not. Oh, from sleep    Most vainly must my weary brain implore     Its long lost flattery now! I wake to weep,    And sit through the long day gnawing the core     Of my bitter heart, and, like a miser, keep    Since none in what I feel take pain or pleasure    To my own soul its self-consuming treasure.'    He dwelt beside me near the sea;    And oft in evening did we meet,    When the waves, beneath the starlight, flee    O'er the yellow sands with silver feet,    And talked. Our talk was sad and sweet,    Till slowly from his mien there passed    The desolation which it spoke;    And smilesas when the lightning's blast    Has parched some heaven-delighting oak,    The next spring shows leaves pale and rare,    But like flowers delicate and fair,    On its rent boughsagain arrayed    His countenance in tender light;    His words grew subtle fire, which made    The air his hearers breathed delight;    His motions, like the winds, were free,    Which bend the bright grass gracefully,    Then fade away in circlets faint;    And wingd Hopeon which upborne    His soul seemed hovering in his eyes,    Like some bright spirit newly born    Floating amid the sunny skies    Sprang forth from his rent heart anew.    Yet o'er his talk, and looks, and mien,    Tempering their loveliness too keen,    Past woe its shadow backward threw;    Till, like an exhalation spread    From flowers half drunk with evening dew,    They did become infectioussweet    And subtle mists of sense and thought,    Which wrapped us soon, when we might meet,    Almost from our own looks and aught    The wild world holds. And so his mind    Was healed, while mine grew sick with fear;    For ever now his health declined,    Like some frail bark which cannot bear    The impulse of an altered wind,    Though prosperous; and my heart grew full,    'Mid its new joy, of a new care;    For his cheek became, not pale, but fair,    As rose-o'ershadowed lilies are;    And soon his deep and sunny hair,    In this alone less beautiful,    Like grass in tombs grew wild and rare.    The blood in his translucent veins    Beat, not like animal life, but love    Seemed now its sullen springs to move,    When life had failed, and all its pains;    And sudden sleep would seize him oft    Like death, so calm,but that a tear,    His pointed eye-lashes between,    Would gather in the light serene    Of smiles whose lustre bright and soft    Beneath lay undulating there.    His breath was like inconstant flame    As eagerly it went and came;    And I hung o'er him in his sleep,    Till, like an image in the lake    Which rains disturb, my tears would break    The shadow of that slumber deep.    Then he would bid me not to weep,    And say, with flattery false yet sweet,    That death and he could never meet,    If I would never part with him.    And so we loved, and did unite    All that in us was yet divided;    For when he said, that many a rite,    By men to bind but once provided,    Could not be shared by him and me,    Or they would kill him in their glee,    I shuddered, and then laughing said    'We will have rites our faith to bind,    But our church shall be the starry night,    Our altar the grassy earth outspread,    And our priest the muttering wind.'    'T was sunset as I spoke. One star    Had scarce burst forth, when from afar    The ministers of misrule sent    Seized upon Lionel, and bore    His chained limbs to a dreary tower,    In the midst of a city vast and wide.    For he, they said, from his mind had bent    Against their gods keen blasphemy,    For which, though his soul must roasted be    In hell's red lakes immortally,    Yet even on earth must he abide    The vengeance of their slaves: a trial,    I think, men call it. What avail    Are prayers and tears, which chase denial    From the fierce savage nursed in hate?    What the knit soul that pleading and pale    Makes wan the quivering cheek which late    It painted with its own delight?    We were divided. As I could,    I stilled the tingling of my blood,    And followed him in their despite,    As a widow follows, pale and wild,    The murderers and corse of her only child;    And when we came to the prison door,    And I prayed to share his dungeon floor    With prayers which rarely have been spurned,    And when men drove me forth, and I    Stared with blank frenzy on the sky,    A farewell look of love he turned,    Half calming me; then gazed awhile,    As if through that black and massy pile,    And through the crowd around him there,    And through the dense and murky air,    And the thronged streets, he did espy    What poets know and prophesy;    And said, with voice that made them shiver    And clung like music in my brain,    And which the mute walls spoke again    Prolonging it with deepened strain    'Fear not the tyrants shall rule forever,    Or the priests of the bloody faith;    They stand on the brink of that mighty river,    Whose waves they have tainted with death;    It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,    Around them it foams, and rages, and swells,    And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,    Like wrecks, in the surge of eternity.'    I dwelt beside the prison gate;    And the strange crowd that out and in    Passed, some, no doubt, with mine own fate,    Might have fretted me with its ceaseless din,    But the fever of care was louder within.    Soon but too late, in penitence    Or fear, his foes released him thence.    I saw his thin and languid form,    As leaning on the jailor's arm,    Whose hardened eyes grew moist the while    To meet his mute and faded smile    And hear his words of kind farewell,    He tottered forth from his damp cell.    Many had never wept before,    From whom fast tears then gushed and fell;    Many will relent no more,    Who sobbed like infants then; ay, all    Who thronged the prison's stony hall,    The rulers or the slaves of law,    Felt with a new surprise and awe    That they were human, till strong shame    Made them again become the same.    The prison bloodhounds, huge and grim,    From human looks the infection caught,    And fondly crouched and fawned on him;    And men have heard the prisoners say,    Who in their rotting dungeons lay,    That from that hour, throughout one day,    The fierce despair and hate which kept    Their trampled bosoms almost slept,    Where, like twin vultures, they hung feeding    On each heart's wound, wide torn and bleeding,    Because their jailors' rule, they thought,    Grew merciful, like a parent's sway.    I know not how, but we were free;    And Lionel sate alone with me,    As the carriage drove through the streets apace;    And we looked upon each other's face;    And the blood in our fingers intertwined      Ran like the thoughts of a single mind,    As the swift emotions went and came    Through the veins of each united frame.    So through the long, long streets we passed    Of the million-peopled City vast;    Which is that desert, where each one    Seeks his mate yet is alone,    Beloved and sought and mourned of none;    Until the clear blue sky was seen,    And the grassy meadows bright and green.    And then I sunk in his embrace    Enclosing there a mighty space    Of love; and so we travelled on    By woods, and fields of yellow flowers,    And towns, and villages, and towers,    Day after day of happy hours.    It was the azure time of June,    When the skies are deep in the stainless noon,    And the warm and fitful breezes shake    The fresh green leaves of the hedge-row briar;    And there were odors then to make    The very breath we did respire    A liquid element, whereon    Our spirits, like delighted things    That walk the air on subtle wings,    Floated and mingled far away    'Mid the warm winds of the sunny day.    And when the evening star came forth    Above the curve of the new bent moon,    And light and sound ebbed from the earth,    Like the tide of the full and the weary sea    To the depths of its own tranquillity,    Our natures to its own repose    Did the earth's breathless sleep attune;    Like flowers, which on each other close    Their languid leaves when daylight's gone,    We lay, till new emotions came,    Which seemed to make each mortal frame    One soul of interwoven flame,    A life in life, a second birth    In worlds diviner far than earth;    Which, like two strains of harmony    That mingle in the silent sky,    Then slowly disunite, passed by    And left the tenderness of tears,    A soft oblivion of all fears,    A sweet sleep:so we travelled on    Till we came to the home of Lionel,    Among the mountains wild and lone,    Beside the hoary western sea,    Which near the verge of the echoing shore    The massy forest shadowed o'er.    The ancient steward with hair all hoar,    As we alighted, wept to see    His master changed so fearfully;    And the old man's sobs did waken me    From my dream of unremaining gladness;    The truth flashed o'er me like quick madness    When I looked, and saw that there was death    On Lionel. Yet day by day    He lived, till fear grew hope and faith,    And in my soul I dared to say,    Nothing so bright can pass away;    Death is dark, and foul, and dull,    But he isoh, how beautiful!    Yet day by day he grew more weak,    And his sweet voice, when he might speak,    Which ne'er was loud, became more low;    And the light which flashed through his waxen cheek    Grew faint, as the rose-like hues which flow    From sunset o'er the Alpine snow;    And death seemed not like death in him,    For the spirit of life o'er every limb    Lingered, a mist of sense and thought.    When the summer wind faint odors brought    From mountain flowers, even as it passed,    His cheek would change, as the noonday sea    Which the dying breeze sweeps fitfully.    If but a cloud the sky o'ercast,    You might see his color come and go,    And the softest strain of music made    Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade    Amid the dew of his tender eyes;    And the breath, with intermitting flow,    Made his pale lips quiver and part.    You might hear the beatings of his heart,    Quick but not strong; and with my tresses    When oft he playfully would bind    In the bowers of mossy lonelinesses    His neck, and win me so to mingle      In the sweet depth of woven caresses,    And our faint limbs were intertwined,    Alas! the unquiet life did tingle    From mine own heart through every vein,    Like a captive in dreams of liberty,    Who beats the walls of his stony cell.    But his, it seemed already free,    Like the shadow of fire surrounding me!    On my faint eyes and limbs did dwell    That spirit as it passed, till soon    As a frail cloud wandering o'er the moon,    Beneath its light invisible,    Is seen when it folds its gray wings again    To alight on midnight's dusky plain    I lived and saw, and the gathering soul    Passed from beneath that strong control,    And I fell on a life which was sick with fear    Of all the woe that now I bear.    Amid a bloomless myrtle wood,    On a green and sea-girt promontory    Not far from where we dwelt, there stood,    In record of a sweet sad story,    An altar and a temple bright    Circled by steps, and o'er the gate    Was sculptured, 'To Fidelity;'    And in the shrine an image sate    All veiled; but there was seen the light    Of smiles which faintly could express    A mingled pain and tenderness    Through that ethereal drapery.    The left hand held the head, the right    Beyond the veil, beneath the skin,    You might see the nerves quivering within    Was forcing the point of a barbd dart    Into its side-convulsing heart.    An unskilled hand, yet one informed    With genius, had the marble warmed    With that pathetic life. This tale    It told: A dog had from the sea,    When the tide was raging fearfully,      Dragged Lionel's mother, weak and pale,    Then died beside her on the sand,    And she that temple thence had planned;    But it was Lionel's own hand    Had wrought the image. Each new moon    That lady did, in this lone fane,    The rites of a religion sweet    Whose god was in her heart and brain.    The seasons' loveliest flowers were strewn    On the marble floor beneath her feet,    And she brought crowns of sea-buds white    Whose odor is so sweet and faint,    And weeds, like branching chrysolite,    Woven in devices fine and quaint;    And tears from her brown eyes did stain    The altar; need but look upon    That dying statue, fair and wan,    If tears should cease, to weep again;    And rare Arabian odors came,    Through the myrtle copses, steaming thence    From the hissing frankincense,    Whose smoke, wool-white as ocean foam,    Hung in dense flocks beneath the dome    That ivory dome, whose azure night    With golden stars, like heaven, was bright    O'er the split cedar's pointed flame;    And the lady's harp would kindle there    The melody of an old air,    Softer than sleep; the villagers    Mixed their religion up with hers,    And, as they listened round, shed tears.    One eve he led me to this fane.    Daylight on its last purple cloud    Was lingering gray, and soon her strain    The nightingale began; now loud,    Climbing in circles the windless sky,    Now dying music; suddenly    'T is scattered in a thousand notes;    And now to the hushed ear it floats    Like field-smells known in infancy,    Then, failing, soothes the air again.    We sate within that temple lone,    Pavilioned round with Parian stone;    His mother's harp stood near, and oft    I had awakened music soft    Amid its wires; the nightingale    Was pausing in her heaven-taught tale.    'Now drain the cup,' said Lionel,    'Which the poet-bird has crowned so well    With the wine of her bright and liquid song!    Heard'st thou not sweet words among    That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?    Heard'st thou not that those who die    Awake in a world of ecstasy?    That love, when limbs are interwoven,    And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,    And thought, to the world's dim boundaries clinging,    And music, when one beloved is singing,    Is death? Let us drain right joyously    The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.'    He paused, and to my lips he bent    His own; like spirit his words went    Through all my limbs with the speed of fire;    And his keen eyes, glittering through mine,    Filled me with the flame divine    Which in their orbs was burning far,    Like the light of an unmeasured star    In the sky of midnight dark and deep;    Yes, 't was his soul that did inspire    Sounds which my skill could ne'er awaken;    And first, I felt my fingers sweep    The harp, and a long quivering cry    Burst from my lips in symphony;    The dusk and solid air was shaken,    As swift and swifter the notes came    From my touch, that wandered like quick flame,    And from my bosom, laboring    With some unutterable thing.    The awful sound of my own voice made    My faint lips tremble; in some mood      Of wordless thought Lionel stood    So pale, that even beside his cheek    The snowy column from its shade    Caught whiteness; yet his countenance,    Raised upward, burned with radiance    Of spirit-piercing joy whose light,    Like the moon struggling through the night    Of whirlwind-rifted clouds, did break    With beams that might not be confined.    I paused, but soon his gestures kindled    New power, as by the moving wind    The waves are lifted; and my song    To low soft notes now changed and dwindled,    And, from the twinkling wires among,    My languid fingers drew and flung    Circles of life-dissolving sound,    Yet faint; in ary rings they bound    My Lionel, who, as every strain    Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien    Sunk with the sound relaxedly;      And slowly now he turned to me,    As slowly faded from his face    That awful joy; with look serene    He was soon drawn to my embrace,    And my wild song then died away    In murmurs; words I dare not say    We mixed, and on his lips mine fed    Till they methought felt still and cold.    'What is it with thee, love?' I said;    No word, no look, no motion! yes,    There was a change, but spare to guess,    Nor let that moment's hope be told.    I looked,and knew that he was dead;    And fell, as the eagle on the plain    Falls when life deserts her brain,    And the mortal lightning is veiled again.    Oh, that I were now dead! but such    Did they not, love, demand too much,    Those dying murmurs?he forbade.    Oh, that I once again were mad!    And yet, dear Rosalind, not so,    For I would live to share thy woe.    Sweet boy! did I forget thee too?    Alas, we know not what we do    When we speak words.               No memory more    Is in my mind of that sea-shore.    Madness came on me, and a troop    Of misty shapes did seem to sit    Beside me, on a vessel's poop,    And the clear north wind was driving it.    Then I heard strange tongues, and saw strange flowers,    And the stars methought grew unlike ours,    And the azure sky and the stormless sea    Made me believe that I had died    And waked in a world which was to me    Drear hell, though heaven to all beside.    Then a dead sleep fell on my mind,    Whilst animal life many long years    Had rescued from a chasm of tears;    And, when I woke, I wept to find        That the same lady, bright and wise,    With silver locks and quick brown eyes,    The mother of my Lionel,    Had tended me in my distress,    And died some months before. Nor less    Wonder, but far more peace and joy,    Brought in that hour my lovely boy.    For through that trance my soul had well    The impress of thy being kept;    And if I waked or if I slept,    No doubt, though memory faithless be,    Thy image ever dwelt on me;    And thus, O Lionel, like thee    Is our sweet child. 'T is sure most strange    I knew not of so great a change    As that which gave him birth, who now    Is all the solace of my woe.    That Lionel great wealth had left    By will to me, and that of all    The ready lies of law bereft        My child and me,might well befall.    But let me think not of the scorn    Which from the meanest I have borne,    When, for my child's belovd sake,    I mixed with slaves, to vindicate    The very laws themselves do make;    Let me not say scorn is my fate,    Lest I be proud, suffering the same    With those who live in deathless fame.    She ceased.'Lo, where red morning through the woods    Is burning o'er the dew!' said Rosalind.    And with these words they rose, and towards the flood    Of the blue lake, beneath the leaves, now wind    With equal steps and fingers intertwined.    Thence to a lonely dwelling, where the shore    Is shadowed with steep rocks, and cypresses    Cleave with their dark green cones the silent skies    And with their shadows the clear depths below,    And where a little terrace from its bowers    Of blooming myrtle and faint lemon flowers    Scatters its sense-dissolving fragrance o'er    The liquid marble of the windless lake;    And where the aged forest's limbs look hoar    Under the leaves which their green garments make,    They come. 'T is Helen's home, and clean and white,    Like one which tyrants spare on our own land    In some such solitude; its casements bright    Shone through their vine-leaves in the morning sun,    And even within 't was scarce like Italy.    And when she saw how all things there were planned    As in an English home, dim memory    Disturbed poor Rosalind; she stood as one    Whose mind is where his body cannot be,    Till Helen led her where her child yet slept,    And said, 'Observe, that brow was Lionel's,    Those lips were his, and so he ever kept    One arm in sleep, pillowing his head with it.    You cannot see his eyesthey are two wells    Of liquid love. Let us not wake him yet.'    But Rosalind could bear no more, and wept    A shower of burning tears which fell upon    His face, and so his opening lashes shone    With tears unlike his own, as he did leap    In sudden wonder from his innocent sleep.    So Rosalind and Helen lived together    Thenceforthchanged in all else, yet friends again,    Such as they were, when o'er the mountain heather    They wandered in their youth through sun and rain.    And after many years, for human things    Change even like the ocean and the wind,    Her daughter was restored to Rosalind,    And in their circle thence some visitings    Of joy 'mid their new calm would intervene.    A lovely child she was, of looks serene,    And motions which o'er things indifferent shed    The grace and gentleness from whence they came.    And Helen's boy grew with her, and they fed    From the same flowers of thought, until each mind    Like springs which mingle in one flood became;    And in their union soon their parents saw    The shadow of the peace denied to them.    And Rosalindfor when the living stem    Is cankered in its heart, the tree must fall    Died ere her time; and with deep grief and awe    The pale survivors followed her remains    Beyond the region of dissolving rains,    Up the cold mountain she was wont to call    Her tomb; and on Chiavenna's precipice    They raised a pyramid of lasting ice,    Whose polished sides, ere day had yet begun,    Caught the first glow of the unrisen sun,    The last, when it had sunk; and through the night    The charioteers of Arctos wheeld round    Its glittering point, as seen from Helen's home,    Whose sad inhabitants each year would come,    With willing steps climbing that rugged height,    And hang long locks of hair, and garlands bound    With amaranth flowers, which, in the clime's despite,    Filled the frore air with unaccustomed light;    Such flowers as in the wintry memory bloom    Of one friend left adorned that frozen tomb.    Helen, whose spirit was of softer mould,    Whose sufferings too were less, death slowlier led    Into the peace of his dominion cold.    She died among her kindred, being old.    And know, that if love die not in the dead    As in the living, none of mortal kind    Are blessed as now Helen and Rosalind. Begun at Marlow, 1817 (summer); already in the press, March, 1818; finished at the Baths of Lucca, August, 1818; published with other poems, as the title-piece of a slender volume, by C. & J. Ollier, London, 1819 (spring). Note by Mrs. Shelley: 'Rosalind and Helen was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside -- till I found it; and, at my request, it was completed. Shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind and develop some high or abstruse truth. When he does touch on human life and the human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more subtle, or more pathetic. He never mentioned Love but he shed a grace borrowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed, on that passion. When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts; and his delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest chords of our nature. Rosalind and Helen was finished during the summer of 1818, while we were at the baths of Lucca.'    ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rosalind and Helen - a Modern Eclogue ,

717:The Door Of Humility ENGLAND We lead the blind by voice and hand, And not by light they cannot see; We are not framed to understand The How and Why of such as He; But natured only to rejoice At every sound or sign of hope, And, guided by the still small voice, In patience through the darkness grope; Until our finer sense expands, And we exchange for holier sight The earthly help of voice and hands, And in His light behold the Light. Let there be Light! The self-same Power That out of formless dark and void Endued with life's mysterious dower Planet, and star, and asteroid; That moved upon the waters' face, And, breathing on them His intent, Divided, and assigned their place To, ocean, air, and firmament; That bade the land appear, and bring Forth herb and leaf, both fruit and flower, Cattle that graze, and birds that sing, Ordained the sunshine and the shower; That, moulding man and woman, breathed In them an active soul at birth In His own image, and bequeathed To them dominion over Earth; That, by whatever is, decreed 418 His Will and Word shall be obeyed, From loftiest star to lowliest seed;The worm and me He also made. And when, for nuptials of the Spring With Summer, on the vestal thorn The bridal veil hung flowering, A cry was heard, and I was born. II To be by blood and long descent A member of a mighty State, Whose greatness, sea-girt, but unpent By ocean, makes the world more great; That, ranging limitless, hath won A Rule more wide than that of Rome, And, journeying onward with the sun, In every zone hath found a home; That, keeping old traditions fast, Still hails the things that are to be, And, firmly rooted in the Past, On Law hath grafted Liberty;That is a birthright nobler far Than princely claim or Right Divine From far-off rapine, wanton war, And I could feel this birthright mine. And not the lowliest hand that drives Or share or loom, if so it be Of British strain, but thence derives A patent of nobility. III The guiding of the infant years Onward to good, away from guile, A mother's humanising tears, A father's philosophic smile; 419 Refining beauty, gentle ways, The admonitions of the wise, The love that watches, helps, and prays, And pities, but doth ne'er despise; An ancient Faith, abiding hope, The charity that suffers long, But flames with sacred zeal to cope With man's injustice, nature's wrong; Melodious leisure, learnëd shelf, Discourse of earnest, temperate mind, The playful wit that of itself Flashes, but leaves no wound behind; The knowledge gleaned from Greece and Rome, From studious Teuton, sprightly Gaul, The lettered page, the mellow tome, And poets' wisdom more than all;These, when no lips severe upbraid, But counsel rather than control, In budding boyhood lend their aid To sensibility of soul. IV But, more than mentor, mother, sire, Can lend to shape the future man With help of learning or of lyre, Of ancient rule, or modern plan, Is that which with our breath we bring Into the world, we know not whence, That needs nor care nor fostering, Because an instinct and a sense. And days and years are all forgot When Nature's aspect, growth, and grace, And veering moods, to me were not The features of the Loved One's face. 420 The The The The cloud whose shadow skims the lake, shimmering haze of summer noon, voice of April in the brake, silence of the mounting moon, Swaying of bracken on the hill, The murmur of the vagrant stream, These motions of some unseen Will, These babblings of some heavenly dream, Seemed tokens of divine desire To hold discourse with me, and so To touch my lips with hallowed fire, And tell me things I ought to know. I gazed and listened, all intent, As to the face and voice of Fate, But what they said, or what they meant, I could surmise not, nor translate. They did but lure me to unrest, Unanswered questioning, longings vain, As when one scans some palimpsest No erudition can explain; But left me with a deep distaste For common speech, that still did seem More meaningless than mountain waste, Less human than the far-off stream. So that a stranger in the land Wherein I moved, where'er I went, I dwelt, whom none could understand, Or exorcise my discontent. And I to them, and they to me Seemed from two different planets come, And, save to flower and wild-bird's glee, My heart was deaf, my soul was dumb. 421 But slowly dawned a happier time When I began to apprehend, And catch, as in some poet's rhyme, The intimations of a friend; When Nature spake no unknown tongue, But language kindred to my thought, Till everything She said, I sung, In notes unforced, in words unsought. And I to Her so closely drew, The seasons round, in mind and mood, I felt at length as if we knew Self-same affection, self-same feud: That both alike scorned worldly aim, Profit, applause, parade, and pride, Whereby the love of generous fame And worthy deeds grows petrified. I did as yet not understand Nature is far more vast than I, Deep as the ocean, wide as land, And overarching as the sky; And but responded to my call, And only felt and fed my need, Because She doth the same for all Who to her pity turn and plead. VI Shall man have mind, and Nature none, Shall I, not she, have soul and heart? Nay, rather, if we be not one, Each is of each the counterpart. She too may have within her breast A conscience, if not like to yours, A sense of rightness ill at rest, Long as her waywardness endures. 422 And hence her thunder, earthquakes, hail, Her levin bolts, her clouds' discharge: She sins upon a larger scale, Because She is herself more large. Hence, too, when She hath pierced with pain The heart of man, and wrecked his years, The pity of the April rain, And late repentance of her tears. She is no better, worse, than we; We can but say she seems more great, That half her will, like ours, is free, And half of it is locked in Fate. Nor need we fear that we should err Beyond our scope in reasoning thus,That there must be a God for Her, If that there be a God for us. VII The chiming of the Sabbath bell, The silence of the Sabbath fields, Over the hamlet cast a spell To which the gracious spirit yields. Sound is there none of wheel or wain, Husht stands the anvil, husht the forge, No shout is heard in rustic lane, No axe resounds in timbered gorge. No flail beats time on granary floor, The windmill's rushing wings are stayed, And children's glee rings out no more From hedgerow bank or primrose glade. The big-boned team that firm and slow Draw yoked, are free to couch or stray; The basking covey seem to know None will invade their peace to-day. 423 And speckless swains, and maidens neat, Through rustic porch, down cottage stair, Demurely up the village street Stream onward to the House of Prayer. They kneel as they were taught to kneel In childhood, and demand not why, But, as they chant or answer, feel A vague communion with the sky. VIII But when the impetuous mind is spurred To range through epochs great but gone, And, heedless of dogmatic word, With fearless ardour presses on, Confronting pulpit, sceptre, shrine, With point by Logic beaten out, And, questioning tenets deemed divine With human challenge, human doubt, Hoists Reason's sail, and for the haze Of ocean quits Tradition's shore, Awhile he comes, and kneels, and prays, Then comes and kneels, but prays no more; And only for the love he bears To those who love him, and who reared His frame to genuflexion, shares In ritual, vain, if still revered. His Gods are many or are none, Saturn and Mithra, Christ and Jove, Consorting, as the Ages run, With Vestal choir or Pagan drove. Abiding still by Northern shores, He sees far off on Grecian coast Veiled Aphrodite, but adores Minerva and Apollo most. 424 Beauty of vision, voice, and mind, Enthrall him so, that unto him All Creeds seem true, if he but find Siren, or saint, or seraphim. And thus once more he dwells apart, His inward self enswathed in mist, Blending with poet's pious heart The dreams of pagan Hedonist. IX If Beauty be the Spirit's quest, Its adoration, creed, and shrine, Wherein its restlessness finds rest, And earthly type of the Divine, Must there for such not somewhere be A blending of all beauteous things In some one form wherein we see The sum of our imaginings? The smile on mountain's musing brow, Sunrise and sunset, moon and star, Wavelets around the cygnet's prow, Glamour anear and charm afar; The silence of the silvery pool, Autumn's reserve and Summer's fire, Slow vanishings of Winter's rule To free full voice of April's choir;The worshippers of Beauty find In maiden form, and face, and tress; Faint intimations of her mind And undulating loveliness. Bound, runnels, bound, bound on, and flow! Sing, merle and mavis, pair and sing! 425 Gone is the Winter, fled the snow, And all that lives is flushed with Spring. Harry the woods, young truant folk, For flowers to deck your cottage sills, And, underneath my orchard oak, Cluster, ye golden daffodils! Unfettered by domestic vow, Cuckoo, proclaim your vagrant loves, And coo upon the self-same bough, Inseparable turtle-doves. Soar, laverock, soar on song to sky, And with the choir of Heaven rejoice! You cannot be more glad than I, Who feel Her gaze, and hear Her voice: Who see Her cheek more crimson glow, And through Her veins love's current stream, And feel a fear She doth but know Is kin to joy and dawning dream. Bound, rivulets, bound, bound on, and flow! Sing, merle and mavis, pair and sing! Gone from the world are want and woe, And I myself am one with Spring. XI They err who say that Love is blind, Or, if it be, 'tis but in part, And that, if for fair face it find No counterpart in mind and heart, It dwells on that which it beholds, Fair fleshly vision void of soul, Deeming, illusioned, this enfolds, Longing's fulfilment, end, and whole. Were such my hapless carnal lot, I too might evanescent bliss 426 Embrace, fierce-fancied, fast forgot, Then leave for some fresh loveliness. But April gaze, and Summer tress, With something of Autumnal thought, In Her seem blent to crown and bless A bond I long in dreams have sought. She looks as though She came to grace The earth, from world less soiled than this, Around her head and virgin face Halo of heavenly holiness. XII He who hath roamed through various lands, And, wheresoe'er his steps are set, The kindred meaning understands Of spire, and dome, and minaret; By Roman river, Stamboul's sea, In Peter's or Sophia's shrine, Acknowledges with reverent knee The presence of the One Divine; Who, to the land he loves so well Returning, towards the sunset hour Wends homeward, feels yet stronger spell In lichened roof and grey church-tower; Round whose foundations, side by side, Sleep hamlet wit and village sage, While loud the blackbird cheers his bride Deep in umbrageous Vicarage. XIII Was it that sense which some aver Foreshadows Fate it doth not see, That gave unwittingly to Her The name, for ever dear to me, 427 Borne by that tearful Mother whom, Nigh unto Ostia's shelving sand, Augustine laid in lonely tomb, Ere sailing for his Afric land? But I at least should have foreseen, When Monica to me had grown Familiar word, that names may mean More than by word and name is shown; That nought can keep two lives apart More than divorce 'twixt mind and mind, Even though heart be one with heart;Alas! Alas! Yes, Love is blind. XIV How could I think of jarring Creeds, And riddles that unread remain, Or ask if Heaven's indulgence heeds Broils born of man's polemic brain, And pause because my venturous mind Had roamed through tracks of polar thought, Whence mightiest spirits turn back blind, Since finding not the thing they sought, When Love, with luring gifts in hand, Beauty, refinement, smile, caress, Heart to surmise and understand, And crowning grace of holiness, Stood there before me, and, with gaze I had been purblind not to see, Said, ``I to you will, all my days, Give what you yearn to give to me''? Must both then sorrow, while we live, Because, rejoicing, I forgot Something there was I could not give, Because, alas! I had it not. 428 XV She comes from Vicarage Garden, see! Radiant as morning, lithe and tall, Fresh lilies in her hand, but She The loveliest lily of them all. The thrushes in their fluting pause, The bees float humming round her head, Earth, air, and heaven shine out because They hear her voice, and feel her tread. Up in the fretted grey church-tower, That rustic gaze for miles can see, The belfry strikes the silvery hour, Announcing her propinquity. And I who, fearful to be late, Passed long since through the deerpark pale, And loitered by the churchyard gate, Once more exclaim, ``Hail! loved one! hail!'' We pass within, and up the nave, Husht, because Heaven seems always there, Wend choirward, where, devoutly grave, She kneels, to breathe a silent prayer. She takes the flowers I too have brought, Blending them deftly with her own, And ranges them, as quick as thought, Around the white-draped altar-throne. How could she know my gaze was not On things unseen, but fixed on Her, That, as She prayed, I all forgot The worship in the worshipper?While She beheld, as in a glass, The Light Divine, that I but sought Sight of her soul?-Alas! Alas! Love is yet blinder than I thought. 429 XVI Who hath not seen a little cloud Up from the clear horizon steal, And, mounting lurid, mutter loud Premonitory thunder-peal? Husht grows the grove, the summer leaf Trembles and writhes, as if in pain, And then the sky, o'ercharged with grief, Bursts into drenching tears of rain. I through the years had sought to hide My darkening doubts from simple sight. 'Tis sacrilegious to deride Faith of unquestioning neophyte. And what, methought, is Doubt at best? A sterile wind through seeded sedge Blowing for nought, an empty nest That lingers in a leafless hedge. Pain, too, there is we should not share With others lest it mar their joy; There is a quiet bliss in prayer None but the heartless would destroy. But just as Love is quick divined From heightened glow or visage pale, The meditations of the Mind Disclose themselves through densest veil. And 'tis the unloving and least wise Who through life's inmost precincts press, And with unsympathetic eyes Outrage our sacred loneliness. Then, when their sacrilegious gaze The mournful void hath half surmised, To some more tender soul they raise The veil of ignorance it prized. 430 XVII `What though I write farewell I could Not utter, lest your gaze should chide, 'Twill by your love be understood My love is still, dear, at your side. ``Nor must we meet to speak goodbye, Lest that my Will should lose its choice, And conscience waver, for then I Should see your face and hear your voice. ``But, when you find yourself once more, Come back, come back and look for me, Beside the little lowly door, The Doorway of Humility.'' XVIII There! Peace at last! The far-off roar Of human passion dies away. ``Welcome to our broad shade once more,'' The waning woodlands seem to say: The music of the vagrant wind, That wandered aimlessly, is stilled; The songless branches all remind That Summer's glory is fulfilled. The fluttering of the falling leaves Dimples the leaden pool awhile; So Age impassively receives Youth's tale of troubles with a smile. Thus, as the seasons steal away, How much is schemed, how little done, What splendid plans at break of day! What void regrets at set of sun! The world goes round, for you, for me, For him who sleeps, for him who strives, And the cold Fates indifferent see 431 Crowning or failure of our lives. Then fall, ye leaves, fade, summer breeze! Grow, sedges, sere on every pool! Let each old glowing impulse freeze, Let each old generous project cool! It is not wisdom, wit, nor worth, Self-sacrifice nor friendship true, Makes venal devotees of earth Prostrate themselves and worship you. The consciousness of sovran powers, The stubborn purpose, steadfast will, Have ever, in this world of ours, Achieved success, achieve it still. Farewell, ye woods! No more I sit; Great voices in the distance call. If this be peace, enough of it! I go. Fall, unseen foliage, fall! XIX Nay, but repress rebellious woe! In grief 'tis not that febrile fool, Passion, that can but overthrow, But Resignation, that should rule. In patient sadness lurks a gift To purify the life it stings, And, as the days move onward, lift The lonely heart to loftier things; Bringing within one's ripening reach The sceptre of majestic Thought, Wherefrom one slowly learns to teach The Wisdom to oneself it taught. And unto what can man aspire, On earth, more worth the striving for, Than to be Reason's loftier lyre, 432 And reconciling monitor; To strike a more resounding string And deeper notes of joy and pain, Than such as but lamenting sing, Or warble but a sensuous strain: So, when my days are nearly sped, And my last harvest labours done, That I may have around my head The halo of a setting sun. Yet even if be heard above Such selfish hope, presumptuous claim, Better one hour of perfect love Than an eternity of Fame! XX Where then for grief seek out the cure? What scenes will bid my smart to cease? High peaks should teach one to endure, And lakes secluded bring one peace. Farewell awhile, then, village bells, Autumnal wood and harvest wain! And welcome, as it sinks or swells, The music of the mighty main, That seems to say, now loud, now low, Rising or falling, sweet or shrill, ``I pace, a sentry, to and fro, To guard your Island fortress still.'' The roses falter on their stalk, The late peach reddens on the wall, The flowers along the garden walk Unheeded fade, unheeded fall. My gates unopened drip with rain, The wolf-hound wends from floor to floor, And, listening for my voice in vain, 433 Waileth along the corridor. Within the old accustomed place Where we so oft were wont to be, Kneeling She prays, while down her face The fruitless tears fall silently. SWITZERLAND XXI Rain, wind, and rain. The writhing lake Scuds to and fro to scape their stroke: The mountains veil their heads, and make Of cloud and mist a wintry cloak. Through where the arching pinewoods make Dusk cloisters down the mountain side, The loosened avalanches take Valeward their way, with death for guide, And toss their shaggy manes and fling To air their foam and tawny froth, From ledge and precipice bound and spring, With hungry roar and deepening wrath; Till, hamlet homes and orchards crushed, And, rage for further ravin stayed, They slumber, satiated, husht, Upon the ruins they have made. I rise from larch-log hearth, and, lone, Gaze on the spears of serried rain, That faster, nigher, still are blown, Then stream adown the window pane. The peasant's goatskin garments drip, As home he wends with lowered head, Shakes off the drops from lid and lip, Then slinks within his châlet shed. 434 The cattle bells sound dull and hoarse, The boats rock idly by the shore; Only the swollen torrents course With faster feet and fuller roar. Mournful, I shape a mournful song, And ask the heavens, but ask in vain, ``How long, how long?'' Ah! not so long As, in my heart, rain, wind, and rain. XXII I ask the dark, the dawn, the sun, The domeward-pointing peaks of snow, Lofty and low alike, but none Will tell me what I crave to know. My mind demands, ``Whence, Whither, Why?'' From mountain slope and green defile, And wait the answer. The replyA far-off irresponsive smile. I ask the stars, when mortals sleep, The pensive moon, the lonely winds; But, haply if they know, they keep The secret of secluded minds. Shall I in Straining Where in Where in vain, then, strive to find, towards merely fancied goal? the lily lurks the mind, the rose discern the soul? More mindless still, stream, pasture, lake, The mountains yet more heartless seem, And life's unceasing quest and ache Only a dream within a dream. We know no more, though racked with thought Than he who, in yon châlet born, Gives not the riddle, Life, a thought, But lays him down and sleeps till morn. 435 Sometimes he kneels; I cannot kneel, So suffer from a wider curse Than Eden's outcasts, for I feel An exile in the universe. The rudeness of his birth enures His limbs to every season's stings, And, never probing, so endures The sadness at the heart of things. When lauwine growls, and thunder swells, Their far-off clamour sounds to me But as the noise of clanging bells Above a silent sanctuary. It is their silence that appals, Their aspect motionless that awes, When searching spirit vainly calls On the effect to bare the Cause. I get no answer, near or far; The mountains, though they soar so high, And scale the pathless ether, are No nearer unto God than I. There dwells nor mystery nor veil Round the clear peaks no foot hath trod; I, gazing on their frontage pale, See but the waning ghost of God. Is Faith then but a drug for sleep, And Hope a fondly soothing friend That bids us, when it sees us weep, Wait for the End that hath no end? Then do I hear voice unforgot Wailing across the distance dim, ``Think, dear! If God existeth not, Why are you always seeking Him?'' XXIII 436 Like glowing furnace of the forge, How the winds rise and roar, as they Up twisting valley, craggy gorge, Seek, and still seek, to storm their way; Then, baffled, up the open slope With quickening pulses scale and pant, Indomitably bent to cope With bristling fronts of adamant. All through the day resounds the strife, Then doth at sunset hour subside: So the fierce passions of our life Slowly expire at eventide. By Nature we are ne'er misled; We see most truly when we dream. A singer wise was he who said, ``Follow the gleam! Follow the gleam!'' XXIV I dreamed, last night, again I stood, Silent, without the village shrine, While She in modest maidenhood Left, fondly clasped, her hand in mine. And, with a face as cerecloth white, And tears like those that by the bier Of loved one lost make dim the sight, She poured her sorrows in mine ear. ``I love your voice, I love your gaze, But there is something dearer still, The faith that kneels, the hope that prays, And bows before the Heavenly Will. ``Not where hills rise, or torrents roll, Seek Him, nor yet alone, apart; He dwells within the troubled soul, His home is in the human heart. 437 ``Withal, the peaceful mountains may 'Twixt doubt and yearning end the strife: So ponder, though you cannot pray, And think some meaning into life: ``Nor like to those that cross the main To wander witless through strange land, Hearing unmastered tongues, disdain The speech they do not understand. ``Firm stands my faith that they who sound The depths of doubt Faith yet will save: They are like children playing round A still remembered mother's grave; ``Not knowing, when they wax more old, And somewhat can her vision share, She will the winding-sheet unfold, And beckon them to evening prayer.'' Then, with my hand betwixt her hands, She laid her lips upon my brow, And, as to one who understands, Said, ``Take once more my vestal vow. ``No other gaze makes mine to glow, No other footstep stirs my heart, To me you only dearer grow, Dearer and nearer, more apart. ``Whene'er you come with humble mind, The little Door stands open wide, And, bending low, you still will find Me waiting on the other side.'' Her silence woke me. . . . To your breast Fold me, O sleep! and seal mine ears; That She may roam through my unrest Till all my dreams are drenched with tears! XXV 438 Why linger longer, subject, here, Where Nature sits and reigns alone, Inspiring love not, only fear, Upon her autocratic throne? Her edicts are the rigid snow, The wayward winds, the swaying branch; She hath no pity to bestow, Her law the lawless avalanche. Though soon cascades will bound and sing, That now but drip with tears of ice, And upland meadows touched by Spring Blue gentian blend with edelweiss, Hence to the Land of youthful dreams, The Land that taught me all I know. Farewell, lone mountain-peaks and streams; Yet take my thanks before I go. You gave me shelter when I fled, But sternly bade me stem my tears, Nor aimless roam with rustling tread 'Mong fallen leaves of fruitless years. ITALY XXVI Upon the topmost wheel-track steep, The parting of two nations' ways, Athwart stone cross engraven deep, The name ``Italia'' greets the gaze! I trembled, when I saw it first, With joy, my boyish longings fed, The headspring of my constant thirst, The altar of my pilgrim tread. Now once again the magic word, So faintly borne to Northern home, Sounds like a silvery trumpet heard 439 Beneath some universal dome. The forests soften to a smile, A smile the very mountains wear, Through mossy gorge and grassed defile Torrents race glad and debonair. From casement, balcony and door, Hang golden gourds, droops tear-tipped vine, And sun-bronzed faces bask before Thin straw-swathed flasks of last year's wine. Unyoked, the patient sleek-skinned steers Take, like their lords, no heed of time. Hark! now the evening star appears, Ave Maria belfries chime. The maidens knit, and glance, and sing, With glowing gaze 'neath ebon tress, And, like to copse-buds sunned by Spring, Seem burgeoning into tenderness. On waveless lake where willows weep, The Borromean Islands rest As motionless as babe asleep Upon a slumbering Mother's breast. O Land of sunshine, song, and Love! Whether thy children reap or sow, Of Love they chant on hills above, Of Love they sing in vale below. But what avail the love-linked hands, And love-lit eyes, to them that roam Passionless through impassioned lands, Since they have left their heart at home! XXVII Among my dreams, now known as dreams In this my reawakened life, I thought that by historic streams, 440 Apart from stress, aloof from strife, By rugged paths that twist and twine Through olive slope and chesnut wood Upward to mediaeval shrine, Or high conventual brotherhood, Along the mountain-curtained track Round peaceful lake where wintry bands Halt briefly but to bivouac Ere blustering on to Northern lands;Through these, through all I first did see, With me to share my raptures none, That nuptialled Monica would be My novice and companion: That we should float from mere to mere, And sleep within some windless cove, With nightingales to lull the ear, From ilex wood and orange grove; Linger at hamlets lost to fame, That still wise-wandering feet beguile, To gaze on frescoed wall or frame Lit by Luini's gracious smile. Now, but companioned by my pain, Among each well-remembered scene I can but let my Fancy feign The happiness that might have been; Imagine that I hear her voice, Imagine that I feel her hand, And I, enamoured guide, rejoice To see her swift to understand. Alack! Imagination might As lief with rustic Virgil roam, Reverent, or, welcomed guest, alight At Pliny's philosophic home; 441 Hear one majestically trace Rome's world-wide sway from wattled wall, And read upon the other's face The omens of an Empire's fall. XXVIII Like moonlight seen through forest leaves, She shines upon me from afar, What time men reap the ripened sheaves, And Heaven rains many a falling star. I gaze up to her lofty height, And feel how far we dwell apart: O if I could, this night, this night, Fold her full radiance to my heart! But She in Heaven, and I on earth, Still journey on, but each alone; She, maiden Queen of sacred birth, Who with no consort shares her throne. XXIX What if She ever thought She saw The self within myself prefer Communion with the silent awe Of far-off mountains more than Her; That Nature hath the mobile grace To make life with our moods agree, And so had grown the Loved One's face, Since it nor checked nor chided me; Or from the tasks that irk and tire I sought for comfort from the Muse, Because it grants the mind's desire All that familiar things refuse. How vain such thought! The face, the form, Of mountain summits but express, Clouded or clear, in sun or storm, 442 Feebly Her spirit's loftiness. Did I explore from pole to pole, In Nature's aspect I should find But faint reflections of Her soul, Dim adumbrations of Her mind. O come and test with lake, with stream, With mountain, which the stronger be, Thou, my divinest dearest dream, My Muse, and more than Muse, to me! XXX They tell me that Jehovah speaks In silent grove, on lonely strand, And summit of the mountain peaks; Yet there I do not understand. The stars, disdainful of my thought, Majestic march toward their goal, And to my nightly watch have brought No explanation to my soul. The truth I seek I cannot find, In air or sky, on land or sea; If the hills have their secret mind, They will not yield it up to me: Like one who lost mid lonely hills Still seeks but cannot find his way, Since guide is none save winding rills, That seem themselves, too, gone astray. And so from rise to set of sun, At glimmering dawn, in twilight haze, I but behold the face of One Who veils her face, and weeps, and prays. What know I that She doth not know? What I know not, She understands: With heavenly gifts She overflows, 443 While I have only empty hands. O weary wanderer! Best forego This questioning of wind and wave. For you the sunshine and the snow, The womb, the cradle, and the grave. XXXI How blest, when organ concords swell, And anthems are intoned, are they Who neither reason nor rebel, But meekly bow their heads and pray. And such the peasants mountain-bred, Who hail to-day with blithe accord Her Feast Who to the Angel said, ``Behold the Handmaid of the Lord!'' Downward they wind from pastoral height, Or hamlet grouped round shattered towers, To wend to shrine more richly dight, And bring their gift of wilding flowers; Their gifts, their griefs, their daily needs, And lay these at Her statue's base, Who never, deem they, intercedes Vainly before the Throne of Grace. Shall I, because I stand apart, A stranger to their pious vows, Scorn their humility of heart That pleads before the Virgin Spouse, Confiding that the Son will ne'er, If in His justice wroth with them, Refuse to harken to Her prayer Who suckled Him in Bethlehem? Of all the intercessors born By man's celestial fancy, none 444 Hath helped the sorrowing, the forlorn, Lowly and lone, as She hath done. The maiden faithful to Her shrine Bids demons of temptation flee, And mothers fruitful as the vine Retain their vestal purity. Too trustful love, by lust betrayed, And by cold worldlings unforgiven, Unto Her having wept and prayed, Faces its fate, consoled and shriven. The restless, fiercely probing mind No honey gleans, though still it stings. What comfort doth the spirit find In Reason's endless reasonings? They have no solace for my grief, Compassion none for all my pain: They toss me like the fluttering leaf, And leave me to the wind and rain. XXXII If Conscience be God's Law to Man, Then Conscience must perforce arraign Whatever falls beneath the ban Of that allotted Suzerain. And He, who bids us not to swerve, Whither the wayward passions draw, From its stern sanctions, must observe The limits of the self-same Law. Yet, if obedient Conscience scan The sum of wrongs endured and done Neither by act nor fault of Man, They rouse it to rebellion. Life seems of life by life bereft 445 Through some immitigable curse, And Man sole moral being left In a non-moral Universe. My Conscience would my Will withstand, Did Will project a world like this: Better Eternal vacuum still, Than murder, lust, and heartlessness! If Man makes Conscience, then being good Is only being worldly wise, And universal brotherhood A comfortable compromise. O smoke of War! O blood-steeped sod! O groans of fratricidal strife! Who will explain the ways of God, That I may be at peace with life! The moral riddle 'tis that haunts, Primeval and unending curse, Racking the mind when pulpit vaunts A Heaven-created Universe. Yet whence came Life, and how begin? Rolleth the globe by choice or chance? Dear Lord! Why longer shut me in This prison-house of ignorance! FLORENCE XXXIII City acclaimed ere Dante's days Fair, and baptized in field of flowers, Once more I scan with tender gaze Your glistening domes, your storied towers. I feel as if long years had flown Since first with eager heart I came, 446 And, girdled by your mountain zone, Found you yet fairer than your fame. It was the season purple-sweet When figs are plump, and grapes are pressed, And all your sons with following feet Bore a dead Poet to final rest. You seemed to fling your gates ajar, And softly lead me by the hand, Saying, ``Behold! henceforth you are No stranger in the Tuscan land.'' And though no love my love can wean From native crag and cradling sea, Yet Florence from that hour hath been More than a foster-nurse to me. When mount I terraced slopes arrayed In bridal bloom of peach and pear, While under olive's phantom shade Lupine and beanflower scent the air, The wild-bees hum round golden bay, The green frog sings on fig-tree bole, And, see! down daisy-whitened way Come the slow steers and swaying pole. The fresh-pruned vine-stems, curving, bend Over the peaceful wheaten spears, And with the glittering sunshine blend Their transitory April tears. O'er wall and trellis trailed and wound, Hang roses blushing, roses pale; And, hark! what was that silvery sound? The first note of the nightingale. Curtained, I close my lids and dream Of Beauty seen not but surmised, And, lulled by scent and song, I seem Immortally imparadised. 447 When from the deep sweet swoon I wake And gaze past slopes of grape and grain, Where Arno, like some lonely lake, Silvers the far-off seaward plain, I see celestial sunset fires That lift us from this earthly leaven, And darkly silent cypress spires Pointing the way from hill to Heaven. Then something more than mortal steals Over the wavering twilight air, And, messenger of nightfall, peals From each crowned peak a call to prayer. And now the last meek prayer is said, And, in the hallowed hush, there is Only a starry dome o'erhead, Propped by columnar cypresses. XXXIV Re-roaming through this palaced town, I suddenly, 'neath grim-barred pile, Catch sight of Dante's awful frown, Or Leonardo's mystic smile; Then, swayed by memory's fancy, stroll To where from May-day's flaming pyre Savonarola's austere soul Went up to Heaven in tongues of fire; Or Buonarroti's plastic hand Made marble block from Massa's steep Dawn into Day at his command, Then plunged it into Night and Sleep. No later wanderings can dispel The glamour of the bygone years; And, through the streets I know so well, 448 I scarce can see my way for tears. XXXV A sombre shadow seems to fall On comely altar, transept fair; The saints are still on frescoed wall, But who comes thither now for prayer? Men throng from far-off stranger land, To stare, to wonder, not to kneel, With map and guide-book in their hand To tell them what to think and feel. They scan, they prate, they marvel why The figures still expressive glow, Oblivious they were painted by Adoring Frà Angelico. Did Dante from his tomb afar Return, his wrongs redressed at last, And see you, Florence, as you are, Half alien to your gracious Past, Finding no Donatello now, No reverent Giotto 'mong the quick, To glorify ascetic vow Of Francis or of Dominic; Self-exiled by yet sterner fate Than erst, he would from wandering cease, And, ringing at monastic gate, Plead, ``I am one who craves for peace.'' And what he sought but ne'er could find, Shall I, less worthy, hope to gain, The freedom of the tranquil mind, The lordship over loss and pain? More than such peace I found when I Did first, in unbound youth, repair 449 To Tuscan shrine, Ausonian sky. I found it, for I brought it there. XXXVI Yet Art brings peace, itself is Peace, And, as I on these frescoes gaze, I feel all fretful tumults cease And harvest calm of mellower days. For Soul too hath its seasons. Time, That leads Spring, Summer, Autumn, round, Makes our ephemeral passions chime With something permanent and profound. And, as in Nature, April oft Strives to revert to wintry hours, But shortly upon garth and croft Re-sheds warm smiles and moistening showers, Or, for one day, will Autumn wear The gayer garments of the Spring, And then athwart the wheatfields bare Again her graver shadows fling; So, though the Soul hath moods that veer, And seem to hold no Rule in awe, Like the procession of the year, It too obeys the sovran Law. Nor Art itself brings settled peace, Until the mind is schooled to know That gusts subside and tumults cease Only in sunset's afterglow. Life's contradictions vanish then, Husht thought replacing clashing talk Among the windy ways of men. 'Tis in the twilight Angels walk. 450 ROME XXXVII The last warm gleams of sunset fade From cypress spire and stonepine dome, And, in the twilight's deepening shade, Lingering, I scan the wrecks of Rome. Husht the Madonna's Evening Bell; The steers lie loosed from wain and plough; The vagrant monk is in his cell, The meek nun-novice cloistered now. Pedant's presumptuous voice no more Vexes the spot where Caesar trod, And o'er the pavement's soundless floor Come banished priest and exiled God. The lank-ribbed she-wolf, couched among The regal hillside's tangled scrubs, With doting gaze and fondling tongue Suckles the Vestal's twin-born cubs. Yet once again Evander leads Æneas to his wattled home, And, throned on Tiber's fresh-cut reeds, Talks of burnt Troy and rising Rome. From out the tawny dusk one hears The half-feigned scream of Sabine maids, The rush to arms, then swift the tears That separate the clashing blades. The Lictors with their fasces throng To quell the Commons' rising roar, As Tullia's chariot flames along, Splashed with her murdered father's gore. Her tresses free from band or comb, Love-dimpled Venus, lithe and tall, 451 And fresh as Fiumicino's foam, Mounts her pentelic pedestal. With languid lids, and lips apart, And curving limbs like wave half-furled, Unarmed she dominates the heart, And without sceptre sways the world. Nerved by her smile, avenging Mars Stalks through the Forum's fallen fanes, Or, changed of mien and healed of scars, Threads sylvan slopes and vineyard plains. With waves of song from wakening lyre Apollo routs the wavering night, While, parsley-crowned, the white-robed choir Wind chanting up the Sacred Height, Where Jove, with thunder-garlands wreathed, And crisp locks frayed like fretted foam, Sits with his lightnings half unsheathed, And frowns against the foes of Rome. You cannot kill the Gods. They still Reclaim the thrones where once they reigned, Rehaunt the grove, remount the rill, And renovate their rites profaned. Diana's hounds still lead the chase, Still Neptune's Trident crests the sea, And still man's spirit soars through space On feathered heels of Mercury. No flood can quench the Vestals' Fire; The Flamen's robes are still as white As ere the Salii's armoured choir Were drowned by droning anchorite. The saint may seize the siren's seat, The shaveling frown where frisked the Faun; Ne'er will, though all beside should fleet, The Olympian Presence be withdrawn. 452 Here, even in the noontide glare, The Gods, recumbent, take their ease; Go look, and you will find them there, Slumbering behind some fallen frieze. But most, when sunset glow hath paled, And come, as now, the twilight hour, In vesper vagueness dimly veiled I feel their presence and their power. What though their temples strew the ground, And to the ruin owls repair, Their home, their haunt, is all around; They drive the cloud, they ride the air. And, when the planets wend their way Along the never-ageing skies, ``Revere the Gods'' I hear them say; ``The Gods are old, the Gods are wise.'' Build as man may, Time gnaws and peers Through marble fissures, granite rents; Only Imagination rears Imperishable monuments. Let Gaul and Goth pollute the shrine, Level the altar, fire the fane: There is no razing the Divine; The Gods return, the Gods remain. XXXVIII Christ is arisen. The place wherein They laid Him shows but cerements furled, And belfry answers belfry's din To ring the tidings round the world. Grave Hierarchs come, an endless band, In jewelled mitre, cope embossed, Who bear Rome's will to every land 453 In all the tongues of Pentecost. Majestic, along marble floor, Walk Cardinals in blood-red robe, Martyrs for Faith and Christ no more, Who gaze as though they ruled the globe. With halberds bare and doublets slashed, Emblems that war will never cease, Come martial guardians, unabashed, And march afront the Prince of Peace. Then, in his gestatorial Chair See Christ's vicegerent, bland, benign, To crowds all prostrate as in prayer Lean low, and make the Holy Sign. Then trumpets shrill, and organ peals, Throughout the mighty marble pile, Whileas a myriad concourse kneels In dense-packed nave and crowded aisle. Hark to the sudden hush! Aloft From unseen source in empty dome Swells prayerful music silvery-soft, Borne from far-off celestial Home. Then, when the solemn rite is done, The worshippers stream out to where Dance fountains glittering in the sun, While expectation fills the air. Now on high balcony He stands, And-save for the Colonna curse,Blesses with high-uplifted hands The City and the Universe. Christ is arisen! But scarce as when, On the third day of death and gloom, Came ever-loving Magdalen With tears and spices to His tomb. 454 XXXIX The Tiber winds its sluggish way Through niggard tracts whence Rome's command Once cast the shadow of her sway, O'er Asian city, Afric sand. Nor even yet doth She resign Her sceptre. Still the spell is hers, Though she may seem a rifled shrine 'Mid circumjacent sepulchres. One after one, they came, they come, Gaul, Goth, Savoy, to work their will; She answers, when She most seems dumb, ``I wore the Crown, I wear it still. ``From Jove I first received the gift, I from Jehovah wear it now, Nor shall profane invader lift The diadem from off my brow. ``The Past is mine, and on the Past The Future builds; and Time will rear The next strong structure on the last, Where men behold but shattered tier. ``The Teuton hither hies to teach, To prove, disprove, to delve and probe. Fool! Pedant! Does he think to reach The deep foundations of the globe?'' For me, I am content to tread On Sabine dust and Gothic foe. Leave me to deepening silent dread Of vanished Empire's afterglow. In this Imperial wilderness Why rashly babble and explore? O, let me know a little less, So I may feel a little more! 455 XL For upward of one thousand years, Here men and women prayed to Jove, With smiles and incense, gifts and tears, In secret shrine, or civic grove; And, when Jove did not seem to heed, Sought Juno's mediatorial power, Or begged fair Venus intercede And melt him in his amorous hour. Sages invoked Minerva's might; The Poet, ere he struck the lyre, Prayed to the God of Song and Light To touch the strings with hallowed fire. With flaming herbs were altars smoked Sprinkled with blood and perfumed must, And gods and goddesses invoked To second love or sanction lust. And did they hear and heed the prayer, Or, through that long Olympian reign, Were they divinities of air Begot of man's fantastic brain? In Roman halls their statues still Serenely stand, but no one now Ascends the Capitolian Hill, To render thanks, or urge the vow. Through now long centuries hath Rome Throned other God, preached other Creed, That here still have their central home, And feed man's hope, content his need. Against these, too, will Time prevail? No! Let whatever gestates, be, Secure will last the tender tale 456 From Bethlehem to Calvary. Throughout this world of pain and loss, Man ne'er will cease to bend his knee To Crown of Thorns, to Spear, to Cross, And Doorway of Humility. XLI If Reason be the sole safe guide In man implanted from above, Why crave we for one only face, Why consecrate the name of Love? Faces there are no whit less fair, Yet ruddier lip, more radiant eye, Same rippling smile, same auburn hair, But not for us. Say, Reason, why. Why bound our hearts when April pied Comes singing, or when hawthorn blows? Doth logic in the lily hide, And where's the reason in the rose? Why weld our keels and launch our ships, If Reason urge some wiser part, Kiss England's Flag with dying lips And fold its glories to the heart? In this gross world we touch and see, If Reason be no trusty guide, For world unseen why should it be The sole explorer justified? The homing swallow knows its nest, Sure curves the comet to its goal, Instinct leads Autumn to its rest, And why not Faith the homing soul? Is Reason so aloof, aloft, It doth not 'gainst itself rebel, 457 And are not Reason's reasonings oft By Reason proved unreasonable? He is perplexed no more, who prays, ``Hail, Mary Mother, full of grace!'' O drag me from Doubt's endless maze, And let me see my Loved One's face! XLII ``Upon this rock!'' Yet even here Where Christian God ousts Pagan wraith, Rebellious Reason whets its spear, And smites upon the shield of Faith. On sacred mount, down seven-hilled slopes, Fearless it faces foe and friend, Saying to man's immortal hopes, ``Whatso began, perforce must end.'' Not men alone, but gods too, die; Fanes are, like hearths, left bare and lone; This earth will into fragments fly, And Heaven itself be overthrown. Why then should Man immortal be? He is but fleeting form, to fade, Like momentary cloud, or sea Of waves dispersed as soon as made. Yet if 'tis Force, not Form, survives, Meseems therein that one may find Some comfort for distressful lives; For, if Force ends not, why should Mind? Is Doubt more forceful than Belief? The doctor's cap than friar's cowl? O ripeness of the falling leaf! O wisdom of the moping owl! Man's Mind will ever stand apart 458 From Science, save this have for goal The evolution of the heart, And sure survival of the Soul. XLIII The Umbilicum lonely stands Where once rose porch and vanished dome; But he discerns who understands That every road may lead to Rome. Enthroned in Peter's peaceful Chair, The spiritual Caesar sways A wider Realm of earth and air Than trembled at Octavian's gaze. His universal arms embrace The saint, the sinner, and the sage, And proffer refuge, comfort, grace To tribulation's pilgrimage. Here scientific searchers find Precursors for two thousand years, Who in a drouthy world divined Fresh springs for human doubts and fears. Here fair chaste Agnes veils her face From prowlers of the sensual den, And pity, pardon, and embrace Await repentant Magdalen. Princess and peasant-mother wend To self-same altar, self-same shrine, And Cardinal and Patriarch bend Where lepers kneel, and beggars whine. And is there then, in my distress, No road, no gate, no shrine, for me? The answer comes, ``Yes, surely, yes! The Doorway of Humility.'' 459 O rival Faiths! O clamorous Creeds! Would you but hush your strife in prayer, And raise one Temple for our needs, Then, then, we all might worship there. But dogma new with dogma old Clashes to soothe the spirit's grief, And offer to the unconsoled Polyglot Babel of Belief! XLIV The billows roll, and rise, and break, Around me; fixedly shine the stars In clear dome overhead, and take Their course, unheeding earthly jars. Yet if one's upward gaze could be But stationed where the planets are, The star were restless as the sea, The sea be tranquil as the star. Hollowed like cradle, then like grave, Now smoothly curved, now shapeless spray, Withal the undirected wave Forms, and reforms, and knows its way. Then, waters, bear me on where He, Ere death absolved at Christian font, Removed Rome's menaced majesty Eastward beyond the Hellespont. Foreseeing not what Fate concealed, But Time's caprice would there beget, That Cross would unto Crescent yield, Caesar and Christ to Mahomet. Is it then man's predestined state To search for, ne'er to find, the Light? Arise, my Star, illuminate These empty spaces of the Night! 460 XLV Last night I heard the cuckoo call Among the moist green glades of home, And in the Chase around the Hall Saw the May hawthorn flower and foam. Deep in the wood where primrose stars Paled before bluebell's dazzling reign, The nightingale's sad sobbing bars Rebuked the merle's too joyful strain. The kine streamed forth from stall and byre, The foal frisked round its mother staid, The meads, by sunshine warmed, took fire, And lambs in pasture, bleating, played. The uncurbed rivulets raced to where The statelier river curled and wound, And trout, of human step aware, Shot through the wave without a sound. Adown the village street, as clear As in one's wakeful mid-day hours, Beheld I Monica drawing near, Her vestal lap one crib of flowers. Lending no look to me, she passed By the stone path, as oft before, Between old mounds Spring newly grassed, And entered through the Little Door. Led by her feet, I hastened on, But, ere my feverish steps could get To the low porch, lo! Morning shone On Moslem dome and minaret! CONSTANTINOPLE 461 XLVI Now Vesper brings the sunset hour, And, where crusading Knighthood trod, Muezzin from his minaret tower Proclaims, ``There is no God but God!'' Male God who shares his godhead with No Virgin Mother's sacred tear, But finds on earth congenial kith In wielders of the sword and spear: Male God who on male lust bestows The ruddy lip, the rounded limb, And promises, at battle's close, Houri, not saint nor seraphim. Swift through the doubly-guarded stream, Shoots the caïque 'neath oarsmen brisk, While from its cushioned cradle gleam The eyes of yashmaked odalisque. Unchanged adown the changing years, Here where the Judas blossoms blaze, Against Sophia's marble piers The scowling Muslim lean and gaze; And still at sunset's solemn hour, Where Christ's devout Crusader trod, Defiant from the minaret's tower Proclaim, ``There is no God but God!'' XLVII Three rival Rituals. One revered In that loved English hamlet where, With flowers in Vicarage garden reared, She decks the altar set for prayer: Another, where majestic Rome, With fearless Faith and flag unfurled 462 'Gainst Doubt's ephemeral wave and foam, Demands obedience from the world. The third, where now I stand, and where Two hoary Continents have met, And Islam guards from taint and tare Monistic Creed of Mahomet. Yet older than all three, but banned To suffer still the exile's doom From shrine where Turkish sentries stand, And Christians wrangle round Christ's tomb. Where then find Creed, divine or dead, All may embrace, and none contemn?Remember Who it was that said, ``Not here, nor at Jerusalem!'' ATHENS XLVIII To Acrocorinth's brow I climb, And, lulled in retrospective bliss, Descry, as through the mists of time, Faintly the far Acropolis. Below me, rivers, mountains, vales, Wide stretch of ancient Hellas lies: Symbol of Song that never fails, Parnassus communes with the skies. I linger, dream-bound by the Past, Till sundown joins time's deep abyss, Then skirt, through shadows moonlight-cast, Lone strand of sailless Salamis, Until Eleusis gleams through dawn, Where, though a suppliant soul I come, The veil remains still unwithdrawn, 463 And all the Oracles are dumb. So onward to the clear white Light, Where, though the worshippers be gone, Abides on unmysterious height The calm unquestioning Parthenon. Find I, now there I stand at last, That naked Beauty, undraped Truth, Can satisfy our yearnings vast, The doubts of age, the dreams of youth; That, while we ask, in futile strife, From altar, tripod, fount, or well, Form is the secret soul of life, And Art the only Oracle; That Hera and Athena, linked With Aphrodite, hush distress, And, in their several gifts distinct, Withal are Triune Goddesses? That mortal wiser then was He Who gave the prize to Beauty's smile, Divides his gifts among the Three, And thuswise baffles Discord's guile? But who is wise? The nobler twain, Who the restraining girdle wear, Contend too often all in vain With sinuous curve and frolic hair. Just as one sees in marble, still, Pan o'er Apollo's shoulder lean, Suggesting to the poet's quill The sensual note, the hint obscene. Doth then the pure white Light grow dim, And must it be for ever thus? Listen! I hear a far-off Hymn, Veni, Creator, Spiritus! 464 XLIX The harvest of Hymettus drips As sweet as when the Attic bees Swarmed round the honey-laden lips Of heavenly-human Sophocles. The olives are as green in grove As in the days the poets bless, When Pallas with Poseidon strove To be the City's Patroness. The wine-hued main, white marble frieze, Dome of blue ether over all, One still beholds, but nowhere sees Panathenaic Festival. O'erhead, no Zeus or frowns or nods, Olympus none in air or skies; Below, a sepulchre of Gods, And tombs of dead Divinities. Yet, are they dead? Still stricken blind, Tiresiaslike, are they that see, With bold uncompromising mind, Wisdom in utter nudity; Experiencing a kindred fate With the First Parents of us all, Jehovah thrust through Eden's Gate, When Knowledge brought about their Fall. Hath Aphrodite into foam, Whence She first flowered, sunk back once more, And doth She nowhere find a home, Or worship, upon Christian shore? Her shrine is in the human breast, To find her none need soar or dive. Goodness or Loveliness our quest, The ever-helpful Gods survive. 465 Hellas retorts, when Hebrew gibes At Gods of levity and lust, ``God of Judaea's wandering tribes Was jealous, cruel, and unjust.'' Godhead, withal, remains the same, And Art embalms its symbols still; As Poets, when athirst for Fame, Still dream of Aganippe's rill. Why still pursue a bootless quest, And wander heartsore farther East, Because unanswered, south or west, By Pagan seer or Christian priest? Brahma and Buddha, what have they To offer to my shoreless search? ``Let Contemplation be,'' they say, ``Your ritual, Nothingness your Church. ``Passion and purpose both forsake, Echoes from non-existent wall; We do but dream we are awake, Ourselves the deepest dream of all. ``We dream we think, feel, touch, and see, And what these are, still dreaming, guess, Though there is no Reality Behind their fleeting semblances.'' Thus the East answers my appeal, Denies, and so illudes, my want. Alas! Could I but cease to feel, Brahma should be my Hierophant. But, hampered by my Western mind, I cannot set the Spirit free From Matter, but Illusion find, 466 Of all, the most illusory. DELPHI LI The morning mists that hid the bay And curtained mountains fast asleep, Begin to feel the touch of day, And roll from off both wave and steep. In floating folds they curve and rise, Then slowly melt and merge in air, Till high above me glow the skies, And cloudless sunshine everywhere. Parnassus wears nor veil nor frown, Windless the eagle wings his way, As I from Delphi gaze adown On Salona and Amphissa. It was the sovran Sun that drew Aloft and scattered morning haze, And now fills all the spacious blue With its own glorifying rays. And, no less sovran than the sun, Imagination brings relief Of morning light to shadows dun, To heart's distress, and spirit's grief. Parnassus boasts no loftier peak Than Poet's heavenward song; which, though Harbouring among the sad and weak, Lifteth aloft man's griefs below. Though sun-bronzed Phocian maidens lave Their kerchiefs in Castalia's spring, The Muses linger round its wave, And aid the pilgrim sent to sing. 467 And, listening there, I seem to hear The unseen Oracle say, ``Be strong: Subdue the sigh, repress the tear, And let not sorrow silence Song. ``You now have learnt enough from pain; And, if worse anguish lurk behind, Breathe in it some unselfish strain, And with grief's wisdom aid your kind. ``Who but of his own suffering sings, Is like an eagle, robbed, distressed, That vainly shrieks and beats its wings, Because it cannot find its nest. ``Let male Imagination wed The orphan, Sorrow, to console Its virgin loneness, whence are bred Serenity and self-control. ``Hence let the classic breezes blow You to your Land beyond the sea, That you may make, for others' woe, Your own a healing melody; ``To wintry woe no more a slave, But, having dried your April tears, Behold a helpful harvest wave From ridges of the fallow years.'' LII Rebuked thus by the stately Past, Whose solemn choruses endure Through voices new and visions vast, And centuries of sepulture, Because, serene, it never blinked At sheen or shadow of the sun, But Hades and Olympus linked 468 With Salamis and Marathon; Which held despondency at bay And, while revering Fate's decree, Reconciled with majestic lay Man to the Human Tragedy; To Gods of every land I vowed, Judaea, Hellas, Mecca, Rome, No more to live by sorrow bowed, But, wending backward to my home, Thenceforth to muse on woe more wide Than individual distress, The loftier Muses for my guide, Minerva for my monitress; Nor yet to scorn the tender aid Of Christian martyr, virgin, sage, And, meekly pondering in the shade, Proffer ripe counsel to my Age. And, haply, since 'tis Song alone Can baffle death, and conquer time, Maiden unborn in days unknown, Under the leaves of fragrant lime, Scanning the verse that here is writ, While cherishing some secret smart Of love or loss, may glean from it Some comfort for her weary heart; And, gently warned, grave minds may own The world hath more to bear than they, And, while I dream 'neath mossy stone, Repeat my name, and love my lay. LIII Scarce to the all-indwelling Power That vow was uttered, ere there came 469 A messenger in boyhood's flower, Winged with his search, his face aflame. From Amphissa he straight had clomb, Thridding that devious mountain land, With letter from my far-off home, And written by my Loved One's hand. ``Come to me where I drooping lie. None yet have died of Love, they say: Withal, I sometimes think that I Have prayed and sighed my life away. ``I want your absolution, dear, For whatso wrong I may have done; My conscience waneth less severe, In softness of the setting sun. ``'Twas I, 'twas I, far more than you, That stood in need, as now I see, Stooping, to enter meekly through The Doorway of Humility. ``In vain I turn to Throne of Grace, Where sorrows cease, and tears are dry; I fain once more would see your face, And hear your voice, before I die.'' ENGLAND LIV The oak logs smoulder on my hearth, Though round them hums no household talk; The roses in the garden-garth Hang mournfully on curving stalk. My wolf-hound round me leaps and bays, That wailed lost footsteps when I went: He little knows the grief that weighs 470 On my return from banishment. Half Autumn now, half Summer yet, For Nature hath a human heart, It seems as though they, having met, To take farewell, are loth to part. The splendour of the Year's decline Hath not yet come. One still can see Late honeysuckle intertwine With Maiden's-Bower and briony. The bracken-fronds, fast yellowing, tower From out sere needles of the pine; Now hawkweed blooms where foxgloves flower, And bramble where once eglantine. And, as I wend with hurrying feet Across the park, along the lane That leads unto the hamlet street, And cradle of my bliss and bane, In cottage plots on either side, O'er mignonette and fragrant stock Soar tiger-lilies lithe and tall, And homely-sheltered hollyhock. And when I reach the low grey wall That skirts God's-acre on the hill, I see, awaiting my recall, The Little Door stand open still. A dip, a slight descent, and then Into the Vicarage Walk I passed; It seemed as though the tongues of men Had left it since I saw it last. Round garden-plot, in westering sun, Her agëd parents slowly stepped: Her Mother had the face of one Who oft hath prayed, and oft hath wept. 471 She wore the silent plaintive grace Of Autumn just before its close, And on her slowly fading face The pathos of November rose. With pitying gaze and accents kind, ``Go in,'' she said, ``and mount the stair; And you through open door will find That Monica awaits you there.'' LV I mounted. At half-open door Pausing, I softly called her name, As one would pause and halt before Heaven's Gateway. But no answer came. She lies, methought, in Sleep's caress, So, passing in, I seemed to see, So saintly white the vision, less A chamber than a Sanctuary. Vestured in white, on snow-white bed, She lay, as dreaming something sweet, Madonna lilies at her head, Madonna lilies at her feet. A thought, I did not dare to speak,``Is this the sleep of life or death?'' And, with my cheek against her cheek, Listening, I seemed to hear her breath. 'Twas Love's last blindness not to see Her sinless soul had taken wing Unto the Land, if such there be, Where saints adore, and Seraphs sing. And yet I felt within my heart, Though lids were closed and lips were dumb, That, for Love's sake, her soul in part Had lingered here, till I should come. 472 I kissed her irresponsive hand, I laid my lips on her cold brow, That She, like me, should understand 'Twas thus I sealed our nuptial vow. And then I saw upon her breast A something writ, she fain had said Had I been near, to me addressed, Which, kneeling down, I took and read. LVI ``I prayed I might prolong my years Till you could come and hush my sighs, And dry my penitential tears; But Heaven hath willed it otherwise: ``That I may expiate the wrong By me inflicted on us both, When, yet Love's novice, feebly strong, I sinned against Love's sovran troth. ``Now Death, the mirror unto Life, Shows me that nought should keep apart Those who, though sore perplexed by strife 'Twixt Faith and Doubt, are one in heart. ``For Doubt is one with Faith when they, Who doubt, for Truth's sake suffering live; And Faith meanwhile should hope and pray, Withholding not what Love can give. ``We lead the blind by voice and hand, And not by light they cannot see; We are not framed to understand The How and Why of such as He, ``But natured only to rejoice At every sound or sign of hope, And, guided by the still small voice, 473 In patience through the darkness grope; ``Until our finer sense expands, And we exchange for holier sight The earthly help of voice and hands, And in His light behold the Light. ``Had my poor Love but been more wise, I should have ta'en you to my breast, Striving to hush your plaintive cries, And rock your Reason back to rest. ``But, though alone you now must tread Where we together should have trod, In loneliness you may be led, Through faith in me, to Faith in God. ``With tranquil purpose, fervent mind, Foster, while you abide on earth, And humbly proffer to your kind, The gift assigned to you at birth. ``As in the far-off boyish year When did your singing voice awake, Disinterestedly revere And love it for its own great sake. ``And when life takes autumnal hues, With fervent reminiscence woo All the affections of the Muse, And write the poem lived by you. ``And should, until your days shall end, You still the lyric voice retain, With its seductive music blend A graver note, a loftier strain. ``While buoyant youth and manhood strong Follow where Siren sounds entice, The Deities of Love and Song, Rapture and loveliness, suffice. 474 ``But when decay, and pain, and loss, Remind one of the Goal forgot, And we in turn must bear the Cross, The Pagan Gods can help us not. ``Nor need you then seek, far and near, More sumptuous shrines on alien strand, But with domestic mind revere The Ritual of your native Land. ``The Little Door stands open wide, And, if you meekly pass therethrough, Though I no longer kneel inside, I shall be hovering near to you. ``Farewell! till you shall learn the whole Of what we here but see in part. Now I to God commend my soul, And unto you I leave my heart.'' LVII I wended up the slope once more To where the Church stands lone and still, And passed beneath the Little Door, My will the subject of Her will. The sunset rays through pictured pane Fell, fretted into weft and woof, On transept, nave, and aisle, to wane On column cold and vaulted roof. Within the carven altar screen Were lilies tall, and white, and fair, So like to those I late had seen, It seemed She must be sleeping there. Mutely I knelt, with bended brow And shaded eyes, but heart intent, To learn, should any teach me now, What Life, and Love, and Sorrow meant. 475 And there remained until the shroud Of dusk foretold the coming night; And then I rose, and prayed aloud, ``Let there be Light! Let there be Light!'' ~ Alfred Austin,

718:Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric Dramatis Personae HUGO, a Norman Baron and a Scholar. ERIC, a friend of Hugo's. THURSTON, | EUSTACE, | RALPH, | Followers of Hugo. HENRY, a Page. LUKE, | HUBERT, | Monks living in a Norman Chapel. BASIL, Abbot of a Convent on the Rhine. CYRIL, a Monk of the same Convent. OSRIC, a Norwegian Adventurer, and formerly a Corsair. RUDOLPH, an Outlawed Count, and the Captain of a Band of Robbers. DAGOBERT, the Captain of some predatory Soldiers called "Free Lances". HAROLD, a Danish Knight. ORION. THORA, AGATHA, ELSPETH, a Nurse of Thora's, URSULA, Abbess of the Convent on the Rhine, | NUNS, etc. | Women. Men-at-arms, Soldiers, and Robbers; Monks, Friars, and Churchmen, Spirits, etc. SCENE — A Castle in Normandy. A Study in a Tower; HUGO seated at a table covered with maps and charts of the heavens, astronomical instruments, books, manuscripts, Enter HENRY, a Page. Hugo: Well, boy, what is it? 27 Henry: The feast is spread. Hugo: Why tarry the guests for me? Let Eric sit at the table's head; Alone I desire to be. [Henry goes out.] What share have I at their festive board? Their mirth I can only mar; To me no pleasure their cups afford, Their songs on my silence jar. With an aching eye and a throbbing brain, And yet with a hopeful heart, I must toil and strain with the planets again When the rays of the sun depart; He who must needs with the topers tope, And the feasters feast in the hall, How can he hope with a matter to cope That is immaterial? Orion: He who his appetite stints and curbs, Shut up in the northern wing, With his rye-bread flavoured with bitter herbs, And his draught from the tasteless spring, Good sooth, he is but a sorry clown. There are some good things upon earth — Pleasure and power and fair renown, And wisdom of worldly worth! There is wisdom in follies that charm the sense, In follies that light the eyes, But the folly to wisdom that makes pretence Is alone by the fool termed wise. Hugo: Thy speech, Orion, is somewhat rude; Perchance, having jeer'd and scoff'd To thy fill, thou wilt curb thy jeering mood; I wot thou hast served me oft. This plan of the skies seems fairly traced; What errors canst thou detect? 28 Orion: Nay, the constellations are misplaced, And the satellites incorrect; Leave the plan to me; you have time to seek An hour of needful rest, The night is young and the planets are weak; See, the sun still reddens the west. Hugo: I fear I shall sleep too long. Orion: If you do It matters not much; the sky Is cloudy, the stars will be faint and few; Now, list to my lullaby. [Hugo reclines on a couch.] (Sings.) Still the darkling skies are red, Though the day-god's course is run; Heavenly night-lamps overhead Flash and twinkle one by one. Idle dreamer — earth-born elf! Vainly grasping heavenly things, Wherefore weariest thou thyself With thy vain imaginings? From the tree of knowledge first, Since his parents pluck'd the fruit, Man, with partial knowledge curs'd, Of the tree still seeks the root; Musty volumes crowd thy shelf — Which of these true knowledge brings? Wherefore weariest thou thyself With thy vain imaginings? Will the stars from heaven descend? Can the earth-worm soar and rise? Can the mortal comprehend Heaven's own hallow'd mysteries? Greed and glory, power and pelf — These are won by clowns and kings; Wherefore weariest thou thyself 29 With thy vain imaginings? Sow and reap, and toil and spin; Eat and drink, and dream and die; Man may strive, yet never win, And I laugh the while and cry — Idle dreamer, earth-born elf! Vainly grasping heavenly things, Wherefore weariest thou thyself With thy vain imaginings? He sleeps, and his sleep appears serene, Whatever dreams it has brought him — [Looks at the plans.] If he knows what those hieroglyphics mean, He's wiser than one who taught him. Why does he number the Pole-star thus? Or the Pleiades why combine? And what is he doing with Sirius, In the devil's name or in mine? Man thinks, discarding the beaten track, That the sins of his youth are slain, When he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back To his old pet sins again. SCENE — The Same. HUGO waking, ORION seated near him. Daybreak. Hugo: Oh, weary spirit! oh, cloudy eyes! Oh, heavy and misty brain! Yon riddle that lies 'twixt earth and skies, Ye seek to explore in vain! See, the east is grey; put those scrolls away, And hide them far from my sight; I will toil and study no more by day, I will watch no longer by night; I have labour'd and long'd, and now I seem No nearer the mystic goal; 30 Orion, I fain would devise some scheme To quiet this restless soul; To distant climes I would fain depart — I would travel by sea or land. Orion: Nay, I warn'd you of this, "Short life, long art", The proverb, though stale, will stand; Full many a sage from youth to age Has toil'd to obtain what you Would master at once. In a pilgrimage, Forsooth, there is nothing new; Though virtue, I ween, in change of scene, And vigour in change of air, Will always be, and has always been, And travel is a tonic rare. Still, the restless, discontented mood For the time alone is eased; It will soon return with hunger renew'd, And appetite unappeased. Nathless I could teach a shorter plan To win that wisdom you crave, That lore that is seldom attain'd by man From the cradle down to the grave. Hugo: Such lore I had rather do without, It hath nothing mystic nor awful In my eye. Nay, I despise and doubt The arts that are term'd unlawful; 'Twixt science and magic the line lies plain, I shall never wittingly pass it; There is now no compact between us twain. Orion: But an understanding tacit. You have prospered much since the day we met; You were then a landless knight; You now have honour and wealth, and yet I never can serve you right. Hugo: Enough; we will start this very day, 31 Thurston, Eric, and I, And the baffled visions will pass away, And the restless fires will die. Orion: Till the fuel expires that feeds those fires They smoulder and live unspent; Give a mortal all that his heart desires, He is less than ever content. SCENE — A Cliff on the Breton Coast, Overhanging the Sea. HUGO. Hugo: Down drops the red sun; through the gloaming They burst — raging waves of the sea, Foaming out their own shame — ever foaming Their leprosy up with fierce glee; Flung back from the stone, snowy fountains Of feathery flakes, scarcely flag Where, shock after shock, the green mountains Explode on the iron-grey crag. The salt spray with ceaseless commotion Leaps round me. I sit on the verge Of the cliff — 'twixt the earth and the ocean — With feet overhanging the surge. In thy grandeur, oh, sea! we acknowledge, In thy fairness, oh, earth! we confess, Hidden truths that are taught in no college, Hidden songs that no parchments express. Were they wise in their own generations, Those sages and sagas of old? They have pass'd; o'er their names and their nations Time's billows have silently roll'd; They have pass'd, leaving little to their children, Save histories of a truth far from strict; Or theories more vague and bewildering, 32 Since three out of four contradict. Lost labour! vain bookworms have sat in The halls of dull pedants who teach Strange tongues, the dead lore of the Latin, The scroll that is god-like and Greek: Have wasted life's springtide in learning Things long ago learnt all in vain; They are slow, very slow, in discerning That book lore and wisdom are twain. Pale shades of a creed that was mythic, By time or by truth overcome, Your Delphian temples and Pythic Are ruins deserted and dumb; Your Muses are hush'd, and your Graces Are bruised and defaced; and your gods, Enshrin'd and enthron'd in high places No longer, are powerless as clods; By forest and streamlet, where glisten'd Fair feet of the Naiads that skimm'd The shallows; where the Oreads listen'd, Rose-lipp'd, amber-hair'd, marble-limb'd, No lithe forms disport in the river, No sweet faces peer through the boughs, Elms and beeches wave silent for ever, Ever silent the bright water flows. (Were they duller or wiser than we are, Those heathens of old? Who shall say? Worse or better? Thy wisdom, O "Thea Glaucopis", was wise in thy day; And the false gods alluring to evil, That sway'd reckless votaries then, Were slain to no purpose; they revel Re-crowned in the hearts of us men.) Dead priests of Osiris and Isis, And Apis! that mystical lore, Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis Of fever, is studied no more; 33 Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles The arch of yon firmament vast Looks calm, like a host of white angels, On dry dust of votaries past. On seas unexplored can the ship shun Sunk rocks? Can man fathom life's links, Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian Or Theban, unspoken by Sphinx? The riddle remains still unravell'd By students consuming night oil. Oh, earth! we have toil'd, we have travail'd, How long shall we travail and toil? How long? The short life that fools reckon So sweet, by how much is it higher Than brute life? — the false gods still beckon, And man, through the dust and the mire, Toils onward, as toils the dull bullock, Unreasoning, brutish, and blind, With Ashtaroth, Mammon, and Moloch In front, and Alecto behind. The wise one of earth, the Chaldean, Serves folly in wisdom's disguise; And the sensual Epicurean, Though grosser, is hardly less wise; 'Twixt the former, half pedant, half pagan, And the latter, half sow and half sloth, We halt, choose Astarte or Dagon, Or sacrifice freely to both. With our reason that seeks to disparage, Brute instinct it fails to subdue; With our false illegitimate courage, Our sophistry, vain and untrue; Our hopes that ascend so and fall so, Our passions, fierce hates and hot loves, We are wise (aye, the snake is wise also) — Wise as serpents, NOT harmless as doves. Some flashes, like faint sparks from heaven, 34 Come rarely with rushing of wings; We are conscious at times we have striven, Though seldom, to grasp better things; These pass, leaving hearts that have falter'd, Good angels with faces estranged, And the skin of the Ethiop unalter'd, And the spots of the leopard unchanged. Oh, earth! pleasant earth! have we hanker'd To gather thy flowers and thy fruits? The roses are wither'd, and canker'd The lilies, and barren the roots Of the fig-tree, the vine, the wild olive, Sharp thorns and sad thistles that yield Fierce harvest — so WE live, and SO live The perishing beasts of the field. And withal we are conscious of evil And good — of the spirit and the clod, Of the power in our hearts of a devil, Of the power in our souls of a God, Whose commandments are graven in no cypher, But clear as His sun — from our youth One at least we have cherished — "An eye for An eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Oh, man! of thy Maker the image; To passion, to pride, or to wealth, Sworn bondsman, from dull youth to dim age, Thy portion the fire or the filth, Dross seeking, dead pleasure's death rattle Thy memories' happiest song, And thy highest hope — scarce a drawn battle With dark desperation. How long? Roar louder! leap higher! ye surf-beds, And sprinkle your foam on the furze; Bring the dreams that brought sleep to our turf-beds, To camps of our long ago years, With the flashing and sparkling of broadswords, 35 With the tossing of banners and spears, With the trampling of hard hoofs on hard swards, With the mingling of trumpets and cheers. The gale has gone down; yet outlasting The gale, raging waves of the sea, Casting up their own foam, ever casting Their leprosy up with wild glee, Still storm; so in rashness and rudeness Man storms through the days of his grace; Yet man cannot fathom God's goodness, Exceeding God's infinite space. And coldly and calmly and purely Grey rock and green hillock lie white In star-shine dream-laden — so surely Night cometh — so cometh the night When we, too, at peace with our neighbour, May sleep where God's hillocks are piled, Thanking HIM for a rest from day's labour, And a sleep like the sleep of a child! SCENE — The Castle in Normandy. THORA working at embroidery, ELSPETH spinning. Thora (sings): We severed in autumn early, Ere the earth was torn by the plough; The wheat and the oats and the barley Are ripe for the harvest now. We sunder'd one misty morning, Ere the hills were dimm'd by the rain, Through the flowers those hills adorning — Thou comest not back again. My heart is heavy and weary With the weight of a weary soul; 36 The mid-day glare grows dreary, And dreary the midnight scroll. The corn-stalks sigh for the sickle, 'Neath the load of the golden grain; I sigh for a mate more fickle — Thou comest not back again. The warm sun riseth and setteth, The night bringeth moistening dew, But the soul that longeth forgetteth The warmth and the moisture too; In the hot sun rising and setting There is naught save feverish pain; There are tears in the night-dews wetting — Thou comest not back again. Thy voice in mine ear still mingles With the voices of whisp'ring trees; Thy kiss on my cheek still tingles At each kiss of the summer breeze; While dreams of the past are thronging For substance of shades in vain, I am waiting, watching, and longing — Thou comest not back again. Waiting and watching ever, Longing and lingering yet, Leaves rustle and corn-stalks quiver, Winds murmur and waters fret; No answer they bring, no greeting, No speech save that sad refrain, Nor voice, save an echo repeating — He cometh not back again. Elspeth: Thine eldest sister is wedded to Max; With Biorn, Hilda hath cast her lot. If the husbands vanish'd, and left no tracks, Would the wives have cause for sorrow, I wot? Thora: How well I remember that dreary ride; 37 How I sigh'd for the lands of ice and snow, In the trackless wastes of the desert wide, With the sun o'erhead and the sand below; 'Neath the scanty shades of the feathery palms, How I sigh'd for the forest of sheltering firs, Whose shadows environ'd the Danish farms, Where I sang and sported in childish years. On the fourteenth day of our pilgrimage We stayed at the foot of a sandhill high; Our fever'd thirst we could scarce assuage At the brackish well that was nearly dry, And the hot sun rose, and the hot sun set, And we rode all the day through a desert land, And we camp'd where the lake and the river met, On sedge and shingle and shining sand: Enfolded in Hugo's cloak I slept, Or watch'd the stars while I lay awake; And close to our feet the staghound crept, And the horses were grazing beside the lake; Now we own castles and serving men, Lands and revenues. What of that? Hugo the Norman was kinder then, And happier was Thora of Armorat. Elspeth: Nay, I warn'd thee, with Norman sails unfurl'd Above our heads, when we wished thee joy, That men are the same all over the world, They will worship only the newest toy; Yet Hugo is kind and constant too, Though somewhat given to studies of late; Biorn is sottish, and Max untrue, And worse than thine is thy sisters' fate. But a shadow darkens the chamber door. Enter THURSTON. Thurston: 'Tis I, Lady Thora; our lord is near. My horse being fresher, I rode before; Both he and Eric will soon be here. 38 Thora: Good Thurston, give me your hand. You are Most welcome. What has delayed you thus? Thurston: Both by sea and land we have travell'd far, Yet little of note has happened to us — We were wreck'd on the shores of Brittany, Near the coast of Morbihan iron-bound; The rocks were steep and the surf ran high, Thy kinsman, Eric, was well-nigh drown'd. By a swarm of knaves we were next beset, Who took us for corsairs; then released By a Breton count, whose name I forget. Now I go, by your leave, to tend my beast. [He goes out.] Elspeth: That man is rude and froward of speech: My ears are good, though my sight grows dim. Thora: Thurston is faithful. Thou canst not teach Courtly nor servile manners to him. SCENE — The Castle Hall. THURSTON, RALPH, EUSTACE, and other followers of HUGO, seated at a long table. HAROLD seated apart. Thurston: Who is that stranger, dark and tall, On the wooden settle next to the wall — Mountebank, pilgrim, or wandering bard? Eustace: To define his calling is somewhat hard; Lady Thora has taken him by the hand Because he has come from the Holy Land. 39 Pilgrims and palmers are all the rage With her, since she shared in that pilgrimage With Hugo. The stranger came yesterday, And would have gone on, but she bade him stay. Besides, he sings in the Danish tongue The songs she has heard in her childhood sung. That's all I know of him, good or bad; In my own opinion he's somewhat mad. You must raise your voice if you speak with him, And he answers as though his senses were dim. Thurston (to Harold): Good-morrow, sir stranger. Harold: Good-morrow, friend. Thurston: Where do you come from? and whither wend? Harold: I have travelled of late with the setting sun At my back; and as soon as my task is done I purpose to turn my face to the north — Yet we know not what a day may bring forth. Thurston: Indeed we don't. (To Eustace, aside): Nay, I know him now By that ugly scar that crosses his brow; And the less we say to him the better. Your judgment is right to the very letter — The man is mad. Eustace: But harmless, I think; He eats but little, eschews strong drink, And only speaks when spoken to first. Thurston: Harmless or not, he was once the worst And bitterest foe Lord Hugo had; And yet his story is somewhat sad. 40 Eustace: May I hear it? Thurston: Nay, I never reveal What concerns me not. Our lord may conceal Or divulge at pleasure his own affairs, — Not even his comrade Eric shares His secrets; though Eric thinks him wise, Which is more than I do, for I despise That foolish science he learnt in Rome. He dreams and mopes when he sits at home, And now he's not much better abroad; 'Tis hard to follow so tame a lord. 'Twixt us two, he won't be worth a rush If he will persist in his studies —— Eustace: Hush! Ralph has persuaded our guest to sing. Thurston: I have known the day when his voice would ring Till the rafters echoed. Eustace: 'Tis pleasant still, Though far too feeble this hall to fill. Harold (sings): On the current, where the wide Windings of the river Eddy to the North Sea tide, Shall I in my shallop glide, As I have done at her side? Never! never! never! In the forest, where the firs, Pines, and larches quiver To the northern breeze that stirs, Shall my lips be press'd to hers, As they were in by-gone years? Never! never! never! 41 In the battle on the plain, Where the lance-shafts shiver, And the sword-strokes fall like rain, Shall I bear her scarf again As I have done — not in vain? Never! never! never! In a fairer, brighter land, Where the saints rest ever, Shall I once more see her stand, White, amidst a white-robed band, Harp and palm-branch in her hand? Never! never! never! SCENE — The Same. EUSTACE, THURSTON, and followers of HUGO. HAROLD. Enter, by the hall door, HUGO, ERIC, and THORA. Eustace (and others standing up): Welcome, Lord Hugo! Hugo: Welcome or not, Thanks for your greeting all. Ha, Eustace! what complaints hast thou got? What grievances to recall? Eustace: Count William came with a numerous band, Ere the snows began to fall, And slew a buck on your lordship's land, Within a league of the wall. Hugo: Count William has done to us no more Than we to him. In his vineyard Last summer, or later, maybe, a boar Was slaughter'd by Thurston's whinyard. 42 Thurston: Aye, Hugo! But William kept the buck, I will wager marks a score, Though the tale is new to me; and, worse luck, You made me give back the boar. Harold (advancing): Lord Hugo! Hugo: What! Art thou living yet? I scarcely knew thee, Sir Dane! And 'tis not so very long since we met. Harold: 'Twill be long ere we meet again. (gives a letter) This letter was traced by one now dead In the Holy Land; and I Must wait till his dying request is read, And in his name ask the reply. Thora (aside): Who is that stranger, Hugo? Hugo: By birth He is a countryman of thine, Thora. What writing is this on earth? I can scarce decipher a line. Harold: The pen in the clutch of death works ill. Hugo: Nay, I read now; the letters run More clearly. Harold: Wilt grant the request? Hugo: I will. Harold: Enough! Then my task is done. (He holds out his hand.) Hugo, I go to a far-off land, 43 Wilt thou say, "God speed thee!" now? Hugo: Sir Harold, I cannot take thy hand, Because of my ancient vow. Harold: Farewell, then. Thora: Friend, till the morning wait. On so wild a night as this Thou shalt not go from my husband's gate; The path thou wilt surely miss. Harold: I go. Kind lady, some future day Thy care will requited be. Thora: Speak, Hugo, speak. Hugo: He may go or stay, It matters little to me. [Harold goes out.] Thora: Husband, that man is ill and weak; On foot he goes and alone Through a barren moor in a night-storm bleak. Eric: Now I wonder where he has gone! Hugo: Indeed, I have not the least idea; The man is certainly mad. He wedded my sister, Dorothea, And used her cruelly bad. He was once my firmest and surest friend, And once my deadliest foe; But hate and friendship both find their end — Now I heed not where he may go. 44 SCENE — A Chamber in the Castle. HUGO, THORA, and ERIC. Hugo: That letter that came from Palestine, By the hands of yon wandering Dane, Will cost me a pilgrimage to the Rhine. Thora: Wilt thou travel so soon again? Hugo: I can scarce refuse the dying request Of my comrade, Baldwin, now; His bones are dust. May his soul find rest He once made a foolish vow, That at Englemehr, 'neath the watchful care Of the Abbess, his child should stay, For a season at least. To escort her there I must start at the break of day. Thora: Is it Agatha that goes, or Clare? Hugo: Nay, Clare is dwelling in Spain With her spouse. Thora: 'Tis Agatha. She is fair, I am told; but giddy and vain. Eric: Some musty tales on my memory grow Concerning Count Baldwin's vow; Thou knew'st his daughter? Hugo: Aye, years ago. I should scarcely know her now. 45 It seems, when her father's vow was made, She was taken sorely ill; Then he travell'd, and on his return was stay'd; He could never his oath fulfil. Eric: If rightly I've heard, 'twas Agatha That fled with some Danish knight — I forget the name. Hugo: Nay, she fled not far; She returned again that night. Thora: For a nun, I fear, she is too self-willed. Hugo: That is no affair of mine. My task is over, my word fulfilled, Should I bring her safe to the Rhine. Come, Thora, sing. Thora: Nay, I cannot sing, Nor would I now if I could. Sing thou. Hugo: I will, though my voice should bring No sound save a discord rude. (Sings.) Where the storm in its wrath hath lighted, The pine lies low in the dust; And the corn is withered and blighted, Where the fields are red with the rust; Falls the black frost, nipping and killing, Where its petals the violet rears, And the wind, though tempered, is chilling To the lamb despoiled by the shears. The strong in their strength are shaken, The wise in their wisdom fall; And the bloom of beauty is taken — Strength, wisdom, beauty, and all, 46 They vanish, their lot fulfilling, Their doom approaches and nears, But the wind, though tempered, is chilling To the lamb despoiled by the shears. 'Tis the will of a Great Creator, He is wise, His will must be done, And it cometh sooner or later; And one shall be taken, and one Shall be left here, toiling and tilling, In this vale of sorrows and tears, Where the wind, though tempered, is chilling To the lamb despoiled by the shears. Tell me, mine own one, tell me, The shadows of life and the fears Shall neither daunt me nor quell me, While I can avert thy tears: Dost thou shrink, as I shrink, unwilling To realise lonely years? Since the wind, though tempered, is chilling To the lamb despoiled by the shears. Enter HENRY. Henry: My lord, Father Luke craves audience straight, He has come on foot from the chapel; Some stranger perished beside his gate When the dawn began to dapple. SCENE — A Chapel Not Very Far from Hugo's Castle. HUGO, ERIC, and two Monks (LUKE and HUBERT). The dead body of HAROLD. Luke: When the dawn was breaking, Came a faint sound, waking Hubert and myself; we hurried to the door, Found the stranger lying 47 At the threshold, dying. Somewhere have I seen a face like his before. Hugo: Harold he is hight. Only yester-night From our gates he wander'd, in the driving hail; Well his face I know, Both as friend and foe; Of my followers only Thurston knows his tale. Luke: Few the words he said, Faint the signs he made, Twice or thrice he groaned; quoth Hubert, "Thou hast sinn'd. This is retribution, Seek for absolution; Answer me — then cast thy sorrows to the wind. Do their voices reach thee, Friends who failed to teach thee, In thine earlier days, to sunder right from wrong? Charges 'gainst thee cited, Cares all unrequited, Counsels spurned and slighted — do they press and throng?" But he shook his head. "'Tis not so," he said; "They will scarce reproach me who reproached of yore. If their counsels good, Rashly I withstood; Having suffered longer, I have suffered more." "Do their curses stun thee? Foes who failed to shun thee, Stricken by rash vengeance, in some wild career, As the barbed arrow Cleaveth bone and marrow, From those chambers narrow — do they pierce thine ear?" And he made reply, Laughing bitterly, "Did I fear them living — shall I fear them dead? Blood that I have spilt Leaveth little guilt; 48 On the hand it resteth, scarcely on the head." "Is there one whom thou May'st have wronged ere now, Since remorse so sorely weigheth down thine heart? By some saint in heaven, Sanctified and shriven, Would'st thou be forgiven ere thy soul depart?" Not a word he said, But he bowed his head Till his temples rested on the chilly sods And we heard him groan — "Ah! mine own, mine own! If I had thy pardon I might ask for God's." Hubert raised him slowly, Sunrise, faint and holy, Lit the dead face, placid as a child's might be. May the troubled spirit, Through Christ's saving merit, Peace and rest inherit. Thus we sent for thee. Hugo: God o'erruleth fate. I had cause for hate; In this very chapel, years back, proud and strong, Joined by priestly vows, He became the spouse Of my youngest sister, to her bitter wrong. And he wrought her woe, Making me his foe; Not alone unfaithful — brutal, too, was he. She had scarce been dead Three months, ere he fled With Count Baldwin's daughter, then betrothed to me. Fortune straight forsook him, Vengeance overtook him; Heavy crimes will bring down heavy punishment. All his strength was shatter'd, Even his wits were scatter'd, Half-deranged, half-crippled, wandering he went. We are unforgiving 49 While our foes are living; Yet his retribution weigh'd so heavily That I feel remorse, Gazing on his corpse, For my rudeness when he left our gates to die. And his grave shall be 'Neath the chestnut tree, Where he met my sister many years ago; Leave that tress of hair On his bosom there — Wrap the cerecloth round him! Eric, let us go. SCENE — A Room in the Castle. HUGO and ERIC. Early morning. Hugo: The morn is fair, the weary miles Will shorten 'neath the summer's wiles; Pomona in the orchard smiles, And in the meadow, Flora! And I have roused a chosen band For escort through the troubled land; And shaken Elspeth by the hand, And said farewell to Thora. Comrade and kinsman — for thou art Comrade and kin to me — we part Ere nightfall, if at once we start, We gain the dead Count's castle. The roads are fair, the days are fine, Ere long I hope to reach the Rhine. Forsooth, no friend to me or mine Is that same Abbot Basil; I thought he wronged us by his greed. My father sign'd a foolish deed For lack of gold in time of need, And thus our lands went by us; Yet wrong on our side may have been: As far as my will goes, I ween, 'Tis past, the grudge that lay between 50 Us twain. Men call him pious — And I have prosper'd much since then, And gain'd for one lost acre ten; And even the ancient house and glen Rebought with purchase-money. He, too, is wealthy; he has got By churchly rights a fertile spot, A land of corn and wine, I wot, A land of milk and honey. Now, Eric, change thy plans and ride With us; thou hast no ties, no bride. Eric: Nay, ties I have, and time and tide, Thou knowest, wait for no man; And I go north; God's blessing shuns The dwellings of forgetful sons, That proverb he may read who runs, In Christian lore or Roman. My good old mother she hath heard, For twelve long months, from me no word; At thought of her my heart is stirr'd, And even mine eyes grow moister. Greet Ursula from me; her fame Is known to all. A nobler dame, Since days of Clovis, ne'er became The inmate of a cloister. Our paths diverge, yet we may go Together for a league or so; I, too, will join thy band below When thou thy bugle windest. [Eric goes out.] Hugo: From weaknesses we stand afar, On us unpleasantly they jar; And yet the stoutest-hearted are The gentlest and the kindest. My mother loved me tenderly; Alas! her only son was I. I shudder'd, but my lids were dry, By death made orphan newly. 51 A braver man than me, I swear, Who never comprehended fear, Scarce names his mother, and the tear, Unbidden, springs unruly. SCENE — A Road on the Norman Frontiers. HUGO, AGATHA, ORION, THURSTON, and armed attendants, riding slowly. Agatha: Sir Knight, what makes you so grave and glum? At times I fear you are deaf or dumb, Or both. Hugo: And yet, should I speak the truth, There is little in common 'twixt us, forsooth; You would think me duller, and still more vain, If I uttered the thoughts that fill my brain; Since the matters with which my mind is laden Would scarcely serve to amuse a maiden. Agatha: I am so foolish and you are so wise, 'Tis the meaning your words so ill disguise. Alas! my prospects are sad enough: I had rather listen to speeches rough Than muse and meditate silently On the coming loss of my liberty. Sad hope to me can my future bring, Yet, while I may, I would prattle and sing, Though it only were to try and assuage The dreariness of my pilgrimage. Hugo: Prattle and sing to your heart's content, And none will offer impediment. Agatha (sings): We were playmates in childhood, my sister and I, Whose playtime with childhood is done; 52 Through thickets where briar and bramble grew high, Barefooted I've oft seen her run. I've known her, when mists on the moorland hung white, Bareheaded past nightfall remain; She has followed a landless and penniless knight Through battles and sieges in Spain. But I pulled the flower, and shrank from the thorn, Sought the sunshine, and fled from the mist; My sister was born to face hardship with scorn — I was born to be fondled and kiss'd. Hugo (aside): She has a sweet voice. Orion: And a sweet face, too — Be candid for once, and give her her due. Agatha: Your face grows longer, and still more long, Sir Scholar! how did you like my song? Hugo: I thought it rather a silly one. Agatha: You are far from a pleasant companion. SCENE — An Apartment in a Wayside Inn. HUGO and AGATHA. Evening. Hugo: I will leave you now — we have talked enough, And for one so tenderly reared and nursed This journey is wearisome, perhaps, and rough. Agatha: Will you not finish your story first? 53 Hugo: I repent me that I began it now, 'Tis a dismal tale for a maiden's ears; Your cheek is pale already, your brow Is sad, and your eyes are moist with tears. Agatha: It may be thus, I am lightly vexed, But the tears will lightly come and go; I can cry one moment and laugh the next, Yet I have seen terrors, as well you know. I remember that flight through moss and fern, The moonlit shadows, the hoofs that rolled In fierce pursuit, and the ending stern, And the hawk that left his prey on the wold. Hugo: I have sorrowed since that I left you there: Your friends were close behind on the heath, Though not so close as I thought they were. (Aside.) Now I will not tell her of Harold's death. Agatha: 'Tis true, I was justly punished, and men, As a rule, of pity have little share; Had I died you had cared but little then. Hugo: But little then, yet now I should care More than you think for. Now, good-night. Tears still? Ere I leave you, child, alone, Must I dry your cheeks? Agatha: Nay, I am not quite Such a child but what I can dry my own. [Hugo goes out. Agatha retires.] Orion (singing outside the window of Agatha's chamber): 'Neath the stems with blossoms laden, 'Neath the tendrils curling, I, thy servant, sing, oh, maiden! I, thy slave, oh, darling! 54 Lo! the shaft that slew the red deer, At the elk may fly too. Spare them not! The dead are dead, dear, Let the living die too. Where the wiles of serpent mingle, And the looks of dove lie, Where small hands in strong hands tingle, Loving eyes meet lovely: Where the harder natures soften, And the softer harden — Certes! such things have been often Since we left Eve's garden. Sweeter follies herald sadder Sins — look not too closely; Tongue of asp and tooth of adder Under leaf of rose lie. Warned, advised in vain, abandon Warning and advice too, Let the child lay wilful hand on Den of cockatrice too. I, thy servant, or thy master, One or both — no matter; If the former — firmer, faster, Surer still the latter — Lull thee, soothe thee with my singing, Bid thee sleep, and ponder On my lullabies still ringing Through thy dreamland yonder. SCENE — A Wooded Rising Ground, Near the Rhine. HUGO and AGATHA resting under the trees. THURSTON, EUSTACE, and followers a little apart. ORION. (Noonday.) The Towers of the Convent in the distance. Agatha: I sit on the greensward, and hear the bird sing, 55 'Mid the thickets where scarlet and white blossoms cling; And beyond the sweet uplands all golden with flower, It looms in the distance, the grey convent tower. And the emerald earth and the sapphire-hued sky Keep telling me ever my spring has gone by; Ah! spring premature, they are tolling thy knell, In the wind's soft adieu, in the bird's sweet farewell. Oh! why is the greensward with garlands so gay, That I quail at the sight of my prison-house grey? Oh! why is the bird's note so joyous and clear? The caged bird must pine in a cage doubly drear. Hugo: May the lances of Dagobert harry their house, If they coax or intimidate thee to take vows; May the freebooters pillage their shrines, should they dare Touch with their scissors thy glittering hair. Our short and sweet journey now draws to an end, And homeward my sorrowful way I must wend; Oh, fair one! oh, loved one! I would I were free, To squander my life in the greenwood with thee. Orion (aside): Ho! seeker of knowledge, so grave and so wise, Touch her soft curl again — look again in her eyes; Forget for the nonce musty parchments, and learn How the slow pulse may quicken — the cold blood may burn. Ho! fair, fickle maiden, so blooming and shy! The old love is dead, let the old promise die! Thou dost well, thou dost wise, take the word of Orion, "A living dog always before a dead lion!" Thurston: Ye varlets, I would I knew which of ye burst Our wine-skin — what, ho! must I perish with thirst! Go, Henry, thou hast a glib tongue, go and ask Thy lord to send Ralph to yon inn for a flask. Henry: Nay, Thurston, not so; I decline to disturb 56 Our lord for the present; go thou, or else curb Thy thirst, or drink water, as I do. Thurston: Thou knave Of a page, dost thou wish me the colic to have? Orion (aside): That clown is a thoroughbred Saxon. He thinks With pleasure on naught save hard blows and strong drinks; In hell he will scarce go athirst if once given An inkling of any good liquors in heaven. Hugo: Our Pontiff to manhood at Englemehr grew, The priests there are many, the nuns are but few. I love not the Abbot — 'tis needless to tell My reason; but all of the Abbess speak well. Agatha: Through vineyards and cornfields beneath us, the Rhine Spreads and winds, silver-white, in the merry sunshine; And the air, overcharged with a subtle perfume, Grows faint from the essence of manifold bloom. Hugo: And the tinkling of bells, and the bleating of sheep, And the chaunt from the fields, where the labourers reap The earlier harvest, comes faint on the breeze, That whispers so faintly in hedgerows and trees. Orion: And a waggon wends slow to those turrets and spires, To feed the fat monks and the corpulent friars; It carries the corn, and the oil, and the wine, The honey and milk from the shores of the Rhine. The oxen are weary and spent with their load, They pause, but the driver doth recklessly goad; Up yon steep, flinty rise they have staggered and reeled, Even devils may pity dumb beasts of the field. 57 Agatha (sings): Oh! days and years departed, Vain hopes, vain fears that smarted, I turn to you sad-hearted — I turn to you in tears! Your daily sun shone brightly, Your happy dreams came nightly, Flowers bloomed and birds sang lightly, Through all your hopes and fears! You halted not, nor tarried, Your hopes have all miscarried, And even your fears are buried, Since fear with hope must die. You halted not, but hasted, And flew past, childhood wasted, And girlhood scarcely tasted, Now womanhood is nigh. Yet I forgive your wronging, Dead seasons round me thronging, With yearning and with longing, I call your bitters sweet. Vain longing, and vain yearning, There now is no returning; Oh! beating heart and burning, Forget to burn and beat! Oh! childish suns and showers, Oh! girlish thorns and flowers, Oh! fruitless days and hours, Oh! groundless hopes and fears: The birds still chirp and twitter, And still the sunbeams glitter: Oh! barren years and bitter, Oh! bitter, barren years! SCENE — The Summit of a Burning Mountain. Night. A terrific storm. ORION (undisguised). 58 Orion (sings): From fathomless depths of abysses, Where fires unquenchable burst, From the blackness of darkness, where hisses The brood of the serpent accurs'd; From shrines where the hymns are the weeping And wailing and gnashing of teeth, Where the palm is the pang never sleeping, Where the worm never dying is the wreath; Where all fruits save wickedness wither, Whence naught save despair can be gleaned — Come hither! come hither! come hither! Fall'n angel, fell sprite, and foul fiend. Come hither! the bands are all broken, And loosed in hell's innermost womb, When the spell unpronounceable spoken Divides the unspeakable gloom. Evil Spirits approach. The storm increases. Evil Spirits (singing): We hear thee, we seek thee, on pinions That darken the shades of the shade; Oh! Prince of the Air, with dominions Encompass'd, with powers array'd, With majesty cloth'd as a garment, Begirt with a shadowy shine, Whose feet scorch the hill-tops that are meant As footstools for thee and for thine. Orion (sings): How it swells through each pause of the thunder, And mounts through each lull of the gust, Through the crashing of crags torn asunder, And the hurtling of trees in the dust; With a chorus of loud lamentations, With its dreary and hopeless refrain! 'Tis the cry of all tongues and all nations, That suffer and shudder in vain. 59 Evil Spirits (singing): 'Tis the cry of all tongues and all nations; Our song shall chime in with their strain; Lost spirits blend their wild exultations With the sighing of mortals in pain. Orion (sings): With just light enough to see sorrows In this world, and terrors beyond, 'Twixt the day's bitter pangs and the morrow's Dread doubts, to despair and despond, Man lingers through toils unavailing For blessings that baffle his grasp; To his cradle he comes with a wailing, He goes to his grave with a gasp. Evil Spirits (singing): His birth is a weeping and wailing, His death is a groan and a gasp; O'er the seed of the woman prevailing, Thus triumphs the seed of the asp. SCENE — Chamber of a Wayside Inn. HUGO sitting alone. Evening. Hugo: And now the parting is over, The parting should end the pain; And the restless heart may recover, And so may the troubled brain. I am sitting within the chamber Whose windows look on the porch, Where the roses cluster and clamber; We halted here on our march With her to the convent going, And now I go back alone: Ye roses, budding and blowing, Ye heed not though she is flown. 60 I remember the girlish gesture, The sportive and childlike grace, With which she crumpled and pressed your Rose leaves to her rose-hued face. Shall I think on her ways hereafter — On those flashes of mirth and grief, On that April of tears and laughter, On our parting, bitterly brief? I remember the bell at sunrise, That sounded so solemnly, Bidding monk, and prelate, and nun rise; I rose ere the sun was high. Down the long, dark, dismal passage, To the door of her resting-place I went, on a farewell message, I trod with a stealthy pace. There was no one there to see us When she opened her chamber door. "Miserere, mei Deus", Rang faint from the convent choir. I remember the dark and narrow And scantily-furnished room; And the gleam, like a golden arrow — The gleam that lighted the gloom. One couch, one seat, and one table, One window, and only one — It stands in the eastern gable, It faces the rising sun; One ray shot through it, and one light On doorway and threshold played. She stood within in the sunlight, I stood without in the shade. I remember that bright form under The sheen of that slanting ray. I spoke — "For life we must sunder, Let us sunder without delay. Let us sever without preamble, As brother and sister part, For the sake of one pleasant ramble, 61 That will live in at least one heart." Still the choir in my ears rang faintly, In the distance dying away, Sweetly and sadly and saintly, Through arch and corridor grey! And thus we parted for ever, Between the shade and the shine; Not as brother and sister sever — I fondled her hands in mine. Still the choir in my ears rang deaden'd And dull'd, though audible yet; And she redden'd, and paled, and redden'd — Her lashes and lids grew wet. Not as brother severs from sister, My lips clung fast to her lips; She shivered and shrank when I kissed her. On the sunbeam drooped the eclipse. I remember little of the parting With the Abbot, down by the gate, My men were eager for starting; I think he pressed me to wait. From the lands where convent and glebe lie, From manors, and Church's right, Where I fought temptation so feebly, I, too, felt eager for flight. Alas! the parting is over — The parting, but not the pain — Oh! sweet was the purple clover, And sweet was the yellow grain; And sweet were the woody hollows On the summery Rhineward track; But a winter untimely swallows All sweets as I travel back. Yet I feel assured, in some fashion, Ere the hedges are crisp with rime, I shall conquer this senseless passion, 'Twill yield to toil and to time. I will fetter these fancies roaming; Already the sun has dipped; 62 I will trim the lamps in the gloaming, I will finish my manuscript. Through the nightwatch unflagging study Shall banish regrets perforce; As soon as the east is ruddy Our bugle shall sound "To Horse!" SCENE — Another Wayside House, Near the Norman Frontier. HUGO and ORION in a chamber. Evening. Orion: Your eyes are hollow, your step is slow, And your cheek is pallid as though from toil, Watching or fasting, by which I know That you have been burning the midnight oil. Hugo: Aye, three nights running. Orion: 'Twill never do To travel all day, and study all night; Will you join in a gallop through mist and dew, In a flight that may vie with the eagle's flight? Hugo: With all my heart. Shall we saddle "Rollo"? Orion: Nay, leave him undisturb'd in his stall; I have steeds he would hardly care to follow. Hugo: Follow, forsooth! he can lead them all. Orion: Touching his merits we will not quarrel; But let me mount you for once; enough Of work may await your favourite sorrel, And the paths we must traverse to-night are rough. 63 But first let me mix you a beverage, To invigorate your enfeebled frame. [He mixes a draught and hands it to Hugo.] All human ills this draught can assuage. Hugo: It hisses and glows like liquid flame; Say, what quack nostrum is this thou'st brewed? Speak out; I am learned in the chemist's lore. Orion: There is nothing but what will do you good; And the drugs are simples; 'tis hellebore, Nepenthe, upas, and dragon's blood, Absinthe, and mandrake, and mandragore. Hugo: I will drink it, although, by mass and rood, I am just as wise as I was before. SCENE — A Rough, Hilly Country. HUGO and ORION riding at speed on black horses. Mountains in the distance. Night. Hugo: See! the sparks that fly from our hoof-strokes make A fiery track that gleams in our wake; Like a dream the dim landscape past us shoots, Our horses fly. Orion: They are useful brutes, Though somewhat skittish; the foam is whit'ning The crest and rein of my courser "Lightning"; He pulls to-night, being short of work, And takes his head with a sudden jerk; Still heel and steady hand on the bit, For that is "Tempest" on which you sit. Hugo: 64 'Tis the bravest steed that ever I back'd; Did'st mark how he crossed yon cataract? From hoof to hoof I should like to measure The space he clear'd. Orion: He can clear at leisure A greater distance. Observe the chasm We are nearing. Ha! did you feel a spasm As we flew over it? Hugo: Not at all. Orion: Nathless 'twas an ugly place for a fall. Hugo: Let us try a race to yon mountain high, That rears its dusky peak 'gainst the sky. Orion: I won't disparage your horsemanship, But your steed will stand neither spur nor whip, And is hasty and hard to steer at times. We must travel far ere the midnight chimes; We must travel back ere the east is grey. Ho! "Lightning"! "Tempest"! Away! Away! [They ride on faster.] SCENE — A Peak in a Mountainous Country Overhanging a Rocky Pass. HUGO and ORION on black horses. Midnight. Hugo: These steeds are sprung from no common race, Their vigour seems to annihilate space; What hast thou brought me here to see? Orion: No boisterous scene of unhallow'd glee, No sabbat of witches coarse and rude, 65 But a mystic and musical interlude; You have long'd to explore the scrolls of Fate, Dismount, as I do, and listen and wait. [They dismount.] Orion (chanting): Spirits of earth, and air, and sea, Spirits unclean, and spirits untrue, By the symbols three that shall nameless be, One of your masters calls on you. Spirits (chanting in the distance): From the bowels of earth, where gleams the gold; From the air where the powers of darkness hold Their court; from the white sea-foam, Whence the white rose-tinted goddess sprung, Whom poets of every age have sung, Ever we come! we come! Hugo: How close to our ears the thunder peals! How the earth beneath us shudders and reels! A Voice (chanting): Woe to the earth! Where men give death! And women give birth! To the sons of Adam, by Cain or Seth! Plenty and dearth! To the daughters of Eve, who toil and spin, Barren of worth! Let them sigh, and sicken, and suffer sin! Woe to the earth! Hugo: What is yon phantom large and dim That over the mountain seems to swim? Orion: 'Tis the scarlet woman of Babylon! Hugo: Whence does she come? Where has she gone? 66 And who is she? Orion: You would know too much; These are subjects on which I dare not touch; And if I were to try and enlighten you, I should probably fail, and possibly frighten you. You had better ask some learned divine, Whose opinion is p'rhaps worth as much as mine, In his own conceit; and who, besides, Could tell you the brand of the beast she rides. What can you see in the valley yonder? Speak out; I can hear you, for all the thunder. Hugo: I see four shadowy altars rise, They seem to swell and dilate in size; Larger and clearer now they loom, Now fires are lighting them through the gloom. A Voice (chanting): The first a golden-hued fire shows, A blood-red flame on the second glows, The blaze on the third is tinged like the rose, From the fourth a column of black smoke goes. Orion: Can you see all this? Hugo: I see and hear; The lights and hues are vivid and clear. Spirits (sing at the first altar): Hail, Mammon! while man buys and barters, Thy kingdom in this world is sure; Thy prophets thou hast and thy martyrs, Great things in thy name they endure; Thy fetters of gold crush the miser, The usurer bends at thy shrine, And the wealthier nations and the wiser Bow with us at this altar of thine. Spirits (sing at the second altar): 67 Hail, Moloch! whose banner floats blood-red, From pole to equator unfurl'd, Whose laws redly written have stood red, And shall stand while standeth this world; Clad in purple, with thy diadem gory, Thy sceptre the blood-dripping steel, Thy subjects with us give thee glory, With us at thine altar they kneel. Spirits (sing at the third altar): Hail, Sovereign! whose fires are kindled By sparks from the bottomless pit, Has thy worship diminish'd or dwindled? Do the yokes of thy slaves lightly sit? Nay, the men of all climes and all races Are stirr'd by the flames that now stir us; Then (as we do) they fall on their faces, Crying, "Hear us! Oh! Ashtaroth, hear us!" Spirits (all in chorus): The vulture her carrion swallows, Returns to his vomit the dog. In the slough of uncleanliness wallows The he-goat, and revels the hog. Men are wise with their schools and their teachers, Men are just with their creeds and their priests; Yet, in spite of their pedants and preachers, They backslide in footprints of beasts! Hugo: From the smoky altar there seems to come A stifled murmur, a droning hum. Orion: With that we have nothing at all to do, Or, at least, not now, neither I nor you; Though some day or other, possibly We may see it closer, both you and I; Let us visit the nearest altar first, Whence the yellow fires flicker and burst, Like the flames from molten ore that spring; We may stand in the pale of the outer ring, 68 But forbear to trespass within the inner, Lest the sins of the past should find out the sinner. [They approach the first altar, and stand within the outer circle which surrounds it, and near the inner.] Spirits (sing): Beneath us it flashes, The glittering gold, Though it turneth to ashes And dross in the hold; Yet man will endeavour, By fraud or by strife, To grasp it and never To yield it with life. Orion: What can you see? Hugo: Some decrepit shapes, That are neither dwarfs, nor demons, nor apes; In the hollow earth they appear to store And rake together great heaps of ore. Orion: These are the gnomes, coarse sprites and rough; Come on, of these we have seen enough. [They approach second altar and stand as before.] Spirits (singing): Above us it flashes, The glittering steel, Though the red blood splashes Where its victims reel; Yet man will endeavour To grapple the hilt, And to wield the blade ever Till his life be spilt. Orion: What see you now? Hugo: A rocky glen, 69 A horrid jumble of fighting men, And a face that somewhere I've seen before. Orion: Come on; there is naught worth seeing more, Except the altar of Ashtaroth. Hugo: To visit that altar I am loth. Orion: Why so? Hugo: Nay, I cannot fathom why, But I feel no curiosity. Orion: Come on. Stand close to the inner ring, And hear how sweetly these spirits sing. [They approach third altar.] Spirits (sing): Around us it flashes, The cestus of one Born of white foam, that dashes Beneath the white sun; Let the mortal take heart, he Has nothing to dare; She is fair, Queen Astarte, Her subjects are fair! Orion: What see you now, friend? Hugo: Wood and wold, And forms that look like the nymphs of old. There is nothing here worth looking at twice. I have seen enough. Orion: You are far too nice; Nevertheless, you must look again. Those forms will fade. 70 Hugo: They are growing less plain. They vanish. I see a door that seems To open; a ray of sunlight gleams From a window behind; a vision as fair As the flush of dawn is standing there. [He gazes earnestly.] Orion (sings): Higher and hotter the white flames glow, And the adamant may be thaw'd like snow, And the life for a single chance may go, And the soul for a certainty. Oh! vain and shallow philosopher, Dost feel them quicken, dost feel them stir, The thoughts that have stray'd again to HER From whom thou hast sought to fly? Lo! the furnace is heated till sevenfold; Is thy brain still calm? Is thy blood still cold To the curls that wander in ripples of gold, On the shoulders of ivory? Do the large, dark eyes, and the small, red mouth, Consume thine heart with a fiery drouth, Like the fierce sirocco that sweeps from the south, When the deserts are parch'd and dry? Aye, start and shiver and catch thy breath, The sting is certain, the venom is death, And the scales are flashing the fruit beneath, And the fang striketh suddenly. At the core the ashes are bitter and dead, But the rind is fair and the rind is red, It has ever been pluck'd since the serpent said, Thou shalt NOT SURELY die. [Hugo tries to enter the inner ring; Orion holds him back; they struggle.] Hugo: Unhand me, slave! or quail to the rod! Agatha! Speak! in the name of God! 71 [The vision disappears; the altars vanish. Hugo falls insensible.] SCENE — The Wayside House. HUGO waking in his chamber. ORION unseen at first. Morning. Hugo: Vanish, fair and fatal vision! Fleeting shade of fever'd sleep, Chiding one whose indecision Waking substance failed to keep; Picture into life half starting, As in life once seen before, Parting somewhat sadly, parting Slowly at the chamber door. Were my waking senses duller? Have I seen with mental eye Light and shade, and warmth and colour, Plainer than reality? Sunlight that on tangled tresses Every ripple gilds and tips; Balm and bloom, and breath of kisses, Warm on dewy, scarlet lips. Dark eyes veiling half their splendour 'Neath their lashes' darker fringe, Dusky, dreamy, deep and tender, Passing smile and passing tinge; Dimpling fast and flushing faster, Ivory chin and coral cheek, Pearly strings, by alabaster Neck and arms made faint and weak; Drooping, downcast lids enduring Gaze of man unwillingly; Sudden, sidelong gleams alluring, Partly arch and partly shy. 72 Do I bless or curse that beauty? Am I longing, am I loth? Is it passion, is it duty That I strive with, one or both? Round about one fiery centre Wayward thoughts like moths revolve. [He sees Orion.] Ha! Orion, thou didst enter Unperceived. I pray thee solve These two questions: Firstly, tell me, Must I strive for wrong or right? Secondly, what things befell me — Facts, or phantasies — last night? Orion: First, your strife is all a sham, you Know as well as I which wins; Second, waking sins will damn you, Never mind your sleeping sins; Both your questions thus I answer; Listen, ere you seek or shun: I at least am no romancer, What you long for may be won. Turn again and travel Rhineward, Tread once more the flowery path. Hugo: Aye, the flowery path that, sinward Pointing, ends in sin and wrath. Orion: Songs by love-birds lightly caroll'd, Even the just man may allure. Hugo: To his shame; in this wise Harold Sinn'd, his punishment was sure. Orion: Nay, the Dane was worse than you are, Base and pitiless to boot; 73 Doubtless all are bad, yet few are Cruel, false, and dissolute. Hugo: Some sins foreign to our nature Seem; we take no credit when We escape them. Orion: Yet the creature, Sin-created, lives to sin. Hugo: Be it so; come good, come evil, Ride we to the Rhine again! Orion (aside): 'Gainst the logic of the devil Human logic strives in vain. SCENE — A Camp Near the Black Forest. RUDOLPH, OSRIC, DAGOBERT, and followers. ORION disguised as one of the Free-lances. Mid-day. Osric: Now, by axe of Odin, and hammer of Thor, And by all the gods of the Viking's war, I swear we have quitted our homes in vain: We have nothing to look to, glory nor gain. Will our galley return to Norway's shore With heavier gold, or with costlier store? Will our exploits furnish the scald with a song? We have travell'd too far, we have tarried too long. Say, captains all, is there ever a village For miles around that is worth the pillage? Will it pay the costs of my men or yours To harry the homesteads of German boors? Have we cause for pride in our feats of arms When we plunder the peasants or sack the farms? I tell thee, Rudolph of Rothenstein, 74 That were thy soldiers willing as mine, And I sole leader of this array, I would give Prince Otto battle this day. Dost thou call thy followers men of war? Oh, Dagobert! thou whose ancestor On the neck of the Caesar's offspring trod, Who was justly surnamed "The Scourge of God". Yet in flight lies safety. Skirmish and run To forest and fastness, Teuton and Hun, From the banks of the Rhine to the Danube's shore, And back to the banks of the Rhine once more; Retreat from the face of an armed foe, Robbing garden and hen-roost where'er you go. Let the short alliance betwixt us cease, I and my Norsemen will go in peace! I wot it never will suit with us, Such existence, tame and inglorious; I could live no worse, living single-handed, And better with half my men disbanded. Rudolph: Jarl Osric, what would'st thou have me do? 'Gainst Otto's army our men count few; With one chance of victory, fight, say I! But not when defeat is a certainty. If Rudiger joins us with his free-lances, Our chance will be equal to many chances; For Rudiger is both prompt and wary; And his men are gallant though mercenary; But the knave refuses to send a lance Till half the money is paid in advance. Dagobert: May his avarice wither him like a curse! I guess he has heard of our late reverse; But, Rudolph, whether he goes or stays, There is reason in what Jarl Osric says; Of provisions we need a fresh supply, And our butts and flasks are shallow or dry; My men are beginning to grumble sadly, 'Tis no wonder, since they must fare so badly. 75 Rudolph: We have plenty of foragers out, and still We have plenty of hungry mouths to fill; And, moreover, by some means, foul or fair, We must raise money; 'tis little I care, So long as we raise it, whence it comes. Osric: Shall we sit till nightfall biting our thumbs? The shortest plan is ever the best; Has anyone here got aught to suggest? Orion: The cornfields are golden that skirt the Rhine, Fat are the oxen, strong is the wine, In those pleasant pastures, those cellars deep, That o'erflow with the tears that those vineyards weep; Is it silver you stand in need of, or gold? Ingot or coin? There is wealth untold In the ancient convent of Englemehr; That is not so very far from here. The Abbot, esteem'd a holy man, Will hold what he has and grasp what he can; The cream of the soil he loves to skim, Why not levy a contribution on him? Dagobert: The stranger speaks well; not far away That convent lies; and one summer's day Will suffice for a horseman to reach the gate; The garrison soon would capitulate, Since the armed retainers are next to none, And the walls, I wot, may be quickly won. Rudolph: I kept those walls for two months or more, When they feared the riders of Melchior! That was little over three years ago. Their Abbot is thrifty, as well I know; He haggled sorely about the price Of our service. 76 Dagobert: Rudolph, he paid thee twice. Rudolph: Well, what of that? Since then I've tried To borrow from him; now I know he lied When he told me he could not spare the sum I asked. If we to his gates should come, He could spare it though it were doubled; and still, This war with the Church I like it ill. Osric: The creed of our fathers is well-nigh dead, And the creed of the Christian reigns in its stead But the creed of the Christian, too, may die, For your creeds or your churches what care I! If there be plunder at Englemehr, Let us strike our tents and thitherward steer. SCENE — A Farm-house on the Rhine (About a mile from the Convent). HUGO in chamber alone. Enter ERIC. Eric: What, Hugo, still at the Rhine! I thought You were home. You have travell'd by stages short. Hugo (with hesitation): Our homeward march was labour in vain, We had to retrace our steps again; It was here or hereabouts that I lost Some papers of value; at any cost I must find them; and which way lies your course? Eric: I go to recruit Prince Otto's force. I cannot study as you do; I Am wearied with inactivity; So I carry a blade engrim'd with rust (That a hand sloth-slacken'd has, I trust, Not quite forgotten the way to wield), 77 To strike once more on the tented field. Hugo: Fighting is all a mistake, friend Eric, And has been so since the age Homeric, When Greece was shaken and Troy undone, Ten thousand lives for a worthless one. Yet I blame you not; you might well do worse; Better fight and perish than live to curse The day you were born; and such has been The lot of many, and shall, I ween, Be the lot of more. If Thurston chooses He may go with you. The blockhead abuses Me and the life I lead. Enter ORION. Orion: Great news! The Englemehr monks will shake in their shoes; In the soles of their callous feet will shake The barefooted friars. The nuns will quake. Hugo: Wherefore? Orion: The outlaw of Rothenstein Has come with his soldiers to the Rhine, Back'd by those hardy adventurers From the northern forests of pines and firs, And Dagobert's horse. They march as straight As the eagle swoops to the convent gate. Hugo: We must do something to save the place. Orion: They are sure to take it in any case, Unless the sum that they ask is paid. Eric: Some effort on our part must be made. Hugo: 78 'Tis not so much for the monks I care. Eric: Nor I; but the Abbess and nuns are there. Orion: 'Tis not our business; what can we do? They are too many, and we are too few; And yet, I suppose, you will save, if you can, That lady, your ward, or your kinswoman. Hugo: She is no kinswoman of mine; How far is Otto's camp from the Rhine? Orion: Too far for help in such time of need To be brought, though you used your utmost speed. Eric: Nay, that I doubt. Hugo: And how many men Have they? Orion: To your one they could muster ten. Eric: I know Count Rudolph, and terms may be made With him, I fancy; for though his trade Is a rough one now, gainsay it who can, He was once a knight and a gentleman. And Dagobert, the chief of the Huns, Bad as he is, will spare the nuns; Though neither he nor the Count could check Those lawless men, should they storm and sack The convent. Jarl Osric, too, I know; He is rather a formidable foe, And will likely enough be troublesome; But the others, I trust, to terms will come. Hugo: 79 Eric, how many men have you? I can count a score. Eric: I have only two. Hugo: At every hazard we must try to save The nuns. Eric: Count Rudolph shall think we have A force that almost equals his own, If I can confer with him alone. Orion: He is close at hand; by this time he waits The Abbot's reply at the convent gates. Hugo: We had better send him a herald. Eric: Nay, I will go myself. [Eric goes out.] Hugo: Orion, stay! So this is the reed on which I've leaned, These are the hopes thou hast fostered, these The flames thou hast fanned. Oh, lying fiend! Is it thus thou dost keep thy promises? Orion: Strong language, Hugo, and most unjust; You will cry out before you are hurt — You will live to recall your words, I trust. Fear nothing from Osric or Dagobert, These are your friends, if you only knew it, And would take the advice of a friend sincere; Neglect his counsels and you must rue it, For I know by a sign the crisis is near. Accept the terms of these outlaws all, And be thankful that things have fallen out Exactly as you would have had them fall — You may save the one that you care about; 80 Otherwise, how did you hope to gain Access to her — on what pretence? What were the schemes that worried your brain To tempt her there or to lure her thence? You must have bungled, and raised a scandal About your ears, that might well have shamed The rudest Hun, the veriest Vandal, Long or ever the bird was tamed. Hugo: The convent is scarce surrounded yet, We might reach and hold it against their force Till another sun has risen and set; And should I despatch my fleetest horse To Otto —— Orion: For Abbot, or Monk, or Friar, Between ourselves, 'tis little you care If their halls are harried by steel and fire: Their avarice left your heritage bare. Forsake them! Mitres, and cowls, and hoods Will cover vices while earth endures; Through the green and gold of the summer woods Ride out with that pretty bird of yours. If again you fail to improve your chance, Why, then, my friend, I can only say You are duller far than the dullest lance That rides in Dagobert's troop this day. "Faemina semper", frown not thus, The girl was always giddy and wild, Vain, and foolish, and frivolous, Since she fled from her father's halls, a child. I sought to initiate you once In the mystic lore of the old Chaldean; But I found you far too stubborn a dunce, And your tastes are coarser and more plebeian. Yet mark my words, for I read the stars, And trace the future in yonder sky; To the right are wars and rumours of wars, To the left are peace and prosperity. Fear naught. The world shall never detect The cloven hoof, so carefully hid 81 By the scholar so staid and circumspect, So wise for once to do as he's bid. Remember what pangs come year by year For opportunity that has fled; And Thora in ignorance. Hugo: Name not her! I am sorely tempted to strike thee dead! Orion: Nay, I hardly think you will take my life, The angel Michael was once my foe; He had a little the best of our strife, Yet he never could deal so stark a blow. SCENE — A Chamber in the Nuns' Apartments of the Convent. AGATHA and URSULA. Agatha: My sire in my childhood pledged my hand To Hugo — I know not why — They were comrades then, 'neath the Duke's command, In the wars of Lombardy. I thought, ere my summers had turned sixteen, That mine was a grievous case; Save once, for an hour, I had never seen My intended bridegroom's face; And maidens vows of their own will plight. Unknown to my kinsfolk all My love was vowed to a Danish knight, A guest in my father's hall. His foot fell lightest in merry dance, His shaft never missed the deer; He could fly a hawk, he could wield a lance, Our wildest colt he could steer. His deep voice ringing through hall or glen Had never its match in song; And little was known of his past life then, Or of Dorothea's wrong. 82 I loved him — Lady Abbess, I know That my love was foolish now; I was but a child five years ago, And thoughtless as bird on bough. One evening Hugo the Norman came, And, to shorten a weary tale, I fled that night (let me bear the blame) With Harold by down and dale. He had mounted me on a dappled steed, And another of coal-black hue He rode himself; and away at speed We fled through mist and dew. Of miles we had ridden some half a score, We had halted beside a spring, When the breeze to our ears through the still night bore A distant trample and ring; We listen'd one breathing space, and caught The clatter of mounted men, With vigour renewed by their respite short Our horses dash'd through the glen. Another league, and we listen'd in vain; The breeze to our ears came mute; But we heard them again on the spacious plain, Faint tidings of hot pursuit. In the misty light of a moon half hid By the dark or fleecy rack, Our shadows over the moorland slid, Still listening and looking back. So we fled (with a cheering word to say At times as we hurried on), From sounds that at intervals died away, And at intervals came anon. Another league, and my lips grew dumb, And I felt my spirit quailing, For closer those sounds began to come, And the speed of my horse was failing. "The grey is weary and lame to boot," Quoth Harold; "the black is strong, And their steeds are blown with their fierce pursuit, What wonder! our start was long. Now, lady, behind me mount the black, 83 The double load he can bear; We are safe when we reach the forest track, Fresh horses and friends wait there." Then I sat behind him and held his waist, And faster we seemed to go By moss and moor; but for all our haste Came the tramp of the nearing foe. A dyke through the mist before us hover'd, And, quicken'd by voice and heel, The black overleap'd it, stagger'd, recover'd; Still nearer that muffled peal. And louder on sward the hoof-strokes grew, And duller, though not less nigh, On deader sand; and a dark speck drew On my vision suddenly, And a single horseman in fleet career, Like a shadow appear'd to glide To within six lances' lengths of our rear, And there for a space to bide. Quoth Harold, "Speak, has the moon reveal'd His face?" I replied, "Not so! Yet 'tis none of my kinsfolk." Then he wheel'd In the saddle and scanned the foe, And mutter'd, still gazing in our wake, "'Tis he; now I will not fight The brother again, for the sister's sake, While I can escape by flight." "Who, Harold?" I asked; but he never spoke. By the cry of the bittern harsh, And the bull-frog's dull, discordant croak, I guess'd that we near'd the marsh; And the moonbeam flash'd on watery sedge As it broke from a strip of cloud, Ragged and jagged about the edge, And shaped like a dead man's shroud. And flagg'd and falter'd our gallant steed, 'Neath the weight of his double burden, As we splash'd through water and crash'd through reed; Then the soil began to harden, And again we gain'd, or we seem'd to gain, With our foe in the deep morass; But those fleet hoofs thunder'd, and gain'd again, 84 When they trampled the firmer grass, And I cried, and Harold again look'd back, And bade me fasten mine eyes on The forest, that loom'd like a patch of black Standing out from the faint horizon. "Courage, sweetheart! we are saved," he said; "With the moorland our danger ends, And close to the borders of yonder glade They tarry, our trusty friends." Where the mossy uplands rise and dip On the edge of the leafy dell, With a lurch, like the lurch of a sinking ship, The black horse toppled and fell. Unharm'd we lit on the velvet sward, And even as I lit I lay, But Harold uprose, unsheath'd his sword, And toss'd the scabbard away. And spake through his teeth, "Good brother-in-law, Forbearance, at last, is spent; The strife that thy soul hath lusted for Thou shalt have to thy soul's content!" While he spoke, our pursuer past us swept, Ere he rein'd his war-horse proud, To his haunches flung, then to the earth he leapt, And my lover's voice rang loud: "Thrice welcome! Hugo of Normandy, Thou hast come at our time of need, This lady will thank thee, and so will I, For the loan of thy sorrel steed!" And never a word Lord Hugo said, They clos'd 'twixt the wood and the wold, And the white steel flickered over my head In the moonlight calm and cold; 'Mid the feathery grasses crouching low, With face bow'd down to the dust, I heard the clash of each warded blow, The click of each parried thrust, And the shuffling feet that bruis'd the lawn, As they traversed here and there, And the breath through the clench'd teeth heavily drawn When breath there was none to spare; 85 Sharp ringing sword play, dull, trampling heel, Short pause, spent force to regain, Quick muffled footfall, harsh grating steel, Sharp ringing rally again; They seem'd long hours, those moments fleet, As I counted them one by one, Till a dead weight toppled across my feet, And I knew that the strife was done. When I looked up, after a little space, As though from a fearful dream, The moon was flinging on Harold's face A white and a weird-like gleam; And I felt mine ankles moist and warm With the blood that trickled slow From a spot on the doublet beneath his arm, From a ghastly gash on his brow; I heard the tread of the sorrel's hoof As he bore his lord away; They passed me slowly, keeping aloof, Like spectres, misty and grey. I thought Lord Hugo had left me there To die, but it was not so; Yet then for death I had little care, My soul seem'd numb'd by the blow; A faintness follow'd, a sickly swoon, A long and a dreamless sleep, And I woke to the light of a sultry noon In my father's castled keep. And thus, Lady Abbess, it came to pass That my father vow'd his vow; Must his daughter espouse the Church? Alas! Is she better or wiser now? For some are feeble and others strong, And feeble am I and frail. Mother! 'tis not that I love the wrong, 'Tis not that I loathe the veil, But with heart still ready to go astray, If assail'd by a fresh temptation, I could sin again as I sinned that day, For a girl's infatuation. 86 See! Harold, the Dane, thou say'st is dead, Yet I weep NOT BITTERLY; As I fled with the Dane, so I might have fled With Hugo of Normandy. Ursula: My child, I advise no hasty vows, Yet I pray that in life's brief span Thou may'st learn that our Church is a fairer spouse Than fickle and erring man; Though fenced for a time by the Church's pale, When that time expires thou'rt free; And we cannot force thee to take the veil, Nay, we scarce can counsel thee. Enter the ABBOT hastily. Basil (the Abbot): I am sorely stricken with shame and grief, It has come by the self-same sign, A summons brief from the outlaw'd chief, Count Rudolph of Rothenstein. Lady Abbess, ere worse things come to pass, I would speak with thee alone; Alack and alas! for by the rood and mass I fear we are all undone. SCENE — A Farm-house Near the Convent. A Chamber furnished with writing materials. HUGO, ERIC, and THURSTON on one side; on the other OSRIC, RUDOLPH, and DAGOBERT. Osric: We have granted too much, ye ask for more; I am not skill'd in your clerkly lore, I scorn your logic; I had rather die Than live like Hugo of Normandy: I am a Norseman, frank and plain; Ye must read the parchment over again. 87 Eric: Jarl Osric, twice we have read this scroll. Osric: Thou hast read a part. Eric: I have read the whole. Osric: Aye, since I attached my signature! Eric: Before and since! Rudolph: Nay, of this be sure, Thou hast signed; in fairness now let it rest. Osric: I had rather have sign'd upon Hugo's crest; He has argued the question mouth to mouth With the wordy lore of the subtle south; Let him or any one of his band Come and argue the question hand to hand. With the aid of my battle-axe I will show That a score of words are not worth one blow. Thurston: To the devil with thee and thy battle-axe; I would send the pair of ye back in your tracks, With an answer that even to thy boorish brain Would scarce need repetition again. Osric: Thou Saxon slave to a milksop knight, I will give thy body to raven and kite. Thurston: Thou liest; I am a freeborn man, And thy huge carcase — in cubit and span Like the giant's of Gath — 'neath Saxon steel, Shall furnish the kites with a fatter meal. 88 Osric: Now, by Odin! Rudolph: Jarl Osric, curb thy wrath; Our names are sign'd, our words have gone forth. Hugo: I blame thee, Thurston. Thurston: And I, too, blame Myself, since I follow a knight so tame! [Thurston goes out.] Osric: The Saxon hound, he said I lied! Rudolph: I pray thee, good Viking, be pacified. Osric: Why do we grant the terms they ask? To crush them all were an easy task. Dagobert: That know'st thou not; if it come to war, They are stronger, perhaps, than we bargain for. Eric: Jarl Osric, thou may'st recall thy words — Should we meet again. Osric: Should we meet with swords, Thou, too, may'st recall them to thy sorrow. Hugo: Eric! we dally. Sir Count, good-morrow. SCENE — The Guest Chamber of the Convent. HUGO, ERIC, and ORION. 89 Eric: Hugo, their siege we might have tried; This place would be easier fortified Than I thought at first; it is now too late, They have cut off our access to the gate. Hugo: I have weigh'd the chances and counted the cost, And I know by the stars that all is lost If we take up this quarrel. Eric: So let it be! I yield to one who is wiser than me. (Aside.) Nevertheless, I have seen the day When the stars would scarcely have bade us stay. Enter the ABBOT, CYRIL, and other Monks. Hugo: Lord Abbot, we greet thee. Good fathers all, We bring you greeting. Orion (aside): And comfort small. Abbot: God's benediction on you, my sons. Hugo: May He save you, too, from Norsemen and Huns! Since the gates are beleaguer'd and walls begirt By the forces of Osric and Dagobert; 'Tis a heavy price that the knaves demand. Abbot: Were we to mortgage the Church's land We never could raise what they would extort. Orion (aside): The price is too long and the notice too short. Eric: 90 And you know the stern alternative. Abbot: If we die we die, if we live we live; God's will be done; and our trust is sure In Him, though His chast'nings we endure. Two messengers rode from here last night, To Otto they carry news of our plight; On my swiftest horses I saw them go. Orion (aside): Then his swiftest horses are wondrous slow. Eric: One of these is captive and badly hurt; By the reckless riders of Dagobert He was overtaken and well-nigh slain, Not a league from here on the open plain. Abbot: But the other escap'd. Eric: It may be so; We had no word of him, but we know That unless you can keep these walls for a day At least, the Prince is too far away To afford relief. Abbot: Then a hopeless case Is ours, and with death we are face to face. Eric: You have arm'd retainers. Cyril (a Monk): Aye, some half score; And some few of the brethren, less or more, Have in youth the brunt of the battle bided, Yet our armoury is but ill provided. Hugo: We have terms of truce from the robbers in chief, Though the terms are partial, the truce but brief; 91 To Abbess, to nuns, and novices all, And to every woman within your wall, We can offer escort, and they shall ride From hence in safety whate'er betide. Abbot: What escort, Hugo, canst thou afford? Hugo: Some score of riders who call me lord Bide at the farm not a mile from here, Till we rejoin them they will not stir; My page and armourer wait below, And all our movements are watch'd by the foe. Strict stipulation was made, of course, That, except ourselves, neither man nor horse Should enter your gates — they were keen to shun The chance of increasing your garrison. Eric: I hold safe conduct here in my hand, Signed by the chiefs of that lawless band; See Rudolph's name, no disgrace to a clerk, And Dagobert's scrawl, and Osric's mark; Jarl signed sorely against his will, With a scratch like the print of a raven's bill; But the foe have muster'd in sight of the gate. For another hour they will scarcely wait; Bid Abbess and dame prepare with haste. Hugo: Lord Abbot, I tell thee candidly There is no great love between thou and I, As well thou know'st; but, nevertheless, I would we were more, or thy foes were less. Abbot: I will summon the Lady Abbess straight. [The Abbot and Monks go out.] Eric: 'Tis hard to leave these men to their fate, 92 Norsemen and Hun will never relent; Their day of grace upon earth is spent. [Hugo goes out, followed by Orion.] SCENE — The Corridor Outside the Guest Chamber. HUGO pacing up and down. ORION leaning against the wall. Hugo: My day of grace with theirs is past. I might have saved them; 'tis too late — Too late for both. The die is cast, And I resign me to my fate. God's vengeance I await. Orion: The boundary 'twixt right and wrong Is not so easy to discern; And man is weak, and fate is strong, And destiny man's hopes will spurn, Man's schemes will overturn. Hugo: Thou liest, thou fiend! Not unawares The sinner swallows Satan's bait, Nor pits conceal'd nor hidden snares Seeks blindly; wherefore dost thou prate Of destiny and fate? Orion: Who first named fate? But never mind, Let that pass by — to Adam's fall And Adam's curse look back, and find Iniquity the lot of all, And sin original. Hugo: But I have sinn'd, repented, sinn'd, Till seven times that sin may be By seventy multiplied; the wind 93 Is constant when compared with me, And stable is the sea! My hopes are sacrificed, for what? For days of folly, less or more, For years to see those dead hopes rot, Like dead weeds scatter'd on the shore, Beyond the surfs that roar! Orion: The wiles of Eve are swift to smite; Aye, swift to smite and not to spare — Red lips and round limbs sweet and white, Dark eyes and sunny, silken hair, Thy betters may ensnare. Hugo: Not so; the strife 'twixt hell and heaven I felt last night, and well I knew The crisis; but my aid was given To hell. Thou'st known the crisis too, For once thou'st spoken true. Having foretold it, there remains For grace no time, for hope no room; Even now I seem to feel the pains Of hell, that wait beyond the gloom Of my dishonour'd tomb. Thou who hast lived and died to save, Us sinners, Christ of Galilee! Thy great love pardon'd and forgave The dying thief upon the tree, Thou canst not pardon me! Dear Lord! hear Thou my latest prayer, For prayer must die since hope is dead; Thy Father's vengeance let me bear, Nor let my guilt be visited Upon a guiltless head! Ah! God is just! Full sure I am 94 He never did predestinate Our souls to hell. Ourselves we damn — [To Orion, with sudden passion] Serpent! I know thee now, too late; Curse thee! Work out thy hate! Orion: I hate thee not; thy grievous plight Would move my pity, but I bear A curse to which thy curse seems light! Thy wrong is better than my right, My day is darker than thy night; Beside the whitest hope I share How white is thy despair! SCENE — The Chapel of the Convent. URSULA, AGATHA, Nuns and Novices. (Hymn of the Nuns): Jehovah! we bless Thee, All works of Thine hand Extol Thee, confess Thee; By sea and by land, By mountain and river, By forest and glen, They praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! The heathen are raging Against Thee, O Lord! The ungodly are waging Rash war against God! Arise, and deliver Us, sheep of Thy pen, Who praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! Thou Shepherd of Zion! 95 Thy firstlings didst tear From jaws of the lion, From teeth of the bear; Thy strength to deliver Is strong now as then. We praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! Thine arm hath delivered Thy servants of old, Hath scatter'd and shiver'd The spears of the bold, Hath emptied the quiver Of bloodthirsty men. We praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! Nathless shall Thy right hand Those counsels fulfil Most wise in Thy sight, and We bow to Thy will; Thy children quail never For dungeon or den, They praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! Though fierce tribulation Endure for a space, Yet God! our salvation! We gain by Thy grace, At end of life's fever, Bliss passing man's ken; There to praise Thee for ever! And ever! Amen! SCENE — The Guest Room of the Convent. HUGO, ERIC, and ORION. Enter URSULA, AGATHA, and Nuns. Ursula: 96 Hugo, we reject thine offers, Not that we can buy Safety from the Church's coffers, Neither can we fly. Far too great the price they seek is, Let their lawless throng Come, we wait their coming; weak is Man, but God is strong. Eric: Think again on our proposals: It will be too late When the robbers hold carousals On this side the gate. Ursula: For myself I speak and others Weak and frail as I; We will not desert our brothers In adversity. Hugo (to the Nuns): Does the Abbess thus advance her Will before ye all? A Nun: We will stay. Hugo: Is this thine answer, Agatha? The wall Is a poor protection truly, And the gates are weak, And the Norsemen most unruly. Come, then. A Nun (to Agatha): Sister, speak! Orion (aside to Hugo): Press her! She her fears dissembling, Stands irresolute; She will yield — her limbs are trembling, Though her lips are mute. 97 [A trumpet is heard without.] Eric: Hark! their savage war-horn blowing Chafes at our delay. Hugo: Agatha, we must be going. Come, girl! Agatha (clinging to Ursula): Must I stay? Ursula: Nay, my child, thou shalt not make me Judge; I cannot give Orders to a novice. Agatha: Take me, Hugo! Let me live! Eric (to Nuns): Foolish women! will ye tarry, Spite of all we say? Hugo: Must we use our strength and carry You by force away? Ursula: Bad enough thou art, Sir Norman, Yet thou wilt not do This thing. Shame! — on men make war, man, Not on women few. Eric: Heed her not — her life she barters, Of her free accord, For her faith; and, doubtless, martyrs Have their own reward. Ursula: In the Church's cause thy father 98 Never grudged his blade — Hugo, did he rue it? Orion: Rather! He was poorly paid. Hugo: Abbess, this is not my doing; I have said my say; How can I avert the ruin, Even for a day, Since they count two hundred fairly, While we count a score; And thine own retainers barely Count a dozen more? Agatha (kneeling to Ursula): Ah! forgive me, Lady Abbess, Bless me ere I go; She who under sod and slab is Lying, cold and low, Scarce would turn away in anger From a child so frail; Not dear life, but deadly danger, Makes her daughter quail. Hugo: Eric, will those faces tearful To God's judgment seat Haunt us? Eric: Death is not so fearful. Hugo: No, but life is sweet — Sweet for once, to me, though sinful. Orion (to Hugo): Earth is scant of bliss; Wisest he who takes his skinful When the chance is his. (To Ursula): Lady Abbess! stay and welcome 99 Osric's savage crew; Yet when pains of death and hell come, Thou thy choice may'st rue. Ursula (to Orion): What dost thou 'neath roof-trees sacred? Man or fiend, depart! Orion: Dame, thy tongue is sharp and acrid, Yet I bear the smart. Ursula (advancing and raising up a crucifix): I conjure thee by this symbol Leave us! [Orion goes out hastily.] Hugo: Ha! the knave, He has made an exit nimble; Abbess! thou art brave. Yet once gone, we're past recalling, Let no blame be mine. See, thy sisters' tears are falling Fast, and so are thine. Ursula: Fare you well! The teardrop splashes Vainly on the ice. Ye will sorrow o'er our ashes And your cowardice. Eric: Sorry am I, yet my sorrow Cannot alter fate; Should Prince Otto come to-morrow, He will come too late. Hugo: Nay, old comrade, she hath spoken Words we must not hear; Shall we pause for sign or token — Taunted twice with fear? 100 Yonder, hilt to hilt adjusted, Stand the swords in which we trusted Years ago. Their blades have rusted, So, perchance, have we. Ursula! thy words may shame us, Yet we once were counted famous, Morituri, salutamus, Aut victuri, te! [They go out.] SCENE — The Outskirts of Rudolph's Camp. RUDOLPH, OSRIC, and DAGOBERT. HUGO. Rudolph: Lord Hugo! thy speech is madness; Thou hast tax'd our patience too far; We offer'd thee peace — with gladness, We gladly accept thy war. Dagobert: And the clemency we extended To thee and thine we recall; And the treaty 'twixt us is ended — We are ready to storm the wall. Osric: Now tear yon parchment to tatters; Thou shalt make no further use Of our safeguard; the wind that scatters The scroll shall scatter the truce. Hugo: Jarl Osric, to save the spilling Of blood, and the waste of life, I am willing, if thou art willing, With thee to decide this strife; Let thy comrades draw their force back; I defy thee to single fight, I will meet thee on foot or horseback, And God shall defend the right. 101 Rudolph: No single combat shall settle This strife; thou art overbold — Thou hast put us all on our mettle, Now the game in our hands we hold. Dagobert: Our lances round thee have hover'd, Have seen where thy fellows bide; Thy weakness we have discover'd, Thy nakedness we have spied. Osric: And hearken, knight, to my story — When sack'd are the convent shrines, When the convent thresholds are gory, And quaff'd are the convent wines: When our beasts with pillage are laden, And the clouds of our black smoke rise From yon tower, one fair-haired maiden Is singled as Osric's prize. I will fit her with chain and collar Of red gold, studded with pearls; With bracelet of gold, Sir Scholar, The queen of my captive girls. Hugo (savagely): May the Most High God of battles The Lord and Ruler of fights, Who breaketh the shield that rattles, Who snappeth the sword that smites, In whose hands are footmen and horsemen, At whose breath they conquer or flee, Never show me His mercy, Norseman! If I show mercy to thee. Osric: What, ho! art thou drunk, Sir Norman? Has the wine made thy pale cheek red? Now, I swear by Odin and Thor, man, Already I count thee dead. 102 Rudolph: I crave thy pardon for baulking The flood of thine eloquence, But thou canst not scare us with talking, I therefore pray thee go hence. Osric: Though I may not take up thy gauntlet, Should we meet where the steel strikes fire, 'Twixt thy casque and thy charger's frontlet The choice will perplex thy squire. Hugo: When the Norman rowels are goading, When glitters the Norman glaive, Thou shalt call upon Thor and Odin: They shall not hear thee nor save. "Should we meet!" Aye, the chance may fall so, In the furious battle drive, So may God deal with me — more, also! If we separate, both alive! SCENE — The Court-yard of the Old Farm. EUSTACE and other followers of HUGO and ERIC lounging about. Enter THURSTON hastily, with swords under his arm. Thurston: Now saddle your horses and girth them tight, And see that your weapons are sharp and bright. Come, lads, get ready as fast as you can. Eustace: Why, what's this bustle about, old man? Thurston: Well, it seems Lord Hugo has changed his mind, As the weathercock veers with the shifting wind; He has gone in person to Osric's camp, 103 To tell him to pack up his tents and tramp! But I guess he won't. Eustace: Then I hope he will, They are plenty to eat us, as well as to kill. Ralph: And I hope he won't — I begin to feel A longing to moisten my thirsty steel. [They begin to saddle and make preparations for a skirmish.] Thurston: I've a couple of blades to look to here. In their scabbards I scarcely could make them stir At first, but I'll sharpen them both ere long. A Man-at-arms: Hurrah for a skirmish! Who'll give us a song? Thurston (sings, cleaning and sharpening): Hurrah! for the sword! I hold one here, And I scour at the rust and say, 'Tis the umpire this, and the arbiter, That settles in the fairest way; For it stays false tongues and it cools hot blood, And it lowers the proud one's crest; And the law of the land is sometimes good, But the law of the sword is best. In all disputes 'tis the shortest plan, The surest and best appeal; — What else can decide between man and man? (Chorus of all): Hurrah! for the bright blue steel! Thurston (sings): Hurrah! for the sword of Hugo, our lord! 'Tis a trusty friend and a true; It has held its own on a grassy sward, When its blade shone bright and blue, Though it never has stricken in anger hard, 104 And has scarcely been cleansed from rust, Since the day when it broke through Harold's guard With our favourite cut and thrust; Yet Osric's crown will look somewhat red, And his brain will be apt to reel, Should the trenchant blade come down on his head — (Chorus of all): Hurrah! for the bright blue steel! Thurston (sings): Hurrah! for the sword of our ally bold, It has done good service to him; It has held its own on an open wold, When its edge was in keener trim. It may baffle the plots of the wisest skull, It may slacken the strongest limb, Make the brains full of forethought void and null, And the eyes full of far-sight dim; And the hasty hands are content to wait, And the knees are compelled to kneel, Where it falls with the weight of a downstroke straight — (Chorus of all): Hurrah! for the bright blue steel! Thurston (sings): Hurrah! for the sword — I've one of my own; And I think I may safely say, Give my enemy his, let us stand alone, And our quarrel shall end one way; One way or the other — it matters not much, So the question be fairly tried. Oh! peacemaker good, bringing peace with a touch, Thy clients will be satisfied. As a judge, thou dost judge — as a witness, attest, And thou settest thy hand and seal, And the winner is blest, and the loser at rest — (Chorus of all): Hurrah! for the bright blue steel! [Hugo and Eric enter during the last verse 105 of the song.] Hugo: Boot and saddle, old friend, Their defiance they send; Time is short — make an end Of thy song. Let the sword in this fight Strike as hard for the right As it once struck for might Leagued with wrong. Ha! Rollo, thou champest Thy bridle and stampest, For the rush of the tempest Dost long? Ho! the kites will grow fatter On the corpses we scatter, In the paths where we shatter Their throng. Where Osric, the craven, Hath reared the black raven 'Gainst monks that are shaven And cowl'd: Where the Teuton and Hun sit, In the track of our onset, Will the wolves, ere the sunset, Have howl'd. Retribution is good, They have revell'd in blood, Like the wolves of the wood They have prowl'd. Birds of prey they have been, And of carrion unclean, And their own nests (I ween) They have foul'd. Eric: Two messengers since Yestermorn have gone hence, 106 And ere long will the Prince Bring relief. Shall we pause? — they are ten To our one, but their men Are ill-arm'd, and scarce ken Their own chief; And for this we give thanks: Their disorderly ranks, If assail'd in the flanks, Will as lief Run as fight — loons and lords. Hugo: Mount your steeds! draw your swords! Take your places! My words Shall be brief: Ride round by the valley, Through pass and gorge sally — The linden trees rally Beneath. Then, Eric and Thurston, Their ranks while we burst on, Try which will be first on The heath. (Aside) Look again, mother mine, Through the happy starshine, For my sins dost thou pine? With my breath, See! thy pangs are all done, For the life of thy son: Thou shalt never feel one For his death. [They all go out but Hugo, who lingers to tighten his girths. Orion appears suddenly in the gateway.] Orion: Stay, friend! I keep guard on Thy soul's gates; hold hard on Thy horse. Hope of pardon 107 Hath fled! Bethink once, I crave thee, Can recklessness save thee? Hell sooner will have thee Instead. Hugo: Back! My soul, tempest-toss'd, Hath her Rubicon cross'd, She shall fly — saved or lost! Void of dread! Sharper pang than the steel, Thou, oh, serpent! shalt feel, Should I set the bruised heel On thy head. [He rides out.] SCENE — A Room in the Convent Tower Overlooking the Gate. URSULA at the window. AGATHA and Nuns crouching or kneeling in a corner. Ursula: See, Ellinor! Agatha! Anna! While yet for the ladders they wait, Jarl Osric hath rear'd the black banner Within a few yards of the gate; It faces our window, the raven, The badge of the cruel sea-kings, That has carried to harbour and haven Destruction and death on its wings. Beneath us they throng, the fierce Norsemen, The pikemen of Rudolph behind Are mustered, and Dagobert's horsemen With faces to rearward inclined; Come last, on their coursers broad-chested, Rough-coated, short-pastern'd and strong, Their casques with white plumes thickly crested, Their lances barb-headed and long: They come through the shades of the linden, Fleet riders and war-horses hot: 108 The Normans, our friends — we have sinn'd in Our selfishness, sisters, I wot — They come to add slaughter to slaughter, Their handful can ne'er stem the tide Of our foes, and our fate were but shorter Without them. How fiercely they ride! And "Hugo of Normandy!" "Hugo!" "A rescue! a rescue!" rings loud, And right on the many the few go! A sway and a swerve of the crowd! A springing and sparkling of sword-blades! A crashing and 'countering of steeds! And the white feathers fly 'neath their broad blades Like foam-flakes! the spear-shafts like reeds! A Nun (to Agatha): Pray, sister! Agatha: Alas! I have striven To pray, but the lips move in vain When the heart with such terror is riven. Look again, Lady Abbess! Look again! Ursula: As leaves fall by wintry gusts scatter'd, As fall by the sickle ripe ears, As the pines by the whirlwind fall shatter'd, As shatter'd by bolt fall the firs — To the right hand they fall, to the left hand They yield! They go down! they give back! And their ranks are divided and cleft, and Dispers'd and destroy'd in the track! Where, stirrup to stirrup, and bridle To bridle, down-trampling the slain! Our friends, wielding swords never idle, Hew bloody and desperate lane Through pikemen, so crowded together They scarce for their pikes can find room, Led by Hugo's gilt crest, the tall feather Of Thurston, and Eric's black plume! A Nun (to Agatha): 109 Pray, sister! Agatha: First pray thou that heaven Will lift this dull weight from my brain, That crushes like crime unforgiven. Look again, Lady Abbess! Look again! Ursula: Close under the gates men are fighting On foot where the raven is rear'd! 'Neath that sword-stroke, through helm and skull smiting, Jarl Osric falls, cloven to the beard! And Hugo, the hilt firmly grasping, His heel on the throat of his foe, Wrenches back. I can hear the dull rasping, The steel through the bone grating low! And the raven rocks! Thurston has landed Two strokes, well directed and hard, On the standard pole, wielding, two-handed, A blade crimson'd up to the guard. Like the mast cut in two by the lightning, The black banner topples and falls! Bewildering! back-scattering! affright'ning! It clears a wide space next the walls. A Nun (to Agatha): Pray, sister! Agatha: Does the sinner unshriven, With naught beyond this life to gain, Pray for mercy on earth or in heaven? Look again, Lady Abbess! Look again! Ursula: The gates are flung open, and straightway, By Ambrose and Cyril led on, Our own men rush out through the gateway; One charge, and the entrance is won! No! our foes block the gate and endeavour To force their way in! Oath and yell, Shout and war-cry wax wilder than ever! Those children of Odin fight well; 110 And my ears are confused by the crashing, The jarring, the discord, the din; And mine eyes are perplex'd by the flashing Of fierce lights that ceaselessly spin; So when thunder to thunder is calling, Quick flash follows flash in the shade, So leaping and flashing and falling, Blade flashes and follows on blade! While the sward, newly plough'd, freshly painted, Grows purple with blood of the slain, And slippery! Has Agatha fainted? Agatha: Not so, Lady Abbess! Look again! Ursula: No more from the window; in the old years I have look'd upon strife. Now I go To the court-yard to rally our soldiers As I may — face to face with the foe. [She goes out.] SCENE — A Room in the Convent. THURSTON seated near a small fire. Enter EUSTACE. Eustace: We have come through this skirmish with hardly a scratch. Thurston: And without us, I fancy, they have a full batch Of sick men to look to. Those robbers accurs'd Will soon put our soundest on terms with our worst. Nathless I'd have bartered, with never a frown, Ten years for those seconds when Osric went down. Where's Ethelwolf? Eustace: Dying. 111 Thurston: And Reginald? Eustace: Dead. And Ralph is disabled, and Rudolph is sped. He may last till midnight — not longer. Nor Tyrrel, Nor Brian will ever see sunrise. Thurston: That Cyril, The monk, is a very respectable fighter. Eustace: Not bad for a monk. Yet our loss had been lighter Had he and his fellows thrown open the gate A little more quickly. And now, spite of fate, With thirty picked soldiers their siege we might weather, But the Abbess is worth all the rest put together. [Enter Ursula.] Thurston: Here she comes. Ursula: Can I speak with your lord? Eustace: 'Tis too late, He was dead when we carried him in at the gate. Thurston: Nay, he spoke after that, for I heard him myself; But he won't speak again, he must lie on his shelf. Ursula: Alas! is he dead, then? Thurston: As dead as St. Paul. And what then? to-morrow we, too, one and all, Die, to fatten these ravenous carrion birds. I knelt down by Hugo and heard his last words: "How heavy the night hangs — how wild the waves dash; Say a mass for my soul — and give Rollo a mash." Ursula: 112 Nay, Thurston, thou jestest. Thurston: Ask Eric. I swear We listened and caught every syllable clear. Eustace: Why, his horse was slain, too. Thurston: 'Neath the linden trees grey, Ere the onset, young Henry rode Rollo away; He will hasten the Prince, and they may reach your gate To-morrow — though to-morrow for us is too late. Hugo rode the boy's mare, and she's dead — if you like — Disembowel'd by the thrust of a freebooter's pike. Eustace: Neither Henry nor Rollo we ever shall see. Ursula: But we may hold the walls till to-morrow. Thurston: Not we. In an hour or less, having rallied their force, They'll storm your old building — and take it, of course, Since of us, who alone in war's science are skill'd, One-third are disabled, and two-thirds are kill'd. Ursula: Art thou hurt? Thurston: At present I feel well enough, But your water is brackish, unwholesome and rough; Bring a flask of your wine, dame, for Eustace and I, Let us gaily give battle and merrily die. [Enter Eric, with arm in sling.] Eric: Thou art safe, Lady Abbess! The convent is safe! To be robbed of their prey how the ravens will chafe! The vanguard of Otto is looming in sight! At the sheen of their spears, see! thy foemen take flight, Their foremost are scarce half a mile from the wall. 113 Thurston: Bring the wine, lest those Germans should swallow it all. SCENE — The Chapel of the Convent. Dirge of the Monks: Earth to earth, and dust to dust, Ashes unto ashes go. Judge not. He who judgeth just, Judgeth merciful also. Earthly penitence hath fled, Earthly sin hath ceased to be; Pile the sods on heart and head, Miserere Domine! Hominum et angelorum, Domine! precamur te Ut immemor sis malorum — Miserere Domine! (Miserere!) Will the fruits of life brought forth, Pride and greed, and wrath and lust, Profit in the day of wrath, When the dust returns to dust? Evil flower and thorny fruit Load the wild and worthless tree. Lo! the axe is at the root, Miserere Domine! Spes, fidesque, caritasque, Frustra fatigant per se, Frustra virtus, forsque, fasque, Miserere Domine! (Miserere!) Fair without and foul within, When the honey'd husks are reft From the bitter sweets of sin, 114 Bitterness alone is left; Yet the wayward soul hath striven Mostly hell's ally to be, In the strife 'twixt hell and heaven, Miserere Domine! Heu! heu! herba latet anguis — Caro herba — carni vae — Solum purgat, Christi sanguis, Miserere Domine! (Miserere!) Pray that in the doubtful fight Man may win through sore distress, By His goodness infinite, And His mercy fathomless. Pray for one more of the weary, Head bow'd down and bended knee, Swell the requiem, Miserere! Miserere Domine! Bonum, malum, qui fecisti Mali imploramus te, Salve fratrem, causa Christi, Miserere Domine! (Miserere!) [End of Ashtaroth.] ~ Adam Lindsay Gordon,

719:A Lyrical Drama, In Four Acts. Audisne haec amphiarae, sub terram abdite? ACT I Scene.A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea andIone are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus. Monarch of Gods and Dmons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair,these are mine empire: More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God! Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. Heaven's wingd hound, polluting from thy lips His beak in poison not his own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by, The ghastly people of the realm of dream, Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind: While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. And yet to me welcome is day and night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet, which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief, Not exultation, for I hate no more, As then ere misery made me wise. The curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, Whose many-voicd Echoes, through the mist Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost, Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisd wings Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss, As thunder, louder than your own, made rock The orbd world! If then my words had power, Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within; although no memory be Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak. First Voice (from the Mountains). Thrice three hundred thousand years O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood: Oft, as men convulsed with fears, We trembled in our multitude. Second Voice (from the Springs). Thunderbolts had parched our water, We had been stained with bitter blood, And had run mute, 'mid shrieks of slaughter, Thro' a city and a solitude. Third Voice (from the Air). I had clothed, since Earth uprose, Its wastes in colours not their own, And oft had my serene repose Been cloven by many a rending groan. Fourth Voice (from the Whirlwinds). We had soared beneath these mountains Unresting ages; nor had thunder, Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains, Nor any power above or under Ever made us mute with wonder. First Voice. But never bowed our snowy crest As at the voice of thine unrest. Second Voice. Never such a sound before To the Indian waves we bore. A pilot asleep on the howling sea Leaped up from the deck in agony, And heard, and cried, 'Ah, woe is me!' And died as mad as the wild waves be. Third Voice. By such dread words from Earth to Heaven My still realm was never riven: When its wound was closed, there stood Darkness o'er the day like blood. Fourth Voice. And we shrank back: for dreams of ruin To frozen caves our flight pursuing Made us keep silencethusand thus Though silence is as hell to us. The Earth. The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills Cried, 'Misery!' then; the hollow Heaven replied, 'Misery!' And the Ocean's purple waves, Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds, And the pale nations heard it, 'Misery!' Prometheus. I heard a sound of voices: not the voice Which I gave forth. Mother, thy sons and thou Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove, Both they and thou had vanished, like thin mist Unrolled on the morning wind. Know ye not me, The Titan? He who made his agony The barrier to your else all-conquering foe? Oh, rock-embosomed lawns, and snow-fed streams, Now seen athwart frore vapours, deep below, Through whose o'ershadowing woods I wandered once With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes; Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now To commune with me? me alone, who checked, As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer, The falsehood and the force of him who reigns Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses: Why answer ye not, still? Brethren! The Earth.                    They dare not.                    Prometheus. Who dares? for I would hear that curse again. Ha, what an awful whisper rises up! 'Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike. Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice I only know that thou art moving near And love. How cursed I him? The Earth.                How canst thou hear Who knowest not the language of the dead? Prometheus. Thou art a living spirit; speak as they. The Earth. I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven's fell King Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain More torturing than the one whereon I roll. Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods Hear not this voice, yet thou art more than God, Being wise and kind: earnestly hearken now. Prometheus. Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim, Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick. I feel Faint, like one mingled in entwining love; Yet 'tis not pleasure. The Earth.             No, thou canst not hear: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known Only to those who die. Prometheus.             And what art thou, O, melancholy Voice? The Earth.            I am the Earth, Thy mother; she within whose stony veins, To the last fibre of the loftiest tree Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust, And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here. Then, see those million worlds which burn and roll Around us: their inhabitants beheld My spherd light wane in wide Heaven; the sea Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown; Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains; Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled: When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm, And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree; And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother's hate Breathed on her child's destroyer; ay, I heard Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, Yet my innumerable seas and streams, Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, And the inarticulate people of the dead, Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate In secret joy and hope those dreadful words, But dare not speak them. Prometheus.              Venerable mother! All else who live and suffer take from thee Some comfort; flowers, and fruits, and happy sounds, And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine. But mine own words, I pray, deny me not. The Earth. They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more; Dreams and the light imaginings of men, And all that faith creates or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade, 'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the gods Are there, and all the powers of nameless worlds, Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts; And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom; And he, the supreme Tyrant, on his throne Of burning gold. Son, one of these shall utter The curse which all remember. Call at will Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter, Hades or Typhon, or what mightier Gods From all-prolific Evil, since thy ruin Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons. Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades, As rainy wind through the abandoned gate Of a fallen palace. Prometheus.           Mother, let not aught Of that which may be evil, pass again My lips, or those of aught resembling me. Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear! Ione. My wings are folded o'er mine ears:   My wings are crossd o'er mine eyes: Yet through their silver shade appears,   And through their lulling plumes arise, A Shape, a throng of sounds;   May it be no ill to thee O thou of many wounds! Near whom, for our sweet sister's sake, Ever thus we watch and wake. Panthea. The sound is of whirlwind underground,   Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven; The shape is awful like the sound,   Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven. A sceptre of pale gold   To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud His veind hand doth hold. Cruel he looks, but calm and strong, Like one who does, not suffers wrong. Phantasm of Jupiter. Why have the secret powers of this strange world Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk In darkness? And, proud sufferer, who art thou? Prometheus. Tremendous Image, as thou art must be He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe, The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear, Although no thought inform thine empty voice. The Earth. Listen! And though your echoes must be mute, Gray mountains, and old woods, and haunted springs, Prophetic caves, and isle-surrounding streams, Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak. Phantasm. A spirit seizes me and speaks within: It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud. Panthea. See, how he lifts his mighty looks, the Heaven Darkens above. Ione.        He speaks! O shelter me!        Prometheus. I see the curse on gestures proud and cold, And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate, And such despair as mocks itself with smiles, Written as on a scroll: yet speak: Oh, speak! Phantasm. Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind,   All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do; Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Human-kind,   One only being shalt thou not subdue. Rain then thy plagues upon me here, Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear; And let alternate frost and fire Eat into me, and be thine ire Lightning, and cutting hail, and legioned forms Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms. Ay, do thy worst. Thou art omnipotent.   O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power, And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent   To blast mankind, from yon ethereal tower. Let thy malignant spirit move In darkness over those I love: On me and mine I imprecate The utmost torture of thy hate; And thus devote to sleepless agony, This undeclining head while thou must reign on high. But thou, who art the God and Lord: O, thou,   Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow   In fear and worship: all-prevailing foe! I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse; Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony; And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain, To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this Curse,   Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good; Both infinite as is the universe,   And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude. An awful image of calm power Though now thou sittest, let the hour Come, when thou must appear to be That which thou art internally; And after many a false and fruitless crime Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time. Prometheus. Were these my words, O Parent? The Earth.                 They were thine.                 Prometheus. It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain. The Earth. Misery, Oh misery to me, That Jove at length should vanquish thee. Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea, The Earth's rent heart shall answer ye. Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead, Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquishd. First Echo. Lies fallen and vanquishd! Second Echo. Fallen and vanquishd! Ione. Fear not: 'tis but some passing spasm, The Titan is unvanquished still. But see, where through the azure chasm Of yon forked and snowy hill Trampling the slant winds on high With golden-sandalled feet, that glow Under plumes of purple dye, Like rose-ensanguined ivory, A Shape comes now, Stretching on high from his right hand A serpent-cinctured wand. Panthea. 'Tis Jove's world-wandering herald, Mercury. Ione. And who are those with hydra tresses And iron wings that climb the wind, Whom the frowning God represses Like vapours steaming up behind, Clanging loud, an endless crowd Panthea. These are Jove's tempest-walking hounds, Whom he gluts with groans and blood, When charioted on sulphurous cloud He bursts Heaven's bounds. Ione. Are they now led, from the thin dead On new pangs to be fed? Panthea. The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud. First Fury. Ha! I scent life! Second Fury.          Let me but look into his eyes!          Third Fury. The hope of torturing him smells like a heap Of corpses, to a death-bird after battle. First Fury. Darest thou delay, O Herald! take cheer, Hounds Of Hell: what if the Son of Maia soon Should make us food and sportwho can please long The Omnipotent? Mercury.         Back to your towers of iron, And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail, Your foodless teeth. Geryon, arise! and Gorgon, Chimra, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine, Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate: These shall perform your task. First Fury.                 Oh, mercy! mercy! We die with our desire: drive us not back! Mercury. Crouch then in silence.             Awful Sufferer! To thee unwilling, most unwillingly I come, by the great Father's will driven down, To execute a doom of new revenge. Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself That I can do no more: aye from thy sight Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell, So thy worn form pursues me night and day, Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good, But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps That measure and divide the weary years From which there is no refuge, long have taught And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms With the strange might of unimagined pains The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell, And my commission is to lead them here, Or what more subtle, foul, or savage fiends People the abyss, and leave them to their task. Be it not so! there is a secret known To thee, and to none else of living things, Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven, The fear of which perplexes the Supreme: Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer, And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane, Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart: For benefits and meek submission tame The fiercest and the mightiest. Prometheus.                  Evil minds Change good to their own nature. I gave all He has; and in return he chains me here Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun Split my parched skin, or in the moony night The crystal-wingd snow cling round my hair: Whilst my belovd race is trampled down By his thought-executing ministers. Such is the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just: He who is evil can receive no good; And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost, He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude: He but requites me for his own misdeed. Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge. Submission, thou dost know I cannot try: For what submission but that fatal word, The death-seal of mankind's captivity, Like the Sicilian's hair-suspended sword, Which trembles o'er his crown, would he accept, Or could I yield? Which yet I will not yield. Let others flatter Crime, where it sits throned In brief Omnipotence: secure are they: For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs, Too much avenged by those who err. I wait, Enduring thus, the retributive hour Which since we spake is even nearer now. But hark, the hell-hounds clamour: fear delay: Behold! Heaven lowers under thy Father's frown. Mercury. Oh, that we might be spared: I to inflict And thou to suffer! Once more answer me: Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power? Prometheus. I know but this, that it must come. Mercury.                    Alas! Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain? Prometheus. They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less Do I desire or fear. Mercury.            Yet pause, and plunge Into Eternity, where recorded time, Even all that we imagine, age on age, Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind Flags wearily in its unending flight, Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless; Perchance it has not numbered the slow years Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved? Prometheus. Perchance no thought can count them, yet they pass. Mercury. If thou might'st dwell among the Gods the while Lapped in voluptuous joy? Prometheus.               I would not quit This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains. Mercury. Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee. Prometheus. Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven, Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene, As light in the sun, throned: how vain is talk! Call up the fiends. Ione.           O, sister, look! White fire Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar; How fearfully God's thunder howls behind! Mercury. I must obey his words and thine: alas! Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart! Panthea. See where the child of Heaven, with wingd feet, Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn. Ione. Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes Lest thou behold and die: they come: they come Blackening the birth of day with countless wings, And hollow underneath, like death. First Fury.                   Prometheus!                   Second Fury. Immortal Titan! Third Fury.         Champion of Heaven's slaves!         Prometheus. He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here, Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms, What and who are ye? Never yet there came Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell From the all-miscreative brain of Jove; Whilst I behold such execrable shapes, Methinks I grow like what I contemplate, And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy. First Fury. We are the ministers of pain, and fear, And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate, And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live, When the great King betrays them to our will. Prometheus. Oh! many fearful natures in one name, I know ye; and these lakes and echoes know The darkness and the clangour of your wings. But why more hideous than your loathd selves Gather ye up in legions from the deep? Second Fury. We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice! Prometheus. Can aught exult in its deformity? Second Fury. The beauty of delight makes lovers glad, Gazing on one another: so are we. As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels To gather for her festal crown of flowers The areal crimson falls, flushing her cheek, So from our victim's destined agony The shade which is our form invests us round, Else we are shapeless as our mother Night. Prometheus. I laugh your power, and his who sent you here, To lowest scorn. Pour forth the cup of pain. First Fury. Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone, And nerve from nerve, working like fire within? Prometheus. Pain is my element, as hate is thine; Ye rend me now: I care not. Second Fury.                Dost imagine We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes? Prometheus. I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer, Being evil. Cruel was the power which called You, or aught else so wretched, into light. Third Fury. Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one, Like animal life, and though we can obscure not The soul which burns within, that we will dwell Beside it, like a vain loud multitude Vexing the self-content of wisest men: That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain, And foul desire round thine astonished heart, And blood within thy labyrinthine veins Crawling like agony? Prometheus.            Why, ye are thus now; Yet am I king over myself, and rule The torturing and conflicting throngs within, As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous. Chorus of Furies. From the ends of the earth, from the ends of the earth, Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth,      Come, come, come! Oh, ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth, When cities sink howling in ruin; and ye Who with wingless footsteps trample the sea, And close upon Shipwreck and Famine's track, Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck;      Come, come, come! Leave the bed, low, cold, and red, Strewed beneath a nation dead; Leave the hatred, as in ashes   Fire is left for future burning: It will burst in bloodier flashes   When ye stir it, soon returning: Leave the self-contempt implanted In young spirits, sense-enchanted,   Misery's yet unkindled fuel:   Leave Hell's secrets half unchanted    To the maniac dreamer; cruel   More than ye can be with hate     Is he with fear.      Come, come, come! We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate And we burthen the blast of the atmosphere, But vainly we toil till ye come here. Ione. Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings. Panthea. These solid mountains quiver with the sound Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make The space within my plumes more black than night. First Fury. Your call was as a wingd car Driven on whirlwinds fast and far; It rapped us from red gulfs of war. Second Fury. From wide cities, famine-wasted; Third Fury. Groans half heard, and blood untasted; Fourth Fury. Kingly conclaves stern and cold, Where blood with gold is bought and sold; Fifth Fury. From the furnace, white and hot, In which A Fury.      Speak not: whisper not: I know all that ye would tell, But to speak might break the spell Which must bend the Invincible, The stern of thought; He yet defies the deepest power of Hell. A Fury. Tear the veil! Another Fury.        It is torn.        Chorus.               The pale stars of the morn Shine on a misery, dire to be borne. Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man? Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever.   One came forth of gentle worth   Smiling on the sanguine earth;   His words outlived him, like swift poison    Withering up truth, peace, and pity.   Look! where round the wide horizon    Many a million-peopled city   Vomits smoke in the bright air.   Hark that outcry of despair!   'Tis his mild and gentle ghost    Wailing for the faith he kindled:   Look again, the flames almost    To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled: The survivors round the embers Gather in dread.     Joy, joy, joy! Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers, And the future is dark, and the present is spread Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. Semichorus I. Drops of bloody agony flow From his white and quivering brow. Grant a little respite now: See a disenchanted nation Springs like day from desolation; To Truth its state is dedicate, And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; A legioned band of linkd brothers Whom Love calls children Semichorus II.               'Tis another's: See how kindred murder kin: 'Tis the vintage-time for death and sin: Blood, like new wine, bubbles within:   Till Despair smothers The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win. [All the Furies vanish, except one. Ione. Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep, And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves. Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? Panthea. Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more. Ione. What didst thou see? Panthea.            A woful sight: a youth With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. Ione. What next? Panthea.      The heaven around, the earth below Was peopled with thick shapes of human death, All horrible, and wrought by human hands, And some appeared the work of human hearts, For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: And other sights too foul to speak and live Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear By looking forth: those groans are grief enough. Fury. Behold an emblem: those who do endure Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. Prometheus. Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears! Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix, So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak, It hath become a curse. I see, I see, The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just, Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee, Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home, An early-chosen, late-lamented home; As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind; Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells: SomeHear I not the multitude laugh loud? Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles, Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood By the red light of their own burning homes. Fury. Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind. Prometheus. Worse? Fury.    In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, and would be just, But live among their suffering fellow-men As if none felt: they know not what they do. Prometheus. Thy words are like a cloud of wingd snakes; And yet I pity those they torture not. Fury. Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes. Prometheus.                    Ah woe! Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever! I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear Thy works within my woe-illumd mind, Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave. The grave hides all things beautiful and good: I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory. The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul With new endurance, till the hour arrives When they shall be no types of things which are. Panthea. Alas! what sawest thou more? Prometheus.                There are two woes: To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one. Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords, they Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry; The nations thronged around, and cried aloud, As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love! Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear: Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil. This was the shadow of the truth I saw. The Earth. I felt thy torture, son; with such mixed joy As pain and virtue give. To cheer thy state I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits, Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought, And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind, Its world-surrounding aether: they behold Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass, The future: may they speak comfort to thee! Panthea. Look, sister, where a troop of spirits gather, Like flocks of clouds in spring's delightful weather, Thronging in the blue air! Ione.               And see! more come, Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb, That climb up the ravine in scattered lines. And, hark! is it the music of the pines? Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall? Panthea. 'Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all. Chorus of Spirits. From unremembered ages we Gentle guides and guardians be Of heaven-oppressed mortality; And we breathe, and sicken not, The atmosphere of human thought: Be it dim, and dank, and gray, Like a storm-extinguished day, Travelled o'er by dying gleams; Be it bright as all between Cloudless skies and windless streams, Silent, liquid, and serene; As the birds within the wind, As the fish within the wave, As the thoughts of man's own mind Float through all above the grave; We make there our liquid lair, Voyaging cloudlike and unpent Through the boundless element: Thence we bear the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee! Ione. More yet come, one by one: the air around them Looks radiant as the air around a star. First Spirit. On a battle-trumpet's blast I fled hither, fast, fast, fast, 'Mid the darkness upward cast. From the dust of creeds outworn, From the tyrant's banner torn, Gathering 'round me, onward borne, There was mingled many a cry Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory! Till they faded through the sky; And one sound, above, around, One sound beneath, around, above, Was moving; 'twas the soul of Love; 'Twas the hope, the prophecy, Which begins and ends in thee. Second Spirit. A rainbow's arch stood on the sea, Which rocked beneath, immovably; And the triumphant storm did flee, Like a conqueror, swift and proud, Between, with many a captive cloud, A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd, Each by lightning riven in half: I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh: Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff And spread beneath a hell of death O'er the white waters. I alit On a great ship lightning-split, And speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank, then plunged aside to die. Third Spirit. I sate beside a sage's bed, And the lamp was burning red Near the book where he had fed, When a Dream with plumes of flame, To his pillow hovering came, And I knew it was the same Which had kindled long ago Pity, eloquence, and woe; And the world awhile below Wore the shade, its lustre made. It has borne me here as fleet As Desire's lightning feet: I must ride it back ere morrow, Or the sage will wake in sorrow. Fourth Spirit. On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the areal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality! One of these awakened me, And I sped to succour thee. Ione. Behold'st thou not two shapes from the east and west Come, as two doves to one belovd nest, Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere? And, hark! their sweet, sad voices! 'tis despair Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound. Panthea. Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned. Ione. Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float On their sustaining wings of skiey grain, Orange and azure deepening into gold: Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire. Chorus of Spirits. Hast thou beheld the form of Love? Fifth Spirit.                   As over wide dominions I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses, That planet-crested shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions, Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial tresses: His footsteps paved the world with light; but as I passed 'twas fading, And hollow Ruin yawned behind: great sages bound in madness, And headless patriots, and pale youths who perished, unupbraiding, Gleamed in the night. I wandered o'er, till thou, O King of sadness, Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness. Sixth Spirit. Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of areal joy, and call the monster, Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet. Chorus. Though Ruin now Love's shadow be, Following him, destroyingly, On Death's white and wingd steed, Which the fleetest cannot flee, Trampling down both flower and weed, Man and beast, and foul and fair, Like a tempest through the air; Thou shalt quell this horseman grim, Woundless though in heart or limb. Prometheus. Spirits! how know ye this shall be? Chorus. In the atmosphere we breathe, As buds grow red when the snow-storms flee, From Spring gathering up beneath, Whose mild winds shake the elder brake, And the wandering herdsmen know That the white-thorn soon will blow: Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace, When they struggle to increase,   Are to us as soft winds be   To shepherd boys, the prophecy   Which begins and ends in thee.   Ione. Where are the Spirits fled? Panthea.                Only a sense Remains of them, like the omnipotence Of music, when the inspired voice and lute Languish, ere yet the responses are mute, Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll. Prometheus. How fair these airborn shapes! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love; and thou art far, Asia! who, when my being overflowed, Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. All things are still: alas! how heavily This quiet morning weighs upon my heart; Though I should dream I could even sleep with grief If slumber were denied not. I would fain Be what it is my destiny to be, The saviour and the strength of suffering man, Or sink into the original gulf of things: There is no agony, and no solace left; Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more. Panthea. Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when The shadow of thy spirit falls on her? Prometheus. I said all hope was vain but love: thou lovest. Panthea. Deeply in truth; but the eastern star looks white, And Asia waits in that far Indian vale, The scene of her sad exile; rugged once And desolate and frozen, like this ravine; But now invested with fair flowers and herbs, And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow Among the woods and waters, from the aether Of her transforming presence, which would fade If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell! END OF THE FIRST ACT. ACT II Scene I. Morning. A lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia alone. Asia. From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended: Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes, And beatings haunt the desolated heart, Which should have learnt repose: thou hast descended Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring! O child of many winds! As suddenly Thou comest as the memory of a dream, Which now is sad because it hath been sweet; Like genius, or like joy which riseth up As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds The desert of our life. This is the season, this the day, the hour; At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine, Too long desired, too long delaying, come! How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl! The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn Beyond the purple mountains. through a chasm Of wind-divided mist the darker lake Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again As the waves fade, and as the burning threads Of woven cloud unravel in pale air: 'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not The olian music of her sea-green plumes Winnowing the crimson dawn? [Panthea enters.                I feel, I see Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears, Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew. Belovd and most beautiful, who wearest The shadow of that soul by which I live, How late thou art! the spherd sun had climbed The sea; my heart was sick with hope, before The printless air felt thy belated plumes. Panthea. Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint With the delight of a remembered dream, As are the noontide plumes of summer winds Satiate with sweet flowers. I was wont to sleep Peacefully, and awake refreshed and calm Before the sacred Titan's fall, and thy Unhappy love, had made, through use and pity, Both love and woe familiar to my heart As they had grown to thine: erewhile I slept Under the glaucous caverns of old Ocean Within dim bowers of green and purple moss, Our young Ione's soft and milky arms Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair, While my shut eyes and cheek were pressed within The folded depth of her life-breathing bosom: But not as now, since I am made the wind Which fails beneath the music that I bear Of thy most wordless converse; since dissolved Into the sense with which love talks, my rest Was troubled and yet sweet; my waking hours Too full of care and pain. Asia.               Lift up thine eyes, And let me read thy dream. Panthea.               As I have said With our sea-sister at his feet I slept. The mountain mists, condensing at our voice Under the moon, had spread their snowy flakes, From the keen ice shielding our linkd sleep. Then two dreams came. One, I remember not. But in the other his pale wound-worn limbs Fell from Prometheus, and the azure night Grew radiant with the glory of that form Which lives unchanged within, and his voice fell Like music which makes giddy the dim brain, Faint with intoxication of keen joy: 'Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world With lovelinessmore fair than aught but her, Whose shadow thou artlift thine eyes on me.' I lifted them: the overpowering light Of that immortal shape was shadowed o'er By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs, And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes, Steamed forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power, As the warm aether of the morning sun Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew. I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt His presence flow and mingle through my blood Till it became his life, and his grew mine, And I was thus absorbed, until it passed, And like the vapours when the sun sinks down, Gathering again in drops upon the pines, And tremulous as they, in the deep night My being was condensed; and as the rays Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died Like footsteps of weak melody: thy name Among the many sounds alone I heard Of what might be articulate; though still I listened through the night when sound was none. Ione wakened then, and said to me: 'Canst thou divine what troubles me to-night? I always knew what I desired before, Nor ever found delight to wish in vain. But now I cannot tell thee what I seek; I know not; something sweet, since it is sweet Even to desire; it is thy sport, false sister; Thou hast discovered some enchantment old, Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept And mingled it with thine: for when just now We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth Of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint, Quivered between our intertwining arms.' I answered not, for the Eastern star grew pale, But fled to thee. Asia.          Thou speakest, but thy words Are as the air: I feel them not: Oh, lift Thine eyes, that I may read his written soul! Panthea. I lift them though they droop beneath the load Of that they would express: what canst thou see But thine own fairest shadow imaged there? Asia. Thine eyes are like the deep, blue, boundless heaven Contracted to two circles underneath Their long, fine lashes; dark, far, measureless, Orb within orb, and line through line inwoven. Panthea. Why lookest thou as if a spirit passed? Asia. There is a change: beyond their inmost depth I see a shade, a shape: 'tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon. Prometheus, it is thine! depart not yet! Say not those smiles that we shall meet again Within that bright pavilion which their beams Shall build o'er the waste world? The dream is told. What shape is that between us? Its rude hair Roughens the wind that lifts it, its regard Is wild and quick, yet 'tis a thing of air, For through its gray robe gleams the golden dew Whose stars the noon has quenched not. Dream.                      Follow! Follow!                      Panthea. It is mine other dream. Asia.             It disappears.             Panthea. It passes now into my mind. Methought As we sate here, the flower-infolding buds Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond-tree, When swift from the white Scythian wilderness A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost: I looked, and all the blossoms were blown down; But on each leaf was stamped, as the blue bells Of Hyacinth tell Apollo's written grief, O, follow, follow! Asia.           As you speak, your words Fill, pause by pause, my own forgotten sleep With shapes. Methought among these lawns together We wandered, underneath the young gray dawn, And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind; And the white dew on the new-bladed grass, Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently; And there was more which I remember not: But on the shadows of the morning clouds, Athwart the purple mountain slope, was written Follow, O, follow! as they vanished by; And on each herb, from which Heaven's dew had fallen, The like was stamped, as with a withering fire; A wind arose among the pines; it shook The clinging music from their boughs, and then Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts, Were heard: O, follow, follow, follow me! And then I said: 'Panthea, look on me.' But in the depth of those belovd eyes Still I saw, follow, follow! Echo.                Follow, follow!                Panthea. The crags, this clear spring morning, mock our voices As they were spirit-tongued. Asia.                It is some being Around the crags. What fine clear sounds! O, list! Echoes (unseen). Echoes we: listen! We cannot stay: As dew-stars glisten Then fade away   Child of Ocean!   Asia. Hark! Spirits speak. The liquid responses Of their areal tongues yet sound. Panthea.                   I hear.                   Echoes. O, follow, follow, As our voice recedeth Through the caverns hollow, Where the forest spreadeth; (More distant.) O, follow, follow! Through the caverns hollow, As the song floats thou pursue, Where the wild bee never flew, Through the noontide darkness deep, By the odour-breathing sleep Of faint night flowers, and the waves At the fountain-lighted caves, While our music, wild and sweet, Mocks thy gently falling feet,   Child of Ocean!   Asia. Shall we pursue the sound? It grows more faint And distant. Panthea. List! the strain floats nearer now. Echoes. In the world unknown Sleeps a voice unspoken; By thy step alone Can its rest be broken;   Child of Ocean!   Asia. How the notes sink upon the ebbing wind! Echoes. O, follow, follow! Through the caverns hollow, As the song floats thou pursue, By the woodland noontide dew; By the forest, lakes, and fountains, Through the many-folded mountains; To the rents, and gulfs, and chasms, Where the Earth reposed from spasms, On the day when He and thou Parted, to commingle now;   Child of Ocean!   Asia. Come, sweet Panthea, link thy hand in mine, And follow, ere the voices fade away. Scene II. A Forest, intermingled with Rocks and Caverns. Asia and Panthea pass into it. Two young Fauns are sitting on a Rock listening. Semichorus I. of Spirits. The path through which that lovely twain Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew, And each dark tree that ever grew, Is curtained out from Heaven's wide blue; Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain,   Can pierce its interwoven bowers, Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew, Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze, Between the trunks of the hoar trees,   Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers Of the green laurel, blown anew; And bends, and then fades silently, One frail and fair anemone: Or when some star of many a one That climbs and wanders through steep night, Has found the cleft through which alone Beams fall from high those depths upon Ere it is borne away, away, By the swift Heavens that cannot stay, It scatters drops of golden light, Like lines of rain that ne'er unite: And the gloom divine is all around, And underneath is the mossy ground. Semichorus II. There the voluptuous nightingales, Are awake through all the broad noonday. When one with bliss or sadness fails,   And through the windless ivy-boughs, Sick with sweet love, droops dying away On its mate's music-panting bosom; Another from the swinging blossom,   Watching to catch the languid close Of the last strain, then lifts on high The wings of the weak melody, 'Till some new strain of feeling bear The song, and all the woods are mute; When there is heard through the dim air The rush of wings, and rising there Like many a lake-surrounded flute, Sounds overflow the listener's brain So sweet, that joy is almost pain. Semichorus I. There those enchanted eddies play Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw, By Demogorgon's mighty law, With melting rapture, or sweet awe, All spirits on that secret way; As inland boats are driven to Ocean Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw:   And first there comes a gentle sound   To those in talk or slumber bound, And wakes the destined soft emotion, Attracts, impels them; those who saw Say from the breathing earth behind There steams a plume-uplifting wind Which drives them on their path, while they Believe their own swift wings and feet The sweet desires within obey: And so they float upon their way, Until, still sweet, but loud and strong, The storm of sound is driven along, Sucked up and hurrying: as they fleet Behind, its gathering billows meet And to the fatal mountain bear Like clouds amid the yielding air. First Faun. Canst thou imagine where those spirits live Which make such delicate music in the woods? We haunt within the least frequented caves And closest coverts, and we know these wilds, Yet never meet them, though we hear them oft: Where may they hide themselves? Second Faun.                  'Tis hard to tell: I have heard those more skilled in spirits say, The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, Are the pavilions where such dwell and float Under the green and golden atmosphere Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves; And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, The which they breathed within those lucent domes, Ascends to flow like meteors through the night, They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed, And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire Under the waters of the earth again. First Faun. If such live thus, have others other lives, Under pink blossoms or within the bells Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep, Or on their dying odours, when they die, Or in the sunlight of the spherd dew? Second Faun. Ay, many more which we may well divine. But, should we stay to speak, noontide would come, And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn, And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old, And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom, And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth One brotherhood: delightful strains which cheer Our solitary twilights, and which charm To silence the unenvying nightingales. Scene III. A Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains. Asia and Panthea. Panthea. Hither the sound has borne usto the realm Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal, Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm, Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth, And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy, That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain To deep intoxication; and uplift, Like Mnads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe! The voice which is contagion to the world. Asia. Fit throne for such a Power! Magnificent! How glorious art thou, Earth! And if thou be The shadow of some spirit lovelier still, Though evil stain its work, and it should be Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, I could fall down and worship that and thee. Even now my heart adoreth: Wonderful! Look, sister, ere the vapour dim thy brain: Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist, As a lake, paving in the morning sky, With azure waves which burst in silver light, Some Indian vale. Behold it, rolling on Under the curdling winds, and islanding The peak whereon we stand, midway, around, Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests, Dim twilight-lawns, and stream-illumd caves, And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist; And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains From icy spires of sun-like radiance fling The dawn, as lifted Ocean's dazzling spray, From some Atlantic islet scattered up, Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops. The vale is girdled with their walls, a howl Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines, Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast, Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow! The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round, Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now. Panthea. Look how the gusty sea of mist is breaking In crimson foam, even at our feet! it rises As Ocean at the enchantment of the moon Round foodless men wrecked on some oozy isle. Asia. The fragments of the cloud are scattered up; The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair; Its billows now sweep o'er mine eyes; my brain Grows dizzy; see'st thou shapes within the mist? Panthea. A countenance with beckoning smiles: there burns An azure fire within its golden locks! Another and another: hark! they speak! Song of Spirits. To the deep, to the deep,   Down, down! Through the shade of sleep, Through the cloudy strife Of Death and of Life; Through the veil and the bar Of things which seem and are Even to the steps of the remotest throne,   Down, down!    While the sound whirls around,   Down, down! As the fawn draws the hound, As the lightning the vapour, As a weak moth the taper; Death, despair; love, sorrow; Time both; to-day, to-morrow; As steel obeys the spirit of the stone,   Down, down!    Through the gray, void abysm,   Down, down! Where the air is no prism, And the moon and stars are not, And the cavern-crags wear not The radiance of Heaven, Nor the gloom to Earth given, Where there is One pervading, One alone,   Down, down!    In the depth of the deep,   Down, down! Like veiled lightning asleep, Like the spark nursed in embers, The last look Love remembers, Like a diamond, which shines On the dark wealth of mines, A spell is treasured but for thee alone.   Down, down!    We have bound thee, we guide thee;   Down, down! With the bright form beside thee; Resist not the weakness, Such strength is in meekness That the Eternal, the Immortal, Most unloose through life's portal The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne   By that alone.   Scene IV. The Cave of Demogorgon. Asia and Panthea. Panthea. What viled form sits on that ebon throne? Asia. The veil has fallen. Panthea.            I see a mighty darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun. Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb, Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is A living Spirit. Demogorgon.          Ask what thou wouldst know.          Asia. What canst thou tell? Demogorgon.            All things thou dar'st demand.            Asia. Who made the living world? Demogorgon.               God.               Asia.                 Who made all That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will, Imagination? Demogorgon. God: Almighty God. Asia. Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring In rarest visitation, or the voice Of one belovd heard in youth alone, Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, And leaves this peopled earth a solitude When it returns no more? Demogorgon.              Merciful God.              Asia. And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things, To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels Under the load towards the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate; And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day; And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell? Demogorgon.                     He reigns.                     Asia. Utter his name: a world pining in pain Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down. Demogorgon. He reigns. Asia.      I feel, I know it: who?      Demogorgon.                   He reigns.                   Asia. Who reigns? There was the Heaven and Earth at first, And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne Time fell, an envious shadow: such the state Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway, As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves Before the wind or sun has withered them And semivital worms; but he refused The birthright of their being, knowledge, power, The skill which wields the elements, the thought Which pierces this dim universe like light, Self-empire, and the majesty of love; For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And with this law alone, 'Let man be free,' Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. To know nor faith, nor love, nor law; to be Omnipotent but friendless is to reign; And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man First famine, and then toil, and then disease, Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before, Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove With alternating shafts of frost and fire, Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves: And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent, And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle Of unreal good, which levied mutual war, So ruining the lair wherein they raged. Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers, Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms, That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine Which bears the wine of life, the human heart; And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey, Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath The frown of man; and tortured to his will Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power, And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves. He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe; And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound; And human hands first mimicked and then mocked, With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine; And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. He told the hidden power of herbs and springs, And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep. He taught the implicated orbits woven Of the wide-wandering stars; and how the sun Changes his lair, and by what secret spell The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye Gazes not on the interlunar sea: He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-wingd chariots of the Ocean, And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds, and the azure aether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen. Such, the alleviations of his state, Prometheus gave to man, for which he hangs Withering in destined pain: but who rains down Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while Man looks on his creation like a God And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, The wreck of his own will, the scorn of earth, The outcast, the abandoned, the alone? Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, ay, when His adversary from adamantine chains Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare Who is his master? Is he too a slave? Demogorgon. All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil: Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no. Asia. Whom calledst thou God? Demogorgon.             I spoke but as ye speak, For Jove is the supreme of living things. Asia. Who is the master of the slave? Demogorgon.                  If the abysm Could vomit forth its secrets. . . But a voice Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless; For what would it avail to bid thee gaze On the revolving world? What to bid speak Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal Love. Asia. So much I asked before, and my heart gave The response thou hast given; and of such truths Each to itself must be the oracle. One more demand; and do thou answer me As mine own soul would answer, did it know That which I ask. Prometheus shall arise Henceforth the sun of this rejoicing world: When shall the destined hour arrive? Demogorgon.                     Behold!                     Asia. The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingd steeds Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars: Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink With eager lips the wind of their own speed, As if the thing they loved fled on before, And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all Sweep onward. Demogorgon.        These are the immortal Hours, Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee. Asia. A spirit with a dreadful countenance Checks its dark chariot by the craggy gulf. Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer, Who art thou? Whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak! Spirit. I am the shadow of a destiny More dread than is my aspect: ere yon planet Has set, the darkness which ascends with me Shall wrap in lasting night heaven's kingless throne. Asia. What meanest thou? Panthea.           That terrible shadow floats Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke Of earthquake-ruined cities o'er the sea. Lo! it ascends the car; the coursers fly Terrified: watch its path among the stars Blackening the night! Asia.            Thus I am answered: strange!            Panthea. See, near the verge, another chariot stays; An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire, Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim Of delicate strange tracery; the young spirit That guides it has the dove-like eyes of hope; How its soft smiles attract the soul! as light Lures wingd insects through the lampless air. Spirit. My coursers are fed with the lightning, They drink of the whirlwind's stream, And when the red morning is bright'ning They bathe in the fresh sunbeam; They have strength for their swiftness I deem, Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean. I desire: and their speed makes night kindle; I fear: they outstrip the Typhoon; Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle We encircle the earth and the moon: We shall rest from long labours at noon: Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean. Scene V. The Car pauses within a Cloud on the top of a snowy Mountain. Asia, Panthea, and the Spirit of the Hour. Spirit. On the brink of the night and the morning My coursers are wont to respire; But the Earth has just whispered a warning That their flight must be swifter than fire: They shall drink the hot speed of desire! Asia. Thou breathest on their nostrils, but my breath Would give them swifter speed. Spirit.                 Alas! it could not.                 Panthea. Oh Spirit! pause, and tell whence is the light Which fills this cloud? the sun is yet unrisen. Spirit. The sun will rise not until noon. Apollo Is held in heaven by wonder; and the light Which fills this vapour, as the areal hue Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water, Flows from thy mighty sister. Panthea.                 Yes, I feel                 Asia. What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale. Panthea. How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee; I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell That on the day when the clear hyaline Was cloven at thine uprise, and thou didst stand Within a veind shell, which floated on Over the calm floor of the crystal sea, Among the gean isles, and by the shores Which bear thy name; love, like the atmosphere Of the sun's fire filling the living world, Burst from thee, and illumined earth and heaven And the deep ocean and the sunless caves And all that dwells within them; till grief cast Eclipse upon the soul from which it came: Such art thou now; nor is it I alone, Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one, But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy. Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not The inanimate winds enamoured of thee? List! [Music. Asia. Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his Whose echoes they are: yet all love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air, It makes the reptile equal to the God: They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now; but those who feel it most Are happier still, after long sufferings, As I shall soon become. Panthea.             List! Spirits speak.             Voice in the Air, singing. Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes. Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them; As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. Fair are others; none beholds thee, But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost for ever! Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing! Asia. My soul is an enchanted boat, Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing; And thine doth like an angel sit Beside a helm conducting it, Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever, for ever, Upon that many-winding river, Between mountains, woods, abysses, A paradise of wildernesses! Till, like one in slumber bound, Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound: Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions In music's most serene dominions; Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven. And we sail on, away, afar, Without a course, without a star, But, by the instinct of sweet music driven; Till through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots, Where never mortal pinnace glided, The boat of my desire is guided: Realms where the air we breathe is love, Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above. We have passed Age's icy caves, And Manhood's dark and tossing waves, And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray: Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee Of shadow-peopled Infancy, Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day; A paradise of vaulted bowers, Lit by downward-gazing flowers, And watery paths that wind between Wildernesses calm and green, Peopled by shapes too bright to see, And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee; Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously! END OF THE SECOND ACT. ACT III Scene I. Heaven. Jupiter on his Throne; Thetis and the other Deities assembled. Jupiter. Ye congregated powers of heaven, who share The glory and the strength of him ye serve, Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent. All else had been subdued to me; alone The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, And lamentation, and reluctant prayer, Hurling up insurrection, which might make Our antique empire insecure, though built On eldest faith, and hell's coeval, fear; And though my curses through the pendulous air, Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, And cling to it; though under my wrath's night It climbs the crags of life, step after step, Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet, It yet remains supreme o'er misery, Aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall: Even now have I begotten a strange wonder, That fatal child, the terror of the earth, Who waits but till the destined hour arrive, Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne The dreadful might of ever-living limbs Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld, To redescend, and trample out the spark. Pour forth heaven's wine, Idan Ganymede, And let it fill the Ddal cups like fire, And from the flower-inwoven soil divine Ye all-triumphant harmonies arise, As dew from earth under the twilight stars: Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins The soul of joy, ye ever-living Gods, Till exultation burst in one wide voice Like music from Elysian winds.                 And thou Ascend beside me, veild in the light Of the desire which makes thee one with me, Thetis, bright image of eternity! When thou didst cry, 'Insufferable might! God! Spare me! I sustain not the quick flames, The penetrating presence; all my being, Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw Into a dew with poison, is dissolved, Sinking through its foundations:' even then Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third Mightier than either, which, unbodied now, Between us floats, felt, although unbeheld, Waiting the incarnation, which ascends, (Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels Griding the winds?) from Demogorgon's throne. Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, O world, The earthquake of his chariot thundering up Olympus? [The Car of the Hour arrives. Demogorgon descends, and moves towards the Throne of Jupiter.     Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!     Demogorgon. Eternity. Demand no direr name. Descend, and follow me down the abyss. I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child; Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not. The tyranny of heaven none may retain, Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee: Yet if thou wilt, as 'tis the destiny Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead, Put forth thy might. Jupiter.            Detested prodigy! Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons I trample thee! thou lingerest?                  Mercy! mercy! No pity, no release, no respite! Oh, That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge, Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge, On Caucasus! he would not doom me thus. Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not The monarch of the world? What then art thou? No refuge! no appeal!            Sink with me then, We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin, Even as a vulture and a snake outspent Drop, twisted in inextricable fight, Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire, And whelm on them into the bottomless void This desolated world, and thee, and me, The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck Of that for which they combated.                  Ai! Ai! The elements obey me not. I sink Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down. And, like a cloud, mine enemy above Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai! Scene II. The Mouth of a great River in the Island Atlantis.Ocean is discovered reclining near the Shore; Apollo stands beside him. Ocean. He fell, thou sayest, beneath his conqueror's frown? Apollo. Ay, when the strife was ended which made dim The orb I rule, and shook the solid stars, The terrors of his eye illumined heaven With sanguine light, through the thick ragged skirts Of the victorious darkness, as he fell: Like the last glare of day's red agony, Which, from a rent among the fiery clouds, Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled deep. Ocean. He sunk to the abyss? To the dark void? Apollo. An eagle so caught in some bursting cloud On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length Prone, and the areal ice clings over it. Ocean. Henceforth the fields of heaven-reflecting sea Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood, Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow Round many-peopled continents, and round Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs shall mark The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see The floating bark of the light-laden moon With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest, Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea; Tracking their path no more by blood and groans, And desolation, and the mingled voice Of slavery and command; but by the light Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours, And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices, And sweetest music, such as spirits love. Apollo. And I shall gaze not on the deeds which make My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse Darkens the sphere I guide; but list, I hear The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit That sits i' the morning star. Ocean.                 Thou must away; Thy steeds will pause at even, till when farewell: The loud deep calls me home even now to feed it With azure calm out of the emerald urns Which stand for ever full beside my throne. Behold the Nereids under the green sea, Their wavering limbs borne on the wind-like stream, Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns, Hastening to grace their mighty sister's joy. [A sound of waves is heard. It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm. Peace, monster; I come now. Farewell. Apollo.                     Farewell.                     Scene III. Caucasus. Prometheus, Hercules, Ione, the Earth, Spirits, Asia, and Panthea, borne in the Car with the Spirit of the Hour. Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who descends. Hercules. Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength To wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love, And thee, who art the form they animate, Minister like a slave. Prometheus.             Thy gentle words Are sweeter even than freedom long desired And long delayed.          Asia, thou light of life, Shadow of beauty unbeheld: and ye, Fair sister nymphs, who made long years of pain Sweet to remember, through your love and care: Henceforth we will not part. There is a cave, All overgrown with trailing odorous plants, Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers, And paved with veind emerald, and a fountain Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound. From its curved roof the mountain's frozen tears Like snow, or silver, or long diamond spires, Hang downward, raining forth a doubtful light: And there is heard the ever-moving air, Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds, And bees; and all around are mossy seats, And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass; A simple dwelling, which shall be our own; Where we will sit and talk of time and change, As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged. What can hide man from mutability? And if ye sigh, then I will smile; and thou, Ione, shalt chant fragments of sea-music, Until I weep, when ye shal smile away The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed. We will entangle buds and flowers and beams Which twinkle on the fountain's brim, and make Strange combinations out of common things, Like human babes in their brief innocence; And we will search, with looks and words of love, For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last, Our unexhausted spirits; and like lutes Touched by the skill of the enamoured wind, Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new, From difference sweet where discord cannot be; And hither come, sped on the charmd winds, Which meet from all the points of heaven, as bees From every flower areal Enna feeds, At their known island-homes in Himera, The echoes of the human world, which tell Of the low voice of love, almost unheard, And dove-eyed pity's murmured pain, and music, Itself the echo of the heart, and all That tempers or improves man's life, now free; And lovely apparitions,dim at first, Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright From the embrace of beauty (whence the forms Of which these are the phantoms) casts on them The gathered rays which are reality Shall visit us, the progeny immortal Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy, And arts, though unimagined, yet to be. The wandering voices and the shadows these Of all that man becomes, the mediators Of that best worship love, by him and us Given and returned; swift shapes and sounds, which grow More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind, And, veil by veil, evil and error fall: Such virtue has the cave and place around. [Turning to the Spirit of the Hour. For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione, Give her that curvd shell, which Proteus old Made Asia's nuptial boon, breathing within it A voice to be accomplished, and which thou Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock. Ione. Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely Than all thy sisters, this is the mystic shell; See the pale azure fading into silver Lining it with a soft yet glowing light: Looks it not like lulled music sleeping there? Spirit. It seems in truth the fairest shell of Ocean: Its sound must be at once both sweet and strange. Prometheus. Go, borne over the cities of mankind On whirlwind-footed coursers: once again Outspeed the sun around the orbd world; And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air, Thou breathe into the many-folded shell, Loosening its mighty music; it shall be As thunder mingled with clear echoes: then Return; and thou shalt dwell beside our cave. And thou, O, Mother Earth! The Earth.                I hear, I feel; Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down Even to the adamantine central gloom Along these marble nerves; 'tis life, 'tis joy, And through my withered, old, and icy frame The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down Circling. Henceforth the many children fair Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants, And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes, Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom, Draining the poison of despair, shall take And interchange sweet nutriment; to me Shall they become like sister-antelopes By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind, Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream. The dew-mists of my sunless sleep shall float Under the stars like balm: night-folded flowers Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose: And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather Strength for the coming day, and all its joy: And death shall be the last embrace of her Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother Folding her child, says, 'Leave me not again.' Asia. Oh, mother! wherefore speak the name of death? Cease they to love, and move, and breathe, and speak, Who die? The Earth.     It would avail not to reply: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known But to the uncommunicating dead. Death is the veil which those who live call life: They sleep, and it is lifted: and meanwhile In mild variety the seasons mild With rainbow-skirted showers, and odorous winds, And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night, And the life-kindling shafts of the keen sun's All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild, Shall clothe the forests and the fields, ay, even The crag-built deserts of the barren deep, With ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers. And thou! There is a cavern where my spirit Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it Became mad too, and built a temple there, And spoke, and were oracular, and lured The erring nations round to mutual war, And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee; Which breath now rises, as amongst tall weeds A violet's exhalation, and it fills With a serener light and crimson air Intense, yet soft, the rocks and woods around; It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine, And the dark linkd ivy tangling wild, And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms Which star the winds with points of coloured light, As they rain through them, and bright golden globes Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven, And through their veind leaves and amber stems The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls Stand ever mantling with areal dew, The drink of spirits: and it circles round, Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams, Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine, Now thou art thus restored. This cave is thine. Arise! Appear! [A Spirit rises in the likeness of a winged child.        This is my torch-bearer; Who let his lamp out in old time with gazing On eyes from which he kindled it anew With love, which is as fire, sweet daughter mine, For such is that within thine own. Run, wayward, And guide this company beyond the peak Of Bacchic Nysa, Mnad-haunted mountain, And beyond Indus and its tribute rivers, Trampling the torrent streams and glassy lakes With feet unwet, unwearied, undelaying, And up the green ravine, across the vale, Beside the windless and crystalline pool, Where ever lies, on unerasing waves, The image of a temple, built above, Distinct with column, arch, and architrave, And palm-like capital, and over-wrought, And populous with most living imagery, Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles Fill the hushed air with everlasting love. It is deserted now, but once it bore Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous youths Bore to thy honour through the divine gloom The lamp which was thine emblem; even as those Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope Into the grave, across the night of life, As thou hast borne it most triumphantly To this far goal of Time. Depart, farewell. Beside that temple is the destined cave. Scene IV. A Forest. In the Background a Cave. Prometheus, Asia, Panthea, Ione, and the Spirit of the Earth. Ione. Sister, it is not earthly: how it glides Under the leaves! how on its head there burns A light, like a green star, whose emerald beams Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves, The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass! Knowest thou it? Panthea.          It is the delicate spirit That guides the earth through heaven. From afar The populous constellations call that light The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes It floats along the spray of the salt sea, Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud, Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep, Or o'er the mountain tops, or down the rivers, Or through the green waste wilderness, as now, Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned It loved our sister Asia, and it came Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted As one bit by a dipsas, and with her It made its childish confidence, and told her All it had known or seen, for it saw much, Yet idly reasoned what it saw; and called her For whence it sprung it knew not, nor do I Mother, dear mother. The Spirit of the Earth (running to Asia).            Mother, dearest mother; May I then talk with thee as I was wont? May I then hide my eyes in thy soft arms, After thy looks have made them tired of joy? May I then play beside thee the long noons, When work is none in the bright silent air? Asia. I love thee, gentlest being, and henceforth Can cherish thee unenvied: speak, I pray: Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights. Spirit of the Earth. Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child Cannot be wise like thee, within this day; And happier too; happier and wiser both. Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly worms, And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever An hindrance to my walks o'er the green world: And that, among the haunts of humankind, Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks, Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles, Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance, Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man; And women too, ugliest of all things evil, (Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair, When good and kind, free and sincere like thee), When false or frowning made me sick at heart To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen. Well, my path lately lay through a great city Into the woody hills surrounding it: A sentinel was sleeping at the gate: When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all; A long, long sound, as it would never end: And all the inhabitants leaped suddenly Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets, Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet The music pealed along. I hid myself Within a fountain in the public square, Where I lay like the reflex of the moon Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon Those ugly human shapes and visages Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain, Passed floating through the air, and fading still Into the winds that scattered them; and those From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms After some foul disguise had fallen, and all Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise And greetings of delighted wonder, all Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts, Could e'er be beautiful? yet so they were, And that with little change of shape or hue: All things had put their evil nature off: I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined, I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries, With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky; So, with my thoughts full of these happy changes, We meet again, the happiest change of all. Asia. And never will we part, till thy chaste sister Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon Will look on thy more warm and equal light Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow And love thee. Spirit of the Earth.        What; as Asia loves Prometheus?        Asia. Peace, wanton, thou art yet not old enough. Think ye by gazing on each other's eyes To multiply your lovely selves, and fill With spherd fires the interlunar air? Spirit of the Earth. Nay, mother, while my sister trims her lamp 'Tis hard I should go darkling. Asia.                  Listen; look!                  [The Spirit of the Hour enters. Prometheus. We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak. Spirit of the Hour. Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky and the wide earth, There was a change: the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the spherd world. My vision then grew clear, and I could see Into the mysteries of the universe: Dizzy as with delight I floated down, Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes, My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun, Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil, Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire; And where my moonlike car will stand within A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me, And you fair nymphs looking the love we feel, In memory of the tidings it has borne, Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers, Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone, And open to the bright and liquid sky. Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake The likeness of those wingd steeds will mock The flight from which they find repose. Alas, Whither has wandered now my partial tongue When all remains untold which ye would hear? As I have said, I floated to the earth: It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind, And first was disappointed not to see Such mighty change as I had felt within Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked One with the other even as spirits do, None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear, Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell, 'All hope abandon ye who enter here;' None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear Gazed on another's eye of cold command, Until the subject of a tyrant's will Became, worse fate, the abject of his own, Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death. None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart The sparks of love and hope till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill; None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes, Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy With such a self-mistrust as has no name. And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel, And changed to all which once they dared not be, Yet being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride, Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame, The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love. Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein, And beside which, by wretched men were borne Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance, Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, The ghosts of a no-more-remembered fame, Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round, These imaged to the pride of kings and priests A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide As is the world it wasted, and are now But an astonishment; even so the tools And emblems of its last captivity, Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now. And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man, Which, under many a name and many a form Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable, Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; And which the nations, panic-stricken, served With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless, And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears, Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate, Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines: The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed or hoped, is torn aside; The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless?no, yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. END OF THE THIRD ACT. ACT IV Scene.A Part of the Forest near the Cave of Prometheus.Panthea and Ione are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song. Voice of unseen Spirits. The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard.   But where are ye?   A Train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing. Here, oh, here: We bear the bier Of the Father of many a cancelled year! Spectres we Of the dead Hours be, We bear Time to his tomb in eternity. Strew, oh, strew Hair, not yew! Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew! Be the faded flowers Of Death's bare bowers Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours! Haste, oh, haste! As shades are chased, Trembling, by day, from heaven's blue waste. We melt away, Like dissolving spray, From the children of a diviner day, With the lullaby Of winds that die On the bosom of their own harmony! Ione. What dark forms were they? Panthea. The past Hours weak and gray, With the spoil which their toil Raked together From the conquest but One could foil. Ione. Have they passed? Panthea.          They have passed; They outspeeded the blast, While 'tis said, they are fled: Ione. Whither, oh, whither? Panthea. To the dark, to the past, to the dead. Voice of unseen Spirits. Bright clouds float in heaven, Dew-stars gleam on earth, Waves assemble on ocean, They are gathered and driven By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee! They shake with emotion, They dance in their mirth.   But where are ye?    The pine boughs are singing Old songs with new gladness, The billows and fountains Fresh music are flinging, Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea; The storms mock the mountains With the thunder of gladness.   But where are ye?   Ione. What charioteers are these? Panthea.                Where are their chariots?                Semichorus of Hours. The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth Have drawn back the figured curtain of sleep Which covered our being and darkened our birth In the deep. A Voice.       In the deep?       Semichorus II.              Oh, below the deep.              Semichorus I. An hundred ages we had been kept Cradled in visions of hate and care, And each one who waked as his brother slept, Found the truth Semichorus II.           Worse than his visions were!           Semichorus I. We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep; We have known the voice of Love in dreams; We have felt the wand of Power, and leap Semichorus II. As the billows leap in the morning beams! Chorus. Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze, Pierce with song heaven's silent light, Enchant the day that too swiftly flees, To check its flight ere the cave of Night. Once the hungry Hours were hounds Which chased the day like a bleeding deer, And it limped and stumbled with many wounds Through the nightly dells of the desert year. But now, oh weave the mystic measure Of music, and dance, and shapes of light, Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure, Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite. A Voice.                     Unite!                     Panthea. See, where the Spirits of the human mind Wrapped in sweet sounds, as in bright veils, approach. Chorus of Spirits. We join the throng Of the dance and the song, By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; As the flying-fish leap From the Indian deep, And mix with the sea-birds, half asleep. Chorus of Hours. Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet, For sandals of lightning are on your feet, And your wings are soft and swift as thought, And your eyes are as love which is veild not? Chorus of Spirits. We come from the mind Of human kind Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind, Now 'tis an ocean Of clear emotion, A heaven of serene and mighty motion From that deep abyss Of wonder and bliss, Whose caverns are crystal palaces; From those skiey towers Where Thought's crowned powers Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours! From the dim recesses Of woven caresses, Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses From the azure isles, Where sweet Wisdom smiles, Delaying your ships with her siren wiles. From the temples high Of Man's ear and eye, Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy; From the murmurings Of the unsealed springs Where Science bedews her Ddal wings. Years after years, Through blood, and tears, And a thick hell of hatreds, and hopes, and fears; We waded and flew, And the islets were few Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew. Our feet now, every palm, Are sandalled with calm, And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm; And, beyond our eyes, The human love lies Which makes all it gazes on Paradise. Chorus of Spirits and Hours. Then weave the web of the mystic measure; From the depths of the sky and the ends of the earth, Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure, Fill the dance and the music of mirth, As the waves of a thousand streams rush by To an ocean of splendour and harmony! Chorus of Spirits. Our spoil is won, Our task is done, We are free to dive, or soar, or run; Beyond and around, Or within the bound Which clips the world with darkness round. We'll pass the eyes Of the starry skies Into the hoar deep to colonize: Death, Chaos, and Night, From the sound of our flight, Shall flee, like mist from a tempest's might. And Earth, Air, and Light, And the Spirit of Might, Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight; And Love, Thought, and Breath, The powers that quell Death, Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath. And our singing shall build In the void's loose field A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield; We will take our plan From the new world of man, And our work shall be called the Promethean. Chorus of Hours. Break the dance, and scatter the song; Let some depart, and some remain. Semichorus I. We, beyond heaven, are driven along: Semichorus II. Us the enchantments of earth retain: Semichorus I. Ceaseless, and rapid, and fierce, and free, With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea, And a heaven where yet heaven could never be. Semichorus II. Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright, Leading the Day and outspeeding the Night, With the powers of a world of perfect light. Semichorus I. We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere, Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear From its chaos made calm by love, not fear. Semichorus II. We encircle the ocean and mountains of earth, And the happy forms of its death and birth Change to the music of our sweet mirth. Chorus of Hours and Spirits. Break the dance, and scatter the song, Let some depart, and some remain, Wherever we fly we lead along In leashes, like starbeams, soft yet strong, The clouds that are heavy with love's sweet rain. Panthea. Ha! they are gone! Ione.           Yet feel you no delight From the past sweetness? Panthea.              As the bare green hill When some soft cloud vanishes into rain, Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water To the unpavilioned sky! Ione.              Even whilst we speak New notes arise. What is that awful sound? Panthea. 'Tis the deep music of the rolling world Kindling within the strings of the waved air olian modulations. Ione.           Listen too, How every pause is filled with under-notes, Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones, Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul, As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air And gaze upon themselves within the sea. Panthea. But see where through two openings in the forest Which hanging branches overcanopy, And where two runnels of a rivulet, Between the close moss violet-inwoven, Have made their path of melody, like sisters Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles, Turning their dear disunion to an isle Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts; Two visions of strange radiance float upon The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound, Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet Under the ground and through the windless air. Ione. I see a chariot like that thinnest boat, In which the Mother of the Months is borne By ebbing light into her western cave, When she upsprings from interlunar dreams; O'er which is curved an orblike canopy Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods, Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil, Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass; Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold, Such as the genii of the thunderstorm Pile on the floor of the illumined sea When the sun rushes under it; they roll And move and grow as with an inward wind; Within it sits a wingd infant, white Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow, Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost, Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds Of its white robe, woof of ethereal pearl. Its hair is white, the brightness of white light Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are heavens Of liquid darkness, which the Deity Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured From jaggd clouds, out of their arrowy lashes, Tempering the cold and radiant air around, With fire that is not brightness; in its hand It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point A guiding power directs the chariot's prow Over its wheeld clouds, which as they roll Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds, Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew. Panthea. And from the other opening in the wood Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony, A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass Flow, as through empty space, music and light: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden, Sphere within sphere; and every space between Peopled with unimaginable shapes, Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep, Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl Over each other with a thousand motions, Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning, And with the force of self-destroying swiftness, Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on, Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, Intelligible words and music wild. With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist Of elemental subtlety, like light; And the wild odour of the forest flowers, The music of the living grass and air, The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed, Seem kneaded into one areal mass Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself, Pillowed upon its alabaster arms, Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil, On its own folded wings, and wavy hair, The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep, And you can see its little lips are moving, Amid the changing light of their own smiles, Like one who talks of what he loves in dream. Ione. 'Tis only mocking the orb's harmony. Panthea. And from a star upon its forehead, shoot, Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined, Embleming heaven and earth united now, Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought, Filling the abyss with sun-like lightenings, And perpendicular now, and now transverse, Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart; Infinite mines of adamant and gold, Valueless stones, and unimagined gems, And caverns on crystalline columns poised With vegetable silver overspread; Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed, Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythd chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! The wrecks beside of many a city vast, Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in gray annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown wingd things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jaggd alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried, 'Be not!' And like my words they were no more. The Earth. The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha! ha! the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind. The Moon. Brother mine, calm wanderer, Happy globe of land and air, Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee, Which penetrates my frozen frame, And passes with the warmth of flame, With love, and odour, and deep melody   Through me, through me!   The Earth. Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains, My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter. The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses, And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses, Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after. They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse, Who all our green and azure universe Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones, And splinter and knead down my children's bones, All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending, Until each crag-like tower, and storied column, Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire; My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom, Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire: How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all; And from beneath, around, within, above, Filling thy void annihilation, love Burst in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball. The Moon. The snow upon my lifeless mountains Is loosened into living fountains, My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine: A spirit from my heart bursts forth, It clothes with unexpected birth My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine   On mine, on mine!    Gazing on thee I feel, I know Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow, And living shapes upon my bosom move: Music is in the sea and air, Wingd clouds soar here and there, Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:   'Tis love, all love!   The Earth. It interpenetrates my granite mass, Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers; Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread, It wakes a life in the forgotten dead, They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being: With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever, Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing, Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error, This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love; Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even, Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move: Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left, Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; Then when it wanders home with rosy smile, Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored. Man, oh, not men! a chain of linkd thought, Of love and might to be divided not, Compelling the elements with adamantine stress; As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze, The unquiet republic of the maze Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness. Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be! His will, with all mean passions, bad delights, And selfish cares, its trembling satellites, A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey, Is as a tempest-wingd ship, whose helm Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway. All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass Of marble and of colour his dreams pass; Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear; Language is a perpetual Orphic song, Which rules with Ddal harmony a throng Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were. The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! The tempest is his steed, he strides the air; And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare, Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none. The Moon. The shadow of white death has passed From my path in heaven at last, A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep; And through my newly-woven bowers, Wander happy paramours, Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep   Thy vales more deep.   The Earth. As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold, And crystalline, till it becomes a wingd mist, And wanders up the vault of the blue day, Outlives the moon, and on the sun's last ray Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst. The Moon. Thou art folded, thou art lying In the light which is undying Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine; All suns and constellations shower On thee a light, a life, a power Which doth array thy sphere; thou pourest thine   On mine, on mine!   The Earth. I spin beneath my pyramid of night, Which points into the heavens dreaming delight, Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep; As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing, Under the shadow of his beauty lying, Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep. The Moon. As in the soft and sweet eclipse, When soul meets soul on lovers' lips, High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull; So when thy shadow falls on me, Then am I mute and still, by thee Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,   Full, oh, too full!    Thou art speeding round the sun Brightest world of many a one; Green and azure sphere which shinest With a light which is divinest Among all the lamps of Heaven To whom life and light is given; I, thy crystal paramour Borne beside thee by a power Like the polar Paradise, Magnet-like of lovers' eyes; I, a most enamoured maiden Whose weak brain is overladen With the pleasure of her love, Maniac-like around thee move Gazing, an insatiate bride, On thy form from every side Like a Mnad, round the cup Which Agave lifted up In the weird Cadman forest. Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest I must hurry, whirl and follow Through the heavens wide and hollow, Sheltered by the warm embrace Of thy soul from hungry space, Drinking from thy sense and sight Beauty, majesty, and might, As a lover or a chameleon Grows like what it looks upon, As a violet's gentle eye Gazes on the azure sky Until its hue grows like what it beholds, As a gray and watery mist Glows like solid amethyst Athwart the western mountain it enfolds, When the sunset sleeps   Upon its snow   The Earth.   And the weak day weeps    That it should be so. Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight Falls on me like thy clear and tender light Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night, Through isles for ever calm; Oh, gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce The caverns of my pride's deep universe, Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce Made wounds which need thy balm. Panthea. I rise as from a bath of sparkling water, A bath of azure light, among dark rocks, Out of the stream of sound. Ione.                Ah me! sweet sister, The stream of sound has ebbed away from us, And you pretend to rise out of its wave, Because your words fall like the clear, soft dew Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair. Panthea. Peace! peace! A mighty Power, which is as darkness, Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky Is showered like night, and from within the air Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up Into the pores of sunlight: the bright visions, Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone, Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night. Ione. There is a sense of words upon mine ear. Panthea. An universal sound like words: Oh, list! Demogorgon. Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul, Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll The love which paves thy path along the skies: The Earth. I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies. Demogorgon. Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth With wonder, as it gazes upon thee; Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony: The Moon. I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee! Demogorgon. Ye Kings of suns and stars, Dmons and Gods, Aetherial Dominations, who possess Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness: A Voice from above. Our great Republic hears, we are blest, and bless. Demogorgon. Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, Whether your nature is that universe Which once ye saw and suffered A Voice from beneath.                  Or as they Whom we have left, we change and pass away. Demogorgon. Ye elemental Genii, who have homes From man's high mind even to the central stone Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on: A confused Voice. We hear: thy words waken Oblivion. Demogorgon. Spirits, whose homes are flesh: ye beasts and birds, Ye worms, and fish; ye living leaves and buds; Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds, Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes: A Voice. Thy voice to us is wind among still woods. Demogorgon. Man, who wert once a despot and a slave; A dupe and a deceiver; a decay; A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day: All. Speak: thy strong words may never pass away. Demogorgon. This is the day, which down the void abysm At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism, And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep: Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings. Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled doom. To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. Composed at Este, Sept., Oct., 1818 (Act I); at Rome, March - April 6, 1819 (Acts II, III); at Florence, close of 1819 (Act IV). Published by C. and J. Ollier, London, summer of 1820. Note from Mrs. Shelley: 'On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. .....Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the law of the world. ....And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in their decay, or gaed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many passages in the Prometheus which show the intense delight he received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and he wrote from Rome, ''My Prometheus Unbound is just finished, and in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.''' ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound ,

720:Beowulf LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won! Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes, from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore, awing the earls. Since erst he lay friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him: for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve, till before him the folk, both far and near, who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate, gave him gifts: a good king he! To him an heir was afterward born, a son in his halls, whom heaven sent to favor the folk, feeling their woe that erst they had lacked an earl for leader so long a while; the Lord endowed him, the Wielder of Wonder, with world's renown. Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him, son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands. So becomes it a youth to quit him well with his father's friends, by fee and gift, that to aid him, aged, in after days, come warriors willing, should war draw nigh, liegemen loyal: by lauded deeds shall an earl have honor in every clan. Forth he fared at the fated moment, sturdy Scyld to the shelter of God. Then they bore him over to ocean's billow, loving clansmen, as late he charged them, while wielded words the winsome Scyld, the leader beloved who long had ruled…. In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel, ice-flecked, outbound, atheling's barge: there laid they down their darling lord on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings, by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure fetched from far was freighted with him. No ship have I known so nobly dight with weapons of war and weeds of battle, 47 with breastplate and blade: on his bosom lay a heaped hoard that hence should go far o'er the flood with him floating away. No less these loaded the lordly gifts, thanes' huge treasure, than those had done who in former time forth had sent him sole on the seas, a suckling child. High o'er his head they hoist the standard, a gold-wove banner; let billows take him, gave him to ocean. Grave were their spirits, mournful their mood. No man is able to say in sooth, no son of the halls, no hero 'neath heaven, - who harbored that freight! Now Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings, leader beloved, and long he ruled in fame with all folk, since his father had gone away from the world, till awoke an heir, haughty Healfdene, who held through life, sage and sturdy, the Scyldings glad. Then, one after one, there woke to him, to the chieftain of clansmen, children four: Heorogar, then Hrothgar, then Halga brave; and I heard that - was -'s queen, the Heathoscylfing's helpmate dear. To Hrothgar was given such glory of war, such honor of combat, that all his kin obeyed him gladly till great grew his band of youthful comrades. It came in his mind to bid his henchmen a hall uprear, a master mead-house, mightier far than ever was seen by the sons of earth, and within it, then, to old and young he would all allot that the Lord had sent him, save only the land and the lives of his men. Wide, I heard, was the work commanded, for many a tribe this mid-earth round, to fashion the folkstead. It fell, as he ordered, in rapid achievement that ready it stood there, of halls the noblest: Heorot [1] he named it whose message had might in many a land. 48 Not reckless of promise, the rings he dealt, treasure at banquet: there towered the hall, high, gabled wide, the hot surge waiting of furious flame. [2] Nor far was that day when father and son-in-law stood in feud for warfare and hatred that woke again. With envy and anger an evil spirit endured the dole in his dark abode, that he heard each day the din of revel high in the hall: there harps rang out, clear song of the singer. He sang who knew tales of the early time of man, how the Almighty made the earth, fairest fields enfolded by water, set, triumphant, sun and moon for a light to lighten the land-dwellers, and braided bright the breast of earth with limbs and leaves, made life for all of mortal beings that breathe and move. So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever [5] mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, [6] and far was he driven, for the slaughter's sake, from sight of men. Of Cain awoke all that woful breed, Etins [7] and elves and evil-spirits, as well as the giants that warred with God weary while: but their wage was paid them! II WENT he forth to find at fall of night that haughty house, and heed wherever the Ring-Danes, outrevelled, to rest had gone. Found within it the atheling band asleep after feasting and fearless of sorrow, 49 of human hardship. Unhallowed wight, grim and greedy, he grasped betimes, wrathful, reckless, from resting-places, thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward, laden with slaughter, his lair to seek. Then at the dawning, as day was breaking, the might of Grendel to men was known; then after wassail was wail uplifted, loud moan in the morn. The mighty chief, atheling excellent, unblithe sat, labored in woe for the loss of his thanes, when once had been traced the trail of the fiend, spirit accurst: too cruel that sorrow, too long, too loathsome. Not late the respite; with night returning, anew began ruthless murder; he recked no whit, firm in his guilt, of the feud and crime. They were easy to find who elsewhere sought in room remote their rest at night, bed in the bowers, [1] when that bale was shown, was seen in sooth, with surest token, the hall-thane's [2] hate. Such held themselves far and fast who the fiend outran! Thus ruled unrighteous and raged his fill one against all; until empty stood that lordly building, and long it bode so. Twelve years' tide the trouble he bore, sovran of Scyldings, sorrows in plenty, boundless cares. There came unhidden tidings true to the tribes of men, in sorrowful songs, how ceaselessly Grendel harassed Hrothgar, what hate he bore him, what murder and massacre, many a year, feud unfading, - refused consent to deal with any of Daneland's earls, make pact of peace, or compound for gold: still less did the wise men ween to get great fee for the feud from his fiendish hands. But the evil one ambushed old and young death-shadow dark, and dogged them still, lured, or lurked in the livelong night 50 of misty moorlands: men may say not where the haunts of these Hell-Runes be. Such heaping of horrors the hater of men, lonely roamer, wrought unceasing, harassings heavy. O'er Heorot he lorded, gold-bright hall, in gloomy nights; and ne'er could the prince [4] approach his throne, - 'twas judgment of God, - or have joy in his hall. Sore was the sorrow to Scyldings'-friend, heart-rending misery. Many nobles sat assembled, and searched out counsel how it were best for bold-hearted men against harassing terror to try their hand. Whiles they vowed in their heathen fanes altar-offerings, asked with words [5] that the slayer-of-souls would succor give them for the pain of their people. Their practice this, their heathen hope; 'twas Hell they thought of in mood of their mind. Almighty they knew not, Doomsman of Deeds and dreadful Lord, nor Heaven's-Helmet heeded they ever, Wielder-of-Wonder. - Woe for that man who in harm and hatred hales his soul to fiery embraces; - nor favor nor change awaits he ever. But well for him that after death-day may draw to his Lord, and friendship find in the Father's arms! III THUS seethed unceasing the son of Healfdene with the woe of these days; not wisest men assuaged his sorrow; too sore the anguish, loathly and long, that lay on his folk, most baneful of burdens and bales of the night. This heard in his home Hygelac's thane, great among Geats, of Grendel's doings. He was the mightiest man of valor in that same day of this our life, stalwart and stately. A stout wave-walker he bade make ready. Yon battle-king, said he, far o'er the swan-road he fain would seek, the noble monarch who needed men! 51 The prince's journey by prudent folk was little blamed, though they loved him dear; they whetted the hero, and hailed good omens. And now the bold one from bands of Geats comrades chose, the keenest of warriors e'er he could find; with fourteen men the sea-wood [1] he sought, and, sailor proved, led them on to the land's confines. Time had now flown; [2] afloat was the ship, boat under bluff. On board they climbed, warriors ready; waves were churning sea with sand; the sailors bore on the breast of the bark their bright array, their mail and weapons: the men pushed off, on its willing way, the well-braced craft. Then moved o'er the waters by might of the wind that bark like a bird with breast of foam, till in season due, on the second day, the curved prow such course had run that sailors now could see the land, sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills, headlands broad. Their haven was found, their journey ended. Up then quickly the Weders' [3] clansmen climbed ashore, anchored their sea-wood, with armor clashing and gear of battle: God they thanked for passing in peace o'er the paths of the sea. Now saw from the cliff a Scylding clansman, a warden that watched the water-side, how they bore o'er the gangway glittering shields, war-gear in readiness; wonder seized him to know what manner of men they were. Straight to the strand his steed he rode, Hrothgar's henchman; with hand of might he shook his spear, and spake in parley. 'Who are ye, then, ye armed men, mailed folk, that yon mighty vessel have urged thus over the ocean ways, here o'er the waters? A warden I, sentinel set o'er the sea-march here, lest any foe to the folk of Danes with harrying fleet should harm the land. 52 No aliens ever at ease thus bore them, linden-wielders: [4] yet word-of-leave clearly ye lack from clansmen here, my folk's agreement. - A greater ne'er saw I of warriors in world than is one of you, yon hero in harness! No henchman he worthied by weapons, if witness his features, his peerless presence! I pray you, though, tell your folk and home, lest hence ye fare suspect to wander your way as spies in Danish land. Now, dwellers afar, ocean-travellers, take from me simple advice: the sooner the better I hear of the country whence ye came.' IV To him the stateliest spake in answer; the warriors' leader his word-hoard unlocked:'We are by kin of the clan of Geats, and Hygelac's own hearth-fellows we. To folk afar was my father known, noble atheling, Ecgtheow named. Full of winters, he fared away aged from earth; he is honored still through width of the world by wise men all. To thy lord and liege in loyal mood we hasten hither, to Healfdene's son, people-protector: be pleased to advise us! To that mighty-one come we on mickle errand, to the lord of the Danes; nor deem I right that aught be hidden. We hear - thou knowest if sooth it is - the saying of men, that amid the Scyldings a scathing monster, dark ill-doer, in dusky nights shows terrific his rage unmatched, hatred and murder. To Hrothgar I in greatness of soul would succor bring, so the Wise-and-Brave [1] may worst his foes, if ever the end of ills is fated, of cruel contest, if cure shall follow, and the boiling care-waves cooler grow; else ever afterward anguish-days 53 he shall suffer in sorrow while stands in place high on its hill that house unpeered!' Astride his steed, the strand-ward answered, clansman unquailing: 'The keen-souled thane must be skilled to sever and sunder duly words and works, if he well intends. I gather, this band is graciously bent to the Scyldings' master. March, then, bearing weapons and weeds the way I show you. I will bid my men your boat meanwhile to guard for fear lest foemen come, your new-tarred ship by shore of ocean faithfully watching till once again it waft o'er the waters those well-loved thanes, - winding-neck'd wood, - to Weders' bounds, heroes such as the hest of fate shall succor and save from the shock of war.' They bent them to march, - the boat lay still, fettered by cable and fast at anchor, broad-bosomed ship. - Then shone the boars over the cheek-guard; chased with gold, keen and gleaming, guard it kept o'er the man of war, as marched along heroes in haste, till the hall they saw, broad of gable and bright with gold: that was the fairest, 'mid folk of earth, of houses 'neath heaven, where Hrothgar lived, and the gleam of it lightened o'er lands afar. The sturdy shieldsman showed that bright burg-of-the-boldest; bade them go straightway thither; his steed then turned, hardy hero, and hailed them thus:'Tis time that I fare from you. Father Almighty in grace and mercy guard you well, safe in your seekings. Seaward I go, 'gainst hostile warriors hold my watch.' STONE-BRIGHT the street: it showed the way to the crowd of clansmen. Corselets glistened hand-forged, hard; on their harness bright the steel ring sang, as they strode along 54 in mail of battle, and marched to the hall. There, weary of ocean, the wall along they set their bucklers, their broad shields, down, and bowed them to bench: the breastplates clanged, war-gear of men; their weapons stacked, spears of the seafarers stood together, gray-tipped ash: that iron band was worthily weaponed! - A warrior proud asked of the heroes their home and kin. 'Whence, now, bear ye burnished shields, harness gray and helmets grim, spears in multitude? Messenger, I, Hrothgar's herald! Heroes so many ne'er met I as strangers of mood so strong. 'Tis plain that for prowess, not plunged into exile, for high-hearted valor, Hrothgar ye seek!' Him the sturdy-in-war bespake with words, proud earl of the Weders answer made, hardy 'neath helmet:-'Hygelac's, we, fellows at board; I am Beowulf named. I am seeking to say to the son of Healfdene this mission of mine, to thy master-lord, the doughty prince, if he deign at all grace that we greet him, the good one, now.' Wulfgar spake, the Wendles' chieftain, whose might of mind to many was known, his courage and counsel: 'The king of Danes, the Scyldings' friend, I fain will tell, the Breaker-of-Rings, as the boon thou askest, the famed prince, of thy faring hither, and, swiftly after, such answer bring as the doughty monarch may deign to give.' Hied then in haste to where Hrothgar sat white-haired and old, his earls about him, till the stout thane stood at the shoulder there of the Danish king: good courtier he! Wulfgar spake to his winsome lord:'Hither have fared to thee far-come men o'er the paths of ocean, people of Geatland; and the stateliest there by his sturdy band is Beowulf named. This boon they seek, that they, my master, may with thee 55 have speech at will: nor spurn their prayer to give them hearing, gracious Hrothgar! In weeds of the warrior worthy they, methinks, of our liking; their leader most surely, a hero that hither his henchmen has led.' VI HROTHGAR answered, helmet of Scyldings:'I knew him of yore in his youthful days; his aged father was Ecgtheow named, to whom, at home, gave Hrethel the Geat his only daughter. Their offspring bold fares hither to seek the steadfast friend. And seamen, too, have said me this, who carried my gifts to the Geatish court, thither for thanks, - he has thirty men's heft of grasp in the gripe of his hand, the bold-in-battle. Blessed God out of his mercy this man hath sent to Danes of the West, as I ween indeed, against horror of Grendel. I hope to give the good youth gold for his gallant thought. Be thou in haste, and bid them hither, clan of kinsmen, to come before me; and add this word, - they are welcome guests to folk of the Danes.' [To the door of the hall Wulfgar went] and the word declared:'To you this message my master sends, East-Danes' king, that your kin he knows, hardy heroes, and hails you all welcome hither o'er waves of the sea! Ye may wend your way in war-attire, and under helmets Hrothgar greet; but let here the battle-shields bide your parley, and wooden war-shafts wait its end.' Uprose the mighty one, ringed with his men, brave band of thanes: some bode without, battle-gear guarding, as bade the chief. Then hied that troop where the herald led them, under Heorot's roof: [the hero strode,] hardy 'neath helm, till the hearth he neared. 56 Beowulf spake, - his breastplate gleamed, war-net woven by wit of the smith:'Thou Hrothgar, hail! Hygelac's I, kinsman and follower. Fame a plenty have I gained in youth! These Grendel-deeds I heard in my home-land heralded clear. Seafarers say how stands this hall, of buildings best, for your band of thanes empty and idle, when evening sun in the harbor of heaven is hidden away. So my vassals advised me well, brave and wise, the best of men, O sovran Hrothgar, to seek thee here, for my nerve and my might they knew full well. Themselves had seen me from slaughter come blood-flecked from foes, where five I bound, and that wild brood worsted. I' the waves I slew nicors [1] by night, in need and peril avenging the Weders, [2] whose woe they sought, crushing the grim ones. Grendel now, monster cruel, be mine to quell in single battle! So, from thee, thou sovran of the Shining-Danes, Scyldings'-bulwark, a boon I seek, and, Friend-of-the-folk, refuse it not, O Warriors'-shield, now I've wandered far, that I alone with my liegemen here, this hardy band, may Heorot purge! More I hear, that the monster dire, in his wanton mood, of weapons recks not; hence shall I scorn - so Hygelac stay, king of my kindred, kind to me! brand or buckler to bear in the fight, gold-colored targe: but with gripe alone must I front the fiend and fight for life, foe against foe. Then faith be his in the doom of the Lord whom death shall take. Fain, I ween, if the fight he win, in this hall of gold my Geatish band will he fearless eat, - as oft before, my noblest thanes. Nor need'st thou then to hide my head; [3] for his shall I be, 57 dyed in gore, if death must take me; and my blood-covered body he'll bear as prey, ruthless devour it, the roamer-lonely, with my life-blood redden his lair in the fen: no further for me need'st food prepare! To Hygelac send, if Hild [4] should take me, best of war-weeds, warding my breast, armor excellent, heirloom of Hrethel and work of Wayland. [5] Fares Wyrd as she must.' VII HROTHGAR spake, the Scyldings'-helmet:'For fight defensive, Friend my Beowulf, to succor and save, thou hast sought us here. Thy father's combat [1] a feud enkindled when Heatholaf with hand he slew among the Wylfings; his Weder kin for horror of fighting feared to hold him. Fleeing, he sought our South-Dane folk, over surge of ocean the Honor-Scyldings, when first I was ruling the folk of Danes, wielded, youthful, this widespread realm, this hoard-hold of heroes. Heorogar was dead, my elder brother, had breathed his last, Healfdene's bairn: he was better than I! Straightway the feud with fee [2] I settled, to the Wylfings sent, o'er watery ridges, treasures olden: oaths he [3] swore me. Sore is my soul to say to any of the race of man what ruth for me in Heorot Grendel with hate hath wrought, what sudden harryings. Hall-folk fail me, my warriors wane; for Wyrd hath swept them into Grendel's grasp. But God is able this deadly foe from his deeds to turn! Boasted full oft, as my beer they drank, earls o'er the ale-cup, armed men, that they would bide in the beer-hall here, Grendel's attack with terror of blades. Then was this mead-house at morning tide dyed with gore, when the daylight broke, all the boards of the benches blood-besprinkled, 58 gory the hall: I had heroes the less, doughty dear-ones that death had reft. - But sit to the banquet, unbind thy words, hardy hero, as heart shall prompt thee.' Gathered together, the Geatish men in the banquet-hall on bench assigned, sturdy-spirited, sat them down, hardy-hearted. A henchman attended, carried the carven cup in hand, served the clear mead. Oft minstrels sang blithe in Heorot. Heroes revelled, no dearth of warriors, Weder and Dane. VIII UNFERTH spake, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the Scyldings' lord, unbound the battle-runes. - Beowulf's quest, sturdy seafarer's, sorely galled him; ever he envied that other men should more achieve in middle-earth of fame under heaven than he himself. 'Art thou that Beowulf, Breca's rival, who emulous swam on the open sea, when for pride the pair of you proved the floods, and wantonly dared in waters deep to risk your lives? No living man, or lief or loath, from your labor dire could you dissuade, from swimming the main. Ocean-tides with your arms ye covered, with strenuous hands the sea-streets measured, swam o'er the waters. Winter's storm rolled the rough waves. In realm of sea a sennight strove ye. In swimming he topped thee, had more of main! Him at morning-tide billows bore to the Battling Reamas, whence he hied to his home so dear beloved of his liegemen, to land of Brondings, fastness fair, where his folk he ruled, town and treasure. In triumph o'er thee Beanstan's bairn [2] his boast achieved. So ween I for thee a worse adventure - though in buffet of battle thou brave hast been, 59 in struggle grim, - if Grendel's approach thou darst await through the watch of night!' Beowulf spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'What a deal hast uttered, dear my Unferth, drunken with beer, of Breca now, told of his triumph! Truth I claim it, that I had more of might in the sea than any man else, more ocean-endurance. We twain had talked, in time of youth, and made our boast, - we were merely boys, striplings still, - to stake our lives far at sea: and so we performed it. Naked swords, as we swam along, we held in hand, with hope to guard us against the whales. Not a whit from me could he float afar o'er the flood of waves, haste o'er the billows; nor him I abandoned. Together we twain on the tides abode five nights full till the flood divided us, churning waves and chillest weather, darkling night, and the northern wind ruthless rushed on us: rough was the surge. Now the wrath of the sea-fish rose apace; yet me 'gainst the monsters my mailed coat, hard and hand-linked, help afforded, battle-sark braided my breast to ward, garnished with gold. There grasped me firm and haled me to bottom the hated foe, with grimmest gripe. 'Twas granted me, though, to pierce the monster with point of sword, with blade of battle: huge beast of the sea was whelmed by the hurly through hand of mine. IX ME thus often the evil monsters thronging threatened. With thrust of my sword, the darling, I dealt them due return! Nowise had they bliss from their booty then to devour their victim, vengeful creatures, seated to banquet at bottom of sea; but at break of day, by my brand sore hurt, on the edge of ocean up they lay, 60 put to sleep by the sword. And since, by them on the fathomless sea-ways sailor-folk are never molested. - Light from east, came bright God's beacon; the billows sank, so that I saw the sea-cliffs high, windy walls. For Wyrd oft saveth earl undoomed if he doughty be! And so it came that I killed with my sword nine of the nicors. Of night-fought battles ne'er heard I a harder 'neath heaven's dome, nor adrift on the deep a more desolate man! Yet I came unharmed from that hostile clutch, though spent with swimming. The sea upbore me, flood of the tide, on Finnish land, the welling waters. No wise of thee have I heard men tell such terror of falchions, bitter battle. Breca ne'er yet, not one of you pair, in the play of war such daring deed has done at all with bloody brand, - I boast not of it! though thou wast the bane [1] of thy brethren dear, thy closest kin, whence curse of hell awaits thee, well as thy wit may serve! For I say in sooth, thou son of Ecglaf, never had Grendel these grim deeds wrought, monster dire, on thy master dear, in Heorot such havoc, if heart of thine were as battle-bold as thy boast is loud! But he has found no feud will happen; from sword-clash dread of your Danish clan he vaunts him safe, from the Victor-Scyldings. He forces pledges, favors none of the land of Danes, but lustily murders, fights and feasts, nor feud he dreads from Spear-Dane men. But speedily now shall I prove him the prowess and pride of the Geats, shall bid him battle. Blithe to mead go he that listeth, when light of dawn this morrow morning o'er men of earth, ether-robed sun from the south shall beam!' Joyous then was the Jewel-giver, hoar-haired, war-brave; help awaited 61 the Bright-Danes' prince, from Beowulf hearing, folk's good shepherd, such firm resolve. Then was laughter of liegemen loud resounding with winsome words. Came Wealhtheow forth, queen of Hrothgar, heedful of courtesy, gold-decked, greeting the guests in hall; and the high-born lady handed the cup first to the East-Danes' heir and warden, bade him be blithe at the beer-carouse, the land's beloved one. Lustily took he banquet and beaker, battle-famed king. Through the hall then went the Helmings' Lady, to younger and older everywhere carried the cup, till come the moment when the ring-graced queen, the royal-hearted, to Beowulf bore the beaker of mead. She greeted the Geats' lord, God she thanked, in wisdom's words, that her will was granted, that at last on a hero her hope could lean for comfort in terrors. The cup he took, hardy-in-war, from Wealhtheow's hand, and answer uttered the eager-for-combat. Beowulf spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'This was my thought, when my thanes and I bent to the ocean and entered our boat, that I would work the will of your people fully, or fighting fall in death, in fiend's gripe fast. I am firm to do an earl's brave deed, or end the days of this life of mine in the mead-hall here.' Well these words to the woman seemed, Beowulf's battle-boast. - Bright with gold the stately dame by her spouse sat down. Again, as erst, began in hall warriors' wassail and words of power, the proud-band's revel, till presently the son of Healfdene hastened to seek rest for the night; he knew there waited fight for the fiend in that festal hall, when the sheen of the sun they saw no more, and dusk of night sank darkling nigh, and shadowy shapes came striding on, 62 wan under welkin. The warriors rose. Man to man, he made harangue, Hrothgar to Beowulf, bade him hail, let him wield the wine hall: a word he added:'Never to any man erst I trusted, since I could heave up hand and shield, this noble Dane-Hall, till now to thee. Have now and hold this house unpeered; remember thy glory; thy might declare; watch for the foe! No wish shall fail thee if thou bidest the battle with bold-won life.' THEN Hrothgar went with his hero-train, defence-of-Scyldings, forth from hall; fain would the war-lord Wealhtheow seek, couch of his queen. The King-of-Glory against this Grendel a guard had set, so heroes heard, a hall-defender, who warded the monarch and watched for the monster. In truth, the Geats' prince gladly trusted his mettle, his might, the mercy of God! Cast off then his corselet of iron, helmet from head; to his henchman gave, choicest of weapons, - the well-chased sword, bidding him guard the gear of battle. Spake then his Vaunt the valiant man, Beowulf Geat, ere the bed be sought:'Of force in fight no feebler I count me, in grim war-deeds, than Grendel deems him. Not with the sword, then, to sleep of death his life will I give, though it lie in my power. No skill is his to strike against me, my shield to hew though he hardy be, bold in battle; we both, this night, shall spurn the sword, if he seek me here, unweaponed, for war. Let wisest God, sacred Lord, on which side soever doom decree as he deemeth right.' Reclined then the chieftain, and cheek-pillows held the head of the earl, while all about him seamen hardy on hall-beds sank. 63 None of them thought that thence their steps to the folk and fastness that fostered them, to the land they loved, would lead them back! Full well they wist that on warriors many battle-death seized, in the banquet-hall, of Danish clan. But comfort and help, war-weal weaving, to Weder folk the Master gave, that, by might of one, over their enemy all prevailed, by single strength. In sooth 'tis told that highest God o'er human kind hath wielded ever! - Thro' wan night striding, came the walker-in-shadow. Warriors slept whose hest was to guard the gabled hall, all save one. 'Twas widely known that against God's will the ghostly ravager him [1] could not hurl to haunts of darkness; wakeful, ready, with warrior's wrath, bold he bided the battle's issue. XI THEN from the moorland, by misty crags, with God's wrath laden, Grendel came. The monster was minded of mankind now sundry to seize in the stately house. Under welkin he walked, till the wine-palace there, gold-hall of men, he gladly discerned, flashing with fretwork. Not first time, this, that he the home of Hrothgar sought, yet ne'er in his life-day, late or early, such hardy heroes, such hall-thanes, found! To the house the warrior walked apace, parted from peace; [1] the portal opended, though with forged bolts fast, when his fists had struck it, and baleful he burst in his blatant rage, the house's mouth. All hastily, then, o'er fair-paved floor the fiend trod on, ireful he strode; there streamed from his eyes fearful flashes, like flame to see. He spied in hall the hero-band, kin and clansmen clustered asleep, 64 hardy liegemen. Then laughed his heart; for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn, savage, to sever the soul of each, life from body, since lusty banquet waited his will! But Wyrd forbade him to seize any more of men on earth after that evening. Eagerly watched Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe, how he would fare in fell attack. Not that the monster was minded to pause! Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder, the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams, swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus the lifeless corse was clear devoured, e'en feet and hands. Then farther he hied; for the hardy hero with hand he grasped, felt for the foe with fiendish claw, for the hero reclining, - who clutched it boldly, prompt to answer, propped on his arm. Soon then saw that shepherd-of-evils that never he met in this middle-world, in the ways of earth, another wight with heavier hand-gripe; at heart he feared, sorrowed in soul, - none the sooner escaped! Fain would he flee, his fastness seek, the den of devils: no doings now such as oft he had done in days of old! Then bethought him the hardy Hygelac-thane of his boast at evening: up he bounded, grasped firm his foe, whose fingers cracked. The fiend made off, but the earl close followed. The monster meant - if he might at all to fling himself free, and far away fly to the fens, - knew his fingers' power in the gripe of the grim one. Gruesome march to Heorot this monster of harm had made! Din filled the room; the Danes were bereft, castle-dwellers and clansmen all, earls, of their ale. Angry were both those savage hall-guards: the house resounded. Wonder it was the wine-hall firm 65 in the strain of their struggle stood, to earth the fair house fell not; too fast it was within and without by its iron bands craftily clamped; though there crashed from sill many a mead-bench - men have told me gay with gold, where the grim foes wrestled. So well had weened the wisest Scyldings that not ever at all might any man that bone-decked, brave house break asunder, crush by craft, - unless clasp of fire in smoke engulfed it. - Again uprose din redoubled. Danes of the North with fear and frenzy were filled, each one, who from the wall that wailing heard, God's foe sounding his grisly song, cry of the conquered, clamorous pain from captive of hell. Too closely held him he who of men in might was strongest in that same day of this our life. XII NOT in any wise would the earls'-defence [1] suffer that slaughterous stranger to live, useless deeming his days and years to men on earth. Now many an earl of Beowulf brandished blade ancestral, fain the life of their lord to shield, their praised prince, if power were theirs; never they knew, - as they neared the foe, hardy-hearted heroes of war, aiming their swords on every side the accursed to kill, - no keenest blade, no farest of falchions fashioned on earth, could harm or hurt that hideous fiend! He was safe, by his spells, from sword of battle, from edge of iron. Yet his end and parting on that same day of this our life woful should be, and his wandering soul far off flit to the fiends' domain. Soon he found, who in former days, harmful in heart and hated of God, on many a man such murder wrought, 66 that the frame of his body failed him now. For him the keen-souled kinsman of Hygelac held in hand; hateful alive was each to other. The outlaw dire took mortal hurt; a mighty wound showed on his shoulder, and sinews cracked, and the bone-frame burst. To Beowulf now the glory was given, and Grendel thence death-sick his den in the dark moor sought, noisome abode: he knew too well that here was the last of life, an end of his days on earth. - To all the Danes by that bloody battle the boon had come. From ravage had rescued the roving stranger Hrothgar's hall; the hardy and wise one had purged it anew. His night-work pleased him, his deed and its honor. To Eastern Danes had the valiant Geat his vaunt made good, all their sorrow and ills assuaged, their bale of battle borne so long, and all the dole they erst endured pain a-plenty. - 'Twas proof of this, when the hardy-in-fight a hand laid down, arm and shoulder, - all, indeed, of Grendel's gripe, - 'neath the gabled roof· XIII MANY at morning, as men have told me, warriors gathered the gift-hall round, folk-leaders faring from far and near, o'er wide-stretched ways, the wonder to view, trace of the traitor. Not troublous seemed the enemy's end to any man who saw by the gait of the graceless foe how the weary-hearted, away from thence, baffled in battle and banned, his steps death-marked dragged to the devils' mere. Bloody the billows were boiling there, turbid the tide of tumbling waves horribly seething, with sword-blood hot, by that doomed one dyed, who in den of the moor laid forlorn his life adown, 67 his heathen soul,-and hell received it. Home then rode the hoary clansmen from that merry journey, and many a youth, on horses white, the hardy warriors, back from the mere. Then Beowulf's glory eager they echoed, and all averred that from sea to sea, or south or north, there was no other in earth's domain, under vault of heaven, more valiant found, of warriors none more worthy to rule! (On their lord beloved they laid no slight, gracious Hrothgar: a good king he!) From time to time, the tried-in-battle their gray steeds set to gallop amain, and ran a race when the road seemed fair. From time to time, a thane of the king, who had made many vaunts, and was mindful of verses, stored with sagas and songs of old, bound word to word in well-knit rime, welded his lay; this warrior soon of Beowulf's quest right cleverly sang, and artfully added an excellent tale, in well-ranged words, of the warlike deeds he had heard in saga of Sigemund. Strange the story: he said it all, the Waelsing's wanderings wide, his struggles, which never were told to tribes of men, the feuds and the frauds, save to Fitela only, when of these doings he deigned to speak, uncle to nephew; as ever the twain stood side by side in stress of war, and multitude of the monster kind they had felled with their swords. Of Sigemund grew, when he passed from life, no little praise; for the doughty-in-combat a dragon killed that herded the hoard: [1] under hoary rock the atheling dared the deed alone fearful quest, nor was Fitela there. Yet so it befell, his falchion pierced that wondrous worm, - on the wall it struck, best blade; the dragon died in its blood. 68 Thus had the dread-one by daring achieved over the ring-hoard to rule at will, himself to pleasure; a sea-boat he loaded, and bore on its bosom the beaming gold, son of Waels; the worm was consumed. He had of all heroes the highest renown among races of men, this refuge-of-warriors, for deeds of daring that decked his name since the hand and heart of Heremod grew slack in battle. He, swiftly banished to mingle with monsters at mercy of foes, to death was betrayed; for torrents of sorrow had lamed him too long; a load of care to earls and athelings all he proved. Oft indeed, in earlier days, for the warrior's wayfaring wise men mourned, who had hoped of him help from harm and bale, and had thought their sovran's son would thrive, follow his father, his folk protect, the hoard and the stronghold, heroes' land, home of Scyldings. - But here, thanes said, the kinsman of Hygelac kinder seemed to all: the other [2] was urged to crime! And afresh to the race, [3] the fallow roads by swift steeds measured! The morning sun was climbing higher. Clansmen hastened to the high-built hall, those hardy-minded, the wonder to witness. Warden of treasure, crowned with glory, the king himself, with stately band from the bride-bower strode; and with him the queen and her crowd of maidens measured the path to the mead-house fair. XIV HROTHGAR spake, - to the hall he went, stood by the steps, the steep roof saw, garnished with gold, and Grendel's hand:'For the sight I see to the Sovran Ruler be speedy thanks! A throng of sorrows I have borne from Grendel; but God still works wonder on wonder, the Warden-of-Glory. It was but now that I never more 69 for woes that weighed on me waited help long as I lived, when, laved in blood, stood sword-gore-stained this stateliest house, widespread woe for wise men all, who had no hope to hinder ever foes infernal and fiendish sprites from havoc in hall. This hero now, by the Wielder's might, a work has done that not all of us erst could ever do by wile and wisdom. Lo, well can she say whoso of women this warrior bore among sons of men, if still she liveth, that the God of the ages was good to her in the birth of her bairn. Now, Beowulf, thee, of heroes best, I shall heartily love as mine own, my son; preserve thou ever this kinship new: thou shalt never lack wealth of the world that I wield as mine! Full oft for less have I largess showered, my precious hoard, on a punier man, less stout in struggle. Thyself hast now fulfilled such deeds, that thy fame shall endure through all the ages. As ever he did, well may the Wielder reward thee still!' Beowulf spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'This work of war most willingly we have fought, this fight, and fearlessly dared force of the foe. Fain, too, were I hadst thou but seen himself, what time the fiend in his trappings tottered to fall! Swiftly, I thought, in strongest gripe on his bed of death to bind him down, that he in the hent of this hand of mine should breathe his last: but he broke away. Him I might not - the Maker willed not hinder from flight, and firm enough hold the life-destroyer: too sturdy was he, the ruthless, in running! For rescue, however, he left behind him his hand in pledge, arm and shoulder; nor aught of help could the cursed one thus procure at all. None the longer liveth he, loathsome fiend, 70 sunk in his sins, but sorrow holds him tightly grasped in gripe of anguish, in baleful bonds, where bide he must, evil outlaw, such awful doom as the Mighty Maker shall mete him out.' More silent seemed the son of Ecglaf [1] in boastful speech of his battle-deeds, since athelings all, through the earl's great prowess, beheld that hand, on the high roof gazing, foeman's fingers, - the forepart of each of the sturdy nails to steel was likest, heathen's 'hand-spear,' hostile warrior's claw uncanny. 'Twas clear, they said, that him no blade of the brave could touch, how keen soever, or cut away that battle-hand bloody from baneful foe. XV THERE was hurry and hest in Heorot now for hands to bedeck it, and dense was the throng of men and women the wine-hall to cleanse, the guest-room to garnish. Gold-gay shone the hangings that were wove on the wall, and wonders many to delight each mortal that looks upon them. Though braced within by iron bands, that building bright was broken sorely; [1] rent were its hinges; the roof alone held safe and sound, when, seared with crime, the fiendish foe his flight essayed, of life despairing. - No light thing that, the flight for safety, - essay it who will! Forced of fate, he shall find his way to the refuge ready for race of man, for soul-possessors, and sons of earth; and there his body on bed of death shall rest after revel. Arrived was the hour when to hall proceeded Healfdene's son: the king himself would sit to banquet. Ne'er heard I of host in haughtier throng more graciously gathered round giver-of-rings! Bowed then to bench those bearers-of-glory, 71 fain of the feasting. Featly received many a mead-cup the mighty-in-spirit, kinsmen who sat in the sumptuous hall, Hrothgar and Hrothulf. Heorot now was filled with friends; the folk of Scyldings ne'er yet had tried the traitor's deed. To Beowulf gave the bairn of Healfdene a gold-wove banner, guerdon of triumph, broidered battle-flag, breastplate and helmet; and a splendid sword was seen of many borne to the brave one. Beowulf took cup in hall: for such costly gifts he suffered no shame in that soldier throng. For I heard of few heroes, in heartier mood, with four such gifts, so fashioned with gold, on the ale-bench honoring others thus! O'er the roof of the helmet high, a ridge, wound with wires, kept ward o'er the head, lest the relict-of-files should fierce invade, sharp in the strife, when that shielded hero should go to grapple against his foes. Then the earls'-defence on the floor bade lead coursers eight, with carven head-gear, adown the hall: one horse was decked with a saddle all shining and set in jewels; 'twas the battle-seat of the best of kings, when to play of swords the son of Healfdene was fain to fare. Ne'er failed his valor in the crush of combat when corpses fell. To Beowulf over them both then gave the refuge-of-Ingwines right and power, o'er war-steeds and weapons: wished him joy of them. Manfully thus the mighty prince, hoard-guard for heroes, that hard fight repaid with steeds and treasures contemned by none who is willing to say the sooth aright. XVI AND the lord of earls, to each that came with Beowulf over the briny ways, an heirloom there at the ale-bench gave, precious gift; and the price [] bade pay 72 in gold for him whom Grendel erst murdered, - and fain of them more had killed, had not wisest God their Wyrd averted, and the man's brave mood. The Maker then ruled human kind, as here and now. Therefore is insight always best, and forethought of mind. How much awaits him of lief and of loath, who long time here, through days of warfare this world endures! Then song and music mingled sounds in the presence of Healfdene's head-of-armies and harping was heard with the hero-lay as Hrothgar's singer the hall-joy woke along the mead-seats, making his song of that sudden raid on the sons of Finn. Healfdene's hero, Hnaef the Scylding, was fated to fall in the Frisian slaughter. Hildeburh needed not hold in value her enemies' honor! [6] Innocent both were the loved ones she lost at the linden-play, bairn and brother, they bowed to fate, stricken by spears; 'twas a sorrowful woman! None doubted why the daughter of Hoc bewailed her doom when dawning came, and under the sky she saw them lying, kinsmen murdered, where most she had kenned of the sweets of the world! By war were swept, too, Finn's own liegemen, and few were left; in the parleying-place he could ply no longer weapon, nor war could he wage on Hengest, and rescue his remnant by right of arms from the prince's thane. A pact he offered: another dwelling the Danes should have, hall and high-seat, and half the power should fall to them in Frisian land; and at the fee-gifts, Folcwald's son day by day the Danes should honor, the folk of Hengest favor with rings, even as truly, with treasure and jewels, with fretted gold, as his Frisian kin he meant to honor in ale-hall there. Pact of peace they plighted further 73 on both sides firmly. Finn to Hengest with oath, upon honor, openly promised that woful remnant, with wise-men's aid, nobly to govern, so none of the guests by word or work should warp the treaty, or with malice of mind bemoan themselves as forced to follow their fee-giver's slayer, lordless men, as their lot ordained. Should Frisian, moreover, with foeman's taunt, that murderous hatred to mind recall, then edge of the sword must seal his doom. Oaths were given, and ancient gold heaped from hoard. - The hardy Scylding, battle-thane best, [9] on his balefire lay. All on the pyre were plain to see the gory sark, the gilded swine-crest, boar of hard iron, and athelings many slain by the sword: at the slaughter they fell. It was Hildeburh's hest, at Hnaef's own pyre the bairn of her body on brands to lay, his bones to burn, on the balefire placed, at his uncle's side. In sorrowful dirges bewept them the woman: great wailing ascended. Then wound up to welkin the wildest of death-fires, roared o'er the hillock: [10] heads all were melted, gashes burst, and blood gushed out from bites [11] of the body. Balefire devoured, greediest spirit, those spared not by war out of either folk: their flower was gone. XVII THEN hastened those heroes their home to see, friendless, to find the Frisian land, houses and high burg. Hengest still through the death-dyed winter dwelt with Finn, holding pact, yet of home he minded, though powerless his ring-decked prow to drive over the waters, now waves rolled fierce lashed by the winds, or winter locked them in icy fetters. Then fared another year to men's dwellings, as yet they do, the sunbright skies, that their season ever 74 duly await. Far off winter was driven; fair lay earth's breast; and fain was the rover, the guest, to depart, though more gladly he pondered on wreaking his vengeance than roaming the deep, and how to hasten the hot encounter where sons of the Frisians were sure to be. So he escaped not the common doom, when Hun with 'Lafing,' the light-of-battle, best of blades, his bosom pierced: its edge was famed with the Frisian earls. On fierce-heart Finn there fell likewise, on himself at home, the horrid sword-death; for Guthlaf and Oslaf of grim attack had sorrowing told, from sea-ways landed, mourning their woes. [1] Finn's wavering spirit bode not in breast. The burg was reddened with blood of foemen, and Finn was slain, king amid clansmen; the queen was taken. To their ship the Scylding warriors bore all the chattels the chieftain owned, whatever they found in Finn's domain of gems and jewels. The gentle wife o'er paths of the deep to the Danes they bore, led to her land. The lay was finished, the gleeman's song. Then glad rose the revel; bench-joy brightened. Bearers draw from their 'wonder-vats' wine. Comes Wealhtheow forth, under gold-crown goes where the good pair sit, uncle and nephew, true each to the other one, kindred in amity. Unferth the spokesman at the Scylding lord's feet sat: men had faith in his Spirit, his keenness of courage, though kinsmen had found him unsure at the sword-play. The Scylding queen spoke: 'Quaff of this cup, my king and lord, breaker of rings, and blithe be thou, gold-friend of men; to the Geats here speak such words of mildness as man should use. Be glad with thy Geats; of those gifts be mindful, or near or far, which now thou hast. Men say to me, as son thou wishest yon hero to hold. Thy Heorot purged, 75 jewel-hall brightest, enjoy while thou canst, with many a largess; and leave to thy kin folk and realm when forth thou goest to greet thy doom. For gracious I deem my Hrothulf, [2] willing to hold and rule nobly our youths, if thou yield up first, prince of Scyldings, thy part in the world. I ween with good he will well requite offspring of ours, when all he minds that for him we did in his helpless days of gift and grace to gain him honor!' Then she turned to the seat where her sons were placed, Hrethric and Hrothmund, with heroes' bairns, young men together: the Geat, too, sat there, Beowulf brave, the brothers between. XVIII A CUP she gave him, with kindly greeting and winsome words. Of wounden gold, she offered, to honor him, arm-jewels twain, corselet and rings, and of collars the noblest that ever I knew the earth around. Ne'er heard I so mighty, 'neath heaven's dome, a hoard-gem of heroes, since Hama bore to his bright-built burg the Brisings' necklace, jewel and gem casket. - Jealousy fled he, Eormenric's hate: chose help eternal. Hygelac Geat, grandson of Swerting, on the last of his raids this ring bore with him, under his banner the booty defending, the war-spoil warding; but Wyrd o'erwhelmed him what time, in his daring, dangers he sought, feud with Frisians. Fairest of gems he bore with him over the beaker-of-waves, sovran strong: under shield he died. Fell the corpse of the king into keeping of Franks, gear of the breast, and that gorgeous ring; weaker warriors won the spoil, after gripe of battle, from Geatland's lord, and held the death-field. Din rose in hall. Wealhtheow spake amid warriors, and said:- 76 'This jewel enjoy in thy jocund youth, Beowulf lov'd, these battle-weeds wear, a royal treasure, and richly thrive! Preserve thy strength, and these striplings here counsel in kindness: requital be mine. Hast done such deeds, that for days to come thou art famed among folk both far and near, so wide as washeth the wave of Ocean his windy walls. Through the ways of life prosper, O prince! I pray for thee rich possessions. To son of mine be helpful in deed and uphold his joys! Here every earl to the other is true, mild of mood, to the master loyal! Thanes are friendly, the throng obedient, liegemen are revelling: list and obey!' Went then to her place.-That was proudest of feasts; flowed wine for the warriors. Wyrd they knew not, destiny dire, and the doom to be seen by many an earl when eve should come, and Hrothgar homeward hasten away, royal, to rest. The room was guarded by an army of earls, as erst was done. They bared the bench-boards; abroad they spread beds and bolsters. - One beer-carouser in danger of doom lay down in the hall. At their heads they set their shields of war, bucklers bright; on the bench were there over each atheling, easy to see, the high battle-helmet, the haughty spear, the corselet of rings. 'Twas their custom so ever to be for battle prepared, at home, or harrying, which it were, even as oft as evil threatened their sovran king. - They were clansmen good. XIX THEN sank they to sleep. With sorrow one bought his rest of the evening, - as ofttime had happened when Grendel guarded that golden hall, evil wrought, till his end drew nigh, slaughter for sins. 'Twas seen and told 77 how an avenger survived the fiend, as was learned afar. The livelong time after that grim fight, Grendel's mother, monster of women, mourned her woe. She was doomed to dwell in the dreary waters, cold sea-courses, since Cain cut down with edge of the sword his only brother, his father's offspring: outlawed he fled, marked with murder, from men's delights warded the wilds. - There woke from him such fate-sent ghosts as Grendel, who, war-wolf horrid, at Heorot found a warrior watching and waiting the fray, with whom the grisly one grappled amain. But the man remembered his mighty power, the glorious gift that God had sent him, in his Maker's mercy put his trust for comfort and help: so he conquered the foe, felled the fiend, who fled abject, reft of joy, to the realms of death, mankind's foe. And his mother now, gloomy and grim, would go that quest of sorrow, the death of her son to avenge. To Heorot came she, where helmeted Danes slept in the hall. Too soon came back old ills of the earls, when in she burst, the mother of Grendel. Less grim, though, that terror, e'en as terror of woman in war is less, might of maid, than of men in arms when, hammer-forged, the falchion hard, sword gore-stained, through swine of the helm, crested, with keen blade carves amain. Then was in hall the hard-edge drawn, the swords on the settles, [1] and shields a-many firm held in hand: nor helmet minded nor harness of mail, whom that horror seized. Haste was hers; she would hie afar and save her life when the liegemen saw her. Yet a single atheling up she seized fast and firm, as she fled to the moor. He was for Hrothgar of heroes the dearest, of trusty vassals betwixt the seas, 78 whom she killed on his couch, a clansman famous, in battle brave. - Nor was Beowulf there; another house had been held apart, after giving of gold, for the Geat renowned. Uproar filled Heorot; the hand all had viewed, blood-flecked, she bore with her; bale was returned, dole in the dwellings: 'twas dire exchange where Dane and Geat were doomed to give the lives of loved ones. Long-tried king, the hoary hero, at heart was sad when he knew his noble no more lived, and dead indeed was his dearest thane. To his bower was Beowulf brought in haste, dauntless victor. As daylight broke, along with his earls the atheling lord, with his clansmen, came where the king abode waiting to see if the Wielder-of-All would turn this tale of trouble and woe. Strode o'er floor the famed-in-strife, with his hand-companions, - the hall resounded, wishing to greet the wise old king, Ingwines' lord; he asked if the night had passed in peace to the prince's mind. XX HROTHGAR spake, helmet-of-Scyldings:'Ask not of pleasure! Pain is renewed to Danish folk. Dead is Aeschere, of Yrmenlaf the elder brother, my sage adviser and stay in council, shoulder-comrade in stress of fight when warriors clashed and we warded our heads, hewed the helm-boars; hero famed should be every earl as Aeschere was! But here in Heorot a hand hath slain him of wandering death-sprite. I wot not whither, proud of the prey, her path she took, fain of her fill. The feud she avenged that yesternight, unyieldingly, Grendel in grimmest grasp thou killedst, seeing how long these liegemen mine he ruined and ravaged. Reft of life, 79 in arms he fell. Now another comes, keen and cruel, her kin to avenge, faring far in feud of blood: so that many a thane shall think, who e'er sorrows in soul for that sharer of rings, this is hardest of heart-bales. The hand lies low that once was willing each wish to please. Land-dwellers here [2] and liegemen mine, who house by those parts, I have heard relate that such a pair they have sometimes seen, march-stalkers mighty the moorland haunting, wandering spirits: one of them seemed, so far as my folk could fairly judge, of womankind; and one, accursed, in man's guise trod the misery-track of exile, though huger than human bulk. Grendel in days long gone they named him, folk of the land; his father they knew not, nor any brood that was born to him of treacherous spirits. Untrod is their home; by wolf-cliffs haunt they and windy headlands, fenways fearful, where flows the stream from mountains gliding to gloom of the rocks, underground flood. Not far is it hence in measure of miles that the mere expands, and o'er it the frost-bound forest hanging, sturdily rooted, shadows the wave. By night is a wonder weird to see, fire on the waters. So wise lived none of the sons of men, to search those depths! Nay, though the heath-rover, harried by dogs, the horn-proud hart, this holt should seek, long distance driven, his dear life first on the brink he yields ere he brave the plunge to hide his head: 'tis no happy place! Thence the welter of waters washes up wan to welkin when winds bestir evil storms, and air grows dusk, and the heavens weep. Now is help once more with thee alone! The land thou knowst not, place of fear, where thou findest out that sin-flecked being. Seek if thou dare! 80 I will reward thee, for waging this fight, with ancient treasure, as erst I did, with winding gold, if thou winnest back.' XXI BEOWULF spake, bairn of Ecgtheow: 'Sorrow not, sage! It beseems us better friends to avenge than fruitlessly mourn them. Each of us all must his end abide in the ways of the world; so win who may glory ere death! When his days are told, that is the warrior's worthiest doom. Rise, O realm-warder! Ride we anon, and mark the trail of the mother of Grendel. No harbor shall hide her - heed my promise! enfolding of field or forested mountain or floor of the flood, let her flee where she will! But thou this day endure in patience, as I ween thou wilt, thy woes each one.' Leaped up the graybeard: God he thanked, mighty Lord, for the man's brave words. For Hrothgar soon a horse was saddled wave-maned steed. The sovran wise stately rode on; his shield-armed men followed in force. The footprints led along the woodland, widely seen, a path o'er the plain, where she passed, and trod the murky moor; of men-at-arms she bore the bravest and best one, dead, him who with Hrothgar the homestead ruled. On then went the atheling-born o'er stone-cliffs steep and strait defiles, narrow passes and unknown ways, headlands sheer, and the haunts of the Nicors. Foremost he [1] fared, a few at his side of the wiser men, the ways to scan, till he found in a flash the forested hill hanging over the hoary rock, a woful wood: the waves below were dyed in blood. The Danish men had sorrow of soul, and for Scyldings all, for many a hero, 'twas hard to bear, 81 ill for earls, when Aeschere's head they found by the flood on the foreland there. Waves were welling, the warriors saw, hot with blood; but the horn sang oft battle-song bold. The band sat down, and watched on the water worm-like things, sea-dragons strange that sounded the deep, and nicors that lay on the ledge of the ness such as oft essay at hour of morn on the road-of-sails their ruthless quest, and sea-snakes and monsters. These started away, swollen and savage that song to hear, that war-horn's blast. The warden of Geats, with bolt from bow, then balked of life, of wave-work, one monster, amid its heart went the keen war-shaft; in water it seemed less doughty in swimming whom death had seized. Swift on the billows, with boar-spears well hooked and barbed, it was hard beset, done to death and dragged on the headland, wave-roamer wondrous. Warriors viewed the grisly guest. Then girt him Beowulf in martial mail, nor mourned for his life. His breastplate broad and bright of hues, woven by hand, should the waters try; well could it ward the warrior's body that battle should break on his breast in vain nor harm his heart by the hand of a foe. And the helmet white that his head protected was destined to dare the deeps of the flood, through wave-whirl win: 'twas wound with chains, decked with gold, as in days of yore the weapon-smith worked it wondrously, with swine-forms set it, that swords nowise, brandished in battle, could bite that helm. Nor was that the meanest of mighty helps which Hrothgar's orator offered at need: 'Hrunting' they named the hilted sword, of old-time heirlooms easily first; iron was its edge, all etched with poison, with battle-blood hardened, nor blenched it at fight in hero's hand who held it ever, 82 on paths of peril prepared to go to folkstead [2] of foes. Not first time this it was destined to do a daring task. For he bore not in mind, the bairn of Ecglaf sturdy and strong, that speech he had made, drunk with wine, now this weapon he lent to a stouter swordsman. Himself, though, durst not under welter of waters wager his life as loyal liegeman. So lost he his glory, honor of earls. With the other not so, who girded him now for the grim encounter. XXII BEOWULF spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'Have mind, thou honored offspring of Healfdene gold-friend of men, now I go on this quest, sovran wise, what once was said: if in thy cause it came that I should lose my life, thou wouldst loyal bide to me, though fallen, in father's place! Be guardian, thou, to this group of my thanes, my warrior-friends, if War should seize me; and the goodly gifts thou gavest me, Hrothgar beloved, to Hygelac send! Geatland's king may ken by the gold, Hrethel's son see, when he stares at the treasure, that I got me a friend for goodness famed, and joyed while I could in my jewel-bestower. And let Unferth wield this wondrous sword, earl far-honored, this heirloom precious, hard of edge: with Hrunting I seek doom of glory, or Death shall take me.' After these words the Weder-Geat lord boldly hastened, biding never answer at all: the ocean floods closed o'er the hero. Long while of the day fled ere he felt the floor of the sea. Soon found the fiend who the flood-domain sword-hungry held these hundred winters, greedy and grim, that some guest from above, some man, was raiding her monster-realm. She grasped out for him with grisly claws, 83 and the warrior seized; yet scathed she not his body hale; the breastplate hindered, as she strove to shatter the sark of war, the linked harness, with loathsome hand. Then bore this brine-wolf, when bottom she touched, the lord of rings to the lair she haunted whiles vainly he strove, though his valor held, weapon to wield against wondrous monsters that sore beset him; sea-beasts many tried with fierce tusks to tear his mail, and swarmed on the stranger. But soon he marked he was now in some hall, he knew not which, where water never could work him harm, nor through the roof could reach him ever fangs of the flood. Firelight he saw, beams of a blaze that brightly shone. Then the warrior was ware of that wolf-of-the-deep, mere-wife monstrous. For mighty stroke he swung his blade, and the blow withheld not. Then sang on her head that seemly blade its war-song wild. But the warrior found the light-of-battle [1] was loath to bite, to harm the heart: its hard edge failed the noble at need, yet had known of old strife hand to hand, and had helmets cloven, doomed men's fighting-gear. First time, this, for the gleaming blade that its glory fell. Firm still stood, nor failed in valor, heedful of high deeds, Hygelac's kinsman; flung away fretted sword, featly jewelled, the angry earl; on earth it lay steel-edged and stiff. His strength he trusted, hand-gripe of might. So man shall do whenever in war he weens to earn him lasting fame, nor fears for his life! Seized then by shoulder, shrank not from combat, the Geatish war-prince Grendel's mother. Flung then the fierce one, filled with wrath, his deadly foe, that she fell to ground. Swift on her part she paid him back with grisly grasp, and grappled with him. Spent with struggle, stumbled the warrior, 84 fiercest of fighting-men, fell adown. On the hall-guest she hurled herself, hent her short sword, broad and brown-edged, the bairn to avenge, the sole-born son. - On his shoulder lay braided breast-mail, barring death, withstanding entrance of edge or blade. Life would have ended for Ecgtheow's son, under wide earth for that earl of Geats, had his armor of war not aided him, battle-net hard, and holy God wielded the victory, wisest Maker. The Lord of Heaven allowed his cause; and easily rose the earl erect. XXIII 'MID the battle-gear saw he a blade triumphant, old-sword of Eotens, with edge of proof, warriors' heirloom, weapon unmatched, - save only 'twas more than other men to bandy-of-battle could bear at all as the giants had wrought it, ready and keen. Seized then its chain-hilt the Scyldings' chieftain, bold and battle-grim, brandished the sword, reckless of life, and so wrathfully smote that it gripped her neck and grasped her hard, her bone-rings breaking: the blade pierced through that fated-one's flesh: to floor she sank. Bloody the blade: he was blithe of his deed. Then blazed forth light. 'Twas bright within as when from the sky there shines unclouded heaven's candle. The hall he scanned. By the wall then went he; his weapon raised high by its hilts the Hygelac-thane, angry and eager. That edge was not useless to the warrior now. He wished with speed Grendel to guerdon for grim raids many, for the war he waged on Western-Danes oftener far than an only time, when of Hrothgar's hearth-companions he slew in slumber, in sleep devoured, fifteen men of the folk of Danes, 85 and as many others outward bore, his horrible prey. Well paid for that the wrathful prince! For now prone he saw Grendel stretched there, spent with war, spoiled of life, so scathed had left him Heorot's battle. The body sprang far when after death it endured the blow, sword-stroke savage, that severed its head. Soon, [1] then, saw the sage companions who waited with Hrothgar, watching the flood, that the tossing waters turbid grew, blood-stained the mere. Old men together, hoary-haired, of the hero spake; the warrior would not, they weened, again, proud of conquest, come to seek their mighty master. To many it seemed the wolf-of-the-waves had won his life. The ninth hour came. The noble Scyldings left the headland; homeward went the gold-friend of men. [2] But the guests sat on, stared at the surges, sick in heart, and wished, yet weened not, their winsome lord again to see. Now that sword began, from blood of the fight, in battle-droppings, war-blade, to wane: 'twas a wondrous thing that all of it melted as ice is wont when frosty fetters the Father loosens, unwinds the wave-bonds, wielding all seasons and times: the true God he! Nor took from that dwelling the duke of the Geats precious things, though a plenty he saw, save only the head and that hilt withal blazoned with jewels: the blade had melted, burned was the bright sword, her blood was so hot, so poisoned the hell-sprite who perished within there. Soon he was swimming who safe saw in combat downfall of demons; up-dove through the flood. The clashing waters were cleansed now, waste of waves, where the wandering fiend her life-days left and this lapsing world. Swam then to strand the sailors'-refuge, 86 sturdy-in-spirit, of sea-booty glad, of burden brave he bore with him. Went then to greet him, and God they thanked, the thane-band choice of their chieftain blithe, that safe and sound they could see him again. Soon from the hardy one helmet and armor deftly they doffed: now drowsed the mere, water 'neath welkin, with war-blood stained. Forth they fared by the footpaths thence, merry at heart the highways measured, well-known roads. Courageous men carried the head from the cliff by the sea, an arduous task for all the band, the firm in fight, since four were needed on the shaft-of-slaughter [4] strenuously to bear to the gold-hall Grendel's head. So presently to the palace there foemen fearless, fourteen Geats, marching came. Their master-of-clan mighty amid them the meadow-ways trod. Strode then within the sovran thane fearless in fight, of fame renowned, hardy hero, Hrothgar to greet. And next by the hair into hall was borne Grendel's head, where the henchmen were drinking, an awe to clan and queen alike, a monster of marvel: the men looked on. XXIV BEOWULF spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'Lo, now, this sea-booty, son of Healfdene, Lord of Scyldings, we've lustily brought thee, sign of glory; thou seest it here. Not lightly did I with my life escape! In war under water this work I essayed with endless effort; and even so my strength had been lost had the Lord not shielded me. Not a whit could I with Hrunting do in work of war, though the weapon is good; yet a sword the Sovran of Men vouchsafed me to spy on the wall there, in splendor hanging, old, gigantic, - how oft He guides 87 the friendless wight! - and I fought with that brand, felling in fight, since fate was with me, the house's wardens. That war-sword then all burned, bright blade, when the blood gushed o'er it, battle-sweat hot; but the hilt I brought back from my foes. So avenged I their fiendish deeds death-fall of Danes, as was due and right. And this is my hest, that in Heorot now safe thou canst sleep with thy soldier band, and every thane of all thy folk both old and young; no evil fear, Scyldings' lord, from that side again, aught ill for thy earls, as erst thou must!' Then the golden hilt, for that gray-haired leader, hoary hero, in hand was laid, giant-wrought, old. So owned and enjoyed it after downfall of devils, the Danish lord, wonder-smiths' work, since the world was rid of that grim-souled fiend, the foe of God, murder-marked, and his mother as well. Now it passed into power of the people's king, best of all that the oceans bound who have scattered their gold o'er Scandia's isle. Hrothgar spake - the hilt he viewed, heirloom old, where was etched the rise of that far-off fight when the floods o'erwhelmed, raging waves, the race of giants (fearful their fate!), a folk estranged from God Eternal: whence guerdon due in that waste of waters the Wielder paid them. So on the guard of shining gold in runic staves it was rightly said for whom the serpent-traced sword was wrought, best of blades, in bygone days, and the hilt well wound. - The wise-one spake, son of Healfdene; silent were all:'Lo, so may he say who sooth and right follows 'mid folk, of far times mindful, a land-warden old, [1] that this earl belongs to the better breed! So, borne aloft, thy fame must fly, O friend my Beowulf, far and wide o'er folksteads many. Firmly thou 88 shalt all maintain, mighty strength with mood of wisdom. Love of mine will I assure thee, as, awhile ago, I promised; thou shalt prove a stay in future, in far-off years, to folk of thine, to the heroes a help. Was not Heremod thus to offspring of Ecgwela, Honor-Scyldings, nor grew for their grace, but for grisly slaughter, for doom of death to the Danishmen. He slew, wrath-swollen, his shoulder-comrades, companions at board! So he passed alone, chieftain haughty, from human cheer. Though him the Maker with might endowed, delights of power, and uplifted high above all men, yet blood-fierce his mind, his breast-hoard, grew, no bracelets gave he to Danes as was due; he endured all joyless strain of struggle and stress of woe, long feud with his folk. Here find thy lesson! Of virtue advise thee! This verse I have said for thee, wise from lapsed winters. Wondrous seems how to sons of men Almighty God in the strength of His spirit sendeth wisdom, estate, high station: He swayeth all things. Whiles He letteth right lustily fare the heart of the hero of high-born race, in seat ancestral assigns him bliss, his folk's sure fortress in fee to hold, puts in his power great parts of the earth, empire so ample, that end of it this wanter-of-wisdom weeneth none. So he waxes in wealth, nowise can harm him illness or age; no evil cares shadow his spirit; no sword-hate threatens from ever an enemy: all the world wends at his will, no worse he knoweth, till all within him obstinate pride waxes and wakes while the warden slumbers, the spirit's sentry; sleep is too fast which masters his might, and the murderer nears, stealthily shooting the shafts from his bow! 89 XXV 'UNDER harness his heart then is hit indeed by sharpest shafts; and no shelter avails from foul behest of the hellish fiend. Him seems too little what long he possessed. Greedy and grim, no golden rings he gives for his pride; the promised future forgets he and spurns, with all God has sent him, Wonder-Wielder, of wealth and fame. Yet in the end it ever comes that the frame of the body fragile yields, fated falls; and there follows another who joyously the jewels divides, the royal riches, nor recks of his forebear. Ban, then, such baleful thoughts, Beowulf dearest, best of men, and the better part choose, profit eternal; and temper thy pride, warrior famous! The flower of thy might lasts now a while: but erelong it shall be that sickness or sword thy strength shall minish, or fang of fire, or flooding billow, or bite of blade, or brandished spear, or odious age; or the eyes' clear beam wax dull and darken: Death even thee in haste shall o'erwhelm, thou hero of war! So the Ring-Danes these half-years a hundred I ruled, wielded 'neath welkin, and warded them bravely from mighty-ones many o'er middle-earth, from spear and sword, till it seemed for me no foe could be found under fold of the sky. Lo, sudden the shift! To me seated secure came grief for joy when Grendel began to harry my home, the hellish foe; for those ruthless raids, unresting I suffered heart-sorrow heavy. Heaven be thanked, Lord Eternal, for life extended that I on this head all hewn and bloody, after long evil, with eyes may gaze! - Go to the bench now! Be glad at banquet, warrior worthy! A wealth of treasure at dawn of day, be dealt between us!' 90 Glad was the Geats' lord, going betimes to seek his seat, as the Sage commanded. Afresh, as before, for the famed-in-battle, for the band of the hall, was a banquet dight nobly anew. The Night-Helm darkened dusk o'er the drinkers. The doughty ones rose: for the hoary-headed would hasten to rest, aged Scylding; and eager the Geat, shield-fighter sturdy, for sleeping yearned. Him wander-weary, warrior-guest from far, a hall-thane heralded forth, who by custom courtly cared for all needs of a thane as in those old days warrior-wanderers wont to have. So slumbered the stout-heart. Stately the hall rose gabled and gilt where the guest slept on till a raven black the rapture-of-heaven [2] blithe-heart boded. Bright came flying shine after shadow. The swordsmen hastened, athelings all were eager homeward forth to fare; and far from thence the great-hearted guest would guide his keel. Bade then the hardy-one Hrunting be brought to the son of Ecglaf, the sword bade him take, excellent iron, and uttered his thanks for it, quoth that he counted it keen in battle, 'war-friend' winsome: with words he slandered not edge of the blade: 'twas a big-hearted man! Now eager for parting and armed at point warriors waited, while went to his host that Darling of Danes. The doughty atheling to high-seat hastened and Hrothgar greeted. XXVI BEOWULF spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:'Lo, we seafarers say our will, far-come men, that we fain would seek Hygelac now. We here have found hosts to our heart: thou hast harbored us well. If ever on earth I am able to win me more of thy love, O lord of men, 91 aught anew, than I now have done, for work of war I am willing still! If it come to me ever across the seas that neighbor foemen annoy and fright thee, as they that hate thee erewhile have used, thousands then of thanes I shall bring, heroes to help thee. Of Hygelac I know, ward of his folk, that, though few his years, the lord of the Geats will give me aid by word and by work, that well I may serve thee, wielding the war-wood to win thy triumph and lending thee might when thou lackest men. If thy Hrethric should come to court of Geats, a sovran's son, he will surely there find his friends. A far-off land each man should visit who vaunts him brave.' Him then answering, Hrothgar spake:'These words of thine the wisest God sent to thy soul! No sager counsel from so young in years e'er yet have I heard. Thou art strong of main and in mind art wary, art wise in words! I ween indeed if ever it hap that Hrethel's heir by spear be seized, by sword-grim battle, by illness or iron, thine elder and lord, people's leader, - and life be thine, no seemlier man will the Sea-Geats find at all to choose for their chief and king, for hoard-guard of heroes, if hold thou wilt thy kinsman's kingdom! Thy keen mind pleases me the longer the better, Beowulf loved! Thou hast brought it about that both our peoples, sons of the Geat and Spear-Dane folk, shall have mutual peace, and from murderous strife, such as once they waged, from war refrain. Long as I rule this realm so wide, let our hoards be common, let heroes with gold each other greet o'er the gannet's-bath, and the ringed-prow bear o'er rolling waves tokens of love. I trow my landfolk towards friend and foe are firmly joined, and honor they keep in the olden way.' 92 To him in the hall, then, Healfdene's son gave treasures twelve, and the trust-of-earls bade him fare with the gifts to his folk beloved, hale to his home, and in haste return. Then kissed the king of kin renowned, Scyldings' chieftain, that choicest thane, and fell on his neck. Fast flowed the tears of the hoary-headed. Heavy with winters, he had chances twain, but he clung to this, [1] that each should look on the other again, and hear him in hall. Was this hero so dear to him. his breast's wild billows he banned in vain; safe in his soul a secret longing, locked in his mind, for that loved man burned in his blood. Then Beowulf strode, glad of his gold-gifts, the grass-plot o'er, warrior blithe. The wave-roamer bode riding at anchor, its owner awaiting. As they hastened onward, Hrothgar's gift they lauded at length. - 'Twas a lord unpeered, every way blameless, till age had broken - it spareth no mortal - his splendid might. XXVII CAME now to ocean the ever-courageous hardy henchmen, their harness bearing, woven war-sarks. The warden marked, trusty as ever, the earl's return. From the height of the hill no hostile words reached the guests as he rode to greet them; but 'Welcome!' he called to that Weder clan as the sheen-mailed spoilers to ship marched on. Then on the strand, with steeds and treasure and armor their roomy and ring-dight ship was heavily laden: high its mast rose over Hrothgar's hoarded gems. A sword to the boat-guard Beowulf gave, mounted with gold; on the mead-bench since he was better esteemed, that blade possessing, heirloom old. - Their ocean-keel boarding, they drove through the deep, and Daneland left. A sea-cloth was set, a sail with ropes, 93 firm to the mast; the flood-timbers moaned; nor did wind over billows that wave-swimmer blow across from her course. The craft sped on, foam-necked it floated forth o'er the waves, keel firm-bound over briny currents, till they got them sight of the Geatish cliffs, home-known headlands. High the boat, stirred by winds, on the strand updrove. Helpful at haven the harbor-guard stood, who long already for loved companions by the water had waited and watched afar. He bound to the beach the broad-bosomed ship with anchor-bands, lest ocean-billows that trusty timber should tear away. Then Beowulf bade them bear the treasure, gold and jewels; no journey far was it thence to go to the giver of rings, Hygelac Hrethling: at home he dwelt by the sea-wall close, himself and clan. Haughty that house, a hero the king, high the hall, and Hygd right young, wise and wary, though winters few in those fortress walls she had found a home, Haereth's daughter. Nor humble her ways, nor grudged she gifts to the Geatish men, of precious treasure. Not Thryth's pride showed she, folk-queen famed, or that fell deceit. Was none so daring that durst make bold (save her lord alone) of the liegemen dear that lady full in the face to look, but forged fetters he found his lot, bonds of death! And brief the respite; soon as they seized him, his sword-doom was spoken, and the burnished blade a baleful murder proclaimed and closed. No queenly way for woman to practise, though peerless she, that the weaver-of-peace [3] from warrior dear by wrath and lying his life should reave! But Hemming's kinsman hindered this. For over their ale men also told that of these folk-horrors fewer she wrought, onslaughts of evil, after she went, 94 gold-decked bride, to the brave young prince, atheling haughty, and Offa's hall o'er the fallow flood at her father's bidding safely sought, where since she prospered, royal, throned, rich in goods, fain of the fair life fate had sent her, and leal in love to the lord of warriors. He, of all heroes I heard of ever from sea to sea, of the sons of earth, most excellent seemed. Hence Offa was praised for his fighting and feeing by far-off men, the spear-bold warrior; wisely he ruled over his empire. Eomer woke to him, help of heroes, Hemming's kinsman, Grandson of Garmund, grim in war. XXVIII HASTENED the hardy one, henchmen with him, sandy strand of the sea to tread and widespread ways. The world's great candle, sun shone from south. They strode along with sturdy steps to the spot they knew where the battle-king young, his burg within, slayer of Ongentheow, shared the rings, shelter-of-heroes. To Hygelac Beowulf's coming was quickly told, that there in the court the clansmen's refuge, the shield-companion sound and alive, hale from the hero-play homeward strode. With haste in the hall, by highest order, room for the rovers was readily made. By his sovran he sat, come safe from battle, kinsman by kinsman. His kindly lord he first had greeted in gracious form, with manly words. The mead dispensing, came through the high hall Haereth's daughter, winsome to warriors, wine-cup bore to the hands of the heroes. Hygelac then his comrade fairly with question plied in the lofty hall, sore longing to know what manner of sojourn the Sea-Geats made. 'What came of thy quest, my kinsman Beowulf, 95 when thy yearnings suddenly swept thee yonder battle to seek o'er the briny sea, combat in Heorot? Hrothgar couldst thou aid at all, the honored chief, in his wide-known woes? With waves of care my sad heart seethed; I sore mistrusted my loved one's venture: long I begged thee by no means to seek that slaughtering monster, but suffer the South-Danes to settle their feud themselves with Grendel. Now God be thanked that safe and sound I can see thee now!' Beowulf spake, the bairn of Ecgtheow:''Tis known and unhidden, Hygelac Lord, to many men, that meeting of ours, struggle grim between Grendel and me, which we fought on the field where full too many sorrows he wrought for the Scylding-Victors, evils unending. These all I avenged. No boast can be from breed of Grendel, any on earth, for that uproar at dawn, from the longest-lived of the loathsome race in fleshly fold! - But first I went Hrothgar to greet in the hall of gifts, where Healfdene's kinsman high-renowned, soon as my purpose was plain to him, assigned me a seat by his son and heir. The liegemen were lusty; my life-days never such merry men over mead in hall have I heard under heaven! The high-born queen, people's peace-bringer, passed through the hall, cheered the young clansmen, clasps of gold, ere she sought her seat, to sundry gave. Oft to the heroes Hrothgar's daughter, to earls in turn, the ale-cup tendered, she whom I heard these hall-companions Freawaru name, when fretted gold she proffered the warriors. Promised is she, gold-decked maid, to the glad son of Froda. Sage this seems to the Scylding's-friend, kingdom's-keeper: he counts it wise the woman to wed so and ward off feud, store of slaughter. But seldom ever 96 when men are slain, does the murder-spear sink but briefest while, though the bride be fair! [1] 'Nor haply will like it the Heathobard lord, and as little each of his liegemen all, when a thane of the Danes, in that doughty throng, goes with the lady along their hall, and on him the old-time heirlooms glisten hard and ring-decked, Heathobard's treasure, weapons that once they wielded fair until they lost at the linden-play [2] liegeman leal and their lives as well. Then, over the ale, on this heirloom gazing, some ash-wielder old who has all in mind that spear-death of men, [3] - he is stern of mood, heavy at heart, - in the hero young tests the temper and tries the soul and war-hate wakens, with words like these:_Canst thou not, comrade, ken that sword which to the fray thy father carried in his final feud, 'neath the fighting-mask, dearest of blades, when the Danish slew him and wielded the war-place on Withergild's fall, after havoc of heroes, those hardy Scyldings? Now, the son of a certain slaughtering Dane, proud of his treasure, paces this hall, joys in the killing, and carries the jewel [4] that rightfully ought to be owned by thee!_ Thus he urges and eggs him all the time with keenest words, till occasion offers that Freawaru's thane, for his father's deed, after bite of brand in his blood must slumber, losing his life; but that liegeman flies living away, for the land he kens. And thus be broken on both their sides oaths of the earls, when Ingeld's breast wells with war-hate, and wife-love now after the care-billows cooler grows. 'So [5] I hold not high the Heathobards' faith due to the Danes, or their during love and pact of peace. - But I pass from that, turning to Grendel, O giver-of-treasure, and saying in full how the fight resulted, 97 hand-fray of heroes. When heaven's jewel had fled o'er far fields, that fierce sprite came, night-foe savage, to seek us out where safe and sound we sentried the hall. To Hondscio then was that harassing deadly, his fall there was fated. He first was slain, girded warrior. Grendel on him turned murderous mouth, on our mighty kinsman, and all of the brave man's body devoured. Yet none the earlier, empty-handed, would the bloody-toothed murderer, mindful of bale, outward go from the gold-decked hall: but me he attacked in his terror of might, with greedy hand grasped me. A glove hung by him [6] wide and wondrous, wound with bands; and in artful wise it all was wrought, by devilish craft, of dragon-skins. Me therein, an innocent man, the fiendish foe was fain to thrust with many another. He might not so, when I all angrily upright stood. 'Twere long to relate how that land-destroyer I paid in kind for his cruel deeds; yet there, my prince, this people of thine got fame by my fighting. He fled away, and a little space his life preserved; but there staid behind him his stronger hand left in Heorot; heartsick thence on the floor of the ocean that outcast fell. Me for this struggle the Scyldings'-friend paid in plenty with plates of gold, with many a treasure, when morn had come and we all at the banquet-board sat down. Then was song and glee. The gray-haired Scylding, much tested, told of the times of yore. Whiles the hero his harp bestirred, wood-of-delight; now lays he chanted of sooth and sadness, or said aright legends of wonder, the wide-hearted king; or for years of his youth he would yearn at times, for strength of old struggles, now stricken with age, hoary hero: his heart surged full 98 when, wise with winters, he wailed their flight. Thus in the hall the whole of that day at ease we feasted, till fell o'er earth another night. Anon full ready in greed of vengeance, Grendel's mother set forth all doleful. Dead was her son through war-hate of Weders; now, woman monstrous with fury fell a foeman she slew, avenged her offspring. From Aeschere old, loyal councillor, life was gone; nor might they e'en, when morning broke, those Danish people, their death-done comrade burn with brands, on balefire lay the man they mourned. Under mountain stream she had carried the corpse with cruel hands. For Hrothgar that was the heaviest sorrow of all that had laden the lord of his folk. The leader then, by thy life, besought me (sad was his soul) in the sea-waves' coil to play the hero and hazard my being for glory of prowess: my guerdon he pledged. I then in the waters - 'tis widely known that sea-floor-guardian savage found. Hand-to-hand there a while we struggled; billows welled blood; in the briny hall her head I hewed with a hardy blade from Grendel's mother, - and gained my life, though not without danger. My doom was not yet. Then the haven-of-heroes, Healfdene's son, gave me in guerdon great gifts of price. XXXI 'So held this king to the customs old, that I wanted for nought in the wage I gained, the meed of my might; he made me gifts, Healfdene's heir, for my own disposal. Now to thee, my prince, I proffer them all, gladly give them. Thy grace alone can find me favor. Few indeed have I of kinsmen, save, Hygelac, thee!' Then he bade them bear him the boar-head standard, the battle-helm high, and breastplate gray, 99 the splendid sword; then spake in form:'Me this war-gear the wise old prince, Hrothgar, gave, and his hest he added, that its story be straightway said to thee. A while it was held by Heorogar king, for long time lord of the land of Scyldings; yet not to his son the sovran left it, to daring Heoroweard, - dear as he was to him, his harness of battle. - Well hold thou it all!' And I heard that soon passed o'er the path of this treasure, all apple-fallow, four good steeds, each like the others, arms and horses he gave to the king. So should kinsmen be, not weave one another the net of wiles, or with deep-hid treachery death contrive for neighbor and comrade. His nephew was ever by hardy Hygelac held full dear, and each kept watch o'er the other's weal. I heard, too, the necklace to Hygd he presented, wonder-wrought treasure, which Wealhtheow gave him sovran's daughter: three steeds he added, slender and saddle-gay. Since such gift the gem gleamed bright on the breast of the queen. Thus showed his strain the son of Ecgtheow as a man remarked for mighty deeds and acts of honor. At ale he slew not comrade or kin; nor cruel his mood, though of sons of earth his strength was greatest, a glorious gift that God had sent the splendid leader. Long was he spurned, and worthless by Geatish warriors held; him at mead the master-of-clans failed full oft to favor at all. Slack and shiftless the strong men deemed him, profitless prince; but payment came, to the warrior honored, for all his woes. Then the bulwark-of-earls [1] bade bring within, hardy chieftain, Hrethel's heirloom garnished with gold: no Geat e'er knew in shape of a sword a statelier prize. The brand he laid in Beowulf's lap; and of hides assigned him seven thousand, 100 with house and high-seat. They held in common land alike by their line of birth, inheritance, home: but higher the king because of his rule o'er the realm itself. Now further it fell with the flight of years, with harryings horrid, that Hygelac perished, and Heardred, too, by hewing of swords under the shield-wall slaughtered lay, when him at the van of his victor-folk sought hardy heroes, Heatho-Scilfings, in arms o'erwhelming Hereric's nephew. Then Beowulf came as king this broad realm to wield; and he ruled it well fifty winters, [4] a wise old prince, warding his land, until One began in the dark of night, a Dragon, to rage. In the grave on the hill a hoard it guarded, in the stone-barrow steep. A strait path reached it, unknown to mortals. Some man, however, came by chance that cave within to the heathen hoard. [5] In hand he took a golden goblet, nor gave he it back, stole with it away, while the watcher slept, by thievish wiles: for the warden's wrath prince and people must pay betimes! XXXII THAT way he went with no will of his own, in danger of life, to the dragon's hoard, but for pressure of peril, some prince's thane. He fled in fear the fatal scourge, seeking shelter, a sinful man, and entered in. At the awful sight tottered that guest, and terror seized him; yet the wretched fugitive rallied anon from fright and fear ere he fled away, and took the cup from that treasure-hoard. Of such besides there was store enough, heirlooms old, the earth below, which some earl forgotten, in ancient years, left the last of his lofty race, heedfully there had hidden away, 101 dearest treasure. For death of yore had hurried all hence; and he alone left to live, the last of the clan, weeping his friends, yet wished to bide warding the treasure, his one delight, though brief his respite. The barrow, new-ready, to strand and sea-waves stood anear, hard by the headland, hidden and closed; there laid within it his lordly heirlooms and heaped hoard of heavy gold that warden of rings. Few words he spake: 'Now hold thou, earth, since heroes may not, what earls have owned! Lo, erst from thee brave men brought it! But battle-death seized and cruel killing my clansmen all, robbed them of life and a liegeman's joys. None have I left to lift the sword, or to cleanse the carven cup of price, beaker bright. My brave are gone. And the helmet hard, all haughty with gold, shall part from its plating. Polishers sleep who could brighten and burnish the battle-mask; and those weeds of war that were wont to brave over bicker of shields the bite of steel rust with their bearer. The ringed mail fares not far with famous chieftain, at side of hero! No harp's delight, no glee-wood's gladness! No good hawk now flies through the hall! Nor horses fleet stamp in the burgstead! Battle and death the flower of my race have reft away.' Mournful of mood, thus he moaned his woe, alone, for them all, and unblithe wept by day and by night, till death's fell wave o'erwhelmed his heart. His hoard-of-bliss that old ill-doer open found, who, blazing at twilight the barrows haunteth, naked foe-dragon flying by night folded in fire: the folk of earth dread him sore. 'Tis his doom to seek hoard in the graves, and heathen gold to watch, many-wintered: nor wins he thereby! 102 Powerful this plague-of-the-people thus held the house of the hoard in earth three hundred winters; till One aroused wrath in his breast, to the ruler bearing that costly cup, and the king implored for bond of peace. So the barrow was plundered, borne off was booty. His boon was granted that wretched man; and his ruler saw first time what was fashioned in far-off days. When the dragon awoke, new woe was kindled. O'er the stone he snuffed. The stark-heart found footprint of foe who so far had gone in his hidden craft by the creature's head. So may the undoomed easily flee evils and exile, if only he gain the grace of The Wielder! - That warden of gold o'er the ground went seeking, greedy to find the man who wrought him such wrong in sleep. Savage and burning, the barrow he circled all without; nor was any there, none in the waste…. Yet war he desired, was eager for battle. The barrow he entered, sought the cup, and discovered soon that some one of mortals had searched his treasure, his lordly gold. The guardian waited ill-enduring till evening came; boiling with wrath was the barrow's keeper, and fain with flame the foe to pay for the dear cup's loss. - Now day was fled as the worm had wished. By its wall no more was it glad to bide, but burning flew folded in flame: a fearful beginning for sons of the soil; and soon it came, in the doom of their lord, to a dreadful end. XXXIII THEN the baleful fiend its fire belched out, and bright homes burned. The blaze stood high all landsfolk frighting. No living thing would that loathly one leave as aloft it flew. Wide was the dragon's warring seen, its fiendish fury far and near, 103 as the grim destroyer those Geatish people hated and hounded. To hidden lair, to its hoard it hastened at hint of dawn. Folk of the land it had lapped in flame, with bale and brand. In its barrow it trusted, its battling and bulwarks: that boast was vain! To Beowulf then the bale was told quickly and truly: the king's own home, of buildings the best, in brand-waves melted, that gift-throne of Geats. To the good old man sad in heart, 'twas heaviest sorrow. The sage assumed that his sovran God he had angered, breaking ancient law, and embittered the Lord. His breast within with black thoughts welled, as his wont was never. The folk's own fastness that fiery dragon with flame had destroyed, and the stronghold all washed by waves; but the warlike king, prince of the Weders, plotted vengeance. Warriors'-bulwark, he bade them work all of iron - the earl's commander a war-shield wondrous: well he knew that forest-wood against fire were worthless, linden could aid not. - Atheling brave, he was fated to finish this fleeting life, his days on earth, and the dragon with him, though long it had watched o'er the wealth of the hoard! Shame he reckoned it, sharer-of-rings, to follow the flyer-afar with a host, a broad-flung band; nor the battle feared he, nor deemed he dreadful the dragon's warring, its vigor and valor: ventures desperate he had passed a-plenty, and perils of war, contest-crash, since, conqueror proud, Hrothgar's hall he had wholly purged, and in grapple had killed the kin of Grendel, loathsome breed! Not least was that of hand-to-hand fights where Hygelac fell, when the ruler of Geats in rush of battle, lord of his folk, in the Frisian land, son of Hrethel, by sword-draughts died, by brands down-beaten. Thence Beowulf fled 104 through strength of himself and his swimming power, though alone, and his arms were laden with thirty coats of mail, when he came to the sea! Nor yet might Hetwaras [2] haughtily boast their craft of contest, who carried against him shields to the fight: but few escaped from strife with the hero to seek their homes! Then swam over ocean Ecgtheow's son lonely and sorrowful, seeking his land, where Hygd made him offer of hoard and realm, rings and royal-seat, reckoning naught the strength of her son to save their kingdom from hostile hordes, after Hygelac's death. No sooner for this could the stricken ones in any wise move that atheling's mind over young Heardred's head as lord and ruler of all the realm to be: yet the hero upheld him with helpful words, aided in honor, till, older grown, he wielded the Weder-Geats. - Wandering exiles sought him o'er seas, the sons of Ohtere, who had spurned the sway of the Scylfings'-helmet, the bravest and best that broke the rings, in Swedish land, of the sea-kings' line, haughty hero. [3] Hence Heardred's end. For shelter he gave them, sword-death came, the blade's fell blow, to bairn of Hygelac; but the son of Ongentheow sought again house and home when Heardred fell, leaving Beowulf lord of Geats and gift-seat's master. - A good king he! XXXIV THE fall of his lord he was fain to requite in after days; and to Eadgils he proved friend to the friendless, and forces sent over the sea to the son of Ohtere, weapons and warriors: well repaid he those care-paths cold when the king he slew. [1] Thus safe through struggles the son of Ecgtheow had passed a plenty, through perils dire, 105 with daring deeds, till this day was come that doomed him now with the dragon to strive. With comrades eleven the lord of Geats swollen in rage went seeking the dragon. He had heard whence all the harm arose and the killing of clansmen; that cup of price on the lap of the lord had been laid by the finder. In the throng was this one thirteenth man, starter of all the strife and ill, care-laden captive; cringing thence forced and reluctant, he led them on till he came in ken of that cavern-hall, the barrow delved near billowy surges, flood of ocean. Within 'twas full of wire-gold and jewels; a jealous warden, warrior trusty, the treasures held, lurked in his lair. Not light the task of entrance for any of earth-born men! Sat on the headland the hero king, spake words of hail to his hearth-companions, gold-friend of Geats. All gloomy his soul, wavering, death-bound. Wyrd full nigh stood ready to greet the gray-haired man, to seize his soul-hoard, sunder apart life and body. Not long would be the warrior's spirit enwound with flesh. Beowulf spake, the bairn of Ecgtheow:'Through store of struggles I strove in youth, mighty feuds; I mind them all. I was seven years old when the sovran of rings, friend-of-his-folk, from my father took me, had me, and held me, Hrethel the king, with food and fee, faithful in kinship. Ne'er, while I lived there, he loathlier found me, bairn in the burg, than his birthright sons, Herebeald and Haethcyn and Hygelac mine. For the eldest of these, by unmeet chance, by kinsman's deed, was the death-bed strewn, when Haethcyn killed him with horny bow, his own dear liege laid low with an arrow, missed the mark and his mate shot down, one brother the other, with bloody shaft. 106 A feeless fight, [2] and a fearful sin, horror to Hrethel; yet, hard as it was, unavenged must the atheling die! Too awful it is for an aged man to bide and bear, that his bairn so young rides on the gallows. A rime he makes, sorrow-song for his son there hanging as rapture of ravens; no rescue now can come from the old, disabled man! Still is he minded, as morning breaks, of the heir gone elsewhere; [3] another he hopes not he will bide to see his burg within as ward for his wealth, now the one has found doom of death that the deed incurred. Forlorn he looks on the lodge of his son, wine-hall waste and wind-swept chambers reft of revel. The rider sleepeth, the hero, far-hidden; [4] no harp resounds, in the courts no wassail, as once was heard. XXXV 'THEN he goes to his chamber, a grief-song chants alone for his lost. Too large all seems, homestead and house. So the helmet-of-Weders hid in his heart for Herebeald waves of woe. No way could he take to avenge on the slayer slaughter so foul; nor e'en could he harass that hero at all with loathing deed, though he loved him not. And so for the sorrow his soul endured, men's gladness he gave up and God's light chose. Lands and cities he left his sons (as the wealthy do) when he went from earth. There was strife and struggle 'twixt Swede and Geat o'er the width of waters; war arose, hard battle-horror, when Hrethel died, and Ongentheow's offspring grew strife-keen, bold, nor brooked o'er the seas pact of peace, but pushed their hosts to harass in hatred by Hreosnabeorh. Men of my folk for that feud had vengeance, 107 for woful war ('tis widely known), though one of them bought it with blood of his heart, a bargain hard: for Haethcyn proved fatal that fray, for the first-of-Geats. At morn, I heard, was the murderer killed by kinsman for kinsman, [1] with clash of sword, when Ongentheow met Eofor there. Wide split the war-helm: wan he fell, hoary Scylfing; the hand that smote him of feud was mindful, nor flinched from the death-blow. - 'For all that he [2] gave me, my gleaming sword repaid him at war, - such power I wielded, for lordly treasure: with land he entrusted me, homestead and house. He had no need from Swedish realm, or from Spear-Dane folk, or from men of the Gifths, to get him help, some warrior worse for wage to buy! Ever I fought in the front of all, sole to the fore; and so shall I fight while I bide in life and this blade shall last that early and late hath loyal proved since for my doughtiness Daeghrefn fell, slain by my hand, the Hugas' champion. Nor fared he thence to the Frisian king with the booty back, and breast-adornments; but, slain in struggle, that standard-bearer fell, atheling brave. Not with blade was he slain, but his bones were broken by brawny gripe, his heart-waves stilled. - The sword-edge now, hard blade and my hand, for the hoard shall strive.' Beowulf spake, and a battle-vow made his last of all: 'I have lived through many wars in my youth; now once again, old folk-defender, feud will I seek, do doughty deeds, if the dark destroyer forth from his cavern come to fight me!' Then hailed he the helmeted heroes all, for the last time greeting his liegemen dear, comrades of war: 'I should carry no weapon, no sword to the serpent, if sure I knew how, with such enemy, else my vows I could gain as I did in Grendel's day. 108 But fire in this fight I must fear me now, and poisonous breath; so I bring with me breastplate and board. [3] From the barrow's keeper no footbreadth flee I. One fight shall end our war by the wall, as Wyrd allots, all mankind's master. My mood is bold but forbears to boast o'er this battling-flyer. - Now abide by the barrow, ye breastplate-mailed, ye heroes in harness, which of us twain better from battle-rush bear his wounds. Wait ye the finish. The fight is not yours, nor meet for any but me alone to measure might with this monster here and play the hero. Hardily I shall win that wealth, or war shall seize, cruel killing, your king and lord!' Up stood then with shield the sturdy champion, stayed by the strength of his single manhood, and hardy 'neath helmet his harness bore under cleft of the cliffs: no coward's path! Soon spied by the wall that warrior chief, survivor of many a victory-field where foemen fought with furious clashings, an arch of stone; and within, a stream that broke from the barrow. The brooklet's wave was hot with fire. The hoard that way he never could hope unharmed to near, or endure those deeps, [4] for the dragon's flame. Then let from his breast, for he burst with rage, the Weder-Geat prince a word outgo; stormed the stark-heart; stern went ringing and clear his cry 'neath the cliff-rocks gray. The hoard-guard heard a human voice; his rage was enkindled. No respite now for pact of peace! The poison-breath of that foul worm first came forth from the cave, hot reek-of-fight: the rocks resounded. Stout by the stone-way his shield he raised, lord of the Geats, against the loathed-one; while with courage keen that coiled foe came seeking strife. The sturdy king had drawn his sword, not dull of edge, 109 heirloom old; and each of the two felt fear of his foe, though fierce their mood. Stoutly stood with his shield high-raised the warrior king, as the worm now coiled together amain: the mailed-one waited. Now, spire by spire, fast sped and glided that blazing serpent. The shield protected, soul and body a shorter while for the hero-king than his heart desired, could his will have wielded the welcome respite but once in his life! But Wyrd denied it, and victory's honors. - His arm he lifted lord of the Geats, the grim foe smote with atheling's heirloom. Its edge was turned brown blade, on the bone, and bit more feebly than its noble master had need of then in his baleful stress. - Then the barrow's keeper waxed full wild for that weighty blow, cast deadly flames; wide drove and far those vicious fires. No victor's glory the Geats' lord boasted; his brand had failed, naked in battle, as never it should, excellent iron! - 'Twas no easy path that Ecgtheow's honored heir must tread over the plain to the place of the foe; for against his will he must win a home elsewhere far, as must all men, leaving this lapsing life! - Not long it was ere those champions grimly closed again. The hoard-guard was heartened; high heaved his breast once more; and by peril was pressed again, enfolded in flames, the folk-commander! Nor yet about him his band of comrades, sons of athelings, armed stood with warlike front: to the woods they bent them, their lives to save. But the soul of one with care was cumbered. Kinship true can never be marred in a noble mind! XXXVI WIGLAF his name was, Weohstan's son, linden-thane loved, the lord of Scylfings, 110 Aelfhere's kinsman. His king he now saw with heat under helmet hard oppressed. He minded the prizes his prince had given him, wealthy seat of the Waegmunding line, and folk-rights that his father owned Not long he lingered. The linden yellow, his shield, he seized; the old sword he drew: as heirloom of Eanmund earth-dwellers knew it, who was slain by the sword-edge, son of Ohtere, friendless exile, erst in fray killed by Weohstan, who won for his kin brown-bright helmet, breastplate ringed, old sword of Eotens, Onela's gift, weeds of war of the warrior-thane, battle-gear brave: though a brother's child had been felled, the feud was unfelt by Onela. [1] For winters this war-gear Weohstan kept, breastplate and board, till his bairn had grown earlship to earn as the old sire did: then he gave him, mid Geats, the gear of battle, portion huge, when he passed from life, fared aged forth. For the first time now with his leader-lord the liegeman young was bidden to share the shock of battle. Neither softened his soul, nor the sire's bequest weakened in war. [2] So the worm found out when once in fight the foes had met! Wiglaf spake, - and his words were sage; sad in spirit, he said to his comrades:'I remember the time, when mead we took, what promise we made to this prince of ours in the banquet-hall, to our breaker-of-rings, for gear of combat to give him requital, for hard-sword and helmet, if hap should bring stress of this sort! Himself who chose us from all his army to aid him now, urged us to glory, and gave these treasures, because he counted us keen with the spear and hardy 'neath helm, though this hero-work our leader hoped unhelped and alone to finish for us, - folk-defender who hath got him glory greater than all men 111 for daring deeds! Now the day is come that our noble master has need of the might of warriors stout. Let us stride along the hero to help while the heat is about him glowing and grim! For God is my witness I am far more fain the fire should seize along with my lord these limbs of mine! [3] Unsuiting it seems our shields to bear homeward hence, save here we essay to fell the foe and defend the life of the Weders' lord. I wot 'twere shame on the law of our land if alone the king out of Geatish warriors woe endured and sank in the struggle! My sword and helmet, breastplate and board, for us both shall serve!' Through slaughter-reek strode he to succor his Chieftain, his battle-helm bore, and brief words spake:'Beowulf dearest, do all bravely, as in youthful days of yore thou vowedst that while life should last thou wouldst let no wise thy glory droop! Now, great in deeds, atheling steadfast, with all thy strength shield thy life! I will stand to help thee.' At the words the worm came once again, murderous monster mad with rage, with fire-billows flaming, its foes to seek, the hated men. In heat-waves burned that board [4] to the boss, and the breastplate failed to shelter at all the spear-thane young. Yet quickly under his kinsman's shield went eager the earl, since his own was now all burned by the blaze. The bold king again had mind of his glory: with might his glaive was driven into the dragon's head, blow nerved by hate. But Naegling was shivered, broken in battle was Beowulf's sword, old and gray. 'Twas granted him not that ever the edge of iron at all could help him at strife: too strong was his hand, so the tale is told, and he tried too far with strength of stroke all swords he wielded, though sturdy their steel: they steaded him nought. 112 Then for the third time thought on its feud that folk-destroyer, fire-dread dragon, and rushed on the hero, where room allowed, battle-grim, burning; its bitter teeth closed on his neck, and covered him with waves of blood from his breast that welled. XXXVII 'TWAS now, men say, in his sovran's need that the earl made known his noble strain, craft and keenness and courage enduring. Heedless of harm, though his hand was burned, hardy-hearted, he helped his kinsman. A little lower the loathsome beast he smote with sword; his steel drove in bright and burnished; that blaze began to lose and lessen. At last the king wielded his wits again, war-knife drew, a biting blade by his breastplate hanging, and the Weders'-helm smote that worm asunder, felled the foe, flung forth its life. So had they killed it, kinsmen both, athelings twain: thus an earl should be in danger's day! - Of deeds of valor this conqueror's-hour of the king was last, of his work in the world. The wound began, which that dragon-of-earth had erst inflicted, to swell and smart; and soon he found in his breast was boiling, baleful and deep, pain of poison. The prince walked on, wise in his thought, to the wall of rock; then sat, and stared at the structure of giants, where arch of stone and steadfast column upheld forever that hall in earth. Yet here must the hand of the henchman peerless lave with water his winsome lord, the king and conqueror covered with blood, with struggle spent, and unspan his helmet. Beowulf spake in spite of his hurt, his mortal wound; full well he knew his portion now was past and gone of earthly bliss, and all had fled 113 of his file of days, and death was near: 'I would fain bestow on son of mine this gear of war, were given me now that any heir should after me come of my proper blood. This people I ruled fifty winters. No folk-king was there, none at all, of the neighboring clans who war would wage me with 'warriors'-friends' [1] and threat me with horrors. At home I bided what fate might come, and I cared for mine own; feuds I sought not, nor falsely swore ever on oath. For all these things, though fatally wounded, fain am I! From the Ruler-of-Man no wrath shall seize me, when life from my frame must flee away, for killing of kinsmen! Now quickly go and gaze on that hoard 'neath the hoary rock, Wiglaf loved, now the worm lies low, sleeps, heart-sore, of his spoil bereaved. And fare in haste. I would fain behold the gorgeous heirlooms, golden store, have joy in the jewels and gems, lay down softlier for sight of this splendid hoard my life and the lordship I long have held.' XXXVIII I HAVE heard that swiftly the son of Weohstan at wish and word of his wounded king, war-sick warrior, - woven mail-coat, battle-sark, bore 'neath the barrow's roof. Then the clansman keen, of conquest proud, passing the seat, [1] saw store of jewels and glistening gold the ground along; by the wall were marvels, and many a vessel in the den of the dragon, the dawn-flier old: unburnished bowls of bygone men reft of richness; rusty helms of the olden age; and arm-rings many wondrously woven. - Such wealth of gold, booty from barrow, can burden with pride each human wight: let him hide it who will! - 114 His glance too fell on a gold-wove banner high o'er the hoard, of handiwork noblest, brilliantly broidered; so bright its gleam, all the earth-floor he easily saw and viewed all these vessels. No vestige now was seen of the serpent: the sword had ta'en him. Then, I heard, the hill of its hoard was reft, old work of giants, by one alone; he burdened his bosom with beakers and plate at his own good will, and the ensign took, brightest of beacons. - The blade of his lord - its edge was iron - had injured deep one that guarded the golden hoard many a year and its murder-fire spread hot round the barrow in horror-billows at midnight hour, till it met its doom. Hasted the herald, the hoard so spurred him his track to retrace; he was troubled by doubt, high-souled hero, if haply he'd find alive, where he left him, the lord of Weders, weakening fast by the wall of the cave. So he carried the load. His lord and king he found all bleeding, famous chief at the lapse of life. The liegeman again plashed him with water, till point of word broke through the breast-hoard. Beowulf spake, sage and sad, as he stared at the gold. 'For the gold and treasure, to God my thanks, to the Wielder-of-Wonders, with words I say, for what I behold, to Heaven's Lord, for the grace that I give such gifts to my folk or ever the day of my death be run! Now I've bartered here for booty of treasure the last of my life, so look ye well to the needs of my land! No longer I tarry. A barrow bid ye the battle-fanned raise for my ashes. 'Twill shine by the shore of the flood, to folk of mine memorial fair on Hrones Headland high uplifted, that ocean-wanderers oft may hail Beowulf's Barrow, as back from far they drive their keels o'er the darkling wave.' 115 From his neck he unclasped the collar of gold, valorous king, to his vassal gave it with bright-gold helmet, breastplate, and ring, to the youthful thane: bade him use them in joy. 'Thou art end and remnant of all our race the Waegmunding name. For Wyrd hath swept them, all my line, to the land of doom, earls in their glory: I after them go.' This word was the last which the wise old man harbored in heart ere hot death-waves of balefire he chose. From his bosom fled his soul to seek the saints' reward. XXXIX IT was heavy hap for that hero young on his lord beloved to look and find him lying on earth with life at end, sorrowful sight. But the slayer too, awful earth-dragon, empty of breath, lay felled in fight, nor, fain of its treasure, could the writhing monster rule it more. For edges of iron had ended its days, hard and battle-sharp, hammers' leaving; and that flier-afar had fallen to ground hushed by its hurt, its hoard all near, no longer lusty aloft to whirl at midnight, making its merriment seen, proud of its prizes: prone it sank by the handiwork of the hero-king. Forsooth among folk but few achieve, - though sturdy and strong, as stories tell me, and never so daring in deed of valor, the perilous breath of a poison-foe to brave, and to rush on the ring-board hall, whenever his watch the warden keeps bold in the barrow. Beowulf paid the price of death for that precious hoard; and each of the foes had found the end of this fleeting life. Befell erelong that the laggards in war the wood had left, 116 trothbreakers, cowards, ten together, fearing before to flourish a spear in the sore distress of their sovran lord. Now in their shame their shields they carried, armor of fight, where the old man lay; and they gazed on Wiglaf. Wearied he sat at his sovran's shoulder, shieldsman good, to wake him with water. [2] Nowise it availed. Though well he wished it, in world no more could he barrier life for that leader-of-battles nor baffle the will of all-wielding God. Doom of the Lord was law o'er the deeds of every man, as it is to-day. Grim was the answer, easy to get, from the youth for those that had yielded to fear! Wiglaf spake, the son of Weohstan, mournful he looked on those men unloved:'Who sooth will speak, can say indeed that the ruler who gave you golden rings and the harness of war in which ye stand - for he at ale-bench often-times bestowed on hall-folk helm and breastplate, lord to liegemen, the likeliest gear which near of far he could find to give, threw away and wasted these weeds of battle, on men who failed when the foemen came! Not at all could the king of his comrades-in-arms venture to vaunt, though the Victory-Wielder, God, gave him grace that he got revenge sole with his sword in stress and need. To rescue his life, 'twas little that I could serve him in struggle; yet shift I made (hopeless it seemed) to help my kinsman. Its strength ever waned, when with weapon I struck that fatal foe, and the fire less strongly flowed from its head. - Too few the heroes in throe of contest that thronged to our king! Now gift of treasure and girding of sword, joy of the house and home-delight shall fail your folk; his freehold-land every clansman within your kin shall lose and leave, when lords highborn 117 hear afar of that flight of yours, a fameless deed. Yea, death is better for liegemen all than a life of shame!' XL THAT battle-toil bade he at burg to announce, at the fort on the cliff, where, full of sorrow, all the morning earls had sat, daring shieldsmen, in doubt of twain: would they wail as dead, or welcome home, their lord beloved? Little [1] kept back of the tidings new, but told them all, the herald that up the headland rode. 'Now the willing-giver to Weder folk in death-bed lies; the Lord of Geats on the slaughter-bed sleeps by the serpent's deed! And beside him is stretched that slayer-of-men with knife-wounds sick: [2] no sword availed on the awesome thing in any wise to work a wound. There Wiglaf sitteth, Weohstan's bairn, by Beowulf's side, the living earl by the other dead, and heavy of heart a head-watch [3] keeps o'er friend and foe. - Now our folk may look for waging of war when once unhidden to Frisian and Frank the fall of the king is spread afar. - The strife began when hot on the Hugas [4] Hygelac fell and fared with his fleet to the Frisian land. Him there the Hetwaras humbled in war, plied with such prowess their power o'erwhelming that the bold-in-battle bowed beneath it and fell in fight. To his friends no wise could that earl give treasure! And ever since the Merowings' favor has failed us wholly. Nor aught expect I of peace and faith from Swedish folk. 'Twas spread afar how Ongentheow reft at Ravenswood Haethcyn Hrethling of hope and life, when the folk of Geats for the first time sought in wanton pride the Warlike-Scylfings. Soon the sage old sire [5] of Ohtere, 118 ancient and awful, gave answering blow; the sea-king [6] he slew, and his spouse redeemed, his good wife rescued, though robbed of her gold, mother of Ohtere and Onela. Then he followed his foes, who fled before him sore beset and stole their way, bereft of a ruler, to Ravenswood. With his host he besieged there what swords had left, the weary and wounded; woes he threatened the whole night through to that hard-pressed throng: some with the morrow his sword should kill, some should go to the gallows-tree for rapture of ravens. But rescue came with dawn of day for those desperate men when they heard the horn of Hygelac sound, tones of his trumpet; the trusty king had followed their trail with faithful band. XLI 'THE bloody swath of Swedes and Geats and the storm of their strife, were seen afar, how folk against folk the fight had wakened. The ancient king with his atheling band sought his citadel, sorrowing much: Ongentheow earl went up to his burg. He had tested Hygelac's hardihood, the proud one's prowess, would prove it no longer, defied no more those fighting-wanderers nor hoped from the seamen to save his hoard, his bairn and his bride: so he bent him again, old, to his earth-walls. Yet after him came with slaughter for Swedes the standards of Hygelac o'er peaceful plains in pride advancing, till Hrethelings fought in the fenced town. [1] Then Ongentheow with edge of sword, the hoary-bearded, was held at bay, and the folk-king there was forced to suffer Eofor's anger. In ire, at the king Wulf Wonreding with weapon struck; and the chieftain's blood, for that blow, in streams flowed 'neath his hair. No fear felt he, stout old Scylfing, but straightway repaid 119 in better bargain that bitter stroke and faced his foe with fell intent. Nor swift enough was the son of Wonred answer to render the aged chief; too soon on his head the helm was cloven; blood-bedecked he bowed to earth, and fell adown; not doomed was he yet, and well he waxed, though the wound was sore. Then the hardy Hygelac-thane, [2] when his brother fell, with broad brand smote, giants' sword crashing through giants'-helm across the shield-wall: sank the king, his folk's old herdsman, fatally hurt. There were many to bind the brother's wounds and lift him, fast as fate allowed his people to wield the place-of-war. But Eofor took from Ongentheow, earl from other, the iron-breastplate, hard sword hilted, and helmet too, and the hoar-chief's harness to Hygelac carried, who took the trappings, and truly promised rich fee 'mid folk, - and fulfilled it so. For that grim strife gave the Geatish lord, Hrethel's offspring, when home he came, to Eofor and Wulf a wealth of treasure, Each of them had a hundred thousand [3] in land and linked rings; nor at less price reckoned mid-earth men such mighty deeds! And to Eofor he gave his only daughter in pledge of grace, the pride of his home. 'Such is the feud, the foeman's rage, death-hate of men: so I deem it sure that the Swedish folk will seek us home for this fall of their friends, the fighting-Scylfings, when once they learn that our warrior leader lifeless lies, who land and hoard ever defended from all his foes, furthered his folk's weal, finished his course a hardy hero. - Now haste is best, that we go to gaze on our Geatish lord, and bear the bountiful breaker-of-rings to the funeral pyre. No fragments merely 120 shall burn with the warrior. Wealth of jewels, gold untold and gained in terror, treasure at last with his life obtained, all of that booty the brands shall take, fire shall eat it. No earl must carry memorial jewel. No maiden fair shall wreathe her neck with noble ring: nay, sad in spirit and shorn of her gold, oft shall she pass o'er paths of exile now our lord all laughter has laid aside, all mirth and revel. Many a spear morning-cold shall be clasped amain, lifted aloft; nor shall lilt of harp those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven, fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate when he and the wolf were wasting the slain.' So he told his sorrowful tidings, and little [4] he lied, the loyal man of word or of work. The warriors rose; sad, they climbed to the Cliff-of-Eagles, went, welling with tears, the wonder to view. Found on the sand there, stretched at rest, their lifeless lord, who had lavished rings of old upon them. Ending-day had dawned on the doughty-one; death had seized in woful slaughter the Weders' king. There saw they, besides, the strangest being, loathsome, lying their leader near, prone on the field. The fiery dragon, fearful fiend, with flame was scorched. Reckoned by feet, it was fifty measures in length as it lay. Aloft erewhile it had revelled by night, and anon come back, seeking its den; now in death's sure clutch it had come to the end of its earth-hall joys. By it there stood the stoups and jars; dishes lay there, and dear-decked swords eaten with rust, as, on earth's lap resting, a thousand winters they waited there. For all that heritage huge, that gold of bygone men, was bound by a spell, [5] 121 so the treasure-hall could be touched by none of human kind, - save that Heaven's King, God himself, might give whom he would, Helper of Heroes, the hoard to open, even such a man as seemed to him meet. XLII A PERILOUS path, it proved, he [1] trod who heinously hid, that hall within, wealth under wall! Its watcher had killed one of a few, [2] and the feud was avenged in woful fashion. Wondrous seems it, what manner a man of might and valor oft ends his life, when the earl no longer in mead-hall may live with loving friends. So Beowulf, when that barrow's warden he sought, and the struggle; himself knew not in what wise he should wend from the world at last. For [3] princes potent, who placed the gold, with a curse to doomsday covered it deep, so that marked with sin the man should be, hedged with horrors, in hell-bonds fast, racked with plagues, who should rob their hoard. Yet no greed for gold, but the grace of heaven, ever the king had kept in view. [4] Wiglaf spake, the son of Weohstan:'At the mandate of one, oft warriors many sorrow must suffer; and so must we. The people's-shepherd showed not aught of care for our counsel, king beloved! That guardian of gold he should grapple not, urged we, but let him lie where he long had been in his earth-hall waiting the end of the world, the hest of heaven. - This hoard is ours but grievously gotten; too grim the fate which thither carried our king and lord. I was within there, and all I viewed, the chambered treasure, when chance allowed me (and my path was made in no pleasant wise) under the earth-wall. Eager, I seized such heap from the hoard as hands could bear 122 and hurriedly carried it hither back to my liege and lord. Alive was he still, still wielding his wits. The wise old man spake much in his sorrow, and sent you greetings and bade that ye build, when he breathed no more, on the place of his balefire a barrow high, memorial mighty. Of men was he worthiest warrior wide earth o'er the while he had joy of his jewels and burg. Let us set out in haste now, the second time to see and search this store of treasure, these wall-hid wonders, - the way I show you, where, gathered near, ye may gaze your fill at broad-gold and rings. Let the bier, soon made, be all in order when out we come, our king and captain to carry thither - man beloved - where long he shall bide safe in the shelter of sovran God.' Then the bairn of Weohstan bade command, hardy chief, to heroes many that owned their homesteads, hither to bring firewood from far - o'er the folk they ruled for the famed-one's funeral. ' Fire shall devour and wan flames feed on the fearless warrior who oft stood stout in the iron-shower, when, sped from the string, a storm of arrows shot o'er the shield-wall: the shaft held firm, featly feathered, followed the barb.' And now the sage young son of Weohstan seven chose of the chieftain's thanes, the best he found that band within, and went with these warriors, one of eight, under hostile roof. In hand one bore a lighted torch and led the way. No lots they cast for keeping the hoard when once the warriors saw it in hall, altogether without a guardian, lying there lost. And little they mourned when they had hastily haled it out, dear-bought treasure! The dragon they cast, the worm, o'er the wall for the wave to take, and surges swallowed that shepherd of gems. 123 Then the woven gold on a wain was laden countless quite! - and the king was borne, hoary hero, to Hrones-Ness. XLIII THEN fashioned for him the folk of Geats firm on the earth a funeral-pile, and hung it with helmets and harness of war and breastplates bright, as the boon he asked; and they laid amid it the mighty chieftain, heroes mourning their master dear. Then on the hill that hugest of balefires the warriors wakened. Wood-smoke rose black over blaze, and blent was the roar of flame with weeping (the wind was still), till the fire had broken the frame of bones, hot at the heart. In heavy mood their misery moaned they, their master's death. Wailing her woe, the widow [1] old, her hair upbound, for Beowulf's death sung in her sorrow, and said full oft she dreaded the doleful days to come, deaths enow, and doom of battle, and shame. - The smoke by the sky was devoured. The folk of the Weders fashioned there on the headland a barrow broad and high, by ocean-farers far descried: in ten days' time their toil had raised it, the battle-brave's beacon. Round brands of the pyre a wall they built, the worthiest ever that wit could prompt in their wisest men. They placed in the barrow that precious booty, the rounds and the rings they had reft erewhile, hardy heroes, from hoard in cave, trusting the ground with treasure of earls, gold in the earth, where ever it lies useless to men as of yore it was. Then about that barrow the battle-keen rode, atheling-born, a band of twelve, lament to make, to mourn their king, chant their dirge, and their chieftain honor. 124 They praised his earlship, his acts of prowess worthily witnessed: and well it is that men their master-friend mightily laud, heartily love, when hence he goes from life in the body forlorn away. Thus made their mourning the men of Geatland, for their hero's passing his hearth-companions: quoth that of all the kings of earth, of men he was mildest and most beloved, to his kin the kindest, keenest for praise. ~ Charles Baudelaire,