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Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk from the 1922
Macmillan and Co. edition.

LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER WITH MANY OTHER VERSES

APOLOGY

About half the verses that follow were written quite lately. The rest are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were published, on considering that these would contain a sufficient number of pages to offer readers at one time, more especially during the distractions of the war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are, however, but some that were overlooked in gathering previous collections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemed to make up for their inexperience and to justify their inclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are not discoverable.

The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse or explanation. Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new book is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practical reasons, however, among which were requests from some illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the accident that several of the poems have already seen the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them once more.

I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently. I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all—readers to whom no passport is required—will care for this new instalment of them, perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them. Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing in technic or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a ladies' school; even though, to use Wordsworth's observation in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose "that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded."

It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For— while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible—it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of "obstinate questionings" and "blank misgivings" tends to a paralysed intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to- day, in allusions to the present author's pages, alleged to be "pessimism" is, in truth, only such "questionings" in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul's betterment, and the body's also.

If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much earlier, in a poem entitled "In Tenebris":

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:

that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama); and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by lovingkindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces— unconscious or other—that have "the balancings of the clouds," happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so- called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words: "This view of life is not mine." The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said "view" (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of "Mr. Hardy refusing consolation," the "dark gravity of his ideas," and so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that 'twere possible!

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual personal criticisms—for casual and unreflecting they must be—but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on what has been called the "philosophy" of these poems—usually reproved as "queer." Whoever the author may be that undertakes such application of ideas in this "philosophic" direction—where it is specially required—glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom IDEAS are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem "queer "—should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited—who would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial—affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet's province, the application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as "Royal Sponsors") following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one's train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver's rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer's aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress for a few moments to more general considerations. The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of Shelley's paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men's tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and "high thinking" nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, "a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age.

I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on the old game of sampling the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in ignorance or not of Coleridge's proof that a versification of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings into a book that its author never dreamt of writing there. I might go on interminably.

But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the cause.

In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion—I include religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and "the truth that shall make you free, men's minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on. I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain worthy but small bodies of various denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter where advance might have been the very least expected a few years back—the English Church—if one reads it rightly as showing evidence of "removing those things that are shaken," in accordance with the wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise, and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a struggle for continuity by applying the principle of evolution to their own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking the hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank march which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask, what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together?

It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry—"the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science," as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas. But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and literary circles

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art

(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence- forward.

I have to thank the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly, Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected publication. T. H.

February 1922.

WEATHERS

THE MAID OF KEINTON MANDEVILLE

SUMMER SCHEMES

EPEISODIA

FAINTHEART IN A RAILWAY TRAIN

AT MOONRISE AND ONWARDS

      I thought you a fire
   On Heron-Plantation Hill,
Dealing out mischief the most dire
   To the chattels of men of hire
      There in their vill.

      But by and by
   You turned a yellow-green,
Like a large glow-worm in the sky;
   And then I could descry
      Your mood and mien.

      How well I know
   Your furtive feminine shape!
As if reluctantly you show
   You nude of cloud, and but by favour throw
      Aside its drape . . .

     —How many a year
   Have you kept pace with me,
Wan Woman of the waste up there,
   Behind a hedge, or the bare
      Bough of a tree!

      No novelty are you,
   O Lady of all my time,
Veering unbid into my view
   Whether I near Death's mew,
      Or Life's top cyme!

THE GARDEN SEAT

BARTHELEMON AT VAUXHALL

"I SOMETIMES THINK"

JEZREEL: ON ITS SEIZURE BY THE ENGLISH UNDER ALLENBY, SEPTEMBER 1918

A JOG-TROT PAIR

   Who were the twain that trod this track
      So many times together
         Hither and back,
In spells of certain and uncertain weather?

   Commonplace in conduct they
      Who wandered to and fro here
         Day by day:
Two that few dwellers troubled themselves to know here.

   The very gravel-path was prim
      That daily they would follow:
         Borders trim:
Never a wayward sprout, or hump, or hollow.

   Trite usages in tamest style
      Had tended to their plighting.
         "It's just worth while,
Perhaps," they had said. "And saves much sad good-nighting."

   And petty seemed the happenings
      That ministered to their joyance:
         Simple things,
Onerous to satiate souls, increased their buoyance.

   Who could those common people be,
      Of days the plainest, barest?
         They were we;
Yes; happier than the cleverest, smartest, rarest.

"THE CURTAINS NOW ARE DRAWN"

   The curtains now are drawn,
   And the spindrift strikes the glass,
   Blown up the jagged pass
   By the surly salt sou'-west,
   And the sneering glare is gone
   Behind the yonder crest,
      While she sings to me:
"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine."

II

   I stand here in the rain,
   With its smite upon her stone,
   And the grasses that have grown
   Over women, children, men,
   And their texts that "Life is vain";
   But I hear the notes as when
      Once she sang to me:
"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine."

1913.

"ACCORDING TO THE MIGHTY WORKING"

"I WAS NOT HE"

   I was not he—the man
Who used to pilgrim to your gate,
At whose smart step you grew elate,
   And rosed, as maidens can,
      For a brief span.

   It was not I who sang
Beside the keys you touched so true
With note-bent eyes, as if with you
   It counted not whence sprang
      The voice that rang . . .

   Yet though my destiny
It was to miss your early sweet,
You still, when turned to you my feet,
   Had sweet enough to be
      A prize for me!

THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL

WELCOME HOME

   To my native place
   Bent upon returning,
   Bosom all day burning
   To be where my race
Well were known, 'twas much with me
There to dwell in amity.

   Folk had sought their beds,
   But I hailed: to view me
   Under the moon, out to me
   Several pushed their heads,
And to each I told my name,
Plans, and that therefrom I came.

   "Did you? . . . Ah, 'tis true
   I once heard, back a long time,
   Here had spent his young time,
   Some such man as you . . .
Good-night." The casement closed again,
And I was left in the frosty lane.

GOING AND STAYING

READ BY MOONLIGHT

AT A HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD

A WOMAN'S FANCY

HER SONG

A WET AUGUST

THE DISSEMBLERS

TO A LADY PLAYING AND SINGING IN THE MORNING

   Joyful lady, sing!
And I will lurk here listening,
Though nought be done, and nought begun,
And work-hours swift are scurrying.

   Sing, O lady, still!
Aye, I will wait each note you trill,
Though duties due that press to do
This whole day long I unfulfil.

   "—It is an evening tune;
One not designed to waste the noon,"
You say. I know: time bids me go—
For daytide passes too, too soon!

   But let indulgence be,
This once, to my rash ecstasy:
When sounds nowhere that carolled air
My idled morn may comfort me!

"A MAN WAS DRAWING NEAR TO ME"

THE STRANGE HOUSE

"AS 'TWERE TO-NIGHT"

THE CONTRETEMPS

   A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,
      And we clasped, and almost kissed;
   But she was not the woman whom
   I had promised to meet in the thawing brume
On that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst.

   So loosening from me swift she said:
      "O why, why feign to be
   The one I had meant!—to whom I have sped
   To fly with, being so sorrily wed!"
—'Twas thus and thus that she upbraided me.

   My assignation had struck upon
      Some others' like it, I found.
   And her lover rose on the night anon;
   And then her husband entered on
The lamplit, snowflaked, sloppiness around.

   "Take her and welcome, man!" he cried:
      "I wash my hands of her.
   I'll find me twice as good a bride!"
  —All this to me, whom he had eyed,
Plainly, as his wife's planned deliverer.

   And next the lover: "Little I knew,
      Madam, you had a third!
   Kissing here in my very view!"
  —Husband and lover then withdrew.
I let them; and I told them not they erred.

   Why not? Well, there faced she and I—
      Two strangers who'd kissed, or near,
   Chancewise. To see stand weeping by
   A woman once embraced, will try
The tension of a man the most austere.

   So it began; and I was young,
      She pretty, by the lamp,
   As flakes came waltzing down among
   The waves of her clinging hair, that hung
Heavily on her temples, dark and damp.

   And there alone still stood we two;
      She one cast off for me,
   Or so it seemed: while night ondrew,
   Forcing a parley what should do
We twain hearts caught in one catastrophe.

   In stranded souls a common strait
      Wakes latencies unknown,
   Whose impulse may precipitate
   A life-long leap. The hour was late,
And there was the Jersey boat with its funnel agroan.

   "Is wary walking worth much pother?"
      It grunted, as still it stayed.
   "One pairing is as good as another
   Where all is venture! Take each other,
And scrap the oaths that you have aforetime made." . . .

  —Of the four involved there walks but one
      On earth at this late day.
   And what of the chapter so begun?
   In that odd complex what was done?
   Well; happiness comes in full to none:
Let peace lie on lulled lips: I will not say.

WEYMOUTH.

A GENTLEMAN'S EPITAPH ON HIMSELF AND A LADY, WHO WERE BURIED TOGETHER

THE OLD GOWN

A NIGHT IN NOVEMBER

A DUETTIST TO HER PIANOFORTE

"WHERE THREE ROADS JOINED"

"AND THERE WAS A GREAT CALM"

HAUNTING FINGERS

         "Are you awake,
      Comrades, this silent night?
   Well 'twere if all of our glossy gluey make
Lay in the damp without, and fell to fragments quite!"

         "O viol, my friend,
      I watch, though Phosphor nears,
   And I fain would drowse away to its utter end
This dumb dark stowage after our loud melodious years!"

And they felt past handlers clutch them,
   Though none was in the room,
Old players' dead fingers touch them,
      Shrunk in the tomb.

         "'Cello, good mate,
      You speak my mind as yours:
   Doomed to this voiceless, crippled, corpselike state,
Who, dear to famed Amphion, trapped here, long endures?"

         "Once I could thrill
      The populace through and through,
   Wake them to passioned pulsings past their will." . . .
(A contra-basso spake so, and the rest sighed anew.)

And they felt old muscles travel
   Over their tense contours,
And with long skill unravel
      Cunningest scores.

         "The tender pat
      Of her aery finger-tips
   Upon me daily—I rejoiced thereat!"
(Thuswise a harpsicord, as from dampered lips.)

         "My keys' white shine,
      Now sallow, met a hand
   Even whiter. . . . Tones of hers fell forth with mine
In sowings of sound so sweet no lover could withstand!"

And its clavier was filmed with fingers
   Like tapering flames—wan, cold—
Or the nebulous light that lingers
      In charnel mould.

         "Gayer than most
      Was I," reverbed a drum;
   "The regiments, marchings, throngs, hurrahs! What a host
I stirred—even when crape mufflings gagged me well-nigh dumb!"

         Trilled an aged viol:
      "Much tune have I set free
   To spur the dance, since my first timid trial
Where I had birth—far hence, in sun-swept Italy!"

And he feels apt touches on him
   From those that pressed him then;
Who seem with their glance to con him,
      Saying, "Not again!"

         "A holy calm,"
      Mourned a shawm's voice subdued,
   "Steeped my Cecilian rhythms when hymn and psalm
Poured from devout souls met in Sabbath sanctitude."

         "I faced the sock
      Nightly," twanged a sick lyre,
   "Over ranked lights! O charm of life in mock,
O scenes that fed love, hope, wit, rapture, mirth, desire!"

Thus they, till each past player
   Stroked thinner and more thin,
And the morning sky grew grayer
      And day crawled in.

THE WOMAN I MET

"IF IT'S EVER SPRING AGAIN"

THE TWO HOUSES

         In the heart of night,
      When farers were not near,
   The left house said to the house on the right,
"I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here."

         Said the right, cold-eyed:
      "Newcomer here I am,
   Hence haler than you with your cracked old hide,
Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam.

         "Modern my wood,
      My hangings fair of hue;
   While my windows open as they should,
And water-pipes thread all my chambers through.

         "Your gear is gray,
      Your face wears furrows untold."
   "—Yours might," mourned the other, "if you held, brother,
The Presences from aforetime that I hold.

         "You have not known
      Men's lives, deaths, toils, and teens;
   You are but a heap of stick and stone:
A new house has no sense of the have-beens.

         "Void as a drum
      You stand: I am packed with these,
   Though, strangely, living dwellers who come
See not the phantoms all my substance sees!

         "Visible in the morning
      Stand they, when dawn drags in;
   Visible at night; yet hint or warning
Of these thin elbowers few of the inmates win.

         "Babes new-brought-forth
      Obsess my rooms; straight-stretched
   Lank corpses, ere outborne to earth;
Yea, throng they as when first from the 'Byss upfetched.

         "Dancers and singers
      Throb in me now as once;
   Rich-noted throats and gossamered fingers
Of heels; the learned in love-lore and the dunce.

         "Note here within
      The bridegroom and the bride,
   Who smile and greet their friends and kin,
And down my stairs depart for tracks untried.

         "Where such inbe,
      A dwelling's character
   Takes theirs, and a vague semblancy
To them in all its limbs, and light, and atmosphere.

         "Yet the blind folk
      My tenants, who come and go
   In the flesh mid these, with souls unwoke,
Of such sylph-like surrounders do not know."

         "—Will the day come,"
      Said the new one, awestruck, faint,
   "When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb -
And with such spectral guests become acquaint?"

         "—That will it, boy;
      Such shades will people thee,
   Each in his misery, irk, or joy,
And print on thee their presences as on me."

ON STINSFORD HILL AT MIDNIGHT

THE FALLOW DEER AT THE LONELY HOUSE

THE SELFSAME SONG

THE WANDERER

A WIFE COMES BACK

   A woman came into his room
Between the dawn and the creeping day:
She was the years-wed wife from whom
He had parted, and who lived far away,
      As if strangers they.

   He wondered, and as she stood
She put on youth in her look and air,
And more was he wonderstruck as he viewed
Her form and flesh bloom yet more fair
      While he watched her there;

   Till she freshed to the pink and brown
That were hers on the night when first they met,
When she was the charm of the idle town
And he the pick of the club-fire set . . .
      His eyes grew wet,

   And he stretched his arms: "Stay—rest!—"
He cried. "Abide with me so, my own!"
But his arms closed in on his hard bare breast;
She had vanished with all he had looked upon
      Of her beauty: gone.

   He clothed, and drew downstairs,
But she was not in the house, he found;
And he passed out under the leafy pairs
Of the avenue elms, and searched around
      To the park-pale bound.

   He mounted, and rode till night
To the city to which she had long withdrawn,
The vision he bore all day in his sight
Being her young self as pondered on
      In the dim of dawn.

   "—The lady here long ago -
Is she now here?—young—or such age as she is?"
"—She is still here."—"Thank God. Let her know;
She'll pardon a comer so late as this
   Whom she'd fain not miss."

   She received him—an ancient dame,
Who hemmed, with features frozen and numb,
"How strange!—I'd almost forgotten your name! -
A call just now—is troublesome;
      Why did you come?"

A YOUNG MAN'S EXHORTATION

   Call off your eyes from care
By some determined deftness; put forth joys
Dear as excess without the core that cloys,
   And charm Life's lourings fair.

   Exalt and crown the hour
That girdles us, and fill it full with glee,
Blind glee, excelling aught could ever be
   Were heedfulness in power.

   Send up such touching strains
That limitless recruits from Fancy's pack
Shall rush upon your tongue, and tender back
   All that your soul contains.

   For what do we know best?
That a fresh love-leaf crumpled soon will dry,
And that men moment after moment die,
   Of all scope dispossest.

   If I have seen one thing
It is the passing preciousness of dreams;
That aspects are within us; and who seems
   Most kingly is the King.

1867: WESTBOURNE PARK VILLAS.

AT LULWORTH COVE A CENTURY BACK

A BYGONE OCCASION

   That night, that night,
   That song, that song!
Will such again be evened quite
   Through lifetimes long?

   No mirth was shown
   To outer seers,
But mood to match has not been known
   In modern years.

   O eyes that smiled,
   O lips that lured;
That such would last was one beguiled
   To think ensured!

   That night, that night,
   That song, that song;
O drink to its recalled delight,
   Though tears may throng!

TWO SERENADES

THE WEDDING MORNING

   Tabitha dressed for her wedding:-
   "Tabby, why look so sad?"
"—O I feel a great gloominess spreading, spreading,
   Instead of supremely glad! . . .

   "I called on Carry last night,
   And he came whilst I was there,
Not knowing I'd called. So I kept out of sight,
   And I heard what he said to her:

   "'—Ah, I'd far liefer marry
   YOU, Dear, to-morrow!' he said,
'But that cannot be.'—O I'd give him to Carry,
   And willingly see them wed,

   "But how can I do it when
   His baby will soon be born?
After that I hope I may die. And then
   She can have him. I shall not mourn!'

END OF THE YEAR 1912

THE CHIMES PLAY "LIFE'S A BUMPER!"

"I WORKED NO WILE TO MEET YOU"

AT THE RAILWAY STATION, UPWAY

   "There is not much that I can do,
For I've no money that's quite my own!"
   Spoke up the pitying child -
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, -
"But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!"

   The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
   As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
      Uproariously:
      "This life so free
      Is the thing for me!"
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in -
The convict, and boy with the violin.

SIDE BY SIDE

DREAM OF THE CITY SHOPWOMAN

A MAIDEN'S PLEDGE

THE CHILD AND THE SAGE

MISMET

   He was leaning by a face,
   He was looking into eyes,
   And he knew a trysting-place,
   And he heard seductive sighs;
      But the face,
      And the eyes,
      And the place,
      And the sighs,
Were not, alas, the right ones—the ones meet for him -
Though fine and sweet the features, and the feelings all abrim.

II

   She was looking at a form,
   She was listening for a tread,
   She could feel a waft of charm
   When a certain name was said;
      But the form,
      And the tread,
      And the charm
      Of name said,
Were the wrong ones for her, and ever would be so,
While the heritor of the right it would have saved her soul to know!

AN AUTUMN RAIN-SCENE

MEDITATIONS ON A HOLIDAY

AN EXPERIENCE

THE BEAUTY

THE COLLECTOR CLEANS HIS PICTURE

   How I remember cleaning that strange picture!
I had been deep in duty for my sick neighbour -
His besides my own—over several Sundays,
Often, too, in the week; so with parish pressures,
Baptisms, burials, doctorings, conjugal counsel -
All the whatnots asked of a rural parson -
Faith, I was well-nigh broken, should have been fully
Saving for one small secret relaxation,
One that in mounting manhood had grown my hobby.

   This was to delve at whiles for easel-lumber,
Stowed in the backmost slums of a soon-reached city,
Merely on chance to uncloak some worthy canvas,
Panel, or plaque, blacked blind by uncouth adventure,
Yet under all concealing a precious art-feat.
Such I had found not yet. My latest capture
Came from the rooms of a trader in ancient house-gear
Who had no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft.
Only a tittle cost it—murked with grime-films,
Gatherings of slow years, thick-varnished over,
Never a feature manifest of man's painting.

   So, one Saturday, time ticking hard on midnight
Ere an hour subserved, I set me upon it.
Long with coiled-up sleeves I cleaned and yet cleaned,
Till a first fresh spot, a high light, looked forth,
Then another, like fair flesh, and another;
Then a curve, a nostril, and next a finger,
Tapering, shapely, significantly pointing slantwise.
"Flemish?" I said. "Nay, Spanish . . . But, nay, Italian!"
—Then meseemed it the guise of the ranker Venus,
Named of some Astarte, of some Cotytto.
Down I knelt before it and kissed the panel,
Drunk with the lure of love's inhibited dreamings.

   Till the dawn I rubbed, when there gazed up at me
A hag, that had slowly emerged from under my hands there,
Pointing the slanted finger towards a bosom
Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime . . .
—I could have ended myself in heart-shook horror.
Stunned I sat till roused by a clear-voiced bell-chime,
Fresh and sweet as the dew-fleece under my luthern.
It was the matin service calling to me
From the adjacent steeple.

THE WOOD FIRE

SAYING GOOD-BYE

ON THE TUNE CALLED THE OLD-HUNDRED-AND-FOURTH

THE OPPORTUNITY

EVELYN G. OF CHRISTMINSTER

THE RIFT

VOICES FROM THINGS GROWING IN A CHURCHYARD

ON THE WAY

   The trees fret fitfully and twist,
   Shutters rattle and carpets heave,
   Slime is the dust of yestereve,
      And in the streaming mist
Fishes might seem to fin a passage if they list.

         But to his feet,
         Drawing nigh and nigher
         A hidden seat,
         The fog is sweet
         And the wind a lyre.

   A vacant sameness grays the sky,
   A moisture gathers on each knop
   Of the bramble, rounding to a drop,
      That greets the goer-by
With the cold listless lustre of a dead man's eye.

         But to her sight,
         Drawing nigh and nigher
         Its deep delight,
         The fog is bright
         And the wind a lyre.

"SHE DID NOT TURN"

   She did not turn,
But passed foot-faint with averted head
In her gown of green, by the bobbing fern,
Though I leaned over the gate that led
From where we waited with table spread;
      But she did not turn:
Why was she near there if love had fled?