THE PILGRIM
I heard a pilgrim near a temple gate
Praying, "I have no fear, for Thou art Fate.
"Morn, eve, noon, if I look up to Thee,
Wilt Thou at night look down, remembering me?
"Nay, then, my sins so great, my service small,"—
So prayed he at the gate,—"forget them all.
"Of claims and rights a load the while I keep,
How in Thy nights, O God, to smile and sleep?
"Pardon, neglect, or slay, as is most meet;
My beaten face I lay beneath Thy feet."
"Pilgrim," I said, "hath He, who toils the while,
Bade thee, of burdens free, to sleep and smile?
"Who built the hills on high, and laid the sea,
Set in thy heart the cry, 'Remember me!'"
ALLAH'S TENT
With fore cloth smoothed by careful hands
The night's serene pavilion stands,
And many cressets hang on high
Against its arching canopy.
Peace to His children God hath sent,
We are at peace within His tent.
Who knows without these guarded doors
What wind across the desert roars?
THE POET AND THE FOUNTAIN
Firdausi by the palace fountain stood
Hard by the Court of Song in quiet mood.
The Sultan smiled to see him. "Thy beard shows
Thee nearer to the cypress than the rose,
"Firdausi. Is thy heart warm and blood cold,
Who singest of love and beauty, being old?"
Firdausi to the fountain turned his eyes,
Grey-mossed and lichened by the centuries.
"What maketh this sweet music, sayest thou?
The water or the stones?" The Sultan's brow
Was overclouded. "Were the water fled,
There were no music certainly," he said.
"The water singing through the garden runs.
Nay, but there is no music in dead stones."
Firdausi bowed: "Allah His grace unfold
Upon the Sultan! Is the water old?"
THE CHENEAUX ISLANDS
There is a wistful, lingering regret
Ever for those whose feet are set
On other paths than where their childhood moved,
And, having loved
The old colonial hills, no level plain,
No tangled forest, the same hope contain,
And by the northern lakes I stand unsatisfied,
Watching the tremulous shadows start and slide,
Hearing the listless waves among the stones,
And the low tones
Of a breeze that through the hemlocks creeps.
Veiled in grey ashes sleeps
The campfire, and thin streams
Of smoke float off like beckoning dreams
Of peaceful men. Around me broods
The sense of aged solitudes,
Of lonely places where
Cold winds have torn blue midnight air
And dipped beneath the edges of the leaves
To moons unchronicled.
We bring
The talk of cities and of schools,
Yet to these quiet pools,
Calm with a thousand silent morns and eves,
It seems no alien thing;
The shadows of the woods
Are brothers to our moods.
Nor less in the quick rush of vivid streets,
And libraries with long rows of mouldering thought,
Is nature, than in green retreats;
Whither from year to year
I come with eager eye and ear,
Hoping, some leafy hour, to feel,
In ways of civic feet unsought,
A secret from the brown earth steal
Into my spirit, and reveal
Some wisdom of a larger worth,
Some quiet truth of growth and birth;
If we, the kindred on the earth,
Are kindred with her, to one issue moving on
Of melancholy night or shimmering dawn,
Surely befits we wanderers wild
To her confederate breast be reconciled;
Out of her primal sleep we came,
And she still dreams; of us that hold
Such strenuous course and venture bold,
Whom such unknown ambition stirs,
Asks of our bright, unsteady flame:
What issue ours that is not hers?
How came he once to these green isles
And channels winding miles and miles,
Cross clasped in hand and pale face set,
The Jesuit, Père Marquette?
To sombre nations, with the blight
Of dead leaves in the blood,
The eager priest into their solitude
And melancholy mood
Flashed like a lamp at night
In sluggish sleepers' eyes;
Out of the east where mornings rise
Came like the morning into ashen skies
With the east's subtle fire and surprise,
And stern beyond his knowledge brought
A message other than he thought:
"Lo! an edict here from the throne of fate,
Whose banners are lifted and armies wait;
The fight moves on at the front, it says,
And the word hath come after many days:
Ye shall walk no more in your ancient ways."
Father, the word has come and gone,
The torpid races
Slumbered, and vanished from their places;
And in our ears intoning ring
The words of that most weary king
In Israel, King Solomon.
Over the earth's untroubled face
The restless generations pace,
Finding their graves regretfully;
Is there no crown, nor any worth,
For men who build upon the earth
What time treads down forgetfully?
Unchanged the graven statute lies,
The code star-lettered in the skies.
It is written there, it is written here;
The law that knows not far or near
Is sacrifice;
And bird and flower, and beast and tree,
Kingdom and planet wheeling free
Are sacrificed incessantly.
From dark, through dusk, toward light, we tread
On the thorn-crowned foreheads of the dead.
The law says not there is nothing lost;
It only says that the end is gain;
The gain may be at the helpless cost
Of hands that give in vain;
And in this world, where many give,
None gives the widow's mite save he
That, having but one life to live,
Gives that one life so utterly.
Thou that unknowing didst obey,
With straitened thought and clouded eye,
The law, we learn at this late day,
O Père Marquette, whose war is done,
Ours is the charge to bear it on,
To hold the veering banner high
Until we die,
To meet the issue in whose awe
Our kindred earth we stand above,
If knowing sacrifice is law,
We sacrifice ourselves for love.
Or are we then such stuff as fills a dream?
Some wide-browed spirit dreams us, where he stands
Watching the long twilight's stream
Below his solemn hands,
Whose reverie and shaping thought began
Before the stars in their large order ran?
Fluid we are, our days flow on,
And round them flow the rivers of the sun,
As long ago in places where
The Halicarnassian wandered with his curious eyes
On Egypt's mysteries,
And Babylonian gardens of the air
Hung green above the city wall.
If this were all, if this were all—
If it were all of life to give
Our hearts to God and slip away,
And if the end for which we live
Were simple as the close of day,
Were simple as the fathers say,
Were simple as their peace was deep
Who in the old faith fell asleep!
No night bird now makes murmur; in the trees
No drowsy chuckle of dark-nested ease.
The campfire's last grey embers fall.
With dipping prow and shallop sides
The slender moon to her mooring rides
Over the ridge of Isle La Salle,
Under the lee of the world,
Her filmy halliards coiled and thin sails furled,
And silver clouds about her phantom rudder curled.
THE SHEPHERD AND THE KNIGHT
SHEPHERD.
Sir Knight with stalwart spear and shield,
Where ridest thou to-day?
The sunlight lies across the field;
Thou art weary in the way;
Dismount and stay.
KNIGHT.
Peace to thine house and folds and stalls,
I ride upon my quest.
I travel until evening falls
Whither my Lord deems best,
By me unguessed.
SHEPHERD.
Who is your lord that sends you forth,
Good knight, from your own land?
He needs must be of royal worth,
To whom such warriors stand
At his command.
KNIGHT.
We have not seen His face, we hear
A voice that bids us be
The servants of an unborn year,
Knights of a day that we
Shall never see.
SHEPHERD.
Good reason that ye go astray!
Warrior, I fain would learn—
So many young knights wend this way—
What wages they may earn,
For none return.
KNIGHT.
They go before me in the night,
They follow after me,
They earn the triumph of the right,
Their wages are to be
Faithful as He.
SHEPHERD.
Look you, Sir Knight, I take mine ease,
Fat are my sheep and kine,
I have mine own philosophies,
My way of life———
KNIGHT.
Is thine,
And mine is mine.=
SHEPHERD.
Why, now! The man is gone! Pardie!
A silly wage! I trow
His lord that pays him mad as he,
Fools are a crop will grow
Though no man sow.
THE HERB OF GRACE
To all who fain would pass their days
Among old books and quiet ways,
And walk with cool, autumnal pace
The bypaths of tranquillity,
To each his own select desire,
To each his old familiar briar
And silent friend and chattering fire,
Companions in civility.
Outside the world goes rolling by,
And on the trampling and the cry
There comes the long, low mournful sigh
Of night winds roaming vagrantly;
They see too many sullen sights
This side the stars on winter nights;
A kind of hopeless Jacobites.
—This brand, indeed, smokes fragrantly.
The perfect mixture's far to seek;
Your pure Virginia, pale and meek,
Requires the passion of Perique,
The Latakian lyrics;
Perfection is the crown that flies
The reaching hands and longing eyes,
And art demands what life denies
To nicotine empirics.
Sirs, you remember Omar's choice,
Wine, verses, and his lady's voice
Making the wilderness rejoice?
It needs one more ingredient.
A boon, the Persian knew not of,
Had made to mellower music move
The lips to wine, if not to love,
A trifle too obedient.
This weed I call the "herb of grace."
My reasons are, as some one says,
"Between me and my fireplace."
Ophelia spoke of rue, you know.
"There's rue for you and there's for me,
But you must wear it differently."
Quite true, of course.—Your pipe I see
Draws hard. They sometimes do, you know.
Alas, if we in fancy's train
To drowse beside our fires are fain,
Letting the world slip by amain,
Uneager of its verities,
Our neighbours will not let us be
At peace with inutility.
They quote us maxims, two or three,
Or similar asperities.
I question not a man may bear
His still soul walled from noisy care,
And walk serene in places where
An ancient wrath is denizen;
The pilgrim's feet may know no ease,
And yet his heart's delight increase,
For all ways that are trod in peace
Lead upward to God's benison.
No less I doubt our age's need
Is some of Izaak Walton's creed.—
Your pardon, gentlemen! I breed
Impatience with a homily.—
Our flag there were a sombre type,
If every star implied a stripe.
I wish you all a wholesome pipe,
And ingle blinking bonnily.
Poor ethics these of mine, I fear,
And yet, when our green leaves and sere
Have dropped away, perhaps we'll hear
These questions answered curiously.
The battered book here on my knees?
Is Herrick, his "Hesperides."
Gold apples from the guarded trees
Are stored here not penuriously.
The poet of the gurgling phrase
And quaint conceits of elder days,
Loved holiness and primrose ways
About in equal quantities,
Wassail and yuletide, feast and fair,
Blown petticoats, a child's low prayer;
A fine, old pagan joy is there;
Some wild-rose muse's haunt it is.
Mine herb of grace, that kindred art
To all who choose "the better part,"
Grant us the old world's childlike heart,
Now grown an antique rarity!
With mayflowers on our swords and shields
We'll learn to babble of green fields
Like Falstaff, whom good humour yields
A place still in its charity.
Visions will come at times; I note
One with a cool, white, delicate throat;
Glory of names that shine remote,
From towers of high endeavouring.
Care not for these, nor care to roam,
Ulysses, o'er the beckoning foam.
"Here rest and call content our home"
Beside our fire's soft wavering.
VERSES FROM "THE CANTICLE OF THE ROAD"
I
On the open road, with the wind at heel
Who is keen of scent and yelping loud,
Stout heart and bounding blood we feel,
Who follow fancy till day has bowed
Her forehead pure to her evening prayer
And drawn the veil on her wind-blown hair.
Free with the hawk and the wind we stride
The open road, and the world is wide
From rim to rim, and the skies hung high,
And room between for a hawk to fly
With tingling wing and lust of the eye.
II
Broad morning, blue morning, oh, jubilant wind!
Lord, Thou hast made our souls to be
Fluent and yearning long, as the sea
Yearns after the moon, and follows her,
With boon of waves and sibilant purr,
Round this world and past and o'er
All waste sea-bottoms and curving shore,
Only once more and again to find
The same sea-bottoms and beaten beach,
The same sweet moon beyond his reach
And drawing him onward as before.
III
Hark, from his covert what a note
The wood thrush whirls from his kingly throat
And the bobolink strikes that silver wire
He stole from the archangelic choir,
From a psaltery played in the glory alone
By an amber angel beneath the throne.
He strikes it twice, and deep, deep, deep,
Where the soul of music lies sleep.—
The rest of his song he learned, Ah me!
From a gay little devil, loose and free,
Making trouble and love in Arcadie.
IV
My brother of the dusty feet
Dragged eastward as my own go west,
Here from the birth of time addressed,
And the manner of your coming set
To this event, that we might meet,
And glance, and pass, and then forget;
We meet no more beneath the sun,
Yet for an instant we were one.
And now once more, as you and I,
In dungeons of ourselves we lie,
And through the grated windows peer;
As though a falling star should shine
A moment in your eyes and mine,
Then darkness there, and silence here.
V
Oh, Fons Bandusiæ, babbling spring,
From what deep wells come whispering!
What message bringest thou, what spells
From buried mountain oracles,
Thou limpid, lucid mystery?
Nay, this one thing I read in thee,
That saint or sinner, wise or fool,
Who dips hot lips within thy pool,
Or last or first, or best or worst,
Thou askest only that he thirst,
And givest water pure and cool.
VI
A draught of water from the spring,
An apple from the wayside tree,
A bit of bread for strengthening,
A pipe for grace and policy;
And so, by taking time, to find
A world that's mainly to one's mind;
Some health, some wit in friends a few,
Some high behaviours in their kind,
Some dispositions to be true.
FAUSTINE
She muses while the sunbeams creep
In slanting piers of light,
She muses while the shadows sleep
About the fire at night;
Hers is the vestal's waiting air,
The silence sweet and weird;
More wisdom nestles in her hair
Than crouched in Nestor's beard;
Troops of to-morrows cross her thought
In happy Junes and Mays,
And files of slow Septembers fraught
With priceless yesterdays;
And all her hours a thronging host
With visitations fill;
She gazes on each tranquil ghost
With eyes more tranquil still.
SOMETIME IT MAY BE
Sometime it may be you and I
In that deserted yard shall lie,
Where memories fade away,
Caring no more for our old dreams,
Busy with new and alien themes,
As saints and sages say.
But let our graves be side by side,
That passers-by at even-tide
May pause a moment's space:
"Ah, they were lovers who lie here!
Else why these low graves laid so near
In this forgotten place?"