Horizons and landmarks

There was a home we used to know
Far, far away,—long, long ago;
So far away, it often seems
A land of ghosts, a world of dreams;
And yet so near, a wind that stirs
A twilight whisper in the firs,
A little river’s wandering tune,
A silver sea-way in the moon,
A flower’s scent is all we need
Thither to call us, thither lead.
Then we are shown each kind old face
And every half-forgotten place
Unchanged: we see the raindrops still
Undried upon the daffodil
On April mornings, still behold
Long-garnered harvests waving gold
On blue horizons, hear again
The winter sound of wind and rain
That filled the land on evenings drear,
And gave our hearth a homelier cheer,—
That hearth whose light has since out-flowed
On every dark and wintry road,—
Whose memory has come to raise
A shelter round our homeless days,
And brought us on our unknown quest
Promise of haven, dreams of rest.

THE TEST OF FAITH

We had no need of faith in those young days
When we went forth on the world’s unknown ways,
When joy from every fount of life welled out,
And beauty over-ran its crystal springs.
We could not ask if life were good or ill
When all our dreams it promised to fulfil,
We could not fear the unknown road, nor doubt
That love divine was at the heart of things.

All is the same, all but ourselves, and we!
Do our eyes fail or but too clearly see?
For we remember how our hearts leapt up
With each new day that dawned upon the earth.
Was it then but a vision we beheld,
And but our youthful spirits that out-welled,
That now the fountain is an unfilled cup,
And where we looked for harvest there is dearth?

We know not when our faith began to wane,
Or whether ’twas the sight of wrong and pain,
The knowledge of a world wherein the strong
Preyed on the weak, that wakened our distrust;
Whether it was the torture that we saw,
Dealt in obedience to Nature’s law,
That made us ask if such a world of wrong
From dust evolved should not return to dust.

Was God, we asked, the shaper of that plan
Of brutal strife from which the soul of man
Emerged? could man, a creature born of earth,
Find beyond earth a place to house his soul?
Or was it all a pattern chance had traced,
A pattern that would be again erased;
Were strife, and wrong, and love, and death, and birth,
But motions of a force without a goal?

Give us, we cry, a pilgrimage of pain,
However long, so it be not in vain!
Show us a task, however desperate,
So that our labour be not all for nought!
We would not mourn a lot, however hard,
If we were sure we had a trust to guard;
We could fight on, careless of our own fate,
If we were sure that not in vain we fought.

But we have looked upon the ants and bees,
And asked ourselves if we be more than these,
Who haply find their sunlit hours sweet,
And for their common weal their lives lay down.
We! we who claim to be the Lord’s elect;
We! we the vile, the outcast, and the wrecked;
We! the gay rabble of a Paris street;
We! the low millions of a Chinese town.

Then, in disdain of all the shame and strife,
We wish no more to be a part of life.
The vital force that we miscalled a soul
Ebbs, and our feet grow weary; we would rest.
Since toil and sacrifice can but avail
To nurse a hope that in the end must fail,
Better, we cry, the graveyard for a goal
Than any further hopeless, aimless quest.
. . . . .
Now is the test of faith: there was no room
For faith when life put forth its vernal bloom,
And brave adventures promised to fulfil
Our dreams, and danger made us long to prove
Our fighting strength; but now that we have spent
Our treasure and beheld our punishment,
Oh! now, when we already feel the chill
Of death, and hear the passing bell of love,

Now while the laws no deeds nor prayers can move
Bear witness against all we long to prove,
Now is the test of faith:—still to be true
To those great purposes our dreams have shown;
And, as a son defends a mother’s name
Although a thousand voices cry her shame,
Because he knows the heart they never knew,
Still, still to trust the life whence springs our own.

We have beheld the evil and the good,
And know, ourselves, the strength of wrong withstood.
May it not be that God is everywhere
Striving Himself against eternal wrong?
May it not be that on that battle-field
He needs the help of those His love would shield?
May not His arm be bound by our despair?
May not our courage help to make it strong?

Come! ere strength fail us, be it ours to guard
That good which now can be upheld or marred,—
Tending, it may be, in our earth-born dust,
The mortal seed of some immortal bloom.
Come! can we dare to pause or hesitate
When we may be the conquerors of fate,—
When fighting on God’s side for life’s great trust
Our victory may break the bonds of doom?

And if no hope appears, yet having seen
Dreams of what should be and what might have been,—
If as a crippled battle-ship that sinks,
Flying her fighting colours to the fleet,
We face the end,—is there no fountain-head
Of strength divine from which such strength is fed?
Must not our lives be bound with unseen links
To some great heart that cannot know defeat.

CHILDREN’S FAITH

Great teachers had we in our youth,
Great lessons learned we unaware.
Faith, sure enough to laugh at Truth,
If Truth had not been also fair,
Was ours: we clasped the very hand
That shaped the worlds, and read complete
The secret of the Love that planned,
In flowers that grew about our feet.

Our instincts made immortal claims;
Our spirits touched the infinite;
We breathed the breath of spacious aims,
But lowly things were our delight.
No load had seemed too great to bear
But in our kinship with the sod,
Our weakness gave us hearts to share
The vast humanity of God.

A RUINED CHAPEL

A few stones piled together long ago,
And fallen again to ruin, have a charm
To hallow all the world. The sweetest sounds
Are those most near akin to silences,
Such as sea whispers rippling at the prow
When the loud engine ceases, muffled bells,
Or wandering waves of dying harmony
In echoing minsters; and the sweetest notes
Of Life are those that reach us from afar,—
Those wafted whispers of humanity
And Love and Death, that none can ever hear
Amid the mighty voices of the world.
This is a little spot of neutral ground
Beside the pilgrim road, between the world
We know of and the world of which we dream.
The summer wind that blows outside and bends
The flowers that grow upon the chancel wall
Sounds far away; the sunbeams falling here
Look other than the common light that floods
The meadowlands beyond, and overhead
The roof of noonday sky is all its own.
The story written now upon these walls
Is not of scenes in long forgotten hours:
Another meaning and another life
Which keeps that past within it, as a tree
Hides vanished sunlight, has outlived the old:
These ruins hold our hearts, not theirs who built.
For though erewhile I fell into a dream
Of summer on a morning long ago,
Saw knightly men and noble ladies cross
The sward of green and climb the winding stair
And enter at the doorway one by one;
Though of their fellowship a while I seemed,
Knelt there at matins, watched the sunlight fall
Through the dim traceries, and stain the floor
With rose and gold where now the grass is green,—
I looked for something which I could not find,
There was a want of something I had known,
An emptiness at heart, as though all life
Had dwindled from its high significance.
And soon the sound of the Gregorian
Grew ghostly in my ears; the simpler faith
My soul accepted in that former world
Was troubled, and once more the chapel walls
Were ruined, and the infinite blue sky
Became a roof above the empty nave.
But lo! the wind, which was the same soft wind
That roamed about the chapel walls of old,
Had gathered from the ages a new voice
And breathed the soul of an unfathomed life;
The skies were deeper; in the wayside flowers
The beauty dreaming at the heart of things
Seemed nearer than before; and in my heart
Beat the strong pulses of the larger hope,
The grander sorrows, the sublimer wrongs,
The nobler freedom and the truer love,
Which the great world has won upon its way
And learned from century to century.

Nay! from our world we cannot long escape,—
Its voices are around me, even here
Within the ruined cloisters of the past;
But here to pilgrim wayfarers they sound
No longer clamorous and harsh, but met
By dreams of the eternal and unknown
They make a whispered music in our ears,—
Even as sea-tides flowing up the stream
Meet the strong rapids breaking among rocks,
And lull their tumult to a rippled song.

NORTH AND SOUTH

In foam of rose the long waves broke below
The lemon trees, and gold and amethyst
The inland mountains gleamed.
It was the land we dreamed of long ago;
But now we looked on it we somewhere missed
The light of which we dreamed.

Beside the oleander and the clove,
And alien midst many a flaming plant
Of gold and cinnabar,
Beyond the garden stood a black-green grove
Of pine-trees, set by some old emigrant
Who knew the polar star.

The shadows deepened in that land unknown;
And presently great stars appeared above
In unfamiliar deeps.
The wind’s voice and the water’s undertone
Were soft as a forgotten touch of love
That comes to one who sleeps.

The night began the garden scents to steal;
The sea grew silver in the rising moon,
And violet the sky.
We looked on splendour that we did not feel;
Strange charms, to which our souls were not in tune,
Touched us and drifted by.

Then the wind rose and from the pines drew forth
Ancestral whispers of their land of birth,—
Dark heath and stormy shore;
And all the wistful magic of the north
And all the old enchantment of the earth
Enfolded us once more.

The north interpreted the south: dreams dreamed
In childhood gave reality its soul,
And filled the earth again
With vanished wonder; while far off I seemed
To hear wild seas beyond a pine-wood roll
At dusk in wind and rain.

INTERPENETRATIONS

Larks sang up in the morning sky,
Wild flowers shone in the dew:
The joy that dwells at the heart of things
The birds and the wild flowers knew.
The sea-waves broke on a lonely shore,
The wind went over the trees:
The sorrow that dwells at the heart of things
Was known to the winds and seas.

The sorrow borne on the wind’s song
The note of a bird made sweet;
And the broken song of the breaking waves
Seemed written in blue and golden staves
In the flowers that grew at our feet.
Secrets hid from the flowers of the field
In the wandering wind we heard;
And the stars of gold and the bells of blue
Of the wild flowers, gave us again the clue
That we missed in the song of the bird.
And something the winds and seas forgot
And the wild flowers left untold
Lay dim in the rose of the twilight sky
And shone in the starlight’s gold.

For the meaning that dwells in all things,
The story of every heart,
Is the same,—the infinite story of all
Whereof each telleth a part:—
Tidings mightier, graver,
Than a single voice can utter,
Too deep and solemn a secret
To sleep in a single breast;
But the voice of each makes truer
The voices of all the rest;
And each repeats of the story
The part that it loves the best.

LIFE AND LOVE

Weeds and flowers grow and die;
Sunlight never is withholden.
There were flowers long ago,
Others coming by and by:—
Do they for the light’s sake grow,
Or for their sake is it golden?

Hope and sorrow, joy and strife,
Years and pleasures new and olden
Leave us: Love alone has stayed.
Grew then Love because of Life?
Or was Love for Life’s sake made,
But for it were unbeholden?

BRICK HORIZONS

Here the old map a woodland marks,
With rivers winding through the hills;
And prints remain of spacious parks,
And gabled farms and watermills.

But now we see no fields to reap,
No flowers to welcome sun and rain:
The hillside is a cinder heap,
The river is an inky drain.

The modern town of red brick streets,
Row beyond row, and shelf on shelf,
On one side spreads until it meets
A town as dreary as itself;
And on the other side its arms
Of road and tramway are out-thrust,
And mutilate the fields and farms,
And shame the woods with noise and dust.

Here, from the scenes we love remote,
Dwell half the toilers of the land,—
The soul we think of as a vote,
The heart we speak of as a hand.

Dull sons of a mechanic age
Who claim but miss the rights of man,—
They have no dreams beyond their cage,
They know not of the haunts of Pan.

Here, wandering through mills and mines
And dreary streets each like the last,
Enclosed by brick horizon lines,
I found an island of the past.

A few sad fields, a few old trees,
In that new world of grime and smoke
Told me the time was springtime; these
Alone remembered and awoke.

And in the grass were stars and bells,
The immemorial blossomings
That spring to greet us from the wells
Of Beauty at the heart of things.

A lark sang overhead, its note
Had the same joy with which it fills
The morning, when we hear it float
Through crystal air on thymy hills.

We mar the earth, our modern toil
Defaces old and lovely things;
We soil the stream, we cannot soil
The brightness of Life’s fountain springs.

Here where man’s last progressive aim
Has stamped the green earth with the brand
Of want and greed, and put to shame
Her beauty, and we see the land

With mine and factory and street
Deformed, and filled with dreary lives,—
Here, too, Life’s fountain springs are sweet:
Our venture fails, God’s hope survives.

And in the heart of every child
Born in this brick horizon ring
The flowers of wonderland grow wild,
The birds of El Dorado sing.

FIRST PATHWAYS

Where were the pathways that your childhood knew?—
In mountain glens? or by the ocean strands?
Or where, beyond the ripening harvest land,
The distant hills were blue?

Where evening sunlight threw a golden haze
Over a mellow city’s walls and towers?
Or where the fields and lanes were bright with flowers,
In quiet woodland ways?

And whether here or there, or east or west,
That place you dwelt in first was holy ground;
Its shelter was the kindest you have found,
Its pathways were the best.

And even in the city’s smoke and mire
I doubt not that a golden light was shed
On those first paths, and that they also led
To lands of heart’s desire.

And where the children in dark alleys penned,
Heard the caged lark sing of the April hills,
Or where they dammed the muddy gutter rills,
Or made a dog their friend;
Or where they gathered, dancing hand in hand,
About the organ man, for them, too, lay
Beyond the dismal alley’s entrance way,
The gates of wonderland.

For ’tis my faith that Earth’s first words are sweet
To all her children,—never a rebuff;
And that we only saw, where ways were rough,
The flowers about our feet.

HIDDEN PATHS

You see a house of weathered stone,
A pillared gate, a courtyard wide,
And ancient trees that almost hide
The garden wild and overgrown;
You see the sheltering screen of pines
Beyond the farmyard and the fold,
And upland cornfields waving gold
Against the blue horizon lines;
But we of every field and wall
And room are now so much a part,
We seem to touch a living heart
And rather feel than see it all.

You pass the broken arch that spanned
The garden walk,—you note the weeds,
But miss our secret path that leads
To hidden nooks of wonderland;
And, where the faded rooms you mark,
You know not of the ancient spell
That o’er them in the firelight fell
When all the world outside was dark.

Elsewhere is your enchanted ground,
Your secret path, your treasure store;
And those who sojourned here before
Saw marvels we have never found.
For Earth is full of hidden ways
More wondrous than the ways it shows,
And treasures that outnumber those
For which men labour all their days.

THE PATHS OF THE INFINITE

Have we not marked Earth’s limits, followed its long ways round,
Charted our island world, and seen how the measureless deep
Sunders it, holds it remote, that still in our hearts we keep
A faith in a path that links our shores with a shore unfound?

No quest the venturer waits, no world have we to explore;
But still the voices that called us far over the lands and seas
Whisper of stranger countries and lonelier deeps than these,
In the wind on the hill, and the reeds on the lake, and the wave on the shore.

Never beyond our Earth shall the venturer find a guide:
From the golden light of the stars, but not from the stars, a clue
May fall to the Earth; and the rose of eve and the noonday blue
Veil with celestial beauty the fathomless deeps they hide.

They have their bounds those deeps, and the ways that end are long;
But the soul seeks not for an end,—its infinite paths are near;
Over its unknown seas by the light of a dream we steer,
Through its enchanted isles we sail on an ancient song.

Here, where a man and a maid in the dusk of the evening meet,
Here, where a grave is green and the larks are singing above,
The secret of life everlasting is held in a name that we love,
And the paths of the infinite gleam through the flowers that grow at our feet.

A DESERTED HOME

Here where the fields lie lonely and untended,
Once stood the old house grey among the trees,
Once to the hills rolled the waves of the cornland—
Long waves and golden, softer than the sea’s.

Long, long ago has the ploughshare rusted,
Long has the barn stood roofless and forlorn;
But oh! far away are some who still remember
The songs of the young girls binding up the corn.

Here where the windows shone across the darkness,
Here where the stars once watched above the fold,
Still watch the stars, but the sheepfold is empty;
Falls now the rain where the hearth glowed of old.

Here where the leagues of melancholy loughsedge
Moan in the wind round the grey forsaken shore,
Once waved the corn in the mid-month of autumn,
Once sped the dance when the corn was on the floor.

BEYOND THE FARTHEST HORIZON

We have dreamed dreams beyond our comprehending,
Visions too beautiful to be untrue;
We have seen mysteries that yield no clue,
And sought our goals on ways that have no ending.
We, creatures of the earth,
The lowly born, the mortal, the foredoomed
To spend our fleeting moments on the spot
Wherein to-morrow we shall be entombed,
And hideously rot,—
We have seen loveliness that shall not pass;
We have beheld immortal destinies;
We have seen Heaven and Hell and joined their strife;
Ay, we whose flesh shall perish as the grass
Have flung the passion of the heart that dies
Into the hope of everlasting life.

Oh, miracle of human sight!
That leaps beyond our earthly prison bars
To wander in the pathways of the stars
Across the lone abysses of the night.
Oh, miracle of thought! that still outsweeps
Our vision, and beyond its range surveys
The vistas of interminable ways,
The chasms of unfathomable deeps,
Renewed forevermore, until at last
The endless and the ended alike seem
Impossible, and all becomes a dream;
And from their crazy watch-tower in the vast
Those wild-winged thoughts again to earth descend
To hide from the unfathomed and unknown,
And seek the shelter love has made our own
On homely paths that in a graveyard end.
Oh, miracles of sight and thought and dream!
You do but lead us to a farther gate,
A higher window in the prison wall
That bounds our mortal state:
However far you lift us we must fall.
But lo! remains the miracle supreme,—
That we, whom Death and Change have shown our fate,
We, the chance progeny of Earth and Time,
Should ask for more than Earth and Time create,
And, goalless and without the strength to climb,
Should dare to climb where we were born to grope;
That we the lowly could conceive the great,
Dream in our dust of destinies sublime,
And link our moments to immortal hope.

No lesson of the brain can teach the soul
That ’twas not born to share
A nobler purpose, a sublimer care
Than those which end in paths without a goal;
No disenchantment turn it from the quest
Of something unfulfilled and unpossessed
O’er which no waters of oblivion roll.
But not in flight of thought beyond the stars
Can we escape our mortal prison bars:
There the unfathomable depths remain
Blind alleys of the brain:
The sources of those sudden gleams of light
That merge our finite in the infinite,
We look for there in vain;
For not upon the pathways that are barred
But those left open,—not where the unknown quest
Dismays the soul, but where it offers rest,
Are set those lights that point us heavenward.

So, let us turn to the unfinished task
That earth demands, strive for one hour to keep
A watch with God, nor watching fall asleep,
Before immortal destinies we ask.
Before we seek to share
A larger purpose, a sublimer care,
Let us o’ercome the bondage of our fears,
And fit ourselves to bear
The burden of our few and sinful years.
Ere we would claim a right to comprehend
The meaning of the life that has no end
Let us be faithful to our passing hours,
And read their beauty, and that light pursue
Which gives the dawn its rose, the noon its blue,
And tells its secret to the wayside flowers.

Our eyes that roam the heavens are too dim,
Our faithless hearts too cumbered with our cares
To reach that light; but whoso sees and dares
To follow, we must also follow him.
Our heroes have beheld it and our seers,
Who in the darkest hours foretold the dawn.
It flashes on the sword for freedom drawn:
It makes a rainbow of a people’s tears.
The vast, the infinite, no more appal
Him who on homely ways has seen it fall:
He trusts the far, he dowers the unknown
With all the love that Earth has made our own,
And all the beauty that his dreams recall:
For him the loneliest deeps of night it cheers;
It gathers in its fold the countless spheres,
And makes a constant homelight for them all.

A HALT ON THE WAY

A pause, a halt upon the way!
A time for dreaming and recalling;
We bore the burden of the day,
And now the autumn night is falling.

A halt in life! a little while
In which to be but a beholder,
And think not of the coming mile
And feel not, “I am growing older.”

A stern old man with wrinkled brow,
Urging us on with beckoning finger,
Time seems no longer—rather now
A sweetheart who would make us linger.

Old times are with us,—long ago;
Upon the wall familiar shadows;
We find again the haunts we know,
The pleasant pathways through the meadows.

And as we turn and look ahead,
Seeking beyond for things departed,
And dream of pathways we must tread
In days to come through lands uncharted,

Old faiths still light us on our way,
Old love and laughter, hope and sorrow,—
As evening of the Northern day
Becomes the morning of to-morrow.

OLD LANDMARKS

The log flames, as they leap and fall,
Cast ancient shadows on the wall;
Again I hear the south-west blow
About the house, as long ago
We heard it, when we gathered round
The hearth made homelier by the sound
That in the chimney caverns keened
And told of things the darkness screened.
Dim in their panels round the room
The old unchanging faces loom;
And soft upon the crimson robe,
The hand that rests upon a globe,
The dusky frames, the faded tints,
The flicker of the hearth-light glints.
Out in the yard familiar tones
Of voices reach me; on the stones
A waggon rumbles, and a bark
Welcomes an inmate from the dark.
It might be twenty years ago,
So much of all we used to know
Remains unchanged; and yet I feel
Some want that makes it half unreal.
For we who long ago were part
Of all we knew, the very heart
Of all we loved, let somewhere slip
The bonds of that old comradeship.
The past awakes; but while I muse
Here in the same old scenes, I lose
The paths to which we once had clues.
Along familiar ways we went
All day, at every turn intent
To mark where Time had made a theft,
Or undisturbed our treasure left.
Here an old tree was down, and there
A roof had fallen, a hearth was bare,
Where once we saw amid the smoke
The glowing turf, the kindly folk.
Here one we had watched beside the plough
Stride with his horses, hobbled now;
And here there strode a full-grown man
Where once a bare-legged urchin ran.
And where was now that girl whose feet
Once made yon mountain path so sweet?
Whose shyness flushed her cheek, the while
The mischief hidden in her smile
Belied it? I behold the spot
Where once she passed but now is not,
The grey rocks, where the mountain breeze
Fluttered the skirts about her knees.
We passed beside the wheelwright’s door
Where, as it used to be, the floor
Was piled with shavings, and a haze
Of dusty motes made dim the rays
Of sunlight, and the air was sweet
With smell of new-sawn wood and peat.
We heard the smithy anvil clink,
And saw the fire grow bright and sink
In answer to the bellows’ wheeze,
While, as of old, between his knees
The smith a horse’s fetlocks drew,
And rasped the hoof and nailed the shoe.
Here, and at every place of call,
The welcome that we had from all,
The pleasant sound of names outgrown
By which in boyhood we were known,
Quick springing to their lips, a look
That backward to old meetings took
Our thoughts, a word that brought to mind
Something for ever left behind,—
All, though they blessed us, touched the springs
Of tears at the deep heart of things.

We saw the mountains far away,
Beyond whose blue horizons lay
The wonderlands of which we dreamed
Of old; and still their barrier seemed
To tell us of the pilgrim quest,
And things remote and unpossessed,—
Not of that world which on our hearts
Had marked its bounds and graved its charts.
They told us of that unknown shore
That none can find; but where, before,
They called us o’er the world to roam,
They now seemed sheltering walls of home.
And those old paths whose ends we sought
Were dearer for themselves than ought
Their ends foretold: no truth could harm
Their beauty or undo their charm;
No disillusions of the far
Could touch their homeliness, or mar
The love that made them what they are.

Here we were children: here in turn
Our children in the same paths learn
The secrets of the woods and flowers,
And dream the dreams that once were ours.
Their vision keen renews our own,
Their certainties our doubts atone,
And, sharing in their joys, we weave
The years we find with those we leave.
A little weary, glad of rest
Ourselves, our hearts are in their quest.
Pilgrims of life, whose steps have slowed,
We love to linger on the road,
Or reach the welcome stage, while they
Are eager for the unknown way.
Some time to come their thoughts will turn
To these wild winter nights, and yearn
For something lost and left behind,
As now I turn.—I hear the wind
Keen in the chimney as of old,
And darkness falls on field and fold;—
I catch the clue, on scenes that were
I look not backward,—I am there!
The men are gone, the gates are barred,
We steal across the empty yard,
The cattle drowse within their stalls,
The shelter of our homestead walls
Is round us, and the ways without
Are filled with mystery and doubt.
Over the hidden forest sweeps
The wind, and all its haunted deeps
Are calling, and we do not dare
Farther beyond our walls to fare
Than o’er one field, the sheds to gain
Where, sheltered from the wind and rain,
The watchful shepherd and his dogs
Still tarry, and a fire of logs,
A lantern’s light, a friendly bark,
Make us an outpost in the dark.
I miss the way! I drop the clues!
Through mists of years again I lose
My childhood, and alone I sit
And watch the shadows leap and flit
Above the hearth. The world that lies
Beyond our homely boundaries
I know, and in the darkness dwell
No hidden foes, no wizard spell.
But still the starry deeps are crossed
By lonelier paths than those we lost;
Still the old wonder and the fear
Of what we know not, makes more dear
The ways we know; and still, no less
Than in my childhood’s days, I bless
The shelter of their homeliness.

Amid the boundless and unknown
Each calls some guarded spot his own;
A shelter from the vast we win
In homely hearths, and make therein
The glow of light, the sound of mirth,
That bind all children of the earth
In brotherhood; and when the rain
Beats loud upon the window-pane,
And shadows of the firelight fall
Across the floor and on the wall,
And all without is wild and lone
On lands and seas and worlds unknown,—
We know that countless hearthlights burn
In darkened places, and discern,
Inwoven with the troubled plan
Of worlds and ways unknown to man,
The shelter at the heart of life,
The refuge beyond doubt and strife,
The rest for every soul outcast,
The homely hidden in the vast;
And doubt not that whatever fate
May lie beyond us, soon or late,
However far afield we roam,
The unknown way will lead us home.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

By SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

POEMS OF THE UNKNOWN WAY

ATHENÆUM.—“The series of poems under the general heading, ‘The Undiscovered Shore,’ contains some exquisite renderings of the moods and impressions of one who goes down, literally as well as tropically, into the great waters. They are full of melody, full of sadness—the harvest of an eye quick to catch the beauty of external circumstance and of an ear open to the calling of the highways of the seas and the highways of life.... Mr. Lysaght puts an exceptional sense of rhythm at the service of sincere thinking and fine feeling.”

DAILY CHRONICLE.—“Mr. Lysaght has an admirable style and an almost Swinburnian command of metre.”

LITERARY WORLD.—“Here is stuff with the right ring; with an accent such as this to guide him, the critic cannot fall into a mistake. We have enjoyed our tour among Mr. Lysaght’s perplexities in no half-hearted fashion.”

Crown 8vo. 6s.

HER MAJESTY’S REBELS

MORNING POST.—“A most remarkable book, and no one on the look-out for the best in contemporary fiction can afford to miss it.”

WORLD.—“Rare and charming novel.... The story is intensely interesting, and every individual is alive and appealing.”

ACADEMY.—“To find fault with Her Majesty’s Rebels is difficult, and to praise it worthily is not easy; few Irish books of such good parts have come into our hands since Carleton’s days.”

STANDARD.—“The story is tremendously absorbing and poignant.”

SPECTATOR.—“A very striking story.”

DAILY CHRONICLE.—“An able book, certainly one of the ablest of the year.”

MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.

By SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each.

ONE OF THE GRENVILLES

DAILY TELEGRAPH.—“Bound to be discussed by any one who reads it, and whatever the verdict of the reader may be, he cannot fail to be interested and attracted.”

GUARDIAN.—“A really good and absorbing tale.”

ACADEMY.—“There is freshness and distinction about One of the Grenvilles.... Both for its characters and setting and for its author’s pleasant wit, this is a novel to read.”

BOOKMAN.—“So high above the average of novels that its readers will want to urge on the writer a more frequent exercise of his powers.”

THE MARPLOT

SPECTATOR.—“A clever, original, and vigorous work.”

WORLD.—“It is not often the path of the reviewer is brightened by so admirable a piece of work as Mr. Lysaght’s novel, The Marplot.”

PALL MALL GAZETTE.—“A book which the reader cannot put down without a glow of honest pleasure.... Of very high excellence.”

SATURDAY REVIEW.—“We do not often come across a better specimen of modern fiction than The Marplot.”

DAILY TELEGRAPH.—“The whole book teems with good things.”

BOOKMAN.—“There is not a dull page in The Marplot.”

MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.

Horizons and landmarks

About This Book