The Project Gutenberg eBook of The flying Parliament and other poems, by Edwina Stanton Babcock.

HERE is the mass, you see it astray and astruggle,
Deafened with noise, pushing and jestling along;
Pleasure and envy and greed, in a feverish juggle,
Outside the City of Song.

There are the Vapid, watching their hookah’s smoke-bubble;
There are the slothful, drunk at the wells of wrong;
At a scarlet booth is a Gypsy pleasing the rabble.
Outside the City of Song.

Here are the credulous, cheated to death by a thimble;
Here are the hungry stumbling on to the gong;
Here stands a lover grasping a treacherous symbol,
Outside the City of Song.

Whirl of pretense, of gilding, of tinsel, of glitter;
Strange that its patter and laughter can keep up so long;
Echo on echo of mocking and cat-call and twitter,
Outside the City of Song.

Long is the road, that they travel and know not the turning;
Black is the pit at the end, and the fear and the wrong;
But bitterest, blackest, their last inescapable yearning
For the lost City of Song.

While in its courts, where the fountains leap up to the zenith,
Dreamers and poets and lovers go all the day long,
Dazzled, and raptured with pondering all that it meaneth,
To dwell in the City of Song.

ON LILY STREET, NANTUCKET

ON Lily Street, where drowsy crickets hum,
And two and two the summer lovers come,
Straying so happily their island paths,
Where the white candle flickers at a low-hung door,
I see soft hooded figures cross a bit of moor—
Hurrying, eager, they—
To hear you play.

Now as the moonlight slants on whitened roof,
And old New England still gives austere proof
Of bygone things in narrowed window glass,
The guests sit quiet in the panelled rooms
Content with half lights and half tinted glooms,
Because they know that they—
Shall hear you play.

And I who lean upon the leafy sill
Feel moonlight dreaming change to vagrom thrill,
And looking forth as on some lantern screen,
See, flitting o’er the stark old house-wall nigh.
Soft shadows of your vivid melody.
So—in an eerie way
I hear you play.

Till, on the house wall opposite my place
I see wild Carmen’s bright poinsettia face;
I see Grieg’s “Day break,” streaming up the sky.
Upon the old Nantucket houses blank
I watch Tannhouser’s Pilgrims climb in solemn rank,
—Past windows grey—the while you play.

Long on the bare screen grieves the “Butterfly.”
Then, as her Oriental sorrows die,
Forth doth the “Earl King” ride;
The Schumann “Warum” drops its pensive leaves,
Macdowell’s “Sea” its toppling billow heaves,
Chaminades, “Dancing Fay”
Trips, as you play.

But ere your noble hands have given their gift
Down on the town, the bells of Curfew drift,
The candle gutters at the low-hung door.
Yet, see; from this low window where I muse,
All Lily Street doth spectrally suffuse,
Glimmers each tiny pane.
You call it “moonlight,” but I think that they
The old Nantucketers, long passed away
Peer forth to hear you play!

THE “BLIND” ROAD, NANTUCKET

IF you would find
Peace, and a lightened load,
And wells of delicate, salt, sweet-fern air,
And tranquil lines around you every where,
Follow the “blind” Rut Road.

It leads to liberties of yellow gorse,
To secret heather and to banks of bay;
It winds along the ocean, and its course
Is wet with wild sea-spray.
It leads along the swamps, where honey-ball
Hangs scented globes, where clethra scatters sweet,
By holly hedge, where pheasants thread the tall
Indigo plant, or flying sea-gulls meet.

It leads away from every fret and jar,
From everything that hurts and stings and tries;
Through green dwarf-pines, and hills of cinnebar,
Marshaling grasses up to windswept skies.

If you would find
Rest and forgetfulness and all things new,
Take the Rut Road, and it will bring to you
All dear forgotten things, things you see through,
But that this road holds sacred, being “blind.”

THE END OF THE SEASON—NANTUCKET

THE hotel building sees its doom, aghast,
And all its windows fix in sullen stare,
For no girl-voices ring on sunset air,
And no bright-breasted youth goes speeding past.
The latticed roses and the phlox have cast
Their petals upon paths where lovers dreamed,
And grey old streets, where gauzy figures streamed,
Settle to lamp-lit quietness at last.

Yet there is endless romance on the moor;
The hawks o’er wine-red hollows stretch their wings,
Wild ducks loop Autumnward in ranging strings,
And swallows balance round time-silvered door;
High looms the bluff in castle like contour,
And wear the beach the full white breasts of dunes
Nourish sky-silence, while the sea communes
With shells, a-quiver to the foam’s allure.

MOVING MILESTONES—NANTUCKET

MIDNIGHT, Black, and a wild sea of stars,
A gold-white surf of stars whose sparkling foam
Breaks into waves on occult ether bars,
Where star-tides have their deep eternal home.
All night the solemn Wonder sweeps me by;
Arcturus, Vega, Spica cross the sky
On one fixed path, by laws that do not change,
Unfailing while all other laws derange.

Midnight, black; and a wild horde of fears,
The brains half-knowledge and the hearts fierce pride
Questions me cold and distant to my tears;
Yet on my thought the old true Visions glide—
Tenderness, Truth, Unselfishness; their lights
Travel the wastes and glimmer on the heights.
So may I keep my way, whose avatars
Gave me a path that leads beyond the Stars.

SOURCE

BY the Alpheus, where the reeds are blown
Aslant by winds that flick the tawny current,
There runs a path that is all overgrown
With low dwarf oaks and many a vine deterrent,
Which leads past grain and broad mulberry trees
To soft Olympia’s cool sanctities.

There, where the cypress makes a trancelike shade,
White pillars gleam, and floors of old mosaic,
Hold gemmy moss and tender bud and blade,
In hints of bygone Pyrrhic and Trochic—
In those fresh petal rhythms which Nature keeps
Like poems living where the poet sleeps.

And all about the place the Games go on.
The buoyant clouds fly swift to wingéd races;
One tall fir gives an Ode to Marathon,
And down the temple paths young sunlight paces;
And that strange rare Perfection, that is Greece,
Here holds its happy spell of calm and Peace.

Dreaming Olympia, whose footpaths take
Their secret way to temple and by column,
Thou art so far away. The blue daybreak
Is all war-reddened now, and the Vow solemn;
Yet, incandescent in those aisles of pines,
Thy same still tranquil beauty grayly shines.

And this is well, for after all the pain,
And all the hate, and all the human blunder,
How we shall need to bathe us once again
In baths of pure Greek beauty! Ah! the wonder
Hellas has ever held! Shall we not need
That wonder to rebuke our shame and greed?

Sylvan Olympia, keep the untouched dream
For years to come and for a noble future!
Bind all thy classic pathways to one Theme
Of Soaring Youth and starward high adventure!
So shall thy dusks, when wistful feet come roaming;
Mean always—world-pain healed, and spirits homing.