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POEMS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALAN SEEGER 
 
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LETTERS AND DIARY 
 OF ALAN SEEGER 
 
 i2mo. $1.50 net 
 
 "The fine spirit of Alan Seeger has been re- 
 vealed to us in his poems, in lines which can never 
 be forgotten and which we had thought had 
 reached the very climax of inspired expression. 
 But as a disclosure of the man himself this simple 
 prose surpasses them. ... It would, indeed, be 
 difficult to imagine a more direct and simple narra- 
 tion of facts than this. " — N. Y. Tribune. 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Digitized by Microsoft® 
 
POEMS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALAN SEEGER 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ARCHER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 MCMXIX 
 
 Digitized by Microsoft® 
 
COPYEIGHT, 1916, BT 
 
 CHAKLES SCRIBNBK'S SONS 
 
 Published December, 1916 
 Reprinted December, 1910; January, 
 March, July, September, October, 
 December, 1917; April, November, 
 1918 
 
 i 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM ARCHER . ix 
 
 JUVENILIA: 
 
 An Ode to Natural Beauty 3 
 
 The Deserted Garden 10 
 
 The Torture of Cuauhtemoc 27 
 
 The Nympholept 32 
 
 The Wanderer 34 
 
 The Need to Love 37 
 
 El Extra viado 39 
 
 La Nue , 41 
 
 All That's Not Love 44 
 
 Paris 45 
 
 The Sultan's Palace 58 
 
 Fragments 63 
 
 TnmTY Sonnets: 
 
 I-XVI 68 
 
 KYRENA'iKOS 84 
 
 Antinous 85 
 
 Vivien 86 
 
 I Loved 87 
 
 virginibus puerisque 88 
 
 With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on 
 
 Leaving College 89 
 
 Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de 
 
 Noailles 90 
 
 V 
 
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COTJCY 91 
 
 Tezcotzinco 92 
 
 The Old Lowe House, Staten Island . . 93 
 
 Oneata 94 
 
 On the Cliffs, Newport 95 
 
 To England at the Outbreak of the 
 
 Balkan Wab 96 
 
 At the Tomb of Napoleon Before the 
 
 Exactions in America — ^November, 1912 . 97 
 
 The Rendezvous 98 
 
 Do You Remember Once 101 
 
 The Bayadere 105 
 
 EUD^JMON 106 
 
 Bboceliande 107 
 
 Lyonesse 108 
 
 TiTHONUS 109 
 
 An Ode to Antares Ill 
 
 TRANSLATIONS: 
 Dante. Inferno, Canto XXVI ... .117 
 
 Ariosto. Orlando Fukioso, Canto X, 91-99 123 
 
 On a Theme in the Greek Anthology . . 127 
 
 After an Epigram of Clement Marot . . 128 
 
 LAST POEMS: 
 
 The Aisne (1914-15) 131 
 
 Champagne (1914-15) 134 
 
 The Hosts 138 
 
 Maktoob 141 
 
 I Have a Rendezvous with Death 144 
 
 vi 
 
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, VAoa 
 
 Sonnets: 
 
 1 145 
 
 II 146 
 
 m 147 
 
 IV. TO ... IN CHURCH 148 
 
 V 149 
 
 VI 150 
 
 VII 151 
 
 Vm 152 
 
 IX 153 
 
 X • 154 
 
 XI. ON RETURNING TO THE FRONT AFTER LEAVE 155 
 
 XII 156 
 
 Bellinglisb 157 
 
 LlEBESTOD 159 
 
 Resurgam 161 
 
 A Message to America . 162 
 
 Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem 167 
 Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers 
 
 Fallen for France 170 
 
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INTRODUCTION 
 
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INTRODUCTION 
 
 This book contains the undesigned, but all the more 
 spontaneous and authentic, biography of a very rare 
 spirit. It contains the record of a short life, into which 
 was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspira- 
 tion — of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul — than 
 it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract 
 from a life of twice the length. Alan Seeger had barely 
 passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to 
 the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, 
 his "escouade" of the Foreign Legion was caught in a 
 deadly flurry of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most 
 of his comrades, on the blood-stained but reconquered 
 soil. To his friends the loss was grievous, to literature it 
 was — we shall never know how great, but assuredly not 
 small. Yet this was a case, if ever there was one, in which 
 we may not only say "Nothing is here for tears," but 
 may add to the well-worn phrase its less familiar sequel: 
 
 Nothing to wail 
 Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt. 
 Dispraise, or blame, — ^nothing but well and fair. 
 And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 
 
 Of all the poets who have died young, none has died so 
 happily. Without suggesting any parity of stature, one 
 cannot but think of the group of English poets who, 
 about a hundred years ago, were cut oflf in the flower of 
 their age. Keats, coughing out his soul by the Spanish 
 
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Steps; Shelley's spirit of flame snuffed out by a chance 
 capful of wind from the hiUs of Carrara; Byron, stung 
 by a fever-gnat on the very threshold of his great ad- 
 venture — for all these we can feel nothing but poignant 
 unrelieved regret. Alan Seeger, on the other hand, we 
 can very truly envy. Youth had given him all that it 
 had to give; and though he would fain have lived on — 
 though no one was ever less world-weary than he — yet in 
 the plenitude of his exultant strength, with eye un- 
 dimmed and pulse unslackening, he met the death he had 
 voluntarily challenged, in the cause of the land he loved, 
 and in the moment of victory. Again and again, both in 
 prose and in verse, he had said that this seemed to him a 
 good death to die; and two years of unflinching endurance 
 of self-imposed hardship and danger had proved that he 
 meant what he said. 
 
 I do not, I repeat, pretend to measure him with Shelley, 
 Byron or Keats, though I think none of them would have 
 disdained his gift of song. But assuredly he is of their 
 fellowship in virtue, not only of his early death, but of 
 his whole-hearted devotion to the spirit of Romance, as 
 they understood it. From his boyhood upward, his one 
 passion was for beauty; and it was in the guise of Ro- 
 mance that beauty revealed itself to him. He was from 
 the first determined not only to write but to live Ro- 
 mance, and when fate threw in his way a world-historic 
 opportunity, he seized it with delight. He knew that he 
 was dicing with Death, but that was the very essence of 
 his ideal; and he knew that if Death won the throw, his 
 ideal was crowned and consummated, for ever safe from 
 the withering touch of time, or accidental soilure. If it 
 had been given to Swinburne to fall, rifle in hand, on, say, 
 the field of Mentana, we should have been the poorer 
 by many splendid verses, but the richer by a heroic lif e- 
 
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story. And would his lot have been the less enviable? 
 Nay, surely, much the more. That is the thought which 
 may well bring solace to those who loved Alan Seeger, 
 and who may at first have felt as an unmixed cruelty the 
 cutting short of so eager, so generous, so gallant a life. 
 
 The description "Juvenilia" attached to the first series 
 of these poems is of his own choosing. It is for the reader 
 to judge what allowance is to be made for unripeness, 
 whether of substance or of form. Criticism is none of 
 my present business. But I think no discerning reader 
 can fail to be impressed by one great virtue pervading 
 all the poet's work — its absolute sincerity. There is no 
 pose, no affectation of any sort. There are marks of the 
 loving study of other poets, and these the best. We are 
 frequently reminded of this singer and of that. The 
 yoimg American is instinctively loyal to the long tradi- 
 tion of English Uterature. He is content to undergo the 
 influence of the great masters, and does not seek for pre- 
 mature originahty on the by-paths of eccentricity. But 
 while he is the disciple of many, he is the vassal of none. 
 His matter is always his own, the fruit of personal vision, 
 experience, imagination, even if he may now and then 
 unconsciously pour it into a mould provided by another. 
 He is no mere echo of the rhythms of this poet, or mimic 
 of that other's attitude and outlook. The great zest of 
 living which inspires him is far too real and intense to 
 clothe itself in the trappings of any alien individuality. 
 He is too straightforward to be even dramatic. It is not 
 his instinct to put on a mask, even for purposes of artis- 
 tic personation, and much less of affectation. 
 
 If ever there was a being who said "Yea" to life, ac- 
 cepted it as a glorious gift, and was determined to live 
 it with all his might, it was Alan Seeger. Such a frame 
 of mind is too instinctive and temperamental to be called 
 
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optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and 
 ill, and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. 
 Rather it is a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty 
 and wonder of the universe — an intuition too overpow- 
 ering to be seriously disturbed by the existence of pain 
 and evil, some of which, at any rate, has its value as a 
 foil, a background, to joy. This was the message — not 
 a philosophy but an irresistible emotion — ^which he sought 
 to deliver through the medium of an art which he seri- 
 ously studied and deeply loved. It spoke from the very 
 depths of his being, and the poems in which it found 
 utterance, whatever their purely literary qualities, have 
 at least the value of a first-hand human document, the 
 sincere self-portraiture of a vivid and virile soul. 
 
 There are three more or less clearly-marked elements 
 in a poet's equipment — observation, passion, reflection, 
 or in simpler terms, seeing, feeling and thinking. The 
 first two are richly represented in the following poems, 
 the third, as was natural, much less so. The poet was 
 too fuUy occupied in garnering impressions and experi- 
 ences to think of co-ordinating and interpreting them. 
 That would have come later; and later, too, would have 
 come a general deepening of the spiritual content of his 
 work. There had been nothing in either his outward or 
 his inward life that could fairly be called suffering or 
 struggle. He had not sounded the depths of human ex- 
 perience, which is as much as to say that neither had he 
 risen to the heights. This he no doubt recognised him- 
 self, and was not thinking merely of the date of compo- 
 sition when he called his pre-war poems "Juvenilia." 
 Great emotions, and perhaps great sorrows, would have 
 come to him in due time, and would have deepened and 
 enriched his vein of song. The first great emotion which 
 found him, when he rallied to the trumpet-call of France 
 
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and freedom, did, as a matter of fact, lend new reality 
 and poignancy to his verse; but the soldier's life left him 
 small leisure for composition. We must regard his 
 work, then, as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he 
 might have achieved had his life been prolonged. But, 
 devoted though he was to his art, he felt that to live 
 greatly is better than to write greatly. The unfuMlment 
 of his poetic hopes and dreams meant the fulfilment of a 
 higher ambition. 
 
 Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888. 
 His father and his mother belonged to old New England 
 families. 
 
 When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten 
 Island, which forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle 
 of New York harbour. There he remained until his 
 tenth year, growing up along with a brother and a sister, 
 the one a little older, the other a little younger, than him- 
 self. From their home on the heights of Staten Island, 
 the children looked out day by day upon one of the most 
 romantic scenes in the world — the gateway to the West- 
 ern Hemisphere. They could see the great steamships 
 of all the nations threading their way through the Nar- 
 rows and passing in procession up the glorious expanse of 
 New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic of 
 tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent an 
 ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Bobbins 
 Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the Statue of 
 Liberty, in the background the giant curves of Brooklyn 
 Bridge, and, range over range, the mountainous buildings 
 of "down town" New York — ^not then as colossal as they 
 are to-day, but already unUke anything else under the 
 sun. And the incoming stream of tramps and liners met 
 the outgoing stream which carried the imagination sea- 
 
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ward, to the islands of the buccaneers, and the haunts of 
 all the heroes and villains of history, in the Old World. 
 The children did not look with incurious eyes upon this 
 stirring scene. They knew the names of all the great 
 European liners and of the warships passing to and from 
 the Navy Yard; and the walls of their nursery were 
 covered with their drawings of the shipping, rude enough, 
 no doubt, but showing accurate observation of such de- 
 tails as funnels, masts and rigging. They were of an age, 
 before they left Staten Island, to realize something of the 
 historic impUcations of their environment. 
 
 In 1898 the family returned to New York, and there 
 Alan continued at the Horace Mann School the educa- 
 tion begun at the Staten Island Academy. The great 
 dehght of the ten-year-old schoolboy was to follow the 
 rushing fire-engines which were an almost daily feature 
 in the life of the New York streets. Even in manhood 
 he could never resist the lure of the fire-alarm. 
 
 Two years later (1900) came a new migration, which 
 no doubt exercised a determining influence on the boy's 
 development. The family removed to Mexico, and there 
 Alan spent a great part of the most impressionable years 
 of his youth. If New York embodies the romance of 
 Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of 
 Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to 
 Mexico is Hke passing at one bound from the New World 
 to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Amer- 
 icanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. 
 It is in many ways curiously like its mother — or rather 
 its step-mother — country, Spain. But Spain can show 
 nothing to equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery 
 or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its cos- 
 tumes. And then it is the scene of the most fascinating 
 adventure recorded in history — an exploit which puts to 
 
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shame the imagination of the greatest masters of romance. 
 It is true that the Mexico City of to-day shows scanty 
 traces (except in its Museum) of the Tenochtitlan of 
 Montezuma; but the vast amphitheatre on which it 
 stands is still wonderfully impressive, and stiU the great 
 silver cones of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl look down 
 upon it from their immaculate altitudes. 
 
 Though well within the tropics, the great elevation of 
 the city (7400 feet) renders its climate very attractive to 
 those for whom height has no terrors ; and the Seegers soon 
 became greatly attached to it. For two very happy years, 
 it was the home of the whole family. The children had 
 a tutor whom they respected and loved, and who helped 
 to develop their taste for poetry and good hterature. 
 "One of our keenest pleasures," writes one of the family, 
 "was to go in a body to the old book-shops, and on Sun- 
 day morning to the 'Thieves Market,' to rummage for 
 treasures; and many were the Elzevirs and worm-eaten, 
 vellum-bound volumes from the old convent libraries that 
 fell into our hands. At that time we issued a home 
 magazine called The Prophet, in honour of a large painting 
 that we had acquired and chose to consider as the patron 
 of our household. The magazine was supposed to ap- 
 pear monthly, but was always months behind its time. 
 Alan was the sporting editor, but his Uterary abihty had 
 even then begun to appear, and he overstepped his de- 
 partment with contributions of poetry and lengthy es- 
 says. No copies of this famous periodical are extant: 
 they all went down in the wreck of the Merida. " 
 
 In the chilly days of winter, frequent visits were paid 
 to the lower levels of the tierra templada, especially to 
 Cuernavaca, one of the "show" places of the country. 
 The children learned to ride and to cycle, and were thus 
 able to extend their excursions on all sides. When, after 
 
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two years, they went back to the United States to school, 
 they were already familiar with Mexican nature and life; 
 and they kept their impressions fresh by frequent vacation 
 visits. It must have been a delightful experience to slip 
 down every now and then to the tropics : first to pass under 
 the pink walls of Morro Castle into the wide lagoon of 
 Havana; then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz; 
 then, after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba, to 
 crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent that 
 divides the tierra templada from the tierrafria; and finally 
 to speed through the endless agave-fields of the upland 
 haciendas, to Mexico City and home. 
 
 Mexico, and the experiences associated with it, have 
 left deep marks on Alan Seeger's poetry. The vacation 
 voyages thither speak in this apostrophe from the "Ode 
 to Antares": 
 
 Star of the South that now through orient mist 
 
 At nightfall off Tampico or Belize 
 
 Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas 
 
 Where first in me, a fond romanticist. 
 
 The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles 
 
 Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles. 
 
 The longest of his poems, "The Deserted Garden" — 
 a veritable gallery of imaginative landscape — is entirely 
 Mexican in colouring. Indeed we may conjecture with- 
 out too much rashness that it is a mere expansion of the 
 sonnet entitled "Tezcotzinco," the fruit of a soUtary ex- 
 cursion to the ruins of Nezahualcoyotl's baths, in the hills 
 beyond Tezcoco. But even where there is no painting of 
 definite Mexican scenes, motives from the vast uplands 
 with their cloud pageantry, and from the palm-fringed, 
 incandescent coasts, frequently recur in his verse. For 
 
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instance, he had not forgotten Mexico when he wrote in 
 a volume of the Comtesse de Noailles: 
 
 Be my companion under cool arcades 
 That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square, 
 Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades 
 White belfries burn in the blue tropic air. 
 
 And even when the tropics were finally left behind, he 
 carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour, 
 an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it 
 was a fortunate chance that took this lover of sunhght 
 and space and splendor, in his most receptive years, to 
 regions where they superabound. Perhaps, had he been 
 confined to gloomier climates, he could not have written: 
 
 From a boy 
 I gloated on existence. Earth to me 
 Seemed all-suflScient, and my sojourn there 
 One trembling opportunity for joy. 
 
 But the same good fortune pursued him throughout. 
 He seemed predestined to environments of beauty. When, 
 at fourteen, he left his Mexican home, it was to go to 
 the Hackley School at Tarry town, N. Y., an institution 
 placed on a high hiU overlooking that noblest of rivers, 
 the Hudson, and surrounded by a domain of its own, ex- 
 tending to many acres of meadow and woodland. An 
 attack of scarlet fever in his childhood had left his health 
 far from robust, and it was thought that the altitude of 
 Mexico City was too great for him. He therefore spent 
 one of his vacations among the hills of New Hampshire, 
 and was afterwards given a year out of school, with the 
 family of his former tutor, in Southern CaUfomia — again 
 a region famed for its beauty. He returned much im- 
 
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proved in health, and after a concluding year at Hackley, 
 he entered Harvard College in 1906. 
 
 He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, 
 both at Harvard, and at the magnificent Boston Library. 
 During his first two years at college, his bent seemed to 
 lie rather towards the studious and contemplative than 
 towards the active life. His brother, at this time, ap- 
 peared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and ad- 
 venturous disposition; and there exists a letter to his 
 mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion 
 to Chaucer's "Prologue," the mediaeval ideals of the 
 Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I 
 the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal 
 of a musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in 
 the world." But about the middle of his Harvard career, 
 a marked change came over his habits of thought and of 
 action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends, 
 and threw himself with great zest into the social life of 
 his conu:ades. It is evident, however, that this did not 
 mean any slackening in his literary interests. His work 
 gives ample proof of real, if not of systematic, culture. 
 He genuinely loves and has made his own many of the 
 great things of the past. His translations from Dante 
 and Ariosto, for example, show no less sympathy than 
 accomplishment. Very characteristic is his selection of 
 the Twenty-sixth Canto of the Inferno, in which the nar- 
 rative of Ulysses brings with it a breath from the great 
 romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy that 
 before he graduated he took up with zeal and with dis- 
 tinction the study of Keltic literature — a corrective, per- 
 haps, in its cooler tones, to the tropical motives with 
 which his mind was stored. He was one of the editors of 
 the Harvard Monthly, to which he made frequent contri- 
 butions of verse. 
 
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There followed two years (1910-12) in New York — 
 probably the least satisfactory years of his life. The 
 quest of beauty is scarcely a profession, and it caused his 
 parents some concern to find him pausing irresolute on 
 the threshold of manhood, instead of setting himself a 
 goal and bracing his energies for its achievement. In 
 1911 his mother and sister left Mexico, a week or two 
 before Porfirio Diaz made his exit, and the Maderists 
 entered the capital. They returned to New York, to 
 find Alan still unsettled, and possessed with the thought, 
 or perhaps rather the instinct, that the life he craved for 
 was not to be found in America, but awaited him in 
 Europe. In the following year he carried his point, and 
 set off for Paris — a departure which may fairly be called 
 his Hegira, the turning-point of his history. That it 
 shortened his span there can be little doubt. Had he 
 settled down to Hterary work, in his native city, he might 
 have lived to old age. But it secured him four years of 
 the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart 
 was set; and during two of these years the joy was of a 
 kind which absolved him for ever from the reproach of 
 mere hedonism and self-indulgence. He would certainly 
 have said — or rather he was continually saying, in words 
 full of passionate conviction — 
 
 One crowded hour of glorious life 
 Is worth an age without a name. 
 
 It was in the spirit of a romanticist of the eighteen- 
 forties that he plunged into the life of Paris. He had a 
 room near the Musde de Cluny, and he found himself 
 thoroughly at home among the artists and students of 
 the Latin Quarter, though he occasionally varied the Vie 
 de Boheme by excursions into "society" of a more ortho- 
 
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dox type. Paris has had many lovers, but few more de- 
 voted than Alan Seeger. He accepted the life of "die 
 singende, springende, schone Paris " with a curious whole- 
 heartedness. Here and there we find evidence — ^for in- 
 stance, in the first two sonnets — that he was not bUnd 
 to its seamy side. But on the whole he appears to have 
 seen beauty even in aspects of it for which it is almost 
 as difficult to find aesthetic as moral justification. The 
 truth is, no doubt, that the whole spectacle was plimged 
 for him in the glamour of romance. Paris did not be- 
 long to the working-day world, but was hke Bagdad or 
 Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights. How his 
 imagination transfigured it we may see in such a passage 
 as this: 
 
 By silvery waters in the plains afar 
 
 Glimmers the inland city like a star. 
 
 With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze. 
 
 And bm-nished domes halt seen tkrough luminous haze. 
 
 Lo, with what opportunity earth teems ! 
 
 How like a fair its ample beauty seems ! 
 
 Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise: 
 
 What bright bazaars, what marvellous merchandise, 
 
 Down seething alleys what melodious din. 
 
 What clamor, importuning from every booth: 
 
 At Earth's great mart where Joy is trafficked in 
 
 Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth ! 
 
 Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner 
 born, but with the eagerness of a traveller from a far 
 country, who feels as though he were living in a dream. 
 His attitude to the whole experience is curiously in- 
 genuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward. It is 
 the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris of 
 Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his ex- 
 
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periences lightly. There is no sign either of any struggle 
 of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the heart. 
 There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of 
 that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives 
 such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic 
 poetry, both French and English. There are traces of 
 disappointment and disillusion, but they are accepted 
 without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, 
 absorbing experience. All this means, of course, that 
 there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in 
 these poems. They are the work of a young man enam- 
 oured of his youth, enthusiastically grateful for the gift 
 of life, and entirely at his ease within his own moral code. 
 He had known none of what he himself calls "that kind 
 of affliction which alone can unfold the profundities of 
 the human spirit." 
 
 It was in Paris that he produced most of the "Juve- 
 nilia." He included only a few of the pieces which he had 
 written at Harvard and in New York. Thus all, or nearly 
 all, the poems ranged under that title, are, as he said — 
 
 Relics of the time when I too fared 
 Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days. 
 
 Paris, however, did not absorb him entirely during 
 these years. He would occasionally set forth on long 
 tramps through the French provinces; for he loved every 
 aspect of that gracious country. He once spent some 
 weeks with a friend in Switzerland; but this experience 
 seems to have left no trace in his work. 
 
 Then came the fateful year 1914. His "Juvenilia" 
 having grown to a passable bulk, he brought them in the 
 early summer to London, with a view to finding a publisher 
 
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for them; but it does not appear that he took any very 
 active steps to that effect. His days were mainly spent 
 in the British Museum, and his evenings with a coterie of 
 friends at the Cafe Royal. In the middle of July, his 
 father came to England and spent a week with him. Of 
 this meeting Mr. Seeger writes: 
 
 We passed three days at Canterbury — three days of such in- 
 timacy as we had hardly had since he was a boy in Mexico. 
 For four or five years I had only seen him a few days at a time, 
 during my hurried visits to the United States. We explored 
 the old town together, heard services in the Cathedral, and had 
 long talks in the close. After service in the Cathedral on a 
 Monday morning, the last of our stay at Canterbury, Alan was 
 particularly enthusiastic over the reading of the Psalms, and 
 said " Was there ever such English written as that of the Bible ? " 
 I said good-bye to Alan on July 25th. 
 
 Two days earlier, the Austrian Ultimatum had been 
 presented to Serbia; on that very day the time linoit 
 expired, the Serbian reply was rejected, and the Austrian 
 Minister left Belgrade. The wheels of fate were already 
 whirling. 
 
 As soon as it became evident that a European war was 
 inevitable Alan returned to Paris. He took Bruges on 
 his way, and there left the manuscript of his poems in 
 the keeping of a printer, not foreseeing the risks to which 
 he was thus exposing them. 
 
 The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty 
 or fifty of his fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign 
 Legion of France. Why did he take this step ? Funda- 
 mentally, no doubt, because he felt war to be one of the 
 supreme experiences of life, from which, when it offered 
 itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal. 
 
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Long before the war was anything more than a vague 
 possibility, he had imagined the time 
 
 . . . when courted Death shall claim my Umbs and find them 
 Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides 
 
 Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them 
 Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides. 
 
 So far back indeed as May, 1912, he had written to his 
 mother from Paris: "Is it not fine the way the Balkan 
 States are triumphing ? I have been so excited over the 
 war, it would have needed a very small opportunity to 
 have taken me over there." It is evident, then, that the 
 soldier's life had long been included among the possibil- 
 ities which fascinated him. But apart from this general 
 procHvity to adventure, this desire to "live dangerously," 
 he was impelled by a simple sentiment of loyalty to the 
 country and city of his heart, which he himself explained 
 in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to The New 
 Republic (New York, May 22, 1915) : 
 
 I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. 
 Their case is httle known, even by the French, yet altogether 
 interesting and appealing. They are foreigners on whom the 
 outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion. But they had 
 stood on the butte ia springtime perhaps, as Julian and Louise 
 stood, and looked out over the myriad twmkling Ughts of the 
 beautiful city. Paris — mystic, maternal, personified, to whom 
 they owed the happiest moments of their lives — Paris was in 
 peril. Were they not under a moral obUgation, no less bind- 
 ing than [that by which] their comrades were bound legally, to 
 put their breasts between her and destruction? Without re- 
 nouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen to make their 
 homes here beyond any other city in the world. Did not the 
 benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty 
 that heart and conscience could not deny? 
 
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"Why did you enlist?" In every case the answer was the 
 same. That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the 
 old haunts were desolate, the boon companions had gone. It 
 was unthinkable to leave the danger to them and accept only 
 the pleasures oneseK, to go on enjoying the sweet things of life 
 in defence of which they were perhaps even then shedding their 
 blood in the north. Some day they would return, and with 
 honor — not all, but some. The old order of things would have 
 irrevocably vanished. There would be a new companionship 
 whose bond would be the common danger run, the common 
 sufferings borne, the common glory shared. "And where have 
 you been all the time, and what have you been doing?" The 
 very question would be a reproach, though none were intended. 
 How could they endure it ? 
 
 Face to face with a situation like that, a man becomes rec- 
 onciled, justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to 
 understand, in a universe where logic counts for so little and 
 sentiment and the impulse of the heart for so much, the inevita- 
 bleness and naturalness of war. Suddenly the world is up in 
 arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith that made him 
 surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love, 
 forces him now to make himself the instrument through which 
 a greater force worlcs out its inscrutable ends through the im- 
 pulses of terror and repulsion. And with no less a sense of 
 moving in harmony with a imiverse where masses are in con- 
 tinual conflict and new combinations are engendered out of 
 eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with 
 haste. 
 
 Already in this passage we can discern the fatalistic 
 acceptance of war which runs through many of his utter- 
 ances on the subject, and may be read especially in the 
 noble conclusion of his poem, "The Hosts:" 
 
 There was a stately drama writ 
 
 By the hand that peopled the earth and air 
 
 And set the stars in the infinite 
 
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And made night gorgeous and morning fair; 
 
 And all that had sense to reason knew 
 
 That bloody drama must be gone through. 
 
 Some sat and watched how the action veered — 
 
 Waited, profited, trembled, cheered — ■ 
 
 We saw not clearly nor understood. 
 
 But, yielding ourselves to the master hand. 
 
 Each in his part, as best he could. 
 
 We played it through as the author planned. 
 
 It was not, in his own conception, a "war against war" 
 that he was waging; it was simply a fight for freedom 
 and for France. Some of us may hope and believe that, 
 in after years, when he was at leisure to view history in 
 perspective and carry his psychology a Uttle deeper, he 
 would have allowed, it not more potency, at any rate 
 more adaptability, to the human wUl. In order to do 
 so, it would not have been necessary to abandon his fatal- 
 istic creed. He would have seen, perhaps, that even if 
 we only will what we have to wiU, the factors which shape 
 the will — of the individual, the nation, or the race — are 
 always changing, and that it is not only possible but prob- 
 able that the factors which make for peace may one day 
 gain the upper hand of those which (for perfectly definite 
 and tangible reasons) have hitherto made for war. The 
 fact remains, however, that he shouldered his knapsack 
 without any theoretic distaste for the soldier's calling. 
 In so far he was more happily situated than thousands 
 who have made all the better soldiers for their intense 
 detestation of the stupidity of war. But this in no way 
 detracts from his loyalty to his p,ersonal ideal, or from the 
 high chivalry of his devotion to France. 
 
 The story of his life as a soldier shall be told, so far 
 as possible, in his own words. 
 
 After some brief preliminary training at Rouen he was 
 
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sent to Toulouse. Thence, on September 28, 1914, he 
 wrote as follows: 
 
 2me Bigiment Etranger, 
 Bataillon C, Ire. Cie, Sme Section. 
 Toulouse, Sept. 28, 1914. 
 Dear Motheb, 
 
 . . . We have been putting in our time here at very hard 
 drilling, and are supposed to have learned in six weeks what 
 the ordinary recruit, in times of peace, takes all his two years 
 at. We rise at 5, and work stops in the afternoon at 5. A 
 twelve hours day at one sou a day. I hope to earn higher wages 
 than this in time to come, but I never expect to work harder. 
 The early rising hour is splendid for it gives one the chance to 
 see the most beautiful part of these beautiful autumn days in 
 the South. We march up to a lovely open field on the end of 
 the ridge behind the barracks, walking right into the rising sun. 
 From this the panorama, spread about on three sides is incom- 
 parably fine — yeUow cornfields, vineyards, harvest-fields where 
 the workers and their teams can be seen moving about in tiny 
 figures — poplars, Uttle hamlets and church-towers, and far 
 away to the south the blue line of the PjTenees, the high peaks 
 capped with snow. It makes one in love with hfe, it is all so 
 peaceful and beautiful. But Nature to me is not only hills and 
 blue skies and flowers, but the Universe, the totahty of things, 
 reaUty as it most obviously presents itself to us; and in this 
 universe strife and sternness play as big a part as love and ten- 
 derness, and cannot be shirked by one whose will it is to rule his 
 life in accordance with the cosmic forces he sees in play about 
 him. I hope you see the thing as I do, and think that I have 
 done well, being without responsibilities and with no one to 
 suffer materially by my decision, in taking upon my shoulders, 
 too, the burden that so much of humanity is suffering under, 
 and, rather than stand ingloriously aside when the opportunity 
 was given me, doing my share for the side that I think right. . - . 
 
 The battalion must have left Toulouse almost Immedi- 
 ately after this was written, for in a post-card of October 
 
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10, from the Camp de Mailly, Aube, he says that they 
 have been there ten days. A week later he wrote: 
 
 . . . After two weeks here and less than two months from en- 
 listment, we are actually going at last to the firing line. By 
 the time you receive this we shall aheady perhaps have had 
 our baptirne de feu. We have been engaged in the hardest kind 
 of hard work — two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the 
 whole, frosty nights and sunny days and beautiful coloring on 
 the sparse foliage that breaks here and there the wide rolling 
 expanses of open coimtry. Every day, from the distance to 
 the north, has come the booming of the cannon around Reims 
 and the hnes along the Meuse. . . . But imagine how thrill- 
 ing it win be tomorrow and the following days, marching toward 
 the front with the noise of battle growing continually louder 
 before us. I could tell you where we are going, but I do not 
 want to run any risk of having this letter stopped by the cen- 
 sor. The whole regiment is going, four battaUons, about 4000 
 men. You have no idea how beautiful it is to see the troops 
 undulating along the road in front of one, in colonnes par quaire 
 as far as the eye can see, with the captains and Ueutenants on 
 horseback at the head of their companies. . . . Tomorrow the 
 real hardship and privations begin. But I go into action with 
 the lightest of light hearts. The hard work and moments of 
 frightful fatigue have not broken but hardened me, and I am 
 in excellent health and spirits. ... I am happy and fuU of 
 excitement over the wonderful days that are ahead. It was 
 such a comfort to receive your letter, and know that you ap- 
 proved of my action. 
 
 In a post-card of October 20, postmarked "Vertus," he 
 says: 
 
 This is the second night's halt of our march to the front. 
 All our way has been one immense battlefield. It was a mag- 
 nificent victory for the French that the world does not fully 
 realize. I think we are marching to victory too, but whatever 
 we are going to we are going triumphantly. 
 
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On October 23, he writes from " 17 kil. south-east of 
 Reims." 
 
 Deah Mother. ... I am sitting on the curbstone of a street 
 at the edge of the town. The houses end abruptly and the yel- 
 low vineyards begin here. The view is broad and uninterrupted 
 to the crest ten kilometers or so across the valley. Between 
 this and ourselves are the lines of the two armies. A fierce can- 
 nonading is going on continually, and I hft my eyes from the 
 sheet at each report, to see the puffs of smoke two or three miles 
 off. The Germans have been firing salvoes of four shots over 
 a little village where the French batteries are stationed, shrapnel 
 that burst in little puffs of white smoke; the French reply with 
 explosive sheUs that raise columns of dust over the German 
 lines. Half of our regiment have left aheady for the trenches. 
 We may go tonight. We have made a march of about 75 kilo- 
 meters in four days, and are now on the front, ready to be called 
 on at any moment. I am feeliag fine, in my element, for I have 
 always thirsted for this kind of thing, to be present always 
 where the pulsations are liveliest. Every minute here is worth 
 weeks of ordinary experience. How beautiful the view is here, 
 over the sunny vineyards ! And what a curious anomaly. On 
 this slope the grape pickers are singing merrily at their work, 
 on the other the batteries are roaring. Boom ! Boom ! 
 
 This will spoil one for any other kind of life. The yellow 
 afternoon sunUght is sloping gloriously across this beautiful 
 valley of Champagne. Aeroplanes pass continually overhead 
 on reconnaissance. I must mail this now. There is too much 
 to be said and too little time to say it. So glad to get your 
 letter. Love and lots of it to all. 
 
 Alan. 
 
 Alas! the hopes of swift, decisive action with which 
 the Legion advanced were destined to disappointment. 
 They soon settled down for the winter into the monoto- 
 nous hardships of trench warfare. Alan described this 
 experience in admirably vivid letteis published in the 
 
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New York Sun, from which a few extracts must suffice. 
 He writes on December 8, during his fourth period of 
 service in the trenches: 
 
 We left our camp in the woods before daybreak this morn- 
 ing, and marched up the hill in single file, under the winter 
 stars. . . . Through openings in the woods we could see that 
 we were marching along a high ridge, and on either hand vapor- 
 ous depths and distances expanded, the darkness broken some- 
 times by a far light or the momentary glow of a magnesium 
 rocket sent up from the German lines. There is something 
 fascinating if one is stationed on sentry-duty immediately after 
 arrival, in watching the dawn slowly illu min e one of these new 
 landscapes, from a position taken up imder cover of darkness. 
 The other section has been relieved and departs. We are given 
 the consigne, by the preceding sentinel, and are left alone behind 
 a mound of dirt, facing the north and the blank, perilous night. 
 Slowly the mystery that it shrouds resolves as the grey light 
 steals over the eastern lulls. Like a photograph in the wash- 
 ing, its high lights and shadows come gradually forth. The 
 light splash in the foregroimd becomes a ruined chateau, the 
 grey street a demohshed village. 
 
 The details come out on the hillside opposite, where the silent 
 trenches of the enemy are hidden a few himdred metres away. 
 We find ourselves in a woody, mountainous country, with broad 
 horizons and streaks of mist in the valleys. Our position is 
 excellent this time, a high crest, with open land sloping down 
 from the trenches and plenty of barbed wire strung along im- 
 mediately in front. It would be a hard task to carry such a 
 line, and there is not much danger that the enemy will try. 
 
 With increasing daylight the sentinel takes a sheltered posi- 
 tion, and surveys his new environment through httle gaps 
 where the mounds have been crenellated and covered with 
 branches. Suddenly he starts as a metallic bang rings out 
 from the woods immediately behind him. It is of the unmis- 
 takable voice of a French 75 starting the day's artillery duel. 
 By the time the sentinel is relieved, in broad dayUght, the can- 
 
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nonade is general all along the line. He surrenders his post to 
 a comrade, and crawls down into his bombproof dugout almost 
 reluctantly, for the long day of inactive waiting has commenced. 
 
 Though he never expresses even a momentary regret 
 for the choice he has made, he freely admits that trench 
 warfare is "anything but romantic." For the artillery- 
 man it is "doubtless very interesting" but "the poor 
 common soldier" has a pretty mean time of it: 
 
 His rule is simply to dig himself a hole in the ground and to 
 keep hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually under 
 the fire of the opposing batteries, he is yet never allowed to get 
 a gUmpse of the enemy. Exposed to all the dangers of war, 
 but with none of its enthusiasm or splendid Slan, he is con- 
 demned to sit hike an animal in its burrow, and hear the shells 
 whistle over his head, and take their Uttle daily toll from his 
 comrades. 
 
 The winter morning dawns with grey skies and the hoar frost 
 on the fields. His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he is 
 not allowed to make a fire. The winter night falls, with its 
 prospect of sentry-duty, and the continual apprehension of the 
 hurried call to arms; he is not even permitted to hght a can- 
 dle, but must fold himself in his blanket and lie down cramped 
 in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may. How different 
 from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the songs and 
 good cheer. 
 
 Of the commissariat arrangements he gives, on the 
 whole, a very good account; but he admits that "to sup- 
 plement the regular rations with luxuries such as butter, 
 cheese, preserves, and especially chocolate, is a matter that 
 occupies more of the young soldier's thoughts than the 
 invisible enemy. Our corporal told us the other day that 
 there wasn't a man in the squad that wouldn't exchange 
 his rifle for a jar of jam." But "though modern warfare 
 
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allows us to think more about eating than fighting, still 
 we do not actually forget that we are in a battle line." 
 
 Ever over our heads goes on the precise and scientific strug- 
 gle of the artillery. Packed elbow to elbow in these obscure 
 galleries, one might be content to squat all day long, auditor 
 of the magnificent orchestra of battle, were it not that one be- 
 comes so soon habituated to it that it is no longer magnificent. 
 We hear the voices of cannon of all calibres and at all distances. 
 We learn to read the score and distinguish the instruments. Near 
 us are field batteries; far away are siege guns. Over all there 
 is the unmistakable, sharp, metallic twang of the French 75, 
 the whistle of its shell and the lesser report of its explosion. 
 
 And every now and then comes the bursting of a shell 
 immediately overhead, and the rattle of its fragments on 
 the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out. Think what it must 
 have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit 
 to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous 
 trench, a grand orchestral concert of this music of human 
 madness ! 
 
 The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as 
 something of a relief. "It may," he says, "be all that 
 is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind 
 moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments 
 of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moon- 
 light breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze 
 with the beauty of the northern stars." 
 
 The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone imder the 
 stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals 
 itself to him. . . . He thrills with the sense of filling an ap- 
 pointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the 
 enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to 
 the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has 
 never before known, a kind of companionship with the stars. 
 
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Six days in the trenches alternated with a three days' 
 interval of rest "either billeted in the stables and hay- 
 lofts of the village or encamped in the woods and around 
 the chateau." Thus the winter of 1914-15 wore away, 
 with little to break its monotony. The heaviest fight- 
 ing was all to the northward. One gathers from his poem 
 "The Aisne" that at Craonne he took part in the repulse 
 of a serious enemy attack; but there is no mention of this 
 in the letters before me. 
 
 On March 12, 1915, he writes to his mother in fierce 
 indignation over something that has appeared in an Amer- 
 ican paper as to life in the Foreign Legion. The writer 
 of the "disgraceful article," he says, "like many others of 
 his type, was long ago eliminated from our ranks, for a 
 person buoyed up by no noble purpose is the first to suc- 
 cumb to the hardslups of the winter that we have been 
 through. ... If his lies did nothing worse than belittle 
 his comrades, who are here for motives that he is unable 
 to conceive, it would be only dishonourable. But when 
 it comes to throwing discredit on the French Govern- 
 ment, that in all its treatment of us has been generous 
 beyond anything that one would think possible, it is too 
 shameful for any words to characterize." 
 
 With the coming of spring, there was of course some 
 mitigation of the trials of the winter. Here is an almost 
 idylhc passage from a letter to his sister, written on the 
 fly-leaves of Les Confessions de J. J. Rcmsseau, Geneve, 
 MDCCLXXXII: 
 
 We put in a very pleasant week here — ^nine hours of guard 
 at night in our outposts up on the hillside; in the daytime sleep, 
 or foraging in the ruined villages, loafing in the pretty garden 
 of the chateau, or reading up in the library. We have cleaned 
 this up now, and it is an altogether curious sensation to recUne 
 here in an easy-chair, reading some fine old book, and just tak- 
 
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ing the precaution not to stay in front of the glassless windows 
 through which the sharpshooters can snipe at you from their 
 posts in the thickets on the slopes of the plateau, not six hun- 
 dred metres away. Sometimes our artillery opens up and then 
 you lay down your book for a while, and, looking through a 
 peek-hole, watch the 75's and 120's throw up foimtains of dirt 
 and debris all along the line of the enemy's trenches. 
 
 "Spring has come here at last," so the letter closes, 
 "and we are having beautiful weather. I am going in 
 swimming in the Aisne this afternoon for the first time. 
 In fine health and spirits." 
 
 During the summer, the Legion was moved about a good 
 deal from sector to sector, and Alan often found himself in 
 pleasant places, and got a good deal of positive enjoyment 
 out of his Hfe. On June 18, 1915, he wrote to his mother: 
 
 You must not be anxious about my not coming back. The 
 chances are about ten to one that I will. But if I should not, 
 you must be proud, like a Spartan mother, and feel that it is 
 your contribution to the triumph of the cause whose righteous- 
 ness you feel so keenly. Everybody should take part in this 
 struggle which is to have so decisive an effect, not only on the 
 nations engaged but on all humanity. There should be no 
 neutrals, but everyone should bear some part of the burden. 
 If so large a part should fall to your share, you would be in so 
 far superior to other women and should be correspondingly 
 proud. There would be nothing to regret, for I could not have 
 done otherwise than what I did, and I think I could not have 
 done better. Death is nothing terrible after all. It may 
 mean something even more wonderful than life. It cannot 
 possibly mean anything worse to the good soldier. 
 
 The same note recurs in a letter of two weeks later 
 (Julys): 
 
 Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point 
 with me: it is being on the side where my sympathies lie that 
 
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matters, and I am ready to see it through to the end. Success 
 in life means doing that thing than which nothing else conceiv- 
 able seems more noble or satisfying or remimerative, and this 
 enviable state I can truly say that I enjoy, for had I the choice 
 I would be nowhere else in the world than where I am. 
 
 In this letter lie says that an article about Rupert 
 Brooke in which his name was mentioned "gave him 
 rather more pain than pleasure, for it rubbed in the 
 matter which most rankled in his heart, that he never 
 could get his book of poems published before the war." 
 However he consoles himself with the reflection that the 
 M.S. is probably as safe at Bruges as anywhere else. 
 "We have finished our eighth month on the firing line," 
 he says, "and rumors are going round of an imminent re- 
 turn to the rear for reorganization." 
 
 These rumors proved to be well founded, and on July 
 17, he wrote on a picture-postcard representing the Lion 
 of BeHort: 
 
 We have finally come to the rear for a little rest and reor- 
 ganization, and are cantoned in a valley not far from Belfort. 
 in the extreme east of France, very near the Swiss frontier. 
 Since I wrote you last, all the Americans in the regiment re- 
 ceived 48 hours permission in Paris, and it was a great happi- 
 ness to get back even for so short a while and to see again old 
 scenes and faces after almost a year's absence. We shall be 
 here several weeks perhaps. 
 
 Three weeks later (August 8) he wrote to his mother: 
 
 ... I have always had the passion to play the biggest part 
 within my reach, and it is really in a sense a supreme success 
 to be allowed to play this. If I do not come out, I will share 
 the good fortune of those who disappear at the pinnacle of their 
 careers. Come to love France and understand the almost un- 
 
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exampled nobility of the effort this admirable people is making, 
 for that will be the surest way of your finding comfort for any- 
 thing that I am ready to suffer in their cause. 
 
 The spell of rest lasted some two months, and then the 
 Legion returned to the front in time for the battle in 
 Champagne "in which" he writes "we took part from the 
 beginning, the morning of the memorable 25th. Septem- 
 ber." I cannot resist quoting at some length from the 
 admirably vivid letter in which he gave an account of this 
 experience : 
 
 The part we played in the battle is briefly as follows. We 
 broke camp about 11 o'clock the night of the 24th, and marched 
 up through ruined Souain to our place in one of the numerous 
 boyaux where the troupes d'attaque were massed. The cannon- 
 ade was pretty violent all that night, as it had been for several 
 days previous, but toward dawn it reached an intensity imim- 
 aginable to anyone who has not seen a modern battle. A little 
 before 9.15 the fire lessened suddenly, and the crackle of the 
 fusillade between the reports of the cannon told us that the 
 first wave of assault had left and the attack begun. At the 
 same time we received the order to advance. The German 
 artillery had now begun to open upon us in earnest. Amid 
 the most infernal roar of every kind of fire-arms, and through 
 "an atmosphere heavy with dust and smoke, we marched up 
 through the boyaux to the trancMes de dSpart. At shallow 
 places and over breaches that shells had made in the bank, we 
 caught momentary glimpses of the blue lines sweeping up the 
 hillside or silhouetted on the crest where they poured into the 
 German trenches. When the last wave of the Colonial brigade 
 had left, we followed. Bayonette au canon, in lines of tirail- 
 leurs, we crossed the open space between the lines, over the 
 barbed wire, where noie so many of our men were lying as I had 
 feared, (thanks to the efficacy of the bombardment) and over 
 the German trench, knocked to pieces and filled with their 
 dead. In some places they still resisted in isolated groups. 
 
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Opposite us, all was over, and the herds of prisoners were being 
 aheady led down as we went up. We cheered, more in triumph 
 than in hate; but the poor devils, terror-stricken, held ujj their 
 hands, begged for their lives, cried "Kamerad," "Bon Fran- 
 Sais," even "Vive la France." We advanced and lay down in 
 columns by twos behind the second crest. Meanwhile, bridges 
 had been thrown across trenches and hoyaux, and the artillery, 
 leaving the emplacements where they had been anchored a 
 whole year, came across and took position in the open, a mag- 
 nificent spectacle. Squadrons of cavalry came up. Suddenly 
 the long, impicturesque guerre de tranchSes was at an end, and 
 the field really presented the aspect of the familiar battle pic- 
 tures, — the battahons in manoeuvre, the oflSeers, superbly in- 
 different to danger, galloping about on their chargers. But 
 now the German guns, moved back, began to get our range, 
 and the shells to burst over and around batteries and troops, 
 many with admirable precision. Here my best comrade was 
 struck down by shrapnel at my side, — ^painfully but not mor- 
 tally woimded. 
 
 I often envied him after that. For now our advanced troops 
 were in contact with the German second-line defenses, and 
 these proved to be of a character so formidable that all further 
 advance without a preliminary artillery preparation was out of 
 the question. And our r61e, that of troops in reserve, was to 
 lie passive in an open field under a shell fire that every hour 
 became more terrific, while aeroplanes and captive balloons, to 
 which we were entirely exposed, regulated the fire. 
 
 That night we spent in the rain. With portable picks and 
 shovels each man dug himself in as well as possible. The next 
 day our concentrated artillery again began the bombardment, 
 and again the fusillade announced the entrance of the infantry 
 into action. But this time only the wounded appeared com- 
 ing back, no prisoners. I went out and gave water to one of 
 these, eager to get news. It was a young soldier, wounded in 
 the hand. His face and voice bespoke the emotion of the ex- 
 perience he had been through, in a way that I will nerer forget. 
 "Ah, les salavdsl" he cried, "They let us come right up to the 
 
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barbed wire without firing. Then a hail of grenades and balls. 
 My comrade fell, shot through the leg, got up, and the next 
 moment had his head taken off by a grenade before my eyes." 
 "And the barbed wire, wasn't it cut down by the bombard- 
 ment?" "Not at all in front of us." I congratulated him on 
 having a blessure heureuse and being well out of the affair. But 
 he thought only of his comrade and went on down the road 
 toward Souain nursing his mangled hand, with the stream of 
 woimded seeking their pastes de secoura. 
 
 He then tells how, in spite of substantial gains, it 
 gradually "became more and more evident that the Ger- 
 man second line of defence presented obstacles too serious 
 to attempt overcoming for the moment, and we began 
 going up at night to work at consolidating our ad- 
 vanced trenches and turning them into a new permanent 
 line." To this time, perhaps, belongs the incident re- 
 lated by Rif Baer, an Egyptian, who was his comrade 
 and best friend in the regiment. A piece of difScult 
 trench work was allotted to the men, to be finished in one 
 night. "Each was given the limit, that lie was supposed 
 to be able to complete in the time. It happened that 
 Rif Baer was ill, and, after working a while, his strength 
 gave out. Alan completed his own job and R. B.'s also, 
 and although he was quite exhausted by the extra labour, 
 his eyes glowed with happiness, and he said he had never 
 done anything in his life that gave him such entire satis- 
 faction." 
 
 Summing up the results of the battle, Alan wrote (still 
 in the same letter, October 25) : "It was a satisfaction at 
 least to get out of the trenches, to meet the enemy face 
 to face and to see German arrogance turned into suppli- 
 ance. We knew many splendid moments, worth having 
 endured many trials for. But in our larger aim, of 
 piercing their line, of breaking the long deadlock, of en- 
 
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tering Vouzlers In triumph, of course we failed." Then 
 he proceeds: 
 
 This a£Fair only deepened my admiration for, my loyalty to, 
 the French. If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the 
 fault of the French soldier. He is a better man, man for man, 
 than the German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the 
 Marsoiuns at Souain would acknowledge it. Never was any- 
 thing more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded 
 in the leg, as he passed us, borne back on a litter by four Ger- 
 man prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when 
 we told him, he cried "Vive la Legion," and kept repeating 
 "Nous les avons eus. Nous les avons eus." He was suffering, 
 but, obhvious of his woimd, was still fired with the enthusiasm 
 of the assault and all radiant with victory. What a contrast 
 with the German wounded on whose faces was nothing but ter- 
 ror and despair. What is the stimulus in their slogans of 
 "Gott mit uns" and "FUr Konig und Vaterland" beside that 
 of men really fighting in defense of their country? Whatever 
 be the force in international conflicts of having justice and all 
 the principles of personal morality on one's side, it at least gives 
 the French soldier a strength that's Uke the strength of ten 
 against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence. It 
 is inconceivable that a Frenchman, forced to yield, could be- 
 have as I saw German prisoners behave, trembling, on their 
 knees, for all the world like criminals at length overpowered and 
 brought to justice. Such men have to be driven to the assault, 
 or intoxicated. But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed 
 with a passion beside which any of the other forms of experi- 
 ence that are reckoned to make life worth while seem pale in 
 comparison. 
 
 A report appeared In the American newspapers that he 
 had been killed In the battle of Champagne. On learn- 
 ing of It, he wrote to his mother: 
 
 I am nam6 to think of your having suffered so. I should have 
 arranged to cable after the attack, had I known that any such 
 
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absurd rumours had been started. Here one has a wholesome 
 notion of the unimportance of the individual. It needs an 
 effort of imagination to conceive of its making any particular 
 difference to anyone or anything if one goes under.' So many 
 better men have gone, and yet the world roUs on just the same. 
 
 After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and 
 did not return to the front until May 1916. On Febru- 
 ary 1st he writes: "I am in hospital for the first time, not 
 for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness." Hitherto 
 his health, since he joined the army, had been superb. 
 As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's 
 life suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mis- 
 chief left behind by the illness of his childhood seemed to 
 have vanished. It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis 
 that sent him to hospital. On his recovery he obtained 
 two months congi de convalescence, part of which he spent 
 at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time, much to 
 his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession 
 of "Juvenilia." On April 13th he wrote to his mother: 
 
 Did I tell you that the Embassy have managed to get my 
 M.S. for me? It was very interesting to re-read this work, 
 which I had almost forgotten. I found much that was good 
 in it, but much that was juvenile too, and am not so anxious to 
 publish it as it stands. I shall probably make extracts from it 
 and join it with what I have done since. I shall go back to the 
 front on the first of May without regrets. These visits to the 
 rear only confirm me in my conviction that the work up there 
 on the front is so far the most interesting work a man can be 
 doing at this moment, that nothing else counts in comparison. 
 
 On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine," Mrs. Weeks: 
 "The chiteau in the grounds of which we are barracked, 
 has a most beautiful name — Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty ? 
 I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it, as a ring is 
 
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made express for a jewel. It is a wonderful old seven- 
 teenth-century manor, surrounded by a lordly estate. 
 What is that exquisite stanza in 'Maud' about 'in the 
 evening through the lilacs (or laurels) of the old manorial 
 home' ?» Look it up and send it to me." Ten days later 
 he wrote to the same lady: 
 
 The week in the trenches was a week of the most beautiful 
 weather. . . . These days were saddened by the death of poor 
 Colette in the bombardment, and by the suffering of his brother 
 who has now returned after the burial. They were marked 
 on the other hand by two afternoons of rather memorable emo- 
 tion. Exasperated by the inactivity of the sector here, and 
 tempted by danger, I stole off twice after guard, and made a 
 patrol all by myself through the wood paths and trails between 
 the lines. In the front of these, at a crossing of paths not far 
 from one of our posts, I found a bxmit rocket-stick planted in 
 the ground, and a scrap of paper stuck in the top, placed there 
 by the boches to guide their Uttle mischief -making parties when 
 they come to visit us in the night. The scrap of paper was 
 nothing else than a bit of the Berliner TageblaM. This seemed 
 so interesting to me that I reported it to the captain, though 
 my going out alone this way is a thing strictly forbidden. He 
 was very decent about it though, and seemed really interested 
 in the information. Yesterday afternoon I repeated this ex- 
 ploit, following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear 
 up to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my 
 name. It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with 
 taunts, with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never 
 
 'He was doubtless thinking of this: 
 
 Alas for her that met me. 
 
 That heard me softly call. 
 
 Came glimmering thro' the laurels 
 
 In the quiet evenf all. 
 
 In the garden by the turrets 
 
 Of the old manorial hall. 
 
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been in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in day- 
 light. Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facili- 
 tates ambushes, for one must keep to the paths, owing to the 
 underbrush. I and a few others are going to try to get permis- 
 sion to go out on patrouUles d'embuscade and bring in some Uve 
 prisoners. It would be quite an extraordinary feat it we could 
 pull it off. In our present existence it is the only way I can 
 think of to get the Croix de Guerre. And to be worthy of my 
 marraine I think that I ought to have the Croix de Guerre. 
 
 He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration 
 Day, May 30th, to read, before the statue of Lafayette 
 and Washington, the "Ode in Memory of the American 
 Volunteers Fallen for France," which he had written at 
 the request of a Committee of American residents; but 
 his "permission" unfortunately did not arrive in time. 
 Completed in two days, during which he was engaged in 
 the hardest sort of labour in the trenches, this Ode is 
 certainly the crown of the poet's achievement. It is en- 
 tirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic oc- 
 casion. If the war has produced a nobler utterance, it 
 has not come my way. On June 24th, he again wrote, 
 giving an account of a march, which was "without ex- 
 ception the hardest he had ever made" — "20 kilometers 
 through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust. Some- 
 thing around 30 kilograms on the back. About 50 per 
 cent dropped by the way. By making a supreme effort, 
 I managed to get in at the finish, with the fifteen men 
 that were all that was left of the section." He now knew 
 that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation," 
 he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not 
 at liberty to say anything about it. My greatest pre- 
 occupation now is whether this affair is coming off before 
 or after the 4th of July. The indications are that it is 
 going to break very soon. In that case nothing doing in 
 
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the way of permission. But I still have hopes of getting 
 in." 
 
 His hopes of getting to Paris were frustrated, as were 
 all his other hopes save one — the hope of 
 
 That rare privilege of dying well. 
 
 On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the 
 evening of July 4th, the Legion was ordered to clear the 
 enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan 
 Seeger advanced in the first rush, and his squad was en- 
 filaded by the fire of six German machine guns, concealed 
 in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan 
 among them — ^wounded in several places. But the fol- 
 lowing waves of attack were more fortunate. As his 
 comrades came up to him, Alan cheered them on; and as 
 they left him behind, they heard him singing a marching- 
 song in English: — 
 
 Accents of ours were in the fierce m616e. 
 
 They took the village, they drove the invaders out; but 
 for some reason unknown — perhaps a very good one — the 
 battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning, 
 Alan Seeger lay dead. 
 
 There is Kttle to add. He wrote his own best epi- 
 taph in the "Ode":— 
 
 And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground 
 Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires, 
 When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound. 
 And on the tangled wires 
 The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops. 
 Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: — 
 Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops. 
 Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours. 
 
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His death was briefly noticed in one or two French 
 papers. The Matin published a translation of part of 
 the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15," and remarked that 
 " Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it." But France 
 had no time, even if she had had the knowledge, to reahze 
 the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her. 
 That will come later. One day France will know that 
 this unassuming soldier of the Legion, 
 
 Who, not unmindful of the antique debt. 
 Came back the generous path of Lafayette, 
 
 was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned 
 among her defenders. 
 
 The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They con- 
 tain lines which he would doubtless have remodelled had 
 he Uved to review them in tranquillity — ^perhaps one or 
 two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood, which, on 
 reflection he would have rejected.^ But they not only 
 show a great advance on his earher work: they rank high, 
 or I am much mistaken, among the hitherto not very 
 numerous poems in the EngUsh language produced, not in 
 mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual 
 stress and under its haunting menace. 
 
 Again and again in the "Last Poems" — notably in 
 "Maktoob" with its tribute to 
 
 The resignation and the calm 
 And wisdom of the East, 
 
 he returns to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only 
 the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his 
 
 * Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems" has anything 
 been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publishing. Indeed 
 nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems on which he 
 had written "These are worthless." 
 
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side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it Is 
 incredible to feehng. But in the potent illusion of free- 
 will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the ad- 
 miration that we feel for good and evil deeds. Not even 
 at Alan Seeger's bidding can we quite persuade ourselves 
 that, when he took up arms for France, he was exercising 
 no brave, no generous choice, but was the conscript of 
 Destiny. 
 
 William Abcheh. 
 
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JUVENILIA 
 
 1914 
 
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AN ODE TO NATURAL BEAUTY 
 
 There is a power whose inspiration fills 
 Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought. 
 Like airy dew ere any drop distils. 
 Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught 
 Unseen which interfused throughout the whole 
 Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul. 
 Now when, the drift of old desire renewing. 
 Warm tides flow northward over valley and field. 
 When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing 
 From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed 
 Such memories as breathe once more 
 Of childhood and the happy hues it wore. 
 Now, with a fervor that has never been 
 In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, — 
 Not as a force whose fountains are within 
 The faculties of the percipient mind. 
 Subject with them to darkness and decay, 
 But something absolute, something beyond. 
 Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer 
 From pale horizons, luminous behind 
 Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day; 
 And in this flood of the reviving year. 
 When to the loiterer by sylvan streams, 
 Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest. 
 Nature in every common aspect seems 
 To comment on the burden in his breast — 
 The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams — 
 
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One then with all beneath the radiant skies 
 
 That laughs with him or sighs. 
 
 It courses through the lilac-scented air, 
 
 A blessing on the fields, a wonder everywhere. 
 
 Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses, 
 Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea. 
 Alone can flush the exalted consciousness 
 With shafts of sensible divinity — 
 Light of the World, essential loveliness: 
 Him whom the Muse hath made thy votary 
 Not from her paths and gentle precepture 
 Shall vulgar ends engage, nor break the spell 
 That taught him first to feel thy secret charms 
 And o'er the earth, obedient to their lure. 
 Their sweet surprise and endless miracle, 
 To follow ever with insatiate arms. 
 On summer afternoons. 
 When from the blue horizon to the shore. 
 Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's 
 Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor. 
 Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements 
 Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence. 
 When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill 
 And autumn winds are still; 
 To watch the East for some emerging sign. 
 Wintry Capella or the Pleiades 
 Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; 
 Ravished in hours like these 
 
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Before thy universal shrine 
 
 To feel the invoked presence hovering near, 
 
 He stands enthusiastic. Star-ht hours 
 
 Spent on the roads of wandering solitude 
 
 Have set their sober impress on his brow, 
 
 And he, with harmonies of wind and wood 
 
 And torrent and the tread of mountain showers. 
 
 Has mingled many a dedicative vow 
 
 That holds him, till thy last delight be known. 
 
 Bound in thy service and in thine alone. 
 
 I, too, among the visionary throng 
 Who choose to follow where thy pathway leads. 
 Have sold my patrimony for a song, 
 And donned the simple, lowly pilgrim's weeds. 
 From that first image of beloved walls, 
 Deep-bowered in umbrage of ancestral trees, 
 Where earliest thy sweet enchantment falls, 
 Tingeing a child's fantastic reveries 
 With radiance so fair it seems to be 
 Of heavens just lost the lingering evidence 
 From that first dawn of roseate infancy, 
 Solong beneath thy tender influence 
 My breast has thrilled. As oft for one brief second 
 The veil through which those infinite offers beckoned 
 Has seemed to tremble, letting through 
 Some swift intolerable view 
 Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing. 
 So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see 
 
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In ferny dells the rustic deity, 
 I stood, like him, possessed, and all my being. 
 Flooded an instant with unwonted light. 
 Quivered with cosmic passion; whether then 
 On woody pass or glistening mountain-height 
 I walked in fellowship with winds and clouds. 
 Whether in cities and the throngs of men, 
 A curious saunterer through friendly crowds. 
 Enamored of the glance in passing eyes, 
 Unuttered salutations, mute replies, — 
 In every character where light of thine 
 Has shed on earthly things the hue of things divine 
 I sought eternal Loveliness, and seeking. 
 If ever transport crossed my brow bespeaking 
 Such fire as a prophetic heart might feel 
 Where simple worship blends in fervent zeal. 
 It was the faith that only love of thee 
 Needed in human hearts for Earth to see 
 Surpassed the vision poets have held dear 
 Of joy diffused in most communion here; 
 That whomsoe'er thy visitations warmed. 
 Lover of thee in all thy rays informed. 
 Needed no difiiculter discipline 
 To seek his right to happiness within 
 Than, sensible of Nature's loveliness. 
 To yield him to the generous impulses 
 By such a sentiment evoked. The thought. 
 Bright Spirit, whose illuminings I sought. 
 That thou unto^thy worshipper might be 
 
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An all-sufficient law, abode with me, 
 
 Importing something more than unsubstantial dreams 
 
 To vigils by lone shores and walks by murmuring streams. 
 
 Youth's flowers like childhood's fade and are forgot. 
 Fame twines a tardy crown of yellowing leaves. 
 How swift were disillusion, were it not 
 That thou art steadfast where all else deceives ! 
 Solace and Inspiration, Power divine 
 That by some mystic sympathy of thine. 
 When least it waits and most hath need of thee, 
 Can startle the dull spirit suddenly 
 With grandeur welled from unsuspected springs, — 
 Long as the light of fulgent evenings. 
 When from warm showers the pearly shades disband 
 And sunset opens o'er the humid land. 
 Shows thy veiled immanence in orient skies, — 
 Long as pale mist and opalescent dyes 
 Hung on far isle or vanishing mountain-crest. 
 Fields of remote enchantment can suggest 
 So sweet to wander in it matters nought. 
 They hold no place but in impassioned thought. 
 Long as one draught from a clear sky may be 
 A scented luxury; 
 
 Be thou my worship, thou my sole desire. 
 Thy paths my pilgrimage, my sense a lyre 
 jEolian for thine every breath to stir; 
 Oft when her full-blown periods recur. 
 To see the birth of day's transparent moon 
 
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Far from cramped walls may fading afternoon 
 
 Find me expectant on some rising lawn; 
 
 Often depressed in dewy grass at dawn. 
 
 Me, from sweet slumber imderneath green boughs. 
 
 Ere the stars flee may forest matins rouse. 
 
 Afoot when the great sun in amber floods 
 
 Pours horizontal through the steaming woods 
 
 And windless fumes from early chimneys start 
 
 And many a cock-crow cheers the traveller's heart 
 
 Eager for aught the coming day afford 
 
 In hills imtopped and valleys unexplored. 
 
 Give me the white road into the world's ends. 
 
 Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends. 
 
 Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze 
 
 On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze 
 
 At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit. 
 
 Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream. 
 
 Over the plain where blue seas border it 
 
 The torrid coast-towns gleam. 
 
 I have fared too far to turn back now; my breast 
 Burns with the lust for splendors unrevealed. 
 Stars of midsummer, clouds out of the west. 
 Pallid horizons, winds that valley and field 
 Laden with joy, be ye my refuge still ! 
 What though distress and poverty assail ! 
 Though other voices chide, yours never will. 
 The grace of a blue sky can never fail. 
 Powers that my childhood with a spell so sweet, 
 
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My youth with visions of such glory nursed. 
 Ye have beheld, nor ever seen my feet 
 On any venture set, but 'twas the thirst 
 For Beauty willed them, yea, whatever be 
 The faults I wanted wings to rise above; 
 I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly 
 I have been loyal to the love of Love! 
 
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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 hHIs 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. 
 
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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 
 
 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. 
 
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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 ease 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) ; 
 
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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. 
 
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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 simset glow 
 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. 
 
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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 carefuUest artifice, 
 
 They made a bower where every outward thing 
 Should comment on the cause of their own bliss; 
 
 "With fiowers 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 aeons 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. 
 
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Still round the turrets of this antique tower 
 The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown, 
 
 Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower. 
 
 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; 
 
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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. 
 
 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 winged 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. 
 
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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, 
 
 Sunlcen 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 eutsidco 
 
 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. 
 
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Close by upon a beryr 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. 
 
 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. 
 
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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 
 
 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. 
 
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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.j 
 
 So dusk would come and mingle lake and shore. 
 
 The snow-peaks fade to frosty opaline. 
 To pearl the domed 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 . . . 
 
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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. 
 
 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 ! 
 
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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 fetes 
 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. 
 
 Witness how sweetly on my heart as well 
 
 The miracles of dawn and starry evening fell! 
 
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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 
 
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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. 
 
 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 
 
 AnJ famish in a fit of unexpressive love. 
 
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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 i 
 
 Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white. 
 
 Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell. 
 
 Came the sweet invocation of the evening bell. 
 
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THE TORTURE OF CUAUHTEMOC 
 
 Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms 
 Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew, 
 Curhng across the jungle's ferny floor. 
 Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides. 
 Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold 
 That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse, 
 Not back to Seville and its sunny plains 
 Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once again. 
 Lords of a palace in Tenochtitlan, 
 They guarded Montezuma's treasure-hoard. 
 Gold, like some finny harvest of the sea. 
 Poured out knee deep around the rifted floors. 
 Shiny and sparkling, — arms and crowns and rings: 
 Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair, — 
 To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down. 
 Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again. 
 And watch the glinting metal trickle off. 
 Even as at night some fisherman, home bound 
 With speckled cargo in his hollow keel 
 Caught off Campeche or the Isle of Pines, 
 Dips in his paddle, lifts it forth again. 
 And laughs to see the luminous white drops 
 Fall back in flakes of fire. . . . Gold was the dream 
 That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now.!* . . . 
 Victory waited on the arms of Spain, 
 Fallen was the lovely city by the lake. 
 The sunny Venice of the western world; 
 
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There many corpses, rotting in the wind. 
 Poked up stiff limbs, but in the leprous rags 
 No jewel caught the sun, no tawny chain 
 Gleamed, as the prying halberds raked them o'er. 
 Pillage that ran red-handed through the streets 
 Came railing home sit evening empty-palmed; 
 And they, on that sad night a twelvemonth gone. 
 Who, ounce by ounce, dear as their own life's blood 
 Retreating, cast the cumbrous load away: 
 They, when brown foemen lopped the bridges down. 
 Who tipped thonged chests into the stream below 
 And over wealth that might have ransomed kings 
 Passed on to safety; — cheated, guerdonless — 
 Found (through their fingers the bright booty slipped) 
 A city naked, of that golden dream 
 Shorn in one moment like a sunset sky. 
 
 Deep in a chamber that no cheerful ray 
 
 Purged of damp air, where in unbroken night 
 
 Black scorpions nested in the sooty beams. 
 
 Helpless and manacled they led him down — 
 
 Cuauhtemotzin — and other lords beside — 
 
 All chieftains of the people, heroes all — 
 
 And stripped their feathered robes and bound them 
 
 there 
 On short stone settles sloping to the head. 
 But where the feet projected, underneath 
 Heaped the red coals. Their swarthy fronts illumed. 
 The bearded Spaniards, helmed and haubergeoned, 
 
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Paced up and down beneath the lurid vault. 
 Some kneeling fanned the glowing braziers; some 
 Stood at the sufferers' heads and all the while 
 Hissed in their ears: "The gold . . . the gold . . . the 
 
 gold. 
 Where have ye hidden it — the chested gold? 
 Speak — and the torments cease!" 
 
 They answered not. 
 Past those proud lips whose key their sovereign claimed 
 No accent fell to chide or to betray, 
 Only it chanced that bound beside the king 
 Lay one whom Nature, more than other men 
 Framing for delicate and perfumed ease. 
 Not yet, along the happy ways of Youth, 
 Had weaned from gentle usages so far 
 To teach that fortitude that warriors feel 
 And glory in the proof. He answered not. 
 But writhing with intolerable pain, 
 Convulsed in every limb, and all his face 
 Wrought to distortion with the agony. 
 Turned on his lord a look of wild appeal, 
 The secret half atremble on his lips. 
 Livid and quivering, that waited yet 
 For leave — ^for leave to utter it — one sign — 
 One word — one little word — to ease his pain. 
 
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As one reclining in the banquet hall, 
 
 Propped on an elbow, garlanded with flowers. 
 
 Saw lust and greed and boisterous revelry 
 
 Surge round him on the tides of wine, but he. 
 
 Staunch in the ethic of an antique school — 
 
 Stoic or Cynic or of Pyrrho's mind — 
 
 With steady eyes surveyed the unbridled scene, 
 
 Himself impassive, silent, self-contained: 
 
 So sat the Indian prince, with brow unblanched. 
 
 Amid the tortured and the torturers. 
 
 He who had seen his hopes made desolate. 
 
 His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him. 
 
 And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled 
 
 His stricken people in their reeking doors. 
 
 Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms 
 
 Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell 
 
 As back and forth he paced along the streets 
 
 With words of hopeless comfort — what was this 
 
 That one should weaken now? He weakened not. 
 
 Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt 
 
 In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round. 
 
 Met that racked visage with his own unmoved, 
 
 Bent on the suflferer his mild calm eyes. 
 
 And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice. 
 
 As who would speak not all in gentleness 
 
 Nor all disdain, said : " Yes ! And am 7 then 
 
 Upon a bed of roses?" 
 
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Stung with shame — 
 Shame bitterer than his anguish — to betray 
 Such cowardice before the man he loved, 
 And merit such rebuke, the boy grew calm; 
 And stilled his struggling limbs and moaning cries ; 
 And shook away his tears, and strove to smile, 
 And turned his face against the wall — and died. 
 
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THE NYMPHOLEPT 
 
 There was a boy — not above childish fears — 
 With steps that faltered now and straining ears, 
 Timid, irresolute, yet dauntless still. 
 Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill 
 Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue 
 And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew. 
 Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun. 
 Walked up into the mountains. One by one 
 Each towering trunk beneath his sturdy stride 
 Fell back, and ever wider and more wide 
 The boundless prospect opened. Long he strayed. 
 From dawn till the last trace of slanting shade 
 Had vanished from the canyons, and, dismayed 
 At that far length to which his path had led, 
 He paused — at such a height where overhead 
 The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chUl, 
 And all was hushed and calm and very still. 
 Save, from abysmal gorges, where the sound 
 Of tumbling waters rose, and all around 
 The pines, by those keen upper currents blown. 
 Muttered in multitudinous monotone. 
 Here, with the wind in lovely locks laid bare. 
 With arms oft raised in dedicative prayer. 
 Lost in mute rapture and adoring wonder. 
 He stood, till the far noise of noontide thunder. 
 Rolled down upon the muffled harmonies 
 Of wind and waterfall and whispering trees, 
 
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Made loneliness more lone. Some Panic fear 
 Would seize him then, as they who seemed to hear 
 In Thracian valleys or Thessalian woods 
 The god's hallooing wake the leafy solitudes; 
 I think it was the same: some piercing sense 
 Of Deity's pervasive immanence, 
 The Life that visible Nature doth indwell 
 Grown great and near and all but palpable . . . 
 He might not linger, but with winged strides 
 Like one pursued, fled down the mountain-sides — 
 Down the long ridge that edged the steep ravine. 
 By glade and flowery lawn and upland green, 
 And never paused nor felt assured again 
 But where the grassy foothills opened. Then, 
 While shadows lengthened on the plain below 
 And the sun vanished and the sunset-glow 
 Looked back upon the world with fervid eye 
 Through the barred windows of the western sky. 
 Homeward he fared, while many a look behind 
 Showed the receding ranges dim-outlined. 
 Highland and hollow where his path had lain. 
 Veiled in deep purple of the mountain rain. 
 
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THE WANDERER 
 
 To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so 
 Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves. 
 Back of old-storied spires and architraves 
 To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut, 
 I 
 
 And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day 
 Flooded with gold some domed metropolis. 
 Between new towers to waken and new bliss 
 Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way: 
 
 These were his joys. Oft under bulging crates. 
 Coming to market with his morning load. 
 The peasant found him early on his. road 
 To greet the sunrise at the city-gates, — 
 
 There where the meadows waken in its rays. 
 Golden with mist, and the great roads commence. 
 And backward, where the chimney-tops are dense. 
 Cathedral-arches glimmer through the haze. 
 
 White dunes that breaking show a strip of sea, 
 A plowman and his team against the blue, 
 Swiss pastures musical with cowbells, too. 
 And poplar-liued canals in Picardie, 
 
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And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth 
 Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky. 
 And swallows in the sunset where they fly 
 Over gray Gothic cities in the north. 
 
 And the wine-cellar and the chorus there. 
 The dance-hall and a face among the crowd, — 
 Were all delights that made him sing aloud 
 For joy to sojourn in a world so fair. 
 
 Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell 
 Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged. 
 Before him tireless to applaud it surged 
 The sweet interminable spectacle. 
 
 And like the west behind a sundown sea 
 Shone the past joys his memory retraced. 
 And bright as the blue east he always faced 
 Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be. 
 
 From every branch a blossom for his brow 
 He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road. 
 And youth impelled his spirit as he strode 
 Like winged Victory on the galley's prow. 
 
 That Loveliness whose being sun and star. 
 Green Earth and dawn and amber evening robe. 
 That lamp whereof the opalescent globe 
 The season's emulative splendors are, 
 
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That veiled divinity whose beams transpire 
 From every pore of universal space. 
 As the fair soul illumes the lovely face — 
 That was his guest, his passion, his desire. 
 
 His heart the love of Beauty held as hides 
 One gem most pure a casket of pure gold. 
 It was too rich a lesser thing to hold; 
 It was not large enough for aught besides. 
 
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THE NEED TO LOVE 
 
 The need to love that all the stars obey 
 Entered my heart and banished all beside. 
 
 Bare were the gardens where I used to stray; 
 Faded the flowers that one time satisfied. 
 
 Before the beauty of the west on fire. 
 
 The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed. 
 Cloud-like arose the image of desire, 
 
 And cast out peace and maddened solitude. 
 
 I sought the City and the hopes it held: 
 With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled. 
 
 As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled 
 Shut out the fair horizons of the world — 
 
 A truant from the fields and rustic joy. 
 
 In my changed thought that image even so 
 
 Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy 
 And all the pure delights I used to know. 
 
 Often the veil has trembled at some tide 
 
 Of lovely reminiscence and revealed 
 How much of beauty Nature holds beside 
 
 Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield: 
 
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Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves 
 When summer cumulates their golden chains. 
 
 Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves. 
 Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes, 
 
 ^An organ-grinder's melancholy tune 
 
 In rainy streets, or from an attic sill 
 The blue skies of a windy afternoon 
 
 Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill : 
 
 And my soul once more would be wrapped entire 
 In the pure peace and blessing of those years 
 
 Before the fierce infection of Desire 
 
 Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears 
 
 Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did. 
 Again ere long the prison-shades would fall 
 
 That Youth condemns itself to walk amid. 
 So narrow, but so beautiful withal. 
 
 And I have followed Fame with less devotion. 
 
 And kept no real ambition but to see 
 Rise from the foam of Nature'^s sunlit ocean 
 
 My dream of palpable divinity; 
 
 And aught the world contends for to mine eye - 
 Seemed not so real a meaning of success 
 
 As only once to clasp before I die 
 My vision of embodied happiness. 
 
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EL EXTRAVIADO 
 
 Over the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind, 
 I have sailed as a butterfly sails whose priming wings 
 unfurled 
 Leave the familiar gardens and visited fields behind 
 To follow a cloud in the east rose-flushed on the rim 
 of the world. 
 
 I have strayed from the trodden highway for walking 
 with upturned eyes 
 On the way of the wind in the treetops, and the drift 
 of the tinted rack. 
 For the will to be losing no wonder of sunny or starlit 
 skies 
 I have chosen the sod for my pillow and a threadbare 
 coat for my back. 
 
 Evening of ample horizons, opaline, delicate, pure, 
 Shadow of clouds on green valleys, trailed over mead- 
 ows and trees. 
 Cities of ardent adventure where the harvests of Joy 
 mature. 
 Forests whose murmuring voices are amorous proph- 
 ecies. 
 
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World of romance and profusion, still round my journey 
 spread 
 The glamours, the glints, the enthralments, the nurture 
 of one whose feet 
 From hours unblessed by beauty nor lighted by love 
 \ have fled 
 
 As the shade of the tomb on his pathway and the 
 scent of the winding-sheet. 
 
 I never could rest from roving nor put from my heart 
 this need 
 To be seeing how lovably Nature in flower and face 
 hath wrought, — 
 In flower and meadow and mountain and heaven where 
 the white clouds breed 
 And the cunning of silken meshes where the heart's 
 desire lies caught. 
 
 Over the azure expanses, on the offshore breezes borne, 
 
 I have sailed as a butterfly sails, nor recked where 
 
 the impulse led, 
 
 SuflBced with the sunshine and freedom, the warmth and 
 
 the summer morn. 
 
 The infinite glory surrounding, the infinite blue ahea<^. 
 
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LA NUE 
 
 Oft when sweet music undulated round, 
 Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea 
 
 Thine image from the waves of blissful sound 
 Rose and thy sudden light illumined me. 
 
 And in the country, leaf and flower and air 
 Would alter and the eternal shape emerge; 
 
 Because they spoke of thee the fields seemed fair. 
 And Joy to wait at the horizon's verge. 
 
 The little cloud-gaps in the east that filled 
 Gray afternoons with bits of tenderest blue 
 
 Were windows in a palace pearly-silled 
 
 That thy voluptuous traits came glimmering through. 
 
 And in the city, dominant desire 
 
 For which men toil within its prison-bars, 
 
 I watched thy white feet moving in the mire 
 And thy white forehead hid among the stars. 
 
 Mystical, feminine, provoking, nude. 
 Radiant there with rosy arms outspread. 
 
 Sum of fulfillment, sovereign attitude. 
 
 Sensual with laughing lips and thrown-back head. 
 
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Draped in the rainbow on the summer hills. 
 Hidden in sea-mist down the hot coast-line. 
 
 Couched on the clouds that fiery sunset fills. 
 Blessed, remote, impersonal, divine; 
 
 The gold all color and grace are folded o'er, 
 
 The warmth all beauty and tenderness embower, — 
 
 Thou quiverest at Nature's perfumed core. 
 The pistil of a myriad-petalled flower. 
 
 Round thee revolves, illimitably wide, 
 
 The world's desire, as stars around their pole. 
 
 Roimd thee all earthly loveliness beside 
 Is but the radiate, infinite aureole. 
 
 Thou art the poem on the cosmic page — 
 In rubric written on its golden ground — 
 
 That Nature paints her flowers and foliage 
 And rich-illumined commentary round. 
 
 Thou art the rose that the world's smiles and tears 
 Hover about like butterflies and bees. 
 
 Thou art the theme the music of the spheres 
 Echoes in endless, variant harmonies. 
 
 Thou art the idol in the altar-niche 
 Faced by Love's congregated worshippers. 
 
 Thou art the holy sacrament roimd which 
 The vast cathedral is the universe. 
 
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Thou art the secret in the crystal where. 
 For the last light upon the mystery Man, 
 
 In his lone tower and ultimate despair. 
 Searched the gray-bearded Zoroastrian. 
 
 And soft and warm as in the magic sphere, 
 Deep-orbed as in its erubescent fire. 
 
 So in my heart thine image would appear. 
 
 Curled round with the red flames of my desire. 
 
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ALL THAT'S NOT LOVE . . . 
 
 All that's not love is the dearth of my days. 
 The leaves of the volume with rubric unwrit. 
 
 The temple in times without prayer, without praise. 
 The altar unset and the candle unlit. 
 
 Let me survive not the lovable sway 
 
 Of early desire, nor see when it goes 
 The courts of Life's abbey in ivied decay. 
 
 Whence sometime sweet anthems and incense arose. 
 
 The delicate hues of its sevenfold rings 
 
 The rainbow outlives not; their yellow and blue 
 
 The butterfly sees not dissolve from his wings, 
 But even with their beauty life fades from them too. 
 
 No more would I linger past Love's ardent bounds 
 Nor live for aught else but the joy that it craves, 
 
 That, burden and essence of all that surrounds. 
 
 Is the song in the wind and the smile on the waves. 
 
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PARIS 
 
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
 Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
 But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
 That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . r 
 
 Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
 When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
 Than, having beauty and your twenty years. 
 You have the means to conquer and the ways, 
 
 And coming where the crossroads separate 
 And down each vista glories and wonders wait, 
 Crowning each path with pinnacles so fair , 
 
 You know not which to choose, and hesitate — 
 
 Oh, go to Paris. ... In the midday gloom 
 
 Of some old quarter take a little room 
 
 That looks off over Paris and its towers 
 
 From Saint Gervais round to the Emperor's Tomb,- 
 
 So high that you can hear a mating dove 
 Croon down the chimney from the roof above, 
 See Notre Dame and know how sweet it is 
 To wake between Our Lady and our love. 
 
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And have a little balcony to bring 
 Fair plants to fill with verdure and blossoming, 
 That sparrows seek, to feed from pretty hands. 
 And swallows circle over in the Spring. 
 
 There of an evening you shall sit at ease 
 In the sweet month of flowering chestnut-trees, 
 There with your little darling in your arms, 
 Your pretty dark-eyed Manon or Louise. 
 
 And looking out over the domes and towers 
 That chime the fleeting quarters and the hours. 
 While the bright clouds banked eastward back of them 
 Blush in the sunset, pink as hawthorn flowers. 
 
 You cannot fail to think, as I have done. 
 Some of life's ends attained, so you be one 
 Who measures life's attainment by the hours 
 That Joy has rescued from oblivion. 
 
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II 
 
 Come out into the evening streets. The green light 
 
 lessens in the west. 
 The city laughs and liveliest her fervid pulse of pleasure 
 
 beats. 
 
 The belfry on Saint Severin strikes eight across the 
 
 smoking eaves: 
 Come out under the lights and leaves to the Reine Blanche 
 
 on Saint Germain. . . . 
 
 Now crowded diners fill the floor of brasserie and res- 
 taurant. 
 
 Shrill voices cry " LTntransigeant," and corners echo 
 "Paris-Sport." 
 
 Where rows of tables from the street are screened with 
 
 shoots of box and bay. 
 The ragged minstrels sing and play and gather sous 
 
 from those that eat. 
 
 And old men stand with menu-cards, inviting passers- 
 by to dine 
 
 On the bright terraces that line the Latin Quarter boule- 
 vards. . . . 
 
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But, having drunk and eaten well, 'tis pleasant then to 
 
 stroll along 
 And mingle with the merry throng that promenades on 
 
 Saint Michel. 
 
 Here saunter types of every sort. The shoddy jostle 
 
 with the chic: 
 Turk and Roumanian and Greek; student and officer 
 
 and sport; 
 
 Slavs with their peasant, Christ-like heads, and cour- 
 tezans like powdered moths. 
 
 And peddlers from Algiers, with cloths bright-hued and 
 stitched with golden threads; 
 
 And painters with big, serious eyes go rapt in dreams, 
 
 fantastic shapes 
 In corduroys and Spanish capes and locks uncut and 
 
 flowing ties; 
 
 And lovers wander two by two, oblivious among the 
 
 press. 
 And making one of them no less, all lovers shall be dear 
 
 to you: 
 
 All laughing lips you move among, all happy hearts 
 that, knowing what 
 
 Makes life worth while, have wasted not the sweet re- 
 prieve of being young. 
 
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"Comment ga va!" "Mon vieux!" "Mon cher!" 
 Friends greet and banter as they pass. 
 
 'Tis sweet to see among the mass comrades and lovers 
 everywhere, 
 
 A law that's sane, a Love that's free, and men of every 
 
 birth and blood 
 Allied in one great brotherhood of Art and Joy and 
 
 Poverty. . . . 
 
 The open cafe-windows frame loungers at their liqueurs 
 
 and beer. 
 And walking past them one can hear fragments of Tosca 
 
 and Boheme. 
 
 And in the brilliant-lighted door of cinemas the barker 
 
 calls. 
 And lurid posters paint the walls with scenes of Love 
 
 and crime and war. 
 
 But follow past the flaming lights, borne onward with 
 
 the stream of feet, 
 Where BuUier's further up the street is marvellous on 
 
 Thursday nights. 
 
 Here all Bohemia flocks apace; you could not often 
 
 find elsewhere 
 So many happy heads and fair assembled in one time 
 
 and place. 
 
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Under the glare and noise and heat the galaxy of dancing 
 
 whirls, 
 Smokers, with covered heads, and girls dressed in the 
 
 costume of the street. 
 
 From tables packed around the wall the crowds that 
 
 drink and frolic there 
 Spin serpentines into the air far out over the reeking hall. 
 
 That, settling where the coils unroll, tangle with pink 
 
 and green and blue 
 The crowds that rag to "Hitchy-koo" and boston to 
 
 the "Barcarole." . . . 
 
 Here Mimi ventures, at fifteen, to make her dSbut in 
 
 romance. 
 And join her sisters in the dance and see the life that 
 
 they have seen. 
 
 Her hair, a tight hat just allows to brush beneath the 
 
 narrow brim. 
 Docked, in the model's present whim, frisi and banged 
 
 above the brows. 
 
 I 
 
 TJncorseted, her clinging dress with every step and turn 
 
 betrays. 
 In pretty and provoking ways her adolescent loveliness, 
 
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As guiding Gaby or Lucile she dances, emulating them 
 In each disturbing stratagem and each lascivious appeal. 
 
 Each turn a challenge, every pose an invitation to com- 
 pete. 
 
 Along the maze of whirling feet the grave-eyed little 
 wanton goes. 
 
 And, flaunting all the hue that lies in childish cheeks 
 
 and nubile waist. 
 She passes, charmingly unchaste, illumining ignoble 
 
 eyes. . . . 
 
 But now the blood from every heart leaps madder 
 
 through abounding veins 
 As first the fascinating strains of "El Irresistible" start. 
 
 Caught in the spell of pulsing sound, impatient elbows 
 
 lift and yield 
 The scented softnesses they shield to arms that catch 
 
 and close them round. 
 
 Surrender, swift to be possessed, the silken supple forms 
 
 beneath 
 To aU the bliss the measures breathe and all the mad« 
 
 ness they suggest. 
 
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Crowds congregate and make a ring. Four deep they 
 
 stand and strain to see 
 The tango in its ecstasy of glowing lives that clasp and 
 
 cling. 
 
 Lithe limbs relaxed, exalted eyes fastened on vacancy, 
 
 they seem 
 To float upon the perfumed stream of some voluptuous 
 
 Paradise, 
 
 Or, rapt in some Arabian Night, to rock there, cradled 
 
 and subdued, 
 In a luxurious lassitude of rhythm and sensual delight. 
 
 And only when the measures cease and terminate the 
 
 flowing dance 
 They waken from their magic trance and join the cries 
 
 that clamor "Bis!" ... 
 
 Midnight adjourns the festival. The couples climb the 
 
 crowded stair. 
 And out into the warm night air go singing fragments 
 
 of the ball. 
 
 Close-folded in desire they pass, or stop to drink and 
 
 talk awhile 
 In the cafes along the mile from BuUier's back to Mont- 
 
 parnasse: 
 
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The "Closerie" or "La Rotonde," where smoking, under 
 
 lamplit trees. 
 Sit Art's enamored devotees, chatting across their brune 
 
 and blonde. . . . 
 
 Make one of them and come to know sweet Paris — not 
 
 as many do. 
 Seeing but the folly of the few, the froth, the tinsel, and 
 
 the show — 
 
 But taking some white proffered hand that from Earth's 
 
 barren every day 
 Can lead you by the shortest way into Love's florid 
 
 fairyland. 
 
 And that divine enchanted life that lurks under Life's 
 
 common guise — 
 That city of romance that lies within the City's toil 
 
 and strife — 
 
 Shall, knocking, open to your hands, for Love is all its 
 
 golden key. 
 And one's name murmured tenderly the only magic it 
 
 demands. 
 
 And when all else is gray and void in the vast gulf of 
 
 memory, 
 Green islands of delight shall be all blessed moments so 
 
 enjoyed: 
 
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When vaulted with the city skies, on its cathedral floors 
 
 you stood, 
 And, priest of a bright brotherhood, performed the mystic 
 
 sacrifice. 
 
 At Love's high altar fit to stand, with fire and incense 
 
 aureoled. 
 The celebrant in cloth of gold with Spring and Youth on 
 
 either hand. 
 
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Ill 
 
 CHORAL SONG 
 
 Have ye gazed on its grandeur 
 
 Or stood where it stands 
 With opal and amber 
 
 Adorning the lands, 
 And orcharded domes 
 
 Of the hue of all flowers? 
 Sweet melody roams 
 
 Through its blossoming bowers. 
 Sweet bells usher in from its belfries the train of the 
 honey-sweet hour. 
 
 A city resplendent, 
 
 Fulfilled of good things. 
 On its ramparts are pendent 
 
 The bucklers of kings. 
 Broad banners unfurled 
 
 Are afloat in its air. 
 The lords of the world 
 
 Look for harborage there. 
 None finds save he comes as a bridegroom, having roses 
 and viae in his hair. 
 
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'Tis the city of Lovers, 
 
 There many paths meet. 
 Blessed he above others, 
 
 With faltering feet. 
 Who past its proud spires 
 
 Intends not nor hears 
 The noise of its lyres 
 
 Grow faint in his ears ! 
 Men reach it through portals of triumph, but leave 
 through a postern of tears. 
 
 It was thither, ambitious, 
 
 We came for Youth's right. 
 When our lips yearned for kisses 
 
 As moths for the light. 
 When our souls cried for Love 
 
 As for life-giving rain 
 Wan leaves of the grove, 
 
 Withered grass of the plain, 
 And our flesh ached for Love-flesh beside it with bit- 
 ter, intolerable pain. 
 
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Under arbor and trellis. 
 
 Full of flutes, full of flowers. 
 What mad fortunes befell us. 
 
 What glad orgies were ours! 
 In the days of our youth, 
 
 In our festal attire. 
 When the sweet flesh was smooth. 
 
 When the swift blood was fire. 
 And all Earth paid in orange and purple to pavilion 
 the bed of Desire ! 
 
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THE SULTAN'S PALACE 
 
 My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face. 
 
 As only when they clasp the arms seem served aright; 
 
 As in their flesh inheres the impulse to embrace, 
 To gaze on Loveliness was my soul's appetite. 
 
 I have roamed far iti search; white road and plunging bow 
 Were keys in the blue doors where my desire was set; 
 
 Obedient to their lure, my lips and laughing brow 
 The hill-showers and the spray of many seas have wet. 
 
 Hot are enamored hands, the fragrant zone unbound. 
 To leave no dear delight unfelt, unfondled o'er. 
 
 The will possessed my heart to girdle Earth around 
 With their insatiate need to wonder and adore. 
 
 The flowers in the fields, the surf upon the sands. 
 The sunset and the clouds it turned to blood and wine. 
 
 Were shreds of the thin veil behind whose beaded strands 
 A radiant visage rose, serene, august, divine. 
 
 A noise of summer wind astir in starlit trees, 
 
 A song where sensual love's delirium rose and fell. 
 
 Were rites that moved my soul more than the devotee's 
 When from the blazing choir rings out the altar bell. 
 
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I woke amid the pomp of a proud palace; writ 
 In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay, 
 
 The names of caliphs were who once held court in it, 
 Their baths and bowers were mine to dwell in for a day. 
 
 Their robes and rings were mine to draw from shimmer- 
 ing trays — 
 
 Brocades and broidered silks, topaz and tourmaline — 
 Their turban-cloths to wind in proud capricious ways. 
 
 And fasten plumes and pearls and pendent sapphires in. 
 
 I rose; far music drew my steps in fond pursuit 
 Down tessellated floors and towering peristyles: 
 
 Through groves of colonnades fair lamps were blushing 
 fruit. 
 On seas of green mosaic soft rugs were flowery isles. 
 
 And there were verdurous courts that scalloped arches 
 wreathed. 
 
 Where fountains plashed in bowls of lapis lazuli. 
 Through enigmatic doors voluptuous accents breathed, 
 
 And having Youth I had their Open Sesame. 
 
 I paused where shadowy walls were hung with cloths of 
 gold. 
 And tinted twilight streamed through storied panes 
 above. 
 In lamplit alcoves deep as flowers when they unfold 
 Soft cushions called to rest and fragrant fumes to love. 
 
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I Imngered; at my hand delicious dainties teemed — 
 Fair pyramids of fruit; pastry in sugared piles. 
 
 I thirsted; in cool cups inviting vintage beamed — 
 Sweet syrups from the South; brown muscat from the 
 isles. 
 
 I yearned for passionate Love; faint gauzes fell away. 
 
 Pillowed in rosy light I found my heart's desire. 
 Over the silks and down her florid beauty lay. 
 
 As over orient clouds the sunset's coral fire. 
 
 Joys that had smiled afar, a visionary form. 
 Behind the ranges hid, remote and rainbow-dyed, 
 
 Drew near unto my heart, a wonder soft and warm. 
 To touch, to stroke, to clasp, to sleep and wake beside. 
 
 Joy, that where summer seas and hot horizons shone 
 Had been the outspread arms I gave my youth to seek. 
 
 Drew near; awhile its pulse strove sweetly with my own, 
 Awhile I felt its breath astir upon my cheek. 
 
 I was so happy there; so fleeting was my stay, — 
 What wonder if, assailed with vistas so divine, 
 
 I only lived to search and sample them the day 
 When between dawn and dusk the sultan's courts 
 
 were mme 
 
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Speak not of other worlds of happiness to be. 
 As though in any fond imaginary sphere 
 
 Lay more to tempt man's soul to immortality 
 Than ripens for his bliss abundant now and here! 
 
 Flowerlike I hope to die as flowerlike was my birth. 
 
 Rooted in Nature's just benignant law like them, 
 I want no better joys than those that from green Earth 
 
 My spirit's blossom drew through the sweet body's 
 stem. 
 
 I see no dread in death, no horror to abhor. 
 
 I never thought it else than but to cease to dwell 
 Spectator, and resolve most naturally once more 
 
 Into the dearly loved eternal spectacle. 
 
 Unto the fields and flowers this flesh I found so fair 
 I yield; do you, dear friend, over your rose-crowned 
 wine. 
 Murmur my name some day as though my lips were 
 there. 
 And frame your mouth as though its blushing kiss 
 were mine. 
 
 Yea, where the banquet-hall is brilliant with young men. 
 You whose bright youth it might have thrilled my 
 breast to know. 
 Drink . . . and perhaps my lips, insatiate even then 
 Of lips to hang upon, may find their loved ones so. 
 
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Unto the flush of dawn and evening I commend 
 This immaterial self and flamelike part of me, — 
 
 Unto the azure haze that hangs at the world's end, 
 The sunshine on the hills, the starlight on the sea, — 
 
 Unto angelic Earth, whereof the lives of those 
 
 Who love and dream great dreams and deeply feel 
 may be 
 
 The elemental cells and nervules that compose 
 Its divine consciousness and joy and harmony. 
 
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FRAGMENTS 
 
 In that fair capital where Pleasure, crowned 
 
 Amidst her myriad courtiers, riots and rules, 
 
 I too have been a suitor. Radiant eyes 
 
 Were my life's warmth and sunshine, outspread arms 
 
 My gilded deep horizons. I rejoiced 
 
 In yielding to all amorous influence 
 
 And multiple impulsion of the flesh. 
 
 To feel within my being surge and sway 
 
 The force that all the stars acknowledge too. 
 
 Amid the nebulous humanity 
 
 Where I an atom crawled and cleaved and sundered, 
 
 I saw a million motions, but one law; 
 
 And from the city's splendor to my eyes 
 
 The vapors passed and there was nought but Love, 
 
 A ferment turbulent, intensely fair. 
 
 Where Beauty beckoned and where Strength pursued. 
 
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II 
 
 There was a time when I thought much of Fame; 
 And laid the golden edifice to be 
 That in the clear light of eternity 
 Should fitly house the glory of my name. 
 
 But swifter than my fingers pushed their plan. 
 Over the fair foundation scarce begun, 
 While I with lovers dallied in the sun, 
 The ivy clambered and the rose- vine ran. 
 
 And now, too late to see my vision, rise. 
 In place of golden pinnacles and towers. 
 Only some sunny mounds of leaves and flowersj 
 Only beloved of birds and butterflies. 
 
 My friends were duped, my favorers deceived; 
 But sometimes, musing sorrowfully there. 
 That flowered wreck has seemed to me so fair 
 I scarce regret the temple unachieved. 
 
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Ill 
 
 For there were nights . . . my love to him whose brow 
 
 Has glistened with the spoils of nights like those, 
 
 Home turning as a conqueror turns home, 
 
 What time green dawn down every street uprears 
 
 Arches of triumph ! He has drained as well 
 
 Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried: 
 
 Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by. 
 
 This only matters: from some flowery bed. 
 
 Laden with sweetness like a homing bee. 
 
 If one have known what bliss it is to come. 
 
 Bearing on hands and breast and laughing lips 
 
 The fragrance of his youth's dear rose. To him 
 
 The hills have bared their treasure, the far clouds 
 
 Unveiled the vision that o'er summer seas 
 
 Drew on his thirsting arms. This last thing known, 
 
 He can court danger, laugh at perilous odds, 
 
 And, pillowed on a memory so sweet. 
 
 Unto oblivious eternity 
 
 Without regret yield his victorious soul. 
 
 The blessed pilgrim of a vow fulfilled. 
 
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IV 
 
 What IS Success? Out of the endless ore 
 
 Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold 
 
 Of passionate memory; to have lived so well 
 
 That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more 
 
 Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build 
 
 And apple flowers unfold. 
 
 Find not of that dear need that all things tell 
 
 The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled. 
 
 O Love, whereof my boyhood was the dream. 
 
 My youth the beautiftd novitiate, 
 
 Life was so slight a thing and thou so great. 
 
 How could I make thee less than all-supreme ! 
 
 In thy sweet transports not alone I thought 
 
 Mingled the twain that panted breast to breast. 
 
 The sun and stars throbbed with them ; they were caught 
 
 Into the pulse of Nature and possessed 
 
 By the same light that consecrates it so. 
 
 Love ! — 'tis the payment of the debt we owe 
 
 The beauty of the world, and whensoe'er 
 
 In silks and perfume and unloosened hair 
 
 The loveliness of lovers, face to face. 
 
 Lies folded in the adorable embrace. 
 
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Doubt not as of a perfect sacrifice 
 
 That soul partakes whose inspiration fills 
 
 The springtime and the depth of summer skies. 
 
 The rainbow and the clouds behind the hills. 
 
 That excellence in earth and air and sea 
 
 That makes things as they are the real divinity. 
 
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SONNET I 
 
 Down the strait vistas where a city street 
 Fades in pale dust and vaporous distances. 
 Stained with far fumes the light grows less and less 
 And the sky reddens round the day's retreat. 
 Now out of orient chambers, cool and sweet. 
 Like Nature's pure lustration, Dusk comes down. 
 Now the lamps brighten and the quickening town 
 Rings with the trample of returning feet. 
 And Pleasure, risen from her own warm mould 
 Sunk all the drowsy and unloved daylight 
 In layers of odorous softness, Paphian girls 
 Cover with gauze, with satin, and with pearls, 
 Crown, and about her spangly vestments fold 
 The ermine of the empire of the Night. 
 
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SONNET II 
 
 Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways. 
 Between the rivers and the illumined sky 
 Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high 
 Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze. 
 They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face 
 Her suitors follow, guessing by the glare 
 Beyond the hilltops in the evening air 
 How bright the cressets at her portals blaze. 
 On the pure fronts Defeat ere many a day 
 Falls like the soot and dirt on city-snow; 
 There hopes deferred lie sunk in piteous seams. 
 Her paths are disillusion and decay. 
 With ruins piled and unapparent woe, 
 The graves of Beauty and the wreck of dreams. 
 
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SONNET III 
 
 Thebe was a youth around whose early way 
 
 White angels hung in converse and sweet choir. 
 
 Teaching in summer clouds his thought to stray, — 
 
 In cloud and far horizon to desire. 
 
 His life was nursed in beauty, like the stream 
 
 Born of clear showers and the mountain dew. 
 
 Close under snow-clad summits where they gleam 
 
 Forever pure against heaven's orient blue. 
 
 Within the city's shades he walked at last. 
 
 Faint and more faint in sad recessional 
 
 Down the dim corridors of Time outworn, 
 
 A chorus ebbed from that forsaken past, 
 
 A hymn of glories fled beyond recall 
 
 With the lost heights and splendor of life's morn. 
 
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SONNET IV 
 
 Up at his attic sill the South wind came 
 
 And days of sun and storm but never peace. 
 
 Along the town's tumultuous arteries 
 
 He heard the heart-throbs of a sentient frame: 
 
 Each night the whistles in the bay, the same 
 
 Whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars: 
 
 For smoke that half obscured, the circling stars 
 
 Burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame. 
 
 Up to his attic came the city cries — 
 
 The throes with which her iron sinews heave — 
 
 And yet forever behind prison doors 
 
 Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes 
 
 The light that hangs on desert hills at eve 
 
 And tints the sea on solitary shores. . . . 
 
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SONNET V 
 
 A TIDE of beauty with returning May 
 
 Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume 
 
 Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom 
 
 The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gaj^ 
 
 Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe; 
 
 The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound; 
 
 And through the streets, like veins when they abound, 
 
 The lust for pleasure throbs itself away. 
 
 Here let me live, here let me still pursue 
 
 Phantoms of bliss that beckon and recede, — 
 
 Thy strange allurements. City that I love. 
 
 Maze of romance, where I have followed too 
 
 The dream Youth treasures of its dearest need 
 
 And stars beyond thy towers bring tidings of. 
 
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SONNET VI 
 
 Give me the treble of thy horns and hoofs, 
 The ponderous undertones of 'bus and tram, 
 A garret and a gUmpse across the roofs 
 Of clouds blown eastward over Notre Dame, 
 The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings 
 Where I drank deep the bliss of being young, 
 The strife and sweet potential flux of things 
 I sought Youth's dream of happiness among! 
 It walks here aureoled with the city-light. 
 Forever through the myriad-featured mass 
 Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace, — 
 Heard sometimes in a song across the night. 
 Caught in a perfume from the crowds that pass. 
 And when love yields to love seen face to face. 
 
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SONNET VII 
 
 To me, a pilgrim on that journey bound 
 
 Whose stations Beauty's bright examples are. 
 
 As of a silken city famed afar 
 
 Over the sands for wealth and holy ground. 
 
 Came the report of one — a woman crowned 
 
 With all perfection, blemishless and high. 
 
 As the full moon amid the moonlit sky. 
 
 With the world's praise and wonder clad around. 
 
 And I who held this notion of success: 
 
 To leave no form of Nature's loveliness 
 
 Unworshipped, if glad eyes have access there, — 
 
 Beyond all earthly bounds have made my goal 
 
 To find where that sweet shrine is and extol 
 
 The hand that triumphed in a work so fair. 
 
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SONNET VIII 
 
 Oft as by chance, a little while apart 
 
 The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, 
 
 Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart. 
 
 Beams like the jewel on the breast of dawn: 
 
 Not though high heaven should rend would deeper awe 
 
 Fill me than penetrates my spirit thus. 
 
 Nor all those signs the Patmian prophet saw 
 
 Seem a new heaven and earth so marvelous; 
 
 But, clad thenceforth in iridescent dyes. 
 
 The fair world glistens, and in after days 
 
 The memory of kind lips and laughing eyes 
 
 Lives in my step and lightens all my face, — 
 
 So they who found the Earthly Paradise 
 
 Still breathed, returned, of that sweet, joyful place. 
 
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SONNET IX 
 
 Amid the florid multitude her face 
 
 Was like the full moon seen behind the lace 
 
 Of orchard boughs where clouded blossoms part 
 
 When Spring shines in the world and in the heart. 
 
 As the full-moon-beams to the ferny floor 
 
 Of summer woods through flower and foliage pour. 
 
 So to my being's innermost recess 
 
 Flooded the light of so much loveliness; 
 
 She held as in a vase of priceless ware 
 
 The wine that over arid ways and bare 
 
 My youth was the pathetic thirsting for, 
 
 And where she moved the veil of Nature grew 
 
 Diaphanous and that radiance mantled through 
 
 Which, when I see, I tremble and adore. 
 
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SONNET X 
 
 A SPLENDOR, flamelike, born to be pursued. 
 
 With palms extent for amorous charity 
 
 And eyes incensed with love for all they see, 
 
 A wonder more to be adored than wooed, 
 
 On whom the grace of conscious womanhood 
 
 Adorning every little thing she does 
 
 Sits like enchantment, making glorious 
 
 A careless pose, a casual attitude; 
 
 Around her lovely shoulders mantle-wise 
 
 Hath come the realm of those old fabulous queens 
 
 Whose storied loves are Art's rich heritage. 
 
 To keep alive in this our latter age 
 
 That force that moving through sweet Beauty's means 
 
 Lifts up Man's soul to towering enterprise. 
 
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SONNET XI * 
 
 When among creatures fair of countenance 
 
 Love comes enformed in such proud character. 
 
 So far as other beauty yields to her, 
 
 So far the breast with fiercer longing pants; 
 
 I bless the spot, and hour, and circumstance. 
 
 That wed desire to a thing so high. 
 
 And say. Glad soul, rejoice, for thou and I 
 
 Of bliss unpaired are made participants; 
 
 Hence have come ardent thoughts and waking dreams 
 
 That, feeding Fancy from so sweet a cup, 
 
 Leave it no lust for gross imaginings. 
 
 Through her the woman's perfect beauty gleams 
 
 That while it gazes lifts the spirit up 
 
 To that high source from which all beauty springs. 
 
 * A paraphrase of Petrarca, Quando fra I'altre donne . . , 
 
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SONNET XII 
 
 Like as a dryad, from her native bole 
 Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge. 
 To a slow river at whose silent verge 
 Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll, 
 Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal 
 Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup. 
 Bend till thine image from the pool beam up 
 Arched with blue heaven like an aureole. 
 See how adorable in fancy then 
 Lives the fair face it mirrors even so, 
 O thou whose beauty moving among men 
 Is like the wind's way on the woods below, 
 Filling all nature where its pathway lies 
 With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs. 
 
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SONNET XIII 
 
 I FANCIED, while you stood conversing there. 
 Superb, in every attitude a queen, 
 Her ermine thus Boadicea bare. 
 So moved amid the multitude Faustine. 
 My life, whose whole religion Beauty is, 
 Be charged with sin if ever before yours 
 A lesser feeling crossed my mind than his 
 Who owning grandeur marvels and adores. 
 Nay, rather in my dream-world's ivory tower 
 I made your image the high pearly sill, 
 And mounting there in many a wistful hour, 
 Burdened with love, I trembled and was still. 
 Seeing discovered from that azure height 
 Remote, untrod horizons of delight. 
 
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SONNET XIV 
 
 It may be for the world of weeds and tares 
 And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty's rose 
 That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows 
 One from the train of Love's true courtiers 
 Straightway on him who gazes, unawares, 
 Deep wonder seizes and swift trembling grows. 
 Reft by that sight of purpose and repose, 
 Hardly its weight his fainting breast upbears. 
 Then on the soul from some ancestral place 
 Floods back remembrance of its heavenly birth, 
 When, in the light of that serener sphere. 
 It saw ideal beauty face to face 
 That through the forms of this our meaner Earth 
 Shines with a beam less steadfast and less clear. 
 
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SONNET XV 
 
 Above the ruin of God's holy place. 
 
 Where man-forsaken lay the bleeding rood, 
 
 Whose hands, when men had craved substantial food, 
 
 Gave not, nor folded when they cried. Embrace, 
 
 I saw exalted in the latter days 
 
 Her whom west winds with natal foam bedewed, 
 
 Wafted toward Cyprus, lily-breasted, nude. 
 
 Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face. 
 
 And, sick with all those centuries of tears 
 
 Shed in the penance for factitious woe. 
 
 Once more I saw the nations at her feet. 
 
 For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears 
 
 Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo ! 
 
 The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet. 
 
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SONNET XVI 
 
 Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest. 
 
 With single rites the common debt to pay? 
 
 On some green headland fronting to the East 
 
 Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day. 
 
 Naked, uplifting in a laden tray 
 
 New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine. 
 
 Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray 
 
 To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine. 
 
 The morning planet poised above the sea 
 
 Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid; 
 
 Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity 
 
 Shall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid. 
 
 That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes, 
 
 Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs. 
 
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KYRENAIKOS 
 
 Lat me where soft Cyrene rambles down 
 
 In grove and garden to the sapphire sea; 
 
 Twine yellow roses for the drinker's crown; 
 
 Let music reach and fair heads circle me. 
 
 Watching blue ocean where the white sails steer 
 
 Fruit-laden forth or with the wares and news 
 
 Of merchant cities seek our harbors here. 
 
 Careless how Corinth fares, how Syracuse; 
 
 But here, with love and sleep in her caress. 
 
 Warm night shall sink and utterly persuade 
 
 The gentle doctrine Aristippus bare, — 
 
 Night-winds, and one whose white youth's loveliness. 
 
 In a flowered balcony beside me laid, 
 
 Dreams, with the starlight on her fragrant hair. 
 
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ANTINOUS 
 
 Stretched on a sunny bank he lay at rest, 
 
 Ferns at his elbow, lilies round his knees. 
 
 With sweet flesh patterned where the cool turf pressed, 
 
 Flowerlike crept o'er with emerald aphides. 
 
 Single he couched there, to his circling flocks 
 
 Piping at times some happy shepherd's tune. 
 
 Nude, with the warm wind in his golden locks. 
 
 And arched with the blue Asian afternoon. 
 
 Past him, gorse-purpled, to the distant coast 
 
 Rolled the clear foothills. There his white- walled town, 
 
 There, a blue band, the placid Euxine lay. 
 
 Beyond, on fields of azure light embossed 
 
 He watched from noon till dewy eve came down 
 
 The summer clouds pile up and fade away. 
 
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VIVIEN 
 
 Her eyes under their lashes were blue pools 
 
 Fringed round with lilies; her bright hair unfurled 
 
 Clothed her as sunshine clothes the summer world. 
 
 Her robes were gauzes — gold and green and gules. 
 
 All furry things flocked round her, from her hand 
 
 Nibbling their foods and fawning at her feet. 
 
 Two peacocks watched her where she made her seat 
 
 Beside a fountain in Broceliande. 
 
 Sometimes she sang. . . . Whoever heard forgot 
 
 Errand and aim, and knights at noontide here. 
 
 Riding from fabulous gestes beyond the seas. 
 
 Would follow, tranced, and seek . . . and find her 
 
 not . . . 
 But wake that night, lost, by some woodland mere. 
 Powdered with stars and rimmed with silent trees. 
 
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I LOVED . . . 
 
 I LOVED illustrious cities and the crowds 
 That eddy through their incandescent nights. 
 I loved remote horizons with far clouds 
 Girdled, and fringed about with snowy heights. 
 I loved fair women, their sweet, conscious ways 
 Of wearing among hands that covet and plead 
 The rose ablossom at the rainbow's base 
 That bounds the world's desire and all its need. 
 Nature I worshipped, whose fecundity 
 Embraces every vision the most fair, 
 Of perfect benediction. From a boy 
 I gloated on existence. Earth to me 
 Seemed all-sufficient and my sojourn there 
 One trembling opportunity for joy. 
 
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VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE . . . 
 
 I CARE not that one listen if he lives 
 
 For aught but life's romance, nor puts above 
 
 All life's necessities the need to love. 
 
 Nor counts his greatest wealth what Beauty gives. 
 
 But sometime on an afternoon in spring. 
 
 When dandelions dot the fields with gold, 
 
 And under rustling shade a few weeks old 
 
 'Tis sweet to stroll and hear the bluebirds sing. 
 
 Do you, blond head, whom beauty and the power 
 
 Of being young and winsome have prepared 
 
 For life's last privilege that really pays. 
 
 Make the companion of an idle hour 
 
 These relics of the time when I too fared 
 
 Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days. 
 
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WITH A COPY OF SHAKESPEAEE'S SONNETS 
 ON LEAVING COLLEGE 
 
 As one of some fat tillage dispossessed, 
 
 Weighing the yield of these four faded years, 
 
 If any ask what fruit seems loveliest. 
 
 What lasting gold among the garnered ears, — 
 
 Ah, then I'll say what hours I had of thine, 
 
 Therein I reaped Time's richest revenue. 
 
 Read in thy text the sense of David's line. 
 
 Through thee achieved the love that Shakespeare knew. 
 
 Take then his book, laden with mine own love 
 
 As flowers made sweeter by deep-drunken rain. 
 
 That when years sunder and between us move 
 
 Wide waters, and less kindly bonds constrain, 
 
 Thou may'st turn here, dear boy, and reading see 
 
 Some part of what thy friend once felt for thee. 
 
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WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF THE COMTESSE 
 DE NOAILLES 
 
 Be my companion under cool arcades 
 
 That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square 
 
 Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades 
 
 White belfries burn in the blue tropic air. 
 
 Lie near me in dim forests where the croon 
 
 Of wood-doves sounds and moss-banked water flows, 
 
 Or musing late till the midsummer moon 
 
 Breaks through some ruined abbey's empty rose. 
 
 Sweetest of those to-day whose pious hands 
 
 Tend the sequestered altar of Romance, 
 
 Where fewer offerings burn, and fewer kneel. 
 
 Pour there your passionate beauty on my heart. 
 
 And, gladdening such solitudes, impart 
 
 How sweet the fellowship of those who feel! 
 
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COUCY 
 
 The rooks aclamor when one enters here 
 Startle the empty towers far overhead; 
 Through gaping walls the summer fields appear, 
 Green, tan, or, poppy-mingled, tinged with red. 
 The courts where revel rang deep grass and moss 
 Cover, and tangled vines have overgrown 
 The gate where banners blazoned with a cross 
 Rolled forth to toss round Tyre and Ascalon. 
 Decay consumes it. The old causes fade. 
 And fretting for the contest many a heart 
 Waits their Tyrtaeus to chant on the new. 
 Oh, pass him by who, in this haunted shade 
 Musing enthralled, has only this much art. 
 To love the things the birds and flowers love too. 
 
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TEZCOTZINCO 
 
 Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold, 
 
 Thou wert sometime the garden of a king. 
 
 The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing. 
 
 The flowers are few. It was not so of old. 
 
 It was not thus when hand in hand there strolled 
 
 Through arbors perfumed with undying Spring 
 
 Bare bodies beautiful, brown, glistening. 
 
 Decked with green plumes and rings of yellow gold. 
 
 Do you suppose the herdsman sometimes hears 
 
 Vague echoes borne beneath the moon's pale ray 
 
 From those old, old, far-off, forgotten years? 
 
 Who knows? Here where his ancient kings held sway 
 
 He stands. Their names are strangers to his ears. 
 
 Even their memory has passed away. 
 
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THE OLD LOWE HOUSE, STATEN ISLAND 
 
 Another prospect pleased the builder's eye. 
 And Fashion tenanted (where Fashion wanes) 
 Here in the sorrowful suburban lanes 
 When first these gables rose against the sky. 
 Relic of a romantic taste gone by. 
 This stately monument alone remains. 
 Vacant, with lichened walls and window-panes 
 Blank as the windows of a skull. But I, 
 On evenings when autumnal winds have stirred 
 In the porch-vines, to this gray oracle 
 Have laid a wondering ear and oft-times heard^ 
 As from the hollow of a stranded shell. 
 Old voices echoing (or my fancy erred) 
 Things indistinct, but not insensible. 
 
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ONEATA 
 
 A HILLTOP sought by every soothing breeze 
 That loves the melody of murmuring boughs. 
 Cool shades, green acreage, and antique house 
 Fronting the ocean and the dawn; than these 
 Old monks built never for the spirit's ease 
 Cloisters more calm — not Cluny nor Clairvaux; 
 Sweet are the noises from the bay below. 
 And cuckoos calling in the tulip-trees. 
 Here, a yet empty suitor in thy train. 
 Beloved Poesy, great joy was mine 
 To while a listless spell of summer days. 
 Happier than hoarder in each evening's gain. 
 When evenings found me richer by one line. 
 One verse well turned, or serviceable phrase. 
 
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ON THE CLIFFS, NEWPORT 
 
 Tonight a shimmer of gold lies mantled o'er 
 
 Smooth lovely Ocean. Through the lustrous gloom 
 
 A savor steals from linden trees in bloom 
 
 And gardens ranged at many, a palace door. 
 
 Proud walls rise here, and, where the moonbeams pour 
 
 Their pale enchantment down the dim coast-line. 
 
 Terrace and lawn, trim hedge and flowering vine. 
 
 Crown with fair culture all the sounding shore. 
 
 How sweet, to such a place, on such a night, 
 
 From halls with beauty and festival a-glare. 
 
 To come distract and, stretched on the cool turf. 
 
 Yield to some fond, improbable delight, 
 
 While the moon, reddening, sinks, and all the air 
 
 Sighs with the muffled tumult of the surf! 
 
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TO ENGLAND AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE 
 BALKAN WAR 
 
 A CLOUD has lowered that shall not soon pass o'er. 
 
 The world takes sides: whether for impious aims 
 
 With Tyranny whose bloody toll enflames 
 
 A generous people to heroic war; 
 
 Whether with Freedom, stretched in her own gore. 
 
 Whose pleading hands and suppliant distress 
 
 Still offer hearts that thirst for Righteousness 
 
 A glorious cause to strike or perish for. 
 
 England, which side is thine? Thou hast had sons 
 
 Would shrink not from the choice however grim, 
 
 Were Justice trampled on and Courage downed; 
 
 Which will they be — cravens or champions? 
 
 Oh, if a doubt intrude, remember him 
 
 Whose death made Missolonghi holy ground. 
 
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AT THE TOMB OF NAPOLEON BEFORE THE 
 ELECTIONS IN AMERICA— NOVEMBER, 1912 
 
 I STOOD beside his sepulchre whose fame, 
 Hurled over Europe once on bolt and blast. 
 Now glows far oflf as storm-clouds overpast 
 Glow in the sunset flushed with glorious flame. 
 Has Nature marred his mould? Can Art acclaim 
 No hero now, no man with whom men side 
 As with their hearts' high needs personified? 
 There are will say, One such our lips could name; 
 Columbia gave him birth. Him Genius most 
 Gifted to rule. Against the world's great man 
 Lift their low calumny and sneering cries 
 The Pharisaic multitude, the host 
 Of piddling slanderers whose little eyes 
 Know not what greatness is and never can. 
 
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THE RENDEZVOUS 
 
 He faints with hope and fear. It is the hour. 
 
 Distant, across the thundering organ-swell. 
 In sweet discord from the cathedral-tower. 
 
 Fall the faint chimes and the thrice-sequent bell. 
 Over the crowd his eye uneasy roves. 
 
 He sees a plume, a fur; his heart dilates — 
 Soars . . . and then sinks again. It is not hers he loves 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
 Braided with streams of silver incense rise 
 
 The antique prayers and ponderous antiphones. 
 Gloria Patri echoes to the skies; 
 
 Nunc et in swcula the choir intones. 
 He marks not the monotonous refrain. 
 
 The priest that serves nor him that celebrates, 
 But ever scans the aisle for his blonde head. ... In vain ! 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
 How like a flower seemed the perfumed place 
 
 Where the sweet flesh lay loveliest to kiss; 
 And her white hands in what delicious ways, 
 
 With what unfeigned caresses, answered his! 
 Each tender charm intolerable to lose. 
 
 Each happy scene his fancy recreates. 
 And he calls out her name and spreads his arms . . . 
 No use! 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
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But the long vespers close. The priest on high 
 
 Raises the thing that Christ's own flesh enforms; 
 And down the Gothic nave the crowd flows by 
 
 And through the portal's carven entry swarms. 
 Maddened he peers upon each passing face 
 
 Till the long drab procession terminates. 
 No princess passes out with proud majestic pace. 
 
 She has not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
 Back in the empty silent church alone 
 
 He walks with aching heart. A white-robed boy 
 Puts out the altar-candles one by one. 
 
 Even as by inches darkens aU his joy. 
 He dreams of the sweet night their lips first met. 
 
 And groans — and turns to leave — and hesitates . . ^ 
 Poor stricken heart, he will, he can not fancy yet 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
 But in an arch where deepest shadows fall 
 
 He sits and studies the old, storied panes. 
 And the calm crucifix that from the wall 
 
 Looks on a world that quavers and complains. 
 Hopeless, abandoned, desolate, aghast. 
 
 On modes of violent death he meditates. 
 And the tower-clock tolls five, and he admits at last. 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
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Through the stained rose the winter daylight dies. 
 
 And all the tide of anguish unrepressed 
 Swells in his throat and gathers in his eyes; 
 
 He kneels and bows his head upon his breast, 
 And feigns a prayer to hide his burning tears, 
 
 While the satanic voice reiterates 
 Tonight, tomorrow, nay, nor all the impending years, 
 
 She vnll not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
 Fond, fervent heart of life's enamored spring, 
 
 So true, so confident, so passing fair. 
 That thought of Love as some sweet, tender thing, 
 
 And not as war, red tooth and nail laid bare. 
 How in that hour its innocence was slain. 
 
 How from that hour our disillusion dates. 
 When first we learned thy sense, ironical refrain. 
 
 She will not come, the woman that he waits. 
 
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DO YOU REMEMBER ONCE 
 
 Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces, 
 
 The night we wandered off under the third moon's 
 rays 
 And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places. 
 Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet 
 quais ? 
 
 The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters 
 Mirrored the walls across where orange windows 
 burned. 
 
 Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us 
 Far promise of the spring already northward turned. 
 
 And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire 
 My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled. 
 
 I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher 
 To the last flower of bliss that Nature's garden held. 
 
 There, in your beauty's sweet abandonment to pleasure. 
 The mute, half-open lips and tender, wondering eyes, 
 
 I saw embodied first smile back on me the treasure 
 Long sought across the seas and back of summer skies. 
 
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Dear face, when courted Death shall claim my limbs 
 and find them 
 Laid in some desert place, alone or where the tides 
 Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them 
 Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood sub- 
 sides, 
 
 Out of the past's remote delirious abysses 
 
 Shine forth once more as then you shone, — beloved 
 head. 
 
 Laid back in ecstasy between our blinding kisses. 
 Transfigured with the bliss of being so coveted. 
 
 And my sick arms will part, and though hot fever sear it, 
 My mouth will curve again with the old, tender flame. 
 
 And darkness will come down, still finding in my spirit 
 The dream of your brief love, and on my lips your 
 name. 
 
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II 
 
 You loved me on that moonlit night long since. 
 
 You were my queen and I the charming prince 
 
 Elected from a world of mortal men. 
 
 You loved me once. . . . What pity was it, then, 
 
 You loved not Love. . . . Deep in the emerald west. 
 
 Like a returning caravel caressed 
 
 By breezes that load all the ambient airs 
 
 With clinging fragrance of the bales it bears 
 
 From harbors where the caravans come down, 
 
 I see over the roof-tops of the town 
 
 The new moon back again, but shall not see 
 
 The ]oy that once it had in store for me. 
 
 Nor know again the voice upon the stair. 
 
 The little studio in the candle-glare. 
 
 And all that makes in word and touch and glance 
 
 The bliss of the first nights of a romance 
 
 When will to love and be beloved casts out 
 
 The want to question or the will to doubt. 
 
 You loved me once. . . ■ Under the western seas 
 
 The pale moon settles and the Pleiades. 
 
 The firelight sinks; outside the night- winds moan — 
 
 The hour advances, and I sleep alone.* 
 
 *AiSvKe niv a ffeXdvra (co! XIXTjiaSes, ^iaaai Se viicret, itipa S' tpx"' ^P"' ^1" '' 
 pJiva KareiBu. — Sappho. 
 
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Ill 
 
 Farewell, dear heart, enough of vain despairing! 
 
 If I have erred I plead but one excuse — 
 The jewel were a lesser joy in wearing 
 
 That cost a lesser agony to lose. 
 
 I had not bid for beautifuUer hours 
 
 Had I not found the door so near unsealed, 
 
 Nor hoped, had you not filled my arms with flowers. 
 For that one flower that bloomed too far afield. 
 
 If I have wept, it was because, forsaken, 
 I felt perhaps more poignantly than some 
 
 The blank eternity from which we waken 
 And all the blank eternity to come. 
 
 And I betrayed how sweet a thing and tender 
 (In the regret with which my lip was curled) 
 
 Seemed in its tragic, momentary splendor 
 My transit through the beauty of the world. 
 
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THE BAYADERE 
 
 Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays 
 More than her beautiful bright limbs were hid 
 By the light veils they burned and blushed amid, 
 Skilled to provoke in soft, lascivious ways, 
 And there was invitation in her voice 
 And laughing lips and wonderful dark eyes, 
 As though above the gates of Paradise 
 Fair verses bade, Be welcome and rejoice! 
 
 O'er rugs where mottled blue and green and red 
 Blent in the patterns of the Orient loom. 
 Like a bright butterfly from bloom to bloom. 
 She floated with delicious arms outspread. 
 There was no pose she took, no move she made. 
 But all the feverous, love-envenomed flesh 
 Wrapped round as in the gladiator's mesh 
 And smote as with his triple-forked blade. 
 
 I thought that round her sinuous beauty curled 
 
 Fierce exhalations of hot human love, — 
 
 Around her beauty valuable above 
 
 The sunny outspread kingdoms of the world; 
 
 Flowing as ever like a dancing fire 
 
 Flowed her belled ankles and bejewelled wrists. 
 
 Around her beauty swept like sanguine mists 
 
 The nimbus of a thousand hearts' desire. 
 
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EUDvEMON 
 
 O HAPPINESS, I know not what far seas, 
 
 Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround, 
 
 That thus in Music's wistful harmonies 
 And concert of sweet sound 
 
 A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore. 
 
 Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store: 
 
 Whether thy beams be pitiful and come. 
 Across the sundering of vanished years. 
 
 From childhood and the happy fields of home, 
 Like eyes instinct with tears 
 
 Felt through green brakes of hedge and apple-bough 
 
 Round haimts delightful once, desert and silent now; 
 
 Or yet if prescience of unrealized love 
 
 Startle the breast with each melodious air. 
 
 And gifts that gentle hands are donors of 
 Still wait intact somewhere. 
 
 Furled up all golden in a perfumed place 
 
 Within the folded petals of forthcoming days. 
 
 Only forever, in the old imrest 
 
 Of winds and waters and the varying year, 
 A litany from islands of the blessed 
 
 Answers, Not here . . . not here! 
 And over the wide world that wandering cry 
 Shall lead my searching heart unsoothed until I die 
 
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BROCELIANDE 
 
 Broceliande ! in the perilous beauty of silence and 
 
 menacing shade, 
 Thou art set on the shores of the sea down the haze of 
 
 horizons untravelled, unscanned. 
 Untroubled, untouched with the woes of this world are 
 
 the moon-marshalled hosts that invade 
 Broceliande. 
 
 Only at dusk, when lavender clouds in the orient twilight 
 
 disband. 
 Vanishing where all the blue afternoon they have drifted 
 
 in solemn parade, 
 Sometimes a whisper comes down on the wind from the 
 
 valleys of Fairyland 
 
 Sometimes an echo most mournful and faint like the 
 
 horn of a huntsman strayed. 
 Faint and forlorn, half drowned in the murmur of foliage 
 
 fitfully fanned. 
 Breathes in a burden of nameless regret till I startle, 
 disturbed and afif rayed: 
 
 Broceliande — 
 Broceliande — ■ 
 Broceliande. . . , 
 
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LYONESSE 
 
 In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say: 
 Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess, 
 And fertile lowlands lengthening far away. 
 In Lyonesse. 
 
 Came a term to that land's old favoredness: 
 Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray, 
 Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless. 
 
 Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay. 
 Where sea-bloom covers corroding palaces. 
 The mermaid glides with a curious glance to-day. 
 In Lyonesse. 
 
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TITHONUS 
 
 So when the verdure of his Hfe was shed. 
 With all the grace of ripened manlihead, 
 And on his locks, but now so lovable. 
 Old age like desolating winter fell, 
 Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn: 
 Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn 
 Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less 
 With pious works of pitying tenderness; 
 Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes, 
 And hoary height bent down none otherwise 
 Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight 
 Of snow when winter winds turn temperate, — 
 So bowed with years — when still he lingered on: 
 Then to the daughter of Hyperion 
 This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar 
 By dove-gray seas under the morning star. 
 Where, on the wide world's uttermost extremes. 
 Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleams. 
 High in an orient chamber bade prepare 
 An everlasting couch, and laid him there. 
 And leaving, closed the shining doors. But he. 
 Deathless by Jove's compassionless decree. 
 Found not, as others find, a dreamless rest. 
 There wakeful, with half-waking dreams oppressed. 
 Still in an aural, visionary haze 
 Float round him vanished forms of happier days; 
 Still at his side he fancies to behold 
 
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The rosy, radiant thing beloved of old; 
 
 And oft, as over dewy meads at morn. 
 
 Far inland from a sunrise coast is borne 
 
 The drowsy, muflfled moaning of the sea, 
 
 Even so his voice flows on unceasingly, — 
 
 Lisping sweet names of passion overblown. 
 
 Breaking with dull, persistent undertone 
 
 The breathless silence that forever broods 
 
 Round those colossal, lustrous sohtudes. 
 
 Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls. 
 
 Change harbors not in those eternal halls 
 
 And tranquil chamber where Tithonus lies. 
 
 But through his window there the eastern skies 
 
 Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end. 
 
 There, in blue mist where air and ocean blend. 
 
 The lazy clouds that sail the wide world o'er 
 
 Falter and turn where they can sail no more. 
 
 There singing groves, there spacious gardens blow — . 
 
 Cedars and silver poplars, row on row. 
 
 Through whose black boughs on her appointed night, 
 
 Flooding his chamber with enchanted light. 
 
 Lifts the full moon's immeasurable sphere, 
 
 Crimson and huge and wonderfully near. 
 
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AN ODE TO ANTARES 
 
 At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide 
 
 Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills 
 
 The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills 
 
 Clamor from every copse and orchard-side, 
 
 I watched the red star rising in the East, 
 
 And while his fellows of the flaming sign 
 
 From prisoning daylight more and more released. 
 
 Lift their pale lamps, and, climbing higher, higher. 
 
 Out of theii" locks the waters of the Line 
 
 Shaking in clouds of phosphorescent fire, 
 
 Rose in the splendor of their curving flight. 
 
 Their dolphin leap across the austral night. 
 
 From windows southward opening on the sea 
 
 What eyes, I wondered, might be watching, too. 
 
 Orbed in some blossom-laden balcony. 
 
 Where, from the garden to the rail above. 
 
 As though a lover's greeting to his love 
 
 Should borrow body and form and hue 
 
 And tower in torrents of floral flame. 
 
 The crimson bougainvillea grew. 
 
 What starlit brow uplifted to the same 
 
 Majestic regress of the summering sky. 
 
 What ultimate thing — Shushed, holy, throned as high 
 
 Above the currents that tarnish and profane 
 
 As silver summits are whose pure repose 
 
 No curious eyes disclose 
 
 Nor any footfalls stain, 
 
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But round their beauty on azure evenings 
 Only the oreads go on gauzy wings. 
 Only the oreads troop with dance and song 
 And airy beings in rainbow mists who throng 
 Out of those wonderful worlds that lie afar 
 Betwixt the outmost cloud and the nearest star. 
 
 Like the moon, sanguine in the orient night 
 
 Shines the red flower in her beautiful hair. 
 
 Her breasts are distant islands of delight 
 
 Upon a sea where all is soft and fair. 
 
 Those robes that make a silken sheath 
 
 For each lithe attitude that flows beneath. 
 
 Shrouding in scented folds sweet warmths and tumid 
 
 flowers. 
 Call them far clouds that halt emerge 
 Beyond a sunset ocean's utmost verge. 
 Hiding in purple shade and downpour of soft showers 
 Enchanted isles by mortal foot untrod. 
 And there in humid dells resplendent orchids nod; 
 There always from serene horizons blow 
 Soul-easing gales and there all spice-trees grow 
 That Phoenix robbed to line his fragrant nest 
 Ench hundred years in Araby the Blest. 
 
 Sti*i- of the South that now through orient mist 
 At nightfall off Tampico or Belize 
 Greetest the sailor rising from those seas 
 Where first in me, a fond romanticist, 
 
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The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles 
 
 Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles- 
 
 Thou lamp of the swart lover to his tryst, 
 
 O'er planted acres at the jungle's rim 
 
 Reeking with orange-flower and tuberose, 
 
 Dear to his eyes thy ruddy splendor glows 
 
 Among the palms where beauty waits for him; 
 
 Bliss too thou bringst to our greening North, 
 
 Red scintillant through cherry-blossom rifts. 
 
 Herald of summer-heat, and all the gifts 
 
 And all the joys a summer can bring forth 
 
 Be thou my star, for I have made my aim 
 To follow loveliness till autumn-strown 
 Sunder the sinews of this flower-like frame 
 As rose-leaves sunder when the bud is blown. 
 Ay, sooner spirit and sense disintegrate 
 Than reconcilement to a common fate 
 Strip the enchantment from a world so dressed 
 In hues of high romance. I cannot rest 
 While aught of beauty in any path untrod 
 Swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad 
 Unworshipped of my love. I cannot see 
 In Life's profusion and passionate brevity 
 How hearts enamored of life can strain too much 
 In one long tension to hear, to see, to touch. 
 Now on each rustling night-wind from the South 
 Far music calls; beyond the harbor mouth 
 Each outbound argosy with sail unfurled 
 
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May point the path through this fortuitous world 
 
 That holds the heart from its desire. Away ! 
 
 Where tinted coast-towns gleam at close of day, 
 
 Where squares are sweet with bells, or shores thick set 
 
 With bloom and bower, with mosque and minaret. 
 
 Blue peaks loom up beyond the coast-plains here. 
 
 White roads wind up the dales and disappear. 
 
 By silvery waters in the plains afar 
 
 Glimmers the inland city like a star. 
 
 With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze 
 
 And burnished domes half-seen through luminous haze, 
 
 Lo, with what opportunity Earth teems ! 
 
 How like a fair its ample beauty seems ! 
 
 Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise: 
 
 What bright bazars, what marvelous merchandise, 
 
 Down seething alleys what melodious din. 
 
 What clamor importuning from every booth ! 
 
 At Earth's great market where Joy is traflScked in 
 
 Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth! 
 
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TRANSLATIONS 
 
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DANTE. INFERNO, CANTO XXVI 
 
 Florence, rejoice! For thou o'er land and sea 
 So spread'st thy pinions that the fame of thee 
 Hath reached no less into the depths of Hell. 
 So noble were the five I found to dwell 
 Therein — thy sons — whence shame accrues to me 
 And no great praise is thine; but if it be 
 That truth unveil in dreamings before dawn. 
 Then is the vengefid hour not far withdrawn 
 When Prato shall exult within her walls 
 To see thy suffering. Whate'er befalls. 
 Let it come soon, since come it must, for later. 
 Each year would see my grief for thee the greater. 
 
 We left; and once more up the craggy side 
 By the blind steps of our descent, my guide. 
 Remounting, drew me on. So we pm-sued 
 The rugged path through that steep solitude. 
 Where rocks and splintered fragments strewed the land 
 So thick, that foot availed not without hand. 
 Grief fiUed me then, and still great sorrow stirs 
 My heart as oft as memory recurs 
 To what I saw; that more and more I rein 
 My natural powers, and curb them lest they strain 
 Where Virtue guide not, — that if some good star. 
 Or better thing, have made them what they are, 
 That good I may not grudge, nor turn to ill. 
 
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As when, reclining on some verdant hill — 
 What season the hot sun least veils his power 
 That lightens all, and in that gloaming hour 
 The fly resigns to the shrill gnat — even then. 
 As rustic, looking down, sees, o'er the glen. 
 Vineyard, or tilth where lies his husbandry. 
 Fireflies innumerable sparkle: so to me, 
 Come where its mighty depth unfolded, straight 
 With flames no fewer seemed to scintillate 
 The shades of the eighth pit. And as to him 
 Whose wrongs the bears avenged, dim and more dim 
 Elijah's chariot seemed, when to the skies 
 Uprose the heavenly steeds; and still his eyes 
 Strained, following them, till naught remained in view 
 But flame, like a thin cloud against the blue: 
 So here, the melancholy gulf within, 
 Wandered these flames, concealing each its sin. 
 Yet each, a fiery integument. 
 Wrapped round a sinner. 
 
 On the bridge intent. 
 Gazing I stood, and grasped its flinty side. 
 Or else, unpushed, had fallen. And my guide, 
 Observing me so moved, spake, saying: "Behold 
 Where swathed each in his imconsuming fold. 
 The spirits lie confined." Whom answering, 
 "Master," I said, "thy words assurance bring 
 To that which I already had supposed; 
 And I was fain to ask who lies enclosed 
 
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In the embrace of that dividing fire, 
 
 Which seems to curl above the fabled pyre, 
 
 Where with his twin-born brother, fiercely hated, 
 
 Eteocles was laid." He answered, "Mated 
 
 In punishment as once in wrath they were, 
 
 Ulysses there and Diomed incur 
 
 The eternal pains; there groaning they deplore 
 
 The ambush of the horse, which made the door 
 
 For Rome's imperial seed to issue: there 
 
 In anguish too they wail the fatal snare 
 
 Whence dead Deidamia stUl must grieve, 
 
 Reft of Achilles; likewise they receive 
 
 Due penalty for the Palladium." 
 
 "Master," I said, "if in that martyrdom 
 
 The power of human speech may stUl be theirs, 
 
 I pray — and think it worth a thousand prayers — 
 
 That, till this horned flame be come more nigh. 
 
 We may abide here; for thou seest that I 
 
 With great desire incline to it." And he: 
 
 "Thy prayer deserves great praise; which willingly 
 
 I grant; but thou refrain from speaking; leave 
 
 That task to me; for fully I conceive 
 
 What thing thou wouldst, and it might fall perchance 
 
 That these, being Greeks, would scorn thine utterance." 
 
 So when the flame had come where time and place 
 Seemed not unfitting to my guide with grace 
 To question, thus he spoke at my desire: 
 "O ye that are two souls within one fire, 
 
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If in your eyes some merit I have won — 
 Merit, or more or less — ^for tribute done 
 When in the world I framed my lofty verse: 
 Move not; but fain were we that one rehearse 
 By what strange fortunes to his death he came." 
 The elder crescent of the antique flame 
 Began to wave, as in the upper air 
 A flame is tempest-tortured, here and there 
 Tossing its angry height, and in its sound 
 As human speech it suddenly had found, 
 Rolled forth a voice of thunder, saying: "When, 
 The twelve-month past in Circe's halls, again 
 I left Gaeta's strand (ere thither came 
 Mneas, and had given it that name) 
 Not love of son, nor filial reverence. 
 Nor that affection that might recompense 
 The weary vigil of Penelope, 
 Could so far quench the hot desire in me 
 To prove more wonders of the teeming earth, — 
 Of human frailty and of manly worth. 
 In one small bark, and with the faithful band 
 That all awards had shared of Fortime's hand, 
 I launched once more upon the open main. 
 Both shores I visited as far as Spain, — 
 Sardinia, and Morocco, and what more 
 The midland sea upon its bosom wore. 
 The hour of our lives was growing late 
 When we arrived before that narrow strait 
 Where Hercules had set his bounds to show 
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That there Man's foot shall pause, and further 
 
 none shall go. 
 Borne with the gale past Seville on the right. 
 And on the left now swept by Ceuta's site, 
 'Brothers,' I cried, 'that into the far West 
 Through perils numberless are now addressed. 
 In this brief respite that our mortal sense 
 Yet hath, shrink not from new experience; 
 But sailing still against the setting sun. 
 Seek we new worlds where Man has never won 
 Before us. Ponder your proud destinies: 
 Bom were ye not like brutes for swinish ease. 
 But virtue and high knowledge to pursue.' 
 My comrades with such zeal did I imbue 
 By these brief words, that scarcely could I then 
 Have turned them from their purpose; so again 
 We set out poop against the morning sky. 
 And made our oars as wings wherewith to fly 
 Into the Unknown. And ever from the right 
 Our course deflecting, in the balmy night 
 All southern stars we saw, and ours so low. 
 That scarce above the sea-marge it might show. 
 So five revolving periods the soft. 
 Pale light had robbed of Cynthia, and as oft 
 Replenished since our start, when far and dim 
 Over the misty ocean's utmost rim, 
 Rose a great mountain, that for very height 
 Passed any I had seen. Boundless delight 
 Filled us — alas, and quickly turned to dole: 
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For, springing from our scarce-discovered goal, 
 A whirlwind struck the ship; in circles three 
 It whirled us helpless in the eddying sea; 
 High on the fourth the fragile stern uprose, 
 The bow drove down, and, as Another chose, 
 Over our heads we heard the surging billows close. 
 
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ARIOSTO. ORLANDO FURIOSO, CANTO X, 91-99 
 
 RuGGiERO, to amaze the British host, 
 
 And wake more wonder in their wondering ranks, 
 
 The bridle of his winged courser loosed. 
 
 And clapped his spurs into the creature's flanks; 
 
 High in the air, even to the topmost banks 
 
 Of crudded cloud, uprose the flying horse, 
 
 And now above the Welsh, and now the Manx, 
 
 And now across the sea he shaped his course. 
 
 Till gleaming far below lay Erin's emerald shores. 
 
 There round Hibernia's fabled realm he coasted, 
 Where the old saint had left the holy cave. 
 Sought for the famous virtue that it boasted 
 To purge the sinful visitor and save. 
 Thence back returning over land and wave, 
 Ruggiero came where the blue currents flow. 
 The shores of Lesser Brittany to lave. 
 And, looking down whUe sailing to and fro. 
 He saw Angelica chained to the rock below. 
 
 'Twas on the Island of Complaint — well named. 
 For there to that inhospitable shore, 
 A savage people, cruel and untamed. 
 Brought the rich prize of many a hateful war. 
 To feed a monster that bestead them sore. 
 
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They of fair ladies those that loveliest shone. 
 
 Of tender maidens they the tenderest bore, 
 
 And, drowned in tears and making piteous moan, 
 
 Left for that ravening beast, chained on the rocks alone. 
 
 Thither transported by enchanter's art, 
 
 Angelica from dreams most innocent 
 
 (As the tale mentioned in another part) 
 
 Awoke, the victim for that sad event. 
 
 Beauty so rare, nor birth so excellent. 
 
 Nor tears that make sweet Beauty lovelier still. 
 
 Could turn that people from their harsh intent. 
 
 Alas, what temper is conceived so ill 
 
 But, Pity moving not. Love's soft enthralment will? 
 
 On the cold granite at the ocean's rim 
 
 These folk had chained her fast and gone their way; 
 
 Fresh in the softness of each delicate limb 
 
 The pity of their bruising violence lay. 
 
 Over her beauty, from the eye of day 
 
 To hide its pleading charms, no veil was thrown. 
 
 Only the fragments of the salt sea-spray 
 
 Rose from the churning of the waves, wind-blown. 
 
 To dash upon a whiteness creamier than their own. 
 
 Carved out of candid marble without flaw. 
 Or alabaster blemishless and rare, 
 Ruggiero might have fancied what he saw. 
 For statue-like it seemed, and fastened there 
 
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By craft of cunningest artificer; 
 
 Save in the wistful eyes Ruggiero thought 
 
 A teardrop gleamed, and with the rippling hair 
 
 The ocean breezes played as if they sought 
 
 In its loose depths to hide that which her hand might not. 
 
 Pity and wonder and awakening love 
 Strove in the bosom of the Moorish Knight. 
 Down from his soaring in the skies above 
 He urged the tenor of his courser's flight. 
 Fairer with every foot of lessening height 
 Shone the sweet prisoner. With tightening reins 
 He drew more nigh, and gently as he might: 
 "O lady, worthy only of the chains 
 With which his bounden slaves the God of Love con- 
 strains, 
 
 "And least for this or any ill designed. 
 
 Oh, what unnatural and perverted race 
 
 Could the sweet flesh with flushing stricture bind. 
 
 And leave to suffer in this cold embrace 
 
 That the warm arms so hunger to replace?" 
 
 Into the damsel's cheeks such color flew 
 
 As by the alchemy of ancient days 
 
 If whitest ivory should take the hue 
 
 Of coral where it blooms deep in the liquid blue. 
 
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Nor yet so tightly drawn the cruel chains 
 
 Clasped the slim ankles and the wounded hands. 
 
 But with soft, cringing attitudes in vain 
 
 She strove to shield her from that ardent glance. 
 
 So, clinging to the walls of some old manse, 
 
 The rose-vine strives to shield her tender flowers, 
 
 When the rude wind, as autumn weeks advance. 
 
 Beats on the walls and whirls about the towers 
 
 And spills at every blast her pride in piteous showers. 
 
 And first for choking sobs she might not speak. 
 
 And then, "Alas!" she cried, "ah, woe is me!" 
 
 And more had said in accents faint and weak, 
 
 Pleading for succor and sweet liberty. 
 
 But hark! across the wide ways of the sea 
 
 Rose of a sudden such a fierce aflfray 
 
 That any but the brave had turned to flee. 
 
 Ruggiero, turning, looked. To his dismay, 
 
 Lo, where the monster came to claim his quivering prey ! 
 
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ON A THEME IN THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY 
 
 Thy petals yet are closely curled, 
 
 Rose of the world, 
 Around their scented, golden core; 
 Nor yet has Summer purpled o'er 
 Thy tender clusters that begin 
 
 To swell within 
 The dewy vine-leaves' early screen 
 
 Of sheltering green. 
 
 O hearts that are Love's helpless prey. 
 
 While yet you may. 
 Fly, ere the shaft is on the string! 
 The fire that now is smouldering 
 Shall be the conflagration soon 
 
 "Whose paths are strewn 
 With torment of blanched lips and eyes 
 
 That agonize. 
 
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AFTER AN EPIGRAM OF CLEMENT MAROT 
 
 The lad I was I longer now 
 Nor am nor shall be evermore. 
 Spring's lovely blossoms from my brow 
 Have shed their petals on the floor. 
 Thou, Love, hast been my lord, thy shrine 
 Above all gods' best served by me. 
 Dear Love, could life again be mine 
 How bettered should that service be! 
 
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LAST POEMS 
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THE AISNE (1914-15) 
 
 We first saw fire on the tragic slopes 
 
 Where the flood-tide of France's early gain, 
 
 Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes. 
 Broke in a surf of blood along the Aisne. 
 
 The charge her heroes left us, we assumed, 
 What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved, 
 
 In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed, 
 Wiuter came down on us, but no man swerved. 
 
 Winter came down on us. The low clouds, torn 
 In the stark branches of the riven pines. 
 
 Blurred the white rockets that from dusk till mom 
 Traced the wide curve of the close-grappling lines. 
 
 In rain, and fog that on the withered hill 
 
 Froze before dawn, the lurking foe drew down; 
 
 Or light snows fell that made forlorner still 
 The ravaged coimtry and the ruined town; 
 
 Or the long clouds would end. Intensely fair. 
 The winter constellations blazing forth — 
 
 Perseus, the Twins, Orion, the Great Bear — 
 Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north. 
 
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And the lone sentinel would start and soar 
 On wings of strong emotion as he knew 
 
 That kinship with the stars that only War 
 Is great enough to lift man's spirit to. 
 
 And ever down the curving front, aglow 
 With the pale rockets' intermittent light. 
 
 He heard, like distant thunder, growl and grow 
 The rumble of far battles in the night, — 
 
 Rumors, reverberant, indistinct, remote. 
 
 Borne from red fields whose martial names have won 
 The power to thrill like a far trumpet-note, — 
 
 Vic, Vailly, Soupir, Hurtebise, Craonne . . . 
 
 Craonne, before thy cannon-swept plateau. 
 Where like sere leaves lay strewn September's dead, 
 I found for all dear things I forfeited 
 
 A recompense I would not now forego. 
 
 For that high fellowship was ours then 
 With those who, championing another's good. 
 More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could. 
 
 Taught us the dignity of being men. 
 
 There we drained deeper the deep cup of life, 
 And on sublimer summits came to learn. 
 After soft things, the terrible and stern. 
 
 After sweet Love, the majesty of Strife; 
 
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There where we faced- under those frowning heights 
 The blast that maims, the hurricane that kills; 
 There where the watchlights on the winter hills 
 
 Flickered like balefire through inclement nights; 
 
 There where, firm links in the unyielding chain. 
 Where fell the long-planned blow and fell in vain — 
 
 Hearts worthy of the honor and the trial. 
 We helped to hold the lines along the Aisne. 
 
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CHAMPAGNE, 1914-15 
 
 In the glad revels, in the happy fetes. 
 
 When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled 
 With the sweet wine of France that concentrates 
 
 The sunshine and the beauty of the world. 
 
 Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread 
 The imdisturbed, delightful paths of Earth, 
 
 To those whose blood, in pious duty shed. 
 
 Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth. 
 
 Here, by devoted comrades laid away, 
 
 Along our lines they slumber where they fell, 
 
 Beside the crater at the Ferme d'Alger 
 And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle, 
 
 And round the city whose cathedral towers 
 
 The enemies of Beauty dared profane. 
 And in the mat of multicolored flowers 
 
 That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne. 
 
 Under the little crosses where they rise 
 
 The soldier rests. Now round him imdismayed 
 
 The cannon thunders, and at night he lies 
 At peace beneath the eternal fusillade. . . 
 
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That other generations might possess — 
 
 From shame and menace free in years to come — 
 
 A richer heritage of happiness. 
 
 He marched to that heroic martyrdom. 
 
 Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid 
 
 Than undishonored that his flag might float 
 
 Over the towers of Hberty, he made 
 
 His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat. 
 
 Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb. 
 Bare of the sculptor's art, the poet's lines. 
 
 Summer shair flush with poppy -fields in bloom. 
 And Autumn yellow with maturing vines. 
 
 There the grape-pickers at their harvesting 
 
 Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays, 
 
 Blessing his memory as they toil and sing 
 In the slant sunshine of October days. . . . 
 
 I love to think that if my blood should be 
 So privileged to sink where his has sunk, 
 
 I shall not pass from Earth entirely, 
 
 But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk, 
 
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And faces that the joys of living fill 
 
 Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer. 
 
 In beaming cups some spark of me shall still 
 Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear. 
 
 So shall one coveting no higher plane 
 
 Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone, 
 
 Even from the grave put upward to attain 
 
 The dreams youth cherished and missed and might 
 have known; 
 
 And that strong need that strove unsatisfied 
 Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore. 
 
 Not death itself shall utterly divide 
 
 From the beloved shapes it thirsted for. 
 
 Alas, how many an adept for whose arms 
 Life held delicious offerings perished here. 
 
 How many in the prime of all that charms. 
 
 Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear! 
 
 Honor them not so much with tears and flowers. 
 But you with whom the sweet fulfilment lies. 
 
 Where in the anguish of atrocious hours 
 Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes, 
 
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Rather when music on bright gatherings lays 
 Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost, 
 
 Be mindful of the men they were, and raise 
 Your glasses to them in one silent toast. 
 
 Drink to them — amorous of dear Earth as well. 
 They asked no tribute lovelier than this — 
 
 And in the wine that ripened where they fell. 
 Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss. 
 
 Champaone, France, July, 1915. 
 
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THE HOSTS 
 
 PufeGED, with the life they left, of all 
 That makes life paltry and mean and small, 
 In their new dedication charged 
 With something heightened, enriched, enlarged, 
 That lends a light to their lusty brows 
 And a song to the rhythm of their tramping feet. 
 These are the men that have taken vows. 
 These are the hardy, the flower, the elite, — 
 These are the men that are moved no more 
 By the will to traffic and grasp and store 
 And ring with pleasure and wealth and love 
 The circles that self is the center of; 
 But they are moved by the powers that force 
 The sea forever to ebb and rise. 
 That hold Arcturus in his course. 
 And marshal at noon in tropic skies 
 The clouds that tower on some snow-capped chain 
 And drift out over the peopled plain. 
 They are big with the beauty of cosmic things. 
 Mark how their columns surge ! They seem 
 To follow the goddess with outspread wings 
 That points toward Glory, the soldier's dream. 
 With bayonets bare and flags unfurled, 
 They scale the si'ijiniits of the world 
 And fade on the farthest golden height 
 In fair horizons full of light. 
 
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Comrades in arms there — friend or foe — 
 That trod the perilous, toilsome trail 
 Through a world of ruin and blood and woe 
 In the years of the great decision — ^hail ! 
 Friend or foe, it shall matter nought; 
 This only matters, in fine: we fought. 
 For we were young and in love or strife 
 Sought exultation and craved excess: 
 To soimd the wildest debauch in life 
 We staked owe youth and its loveliness. 
 Let idlers argue the right and wrong 
 And weigh what merit our causes had. 
 Putting our faith in being strong — 
 Above the level of good and bad — 
 For us, we battled and burned and killed 
 Because evolving Nature willed. 
 And it was our pride and boast to be 
 The instruments of Destiny. 
 There was a stately drama writ 
 By the hand that peopled the earth and air 
 And set the stars in the infinite 
 And made night gorgeous and morning fair, 
 And all that had sense to reason knew 
 That bloody drama must be gone through. 
 
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Some sat and watched how the action veered- 
 
 Waited, profited, trembled, cheered — 
 
 We saw not clearly nor understood. 
 
 But, yielding ourselves to the masterhand. 
 
 Each in his part as best he could. 
 
 We played it through as the author planned. 
 
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MAKTOOB 
 
 A SHELL surprised our post one day 
 And killed a comrade at my side. 
 My heart was sick to see the way 
 He suffered as he died. 
 
 I dug about the place he fell, 
 
 And found, no bigger than my thumb, 
 A fragment of the splintered shell 
 In warm aluminum. 
 
 I melted it, and made a mould. 
 And poured it in the opening. 
 And worked it, when the cast was cold. 
 Into a shapely ring. 
 
 And when my ring was smooth and bright. 
 
 Holding it on a rounded stick. 
 For seal, I bade a Turco write 
 Maktoob in Arabic. 
 
 MaJctoob! "'Tis written!" ... So they think. 
 These children of the desert, who 
 From its immense expanses drink 
 Some of its grandeur too. 
 
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Within the book of Destiny, 
 
 Whose leaves are time, whose cover, space. 
 The day when you shall cease to be, 
 The hour, the mode, the place. 
 
 Are marked, they say; and you shall not 
 
 By taking thought or using wit 
 Alter that certain fate one jot. 
 Postpone or conjure it. 
 
 Learn to drive fear, then, from your heart. 
 
 If you must perish, know, O man, 
 'Tis an inevitable part 
 
 Of the predestined plan. 
 
 And, seeing that through the ebon door 
 
 Once only you may pass, and meet 
 
 Of those that have gone through before 
 
 The mighty, the elite 
 
 Guard that not bowed nor blanched with fear 
 
 You enter, but serene, erect. 
 As you would wish most to appear 
 To those you most respect. 
 
 3o die as though your fimeral 
 
 Ushered you through the doors that led 
 Into a stately banquet hall 
 
 Where heroes banqueted; 
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And it shall all depend therein 
 
 Whether you come as slave or lord. 
 If they acclaim you as their kin 
 
 Or spurn you from their board. 
 
 So, when the order comes: "Attack!" 
 
 And the assaulting wave deploys. 
 
 And the heart trembles to look back 
 
 On life and all its joys; 
 
 Or in a ditch that they seem near 
 
 To find, and round your shallow trough 
 Drop the big shells that you can hear 
 Coming a half mile off; 
 
 When, not to hear, some try to talk. 
 
 And some to clean their guns, or sing. 
 And some dig deeper in the chalk — 
 I look upon my ring: 
 
 And nerves relax that were most tense. 
 
 And Death comes whistling down unheard, 
 As I consider all the sense 
 
 Held in that mystic word. 
 
 And it brings, quieting like balm 
 
 My heart whose flutterings have ceased. 
 The resignation and the calm 
 
 And wisdom of the East. 
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I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH . . . 
 
 I HAVE a rendezvous with Death 
 At some disputed barricade. 
 When Spring comes back with rustling shade 
 And apple-blossoms fill the air — 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 When Spring brings back blue days and fair. 
 
 It may be he shall take my hand 
 And lead me into his dark land 
 And close my eyes and quench my breath — 
 It may be I shall pass him still. 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 On some scarred slope of battered hill. 
 When Spring comes round again this year 
 And the first meadow-flowers appear. 
 
 God knows 'twere better to be deep 
 Pillowed in silk and scented down. 
 Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep. 
 Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath. 
 Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . 
 But I've a rendezvous with Death 
 At midnight in some flaming town. 
 When Spring trips north again this year. 
 And I to my pledged word am true, 
 I shall not fail that rendezvous. 
 
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SONNET I 
 
 Sidney, in whom the heyday of romance 
 
 Came to its precious and most perfect flower. 
 
 Whether you tourneyed with victorious lance 
 
 Or brought sweet roundelays to Stella's bower, 
 
 I give myself some credit for the way 
 
 I have kept clean of what enslaves and lowers. 
 
 Shunned the ideals of our present day 
 
 And studied those that were esteemed in yours; 
 
 For, turning from the mob that buys Success 
 
 By sacrificing all Life's better part, 
 
 Down the free roads of human happiness 
 
 I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart. 
 
 And lived in strict devotion all along 
 
 To my three idols — Love and Arms and Song. 
 
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SONNET II 
 
 Not that I always struck the proper mean 
 
 Of what mankind must give for what they gain. 
 
 But, when I think of those whom dull routine 
 
 And the pursuit of cheerless toil enchain. 
 
 Who from their desk-chairs seeing a summer cloud 
 
 Race through blue heaven on its joyful course 
 
 Sigh sometimes for a life less cramped and bowed, 
 
 I think I might have done a great deal worse; 
 
 For I have ever gone untied and free. 
 
 The stars and my high thoughts for company; 
 
 Wet with the salt-spray and the mountain showers, 
 
 I have had the sense of space and amplitude. 
 
 And love in many places, silver-shoed. 
 
 Has come and scattered all my path with flowers. 
 
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SONNET III 
 
 Why should you be astonished that my heart, 
 
 Plunged for so long in darkness and in dearth, 
 
 Should be revived by you, and stir and start 
 
 As by warm April now, reviving Earth? 
 
 I am the field of undulating grass 
 
 And you the gentle perfumed breath of Spring, 
 
 And all my lyric being, when you pass. 
 
 Is bowed and filled with sudden murmuring. 
 
 I asked you nothing and expected less. 
 
 But, with that deep, impassioned tenderness 
 
 Of one approaching what he most adores, 
 
 I only wished to lose a little space 
 
 All thought of my own life, and in its place 
 
 To live and dream and have my joy in yours. 
 
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SONNET IV 
 
 TO ... IN CHUECH 
 
 If I was drawn here from a distant place, 
 
 'TWas not to pray nor hear our friend's address. 
 
 But, gazing once more on your winsome face. 
 
 To worship there Ideal Loveliness. 
 
 On that pure shrine that has too long ignored 
 
 The gifts that once I brought so frequently 
 
 I lay this votive ofifering, to record 
 
 How sweet your quiet beauty seemed to me. 
 
 Enchanting girl, my faith is not a thing 
 
 By futile prayers and vapid psalm-singing 
 
 To vent in crowded nave and public pew. 
 
 My creed is simple: that the world is fair. 
 
 And beauty the best thing to worship there. 
 
 And I confess it by adoring you. 
 
 BlABBiTZ, Sunday, March 26, 1916. 
 
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SONNET V 
 
 Seeing you have not come with me, nor spent 
 
 This day's suggestive beauty as we ought, 
 
 I have gone forth alone and been content 
 
 To make you mistress only of my thought. 
 
 And I have blessed the fate that was so kind 
 
 In my life's agitations to include 
 
 This moment's refuge where my sense can find 
 
 Refreshment, and my soul beatitude. 
 
 Oh, be my gentle love a little while! 
 
 Walk with me sometimes. Let me see you smile. 
 
 Watching some night imder a wintry sky. 
 
 Before the charge, or on the bed of pain. 
 
 These blessed memories shall revive again 
 
 And be a power to cheer and fortify. 
 
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SONNET VI 
 
 Oh, you are more desirable to me 
 
 Than all I staked in an impulsive hour, 
 
 Making my youth the sport of chance, to be 
 
 Blighted or torn in its most perfect flower; 
 
 For I think less of what that chance may bring 
 
 Than how, before returning into fire. 
 
 To make my dearest memory of the thing 
 
 That is but now my ultimate desire. 
 
 And in old times I should have prayed to her 
 
 Whose haunt the groves of windy Cyprus were. 
 
 To prosper me and crown with good success 
 
 My will to make of you the rose-twined bowl 
 
 From whose inebriating brim my soul 
 
 Shall drink its last of earthly happiness. 
 
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SONNET VII 
 
 There have been times when I could storm and plead. 
 
 But you shall never hear me supplicate. 
 
 These long months that have magnified my need 
 
 Have made my asking less importunate, 
 
 For now small favors seem to me so great 
 
 That not the courteous lovers of old time 
 
 Were more content to rule themselves and wait. 
 
 Easing desire with discourse and sweet rhyme. 
 
 Nay, be capricious, willful; have no fear 
 
 To wound me with unkindness done or said. 
 
 Lest mutual devotion make too dear 
 
 My life that hangs by a so slender thread. 
 
 And happy love unnerve me before May 
 
 For that stern part that I have yet to play. 
 
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SONNET VIII 
 
 Oh, love of woman, you are known to be 
 
 A passion sent to plague the hearts of men; 
 
 For every one you bring felicity 
 
 Bringing rebuffs and wretchedness to ten. 
 
 I have been oft where human life sold cheap 
 
 And seen men's brains spilled out about their ears 
 
 And yet that never cost me any sleep; 
 
 I lived untroubled and I shed no tears. 
 
 Fools prate how war is an atrocious thing; 
 
 I always knew that nothing it implied 
 
 Equalled the agony of suffering 
 
 Of him who loves and loves unsatisfied. 
 
 War is a refuge to a heart like this; 
 
 Love only tells it what true torture is. 
 
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SONNET IX 
 
 Well, seeing I have no hope, then let us part; 
 
 Having long taught my flesh to master fear, 
 
 I should have learned by now to rule my heart. 
 
 Although, Heaven knows, 'tis not so easy near. 
 
 Oh, you were made to make men miserable 
 
 And torture those who would have joy in you. 
 
 But I, who could have loved you, dear, so well. 
 
 Take pride in being a good loser too; 
 
 And it has not been wholly unsuccess. 
 
 For I have rescued from forgetfulness 
 
 Some moments of this precious time that flies. 
 
 Adding to my past wealth of memory 
 
 The pretty way you once looked up at me, 
 
 Vour low, sweet voice, your smile, and your dear eyes. 
 
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SONNET X 
 
 I HAVE sought Happiness, but it has been 
 A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit, 
 And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit 
 More fair of outward hue than sweet within. 
 Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment 
 Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil, 
 There only, chastened by fatigue and toil, 
 I knew what came the nearest to content. 
 For there at least my troubled flesh was free 
 From the gadfly Desire that plagued it so; 
 Discord and Strife were what I used to know. 
 Heartaches, deception, murderous jealousy; 
 By War transported far from all of these, 
 Amid the clash of arms I was at peace. 
 
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SONNET XI 
 
 ON RETURNING TO THE FRONT AFTER LEAVE 
 
 Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed). 
 
 Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue 
 
 Look the leftovers of mankind that rest, 
 
 Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you. 
 
 War has its horrors, but has this of good — 
 
 That its sure processes sort out and bind 
 
 Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood 
 
 And leave the shams and imbeciles behind. 
 
 Now turn we joyful to the great attacks. 
 
 Not only that we face in a fair field 
 
 Our valiant foe and all his deadly tools. 
 
 But also that we turn disdainful backs 
 
 On that poor world we scorn yet die to shield — 
 
 That world of cowards, hypocrites, and fools. 
 
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SONNET XII 
 
 Clouds rosy-tinted in the setting sun. 
 
 Depths of the azure eastern sky between, 
 
 Plains where the poplar-bordered highways run. 
 
 Patched with a hundred tints of brown and green,- 
 
 Beauty of Earth, when in thy harmonies 
 
 The cannon's note has ceased to be a part, 
 
 I shall return once more and bring to these 
 
 The worship of an undivided heart. 
 
 Of those sweet potentialities that wait 
 
 For my heart's deep desire to fecundate 
 
 I shall resume the search, if Fortune grants; 
 
 And the great cities of the world shall yet 
 
 Be golden frames for me in which to set 
 
 New masterpieces of more rare romance. 
 
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BELLINGLISE 
 
 Deep in the sloping forest that surrounds 
 
 The head of a green valley that I know. 
 
 Spread the fair gardens and ancestral grounds 
 
 Of Bellinglise, the beautiful chS,teau. 
 
 Through shady groves and fields of unmown grass. 
 
 It was my joy to come at dusk and see. 
 
 Filling a little pond's untroubled glass. 
 
 Its antique towers and mouldering masonry. 
 
 Oh, should I fall to-morrow, lay me here. 
 
 Thai, o'er my tomb, with each reviving year. 
 
 Wood-flowers may blossom and the wood-doves croon; 
 
 And lovers by that unrecorded place. 
 
 Passing, may pause, and cling a little space. 
 
 Close-bosomed, at the rising of the moon. 
 
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n 
 
 Here, where in happier times the huntsman's horn 
 Echoing from far made sweet midsummer eves. 
 Now serried camion thunder night and mom. 
 Tearing with iron the greenwood's tender leaves. 
 Yet has sweet Spring no particle withdrawn 
 Of her old bounty; still the song-birds hail. 
 Even through our fusillade, delightful Dawn; 
 Even in our wire bloom lilies of the vale. 
 You who love flowers, take these; their fragile bells 
 Have trembled with the shock of volleyed shells. 
 And in black nights when stealthy foes advance 
 They have been lit by the pale rockets' glow 
 That o'er scarred fields and ancient towns laid low 
 Trace in white fire the brave frontiers of France. 
 
 May 182, 1916. 
 
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LIEBESTOD 
 
 I WHO, conceived beneath another star, 
 
 Had been a prince and played with life, instead 
 
 Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far 
 
 From the fair things my faith has merited. 
 
 My ways have been the ways that wanderers tread 
 
 And those that make romance of poverty — 
 
 Soldier, I shared the soldier's board and bed. 
 
 And Joy has been a thing more oft to me 
 
 Whispered by summer wind and summer sea 
 
 Than known incarnate in the hours it lies 
 
 All warm against our hearts and laughs into our eyes. 
 
 I know not if in risking my best days 
 I shall leave utterly behind me here 
 This dream that lightened me through lonesome ways 
 And that no disappointment made less dear; 
 Sometimes I think that, where the hilltops rear 
 Their white entrenchments back of tangled wire. 
 Behind the mist Death only can make clear. 
 There, like Brunhilde ringed with flaming fire. 
 Lies what shall ease my heart's immense desire: 
 There, where beyond the horror and the pain 
 Only the brave shall pass, only the strong attain. 
 
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Truth or delusion, be it as it may, 
 
 Yet think it true, dear friends, for, thinking so. 
 
 That thought shall nerve our sinews on the day 
 
 When to the last assault our bugles blow: 
 
 Reckless of pain and peril we shall go. 
 
 Heads high and hearts aflame and bayonets bare- 
 
 And we shall brave eternity as though 
 
 Eyes looked on us in which we would seem fair — 
 
 One waited in whose presence we would wear, 
 
 Even as a lover who would be well-seen. 
 
 Our manhood faultless and our honor clean. 
 
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RESURGAM 
 
 Exiled afar from youth and happy love, 
 If Death should ravish my fond spirit hence 
 
 I have no doubt but, like a homing dove, 
 It would return to its dear residence. 
 
 And through a thousand stars find out the road 
 
 Back into earthly flesh that was its loved abode. 
 
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A MESSAGE TO AMERICA 
 
 You have the grit and the guts, I know; 
 You are ready to answer blow for blow 
 You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard. 
 But your honor ends with your own back-yard; 
 Each man intent on his private goal. 
 You have no feeling for the whole; 
 What singly none would tolerate 
 You let unpunished hit the state. 
 Unmindful that each man must share 
 The stain he lets his coimtry wear. 
 And (what no traveller ignores) 
 That her good name is often yours. 
 
 You are proud in the pride that feels its might; 
 From your imaginary height 
 Men of another race or hue 
 Are men of a lesser breed to you: 
 The neighbor at your southern gate 
 You treat with the scorn that has bred his hate. 
 To lend a spice to your disrespect 
 You call him the "greaser," But reflect! 
 The greaser has spat on you more than once; 
 He has handed you multiple affronts; 
 He has robbed you, banished you, burned and killed; 
 He has gone untrounced for the blood he spilled; 
 He has jeering used for his bootblack's rag 
 The stars and stripes of the gringo's flag; 
 
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And you, in the depths of your easy-chair — 
 
 What did you do, what did you care? 
 
 Did you find the season too cold and damp 
 
 To change the counter for the camp? 
 
 Were you frightened by fevers in Mexico? 
 
 I can't imagine, but this I know — 
 
 You are impassioned vastly more 
 
 By the news of the daily baseball score 
 
 Than to hear that a dozen countrymen 
 
 Have perished somewhere in Darien, 
 
 That greasers have taken their innocent lives 
 
 And robbed their holdings and raped their wives. 
 
 Not by rough tongues and ready fists 
 Can you hope to jilt in the modern lists. 
 The armies of a littler folk 
 Shall pass you under the victor's yoke, 
 Sobeit a nation that trains her sons 
 To ride their horses and point their guns — 
 Sobeit a people that comprehends 
 The limit where private pleasure ends 
 And where their public dues begin, 
 A people made strong by discipline 
 W^o are willing to give — what you've no mind to — 
 And understand — what you are blind to-^ 
 The things that the individual 
 Must sacrifice for the good of all- 
 
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You have a leader who knows — the man 
 Most fit to be called American, 
 A prophet that once in generations 
 Is given to point to erring nations 
 Brighter ideals toward which to press 
 And lead them out of the wilderness. 
 Will you turn your back on him once again? 
 Will you give the tiller once more to men 
 Who have made your country the laughing-stock 
 For the older peoples to scorn and mock. 
 Who would make you servile, despised, and weak, 
 A country that turns the other cheek. 
 Who care not how bravely your flag may float, 
 Who answer an insult with a note. 
 Whose way is the easy way in all. 
 And, seeing that polished arms appal 
 Their marrow of milk-fed pacifist. 
 Would tell you menace does not exist? 
 Are these, in the world's great parliament. 
 The men you would choose to represent 
 Your honor, your manhood, and your pride. 
 And the virtues your fathers dignified? 
 Oh, bury them deeper than the sea 
 In universal obloquy; 
 
 Forget the ground where they lie, or write 
 For epitaph: "Too proud to fight." 
 
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I have been too long from my country's shores 
 To reckon what state of mind is yours, 
 But as for myself I know right well 
 I would go through fire and shot and shell 
 And face new perils and make my bed 
 In new privations, if ROOSEVELT led; 
 But I have given my heart and hand 
 To serve, in serving another land, 
 Ideals kept bright that with you are dim; 
 Here men can thrill to their country's hymn, 
 For the passion that wells in the Marseillaise 
 Is the same that fires the French these days, 
 And, when the flag that they love goes by, 
 With swelling bosom and moistened eye 
 They can look, for they know that it floats there still 
 By the might of their hands and the strength of their will. 
 And through perils countless and trials unknown 
 Its honor each man has made his own. 
 They wanted the war no more than you. 
 But they saw how the certain menace grew, 
 And they gave two years of their youth or three 
 The more to insure their liberty 
 When the wrath of rifles and pennoned spears 
 Should roll like a flood on their wrecked frontiers. 
 They wanted the war no more than you, 
 But when the dreadful summons blew 
 And the time to settle the quarrel came 
 
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They sprang to their guns, each man was game; 
 And mark if they fight not to the last 
 For their hearths, their altars, and their past: 
 Yea, fight till their veins have been bled dry 
 For love of the country that will npt die. 
 
 O friends, in your fortunate present ease 
 (Yet faced by the self -same facts as these). 
 If you would see how a race can soar 
 That has no love, but no fear, of war. 
 How each can turn from his private r6le 
 That all may act as a perfect whole, 
 How men can live up to the place they claim 
 And a nation, jealous of its good name. 
 Be true to its proud inheritance. 
 Oh, look over here and learn from FRANCE ! 
 
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INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION OF A 
 LONG POEM 
 
 I HAVE gone sometimes by the gates of Death 
 And stood beside the cavern through whose doors 
 Enter the voyagers into the unseen. 
 From that dread threshold only, gazing back. 
 Have eyes in swift illumination seen 
 Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein 
 What things were vital and what things were vain. 
 Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet 
 Spreading away into the morning sky, 
 I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo. 
 Oblivion like a morning mist obscured 
 Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease. 
 And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume 
 Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf, 
 Gleamed only through the all-involving haze 
 The hours when we have loved and been beloved. 
 
 Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love 
 You rise absorbed into the harmony 
 Of planets singing round magnetic sims. 
 Let not propriety nor prejudice 
 Nor the precepts of jealous age deny 
 What Sense so incontestably aflSrms; 
 
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Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep 
 Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone 
 Were that which makes lite worth the pain to live. 
 What is so fair as lovers in their joy- 
 That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy? 
 Caressing arms are their light pillows. They 
 That like lost stars have wandered hitherto 
 Lonesome and lightless through the universe. 
 Now glow transfired at Nature's flaming core; 
 They are the centre; constellated heaven 
 Is the embroidered panoply spread round 
 Their bridal, and the music of the spheres 
 Rocks them in hushed epithalamium. 
 
 I know that there are those whose idle tongues 
 Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was 
 So wondrous and so worshipful to me, 
 I call them those that, in the palace where 
 Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay. 
 Wandered without the secret or the key. 
 I know that there are those, of gentler heart. 
 Broken by grief or by deception bowed, \ 
 
 Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive 
 The bliss they found not here; but, as for me. 
 
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In the soft fibres of the tender flesh 
 I saw potentialities of Joy- 
 Ten thousand lifetimes could not use. Dear Earth, 
 In this dark month when deep as morning dew 
 On thy maternal breast shall fall the blood 
 Of those that were thy loveliest and thy best. 
 If it be fate that mine shall mix with theirs. 
 Hear this my natural prayer, for, purified 
 By that Lethean agony and clad 
 In more resplendent powers, I ask nought else 
 Than reincarnate to retrace my path. 
 Be born again of woman, walk once more 
 Through Childhood's fragrant, flowery wonderland 
 And, entered in the golden realm of Youth, 
 Fare still a pilgrim toward the copious joys 
 I savored here yet scarce began to sip; 
 Yea, with the comrades that I loved so well 
 Resume the banquet we had scarce begim 
 When in the street we heard the clarion-call 
 And each man sprang to arms — ay, even myself 
 Who loved sweet Youth too truly not to share 
 Its pain no less than its delight. If prayers 
 Are to be prayed, lo, here is mine ! Be this 
 My resurrection, this my recompense! 
 
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ODE IN MEMORY OF THE AMERICAN 
 VOLUNTEERS FALLEN FOR FRANCE 
 
 (To have been read before the statue of Lafayette and Washington in Paris, 
 on Decoration Day, May 30, 1916.) 
 
 Ay, it is fitting on this holiday. 
 
 Commemorative of our soldier dead. 
 
 When — with sweet flowers of our New England May 
 
 Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray- 
 
 Their graves in every town are garlanded. 
 
 That pious tribute should be given too 
 
 To our intrepid few 
 
 Obscurely fallen here beyond the seas. 
 
 Those to preserve their country's greatness died; 
 
 But by the death of these 
 
 Something that we can look upon with pride 
 
 Has been achieved, nor wholly unreplied 
 
 Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make 
 
 That from a war where Freedom was at stake 
 
 America withheld and, daunted, stood aside. 
 
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II 
 
 Be they remembered here with each reviving spring. 
 
 Not only that in May, when life is loveliest. 
 
 Around Neuville-Saint-Vaast and the disputed crest 
 
 Of Vimy, they, superb, unfaltering. 
 
 In that fine onslaught that no fire could halt. 
 
 Parted impetuous to their first assault; 
 
 But that they brought fresh hearts and springlike too 
 
 To that high mission, and 'tis meet to strew 
 
 With twigs of lilac and spring's earliest rose 
 
 The cenotaph of those 
 
 Who in thq cause that history most endears 
 
 Fell in the sunny morn and flower of their young years. 
 
 in 
 
 Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise. 
 
 Nor to be mentioned in another breath 
 
 Than their blue coated comrades whose great days 
 
 It was their pride to share — ay, share even to the death ! 
 
 Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks 
 
 (Seeing they came for honor, not for gain). 
 
 Who, opening to them your glorious ranks. 
 
 Gave them that grand occasion to excel. 
 
 That chance to hve the life most free from stain 
 
 And that rare privilege of dying well. 
 
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IV 
 
 friends ! I know not since that war began 
 From which no people nobly stands aloof 
 
 If in all moments we have given proof 
 Of virtues that were thought American. 
 
 1 know not if in all things done and said 
 All has been well and good, 
 
 Or if each one of us can hold his head 
 
 As proudly as he should, 
 
 Or, from the pattern of those mighty dead 
 
 Whose shades our country venerates to-day. 
 
 If we've not somewhat fallen and somewhat gone astray 
 
 But you to whom our land's good name is dear. 
 
 If there be any here 
 
 Who wonder if her manhood be decreased. 
 
 Relaxed its sinews and its blood less red 
 
 Than that at Shiloh and Antietam shed, 
 
 Be proud of these, have joy in this at least, 
 
 And cry: "Now heaven be praised 
 
 That in that hour that most imperilled her. 
 
 Menaced her liberty who foremost raised 
 
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Europe's bright flag of freedom, some there were 
 
 Who, not unmindful of the antique debt. 
 
 Came back the generous path of Lafayette; 
 
 And when of a most formidable foe 
 
 She checked each onset, arduous to stem — 
 
 Foiled and frustrated them — 
 
 On those red fields where blow with furious blow 
 
 Was countered, whether the gigantic fray 
 
 Rolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot, 
 
 Accents of ours were in the fierce melee; 
 
 And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground 
 
 Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires. 
 
 When the slam bugler has long ceased to sound. 
 
 And on the tangled wires 
 
 The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops. 
 
 Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: — 
 
 Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops; 
 
 Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours." 
 
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There, holding still, in frozen steadfastness. 
 
 Their bayonets toward the beckoning frontiers. 
 
 They lie — our comrades — ^lie among their peers. 
 
 Clad in the glory of fallen warriors. 
 
 Grim clusters under thorny trellises. 
 
 Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores. 
 
 Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewn 
 
 Even as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon; 
 
 And earth in her divine indifference 
 
 Rolls on, and many paltry things and mean 
 
 Prate to be heard and caper to be seen. 
 
 But they are silent, calm; their eloquence 
 
 Is that incomparable attitude; 
 
 No human presences their witness are. 
 
 But summer clouds and sunset crimson-hued. 
 
 And showers and night winds and the northern star. 
 
 Nay, even our salutations seem profane. 
 
 Opposed to their Elysian quietude; 
 
 Our salutations calling from afar. 
 
 From our ignobler plane 
 
 And undistinction of our lesser parts: 
 
 Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave 
 
 hearts. 
 Double your glory is who perished thus, 
 For you have died for France and vindicated us. 
 
 The End 
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