OF the;Suns AND -OTHER POEMS 1 .1=, iiiiii TS 35-57 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Robert Kimberly von Reuss-Chenberg Cornell University Library PS3537.T314T3 The testimony of the suns, and other poem 3 1924 007 691 094 /M^Tnt^M a€ccv All books are subject to recall after two weeks. Olln/Kroch Library DATE DUE ppTtr PPfUjllP^ ■! iMyfl GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924007691094 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS AND OTHER POEMS photo by Genthe. George Sterling, author of " The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems." Published by A. M. Robertson. THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS AND OTHER POEMS BY GEORGE STERLING W. E. WOOD PUBLISHER SAN FRANCISC9 1903 'MIn COPYRIGHT 1903 BY GEORGK STERLING *^ '',/., H\^ the murdock press L4 \y 1^ ^ 0(^1 K"r CONTENTS. PAGE DEDICATION 7 MEMORIAL DAY, I9OI I3 POESY , 25 THE CITY OF MUSIC 30 TO ONE LOVED 3I THE SUMMER OF THE GODS 34 THE LORDS OF PAIN 35 THE FOG SIREN 36 TO MISS CONSTANCE CRAWLEY IN "EVERYMAN" . 37 TO IMAGINATION 38 TO A LILY 40 "with THE STRENGTH OF DREAMS " .... 42 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS 43 MUSIC 85 A WHITE ROSE 97 THE soul's EXILE 100 IN THE BEGINNING 102 MEMORY OF THE DEAD I05 TO MY WIFE 106 THE HAUNTING IO7 WAR 108 NIGHTMARE IO9 CONTENTS. THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY 1 10 TO KATHERINE II3 MYSTERY 114 TO MY SISTER II5 THE POETS 119 REINCARNATION I20 ON READING THE POEMS OF FATHER TABB . . . 121 THE PARTING 122 WORDS FOR LANGE's "bLUMENLIED" . . . . I24 THE ALTAR-FLAME I25 TO ONE ASKING LIGHTER SONGS 126 THE SEA-FOG I28 THE NILE 129 DARKNESS I30 THE IDEAL I32 TO COLONEL JOHN S. ENGS 133 "sad SEA-HORIZONS " 134 EVENING 136 ULTIMA THULE I38 THE SWOON 140 THE CITY AND THE SILENCE I4I THE DIRECTORY I42 DEDICATION. TO AMBROSE BIERCE. Ah 1 glad to thy decree I how. From whose unquestioned hand did fall. Beyond a lesser to recall. The solemn laurels on my brow. I tremble with the splendid weight. To mine unworth 't is given to know How dread the charge I undergo Who claim the holy Muse as mate. Her altars lift incessant fire ; She holds no truce with Death nor Peace ; Till mind degrade and beauty cease. She calls her chosen to the Lyre. DEDICATION. Remiss the ministry they bear Who serve her with divided heart ; She stands reluctant to impart Her strength to purpose, end, or care. Shall best I guard her hallowed light By sheltered service on her tow'rs. Or strife with Mammon and the powers That hold humanity in night ? I loose the choral trumpet's gleam. But half its thunder leave untried ; Midway on doubting vans I glide. Nor hasten to the heights of dream. A shadow o'er the vision runs : I hear a grieving from the lands Where Sorrow heavy-sceptred stands. And moanings from the mist of suns: 8 DEDICATION. Lo ! men in weariness behold No respite from the toils of Time. Their children wander in the slime Round Mammon's domes of plundered gold. And taste the bitterness of dearth. Must they beyond my conscience wait. Or lack my voice as advocate To cry their wrongs athwart the earth ? Shall Song, delinquent, win from life The light and rapture that she knows. And sleep at last where Lethe flows, A stranger to the human strife ? Shall Art fare sunward, and disdain The patient hands that smooth her ways ? Shall she, delighting, scorn to raise The fallen on their path of pain? 9 DEDICATION. So questioning, can I endure The fe ace of mine uplifted place? Accused and judge, I fear to face The dumb tribunals of the -poor. But Doubt, in unrelenting quest. Upon the psychic whirlwind rides; Her potent moons advance the tides That urge her maelstroms to unrest. With virgin powers my spirit waits ; Shall she, unequal, judge her God, Or trespass where His feet have trod Whenas He wrought to arm His fates? What hath been, is. What is, shall be. May Man, presuming, intervene On what his Lords have long foreseen And sealed unto eternity ? lO DEDICATION. Shall Art annul and Song disclaim The laws that guard their deeper good ? Or hold so little understood The larger issues of their fame? Can Song accord the light she brings In crypts where Beauty never woke ? Share with Utility his yoke, Tet roam her sky on lucent wings ? How darkly wait the silent years Wherein the Vision veils the End I May /, untroubled, comprehend The truths that best are seen thro' tears ? Emotion smites with blinded aim ; Religion seeks, a baffled wraith. The ignis fatuus of Faith, And Learning tends a ruthless flame. II DEDICATION. I, fearful of Unreason's drink. Avail me of a deeper sight. And turn me to thy clearer light. In which as babes we others blink. August, igoi. 12 MEMORIAL DAY, 1901. To each the city of his dream! Far lifts the purple of her walls, And pure her domes eternal gleam Above the promise of her halls. Unto each soul her choSen ways And travail upward from the night. Enough, that from her dark of days She have in quest the trusted light. Tho' in futility she hold, To heights eternally afar. Eyes that the waited morning's gold Bless never — she hath stood a star. 13 MEMORIAL DAY. Weary the ways whereon we strive To heirdom of the ends of strife: Sabre and cannon, lance and gyve Prepare the after-peace of life. Irrevocable, fraught with dread, The mandates of the cosmic plan Await in traceries of red The men that frame the House of Man, Whereof as holy lies the stone Deep in obscurities of dust, As that whereby the years shall own The far fulfillment of the Trust. Ah, dream of unavailing eyes! Ah, glory of the lucent cross By hope foreseen on future skies. To hush the memory of loss! MEMORIAL DAY. The cannon take their pall of rust, Its gentler harvests wait the sword, The deep of war's recurrent lust Submissive to a deeper word. As honored by that farther day Shall be the warrior as the bard; And equal, shall its wisdom say. The hands that build, the hands that guard. Large writ in blood their annals burn, And hallowed, tho' the morning star Of Peace arise and races earn The red affranchisement of War. O vision of a nation crowned With purer light by lasting Peace, 'Neath altered skies whence Battle frowned And Pain had terrible release! 15 MEMORIAL DAY. Deep in our dark of strife and wrong, Blinded we loose a sanguine flood, Entreating from our Fates ere long The guerdon of the holy blood — Diviner cities wrought anew In all that Love and Art may lend. And heights of freedom whereunto We deem the toiling ages trend. Pleasant, O Love, thy garden-close And murmur of the untroubled dove. But sterner walls constrain thy foes. And other sounds than thine, O Love!- Incitement of the whining fife And mutter of the troubled drum, Clamor of life that reels from life. Cannon that smite all clamor dumb! i6 MEMORIAL DAY. Supreme, O Art! thy splendors blaze, And fair the shrine thy sons attain; But ruder hands on darker ways Ensure the incomparable fane. ( So gently came the feet of Spring Along the wintry ways afar. So rich in song the valleys ring, We deem we have but dreamt of war.) And we, above the war-won graves, Stand conscious of their homage due; We wander where the cypress waves. Sad for the dead we never knew — From whom we gathered, in regret. Tribute of unregretful breath; On whom the panoply we set That molders on the road of Death. 17 MEMORIAL DAY. So now their time held consecrate We greet in hall and temple, or Where Summer, calling at the gate. Has thrown her blossoms in before. And rose and marble clasp the dead. And gleam about the ghostly court, To quieter camp the soldier led, The seaman to a farther port. How deep they lie from voice or tear! With silence how supremely blest! — So far in peace they cannot hear The grieving pines above their rest. Tho' strongly on their holy place The cumbrous nations prove their might. Unheard the battle-thunders pace A-bove the nations of the night. i8 MEMORIAL DAY. A sense of this their dreamlessness Arises to the mortal brow. We feel their quietudes confess To war's futility, that now Above the dust so swift to slay Alight the lily's tender snows, And on the long-forgiven clay Its foeman's children loose the rose. Set to duration of the bronze, The soldier stands all ages' guest: Harness of high renown he dons, But sweeter fame the flowers attest. 19 MEMORIAL DAY. Content, as though for valor crowned, Austere, untroubled, rest the dead — The citadel of silence found, And all its armament of dread. Before whose imminence we pause And question far the nightward posts, And seek with darkened eyes the cause Of menace to the mortal hosts: Upon whose war our foe is sent; What purpose his invasions prove; Or issues of the dim intent Wherewith his ghostly legions move. But never answer da3rward ran. Nor message from the eternal scouts, Resolving to our anxious van The riddle of the dark redoubts. 20 MEMORIAL DAY. Perchance they know the secret sought, (Tidings we reach from Time to share; That bought with life were cheaply bought) , But find the message dread to bear. Perchance, to that imputed night The future lies too sadly clear; Perchance the soldier's better sight Confirms the Prophecy of Fear, Revealing, to the spirit's quest. The Mother in whose need the swords He faced with unregarded breast. In vassalage to monstrous lords. For in the prophet's light of dream, She stands immanacled in gold. Disclosing, as the sages deem, Decadence from the worth of old. 21 MEMORIAL DAY. O vision of insurgent doom, ; And thunders holden to that day! Portentous in that farther gloom, The Titans bend above their prey. And all that sky ia dark with wings That bear to feasts of infamy And shame of unconjectured things The vampire brood of luxury. Lo! Power, with encrimsoned hands, The blood-draught of his shambles sips ; And Justice at her altar stands And stammers with polluted lips; Lo ! man to Man as alien seems, Nor seeks, for serfdom to delight, Divergence of the chartered streams That sate the languid parasite; 22 MEMORIAL DAY. But sits the throne of privilege, And claims all lordship of the soil, And wrings from penury the pledge Of lifelong servitude to toil, Forgetting, in the lust for pow'r, The peoples faithless to their trust. Who joined, at Time's avenging hour. The nations touched by Time to dust. So dark the doom our sages feel Impendent; but the Fates have stood Unknown of man, nor deign to seal The auguries of likelihood. For peril that the seer foresees, Perils transcending intervene: Transition holds her mysteries Accordant to the unforeseen. 23 MEMORIAL DAY. And evil comes with good allied, Nor hath supremacy of scope. The Builder and the Plan abide. We hope, who are the sons of Hope. O timeless Light beyond the years. Illume Thy mysteries of fate! Absolve the future of its fears, And loose us from the law of hate! 24 POESY. Maiden! to whom our Fates assign The tale of mortal years, What joyance on thy lips divine And at thy heart what tears! Musest thou girt with memories Of ancient wars and woes — The tale of quest on lonely seas For far Romance's rose? Are thine but Joy's untroubled hours — Days fashioned gentlewise? (So soft the winds that stir thy flow'rs, So blue thy distant skies!) 25 POESY. For as the birds of Tempe glad, Called by the dawn from sleep, Are thine exultant chords, or sad As twilight on the deep. Thine is the dusk where Love hath knelt To cry his holy pain ; The flower of all that Grief hath felt Hath found in thee its fane. Can light and hue, imperfect, limn, Can word of man confess The vision radiant or dim Of thy dear loveliness? I dream thy tresses float as gold Spun to a mist of light; I deem thy voice as sorrow told In music to the night. 26 POESY. Softer than Hebe's to allure Gleam thine immortal eyes, Great with fair memories, and pure As dew in Paradise. Thy lips seem harmonies unheard, Portals to perfect sound. That shrine, but render not, that word The soul hath never found. Can Art a fairer pathway trace Than that thy chosen share. Or we forget thy regnant face. Who hold the gods less fair? So long as Beauty's reign endure Art thou her voice to me ; And all I note of high and pure Seem shadows cast by thee — 27 POESY. All marvels delicate or bright — To sense but scarce confest: Foam, fragrance, latencies of light That make a gem's unrest; Mist, and the tiny dawns that hide About the opal-stone, Or sunset Edens that abide Till day and dusk are flown. Thou gleam'st, an unrecorded star, (Happy their eyes that see!) From domes of moonlight built afar In Fancy's empery. Thy flight is ever at the verge Of Art's horizon-line; Remote, where dream and beauty merge, Thy wings irradiant shine. 28 POESY. I may not vaunt thy mystic grace Nor thy communion tell, Unseen as Sleep's approaching face, Unheard as her farewell — Who from the beautiful hast wrought A vision on the mind Too fair for Hope to leave unsought Or human heart to find. 29 THE CITY OF MUSIC. Where lonely now Scamander flows And scattered lies the hero's pyre, The towers of Troy (saith Song) arose Accordant to Apollo's lyre, When Music, floating on the storm Of chords that cried Infinity, Swept unto permanence of form The city of the Dardan sea. And 'neath an arch that Iris drew From headlands of celestial gold. Shone forth from heaven's pacific blue The faces of the gods of old. But when I list to Music cry Her ecstasies of grief and joy. Diviner visions throng my sky, And lordlier domes than those of Troy. 30 TO ONE LOVED. God, as He shaped thy beauty, took What element divine? For Oh! I deem His angels look From Heaven with eyes like thine. They are as gems by Beauty wrought To blossoms pure and strange — Forgotten flowers the soul hath sought Where things immortal range. I may not know the visions seen Within their crystal scope, For oft they are as skies serene In all that Love can hope; But when in those enchanted skies The shadows come and go. They seem as deeps whence Music sighs But cannot tell her woe. 31 TO ONE LOVED. Such are God's jewels. Tho' their light May grace but mortal years, Divinely yet they star our night, More beautiful for tears. They are as voice to things that lie Beyond the bourne of speech — Too great for ecstasy to sigh, Too fair for tongue to teach. They are as that intrinsic word That Nature strives to say — By night an immanence unheard, A peacelessness by day. And thus their gentle glories are A mystery to me So kindred to the evening star. The mountains and the sea. 32 TO ONE LOVED. That when we part my soul must yet Regard, in wanderings, The beauty and the sadness met In far, eternal things. 33 THE SUMMER OF THE GODS. Methought in dream I saw Ulysses bold — Lured by strange music to the hidden West — Pass onward in that memorable quest Of islands where the demigods of old Beyond the portals of Elysium hold The twilight and the threnodies of rest. Great gleamed the sunset upon ocean's breast And all those urgent oars cast up its gold. Hushed are the voices of the mythic dales And lost the days whose dawn and eve of yore Held yet a mystery whose kindly veils Fell as a radiance on sea and shore, Whose eastward moons and suns departing bore A glory unto far, intrepid sails. 34 THE LORDS OF PAIN. The Lords of Pain are mightier by night: Swiftly, as darkness closed the dreary day, They marshalled whose inimical array I saw not, conscious only of their might, As, thro' the hours' intolerable flight And swoon recurrent of the spirit, they Wrought grievously their will upon the clay, Till respite of the dawn's delaying light. Not thus, O Life ! would I depart from thee — Relinquishing at Agony's command The lights and shadows of thine empery; But so put by the guerdon of the breath As one grown weary in a twilight land. Whom Music leads to Sleep, and Sleep to Death. 35 THE FOG SIREN. The grey mist veils the deep, the seeming ghost, Forlorn and olden, of the world's lost seas. Veering to fancies of the mufHed breeze, There moans with ocean down the shrouded coast (Ceaseless, as from eternal pain and post, And born of woe no mortal may appease) The siren's grieving, that, as daylight flees, Summons the drowned, a solemn shadow-host. Then, as the pallid spectres landward creep, Apocalyptic voices haunt the gloom; We hear, upon the troubling of the deep. The bellow of the Beast drawn down to doom; And rending all Death's empire in its sweep. The trumpet's groaning rolls athwart the tomb. 36 TO MISS CONSTANCE CRAWLEY IN "EVERYMAN." Thine is the frailest of the arts And like the flower must pass; Its empery in human hearts Dies with the voice, alas! The poet tells to years unborn His dreams of joy or woe; His crown is of a farther morn, From hands he shall not know. Tho' time, in tardy reckoning, Placed laurels on my brow, Sing as I might, I could not sing A fairer dream than thou — Who by thine art and haunting face Hast filled a thoughtful hour With somewhat of the passing grace Of twilight and the flow'r. 37 TO IMAGINATION. Thou needest not the guides of Sense, O soul and inner light of song! Despotic Wisdom works thee wrong And frowning Reason chides thee hence. Thy lands are hid from ordered sight: Thy word an alien realm hath made, Suffused as with the glory laid On mountains domed by sunset-light. In visioned memory supreme, Thy heart beholds forgotten things; Thy winds recall the fabled kings And whisper Time's remotest dream. 38 TO IMAGINATION. Thy feet obtain the hidden ways Where steal the angels of the dawn Down ferny glooms that hide the fawn, Or evening lulls the woodland maze. Thy wings at heavenly vigils rest, Or lost in human zeniths roam — Far down, the billow slips to foam; The ships declare their ancient quest. Thine eyes forsake the sterile noon, Till mottled flowers, where Circe treads, Like hooded serpents sway their heads. In gardens ghostly with the moon. Who once hath known thy harp's appeal Shall hold its music past his lore — Desirous of the crystalled shore And snows thy lancing stars reveal. 39 TO A LILY. Thou livest yet! Then few the days, Altho' they seem not few, Since here we watched, on garden ways, Thy pure and moonlit dew. She bent thy pallor to caress, As snow that toucheth snow; Thou couldst not know her gentleness, Tho' angels now may know. She spoke of all that Love might dream, And dreaming, know divine; Till on her face I saw the gleam Of holier dews than thine. 40 TO A LILY. She spoke of God, of Change, of Death ; Blinded, I could not tell Why grief so trembled on her breath: 'Twas thus she spoke farewell! Farewell — tho' yet her soul bereaved, In mercy unconfessed Forbore to tell a heart ungrieved How soon her own would rest — Here in the silence, I at last Render (too late? unheard?) Mine own farewell, ah ! deeply past All tale of tear or word. 41 "WITH THE STRENGTH OF DREAMS." I saw the Lesbian Sappho bowed in light Before the hushed altar of the sea — Song-swept, a lyre on which in threnody Th' ascendant tremors of her spirit's might Thrilled chord on chord to music. In my flight From dream to dream, I paused; I wept; while she Sang till I saw the western glory flee, A molten pearl, one with the wine of night. I know not if the blossom of their day. In Paradise, be blessed with fairer fruit; If deeper ecstasies of music may. Dying or latent, fill their fancied lute. Or happier tear-drops find the olden way, Ere yet the twilight seraphim be mute. 42 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. To Whom the unceasing suns belong. And cause is one with consequence, — To Whose divine inclusive sense The moan is blended with the song. — Ambrose Bierce. The winter sunset fronts the North. The light deserts the quiet sky. From their far gates how silently The stars of evening tremble forth! Time, to thy sight what peace they share On Night's inviolable breast! Remote in solitudes of rest, Afar from human change or care. 43 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Eternity, unto thine eyes In war's unrest their legions surge, Foam of the cosmic tides that urge The battle of contending skies, The war whose waves of onslaught, met Where night's abysses storm afar, Break on the high, tremendous bar Athwart that central ocean set — From seas whose cyclic ebb and sweep, Unseen to Life's oblivious hours. Are ostent of the changeless Pow'rs That hold dominion of the Deep. O armies of eternal night. How flame your guidons on the dark! Silent we turn from Time to hark What final Orders sway your might. 44 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Cold from colossal ramparts gleam, At their insuperable posts The seven princes of the hosts Who guard the holy North supreme; Who watch the phalanxes remote That, gathered in opposing skies. Far on the southern wastes arise, Marshalled by flaming Fomalhaut. Altair, what captains compass thee? What foes, Aldebaran, are thine? Red with what blood of wars divine Glows that immortal panoply? What music from Capella runs? How hold the Pleiades their bond? How storms the hidden war beyond Orion's dreadful sword of suns? 45 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. When, on what hostile firmament, Shall stars unnamed contend our gyre, 'Mid councils of Bootes' fire, Or night of Vega's fury spent? What tidings of the heavenly fray? These, as our sages nightward turn To gaze within the gulfs where burn The helms of that sublime array: Splendors of elemental strife; Smit suns that startle back the gloom ; New light whose tale of stellar doom Fares to uncomprehending life; Profounds of fire whose maelstroms froth To gathered armies of offense; Cohorts unweariable, immense, And bulks wherewith the Dark is wroth; 46 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Reserves and urgencies of light That flame upon the battle's path, And allied suns that brave the wrath Of systems leagued athwart the night; Menace of silent ranks that sweep Unto irrevocable wars, And onset of Titanic cars In Armageddons of the Deep! Deem we their enginery was not. Far in the dim, eternal past? Deem we eternity at last Will find their thunders unbegot? How haste the unresting feet of Change, On life's stupendous orbit set! She walks a way her blood hath wet. Yet deems her path untrodden, strange. 47 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. By night's immeasurable dome She deems her hopes in surety held — Lo! from insurgent deeps impelled The fleeting systems lapse like foam. Unshared she deems the kindred skies; But runic gulf and star proclaim (Archival gloom, prophetic flame) The immutable infinities: Vague on the night the mist we mark That tells where met the random suns: In changeless moulds of law it runs To orbs that roam anew the dark, And unto which the worlds are born. Where Life awakes to know again The light of stars, caress of rain. And winds of the forgotten morn. 48 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Lift up, ye everlasting gates Whence fare her feet to wars unknown, To heights august of Reason's throne^ And heritage of ampler Fates! When she, the mindless clay no more In Lust's or Fear's potential hands. Shall range her uncontested lands Or sister world's befriending shore. Till lapse her beatific years In emperies of art untold. The music of her age of gold Requiting for unnumbered tears; Till she behold — the visual boon Surviving elemental risk — The nearing sun's enormous disc, Blood-red at dusk of sullen noon; 49 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Till her appointed course be run; Till on the darkness faint her breath, Flown to the silent void, and Death Sit crowned upon the ashen sun. Till sun and sun be met at last In warfare that annuls the night, When sea and mountain start to light, Pyres of the sacrificial past, Dim veils of fire, O world! that were The stubborn bastions of thy frame, And reaches of abysmal flame Wherein thy spectral oceans stir — A mist upon the vassal skies Gyrant to Betelgeuse — a flare Upon the midnights round Altair — A portent to barbaric eyes. 50 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. O dread and strong Eternity! Prickt in an instant of thy clime, The bubble of Antares' time Is one with thine unchanging sea. Ever the star, unstable, frames Her transitory throne of fire, But in thy sight how soon expire, How soon recur, the inviolate flames !- Throbs of the fitful sun that are Unto thine amplitude of sight, Even as the quick unrest of light That stirs, to mortal sense, the star. What silence rules the ghostly hours That guard the close of human sleep! Aldebaran crowns the western deep; Belted with suns Orion tow'rs, 51 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. And greaved with light of worlds destroyed, And girt with firmamental gloom, Abides his far, portended doom And menace of the warring void. Shall night allay his high unrest? Shall Time his destinies aver. Or darkened vastitude deter His feet from their immortal quest? Shall augury his goal impart. Or mind his hidden steps retrace To mausolean pits of space Where throbs the Hydra's crimson heart? Ephemeral, may Life declare What quarry from the Lion runs. And sway the inexorable suns Where gape the abysses of his lair? 52 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. O Night, what legions serve thy wars! Lo! thy terrific battle-line — The rayless bulk, the blazing Sign, The leagued infinity of stars! Remote they burn whose dread array Glows from the dark a dust of fire ; Unheard the storm of Rigel's ire, A grain of light Arcturus' day. Unheard their antiphon of death Who gleam Capella's cosmic foes; Unseen the war whose causal throes Perturb gigantic Algol's breath — Whom from afar we mete and name Ere Light and Life their doom fulfill. Spawn of the Power whose aeons still The suns of Taurus armed with flame. 53 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. What sound shall pass the gulfs where groan Their sullen axles on the night? What thunder from the strands of light Whence Vega glares on worlds unknown? O Deep whose very silence stuns! Where Light is powerless to illume Lost in immensities of gloom That dwarf to motes the flaring suns. O Night where Time and Sorrow cease! Eternal magnitude of dark Wherein Aldebaran drifts a spark, And Sirius is hushed to peace! O Tides that foam on strands untrod, From seas in everlasting prime, To light where Life looks forth on Time, And Pain, unanswered, questions God! 54 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. What Power, with inclusive sweep And rigor of compelling bars, Shall curb the furies of the stars. And still the troubling of that Deep? What will shall calm that wrathful sky? Crave ye tranquillities of light Who stand the sons of war and night? Behold! the Abyss hath given reply. Wards of Whose realm shall ye avail To loose the tentacles of force That drag Arcturus from his course. And rend the weight of Procyon's mail? Shall yet your feet essay, unharmed, The glare of cosmic leaguers met Round stellar strongholds gulfward set, With night and fire supremely armed? 55 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Shall sun or cycle yet confirm Your lordship to the unceded Vast, Or human period outlast The vigil of Capella's term? Deem ye the Eternal Mind will change The throned infinity of law That never aeon altered saw In all the Past's eternal range? Child of unrest, but fain for peace. Life dreams, in her expectant dark, Of final things, and waits to hark Conclusive trumpets crying cease. She lifts an alien voice to call To near Denebola: " O sun! A little, and thy day is done, A little, and the Night is all." 56 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. A little, and his rays, far-flown, Gleam in the dews upon her grave, The storied pomps her epochs gave A dust within her deserts lone. Yea! so shall Life on worlds afar Muse idly of a cosmic tomb, Where now past Alioth the gloom Stirs not with her awaited star. Her fate, how stranger than we deem! Tho' Faith behold with trusting eyes A vision on transmuted skies — The splendors of the human dream ; To live, tho' Pain and Sorrow cease; To reach the high Eternal Heart; To know Infinity, nor part; To find the far Ideal, Peace — 57 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. The life of each perfected world August archangels chanting praise, Deep-ranked in everlasting ways, With wings of grief and exile furled. O dream not all the worlds fulfill! Unblest, unbidden, save of hope. Not for finality the scope And strength of that unaltered Will. The eternal Night hath writ in stars Denial of the ends ye name; Ye stand rebuked by suns who claim The consummation of her wars. Constrained to what abysmal pole Shall severed armies close their flanks To stand with deviated ranks, Subserving to a final goal? 58 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Shall Godhead dream a transient thing? Strives He for that which now he lacks? Shall Law's dominion melt as wax At touch of Hope's irradiant wing? Are these the towers His hands have wrought? Dreams He the dream of end and plan Dear to the finity of man, And shall mutation rule His thought? What powers throng the pregnant gloom! Unseen, the ministers of Law Reach from eternity to draw The suns to predetermined doom. On Law ye serve with kindred might, Atom and world that hold her ways; The firefly's mote, the comet's blaze. Are equal in her perfect sight. 59 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Her bonds compel the Vast where boils Intensest Spica's sea of fire ; Her lips decree the hidden gyre Of bulks that strain in Algol's toils. Subject to Law's resistless word, Thy hands, O Force! resolve the star, And toil, at Alphard's battle-car. His flaming panoply to gird. Charged, the immeasured gulfs transmit Her mandate to the fonts of life. Inciting to the governed strife Whereby the lethal voids are lit. With augment of imperious tides On vague, illimitable coasts, And battle-haze of merging hosts To which the flare of Vega rides. 60 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. " But nayl " ye cry, " we trust her hands Induce an unconjectured morn, To whose divine fulfillment born Her strength irrevocable stands." O lights by which, far-taught, we trace The path of Life from death to death! O fanes of her recurrent breath. And strength of Night's annulling mace ! — Profounds whose silences proclaim What realms of mystery and awe! Colossal Wraths extolling Law From unsubverted thrones of flame! — Suns of the Lyre whose thunders rise From chords the eternal Hands have smit! Stars of the Sword a moment lit Ere Life re-name her altered skies! — 6i THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Without beginning, aim or end; Supreme, incessant, unbegot; The systems change, but goal is not. Where the Infinities attend. Deem ye their armaments confess A source of mutable desire? Think ye He mailed His thought in fire And called from night and nothingness And armed for Time their high array? Dream ye Infinity was bent Upon a whim, a drama spent Within an instant of His day? Think ye He broke His dream indeed, And rent His deep with fearful Pow'rs, That Man inherit fadeless bow'rs? Since He desires, He knows a need. 62 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Nay! stable His Infinity, Beyond mutation or desire. The visions pass. The worlds expire, Unfathomed still their mystery. So hath He dreamt. So stands His night, Wherein the suns abiding range, Dust of the dynasties of change. And altars of eternal light. December, 1 90 1 . 63 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. II. My sleep was like a summer sky That held the music of a lark: I waken to the voiceless dark And life's more silent mystery. Night with her fleeting hours, how brief To watch beyond her vault sublime The gyrant systems meting Time, That holds the timelessness of grief! How pure the light their legions shed ! How calm above the crumbling tomb Of race and epoch passed to gloom No ray can pierce nor mortal tread! 64 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. What gulfs define the cosmic storm! The torrent of Capella's light A needle on the nerves of sight Till Force annul the bonds of form; Till Alcor vanish from the void Wherein the Dragon dares the waste, Wherein the spawn of Alioth haste To ghostly bastions long destroyed. O nearer dark whence Man descries Abyssal lamps that flare and sink! Profounds where stellar glories shrink, Or Betelgeuse relumined flies! In gloom as dense can Spica grope As this that bars the human will? Desires as vast her children fill, Or kindred mystery and hope? 65 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS, Lo! peaceless, ere the veiling day Expand where now Arcturus shines, I cry to night's ascendant Signs The timeless questions of the clay: Will Life, the bourne eternal crossed. Attain the secret of her hours? Will Sorrow find atoning Pow'rs, And Love fare heavenward to her lost? I lift entreating eyes to see Gulf beyond gulf till sight relent. Sun beyond sun till Time repent Its question of Infinity. Shall voice or vision cross the night From glooms where grope the hands of Force On law's inexorable course. To Being's transitory light? 66 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Shall Sirius resolve our fears? Shall Vega's Lord command the Lyre To scatter from her chords of fire A music on the mortal years? Shall Procyon with flaming tongue Declare the doom his strength awaits, Or Rigel's light reveal the Fates Whereto his shadowed worlds have sung? O silence of the changeless dark Whence Hope uplifts unwearied eyes! O patience of devouring skies That close on Algol's dying spark! Enhooved with gloom, the Age stamps down The palace-flare of Babylon; To night the lords of Ur are gone ; The Tyres of Time put by the crown. 67 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. To Death the sons of Life are thrust; From night to night the nations pace; Empire by empire, race by race, The generations pass to dust. Enter, O Life! their place of dread, And seek their silence to attain : Shall Mystery renounce her reign. Or darkness render thee thy dead? Where stirs the energy they knew? Joins it the forces undestroyed That urge the suns within the void. And shake the star in evening's dew? Or sit they girt by laws unknown Whereto the senses serve as bars — With fire of unrecorded stars That light a heaven not our own? 68 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. The Night inevitable waits Till fails the insufficient sun, And darkness ends the toil begun By Chaos and the morning Fates, And starward drifts the stricken world, Lone in unalterable gloom. Dead, with a universe for tomb, Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled. How dread thy reign, O Silence, there! A little, and the deeps are dumb — Lo! thine eternal feet are come Where trod the thunders of Altair. O ashen bulks that haunt the Vast, Beyond the ministry of Light! O strong intrenchment of the Night On charred Antares cold at last! 69 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Eternity! thine awful hands Shall blot the Lion from our skies, And build thy dark for future eyes Where now illumed Orion stands. Forever, infinite of range, Unceasing whirls the cosmic storm. In changeless gulfs where Force and Form Renew the mystery of change. A fleeting moment, to thy sight. Lamp of thine altar Alphard burns ; Aldebaran to dusk returns. And Betelgeuse is stone and night. . . . What solitudes of gloom unknown Abide, O Sun! thy future ways. Ere Light at last a sceptre raise, Resuming her forsaken throne — 70 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. When Law's compulsive angels sweep The armored sun athwart thy path; When hands resistless wake the wrath That smites to flame the boiling Deep ! And sprung from that recurrent storm, The youthful world exultant wheels, Where slow Eternity anneals The manacles of Time and Form; Where dim alchemic powers rebuild. To Law's immutable designs, The primal, unapparent shrines With Being's basic mystery filled — Fanes of the slowly fostered spark Whose fire shall light the groping clay To Reason's sympathetic day And refuge from the bestial dark. 71 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Reborn to that selective strife And fury of ascendant wars, What tidings of the immortal shores? What covenant from Death, O Life? When, in what maze of spacial bound. Or cryptic glooms that wall the grave. Hast heard the secret which we crave From that inscrutable Profound? What surety that thy sons attain The litten council of thy Lords, And thunder of seraphic chords To music not of Time and Pain? What whisper from the world new-born Recalled thy footsteps to essay The far, inevitable way Lit sunward from thy mists of morn? 72 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Nay! were Oblivion's nightward springs So fair to thine enchanted eyes That now forgot the message lies From Mystery's reluctant kings? Nay! are thy lips forever sealed, O thou that stoodst aloof with Death — Thou that with unrevealing breath Hast passed the swords his angels wield? She standeth mute. She cannot say (Ah! dumb to Love's appealing Deep!) If Death be suzerain of Sleep, Or Lethe cross the road to Day. She cannot say if she in sooth Abide Infinity's concern, Tho' Time's unanswered altars burn In question to the final Truth. 73 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. And yet from unaccording Fates We crave the secret of our tears, With trust in the betraying years, And clamor at relentless gates. And lost within the glooms that fill The Night's primordial realm unknown, See Mystery on a vaster throne And Truth's far face receding still. Shall yet the fearful answer fare To ancient life supremely wise, By seas that flash on alien eyes The riven sunlight of Altair? Athwart the gulfs of mote and mind How vast, to Sense, the shadow falls! She gazes from her proven walls What deeps unfathomable to find! 74 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Lo! wearied with the fruitless quest Their shores invisible to mark, We turn us to the outer Dark, And gleaming suns far-manifest. Night! of the dooms to which they sweep What rumor from the battle's verge, Where sun and sun their chariots urge To leaguers of the hostile Deep? O Space and Time and stars at strife. How dreadful your infinity! Shrined by your termless trinity, How strange, how terrible, is life! How dark to Being's baffled glance The pits of night and nothingness. Where manacled in Law's duress The allegiant Pleiades advance! 75 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Behold! her little sight is drawn By Hope's untold, immortal ray; Debarred, she seeks atoning day; Beyond her gloom she dreams a dawn. Thy secret, O profound of stars! We, born of darkness, dare to seek, Adjuring Rigel that he speak His tidings of the eternal wars. Capella! past thy lonely light What Guardians rule the changeless void? What final Eden undestroyed Where seethe the caldrons of the night? — Where, on the path of suns far-fled, Aldebaran goes forth to doom; Where unto Night's tremendous tomb The worlds of Procyon are led. 76 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Ere yet below our sky-line dip Thy sun-crowned spars to deeps unknown, Ere yet our pharos-light be flown, Declare thy cosmic port, O Ship! Arcturus! from the abysses vast That hush the Voices of thy strife, Hast heard a whisper unto Life, Assuring that she rest at last? Crave ye a truce, O suns supreme? What order shall ye deign to hark, Enormous shuttles of the dark! That weave the Everlasting Dream? Shall Sirius light the gulfs untrod That bar, O Life! thy claimant gaze? Shall Betelgeuse attend thy ways. Or Alphard guide thy feet to God? 77 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Shall lone Antares whisper thee His attestation to thy hope, Or Alioth aid the souls that grope Within the Night's infinity? Dost dream to hold the ghostly heights That soar beyond Mutation's reign, Or sway the tides of Time and Pain, Lord of the war Arcturus lights? Wouldst set the Crown upon thy brow? Wouldst still the Scorpion's heart of fire? Wouldst tread the arc of Rigel's gyre. Or greet the God his worlds avow? Lo! claspt to His atoning breast In Whom are woe and wrong made just, Why this regression to the dust — This loss of certitude and rest? 78 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. What farce were that in which the soul Were summoned to celestial peace, And, ere her jubilation cease. Dismissed to her ancestral goal? To what emergency concealed. Abides the realm we seek to share Which to all antecedent pray'r Eternity hath not revealed? Hath Vega's night diviner shores? Shall Spica with surpassing ray Illume her worlds with vaster day Than that Denebola outpours? Dim are the laws the sages give, For Science sees in all her lands Illusive twilight, in her hands The judgments of the Relative. 79 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. Obscure the glooms that harbor Truth, And mute the lips from which we crave The guarded secret of the grave — So soon grown dumb to word and ruth! But ye, O suns! concede the boon To those whose baffled eyes aspire To search your syllables of fire, And read Orion's telic rune — The boon to know that Life abides One with your immortality. One with your changing mystery, And foam of your eternal tides. Exalt, Infinity, thy might, Nor deem their decrement to mark. Spread thou their ashes on the dark: Behold! they leap again to light — 80 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. To light that summons Life to wake, And stirred from consummated sleep In matter's unconjectured deep, From mire to mind the pathway take. The pathway traced with blood and tears. And dust of all our fathers dead. Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red, Fade to the mist of nameless years. How oft, O Life, on worlds forgot, Hast thou, in thine unnumbered forms. Gone forth to Time's transmuting storms. And fought till storm and stress were not! How oft hast striven, hoped, and died. And dying, fared to gracious rest. The Night's inevitable guest. In alien realms unverified! 8i THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. How oft to Mystery and Time Returned, their ancient ways to hold, With lips that never yet have told The tidings of that distant clime — With little hands that could not keep The mighty message of the Night, Nor bare to Day's appealing sight The hidden annals of thy sleep. Dost deem the eternity to come The secret will disclose at last Whereunto an eternal past Held lips to revelation dumb? How vast the gulfs of man's desire! Children of Change, we dream to share The battle-vigil of Altair, And watch great Fomalhaut expire; 82 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. To live, where darkened suns relume Their kingdoms in the abysmal haze — Where nearing Night attends the blaze Of high Antares red with doom ; To hear within the deep of Law The Word that moves her causal tides ; To know what Permanence abides Beyond the veil the senses draw. And such the hope that falls thy heart, O Life! on some allegiant world Round Procyon's throne of thunder whirled Or poised in Spica's gulf apart. So dreamt thy sons on worlds destroyed Whose dust allures our careless eyes, As, lit at last on alien skies, The meteor melts athwart the void. 83 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS. So shall thy seed on worlds to be, At altars built to suns afar, Crave from the silence of the star Solution of thy mystery; And crave unanswered, till, denied By cosmic gloom and stellar glare. The brains are dust that bore the pray'r, And dust the yearning lips that cried. February, 1 902. 84 MUSIC. Her face we have a little, but her voice Is not of our imagining nor time, And her deep soul is one, perchance, with life. Immortal, cosmic. Heritage of her Is half the human birthright. She hath part With Love and Death in the one mystery Of being, lifted on eternal wings From world to world. Her home is in our hearts. She is that moon for which the sea of tears Is ever a-tremble, and she seemeth ghost Of all past beauty, haunting yet the dusk Of unforgotten days ; for of the lost. The changeless, irrecoverable years. Regret will waken in her gladdest voice, 85 MUSIC. And linger, as the sorrow of a dream Hath shadow for a little in the morn. In echo and forewhispering of her, Nature hath many voices — gracious sounds Whereof she abideth spirit and unrest, Being their mystery. Such is the voice Of sea-torn headlands, and the song of pines. When the world's harp is touched from out the North ; All cadences and murmurs of the wind ; Cascades afar; vast whisperings of rain, Nightward; aeolian fruitage of the lute; And gladness of the reawakened birds. Heard in the morning twilight, like the drip Of gems athwart a fallen lyre; the calls That herald, in the wan, blue Arctic sky, The wreaths of wild, Cadmean water-fowl; Tinkle of nightly filletings of ice. 86 MUSIC. Touched by the dawn, and singing of all streams. She is that sorrow in the ocean's voice. In that undying garden of the years, Sweet poesy, she liveth, and her breath. Like winds a-whisper with a league of rose. Is fragrance of its flower, she lying pent Within the web and mystery of words. Those films of song that of man's victories Longest endure, outliving tower or dome Of clasped marble. Not in vain her spell Hath fallen upon the poets: Keats outsang His tender nightingale; and hearken Poe, So sweeter than his bells! Great Milton made Within that night (how clearer than our day!) He shared with Homer, solemn harmonies From out the names of ancient powers and realms, 87 MUSIC. Caught up and rolled in thunder on his voice. And Shelley rained her tears from many a line. So filleth she the high immortal hearts That sorrow unto song, so whispereth, Haunting those deeper voices of the Lyre That have the calling of Life's tragedy. So calleth she, fast in whose golden toils. Beauty, tho' captive, hath eternal reign. Many are we who listen, yet her voice First came not unto many, seeking first Her chosen few, that heard her where she passed. And saw thro' many veils her awful face. And clasped her raiment in their hands of flame. To these her voice was virginal, thro' these She poured, tho' as an echo far removed, The passion and the rapture and the storm Of her great deep, full-tided. These are kings. Having such queen as she. Silent we wait 88 MUSIC. Their telling of her glories, tho' their souls Go mad with stress of the ineffable, Yearning forever in their powerlessness To cry the wonder heard, the harmonies That surge upon them from her hidden deep. Ah joy that leapeth in the living blood! She hath the star of loveliness in dow'r. And Beauty's every vision. At her call. The fauns have fled their slumbering, the nymphs Gleam in their mazy covert of the years. Deep Arcadies, where all the woodland aisles Are tremulous of blossom. At her call, We see again the living rose-and-pearl Fabled of Paphos, and the hurrying doves. She with the wind awakened, we have heard, Or seem to hear, the chime of faery feet. Spurning thie sea-strewn jewels of the moon; 89 MUSIC. Or listening, have lingered with the time Wherein, to Aphrodite and the dusk, With travail of the supplicating lyre, (Low sorrow of the phantom, throbbing chord. And fine insistencies of grieved strings!) Ineffably sang Sappho. Helen hath come. Robed in Time's purple, and Semiramis Hath lit her deepening twilight as a star. Or Fancy, bolder for her voice, hath turned Our dreams to pleasant madness, and we join, Careless, the revels on a moonlit strand Of dust of sapphire, softer for the toil. Perennial, of seas of ruddy wine, Whose purple foam the Naiads wear as crown. She hath a realm her own, whose fragile isles. The sudden Edens of the sea of tone. Gather from shadow their illusive palms, From mist their lilies, drawn to fluctuant form By melody. And here allegiant moons 90 MUSIC. Wane at her passing, or in larger pearl Restore her ghostly twilight. Here, unseen. The lutes of all Elysiums of song Awake in hidden hands, Orphean winds Inducing her from quiet. And remote. From starry gateways to her glooms of rest, Cometh a murmuring, and whispers vague Of secret waters, and of harmonies Adrift upon such wings as seem to bear The weary unto sleep. For here abide The ghosts of all sweet strains that to the soul Pass through sound's charmed portals, and her winds Are wafture of celestial wings that sweep Her chords of shadowy gold to films of light. Ah sense of something beautiful forgot! The bubble joy lifteth from but a tear. She awakeneth, who, changeless in her might, 91 MUSIC. Hath come immortal on her hidden ways From other worlds and sorrows. At her voice, Imagination bareth its high vault, As when, in some great breathing of the night, The clouds leave heaven lonely, and reveal The deep of stars. Her beautiful unrest Holdeth the soul, awaking with her fire The hidden chords that of their trembling lift Our Ilions of vision. She hath sought The garlands of Aglaia, and the dawns Of Elis, and hath found a solitude. A silence broodeth on the lonely vale That once was Tempe. Vainly may we mourn Their empire faded like the realm of rose Of some forgotten sunset. Oversoon The twilight of their temples met the day. Alas! ere long the rippling harps are mute! The dust in Daphne wonderful and swift Hath leapt from many ploughshares. Artemis 92 MUSIC. Had still a secret place, a holy dusk; Her moonlight haunteth yet the hidden dew: She sleepeth with her nymphs. Alcyone Hath told her sadness to the evening star. It stirreth nightly in the vibrant deep : She Cometh nevermore. The gods have passed. They left us, as the soul for sleep, unheard, With never a farewell, and fled afar. In the sweet morning of an after-world To waken beautiful. Delight and dream Have passed beyond recall, and Memory Forever walketh with Regret. The years Grow dark. Our musings deepen. Life, a wraith, Hath taken in futility the ways That mete unending gloom. Heard from afar. Her voice but mourneth, as the midnight sea's. Borne from the foam and snows of haunted coasts. And home she hath not — nay, nor any rest. 93 MUSIC. Waif of eternity, her sightless eyes Are dewed of the illimitable mists That clasp her. And her night is very strange. And where she goeth, there is Loneliness. And where she loveth, Change and Death shall meet. Music is the voice of the forgotten years — The years that cry thro' her unchanging lips Their loss and evanescence. For her hands Are those of Memory, and lead the soul To yesterdays regretful, and the hush Of holy-lands beyond the winds of change. In her the voices of our dead are met. Vanished, lost light, beyond the bourne of Time — An echo, and the tears are at our hearts. Far wing the choric seraphim with her. 94 MUSIC. Lo! her ascensions and exalted thrones! Ah, ringing of the swift celestial feet On unconjectured heights of harmony 1 Silence and she are sisters. Silence waiteth Ever beyond her ultimates of flight, With gentle arms, and breast compassionate. In welcome. Music hath forever there A refuge tender, when, upborne afar, Beyond the stress of thought, and reach of woe. And past all travailing of finite things, Swooning she faltereth of the Infinite, Within the adumbration of whose light Standeth the archangel Pain, whose holy eyes Hold buried nights and seas; for whom, with her. We take thro' storm and mystery the toils Of life ascendant unto thrones afar. And for whose shadows come the eternal stars Of sympathy and peace. The voice of Love 95 MUSIC. To Sorrow, still she crieth to the soul Its homelessness, and telleth of domains Beyond the death-horizon, and of rest Beyond unrest, and of forgotten dreams That held the soul before this dream of life, In hush or troubling of the psychic deep. Being the voice wherewith immortal things Speak from their darkness. At her heart abide The unimagined harmonies that wait The archangel races of the farther years. Who to their changed after-skies shall lift The world's great evensong, Till that far dusk. She stirreth as a hunger at the heart. As grief and rapture of the human dream, And as a calling from eternal heights. 96 A WHITE ROSE. How pure the light thy petals hold In fragrance on the tideless air! How gently come the Hands that mould, Nor break the sleep of color there! How mutely on the richer day Thy wafture floats of patient breath! — We cannot hurry nor delay The feet of Time and Love and Death. Ah, calm thy day, ere evening take Her misty throng, upbuilt anew Of starlit gloom, till dawn awake The topaz hidden in the dew. 97 A WHITE ROSE. And sweet thy night, ere, uncontrolled, The restless winds of dawn depart; And, cast from sudden heights of gold, The shadows tremble at thy heart. O brother-life! the silent Pow'r Constrains thy wings with other bars; Remote from human time thine hour. Thine evening lit with other stars. Our senses light a little arc. Beyond whose twilight, vague, untrod, The reaches of denying Dark Withhold the infinity of God, Whose range of unrecorded night, And distance of eternal plan. Isle in equality of light The stars of life in flower and man; 98 A WHITE ROSE. And waken to recurrent morn Of bee or blossom, bird or leaf, The life that in the days unborn Shall sorrow in the halls of Grief. When I, afar from human fears, Illusive hope or joy intense. May yet, beyond estranging years. Attain the blossom's innocence. 99 THE SOUL'S EXILE. Slow to Hesperian gateways cold The stricken daylight turns, And lone upon the sunset's gold The star of evening burns. With hush of shadow dimmer grown, With peace to weary things. Night, from celestial glooms unknown, Her holy silence brings. She stills the mourning of the wind — How very deep the rest Her tranquil moonlight seems to find Upon the lily's breast! lOO THE soul's exile. Calm, beyond any dream of calm, Her soul unfathomed lies; The little fringes of the palm Are quiet on her skies. Untroubled sleeps the dreamless bird Beside the sleeping rill; The lucent stars alone are stirred. For all on earth is still. Profound the sense, at such an hour, Of some forgotten change; And distant moon and nearest flow'r Alike seem far and strange. lOI IN THE BEGINNING. In panoply the nations wait, Colossal, throned on many lands; Strong to fulfill with mailed hands The endless purposes of Fate. To thee, America, the word From deeps beyond the spirit's ken. In accents all unknown to men, Who, hearing, know not they have heard; But who, in yearnings nation-deep. Strive vastly, as a giant blind ; And docile to a hidden Mind, The ways that it hath willed, they keep. 1 02 IN THE BEGINNING. For straightly, in a crimson flood, A light hath sought thee from afar, Effulgent of a spectral star — The century-sun that sets in blood. It crowns thee where the shadows rift. And laps the armies and the ships. It glimmers where with patient lips, Awful and dumb, the cannon lift. And Liberty hath touched to flame A star within the nations' skies ; A fire than beacons far, nor dies; Or, dying, leaves our night of shame. But brief for them the Spaniard's rod; Beyond our morning and our South, They heard the message of her mouth, Who, seldom speaking, speaks as God. 103 IN THE BEGINNING. The Mother girds Her, glad to be Where war's long surf of carnage breaks. E'en now her mighty breath awakes The first low thunder of that sea. May I, 1898. 104 MEMORY OF THE DEAD. O thou that walkest with the quiet dead, And keepest vigil in the darkness cast Around the portals of the ruined past, What the strange glory set about thy head, That we, tho' other lands were surely fair, Should wander with thee in thy shadow- lands. And, yearning, grope for unresponsive hands. And faces vaguer for the twilight there? For thou art risen from the ghostly sea Of tears of many sorrows. Ah ! but when We turn aside to rest with Joy again. We pause, we sigh, we wander yet with thee. 105 TO MY WIFE. Not beauty of the marble set To Art's intensest line, Nor depth of light and color met, Tho' all indeed are thine — Not these thy loveliness impart, For, wrought by wiser Hands, The charm that makes thee all thou art Beyond transition stands; And surer fealty to thee, O fairest! I confess. For that beyond all fair I see The grace of tenderness, Past Art's endeavor to portray Or poet's word to reach; For all that Beauty seems to say Is told in feebler speech. 1 06 THE HAUNTING. Dear, thou art ever with me. For it seems That in all forms of beauty I must trace Thine utter loveliness, and find thy grace In gardens v^here the drooping lily teems ; Nor may the vision vanish : still it gleams In all of sweet and beautiful whose place Is with the day ; at nightfall, lo I thy face, A phantom pearl within the gulf of dreams! I would some hidden twilight held us twain Wherein all rapture and nepenthe are; Where we might lose the memory of Pain, And smiling, gaze on Sorrow from afar, As one long dead, who sees sad Earth again From Paradise, and deems her but a star. 107 WAR. Ah ! long ago, by that far hope beguiled, Men said, "Tho' now his hands are strong with steel. Yet shall War tremble, and the Titan reel Back into darkness, and his trumpets wild Thrill with his death-cry. Then shall man, grown mild, Ere setting of the century-sun repeal War's rubrics, and at gentler altars kneel, And Peace come to us as a little child." But with the falling of the last red sands. Like to a blood-drop gleamed the morning- star; And all the dawn burned crimson from afar; And the new age upon the guarding lands Came with a sword in his uplifted hands, Crying the red evangel of old War. io8 NIGHTMARE. Departing troubled to her tryst with Sleep, The soul, that night, paused doubtful and afraid Within the portals and eternal shade Of his great temple. All the shapes that sweep Athwart its twilight, from the abysm they keep Rose in tremendous menace. She, dismayed. Turned to her day in trembling, nor delayed Her breathless flight from that portentous deep. But thou, O Death! shalt feign no dream nor dawn, Tho' aeons sunder the hermetic tomb, And light annul the mausolean gloom — Nay! tho' contending sun to sun be drawn In ruin that the worlds diffused attest To watchers round Arcturus, I shall rest! 109 THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY. In sleep I saw her, the immutable, Who came in haunting on the farther dreams Of all the poets. As a mist she fled Before mine, eyes enchanted ; and her face Was like a lily hidden in holy dusks — Even such as gaze, in vision far from Time, From out the skies of dreamland, being moons In slumber's realm of shadow. And her eyes Were great with griefs unsearchablq, and gleamed, Sorrow beyond them, like the larger dew Of Aidenn, having each Love's perfect star Mirrored therein. And with her came the hush That follows music dying, or is peace About all dead things beautiful. Low light, Softer than shadow midmost of the rose, no THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY. A raiment from the footfall to the brow, Held her, and clung about her trembling hair. And she spake words I knew not, but I knew That this was she whom every poet's soul Had found for once in vision, and had felt Thenceforth her presence alway, that, unseen, Still broke upon his sleep, and was by day A hunger and a haunting and a grace, Unutterable. For that chord the heart Holds vibrant unto wonder, at her words. Sang suddenly; and her untroubled voice, Tho' glad, yet held an echoing of harps To which dead singers had saddened, hearing there The sorrow in world-voices and the tides Of Time in travail. And the radiance That clasped her limbs was as the memory And afterglow of all transmuting light That from old moons of Arcady fell wan III THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY. Thro' pearly blossom, or about the isles Of ocean, long forsaken of their gods, Gleamed from the foam at twilight. And the hush That drank her voice so like to falling rills, Lay sweeter than all harmony: therein Slept Music and her dreams, and there was set The silence that enfolds the ineffable. And I had spoken, but a wonder held My lips, that I, unworthy, should behold What others had in guerdon for the pains Of Poesy, (tho' seen but once, and seen But for a sorrow) ; and in words half-mad Had striven to stay her flight. But swift the mind Turned with its dawn-light on that vale of dream: She smiled, then passed forever to her day. 112 TO KATHERINE. Discerning its abode so fair, So delicate with all of grace, I deem thine eyes in truth declare The inherent soul's abiding-place. But oh ! 't is harder of belief To think, illumined with thy smile, That thou art made a child of grief, A waif our careless hours exile. Yet such thou art. Thy spirit sighs For vanished heavens that could not last- A watcher of unchanging skies. In lands and seasons of the past. Where Memory, with tireless sight. Seeks upon unforgotten ways Her visions holy with the light Of irrecoverable days. 113 MYSTERY. Men say that sundered by enormous nights Burn star and nearest star. That where companioned seem the sister lights The great abysses are. So held by Life's unsympathetic dark, We press to hidden goals. From gulfs unshared the friending fire& we mark, And we are lonely souls — Your hearts, O friends ! beyond their veiling bars, Are hidden deep away. Your faces gleam familiar as the stars, And as unknown as they. 114 TO MY SISTER. O face where light and roses stir, As bloomed on younger skies The cloudland gardens faint that were The dawn in Paradise! What fanes of love — ere life be done — What hearts shall hold thee fair, Child of a line whose setting sun Is yellow on thy hair? What love shall wake thy dreaming breast, Controlling thee in fears? — Too young to know the heart's unrest. Too innocent for tears! "5 TO MY SISTER. I fain in seasons yet untold Would stand thy trust and guard, As one that, hopeless, longs to hold Thy virgin hopes unmarred. Joy is the pledge of grief to be, A surety of the way That leads to loneliness for thee. Who art so glad to-day. For Beauty waits, and helpless waits, A heritage of woe ; She may not find pacific Fates, Nor years untroubled know. And certain as the fine and pure Accord their gift of fair, So sure must Sorrow wake, so sure Must come the feet of Care. ii6 TO MY SISTER. Swift on the glory of the dream The barren dawn must spring; Not without shadow comes the gleam Of any perfect thing. Not they that grant us Beauty's light Its deeper joy attain, Since only worlds in outer night The star's irradiance gain. I deem it sad that Time should mar A thing as fair as thou, Or dim with years the locks that are A light above thy brow. But on the paths that wait thy feet Unfriendly powers conspire; The days thy heart shall find so sweet Are wonderful but dire: 117 TO MY SISTER. The winds of Eden stir the rose In gardens glad and strange, Lost isles where Youth enchanted goes. Nor dreams of care and change. Life fashions, and in mystery, A lure for Love's young eyes — Fond Love, who changeless hopes to see That rainbow on the skies! Ah, holiness of beauty! lent To mortals' undesert — How far thy glories from content, And with what peril girt! ii8 THE POETS. I saw from Tamalpais the morning star Herald the morning thro' her gates of gold (Tho' yet the night reigned absolute and old, And day seemed past recall, or most afar) ; Whereat the hosts of light that cinctured are In evanescent roses, and that hold The vanguard of the dawn, uprising, rolled To sea the twilight's grey, enormous bar. Sons of the dawn! Ye whose exalted light Foreruns the day, from an inviolate height Your voices fall ; for, set above your kind, Ye see the morrow when the world gropes blind In ancient darkness — ere the East is white, And the new mornings strike from mind to mind. 119 REINCARNATION. Once by the sea her lips, laid hushed on mine, Stirred faintly, saying, "I love thee!" Here, how still I Nor in her eyes is that unchanging thrill As of the starlight, solemn and divine. Death being possessed of them, for if they shine, 'T is by a sea that other shadows fill. Where foileth ever her pursuing will The unapproachable horizon line. Alas! if irretrievably we part . . . The spirit boweth with her weight of fears. Ah ! met again within the farther years, Shall I not know thee for the ghost thou art? Or will there be no wonder at the heart And sudden starlight in remembering tears? 120 ON READING THE POEMS OF FATHER TABB. So airy sweet the fragile song, I deemed his visions true, And roamed Edenic vales along, Lit by celestial dew. Illusive gleamed the timeless bow'rs ; The winds and streams were such As Eve had mourned — but ah, the flow'rs ! Too delicate for touch 1 121 THE PARTING. Gathered they sadly in that quieter day, O soul ! thy sister spirits, when that thou Bent to thine ancient burden of the clay? Fell not some ghostly tear-drop on thy brow? Surely they stood as mourners, when the mesh Of those recurrent cerements of the dust Netted the spirit in her tomb of flesh. They mourned, as ever the abandoned must. And Memory, with all her joys and tears. Departing cried: "Farewell! we meet again! " But Sorrow said : "I for all worlds and years In awful constancy to life remain." 122 THE PARTING. And Love : "I share with her the mortal skies." Their voices are forgotten here; yet when In some dear face awake Love's changeless eyes, We tremble — almost we remember then. 123 WORDS FOR LANGE'S " BLUMENLIED." How many flowers are gently met Within my garden fair! The daffodil, the violet, And lilies dear are there. They fade and pass, the fleeting flowers, And brief their little light; They hold not Love's diviner hours, Nor Sorrow's human night. Tho' one by one their blooms depart. No change thy lover knows, For mine the fragrance of thy heart, O thou my perfect rose I 124 THE ALTAR-FLAME. I saw a mountain at the close of day, Snow-crowned and lonely, where the after- glow Lingered, the ghost of sunset, fading slow. I said, " This is God's altar, and the way Earthward, of things eternal, even all they That see His face." And evening was, and lo! I was aware how that inviolate snow Upheld a fire! As one who in dismay Views what he deems a mystery, so I Stood silent, till, an alien glory grown. That light broke loose to a remoter sky And in its deeper heaven burned alone. So had the star of evening, fancied nigh. Sate for a little that stupendous throne. 125 TO ONE ASKING LIGHTER SONGS. A gentle sadness best becomes The features of the perfect Muse : The shock of laughter but benumbs The lips that crave immortal dews. For she hath known diviner fears, And she hath held her vigils far; But never in untroubled years, Nor world that grief came not to mar. For joy is as the wreaths that lie Foam-wrought along the sterile sands; And sorrow, as the voice whereby The ocean saddens all its lands, — 126 TO ONE ASKING LIGHTER SONGS. That calls afar to pine or palm The changeless trouble of the deep; That murmurs in the gentlest calm, And haunts, unknown, the realm of sleep. But pleasure's foam, so fondly prized, We strive to keep (unduly dear — Its very touch scarce realized) With hands unwarmed, till, lo! a tear. 127 THE SEA-FOG. Far from the marble reaches of the foam, It wanders, phantom of the grey old sea. The night wherein it passes silently Was once a deeper darkness — even the home Of the abyss. So might man's spirit roam. Revisiting, from realms unknown set free, Forsaken haunts of its mortality. Sad in the changeless starlight of their dome. So she might come, so from the eternal prime Where night and sorrowing together cease, Pass earthward in that piteous release. And shall I call her from the tearless clime? From dream and light of her abode of peace? Nay, lest my grieving reach her out of Time! 128 THE NILE. Low moaning in the shadows of their might, I echo all the voices of my dead. I call, until their memory be fled, Thoth and Osiris sepulchred in night, High Cheops and the Ramses. In my sight Arise the ruins of their pomp, stained red As by eternal sunset. I am led To where the seas are mystery and light. Thus ordered stand thy destinies, O soul ! Thou callest, ere the lesser vision flee. Thy cherished fled before thee to the goal Far in the shadows of Eternity. Thou art drawn down to where Death's thunders roll. And lost at twilight in a stranger sea. 129 DARKNESS. The Night sate weeping in a lonely land; Or ever, in the faithless truce of Grief, Held dumb communion — ominous relief I — With Mystery and Silence, hard at hand. Then crept that vast conspiracy to-West; And then came bird-song and the sunlight, born Of that unnoted miracle of morn. And for my labor in the darkness, rest My mind, grown weary with the day — it seemed — Had lingered o'er the poet's lines too long; Or snows of sorrow hid the flowers of song; For fire and beauty shunned his page, I deemed. 130 DARKNESS. Then music was, and lo ! beneath the dome Of Song's high land I wandered. Found at last Were seas and cities of the fabled past, And faery islands girt with golden foam. Will Dawn at last, beyond the mortal years, Reveal the land that now by faith we name, And Music with celestial lips proclaim The mystery of unrequited tears? 131 THE IDEAL. Red, in what maze of indecisive war, Sought I thy dooming beauty in the past? For as a light from firmaments o'ercast, Or pharos high on Death's forgotten shore, Thou fiamest on my soul for evermore. Thy burning eyes unsearchable outlast All suns and furies of the cosmic Vast — The stars supreme that Night to Godhood bore. Thou art as Morning in her house of gold. When mute, dethroned, unhappy Night hath fled To refuge with the ocean grey and old, Companioned by the vassal stars in flight. And rout of armies panoplied in red. The rest are shadows — thou indeed art Light. 132 TO COLONEL JOHN S. ENGS. Kindred to Art's creative school Her sons discerning are : So gleams within the glassing pool The likeness of the star. 133 "SAD SEA-HORIZONS." I yearn, beside the solemn sea, To pass its calm horizon-line : In vain, O longing soul of mine ! The star it hides is not for thee. How strong that hunger of the heart For marvels past the haunted bourne Of unfamiliar seas that mourn The tale immortal to impart Of loves forlorn and wars unsung. Forgotten tragedies that were Of old upon the sea, and stir No music on the poet's tongue. Ghostly, supreme, their voices lift Beyond the purple of all seas ; They lure afar the questing breeze. And call us that we follow swift — 134 "SAD SEA-HORIZONS." Voices too sweet for mortal sense, That waken where the billows surge A little past the lonely verge Of seas unknown that call us thence. " O beautiful and far away! " The lips of ocean seem to cry To youth divine that yearns to try The perils of a distant day. Star of romance, how far thy goal ! Remoter than the moons that gleam Above the shadow-lands of dream, Thy futile splendors stir the soul. And we that seek thee shall not find, Nor linger where thy marvels are. Elusive as the sea-line far. And all the secret of the wind. 135 EVENING, Slowly she wanders up the river sands, Faint on her brow the flush of lapsing day. She comes with Silence from the twilight lands, And smiles to think the dawn so far away. Day's fragrance lingers round her. In her hair Are tiny lilies trembling lest they die ; And Sleep, her child, is near, who has in care The weariness of worlds. The ceaseless cry Of timid voices that the day had stilled Comes to her wandering. Are those her eyes That greaten with the dew, as if tear-filled. Or lowly stars awaking in the skies? 136 EVENING. I shall not hear until mine evening come, And flower-shadows fall across my grave, The gentler voices that the day made dumb, Nor hold the plenitude of peace I crave. 137 ULTIMA THULE. Alone I watched one twilight-time A little cloud go by, Remote within the fairer clime Of sunset's gleaming sky. So far, so bright, it drifted on O'er ocean's azure wall I could but muse of glories gone. In days beyond recall. Swift, as to dim Hesperides, The wind fled on its way; It whispered to the kindly trees And paused, but could not stay. 138 ULTIMA THULE. The evening star at ocean's brink Passed seaward with the night. How pure it burned! I sighed to think What eyes would seek its light. I fain with star and cloud and wind Had held elysian quest And sought all secrets undivined, Beyond the mystic West; But turned me to familiar things, A lowlier way to go, For who shall take their deathless wings, Or who their freedom know? A sense of loss was at my heart. Of beauty far and strange. Of deeper joys in lives apart — And over all, what change! 139 THE SWOON. Upon me (as on Siddim's lethal plain And on the cities of accurst desire Came in its panoply of clinging fire From Heaven's arsenal the mordant rain) Fell Anguish. From that ministry in vain Respite I sought: implacable that ire: The torment deepened, lingering and dire, Till God had numbered all the nerves of pain. The mercy of her unremembered face Oblivion turned upon me. At her sight, Down gulfs beyond imagining to trace, . The realm of self sank in portentous flight; The Spirit faltered in her secret place; And lo! Pain's war rolled on another night! 140 « THE CITY AND THE SILENCE. Deeper than ocean's thunder unsubdued, Titanic voices of the warfare strong Of man on fellow-man about me throng In my captivity. Yet how elude The tumult of the torrents that exclude The voices that to loneliness belong? How may I find thy silences, O Song? Thine angels whisper but in solitude. I am set far from that. Fast as a flow'r In some sad city-garden, for release I search my grim horizon without cease. Craving, if only for a little hour. The stillness and the shadow of a bow'r Where the blue mountains hold a realm of peace. 141 THE DIRECTORY. Selective Time! 'mid all the burthened reams Toil graves no name thy fretting moth shall spare, Even tho' one say, "Behold! my fame, a flare Remote in alien dusks, forever gleams, Lingering with the star." For glory seems, In sooth, a sunset drowned by glooming air. Nor empire may the stellar vigil share — Gone like the music of forgotten dreams! Gone ! till on worlds that serve a younger star Estranged by voids that blot Arcturus' light, Or sunder Vega from the bourne of sight. Remoter life shall scan in vain the Deep — Girt with the voiceless skies that hold afar Eternal night, sealing the race's sleep. 142 t' I 111111