VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS.

Your hair and chin are like the hair And chin Burne-Jones’s ladies wear; You were unfashionably fair In ’83; And sad you were when girls are gay, You read a book about Le vrai Mérite de l’homme, alone in May. What can it be, Le vrai mérite de l’homme? Not gold, Not titles that are bought and sold, Not wit that flashes and is cold, But Virtue merely! Instructed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (And Jean-Jacques, surely, ought to know), You bade the crowd of foplings go, You glanced severely, Dreaming beneath the spreading shade Of ‘that vast hat the Graces made;’ [88] So Rouget sang—while yet he played With courtly rhyme, And hymned great Doisi’s red perruque, And Nice’s eyes, and Zulmé’s look, And dead canaries, ere he shook The sultry time With strains like thunder. Loud and low Methinks I hear the murmur grow, The tramp of men that come and go With fire and sword. They war against the quick and dead, Their flying feet are dashed with red, As theirs the vintaging that tread Before the Lord. O head unfashionably fair, What end was thine, for all thy care? We only see thee dreaming there: We cannot see The breaking of thy vision, when The Rights of Man were lords of men, When virtue won her own again In ’93.

Thine eyes are like the sea, my dear, The wand’ring waters, green and grey; Thine eyes are wonderful and clear, And deep, and deadly, even as they; The spirit of the changeful sea Informs thine eyes at night and noon, She sways the tides, and the heart of thee, The mystic, sad, capricious Moon!

The Moon came down the shining stair Of clouds that fleck the summer sky, She kissed thee, saying, “Child, be fair, And madden men’s hearts, even as I; Thou shalt love all things strange and sweet, That know me and are known of me; The lover thou shalt never meet, The land where thou shalt never be!”

She held thee in her chill embrace, She kissed thee with cold lips divine, She left her pallor on thy face, That mystic ivory face of thine; And now I sit beside thy feet, And all my heart is far from thee, Dreaming of her I shall not meet, And of the land I shall not see!

’Tis thought Odysseus when the strife was o’er With all the waves and wars, a weary while, Grew restless in his disenchanted isle, And still would watch the sunset, from the shore, Go down the ways of gold, and evermore His sad heart followed after, mile on mile, Back to the Goddess of the magic wile, Calypso, and the love that was of yore.

Thou too, thy haven gained, must turn thee yet To look across the sad and stormy space, Years of a youth as bitter as the sea, Ah, with a heavy heart, and eyelids wet, Because, within a fair forsaken place The life that might have been is lost to thee.

Homer, thy song men liken to the sea With all the notes of music in its tone, With tides that wash the dim dominion Of Hades, and light waves that laugh in glee Around the isles enchanted; nay, to me Thy verse seems as the River of source unknown That glasses Egypt’s temples overthrown In his sky-nurtured stream, eternally.

No wiser we than men of heretofore To find thy sacred fountains guarded fast; Enough, thy flood makes green our human shore, As Nilus Egypt, rolling down his vast His fertile flood, that murmurs evermore Of gods dethroned, and empires in the past.

Dead—he is dead! The rouge has left a trace On that thin cheek where shone, perchance, a tear, Even while the people laughed that held him dear But yesterday. He died,—and not in grace, And many a black-robed caitiff starts apace To slander him whose Tartuffe made them fear, And gold must win a passage for his bier, And bribe the crowd that guards his resting-place.

Ah, Molière, for that last time of all, Man’s hatred broke upon thee, and went by, And did but make more fair thy funeral. Though in the dark they hid thee stealthily, Thy coffin had the cope of night for pall, For torch, the stars along the windy sky!

The wail of Moschus on the mountains crying The Muses heard, and loved it long ago; They heard the hollows of the hills replying, They heard the weeping water’s overflow; They winged the sacred strain—the song undying, The song that all about the world must go,— When poets for a poet dead are sighing, The minstrels for a minstrel friend laid low.

And dirge to dirge that answers, and the weeping For Adonais by the summer sea, The plaints for Lycidas, and Thyrsis (sleeping Far from ‘the forest ground called Thessaly’), These hold thy memory, Bion, in their keeping, And are but echoes of the moan for thee.

Now the bright crocus flames, and now The slim narcissus takes the rain, And, straying o’er the mountain’s brow, The daffodilies bud again. The thousand blossoms wax and wane On wold, and heath, and fragrant bough, But fairer than the flowers art thou, Than any growth of hill or plain.

Ye gardens, cast your leafy crown, That my Love’s feet may tread it down, Like lilies on the lilies set; My Love, whose lips are softer far Than drowsy poppy petals are, And sweeter than the violet!

The winter is upon us, not the snow, The hills are etched on the horizon bare, The skies are iron grey, a bitter air, The meagre cloudlets shudder to and fro. One yellow leaf the listless wind doth blow, Like some strange butterfly, unclassed and rare. Your footsteps ring in frozen alleys, where The black trees seem to shiver as you go.

Beyond lie church and steeple, with their old And rusty vanes that rattle as they veer, A sharper gust would shake them from their hold, Yet up that path, in summer of the year, And past that melancholy pile we strolled To pluck wild strawberries, with merry cheer.

Apollo left the golden Muse And shepherded a mortal’s sheep, Theocritus of Syracuse!

To mock the giant swain that woo’s The sea-nymph in the sunny deep, Apollo left the golden Muse.

Afield he drove his lambs and ewes, Where Milon and where Battus reap, Theocritus of Syracuse!

To watch thy tunny-fishers cruise Below the dim Sicilian steep Apollo left the golden Muse.

Ye twain did loiter in the dews, Ye slept the swain’s unfever’d sleep, Theocritus of Syracuse!

That Time might half with his confuse Thy songs,—like his, that laugh and leap,— Theocritus of Syracuse, Apollo left the golden Muse!

Ye say that when a man is dead He never more shall lift his head, As doth the flower perishèd, Nor break ne sweet ne bitter bread. I hold you much in scorn! Lo, if you cast in earth a seed That seemeth to be dead indeed, I wot ye shall have corn; And all men shall rejoice and reap: And so it fares with them that sleep, The narrow house doth them but keep Until the judgment morn.

There is an end of grief and mirth, There is an end of all things born, And if ye sow into the earth A seed, ye shall have corn; But if ye sow its withered root It shall not bear you any fruit, It will not sprout and spring again; And if ye look to gather grain, Of men mote ye have scorn. Man’s body buried is the sown Dead root, whose flower is over-blown.

Beshrew thee for thy subtleties That melt the hearts of men with lies, An evil task hath he that tries To still thy subtle tongue! But look ye round and ye shall see The Dames that Queens of dead men be, I wot there are no mo than three, When all is said and sung.

Hic intrabunt et cantabunt tres Reginæ.

I am the Queen Persephone. The lips of Grecians prayed to me, Saying, I give men sleep; But I would have ye well to know That with me none do slumber so; But there be some that weep, And juster souls content to dwell Among the fields of asphodel, By the Nine Waters deep.

I am the Queen of Hela’s House, Great clouds I bind upon my brows; Night for a covering. For them I hold, I will ye wot They sorrow, but they slumber not, They have no lust to sing, And never comes a merry voice, Nor doth a soul of them rejoice Until their uprising.

I am a Queen of Paradise, And who shall look on me, I wis, His spirit shall find grace. Whoso dwells with me walks along In gardens glad with small birds’ song, A flowered and grassy place, Therein the souls of blessèd men Wait each, till comes his love again, To look upon her face!

Thou, Sir Diabolus, art shent, I wot that well ye might repent, But till Midsummer fall in Lent, Ye will not cease to sin. Get thee to dungeon underground And sit beside thy man, Mahound. I wot I would ye twain were bound For evermore therein.

Fugiat Diabolus ad locum suum.

Which my name is Stoker Bill, And a pleasant berth I fill, And the care the ladies take of me is clipping; They have made me pretty snug, With a blooming Persian rug, In the Ladies’ new Æsthetic Training Shipping.

There’s my Whistler pastels, there, As are quite beyond compare, And a portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist skipping; From such art we all expect Quite a softening effect, In the Ladies’ new Æsthetic Training Shipping.

And my beer comes in a mug— Such a rare old Rhodian jug! And here I sits æsthetically sipping; And I drinks my grog or ale On a chair by Chippendale— We’ve no others in our modern training shipping.

There’s our first Liftenant, too, Is a rare old (China) Blue, And you do not very often catch him tripping At a monogram or mark, But no more than Noah’s ark, Does he know the way to manage this here shipping.

But the Boys? the Boys, they stands With white lilies in their hands, And they do not know the meaning of a whipping: For the whole delightful ship is Like a dream of Lippo Lippi’s, More than what you mostly see in modern shipping.

Well, some coves they cuts up rough, And they calls æsthetics stuff, And they says as we’ve no business to keep dipping In the rates, but ladies likes it, And our flag we never strikes it— Bless old England’s new Æsthetic Training Shipping!

“Once Cagn was like a father, kind and good, But He was spoiled by fighting many things; He wars upon the lions in the wood, And breaks the Thunder-bird’s tremendous wings; But still we cry to Him,—We are thy brood— O Cagn, be merciful! and us He brings To herds of elands, and great store of food, And in the desert opens water-springs.”

So Qing, King Nqsha’s Bushman hunter, spoke, Beside the camp-fire, by the fountain fair, When all were weary, and soft clouds of smoke Were fading, fragrant, in the twilit air: And suddenly in each man’s heart there woke A pang, a sacred memory of prayer.

As one that for a weary space has lain Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, Where that Ææan isle forgets the main, And only the low lutes of love complain, And only shadows of wan lovers pine, As such an one were glad to know the brine Salt on his lips, and the large air again,— So gladly, from the songs of modern speech Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, And through the music of the languid hours, They hear like ocean on a western beach The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Ah, mystic child of Beauty, nameless maid, Dateless and fatherless, how long ago, A Greek, with some rare sadness overweighed, Shaped thee, perchance, and quite forgot his woe! Or Raphael thy sweetness did bestow, While magical his fingers o’er thee strayed, Or that great pupil of Verrocchio Redeemed thy still perfection from the shade

That hides all fair things lost, and things unborn, Where one has fled from me, that wore thy grace, And that grave tenderness of thine awhile; Nay, still in dreams I see her, but her face Is pale, is wasted with a touch of scorn, And only on thy lips I find her smile.