Part 2
Through all the hurrying toil and strife, The uproar of this sordid life In which we sorrow and rejoice, O soul, how can we hear thy voice?
But when the heat of strife is past And quiet folds us round at last, And all our unaccomplished schemes Are dimmer than remembered dreams,
When deaf ambition’s restless will Is either satisfied or still, And tides that rose in stormy rage Ebb calmly from the shores of age--
O soul! in some such quiet lain We’ll listen for thy voice again, Our hearts by time made wise and meek, And in the silence hear thee speak.
And listening thus and hearing thee The light thou seest we shall see, Shall know what thou for many a year Wert saying when we could not hear,
And find the truth for which we yearn, Which seems so dark and hard to learn, A clear and simple thing that, lo! We always knew, and did not know.
THE LAST DAWN
From my window fades, like a blur of the breath, The passing shadow of Night, And Dawn looks in with the face of Death, Silent, and cold, and white:
As at last, when the last night’s silence shall break And the darkness rolls away, The eyes that were sleeping shall see when they wake Death with the face of Day.
A FORLORN HOPE
Lest you should feel That I am all unworthy of your grace, I set me in your presence to reveal Whate’er of good within my heart hath place.
Lest you should then Love me too well at first, and then despise-- Finding I am but weak as other men-- I do not hide my folly from your eyes.
Mask’d with no sham, When thus my strivings and my sins you see, Although you cannot love the man I am, You yet may love the man I strive to be.
THE CUPBEARER
The beauty of the world but runs to waste, For sunrise after sunrise comes and goes And leaves no trace of all its splendour gone, And sunset after sunset, like the sea We cross in dreams to reach the gates of God, Ebbs far and farther, and is seen no more; Night through her billowy clouds upswings the moon And blurs the dark with flying mists of light, Or bares her fathomless deeps of slumbrous calm And silent hollows pebbled thick with stars, But fades and is forgotten of the day; And love and hope and joy and youth, and all The bloom of life and sweetness of the year
Flows past us ever to its bourne of death, Sings like a stream adown its sunny hill And sighs through sunless places of the vale, Its depths and shallows glimmering strangely flecked With shadowed gloom and glory of earth and heaven, Slips from our touch and flashes out of sight.
And even as it passes and is lost-- Ere yet it spills into the sunset sea That far-off murmurs by the gates of God-- The immortal Hebe captive among men, Art dips her golden cup into the stream And lifts the living water to our lips That we may taste how sweet is all we lose.
A DEAD FRIENDSHIP
There is no more to say; Some bitterness of thought is left unsaid And broods within the heart and will not go, But leave it thus untold to fade away, And give no life to what is better dead: Each knows the other knows it; leave it so.
Henceforward we may meet With knowledge of each other, but not love; Here for the last time we shake hands and part; Our love has waned, our faith grown incomplete; Which is at fault we may not hope to prove, For each acquits himself to his own heart.
Ah! friendship has its spring Like all things else, its growth and its decay: It may not last, its summer is not long; When it is dead and ended, shall we bring But bitter words unto its grave, and say: Thus did thou wrong me! Thus thou did’st me wrong!
Nay, hush! let us forget. What profit is it to remember all? Let us remember only what was best. Things that are bitter, things that pain and fret, Ill-thoughts we may regret but not recall, Let them be all forgotten unexpressed.
And I will think that you Died with your hand in mine, one summer when No shadow of this sadder time to be Clouded those sunny days our friendship knew, That thus, ere life grew sad, and even then, You died.--I ask you to think thus of me.
So each, perhaps, may keep Remembrance as of one he used to know, A dear, dead friend he ne’er again shall meet, And ne’er forget; forgetfulness shall heap Its dust on all but that, and we may grow To find in such remembrance something sweet.
THE WIDER VIEW
Nay, if your friend should prove A secret foe, And where you sowed your love No love should grow; If when your hope had end, One smiled thereat, One promised to befriend And then forgat-- You may not judge the world by this man or by that.
What though to-day the ways Are chill with sleet? The year has many days, And some are sweet; And while the world no less Within its span Hath still one heart to bless For two that ban, You need but lose your faith in men, and not in man.
UNTIL THE EVENING
Tired with the daily toil for daily bread, The spirit slaving for the body’s needs, The brain and nerve are dulled, and the heart bleeds And breaks with grief of brooding thought unsaid: Were we but born to labour and be fed? To spend our souls in lowly, trivial deeds, Mere sordid coin the guerdon God concedes? Ah, yet press on though with a fainting tread--
Till evening ends our work and stills our cries: Then we may find our lowness is our height, Our crown the tasks we wrought with sobbing breath; As common things a sunset glorifies, This life, at last, may robe itself in light And stand transfigured at the touch of Death.
AFTER PARTING
When the sun sets, And I am tired of work and fall asleep, And may no longer weep For any old regrets, Haply I still shall dream of what was best On earth, and so have heaven in happy rest.
And surely then My wistful feet shall often find a way, Unlit of any day, Back to this world of men-- Back through the shadowy land of dreams, afar To this dear world where you that love me are.
Until, at last, Your day is ended also, and you pace That same dim land, and trace My footprints where I passed, And follow them and meet me dreaming through The heavenward way once more to earth and you.
THE GUEST
Time runs so swiftly when the heart is glad, Let me be sometimes sad, Lest the all-happy noon Flash into eve and fade, and I grow old too soon.
Let me be sometimes sad that life may gain Sweetness from sorrow’s rain, Nor bask till day be done, A scentless blossom, shrivelling in a cloudless sun.
For broken hearts to riper wisdom wake Than hearts that never break, And from their anguish flows The joy that tearless laughter seeks but never knows.
Since sorrows are life’s winters, in our primes If we be sad sometimes, At last, one winter more, Age comes but as a guest that stayed with us before.
The heart renews its youth when griefs are past, And age so comes, at last, Like some remembered pain That shall but come and go, and leave us young again.
THE DREAMER
Night is the lord of our birth, and lord of our death he shall be: We are visions born of a sleep, as mists are born of the sea.
And the hand we press, the face we know, and the voice that replies, The folly and sin of the fool, the wisdom and work of the wise,
The world that echoes about us with ripple of laughter and song, With music and shoutings of triumph, with wailing of sorrow and wrong,
And all that the happy enjoy and the wretched have toiled for in vain, All the good that we lose and the little good that we gain--
Are nothing, or will be nothing when, sighing farewells, we embark And return to the void, or are blown to some isle of new life in the dark.
Here, we are only the dreams of a slumber disturbed by our tears; The sounds of our lives are as noises the Dreamer but dreams that he hears--
Unreal, confused and fantastic, they touch his compassion at most As the weariful cries of the wind when it wanders all night like a ghost--
And all that is sweetest and dearest, and all that is fairest and best Seems but more fancied and fabled and more of a dream than the rest.
Ah! let us live, let us die--all’s one when the night shall have flown! We, who can wrangle and reason and dream we have dreams of our own,
We--with our pride and our meanness, with self the crowned king in our courts, And Mammon our god in the highest--are less than the least of our thoughts:
For the world of the Dreamer remains, and even the things that we seem By the might and the magic of labour to fashion and build in his dream
Will remain, when ourselves shall have gone and the dream-lives now lying dumb And dim in the brain of the Sleeper--his dreams of the years to come--
Are here to inherit the work of our hands and to struggle and fret For the pleasures and honours that we have forgotten, and they shall forget.
And the Dreamer?--Oh, heart, if our knowledge were knowing, our seeing but sight, We might know the Unknown that is dreaming and dreams us here out of the night,
And if there shall yet be an end of his sleep and the visions he makes, And whether he then will recall us, remembering his dreams when he wakes.
ENOUGH
Men there be who lose their days Toiling after empty praise, All they do they count as vain Should the world their work disdain; If I hear but praise from thee, That is praise enough for me.
Shall I flatter high or low Fearful lest I make a foe? Shall I sorrow without end For the falseness of a friend?-- If I win but love from thee, That is love enough for me.
Other worlds afar may rise Somewhere under other skies, Other worlds and fairer still-- Sail and seek them they that will! Wheresoe’er I walk with thee There is world enough for me.
Wiser men than I may say Heaven is high and far away, Or may prove with reasonings rare Heaven is neither here nor there; Here where thou art, I with thee, This is heaven enough for me.
LIGHT
When we have sought Him vainly otherwhere-- Have closed our books and hushed our idle prayer, Too weary and heart-sore To seek Him any more--
And, loving yet our human kindred, go, Forgetting self, to work with them, nor know By lonely paths benign We reach the height divine:
Then, mid the living world where He hath wrought, In some chance word, or thought, or glimpse of thought, When all our search is past, We may see God at last.
A SONG OF SHADOWS
The city is weird with shadows, In the shine of a sunny day You may see them darken the pavements-- Furtive, and hushed, and grey, They crouch by the brooding houses, They flit through the streets below: Every man has his shadow That follows him to and fro.
And still when the day is sunless They haunt the heart of the din, They dance at the heels of pleasure, They run before folly and sin, Love, and honour, and beauty They follow without a sound--If the sun shine out but a moment You may see them darken the ground.
The city is weird with shadows, And fear or thought of them lies On pallid and weary faces, In hungry and wistful eyes, In brains that madden with sorrow, In hearts that sadden and break-- Shadows of day and darkness Nor sun nor moon ever make.
Heedless each of the other, We people the crowded way, We are shadows born of the daylight And pass and fade with the day, And the glory and gold we garner, What is it when all is done?-- Every man has his shadow, Though he walk in the shade or the sun.
RECOMPENSE
Through day and dark our years go by, And youth is sweet with dreams that die; In winter’s wistful sunset gleams Like ghosts they haunt us from the dead; But Time, that took away my dreams, Has given me you instead.
Though youth must pass and none can say The hour it left him or the day, Though Time shall take our joys, in sooth, Who brings us joy again but He? And when he took away my youth He gave your love to me.
THE HAUNTED CITY
Some heart’s remembrance and regret Fill every street with life profound: This corner where of old we met To me has since been hallowed ground; I never pass in sun or rain Now, but I meet you here again.
We cannot go from where we dwell And leave behind no lingering trace; Where in the past our shadow fell A shadow of us haunts the place; Returning now, ourselves may there Disturb some ghost of what we were.
The stones are thrilled by many a tread That leaves no footprint where it strays; Shades of the living and the dead In silence throng the noisy ways: Here where I meet in shower or shine Your ghost, you haply meet with mine.
The air has sounds we cannot hear, Is dim with shapes that none can see; Though dear the living voice, and dear The sight of living faces be, With kindlier yearnings yet we greet The friends we see not when we meet.
RETURNING
Spring pipes an airy measure That only he can play: I caught its echo on the hill This morning while the world was still And the dreamy hollows began to fill With a laughing rumour of day.
The hours of sleep are over, The wintry night is past; Spring pipes his joyance far and near And hope awakes in hearts that hear, As the bud and leaf and bloom o’ the year Shall wake to his calling at last.
Adown through greening valleys, Up over hill and wold-- Oh, youth and joy and love are met In every note his lips beget! And the world shall hear and follow him yet, And forget it is growing old.
’TWIXT DAWN AND DAY
If you were gone, and any anodyne Could drown in deep forgetfulness benign All thought of all things past, Until, at last, I had forgotten too Even the dearer memory of you--
In some dim hour betwixt the dawn and day, When I awoke to feel how bleak and grey My life without you spread, Then from the dead Those memories would upstart And one--the thought of you would break my heart.
And passing thus, could lapse of day and year Keep me still distant from you there as here? Nay, for remembering so Were hence to go Back through the years a space And where we parted make our meeting place.
UNFORGOTTEN
Last night in some dim corner of my brain, The while I slept, there woke a thought of thee That lit my sleep; for though no more I see Or hear thee, and no more may share my pain And pleasure with thee, in my heart remain Old words of our lost friendship that to me Are dear and sacred still, as things must be That have been and can never be again:
Dear as the boyhood’s hopes to which we cleave No longer--ah, no longer fancy led! Dear as the dreams the looms of Memory weave With many a lost and half-remembered thread; Sacred as those last kisses that we leave On the unknowing faces of our dead.
A LAST TRIBUTE
(W. T. A. Died 1895)
Bear him away in silence to his rest. The world knows nothing of the fight he fought, The patient toil to no fruition brought; Fold the white hands upon the quiet breast, Bear him away in silence to his rest: Rest he at least has won. No victor’s wreath may deck the turf above, No crown was his for all his labour done-- Only our love.
Lavish your bays, O world, on lesser brows! He came to your high places, staunch, elate, Too proud of soul to stoop to any gate That fool or knave may enter if he bows: Lavish your bays, O world, on lesser brows That bend to your commands! Better, than thus to cringe and crawl above, To fail and pass, no guerdon in his hands-- Only our love.
Greater is work than wage, and love than fame. The world to many idols still shall turn And worship those that take, not those that earn, The while he sleeps and most forget his name: Greater is work than wage, and love than fame. So leave him--earth to earth, The peace of heaven about him and above, And with him ever all we have of worth-- Only our love.
YOUTH
Youth being gone, but not the dreams of youth, Life has lost nothing of its earlier fire: The pale star, newly risen, fades not quite As the dusk deepens round it into night But shines with gathering light and mounts the higher. Age is but youth’s husk if it still enfold Within it that glad heart of hope and truth Whose youth, outlasting youth, Can keep us young when years have made us old.
What though our hopes be stronger than our hands And we have followed many a dream in vain? Dearer is that we never gained than all We garnered; and with Hope’s clear clarion call Hushed on the height, our youth begins to wane And we grow old who else had time defied, And, growing old, endure no longer then, But leave our lives, as men Tired with long travel lay their loads aside.
If we had faith in death we should have faith In life, and age could touch our hearts no more; The sorrow-haunted world, whose restless moan Yearns saddening up to heaven like the lone Long surge of waters on a barren shore, Would laugh and labour with a heart at rest And pass unfaltering, knowing, strangely wise, Though sweet this life that dies, It is not all--it is not even best.
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh
Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. One misspelled word was corrected.