The Children of the Night

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Amaryllis

ONCE, when I wandered in the woods alone,

An old man tottered up to me and said,

"Come, friend, and see the grave that I have made

For Amaryllis." There was in the tone

Of his complaint such quaver and such moan

That I took pity on him and obeyed,

And long stood looking where his hands had laid

An ancient woman, shrunk to skin and bone.

Far out beyond the forest I could hear

The calling of loud progress, and the bold

Incessant scream of commerce ringing clear;

But though the trumpets of the world were glad,

It made me lonely and it made me sad

To think that Amaryllis had grown old.

Kosmos

AH, -- shuddering men that falter and shrink so

To look on death, -- what were the days we live,

Where life is half a struggle to forgive,

But for the love that finds us when we go?

Is God a jester? Does he laugh and throw

Poor branded wretches here to sweat and strive

For some vague end that never shall arrive?

And is He not yet weary of the show?

Think of it, all ye millions that have planned,

And only planned, the largess of hard youth!

Think of it, all ye builders on the sand,

Whose works are down! -- Is love so small, forsooth?

Be brave! To-morrow you will understand

The doubt, the pain, the triumph, and the Truth!

Zola

BECAUSE he puts the compromising chart

Of hell before your eyes, you are afraid;

Because he counts the price that you have paid

For innocence, and counts it from the start,

You loathe him. But he sees the human heart

Of God meanwhile, and in God's hand has weighed

Your squeamish and emasculate crusade

Against the grim dominion of his art.

Never until we conquer the uncouth

Connivings of our shamed indifference

(We call it Christian faith!) are we to scan

The racked and shrieking hideousness of Truth

To find, in hate's polluted self-defence

Throbbing, the pulse, the divine heart of man.

The Pity of the leaves

VENGEFUL across the cold November moors,

Loud with ancestral shame there came the bleak

Sad wind that shrieked, and answered with a shriek,

Reverberant through lonely corridors.

The old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,

Words out of lips that were no more to speak --

Words of the past that shook the old man's cheek

Like dead, remembered footsteps on old floors.

And then there were the leaves that plagued him so!

The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside

Skipped with a freezing whisper. Now and then

They stopped, and stayed there -- just to let him know

How dead they were; but if the old man cried,

They fluttered off like withered souls of men.

Aaron Stark

WITHAL a meagre man was Aaron Stark, --

Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shrivelled, and morose.

A miser was he, with a miser's nose,

And eyes like little dollars in the dark.

His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;

And when he spoke there came like sullen blows

Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,

As if a cur were chary of its bark.

Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,

Year after year he shambled through the town, --

A loveless exile moving with a staff;

And oftentimes there crept into his ears

A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, --

And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.

Garden

THERE is a fenceless garden overgrown

With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves;

And once, among the roses and the sheaves,

The Gardener and I were there alone.

He led me to the plot where I had thrown

The fennel of my days on wasted ground,

And in that riot of sad weeds I found

The fruitage of a life that was my own.

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!

And there were all the lives of humankind;

And they were like a book that I could read,

Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,

Outrolled itself from Thought's eternal seed,

Love-rooted in God's garden of the mind.

Cliff Klingenhagen

CLIFF Klingenhagen had me in to dine

With him one day; and after soup and meat,

And all the other things there were to eat,

Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine

And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign

For me to choose at all, he took the draught

Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed

It off, and said the other one was mine.

And when I asked him what the deuce he meant

By doing that, he only looked at me

And grinned, and said it was a way of his.

And though I know the fellow, I have spent

Long time a-wondering when I shall be

As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.

Charles Carville's Eyes

A MELANCHOLY face Charles Carville had,

But not so melancholy as it seemed, --

When once you knew him, -- for his mouth redeemed

His insufficient eyes, forever sad:

In them there was no life-glimpse, good or bad, --

Nor joy nor passion in them ever gleamed;

His mouth was all of him that ever beamed,

His eyes were sorry, but his mouth was glad.

He never was a fellow that said much,

And half of what he did say was not heard

By many of us: we were out of touch

With all his whims and all his theories

Till he was dead, so those blank eyes of his

Might speak them. Then we heard them, every word.

The Dead Village

HERE there is death. But even here, they say, --

Here where the dull sun shines this afternoon

As desolate as ever the dead moon

Did glimmer on dead Sardis, -- men were gay;

And there were little children here to play,

With small soft hands that once did keep in tune

The strings that stretch from heaven, till too soon

The change came, and the music passed away.

Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things, --

No life, no love, no children, and no men;

And over the forgotten place there clings

The strange and unrememberable light

That is in dreams. The music failed, and then

God frowned, and shut the village from His sight.

Boston

MY northern pines are good enough for me,

But there's a town my memory uprears --

A town that always like a friend appears,

And always in the sunrise by the sea.

And over it, somehow, there seems to be

A downward flash of something new and fierce,

That ever strives to clear, but never clears

The dimness of a charmed antiquity.

Two Sonnets

I

JUST as I wonder at the twofold screen

Of twisted innocence that you would plait

For eyes that uncourageously await

The coming of a kingdom that has been,

So do I wonder what God's love can mean

To you that all so strangely estimate

The purpose and the consequent estate

Of one short shuddering step to the Unseen.

No, I have not your backward faith to shrink

Lone-faring from the doorway of God's home

To find Him in the names of buried men;

Nor your ingenious recreance to think

We cherish, in the life that is to come,

The scattered features of dead friends again.

II

Never until our souls are strong enough

To plunge into the crater of the Scheme --

Triumphant in the flash there to redeem

Love's handsel and forevermore to slough,

Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough

And reptile skins of us whereon we set

The stigma of scared years -- are we to get

Where atoms and the ages are one stuff.

Nor ever shall we know the cursed waste

Of life in the beneficence divine

Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine

That we have squandered in sin's frail distress,

Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste,

The mead of Thought's prophetic endlessness.

The Clerks

I DID not think that I should find them there

When I came back again; but there they stood,

As in the days they dreamed of when young blood

Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.

Be sure, they met me with an ancient air, --

And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood

About them; but the men were just as good,

And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,

And you that feed yourselves with your descent,

What comes of all your visions and your fears?

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,

Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,

Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

Fleming Helphenstine

AT first I thought there was a superfine

Persuasion in his face; but the free glow

That filled it when he stopped and cried, "Hollo!"

Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.

He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,

But be that as it may; -- I only know

He talked of this and that and So-and-So,

And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.

But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,

And I looked hard at him; and there we gazed

With a strained shame that made us cringe and wince:

Then, with a wordless clogged apology

That sounded half confused and half amazed,

He dodged, -- and I have never seen him since.

For a Book by Thomas Hardy

WITH searching feet, through dark circuitous ways,

I plunged and stumbled; round me, far and near,

Quaint hordes of eyeless phantoms did appear,

Twisting and turning in a bootless chase, --

When, like an exile given by God's grace

To feel once more a human atmosphere,

I caught the world's first murmur, large and clear,

Flung from a singing river's endless race.

Then, through a magic twilight from below,

I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:

Life's wild infinity of mirth and woe

It sang me; and, with many a changing gleam,

Across the music of its onward flow

I saw the cottage lights of Wessex beam.

Thomas Hood

THE man who cloaked his bitterness within

This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,

God never gave to look with common eyes

Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

His brother was the branded man of Lynn;

And there are woven with his jollities

The nameless and eternal tragedies

That render hope and hopelessness akin.

We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel

A still chord sorrow-swept, -- a weird unrest;

And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,

As if the very ghost of mirth were dead --

As if the joys of time to dreams had fled,

Or sailed away with Ines to the West.

The Miracle

"DEAR brother, dearest friend, when I am dead,

And you shall see no more this face of mine,

Let nothing but red roses be the sign

Of the white life I lost for him," she said;

"No, do not curse him, -- pity him instead;

Forgive him! -- forgive me! . . God's anodyne

For human hate is pity; and the wine

That makes men wise, forgiveness. I have read

Love's message in love's murder, and I die."

And so they laid her just where she would lie, --

Under red roses. Red they bloomed and fell;

But when flushed autumn and the snows went by,

And spring came, -- lo, from every bud's green shell

Burst a white blossom. -- Can love reason why?

Horace to Leuconoe

I PRAY you not, Leuconoe, to pore

With unpermitted eyes on what may be

Appointed by the gods for you and me,

Nor on Chaldean figures any more.

'T were infinitely better to implore

The present only: -- whether Jove decree

More winters yet to come, or whether he

Make even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shore

Shatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last --

Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fill

Your bosom with large hopes; for while I sing,

The envious close of time is narrowing; --

So seize the day, -- or ever it be past, --

And let the morrow come for what it will.

Reuben Bright

BECAUSE he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

The Altar

ALONE, remote, nor witting where I went,

I found an altar builded in a dream --

A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam

So swift, so searching, and so eloquent

Of upward promise, that love's murmur, blent

With sorrow's warning, gave but a supreme

Unending impulse to that human stream

Whose flood was all for the flame's fury bent.

Alas! I said, -- the world is in the wrong.

But the same quenchless fever of unrest

That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng

Thrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the same

Bewildered insect plunging for the flame

That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.

The Tavern

WHENEVER I go by there nowadays

And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,

The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,

I seem to be afraid of the old place;

And something stiffens up and down my face,

For all the world as if I saw the ghost

Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,

With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.

The Tavern has a story, but no man

Can tell us what it is. We only know

That once long after midnight, years ago,

A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,

Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran

That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.

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