Ishak's Song5

Ishak's Song55This song comes from Flecker's unpublished dramaHassan, which those who have seen it consider immeasurably the finest thing that he ever wrote. It has remained in manuscript since his death, awaiting stage production. HisYasminis another song from the play, and his well-knownGolden JourneytoSamarkandis its epilogue. Ishak is the Court poet of Haroun-al-Raschid.Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn,The hour the lilies open on the lawn,The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,The hour of silence when we hear the fountains,The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,O Master of the World, the Persian dawn!This hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,The braves who fight thy fight unsheath the sabre,The slaves who toil thy toil are lashed to labour,For thee the waggons of the world are drawn—The ebony of night, the red of dawn!JAMES ELROY FLECKERThe BuzzardsWhen evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,And every tree that bordered the green meadowsAnd in the yellow cornfields every reaperAnd every corn-shock stood above their shadowsFlung eastward from their feet in longer measure,Serenely far there swam in the sunny heightA buzzard and his mate who took their pleasureSwirling and poising idly in golden light.On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,So effortless and so strong,Cutting each other's paths together they glided,Then wheeled asunder till they soared dividedTwo valleys' width (as though it were delightTo part like this, being sure they could uniteSo swiftly in their empty, free dominion),Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,Swung proudly to a curve, and from its heightTook half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,Stood tranced, until our souls arose upliftedOn those far-sweeping, wide,Strong curves of flight—swayed up and hugely drifted,Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tideOf sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholdenThrough shining deeps of air, the fields were goldenAnd rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrewOut of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.MARTIN ARMSTRONGThe Moon(To Maurice Baring)1I waited for a miracle to-night.Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,Her current rippled past invisibly.No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,Only the water, whispering in the shadows,That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,Waiting, and then a sudden silver flameBurned in the eastern heaven, and she came.2The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening trackThat lies across the wide and tranquil river,Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.She rises still: the liquid light she spillsMakes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;And, as she goes, I know her glory fillsThe air of all our English lakes and hills.3High over all this England doth she ride;She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,And even as here, where now I stare and dream,Standing my own transfigured banks beside,On many a quiet wandering English streamThere lies the unshifting image of her beam.4Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I knowBy many a river other eyes than mineTurn up to her; and, as of old, they showTheir inward hearts all naked to her shine:Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,To whom her dear returning orb discoversFor each the gift he waits for: soft release,The unsealing of imagination's flow,Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,The friendly benediction of her peace.5I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,As when long since a younger heart drank deepFrom that sweet solace, while, through summer air,Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.O as I stand this latest moon beholding,Her forms unresting memory is moulding;Beneath my enchanted eyelids there ariseVisions again of many moons that were,Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.6Unnumbered are those moons of memoryStored in the backward chambers of my brain:The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,The golden harvest moon above the grain;The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,Filtering through the meshes of the greenTo breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screenThe bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;7Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;The fairy moons of luminous evenings,Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,Erect and heavy, and all waters lieOily, and there is not a bird that sings.All these I know, I have seen them born and die,And many another moon in many a sky.8There was a moon that shone above the groundWhere on a grassy forest height I stood;Bright was that open place, and all aroundThe dense discovered treetops of the wood,Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.Protruding from the middle of the mound,Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.9A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;An orator exultant in defeat;Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;My heart was one with those rebellious people,Until along a chapel's pointing steepleMy eyes unwitting wandered, and I foundA moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;And in my spirit's life all human dinDied, and eternal Silence stood within.10And once, on a far evening, warm and still,I leant upon a cool stone parapet.The quays and houses underneath the hillTwinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;And then above the eastern cape's long billowSilent there welled a trembling line of yellow,A shred that quickened, then a half that grewTo a full moon, that moved with even will.The night was long before her, well she knew,And, as she slowly rose into the blue,11She slowly paled, and, glittering far awayFlung on the silken waters like a spear,Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.The lighthouse lamp upon the little pierBurned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,I watched the unmoving world beneath my feetTill, without warning, miles across the bay,Into that silver out of shadows beat,Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.12These moons I have seen, but these and every oneCame each so new it seemed to be the first,New as the buds that open to the sun,New as the songs that to the morning burst.The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,Last year it was another blackbird singing,Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flowerBeyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,Retain'st for ever an unwithering powerThat stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.13But O, had all my infant nights been dark,Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,Had never a teller of stories bid me harkThe promised splendours of that moon unknown:How perfect then had been the revelationWhen first her gradual gold illuminationBroke on a night upon the conscious child:My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arcClimbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,So large with light, so even and so mild.14Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,This world of shadows cool with silver fires,Drawing us higher than our human birth:To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspiresIts saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrantTears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.15Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,But always peaceful and removed and proud,Whether with loveliness revealed complete,Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonderThat men who made of sun and storm and thunderThe awful forms of strong divinity,Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?16Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,Diana, she whose downward-bending kissOne only knew, though all men yearned to know;The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless blissLapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,All the still night, until the night was gone.17By many names they knew thee, but thy shapeWas woman's always, transient and white:A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,A sweet descent of beauty in the night:Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,A witch the man who saw might not escape,A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.18And even to-night in African forests someThere are, possessed by such a blasphemy;Through branching beams thy fevered votaries comeTo appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguishIn the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.19So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,In all the continents, by all the seas,Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,Adoring her with gentler rites than these:The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee upliftedRise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,Perpetual incense poured before thy throneBy those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.20For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;Entranced on templed lakes is many a boatFor thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;On the great seas where none but thou is tenderRising and setting, unto thee surrenderAll lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slipsTo gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.21O thus they do, and thus they did of old;Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;Ere our first records were thy shrine was coldThat speechless eyes went seeking in the night;Beyond the compass of our dim traditionsThou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,Their loves and their despair; within thy kenAll our poor history has been unrolled;Thou hast seen all races born and die again,The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.22Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyesWho paced with backward arms beyond his tents,Lone in the night, and felt above him riseThe ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,Fighting with his moon-coloured memoriesOf vanished kings who builded, and the bareSands in the moon before those builders were.23Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fameAmid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.And, circling round that fixed monition, cameWoven by moonlight, random, transitory,Fragments of all the dim receding story:The moonlit water dripping from the oarsOf triremes in the bay of Syracuse;The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.24He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,The moonlight on the Atlantean waveThat covered all a multitude's distress:Cities and hosts and emperors departedUnder the steady moon. And sullen-heartedHe turned away, and, in a little, died,Even as he who hunted from his caveAnd struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hideUnder the moon, and was not satisfied.25For in the prime, thy influence was felt;When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion meltBefore men dreamed of empire. The abyssOf thought yawned through their jungle then, as everDark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and seaNaked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in theeThought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.26Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,Thou shinedst there ere any life began,When of his pain or of his powerless loveThou heardest not from heart of any man;Though long the earth had shaken off the vapourLeft by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did growEre aught but her blind elements did move;Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,And afterwards again shalt see her so.27A time there was when Life had never been,A time will be, it will have passed away;Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,When Life which in thy sister's yesterdayHad never flowered, will have drooped and faded;Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.She will be barren then as not before,Bared of her snows and all her garments green;No darkling sea by any earthly shoreWill take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.28Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,Not any voice will cry upon thee then;Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,An end there will have been to all their lust,Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.29Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,The rumours and the marching and the strife;Earth will be still, and all the face of herSwept of the last remains of moving life;The last of all men's monuments that defied them,Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,Into the waiting elements will fade,And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,A forlorn round of rocky contours made,A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,30Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;The old, the cold companions, you will go,Obeying still some long-forgotten past,And all our pitiful history none will know;Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,But on that greater ball no heart will ponderThe thought that rose and nightingale are gone,And all sweet things but thou; and only vastRidges of rock remain, and stars and sun;O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.31And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,Passing beyond imagination's range,Away into the void where waits for theeThy inconceivable destiny of change;And after all the memories I have strivenTo paint, this picture that thyself hast givenLives, and I watch, to all those others blind,Thy form, gliding into eternity,Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,The last, most wonderful image of the mind.32Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,Did never this most faithful heart invest;Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,And I, and I, the heart within my breast,Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.J. C. SQUIRE

5This song comes from Flecker's unpublished dramaHassan, which those who have seen it consider immeasurably the finest thing that he ever wrote. It has remained in manuscript since his death, awaiting stage production. HisYasminis another song from the play, and his well-knownGolden JourneytoSamarkandis its epilogue. Ishak is the Court poet of Haroun-al-Raschid.

Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn,The hour the lilies open on the lawn,The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,The hour of silence when we hear the fountains,The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,O Master of the World, the Persian dawn!This hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,The braves who fight thy fight unsheath the sabre,The slaves who toil thy toil are lashed to labour,For thee the waggons of the world are drawn—The ebony of night, the red of dawn!

This hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,The braves who fight thy fight unsheath the sabre,The slaves who toil thy toil are lashed to labour,For thee the waggons of the world are drawn—The ebony of night, the red of dawn!

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,And every tree that bordered the green meadowsAnd in the yellow cornfields every reaperAnd every corn-shock stood above their shadowsFlung eastward from their feet in longer measure,Serenely far there swam in the sunny heightA buzzard and his mate who took their pleasureSwirling and poising idly in golden light.On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,So effortless and so strong,Cutting each other's paths together they glided,Then wheeled asunder till they soared dividedTwo valleys' width (as though it were delightTo part like this, being sure they could uniteSo swiftly in their empty, free dominion),Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,Swung proudly to a curve, and from its heightTook half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,Stood tranced, until our souls arose upliftedOn those far-sweeping, wide,Strong curves of flight—swayed up and hugely drifted,Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tideOf sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholdenThrough shining deeps of air, the fields were goldenAnd rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrewOut of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.

On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,So effortless and so strong,Cutting each other's paths together they glided,Then wheeled asunder till they soared dividedTwo valleys' width (as though it were delightTo part like this, being sure they could uniteSo swiftly in their empty, free dominion),Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,Swung proudly to a curve, and from its heightTook half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.

And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,Stood tranced, until our souls arose upliftedOn those far-sweeping, wide,Strong curves of flight—swayed up and hugely drifted,Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tideOf sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholdenThrough shining deeps of air, the fields were goldenAnd rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.

And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrewOut of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

(To Maurice Baring)

1I waited for a miracle to-night.Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,Her current rippled past invisibly.No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,Only the water, whispering in the shadows,That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,Waiting, and then a sudden silver flameBurned in the eastern heaven, and she came.2The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening trackThat lies across the wide and tranquil river,Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.She rises still: the liquid light she spillsMakes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;And, as she goes, I know her glory fillsThe air of all our English lakes and hills.3High over all this England doth she ride;She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,And even as here, where now I stare and dream,Standing my own transfigured banks beside,On many a quiet wandering English streamThere lies the unshifting image of her beam.4Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I knowBy many a river other eyes than mineTurn up to her; and, as of old, they showTheir inward hearts all naked to her shine:Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,To whom her dear returning orb discoversFor each the gift he waits for: soft release,The unsealing of imagination's flow,Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,The friendly benediction of her peace.5I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,As when long since a younger heart drank deepFrom that sweet solace, while, through summer air,Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.O as I stand this latest moon beholding,Her forms unresting memory is moulding;Beneath my enchanted eyelids there ariseVisions again of many moons that were,Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.6Unnumbered are those moons of memoryStored in the backward chambers of my brain:The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,The golden harvest moon above the grain;The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,Filtering through the meshes of the greenTo breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screenThe bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;7Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;The fairy moons of luminous evenings,Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,Erect and heavy, and all waters lieOily, and there is not a bird that sings.All these I know, I have seen them born and die,And many another moon in many a sky.8There was a moon that shone above the groundWhere on a grassy forest height I stood;Bright was that open place, and all aroundThe dense discovered treetops of the wood,Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.Protruding from the middle of the mound,Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.9A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;An orator exultant in defeat;Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;My heart was one with those rebellious people,Until along a chapel's pointing steepleMy eyes unwitting wandered, and I foundA moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;And in my spirit's life all human dinDied, and eternal Silence stood within.10And once, on a far evening, warm and still,I leant upon a cool stone parapet.The quays and houses underneath the hillTwinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;And then above the eastern cape's long billowSilent there welled a trembling line of yellow,A shred that quickened, then a half that grewTo a full moon, that moved with even will.The night was long before her, well she knew,And, as she slowly rose into the blue,11She slowly paled, and, glittering far awayFlung on the silken waters like a spear,Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.The lighthouse lamp upon the little pierBurned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,I watched the unmoving world beneath my feetTill, without warning, miles across the bay,Into that silver out of shadows beat,Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.12These moons I have seen, but these and every oneCame each so new it seemed to be the first,New as the buds that open to the sun,New as the songs that to the morning burst.The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,Last year it was another blackbird singing,Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flowerBeyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,Retain'st for ever an unwithering powerThat stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.13But O, had all my infant nights been dark,Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,Had never a teller of stories bid me harkThe promised splendours of that moon unknown:How perfect then had been the revelationWhen first her gradual gold illuminationBroke on a night upon the conscious child:My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arcClimbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,So large with light, so even and so mild.14Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,This world of shadows cool with silver fires,Drawing us higher than our human birth:To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspiresIts saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrantTears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.15Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,But always peaceful and removed and proud,Whether with loveliness revealed complete,Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonderThat men who made of sun and storm and thunderThe awful forms of strong divinity,Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?16Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,Diana, she whose downward-bending kissOne only knew, though all men yearned to know;The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless blissLapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,All the still night, until the night was gone.17By many names they knew thee, but thy shapeWas woman's always, transient and white:A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,A sweet descent of beauty in the night:Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,A witch the man who saw might not escape,A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.18And even to-night in African forests someThere are, possessed by such a blasphemy;Through branching beams thy fevered votaries comeTo appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguishIn the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.19So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,In all the continents, by all the seas,Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,Adoring her with gentler rites than these:The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee upliftedRise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,Perpetual incense poured before thy throneBy those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.20For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;Entranced on templed lakes is many a boatFor thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;On the great seas where none but thou is tenderRising and setting, unto thee surrenderAll lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slipsTo gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.21O thus they do, and thus they did of old;Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;Ere our first records were thy shrine was coldThat speechless eyes went seeking in the night;Beyond the compass of our dim traditionsThou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,Their loves and their despair; within thy kenAll our poor history has been unrolled;Thou hast seen all races born and die again,The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.22Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyesWho paced with backward arms beyond his tents,Lone in the night, and felt above him riseThe ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,Fighting with his moon-coloured memoriesOf vanished kings who builded, and the bareSands in the moon before those builders were.23Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fameAmid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.And, circling round that fixed monition, cameWoven by moonlight, random, transitory,Fragments of all the dim receding story:The moonlit water dripping from the oarsOf triremes in the bay of Syracuse;The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.24He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,The moonlight on the Atlantean waveThat covered all a multitude's distress:Cities and hosts and emperors departedUnder the steady moon. And sullen-heartedHe turned away, and, in a little, died,Even as he who hunted from his caveAnd struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hideUnder the moon, and was not satisfied.25For in the prime, thy influence was felt;When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion meltBefore men dreamed of empire. The abyssOf thought yawned through their jungle then, as everDark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and seaNaked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in theeThought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.26Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,Thou shinedst there ere any life began,When of his pain or of his powerless loveThou heardest not from heart of any man;Though long the earth had shaken off the vapourLeft by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did growEre aught but her blind elements did move;Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,And afterwards again shalt see her so.27A time there was when Life had never been,A time will be, it will have passed away;Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,When Life which in thy sister's yesterdayHad never flowered, will have drooped and faded;Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.She will be barren then as not before,Bared of her snows and all her garments green;No darkling sea by any earthly shoreWill take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.28Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,Not any voice will cry upon thee then;Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,An end there will have been to all their lust,Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.29Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,The rumours and the marching and the strife;Earth will be still, and all the face of herSwept of the last remains of moving life;The last of all men's monuments that defied them,Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,Into the waiting elements will fade,And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,A forlorn round of rocky contours made,A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,30Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;The old, the cold companions, you will go,Obeying still some long-forgotten past,And all our pitiful history none will know;Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,But on that greater ball no heart will ponderThe thought that rose and nightingale are gone,And all sweet things but thou; and only vastRidges of rock remain, and stars and sun;O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.31And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,Passing beyond imagination's range,Away into the void where waits for theeThy inconceivable destiny of change;And after all the memories I have strivenTo paint, this picture that thyself hast givenLives, and I watch, to all those others blind,Thy form, gliding into eternity,Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,The last, most wonderful image of the mind.32Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,Did never this most faithful heart invest;Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,And I, and I, the heart within my breast,Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.

I waited for a miracle to-night.Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,Her current rippled past invisibly.No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,Only the water, whispering in the shadows,That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,Waiting, and then a sudden silver flameBurned in the eastern heaven, and she came.

The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening trackThat lies across the wide and tranquil river,Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.She rises still: the liquid light she spillsMakes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;And, as she goes, I know her glory fillsThe air of all our English lakes and hills.

High over all this England doth she ride;She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,And even as here, where now I stare and dream,Standing my own transfigured banks beside,On many a quiet wandering English streamThere lies the unshifting image of her beam.

Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I knowBy many a river other eyes than mineTurn up to her; and, as of old, they showTheir inward hearts all naked to her shine:Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,To whom her dear returning orb discoversFor each the gift he waits for: soft release,The unsealing of imagination's flow,Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,The friendly benediction of her peace.

I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,As when long since a younger heart drank deepFrom that sweet solace, while, through summer air,Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.O as I stand this latest moon beholding,Her forms unresting memory is moulding;Beneath my enchanted eyelids there ariseVisions again of many moons that were,Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.

Unnumbered are those moons of memoryStored in the backward chambers of my brain:The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,The golden harvest moon above the grain;The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,Filtering through the meshes of the greenTo breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screenThe bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;

Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;The fairy moons of luminous evenings,Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,Erect and heavy, and all waters lieOily, and there is not a bird that sings.All these I know, I have seen them born and die,And many another moon in many a sky.

There was a moon that shone above the groundWhere on a grassy forest height I stood;Bright was that open place, and all aroundThe dense discovered treetops of the wood,Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.Protruding from the middle of the mound,Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.

A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;An orator exultant in defeat;Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;My heart was one with those rebellious people,Until along a chapel's pointing steepleMy eyes unwitting wandered, and I foundA moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;And in my spirit's life all human dinDied, and eternal Silence stood within.

And once, on a far evening, warm and still,I leant upon a cool stone parapet.The quays and houses underneath the hillTwinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;And then above the eastern cape's long billowSilent there welled a trembling line of yellow,A shred that quickened, then a half that grewTo a full moon, that moved with even will.The night was long before her, well she knew,And, as she slowly rose into the blue,

She slowly paled, and, glittering far awayFlung on the silken waters like a spear,Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.The lighthouse lamp upon the little pierBurned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,I watched the unmoving world beneath my feetTill, without warning, miles across the bay,Into that silver out of shadows beat,Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.

These moons I have seen, but these and every oneCame each so new it seemed to be the first,New as the buds that open to the sun,New as the songs that to the morning burst.The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,Last year it was another blackbird singing,Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flowerBeyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,Retain'st for ever an unwithering powerThat stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.

But O, had all my infant nights been dark,Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,Had never a teller of stories bid me harkThe promised splendours of that moon unknown:How perfect then had been the revelationWhen first her gradual gold illuminationBroke on a night upon the conscious child:My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arcClimbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,So large with light, so even and so mild.

Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,This world of shadows cool with silver fires,Drawing us higher than our human birth:To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspiresIts saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrantTears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.

Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,But always peaceful and removed and proud,Whether with loveliness revealed complete,Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonderThat men who made of sun and storm and thunderThe awful forms of strong divinity,Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?

Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,Diana, she whose downward-bending kissOne only knew, though all men yearned to know;The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless blissLapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,All the still night, until the night was gone.

By many names they knew thee, but thy shapeWas woman's always, transient and white:A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,A sweet descent of beauty in the night:Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,A witch the man who saw might not escape,A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.

And even to-night in African forests someThere are, possessed by such a blasphemy;Through branching beams thy fevered votaries comeTo appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguishIn the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.

So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,In all the continents, by all the seas,Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,Adoring her with gentler rites than these:The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee upliftedRise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,Perpetual incense poured before thy throneBy those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.

For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;Entranced on templed lakes is many a boatFor thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;On the great seas where none but thou is tenderRising and setting, unto thee surrenderAll lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slipsTo gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.

O thus they do, and thus they did of old;Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;Ere our first records were thy shrine was coldThat speechless eyes went seeking in the night;Beyond the compass of our dim traditionsThou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,Their loves and their despair; within thy kenAll our poor history has been unrolled;Thou hast seen all races born and die again,The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.

Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyesWho paced with backward arms beyond his tents,Lone in the night, and felt above him riseThe ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,Fighting with his moon-coloured memoriesOf vanished kings who builded, and the bareSands in the moon before those builders were.

Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fameAmid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.And, circling round that fixed monition, cameWoven by moonlight, random, transitory,Fragments of all the dim receding story:The moonlit water dripping from the oarsOf triremes in the bay of Syracuse;The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.

He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,The moonlight on the Atlantean waveThat covered all a multitude's distress:Cities and hosts and emperors departedUnder the steady moon. And sullen-heartedHe turned away, and, in a little, died,Even as he who hunted from his caveAnd struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hideUnder the moon, and was not satisfied.

For in the prime, thy influence was felt;When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion meltBefore men dreamed of empire. The abyssOf thought yawned through their jungle then, as everDark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and seaNaked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in theeThought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.

Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,Thou shinedst there ere any life began,When of his pain or of his powerless loveThou heardest not from heart of any man;Though long the earth had shaken off the vapourLeft by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did growEre aught but her blind elements did move;Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,And afterwards again shalt see her so.

A time there was when Life had never been,A time will be, it will have passed away;Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,When Life which in thy sister's yesterdayHad never flowered, will have drooped and faded;Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.She will be barren then as not before,Bared of her snows and all her garments green;No darkling sea by any earthly shoreWill take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.

Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,Not any voice will cry upon thee then;Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,An end there will have been to all their lust,Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.

Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,The rumours and the marching and the strife;Earth will be still, and all the face of herSwept of the last remains of moving life;The last of all men's monuments that defied them,Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,Into the waiting elements will fade,And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,A forlorn round of rocky contours made,A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,

Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;The old, the cold companions, you will go,Obeying still some long-forgotten past,And all our pitiful history none will know;Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,But on that greater ball no heart will ponderThe thought that rose and nightingale are gone,And all sweet things but thou; and only vastRidges of rock remain, and stars and sun;O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.

And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,Passing beyond imagination's range,Away into the void where waits for theeThy inconceivable destiny of change;And after all the memories I have strivenTo paint, this picture that thyself hast givenLives, and I watch, to all those others blind,Thy form, gliding into eternity,Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,The last, most wonderful image of the mind.

Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,Did never this most faithful heart invest;Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,And I, and I, the heart within my breast,Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.

J. C. SQUIRE

By L. PEARSALL SMITH

I SATthere, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?

Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight—these awful things will happen—our souls joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.

"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of "sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.

"So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?" Then lifting the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher level, "This notion of free will," I went on, "the notion, for instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you think of it—at least to me it seems—a wretched notion really. I like to think I must follow the things of desire as—how shall I put it?—as the tide follows the moon; that my actions are due to necessary causes; that the world inside isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the Stars are governed."

"How I love the Stars!" murmured Lady Hyslop. "What things they say to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions—the promise of ineffable mitigations."

"Mitigations?" I gasped, feeling a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations. And is not their greatest charm precisely the fact that neither of us understands a word the other says?

Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.

Opalescent, infinitely desirable, tinged with all the rainbow hues of fancy, inaccessible in the window of a stationer's shop around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my day-dreams. Every day I passed it, but every day some inhibition paralyzed my will; or my thoughts would be distracted in a golden dream or splendid disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.

So time rolled on; the seasons followed in each other's footsteps. Empires rose and fell; and still that paste-pot hung, a dragon-guarded fruit of the Hesperides, in the window I walked by every day.

Then one morning, one awful morning, my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly resolution: I was the master of my fate! Summoning all the forces of my moral nature, I put on my hat and went calmly out and bought that paste-pot. I bought three paste-pots, and carried them with me calmly home. At last the countercharm was found, the spell was broken, and the Devil finally defeated—but, oh, at what a cost! In the reaction, which immediately followed, I sat, facing those pots of nauseating paste, unnerved and disenchanted, beyond the reach of consolation, with nothing to wait for now but Death.

The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost ecstatic attention.

As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.

And anyhow—thus I laughed away the notion—how could she do it anyhow, even if she tried? Other people perhaps—but me? No, that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber. For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?

Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.

What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom, having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out, had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.

Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr. Johnson describes it?

O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation—if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?

As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing. Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding; their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their littleones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.

But as for the Righteous Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the blessings of those who walk in the right way. "These blessings"—the words came back to me from the Evening Lesson—"these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee." And suddenly, in the mild summer air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me. From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were coming to reward me with benedictions for which I had not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the sea and as the stars of heaven. My sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.

My Prayer Book began to smoke in my hand from the hot lava embedded in it; the meadow was scorched by the live coals of cursing and still more awful benediction I had so thoughtlessly raked out of the church furnace and brought down in a hot shower on myself and my neighbours.

We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great mechanism; man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the chance product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him, he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront a hostile universe with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny, to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy stars—this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was completely carried away by my enthusiasm. "By Jove, that is a stunt!" I cried.

"Life," said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever—"life is a perpetual toothache."

In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were discussed of food-restrictions, epidemics, cancer, and so on.

Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea, and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. "Well, I must say," she remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, "I must say I enjoy life."

"So do I," I whispered.

"When I enjoy things," she went on, "I know it. Eating, for instance, the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference," she added, as she got up to go with the others.

"All the difference in the world," I answered.

It's too bad that I had no chance for further conversation with that wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind with garbage: we make a better use of that divine and adorable endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our art.

Occultisms, fairyisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from another world—all kinds of supernaturalisms are most distasteful to me; I cling to the world of science and common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out, therefore, to find this morning a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB—what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, familiar, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.

Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon-party? Do I not owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And howabout the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted, and Deborah sing without blame how she arose a mother in Israel? And didn't David boast of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in his confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?

Was I not made in His image?

"Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner," I went on, "but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often think asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet I don't know—when one thinks of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus as one can of strawberries—but tender green peas and peaches I could eat for ever. And there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. It's one of my favourite day-dreams for my declining years to live alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say, in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs and peaches; and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment pick a delicious pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say——"

By GEORGE SAINTSBURY

(A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at what may be called the headquarters of the subject—the Pump Room, Bath, October 1st, 1919)

THEeffect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.

Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there wasnoeighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing "eighteenth-centurypoetry," he found the subject announced at first as "eighteenth-centuryverse." In face of such a popular attitude—let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar error—it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is not recorded that Sisyphusdidget that stone lodged at last. At any rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty, of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century poetry, youdon'tlike—or don't sufficiently understand—seventeenth and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the negative, without deciding our general point here.

There is, of course—the fact has been already admitted by glance—a division of the poetry of 1700–1800 to which, in a more or less grudging way, the poetical franchise is generally granted. Scraps of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell quite early; Dyer and Thomson at the beginning of the second quarter; Collins and Gray in the middle; Blake and Burns and Chatterton if not also Cowper and Crabbe, in the last division are admitted, if only to a sort of provincial or proselyte membership. Gray, indeed, has alwaysbeen granted special grace, even, as some think, to an unfair comparative extent, and perhaps Mr. Swinburne's exuberant championship was never less wasted than in the cases of Collins and Blake. But Blake really does belong to no time at all except in a few fragments, and most of the others are too well known for further comment. Let us in the very limited space here available, before passing to other aspects of the subject, take two poems, one of the earlier, one of the later time, as examples of pure poetry charged with special eighteenth-century difference—for that is the point at issue. They shall be Dyer'sGrongar Hilland Mrs. Greville'sPrayer for Indifference. The one is a picture of that external nature to which as a rule the century is supposed to have been blind, yet charged with an "inwardness" to which that century is equally supposed to have been callous. The other is a poem of mood, almost a pathological poem, possessing the same inwardness, but charged with a flutter of feeling, again supposed to be quite unknown to the age of prose and sense. Both are curious examples of what is called the conventional phraseology of the time, flushed and animated by something additional—a characteristic which also appears in Collins, but is more disputable in Gray, save perhaps in the remarkable "Vicissitude" ode.Grongar Hillought to be given whole, but it is not difficult of access; the "Hymn" is not so easy to get at, but it suffers less from "sampling."

There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point of view over poetry, in callingGrongar Hillsimply beautiful. I think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d——n metres. The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature except Thomson, and in the very year ofWinteritself, full eighty, too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse should be able to express the effect of painting—how visual as well as audible effect is produced. The exordium to the

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