VI

VIJOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODYA BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly their secret.Her first volume,The Wayfarers, revealed at the outset a poet’s imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the work of one who had not yetmet her revealing crisis, not yet been identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not, however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection, which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusivehopes and fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams:Lo, a gray pallor on the loomWaxeth apace,—a glamourieLike dawn outlooking, pale to seeBefore the sun hath burst to bloom;Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,With promise of fair things to be.·  ·  ·  ·  ·The shuttle singeth. And fair thingsUpon the web do come and go;Dim traceries like clouds ablowFade into cobweb glimmerings,A silver, fretted with small wings,—The while a voice is singing low.Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of the lyrics.Illustration of Josephine Preston PeabodyMiss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is highly developed, orrather it is innately correct, being manifest with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these stanzas from “Spinning in April”:Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadowsSomething calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.The poem has several other stanzas equally charming, but which detract from the artistic structure of the song by over-spinning the thought.Among the simple, sincere lyrics which prevail more by their feeling than mechanism, are “One That Followed,” “Horizon,” “Dew-Fall,”“Befriended,” “The Song of A Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem,” and the two stanzas called, “After Music,” whose intimate beauty renders them personally interpretative.I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,Until the music called, and called me thence,And tears stirred in my heart as tears may comeTo lonely children straying far from home,Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.If I might follow far and far awayUnto the country where these songs abide,I think my soul would wake and find it day,Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—Would tell me who I was before I died.There is a mystical touch here in note with the opening reference to the subtlety of Miss Peabody’s sources of inspiration.In the first volume is also a sonnet from the heart and to the heart, for who has not known the weariness that comes of long striving to image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is loth to commit his unfulfilled dream to the oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, “To the Unsung.”Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;The day was heavy and the sun will riseOn day as heavy, weariness as deep.Be near, though you be silent. Let me steepA sad heart in that peace, as a child triesTo hold his comfort fast, in fingers wiseWith imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—Too dull to listen or to understand.But only let me close the eyes of trustOn you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.Altogether, Miss Peabody’s first book of verse revealed strength, feeling, and imagination, though tentative in its philosophy, as the initial work of a young poet must necessarily be, and having but a slight rooting in life.The second volume,Fortune and Men’s Eyes, opens with a cleverly written one-act play, turning upon an adventure of two maids of honor at Elizabeth’s court, with Master W. S., a player, whose identity is not far to seek, and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, the scene being laid at the tavern of the Bear and the Angel, whither Mistress Anne Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a merry escapade under cover of seeing the people celebrate the fête of the Bear.The atmosphere of the time is well reproduced, the dialogue of the tapsters cleverlydone, and the final scene between the Player and Mary is full of dramatic intensity.In her second volume, Miss Peabody has also a dramatic monologue called, “The Wingless Joy,” which, though now and again Browningesque in tone, has many felicitous images and shows a true insight into human motive.The lyrics in the second volume form a less important part of the collection, though there are several, such as “The Source,” “The Survivor,” “Psyche in the Niche,” and “In the Silence,” which rank with Miss Peabody’s best work, particularly the last, illustrating the truth that the Spirit manifests at the need, even the dumb and undivining need, and not alone at the call:Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,Who heeded not my prayer?All the long day, all the long night,I stretched my hands to air.“There was a bitterer want than thineCame from the frozen North;Laid hands upon my garment’s hemAnd led me forth.“It was a lonely Northern man,Where there was never treeTo shed its comfort on his heart,There he had need of me.“He kindled us a little flameTo hope against the storm;And unto him, and unto me,The light was warm.”And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—Who answered not, nor came:All the long day, and yesterday,I called Thee by Thy name.“There was a dumb, unhearing griefSpake louder than Thy word,There was a heart called not on me,But yet I heard.“The sorrow of a savage manShaping him gods, alone,Who found no love in the shapen clayTo answer to his own.“His heart knew what his eyes saw notHe bade me stay and eat;And unto him, and unto me,The cup was sweet.“Too long we wait for thee and thine,In sodden ways and dim,And where the man’s need cries on meThere have I need of him.“Along the borders of despairWhere sparrows seek no nest,Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—The Unnamed Guest.”Before leaving the second volume there is one other poem of which I cannot refrain from quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which a phase of the psychology of sentiment has been grasped and analyzed in these lines called “The Knot”:Oh, I hated me,That when I loved you not, yet I could feelSome charm in me the deeper for your love:Some singing-robe invisible—and spunOf your own worship—fold me silverlyIn very moonlight, so that I walked fairWhen you were by, who had no wish to beThe fairer for your eyes! But at some costOf other life the hyacinth grows blue,And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,The sadder race. I would have fled from you,And yet I felt some fibre in myselfBinding me here, to search one moment yet—The only well that gave me back a star,—Your eyes reflecting. And I grew awareHow worship that must ever spend and burnWill have its deity from gold or stone;Till that fain womanhood that would be fairAnd lovable,—the hunger of the plant—Against my soul’s commandment reached and tookThe proffered fruit, more potent day by day.And the lines which follow close with the wholly feminine query,Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent femininity to a common denominator.In her third volume,Marlowe, a drama, founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burned the topless towers of Ilium!While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,” who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage, remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life essential to a character in drama.In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close. Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but they are notshownin some great scene where he might receive the acclamations of the people and so contrast sharplywith his downfall at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience. “Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense, variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizingstrain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison as having for him—Snowflake pity,Destined to melt and lose itself in fireOr ever it can cool my tongue,and thus describes her:Why, she was a maidOf crystalline! If you looked near enough,You’d see the wonder changing in her eyesLike parti-colored marvels in a brook,Bright through the clearness!Note now in contrast the impassioned words in which he pictures his divinity:Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the worldSince the first woman. Beauty cannot die.No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,There to be cherished by the cautious spring,Close folded in a rose, until the timeSome new imperial spirit comes to earthDemanding a fair raiment; and the earthYields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,And so the Woman comes!And this beautiful passage addressed to her after the triumph of “Faustus”:Drink my song.Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;Sip from the last year’s leaves their memoriesOf April, May, and June, their summer joy,Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.And finally these words spoken to her in splendid scorn, after his downfall and her rejection:I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—I—I who showed you first what you might be!But see now, you were hollow all the time,A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,And you are gone in ashes.At once the most beautiful and artistically drawn scene is that previously referred to, in which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits Alison after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situation, human and vital, and Miss Peabody has developed it with rare feeling and skill. The picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and despondency, coming to the woman who had believed in him, and whose love had shone upon his unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine delicacy and pathos. In the flash of revelation that comes to him from her white spirit, he speaks these words:Thou hast heardOf Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?And darkness comprehended not the Light?So. But I tell thee why. It was becauseThe Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,Bewildered at a thing it did not know.·  ·  ·  ·  ·Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.For after all is said, there is no thingSo hails the Light as that same blackness there,O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you thinkIt will not know at last?—it will not know?Those, too, are noble passages, though too long to quote, in which Marlowe unburdens his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts to her faith the keeping of that higher self she had divined in him; and when Marlowe, early in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says:You do not knowThe sense of waking down among the dead,Hard by some lazar-house,—note the hidden meaning in Alison’s reply:Nay; but I knowThe sense of death. And then to rise againAnd feel thyself bewildered, like a spiritOut of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic, distinguish this scene.Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill-starredgenius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.Many of her critics have found in Miss Peabody’s latest volume,The Singing Leaves, an inspiration and charm exceeding that of her former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, simplicity, and ideality it must be accounted one of her truest achievements; but there is about the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstantiality, which renders it elusive and unconvincing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in Miss Peabody’s work has, in the latest volume, grown, until many of the poems have so little objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of foam upon the deep of thought. They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, anaïveté, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificialartlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet; in short, the poems seem to me, with a few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, and to bring few warmly imbued words from life. They are as the pale moon-flower, growing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the rose dyed with the blood of the heart.But what is, to me, the limitation of the volume,—its over-subtilized mood and lack of definite, moving purpose,—must, to many of its readers, be granted to be its distinction; and for their very impalpability these delicate Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as that which moves the aspen when the wind is still, have for many the greater charm.To glance, then, at some of the finer achievements of the volume, one finds among the lyrics several turning upon love that catch in artistic words an undefined mood, such as “Forethought” and “Unsaid,” or in captivating picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as “The Enchanted Sheepfold,” or, stronger and finer than these, that vision of love called “The Cloud,” which enfolds truth and wraps the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which to clothe the thought of these lines:The islands called me far away,The valleys called me home.The rivers with a silver voiceDrew on my heart to come.The paths reached tendrils to my hairFrom every vine and tree.There was no refuge anywhereUntil I came to thee.There is a northern cloud I know,Along a mountain crest.And as she folds her wings of mist,So I could make my rest.There is no chain to bind her soUnto that purple height;And she will shine and wander, slow,Slow, with a cloud’s delight.Would she begone? She melts away,A heavenly joyous thing.Yet day will find the mountain white,White-folded with her wing.·  ·  ·  ·  ·And though love cannot bind me, Love,—Ah no!—yet I could stayMaybe, with wings forever spread,—Forever, and a day.Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life.Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure,and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems.Nearly all the lyrics inThe Singing Leavesare very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book,The Wayfarers. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third:A lie, it may be black or white;I care not for the lie:My grief is for the tortured breathOf Truth that cannot die.And cruelty, what that may be,What creature understands?But O, the glazing eyes of Love,Stabbed through the open hands!Two poems contained inThe Singing Leavesare of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience:O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,To give for asking: yet again to trustThe needy love in women and in men,Until again my faith is turned to dustBy one more thrust.How you must smile apart who make my handsEver to bleed where they were reached to bless;—Wonder how any wit that understandsShould ever try too near, with gentle stress,Your sullenness!Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—The only triumph slain by no surprise:True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,Starving on lies.Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:When I am dark, begone into the sun.I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—A lonely game indeed, but now all done;—And I have won!’Here speaks a word from life worth a score of “Charms: To Be Said In The Sun,” or other fanciful unreality; and because of such poems as this, fibred in human motive, one feels by contrast in many of the others that Miss Peabody has been playing with her genius, casting “Charms” and “Spells,” which are mere poetic sorcery.Miss Peabody has a rare sympathy with child-life, and her group of poems of this nature could not well be bettered. With the exception of a line now and then which may be a bit beyond the expression of a child, they are fidelity itself to the moods that swayedThe Little Past. “Journey,” “The Busy Child,” and “The Mystic” are among the best, though none could be spared, unless, perhaps, “Cakes and Ale.” Still another with the true child-feeling is that called “Late,”—a tender little song which, because of its brevity, must suffice to represent the group:My father brought somebody up,To show us all asleep.They came as softly up the stairsAs you could creep.They whispered in the doorway thereAnd looked at us awhile,I had my eyes shut up, but ICould feel him smile.I shut my eyes up close, and layAs still as I could keep;Because I knew he wanted usTo be asleep.Miss Peabody’s work, considered in its entirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace and delicacy, by imagination and vision, susceptibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever-present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat the element of personal emotion and passion, it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less intimate in its revealing.

A BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly their secret.

Her first volume,The Wayfarers, revealed at the outset a poet’s imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the work of one who had not yetmet her revealing crisis, not yet been identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not, however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection, which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusivehopes and fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams:

Lo, a gray pallor on the loomWaxeth apace,—a glamourieLike dawn outlooking, pale to seeBefore the sun hath burst to bloom;Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,With promise of fair things to be.·  ·  ·  ·  ·The shuttle singeth. And fair thingsUpon the web do come and go;Dim traceries like clouds ablowFade into cobweb glimmerings,A silver, fretted with small wings,—The while a voice is singing low.

Lo, a gray pallor on the loomWaxeth apace,—a glamourieLike dawn outlooking, pale to seeBefore the sun hath burst to bloom;Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,With promise of fair things to be.·  ·  ·  ·  ·The shuttle singeth. And fair thingsUpon the web do come and go;Dim traceries like clouds ablowFade into cobweb glimmerings,A silver, fretted with small wings,—The while a voice is singing low.

Lo, a gray pallor on the loomWaxeth apace,—a glamourieLike dawn outlooking, pale to seeBefore the sun hath burst to bloom;Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,With promise of fair things to be.·  ·  ·  ·  ·The shuttle singeth. And fair thingsUpon the web do come and go;Dim traceries like clouds ablowFade into cobweb glimmerings,A silver, fretted with small wings,—The while a voice is singing low.

Lo, a gray pallor on the loom

Waxeth apace,—a glamourie

Like dawn outlooking, pale to see

Before the sun hath burst to bloom;

Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,

With promise of fair things to be.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

The shuttle singeth. And fair things

Upon the web do come and go;

Dim traceries like clouds ablow

Fade into cobweb glimmerings,

A silver, fretted with small wings,—

The while a voice is singing low.

Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of the lyrics.

Illustration of Josephine Preston Peabody

Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is highly developed, orrather it is innately correct, being manifest with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these stanzas from “Spinning in April”:

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadowsSomething calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadowsSomething calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,

Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,

Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;

All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.

Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!

Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!

Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!

Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;

Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!

All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadowsSomething calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.

All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadows

Something calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:

A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—

The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.

Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;

Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,

Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,

And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

The poem has several other stanzas equally charming, but which detract from the artistic structure of the song by over-spinning the thought.

Among the simple, sincere lyrics which prevail more by their feeling than mechanism, are “One That Followed,” “Horizon,” “Dew-Fall,”“Befriended,” “The Song of A Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem,” and the two stanzas called, “After Music,” whose intimate beauty renders them personally interpretative.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,Until the music called, and called me thence,And tears stirred in my heart as tears may comeTo lonely children straying far from home,Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.If I might follow far and far awayUnto the country where these songs abide,I think my soul would wake and find it day,Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—Would tell me who I was before I died.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,Until the music called, and called me thence,And tears stirred in my heart as tears may comeTo lonely children straying far from home,Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.If I might follow far and far awayUnto the country where these songs abide,I think my soul would wake and find it day,Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—Would tell me who I was before I died.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,Until the music called, and called me thence,And tears stirred in my heart as tears may comeTo lonely children straying far from home,Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,

Until the music called, and called me thence,

And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come

To lonely children straying far from home,

Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.

If I might follow far and far awayUnto the country where these songs abide,I think my soul would wake and find it day,Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—Would tell me who I was before I died.

If I might follow far and far away

Unto the country where these songs abide,

I think my soul would wake and find it day,

Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—

Would tell me who I was before I died.

There is a mystical touch here in note with the opening reference to the subtlety of Miss Peabody’s sources of inspiration.

In the first volume is also a sonnet from the heart and to the heart, for who has not known the weariness that comes of long striving to image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is loth to commit his unfulfilled dream to the oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, “To the Unsung.”

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;The day was heavy and the sun will riseOn day as heavy, weariness as deep.Be near, though you be silent. Let me steepA sad heart in that peace, as a child triesTo hold his comfort fast, in fingers wiseWith imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—Too dull to listen or to understand.But only let me close the eyes of trustOn you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;The day was heavy and the sun will riseOn day as heavy, weariness as deep.Be near, though you be silent. Let me steepA sad heart in that peace, as a child triesTo hold his comfort fast, in fingers wiseWith imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—Too dull to listen or to understand.But only let me close the eyes of trustOn you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;The day was heavy and the sun will riseOn day as heavy, weariness as deep.Be near, though you be silent. Let me steepA sad heart in that peace, as a child triesTo hold his comfort fast, in fingers wiseWith imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—Too dull to listen or to understand.But only let me close the eyes of trustOn you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.

Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;

The day was heavy and the sun will rise

On day as heavy, weariness as deep.

Be near, though you be silent. Let me steep

A sad heart in that peace, as a child tries

To hold his comfort fast, in fingers wise

With imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.

Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,

—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—

Too dull to listen or to understand.

But only let me close the eyes of trust

On you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,

Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Altogether, Miss Peabody’s first book of verse revealed strength, feeling, and imagination, though tentative in its philosophy, as the initial work of a young poet must necessarily be, and having but a slight rooting in life.

The second volume,Fortune and Men’s Eyes, opens with a cleverly written one-act play, turning upon an adventure of two maids of honor at Elizabeth’s court, with Master W. S., a player, whose identity is not far to seek, and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, the scene being laid at the tavern of the Bear and the Angel, whither Mistress Anne Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a merry escapade under cover of seeing the people celebrate the fête of the Bear.

The atmosphere of the time is well reproduced, the dialogue of the tapsters cleverlydone, and the final scene between the Player and Mary is full of dramatic intensity.

In her second volume, Miss Peabody has also a dramatic monologue called, “The Wingless Joy,” which, though now and again Browningesque in tone, has many felicitous images and shows a true insight into human motive.

The lyrics in the second volume form a less important part of the collection, though there are several, such as “The Source,” “The Survivor,” “Psyche in the Niche,” and “In the Silence,” which rank with Miss Peabody’s best work, particularly the last, illustrating the truth that the Spirit manifests at the need, even the dumb and undivining need, and not alone at the call:

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,Who heeded not my prayer?All the long day, all the long night,I stretched my hands to air.“There was a bitterer want than thineCame from the frozen North;Laid hands upon my garment’s hemAnd led me forth.“It was a lonely Northern man,Where there was never treeTo shed its comfort on his heart,There he had need of me.“He kindled us a little flameTo hope against the storm;And unto him, and unto me,The light was warm.”And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—Who answered not, nor came:All the long day, and yesterday,I called Thee by Thy name.“There was a dumb, unhearing griefSpake louder than Thy word,There was a heart called not on me,But yet I heard.“The sorrow of a savage manShaping him gods, alone,Who found no love in the shapen clayTo answer to his own.“His heart knew what his eyes saw notHe bade me stay and eat;And unto him, and unto me,The cup was sweet.“Too long we wait for thee and thine,In sodden ways and dim,And where the man’s need cries on meThere have I need of him.“Along the borders of despairWhere sparrows seek no nest,Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—The Unnamed Guest.”

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,Who heeded not my prayer?All the long day, all the long night,I stretched my hands to air.“There was a bitterer want than thineCame from the frozen North;Laid hands upon my garment’s hemAnd led me forth.“It was a lonely Northern man,Where there was never treeTo shed its comfort on his heart,There he had need of me.“He kindled us a little flameTo hope against the storm;And unto him, and unto me,The light was warm.”And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—Who answered not, nor came:All the long day, and yesterday,I called Thee by Thy name.“There was a dumb, unhearing griefSpake louder than Thy word,There was a heart called not on me,But yet I heard.“The sorrow of a savage manShaping him gods, alone,Who found no love in the shapen clayTo answer to his own.“His heart knew what his eyes saw notHe bade me stay and eat;And unto him, and unto me,The cup was sweet.“Too long we wait for thee and thine,In sodden ways and dim,And where the man’s need cries on meThere have I need of him.“Along the borders of despairWhere sparrows seek no nest,Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—The Unnamed Guest.”

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,Who heeded not my prayer?All the long day, all the long night,I stretched my hands to air.

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,

Who heeded not my prayer?

All the long day, all the long night,

I stretched my hands to air.

“There was a bitterer want than thineCame from the frozen North;Laid hands upon my garment’s hemAnd led me forth.

“There was a bitterer want than thine

Came from the frozen North;

Laid hands upon my garment’s hem

And led me forth.

“It was a lonely Northern man,Where there was never treeTo shed its comfort on his heart,There he had need of me.

“It was a lonely Northern man,

Where there was never tree

To shed its comfort on his heart,

There he had need of me.

“He kindled us a little flameTo hope against the storm;And unto him, and unto me,The light was warm.”

“He kindled us a little flame

To hope against the storm;

And unto him, and unto me,

The light was warm.”

And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—Who answered not, nor came:All the long day, and yesterday,I called Thee by Thy name.

And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—

Who answered not, nor came:

All the long day, and yesterday,

I called Thee by Thy name.

“There was a dumb, unhearing griefSpake louder than Thy word,There was a heart called not on me,But yet I heard.

“There was a dumb, unhearing grief

Spake louder than Thy word,

There was a heart called not on me,

But yet I heard.

“The sorrow of a savage manShaping him gods, alone,Who found no love in the shapen clayTo answer to his own.

“The sorrow of a savage man

Shaping him gods, alone,

Who found no love in the shapen clay

To answer to his own.

“His heart knew what his eyes saw notHe bade me stay and eat;And unto him, and unto me,The cup was sweet.

“His heart knew what his eyes saw not

He bade me stay and eat;

And unto him, and unto me,

The cup was sweet.

“Too long we wait for thee and thine,In sodden ways and dim,And where the man’s need cries on meThere have I need of him.

“Too long we wait for thee and thine,

In sodden ways and dim,

And where the man’s need cries on me

There have I need of him.

“Along the borders of despairWhere sparrows seek no nest,Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—The Unnamed Guest.”

“Along the borders of despair

Where sparrows seek no nest,

Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—

The Unnamed Guest.”

Before leaving the second volume there is one other poem of which I cannot refrain from quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which a phase of the psychology of sentiment has been grasped and analyzed in these lines called “The Knot”:

Oh, I hated me,That when I loved you not, yet I could feelSome charm in me the deeper for your love:Some singing-robe invisible—and spunOf your own worship—fold me silverlyIn very moonlight, so that I walked fairWhen you were by, who had no wish to beThe fairer for your eyes! But at some costOf other life the hyacinth grows blue,And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,The sadder race. I would have fled from you,And yet I felt some fibre in myselfBinding me here, to search one moment yet—The only well that gave me back a star,—Your eyes reflecting. And I grew awareHow worship that must ever spend and burnWill have its deity from gold or stone;Till that fain womanhood that would be fairAnd lovable,—the hunger of the plant—Against my soul’s commandment reached and tookThe proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

Oh, I hated me,That when I loved you not, yet I could feelSome charm in me the deeper for your love:Some singing-robe invisible—and spunOf your own worship—fold me silverlyIn very moonlight, so that I walked fairWhen you were by, who had no wish to beThe fairer for your eyes! But at some costOf other life the hyacinth grows blue,And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,The sadder race. I would have fled from you,And yet I felt some fibre in myselfBinding me here, to search one moment yet—The only well that gave me back a star,—Your eyes reflecting. And I grew awareHow worship that must ever spend and burnWill have its deity from gold or stone;Till that fain womanhood that would be fairAnd lovable,—the hunger of the plant—Against my soul’s commandment reached and tookThe proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

Oh, I hated me,That when I loved you not, yet I could feelSome charm in me the deeper for your love:Some singing-robe invisible—and spunOf your own worship—fold me silverlyIn very moonlight, so that I walked fairWhen you were by, who had no wish to beThe fairer for your eyes! But at some costOf other life the hyacinth grows blue,And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,The sadder race. I would have fled from you,And yet I felt some fibre in myselfBinding me here, to search one moment yet—The only well that gave me back a star,—Your eyes reflecting. And I grew awareHow worship that must ever spend and burnWill have its deity from gold or stone;Till that fain womanhood that would be fairAnd lovable,—the hunger of the plant—Against my soul’s commandment reached and tookThe proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

Oh, I hated me,

That when I loved you not, yet I could feel

Some charm in me the deeper for your love:

Some singing-robe invisible—and spun

Of your own worship—fold me silverly

In very moonlight, so that I walked fair

When you were by, who had no wish to be

The fairer for your eyes! But at some cost

Of other life the hyacinth grows blue,

And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,

The sadder race. I would have fled from you,

And yet I felt some fibre in myself

Binding me here, to search one moment yet—

The only well that gave me back a star,—

Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware

How worship that must ever spend and burn

Will have its deity from gold or stone;

Till that fain womanhood that would be fair

And lovable,—the hunger of the plant—

Against my soul’s commandment reached and took

The proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

And the lines which follow close with the wholly feminine query,

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?

It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent femininity to a common denominator.

In her third volume,Marlowe, a drama, founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burned the topless towers of Ilium!

Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burned the topless towers of Ilium!

Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burned the topless towers of Ilium!

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium!

While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,” who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage, remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life essential to a character in drama.

In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close. Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but they are notshownin some great scene where he might receive the acclamations of the people and so contrast sharplywith his downfall at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience. “Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense, variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.

On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizingstrain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison as having for him—

Snowflake pity,Destined to melt and lose itself in fireOr ever it can cool my tongue,

Snowflake pity,Destined to melt and lose itself in fireOr ever it can cool my tongue,

Snowflake pity,Destined to melt and lose itself in fireOr ever it can cool my tongue,

Snowflake pity,

Destined to melt and lose itself in fire

Or ever it can cool my tongue,

and thus describes her:

Why, she was a maidOf crystalline! If you looked near enough,You’d see the wonder changing in her eyesLike parti-colored marvels in a brook,Bright through the clearness!

Why, she was a maidOf crystalline! If you looked near enough,You’d see the wonder changing in her eyesLike parti-colored marvels in a brook,Bright through the clearness!

Why, she was a maidOf crystalline! If you looked near enough,You’d see the wonder changing in her eyesLike parti-colored marvels in a brook,Bright through the clearness!

Why, she was a maid

Of crystalline! If you looked near enough,

You’d see the wonder changing in her eyes

Like parti-colored marvels in a brook,

Bright through the clearness!

Note now in contrast the impassioned words in which he pictures his divinity:

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the worldSince the first woman. Beauty cannot die.No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,There to be cherished by the cautious spring,Close folded in a rose, until the timeSome new imperial spirit comes to earthDemanding a fair raiment; and the earthYields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,And so the Woman comes!

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the worldSince the first woman. Beauty cannot die.No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,There to be cherished by the cautious spring,Close folded in a rose, until the timeSome new imperial spirit comes to earthDemanding a fair raiment; and the earthYields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,And so the Woman comes!

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the worldSince the first woman. Beauty cannot die.No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,There to be cherished by the cautious spring,Close folded in a rose, until the timeSome new imperial spirit comes to earthDemanding a fair raiment; and the earthYields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,And so the Woman comes!

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the world

Since the first woman. Beauty cannot die.

No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,

There to be cherished by the cautious spring,

Close folded in a rose, until the time

Some new imperial spirit comes to earth

Demanding a fair raiment; and the earth

Yields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,

Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,

And so the Woman comes!

And this beautiful passage addressed to her after the triumph of “Faustus”:

Drink my song.Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;Sip from the last year’s leaves their memoriesOf April, May, and June, their summer joy,Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

Drink my song.Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;Sip from the last year’s leaves their memoriesOf April, May, and June, their summer joy,Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

Drink my song.Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;Sip from the last year’s leaves their memoriesOf April, May, and June, their summer joy,Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

Drink my song.

Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;

Sip from the last year’s leaves their memories

Of April, May, and June, their summer joy,

Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

And finally these words spoken to her in splendid scorn, after his downfall and her rejection:

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—I—I who showed you first what you might be!But see now, you were hollow all the time,A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,And you are gone in ashes.

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—I—I who showed you first what you might be!But see now, you were hollow all the time,A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,And you are gone in ashes.

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—I—I who showed you first what you might be!But see now, you were hollow all the time,A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,And you are gone in ashes.

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—

I—I who showed you first what you might be!

But see now, you were hollow all the time,

A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,

And you are gone in ashes.

At once the most beautiful and artistically drawn scene is that previously referred to, in which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits Alison after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situation, human and vital, and Miss Peabody has developed it with rare feeling and skill. The picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and despondency, coming to the woman who had believed in him, and whose love had shone upon his unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine delicacy and pathos. In the flash of revelation that comes to him from her white spirit, he speaks these words:

Thou hast heardOf Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?And darkness comprehended not the Light?So. But I tell thee why. It was becauseThe Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,Bewildered at a thing it did not know.·  ·  ·  ·  ·Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.For after all is said, there is no thingSo hails the Light as that same blackness there,O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you thinkIt will not know at last?—it will not know?

Thou hast heardOf Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?And darkness comprehended not the Light?So. But I tell thee why. It was becauseThe Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,Bewildered at a thing it did not know.·  ·  ·  ·  ·Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.For after all is said, there is no thingSo hails the Light as that same blackness there,O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you thinkIt will not know at last?—it will not know?

Thou hast heardOf Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?And darkness comprehended not the Light?So. But I tell thee why. It was becauseThe Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,Bewildered at a thing it did not know.·  ·  ·  ·  ·Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.For after all is said, there is no thingSo hails the Light as that same blackness there,O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you thinkIt will not know at last?—it will not know?

Thou hast heard

Of Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?

And darkness comprehended not the Light?

So. But I tell thee why. It was because

The Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,

Bewildered at a thing it did not know.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.

For after all is said, there is no thing

So hails the Light as that same blackness there,

O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you think

It will not know at last?—it will not know?

Those, too, are noble passages, though too long to quote, in which Marlowe unburdens his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts to her faith the keeping of that higher self she had divined in him; and when Marlowe, early in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says:

You do not knowThe sense of waking down among the dead,Hard by some lazar-house,—

You do not knowThe sense of waking down among the dead,Hard by some lazar-house,—

You do not knowThe sense of waking down among the dead,Hard by some lazar-house,—

You do not know

The sense of waking down among the dead,

Hard by some lazar-house,—

note the hidden meaning in Alison’s reply:

Nay; but I knowThe sense of death. And then to rise againAnd feel thyself bewildered, like a spiritOut of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Nay; but I knowThe sense of death. And then to rise againAnd feel thyself bewildered, like a spiritOut of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Nay; but I knowThe sense of death. And then to rise againAnd feel thyself bewildered, like a spiritOut of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Nay; but I know

The sense of death. And then to rise again

And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit

Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic, distinguish this scene.

Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill-starredgenius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.

Many of her critics have found in Miss Peabody’s latest volume,The Singing Leaves, an inspiration and charm exceeding that of her former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, simplicity, and ideality it must be accounted one of her truest achievements; but there is about the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstantiality, which renders it elusive and unconvincing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in Miss Peabody’s work has, in the latest volume, grown, until many of the poems have so little objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of foam upon the deep of thought. They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, anaïveté, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificialartlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet; in short, the poems seem to me, with a few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, and to bring few warmly imbued words from life. They are as the pale moon-flower, growing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the rose dyed with the blood of the heart.

But what is, to me, the limitation of the volume,—its over-subtilized mood and lack of definite, moving purpose,—must, to many of its readers, be granted to be its distinction; and for their very impalpability these delicate Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as that which moves the aspen when the wind is still, have for many the greater charm.

To glance, then, at some of the finer achievements of the volume, one finds among the lyrics several turning upon love that catch in artistic words an undefined mood, such as “Forethought” and “Unsaid,” or in captivating picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as “The Enchanted Sheepfold,” or, stronger and finer than these, that vision of love called “The Cloud,” which enfolds truth and wraps the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which to clothe the thought of these lines:

The islands called me far away,The valleys called me home.The rivers with a silver voiceDrew on my heart to come.The paths reached tendrils to my hairFrom every vine and tree.There was no refuge anywhereUntil I came to thee.There is a northern cloud I know,Along a mountain crest.And as she folds her wings of mist,So I could make my rest.There is no chain to bind her soUnto that purple height;And she will shine and wander, slow,Slow, with a cloud’s delight.Would she begone? She melts away,A heavenly joyous thing.Yet day will find the mountain white,White-folded with her wing.·  ·  ·  ·  ·And though love cannot bind me, Love,—Ah no!—yet I could stayMaybe, with wings forever spread,—Forever, and a day.

The islands called me far away,The valleys called me home.The rivers with a silver voiceDrew on my heart to come.The paths reached tendrils to my hairFrom every vine and tree.There was no refuge anywhereUntil I came to thee.There is a northern cloud I know,Along a mountain crest.And as she folds her wings of mist,So I could make my rest.There is no chain to bind her soUnto that purple height;And she will shine and wander, slow,Slow, with a cloud’s delight.Would she begone? She melts away,A heavenly joyous thing.Yet day will find the mountain white,White-folded with her wing.·  ·  ·  ·  ·And though love cannot bind me, Love,—Ah no!—yet I could stayMaybe, with wings forever spread,—Forever, and a day.

The islands called me far away,The valleys called me home.The rivers with a silver voiceDrew on my heart to come.

The islands called me far away,

The valleys called me home.

The rivers with a silver voice

Drew on my heart to come.

The paths reached tendrils to my hairFrom every vine and tree.There was no refuge anywhereUntil I came to thee.

The paths reached tendrils to my hair

From every vine and tree.

There was no refuge anywhere

Until I came to thee.

There is a northern cloud I know,Along a mountain crest.And as she folds her wings of mist,So I could make my rest.

There is a northern cloud I know,

Along a mountain crest.

And as she folds her wings of mist,

So I could make my rest.

There is no chain to bind her soUnto that purple height;And she will shine and wander, slow,Slow, with a cloud’s delight.

There is no chain to bind her so

Unto that purple height;

And she will shine and wander, slow,

Slow, with a cloud’s delight.

Would she begone? She melts away,A heavenly joyous thing.Yet day will find the mountain white,White-folded with her wing.·  ·  ·  ·  ·And though love cannot bind me, Love,—Ah no!—yet I could stayMaybe, with wings forever spread,—Forever, and a day.

Would she begone? She melts away,

A heavenly joyous thing.

Yet day will find the mountain white,

White-folded with her wing.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

And though love cannot bind me, Love,

—Ah no!—yet I could stay

Maybe, with wings forever spread,

—Forever, and a day.

Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life.

Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure,and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems.

Nearly all the lyrics inThe Singing Leavesare very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book,The Wayfarers. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third:

A lie, it may be black or white;I care not for the lie:My grief is for the tortured breathOf Truth that cannot die.And cruelty, what that may be,What creature understands?But O, the glazing eyes of Love,Stabbed through the open hands!

A lie, it may be black or white;I care not for the lie:My grief is for the tortured breathOf Truth that cannot die.And cruelty, what that may be,What creature understands?But O, the glazing eyes of Love,Stabbed through the open hands!

A lie, it may be black or white;I care not for the lie:My grief is for the tortured breathOf Truth that cannot die.

A lie, it may be black or white;

I care not for the lie:

My grief is for the tortured breath

Of Truth that cannot die.

And cruelty, what that may be,What creature understands?But O, the glazing eyes of Love,Stabbed through the open hands!

And cruelty, what that may be,

What creature understands?

But O, the glazing eyes of Love,

Stabbed through the open hands!

Two poems contained inThe Singing Leavesare of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience:

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,To give for asking: yet again to trustThe needy love in women and in men,Until again my faith is turned to dustBy one more thrust.How you must smile apart who make my handsEver to bleed where they were reached to bless;—Wonder how any wit that understandsShould ever try too near, with gentle stress,Your sullenness!Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—The only triumph slain by no surprise:True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,Starving on lies.Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:When I am dark, begone into the sun.I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—A lonely game indeed, but now all done;—And I have won!’

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,To give for asking: yet again to trustThe needy love in women and in men,Until again my faith is turned to dustBy one more thrust.How you must smile apart who make my handsEver to bleed where they were reached to bless;—Wonder how any wit that understandsShould ever try too near, with gentle stress,Your sullenness!Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—The only triumph slain by no surprise:True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,Starving on lies.Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:When I am dark, begone into the sun.I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—A lonely game indeed, but now all done;—And I have won!’

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,To give for asking: yet again to trustThe needy love in women and in men,Until again my faith is turned to dustBy one more thrust.

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,

To give for asking: yet again to trust

The needy love in women and in men,

Until again my faith is turned to dust

By one more thrust.

How you must smile apart who make my handsEver to bleed where they were reached to bless;—Wonder how any wit that understandsShould ever try too near, with gentle stress,Your sullenness!

How you must smile apart who make my hands

Ever to bleed where they were reached to bless;

—Wonder how any wit that understands

Should ever try too near, with gentle stress,

Your sullenness!

Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—The only triumph slain by no surprise:True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,Starving on lies.

Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—

The only triumph slain by no surprise:

True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,

The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,

Starving on lies.

Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:When I am dark, begone into the sun.I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—A lonely game indeed, but now all done;—And I have won!’

Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:

When I am dark, begone into the sun.

I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—

A lonely game indeed, but now all done;

—And I have won!’

Here speaks a word from life worth a score of “Charms: To Be Said In The Sun,” or other fanciful unreality; and because of such poems as this, fibred in human motive, one feels by contrast in many of the others that Miss Peabody has been playing with her genius, casting “Charms” and “Spells,” which are mere poetic sorcery.

Miss Peabody has a rare sympathy with child-life, and her group of poems of this nature could not well be bettered. With the exception of a line now and then which may be a bit beyond the expression of a child, they are fidelity itself to the moods that swayedThe Little Past. “Journey,” “The Busy Child,” and “The Mystic” are among the best, though none could be spared, unless, perhaps, “Cakes and Ale.” Still another with the true child-feeling is that called “Late,”—a tender little song which, because of its brevity, must suffice to represent the group:

My father brought somebody up,To show us all asleep.They came as softly up the stairsAs you could creep.They whispered in the doorway thereAnd looked at us awhile,I had my eyes shut up, but ICould feel him smile.I shut my eyes up close, and layAs still as I could keep;Because I knew he wanted usTo be asleep.

My father brought somebody up,To show us all asleep.They came as softly up the stairsAs you could creep.They whispered in the doorway thereAnd looked at us awhile,I had my eyes shut up, but ICould feel him smile.I shut my eyes up close, and layAs still as I could keep;Because I knew he wanted usTo be asleep.

My father brought somebody up,To show us all asleep.They came as softly up the stairsAs you could creep.

My father brought somebody up,

To show us all asleep.

They came as softly up the stairs

As you could creep.

They whispered in the doorway thereAnd looked at us awhile,I had my eyes shut up, but ICould feel him smile.

They whispered in the doorway there

And looked at us awhile,

I had my eyes shut up, but I

Could feel him smile.

I shut my eyes up close, and layAs still as I could keep;Because I knew he wanted usTo be asleep.

I shut my eyes up close, and lay

As still as I could keep;

Because I knew he wanted us

To be asleep.

Miss Peabody’s work, considered in its entirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace and delicacy, by imagination and vision, susceptibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever-present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat the element of personal emotion and passion, it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less intimate in its revealing.

VIICHARLES G. D. ROBERTSMR. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS presents so marked an example of evolution in the style of his work and the sources of his inspiration, that he has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, “changed his last year’s dwelling for the new,” and having entered the “more stately mansion” has “known the old no more.”The first chamber which he fashioned for himself in the House of Art could not long contain him, as its walls were built of myths and traditions, incapable of further expansion. This was the period ofOrion and Other Poems, such as “Ariadne,” “Memnon,” and “Launcelot And The Four Queens,” work done prior to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of a young collegian.The second lodging was scarcely more permanent; though structured less in myth, and showing a gain in workmanship, it was still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding spirit, and did little more than give foretokensof that which should succeed it. The volume contained, however, one admirable composition, one that remains as vital and apposite as when it was written,—the stirring stanzas to Canada. Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraignment, and leads one to wonder why other poets of her domain do not turn their pens to revealing her to herself as does this fine utterance.Mr. Roberts’ third volume,Songs of the Common Day, bore almost no relation to its predecessors, and might have been the work of a different hand, as regards both subject and style. Legend and myth had wholly disappeared, and experience had begun to furnish the raw material, the flax, for the poet’s spindle and distaff which earlier effort had been making ready. Not yet, however, had the work the virility and tang that smack in the very first line of its successor,The Book of the Native. It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, except in a few instances, the large free note that sounds in the later work. Among its lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and sweet as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” andin the sifting of the volume, this remains, perhaps, the sand of gold:Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart a nameMy lips shall speak no more.The high and lonely hillsEndure the darkening year—And in my heart endureA memory and a tear.Across the tide a sailThat tosses and is gone—And in my heart the kissThat longing dreams upon.Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart the faceThat I shall see no more.The simplicity and pathos of this lyric render it unforgettable.Illustration of Charles G. D. Roberts“The Tide on Tantramar,” from the third volume, a ballad of the sea and the salt marshes, transfers to the page the keen pungence of the brine, as do the descriptive stanzas of Tantramar used illustratively in the “Ave” to Shelley. There is noble work in this elegy, and while it wanders over a good deal of Canadian territory, making inspired observations of naturebefore it discloses their relation to the subject—when the comparison is reached it is apposite, and the poem shows an insight into the character of Shelley that is gratifying, in view of the vagueness usually associated with his name.OtherSongs of the Common Day, forelooking to the later poet, are “The Silver Thaw,” “Canadian Streams,” and “The Wood Frolic,” having the first-hand, magnetic touch distinguishing every line of Mr. Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—The Book of the Native. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration,Back to the bewildering visionAnd the border-land of birth;Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth,and puts the query to nature:Tell me how some sightless impulse,Working out a hidden plan,God for kin and clay for fellow,Wakes to find itself a man.Tell me how the life of mortal,Wavering from breath to breath,Like a web of scarlet patternHurtles from the loom of death.How the caged bright bird, Desire,Which the hands of God deliver,Beats aloft to drop unheededAt the confines of forever.Faints unheeded for a season,Then outwings the farthest star,To the wisdom and the stillnessWhere thy consummations are.This sounds the keynote toThe Book of the Native, which is equally concerned with the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of nature. The questing spirit is abroad in it; the unquenched faith, the vitality, the hidden import of life is in it; and while its metaphysics do not go to the point of developing a definite philosophy, they set one to thinking for himself, which is a better service. “Origins,” a speculation as to our coming from “the enigmatic Will,” and the “Unsleeping,” a vision of the Force brooding over life,—are among the strongest poems of this motive. To cite the second:I soothe to unimagined sleepThe sunless bases of the deep,And then I stir the aching tideThat gropes in its reluctant side.I heave aloft the smoking hill:To silent peace its throes I still.But ever at its heart of fireI lurk, an unassuaged desire.I wrap me in the sightless germAn instant or an endless term;And still its atoms are my care,Dispersed in ashes or in air.I hush the comets one by oneTo sleep for ages in the sun;The sun resumes before my faceHis circuit of the shores of space.The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of God go by.What a fine touch in the lines declaring thatTime, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane!Mr. Roberts has the rare pictorial gift of flashing a scene before one without employing an excess of imagery, and never that which is confused or cumbrous. His style is nervous, magnetic, direct, and has, in his later work, very little superfluous tissue. This statement, has, of course, its exceptions, but is sufficiently accurate to be made a generalization, and in no case is it better shown than in thedescriptive poems of the Canadian country inThe Book of the Native. What is there about Canada that sets the blood of her poets a-tingle and lends magic to their fingers when writing of her? What is there in Grand Pré’s “barren reaches by the tide,” or in the marshes of Tantramar, that such a spell should wait upon them, calling the roamer“Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth”?With the American poets of the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them,—though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement,—but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.Particularly is this true of Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D.Roberts; and it was equally true of Archibald Lampman, whose untimely passing lost to Canada one of her anointed singers, to whose high promise justice has hardly yet been done. To illustrate Mr. Roberts’ nature-sympathy, and susceptibility to the mood of the year, let me put in contrast parts of two poems fromThe Book of the Native. The first belongs to the racy note pervading a good deal of the nature-verse of to-day, of which the Vagabondia books set the fashion: it is called “Afoot,” but might with equal aptness be named the “Processional,” since the second is the “Recessional”:Comes the lure of green things growing,Comes the call of waters flowing,—And the wayfarer desireMoves and wakes and would be going.Hark the migrant hosts of JuneMarching nearer noon by noon!Hark the gossip of the grassesBivouacked beneath the moon!Hark the leaves their mirth averring;Hark the buds to blossom stirring;Hark the hushed, exultant hasteOf the wind and world conferring!Hark the sharp, insistent cryWhere the hawk patrols the sky!Hark the flapping, as of banners,Where the heron triumphs by!Note the picturesque phrase and the compulsive, quickstep note in the lines above, as of the advancing cohorts of spring, and in contrast the slow movement, the sadness of the retreating year, in these beautiful “Recessional” stanzas:Now along the solemn heightsFade the Autumn’s altar-lights;Down the great earth’s glimmering chancelGlide the days and nights.Little kindred of the grass,Like a shadow on a glassFalls the dark and falls the stillness;We must rise and pass.We must rise and follow, wendingWhere the nights and days have ending,—Pass in order pale and slow,Unto sleep extending.Little brothers of the clod,Soul of fire and seed of sod,We must fare into the silenceAt the knees of God.Little comrades of the sky,Wing to wing we wander by,Going, going, going, going,Softly as a sigh.And to make the season-cycle complete, and also to show the delicacy of imagination withwhich Mr. Roberts invests every changing aspect of his well-loved outer world, here are two stanzas on “The Frosted Pane”:One night came Winter noiselessly, and leanedAgainst my window-pane.In the deep stillness of his heart convenedThe ghosts of all his slain.Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,And fugitives of grass,—White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,He drew them on the glass.Fancies as exquisite as this bespeak the true poet. “The Trout Brook” and “The Solitary Woodsman” are other inspirations as individual.Mr. Roberts’ fifth volume,New York Nocturnes, as its name implies, was a decided departure from his former work, showing his versatility, but what is more to the purpose, his recognition of the dramatic element, the human, vital poetry in the babel of the streets. One could wish that theNocturnespenetrated more profoundly into the varied phases of life in the great seething city, that, in short, they sounded other deeps than those of love; but Mr. Roberts has succeeded in conveying that sense of isolation in a throng, that heavy loneliness and reaction, throwing one back uponhis own spiritual personality, which belongs to the bewildering city night, and from which the finer companionships of love arise as a refuge and need.TheNocturneshave the city’s over-soul incarnate in them; for in the last analysis, the commerce, the art, the ambition, the strife, the defeat, that one may term the city’s life, are but as hands and feet to minister to the spirit of love. The first of theNocturnessuggests this:I walk the city square with thee,The night is loud; the pavements roar.Their eddying mirth and miseryEncircle thee and me.The street is full of lights and cries:The crowd but brings thee close to me,I only hear thy low replies;I only see thine eyes.The “Nocturne of Consecration” is impassioned and full of spirituality; it is, however, too long to quote, which is unfortunately the case with the “Nocturne of the Honeysuckle,” another of the finer poems. “At the Station” is instinct with movement, reproducing the picture of the swiftly changing throngs, and conveying the eager expectancy of the hour of meeting. TheNocturneshave also a group of miscellaneouspoems, and the volume as a whole, while less virile thanThe Book of the Native, owing to the difference in theme, is distinguished by refinement of feeling and artistry.InThe Book of the RoseMr. Roberts has done some excellent work, and some, alas, that strikes a decided note of artificiality. The least real and convincing of the poems is that called “On the Upper Deck,” which opens the volume. The first stanza is subtly phrased, and also the lyric which occurs midway of the poem; but the dialogue between the lovers is honeyed poetizing rather than genuine emotion. I find few heart-throbs in it, but rather a melodramatic sentimentality from whose flights one is now and again let down to the common day with summary despatch, as in the parenthetical clause of the stanza which follows:Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you thinkThe engine’s pulse throbs louder now the lightHas gone? The hiss of waters past our hullIs more mysterious, with a menace in it?And that pale streak above the unseen land,How ominous! a sword has just such pallor!(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.)Never has life shown me the face of beautyBut near it I have seen the face of fear.It may be that an obtuse man upon the deck of a steamer would interrupt his sweetheart’sflight of poesy to envelop her in a shawl, but the details of the matter may well be left to the imagination. It is doubtless one of those passages which seem to a writer to give reality to a picture, but afterward smile at him sardonically from the printed page. Mr. Roberts inclines elsewhere in the same poem to be too explicit; after a most exalted declaration, he says:No, do not move! Alone although we beI dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hemI will not touch lest I should break my dreamAnd just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.Here again it was scarcely necessary to qualify the chair, and indeed the whole passage savors of melodrama. These are, however, only such lines as show that to the one relating a matter the least incident may appear to lend reality to the setting, whereas to the reader the detail may violate taste.The opening stanza, mentioned as one of the truly subtle bits of the poem in question, has these fine lines:As the will of last year’s wind,As the drift of the morrow’s rain,As the goal of the falling star,As the treason sinned in vain,As the bow that shines and is gone,As the night cry heard no more,—Is the way of the woman’s meaningBeyond man’s eldest lore.This stanza and the lyric below, which is sung as an interlude to the dialogue, go far toward redeeming the over-ripe sentiment of the poem:O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deepsThe hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps,There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth,Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire,The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire,The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,—With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.The remaining poems of the volume are much more artistic than the first, with the exception of the passages last quoted. “The Rose of Life” is artistically wrought as to form and metre, and subtle in analysis; but, because of its length and that it voices somewhat the same thought as the lyric above, the former must serve to show with what delicacyof interpretation he approaches a theme so well worn, but ever new, as that of the rose. It is chiefly on the symbolistic side that Mr. Roberts considers the subject; and while one may feel that the sentiment cloys at times when a group of poems using the rose as an image are bracketed together, this is the chief criticism of the volume, as the lyrics following the opening poem, “On the Upper Deck,” have both charm and art, and one hesitates between such an one as, “O Little Rose, O Dark Rose,” and the one immediately following it, “The Rose of My Desire.” This, perhaps, has a more compelling mood, though no greater charm of touch than the other:O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire,An Eastern wizard made youOf earth and stars and fire.When the orange moon swung lowOver the camphor-trees,By the silver shaft of the fountainHe wrought his mysteries.The hot, sweet mould of the gardenHe took from a secret placeTo become your glimmering bodyAnd the lure of your strange face.From the swoon of the tropic heavenHe drew down star on star,And breathed them into your soulThat your soul might wander far—On earth forever homeless,But intimate of the spheres,A pang in your mystic laughter,A portent in your tears.From the night’s heat, hushed, electric,He summoned a shifting flame,And cherished it, and blew on itTill it burned into your name.And he set the name in my heartFor an unextinguished fire,O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire!Metrically the poem jars in the line,And breathed them into your soul,departing as it does from the general scheme of the third lines, and rendering it necessary to make “soul” bisyllabic in order to carry the metre smoothly, and in accord with its companion verses. “Spirit” would have fitted the metrical exigency better, leaving the final unaccented syllable as in the majority of the lines, but would not have lent itself to repetition in the succeeding line as does “soul,”—so“who shall arbitrate”? Mr. Roberts rarely offends the ear in his metres, but instead his cadences are notably true.Aside from the poems upon love, filling the first division ofThe Book of the Roseit has a miscellaneous group, of which the two that best represent it, to my fancy, are so widely diverse that their mere mention in juxtaposition is amusing; nevertheless they are the lines “To An Omar Punch Bowl,” and the reverent Nativity Song, “When Mary, the Mother, Kissed the Child.” The haunting couplets of the former are by no means of the convivial sort, but the essence of memory and desire, the pathos of this dust that is but “wind that hurries by,”—is in them. However, to be quoted, they need their full context, as does the Nativity Song mentioned.Mr. Roberts has a rare sympathy with childhood, and a gift of reaching the hearts of the little ones; the “Sleepy Man” and “Wake-up Song” could scarcely be improved; note the picturing in the former and the drowsihood in its falling cadences:When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)·  ·  ·  ·  ·Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)Mr. Roberts has collected his several volumes, exclusive ofThe Book of the Rose, into one, eliminating such of the earlier work as falls short of his standard of criticism, and adding new matter showing growth and constantly broadening affinity with life. He manifests more and more the potentialities of his nature, and while all of his later work does not ring equally true, the majority of it is instinct with sincerity and high idealism, and one may go to it for unforced, unconventional song, having art without trammels, for a breath of the ozone of nature, andfor suggestive thoughts upon life and the things of the spirit. Its creed is epitomized in the following lines, pregnant with suggestion to the votary of Art, the creed of the idealist, and yet the truer realist:Said Life to Art: I love thee bestNot when I find in theeMy very face and form, expressedWith dull fidelity.But when in thee my longing eyesBehold continuallyThe mystery of my memoriesAnd all I crave to be.

MR. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS presents so marked an example of evolution in the style of his work and the sources of his inspiration, that he has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, “changed his last year’s dwelling for the new,” and having entered the “more stately mansion” has “known the old no more.”

The first chamber which he fashioned for himself in the House of Art could not long contain him, as its walls were built of myths and traditions, incapable of further expansion. This was the period ofOrion and Other Poems, such as “Ariadne,” “Memnon,” and “Launcelot And The Four Queens,” work done prior to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of a young collegian.

The second lodging was scarcely more permanent; though structured less in myth, and showing a gain in workmanship, it was still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding spirit, and did little more than give foretokensof that which should succeed it. The volume contained, however, one admirable composition, one that remains as vital and apposite as when it was written,—the stirring stanzas to Canada. Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraignment, and leads one to wonder why other poets of her domain do not turn their pens to revealing her to herself as does this fine utterance.

Mr. Roberts’ third volume,Songs of the Common Day, bore almost no relation to its predecessors, and might have been the work of a different hand, as regards both subject and style. Legend and myth had wholly disappeared, and experience had begun to furnish the raw material, the flax, for the poet’s spindle and distaff which earlier effort had been making ready. Not yet, however, had the work the virility and tang that smack in the very first line of its successor,The Book of the Native. It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, except in a few instances, the large free note that sounds in the later work. Among its lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and sweet as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” andin the sifting of the volume, this remains, perhaps, the sand of gold:

Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart a nameMy lips shall speak no more.The high and lonely hillsEndure the darkening year—And in my heart endureA memory and a tear.Across the tide a sailThat tosses and is gone—And in my heart the kissThat longing dreams upon.Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart the faceThat I shall see no more.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart a nameMy lips shall speak no more.The high and lonely hillsEndure the darkening year—And in my heart endureA memory and a tear.Across the tide a sailThat tosses and is gone—And in my heart the kissThat longing dreams upon.Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart the faceThat I shall see no more.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart a nameMy lips shall speak no more.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore—

And in my heart a name

My lips shall speak no more.

The high and lonely hillsEndure the darkening year—And in my heart endureA memory and a tear.

The high and lonely hills

Endure the darkening year—

And in my heart endure

A memory and a tear.

Across the tide a sailThat tosses and is gone—And in my heart the kissThat longing dreams upon.

Across the tide a sail

That tosses and is gone—

And in my heart the kiss

That longing dreams upon.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,And surf along the shore—And in my heart the faceThat I shall see no more.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore—

And in my heart the face

That I shall see no more.

The simplicity and pathos of this lyric render it unforgettable.

Illustration of Charles G. D. Roberts

“The Tide on Tantramar,” from the third volume, a ballad of the sea and the salt marshes, transfers to the page the keen pungence of the brine, as do the descriptive stanzas of Tantramar used illustratively in the “Ave” to Shelley. There is noble work in this elegy, and while it wanders over a good deal of Canadian territory, making inspired observations of naturebefore it discloses their relation to the subject—when the comparison is reached it is apposite, and the poem shows an insight into the character of Shelley that is gratifying, in view of the vagueness usually associated with his name.

OtherSongs of the Common Day, forelooking to the later poet, are “The Silver Thaw,” “Canadian Streams,” and “The Wood Frolic,” having the first-hand, magnetic touch distinguishing every line of Mr. Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—The Book of the Native. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration,

Back to the bewildering visionAnd the border-land of birth;Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth,

Back to the bewildering visionAnd the border-land of birth;Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth,

Back to the bewildering visionAnd the border-land of birth;Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth,

Back to the bewildering vision

And the border-land of birth;

Back into the looming wonder,

The Companionship of Earth,

and puts the query to nature:

Tell me how some sightless impulse,Working out a hidden plan,God for kin and clay for fellow,Wakes to find itself a man.Tell me how the life of mortal,Wavering from breath to breath,Like a web of scarlet patternHurtles from the loom of death.How the caged bright bird, Desire,Which the hands of God deliver,Beats aloft to drop unheededAt the confines of forever.Faints unheeded for a season,Then outwings the farthest star,To the wisdom and the stillnessWhere thy consummations are.

Tell me how some sightless impulse,Working out a hidden plan,God for kin and clay for fellow,Wakes to find itself a man.Tell me how the life of mortal,Wavering from breath to breath,Like a web of scarlet patternHurtles from the loom of death.How the caged bright bird, Desire,Which the hands of God deliver,Beats aloft to drop unheededAt the confines of forever.Faints unheeded for a season,Then outwings the farthest star,To the wisdom and the stillnessWhere thy consummations are.

Tell me how some sightless impulse,Working out a hidden plan,God for kin and clay for fellow,Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how some sightless impulse,

Working out a hidden plan,

God for kin and clay for fellow,

Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how the life of mortal,Wavering from breath to breath,Like a web of scarlet patternHurtles from the loom of death.

Tell me how the life of mortal,

Wavering from breath to breath,

Like a web of scarlet pattern

Hurtles from the loom of death.

How the caged bright bird, Desire,Which the hands of God deliver,Beats aloft to drop unheededAt the confines of forever.

How the caged bright bird, Desire,

Which the hands of God deliver,

Beats aloft to drop unheeded

At the confines of forever.

Faints unheeded for a season,Then outwings the farthest star,To the wisdom and the stillnessWhere thy consummations are.

Faints unheeded for a season,

Then outwings the farthest star,

To the wisdom and the stillness

Where thy consummations are.

This sounds the keynote toThe Book of the Native, which is equally concerned with the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of nature. The questing spirit is abroad in it; the unquenched faith, the vitality, the hidden import of life is in it; and while its metaphysics do not go to the point of developing a definite philosophy, they set one to thinking for himself, which is a better service. “Origins,” a speculation as to our coming from “the enigmatic Will,” and the “Unsleeping,” a vision of the Force brooding over life,—are among the strongest poems of this motive. To cite the second:

I soothe to unimagined sleepThe sunless bases of the deep,And then I stir the aching tideThat gropes in its reluctant side.I heave aloft the smoking hill:To silent peace its throes I still.But ever at its heart of fireI lurk, an unassuaged desire.I wrap me in the sightless germAn instant or an endless term;And still its atoms are my care,Dispersed in ashes or in air.I hush the comets one by oneTo sleep for ages in the sun;The sun resumes before my faceHis circuit of the shores of space.The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

I soothe to unimagined sleepThe sunless bases of the deep,And then I stir the aching tideThat gropes in its reluctant side.I heave aloft the smoking hill:To silent peace its throes I still.But ever at its heart of fireI lurk, an unassuaged desire.I wrap me in the sightless germAn instant or an endless term;And still its atoms are my care,Dispersed in ashes or in air.I hush the comets one by oneTo sleep for ages in the sun;The sun resumes before my faceHis circuit of the shores of space.The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

I soothe to unimagined sleepThe sunless bases of the deep,And then I stir the aching tideThat gropes in its reluctant side.

I soothe to unimagined sleep

The sunless bases of the deep,

And then I stir the aching tide

That gropes in its reluctant side.

I heave aloft the smoking hill:To silent peace its throes I still.But ever at its heart of fireI lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I heave aloft the smoking hill:

To silent peace its throes I still.

But ever at its heart of fire

I lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I wrap me in the sightless germAn instant or an endless term;And still its atoms are my care,Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I wrap me in the sightless germ

An instant or an endless term;

And still its atoms are my care,

Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I hush the comets one by oneTo sleep for ages in the sun;The sun resumes before my faceHis circuit of the shores of space.

I hush the comets one by one

To sleep for ages in the sun;

The sun resumes before my face

His circuit of the shores of space.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,

They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,

Shall drift across the darkened pane.

Space, in the dim predestined hour,Shall crumble like a ruined tower.I only, with unfaltering eye,Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

Space, in the dim predestined hour,

Shall crumble like a ruined tower.

I only, with unfaltering eye,

Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

What a fine touch in the lines declaring that

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane!

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane!

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,Shall drift across the darkened pane!

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,

Shall drift across the darkened pane!

Mr. Roberts has the rare pictorial gift of flashing a scene before one without employing an excess of imagery, and never that which is confused or cumbrous. His style is nervous, magnetic, direct, and has, in his later work, very little superfluous tissue. This statement, has, of course, its exceptions, but is sufficiently accurate to be made a generalization, and in no case is it better shown than in thedescriptive poems of the Canadian country inThe Book of the Native. What is there about Canada that sets the blood of her poets a-tingle and lends magic to their fingers when writing of her? What is there in Grand Pré’s “barren reaches by the tide,” or in the marshes of Tantramar, that such a spell should wait upon them, calling the roamer

“Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth”?

“Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth”?

“Back into the looming wonder,The Companionship of Earth”?

“Back into the looming wonder,

The Companionship of Earth”?

With the American poets of the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them,—though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement,—but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.

Particularly is this true of Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D.Roberts; and it was equally true of Archibald Lampman, whose untimely passing lost to Canada one of her anointed singers, to whose high promise justice has hardly yet been done. To illustrate Mr. Roberts’ nature-sympathy, and susceptibility to the mood of the year, let me put in contrast parts of two poems fromThe Book of the Native. The first belongs to the racy note pervading a good deal of the nature-verse of to-day, of which the Vagabondia books set the fashion: it is called “Afoot,” but might with equal aptness be named the “Processional,” since the second is the “Recessional”:

Comes the lure of green things growing,Comes the call of waters flowing,—And the wayfarer desireMoves and wakes and would be going.Hark the migrant hosts of JuneMarching nearer noon by noon!Hark the gossip of the grassesBivouacked beneath the moon!Hark the leaves their mirth averring;Hark the buds to blossom stirring;Hark the hushed, exultant hasteOf the wind and world conferring!Hark the sharp, insistent cryWhere the hawk patrols the sky!Hark the flapping, as of banners,Where the heron triumphs by!

Comes the lure of green things growing,Comes the call of waters flowing,—And the wayfarer desireMoves and wakes and would be going.Hark the migrant hosts of JuneMarching nearer noon by noon!Hark the gossip of the grassesBivouacked beneath the moon!Hark the leaves their mirth averring;Hark the buds to blossom stirring;Hark the hushed, exultant hasteOf the wind and world conferring!Hark the sharp, insistent cryWhere the hawk patrols the sky!Hark the flapping, as of banners,Where the heron triumphs by!

Comes the lure of green things growing,Comes the call of waters flowing,—And the wayfarer desireMoves and wakes and would be going.

Comes the lure of green things growing,

Comes the call of waters flowing,—

And the wayfarer desire

Moves and wakes and would be going.

Hark the migrant hosts of JuneMarching nearer noon by noon!Hark the gossip of the grassesBivouacked beneath the moon!

Hark the migrant hosts of June

Marching nearer noon by noon!

Hark the gossip of the grasses

Bivouacked beneath the moon!

Hark the leaves their mirth averring;Hark the buds to blossom stirring;Hark the hushed, exultant hasteOf the wind and world conferring!

Hark the leaves their mirth averring;

Hark the buds to blossom stirring;

Hark the hushed, exultant haste

Of the wind and world conferring!

Hark the sharp, insistent cryWhere the hawk patrols the sky!Hark the flapping, as of banners,Where the heron triumphs by!

Hark the sharp, insistent cry

Where the hawk patrols the sky!

Hark the flapping, as of banners,

Where the heron triumphs by!

Note the picturesque phrase and the compulsive, quickstep note in the lines above, as of the advancing cohorts of spring, and in contrast the slow movement, the sadness of the retreating year, in these beautiful “Recessional” stanzas:

Now along the solemn heightsFade the Autumn’s altar-lights;Down the great earth’s glimmering chancelGlide the days and nights.Little kindred of the grass,Like a shadow on a glassFalls the dark and falls the stillness;We must rise and pass.We must rise and follow, wendingWhere the nights and days have ending,—Pass in order pale and slow,Unto sleep extending.Little brothers of the clod,Soul of fire and seed of sod,We must fare into the silenceAt the knees of God.Little comrades of the sky,Wing to wing we wander by,Going, going, going, going,Softly as a sigh.

Now along the solemn heightsFade the Autumn’s altar-lights;Down the great earth’s glimmering chancelGlide the days and nights.Little kindred of the grass,Like a shadow on a glassFalls the dark and falls the stillness;We must rise and pass.We must rise and follow, wendingWhere the nights and days have ending,—Pass in order pale and slow,Unto sleep extending.Little brothers of the clod,Soul of fire and seed of sod,We must fare into the silenceAt the knees of God.Little comrades of the sky,Wing to wing we wander by,Going, going, going, going,Softly as a sigh.

Now along the solemn heightsFade the Autumn’s altar-lights;Down the great earth’s glimmering chancelGlide the days and nights.

Now along the solemn heights

Fade the Autumn’s altar-lights;

Down the great earth’s glimmering chancel

Glide the days and nights.

Little kindred of the grass,Like a shadow on a glassFalls the dark and falls the stillness;We must rise and pass.

Little kindred of the grass,

Like a shadow on a glass

Falls the dark and falls the stillness;

We must rise and pass.

We must rise and follow, wendingWhere the nights and days have ending,—Pass in order pale and slow,Unto sleep extending.

We must rise and follow, wending

Where the nights and days have ending,—

Pass in order pale and slow,

Unto sleep extending.

Little brothers of the clod,Soul of fire and seed of sod,We must fare into the silenceAt the knees of God.

Little brothers of the clod,

Soul of fire and seed of sod,

We must fare into the silence

At the knees of God.

Little comrades of the sky,Wing to wing we wander by,Going, going, going, going,Softly as a sigh.

Little comrades of the sky,

Wing to wing we wander by,

Going, going, going, going,

Softly as a sigh.

And to make the season-cycle complete, and also to show the delicacy of imagination withwhich Mr. Roberts invests every changing aspect of his well-loved outer world, here are two stanzas on “The Frosted Pane”:

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leanedAgainst my window-pane.In the deep stillness of his heart convenedThe ghosts of all his slain.Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,And fugitives of grass,—White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,He drew them on the glass.

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leanedAgainst my window-pane.In the deep stillness of his heart convenedThe ghosts of all his slain.Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,And fugitives of grass,—White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,He drew them on the glass.

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leanedAgainst my window-pane.In the deep stillness of his heart convenedThe ghosts of all his slain.

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned

Against my window-pane.

In the deep stillness of his heart convened

The ghosts of all his slain.

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,And fugitives of grass,—White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,He drew them on the glass.

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,

And fugitives of grass,—

White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,

He drew them on the glass.

Fancies as exquisite as this bespeak the true poet. “The Trout Brook” and “The Solitary Woodsman” are other inspirations as individual.

Mr. Roberts’ fifth volume,New York Nocturnes, as its name implies, was a decided departure from his former work, showing his versatility, but what is more to the purpose, his recognition of the dramatic element, the human, vital poetry in the babel of the streets. One could wish that theNocturnespenetrated more profoundly into the varied phases of life in the great seething city, that, in short, they sounded other deeps than those of love; but Mr. Roberts has succeeded in conveying that sense of isolation in a throng, that heavy loneliness and reaction, throwing one back uponhis own spiritual personality, which belongs to the bewildering city night, and from which the finer companionships of love arise as a refuge and need.

TheNocturneshave the city’s over-soul incarnate in them; for in the last analysis, the commerce, the art, the ambition, the strife, the defeat, that one may term the city’s life, are but as hands and feet to minister to the spirit of love. The first of theNocturnessuggests this:

I walk the city square with thee,The night is loud; the pavements roar.Their eddying mirth and miseryEncircle thee and me.The street is full of lights and cries:The crowd but brings thee close to me,I only hear thy low replies;I only see thine eyes.

I walk the city square with thee,The night is loud; the pavements roar.Their eddying mirth and miseryEncircle thee and me.The street is full of lights and cries:The crowd but brings thee close to me,I only hear thy low replies;I only see thine eyes.

I walk the city square with thee,The night is loud; the pavements roar.Their eddying mirth and miseryEncircle thee and me.

I walk the city square with thee,

The night is loud; the pavements roar.

Their eddying mirth and misery

Encircle thee and me.

The street is full of lights and cries:The crowd but brings thee close to me,I only hear thy low replies;I only see thine eyes.

The street is full of lights and cries:

The crowd but brings thee close to me,

I only hear thy low replies;

I only see thine eyes.

The “Nocturne of Consecration” is impassioned and full of spirituality; it is, however, too long to quote, which is unfortunately the case with the “Nocturne of the Honeysuckle,” another of the finer poems. “At the Station” is instinct with movement, reproducing the picture of the swiftly changing throngs, and conveying the eager expectancy of the hour of meeting. TheNocturneshave also a group of miscellaneouspoems, and the volume as a whole, while less virile thanThe Book of the Native, owing to the difference in theme, is distinguished by refinement of feeling and artistry.

InThe Book of the RoseMr. Roberts has done some excellent work, and some, alas, that strikes a decided note of artificiality. The least real and convincing of the poems is that called “On the Upper Deck,” which opens the volume. The first stanza is subtly phrased, and also the lyric which occurs midway of the poem; but the dialogue between the lovers is honeyed poetizing rather than genuine emotion. I find few heart-throbs in it, but rather a melodramatic sentimentality from whose flights one is now and again let down to the common day with summary despatch, as in the parenthetical clause of the stanza which follows:

Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you thinkThe engine’s pulse throbs louder now the lightHas gone? The hiss of waters past our hullIs more mysterious, with a menace in it?And that pale streak above the unseen land,How ominous! a sword has just such pallor!(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.)Never has life shown me the face of beautyBut near it I have seen the face of fear.

Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you thinkThe engine’s pulse throbs louder now the lightHas gone? The hiss of waters past our hullIs more mysterious, with a menace in it?And that pale streak above the unseen land,How ominous! a sword has just such pallor!(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.)Never has life shown me the face of beautyBut near it I have seen the face of fear.

Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you thinkThe engine’s pulse throbs louder now the lightHas gone? The hiss of waters past our hullIs more mysterious, with a menace in it?And that pale streak above the unseen land,How ominous! a sword has just such pallor!(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.)Never has life shown me the face of beautyBut near it I have seen the face of fear.

Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you think

The engine’s pulse throbs louder now the light

Has gone? The hiss of waters past our hull

Is more mysterious, with a menace in it?

And that pale streak above the unseen land,

How ominous! a sword has just such pallor!

(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.)

Never has life shown me the face of beauty

But near it I have seen the face of fear.

It may be that an obtuse man upon the deck of a steamer would interrupt his sweetheart’sflight of poesy to envelop her in a shawl, but the details of the matter may well be left to the imagination. It is doubtless one of those passages which seem to a writer to give reality to a picture, but afterward smile at him sardonically from the printed page. Mr. Roberts inclines elsewhere in the same poem to be too explicit; after a most exalted declaration, he says:

No, do not move! Alone although we beI dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hemI will not touch lest I should break my dreamAnd just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.

No, do not move! Alone although we beI dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hemI will not touch lest I should break my dreamAnd just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.

No, do not move! Alone although we beI dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hemI will not touch lest I should break my dreamAnd just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.

No, do not move! Alone although we be

I dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hem

I will not touch lest I should break my dream

And just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.

Here again it was scarcely necessary to qualify the chair, and indeed the whole passage savors of melodrama. These are, however, only such lines as show that to the one relating a matter the least incident may appear to lend reality to the setting, whereas to the reader the detail may violate taste.

The opening stanza, mentioned as one of the truly subtle bits of the poem in question, has these fine lines:

As the will of last year’s wind,As the drift of the morrow’s rain,As the goal of the falling star,As the treason sinned in vain,As the bow that shines and is gone,As the night cry heard no more,—Is the way of the woman’s meaningBeyond man’s eldest lore.

As the will of last year’s wind,As the drift of the morrow’s rain,As the goal of the falling star,As the treason sinned in vain,As the bow that shines and is gone,As the night cry heard no more,—Is the way of the woman’s meaningBeyond man’s eldest lore.

As the will of last year’s wind,As the drift of the morrow’s rain,As the goal of the falling star,As the treason sinned in vain,As the bow that shines and is gone,As the night cry heard no more,—Is the way of the woman’s meaningBeyond man’s eldest lore.

As the will of last year’s wind,

As the drift of the morrow’s rain,

As the goal of the falling star,

As the treason sinned in vain,

As the bow that shines and is gone,

As the night cry heard no more,—

Is the way of the woman’s meaning

Beyond man’s eldest lore.

This stanza and the lyric below, which is sung as an interlude to the dialogue, go far toward redeeming the over-ripe sentiment of the poem:

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deepsThe hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps,There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth,Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire,The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire,The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,—With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deepsThe hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps,There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth,Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire,The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire,The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,—With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deepsThe hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps,There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth,Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deeps

The hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps,

There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth,

Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.

O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire,The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire,The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,—With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.

O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire,

The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire,

The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,—

With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.

The remaining poems of the volume are much more artistic than the first, with the exception of the passages last quoted. “The Rose of Life” is artistically wrought as to form and metre, and subtle in analysis; but, because of its length and that it voices somewhat the same thought as the lyric above, the former must serve to show with what delicacyof interpretation he approaches a theme so well worn, but ever new, as that of the rose. It is chiefly on the symbolistic side that Mr. Roberts considers the subject; and while one may feel that the sentiment cloys at times when a group of poems using the rose as an image are bracketed together, this is the chief criticism of the volume, as the lyrics following the opening poem, “On the Upper Deck,” have both charm and art, and one hesitates between such an one as, “O Little Rose, O Dark Rose,” and the one immediately following it, “The Rose of My Desire.” This, perhaps, has a more compelling mood, though no greater charm of touch than the other:

O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire,An Eastern wizard made youOf earth and stars and fire.When the orange moon swung lowOver the camphor-trees,By the silver shaft of the fountainHe wrought his mysteries.The hot, sweet mould of the gardenHe took from a secret placeTo become your glimmering bodyAnd the lure of your strange face.From the swoon of the tropic heavenHe drew down star on star,And breathed them into your soulThat your soul might wander far—On earth forever homeless,But intimate of the spheres,A pang in your mystic laughter,A portent in your tears.From the night’s heat, hushed, electric,He summoned a shifting flame,And cherished it, and blew on itTill it burned into your name.And he set the name in my heartFor an unextinguished fire,O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire!

O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire,An Eastern wizard made youOf earth and stars and fire.When the orange moon swung lowOver the camphor-trees,By the silver shaft of the fountainHe wrought his mysteries.The hot, sweet mould of the gardenHe took from a secret placeTo become your glimmering bodyAnd the lure of your strange face.From the swoon of the tropic heavenHe drew down star on star,And breathed them into your soulThat your soul might wander far—On earth forever homeless,But intimate of the spheres,A pang in your mystic laughter,A portent in your tears.From the night’s heat, hushed, electric,He summoned a shifting flame,And cherished it, and blew on itTill it burned into your name.And he set the name in my heartFor an unextinguished fire,O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire!

O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire,An Eastern wizard made youOf earth and stars and fire.

O wild, dark flower of woman,

Deep rose of my desire,

An Eastern wizard made you

Of earth and stars and fire.

When the orange moon swung lowOver the camphor-trees,By the silver shaft of the fountainHe wrought his mysteries.

When the orange moon swung low

Over the camphor-trees,

By the silver shaft of the fountain

He wrought his mysteries.

The hot, sweet mould of the gardenHe took from a secret placeTo become your glimmering bodyAnd the lure of your strange face.

The hot, sweet mould of the garden

He took from a secret place

To become your glimmering body

And the lure of your strange face.

From the swoon of the tropic heavenHe drew down star on star,And breathed them into your soulThat your soul might wander far—

From the swoon of the tropic heaven

He drew down star on star,

And breathed them into your soul

That your soul might wander far—

On earth forever homeless,But intimate of the spheres,A pang in your mystic laughter,A portent in your tears.

On earth forever homeless,

But intimate of the spheres,

A pang in your mystic laughter,

A portent in your tears.

From the night’s heat, hushed, electric,He summoned a shifting flame,And cherished it, and blew on itTill it burned into your name.

From the night’s heat, hushed, electric,

He summoned a shifting flame,

And cherished it, and blew on it

Till it burned into your name.

And he set the name in my heartFor an unextinguished fire,O wild, dark flower of woman,Deep rose of my desire!

And he set the name in my heart

For an unextinguished fire,

O wild, dark flower of woman,

Deep rose of my desire!

Metrically the poem jars in the line,

And breathed them into your soul,

And breathed them into your soul,

And breathed them into your soul,

And breathed them into your soul,

departing as it does from the general scheme of the third lines, and rendering it necessary to make “soul” bisyllabic in order to carry the metre smoothly, and in accord with its companion verses. “Spirit” would have fitted the metrical exigency better, leaving the final unaccented syllable as in the majority of the lines, but would not have lent itself to repetition in the succeeding line as does “soul,”—so“who shall arbitrate”? Mr. Roberts rarely offends the ear in his metres, but instead his cadences are notably true.

Aside from the poems upon love, filling the first division ofThe Book of the Roseit has a miscellaneous group, of which the two that best represent it, to my fancy, are so widely diverse that their mere mention in juxtaposition is amusing; nevertheless they are the lines “To An Omar Punch Bowl,” and the reverent Nativity Song, “When Mary, the Mother, Kissed the Child.” The haunting couplets of the former are by no means of the convivial sort, but the essence of memory and desire, the pathos of this dust that is but “wind that hurries by,”—is in them. However, to be quoted, they need their full context, as does the Nativity Song mentioned.

Mr. Roberts has a rare sympathy with childhood, and a gift of reaching the hearts of the little ones; the “Sleepy Man” and “Wake-up Song” could scarcely be improved; note the picturing in the former and the drowsihood in its falling cadences:

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)·  ·  ·  ·  ·Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)·  ·  ·  ·  ·Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)·  ·  ·  ·  ·Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

Mr. Roberts has collected his several volumes, exclusive ofThe Book of the Rose, into one, eliminating such of the earlier work as falls short of his standard of criticism, and adding new matter showing growth and constantly broadening affinity with life. He manifests more and more the potentialities of his nature, and while all of his later work does not ring equally true, the majority of it is instinct with sincerity and high idealism, and one may go to it for unforced, unconventional song, having art without trammels, for a breath of the ozone of nature, andfor suggestive thoughts upon life and the things of the spirit. Its creed is epitomized in the following lines, pregnant with suggestion to the votary of Art, the creed of the idealist, and yet the truer realist:

Said Life to Art: I love thee bestNot when I find in theeMy very face and form, expressedWith dull fidelity.But when in thee my longing eyesBehold continuallyThe mystery of my memoriesAnd all I crave to be.

Said Life to Art: I love thee bestNot when I find in theeMy very face and form, expressedWith dull fidelity.But when in thee my longing eyesBehold continuallyThe mystery of my memoriesAnd all I crave to be.

Said Life to Art: I love thee bestNot when I find in theeMy very face and form, expressedWith dull fidelity.But when in thee my longing eyesBehold continuallyThe mystery of my memoriesAnd all I crave to be.

Said Life to Art: I love thee best

Not when I find in thee

My very face and form, expressed

With dull fidelity.

But when in thee my longing eyes

Behold continually

The mystery of my memories

And all I crave to be.

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