The Project Gutenberg eBook, Labor and the Angel, by Duncan Campbell Scott

LABOR AND
THE ANGEL

DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT

BOSTON

COPELAND AND DAY

M DCCC XCVIII

COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY COPELAND AND DAY

TO MY WIFE

In every heart the heart of spring

Bursts into leaf and bud;

The heart of love in every heart

Leaps with its eager flood.

Then hasten, rosy life, and lead

The Pilgrim to the door,

His sandals thonged for ministering,

His forehead bright with lore.

Oh, happy lovers, learn to serve,

And crown your state with power,

For Service is the peasant root,

And Love the princely flower.

CONTENTS.

LABOR AND THE ANGEL.

The wind plunges—then stops;

And a column of leaves in a whirl,

Like a dervish that spins—drops,

With a delicate rustle,

Falls into a circle that thins;

The leaves creep away one by one,

Hiding in hollows and ruts;

Silence comes down on the lane:

The light wheels slow from the sun,

And glints where the corn stood,

And strays over the plain,

Touching with patches of gold,

The knolls and the hollows,

Crosses the lane,

And slips into the wood;

Then flashes a mile away on the farm,

A moment of brightness fine;

Then the gold glimmers and wanes,

And is swept by a clouding of gray,

For cheek by jowl, arm in arm,

The shadow’s afoot with the shine.

The wind roars out from the elm,

Then leaps tiger-sudden;—the leaves

Shudder up into heaps and are caught

High as the branch where they hung

Over the oriole’s nest.

Down in the sodden field,

A blind man is gathering his roots,

Guided and led by a girl;

Her gold hair blows in the wind,

Her garments with flutter and furl

Leap like a flag in the sun;

And whenever he stoops, she stoops,

And they heap the dark colored beets

In the barrow, row upon row.

When it is full to the brim,

He wheels it patiently, slow,

Something oppressive and grim

Clothing his figure, but she

Beautifully light at his side,

Touches his arm with her hand,

Ready to help or to guide:

Power and comfort at need

In the flex of her figure lurk,

The fire at the heart of the deed

The angel that watches o’er work.

This is her visible form,

Heartening the labor she loves,

Keeping the breath of it warm,

Warm as a nestling of doves.

Humble or high or sublime,

Hers no reward of degrees,

Ditching as precious as rhyme,

If only the spirit be true.

“Effort and effort,” she cries,

“This is the heart-beat of life,

Up with the lark and the dew,

Still with the dew and the stars,

Feel it athrob in the earth.”

When labor is counselled by love,

You may see her splendid, serene,

Bending and brooding above,

With the justice and power of her mien

Where thought has its passionate birth,

Her smile is the sweetest renown,

For the stroke and the derring-do,

Her crown is the starriest crown.

When tears at the fountain are dry,

Bares she the round of her breast,

Soft to the cicatrized cheek,

Lulls this avatar of rest;

Strength is her arm for the weak;

Courage the wells of her eyes;

What is the power of their deeps,

Only the baffled can guess;

Nothing can daunt the emprise

When she sets hand to the hilt;

Victory is she—not less.

And oh! in the cages and dens

Where women work down to the bone,

Where men never laugh but they curse,

Think you she leaves them alone?

She the twin-sister of Love!

There, where the pressure is worst,

Of this hell-palace built to the skies

Upon hearts too crushed down to burst,

There, she is wiser than wise,

Giving no vistas sublime

Of towers in the murmurous air,

With gardens of pleasaunce and pride

Lulling the fleetness of time,

With doves alight by the side

Of a fountain that veils and drips;

She offers no tantalus-cup

To the shrunken, the desperate lips;

But she calms them with lethe and love,

And deadens the throb and the pain,

And evens the heart-beat wild,

Whispering again and again,

“Work on, work on, work on,

My broken, my agonized child,”

With her tremulous, dew-cool lips,

At the whorl of the tortured ear,

Till the cry is the presage of hope,

The trample of succor near.

And for those whose desperate day

Breeds night with a leaguer of fears,

(Night, that on earth brings the dew,

With stars at the window, and wind

In the maples, and rushes of balm,)

She pours from their limitless stores

Her sacred, ineffable tears.

When a soul too weary of life

Sets to its madness an end,

Then for a moment her eyes

Lighten, and thunder broods dark,

Heavy and strong at her heart;

But for a moment, and then

All her imperious wrath

Breaks in a passion of tears,

With the surge of her grief outpoured,

She sinks on the bosom of Love,

Her sister of infinite years,

And is wrapped, and enclosed, and restored.

So we have come with the breeze,

Up to the height of the hill,

Lost in the valley trees,

The old blind man and the girl;

But deep in the heart is the thrill

Of the image of counselling love;

The shape of the soul in the gloom,

And the power of the figure above,

Stand for the whole world’s need:

For labor is always blind,

Unless as the light of the deed

The angel is smiling behind.

Now on the height of the hill,

The wind is fallen to a breath;

But down in the valley still,

It stalks in the shadowy wood,

And angers the river’s breast;

The fields turn into the dark

That plays on the round of the sphere;

A star leaps sharp in the clear

Line of the sky, clear and cold;

But a cloud in the warmer west

Holds for a little its gold;

Like the wing of a seraph who sinks

Into antres afar from the earth,

Reluctant he flames on the brinks

Of the circles of nebulous stars,

Reluctant he turns to the rest,

From the planet whose ideal is love,

And then as he sweeps to the void

Vivid with tremulous light,

He gives it his translucent wing,

An emblem of pity unfurled,

Then falls to the uttermost ring,

And is lost to the world.

THE HARVEST.

Sun on the mountain,

Shade in the valley,

Ripple and lightness

Leaping along the world,

Sun, like a gold sword

Plucked from the scabbard,

Striking the wheat-fields,

Splendid and lusty,

Close-standing, full-headed,

Toppling with plenty;

Shade, like a buckler

Kindly and ample,

Sweeping the wheat-fields

Darkening and tossing;

There on the world-rim

Winds break and gather

Heaping the mist

For the pyre of the sunset;

And still as a shadow,

In the dim westward,

A cloud sloop of amethyst

Moored to the world

With cables of rain.

Acres of gold wheat

Stir in the sunshine,

Rounding the hill-top,

Crested with plenty,

Filling the valley,

Brimmed with abundance;

Wind in the wheat-field

Eddying and settling,

Swaying it, sweeping it,

Lifting the rich heads,

Tossing them soothingly;

Twinkle and shimmer

The lights and the shadowings,

Nimble as moonlight

Astir in the mere.

Laden with odors

Of peace and of plenty,

Soft comes the wind

From the ranks of the wheat-field,

Bearing a promise

Of harvest and sickle-time,

Opulent threshing-floors

Dusty and dim

With the whirl of the flail,

And wagons of bread,

Down-laden and lumbering

Through the gateways of cities.

When will the reapers

Strike in their sickles,

Bending and grasping,

Shearing and spreading;

When will the gleaners

Searching the stubble

Take the last wheat-heads

Home in their arms?

Ask not the question!—

Something tremendous

Moves to the answer.

Hunger and poverty

Heaped like the ocean

Welters and mutters,

Hold back the sickles!

Millions of children

Born to their terrible

Ancestral hunger,

Starved in their mothers’ womb,

Starved at the nipple, cry,—

Ours is the harvest!

Millions of women

Learned in the tragical

Secrets of poverty,

Sweated and beaten, cry,—

Hold back the sickles!

Millions of men

With a vestige of manhood,

Wild-eyed and gaunt-throated,

Shout with a leonine

Accent of anger,

Leave us the wheat-fields!

When will the reapers

Strike in their sickles?

Ask not the question;

Something tremendous

Moves to the answer.

Long have they sharpened

Their fiery, impetuous

Sickles of carnage,

Welded them æons

Ago in the mountains

Of suffering and anguish;

Hearts were their hammers

Blood was their fire,

Sorrow their anvil,

(Trusty the sickles

Tempered with tears;)

Time they had plenty—

Harvests and harvests

Passed them in agony,

Only a half-filled

Ear for their lot;

Man that had taken

God for a master

Made him a law,

Mocked him and cursed him,

Set up this hunger,

Called it necessity,

Put in the blameless mouth

Judas’s language:

The poor ye have with you

Alway, unending.

But up from the impotent

Anguish of children,

Up from the labor

Fruitless, unmeaning,

Of millions of mothers,

Hugely necessitous,

Grew by a just law

Stern and implacable,

Art born of poverty,

The making of sickles

Meet for the harvest.

And now to the wheat-fields

Come the weird reapers

Armed with their sickles,

Whipping them keenly

In the fresh-air fields,

Wild with the joy of them,

Finding them trusty,

Hilted with teen.

Swarming like ants,

The Idea for captain,

No banners, no bugles,

Only a terrible

Ground-bass of gathering

Tempest and fury,

Only a tossing

Of arms and of garments;

Sexless and featureless,

(Only the children

Different among them,

Crawling between their feet,

Borne on their shoulders;)

Rolling their shaggy heads

Wild with the unheard-of

Drug of the sunshine;

Tears that had eaten

The half of their eyelids

Dry on their cheeks;

Blood in their stiffened hair

Clouted and darkened;

Down in their cavern hearts

Hunger the tiger,

Leaping, exulting;

Sighs that had choked them

Burst into triumphing;

On they come, Victory!

Up to the wheat-fields,

Dreamed of in visions

Bred by the hunger,

Seen for the first time

Splendid and golden;

On they come fluctuant,

Seething and breaking,

Weltering like fire

In the pit of the earthquake,

Bursting in heaps

With the sudden intractable

Lust of the hunger:

Then when they see them—

The miles of the harvest

White in the sunshine,

Rushing and stumbling,

With the mighty and clamorous

Cry of a people

Starved from creation,

Hurl themselves onward,

Deep in the wheat-fields,

Weeping like children,

After ages and ages,

Back at the breasts

Of their mother the earth.

Night in the valley,

Gloom on the mountain,

Wind in the wheat,

Far to the southward

The flutter of lightning,

The shudder of thunder;

But high at the zenith,

A cluster of stars

Glimmers and throbs

In the grasp of the midnight,

Steady and absolute,

Ancient and sure.

WHEN SPRING GOES BY.

The winds that on the uplands softly lie,

Grow keener where the ice is lingering still,

Where the first robin on the sheltered hill

Pipes blithely to the tune, “When Spring goes by!”

Hear him again, “Spring! Spring!” he seems to cry,

Haunting the fall of the flute-throated rill,

That keeps a gentle, constant, silver thrill,

While he is restless in his ecstasy.

Ah! the soft budding of the virginal woods,

Of the frail fruit trees by the vanishing lakes:

There’s the new moon where the clear sunset floods,

A trace of dew upon the rose leaf sky;

And hark! what rapture the glad robin wakes—

“When Spring goes by; Spring! Spring! When Spring goes by.”

MARCH.

Now swoops the wind from every coign and crest;

Like filaments of silver, ripped and spun,

The snow reels off the drift-ridge in the sun;

And smoky clouds are torn across the west,

Clouds that would snow if they had time to rest;

The sparrows brangle and the icicles clash;

The grosbeaks search for berries in the ash;

The shore-lark tinkles while he plans his nest.

Now in the steaming woods the maples drip,

And plunging in with the last load of sap,

Beyond the branches through a starry gap,

The driver sees the frail aurora flow,

And round the sinking Pleiads bend and blow;

A rosy banner and a silver ship.

IN MAY.

The clouds that veil the early day

Are very near and soft and fine,

The heaven peeps between the gray,

A luminous and pearly line.

The breeze is up, now soft, now full,

And moulds the vapor light as fleece,

It trembles, then, with drip and lull,

The rain drifts gently through the trees.

It trails into a silver blur,

And hangs about the cherry tops

That sprinkle, with the wind astir,

In little sudden whirls of drops.

The apple orchards, banked with bloom,

Are drenched and dripping with the wet,

And on the breeze their deep perfume

Grows and fades by and lingers yet.

In some green covert far remote

The oven-bird is never still,

And, golden-throat to golden-throat,

The orioles warble on the hill.

Now over all the gem-like woods

The delicate mist is blown again,

And after dripping interludes

Lets down the lulling silver rain.

ON THE MOUNTAIN.

I.

A storm from the mountain is coming,

With lightning and thunder and rain,

The wind is sweeping and humming

In the butternut trees on the plain.

The cloud is ebon that follows,

The fore-cloud is livid and pale,

There’s the flash and the tossing of swallows

In the turn of the eddying gale.

The rain is awake on the mountain,

’T is lashing the forest afar

With fall of a shattering fountain

And the tramp and tumult of war,

With the drums of the detoning thunder,

And the clang in the bugles of wind,

With the gonfalons tortured asunder

By the rush of the host from behind.

The plains are leaping with shadows,

The highlands go out like a blot,

And over the eddying meadows

The rain is hurtled like shot.

The darkness is glooming and brightening,

There is alternate chaos and form,

With the parry and thrust of the lightning

In the turbulent heart of the storm.

II.

Now the storm is over,

And the greener plain

Seems to glow and hover

Through the thinning rain.

Now the wind is gusty

In the maple tops,

Striking out the lusty

Storms of gleaming drops.

Now the goldfinch whistles

In his spattered vest,

Balanced on the thistles,

Bolder than the best.

And the hermit thrushes

On the sparkling hills,

Link the dripping hushes

With their silver thrills.

THE ONONDAGA MADONNA.

She stands full-throated and with careless pose,

This woman of a weird and waning race,

The tragic savage lurking in her face,

Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;

Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,

And thrills with war and wildness in her veins;

Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains

Of feuds and forays and her father’s woes.

And closer in the shawl about her breast,

The latest promise of her nation’s doom,

Paler than she her baby clings and lies,

The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;

He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,

He draws his heavy brows and will not rest.

WATKWENIES.[^[1]]

Vengeance was once her nation’s lore and law:

When the tired sentry stooped above the rill,

Her long knife flashed, and hissed, and drank its fill;

Dimly below her dripping wrist she saw,

One wild hand, pale as death and weak as straw,

Clutch at the ripple in the pool; while shrill

Sprang through the dreaming hamlet on the hill,

The war-cry of the triumphant Iroquois.

Now clothed with many an ancient flap and fold,

And wrinkled like an apple kept till May,

She weighs the interest-money in her palm,

And, when the Agent calls her valiant name,

Hears, like the war-whoops of her perished day,

The lads playing snow-snake in the stinging cold.

AVIS.

With a golden rolling sound

Booming came a bell,

From the aery in the tower

Eagles fell;

So with regal wings

Hurled, and gleaming sound and power,

Sprang the fatal spell.

Then a storm of burnished doves

Gleaming from the cote

Flurried by the almonry

O’er the moat,—

Fell and soared and fell

With the arc and iris eye

Burning breast and throat.

Avis heard the beaten bell

Break the quiet space,

Gathering softly in the room

Round her face;

And the sound of wings

From the deeps of rosy gloom

Rustled in the place.

Nothing moved along the wall,

Weltered on the floor;

Only in the purple deep,

Streaming o’er,

Came the dream of sound

Silent as the dale of sleep,

Where the dreams are four.

(One of love without a word,

Wan to look upon,

One of fear without a cry,

Cowering stone,

And the dower of life,—

Grief without a single sigh,

Pain without a moan.)

“Avis—Avis!” cried a voice;

Then the voice was mute.

“Avis!” soft the echo lay

As the lute.

Where she was she fell,

Drowsy as mandragora,

Trancèd to the root.

Then she heard her mother’s voice,

Tender as a dove;

Then her lover plain and sigh,

“Avis—Love!”

Like the mavis bird

Calling, calling lonelily

From the eerie grove.

Then she heard within the vast

Closure of the spell,

Rolled and moulded into one

Rounded swell,

All the sounds that ever were

Uttered underneath the sun,

Heard in heaven or hell.

In the arras moved the wind,

And the window cloth

Rippled like a serpent barred,

Gray with wrath;

In the brazier gold

The wan ghost of a rose charred

Fluttered like a moth.

Tranquil lay her darkened eyes

As the pools that keep

Auras dim of fern and frond

Dappled, deep,

Dreamy as the map of Nod;

Moveless was she as a wand

In the wind of sleep.

Then the birds began to cry

From the crannied wall,

Piping as the morning rose

Mystical,

Gray with whistling rain,

Silver with the light that flows

In the interval.

Pallid poplars cast a shade,

Twinkling gray and dun,

Where the wind and water wove

Into one

All the linnet leaves,

Greening from the mere and grove

In the undern sun.

Night fell with the ferny dusk,

Planets paled and grew,

Up, with lilt and clarid turns

Throbbing through,

Rose the robin’s song,

Heart of home and love that burns

Beating in the dew.

But she neither moved nor heard,

Trancèd was her breath;

Lip on charmèd lip was laid

(One who saith

“Love—Undone” and falls).

Silent was she as a shade

In the dells of death.

THE VIOLET PRESSED IN A COPY OF SHAKESPEARE.

Here in the inmost of the master’s heart

This violet crisp with early dew,

Has come to leave her beauty and to part

With all her vivid hue.

And while in hollow glades and dells of musk,

Her fellows will reflower in bands,

Clasping the deeps of shade and emerald dusk,

With sweet inviolate hands,

She will lie here, a ghost of their delight,

Their lucent stems all ashen gray,

Their purples fallen into pulvil white,

Dull as the bluebird’s alula.

But here where human passions pulse in power,

She will transcend our Shakespeare’s art,

From Desdemona to a smothered flower,

Will leap the tragic heart.

And memory will recall in keener mood

The precinct fair where passion grew,

The stars within the water in the wood,

The moonlit grove, the odorous dew.

The voice that throbbed along the summer dark

Will float and pause and thrill,

In lonely cadence silvern as the lark,

To fail below the hill.

The reader will grow weary of the play,

Finding his heart half understood,

And with the young moon in the early dusk will stray

Beside the starry water in the wood.

ANGELUS.

A deep bell that links the downs

To the drowsy air;

Every loop of sound that swoons,

Finds a circle fair,

Whereon it doth rest and fade;

Every stroke that dins is laid

Like a node,

Spinning out the quivering, fine,

Vibrant tendrils of a vine:

(Bim—bim—bim.)

How they wreathe and run,

Silvern as a filmy light,

Filtered from the sun:

The god of sound is out of sight,

And the bell is like a cloud,

Humming to the outer rim,

Low and loud:

(Bim—bim—bim.)

Throwing down the tempered lull,

Fragile, beautiful:

Married drones and overtones,

How we fancy them to swim,

Spreading into shapes that shine,

With the aura of the metals,

Prisoned in the bell,

Fulvous tinted as a shell,

Dreamy, dim,

Deep in amber hyaline:

(Bim—bim—bim.)

ADAGIO.

Grave maid, surrounded by the austere air

Of this delaying spring, what gentle grief,

What hovering, mystical melancholy

Hath covered thee with the translucent shadow?

The glaucous silver buds upon the tree,

And the light burst of blossom in the bush

Are the new year’s evangel: soon the birch

Will breathe in heaven with her myriad leaves,

And hide the birds’ nests from the tuliped lawn;

But thou, with look askance and dreaming eyes,

Brooding on something subtly sad and sweet,

Art passive, and the world may have her way,

Hide the moraine of immemorial days

With bines and blossoms, so thine unvaried hour

Be not perplexèd with the change of growth.

Within this sombre circle of the hills,

Thy girlish eyes have seen the winter’s close,

And what may lie beyond, where the sun falls,

When the vale fills with rose, and the first star

Looks liquidly, thy quiet heart knows not.

The permanence of beauty haunts thy dreams,

And only as a land beyond desire,

Where the fixed glow may stain the vivid flower,

Where youth may lose his wings but keep his joy,

Does that far slope in the reluctant light

Lure thee beyond the barrier of the hills.

And often in the morning of the heart,

When memories are like crocus-buds in spring,

Thou hast up-builded in thy crystal soul

Immutable forms of things loved once and lost,

Or loved and never gained.

Now while the wind

From the reflowering bush gushes with perfume,

Thou hast a vision of a precinct fair,

Daled in the lustrous hills, where the mossed dial

Holds the slow shadow narrowed to a line;

Where a parterre of tulips hoards the light,

Changeless and pure in cups of tranquil gold;

Where bee-hives gray against the poplar shade,

Peopled with bees, hum in perpetual drone;

In a pavilion centred in the close,

Four viols build the perfect cube of sound;

A path beside the rosy barberry hedge,

Leads to the cool of water under spray,

Leads to the fountain-echoing ivied wall;

Pedestaled there, flecked with the linden shadows,

A guardian statue carved in purest stone,

Love and Mnemosyne; Mnemosyne

Mothering the Truant to an all-cherishing breast,

The wells of lore deepening her eyes, would speak—

But Love hath laid his hand upon her lips.

DIRGE FOR A VIOLET.

Here was a happy flower,

Born in sun and shower,

In the meadow;

Sorrow was her dower,

And shadow.

Bid the gentle mole

Dig his deepest hole,

For her rest;

Sleep has charmed her soul,

Sleep is best.

Bid the vervain spire

Light the funeral fire,

And the yarrow

Build a shady choir,

For the sparrow.

Bid him chirp and cry,

“Everything must die,

She is dead,”

Now in exequy,

All is said.

EQUATION.

When we grow old, and time looks like a thief,

That was the spendthrift of our dearest days;

When color mingles merged in silvered grays;

When joys are ever memoried to be brief;

When beauty fades; when hope is under feof;

When all our moods are mantled in a haze;

When sprightly pleasure for a penance plays

The part of prudence in the weeds of grief;

It will suffice if unto memory

Visit the voices and the eager grace

Of days that promised never to forget;

If they will flow like rumors of the sea,

Heard under honied lindens in the place,

Where start the marguerite and the mignonette.

AFTERWARDS.

Her life was touched with early frost,

About the April of her day,

Her hold on earth was lightly lost,

And like a leaf she went away.

Her soul was chartered for great deeds,

For gentle war unwonted here:

Her spirit sought her clearer needs,

An Empyrean atmosphere.

At hush of eve we hear her still

Say with her clear, her perfect smile,

And with her silver-throated thrill:

“A little while—a little while.”

STONE BREAKING.

March wind rough

Clashed the trees,

Flung the snow;

Breaking stones,

In the cold,

Germans slow

Toiled and toiled;

Arrowy sun

Glanced and sprang,

One right blithe

German sang:

Songs of home,

Fatherland:

Syenite hard,

Weary lot,

Callous hand,

All forgot:

Hammers pound,

Ringing round;

Rise the heaps,

To his voice,

Bounds and leaps

Toise on toise:

Toil is long,

But dear God

Gives us song,

At the end,

Gives us rest,

Toil is best.

THE LESSON.

When the great day is done,

That seems so long,

So full of fret and fun,

Our little girl is in her cradle laid:

She takes the soft dark-petaled flower of sleep

Between her fragile hands,

Striving to pluck it:

And as the dream-roots slowly part,

She is not in possession of the lands,

Where flowered her tender heart,

Nor in this turmoil dire of cark and strife,

Which we call life,

The which, husbanding all our art,

We will keep veiled until the latest day,

And from her wrapt away:

Then when the drowsy flower

Has parted from the dreamful mead,

And in her palm lies plucked indeed,

When her dear breathing steadies after sighs,

And the soft lids have clouded the blue eyes,

A tiny hand falls on my cheek—

Lightly and so fragrantly

As if a snow-flake could a rose-leaf be—

And in the dark touches a tear

Which has sprung clear,

From eyes unconscious of their own distress,

At the deep pathos of such tender helplessness.

And then she claims her sleep,

As if she knows my love and trusts it deep.

Dear God! to whom the bravest of us is a child,

When I am weary, when I cannot rest,

I have stretched out my hand into the dark,

And felt the shadow stark,

But no face brooding near,

Nor any tear

Compassionately wept:

I have not slept.

But now I learn my lesson from the sage,

Who burns his lore with acid on the heart;

I will not whimper when I feel the smart,

And for my comfort will look down, not up;

I will give ever from a brimming sky,

Not telling how or why;

I will be answered in this little child,

I will be reconciled.

FROM SHADOW.

Now the November skies,

And the clouds that are thin and gray,

That drop with the wind away;

A flood of sunlight rolls,

In a tide of shallow light,

Gold on the land and white

On the water, dim and warm in the wood;

Then it is gone, and the wan

Clear of the shade

Covers field and barren and glade.

The peace of labor done,

Is wide in the gracious earth;

The harvest is won;

Past are the tears and the mirth;

And we feel in the tenuous air

How far beyond thought or prayer

Is the grace of silent things,

That work for the world alway,

Neither for fear nor for pay,

And when labor is over, rest.

The moil of our fretted life

Is borne anew to the soul,

Borne with its cark and strife,

Its burden of care and dread,

Its glories elusive and strange;

And the weight of the weary whole

Presses it down, till we cry:

Where is the fruit of our deeds?

Why should we struggle to build

Towers against death on the plain?

All things possess their lives

Save man, whose task and desire

Transcend his power and his will.

The question is over and still;

Nothing replies: but the earth

Takes on a lovelier hue

From a cloud that neighbored the sun,

That the sun burned down and through,

Till it glowed like a seraph’s wing;

The fields that were gray and dun

Are warm in the flowing light;

Fair in the west the night

Strikes in with a vibrant star.

Something has stirred afar

In the shadow that winter flings;

A message comes up to the soul

From the soul of inanimate things:

A message that widens and grows

Till it touches the deeds of man,

Till we see in the torturous throes

Some dawning glimmer of plan;

Till we feel in the deepening night

The hand of the angel Content,

That stranger of calmness and light,

With his brow over us bent,

Who moves with his eyes on the earth,

Whose robe of lambent green,

A tissue of herb and its sheen,

Tells the mother who gave him birth.

The message plays through his touch,

It grows with the roots of his power,

Till it flames exultant in thought,

As the quince-tree triumphs in flower.

The fruit that is checked and marred

Goes under the sod:

The good lives here in the world;

It persists,—it is God.

THE PIPER OF ARLL.

There was in Arll a little cove

Where the salt wind came cool and free:

A foamy beach that one would love,

If he were longing for the sea.

A brook hung sparkling on the hill,

The hill swept far to ring the bay;

The bay was faithful, wild or still,

To the heart of the ocean far away.

There were three pines above the comb

That, when the sun flared and went down,

Grew like three warriors reaving home

The plunder of a burning town.

A piper lived within the grove,

Tending the pasture of his sheep;

His heart was swayed with faithful love,

From the springs of God’s ocean clear and deep.

And there a ship one evening stood,

Where ship had never stood before;

A pennon bickered red as blood,

An angel glimmered at the prore.

About the coming on of dew,

The sails burned rosy, and the spars

Were gold, and all the tackle grew

Alive with ruby-hearted stars.

The piper heard an outland tongue,

With music in the cadenced fall;

And when the fairy lights were hung,

The sailors gathered one and all,

And leaning on the gunwales dark,

Crusted with shells and dashed with foam,

With all the dreaming hills to hark,

They sang their longing songs of home.

When the sweet airs had fled away,

The piper, with a gentle breath,

Moulded a tranquil melody

Of lonely love and longed-for death.

When the fair sound began to lull,

From out the fireflies and the dew,

A silence held the shadowy hull,

Until the eerie tune was through.

Then from the dark and dreamy deck

An alien song began to thrill;

It mingled with the drumming beck,

And stirred the braird upon the hill.

Beneath the stars each sent to each

A message tender, till at last

The piper slept upon the beach,

The sailors slumbered round the mast.

Still as a dream till nearly dawn,

The ship was bosomed on the tide;

The streamlet, murmuring on and on,

Bore the sweet water to her side.

Then shaking out her lawny sails,

Forth on the misty sea she crept;

She left the dawning of the dales,

Yet in his cloak the piper slept.

And when he woke he saw the ship,

Limned black against the crimson sun;

Then from the disc he saw her slip,

A wraith of shadow—she was gone.

He threw his mantle on the beach,

He went apart like one distraught,

His lips were moved—his desperate speech

Stormed his inviolable thought.

He broke his human-throated reed,

And threw it in the idle rill;

But when his passion had its mead,

He found it in the eddy still.

He mended well the patient flue,

Again he tried its varied stops;

The closures answered right and true,

And starting out in piercing drops,

A melody began to drip

That mingled with a ghostly thrill

The vision-spirit of the ship,

The secret of his broken will.

Beneath the pines he piped and swayed,

Master of passion and of power;

He was his soul and what he played,

Immortal for a happy hour.

He, singing into nature’s heart,

Guiding his will by the world’s will,

With deep, unconscious, childlike art

Had sung his soul out and was still.

And then at evening came the bark

That stirred his dreaming heart’s desire;