Beyond the Hills of Dream

By W. Wilfred Campbell

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY W. WILFRED CAMPBELL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To the Right Honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier, P. C., G. C. M. G., by whose appreciation, sympathy, and friendship the author has been aided and encouraged, this volume is affectionately dedicated.

Ottawa, August, 1899.

CONTENTS

Beyond the Hills of Dream

Over the mountains of sleep, my Love,
Over the hills of dream,
Beyond the walls of care and fate,
Where the loves and memories teem;
We come to a world of fancy free,
Where hearts forget to weep;—
Over the mountains of dream, my Love,
Over the hills of sleep.

Over the hills of care, my Love,
Over the mountains of dread,
We come to a valley glad and vast,
Where we meet the long-lost dead:
And there the gods in splendor dwell,
In a land where all is fair,
Over the mountains of dread, my Love,
Over the hills of care.

Over the mountains of dream, my Love,
Over the hills of sleep;—
Could we but come to that heart’s desire,
Where the harvests of fancy reap,
Then we would know the old joys and hopes,
The longings of youth’s bright gleam,
Over the mountains of sleep, my Love,
Over the hills of dream.

Yea, there the sweet old years have rest,
And there my heart would be,
Amid the glad ones loved of yore,
At the sign of the Fancy Free;
And there the old lips would repeat
Earth’s memories o’er and o’er,
Over the mountains of might-have-been,
Over the hills of yore.

Unto that valley of dreams, my Love,
If we could only go,
Beyond the mountains of heart’s despair,
The hills of winter and snow,
Then we would come to those happy isles,
Those shores of blossom and wing,
Over the mountains of waiting, my Love,
Over the hills of spring.

And there where the woods are scarlet and gold,
And the apples are red on the tree,
The heart of Autumn is never old
In that country where we would be.
And how would we come to that land, my Love?
Follow the midnight stars,
That swim and gleam in a milk-white stream,
Over the night’s white bars.

Or follow the trail of the sunset red
That beacons the dying deeps
Of day’s wild borders down the edge
Of silence, where evening sleeps;
Or take the road that the morning wakes,
When he whitens his first rosebeam,
Over the mountains of glory, my Love,
Over the hills of dream.

Sometime, sometime, we will go, my Love,
When winter loosens to spring,
And all the spirits of Joy are ajog,
After the wild-bird’s wing,—
When winter and sorrow have opened their doors
To set love’s prisoners free,
Over the mountains of woe, my Love,
Over the hills of dree.

And when we reach there we will know
The faces we knew of yore,
The lips that kissed, the hands that clasped,
When memory loosens her store,
And we will drink to the long dead years,
In that inn of the golden gleam,
Over the mountains of sleep, my Love,
Over the hills of dream.

And all the joys we missed, my Love,
And all the hopes we knew,
The dreams of life we dreamed in vain,
When youth’s red blossoms blew;
And all the hearts that throbbed for us,
In the past so sunny and fair,
We will meet and greet in that golden land,
Over the hills of care.

Over the mountains of sleep, my Love,
Over the hills of dream,
Beyond the walls of care and fate,
Where the loves and memories teem,
We come to a land of fancy free,
Where hearts forget to weep,
Over the mountains of dream, my Love,
Over the hills of sleep.

Morning

When I behold how out of ruined night
Filled with all weirds of haunted ancientness,
And dreams and phantasies of pale distress,
Is builded, beam by beam, the splendid light,
The opalescent glory, gem bedight,
Of dew-emblazoned morning; when I know
Such wondrous hopes, such luminous beauties grow
From out earth’s shades of sadness and affright;

O, then, my heart, amid thy questioning fear,
Dost thou not whisper: “He who buildeth thus
From wrecks of dark such wonders at his will,
Can re-create from out death’s night for us
The marvels of a morning gladder still
Than ever trembled into beauty here?”

Out of Pompeii

She lay, face downward, on her bended arm,
In this her new, sweet dream of human bliss,
Her heart within her fearful, fluttering, warm,
Her lips yet pained with love’s first timorous kiss.
She did not note the darkening afternoon,
She did not mark the lowering of the sky
O’er that great city. Earth had given its boon
Unto her lips, love touched her and passed by.

In one dread moment all the sky grew dark,
The hideous rain, the panic, the red rout,
Where love lost love, and all the world might mark
The city overwhelmèd, blotted out
Without one cry, so quick oblivion came,
And life passed to the black where all forget;
But she—we know not of her house or name—
In love’s sweet musings doth lie dreaming yet.

The dread hell passed, the ruined world grew still,
And the great city passed to nothingness:
The ages went and mankind worked its will.
Then men stood still amid the centuries’ press,
And in the ash-hid ruins opened bare,
As she lay down in her shamed loveliness,
Sculptured and frozen, late they found her there,
Image of love ’mid all that hideousness.

Her head, face downward, on her bended arm,
Her single robe that showed her shapely form,
Her wondrous fate love keeps divinely warm
Over the centuries, past the slaying storm.
The heart can read in writings time hath left,
That linger still through death’s oblivion;
And in this waste of life and light bereft,
She brings again a beauty that had gone.

And if there be a day when all shall wake,
As dreams the hoping, doubting human heart,
The dim forgetfulness of death will break
For her as one who sleeps with lips apart;
And did God call her suddenly, I know
She’d wake as morning wakened by the thrush,
Feel that red kiss across the centuries glow,
And make all heaven rosier by her blush.

Morning on the Shore

The lake is blue with morning; and the sky
Sweet, clear, and burnished as an orient pearl.
High in its vastness scream and skim and whirl
White gull-flocks where the gleaming beaches die
Into dim distance, where great marshes lie.
Far in ashore the woods are warm with dreams,
The dew-wet road in ruddy sunlight gleams,
The sweet, cool earth, the clear blue heaven on high.

Across the morn a carolling school-boy goes,
Filling the world with youth to heaven’s stair;
Some chattering squirrel answers from his tree;
But down beyond the headland, where ice-floes
Are great in winter, pleading in mute prayer,
A dead, drowned face stares up immutably.

Bereavement of the Fields

IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN, WHO DIED FEBRUARY 10, 1899

Soft fall the February snows, and soft
Falls on my heart the snow of wintry pain;
For never more, by wood or field or croft,
Will he we knew walk with his loved again;
No more, with eyes adream and soul aloft,
In those high moods where love and beauty reign,
Greet his familiar fields, his skies without a stain.

Soft fall the February snows, and deep,
Like downy pinions from the moulting breast
Of all the mothering sky, round his hushed sleep,
Flutter a million loves upon his rest,
Where once his well-loved flowers were fain to peep,
With adder-tongue and waxen petals prest,
In young spring evenings reddening down the west.

Soft fall the February snows, and hushed
Seems life’s loud action, all its strife removed,
Afar, remote, where grief itself seems crushed,
And even hope and sorrow are reproved;
For he whose cheek erstwhile with hope was flushed,
And by the gentle haunts of being moved,
Hath gone the way of all he dreamed and loved.

Soft fall the February snows, and lost,
This tender spirit gone with scarce a tear,
Ere, loosened from the dungeons of the frost,
Wakens with yearnings new the enfranchised year,
Late winter-wizened, gloomed, and tempest-tost;
And Hesper’s gentle, delicate veils appear,
When dream anew the days of hope and fear.

And Mother Nature, she whose heart is fain,
Yea, she who grieves not, neither faints nor fails,
Building the seasons, she will bring again
March with rudening madness of wild gales,
April and her wraiths of tender rain,
And all he loved,—this soul whom memory veils,
Beyond the burden of our strife and pain.

Not his to wake the strident note of song,
Nor pierce the deep recesses of the heart,
Those tragic wells, remote, of might and wrong;
But rather, with those gentler souls apart,
He dreamed like his own summer days along,
Filled with the beauty born of his own heart,
Sufficient in the sweetness of his song.

Outside this prison-house of all our tears,
Enfranchised from our sorrow and our wrong,
Beyond the failure of our days and years,
Beyond the burden of our saddest song,
He moves with those whose music filled his ears,
And claimed his gentle spirit from the throng,—
Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.

Like some rare Pan of those old Grecian days,
Here in our hours of deeper stress reborn,
Unfortunate thrown upon life’s evil ways,
His inward ear heard ever that satyr horn
From Nature’s lips reverberate night and morn,
And fled from men and all their troubled maze,
Standing apart, with sad, incurious gaze.

And now, untimely cut, like some sweet flower
Plucked in the early summer of its prime,
Before it reached the fulness of its dower,
He withers in the morning of our time;
Leaving behind him, like a summer shower,
A fragrance of earth’s beauty, and the chime
Of gentle and imperishable rhyme.

Songs in our ears of winds and flowers and buds
And gentle loves and tender memories
Of Nature’s sweetest aspects, her pure moods,
Wrought from the inward truth of intimate eyes
And delicate ears of him who harks and broods,
And, nightly pondering, daily grows more wise,
And dreams and sees in mighty solitudes.

Soft fall the February snows, and soft
He sleeps in peace upon the breast of her
He loved the truest; where, by wood and croft,
The wintry silence folds in fleecy blur
About his silence, while in glooms aloft
The mighty forest fathers, without stir,
Guard well the rest of him, their rare sweet worshipper.

A Wood Lyric

Into the stilly woods I go,
Where the shades are deep and the wind-flowers blow,
And the hours are dreamy and lone and long,
And the power of silence is greater than song.
Into the stilly woods I go,
Where the leaves are cool and the wind-flowers blow.

When I go into the stilly woods,
And know all the flowers in their sweet, shy hoods,
The tender leaves in their shimmer and sheen
Of darkling shadow, diaphanous green,
In those haunted halls where my footstep falls,
Like one who enters cathedral walls,
A spirit of beauty floods over me,
As over a swimmer the waves of the sea,
That strengthens and glories, refreshens and fills,
Till all mine inner heart wakens and thrills
With a new and a glad and a sweet delight,
And a sense of the infinite out of sight,
Of the great unknown that we may not know,
But only feel with an inward glow
When into the great, glad woods we go.

O life-worn brothers, come with me
Into the wood’s hushed sanctity,
Where the great, cool branches are heavy with June,
And the voices of summer are strung in tune;
Come with me, O heart outworn,
Or spirit whom life’s brute-struggles have torn,
Come, tired and broken and wounded feet,
Where the walls are greening, the floors are sweet,
The roofs are breathing and heaven’s airs meet.

Come, wash earth’s grievings from out of the face,
The tear and the sneer and the warfare’s trace,
Come where the bells of the forest are ringing,
Come where the oriole’s nest is swinging,
Where the brooks are foaming in amber pools,
The mornings are still and the noonday cools.
Cast off earth’s sorrows and know what I know,
When into the glad, deep woods I go.

An August Reverie

There is an autumn sense subdues the air,
Though it is August and the season still
A part of summer, and the woodlands fair.
I hear it in the humming of the mill,
I feel it in the rustling of the trees,
That scarcely shiver in the passing breeze.

’Tis but a touch of Winter ere his time,
A presaging of sleep and icy death,
When skies are rich and fields are in their prime,
And heaven and earth commingle in a breath:—
When hazy airs are stirred with gossamer wings,
And in shorn fields the shrill cicada sings.

So comes the slow revolving of the year,
The glory of nature ripening to decay,
When in those paths, by which, through loves austere,
All men and beasts and blossoms find their way,
By steady easings of the spirit’s dream,
From sunlight past the pallid starlight’s beam.

Nor should the spirit sorrow as it passes,
Declining slowly by the heights it came;
We are but brothers to the birds and grasses,
In our brief coming and our end the same:
And though we glory, god-like in our day,
Perchance some kindred law their lives obey.

There are a thousand beauties gathered round,
The sounds of waters falling over-night,
The morning scents that steamed from the fresh ground,
The hair-like streaming of the morning light
Through early mists and dim, wet woods where brooks
Chatter, half-seen, down under mossy nooks.

The ragged daisy starring all the fields,
The buttercup abrim with pallid gold,
The thistle and burr-flowers hedged with prickly shields,
All common weeds the draggled pastures hold,
With shrivelled pods and leaves, are kin to me,
Like-heirs of earth and her maturity.

They speak a silent speech that is their own,
These wise and gentle teachers of the grass;
And when their brief and common days are flown,
A certain beauty from the year doth pass:—
A beauty of whose light no eye can tell,
Save that it went; and my heart knew it well.

I may not know each plant as some men know them,
As children gather beasts and birds to tame;
But I went ’mid them as the winds that blow them,
From childhood’s hour, and loved without a name.
There is more of beauty in a field of weeds
Than in all blooms the hothouse garden breeds.

For they are nature’s children; in their faces
I see that sweet obedience to the sky
That marks these dwellers of the wilding places,
Who with the season’s being live and die;
Knowing no love but of the wind and sun,
Who still are nature’s when their life is done.

They are a part of all the haze-filled hours,
The happy, happy world all drenched with light,
The far-off, chiming click-clack of the mowers,
And yon blue hills whose mists elude my sight;
And they to me will ever bring in dreams
Far mist-clad heights and brimming rain-fed streams.

In this dream August air, whose ripened leaf,
Pausing before it puts death’s glories on,
Deepens its green, and the half-garnered sheaf
Gladdens the haze-filled sunlight, love hath gone
Beyond the material, trembling like a star,
To those sure heights where all thought’s glories are.

And Thought, that is the greatness of this earth,
And man’s most inmost being, soars and soars,
Beyond the eye’s horizon’s outmost girth,
Garners all beauty, on all mystery pores:
Like some ethereal fountain in its flow,
Finds heavens where the senses may not go.

In the Spring Fields

There dwells a spirit in the budding year—
As motherhood doth beautify the face—
That even lends these barren glebes a grace,
And fills gray hours with beauty that were drear
And bleak when the loud, storming March was here:
A glamour that the thrilled heart dimly traces
In swelling boughs and soft, wet, windy spaces,
And sunlands where the chattering birds make cheer.

I thread the uplands where the wind’s footfalls
Stir leaves in gusty hollows, autumn’s urns.
Seaward the river’s shining breast expands,
High in the windy pines a lone crow calls,
And far below some patient ploughman turns
His great black furrow over steaming lands.

The Dryad

Her soul was sown with the seed of the tree
Of old when the earth was young,
And glad with the light of its majesty
The light of her beautiful being upgrew.
And the winds that swept over land and sea,
And like a harper the great boughs strung,
Whispered her all things new.

The tree reached forth to the sun and the wind
And towered to heaven above.
But she was the soul that under its rind
Whispered its joy through the whole wood’s span,
Sweet and glad and tender and kind;
For her love for the tree was a holier love
Than the love of woman for man.

The seasons came and the seasons went
And the woodland music rang;
And under her wide umbrageous tent,
Hidden forever from mortal eye,
She sang earth’s beauty and wonderment.
But men never knew the spirit that sang
This music too wondrous to die.

Only nature, forever young,
And her children, forever true,
Knew the beauty of her who sung
And her tender, glad love for the tree;
Till on her music the wild hawk hung
From his eyrie high in the blue
To drink her melody free.

And the creatures of earth would creep from their haunts
To stare with their wilding eyes,
To hearken those rhythms of earth’s romance,
That never the ear of mortal hath heard;
Till the elfin squirrels would caper and dance,
And the hedgehog’s sleepy and shy surprise
Would grow to the thought of a bird.

And the pale wood-flowers from their cradles of dew
Where they rocked them the whole night long,
While the dark wheeled round and the stars looked through
Into the great wood’s slumbrous breast,
Till the gray of the night like a mist outblew;
Hearkened the piercing joy of her song
That sank like a star in their rest.

But all things come to an end at last
When the wings of being are furled.
And there blew one night a maddening blast
From those wastes where ships dismantle and drown,
That ravaged the forest and thundered past;
And in the wreck of that ruined world
The dryad’s tree went down.

When the pale stars dimmed their tapers of gold,
And over the night’s round rim
The day rose sullen and ragged and cold,
Over that wind-swept, desolate wild,
Where the huge trunks lay like giants of old,
Prone, slain on some battlefield, silent and grim;
The wood-creatures, curious, mild,

Searching their solitudes, found her there
Like a snowdrift out in the morn;
One lily arm round the beech-trunk bare,
One curved, cold, under her elfin head,
With the beechen shine in her nut-brown hair,
And the pallor of dawn on her face, love-lorn,
Beautiful, passionless, dead.

Peniel

In a place of the mountains of Edom,
And a waste of the midnight shore,
When the evil winds of the desolate hills
Beat with an iron roar,
With the pitiless black of the desert behind,
And the wrath of a brother before:—

In a place of the ancient mountains,
And the time of the midnight dead,
Where the great wide skies of his father’s land
Loomed vastly overhead,
Jacob, the son of the ancient of days,
Stood out alone with his dread

And there in that place of darkness,
When the murk of the night grew dim,
Under the wide roof-tree of the world
An unknown stood with him,—
Whether a devil or angel of God,—
With presence hidden and grim,

And spake—“Thou Son of Isaac,
On mountain and stream and tree,
And this wide ruined world of night,
Take thy last look with me:
For out of the darkness have I come,
To die, or conquer thee.”

Then Jacob made stern answer,—
“Until thy face I see,
Though I strive with life or wrestle with death,
Yet will I strive with thee:
For better it were to die this hour
Than from my fate to flee.

“Yea, speak thy name or show thy face,
Else shall I conquer thy will.”
But the other closed with an iron shock,
Till it seemed the stars so still,
With the lonely night, in a wheeling mist,
Went round by river and hill.

And Jacob strove as the dying strive,
In the woe of that awful place.
Yea, he fought with the desperate soul of one
Who fights in evil case:
And he called aloud in the pauses dread,
“O give me sight of thy face.

“Yea, speak thy name, what art thou, spirit,
Or man, or devil, or God?
Yea, speak thy name!” But no voice came,
From heaven or deep or sod:
And the spirit of Jacob clave to his flesh
As the dews in a dried-up clod.

Then they rocked and swayed as Autumn storms
Do rock the centuried trees:
Yea, swayed and rocked: that other strove,
And drave him to his knees,
And Jacob felt the wide world’s gleam
And the roar of unknown seas.

Like to a mighty storm it seemed,
There thundered in his ears:
Then a mighty rushing water teemed
Like brooks of human tears,
And opened the channels of his spent heart,
And washed away his fears.

And he rose with the last despairing strength
Of life’s tenacity,
And he swore by the blood of man in him,
And God’s eternity,
“’Tis my life, my very soul he wants;
That he shall not have of me.”

Then his heart grew strong and he felt the earth
Grow iron beneath his feet,
And he drank the balmy airs of night
Like rose-blooms rare and sweet:
And his soul rose up as a welling brook,
His life or death to meet.

And he spake to that unknown enemy there,—
“By yon white stars I vow,
That be thou devil or angel or man,
Thou canst not conquer me now;
For I feel new lease of life and strength
In this sweat that beads my brow.”

They locked once more; the stars, it seemed
Went round in dances dim,
Where the great white watchers over each hill,
With the black night, seemed to swim;
But Jacob knew his enemy now,
Could nevermore conquer him.

Yea, still with grip of death they strove,
In iron might, until,
Planet by planet, the great stars dropped
Down over the westward hill:
And Jacob stood like one who stands
In the strength of a mighty will.

Then at that late, last midnight hour,
When the little birds rejoice,
And out of the lands of sleep life looms
With the rustle of day’s annoys,
That other spake as one who speaks
With a sad despairing voice,

And cried aloud, “I have met my fate,
Loosen, and let me go;
For I have striven with thee in vain,
Till my heart is water and woe.”
“Nay, nay,” cried Jacob, “we strive, we twain,
Till the mists of dawning blow.”

Then spake that other, “I hate thee not,
My spirit is spent, alas,
Thou art a very lion of men;
Release, and let me pass;
For thou hast my heart and sinews ground
As ocean grinds his grass.”

Then answered Jacob, “Nay, nay, thou liar,
This is the lock of death:
For thee or me it must be thus,
The will of my being saith;
Thou man or devil, I hold thee here
Unto thy latest breath;

“For I do feel in thee I hold
My life’s supremest hour:
I would as lief let all life slip
As thee from out my power,
Until I gaze on thy hid face,
And read my spirit’s dower.

“Yea, show thy face or who thou art,
Or, man or angel or fiend,
I rend thy being fold from fold,
And scatter thee to the wind.”
Then they twain rocked as passions rock,
When madness wrecks the mind.

For each now knew this was the end,
And one of them must die,
Then Jacob heaved a mighty breath,
With a last great sobbing cry,
And gripped that other in a grip
Like the grip of those who die.

For he felt once more his spirit faint,
And his strong knees quake beneath,
And it seemed the mountains flamed all red
At the coming of his breath;
And he prayed if he were conquered now
That this might be his death.

The tight grip eased, the huge form slipped
Back earthward with a moan,
And Jacob stood there ’neath the dawn,
Like one new-changed to stone;
For in the face of the prone man there
He read his very own.

Not as man sees who reads his fellows
In the dim crowds that pass:
Nor as a soul may know himself,
Who looks within a glass:—
But as God sees, who kneads the clay,
And parts it from the mass.

And over his head the great day rose
And gloried leaf and wing,
And the little boughs began to tremble,
And the little birds to sing;
But on his face there shone a strength
Like the power of a new-crowned king.

Afterglow

After the clangor of battle,
There comes a moment of rest,
And the simple hopes and the simple joys
And the simple thoughts are best.

After the victor’s pæan,
After the thunder of gun,
There comes a lull that must come to all
Before the set of the sun.

Then what is the happiest memory?
Is it the foe’s defeat?
Is it the splendid praise of a world
That thunders by at your feet?

Nay, nay, to the life-worn spirit
The happiest thoughts are those
That carry us back to the simple joys
And the sweetness of life’s repose.

A simple love and a simple trust
And a simple duty done
Are truer torches to light to death
Than a whole world’s victories won.

The Tree of Truth

There grows a mighty centuried tree,
Its roots athwart the world,
Its branches wide as earth’s wide girth
By thousand dews impearled.

Its top is hoary, its wide boughs
Reach out to heaven above,
Its roots are knowledge, and its sap
The yearning heart of love.

Men hack its branches, curb its roots,
To trim it to their ken,
Or hide its green in poisonous vines
From evil’s grimmest fen.

But evermore while ages wane,
And centuries rise and die,
Through dark, through light, through good and ill,
Its saps the years defy.

For deeper in the heart of things,
And older far than time,
Its roots are fixed in those sure deeps
From which the centuries climb.

Ages ago its girth was great;
Its boughs o’er earth’s wide lands;
All peoples gathered ’neath its glades
Where now old ruin stands.

But form and custom staled its green
And curbed it into bounds
Of pruning hooks and greedy walls
That hemmed its sacred rounds.

And vast and wide where once to all
Its radiant leaves were free,
Far peoples paid, with earth’s red gold,
Its sacred home to see.

And summer by summer, yea, year by year,
Still lower shrank its head,
Till shallow deceit and life’s despair
Declared its heart was dead.

Then men cried, “We will hew it down,
And build from out its wood
A temple rare wherein to teach
Us memory of its good.

“And ’neath its shelter we will keep,
To hold the ages’ youth,
Those holy dreams our fathers drew
From out the tree of truth.”

They hacked and hewed, they sawed and planed,
They lopped its branches wide,
Till shorn and bare the old tree stood
To every wind and tide.

And round its scathed and ruined trunk,
Whence life had fled aloof,
They built a temple carved and arched
From floor to groinèd roof.

And reared a shrine where art was all
The end of human pain,
Till a sprout shot forth from the old tree’s trunk
And burst its walls amain;

A sturdy, wayward, wilding growth,
That mocked their maimèd dream
Of life and truth in legend carved
On groinèd arch and beam.

Men stood amazed. The teachers cried,
“Behold the curse of earth!
Its life must die or all our words
Are but as nothing worth.”

“Nay, nay,” cried others, “but let it stand,
Perchance a miracle.”
Then straight about its burgeoning boughs
Old bloody battles fell.

Wild clamor and clash of fiery arms,
The old against the new.
Mad hosts arrayed with banner and blade,
Where war’s wild trumpets blew.

But as they strove by gates of blood,
With glad unconscious youth,
Higher and wider skyward climbed
The newer tree of truth.

And blithe within its boughs their nests
The birds of heaven made,
While at its foot mid earth’s old ruins,
The happy children played.

And form and cant were swept away,
While under its dream sublime,
Men drank anew ’neath heaven’s arch
From nature for a time.

Yea, still it spreads its antres vast,
Through peace and clash of arms,
And blossoms brave and blithe and free,
O’er all earth’s shrunk alarms.

And still men battle to destroy
The living for the dead
Old ruined trunk of that which towers
Its glories overhead:

And strive for art’s distorted ways,
While from earth’s heart of youth,
Higher and wider heavenward spreads
The ancient tree of truth.

Glory of the Dying Day

O glory of the dying day
That into darkness fades away!
O violet splendor melting down
By river bend o’er tower and town!
O glory of the dying day
That into darkness fades away!

O splendor of the gates of night!
O majesty of dying light
That all a molten glory glows,
Till purple-crimson fades to rose
And dying, melting, outward goes
In ashes on the even’s rim,
When all the world grows faint and dim!

O silvern sound of far-off bells
Ringing, ringing miles away
Over river, fields, and fells,
Round the crimson and the gray;
Pealing softly evening out
As the dewy dusk comes down,
And the great night folds about
River, woodlands, hills, and town!

O glory of the fading hills!
Splendor of the river’s breast!
O silence that the whole world fills!
Sanctity of peaceful rest!
Alien from the care of day,
Now a petalled star peeps in:
Now night’s choruses begin,
Musical and far away.

O glory of the dying day,
When my life’s evening fades away,
May it in splendid peace go down
Like yours o’er river-bend and town—
Not into silence blind and stark,
Not into wintry muffled dark—
But, heralded by stars divine,
May my life’s latest evening ray
Melt into such a night as thine.

September in the Laurentian Hills

Already Winter in his sombre round,
Before his time hath touched these hills austere
With lonely flame. Last night, without a sound,
The ghostly frost walked out by wood and mere.
And now the sumach curls his frond of fire,
The aspen-tree reluctant drops his gold,
And down the gullies the North’s wild vibrant lyre
Rouses the bitter armies of the cold.

O’er this short afternoon the night draws down,
With ominous chill, across these regions bleak;
Wind-beaten gold, the sunset fades around
The purple loneliness of crag and peak,
Leaving the world an iron house wherein
Nor love nor life nor hope hath ever been.

Lazarus

O Father Abram, I can never rest,
Here in thy bosom in the whitest heaven,
Where love blooms on through days without an even;
For up through all the paradises seven,
There comes a cry from some fierce, anguished breast,—

A cry that comes from out of hell’s dark night,
A piercing cry of one in agony,
That reaches me here in heaven white and high;
A call of anguish that doth never die;
Like dream-waked infant wailing for the light.

O Father Abram, heaven is love and peace,
And God is good; eternity is rest.
Sweet would it be to lie upon thy breast
And know no thought but loving to be blest
Save for that cry that nevermore will cease.

It comes to me above the angel-lyres,
The chanting praises of the cherubim;
It comes between my upward gaze and Him,
All-blessed Christ; a voice from the vague dim—
“O Lazarus, come and ease me of these fires.”

O Lazarus, I have called thee all these years,
It is so long for me to reach to thee,
Across the ages of this mighty sea,
That loometh dark, dense, like eternity;
Which I have bridged by anguished prayers and tears:

“Which I have bridged by knowledge of God’s love,
That even penetrates this anguished glare;
A gleaming ray, a tremulous star-built stair,
A road by which love-hungered souls may fare
Past hate and doubt, to heaven and God above.”

So calleth it ever upward unto me:
It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors:
It echoes all along the sapphire floors:
Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars,
It fills the vastness of eternity;

Until my sense of love is waned and dimmed:
The music-rounded spheres do clash and jar,
No more those spirit-calls from star to star,
Those harmonies that float and melt afar,
Those belts of light by which all heaven is rimmed.

No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings,
The seraph chanting in my rest-tuned ear:
I only know a cry, a prayer, a tear,
That rises from the depths up to me here;
A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.

O Father Abram, thou must bid me go
Into the spaces of the deep abyss;
Where far from us and our God-given bliss,
Do dwell those souls that have done Christ amiss;
For through my rest I hear that upward woe.

I hear it crying through the heavenly night,
When curvèd, hung in space, the million moons
Lean planet-ward, and infinite space attunes
Itself to silence. As from drear gray dunes
A cry is heard along the shuddering light,

Of wild dusk-bird, a sad, heart-curdling cry,
So comes to me that call from out hell’s coasts;
I see an infinite shore with gaping ghosts!
This is no heaven, with all its shining hosts!
This is no heaven, until that hell doth die!

So spake the soul of Lazarus, and from thence,
Like new-fledged bird from its sun-jewelled nest,
Drunk with the music of the young year’s quest,
He sank out into heaven’s gloried breast,
Spaceward turned, toward darkness dim, immense.

Hellward he moved like a radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even,
When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven
Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven—
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.

The liquid floor of heaven bore him up
With unseen arms, as in his feathery flight
He floated down toward the infinite night;
And each way downward, on the left and right,
He saw each moon of heaven like a cup

Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar
From sentinel towers of heaven’s battlements;
But onward, winged by love’s desire intense,
And sank, space-swallowed, into the immense,
While with him ever widened heaven’s bar.

’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls;
But hellward still he ever floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout.

The Mother [1]

I

It was April, blossoming spring,
They buried me, when the birds did sing;

Earth, in clammy wedging earth,
They banked my bed with a black, damp girth.

Under the damp and under the mould,
I kenned my breasts were clammy and cold.

Out from the red beams, slanting and bright,
I kenned my cheeks were sunken and white.

I was a dream, and the world was a dream,
And yet I kenned all things that seem.

I was a dream, and the world was a dream,
But you cannot bury a red sunbeam.

For though in the under-grave’s doom-night
I lay all silent and stark and white,

Yet over my head I seemed to know
The murmurous moods of wind and snow,

The snows that wasted, the winds that blew,
The rays that slanted, the clouds that drew

The water-ghosts up from lakes below,
And the little flower-souls in earth that grow.

Under earth, in the grave’s stark night,
I felt the stars and the moon’s pale light.

I felt the winds of ocean and land
That whispered the blossoms soft and bland.

Though they had buried me dark and low,
My soul with the season’s seemed to grow.

II

From throes of pain they buried me low,
For death had finished a mother’s woe.

But under the sod, in the grave’s dread doom,
I dreamed of my baby in glimmer and gloom.

I dreamed of my babe, and I kenned that his rest
Was broken in wailings on my dead breast.

I dreamed that a rose-leaf hand did cling:
Oh, you cannot bury a mother in spring!

When the winds are soft and the blossoms are red
She could not sleep in her cold earth-bed.

I dreamed of my babe for a day and a night,
And then I rose in my graveclothes white.

I rose like a flower from my damp earth-bed
To the world of sorrowing overhead.

Men would have called me a thing of harm,
But dreams of my babe made me rosy and warm.

I felt my breasts swell under my shroud;
No star shone white, no winds were loud;

But I stole me past the graveyard wall,
For the voice of my baby seemed to call;

And I kenned me a voice, though my lips were dumb:
Hush, baby, hush! for mother is come.

I passed the streets to my husband’s home;
The chamber stairs in a dream I clomb.

I heard the sound of each sleeper’s breath,
Light waves that break on the shores of death.

I listened a space at my chamber door,
Then stole like a moon-ray over its floor.

My babe was asleep on a stranger arm.
“O baby, my baby, the grave is so warm,

“Though dark and so deep, for mother is there!
O come with me from the pain and care!

“O come with me from the anguish of earth,
Where the bed is banked with a blossoming girth,

“Where the pillow is soft and the rest is long,
And mother will croon you a slumber-song,

“A slumber-song that will charm your eyes
To a sleep that never in earth-song lies!

“The loves of earth your being can spare,
But never the grave, for mother is there.”

I nestled him soft to my throbbing breast,
And stole me back to my long, long rest.

And here I lie with him under the stars,
Dead to earth, its peace and its wars;

Dead to its hates, its hopes, and its harms,
So long as he cradles up soft in my arms.

And heaven may open its shimmering doors,
And saints make music on pearly floors,

And hell may yawn to its infinite sea,
But they never can take my baby from me.

For so much a part of my soul he hath grown
That God doth know of it high on his throne.

And here I lie with him under the flowers
That sun-winds rock through the billowy hours,

With the night-airs that steal from the murmuring sea,
Bringing sweet peace to my baby and me.

[1] This poem was suggested by the following passage in Tyler’s Animism: “The pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she had left on earth may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay.”

Dusk

Down by the shore at even, when the waves
Lap lightly on the reedy rims, and soft,
One trembling star, a blossom, flames aloft,
Where the sunk sun the western heaven laves
With lowest tides of day; the tired world craves
For the great night that cometh brooding in,
With draught of healing over earth’s far din,
And blessed rest that recreates and saves.

Far in the breathing woods the whip-poor-will
Reiterates his plaintive note; and hark!
A dusky night-hawk whirrs athwart the dark,
Haunting the shadows, till in silvern swoon,
Hunted by her own spirit, strange and still,
Over the waters comes the wan, white moon.

The Last Prayer

Master of life, the day is done;
My sun of life is sinking low;
I watch the hours slip one by one
And hark the night-wind and the snow.

And must thou shut the morning out,
And dim the eye that loved to see;
Silence the melody and rout,
And seal the joys of earth for me?

And must thou banish all the hope—
The large horizon’s eagle-swim,
The splendor of the far-off slope
That ran about the world’s great rim,

That rose with morning’s crimson rays
And grew to noonday’s gloried dome,
Melting to even’s purple haze
When all the hopes of earth went home?

Yea, Master of this ruined house,
The mortgage closed, outruns the lease;
Long since is hushed the gay carouse
And now the windowed lights must cease.

The doors all barred, the shutters up,
Dismantled, empty, wall and floor,
And now for one grim eve to sup
With death the bailiff at the door.

Yea, I will take the gloomward road
Where fast the Arctic nights set in,
To reach the bourne of that abode
Which thou hast kept for all my kin.

And all life’s splendid joys forego,
Walled in with night and senseless stone,
If at the last my heart might know
Through all the dark one joy alone.

Yea, thou mayst quench the latest spark
Of life’s weird day’s expectancy,
Roll down the thunders of the dark
And close the light of life for me.

Melt all the splendid blue above
And let these magic wonders die,
If thou wilt only leave me Love
And Love’s heart-brother Memory.

Though all the hopes of every race
Crumbled in one red crucible,
And melted mingled into space,
Yet, Master, thou wert merciful.

Pan the Fallen

He wandered into the market
With pipes and goatish hoof;
He wandered in a grotesque shape,
And no one stood aloof.
For the children crowded round him,
The wives and graybeards, too,
To crack their jokes and have their mirth,
And see what Pan would do.

The Pan he was they knew him,
Part man, but mostly beast,
Who drank, and lied, and snatched what bones
Men threw him from their feast;
Who seemed in sin so merry,
So careless in his woe,
That men despised, scarce pitied him,
And still would have it so.

He swelled his pipes and thrilled them,
And drew the silent tear;
He made the gravest clack with mirth
By his sardonic leer.
He blew his pipes full sweetly
At their amused demands,
And caught the scornful earth-flung pence
That fell from careless hands.

He saw the mob’s derision,
And took it kindly, too,
And when an epithet was flung,
A coarser back he threw;
But under all the masking
Of a brute, unseemly part,
I looked, and saw a wounded soul,
And a god-like, breaking heart.

And back of the elfin music,
The burlesque, clownish play,
I knew a wail that the weird pipes made,
A look that was far away,—
A gaze into some far heaven
Whence a soul had fallen down;
But the mob only saw the grotesque beast
And the antics of the clown.

For scant-flung pence he paid them
With mirth and elfin play,
Till, tired for a time of his antics queer,
They passed and went their way;
Then there in the empty market
He ate his scanty crust,
And, tired face turned to heaven, down
He laid him in the dust.

And over his wild, strange features
A softer light there fell,
And on his worn, earth-driven heart
A peace ineffable.
And the moon rose over the market,
But Pan the beast was dead;
While Pan the god lay silent there,
With his strange, distorted head.

And the people, when they found him,
Stood still with awesome fear.
No more they saw the beast’s rude hoof,
The furtive, clownish leer;
But the lightest spirit in that throng
Went silent from the place,
For they knew the look of a god released
That shone from his dead face.

The Vengeance of Saki

When the moon is red in the heaven, and under the night
Is heard on the winds the thunder of shadowy horses,
Then out of the night I arise, and again am a woman;
And leap to the back of an ebon steed that knows me,
And hound him on in the wake of hoofs that thunder,
Of smoking nostrils, and gleaming eyes, and foam-flecked
Flanks that glow and flash in the flow of the moonlight;
While under the mirk and the moon, out into the blackness,
Round the world’s edge with an eerie, mad, echoing laughter,
Leaps the long cry of the hate of the wild snake-woman.

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the blackness forever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!

I was a girl of the South, with eyes as tender
And dreamy and soft and true as the skies of my people;
But I was a slave and an alien captured in battle,
And brought to the North by a people ruder and stronger,
Who held me as naught but a toy, to be played with and broken,
Then thrown aside like a bow that is snapped asunder.
Lithe and supple my limbs as the sinuous serpent,
And quick as the eye and the tongue of the serpent mine anger
That flashed out the fire of my hate on the scorn of my scorners.
But hate soon softened to love, as fire into sunlight,
When my eyes met the eyes of the chieftain, my lord, and my master.

Sweet as the flowers that bloom on the blossoming prairie,
Gladder than voices of fountains that dance in the sunlight,
Were the new and tremulous fancies that dwelt in my bosom;
For he was my king and my sun, and the power of his glance
To me as at springtime the returning sun to the landscape,
And his touch and the sound of his voice that set my heart throbbing.

Sweet were the days of the summer I dwelt in his tent,
And glad and loving the nights that I lay on his bosom.
But woe, woe, woe, to the summer that fades into autumn,
And woe upon woe is the love that dwindles and dies,
And ere my hot heart was abrim with its summer of loving
I knew that its autumn had come, that his love was another’s—
A blue-eyed haughty captive they brought from the East,
Her hair like moving sunlight that rippled and ran
With the golden flow of a brook from her brow to her girdle.
He saw her, he looked on her face, and I was forgotten—
Yea, I and the love that fed on my soul in its anguish!

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the darkness forever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!

I bowed my head with its woe to him in my anguish;
I veiled my face in my hair like the night of my sorrow;
And I plead with him there by the love that was true and forgiving:
Oh! my lord and my love, by the days that are past of our loving,
Oh! slay thy poor Saki, but send her not forth in her anguish!
And I fell to the earth with my face, like the moon hid in heaven,
In the folds of my hair. But he sate there and uttered no answer;
And the white woman sate there, and scorned at the woe of my sorrow.

Then I bit my tongue through that had prayed for the pity ungiven,
And I rose with my hate in my eyes, like the lightning in heaven
That leaps red to kill with a hiss like the snake that they called me;
And I looked on them there, and I cursed them, the man, and the woman—
The man whose lips had kissed my love into being,
And the woman whose beauty had withered that love into ashes—
With curses so dread and so deep that he rose up and smote me,
And hounded me forth like a dog to die in the desert.

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the blackness for ever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!

Then wandered I forth an outcast hounded and beaten;
Careless whither I went or living or dying,
With that load of despair at my heartstrings wearing to madness.
Long and loud I laughed at the heaven that mocked me
With its beautiful sounds and its sights and the joy of its being,
For I longed but to die and to go to that region of darkness
Where I might shroud me and curse in my madness for ever.
Far, oh far I fled till my feet were wounded
And bruised and cut by the ways unkindly and cruel.
Then all the world grew red and the sun as a furnace,
And I raved till I knew no more for a horrible season.
Then I arose, and stood like one in a dream
Who, after long years of forgetting, sudden remembers
The dread wild cry of a wrong that clamors for righting;
Then sending a curse to the heart of the night sky, I turned me
And fled like the wind of the winter, the sound of whose footstep is vengeance.
Late, when the moon had lowered, I entered his village,
And threading the silent streets came to the well-known tent-door,
And, dragging aside the skins, with serpentine motion
Entered now as a thief where once I had entered as mistress.
And there in the gleam of the moon, with the flame of her hair on his bosom,
Lay the woman I hated like hell with the man I loved clasped to her heart.

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the blackness forever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!
If hate could have slain they’d have shrivelled up there in the moonlight;
But theirs was a sin too deep for the kiss of a knife-blade.
Long did I stand like a poisoned wind in a desert,
Gray and sad and despairing, and nursing my hate;
When out of the night, like one voice that calls to another,
Came the far-off neigh of a horse, and a mad joy leaped to my veins,
And a thought curled into my heart as a serpent coils into a flower;
And I turned me, and left them there in their foolish love and their slumber
That my hot heart hissed was their last.
Then hurrying out of the door that flapped in the night-wind I fled,
With a pent-up hunger of hate that maddened to burst from its sluices,
And came to a place on the plain far up and out from the village,
Where tethered in rows of hurdles, champing and restless and neighing,
Half a thousand horses were herded under the night.

Ha! Ha! I live it anew, I dream it again in my madness.
I see that moving ocean of shimmering flanks in the moonlight:
I snatch a brand from a watchfire that smoulders and dwindles:
I creep around to the side of the herd remote from the village:
I cry, a low call, that is answered by a neigh and a whinny:
Then I leap to the back of an ebon stallion that knows me.
’Tis but the cut of a thong, a cry in the night,
A fiery waving brand like lightning to thunder,
A terrified moaning and neighing, a heaving of necks and of haunches;
A bound, a rush, a crack of a thong, then a whirlwind of hoofs!
Like a sweep of a wave on a beach we are thundering onwards,
Neck and neck in the wake of my hate, that ever before us
Clamors from heaven to hell in its terrible vengeance!
With neck outstretched and mad eyes agleam in the moonlight,
I see on ahead the sleeping huts in the moonlight.

Ha! Ha! they will rest well under the sleep that we bring them!
See, see, we are nearing them now; the first wild thundering hoof-beats
Have ridden them down, ’mid the shriekings and groanings of anguish,
Blotting them out with their loves and their hates into blackness.
Ha! Ha! ride, ride, my beauties, my terrible tramplers!
Pound, pound into dust the mother, the child, and the husband!
Pound, pound to the pulse of my hate that exults in your thunders!
Ha! Over the little ones nestled to suckle the bosom,
Over the man that I loved, we thunder, we thunder!
Over the woman I hate with the flame of her hair on his bosom;
Trampling, treading them down out into silence and blackness,
Like the swirl of a merciless storm we sweep on to darkness forever!
And now, when the moon is in heaven, and under the night
Is heard on the winds the thunder of shadowy horses,
Then out of the dark I arise, and again am a woman;
And leap to the back of an ebon steed that knows me,
And hound him on in the wake of hoofs that thunder;
While under the mirk and the moon, out into the blackness,
Round the world’s edge with an eerie, mad, echoing laughter,
Leaps the long cry of the hate of the wild snake-woman.

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the blackness forever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!

Love

Love came at dawn when all the world was fair,
When crimson glories, bloom, and song were rife;
Love came at dawn when hope’s wings fanned the air,
And murmured, “I am life.”

Love came at even when the day was done,
When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed;
Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun,
And whispered, “I am rest.”

Victoria

JUBILEE ODE, A. D. 1897

With thunder of cannon and far-off roll of drum,
And martial music blaring forth her glory,
’Mid miles of thronging millions down each street
Where all the earth is bound in one heart-beat
The world’s great Empire’s greatest Queen doth come,
Borne on one mighty, rocking earthquake voice
Wherein all peoples of wide earth rejoice—
She comes, she comes, to beat of martial drums,
And pageants blazoning England’s ancient story;
The good, gray Queen, whose majesty and worth
Have lent their radiance to remotest earth;
While the splendor and might and power of her mighty empire bound her;
And the serried millions, mad with joy, are near her,
All to love her, none to fear her,
But nearer far than power, than splendor dearer,
The surging love of her loved people round her.
She comes, she comes, encircled by her people,
While praise to Heaven peals out from tower and steeple,
Into the great cathedral, hushed and dim,
With thankful heart and humble queenly head
Over the sleep of England’s mighty dead,
To render up her heart’s best thoughts to Him
The King of Kings—’mid hush of priestly tread,
And gloried anthem’s solemn pealing hymn.

The mighty millions, awed, now bow the head,
Thank Heaven for her simple, noble life,
Earth’s queenliest empress, mother, daughter, wife!
Thank Heaven for all she held her dearest own!
Forgiveness for the weakness she hath known!
Blessings on her wise old widowed head,
For what her life is now, and what her life hath been,
Noble mother, wife and Queen!

Let the mighty organs roll, and the mighty throng disperse!
She is ours, and we are hers,
And both are Britain’s. Both to Britain’s God
Lift up the heart-felt praise for the might of splendid days,
For the glory that hath been.
Let the cannon thunder out, and the miles of voices shout—Victoria!
Let the bells peal out afar, till the rocket tells the star,
And the ocean shouts its pæan to the thunder-answering bar;
England’s glory, Britain’s pride,
Revered of half a world beside,
O good gray Queen, Victoria!

Daughter of monarchs, mother of kings;
All her sorrows we have shared,
All her triumphs they are ours.
Kind Heaven, that virtue still endowers,
Be with her, may her path be flowers;
Be with her, may her days be spared,
Death aloof with shadowing wings,
Unto nature’s latest hours!
Daughter of monarchs, mother of kings,
O good gray Queen, Victoria!