t'.U [ill Hi nnw llljljijjjijljli ;;iijjjiyuj ijjlj I |lj iiiii iiiiii iillllliliiili ■PiPi i liiiiliii' Class Book_.__ fi4— [■^ 9 COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr BY JOHN DAVIDSON Plays Ballads and Songs New Ballads Fleet Street Eclogues Godfrida The Last Ballad and Other Poems A Rosary Holiday and Other Poems Selected Poems A Random Itinerary Self's the Man The Knight of the Maypole The Testament of a Vivisector The Testament of a Man Forbid The Testament of an Empire Builder The Theatrocrat Mammon and His Message The Triumph of Mammon FLEET STREET and other poems By JOHN DAVIDSON NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS 1909 Copyright IQOQ by Mitchell Kennerley LIBRARY of CONGRESS Two Cooics Received JUN 3 IBOi^ ^ CcpyriJfit tntry „ The time has come to make an end. There are several motives. I find my pension is not enough; I have therefore still to turn aside and attempt things for which people will pay. My health also counts. Asthma and other annoyances I have tol- erated for years; but I cannot put up with cancer. I thought this might be my last book, and in- tended five poems, " Cain," " Judas," " Caesar Bor- gia," " Calvin," and " Cromwell " under the gen- eral title, ''When God Meant God," to be the principal contents. " Cain " Is the only one of these poems which I have written. I should have concluded the volume with a second Testament In my own person. Insisting that men should no longer degrade themselves under such appellations as Christian, Mohammedan, Agnostic, Monlst, etc. Men are the Universe become conscious: the sim- plest man should consider himself too great to be called after any name. J. D. CONTENTS PAGE FLEET STREET 1 SONG II THE CRYSTAL PALACE 13 RAILWAY stations: 2$ LONDON BRIDGE LIVERPOOL STREET IN THE CITY 43 CAIN 45 ECLOGUES 61 THE FEAST OF ST. HILARY ST. VALENTINE^S DAY SNOW 75 THE TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMON SIMPLEX CONCERNING AUTOMOBILISM 79 THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 88 THE LUTANIST 92 ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT 95 TWO DOGS 96 THE WASP lOI THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 103 THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD I07 ROAD AND RAIL 112 SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY . . . . 11 8 FLEET STREET Wisps and rags of cloud In a withered sky, A strip of pallid azure, at either end, Above the Ludgate obelisk, above The Temple griffin, widening with the width Below, and parallel with the street that counts Seven hundred paces of tesselated road From Ludgate Circus west to Chancery Lane: By concrete pavement flanked and precipice Of windowed fronts on this side and on that, A thoroughfare of everything that hastes, The sullen tavern-loafers notwithstanding And hawkers in the channel hunger-bit. Interfluent night and day the tides of trade, Labour and pleasure, law and crime, are sucked From every urban quarter: through this strait All business London pours. Amidst the boom And thud of wheel and hoof the myriad feet Are silent save to him who stands a while And hearkens till his passive ear, attuned To new discernment like an erudite Musician's, which can follow note by note The part of any player even In the din 2 FLEET STREET And thrashing fury of the noisiest close Orchestral, hears chromatic footsteps throb And tense susurrant speech of multitudes That stride In pairs discussing ways and means, Or reason with themselves in single file Advancing hardily on ruinous Events; and should he listen long there comes A second-hearing like the second-sight Diviners knew, or as the runner gains His second-breath; then phantom footsteps fell, And muffled voices travel out of time: Alsatians pass and Templars; stareabouts For the new motion of Nineveh; morose Or jolly tipplers at the Bolt-in-Tun, The Devil Tavern; Johnson's heavy tread And rolling laughter; Drayton trampling out The thunder of Agincourt as up and down He paces by St. Dunstan's; Chaucer, wroth. Beating the friar that traduced the State; And more remote, from centuries unknown, Rumour of battle, noises of the swamp, The gride of glacial rock, the rush of wings. The roar of beasts that breathed a fiery air Where fog envelops now electric light, The music of the spheres, the humming speed Centrifugal of molten planets loosed From pregnant suns to find their orbits out. The whirling spindle of the nebulae. FLEET STREET 3 The rapture of ethereal darkness strung Illimitable in eternal space. Fleet Street was once a silence in the ether. The carbon, iron, copper, silicon, Zinc, aluminium vapours, metalloids, Constituents of the skeleton and shell Of Fleet Street — of the woodwork, metalwork, Brickwork, electric apparatus, drains And printing-presses, conduits, pavement, road — Were at the first unelemented space, Imponderable tension in the dark Consummate matter of eternity. And so the flesh and blood of Fleet Street, nerve And brain infusing life and soul, the men. The women, woven, built and kneaded up Of hydrogen, of azote, oxygen. Of carbon, phosphorus, chlorine, sulphur, iron. Of calcium, kalium, natrum, manganese, The warm humanities that day and night Inhabit and employ it and inspire, Were in the ether mingled with it, there Distinguished nothing from the road, the shops. The drainpipes, sewage, sweepings of the street: Matter of infinite beauty and delight Atoning offal, filth and all offence With soul and intellect, with love and thought; Matter whereof the furthest stars consist, 4 FLEET STREET And every Interstellar wilderness From galaxy to galaxy, the thin Imponderable ether, matter's ghost, But matter still, substance demonstrable Being the icy vehicle of light. Flung off in teardrops spirally, or cast In annular fission forth like Saturn's hoops, Earth and the planets girdled solar space. The offspring and the suburbs of the sun. In rings or drops — the learned are unresolved How planets and their satellites arrive; But vision, vouching both, is more obsessed By Saturn's way of circles here at hand. Saturn has uttered many moons; his rings May be the last abortive birth of powers Luniparous unmatched in heaven ; or else These still-born undeveloped satellites Denote an overweening confidence Determined, risking all, on something new. Having outstretched spirally and well A brilliant series of customary moons, The hazardous and genial orb began A segregation annular instead. Attempting boldly the impossible, Thus to become the wonder of the skies For ever hampered with the rings we see. Stupendous error still eclipses net FLEET STREET 5 Achievement; as In art the SIstlne roof Sublimely figured, or hardihood In war That wastes a troop for glory, or as earth In sheer terrestrial wantonness flung up The Marlpesan Vale, so In the skies The most enchanting vision of the night, Our belted Saturn shines, extravagance Celestial jewelled with its dazzling fault. Now, In the ether with all the universe, And In the nebula of air our scheme, Fleet Street and Saturn's rings were Interfused One mass of molecules being set apart For the high theme of wonder and the butt Of speculation, and the other doomed, Although the most renowned throughout the world, To be a little noisy London street. How think we then? The metal, stone and lime, Brick, asphalt, wood, the matter that renews The shell of Fleet Street, does It still begrudge The luminous zones with which it once was blent Their lofty glory? Or must the carapace Of Fleet Street, welded of the self-same stuff As man, be utterly oblivious? Thought And passion, envy, joy, are these unfelt By carbon, iron, azote, oxygen. And other liberal substances that know, 6 FLEET STREET Rejoice and suffer In mankind, when power Selective turns them into street? Things wrought By us, are they, too, psychophysical? Do these piled storeys and purlieus quaint of square And alley envy Saturn's belts — a brief. Not outwardly distinguished urban street Upon a planet only remarkable Among the spheres for Insignificance, And they so lovely and unparagoned A thousand million of mundane miles away? Are able editors, leader-writers, apt Telegraphists and printers, the only soul In Fleet Street, they, its only consciousness? Perhaps the bricks remember. Who can tell When filthy fog comes down and lights are out, Machinery still, and traffic at the ebb. If Idle streets with time to meditate Resent enforced passivity? I think The admirable patience of the bricks May fail them of a Sunday. Imagine it: To be for ages unalterable brick. Sans speech or motion, nameless In a wall Among a million bricks alike unknown! I think the splendid patience of the bricks Gives out In darkness and foul weather, even To the length of envying the wonderful Exalted destiny of Saturn's belts; FLEET STREET 7 And then I long to tell them, if I could, How much more happy their condition is Than that of rubbish revolving endlessly In agonies of impotent remorse About the planet it deserted. Thus Should I exhort them: — ''Bricks, beloved bricks, My brethren of the self-same ether bred, I hold it very beautiful of you To think so handsomely of Saturn's rings, Your old companions in the nebula; But I can tell you and I'll make you know, Your fate is no inferior to theirs. These seeming jewelled zones that shine so bright Are the mere wreck of matter, broken bits. Detached and grinding beaches of barren rock Hung up there as a menace and a sign; Circular strips of chaos unredeemed, Whirling in madness of oppugnant powers. Whether his rings are Saturn's own attempt. Abnormal and abortive, a brilliant ninth Consummate moon to utter, or likelier still, A leash of runaway material tides That mutinously left their native orb In molten youth to show all other stars The real and only way to shine, and failed Inevitably, being immature. They are, beyond all doubt, unhappy zones. Forlorn, remorseful, useless and ashamed. 8 FLEET STREET Most beautiful, I grant you; beautiful And useless, like all art: their fate it is To be an agony of beauty, art Inutile, unavailing, misconceived. But you, most genial, intellectual bricks, Most dutiful and most important, you Are indispensable, an integral Component of the world's most famous street. Within your wholesome and convenient bield The truest miracle is daily done. " Never forget that men have tamed and taught The lightning; clad it in a livery known As news; and that without your constant aid Our modern, actual magic, black and white, Momentous mystery of telegraphy. Resounding press, accomplished intellects And pens expert would be impossible. Take down the walls your myrmidons compose, And Fleet Street, soul and body, ceases — fog Unoccupied, wind, city sunshine sparse And pallid claiming all the room that now. Enclosed, accoutred, functioned, named and known, Serves as the Dionysius' ear of the world. Honour and excellence and praise are yours; Be satisfied; be glad." But all the bricks, FLEET STREET 9 O'erburdened and begrimed, in chorus sighed, And as one brick, " Upon my cubical Content, and by our common mother, I Had rather shine, a shard of chaos, set In Saturn's glistering rings, the exquisite Enigma of the night, than be the unnamed, Unthought-of copestone or foundation — stone Of any merely world-distinguished street." Applauding the ambition of the bricks, I felt, I also, I would rather share Dazzling perdition with material wreck Suspended in majestic agony About the withered loins of some undone Wide-circling planet for the universe To see, than live the dull life of a baked Oblength of tempered clay, year in year out Unnoticed In a murky, mundane street; But recollecting that the bricks were bricks And not a planetary wonder, what Event soe'er awaits the world and time, I reassured them : " Gallant souls," I cried, " Noble and faithful bricks, be not dismayed ! I hear the shapeless fragments that make up Aesthetic marvel in Saturn's girdles sigh Disconsolately, as they chafe and grind Each other, — Such an enviable fate As that of any single solid brick lo FLEET STREET In Fleet Street, London, well and truly laid, A moulded, tempered, necessary brick In that most famous faubeurg of the world. Exceeds our merits! Could we but attain The crude integrity of commonplace Cohesion even in the most exhausted, most Decrepit, ruinous, forgotten orb In some back alley of the Milky Way How happy we should be! Remember, bricks, Neither success nor failure envy spares: Use envies art; art envies use. These moods Will come, but regular bricks like you transcend Them always. Be courageous; be yourselves, Be proud of your telluric destiny." With that the bricks took heart: " Why, so vjt are," They said, " the ear of England ! Let us be Old England's ear ! " And revolution beat In smothered cries and muffled fusillades Upon the trembling tympanal; empires At war thridded the sounding labyrinth With cannon; loyal peoples through the sea And through the air by auditory nerves Electric from the quarters of the earth And from a hundred isles, their homage sent With whispered news of aspirations, deeds. Achievements to the Mother of Nations, she Whose ever vigilant, clairaudient ear Is Fleet Street. SONG Closes and courts and lanes, Devious, clustered thick, The thoroughfare, mains and drains. People and mortar and brick, Wood, metal, machinery, brains, Pen and composing stick: Fleet Street, but exquisite flame In the nebula once ere day and night Began their travail, or earth became, And all was passionate light. Networks of wire overland. Conduits under the sea. Aerial message from strand to strand By lightning that travels free, Hither in haste to hand Tidings of destiny These tingling nerves of the world's affairs Deliver remorseless, rendering still The fall of empires, the price of shares, The record of good and ill. Tidal the traffic goes Citywards out of the town; II 13 SONG Townwards the evening ebb o'erflows This highway of old renown, When the fog-woven curtains close, And the urban night comes down, Where souls are spilt and intellects spent O'er news vociferant near and far. From Hesperus hard to the Orient, From dawn to the evening star. This is the royal refrain That burdens the boom and the thud Of omnibus, mobus, wain, And the hoofs on the beaten mud, From the Griffin at Chancery Lane To the portal of old King Lud — Fleet Street, diligent night and day, Of news the mart and the burnished hearth. Seven hundred paces of narrow way, A notable bit of the earth. THE CRYSTAL PALACE Contraption, — that's the bizarre, proper slang, Eclectic word, for this portentous toy, The flying-machine, that gyrates stiffly, arms A-kimbo, so to say, and baskets slung From every elbow, skating in the air. Irreverent, we; but Tartars from Thibet May deem Sir Hiram the Grandest Lama, deem His volatile machinery best, and most Magnific, rotatory engine, meant For penitence and prayer combined, whereby Petitioner as well as orison Are spun about in space: a solemn rite Before the portal of that fane unique, Victorian temple of commercialism, Our very own eighth wonder of the world, The Crystal Palace. So sublime! Like some Immense crustacean's gannoid skeleton. Unearthed, and cleansed, and polished! Were it so Our paleontological respect Would shield it from derision: but when a shed. Intended for a palace, looks as like The fossil of a giant myriapod! .... 13 14 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 'Twas Isabey — sarcastic wretch! — who told A young aspirant, studying tandem art And medicine, that he certainly was born To be a surgeon: ** When you try," he said, " To paint a boat you paint a tumour." No Idea of Its purpose, and no word Can make your glass and Iron beautiful. Colossal ugliness may fascinate If something be expressed ; and time adopts Ungalnllest stone and brick and ruins them To beauty; but a building lacking life, A house that must not mellow or decay? — 'TIs nature's outcast. Moss and lichen? Stains Of weather? From the first Nature said "No! Shine there unblessed, a witness of my scorn! I love the ashlar and the well-baked clay: My seasons can adorn them sumptuously: But you shall stand rebuked till men ashamed, Abhor you, and destroy you and repent!" But come : here's crowd ; here's mob ; a gala day ! The walks are black with people: no one hastes; They all pursue their purpose business-like — The polo-ground, the cycle track; but most Invade the palace glumly once again. It is " again " ; you feel it In the air — Resigned habitues on every hand: THE CRYSTAL PALACE 15 And yet agog; abandoned, yet concerned! They can't tell why they come; they only know They must shove through the holiday somehow. In the main floor the fretful multitude Circulates from the north nave to the south Across the central transept — swish and tread And murmur, like a seaboard's mingled sound. About the sideshows eddies swirl and swing: Distorting mirrors; waltzing-tops — ^wherein Couples are wildly spun contrariwise To your revolving platform; biographs. Or rifle-ranges; panoramas: choose! As stupid as it was last holiday? They think so, — every whit! Outside, perhaps? A spice of danger in the flying-machine? A few who passed that whirligig, their hopes On higher things, return disconsolate To try the Tartar's volant oratory. Others again, no more anticipant Of any active business in their own Diversion, joining stalwart folk who sought At once the polo-ground, the cycle-track, Accept the ineludlble; while some (Insidious anti-climax here) frequent The water-entertainments — shallops, chutes And rivers subterrene: — thus, passive, all, i6 THE CRYSTAL PALACE Like savages bewitched, submit at last To be the dupes of pleasure, sadly gay — Victims, and not companions, of delight. Not all! The garden-terrace: — hark, behold. Music and dancing! People by themselves Attempting happiness! A box of reeds — Accordion, concertina, seraphine — And practised fingers charm advertent feet! The girls can dance, but, O their heavy-shod Unwieldy swains! — No matter: — hatless heads, With hair undone, eyes shut and cheeks aglow On blissful shoulders lie: — such solemn youths Sustaining ravished donahs! Round they swing, In time or out, but unashamed and all Enchanted with the glory of the world. And look! — Among the laurels on the lawns Torn coats and ragged skirts, starved faces flushed With passion and with wonder! — hid away Avowedly; but seen — and yet not seen! None laugh ; none point ; none notice : multitude Remembers and forgives; unwisest love Is sacrosanct upon a holiday. Out of the slums. Into the open air Let loose for once, their scant economies Already spent, what was there left to do? O sweetly, tenderly, devoutly think. Shepherd and Shepherdess In Arcady! THE CRYSTAL PALACE 17 O heavy shower; the Palace fills; begins The business and the office of the day, The eating and the drinking — only real Enjoyment to be had, they tell you straight Now that the shifty weather fails them too. But what's the pother here, the blank dismay? Money has lost its value at the bars: Like tavern-tokens when the Boar's Head rang With laughter and the Mermaid swam in wine, Tickets are now the only currency. Before the buffets, metal tolles packed As closely as mosaic, with peopled chairs Cementing them, where damsels in and out Attend with food, like disembodied things That traverse rock as easily as air — These are the havens, these the happy isles! A dozen people fight for every seat — Without a quarrel, unturbently: O, A peaceable, a tame, a timorous crowd! And yet relentless: this they know they need; Here have they money's worth — some food, some drink ; And so alone, in couples, families, groups. Consuming and consumed — for as they munch Their victuals all their vitals ennui gnaws — They sit and sit, and fain would sit it out In tedious gormandize till firework-time. But business beats them: those who sit must eat. i8 THE CRYSTAL PALACE Tickets are purchased at besieged Kiosks, And when their value's spent — ^with such a grudge ! — They rise to buy again, and lose their seats; For this is Mob, unhappy locust-swarm, Instinctive, apathetic, ravenous. Beyond a doubt a most unhappy crowd! Some scores of thousands searching up and down The north nave and the south nave hungrily For space to sit and rest to eat and drink; Or captives in a labyrinth, or herds Imprisoned in a vast arena; here A moment clustered ; there entangled ; now In reaches sped and now in whirlpools spun With noises like the wind and like the sea, But silent vocally: they hate to speak: Crowd: Mob: a blur of faces featureless, Of forms inane; a stranded shoal of folk. Astounding in the midst of this to meet Voltaire, the man who worshipped first, who made Indeed, the only god men reverence now, Public Opinion. There he sits alert — A cast of Hordin's smiling philosophy. Old lion-fox, old tiger-ape — ^what names They gave him! — better charactered by one Who was his heir : ** The amiable and gay." THE CRYSTAL PALACE 19 So said the pessimist who called life sour And drank It to the dregs. Enough: Voltaire — About to speak : hands of a mummy clutch The fauteuil's arms; he listens to the last Before reply ; one foot advanced ; a new Idea radiant in his wrinkled face. Lunch in the grill-room for the well-to-do, The spendthrifts and the connoisseurs of food — Gourmet, gourmand, bezonian, epicure. Reserved seats at the window? — Surely; you And I must have the best place everywhere. A deluge smudges out the landscape. Watch The waiters since the scenery's not on view. A harvest-day with them, our Switzers-knights Of the napkin ! How they balance loaded trays. And, though they push each other, spill no drop! And how they glare at lazy lunchers, snatch Unfinished plates sans " by your leave," and fling The next dish down, before the dazzled lout (The Switzer knows his man) has time to con The menu, every tip precisely gaged. Precisely earned, no service thrown away. Sign of an extra douceur, reprimand Is welcomed, and the valetudinous Voluptuary served devoutly: he With cauteries on his cranium; dyed moustache; Teeth like a sea-wolf's, each a work of art 20 THE CRYSTAL PALACE Numbered and valued singly; copper skin; And nether eyelids pouched: — why he alone Is worth a half-day's wage! Walters for him Are pensioners of indigestion, paid As secret criminals disburse blackmail, As Attic gluttons sacrificed a cock To i^sculaplus to propitiate Hygela — if the classic flourish serves! "Grilled soles?" — for us: — Kidneys to follow. — Now, Your sole, sir; eat it with profound respect. A little salt with one side: — scarce a pinch! The other side with lemon: — tenderly! Don't crush the starred bisection : — count the drops ! Those who begin with lemon miss the true Aroma: quicken sense with salt, and then The subtle, poignant, critic savour tunes The delicate texture of the foam-white fish, Evolving palatable harmony That music might by happy chance express. A crust of bread — (eat slowly: thirty chews, Gladstonian rumination) — to change the key. And now the wine — a well-decanted, choice Chateau, bon per; a decade old; not more. A velvet claret, piously unchilled. A boiled potato with the kidney . . . No! Barbarian! Vandal! Sauce? 'Twould ruin all! THE CRYSTAL PALACE 21 The kidney's the potato's sauce. Perpend: You taste the esoteric attribute In food; and know that all necessity Is beauty's essence. Fill your glass: salute The memory of the happy neolith Who had the luck to hit on roast and boiled. Finish the claret. — Now the rain has gone The clouds are winnowed by the sighing south, And hidden sunbeams through a silver woof A warp of pallid bronze in secret ply. Cigars and coffee in the billiard-room. No soul here save the marker, eating chops; The waiter and the damsel at the bar, In listless talk. A most uncanny thing, To enter suddenly a desolate cave Upon the margent of the sounding Mob! A hundred thousand people, class and mass, In and about the palace, and not a pair To play a hundred up! The billiard-room's The smoking-room; and spacious too, like all The apartments of the Palace: — why Unused on holidays? The marker: aged; Short, broad, but of a presence reticent And self-respecting; not at all the type: — " O well," says he; " the business of the room Fluctuates very little, year in, year out. My customers are seasons mostly." One 22 THE CRYSTAL PALACE On the Instant enters: a curate, very much At ease in Zion — and in Sydenham. He tells too funny stories — not of the room: And talks about the stage. " In London now," He thinks, " the play's the thing." He undertakes To entertain and not to preach: you see, It's with the theatre and the music-hall, Actor and artiste, the parson must compete. Every bank-holiday and special day The Crystal Palace sees him. Yes; he feels His hands upon the public pulse on such Occasions. O, a sanguine clergyman! Heard In the blUIard-room the sound of Mob, Occult and ominous, besets the mind: Something gigantic, something terrible Passes without; repasses; lingers; goes; Returns and on the threshold pants In doubt Whether to knock and enter, or burst the door In hope of treasure and a living prey. The vainest fantasy! Rejoin the crowd: At once the sound depreciates. Up and down The north nave and the south nave hastily Some tens of thousands walk, silent and sad, A most unhappy people. — Hereabout Cellini's Perseus ought to be. Not that; That's stucco — and Canova's: a stupid thing: The face and posture of a governess — THE CRYSTAL PALACE 23 A nursery governess who's had the nerve To pick a dead mouse up. It used to stand Beside the billiard-room, against the wall, A cast of Benvenuto's masterpiece — That came out lame, as he pretold, despite His dinner dishes in the foundry flung. They shift their sculpture here haphazard. — That? King Francis — by Clesinger: — on a horse. Absurd: most mounted statues are. — And this? Verrochio's Coleone. Not absurd: Grotesque and strong, the battle-harlot rides A stallion: fore and aft, his saddle, peaked Like a mitre, grips him as in a vice. In heavy armour mailed; his lifted helm Reveals his dreadful look; his brows are drawn; Four wrinkles deeply trench his muscular face; His left arm half -extended, and the reins Held carelessly, although the gesture's tense; His right hand wields a sword invisible; Remorseless pressure of his lips protrudes His mouth; he would decapitate the world. The light is artificial now; the place Phantasmal like a beach in hell where souls Are ground together by an unseen sea. A dense throng in the central transept, wedged So tightly they can neither clap nor stamp, 24 THE CRYSTAL PALACE Shouting applause at something, goad themselves In sheer despair to think it rather fine: " We came here to enjoy ourselves. Bravo, Then! Are we not?" Courageous folk beneath The brows of Michael Angelo's Moses dance A Cakewalk in the dim Renascence Court. Three people in the silent reading-room. Regard us darkly as we enter: three Come in with us, stare vacantly about, Look from a window and withdraw at once. A drama; a balloon; a Beauty Show: — People have seen them doubtless; but none of those Deluded myriads walking up and down The north nave and the south nave anxiously — And aimlessly, so silent and so sad. The day wears; twilight ends; the night comes down. A ruddy targetlike moon in a purple sky, And the crowd waiting on the fireworks. Come: Enough of Mob for one while. This way out — Past Linacre and Chatham, the second Charles, Venus and Victory — and Sir William Jones In placid contemplation of a State! — Down the long corridors to the district train. RAILWAY STATIONS I LONDON BRIDGE Much tolerance and genial strength of mind Unbiased, witnesses who wish to find This railway-station possible at all Must cheerfully expend. Artistical Ideas wither here: a magic power Alone can pardon and in pity dower With fictive charm a structure so immane. How then may fancy, to begin with, feign An origin for such a roundabout Approach — so intricate, yet so without Intention, and so spanned by tenebrous And thundering viaducts? Grotesquely, thus One night the disposition of the ward Was shifted; for the streets with one accord, Enfranchised by a landslip, danced the hay And innocently jumbled up the way. And so we enter. Here, without perhaps, Except the automatic money-traps. Inside the station, everything so old, So inconvenient, of such manifold 25 26 RAILWAY STATIONS Perplexity, and, as a mole might see, So strictly what a station shouldn't be, That no Idea minifies Its crude And yet elaborate Ineptitude, But some such fancied cataclysmal birth: — Out of the nombles of the martyred earth This old, unhappy terminus was hurled Back from a day of small things when the world At twenty miles an hour still stood aghast. And thought the penny post mutation vast As change Itself. Before the Atlantic race Developed turblned speed; before life's pace Was set by automobllism ; before The furthest stars came thundering at the door To claim close kindred with the sons of men; Before the lettered keys outsped the pen; Ere poverty was deemed the only crime Or wireless news annihilated time. Divulged now by an earthquake In the night, This ancient terminus first saw the light. A natural magic having gravely made This desperate station possible, delayed No longer by Its character uncouth. The Innocent adventurer, seeking truth Imaginative, if it may be, plays His vision, penetrant as chemic rays, RAILWAY STATIONS ^^ Upon the delta wide of platforms, whence Discharges into London's sea, immense And turbulent, a brimming human flood, A river inexhaustible of blood That turns the wheels, and by a secret, old As labour, changes heart-beats into gold For those that toil not: all the gutters run. Houses are daubed, with it; and moon and sun Splashed as they spin. And yet this human tide. As callous as the glaciers that glide A foot a day, but as a torrent swift, Sweeps unobservant save of time — for thrift Or dread disposes clockwards every glance — Right through a station which a seismic dance Chimerical alone can harmonize Even in imagination's friendly eyes. Clearly a brimming tide of mind as well As blood, whose ebb and flow is buy and sell. Engulfed by London's storm and stress of trade Before it reached the civic sea, and made Oblivious, knowing nought terrestrial Except that time is money, and money all. Or when a portly dealer, well-to-do. Chances to see it as he passes through. Or boy or girl not get entirely swamped In way and means and business of accompt, 28 RAILWAY STATIONS About the many-platformed embouchure And utterance of suburban life obscure A liberal oeillade tosses, with a note Chromatic, crimson van and crimson coat, The parcel-post, and many a crimson shrine Of merchandise mechanical combine To reassure them as a point of war Inspires the soldier; for the cannon's roar, The trumpet's blast, the thunder of the drum, Are crimson motives; and the city's hum. The noise of battle, and a ruddy sky May echo in the selfsame harmony. Save when the glance of age whose brisk affairs Look up on 'Change, of youth untouched by care's Inhibitory wand that palsies thought, No other gracious sign appears, nor aught Distinctly personal, innate or earned. In the dull, rapid passage of concerned Expression from the station to the street, Until a dire resemblance of defeat In one set visage hides the common face: Such a premonstrant shadow of disgrace, Such grey alarm, such sickening for despair Is only seen in urban crowds, for there The broken broker feels himself alone, Exempt from scrutiny, even of his own Railway stations 20 Protean introspection, and as free As genius, or as fallen spirit, to be The very image of the thing he is — A figure on the brink of the abyss, The failure and the scapegoat of the mart. The loser in the game, the tragic part Wherein some novice mastered by the play Without rehearsal triumphs every day. II LIVERPOOL STREET Through crystal roofs the sunlight fell, And pencilled beams the gloss renewed On iron rafters balanced well On iron struts; though dimly hued, With smoke o'erlaid, with dust endued, The walls and beams like beryl shone; And dappled light the platforms strewed With yellow foliage of the dawn That withered by the porch of day's divan. The fragrant, suave, autumnal air A dulcet Indian summer breathed, Able to reach the inmost lair Unclean of London's interwreathed And labyrinthine railways, sheathed In annual increments of soot: Memories of regions parked and heathed, Of orchards lit with golden fruit Attuned October's subterranean lute. But orchards lit with golden lamps, Or purple moor, or nutbrown stream, 30 RAILWAY STATIONS 31 Or mountains where the morn encamps Frequent no station-loafer's dream: A breed of folk forlorn that seem The heirs of disappointment, cast By fate to be the preacher's theme, To hunger daily and to fast And sink to helpless indigence at last. From early morn they hang about The book-stall, the refreshment-room; They pause and think, as if in doubt Which train to go by; now assume A jaunty air, and now in gloom They take the platform for a stage And pace it, meditating doom — Their own, the world's; in baffled rage Condemning still the imperceptlve age. Like aromatic wine that does As wine will do w^ith living clay, The wonderful anachronous. Autumnal — summertidal day Seduced a laboured soul to play The idler: — (one who could rehearse Unheard-of things; whose thoughts were grey With travail, and whose reason scarce Escaped the onslaught of the universe: 32 RAILWAY STATIONS Yet one who waged an equal strife, And, unsubdued, beyond the sad Horizon of terrestrial life In noisome cloud and thunder clad, And death-cries of the past that bade Repent, above the galaxy Enthroned himself; and, sane or mad. Magnanimously claimed to be The soul and substance of eternity). He, then, to whom all things were great By virtue of his native power, Applauded autumn's sumptuous state, And meant to share her golden hour — Her kiss that moved the faded flower To blush again, the haunting time And witchcraft of her Inmost bower, Restoring for an afternoon The bosom and the fragrant skirts of June. He booked to Epping Street. The train Drew out, and clanking Idly, strayed Along the line with dull refrain That mocked the exigence of trade. At Woodford milkmen long delayed The journey; and at Snaresbrook noise Broke out, and passengers inveighed Against the line: such bitter joys Two-faced occasion brings. At Theydon Bois, RAILWAY STATIONS 33 At Chigwell Lane and Loughton, all Complacent forest hamlets, folk, Since chance itself might not forestall Their sylvan leisure, tarrying, spoke On footboards poised ; and this one's joke. And that one's parting comment, wound A strand of laughter through the smoke And pulsing steam, whose rhythmic sound With pliant wheels a thundrous music ground. From Epping Street, w^here half a score Inviting hostels lie between The upper forest and the lower, The bounds and metes of that demesne That once from Waltham surged in green Luxuriance to the northern tide, The lover of the fall's serene Miraculous renascence hied By turnpike, woodland path and forest-ride. A purple haze that scarce could keep Diaphanous consistence spread Above the ridged perspective deep Of Epping Forest; overhead, With arabesque of shining thread As manifold as jewelled dyes, In varied beauty interwed A snowy vapour damaskwise Endued the tenderest of turquoise skies. 5+ RAILWAY STATIONS Ripples of cloud like silver strands Escalopcd by continual surge, The seaboard of fantastic lands, Defined the welkin's orient verge: He heard afar the airy dirge Of breaking billows, saw the foam In heaven mantle, spindrift scourge The zelnth, and their shadows roam Across the woods like coveys flying home. A herd of clouds with fleeces rent Flocked in the west; an aigret plumed The low-hung northern firmament; But in the south a shadow loomed Like chaos out of eld exhumed To re-engulf the world long lost In time; and yet the darkness bloomed With sprays of bronze like briars tossed. With hidden flower and fruit of flame embossed. He heard the woodman's fateful strokes In Epping Thicket, blow on blow, Where spaciously the loftiest oaks In all the forest precincts grow. The rose, the bramble and the sloe Muffled the holly, hid the thorn; And berries blushed with diverse glow Of gradual colour like the morn, Whose changing hues the ravished east adorn. RAILWAY STATIONS 35 In many a dome of russet green, Without a centre shaft to draw The branches round It, might be seen, Once more with tender-hearted awe. The burning bush religion saw — The nightshade's coral hanging free, The scarlet hip, the crimson haw. The swarthy bramble lovingly Enwreathed as in a myriad-minded tree. The bramble leaves, with iron mould Distained, like metal foliage glanced; The fluted beech, in ruddy gold Accoutred bravely, countenanced The yellow thorn, whose hue enhanced In turn the heather's rusty ore; The bracken, faded all, advanced Along the forest's pillared floor — A tawny tide upon an emerald shore. But eager frosts that braise and brand Autumnal foliage still delayed; Green was the forest, green the land, A fibrous sward, a toothsome blade: The cow-bells rang in every glade Their quaint memorial refrain, A ghostly sound by change inlaid; The year stood still; and summer fain As in her prime, usurped the world again. 36 RAILWAY STATIONS The chrysosperm In sunbeams pent A largesse squandered. Rich as light Of rainbow brede, the forest-scent; And subtler, keener than the white Aroma of the stars at night That maddens lovers wandering late Betrothed in destiny's despite; As searching as the importunate And supersensuous ether uncreate. A doe stepped forth and pried about With wondering look and wtachful ear, Then vanished. Venturous birds burst out. As in the heyday of the year. With summer song in snatches, clear As water dropping In a well ; Harmonious from a turret near Replied a silvery vesper-bell; The braided light grew golden; evening fell. In Highbeach Holt, a place alone, A wonder of the world, antique Protected beeches straightly grown, Or pollarded of yore and meek Transmuters of the shapeless freak The Iron wrought throughout the years To symmetry, that all things seek Forever, they, the verderer's Most cherished vert In all his marks and meres. RAILWAY STATIONS 37 Upon a forest fabric stood Three-piles of leaves and fruitful mast, That carpeted the upland wood And crypts and bowers, obscure and vast In the close twilight waning fast: Some scumbled moss, with here and there A stroke of scanty herbage, cast A chord of green, remarked and rare Among the russet spreading everywhere. All still and stately ancient trees, With stem erect and ample bole, Maintained their native majesties In leafy robe and verdant stole Invested, green from fork to poll; Old, gnarled and thundersmitten, some Uncouthly grew, the sylvan soul By brutal accident became A tortured wraith in hideous anguish dumb. The saplings flourished straight and tall Like living palisades a-row. Their lance-like stems in vertical, And rhythmic parallels below; Above like crayon lines that flow Obliquely through each other, swart Immingled boughs in writhen throe A cross-hatched canopy athwart The precinct flung and roofed and arboured court: 3^ RAILWAY STATIONS A silence like the dead of night The ebon-pIUared emerald walls Immuned; a dusky latticed light Fulfilled the high-groined cloisters, halls, Occult recesses, wildwood stalls In glimmering chancel-aisles arrayed; And violet beams at intervals Illumined the forest-girdled glade Through rents and loopholes in the beechen shade. With hue and form so diverse stored, Beauty and wonder, vaulted space By fantasy alone explored, The solitude and rich embrace Soul-clasping of that silent place So sphered his vision, steeped his brain In dreams, that he beheld no trace Of mundane things, nor hint nor stain Of twilight or of night, until again He reached the city. Then and there A potent urban spell subdued The forest's, for the sorcerer Of sorcerers is multitude. Three railway-stations closely brood Together by the Bishop's Gate, That ancient, famous neighbourhood ; And nowhere more profoundly, late Or early, can the nameless sense of fate RAILWAY STATIONS 39 In numbers Immanent be felt Than in these eastern haunts at night, Where eddying tumults surge and melt Like clouds beneath remorseless light In streets and garnished windows, bright As for some celebration night, While tides of transit at the height In rival modes of passage vie, And wheel and hoof and automobile ply. Barbaric shouts and shrieks he heard, Like cries of wrath or cries of ruth; But no one laughed or spoke a word; Master and man, and age and youth In purposeless, intense, uncouth Commotion seemed for ever lost. Save those that wooed in saddest sooth A hope forlorn. In all things crossed, And yet resolved to live at any cost. The gutter-merchants. At the kerb Fifty and five, a ghastly row, With faces hell could not perturb So rigid were they in their woe, Self-centred stood. Life's undertow Had dragged them down : a few were old, A few were young, though fallen so low; But most were in their prime: they sold Unnecessary trifles manifold. 40 RAILWAY STATIONS A while he watched them wonderstruck ; And scornfully they watched again. Not there the undistinguished ruck And ordinary run of men! Their mystery seemed beyond his ken: What brought such mortals there, so strong, So resolute? How, where and when Had fortune thrust them forth among The sufferers unsalvable of wrong? Their eyes on fire, their wrinkles changed To shadowed sculpture in the brute Effulgence of the windows, ranged Together closely, foot by foot. Like giant marionettes, as mute. As quick and as mechanical. Fronting the shops, they made their suit By signs alone; and each and all Unhuman seemed, austere, asexual. And yet in faces drawn and starved Tlie tale of many a lingering fight With circumstance was deeply carved; Of hazardous attempts to smite A passage through the solid night The outcast beats his head against; To enter, maugre might and rights A huckstering world, alike incensed By challengers and suppliants, and fenced RAILWAY STATIONS 41 About with adamantine hearts. He thought, " As well would It behove The morning to invade the marts; Or that the dawn should live and move Within an iceberg! Nought can prove More terrible than toil for hire, Or toil at all, to these; the groove, The settled habit men desire — They find it torture and the nether fire. " On every lip, on every brow I see their dreadful secret lurk: All work to them is thraldom now; They hate to work, they cannot work. This last expedient still they shirk, And every day resolve to fly From hell: — No hope, no fear, no quirk Of conscience, in the public eye Shall stand us there again who dare to die! " But all have made it up with fate Sincerely by the evening! Soon, Or when the Irksome night is late And In the west the wintry moon Disdains the city, or at noon When the huge welter of the day Goes thundering past them to a tune They cannot sing, the old dismay Victorious seems and death the only way. 42 RAILWAY STATIONS " DIurnally recurrent strife ! Some carry poison; always there The silent river flows; now life, Now death, the makeweight of despair Determines; but the end is ne'er In doubt: — In utter obloquy. In utter woe, we greatly dare To live, since those alone are free Who keep the power to be or not to be. " Such is their dread, their awful lot — To live with palsied souls and numb Affections! Higher courage not With sound of prayer or sound of drum In battle or in martyrdom Was ever shown by saint or knight! They stand at gaze through wearisome Eternities, by ruthless light Betrayed and scorned and shuddered at, invite " The passers-by to spend the pence That keeps them tortured in the pit Wherein their supersubtle sense Entrapped them, and the fire their wit Prepared, their pride and passion lit! Only the miracle, mankind, Can face this hell of the unfit — Only the universe enshrined In lordly flesh and blood and lordly mind." IN THE CITY Is it heaven and its city-porch Or a ceiling high-hung of old With lacquer fumed and scrolled Of many a festal torch? High heaven it is, and the day With its London doom of smoke No storm can quite revoke, No deluge w^ash away. When their march and song grow mute In the city's labyrinth trapped. The Storms themselves are wrapped In draggled shrouds of soot. Whirlwinds by lightnings paced To run their wild career. With ragged gossamere Of fine-spun carbon laced. As soon as they quit the shires Are lost beyond all hail: The mightiest tempests quail In the midst of a million fires. 43 44 IN THE CITY But the heavens are clear to-day Though their London doom of smoke, No storm can quite revoke, No deluge wash away. CAIN My sons and daughters; children's children; Cain's Posterity: — God, what a multitude From one man's seed — hiding the sun! They stop the air, and make this cave a tomb Already! . . . What? I bade them? If I did, 'Twas not to stifle me. Stand from the door! Let in the light, let in the breath, of heaven! Now^ I remember why I made them come. Carry me out among them. All the air That mantles earth invisibly, and fills The bosom of the world, would scarce sufliice To word with power the thing I have to tell. My sight grows keen again: I see them, — these The offspring of my loins: — Enoch and Irad, Sons and companions; generations; boys That promise to be great — Jabal and Jubal, And my namesake, Tubalcaln. My lusty men, My breeding women and my little ones, My maidens beautiful, my young men chaste, My blessing and God's curse be with you all. 45 4^ CAIN Lie down about me, stretched at length; behind There, sit or kneel; and let the standers ring Us closely round, that every one may hear. My children, I am dying. Very old Am I. A thousand storms have shaken all My members; and the moments, like a rain That never lessens, falling day and night Throughout the steadfast centuries, have cleansed My memory of the chances that befell: — Our sojourns and our warfare and our work. Our triumphs, travels, happinesses, pains. My own especial charge and vigilance For us and ours, as well as intimate Affection, privy thoughts and single life. From my remembrance like a landslip fall. Leaving the naked rock of that event Whereon our fate is founded. Many times I thought to tell you, many times put off. It may be said when I have made it known — Often I told myself so: — Had he kept His secret to himself ^ our folk, unswayed By knowledge, might have overborne divine Intention, and the tribal fate decreed. But I say, No. I fought God's will, and built A city east of Eden. Void it stands, — It, and the city, Enoch, which I named After my eldest born, — silent and void CAIN 47 Except for beasts and birds: — you would not live In houses, rooted, impotent as trees. Why had God loosed you from the cumbering earth And given you pliant limbs if not to roam From place to place? Caves in the wilderness, And in the desert camps for sons of mine! God had ordained it; deftly given us limbs That he might curse us: — did we grow like trees Where had his fugitives and wanderers been? God cannot be escaped : He means that I Should tell you. Fables, whispered closely, hum About the watchfires ; and a lie believed May sow a tribal fate more terrible Than errantry like ours. This too, I know My children, — that I dare not, cannot, die Until I tell you: — and I wish to die, Being forewearied of the world and time. I had a brother, Abel, whom I loved As no man shall be loved by man again. Companions were we when the world was young. And only us of our nativity To love the other for the other's sake: Our gentle mates were second in our hearts. Younger than I, he was the hardier; And I in everything gave way, well pleased That he should still excel, — and with his pride In excellence well pleased. Our thoughts of God 48 CAIN Alone divided us, as such thoughts will — Father from son, kindred from kindred, folk From folk, until the world or God shall cease. I dug and planted; studied nature's way; And out of meagre grasses fostered grain, Enhanced the zest, augmented and refined The substances of fruits and roots and herbs. My brother idled, angry in the sun And sullen in the shade. At times he gazed On Eden half a day in ecstacy; Or dark with sin heredltarj'', wrath And sorrow intermingled, frow^ned on heaven Until he fell down pulseless, breathless, dead It seemed, by fighting passions hacked and slain. In rarer moods he wrought with me, perturbed By mystery of the blossoms that unveiled Such tender beauty, and with fragrance bore The seed the earth enwombed: it maddened him To watch how nature did, to know the thing Achieved and not to understand: — " Shall folk. The human fruit of blossom.s that unite, Be in the earth enwombed and live again ? " " Not as the plants are we," I answered still His obdurate demand. " Released from earth. Our birth, our growth, our life are in the air, Though when we die the soil reclaims us: God Appointed it. But in our seed we live CAIN 49 As blossoms do:" — an all-atoning truth That only tortured him. He knew no ease In life, no respite found from doubt and dread Except In force expended, powers employed. Loving the heats and dangers of the chase. Deep-bosomed, swift of foot, he overtook The leopard flying for life; the lion feared To meet him; from their bloody dens he dragged The fiercest beasts and killed them weaponless. At dawn upon an altar built of turf And grafted In the earth, I daily spread For God a grateful table, fruit and corn In season. But my brother worshipped not With me: — '' I serve the Lord by killing things," He told me w^hen I asked him how he praised The maker of the world. '* God's will It Is," He said, " that all his creatures should destroy Each other: hoofed-and-horned devour the herb Fattening themselves for f anged-and-clawed ; the night Devours the day; the day, the night; I kill All things that are — beasts, fishes, birds, grain, fruit; Darkness itself with fire I can dismember. God's will is light and darkness, life and death : Two utmost joys, to kill and to beget, I share with God, creator and destroyer.'* 56 CAIN " But God is love," I said. " Seek not for God In bloodshed. In the rapture of desire, In busy peace of heart by day, in dreams By night that sweeten sleep with paradise Discover God." " No ; God is strength," he said. " Hunger and carnage, lust and strife are God Inspiring all His creatures, strong or weak, In their divine degree." " Save man ! " I cried, " Although with skins of slaughtered beasts we veil Our nakedness, against the weather pitch Pavilions in the desert, we devour No flesh, nor stain our lips with blood; the earth's Benignant bosom feeds us tenderly." " Like sheep and kine — big-bellied things, the prey Of lean ferocity! Since we can kill" . . . He looked at me askance, a splintered fire Burst from his eyes athwart the dawning thought; Unwonted laughter shimmered in his face. Like heat that vibrates from the sun-soaked earth And makes a presence of the throbbing air. ** Since we can kill ? " I echoed, knowing well His dreadful meaning. " What you dare not speak You will not do ! " CAlK $t " The thoughts that teem with deeds Fulfil themselves unspoken. God delights To rend and tear, to lap the smoking blood. God's a voracious God; the uddered things And haunched, the sagging entrails are his prey Assigned ; the tiger and the lion, His fangs, His appetite and maw. Were we to dip Our mouths in blood, like those beloved beasts, It would rejoice the hungry heart of God. And for our own behoof, — if flesh of fruit, The blood of berries, mellow sap of pulse And marrow of the grain can nourish strength Like ours, what keener zest, what ampler might A more compact, a more essential fare Might goad our palates with and prime our nerves! The loins of timid things that chew the cud Mature the pasturage we cannot eat For our superior nurture. I shall flesh My appetite — God's appetite in me." " Not God's! " I cried in wrath. " The God of man Lions and tigers in his similitude Would never frame." " In whose resemblance, then ? Brother, God shaped his wanton, ravening beasts In likeness of his cruelty — the mark, S2 CAIN The very soul and character of God. So sure am I that God designed His men To feed on flesh and blood as lions do That I shall challenge it. You offer God The sweetness and the ripeness of the earth Upon your turfen table, and salute The dawn. To-morrow at your side I shall upon an altar built of stone — The monument of what must there befall — A living victim sacrifice, while both Entreat a sign from heaven, nor cease to pray Until God's will and pleasure are made known. How say you? Dare you put God to the test? " " In His great name! " I cried, assured that now The man I loved would know the heart of God, So human, so divine — as I believed. Wet with the vapour that involved the earth, A sheaf of corn across my shoulders slung, With apples in a basket in my right, And in my other hand a bunch of grapes, I climbed the hill before the dawn, and laid My offering on my altar, sure of heaven. My brother followed, leading In a withe, A white bull, whiter than the rolling fog That wreathed its horns. He spoke not ; nor did I. But when the touch of morning lit the crests CAIN S3 Of Havilah o'erhanging Eden, doubt Assailed me suddenly. I crushed the grapes In eager hands, staining the golden corn. The ruddy fruit — a rite then first observed Unwittingly, for all my being shook With abject fear of God, unknown before, But soon about to overcast the world — Though not on us the woeful shadow lies: Accursed of God we earnestly disclaim The cowardice that hallows vengeful wrath The terror of the inconceivable. It was in ignorance I crushed the grapes, Inspired by God against my conscious will To pour out blood before Him. Yet I spoke My prayer — our prayer: — together children, pray Once more with me — with Cain before he dies: — " O God of men we thank Thee for the earth, For life and death, for labour and for rest. For day and night, for seasons, times and tides; Empower our souls with faith; direct our steps In ways of pleasantness and paths of peace; And thine shall be the praise for ever more. Creator of the world, the just, the true, The merciful, the gracious God of men." I made my Invocation, unaware How insolent it was; and on my knees 54 CAIN Implored a token of acceptance. Through The valley rolled the mist; a pearly smoke O'ercanopied the guarded bowers, and depths Profound of sylvan shadow, that the day, Unveiling, deepened ; sundered mountain-tops, Pellucid in the crimson gorge of dawn. Above the earth like pendent meteors burned; The Pishon w^ound among the woods below, The mirror of the morning streaming blood, With amber and with ber>4-stone enchased. But God was silent and allowed no sign. Then as the sun surmounted Havilah, My brother, kneeling strongly on the bull's Ascendant shoulder, bore the creature down: His left hand gripped its under jaw, and bent Its tossing head backward and stretched its throat; His right implanted in its curded neck The ivory blade, that out he drew again Ensanguined all its length, swiftly and smooth As though the spouting blood had thrust it forth. His grip upon its muzzle choked the bull's Affrighted roar, his puissance overcame Its agony, and held it till it died, Upon the dripping altar offered up. Its milkwhite dewlap and its milkwhite flank With bloody foliage strown and flowers of death. Mastering his bosom as a rough-wrought sea CAIN 55 Recovers tidal measure when the storm Desists, my brother tarried, vigilant To repossess himself; then stepping slow With majesty and grace unseen on earth Before that morn of world-transforming chance, He left the altar, and flung his looks aloft Where sumptuously the vintage of the east Empurpled all the peaks of Havilah, And westward where belated orbs of night, So limpid was the heaven-spanned firmament, Between Assyrian summits darkling swung Their crystal lamps. The beauty of the world Rebuked him for a moment — or I thought It did; the pause, the doubt, if doubt or pause Began, was seen by me, not felt by him. And died upon its birth. "Almighty God," With hardihood devout he said, " accept This blood that steams new-spilt, and this. Thy brute, New-slain to please Thee; and bestow a sign Of Thy acceptance that Thy men may know How strenuous, how absolute Thou art, A God alive, an active God, a God Delighting in a bloody sacrifice. As Thy ferocious creatures take delight In slaughter and the flesh of rams and bulls.** 56 CAIN Forthwith while yet the coil of breath, that bore His supplicative arrogance, aspired Unseen in the unseen, the cloudless top And tented blue of heaven, disparting, showed As in a fruit that bursts, the sanguine seed And crimson heart of glory, lucid shapes Celestial and pavilions thronged with life, — A transient revelation, but beheld In vision still, as obvious as the sun. By my surviving eyes that wait on death. Heaven opened and heaven closed: adow^n the gulf Unmeasured and aerial steep of space A saffron flame, in figure like a frond The wind inwraps and tapers skywards, fell Directly on my brother's altar, lapped The hissing blood as with a hundred tongues. And, fawning o'er the carcase, burnt it up. Transfigured by acceptance of the blood He spilt, my brother laughed aloud, and called Exultantly on God. " Divine destroyer, Reveller in life and death, let me partake With Thee! " he cried. Dropping the ivory blade That broached the creature's life, before the fire Had licked the flesh from all the blackened ribs. He grasped a smouldering handful and scorched his mouth CAIN 57 With God's accepted sacrifice. Appalled To see a man, my brother, taste the food Of savage brutes, my senses failed, my heart Stood still a space; then thundering in my ears A tide of passion swept me from myself, A thousand judgments like a gathered storm Burst in my mind: — " If God," I thought, and seized My brother's blade, " delights in blood of beasts. The blood of men should fill the cup divine With happiness ineffable." Straightway I flung an arm about my brother's neck. And drove the bloodstained ivory through his heart. He fell without a murmur: the breath of life Escaped his grinding teeth, his parted lips; The wonder in his eyes dismays me still, — And overwhelmed then. But when I looked To see the vaulted base of paradise Re-open, and a sheaf of fire descend, No fissure, chink or crevice, broke the blue Immensity that hid the infinite. Thus God refused my brother's blood — the man I loved, and killed that he might live divine Eternally, a part of God ; for that, Within the madness of the murder, sang Like music in a tempest. God preferred A bull's blood to my brother's: — still I think, 58 CAIN Old, dying as I am, something went wrong In heaven. Howbelt when I saw him dead And unaccepted, not the saltest tear Assuaged the fiery horror of myself That melted all my strength: in thunder drops The sweat splashed from my brow; a core of pain Without remission rising In my gorge, Hot, hard and noisome sickened me; I beat My breast; I fell; I rose; I fled, and plunged In wooded darkness where the thicket wove A thorny canopy. My fate, my doom! — God had me there alone, unhelped by light. By power and beauty of the widespread world. Immediately the still and awful voice. Whose accents are omnipotence, besieged My soul and said, " Thy brother, where Is he? " I answered, as men answer God, at once, " I know not, I. Am I my brother's keeper?" ''What hast thou done?" God said. "Thy brother's blood, That crieth from the ground, hath cursed the ground For thee. When thou shalt till the ground that oped Her mouth to drink thy brother's blood, poured by thy hand Henceforth it shall yield thee of her strength. CAIN 59 A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be Upon the earth ! " I answered in the rapt Despair the presence and the ire of God Begat, " I know that my iniquity Can never be forgiven. Behold since Thou Hast reft from me the favour of the ground And turned Thy countenance away, and I Shall be a wanderer, it shall come to pass That whosoever findeth me shall slay me." " Therefore," said God, " whoever slayeth Cain On him a sevenfold vengeance shall be taken." With that God set His mark upon my brow, Which none behold unawed or look on twice. I have told the truth; no more remains to tell: God's curse is on us; and we make it do. Our errant life is not unhappy; fear. That harrows others, is to us unknown. Being close to God by reason of His curse. \ Sometimes I think that God Himself is cursed, (For all His things go wrong. We cannot guess; He is very God of God, not God of men: We feel His power. His inhumanity; Yet, being men, we fain would think Him good. Since in imagination we conceive 6o CAIN A merciful, a gracious God of men, It may be that our prayer and innocent life Will shame Him into goodness in the end. Meantime His vengeance is upon us; so, My blessing and God's curse be with you all. ECLOGUES THE FEAST OF ST. HILARY Bertram. Lionel, Sandy. Cyril. Vivian. Bertram Your evolution, still so crude In civic life, prefers to sit In murky air of muslin stewed With soot and sulphur of the pit. Lionel Why, this is only London's own Appurtenance in Janiveer And winter months — a want of tone, A jaundice of the atmosphere. Vivian And every winter cheerful folk, Six millions powerless to escape, Upon this clammy muslin choke This filthy air of sodden crape. Bertram Expecting no imperial cure From any corporate King Log 6i 6z ECLOGUES They undergo it, forte et dure. The torture of the London fog. And though habitual croakers croak, A metaphysical desire Not to consume our proper smoke, Save when the chimney goes on fire. Through urban and suburban deeps Sub-conscious in the minds of all, Explains the tolerance that keeps Our fog 9. hardy annual. Lionel I love the fog: in every street Shrill muffled cries and shapes forlorn, The frosted hoof with stealthy beat. The hollow sounding motor-horn: A fog that lasts till, gently wrung By Pythian pangs, we realise That Doomsday somewhere dawns among The systems and the galaxies. And ruin at the swiftest rate The chartered destinies pursue; While as for us, our final fate Already fixed with small ado. ECLOGUES 63 Spills on our heads no wrathful cup, Now wrecks us on a fiery shore, But leaves us simply swallowed up In London fog for evermore. Cyril The admirable errantry Of London's climate who can sing? From fogs of filthy muslin free, ^ Elastic as a morn of Spring. The weather, like a dazzling bride, Undid the lonely winter, threw The casemate of the arient wide And made the enchanted world anew. But yesterday, so quick and so Chromatic Is the climate here — From russet mud to silver snow, From radiant suns to fogs austere. Lionel I watched the morning yesterday Where from the ample stair you look Across the Park beneath the grey Ungainly column of the Duke; You see him like a stylite true Impaled upon his pillar stand: — <4 ECLOGUES It seems to pierce him through and through, The rod that braves the brand. Sunlit the other column glowed Intensely, lifting to the skies The admiral who swept the road Of empire clear for centuries. Entangled on the Surrey-side The eager day a moment hung, Then struck in hate his ardent stride And round the southern chimneys swung. A silvery weft of finest lawn, So thin, so phantom-like, became Ethereal mystery scarcely drawn Athwart the morning's saffron flame. The Palace and the Abbey lost Their character of masonry, Transformed to glittering shadows tossed And buoyant on a magic sea. And park and lake and precincts old Of Westminster were all arrayed In spectral weeds of pearl and gold And airy drifts of amber braid. ECLOGUES 6s Bertram Ghastly and foul, as Hecate's ban Pernicious are our fogs; but sweet And wonderful the mists that can Imparadise a London street. The fabrics winnowed sunbeams work Or urban dew and smoky air; The opalescences that lurk In many a court and sombre square. The tissued dawn that gems encrust, The violet wreaths of noon, the haze Of emerald and topaz dust That shrouds the evening distances; And gloom in baths of light annealed. . . . ENTER SANDY Lionel From top to toe one travel-stain You came? And whence? Sandy An outland weald I come from, and a dateless reign That modes and periods never touch. Bertram From Epping Forest, I'll be sworn, The wilderness you haunt so much! 66 ECLOGUES Sandy No; from a less familiar bourne: A Sussex chace renowned of old Where withering innovation halts; A tract of mingled wood and wold, Of ragged heaths and ferny vaults. Lionel St. Leonard's Forest by your shoes Over the latchet daubed with earth! I know it well: the Mole, the Ouse, Arun and Adur have their birth. Among its silting springs; and there The nightingale has never sung They say, so humid is the air, So dank the woods with ivy hung. In summer-time you lightly tread On moss as green as emerald. And soft as silken velvet spread Along the forest chancel, stalled With bowers of thorn and laurel-tree; And roomier and loftier Than forest aisles are wont to be, The green groined roof of beach and fir, ECLOGUES 67 Admits a dulcet twilight filled With golden notes and beryl hues, That through the darkling thickets gild Arun and Adur, Mole and Ouse. Sandy When I went out from Horsham town A Northern blast of winter's breath Blew low across the open down As hard as hate, as cold as death. Close to the land the firmament Like a camp-celling clung; and nigh The eaves of the horizon, bent Like frowning brows, the ashen sky Through ruined loop-holes scattered wide A pallid gleam; but as the path, Leaving the highway leapt aside To gain the forest, winter's wrath, By sheltering hedgerows doubly baulked, Became a legendary thing, And for awhile beside me walked The very presence of the spring. A bridge that spans a pebbled burn The threshold of the forest is; And there like some daedallan urn, Or sangreal of fragrances. 6% ECLOGUES A deeply sunk, a vaulted dell Possessed the summer's inmost soul — A captive, like the roscal smell That haunts a seeming-empty bowl. Though all the roses, plucked and rent, Are squandered yet our essence knows And greets the pure material scent. Which is the spirit of the rose. Within the forest-chancel, stalled With bowers of evergreen and laid With lustrous living emerald, As rich a moss as spring displayed. No green groined roof of fir and beach Reflected bronze and beryl hues, That could through darkling thickets reach Arun and Adur, Mole and Ouse. Unthatched, instead of summer's leaves, A roof, with ebon rafters bare. Allowed the light in frosted sheaves To silver all the wintry air. With clapping wings doves wheeled about Between the pine-tops and the skies; And blackbirds flitted in and out The underwood with guttural cries. ECLOGUES 69 A throstle had begun to build Though still untimed ; but loud and long The eager storm-cock sang and filled The forest with his splendid song; While spring, in winter's bosom warm, Prologued in bough and bob and root The pregnant trance of trees that form The summer's foliage, flower and fruit. Bertram Harvest in Winter's bosom sleeps, While time his patient vigil keeps. II ST. valentine's day Ernest. Julian. Julian Virginia lives in a square ; I harbour at hand in a street: And Spring has begun over there; So love like a pestilence sweet Envenoms the neighbouring air. Ernest No pestilence, Julian! Greet The coming of Spring with delight. Have done with your modish display! The cynic's intelligent spite Arrives by the miriest way: The ferment that works in the night Of a prodigal, desolate day, A morbid, acidulent scorn, Inhabits the vinegared lees In bosoms condignly forlorn — 70 ECLOGUES 7« Julian In bosoms philosophy frees From the burden to which we are born! Ernest In bosoms that nothing can please, Being empty of pleasure and sunk In themselves; being wizened and frail Like vats when the wine has been drunk — Being warped and unspeakably stale Like vats in desuetude shrunk. Let the season and nature prevail ; Let the winepress of youth over- run; — Julian If the valves be corroded with rust, And the power and gearing undone! Ernest Empurpled with stains of the worst My fancy, forestalling the sun — Julian In the city we take him on trust! 73 ECLOGUES Ernest Disheartened the fog with a glance, And tinctured with opulent dyes Of the lily, the rose and the paunce The sombre, the tenebrous skies — With the tricoloured blazon of France, And the light of a paramour's eyes! For this is St. Valentine's day, And my sweetheart came into the lane; As I went by the speediest way, Being late for the morning train, Diana, in sweet disarray, The wonder of women, was fain To see and be seen of me first! Julian How happy to love and be loved ! How wretched is he, how accursed. Whom Destiny handles ungloved! Ernest The highest encounter the worst; For they must be sifted and proved, While the rabble are shaken with ease Through a wide-meshed riddle of Fate. ECLOGUES 73 Julian O spare your proverbial pleas And the wisdom that wiseacres prate! Ernest You said that philosophy frees — Julian From a passion I would not abate For the wealth of the world all told? From the exquisite alchemy pain, That tortures the dross into gold? I spoke in a negligent vein, For I love like the lovers of old. Adoring a woman's disdain. That crushed the doughtiest hope. Ernest You speak like a vassal of words The indolent slave of a trope! Exalt your irresolute thirds Into fifths and their jubilant scope; And learn of St. Valentine's birds That love is the herald of joy. Julian The pursuivant rather of care! 74 ECLOGUES Ernest You must brood on her beauty and cloy Your fancy, extinguish despair With obdurate visions; destroy Yourself in her excellence rare; Be burled in dreams of her worth! Julian My heart with her excellence bleeds; My dreams of her people the earth. And the curse Is, there's nothing she needs; She Is rich and a woman of birth. While I am the son of my deeds. Ernest Achieve then a sire of renown; Perform to the height and be great. You have fought Julian And defeat was my crown! When, naked, I wrestled with Fate, The Destinies trampled me down: — I fought In the van and was great, And I won, though I wore no crown. In the lists of the world; for Fate And the Destinies trampled me down — The myrmidons trampled me down. SNOW I " Who affirms that crystals are alive? " I affirm it, let who will deny: — Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive, Wane and wither; I have seen them die. Trust me, masters, crystals have their day, Eager to attain the perfect norm. Lit with purpose, potent to display Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form. n Water-crystals need for flower and root Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more; Snow, so fickle, still in this acute Angle thinks, and learns no other lore. Such its life, and such its pleasure is, Such its art and traffic, such its gain. Evermore in new conjunctions this Admirable angle to maintain. 75 76 SNOW Crystal craft in every flower and flake Snow exhibits, of the welkin free: Crystalline are crystals for the sake, All and singular, of crystalry. Yet does every crystal of the snow Individualise, a seedling sown Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow Beautiful in beauty of its own. Every flake with all its prongs and dints Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star: Men are not more diverse, finger-prints More dissimilar than snow-flakes are. Worlds of men and snow endure, increase. Woven of power and passion to defy Time and travail: only races cease, Individual men and crystals die. Ill Jewelled shapes of snow whose feathery showers, Fallen or falling wither at a breath, All afraid are they, and loth as flowers, Beasts and men to tread the way to death. Once I saw upon an object-glass, Martyred underneath a microscope, One elaborate snow-flake slowly pass, Dying hard, beyond the reach of hope. SNOW 77 Still from shape to shape the crystal changed, Writhing in its agony; and still, Less and less elaborate, arranged Potently the angle of its will. Tortured to a simple final form, Angles six and six divergent beams, Lo, in death it touched the perfect norm, Verifying all its crystal dreams! IV Such the noble tragedy of one Martyred snow-flake. Who can tell the fate Heinous and uncouth of showers undone. Fallen in cities! — Showers that expiate Errant lives from polar worlds adrift When the great millennial snows abide; Castaways from mountain-chains that lift Snowy summits in perennial pride; Nomad snows, or snows in evil day Born to urban ruin, to be tossed. Trampled, shovelled, ploughed and swept away Down the setting sewers: all the frost Flowers of heaven melted up with lees, Offal, recrement, but every flake Showing to the last in fixed degrees Perfect crystals for the crystal's sake. 78 SNOW V Usefulness of snow is but a chance Here in temperate climes with winter sent, Sheltering earth's prolonged hibernal trance: All utility is accident. Sixty clear degrees the joyful snow, Practising economy of means, Fashions endless beauty in, and so Glorifies the universe with scenes, Arctic and antarctic: stainless shrouds, Ermine woven in silvery frost, attire Peaks in every land among the clouds Crowned with snows to catch the morning's fire. THE TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMON SIM- PLEX CONCERNING AUTOMO- BILISM That railways are inadequate appears Indubitable now. For sixty years Their comfort grew until the train de luxe Arrived, arousing in conducted books, And other wholesale, tourists, an envious smart. For here they recognised the perfect art And science of land-travel. Now we sing A greater era, hail a happier Spring. The motor-car reveals ineptitude For railway-trains; and travellers conclude The railway is archaic: strictly true, Although the reason sounds as false as new: — Railways are democratic, vulgar, laic; And who can doubt Democracy's archaic? The railway was the herald and the sign, And powerful agent in the swift decline Of Europe and the West. The future sage Will blame sententiously the railway age, Preachers upon its obvious vices pounce, And poets, wits and journalists pronounce 79 8o tiestAment of sir simplex The nineteenth century in prose and rhyme The most unhappy period of time. That nations towering once in pomp and pride Of monarchs, rank and breeding, should subside To one dead undistinguishable horde Sans sceptre, mitre, coronet and sword, Reverting to a pithecoidal state May be the purpose of recurrent fate; But that such folks should to themselves appear Progressing toward a great millennial year Is just the bitter-sweet, the chilly-hot, The subtle metaphysic of the plot. The last age saw the last stage of the fit That pestered, when the Roman Empire split, The catalytic centuries: the strange Insanity that fed on secular change; The general paralysis of men That ended in the railway and then Called London: from the Tiber to the Thames, From dreaming empire to delirious aims That move the laughter of the careless fates And effervesce in socialistic pates. But convalescence with the car begins And petrol expiates our railway sins. Before w^e know we shall with joy behold A world as sane as any world of old; TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 8i From labour and electoral problems free, A world the fibre of whose health shall be, No Will to be the Mob, but mastering all, A Will to be the Individual; For every Mob exhales a poisonous breath. And Socialism is decadence, is death: The Mob expropriates, degrades, destroys; The Individual conquers, makes, enjoys. Not till the motor was the contrast plain, Because the separate classes of the train Deceived us with a choice of company; And, when he liked, the tame celebrity. The genius, man of wealth, aristocrat, By means of tips through any journey sat In correct state; or, with sufficient pelf, Could purchase a compartment for himself. He rather would have deemed himself a snob Than that the train could turn him into Meb, Till automotion's privacy and pride Exposed the grossness of the railway ride; For 'twas the freedom of the motor-car That showed how tyrannous the railways are. To go by train from one place to another You have to brave the station's smoke and smother: The train derides you there; 'twill never come To pick you up, nor turn, to see you home, A single wheel : the getting under way, Sa TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX The true vexation of a holiday, The stolid train permits you to deplore; But with your automobile at the door — Why, there you are, nor need you stir a foot, Man and portmanteau instantly en route! You buy a ticket if you go by train At some ofifensive loophole, which you gain After prolonged attendance in a queue — Whatever class you take, a motley crew: And to await one's turn, like patient Job, Unites one with a vengeance to the Mob. Then you may miss the train; but you must wait Its advent and departure prompt or late. The motor soothes, the railway racks your nerves; The train commands, the automobile serves. The automobile nurses all caprice, And gives the longest life a second lease; Indulgences, indolence, and even in me Increases individuality. I thought, and many my opinion shared. That the deceased politic who declared That all were Socialists, had told, perhaps, A fib exploited in a studied lapse Of platform declamation as a sop To catch erratic voters on the hop, The strained politeness of a caustic mind, A dead-lift ciiort to say something kind. TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 83 'Twas more than that: not only had we learned To suffer Socialism; our soul's discerned A something fine about it; egoists even Perceived therein at last a mundane heaven. " Life is a railway journey," genius thought — (The erring genius very cheaply bought With gilded apples of Asphaltites) — " Thieves bearing swag, and poets sprouting bags, The ring, the cabinet, scortatory dames. Bishops, sectarians of a myriad names, Bankers and brokers, merchants, mendicants, Booked in the same train like a swarm of ants; First, second, third class, mass and mob expressed, Together to the Islands of the Blest — Each passenger provided with a groat To pass the Stygian stile for Charon's boat. Or broad or narrow as the gauge may run. None leaves the track without disaster; none Escapes a single stoppage on the way; And none arrives before his neighbour may. In the guard's van my sacred luggage knocks Against the tourist's traps, the bagman's box; And people with inferior aims to mine Partake the rapid transit of the line. But this is culture of the social school, And teaches me to lead my life by rule Empirical, of positive descent S4 TESTAMIEISIT OF SIR SIMPLEX And altruistic self-embezzlement. Life is a railway journey: I rejoice That folk whose purpose, visage, clothes and voice Offend we will continue to offend In the same train until the journey's end." So spoke the genius in pathetic rage.- ••" The socialistic and the railway age Were certainly coeval; machinery too Equated commission; and every new Development of electricity Was welcomed by the Mob with three times three, Convinced the world at last was through the wood — Right through to Universal Brotherhood! Conceive it: — Universal Brotherhood, With everybody feeble, kind and good! I, even I, Sir Simon Simplex, know The world would end to-day if that were so. What spur does man require, what stinging zest To do still better than his level best? Why, enemies; and if he has them not He must unearth and beat them till they're hot; For only enmity can train and trounce The cortex and the muscle to an ounce. Let Socialists deny, mistaking peace, That only with the world will warfare cease; When we behold the battle-flags unfurled We know the fates phlebotomise the world, TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 85 And alternate with peace's patent pill, The old heroic cure for every ill. Life was a railway journey; foe and friend, Infected with nostalgia of the end, Awaited patiently the crack of doom; Predestined to postpone the judgment-day, Arrived in time to show a better way. And when the Automobile came, we found Our incorrupt opinion safe and sound. Inoculated only by the schism, For every proof against all Socialism. The motor stops the decadence: not all Are in the same train with the prodigal. The Christian scientist, the souteneur. The Gothamite, the man from anywhere. Domestic Gill and idiomatic Jack, The wheedling knave, the sneak, the hectoring quack ; The man of broader mind and farther goal Is not entrained with Lubin Littlesoul; Your gentleman by birth and quickened sense. Refined requirements and abundant pence, And men of faculty and swelling aim Who conquer riches, power, position, fame. Are not entrained with loafers, quibblers, cranks, Nor with the Mob who never leave the ranks. 86 TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX With plodding dullness, unambitious ease, And discontented incapacities. Goodwill is in the blood, in you and me, And most in men of wealth and pedigree; So rich and poor, men, women, age and youth Imagined some ingredient of truth In Socialistic faith that there could be A common basis of equality. But now we know and by the motor swear The prepossession was as false as fair; Men are not equal; no two intellects Are of a calibre; desires, defects, Powers, aptitudes, are never on a par. No more than fingerprints and noses are. And on my soul and conscience, I maintain Political equality as vain As personal: for instance, I would place The franchise on a principle of race. And give the Saxon's forward reach a felt Prepotence o'er the backward-glancing belt; And if his chauffeur counts as one, why then Sir Simon Simplex should be reckoned ten. I call Democracy archaic, just As manhood suffrage is atavic lust For folkmotes of the prime, whose analogue In travel was the train, a passing vogue: TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 87 The automobile put an end to that, And left Democracy as fallen and flat As railway-stock. Wealth and the crafty hand That gathers wealth had always at command Horse-carriages for private travel, but The pace had got beyond that leisured rut; Class, mass and mob for fifty years and more Had all to travel in the jangling roar Of railways, the nomadic caravan That stifled individual mind in man, Till automobilism arose at last! Nor with the splendid periods of the past Our youthful century is proudly linked ; And things that Socialism supposed extinct, Degree, nobility and noble strife, A form, a style, a privacy in life Will reappear; and, crowning Nature's plan, The individual and the gentleman In England reassume his lawful place And vindicate the greatness of the race. THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES Quenched is the fire on autumn's hearth, The ingle vacant, hushed the song; But the resolved, consistent earth, And Nature, tolerant and strong. Serenely wait the ordered change Of times and tides. Ten thousand years Of day and night, the scope and range Of liberal seasons; smiles and tears. Of June and April; brumal storm Autumnal calm, and flower and fruit: These are the rich content, the form Of Nature's mind; these constitute The academe and discipline, The joust and knightly exercise, The culture of the earth wherein The earth's profound composure lies. The wisdom of the earth excels The craft and skill of every age. Witness the tale the Persian tells Of Mithridates, King and mage. 88 THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 89 The whole divan extolled his powers: They said the soil revered him so, That, if he planted sawdust, flowers Of every hue would promptly grow. " So be it! " quoth the King of Kings: " Bring hither sweepings of the street, Chaff, sawdust, money, jewels, rings. And fifty grains of summer wheat." He sowed them in a fertile bed. And set a guard about the plot Both day and night: "Although," he said, " The earth is honest, men are not." The wheat betimes began to grow. In shame as in a mordant steeped, The viziers, sulking in a row, Beheld at length the harvest reaped. Said then the King, "A sheaf! Proceed: Thresh, winnow, grind it, bolt and bake, And bring with all convenient speed Of leavened bread a goodly cake. " For you, my worthy viziers — come ! The marvellous crops you promised me ? " The whole perturbed divan, as dumb As oysters, felt indeed at sea. 90 THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES " Ha! " cried the King, "when shall we laugh At prodigies great nature grants Almighty monarchs? Fruit of chaff, Where is it? Where, my sawdust-plants? " The vine and vintage of my gold ? My silver-bushes, where are they? My coin should yield a hundred-fold By nature's lavish usury! " My fragrant banks of posied rings Where diamonds blossom, show us; show In arbours where the bulbul sings A branch of budding rubies glow. " My jewel-orchards, money-shrubs? Perhaps they're sprouting underground? My cash, at least, among the grubs — My cash and gems! Let them be found! "Dig, viziers, dig!" The viziers dug: Among the deep roots of the grain. With here an earthworm, there a slug They found the treasure, sowed in vain. And all the sweepings of the streets, The chaff, the rubbish? Like a jest Forgiven, forgotten! So discreet Is nature's kindly alkahest. THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 91 Then every vizier lost his nerve, Expecting death, a prompt despatch. But Mithridates said, " Observe How great the soil is: bulbuls hatch " The cuckoo's eggs, w^hereas the earth Ignores the costliest stone to feed With chosen fare and bring to birth The soul of any honest seed. " The earth is true and harbours not Imposture: all your flattering lies Are buried in this garden-plot; Be genuine if you would be wise." With that the baker, breathing spice, Produced the cake hot from the fire, And every vizier ate a slice Resolving to be less a liar. THE LUTANIST The harvests of purple and gold Are garnered and trodden ; dead leaves To-morrow will carpet the wold ; And the arbours and sylvan eaves Dismantled, no welcome extend; The bowers and sheltering eaves Will witness to-morrow the end Of their stained, of their sumptuous leaves. While tempests apparel the wold In their cast-off crimson and gold. But I of abundance to be Think only, the corn and the wine, The manifold wealth of the sea And the harvest-home of the mine. Decay and the fall of leave, Lost lives in the tenebrous mine, Disaster, disconsolate grief Molest not the corn and the wine, The infinite wealth of the sea And the bountiful harvests to be. For beneath are the heavens and above,^ And time is a silken yoke; 92 THE LUTANIST 93 My lute is my friend ; and I love A beautiful maid of my folk — • A marvel to see and adore, Astounding her foes and her folk With silence and exquisite lore Of youth and its delicate yoke, With wonderful wisdom in love. And the music beneath and above. I think how her beauty would kill A lover less ardent than I, I faint and my heart stands still In the street when she passes by; My lute, I bid it be dumb: — " Hush, for my love goes by ! O hush, or she may not come! A lover less ardent than I Her beauty might palsy, might kill ! Lute-strings, heart-strings, be still ! But when she has passed, a spell Delivers my voice and my lute; My songs and my melodies well Like fountains; like clusters of fruit My fantasy ripens; my rhymes, With savour of wayside fruit And sweet as aerial chimes Of flower-bells, ring to my lute; 94 THE LUTANIST Like fountains my melodies well When the thought of her works like a spell. She walks and the emerald lawn Is jewelled at every tread ; Like the burning tresses of dawn The virgin gold of her head Illumines the land and the sea; From her glittering feet to her head Is the essence of being — is she Who walks with a magical tread As she dazzles the eyes of dawn And jewels the grass-green lawn. Though the harvests of purple and gold Are garnered, and fallen leaves To-morrow will carpet the wold, I think how the sylvan eaves A welcome in summer extend, How the bowers and the sheltering eaves Will mantle in summer and bend With their bloom and their burden of leaves, And autumn apparel the wold In harvests of purple and gold. ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT St. Michael's Mount, the tidal isle, In May with daffodils and lilies Is kirtled gorgeously a while As ne'er another English hill is: About the precipices cling The rich renascence robes of Spring. Her gold and silver, nature's gifts. The prodigal with both hands showers: O rich in patches, not in drifts But round and round a mount of flowers Of lilies and of daffodils. The envy of all other hills. And on the lofty summit looms The castle: None could build or plan It. The four square foliage springs and blooms, The piled elaborate flower of granite, That not the sun can wither; no, Nor any tempest overthrow. 95 TWO DOGS Two dogs on Bournemouth beach: a mongrel, one, With spaniel plainest on the palimpsest. The blur of muddled stock; the other, bred, With tapering muzzle, rising brow, strong jaw — A terrier to the tail's expressive tip. Magnetic, nimble, endlessly alert. The mongrel, wet and shivering, at my feet Deposited a weage of half-inch board, A foot in length and splintered at the butt ; Withdrew a yard and crouched in act to spring, While to and fro between his wedge and me The glancing shuttle of his eager look A purpose wore. The terrier; ears a-cock. And neck one curve of sheer intelligence, Stood sentinel: no sound, no movement, save The mongrel's telegraphic eyes, bespoke The object of the canine pantomime. I stooped to grasp the wedge, knowing the game; But like a thing uncoiled the mongrel snapped It oil, and promptly set It out again. The terrier at his quarters, every nerve Waltzing inside his lithe rigidity. 96 TWO DOGS 97 " More complex than I thought ! " Again I made To seize the wedge; again the mongrel won, Whipped off the Jack, relaid it, crouched and watched, The terrier at attention all the time. I won the third bout: ere the mongrel snapped His toy, I stayed my hand: he halted, half Across the neutral ground, and in the pause Of doubt I seized the prize. A vanquished yelp From both; and then intensest vigilance. Together, when I tossed the wedge, they plunged Before it reached the sea. The mongrel, out Among the waves, and standing to them, meant Heroic business; but the terrier dodged Behind, adroitly scouting in the surf. And seized the wedge, rebutted by the tide. In shallow water, while the mongrel searched The English Channel on his hind-legs poised The terrier laid the trophy at my feet: And neither dog protested when I took The wedge: the overture of their marine Diversion had been played out once for all. A second match the reckless mongrel won, Vanishing twice under the heavy surf. Before he found and brought the prize to land. Then for an hour the aquatic sport went on, 9^ TWO DOGS And still the mongrel took the heroic role, The terrier hanging deftly in the rear. Sometimes the terrier when the mongrel found Betrayed a jealous scorn, as who should say, " Your hero's always a vulgarian ! Pah ! " But when the mongrel missed, after a fight With such a sea of troubles, and saw the prize Grabbed by the terrier In an Inch of surf. He seemed entirely satisfied, and watched With more pathetic vigilance the cast That followed. " Once a passion, mongrel, this Retrieving of a stick," I told the brute, " Has now become a vice with you. Go home ! Wet to the marrow and palsied with the cold, You won't give in, and, good or bad, you've earned My admiration. Go home now and get warm. And the best bone in the pantry." As I talked I stripped the water from his hybrid coat. Laughed and made much of him — which mortified The funking terrier. "I'm despised, it seems!'* The terrier thought. " My cleverness (my feet are barely wet!) beside the mongrel's zeal Appears timidity. This biped's mad TWO DOGS 99 To pet the stupid brute. Yap ! Yah ! " He seized The wedge and went; and at his heels at once, Without a thought of me, the mongrel trudged. Along the beach, smokers of cigarettes, All sixpenny-novel-readers to a man. Attracted Master Terrier. Again the wedge, Passed to the loyal mongrel, was teed with care; Again the fateful overture began. Upon the fourth attempt, and not before. And by a feint at that, the challenged youth (Most equable, be sure, of all the group: Allow the veriest dog to measure men!) Secured the soaked and splintered scrap of deal. Thereafter, as with me, the game progressed, The breathless, shivering, mongrel, rushing out Into the heavy surf, there to be tossed And tumbled like a floating bunch of kelp, While gingerly the terrier picked his steps Strategic in the rear, and snapped the prize Oftener than his more adventurous, more Romantic, more devoted rival did. The uncomfortable moral glares at one! And, further, in the mongrel's wistful mind A primitive idea darkly wrought: loo TWO DOGS Having once lost the prize in the overture With his bipedal rival, he felt himself In honour and in conscience bound to plunge For ever after it at the winner's will. But the smart terrier was an Overdog, And knew a trick worth two of that. He thought — If canine cerebration works like ours, And I interpret the canine mind aright — " Let men and mongrels worry and wet their coats! I use my brains and choose the better part. Quick-witted ease and self-approval lift Me miles above this anxious cur, absorbed, Body and soul, in playing a game I win Without an effort. And yet the mongrel seems The happier dog. How's that? Belike, the old Compensator}^ principle again. I have pre-eminence and conscious worth; And he has power to fling himself away For anything or nothing. Men and dogs, What an unfathomable world it is! " THE WASP Once as I went by rail to Epping Street, Both windows being open, a wasp flew in; Through the compartment swung and almost out, Scarce seen, scarce heard; but dead against the pane Entitled " Smoking," did the train's career Arrest her passage. Such a wonderful Impervious transparency, before That palpitating moment, had never yet Her airy voyage thwarted. Undismayed, With diligence incomparable, she sought An exit, till the letters like a snare Entangled her; or else the frosted glass And signature indelible appeared The key to all the mystery: there she groped. And flirted petulant wings, and fiercely sang A counter-spell against the sorcery, The sheer enchantment that inhibited Her access to the world — her birthright there! So visible, and so beyond her reach ! Baffled and raging like a tragic queen, She left at last the stencilled tablet; roamed The pane a while to cool her regal ire. Then tentatively touched the window-frame: lOI 102 THE WASP Sure footing still, though rougher than the glass; Dissimilar in texture, and so obscure! Perplexed now by opacity, with foot and wing She coasted up and down the wood and worked Her wrath to passion-point again. Then from the frame She slipped by chance into the open space Left by the lowered sash: — the world once more In sight! She paused; she closed her wings, and felt The air with learned antennae for the smooth Resistance that she knew now must belong To such mysterious transparences. No foothold? Down she fell — six inches down! — Hovered a second, dazed and delirious still; Then soared away, a captive queen set free. THE THAMES EMBANKMENT As grey and dank as dust and ashes slaked With wash of urban tides the morning lowered; But over Chelsea Bridge the sagging sky Had colour in it — blots of faintest bronze, The stains of daybreak. Westward slabs of light From vapour disentangled, sparsely glazed The panelled firmament; but vapour held The morning captive in the smoky east. At lowest ebb the tide on either bank Laid bare the fat mud of the Thames, all pinched And scalloped thick with dwarfish surges. Cranes, Derricks and chimney-stalks of the Surrey-side, Inverted shadows, in the motionless. Dull, leaden mirror of the channel hung: Black flags of smoke broke out, and in the dead Sheen of the water hovered underneath, As in the upper region, listlessly, Across the viaduct, trailing plumes of steam. The trains clanked in and out. Slowly the sun Undid the homespun swathing of the clouds, And splashed his image on the northern shore — A thing extravagantly beautiful: 103 IO+ THE THAMES EMBANKMENT The glistening, close-grained canvas of the mud Like hammered copper shone, and all about The burning centre of the mirror'd orb's Illimitable depth of silver fire Harmonious beams, the overtones of light, Suffused the emboss'd, metallic river bank. Woven of rainbows a dewdrop can dissolve And packed with power a simple lens can wield, The perfect, only source of beauty, light Reforms uncouthest shapelessness and turns Decoloured refuse Into ornament; The leafless trees that lined the vacant street Had all their stems picked out in golden scales, Their branches carved in ebony; and shed Around them by the sanction of the acorn In lieu of leaves each wore an aureole. Barges at anchor, barges stranded, hulks Ungainly, in the unshorn beams and rich Replenished planet of a winter sun, Appeared ethereal, and about to glide On high adventure chartered, swift away For regions undiscovered. Huddled wharfs A while, and then once more a reach of Thames Visibly flowing where the sun and wind Together caught the current. Quays and piers THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 105 To Vauxhall Bridge, and there the Baltic Wharf Exhibited its wonders: figureheads Of the old wooden walls on gate and post — Colossal torsos, bulky bosoms thrown Against the storm, sublime uplifted eyes Telling the stars. As white as ghosts They overhung the way, usurping time With carved memorials of the past. Forlorn Elysium of the weight of England! Gulls Riparian scavengers, arose and wheeled About my head, for morsels begging loud With savage cries that piercingly reverbed The tempest's dissonance. Birds in themselves Unmusical and uninventive ape Impressive things with mocking undesigned: The eagle's bark mimics the crashing noise That shakes his eyry when the thunder roars; And chanticleer's imperious trumpet-call Re-echoes round the world his ancestor's Barbaric high-wrought challenge to the dawn; But birds of homely feather and tuneful throat, With music in themselves and masterdom. To beauty turn obsessive sight and sounds: The mounting larks, compact of joyful fire, Render the coloured sunlight into song; Adventurous and impassioned nightingales io6 THE THAMES EMBANKMENT Transmute the stormy equinox they breast With courage high, for hawthorn thickets bound When spring arrives, into the melody That floods the forest aisles; the robin draws Miraculously from the rippling brook The red wine of his lay; blackbird and thrush, Prime-artists of the woodland, proudly take All things sonorous for their province, weave The gold-veined thunder and the crystal showers, The winds, the rivers and the choir of birds In the rich strains of their chromatic score. By magic mechanism the w^eltering clouds Re-grouped themselves in continents and isles That diapered the azure firmament; And sombre chains of cumulus, outlined In ruddy shade along the house-tops loomed. Phantasmal Alp on Alp. The sunbeams span Chaotic vapour into cosmic forms. And juggled in the sky, with hoods of cloud As jesters twirl on sticks their booby-caps — The potent sunbeams, that had fished the whole Enormous mass of moisture from the sea. Kneaded, divided and divided, wrought And turned it to a thousand fantasies Upon the ancient potter's wheel, the earth. THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD More than one way of walking? Verily; But, for the art of walking, only one. Beginners in the ambulative art, As in all art, are immethodical : Your want of method, rightly understood. Is faculty, and not its absence; style Adventurous of genius; say, a gift; Immethod, necessary handicap Upon originality, that loses Matches many on time or w^eight, but beats The winner virtually. The crammer's wiles, And royal roads to knowledge, short-cuts, keys. And time-and-labour-saving mechanism Beset the ambulative acolyte; But true originality in art Would not at first, even if it could, possess Impeccable technique; and your foredoomed Pedestrian errs designedly (if one Whose privilege it is to deviate Can ever be arraigned for trespass) bent On quitting, jeopardy or none, the old Immediately seductive methods blazed By trained precursors in pedestrial art. 107 io8 THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD At first then the prospective walker, rash As any hero, dedicates himself To chance. A vagabond upon the earth. He leads a life uncertain: art and craft Pedalian suffer secret chrysalid Probations and adventures ere they gain The ultimate image of complete Pedestrianism. Through gross suburban miles And over leagues of undistinguished ground He plods, he tramps. Utilitarian thoughts Of exercise and health extenuate The dullness of the duty; he persuades Himself he likes it; finds, where none exist. Amazing qualities; and tires his limbs, His thought, his fancy, o'er and o'er again. But in the dismal watches of the night He knows it all delusion ; beauty none. Nor pleasure in it ; ennui only — eased By speculation on the wayside-inn, Or country-town hotel where lunch permits An hour's oblivion of his self-imposed. His thriftless drudgery. Despair! — And life? Worth picking from the gutter? No; not worth The stooping for! Natheless, a walker born. He takes the road next day; steps out once more, As if the world were just begun, and he, Sole monarch ; plods the suburb, tramps the waste- Again returning baffled and dismayed. THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD 109 He tries a comrade. Worse and worse! — for that, In high pedestrlanism, turns out to be A double misery, a manacled Contingence with vexation. Walking-tours? Belletrists crack them up. He takes one: — lo, A sheer atrocity! A man may like To drink, but who would quench next morning's drouth, Unholy though it be, with torture forte Et dure in gallon draughts when by his bed A hair gleams of the dog that bit him! Tours Pedestrious? Madness, like the poet's who thought To write a thousand sonnets at the rate Of three a day! And this the tale of years! Forth from his travail and despair at last, Crash through his plodding apparatus, breaks The dawn of art. He recollects a mile, Or half a mile that pleased him; a furlong here. And there a hundred yards ; or an hour's march Over some curve of the world when everything Above him and about him from the zenith To the sky-edge, and radiant from his feet Toward every cardinal point put off the veil. Becoming evident as guilt or love, as things That cannot hide: — becoming him. And he becoming them ; and all his past And all his future wholly what they are. The very form and meaning of the earth no THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD Itself. And at these times he recollects, And in these places, how his thoughts were clear As crystal, deeper than the sea, as swift As light — the pulse, the bosom and the zone Of beauty infinite. And then and there Whatever he imagined took at once A bodily shape; and nought conceived or done Since life began appeared irrational, Wanton or needless. Since, the world and fate, Material functions of each other, apt As syllables of power and magic mind In some self-reading riddle, as fracted bits In self-adjusting instruments that play Unheard ethereal music of the spheres, Assumed their places equably; all things Fell duly into line and dressed their ranks. Thus art begins, as sudden as a star In some unconstellated tract of space. Where two extinct long-wandering orbs collide And smite into each other and become A lamp of glory, no corpuscular Uncertainty, no interval between The old misfortune and the new delight. And thus at once the plodder of the waste Attains utility and finds himself Aristocrat and patron of the road; The artizan, an artist — aristocrat THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD in And artist being over synonymes. All vagabondage, all bohemianism, All errantry, the unllcked, chrysalld Condition of aristocracy and art. Cut off for ever, the proud pedestrian free Of the world, walks only now in picked resorts, And can without a chart, without a guide, Discover lands richer than El Dorado, Sweeter than Beulah, and with ease Ascend secluded mountains more delectable Than heights in ancient pilgrimages famed, Or myth-clad hills, or summits of romance. Old traversed roads he traverses again. Untroubled ; nothing new he sees Except the stretch of pleasure-ground, like one Who turns the leaves o'er of a tedious book. Careless of verbiage to reperuse The single page inspired; in regions new He goes directly to his own like beasts That never miss the way; and having marked A province with the beauties of his choice. In them alone he walks, lord of the world. ROAD AND RAIL March Many-weathers, bluff and affable, The usher and the pursuivant of Spring, Had sent his North wind blaring through the world — A mundane wind that held the earth, and puffed The smoke of urban fire and furnace far Afield. An ashen canopy of cloud, The dense immobled sky, high-pitched above The wind's terrestrial office, overhung The city when the morning train drew out. Leaping along the land from town to town. Its iron lungs respired Its breath of steam, Its resonant flanges, and its vertebral Loose-jointed carcase of a centipede Gigantic, hugged and ground the parallel Adjusted metals of its destined way With apathetic fatalism, the mark Of all machinery. — From Paddington To Basingstoke the world seemed standing still: Nothing astir between the firmaments Except the aimless tumult of the wind. And clanging travail of the ponderous train In labour with its journey on the smooth, The ineludible, the shining rails. 112 ROAD AND RAIL 113 But prompt at Basingstoke an interlude Began: a reckless youth, possessed with seven Innocuous devils of self -consciousness Primeval, bouncing in irruptlvely, Lusty-Juventus-wIse, annexed the whole Compartment — as a pendant to the earth. Already his! Wind-shaven, ruddy; hunched And big; all knees and knuckles; with a mouth That opened like a portal; fleshy chops And turned-up nose widespread, the signature Of jollity; a shapeless, elvish skull; His little pig's eyes in their sockets soused But simmering merrily; just twenty years; One radiation of nervous energy; A limber tongue and most unquenchable, Complacent blaze of indiscretion, soft As a night-light in a nursery. "Where away?" Quoth he; and "Hang the weather! I've seen worse. In my time, for the season." Then: Did we think The train was doing thirty or forty miles An hour? Sometimes, by instinct, he could tell To a mile the rate at which a train went. This morning, for a wonder, he couldn't trust His judgment in the matter; — annoying! — Still A man's form varied, and we must excuse His inability to gauge our speed. 114 ROAD AND RAIL Good golf about here, — very! Did we play? And, bye the bye, talking of golf, he did A brilliant thing just now: — missing the train At Farnham on the other line, instead Of waiting for the next, he tramped across To Basingstoke, — some decent tale of miles; His destination being Winchester, Either line suited, — see? The weather, — yes, The weather; — healthy, of course; — your moist cold kills; Your dry cold cures; — to-day it seemed as cold, — But that must be the wind ; in sheltered roads It smelt like Spring; — to-morrow, — who could tell To-morrow's weather? — a funny climate, ours! Was that a cow there, or a — ^Yes, a cow. He didn't know how we regarded it. But he, for his part, took it that the hand That rocked the cradle ruled the world: to drop A signature into a ballot-box Would make no earthly! (Slang, elliptical.) Although we must remember, all of us, This rocking of the cradle was out of date; But that he wouldn't canvass; — we were to mind There must be no mistake: women were women All the world to nothing; and — mark him — if They had political enfranchisement, No one could say — no one at all! — what might And mightn't happen: not a doubt of that. ROAD AND RAIL 115 Getting along more quickly; forty miles, He thought; or less, perhaps. He meant to lunch At Winchester; then hire a trap and drive . . , " Instanter to the devil," someone sighed. All this, and further, an infinitude Of dislocated prattle, with a smile Indelible, and such a negligent Absorbition* in self that no appeal. Except a sheer affront, abuse, or blow, Could have revealed remotely any gleam Or shade, to him apparent, of his own Insipid and grotesque enormity! When time, distemper or disaster sap Such individuals, and they see themselves, In facets of disrupted character, As others see them, stupid and absurd, How bad the quarter of an hour must be! Natheless there are extant a hearty breed, Incorrigibly cheerful, who behold Themselves for ever in the best of lights. And by the pipe and bowl of Old King Cole They have the best of it! To see ourselves * This word has fallen out of use; but having it we might employ it. Its doublet, " absorption," could be relegated to physics, etc., and " absorbition " kept for men- tal engrossment. The dictionaries lay the stress on the penultimate ; but in restoring '* absorbition " to the lan- guage, I place the main accent on the second syllable. J. D. n6 ROAD AND RAIL As others see us may be good enough; But to love others in their vanities, And to portray the glorious counterfeit — In sympathetic ink that sympathy Alone can read aright, — why that's a gift Vouchsafed to genius of the rarest strain! At Lyndhurst-road the coach for Lyndhurst took The turnpike at is best commercial pace. And there the sun burst out with moted beams In handfuls, clenched like sheaves of thunderbolts. The riven clouds, of homespun slashed and gored. Displayed through unhemmed slits the turquoise sky, — As tender as a damsel's bosom-thoughts. Across the forest's swarthy-purple ridge A sparse shower twinkled ; but the broken bulk Of vapour, by the sunbeams bundled up, Slipped o'er the sky-edge and was no more seen. Like a lithe weapon by gigantic hands In pastance wielded, keen the brandished wind Whistled about us all the uphill way To Lyndhurst, where a lofty church o'erlooks The forest's metes and bounds, its modish spire A landmark far and wide. But in the glebes And garden-closes ancient houses — thatched, Of post-and-panel, and with arching eaves ROAD AND RAIL 117 About their high and deep-set windows — peer Occultly out of many centuries. An old-world use and wont, the neighbourhood And venue of the place are everywhere Presumptive, — in the High Street, new and raw, As in the sylvan faubourgs; for a gust Of burning log and faggot importunes The passer-by — the forest's bitter-sweet Aroma, as it turns to genial warmth And toothsome savour for the villager. SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY The character and strength of us Who conquer everywhere, We sing the English of it thus, And bid the world beware; We bid the world beware The perfect heart and will, That dare the utmost men may dare And follow freedom still. Sea-room, land-room, ours, my masters, ours, Hand in hand with destiny, and first among the Powers ! Our boasted Ocean Empire, sirs, we boast of it again. Our Monarch, and our Rulers, and our Women, and our Men! n The pillars of our Empire stand In unforgotten graves; We built dominion on the land. And greatness on the waves; ii8 SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY 119 Our Empire on the waves, Established firm and sure, And founded deep in ocean's caves While honour shall endure. Sea-room, land-room, honourably ours. Hand in hand with destiny, and first among the Powers! Our boasted Ocean Empire, sirs, we boast of it again. Our ancient Isles, our Lands afar, and all our loyal Men! m Our flag, on every wind unfurled, Proclaims from sea to sea A future and a nobler world Where men and thoughts are free; Our men, our thoughts are free; Our wars are waged for peace; We stand in arms for liberty Till bonds and bondage cease. Sea-room, land-room, ours, appointed ours. Conscious of our calling and the first among the Powers! Our boasted Ocean Sovereignty, again and yet again! Our Counsel, and our Conduct, and our Arm- aments and Men! JUN 3 m9 1 1 1 i J ■ IliliPf ^^^1 1 n iy^iliii H HH IH^H