Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure | Page 4

some by-gone lord of mind.
Mournful the face and
dignified the head:
A man who pondered much upon the dead.
Repose unbroken now his dust surrounds,
He is with those whom
mortals honor most.
Respect and tender sighs and holy sounds
Of

choirs, and the presence of the Holy Ghost
And fellow spirits and
shadowy mem'ries dear
Make for his rest a sacred atmosphere.
Sometime a gentle and profound Divine,
Father revered of spiritual
sons.
He died. They laid him here. About his shrine,
Of what they
wrote this remnant legend runs:
"Nascitur omnis homo peccato
mortuus
Una post cineres virtus vivere sola facit."[A]
There as I breathed the lesson of the dead:
Sudden the rich bells
chorussed overhead:
"O be not of the throng ephemeral
To whom
to-day is fame, to-morrow fate,
Proud of some robe no statelier than a
pall,
Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral--
A phantom
generation fatuate.
Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save,

Virtue alone revives beyond the grave."
[Footnote A: "Every man is born dead in sin. Virtue alone brings life
eternal."]
STANCHEZZA.
EARLY LINES
Lo Zephyr floats, on pinions delicate,
Past the dark belfry, where a
deep-toned bell
Sways back and forth, Grief tolling out the knell
For thee, my friend, so young and yet so great.
Dead--thou art dead.
The destiny of men
Is ever thus, like waves upon the main
To rise,
grow great, fall with a crash and wane,
While still another grows to wane again,
Dead--thou art dead. Would
that I too were gone
And that the grass which rustles on thy grave

Might also over mine forever wave
Made living by the death it grew upon.
I ask not Orpheus-like, that
Pluto give
Thy soul to earth. I would not have thee live.

PRÆTERITA EX INSTANTIBUS.
How strange it is that, in the after age,--
When Time's clepsydra will be nearer dry--
That all the accustomed
things we now pass by
Unmarked, because familiar, shall engage

The antique reverence of men to be;
And that quaint interest which prompts the sage
The silent fathoms of
the past to gauge
Shall keep alive our own past memory,
Making all
great of ours--the garb we wear--
Our voiceless cities, reft of roof and spire--
The very skull whence
now the eye of fire
Glances bright sign of what the soul can dare.

So shall our annals make an envied lore,
And men will say, 'Thus did
the men of yore.'
SUNRISE.
EARLY LINES
I saw the shining-limbed Apollo stand,
Exultant, on the rim of Orient,
And well and mightily his bow he bent,

And unseen-swift the arrow left his hand.
Far on it sped, as did
those elder ones
That long ago shed plague upon the Greek--
Far
on--and pierced the side of Night, who weak
And out of breath with
fright, fled to his sons,
The nether ghosts; and lo! his jewelled robe

No more did shade a sleep-encircled world;
And thereupon the faëry
legions furled
The silk of silence, and the wheeling globe
Spun
freer on its grand, accustomed way,
While all things living rose to
hail the day.
REALITY.
A FANCY

Fade lesser dreams, that, built of tenderness,
Young trust and tinted
hopes, have led me long.
These jagged ways ye whiled will pain me
less
Than hath your falsity. Your spirit song
Sent magic wafted up
and down along
The waves of wind to me. Your world was real.

There was no ruder world that I could feel.
I lived in dreams and
thought you all I would,
Nor knew what dread, bare truth is doomed
to rise,
When love and hope and all but one far Good,
Like sunset
lands feel the cold night of lies.
Go, sweetest visions, die amid my tears,
For hence, nor cheered, nor
blinded, must I seek
That larger dream that cannot fade; though years

Of leaden days and leagues of by-path bleak
Must intervene, with
austere sadness gray,
Fade dimmer! lest in agony I turn,
And
heartsick seek ye, though the Fates shriek "Nay!"
And the wroth
heavens with judgment lightnings burn.
Go useless lesser dreams. And where they were,
Rise, grave aërial
Good! Thy texture's true.
There is no good can die. "No ill," says
Time, "can bear,
However beautiful, my long, long earnest view."
SEARCHINGS.
(EARLY LINES.)
Soul, thou hast lived before. Thy wing
Hath swept the ancient folds
of light
Which once wrapt stilly everything,
Before the advent of a
Night.
O thou art blind and thou art dead
Unto the knowledge that was thine.

A longing and a dreamy dread
Alone oft shadow the divine.
Full loud calls past eternity,
But Lethe's murmur stills its roar,
The
one vague truth that reaches thee
Is this--that thou hast lived before.
Home often comes some voice of eld
Confused and low--a broken

surge
By fate and distance half withheld--
Rich in linked sadness
like a dirge.
The muffled, great bell Silence clangs
His solemn call, and thou, O
soul!
Dost stir in sense's torpid fangs,
Like the blind magnet,
toward a pole.
The deep, vast, swelling organ-sound;
The cadence of an evening
flute,
Bring oft those ancient joys around
To linger till the notes are
mute.
And when thy hushéd breathing fills
The shrine of quiet reverence,

Then, too, a freeing angel stills
The clanking of the chains of sense.