How beautiful is life--the physical joy of sense and breathing;
The glory of the world which has found speech and speaks to us;
The robe which summer throws in June round the white bones of winter;
The new birth of each day, itself a life, a world, a sun!
I love all things that are young and happy and eternal,
Eternal in their change and growth as I too changing grow.
Old am I, and how many voices that I loved are heard not!
Yet the world lives, and in its life I live and laugh and love.
I woke to--day at daybreak, thrilled with a new sense of pleasure near me,
Because a bird sang at my window and had ceased, afraid.
A while I lay and listened conscious only of my being,
The same fool school--boy as in days gone by, nerve, sinew, vein.
Who tells us we are changed, that we with our wise years grow older?
I am a poet, may be patriot, soldier, statesman, priest.
Yet none the less I lay to--day and watched in childish wonder The flies tie and untie their knots, a mystery unrevealed.
The flies' way in the air perplexed me ever and perplexes No less this hour than in old time.
So Solomon the wise,
Spite of his wit, essayed in vain the riddle of the eagles;
And I a child to--day lay there, a child, less than a child.
And I heard tones well--known and prudent words and phrases ventured Gently to chide me for hours wasted thus in ease,
Till I too spoke and vowed aloud new ways of life amended,
And for the thousandth time in pain arraigned and blamed my dreams.
Then I rose hastily, as one who hears and fears reproving,
Although,
God help me, there is living none now dares to chide or blame,
And I broke through the curtain of the dusk, and from the Orient The sun's face through the window smiled, the lord of a new day.
How dare I grieve in the fair presence of the lord of morning?
How dare I not rejoice who thus its king in Eden reign?
God's peace is on this place proclaimed, and named, and promised,
A sentient joy of living things which fills and thrills the Earth.
Here all things joyous are.
Birds breed in sedge and thicket;
Hares feed in pairs, and squirrels leap from spray to spray;
Dead limbs of elms make nests for the woodpeckers;
The coots' cry from the mere comes loud and tells of rain.
Naught here may harm or hurt.
This is a sanctuary For the world's weak, hedged in with love and fenced and sealed-- Man its sole outcast, the earth's mad disturber branded Still with the mark of Cain and death from which life flees.
Thus musing in my pride, and shame too somewhat,
I descended,
Led by invisible hands towards the trees and fields below.
Along these self--same paths my childhood ran exulting,
Following the poor lost dead who loved them as I love.
What was their pride then in their leafy fair possession,
Theirs in their day, who planned these glades and thickets round!
How has their presence vanished from the silent pastures,
The poor lost dead who held my hand and loved them as I love!
Yet not to mourn I came.
No day of joy destroyed deserves our anguish.
Pleasure's whole soul is this, to feel the living stream which flows.
That which they did I do.
In me they live unvanquished.
My voice is theirs to--day, my step their step, my soul their soul.
For them I live ungrieving, and ungrieved their fruit I gather From trees they planted bravely in their pride of life and time.
They fashioned these old gardens.
Let my soul their joy inherit,
Their passion heaped on passion, life on life, for my life's prize.
Who were they all?
Some names they bore well--known, some others fameless.
A box of parchments yellow lies in the dull dust of age;
A few poor letters, written by fond hands to fonder faces;
Through all the passionate love of home, this home of mine, once theirs.
The primaeval tiller of the soil enjoyed, the soil ancestral,
Whence came he?
What his lineage?
Nay, 'tis hidden.
Some have told Tales of high daring done, lands won, through lines remote descending From old Norse sources and the potent loins of kings and gods.
Or, with less pomp, of armoured knights, when knights were held heroic,
Of prudent counsellors and priests and men revered for law,
Dim--featured ghosts of vanished names set in forgotten story,
Pleading for memory still of their last son through years of change.
And yet I know not.
Truth and fable here are strangely blended.
Nay, rather let me set before my face in fancy one Like to myself, a clod of Sussex earth more kindly kneaded,
And mostly noble through the love of right, the sense of wrong.
I see him stand beneath these pollard oaks, the same, hardhanded,
With hook, and axe, and bill, a wrestler with the forest's green,
A man grave--featured, dull of thought and wit, slow--paced, unyielding,
Stern in his toil and niggard still of smile and sign and speech.
The woodland round him a vast sea was then, whose scattered islands Were these few acres conquered hardly by men whole of heart,
Spite of the demons and wild spectral elves that held the forest And deadly dragons haunting still in guile the undrained morass.
Who knows?
A servant he, may be, of our good saint and patron,
The cloistered friar, who for his life--long penance vowed and done,
And for some monsters slain, had claimed in sole reward and guerdon The wood birds' silence round him while he made his prayer at noon.
How have the birds grown jubilant once more in song and godless,
In these unchastened days when men have ceased to kneel or pray!
This peasant knelt in faith.
The world to him had nothing joyous.
Death, like a spectre, dogged him close with fears of Heaven and Hell.
And yet he loved these lands.
Here haply a strange breadth of freedom Was from all lords and kings by reason of the forest fear.
What warrior dared to search these ``antres vast and desarts idle'' For such poor scattered few freeholders as its fastness held?
The Roman,
Dane and Norman from the Down, their distant eyrie,
Looked forth, but only looked.
The swamps of trackless mire Clogged all their chariot wheels who dared by force of arms to venture With horse and spear and rider through these perilous bogs accursed.
And thus he lived and died, unknown to all, untamed, unlorded,
This silent first forefather of the paternal woods reclaimed,
Holding his place beneath the sun with sullen desperate caution On the square plot of up--turned acres that his spade had made.
Lives there in me his son still something of his hardy sinew,
Something of his heroic soul?
Still darkly arched o'erhead The forest speaks to me, its child.
I hoard and count and reckon As my birth's right and prize these lands, and look askance at men.
Deep in my soul he lies.
Nor less the rest, the crew penurious Of careful tillers holding gold achieved more dear than ease,
The covetous of farms still grimly set through generations To add their store of value won to the ancestral fields.
The wealth they made that day is mine, the glades reclaimed, the hamlets,
The treasure of the earth deep delved in reigns Plantagenet,
The store of iron ore heaped high for needs of civil battle,
When men in armour trod the flying heels of armèd men.
Some gathered fortune boldly daring.
Truce then to the forest.
Some spent their store in lordly wassail, brawling and lewd wine.
What anger was twixt neighbours there, twixt sire and son what contest!
What bonds usurious countersigned enriched the hands of guile!
Still in their stubbornness of blood they stood, these my own fathers,
Through whom the thread of life, a feeble cord by fortune spun And loosed upon Time's tempest, to their latest born descended,
And with the life the lands redeemed which thus unshorn he loves.
Justice, and squire, and clerk, and graduate of humaner letters!
Here history spreads her written page for certain truth to record.
On these green lawns rose novel shapes, trim walks and classic gardens Decked with Italian forms in stone of nymph and faun and god.
Thus was I born.
And lo, their golden leaves renewed each summer The oak trees weave for me as them, sublimely, blindly dumb,
Holding their secrets closely shut, nor even to my cunning Yielding a word but this, ``Alas for thee! and woe for Man!'' Woe for his valour, woe for thine!
Time still shall all things vanquish,
Folly and virtue, lusts of youth, mad griefs, sublime designs,
The courage of high manhood feebly striving and then failing.
Yonder behold the churchyard is, heaped high with thy own kind.
Here I broke off, in sudden exclamation loud disclaiming This new insistence of my foolish soul's disease of grief.
The day's work calls me, to my soul I said, a day of labour,
Or only laboured idleness yet clear at least of tears.
Therewith I turned the latch before me of the low cow's--stable,
Where, with her udders full and lowing loud to hear me near,
Stood my cow Myrtle, large--eyed, moon--faced, brindlehided, patient,
Waiting my footstep on the path which every morn she hears.
What does she meditate on all things, brute, divine and human,
This mild--eyed mother?
She too loves the knee--deep fields she knows With the same reasonless desire and natural greed of longing,
And this between us hidden deep is a strong bond of love.
Her pulses can beat wildly too with rage and subtle passion When from her herd she strays.
And once each Spring, with fortune cloyed,
For a brief month she knows all Heaven's love and rapturous pleasure,
Fondling the thing new born, which is her own, her soul, her joy.
I love to touch the links of life between us, the blind kindness Of joy unreasoned, solace in the sun, in shade delight.
The unhuman part of Man is still the best, his love of children,
His love of meads and vales at home, his fondness for his kind.
Let me extenuate naught in thought, nor set down aught in malice.
Here,
Myrtle, is that thing thou lovest best, thy feed of corn.
Give me in turn thy peace of soul, peace passing understanding,
Thy trust each vain sweet day renewed sublime in Man thy god.
How beautiful is life, the conscious power of thought in action,
The brain's imperious will commanding fate within its sphere!
Around it the world's forces, prisoned Jinns, obey the magician,
Tamed and constrained for his delight their allotted tasks to weave.
And what were life unlabouring, life even here in this dear Eden,
Were there no toil?
Eternal perfectness in idle round Is God's sole lot to taste, not ours whom rage of hope possesses And Time disturbs with tales of change, and dark oblivion goads.
Our actions are our monument.
The prince in slaughtered thousands Carves his red name on fields of war that he may sounder sleep.
The Statesman fashions high his sluggard pride to patriot glories That he may lie entombed with kings while kings and kingdoms grieve.
The prophet as of old speaks, ``Rise, ye mourners, from your bondage,
Get ye from hence and flee away afar lest evil come;
Behold, the Lord shall lead you forth through deserts to new pastures,
Thus shall ye do, and thus.'' And he too sleeps his sleep with God.
Nor less the poet.
Chosen to sing of an eternal beauty,
Dares he be silent in his day and leave his tale untold?
How shall he wait on, idly, he a hireling without wages,
Lest in the night untried of toil he wake and cry aloud?
There is a record given him he must needs in deeds accomplish,
A tale of transient things his eyes have seen, his ears have heard;
And he a traitor were if dying dumb they too should vanish,
And fill the forgotten lapses lost of the unnumbered years;
Memories of times departed, each hour filled to the brim with promise;
Voices how sweet of human souls whose dreams are with them laid;
Echoes of laughters fraught with tears, since joy has turned to sorrow;
Footsteps of dancing feet long gone to rest where grasses wave;
Tender, sad vows of women, how passionately appealing To eyes they loved, nor deeming day nor night itself too long For their blest service, sieging heaven amain in vain for pity,
And holding earth and fate too strait for their wide arms of love;
Manly ambitions, vast as the high arch unspanned of heaven;
Schemes of impossible good for Man, made naught by human fraud;
Follies of valiant hearts cast forth upon the die of battle;
Hopes of a world destroyed, made void through human greed of gold.
I too have dreamed a dream which I would fain essay to interpret,
A dream of infinite love, which, if my hour of wit were proved,
Should stand my message to the world, a voice of power for ever,
Binding the generations new to the past ages dumb.
How should I speak it best, in what high tones of fullvoiced reason Holding the souls of all?
No idle lapse of empty sounds Should cloy the hearing of the earth grown deaf to alien passion,
No clamour of vain sobs, no throbs, no formless dirge of words.
But the true sculpture of a thought, clean cut and plain of meaning,
Marble made life, with sinewy phrase and knotted argument,
And that deep--throated resonant voice which in the morn of Egypt Spoke through her Memnon's lips to all, and all a nation heard.
This should be prophecy--nay, judgment.
But with less, if granted,
Well were I winged for song, and luminous so in thought should move With the world's teachers, bards whose chosen strings have nobly chaunted Hymns of heroic Heaven or only this of human love.
Only that tragedy of hope, which in its full expansion Has never yet been told, the history of a human soul From its first outlook with blank eyes upon a world of shadows To its last blank farewell in tears upon a world of scorn;
The very truth of childhood, with its fears and tribulations,
Hushed into sudden smiles and sleep by what unreasoning change;
The wherefore and the why of its first bursts of causeless laughter;
The meaning of its griefs untold, the sense of its first pain;
And boyhood's early trust, thrust forth to the chill winds of schooling,
Learning the bitterness of life through divers ways of loss,
Wasting the freshness of its joys on noise, its first compassion On its own wounded back, till, turning, it too grasps the rod;
And youth's high hope, with painted dreams of all potential pleasure,
Doubting which way to spring, the paths of honour leading here,
There of delight, each robed with morning's virginal new vesture And beautiful with tears of love, though who should call them tears?
And manhood with its wars; and middle life as yet unvanquished,
When strength is tried and, having learned through grief the nobler roads Of the world's glory, he beholds life's settled purpose, standing Calm with his fate, and seems to touch at last the ulterior goal;
And then the pang which strikes, and the swift end.
All these, in sequence,
Would I set forth in words, tragic, severe, and each should breathe Of a new beauty, shade and light, blue skies, white clouds and tempests,
Mountain and vale and plain and stream, and, circling all,
Death's sea.
How beautiful is life!
The present sense of souls that love us;
The enfolding spirit of love, made known in divers silent ways;
The wife, the child, the man and maid, whose zeal and faith enthrone us High in their temple niche enshrined!
Thus angels serving stand.
What need we of more love, of larger fields revealed of conquest,
Who all things have that heaven itself in its reward might deal?
What need we of new life, who touch the goal supreme of fortune,
Holding to--day for prize the perfect love that casts out fear?
Come with me, child, who art myself, only a self grown dearer,
One that I dare to love and without shame, for thou art mine.
What shall our pleasure be to--day, our daily task being ended?
Take thou a counsel of thy joy.
Be thou my pleasure's guide.
Speak.
Shall we make our visitation of the woods and forests?
The midsummer shoot is there; and in their nuptial robes of green The oak trees murmur to the flies their tale of full--blown summer,
And, where the stems were felled in Spring, the foxgloves point their spears.
Or to the paddocks, deep in green for grazing steer and heifer,
And, what we better love, those creatures of a nobler mould,
Which are fair Nature's masterpiece and last supreme perfection,
Mares with their unweaned foals high--souled in proud descent of blood.
Or rather--let the indulgence to our idle souls be granted-- Lapped in the summer heat, without more toil than this of dreams,
On the lake's bosom moored, where birch and alder cast their shadows,
Sit we and woo, hours through, with rod and line the mistrustful bream.
Here the boat lies, half hidden she, where three weeks since we left her,
In her snug dog--wood nook.
The rushes round have bound her in Already in their net.
But we will free and float and set her,
An ark for our new fortunes launched, to bear us where we will.
See, there she swims.
Our noise in loosing her has roused a heron,
And with him teals and lapwings, with a cry of swift alarm.
Ah Man! thy hated face disturbs once more thy natural fellows.
What is thy kingship worth to thee if all things fly thy hand?
The evil done is done, alas!
Let us indulge our laughter,
Dear Hester, sing to me that song the foolish fishes heard When you deceived them to their hurt by your unreal assurance,
Telling of captive birds set free--the while the nets we spread.
Sing me a song, while I the happy oars in listless measure Ply looking at your face, and presently, when it is done,
You shall hear stories told of far--off lands and strange adventures,
Things that your father saw ere you to give him joy were born;
Tales of great mountains where he set his steps in early manhood,
Not hills like ours, but craggy pinnacles that pierce the clouds,
Abysmal valleys and white slopes of treacherous ice, whose foothold Failed as in dreams men fail and urged him headlong down,
Falling for ever--ever--and yet saved by intervention,
On the extreme curve's edge, of a miraculous softer snow,
Wherein he bedded lay with beating heart till the slow rescue Gravely descending came and bore him scathless home;
Or of the unlimited fields revealed of grey Arabian desert,
Where are no streams or shade, but only the blind haze of noon,
And the sun strikes with might, and the skins shrink which hold his blessing,
The dole of water spared, his forfeit life if these be gone;
Drear and untenanted.
Yet see the sudden transformation When the Spring rains have come!
In every vale and hollow there Cattle unnumbered pasture knee--deep down in purple blossoms,
And the calf--camels prance, and their dams roar like souls in pain.
Or of days spent alone and nights in far Brazilian forests,
Where sky and earth itself are lost in insolent depths of green.
High overhead the laden tree--tops touch the extremest heaven,
Leading through latticed walls of flowers and veils deepdripped with dew.
The impenetrable shadows dark of that shut place of silence How are they broken by the sheen and glint of insect wings,
Bright coloured lamps slow flitting!
Lo from the impervious thicket A blaze of blue, a butterfly, bursts flashing through the trees.
Or last, of the vast hum of a tumultuous Indian city,
Where street and bridge are thronged with men who sell and buy and cry,
And women with bright eyes half veiled pass bearing flowers and incense,
Through the tall temple gates set wide, to gods in ochreous shrines.
Strange wonderful and vast, till you forget the immediate beauty,
The home we love, our little raptures over joys well known,
This lake, these woods, this boat, the brook which tells of English summer With its mad bubbles dancing and its hazel foam windborne,
And all that was and is to fill our souls with their contentment From dawn to dusk.
And so in joy this latest evening ends.
God grant us length of days, of days like these to be remembered Till life's last night has come and we too gathered are in death!
