LITMIR.BIZ

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to see for evermore.

       "Ah, ha!" he said, "my dreams are come for me!

       Now shall they have me!" For, all through the night,

       There had been growing trouble in his frame,

       An overshadowing of something dire.

       Arrived at home, the weary man and horse

       Forsook their load; the one went to his stall,

       The other sought the haven of his bed—

       There slept and moaned, cried out, and woke, and slept:

       Through all the netted labyrinth of his brain

       The fever shot its pent malignant fire.

       'Twas evening when to passing consciousness

       He woke and saw his father by his side:

       His guardian form in every vision drear

       That followed, watching shone; and the healing face

       Of his true sister gleamed through all his pain,

       Soothing and strengthening with cloudy hope;

       Till, at the weary last of many days,

       He woke to sweet quiescent consciousness,

       Enfeebled much, but with a new-born life—

       His soul a summer evening after rain.

      Slow, with the passing weeks, he gathered strength,

       And ere the winter came, seemed half restored;

       And hope was busy. But a fire too keen

       Burned in his larger eyes; and in his cheek

       Too ready came the blood at faintest call,

       Glowing a fair, quick-fading, sunset hue.

      Before its hour, a biting frost set in.

       It gnawed with icy fangs his shrinking life;

       And that disease bemoaned throughout the land,

       The smiling, hoping, wasting, radiant death,

       Was born of outer cold and inner heat.

      One morn his sister, entering while he slept,

       Spied in his listless hand a handkerchief

       Spotted with red. Cold with dismay, she stood,

       Scared, motionless. But catching in the glass

       The sudden glimpse of a white ghostly face,

       She started at herself, and he awoke.

       He understood, and said with smile unsure,

       "Bright red was evermore my master-hue;

       And see, I have it in me: that is why."

       She shuddered; and he saw, nor jested more,

       But smiled again, and looked Death in the face.

      When first he saw the red blood outward leap,

       As if it sought again the fountain-heart

       Whence it had flowed to fill the golden bowl,

       No terror seized—an exaltation swelled

       His spirit: now the pondered mystery

       Would fling its portals wide, and take him in,

       One of the awful dead! Them, fools conceive

       As ghosts that fleet and pine, bereft of weight,

       And half their valued lives: he otherwise;—

       Hoped now, and now expected; and, again,

       Said only, "I await the thing to come."

      So waits a child the lingering curtain's rise,

       While yet the panting lamps restrained burn

       At half-height, and the theatre is full.

      But as the days went by, they brought sad hours,

       When he would sit, his hands upon his knees,

       Drooping, and longing for the wine of life.

       For when the ninefold crystal spheres, through which

       The outer light sinks in, are cracked and broken,

       Yet able to keep in the 'piring life,

       Distressing shadows cross the chequered soul:

       Poor Psyche trims her irresponsive lamp,

       And anxious visits oft her store of oil,

       And still the shadows fall: she must go pray!

       And God, who speaks to man at door and lattice,

       Glorious in stars, and winds, and flowers, and waves,

       Not seldom shuts the door and dims the pane,

       That, isled in calm, his still small voice may sound

       The clearer, by the hearth, in the inner room—

       Sound on until the soul, fulfilled of hope,

       Look undismayed on that which cannot kill;

       And saying in the dark, I will the light, Glow in the gloom the present will of God: Then melt the shadows of her shaken house.

      He, when his lamp shot up a spiring flame,

       Would thus break forth and climb the heaven of prayer:

       "Do with us what thou wilt, all-glorious heart!

       Thou God of them that are not yet, but grow!

       We trust thee for the thing we shall be yet;

       We too are ill content with what we are."

       And when the flame sank, and the darkness fell,

       He lived by faith which is the soul of sight.

      Yet in the frequent pauses of the light,

       When all was dreary as a drizzling thaw,

       When sleep came not although he prayed for sleep,

       And wakeful-weary on his bed he lay,

       Like frozen lake that has no heaven within;

       Then, then the sleeping horror woke and stirred,

       And with the tooth of unsure thought began

       To gnaw the roots of life:—What if there were

       No truth in beauty! What if loveliness

       Were but the invention of a happier mood!

       "For, if my mind can dim or slay the Fair,

       Why should it not enhance or make the Fair?"

       "Nay," Psyche answered; "for a tired man

       May drop his eyelids on the visible world,

       To whom no dreams, when fancy flieth free,

       Will bring the sunny excellence of day.

       'Tis easy to destroy; God only makes.

       Could my invention sweep the lucid waves

       With purple shadows—next create the joy

       With which my life beholds them? Wherefore should

       One meet the other without thought of mine,

       If God did not mean beauty in them and me,

       But dropped them, helpless shadows, from his sun?

       There were no God, his image not being mine,

       And I should seek in vain for any bliss!

       Oh, lack and doubt and fear can only come

       Because of plenty, confidence, and love!

       Those are the shadow-forms about the feet

       Of these—because they are not crystal-clear

       To the all-searching sun in which they live:

       Dread of its loss

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