X.
O August imperial! night divine! O infinite passionate sea!
Each of itself is a gift so rich that well may the high gods be
Envying man the sweet low earth and their beautiful trinity!
Kyrle and Saville went wandering on, slow pacing the surf-beat shore,
And he stumbled not, for she chose the path, and heavy his arm hung o’er
Her delicate shoulders; so faithfully, so spaniel-humble she led,
Kyrle had not dashed his foot on a stone since the vernal day they were wed.
Fair is the dawn, when the half-waked robins closelier nestle and croon,
Fair, but faint by the smiting white supernal splendor of noon,
And they who but warble of “Love’s Young Dream” methinks can never have known
The gordian tie of an older love, where shadow and substance have grown
Incorporate utterly, not as the moss clings into the crannied stone,
But knitted with intimate penetrant pangs, as bone knitteth into bone,
By the hours when shuddering nature brings to racking reluctant birth
Another soul to unravel anew the painful riddle of earth,—
By the nights in the chamber of sickness when the horror of death cleaves through,
And one fears to wipe or to leave unwiped the brow of its clustering dew,—
By the time when the last hard gasp is hushed and the poor little body lies still—
O God! I have not forgotten! Let any write of it who will!
By the kisses that leaven the soddenest lives, the kisses that stab as with spears
Of rapture the dull integument of the sordid and leaden-paced years,
Kisses for which full many a man and maiden have counted it well
To court dishonor and death and burn forever in burning hell,—
Shall a slight thing come to dissever the twain cemented thus heart to heart?
Shall they sundered be though earth divides? Can God even drive them apart?
’Tis said that not overmuch do they speak, lovers long happily wed,—
Nay, ’twere superfluous,—where is the need? since all that the one would have said
The other discerns in a tangent tone, a sigh, or a lifted lash,
Whose hidden intent doth cycle and spread as the waves from a pebble’s plash,—
But not as yet could this pair dispense with the word’s mere pleasure and need,
Nor in silence commune, which accomplishment is a matter of lustrums indeed,
And Kyrle, sense-hampered and shorn of sight, delighted forever to hark
Saville, like Elaine, embroidering the velvety shield of the dark,—
She told how a race serenely pure dwelt in some fury-fed spark,
How a demon-brood infested the whitest orb of the glittering arc,—
How the wandering Pleiad was she herself, who had long, long ages ago
Resolved to dip to the dear dim earth, rocking so tiny below,
And had fearfully waited where comets whirred and planets loomed monstrous and grim,
Waiting the silvery summons of Love,—waiting for him, for him!
And she fretted oft at the noble verse of The Book—“There shall be no night”—
For what were a day everlasting, garishly, brazenly bright,
To this tablature soft and Egyptian, charactered over with light,
Where the mind in the giant science trained, the lore of the terrible stars,
Swings confident past the asteroids slight, past neighboring Venus and Mars,
Out where each diamond grain of dust is a throbbing and thousand-fold world,
And the intellect, steady and poised at first, is faster and faster whirled
’Till it staggers and swoons in the awful void, and trembling and over-awed
Flies as a child to its father to the tenderer thought of God.
And partly she worshiped the night because she was liker her husband then,—
More than himself, she scarce could see,—the star-seed, and now and again
A lamp in a cottage, a Stygian boat, and ever the refluent line
Of the little sad waves that followed them, seeming to murmur and pine
And beg for an alms, a dole, from her too munificent share,—
She could weep in the midst of her happiness, hearing that endless prayer,—
There had been a time she had walked alone by the miserly sea, she said,
And for one pale pearl from its caverns dim herself had begged vainly instead;
She had woven a song, a trifling strain, of that starved and insatiate time,—
Would he hear the thing? she was something gifted, ’twas said, in music and rhyme.
ON THE BEACH.
The ocean is life and the beach
Is time, and days are the waves
That heavily each over each,
Now wild when the equinox raves,
Now languid in summer, do still
Curl green with the coil of a snake,
And ponderous, cruel, and chill,
In laughter and mockery break.
I hoped long ago that a wave
Might bring to me jetsam of price,—
What tapestries silken and brave,
What chests full of Indian spice
I fancied were destined for me
As I ran to and fro on the strand
In search of the treasures the sea
Must certainly bring to my hand.
But thousands of waves have come in,
Mere bubbles and foam as their freight,—
Oh, weary the watching has been,
And still do I hungrily wait,
For what? for a morsel of bread,
Though scarce if it comes within reach
Can I rouse from this apathy dead,
So famished I wait on the beach!
And Kyrle mused silent, while slowly his mind, as whelmed in the gulf-stream’s drift,
Swirled far in a vague speculation: This poetic, this perilous gift,
Whose owner may dwell in the ultimate stars and is free of a fairy-knoll,
Who heareth the grass give thanks to the rain, who readeth a dragon-fly’s soul,
Who trembles at night to list the winds conspire and whisper and plot,
Who of choice is blind to all false foul things and seeth but that which is not,
How can a creature like this endure humanity’s sordid lot—
How sink from its rosy and opal haunts in filmy Elysian tracts
To life and its commoner uses, its hard mathematical facts?
That song of Saville’s—she had suffered, be sure; one could hearken the ruddy slow drip
From a heart which relentless Fate had crushed in mortal implacable grip,—
Ah, well! we are born to suffer,—we are bound in an iron spiked wheel
And roll down a slope precipitous till the senses sicken and reel,
And haply their sorrows are lighter and less who can sing what their fellows but feel!
“Thanks for your song, my sweet,” he said, “it quickens and quivers with truth,—
And yet I must marvel a woman like you, dowered with beauty and youth,
Should have girded at loneliness blank yet brief, nor have guessed it was certain to end,—
Did you not know God in His own good time would happy deliverance send?”
The liquid plaint of the lapsing waves was the only sound for a space,
Then Saville: “My beauty you never have named till now,—shall I dexterous trace
Word-semblance thereof, and limn for you the lines of this poor fair face?”
“Not so!” laughed Kyrle, “too well I fathom your woman’s and poet’s ways—
The truth within you abideth not,—you would lure me into a maze,
And muddy your matchless beauty, miring it with dispraise!”
“No, no!” quoth Saville, “Oh, I should not dare!—What, speak of my person a lie,
Defaming the charms which had you but seen I surely had won you by?
Nay, dear heart, shall I paint for you a meteor’s arrowy flight,
The captain jewels that blaze serene in the tiara of night,
And not do justice to this my beauty and bring it full plain to your sight?
For I am beautiful,—amethyst clear are mine eyes, and yet amaranth deep,
Violets held by a nixie’s hand under the liquid sweep
Of a brook, little wells where truth celestial lieth in summery sleep,
And my hair glints gold as our marriage ring, and lifts in a shimmering cloud
Over a face that is girlish fair, candid and noble-browed,
Yet ’ware of its own perfections high, and some thing haughty and proud,
Scarce warmer in tint than the cornel’s leaf or a runlet’s eddying foam
’Till your voice or touch calls the straying blood back to its natural home,
And then,—not the heart of a half-blown rose holds ever a hue so sweet
As the pink in the cheek of a woman where youth and happiness meet!”
“I am as a wanton boy who rifles the trillium’s marshy bed,
And wins unweeting an orchid rare, sacred, dove-shapen instead,—
I, presumptuous, kneel at your shrine, abasing my penitent head!”
“Yet what is Beauty unknown of Love? Naught but a sea-lamp unfed,
Uninformed by the golden oil and flame, a dark in the dark overhead,
No beacon to save the mariner’s bones from seeking the bones of the dead,—
And I was not always so beautiful, dear; the flush and the light to my face
Came as the sun strikes rosily through some cold alabastrian vase
With the first swift words that I heard you say, and ’twas under your quickening kiss
That I grew to be as adorable, love, as parian-perfect as this!”
