Poems

BOPEEP: A PASTORAL

“O, to what uses shall we putThe wildweed flower that simply blows?And is there any moral shutWithin the bosom of the rose?”Tennyson.IShe lies upon the soft, enamoured grass,I’ the wooing shelter of an apple-tree,And at her feet the trancéd brook is glass,And in the blossoms over her the beeHangs charméd of his sordid industry;For love of her the light wind will not pass.IIHer golden hair, blown over her red lips,That seem two rose-leaves softly breathed apart,Athwart her rounded throat like sunshine slips;Her small hand, resting on her beating heart,The crook that tells her peaceful shepherd-artScarce keeps with light and tremulous finger-tips.IIIShe is as fair as any shepherdessThat ever was in mask or Christmas scene:Bright silver spangles hath she on her dress,And of her red-heeled shoes appears the sheen;And she hath ribbons of such blue or greenAs best suits pastoral people’s comeliness.IVShe sleeps, and it is in the month of May,And the whole land is full of the delightOf music and sweet scents; and all the dayThe sun is gold; the moon is pearl all night,And like a paradise the world is bright,And like a young girl’s hopes the world is gay.VSo waned the hours; and while her beauteous sleepWas blest with many a happy dream of Love,Untended still, her silly, vagrant sheepAfar from that young shepherdess did rove,Along the vales and through the gossip grove,O’er daisied meads and up the thymy steep.VIThen (for it happens oft when harm is nigh,Our dreams grow haggard till at last we wake)She thought that from the little runnel byThere crept upon a sudden forth a snake,And stung her hand, and fled into the brake;Whereat she sprang up with a bitter cry,VIIAnd wildly over all that place did look,And could not spy her ingrate, wanton flock,–Not there among tall grasses by the brook,Not there behind the mossy-bearded rock;And pitiless Echo answered with a mockWhen she did sorrow that she was forsook.VIIIAlas! the scattered sheep might not be found,And long and loud that gentle maid did weep,Till in her blurréd sight the hills went round,And, circling far, field, wood, and stream did sweep;And on the ground the miserable BopeepFell and forgot her troubles in a swound.IXWhen she awoke, the sun long time had set,And all the land was sleeping in the moon,And all the flowers with dim, sad dews were wet,As they had wept to see her in that swoon.It was about the night’s low-breathing noon;Only the larger stars were waking yet.XBopeep, the fair and hapless shepherdess,Rose from her swooning in a sore dismay,And tried to smooth her damp and rumpled dress,That showed in truth a grievous disarray;Then where the brook the wan moon’s mirror lay,She laved her eyes, and curled each golden tress.XIAnd looking to her ribbons, if they wereAs ribbons of a shepherdess should be,She took the hat that she was wont to wear(Bedecked it was with ribbons flying freeAs ever man in opera might see),And set it on her curls of yellow hair.XII“And I will go and seek my sheep,” she said,“Through every distant land until I die;But when they bring me hither, cold and dead,Let me beneath these apple-blossoms lie,With this dear, faithful, lovely runnel nigh,Here, where my cru–cru–cruel sheep have fed.”XIIIThus sorrow and despair make bold Bopeep,And forth she springs, and hurries on her way:Across the lurking rivulet she can leap,No sombre forest shall her quest delay,No crooked vale her eager steps bewray:What dreadeth she that seeketh her lost sheep?XIVBy many a pond, where timorous water-birds,With clattering cries and throbbing wings, arose,By many a pasture, where the soft-eyed herdsLooked shadow-huge in their unmoved repose,Long through the lonesome night that sad one goesAnd fills the solitude with wailing words;XVSo that the little field-mouse dreams of harm,Snuggled away from harm beneath the weeds;The violet, sleeping on the clover’s arm,Wakes, and is cold with thoughts of dreadful deeds;The pensive people of the water-reedsHark with a mute and dolorous alarm.XVIAnd the fond hearts of all the turtle-dovesAre broken in compassion of her woe,And every tender little bird that lovesFeels in his breast a sympathetic throe;And flowers are sad wherever she may go,And hoarse with sighs the waterfalls and groves.XVIIThe pale moon droppeth low; star after starGrows faint and slumbers in the gray of dawn;And still she lingers not, but hurries far,Till in a dreary wilderness withdrawnThrough tangled woods she lorn and lost moves on,Where griffins dire and dreadful dragons are.XVIIIHer ribbons all are dripping with the dew,Her red-heeled shoes are torn, and stained with mire,Her tender arms the angry sharpness rueOf many a scraggy thorn and envious brier;And poor Bopeep, with no sweet pity nigh her,Wrings her small hands, and knows not what to do.XIXAnd on that crude and rugged ground she sinks,And soon her seeking had been ended there,But through the trees a fearful glimmer shrinks,And of a hermit’s dwelling she is ’ware:At the dull pane a dull-eyed taper blinks,Drowsed with long vigils and the morning air.XXThither she trembling moves, and at the doorFalls down, and cannot either speak or stir:The hermit comes,–with no white beard before,Nor coat of skins, nor cap of shaggy fur:It was a comely youth that lifted her,And to his hearth, and to his breakfast, bore.XXIArrayed he was in princeliest attire,And of as goodly presence sooth was heAs any little maiden might admire,Or any king-beholding cat might see“My poor Bopeep,” he sigheth piteously,“Rest here, and warm you at a hermit’s fire.”XXIIShe looked so beautiful, there, mute and white,He kissed her on the lips and on the eyes(The most a prince could do in such a plight);But chiefly gazed on her in still surprise,And when he saw her lily eyelids rise,For him the whole world had no fairer sight.XXIII“Rude is my fare: a bit of venison steak,A dish of honey and a glass of wine,With clean white bread, is the poor feast I make.Be served, I pray: I think this flask is fine,”He said. “Hard is this hermit life of mine:This day I will its weariness forsake.”XXIVAnd then he told her how it chanced that he,King Cole’s son, in that forest held his court,And the sole reason that there seemed to beWas, he was being hermit there for sport;But he confessed the life was not his forte,And therewith both laughed out right jollily.XXVAnd sly Bopeep forgot her sheep againIn gay discourse with that engaging youth:Love hath such sovran remedies for pain!But then he was a handsome prince, in truth,And both were young, and both were silly, sooth,And everything to Love but love seems vain.XXVIThey took them down the silver-claspéd bookThat this young anchorite’s predecessor kept,–A holy seer,–and through it they did look;Sometimes their idle eyes together crept,Sometimes their lips; but still the leaves they swept,Until they found a shepherd’s pictured crook.XXVIIAnd underneath was writ it should befallOn such a day, in such a month and year,A maiden fair, a young prince brave and tall,By such a chance should come together here.They were the people, that was very clear:“O love,” the prince said, “let us read it all!”XXVIIIAnd thus the hermit’s prophecy ran on:Though she her lost sheep wist not where to find,Yet should she bid her weary care begone,And banish every doubt from her sweet mind:They, with their little snow-white tails behind,Homeward would go, if they were left alone.XXIXThey closed the book, and in her happy eyesThe prince read truth and love forevermore,–Better than any hermit’s prophecies!They passed together from the cavern’s door;Embraced, they turned to look at it once more,And over it beheld the glad sun rise,XXXThat streamed before them aisles of dusk and goldUnder the song-swept arches of the wood,And forth they went, tranced in each other’s hold,Down through that rare and luminous solitude,Their happy hearts enchanted in the moodOf morning, and of May, and romance old.XXXISometimes the saucy leaves would kiss her cheeks,And he must kiss their wanton kiss away;To die beneath her feet the wood-flower seeks,The quivering aspen feels a fine dismay,And many a scented blossom on the sprayIn odorous sighs its passionate longing speaks.XXXIIAnd forth they went down to that stately stream,Bowed over by the ghostly sycamores(Awearily, as if some heavy dreamHeld them in languor), but whose opulent shoresWith pearléd shells and dusts of precious oresWere tremulous brilliance in the morning beam;XXXIIIWhere waited them, beside the lustrous sand,A silk-winged shallop, sleeping on the flood;And smoothly wafted from the hither strand,Across the calm, broad stream they lightly rode,Under them still the silver fishes stood;The eager lilies, on the other land,XXXIVBeckonéd them; but where the castle shoneWith diamonded turrets and a wallOf gold-embedded pearl and costly stone,Their vision to its peerless splendor thrallThe maiden fair, the young prince brave and tall,Thither with light, unlingering feet pressed on.XXXVA gallant train to meet this loving pair,In silk and steel, moves from the castle door,And up the broad and ringing castle stairThey go with gleeful minstrelsy before,And “Hail our prince and princess evermore!”From all the happy throng is greeting there.XXXVIAnd in the hall the prince’s sire, King Cole,Sitting with crown and royal ermine on,His fiddlers three behind with pipe and bowl,Rises and moves to lift his kneeling son,Greeting his bride with kisses many a one,And tears and laughter from his jolly soul;XXXVIIThen both his children to a window leadsThat over daisied pasture-land looks out,And shows Bopeep where her lost flock wide feeds,And every frolic lambkin leaps about.She hears Boy-Blue, that lazy shepherd, shout,Slow pausing from his pipe of mellow reeds;XXXVIIIAnd, turning, peers into her prince’s eyes;Then, caught and clasped against her prince’s heart,Upon her breath her answer wordless dies,And leaves her gratitude to sweeter art,–To lips from which the bloom shall never part,To looks wherein the summer never dies!

WHILE SHE SANG

IShe sang, and I heard the singing,Far out of the wretched past,Of meadow-larks in the meadow,In a breathing of the blast.Cold through the clouds of sunsetThe thin red sunlight shone,Staining the gloom of the woodlandWhere I walked and dreamed alone;And glinting with chilly splendorThe meadow under the hill,Where the lingering larks were lurkingIn the sere grass hid and still.Out they burst with their singing,Their singing so loud and gay;They made in the heart of OctoberA sudden ghastly May,That faded and ceased with their singing.The thin red sunlight paled,And through the boughs above meThe wind of evening wailed;–Wailed, and the light of eveningOut of the heaven died;And from the marsh by the riverThe lonesome killdee cried.IIThe song is done, but a phantomOf music haunts the chords,That thrill with its subtile presence,And grieve for the dying words.And in the years that are perished,Far back in the wretched past,I see on the May-green meadowsThe white snow falling fast;–Falling, and falling, and falling,As still and cold as death,On the bloom of the odorous orchard,On the small, meek flowers beneath;On the roofs of the village-houses,On the long, silent street,Where its plumes are soiled and brokenUnder the passing feet;On the green crest of the woodland,On the cornfields far apart;On the cowering birds in the gable,And on my desolate heart.

A POET

From wells where Truth in secret layHe saw the midnight stars by day.“O marvellous gift!” the many cried,“O cruel gift!” his voice replied.The stars were far, and cold, and high,That glimmered in the noonday sky;He yearned toward the sun in vain,That warmed the lives of other men.

CONVENTION

He falters on the threshold,She lingers on the stair:Can it be that was his footstep?Can it be that she is there?Without is tender yearning,And tender love is within;They can hear each other’s heart-beats,But a wooden door is between.

THE POET’S FRIENDS

The robin sings in the elm;The cattle stand beneath,Sedate and grave, with great brown eyesAnd fragrant meadow-breath.They listen to the flattered bird,The wise-looking, stupid things;And they never understand a wordOf all the robin sings.

NO LOVE LOST.

A ROMANCE OF TRAVEL

1862Bertha–Writing from VeniceIOn your heart I feign myself fallen–ah, heavier burden,Darling, of sorrow and pain than ever shall rest there! I take youInto these friendless arms of mine, that you cannot escape me;Closer and closer I fold you, and tell you all, and you listenJust as you used at home, and you let my sobs and my silenceSpeak, when the words will not come–and you understand and forgive me.– Ah! no, no! but I write, with the wretched bravado of distance,What you must read unmoved by the pity too far for entreaty.IIWell, I could never have loved him, but when he sought me and asked me,–When to the men that offered their lives, the love of a womanSeemed so little to give!–I promised the love that he asked me,Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips, and thought him my hero.Afterward came the doubt, and out of long question, self-knowledge,–Came that great defeat, and the heart of the nation was withered;Mine leaped high with the awful relief won of death. But the horror,Then, of the crime that was wrought in that guilty moment of rapture,–Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet that struck him,–Clung to me day and night, and dreaming I saw him forever,Looking through battle-smoke with sorrowful eyes of upbraiding,Or, in the moonlight lying gray, or dimly approaching,Holding toward me his arms, that still held nearer and nearer,Folded about me at last … and I would I had died in the fever!–Better then than now, and better than ever hereafter!IIIWeary as some illusion of fever to me was the ocean–Storm-swept, scourged with bitter rains, and wandering alwaysOnward from sky to sky with endless processions of surges,Knowing not life nor death, but since the light was, the first day,Only enduring unrest till the darkness possess it, the last day.Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living:All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness;Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembranceOf the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit,–the troubleOf a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created,–And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion,Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness.Naught but the dark in my soul remained to me constant and real,Growing and taking the thoughts bereft of happier uses,Blotting all sense of lapse from the days that with swift iterationWere and were not. They fable the bright days the fleetest:These that had nothing to give, that had nothing to bring or to promise,Went as one day alone. For me was no alternationSave from my dull despair to wild and reckless rebellion,When the regret for my sin was turned to ruthless self-pity–When I hated him whose love had made me its victim,Through his faith and my falsehood yet claiming me. Then I was smittenWith so great remorse, such grief for him, and compassion,That, if he could have come back to me, I had welcomed and loved himMore than man ever was loved. Alas, for me that anotherHolds his place in my heart evermore! Alas, that I listenedWhen the words, whose daring lured my spirit and lulled it,Seemed to take my blame away with my will of resistance!Do not make haste to condemn me: my will was the will of a woman,–Fain to be broken by love. Yet unto the last I endeavoredWhat I could to be faithful still to the past and my penance;And as we stood that night in the old Roman garden together–By the fountain whose passionate tears but now had implored meIn his pleading voice–and he waited my answer, I told himAll that had been before of delusion and guilt, and conjured himNot to darken his fate with mine. The costly endeavorOnly was subtler betrayal. O me, from the pang of confession,Sprang what strange delight, as I tore from its lurking that horror–Brooded upon so long–with the hope that at last I might see itThrough his eyes, unblurred by the tears that disordered my vision!Oh, with what rapturous triumph I humbled my spirit before him,That he might lift me and soothe me, and make that dreary remembrance,All this confused present, seem only some sickness of fancy,Only a morbid folly, no certain and actual trouble!If from that refuge I fled with words of too feeble denial–Bade him hate me, with sobs that entreated his tenderest pity,Moved mute lips and left the meaningless farewell unuttered–She that never has loved, alone can wholly condemn me.IVHow could he other than follow? My heart had bidden him follow,Nor had my lips forbidden; and Rome yet glimmered behind me,When my soul yearned towards his from the sudden forlornness of absence.Everywhere his face looked from vanishing glimpses of faces,Everywhere his voice reached my senses in fugitive cadence.Sick, through the storied cities, with wretched hopes, and upbraidingsOf my own heart for its hopes, I went from wonder to wonder,Blind to them all, or only beholding them wronged, and related,Through some trick of wayward thought, to myself and my trouble.Not surprise nor regret, but a fierce, precipitate gladnessSent the blood to my throbbing heart when I found him in Venice.“Waiting for you,” he whispered; “you would so.” I answered him nothing.VFather, whose humor grows more silent and ever more absent(Changed in all but love for me since the death of my mother),Willing to see me contented at last, and trusting us wholly,Left us together alone in our world of love and of beauty.So, by noon and by night, we two have wandered in Venice,Where the beautiful lives in vivid and constant caprices,Yet, where the charm is so perfect that nothing fantastic surprisesMore than in dreams, and one’s life with the life of the city is blendedIn a luxurious calm, and the tumult without and beyond itSeems but the emptiest fable of vain aspiration and labor.Yes, from all that makes this Venice sole among cities,Peerless forever,–the still lagoons that sleep in the sunlight,Lulled by their island-bells; the night’s mysterious watersLit through their shadowy depths by stems of splendor, that blossomInto the lamps that float, like flamy lotuses, over;Narrow and secret canals, that dimly gleaming and gloomingUnder palace-walls and numberless arches of bridges,List no sound but the dip of the gondolier’s oar and his warningCried from corner to corner; the sad, superb CanalazzoMirroring marvellous grandeur and beauty, and dreaming of gloryOut of the empty homes of her lords departed; the footwaysWandering sunless between the walls of the houses, and stealingGlimpses, through rusted cancelli, of lurking greenness of gardens,Wild-grown flowers and broken statues and mouldering frescos;Thoroughfares filled with traffic, and throngs ever ebbing and flowingTo and from the heart of the city, whose pride and devotion,Lifting high the bells of St. Mark’s like prayers unto heaven,Stretch a marble embrace of palaces toward the cathedralOrient, gorgeous, and flushed with color and light, like the morning!–From the lingering waste that is not yet ruin in Venice,And her phantasmal show, through all, of being and doing–Came a strange joy to us, untouched by regret for the idleDays without yesterdays that died into nights without morrows.Here, in our paradise of love we reigned, new-created,As in the youth of the world, in the days before evil and conscience.Ah! in our fair, lost world was neither fearing nor doubting,Neither the sickness of old remorse nor the gloom of foreboding,–Only the glad surrender of all individual beingUnto him whom I loved, and in whose tender possession,Fate-free, my soul reposed from its anguish.– Of these things I write youAs of another’s experience; part of my own they no longerSeem to me now, through the doom that darkens the past like the future.VIGolden the sunset gleamed, above the city behind us,Out of a city of clouds as fairy and lovely as Venice,While we looked at the fishing-tails of purple and yellowFar on the rim of the sea, whose light and musical surgesBroke along the sands with a faint, reiterant sadness.But, when the sails had darkened into black wings, through the twilightSweeping away into night–past the broken tombs of the HebrewsHomeward we sauntered slowly, through dew-sweet, blossomy alleys;So drew near the boat by errant and careless approaches,Entered, and left with indolent pulses the Lido behind us.All the sunset had paled, and the campanili of VeniceRose like the masts of a mighty fleet moored there in the water.Lights flashed furtively to and fro through the deepening twilight.Massed in one thick shade lay the Gardens; the numberless islandsLay like shadows upon the lagoons. And on us as we loiteredBy their enchanted coasts, a spell of ineffable sweetnessFell and made us at one with them; and silent and blissfulShadows we seemed, that drifted on through a being of shadow,Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded by hope or remembrance.Yet we knew the beautiful night, as it grew from the evening:Far beneath us and far above us the vault of the heavensGlittered and darkened; and now the moon, that had haunted the daylightThin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her fulness of splendor,And over all the lagoons fell the silvery rain of the moonbeams,As in the song the young girls sang while their gondolas passed us,–Sang in the joy of love, or youth’s desire of loving.Balmy night of the South! O perfect night of the Summer!Night of the distant dark, of the near and tender effulgence!–How from my despair are thy peace and loveliness frightened!For, while our boat lay there at the will of the light undulations,Idle as if our mood imbued and controlled it, yet everSeeming to bear us on athwart those shining expansesOut to shining seas beyond pursuit or returning–There, while we lingered, and lingered, and would not break from our rapture,Down the mirrored night another gondola driftedNearer and slowly nearer our own, and moonlighted facesStared. And that sweet trance grew a rigid and dreadful possession,Which, if no dream indeed, yet mocked with such semblance of dreaming,That, as it happens in dreams, when a dear face, stooping to kiss us,Takes, ere the lips have touched, some malign and horrible aspect,His face faded away, and the face of the Dead–of that other–Flashed on mine, and writhing, through every change of emotion,–Wild amaze and scorn, accusation and pitiless mocking,–Vanished into the swoon whose blackness encompassed and hid me.Philip–To BerthaI am not sure, I own, that if first I had seen my delusionWhen I saw you, last night, I should be so ready to give youNow your promises back, and hold myself nothing above you,That it is mine to offer a freedom you never could ask for.Yet, believe me, indeed, from no bitter heart I release you:You are as free of me now as though I had died in the battle,Or as I never had lived. Nay, if it is mine to forgive you,Go without share of the blame that could hardly be all upon your side.Ghosts are not sensitive things; yet, after my death in the papers,Sometimes a harrowing doubt assailed this impalpable essence:Had I done so well to plead my cause at that moment,When your consent must be yielded less to the lover than soldier?“Not so well,” I was answered by that ethereal conscienceGhosts have about them, “and not so nobly or wisely as might be.”– Truly, I loved you, then, as now I love you no longer.I was a prisoner then, and this doubt in the languor of sicknessCame; and it clung to my convalescence, and grew to the purpose,After my days of captivity ended, to seek you and solve it,And, if I haply had erred, to undo the wrong, and release you.Well, you have solved me the doubt. I dare to trust that you wept me,Just a little, at first, when you heard of me dead in the battle?For we were plighted, you know, and even in this saintly humor,I would scarce like to believe that my loss had merely relieved you.Yet, I say, it was prudent and well not to wait for my comingBack from the dead. If it may be I sometimes had cherished a fancyThat I had won some right to the palm with the pang of the martyr,–Fondly intended, perhaps, some splendor of self-abnegation,–Doubtless all that was a folly which merciful chances have spared me.No, I am far from complaining that Circumstance coolly has orderedMatters of tragic fate in such a commonplace fashion.How do I know, indeed, that the easiest isn’t the best way?Friendly adieux end this note, and our little comedy with it.Fanny–To ClaraIYes, I promised to write, but how shall I write to you, darling?Venice we reached last Monday, wild for canals and for color,Palaces, prisons, lagoons, and gondolas, bravoes, and moonlight,All the mysterious, dreadful, beautiful things in existence.Fred had joined us at Naples, insuff’rably knowing and travelled,Wise in the prices of things and great at tempestuous bargains,Rich in the costly nothing our youthful travellers buy here,At a prodigious outlay of time and money and trouble;Utter confusion of facts, and talking the wildest of pictures,–Pyramids, battle-fields, bills, and examinations of luggage,Passports, policemen, porters, and how he got through his tobacco,–Ignorant, handsome, full-bearded, brown, and good-natured as ever:Annie thinks him perfect, and I well enough for a brother.Also, a friend of Fred’s came with us from Naples to Venice;And, altogether, I think, we are rather agreeable people,For we’ve been taking our pleasure at all times in perfect good-humor;Which is an excellent thing that you’ll understand when you’ve travelled,Seen Recreation dead-beat and cross, and learnt what a burdenFrescos, for instance, can be, and, in general, what an afflictionLife is apt to become among the antiques and old masters.Venice we’ve thoroughly done, and it’s perfectly true of the pictures–Titians and Tintorettos, and Palmas and Paul Veroneses;Neither are gondolas fictions, but verities, hearse-like and swan-like,Quite as the heart could wish. And one finds, to one’s infinite comfort,Venice just as unique as one’s fondest visions have made it:Palaces and mosquitoes rise from the water together,And, in the city’s streets, the salt-sea is ebbing and flowingSeveral inches or more.– Ah! let me not wrong thee, O Venice!Fairest, forlornest, and saddest of all the cities, and dearest!Dear, for my heart has won here deep peace from cruel confusion;And in this lucent air, whose night is but tenderer noon-day,Fear is forever dead, and hope has put on the immortal!– There! and you need not laugh. I’m coming to something directly.One thing: I’ve bought you a chain of the famous fabric of Venice–Something peculiar and quaint, and of such a delicate textureThat you must wear it embroidered upon a riband of velvet,If you would have the effect of its exquisite fineness and beauty.“Isn’t it very frail?” I asked of the workman who made it.“Strong enough, if you will, to bind a lover, signora,”–With an expensive smile. ’Twas bought near the Bridge of Rialto.(Shylock, you know.) In our shopping, Aunt May and Fred do the talking:Fred begins always in French, with the most delicious effront’ry,Only to end in profoundest humiliation and English.Aunt, however, scorns to speak any tongue but Italian:“Quanto per these ones here?” and “What did you say was the prezzo?”“Ah! troppo caro! Too much! No, no! Don’t I tell you it’s troppo?”All the while insists that the gondolieri shall show usWhat she calls Titian’s palazzo, and pines for the house of Othello.Annie, the dear little goose, believes in Fred and her motherWith an enchanting abandon. She doesn’t at all understand them,But she has some twilight views of their cleverness. Father is quiet,Now and then ventures some French when he fancies that nobody hears him,In an aside to the valet-de-place–I never detect him–Buys things for mother and me with a quite supernatural sweetness,Tolerates all Fred’s airs, and is indispensably pleasant.IIPrattling on of these things, which I think cannot interest deeply,So I hold back in my heart its dear and wonderful secret(Which I must tell you at last, however I falter to tell you),Fain to keep it all my own for a little while longer,–Doubting but it shall lose some part of its strangeness and sweetness,Shared with another, and fearful that even you may not find itJust the marvel that I do–and thus turn our friendship to hatred.Sometimes it seems to me that this love, which I feel is eternal,Must have begun with my life, and that only an absence was endedWhen we met and knew in our souls that we loved one another.For from the first was no doubt. The earliest hints of the passion,Whispered to girlhood’s tremulous dream, may be mixed with misgiving,But, when the very love comes, it bears no vagueness of meaning;Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt by the ignorant senses,Knowing but looks and utterance) soul unto soul makes confession,Silence to silence speaks. And I think that this subtile assurance,Yet unconfirmed from without, is even sweeter and dearerThan the perfected bliss that comes when the words have been spoken.– Not that I’d have them unsaid, now! But ’t was delicious to ponderAll the miracle over, and clasp it, and keep it, and hide it,–While I beheld him, you know, with looks of indifferent languor,Talking of other things, and felt the divine contradictionTrouble my heart below!And yet, if no doubt touched our passion,Do not believe for that, our love has been wholly unclouded.All best things are ours when pain and patience have won them:Peace itself would mean nothing but for the strife that preceded;Triumph of love is greatest, when peril of love has been sorest.(That’s to say, I dare say. I’m only repeating what he said.)Well, then, of all wretched things in the world, a mystery, Clara,Lurked in this life dear to mine, and hopelessly held us asunderWhen we drew nearest together, and all but his speech said, “I love you.”Fred had known him at college, and then had found him at Naples,After several years,–and called him a capital fellow.Thus far his knowledge went, and beyond this began to run shallowOver troubled ways, and to break into brilliant conjecture,Harder by far to endure than the other’s reticent absence–Absence wherein at times he seemed to walk like one troubledBy an uneasy dream, whose spell is not broken with waking,But it returns all day with a vivid and sudden recurrence,Like a remembered event. Of the past that was closest the present,This we knew from himself: He went at the earliest summons,When the Rebellion began, and falling, terribly wounded,Into the enemy’s hands, after ages of sickness and prison,Made his escape at last; and, returning, found all his virtuesGrown out of recognition and shining in posthumous splendor,–Found all changed and estranged, and, he fancied, more wonder than welcome.So, somewhat heavy of heart, and disabled for war, he had wanderedHither to Europe for perfecter peace. Abruptly his silence,Full of suggestion and sadness, made here a chasm between us;But we spanned the chasm with conversational bridges,Else talked all around it, and feigned an ignorance of it,With that absurd pretence which is always so painful, or comic,Just as you happen to make it or see it.In spite of our fictions,Severed from his by that silence, my heart grew ever more anxious,Till last night when together we sat in Piazza San Marco(Then, when the morrow must bring us parting–forever, it might be),Taking our ices al fresco. Some strolling minstrels were singingAirs from the Trovatore. I noted with painful observance,With the unwilling minuteness at such times absolute torture,All that brilliant scene, for which I cared nothing, before me:Dark-eyed Venetian leoni regarding the forestieriWith those compassionate looks of gentle and curious wonderHome-keeping Italy’s nations bend on the voyaging races,–Taciturn, indolent, sad, as their beautiful city itself is;Groups of remotest English–not just the traditional English(Lavish Milor is no more, and your travelling Briton is frugal)–English, though, after all, with the Channel always between them,Islanded in themselves, and the Continent’s sociable races;Country-people of ours–the New World’s confident children,Proud of America always, and even vain of the TroublesAs of disaster laid out on a scale unequalled in Europe;Polyglot Russians that spoke all languages better than natives;White-coated Austrian officers, anglicized Austrian dandies;Gorgeous Levantine figures of Greek, and Turk, and Albanian–These, and the throngs that moved through the long arcades and Piazza,Shone on by numberless lamps that flamed round the perfect Piazza,Jewel-like set in the splendid frame of this beautiful picture,Full of such motley life, and so altogether Venetian.Then we rose and walked where the lamps were blanched by the moonlightFlooding the Piazzetta with splendor, and throwing in shadowAll the façade of Saint Mark’s, with its pillars, and horses, and arches;But the sculptured frondage, that blossoms over the archesInto the forms of saints, was touched with tenderest lucence,And the angel that stands on the crest of the vast campanileBathed his golden vans in the liquid light of the moonbeams.Black rose the granite pillars that lift the Saint and the Lion;Black sank the island campanili from distance to distance;Over the charmèd scene there brooded a presence of music,Subtler than sound, and felt, unheard, in the depth of the spirit.How can I gather and show you the airy threads of enchantmentWoven that night round my life and forever wrought into my being,As in our boat we glided away from the glittering city?Dull at heart I felt, and I looked at the lights in the water,Blurring their brilliance with tears, while the tresses of eddying seaweed,Whirled in the ebbing tide, like the tresses of sea-maidens driftingSeaward from palace-haunts, in the moonshine glistened and darkened.Sad and vague were my thoughts, and full of fear was the silence;And, when he turned to speak at last, I trembled to hear him,Feeling he now must speak of his love, and his life and its secret,–Now that the narrowing chances had left but that cruel conclusion,Else the life-long ache of a love and a trouble unuttered.Better, my feebleness pleaded, the dreariest doubt that had vexed me,Than my life left nothing, not even a doubt to console it;But, while I trembled and listened, his broken words crumbled to silence,And, as though some touch of fate had thrilled him with warning,Suddenly from me he turned. Our gondola slipped from the shadowUnder a ship lying near, and glided into the moonlight,Where, in its brightest lustre, another gondola rested.I saw two lovers there, and he, in the face of the woman,Saw what has made him mine, my own belovèd, forever!Mine!–but through what tribulation, and awful confusion of spirit!Tears that I think of with smiles, and sighs I remember with laughter,Agonies full of absurdity, keen, ridiculous anguish,Ending in depths of blissful shame, and heavenly transports!IIIWhite, and estranged as a man who has looked on a spectre, he mutelySank to the place at my side, nor while we returned to the cityUttered a word of explaining, or comment, or comfort, but only,With his good-night, incoherently craved my forgiveness and patience,Parted, and left me to spend the night in hysterical vigils,Tending to Annie’s supreme dismay, and postponing our journeyOne day longer at least; for I went to bed in the morning,Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and the pleasures of travel,Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get any better.Later, however, I rallied, when Fred, with a maddening prologueTouching the cause of my sickness, including his fever at Jaffa,Told me that some one was waiting; and could he see me a moment?See me? Certainly not. Or,–yes. But why did he want to?So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown and an arm-chair,Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye and of cheek, I received him–Willing to touch and reproach, and half-melted myself by my pathos,Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly forgot the next instant,When, with electric words, few, swift, and vivid, he brought me,Through a brief tempest of tears, to this heaven of sunshine and sweetness.Yes, he had looked on a ghost–the phantom of love that was perished!–When, last night, he beheld the scene of which I have told you.For to the woman he saw there, his troth had been solemnly plightedEre he went to the war. His return from the dead found her absentIn the belief of his death; and hither to Europe he followed,–Followed to seek her, and keep, if she would, the promise between them,Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to break it and free her.Then, at Naples we met, and the love that, before he was conscious,Turned his life toward mine, laid torturing stress to the purposeWhither it drove him forever, and whence forever it swerved him.How could he tell me his love, with this terrible burden upon him?How could he linger near me, and still withhold the avowal?And what ruin were that, if the other were doubted unjustly,And should prove fatally true! With shame, he confessed he had faltered,Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes that were bitter with treason,Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared him.Her love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosomWith a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting,Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that phantomProved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight,Such as speech with the lady’s father.And now, could I pardon–Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought so.And we are all of us going to Lago di Como to-morrow,With an ulterior view at the first convenient Legation.Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred, whose sense of what’s properNever was touched till now, is shocked at my glad self-betrayals,And I am pointed out as an awful example to Annie,Figuring all she must never be. But, oh, if he loves me!–POSTSCRIPTSince, he has shown me a letter in which he absolves and forgives her(Philip, of course, not Fred; and the other, of course, and not Annie).Don’t you think him generous, noble, unselfish, heroic?L’Envoy.–Clara’s CommentWell, I’m glad, I am sure, if Fanny supposes she’s happy.I’ve no doubt her lover is good and noble–as men go.But, as regards his release of a woman who’d wholly forgot him,And whom he loved no longer, for one whom he loves, and who loves him,I don’t exactly see where the heroism commences.