* THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR BY JOHN COLLIER MCMXI f^W COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY JOHN COLLIER ©CI.A29384 / >- f' CONTENTS PAGE To Ardanna ix VISTAS FROM THE HIGHROAD Is It Enough ? 3 Primavera 4 Faith 5 Francisco Ferrer 6 Large Light 7 Isadora Duncan 8 Sunrise On Blood Mountain . . . .11 Edwin Kendall Cutter . . . . . .12 Crocus On the Appennines . . . . .12 rhe Awakening . -. 13 Leonardo Da Vinci 18 The Larger Will 19 Vista 19 The Steel Mill 20 The Holocaust of the Workers . . . .21 Dust Over the City 23 The Light Bearer 28 Sheareth Israel 30 The Garden of Lintoun 31 The Awakening of the East . . . • 32 The Garden 35 The Hour of Peace 40 Wind In the Bough 41 THE ETERNAL FORGES The Eternal Forges 45 Vain Heaven 47 The Mystical Sufficiency 48 V PAGE An Autumn Afternoon 49 Free Joe 51 The Indwelling Splendor 53 The Immortal Hour 54 Thanksgiving 56 The World and the Individual . . . .58 Deep Life 61 Wind of the Spirit .63 The Dark Weaver 64 Gloaming 65 Eire 67 TO D. W. ToD. W 71 THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR "A whisper of the secret tides upon another coast, The windy headlands of the soul, the lone sands of the mind." **And the Vision said unto me: 'I am as the centre, to the which all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation : but with thee it is not thus.' " — Dante : L« Vita Nuova. THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR TO ARDANNA I WORKER with me in this strange house of fire ! Lengthening my imperfections, while to thee I give temptation back, and sternly we Are held and whirled by duty and desire : With our deep doom our holiest hopes conspire. Our sin conspires in its ubiquity. We had tasted wells of pain, had seen the pyre Glow beyond shoreward waves, of childhood dead. Ere chance, that is one deed of Law Entire, Joined us who shall not part when earth is fled. Thence into life came our Eternity, And life on larger, statlier ways was led. We are dumb in joy ; but ah, what alchemy Makes gold at last the rudest path we tread ! II Grave Heart, constrained and myriad seem our days ; Yet the large eye sees only one lone ledge Scarred on a spray-stormed wall at ocean *s edge. One halting-place in migratory ways. And chance and change its imminent boundaries. Thence, O my Friend of winged heritage. We look into the yearning wondrous skies Unwavering : though the long detours may bear Us lonely through no gulfs the other flies ; Though lone transfigurations we may wear. And lone storm-battles in the stars may wage. And winged with alien passion we may flare Oblivious through dark dawns of distant age : Yet in the deep we are wed, our home is there. Ill For of the deep we are wed : ah, how we crave The meaning of that symbol called the grave ! Wed of the deep, a well-spring may we be For all realities of the salten sea. And salt our life and stern, and the grave dire ! For the sea rushes with all splendid fire. The grave is only Infinite Desire, And death the unheard, ineffable fleet tone Of Him, the Unseen and Sure, who cries the dawn. May we die deaths with all the days that fly. And may the springs be bitter till we die : May we bear well the burden which alone Gives wings to soar beside the living sun And in the purpose of the Nazarine Create anew what olden eyes have seen. Here on this distant, measureless, dark coast Rumorous with the sighing of worlds lost. We who, indissoluble, yearn to give Out of our weakness all that life may live. Claim but the human lot, kindled once more With fires that shone ten thousand years of yore For primal priest or in Gethsemane, Beacons around our wandering world today. IV Why do we who know Joy is the inner heart of the sundown. We who on earth below Would laugh away the old ascetic frown Till Life grow free; Why do we gaze into the onward years Of Life's eternity Whitening our April, still through a mist of tears? Ah, Comrade Mine, There never laughed a land Hke Greece of old. Pouring ripe wine Magnificently forth on sands of gold To the laughing God ! Yet never on fateful margin lorn and gray Of nemesis-mood. Moaned as in Greece of old the human lay ! They went with flowers And laughter and dance up to the Oracle, But the dim Powers Breathed in no sunlit sound their holy spell; And Greece, the Fountain, Flows for all life while onward ages crowd. For that its mountain Harbored the mist and drained the thunder-cloud; And Greece, the Portal, Shines evermore o'er laughing hosts that wait Glad and immortal Under the rainbow of tears and tragic fate. The Shadowy Pinion Sustained o'er Sappho and o'er Euripides, In dim dominion Endures, and binds our lowly lives to these. Whether God gave us Shadow at the heart that we might love the light; Whether to save us For Earth, our own Soul weds the unconquered night; xi Whether the Glory Lies nowhere hitherward of the shadowy tide And all our story Is homesick-haunted : Sorrow doth abide. But you, when darkling From out such eyes as dream beneath the fern By stream swift-sparkling, Comes your fawn-soul ; or when slow sunsets burn And under brows Earnest, and hair made luminous from the West, Your deep soul shows. You know what laughter crowneth all the rest. These are mere phantoms. You who saw the crowd Spreading one gala morn along a beach Rock-strewn, and Druid-old, and gray, and each Of all that Breton-gathering sang and flowed And was as tide-strown water, and how they glowed In colors that even memory scarce can teach And my words, never : you who saw that cloud Lighten in old-world heavens and fade away. Never to be recalled or understood. Although it feeds our wondering life for aye — You will receive these phantoms. Oh they reach In yearning toward the source of all our day ! Dreams, memory, mist of dawn ! Yet they beseech Faith for the mightiest hope that guides our way ! xu VISTAS FROM THE HIGHROAD Mistlike the long way wanders, Where far by ancient streams In dream the sower squanders Seed for our present dreams; Mistlike, which no man numbers. The conscript legions gray Stream through their waking slumbers: Their way becomes our way. IS IT ENOUGH ? I READ of the Alamo : In the desert, in the years That are melted like the snow. Where the ruined convent rears Lone above the indifferent plain, . Died the boldest of the bold. And a valor without stain Flared to glorious ashes cold. Only eighty years ago ! And as from another earth On the fervid Alamo Gazing past the gates of birth, "What the gain," I ask, "What use That for which the noblest died? Nature gathers but to loose. And her way is bland and wide. **In the mystic ways of her Whose impulsive children, we. Shout like waves upon a bar Soon abandoned by the sea, "Cling like leaves upon the bough Till her own frosts give surcease. What are all our valors now. Lost in that indifferent Peace? * 'Texas free, or Mexico — When the ice is melting fast And the nations are in flow. What avails an epic past?" Then the question turns within. There is dream and rivalry Battling on my field to win. Fealties for which I would die. Jaimtily my life I bear. And if battle bugles sung And the banners were in air, I should spring as Crockett sprung. Fall as he among the dead. Silent in a shattered breach : So the earnest ages tread. Things to die for given each ! PRIMAVERA SHE came from one invisible place that each Dreamer shall dream of till his life is done. She brought the vision men will die to reach. Then went away to lands beyond the sun. As Botticelli went into the night Still rapt in thought of Her who came in Spring, So to the homesickness of human sight She beckons, all its days of wandering. These intuitions hover, flash and go. As holy seasons of remembered fire Rise upon earth again. We dream and know — There is a goal for such divine desire ! FAITH ET it fade, the old form Of our longing transcendant ! At the heart of the storm Bides one Power Defendant Which has locked in the atom and sealed in the star The meaning, the mission, of things as they are. Oh, that Power Defendant Hid away, long ago. Deep-involved yet resplendant. Those fountains which throw Through the chambers unsounded of spirit and brain. Lost yet ever returning, their mystical rain. We have ranged earth and heaven. But call it not Faith : N'er for doftrine was given That marvellous Breath Which in child as in sage, in all ages, each land Hears the fountain far-playing, feels the touch of a hand. And defying the cerement Which the mind in its toil. Sick with endless deferment Has weaved, which the moil Of the myriad fierce forces of life-on-its-way Have entangled, looks up to the zenith of day. And beyond a white portal Which the eye has not seen Finds a fountain immortal. And its murmur, its sheen Are the murmur, the fire, of that fountain aye blown Through life's own inmost chamber. Faith's objedl is done. T FRANCISCO FERRER Executed at Barcelona, October 13, 1909 HEY shot him down, far off in ancient Spain. A gentle man, soft-voiced, and spirit-clear, A man like you and me, greater through pain. Holier, and happier far through conquered fear. They shot him down?, calm enemy of all wars. Herald of peace, who waged his lonely fight. They shot him down, cowards and murderers. They slew the herald, they cannot slay the light. Brothers, have we forgotten how late we dealt Fiercely, and wrenched the Southern Isles from Spain? I have seen Moro Castle, and I have knelt Where hundreds knelt never to rise again — Knelt as I knelt against a sun-warmed wall. Old-world, and harrowed with an old-world sign. Where brains were scattered with the leaden ball That bit the stone. And they had souls like mine ! He was an anarchist. Well, and so were we Who scourged Spain from the Caribbean shore. He fought at home, alone and terribly. What we drove from this West forevermore. He fought to save a nation from within. Grappled with monstrous vampires from the grave. Asked for his people what we need not win. Whose fathers won our freedom. Oh now they rave Dull, far-off, strange to us, those restless seas That broke our dungeon, and that are not done. Though feared and named by us as anarchies. Till the last mortal cavern sees the sun. And we, who cry because they shot him down — We are less happy, we have not conquered fear. Subtler, stranger our war which is not won. Oh that we had his epic chance and clear ! Oh that we heard a clarion-call, as they In old-world countries with their tangible foes ! We fight in multitudes and terribly And know not whither the endless battle goes. Only we bear a spark from earlier time. And in the simplified distance still may wait An age heroic, a clarion-call sublime. We are as bridges between Fate and Fate. LARGE LIGHT HINK, that no storm- wave e'er may shift One dreaming coral, far below. Till waves are laid and corals lift In snowlike shores more strong than snow. T Think, truly ! that all storms that rave. With thunder-light or whirlwind-leap. Drift quiet as a lapsing wave Across the enfolding heaven's deep. Then turn unto the magic glass And see large history taking form. With seas of waves that seethe and pass. With shattering of asonian storm : And, of that coral-lineage far One self-same link; and o'er that storm Lit by one same and changeless star; Find high thine heart, thy hope-fires warm. ISADORA DUNCAN I THE MODERN AGE O PRIESTESS of an unperish'd fire that glows To exstacy ere our mind can understand ! ^ O Life-Spring from a permanent stream that flows Even 'neath our famish' d land! We bless you for the mighty Thought you bring, ^• And for the dumb despairs your motions thrill To such glad life as in our dreams may sing. And which is singing still. W^ bless you for the token to us all You flash' d on our raised vision, through the dust Of staggering hours. O Lode-Star beautiful In skies that are not lost ! O'er road that is not lost! O'er April lands Where rains dance through the tide of human flowers. And sunrise, and the work of human hands Fulfill unspeakable hours ! Oh not a dream ! Though when you went away Such silence fell as long we had not known. Who had forgotten Silence in the fray — Oh out of silence grown. And from your dancing, from the awakening reed '- Of unheard music, from the beckoning hand Of your sweet summons, rise the desires that lead Into your land, our land ! II THE PERSONAL CRY Oh you bring anguish to Our weariness. We who uprise to you. Weeping, to bless ! Lo, Isadora! We Out of our doom, j/' See your eternity. Thirst for your bloom: We who can only live. Bridges between All that you have to give- Worlds that have been. Worlds only quickening Now on the sky — Out of our hope they swing Measurelessly ! Ill THE world's great AGE <*The world's great age begins anew." Planted in melody Where pale and fair the morning grew In a forgotten sky. Came life : and still those faint fields are Germinal beneath the morning star; (And under starlight lies the sea And worlds of yonder mystery.) <*The world's great age begms anew." Oh it was yesterday The flutes of Grecian morning blew. And on a shining way The world* s great age was morning light. Then fell the rythm, then came the night: (Yet, starless, moved the music-stream. Far- thundering through dark deeps of dream. ) And came the night with deeper tone. Whose trembling spires touched the stars. And sweet and stern was music grown. And in a middle night of wars And vast discordancies, desire Was changed and sought dark heaven like fire ; (And on the yearning ocean-flood In wonder came the gleam of God.) * Knowing that in thy pure white sail the breath Of life is blown, toward worlds of other need. 28 But here thy life begins. Even while we bow Mourning for one who loved us utterly. We know that life has only dawned for thee. Who livest in our own souls that mourn thee now. What on thy ship that came across the seas Was borne, what hast thou left, God's mariner? Oh, seeds of new and rich eternities. Sown in the minds of men forevermore ! Even in our minds, who may not see the flower. Who will not see the fruit, but who may pass. Having seen only, darkly, through the glass Of love and hope and pain in this gray hour. Yet is thy seed sown. Well enough we know What mighty mission thou laid'st on us here And bade us in this field America, Singing and passionate, handle well the plow ! And we bear in our hands the Hfe of thee — Seeds of thy vision of the eagle's wings Unwearying of thine own democracy. Foreshadowing a world of Viking kings ! 29 SHEARETH ISRAEL (The Old Bowery Cemetery, the Pioneer Jewish Cemetery of America) UNDER the looming of these murky walls Which answer to the long street* s heedless roar. Thousandfold, endless, echoing evermore Over the waste graves and oblivious palls. Forget, yet memorable, he waits the doom. Forgotten : He ! From the grim old-world bans And lurid waste of dying Europe's wars. He lifted up his race's trampled bloom And planted it beneath the Western stars ! He carved our garden from the wilderness; He wrought with our forefathers, side by side. This heaven-strong temple, glorious-arched and wide. Our freedom! Now, forgotten : centuries press— Dust on the eyelids of the Jewish king ! Yet oh, America, remember ! spring Futures, far dawns those lone eyes wake to bless. Where prophecy of a world-peacefiilness Comes like a murmur on the wind of spring; Far fields that trampled unperished bloom doth dress. Thy fields, remembermg when their glad birds smg ! 30 THE GARDEN OF LINTOUN THERE on the plain, where the world's end is found, A cloister lies, which all men's feet may tread. Mountains and deserts guard the mystic ground. And oe'r its ways the unending years are led. Morning shines on the roofs embowered, the rill With cryptic shore carved long ere Greece was known; Prayer to the waning twilight heaven is blown ; 4nd Shensi dreams, unrumored, unsought, and still. ^h, still ! yet living in its life of life : Strange as the face of yonder quiet star. And warm with intimacy, patient, sure. Beauty more strong than my choked hour of strife. Reverence where I could only come to mar. And love, and verity that shall endure ! 31 THE AWAKENING OF THE EAST I THERE is a closed gate in the East, which few Have opened, and these few have scarce returned. Old roads of time that portal lead unto. White, graven ways an ancient sun has burned. No prison, and no spell that we may name. Holds them who like Lafcadio Hearn have gone Beyond the gate and past the court of flame That rarely Western eyes have looked upon. But a more strange and haunted prison swung Behind them, than the map of Asia shows. And mirage wrapt the Western brain and tongue. Between pale seas and Himalayan snows. No childhood of the race, like India, Calls the remembering soul to China's quest. Strange as the Martian shore, remote, bizarre. The Hidden Country takes millenial rest. And spells are round it, and the gate is closed. And from its racial font our mind must part Which seeks yon cloud, perfumed and wondrous-rosed, Inscrutable China's bland and subtle heart! II No other garden past an eyeless wall On any shore of human life has grown So ancient, orient-lush and tropical Yet supple and virile from a temperate sun. 32 No multitude of lives compound and deep And bound in immortal unity. Was ever stirred from undegenerate sleep Like these, and made with knowledge and power free. I see upon the sky beyond the waves Thundering beside our last wide western dune. Risen on red wings from ethnic wastes and graves. The Will of Asia, crowned with an occult moon. Dark with interior counsel, and illumined With lightnings lighted in the Occident, Which seemed invincible might to us who roamed And conquered, kings in arrogant strength content. We who have risen out of twilight, high In the swift incandescence of the brain. Have lost the lesson of the frirther sky. We stride a giant stallion without rein. We drift as chaff in the wind our genius bloweth ! Conquerers, in turn we are slaved and blind and maimed ! Our might despiseth what our deep heart knoweth ; Our lust is loosened, our racial wing is lamed ! We who have chained the elemental vast And made the devouring ocean serve us well. Have launched our falcon against the Asian Past, And the quarry nets her: Asia hath tamed our spell ! Haply our God shall chasten His wild West With Asia, till hypocrisy of soul. Which is a gnawing wolf against our breast. He bared; till pride shall flout, till greed shall prowl, 33 Unlicensed but approved, no more along These sacred ways that Christ and Darwin owned. Else drown our clamor in runic Asian song Rock-written ere Sophocles divinely moaned ! Low onward o'er Pacific mystery On patient skies the Asian wing is lain. And round its moon is lightning known to thee. Soul of the West, but not thy thunder-rain ! Thou shalt not perish. Fairest and Last-born ! Thou guard' St a cloister deep as China's own, A portal of mystery, an altar worn With primal rites. Thine incommunicate rune Endures, and thy redemption shall not fail; For thou shalt seek and honor thine own soul When from the vast and Asian wing in hail God's wrath shall loosen and His thunders roll! 34 THE GARDEN I KNOW a garden in starry height. Beyond the coves of the tree and fern. Its light is not as the valley's light: For smoky mountains at sunset burn Far toward the place where my garden lies; And many a hallowed range and dim Gives back the glimmer of olden skies To fall like dew by the garden's rim. A world removed and a place unknown : Around in numberless multitude. In hosts of forest and walls of stone. Earth's haunting memories drift and brood. A garden beyond the gates of day. Charmed out of age with a timeless rune Whose heart of ineffable prophecy Holds vigil on one far height alone ! There, 'mid a close that none may see, A cirque impalpable few may guess (And these will penetrate sacredly,) My garden blooms in the wilderness. Along Tusquittee the silent spurs Plunge, populous amid solitude. Where not the wing of an insect whirs. What life, prophetic and multitude ! And music to which the hours go Is wind in the shadowy height of trees. 35 And to all the suns the waters flow; And of one deep Heart the pulse is these. Along Tusquittee a Song is hurled. Rolled by the vast and dark hill-choir. Where is the Genesis of the World, Blazoned from fonts of primal fire. Tortured with ancient earthquake-blow. By rythmic sway immeasurable Made sonorous of the ocean-flow? Here in the hills is laid that scroll: Hills at the centre of the sea, (Which remembers not though laboring loud. And though still at heart as Eternity, Remembers not, while the wandering cloud Of continents builds in vanishing form;) Hills of the farthest inland reach. Recording still the Silurian storm That ground the shells on a vanished beach ! Upon Tusquittee the forest ends. And the track of heaven is overhead. Swiftly toward the horizon bends A field of grass. I am led — I am led- Out where the mighty mountain leaps ; Out to the place of remembering. To the summit where the moveless deeps Are seen, and the end of wandering. 36 Garden, O Garden, unnamed, unknown: All tenderness of the awful height. All tenderness of the last dim throne. Mountain or cloud at verge of night. Where the One Unnamed of whose life thou art Lingers in love as now on thee — Tenderness, and its solemn part Is thine, of purpose and mystery. And if by invisible gardeners laid— The mighty wind that is likest God, The mystic rains, and the light that said Live! and the sun*s life thrilled the sod- Titanic powers of the earlier day. And the winged ancient-inseft host Who tutored the dark rude earth to play And evoked these flowers that wave wind- tossed — Not less a garden, and memory Of earnest gardeners that wrought the wall And sowed the beauty they should not see. Is mine, this garden and type of all. Only because of powers divine Called by whatever name, from gleam Of ether-light to desire of mine. Is garden or gardener aught but dream. Far hence, on mountain slowly wrought. With a vaster, stranger world beneath. In an un-dreamed garden loved and sought. Some flickering leaf is my life and death. 37 Now is the garden's haunting hour. Luminous, jewelled darkness flows Through gulfs uncompassable. Before, Vast and remote the mountains rose. Purple upland or amber cloud Beneath a sky that alone held all. Changed now is the titan crowd: Plumbless now as an ocean, fall Dead-black deeps from the garden's verge. And the verge is dusted with light of stars. And like a world's wall climbs a surge Out of the ocean's night. There jars Thirst of nothingness with the steep Quickening fire of the rapturous dome. And on the bound of the no6lurne deep The mountainous waters pile and roam. And they are as near as heart can hold. And the symbol is given back to me. And one with these laboring hosts of old I hear the cry of Eternity. But the night is long, the visions wane. Dreams bear me down, I arise to dreams. Changed is the dark ocean's plain. Sunken. Only in pallid streams Far below on a gloaming breast. Stays a vestige of all that was. Faintly bounding a world at rest Shadows rise, where the great waves rose. For the daybreak travel* eternally. Rushing, soundless, a sky-foamed tide. Billowing into the exstacy Of waking worlds in a track world-wide: And far on my waiting heights alone, I know that my garden knows the dawn. The wind is a river to eastward blown : The whole air flows: on the dew- drenched lawn The twilight now as a wraith is pale. An intimate breath in the brush and grass Grows palpable. Ah but I cannot tell How I feel, how I know how the King- doms pass — The solemn Kingdoms of day and night. As of life and death, of the fall and spring. Self- veiled from their immanent Ruler's sight. The source and end of their wandering ! 39 THE HOUR OF PEACE STRANGELY comes vision to our gray twilight. Strangely it calls us from our well-loved fields. All day no air has blown. For many days The wind battled with lowering worlds of cloud. And sunlight is remembered old and far. Strangely comes vision to our quiet toil. A mouldering and an unknown breath respires From the bowed garden and uprooted weeds Tropic with ram that fell ere twilight grew. Gray twilight — no dead memories or names Haunt its soft spaces; it is we are held As ghosts in a sunken garden of dim dreams Hardly of past or future, or of God, But of an otherworld that waits for Him. We are sad, but not with aught desire grown vain ; We are bowed, but not with weight of yesterdays ; We are solemn — not with thought of worlds or pov/ers That are but shadows in the twilight now. We are happy — as a well of water flows In a sunken garden, careless of all change Or ruined stone or gardener gone to dust. Being fed from a far mountain's changeless store. Strangely comes vision; vague, and like the sigh Of a God in His own gray unreached twilight : All day He labored by a loom, with suns. Bright lightnings thridded through with ebon skeins. Incalculable thunders, and the fall Of single blades of grass in windless fields. Laughter of children, song on gala ways And moan of earth beside a homeless shore. He labored, knowing not the source or end. His handiwork yearned to Him, the God on high. He wrought with love but more obedience, 40 And yearned indeed toward some encompassing Will; And in the sense of mystery, the desire That is a light leaping the universe. The breath of all the gods laboring afar. Breath of the soul. He ceased awhile and sighed. WIND IN THE BOUGH WIND in the bough, 'Tis an old old word you whisper and soon are still. And the word is quiet now As your rustling breathes on a shadowy lonlier hill. All the old old sound. While the grey leaves fall and the frost is gathering And pale is the leaf-strewn ground And faint clouds trail the moon in its wandering. Not of autumn alone. Nor the bough grown bare, the lite that is no more; For yours is the solemn moan Of an ocean roundmg the farthest unnamed shore. On its glimmering beach The stars are a quiet phosphorescent snow. And yours is the sound of each Dark tide that wells from a place I may not know. 41 THE ETERNAL FORGES IN THOUGHT OF ONE, TO WHOM IS COMMITTED ELEMENTAL FIRE FAR BEYOND REACH OF CIRCUMSTANCE, OBLIVION OR WILL "We must pass like smoke or Bve within the spirit's fire." — yE. <*The soul has little concern with our happiness or unhappiness." — Fiona Macleod. **I know there shall dawn a day — Is it here on homely earth? Is it yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth, That Power comes full in play?** — Robert Broivning. i THE ETERNAL FORGES THE Will that is wrought of us Asks not nor waits. Moving unsought of us. Blinding our way, named among men The Fates. The Fates weld and sunder us. We, molten in desire. The Fates wield the ponderous Hammer of Consequence by the anvil fire. There is that bound in us Craving the fire; And there is sound in us Echoing the anvil strokes that never tire. We are of hero-mould. Frail though we are: Frail were the saints of old. Frail, quenched evermore, quenchless as a star! Here is Existence Come to event. Here is all distance. Time without measure, in microcosm blent. All of our tenderness. Love's dawn-desire. Flower-faint slenderness. All are but inner gleams of the anvil fire. Horrors that blast us. Frailties that shame. Deaths that o'ercast us. Are but the tempering plunge or the core of flame. 45 There is no Highest Found not within This fire, and the nighest Stern stroke on the mystic anvil shapes good from sin. Joy, the maternal, Joy of love's eyes, Joy, the eternal Dream beatific, lives in this fire nor dies. Never a smithy flared With Norse-god* s fire Like to the smithy reared Dark on our mountain-land ot life's desire. There is no name for it. There is no place. But the Fates claim for it All we may own, all ore of the human race. i 46 VAIN HEAVEN WHEN we are spread before Thy seat, O God of Judgment at the end. And the cold God in Thee shall meet The fervent Gods in us that blend. Wilt Thou, O God by us conceived. Be equal to thy task unscanned : To vv^ed these whirlv^^inds Thou hast breathed Or calm these oceans they have fanned ? And wilt Thou save our souls, O God, And hoard them into ecstacy: But how shall fare the burning clod That is its own Eternity? How shalt Thou cope with prayers and stings Mortal, and earthen of the earth. Which beat their sad ensanguined wings Or labor through such bitter birth As brings the firstborn from the dead? Have these a place in Thy demesne, O God Whom colder hope hath made And less desiring eyes hath seen? O God, art Thou, the God on High, But as the strength of man at last : Which sees the extreme fires die And palely stirs an ashen past And lifts a gold from out the gray. And all forgets the streaming fire That was a furnace yesterday And is a dust of lost desire ? Awful, ineffable it seems. The past no dreamed-of God can raise. What memory or heaven of dreams Can hold a life's insatiate blaze? 47 THE MYSTICAL SUFFICIENCY BORNE by thy steadfastness, O Mother mine. Dark and most tender and most mighty mother, (Thou in the soul's abysm or that other Abyss of worlds in this large care of thine:) Borne by thy steadfastness our faint wings hover, O mother Nature of the dream divine. Lo, are we fallen from the vaster mood Wherein thy law and mother-love entwine And in doom's grape-field grows thy spirit- wine? Even there, where faints the homeless wailing plover. Mother of all weary wings, thy sheltering pine ! O Mystery, steadfast, dumb, profound as God, One symbol breathes of thee, one utter sign : The ancient, awful face of motherhood. 48 AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON ON these great hills doth sorrow rest I As round one withered leaf of all. Unto the autumn and the west They bow, where mystic trumpets call. The scope of this unmeasured wold That is our planet's eldest range. That flame and glacier cast of old. Bows like a leaf, and waits the change. Sorrow is on the beechen leaf. Sorrow is on the desert stones In height where vernal bloom or grief Comes never, but the autumn comes. They know, there heaved before the flood. Or ever life or leaf could hear The trumpet of the mystic God, How comes the autumn of the year ; They know, in kingdoms of the star. What boundless autumns have begun. What waning suns and worlds afar Have heard the summons and have gone. O human soul in autumn's hour. By leaves that fall and hills that gloom And by thine own mysterious power. Rise to thy glory and thy doom ! Out of the dumb and deep and vast. Intense the will of God is hurled. Through fiery night and cosmic past It strikes, and binds thee to the world. 49 The sad face and its mystery. The wandering face of autumn earth. Thine is the doom to make it free. Thou furnace of God's second birth: Till all the cycle shall be run; Till all the deeds of leaf and stone. Till all the lives of star and sun And thine, shall hear the trumpet tone. And from the impossible untold A mightier WOl shall flow like air And heap an autumn into gold. And sorrow shall be heaven there ! . . .f.Yet on the hills doth sorrow bow. The symbol hath a face of dole .... Sorrow desireth vision now .... A mystic trumpet strikes the soul .... 50 FREE JOE* SORROW of Lear, Helen, and Deirdre, Sorrow of the sea Without goal or home. Sorrow of the world> Of the twilight sky. And of kingly songs And kingly decay: All sorrows, to Christ's Gethsemane tears And Mary's sorrow On Jerusalem's hill: All sorrows, their depth. Their mystery, their hope. Their ineffable power. Are here in this sorrow. Free Joe's, of the lowly And sacred tale. Sorrow of the slave In twilight of time ; Sorrow of the free. When the bloom of the world In a day of our dreams Ripened, falls to decay. And the Lesser remains. And the vanishing, dear Irretrievable love. Which no heaven can regain. Lies m dust on the ground : Sorrow of one On the Caucasus, ♦An earlier story by Joel Chandler Harris. Prometheus, vast Protagonist of Man, Guarding the fire Snatched out of heaven. The faithful, vain, Unmitigable love ! Here are the sorrows Of all the earth's tales. Here in Free Joe. Here in Free Joe Is Prometheus Unbound; Here the viftorious Love that compels God in His silence Beyond the stars To hearken to man. Here the supreme Effort of Being, Divinely desirous. To throv^r its arrow. Arrow of longing. To the further shore. Here the sorrow Whereon, as a pinion. Unwearying, undying. Patient forever. Through gyre on gyre Of the boundless whirl Of the ages of earth. The mystical purpose Of Being climbs. Here the Bible Of humankind. Ever re-written 52 Through humble lives In the deathless glory Of silent love : Of the One Defeated And All-Viftorious, One and Homeless And only Home ! Here in Free Joe. THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR THE indwelling splendor of the life of man Makes nothing vain, when once his eyes have seen Its pulsing fire along the searchless plan Broider the night with lightnings high and keen. Rain on impregnable walls its arrowing sheen. And through old anguish beacon still his clan. He is weary, yea, in wisdom bows he down : He is dust of famished hopes, chaff of vain fears : Deathless he is through inner light alone. Lightening with gleam of undefeated spears And warrior banners through his mist of tears. Aye the indwelling purpose claims its own — Splendor of primal purpose, deeplier known Than any chance or fate that bind his years. 5? THE IMMORTAL HOUR* ENCHANTRESS! Keeper of the unbodied spaces, of lives enthralled ! Show me your face, behind the glowing veil ; speak your word, and set me free for yet a little while. Have I eaten the poppy and heard the siren sing, or only drunk of the old dew of honey of all love, of beauty of all beauty? I have loved Vivien, who is indeed Etain; and Dalua, he, the futile, the starry divinity of madness, has entered my soul grown large enough for him. On your walls. Enchantress, is the red morning-glory, but moonflowers are there in bloom through the twilight day. The morning-glory is Vivien .... it is Beauty; the moonflower is Etain, Divine Unrest. I, Eochaidh, and I, Dalua — they are loved of me. But I hear .... outside .... the rumor of the earth; I hear the ringing of arms, the trumpet sounds incessently ; the noise of poised emer- gencies dimly falls, as the noise of sea-battles goes down through silent gulfs, down to the gray splendor of the halls of the sea ... . Enchantress, you cannot bid Dalua to the outer stars once more; you cannot unsay the truth of the song, siren or holy, or quell the despair of the poppy, sweeter than all flowers or sunlit dreams. You, who evoke, you, who fatally bind, can undo .... nothing, evermore : your child is born. Enchantress ; now he is Life's child, not your own. But you can set me a little free from these too-many dreams, from this too-infinite pain .... you have taught me pain, I never knew pain before. You can free me a *Symbolism, in part, from drama by Fiona Macleod 54 span, from the immortal hour .... for those emergencies that cry, beyond the morning-glory wall, beyond the moonflower wall. Enchantress of the unbodied spaces, breathe one reve- lation, lay one touch of your hand. Show me your face, behind the glowing veil. Free me a little span .... In the more deep gleam of your own wisdom, be merciful to earth which calls .... be merciful to me ... . 55 THANKSGIVING THANKSGIVING? See! We are made gods through thirst for heavenly fire: Immortal spirits, yea Even through immortal longing, we are grown; Passion immortal we have drunken and known, God laying upon us His own heart's desire. Farther and higher By worlds we are gone, even in the days that fly. Thanks, that they tire Never, those strong wings that beat the golden dawn Wherethrough a million lives have plunged and gone Nightward, yet life's wing beats the shining sky! Thanks, though we die. That we are cast into God's passion-stream: God's passion-cry Still on the winds of wasted autumn blown. Still in the furrows of April sown. Cries through our mystery and morning-gleam. Cries through our dream ! We are upon the highroad of great Earth: Thanks, that they teem. Those strong enigmas of our father-years. Those dusts of hunger and those rains of tears. Those teeming sorrows by our doors of birth ! Thanks, infinite-worth. That God, since daybreak-birds began to call. With sweet grave mirth Laid in our hands — we, frightened and amazed, We, wonder-wrought when love's far sunfire blazed. We, wildly and supremely rendered thrall, 56 His Law of All. Pressed by the weight of sudden mystery Our faint hands fall : Yet thanks, that out ot the old and twilight sleep He has raised us, even His mystic fires to keep And be the bearers of His destiny ! 57 THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL I HOLD, dear friend of common aim. That we must follow to the end This arc, whose long ascent may bend Far out and past our personal dream. For man, not men, its splendors gleam: A world's way, scarce our own, we wend. You write, dear modern mystic Friend, That you have found a changeless way. Since heaven fulfills your common day. Since even your daily hopes transcend All possible light that life can lend: And you, surrendering earth, are free. You write, **Not mere tranquility. Such stoic groves as he, the cold And bright Lucretius sang of old; Nor vaporous dreams have conquered me — Such mystic sensuality. Inert nirvanas, fold on fold. Insidious as the curse of gold. As palsied India from her prime ! ' ' Ah, Friend, they haunt the waste of time Like clouds on dead horizons rolled. Like Memphian dust whose tale is told — Those faiths that made our world sublime ! Dream not they rose from weary dream. Pale dream of wearied wisdom, spent With lust or disillusionment Or oars against a hopeless stream. They rose by primal watch-fires* gleam. And where the sails of Jason went; They lit in tragic wonderment Those clans of daybreak, wierd and far, 58 Who locked their shields in tribal war And died, in their fierce faiths content. That men be Man, earth's creeds were sent. That men be Man, and man endure ! No raven of a world's despair. No faith-in-vain, seized e'er one limb Of earth's vast life-tree, gnarled and grim And glorious in the wide free air. Till seedless hung the bough and bare. And near at hand was winter's rime. Ours, Friend, a transcendental clime : Placid, and walled with prudent reed Which bends when blows the storm indeed. It harbors no resplendent crime. Nor jars its faint and misty chime With clangor of a warrior creed : But nourishes a peaceful meed Of spirit-faith, of subtler power Than those devouring faiths of yore. To wind the glowing skeins that lead Through pale warm labyrinths, cleansed and freed From terror of the Minotaur ! Then old Lucretius wiser far; Saved from the opiate fugue, from waste Coils of the sensual Indian mist; Kindlier than Semite priests we are. But ah, what weight of life they bore. Those dark religions of the past ! But ah, what potent bonds they cast On men, that life be builded ! We, Who nurse a personal destiny Through creeds our inner heart has guessed. Are stayed by peace and dream and rest : But they a world's eternity 59 Compelled, moulding remorselessly To human ends the heavenly goal. To racial scope the human soul; And ours the ultimate heresy. That fond false freedom of the free Which dares renounce the imperious Whole ! What faith, while onward ages roll. In glooms where subtler terrors creep. On waters of the lasting deep. Toward ice-floes of the unreached pole. In stern and burning self-control Its ethnic vigil still doth keep? Is this our mystic faith : to reap What saints of elder creeds have sown In furrows of a toil forgone; Merely to quaff the exstatic grape God planted ere He fell on sleep. Ere faith's primordial mission — To bind all ages into one Divine, unthinkable, onward stream — Grew dark, and faith was lost in dream ? By passion-flow, by seed and sun. By fatherhood, by strong goals unwon. Were marked those mighty creeds of time. And shall be marked those creeds sublime. Fresh, procreant creeds for worlds that cry Through famished years on deserts dry. Fierce thirsting worlds — in this our prime Of power and chaos, tiger and slime — That wait a lightning in the sky I 60 DEEP LIFE HOW brave, through all its wavering. Is this our life of flame-faint thrill. Our tremulous, our immutable. Our long and dumb- desiring will: Through all that Dante and Milton sing We bear our burden, and are still. The wmds are laden with our cry. And the unechoing deep is fed With rumor of our passion-tread. But where the instinftive soul is led No catarafts rave or lost waves sigh^ Nor any praise or prayer is said. For where the instinftive purpose lies There is no need of litany Or paen or dirge eternally: What need for speech has Deity, Self-piloted on eternal seas With purpose patient as the sea? To us it is a boon supreme That we are made as harp-chords loud Played by a player hid in cloud. Who draws our passion to the crowd Thronging his dark and holy dream. That we are seed for furrows plowed By plowmen veiled in mist and fire. Whose potencies in us are sealed; That lingering-warm though unrevealed A patient gardener guards our field ; Is crown enough for our desire. And goal for all of dream we yield. 6i O lives of the unnumbered past. Through whom the nameless river flov/ed On whose vast voiceless waters glowed Only the silent lights of God : On rustling shoals were sometimes cast Your waves of phosphorescent load. Breaking the veils of deeper dark; But these, O lives, were not your law. The silent onward waters draw Toward something more divine in awe Than any phosphorescent spark That Christ or Plato lived or saw. 62 WIND OF THE SPIRIT I KNOW not how much, how little I shall know. There came a wmd upon the mountain lone Of life. It had companioned God, and known ; And ever, strong and glad, the sweet winds blow From somewhere off beyond eternal snow. And all that I may know from thence is blown. For now through all the world, by ruined stone Of homestead from whose door the life is fled Or iron coast where all the wrecks are thrown. Travels that wind among the hopeless dead. Where it goes, there along the world I go. Be it by sodden field, harvest or bloom. And though I came beside my first hope's tomb, I should be glad, knowing the wind doth know. 6, THE DARK WEAVER HOW Mystery, at her dark and intricate loom. Weaves her unnumbered, her unending threads : Her shuttle bears our luminous golds and reds Of human life; it bears our skeins of gloom. The weaving of her shuttle is our doom, Or bright, or dark. But follow where it leads ! And follow, careless of our personal creeds. Till haply some vast tapestry shall bloom In glory on some wide and mighty wall. O'er subdued splendors of some echoing hall Where some grave Race shall tread a cloudy home ; And on our visionary ear may fall Indeed the romance of the Weaver of All, The Mystic One, risen from an outworn loom ! 6< GLOAMING THERE is a flooded noon of pagan might. Complete, absorbed, with all the surface glow Of earth, meeting the crystal surface light. The lesser lights of earth that come and go Vacant of immortality or pain. And there is night whose wings are like the pall. Whose talons clasp the tragic hearts of men. And there is gloaming at the heart of all. There are three gloamings. One lies underneath A fane uncompassable of quarried stone. Sad legions, laboring through life and death. Have built this fane of mystery, rune by rune. And none hath told what Builder's is the plan. Though all have seen a Face in wizard gleam ; And round this home and altar-fane of man At daybreak-gloaming mounts the light of dream. Dawn-gloaming, when the builder stirs from sleep, Answermg the grave, supreme, unquestioned call, (A world of builders,) glows divine and deep. And heaven lightens on the labored wall. Elsewhere the second gloaming beautiful Waits, and for all the weary waits indeed. And the desirous, the insatiable Hold through its silent sway their inner creed. Their bold insanity of infinitude. On the great Fail, the old earth's living fane. They labor, as upon the homing road A wanderer goes, heedless of sun or rain, 65 Unto the fire and the hand of home. No idle builders of enigmal walls Are they who wait the vision that shall come When this, the sacramental gloaming falls. One gleaming rests, more primal than the dawn. Even the heart of twilight's vast desire. Its breath impelled the God who made the sun. It is the passion of the solar fire ; It is the cry afar that urges all Who war or build about that ancient pile. The world's long Deed, the altar mystical. Ever betrayed, which none can e*er defile. This gloaming has no time but evermore ; No place, but wondrously it fills the world ; No goal, yet rolls its wave on every shore ; No cause, yet never is its banner furled. It is a haunting shadow, yea a song That flies at dusk within a haunted wood; A loneliness that strikes where myriads throng, A sudden hope that pales all previous good; Even a hand that reaches from the dumb The deep, the gloaming universal Love And holds the impassioned Mortal to its doom And makes immortal all that breathe or move. Whether in prayer of solemn motherhood. Or passion of desiring, battling flame. Or ideal longing on the Mount of God, This gloaming stays, which none may know or name. 66 EIRE I LOOKED across the snow, blue as pale foam When phosphorescence glows on darkling shore. When faint floods whisper and the winds are dumb In wandering fields of the cold sea-flame flower. Then is the heart aware of magic power. Of plumed dominions on the eternal sea. Of haunting hunger on the dim still shore. So on the moonlit snow I witnessed thee : Only a shadow on the bridge of hoar Over dark waters ; nigh the porch of home ; Leaning with incantation to the lure Of unknown tides ; poignant with dream and doom ; And sorrow of the middle rosary Above; and on thy brow the Easter bloom. 67 TO D. W. F TO D. W. Died, 1906 AR friend of mine. Aye in the thunderous summer noon remembered Or by the sign Of night and stars beyond a porch huge-timbered : Nay, many places. And through some kinship with the distant seas And stranger races. With me thou goest to the end of these. One deep desire. That is exhaustless as the wind that rolls From sunset fire On Achill's vast sea-mountain, filled our souls. I was a boy. Who travelled weeks across the solemn range Alone, in joy Seeking thee, finding thee in that old grange. Those haunting pines And purple concave of a planet's hills. On thee, the lines Of life were drawn, and dread, and pain that stills. And yet thy tone Could stir me like a waterfall at night Far yonder thrown Down breathless hollows lit with the moonlight. And in thine eye Hovered the lightning, the enhungered flame. Life, destiny — The world -thought drives me still, though thou art dream. 71 Far friend, when last I came from out the silent eastern way. Rested, and passed Alone and up the mountain-steps of day, I could not seem To put thee out of mind. There haunted me A call that came And haunts for aye the longing thought of thee. It drew me back. I found thee pallid as with spirit- wars. We could not speak Our thought, but gazed together at the stars. The doom of youth Was on me, and its helpless love and pain. Earth* s eldest truth Was thine. Helper who sought for help in vain ! Only once more I saw thee, when the roof-tree was crushed down. By a strange shore I found thee, lost to mountain-lands thine own. Unspeakable Sorrow, anguish of th"e shadowed soul. Ineffable Estrayed bewilderment ! You drained the whole Cup of defeat That life may blend. But when I found you there, How strange, how sweet. How infinite was your conquest of despair ! To the caress Of a returned, a frail but kindered hand. With buoyant stress You rose, and day came back upon the land : 72 Though Death stood near. His touch upon your shoulder lovingly. And all was there That was and is your immortality. I brought it back. That day. You knew that when I went again Horror would track Your steps and drag you to a final den. But the waves ran In whiteness eastward from a shining gate. *«Your way, your plan. Your life to live ! Go, and good-bye,'* you said. And my ship sailed- Far friend of mine, from life's last mystery You have not quailed. Yet are my potent friend on land and sea. Far vale and crest Through the world's centuries remembering, keep All that need rest Of you, who have no need of balm or sleep. I do not guess That on som.e plain ringed with eternal snow, Face to dear face Immortal, we shall meet as man may know; But lowering yonder. Gathers a surcharged dusk along the height That may not sunder For overlong our dream of day and night. Transfiguration Goes with you on some undiscernable way. And your elation Shakes like a lightning through my manhood's day. 73 I yearn to render From the vast fields some flower for your name. But oh. Defender Of Dream, it is you are flower and flowering flame; And deep this earth Grows, and in onward deeps of all fruition. In midnoon mirth And living will, wingeth your intuition. 74 PRINTED AND BOUND FOR JOHN COLLIER BYTHE STONE HOUSE PRESS, JOHNSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA, DURING MAY AND JUNE, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ELEVEN I nr