A Jongleur Strayed

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Title: A Jongleur Strayed
Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane
Author: Richard Le Gallienne
Release Date: January 29, 2006 [eBook #17619]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A JONGLEUR STRAYED***
E-text prepared by Al Haines
Transcriber's note:
The word "beloved" appears in this book several times, in various upper and lower case combinations. Whatever the combination, in some cases, the second E in "beloved" is e-accent (��) and sometimes it is e-grave (��). Since I had no way of telling if this was what the author intended, or a typesetting error, or some other reason, I have left each exactly as it appears in the original book.
A JONGLEUR STRAYED
Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane
by
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
With an Introduction by Oliver Herford
Garden City ---------- New York?Doubleday, Page & Company?1922?Copyright, 1922, by?Doubleday, Page & Company?All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation?into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian?Printed in the United States?at?The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.?First Edition
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The writer desires to thank the editors of _The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Life, Judge, Leslie's, Munsey's, Ainslee's, Snappy Stories, Live Stories, The Cosmopolitan_, and Collier's for their kind permission to reprint the following verses.
He desires also to thank the editor of The New York Evening Post for the involuntary gift of a title.
The Catskills,
June, 1922.
TO
THE LOVE
OF
ANDR�� AND GWEN
_If after times?Should pay the least attention to these rhymes,?I bid them learn?'Tis not my own heart here?That doth so often seem to break and burn--?O no such thing!--?Nor is it my own dear?Always I sing:?But, as a scrivener in the market-place,?I sit and write for lovers, him or her,?Making a song to match each lover's case--?A trifling gift sometimes the gods confer!_
(After STRATO)
CONTENTS
I
An Echo from Horace?Ballade of the Oldest Duel in the World?Sorcery?The Dryad?May is Back?Moon-Marketing?Two Birthdays?Song?The Faithful Lover?Love's Tenderness?Anima Mundi?Ballade of the Unchanging Beloved?Love's Arithmetic?Beauty's Arithmetic?The Valley?Ballade of the Bees of Trebizond?Broken Tryst?The Rival?The Quarrel?Lovers?Shadows?After Tibullus?A Warning?Primum Mobile?The Last Tryst?The Heart on the Sleeve?At Her Feet?Reliquiae?Love's Proud Farwell?The Rose Has Left the Garden
II
The Gardens of Adonis?Nature the Healer?Love Eternal?The Loveliest Face and the Wild Rose?As in the Woodland I Walk?To a Mountain Spring?Noon?A Rainy Day?In the City?Country Largesse?Morn?The Source?Autumn?The Rose in Winter?The Frozen Stream?Winter Magic?A Lover's Universe?To the Golden Wife?Buried Treasure?The New Husbandman?Paths that Wind?The Immortal Gods
III
Ballade of Woman?The Magic Flower?Ballade of Love's Cloister?An Old Love Letter?Too Late?The Door Ajar?Chipmunk?Ballade of the Dead Face that Never Dies?The End of Laughter?The Song that Lasts?The Broker of Dreams
IV
At the Sign of the Lyre?To Madame Jumel?To a Beautiful Old Lady?To Lucy Hinton; December 19, 1921
V
OTHER MATTERS, SACRED AND PROFANE
The World's Musqueteer: To Marshal Foch?We Are With France?Satan: 1920?Under Which King??Man, the Destroyer?The Long Purposes of God?Ballade to a Departing God?Ballade of the Absent Guest?Tobacco Next?Ballade of the Paid Puritan?The Overworked Ghost?The Valiant Girls?Not Sour Grapes?Ballade of Reading Bad Books?Ballade of the Making of Songs?Ballade of Running Away with Life?To a Contemner of the Past
INTRODUCTION
One Spring day in London, long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London was then talking.
Richard Le Gallienne was the first real poet I had ever laid eyes upon in the flesh and it seemed to my rapt senses that this frock-coated young god, with the classic profile and the dark curls curving from the impeccable silk "tile" that surmounted them as curve the acanthus leaves of a Corinthian capital, could be none other than Anacreon's self in modern shape.
I can see Le Gallienne now, as he steps across the sunlit sidewalk and with gesture Mercurian hails the passing Jehu. I can even hear the quick clud of the cab doors as the smartly turning hansome snatches from my view the glass-dimmed face I was not to behold again until years later at the house of a mutual friend in New York.
In another moment the swiftly moving vehicle was dissolved in the glitter of Regent Street and I fell to musing upon the curious interlacement of parts in this picture puzzle of life.
Here was a common Cabby, for the time being combining in himself the several functions of guide-book, chattel-mortgage and writ of habeas corpus on the person of the most popular literary idol of the hour and all for the matter of maybe no more than half a crown, including