Ban and Arriere Ban | Page 5

hame, and
the better their grace to buy,
Wullie Wanbeard's purse maun pay the
keep o' the men that did him defy!
Men never hae gotten sic terms o' peace since first men went to war,

As got Halyburton, and Middleton, and Roy, and the young Dunbar.
Sae I drink to ye here, To the Young Chevalier! I hae said ye an auld
man's say,
And there may hae been mightier deeds of arms, but there
never was nane sae gay!
THREE PORTRAITS OF PRINCE CHARLES
1731
Beautiful face of a child,
Lighted with laughter and glee,
Mirthful,
and tender, and wild,
My heart is heavy for thee!
1744
Beautiful face of a youth,
As an eagle poised to fly forth,
To the old
land loyal of truth,
To the hills and the sounds of the North:
Fair
face, daring and proud,
Lo! the shadow of doom, even now,
The
fate of thy line, like a cloud,
Rests on the grace of thy brow!
1773

Cruel and angry face,
Hateful and heavy with wine,
Where are the
gladness, the grace,
The beauty, the mirth that were thine?
Ah, my Prince, it were well,--
Hadst thou to the gods been dear, -

To have fallen where Keppoch fell,
With the war-pipe loud in thine
ear!
To have died with never a stain
On the fair White Rose of
Renown,
To have fallen, fighting in vain,
For thy father, thy faith,
and thy crown!
More than thy marble pile,
With its women weeping
for thee,
Were to dream in thine ancient isle,
To the endless dirge of
the sea!
But the Fates deemed otherwise,
Far thou sleepest from
home,
From the tears of the Northern skies,
In the secular dust of
Rome.
0. * *
A city of death and the dead,
But thither a pilgrim came,
Wearing
on weary head
The crowns of years and fame:
Little the Lucrine
lake
Or Tivoli said to him,
Scarce did the memories wake
Of the
far-off years and dim.
For he stood by Avernus' shore,
But he
dreamed of a Northern glen
And he murmured, over and o'er,
'For
Charlie and his men:'
And his feet, to death that went,
Crept forth to
St. Peter's shrine,
And the latest Minstrel bent
O'er the last of the
Stuart line.
FROM OMAR KHAYYAM
[Rhymed from the prose version of Mr. Justin Huntly M'Carthy]
The Paradise they bid us fast to win
Hath Wine and Women; is it then
a sin
To live as we shall live in Paradise,
And make a Heaven of
Earth, ere Heaven begin?
The wise may search the world from end to end,

From dusty nook to
dusty nook, my friend,
And nothing better find than girls and wine,

Of all the things they neither make nor mend.

Nay, listen thou who, walking on Life's way,
Hast seen no lovelock
of thy love's grow grey
Listen, and love thy life, and let the Wheel

Of Heaven go spinning its own wilful way.
Man is a flagon, and his soul the wine,
Man is a lamp, wherein the
Soul doth shine,
Man is a shaken reed, wherein that wind,
The Soul,
doth ever rustle and repine.
Each morn I say, to-night I will repent,
Repent! and each night go the
way I went -
The way of Wine; but now that reigns the rose,
Lord
of Repentance, rage not, but relent.
I wish to drink of wine--so deep, so deep -
The scent of wine my
sepulchre shall steep,
And they, the revellers by Omar's tomb,
Shall
breathe it, and in Wine shall fall asleep.
Before the rent walls of a ruined town
Lay the King's skull, whereby
a bird flew down
'And where,' he sang, 'is all thy clash of arms?

Where the sonorous trumps of thy renown?'
AESOP
He sat among the woods, he heard
The sylvan merriment: he saw

The pranks of butterfly and bird,
The humours of the ape, the daw.
And in the lion or the frog -
In all the life of moor and fen,
In ass
and peacock, stork and dog,
He read similitudes of men.
'Of these, from those,' he cried, 'we come,
Our hearts, our brains
descend from these.'
And lo! the Beasts no more were dumb,
But
answered out of brakes and trees:
'Not ours,' they cried; 'Degenerate,
If ours at all,' they cried again,

'Ye fools, who war with God and Fate,
Who strive and toil: strange
race of men.

'For WE are neither bond nor free,
For WE have neither slaves nor
kings,
But near to Nature's heart are we,
And conscious of her
secret things.
'Content are we to fall asleep,
And well content to wake no more,

We do not laugh, we do not weep,
Nor look behind us and before;
'But were there cause for moan or mirth,
'Tis WE, not you, should
sigh or scorn,
Oh, latest children of the Earth,
Most childish
children Earth has borne.'
0. * *
They spoke, but that misshapen slave
Told never of the thing he
heard,
And unto men their portraits gave,
In likenesses of beast and
bird!
LES ROSES DE SADI
This morning I vowed I would bring thee my Roses,
They were thrust
in the band that my bodice encloses,
But the breast-knots were
broken, the Roses went free.
The breast-knots were broken; the Roses