Lifes Enthusiasms | Page 5

with little Nell, on English meadows,
Wandered and
lost their way.
Lost is that camp and wasted all its fire,
And he who
wro't that spell;
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye
have one tale to tell.
Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story

Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop vines' incense all the
pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.
And on that grave where
English oak and holly
And laurel wreath entwine,
Deem it not all a
too presumptuous folly,
This spray of Western pine."
--
"Dark browed she broods with weary lids
Beside her Sphynx and
Pyramids,
With her low, never lifted eyes.
If she be dead, respect
the dead;
If she be weeping, let her weep;
If she be sleeping, let her
sleep;
For lo, this woman named the stars.
She suckled at her tawny
dugs
Your Moses, while ye reeked with wars
And prowled the
woods, rude, painted thugs."
--
"The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
The humble and the contrite
heart."
--
"Careless seems the Great Avenger,
History's pages but record
One death grapple in the darkness
Twixt old systems and the word.
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
But that scaffold sways the future,

And behind the dim Unknown
Standeth God within the shadow.
Keeping watch above his own."
--
"Pledge me round, I bid you declare,
All good fellows whose beards
are gray,
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow and
wearisome, ere
Ever a month had passed away?
The reddest lips
that ever have kissed,
The brightest eyes that ever have shone
May
pray and whisper and we not list
Or look away and never be missed

Ere yet ever a month is gone.
Gillian's dead. God rest her bier!

How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian's married and I sit here

Alone and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine."
--
"Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.
Glad
did I live and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will.
This be the
verse ye grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from
the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'"
--
"By the brand upon my shoulders,
By the lash of clinging steel,
By
the welts the whips have left me,
By the wounds that never heal,
By
the eyes grown dim with staring
At the sun-wash on the brine,
I am
paid in full for service,--
Would that service still were mine."
And with these the more familiar verses beginning:
"Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea."
"Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music."

"Just for a handful of silver he left us."
"Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead."
"O to be in England, now that April's there."
"The mists are on the Oberland,
The Fungfrau's snows look faint and
far."
"The word of the Lord by night
To the watching pilgrims came."
"Fear, a forgotten form;
Death, a dream of the eyes;
We were atoms
in God's great storm
That raged through the angry skies!"
And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were
hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War.
Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to
your taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range of literature
is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every
craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand--best, what
you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have loved the
highest." It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach.
Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will give you a
fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry
in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words
which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without
weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To
choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in
good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward
doing this instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In
the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage
more valuable than the habit of good English. And to this end the
masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of
perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have
written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written.
Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose

well worthy to be borne in memory.
Take this from Emerson:
"The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow falls or
water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,
wherever the blue heaven