Rhymes of a Rolling Stone | Page 3

78 characters are broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces.]
[This etext is transcribed from the 1912 edition, 1917 printing. Some very minor changes have been made in spelling and punctuation after consulting another edition.]
I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,?As seas of ink I spatter.?Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --?The other kind don't matter.
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone?by Robert W. Service
Author of "The Spell of the Yukon", "Ballads of a Cheechako", etc.
Contents
Prelude?A Rolling Stone?The Soldier of Fortune?The Gramaphone at Fond-Du-Lac?The Land of Beyond?Sunshine?The Idealist?Athabaska Dick?Cheer?The Return?The Junior God?The Nostomaniac?Ambition?To Sunnydale?The Blind and the Dead?The Atavist?The Sceptic?The Rover?Barb-Wire Bill?"?"?Just Think!?The Lunger?The Mountain and the Lake?The Headliner and the Breadliner?Death in the Arctic?Dreams Are Best?The Quitter?The Cow-Juice Cure?While the Bannock Bakes?The Lost Master?Little Moccasins?The Wanderlust?The Trapper's Christmas Eve?The World's All Right?The Baldness of Chewed-Ear?The Mother?The Dreamer?At Thirty-Five?The Squaw Man?Home and Love?I'm Scared of it All?A Song of Success?The Song of the Camp-Fire?Her Letter?The Man Who Knew?The Logger?The Passing of the Year?The Ghosts?Good-Bye, Little Cabin?Heart o' the North?The Scribe's Prayer
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
Prelude
I sing no idle songs of dalliance days,?No dreams Elysian inspire my rhyming;?I have no Celia to enchant my lays,?No pipes of Pan have set my heart to chiming.?I am no wordsmith dripping gems divine?Into the golden chalice of a sonnet;?If love songs witch you, close this book of mine,
Waste no time on it.
Yet bring I to my work an eager joy,?A lusty love of life and all things human;?Still in me leaps the wonder of the boy,?A pride in man, a deathless faith in woman.?Still red blood calls, still rings the valiant fray;?Adventure beacons through the summer gloaming:?Oh long and long and long will be the day
Ere I come homing!
This earth is ours to love: lute, brush and pen,?They are but tongues to tell of life sincerely;?The thaumaturgic Day, the might of men,?O God of Scribes, grant us to grave them clearly!?Grant heart that homes in heart, then all is well.?Honey is honey-sweet, howe'er the hiving.?Each to his work, his wage at evening bell
The strength of striving.
A Rolling Stone
There's sunshine in the heart of me,?My blood sings in the breeze;?The mountains are a part of me,?I'm fellow to the trees.?My golden youth I'm squandering,?Sun-libertine am I;?A-wandering, a-wandering,?Until the day I die.
I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,?And I roomed in the cool of a cave;?I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,?The fret and the sweat of a slave:?For far over all that folks hold worth,?There lives and there leaps in me?A love of the lowly things of earth,?And a passion to be free.
To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,?To range and to change at will;?To mock at the mastership of man,?To seek Adventure's thrill.?Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;?To go my own sweet way;?To reck not at all what may befall,?But to live and to love each day.
To make my body a temple pure?Wherein I dwell serene;?To care for the things that shall endure,?The simple, sweet and clean.?To oust out envy and hate and rage,?To breathe with no alarm;?For Nature shall be my anchorage,?And none shall do me harm.
To shun all lures that debauch the soul,?The orgied rites of the rich;?To eat my crust as a rover must?With the rough-neck down in the ditch.?To trudge by his side whate'er betide;?To share his fire at night;?To call him friend to the long trail-end,?And to read his heart aright.
To scorn all strife, and to view all life?With the curious eyes of a child;?From the plangent sea to the prairie,?From the slum to the heart of the Wild.?From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,?From the vast to the greatly small;?For I know that the whole for good is planned,?And I want to see it all.
To see it all, the wide world-way,?From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;?With never a one to say me nay,?And none to cramp my soul.?In belly-pinch I will pay the price,?But God! let me be free;?For once I know in the long ago,?They made a slave of me.
In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,?Here, pal, is my calloused hand!?Oh, I love each day as a rover may,?Nor seek to understand.?To ENJOY is good enough for me;?The gipsy of God am I;?Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn!?And here's a cheer to the night that's gone!?And may I go a-roaming on?Until the day I die!
Then every star shall sing to me?Its song of liberty;?And every morn shall bring to me?Its mandate to be free.?In every throbbing vein of me?I'll feel the vast Earth-call;?O body, heart and brain of me?Praise Him who made it all!
The Soldier of Fortune
"Deny your God!" they ringed me with their spears;?Blood-crazed were they, and reeking from the strife;?Hell-hot their hate, and venom-fanged their sneers,?And one man spat