Songs of Travel | Page 8

the crown of the silver hair.
Honolulu.
XXXIII - TO MY WIFE (A Fragment)
LONG must elapse ere you behold again
Green forest frame the entry
of the lane -
The wild lane with the bramble and the brier,
The
year-old cart-tracks perfect in the mire,
The wayside smoke,
perchance, the dwarfish huts,
And ramblers' donkey drinking from
the ruts: -
Long ere you trace how deviously it leads,
Back from
man's chimneys and the bleating meads
To the woodland shadow, to
the sylvan hush,
When but the brooklet chuckles in the brush -

Back from the sun and bustle of the vale
To where the great voice of
the nightingale
Fills all the forest like a single room,
And all the
banks smell of the golden broom;
So wander on until the eve
descends.
And back returning to your firelit friends,
You see the
rosy sun, despoiled of light,
Hung, caught in thickets, like a
schoolboy's kite.
Here from the sea the unfruitful sun shall rise,
Bathe the bare deck
and blind the unshielded eyes;
The allotted hours aloft shall wheel in
vain
And in the unpregnant ocean plunge again.
Assault of squalls

that mock the watchful guard,
And pluck the bursting canvas from
the yard,
And senseless clamour of the calm, at night
Must mar
your slumbers. By the plunging light,
In beetle-haunted, most
unwomanly bower
Of the wild-swerving cabin, hour by hour . . .
Schooner 'Equator.'
XXXIV - TO MY OLD FAMILIARS
DO you remember - can we e'er forget? -
How, in the
coiled-perplexities of youth,
In our wild climate, in our scowling
town,
We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed and feared?
The
belching winter wind, the missile rain,
The rare and welcome silence
of the snows,
The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night,
The
grimy spell of the nocturnal town,
Do you remember? - Ah, could
one forget!
As when the fevered sick that all night long
Listed the wind intone,
and hear at last
The ever-welcome voice of chanticleer
Sing in the
bitter hour before the dawn, -
With sudden ardour, these desire the
day:
So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope;
So we,
exulting, hearkened and desired.
For lo! as in the palace porch of life

We huddled with chimeras, from within -
How sweet to hear! - the
music swelled and fell,
And through the breach of the revolving
doors
What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled!
I have since then contended and rejoiced;
Amid the glories of the
house of life
Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld:
Yet when
the lamp from my expiring eyes
Shall dwindle and recede, the voice
of love
Fall insignificant on my closing ears,
What sound shall
come but the old cry of the wind
In our inclement city? what return

But the image of the emptiness of youth,
Filled with the sound of
footsteps and that voice
Of discontent and rapture and despair?
So,
as in darkness, from the magic lamp,
The momentary pictures gleam

and fade
And perish, and the night resurges - these
Shall I
remember, and then all forget.
Apemama.
XXXV
THE tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
From Halkerside, from
topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far
set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the
shallows of her smoke,
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort

Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,
New folds of city
glitter. Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,

And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.
There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings,
repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their
works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their
founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The
artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain
erases, and the rust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence. Continents

And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,

Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain. The voice of
generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My
numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And, all mutation over, stretch
me down
In that denoted city of the dead.
Apemama.
XXXVI - TO S. C.
I HEARD the pulse of the besieging sea
Throb far away all night. I
heard the wind
Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms.
I rose
and strolled. The isle was all bright sand,
And flailing fans and
shadows of the palm;
The heaven all moon and wind and the blind

vault;
The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept.
The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives,
Slept in the precinct
of the palisade;
Where single, in the wind, under the moon,
Among
the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,
Sole street-lamp and the only
sentinel.
To other lands and nights my fancy turned -
To London first, and
chiefly to your house,
The many-pillared and the well-beloved.

There yearning fancy lighted; there again
In the upper room I lay, and
heard far off
The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
The muffled
tramp of the Museum guard
Once more went by me; I beheld again

Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
Again I longed for the
returning morn,
The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
The
consentaneous trill of tiny song
That weaves round monumental
cornices
A passing