The Man against the Sky | Page 6

light
that showed the way for men to seek.
"We found it in the morning with an iron bar behind,
And there were
chains around it; but no search could ever find, Either in the ashes that
were left, or anywhere,
A sign to tell of who or what had been with
Stafford there.
"Stafford was a likely man with ideas of his own --
Though I could
never like the kind that likes to live alone; And when you met, you
found his eyes were always on your shoes, As if they did the talking
when he asked you for the news.
"That's all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years I'd never
clear away from there the cloud that never clears. We buried what was
left of it, -- the bar, too, and the chains; And only for the apple tree
there's nothing that remains."
Forty years ago it was I heard the old man say,
"That's all, my son." --
And here again I find the place to-day, Deserted and told only by the
tree that knows the most,
And overgrown with golden-rod as if there
were no ghost.
Hillcrest
(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)
No sound of any storm that shakes
Old island walls with older seas

Comes here where now September makes
An island in a sea of trees.
Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets

The roaring of a world remade,
And all his ruins and regrets;

And if he still remembers here
Poor fights he may have won or lost,
--
If he be ridden with the fear
Of what some other fight may cost,
--
If, eager to confuse too soon,
What he has known with what may be,

He reads a planet out of tune
For cause of his jarred harmony, --
If here he venture to unroll
His index of adagios,
And he be given
to console
Humanity with what he knows, --
He may by contemplation learn
A little more than what he knew,

And even see great oaks return
To acorns out of which they grew.
He may, if he but listen well,
Through twilight and the silence here,

Be told what there are none may tell
To vanity's impatient ear;
And he may never dare again
Say what awaits him, or be sure
What
sunlit labyrinth of pain
He may not enter and endure.
Who knows to-day from yesterday
May learn to count no thing too
strange:
Love builds of what Time takes away,
Till Death itself is
less than Change.
Who sees enough in his duress
May go as far as dreams have gone;

Who sees a little may do less
Than many who are blind have done;
Who sees unchastened here the soul
Triumphant has no other sight

Than has a child who sees the whole
World radiant with his own
delight.
Far journeys and hard wandering
Await him in whose crude surmise

Peace, like a mask, hides everything
That is and has been from his
eyes;
And all his wisdom is unfound,
Or like a web that error weaves
On
airy looms that have a sound
No louder now than falling leaves.

Old King Cole
In Tilbury Town did Old King Cole
A wise old age anticipate,

Desiring, with his pipe and bowl,
No Khan's extravagant estate.
No
crown annoyed his honest head,
No fiddlers three were called or
needed;
For two disastrous heirs instead
Made music more than
ever three did.
Bereft of her with whom his life
Was harmony without a flaw,
He
took no other for a wife,
Nor sighed for any that he saw;
And if he
doubted his two sons,
And heirs, Alexis and Evander,
He might
have been as doubtful once
Of Robert Burns and Alexander.
Alexis, in his early youth,
Began to steal -- from old and young.

Likewise Evander, and the truth
Was like a bad taste on his tongue.

Born thieves and liars, their affair
Seemed only to be tarred with evil
--
The most insufferable pair
Of scamps that ever cheered the devil.
The world went on, their fame went on,
And they went on -- from bad
to worse;
Till, goaded hot with nothing done,
And each accoutred
with a curse,
The friends of Old King Cole, by twos,
And fours, and
sevens, and elevens,
Pronounced unalterable views
Of doings that
were not of heaven's.
And having learned again whereby
Their baleful zeal had come about,

King Cole met many a wrathful eye
So kindly that its wrath went
out --
Or partly out. Say what they would,
He seemed the more to
court their candor;
But never told what kind of good
Was in Alexis
and Evander.
And Old King Cole, with many a puff
That haloed his urbanity,

Would smoke till he had smoked enough,
And listen most attentively.

He beamed as with an inward light
That had the Lord's assurance
in it;
And once a man was there all night,
Expecting something
every minute.

But whether from too little thought,
Or too much fealty to the bowl,

A dim reward was all he got
For sitting up with Old King Cole.

"Though mine," the father mused aloud,
"Are not the sons I would
have chosen,
Shall I, less evilly endowed,
By their infirmity be
frozen?
"They'll have