The Sisters Tragedy | Page 4

1851-1870
I
Now there was one who came in later days
To play at Emperor: in the
dead of night
Stole crown and sceptre, and stood forth to light
In
sudden purple. The dawn's straggling rays
Showed Paris fettered,
murmuring in amaze,
With red hands at her throat--a piteous sight.

Then the new Caesar, stricken with affright
At his own daring, shrunk
from public gaze
In the Elysee, and had lost the day
But that around him flocked his
birds of prey,
Sharp-beaked, voracious, hungry for the deed.
'Twixt
hope and fear behold great Caesar hang!
Meanwhile, methinks, a
ghostly laughter rang
Through the rotunda of the Invalides.
II
What if the boulevards, at set of sun,
Reddened, but not with sunset's
kindly glow?
What if from quai and square the murmured woe


Swept heavenward, pleadingly? The prize was won,
A kingling made
and Liberty undone.
No Emperor, this, like him awhile ago,
But his
Name's shadow; that one struck the blow
Himself, and sighted the
street-sweeping gun!
This was a man of tortuous heart and brain,
So warped he knew not
his own point of view--
The master of a dark, mysterious smile.
And there he plotted, by the storied Seine
And in the fairy gardens of
St. Cloud,
The Sphinx that puzzled Europe, for awhile.
III
I see him as men saw him once--a face
Of true Napoleon pallor;
round the eyes
The wrinkled care; mustache spread pinion-wise,

Pointing his smile with odd sardonic grace
As wearily he turns him in
his place,
And bends before the hoarse Parisian cries--
Then
vanishes, with glitter of gold-lace
And trumpets blaring to the patient
skies.
Not thus he vanished later! On his path
The Furies waited for the
hour and man,
Foreknowing that they waited not in vain.
Then fell the day, O day of dreadful wrath!
Bow down in shame, O
crimson-girt Sedan!
Weep, fair Alsace! weep, loveliest Lorraine!
So mused I, sitting underneath the trees
In that old garden of the
Tuileries,
Watching the dust of twilight sifting down
Through
chestnut boughs just toucht with autumn's brown--
Not twilight yet,
but that illusive bloom
Which holds before the deep-etched shadows
come;
For still the garden stood in golden mist,
Still, like a river of
molten amethyst,
The Seine slipt through its spans of fretted stone,

And, near the grille that once fenced in a throne,
The fountains still
unbraided to the day
The unsubstantial silver of their spray.

A spot to dream in, love in, waste one's hours!
Temples and palaces,
and gilded towers,
And fairy terraces!--and yet, and yet
Here in her
woe came Marie Antoinette,
Came sweet Corday, Du Barry with
shrill cry,
Not learning from her betters how to die!
Here, while the
Nations watched with bated breath,
Was held the saturnalia of Red
Death!
For where that slim Egyptian shaft uplifts
Its point to catch
the dawn's and sunset's drifts
Of various gold, the busy Headsman
stood. . . .
Place de la Concorde--no, the Place of Blood!
And all so peaceful now! One cannot bring
Imagination to accept the
thing.
Lies, all of it! some dreamer's wild romance--
High-hearted,
witty, laughter-loving France!
In whose brain was it that the legend
grew
Of Maenads shrieking in this avenue,
Of watch-fires burning,
Famine standing guard,
Of long-speared Uhlans in that palace-yard!

What ruder sound this soft air ever smote
Than a bird's twitter or a
bugle's note?
What darker crimson ever splashed these walks
Than
that of rose-leaves dropping from the stalks?
And yet--what means
that charred and broken wall,
That sculptured marble, splintered, like
to fall,
Looming among the trees there? . . . And you say
This
happened, as it were, but yesterday?
And here the Commune
stretched a barricade,
And there the final desperate stand was made?

Such things have been? How all things change and fade!
How little
lasts in this brave world below!
Love dies; hate cools; the Caesars
come and go;
Gaunt Hunter fattens, and the weak grow strong.

Even Republics are not here for long!
Ah, who can tell what hour may bring the doom,
The lighted torch,
the tocsin's heavy boom!
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
"The Southern Transept,
hardly known by any other name but Poet's
Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.
TREAD softly here; the sacredest of tombs
Are those that hold your
Poets. Kings and queens
Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.

Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!
But he who
from the darkling mass of men
Is on the wing of heavenly thought
upborne
To finer ether, and becomes a voice
For all the voiceless,
God anointed him:
His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.
Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
Beneath those marble
cenotaphs and urns
Lies richer dust than ever nature hid
Packed in
the mountain's adamantine heart,
Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected
sand--
The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.
How vain and
all ignoble seems that greed
To him who stands in this dim claustral
air
With these most sacred ashes at his feet!
This dust was Chaucer,
Spenser, Dryden this--
The spark that once illumed it lingers still.
O
ever-hallowed spot of English earth!
If the unleashed and happy spirit
of man
Have option to revisit our dull globe,
What august Shades at
midnight here convene
In the miraculous sessions of the moon,

When the great pulse