The Sisters Tragedy | Page 4

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 of London faintly throbs,?And one by one the stars in heaven pale!
ALEC YEATON'S SON
GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720
The wind it wailed, the wind it moaned,
And the white caps flecked the sea;?"An' I would to God," the skipper groaned,
"I had not my boy with me!"
Snug in the stern-sheets, little John
Laughed as the scud swept by;?But the skipper's sunburnt cheek grew wan
As he watched the wicked sky.
"Would he were at his mother's side!"
And the skipper's eyes were dim.?"Good Lord in heaven, if ill betide,
What would become of him!
"For me--my muscles are as