Roden Noel

“ Shadowy fruits and flowers in elf-light hanging;
Plaintive low voices floating tenderly.
One waking here, in slumber borne from far,
Would deem he had died in sleep, and was in
heaven.
⁠Alas! all fair dreams fade, and this would fade!
Joy only masketh the wan face of woe.
For not alone here fever's mortal breath
Chills all exultant ardours of the brave;
Slackens bent bows of young impetuous lives,
Baffling the swift-wing'd arrows of their aim;
Veils youthful eyes in languorous impotence,
So that they love no more fair life than death. ”

“ The slave may kneel; but only kneel to God!
Thou, gallant Stanley, scorning toil, alert,
Stern battling with thy formidable foes,
Hast won the brilliant prize; and Europe turn
Her enviously grateful eyes on thee!
⁠The outer world supposed the traveller dead.
But Murchison, and some true friends beside,
In England, as beyond the sundering sea,
Firm in sagacions confidence, divined
His living need, and sent strong hearts to help.
Young, namesake of a faithful friend at home,21
Finds all the falsehood of a traitor's tale:
But Stanley finds the murder'd man alive! ”

“ Yea, these shall feel Love's own rare vintage prest
From sin, and sorrow, and the world's unrest;
Calvary's midnight, with the cross of shame,
The very heart of Love's immortal flame!
While agony weighs common mortals down,
Our heroes lift, and wear it for a crown:
A bow that none save hallowed hearts may bend,
A sword that will the weakling wielder rend,
Spell for a mighty Mage to conjure with,
Confounding fools who are not of their kith! ”

“ Have these a lowlier place allotted them?
Yet they full surely have their post prepared
In God's world-army: I will help them there.
And I believe Jesus, the Man of men,
Who is God's personal Love and Righteousness,
To be the one and only living Lord,
Ruler alike of loftiest and least,
Who, being reveal'd, will draw men unto Him,
Each in his order and foreknown degree.
⁠Sun of the living! Hesper of the gloom!
Surely Thy dusky children call for Thee,
Unknowing whom they call—the wail resounds
Yet in mine ears of some funereal dirge
For one beloved and vanished ”

“ One drop of earth's pale vintage can so brim
A human want we counted infinite,
Or one defeat so daunt the whim to fight,
That how God's armies fare concerns him not,
If he may lie at ease, and idly rot!
Shall one, whose mind co-operates to found
The vision of a world with ne'er a bound,
Merge into some mere image, or a feeling
From forth an alien spirit swiftly stealing?
Material appearance can be naught,
Save in a human, or a foreign thought. ”

“ These labour-roughen'd hands have builded it.
Nor for myself alone, but for the dark
Children of whom I am the father here,
I labour with strong hand, and heart, and soul.
I smelt rude ores; and, fervid as large eyes
Of wrathful tigers, ringing iron yields
Upon mine anvil, hammer'd heartily;
While a bow'd native plies the goatskin bellows.
Lusty and hale, in manhood's vigorous prime,
I startle the lone woods with stalwart blows;
While cream-white splinters fly from stubborn trunks,
Whose leafy pride falls headlong shattering ”

“ Whom now a delicate cloud receives from view,
A cool, soft, delicate cloud, we name dim Death!
O pure white lamb-lily, inhaling breath
From spiritual ether among bowers
Of evergreen in the ever-living flowers,
Yonder aloft upon the airy height,
Mine eyes may scarce arrive at thy still light!
Wandering ever higher, oh, farewell!
Wilt thou the dear God tell
We loved thee well,
While He would lend thee? Why may we not follow?
Do thou remember us in our dim hollow! ”

“ To embrace fair Philæ, Philæ, fairest isle
Of all earth's islands! fringed with mirror'd palm,
And lotos blossom on the crystalline
Laving her bosom; she hath lotos blossom
For capitals of her hypæthral fane,
Quiet in heaven, tremulous in the river:
Where, sundering flowing phantoms of the stars,
Boats glide by night, aslant on broider'd sail,
Freighted with youth, and love and loveliness:
Balmy night breezes, all alive with song,
Laughter, and rhythmic plashing of light oars,
(While coloured lamp-lights lambent on the ripple
Stream from fair vessel, or embower'd shore) ”

“ One pure white Light is over all,
One Spirit-Pulse serene,
Who when we rise, and when we fall,
Unmoved approves the scene.
For Love is Lord from Heaven to Hell,
Walks our red waves of sorrow;
Love weeps beside us; all is well ”

“ To me I confess it appears that Past and Present are equally poetical, when regarded and treated by a poet—equally unpoetical when regarded and treated by a mere versifier—though I am far from saying that every particular time is fully as poetical as any other. But the present time seems by no means deficient in that respect. No age is heroic to its valet-de-chambre; and every age has many valets-de-chambre. ”

“ And fibres of a leaf; weave grassy cloths
In looms, or spin with immemorial spindle.
Some men have gone with quiver, targe, and spear,
To hunt the beast for food; some loll at ease,
Like their own gourds, luxuriously idle;
Listless and vacant dumb black animals,
Who spurn the accursèd joke of thought and toil—
They never roll the stone of Sisyphus!
No fool's ambition ever goads their lives
To rouse a restless rumour, while they roll
Into fate's mortal darkness, and to leave
A hollow murmur for a little time
In some poor space of insignificant earth! ”

“ Men deem life not fled, dear,
Deem my life not fled,
Tho' I with thee am dead, dear,
I with thee am dead,
O my little child!
What is the grey world, darling,
What is the grey world,
Where the worm is curled, darling,
The deathworm is curled? ”

“ Her guilty sail; while evil strangers brand
Dark women on a golden strand with fire;
Who are mute with endless woes unutterable!
⁠Nay! the long wail of wounded innocence
Hath ne'er been squander'd on a voiceless Void!
But every tear of every helpless child
Sinks in a warm unfathomable Love:
And armèd Righteousness awaits her hour,
Albeit Her lightning slumber in the cloud.
These human shambles shall be purged from blood:
This charnel of the world shall reek no more,
Plague-spot of all the starry universe! ”

“ Thou should have laid me my in quiet grave,
Sorrowing calm;
And I with folded palm.
But now above thine own behold I rave!
With all thy life before thee so to die,
Unseasonably!
"Whom the gods love die young;" ”

“ Of over-frowning mountain-presences
With stealthily mysterious forms aware.
A bitter, long, monotonous human wail!
More poignant than the cries of animal lives
In unreverberate torture; 'tis a wail
Of one that's cloven to the depths of being,
Maim'd in the vitals of an immortal soul.
To me it seems alive with the wild prayer,
This poor blind people hath so oft preferr'd,
Crying with dumb yet infinite eloquence,
"O wise white man! we pray thee give us sleep!" ”

“ I cannot find my child.
The infinite blank spaces
Are weighing on my soul,
Gloom reigns in their dumb faces,
And there is no goal!
My hand is on the hollow,
Where I dreamed a heart;
The world is dead ”

“ Ourselves are the foundation stone;
If thought fail, the world is gone;
All were ruined, wanting one.
But all the valley sings!
Nature rises on immortal wings!
And soaring, lo! she sings! she sings!
There is no death! ”

“ Tortures a feeble lowly-witted race,
Poor fallen outcast of humanity;
Inflames the lurking salvage brute that haunts
A wilding blood to fratricidal war,
To thrall its very kindred, for the sport
Of paler large-brain'd fiends, the common foe,
And glut their markets with the flesh of men.
Shoot them and drown them! from convulsive arms
Tear small sweet clinging babes, and fainting brides
From lovers, who with unavailing life
Stain them in falling, or themselves enslaved,
Yoked, goaded, pinioned, tramp the burning wilds,
To bleach with beast-gnawn bones the wilderness ”

“ With all these who love him
A brief while ago,
Heaven's joy above him,
Our joy below!
Ah! may you be merry
While one is lost,
In his dear bosom the
Terrible frost?
Smile we who bury
All we love most? ”

“ Ordeal poison from a gourden bowl,
And, struggling piteous to reverse the doom
Of her young murder, reels, and sinks, and falls;
A hundred daggers mangling her fair life. . . . .
Do these not need the Gospel of the Lord?
⁠Therefore I press right onward to my goal:
Nor only for an hour, a month, a year;
But while life lasts, a warrior to the end,
I wrest from Fortune all she would withhold. ”

“ Quail'd and rebell'd—let him but struggle home!
Homeward they hasten—life ebbing apace.
And first he rides; but soon they carry him.
So when they have arrived at Muilala,
He bows the head—"A hut where I may die!"
⁠Now all the mists of death pass over him:
Terrible pain, ill dreams; with longings vain
For one glimpse of a loving face afar.
It is the hour of mortal agony.
Watchman! will the terrible night soon pass? ”

“ The sun-god lies not dead within the shroud,
Tho' shorn of beams he dwindle in a cloud.
Yea, all the vaster souls in whom we fell
By right divine will rouse them from their hell,
To claim the royal heritage of sons. ”

“ Sorrow and Wrong are pangs of a new birth:
All we who suffer bleed for one another;
No life may live alone, but all in all;
We lie within the tomb of our dead selves,
Waiting till One command us to arise. ”

“ A dirge world-weary, an old-world requiem,
Trailing a slow wan length along the dust,
Faint from the fount of immemorial tears;
A shadow, whose maim'd wings are plumed with awe;
Sunken so deep from ghostly woes and fears,
And broken hearts of all ancestral lives;
Phantoms aroused by a fresh living pain
To haunt the labyrinths of a living soul,
And all the dark slow movement of the dirge!
⁠One cabin stands a little way apart
From all the rest upon a higher ground.
Hence flows the wail! A man laments his son. ”

“ If a low strain of music sails
Among melodious hills and dales,
When a white lamb or kitten leaps,
Or star, or vernal flower peeps,
When rainbow dews are pulsing joy,
Or sunny waves, or leaflets toy,
Then he who sleeps
Softly wakes within my heart ”

“ Whose shores are blushing corallines most rare,
Where ocean-fairies wander mailed in gems,
Silently gliding through the branching bowers
While far inland strange palaces are piled
Profusely with pure ivory and gold—3
No lynx-eyed peril-affronting pioneer,
Since the beginning, until yesterday,
Dared violate thy sultry somnolence,
Couch'd, a grim lion in thine ancient lair;
Sullenly self-involved, impenetrable! ”

“ Once more he is the child, the blithe boy-lover,
Who lay concealed below life's lavish later growth.
And though the soul bewildered err from life to life,
She shall possess them all in God, afar from mortal strife! ”

“ Fragments of torn soil'd paper, strewn around,
Show notes of travel jotted on the way
With his own red blood, used in place of ink.
A notebook, and a Bible, lie beside;
With sextant, and chronometer, and hides;
Ivory, tusks, a rifle, a javelin.
⁠Hark! the tranquillity of burning noon
A distant shot disturbs!—and now another!
Men rouse them—what is it? another shot!
It must be some approaching caravan.
Shall they awake the Master? Nay, he hears:
He is awake, and, listening, wonders too;
Hoping, and fearing; communing with God. ”

“ Perish, my bauble crown, my toy,
All the science, all the sway,
Power to mould the world my way,
Persuade to beauty the dull clay!
Take all; but leave, ah! leave my boy,
Give me back my life, my joy! ”

“ Loathsome with low lust, anguish, desolation!
Until awakes Man's mournful generation
From the colossal ruin of lost life;
And lo! his infinite, opening eyes are rife
With hunger for eternal days, and good,
Piteously craved as necessary food!
Reveal from whence the holy hunger comes!
For all the mute onlookers turn their thumbs
Doomward around the immense arena spaces,
As Man, the victim, peers in their dread faces,
Implacable, though all the beauty-flower
Of the young gladiator plead with power! ”

“ Large-brain'd, blood-thirstiest of the infernal crew,
Six human victims hath the wizard slain,
Ere, man once more, the avengers torture him,
Avowing with bitter tears the sorcery. . . . .
Then many a negro, shivering, glances round,
Timidly peering into forest gloom;
They pile more wood; sitting in silence, till
Another adds his marvel to the store.
⁠Is it all fable? is it all illusion?
Nay, doth not our most awful Universe
Lead poor, mad mortals to the wilds alone,
Into a barren wilderness of souls ”

“ God would be the devil,
Love and Truth were dead,
Man a maniac, mooning
A moment plausibly,
Joy an idiot fooling,
And life Death's leprosy!
No! no! no!
An Eye rules the wild sea
Of human misery! ”

“ In life, in death, She claims to hold his heart!
. . . Hath he not died in her own awful arms?
His sons and daughters in deep sable robed
Bear large white wreaths of blossom for his grave:
Yea, dark Death lies all buried and conceal'd
Under sweet emblems of immortal life! ”

“ Refuse foul is food for a fair supernal flower;
Blaspheme not the rank soil where a pure blossom springs;
For blossom soars away in a singing-bird's blithe pinion,
And bird yields a meek life for a spiritual king's. ”

“ But his chief concern—though he takes a very humane and broad interest in all—is the future of the people, among whom he has so long lived: he is a profoundly sincere Christian missionary—a philanthropist in the best and widest sense—with heart bleeding for all the ignorance, darkness, and misery, which he sees around him; thirsting to devise the best possible means for the salvation, enlightenment, and civilization of the races. ”

“ Where youth's high hope to order the wild world?
A once-bright banner, mouldering and furled!
The stern resolve to mould a world within?
Dead in deep jungles of inveterate sin!
Or may the race prove conqueror, tho' we fall? ”

“ While ever and anon an ebony bird
Rouses from his dim dreaming on the sand,
And screaming harshly, wakes a long wild cry
From some fish-eagle, widening vast brown wings.
In shoals grave marabouts, with red flamingoes,
Wade; and behold! ”

“ IV.
"Measure him for his coffin,"
He heard a stranger say;
And then he broke to laughing,
"God! measure my poor clay,
And shut me in my coffin,
A soul gone grey!
For hope lies dead,
Life is fled." ”

“ Seeks those immortals, who have passed away
From earth to yonder infinite star-worlds:
World within world, sun, planet, comet, moon,
All in their order and their own degree,
One crimson, and one golden, and one green,
Harmonious hearing a low voice of Love! ”

“ And rings, and rings!
Ah! Nature never would have power
To breath such ecstasy of flower,
Vernal songs of happy birds,
The young rill's delicious words,
No iris hues might bring to birth,
No heart were hers for any mirth,
If he were turned to common earth! ”

“ Hover'd and slanted, dipp'd his breast in brine.
Exulting in the wind and turbulent foam;
While half the mortal languor left my limbs,
And I rejoiced with him. From sea to sea!
I traversed all the dark, blank continent;
And proved it not, as timid idle dream
Surmised, an evil waste unprofitable,
Huge blot on God's most bountiful, fair world ”

“ Nor any God may torture us with false hopes of release!"
I spake again to Time:
"Thou liest in thy throat
All may change, or fall, or climb,
Yet all lives self-retained in change, tho' never so remote. ”

“ But there is worse than treacherous-soul'd Miasma,
Lurking for prey, close-mask'd in orient glory,
Enveloping a man with subtle folds
Of dull impalpable mortality.
Sin is a deadlier malady than all!
These flowers are only strewn upon a corpse.
Man has made Earth a hissing and a scorn
Among the constellated worlds of light! ”

“ And our beloved in Thine embrace?
We dream a dream of cold white death,
And all our being shuddereth.
Ah! when may we interpret, Lord,
The meaning of Thy mystic Word?
Death is very pitiful,
Death for a dear child! ”