George Edward Woodberry

“ A serpent wand, tipped with a pine-tree cone,
Proclaimed him Bacchanal; like bronze he shone,
The form and feature of an antique land,
Ionian Asia, rich in old decay.
"Other my gods," the Roamer said, "'t is true;
But not my heart. What place of woe is this?"
"Thy full brows show thee a creator born;
But here is discreation. Avaunt!" he cried;
"Fly the mad region! fly the woeful strand,
Where beauty dies a thousand deaths in vain!
For vain the death is of immortal things,
Though ceaseless is their dying in the world." ”

“ The Roamer's gaze! The other, in quick turn,
As if antiphonal to that high strain,
Took up the Word: "Abandoned and deprived,
He is most rich who, vowed to poverty,
Hath nothing to receive and all to give;
And who beholds him learns the works of love.
Love is the bread that feeds the multitudes;
Love is the healing of the hospitals;
Love is the light that breaks through prison doors;
Love knows not rich nor poor, nor good nor bad,
But only the beloved, in every heart
One and the same, the incorruptible
Spirit divine, whose tabernacle is life. ”

“ Their hymns shall be a nation's memory.
The few ride on, their lips too firm for song;
On many a lonely field they find how hard
The bright rebellion is that showed so fair
'Gainst this world’s wrong; now, taught within, they learn
What might it takes to wield a heavenly sword!"
⁠He could not stay the spirit's wandering cries,
The music of the breaking heart of man,
Made hoarse by passion now, with grief grown stern:
⁠"Is God then weary? has the flaming sphere,
Belted with burning noons and starred with night,
Paused in its revolution in the deep? ”

“ Here raise aloft the world's great hope anew,
Proclaiming man, who lives in all men's lives,
What is endures, what shall be brings! O send
Omnipotently forth thy word where now
He sows the western edges of the world
With wisdom and delight and love's increase,
Till earth shall lift one harvest from one field,
Reaped by one race that shall one Father own,
Eat at one table, sleep beside one hearth,
Confederate in blessèd unities,
One law, one faith, and one prosperity,
One labor looking to one end divine:
So fair a star hangs in our western skies. ”

“ Up from the sunken vale,—his world that was,
And through its stony heart the black gash drawn.
So far his feet had pierced into the night,
Such labors done had stamped out all return,
Such grim despair had cut him from his kind;
And in the narrow onward what should lie
More than the bare couch of a lonely grave,
Where never one of men should find the place?
Then leaped the arrow in the open wound:
"Go, if thou wilt, O following with the stars
That rose with thy creation—unbeloved,
Inglorious, though love and fame without
None finds the wholesome uses of his life ”

“ Insatiate hope, unconquerable will!
Now over-seas he bears the human fates;
He opens mighty lands; he lieth down
In the waste places. Harken to his voice,
In this world's wilderness his living cry,
The soul of man, heard now in this new verse!
In me he is the passion perilous;
In me he is the truth all-nourishing;
In me he is the never-silent song,
In new lands rising. Watch, O Heavenly Truth!
Though past the pillars of Atlantic seas
Another earth I travel and new stars
In this great continent that yokes the poles,
Yet not from thee removed, o'er lake and plain ”

“ Melted to vision, his habitual world;
And all experience to his hand was clay,
The stuff of life, wherein his moulding thought
Mysterious moved, and fashioned, like a god's,—
The poet's art-instinctive in his life,
Not for the world, but his own natural breath
Whereby he greatened and grew into man,
True man and whole, at one with this dark frame,
By penetration mastering the sphere
In secret study, and at one with man,
Merging with men by love and sympathy
And old imaginations fusing might
Confederating man in human fate. ”

“ XXVIII
"An evil thing is honor," once of old
⁠The saddest of Italian shepherds sang,
⁠And on his mouth the immortal lyric sprang
That through all ages pours the age of gold:
"Not that the earth untilled her harvests rolled,
⁠The rose no thorn, the serpent had no fang,
⁠The sea no furrow, nowhere ever rang
The battle, but that love was uncontrolled."
The reminiscence of all lost desire
⁠That love-defrauded hearts dream on for aye,
Hangs in the words, and rises from the lyre,
⁠Whose ecstasy fails not unto this day.
O Song of Gold! O all-consuming fire! ”

“ Earth's victor, thronged with captives and with spoils,
Where consul-captains of great Rome enthroned
Drew their long triumphs to the Capitol!
They on their shoulders bore the mighty world:
But here, the soaring soul on outstretched wings
Bears up the precious burden of all hope
Through dim and starry deeps, the charge of heaven.
How wan it grows, and waxes gray with time!
Beauty and glory die, and love hath end;
Mary and Magdalen are made one dust;
And all things turn to phantoms, fade, and cease.
Only a little while those glories stand
That rose unto eternal memory. ”

“ Created or imagined or devised,
The masks of mimicry or vestures true,
Earth's massy mould or the dark breast of man.
As one whose fixed soul settles to its hate,
A moment on the world's dismay he looked,
And felt the strength within him knit and lock;
Then slow a myriad glooms expanding swung—
Far off they knew their prey—and, vulture-like,
Their grim and soundless welcome fell on him.
Darkness, and blasts that made the willows white,
Blinded his spirit; moaning were the woods
With tempest, and the heavy-folded storm
Lifted its head and breathed against the stars. ”

“ As if himself were seated in thy breast.
Then shalt thou shake with the first throb of love
That knows what love is; love is sacrifice
Of all that love holds dear unto itself,
Even to the extinction of its hopes, its life,
So that its object live, complete and fair,
Its nature out to its own loveliness
Of act and being." "Thou hast told my tale,
As if myself had emptied all my heart,"
The Roamer said; and over them swift night
Came in the striding shadow of eclipse
Upon the desert sands. "The light? the light?"
The Roamer said; "the light divine?" "The light?" ”

“ The one in thousands, for some trivial thing,
Submit the conscious spirit to the shame,
Or cheat life's blossom of its bitter fruit,
And dying find the near way to the grave?
Eternal Vengeance! Who that hath a soul,
The match of knowledge, would not break the bond,
The base, base thraldom? who would tame his will,
That from heaven's justice takes its liberty,
To do the lecherous and bloody act
Of natural being? who would game and lie,
And shrink into a cruel selfish heart,
To lord it o'er this serf-society?
Great souls might conquer pain; loss nor mischance
Can touch their essence ”

“ And all that is fills but a player's scene,
Where time is not, nor place; there, to the soul
The passing world, unfolding like a flower
From unseen roots, that shuts at eventide,
Is but a phantom-bloom and beauty's shade,
Echoing far off divine reality:
Such song the morning-stars together sang,
And at creation's birth praised light unseen."
Then in the Roamer stirred his dreaming youth:
"So once I sang with lifted hands to heaven
The beauty that the dawn hath never clasped,
The peace that falls not with eve's blessèd dew,
The mystery within the seas and stars ”

“ Wild birds in the void air; forward he saw
Where the wide world, westering with dune and butte
Sky-bordering, lifted on the rolling plains
A harsh, scant herbage of dull silvery leaf,
Flooring the solemn dawn. "The herb of grace"—
He heard the old man speak—"grows everywhere;
But sweetest, on the desert border found
And crushed, gives up its fragrant virtue here."
Then the awed Roamer swift bethought himself,
Replying, "Such tranquillity is thine,
So saintly bends toward earth thy age serene,
Scarce mortal thou, though mortal sounds thy voice." ”

“ Sleeps in man's heart the writhing worm of hell?
Had I sought peace, peace long ago were found.
O cruel guile! O pitiless! to make
The sorrow of the soul thy instrument,
And ruin with what saves, if aught!" He turned
Into the dark beneath the great stone brows;
"O fertile Falsehood! fool, to think him known
Who draws his cordon round the mount of time
And singly doth beleaguer the whole world
That there sits perched! races and states opposed,
And God's alliance! yet each poor soul doth press
As it were all his war! ”

“ For that strange light that aye shines in my face
⁠From her I love in secret, makes them mine,
And they adopt me into their high race,
⁠Who only through my lady walk divine.
XXXVII
Between my eyes and her so thin the screen
⁠Grows with the passage of my mortal years
⁠That almost to my human sight appears
The holy presence of the life serene.
The skies of Perugino, golden-green,
⁠Encompass it; and like an angel nears,
⁠Through cypress lights, she whom my soul reveres
And dim through veils of nature I have seen. ”

“ It drifts upon the sea, it crawls the ooze;
It casts its films on slime and shale and sand;
It rises up—O miracle of change!
He comes, he comes, the spirit-visioned One,
The child of promise, earth's dear heavenly charge,
The heir of all that was, the prophecy
Of all that shall be, man, the crown of things.
Take him, O Nature, flower and seed divine!
With fragrant seasons harbor him, O Earth!
Bright heaven, with lucid balms his eyelids bathe!
Thou vital air, sustain him! our rich hope,
Our bliss on earth, our immortality
In heaven!-Mockery! mockery! ”

“ Wonderful, Earth, from thy dark soil it comes,
Flower of the spirit, in highest heaven up-borne,
Supreme of things, far-shining, the Ideal!
Clothed on with beauty of the world below,
That from the mortal senses takes its form
And radiance,—not alone the outer frame
Of eye and ear and touch, material things,
But all that loveliness within the soul,
The holy burden of its great ideas,
The splendor of its passions unto death,
Wrapping the world in little spiritual flames,—
How mounts the Dream! up! ”

“ He seemed to hear the ceaseless surge of thought
Breaking on nature, and himself was drawn
In the dark undertow down unknown deeps,
And aye in him the climbing thought again
Made up the steeps of life in breaking waves,—
And, like an echo, there a spirit stood:
"O fallen star of morning beautiful,—
But sad thy beauty,"—the deep voice began—
"Why comest thou, breath of the living flesh,
From the lost lands of unfulfilled desire
Into the waste and turmoil of this death?
Not of our race, thee other gods protect." ”

“ Once theirs, so fair, so dear, so intimate
They shine upon the eye and reach the heart,
Thus in the waste dominion round me strown
The immortal shadow of my own sweet land
Smiles from its ruins; on the rocky verge
The past gleams visionary; in the noon I see
Prone columns and huge capitals o'erthrown,
A tract of marble desolation piled,
Edged by the bright sea where I tasted death."
Even to the Roamer's self the landscape round,
As when the wind breathes on a field of wheat
And lifts the poppies, laughter of the spring,
Seemed by the dying gleam of time o'erswept ”

“ Brown, bleak, and bare, withers the wind-blown waste;
No fresh-turned field, no glade of violets there,
Nor far gleams of the emerald winter-wheat,
Nor drifts of orchard-blossoms on the hills,
Nor garden-plot, nor tree, nor lilac-spray!
Now homeward through the moonlight-darkened fields
The lover goes; the fire-flies flash; but he
Sees one sweet face that held the rosy West"—
As one who thinks of her he may not love,
And feels his eyes o'erbrim with wasted light,
He sighed, and, sighing, kept the herbless way. ”

“ The wild beast's portion and the vulture's perch;
The outcast, whitening in the passing winds;
The fool, erased from human memory!"
⁠"All ye remembered years, upbear me now!"
The Roamer cried, descending down the dark;
And he was shut in that tremendous pass
Whose exit lay on sky-hung capes unknown,
On seas of death perchance; for well he knew
The frailty that the wasting years had wrought,
And his stern need, O, not of youth's green strength
Undisciplined, but that all-secret proof
Which from defeat its perfect temper takes,—
The wisdom of how much the weak can dare ”

“ Body and soul, and life's old strife assuage;
⁠Still must abide, till heaven perfect its grace,
⁠And love grown wisdom sweeten in man's face,
Alike the Christian and the heathen rage.
The tutelary genius of mankind
⁠Ripens by slow degrees the final State,
That in the soul shall its foundations find
⁠And only in victorious love grow great;
Patient the heart must be, humble the mind,
⁠That doth the greater births of time await! ”

“ Though glorified, their love was human love,
⁠One unto one: a greater love I know.
VI
How many human loves swarm to my arms,
⁠Although I am unworthy! yet, in truth,
⁠I was a lover from my earliest youth,
And love, even the unworthiest, hath dear charms;
And oft I feel within me vague alarms,
⁠Thick-thronging fears, and inward-turning ruth,
⁠Lest my affections be not things of sooth,
But phantom-fancies that oft end in harms. ”

“ The bird took flight, the throngèd street stood still;
'O breath that wakes the hundred lyres of song,
O trump that fills the thousand fields of fame,
O hand of Hope, O seed of Memory,
Planting the future with the past sublime!
O voice that doth proclaim the glorious peace,
O hymn that lifts the jubilee of slaves—
The birth-cry of the nations, earth's new name,
The victory's blazon, Christ's eternal rouse!
Thy faintest whisper quakes beneath the throne,
And echoes in the people's mighty heart,
And gathers to the shout that gives God hail! ”