Thomas Runciman

“ Shaded by gloom!
Life with the fun in it—
Shadowed by Doom!
Life with its Love ever haunted by Hate!
Life's laughing morrows frowned over by Fate!
Young Life's wild gladness still waylaid by Age! ”

“ Dry light reverberates, colour withdrawing
Into a sky so white, sight cannot follow it.
While in the shadows cast, rich hues, intenser
Far than in light spaces, offer me gladness.
Sun reigns triumphantly, thinning all vapour
Into translucency, through which the foliage
Bears out in sparkles of full golden greenery.
O'er this, short dashes of keen grey-green masses lie;
Even the cooler tints, pitched in this higher key—
Purpling and greening greys—are fierce as fires.
All the vast universe lives in one beautiful
Summer—made lambent light, offering gladness. ”

“ And larger thoughts have birth among the moors and lowly glades
And reedy mounds and sands of my North Countrie.
II.
You who know what easeful arms
Silence winds about the dead,
Or what far-swept music charms
Hearts that were earth-wearied;
You who know—if aught be known
In that everlasting Hush
Where the life-born years are strewn,
Where the eyeless ages rush,—
Tell me, is it conscious rest
Heals the whilom hurt of life?
Or is Nirvana undistressed
E'en by memory of strife?
III.
Metempsychosis. ”

“ No help to human anguish bring, that bleeds
For all two thousand years of Christian deeds.
Let Use and Wont in styes still feed and grunt,
Or, bovine, graze knee-deep in flowering meads.
Mount! follow! Onward urge Life's dragon-hunt!"
—So cries the sportsman brisk at break of day. ”

“ Artists of his name had been men of mark in Scotland, and as he had their strong feeling for colour he was allowed for a time to become a pupil of William Bell Scott, who was on the fringe of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Throughout his life he painted portraits and landscapes, but the latter were what he loved. His work was not widely known, for he had a nervous contempt for Exhibitions, and the first collection of his landscapes in water-colour and oil was opened to the public at a posthumous exhibition in Newcastle in 1911. ”