William Dean Howells

“ If I knock, no one will come:
The feet are at rest forever,
And the lips are cold and dumb.
The summer moon is shining
So wan and large and still,
And the weary dead are sleeping
In the graveyard under the hill.
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IV.
We looked at the wide, white circle
Around the Autumn moon,
And talked of the change of weather:
It would rain, to-morrow, or soon.
And the rain came on the morrow,
And beat the dying leaves
From the shuddering boughs of the maples
Into the flooded eaves.
The clouds wept out their sorrow;
But in my heart the tears
Are bitter for want of weeping,
In all these Autumn years. ”

“ The songs that silence knows by heart!––
I see sweet burlesque feigning art,
The careless grace that curved and swayed
Through dances and through breezy walks;
I feel once more the eyes that smiled,
And that dear presence that beguiled
The pauses of the foolish talks,
When this poor phantom of perfume
Was the Sweet Clover’s living soul,
And breathed from her as if it stole,
Ah, heaven! from her heart in bloom!
II.
We have not many ways with pain:
We weep weak tears, or else we laugh;
I doubt, not less the cup we quaff,
And tears and scorn alike are vain. ”

“ Like a great flower, afar on the crest of the eastern woodland,
Goldenly bloomed the sun, and over the beautiful valley,
Dim with its dew and shadow, and bright with its dream of a river,
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Looked to the western hills, and shone on the humble procession,
Paining with splendor the children’s eyes, and the heart of the mother.
Beauty, and fragrance, and song filled the air like a palpable presence.
Sweet was the smell of the dewy leaves and the flowers in the wild-wood,
Fair the long reaches of sun and shade in the aisles of the forest. ”

“ Laid its last light touches on Eve driven forth out of Eden,
Otherwise Violante, and while his pupils about him
Wrought and chattered, in silence ran the thought of the painter:
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“She, and forever she! Is it come to be my perdition?
Shall I, then, never more make the face of a beautiful woman
But it must take her divine, accursèd beauty upon it,
And, when I finish my work, stand forth her visible presence?
Ah! I could take this sword and strike it into her bosom!
Though I believe my own heart’s blood would stream from the painting,
So much I love her! ”

“ Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler,––
Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning.
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Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were;
Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,
With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor
All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so.
‘Say! is it so?’ she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master
Died a sickly smile, and he said, ‘Louise, I have sold you.’
God is my judge! ”

“ Venice we’ve thoroughly done, and it’s perfectly true of the pictures––
Titians and Tintorettos, and Palmas and Paul Veroneses;
Neither are gondolas fictions, but verities, hearse-like and swan-like,
Quite as the heart could wish. And one finds, to one’s infinite comfort,
Venice just as unique as one’s fondest visions have made it:
Palaces and mosquitoes rise from the water together,
And, in the city’s streets, the salt-sea is ebbing and flowing
Several inches or more.
––Ah! let me not wrong thee, O Venice! ”

“ Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded by hope or remembrance.
Yet we knew the beautiful night, as it grew from the evening:
Far beneath us and far above us the vault of the heavens
Glittered and darkened; and now the moon, that had haunted the daylight
Thin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her fulness of splendor,
And over all the lagoons fell the silvery rain of the moonbeams,
As in the song the young girls sang while their gondolas passed us,––
Sang in the joy of love, or youth’s desire of loving. ”

“ Not surprise nor regret, but a fierce, precipitate gladness
Sent the blood to my throbbing heart when I found him in Venice.
“Waiting for you,” he whispered; “you would so.” I answered him nothing.
V.
Father, whose humor grows more silent and ever more absent
(Changed in all but love for me since the death of my mother) ,
Willing to see me contented at last, and trusting us wholly,
Left us together alone in our world of love and of beauty. ”

“ Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.
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II.
Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound;
And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,
As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.
Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strong and stanch,
And to the lines and treacherous rocks look well as you launch! ”

“ Rapt from all mortal presence, and in her rapture uplifted,
Glorified she rose, and stood in the midst of the people,
Looking on all with the still, unseeing eyes of devotion,––
Vague, and tender, and sweet, as the eyes of the dead, when we dream them
Living and looking on us, but they cannot speak, and we cannot,––
Knowing only the peril that threatened his soul’s unrepentance,
Knowing only the fear and error and wrong that withheld him,
Thinking, “In doubt of me, his soul had perished forever!” ”

“ Like its thunder and its lightning our brave burst on the foe,
Up above the clouds on Freedom’s Lookout Mountain
Raining life-blood like water on the valleys down below.
O, green be the laurels that grow,
O sweet be the wild-buds that blow,
In the dells of the mountain where the brave are lying low.
Light of our hope and crown of our story,
Bright as sunlight, pure as starlight shall their deeds of daring glow,
While the day and the night out of heaven shed their glory,
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On Freedom’s Lookout Mountain whence they routed Freedom’s foe. ”

“ Children, whose golden locks yet shone with the lingering effulgence
Of the touches of Him who blessed little children forever;
Old men, whose yearning eyes were dimmed with the far-streaming brightness
Seen through the opening gates in the heart of the heavenly city,––
Stealthily through the harking woods the lengthening shadows
Chased the wild things to their nests, and the twilight died into darkness.
Now the four great pyres that were placed there to light the encampment,
High on platforms raised above the people, were kindled. ”

“ Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared him.
Her love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosom
With a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting,
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Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that phantom
Proved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight,
Such as speech with the lady’s father.
And now, could I pardon––
Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought so. ”

“ Then both his children to a window leads
That over daisied pasture-land looks out,
And shows Bopeep where her lost flock wide feeds,
And every frolic lambkin leaps about.
She hears Boy-Blue, that lazy shepherd, shout,
Slow pausing from his pipe of mellow reeds;
XXXVIII.
And, turning, peers into her prince’s eyes;
Then, caught and clasped against her prince’s heart,
Upon her breath her answer wordless dies,
And leaves her gratitude to sweeter art,––
To lips from which the bloom shall never part,
To looks wherein the summer never dies! ”

“ Out of the midst of the people, a woman old and decrepit,
Tremulous through the light, and tremulous into the shadow,
Wavered toward him with slow, uncertain paces of palsy,
Laid her quivering hand on his arm and brokenly prayed him:
“Louis Lebeau, I closed in death the eyes of your mother.
On my breast she died, in prayer for her fatherless children,
That they might know the Lord, and follow him always, and serve him. ”

“ Of the people that sang in the virgin heart of the forest.
Autumn was in the land, and the trees were golden and crimson,
And from the luminous boughs of the over-elms and the maples
Tender and beautiful fell the light in the worshippers’ faces,
Softer than lights that stream through the saints on the windows of churches,
While the balsamy breath of the hemlocks and pines by the river
Stole on the winds through the woodland aisles like the breath of a censer.
Loud the people sang old camp-meeting anthems that quaver
Quaintly yet from lips forgetful of lips that have kissed them ”

“ More than in dreams, and one’s life with the life of the city is blended
In a luxurious calm, and the tumult without and beyond it
Seems but the emptiest fable of vain aspiration and labor.
Yes, from all that makes this Venice sole among cities,
Peerless forever,––the still lagoons that sleep in the sunlight,
Lulled by their island-bells; the night’s mysterious waters
Lit through their shadowy depths by stems of splendor, that blossom
Into the lamps that float, like flamy lotuses, over ”

“ And in Mantua they are remembered
As is the last year’s snow;
But the Marchioness goes to her chamber
Day after day to weep,––
For the changeless heart of a mother
The love of a son must keep.
The Marchioness weeps in her chamber
Over tidings that come to her
Of the exiles she seeks, by letter
And by lips of messenger,
Broken hints of their sojourn and absence,
Comfortless, vague, and slight,––
Like feathers wafted backwards
From passage birds in flight. ”

“ Smote them and strewed them to earth like leaves in the breath of the whirlwind.
Hushed at last was the sound of the lamentation and singing;
But from the distant hill the throbbing drum of the pheasant
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Shook with its heavy pulses the depths of the listening silence,
When from his place arose a white-haired exhorter, and faltered:
“Brethren and sisters in Jesus! the Lord hath heard our petitions,
So that the hearts of his servants are awed and melted within them,––
Even the hearts of the wicked are touched by his infinite mercy. ”

“ Glimpses, through rusted cancelli, of lurking greenness of gardens,
Wild-grown flowers and broken statues and mouldering frescos;
Thoroughfares filled with traffic, and throngs ever ebbing and flowing
To and from the heart of the city, whose pride and devotion,
Lifting high the bells of St. Mark’s like prayers unto heaven,
Stretch a marble embrace of palaces toward the cathedral
Orient, gorgeous, and flushed with color and light, like the morning! ”

“ Brawls at New Orleans, and all the towns on the rivers,
All the godless towns of the many-ruffianed rivers.
Only she who loved him the best of all, in her loving
Knew him the best of all, and other than that of the rumors.
Daily she prayed for him, with conscious and tender effusion,
That the Lord would convert him. But when her father forbade him
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Unto her thought, she denied him, and likewise held him for outcast,
Turned her eyes when they met, and would not speak, though her heart broke. ”

“ They reached the gate, one fine spell hindered them both.
Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish
Such as but women know
That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,
And what they would, would rather they would not so;
Till he said,––man-like nothing comprehending
Of all the wondrous guile
That women won win themselves with, and bending
Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,––
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“Ah, if beyond this gate the path united
Our steps as far as death,
And I might open it!––” His voice, affrighted
At its own daring, faltered under his breath. ”

“ Into the enemy’s hands, after ages of sickness and prison,
Made his escape at last; and, returning, found all his virtues
Grown out of recognition and shining in posthumous splendor,––
Found all changed and estranged, and, he fancied, more wonder than welcome.
So, somewhat heavy of heart, and disabled for war, he had wandered
Hither to Europe for perfecter peace. Abruptly his silence,
Full of suggestion and sadness, made here a chasm between us ”

“ Still, when I look on his work, my soul makes obeisance within me,
Humbling itself before the touch that shall never be equalled.”
He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence,
And Pordenone was roused from these thoughts anon by the sudden
Hush that had fallen upon the garrulous group of his pupils;
And ere he turned half-way with instinctive looks of inquiry,
He was already warned, with a shock at the heart, of a presence
Long attended, not feared; and he laid one hand on his sword-hilt,
Seizing the sheath with the other hand, that the pallet had dropped from. ”

“ If it should touch a century’s bound, I should think it too precious
Even to spare a moment for rage at another’s good fortune.
Do not be fooled by the purblind flatterers who would persuade you
Either of us shall have greater fame through the fall of the other.
We can thrive only in common. The tardily blossoming cycles,
Flowering at last in this glorious age of our art, had not waited,
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Folded calyxes still, for Pordenone or Titian. ”

“ In youth there comes a west-wind
Blowing our bloom away,––
A chilly breath of Autumn
Out of the lips of May.
We bear the ripe fruit after,––
Ah, me! for the thought of pain!––
We know the sweetness and beauty
And the heart-bloom never again.
II.
One sails away to sea,
One stands on the shore and cries ”

“ A boy, with the whole wide world at my feet,
Under the shade of the mulberry-tree,––
From the shame of the squandered chances, the sleep
Of the will that cannot itself awaken,
From the promise the future can never keep,
From the fitful purposes vague and shaken,––
Then, while the grasshopper sang out shrill
In the grass beneath the blanching thistle,
And the afternoon air, with a tender thrill,
Harked to the quail’s complaining whistle,––
Ah me! ”

“ Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
“Perish the thorns and splendor,––the bloom and the sweetness are perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one’s Duty,––
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These and the world, for dead Love!––The end of these modern romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?... Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin Clement.” ”

“ Dear, for my heart has won here deep peace from cruel confusion;
And in this lucent air, whose night is but tenderer noon-day,
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Fear is forever dead, and hope has put on the immortal!
––There! and you need not laugh. I’m coming to something directly.
One thing: I’ve bought you a chain of the famous fabric of Venice––
Something peculiar and quaint, and of such a delicate texture
That you must wear it embroidered upon a riband of velvet,
If you would have the effect of its exquisite fineness and beauty.
“Isn’t it very frail?” I asked of the workman who made it. ”

“ Her golden hair, blown over her red lips,
That seem two rose-leaves softly breathed apart,
Athwart her rounded throat like sunshine slips;
Her small hand, resting on her beating heart,
The crook that tells her peaceful shepherd-art
Scarce keeps with light and tremulous finger-tips. ”