Fame's pillar here, at last, we set,
Outduring    marble,    brass,    or    jet.
Charm'd    and    enchanted    so
As    to    withstand    the    blow
    Of o v e r t h r o w;
    Nor shall    the    seas,
    Or    o u t r a g e s
    Of    storms    o'erbear
    What    we    uprear.
    Tho'    kingdoms    fall,
This    pillar    never    shall
Decline    or    waste    at    all;
But    stand    for    ever    by    his    own
Firm    and    well-fix'd    foundation.

(Spoken by Mrs. Hilson.)




    The music's done.    Be quiet, Mr. Durie!
Your bell and whistle put me in a fury!
Don't ring up yet, sir--I've a word to say
Before the curtain rises for the play!

    Your pardon, gentlefolks, nor think me bold,
Because I thus our worthy promoter scold:
'Twas all feigned anger.    This enlightened age
Requires a RUSE to bring one on the stage!

    Well, here I am, quite dazzled with the sight
Presented on this brilliant festal night!
Where'er I turn, whole rows of patrons sit--
The house is full--box, gallery, and pit!
Who says the New-York public are unkind?
I know them well, and plainly speak my mind--
"It is our right," the ancient poet sung--
He knew the value of a woman's tongue!
With ...

"How shall we honor the man who creates?"
Asked the Bedouin chief, the poet Antar; -
"Who unto the truth flings open our gates,
Or fashions new thoughts from the light of a star;
Or forges with craft of his finger and brain
Some marvelous weapon we copy in vain;
Or chants to the winds a wild song that shall wander forever undying?

"See! His reward is in envies and hates;
In lips that deny, or in stabs that may kill."
"Nay," said the smith; "for there's one here who waits
Humbly to serve you with unmeasured skill,
Sure that no utmost devotion can fail,
Offered to you, nor unfriended assail
The heart of the hero and poet Antar, whose fame is undying!"

"Speak," said the chief. Then the smith: "O Antar,
It is I who would serve you! I know, by the sou...

O Science, reaching backward through the distance,
    Most earnest child of God,
Exposing all the secrets of existence,
    With thy divining rod,
I bid thee speed up to the heights supernal,
    Clear thinker, ne'er sufficed;
Go seek and bind the laws and truths eternal,
    But leave me Christ.

Upon the vanity of pious sages
    Let in the light of day;
Break down the superstitions of all ages -
    Thrust bigotry away;
Stride on, and bid all stubborn foes defiance,
    Let Truth and Reason reign:
But I beseech thee, O Immortal Science,
    Let Christ remain.

What canst thou give to help me bear my crosses,
    In place of Him, my Lord?
And what to recompense for all my losses,
    And bring me sweet reward?
THOU couldst not ...

Against a robber fox, a tree
Some turkeys served as citadel.
That villain, much provoked to see
Each standing there as sentinel,
Cried out, 'Such witless birds
At me stretch out their necks, and gobble!
No, by the powers! I'll give them trouble.'
He verified his words.
The moon, that shined full on the oak,
Seem'd then to help the turkey folk.
But fox, in arts of siege well versed,
Ransack'd his bag of tricks accursed.
He feign'd himself about to climb;
Walk'd on his hinder legs sublime;
Then death most aptly counterfeited,
And seem'd anon resuscitated.
A practiser of wizard arts
Could not have fill'd so many parts.
In moonlight he contrived to raise
His tail, and make it seem a blaze:
And countless other tricks like that.
Meanwhile, n...

They are creeping on through the cornfields yet, and they clamber amongst the rocks,
Ere they rush to stab with the bayonet and smash with the rifle-stocks.
And many are wounded, many are dead, some reel as if drunk with wine,
And fling them down on a blood-stained bed, and sleep in the firing-line.

And they dream, perhaps, of the days shut back, while the shrapnel shrieks and crashes,
And field-guns hammer and rifles crack, and the blood of a comrade splashes.
In horrible shambles they rest a while from murder by right divine;
They curse or jest, and they frown or smile, and they dream in the firing-line.

In the dreadful din of a ghastly fight they are shooting, murdering, men;
In the smothering silence of ghastly peace we murder with tongue and pen.
Where is heard the tap of ...

The noontide sun streamed brightly down
    Moriah's mountain crest,
The golden blaze of his vivid rays
    Tinged sacred Jordan's breast;
While towering palms and flowerets sweet,
Drooped low 'neath Syria's burning heat.

In the sunny glare of the sultry air
    Toiled up the mountain side
The Patriarch sage in stately age,
    And a youth in health's gay pride,
Bearing in eyes and in features fair
The stamp of his mother's beauty rare.

She had not known when one rosy dawn,
    Ere they started on their way,
She had smoothed with care his clustering hair,
    And knelt with him to pray,
That his father's hand and will alike
Were nerved at his young heart to strike.

The Heavenly Power that with such dower
    Of love fills a mot...

Let this rough fragment lend its mossy seat;
Let Contemplation hail this lone retreat:
Come, meek-eyed goddess, through the midnight gloom,
Born of the silent awe which robes the tomb!
This gothic front, this antiquated pile,
The bleak wind howling through each mazy aisle;
Its high gray towers, faint peeping through the shade,
Shall hail thy presence, consecrated maid!
Whether beneath some vaulted abbey's dome,
Where ev'ry footstep sounds in every tomb;
Where Superstition, from the marble stone,
Gives every sound, a pilgrim-spirit's groan:
Pensive thou readest by the moon's full glare
The sculptured children of Affection's tear;
Or in the church-yard lone thou sitt'st to weep
O'er some sad wreck, beneath the tufty heap--
Perchance some victim to Seduction's sp...

So, then! Wilt use me as a garment? Well,
'Tis man's high impudence to think he may;

But I, who am as old as heav'n and hell,
I am not lightly to be east away.

Wilt run a race? Then I will run with thee,
And stay thy steps or speed thee to the goal;

Wilt dare a fight? Then, of a certainty,
I'll aid thy foeman, or sustain thy soul.

Lo, at thy marriage-feast, upon one hand.
Face of thy bride, and on the other, mine!

Lo, at thy couch of sickness close I stand.
And taint the cup, or make it more benign.

Yea, hark! the very son thou hast begot

One day doth give thee certain sign and cry;

Hold thou thy peace, frighted or frighted not;
That look, that sign, that presence, it is I!

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

The Two Greetings.

I.

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Where all that was to be, in all that was,
Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light—
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Thro’ all this changing world of changeless law,
And every phase of ever-heightening life,
And nine long months of antenatal gloom,
With this last moon, this crescent—her dark orb
Touch’d with earth’s light—thou comest, darling boy;
Our own; a babe in lineament and limb
Perfect, and prophet of the perfect man;
Whose face and form are hers and mine in one,
Indissolubly married like our love;
Live, and be happy in thyself, and serve
This mortal race thy kin so well, that men
May bless thee as we bless thee,...

He chastens us as nations and as men,
He smites us sore until our pride doth yield,
And hence our heroes, each with hearts for ten,
Were vanquished in the field;

And stand to-day beneath our Southern sun
O'erthrown in battle and despoiled of hope,
Their drums all silent and their cause undone,
And they all left to grope

In darkness till God's own appointed time
In His own manner passeth fully by.
Our Penance this. His Parable sublime
Means we must learn to die.

Not as our soldiers died beneath their flags,
Not as in tumult and in blood they fell,
When from their columns, clad in homely rags,
Rose the Confederate yell.

Not as they died, though never mortal men
Since Tubal Cain first forged his cruel blade
Fought as they fought,...

In Art some hold Themselves content
If they but compass what they meant;
Others prefer, their Purpose gained,
Still to find Something unattained--
Something whereto they vaguely grope
With no more Aid than that of Hope.
Which are the Wiser? Who shall say!
The prudent Follower of GAY
Declines to speak for either View,
But sets his Fable 'twixt the two.

Once--'twas in good Queen ANNA'S Time--
While yet in this benighted Clime
The GENIUS of the ARTS (now known
On mouldy Pediments alone)
Protected all the Men of Mark,
Two Painters met Her in the Park.
Whether She wore the Robe of Air
Portrayed by VERRIO and LAGUERRE;
Or, like BELINDA, trod this Earth,
Equipped with Hoop of monstrous Girth,
And armed at every Point for Slaughter
With ...

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it, as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

Did you see that man riding past,
With shoulders bowed with care?
There’s failure in his eyes to last,
And in his heart despair.
He seldom looks to left or right,
He nods, but speaks to none,
And he’s a man who fought the fight,
God knows how hard!, and won.

No great “review” could rouse him now,
No printed lies could sting;
No kindness smooth his knitted brow,
Nor wrong one new line bring.
Through dull, dumb days and brooding nights,
From years of storm and stress,
He’s riding down from lonely heights,
The Mountains of Success.

He sees across the darkening land
The graveyards on the coasts;
He sees the broken columns stand
Like cold and bitter ghosts;
His world is dead while yet he lives,
Though known in continents;
H...

I thought today within the crowded mart
    I saw thee for a moment, friend of mine,
    And all at once my blood leapt fast and fine
And a new light broke on my shadowed heart.
'T was but a moment that my fancy's art
    Moulded another's features into thine,
    For when he passed me by and gave no sign,
The bitter truth came back with sudden start.
Then I remembered how the Merlin spell
    Of waving arms and woven paces bands
Thy dust forever in its four-walled cell,
    Heedless of all except thy Seer's commands--
Holds thee enraptured with the charms that dwell
    In broken paces and in folded hands.

Browning contributed the money he earned by this poem to the people of Paris suffering from the Franco-Prussian War. Hervé Riel appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for March, 1871, and the publisher, Mr. George Smith, paid one hundred pounds for the poem.


I
On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two,
Did the English fight the French, woe to France!
And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue,
Came crowding ship on ship to Saint Malo on the Rance,
With the English fleet in view.

II
’Twas the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full chase;
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Damfreville;
Close on him fled, great and small,
Twenty-two good ships ...

Down in the hollow there's the whole Brigade
Camped in four groups: through twilight falling slow
I hear a sound of mouth-organs, ill-played,
And murmur of voices, gruff, confused, and low.
Crouched among thistle-tufts I've watched the glow
Of a blurred orange sunset flare and fade;
And I'm content. To-morrow we must go
To take some cursèd Wood.... O world God made!

July 3rd, 1916.