Read Ebook: Villa Eden: The Country-House on the Rhine by Auerbach Berthold Shackford Charles C Charles Chauncy Translator

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Ebook has 10651 lines and 461811 words, and 214 pages

When I behold how out of ruined night Filled with all weirds of haunted ancientness, And dreams and phantasies of pale distress, Is builded, beam by beam, the splendid light, The opalescent glory, gem bedight, Of dew-emblazoned morning; when I know Such wondrous hopes, such luminous beauties grow From out earth's shades of sadness and affright;

O, then, my heart, amid thy questioning fear, Dost thou not whisper: "He who buildeth thus From wrecks of dark such wonders at his will, Can re-create from out death's night for us The marvels of a morning gladder still Than ever trembled into beauty here?"

Out of Pompeii

She lay, face downward, on her bended arm, In this her new, sweet dream of human bliss, Her heart within her fearful, fluttering, warm, Her lips yet pained with love's first timorous kiss. She did not note the darkening afternoon, She did not mark the lowering of the sky O'er that great city. Earth had given its boon Unto her lips, love touched her and passed by.

In one dread moment all the sky grew dark, The hideous rain, the panic, the red rout, Where love lost love, and all the world might mark The city overwhelm?d, blotted out Without one cry, so quick oblivion came, And life passed to the black where all forget; But she--we know not of her house or name-- In love's sweet musings doth lie dreaming yet.

The dread hell passed, the ruined world grew still, And the great city passed to nothingness: The ages went and mankind worked its will. Then men stood still amid the centuries' press, And in the ash-hid ruins opened bare, As she lay down in her shamed loveliness, Sculptured and frozen, late they found her there, Image of love 'mid all that hideousness.

Her head, face downward, on her bended arm, Her single robe that showed her shapely form, Her wondrous fate love keeps divinely warm Over the centuries, past the slaying storm. The heart can read in writings time hath left, That linger still through death's oblivion; And in this waste of life and light bereft, She brings again a beauty that had gone.

And if there be a day when all shall wake, As dreams the hoping, doubting human heart, The dim forgetfulness of death will break For her as one who sleeps with lips apart; And did God call her suddenly, I know She'd wake as morning wakened by the thrush, Feel that red kiss across the centuries glow, And make all heaven rosier by her blush.

Morning on the Shore

The lake is blue with morning; and the sky Sweet, clear, and burnished as an orient pearl. High in its vastness scream and skim and whirl White gull-flocks where the gleaming beaches die Into dim distance, where great marshes lie. Far in ashore the woods are warm with dreams, The dew-wet road in ruddy sunlight gleams, The sweet, cool earth, the clear blue heaven on high.

Across the morn a carolling school-boy goes, Filling the world with youth to heaven's stair; Some chattering squirrel answers from his tree; But down beyond the headland, where ice-floes Are great in winter, pleading in mute prayer, A dead, drowned face stares up immutably.

Bereavement of the Fields

IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN, WHO DIED FEBRUARY 10, 1899

Soft fall the February snows, and soft Falls on my heart the snow of wintry pain; For never more, by wood or field or croft, Will he we knew walk with his loved again; No more, with eyes adream and soul aloft, In those high moods where love and beauty reign, Greet his familiar fields, his skies without a stain.

Soft fall the February snows, and deep, Like downy pinions from the moulting breast Of all the mothering sky, round his hushed sleep, Flutter a million loves upon his rest, Where once his well-loved flowers were fain to peep, With adder-tongue and waxen petals prest, In young spring evenings reddening down the west.

Soft fall the February snows, and hushed Seems life's loud action, all its strife removed, Afar, remote, where grief itself seems crushed, And even hope and sorrow are reproved; For he whose cheek erstwhile with hope was flushed, And by the gentle haunts of being moved, Hath gone the way of all he dreamed and loved.

Soft fall the February snows, and lost, This tender spirit gone with scarce a tear, Ere, loosened from the dungeons of the frost, Wakens with yearnings new the enfranchised year, Late winter-wizened, gloomed, and tempest-tost; And Hesper's gentle, delicate veils appear, When dream anew the days of hope and fear.

And Mother Nature, she whose heart is fain, Yea, she who grieves not, neither faints nor fails, Building the seasons, she will bring again March with rudening madness of wild gales, April and her wraiths of tender rain, And all he loved,--this soul whom memory veils, Beyond the burden of our strife and pain.

Not his to wake the strident note of song, Nor pierce the deep recesses of the heart, Those tragic wells, remote, of might and wrong; But rather, with those gentler souls apart, He dreamed like his own summer days along, Filled with the beauty born of his own heart, Sufficient in the sweetness of his song.

Outside this prison-house of all our tears, Enfranchised from our sorrow and our wrong, Beyond the failure of our days and years, Beyond the burden of our saddest song, He moves with those whose music filled his ears, And claimed his gentle spirit from the throng,-- Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.

Like some rare Pan of those old Grecian days, Here in our hours of deeper stress reborn, Unfortunate thrown upon life's evil ways, His inward ear heard ever that satyr horn From Nature's lips reverberate night and morn, And fled from men and all their troubled maze, Standing apart, with sad, incurious gaze.

And now, untimely cut, like some sweet flower Plucked in the early summer of its prime, Before it reached the fulness of its dower, He withers in the morning of our time; Leaving behind him, like a summer shower, A fragrance of earth's beauty, and the chime Of gentle and imperishable rhyme.

Songs in our ears of winds and flowers and buds And gentle loves and tender memories Of Nature's sweetest aspects, her pure moods, Wrought from the inward truth of intimate eyes And delicate ears of him who harks and broods, And, nightly pondering, daily grows more wise, And dreams and sees in mighty solitudes.

Soft fall the February snows, and soft He sleeps in peace upon the breast of her He loved the truest; where, by wood and croft, The wintry silence folds in fleecy blur About his silence, while in glooms aloft The mighty forest fathers, without stir, Guard well the rest of him, their rare sweet worshipper.

A Wood Lyric

Into the stilly woods I go, Where the shades are deep and the wind-flowers blow, And the hours are dreamy and lone and long, And the power of silence is greater than song. Into the stilly woods I go, Where the leaves are cool and the wind-flowers blow.

When I go into the stilly woods, And know all the flowers in their sweet, shy hoods, The tender leaves in their shimmer and sheen Of darkling shadow, diaphanous green, In those haunted halls where my footstep falls, Like one who enters cathedral walls, A spirit of beauty floods over me, As over a swimmer the waves of the sea, That strengthens and glories, refreshens and fills, Till all mine inner heart wakens and thrills With a new and a glad and a sweet delight, And a sense of the infinite out of sight, Of the great unknown that we may not know, But only feel with an inward glow When into the great, glad woods we go.

O life-worn brothers, come with me Into the wood's hushed sanctity, Where the great, cool branches are heavy with June, And the voices of summer are strung in tune; Come with me, O heart outworn, Or spirit whom life's brute-struggles have torn, Come, tired and broken and wounded feet, Where the walls are greening, the floors are sweet, The roofs are breathing and heaven's airs meet.

Come, wash earth's grievings from out of the face, The tear and the sneer and the warfare's trace, Come where the bells of the forest are ringing, Come where the oriole's nest is swinging, Where the brooks are foaming in amber pools, The mornings are still and the noonday cools. Cast off earth's sorrows and know what I know, When into the glad, deep woods I go.

An August Reverie

There is an autumn sense subdues the air, Though it is August and the season still A part of summer, and the woodlands fair. I hear it in the humming of the mill, I feel it in the rustling of the trees, That scarcely shiver in the passing breeze.

'Tis but a touch of Winter ere his time, A presaging of sleep and icy death, When skies are rich and fields are in their prime, And heaven and earth commingle in a breath:-- When hazy airs are stirred with gossamer wings, And in shorn fields the shrill cicada sings.

Nor should the spirit sorrow as it passes, Declining slowly by the heights it came; We are but brothers to the birds and grasses, In our brief coming and our end the same: And though we glory, god-like in our day, Perchance some kindred law their lives obey.

There are a thousand beauties gathered round, The sounds of waters falling over-night, The morning scents that steamed from the fresh ground, The hair-like streaming of the morning light Through early mists and dim, wet woods where brooks Chatter, half-seen, down under mossy nooks.

The ragged daisy starring all the fields, The buttercup abrim with pallid gold, The thistle and burr-flowers hedged with prickly shields, All common weeds the draggled pastures hold, With shrivelled pods and leaves, are kin to me, Like-heirs of earth and her maturity.

They speak a silent speech that is their own, These wise and gentle teachers of the grass; And when their brief and common days are flown, A certain beauty from the year doth pass:-- A beauty of whose light no eye can tell, Save that it went; and my heart knew it well.

I may not know each plant as some men know them, As children gather beasts and birds to tame; But I went 'mid them as the winds that blow them, From childhood's hour, and loved without a name. There is more of beauty in a field of weeds Than in all blooms the hothouse garden breeds.

For they are nature's children; in their faces I see that sweet obedience to the sky That marks these dwellers of the wilding places, Who with the season's being live and die; Knowing no love but of the wind and sun, Who still are nature's when their life is done.

They are a part of all the haze-filled hours, The happy, happy world all drenched with light, The far-off, chiming click-clack of the mowers, And yon blue hills whose mists elude my sight; And they to me will ever bring in dreams Far mist-clad heights and brimming rain-fed streams.

In this dream August air, whose ripened leaf, Pausing before it puts death's glories on, Deepens its green, and the half-garnered sheaf Gladdens the haze-filled sunlight, love hath gone Beyond the material, trembling like a star, To those sure heights where all thought's glories are.

And Thought, that is the greatness of this earth, And man's most inmost being, soars and soars, Beyond the eye's horizon's outmost girth, Garners all beauty, on all mystery pores: Like some ethereal fountain in its flow, Finds heavens where the senses may not go.

In the Spring Fields

There dwells a spirit in the budding year-- As motherhood doth beautify the face-- That even lends these barren glebes a grace, And fills gray hours with beauty that were drear And bleak when the loud, storming March was here: A glamour that the thrilled heart dimly traces In swelling boughs and soft, wet, windy spaces, And sunlands where the chattering birds make cheer.

I thread the uplands where the wind's footfalls Stir leaves in gusty hollows, autumn's urns. Seaward the river's shining breast expands, High in the windy pines a lone crow calls, And far below some patient ploughman turns His great black furrow over steaming lands.

The Dryad

Her soul was sown with the seed of the tree Of old when the earth was young, And glad with the light of its majesty The light of her beautiful being upgrew. And the winds that swept over land and sea, And like a harper the great boughs strung, Whispered her all things new.

The tree reached forth to the sun and the wind And towered to heaven above. But she was the soul that under its rind Whispered its joy through the whole wood's span, Sweet and glad and tender and kind; For her love for the tree was a holier love Than the love of woman for man.

The seasons came and the seasons went And the woodland music rang; And under her wide umbrageous tent, Hidden forever from mortal eye, She sang earth's beauty and wonderment. But men never knew the spirit that sang This music too wondrous to die.

Only nature, forever young, And her children, forever true, Knew the beauty of her who sung And her tender, glad love for the tree; Till on her music the wild hawk hung From his eyrie high in the blue To drink her melody free.

And the creatures of earth would creep from their haunts To stare with their wilding eyes, To hearken those rhythms of earth's romance, That never the ear of mortal hath heard; Till the elfin squirrels would caper and dance, And the hedgehog's sleepy and shy surprise Would grow to the thought of a bird.

And the pale wood-flowers from their cradles of dew Where they rocked them the whole night long, While the dark wheeled round and the stars looked through Into the great wood's slumbrous breast, Till the gray of the night like a mist outblew; Hearkened the piercing joy of her song That sank like a star in their rest.

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