Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

1883-1886

I HAVE not delved in the ruins of antiquity, nor moralized upon the past, as Byron did, but have kept, or tried to keep, two lines of Keats, two lines of Endymion, forever in mind while writing, and striven to the uttermost to make my lines worthy the text.

Lead me, thou Bard of Beauty, through those caves Of pale Diana! let me hear the moan Of Ocean, sorrowing with all his waves As once he sorrowed on that Island lone

In siren moonlight. Here, where twilight paves The woodland paths, I seem to hear her trail Dim raiment; her, that damsel who enslaves My soul; that Beauty, sad, divinely pale, That haunts thy song, mastering the gamut whole Of dreams and music; on whose easeful breast,— As once Endymion's head, soft-dreaming, pressed That Indian maiden's bosom,—rests my soul.

O let me sing as thou didst, Keats, and die! With soul poured on the circling starry night; When Dian's lune hangs dewy in the sky, And the wild nightingale with anguished might Bewails in some dense bramble's spicy dusk Its old heart-sorrow to the wild rose wan;

Or let me, like thyself, drink in the musk Of some dull draught from Lethe's waters drawn, And sink, as thou didst, into dreamless sleep, Where disappointment, heartache, grief and scorn, And human misery can no longer heap The soul that treads life's path set round with thorn; Ay! fall asleep, as thou didst fall asleep Under the alien skies, of hope forlorn!

In the forest of music often and often, To the murmuring song of the winds and waters, Have our spirits mingled and mixed In the wildflower dance of the Hours On the mossy carpet under the whispering leaves: Or wandered, hand in shadowy hand, Beneath the song-suggestive stillness of the moon: Or leaned, listening, Over deep glens of echoing green, Carved in the ancient bosoms of the hills

By sonorous and impetuous waters, Bearing upon their foamy crests Crescents and points, starry and still, Of reflected emerald flame, When the heavens bloomed and blazed with a million quivering fires. Dost thou know her name? Fairest of the Daughters of Music is she, Loveliest of all the Children of Art.

The puff-ball of the autumn ways is Puck's fat fist thrust threateningly out of the half-concealing weeds at the bee to whom the blossom offers her milk-white bosom.

When winter nights are cold and shrill, And winds sit rocking wild their arms, Far off, beyond the treeless hill, Sound ghostly faint the owl's alarms. Wail, wail, thou bird of ill omén, Within thy freezing glen! Screech, screech through all the frosty night Where gleams the cold moonlight!

Well with man's mood thy song accords, Thy song that knows but wailing words.

Lo, where the oats in barn are housed, The screech-owl sits and croons and cries, Until the cocks are all aroused And know to-night some pullet dies. Hush, hush, thou staring owl! And leave the roosting fowl! Go, seek the shivering wood, And there, where wild winds brood, Sing to the soul that hope has lost, The soul that still is tempest-tost.

When snows drift deep the forest path, And sleet bows down the strongest trees, Like Edgar's fear and Lear's crazed wrath, The screech-owl's voice makes wild the breeze. Mourn, mourn, thou feathered witch Above the frozen ditch! Weep, weep, unto the icy gale, Where icicles hang pale, As weeps the heart, ingratitude Makes winter of, the grief pursued.

Like a pearl, dissolving in a goblet of golden wine, is the new moon in the drowning deeps of the sunset.

July 9

The sea-pink and the tall wild bell-flower divide the honors of July; the one, pearly pink, the other, turquoise-azure, conspicuously placed in her flower-garland in fragrant fraternity, each proud of its showy loveliness and of the abundant beauty of the month that bore them.

Toadstools, large and little, overrun the woods to-day after a day and night of rain: red and yellow and white, green and saffron and gray; upright, sidewise; some with the woodland loam and leaves, upheaved with them, still strewing their tops; graceful and slender, or bloated and distorted they stand; poisonous-looking some of them, and of a blue mottled color, which, when broken, exude

a thin cobalt-colored watery juice that stains whatever it touches; some of them a burnt-umber brown and of enormous size, looking like huge flat hats, rims turned up, swollen with rain, rotting and reeking in the underwoods and filling the air with a fetid fungous odor.

Great clumps of the Mayapples, beaten down and ruined by the rain here and there by the wayside, show the smooth green and ripening yellow of their oval fruit, often too large and heavy for the stalk to support.

The elecampane and the black-eyed Susan, with their frank, wide eyes of gold and bronze; the thimble-weed, with its terminal greenish white blossoms and stiff thyrsus-like thimbles of green thrust from and over the surrounding briers and weeds; and the lacy white of the wild-carrot together with the bugled scarlet of the trumpet-vine, make a perfect riot of

color in an angle of an old worm-fence separating a bit of fallow-field from a bit of sown, wherein a bob-white keeps calling; repeatedly tying, as it were, with a thread of three notes, the stillness and the heat: the first two, soft, careful, and preliminary; the last one, whipped out emphatically, straight as a thread thrust through the eye of a needle, completing and forming the final knot to its own satisfaction and that also of the listening summer day.

Across a wooded vista a red-bird suddenly wings. Its flight is as the swift unfurling of a ribbon of living crimson uniting tree to tree, with a bright bowknot of silken song at either end.

In the careless shadow of a flowering tree she sat—a witch whiter than a windflower. Her song was all of poison,—hemlock,— the squeezing

of the dark juice through white fingers. A sound as of owlet wings kept time to her wild singing. At her feet lay a youth with closed eyes, whose lips and forehead she kissed repeatedly, each kiss leaving a mark as of a serpent's fang. He was dead, and yet he seemed to live, his heart and soul, through her kisses, ashes and dust within him. His face was pinched into smiles that were not smiles. She laughed, and beneath her laugh the monkshood and nightshade covered themselves with poison-dripping blossoms, and the wild-rose was slimed with snails.

The spirits of the tempest advance their embattled hosts, thunderous rank on rank, black with their shields of midnight. Beneath the flashings of their terrible helmets and the hissing and rebounding rain of their

arrows, the hills lift up their writhing arms of trees, and the river, foaming with fear, hurls itself headlong at its banks.

Twilight with her dusky locks binds up the beautiful eyes of day, whose head she pillows on flaming flowers,—tulip and poppy and rose. Her voice is plaintive as echo's amid the rocks where sleeping waves in dull green mantles lie beneath the caverned cliff; or billows climb, white-shouldered, with long fingers of foam.

Here are passion-flowers, purple of heart, bearing the cross, as it were, of some stainless flower-creed; acacias, too, spotless as the angel innocence of a babe, and expressing in fragrance what the poet thinks but cannot say.

The roar of winter through the palsied oaks, Wind-tortured on the withered fields, Is as the sound of giant chariot spokes, And clashing of innumerable shields.

I've wooed soft sleep all night, Clothed in her mantle white And dim as rain; I've lain all night and wept For death, who past me crept,To still this pain, Heart's pain, but all in vain.

Why cam'st thou not, O death? Why cam'st thou not, O sleep? Death's brother, calm of breath, For whom I keep Vigil the long night through:At last the day breaks blue And dim the dawn. Would that you yet might hear, And hearing me, draw near Ere night be gone.

The night is wild; the bitter blasts sweep by; The shrouded snows with ghostly fingers beat The shuddering casements, and the candle flame Seems fluttered of phantom lips whose kiss is death.

Next to children, birds and flowers are the most beautiful gifts of God.

A treasure seems concealed here where the moss is damp and deep, and the golden blossoms of the crowfoot and the wood-sorrel are spilled like little yellow coins.

As I reached up among the blossoming clusters of the elder copse, was it a faun concealed in the boscage who blinded me with a storm of white stars showered into my face, or was it merely the wind that passed, low laughing to itself, and whispering of

forgotten things, lost long ago, and living now only in the land of dreams and song?

With its helm of silver and spur of gold A fairy knight is the toad-flax bold, Who takes this form to mortal eyes, The form of a flower of golden dyes.

By the willow copse near the river shore, Where the white waves hush their splash and roar, With an idle sail and an idle oar I seemed to drift into other streams, Borne on by the sleepy current of dreams.

O wilding of the young, young June,That this old rock holds fast, Thy day is done too soon, too soon, Too beautiful to last.

Water lily, do the Nisses weave from you their nuptial raiment of white? Or does the enamoured

Necken pluck you for his hair to lure some maiden mortal to his arms? Or the mermaid dew you with her tears when lamenting that she cannot be redeemed? Speak! and with your white, sweet lips now tell me! I know the young Nisses weep because they cannot be saved. Often do I fancy them as seated on your broad green pads, harping and singing sad songs of sad mortality in the light of the setting moon, the vibrant silver of their strings and the hollow gold of their harps sobbing like some wild bird in the silence of the night. And often have you bent your pensive head in helpless meekness, making yourself a bud again, closing the wildness of their music into the imprisoning petals of your beautiful bosom, to give it forth again in perfume.

When all the orchards faded lie, When roses drop and lilies die,

When fall's full moon makes deep the sky, Lay me asleep, Where breezes bend the sighing trees, Lay me asleep.

When all the dusty autumn day Is heard the locust's roundelay, And, dropping leaves, the tree-tops sway And wildflowers there, Beneath the wildflowers let me rest, The wildflowers there.

Let not thy hand disturb the grass To plant an alien flower there; Let those wild infants, free as fair, Above me, sleeping, bloom and pass, Forgotten die, Forgotten as myself, alas! Who 'neath them lie.

Gems and crystals lay scattered around him, on marble the color of fire: sea-green chrysoprase and copalite from Zanzibar; spar the color of amber; alexandrines—green by day, by night purple or crimson—

from the Urals; iron, with red streaks of jasper through it; lapis-lazuli and chrysoberyl; fluorspar crystals, white, amethystine, pink and green; cairngorms, dark and clear as an Ethiope's eye; topazes, smoky and blue and wine-colored; and heaped high amid them, like violets smothered under the snows of spring, great sapphires mingled and mixed with the milky fire of many opals.

The great stars wax and wane, and the moon rises over gull-haunted crags, honeycombed with caves, in whose dark crevices the yellow mollusks cling like ingots of gold, and upon whose floors of green the red coral is strewn like branches of bleeding ruby.

I cannot help admiring the great gray hawk. How bold, how bright,

how swift he is! Let him but show his shadow and the shrieking hens scatter, flying to cover; and the blood-red cock, that braggart of the barn-yard, hides his proud crest in fear.

To-day I found a flower unknown to me,—a flower white as a pearl and spotted with crimson, as if some wild bird, stabbed with a thorn, had breathed its small life out upon the altar of its loveliness.

The moon is a lemon petal, And the west a wild-rose red, And the twilight twines her dusky locks With lily-like stars o'erhead.

Deep down, deep down, deep, deep, deep! Follow us! come with us!— See how we leap! Daughters of Æger, veiled white with the spray, Beckoning, calling you. Oh, come away!

Children of Earth, come hither, where we Dwell in Ran's realms of cerulean hue; Where through her caverns of green and of blue Echo our songs, our songs of the sea, Dirging the dead, the sailors who sleep Deep down, deep down, deep, deep, deep! Come, where the dulse and the nautilus cling! Come away, come away, here where we sing! Where of your eyes we will fashion pale homes, Hollow, for pearls and the glimmering foams.

The pale-haired Waves and the white-veiled Billows, daughters of Ran, hurry to meet Æger, King of Ocean, in his helmet of terrifying darkness, amid the roaring reefs and booming breakers. The demons of the deep, armored and helmeted with mist, swarm from the caves of the cliffs, howling to the legions of the

storm, driving some vessel, helpless and tattered of sail, toward them.

Come, kiss me, beautiful Death, And lull me with thy wings; Breathe on me with thy breath, And touch my soul with things Unknown of life. Imbue My body with thy dew And bear me far away Into a deeper dawn Than lights life's shadowy lawn, Some fairer break-of-day.

Life's sickness, long and old, Cure in me; everything:Life's greed for fame and gold And love and suffering. Yea, I am young and fair! Come, take me by the hair And kiss me on the eyes; Then bear me through the deep, As thy brother, dream-tossed Sleep, Hath borne me loving-wise.

The new moon is the golden battlebow of a sylph; the evening star is the arrow with which it pierces the sunset.

I saw the Spirits of Day and of Darkness meet. Whiter than the bloom of crystal were his cheeks; and hers, a hectic flush that seemed the reflection of some inward fire, like the scarlet of the autumn woods. To grace her drowsy head he wove for her a chaplet of poppied clouds.

Cheerily rang the bugle horn, Cheerily through the wood, For the ten-tined buck by the hunt outworn At bay 'neath the old oak stood.

The morn, like some blear-eyed beggar, came trailing her tatters in, streaming with vapor, dark and dismal,

her sodden hair blinding her eyes.

The noon was clear; but now, as the sun sinks, the broadening black of one tremendous cloud breaks into peaks, creviced and ravined and rivered with burning gold, cascading and circling and cleaving their crags of storm. The thunder seems the sound of its mighty flowing. Nearer and nearer the blue lines of the rain shadow and streak the woods, the hills, and the heavens. Now they plunge, big-dropped, crackling, and resilient, clamoring on the reverberating stones; so thin the film of spray of the shattered drops that the white-tufted dandelion loses not one light seed in the shelter of this rock, where, like a host of fairy helms, the rose bush bristles against the rain a myriad green buds. Again, and yet again, the thunder, breaking, travels ponderously along the clouds, the

gray-steel flash of the lightning like a torch before its rolling chariot.

And now yon crystal mount of clouds Silvers with light as 't were of wings, Whose base the thunder's blackness shrouds, While to its summit brightness clings.

Along the west, flashed through the dun, Leaping, the angled lightnings fly, Cleaving the deeps, where thunders run Like mountain torrents down the sky.

Out of it rises, partly hid, A cloud, rose-spar, all fair of form, Like some sky-pointed pyramid, Or pillar of light, above the storm.

MAY 23, 1885; 6 P. M.

The broad Ohio's darkening stream Seems now as still as liquid glass, In which the bridge's pillars dream Unwavering where the still waves pass.

The shattered thunder fragments fly; One cloud alone makes dark the west, Low stooping to the evening sky, A champion with a burning crest:

Through whose mailed breast of darkness dim And ragged rents of vapors deep, The sun sweeps lances, long and slim, Of flame that fall on vale and steep.

Through stratas torn of windy rack Full flashes now its crimson star, Blazing blood-red through stormy black And bronze of tempest scattered far.

MAY 23, 1885, 6.30 P. M.

O wind of eve, what spices, steeped In some more aromatic clime, Thou breathest,—as from islands reaped Of Summer, over seas of thyme.

Thou bearest odor on thy breath Fresh as the scent of ocean's waves; Cool as if thou hadst lain beneath, All day, in dark and crystal caves.

Night comes, with sparkling fireflies Like jewels tangled in her hair, And all around her perfumes rise Of rain, as 't were dim spirits there.

To-day I am like one drifting, drifting, and beholding, as in a dream, never nearer, never farther away, a line of dim shore, cliffed and pined and cascaded, against the sunset's luminous seas.

When eve casts on the day's dark bier The rhododendrons of her light, And trims her stars, like tapers clear, At feet and head, how fair is night.

To-day I have learned with Keats "heart's lightness from the merriment" of late summer, instead of "May," and wandered with Shakespeare

"Over hill, over dale,Thorough bush, thorough brier,"

and seen many things that the ordinary eye would refuse to consider: the Chickasaw plum, red as the cheek of an Oread; the jellied spawn of the frog in a pond, a flaccid white blotched with black like the freckled face of Caliban; mushrooms, low and leaning, Puck's own footstools; rocks, green with lichen, carved of the rain and frost and heat into fantastic shapes as of rebeck and of rose, fairer to my eyes than any templed frieze of old Greece, where the Amazons and Bacchantes still seem to live in marble; lethargic pawpaws, rotund and jolly as the bottle-belly of old Silenus; and blackberry-lilies, freaked and streaked with rose and ruby, like the hood of Ariel; morning glories, azure and crimson and crystal, finely fragile, and hung up like the petticoats of the fays, the fairies' own laundry, at the entrance to the wood, that holds in its green heart

many a woodland spring, like a pure thought, framed in with rocks and ferns,—the secret mirrors of glimmering shapes, the sylvan spirits of the solitude.

O my Kentucky, forest old! Where Beauty dwells, the stalwart child Of Love and Life, where I behold The dreams still glow that long beguiled

The marble and the bronze of men, Whose Art made fair the world of old, Yet never held, of classic ken, A form like thine which I would mould.

Around me now I turn and gaze: The earth is green; the heaven is clear: Where smile the stars, or bloom the days More absolutely fair than here!

Young still is she, and fresh as morn, Standing her sister States among; Ah! would I were a poet born, To sing her as she should be sung!

Bidding her keep beneath her heel The lust for wealth, wrong's iron crown; Her pioneer pride, a shield of steel, A buckler that no foe may down.

Sister to Hospitality! Mother of Lincoln and of Clay! Make thyself worthy still to be Mother of men as great as they.

Mother of loves and hopes that dare; Of dreams and deeds that sing and toil, Whose hands are open as the air, Whose honor none on earth may soil!

Let mightier dreams be thine! arise! Let all the world behold thee set A constellation in the skies Where all thy sister Stars are met!

1885.

The noisome hollow of the wood was fetid with toadstools. The trees were crippled and swollen with wormy galls, and twisted like tortured things with disease, and distorted

with huge fungous growths. Nearby, surrounded with such trees, a rushless and reedless pool lay stagnant and sullen in the sun, where toads and newts and water-snakes abounded, breeding in the rankness of its slime and ooze. The horrible hillside, rising from the pool, was smothered with thistle and nettle and burdock and the evil-smelling jimsonweed; one wild-rose bush eked out a sickly existence amid this army of evils, its stems and leaves leprous with the mining larvæ, and labyrinthed with the web-white trails of the red spider. By the side of the pool, in the shadow of the rose-bush, like some lean yellow spider, or obscene larva, sat a man, hideous and old, with long, straggly gray beard and bristling eyebrows, through which his small eyes glittered like a snake's. Hatless and perfectly bald he sat,—a mirthless, a cruel smile, repugnant and unchanging,

wreathing his wrinkled face,—watching a viper devour a toad.

A distant river glimpsed through deep-leaved trees. A field of fragment flint, blue, gray, and red. Rocks overgrown with twigs of trailing vines Thick-hung with clusters of the green wild-grape. Old chestnut groves the haunt of drowsy cows, Full-uddered kine chewing a sleepy cud; Or, at the gate, around the dripping trough, Docile and lowing, waiting the milking-time. Lanes where the wild-rose blooms, murmurous with bees, The bumble-bee tumbling their frowsy heads, Rumbling and raging in the bell-flower's bells, Drunken with honey, singing himself asleep.

Old in romance a shadowy belt of woods. A house, wide-porched, before which sweeps a lawn Gray-boled with beeches and where elder blooms. And on the lawn, whiter of hand than milk, And sweeter of breath than is the elder bloom, A woman with a wild-rose in her hair.

How long she had waited! It seemed ages since that morn, bloodshot of eye, arose from the couch of old Tithonos, and she, with kindred eyes of sleepless hours and tears, arose from Mark's hated side.

From her casement she sees the castle lake, lilied and fountained, and far beyond the moated walls the forested mountains where Tristram, it is whispered, runs naked, a madman amid swineherds.

Now sinks the sadder eve, bloodshot

of gaze as morn, over the shadowy bier of day bowing her melancholy star. And so o'er their dead past her sorrowing fancy bends, lit with the light of tearful eyes. Tristram naked and lost among vile men and barren hills and savage woods. Why could she not die! Yes, she would die! To-morrow should not gaze upon her misery,—the misery of Isoud the Beautiful! Why had God cursed her with this great, this sinful love? Yes, she would die. Morn would find her dead,— morn that she loved,— the fresh and radiant morn! Ah! she would miss the oxen's far-off low; the smell of early meadows tedded and deep with hay; the cock's clear clarion call; and under the eaved cottage thatch, as often she and Tristram rode afield, the twittering of sparrows. And, sighing, from the window slow she turned, and took

her lute; touching its strings, she sang:

"No more for me shall gray-robed Dawn look throughHeaven's windows of the fog, or rain, or dew,The maiden Dawn with eyes of beautiful blue,"

I saw sweet Summer go Into a woodland green, Unto a sliding stream, A drowsy water; With cheeks of sunset glow Dreaming she seemed to lean, Dreaming a wild-wood dream, The wood's wild daughter.

She seemed to smile, then weep, Then lift, then bow her head, Deep with its golden hair, Sad as some maiden Who loveless falls asleep, Her eyes to sorrow wed, Her cheeks as wild flowers fair With dewdrops laden.

I heard the streamlet moan; I heard the wood-wind wail; I heard the forest sob: "Summer is dying!" Whiter she lay than stone, And down each dell and dale I heard the wild heart-throb Of Nature sighing:—

"Come back!—Oh, art thou dead, Thou, thou my sweetest child? Come back with all thy flowers!"—But naught she heeded, Lying with wild-flowered head In beauty undefiled, While 'round her sad the Hours Bowed down and pleaded.

Then through the woodland there, With ribbons flying gay, Mocking at Summer's death With laughter hollow, Tossing her gipsy hair, In Romany array, Autumn, all wild of breath, Cried, "Follow! follow!"

Is it an iron harp smitten of iron hands? or only the winter wind in the palsied and ancient oaks, Lear-like, that toss their hoary arms on the withered hills? All day, all night, I hear them, rustling, warring, sighing or roaring with the wind, their few last, brown leaves beating their frantic tatters to and fro. The sound of their shriveled sorrow will not let me sleep. An ancient agony seems theirs, older than that which wrings the hearts of mortals.

When the jeweled lights of the fireflies gleam In fairy revelry; When the waning moon on the forest stream Looks down, I love to sit and dream, To dream her again with me.

We speak of the past; of the things once said; Of the happiness long gone by;

While one blue star burns bright overhead:— For sweet it is to talk with the dead, The dead that do not die.

With the dead that are never far away, That are even as yonder star, Whose light the darkness, ray on ray, Makes visible, viewless all the day Though shining still afar.

Like a lonely beautiful flower wild In the limitless lands of space, That star is, blossoming undefiled; More beautiful for that loneness, mild It shines on my upturned face.

'Mid the fairy lights of the fireflies, In the light of the waning moon, Born of the grief that never dies, Into my eyes gaze her dark eyes, The eyes death closed last June.

And I hear her speak, and I hear her sigh:— For, the dead—they never forget: Around my heart her white hands lie, And she kisses my face and asks me why My cheeks with tears are wet.

And as in life I clasp her and hold, And meseems it is no dream— That here we meet, as oft of old, When the lights of the fireflies' lamps gleam gold, In the trysting place by the stream.

On autumn eves in the beautiful Indian Summer, sitting wrapt in contemplation of the sunset, the world seems compact of imagination. As the fancy bodies forth, thought gives substance to things, and unrolling the Nubian curtains of night, behold, it is not the sunset that I see, but a sea of gold dotted with islands vermilion as the continents of Mars; their bowers and streams burning rose and pearl, among and beside which, robed in shadowy silver, sylphid shapes wander,—spirits, naked and beautiful as stars, flashing flame-like from the caverns of purple-pinnacled peaks, or leaning from the battlemented

blue of ethereal cities. Changing, ever changing, now, behold, it is some mainland of isolated heaven, moving in mirage, forested with trees of ruby and silver, oozing and weeping gold and amber into lakes and rivers of gold, from whose crimson banks bronzed savages launch a crescent canoe.

Sleep came to me distilling dews of dreams, within whose diamond spheres an ethereal world lay of thought and scene. Methought that I was dead; that I was drowned; and, in a cavern vaster and bluer than night, before a shadowy presence of hoary foam and weedy shell, the presence of that Ancient of the Sea, I stood; the shadow of whose sceptre huge, a rib of cloudy pearl, lay white upon me. Around him circled and sang the mermaids, chanting that song whose mystery fills—old and

unchanging—the mouths of the murmur-haunted shells of ocean. And, behold! I heard a mermaid tell in song, standing before that throned and ancient presence, how she had stolen and taken on the beauty and the likeness of a mortal maiden and lured with these the maiden's lover to save her apparently from the sea, dragging him down into its green depths. And at the Ancient's feet she laid a body,—wan-faced with wide and ghastly eyes. I looked upon the face—and, lo! the face was mine.

Here follows the synopsis of a poem that was partly completed and afterwards destroyed:—

The gathering gloom of the sea; the revels of Storm and Tempest; the dancing of the winds with the daughters Of Æger, the waves, by the wild

torches of the lightning. In the midst of it all, illuminated by the phosphorescent glow of mountainous waters, a barque is discovered, torn of sail, driving rudderless towards, and crashing thunderously upon opposing cliffs of granite, an island in a white whirl of booming surf. The vessel, overwhelmed and engulfed, is borne down, down, down into the wild waters by the daughters of Æger, to be plunged among the piled-up wrecks in the treasure caves of the Sea King.

Dawn. Near the shore of a tropical island a youth lies, awaking slowly from a swoon. His despair on finding himself the sole survivor of the vessel, and cast on a desert island. Wearily, in search of food, he wanders inland. Coming upon what seems to him a beautiful lake, but which is really the crater of an extinct volcano filled with the sea and

connecting with the sea, he seats himself despondently beside it, lamenting his fate. A mermaid rises. Apparently all unconscious of his presence she proceeds to comb her hair, richly auburn as the auburn seaweed, with a comb of pearl, singing a song all the while such as only the shells and the caves of the deep have ever heard before. She sings of the bliss that is in store for all mortals who, weary of life in the world of earth and air, visit the world of waters, and become vassals of the Sea King, deep down in his wonder caves of coral and of crystal. In the ecstasy of the moment, dazed as it were by her chanting, the youth extends her his hand. It is seized instantly in a grasp that he cannot resist even if he desired to; and the creature, changing her song from one of love-longing to one of triumph, drags him, still unresisting, fathoms deep, into the emerald

waters, casting him senseless upon the silvery sands of a coral cavern.

The green glimmer of the sea-cave, broken here and there with purple blurs and shafts of light, on his awakening, shows him where, at the far end of the mighty cavern, on a vast throne of piled-up, wave-welded gold and gems, treasures of wrecked ships, mingled with the skulls and bones of drowned men, looms a shadowy presence, weed-bearded and hoary with shells and pearls, crowned with a crown of ore set round, like gems, with the eyes of the drowned; his sceptre, a broken and mighty anchor of iron and gold. Combing their long locks and circling around him, many mermaids sing. Vast bulks, whales, cuttlefish, and sea-serpents, amorphous monsters of the deep, herds of ocean, pass and repass, driven of mermen from pasture to

pasture of the underworld of waters. Storm and Tempest, chained and manacled with adamantine chains, lie restlessly beneath his throne.

Standing before this terrible presence the youth begs that his love, lost in the wreck of yesterday, be returned to him. The King promises that she will be restored on one condition—that they remain his subjects forever beneath the sea. He consents. His love is brought to him by a mermaid. Pale as a pearl she stands before him, her beauty overshadowing even the beauty of the mermaids.

Gathering gradually, far above, a muttering is heard; a calling, as it were, to the over-deeps. Storm and Tempest rise on their hideous feet, shaking their tremendous chains. Mournful echoes, wave-like and wind-like

sigh through the glimmering cavern, labyrinthed like a shell: a far, wild sound as of a voice, sonorous and deep as thunder, calling and summoning Storm and Tempest to rise. They strain at their huge gyves, howling to be set free. Æger smites them mightily down, again and yet again, with his terrible sceptre of gold and iron. The voice above seems multiplied into myriad voices, pleading, insistent, importunate. Storm and Tempest rend their chains asunder; the cavern is lashed into furious foam, and the throne is lost in whirling and overwhelming waters. Storm and Tempest reign supreme 'mid darkness and foam and thunder. The lovers borne on the backs of the billows are cast, clasped in each other's arms, naked and cold in death, on the shores of the desert island.

Thus in the dusk as ghosts they met, Culling the pansy-violet, The violet of sweet regret And memory, dim and dewy wet.

These are not bees, my child, but fairies disguised, seeking the souls of little children in the cups of the wild flowers. There it was, closed in the bud of a wild rose, that they found thine. Therefore is it that thou art so fair and sunny and fragrant and pink. See, as this sweet bud closes in all its perfume, so does thy loveliness contain thy innocence.

In dimly lighted cloisters of the heart I met with one whose face was like to thine, The ghost-face of the love that once I wronged.

All day the world has swooned with heat. Now, shaking back his

raven locks of storm, lit with the lightning of terrific eyes, comes on the storm.

Amid the summer fields and flowers, Let us be children for a day, Where laughter speeds the joyful hours And drives dull care away.

Keep thou my face engraven in thine heart, Now that we part; Forget me not; or if thou dost forget Hold me to blame, Who leave thee now, without one heart's regret, Forgotten even thy name.

One milk-white hand she stretched to me,My heart sobbed, "O beware!" But both my arms reached out to her Despite my soul's despair.