Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells
Page 1144
And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever.”
VI.
Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him
Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope for stopping. Then, turning, —
“This is the place where it happened,” brokenly whispered the pilot.
“Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time.”
Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight,
Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines,
And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.
Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward
Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.
All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows
Smote with a mystical sense of infinite sorrow upon us.
FORLORN.
I.
Red roses, in the slender vases burning,
Breathed all upon the air, —
The passion and the tenderness and yearning,
The waiting and the doubting and despair.
II.
Still with the music of her voice was haunted,
Through all its charméd rhymes,
The open book of such a one as chanted
The things he dreamed in old, old summer-times.
III.
The silvern chords of the piano trembled
Still with the music wrung
From them; the silence of the room dissembled
The closes of the songs that she had sung.
IV.
The languor of the crimson shawl’s abasement, —
Lying without a stir
Upon the floor, — the absence at the casement,
The solitude and hush were full of her.
V.
Without, and going from the room, and never
Departing, did depart
Her steps; and one that came too late forever
Felt them go heavy o’er his broken heart.
VI.
And, sitting in the house’s desolation,
He could not bear the gloom,
The vanishing encounter and evasion
Of things that were and were not in the room.
VII.
Through midnight streets he followed fleeting visions
Of faces and of forms;
He heard old tendernesses and derisions
Amid the sobs and cries of midnight storms.
VIII.
By midnight lamps, and from the darkness under
That lamps made at their feet,
He saw sweet eyes peer out in innocent wonder,
And sadly follow after him down the street.
IX.
The noonday crowds their restlessness obtruded
Between him and his quest;
At unseen corners jostled and eluded,
Against his hand her silken robes were pressed.
X.
Doors closed upon her; out of garret casements
He knew she looked at him;
In splendid mansions and in squalid basements,
Upon the walls he saw her shadow swim.
XI.
From rapid carriages she gleamed upon him,
Whirling away from sight;
From all the hopelessness of search she won him
Back to the dull and lonesome house at night.
XII.
Full early into dark the twilights saddened
Within its closéd doors;
The echoes, with the clock’s monotony maddened,
Leaped loud in welcome from the hollow floors;
XIII.
But gusts that blew all day with solemn laughter
From wide-mouthed chimney-places,
And the strange noises between roof and rafter,
The wainscot clamor, and the scampering races
XIV.
Of mice that chased each other through the chambers,
And up and down the stair,
And rioted among the ashen embers,
And left their frolic footprints everywhere, —
XV.
Were hushed to hear his heavy tread ascending
The broad steps, one by one,
And toward the solitary chamber tending,
Where the dim phantom of his hope alone
XVI.
Rose up to meet him, with his growing nearer,
Eager for his embrace,
And moved, and melted into the white mirror,
And stared at him with his own haggard face.
XVII.
But, turning, he was ‘ware her looks beheld him
Out of the mirror white;
And at the window yearning arms she held him,
Out of the vague and sombre fold of night.
XVIII.
Sometimes she stood behind him, looking over
His shoulder as he read;
Sometimes he felt her shadowy presence hover
Above his dreamful sleep, beside his bed;
XIX.
And rising from his sleep, her shadowy presence
Followed his light descent
Of the long stair; her shadowy evanescence
Through all the whispering rooms before him went.
XX.
Upon the earthy draught of cellars blowing
His shivering lamp-flame blue,
Amid the damp and chill, he felt her flowing
Around him from the doors he entered through.
XXI.
The spiders wove their webs upon the ceiling;
The bat clung to the wall;
The dry leaves through the open transom stealing,
Skated and danced adown the empty hall.
XXII.
About him closed the utter desolation,
About him closed the gloom;
The vanishing encounter and evasion
Of things that were and were not in the room
XXIII.
Vexed him forever; and his life forever
Immured and desolate,
Beating itself, with desperate endeavor,
But bruised itself, against the round of fate.
XXIV.
The roses, in their slender vases burning,
Were quenchéd long before;
A dust was on the rhymes of love and yearning;
The shawl was like a shroud upon the floor.
XXV.
Her music from the thrilling chords had perished;
The stillness was not moved
With memories of cadences long cherished,
The closes of the songs that she had loved.
XXVI.
But not the less he felt her presence never
Out of the room depart;
Over the threshold, not the less, forever
He felt her going on his broken heart.
PLEASURE-PAIN.
“Das Vergnügen ist Nichts als ein höchst angenehmer
Schmerz.” — HEINRICH HEINE.
I.
Full of beautiful blossoms
Stood the tree in early May:
Came a chilly gale from the sunset,
And blew the blossoms away;
Scattered them through the garden,
Tossed them into the mere:
The sad tree moaned and shuddered,
“Alas! the Fall is here.”
But all through the glowing summer
The blossomless tree throve fair,
And the fruit waxed ripe and mellow,
With sunny rain and air;
And when the dim October
With golden death was crowned,
Under its heavy branches
The tree stooped to the ground.
In youth there comes a west-wind
Blowing our bloom away, —
A chilly breath of Autumn
Out o
f 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;
The ship goes down the world, and the light
On the sullen water dies.
The whispering shell is mute,
And after is evil cheer:
She shall stand on the shore and cry in vain,
Many and many a year.
But the stately, wide-winged ship
Lies wrecked on the unknown deep;
Far under, dead in his coral bed,
The lover lies asleep.
III.
Through the silent streets of the city,
In the night’s unbusy noon,
Up and down in the pallor
Of the languid summer moon,
I wander, and think of the village,
And the house in the maple-gloom,
And the porch with the honeysuckles
And the sweet-brier all abloom.
My soul is sick with the fragrance
Of the dewy sweet-brier’s breath:
O darling! the house is empty,
And lonesomer than death!
If I call, no one will answer;
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.
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.
V.
The bobolink sings in the meadow,
The wren in the cherry-tree:
Come hither, thou little maiden,
And sit upon my knee;
And I will tell thee a story
I read in a book of rhyme;
I will but fain that it happened
To me, one summer-time,
When we walked through the meadow,
And she and I were young.
The story is old and weary
With being said and sung.
The story is old and weary:
Ah, child! it is known to thee.
Who was it that last night kissed thee
Under the cherry-tree?
VI.
Like a bird of evil presage,
To the lonely house on the shore
Came the wind with a tale of shipwreck,
And shrieked at the bolted door,
And flapped its wings in the gables,
And shouted the well-known names,
And buffeted the windows
Afeard in their shuddering frames.
It was night, and it is morning, —
The summer sun is bland,
The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
In to the summer land.
The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
In the sun so soft and bright,
And toss and play with the dead man
Drowned in the storm last night.
VII.
I remember the burning brushwood,
Glimmering all day long
Yellow and weak in the sunlight,
Now leaped up red and strong,
And fired the old dead chestnut,
That all our years had stood,
Gaunt and gray and ghostly,
Apart from the sombre wood;
And, flushed with sudden summer,
The leafless boughs on high
Blossomed in dreadful beauty
Against the darkened sky.
We children sat telling stories,
And boasting what we should be,
When we were men like our fathers,
And watched the blazing tree,
That showered its fiery blossoms,
Like a rain of stars, we said,
Of crimson and azure and purple.
That night, when I lay in bed,
I could not sleep for seeing,
Whenever I closed my eyes,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
Against the darkened skies.
I cannot sleep for seeing,
With closéd eyes to-night,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
Dropping its blossoms bright;
And old, old dreams of childhood
Come thronging my weary brain,
Dear, foolish beliefs and longings:
I doubt, are they real again?
It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,
That I either think or see:
The phantoms of dead illusions
To-night are haunting me.
IN AUGUST.
All the long August afternoon,
The little drowsy stream
Whispers a melancholy tune,
As if it dreamed of June
And whispered in its dream.
The thistles show beyond the brook
Dust on their down and bloom,
And out of many a weed-grown nook
The aster-flowérs look
With eyes of tender gloom.
The silent orchard aisles are sweet
With smell of ripening fruit.
Through the sere grass, in shy retreat,
Flutter, at coming feet,
The robins strange and mute.
There is no wind to stir the leaves,
The harsh leaves overhead;
Only the querulous cricket grieves,
And shrilling locust weaves
A song of Summer dead.
THE EMPTY HOUSE.
The wet trees hang above the walks
Purple with damps and earthish stains,
And strewn by moody, absent rains
With rose-leaves from the wild-grown stalks.
Unmown, in heavy, tangled swaths,
The ripe June-grass is wanton blown;
Snails slime the untrodden threshold-stone;
Along the sills hang drowsy moths.
Down the blank visage of the wall,
Where many a wavering trace appears,
Like a forgotten trace of tears,
From swollen eaves the slow drops crawl.
Where everything was wide before,
The curious wind, that comes and goes,
Finds all the latticed windows close,
Secret and close the bolted door.
And with the shrewd and curious wind,
That in the archéd doorway cries,
And at the bolted portal tries,
And harks and listens at the blind, —
Forever lurks my thought about,
And in the ghostly middle-night
Finds all the hidden windows bright,
And sees the guests go in and out,
And lingers till the pallid dawn,
And feels the mystery deeper there
In silent, gust-swept chambers, bare,
With all the midnight revel gone;
But wanders through the lonesome rooms,
Where harsh the astonished cricket calls,
And, from the hollows of the walls
Vanishing, start unshapen glooms;
And lingers yet, and cannot come
Out of the drear and desolate place,
So full of ruin’s solemn grace,
And h
aunted with the ghost of home.
BUBBLES.
I.
I stood on the brink in childhood,
And watched the bubbles go
From the rock-fretted, sunny ripple
To the smoother tide below;
And over the white creek-bottom,
Under them every one,
Went golden stars in the water,
All luminous with the sun.
But the bubbles broke on the surface,
And under, the stars of gold
Broke; and the hurrying water
Flowed onward, swift and cold.
II.
I stood on the brink in manhood,
And it came to my weary brain,
And my heart, so dull and heavy
After the years of pain, —
That every hollowest bubble
Which over my life had passed
Still into its deeper current
Some heavenly gleam had cast;
That, however I mocked it gayly,
And guessed at its hollowness,
Still shone, with each bursting bubble,
One star in my soul the less.
LOST BELIEFS.
One after one they left us;
The sweet birds out of our breasts
Went flying away in the morning:
Will they come again to their nests?
Will they come again at nightfall,
With God’s breath in their song?
Noon is fierce with the heats of summer,
And summer days are long!
O my Life, with thy upward liftings,
Thy downward-striking roots,
Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
But hard and bitter fruits! —
In thy boughs there is no shelter
For the birds to seek again.
The desolate nest is broken
And torn with storms and rain!
LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.
Yesterday, while I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva,
Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands,
And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance,
Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer,
Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December, —
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,
Breathing air that was full of Old World sadness and beauty
Into my thought came this story of free, wild life in Ohio,
When the land was new, and yet by the Beautiful River
Dwelt the pioneers and Indian hunters and boatmen.
Pealed from the campanili, responding from island to island,
Bells of that ancient faith whose incense and solemn devotions
Rise from a hundred shrines in the broken heart of the city;
But in my revery heard I only the passionate voices
Of the people that sang in the virgin heart of the forest.