Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  CONSCIENCE

  REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

  SYMPATHY

  STATISTICS

  PARABLE

  VISION

  SOCIETY

  GOOD SOCIETY

  FRIENDS AND FOES

  SPHINX

  MATERIALS OF A STORY

  THE KING DINES

  LABOR AND CAPITAL

  EQUALITY

  JUDGMENT DAY

  MORTALITY

  ANOTHER DAY

  SOME ONE ELSE

  LIFE

  WEATHER-BREEDER

  PEONAGE

  RACE

  TEMPERAMENT

  WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

  NOVEMBER

  A WEFT of leafless spray

  Woven fine against the gray

  Of the autumnal day,

  And blurred along those ghostly garden tops

  Clusters of berries crimson as the drops

  That my heart bleeds when I remember

  How often, in how many a far November,

  Of childhood and my children’s childhood I was glad,

  With the wild rapture of the Fall,

  Of all the beauty, and of all

  The ruin, now so intolerably sad.

  MIDWAY

  SO blithe the birds sang in the trees,

  The trees sang in the wind,

  I winged me with the morning breeze,

  And left Care far behind.

  But now both birds and trees are mute

  In the hot hush of noon;

  And I must up and on afoot,

  Or Care will catch me soon.

  TIME

  DO you wish me, then, away?

  You should rather bid me stay:

  Though I seem so dull and slow,

  Think before you let me go!

  Whether you entreat or spurn

  I can nevermore return:

  Times shall come, and times shall be,

  But no other time like me.

  Though I move with leaden feet,

  Light itself is not so fleet;

  And before you know me gone

  Eternity and I are one.

  FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

  I

  INNOCENT spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!

  Why throng your heavenly hosts,

  As eager for their birth

  In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?

  Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,

  And shun this evil star,

  Where we who are doomed to die,

  Have our brief being and pass, we know not where or why.

  II

  We have not to consent or to refuse;

  It is not ours to choose:

  We come because we must,

  We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.

  The doom is on us, as it is on you,

  That nothing can undo;

  And all in vain you warn:

  As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.

  THE BEWILDERED GUEST

  I WAS not asked if I should like to come.

  I have not seen my host here since I came,

  Or had a word of welcome in his name.

  Some say that we shall never see him, and some

  That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know

  Why we were bid. How long I am to stay

  I have not the least notion. None, they say,

  Was ever told when he should come or go.

  But every now and then there bursts upon

  The song and mirth a lamentable noise,

  A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys

  Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.

  They say we meet him. None knows where or when.

  We know we shall not meet him here again.

  COMPANY

  I THOUGHT, “How terrible, if I were seen

  Just as in will and deed I had always been!

  And if this were the fate that I must face

  At the last day, and all else were God’s grace,

  How must I shrink and cower before them there,

  Stripped naked to the soul and beggared bare

  Of every rag of seeming!” Then, “Why, no,”

  I thought, “Why should I, if the rest are so?”

  HEREDITY

  THAT swollen paunch you are doomed to bear

  Your gluttonous grandsire used to wear;

  That tongue, at once so light and dull,

  Wagged in your grandam’s empty skull;

  That leering of the sensual eye

  Your father, when he came to die,

  Left yours alone; and that cheap flirt,

  Your mother, gave you from the dirt

  The simper which she used upon

  So many men ere he was won.

  Your vanity and greed and lust

  And each your portion from the dust

  Of those that died, and from the tomb

  Made you what you must needs become.

  I do not hold you aught to blame

  For sin at second hand, and shame:

  Evil could but from evil spring;

  And yet, away, you charnel thing!

  TWELVE P. M.

  TO get home from some scene of gayety,

  Say a long dinner, and the laugh and joke,

  And funny story, and tobacco smoke,

  And all the not unkindly fatuousness

  Of fellow-beings not better and not worse

  Than others are, but gorged with course on course,

  And drenched with wine; and with one’s evening dress

  To take off one’s perfunctory smile, and be

  Wholly and solely one’s sheer self again —

  Is like escaping from some dull, dumb pain;

  And in the luxury of that relief,

  It is, in certain sort and measure, as if

  One had put off the body, and the whole

  Illusion of life, and in one’s naked soul

  Confronted the eternal Verity.

  CHANGE

  SOMETIMES, when after spirited debate

  Of letters or affairs, in thought I go

  Smiling unto myself, and all aglow

  With some immediate purpose, and elate

  As if my little, trivial scheme were great,

  And what I would so were already so:

  Suddenly I think of her that died, and know,

  Whatever friendly or unfriendly fate

  Befall me in my hope or in my pride,

  It is all nothing but a mockery,

  And nothing can be what it used to be,

  When I could bid my happy life abide,

  And build on earth for perpetuity,

  Then, in the deathless days before she died.

  IN THE DARK

  HOW often, when I wake from sleep at night,

  I search my consciousness to find the ill

  That has lurked formlessly within it, still

  Haunting me with a shadowy affright;

  And try to seize it and to know aright

  Its vague proportions, and my frantic will

  Runs this way and runs that way, with a thrill

  Of horror, to all things that ban or blight!

  Then, when I find all well, it is as though

  The moment were some reef where I had crept

  From the wide waste of danger and of death,

  And for a little I might draw my breath

  Before the flood came up again, and swept

  Over it, and gulfed me in its deeps below.

  TO-MORROW

  OLD fraud, I know you in that gay disguise,

  That air of hope, that promise of surprise:

  Beneath your bravery, as you come this way,

  I see the sordid presence of To-day;

  And I shall see there, long ere you are gone,

  All the dull Yesterdays that I have known.

  LIVING

  HOW passionatel
y I will my life away

  Which I would give all that I have to stay;

  How wildly I hurry, for the change I crave,

  To hurl myself into the changeless grave!

  IF

  YES, death is at the bottom of the cup,

  And every one that lives must drink it up;

  And yet between the sparkle at the top

  And the black lees where lurks that bitter drop,

  There swims enough good liquor, Heaven knows,

  To ease our hearts of all their other woes.

  The bubbles rise in sunshine at the brim;

  That drop below is very far and dim;

  The quick fumes spread and shape us such bright dreams

  That in the glad delirium it seems

  As though by some deft sleight, if so we willed,

  That drop untasted might be somehow spilled.

  SOLITUDE

  AH, you cannot befriend me, with all your love’s tender persistence!

  In your arms’ pitying clasp sole and remote I remain,

  Rapt as far from help as the last star’s measureless distance,

  Under the spell of our life’s innermost mystery, Pain.

  RESPITE

  DROWSING, the other afternoon, I lay

  In that sweet interlude that falls between

  Waking and sleeping, when all being is seen

  Of one complexion, and the vague dreams play

  Among the thoughts, and the thoughts go astray

  Among the dreams. My mother, who has been

  Dead almost half my life, appeared to lean

  Above me, a boy, in a house far away,

  That once was home, and all the troubled years

  That have been since were as if they were not.

  The voices that are hushed were in my ears,

  The looks and motions that I had forgot

  Were in my eyes; and they disowned the tears

  That now again beneath their lids are hot.

  QUESTION

  SHALL it be after the long misery

  Of easeless pillows, and the waste of flesh

  In sickness, till some worn and widening mesh

  Frays out at last, and lets the soul go free?

  Or, shall some violent accident suddenly

  Dismiss it, or some black cloud in the brain

  Lower till life maddens against the amain?

  Where, in what land, or on what lonely sea?

  When, in the light of what unrisen sun?

  Under what fatal planet? There is none

  Can tell, or know aught but that it shall be:

  The one thing certain which all other things

  Have taught my being in its inmost springs

  To feel the sole impossibility.

  HOPE

  WE sailed and sailed upon the desert sea

  Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.

  At last we saw a dim, vague line arise

  Between the empty billows and the skies,

  That grew and grew until it wore the shape

  Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;

  Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,

  Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.

  And then I thought, “Sometime I shall embark

  Upon a sea more desert and more dark

  Than ever this was, and between the skies

  And empty billows I shall see arise

  Another world out of that waste and lapse,

  Like yonder land. Perhaps — perhaps — perhaps!”

  THE BURDEN

  I WRITHED beneath my burden, fumed and groaned.

  My burden that had felt and heard me, moaned:”

  You do not know what misery is, nor what

  The bitterest part is of our common lot.

  The strength I load in you with my loath weight,

  My weakness would so gladly own its fate.

  Think, once, how much more dreadful it must be

  To be the burden than bear it, and pity me!”

  CALVARY

  IF He could doubt on His triumphant cross,

  How much more I, in the defeat and loss

  Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,

  Of having lived the very life I willed,

  Of being all that I desired to be?

  My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?

  CONSCIENCE

  JUDGE me not as I judge myself, O Lord!

  Show me some mercy, or I may not live:

  Let the good in me go without reward;

  Forgive the evil I must not forgive!

  REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

  YOU are the best and the worst of everything you require.

  If you have looked on shame willingly, yours is the shame.

  You are the evil you mean, and you are the good you desire;

  You shall be for yourself both the praise and the blame.

  SYMPATHY

  FRIEND, neighbor, stranger, as the case may be,

  You who are sitting in the stall next me,

  And listening also to this pitiless play

  That says for me all that I would not say,

  And follows me, however I wind about,

  And seems to turn my whole life inside out:

  I wonder, should I speak and be the first

  To own just where in my soul it hurt worst,

  And you revealed in yours the spot its flame

  STATISTICS

  SO many men, on such a date of May,

  Despaired and took their hopeless lives away

  In such another place, it would appear

  The assassinations averaged so and so,

  Through August after August, scarce below

  A given range; and in another one,

  March after March, it seems there were undone

  So many women still about the same,

  With little varying circumstance in their shame;

  Burglaries, arsons, thefts, and forgeries

  Had their own averages as well as these;

  And from these figures science can discern

  The future in the past. We but return

  Upon our steps, although they seem so free.

  The thing that has been is that which shall be.

  Dark prophet, yes! But still somehow the round

  Is spiral, and the race’s feet have found

  The path rise under them which they have trod.

  Your facts are facts, yet somewhere there is God.

  PARABLE

  THE young man who had great possessions dreamed

  That once again he came to Christ and seemed

  To hear Him making answer as before,

  “Sell all thou hast and give unto the poor,

  And come and follow me.”

  And now he did

  In all immediately as Jesus bid.

  Then some of them to whom he gave his wealth

  Mocked at him for a fool or mad, by stealth

  Or openly; and others he could see

  Wasting his substance with a spendthrift glee;

  And others yet were tempted, and drawn in

  The ways of sin that had not dreamed of sin:

  Others, besides, that took were robbed and killed:

  Some that had toiled their whole lives were unwilled

  By riches, and began the life accurst

  Of idleness, like rich men from the first.

  Some hid his money in the earth, a root

  From which should grow a flower of deadly fruit;

  Some kept, and put it out at usury,

  And made men slaves with it that had been free.

  The young man’s dream was broken with his grief,

  And he awoke to his immense relief,

  And wept for joy, and cried, “He could not know

  What dire results from His behests would flow!

  I must not follow Him, but I can fulfil

  The spirit, if not the lette
r, of His will.

  Seeing the things I have been shown in sleep,

  I realize how much better ‘twere to keep

  The means that Providence has bestowed on me,

  Doubtless for some wise purpose, and to be

  The humble agency and instrument

  Of good to others not intelligent

  Enough to use the gifts of God aright.

  “He rose up with a heart at peace, and light;

  And thenceforth none of the Deserving Poor

  Ever went empty-handed from his door.

  VISION

  WITHIN a poor man’s squalid home I stood:

  The one bare chamber, where his work-worn wife

  Above the stove and wash-tub passed her life,

  Next the sty where they slept with all their brood.

  But I saw not that sunless, breathless lair,

  The chamber’s sagging roof and reeking floor;

  The smeared walls, broken sash, and battered door;

  The foulness and forlornness everywhere.

  I saw a great house with the portals wide

  Upon a banquet room, and, from without,

  The guests descending in a brilliant line

  By the stair’s statued niches, and beside

  The loveliest of the gemmed and silken rout

  The poor man’s landlord leading down to dine.

  SOCIETY

  I LOOKED and saw a splendid pageantry

  Of beautiful women and of lordly men,

  Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,

  Where poppies and the red anemone,

  And many another leaf of cramoisy,

  Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain

  To heels of iron or satin, and the grain

  Of silken garments floating far and free,

  As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed

  By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,

  Or curtseyed to each other, or else played

  At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid In their delight; and all so high and proud They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.

  II

  I looked again and saw that flowery space

  Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread

  That rested now upon an old man’s head

  And now upon a baby’s gasping face,