CAGE

In virtues and in grandeurs, fade away

Into the dusk as night before the day

Yet of her life you fear to hear me tell

__« She was so wicked » But she loved so well.

You saw the portrait taken from her grasp Stiffened in death’s cold clasp.

Two little children, poorly clad and plain Sun scorched and worn with pain

Wan with mean cares, too early for their years

Their child eyes eager with unchildish fears

And sordid bitter yearnings. « But a smutch ! »

You say. « And after all it’s nought to me.

What was her life, and wbat her hopes might be

« She was so wicked » ! « Oh she loved so much. »

SONNETS FROM THE WAY OF THE WINEPRESS Tbe Pantheist.

A New rose on the bush, à ripe red mouth,

Coy opening to the kisses of the sun;

A new bird on the bough for Summer won

À carol in the tangled hawthorn growth;

A new breath in the breeze, of the soft South That tells, new stirrings in the air that run. But trifles all, when all is said and done :

Yet they avail to stay the spirits drouth, Voicing the promise given by Winter past And Summer sacring all the woods and leas, Of some far fairer ecstasy and ease,

Which shall be ours when life’s dull dream at last Dreamt to an end, we one are with all these, With rain and sun, with rose and bird and breeze.

Lux indica.

Three hundred million gods the law of Ind Counts in its Heaven, one to every man,

ATOS

Woman and child within the mighty span Between the Indus and the sea confined.

Such reckoning stuff, to the unreasoning mind For shear derision seems; but, if thou scan The case with philosophie eye, à plan Profound beneath its mien grotesque thou’lt find. To each his God; to wit, let each the light Follow of his soul, o’erdarkened by no wraith Of man-made deity, no priesi-wrought rite, And by the fruits be judged of his own faith. And thus the enlightened East à new behest Of high-souled wisdom gives the grosser West.

Except a Corn of Wheat.…

To crush for sustenance the stubborn clods,

To wish and want or (yet môore piteous !)

Find the wish filled, we would not have it thus; To cower and tremble’ neath the Furies’ rods, To wrestle with the unrelenting Gods

And children to beget, who shall, like us,

Fight the same battle unvictorious

And lie at last beneath the daisied sods;

Such is man’s lot. Small wonder that he flies

For solace still to dreams of iands of light Beyon the darkness; dreams, alas ! in vain, Since in the furrow needs the golden grain Must cot, ere, in its semblance from Death’s night, Alike, yet not the same, new sheaves arise.

Ideality.

We strain athwart the cloud-screen of the years And on the dim horizon think to trace :

The flowerage of the Future’s growth of grace,- As in the East the phanton Dawn appears Against the darkness, ere the daybreak nears,- Nor know that the reflection of our face

Jobn Payne

It is, refracted from the fields of space,

We see, our mirrored wishes, hopes and fears. Yet, courage, soul ! Thy will the planets seven It was that bade illume our life benighted, Thy thought the towering steeps of Heaven That formed for hope. True ideality,

Indeed the sick sage said, it is to see !

The surnise blossom, where à taper’s lighted.

Life’s Motive Force.

Imagination is the spirit’s light :

Without it through life’s pageant deaf and blind, We pass, all hearing as à babbling wind,

All seeing as à cloud-rack in the night.

Without its purging, sublimating might,

Dogs drowsing in the dark were humankind.

It is the spur thar vivifies the mind,

That stirs the sense to dare the heavenward flight, The influence of the past and the To-be, Moulding the Now, that makes us see and feel. Still in thoughts shallows and Doubt’s shifting sands, The vessel of the soul sticks fast and stands, Except it urged and furthered o’er Life’s sea

Be by Imagination’s driving-wheel.

Love and Love.

We were lovers, indeed, in our day; we loved because we must,

Because of the heat in our hearts that soared to the skies like

| [a spire

And lifted our lives from the swamp, our souls from the mist

[and the mire.

For love and the world well lost we lived. You may style it lust

But the lusts of the soul and the sense combine in a birth august To gender a joy divine, a flame like a flower of fire,

1, Nietzsche.

That dries up the dross of the flesh with the blaze of its bright

[desire.

But you, like the swine in the slough you love, like the dogs in

[the dust.

You, what can you do for love, who know not what * tis to give

Who know not what ? tis to die, who know not what ? tis to live ?

Whilst youth in our hearts was hot, we poured out our lives

à [like wine

At the altars of Love and Spring; and now that the fiery flood No longer beats in our brain, no longer boils in our blood,

The love, that we lit with sense, burn’s bright at the spirit’s

| [shrine.