The rolling glory of their golden hair,
And emperors extinguished with a smile.
They foiled his years with many an ancient wile,
And if they limped, O’Leary didn’t care:
He turned them loose and had them everywhere,
Undoing saints and senates with their guile.
But this was not the end. A year ago
I met him—and to meet was to admire:
Forgotten were the ladies and the lyre,
And the small, ink-fed Eros of his dream.
By questioning I found a man to know—
A failure spared, a Shadrach of the Gleam.
Stung by the mob that came to see the show,The Master toiled along to Calvary;We gibed him, as he went, with houndish glee,Till his dimmed eyes for us did overflow;We cursed his vengeless hands thrice wretchedly, —And this was nineteen hundred years ago.But after nineteen hundred years the shameStill clings, and we have not made…
A town that always like a friend appears,And always in the sunrise by the sea.And over it, somehow, there seems to beA downward flash of something new and fierce,That ever strives to clear, but never clearsThe dimness of a charmed antiquity.
Morgan, Fingal, fiddle, and all,They had come for the night with me.The spirit of joy was in Morgan’s wrist,There were songs in Fingal’s throat;And secure outside, for the spray to drench,Was a tossed and empty boat.And there were the pipes, and there was the punch,And somewhere were twelve years;So it came, in the manner of…
As desolate as ever the dead moonDid glimmer on dead Sardis, men were gay;And there were little children here to play,With small soft hands that once did keep in tuneThe strings that stretch from heaven, till too soonThe change came, and the music passed away.Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things,—No life, no…
A miser was he, with a miser’s nose,And eyes like little dollars in the dark.His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;And when he spoke there came like sullen blowsThrough scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,As if a cur were chary of its bark.Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,Year after…
Supreme in an impregnable domainThat with his magic he has fortified;And though melodious multitudes have triedIn ecstasy, in anguish, and in vain,With invocation sacred and profaneTo lure him, even the loudest are outside.Only at unconjectured intervals,By will of him on whom no man may gaze,By word of him whose law no man has read,A questing…
