ST. Muiring their innocent, old-world canticles,
Sing in the storied air
All rosy-and-golden, as with memories
Of woods at evensong, and sands and seas
Disconsolate for that the night is nigh.
O, the low, lingering lights! The large last gleam
(Hark! how those brazen choristers cry and call!)
Touching these solemn ancientries, and there,
The silent River ranging tide-mark high
And the callow, grey-faced Hospital,
With the strange glimmer and glamour of a dream!
The Sabbath peace is in the slumbrous trees,
And from the wistful, the fast-widowing sky
(Hark! how those plangent comforters call and cry!) Falls as in August plots late roseleaves fall. The sober Sabbath stir
Leisurely voices, desultory feet!
Comes from the dry, dust-coloured street,
Where in their summer frocks the girls go by,
And sweethearts lean and loiter and confer,
Just as they did an hundred years ago,
Just as an hundred years to come they will:-
And sweet-throats none our welkin shall fulfil,
Nor any sunset fade serene and slow;
But, being dead, we shall not grieve to die.
ORTH from the dust and din,
The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare, The odour and sense of life and lust aflare,
The wrangle and jangle of unrests,
Let us take horse, dear heart, take horse and win
As from swart August to the green lap of May —
To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts
Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware
In any of her innumerable nests
Of that first sudden plash of dawn,
Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large,
Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day
In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn
Forward and up, in wider and wider way
Shall float the sands and brim the shores
On this our haunch of Earth, as round she roars
And spins into the outlook of the Sun
(The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge)
With light, with living light, from marge to marge,
Until the course He set and staked be run.
Through street and square, through square and street, Each with his home-grown quality of dark
And violated silence, loud and fleet,
Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp,
Sweet, how the old mare's bit and chain
Ring back a rough refrain
Upon the marked and cheerful tramp
And O the languid midsummer wafts adust,
The tired midsummer blooms!
O the mysterious distances, the glooms
Romantic, the august
And solemn shapes! At night this City of Trees
Turns to a tryst of vague and strange
And monstrous Majesties,
Let loose from some dim underworld to range
These terrene vistas till their twilight sets:
When, dispossessed of wonderfulness, they stand
Beggared and common, plain to all the land
For stooks of leaves! And lo! the wizard hour
Whose shining, silent sorcery hath such power!
Still, still the streets, between their carcanets
Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep:
But see how gable ends and parapets
In gradual beauty and significance
Emerge! And did you hear
That little twitter-and-cheep,
Breaking inordinately loud and clear
On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere? 'Tis a first nest at matins! And behold
A rakehell cat-how furtive and acold!
A spent witch homing from some infamous dance-
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!
And lo! a little wind and shy,
The smell of ships (that earnest of romance),
A sense of space and water, and thereby
A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky,
And look, O look! a tangle of silver gleams
And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams,
His dreams of a dead past that cannot die!
What miracle is happening in the air,
Charging the very texture of the grey
With something luminous and rare ?
The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire,
And, as one lights a candle, it is day.
The extinguisher that fain would strut for spire
On the formal little church is not yet green
Across the water: but the house-tops nigher,
The corner-lines, the chimneys- look how clean,
How new, how naked! See the batch of boats,
Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam!
And those are barges that were goblin floats,
Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and dream!
And in the piles the water frolics clear,
The ripples into loose rings wander and flee,
And we we can behold that could but hear
The ancient River singing as he goes
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