AFTER THE BURIAL.

AFTER THE BURIAL.

YES, faith is a goodly anchor;
When skies are sweet as a psalm,
At the bows it lolls so stalwart,
In bluff, broad-shouldered calm.

And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its iron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory,
One broken plank of the Past,
That our human heart may cling to,
Though hopeless of shore at last!

To the spirit its splendid conjectures,
To the flesh its sweet despair,
Its tears o'er the thin-worn locket
With its anguish of deathless hair!

Immortal? I feel it and know it,
Who doubts it of such as she?
But that is the pang's very secret, -
Immortal away from me.

There's a narrow ridge in the graveyard

Would scarce stay a child in his race,
But to me and my thought it is wider
Than the star-sown vague of Space.

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your morals most drearily true;
But, since the earth clashed on her
coffin,

I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper pas-

sion

Tears down to our primitive rock.

"I claim you, old friend," yawned the arm-chair,

"This corner, you know, is your seat";

"Rest your slippers on me," beamed the fender,

"I brighten at touch of your feet." "We know the practised finger,"

Said the books, "that seems like
brain";

And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.

Sang the pillow, "My down once quiv. ered

On nightingales' throats that flew Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz

To gather quaint dreams for you."

Ah me, where the Past sowed heart'sease,

The Present plucks rue for us men! I come back that scar unhealing Was not in the churchyard then.

But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.

Unaltered! Alas for the sameness That makes the change but more! "Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors, 'Tis his tread that chills the floor!

To learn such a simple lesson,

Need I go to Paris and Rome, That the many make the household, But only one the home?

"T was just a womanly presence, An influence unexprest,

But a rose she had worn, on my gravesod

Were more than long life with the rest!

'T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle, "T was nothing that I can phrase, But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,

And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.

For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside

That looks over woodland and corn.

Thou only aspirest the more,
Unregretful the old leaves shedding
That fringed thee with music before,
And deeper thy roots embedding
In the grace and the beauty of yore;
Thou sigh'st not, "Alas, I am older,
The green of last summer is sear!"
But loftier, hopefuller, bolder,
Winnest broader horizons each year.

To me 't is not cheer thou art singing:
There's a sound of the sea,
O mournful tree,

In thy boughs forever clinging,
And the far-off roar

Of waves on the shore
A shattered vessel flinging.

As thou musest still of the ocean
On which thou must float at last,
And seem'st to foreknow

The shipwreck's woe

And the sailor wrenched from the broken

mast,

Do I, in this vague emotion,
This sadness that will not pass,
Though the air throbs with wings,
And the field laughs and sings,
Do I forebode, alas!

The ship-building longer and wearier,
The voyage's struggle and strife,
And then the darker and drearier
Wreck of a broken life?

A MOOD.

I Go to the ridge in the forest
I haunted in days gone by,
But thou, O Memory, pourest
No magical drop in mine eye,
Nor the gleam of the secret restorest
That hath faded from earth and sky:
A Presence autumnal and sober
Invests every rock and tree,
And the aureole of October

Lights the maples, but darkens me.

Pine in the distance,
Patient through sun or rain,
Meeting with graceful persistence,
With yielding but rooted resistance,
The northwind's wrench and strain,
No memory of past existence
Brings thee pain;

Right for the zenith heading,
Friendly with heat or cold,

Thine arms to the influence spreading
Of the heavens, just from of old,

THE VOYAGE TO VINLAND.

I.

BIORN'S BECKONERS.

Now Biörn, the sun of Heriulf, had ill days

Because the heart within him seethed with blood

That would not be allayed with any toil, Whether of war or hunting or the oar, But was anhungered for some joy untried :

For the brain grew not weary with the limbs,

But, while they slept, still hammered like a Troll,

Building all night a bridge of solid dream

Between him and some purpose of his soul,

remained,

And every night with yellow-bearded kings

His sleep was haunted, — mighty men of old,

Once young as he, now ancient like the gods,

And safe as stars in all men's memories.

Strange sagas read he in their sea-blue eyes

Cold as the sea, grandly compassionless; Like life, they made him eager and then mocked.

Nay, broad awake, they would not let him be;

They shaped themselves gigantic in the mist,

They rose far-beckoning in the lamps of heaven,

They whispered invitation in the winds, And breath came from them, mightier than the wind,

To strain the lagging sails of his resolve, Till that grew passion which before was wish,

And youth seemed all too costly to be staked

On the soiled cards wherewith men

played their game,

Letting Time pocket up the larger life. Lost with base gain of raiment, food, and roof.

"What helpeth lightness of the feet?" they said,

"Oblivion runs with swifter foot than they;

Or strength of sinew? New men come as strong,

And those sleep nameless; or renown in war?

Swords grave no name on the longmemoried rock

But moss shall hide it; they alone who wring

Some secret purpose from the unwilling gods

Survive in song for yet a little while
To vex, like us, the dreams of later

II. THORWALD'S LAY.

So Biörn went comfortless but for his thought,

And by his thought the more discomforted,

Till Eric Thurlson kept his Yule-tide feast:

And thither came he, called among the

rest,

Silent, lone-minded, a church-door to mirth :

But, ere deep draughts forbade such serious song

As the grave Skald might chant nor after blush,

Then Eric looked at Thorwald where he

sat

Mute as a cloud amid the stormy hall, And said: "O Skald, sing now an olden song,

Such as our fathers heard who led great lives;

And, as the bravest on a shield is borne Along the waving host that shouts him king,

So rode their thrones upon the thronging seas!"

Then the old man arose; white-haired he stood,

White-bearded, and with eyes that looked afar

From their still region of perpetual snow, Beyond the little smokes and stirs of

men:

His head was bowed with gathered flakes of years,

As winter bends the sea-foreboding pine, But something triumphed in his brow and eye,

Which whoso saw it could not see and crouch:

Loud rang the emptied beakers as he mused,

Brooding his eyried thoughts; then, as an eagle

Circles smooth-winged above the windvexed woods,

So wheeled his soul into the air of song High o'er the stormy hall; and thus he

sang:

"The fletcher for his arrow-shaft picks

out

Wood closest -grained, long-seasoned, straight as light;

And from a quiver full of such as these

Sadly, as one who oft had seen her pass Nor stayed her: and forthwith the frothy tide

Of interrupted wassail roared along; But Biörn, the son of Heriulf, sat apart Musing, and, with his eyes upon the fire, Saw shapes of arrows, lost as soon as seen. "A ship," he muttered, "is a winged bridge

That leadeth every way to man's desire, And ocean the wide gate to manful luck";

And then with that resolve his heart was bent,

Which, like a humming shaft, through many a stripe

Of day and night, across the unpathwayed seas

Shot the brave prow that cut on Vinland sands

The first rune in the Saga of the West.

III.

GUDRIDA'S PROPHECY.

Four weeks they sailed, a speck in sky

shut seas,

Life, where was never life that knew itself,

But tumbled lubber-like in blowing whales;

Thought, where the like had never been before

Since Thought primeval brooded the abyss;

Alone as men were never in the world. They saw the icy foundlings of the sea, White cliffs of silence, beautiful by day, Or looming, sudden-perilous, at night In monstrous hush; or sometimes in the dark

The waves broke ominous with paly gleams

Crushed by the prow in sparkles of cold fire.

Then came green stripes of sea that promised land

But brought it not, and on the thirtieth day

Leaving their sons' sons
All things save song-craft,
Plant long in growing,
Thrusting its tap-root
Deep in the Gone.

Here men shall grow up
Strong from self-helping;
Eyes for the present
Bring they as eagles',
Blind to the Past.

They shall make over
Creed, law, and custom;
Driving-men, doughty
Builders of empire,
Builders of men.

Here is no singer;
What should they sing of?
They, the unresting?
Labor is ugly,
Loathsome is change.

These the old gods hate,
Dwellers in dream-land,
Drinking delusion
Out of the empty
Skull of the Past.

These hate the old gods,
Warring against them;
Fatal to Odin,

Here the wolf Fenrir
Lieth in wait.

Here the gods' Twilight
Gathers, earth-gulfing;
Blackness of battle,
Fierce till the Old World
Flares up in fire.

Doubt not, my Northmen;
Fate loves the fearless;
Fools, when their roof-tree
Falls, think it doomsday;
Firm stands the sky.

Over the ruin

See I the promise;

Crisp waves the cornfield,
Peace-walled, the homestead
Waits open-doored.

There lies the New Land;
Yours to behold it,
Not to possess it;
Slowly Fate's perfect
Fulness shall come.