(The ruined Gold Cities of Rhodesia. The Ophir of Scripture.)
INTO the darkness whence they came,
They passed, their country knoweth none,
They and their gods without a name
Partake the same oblivion.
Their work they did, their work is done,
Whose gold, it may be, shone like fire
About the brows of Solomon,
And in the House of God’s Desire.
Hence came the altar all of gold,
The hinges of the Holy Place,
The censer with the fragrance rolled
Skyward to seek Jehovah’s face;
The golden Ark that did encase
The Law within Jerusalem,
The lilies and the rings to grace
The High Priest’s robe and diadem.
The pestilence, the desert spear,
Smote them; they passed, with none to tell
The names of them who laboured here:
Stark walls and crumbling crucible,
Strait gates, and graves, and ruined well,
Abide, dumb monuments of old,
We know but that men fought and fell,
Like us, like us, for love of Gold.
_Love’s Cryptogram_.
[The author (if he can be so styled) awoke from a restless sleep, with
the first stanza of the following piece in his mind. He has no memory of
composing it, either awake or asleep. He had long known the perhaps
Pythagorean fable of the bean-juice, but certainly never thought of
applying it to an amorous correspondence! The remaining verses are the
contribution of his Conscious Self!]
ELLE.
I CANNOT write, I may not write,
I dare not write to thee,
But look on the face of the moon by night,
And my letters shalt thou see.
For every letter that lovers write,
By their loves on the moon is seen,
If they pen their thought on the paper white,
With the magic juice of the bean!
LUI.
Oh, I had written this many a year,
And my letters you had read.
Had you only told me the spell, my dear,
Ere ever we twain were wed!
But I have a lady and you have a lord,
And their eyes are of the green,
And we dared not trust to the written word,
Lest our long, long love be seen!
ELLE.
“Oh, every thought that your heart has thought,
Since the world came us between,
The birds of the air to my heart have brought,
With no word heard or seen.”
’_Twas thus in a dream we spoke and said_
_Myself and my love unseen_,
_But I woke and sighed on my weary bed_,
_For the spell of the juice of the bean_!
_Tusitala_.
WE spoke of a rest in a fairy knowe of the North, but he,
Far from the firths of the East, and the racing tides of the West,
Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite Southern Sea,
Weary and well content in his grave on the Vaëa crest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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