"Lo! this thing is not mine Nor thine to hinder, For the custom is full old, And here in Nineveh have I beheld Many a singer pass and take his place In those dim halls where no man troubleth His sleep or song. And many a one hath sung his songs More craftily, more subtle-souled than I; And many a one now doth surpass My wave-worn beauty with his wind of flowers, Yet am I poet, and upon my tomb Shall all men scatter rose leaves Ere the night slay light With her blue sword. "It is not, Raama, that my song rings highest Or more sweet in tone than any, but that I Am here a Poet, that doth drink of life As lesser men drink wine." The White Stag I ha' seen them mid the clouds on the heather. Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow, Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover, When the white hart breaks his cover And the white wind breaks the morn. "_'Tis the white stagy Fame, we're a-hunting, Bid the world's hounds come to horn!_" _Piccadilly_ _Beautiful, tragical faces,_ _Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;_ _And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,_ _That are so sodden and drunken,_ _Who hath forgotten you?_ _O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!_ _The gross, the coarse, the brazen,_ _God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,_ _But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,_ _Who hath forgotten you?_ NOTES NOTE PRECEDENT TO "LA FRAISNE" "When the soul is exhausted of fire, then doth the spirit return unto its primal nature and there is upon it a peace great and of the woodland "_magna pax et silvestris_." Then becometh it kin to the faun and the dryad, a woodland-dweller amid the rocks and streams "_consociis faunis dryadisque inter saxa sylvarum_." Janus of Basel.[1] Also has Mr. Yeats in his "Celtic Twilight" treated of such, and I because in such a mood, feeling myself divided between myself corporal and a self aetherial "a dweller by streams and in woodland," eternal because simple in elements "_ Aeternus quia simplex naturae_." Being freed of the weight of a soul "capable of salvation or damnation," a grievous striving thing that after much straining was mercifully taken from me; as had one passed saying as one in the Book of the Dead, "I, lo I, am the assembler of souls," and had taken it with him leaving me thus _simplex naturae_, even so at peace and transsentient as a wood pool I made it. The Legend thus: "Miraut de Garzelas, after the pains he bore a-loving Riels of Calidorn and that to none avail, ran mad in the forest.