Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play, When shimmeringly, glimpse by glimpse Seen through the leaves, the silken figures sway In measured dance. Never at shut of day, When Time perversely loitering limps Through endless twilights, should your strings Whisper of light remembered things That happened long ago and far away: Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play.... And you, pale marble statues, far descried Where vistas open suddenly, I bid you shew yourselves no more, but hide Your loveliness, lest too much glorified By western radiance slantingly Shot down the glade, you turn from stone To living gods, immortal grown, And, ageless, mock my beauty’s fleeting pride, You pale, relentless statues, far descried.... BOOKS AND THOUGHTS. Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry Across the Lethe of the years-- These are my friends, and at their tears I weep and with their mirth am merry. On a high tower, whose battlements Give me all heaven at a glance, I lie long summer nights in trance, Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents That rise from earth, while the sky above me Merges its peace with my soul’s peace, Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me, Nought break the quiet of my release: In vain the windy sunlight raves At the hush and gloom of polar caves. THE HIGHER SENSUALISM. There’s a church by a lake in Italy Stands white on a hill against the sky; And a path of immemorial cobbles Leads up and up, where the pilgrim hobbles Past a score or so of neat reposories, Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries To the shrined terra-cotta mannikins, That expound with the liveliest quirks and grins Known texts of Scripture. But no long stay Should the pilgrim make upon his way; But as means to the end these shrines stand here To guide to something holier, The church on the hill top. Your heaven’s so With a path leading up to it past a row Of votary Priapulids; At each you pause and tell your beads Along the quintuple strings of sense: Then on, to face Heaven’s eminence, New stimulated, new inspired. FORMAL VERSES. I. Mother of all my future memories, Mistress of my new life, which but to-day Began, when I beheld, deep in your eyes, My own love mirrored and the warm surprise Of the first kiss swept both our souls away, Your love has freed me; for I was oppressed By my own devil, whose unwholesome breath Tarnished my youth, leaving to me at best Age lacking comfort of a soul at rest And weariness beyond the hope of death. II. Ah, those were days of silent happiness! I never spoke, and had no need to speak, While on the windy down-land, cheek by cheek, The slow-driven sun beheld us. Each caress Had oratory for its own defence; And when I kissed or felt her fingers press, I envied not Demosthenes his Greek, Nor Tully for his Latin eloquence. PERILS OF THE SMALL HOURS.