Listlessly deaf amid the hum.
A purblind man, too, sly he views
With staff before him, pattering thin:
Informers these, perchance, and spies?
So queries one, a craftsman there,
Nudging his fellow, winking back.
And, verily, rumor long has run
That Bomba’s blind men well can see,
His deaf men hear, his dumb men talk.
But never amid the varied throng
The boy a straggling soldier notes
In livery lace declaring him.
Howbeit, some sombre garbs he views:
A Jesuit grave, genteely sleek
In dapper small-clothes and fine hose
Of sable silk, and shovel-hat,
Hard by a doctor of the law,
In sables, too, with parchment cheek;
A useful man to lawless power,
Expert to legalize the wrong.
The twain, brief tarrying there behind,
Went sauntering off ere came the close.
But now the lad, in posture grave,
With sidelong leaning head intent,
The shell’s lips to his listening ear,
In undulating tone began:
IX
WITH the precocity of his precocious tribe, the juvenile Levantine, knowing that there is nothing the populace everywhere more like to hear than something anyway touching upon themselves, their town and their period, entertains his street-audience accordingly with certain improvisations partaking alike of the sentiment and devil-may-care incident to the Neapolitan clime.
“Metheglin befuddles this freak o’ the sea,
Humming, low humming—in brain a bee!
“Hymns it of Naples her myriads warming?
Involute hive in fever of swarming.
“What Hades of sighs in irruption suppressed,
Suffused with huzzahs that buzz in arrest!
“Neapolitans, ay, ’tis the soul of the shell
Intoning your Naples, Parthenope’s bell.
“O, conch of the Siren renowned through the sea
That enervates Salerno, seduces Baiæ;
“I attend you, I hear; but how to resolve
The complex of conflux your murmurs involve”!
He paused, as after prelude won;
Abrupt then in recitative, he:
“Hark, the stir
The ear invading:
“Crowds on crowds
All promenading;
“Clatter and clink
Of cavalcading;
“Yo-heave-ho!
From ships unlading;
“Funeral dole,
Through arches fading;
“All hands round!
In masquerading;
“Litany low—
High rodomontading;
“Grapes, ripe grapes!
In cheer evading
“Lazarus’ plaint
All vines upbraiding;
“Crack-crick-crack
Of fusilading!
“Hurly-burly late and early,
Gossips prating, quacks orating,
Daft debating:
Furious wild reiteration
And incensed expostulation!
“Din condensed
All hubbub summing:
Larking, laughing,
Chattering, chaffing,
Thrumming, strumming,
Singing, jingling,
All commingling—
Till the Drum,
Rub-a-dub sounded, doubly pounded,
Deafening in deep din rebounded,
Smiting all this hive of noises
Babel tongued with myriad voices,
Drubs them dumb!
“No more larking,
No more laughing,
No more chattering,
Nay, nor chaffing—
All is glum!
“To blab the reason—
Were out of season,
For, look, they come!
“Rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub,
Rub-a-double-dub-dub,
X
ALERT in his young senses five
The lad had caught the wafted roll
Of Bomba’s barbarous tom-toms thumped,
And improvised the beat. Anon
The files wheeled into open view.
A second troop a thousand strong
With band and banners, flourished blades,
Launched from a second cannoned den
And now in countermarch thereon;
The great drum-major towering up
In aigulets and tinsel tags—
Pagoda glittering in Cathay!
Arch whiskerando and gigantic,
A grandiose magnifico antic
Tossing his truncheon in the van.
A hifalutin exaggeration,
Barbaric in his bear-skin shako,
Of bullying Bomba’s puffed elation
And blood-and-thunder proclamation,
A braggadocio Bourbon-Draco!
XI
IN which the young Impudence ventures to treat with sly levity even so sanctioned an abstraction as the “powers that be.”
While yet the bayonets flashed along
And all was silent save the drum,
Then first it was I chanced to note
Some rose-leaves fluttering off in air,
While on my lap lay wilted ones.
Ah, Rose, that should not bloom outlast,
Now leaf by leaf art leaving me?
But here anew the lad brake in:
“Lo, the King’s men
They go marching!
O, the instep
Haughty arching!—
Live the King!
What’s the grin for—
Queer grimacing?
Who, yon grenadiers
Outfacing
Here dare sing
Ironically—
Live the King?”
But there, a comely wine-wife plump,
A bustling motherly good body
Who all along in fidgety sort
Concern had shown, and tried her way
To push up to this imp satiric,
Got next him now, and clapping hand
Across his mouth, she whispered him.
He heard; then, turning toward the throng,
“She says, ‘Young chick come down a peg,
Nor risk being pent anew in egg.’”
Castel dell Ovo here was meant,
The oval fortress on the bay,
Hiving its captives in sea-cells;
Nor patriots only, plotters deemed,
But talkers, rhymesters, every kind
Of indiscreetly innocent mind.
Nor less the volatile audience—late
Grinding their teeth at Bomba’s guards,
Were tickled by the allusive pun,
Howbeit, the boy here made an end;
And dulcet now, with decent air,
Of mild petitionary grace:
“Carlo am I, some carlins then!”
He twitched his sash up, scarlet rag,
Blithely in bonnet caught the coins,
Then disappeared beyond the marge,
To dice with other imps as young,
Ere yet a little and his star
Evanish like the Pleiad lost.
XII
HEREIN, if Jac
k Gentian, ever reputed a man of veracity, is to be credited, so thin a thing as a wafer made of a little flour and water and so forth, the same being viewless, or carefully covered from view, proves of far more efficacy in bringing a semi-insurgent populace to their knees than all the bombs, bayonets and fusilades of the despot of Naples.
The younker faded, voice and all—
He faded, and his carol died,
Forgot anon in shifted scene;
For, hark, what slender chimes are these
On zephyr borne? And, look, the folk,
In one consent of strange accord,
Part, and in expectation stand;
Yet scarse as men who mirth await—
More like to crowds that bide eclipse,
So gravely sobering seems to fall
Those light lilt chimes now floating near,
For harbinger of—what behind?
It comes: a corpulent form erect,
And holds what looks a Titan stem
Of lily-of-the-vale, the buds
A congregation of small bells—
Small, silver, and of dulcet tone,
Drooping from willowy light wires;
Behind, in square, four boys in albs
Whose staves uphold a canopy,
And, under this, a shining priest
Who to some death-bed bears the host
In mystic state before him veiled.
A hush falls; and the people drop
Stilly and instantaneous all
As plumps the apple ripe from twig
And cushions motionless in sod.
My charioteer reins short—transfixed;
The very mountebanks they kneel;
And idlers, all along and far,
Bow over as the host moves on—
Bow over, and for time remain
Like to Pompeiian masquers caught
With fluttering garb in act of flight,
For ages glued in deadly drift.
But, look, the Rose, brave Rose, is where?
Last petals falling, and its soul
Of musk dissolved in empty air!
And here this draught at hazard drawn,
Like squares of fresco newly dashed,
Cools, hardens, nor will more receive,
Scarse even the touch that mends a slip:
The plaster sets; quietus—bide.
Let bide; nor all the piece esteem
A medley mad of each extreme;
Since, in those days, gyved Naples,—stung
By tickling’s tantalizing pain,—
Like triced St. Anthony giddy hung
Betwixt the tittering hussies twain:
She sobbed, she laughed, she rattled her chain;
Till the Red Shirt proved signal apt
Of danger ahead to Bomba’s son,
And presently freedom’s thunder clapt,
And lo, he fell from toppling throne—
Fell down, like Dagon on his face,
And ah, the unfeeling populace!
But Garibaldi:—Naples’ host
Uncovers to her deliverer’s ghost,
While down time’s aisle, mid clarions clear
“Pale glory walks by valor’s bier.”
After-Piece
“Pale-Glory-walks-by-Valor’s-bier.”—
Now why a catafalque in close?
Nor relish I that stupid cheer
Ringing down the curtain on the rose.
UNCOLLECTED POETRY
AND PROSE-AND-VERSE
CONTENTS
The Admiral of the White
A Battle-Picture
Billy in the Darbies
Camoens
The Continents
The Dust-Layers
Falstaff’s Lament
Fruit and Flower Painter
Give me the nerve
Gold in the mountain
Hearts-of-gold
Honor
Immolated
In a nutshell
In the Hall of Marbles
In the jovial age of old
In the old Farm House
In the Paupers’ Turnip-Field
Inscription For the Dead At Fredericksburgh
Madam Mirror and The Wise Virgins an answer
Madam Mirror
The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror
The Medallion
Merry Ditty of the Sad Man
Montaigne and his Kitten
My jacket old
The New Ancient of Days
Old Age in his ailing
Pontoosuc
Puzzlement
A Rail Road Cutting
Rammon
A Reasonable Constitution
The Rusty Man
A Spirit appeared to me
Suggested by the Ruins
Thy aim, thy aim?
Time’s Long Ago!
To ——––
To Daniel Shepherd
To Tom
Under the Rose
Adieu
The Admiral of the White
PROUD, O proud in his oaken hall
The Admiral walks to-day,
From the top of his turreted citadel
French colors ’neath English play.—
Why skips the needle so frolic about,
Why danceth the ship so to-day?
Is it to think of those French Captains’ swords
Surrendered when ended the fray?
O well may you skip, and well may you dance,
You dance on your homeward way;
O well may you skip and well may you dance
With homeward-bound victors to-day.
Like a baron bold from his mountain-hold,
At night looks the Admiral forth:
Heavy the clouds, and thick and dun,
They slant from the sullen North.
Catching at each little opening for life,
The moon in her wane swims forlorn:
Fades, fades mid the clouds her pinched palid face
Like the foeman’s in seas sinking down.
Tack off from the land! And the watch below
Old England the oak-crowned to drink:—
Knock, knock, knock, the loud billows go,
Rapping “Bravo my boys!” ere they sink—
Knock, knock, knock, on the windward bow;
The Anvil-Head whale you would think.
Tis Saturday night,—the last of the week,
The last of the week, month, and year—
On deck! shout it out, you forecastle-man,
Shout “Sail ho, Sail ho—the New Year!”
Drink, messmates, drink; tis sweet to think
Tis the last of the week, month, and year,
Then perils are past, and Old England at last,
Though now shunned, on the morn we will near;
We’ve beaten the foe, their ship blown below,
Their flags in St. Paul’s Church we’ll rear.
Knock, knock, knock, the loud billows go—
God! what’s that shouting and roar?
Breakers!—close, close ahead and abeam:
She strikes—knock, knock—we’re ashore!
Why went the needle so trembling about,
Why shook you, and trembled to day?
Was it, perchance, that those French Captains’ swords
In the arm-chest too near you lay?
Was it to think that those French Captains’ swords,
Surrendered, might ye
t win the day?
O woe for the brave no courage can save,
Woe, woe for the ship led astray.
High-beetling the rocks below which she shocks,
Her boats they are stove by her side,
Tattered seas lick her round, as in flames she were bound,
Roar, roar like a furnace the tide.
O jagged the rocks, repeated she knocks,
Splits the hull like a cracked filbert there,
Her timbers are torn, and ground-up are thrown,
Float the small chips like filbert-bits there.
Pale, pale, but proud, ’neath the billows loud,
The Admiral sleeps to night;
Pale, pale, but proud, in his sea-weed shroud,—
The Admiral of the White:
And by their guns the dutiful ones,
Who had fought, bravely fought the good fight.
A Battle-Picture
THREE mounted buglers laced in gold,
Sidelong veering, light in seat,
High on the crest of battle rolled.
Ere yet the surge is downward beat,
The pennoned trumpets lightly hold—
Mark, how they snatch the swift occasion
To thrill their rearward invocation
While the sabres, never coy,
Ring responses as they ride;
And, like breakers of the tide,
All the mad plumes dance for joy!
Billy in the Darbies
GOOD of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd.—But, look:
Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook;
But ’twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day.