Part 7

Even as when the trackway thundered With the charge of grenadiers, And the blood of forty hundred Splashed its parapets and piers . . .

VII

Any ancient crone I’d toady Like a lass in young-eyed prime, Could she tell some tale of Lodi At that moving mighty time.

VIII

So, I ask the wives of Lodi For traditions of that day; But alas! not anybody Seems to know of such a fray.

And they heed but transitory Marketings in cheese and meat, Till I judge that Lodi’s story Is extinct in Lodi’s street.

Yet while here and there they thrid them In their zest to sell and buy, Let me sit me down amid them And behold those thousands die . . .

—Not a creature cares in Lodi How Napoleon swept each arch, Or where up and downward trod he, Or for his memorial March!

XII

So that wherefore should I be here, Watching Adda lip the lea, When the whole romance to see here Is the dream I bring with me?

XIII

And why sing “The Bridge of Lodi” As I sit thereon and swing, When none shows by smile or nod he Guesses why or what I sing? . . .

XIV

Since all Lodi, low and head ones, Seem to pass that story by, It may be the Lodi-bred ones Rate it truly, and not I.

Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi, Is thy claim to glory gone? Must I pipe a palinody, Or be silent thereupon?

XVI

And if here, from strand to steeple, Be no stone to fame the fight, Must I say the Lodi people Are but viewing crime aright?

XVII

Nay; I’ll sing “The Bridge of Lodi”— That long-loved, romantic thing, Though none show by smile or nod he Guesses why and what I sing!

ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES

MY ardours for emprize nigh lost Since Life has bared its bones to me, I shrink to seek a modern coast Whose riper times have yet to be; Where the new regions claim them free From that long drip of human tears Which peoples old in tragedy Have left upon the centuried years.

For, wonning in these ancient lands, Enchased and lettered as a tomb, And scored with prints of perished hands, And chronicled with dates of doom, Though my own Being bear no bloom I trace the lives such scenes enshrine, Give past exemplars present room, And their experience count as mine.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

THE MOTHER MOURNS

WHEN mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time, And sedges were horny, And summer’s green wonderwork faltered On leaze and in lane,

I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly Came wheeling around me Those phantoms obscure and insistent That shadows unchain.

Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me A low lamentation, As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened, Perplexed, or in pain.

And, heeding, it awed me to gather That Nature herself there Was breathing in aërie accents, With dirgeful refrain,