Part 5

Between a blurred sagacity That once had power to sound him, And Love, that will not let him be The Judas that she found him, Her pride assuages her almost, As if it were alone the cost.-- He sees that he will not be lost, And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees Envelops and allures him; Tradition, touching all he sees, Beguiles and reassures him; And all her doubts of what he says Are dimmed of what she knows of days-- Till even prejudice delays And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates The reign of her confusion; The pounding wave reverberates The dirge of her illusion; And home, where passion lived and died, Becomes a place where she can hide, While all the town and harbor side Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows, The story as it should be,-- As if the story of a house Were told, or ever could be; We'll have no kindly veil between Her visions and those we have seen,-- As if we guessed what hers have been, Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they That with a god have striven, Not hearing much of what we say, Take what the god has given; Though like waves breaking it may be, Or like a changed familiar tree, Or like a stairway to the sea Where down the blind are driven.

Old Trails

(Washington Square)

I met him, as one meets a ghost or two, Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel. "King Solomon was right, there's nothing new," Said he. "Behold a ruin who meant well."

He led me down familiar steps again, Appealingly, and set me in a chair. "My dreams have all come true to other men," Said he; "God lives, however, and why care?

"An hour among the ghosts will do no harm." He laughed, and something glad within me sank. I may have eyed him with a faint alarm, For now his laugh was lost in what he drank.

"They chill things here with ice from hell," he said; "I might have known it." And he made a face That showed again how much of him was dead, And how much was alive and out of place,

And out of reach. He knew as well as I That all the words of wise men who are skilled In using them are not much to defy What comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.

What evil and infirm perversity Had been at work with him to bring him back? Never among the ghosts, assuredly, Would he originate a new attack;

Never among the ghosts, or anywhere, Till what was dead of him was put away, Would he attain to his offended share Of honor among others of his day.

"You ponder like an owl," he said at last; "You always did, and here you have a cause. For I'm a confirmation of the past, A vengeance, and a flowering of what was.

"Sorry? Of course you are, though you compress, With even your most impenetrable fears, A placid and a proper consciousness Of anxious angels over my arrears.

"I see them there against me in a book As large as hope, in ink that shines by night. For sure I see; but now I'd rather look At you, and you are not a pleasant sight.

"Forbear, forgive. Ten years are on my soul, And on my conscience. I've an incubus: My one distinction, and a parlous toll To glory; but hope lives on clamorous.

"'Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what-- The kind that blinks and rises when it falls, Whether it sees a reason why or not-- That heard Broadway's hard-throated siren-calls;

"'Twas hope that brought me through December storms, To shores again where I'll not have to be A lonely man with only foreign worms To cheer him in his last obscurity.

"But what it was that hurried me down here To be among the ghosts, I leave to you. My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear: Though you are silent, what you say is true.

"There may have been the devil in my feet, For down I blundered, like a fugitive, To find the old room in Eleventh Street. God save us!--I came here again to live."

We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then, And followed us unseen to his old room. No longer a good place for living men We found it, and we shivered in the gloom.

The goods he took away from there were few, And soon we found ourselves outside once more, Where now the lamps along the Avenue Bloomed white for miles above an iron floor.

"Now lead me to the newest of hotels," He said, "and let your spleen be undeceived: This ruin is not myself, but some one else; I haven't failed; I've merely not achieved."

Whether he knew or not, he laughed and dined With more of an immune regardlessness Of pits before him and of sands behind Than many a child at forty would confess;

And after, when the bells in 'Boris' rang Their tumult at the Metropolitan, He rocked himself, and I believe he sang. "God lives," he crooned aloud, "and I'm the man!"

He was. And even though the creature spoiled All prophecies, I cherish his acclaim. Three weeks he fattened; and five years he toiled In Yonkers,--and then sauntered into fame.