Light a fire in the gloom
Of some dusty dining-room;
See the pictures on the walls,
Heroes, fights, and festivals;
And in a corner find the toys
Of the old Egyptian boys.

THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons

HEN I was sick and lay a-bed,

WHE

I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bedclothes, through the hills.

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill,

And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant Land of Counterpane.

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,

All round the house is the jet-black night:

It stares through the window-pane;
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light,
And it moves with the moving flame.

Now my little heart goes a-beating like a drum,
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;

And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed,—
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.

III. IN PORT

Last, to the chamber where I lie

My fearful footsteps patter nigh,

And come from out the cold and gloom

Into my warm and cheerful room.

There, safe arrived, we turn about
To keep the coming shadows out,
And close the happy door at last
On all the perils that we past.

Then, when mamma goes by to bed,
She shall come in with tiptoe tread,
And see me lying warm and fast
And in the Land of Nod at last.

"IF THIS WERE FAITH »

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons

OD, if this were enough,

GR

That I see things bare to the buff

And up to the buttocks in mire;

That I ask nor hope nor hire,

Not in the husk,

Nor dawn beyond the dusk,

Nor life beyond death:

God, if this were faith?

Having felt thy wind in my face

Spit sorrow and disgrace,

Having seen thine evil doom

In Golgotha and Khartoum,

And the brutes, the work of thine hands,

Fill with injustice lands

And stain with blood the sea:

If still in my veins the glee

Of the black night and the sun

And the lost battle, run;

If, an adept,

The iniquitous lists I still accept

With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,

And still to battle and perish for a dream of good:
God, if that were enough?

If to feel, in the ink of the slough
And the sink of the mire,

Veins of glory and fire

Run through and transpierce and transpire,
And a secret purpose of glory in every part,
And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;

To thrill with the joy of girded men

To go on for ever and fail and go on again,

And be mauled to the earth and arise,

And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the

eyes:

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night

That somehow the right is the right

And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:

Lord, if that were enough?

REQUIEM

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons

Still with gray hair we stumble on,
Till, behold, the vision gone!
Where hath fleeting beauty led?

To the doorway of the dead.
Life is over, life was gay:

We have come the primrose way.

"THE TROPICS VANISH »

From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons

HE tropics vanish, and meseems that I,

THE

From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,
New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.

There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,

My dead, the ready and the strong of word.

Their works, the salt-incrusted, still survive;

The sea bombards their founded towers; the night

Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,

Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,

Fell upon lasting silence. Continents

And continental oceans intervene;

A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,

Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain. The voice of generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And all mutation over, stretch me down
In that denoted city of the dead.

APEMAMA.