Songs of Travel and Other Verses

by Robert Louis Stevenson

XXIII


HE hears with gladdened heart the thunder

Peal, and loves the falling dew;

He knows the earth above and under -

Sits and is content to view.

He sits beside the dying ember,

God for hope and man for friend,

Content to see, glad to remember,

Expectant of the certain end.

XXIV


FAREWELL, fair day and fading light!

The clay-born here, with westward sight,

Marks the huge sun now downward soar.

Farewell. We twain shall meet no more.

Farewell. I watch with bursting sigh

My late contemned occasion die.

I linger useless in my tent:

Farewell, fair day, so foully spent!

Farewell, fair day. If any God

At all consider this poor clod,

He who the fair occasion sent

Prepared and placed the impediment.

Let him diviner vengeance take -

Give me to sleep, give me to wake

Girded and shod, and bid me play

The hero in the coming day!

XXV
IF THIS WERE FAITH

GOD, if this were enough,

That I see things bare to the buff

And up to the buttocks in mire;

That I ask nor hope nor hire,

Nut 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?

XXVI
MY WIFE

TRUSTY, dusky, vivid, true,

With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,

Steel-true and blade-straight,

The great artificer

Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;

A love that life could never tire,

Death quench or evil stir,

The mighty master

Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,

A fellow-farer true through life,

Heart-whole and soul-free

The august father

Gave to me.

XXVII
TO THE MUSE

RESIGN the rhapsody, the dream,

To men of larger reach;

Be ours the quest of a plain theme,

The piety of speech.

As monkish scribes from morning break

Toiled till the close of light,

Nor thought a day too long to make

One line or letter bright:

We also with an ardent mind,

Time, wealth, and fame forgot,

Our glory in our patience find

And skim, and skim the pot:

Till last, when round the house we hear

The evensong of birds,

One corner of blue heaven appear

In our clear well of words.

Leave, leave it then, muse of my heart!

Sans finish and sans frame,

Leave unadorned by needless art

The picture as it came.

XXVIII
TO AN ISLAND PRINCESS

SINCE long ago, a child at home,

I read and longed to rise and roam,

Where'er I went, whate'er I willed,

One promised land my fancy filled.

Hence the long roads my home I made;

Tossed much in ships; have often laid

Below the uncurtained sky my head,

Rain-deluged and wind-buffeted:

And many a thousand hills I crossed

And corners turned - Love's labour lost,

Till, Lady, to your isle of sun

I came, not hoping; and, like one

Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes,

And hailed my promised land with cries.

Yes, Lady, here I was at last;

Here found I all I had forecast:

The long roll of the sapphire sea

That keeps the land's virginity;

The stalwart giants of the wood

Laden with toys and flowers and food;

The precious forest pouring out

To compass the whole town about;

The town itself with streets of lawn,

Loved of the moon, blessed by the dawn,

Where the brown children all the day

Keep up a ceaseless noise of play,

Play in the sun, play in the rain,

Nor ever quarrel or complain; -

And late at night, in the woods of fruit,

Hark! do you hear the passing flute?

I threw one look to either hand,

And knew I was in Fairyland.

And yet one point of being so

I lacked. For, Lady (as you know),

Whoever by his might of hand,

Won entrance into Fairyland,

Found always with admiring eyes

A Fairy princess kind and wise.

It was not long I waited; soon

Upon my threshold, in broad noon,

Gracious and helpful, wise and good,

The Fairy Princess Moe stood.

Tantira, Tahiti, Nov. 5, 1888.

XXIX
TO KALAKAUA (With a present of a Pearl)

THE Silver Ship, my King - that was her name

In the bright islands whence your fathers came -

The Silver Ship, at rest from winds and tides,

Below your palace in your harbour rides:

And the seafarers, sitting safe on shore,

Like eager merchants count their treasures o'er.

One gift they find, one strange and lovely thing,

Now doubly precious since it pleased a king.

The right, my liege, is ancient as the lyre

For bards to give to kings what kings admire.

'Tis mine to offer for Apollo's sake;

And since the gift is fitting, yours to take.

To golden hands the golden pearl I bring:

The ocean jewel to the island king.

Honolulu, Feb. 3, 1889.

XXX
TO PRINCESS KAIULANI

[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani's banyan! When she comes to my land and her father's, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there alone. - R. L. S.]

FORTH from her land to mine she goes,

The island maid, the island rose,

Light of heart and bright of face:

The daughter of a double race.

Her islands here, in Southern sun,Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone,

And I, in her dear banyan shade,

Look vainly for my little maid.

But our Scots islands far away

Shall glitter with unwonted day,

And cast for once their tempests by

To smile in Kaiulani's eye.

Honolulu.

XXXI
TO MOTHER MARYANNE

To see the infinite pity of this place,

The mangled limb, the devastated face,

The innocent sufferer smiling at the rod -

A fool were tempted to deny his God.

He sees, he shrinks. But if he gaze again,

Lo, beauty springing from the breast of pain!

He marks the sisters on the mournful shores;

And even a fool is silent and adores.

Guest House, Kalawao, Molokai.

XXXII
IN MEMORIAM E. H.

I KNEW a silver head was bright beyond compare,

I knew a queen of toil with a crown of silver hair.

Garland of valour and sorrow, of beauty and renown,

Life, that honours the brave, crowned her himself with the crown.

The beauties of youth are frail, but this was a jewel of age.

Life, that delights in the brave, gave it himself for a gage.

Fair was the crown to behold, and beauty its poorest part -

At once the scar of the wound and the order pinned on the heart.

The beauties of man are frail, and the silver lies in the dust,

And the queen that we call to mind sleeps with the brave and the just;

Sleeps with the weary at length; but, honoured and ever fair,

Shines in the eye of the mind the crown of the silver hair.

Honolulu.

XXXIII
TO MY WIFE (A Fragment)

LONG must elapse ere you behold again

Green forest frame the entry of the lane -

The wild lane with the bramble and the brier,

The year-old cart-tracks perfect in the mire,

The wayside smoke, perchance, the dwarfish huts,

And ramblers' donkey drinking from the ruts: -

Long ere you trace how deviously it leads,

Back from man's chimneys and the bleating meads

To the woodland shadow, to the sylvan hush,

When but the brooklet chuckles in the brush -

Back from the sun and bustle of the vale

To where the great voice of the nightingale

Fills all the forest like a single room,

And all the banks smell of the golden broom;

So wander on until the eve descends.

And back returning to your firelit friends,

You see the rosy sun, despoiled of light,

Hung, caught in thickets, like a schoolboy's kite.

Here from the sea the unfruitful sun shall rise,

Bathe the bare deck and blind the unshielded eyes;

The allotted hours aloft shall wheel in vain

And in the unpregnant ocean plunge again.

Assault of squalls that mock the watchful guard,

And pluck the bursting canvas from the yard,

And senseless clamour of the calm, at night

Must mar your slumbers. By the plunging light,

In beetle-haunted, most unwomanly bower

Of the wild-swerving cabin, hour by hour . . .

Schooner 'Equator.'

XXXIV
TO MY OLD FAMILIARS

DO you remember - can we e'er forget? -

How, in the coiled-perplexities of youth,

In our wild climate, in our scowling town,

We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed and feared?

The belching winter wind, the missile rain,

The rare and welcome silence of the snows,

The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night,

The grimy spell of the nocturnal town,

Do you remember? - Ah, could one forget!

As when the fevered sick that all night long

Listed the wind intone, and hear at last

The ever-welcome voice of chanticleer

Sing in the bitter hour before the dawn, -

With sudden ardour, these desire the day:

So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope;

So we, exulting, hearkened and desired.

For lo! as in the palace porch of life

We huddled with chimeras, from within -

How sweet to hear! - the music swelled and fell,

And through the breach of the revolving doors

What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled!

I have since then contended and rejoiced;

Amid the glories of the house of life

Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld:

Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes

Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love

Fall insignificant on my closing ears,

What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind

In our inclement city? what return

But the image of the emptiness of youth,

Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice

Of discontent and rapture and despair?

So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp,

The momentary pictures gleam and fade

And perish, and the night resurges - these

Shall I remember, and then all forget.

Apemama.

XXXV


THE tropics vanish, and meseems that I,

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-encrusted, 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,

nvirons 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.

XXXVI
TO S.C.

I HEARD the pulse of the besieging sea

Throb far away all night. I heard the wind

Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms.

I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand,

And flailing fans and shadows of the palm;

The heaven all moon and wind and the blind vault;

The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept.

The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives,

Slept in the precinct of the palisade;

Where single, in the wind, under the moon,

Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,

Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel.

To other lands and nights my fancy turned -

To London first, and chiefly to your house,

The many-pillared and the well-beloved.

There yearning fancy lighted; there again

In the upper room I lay, and heard far off

The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;

The muffled tramp of the Museum guard

Once more went by me; I beheld again

Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;

Again I longed for the returning morn,

The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,

The consentaneous trill of tiny song

That weaves round monumental cornices

A passing charm of beauty. Most of all,

For your light foot I wearied, and your knock

That was the glad reveille of my day.

Lo, now, when to your task in the great house

At morning through the portico you pass,

One moment glance, where by the pillared wall

Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,

Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument

Of faiths forgot and races undivined:

Sit now disconsolate, remembering well

The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,

The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,

Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.

As far as these from their ancestral shrine,

So far, so foreign, your divided friends

Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.

Apemama.

XXXVII
THE HOUSE OF TEMBINOKA

[At my departure from the island of Apemama, for which you will look in vain in most atlases, the King and I agreed, since we both set up to be in the poetical way, that we should celebrate our separation in verse. Whether or not his Majesty has been true to his bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year. The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience. Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author's muse has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts or legends that I saw or heard during two months' residence upon the island. - R. L. S.]

ENVOI

Let us, who part like brothers, part like bards;

And you in your tongue and measure, I in mine,

Our now division duly solemnise.

Unlike the strains, and yet the theme is one:

The strains unlike, and how unlike their fate!

You to the blinding palace-yard shall call

The prefect of the singers, and to him,

Listening devout, your valedictory verse

Deliver; he, his attribute fulfilled,

To the island chorus hand your measures on,

Wed now with harmony: so them, at last,

Night after night, in the open hall of dance,

Shall thirty matted men, to the clapped hand,

Intone and bray and bark. Unfortunate!

Paper and print alone shall honour mine.

THE SONG

LET now the King his ear arouse

And toss the bosky ringlets from his brows,

The while, our bond to implement,

My muse relates and praises his descent.

I

Bride of the shark, her valour first I sing

Who on the lone seas quickened of a King.

She, from the shore and puny homes of men,

Beyond the climber's sea-discerning ken,

Swam, led by omens; and devoid of fear,

Beheld her monstrous paramour draw near.

She gazed; all round her to the heavenly pale,

The simple sea was void of isle or sail -

Sole overhead the unsparing sun was reared -

When the deep bubbled and the brute appeared.

But she, secure in the decrees of fate,

Made strong her bosom and received the mate,

And, men declare, from that marine embrace

Conceived the virtues of a stronger race.

II

Her stern descendant next I praise,

Survivor of a thousand frays: -

In the hall of tongues who ruled the throng;

Led and was trusted by the strong;

And when spears were in the wood,

Like a tower of vantage stood: -

Whom, not till seventy years had sped,

Unscarred of breast, erect of head,

Still light of step, still bright of look,

The hunter, Death, had overtook.

III

His sons, the brothers twain, I sing,

Of whom the elder reigned a King.

No Childeric he, yet much declined

From his rude sire's imperious mind,

Until his day came when he died,

He lived, he reigned, he versified.

But chiefly him I celebrate

That was the pillar of the state,

Ruled, wise of word and bold of mien,

The peaceful and the warlike scene;

And played alike the leader's part

In lawful and unlawful art.

His soldiers with emboldened ears

Heard him laugh among the spears.

He could deduce from age to age

The web of island parentage;

Best lay the rhyme, best lead the dance,

For any festal circumstance:

And fitly fashion oar and boat,

A palace or an armour coat.

None more availed than he to raise

The strong, suffumigating blaze,

Or knot the wizard leaf: none more,

Upon the untrodden windward shore

Of the isle, beside the beating main,

To cure the sickly and constrain,

With muttered words and waving rods,

The gibbering and the whistling gods.

But he, though thus with hand and head

He ruled, commanded, charmed, and led,

And thus in virtue and in might

Towered to contemporary sight -

Still in fraternal faith and love,

Remained below to reach above,

Gave and obeyed the apt command,

Pilot and vassal of the land.

IV

My Tembinok' from men like these

Inherited his palaces,

His right to rule, his powers of mind,

His cocoa-islands sea-enshrined.

Stern bearer of the sword and whip,

A master passed in mastership,

He learned, without the spur of need,

To write, to cipher, and to read;

From all that touch on his prone shore

Augments his treasury of lore,

Eager in age as erst in youth

To catch an art, to learn a truth,

To paint on the internal page

A clearer picture of the age.

His age, you say? But ah, not so!

In his lone isle of long ago,

A royal Lady of Shalott,

Sea-sundered, he beholds it not;

He only hears it far away.

The stress of equatorial day

He suffers; he records the while

The vapid annals of the isle;

Slaves bring him praise of his renown,

Or cackle of the palm-tree town;

The rarer ship and the rare boat

He marks; and only hears remote,

Where thrones and fortunes rise and reel,

The thunder of the turning wheel.

V

For the unexpected tears he shed

At my departing, may his lion head

Not whiten, his revolving years

No fresh occasion minister of tears;

At book or cards, at work or sport,

Him may the breeze across the palace court

For ever fan; and swelling near

For ever the loud song divert his ear.

Schooner 'Equator,' at Sea.

XXXVIII
THE WOODSMAN

IN all the grove, nor stream nor bird

Nor aught beside my blows was heard,

And the woods wore their noonday dress -

The glory of their silentness.

From the island summit to the seas,

Trees mounted, and trees drooped, and trees

Groped upward in the gaps. The green

Inarboured talus and ravine

By fathoms. By the multitude

The rugged columns of the wood

And bunches of the branches stood;

Thick as a mob, deep as a sea,

And silent as eternity.

With lowered axe, with backward head,

Late from this scene my labourer fled,

And with a ravelled tale to tell,

Returned. Some denizen of hell,

Dead man or disinvested god,

Had close behind him peered and trod,

And triumphed when he turned to flee.

How different fell the lines with me!

Whose eye explored the dim arcade

Impatient of the uncoming shade -

Shy elf, or dryad pale and cold,

Or mystic lingerer from of old:

Vainly. The fair and stately things,

Impassive as departed kings,

All still in the wood's stillness stood,

And dumb. The rooted multitude

Nodded and brooded, bloomed and dreamed,

Unmeaning, undivined. It seemed

No other art, no hope, they knew,

Than clutch the earth and seek the blue.

'Mid vegetable king and priest

And stripling, I (the only beast)

Was at the beast's work, killing; hewed

The stubborn roots across, bestrewed

The glebe with the dislustred leaves,

And bade the saplings fall in sheaves;

Bursting across the tangled math

A ruin that I called a path,

A Golgotha that, later on,

When rains had watered, and suns shone,

And seeds enriched the place, should bear

And be called garden. Here and there,

I spied and plucked by the green hair

A foe more resolute to live,

The toothed and killing sensitive.

He, semi-conscious, fled the attack;

He shrank and tucked his branches back;

And straining by his anchor-strand,

Captured and scratched the rooting hand.

I saw him crouch, I felt him bite;

And straight my eyes were touched with sight.

I saw the wood for what it was:

The lost and the victorious cause,

The deadly battle pitched in line,

Saw silent weapons cross and shine:

Silent defeat, silent assault,

A battle and a burial vault.

Thick round me in the teeming mud

Brier and fern strove to the blood:

The hooked liana in his gin

Noosed his reluctant neighbours in:

There the green murderer throve and spread,

Upon his smothering victims fed,

And wantoned on his climbing coil.

Contending roots fought for the soil

Like frightened demons: with despair

Competing branches pushed for air.

Green conquerors from overhead

Bestrode the bodies of their dead:

The Caesars of the sylvan field,

Unused to fail, foredoomed to yield:

For in the groins of branches, lo!

The cancers of the orchid grow.

Silent as in the listed ring

Two chartered wrestlers strain and cling;

Dumb as by yellow Hooghly's side

The suffocating captives died;

So hushed the woodland warfare goes

Unceasing; and the silent foes

Grapple and smother, strain and clasp

Without a cry, without a gasp.

Here also sound thy fans, O God,

Here too thy banners move abroad:

Forest and city, sea and shore,

And the whole earth, thy threshing-floor!

The drums of war, the drums of peace,

Roll through our cities without cease,

And all the iron halls of life

Ring with the unremitting strife.

The common lot we scarce perceive.

Crowds perish, we nor mark nor grieve:

The bugle calls - we mourn a few!

What corporal's guard at Waterloo?

What scanty hundreds more or less

In the man-devouring Wilderness?

What handful bled on Delhi ridge?

- See, rather, London, on thy bridge

The pale battalions trample by,

Resolved to slay, resigned to die.

Count, rather, all the maimed and dead

In the unbrotherly war of bread.

See, rather, under sultrier skies

What vegetable Londons rise,

And teem, and suffer without sound:

Or in your tranquil garden ground,

Contented, in the falling gloom,

Saunter and see the roses bloom.

That these might live, what thousands died!

All day the cruel hoe was plied;

The ambulance barrow rolled all day;

Your wife, the tender, kind, and gay,

Donned her long gauntlets, caught the spud,

And bathed in vegetable blood;

And the long massacre now at end,

See! where the lazy coils ascend,

See, where the bonfire sputters red

At even, for the innocent dead.

Why prate of peace? when, warriors all,

We clank in harness into hall,

And ever bare upon the board

Lies the necessary sword.

In the green field or quiet street,

Besieged we sleep, beleaguered eat;

Labour by day and wake o' nights,

In war with rival appetites.

The rose on roses feeds; the lark

On larks. The sedentary clerk

All morning with a diligent pen

Murders the babes of other men;

And like the beasts of wood and park,

Protects his whelps, defends his den.

Unshamed the narrow aim I hold;

I feed my sheep, patrol my fold;

Breathe war on wolves and rival flocks,

A pious outlaw on the rocks

Of God and morning; and when time

Shall bow, or rivals break me, climb

Where no undubbed civilian dares,

In my war harness, the loud stairs

Of honour; and my conqueror

Hail me a warrior fallen in war.

Vailima.

XXXIX
TROPIC RAIN

AS the single pang of the blow, when the metal is mingled well,

Rings and lives and resounds in all the bounds of the bell,

So the thunder above spoke with a single tongue,

So in the heart of the mountain the sound of it rumbled and clung.

Sudden the thunder was drowned - quenched was the levin light -

And the angel-spirit of rain laughed out loud in the night.

Loud as the maddened river raves in the cloven glen,

Angel of rain! you laughed and leaped on the roofs of men;

And the sleepers sprang in their beds, and joyed and feared as you fell.

You struck, and my cabin quailed; the roof of it roared like a bell.

You spoke, and at once the mountain shouted and shook with brooks.

You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.

And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;

And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;

And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;

And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.

Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;

And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.

Vailima.

XL
AND END TO TRAVEL

LET now your soul in this substantial world

Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored; -

This spectacle immutably from now

The picture in your eye; and when time strikes,

And the green scene goes on the instant blind -

The ultimate helpers, where your horse to-day

Conveyed you dreaming, bear your body dead.

Vailima

XLI


WE uncommiserate pass into the night

From the loud banquet, and departing leave

A tremor in men's memories, faint and sweet

And frail as music. Features of our face,

The tones of the voice, the touch of the loved hand,

Perish and vanish, one by one, from earth:

Meanwhile, in the hall of song, the multitude

Applauds the new performer. One, perchance,

One ultimate survivor lingers on,

And smiles, and to his ancient heart recalls

The long forgotten. Ere the morrow die,

He too, returning, through the curtain comes,

And the new age forgets us and goes on.

XLII


SING me a song of a lad that is gone,

Say, could that lad be I?

Merry of soul he sailed on a day

Over the sea to Skye.

Mull was astern, Rum on the port,

Eigg on the starboard bow;

Glory of youth glowed in his soul:

Where is that glory now?

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,

Say, could that lad be I?

Merry of soul he sailed on a day

Over the sea to Skye.

Give me again all that was there,

Give me the sun that shone!

Give me the eyes, give me the soul,

Give me the lad that's gone!

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,

Say, could that lad be I?

Merry of soul he sailed on a day

Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,

Mountains of rain and sun,

All that was good, all that was fair,

All that was me is gone.

XLIII
TO S. R. CROCKETT (On receiving a Dedication)

BLOWS the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,

Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,

My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,

Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,

Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,

And winds, austere and pure:

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and to hear again the call;

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,

And hear no more at all.

Vailima.

XLIV
EVENSONG

THE embers of the day are red

Beyond the murky hill.

The kitchen smokes: the bed

In the darkling house is spread:

The great sky darkens overhead,

And the great woods are shrill.

So far have I been led,

Lord, by Thy will:

So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.

The breeze from the enbalmed land

Blows sudden toward the shore,

And claps my cottage door.

I hear the signal, Lord - I understand.

The night at Thy command

Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more.

Vailima.

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