Poems. Howells William Dean

songs that silence knows by heart!–

      I see sweet burlesque feigning art,

      The careless grace that curved and swayed

      Through dances and through breezy walks;

      I feel once more the eyes that smiled,

      And that dear presence that beguiled

      The pauses of the foolish talks,

      When this poor phantom of perfume

      Was the Sweet Clover’s living soul,

      And breathed from her as if it stole,

      Ah, heaven! from her heart in bloom!

II

      We have not many ways with pain:

      We weep weak tears, or else we laugh;

      I doubt, not less the cup we quaff,

      And tears and scorn alike are vain.

      But let me live my quiet life;

      I will not vex my calm with grief,

      I only know the pang was brief,

      And there an end of hope and strife.

      And thou? I put the letters by:

      In years the sweetness shall not pass;

      More than the perfect blossom was

      I count its lingering memory.

      Alas! with Time dear Love is dead,

      And not with Fate. And who can guess

      How weary of our happiness

      We might have been if we were wed?

Venice.

      THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.

      (AT LUDWIGSHOF.)

I

      Confronting each other the pictures stare

      Into each other’s sleepless eyes;

      And the daylight into the darkness dies,

      From year to year in the palace there:

      But they watch and guard that no device

      Take either one of them unaware.

      Their majesties the king and the queen,

      The parents of the reigning prince:

      Both put off royalty many years since,

      With life and the gifts that have always been

      Given to kings from God, to evince

      His sense of the mighty over the mean.

      I cannot say that I like the face

      Of the king; it is something fat and red;

      And the neck that lifts the royal head

      Is thick and coarse; and a scanty grace

      Dwells in the dull blue eyes that are laid

      Sullenly on the queen in her place.

      He must have been a king in his day

      ’Twere well to pleasure in work and sport:

      One of the heaven-anointed sort

      Who ruled his people with iron sway,

      And knew that, through good and evil report,

      God meant him to rule and them to obey.

      There are many other likenesses

      Of the king in his royal palace there;

      You find him depicted everywhere,–

      In his robes of state, in his hunting-dress,

      In his flowing wig, in his powdered hair,–

      A king in all of them, none the less;

      But most himself in this on the wall

      Over against his consort, whose

      Laces, and hoops, and high-heeled shoes

      Make her the finest lady of all

      The queens or courtly dames you choose,

      In the ancestral portrait hall.

      A glorious blonde: a luxury

      Of luring blue and wanton gold,

      Of blanchéd rose and crimson bold,

      Of lines that flow voluptuously

      In tender, languorous curves to fold

      Her form in perfect symmetry.

      She might have been false. Of her withered dust

      There scarcely would be enough to write

      Her guilt in now; and the dead have a right

      To our lenient doubt if not to our trust:

      So if the truth cannot make her white,

      Let us be as merciful as we–must.

II

      The queen died first, the queen died young,

      But the king was very old when he died,

      Rotten with license, and lust, and pride;

      And the usual Virtues came and hung

      Their cypress wreaths on his tomb, and wide

      Throughout his kingdom his praise was sung.

      How the queen died is not certainly known,

      And faithful subjects are all forbid

      To speak of the murder which some one did

      One night while she slept in the dark alone:

      History keeps the story hid,

      And Fear only tells it in undertone.

      Up from your startled feet aloof,

      In the famous Echo-Room, with a bound

      Leaps the echo, and round and round

      Beating itself against the roof,–

      A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound,–

      Dies ere its terror can utter proof

      Of that it knows. A door is fast,

      And none is suffered to enter there.

      His sacred majesty could not bear

      To look at it toward the last,

      As he grew very old. It opened where

      The queen died young so many years past.

III

      How the queen died is not certainly known;

      But in the palace’s solitude

      A harking dread and horror brood,

      And a silence, as if a mortal groan

      Had been hushed the moment before, and would

      Break forth again when you were gone.

      The present king has never dwelt

      In the desolate palace. From year to year

      In the wide and stately garden drear

      The snows and the snowy blossoms melt

      Unheeded, and a ghastly fear

      Through all the shivering leaves is felt.

      By night the gathering shadows creep

      Along the dusk and hollow halls,

      And the slumber-broken palace calls

      With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep;

      And then the ghostly moonlight falls

      Athwart the darkness brown and deep.

      At