song.
As the soldiers charge with cheers
All the air is drenched with tears.
And when they take their ease at night
The cypress-trees are clothed in white.
GREIFSWALD, 1909
I was sick with pain, once,
Sick with pain.
And an old witch drew to my side
And healed me again.
She was withered, and wretched, and gray,
Deep stabbed with years.
And the skin of her face was scarred
With hate and tears.
She had lived fierce days in that town
The sea-winds flog.
Hourly the neighbours jibed,
Cast stones at a dog.
They had slandered her, tricked her; robbed her
Of honour and purse.
But her wrongs slept deep in her heart
For the fiends to nurse.
One went blind; another stark mad,—
He's dead.
Fruit of the curse she flung.
"Old witch," they said.
Life ran high there; men nourished their hates
And slashed with swords.
Harsh skies swerved to the rim of the bay,—
Sweden seawards.
And I lay in her bare, clean room
At the stairway's end.
And the fierce pain clutched me and held me;
And nought would fend.
"O mother," I cried—and she leaned to me—
"Give me your hand's touch.
They have broken me too, and flung me
This same blind crutch."
And she placed her hand in my hand;
And her touch thrilled me.
And the blood ran warm in my veins;
And her dead life healed me.
She was wasted, arid as one
Whom no sun cheers.
But her dead life flowered that day
Down sixty years.
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THE PUPIL: RHINELAND
"Mister, I do not like the task.
'Tis dull to-day, you're tired, too.
But, Mister, I've a thing to ask;—
Am I not beautiful? Speak true."
Now, God save all poor tutor-men
From Innocence so rapt and sly,
And send the plainest student-girls
To one so passion-starved as I.
She sat within my student's room
In the twilight hour when the shadows stir;
Red lights of sunset swirled the gloom
And rested, glimmering, on her hair.
Coil upon coil it wreathed her crown
In a crushing aureole of flame.
And her brows of alabaster shone
As pure as Mary's of Bethlehem.
Her eyes,—I never knew their hue—
Drowsed, smouldering, in the burning dusk.
And somewhere out of the earth's view
A planet sang, and the air breathed musk.
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THE BUSHRANGERS
As I was walking down Oxford Street
Ten fierce soldiers I chanced to meet,
They wore big slouch hats with khaki sashes,
And talked like the angry guns, in flashes.
And my friend said to me, "They come from Australia;
Villainous fellows for War's regalia.
John Briton keeps a tobacconist's shed
And twice they have held a gun at his head."
Well, I would have given all I had
To have gone with the bunch of them, good or bad,
To have heard the wickedest say, "Old fellow!"
And staunched his wounds where the black guns bellow.
I'd have thought it a merry thing to die
With such stalwart comrades standing by.
One of them had round eyes like coals—
True parson's quarry when he hunts souls.
The brawniest made my heart turn queer;
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