The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Jongleur Strayed, by Richard Le Gallienne

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Title: A Jongleur Strayed Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane

Author: Richard Le Gallienne

Release Date: January 29, 2006 [eBook #17619]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A JONGLEUR STRAYED***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

Transcriber's note:

The word "beloved" appears in this book several times, in various upper and lower case combinations. Whatever the combination, in some cases, the second E in "beloved" is e-accent (é) and sometimes it is e-grave (è). Since I had no way of telling if this was what the author intended, or a typesetting error, or some other reason, I have left each exactly as it appears in the original book.

A JONGLEUR STRAYED

Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane

by

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

With an Introduction by Oliver Herford

Garden City ————— New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation
into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian
Printed in the United States
at
The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.
First Edition

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The writer desires to thank the editors of The Atlantic Monthly,
Harper's, Life, Judge, Leslie's, Munsey's, Ainslee's, Snappy Stories,
Live Stories, The Cosmopolitan, and Collier's for their kind
permission to reprint the following verses.

He desires also to thank the editor of The New York Evening Post for the involuntary gift of a title.

The Catskills,

June, 1922.

TO

THE LOVE

OF

ANDRÉ AND GWEN

  If after times
  Should pay the least attention to these rhymes,
  I bid them learn
  'Tis not my own heart here
  That doth so often seem to break and burn—
  O no such thing!—
  Nor is it my own dear
  Always I sing:
  But, as a scrivener in the market-place,
  I sit and write for lovers, him or her,
  Making a song to match each lover's case—
  A trifling gift sometimes the gods confer!

(After STRATO)

CONTENTS

I

  An Echo from Horace
  Ballade of the Oldest Duel in the World
  Sorcery
  The Dryad
  May is Back
  Moon-Marketing
  Two Birthdays
  Song
  The Faithful Lover
  Love's Tenderness
  Anima Mundi
  Ballade of the Unchanging Beloved
  Love's Arithmetic
  Beauty's Arithmetic
  The Valley
  Ballade of the Bees of Trebizond
  Broken Tryst
  The Rival
  The Quarrel
  Lovers
  Shadows
  After Tibullus
  A Warning
  Primum Mobile
  The Last Tryst
  The Heart on the Sleeve
  At Her Feet
  Reliquiae
  Love's Proud Farwell
  The Rose Has Left the Garden

II

  The Gardens of Adonis
  Nature the Healer
  Love Eternal
  The Loveliest Face and the Wild Rose
  As in the Woodland I Walk
  To a Mountain Spring
  Noon
  A Rainy Day
  In the City
  Country Largesse
  Morn
  The Source
  Autumn
  The Rose in Winter
  The Frozen Stream
  Winter Magic
  A Lover's Universe
  To the Golden Wife
  Buried Treasure
  The New Husbandman
  Paths that Wind
  The Immortal Gods

III

  Ballade of Woman
  The Magic Flower
  Ballade of Love's Cloister
  An Old Love Letter
  Too Late
  The Door Ajar
  Chipmunk
  Ballade of the Dead Face that Never Dies
  The End of Laughter
  The Song that Lasts
  The Broker of Dreams

IV

  At the Sign of the Lyre
  To Madame Jumel
  To a Beautiful Old Lady
  To Lucy Hinton; December 19, 1921

V

OTHER MATTERS, SACRED AND PROFANE

  The World's Musqueteer: To Marshal Foch
  We Are With France
  Satan: 1920
  Under Which King?
  Man, the Destroyer
  The Long Purposes of God
  Ballade to a Departing God
  Ballade of the Absent Guest
  Tobacco Next
  Ballade of the Paid Puritan
  The Overworked Ghost
  The Valiant Girls
  Not Sour Grapes
  Ballade of Reading Bad Books
  Ballade of the Making of Songs
  Ballade of Running Away with Life
  To a Contemner of the Past

INTRODUCTION

One Spring day in London, long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London was then talking.

Richard Le Gallienne was the first real poet I had ever laid eyes upon in the flesh and it seemed to my rapt senses that this frock-coated young god, with the classic profile and the dark curls curving from the impeccable silk "tile" that surmounted them as curve the acanthus leaves of a Corinthian capital, could be none other than Anacreon's self in modern shape.

I can see Le Gallienne now, as he steps across the sunlit sidewalk and with gesture Mercurian hails the passing Jehu. I can even hear the quick clud of the cab doors as the smartly turning hansome snatches from my view the glass-dimmed face I was not to behold again until years later at the house of a mutual friend in New York.

In another moment the swiftly moving vehicle was dissolved in the glitter of Regent Street and I fell to musing upon the curious interlacement of parts in this picture puzzle of life.

Here was a common Cabby, for the time being combining in himself the several functions of guide-book, chattel-mortgage and writ of habeas corpus on the person of the most popular literary idol of the hour and all for the matter of maybe no more than half a crown, including the pourboire!

Who would not have rejoiced to change places with that cabman! And how might not Pegasus have envied that cab-horse!

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