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I--Lyrics. $2.00. II--DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00.
REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Illustrated. $2.00.
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 _All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
MY DEAR "MAURICE"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last summer when your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had walked behind us for a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some day when "Minoulooshe" is asleep.
On the grey sand beside the shallow stream, Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still A lamp burns on above the open book That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon, And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace, Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, Magical shapes.
By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon.
And I would find myself and not an image.
That is our modern hope, and by its light We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush, We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed, Lacking the countenance of our friends.
And yet, The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself, That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
And did he find himself, Or was the hunger that had made it hollow A hunger for the apple on the bough Most out of reach? And is that spectral image The man that Lapo and that Guido knew? I think he fashioned from his opposite An image that might have been a stony face, Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof, From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned Among the coarse grass and the camel dung. He set his chisel to the hardest stone; Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, Derided and deriding, driven out To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, He found the unpersuadable justice, he found The most exalted lady loved by a man.