Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: Verses about Passion

Toiling love, loose your pack,
All your sighs and tears unbind:
Care's a ware will break a back,
Will not bend a maiden's mind.
In this State a man shall need
Neither priest nor law giver:
Those same lips that are his creed
Shall confess their worshipper.
All the laws he must obey,
Now in force and now repeal'd,
Shift in eyes that shift as they,
Till alike with kisses seal'd.

Small is my secret-let it pass-
Small in your life the share I had,
Who sat beside you in the class,
Awed by the bright superior lad:
Whom yet with hot and eager face
I prompted when he missed his place.

For you the call came swift and soon:
But sometimes in your holidays
You meet me trudging home at noon
To dinner through the dusty ways,
And recognized, and with a nod
Passed on, but never guessed-thank God!

Truly our ways were separate.
I bent myself to hoe and drill,

Yea, with an honest man to mate,
Fulfilling God Almighty's will;
And bore him children. But my prayers
Were yours-and, only after, theirs.

While you-still loftier, more remote,
You sprang from stair to stair of fame,
And you've a riband on your coat,
And you've a title to your name;
But have you yet a star to shine
Above your bed, as I o'er mine?

By A. C. S.
The Centuries kiss and commingle,
Cling, clasp, and are knit in a chain;
No cycle but scorns to be single,
No two but demur to be twain,
'Till the land of the lute and the love-tale
Be bride of the boreal breast,
And the dawn with the darkness shall dovetail,
The East with the West.
The desire of the grey for the dun nights
Is that of the dun for the grey;
The tales of the Thousand and One Nights
Touch lips with 'The Times' of to-day.—
Come, chasten the cheap with the classic;
Choose, Churton, thy chair and thy class,
Mix, melt in the must that is Massic
The beer that is Bass!
Omnipotent age of the Aorist!
Infinitely freely exact!—
As the fragrance of fiction is fairest
If frayed in the furnace of fact—
Though nine be the Muses in number
There is hope if the handbook be one,—
Dispelling the planets that cumber
The path of the sun.
Though crimson thy hands and thy hood be
With the blood of a brother betrayed,
O Would-be-Professor of Would-be,
We call thee to bless and to aid.
Transmuted would travel with Er, see
The Land of the Rolling of Logs,
Charmed, chained to thy side, as to Circe
The Ithacan hogs.
O bourne of the black and the godly!
O land where the good niggers go.
With the books that are borrowed of Bodley,
Old moons and our castaway clo'!
There, there, till the roses be ripened
Rebuke us, revile, and review,
Then take thee thine annual stipend
So long over-due.

Friend, old friend in the Manse by the fireside sitting,
Hour by hour while the grey ash drips from the log;
You with a book on your knee, your wife with her knitting,
Silent both, and between you, silent, the dog.

Silent here in the south sit I; and, leaning,
One sits watching the fire, with chin upon hand;
Gazes deep in its heart--but ah! its meaning
Rather I read in the shadows and understand.

Dear, kind she is; and daily dearer, kinder,
Love shuts the door on the lamp and our two selves:

Not my stirring awakened the flame that behind her
Lit up a face in the leathern dusk of the shelves.

Veterans are my books, with tarnished gilding:
Yet there is one gives back to the winter grate
Gold of a sunset flooding a college building,
Gold of an hour I waited--as now I wait--

For a light step on the stair, a girl's low laughter,
Rustle of silk, shy knuckles tapping the oak,
Dinner and mirth upsetting my rooms and, after,
Music, waltz upon waltz, till the June day broke.

Where is her laughter now? Old tarnished covers--
You that reflect her with fresh young face unchanged--
Tell that we met, that we parted, not as lovers;
Time, chance, brought us together, and these estranged.

Loyal were we to the mood of the moment granted,
Bruised not its bloom, but danced on the wave of its joy;
Passion--wisdom--fell back like a fence enchanted,
Ringing a floor for us both--whole Heaven for the boy!

Where is she now? Regretted not, though departed,
Blessings attend and follow her all her days!
--Look to your hound: he dreams of the hares he started,
Whines, and awakes, and stretches his limbs to the blaze.

Far old friend in the Manse, by the green ash peeling
Flake by flake from the heat in the Yule log's core,
Look past the woman you love. On wall and ceiling
Climbs not a trellis of roses--and ghosts--of yore?

Thoughts, thoughts! Whistle them back like hounds returning--
Mark how her needles pause at a sound upstairs.
Time for bed, and to leave the log's heart burning!
Give ye good-night, but first thank God in your prayers!