II. The Children of the Night   
24. Two Sonnets   
     
I

JUST as I wonder at the twofold screen      
Of twisted innocence that you would plait      
For eyes that uncourageously await      
The coming of a kingdom that has been,      
So do I wonder what God’s love can mean           5   
To you that all so strangely estimate      
The purpose and the consequent estate      
Of one short shuddering step to the Unseen.      
   
No, I have not your backward faith to shrink      
Lone-faring from the doorway of God’s home          10   
To find Him in the names of buried men;      
Nor your ingenious recreance to think      
We cherish, in the life that is to come,      
The scattered features of dead friends again.      
   
IL

Never until our souls are strong enough          15   
To plunge into the crater of the Scheme—      
Triumphant in the flash there to redeem      
Love’s handsel and forevermore to slough,      
Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough      
And reptile skins of us whereon we set          20   
The stigma of scared years—are we to get      
Where atoms and the ages are one stuff.      
   
Nor ever shall we know the cursed waste      
Of life in the beneficence divine      
Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine          25   
That we have squandered in sin’s frail distress,      
Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste,      
The mead of Thought’s prophetic endlessness.

II. The Children of the Night   
25. The Clerks   
     
I DID not think that I should find them there      
When I came back again; but there they stood,      
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood      
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.      
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,—           5   
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood      
About them; but the men were just as good,      
And just as human as they ever were.      
   
And you that ache so much to be sublime,      
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,          10   
What comes of all your visions and your fears?      
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,      
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,      
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

II. The Children of the Night   
26. Fleming Helphenstine   
     
AT first I thought there was a superfine      
Persuasion in his face; but the free glow      
That filled it when he stopped and cried, “Hollo!”      
Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.      
He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,           5   
But be that as it may;—I only know      
He talked of this and that and So-and-So,      
And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.      
   
But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,      
And I looked hard at him; and there we gazed          10   
In a strained way that made us cringe and wince:      
Then, with a wordless clogged apology      
That sounded half confused and half amazed,      
He dodged,—and I have never seen him since.

II. The Children of the Night   
27. Thomas Hood   
     
THE MAN who cloaked his bitterness within      
This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,      
God never gave to look with common eyes      
Upon a world of anguish and of sin:      
His brother was the branded man of Lynn;           5   
And there are woven with his jollities      
The nameless and eternal tragedies      
That render hope and hopelessness akin.      
   
We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel      
A still chord sorrow-swept,—a weird unrest          10   
And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,      
As if the very ghost of mirth were dead—      
As if the joys of time to dream had fled,      
Or sailed away with Ines to the West.

II. The Children of the Night   
28. Horace to Leuconoë   
     
I PRAY you not, Leuconoë, to pore      
With unpermitted eyes on what may be      
Appointed by the gods for you and me,      
Nor on Chaldean figures any more.      
’T were infinitely better to implore           5   
The present only:—whether Jove decree      
More winters yet to come, or whether he      
Make even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shore      
     
Shatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last—      
Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fill          10   
Your bosom with large hopes; for while I sing,      
The envious close of time is narrowing;—      
So seize the day, or ever it be past,      
And let the morrow come for what it will.

II. The Children of the Night   
29. Reuben Bright   
     
BECAUSE he was a butcher and thereby      
Did earn an honest living (and did right),      
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright      
Was any more a brute than you or I;      
For when they told him that his wife must die,           5   
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,      
And cried like a great baby half that night,      
And made the women cry to see him cry.      
   
And after she was dead, and he had paid      
The singers and the sexton and the rest,          10   
He packed a lot of things that she had made      
Most mournfully away in an old chest      
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs      
In with them, and tore down to the slaughter-house

II. The Children of the Night   
30. The Altar   
     
ALONE, remote, nor witting where I went,      
I found an altar builded in a dream—      
A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam      
So swift, so searching, and so eloquent      
Of upward promise, that love’s murmur, blent           5   
With sorrow’s warning, gave but a supreme      
Unending impulse to that human stream      
Whose flood was all for the flame’s fury bent.      
   
Alas! I said,—the world is in the wrong.      
But the same quenchless fever of unrest          10   
That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng      
Thrilled me, and I awoke … and was the same      
Bewildered insect plunging for the flame      
That burns, and must burn somehow for the best

II. The Children of the Night   
31. The Tavern   
     
WHENEVER I go by there nowadays      
And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,      
The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,      
I seem to be afraid of the old place;      
And something stiffens up and down my face,           5   
For all the world as if I saw the ghost      
Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,      
With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.      
   
The Tavern has a story, but no man      
Can tell us what it is. We only know          10   
That once long after midnight, years ago,      
A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,      
Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran      
That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.

II. The Children of the Night   
32. Sonnet   
     
OH for a poet—for a beacon bright      
To rift this changless glimmer of dead gray;      
To spirit back the Muses, long astray,      
And flush Parnassus with a newer light;      
To put these little sonnet-men to flight           5   
Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way,      
Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,      
To vanish in irrevocable night.      
   
What does it mean, this barren age of ours?      
Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,          10   
The seasons, and the sunset, as before.      
What does it mean? Shall there not one arise      
To wrench one banner from the western skies,      
And mark it with his name forevermore?

II. The Children of the Night   
33. George Crabbe   
     
GIVE him the darkest inch your shelf allows,      
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—      
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still      
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.      
In spite of all fine science disavows,           5   
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill      
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,      
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.      
   
Whether or not we read him, we can feel      
From time to time the vigor of his name          10   
Against us like a finger for the shame      
And emptiness of what our souls reveal      
In books that are as altars where we kneel      
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.