In age and shape and color, too,
His dainty goods excel-
Aha, my friends, if you but knew-
But no! I will not tell!
A thousand other shops I know
Where bargains can be got-
Where other folk would like to go
Who have what I have not.
I let them hunt; I hold my mouth-
Yes, though I know full well
Where lie the treasures of the South,
I'm not a-going to tell!
COMETH the Wind from the garden, fragrant and full of sweet singing
Under my tree where I sit cometh the Wind to confession.
"Out in the garden abides the Queen of the beautiful Roses-. Her do I love and to-night wooed her with passionate singing; Told I my love in those songs, and answer she gave in her blushes
She shall be bride of the Wind, and she is the Queen of the Roses!"
"Wind, there is spice in thy breath; thy rapture hath fragrance Sabæan!"
"Straight from my wooing I come-my lips are bedewed with her kisses
My lips and my song and my heart are drunk with the rapture of loving!"
The Wind he loveth the red, red Rose,
And he wooeth his love to wed:
Sweet is his song
The Summer long
As he kisseth her lips so red;
And he recketh naught of the ruin wrought
When the Summer of love is sped!
Cometh the Wind from the garden, bitter with sorrow of winter.
"Wind, is thy love-song forgot? Wherefore thy dread lamentations?"
Sigheth and moaneth the Wind: "Out of the desolate garden Come I from vigils with ghosts over the grave of the Summer!"
"Thy breath that was fragrant anon with rapture of music and loving,
It grieveth all things with its sting and the frost of its wailing displeasure."
The Wind maketh evermore moan and ever it giveth this answer: "My heart it is numb with the cold of the love that was born of the Summer
I come from the garden all white with the wrath and the sorrow of Winter;
I have kissed the low, desolate tomb where my bride in her loveliness lieth
And the voice of the ghost in my heart is the voice that forever outerieth!"
The Wind he waileth the red, red Rose
When the Summer of love is sped-
He waileth above
His lifeless love
With her shroud of snow o'erspread-
Crieth such things as a true heart brings
To the grave of its precious dead.
OUR Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name;
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, in Heaven the
Give us this day our daily bread, and may our debts to Heaven—
As we our earthly debts forgive-by Thee be all forgiven;
When tempted or by evil vexed, restore Thou us again,
And Thine be the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever; amen.
Of all the opry-houses then obtaining in the West
The one which Milton Tootle owned was, by all odds, the best;
Milt, being rich, was much too proud to run the thing alone,
So he hired an "acting manager," a gruff old man named Krone-
A stern, commanding man with piercing eyes and flowing beard,
And his voice assumed a thunderous tone when Jack and I ap-
peared;
He said that Julius Cæsar had been billed a week or so,
And would have to have some armies by the time he reached St. Jo!
O happy days, when Tragedy still winged an upward flight,
When actors wore tin helmets and cambric robes at night!
O happy days, when sounded in the public's rapturous ears
The creak of pasteboard armor and the clash of wooden spears!
O happy times for Jack and me and that one other supe
That then and there did constitute the noblest Roman's troop!
With togas, battle axes, shields, we made a dazzling show,
When we were Roman soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!
We wheeled and filed and double-quicked wherever Brutus led,
The folks applauding what we did as much as what he said;
"T was work, indeed; yet Jack and I were willing to allow
'T was easier following Brutus than following father's plough;
And at each burst of cheering, our valor would increase-
We tramped a thousand miles that night, at fifty cents apiece!
For love of Art-not lust for gold-consumed us years ago,
When we were Roman soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!
To-day, while walking in the Square, Jack Langrish says to me:
"My friend, the drama nowadays ain't what it used to be!
These farces and these comedies-how feebly they compare
With that mantle of the tragic art which Forrest used to wear!
My soul is warped with bitterness to think that you and I—
Co-heirs to immortality in seasons long gone by-
Now draw a paltry stipend from a Boston comic show,
We, who were Roman soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!"
And so we talked and so we mused upon the whims of Fate
That had degraded Tragedy from its old, supreme estate;
And duly, at the Morton bar, we stigmatized the age
As sinfully subversive of the interests of the Stage!
For Jack and I were actors in the halcyon, palmy days
Long, long before the Hoyt school of farce became the craze;
Yet, as I now recall it, it was twenty years ago
That we were Roman soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!
We were by birth descended from a race of farmer kings
Who had done eternal battle with grasshoppers and things;
But the Kansas farms grew tedious-we pined for that delight
We read of in the Clipper in the barber's shop by night!
We would be actors-Jack and I-and so we stole away
From our native spot, Wathena, one dull September day,
And started for Missouri-ah, little did we know
We were going to train as soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!
Our army numbered three in all-Marc Antony's was four;
Our army hankered after fame, but Marc's was after gore!
And when we reached Philippi, at the outset we were met
With an inartistic gusto I can never quite forget.
For Antony's overwhelming force of thumpers seemed to be Resolved to do "them Kansas jays"—and that meant Jack and me! My lips were sealed but that it seems quite proper you should know That Rome was nowhere in it at Philippi in St. Jo!
I've known the slow-consuming grief and ostentatious pain
Accruing from McKean Buchanan's melancholy Dane;
Away out West I've witnessed Bandmann's peerless hardihood,
With Arthur Cambridge have I wrought where walking was not
good;
In every phase of horror have I bravely borne my part,
And even on my uppers have I proudly stood for Art!
And, after all my suffering, it were not hard to show
That I got my allopathic dose with Brutus at St. Jo!
That army fell upon me in a most bewildering rage
And scattered me and mine upon that histrionic stage;
My toga rent, my helmet gone and smashed to smithereens,
They picked me up and hove me through whole centuries of scenes!
I sailed through Christian eras and mediæval gloom
And fell from Arden forest into Juliet's painted tomb!
Oh, yes, I travelled far and fast that night, and I can show
The scars of honest wounds I got with Brutus in St. Jo!
Ah me, old Davenport is gone, of fickle fame forgot,
And Barrett sleeps forever in a much neglected spot;
Fred Warde, the papers tell me, in far woolly western lands
Still flaunts the banner of high Tragic Art at one-night stands:
And Jack and I, in Charley Hoyt's Bostonian dramas wreak
Our vengeance on creation at some eensty dolls. per week.
By which you see that public taste has fallen mighty low
Since we fought as Roman soldiers with Brutus in St. Jo!
|