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Read Ebook: Happy Ending: The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney by Guiney Louise Imogen
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Ebook has 80 lines and 7953 words, and 2 pages
Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray, Lend to our steps both fortitude and light! Feebly along a venerable way They climb the infinite, or perish quite: Nothing are days and deeds to such as they, While in this liberal house thy face is bright.
ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain, And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low; Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow, Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain: From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain, Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.
Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower A subtle beauty on the empty hour, From all their dark throats aching and outblown; Aye in the prayerless places welcome most, Like the last gull that up some naked coast Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.
WHEN, after dawn, the lordly houses hide Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest ,
Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft, Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still, Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable, Which cannot but have been, for evermore.
MANY a musing eye returns to thee, Against the formal street disconsolate, Who kept in green domains thy bridal state, With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee; And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity, Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate; Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.
Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus Till the next fury; teach the time and us Leisure and will to draw a serious breath: Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed, Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.
WHERE the bales thunder till the day is done, And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope; Where over crouching sail and coiling rope, Lascar and Moor along the gangway run; Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun, A hive of anarchy from slope to slope; Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope, I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!
O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm, To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound, Away, away from this too thoughtful ground, Sodden with human trespass and despair, Thee only, from the desert, from the storm, A sick mind follows into Eden air.
NOTES
II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.
One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song, "Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time.
St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now for some years stood in place of the interesting original one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer west wall of the church.
Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4, the last two lines coming in for repetitions.
Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.
It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.
"The Praetor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical Brutus.
"Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines ... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt Temperantiam."
It may be well to state , that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.
A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton in Berkshire, May, 1908.
OXFORD
This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S., 1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that most ingeniose Place!"
The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude , Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was written barely a month before his rather sudden death on August 11, 1890.
The College is a century and a half older than the upper part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell is much older than either. "The Tom Tower finished in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal that all students should be within their College walls. It need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"
"The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when this sonnet was written , though it is so no longer. From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on St. John Baptist's Day.
LONDON
St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.
Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.
The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A
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