Propped on an elbow, garlanded with flowers,
Saw lust and greed and boisterous revelry

Surge round him on the tides of wine, but he,
Staunch in the ethic of an antique school --

Stoic or Cynic or of Pyrrho's mind --
With steady eyes surveyed the unbridled scene,

Himself impassive, silent, self-contained:
So sat the Indian prince, with brow unblanched,

Amid the tortured and the torturers.
He who had seen his hopes made desolate,

His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him,
And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled

His stricken people in their reeking doors,
Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms

Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell
As back and forth he paced along the streets

With words of hopeless comfort -- what was this
That one should weaken now? He weakened not.

Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt
In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round,

Met that racked visage with his own unmoved,
Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyes,

And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice,
As who would speak not all in gentleness

Nor all disdain, said: "Yes! And am -I- then
Upon a bed of roses?"

Stung with shame --
Shame bitterer than his anguish -- to betray

Such cowardice before the man he loved,
And merit such rebuke, the boy grew calm;

And stilled his struggling limbs and moaning cries,
And shook away his tears, and strove to smile,

And turned his face against the wall -- and died.
The Nympholept

There was a boy -- not above childish fears --
With steps that faltered now and straining ears,

Timid, irresolute, yet dauntless still,
Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill

Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue
And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew,

Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun,
Walked up into the mountains. One by one

Each towering trunk beneath his sturdy stride
Fell back, and ever wider and more wide

The boundlessprospect opened. Long he strayed,
From dawn till the last trace of slanting shade

Had vanished from the canyons, and, dismayed
At that far length to which his path had led,

He paused -- at such a height where overhead
The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chill,

And all was hushed and calm and very still,
Save, from abysmal gorges, where the sound

Of tumbling waters rose, and all around
The pines, by those keen upper currents blown,

Muttered in multitudinous monotone.
Here, with the wind in lovely locks laid bare,

With arms oft raised in dedicative prayer,
Lost in mute rapture and adoring wonder,

He stood, till the far noise of noontide thunder,
Rolled down upon the muffled harmonies

Of wind and waterfall and whispering trees,
Made loneliness more lone. Some Panic fear

Would seize him then, as they who seemed to hear
In Tracian valleys or Thessalian woods

The god's hallooing wake the leafy solitudes;
I think it was the same: some piercing sense

Of Deity's pervasive immanence,
The Life that visible Nature doth indwell

Grown great and near and all but palpable . . .
He might not linger, but with winged strides

Like one pursued, fled down the mountain-sides --
Down the long ridge that edged the steep ravine,

By glade and flowery lawn and upland green,
And never paused nor felt assured again

But where the grassy foothills opened. Then,
While shadows lengthened on the plain below

And the sun vanished and the sunset-glow
Looked back upon the world with fervid eye

Through the barred windows of the western sky,
Homeward he fared, while many a look behind

Showed the receding ranges dim-outlined,
Highland and hollow where his path had lain,

Veiled in deep purple of the mountain rain.
The Wanderer

To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so
Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves,

Back of old-storied spires and architraves
To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,

And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day
Flooded with gold some domed metropolis,

Between new towers to waken and new bliss
Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way:

These were his joys. Oft under bulging crates,
Coming to market with his morning load,

The peasant found him early on his road
To greet the sunrise at the city-gates, --

There where the meadows waken in its rays,
Golden with mist, and the great roads commence,

And backward, where the chimney-tops are dense,
Cathedral-arches glimmer through the haze.

White dunes that breaking show a strip of sea,
A plowman and his team against the blue,

Swiss pastures musical with cowbells, too,
And poplar-lined canals in Picardie,

And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth
Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky,

And swallows in the sunset where they fly
Over gray Gothic cities in the north,

And the wine-cellar and the chorus there,
The dance-hall and a face among the crowd, --

Were all delights that made him sing aloud
For joy to sojourn in a world so fair.

Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell
Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged.

Before him tireless to applaud it surged
The sweet interminable spectacle.

And like the west behind a sundown sea
Shone the past joys his memory retraced,

And bright as the blue east he always faced
Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be.

From every branch a blossom for his brow
He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road,

And youth impelled his spirit as he strode
Like winged Victory on the galley's prow.

That Loveliness whose being sun and star,
Green Earth and dawn and amber evening robe,

That lamp whereof the opalescent globe
The season's emulative splendors are,

That veiled divinity whose beams transpire
From every pore of universal space,