EL MANALO

'N THE still dark shade of the palace wall, Where the peacocks strut,

IN

Where the Queen may have heard my madrigal,
Together we sat.

My sombrero hid the fire in my eyes,
And shaded her own;

This serge cloak stifled her sweet little cries,
When I kissed her mouth.

The pale olive-trees on the distant plain,
The jagged blue rocks,

The vaporous sea-like mountain chain
Dropped into the night.

We saw the lights in the palace flare;
The musicians played;

The red guards slashed and sabred the stair
And cursed the old king.

In the long black shade of the palace wall,
We sat the night through;

Under my cloak-but I cannot tell all
The Queen may have seen!

MERCEDES

[NDER a sultry yellow sky

UNDE

On the yellow sand I lie;

The crinkled vapors smite my brain,

I smolder in a fiery pain.

Above the crags the condor flies,-
He knows where the red gold lies;
He knows where the diamonds shine:
If I knew, would she be mine?

Mercedes in her hammock swings;
In her court a palm-tree flings
Its slender shadow on the ground;
The fountain falls with silver sound.

Beneath these battlements

My bones were stirred with Roman pride,
Though centuries before my Romans died:
Now my bones are dust; the Goths are dust.
The river-bed is dry where sleeps the king;
My tomb remains.

When Rome commanded the earth,
Great were the Metelli:

I was Metellus's wife;

I loved him, and I died.

Then with slow patience built he this memorial: Each century marks his love.

Pass by on the Appian Way

The tomb of Cecilia Metella.

Wild shepherds alone seek its shelter,
Wild buffaloes tramp at its base,

Deep in its desolation,

Deep as the shadow of Rome!

ON MY BED OF A WINTER NIGHT

Ο

N MY bed of a winter night,

Deep in a sleep, and deep in a dream,

What care I for the wild wind's scream?

What to me is its crooked flight?

On the sea of a summer's day,

Wrapped in the folds of a snowy sail,

What care I for the fitful gale,

Now in earnest, and now in play?

What care I for the fitful wind,

That groans in a gorge, or sighs in a tree? Groaning and sighing are nothing to me; For I am a man of steadfast mind.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

(1825-)

HE poems of Richard Henry Stoddard, one of America's truest lyrical poets, were collected and published in a complete edition in 1880. The Early Poems' form the first of the periods into which, for convenience's sake, the book is divided; the 'Songs of Summer' with The King's Bell' the second; the 'Songs of the East' the third; and 'Later Poems' the fourth. They represent the work of thirty years. In 1890 he published 'The Lion's Cub and Other Verses,' a book not unworthy of

his maturity.

Stoddard's early verses, too good to be purely original, are perhaps the nearest approach made by any youthful poet to the tuneful phrases and overflowing melody of Keats. But the poet of twenty had lighted his fire with the divine torch. The song

"You know the old Hidalgo,"

the serenade

"But music has a golden key,"

R. H. STODDARD

songs of the gay troubadour singing under the latticed window, -a are true lyrics, showing those peculiar traits of poetic power which are recognizable through all the changes consequent upon nearly fifty years of study and development. These traits are a passionate love of beauty, affluence, virility, and imagination; and a minor but unusual quality, that of childlike unselfconsciousness. He propounds no questions, he seeks to solve no problems. He is a poet, not a metaphysician.

Stoddard learned to "find" his art, according to his own confession, in his early poems. The Songs of Summer' are made up of short poems in which his warm imagination gives life to the simplest themes. Among the best known of them are 'There are Gains for all Our Losses,' 'Two Brides,' 'Through the Night,' and the songs 'The Sky is a Drinking-Cup,' and 'Birds are Singing Round my Window.'