No More Learning

He lived beyond the bars.

It was to him a vague mirage
Or memory of a storied page
With only that appeal;
But oftentimes a sound or sight
Would bring to him his own delight
More subtle than the real.

And with his sense of entity
Half lost, he raised a vacant eye
Into the empyrean.
And as he lay upon his back
The pealing centuries rolled back. . . .
He saw the blue AEgean.

And thus he dreamt: "My palace home
With minaret and marble dome
Upon the sapphire strait.
My garden full of nightingales,
One singing as the other fails
While evening groweth late.

"And from my watch-tower I behold
Beneath a sky of molten gold
My argosies return.
A homeward wind is in their sails,
Freighted are they with costly bales,
Vast fires behind them burn.

"I have a room with shining floors
And lofty roof and polished doors,
Wherein I love to dine
With two good friends at left and right,
Whose converse is my soul's delight
And glads my heart like wine.

"Or in my marble portico
We sit and watch the summer glow
And talk of love and death;
And when the amber twilight fails
We listen to the nightingales,
And evening holds her breath.

"Oh!
Charicles and Charmides,
Much have I dreamt of hours like these,
My friends I never knew--
Whose voices and whose grave, sweet words
Were lovelier than the songs of birds,
And fresher than the dew.

"For Charicles has love and youth,
And all his words are sweet with truth,
Like a garden with the rain;
And Charmides is mild and wise,
But with his tear-washed, violet eyes
Yet can he smile again.

"Perhaps I knew you, ancient lords
Of nobler wit and finer chords--
But this I cannot tell;
For ever lovely things I sought
In some strange borderland of thought,
Content therein to dwell.

"For who could blame or who could praise
If one should choose to pass his days
In a phantasy of dreams,
And, finding thus his own ideal
In things dissevered from the real,
Be happier than he seems?

"Ah! who could praise or who could blame,
Tho' glimmers all my way the same,
Like a dyke-road thro' a fen.
Far on, far on--a ruddy spark--
The toll-light glows adown the dark,
And I, like other men,

"Must pay my toll and pass beyond,--
I made no vow, I signed no bond,
Nor lose my self-esteem,
But pass, unknown, unloved, unlost,
The man who knew and weighed the cost,
The man who dared to dream.

"For what is Fame and what's a Name,
Your cries of sorrow, wrath, and shame,
Your Hamlets and King Lears,
The night must cover them again
Did they last a thousand lives of men,
A thousand thousand years.

"The world may say that I have missed;
Ah! no--I am an egoist
Of subtle, fixed design.
My dreams a garden are to me
To which no other holds the key,
I wish to keep them mine.

"All mine--those tender, half-thought things,
Which flutter gossamer rainbow wings
And hover near, near, near.
Why should I catch and pin them down
And lose their beauty for a crown
Would chafe my brows to wear.

"And thus, a baser alchemist
In some perverted plan persist
To turn my gold to dross.
If I turned my gold their soul were sold
Tho' I wore a crown and cloth of gold,
Their soul were then the loss.

"If I sat high, a crowned king,
With lofty brows in a royal ring,
A lustrous diadem,
If I wore the titles 'High, Strong, and Wise,'
And garments stained with purple dyes,
All jewelled at the hem

"With emeralds, rubies and jacinth stones,
Such as great kings wear on their golden thrones,
And a royal mantle of vair,
And held a sceptre in my hand,
Which showed me ruler of all the land,
In my palace, where none might dare

"To cross my word, but all must bow
As the courtly throng are bending now,
And give the King his meed,
And slaves waved forests of peacock fans
And a cry went up like a single man's,
'This is the King indeed.