Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/162

154 poet who means much is little of a poet. I will sing you the song; but it is dreadfully direct in expression. I wrote it one night at Oxford when I was supremely drunk. I remember I wept as I wrote, great, wonderful tears. Yes, I will sing it. It is full of the sorrow, the white burnished sorrow of youth. How divine the melancholies of youth are! With age comes folly, and with folly comes the appalling merriment of experience. Experienced men are always merry. They see things as they really are. How terrible! until we can see things as they really are not we never truly live."

He went slowly to the piano, sat down, and played a plaintive, fleeting air—an air that was like a wandering moonbeam, the veritable phantom of a melody. Then he sang this song, in a low and almost toneless voice, uttering the notes rather than vocalising them.

Passing, passing—ah! sad heart, sing;
 * But you cannot keep me beyond to-day,

For I am a wayward bird on the wing—
 * A wayward waif, who will never stay.

The ivory morn, and the primrose eve,
 * And the twilight, whispering late and low,

They kiss the hem of the spell I weave;
 * They tremble, and ask me where I go.