Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/259

1866.] city wharves, gathers it from ships laden with tropic oranges and orient dates.

If Mr. Aldrich needed any defence for the poems in which he gives rein to his love for the East and the South, he would have it in the fact that they are very beautiful, and distinctively his own, while they breathe full east in their sumptousness of diction, and are genuinely southern in their summer-warmth of feeling. We doubt if any poet of Persia could have told more exquisitely than he what takes place

WHEN THE SULTAN GOES TO ISPAHAN.

When the Sultan Shah-Zaman

Goes to the city Ispahan,

Even before he gets so far

As the place where the clustered palm-trees are,

At the last of the thirty palace-gates,

The pet of the harem, Rose-in-Bloom,

Orders a feast in his favorite room,—

Glittering squares of colored ice,

Sweetened with syrop, tinctured with spice,

Creams, and cordials, and sugared dates,

Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces,

Limes, and citrons, and apricots,

And wines that are known to Eastern princes;

And Nubian slaves, with smoking pots

Of spicèd meats and costliest fish,

And all that the curious palate could wish,

Pass in and out of the cedarn doors:

Scattered over mosaic floors

Are anemones, myrtles, and violets,

And a musical fountain throws its jets

Of a hundred colors into the air.

The dusk Sultana loosens her hair,

And stains with the henna-plant the tips

Of her pearly nails, and bites her lips

Till they bloom again,—but, alas! that rose

Not for the Sultan buds and blows;

Not for the Sultan Shah-Zaman,

When he goes to the city Ispahan.

"Then, at a wave of her sunny hand,

the dancing girls of Samarcand

Float in like mists from Fairy-land!

And to the low voluptuous swoons

Of music rise and fall the moons

Of their full, brown bosoms. Orient blood

Runs in their veins, shines in their eyes:

And there, in this Eastern Paradise,

Filled with the fumes of sandal-wood,

And Khoten musk, and aloes and myrrh,

Sits Rose-in-Bloom on a silk divan,

Sipping the wines of Astrakhan;

And her Arab lover sits with her.

That's when the Sultan Shah-Zaman

Goes to the city Ispahan.

"Now, when I see an extra light,

Flaming, flickering on the night

From my neighbor's casement opposite,

I know as well as I know to pray,

I know as well as a tongue can say,

That the innocent Sultan Shah-Zaman

Has gone to the city Ispahan."

As subtilely beautiful as this, and even richer in color and flavor than this, is the complete little poem which Mr. Aldrich calls a fragment:—

So, after bath, the slave-girls brought

The broidered raiment for her wear,

The misty izar from Mosul,

The pearls and opals for her hair,

The slippers for her supple feet,

(Two radiant crescent moons they were,)

And lavender, and spikenard sweet,

And attars, nedd, and richest musk.

When they had finished dressing her,

(The eye of morn, the heart's desire!)

Like one pale star against the dusk,

A single diamond on her brow

Trembled with its imprisoned fire!"

Too long for quotation here, but by no means too long to be read many times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of thought running through the poem is slight as the plot of dreams,—breaks, perhaps, if you take it up too abruptly; but how beautiful are the hues and the artificing of the jewels strung upon it!

And knowing how in other times

Her lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymes

Of love and wine and dance, I spread

My mantle by almond-tree,

'And here, beneath the rose,' I said,

'I'll hear thy Tuscan melody.'

I heard a tale that was not told

In those ten dreamy days of old,

When Heaven, for some divine offence,

Smote Florence with the pestilence;

And in that garden's odorous shade,

The dames of the Decameron,

With each a loyal lover, strayed,

To laugh and sing, at sorest need,

To lie in the lilies in the sun

With glint of plume and silver brede!

And while she whispered in my ear,

The pleasant Arno murmured near,

The dewy, slim chameleons run

Through twenty colors in the sun;

The breezes broke the fountain's glass,

And woke æolian melodies,

And shook from out the scented trees

The lemon-blossoms on the grass.

The tale? I have forgot the tale,—

A Lady all for love forlorn,

A rose-bud, and a nightingale

That bruised his bosom on the thorn:

A pot of rubies buried deep,

A glen, a corpse, a child asleep,

A Monk, that was no monk at all,

In the moonlight by a castle wall."

As to "Babie Bell," that ballad has