Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/389

 And take the old free, dauntless stand again,

He came to be as helpless as a child,

And Darkness settled on the face of things,

And Hope fell dead, and Will was paralysed.

Yet sometimes, in the gloomy breaks between

Each fit of madness issuing from his sin,

He used to wander through familiar woods

With God's glad breezes blowing in his face,

And try to feel as he was wont to feel

In other years; but never could he find

Again his old enthusiastic sense

Of Beauty; never could he exorcize

The evil spell which seemed to shackle down

The fine, keen, subtle faculty that used

To see into the heart of loveliness;

And therefore Basil learned to shun the haunts

Where Nature holds her chiefest courts, because

They forced upon him in the saddest light

The fact of what he was, and once had been.

So fared the drunkard for five awful years—

The last of which, while lighting singing dells,

With many a flame of flowers, found Basil Moss

Cooped with his wife in one small wretched room;

And there, one night, the man, when ill and weak—

A sufferer from his latest bout of sin—

Moaned, stricken sorely with a fourfold sense

Of all the degradation he had brought

Upon himself, and on his patient wife;

And while he wrestled with his strong remorse

He looked upon a sweet but pallid face,

And cried, "My God! is this the trusting girl

I swore to love, to shield, to cherish so

But ten years back? O, what a liar I am!"

She, shivering in a thin and faded dress

Beside a handful of pale, smouldering fire,

On hearing Basil's words, moved on her chair,

And turning to him blue, beseeching eyes,

And pinched, pathetic features, faintly said—