Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/49

ALICE OF MONMOUTH Wed to a lady whose delicate veins that molten azure held,

Ichor of equal birth, wherewith our gentry their couplings weld;

Viewing his father's careless modes with half a tolerant eye,

As one who honors, regretting not, old fashions passing by.

After a while the moment came when, unto the son and heir,

A son and heir was given in turn,—a moment of joy and prayer;

For the angel who guards the portals twain oped, in the self-same breath,

To the child the pearly gate of life, to the mother the gate of death.

Father, and son, and an infant plucking the daisies over a grave:

The swell of a boundless surge keeps on, wave following after wave;

Ever the tide of life sets toward the low invisible shore:

Whence had the current its distant source? when shall it flow no more?

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Nature's serene renewals, that make the scion by one remove

Bear the ancestral blossom and thrive as the forest wilding throve!

Roseate stream of life, which hides the course its ducts pursue,

To rise, like that Sicilian fount, in far-off springs anew!

For the grandsire's vigor, rude and rare, asleep in the son had lain,

To waken in Hugh, the grandson's frame, with the ancient force again; 19