Page:Knickerbocker 1864-11 64 5.pdf/25
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1864.]
Broadway.
409
And the sunset darts like a golden breeze
Her long light lances through the trees,
Like hints of a world whose monody wells,
Set to the rhythm of Eden bells—
Those Eden bells which in orient tales
Are the leaves of the trees in fairy-like vales,
Whose breezes float to the silver tune
That fountains sing in the month of June,
Stirring the trees and stirring the leaves
To melody through delicious eves?
Then, reader, you know how a life should flow
With a glimpse of skies in its waters below,
As along the meadows sweet streamlets pass
Like music winding through the grass,
Stirring the grass the whole day long
With the tinkling laughter of their song.
But how many lives in this din of Broadway
Have a glimpse of skies in their flow to-day?
IX.
It is midnight: at random through the gloom
Creeps like a spectre from a tomb
An occasional step from those pitiful dens,
Night 'concert-saloons'—they are numbered by tens—
Which—so is man made—like all matters of sin,
Seem palace without and prison within;
Or, like some weird dead city of gleaming mausoles,
Inhabited only by corpses and ghouls—
Yes, corpses—just this dwell a moment upon—
They are dead, though they walk, for their manhood is gone.
But 'tis midnight; I've said nearly all I can say—
To-morrow we meet in the din of Broadway.
X.
And now, as an Arab would say or would sing
In his tales of a lady or ghoul,
By way of a moral I tell you this thing,
(And its maxims are true as a whole,)
That the beggar in soul is often a king,
And the king is a beggar in soul;
That a man may be moneyed and pampered and fat,
And a manikin only in spite of all that;
That one may have wealth and servants at call,
And be only a pauper notwithstanding it all;
That in spite of neglect and of social ban,
A pauper is often far more of a man—
Is surer of heaven and its blisses untold,
Than the millionaire with his worship of gold.
Her long light lances through the trees,
Like hints of a world whose monody wells,
Set to the rhythm of Eden bells—
Those Eden bells which in orient tales
Are the leaves of the trees in fairy-like vales,
Whose breezes float to the silver tune
That fountains sing in the month of June,
Stirring the trees and stirring the leaves
To melody through delicious eves?
Then, reader, you know how a life should flow
With a glimpse of skies in its waters below,
As along the meadows sweet streamlets pass
Like music winding through the grass,
Stirring the grass the whole day long
With the tinkling laughter of their song.
But how many lives in this din of Broadway
Have a glimpse of skies in their flow to-day?
IX.
It is midnight: at random through the gloom
Creeps like a spectre from a tomb
An occasional step from those pitiful dens,
Night 'concert-saloons'—they are numbered by tens—
Which—so is man made—like all matters of sin,
Seem palace without and prison within;
Or, like some weird dead city of gleaming mausoles,
Inhabited only by corpses and ghouls—
Yes, corpses—just this dwell a moment upon—
They are dead, though they walk, for their manhood is gone.
But 'tis midnight; I've said nearly all I can say—
To-morrow we meet in the din of Broadway.
X.
And now, as an Arab would say or would sing
In his tales of a lady or ghoul,
By way of a moral I tell you this thing,
(And its maxims are true as a whole,)
That the beggar in soul is often a king,
And the king is a beggar in soul;
That a man may be moneyed and pampered and fat,
And a manikin only in spite of all that;
That one may have wealth and servants at call,
And be only a pauper notwithstanding it all;
That in spite of neglect and of social ban,
A pauper is often far more of a man—
Is surer of heaven and its blisses untold,
Than the millionaire with his worship of gold.