Give me, for friends, my own true
folk
Who kept the very word they spoke;
Whose quiet prayers, from day to day,
Have brought the heavens about my way.
Not those whose intellectual pride
Would quench the only lights that guide;
Confuse the lines ’twixt
good and ill
Then throne their own capricious
will;
Not those whose eyes in mockery scan
The simpler hopes and dreams of man;
Not those keen wits, so quick
to hurt,
So swift to trip you in the
dirt.
Not those who’d pluck your mystery
out,
Yet never saw your last redoubt;
Whose cleverness would kill
the song
Dead at your heart, then prove
you wrong.
Give me those eyes I used to know
Where thoughts like angels come and go;
—Not glittering eyes,
nor dimmed by books,
But eyes through which the
deep soul looks.
Give me the quiet hands and face
That never strove for fame and place;
The soul whose love, so many
a day
Has brought the heavens about
my way._
Was it a dream, that low dim-lighted room
With that dark periwigged phantom of Dean Swift
Writing, beside a fire, to one he loved,—
Beautiful Catherine Barton, once the light
Of Newton’s house, and his half-sister’s
child?
Yes, Catherine Barton, I am brave enough
To face this pale, unhappy, wistful ghost
Of our departed friendship.
It
was I
Savage and mad, a snarling kennel of sins,
“Your Holiness,” as you called me, with
that smile
Which even your ghost would quietly turn on me—
Who raised it up. It has no terrors, dear.
And I shall never lay it while I live.
You write to me. You think I have the power
To shield the fame of Newton from a lie.
Poor little ghost! You think I hold the keys
Not only of Parnassus, then, but hell.
There is a tale abroad that Newton owed
His public office to Lord Halifax,
Your secret lover. Coarseness, as you know,
Is my peculiar privilege. I’ll be plain,
And let them wince who are whispering in the dark.
They are hinting that he gained his public post
Through you, his flesh and blood; and that he knew
You were his patron’s mistress!
Yes,
I know
The coffee-house that hatched it—to be
scotched,
Nay, killed, before one snuff-box could say “snap,”
Had not one cold malevolent face been there
Listening,—that crystal-minded lover of
truth,
That lucid enemy of all lies,—Voltaire.
I am told he is doing much to spread the light
Of Newton’s great discoveries, there, in France.
There’s little fear that France, whose clear
keen eyes
Have missed no morning in the realm of thought,
Would fail to see it; and smaller need to lift
A brand from hell to illume the light from heaven.
