st be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art
alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art
was not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was.
In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty.
Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble
verses, "On the Beach at Night"?--
"On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
"Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
"From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all
Watching, silently weeps.
"Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in
apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the
Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall
shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they
endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall
again shine.
"Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
"Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."
or those touching lines, "Reconciliation"?--
"Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
Wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is de
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