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AJ'IEKICA ’d :,OCKSLE Y HALL”
fe Carmen Aetati,” by/lississippi's brilliant ‘Educator and Poet Philosopher, Prof. Tom F. Mc'Beath, is Declared by Many
to be More 'Beautiful Than Tennyson f s Immortal Poem —It Laughs and Leaps and Pippies Like a Stream.
. AST year the readers of The Gol
v I den Age were greatly delighted and
If enriched by our publication of “Bi-
Jsx / opsis,” the great blank verse poem
{gßr of Tom F. Mcßeath. Many have
f wished to know more of the remark
s/ able author, and read more from his
modest but masterful pen.
give you this week his rhythmic masterpiece,
“Carmen Aetati,” written twenty odd years
ago and published in the Sunny South, and af
terward appearing by consent of the author in
the supplement to “Echoes from a Recluse,” a
volume of sketches and poems by William 1).
Upshaw.
Instead of writing “Carmen Aetati” in the
environment of Locks ey Hall and waiting for
the waking call of the hunter’s horn, Mcßeath
wrote on the crest, we are told, of Vinegar
Hill, overlooking Bowling Green, Ky., with the
river winding in crystal beauty at the base,
while the poet-seer caught a vision of the fu-
Here upon the silent summit of this softly sunlit hill
Let us rest, to wait the coming of the evening, calm and still,
While around our fevered foreheads plays the playful wanton breeze,
Watch the red sun slowly sinking down behind the distant trees.
Watch the purple clouds, flame-bordered, crossed with shining, golden bars,
Shouldering up behind the mountains —watch the blossoming of stars —
As the night, with stately footsteps, drives the laughing light away,
Draws the glowing, crimson curtains ’round the couch of dying day.
Gleaming like a silver serpent, seaward watch yon river glide,
Where the slanting sunlight slumbers, quivering on its burnished tide.
Far away in deep’ning purple, clear against the azure skies,
Dark-brow ed, solemn, circling round us, sombre hills like sentries rise.
Seest thou not the magic circle God’s own hand hath ’round us drawn,
Where the lips of Heaven, stooping, rest the lips of earth upon?
So within a like circumference, circumscribed by its own hand,
Every soul —itself the centre of the world it sees —must stand;
Every part, itself the centre of the whole it comprehends,
And the circles widen only as the climbing soul ascends.
Lo! all things are full of beauty unto him whose lifted eyes
Nightly turn with love and longing upward to the starry skies.
There is nothing vile or evil in this perfect world below,
But man’s thought or touch, unholy, marring it, hath made it so
Beauty’s but the bright reflection of that first proud smile of God,
When, well pleased, he saw the creature man, perfected from the clod.
And the daisies in the valley and the alters on the hill,
And the lilies of the rivers do but whisper of him still.
Though no more by priest or prophet is His wondrous will made known,
Though no more His dread commandments graves He on the flinty stone,
In the deep secluded valley, on the mountain’s lordly crest, .
In the winding of the river, on the robin’s painted breast.
In the king-cups, in the meadows, in tne rosy bars of morn,
In the rustle of the breezes through the fields of summer corn,
In the silence of the forest —God still writes with beauty’s pen,
What the poets, His translators, still interpret unto men,
Laying bare the hidden real that behind each image glows,
As they voice the thought that blushes in the petals of the rose.
Teach thee, then, life’s higher lesson, manhood’s duties grand and stern?
Ah! I fear thou wouldst but find them lessons dull and hard to learn.
Wisdom! Wisdom! What is Wisdom? And why tarries it so long?
Wisdom, grandly sings the poet, is to suffer and be strong.
Nay! Tis but a gray beard demon dwelling in the dismal tombs,
ATLANTA, GA., AUUGST 5, 1909.
TOM F. McBEATH.
6 /
Where from out the mould of knowledge, pride, the poison fungus, blooms!
Yet ’twere good to know of knowledge flashed along the path before,
If it shone out o’er the breakers from the headlands on the shore,
But what’s worth the richest sunshine of a yesterday that’s lost?
Who would care to burn the bridges when the foe’d already crossed?
Swiftly speeds each passing moment on its unreturning wing;
Life’s day hath but one sweet morning,- life’s year but one blooming spring.
Only once is fought the battle on whose issue hangs our fate;
Only once the hand of fortune knocks at every closed gate!
Only once to every mortal opens Heaven’s golden door —
Opens once, then swiftly closes, and, to him, forevermore!
Once we enter, and forever; or, if madly we refuse,
Only once we catch the glimpses of the glory that we lose.
O, ’tis not in gold and silver, is this life’s true riches found!
Blessed are the souls that sorrow hath with tender memories crowned;
Blessed are those lips forever that have kissed the brow of pain;
Holy is the hand that girdeth, hoping not to take again.
Sweet the voice of one beloved, sweet is music’s witching tone.
Sweeter far the lingering whispers of a joy remembered, flown.
There’s a picture —shall I paint it? ’Tis a morning soft and fair,
Golden sunlight sifting gently down o’er shining amber hair,
Blue eyes bending o’er the pages of her book, I saw her go—
Back and forth from sun to shadow, slowly walking to and fro.
Often I have paused to watch her through the quivering, leafy aisles,
And the sunniest morn grew brighter with the sunlight of her smiles,
O, by night a flaming beacon, and a rosy cloud by day,
Shall the memory of that summer go before me all the way!
Evermore the world is- holy; for the radiance that it flings
Still baptizes with its glory all earth’s grosser, meaner things.
And a river of pure water, fresh and cool and crystal clear.
Flowing through the arid valleys of life’s desert bleak and drear,
Shall that holy fount of feeling that, responsive to the stroke
Os her little lily fingers, in my flinty heart awoke,
Evermore my earthly journey still by day and night attend,
And in all my weary wand’rings follow after to the end.
He hath never lived who never, tangling all his heart within,
Tied a dainty blue sunbonnet underneath a dimpled chin.
He who wants some one to crown him, loses, though he win the strife—
He who lacks the love of woman, lives the lesser half of life.
Ah! the old songs are the sweetest, let the world say what it will—
Old friends are the best and truest, old love is the tenderest still.
(Continued on Page 3.)
ture and sang the “song of the age” amid the
“blossoming of stars.”
Because Tom F. Mcßeath’s poem was evi
dently suggested by “Locksley Hall,” some
critic may say that it is thereby shorn of part
of its glory, but to our thinking it only adds
a charm to the American poem. We believe
that many who read it will declare that in
“Carmen Aetati” Mcßeath almost out-Tenny
son’s Tennyson himself Read, compare and
see. Anyway, it deserves a place alongside of
England’s famous poem and can be truly called
AMERICA’S LOCKSLEY HALL.
The picture accompanying the poem was
made about the time “Carmen” and “Biopsis”
were writen, and it will naturally hold interest
for the reader to know that the noble
bHI. woman (formerly Ome.
i < ‘piesville, ria.), jjTresided where the ■
Mcßelath’s home, Colhmbus, where he
is a member of the faculty of the great I. I. and
C., is none other than the heroine of th<? “little
blue sunbonnet” who is described with such
deft and winsome touch in “Carmen Aetati.”.
The Editor.
TWO VOL LAKS A YEAH.
r/VE CENTS A con.
