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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408271" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Basil Moss</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">SING, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song—<br>Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts<br>Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams<br>Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make<br>A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.<br>Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,<br>The grand, austere, imperial utterance.<br>Which drives my soul before it back to days<br>In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high<br>Past broken hills, and when the polar gale<br>Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath<br>That speaks for ever of the White South Land<br>Alone with God and Silence in the cold,<br>I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss, <br>A story shining with a woman’s love!<br>And who that knows that love can ever doubt<br>How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;<br>For while the tale of Basil Moss was one<br>Not blackened with those stark, satanic sins<br>Which call for superhuman sacrifice,<br>Still, from the records of the world’s sad life,<br>This great, sweet, gladdening fact at length we’ve learned,<br>There’s not a depth to which a man can fall,<br>No slough of crime in which such one can lie<br>Stoned with the scorn and curses of his kind,<br>But that some tender woman can be found<br>To love and shield him still. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>What was the fate<br>Of Basil Moss who, thirty years ago,<br>A brave, high-minded, but impetuous youth,<br>Left happy homesteads in the sweetest isle<br>That wears the sober light of Northern suns?<br>What happened him, the man who crossed far, fierce<br>Sea-circles of the hoarse Atlantic—who,<br>Without a friend to help him in the world,<br>Commenced his battle in this fair young land,<br>A Levite in the Temple Beautiful<br>Of Art, who struggled hard, but found that here<br>Both Bard and Painter learn, by bitter ways,<br>That they are aliens in the working world,<br>And that all Heaven’s templed clouds at morn<br>And sunset do not weigh one loaf of bread! <br>This was his tale. For years he kept himself<br>Erect, and looked his troubles in the face<br>And grappled them; and, being helped at last<br>By one who found she loved him, who became<br>The patient sharer of his lot austere,<br>He beat them bravely back; but like the heads<br>Of Lerna’s fabled hydra, they returned<br>From day to day in numbers multiplied;<br>And so it came to pass that Basil Moss<br>(Who was, though brave, no mental Hercules,<br>Who hid beneath a calmness forced, the keen<br>Heart-breaking sensibility—which is<br>The awful, wild, specific curse that clings<br>Forever to the Poet’s twofold life)<br>Gave way at last; but not before the hand<br>Of sickness fell upon him—not before<br>The drooping form and sad averted eyes<br>Of hectic Hope, that figure far and faint,<br>Had given all his later thoughts a tongue—<br>“It is too late—too late!” </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>There is no need<br>To tell the elders of the English world<br>What followed this. From step to step, the man—<br>Now fairly gripped by fierce Intemperance—<br>Descended in the social scale; and though<br>He struggled hard at times to break away,<br>And take the old free, dauntless stand again,<br>He came to be as helpless as a child,<br>And Darkness settled on the face of things,<br>And Hope fell dead, and Will was paralysed. <br>Yet sometimes, in the gloomy breaks between<br>Each fit of madness issuing from his sin,<br>He used to wander through familiar woods<br>With God’s glad breezes blowing in his face,<br>And try to feel as he was wont to feel<br>In other years; but never could he find<br>Again his old enthusiastic sense<br>Of Beauty; never could he exorcize<br>The evil spell which seemed to shackle down<br>The fine, keen, subtle faculty that used<br>To see into the heart of loveliness;<br>And therefore Basil learned to shun the haunts<br>Where Nature holds her chiefest courts, because<br>They forced upon him in the saddest light<br>The fact of what he was, and once had been. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">So fared the drunkard for five awful years—<br>The last of which, while lighting singing dells,<br>With many a flame of flowers, found Basil Moss<br>Cooped with his wife in one small wretched room;<br>And there, one night, the man, when ill and weak—<br>A sufferer from his latest bout of sin—<br>Moaned, stricken sorely with a fourfold sense<br>Of all the degradation he had brought<br>Upon himself, and on his patient wife;<br>And while he wrestled with his strong remorse<br>He looked upon a sweet but pallid face,<br>And cried, “My God! is this the trusting girl<br>I swore to love, to shield, to cherish so<br>But ten years back? O, what a liar I am!”<br>She, shivering in a thin and faded dress<br>Beside a handful of pale, smouldering fire,<br>On hearing Basil’s words, moved on her chair,<br>And turning to him blue, beseeching eyes,<br>And pinched, pathetic features, faintly said—<br>“O, Basil, love! now that you seem to feel<br>And understand how much I’ve suffered since<br>You first gave way—now that you comprehend<br>The bitter heart-wear, darling, that has brought<br>The swift, sad silver to this hair of mine<br>Which should have come with Age—which came with Pain,<br>Do make one more attempt to free yourself<br>From what is slowly killing both of us;<br>And if you do the thing I ask of you,<br>If you but try this once, we may indeed—<br>We may be happy yet.” </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Then Basil Moss,<br>Remembering in his marvellous agony<br>How often he had found her in the dead<br>Of icy nights with uncomplaining eyes,<br>A watcher in a cheerless room for him;<br>And thinking, too, that often, while he threw<br>His scanty earnings over reeking bars,<br>The darling that he really loved through all<br>Was left without enough to eat—then Moss,<br>I say, sprang to his feet with sinews set<br>And knotted brows, and throat that gasped for air,<br>And cried aloud—“My poor, poor girl, I will.” <br>And so he did; and fought this time the fight<br>Out to the bitter end; and with the help<br>Of prayers and unremitting tenderness<br>He gained the victory at last; but not—<br>No, not before the agony and sweat<br>Of fierce Gethsemanes had come to him;<br>And not before the awful nightly trials,<br>When, set in mental furnaces of flame,<br>With eyes that ached and wooed in vain for sleep,<br>He had to fight the devil holding out<br>The cup of Lethe to his fevered lips.<br>But still he conquered; and the end was this,<br>That though he often had to face the eyes<br>Of that bleak Virtue which is not of Christ<br>(Because the gracious Lord of Love was one with Him<br>Who blessed the dying thief upon the cross),<br>He held his way with no unfaltering steps,<br>And gathered hope and light, and never missed<br>To do a thing for the sake of good.<br>And every day that glided through the world<br>Saw some fine instance of his bright reform,<br>And some assurance he would never fall<br>Into the pits and traps of hell again.<br>And thus it came to pass that Basil’s name<br>Grew sweet with men; and, when he died, his end<br>Was calm—was evening-like, and beautiful. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here ends the tale of Basil Moss. To wives<br>Who suffer as the Painter’s darling did,<br>I dedicate these lines; and hope they’ll bear<br>In mind those efforts of her lovely life,<br>Which saved her husband’s soul; and proved that while<br>A man who sins can entertain remorse,<br>He is not wholly lost. If such as they<br>But follow her, they may be sure of this,<br>That Love, that sweet authentic messenger<br>From God, can never fail while there is left<br>Within the fallen one a single pulse<br>Of what the angels call humanity.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Henry+Kendall">Henry Kendall</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408271" data-title="Basil Moss de Henry Kendall" data-description="SING, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song—
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-w..."></div>
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