I
The dubious daylight ended,
And I walked the Town alone, unminding whither bound and why,
As from each gaunt street and gaping square a mist of light
ascended
And dispersed upon the sky.
II
Files of evanescent faces
Passed each other without heeding, in their travail, teen, or
joy,
Some in void unvisioned listlessness inwrought with pallid
traces
Of keen penury’s annoy.
III
Nebulous flames in crystal
cages
Leered as if with discontent at city movement, murk, and
grime,
p. 18And as
waiting some procession of great ghosts from bygone ages
To exalt the ignoble time.
IV
In a colonnade
high-lighted,
By a thoroughfare where stern utilitarian traffic dinned,
On a red and white emblazonment of players and parts, I
sighted
The name of “Rosalind,”
V
And her famous mates of
“Arden,”
Who observed no stricter customs than “the seasons’
difference” bade,
Who lived with running brooks for books in Nature’s
wildwood garden,
And called idleness their trade . . .
VI
Now the poster stirred an
ember
Still remaining from my ardours of some forty years before,
When the selfsame portal on an eve it thrilled me to remember
A like announcement bore;
And expectantly I had
entered,
And had first beheld in human mould a Rosalind woo and plead,
On whose transcendent figuring my speedy soul had centred
As it had been she indeed . . .
VIII
So; all other plans
discarding,
I resolved on entrance, bent on seeing what I once had seen,
And approached the gangway of my earlier knowledge,
disregarding
The tract of time between.
IX
“The words, sir?”
cried a creature
Hovering mid the shine and shade as ’twixt the live world
and the tomb;
But the well-known numbers needed not for me a text or teacher
To revive and re-illume.
X
Then the play . . . But how
unfitted
Was this Rosalind!—a mammet quite to me, in memories
nurst,
p. 20And with
chilling disappointment soon I sought the street I had
quitted,
To re-ponder on the first.
XI
The hag still hawked,—I
met her
Just without the colonnade. “So you don’t like
her, sir?” said she.
“Ah—I was once that Rosalind!—I acted
her—none better—
Yes—in eighteen sixty-three.
XII
“Thus I won Orlando to
me
In my then triumphant days when I had charm and maidenhood,
Now some forty years ago.—I used to say, Come woo
me, woo me!”
And she struck the attitude.
XIII
It was when I had gone there
nightly;
And the voice—though raucous now—was yet the old
one.—Clear as noon
My Rosalind was here . . . Thereon the band withinside lightly
Beat up a merry tune.
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