| UP from the street and the crowds that went, | |
| Morning and midnight, to and fro, | |
| Still was the room where his days he spent, | |
| And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow. | |
| |
| Year after year, with his dream shut fast, | 5 |
| He suffered and strove till his eyes were dim, | |
| For the love that his brushes had earned at last, | |
| And the whole world rang with the praise of him. | |
| |
| But he cloaked his triumph, and searched, instead, | |
| Till his cheeks were sere and his hairs were gray. | 10 |
| “There are women enough, God knows,” he said … | |
| “There are stars enough—when the sun’s away.” | |
| |
| Then he went back to the same still room | |
| That had held his dream in the long ago, | |
| When he buried his days in a nameless tomb, | 15 |
| And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow. | |
| |
| And a passionate humor seized him there— | |
| Seized him and held him until there grew | |
| Like life on his canvas, glowing and fair, | |
| A perilous face—and an angel’s too. | 20 |
| |
| Angel and maiden, and all in one,— | |
| All but the eyes. They were there, but yet | |
| They seemed somehow like a soul half done. | |
| What was the matter? Did God forget? … | |
| |
| But he wrought them at last with a skill so sure | 25 |
| That her eyes were the eyes of a deathless woman,— | |
| With a gleam of heaven to make them pure, | |
| And a glimmer of hell to make them human. | |
| |
| God never forgets.—And he worships her | |
| There in that same still room of his, | 30 |
| For his wife, and his constant arbiter | |
| Of the world that was and the world that is. | |
| |
| And he wonders yet what her love could be | |
| To punish him after that strife so grim; | |
| But the longer he lives with her eyes to see, | 35 |
| The plainer it all comes back to him. | |
