A Painter's Holiday

We painters sometimes strangely keep

These holidays. When life runs deep

And broad and strong, it comes to make

Its own bright-colored almanack.

Impulse and incident divine

Must find their way through tone and line;

The throb of color and the dream

Of beauty, giving art its theme

From dear life's daily miracle,

Illume the artist's life as well.

A bird-note, or a turning leaf,

The first white fall of snow, a brief

Wild song from the Anthology,

A smile, or a girl's kindling eye,—

And there is worth enough for him

To make the page of history dim.

Who knows upon what day may come

The touch of that delirium

Which lifts plain life to the divine,

And teaches hand the magic line

No cunning rule could ever reach,

Where Soul's necessities find speech?

None knows how rapture may arrive

To be our helper, and survive

Through our essay to help in turn

All starving eager souls who yearn

Lightward discouraged and distraught.

Ah, once art's gleam of glory caught

And treasured in the heart, how then

We walk enchanted among men,

And with the elder gods confer!

So art is hope's interpreter,

And with devotion must conspire

To fan the eternal altar fire.

Wherefore you find me here to-day,

Not idling the good hours away,

But picturing a magic hour

With its replenishment of power.

Conceive a bleak December day,

The streets all mire, the sky all gray,

And a poor painter trudging home

Disconsolate, when what should come

Across his vision, but a line

On a bold-lettered play-house sign,

A Persian Sun Dance.

In he turns.

A step, and there the desert burns

Purple and splendid; molten gold

The streamers of the dawn unfold,

Amber and amethyst uphurled

Above the far rim of the world;

The long-held sound of temple bells

Over the hot sand steals and swells;

A lazy tom-tom throbs and dones

In barbarous maddening monotones;

While sandal incense blue and keen

Hangs in the air. And then the scene

Wakes, and out steps, by rhythm released,

The sorcery of all the East,

In rose and saffron gossamer,—

A young light-hearted worshipper

Who dances up the sun. She moves

Like waking woodland flower that loves

To greet the day. Her lithe, brown curve

Is like a sapling's sway and swerve

Before the spring wind. Her dark hair

Framing a face vivid and rare,

Curled to her throat and then flew wild,

Like shadows round a radiant child.

The sunlight from her cymbals played

About her dancing knees, and made

A world of rose-lit ecstasy,

Prophetic of the day to be.

Such mystic beauty might have shone

In Sardis or in Babylon,

To bring a Satrap to his doom

Or touch some lad with glory's bloom.

And now it wrought for me, with sheer

Enchantment of the dying year,

Its irresistible reprieve

From joylessness on New Year's Eve.