libertine,
     Without a scoff, without a grin,
     And mannered like the courtly few,
     Who merely danced when light winds blew,
     Impervious to beak and claws,
     Tradition’s ruinous Whitebeard was;
     Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
     Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
     With word, that less than feather-weight,
     He smote the web like bolt of Fate.

     This muted drama, hour by hour,
     I watched amid a world in flower,
     Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
     Their gray-blue o’er the grass’s blade,
     And still along the garden-run
     The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun. 
     Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
     Her visitor performed a dance;
     She puckered thinner; he the same
     As when on that light wind he came.

     Next day was told what deeds of night
     Were done; the web had vanished quite;
     With it the strange opposing pair;
     And listless waved on vacant air,
     For her adieu to heart’s content,
     A solitary filament.

     Poem:  Foresight And Patience

     Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
     Are they who point our pathway and sustain. 
     They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired. 
     When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.

     To see Life’s formless offspring and subdue
     Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
     Whose union is right reason:  join they hands,
     The world shall know itself and where it stands;
     What cowering angel and what upright beast
     Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
     Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers. 
     When these two meet, a point of time is ours.

     As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
     Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
     Some eddies near the brink borne swift along,
     Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
     So, while the headlong world’s imperious force
     Resounded under, heard I these discourse.

     First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
     To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said: 

     — Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
     When still I find you in this mire alone.

     — The few steps taken at a funeral pace
     By men had slain me but for those you trace.

     — Look I once back, a broken pinion I: 
     Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!

     — Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
     And make me rich in feeling I can give.