POETRY.

TRAVEL-PIECE. (CONFESSIO JUVENIS, PASSUS 1.) I HAVE seen lightning walking upon the water, While thunder shook my head like a sieve of corn : I have felt cold-handed Winter touch me in the dark, And Atlas-like have borne the burning weighty sun.

I have seen mountains and forests and beautiful cities Growing empty as a deserted garden : Mountains, and broken castles : desolate forests, Where by a hundred paths The singing Danube giddies through the plain : I have felt by night its pulse on the boat's shell, While fishes leapt like hoops in the dim light : Seen sunrise delicately tread the uneven water.

Then for a while I sat in stranger places, Dicing with Hunger to pass away the time ; I cut my fingers on the reins of State, I knew the wicked eye of half-drawn steel

Outstare my own, and reached my hand for help To my sole comrade, hidden-footed Fear.

So came at length to climb on alien hills,

—Where pine trees sang like the fifty-fluted sea, And Snow let down her hair among the crocuses; Where I saw men, upon that roof of the world, Battle like cats, and utter their terrible notes.

I have walked with the sun shut into my tight head, And my hands jewelled with flies till my hands bled, At noon with bared feet in the hot sand, The span-deep forest sand, where cedars stretch for ever,

And orchids suck weak breath over coloured V swamp-water.

Where hot ciealas trill and bright bird never sings, —I have seen the glassy wind warp in the hot sun : The beautiful curved wind where the locusts tread :

Seen leaves of bushes like myriad green eyes,

And big butterflies like heavy voiceless birds.

And in mid-ocean I have seen green tigers —Endlessly burst through pale dense leaves of fog : Deep in the under-parts of a ship have seen Men, the innumerable nations of the world, Like lights, dancing : looked in strange fleckt eyes.

I know the prick of turf, the scent of warm trees, —The taste of cheese, the sound of an old clock, A fire of green ash logs in a stone house, The lovely cooling touch of driven rain, The perfect unrepeated shape of the Welsh hills —But I have seen smooth familiar things So thorny grow with criss-cross memories, It pained to touch them.

Once, when a boy, I saw an old man die, —So slowly scarce you knew which way the battle went Till Pallor came on his cold horse With certain rumour of defeat : And the next day I saw men leap from life Like salmon leap a weir.

At times, I have got drunk on brimming eyes ;

—Wrestled alone with him who comes by night, And with a drop of scalding oil have lost him : At times, fused night with day in fervent thinking Till the brain sweated ; Or tumbled with rhythms on a pile of hay For half a honey-suckled summer.

But all these things I don't mistake for living, Nor bombast about them for creative writing, —Romantics, largely spun from my own stomach, Samples snipped from an enormous pattern : Though greatly moving me—part of my substance.

Now, coming to manhood, I know I have plunged no deeper Into thought or doing than a kitten Trying to dare to pat an electric fan. - And like that kitten, most I do is prompted By uneasy twitchings in my tail's tip.

Surely it's now high time that something happened, Something snapped somewhere, and I entered in ; —Ceased to be like the man who painted in the dark,

Then called for a light to see what he had painted ?

RICHARD HUGHES.