The Jaunt Poem by Samuel Alfred Beadle

A sire and youth went out upon a jaunt,
Along a course as old, 'tis said, as time;
The scene was varied, beautiful, sublime;
None saw ne'er landscape fairer nor was wont
And yet the course, with all its high blown vaunt,
Was but veneered fiction, still youth would climb
From vale and foot-hill to the mountain clime;
Fear could not check him, nor could danger daunt:
For hope and destiny, with mystic force,
Allured, and youth knew not that there lurked pain;
Yet how e'er fair the prospect, smoothe the course,
Few, who assension dare, can ever gain
The little hills of glory there hard by
The heights where Fame her plumage dips in sky.


They journeyed first a-down a verdured vale,
By sunny fountains, and by gurgling rills,
Where he amused himself by piping quills
To a fair damsel with a milking pail;
Then frowned the sire and at the youth did rail
Some suasive reprimand, and of the hills
Of fame would say, no man ascends who wills
To pipe his pibroch to a lover's tale;
Then youth, impatient, strolled alone and sire
Trailed after, like mother's hope, for he knew
The sure fatality of love's sweet lyre,
Then youth took winged ankles, swiftly flew
Unto the bowers of a floral grove,
Where Venus wooed him into dreams of love.


Umbrage and guile were there, and said 'Ah friend,
The hope of fame's but fancy's fiction set
To the fitful music of life's calumet;
If you'd do well, be gay and happy, tend
The revelries and be content to spend
The time at song and laughter, and forget
The rampage of thy sire, just let him fret;
Ere you achieve life's honors: life will end:
The wise fret not but, feast and let their mirth
Flood deep: for tomorrow shadows will be
Burdens, and hope a plague: the salt of earth
Is cheerfulness mixed with wit and levity,
No matter whether good or bad it be,
Cheer on, for mirth's a foil to destiny.


At this youth wandered from the beaten way,
Piping his pibroch to a festive air;
The maid, her virginhood a-budding fair,
Forsook her kine, the mystic rounderlay
A-carrolling, and tripping like a Fay,
At love's enchantment, wended with him there,
Her breast a heave 'neath silken gauze, her hair
With myrtle wreathed, both passion drunk and gay,
Forgot the care and wisdom of their sire,
And all he ever taught them of the course,
Its lapse of righteous law, the strife and ire
And carnivals of crime, the vicious force
Upon the sense of innocence at large,
And never grant it respite nor discharge.


In such a plight the sire might well despair
Of converse with his wayward child; but he,
Still on the course did loiter long, to see
What late pedestrian would there repair;
But care possessed his soul and through his hair
Did nervous fingers dig his pate, to free
Its thought of virtue's ebb, and fate's decree.
Youth, spurning his solicitude and care,
Sang on, and danced in love's sensual haunt,
With Venus fair, until the gray dawn blushed
To crimson on the cheeks of morn; then gaunt
Did innocence lie on their wan brows, crushed
And wilted, like a wild rose on a stone;
And to his sire youth plied quibbles of his own.


Misogymy's dead world you fled, 'tis said,
With woman fair and fickle, Sire, and strolled
Along life's sunny side an ardent soul;
If not a reed you piped, 'twas that you played
A stringed instrument and to Venus laid
Your heart, a tribute unto her control,
And thought the drama brilliant when the roll
A master should have played, the buffo swayed:
So Sire, away till I've sown my 'wild oats,'
And scythe, keen scythe, has mown the grain of mine;
Hold thou! thy tongue, my lord until the moats
In my eyes grow to beams like those in thine,
And then the two grew reckless in their thought,
And neither saw the other as he ought.


Then youth, a plunging heedless in the chase,
Went deeper down than honor e'er was wont
And lost his virtue in the dismal haunt,
Where vice and sloth doth chastity deface,
And love is but a license to disgrace,
What ever fair and gracious is; where gaunt
And reckless villians, shorn of shame, doth flaunt
Perfidy's triumph in the public place,
The lassie, lost to mother's love, and truth
Saw scenes where Grace had never placed her feet;
And at a time she knew not of, gay youth
Took wings and flew like beaming light, too fleet
For her, she sought the shades of solitude and yearned
For what age had taught her and she had spurned.


Many a Summer past them ere youth knew,
The purpose of his pilgrimage, and he,
Too often wayward, wilful, wild and free,
Returned unto the jaunt and would pursue
A wiser, if not better course; but few
Are those who do their childhood's errors flee;
They cling unto old customs and must be
Progressive in performing what they rue
The coquet, still a flirting, oft will feign,
Her waining summers are but budding springs,
And, in the realm of passion, long would reign
Where honor should preside o'er better things,
And later on, in wed-lock find that life,
Is noblest in the mother that's a wife.


Beware of women who are quoquetts, bard,
Their ruling passion is a fatal dart,
Set to the fancy of sensual art,
Of zeal their souls are void, cold, sterile, hard,
The heart's vivacious flame in them is charred.
If they are old, and feign the maid, lose heart
And hope; for prone to drift from grace apart,
They'd crush the fervor of thy fond regard;
For, though they have refinement, grace and ease,
They have not love's enchantment nor its flame;
For they are outlawed by Hesperides,
Nor are, nor can be, ever more the same;
Bright, charming, gay; but neither wise nor good,
They are but shadows of their virginhood.


All who have seen them in their glory say
That men have rarely 'neath their sceptres passed,
Who did not feel that something awful massed
The passions carnal, in their souls; and they
Who fell not, look on that eventful day
As one, in which the fair dissemblers, masqued
As cherubim of light, were by them classed
Good friends immaculate, whom to inveigh
Wert madness; such were the whims of youth,
Who did the woman, fallen in her prime,
Adore; and, spurning virtue and fair truth,
Did hold the ways of wantonness sublime;
However much we chide them still they get
And dissipate our fortune while we fret.


And though you deem one gracious, fairer far
Than fabled nymph, or ought that lives in song,
Romance and drama, or the toilings long
Of art, at form and grace and charm - all are
But false conceptions of thy beauteous star.
She'll spurn thy hopes and will not right, but wrong,
Consider; free love's her realm; among
The sons of men her will doth often mar
Fortunes; passion is her sceptre; the great
The good, the wise her prey; genius her toy;
Her smiles the gods doth conjure with and Fate,
Doth of her mien and beauty make decoy
For human souls: if life means aught to you,
Beware, lest her bewitchery you rue.


Thus spoke the sire, to youth, who knew the force
Of woman shorn of blessed chastity;
And then he masqued the boy, that he might n't see
And led him down a by-path from the course;
But on the ears of him, from its sweet source
Some rythmic music swept its cadency-
'A damsel shook her tambourine at me,'
Said youth, and then a stupor, like morose
Was his; for him the music witched and haunted,
Soothing in melody, like chords in flight,
By some fair being touched and love enchanted,
Sent wandering and echoing through night,
So well the temptor plays his subtle role
That they who on the by-path fall lose soul.


Then to the temple of the wise did age
Lead youth, and bade him with the muses mate
His soul, embelish and enrich his state
Of mind, and so enlarge his heritage,
That lucid wisdom might declare him sage;
And well the youth applied him long and late;
But ever and anon at wisdom's gate,
The song of sisters fallen rung; engage
Him as he would, with books, he could not part
With phantom beautiful, a woman's face,
Nor th' sweeter memoirs of his fickle heart;
So he, between his study and her grace,
Swung like a pendulum, in fitful doubt,
Till carnal passion won him and he spoke out:


Oh let the sage get what he can from books,
Divert from science and purloin fom lore,
All will but tax his energy the more,
Derange digestion and confound his cooks.
Where e'er his path of glory runs or crooks;
He'll find that mortals journeyed there before,
And found what he shall find on ev'ry shore;
The more he learns, the more the sage he looks,
The more he shows the same old grooves he treads
That fate allures him with the same old charms,
And gives him little else besides life's shreds;
The gold he hoards, his princely fees and farms,
All that fortune brings him, might commands,
Tomorrow fate will place in other hands.


It matters little who the tensures hold.
Who vassal is, who peasant, lord, or king;
Whether we laugh, or we weep, or we sing;
As we climb the heights, or go down the wold,
When Youth is fervent, or when Age is cold,
We grow immortal if we simply cling
To self denial and will kindly fling
Charity's mantle o'er the wilful souled;
He who goes thus to the end of his cord,
With which environment encumbers him,
To aid the fallen of mankind, is lord
Superior to him whose law, is whim;
Whose hope, is pedigree; whose God, is Caste,
Though his grace were crowned with dominions vast.


They sat them then upon a mossy stone,
Where glances of the eye could sweep the plain,
And Youth gave ear to him, who did explain,
The strife of those who before had gone,
To fame and glory, or oblivion:
How small the glory and how great the pain,
Of those who strive for opulency's vain
Pomp and show; how little their deeds atone,
The evil done, the paupers they have made
Of happy childhood and decrepid age,
That lucre might prance 'neath a gay cockade:
Tyranny have its minions, pomp its page
And avaricious misers hoard the coin,
They from the innocent and just purloin.


While thus their light and happy discourse ran,
A hag came riding in a peddler's cart,
Drawn by a filly to the public mart.
The hag was old, the filly for a clan
Of robers fit, or bold equestrian;
A horse she needed that was sure in start,
And not a filly that would jump and dart,
And prance and gallop in a trading van:
And sure there came a man with steed for trade,
That sturdy was, road-proof and bridle wise;
Ne'er had he shied and ne'er a balk had made.
Her nag she swapped with him; and what surprise:
The steed she gst had lost its eyes, its speed
Was ox-like and its urgent want was feed.


The villain mounted, on the filly fled,
Nor looked he back, nor cared how ill her luck,
Nor in the mire how fast the hag was stuck,
Who o'er her filly's loss, lamenting, said,
'I wish the filly and the rogue were dead,'
Then fell to nagging at the maimed old buck,
Till she forgot and in her anger struck
Him a blow so hard, on his dense old head,
He fell the carcass of a quadruped;
And then she journeyed o'er the course unknown,
Morose, unpitted and disquieted,
With nothing on earth she could call her own,
Brought from the harvesting of human strife
But steedless apple cart and such is life.


As was the hag with filly, steed and cart,
So is it with whoever journeys here,
Whatever his endeavor, hope or fear,
In the contest at arms, the toils of art
Or barter and trade in the world's great mart;
In heart affairs, be it laughter and cheer,
Or what is better still, staunching a tear
A-drip from rupture in a stranded heart,
No matter which, experience alone
Is the supreme tutor of human thought;
With all the learning of the schools one's own,
Still he's a simpleton, who has not caught
The inspiration which contact brings,
To him who rubs elbows with serfs and kings.


On youth the sire looked wistfully and smiled,
Wondering whence his wisdom came and he,
But yesterday a child, had grown to be
Pensived souled; and, sore of waywardness, whiled
Away the time; his mind, now unbeguiled,
At issue on the void; 'twix bound and free;
Why all who labor should not earn the fee
Of freemen; and, toiling, be undefiled
By odium, caste and greed, miscalled fate,
By men who feed their maws upon the hard
Earned wage of honest toil; degenerate
And fallen must he be who the award
Of serfdom does not spurn, though wide gaped hell
Him to coerce and he with Satan fell.


Standing upon an eminence, they saw
As far beyond as mortal eye could scan,
Upon a plain, a myriad host that ran,
To and fro, its confines, to hum and haw,
And hesitate 'twix anarchy and law;
The vile negation fixed on the hide of man,
The vagaries of parties, sex and clan,
Where despotism's power sways to awe
The weaker man, by terror into thrall;
'It ever has and ever will be so,'
Said he to Youth, 'If I aright recall,
Man is the prey of man the wide world o'er
Since Cain hid Able in the sand and fled
The stark, cold visage of a brother dead.


They now were well advanced upon the way,
Some forty leagues or more, and youth would fain
Of his companion's further discourse gain
Intelligence about the course, which lay
Before them still, a theatre where play
The great and petty lords of earth, with vain
Hope; there humanity, an ebbless main,
Floods on, and on, 'Forever and a day,'
The meed of its pursuit the same old toys,
Wealth, greed and power; or the tyrant's stroke
That makes of weaklings slaves, or them destroys;
Let him whose soul is weak accept the yoke,
Unhinge the knee and kiss the hand that smites,
And grope the vassal shorn of human rights.


But he who feels his soul within him yearn
To fly his thrall, and flying, sound alarm,
That laggards cow'ring may have never calm;
And he who'd vassals into freemen turn,
Dethrone a tyrant and his minions spurn,
Should shield his soul against the dread of harm;
Should agitate the mass, direct the storm,
Until the hearts of patriots should burn,
Struck by the thunderbolt of righteous cause.
Youth, put thou thy frivolities aside,
Learn of Divinity's eternal laws,
That there's no question what the fates decide;
Though ne'er so frail the bark, nor rough the sea,
The fiat is, sail on or cease to be.


Far out upon the plain the youth could see
An old cathedral lift its burnished spire,
Agleam into the sky. 'Aye tell me sire,
The story of yon pile of masonry?'
He shook his hoary locks and sighed, 'Ah me:'
The record there's a tale of tense desire,
There neither truth, nor faith nor hope aspire
Longer to light man to his destiny;
Full many and many an age has flown,
So run the annals of that pile of stone,
Since man for solace to its pews has gone,
With faith in creed and tenets there; 'tis known
The creeds are spurned, and yet some feign belief
While in their conscience they but malice sheath.


But there in olden time the curfew rung
Its calm and rythmic melody, and there
A-weary did the peasant kneel in prayer;
And there the priesthood in its glory rung
The heart of might, and greed and wealth, and sung
Te-Deum airs, kings and vassals together there
With woman beautiful, glorious, fair,
Repaired, the penitential host among,
To the confessional; 'twas the vica's reign;
And well his highness did the sceptre wield.
Between the mighty and the poor, the fane,
Then arbiter of empire, hung a shield;
For whoever worshipped there, great or small,
Lost both, his caste distinction and his thrall


By its grace judges at their trials swore,
And Justice did at its behest declare,
'Betwixt a shadow and a shade,' the tare
Of Equiiy and Law, and further more
'Tis said, its chalice, pews and altars bore
The majesty of fate; and glory there
Beamed like a diadem in beauty's hair;
And to humanity the wide world o'er
The simple tenets of the place have been,
So all tradition and the records tell,
That liberty and life is the right of man;
Except when some infamous fiend of hell,
Escaping thence, has marred the common good
Of our own God-created brotherhood.


And there, in that majestic pile, was taught,
That our Creator, the eternal God,
Did make us from some simple bit of sod,
Regarding not the clay in which he wrought,
Whether it was muck of chaos, or ought
Else that then was inanimate, 'twas clod
Whicn took its being from Jehovah's nod
And moved a living soul; in its own thought
The first progenitor of human kind;
That mother, Eve, 'Creations master-piece,'
Did from his fancy spring endowed with mind,
And with the glory of the world's increase
So charged, that all the races of the earth
Their lineage doth reckon from her birth.


Forgetting he is one of transcient things,
Blind to his commonage and mystic love
Which placed him in his order nich above
The worn, vain man, grown haughty, proud, now springs
A petty god, and, gorged with pillage, sings
Of his own prowess, until the fleet wing'd dove
Of peace flies this unhappy vale, to move
Henceforth and forever on restless wings,
Contemned by man: he who is himself the law
Dethrones justice, and doth the virtues spurn;
And that he might some humbler brother awe
Into his service, oft fiend-like, doth burn
Some fellow mortal at the stake, and by
Caste makes the bench, as the shrine his ally.


For, so I take it, none will dare deny,
That there's a cism, as well as caste in church;
The pew and pulpit have a sep'rate perch.
They like dissension, and my, my, my!
When it comes to a fellow man, how they do lurch
And on the tangent fly, squirm o'er and smirch
Beatitude with vile hypocricy;
And of self-righteousness together vie
In feigning love to God: yet spurn the test,
Which says you love not him you've never seen,
While spurning fellow mortals from your breast;
It's in the ethics of the Nazarene,
They come the surest to the mercy seat,
Who !ove the people whom they daily meet.


The passion service of our Lord no more
Reminds men now that He will come again,
Nor does it show the anguish, care and pain
Of Him whose sacred heart for mortals bore
The sin accumulations of the sore,
Deluded wanderers from Eden's reign,
Who prostitute the sacraments with vain
Display; they who around the altar soar
In fashion's garb, love not the mystic shrine;
They congregate and babble there, not prayer,
But quibs of fashion while they sip the wine,
And claim God's mercy, since they there repair;
While sitting on the altar, cheek-by-jowl,
Devil and parson barter human soul.


And there hard by the old cathedral stands,
An edifice of grandeur with a dome;
Tell me what ruler, sire, made that his home;
What of his passions, prowess, tenures, lands;
What people came and went at his commands,
In the olden times, ere he had passed to loam?
Ah, youte! Your query bids my mem'ry roam
Across a dreary waste of shifting sands;
A mighty people they, who tribute paid
The lord of yon old castle in its prime;
But he, as well as they, have long since laid
His glory by with th' annals of his time,
Which show that he, of old, was held to be
A shield for high and low, for bond and free.


From time immemorial, the ruler there
Was king, and lord and vassal too; and high
From his exalted state he cast the die
That wrecked a throne, or made a crown; still where
A tyrant would have murdered, he heard prayer,
And then he'd put the sceptre's terror by
And clemency, its brighter glory, try
On penitent souls; yet withal, the fair,
The mean, the low, the opulent and grand -
Whoever stood before him, king or serf,
No matter which, nor what his native land,
His prime anatomy he held but earth,
With all the rank and file of human kind,
With him, man's fitness came from upright mind.


And Themis was his patron, and his reign
O'er all man's civic glory was sublime;
The soul of virtue and the ban of crime,
He neither winked at felony, nor feign'd
Friendship to vassals while he gave them pain;
He took them as they came, from time to time,
Upon the records of their manhood's prime;
To fix a right 'twix man and man, he fain
Would storm a citidel, or spurn a crown;
Unknown to quibbles and to factions blind,
Caste was a fiction he could never own;
The soul of equity by him defined,
Excluded favor, pedigree and blood,
As blights destructive of the public good.


Because of his imperial bent of mind,
His erudition and his lofty poise,
Aversion to vain glory's pompous noise;
And the ease with which he did of logic find,
The motive of an act and hope combined;
Just what was sterling worth, and what alloys,
That filled the measure of their carnal joys,
Men called him stern, inexorable and blind:
But Justice was his name, the law his shield,
And, say the legends of his time and age,
So long as Justice did the sceptre wield,
Men felt no terrors of a tyrant's rage;
But on a fatal day for them, bold caste
Did Themis rape and Justice strayed outcast.


Why further scan the annals of the vile,
Since riddle seems to mystify the light;
And often crime is reckoned to be right,
When innocense it plunders to defile:
And Youth, the prey of vanity and guile,
Must die and age live on: by day, by night,
Harrassing soul till time and wear unplight
The heart? Why not let weary spirit file
Into the vista of the years that make
Eternity? Why not the curtains fall,
Since youth is gone and whither none can break
Intelligence, nor ever him recall?
For he comes not back when he and the sage
Jaunt down two score years of their pilgrimage.


But hear his low soliloquy you may,
'Far, far away, in the land of dream and hope,
What leisure Time did gently take; to mope
And play the truant seemed his wont, delay
His virtue was, minority a stay
With which he vexed wild youth, a fetter rope
That held captive, so ne'er a sunbeam oped
The morn, but Time would dally it away,
So it seemed; but at forty, when I fain
Would rest, Time flew, fleet as a beam of light;
Then 'twas the flight of Time did give me pain,
How pitiless is Time! When I gloried in flight,
He bade me climb; now, old, lame and blind,
He bids me pace it with the rushing wind.


'Seeking repose, I slept, awoke and found
I'd fifty summers gone, gone like a dream,
Ah me! how brief, how silently they teem;
The years at fifty, winged years, that wound
The pages of youth's blotted scroll and bound
It to inertia, whence my foe, supreme
Nemesis comes, chanting a doleful theme,
The advent of Fate, and bids me with her sound
The requiem of all my hopes, or find
Glory in reminiscences of things
That were: but now, plumeless and bare, behind
Me lie the broken pinions of Fancy's wings
Where memory journeys in her pensive mood
To sit upon the tomb of youth and brood.'