The Black Panther by John Hall Wheelock — Free Audiobook

1 01 - The Black Panther 0:55

2 02 - Night Has Its Fear 4:17

Night has its fear.

Night has its fear, as the slow dusk advances, and the day fades out in fire along the starry way, the ancient doubt draws near. Vague shapes of dread, soft owl or moth, And timid, twittering things move through the growing dark. On furtive wings the bat flits overhead. And in the house the death-watch ticks. The dust of time is stirred with timorous footfalls. In the night is heard the gnawing of the mouse. Through the old room what phantoms throng, what shapes that to and fro tremble, and lips that laughed here long ago come back into the gloom. A whip-poor-will, bleakly across the baleful country, cries from a blurred mouth, and from the west replies, Echo, and all is still. Now from her shell her body's prison, with the ancient doubt and terror-stricken, the scared soul looks out, asking, If all be well?

Great kings have been, poets and mighty prophets, shapes have cried about the world, or moved in mournful pride. And are no longer seen. From many lands their plaint was lifted, from how many ashore sorrows have wailed that are not any more. They sleep with folded hands. They have their day. Their cry is loud about the earth to come to the one end. The singing lips grow dumb always in the one way. Though they implore, brief is the plea, inflexible the fate. Silence has the last word, and then the great silence forevermore. Pondering these, the fretful spirit in bewilderment quickens with a vague doubt, and not content broods, and is ill at ease. Her being is thrown in so frail a pulse. Such fleeting breath bears up her dream across the gulf of death and the obscure abyss.

Always she hears the hurtling chariots of the hurrying blood. Her shuttling breath that is the solitude weaves the one south she wears. Now first the vast veil over heaven is rent, and bears the whole shining reality, whereat the soul sickens and is aghast. Darkness reveals the tragic truth. Her will sinks hopeless wings before the inexorable fact of things. Humbling the dread she feels. With the old awes confronted and the flaming mystery, she may not speak, but pondering suddenly grow silent and withdraws. She may not bear that sight. The spangled heavens from east to west stretch out too wide, the confines of her breast straining in wonder there. Upon what brow of awful imminence O thought that stuns, is laid that chaplet of a million suns, upon what forehead now?

Who was it wrought this universal glory all around, of glittering worlds for ever without bound? Great poet, what a thought! It is a word unutterable that is written there. The spirit gazing is one voiceless prayer, careless if it be heard. Her thoughts ascend, star beyond star, Height beyond aching height. Upward in adoration infinite, for ever without end. So shall it be. Till heaven yields her sceptre, till the throne of night be shaken, and the face be known beyond eternity. Till God divide and rend asunder the embroidered hymn of darkness. Till the starry diadem and crown be set aside.

3 03 - The Sorrowful Masquerade 1:19

4 04 - October Moonlight 1:26

5 05 - The Flesh And The Dream 0:32

6 06 - Vaudeville 1:27

7 07 - 1914 0:30

8 08 - The Beloved 1:50

9 09 - Proud Doom 0:45

10 10 - The Secret One 2:58

11 11 - The Undissuadable Austerity 0:32

12 12 - Blind Players 1:05

13 13 - Travail 1:06

14 14 - The Poet Tells Of His Love 1:47

15 15 - The Buried Dream 1:09

16 16 - Haunted Earth 1:26

17 17 - Long Ago 1:06

18 18 - Tchaikovsky: Fifth Symphony 1:09

19 19 - Mirror 1:12

20 20 - Plaint 1:04

21 21 - Andante 2:51

Andante by John Hall Wheelock. Read for LibriVox.org by Jackpot7.

The evening steals like an ocean around your playing, whose perfect tones move on the sombre deep. With a grave gesture and sigh into a sleep, George, where your hands along the piano string an intricate rhythm keep.

And all the room is starry with your dreaming. And limitless and vague. Oh, the white square of the window-pane shimmers behind you there, framing the street, where the first lights are gleaming, transfigured now and fair. Now, while the heaven of night grows vast above her, the soul from her lone dream has sure release. The tumult and the ancient struggles cease. The wars that beauty wages on her lover dwindle into a peace. When Schumann speaks so firmly and so sadly, and all the twilight rustles wave on wave, oh, at that smile his wondering spirit gave, what new smile in all things shines back so gladly, grown dignified and grave. The curtains by the window rise and flutter, the ornaments on the mantle row on row seem touched with the melancholy of long ago.

What is it the music dreams but cannot utter? Schumann, we know, we know. Ah, George, what shall be said to you who feel it? All the half-hope and passion unexpressed, when twilight heaves more gently in the breast. Ah, George, but you, when words would fain reveal it, smile and divine the rest. Oh, wrap me in Beethoven's storm and thunder, my baffled spirit with abated breath, Flutters upon the verge of life and death, and all my being, world along in wonder, dies between breath and breath. Let me endure within a single pulsing of the quick heart, in a storm of showering rain, of sound, all joy, all grief, each breath again, live through a life complete in one convulsing moment of rapturous pain.

Silence. The lamplight through the window streaming, falls on the listless keyboard, smooth and white. Remembered music dreams in the dull light, and you too, George, sit silently and dreaming, alone, into the night.

22 22 - The Dear Mystery 0:58

23 23 - In The Dark City 1:18

24 24 - Immensity 0:34

25 25 - Sea-Horizons 4:12

Sea Horizons by John Hall Wheelock. The sorrowful expanse from heaven to heaven, from zone to zone, from deep to height above, the mute arch of the everlasting heaven bends over me with your unwearied love. Inmeasurable, unutterable, and soundless. Wide as the east from the west, your love is wide. The unfathomable distances are boundless, infinite tenderness on every side. Against the dark strength of your huge endurance, my little being beats her baffled wings, lifts her shrill voice, and wound the calm assurance. And tenderness of your large evenings.

In the vast robes of your serene compassion, she hides her soiled and burning face of shame. Your solemn and inexorable passion lifts her blurred eyes to meet your glance of flame.

As bread that for my daily fare is broken, The eternal loveliness before me spread. Unutterable gesture, word unspoken, in the proud silences forever said.

The sun puts forth his strength, the reaches shimmer. With inarticulate rapture and the proud, waters are thrilled, the fields of ocean glimmer. With shifting light An overshadowing cloud.

Noon upon noon, and heaven takes up his station. Day follows night, and night succeeds today. Your infinite and lonely meditation sinks with the sunset down the starry way.

Veiled is the vast, the heaven of evening burning. Reveals on the large waters of the sea. Hopelessness, hopelessness, the patient yearning, and dumb caresses of the immensity.

What message have you left for me? What token? Of your lone love, whose laboring will has wrought? The firmament over my head, and spoken. Unto my nothingness your starry thought. Sorrowful is the mighty heart that reaches around this brief and scornful heart of mine, the dim curve of the melancholy beaches and vacancies along the lone sea line.

In the huge longing of the far sea spaces, the tremulous rim about the waters curled, Waits the eternal gentleness and traces his sad horizons round the fading world.

Cloud beyond cloud, the arch of heaven goes over. Steep beyond steep, the patient skies descend. The illimitable wastes and waves discover loneliness, loneliness without an end.

Inexorable compassion may I never reach the last verge and limits of your love.

Beyond me, still beyond me, melt forever, the eternal margins fading as I move.

26 26 - Of Day Came Night 1:50

27 27 - Pilgrim 0:52

28 28 - By The Gray Sea 1:25

29 29 - The Fish-Hawk 2:26

30 30 - Disdainful Beauty 1:02

31 31 - My Lonely One 2:03

32 32 - Wild Thought 0:37

33 33 - Journey’S End 0:51

34 34 - Belated Love 1:09

35 35 - A Leave-Taking 8:55

A leave taken by John Hall Wheelock. Well, I remember it, that night in May, that last sweet night in the old world long ago, the last air my departure, the dark room that brooded round us and the drowsy breath, out of the courtyard of the linden trees. Pungent and sad, only your hand I felt. Reach to me in the darkness, and the beat, all through its fingers of the unconscious blood. Your life at battle, in the silence told, immortally to mine its plaintive tale. And doom eternal, only your hand I felt. Reach to me in the darkness, yet it seemed, in your hand's touch. I touched your very self. Your very presence, changeable, careless, wild. But, oh, how poignant, sharp with all delight, and gracious with dear bounties to bestow.

How greatly granted! Drowsily, then at last. In the old way, you begged me for some legend, out of my boyhood's record, some romance. From the far world that bore me and my voice, in the sweet alien tongue, your mother tongue, moved through the darkness with a peace unfeigned. For a grave peace was on us, and the fear that thrilled the midnight fell away. The streets slumbered, save where, departing like a ghost's, faint footfalls down the farthest distant side. And dwindled out forever, so you slept.

Well, I remember it, that night in May, the sleep, the hushed awakenings, full of dread, from haunted mirrors of horror and disdain, from dreams of terror and the mad return, into the bounteous pity of two arms, the comfort and the kindness, oh, the return. Forever and forever, wild and sad, seraphic with all weariness and pain, and satiate with all love, as if to slake, in one abandoned all the desperate drought of the years to come. Upon my own I felt the wet salt quivering of your lips, and all your being fold me in, urgent to save. Urgent to hide the approaching loneliness. Our bitter portion, prismed in tears. The dusk swam round with dizzy color. The nightingales. Beauty's disdain above the war of things.

Beauty's high pity from her virgin heights. Our meeting hearts pierced with a single pong. Like a bright sword of sorrow through the breast, driven. And like a bruising sword withdrawn.

The sun arose. Fled were the nightingales, the love, the joy. And with him rose, at last, the relentless fear. Like a harsh face, never to be pushed back. Between your face and mine, till all the terror, the loneliness, the irrevocable fate, in the dim twilight hugged me. And a cry. Up from myself to yourself would have rent. My hesitant lips, in the great need to you, turned for the last compassion. But you slept. At peace you lay. Over you in the dawn, I leaned and knew what you truly were.

Then a great love, triumphing over sorrow, like the light. Clearing the west when sunset's wrath has waned. Before the risen stars, a mystery, welled up through me radiant, helpless where you lay, in the calm pose of sleep, and above time, our little passion, and the circumstance of temporal tumult, self to self we met, and sundered reverent. Faintest breath of flowers, stirred in the twilight fragrantly. And there, the pathos of our days together filled me with a new wonder. Flooding on me came a host of memories, as to one long dead, lifted beyond his living, till all seemed marvelous and immortal and benign.

And now the hour was come. Beside your quiet breast, I begged forgiveness for my many sins, done to you, though unwitting, all the hurt, in a swift prayer, and even for this last, to wake you to your sorrow and your lips. Forgive me, yes, in the silence. So I touched your lids with kisses, and you woke and wept. But brave to the end, with a heart-breaking bravery, gallant and gracious, dear with sacred eyes, you let me go. With a half-kiss we parted. Two. Along the city ways, already day's vehement tumult had begun. Through street and jostled alley, court and square, the tireless and eternal heart poured forth. Its my red humid faces, grave or glad, on the old chorus of toil, a choral hymn from the lips of life.

Each face a testimony of some prefiguring love. Oh, the delight, the incredible bounty and sustaining will of passionate longing peopling all the earth, and the joy of man and woman, the laughing boys, The milkman clanking along in his cart. And there, two bonneted old women, and there a thief, perhaps with a knight's booty sneaking home, yet solemn, all and sacred, with new eyes. I saw them then, and in each face I seemed, with a new soul to read the soul beneath, through love and pain and sorrow having passed. Into the breasts of all humanity. Through love and sorrow, yes, and for your sake, being human, all things human, touched to love. This heart of mine, made holy, and the thought, of the million other hearts beyond the dawn, the gladness and the sadness and the pain, came back upon me like a lifting music.

Beautiful. And most sorrowful, and divine.

Till a vast compassion, up through the springs of all my being welled, intarably, ah, even as to myself, unfaithful, the exuberant bounty stooped, with arms of pity so I longed to do, to lose myself at last in the great self, That beams upon the just and the unjust, carelessly shedding radiant light around, compassing finite hate with infinite love, with beauty, ugliness, and death with life. So through that street of pouring souls I passed, torn between grief and ecstasy, but none guessed the immortal secret that I bore, close at the fluttering heart, The fear. The joy. The very beat and memory in my blood. The exquisite sense and lingering pain of you.

36 36 - But Love -- 1:07

37 37 - Anne 1:04

38 38 - The Silence 0:50

39 39 - Exultation 1:56

40 40 - Song Of Songs 0:58

41 41 - Sorrowful Freedom 1:03

42 42 - Starless Morning 1:17

43 43 - Phantom 0:49

44 44 - Legend 1:37

45 45 - The Divine Fantasy 13:33

IV. THE DIVINE FANTASY, by John Hull Wheelock.

Brother, from what dim world of lonely light, Trembling on heaven's pinnacles to-night, Is lifted your sad face of love, While you stare upward toward me, Staring upward, too, At that faint flame which is your home, Between the leafy branches of these poplars seen, So hushed, so far. Perhaps tonight you scan your starry heaven for the star of man, high in the trellis of eternity and glittering arches, hon. Perhaps, like me, you too look up and wonder. Is it fair, that world of yours? Are there great cities there, populous millions, hearts that beat as these? Clear meadows and far mountains, shoreless seas. Shadows of moving armies, thrones that shake. Does the heart thrill for love there? Does it break?

Tell me, are there hushed gardens, quiet tombs? And mighty poets weaving at their looms the old dim wisdoms that outweary time? And saints and lifted saviors, and sublime faiths and high fortitudes beyond belief? All blotted out. By one small poplar leaf, in the light wind of languid summer stirred. Brother, what news out of the night? What word from the frontiers of mind beyond our ken? Of mysteries unimagined, yet of men? Compass'd by travail of your spirit? Oh, could you but reach to us? Could we but know across the imperturbable old dark Some answering glimmer of the ancient spark lifted? Some token, tangible to sense, of the indomitable intelligence that thrones on matter. Language visible, crying, Eternity, and all is well.

Brother, be of good cheer. We, too, have known. Not lonely moves, not utterly alone, your sad fraternity through the dark of God. But the Confederate legions are abroad. Life's flag advances on the starry way, and consciousness, still battling, still at bay, holds the bright forts against oblivion. What answering thrill would round the planet run? For we are one. All consciousness is one. Whatever form it wear, however dressed in gray or glamour, in whatever breast it lift its longing. Glimmering, it moves through the green wave. It stamps with startled hooves the upland pastures of the world, and soars in heaven with the eagle. On bright shores it basks a sunny body, or in dread lifts from the undergrowth a snaky head, and darts a flickering tongue.

It is most clear in the lark's throat. Among the grasses here that couch the ant, it turns a tiny eye around the darkness, scampers, and is shy in the scared rabbit. Through the murmuring air wheels with the beetle, and where heaven is bare, southward with the wild crane at summer's close. Hungry, an eternal pilgrim goes on quests implacable. And from the eyes of the poised panther gleam the cruelties of its stern need that roams the world, and rends with tooth or talon. And the hawk descends on the stunned squirrel. And the squirrel moans as the hawk strikes. Darkens the earth with bones of its own wreck, and hungering again, knows in its body the old spur. For when hunger the shadow cast by death draws near, life on her thousand thrones feels the one fear, and in the lion's roar at dusk is heard the unassuageable, insistent word of urgent being, clamorous to be.

Reeking and wrought upon, Eternally mingling and mixed, inextricably blent, victor and vanquished in one sacrament. Body with body, of delight and death, it moves in splendor, lifts the shuddering breath of the spent stag, and in the mind of man rebels against the miserable plan, flings its frail web of thought across the path of sons in heaven and in holy wrath, On blood of murdered brothers nourished, still thunders to all the world, thou shalt not kill. And the worm's death is in the sparrow's song. And I have seen it in the gnats that throng old shadowy force in tumultuous dance, or in the little measuring worm advance, inch by slow inch along the swaying stem of some exalted flower, or lift the hem of the frail butterfly's embroidered cloak, In gentle breathings that the sun did stroke, caressingly with fingers of his heat, or from the dog-yearn upward and entreat with eyes of adoration or of fear, the great god-man.

What message, master dear, from the dim heights beyond me where you are? In the mare's tremulous whinny, in the far lowing of cattle from the upland sward? Or wail of whippoorwills at twilight? Poured on pools of silence plaintively, or cry of the lone wolf beneath the glittering sky of soundless winter. I have heard the same splendour speak forth, and utter the one name of life, the dreadful, the magnificent. All afternoon the passion of heaven spent on earth its fiery fury in blind bright lightnings of dread, and laughters of delight down shuddering deeps of shaken thunder Where the delirious longing loosed its sorrowing hair of wind and shower and overshadowing cloud, across the beloved face in darkness bowed, or glimmering light revealed, and cried aloud for anger of utter ecstasy, and shed the wild love of the rushing rain that sped to the thrilled heart, consenting of the dim and rapturous earth that lifted up to him drowsed lips of thirsty flowers.

And the cup of every flower for joy was lifted up, and drank and swayed. So, wearied out at length, flagged the bright pulses, and the ebbing strength, with muttering of remembered thunders, passed down the large shores of evening. Till at last the exhausted heaven of twilight from afar shone washed of all her sorrows, and a star brooded above the fading storm, And saw the winnowed reaches deepening into awe of gradual darkness, and the fields that lay all drenched and wearied out at dusk of day, and the worn end of things, while far away the receding fury moaned. And now they lie in the same peace around me, and the sky holds up her stars. Now in the rain-drenched wood the tree-toed drinks the rain and finds its good.

And trills for joy. The sliding waters grieve quietly. Now the bat begins to weave with intricate motion on the cloudy loom of glamorous starlight mingled in gray gloom. His dipping flight among the darkened boughs and dreamy vistas, and the little mouse furtively hurries through the lane, his eye turned up in terror as the howl goes by. On softest feathers of silence overhead, Flits the dim shadow of the ancient dread, hooded and vague, the cruelty of his beak bent on old lustful mysteries. A squeak, a scuffle, beating of wings, and in the lane silence, and the old wrong is done again. That was heir-adam, the triumphant heart and the defeated, each one doomed to his part. They play it through, the old tragedy, Where one presence still wars, and still is warred upon, Slays, and is slain, While fiercely all around shakes the eternal love-song In shrill sound.

A grasshopper and cricket, Sleepless flow the immortal tides of longing to and fro On waves of music. Endless is the prayer of life to the beloved, Everywhere lifted in adoration. On dark shores beats the insistent passion That implores the one dear breast of pity or disdain, to be reborn, to be reborn again, nor perish wholly. The blind earth is thrilled as with vague rites accomplished, dreams fulfilled, marriage and mystic union. All along her brimming meadows rings the bridal song and chant ecstatic. That great heart of hers is touched now, The eternal longing stirs from hill to hollow, and hollow to clear hill, in many voices mingled, or the still ecstasy of the firefly that trails among the shadows where the starlight fails.

His body's burning love. Forever flows the dreadful drama to its stately close, an endless ending, the fierce carnival of death and passion, wherein each and all mix and are mingled, slaughter, blend, And pass each into other. The high poem that has no end and no beginning, that the one self in all living forms beneath the sun, and on all worlds around him and above, weaves on strands of hunger, death, and love. I see it all. I hear it all. And lie under my swaying poplars, and the sky is fretted with frail leaves. The mortal dream is in my heart. I hear the night-hawk scream, shatter the silver silences. I hear the owl's clear tremolo rise over-clear. The mouse's blood along his veins has made his love-note lovelier, and the night afraid of beauty's dreadful secret.

And I know soft shapes of stealth that in the darkness go, of furry lusts and nine hungers, small twittering things obscene, That flit or crawl in furtive secrecy, vague mouths, and blurred of the night creature or nocturnal bird, amorphous moth and batwing, and the earth with all her burrows, nooks and nests of birth, crowded in wreck of many a perished might, by the ebbed waters of life's fierce delight, washed up on shores of silence, spoiled and spurned altars where once the sacred fire burned. Forms flowing back into the formlessness. In a supreme embrace, a long caress, mixing their bodies with the mother-mold, and all the heaven of stars around me rolled, whose brooding eyes have stared so many an age upon this theatre of lust and rage.

Of death and adoration, and a breeze rustles the branches of the poplar-trees. Dear spark that shinest in the solitude, One consciousness that in the brotherhood of all earth's living creatures movest on the shaken ramparts of oblivion. Whose starry cry, across the darkness hurled, makes music in the silence of the world. Life whose sole splendor in red slaughter spills the blood of its own breast. In many wills wars on the one will, and in wrath or dread feeds on itself, and on itself being fed. Shines forth in song and color, gilds the dress of the green-fly, and pours its loveliness and rapture on the earth. In theaters of crowded congregations sits, nor stirs, watching itself, itself the spectacle, and builds the swallow's breast, and shapes the shell and all these mansions of its thought that are between the morning and the evening star, on earth, in heaven, or in the glimmering caves.

And grottoes of the world below the waves. Butchers the ox, and gladdened by his beat, and the young mother's downward smile is sweet. Or sated on his body, walks abroad in symphonies, and poems, and prayers to God. Sends, and has conscience, and repenting sins. And in the lowly patient spider spins its fragile web, and in these words of mine flings out its groping utterance, Line by line, across the intangible abyss of thought, with infinite passion, infinite patience wrought, dread loveliness. Be strong in me. Be strong to utter forth your meaning in my song.

46 46 - The Lion-House 1:05

queue_music Chapters 46