For there upon the shining plain a city radiantly lay, All coloured in the rising day, amid the snow a jewelled stain, And in her walls a spacious gate gave entrance to a varied stream Of folk that went incorporate like figures in a silent dream, And high above the roofs arose, more coloured for the hueless snows, The domes of churches, bronze and green, like peacocks in their painted sheen.
The merchant, with a trembling hand extended far, extended wide Against illusion’s fairyland, at length articulately cried: “Irkutsk! but twice a hundred miles remained of weary pilgrimage Before we hoped with happy smiles to reach our final anchorage.
But look again. That rosy tower that rises like a tulip straight Within the walls beside the gate, a balanced plume, a springing flower, And pointed with a lance-like spire of bronze, was fifty years ago --A boy, I saw it standing so,--demolished and destroyed by fire.”
And one, a venerable Kurd, took up again the fallen word: “I travelled both as boy and man between Irkutsk and Kurdistan, But never since my beard was grown saw I that inn beside the way Wherewith the Council made away, full fifty counted years aflown.”
They gazed upon the marvel long, the spectre city wonderful, Until the youth who made the song cried out, “We grow too fanciful. Irkutsk with roofs of coloured tiles lies distant twice a hundred miles, And this, a city of the shades, a rainbow of the echoing air, As fair as false, and false as fair, already into nothing fades.”
And like a bubble, like the mist that in the valley faintly swirls, Like orient sheen on sulky pearls, like hills remotely amethyst, Like colours on Phœnician glass, like plumage on the ‘fisher’s wing, Like music on the breath of spring, they saw the vision lift and pass, Till only white unbroken snow stretched out before the caravan, And the bewildered heart of man truth from delusion could not know. But all the long laborious train moved slowly on its course again Across the snow unbroken, white, and nursing each his private creed, The merchant his illusive greed, the camels their illusive spite.
LOTUS flowers clustering Round your feet in storeys laid, Splendid daughter of a King.
In a graven vase of Ming Peaches, apricots of jade, Lotus flowers clustering,