The overbending boughs between,
I glide, as in a fairy glade,
Till the sweet summer day is made
A melody of summer green.
The meadows all are clothed with light,
As with a garment, and the heat
Swims dreamful where the grass is dight
With ox-eye daisies and the white
Of lady’s smock and meadow-sweet.
And clear-cut in the quiet air
Move large brown outlines of the cows,
That nose Earth’s verdure fresh and fair
And scatter far its perfume where
With peaceful onward push they browse.
Beside the brink the swift stream lags,
And spreads its liquid arms to cool
The golden-flowered phalanx of flags
Whereby the water-wagtail wags
Its mirrored head in many a pool.
And here a swallow lightly skims
Or strikes the broad flood, breast to breast,
And there in shady hollow swims
The lazy roach between wet rims
Of water-lilies, where they rest.
Here by an overhanging bank
The sunlit soft transparent wave
Reveals a myriad lives that prank
In giddy dance within the dank
Deep water-world which is their grave;
And there a wild rose overblown
Showers red rain on the shining way,
And the fair moving fields are sown
With countless blossoms random-thrown
And gliding downwards with the day;
And here and there a willow dips
And dallies with the dimpling plain,
But evermore the river slips
Onward--as from a maiden’s lips
Some low melodious refrain.
And with a soft and rippling sound
The little bark fleets onward too,
By bushy brake and meadow-bound,
The swimming swirling curves around,
Till in a slumbrous swoon the view
Slides swiftly shifting, and the shades
Grow longer, and the evening light
Dies, and the sunset splendour fades
Slowly against the stars of night.
CAMBRIDGE, 1869.
THE ARTIST TO HIS LADY
I put my hands together, palm to palm,
And say: Take these; and, whereso’er thou wilt
Go,--I will follow. For indeed I have
No other life than this--to follow Thee.
The lady of my love is very fair;
Often when morning rose above the rain
She waved her white hand at the window-pane,
And passed and mounted through the fields of air.
I never saw her face or felt her smile,
She seemed to pine among the haunts of men;
Till at the last I left my city den,
And followed in her footsteps for a while.
She led me where the light shines freely down,
She set me by the river-fringes green,
And turned herself, and in her face, I ween,
The glories of all worlds to me were shown.
Her marble front is not of mortal mould,
Her look is of the lands which are not seen,
Broad is her brow, somewhat austere her mien,
Yet magical her beauty to behold.
For all the friendless way hedged with offence,
For all the hours forsaken of her face,
Now to behold in peace her peerless grace
Is and remains my perfect recompense.
CAMBRIDGE, 1871.
APHRODITE
I
Once, when as ever since the world began,
Dawn touched the silver level of the sea,
And like a golden shield of growing span
Crept on the land of twilight stealthily;
The Sun, yet sunk below his eastern lea,
Whence all the heavenly limits he could mark,
As Perseus through Medusa’s locks, in glee
Shot all his shining fingers through the Dark,
And once more laid the monster motionless and stark.
II
In that day for the inhabitants of Earth
And Heaven, moving in darkness heretofore,
A vision of high beauty came to birth
Amid the foam of Ocean’s eastern shore:
Such as the Gods, who tread their golden floor,
And mortals, dwellers in the orange grove
Domed with aerial blue, in all their lore
Feigned not in earth below or sky above,
Yet, seeing, made the queen and regent of their love.
III
For while the waves danced onward o’er the deep,
As at the first day bright and bluely clear,
And morning mounting up the saffron steep
In opaline pure splendour did appear
Pavilioning with flame the ocean-sphere,
A mist shot upward from the shining main,
A deep blush brightened through it, like a tear
That trembles on a rosebud after rain
And glows with heightened hue on what it cannot stain.
IV
One cloud-like moment in the air it hung;
And then the Sun, in eastern state confest,
Great level arms along the ocean flung,
Giving to each swart wave a golden crest,
And let one finger on the foambell rest,
Which like a hollow fretted crystalline
Of some rich secret rudely dispossessed,
Sundered and parted in the bright sunshine,
Showing the Foamborn in her beauty made divine.
V
A sunbow bent above her for a sign,
The spray embowered her in brilliant rain,
Her rosy feet upon the hyaline
Danced lightly like rose-petals o’er a plain;
Heaven was her canopy, a lofty fane
For incense and for music and high mirth,
Her laughing eyes, turned sunward, did detain
As in a mirror, all the smiles of Earth
Made happier because of beauty’s perfect birth.
VI
With one hand half uplifted did she hold
Her fair locks from her in a shining band,
As if to match the sunlight with their gold
Glittering with ocean-dew; the other hand
Sustained a robe sea-woven of glaucous strand,
Which veiled her limbs as softly as the moon
Glimmers where dawn-illumined mountains stand
Rosy in snow, or as in leafy June
The glowing foliage holds yet hides the hot midnoon.
VII
And where she stood the waves on every side
Fell from her into many a hollow space
And fair concavity, as though they tried
To keep the impress of her rounded grace
In inverse beauty; like a crystal case,
Broken to free some glory of art, they lay,
But shifting ever as to catch a trace
Of that fair model, till in fair dismay
They spread and died upon the distance far away.
VIII
For with divine consent from arm to arm,
From breast to brow, the lines of beauty run
And shift and flow with ever-changing charm
Which nothing can detain beneath the sun;
And like a silver fount that seems to shun
Even momentary rest, but ever flows
In wasteful beauty till the day is done,
Lovely in loss, since loveless in repose,
So rich in love’s regret fair Aphrodite rose.
IX
And Neptune’s children from the emerald gloom
Of ocean caverns, in a boisterous pack
Played round about her path of roseate bloom--
Sea-nymph and Triton in a foamy track,
With winds and water-sprites and cloudy rack
Of morning, and the mountains seen afar--
Orbed in one onward course which grew not slack
Till Venus, mounting on her dove-drawn car,
Went heavenward through the blue vault like a glistening star.
X
Therefore when Gorgon-headed Night was gone--
In labyrinthine marble calm and dread
Unearthly glitter, death to look upon--
Beauty arose to birth, and so was wed
To every dawn-lit dell and mountain-head
And dream of man; wherewith in flowing guise
Unto the heavenly lands she lightly sped,
To be Earth’s lovely envoy in the skies
And chosen Cynosure of Gods’ and mortals’ eyes.
CAPRI, 1873.
SCHRECKHORN
Upward all day we toiled athwart the rain,
Henry and I, through Alpine pastures green
And great firwoods that overhung the vale
Far spread below; but ever, as evening fell,
Day’s cloudy curtain parted, and the mists
Thinned more and more, and fled among the hills,
Or dropped beneath, or clung in silver threads
To tresses of dim forest; and we saw
A clear blue arch of space spanned high above,
And, burning behind the utmost mountain edge,
Gold altar-glories of the stricken sun.
And high amid the snows we found a crag,
Hung darkly on that argent slope, within
Stamped hollow as by rage of Titan foot;
And there we lit the flame, and made ourselves
Good cheer, while round us dreamed a silent world.
But ere we slept, he, my beloved, arose
And lightly left our firelit cave and stood
Night-circled on a jutting rock beyond;
And with the setting stars about his head
And at his feet that purple vale profound,
He sang the song he sings me evermore.
He sang to watchful heaven and weary earth,
To glittering peak and star and crescent moon,
And high Love, and the loveworn Heart of all.
And all the vales were filled with melody,
And o’er the wide wide night and clear profound,
And over the blank snows and barren crags,
His song came floating back unto his feet:
Unto his feet, and deep into my heart,
There as I lay by the fire and saw him stand,
Saw him there in the night, and see him now,
Now, and for ever.
For he came not back.
At morning dawn, when earth was dashed with light,
Beside the golden summit he slipped and fell,
And slid, and passed to his own home beyond.
_January_, 1870.
THE VEILED ISIS
Ἐγὼ εἰμὶ πᾶν τὸ γεγονὸς καὶ ὂν καὶ ἐσόμενον
καὶ τὸν ἐμὸν πέπλον οὐδείς πω θνητὸς ἀπεκάλυψε.
Now know I that the white-winged hours of heaven
’Twixt me and thee in endless retinue,
Each after each, shall pass; nor ever pause
To lift the least light corner of thy veil,
Or grant thine eyes to mine. O hidden One,
Supreme-set Mother of all mystery,
And myriad-named of men, now know I well
Thou dost endure us but a moment’s span
Upon thy heaving bosom to behold
The wonder of thy movement, at thy grace
To fall and worship--ay, we know not what!
And then, or ever thou hast heard, to fall
And pass, remembering ourselves and thee
No more. O strange, O unassailable,
Thou that with myriad bright play of eyes
Provokest our desire, thy seamless robe,
Set close about for our bewilderment,
Folds thee in perfect proof. For I have toiled
And tarried long by thy familiar ways,
Have known thee going out and coming in,
And watched thy daily wont; have felt the flame
Flash from thy face almost to scathe mine eyes,
And heard at night thy breath about my ears
Beat, and pass quickly by; yea, I have tracked
Thy fingers in and out through woven clouds,
And passionless ebb and flow of waves and streams,
And rockings of the air, only to know
The weft is woven without any flaw
From flight of stars to atoms: rent is none,
No gap, no visionary gleam, and Thou
Art hid for ever.
Therefore now, once more,
I see the Spring descend upon the Earth--
The new life quivering upwards into light;
I see the plaited green on plant and tree
Slide from the soil and break the knotted bark;
The grey elm quickens with a strange delight;
The golden chestnut-buds against the blue
Gleam like a thousand lamps; and melody
Thrills through the woodland air. O now once more
The primal splendour of the sun returns
With a most welcome triumph. Thorn and may
Stand white with bridal blossom unto him;
The ground is cloven and the sleeping flowers
Have heard and known their lord: through wood and dell
Yellow primroses leap and peer to heaven--
He rideth by begirt with azure wings--
And bloom and beauty multitudinous
Break on his path. The violet stands by
Glad in her grassy covert. In the meads
Like angel hosts white daisies wave their wings,
And as he passes bend like one and rise,
And, while he fires with light the Western lands,
Close their bright eyes and blush for very joy.
Once more o’er vale and mountain do I hear
The voice of Spring’s sweet trouble: nightingales
And thrushes in the thicket numberless
Tremble to utter on the quiet air
The mystery of eve; where all night Earth,
Orbed in her dreams of star-related life,
Floats in a flood of moonlight and of dew.
Once more I see it all, and, seeing, know
The infinite of beauty--how thy world
Is charactered with wisdom: each winged sense
Faints with the weight of wonder, till I walk
Like one enchanted to a magic sound,
A king whose eyes are feasted with a play
Of endless scenic change, a child to whom
Earth has no bounds for joy.
And yet, ah! yet,
Deeper than all, and deeper than my joy,
Thou whom I know, nor yet can ever see,
Thou, mother Isis, mother over all,
Thou radiant life and one Reality,
Vanishest for ever: like the Northern beam
Decking the far-off mountains, all untouched,
Unheard, inviolable, Thou movest on
In the great silence of our hearts, through leaf
And bud and fairy bloom fleeting for aye
Wherever we are not. And though our spirits
Burst through their woven chambers till the heart
Ache for the stress of passion; though our dreams
Be girt about with one dull cloud of death
For hope that cannot pierce; yea, though our eyes
For gazing vainly on thy vanishings
Waste away in their orbits; yet at last
We fall, our arms stretched outward on the earth
And features folded in the clay-cold ground,
Nor e’er behold thee face to face at all.
ROME, 1873.
THE TIDE
Six hours it voiceless sank along the shore
In the soft cloud-girt eve; turned in its bed,
And dreamed of other lands. But when the night
Grew to its stillest, and none knew thereof,
There crept across the world a wind-like sigh--
Sweet breath of waking lips--that rose, and passed,
And died along the night, and rose again
Ineffable. And Ocean knew once more
Her crescent tide-mark with its golden range
Of fretted sands and shell-impearlèd weeds,
And once more, joyous, filled with rolling waves
Her creeks and inland waterways; then paused,
And, wondering at herself, sank back to rest,
And dreamed again the dream that has no end.
_January_, 1870.
SUMMER LIGHTNING
Like a dawn the distant lightning,
Fitful, shadow-crowned,
O’er the twilit ocean brightening
Breaks without a sound.
Softly-fair the clouds are riven
Crimsoning in bliss,
As the heights and depths of heaven
Open to its kiss.
Calm in western lake-like splendour
Floats the star of eve:
All hues opaline and tender
Round about it weave;
And that other crystal ocean
Holds its image clear,
Like a smile with soft emotion
Shining through a tear.
Faintly rings a silver laughter
As the ripples die,
And the rising stars thereafter
Answer, and their cry,
As of love to passion risen,
Passes o’er the strand
From Night’s gloomy eastern prison
To the golden land
Where flushed Eve with shining fingers
For an instant keeps
Back the curtained dark, and lingers,
Lovely, ere she sleeps.
So upon the beachy margent
Love a moment stands,
Takes the ocean and the argent
Starlight on the sands;
Takes the sunset slowly whitening
From its golden bloom,
Takes the cloud-girt summer lightning
And the distant gloom;
Orbs them all from world-mutation,
Whole and unforgot,
Into his divine creation
Of immortal thought;
Where, like essences supernal,
They nor pass nor range,
Lifted high in Love’s eternal
O’er eternal change.
NAPLES, 1873.
IN THE GRASS
BY A MONAD (OF LEIBNITZ)
Here in the grass they laid me long ago,
Far from the tumult and the tears of men,
Soft in the summer grass, forlorn and low--
The face of all the world is changed since then.
Here, on my back and scarce beneath the turf,
To lie and lie for many a summer day,
Hearing the faint far ocean-sweeping surf,
Seeing the blue midnoon and twilight grey.
Yea, though you seek and find me not at all
In these wide meadows and the shoreward plain,
Though in the ground and tangled grasses tall
No vestige of my mortal part remain.
Yet, peradventure, where you plant your heel
And heedless start the lizard on the sand,
I am, and all day watch wild duck and teal
Fly northward in a blue-enamelled band.
Here, void of will, of action unaware,
And dwindled to a mere perceptive point,
Changeless I watch the light divide the air
And glitter on each reedy knot and joint.
Changeless I watch the changes of the sky,
Its liquid blue, its motionless light clouds,--
A solitary seagull sailing by,
A butterfly that him from sight enshrouds.
Now midway-down a thin mist thunder-driven
Moves on the air-built battlements beyond;
Still is the land, until the heights of heaven
Burst and break backward, detonant with sound.
And on the earth fire and a flood are spilled,
The air is no more sultry, but the wind
Drives forward in the grass. The moor-fowl, chilled,
Huddle and crouch in hollows water-lined.
Then, all night long, grey spectres of the dark
Fly onward overhead in strange disguise,
With shriekings of the wind, and weird blue spark
Lighting their myriad white hail-like eyes.
But in the morning with a song the land
Resumes the primal harmony of dawn;
A lark the latest of its tuneful band,
Into the heart of Paradise is drawn
To sing that sweet and slender hymn that I
Have heard so many ages ever new,
Never the same, yet, as the world goes by,
The same hymn steeped in sunlight and in dew.
And sometimes in the reeds a feathered thing
Will shyly peer about, as though it sought
Some old forgotten love of kindred wing
Amid the grass with last year’s dead leaves fraught.
Sometimes a mouse will move, or spider thread
His amber beads betwixt the sky and me,
Sometimes a frozen swallow will fall dead,
Sometimes the southern winds will bring a bee.
Or sometimes in the later autumn days
A red-fanged rough retriever will come nigh,
Threading the scent all through that reedy maze,
And anxious, earnest, panting, pass me by.
But oftenest the world is very still;
A light breeze o’er the land will break and shiver
With musical low melancholy thrill
Among the grasses and the reeds for ever.
I ask no more. The liquid summer light
About this poplar, when its leaves are green,
The change, when glitteringly bare and white
Its branches on the wintry blue are seen.
All are but changes of delight to me,
In each I lose myself, and live, and die,
And rise upon the next with equal glee,
Like one who feasts for ever with his eye.
I ask no more. The slender drooping grace
Of stem and blade seen thus obliquely clear
Suffice me while the moments interlace
To minutes and the minutes to a year.
The centuries soon pass, and, while I live,
The world, which without me were but a dream,
Its changing image to my mind shall give,--
One image and one aspect of its scheme.
1873.
THE WORLD-SPIRIT
Like soundless summer lightning seen afar,
A halo o’er the grave of all mankind,
O undefinèd dream-embosomed star,
O charm of human love and sorrow twined:
Far, far away beyond the world’s bright streams,
Over the ruined spaces of the lands,
Thy beauty, floating slowly, ever seems
To shine most glorious; then from out our hands
To fade and vanish, evermore to be
Our sorrow, our sweet longing sadly borne,
Our incommunicable mystery
Shrined in the soul’s long night before the morn.
Ah! in the far fled days, how fair the sun
Fell sloping o’er the green flax by the Nile,
Kissed the slow water’s breast, and glancing shone
Where laboured men and maidens, with a smile
Cheating the laggard hours; o’er them the doves
Sailed high in evening blue; the river-wheel
Sang, and was still; and lamps of many loves
Were lit in hearts, long dead to woe or weal.
And, where a shady headland cleaves the light
That like a silver swan floats o’er the deep
Dark purple-stained Ægean, oft the height
Felt from of old some poet-soul upleap,
As in the womb a child before its birth,
Foreboding higher life. Of old, as now,
Smiling the calm sea slept, and woke with mirth
To kiss the strand, and slept again below.
So, without end, o’er Athens’ god-crowned steep
Or round the shattered bases of great Rome,
Fleeting and passing, as in dreamful sleep,
The shadow-peopled ages go and come:
Sounds of a far-awakened multitude,
With cry of countless voices intertwined,
Harsh strife and stormy roar of battle rude,
Labour and peaceful arts and growth of mind.
And yet, o’er all, the One through many seen,
The phantom Presence moving without fail,
Sweet sense of closelinked life and passion keen
As of the grass waving before the gale.
What art Thou, O that wast and art to be?
Ye forms that once through shady forest-glade
Or golden light-flood wandered lovingly,
What are ye? Nay, though all the past do fade
Ye are not therefore perished, ye whom erst
The eternal Spirit struck with quick desire,
And led and beckoned onward till the first
Slow spark of life became a flaming fire.
Ye are not therefore perished: for behold
To-day ye move about us, and the same
Dark murmur of the past is forward rolled
Another age, and grows with louder fame
Unto the morrow: newer ways are ours,
New thoughts, new fancies, and we deem our lives
New-fashioned in a mould of vaster powers;
But as of old with flesh the spirit strives,
And we but head the strife. Soon shall the song
That rolls all down the ages blend its voice
With our weak utterance and make us strong;
That we, borne forward still, may still rejoice
Fronting the wave of change. Thou who alone
Changeless remainest, O most mighty Soul,
Hear us before we vanish! O make known
Thyself in us, us in thy living whole.
TO A FRIEND
Fair friend, of the sweet hours that are no more,
Canst thou not charm from chambers of the Past
Those happy days of old, the summer wore
Like roses in her emerald zone set fast?
The dawn returns o’er ocean-meadows blue,
And still the moon in ancient splendour glows;
Alas, the mortal mind no magic knows
To render back the joys that once it knew.
Ah me! that day we sat, two souls in one,
Couched in a rocky vale, the summer hours,
And heard in trance the murmurous waters run,
And saw the sunbeam sleep amid the flowers.
A mighty boulder, cloven from the steep,
Cast on the meadow-green its silent shade,
Where we our pleasant rest together made
Till day dipped downwards on the fields of sleep.
From noon till eve the mountain shadows wheeled
And slid from slope to slope and cleft the air,
The hollow vale with laughing light was filled,
Like sunny wine that brims a flagon fair.
The barren crags gleamed moist with heavenly dew,
Forthstreaming from a thousand rills of snow
And dripping dark through mountain halls below
Or leaping with the cataract into view.
The clouds rode overhead, as in a dream,
Piled high in shifting splendour grandly calm,
Until, by magic moved, on us did seem
To fall delicious sleep, like some sweet balm
That steeps the soul in memories divine;
And Fancy, soaring high on wings of Love,
Held revel in the heaven of hope above,
Where dawned the daystar of my life and thine.
So were the happy hours that were; but now
Only sad echoes of sweet voices heard--
Visions that flit along the rugged brow
Of that broad-featured past: like some swift bird
That touching slowly stirs a sleeping flood,
And while its broad face brightens into smiles
Is past already westward many miles,
To where the red sun sinks in fire and blood.
So pass the years, and ever in the past
Old Nature smiles at us frail houseless things;
And if in love or in derision vast
Men scarcely know; alone thy memory brings
To me a hope that cannot fail: a calm
That spreads where else despair: for in thy soul
I see the mould of Nature’s mirrored whole--
One love, like thine, to shield mankind from harm.
1871.
BY THE MOUTH OF THE ARNO
Here, where the crawling river seaward sets,
And riverward the sea, about a land
Laid under heaven in lonely flats of sand
Saltblackened, where the sluggish water frets
Its margin till marsh-deltas interlace
In reedy desolation; on each hand
The long gray grasses shiver in their grace
Through sun and shadow, till salt winds deface,
Their wasted beauty; here--by such a strand--
Pale Shelley passed, and so his course did keep
To sail Death’s unexplored and open deep.
* * * * *
AS ROUND A LIGHTHOUSE
TO----
As round a lighthouse swept of sea and air
The waves plunge many fathom deep, and flow
Unresting o’er the rocky base below,
And glimmer shifting in the fitful glare;
So great unrest about thy heart doth go,
So deep a flood of turbulent despair.
Stand true, O tender heart and strong, stand true:
For I, who steer alone across the deep,
By thee, unknown of thee, my course must keep
O’er the foam-crested fields for ever new;
And thou, alone, unknowing, on the steep,
Must watch the waves with ruin all bestrew.
Not overnear to thee my course may run;
Yet pray I, somewhere on the bitter tide
Thy beam the shuddering night for me divide,
And show the heart-red splendour of thy sun
Reorient with delight upon the wide
Waters of gloomy death when life is done.
1871.
THE COMPLAINT OF JOB
CHAP. III
O perish the day I was born, and the night when my mother conceived;
Let that day be darkness, let God regard it no more from on high;
Let fear fright it back to the gloom, and let it no more be reprieved
From the shadowy challenge of death and clouds that about it lie.
O let it no more rejoice with the light-footed days of the year,
Let the pale moon know it no more, let it not be reckoned as one;
O curse it all ye that curse the day! let that night be dear
To them that pray to the Dragon that preys on the light of the Sun.
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: let it long for the day,
And know it not, nor behold the fragrant eyelids of morn,
Since it shut not the doors of the womb when my mother in travail lay,
Nor hid mine eyes from the dawning light of sorrow and scorn.