Through the greensward peeping,
Shall the soft lights start;
Laughing maids, unstaying,
Deeming it trick-playing,
High their robes upswaying,
O’er the lights shall dart;
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world’s burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems, to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade.
FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON
1821-1895
_746._ _At Her Window_
Beating Heart! we come again
Where my Love reposes:
This is Mabel’s window-pane;
These are Mabel’s roses.
Is she nested? Does she kneel
In the twilight stilly,
Lily clad from throat to heel,
She, my virgin Lily?
Soon the wan, the wistful stars,
Fading, will forsake her;
Elves of light, on beamy bars,
Whisper then, and wake her.
Let this friendly pebble plead
At her flowery grating;
If she hear me will she heed?
_Mabel, I am waiting._
Mabel will be deck’d anon,
Zoned in bride’s apparel;
Happy zone! O hark to yon
Passion-shaken carol!
Sing thy song, thou trancèd thrush,
Pipe thy best, thy clearest;--
Hush, her lattice moves, O hush--
_Dearest Mabel!--dearest ..._
MATTHEW ARNOLD
1822-1888
_747._ _The Forsaken Merman_
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.
Now my brothers call from the bay;
Now the great winds shoreward blow;
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way!
Call her once before you go.
Call once yet.
In a voice that she will know:
‘Margaret! Margaret!’
Children’s voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother’s ear;
Children’s voices, wild with pain.
Surely she will come again.
Call her once and come away.
This way, this way!
‘Mother dear, we cannot stay.’
The wild white horses foam and fret.
Margaret! Margaret!
Come, dear children, come away down.
Call no more.
One last look at the white-wall’d town,
And the little grey church on the windy shore.
Then come down.
She will not come though you call all day.
Come away, come away.
Children dear, was it yesterday
We heard the sweet bells over the bay?
In the caverns where we lay,
Through the surf and through the swell,
The far-off sound of a silver bell?
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam;
Where the salt weed sways in the stream;
Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail, and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye?
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?
Children dear, was it yesterday
(Call yet once) that she went away?
Once she sate with you and me,
On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sate on her knee.
She comb’d its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of the far-off bell.
She sigh’d, she look’d up through the clear green sea.
She said, ‘I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little grey church on the shore to-day.
’Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee.’
I said, ‘Go up, dear heart, through the waves.
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves.’
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
Children dear, was it yesterday?
Children dear, were we long alone?
‘The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.
Long prayers,’ I said, ‘in the world they say.
Come,’ I said, and we rose through the surf in the bay.
We went up the beach, by the sandy down
Where the sea-stocks bloom, to the white-wall’d town.
Through the narrow paved streets, where all was still,
To the little grey church on the windy hill.
From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers,
But we stood without in the cold-blowing airs.
We climb’d on the graves, on the stones worn with rains,
And we gazed up the aisle through the small leaded panes.
She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear:
‘Margaret, hist! come quick, we are here.
Dear heart,’ I said, ‘we are long alone.
The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.’
But, ah! she gave me never a look,
For her eyes were seal’d to the holy book.
Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more.
Come away, come down, call no more.
Down, down, down;
Down to the depths of the sea.
She sits at her wheel in the humming town,
Singing most joyfully.
Hark what she sings: ‘O joy, O joy,
For the humming street, and the child with its toy.
For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well.
For the wheel where I spun,
And the blessed light of the sun.’
And so she sings her fill,
Singing most joyfully,
Till the shuttle falls from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands still.
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand;
And over the sand at the sea;
And her eyes are set in a stare;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh
For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.
Come away, away, children.
Come children, come down.
The hoarse wind blows colder;
Lights shine in the town.
She will start from her slumber
When gusts shake the door;
She will hear the winds howling,
Will hear the waves roar.
We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,
A pavement of pearl.
Singing, ‘Here came a mortal,
But faithless was she:
And alone dwell for ever
The kings of the sea.’
But, children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow;
When clear falls the moonlight;
When spring-tides are low:
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starr’d with broom;
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanch’d sands a gloom:
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie;
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side--
And then come back down.
Singing, ‘There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she.
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.’
_748._ _The Song of Callicles_
Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame.
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame.
Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee.
But, where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea.
Where the moon-silver’d inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,
O speed, and rejoice!
On the sward at the cliff-top,
Lie strewn the white flocks;
On the cliff-side, the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.
In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lull’d by the rills,
Lie wrapt in their blankets,
Asleep on the hills.
--What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flower’d broom?
What sweet-breathing Presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night’s balmy prime?--
’Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, The Nine.
--The Leader is fairest,
But all are divine.
They are lost in the hollows.
They stream up again.
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train?--
They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road.
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode.
--Whose praise do they mention
Of what is it told?--
What will be for ever.
What was from of old.
First hymn they the Father
Of all things: and then,
The rest of Immortals,
The action of men.
The Day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The Night in her silence,
The Stars in their calm.
_749._ _To Marguerite_
Yes: in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown.
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour;
O then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent!
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain--
O might our marges meet again!
Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?--
A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
_750._ _Requiescat_
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.
Her mirth the world required:
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.
Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.
Her cabin’d, ample Spirit,
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of Death.
_751._ _The Scholar-Gipsy_
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill;
Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp’d grasses shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch’d green;
Come, Shepherd, and again begin the quest.
Here, where the reaper was at work of late,
In this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves
His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruise,
And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use;
Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn--
All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
Screen’d is this nook o’er the high, half-reap’d field,
And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers:
And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book--
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:
The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at Preferment’s door,
One summer morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore,
And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answer’d that the Gipsy crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men’s brains;
And they can bind them to what thoughts they will:
‘And I,’ he said, ‘the secret of their art,
When fully learn’d, will to the world impart:
But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!’
This said, he left them, and return’d no more,
But rumours hung about the country-side,
That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
The same the Gipsies wore.
Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock’d boors
Had found him seated at their entering,
But, ’mid their drink and clatter, he would fly:
And I myself seem half to know thy looks,
And put the shepherds, Wanderer, on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
I ask if thou hast pass’d their quiet place;
Or in my boat I lie
Moor’d to the cool bank in the summer heats,
‘Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
And watch the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills,
And wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.
For most, I know, thou lov’st retirèd ground.
Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the slow punt swings round:
And leaning backwards in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Pluck’d in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream:
And then they land, and thou art seen no more.
Maidens who from the distant hamlets come
To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.
Oft thou hast given them store
Of flowers--the frail-leaf’d, white anemone--
Dark bluebells drench’d with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with spotted leaves--
But none has words she can report of thee.
And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here
In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,
Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-wing’d swallows haunt the glittering Thames,
To bathe in the abandon’d lasher pass,
Have often pass’d thee near
Sitting upon the river bank o’ergrown:
Mark’d thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,
Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air;
But, when they came from bathing, thou wert gone.
At some lone homestead in the Cumnor hills,
Where at her open door the housewife darns,
Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate
To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.
Children, who early range these slopes and late
For cresses from the rills,
Have known thee watching, all an April day,
The springing pastures and the feeding kine;
And mark’d thee, when the stars come out and shine,
Through the long dewy grass move slow away.
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,
Where most the Gipsies by the turf-edged way
Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see
With scarlet patches tagg’d and shreds of gray,
Above the forest-ground call’d Thessaly--
The blackbird picking food
Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;
So often has he known thee past him stray
Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither’d spray,
And waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall.
And once, in winter, on the causeway chill
Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,
Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,
Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou hast climb’d the hill
And gain’d the white brow of the Cumnor range;
Turn’d once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall--
Then sought thy straw in some sequester’d grange.
But what--I dream! Two hundred years are flown
Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,
And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe
That thou wert wander’d from the studious walls
To learn strange arts, and join a Gipsy tribe:
And thou from earth art gone
Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid;
Some country nook, where o’er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave--
Under a dark red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.
--No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours.
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
’Tis that from change to change their being rolls:
’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls,
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn-out life, and are--what we have been.
Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?
Thou hadst _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire:
Else wert thou long since number’d with the dead--
Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire.
The generations of thy peers are fled,
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,
Because thou hadst--what we, alas, have not!
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O Life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven: and we,
Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never have been fulfill’d;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day--
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
Yes, we await it, but it still delays,
And then we suffer; and amongst us One,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
This for our wisest: and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear,
With close-lipp’d Patience for our only friend,
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to Despair:
But none has hope like thine.
Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
And every doubt long blown by time away.
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife--
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver’d branches of the glade--
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue.
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales,
Freshen thy flowers, as in former years,
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales.
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix’d thy powers,
And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made:
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair’d creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted Masters of the waves;
And snatch’d his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales.
_752._ _Philomela_
Hark! ah, the Nightingale!
The tawny-throated!
Hark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark--what pain!
O Wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still, after many years, in distant lands,
Still nourishing in thy bewilder’d brain
That wild, unquench’d, deep-sunken, old-world pain--
Say, will it never heal?
And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,
To thy rack’d heart and brain
Afford no balm?
Dost thou to-night behold
Here, through the moonlight on this English grass,
The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?
Dost thou again peruse
With hot cheeks and sear’d eyes
The too clear web, and thy dumb Sister’s shame?
Dost thou once more assay
Thy flight, and feel come over thee,
Poor Fugitive, the feathery change
Once more, and once more seem to make resound
With love and hate, triumph and agony,
Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?
Listen, Eugenia--
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves
Again--thou hearest!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!
_753._ _Shakespeare_
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place.
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil’d searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure,
Didst walk on earth unguess’d at. Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
_754._ _From the Hymn of Empedocles_
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;
That we must feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?
Not much, I know, you prize
What pleasures may be had,
Who look on life with eyes
Estranged, like mine, and sad:
And yet the village churl feels the truth more than you;
Who’s loth to leave this life
Which to him little yields:
His hard-task’d sunburnt wife,
His often-labour’d fields;
The boors with whom he talk’d, the country spots he knew.
But thou, because thou hear’st
Men scoff at Heaven and Fate;
Because the gods thou fear’st
Fail to make blest thy state,
Tremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there are.
I say, Fear not! life still
Leaves human effort scope.
But, since life teems with ill,
Nurse no extravagant hope.
Because thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair.
WILLIAM BRIGHTY RANDS
1823-1880
_755._ _The Flowers_
When Love arose in heart and deed
To wake the world to greater joy,
‘What can she give me now?’ said Greed,
Who thought to win some costly toy.
He rose, he ran, he stoop’d, he clutch’d;
And soon the Flowers, that Love let fall,
In Greed’s hot grasp were fray’d and smutch’d,
And Greed said, ‘Flowers! Can this be all?’
He flung them down and went his way,
He cared no jot for thyme or rose;
But boys and girls came out to play,
And some took these and some took those--
Red, blue, and white, and green and gold;
And at their touch the dew return’d,
And all the bloom a thousandfold--
So red, so ripe, the roses burn’d!
_756._ _The Thought_
Into the skies, one summer’s day,
I sent a little Thought away;
Up to where, in the blue round,
The sun sat shining without sound.
Then my Thought came back to me.--
Little Thought, what did you see
In the regions whence you come?
And when I spoke, my Thought was dumb.
But she breathed of what was there,
In the pure bright upper air;
And, because my Thought so shone,
I knew she had been shone upon.
Next, by night a Thought I sent
Up into the firmament;
When the eager stars were out,
And the still moon shone about.
And my Thought went past the moon
In between the stars, but soon
Held her breath and durst not stir,
For the fear that covered her;
Then she thought, in this demur:
‘Dare I look beneath the shade,
Into where the worlds are made;
Where the suns and stars are wrought?
Shall I meet another Thought?
‘Will that other Thought have wings?
Shall I meet strange, heavenly things?
Thought of Thoughts, and Light of Lights,
Breath of Breaths, and Night of Nights?’
Then my Thought began to hark
In the illuminated dark,
Till the silence, over, under,
Made her heart beat more than thunder.
And my Thought, came trembling back,
But with something on her track,
And with something at her side;
Nor till she has lived and died,
Lived and died, and lived again,
Will that awful thing seem plain.
WILLIAM PHILPOT
1823-1889
_757._ _Maritæ Suæ_
I
Of all the flowers rising now,
Thou only saw’st the head
Of that unopen’d drop of snow
I placed beside thy bed.
In all the blooms that blow so fast,
Thou hast no further part,
Save those the hour I saw thee last,
I laid above thy heart.
Two snowdrops for our boy and girl,
A primrose blown for me,
Wreathed with one often-play’d-with curl
From each bright head for thee.
And so I graced thee for thy grave,
And made these tokens fast
With that old silver heart I gave,
My first gift--and my last.
II
I dream’d, her babe upon her breast,
Here she might lie and calmly rest
Her happy eyes on that far hill
That backs the landscape fresh and still.
I hoped her thoughts would thrid the boughs
Where careless birds on love carouse,
And gaze those apple-blossoms through
To revel in the boundless blue.
But now her faculty of sight
Is elder sister to the light,
And travels free and unconfined
Through dense and rare, through form and mind.
Or else her life to be complete
Hath found new channels full and meet--
Then, O, what eyes are leaning o’er,
If fairer than they were before!
WILLIAM (JOHNSON) CORY
1823-1892
_758._ _Mimnermus in Church_
You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forgo,
This warm kind world is all I know.
You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.
You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend’s remember’d tones.
Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But O, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.
_759._ _Heraclitus_
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember’d how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
COVENTRY PATMORE
1823-1896
_760._ _The Married Lover_
Why, having won her, do I woo?
Because her spirit’s vestal grace
Provokes me always to pursue,
But, spirit-like, eludes embrace;
Because her womanhood is such
That, as on court-days subjects kiss
The Queen’s hand, yet so near a touch
Affirms no mean familiarness;
Nay, rather marks more fair the height
Which can with safety so neglect
To dread, as lower ladies might,
That grace could meet with disrespect;
Thus she with happy favour feeds
Allegiance from a love so high
That thence no false conceit proceeds
Of difference bridged, or state put by;
Because although in act and word
As lowly as a wife can be,
Her manners, when they call me lord,
Remind me ’tis by courtesy;
Not with her least consent of will,
Which would my proud affection hurt,
But by the noble style that still
Imputes an unattain’d desert;
Because her gay and lofty brows,
When all is won which hope can ask,
Reflect a light of hopeless snows
That bright in virgin ether bask;
Because, though free of the outer court
I am, this Temple keeps its shrine
Sacred to Heaven; because, in short,
She’s not and never can be mine.
_761._ ‘_If I were dead_’
‘If I were dead, you’d sometimes say, Poor Child!’
The dear lips quiver’d as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor Child, poor Child!
I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor Child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor Child, poor Child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have Thou _no_ mercy upon me!
Poor Child!
_762._ _Departure_
It was not like your great and gracious ways!
Do you, that have naught other to lament,
Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
Upon your journey of so many days
Without a single kiss, or a good-bye?
I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;
And so we sate, within the low sun’s rays,
You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,
Your harrowing praise.
Well, it was well
To hear you such things speak,
And I could tell
What made your eyes a growing gloom of love,
As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.
And it was like your great and gracious ways
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash
To let the laughter flash,
Whilst I drew near,
Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.
But all at once to leave me at the last,
More at the wonder than the loss aghast,
With huddled, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
And go your journey of all days
With not one kiss, or a good-bye,
And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d:
’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.
_763._ _The Toys_
My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkiss’d,
--His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’
_764._ _A Farewell_
With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My Very Dear,
Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear.
It needs no art,
With faint, averted feet
And many a tear,
In our opposèd paths to persevere.
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There’s any hope, it is so far away.
But, O, my Best,
When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nursling Grief,
Is dead,
And no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies,
Perchance we may,
Where now this night is day,
And even through faith of still averted feet,
Making full circle of our banishment,
Amazèd meet;
The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet
Seasoning the termless feast of our content
With tears of recognition never dry.
SYDNEY DOBELL
1824-1874
_765._ _The Ballad of Keith of Ravelston_
The murmur of the mourning ghost
That keeps the shadowy kine,
‘O Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’
Ravelston, Ravelston,
The merry path that leads
Down the golden morning hill,
And thro’ the silver meads;
Ravelston, Ravelston,
The stile beneath the tree,
The maid that kept her mother’s kine,
The song that sang she!
She sang her song, she kept her kine,
She sat beneath the thorn,
When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
Rode thro’ the Monday morn.
His henchmen sing, his hawk-bells ring,
His belted jewels shine;
O Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
Year after year, where Andrew came,
Comes evening down the glade,
And still there sits a moonshine ghost
Where sat the sunshine maid.
Her misty hair is faint and fair,
She keeps the shadowy kine;
O Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
I lay my hand upon the stile,
The stile is lone and cold,
The burnie that goes babbling by
Says naught that can be told.
Yet, stranger! here, from year to year,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
O Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
Step out three steps, where Andrew stood--
Why blanch thy cheeks for fear?
The ancient stile is not alone,
’Tis not the burn I hear!
She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
O Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
_766._ _Return!_
Return, return! all night my lamp is burning,
All night, like it, my wide eyes watch and burn;
Like it, I fade and pale, when day returning
Bears witness that the absent can return,
Return, return.
Like it, I lessen with a lengthening sadness,
Like it, I burn to waste and waste to burn,
Like it, I spend the golden oil of gladness
To feed the sorrowy signal for return,
Return, return.
Like it, like it, whene’er the east wind sings,
I bend and shake; like it, I quake and yearn,
When Hope’s late butterflies, with whispering wings,
Fly in out of the dark, to fall and burn--
Burn in the watchfire of return,
Return, return.
Like it, the very flame whereby I pine
Consumes me to its nature. While I mourn
My soul becomes a better soul than mine,
And from its brightening beacon I discern
My starry love go forth from me, and shine
Across the seas a path for thy return,
Return, return.
Return, return! all night I see it burn,
All night it prays like me, and lifts a twin
Of palmèd praying hands that meet and yearn--
Yearn to the impleaded skies for thy return.
Day, like a golden fetter, locks them in,
And wans the light that withers, tho’ it burn
As warmly still for thy return;
Still thro’ the splendid load uplifts the thin
Pale, paler, palest patience that can learn
Naught but that votive sign for thy return--
That single suppliant sign for thy return,
Return, return.
Return, return! lest haply, love, or e’er
Thou touch the lamp the light have ceased to burn,
And thou, who thro’ the window didst discern
The wonted flame, shalt reach the topmost stair
To find no wide eyes watching there,
No wither’d welcome waiting thy return!
A passing ghost, a smoke-wreath in the air,
The flameless ashes, and the soulless urn,
Warm with the famish’d fire that lived to burn--
Burn out its lingering life for thy return,
Its last of lingering life for thy return,
Its last of lingering life to light thy late return,
Return, return.
_767._ _A Chanted Calendar_
First came the primrose,
On the bank high,
Like a maiden looking forth
From the window of a tower
When the battle rolls below,
So look’d she,
And saw the storms go by.
Then came the wind-flower
In the valley left behind,
As a wounded maiden, pale
With purple streaks of woe,
When the battle has roll’d by
Wanders to and fro,
So totter’d she,
Dishevelled in the wind.
Then came the daisies,
On the first of May,
Like a banner’d show’s advance
While the crowd runs by the way,
With ten thousand flowers about them they came trooping through the fields.
As a happy people come,
So came they,
As a happy people come
When the war has roll’d away,
With dance and tabor, pipe and drum.
And all make holiday.
Then came the cowslip,
Like a dancer in the fair,
She spread her little mat of green,
And on it danced she.
With a fillet bound about her brow,
A fillet round her happy brow,
A golden fillet round her brow,
And rubies in her hair.
_768._ _Laus Deo_
In the hall the coffin waits, and the idle armourer stands.
At his belt the coffin nails, and the hammer in his hands.
The bed of state is hung with crape--the grand old bed where she was wed--
And like an upright corpse she sitteth gazing dumbly at the bed.
Hour by hour her serving-men enter by the curtain’d door,
And with steps of muffled woe pass breathless o’er the silent floor,
And marshal mutely round, and look from each to each with eyelids red;
‘Touch him not,’ she shriek’d and cried, ‘he is but newly dead!’
‘O my own dear mistress,’ the ancient Nurse did say,
‘Seven long days and seven long nights you have watch’d him where he lay.’
‘Seven long days and seven long nights,‘the hoary Steward said;
‘Seven long days and seven long nights,’ groan’d the Warrener gray;
‘Seven,’ said the old Henchman, and bow’d his aged head;
‘On your lives!’ she shriek’d and cried,‘he is but newly dead!’
Then a father Priest they sought,
The Priest that taught her all she knew,
And they told him of her loss.
‘For she is mild and sweet of will,
She loved him, and his words are peace,
And he shall heal her ill.’
But her watch she did not cease.
He bless’d her where she sat distraught,
And show’d her holy cross,--
The cross she kiss’d from year to year--
But she neither saw nor heard;
And said he in her deaf ear
All he had been wont to teach,
All she had been fond to hear,
Missall’d prayer, and solemn speech,
But she answer’d not a word.
Only when he turn’d to speak with those who wept about the bed,
‘On your lives!’ she shriek’d and cried, ‘he is but newly dead!’
Then how sadly he turn’d from her, it were wonderful to tell,
And he stood beside the death-bed as by one who slumbers well,
And he lean’d o’er him who lay there, and in cautious whisper low,
‘He is not dead, but sleepeth,’ said the Priest, and smooth’d his brow.
‘Sleepeth?’ said she, looking up, and the sun rose in her face!
‘He must be better than I thought, for the sleep is very sound.’
‘He is better,’ said the Priest, and call’d her maidens round.
With them came that ancient dame who nursed her when a child;
O Nurse!’ she sigh’d, ‘O Nurse!’ she cried, ‘O Nurse!’ and then she smiled,
And then she wept; with that they drew
About her, as of old;
Her dying eyes were sweet and blue,
Her trembling touch was cold;
But she said, ‘My maidens true,
No more weeping and well-away;
Let them kill the feast.
I would be happy in my soul.
“He is better,” saith the Priest;
He did but sleep the weary day,
And will waken whole.
Carry me to his dear side,
And let the halls be trim;
Whistly, whistly,’ said she,
‘I am wan with watching and wail,
He must not wake to see me pale,
Let me sleep with him.
See you keep the tryst for me,
I would rest till he awake
And rise up like a bride.
But whistly, whistly!’ said she.
‘Yet rejoice your Lord doth live;
And for His dear sake
Say _Laus, Domine_.’
Silent they cast down their eyes,
And every breast a sob did rive,
She lifted her in wild surprise
And they dared not disobey.
‘_Laus Deo_,’ said the Steward, hoary when her days were new;
‘_Laus Deo_,’ said the Warrener, whiter than the warren snows;
‘_Laus Deo_,’ the bald Henchman, who had nursed her on his knee.
The old Nurse moved her lips in vain,
And she stood among the train
Like a dead tree shaking dew.
Then the Priest he softly slept
Midway in the little band,
And he took the Lady’s hand.
‘_Laus Deo_,’ he said aloud,
‘_Laus Deo_,’ they said again,
Yet again, and yet again,
Humbly cross’d and lowly bow’d,
Till in wont and fear it rose
To the Sabbath strain.
But she neither turn’d her head
Nor ‘Whistly, whistly,’ said she.
Her hands were folded as in grace,
We laid her with her ancient race
And all the village wept.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
1824-1889
_769._ _The Fairies_
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.
By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
If any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
GEORGE MAC DONALD
1824-1905
_770._ _That Holy Thing_
They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high:
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry.
O Son of Man, to right my lot
Naught but Thy presence can avail;
Yet on the road Thy wheels are not,
Nor on the sea Thy sail!
My how or when Thou wilt not heed,
But come down Thine own secret stair,
That Thou mayst answer all my need--
Yea, every bygone prayer.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
1828-1882
_771._ _The Blessèd Damozel_
The blessèd Damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven:
Her blue grave eyes were deeper much
Than a deep water, even.
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift
On the neck meetly worn;
And her hair, lying down her back,
Was yellow like ripe corn.
Herseem’d she scarce had been a day
One of God’s choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.
(To _one_ it is ten years of years:
... Yet now, here in this place,
Surely she lean’d o’er me,--her hair
Fell all about my face....
Nothing: the Autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)
It was the terrace of God’s house
That she was standing on,--
By God built over the sheer depth
In which Space is begun;
So high, that looking downward thence,
She scarce could see the sun.
It lies from Heaven across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
But in those tracts, with her, it was
The peace of utter light
And silence. For no breeze may stir
Along the steady flight
Of seraphim; no echo there,
Beyond all depth or height.
Heard hardly, some of her new friends,
Playing at holy games,
Spake, gentle-mouth’d, among themselves,
Their virginal chaste names;
And the souls, mounting up to God,
Went by her like thin flames.
And still she bow’d herself, and stoop’d
Into the vast waste calm;
Till her bosom’s pressure must have made
The bar she lean’d on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.
From the fixt lull of Heaven, she saw
Time, like a pulse, shake fierce
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove,
In that steep gulf, to pierce
The swarm; and then she spoke, as when
The stars sang in their spheres.
‘I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come,’ she said.
‘Have I not pray’d in solemn Heaven?
On earth, has he not pray’d?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?
‘When round his head the aureole clings,
And he is clothed in white,
I’ll take his hand, and go with him
To the deep wells of light,
And we will step down as to a stream
And bathe there in God’s sight.
‘We two will stand beside that shrine,
Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps tremble continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And where each need, reveal’d, expects
Its patient period.
‘We two will lie i’ the shadow of
That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Sometimes is felt to be,
While every leaf that His plumes touch
Saith His name audibly.
‘And I myself will teach to him,--
I myself, lying so,--
The songs I sing here; which his mouth
Shall pause in, hush’d and slow,
Finding some knowledge at each pause,
And some new thing to know.’
(Alas! to _her_ wise simple mind
These things were all but known
Before: they trembled on her sense,--
Her voice had caught their tone.
Alas for lonely Heaven! Alas
For life wrung out alone!
Alas, and though the end were reach’d?...
Was _thy_ part understood
Or borne in trust? And for her sake
Shall this too be found good?--
May the close lips that knew not prayer
Praise ever, though they would?)
‘We two,’ she said, ‘will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies:--
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.
‘Circle-wise sit they, with bound locks
And bosoms coverèd;
Into the fine cloth, white like flame,
Weaving the golden thread,
To fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.
‘He shall fear, haply, and be dumb.
Then I will lay my cheek
To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abash’d or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.
‘Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel--the unnumber’d solemn heads
Bow’d with their aureoles:
And Angels, meeting us, shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.
‘There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me:--
To have more blessing than on earth
In nowise; but to be
As then we were,--being as then
At peace. Yea, verily.
‘Yea, verily; when he is come
We will do thus and thus:
Till this my vigil seem quite strange
And almost fabulous;
We two will live at once, one life;
And peace shall be with us.’
She gazed, and listen’d, and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild,--
‘All this is when he comes.’ She ceased:
The light thrill’d past her, fill’d
With Angels, in strong level lapse.
Her eyes pray’d, and she smiled.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their flight
Was vague ’mid the poised spheres.
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
GEORGE MEREDITH
1828-1909
_772._ _Love in the Valley_
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couch’d with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?
* * * * *
Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river’s light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirror’d winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!
* * * * *
When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,
Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
More love should I have, and much less care.
When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,
Loosening her laces, combing down her curls,
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
I should miss but one for many boys and girls.
* * * * *
Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows
Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon.
No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder:
Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon.
Deals she an unkindness, ’tis but her rapid measure,
Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:
Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones
Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.
* * * * *
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be will’d.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it fill’d.
* * * * *
Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
Arm in arm, all against the raying West,
Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
Brave is her shape, and sweeter unpossess’d.
Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking
Whisper’d the world was; morning light is she.
Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.
* * * * *
Happy happy time, when the white star hovers
Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,
Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,
Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew.
Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens
Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells.
Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.
* * * * *
Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting
Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along,
Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter
Chill as a dull face frowning on a song.
Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feather’d bosom
Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend
Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset
Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.
* * * * *
When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window
Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams,
Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily
Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams.
When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle
In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May,
Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden-lily
Pure from the night, and splendid for the day.
* * * * *
Mother of the dews, dark eye-lash’d twilight,
Low-lidded twilight, o’er the valley’s brim,
Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark,
Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him.
Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet,
Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers.
Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever
Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers.
* * * * *
All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose;
Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands.
My sweet leads: she knows not why, but now she loiters,
Eyes the bent anemones, and hangs her hands.
Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping,
Coming the rose: and unaware a cry
Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour,
Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why.
* * * * *
Kerchief’d head and chin she darts between her tulips,
Streaming like a willow gray in arrowy rain:
Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel
She will be; she lifts them, and on she speeds again.
Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gateway:
She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth.
So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder
Saw I once a white dove, sole light of earth.
* * * * *
Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,
Train’d to stand in rows, and asking if they please.
I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones:
O my wild ones! they tell me more than these.
You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,
Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they,
They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness,
You are of life’s, on the banks that line the way.
* * * * *
Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,
Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three.
Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me.
Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest?
Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,
Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths.
* * * * *
Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades;
Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-gray leaf;
Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow;
Blue-neck’d the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf.
Green-yellow, bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle;
Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine:
Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens,
Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine.
* * * * *
This I may know: her dressing and undressing
Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport
Shift from cloud to moonlight; or edging over thunder
Slips a ray of sun; or sweeping into port
White sails furl; or on the ocean borders
White sails lean along the waves leaping green.
Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight
Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen.
* * * * *
Front door and back of the moss’d old farmhouse
Open with the morn, and in a breezy link
Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadow’d orchard,
Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink.
Busy in the grass the early sun of summer
Swarms, and the blackbird’s mellow fluting notes
Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge:
Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats!
* * * * *
Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
Cricketing below, rush’d brown and red with sunshine;
O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool!
Spying from the farm, herself she fetch’d a pitcher
Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak.
Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,
Said, ‘I will kiss you’: she laugh’d and lean’d her cheek.
* * * * *
Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof
Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway
Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.
Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,
Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.
Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,
Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.
* * * * *
O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful!
O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!
O the treasure-tresses one another over
Nodding! O the girdle slack about the waist!
Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet
Quick amid the wheat-ears: wound about the waist,
Gathered, see these brides of Earth one blush of ripeness!
O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!
* * * * *
Large and smoky red the sun’s cold disk drops,
Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow:
Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moonrise,
Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow.
Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree
Gazes in this whiteness: nightlong could I.
Here may life on death or death on life be painted.
Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die!
* * * * *
Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber
Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.
‘When she was a tiny,’ one agèd woman quavers,
Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear.
Faults she had once as she learn’d to run and tumbled:
Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.
Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy
Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.
Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,
Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise
High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;
Yet am I the light and living of her eyes.
Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming,
Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames.--
Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting,
Arms up, she dropp’d: our souls were in our names.
* * * * *
Soon will she lie like a white frost sunrise.
Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale as rye,
Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher,
Felt the girdle loosen’d, seen the tresses fly.
Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset.
Swift with the to-morrow, green-wing’d Spring!
Sing from the South-west, bring her back the truants,
Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing.
* * * * *
Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April
Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you
Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,
Youngest green transfused in silver shining through:
Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:
Fair as in image my seraph love appears
Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids:
Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears.
* * * * *
Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need.
Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood,
Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed.
Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October;
Streaming like the flag-reed South-west blown;
Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam:
All seem to know what is for heaven alone.
_773._ _Phœbus with Admetus_
When by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked,
Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God,
Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked,
Who: and what a track show’d the upturn’d sod!
Mindful were the shepherds, as now the noon severe
Bent a burning eyebrow to brown evetide,
How the rustic flute drew the silver to the sphere,
Sister of his own, till her rays fell wide.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
Chirping none, the scarlet cicalas crouch’d in ranks:
Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk gray:
Scarce the stony lizard suck’d hollows in his flanks:
Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay.
Sudden bow’d the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard,
Lengthen’d ran the grasses, the sky grew slate:
Then amid a swift flight of wing’d seed white as curd,
Clear of limb a Youth smote the master’s gate.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
Water, first of singers, o’er rocky mount and mead,
First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill,
Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed,
Seeking whom to waken and what ear fill.
Water, sweetest soother to kiss a wound and cool,
Sweetest and divinest, the sky-born brook,
Chuckled, with a whimper, and made a mirror-pool
Round the guest we welcomed, the strange hand shook.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields:
Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high:
Big of heart we labour’d at storing mighty yields,
Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry!
Hand-like rush’d the vintage; we strung the bellied skins
Plump, and at the sealing the Youth’s voice rose:
Maidens clung in circle, on little fists their chins;
Gentle beasties through push’d a cold long nose.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
Foot to fire in snowtime we trimm’d the slender shaft:
Often down the pit spied the lean wolf’s teeth
Grin against his will, trapp’d by masterstrokes of craft;
Helpless in his froth-wrath as green logs seethe!
Safe the tender lambs tugg’d the teats, and winter sped
Whirl’d before the crocus, the year’s new gold.
Hung the hooky beak up aloft, the arrowhead
Redden’d through his feathers for our dear fold.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darkened
That had thee here obscure.
Tales we drank of giants at war with gods above:
Rocks were they to look on, and earth climb’d air!
Tales of search for simples, and those who sought of love
Ease because the creature was all too fair.
Pleasant ran our thinking that while our work was good,
Sure as fruits for sweat would the praise come fast.
He that wrestled stoutest and tamed the billow-brood
Danced in rings with girls, like a sail-flapp’d mast.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
Lo, the herb of healing, when once the herb is known,
Shines in shady woods bright as new-sprung flame.
Ere the string was tighten’d we heard the mellow tone,
After he had taught how the sweet sounds came.
Stretch’d about his feet, labour done, ’twas as you see
Red pomegranates tumble and burst hard rind.
So began contention to give delight and be
Excellent in things aim’d to make life kind.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
You with shelly horns, rams! and, promontory goats,
You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!
Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!
You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,
You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent:
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days;
Us he chose for housemates, and this way went.
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.
_774._ _Tardy Spring_
Now the North wind ceases,
The warm South-west awakes;
Swift fly the fleeces,
Thick the blossom-flakes.
Now hill to hill has made the stride,
And distance waves the without-end:
Now in the breast a door flings wide;
Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.
And song of England’s rush of flowers
Is this full breeze with mellow stops,
That spins the lark for shine, for showers;
He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.
The stir in memory seem these things,
Which out of moisten’d turf and clay,
Astrain for light push patient rings,
Or leap to find the waterway.
’Tis equal to a wonder done,
Whatever simple lives renew
Their tricks beneath the father sun,
As though they caught a broken clue:
So hard was earth an eyewink back;
But now the common life has come,
The blotting cloud a dappled pack,
The grasses one vast underhum.
A City clothed in snow and soot,
With lamps for day in ghostly rows,
Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,
The river that reflective flows:
And there did fog down crypts of street
Play spectre upon eye and mouth:--
Their faces are a glass to greet
This magic of the whirl for South.
A burly joy each creature swells
With sound of its own hungry quest;
Earth has to fill her empty wells,
And speed the service of the nest;
The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,
That haunts the farmer’s look abroad,
Who sees what tomb a white night built,
Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
For iron Winter held her firm;
Across her sky he laid his hand;
And bird he starved, he stiffen’d worm;
A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
Her shivering Spring feign’d fast asleep.
The bitten buds dared not unfold:
We raced on roads and ice to keep
Thought of the girl we love from cold.
But now the North wind ceases,
The warm South-west awakes,
The heavens are out in fleeces,
And earth’s green banner shakes.
_775._ _Love’s Grave_
Mark where the pressing wind shoots javelin-like,
Its skeleton shadow on the broad-back’d wave!
Here is a fitting spot to dig Love’s grave;
Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and strike,
And dart their hissing tongues high up the sand:
In hearing of the ocean, and in sight
Of those ribb’d wind-streaks running into white.
If I the death of Love had deeply plann’d,
I never could have made it half so sure,
As by the unblest kisses which upbraid
The full-waked sense; or failing that, degrade!
’Tis morning: but no morning can restore
What we have forfeited. I see no sin:
The wrong is mix’d. In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray’d by what is false within.
_776._ _Lucifer in Starlight_
On a starr’d night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen’d,
Where sinners hugg’d their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he lean’d,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careen’d,
Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that prick’d his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d, and sank.
Around the ancient track march’d, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
ALEXANDER SMITH
1829-1867
_777._ _Love_
The fierce exulting worlds, the motes in rays,
The churlish thistles, scented briers,
The wind-swept bluebells on the sunny braes,
Down to the central fires,
Exist alike in Love. Love is a sea
Filling all the abysses dim
Of lornest space, in whose deeps regally
Suns and their bright broods swim.
This mighty sea of Love, with wondrous tides,
Is sternly just to sun and grain;
’Tis laving at this moment Saturn’s sides,
’Tis in my blood and brain.
All things have something more than barren use;
There is a scent upon the brier,
A tremulous splendour in the autumn dews,
Cold morns are fringed with fire.
The clodded earth goes up in sweet-breath’d flowers;
In music dies poor human speech,
And into beauty blow those hearts of ours
When Love is born in each.
Daisies are white upon the churchyard sod,
Sweet tears the clouds lean down and give.
The world is very lovely. O my God,
I thank Thee that I live!
_778._ _Barbara_
On the Sabbath-day,
Through the churchyard old and gray,
Over the crisp and yellow leaves I held my rustling way;
And amid the words of mercy, falling on my soul like balms,
’Mid the gorgeous storms of music--in the mellow organ-calms,
’Mid the upward-streaming prayers, and the rich and solemn psalms,
I stood careless, Barbara.
My heart was otherwhere,
While the organ shook the air,
And the priest, with outspread hands, bless’d the people with a prayer;
But when rising to go homeward, with a mild and saint-like shine
Gleam’d a face of airy beauty with its heavenly eyes on mine--
Gleam’d and vanish’d in a moment--O that face was surely thine
Out of heaven, Barbara!
O pallid, pallid face!
O earnest eyes of grace!
When last I saw thee, dearest, it was in another place.
You came running forth to meet me with my love-gift on your wrist:
The flutter of a long white dress, then all was lost in mist--
A purple stain of agony was on the mouth I kiss’d,
That wild morning, Barbara.
I searched, in my despair,
Sunny noon and midnight air;
I could not drive away the thought that you were lingering there.
O many and many a winter night I sat when you were gone,
My worn face buried in my hands, beside the fire alone--
Within the dripping churchyard, the rain plashing on your stone,
You were sleeping, Barbara.
’Mong angels, do you think
Of the precious golden link
I clasp’d around your happy arm while sitting by yon brink?
Or when that night of gliding dance, of laughter and guitars,
Was emptied of its music, and we watch’d, through lattice-bars,
The silent midnight heaven creeping o’er us with its stars,
Till the day broke, Barbara?
In the years I’ve changed;
Wild and far my heart has ranged,
And many sins and errors now have been on me avenged;
But to you I have been faithful whatsoever good I lack’d:
I loved you, and above my life still hangs that love intact--
Your love the trembling rainbow, I the reckless cataract.
Still I love you, Barbara.
Yet, Love, I am unblest;
With many doubts opprest,
I wander like the desert wind without a place of rest.
Could I but win you for an hour from off that starry shore,
The hunger of my soul were still’d; for Death hath told you more
Than the melancholy world doth know--things deeper than all lore
You could teach me, Barbara.
In vain, in vain, in vain!
You will never come again.
There droops upon the dreary hills a mournful fringe of rain;
The gloaming closes slowly round, loud winds are in the tree,
Round selfish shores for ever moans the hurt and wounded sea;
There is no rest upon the earth, peace is with Death and thee--
Barbara!
CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI
1830-1894
_779._ _Bride Song_
FROM ‘THE PRINCE’S PROGRESS’
Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loiter’d on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate;
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died, behind the grate;
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.
Ten years ago, five years ago,
One year ago,
Even then you had arrived in time,
Though somewhat slow;
Then you had known her living face
Which now you cannot know:
The frozen fountain would have leap’d.
The buds gone on to blow,
The warm south wind would have awaked
To melt the snow.
Is she fair now as she lies?
Once she was fair;
Meet queen for any kingly king,
With gold-dust on her hair.
Now there are poppies in her locks,
White poppies she must wear;
Must wear a veil to shroud her face
And the want graven there:
Or is the hunger fed at length,
Cast off the care?
We never saw her with a smile
Or with a frown;
Her bed seem’d never soft to her,
Though toss’d of down;
She little heeded what she wore,
Kirtle, or wreath, or gown;
We think her white brows often ached
Beneath her crown,
Till silvery hairs show’d in her locks
That used to be so brown.
We never heard her speak in haste:
Her tones were sweet,
And modulated just so much
As it was meet:
Her heart sat silent through the noise
And concourse of the street.
There was no hurry in her hands,
No hurry in her feet;
There was no bliss drew nigh to her,
That she might run to greet.
You should have wept her yesterday,
Wasting upon her bed:
But wherefore should you weep to-day
That she is dead?
Lo, we who love weep not to-day,
But crown her royal head.
Let be these poppies that we strew,
Your roses are too red:
Let be these poppies, not for you
Cut down and spread.
_780._ _A Birthday_
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
_781._ _Song_
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember.
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
_782._ _Twice_
I took my heart in my hand
(O my love, O my love),
I said: Let me fall or stand,
Let me live or die,
But this once hear me speak
(O my love, O my love)--
Yet a woman’s words are weak;
You should speak, not I.
You took my heart in your hand
With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scann’d,
Then set it down,
And said, ‘It is still unripe,
Better wait awhile;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown.’
As you set it down it broke--
Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
At your judgement I heard:
But I have not often smiled
Since then, nor question’d since,
Nor cared for cornflowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.
I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God:
Now let thy judgement stand--
Yea, judge me now.
This contemn’d of a man,
This marr’d one heedless day,
This heart take thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge Thou its dross away--
Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out.
I take my heart in my hand--
I shall not die, but live--
Before Thy face I stand;
I, for Thou callest such:
All that I have I bring,
All that I am I give,
Smile Thou and I shall sing,
But shall not question much.
_783._ _Uphill_
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you waiting at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
_784._ _Passing Away_
Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth sapp’d day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answer’d: Yea.
Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day,
Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answer’d: Yea.
Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Though I tarry, wait for me, trust me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away; night is past, and lo, it is day;
My love, my sister, my spouse, thou shalt hear me say--
Then I answer’d: Yea.
_785._ _Marvel of Marvels_
Marvel of marvels, if I myself shall behold
With mine own eyes my King in His city of gold;
Where the least of lambs is spotless white in the fold,
Where the least and last of saints in spotless white is stoled,
Where the dimmest head beyond a moon is aureoled.
O saints, my belovèd, now mouldering to mould in the mould,
Shall I see you lift your heads, see your cerements unroll’d,
See with these very eyes? who now in darkness and cold
Tremble for the midnight cry, the rapture, the tale untold,--
_The Bridegroom cometh, cometh, His Bride to enfold!_
Cold it is, my belovèd, since your funeral bell was toll’d:
Cold it is, O my King, how cold alone on the wold!
_786._ _Is it Well with the Child?_
Safe where I cannot die yet,
Safe where I hope to lie too,
Safe from the fume and the fret;
You, and you,
Whom I never forget.
Safe from the frost and the snow,
Safe from the storm and the sun,
Safe where the seeds wait to grow
One by one,
And to come back in blow.
_787._ _Remember_
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
_788._ _Aloof_
The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea,
Speak both one message of one sense to me:--
Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand
Thou too aloof, bound with the flawless band
Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
What heart shall touch thy heart? What hand thy hand?
And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seem’d not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seem’d much less cold,
And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong, and life itself not weak.
_789._ _Rest_
O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
Hush’d in and curtain’d with a blessèd dearth
Of all that irk’d her from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song;
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when she wakes she will not think it long.
THOMAS EDWARD BROWN
1830-1897
_790._ _Dora_
She knelt upon her brother’s grave,
My little girl of six years old--
He used to be so good and brave,
The sweetest lamb of all our fold;
He used to shout, he used to sing,
Of all our tribe the little king--
And so unto the turf her ear she laid,
To hark if still in that dark place he play’d.
No sound! no sound!
Death’s silence was profound;
And horror crept
Into her aching heart, and Dora wept.
If this is as it ought to be,
My God, I leave it unto Thee.
_791._ _Jessie_
When Jessie comes with her soft breast,
And yields the golden keys,
Then is it as if God caress’d
Twin babes upon His knees--
Twin babes that, each to other press’d,
Just feel the Father’s arms, wherewith they both are bless’d.
But when I think if we must part,
And all this personal dream be fled--
O then my heart! O then my useless heart!
Would God that thou wert dead--
A clod insensible to joys and ills--
A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!
_792._ _Salve!_
To live within a cave--it is most good;
But, if God make a day,
And some one come, and say,
‘Lo! I have gather’d faggots in the wood!’
E’en let him stay,
And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood!
So sit till morning! when the light is grown
That he the path can read,
Then bid the man God-speed!
His morning is not thine: yet must thou own
They have a cheerful warmth--those ashes on the stone.
_793_. _My Garden_
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Fern’d grot--
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not--
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
’Tis very sure God walks in mine.
EDWARD ROBERT BULWER LYTTON, EARL OF LYTTON
1831-1892
_794._ _A Night in Italy_
Sweet are the rosy memories of the lips
That first kiss’d ours, albeit they kiss no more:
Sweet is the sight of sunset-sailing ships,
Altho’ they leave us on a lonely shore:
Sweet are familiar songs, tho’ Music dips
Her hollow shell in Thought’s forlornest wells:
And sweet, tho’ sad, the sound of midnight bells
When the oped casement with the night-rain drips.
There is a pleasure which is born of pain:
The grave of all things hath its violet.
Else why, thro’ days which never come again,
Roams Hope with that strange longing, like Regret?
Why put the posy in the cold dead hand?
Why plant the rose above the lonely grave?
Why bring the corpse across the salt sea-wave?
Why deem the dead more near in native land?
Thy name hath been a silence in my life
So long, it falters upon language now,
O more to me than sister or than wife,
Once ... and now--nothing! It is hard to know
That such things have been, and are not; and yet
Life loiters, keeps a pulse at even measure,
And goes upon its business and its pleasure,
And knows not all the depths of its regret....
Ah, could the memory cast her spots, as do
The snake’s brood theirs in spring! and be once more
Wholly renew’d, to dwell i’ the time that’s new,
With no reiterance of those pangs of yore.
Peace, peace! My wild song will go wandering
Too wantonly, down paths a private pain
Hath trodden bare. What was it jarr’d the strain?
Some crush’d illusion, left with crumpled wing
Tangled in Music’s web of twinèd strings--
That started that false note, and crack’d the tune
In its beginning. Ah, forgotten things
Stumble back strangely! and the ghost of June
Stands by December’s fire, cold, cold! and puts
The last spark out.--How could I sing aright
With those old airs haunting me all the night
And those old steps that sound when daylight shuts?
For back she comes, and moves reproachfully,
The mistress of my moods, and looks bereft
(Cruel to the last!) as tho’ ’twere I, not she,
That did the wrong, and broke the spell, and left
Memory comfortless.--Away! away!
Phantoms, about whose brows the bindweed clings,
Hopeless regret! In thinking of these things
Some men have lost their minds, and others may.
Yet, O for one deep draught in this dull hour!
One deep, deep draught of the departed time!
O for one brief strong pulse of ancient power,
To beat and breathe thro’ all the valves of rhyme!
Thou, Memory, with thy downward eyes, that art
The cup-bearer of gods, pour deep and long,
Brim all the vacant chalices of song
With health! Droop down thine urn. I hold my heart
One draught of what I shall not taste again
Save when my brain with thy dark wine is brimm’d,--
One draught! and then straight onward, spite of pain,
And spite of all things changed, with gaze undimm’d,
Love’s footsteps thro’ the waning Past to explore
Undaunted; and to carve in the wan light
Of Hope’s last outposts, on Song’s utmost height,
The sad resemblance of an hour or more.
Midnight, and love, and youth, and Italy!
Love in the land where love most lovely seems!
Land of my love, tho’ I be far from thee,
Lend, for love’s sake, the light of thy moonbeams,
The spirit of thy cypress-groves and all
Thy dark-eyed beauty for a little while
To my desire. Yet once more let her smile
Fall o’er me: o’er me let her long hair fall....
Under the blessèd darkness unreproved
We were alone, in that best hour of time
Which first reveal’d to us how much we loved,
’Neath the thick starlight. The young night sublime
Hung trembling o’er us. At her feet I knelt,
And gazed up from her feet into her eyes.
Her face was bow’d: we breathed each other’s sighs:
We did not speak: not move: we look’d: we felt.
The night said not a word. The breeze was dead.
The leaf lay without whispering on the tree,
As I lay at her feet. Droop’d was her head:
One hand in mine: and one still pensively
Went wandering through my hair. We were together.
How? Where? What matter? Somewhere in a dream,
Drifting, slow drifting down a wizard stream:
Whither? Together: then what matter whither?
It was enough for me to clasp her hand:
To blend with her love-looks my own: no more.
Enough (with thoughts like ships that cannot land,
Blown by faint winds about a magic shore)
To realize, in each mysterious feeling,
The droop of the warm cheek so near my own:
The cool white arm about my shoulder thrown:
Those exquisite fair feet where I was kneeling.
How little know they life’s divinest bliss,
That know not to possess and yet refrain!
Let the young Psyche roam, a fleeting kiss:
Grasp it--a few poor grains of dust remain.
See how those floating flowers, the butterflies,
Hover the garden thro’, and take no root!
Desire for ever hath a flying foot:
Free pleasure comes and goes beneath the skies.
Close not thy hand upon the innocent joy
That trusts itself within thy reach. It may,
Or may not, linger. Thou canst but destroy
The wingèd wanderer. Let it go or stay.
Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem.
Think! Midas starved by turning all to gold.
Blessèd are those that spare, and that withhold;
Because the whole world shall be trusted them.
The foolish Faun pursues the unwilling Nymph
That culls her flowers beside the precipice
Or dips her shining ankles in the lymph:
But, just when she must perish or be his,
Heaven puts an arm out. She is safe. The shore
Gains some new fountain; or the lilied lawn
A rarer sort of rose: but ah, poor Faun!
To thee she shall be changed for evermore.
Chase not too close the fading rapture. Leave
To Love his long auroras, slowly seen.
Be ready to release as to receive.
Deem those the nearest, soul to soul, between
Whose lips yet lingers reverence on a sigh.
Judge what thy sense can reach not, most thine own,
If once thy soul hath seized it. The unknown
Is life to love, religion, poetry.
The moon had set. There was not any light,
Save of the lonely legion’d watch-stars pale
In outer air, and what by fits made bright
Hot oleanders in a rosy vale
Searched by the lamping fly, whose little spark
Went in and out, like passion’s bashful hope.
Meanwhile the sleepy globe began to slope
A ponderous shoulder sunward thro’ the dark.
And the night pass’d in beauty like a dream.
Aloof in those dark heavens paused Destiny,
With her last star descending in the gleam
Of the cold morrow, from the emptied sky.
The hour, the distance from her old self, all
The novelty and loneness of the place
Had left a lovely awe on that fair face,
And all the land grew strange and magical.
As droops some billowy cloud to the crouch’d hill,
Heavy with all heaven’s tears, for all earth’s care,
She droop’d unto me, without force or will,
And sank upon my bosom, murmuring there
A woman’s inarticulate passionate words.
O moment of all moments upon earth!
O life’s supreme! How worth, how wildly worth,
Whole worlds of flame, to know this world affords.
What even Eternity can not restore!
When all the ends of life take hands and meet
Round centres of sweet fire. Ah, never more,
Ah never, shall the bitter with the sweet
Be mingled so in the pale after-years!
One hour of life immortal spirits possess.
This drains the world, and leaves but weariness,
And parching passion, and perplexing tears.
Sad is it, that we cannot even keep
That hour to sweeten life’s last toil: but Youth
Grasps all, and leaves us: and when we would weep,
We dare not let our tears fall, lest, in truth,
They fall upon our work which must be done.
And so we bind up our torn hearts from breaking:
Our eyes from weeping, and our brows from aching:
And follow the long pathway all alone.
_795._ _The Last Wish_
Since all that I can ever do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be:
That thou mayst never guess nor ever see
The all-endured this nothing-done costs me.
JAMES THOMSON
1834-1882
_796._ _In the Train_
As we rush, as we rush in the Train,
The trees and the houses go wheeling back,
But the starry heavens above the plain
Come flying on our track.
All the beautiful stars of the sky,
The silver doves of the forest of Night,
Over the dull earth swarm and fly,
Companions of our flight.
We will rush ever on without fear;
Let the goal be far, the flight be fleet!
For we carry the Heavens with us, dear,
While the Earth slips from our feet!
_797._ _Sunday up the River_
My love o’er the water bends dreaming;
It glideth and glideth away:
She sees there her own beauty, gleaming
Through shadow and ripple and spray.
O tell her, thou murmuring river,
As past her your light wavelets roll,
How steadfast that image for ever
Shines pure in pure depths of my soul.
_798._ _Gifts_
Give a man a horse he can ride,
Give a man a boat he can sail;
And his rank and wealth, his strength and health,
On sea nor shore shall fail.
Give a man a pipe he can smoke,
Give a man a book he can read:
And his home is bright with a calm delight,
Though the room be poor indeed.
Give a man a girl he can love,
As I, O my love, love thee;
And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate,
At home, on land, on sea.
_799._ _The Vine_
The wine of Love is music,
And the feast of Love is song:
And when Love sits down to the banquet,
Love sits long:
Sits long and arises drunken,
But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
That great, rich Vine.
WILLIAM MORRIS
1834-1896
_800._ _Summer Dawn_
Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
The summer night waneth, the morning light slips
Faint and gray ’twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow’d locks of the corn.
_801._ _Love is enough_
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass’d over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
_802._ _The Nymph’s Song to Hylas_
I know a little garden-close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
And though within it no birds sing,
And though no pillar’d house is there,
And though the apple boughs are bare
Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
Her feet upon the green grass trod,
And I beheld them as before!
There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the place two fair streams are,
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea;
The hills whose flowers ne’er fed the bee,
The shore no ship has ever seen,
Still beaten by the billows green,
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.
For which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight,
That maketh me both deaf and blind,
Careless to win, unskill’d to find,
And quick to lose what all men seek.
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place;
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kiss’d, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.
RODEN BERKELEY WRIOTHESLEY NOEL
1834-1894
_803._ _The Water-Nymph and the Boy_
I flung me round him,
I drew him under;
I clung, I drown’d him,
My own white wonder!...
Father and mother,
Weeping and wild,
Came to the forest,
Calling the child,
Came from the palace,
Down to the pool,
Calling my darling,
My beautiful!
Under the water,
Cold and so pale!
Could it be love made
Beauty to fail?
Ah me for mortals!
In a few moons,
If I had left him,
After some Junes
He would have faded,
Faded away,
He, the young monarch, whom
All would obey,
Fairer than day;
Alien to springtime,
Joyless and gray,
He would have faded,
Faded away,
Moving a mockery,
Scorn’d of the day!
Now I have taken him
All in his prime,
Saved from slow poisoning
Pitiless Time,
Fill’d with his happiness,
One with the prime,
Saved from the cruel
Dishonour of Time.
Laid him, my beautiful,
Laid him to rest,
Loving, adorable,
Softly to rest,
Here in my crystalline,
Here in my breast!
_804._ _The Old_
They are waiting on the shore
For the bark to take them home:
They will toil and grieve no more;
The hour for release hath come.
All their long life lies behind
Like a dimly blending dream:
There is nothing left to bind
To the realms that only seem.
They are waiting for the boat;
There is nothing left to do:
What was near them grows remote,
Happy silence falls like dew;
Now the shadowy bark is come,
And the weary may go home.
By still water they would rest
In the shadow of the tree:
After battle sleep is best,
After noise, tranquillity.
THOMAS ASHE
1836-1889
_805._ _Meet We no Angels, Pansie?_
Came, on a Sabbath noon, my sweet,
In white, to find her lover;
The grass grew proud beneath her feet,
The green elm-leaves above her:--
Meet we no angels, Pansie?
She said, ‘We meet no angels now’;
And soft lights stream’d upon her;
And with white hand she touch’d a bough;
She did it that great honour:--
What! meet no angels, Pansie?
O sweet brown hat, brown hair, brown eyes,
Down-dropp’d brown eyes, so tender!
Then what said I? Gallant replies
Seem flattery, and offend her:--
But--meet no angels, Pansie?
_806._ _To Two Bereaved_
You must be sad; for though it is to Heaven,
’Tis hard to yield a little girl of seven.
Alas, for me ’tis hard my grief to rule,
Who only met her as she went to school;
Who never heard the little lips so sweet
Say even ‘Good-morning,’ though our eyes would meet
As whose would fain be friends! How must you sigh,
Sick for your loss, when even so sad am I,
Who never clasp’d the small hands any day!
Fair flowers thrive round the little grave, I pray.
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
1836-1914
_807._ _Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern_
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place,
Where?
_Raleigh._
’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright of golden roofs and walls--
El Dorado’s rare domain--
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold thro’ leafless branches,
Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.
CHORUS. Christmas knows a merry, merry place, &c.
_Drayton._
’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O’er the river-flags emboss’d
Rich with flowery runes of frost--
O’er the meads where snowy tufts are toss’d--
Strains of olden time.
CHORUS. Christmas knows a merry, merry place, &c.
_Shakespeare’s Friend._
’Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakespeare’s feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crown’d
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship’s face he loveth well:
’Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o’er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.
CHORUS. Christmas knows a merry, merry place, &c.
_Heywood._
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam--
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.
CHORUS. Christmas knows a merry, merry place, &c.
_Ben Jonson._
Love’s old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof:
Love’s old drink of Yule brew I
Wassail for new love’s behoof.
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring--
Yea, from rush to roof.
FINALE.
Christmas loves this merry, merry place;
Christmas saith with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
‘Ben, the drink tastes rare of sack and mace;
Rare!’
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
1837-1909
_808._ _Chorus from ‘Atalanta’_
When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces.
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamour of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.
Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember’d is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
The full streams feed on flower of rushes,
Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre,
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes
The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root.
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Mænad and the Bassarid;
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.
The ivy falls with the Bacchanal’s hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare
Her bright breast shortening into sighs;
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare
The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.
_809._ _Hertha_
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
Before ever land was,
Before ever the sea,
Or soft hair of the grass,
Or fair limbs of the tree,
Or the flesh-colour’d fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in me.
First life on my sources
First drifted and swam;
Out of me are the forces
That save it or damn;
Out of me man and woman, and wild-beast and bird: before God was, I am.
Beside or above me
Naught is there to go;
Love or unlove me,
Unknow me or know,
I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.
I the mark that is miss’d
And the arrows that miss,
I the mouth that is kiss’d
And the breath in the kiss,
The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that is.
I am that thing which blesses
My spirit elate;
That which caresses
With hands uncreate
My limbs unbegotten that measure the length of the measure of fate.
But what thing dost thou now,
Looking Godward, to cry,
‘I am I, thou art thou,
I am low, thou art high’?
I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou art I.
I the grain and the furrow,
The plough-cloven clod
And the ploughshare drawn thorough,
The germ and the sod,
The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the dust which is God.
Hast thou known how I fashion’d thee,
Child, underground?
Fire that impassion’d thee,
Iron that bound,
Dim changes of water, what thing of all these hast thou known of or found?
Canst thou say in thine heart
Thou hast seen with thine eyes
With what cunning of art
Thou wast wrought in what wise,
By what force of what stuff thou wast shapen, and shown on my breast to the skies?
Who hath given, who hath sold it thee,
Knowledge of me?
Has the wilderness told it thee?
Hast thou learnt of the sea?
Hast thou communed in spirit with night? have the winds taken counsel with thee?
Have I set such a star
To show light on thy brow
That thou sawest from afar
What I show to thee now?
Have ye spoken as brethren together, the sun and the mountains and thou?
What is here, dost thou know it?
What was, hast thou known?
Prophet nor poet
Nor tripod nor throne
Nor spirit nor flesh can make answer, but only thy mother alone.
Mother, not maker,
Born, and not made;
Though her children forsake her,
Allured or afraid,
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for all that have pray’d.
A creed is a rod,
And a crown is of night;
But this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as the light.
I am in thee to save thee,
As my soul in thee saith;
Give thou as I gave thee,
Thy life-blood and breath,
Green leaves of thy labour, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death.
Be the ways of thy giving
As mine were to thee;
The free life of thy living,
Be the gift of it free;
Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee to me.
O children of banishment,
Souls overcast,
Were the lights ye see vanish meant
Alway to last,
Ye would know not the sun overshining the shadows and stars overpast.
I that saw where ye trod
The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow call’d God
In your skies to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight.
The tree many-rooted
That swells to the sky
With frondage red-fruited,
The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.
But the Gods of your fashion
That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live.
My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark;
Stars caught in my branches
Make day of the dark,
And are worshipp’d as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.
Where dead ages hide under
The live roots of the tree,
In my darkness the thunder
Makes utterance of me;
In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea.
That noise is of Time,
As his feathers are spread
And his feet set to climb
Through the boughs overhead,
And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.
The storm-winds of ages
Blow through me and cease,
The war-wind that rages,
The spring-wind of peace,
Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms increase.
All sounds of all changes,
All shadows and lights
On the world’s mountain-ranges
And stream-riven heights,
Whose tongue is the wind’s tongue and language of storm-clouds on earth-shaking nights;
All forms of all faces,
All works of all hands
In unsearchable places
Of time-stricken lands,
All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands.
Though sore be my burden
And more than ye know,
And my growth have no guerdon
But only to grow,
Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or deathworms below.
These too have their part in me,
As I too in these;
Such fire is at heart in me,
Such sap is this tree’s,
Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas.
In the spring-colour’d hours
When my mind was as May’s
There brake forth of me flowers
By centuries of days,
Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot out from my spirit as rays.
And the sound of them springing
And smell of their shoots
Were as warmth and sweet singing
And strength to my roots;
And the lives of my children made perfect with freedom of soul were my fruits.
I bid you but be;
I have need not of prayer;
I have need of you free
As your mouths of mine air;
That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair.
More fair than strange fruit is
Of faiths ye espouse;
In me only the root is
That blooms in your boughs;
Behold now your God that ye made you, to feed him with faith of your vows.
In the darkening and whitening
Abysses adored,
With dayspring and lightning
For lamp and for sword,
God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the Lord.
O my sons, O too dutiful
Toward Gods not of me,
Was not I enough beautiful?
Was it hard to be free?
For behold, I am with you, am in you and of you; look forth now and see.
Lo, wing’d with world’s wonders,
With miracles shod,
With the fires of his thunders
For raiment and rod,
God trembles in heaven, and his angels are white with the terror of God.
For his twilight is come on him,
His anguish is here;
And his spirits gaze dumb on him,
Grown gray from his fear;
And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his infinite year.
Thought made him and breaks him,
Truth slays and forgives;
But to you, as time takes him,
This new thing it gives,
Even love, the belovèd Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.
For truth only is living,
Truth only is whole,
And the love of his giving
Man’s polestar and pole;
Man, pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed of my soul.
One birth of my bosom;
One beam of mine eye;
One topmost blossom
That scales the sky;
Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I.
_810._ _Ave atque Vale_
(IN MEMORY OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE)
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
Trod by no tropic feet?
For always thee the fervid languid glories
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
Blind gods that cannot spare.
Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,
Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:
Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,
Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other
Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;
The hidden harvest of luxurious time,
Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech;
And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep
Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;
And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,
Seeing as men sow men reap.
O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,
That were athirst for sleep and no more life
And no more love, for peace and no more strife!
Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping
Spirit and body and all the springs of song,
Is it well now where love can do no wrong,
Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang
Behind the unopening closure of her lips?
Is it not well where soul from body slips
And flesh from bone divides without a pang
As dew from flower-bell drips?
It is enough; the end and the beginning
Are one thing to thee, who art past the end.
O hand unclasp’d of unbeholden friend,
For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,
No triumph and no labour and no lust,
Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.
O quiet eyes wherein the light saith naught,
Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night
With obscure finger silences your sight,
Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,
Sleep, and have sleep for light.
Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,
Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,
Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,
Such as thy vision here solicited,
Under the shadow of her fair vast head,
The deep division of prodigious breasts,
The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
The weight of awful tresses that still keep
The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests
Where the wet hill-winds weep?
Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?
O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
Hast thou found sown, what gather’d in the gloom?
What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
What of life is there, what of ill or good?
Are the fruits gray like dust or bright like blood?
Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,
The faint fields quicken any terrene root,
In low lands where the sun and moon are mute
And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers
At all, or any fruit?
Alas, but though my flying song flies after,
O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet
Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet,
Some dim derision of mysterious laughter
From the blind tongueless warders of the dead,
Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine’s veil’d head,
Some little sound of unregarded tears
Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,
And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs--
These only, these the hearkening spirit hears,
Sees only such things rise.
Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,
Far too far off for thought or any prayer.
What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?
What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?
Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,
Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.
Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,
The low light fails us in elusive skies,
Still the foil’d earnest ear is deaf, and blind
Are still the eluded eyes.
Not thee, O never thee, in all time’s changes,
Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,
The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll
I lay my hand on, and not death estranges
My spirit from communion of thy song--
These memories and these melodies that throng
Veil’d porches of a Muse funereal--
These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold
As though a hand were in my hand to hold,
Or through mine ears a mourning musical
Of many mourners roll’d.
I among these, I also, in such station
As when the pyre was charr’d, and piled the sods.
And offering to the dead made, and their gods,
The old mourners had, standing to make libation,
I stand, and to the Gods and to the dead
Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed
Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,
And what of honey and spice my seed-lands bear,
And what I may of fruits in this chill’d air,
And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb
A curl of sever’d hair.
But by no hand nor any treason stricken,
Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,
The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
Thou liest and on this dust no tears could quicken.
There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear
Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
Down the opening leaves of holy poets’ pages.
Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
But bending us-ward with memorial urns
The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
Weep, and our God’s heart yearns.
For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
Among us darkling here the lord of light
Makes manifest his music and his might
In hearts that open and in lips that soften
With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
Thy lips indeed he touch’d with bitter wine,
And nourish’d them indeed with bitter bread;
Yet surely from his hand thy soul’s food came,
The fire that scarr’d thy spirit at his flame
Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
Who feeds our hearts with fame.
Therefore he too now at thy soul’s sunsetting,
God of all suns and songs, he too bends down
To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown,
And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.
Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,
Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,
Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,
And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs
Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,
And over thine irrevocable head
Sheds light from the under skies.
And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,
And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;
That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
Long since, and face no more call’d Erycine--
A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell
Did she, a sad and second prey, compel
Into the footless places once more trod,
And shadows hot from hell.
And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation lure to light
A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night
And love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
There is no help for these things; none to mend,
And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,
Will make death clear or make life durable.
Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine
And with wild notes about this dust of thine
At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell
And wreathe an unseen shrine.
Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants gray,
Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,
Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
Among the days departed?
For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
With sadder than the Niobean womb,
And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.
_811._ _Itylus_
Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow?
What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?
O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow,
Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south,
The soft south whither thine heart is set?
Shall not the grief of the old time follow?
Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?
Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?
Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and the south;
But I, fulfill’d of my heart’s desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire.
I the nightingale all spring through,
O swallow, sister, O changing swallow,
All spring through till the spring be done,
Clothed with the light of the night on the dew,
Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow,
Take flight and follow and find the sun.
Sister, my sister, O soft light swallow,
Though all things feast in the spring’s guest-chamber,
How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet?
For where thou fliest I shall not follow,
Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget.
Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow,
I know not how thou hast heart to sing.
Hast thou the heart? is it all past over?
Thy lord the summer is good to follow,
And fair the feet of thy lover the spring:
But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover?
O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow,
My heart in me is a molten ember
And over my head the waves have met.
But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow
Could I forget or thou remember,
Couldst thou remember and I forget.
O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow,
The heart’s division divideth us.
Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree;
But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow
To the place of the slaying of Itylus,
The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea.
O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow,
I pray thee sing not a little space.
Are not the roofs and the lintels wet?
The woven web that was plain to follow,
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten!
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
_Who hath remember’d me? who hath forgotten?_
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
b. 1837
_812._ _Earliest Spring_
Tossing his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and ’thwart all the hollows and angles
Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.
But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
Deep in the oak’s chill core, under the gathering drift.
Nay, to earth’s life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
(How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes--
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect--as if in the brier,
Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.
BRET HARTE
1839-1902
_813._ _What the Bullet sang_
O joy of creation,
To be!
O rapture, to fly
And be free!
Be the battle lost or won,
Though its smoke shall hide the sun,
I shall find my love--the one
Born for me!
I shall know him where he stands
All alone,
With the power in his hands
Not o’erthrown;
I shall know him by his face,
By his godlike front and grace;
I shall hold him for a space
All my own!
It is he--O my love!
So bold!
It is I--all thy love
Foretold!
It is I--O love, what bliss!
Dost thou answer to my kiss?
O sweetheart! what is this
Lieth there so cold?
JOHN TODHUNTER
1839-1916
_814._ _Maureen_
O you plant the pain in my heart with your wistful eyes,
Girl of my choice, Maureen!
Will you drive me mad for the kisses your shy, sweet mouth denies,
Maureen?
Like a walking ghost I am, and no words to woo,
White rose of the West, Maureen:
For it’s pale you are, and the fear that’s on you is over me too,
Maureen!
Sure it’s one complaint that’s on us, asthore, this day,
Bride of my dreams, Maureen:
The smart of the bee that stung us his honey must cure, they say,
Maureen!
I’ll coax the light to your eyes, and the rose to your face,
Mavourneen, my own Maureen!
When I feel the warmth of your breast, and your nest is my arm’s embrace,
Maureen!
O where was the King o’ the World that day--only me?
My one true love, Maureen!
And you the Queen with me there, and your throne in my heart, machree,
Maureen!
_815._ _Aghadoe_
There’s a glade in Aghadoe, Aghadoe, Aghadoe,
There’s a green and silent glade in Aghadoe,
Where we met, my love and I, Love’s fair planet in the sky,
O’er that sweet and silent glade in Aghadoe.
There’s a glen in Aghadoe, Aghadoe, Aghadoe,
There’s a deep and secret glen in Aghadoe,
Where I hid from the eyes of the red-coats and their spies,
That year the trouble came to Aghadoe.
O, my curse on one black heart in Aghadoe, Aghadoe,
On Shaun Dhu, my mother’s son in Aghadoe!
When your throat fries in hell’s drouth, salt the flame be in your mouth,
For the treachery you did in Aghadoe!
For they track’d me to that glen in Aghadoe, Aghadoe,
When the price was on his head in Aghadoe:
O’er the mountain, through the wood, as I stole to him with food,
Where in hiding lone he lay in Aghadoe.
But they never took him living in Aghadoe, Aghadoe;
With the bullets in his heart in Aghadoe,
There he lay, the head, my breast keeps the warmth of where ’twould rest,
Gone, to win the traitor’s gold, from Aghadoe!
I walk’d to Mallow town from Aghadoe, Aghadoe,
Brought his head from the gaol’s gate to Aghadoe;
Then I cover’d him with fern, and I piled on him the cairn,
Like an Irish King he sleeps in Aghadoe.
O, to creep into that cairn in Aghadoe, Aghadoe!
There to rest upon his breast in Aghadoe!
Sure your dog for you could die with no truer heart than I,
Your own love, cold on your cairn in Aghadoe.
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
b. 1840
_816._ _Song_
O fly not, Pleasure, pleasant-hearted Pleasure;
Fold me thy wings, I prithee, yet and stay:
For my heart no measure
Knows, nor other treasure
To buy a garland for my love to-day.
And thou, too, Sorrow, tender-hearted Sorrow,
Thou gray-eyed mourner, fly not yet away:
For I fain would borrow
Thy sad weeds to-morrow,
To make a mourning for love’s yesterday.
The voice of Pity, Time’s divine dear Pity,
Moved me to tears: I dared not say them nay,
But passed forth from the city,
Making thus my ditty
Of fair love lost for ever and a day.
_817._ _The Desolate City_
Dark to me is the earth. Dark to me are the heavens.
Where is she that I loved, the woman with eyes like stars?
Desolate are the streets. Desolate is the city.
A city taken by storm, where none are left but the slain.
Sadly I rose at dawn, undid the latch of my shutters,
Thinking to let in light, but I only let in love.
Birds in the boughs were awake; I listen’d to their chaunting;
Each one sang to his love; only I was alone.
This, I said in my heart, is the hour of life and of pleasure.
Now each creature on earth has his joy, and lives in the sun,
Each in another’s eyes finds light, the light of compassion,
This is the moment of pity, this is the moment of love.
Speak, O desolate city! Speak, O silence in sadness!
Where is she that I loved in my strength, that spoke to my soul?
Where are those passionate eyes that appeal’d to my eyes in passion?
Where is the mouth that kiss’d me, the breast I laid to my own?
Speak, thou soul of my soul, for rage in my heart is kindled.
Tell me, where didst thou flee in the day of destruction and fear?
See, my arms still enfold thee, enfolding thus all heaven,
See, my desire is fulfill’d in thee, for it fills the earth.
Thus in my grief I lamented. Then turn’d I from the window,
Turn’d to the stair, and the open door, and the empty street,
Crying aloud in my grief, for there was none to chide me,
None to mock my weakness, none to behold my tears.
Groping I went, as blind. I sought her house, my belovèd’s.
There I stopp’d at the silent door, and listen’d and tried the latch.
Love, I cried, dost thou slumber? This is no hour for slumber,
This is the hour of love, and love I bring in my hand.
I knew the house, with its windows barr’d, and its leafless fig-tree,
Climbing round by the doorstep, the only one in the street;
I knew where my hope had climb’d to its goal and there encircled
All that those desolate walls once held, my belovèd’s heart.
There in my grief she consoled me. She loved me when I loved not.
She put her hand in my hand, and set her lips to my lips.
She told me all her pain and show’d me all her trouble.
I, like a fool, scarce heard, hardly return’d her kiss.
Love, thy eyes were like torches. They changed as I beheld them.
Love, thy lips were like gems, the seal thou settest on my life.
Love, if I loved not then, behold this hour thy vengeance;
This is the fruit of thy love and thee, the unwise grown wise.
Weeping strangled my voice. I call’d out, but none answer’d;
Blindly the windows gazed back at me, dumbly the door;
She whom I love, who loved me, look’d not on my yearning,
Gave me no more her hands to kiss, show’d me no more her soul.
Therefore the earth is dark to me, the sunlight blackness,
Therefore I go in tears and alone, by night and day;
Therefore I find no love in heaven, no light, no beauty,
A heaven taken by storm, where none are left but the slain!
_818._ _With Esther_
He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction’s reach. His fortune then
Holds nothing secret; and Eternity,
Which is a mystery to other men,
Has like a woman given him its joy.
Time is his conquest. Life, if it should fret,
Has paid him tribute. He can bear to die,
He who has once been happy! When I set
The world before me and survey its range,
Its mean ambitions, its scant fantasies,
The shreds of pleasure which for lack of change
Men wrap around them and call happiness,
The poor delights which are the tale and sum
Of the world’s courage in its martyrdom;
When I hear laughter from a tavern door,
When I see crowds agape and in the rain
Watching on tiptoe and with stifled roar
To see a rocket fired or a bull slain,
When misers handle gold, when orators
Touch strong men’s hearts with glory till they weep,
When cities deck their streets for barren wars
Which have laid waste their youth, and when I keep
Calmly the count of my own life and see
On what poor stuff my manhood’s dreams were fed
Till I too learn’d what dole of vanity
Will serve a human soul for daily bread,
--Then I remember that I once was young
And lived with Esther the world’s gods among.
_819._ _To Manon, on his Fortune in loving Her_
I did not choose thee, dearest. It was Love
That made the choice, not I. Mine eyes were blind
As a rude shepherd’s who to some lone grove
His offering brings and cares not at what shrine
He bends his knee. The gifts alone were mine;
The rest was Love’s. He took me by the hand,
And fired the sacrifice, and poured the wine,
And spoke the words I might not understand.
I was unwise in all but the dear chance
Which was my fortune, and the blind desire
Which led my foolish steps to Love’s abode,
And youth’s sublime unreason’d prescience
Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire
Its dedication _To the Unknown God_.
_820._ _St. Valentines Day_
To-day, all day, I rode upon the down,
With hounds and horsemen, a brave company
On this side in its glory lay the sea,
On that the Sussex weald, a sea of brown.
The wind was light, and brightly the sun shone,
And still we gallop’d on from gorse to gorse:
And once, when check’d, a thrush sang, and my horse
Prick’d his quick ears as to a sound unknown.
I knew the Spring was come. I knew it even
Better than all by this, that through my chase
In bush and stone and hill and sea and heaven
I seem’d to see and follow still your face.
Your face my quarry was. For it I rode,
My horse a thing of wings, myself a god.
_821._ _Gibraltar_
Seven weeks of sea, and twice seven days of storm
Upon the huge Atlantic, and once more
We ride into still water and the calm
Of a sweet evening, screen’d by either shore
Of Spain and Barbary. Our toils are o’er,
Our exile is accomplish’d. Once again
We look on Europe, mistress as of yore
Of the fair earth and of the hearts of men.
Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules
And Goth and Moor bequeath’d us. At this door
England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
And at the summons of the rock gun's roar
To see her red coats marching from the hill!
_822._ _Written at Florence_
O world, in very truth thou art too young;
When wilt thou learn to wear the garb of age?
World, with thy covering of yellow flowers,
Hast thou forgot what generations sprung
Out of thy loins and loved thee and are gone?
Hast thou no place in all their heritage
Where thou dost only weep, that I may come
Nor fear the mockery of thy yellow flowers?
O world, in very truth thou art too young.
The heroic wealth of passionate emprize
Built thee fair cities for thy naked plains:
How hast thou set thy summer growth among
The broken stones which were their palaces!
Hast thou forgot the darkness where _he_ lies
Who made thee beautiful, or have thy bees
Found out his grave to build their honeycombs?
O world, in very truth thou art too young:
They gave thee love who measured out thy skies,
And, when they found for thee another star,
Who made a festival and straightway hung
The jewel on thy neck. O merry world,
Hast thou forgot the glory of those eyes
Which first look'd love in thine? Thou hast not furl'd
One banner of thy bridal car for them.
O world, in very truth thou art too young.
There was a voice which sang about thy spring,
Till winter froze the sweetness of his lips,
And lo, the worms had hardly left his tongue
Before thy nightingales were come again.
O world, what courage hast thou thus to sing?
Say, has thy merriment no secret pain,
No sudden weariness that thou art young?
_823._ _The Two Highwaymen_
I long have had a quarrel set with Time
Because he robb’d me. Every day of life
Was wrested from me after bitter strife:
I never yet could see the sun go down
But I was angry in my heart, nor hear
The leaves fall in the wind without a tear
Over the dying summer. I have known
No truce with Time nor Time’s accomplice, Death.
The fair world is the witness of a crime
Repeated every hour. For life and breath
Are sweet to all who live; and bitterly
The voices of these robbers of the heath
Sound in each ear and chill the passer-by.
--What have we done to thee, thou monstrous Time?
What have we done to Death that we must die?
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON
b. 1840
_824._ _A Garden Song_
Here in this sequester’d close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose,
Here beside the modest stock
Flaunts the flaring hollyhock;
Here, without a pang, one sees
Ranks, conditions, and degrees.
All the seasons run their race
In this quiet resting-place;
Peach and apricot and fig
Here will ripen and grow big;
Here is store and overplus,—
More had not Alcinoüs!
Here, in alleys cool and green,
Far ahead the thrush is seen;
Here along the southern wall
Keeps the bee his festival;
All is quiet else—afar
Sounds of toil and turmoil are.
Here be shadows large and long;
Here be spaces meet for song;
Grant, O garden-god, that I,
Now that none profane is nigh,—
Now that mood and moment please,—
Find the fair Pierides!
_825._ _Urceus Exit_
_Triolet_
I intended an Ode,
And it turn’d to a Sonnet
It began _à la mode_,
I intended an Ode;
But Rose crossed the road
In her latest new bonnet;
I intended an Ode;
And it turn’d to a Sonnet.
_826._ _In After Days_
_Rondeau_
In after days when grasses high
O’er-top the stone where I shall lie,
Though ill or well the world adjust
My slender claim to honour’d dust,
I shall not question nor reply.
I shall not see the morning sky;
I shall not hear the night-wind sigh;
I shall be mute, as all men must
In after days!
But yet, now living, fain would I
That some one then should testify,
Saying--‘He held his pen in trust
To Art, not serving shame or lust.’
Will none?--Then let my memory die
In after days!
HENRY CLARENCE KENDALL
1841-1882
_827._ _Mooni_
He that is by Mooni now
Sees the water-sapphires gleaming
Where the River Spirit, dreaming,
Sleeps by fall and fountain streaming
Under lute of leaf and bough!--
Hears what stamp of Storm with stress is,
Psalms from unseen wildernesses
Deep amongst far hill-recesses--
He that is by Mooni now.
Yea, for him by Mooni’s marge
Sings the yellow-hair’d September,
With the face the gods remember,
When the ridge is burnt to ember,
And the dumb sea chains the barge!
Where the mount like molten brass is,
Down beneath fern-feather’d passes
Noonday dew in cool green grasses
Gleams on him by Mooni’s marge.
Who that dwells by Mooni yet,
Feels in flowerful forest arches
Smiting wings and breath that parches
Where strong Summer’s path of march is,
And the suns in thunder set!
Housed beneath the gracious kirtle
Of the shadowy water-myrtle--
Winds may kiss with heat and hurtle,
He is safe by Mooni yet!
Days there were when he who sings
(Dumb so long through passion’s losses)
Stood where Mooni’s water crosses
Shining tracks of green-hair’d mosses,
Like a soul with radiant wings:
Then the psalm the wind rehearses--
Then the song the stream disperses--
Lent a beauty to his verses,
Who to-night of Mooni sings.
Ah, the theme--the sad, gray theme!
Certain days are not above me,
Certain hearts have ceased to love me,
Certain fancies fail to move me,
Like the effluent morning dream.
Head whereon the white is stealing,
Heart whose hurts are past all healing,
Where is now the first, pure feeling?
Ah, the theme--the sad, gray theme!
* * * * *
Still to be by Mooni cool--
Where the water-blossoms glister,
And by gleaming vale and vista
Sits the English April’s sister,
Soft and sweet and wonderful!
Just to rest beneath the burning
Outer world--its sneers and spurning--
Ah, my heart--my heart is yearning
Still to be by Mooni cool!
ARTHUR WILLIAM EDGAR O’SHAUGHNESSY
1844-1881
_828._ _Ode_
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.