University of Virginia Library

MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.

PERICLES.

He gave its title to the golden prime
Of Athens, called the Age of Pericles;
He left a name for arts of war and peace
Scarce-rivalled in two thousand years of time;
But not for this doth he illumine rhyme
Above all heroes of historic Greece;
But that when power might pall or cares might cease,
He lived in love as sunny as his clime.
Surely he was of all men happiest,
The greatest of his country and his age,
And privileged to pillow on the breast
Of that most famous of Eve's family,
Whose name is writ upon Romance's page,
Aspasia of ambrosial memory.

MARGARET OF SCOTLAND.

There's magic in the name of Margaret,
The sweetest sound in Scotland, though the two
Best-worshipped Margarets she ever knew
Were English: one is saint of Scotland yet.
The other we pourtray with lashes wet
For him her countrymen at Flodden slew,
And found, his mail arust with autumn dew,
'Mid bishop, earl, and doughty banneret
Upon the morrow-morning. Yet for me
The name wakes not the Scots' kings' English queens
Widowed by English arrows, but the glee,
Blue eyes, and glittering hair and proud sweet miens
Of two of Scotland's daughters—born afar
From Tweed or Aln—'neath the southern star.

PLATONIC LOVE.

WIFE-LOVE.

INFANCY.

When we recall the myriad accidents
Which babe-life threaten, marvel is it great
That they have ever come to man's estate,
Who won great wars or carved out continents!
Napoleon, for all his regiments,
Was once a little helpless child, whose fate
Lay balanced in his nurse's love and hate:
A chill at Cromwell's birth had changed events,
As Rupert could not, and his cavaliers,
In half-a-dozen battles. When we think
How surfeit or starvation, heat or cold,
Neglect, unwary diet—not for years
But hours—will sweep the infant o'er the brink,
The marvel is that any man grows old.

ON A DEAD INFANT.

Dead that two brothers should not disagree!
Poor babe! Thy brief experience of earth
Knew little of its beauty and its worth,
But yet thou didst fulfil a destiny,
In that thou wouldst not come 'twixt him and me.
Ten weeks of wintry weather from thy birth,
And then thou soaredst where there is no dearth
Of sun and southern air and sympathy.
O may no cloud, though smaller than a hand,
Arise again between us, lest once more
God should from us some sacrifice demand
Like this, which thus untimely we deplore.
We are amenable to Providence
Although we understand not in what sense.

BOB.

This was the child of hope: about his birth
Fair portents shone, recorded that they might,
When he had won his name, be brought to light,
And men might read the promise of his worth
In all that heralded his dawn on Earth,
And from his cradle fame begin to write.
But after a brief sojourn took he flight
Before he knew so much as grief or mirth.
High hopes are buried underneath this stone,
Where lies a child begotten overseas,
Who never breathed in that serener zone
Where, even in the winter, cooling breeze
Is welcome to the joyous folk who fare
Free and contented in the sunny air.

TOO LATE.

Whom has it not befallen at a ball
That some shy maid, he did not note till late
And briefly danced with, should by some ill fate
Be she who most attracted him of all:
And so in friendships will it oft befall:
Some one for weeks has been your constant mate,
In day-walks and night-talks inseparate,
In all you minded, sympathetical,
And yet the closing link of sympathy
To make the two ends of your bond to meet
Your vigilance has cheated, till well nigh
Your intercourse's season has passed by;
And then you see how passingly more sweet
This intercourse had been, if thus complete.

CATHEDRALS.

EXETER CATHEDRAL.

Not greatest of our minsters is the fane
Of Exeter, but dear it is to me
As the first fresh one, which I chanced to see
(Though I had been to Westminster again
And huge St Paul's) since I recrossed the main,
From the New England in the Southern Sea,
Where ancient minsters are not. Royally
it rises up, with tracery, rich pane
And sculptured niches glorious its west,
And Norman towers its centre, and its east
Inside with antique tomb of knight and priest,
Rood-screen and bishop's throne. And by me stands
She whom I think of many maids the best,
A pilgrim, like myself, from Austral lands.

COCKINGTON LANES,

near Torquay.

Rare afternoon in an October rare!
We passed red cliffs environing blue seas,
Red lanes with green banks bounded and elm trees;
The sky was clouded lightly; soft the air
And fresh and soft the breezes; the rich glare
Of red and green was almost Cinghalese,
Recalling for the traveller reveries
Of red-tiled roofs and palm-tree groves, so fair
To unaccustomed eyes; but soon the green
Of elms with linden-yellow, hawthorn-red,
And marvellous horse-chestnut-orange sheen
Was tempered, and once more 'twas mine to tread
The merry, crackling leaves—a sound scarce known
In ever-green Australia's milder zone.

A WALK IN SPRING.

[From Torquay to Marldon.]

DEVONSHIRE.

Broad county of deep hedge-rows and blown trees,
With wild deer ranging on thine eastern heights,
And salmon in thy spates, and rich in bights
And wooded estuaries and pebbled quays,
Elbowed against the western storms and seas!
Great mother of Elizabethan Knights,
Who fought in frozen seas and famous fights,
And bearing in thy quaint-named villages
The impress of the Norman, as thou bearest
The emblem of the Briton on thy moors!
Nor is this all thou boastest but the fairest
Of mead and orchard, yielding oft-sung stores
Of cream and cider—for thy wealth with fame
As great as for wild beauty and high name.

BOWOOD.

[Near “Bideford in Devon.”]

TOR STEPS

—A BRITISH BRIDGE NEAR EXMOOR.

Tor Steps,—a relic of the ancient race
Who ruled the land, a causeway of vast stones
Built in the days of men with giants' bones
And heroes' might,—thou standest in thy place
After Time's storms have conquered to efface
The Celt's and Saxon's, Dane's and Norman's thrones.
Who knows if thou hast heard not ringing tones
From Arthur, glowing with an Exmoor chace,
Or rooting out some robber-prince, who made
His fastness in the savage moorland combes,
Or maybe with a gentle cavalcade
Of ladies in rich silks from ancient looms?
The bridge stands: the brown river ripples on:
But errant-knight and tourney-queen have gone.

THE HERB-ROBERT.

Herb-Robert, wherefore Robin of the flowers?
Because thou art their Red-breast, red in leaves
And blossoms, when the latest of the sheaves
Have long been garnered and ere April showers
Have filled the womb of May and she embowers
All Nature. Not the glow on summer eves,
Just ere the sea the setting sun receives,
Can shame the crimson, which in autumn hours
Flows through thy fronds, and thy wee pink-tinged bloom,
Amid the darkness of November days,
Serves with its small light to dispel the gloom—
Its small light hardly noticed mid the blaze
Of huge bright summer-blossoms—as sick room
Is cheered by humble folk with kindly ways.

THE BEECH TREE.

Give me of all our English trees the beeches,
Upright, smooth stemmed, and shapely in their spread
Of leafy boughs, in summer raimented
In glossy green and, when November preaches
His warning to the failing year in speeches
Of gust and frost, so gloriously red
That all the hollows where the leaves lie dead,
Rival the glow of crimson on the peaches
In hothouse reared. Not for fair stem and leaves
We praise thee only! have we not, when boys,
Declared thy nuts superior to the joys
Of walnuts fenced securely? Have not eves
Of chilly Christmases mid London fogs
Been transformated by thy blazing logs?

THE SONNET'S SCANTY PLOT.

OXFORD, THE GRAND UNDOER.