University of Virginia Library

Miscellaneous Sonnets.

Ezekiel.

Ezekiel, thus from the Lord God: Behold,
Mount Seir, I am against thee! Desolate,
Most desolate thy cloudy and dark fate.
Between the lips of talkers bad and bold,
Thy towns forsaken, and thy rivers rolled
Thro' silent wastes, are taken up, and great
The joy at thy high glories ruinate.
While all the earth is wanton, thou art cold,
For thy most cruel lifting of the spear
'Gainst Israel in her time of consternation.
Slain men shall fill thy mountains, O mount Seir!
Sith thou hast blood pursued, fell tribulation
Shall curse thy blessings, mock'd and undeplored:—
As I live, thou shalt know I am the Lord!

To Mavis.

Sweet Mavis! at this cool delicious hour
Of gloaming, with a pensive quietness
Hushes the odorous air,—with what a power
Of impulse unsubdued, thou dost express
Thyself a spirit! While the silver dew
Holy as manna on the meadow falls,
Thy song's impassioned clarity, trembling through
This omnipresent stillness, disenthrals
The soul to adoration. First I heard
A low thick lubric gurgle, soft as love,
Yet sad as memory, thro' the silence poured
Like starlight. But the mood intenser grows,
Precipitate rapture quickens, move on move
Lucidly linked together, till the close.

Despondency.

O mystery of love and human grief,
And hope, half-prophet ever prone to tears!
My heart is lonely as a withered leaf
Upon the winter tree. The passing years
Are barren to me of all happiness,
And, like a hoary anchorite, I feed
Upon my past, and, fetisch-like, it dress
With glory and clear jewels not its own.
O Love, and Childhood! and those happy times
When ignorance was patron to my need,
When every hour was like a linnet flown
In song, and beautiful in simple rhymes.
Would that my feelings knew the quiet flow
Of thy clear waters, Luggie! singing as they go!

The Moon.

The Luggie.

Thomas the Rhymer.

Listen, O spirit of that ancient bard!
Thou weird Ezekiel of an age of lies
And human fantasy! If 'neath the skies
One being liveth, worthy to be heard,
Whisper the awful sesame that unstarr'd
To thee the riddle of those mysteries,
Dumb evermore to gazing of all eyes
Mortal and uninspired! O thou that warr'd
With man and custom, I do think of thee
As something of a glory, something grand
Beyond what ever satisfied this land
With earnest of a strange divinity,
Penn'd in thy passionately-breathing moods,
Prophetic peopler of old solitudes!

The Lime-Tree.

A Lime-Tree broad of bough and rough of trunk
Deepens a shadow, as the evening cool,
Over the Luggie gathering in deep pool
Contemplative, its waters summer-shrunk;
The Lammas floods have sucked away the mould
About its roots, and now in bare sunshine
Like knot of snakes they twine and intertwine
Fantastic implication, fold in fold.
Secure in covert, 'neath the fringing fern
Lurks the bright-speckled trout, untroubled, save
When boyhood with a glorious unconcern
Eagerly plunges in the sleeping wave.
Here the much-musing poet might recapture
The inspiration flown, the vagrant rapture.

The Brooklet.

O deep unlovely brooklet, moaning slow
Thro' moorish fen in utter loneliness!
The partridge cowers beside thy loamy flow
In pulseful tremor, when with sudden press
The huntsman flusters thro' the rustled heather.
In March thy sallow-buds from vermeil shells
Break, satin-tinted, downy as the feather
Of moss-chat that among the purplish bells
Breasts into fresh new life her three unborn.
The plover hovers o'er thee, uttering clear
And mournful—strange, his human cry forlorn:
While wearily, alone, and void of cheer
Thou glid'st thy nameless waters from the fen,
To sleep unsunned in an untrampled glen.

Maidenhood.

A sacred land, to common men unknown,
A land of bowery glades and greenwoods hoary,
Still waters where white stars reflected shone,
And ancient castles in their ivied glory.
Fair knights caparison'd in golden mail,
And maidens whose enchantment was their beauty,
Met but to whisper each the passion-tale,
For love was all their pleasure and their duty.
Here cedar bark, as with a moving will,
Floated thro' liquid silver, all untended;
Here wrong and baseness ever came to ill,
And virtue with delight was sweetly blended.
This land, dear Spenser! was thy fair creation,
Made thro' fine glamour of imagination.

Sleep.

O precious Morphia! I sanctify
The soothing power that in a painless swoon
Laps my weak limbs, giving me strength to lie,
Till sacred dawn increases unto noon:
Then when, from highest meridional height,
The sun devolves, and cooling breezes wake,
It is a comfort and divine delight
The weary bed exhausted to forsake,
And bathe my temples in the blessed air.
But when day wanes, and the wind-moaning night
Deepens to darkness, then thy virtue rare,
O dream-creative liquid! brings delight,
Thy silver drops, diffusive, kindly steep
The senses in the golden juice of sleep.

The Days of Old Mythology.

O for the days of old Mythology,
When dripping Naiads taught their streams to glide!
When, 'mid the greenery, one would oft-times spy
An Oread tripping with her face aside.
The dismal realms of Dis by Virgil sung,
Whose shade led Dante, in his virtue bold,
All the sad grief and agony among,
O'er Acheron, that mournful river old,
Ev'n to the Stygian tide of purple gloom!
Pan in the forest making melody!
And far away where hoariest billows boom,
Old Neptune's steeds with snorting nostrils high!
These were the ancient days of sunny song;
Their memory yet how dear to the poetic throng.

Discontentment.

O if we never knew the genial hour
When Happiness sits by us like a god
Dispensing treasures, we would never know
The barren sadness of the common day,
The weariness, and discontentment sour
At human life—its ordinary load
Of hopes deferred, and presences that flow
Smilingly past us, syrens in the dream
Of young imagination, fancy-fed.
O I have seen such beauties with the gleam
Of fairy sunshine on them, and I long
Upon their bosoms this my life away
To dally, like the lover in a song,
And be a luting swain, Arcadian bred!

Snow.

But yestermorn the February snow
Lay printless as the heaven upon this field,
And, with a rapture in my bosom born,
In sudden awe and reverence I kneeled
Alone beneath the glory of the sky
And omnipresent deity. To-day
The spirit of the beautiful no more
Over the wondering earth, in earnest glow
Touches to beauty all the landscape grey,—
Bringing a vision from her palace high
To this sublunar planet. Now, forlorn
As Ariadne on Cretan shore
For many bitter-cold and weary days
She knoweth not her old immortal ways.

The Thrush.

One Candlemas, a gentle day of Spring,
I was abroad betimes while the red sun
Rose large and stately with a purpled ring
Of mist about him, and a mantle dun.
Thro' naked boughs he ominously glared,
Till, soul-constrained, in sudden awe I stood,
And with a Persian's adoration stared.
When lo! from a round beech-tree in the wood,
The only tree to which the brown leaves clung,
A mavis warbled forth his mellow lay;
And ever as his ditty clear he sung
The passion swelled his breast of downy grey.
Dear bird! since then thy melody I know
The boldest in intent, the fullest in its flow.

Stars.

O cold blue night, and deep the cloudless sky
Gleams, sown with lucid keen and trembling stars;—
A ravishment of glory shines on high,
And the rapt soul yearns upward. Fiery Mars
Shines with a baleful redness in the west;
While mail'd Orion, frozenly severe,
Stands like an armed skeleton opprest
With centuries of sentinelship. Thro' clear
Smooth ether the keen-silvered Plough upheaves
Its seven diamonds; and far away
Poor Cassiopeia for her daughter grieves—
Andromeda cold-touch'd by windy spray,
While faintly watching with tear-misted eyne,
Perseus flying shoreward o'er the gleaming brine.