Poems: Second Series :: :: University of Virginia Library

The serpent tempted them, and they did eat:
They took the fruit of the forbidden tree;
And tasted it, and tasting found it sweet:—
And all was changed—and they did hear and see:—
They heard the silence of God's voice proclaim
Their sentence of irrevocable doom:
They saw the angel sword of living flame:
They looked—and dreadful faces thronged the gloom.
And through the world they went their weary way:
The flaming sword was ever in their sight:
And in the night they would that it were day;
And prayed for darkness in the noonday light.
And so they wandered till the touch of death
Made light the heavy burden of their breath.

II.

Not only our first parents once of old
By disobedience lost what God had given:
The wrath of the Eternal rolled and rolled
From age to age like thunder through the heaven.

What were the pangs of exile from a home
That ne'er had clasped the outlaw to her breast?
'Twere little punishment that one should roam
Who ne'er had known the blessedness of rest.
God cursèd the sons of Adam: each in turn
Must share the bliss that he may share the doom:
Pain is no pain but what glad hearts discern:
We love the light that we may dread the gloom.
Only inheritors of Eden know
Its heritage of ruin and of woe.

III.

There was a time, ere I had learned to look
Beyond the limits of the passing day,
When each new moment lived its life and took
The measure of its joy and went its way.
Not yet the past and future had conspired
To rob the present of its due delight:
Life had no goal to which my heart aspired,—
No happier past to mar the moment's flight.
Oh I was glad because I never knew
What wave of gladness bore my soul along:—
Does the blue heaven know that it is blue?
Does the lark guess the rapture of its song?
Or do the bounding breezes pause to think
How exquisite the fragrance that they drink?

IV.

Why did I thirst for the forbidden fruit?
Why did I yearn to wake and see and know?
What serpent coiled itself about the root,
And tempted me and won me to my woe?
O nature! thine the answer, for in thee
My being has its well-spring and its goal:
And deep beneath these waves, that are of me,
Moves the great stream of thy eternal soul.
Thine is each lust, each impulse, each desire—
In the one current of thy will they blend:
For thee I toil, dream, hope, believe, aspire:
I break thy laws yet serve thy central end.
Thou knowest all things—but I know too well
I was in Eden once and sinned and fell.

V.

There is a moment's rapture in awaking
When half awake we know the sweets of sleep:
And light and darkness when the day is breaking
Give earth a glory that she cannot keep.
And there's a time too when the soul of man
Starts at the message of life's dawning beams,
And dares with half-awakened eyes to scan
Its own mysterious paradise of dreams.

Then for a little while the pulses beat
With the old thrillings of unconscious joy:
While blend their beings in confusion sweet
The thoughtful man—the happy careless boy.
O one fair fruit that God to man forbad—
To know his joy while yet his heart is glad!

VI.

Sweet beyond mortal sweetness was that hour—
If such there ever were—when first I knew
How pure the fragrance of each April flower,—
How green the woodland mist—the heaven how blue:—
When first I saw with half bewildered sight
The solid earth—the world of every day—
Transfigured by a veil of fairy light
From childhood's dreams that scarce had passed away.
Oh then the breeze of morning wandered wide,
Brushing the dewy leaves with airy wing:
Oh then the love of summer glorified,
Ere yet it kissed away, the bloom of spring.
Dawn of my life! and May time of my year!
My heaven is dark—my every leaf is sere.

VII.

I sometimes wonder was it ever mine
The twilight hour that I have deemed so fair:—
Peace, doubting heart! have faith in God's design;—
Trust the abysses of thine own despair.
Were Eden a forgotten dream of night,
Where were the disenchantment of the morn?
Had I no memories of past delight
Why should I weep to wander forth forlorn?
What were the curse without the poisoned sting?
The cup of wrath without the bitter lees?
Autumnal winds wail of remembered spring;—
Sere leaves remind us of the budding trees.
Yes, for a moment in the light of day
I saw my bliss and saw it wane away.

VIII.

If I had travelled from the land of dreams
At once into the fulness of the light,
Nor lingered, dazed by the first golden gleams,
In the sweet borderland of day and night,—
Then had my Eden passed away from thought—
An unremembered dream, a broken bubble,
A breath of midnight air, a thing of nought,
Dead as dissevered grass, or withered stubble.

But no; it lived in that mysterious hour,
And living still defies me to forget,
And bids me feel the thorn within the flower,
The torture of my impotent regret:—
O fatal fruit! thy sweetness was my doom,
And poisonous dust the fragrance of thy bloom.

IX.

And then the twilight ripened into day:
A fuller light eclipsed the dazzling gold:
The rosy streaks of sunrise died away,
And banks of cloud grew upward grey and cold.
And knowledge killed the joy that it revealed:
The daybreak lost its lustre in its birth:
I was alone and gazed with eyes unsealed
On the wide lifeless disenchanted earth.
And yet methought a form of beauty gleamed
Through the white marsh mists of the river's bed:
And I drew near to clasp it, but it seemed
To mock my grasp; I followed and it fled.
I follow still, till death shall make me blind,
The phantom light that is so far behind.

X.

There came a woman once with lustrous eyes
And golden hair that wandered to her waist:

Was it an angel who had heard my sighs
And come—God's messenger—in holy haste?
For I was weary, and had sat me down,
Dupe of my dreams, to muse awhile on death:
I started and looked up: her eyes were brown:
She stooped: I felt the fragrance of her breath.
One warm white arm hung lightly round my neck:
Over my shoulders fell her floating hair:
She smiled “O Love! thou dost not well to wreck
Life on this rock of too divine despair.”
She held a cup and with a siren's laugh
She raised it to my lips and bade me quaff.

XI.

I touched the rim and lingered and she laughed
“Drink, drink, while yet some respite is allowed.”
But through the clearness of the ruby draught
I saw the subtle poison's floating cloud.
Some lift the cup and drink without a care,
For still the present hides what is to be.
The moments come, and each in turn is fair:—
I saw beyond: I could not choose but see.
In thought I drained the goblet to the lees,
Down to the bitter after-taste of sin:
I drank each pleasure till it ceased to please:
I ate the fruit; the core was hard within.

My foresight fathomed the abyss of lust,
And dropped at last to death, decay and dust.

XII.

And yet I sometimes would that I had drunk—
Drunk deep and tasted all the sweets of Hell,—
And boldly plunged into the slough and sunk
Down to the last defilement when I fell.
For this at least—the moment's joy is sure,
The pulse is heightened and the thrill is sweet:
But dreams of bliss ethereal and pure
Mock our bewildered gaze, our bleeding feet.
So subtle nature tempts us to forego
The apt enjoyment of each offered pleasure,
For love of light that none may ever know,
For quest of life's too deeply buried treasure:
Each unfulfilled, the moments glide away,
And hope deludes us to our latest day.

XIII.

I rose and fled and left the cup untasted,
Her whisper taunting me where'er I went:
“Eternity is lost—shall time be wasted?
The thought was sin—then earn sin's punishment”
And still the witchcraft of her eyes pursued me:
Her golden hair still fluttered in my sight:—

And still the music of her laughter wooed me:—
And still I trembled, for her touch was light.
I fled to seek a refuge from the storm—
A buckler proof against each poisoned dart—
A veil of light to hide the siren's form—
A countercharm to her insidious art.
What joy had earth that should requite the cost,
And make my heart forget what it had lost?

XIV.

The church door opened, and I passed within
To kneel in prayer before the sacred token:
The garish light of day came flooding in
Through mullions bare whose pictured glass was broken.
Dumb was the organ: hushed each quivering chord:
There reigned a death-like stillness everywhere:
The very crucifix had lost its Lord:—
The shrines were empty and the altar bare.
The Saviour's life-blood stained the floor below:—
I veiled my face in agony and wept—
Then started and forgot my tears—for lo!
A chilling whisper from the altar crept.
“All outward forms are doomed to droop and die:
Let others kneel—thy worship were a lie.”

XV.

Take me, O world! and clasp me to thy breast:
Take me, O glare and turmoil of the day!
O surging tides of uproar and unrest!
O multitudes that throng the crowded way!
Beneath the waves of your tumultuous sound
Bury that speaking stillness of despair:
Let me forget that I had ever found
A moment's shelter in that house of prayer.
Take me O world! my heart has somewhere seen
A white-robed phantom in the dead of night:
It haunts me yet: come busy world between!
My blood is chilled and curdled at the sight.
I spoke and plunged into the eddying flood,
And life renewed the current of my blood.

XVI.

I dreamed that yet some perfect end should crown
The toil and anguish of humanity:—
That yet each weary stream that wanders down
Should rush into the rolling of the sea.
I dreamed that hate and misery should cease:
That each should labour for the common good:—
And war be hushed in universal peace:—
And all mankind be one wide brotherhood.

I dreamed that yet the golden sun of love
Should rise and melt the darkness of our night:
And with sudden glory leap above
The struggling waves and make the whole world bright.
Through clouds of stormy splendour daylight broke:—
But oh! the disenchantment when I woke.

XVII.

For still the world held on its wonted way;
And men still wallowed in the mire of sin:
Lust ruled their hearts with undivided sway;
They toiled—but gold was all they toiled to win.
Hate rose triumphant: Love was trampled down:
Rude oaths and railing curses filled the air:
The cannon thundered, and the helpless town
Answered with cries of anguish and despair.
The rich were clothed in insolence and pride:
Their fellow men were counters in their game:
The starving poor were huddled by their side
In dens of filth and misery and shame.
O progress! empty vaunt—with straining eyes
I watched in vain:—the sun would never rise.

XVIII.

My heart was sick: the times were out of tune:
Hope died away: I only prayed to find
A place of shadow in the glare of noon,—
A refuge from the ravings of the wind.
I longed for deep inviolable peace
Such as recluses find in cloistered shade,
Far from the babel sounds that swell and cease,
Far from the rays of light that gleam and fade:
Where there is nothing wished for, nothing lost:—
Where hope and disappointment are unknown:—
I prayed—but evermore my prayer was crossed
By warnings whispered in a deeper tone:—
“Better the whirlwind of chaotic strife—
Better the frost of death than death in life.”

XIX.

O love! warm love of a warm human heart!
Key to each riddle!—clue to every maze!
In thee beloved one, whosoe'er thou art,
I solve at last the mystery of my days.
O love! without thee life is all accurst:—
Come sovereign healer of each earthly care!
Thou living wave that slakest every thirst!
Thou one fulfilment of each inward prayer!

I sigh for peace when winds awake,—and lo!
Love is a haven of unrippled rest:
I long to feel the great world's ebb and flow—
Its truest pulse is in the loved one's breast.
I ask what end shall bless man's travailing soul,—
But when I love I touch the very goal.

XX.

Hide lower slopes! oh hide the mountain height—
The broken buttresses of torrent ice—
The upland fields of ever dazzling white—
Gully of snow and storm-gashed precipice.
Hide them from sight and hiding set me free
From bondage of imperious desire,
That most enthrals me when from far I see
The last white crest touched with the sunset fire.
I am content to rest my gazing eyes
On your high meadows deep with unmown hay,
Or where grey rocks through depths of woodland rise,
And climbing pine trees break the light of day.
Is aught of earth above you, for you lie
Against the very azure of the sky?

XXI.

So for awhile I dwelt beneath your shade,
Deep in the shelter of a leafy dell:

The streams came down in cataracts, and made
Eternal verdure where the spray mist fell.
Mellowed and softened came the fiercest ray
Through blended boughs of overarching trees:
The very storm-blast, if it lost its way
In those dark woods, became a wandering breeze.
But once I chanced to roam in pensive mood
I knew not whither:—and I looked—and lo!
High o'er the pine-clad hill's horizon stood
A dazzling dome of pure untrodden snow.
Its wintry stillness seemed to murmur “Come
I wait for thee:” it spoke—and it was dumb.

XXII.

I look around: the rocks are black and bare:
The splendour of the snowfields blind my eyes.
I gaze above through depths of quivering air
On the blue ocean of the burning skies.
Each stream of life is frozen at its source:
If winds are hushed, the slumber is of death:
If winds awake, destruction marks their course,
And hail and clouds and darkness are their breath.
What have I gained? At times a breath of wind
Wafts me a murmur from the far-off stream:
It tells of all that I have left behind,
Of blissful days that vanished like a dream.

Ah me! I loved, till love forsook my breast:
Love was my doom—the very love that blessed.

XXIII.

So many ways of wandering have I traced,
So many paths my bleeding feet have trod
Through poisonous undergrowth and thorny waste,
That lies without the garden bowers of God.
And each in turn has led me to the gate
Where stands the angel with his sword of flame;
And evermore inexorable fate
Bids me retrace the way by which I came.
Oh lost! Oh Eden! is there no return?
No hope of final pardon for my soul?
And shall the flaming sword for ever burn?
And must the voice of thunder ever roll?
Must Nature share my doom and roam for aye
A homeless planet—blind, forlorn, astray?

XXIV.

Wail on bleak wind—wail on, and do thy worst:
Make wintry moan across the barren heath:—
“No hope for nature past redemption cursed”—
Is this the burden of thy bitter breath?
Wail on bleak wind: thy dark despairing tone
Finds in my breast its own sad counterpart:

Nature has many voices:—thine alone
Wakes a full echo in my listening heart.
For here within is Nature's crown of life,
Whose every breath is one more travail throe:
Here is her last intensity of strife—
Her worst despair—the climax of her woe.
Without she toils on dumb and deaf and blind:
Within she wakes—wail on thou bitter wind!

XXV.

Oh many-mooded Nature! there are times
When skies are blue and balmy zephyrs blow:
And I have heard of softer, sunnier climes
Where heaven's own brightness robes the earth below.
But those thy rifts of light and hope and mirth
Darken the fringes of thy rolling clouds:
And thy true image is the wintry earth,
And thy true garments are thy burial shrouds.
Unending travail towards a far-off goal—
Toil—imperfection—sorrow—sin—despair—
These are thy life—and in man's inmost soul—
What voice is thine when thou awakest there?—
Wail on bleak wind—wail on and do thy worst—
Be mine the echo “Past redemption cursed.”

XXVI.

I stood alone upon the white cliff's verge:
The great blue sea came rolling in below:
I heard the murmur of the restless surge:
I watched the ripples melting into snow.
A few white clouds that floated o'er the blue
Deepened the azure splendour of the sky:
Through fields of golden corn the south wind flew,
And ripples tracked it as it wandered by.
I could have thought that Nature lay asleep:
It was the hush of noon when all things rest:
The measured flow and reflow of the deep
Where rhythmic pulsings of her mighty breast.
And when the poppies fluttered and I heard
The rustling wind—it was her breath that stirred.

XXVII.

Her breath was mine: I breathed and was content:
Her life was flowing in a boundless flood:
No need to ask what Nature's being meant:
My answer was the pulsing of her blood.
I only knew that all around me moved
A vast eternal self-sufficing life:
The faintest flutter of the poppies proved
How deep a harmony controlled the strife.

Somewhere in woodland depths the cooing dove
Sent from afar this message to my soul—
“When life is light and liberty and love,
Life is itself its own supremest goal.”
The south wind whispered as it fanned my hair—
“Be strong: trust Nature: wake from thy despair.”

XXVIII.

Yes, Nature lives, although my life be death:
I slip and fall—she heeds not—she shall stand:
Sunshine and joy and beauty are her breath:
Blessings of peace and plenty fill her hand.
Yet what avails it that the mighty river
Sweeps on triumphant—wave pursuing wave?
How shall it help me that it finds for ever
In every drop its well-spring and its grave?
Nature is everywhere herself the home,
The happy haven where her toil is crowned:
But what am I? A wandering bell of foam—
A bubble in a whirlpool eddying round.
Roll on blue waves—blow, buoyant breezes! blow:
Your gladness is the measure of my woe.

XXIX.

I heard a voice that was not of the wind—
A laughing sound that was not of the sea:

It came again—I turned and looked behind—
A little child was standing near to me.
Her hair was golden as the sun in heaven:—
Her arms were browner than the sunburnt wheat:
The ruddy flush that life and health had given,
Rivalled the scarlet poppies at her feet.
She looked at me from eyes of Heaven's own blue,
That like the sky glowed with a sunny smile,—
A smile of joy and innocence that knew
No tear of misery—no cloud of guile.
I bade her tell the secret of her bliss,
She raised her lips and answered—with a kiss.

XXX.

But the wind answered as it rustled by,
And the waves answered from the rocks below:—
There came this answer from the azure sky—
This from the ocean's fringe of melting snow.
“She is our sister—and our hearts are glad,—
For we are Nature's children, and our breath
Is Nature's breath—whose eyes are only sad
What time she weaves new life from threads of death.”
And so I learned that joy is all around,
That whoso wills can make that joy his own:

I learned of every tint and every sound
That life and happiness are theirs alone,
The central currents of whose being glide
In harmony with Nature's ample tide.

XXXI.

In thought I traversed the abysmal past:
Unnumbered æons came and rolled away:
And then I saw no further, for at last
Out of primeval darkness dawned the day.
In thought I traversed the wide world of space
Wherein this earth of boundless sea and land—
Itself a world in each minutest place—
Is but a speck—an eddying grain of sand.
And still I came no nearer to the brink;—
The more I strove the tighter grew my bond:
And still I knew that all that I could think
Was but the thought of all that lay beyond:
For our eternities are less to thee
Than drops, O Nature! in thy shoreless sea.

XXXII.

But is this all of Nature? for my soul
Rose up triumphantly—I knew not how—
And in a moment passed from pole to pole,
And said “O Nature! I am more than thou.

Roll on from world to world, from clime to clime:
My passion's changing moods are mightier far:—
My thought is deeper than the depths of time:
My love soars higher than thine utmost star.”
And still I mused, and still the ripples broke,
And through the cornfields flew the rustling wind—
Breathing of joy:—yet oft as Nature spoke
Lingered a darker after-tone behind—
An after-tone of yearning, that confessed
“My truest life is hidden in thy breast.”

XXXIII.

And here alone shall her true life be found—
Here in this world of human hopes and fears:
Without she moves on one eternal round,
Tracing one orbit through the circling years.
But here she yearns for her own inmost light,
Her heart's ideal self, and still the screen
Of what she is is hung before her sight,
And all she sees still points to the unseen.
And here she reaches onward and atones
For what she is not by her final aim,—
True to herself when she herself disowns—
Because she changes ever, still the same.
For death alone can triumph over death,
And restless movement is her being's breath.

XXXIV.

I said “What art thou, Nature?” and the wind
And water bore this answer back to me—
“I am the very light that makes thee blind:
I am what in thy breast I yearn to be.”
I bade her tell in what a far-off goal
The river of her life should find its rest:
She answered, “Ask the longings of thy soul:
I have no voice but in thine inmost breast.”
So pulse for pulse her truest life is mine:
If I am sick at heart, 'tis she who sighs:
Hers is the travail, hers the thirst divine:
In me she toils: for her I agonize:—
Still most myself when Nature most inspires
My heart with her own infinite desires.

XXXV.

But thou, O Nature! thou art none the less
Nature, the mighty mother—mistress—queen—
Fountain of life and light and loveliness—
Author of all that shall be or has been.
Nor less I love the splendour of the sun—
The roll of waters—the free rush of air:—
Fair as of old each thread that thou hast spun:—
The robe Time weaves for thee is not less fair.

Nay now they teach me—and I love them more—
To read thy riddle—guess thy hidden plan:
The wind sweeps on—the waters climb the shore—
Art thou less mighty in the life of man?
And if the sun above me be so bright,
How pure the radiance of thine inward light!

XXXVI.

Thy cause must conquer: he alone who loves
To walk with thee shall never go astray:
Thy cause is mine, for all creation moves
To lead me nearer to the light of day.
Then I will follow thee where'er thy hand
May guide me on, from airy height to height:
I will not fear to step where thou dost stand,
Nor dread the darkness that to thee is light.
All must be well when thou art near my side:
Even now the first faint glimmer has begun;—
Still through the stormy daybreak be my guide,
Till the last triumph of thy life be won:
And in the end, O Nature! thou shalt rest,
And I in thee on God's eternal breast.

ON THE YORKSHIRE COAST.

I sat by the scarlet poppies near the sands of the sunken shore:
The hedges rustled above me as the warm wind wandered o'er:
I heard it speak to the cornfields—I heard it speak to the sea:—
Had it no message, I wondered—nothing to whisper to me?

It passed from the brimming river to the waves that died at my feet,
O'er the land of bearded barley, deep meadow and yellow wheat:
Blue was the Northern Ocean, blue was the summer sky,
And all things laughed for gladness as the wind went fluttering by.

I marked by the rushing ripples its path through the golden grain:
Gay wavelets danced before it over the sunlit main:

What were the words it whispered as it kissed the ocean spray?
Tell me, O bending corn-fields, what did the soft wind say?

The wheat and the poppies answered: It whispered of sunny mirth,
Of the wealth of the coming harvest, of the gifts of the goodly earth:
Its breath was the blended odour of fruit, and flower, and corn,—
Pure as the noon-day Heaven, fresh as the early morn.

But the great blue sea made answer: It came from the laughing land;—
It breathed of joy as it hurried over the glistening sand:
But its gladness grew to yearning as it sank on my boundless breast,
And it wandered away for ever and could not find its nest.

It could not find its haven: it drooped and it yearned to die:
The voice of its noon-day laughter was hushed in a weary sigh:

It sighed, “O joy and sunshine, I fathomed your deepest deep,
And depths were still beneath it”—it sighed—and it fell asleep.

TO MY MISTRESS.

When shall I see thee, Dearest! as thou art?
My light of life! My guiding star! My goal!
Mistress of all the pulsings of my heart!
The yearnings of my soul!

Queen of the hopes, the prayers that burn in me!
Fair nymph of earth! Pure angel from above!
Vision of beauty!—while it dreamed of thee—
My soul awoke to love.

When shall I see thee — not as now I watch
A phantom form that beckons and is gone
Far down the avenue of years, or catch
One glimpse that lures me on?

For still I follow my imperious fate,
As when of old, heart-whole, and fancy free,
I vowed for evermore to consecrate
My spirit's depths to thee.

Yet as a bee, that flits from flower to flower,
To sip from each the honey of its kiss,
So have I courted for the passing hour
Some form of transient bliss.

But light of wing the rover bee has flown:
The sweets whereon he feasted fade forgot:
Fickle or false to these—to thee alone,
My Queen! I faltered not.

What if each charm beguiled me in its turn—
'Twas that each glimpse of glory or of grace
Whispered of thee, and I aspired to learn
Of each thy hiding-place.

For I believed that in each rainbow hue
I saw the dazzle of thy whiteness shine:
And all the gleams of beauty that I knew
Lived in revealing thine.

The hedgerow flowers, the poppies in the corn
Were twined about thy tresses—such my faith:
The fragrant freshness of the early morn
Breathed perfume of thy breath.

And every sound that swept my soul along
In waves of rapture, was a voice from thee—
The skylark's airy ecstasy of song—
The thunder of the sea.

And when—the storm clouds past—on blade and leaf
Fresh raindrops sparkled in the sudden glow,
I guessed that if thy soul could melt in grief,
Its tears would sparkle so.

And in the golden mist divinely bright,
Whose loveliness throbbed through the evening air
On sea and hill,—I saw the floating light,
The lit waves of thy hair.

Or if the purple of the sunset turned
The distant river to a rosy streak,
Methought thy beauty over-conscious burned
In blushes on thy cheek.

But ever, as I sought for thee in these,
I disenchanted each of its true charm,
That vanished, as the fairy moonlight flees
The daybreak in alarm.

The flowers drooped dead: the fragrance passed away:
Sweet sounds were hushed: the raindrops lost their light:
The gold, the purple of the setting day
Died into clouds of night.

And so I lost, because I loved so well
That love was thirst for a diviner love;
For things of earth must ever lose their spell,
That tell of things above.

All shapes, all tints that feed our hearts on bliss,
All moments of delight are thine, and thou
Hidden in each dost breathe an angel's kiss
On each unconscious brow.

But if desire to see thee face to face
Dawn on our hearts, those passing charms decay,
And, like a phantom from its lurking place,
Thy presence fades away.

For this—to know that thou art hiding there,
Veiled by thy very splendour from our eyes—
Turns our delight into an aching prayer,
Our laughter into sighs.

And though the veil be thin as sunlit rain,
Or bridal gauze that flutters snowy white,
Yet if we lift it overquick, we gain
Not thee—but empty night.

And once a bosom trembled against mine,
And dark eyes hid their beauty in a mist
Of overbrimming love: I thought that thine
Shone through them, and I kissed

With burning lips their brightness till they closed
Their lustre-fringèd lids, and kissed the brow
And coiling tresses till the head reposed
In ecstasy:—'twas thou!

Fond dream—but she, forgotten as I dreamed,
Waned from my arms into the empty air,
And on the darkness for an instant gleamed
The ripples of her hair.

And in their sunlit loveliness I knew
Thee, the enchantress, fading into gloom—
Revealed and hidden to bemock the view,—
My blessing and my doom.

For such thy wont: as each new change of form
Uplifts the transient veil thy features wore,
Swift, as the lightning streak against the storm,
Thou art and art no more.

Ah! then the nearness of the light that waned
Deepened the gloom that circled me forlorn,
And in thy stead a mocking voice remained
That laughed in bitter scorn:

“Oh fool! to deem that beauty the disguise
Of visionary charms that slept in her,—
Could not the dreamy splendours of her eyes
Content thee as they were?

Not as the shadows of a hidden fire,
But in themselves as stars of love and light:—
So had they deepened to thy soul's desire
And been for ever bright.

Dupe of thine aspirations! did it seem
So slight a thing that throbbing human breast,
That thou couldst lose it for this airy dream,
This endless empty quest?”

Not thine the voice that mocked me while I sighed,
And not in vain through all the rolling years
Do I pursue thee, though the world deride
My yearnings and my tears.

For light is breaking, light whose first dawn shews
Only the dappled cloudlets grey and cold,—
But even now about the Orient grows
A warmth, a tinge of gold.

And is it that thy beauty flits before,
Eastward and eastward to the springs of day,
And so for me who follow, more and more
The night mists melt away?

Or—for at times the lightning of this thought
Flashes upon my vision—can it be
That all this seeking is the treasure sought,—
And thou this love of thee?

This parching thirst itself the hanging fruit—
This cruel strife the prize for which I bled—
The fever of this infinite pursuit
The phantom form that fled?

And is the sea, to which all rivers roll,
The fountain head wherein their waves begin?
Thyself the hidden firesprings of the soul—
The light that burns within?

Then all this dawn of day is thy creation;
My yearning is the thrill of thy embrace;
And in the dream, the hope, the aspiration
I see thee face to face.

WHENCE AND WHITHER.

O Father to what end
Do all these moments tend—
These drops of time that come and glide away?
To what far-distant goal
Do these wide waters roll,
Whose ripples break the sunshine in its play?
What ocean's infinite embrace
Shall be to each vexed eddy a last resting place?

Or is it all in vain
That dew and mist and rain
Shed tears of blessing on the earth below?
And is each strong desire
Born only to expire—
A mountain brook lost in the river's flow,
That wanders down without an aim,
Content to reach at last the nothing whence it came?

Forgive the uttered thought:—
This present world is nought—
This gleaming reach that sweeps from bend to bend:—

The lispings of the stream
Are murmurs in a dream:—
Flashes of ghostly white the brooks descend:—
If without end or aim for aye
The phantom river glides along its weary way.

Life is not thus accurst:
The end is last and first,
More true, more certain than each fleeting drop:—
The end controls the course,
Itself the truest source,
Womb of the mists that haunt the mountain top:—
Trace to its birth the moorland burn—
'Twas Ocean gave the clouds that feed its fountain urn.

Once—I remember well—
What time the last leaves fell,
Fell eddying down on the broad river's breast—
Above, the Heaven's height
Was leaden-hued and white—
Frosty and red the sunset in the west—
The earth lay cold and dead below,
Wrapped in a winding sheet of thin November snow.—

Was it the wintry blast
That whispered as it passed

“The flowers of spring—the leaves of summer die:
Bleak northern winds assail
Thy warm and sheltered vale:
Rise up: forget the stream that ripples by:
Far, far away they speak to thee—
The mountain solitudes, the wastes of rolling sea.”

“O stern imperious fate”
I answered—“let me wait
A few bright seasons in these happy fields:
I fear the frozen steep,
I tremble at the deep—
Sweet, sweet the flowers the river meadow yields:—
Spare me awhile to see once more
The brushwood lost to view—the elm roof darkened o'er.”

Such was my prayer—but thou
“Rise up, if ever, now
While yet the boughs are bare, the birds are dumb:
Thy true life is not here
Where greenest leaves grow sere—
Rise—if thou tarry till the spring-time come,
The clinging flowers will bid thee stay,
The songs of happy birds detain thee on thy way.”

And did I rise and go?
I know not—who may know
The deep mysterious secrets of his soul?
We dream not what we are—
What life we live afar—
Beyond our thought, beyond the clouds that roll:—
We search our hearts and grope and guess,
And catch a glimpse—a flash—that blinds with burning stress.

Yet waking or in dreams
My heart has traced the streams
That feed the river to their icy source,
Has somewhere stood alone,
And heard the ocean moan,
And seen the river end its weary course:—
And sometimes through its valley sweep
The mountain's icy blast—the breezes from the deep.

Its wave awakes to light,
Beyond the utmost sight,
In mountain wastes of pure eternal snow,
That buttress wintry peaks,
Whose stillness only speaks
Now and again to us who dwell below,
When through the slumber of our souls
The midnight avalanche with voice of thunder rolls.

Then for a moment's space,
With pale uplifted face,
We listen and we wonder and are still:
But soon each wonted strain
Of life awakes again—
The runnels babble down the wooded hill,
And breezes rustling through the trees
Hide from our hearts the voice of vaster harmonies.

And widening as it goes
The river flows and flows,
Till wood and steep grow dim on either side:
And waves begin to roll,
And grandly—soul to soul—
It meets the rushing of the ocean tide,
And faints for joy, and falls asleep
On the broad heaving breast of the unmeasured deep.

But sometimes, fresh and free,
The salt wind from the sea
Breathes through the dingles of our woodland home:
We drink the fragrance in,
And drinking seem to win
A moment's glimpse of headlands white with foam:
But violets tempt our feet apart,
And straight the message fades forgotten from the heart.

And there are some who say
“Fool, be content to stray
Here in this Eden with its blissful bowers:
Make good each moment's flight
With its own brief delight:
Gather the sweets of sunshine and of flowers:
Nor lose familiar paths of men
For cold and shadowy lands beyond thy fancy's ken.

Here in sweet interchange
The rolling seasons range:—
If birds are dumb, we prize their songs the more:
Light deepens out of shade,
And summer's green leaves fade
To dawn again more sweetly than before:
These are thine heritage, but there
Is vast monotony or desolate despair.”

I know not—but I know
That I must some day go
Alone into the mountains' midnight sleep:
And I must some day stand
Alone upon the strand,
And hear the surging thunder of the deep:
And wood and flower and purling stream
Must fade away from thought like a forgotten dream.

How shall I bear my part—
How and with what a heart—
In that new world whose threshold is in this?
If I have framed my mind
To what I leave behind,
How shall I quit this portal of my bliss,
And see the soaring pillars bear
The vaulted roof aloft into the twilight air?

If never from below
I watched the cold, cold snow
High in the starlit slumber of the night:—
If never rose for me
Over the rolling sea
The sudden splendour of the dawning light—
If moanings from the ocean foam
Bore me no message from a far mysterious home:—

Shall I not move alone
Through regions not my own,
Forlorn and friendless in an alien land?—
Ah! well, but who shall say?
And that is far away,
And the soft summer twilight is at hand:—
And oh! how sweet the wakening breeze,
Whose kisses cool my brow and stir the sheltering trees.

ON SNOWDON.

But mists grew round us even as we spake—
Impenetrable mists of ghostly white,
That hid the darkness and the stars of night,
And hid the slumber of the glimmering lake,
And the dark cliffs that circle it and break
The might of storm and sun—and hid the snow,
And frozen steps imprinted deep to show
The perilous pathway that our feet must take.
So wrapped in mist we climbed forlorn of hope,
Forgetful of the prize that our desire
Had painted in its dreams—night's veil withdrawn,
And, from the summit of the weary slope,
Sea, hill and plain—a waking world afire
With the first rosy shimmer of the dawn.

Then came the rushing of a sudden blast—
A bitter nightwind, from whose icy breath
Even the mists, chilly and damp as death,
Shivered and shrank affrighted—fierce and fast

Into the void of air their billows passed,
Rolled by the fury of the whirling wind—
And for a moment all the heights behind
Stood forth supremely—manifest at last—
The kingly mountain in its robe of white
Wildly awoken from its misty swoon—
The pillars that uplift its dome on high—
Its lonely precipices black as night
Against the crescent of the risen moon,
And stars and darkness of the unclouded sky.

And then the mists grew round us, as before,
And knee-deep in the snow we struggled on
With blinded eyes: but ever and anon
For one such mighty moment and no more
Came such a shiver of the wind and tore
Aside the veil that hid the mountain's face,
And shewed the white mists wreathing round the base
Of its dark dripping buttresses, and bore
Their boiling waves with stormy speed along:—
O lost and found! O mountain, lake and sky!
O sudden revelation! swift eclipse!
Marvellous moments, that my accents wrong,
Forgive! My passionate recollections die
Even on the threshold of my faltering lips.

There passed a time and we had won the height:
Bitter and bleak the breath of twilight blew,
Visible in the mist, that ever grew
More wan and cold: the darkness of the night
Slowly became a pale and lifeless light,
That touched with frosty red each orient cloud:—
And ever as the circling mists allowed,
A wilderness of mountains filled the sight—
Black island masses, round whose shores were tost
Billows of vapour—surgings of a sea:—
While to the west, in one vast crescent sweep,
Ran fifty leagues of dimly outlined coast,
Whose rocky headlands murmured voicelessly
The white lipped moanings of the eternal deep.

VOICES OF AUTUMN.

Wild in your wonderful wailing—
Winds of despair!
Winds of the waste and the darkness!
Fiends of the air!
Come from your haunts—from the moorlands
Lonely and bare.

Deathlike and weird was the slumber
Till you wandered by—
First a faint breath, then a shiver—
A mutter—a sigh—
A moan—a wail lost in the midnight—
An agonized cry.

Children of dark desolation!
I am alone:
All the great storm of your being
Breathes through my own—
Earth-shaking hurricane thunder—
Faint far off moan.

Eddy on eddy of madness!
Frenzied and fast—
How the grim ghosts of the forest
Shook as each past—
Shook till their leaves dead and dying
Went with the blast.

Borne on its bosom, my fancy
Follows its flight—
Out of the forest abysses—
On through the night—
On to the shore where the reef rocks
Are streaming and white.

Follows it driving the ridges
Of darkness and doom—
Sees the white foam of their surges
Flash through the gloom—
Hears how the shriek of the hell-wind
Pierces their boom.

Now the wind droops: it is weary—
Worn with its play—
Weary of whirling the dead leaves—
Flinging the spray:
Only a wail, faint and failing,
Dies far away.

Hark! that far infinite moaning
Rises again—
Rises and rushes and rages
In volleys of rain,—
Hark! what a triumph of anguish,
Rapture of pain.

Yes—'twas our hearts that were speaking
To forest and shore—
Driving with eddies of laughter
Storm clouds before—
Strong in the pride of the hidden
Scars that they bore.

Finding their fierce inspiration
Deep in their throes—
Still through their torrents of thunder
Moaning their woes—
Moaning the wound of whose bleeding
None ever knows.

What if my soul has its passions
Wayward and wild,
Chide not their whirlwinds O mother,
Mighty as mild;
Thine is the midnight autumnal:
I am thy child.

TO SLIEVE CROGHAUN.

High headland mountain, that with double face
Dost ever sentinel the western land—
For us thou risest from a sheltered strand,
For us thy slopes of heathery rock embrace
A happy haven, an unrippled place
Of windless water and smooth, silver sand;
But where we cannot see thee, thou dost stand
Fronting the deep, and round thy rocky base
The restless surge of the Atlantic raves
With sullen murmur: so thou standest there,—
Though never eye behold those ocean waves—
Lonely and strong and steadfast as despair,
Thyself the screen that hides thy stormy breast
And thy true life of passion and unrest.

SONNETS OF THE ATLANTIC.

THE WRECK OF THE INTRINSIC.

All day we listened to a rising gale,
That drove the Atlantic billows more and more
Against the bulwarks of the stormy shore:
All day—but with the darkness came a sail—
Came angrier blasts of howling wind and hail:
And for a moment through the thunder roar
Of shivered waves the sweeping tempest bore,
With flakes of flying foam, one helpless wail.
Onward she comes to where the breakers boom,
On through the murky horror of the night—
On till one mountain mass of rolling doom,
One rushing ridge of Ocean glimmering white
Deep in a cliff-girt bay of midnight gloom
Veils her in death for ever from our sight.

MEMORIES.

O land of solitude can I forget
How I have watched a sudden sheet of spray
Leap up triumphant on a stormy day
Above the cliffs, when wintry waves beset

A headland of despair—how I have met
Far inland—wanderers from their native home—
The flying feathers of your ocean foam,
And felt the rushing west wind, salt and wet
With driven mist:—but I remember most
How all one night, O melancholy land,
By lone Liscannor bay I could not sleep
For listening to the voices of the deep—
The tramplings of a never ending host
Along the desolation of the sand.

“STORMING THE SHORE.”

No belt of shingle or of level sand
Sunders the lines of the besieging host
From the black bulwarks of the iron coast,—
The fortress walls of that beleagured land:
Deep, deep at every tide the waters stand
Beneath the ramparts, and in dense array
Wave after wave breaks into seething spray
Against the stern resistance of the strand.
Yet inch by inch the stubborn barrier yields:
Bear witness broken bays, and sullen roar
Of caverned waters, and ye pastured fields
Of islets fronting the dissevered shore,—
For all unwearied the Atlantic wields
The thunders of her onsets evermore.

EVENING.

When evening came, I wandered on thy breast
In fragile coracle—now sunk between
Two overarching waves of glassy green,
Like sea bird floating in its stormy nest—
Now borne aloft upon a rolling crest
I saw the shore's surf-beaten crescent sweep,
And mid-sea purple of the rushing deep,
That darkened towards the splendour of the west.
Or I would guide my skiff amid the wrack
Of shattered waves that overwhelm and hide
Duggerna's sunken rocks, then falling back
Exhausted sink away on every side
In cataracts of foam—while bare and black
The dripping reefs rise through the surging tide.

NIGHT.

Night comes and stars their wonted vigils keep
In soft unfathomable depths of sky:
In mystic veil of shadowy darkness lie
The infinite expanses of the deep,—
Save where the silvery paths of moonlight sleep,
And rise and sink for ever dreamily
With the majestic heaving of the sea.
Night comes, and tenfold gloom where dark and steep

Into black waters of a land-locked bay
The cliffs descend: there never tempest raves
To break the awful slumber: far below
Glimmer the foamy fringes white as snow;
And sounds of strangled thunder rise alway,
And midnight moanings of imprisoned waves.

FROM SHANNON TO SEA.

The Shannon bore me to thy bosom wide:
I wandered with it on its winding way
By fields of yellow corn and new mown hay,
And far blue hills that rose on either side,
And low dark woods that fringed the ebbing tide:
And ever as its waters neared the west,
Out of the slumber of its broadening breast
Faint momentary ripples rose and died;—
And rose again before the breeze and grew
To wavelets dancing in the noonday light,
And these were changed to waves of ocean blue,
And creek and headland faded from the sight,
And oh! at last—at last I floated free
On the long rollers of the open sea.

ETERNAL VIGIL.

Oh! once again upon thy heaving breast
I floated, like a seabird when it braves

The shoreward onset of thy flowing waves,
And leaps triumphant on each rushing crest:
Round me in dark magnificent unrest
The billows of the wild Atlantic rolled
Far, far away, into the gates of gold,
The sunlit portals of the stormy west:
O never wearied! In the hush of noon
Thy billows break the paths of golden sleep:
They break the dreamlike lustre of the moon:
Earth knows the hours of darkness: thou dost keep
Eternal vigil: still thy surges white
Flash through the deepest gloom of starless night.

“OH SPARE ME A LITTLE.”

Oh! stay thy rollers for a moment's space—
I cannot live thy vast unquiet life:—
I cannot measure the exultant strife
Of waves that storm yon headland's dripping face:
My heart will break for yearning—give it grace
To beat awhile more calmly—to renew
The lowlier life it led before it knew
The deep thrill of thine infinite embrace.
For 'tis my curse—that never tempest raves,
But in my breast it finds its counterpart:—
The echoed thunder of thy caverned waves
Rolls through the deep recesses of my heart:—

And tides of tyrant passion throb in me
To match thy pulsings, O imperial sea!

FROM THE LOOK-OUT CLIFF.

I gained the topmost height and looked below—
Listened and looked again: the billows spoke
With wonted voice of thunder as they broke,
Wave after wave with emerald light aglow,
And changed their crystal clearness for the snow
Of seething foam: deep in their depths were seen
Huge rocky fragments, giant gems of green:
And then I raised my eyes and looked, and lo!
From dim, dark southern headlands far away
To northern peaks of Achil's utmost isle,
And ever westward till the noonday smile
Veiled its horizon, the Atlantic lay—
One infinite expanse of deepest blue
That shamed the cloudless Heaven's fainter hue.

LIGHT AND SHADE.

Too deeply blue! Too beautiful! Too bright!
Oh! that the shadow of a cloud might rest
Somewhere upon the splendour of thy breast
In momentary gloom: the molten light
That hides thy far horizon pains my sight:

Too crystal clear thy waves that heave below
O'er green rocks fathoms deep: the fringing snow
That girds thy headland cliffs is all too white.
So as I mused, a sudden turn revealed
The dungeon gloom of a cliff-circled bay,
Where the sad sea, whose wounds are never healed,
Makes moan of ruffled thunder night and day,—
And awful shadows sleep, and all things seem
Dark and mysterious as an evil dream.

ON THE MOORS.

The clouds were light and fleecy: the sky was bright and blue:
And over the purple heather the wild wind laughed and flew:
And over the rushy grasses, and over the withered fern,
And down to the wooded dingle that winds with the winding burn.

It laughed through the leaves of autumn, russet and gold and brown:
And the boughs were bent and shaken, and the dead leaves fluttered down.
The foam of the leaping brooklet was whirled in a mist away:
The tarn on the lonely moorlands was blue as a summer's day.

Unseen was the sheltered valley where the busy river flows:
Line beyond line of purple dim into distance rose:
But never a sound was wafted, and never a wreath of smoke,
And only the shivering rushes, and only the wild winds spoke.

Alone on the lonely heather—far, far from the life of men,
I lived—I had long been dreaming—alone—but I lived again:
Pure as a child I wandered—free as a careless boy,
And the wind breathed through my spirit, and life was a throb of joy.

I lived in the moors around me: I lived in the bright blue sky:
I lived in the rushing freedom of the wind that swept me by:
And oh! when the grasses shivered, I lived in the loving kiss,
In the touch divine of sadness, the bloom of the flower of bliss.

Dark clouds came over the heaven: grey mists crept over the moors:
For the face of Nature changes, but the life of the soul endures;
And wind, and heather, and sunlight, that sleep in their wintry grave,
Are part of the soul they quickened, and live in the life they gave.

A SUNSET.

Sink down, oh sun! in throbbing mists of gold—
Bid earth melt into Heaven beneath thy rays—
Veil the far mountains with thy violet haze,
And in the mantle of thy glory fold
Me, too, for I am cast in Nature's mould
Even as these: thy floods of living light,
Thy purple waves mysteriously bright
Beat through my breast in ecstasy untold:
Aye and in me thy showers of stormlight flow
From clouds of flame: mine, too, the after doom
Of more than mortal beauty—mine the woe
That wakes to being in the very womb
Of kindled rapture: mine the dying glow,
The dusk of twilight and the gathering gloom.

GLENGARRIFF.

There was a stillness all the summer night:
The landlocked inlet dark as dreaming death
Lay like a lake, nor felt the faintest breath,—
But all night long with flashing waters white
A torrent thundered from its rocky height,
And sent its waves into the peaceful bay,
And broke its slumber for a little way,
And then grew dumb and passed away from sight.
Type of a wayward and impetuous life!
The stillness had not spoken but for thee:
Peace proved its presence by thy voice of strife:—
Was it for this thy waters sought the sea—
To witness to its slumber calm and deep,
And hush their wrath in its unfathomed sleep?

ΑΠΑΘΕΙΑ.

O passionately passionless—
O strong to play thy lonely part—
Speak for a moment and confess
The secret of thine inmost heart:
What passion taught thee to control
The surging passions of thy soul?

Thine eyes are never bright with hope,
Nor clouded with a gathering tear:
Thou art not blind where others grope:
Thy face is pale, but not with fear:
And thou hast trampled down desire,
And quenched love's own triumphant fire.

And when the great stream surges by,
The wild chaotic waves of life,
Whose myriad passions meet and die
In eddies of unceasing strife—
I see thee gaze, with not a trace
Of feeling on thine alien face.

Thou hast no tear for those who weep,
No smile for joy, no sigh for pain:
Whate'er the scene, thy features keep
Their look of calm and cold disdain,
Unmoved, save when thy lips appear
Curled in a momentary sneer.

A passing sneer—and yet it tells
That Nature holds her wonted sway,
And dooms the spirit that rebels
Through his rebellion to obey,
Keeping, whate'er the course he take,
The very laws that he would break.

The springs of feeling still would flow,
Though every outlet were denied:
The baffled currents, swift or slow,
Would cleave a way with mingled tide,
And move with concentrated force
In one deep channelled water course.

Or, as the flooding sea drives back
Each eager stream that eddies down
From distant hills, where clouds are black,
With torrent waters swift and brown,—
And drowns the murmurs of their wrath,
And buries deep their foam and froth.

So surely if each stream is dumb,
Each wave that ever pulsed in thee,
Some stiller, mightier tide has come
From depths of some mysterious sea—
The passion of thy lonely mood—
Thy self-concentred solitude.

Or on a wan autumnal day,
A weird and melancholy land
Stretches its weary leagues away—
Meadow or cornfield, heath or sand:
Whose far blue undulations lie
Against a grey cloud-dappled sky.

The threatening rain forbears to fall:
Cold mists forbid the faintest ray:
Nor rushing wind, nor rising squall
Troubles the slumber of the day:
And nature holds her every force
Chained and arrested in its course.

Yet in that swoon, that dead repose,
That universal hush of strife,
There dwells, too deep for passion's throes,
A still intensity of life,
And never flood of light or sound
Stirs depths of feeling so profound.

So unbetrayed by tear or sigh
Thy over-mastering passion sleeps,
Whose very stillness is the cry
Sent up from its unfathomed deeps—
Whose storm has left its truest trace
In the chill slumber of thy face.

Long since the world disowned thy creed,
And drove thee forth in bitter scorn,
And scattered to the winds thy seed,
And cursed the fruit that thou hadst borne:—
Long since—and I, who learn of time,
Shall I not curse thee in my rhyme?

I know not: in a distant age
The Lord of thought's divining rod—
The prince of reason—the world-sage
Dared over bold to dream of God
As alien, passionless, alone,
Blind to all being but his own.

But that is past and buried now:
We worship Christ who died for men—
The man-God with the bleeding brow,
Whose secret none had whispered then:
Our aims are moulded to his will,
Yet half his message slumbers still.

The jarring creeds forget their strife,
And with harmonious accents cry
“Flee from the self-concentred life;
To seek thy welfare is to die;
But follow outward ends and give
Thy life to men if thou would'st live.”

I listen, with a heart the while
Too quick to stir to every breath—
To win a gleam from every smile—
A chill from every shade of death:
A thousand mingled voices say,
‘Here and here only lies the way.’

I listen, and I turn aside
And gaze upon thy face of stone,
And read the passion of its pride,
Until its sneer is half my own,
And I am strong to seek again
The turmoil of the ways of men.

TO MELANCHOLY.

A MOONLIT NIGHT IN FEBRUARY.

D'ou vient a l'homme la plus durable des jouissances de son cœur, cette volupté de la mélancolie, ce charme plein de secrets, qui le fait vivre de ses douleurs et s'aimer encore dans le sentiment de sa ruine?—Senancour.

Come to me—for I am weary:
Bid thy breezes fan my brow:
Come to me—the night is weird and dreary,
Wan and weird as thou.
Come—the wind of midnight moans and shivers
Through the bending bushes black as death,—
And each mooncast shadow starts and quivers
At each fancied passing of the night wind's breath.

See the moorland tarn is gleaming
In the hollow far below,
While around the lonely wastes are dreaming
White as wintry snow.
Through the calm unruffled deep of Heaven
Glides in majesty the maiden queen:
Few the clouds and fleecy that are driven
O'er the floating splendour of her midnight sheen.

Listen to the wavelets sobbing
On the pebbles of the beach,
Keeping time with ripples that are throbbing
In yon moonlit reach.
Listen to the breezes that are sighing
Through the rushes of yon marshy shore,
Where the shadows of the hills are lying,
And the reedy coves are darkly woven o'er.

Come to me—for I am lonely,
And the heart in solitude
Finds itself, and is companioned only
Of its inmost mood.
And our deepest feelings are awoken
Of the things without us—come to me:
In that plash of waters thou hast spoken;
And the murmur in the rushes is of thee.

'Tis of thee: each master feeling,
As it dawns and dies away,
Has an hour—a season for revealing
Its imperial sway.
And this hour of midnight and of moaning,
Sobbing waters and unearthly light—
Is not all its voice—its silence owning
Thee supreme and lonely, mistress of the night.

There is here no joy, no sadness—
Hushed despair or hope confessed:—
No exultant burst of evening gladness
From a darkened west—
Not the triumph of unclouded splendour,
Not the blinding glory of the noon:
Not the haze of love, serene and tender,
In the full-orbed lustre of the summer moon.

In the songs—the flowers of Maytime,—
In the green leaves Hope is nigh:
Then the fragant breezes have their playtime—
Now the night winds sigh.
When the woods are touched with autumn's fire
Come the gusts and, as they drive the rain,
Wail with infinite, untold desire—
Ah! that soughing murmur is no voice of pain.

In the scented summer meadows,
When the sounds of labour cease,
With the slowly-lengthening twilight shadows
Comes a solemn peace.
Peace enfolds the spirit that has striven:—
Raving storms may rock themselves to rest:—
But those clouds are all too faintly driven,
And the night wind moans, and cannot find its nest.

And to-night is not the chosen
Time of desolate despair,
Such as reigns when earth is white and frozen,
And the woods are bare.
'Tis no time of glorious awaking,
As when sunrise gilds a rolling wave:
'Tis no time of stormy passions breaking
On a reef of wrath when angry tempests rave.

Other hours to these are given—
Other seasons own their might:
But the spirits of the earth and heaven
Bow to thee to-night.
Every shadow, every breath is holy—
Every stir and every sound to thee,
O my queen! mysterious melancholy—
And with these my heart is mingled—come to me.

Now thou reignest—none beside thee—
Cloudless as yon thronéd sphere:
Yet no cloud no light can ever hide thee:—
Hidden, thou art near.
Ay in other hours of kindled feeling,
When the waves awoke and spurned control,
I have heard thy deeper accents stealing,
Out of depths of slumber stealing on the soul.

Pure the fragrance of the river,
Taintless in the early morn—
Yet I know thee, for the alders shiver
At the breath of dawn.
Or if e'er the summer wind is sounding
Through the cornfields onward to the deep;
Oh! that rush of gladness pulsing, bounding
Yearns and yearns and on thy bosom falls asleep.

When the midnight moon has fashioned
Gleaming pathways o'er the sea—
Look, that lit repose—that peace impassioned
Breaks in waves on thee.
When the fierce autumnal blasts are wailing,
Eddying through the forest solitudes—
Hark! that wearied gust is faint and failing,
'Tis thy far off moaning in the dripping woods.

This the curse that all inherit—
This that through the gates of sense
Passion sweeps in whirlwinds o'er the spirit,
Limitless—intense:
And the heart, in thrall to each emotion,
Rises as the deep when storms are black—
But hard barriers bound that fettered ocean,
And its billows break and break in wrath and wrack.

For the wind is free and chainless—
Chained and bound the ocean's flow—
Yet its durance is unguessed and painless,
Till the storm winds blow.
Then it knows its bonds and pants to break them,
And it beats its wings against the shore,
But in vain its slumbering waves awake them—
And in scorn the sea caves thunder back their roar.

So they come and go for ever—
Waves that wander through the soul:
And in turn each trance and each endeavour
Finds in thee its goal.
Aimless longings, without form or number,
Into thy dark depth of waters leap—
Rest itself exhausted of its slumber,
And despair that wearies of its frozen sleep.

Thine the hush of wearied laughter:—
Thine the swoon of tears that fail:
Sets the sun of hope to linger after
In thy twilight pale.
Aye and love's own flame too fiercely burning
Dies of its deep passion into thee,
Dies and lives—for thou art endless yearning
For unuttered things that may not ever be.

Say then who is doomed to know thee
As I know thee face to face,
If all stirrings of the tempest show thee
In each breathing space?
For a thousand winds have swept and shaken
Into music every slumbering chord,
And my heart, of each in turn forsaken,
In the dying strains thy mystic accents heard.

So to-night, because thou reignest,
These that lived and died in thee—
These, that sink forgotten if thou wanest,
Wake again in me.
Not alone—for each with all is blended—
Love and sorrow, hope and joy and pain
Rise anew, their time of slumber ended,
Rise transfigured, lit with glory, live again.

Live again those wond'rous hours
When my heart awoke to love,
When the green earth laughed in wreaths of flowers—
Laughed the skies above.
Burn again through clouds of sunset fire
Days of bliss that left a night of woe:
Breathes again each blast of deep desire
At whose breath my bosom panted long ago.

Let them come and let them quicken
Into life my swooning heart:
Aye if e'er my soul was blest or stricken—
Let it feel the smart—
Like it feel the angel's kiss of healing—
Dewlike peace the child of whirling strife:
In those tides of strong impassioned feeling
Beat the truest pulsings of the spirit's life.

Let them come, and roll in thunder
Through the caverns of the air:
Bid their lightning flashes cleave asunder
Leaden-hued despair.
Bid the blast awake in wrath, atoning
For its weary trance with Ocean's roar:—
Hush! the midnight wind is faintly moaning,
And the tarn is plashing on its pebbly shore,

THANK GOD FOR THE NIGHT.

My heart has been long a rover,
But the haven is half in sight:
The heat of the day is over:—
Thank God for the night.

The channel narrows before me:
The surf on the sands is white:
Grey clouds are gathering o'er me,
And shadows of night.

I listen—the waves are breaking
In thunder to left and right:
The evening winds are awaking,
To herald the night.

What then when I leave the river
And follow the seabird's flight?
My heart gives a farewell shiver
At the breath of the night.

I ask not what shall betide me,
For above in the heaven's height

The stars will come out to guide me—
The splendour of night.

Thank God for the boundless ocean,
With never a shore in sight—
For the sleep of eternal motion
And fathomless night.

Thank God for the mists of even;
Thank God for the pale twilight:
Thank God for the stars of Heaven:
Thank God for the night.

TO TIME.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Answer, O life's hereafter!
Answer, O hidden years!—
Laughter and sunlit tears—
Weeping and bitter laughter.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Visions of Beauty and Truth
Beckoning me on till they wane,
As life with its drizzling rain
Quenches the ardour of youth.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Hope that is born to die—
Love that breaks into ashes,
Joy with its lightning flashes
Streaking a leaden sky.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
The host of the heart's desires—

Lust or the love of God—
The sky or the clayey clod—
Sunlight or phantom fires.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Work in the noonday heat,
Work on the rock and the sand,
Till the heart grows hard as the hand,
Or bleeds as the bleeding feet.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Mazes of dazzling light—
Mazes of whirling sound,
Till the solid earth swims round,
And we long for the lonely night.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Haply an hour of peace—
Of weird and expectant calm,
When the night dews fall like balm,
And the sounds of the noonday cease.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
A twilight of creeping chill,
When the fog steals up from the meadows,
And, folded in dusky shadows,
The earth lies dewy and still.

What wilt thou bring me, O Time?
Spasms of strangled breath—
White mist and a shiver of wind,
And—sweet to the weary and blind—
Thine icy kisses, O death.

THE RIVER.

Brown and brimming and flecked with foam,
Wandering down to your distant home,
Tell me O river! whence do you flow?
And what becomes of you far below?

What is your answer? the foam bells speak
Of heathery wastes and a mossy streak,
And the ripples tell of a sandy shore,
And salt sea marshes and ocean's roar.

But far above is the emerald moss,
And far below do the billows toss,
And life is short, and the sun is bright,
And the shadows say “it will soon be night.”

So under the elm trees' branching shade
I'll sit till the light begins to fade,
And watch how the eddies of foam go by,
And ask not whither or whence or why.

And still the waters are hurrying down,
And still they are near me brimming and brown,
And still they change and are still the same—
As they flow to the fountain whence they came.

GOODBYE TO MABEL.

My little fairhaired Mabel! My child with the laughing eyes!
My gleam of merry sunshine! My rift of blue in the skies!
What! must my Mabel leave me, and take her gifts away—
Each fleeting glimpse of childhood—each dear remembered day?

Ah, me! for the days of childhood—so sweet when they are past:—
Cling to them closely, Mabel—cherish them while they last:—
They will repay with blessing the love you bear them now,
And come like white-winged angels, and kiss my Mabel's brow.

My brow was hot and fevered—my mind was over-wrought;
My sky was over-woven with clouds of care and thought:
For sultry heat had fettered the breeze's airy wing,
And blinding dust had tarnished the freshness of the spring.

But in my Mabel's laughter, and in her radiant tears,
A child again I wandered through paths of happier years:
I felt the cooling breezes blow round me fresh and free—
I saw the April sunlight dance o'er the dark blue sea.

Or as one slowly climbing through ice, and rock, and snow,
With the mountain mist around him, and the valley far below,
Sees, when the mists are parted in a momentary break,
The verdure of the lowlands, the blue waves of the lake.

So—for my path lies upwards—my little child, in you
A glimpse of mere and meadow broke brightly on my view:
But now farewell, my Mabel, the moment's glimpse is o'er,
And clouds of stormy darkness roll round my path once more.

ANYONE TO ANYONE.

AN OLD, OLD STORY.

I.

Glide up, O sea, along the wastes of sand,
Glide foaming up and clasp the shadowy land,
And pant and break in yearning on the strand.

Rise up, O moon, over the rolling deep,
Rise up and bless the ripples as they creep,
And melt into the magic of their sleep.

Look down on me, O eyes so darkly bright,
Languid with lustre like the summer night,
Look down and bathe me in your haze of light.

My soul went out in yearning towards the sea,
That swayed and murmured everlastingly:—
Its endless plaint was not of love for me.

And towards the tender moonlight went my soul,
And felt far off the gleaming ripples roll,—
But on its throbbing tide no moonbeam stole.

And then I looked deep into your dark eyes,
Deeper than summer depth of midnight skies,
And they looked back on me in sweet surprise—
Oh love—love—love.

II.

Why did my heart awake,
And fling aside the weeds it never wore?
Why in that moment did my spirit slake
A thirst unfelt before?

Why, when the sky reveals
Mid depths of tempest gloom a rift of blue—
Gleams forth a light no darkness e'er conceals,
Nor storm cloud veils from view?

Or why, love! when I find
The year's first primrose on a sunny bank
Comes back a joy I never left behind—
A hope that never sank?

III.

May I not love you, dearest!
As I love the flowers of spring?
Listen to you with rapture
As I listen to birds that sing?

When shadow and light are mingled
Where clouds of sunset burn—
I am content to love them,
Careless of love's return.

I love them and bless their beauty—
May I not love you so?
Only my heart can answer:
My heart makes answer—No.

IV.

I stood and watched the line of tender light
That would not fade away,
The streak of yellow sky that told how bright
Had been the summer day.

I stood and listened to the sweet refrain,
Whose liquid fountain rose
From some near grove—that voice of rapturous pain—
Of passionate repose.

I stood and felt the warm and balmy breath
Of midnight breezes stir—
Fragrant from wandering over gorse and heath.
Through woods of birch and fir.

I stood entranced, till odour, light and song
Were waves that throbbed in me,
And on their bosom bore my soul along
To some mysterious sea.

O sea of love! thy pulsing passed away—
Its meaning yet unguessed:
I loved too well to marvel that I lay
In rapture on thy breast.

V.

I breathed the freedom of the air:
I drank it in, and was content:
It flowed around me everywhere:
Why should I marvel what it meant?
Then only when I gasped for breath
I knew its loss was more than death.

And in the common light of day
I saw the loveliness of earth:
Yet never blest the golden ray
Wherein its colours had their birth;
Till lost in void abysmal night
I knew how goodly was the light.

Nor did I marvel when I heard
My darling falter forth her love:
My soul was all too lightly stirred—
I never raised my eyes above:
Love seemed like air or light—but oh!
I learned my blessing in my woe.

VI.

Come rain of tears: the morn was all too bright:
Too darkly blue was the unclouded sky:
The sun has drunk the freshening dews of night,
And drained each chalice dry.

And now the flowers hang down their drooping heads:
Dust hides the leaves: the grass is parched and wan:
The brooks are shrunken in their pebbly beds,
And scarcely trickle on.

Come heavy clouds and hide the sultry blue:
Come welcome shade and veil the blinding light:
Come cooling rain and bathe the flowers in dew—
Fresh as the tears of night.

Bless the sad earth—and bid her laugh again:
Give back to leaf and blade their tender grace:
Feed the faint streamlet: grant it life to gain
The river's wide embrace.

So when the sun long-hidden re-appears,
The gold fringed curtains of his tent withdrawn—
The earth will smile as brightly through her tears
As once after the dawn.

VII.

Once we wandered forth together:
All the world was wet with rain:
Storms will come in sunniest weather,
Darkening heavens without a stain.

Storms will come, and soak and sadden
All the leafy solitudes—
Hush the birds that sing to gladden
Mossy depths of summer woods.

Storms will come and gather thickly,
As our hearts are born to know:—
Come and pass again as quickly—
Oh! the wonder when they go.

From the cloud's black fringes streaming
Burst the sun divinely bright:
Land and sea were lit and gleaming
In the mystic evening light.

Hark! unnumbered notes are ringing
From the groves so lately dumb:
Oh! the rapture of their singing—
Love! the silence had to come.

And the sparkling pearls that cluster
On each leaf in yonder copse—
Dearest! what a sunny lustre
Hides its light in tempest drops.

VIII.

Love not me, love! but the aspiration
That would make me what I am not now;
Love a spirit of thy heart's creation,
An imagined being pure as thou.

Love not what I am—a narrow prison
Where the self within me pines forlorn:
Love the sun that is not yet arisen,
And the sadness of the glimmering morn.

Do not love this blaze of noonday fire,
But the stars to which it makes me blind:
Love the light that fades from my desire,
And the darkness that it leaves behind.

Do not love the mirth, the ready laughter,
Happy in each moment as it flies,—
Careless of the past and the hereafter,
Of the life wherein each present dies.

Love this anguish, this unblest endeavour
To become what I may never be:
So alone thy love will live for ever—
So alone be lavished, love! on me.

IX.

Such was the deep unuttered prayer,
That in my heart I dared to cherish:
It passed into the voids of air:
Ah! me, it was not doomed to perish.

I dreamed of more than earthly love:
God heard my vows that were not spoken:
And straightway like a fluttering dove
Joy fled away: The spell was broken.

X.

It has come then, the hour of even:
The earth has grown strangely still:
There's a flush in the western heaven,
In the air there's a sudden chill:

And the hills lie lost in their shadows,
Dewy and dusky and dim:
And down in the river-meadows,
The chill white vapours swim.

So lately the sun was reigning
Alone in the cloudless blue:
So lately his orb was waning,
Blood-red as it sank from view.

Now the lingering light has ended:
The flush has melted away;
And earth and heaven are blended
In a mist of mournful grey.

XI.

So quickly disenchanted!
Oh! learn what life would teach:
The prize for which you panted
Is ashes if you reach.

The silvery lake, whose vision
Solaced the desert land,
Changes in dumb derision
To wastes of burning sand.

The light is shining yonder:
It lures us on and on:
And westward we must wander,
Till all the light has gone.

XII.

Once, ere the day had broken,
By wayward fancy led—
The last word yet unspoken,
The last tear yet unshed—

Into the woods I wandered:
The leaves were wet with dew:—
Not yet my soul had squandered
The bliss it never knew.

I breathed the air untainted,
The fragrant breath of morn:—
So sweet—my heart had fainted,
Its yearning bliss unborn.

There came a chilly shiver:
A wan and lonely breeze
Ruffled the sleeping river,
Sighed through the rustling trees.

And then I knew my gladness:
My yearning found relief:
For the breath of joy is sadness;
And bliss is born of grief.

XIII.

Some are content to take the faded flower,
And keep it for the old love's sake:
As if the mockery of a happier hour
Could comfort hearts that break.

They look again: its withered hues remind them
How sweetly mingled once they met:
They live again the woes that are behind them—
Their wounds are bleeding yet.

But wiser far, when once the flower had faded,
You tore it from your breast away:
Its mute familiar face in death upbraided:
You trod it into clay.

XIV.

I left you, and we were parted:
I swooned in a frozen sleep:
I prayed to be broken-hearted:
I prayed to have grace to weep.

I wandered—I knew not whither:—
I wandered without a will
To the wastes of lonely heather,
Where the winds are never still.

The wind with its voice of anguish
Came wailing and wuthering by:
And now it would droop and languish,
Now triumph in agony.

The breath of its life was blended
With mine that had ceased and swooned,
Till the trance of despair was ended,
And I woke and I knew my wound.

And a sudden strength was given,
As the wind bewailed my woes:
For I knew that grief has a Heaven
Set deep in its very throes.

XV.

Look back, O love-forsaken,
For else your eyes are blind:
The light that life has taken
Is shining far behind.

Look back, the lake is gleaming,
That turned to wastes of sand:
The prize of all your dreaming
Still hangs to mock your hand.

Ah! Hope can bid the morrow
Dawn dazzling on the sight:
But mightier far is sorrow
That bathes the past in light.

XVI.

And do not weep that God has quenched and hidden
A light He never gave:
The fruit of our desires is still forbidden:—
The present is its grave.

We live our lives, not in passing minute
That is and then is not:
Else is the prize, as often as we win it,
Lost, faded and forgot.

Life reaches forth into the far hereafter
Into the dimmest past:
Then heed no more the mocking wails of laughter
Of every demon blast.

For there and there the light of life is burning
Behind thee and before:
And in the very anguish of thy yearning
'Tis thine for evermore.

Deep in our inmost hearts—whose depths are Heaven—
Past, present, future blend:
And there alone the gift of God is given,
Light without birth or end.

XVII.

Forgive me that I dared to falter
A moment from my faith to thee,
Dared to desert the hallowed altar
The memory of thy love for me.

Forgive me that my trust was shaken,
Till God's own promise seemed a lie:
Thy heart is cold, and mine forsaken,
But love itself can never die.

The flame leaps up—and lives no longer—
The baffled flame of brief desire:
But unsubdued, from strong to stronger
Burns the white core of central fire.

And oh! my love, 'twere darkest treason
No more to worship at the shrine—
The memory of that blessèd season,
That gave the spark of love divine.

XVIII.

Yet once again the music of your laughter
Rang through the ruined chambers of my soul:
And once again upon each mouldering rafter
A momentary glimpse of sunshine stole.

The laughter was of one who mocked and taunted:
The sunshine was a gleam of phantom white:
I sometimes wonder if my heart is haunted,
Like crumbling corridors in dead of night.

Do they not say where'er a rebel passion,
For one mad moment set its bonds at nought—
There lingers yet, in some mysterious fashion,
A ghostly witness of the deed it wrought?

And if the flood of pent-up flame may never
Find the fierce outlet of a stormy deed;
But rolls in surges through the heart for ever,
Till the black thunder clouds have ceased to feed.

Where shall we find its dread undying traces—
Voices of mocking laughter—ghostly gleams?
Not in the loneliness of haunted places—
But in the ruins of the heart's own dreams.

XIX.

I saw thee for a little space:
I saw thee love! unseen of thee:
Thy lovely unimpassioned face
Turned for a moment full on me.

Its blue eyes were as dark and deep
As when of old for me they shone:
Like mountain tarns in midnight sleep,
That stars unnumbered gaze upon.

I watched them with as pure a love,
As innocent as I have found
In wonder of the deeps above,
Or of the flowers that laugh around.

No storm of longing or despair
Troubled my deep serene delight:
I knew my love was passing fair:
I blessed God for so dear a sight.

And then the glimpse of thee was o'er,
For other faces came between:
But this is mine for evermore:
I saw my love and was not seen.

XX.

Ebb, ebb away, O wan and weary sea!
Sink down, pale moon! and let the darkness be:
O eyes that never more will shine on me,
Farewell! O love, farewell!

100

TOO DEEP FOR TEARS.

Come once again out of the depths of night,
Out of the darkness that is all too bright
For eyes that need the glare of earthly light.

Look once again, O eyes of purest blue,
Deep into mine—alas! that never knew
In bygone days what beauty shone in you.

O calm and silent eyes, yet once again
Ye look on me, and I look back in vain:
That baffling stillness—is it love or pain?

Or love reproaching me that mine is cold?
Ah! never so: the love that burned of old
Burns all the more because it burns untold.

Nay, doubt me not: a thousand cares beset:
New joys, new sorrows tempt me to forget:
But thou, my dearest! art remembered yet.

My brother! my lost brother! who can say
How far from sight beneath life's surface play,
Live wounds of anguish that no tears betray?

101

Thou knowest at least that only when my woe
Grew part of me, and sank from sight below
Into my life—my tears forbore to flow.

Thou knowest, O love, how often while I fare
Through dark and stony paths—in my despair
I seek thine arm—and lean—on empty air.

Aye even now thy dear imagined eyes
Speak from the darkness, and thy heart replies
To these my passionate and wayward cries.

“Lean on me still: God gave, in taking me,
His precious gifts of Hope and Memory:
Be strong in these, and I am near to thee.”

102

A HAVEN OF PEACE.

Long tempest-tost on stormy hopes and fears,
The wandering billows of this sea of years—
I seek the haven of that hour of tears,—

That hour of rushing anguish, that possessed
The springs of life deep hidden in my breast,
And freed their flood of yearning long repressed.

O hour of blessing—for a moment's space
God in His endless mercy gave me grace
To rest my eyes on His unclouded face.

On depths of gold intolerably bright—
Till the fierce anguish of my blinded sight,
Measured the dread intensity of light.

But now I know, for years have past between,
The light that scorched me then was calm, serene
As midnight waters in the moonlight sheen.

103

And in the memory of that bitter day,
For me who wander on life's stormy way,
There lies a land-locked and unrippled bay—

Where the strained canvas finds a brief release:
The wind drops down: the rushing billows cease:
And on the bosom of eternal peace

I sleep awhile—till once again I glide
Before a kinder breeze, and wander wide
O'er the grey wastes of the unquiet tide.

104

WAITING FOR THE DAWN.

I said ‘Mama is going home
To God's home in the bright blue sky:
She wants her little ones to come
And kiss her—and then say goodbye.’

The children wondering what I meant
Looked up—my eyes were far away:
They put their hands in mine, and went
To where their dying mother lay.

Their rosy lips gave, each in turn,
Warm kisses to the cold white brow:
I saw her eyes light up and yearn—
I see them lit and yearning now.

The children went away to bed,
And on each pillow snowy white
A ruddy cheek—a curly head
Nestled in slumber all the night.

105

And I was in the room of death
Alone—alone—the long hours through:
I watched the gently taken breath
Grow faint and faint as falling dew.

At length there came a change—a chill,
That drew a shiver from the earth,
A shiver of wind—then all was still—
I waited for the daylight's birth.

A ghastly glimmer of the dawn,
Sadder than darkness, filled the room:
The veil was lifted—not withdrawn;
I saw enough to see the gloom.

I took in mine the wasted hand,
And sank upon my knees in prayer,
The while with dreamy eyes I scanned
The large blue veins that wandered there.

Till something seemed to whisper ‘Rise’—
I rose in haste, and bending o'er
The pillow, sought the sweet blue eyes
Where life's warm sparkle played no more.

106

Yet love shone through them—Love that gains
Intensity when force is spent;
Infinite in its very chains,
And in its dumbness eloquent.

For never is the sun so bright
As then when evening clouds eclipse,
Nor Love so fair as when her light
Burns through the veil of speechless lips.

O speechless lips, I saw you move
To make a kiss, but Death forbade:
You told your agony of love,
Although the kiss was never made.

For unperceived Death's shadowy mist
Came lightly gliding in between
Our yearning souls, and as I kissed
The lips, I touched the icy screen.

And in that touch a chilling wave
Of wintry breath, that crept and stole
Like nightwind moaning o'er a grave,
Curdled the stillness of my soul.

107

I dared not name or shape in thought
The sickening doubt—the formless dread;
Half aimlessly I rose and sought
The window pane—the sky was dead:

Clouds hung against it, wan and dim
And lifeless as my darling's cheek;
But just along the eastern rim
There ran a faintly golden streak.

108

IN NIDDERDALE.

Grey ragged clouds were scudding o'er the sky
Before the breath of the autumnal blast,
That raved and roared and rustled stormily
Through the dark-tufted fir trees as it passed.

The congregated mists, that blurred from sight
The outlines of the dim-discovered hills,
Had poured their flooding torrents all the night,
And fed the fountains of the moorland rills.

And now unnumbered brooks were rushing down,
Each from the heather of its upland home,
To swell the river's brimming waves of brown,
That whirled along in eddies flecked with foam.

Over the whirlpools of the river hung
The mourning robes of an autumnal wood,
And every gust, that swept the branches, flung
Red leaves and golden on the eddying flood.

109

Rose strangled murmurs from the stream below:
Darkness and tears and sighs were everywhere:
The wind breathed of immedicable woe,
And all things told of ruin and despair.

But lo! a momentary gleam of day
Touched into showers of light the distant rain:
And in that moment Nature seemed to say
‘Courage awhile—I triumph in my pain.’

110

THE MELEE,

OR PROGRESS.

God Thou rememberest all how straight to the battle we sprang:
Fiercely our sabres flashed in the light of the breaking day:
We sang with exultant hope as the stars of the morning sang
When God looked forth on the night and darkness melted away.

Each heart was a thrill of joy, and joy is a psalm of praise:
Each heart was a flame of love, and love is a speechless prayer:
A rolling pæan arose, as floated before our gaze
Thy banner of ardent snow high into the azure air.

Its splendour dazzled the eyes of one who was near my side:
The spear of the foeman came. I saw but I could not save.

111

The heart blood gushed from its fount: he sank to the ground and died:
His eyes were on Thee, oh God! Did they see Thee beyond the grave?

The thunder of battle crashed around me, as on I pressed:
I went—for the banner led me—to ramparts of living steel.
Were lances shivered against me—I knew that my shield was blest;
I laughed at the blows that numbed not, and wounds that I could not feel.

For strong in the faith of Hope I dreamed that if e'er the foe
Looked up where above his head the banner floated and came,
He would shrink and wither away from the blaze of its burning snow
As the stubble of autumn shrinks from the breath of the burning flame.

But the serried ranks stood firm as rocks in a raging sea:
The waves of our fury burst against them in empty spray:

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And the driving wind was changed to eddies of mocking glee,
That caught the feathers of foam and laughed and whirled them away.

Then we looked that the Lord of hosts should wake in a moment's space,
Should waken and work a wonder, and leave us a living sign:
And we looked that the foe should melt at the lightning sheen of His face,
And know that the banner of snow that led us, O Lord! was thine.

But never a sign was given, and never a voice was heard,
And they who were faint of heart cried out that the day was lost—
For ‘the foe is still unshaken, and the Lord has never stirred’
And they turned and left the battle or fought with the demon host.

The sword of my ardent hope is broken, O God, in twain:
I am pierced with a hundred wounds and hidden in dust and gore:

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I am stiff with unending toil: I am weary and worn with pain:
I reel and my eyes are blind, for the death mist swims before.

Yet it may be that inch by inch, since the dawn of the day began,
We have driven the foemen back, though I knew not when or where:
We see but a little space, and life is a little span,
And the soldier can but know how his nearest comrades fare.

And the ages come and vanish, but the world flows on for aye;
And the battle is ever fought, and the Good for ever wins:
And the lightest blow is weighty to guide to its end the fray—
For God the Eternal ripens what the seed of time begins.

We bid Him arise from slumber—but the Lord God never sleeps:
His work is a lightning flash, but it flashes in God's own sight:

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He holds in a drop of light the infinite Ocean deeps,
And the lives of a million men are less than a moment's flight.

We bid him work us a wonder and show us His cloudless face:
Its splendour is all around us: our eyes are dazzled and dim:
And wide as the world of being, and wider than time and space
Is the wonder that He is working through hearts that are strong in Him.

They say that our cause is broken: I see with the eyes of death,
Whose mists are stealing around me to hide me away from pain:
I shall sleep as a little child on the bosom of one deep faith,
That never a wound was wasted and never a blow was vain.

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THE TERROR PIKE.

FOUR SONNETS.

We climbed or crept, full in the morning's glow,
Too high for fear, along that narrow edge
Of treacherous splinter and imagined ledge—
On either hand four thousand feet below
Fell walls of naked rock or dazzling snow,
Sudden and sheer, to where a river rolled
Out of its frozen fountain—green and cold—
Tempestuous billows in arrested flow.
And from that height we looked on snowy field,
And iron peak and glacier heaped around
In giant desolation: everywhere
A stillness reigned triumphant as despair,
A stillness ever and anon revealed—
Not broken—by the avalanche's sound.

Grim in your desolation—iron peaks,
Whose snow slopes burned beneath the cloudless sky,
Whose glittering glaciers pained the gazing eye,—
Fiends of the wilderness! your spirit speaks

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Now even as then, and mine uprising wreaks
Its utmost force against you, and recoils
Crushed and appalled—for so your grandeur foils
Feeling itself, withholding all it seeks.
Yet not in vain I, wearied and oppressed,
Gazed on you then and was athirst to see
A leaf or floweret: even while I shrank
From you, the winter of your stillness sank
Into my soul, and, locked within my breast,
Lived with my life and grew a part of me.

It yet may be that I shall turn to you,
O ice and iron of that silent land,
If ever with imperious command
Some voice serene shall bid my heart renew
Old wounds of anguish—and no more pursue
The hanging prize of some desirèd fruit,
But pluck from earth unflinching by the root
The flower of hope so cherished while it grew:
Then shall I find you, snow and precipice,
And cataract of glacier, hidden deep
As thews and sinews of my inmost soul,
And strong in you my passion to control,
Grow hard as cliff of granite, cold as ice
And lonely as the mountains in their sleep.

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But now farewell: to other scenes I turn:
Your frozen summits for awhile recede:
For well I know where woodland valleys lead
To narrower glens of mingled heath and fern,
And bushes that o'erhang the wayward burn;
And on through bleaker uplands I have traced
The wandering stream to where 'mid mossy waste
Mists of the moorland feed its fountain urn.
Dear to my every mood—in these I find
Companionship in gladness as in pain:
I know the hour when sunset's violet glow
Bathes the far lines of purple: and I know
As well the wailings of autumnal wind,
That bring grey clouds and melancholy rain.

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JOY AND SORROW:

OR THE GODS DETHRONED.

They lie at thy feet, oh Christ! Thou hast trodden them into the clay:
The spear that Athena bore is broken and red with rust:
And Phœbus and Aprodite, the beautiful—where are they?
They are fallen, oh Christ! and shattered—they kiss Thy feet in the dust.

They are fallen—heroic Wisdom and high ideal Art—
And Beauty that laughed and lured us—what is she? cinders and ashes:
Oh man! with the soul divine: Oh God! with the human heart:
Oh eyes of sorrowing love are these your lightning flashes?

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Ye looked on the Gods of Hellas, and they were as dreams forgotten:
The glory of all their shrines was dust at the touch of God:
As a fruit, that is fair without, drops down when the core is rotten,
Drops down at a breath of wind and moulders into the sod.

The joy of our hearts begot them—they waned to a dreary end:
Were they vile in Thine eyes, oh Christ! in this that we held them fair?
But thou knewest the heart's desires: men called Thee the sinner's friend:
And a harlot bathed Thy feet in the waves of her rippling hair.

Ah no! from within they perished: they were born with the germs of death:
They grew with a growing cancer: they ripened into decay:
They waited a touch of frost: they waited a wintry breath:
And the shrines of our hearts were bare before the dawn of Thy day.

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For the plant of joy must wither unblest by the rain of tears,
When the lips of the sun have drained its chalice of sparkling dew:
Ah! well that we worshipped these in the joy of our early years—
Ah! well that we laughed for gladness when skies were bright and blue.

Tears came and a cloud of care: we turned to our gods in vain:
They had listened, alas! too long to the voice of music and mirth:
They knew not the ways of sorrow: they knew not the paths of pain—
And they were dethroned and fallen, and the light had left the earth.

For tears are as precious pearls, the pride of a kingly line—
The gleam of the far-off grandeur of the goal we are born to win:
For the light of our life is darkened by the dawn of a light divine:
And had we not dreamed of Heaven, we never had wept for sin.

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Tears come, and another world awakes to their magic wand:
They veil our eyes with a film, and blind them and make them see:
And they rise when love has grown to thirst for a love beyond:
And they doom “what is” to wither at the dream of what ought to be.

Tears came and a cloud of care, and the light of the morning died:
Thou camest incarnate Love! and Thine was a bleeding brow:
There were wounds in Thine hands and feet, and wounds in Thy stricken side:
Thy sweat was a sweat of blood, and the drops are trickling now.

We looked on the waste of briars that Thou hadst trampled down:
We looked on the crimson stains that told where Thy feet had trod:
We looked on the wreath of thorns and hailed it a monarch's crown,
We looked on Thine eyes of sorrow, and knew they were eyes of God.

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THE WESTERN SEA.

I saw thee on a summer's day
Among thy many isles asleep;
A few faint fleecy cloudlets lay
In shadow on thine azure deep;
And as they drifted past, I knew
How bright and boundless was the blue.

I saw thee pitiless and cold,
With clouds and darkness overcast;
Long stormy crested billows rolled
Before an icy northern blast:
And broke far off with ceaseless shocks
On bleak inhospitable rocks.

I had not loved thy sleep so well,
If wintry winds had never blown:
I learned of thy tempestuous swell
The music of thy softer tone:
And when the waves were dark as night,
I blest thy paths of rippling light.

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THE STEPPING STONES.

Thou nameless meeting of two nameless streams—
Sweet haunt—familiar to my wandering feet—
So well beloved, that in my very dreams
Thy murmuring waters meet.

My heart is weary of the ways of men:
Fain would I set the busy world aside,
And seek thy solitary paths again,
And hear thy wavelets glide.

Lo! I am with thee: though yon purple height
Still stands between, and thou art far beyond,
Yet thou dost ever come to bless my sight
When fancy waves her wand.

I close my eyes, and out of empty space
I bid them rise, obedient to my will,
The many blended features of thy face—
Mist, moorland, stream and hill.—

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Above—the bluffs of bracken and of rock,
Where desolation has its own sweet charm:—
The scanty pasture,—the wide-wandering flock,—
The last lone upland farm.

Below—the broken boulders and the maze
Of waters half bewildered, half in haste,
That wind and wander by so many ways,
Threading thy rocky waste.

And the grey causeway through the river's bed,
So rudely shaped that I have deemed it strewn
By Nature's artless hand—in turn I tread
Each wave-worn stepping-stone.

And the wide wilderness of moors around,
The russet grass, the fringe of stunted fir,
The ever wakeful wind's mysterious sound,
The moorcock's rushing whirr.

I know them all, and wander, not astray,
With tender recollection for my guide,
By every devious heather-hidden way
That leads me to thy side.

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For who shall tell how often I pursued
My wonted paths to thee, till time had taught
My heart to know thee in each change of mood
That changing Nature wrought?

I know that season when the tender haze
Of verdure, stealing through the stunted trees,
Tells me that winter dreams of summer days,
Sunshine and balmy breeze.

And when the summer comes with skies of blue
And purple twilights lingering in the west,
I've stood and watched the clouds of rosy hue
That slumbered on thy breast.

And when the rain clouds from the south-west blacken
The lower heaven, and mists of autumn rise,
I've seen the glories of thy faded bracken
Atone for faded skies.

Nor least I love thee when the untrodden snow
Enshrouds the moorlands in their swoon of death,
And bleak and bitter are the winds that blow,
With winter in their breath.

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Nay more—I love thy solitude so well,
That not to thee alone I went to make
My pilgrimage, but every clough and fell
Is sacred for thy sake.

Thou lesser stream, whose infant life is fed
On western slopes, confess that I have traced
The windings back to where a verdurous thread
Streaks the brown upland waste.

And thou fair child of dew and cloud and rain,
What though thy valley is a dreamland still,
Yet chide me not—I tremble to profane
The fancy-haunted hill—

That hallowed spot where moorland mist conceals
The lonely nymph that holds thy fountain urn,
And ever bending o'er thy cradle kneels,
Waist-deep in heath and fern.

And I have tracked the mingled streams below
Through one deep gorge of wood and crag and heath,
And heard the waves with murmured music flow
Invisible beneath.

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Why do I love thee so? What magic spell,
What subtle charm has thus enthralled my heart?
I know not—'tis enough that I love well
Thee, whatsoe'er thou art.

Love cares but little how or whence she came—
In what an hour—from what sufficient source:—
Her only warrant is her own pure flame—
Her calm and constant course.

I have seen stately rivers roll the snow
Of mighty mountains through a boundless plain,
And blend in one their ample floods and flow
Broad bosomed to the main.

I have seen streams that wandered murmuring down
Deep dales in many-tinted verdure drest,
Mingle with melody their waters brown
By bending branches blest.

I have seen mountain torrents held asunder
In lonely chasms, leap quivering with the shock
Into one dark abyss of foam and thunder,
Through gates of dungeon rock.

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Fair nymphs are those whose queenly locks are wound
With garland rare or pearl-inwoven wreath,—
But fairer far thy simple tresses bound
With spray of russet heath.

And still each pious pilgrimage reveals
Thee in thy wonted beauty—fresh as fair—
Fresh as the breath of spring-time when it heals
The earth of her despair.

And still I learn of thee, and still renew
The thrill of peace that erst thy message gave,
That there are rifts of pure ethereal blue,
Though blinding tempests rave.

I learn of thee that there are isles of palm
Sown in the weariest waste of burning sand,
And dews of twilight falling fresh and calm
To bless the thirstiest land.

I learn of thee that nature yet doth keep
Some secret havens of unrippled rest,
Where rise and sink in rhythmic accents deep
The pulses of her breast.

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And still, when winds awake and billows beat,
I go to thee—blest haven that thou art—
And in thy solitude hold converse sweet
With nature—heart to heart.

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CHILDHOOD'S HOME.

I passed through the open gateway and under the bending trees:
The boughs of the stooping beeches stirred in the summer breeze:
The branching shadows fluttered as asleep on the lawn they lay:
And up through the sunny meadow the avenue wound its way.

I passed through the open gateway and I was a child again:
The grass and the leaves were sparkling in jewels of last night's rain:
But lo! a turn in the pathway clouded my eyes with tears,
And I stood and gazed in rapture on the home of my early years.

The same—and yet I marvelled, for surely of old it stood
Fronting a boundless meadow,—on the skirts of a sombre wood,—

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With a stately hill behind it, from whose height I used to gaze
To where the horizon bounded the world of my childish days.

But the hill was a little hillock—the wood was a little grove:
'Twas only a little paddock through which I loved to rove:
I climbed, but the wizard fancy had somewhere lost his wand:
I looked to the far horizon, but the whole world lay beyond.

Yet the grass had its wonted verdure—the sun had its wonted gold—
The raindrops trembled and sparkled, as ever in days of old:
And clouds were ne'er more fleecy, and never a fresher breeze
Passed with a crisper murmur through depths of the greenwood trees.

And I wondered if one of the dear ones, who left us and went his way
Into the kingdom of twilight misty and cold and grey,

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Could rise from the depths of silence and come for a little while,
And hear the breezes rustle and see the green earth smile;—

Would the earth he had left behind him—the earth he had loved so well—
That once was higher than heaven, and deeper than depths of hell—
Seem now but a mote in the sunbeam, a drop in the water race,
Its life the pulse of a moment—a foothold its orb of space?

Would he learn that its ancient limits, now grown so narrow and near,
Had veiled from imagination the skirts of a boundless sphere?
Would he look to the utmost verges that ever his feet had trod,
And still find far beyond them the world of the Heaven of God?

Yet perchance as he gazed around him a tear of regret might rise,
And blot for a passing moment all else but earth from his eyes:

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He would murmur “Oh God I know thee in the least of thy works complete:
It is all as of old I left it, and then it was oh! how sweet.”

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FACE TO FACE.

I ask not in what season I shall feel
Thy wintry kisses on my burning brow,
Nor when the balm of thy approach will heal
The wounds that wring me now.

I ask not when thy grey and gathered gloom
Must end the sunshine of these sparkling hours:
Nor when the March wind of thy breath must doom
Life and its laughing flowers.

I ask not what the span of circling years
That yet remains—for, be it long or brief,
Death still will clothe itself in chilling fears—
Still bring me sweet relief.

Nor need I ask of thee in what a guise
Thou wilt draw near the threshold of my door:
To see thee is a film before our eyes,
That see and see no more.

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It may be that a thorny path of pain—
A weary and interminable way—
Will lead me on through swamps of blinding rain
Into the light of day.

Or haply on thy slowly heaving breast
Without a pang my soul will fall asleep,
As moonbeams glide into the gleaming rest
Of the enchanted deep.

Or it may be that in a moment's space
The sudden quiver of a lightning flash
Will shrivel me to earth, nor grant me grace
To hear its thunder crash.

Or in a mountain tempest thou wilt come,
And through an hour of unavailing woe
Young life will struggle on—then faint and numb
Sink into drifts of snow.

I know not—but I know that late or soon
My heart must beat to feel thee drawing nigh—
Beat into stillness at thy touch, and swoon
Away from life—and die.

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And there are times when I am quick to hear
Thy fancied footstep in a hush of sound:
There falls the shadow of a sudden fear—
I start and look around.

What even now the dream of thee can chill
My heart, and rob life's sunshine of its charm:
O death, there is one only way to still
These stirrings of alarm.

In fancy I will see thee face to face,
And pluck the veil from thine abhorrèd brow,
And commune with thee for a while—and trace
Thy ghastly features now.

And I will face thee in thy grimmest form—
With snow and darkness for thy winding sheet—
A phantom folded in a freezing storm,
Whose breath is driven sleet.

Whose eyes are lit with such a glare as froze
The Gorgon's victim into lifeless stone:
From whose pale lips each murmur, as it flows,
Is cruel as the moan

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Of loosened avalanche in wintry peak,
Where gathering thunder clots with ice the blood
Of one below: with terror-blanchèd cheek
He waits the rushing flood.

Such and so terrible shalt thou appear,
A bidden guest, that haply in the end
I may arise—for use can conquer fear—
To hail a welcome friend.

There is an hour—the dreariest of night—
When stars are dead—the daybreak yet unborn:—
The moon—a crescent cloud of ghostly white—
Wanes, waiting for the morn.

Grey dappled clouds against a lifeless sky
Hang motionless: there's not a star below,
Where smokeless hamlets, misty meadows lie
By the pale rivers flow.

At such a season were it fit to find
A like repose, and, at the chilly breath
Of the first shiver of the morning wind,
Pass into realms of death.

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I cannot see on stream or dewy lawn
The desolation of the growing light;
I feel the wan approaches of the dawn,—
The stillness of the night.

The weird repose, the damp, the change, the chill,
I feel them—heralds of the hour of doom:—
But heavy curtains veil the window still,
And darkness fills the room;

Save where the glimmer of the lamp reveals
Beloved and loving faces wan with care:
One holds my restless hand: another kneels
Low on her knees in prayer.

Let pangs of cruel suffering rack my frame,
And wring cold drops of anguish from my brow:
Let life be wasted by a subtle flame—
Let spasms awake and bow

My soul in unavailing prayer to thee
To hasten thy approach, and bring me rest:
Yet suffer not these pains of death to be
An opiate to the breast.

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Yes, do thy worst: forbid them to conceal
The darker torments of the soul within:
With calm unclouded anguish let me feel
The vengeful depths of sin.

Yes, do thy worst: let loose the hounds of hell,—
Torture of fear—bewilderment of doubt:—
Angels of hope and innocence that fell
To join the demon rout.

Let all my dreams of possible delight—
Visions of work achieved—of love returned—
The gleams of loveliness that filled my sight—
The light for which I yearned—

Return as angry demons: let me hear
The obscene flappings of their dusky wings:
Till I have half forgotten in my fear
The outward pain that wrings.

Let life and all its flying moments seem
A shock of senseless colour, deafening sound:—
Idle as nightmare pageants in a dream,
Or “noises in a swound.”

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Or let me deem the whole creation curst,
And man more deeply damned because awake
To suffer—tortured by a parching thirst,
That he may never slake.

But those pale watchers, wasted with my woes,
Whose love unwearied waits the dread release—
Is there no healing in the prayer that flows
From hearts of purest peace?

Nay this is bitterest: in this I drink
The wine of anguish to its bitter lees—
This is the crowning pang—I may not think
The thoughts that solace these.

They reck not of the gulf that is between
My faith and theirs: they may not ever know,
How all the props on which I learned to lean
Were broken long ago.

For oh! not mine that angel whose white wings
Have charmed away the darkest fiends of death:
Not mine the sweet serenity that springs
From simple childlike faith.

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And Father shield me when death clouds eclipse
The light of reason. Be it far from me
To falter falsehoods with my dying lips—
To lie when nearest Thee.

What, am I dying then without one ray
Of hope to pierce the gloom of my despair—
Dying as blasts that wail and die away
On blank of midnight air?

Oh! never so—one burning faith is mine—
The background of one unextinguished flame—
That sin and sorrow shew the soul divine—
That failure proves the aim—

That darkness only lives against the light,
And were not if the sun had never shone:—
And were it not, the starry hosts of night
Were lifeless and unknown.—

That love and truth and beauty are the last
Supreme realities. The burial sod
Blinds us to these—but when their light is past,
We see the face of God.

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And I have fathomed to its last abyss
This hell of stormy gloom, and found beneath
The blessing and the balm of such a kiss
As only angels breathe.

I had not found it, if I had not faced
This utter darkness with unflinching soul,—
Through wastes of sand and bitter marshes traced
The river to its goal.

Pray on sweet souls and I will join your prayer,
And kneel in spirit humbled to the ground:
The currents of our faith are mingled there
Where they are most profound.

I care not if the play of surface thought
Sunder our minds: our deepest hearts are one:
Pray on: the heart will throb when mind is nought—
When reason's work is done.

The faith—the hope—the purpose of our days
Meet in one central orb of light divine:
Pray on: your kindled hearts are strong to gaze
On truth that dazzles mine.

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And kiss and cool the fever of my brow,
And feed my dying soul on bread of love:
O Death: O King of Terrors, what art thou?—
God's angel from above.

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TO TRUTH.

Come to me garbed in love and light;
Wreath thy tresses in myrtle leaves:
Smile through a veil of bridal white
Fair as any that fancy weaves;
Smile from eyes that are blue and bright.

Come if thou wilt with sterner mien,
Calm imperious—none the less
Wear a halo of light serene:
Clothe thy presence in loveliness:
Claim my homage—a stately queen.

Some there are who, of hope forlorn,
Make a goddess of their despair—
Dream of lips that are wreathed in scorn—
Dream of eyes with a frosty glare,
Cold and wan as the early morn.

Her they place in a lonely shrine,
And on the altar of Holy Truth

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Offer all that we deem divine—
All the passionate dreams of youth—
Joy and beauty and love in fine.

Truth! forgive them if they blaspheme:
Thine was never a face to chill:
Dupes are these of a grisly dream
That they have woven, who give at will
Life to shadows that only seem.

These they offer in impious haste,
Rashly calling the altar thine,
Are thy sisters—as richly graced—
Stars of light—if they cease to shine,
All the world is an empty waste.

Words that bury the light we see
Deep in a pathless atmosphere—
Words that clothe us in misery—
Words that palsy our hearts with fear
Never fall from the lips of thee.

Then should ever a clouded brow
Darken life in a moment's space—
Send a tempest of driving snow—
While I shudder and hide my face,
I will know that it is not thou.

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Only then, when a face serene
Wakes to rapture and melts to love—
Lifts the veil of the world unseen—
Turns my gaze to the skies above—
I will hail thee, O Truth—my queen.

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WHAT ART THOU, GOD?

What art Thou, God? The cry of all the ages
Is rising upward to Thine Altar Throne:
What art Thou, God? The wisdom of our sages
Bows prone and humbled in this prayer alone.

What art Thou, God? The poet's flood of passion
Leaps from the wellspring of this living wave.
What art Thou, God? Man's heart must ever fashion
Visions of Thee, or life becomes the grave.

Visions alas! that they who worship wholly,
False to their faith in a diviner light,
See from their shrines melt, fade and vanish slowly
Into the empty loneliness of night.

And other hearts, that see our idols shattered,
Laugh at our desolation, strong in scorn,
“Are these your gods—these mists of darkness scattered
At the first faintest glimmer of the morn?

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“Oh dream no more your empty dreams of Heaven:
Awake to life's realities and live:
Content with earth and all that earth has given
Kneel not in prayer to one who cannot give.”

Yet no—for earth and her unnumbered treasures
Live only in the shining of the sun:
A higher bliss makes possible our pleasures,—
We read the many in this dream of One.

Even you for ever passionately seeking
Order in chaos, unity in strife,—
What though your lips deny, your lives are speaking—
Your works confess One law: One end: One life.

One in the manifold of things created
That, without this to quicken them, would be
Formless and featureless—a power unmated—
A nothingness—a blank infinity.

One thread of purpose through the grades of being,
Up from the atom to the mind of man,
Untwining which touch ripened into seeing,
And out of sense thought's lightning flashes ran.

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One light behind the rainbow hues that hide it,
In quest whereof the poet's fervid heart,
With but this dream of loveliness to guide it,
Framed the ethereal realms of song and art.

One life to crown the lives that, each in order,
Measure the fulness of a wider sphere;—
To reach out arms to Being's utmost border,
And bring at last the farmost Heavens near.

One self wherein this infinite self-losing
May find at last its climax and its end:
One narrow path to bless us in refusing
So many paths to which our passions tend.

One halcyon calm to make this sea of trouble,
Upon whose waves we wander tempest-tost,
Seem as the breaking of a foamy bubble
In the great deep that sail hath never crossed.

One sure delight to charm this racking anguish—
These numbing blows, this hot and fevered strife—
This weariness wherein we waste and languish—
Into the travail throes of heavenly life.

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One bond of brotherhood—One common Father—
For are not brothers kinsmen in their birth?
One shepherd and one flock—one love to gather
Into one fold the kindreds of the earth.

What—when with eyes awakened from their slumber
My soul looks out upon this stormy sea—
Wind—water—light—waves without form or number
Bewildering in their infinity—

What do I see?—unmeaning billows surging
Against a misty shore unknown, untrod?
Ah! no—but lines of endless light converging
Into one burning point—and that is God.

And in that point they live—are born—expire—
Rays from its inmost essence, whose pure light
In these alone reveals its central fire,
For rayless solitude were deep as night.

Or nearer yet—for all the starry spaces
Are less than one true flash of inward flame,
And love is larger than the Heavenly places,
And deeper than the depths from which it came.

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Blind for a moment to the world without me—
Deaf to the myriad voices that I hear—
A glimmer of Thy glory grows about me—
O God, I know that Thou art near—too near.

Too true for knowledge and too near for seeing—
Only revealed to Thee, Eternal Love!
O Love, the stillness of our inmost being
Is farther from us than the stars above.

Man cannot see Thee, clasped to Thy embraces:
Man cannot know Thee, folded to Thy breast:
He scans the features of all other faces,
But Thine is still invisible, unguessed.

And still we ask and there is no replying,
Save one low murmur—Faint not in the strife;
The only way to Me is endless dying,
And in My presence there is endless life.

152

NATURE WORSHIP.

I. THE GOD WITHOUT.

Vast, lifeless, masterless, death-nurtured force—
Huge phantom engine whose revolving wheels
Rush round in mad and everlasting course
Till thought itself grows blind and deaf and reels—
Shall I forget that when thy chaos first
Broke on my life and with its iron heels
Crushed down my soul, I yet rose up and cursed
Thine utmost strength and bade thee do thy worst?

Yet some there are who bid me bow to thee
And know that thou art God and thou alone,
And offer up in silent ecstasy
My spirit's adoration—kneeling prone,
And force my wayward isolated will
Into the world-deep current of thine own,
Omnipotent, eternal, strong to still
The fitful murmurs of each wanton rill.

153

Where shall I worship thee? what altar shrine
Waits for the offering of my heart's desire?
Where dost thou veil thyself in light divine?
Is thy Shechinah where the furnace fire
Kindles the engine-room with hellish glow,
And day and night with tongues of flaming spire
Devours the food that makes thy life-blood flow—
The night-black fuel from the depths below?

Or is it where thy maze of whirling steel,
Thy mighty self-controlled machinery,
Bewilderingly complex—pulley, wheel,
Band, cylinder and roller—flash and fly
With lightning speed around and overhead—
And iron teeth and humming spindles ply,
And tear and spin, as fast as they are fed,
The stuff of primal matter into thread?

Or is thine altar in the weaving-room
Where all day long, though men may come and go,
Rises the busy uproar of the loom,
The shriek of shuttles flashing to and fro?
And are those shrill discordant sounds, that daze
My listening ear, the harmonies that flow
From the great key-board of the years, and raise
Up to thy throne our hymns of prayer and praise?

154

Oh there perchance—for there thy toil is crowned,
Where, still the same and still for ever new,
Soft subtly-woven tissues are unwound
Of tender texture and harmonious hue—
Faith, Hopeand Love—stars in the darkest night—
Hands swift to act—Hearts eager to pursue—
Brave aspirations after truth and right—
Ideal loveliness—Eternal light.

But no; thy fervent votary replies—
These thy last works, the fairest thou hast planned
Are dreams, delusions, air-born phantasies,
That mock the sight and vanish from the hand:
Though primal matter, formless and unwrought,
Be sure and solid as the hills that stand:
Yet these that thou hast woven—Love and Thought—
Their warp is emptiness—their woof is nought.

Then all thy life is death, and all thy course
Without a purpose and without a goal:
Thine endless waves of ever-wasted force
On shores of shapeless desolation roll:
Or does one end for all eternity
Quicken each part, give meaning to the whole?
Is it for this that loom and engine ply—
To frame a mockery—to weave a lie?

155

Thou art not blind—for thou hast never seen:
Thou art not dumb—for thou hast never spoken:
Thou canst not die: for thine has never been
A living soul—a spirit to be broken:
Thou dost not weary—for thou dost not feel:
Thou canst not love: thy heart ne'er gave a token
Of sorrow, or of joy: and shall I kneel
To thee whose breath is flame, whose blood is steel?

Not so—but rather with indignant heart
I hurl at thee revolt and hate and scorn,
And dare to curse thee, tyrant that thou art,
For the deep wrongs of man whom thou hast borne
Only to teach him that his pride is shame,
And every gleam of his triumphant morn—
Each pure emotion and each lofty aim—
A lurid shadow of thy furnace flame.

Thou Moloch whose insatiate jaws of fire
Consume our offered gifts with scorching breath—
Our heart's fair children born but to expire:—
Thou Juggernaut whose chariot wheels of death
Grind into dust our suppliant hearts that wait
Prostrate and prone:—I too profess thy faith,
And kneeling at thine altar consecrate
Defiance and anathema and hate.

156

But all in vain: still heedless of the issue
Thy pistons rise and fall: thy looms unfurl
Interminable lengths of dream-like tissue:
And wheels revolve, and spindles hum and whirl:
Thy very dumbness and thy deafness foil
My proud rebellion, and each curse I hurl
Is but a groan, a creak for lack of oil,
A hiss, a sputter where thy waters boil.

II. THE GOD WITHIN.

Life of my life! soul of my inmost soul!
Pure central point of everlasting light!
Creative splendour! Fountain-head and goal
Of all the rays that make the darkness bright—
And pierce the gloom of nothing more and more
And win new realms from the abyss of night!
O God, I veil my eyes and kneel before
Thy shrine of love and tremble and adore.

The unfathomable past is but the dawn
Of thee triumphant rising from the tomb;

157

And could we deem thy lamp of light withdrawn,
Back in an instant into primal gloom
All things that are, all things that time has wrought,
All that shall ever yet unseal the womb
Of elemental Chaos, swift as thought
Would melt away and leave a world of nought.

We gaze in wonder on the starry face
Of midnight skies, and worship and aspire,
Yet all the kingdoms of abysmal space
Are less than thy one point of inmost fire:
We dare not think of time's unending way,
Yet present, past, and future would expire,
And all eternity would pass away
In thy one moment of intensest day.

Of old our fathers heard thee when the roll
Of midnight thunder crashed across the sky:
I hear thee in the silence of the soul—
Its very stillness is the majesty
Of thy mysterious voice, that moves me more
Than wrath of tempest as it rushes by,
Or booming thunder, or the surging roar
Of seas that storm a never trodden shore.

158

And they beheld thee when the lightning shone,
And tore the leaden slumber of the storm
With vivid flame that was and then was gone,
Whose blaze made blind, whose very breath was warm:—
But I, if I would see thee, pray for grace
To veil my eyes to every outward form,
And in the darkness for a moment's space
I see the splendour of thy cloudless face.

In thought I climb to Being's utmost brink
And pass beyond the last imagined star,
And tremble and grow dizzy while I think—
But thou are yet more infinitely far,
O God, from me who breathe the air of sin,
And I am doomed to traverse worlds that are
More fathomless to fancy ere I win
The central altar of the soul within.

How shall I worship thee? With speechless awe
Of guilt that shrinks when innocence is near
And veils its face: with faith, that ever saw
Most when its eyes were clouded with a tear:
With hope, the breath of spirits that aspire:
Lastly, with love—the grave of every fear,
The fount of faith, the triumph of desire,
The burning brightness of thine own white fire.

159

And I have worshipped at no other shrine:
No other fount has slaked my sacred thirst:
I never called Humanity divine:
With all my heart's anathemas I cursed
The creed that dared to say with priestly tone
“Forget thyself, or love thy neighbour first,”
I only answered “Could the world atone
For my lost self? Love God: leave man alone.”

For if indeed thy glory be the goal
Of every breast that throbs and then is still,—
He most, who seeks the Heaven of his own soul,
Toils for his brothers, knows the magic thrill
Of world-wide fellowship—for it must be
That all are one in oneness with thy will;—
But love of man is less than nought to me
That is not rooted in the love of thee.

Long held apart in depths of primal night
O sons of men dead—living—yet unborn—
Unnumbered rays, faint effluence of one light,
Ye knew not of each other—lost and lorn;
But love and kinship dawned with the desire
Of God, the well-spring of your glimmering morn,
And I have dreamed that ye shall yet expire
Blent each with each in one unfathomed fire.

160

For only love can still the stormy strife
And calm the winds that rave, the waves that roll,
And crown the endless aim of nature's life
And link mankind together—soul to soul:
O Love, though dimly guessed, yet even now
In thy far dawn the nations see their goal,
And set their faces eastward: what art thou?
The last thin veil—the splendour of God's brow.

O God that dwellest in transcendant light
Beyond our dreams, who grope in darkness here,
Beyond imagination's utmost flight,—
I bless thee most that sometimes when a tear
Of tender yearning rises unrepressed,
Lo! for an instant thou art strangely near—
Nearer to my own heart than I who rest
In speechless adoration on thy breast.

161

SUNSET AND SEA.

The river flows down to the sunset:
The river flows down to the sea;
But just where the sunset is brightest,
The river has ended for me.
Where the earth and the heaven are mingled
In rapture of radiant rest,
And the breadth of the brimming waters
Lies lost in the burning west.

Yet afar in the hidden distance,
Beyond the immortal light,
The stream with its weary windings
Must wander on through the night—
Must wander on till the daybreak
Dawns desolate and forlorn,
And the waters mirror only
The wan white clouds of morn.

And the stream of your days, my darling,
Flows down to one ardent hour,
When the sunlight of love descended
On earth in a golden shower:—

162

Golden as Hope in the heaven,
Stainless of doubts or fears;—
Ah! now it is red and burning
Through the mists of memory's tears.

The river flowed out of the sunlight;
The river is flowing for aye:—
I know not if white mists haunt it:
I know not if clouds are grey.
For me it has stayed its waters
In the gates of the golden sky:
It died in the sun's embraces,
And it lived, and it cannot die.

For life is a stream to the ocean
Of passionate inward peace,
And in each true moment of Heaven
The waves of our wandering cease.
Each pulse of joy is the throbbing
Of tides of the shoreless sea,
And there they are met together—
This life and the life to be.

163

TO THE ISIS.

I sought thy side before the dawn:
I wandered through familiar ground:
Beneath the woods that skirt the lawn
The pathway wound.

I could have thought that clouds of blue—
Such glimpses from the woodlands came—
Had lost their way while floating through
Without an aim.

And robed in freshest hues of May,
In softly blended green and gold,
Thy slumbering meadows waned away
Just as of old.

I gained the towpath by thy side:
The meadow grass was damp and deep:
I saw and heard thy current glide
Still half-asleep.

164

The lonely waters rippled by,
And mirrored in their depths forlorn
Wan cloudlets hung against the sky,
Waiting the morn.

I gazed, and in a moment's space
Each sweet secluded nook I knew—
Familiar features of a face
Long lost to view.

In yonder reach beneath the wood
I scarcely stemmed thine eddying flow,
When showers of spring had swelled thy flood
Once long ago.

In yonder rushy bed I made
A little haven for my boat:
Beneath yon tree in welcome shade
I lay afloat.

From bend to bend I knew it all—
And strove—so sweet the taste had been—
To drink more deeply and recall
What was not seen:—

165

To trace thy course beyond the sight,
By bridge and meadow, wood and weir:
But no—the days had sunk in night,
That were so dear.

And when they changed to clouds and rain,
I well remember that I sought
An opiate strong to numb the pain
That memory wrought.

And slowly, drop by drop distilled,
The dewlike Lethe of the years
Came, and remembered scenes that filled
My eyes with tears.

Faded from thought, and sank at last
Into oblivion's twilight pale,
And distance drew over the past
Its dusky veil.

But now I stood, athirst to take
Some draught as potent to undo—
To bid each slumbering scene awake
And live anew.

166

And lo! the breath of herald breeze,
That comes before the dawn of day,
Awoke and rustled through the trees
And went its way:—

And wandered wide through wood and glade,
And startled all things as they slept:
By fluttering leaf and bending blade
Its shiver crept.

Thy sleep was ruffled as it passed;—
Thy rushes answered with a sigh;—
The clouds were stirred that overcast
Thy mirrored sky.

It bent the grasses at my feet:
It fanned my brow: it waved my hair:
And breathed a fragrance all too sweet
For earthly air.

The morning incense of the flowers—
The delicate perfume distilled
In chalices by cooling showers
Or night dews filled—

167

The faint fresh odour wafted near
In mists invisible of spray
From foam of everrushing weir
Or tumbling bay—

All these and each delicious scent
Exhaled from hedge, or bush, or bough,
With fragrance of the hawthorn blent,
Breathed on my brow.

I drank the breeze, and drank again
Panting for joy—and as I quaffed,
It loosed me from the subtle chain
Of Lethe's draught.

It waked from their enchanted sleep
Whatever feelings long repressed
Had lain in slumber hidden deep,
Deep in my breast.

It set each spell-bound memory free:
It whispered of departed days:
It bade me trace again with thee
Thy winding ways.

168

And lo! the ice of winter ceased,
And scenes of beauty loved and lost
Came like a rushing flood released
From numbing frost.

And once again I floated down
By hidden lock, and waveworn bridge—
By old grey church—by hamlet brown—
By wooded ridge.

Whatever streams from distant hills
Bring tribute waves to swell thy tide:—
Whatever happy murmuring rills
To meet thee glide—

Were flowing now, as once they rolled
Their languid waves of shadowy green,
Through meadows golden as of old
When May was queen.

By wooded slopes—I knew them all—
Wandered the peaceful Evenlode:
By Minster Lovell's ruined hall
The Windrush flowed.

169

Old elm trees stirring to the breeze
In depths of Cherwell mirrored lay:
By curving lines of willow trees
Thame wound his way.

No need for sight to vouch the truth:
In fancy through their fields I ranged:
In Nature's everlasting youth
They lay unchanged,—

Untouched by time's transforming spell—
Unravaged by the blight of years:—
But oh! from what mysterious well
Rose blinding tears?

Whence did it come that while I deemed
My bliss was innocent of pain,
In one sweet instant, lo! I dreamed
And woke again?

Alas! I could not choose but think
What passing years had wrought for me,
Since last I hung upon thy brink
And gazed on thee.

170

For I remember once I bent
Over thy waters dark as death:
And heard them murmur as they went
Unseen beneath.

Dark clouds had veiled the midnight moon:
The nightwind moaned and shivered by:
I spake to thee and craved a boon,
Nor stayed reply.

I bade thee whisper words from me,
Or be thyself my message sweet
To one who dwelt where rising sea
And river meet.

I have no message now to give:
My heart grew silent long ago:
Love was too fair a flower to live—
Too sweet to blow.

No message—but the old grey bridge
Stands with its pointed arches still:
And woodlands crown the lowly ridge
Of Fyfield hill.

171

No message—and my life-stream flows
In channels unforeseen and strange:
With whirling speed its current goes
From change to change.

Old friends are lost: new friends are won:
I have not time to breathe a sigh:
This task is ended—that begun:
I know not why.

The act is past: the curtain falls;
And rises on an altered scene:
And soon the mind no more recalls
What once had been.

And alien hills, and alien woods
Are charmed into familiar ground:
While paths in friendly solitudes
May scarce be found.

And scenes and faces come and go,
Like phantom pageants in a dream:
And streaks of sunlight fall below
With fitful gleam.

172

And sometimes out of my despair
I cry aloud—No pause—no peace—
Is there no belt of upper air
Where storm winds cease?

No depths of sleep to underlie
These whirling eddies of my life?
No stillness of eternity
To hush this strife?

No thread of purpose in the days,
To stay them as they take their flight?
No clue to this unmeaning maze
Of sound and light?

Oh! into such a cry of pain
The rapture of that moment died:
Was it for this, and all in vain
I sought thy side?

I wronged thee: Nature ne'er repelled
The faith of him who went apart
To commune with her—ne'er withheld
From such her heart.

173

She bids us weep and we obey:
A film of sorrow blinds our eyes:
But her warm kisses wipe away
The tears that rise.

Ay even then the very thought,
That turned my gladness into grief,
Itself made whole the wounds it wrought,
And breathed relief.

Thou changest not—and yet I know
That there is endless change in thee:
Drop after drop, thy waters flow
From source to sea.

Thy life is change: those bells of foam,
Those eddies are thy being's breath:
If e'er thy wanderings found a home,
That home were death.

The meadows that thou glidest by,
The leaves that deck yon hanging wood,
The woodland flowerets change and die—
And are renewed.

174

Yet all is as it was before,
When first to this dear haunt I came,
And thou who changest evermore
Art still the same.

O deep consoling mystery,
Subdue my doubts and calm my fears:
The lesson that I learn of thee
Condemns my tears.

Through endless change unaltered still,
Thou movest, true to Nature's plan—
Is she less able to fulfil
Her end in man?

Is there no central calm within
To match this living peace without—
No changelessness? Forgive the sin
Of such a doubt.

For change and chance and stir and strife,
Are signs to him, who reads aright,
Of one self-same unchanging life
Beyond the sight.

175

Unalterable—calm—serene,
It listens while the tempest raves,
Like Ocean's deeper self unseen
Beneath the waves.

The turmoil of each passing day—
The restless swaying to and fro
Were not, unless the great sea lay
Unmoved below.

Life's fever tells of inward rest—
Eternal stillness laps us round—
And somewhere deep in Nature's breast
Is peace profound.

176

STANDING STILL.

God be praised that I stand at last
Facing the enemy, rifle in hand:
Hist! how the bullets whistle past—
And still we wait the word of command,
Though our fellows are dropping fast.

When will it be my turn, I wonder:
Where and how am I doomed to die?
Will a sword-blade cleave my skull asunder,
Or the lightning-flash from a battery
Strike me dead ere I hear its thunder?

Will one of those whistling bullets bring
The message of doom, or worse than all
Will a crashing shell leap in and fling
Fragments of death, or shall I fall
Where bayonets clash and ring?

Or is it a boon too precious by far—
Too blest a fate—to die as I stand—
Death 'mid the press and clamour of war—
Death red and hot for the motherland—
For the land where the dear ones are?

177

Mother of nations! Mother of men!
I drank in life at thy Titan breast:
Thine arms of love were around me then,
And if ever I muse how my birth was blest
I am clasped to thy heart again.

Mistress of empires! Queen of the sea!
The pulse of a strong exultant hope
Beats in thy breast till it beats in me:
Thou hast given my life an unbounded scope:
I am proud in the pride of thee.

I reap the fruit of the toil and tears,
Of the deeds of heroes that made thee great;
Of the travail throes of a thousand years—
Of the patient courage that conquered fate—
Of doubts and despairing fears.

Each drop of blood that thy children shed—
Each spasm of pain that broke their breath—
For me they suffered—for me they bled:—
O mother's love, I am dumb till death:
I could speak were I cold and dead.

Thou knowest how often I strove to break
The fetters of speech for a moment's space:—

178

How love grew a thirst that I yearned to slake—
How I prayed that Heaven would grant me grace
To strike one blow for thy sake.

One blow for England—however light—
One drop in the stream of her ample life—
One breaking bubble—one foambell white
In one of those whirlpools of eddying strife
That mark her resistless might.

And here I stand—and the fates fulfil
My heart's one wish—my devoutest prayer:
I am standing obedient to England's will:—
Not mine to ask how my comrades fare:—
She has bidden me stand here still.

I murmur not: I am more than blest:
She has found me a foot of earth to defend:
She has marked me the way I may serve her best:
She judges the issue: she knows the end:—
Mine to work—be the meaning unguessed.

So little a work—but I thank God most
For this—that the issue itself is large—
That all may serve it, and none may boast:
The pulse beats high in a cavalry charge—
Is it nothing to hold one's post—

179

When shells are screaming to left and right?
When grape is falling in scathing showers?
I stand here still with as stern delight,
As ever in fierce exultant hours
Bade hearts beat fast for the fight.

Mother of nations! and if I fell
I dare to dream thy love would spare
A sigh—it may be a tear—ah! well,
I hear the voice that accepts my prayer
In the scream of the passing shell.

180

FOR ENGLAND'S SAKE.

Stand steady, Lads! for dear old England's sake:
Let shot and shell and bullet do their worst:
Stand firm as rocks when raging billows break:
Stand steady, Lads! the storm will soon have burst.

Cool heads—cool hands for dear old England's sake:
Fire low—lads! low: take calm unflinching aim:
Remember England's honour is at stake:
Cool heads—cool hands—but hearts of living flame.

Yes—hearts aflame for dear old England's sake:
A deep desire to strike one weighty blow:—
Death—death alone or victory shall slake
Hearts all aflame to mingle with the foe.

One fierce hurrah for dear old England's sake:
One English yell—and let the foemen hear:
Clear through the roar of battle let it break—
One fierce hurrah—one stern exultant cheer.

181

Come death itself for dear old England's sake:
True English soldiers know not how to fly:
Each took his bidden post when England spake:
Come death itself, if England bids us die.

182

THE HEAVY BRIGADE.

Oct. 1854.

The word was given: I held my breath:
There stood the enemy—ten to one:
No time to dream about wounds or death:
The greater the odds, the fiercer the fun.

Our Colonel led us, and off we dashed:
Hope thrilled our hearts as the gallop began:
Hope rose to rapture as in we crashed,
Charger on charger, and man on man.

It is ringing yet—the wild Irish cheer—
The wild free yell that rose on our right:
And the Greys beside me—ah! yes I hear
Their low deep long-drawn moan of delight.

Straight as an arrow that cleaves its way
Into the heart of the stubborn wood—
Each drove his steed on the dense array,
Piercing the Russian ranks as they stood.

183

A few bright minutes of flashing steel—
Clashing and flashing to right and left:
My blood flowed fast, but I could not feel—
Though I knew when shako and skull were cleft.

These long grey cloaks—how they foiled our blows,
Baffling our blades as we drove them in—
Till mad with rage in our stirrups we rose,
And heads were cloven from crown to chin.

A yell of triumph on either side,
That nerved each arm for a weightier blow!
And, full and fresh as a surging tide,
New squadrons rolled on the flagging foe.

A minute more—then a ringing cheer—
The dense grey mass was riven in twain:
We passed beyond it into the clear,
And formed and rallied and charged again.

Back through the throng with a sterner shout:
Then came the moment for which we bled:
The deep ranks wavered and opened out,
Swayed, reeled and scattered, and broke and fled.

184

HIDDEN DEPTHS.

Nay dearest, do not lean on me,
Nor let thy fond and fragile form
Cling to my breast—my love! my own!
Thy sweet confiding faith would be
A prop to stay me in life's storm—
And I must stand alone—alone.

And do not seek to know too well
The deepest secrets of my soul:
Nor in my lore be overwise.
Nay—if I could, I would not tell,
For straightway waves of flame would roll
Before my darling's dazzled eyes.

And not the endless plummet-line
Of thy dear love could ever reach
The bottom of this well of fire—
The seafloor of this heart of mine—
This stormy sea without a beach—
Where wonder, doubt and dread desire

185

Are swirling currents, free and swift,
Of wind or water, light or flame,
That wander myriad fathoms deep,
And bear about, and whirl and lift
The sounding lead with aimless aim,
Mocking the course it cannot keep.

I little care that alien eyes
Should misinterpret what they see,
Or what they see not—being blind;
But tears of bitter anguish rise,
That even my beloved in me
No rock, no resting-place may find.

And yet they say the solid hill,
The granite wall that breaks the blast,
Rolled molten billows long ago,
That slowly—yielding to God's will—
Grew cold, and knew that they were cast
In iron moulds, and ceased to flow.

And haply what they tell is true,
And—mastered by eternity—
These fiery waves of seething spray
Will change to peaks that pierce the blue,
And from their heights my love and I
Shall wait the breaking of the day.

186

SONNETS TO AN IMAGINARY BEING.

Ah, me! my love, I was afraid to love you
In those old days when you might yet be won,
For you were golden as the sun above you,
And I too blind to look upon the sun.
Forgive me, dearest, that my love was weak
As callow eaglet in the sight of you,
Its fluttering feathers yet untrained to seek
The midday spaces of ethereal blue.
Forgive me, dearest, that my heart's desire
Was yet enthralled to false humility:
Time teaches me that worship should aspire,
That Love's true bondsman should be proudly free.
Time gives me eagle wings: Time makes me bold
To face the noonday's depths of molten gold.

Far hence in depths of cliff-girt solitude—
In icy gorges unexplored of man—
My heart-springs are eternally renewed,
For there the river of my love began.

187

Far hence: no whirling waters, free as air,
Thundered in chasm or flashed from precipice,
But frozen billows—torrents of despair—
Rolled down the gorge their cataract of ice:
Until the smile of you, my summer sun,
Melted to tears the winter of their sleep,
And straight the fettered waves, their freedom won,
Rushed into life and sprang from steep to steep—
Leaping the cliffs in sheets of fitful spray,
Rending the rocks that rose to bar their way.

But once the eager torrent leaped from sight
Into a yawning chasm as deep as Hell,
And never ceasing mists of flashing white
Rose up in smoke of thunder as it fell.
And in that infinite abyss of foam
The river vanished, and was seen no more,
And I half feared that it had found its home
In Stygian darkness of some nether shore.
Till your sweet sunshine wove the mists of spray
Into a rainbow beautiful as hope,
And by the guidance of its sudden ray
I saw below the vanished waters grope
Their blinded course—bewildered by the shock—
Through dungeon walls of overarching rock.

188

THE RIDDLE GUESSED.

I was weary—I had long been thinking—
And my soul was full of doubt:
For the old mysterious riddle vexed me,
And I could not think it out.
I was weary and my brow was fevered
And I sighed “no hope—no clue:
Life and death have you no inner meaning?
Is there nothing lost in you?”

Then it happened that your eyes, my darling,
Shone upon me calm and clear:
And it happened that your rippling accents
Stole like music on my ear.
And at once each baffling doubt was answered,
And I breathed as one set free:
And at once a film of blindness melted,
And my eyes had light to see.

Love, the whole wide world may fall in ruins
But it cannot shake my faith;
I will face without a fear the darkness
And the mystery of death.

189

When you looked at me, I guessed life's riddle:
When you spoke, the clue was found:
Now I know that Nature has a meaning,
And that life shall yet be crowned.