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HAPPY ENDING

[Illustration:

  _G.F. Watts, pinx._
  _Hollyer, Photo._]

  _Rower maul'd in the Sea, ah, Rower
  Limp as Grasses behind the Mower.
  Pity'd most that thy Woes deny thee
  Sight of the Spirit Steersman by thee!_

  _Tho' more near than a hinted Haven
  Lie the Port that is coral-paven,
  All is well: the Unseen Befriending
  Makes of either the Happy Ending._




HAPPY ENDING


  _The Collected Lyrics of_
  LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY


[Illustration: TOUT BIEN OU RIEN]


  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK: 1909




COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published December 1909_




TO

ANNE WHITNEY




PREFACE


THIS volume has been garnered from the author's earlier
books. Two poems have been chosen from "The White Sail" (1887);
nine Oxford Sonnets from a privately printed booklet (1895), since
added to, and much altered; and many lyrics, under a revised form,
from "A Roadside Harp" (1893), and "The Martyrs' Idyl" (1899), plus
some twenty newer titles transferred, with grateful acknowledgments,
from _McClure's Magazine_, _The Atlantic_, _Harper's_, _Scribner's_,
and _The Century_. The principle of exclusion goes far enough to
cover all poems in narrative form, or of any appreciable length, or
translated; also, any which seemed out of keeping with the character
of the present collection. Such as that is, it comprises the less
faulty half of all the author's published verse.

L.I.G.

BOSTON, October 21, 1909.




CONTENTS


  _The Kings_                                                        3

  _The Squall_                                                       5

  _Open, Time_                                                       9

  _The Knight Errant_ (_Donatello's Saint George_)                  11

  _To a Dog's Memory_                                               13

  _Memorial Day_                                                    15

  _Romans in Dorset: A.D. MDCCCXCV_                                 16

  _Horologion_                                                      19

  _His Angel to his Mother_                                         21

  _Autumn Magic_                                                    23

  _Five Carols for Christmastide_:

      _I. The Ox he Openeth wide the Doore_                         25

      _II. Vines Branching Stilly_                                  26

      _III. Three without Slumber Ride from Afar_                   27

      _IV. Was a Soule from Farre Away_                             28

      _V. The Ox and the Ass_                                       29

  _On Leaving Winchester_                                           32

  _Cobwebs_                                                         34

  _Astræa_                                                          35

  _The Yew-Tree_                                                    36

  _Ten Colloquies_:

      _I. The Search_                                               38

      _II. Fact and the Mystic_                                     39

      _III. The Poet's Chart_                                       40

      _IV. Of the Golden Age_                                       41

      _V. On Time's Threshold_                                      42

      _VI. Wood-Pigeons_                                            42
      [Transcriber's Note: original erroneously has "Wood-Doves"]

      _VII. Predicaments_                                           43

      _VIII. The Co-Eternal_                                        44

      _IX. Stern Aphrodite_                                         44

      _X. The Jubilee_                                              45

  _Winter Boughs_                                                   46

  _W.H.: A.D. MDCCLXXVIII-MDCCCXXX_                                 47

  _The Vigil-at-Arms_                                               48

  _A Friend's Song for Simoisius_                                   49

  _To an Ideal_                                                     51

  _In a Ruin, after a Thunder-Storm_                                53

  _Beati Mortui_                                                    54

  _Two Irish Peasant Songs_:

      _I. In Leinster_                                              57

      _II. In Ulster_                                               58

  _The Japanese Anemone_                                            61

  _Orisons_                                                         63

  _The Inner Fate: A Chorus_                                        64

  _The Acknowledgment_                                              66

  _By the Trundle-Bed_                                              67

  _Arboricide_                                                      68

  _The Cherry Bough_                                                70

  _The Wild Ride_                                                   73

  _Bedesfolk_                                                       75

  _In a City Street_                                                77

  _Florentin: A.D. MDCCCXC_                                         79

  _A Song of the Lilac_                                             80

  _Monochrome_                                                      81

  _Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon_                                 82

  _An Estray_                                                       83

  _Friendship Broken_                                               85

  _A Talisman_                                                      87

  _Heathenesse_                                                     88

  _For Izaak Walton_                                                89

  _Fifteen Epitaphs_                                                91

  _Deo Optimo Maximo_                                               98

  _Charista Musing_                                                 99

  _The Still of the Year_                                          100

  _A Footnote to a Famous Lyric_                                   102

  _T.W.P.: A.D. MDCCCXIX-MDCCCXCII_                                104

  _Summum Bonum_                                                   105

  _When on the Marge of Evening_                                   106

  _Hylas_                                                          107

  _Nocturne_                                                       109

  _To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey_                                110

  _Planting the Poplar_                                            111

  _To One Who would not Spare Himself_                             113

  _Winter Peace_                                                   114

  _Sleep_                                                          116

  _Writ in my Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion_           117

  _In a February Garden_ (_Somerset, England_)                     118

  _A Valediction._ (_R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV_)                      120

  _A Footpath Morality_                                            121

  _The Light of the House_                                         123

  _An Outdoor Litany_                                              125

  _Of Joan's Youth_                                                127

  _In a Brecon Valley_                                             128

  _A Song of Far Travel_                                           130

  _Spring_                                                         131

  _The Colour-Bearer_                                              132

  _Sanctuary_                                                      134

  _Emily Brontë_                                                   135

  _Pascal_                                                         136

  _Borderlands_                                                    137

  _Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore_                                138

  _Oxford and London: XXVI Sonnets_

    _Oxford_:

      _I. The Tow-Path_                                            145

      _II. Ad Antiquarium_                                         146

      _III. Martyrs' Memorial_                                     147

      _IV. Parks Road_                                             148

      _V. Tom_                                                     149

      _VI, VIa. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford_      150

      _VII. A December Walk_                                       152

      _VIII. The Old Dial of Corpus_                               153

      _IX. Rooks: New College Gardens_                             154

      _X. Above Port Meadow_                                       155

      _XI. Undertones at Magdalen_                                 156

      _XII, XIIa. A Last View_                                     157

    _London_:

      _I. On First Entering Westminster Abbey_                     159

      _II. Fog_                                                    160

      _III. St. Peter-ad-Vincula_                                  161

      _IV. Strikers in Hyde Park_                                  162

      _V. Changes in the Temple_                                   163

      _VI. The Lights of London_                                   164

      _VII. Doves_                                                 165

      _VIII. In the Reading-Room of the British Museum_            166

      _IX. Sunday Chimes in the City_                              167

      _X. A Porch in Belgravia_                                    168

      _XI. York Stairs_                                            169

      _XII. In the Docks_                                          170

  _Notes_                                                          171




HAPPY ENDING




_The Kings_


  A MAN said unto his Angel:
  "My spirits are fallen low,
  And I cannot carry this battle:
  O brother! where might I go?

  "The terrible Kings are on me
  With spears that are deadly bright;
  Against me so from the cradle
  Do fate and my fathers fight."

  Then said to the man his Angel:
  "Thou wavering witless soul,
  Back to the ranks! What matter
  To win or to lose the whole,

  "As judged by the little judges
  Who hearken not well, nor see?
  Not thus, by the outer issue,
  The Wise shall interpret thee.

  "Thy will is the sovereign measure
  And only event of things:
  The puniest heart, defying,
  Were stronger than all these Kings.

  "Though out of the past they gather,
  Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,
  And pallid Thirst of the Spirit
  That is kin to the other twain,

  "And Grief, in a cloud of banners,
  And ringletted Vain Desires,
  And Vice, with the spoils upon him
  Of thee and thy beaten sires,--

  "While Kings of eternal evil
  Yet darken the hills about,
  Thy part is with broken sabre
  To rise on the last redoubt;

  "To fear not sensible failure,
  Nor covet the game at all,
  But fighting, fighting, fighting,
  Die, driven against the wall."




_The Squall_


  WHILE all was glad,
  It seemed our birch-tree had,
  That August hour, intelligence of death;
  For warningly against the eaves she beat
  Her body old, lamenting, prophesying,
  And the hot breath
  Of ferny hollows nestled at her feet
  Spread out in startled sighing.

  Across an argent sea,
  Distinct unto the farthest reef and isle,
  The clouds began to be.
  Huge forms 'neath sombre draperies, awhile
  Made slow uncertain rally;
  But as their ranks conjoined, and from the north
  The leader shook his lance, Oh, then how fair
  Unvested, they stood forth,
  In diverse armour, plumed majestically,
  Each with his own esquires, a King in air!

  Up moved the dark vanguard,
  With insolent colours that o'erdusked the skies,
  And trailed from beach to beach:
  Massed orange and mould-green; vermilion barred
  On bronze or mottled silver; saffron dyes
  And purples migratory
  Fanned each in each,
  As the long column broke, athirst for glory.

  Sudden, the thunder!
  Upon the roofed verandas how it rolled,
  Twice, thrice: a thud and flame of doom that told
  New-fallen, nor far away,
  Some black destruction on the innocent day.
  And little Everard
  Deep in the hammock under, eyes alight
  With healthful fear and wonder
  The brave do ne'er unlearn,
  Clenched his soft hand, and breathing hard,
  Smiled there against his father, like a knight
  Baptized on Cressy field or Bannockburn.

  A moment gone,
  Into our paradise from Acheron,
  With imperceptive sorcery crawled ashore
  Odours unnamable: an exhalation
  Of men and ships in oozy graves. (Ah, cease,
  Derisive nereids! cease:
  Be it enough, that even ye can pour,
  From crystal flagons of your ancient peace,
  So strange obscene libation.)
  But with the thunder-peal
  Sprang the pure winds, their thurible swung wide,
  To chase that tainted tide;
  Fresh from the pastures and the cedar-grove,
  They rode the copper ridges of the main,
  And bared a league of distance to reveal
  A sail, aslant, astrain,
  Impetuous for the cove;
  And tossing after, panic-stricken,
  Another, and a third: white spirits, fain to sicken,
  Nor out of natural harm salvation gain.

  The selfsame hunter winds that drave
  The horror down, as faithful-hearted drew
  The sad clouds from their carnage, and up-piled
  Their rebel gonfalons, or jocund threw
  Their cannon in the wave;
  And subtly, with a parting whisper, gave
  An eve most mild:
  A sunset like a prayer, a world all rose and blue:

  A good world, as it was,
  And as it shall be: clear circumferent space,
  Where punctual yet, for worship of their Cause,
  The stars came thick in choir.
  Sleep had our Everard in her cool embrace,
  Else from his cot he hardly need have stooped
  To see (and laugh to see!) the headland pine
  Embossed on changing fire:
  For close behind it, cooped
  Within a smallest span,
  In fury, to and fro and round and round,
  The routed leopards of the lightning ran:
  Bright, bright, inside their dungeon-bars, malign
  They ran; and ran till dawn, without a sound.




_Open, Time_


  OPEN, Time, and let him pass
  Shortly where his feet would be!
  Like a leaf at Michaelmas
  Swooning from the tree,

  Ere its hour the manly mind
  Trembles in a sure decrease,
  Nor the body now can find
  Any hold on peace.

  Take him, weak and overworn;
  Fold about his dying dream
  Boyhood, and the April morn,
  And the rolling stream:

  Weather on a sunny ridge,
  Showery weather, far from here;
  Under some deep-ivied bridge,
  Water rushing clear:

  Water quick to cross and part
  (Golden light on silver sound),
  Weather that was next his heart
  All the world around!

  Soon upon his vision break
  These, in their remembered blue;
  He shall toil no more, but wake
  Young, in air he knew.

  He hath done with roofs and men.
  Open, Time, and let him pass,
  Vague and innocent again,
  Into country grass.




_The Knight Errant_

(_Donatello's Saint George_)


  SPIRITS of old that bore me,
  And set me, meek of mind,
  Between great dreams before me,
  And deeds as great behind,
  Knowing humanity my star
  As first abroad I ride,
  Shall help me wear with every scar
  Honour at eventide.

  Let claws of lightning clutch me
  From summer's groaning cloud,
  Or ever malice touch me,
  And glory make me proud.
  Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,
  Choice of the heart's desire:
  A short life in the saddle, Lord!
  Not long life by the fire.

  Forethought and recollection
  Rivet mine armour gay!
  The passion for perfection
  Redeem my failing way!
  The arrows of the upper slope
  From sudden ambush cast,
  Rain quick and true, with one to ope
  My Paradise at last!

  I fear no breathing bowman,
  But only, east and west,
  The awful other foeman
  Impowered in my breast.
  The outer fray in the sun shall be,
  The inner beneath the moon;
  And may Our Lady lend to me
  Sight of the Dragon soon!




_To a Dog's Memory_


  THE gusty morns are here,
  When all the reeds ride low with level spear;
  And on such nights as lured us far of yore,
  Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine,
  The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine:
  But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine,
  Together roam no more.

  Soft showers go laden now
  With odours of the sappy orchard-bough,
  And brooks begin to brawl along the march;
  Steams the late frost from hollow sedges high;
  The finch is come, the flame-blue dragonfly,
  The marsh-born marigold that children spy,
  The plume upon the larch.

  There is a music fills
  The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills
  Southward to Dewing's little bubbly stream,--
  The heavenly weather's call! Oh, who alive
  Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive,
  Having free feet that never felt a gyve
  Weigh, even in a dream?

  But thou, instead, hast found
  The sunless April uplands underground,
  And still, wherever thou art, I must be.
  My beautiful! arise in might and mirth,
  (For we were tameless travellers from our birth);
  Arise against thy narrow door of earth,
  And keep the watch for me.




_Memorial Day_


  O DAY of roses and regret,
  Kissing the old graves of our own!
  Not to the slain love's lovely debt
  Alone.

  But jealous hearts that live and ache,
  Remember; and while drums are mute,
  Beneath your banners' bright outbreak,
  Salute:

  And say for us to lessening ranks
  That keep the memory and the pride,
  On whose thinned hair our tears and thanks
  Abide,

  Who from their saved Republic pass,
  Glad with the Prince of Peace to dwell:
  _Hail, dearest few! and soon, alas,
  Farewell_.




_Romans in Dorset_

_A.D. MDCCCXCV_


        A STUPOR on the heath,
        And wrath along the sky;
        Space everywhere; beneath
  A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.

        Sullen quiet below,
        But storm in upper air!
        A wind from long ago,
  In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there,

        And singed the triple gloom,
        And let through, in a flame,
        Crowned faces of old Rome:
  Regnant o'er Rome's abandoned ground, processional they came.

        Uprisen as any sun
        Through vistas hollow grey,
        Aloft, and one by one,
  In brazen casques the Emperors loomed large, and sank away.

        In ovals of wan light
        Each warrior eye and mouth:
        A pageant brutal bright
  As if once over loudly passed Jove's laughter in the south;

        And dimmer, these among,
        Some cameo'd head aloof,
        With ringlets heavy-hung,
  Like yellow stonecrop comely grown around a castle roof.

        An instant: gusts again,
        Then heaven's impacted wall,
        The hot insistent rain,
  The thunder-shock; and of the Past mirage no more at all,

        No more the alien dream
        Pursuing, as we went,
        With glory's cursèd gleam:
  Nor sin of Cæsar's ruined line engulfed us, innocent.

        The vision great and dread
        Corroded; sole in view
        Was empty Egdon spread,
  Her crimson summer weeds ashake in tempest: but we knew

        What Tacitus had borne
        In that wrecked world we saw;
        And what, thine heart uptorn,
  My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.




_Horologion_


  THE frost may form apace,
  The roses pine away:
  Nomæa! if I see thy face,
  Then is the summer day.

  A word of thine, a breath,
  And lo! my joy shall seem
  To peer far down where life and death
  Stir like a forded stream;

  Or else shall misery sound
  And travel in that hour
  All utmost things in their shut round,
  As a bee feels his flower.

  Thought lags and cries Alas,
  Love ranges quick and free.
  Oh, figured clock and sanded glass,
  They mark no term for me.

  And since I can but rue
  The calendar gone wrong,
  And dials never telling true
  If dreams be short or long,

  Dear, from these arts that fail
  To thee I will repair.
  Till the last eve dance down the gale
  With no star in her hair,

  Be thou my solar chime,
  Be thou my wheel of night,
  Be thy bright heart, not ashen Time,
  My measure, law, and light.




_His Angel to his Mother_


  WHAT would you do for your fairest one,
  Wild as the wind and free as the sun,
  Born a fugitive, sure to slip
  Soon from secular ownership?
  Men in search of the heart's desire,
  Wearily trampling flood and fire,
  Rove betimes into some abyss
  Darker far than eternity's.
  (Ah, the hazard! it awes one so!)

  _And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
  Sweet, if you love him, let him go._

  Happy the Frontier to have gained
  Undetaining and undetained,
  Quick and clean, like a solar ray
  Shot through spindrift across the bay!
  Men would follow a long vain quest,
  Feed on ashes and forfeit rest,
  Bleed with battle and flag with toil,
  Only to stifle in desert soil.
  (Ah, the failure! it stings one so!)

  _And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
  Sweet, if you love him, let him go._

  Vats fill up, and the sheaves are in:
  Never a blessing is left to win
  Save for the myrtle coronal
  Round the urn at the end of all.
  Men will clutch, as they clutched of old,
  Souring honey or dimming gold,
  Not the treasure-trove of the land
  Here shut fast in a roseleaf hand.
  (Ah, the folly! it irks one so!)

  _And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
  Sweet, if you love him, let him go._




_Autumn Magic_


  SOON as divine September, flushing from sea to sea,
  Peers from the whole wide upland into eternity,

  Soft as an exhalation, ghosts of the thistle start:
  Never a poet saw them but ached in his baffled heart.

  Gossamer armies rising thicker than snowflakes fall,
  Waken in blood and marrow, aware of the unheard call.

  Oh, what a nameless urging through avenues laid in air,
  Hints of escape, unbodied, intricate, everywhere,

  Sense of a feared denial, or access hard to be won;
  Gleams of a dubious gesture for guesses to feed upon!

  Flame goes flying in heaven, the down on the cool hillside:
  Earth is a bride-veil glory to show and conceal the Bride.




_Five Carols for Christmastide_


I

  THE OX he openeth wide the Doore,
  And from the Snowe he calls her inne,
  And he hath seen her Smile therefor,
  Our Ladye without Sinne.
  Now soone from Sleep
  A Starre shall leap,
  And soone arrive both King and Hinde:
    _Amen, Amen_:
  But O, the Place co'd I but finde!

  The Ox hath hush'd his voyce and bent
  Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,
  And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,
  The Blessed layes her Browe.
  Around her feet
  Full Warme and Sweete
  His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell:
    _Amen, Amen_:
  But sore am I with Vaine Travèl!

  The Ox is host in Judah stall
  And Host of more than onelie one,
  For close she gathereth withal
  Our Lorde her littel Sonne.
  Glad Hinde and King
  Their Gyfte may bring,
  But wo'd to-night my Teares were there,
    _Amen, Amen_:
  Between her Bosom and His hayre!


II

      VINES branching stilly
      Shade the open door,
      In the house of Zion's Lily,
      Cleanly and poor.
      Oh, brighter than wild laurel
      The Babe bounds in her hand,
      The King, who for apparel
      Hath but a swaddling-band,
  And sees her heavenlier smiling than stars in His command!

      Soon, mystic changes
      Part Him from her breast,
      Yet there awhile He ranges
      Gardens of rest:
      Yea, she the first to ponder
      Our ransom and recall,
      Awhile may rock Him under
      Her young curls' fall,
  Against that only sinless love-loyal heart of all.

      What shall inure Him
      Unto the deadly dream,
      When the Tetrarch shall abjure Him,
      The thief blaspheme,
      And scribe and soldier jostle
      About the shameful tree,
      And even an Apostle
      Demand to touch and see?--
  But she hath kissed her Flower where the Wounds are to be.


III

  THREE without slumber ride from afar,
  Fain of the roads where palaces are;
  All by a shed as they ride in a row,
  "Here!" is the cry of their vanishing Star.

  First doth a greybeard, glittering fine,
  Look on Messiah in slant moonshine:
  "_This have I bought for Thee!_" Vainly: for lo,
  Shut like a fern is the young hand divine.

  Next doth a magian, mantled and tall,
  Bow to the Ruler that reigns from a stall:
  "_This have I sought for Thee!_" Though it be rare,
  Loath little fingers are letting it fall.

  Last doth a stripling, bare in his pride,
  Kneel by the Lover as if to abide:
  "_This have I wrought for Thee!_" Answer him there
  Laugh of a Child, and His arms opened wide.


IV

  WAS a Soule from farre away
  Stood wistful in the Hay,
  And of the Babe a-sleeping hadde a sight:
  Neither reck'd hee any more
  Men behind him and before,
  Nor a thousand busie Winges, flitting light:
  But in middle of the night
  This few-worded wight
        (_Yule! Yule!_)
  Bespake Our Ladye bright:

  "Fill mee, ere my corage faints,
  With the lore of all the Saints:
  Harte to harte against my Brother let mee be.
  By the Fountaines that are His
  I wo'd slumber where Hee is:
  Prithee, Mother, give the other Brest to mee!"
  The Soule that none co'd see
  She hath taken on her knee:
        (_Yule! Yule!_)
  Sing prayse to Our Ladye.


V

          _The Ox and the Ass,
          Tell aloud of them:
          Sing their pleasure as it was
          In Bethlehem._

  STILL as blowing rose, sudden as a sword,
  Maidenly the Maiden bare Jesu Christ the Lord;
  Yet for very lowlihood, such a Guest to greet,
  Goeth in a little swoon while kissing of His feet.

  Mary, drifted snow on the earthen floor,
  Joseph, fallen wondrous weak now he would adore,--
  (Oh, the surging might of love! Oh, the drowning bliss!)
  Both are rapt to Heaven and lose their human Heaven that is.

  From the Newly Born trails a lonely cry.
  With a mind to heed, the Ox turns a glowing eye;
  In the empty byre the Ass thinks her heart to blame:
  Up for comforting of God the beasts of burden came,

  Softly to inquire, thrusting as for cheer
  There between the tender hands, furry faces dear.
  Blessing on the honest coats! tawny coat and grey
  Friended Our Delight so well when warmth had strayed away.

  Crooks are on the sill; sceptres sail the wave;
  All the hopes of all the years are thronging to the Cave.
  Mother slept not long, nor long Father's sense was dim,
  But another twain the while stood parent-wise to Him.

          _The Ox and the Ass,
          Be you glad for them
          Such a moment came to pass
          In Bethlehem!_




_On Leaving Winchester_


  WINTON, my window with a mossy marge,
  My lofty oriel, whence the soul hath sight
  Of passionate yesterdays, all gold and large,
  Arisen to enrich our narrow night:
  Though others bless thee, who so blest before
  Hath pastured from the violent time apart,
  And laved in supersensual light the heart
  Alone with thy magnificent No More?

  Sweet court of roses now, sweet camp of bees!
  The hills that lean to thy white bed at dawn
  Hear, for the clash of raging dynasties,
  Laughter of boys about a branchy lawn.
  Hast thou a stain, let ivy cover all;
  Nor seem of greatness disinhabited
  While spirits in their wonted splendour tread
  From close to close, by Wolvesey's idle wall.

  Bright fins against thy lucid waters leap,
  And nigh thy towers the nesting ring-doves dwell;
  Be lenient winter, and long moons, and sleep
  Upon thee; but on me the sharp Farewell.
  Happy art thou, O clad and crowned with rest!
  Happy the shepherd (would that I were he!)
  Whose early way is step for step with thee,
  Whose old brow fades on thine immortal breast.




_Cobwebs_


  WHO would not praise thee, miracle of Frost?
  Some gesture overnight, some breath benign,
  And lo! the tree's a fountain all a-shine,
  The hedge a throne of unimagined cost;
  In wheel and fan along a wall embossed,
  The spider's humble handiwork shows fine
  With jewels girdling every airy line:
  Though the small mason in the cold be lost.

  Web after web, a morning snare of bliss
  Starring with beauty the whole neighbourhood,
  May well beget an envy clean and good.
  When man goes too into the earth-abyss,
  And God in His altered garden walks, I would
  My secret woof might gleam so fair as this.




_Astræa_


  SINCE I avail no more, O men! with you,
  I will go back unto the gods content;
  For they recall me, long with earth inblent,
  Lest lack of faith divinity undo.
  I served you truly while I dreamed you true,
  And golden pains with sovereign pleasure spent:
  But now, farewell! I take my sad ascent,
  With failure over all I nursed and knew.

  Are ye unwise, who would not let me love you?
  Or must too bold desires be quieted?
  Only to ease you, never to reprove you,
  I will go back to heaven with heart unfed:
  Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you,
  To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.




_The Yew-Tree_


  AS I came homeward
  At merry Christmas,
  By the old Church tower
  Through the Churchyard grass,

  And saw there circled
  With graves all about,
  The Yew-tree paternal,
  The Yew-tree devout,

  Then this hot life-blood
  Was hard to endure,
  O Death! so I loved thee,
  The sole love sure.

  For stars slip in heaven,
  They wander, they break;
  But under the Yew-tree
  Not one heartache.

  And ours, what failure
  Renewed and avowed!
  But ah, the long-buried
  Is leal, and is proud.

         *       *       *       *       *

  At eve, o'erlooking
  The smooth chilly tide,
  With age-hidden meaning
  The Yew-tree sighed,

  By the square grey tower,
  In the short grey grass,
  As I came homeward
  At merry Christmas.




_Ten Colloquies_


I. THE SEARCH

  "WHY dost thou hide from these
  Out along the hills halloaing?
  Why hast forbade
  Thy face, O goddess! to thy votaries?"

    "_Unasking and unknowing
    Is he whom I make glad,
    Like Dian grandly going
    To the sleeping shepherd-lad.
    Men that pursue learn not
    To follow is my lot._"

  "Happiness, secret one,
  Heartbeat of the April weather,
  Where art thou found?
  Tell; lest I err too, yonder in the sun."

    "_Call in thine eye from ether,
    Thy feet from far ground;
    Seek Honour in this heather,
    With austere purples wound.
    Serve her: she will reveal
    Me, hound-like at thy heel._"


II. FACT AND THE MYSTIC

  "GOOD-MORROW, Symbol."--"_Call me not
  The name I neither love nor merit._"
  --"That grave eternal name inherit,
  Thine ever, though all men forgot."

  "_Mistake me not; secure and free
  From rock to rock my falchion passes:
  But Symbols trail through grey morasses
  The tattered shows of faëry._"

  "My Symbol thou, of phantom blood,
  With starlight from thy temples raying;
  Along thy floated body playing
  Are withering wings, and wings in bud."

  "_Alas, thine eye with clay is sealed._"
  --"Symbol, before the clay's denial,
  While yet I had a god's espial,
  I saw thee in a solar field!"

  "_Nay: I am Fact._"--"Then lose thy praise;
  And lest to-day no song behoove thee,
  Lest mine impeach thee, or reprove thee,
  Ah, Symbol, Symbol! go thy ways."


III. THE POET'S CHART

  "WHERE shall I find my light?"

    "_Turn from another's track:
    Whether for gain or lack,
    Love but thy natal right.
    Cease to follow withal,
    Though on thine up-led feet
    Flakes of the phosphor fall.
    Oracles overheard
    Are never again for thee,
    Nor at a magian's knee
    Under the hemlock tree,
    Burns the illumining word._"

  "Whence shall I take my law?"

    "_Neither from sires nor sons,
    Nor the delivered ones,
    Holy, invoked with awe.
    Rather, dredge the divine
    Out of thine own poor dust,
    Feebly to speak and shine.
    Schools shall be as they are:
    Be thou truer, and stray
    Alone, intent, and away,
    In a savage wild to obey
    Some dim primordial star._"


IV. OF THE GOLDEN AGE

  "RECALL for me, recall
  The time more true and ample;
  The world whereon I trample,
  How tortuous and small!
  Behold, I tire of all.

  "Once, gods in jewelled mail
  Through greenwood ways invited;
  There how the moon is blighted,
  And mosses long and pale
  On lifeless cedars trail."

  "_Child, keep this good unrest:
  But give to thine own story
  Simplicity with glory;
  To greatness dispossessed,
  Dominion of thy breast._

  "_In abstinence, in pride,
  Thou, who from Folly's boldest
  Thy sacred eye withholdest,
  Another morn shalt ride
  At Agamemnon's side._"


V. ON TIME'S THRESHOLD

  "_See: brood: remember: this thy function only;
  Neither to have nor do is meet for thee._"
  "Ah, earth's a palace where I must go lonely!"
  "_Nay: earth's a dungeon which thou passest, free._"


VI. WOOD-PIGEONS

  "I CANNOT soar beside, but must for ever suffer
  Blue air athrill with thee to lap against my breast,
  And dream it is thy wing."
          --"_Dear, sighs about thee hover:
  Among the dewy leaves my longing is thy guest.
  Yet, lone and far apart, shall we no joy discover
  To travel the same sky, and by one sea to rest?
  Say, mate in all this world?_"
          --"Ah, mute forbidden lover,
  Ah, song I shall not hear!"
          --"_Ah, sweet unbuilded nest!_"


VII. PREDICAMENTS

  "IF the gods ruin send?"--
  "_Make that thy bride and friend._"

  "If the gods cheat?"--"_They say
  The one true word alway._"

  "If for some loss I pine?"
  "--_The past is theirs, yet thine._"

  "If I sue not?"--"_Vain cares!
  The morrow's thine, not theirs._"


VIII. THE CO-ETERNAL

  "_Is it thou, silly heart,
  Not prone on thy pallet, but grieving apart?_"
  --"Natal Star, even so."
  "_I miss thee to-night, while thou smoulderest low._"
  --"Live in beauty! but I
  For bloodshed of spirit, here dwindle and die."

  "_Are we two not the same,
  By law everlasting one mystical flame?
  Aloft if I burn,
  Every ray of my light be thy stair of return:
  Up, up! to our lot
  Where warfare and time and the body are not._"


IX. STERN APHRODITE

  "IOLE is coy with me,
  Goddess! for a month I suffer
  Knowing not how far I be:
  Teach me softer arts, or rougher,
  Well to sail that sea."

  "_Fie: how long could Love divine
  Venturing, abstain from answer,
  Nor look landward for a sign!
  Niggard, take of thine entrancer
  Shipwreck in the brine._"


X. THE JUBILEE

  "_Master of your wounded heart, regent of your pleasure!
  We that long defied your art, tamèd Moods at leisure,
  All with you, nor now apart, would tread out our measure._"

  "Welcome, equal powers benign, quit of ancient madness!
  Dance with me beneath the vine, not ungentle Sadness;
  Link your little hand in mine soberly, my Gladness."




_Winter Boughs_


  HOW tender and how slow, in sunset cheer,
  Far on the hill, our quiet treetops fade!
  A broidery of ebon seaweed, laid
  Long in a book, were scarce more fine and clear.
  Frost and sad light and windless atmosphere
  Have breathed on them, and of their frailties made
  Beauty more sweet than summer's builded shade,
  Whose green domes fallen, leave this wonder here.

  O ye forgetting and outliving boughs,
  With not a plume, gay in the joust before,
  Left for the Archer! so, in evening's eye,
  So stilled, so lifted, let your lover die,
  Set in the upper calm no voices rouse,
  Stript, meek, withdrawn, against the heavenly door.




_W.H._

_A.D. MDCCLXXVIII-MDCCCXXX_


  BETWEEN the wet trees and the sorry steeple,
  Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
  Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;

  Beauty's a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
  But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
  Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.

  Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
  Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
  Some one love worth the ages and the nations!

  Falleth no thing that was to thee eternal.
  Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,
  Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches.




_The Vigil-at-Arms_


  KEEP holy watch with silence, prayer, and fasting
  Till morning break, and every bugle play;
  Unto the One aware from everlasting
  Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.

  Forth from this peace on manhood's way thou goest,
  Flushed with resolve, and radiant in mail;
  Blessing supreme for men unborn thou sowest,
  O knight elect! O soul ordained to fail!




_A Friend's Song for Simoisius_


  THE breath of dew and twilight's grace
  Be on the lonely battle-place,
  And to so young, so kind a face,
  The long protecting grasses cling!
  (Alas, alas,
  That one inexorable thing!)

  In rocky hollows cool and deep,
  The honey-bees unrifled sleep;
  The early moon from Ida steep
  Comes to the empty wrestling-ring;

  Upon the widowed wind recede
  No echoes of the shepherd's reed;
  And children without laughter lead
  The war-horse to the watering;

  With footstep separate and slow
  The father and the mother go,
  Not now upon an urn they know
  To mingle tears for comforting.

  Thou stranger Ajax Telamon!
  What to the lovely hast thou done,
  That nevermore a maid may run
  With him across the flowery Spring?

  The world to me has nothing dear
  Beyond the namesake river here:
  Oh, Simois is wild and clear!
  And to his brink my heart I bring;

  My heart, if only this might be,
  Would stay his waters from the sea,
  To cover Troy, to cover me,
  To haste the hour of perishing.
  (Alas, alas,
  That one inexorable thing!)




_To an Ideal_


  THAT I have tracked you from afar, my crown I call it and my height:
  All hail, O dear and difficult star! All hail, O heart of light!
  No pleasure born of time for me,
  Who in you touch eternity.
  If I have found you where you are, I win my mortal fight.

  You flee the plain: I therefore choose summit and solitude for mine,
  The high air where I cannot lose our comradeship divine.
  More lovely here, to wakened blood,
  Sparse leaf and hesitating bud,
  Than rosaries in the dewy vales for which the dryads pine.

  Spirit austere! lend aid: I walk along inclement ridges too,
  Disowning toys of sense, to baulk my soul of ends untrue.
  Because man's cry, by night and day,
  Cried not for God, I broke away.
  On, at your ruthless pace! I'll stalk, a hilltop ghost, with you.




_In a Ruin, after a Thunder Storm_


  KEEP of the Norman, old to flood and cloud!
  Thou dost reproach me with thy sunset look,
  That in our common menace I forsook
  Hope, the last fear, and stood impartial proud:
  Almost, almost, while ether spake aloud,
  Death from the smoking stones my spirit shook
  Into thy hollow as leaves into a brook,
  No more than they by heaven's assassins cowed.

  But now thy thousand-scarrèd steep is flecked
  With the calm kisses of the light delayed,
  Breathe on me better valour: to subject
  My soul to greed of life, and grow afraid
  Lest ere her fight's full term, the Architect
  See downfall of the stronghold that He made.




_Beati Mortui_


  BLESSED the Dead in Spirit, our brave dead
  Not passed, but perfected:
  Who tower up to mystical full bloom
  From self, as from a known alchemic tomb;
  Who out of wrong
  Run forth with laughter and a broken thong;
  Who win from pain their strange and flawless grant
  Of peace anticipant;
  Who cerements lately wore of sin, but now,
  Unbound from foot to brow,
  Gleam in and out of cities, beautiful
  As sun-born colours of a forest pool
  Where Autumn sees
  The splash of walnuts from her thinning trees.

  Though wondered-at of some, yea, feared almost
  As any chantry ghost,
  How sight of these, in hermitage or mart,
  Makes glad a wistful heart!
  For life's apologetics read most true
  In spirits risen anew,
  Like larks in air
  To whom flat earth is all a heavenward stair,
  And who from yonder parapet
  Scorn every mortal fret,
  And rain their sweet bewildering staves
  Upon our furrow of fresh-delvèd graves.

  If thus to have trod and left the wormy way
  Makes men so wondrous gay,
  So stripped and free and potently alive,
  Who would not his infirmity survive,
  And bathe in victory, and come to be
  As blithe as ye,
  Saints of the ended wars? Ah, greeting give;
  Turn not away, too fugitive:
  But hastening towards us, hallow the foul street,
  And sit with us at meat,
  And of your courtesy, on us unwise
  Fix oft those purer eyes,
  Till in ourselves who love them dwell
  The same sure light ineffable:
  Till they who walk with us in after years
  Forgetting time and tears
  (As we with you), shall sing all day instead:
  "How blessed are the Dead!"




_Two Irish Peasant Songs_


I. IN LEINSTER

  I TRY to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.
  Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;
  Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
  Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall?

  The shower-sodden earth, the earth-coloured streams,
  They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,
  And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,
  It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

  The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill,
  And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;
  But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call,
  The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!


II. IN ULSTER

  'TIS the time o' the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
  The green like a breaker rolls steady up the branch,
  And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
  In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
  And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
  And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

  'Tis the time o' the year the marsh is full of sound,
  And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground.
  The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars,
  The daisy takes the middle field and spangles it with stars,
  And down the hedgerow to the lane the primroses do crowd,
  All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!

  'Tis the time o' the year, in early light and glad,
  The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
  The rocks are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,
  Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling's golden eyes,
  And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep
  Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

  'Tis the time o' the year I turn upon the height
  To watch from my harrow the dance of going light;
  And if before the sun be hid, come slowly up the vale
  Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,
  Hey, but there's many a March for me, and many and many a lass!--
  I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.




_The Japanese Anemone_


  ALL summer the breath of the roses around
  Exhales with a delicate passionate sound;
  And when from a trellis, in holiday places,
  They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,
  A lad in the lane must slacken his paces.

  Fragrance of these is a voice from a bower:
  But low by the wall is my odourless flower,
  So pure, so controlled, not a fume is above her,
  That poet or bee should delay there and hover;
  For she is a silence, and therefore I love her.

  And never a mortal by morn or midnight
  Is called to her hid little house of delight;
  And she keeps from the wind, on his pillages olden,
  Upon a true stalk in rough weather upholden,
  Her winter-white gourd with the hollow moon-golden.

  While ardours of roses contend and increase,
  Methinks she has found how noble is peace,
  Like a spirit besought from the world to dissever,
  Not absent to men, though resumed by the Giver,
  And dead long ago, being lovely for ever.




_Orisons_


  ORANGE and olive and glossed bay-tree,
  And air of the evening out at sea,
  And out at sea on the steep warm stone,
  A little bare diver poising alone.

  Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves,
  Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves,
  "I am!" he cries to his glorying heart,
  And unto he knows not what: "THOU art!"

  He leaps, he shines, he sinks and is gone:
  He will climb to the golden ledge anon.
  Perfecter rite can none employ,
  When the god of the isle is good to a boy.




_The Inner Fate: a Chorus_


  NOT weak with eld
  The stars beheld
  Proud Persia coming to her doom;
  Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed,
  The long luxurious galleys lost
  Their souls at Actium.

  Not outer arts
  Of hostile hearts
  Seduced the arm of France to be
  The wreckage of his wars at last,
  The orphan of the kingdoms, cast
  Upon the mothering sea.

  Man evermore doth work his will,
  And evermore the gods are still,
  Applauding him alone who stands
  Too just for Heaven-accusing groans,
  But in his house of havoc owns
  The doing of his hands:
  Transgressor, yet divinely taught
  To suffer all, blaspheming naught,
  When fair-begun must foul conclude:
  Himself progenitor of death
  Who breeds, within, the only breath
  Can kill beatitude.




_The Acknowledgment_


  SINCE first I knew it our divine employ
  To beat beyond the reach of soiling care,
  As at Philippi, well of doom aware,
  The Prætor called and heard the singing-boy;
  Since first my soul so jealous was of joy,
  That any facile linden-bloom in air,
  Or fall of water on a wildwood stair,
  Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy;
  Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled
  Long, long, at such august amends up-piled,
  Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop
  Death's aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup,
  On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child,
  Immortals! unto You will drink it up.




_By the Trundle-bed_


  LOST love, be never beyond Love's calling!
  For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet
  As fontal water in Arden falling,
  As first-mown hay in the April heat:

  To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden,
  And bring to bloom in the outer cold,
  Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden,
  Our son that is like you, and six years old;

  And lest his worth be the worth unreal,
  To ward him not from the mortal blast,
  But suffer your own, through a long ordeal,
  Verily like you to be at the last,

  And hear men murmur, if so he merit
  In your old place with your look to arise:
  "The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?--
  You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes."




_Arboricide_


  A WORD of grief to me erewhile:
  _We have cut the oak down, in our isle._

  And I said: "Ye have bereaven
  The song-thrush and the bee,
  And the fisher-boy at sea
  Of his sea-mark in the even;
  And gourds of cooling shade, to lie
  Within the sickle's sound;
  And the old sheep-dog's loyal eye
  Of sleep on duty's ground;
  And poets of their tent
  And quiet tenement.
  Ah, impious! who so paid
  Such fatherhood, and made
  Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade."

  For the hewn oak a century fair,
  A wound in earth, an ache in air.

  And I said: "No pillared height
  With a summer daïs over,
  Where a dryad fled her lover
  Through the long arcade of light;
  Nor 'neath Arcturus rolleth more,
  Since the loud leaves are gone,
  Between the shorn cliff and the shore,
  Pan's organ antiphon.
  Some nameless envy fed
  This blow at grandeur's head:
  Some breathed reproach, o'erdue,
  Degenerate men, ye drew!
  Hence, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew."




_The Cherry Bough_


  IN a new poet's and a new friend's honour,
  Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting,
  Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome
  Here in my garden,

  Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses,
  And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting,
  One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries.
  Oh, naught is absent,

  Oh, naught but you, kind head that far in prison
  Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god's pity
  Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels
  Were once so plenty;

  Nor dreams, from revel and strange faces turning,
  How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you
  I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden
  With your rich verses!

  Since, long ago, in other gentler weather,
  Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it
  (Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother
  Glad with your gladness),

  What has befallen in the world of wonder,
  That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet colour,
  And you, and you that fed our eyes with beauty,
  Are sapped and rotten?

  Alas! When my young guests have done with singing,
  I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden's glory,
  And hold it high among them, and say after:
  "O my poor Ovid,

  "Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember
  For the clear time when we were boys together,
  These tears at home are shed; and with you also
  Your bough is dying."




_The Wild Ride_


  I HEAR in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
  All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
  All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.

  Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle
  Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,
  With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

  The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;
  There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
  What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.

  Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,
  And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:
  Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.

  A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,
  A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:
  We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

  (I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
  All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
  All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)

  We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
  We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil.
  Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers that follow.




_Bedesfolk_


  WHO is good enough to be
  Near the never-stainèd sea?
      Ah, not I,
      Who thereby
      Only sigh:
      _Pray for me._

  Standing underneath some free
  Innocent magnanimous tree,
      To be true,
      There anew
      Must I sue:
      _Pray for me._

  Ere I pass on hilly lea
  Fellow-lives of glad degree,
      Without shame,
      Name by name
      These I claim:
      _Pray for me._

  Fail not, then, thou kingly sea!
  Aid the needy, sister tree!
      March herds,
      Ye have words!
      April birds,
      _Pray for me_!




_In a City Street_


  THOUGH sea and mount have beauty and this but what it can,
  Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,
  The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,
  The dread endearing stain of time,
  The sullied heart of man.

  Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,
  That where it dare not enter steals in shrouded passion by;
  And mine the saffron river-sails,
  And every plane-tree that avails
  To rest an urban eye;

  The bells, the dripping gable, the tavern's corner glare;
  The cab in firefly darting; the barrel-organ air,
  While one by one, or two by two
  The hatless babes are waltzing through
  The gutters of the Square.

  Not on Thessalian headlands of song and old desire
  My spirit chose her pleasure-house, but in the London mire:
  Long, long alone she loves to pace,
  And find a music in this place
  As in a minster choir.

  O names of awe and rapture! O deeds of legendry!
  Still is it most of joy within your altered pale to be,
  Whose very ills I fain would slake
  Mine angels are, and help to make
  In Hell a Heaven for me.




_Florentin_

_A.D. MDCCCXC_


  HEART all full of heavenward haste, too like the bubble bright
  On wild little waters floating half of an April night,
  Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light,

  Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be
  Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea:
  Whither, through troubled valleys, we also follow thee.




_A Song of the Lilac_


  ABOVE the wall that's broken,
  And from the coppice thinned,
  So sacred and so sweet
  The lilac in the wind!
  For when by night the May wind blows
  The lilac-blooms apart,
  The memory of his first love
  Is shaken on his heart.

  In tears it long was buried,
  And trances wrapt it round;
  Oh, how they wake it now,
  The fragrance and the sound!
  For when by night the May wind blows
  The lilac-blooms apart,
  The memory of his first love
  Is shaken on his heart.




_Monochrome_


  SHUT fast again in Beauty's sheath
  Where ancient forms renew,
  The round world seems above, beneath,
  One wash of faintest blue,

  And air and tide so stilly sweet
  In nameless union lie,
  The little far-off fishing fleet
  Goes drifting up the sky.

  Secure of neither misted coast
  Nor ocean undefined,
  Our flagging sail is like the ghost
  Of one that served mankind,

  Who in the void, as we upon
  This melancholy sea,
  Finds labour and allegiance done,
  And Self begin to be.




_Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon_


  "AND now, my clerks who go in fur or feather
  Or brighter scales, I bless you all. Be true
  To your true Lover and Avenger, whether
  By land or sea ye die the death undue.
  Then proffer man your pardon; and together
  Track him to Heaven, and see his heart made new.

  "From long ago one hope hath in me thriven,
  Your hope, mysterious as the scented May:
  Not to Himself your titles God hath given
  In vain, nor only for our mortal day.
  O doves! how from The Dove shall ye be driven?
  O darling lambs! ye with The Lamb shall play."




_An Estray_


  WELL we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream:
  Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,

  For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd's stave,
  For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.

  While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering,
  And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,

  Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast
  Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,

  As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay,
  Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?

  Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain
  Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,

  As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light,
  How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!

  Lest captivity be o'er, lest thou glide away, and so
  From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.




_Friendship Broken_


I

  WE chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,
  Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,
  Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke
  Strange things and deep as any poet penned,
  Such truth as never truth again can mend,
  Whatever art we use, what gods invoke;
  It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke:
  Be what it may, it had a solemn end.

  Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne
  Are foeman vassals; pale astrologers,
  Each a wise skeptic of the other's star.
  Silently, as we went our ways alone,
  The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters,
  Drew high between us his majestic bar.


II

  MINE was the mood that shows the dearest face
  Through a long avenue, and voices kind
  Idle, and indeterminate, and blind
  As rumours from a very distant place;
  Yet, even so, it gathered the first chase
  Of the first swallows where the lane's inclined,
  An ebb of wavy wings to serve my mind
  For round Spring's vision. Ah, some equal grace
  (The calm sense of seen beauty without sight)
  Befell thee, honourable heart! no less
  In patient stupor walking from the dawn;
  Albeit thou too wert loser of life's light,
  Like fallen Adam in the wilderness,
  Aware of naught but of the thing withdrawn.




_A Talisman_


  TAKE Temperance to thy breast,
  While yet is the hour of choosing,
  As arbitress exquisite
  Of all that shall thee betide;
  For better than fortune's best
  Is mastery in the using,
  And sweeter than any thing sweet
  The art to lay it aside!




_Heathenesse_


  NO round boy-satyr, racing from the mere,
  Shakes on the mountain lawn his dripping head
  This many a May, your sister being dead,
  Ye Christian folk! your sister great and dear.
  To breathe her name, to think how sad-sincere
  Was all her searching, straying, dreaming, dread,
  How of her natural night was Plato bred
  (A star to keep the ways of honour clear),

  Who will not sigh for her? who can forget
  Not only unto campèd Israel,
  Nor martyr-maids that as a bridegroom met
  The Roman lion's roar, salvation fell?
  To Him be most of praise that He is yet
  Your God through gods not inaccessible.




_For Izaak Walton_


  CAN trout allure the rod of yore
  In Itchen stream to dip?
  Or lover of her banks restore
  That sweet Socratic lip?
  Old fishing and wishing
  Are over many a year.
  Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

  Again the foamy shallows fill,
  The quiet clouds amass,
  And soft as bees by Catherine Hill
  At dawn the anglers pass,
  And follow the hollow,
  In boughs to disappear.
  Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

  Nay, rise not now, nor with them take
  One amber-freckled fool!
  Thy sons to-day bring each an ache
  For ancient arts to cool.
  But, father, lie rather
  Unhurt and idle near;
  Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

  While thought of thee to men is yet
  A sylvan playfellow,
  Ne'er by thy marble they forget
  In pious cheer to go.
  As air falls, the prayer falls
  O'er kingly Winchester:
  Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.




_Fifteen Epitaphs_


I

  I LAID the strewings, darling, on thine urn;
  I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
  Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
  Long sleep how good it is.

  In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence,
  Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell;
  But thou more blest, O mild intelligence!
  Forget her, and Farewell.


II

  GENTLE Grecian passing by,
  Father of thy peace am I:
  Wouldst thou now, in memory,
  Give a soldier's flower to me,
  Choose the standard named of yore
  Beautiful Worth-dying-for,
  That shall wither not, but wave
  All the year above my grave.


III

  LIGHT thou hast of the moon,
  Shade of the dammar-pine,
  Here on thy hillside bed;
  Fair befall thee, O fair
  Lily of womanhood,
  Patient long, and at last
  Here on thy hillside bed,
  Happier: ah, Blæsilla!


IV

  ME, deep-tressèd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,
  Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
  Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!


V

  UPON thy level tomb, till windy winter morn,
  The fallen leaves delay;
  But plain and pure their trace is, when themselves are torn
  From delicate frost away.

  As here to transient frost the absent leaf is, such
  Thou wert and art to me:
  So on my passing life is thy long-passèd touch,
  O dear Alcithoë!


VI

  HAIL, and be of comfort, thou pious Xeno,
  Late the urn of many a kinsman wreathing;
  On thine own shall even the stranger offer
  Plentiful myrtle.


VII

  HERE lies one in the earth who scarce of the earth was moulded,
  Wise Æthalides' son, himself no lover of study,
  Cnopus, asleep, indoors: the young invincible runner.
  They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave we made him,
  Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare and beautiful iris,
  Stop short, full of delight, and cry out: "See, it is Cnopus
  Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to Chalcis!"


VIII

  ERE the Ferryman from the coast of spirits
  Turn the diligent oar that brought thee thither,
  Soul, remember: and leave a kiss upon it
  For thy desolate father, for thy sister,
  Whichsoever be first to cross hereafter.


IX

  JAFFA ended, Cos begun
  Thee, Aristeus. Thou wert one
  Fit to trample out the sun:
  Who shall think thine ardours are
  But a cinder in a jar?


X

  TWO white heads the grasses cover:
  Dorcas, and her lifelong lover.
  While they graced their country closes
  Simply as the brooks and roses,
  Where was lot so poor, so trodden,
  But they cheered it of a sudden?
  Fifty years at home together,
  Hand in hand, they went elsewhither,
  Then first leaving hearts behind
  Comfortless. Be thou as kind.


XI

  AS wind that wasteth the unmarried rose,
  And mars the golden breakers in the bay,
  Hurtful and sweet from heaven for ever blows
  Sad thought that roughens all our quiet day;

  And elder poets envy, while they weep,
  Ion, whom first the gods to covert brought,
  Here under inland olives laid asleep,
  Most wise, most happy, having done with thought.


XII

  COWS in the narrowing August marshes,
  Cows in a stretch of water
  Motionless,
  Neck on neck overlapped and drooping;

  These in their troubled and dumb communion,
  Thou on the steep bank yonder,
  Pastora!
  No more ever to lead and love them,

  No more ever. Thine innocent mourners
  Pass thy tree in the evening
  Heavily,
  Hearing another herd-girl calling.


XIII

  GO you by with gentle tread.
  This was Paula, who is dead:
  Dear grey eyes that had a look
  Like some rock-o'ershadowed brook,
  Voice upon the ear to cling
  Sweeter than the cithern string.
  With that spirit shy and fair
  Quietly and unaware
  Climbing past the starry van
  Went, for triple talisman,
  They to whom the heavens must ope:
  Candour, Chastity, and Hope.


XIV

  TAKE from an urn my vow and salutation
  Unto the land I never now shall see:
  Laid here exiled, my heart in desolation
  Frets like a child against her breast to be.

  Far from the sky, a rose that opes at even
  (One liquid star for dewdrop on the rose),
  Far from the shower that nesting low in heaven
  Thrice in an hour light-wingèd comes and goes,

  Far from my lost and blessèd and belovèd
  Nightfall of June beside the Rhodian wave,
  Mine is the pain another isle to covet,
  Though all in vain, for gardener of my grave.


XV

  PRAISE thou the Mighty Mother for what is wrought, not me,
  A nameless nothing-caring head asleep against her knee.




_Deo Optimo Maximo_


  ALL else for use, One only for desire;
  Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:
  Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,
  Impel Thou me.

  Delight is menace if Thou brood not by,
  Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.
  Oft as the morn (though none of earth deny
  These three are dear),

  Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,
  And wander free amid my freeborn joys:
  Oh, close my hand upon Beatitude!
  Not on her toys.




_Charista Musing_


  MOVELESS, on the marge of a sunny cornfield,
  Rapt in sudden revery while thou standest,
  Like the sheaves, in beautiful Doric yellow
  Clad to the ankle,

  Oft to thee with delicate hasty footstep
  So I steal, and suffer because I find thee
  Inly flown, and only a fallen feather
  Left of my darling.

  Give me back thy wakening breath, thy ringlets
  Fragrant as the vine of the bean in blossom,
  And those eyes of violet dusk and daylight
  Under sea-water,

  Eyes too far away, and too full of longing!
  Yes: and go not heavenward where I lose thee,
  Go not, go not whither I cannot follow,
  Being but earthly.

  Willing swallow poisèd upon my finger,
  Little wild-wing ever from me escaping,
  For the care thou art to me, I thy lover
  Love thee, and fear thee.




_The Still of the Year_


  UP from the willow-root
  Subduing agonies leap;
  The field-mouse and the purple moth
  Turn over amid their sleep;
  The icicled rocks aloft
  Burn amber and blue alway,
  And trickling and tinkling
  The snows of the drift decay.
  Oh, mine is the head must hang
  And share the immortal pang!
  Winter or spring is fair;
  Thaw's hard to bear.
  Heigho! my heart's sick.

  Sweet is cherry-time, sweet
  A shower, a bobolink,
  And trillium, fain far under
  Her cloistering leaf to shrink;
  But here in the vast, unborn,
  Is the bitterest place to be,
  Till striving and longing
  Shall quicken the earth and me.
  What change inscrutable
  Is nigh us, we know not well;
  Gone is the strength to sigh
  Either to live or die.
  Heigho! my heart's sick.




_A Footnote to a Famous Lyric_


  TRUE love's own talisman, which here
  Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
  A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
  Gave to our Saxon speech:

  Chief miracle of theme and touch
  That all must envy and adore:
  _I could not love thee, dear, so much,
  Loved I not Honour more._

  No critic born since Charles was King
  But sighed in smiling, as he read:
  "Here's theft supreme of everything
  A poet might have said!"

  Young knight and wit and beau, who won
  Mid war's upheaval, ladies' praise,
  Was't well of you, ere you had done,
  To blight our modern bays?

  Oh, yet to you, whose random hand
  Struck from the dark whole gems like these
  (Archaic beauty, never planned
  Nor reared by wan degrees,

  Which leaves an artist poor, and Art
  An earldom richer all her years);
  To you, dead on your shield apart,
  Be "_Ave!_" passed in tears.

  'Twas virtue's breath inflamed your lyre:
  Heroic from the heart it ran;
  Nor for the shedding of such fire
  Lived, since, a manlier man.

  And till your strophe sweet and bold
  So lovely aye, so lonely long,
  Love's self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold
  The parapets of Song.




_T.W.P._

_A.D. MDCCCXIX-MDCCCXCII_


  FRIEND who hast gone, and dost enrich to-day
  New England brightly building far away,
  And crown her liberal walk
  With company more choice, and sweeter talk,

  Look not on Fame, but Peace; and in a bower
  Receive at last her fulness and her power:
  Nor wholly, pure of heart!
  Forget thy few, who would be where thou art.




_Summum Bonum_


  WAITING on Him who knows us and our need,
  Most need have we to dare not, nor desire,
  But as He giveth, softly to suspire
  Against His gift with no inglorious greed,
  For this is joy, though still our joys recede;
  And, as in octaves of a noble lyre,
  To move our minds with His, and clearer, higher,
  Sound forth our fate: for this is strength indeed.

  Thanks to His love let earth and man dispense
  In smoke of worship when the heart is stillest,
  A praying more than prayer: "Great good have I,
  Till it be greater good to lay it by;
  Nor can I lose peace, power, permanence,
  For these smile on me from the thing Thou willest!"




_When on the Marge of Evening_


  WHEN on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,
  And winds of dreamy odour are loosened from afar,
  Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken,
  On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying star,

  I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!),
  Whose greater noonday splendours the many share and see,
  While sacred and for ever, some perfect law is keeping
  The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.




_Hylas_


  (THERE'S a thrush on the under bough
  Fluting evermore and now:
  "_Keep--young!_" but who knows how?)

  Jar in arm, they bade him rove
  Through the alder's long alcove,
  Where the hid spring musically
  Gushes to the ample valley.

  Down the woodland corridor,
  Odours deepened more and more;
  Blossomed dogwood in the briars
  Struck her faint delicious fires;
  Miles of April passed between
  Crevices of closing green,
  And the moth, the violet-lover,
  By the wellside saw him hover.

  Ah, the slippery sylvan dark!
  Never after shall he mark
  (On his drownèd cheek down-sinking),
  Noisy ploughman drinking, drinking.

  Quit of serving is that wild
  Absent and bewitchèd child,
  Unto action, age, and danger
  Thrice a thousand years a stranger.

  Fathoms low, the naiads sing,
  In a birthday welcoming;
  Water-white their breasts, and o'er him,
  Water-grey, their eyes adore him.

  (There's a thrush on the under bough
  Fluting evermore and now:
  "_Keep--young!_" but who knows how?)




_Nocturne_


  THE sun that hurt his lovers from on high
  Is fallen; she more merciful is nigh,
  The blessèd one whose beauty's even glow
  Gave never wound to any shepherd's eye.
  Above our lonely boat in shallows drifting,
  Alone her plaintive form ascends the sky.

  Oh, sing! the water-golds are deepening now,
  Almost a hush is on the aspen bough;
  Her light caresseth thine, as saint to saint
  Sweet interchanged adorings may allow:
  Sing, Eunoë, that lily throat uplifting:
  They are so like, the holy Moon and thou!




_To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey_


  YOUNG father-poet! much in you I praise
  Adventure high, romantic, vehement,
  All with inviolate honour sealed and blent
  To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays;
  Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;
  And most, that verse of strict imperious bent
  Heard sweetly as from some old harper's tent,
  And clanging in the listener's brain for days.

  At Framlingham to-night if there should be
  No guest beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,
  No guard save moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,
  And I, your pilgrim, call you, Oh, let me
  In at the gate! and smile into the eyes
  That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.




_Planting the Poplar_


  BECAUSE thou'rt not an oak
  To breast the thunder-stroke,
  Or flamy-fruited yew
  Darker than Time, how few
  Of birds or men or kine
  Will love this throne of thine,
  Scant Poplar, without shade
  Inhospitably made!
  Yet, branches never parted
  From their straight secret bole,
  Yet, sap too single-hearted!
  Prosper as my soul.

  In loneliness, in quaint
  Perpetual constraint,
  In gallant poverty,
  A girt and hooded tree,
  See if against the gale
  Our leafage can avail:
  Lithe, equal, naked, true,
  Rise up as spirits do,
  And be a spirit crying
  Before the folk that dream!
  My slender early-dying
  Poplar, by the stream.




_To One who would not Spare Himself_


  A CENSER playing from a heart all fire,
  A flushing, racing, singing mountain stream
  Thou art; and dear to us of dull desire
  In thy far-going dream.

  Full to the grave be thy too fleeting way,
  And full thereafter: few that know thee best
  Will grudge it so, for neither thou nor they
  Can mate thy soul with rest.

  God put thee from the laws of Time adrift.
  Lo, He who moves without delay or haste,
  Far less may love the sheaves of ghostly thrift,
  Than some diviner waste.

  Be mine to ride in joy, ere thou art gone,
  The flame, the torrent, which is one with thee!
  Saint, from this pool of dying sweep us on
  Where Life must long to be.




_Winter Peace_


  APRIL seemed a restless pain,
  June a phantom in the rain;
  Weary Autumn without grain
  Turned her home, full of tears.
  O my year, the most in vain
  Of the years!

  While the furrowed field was red,
  While the roses rioted,
  While a leaf was left to shed,
  There was storm in the air.
  Now that troubled heart is dead,
  All is fair.

  'Neath a glow of copper-grey
  Spreads the stubble far away,
  And the hilltop cedars play
  Interludes in accord,
  And the sun adorns the day
  Like a sword.

  Even, usual, and slow,
  Blue enchanted breakers go
  Over carmine reefs in snow,
  With a sail in the lee:
  There's the godhead that we know
  On the sea.

  Ah, let be a promise vast
  So mysteriously downcast!
  I will love this year that passed
  To her grave in the wild,
  And is clear of stain at last
  As a child.




_Sleep_


  O GLORIOUS tide, O hospitable tide
  On whose mysterious breast my head hath lain,
  Lest I, all eased of wounds and washed of stain
  Through holy hours, be yet unsatisfied,
  Loose me betimes: for in my soul abide
  Urgings of memory, and exile's pain
  Weighs on me, as the spirit of one slain
  May throb for the old strife wherein he died.

  Often and evermore, across the sea
  Of dark and dreams, to fatherlands of Day,
  Oh, speed me: as that outworn King erewhile
  By kind Phæacians borne ashore, so me,
  Thy loving healèd ward, fail not to lay
  Beneath the olive boughs of mine own isle.




_Writ in my Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion_


  HOW life hath cheapen'd, and how blank
  The Worlde is! like a fen
  Where long ago unstainèd sank
  The starrie gentlemen:
  Since Marston Moor and Newbury drank
  King Charles his gentlemen.

  If Fate in any air accords
  What Fate deny'd, Oh, then
  I ask to be among your Swordes,
  My joyous gentlemen;
  Towards Honour's heaven to goe, and towards
  King Charles his gentlemen!




_In a February Garden_


  ONE rose till after snowtime
  O'erlooked the sodden grass;
  Now crocuses are twenty
  With spear and torch a plenty,
  To keep our Candlemas.

  So thin that winter greyness,
  So light that sleep forlorn,
  No seventh week uncloses
  Between the martyr roses
  And crocus newly born.

  All doubt is hushed for ever,
  Confuted without sound,
  All ruin featly ended,
  When bulbs begin their splendid
  Gay muster overground;

  And mid the golden heralds
  That ride the icy breeze,
  Man, too, divinely vernal,
  Storms into life eternal
  Victoriously with these.

  O Beauty, O Persistence
  Ineffable and strong!
  Would we had borne with Sorrow
  In her unlasting morrow:
  And Death was not for long.




_A Valediction_

_R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV_


  WHEN from the vista of the Book I shrink,
  From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage
  Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage,
  Nor keep with Shakespeare's use one golden link;
  When heavily my sanguine spirits sink
  To read too plain on each impostor page
  Only of kings the broken lineage,--
  Well for my peace if then on thee I think,

  Louis, our priest of letters, and our knight
  With whose familiar baldric Hope is girt,
  From whose young hands she bears the Grail away.
  All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert,
  I am and must be; and in thy known light
  Go down to dust, content with this my day.




_A Footpath Morality_


  ALONG the Hills, height unto height
  Tosses the dappled light,
  Rills in a torrent flow,
  And cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow.
  Young winds nothing can quell
  Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,
  Again to make
  Its thousand faëry white pagodas shake.
  Up many a lane
  The blue vervain
  A coverlid hath featly spread
  For the bees' bed,
  That those tired sylvan thieves
  May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.
  And by to-morrow morn
  Bright agrimony, in the thickets born,
  Will high uphold
  Each cinquefoil of plain gold;
  Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,
  And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,
  And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,
  On some waste common, by a rock
  Her small dark-centred wheel draw in
  Long, long ere dusk begin.

  This day
  Of infinite May
  Is far more fitly yours than ours,
  O spirit-bodied flowers!
  What heart disordered sore
  Comes through the greenwood door,
  Shall for your sake
  Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break;
  And hearts beneath no ban
  Will in your sight some penance do for man,
  Poor lagging man, content to be
  Sick with the impact of eternity,
  Who might keep step with you in the low grass,
  Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!
  Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown
  To flourish fair and fall fair, and be strewn
  Deep in that Will of God, where blend
  The origin of beauty and the end.




_The Light of the House_


  BEYOND the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;
  You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive;
  You linger on the stair: Love's lonely pulses leap!
  The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.

  Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still;
  The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will,
  Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored;
  And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.

  To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought,
  Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought,
  And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore),
  The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.




_An Outdoor Litany_

  _Donec misereatur nostri._


  THE spur is red upon the briar,
  The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
  The wind shakes out the coloured fire
  From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
  The bluebird with his flitting note
  Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
  The mink is busy; herds again
  Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
  The midges meet. I cry to Thee
  Whose heart
  Remembers each of these: Thou art
  My God who hast forgotten me!

  Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
  The lined gulls in the offing ride;
  Along an edge of marshy ground
  The shad-bush enters like a bride.
  Yon little clouds are washed of care
  That climb the blue New England air,
  And almost merrily withal
  The hyla tunes at evenfall
  His oboe in a mossy tree.
  So too,
  Am I not Thine? Arise, undo
  This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

  Happy the vernal rout that come
  To their due offices to-day,
  And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum,
  Excluded man alone decay.
  I ask no triumph, ask no joy,
  Save leave to live, in law's employ.
  As to a weed, to me but give
  Thy sap! lest aye inoperative
  Here in the Pit my strength shall be:
  And still
  Help me endure the Pit, until
  Thou wilt not have forgotten me.




_Of Joan's Youth_


  I WOULD unto my fair restore
  A simple thing:
  The flushing cheek she had before!
  Out-velveting
  No more, no more,
  On our sad shore,
  The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.

  Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
  Unmoor the rose;
  Or guileful ways the salmon pass
  To sea, disclose:
  For so, alas,
  With Love, alas,
  With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.




_In a Brecon Valley_

    _Patulis ubi vallibus errans
  Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater._
                          H.V. _Ad Posteros._


I

  I FOLLOWED thee, wild stream of Paradise,
  White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee
  In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;
  And all along had magical surmise
  Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,
  As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,
  Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly
  The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.

  Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew,
  Ere distance perished, ere a star began,
  His clear monastic measure, heard of few,
  Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;
  And thou to me wert dear, because I knew
  The God who made thee gracious, and the man.


II

  IF, by that second lover's power controlled,
  In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills
  Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,
  From distance unto distance trailing gold;
  If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,
  Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills
  Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
  Diviner run thy shallows than of old;--

  If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan
  Creator too: and close his memory keep
  Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn
  Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;
  A play of thought more mystic than the dawn,
  And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.




_A Song of Far Travel_


  MANY a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited,
  Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted,
  There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.

  Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting,
  Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,--
  Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.

  Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger);
  Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger:
  Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.




_Spring_

  _With a difference._--HAMLET.


  AGAIN the bloom, the northward flight,
  The fount freed at its silver height,
  And down the deep woods to the lowest
  The fragrant shadows scarred with light.

  O inescapeable joy of Spring!
  For thee the world shall leap and sing;
  But by her darkened door thou goest
  Henceforward as a spectral thing.




_The Colour-Bearer_


  THY charge was: "Hold My banner
  Against our hidden foe;
  To war where sounds no manner
  Of glorious music, go!"
  And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."

  Ah, not to brave Thy censure
  But win Thy smile of light,
  My heart of misadventure
  Will end in the losing fight,
  And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.

  The day will pass of torment,
  The evenfall be sweet
  When I shall wear for garment
  The nakedness of defeat.
  But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet

  That eagle of the wartime,
  That oriflamme, outrolled
  With strength of staff aforetime,
  With cleanly and costly fold,--
  Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,

  And take from me (turned donor
  That night on blood-soaked sand),
  The stick and rag of Honour
  There safe in a stiffened hand,
  Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.




_Sanctuary_


  HIGH above hate I dwell:
  O storms! farewell.
  Though at my sill your daggered thunders play
  Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
  To me they sound more small
  Than a young fay's footfall:
  Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
  In Long Ago,
  And winnowed into silence on that wind
  Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

  Hither Felicity
  Doth climb to me,
  And bank me in with turf and marjoram
  Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
  With golden barberry-wreath,
  And bluets thick beneath;
  One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
  With bud-red breast,
  Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
  Float less than April fog below our hermitage.




_Emily Brontë_


  WHAT sacramental hurt that brings
  The terror of the truth of things
  Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
  'Twas thine, upon a headland set,
  To view no isles of man's delight,
  With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
  But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
  Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.




_Pascal_


  THOU lovedst life, but not to brand it thine
  (O rich in all forborne felicities!),
  Nor use it with marauding power, to seize
  And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line.
  Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine
  Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease,
  And foot of thine across the unpressed leas
  Went light as some Idæan foot divine.

  Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay
  What passion of possession? Day by day
  Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure,
  In forward sea-like surges unforgot?
  Yes: and in life and death those joys endure
  More blessedly, that men can name them not.




_Borderlands_


  THROUGH all the evening,
  All the virginal long evening,
  Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
  For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
  And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
  Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

  Yet in the valley,
  At a turn of the orchard alley,
  When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
  Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
  Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
  O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!




_Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore_


  THERE in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,
  To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
  And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,
  Quiet and old sits he.
  Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
  Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,
  Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
  Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?

  Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
  Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
  The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
  Their veering weight across.
  On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,
  To lands where stunted cedars throw
  A lace-like shadow over snow,
  Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

  Again play up and down the briny spar
  Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,
  Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
  The Labradorian blue;
  All homeless hurricanes about him break;
  The purples of spent day he sees
  From Samos to the Hebrides,
  And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

  Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
  Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
  Away, and far away, his barque is borne
  Riding the noisy morn,
  Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
  The helm and tightening halyards still
  Follow the urging of his will,
  And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

  Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,
  And shackles him with many an inland tie,
  And of his only wisdom makes a jibe
  Amid an alien tribe:
  No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
  The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
  Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
  Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

  Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
  Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!
  Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
  Unto his subject soul,
  Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
  Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
  But she may know that voice again,
  And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

  And give him back, before his passion fail,
  The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
  And level with those ageing eyes let be
  The bright unsteady sea;
  And like a film remove from sense and brain
  This pasture wall, these boughs that run
  Their evening arches to the sun,
  Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

  And on the shut space and the shallow hour,
  Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
  With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
  Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
  That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
  Not having, at the last, less grace
  Of thee than had his roving race,
  Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.




OXFORD AND LONDON

XXVI SONNETS




OXFORD




I. _The Tow-Path_


  FURROW to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,
  Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;
  The sister shells that hither, thither, flit
  Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds.
  A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,
  Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:
  An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits,
  Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.

  West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black
  Where waters by their warm escarpments run,
  Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington,
  Print in the early dew a married track,
  And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun,
  Ere in laborious health the crews come back.




II. _Ad Antiquarium_


  MY gentle Aubrey, who in everything
  Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust,
  Yet never lineal to her towers august
  Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,
  Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,
  Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust
  Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,
  Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.

  Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,
  Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now,
  The endless terraces of ended Time
  Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release
  Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,
  Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.




III. _Martyrs' Memorial_


  SUCH natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
  So many ancient dues undesecrate,
  I marvel how the landmark of a hate
  For witness unto future time she chose;
  How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose
  The Three, in great denial only great,
  For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight,
  My soul to seek a holier captain goes:

  That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell
  Whenas the synagogues were watching not;
  Whose crystal name on royal Oriel
  Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot
  Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well
  To live of all his dear domain forgot.




IV. _Parks Road_


  VIEWED yesterday, in sad elusive light,
  These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree,
  Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly,
  Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite.
  All the wild winter day and flooded night
  They feigned to march far as the eye could see,
  Through transient oceans plunging to the knee
  Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.

  To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare
  Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow
  Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air,
  Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow.
  What secret craftsmen painted them so fair?
  Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.




V. _Tom_


  HARK! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir.
  As in between each golden roar doth come
  That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum
  Chiding the truant with archaic ire,
  On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre
  The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from
  May's chestnut like a lampadarium
  By Brasenose, with every point afire.

  Yet over all roofs to the uttermost,
  Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground:
  For some there be, on whatsoever coast,
  In midst of any morrow's ordered round,
  Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!)
  And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.




VI. _On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford_


I

  IMPERIAL Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,
  And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call,
  And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall
  That dost upon adoring ivies lean;
  Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene
  Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall;
  Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual,
  Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:

  If one of all in your sad courts that come
  Belovèd and disparted! be your own,
  Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures
  Some memory of a great communion known
  At home in quarries of old Christendom,--
  Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.


II

  IS this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day
  For dread, for dereliction, and for tears?
  Rather, from grass and air and many spheres
  In prophecy his heart is called away;
  And under English eaves, more still than they,
  Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears
  The long-arrested, the believing years
  Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:

  "Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best
  Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain
  To watch beside her darkened doors, go by
  With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh!
  Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest:
  Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."




VII. _A December Walk_


  WHITHERSOEVER cold and fair ye flow,
  Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind,
  Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined,
  And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow,
  And groves in bridal gossamer below
  Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned
  In altered eminence for dawn to find
  Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.

  White sacraments of weather, shine on me!
  Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift,
  Lest either blemish an ensainted ground
  Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound,
  On recollected wing mine angel drift
  Across new spheres of immortality.




VIII. _The Old Dial of Corpus_


  WARDEN of hours and ages, here I dwell,
  Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook
  For good unborn; and towards a willow nook,
  Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;
  And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,
  Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,
  Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:
  Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.

  Naught steadfast may I image nor attain
  Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope
  After my god, like him, inconstant bright:
  But sun and shade will unto you remain
  Alternately a symbol and a hope,
  Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.




IX. _Rooks: New College Gardens_


  THROUGH rosy cloud and over thorny towers,
  Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,
  From Isis' valley border, many-hilled,
  The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:
  Not for men only, and their musing hours
  By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build
  These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,
  These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

  Blest birds! A book held open on the knee
  Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight:
  With surer art the while, and simpler rite,
  They gather power in some monastic tree
  Where breathe against their docile breasts by night
  The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.




X. _Above Port Meadow_


  THE plain gives freedom. Hither from the town
  How oft a dreamer and a book of yore
  Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more
  Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown,
  But bade the vernal sky with spices drown
  His head by Plato's in the grass, before
  Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar,
  At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!

  So seeming far the confines and the crowd,
  The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire,
  From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven,
  Go happier than the inly-moving cloud
  Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire,
  Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.




XI. _Undertones at Magdalen_


  FAIR are the finer creature-sounds; of these
  Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop
  Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop;
  And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries
  Of wrens in council from an hundred leas;
  And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop
  The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop
  Delicious herbage under choral trees.

  The cry for silver and gold in Christendom
  Without, threads not her silence and her dark.
  Only against the isolate Tower there break
  Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come:
  Invasive seas of hushed approach that make
  Memorial music, would the ear but hark.




XII. _A Last View_


I

  WHERE down the hill, across the hidden ford
  Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene,
  By halted horses silently we lean,
  Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward.
  How yon low loving skies of April hoard
  A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen
  Of spike and ball her languid clouds between
  Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!

  Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls
  Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls;
  Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar.
  Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well,
  And powers that aye aglow in you, impel
  Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.


II

  STARS in the bosom of thy braided tide,
  Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone,
  O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown,
  Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide!
  And still, for greatness flickering from thy side,
  Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone
  True heirs in true succession, later blown
  From that same seed of fire which never died.

  Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold
  Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge,
  Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces;
  And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old,
  In radiant broad tumultuary surge
  For ever, the young voices, the young faces.




LONDON




I. _On First Entering Westminster Abbey_


  HOLY of England! since my light is short
  And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew
  Of timeless passion set my dial true,
  That with thy saints and thee I may consort;
  And wafted in the cool enshadowed port
  Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
  And be as one the call of memory drew
  Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.

  Not now for secular love's unquiet lease
  Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile
  Hath broken tryst with transitory things;
  But seal with her a marriage and a peace
  Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle,
  Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.




II. _Fog_


  LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh,
  Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
  And in their sharp disastrous undertow
  Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
  The towery vista sinks upon the eye,
  As if it heard the horns of Jericho,
  Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know
  How what was built so bright should daily die.

  Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in,
  City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown
  The natural light in which thy life began;
  Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
  Greater and elder yet the love of man
  Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.




III. _St. Peter-ad-Vincula_


  TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe,
  Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
  More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye,
  The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw;
  Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
  Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie
  White martyrdoms: rank in a company
  Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.

  Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row
  Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,
  Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,
  Infects me: suddenly must I depart,
  Ere thought of man's injustice then and now
  Add to these aisles one other broken heart.




IV. _Strikers in Hyde Park_


  A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave,
  How slow! but never once they slip the thread.
  Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread,
  Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,
  Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
  Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
  Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
  Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

  What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange
  Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
  The clear Republic waits the general throe,
  Along her noonday mountains' open range.
  God be with both! for one is young to know
  The other's rote of evil and of change.




V. _Changes in the Temple_


  THE cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground,
  Again: for oft ere now thy children went
  Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent
  Some old red alley with a dial crowned;
  Some house of honour, in a glory bound
  With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;
  Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent
  Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.

  Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that
  Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!
  Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,
  Her walled oasis, and where once it was
  All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat
  Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.




VI. _The Lights of London_


  THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot
  Far down into the valley's cold extreme,
  Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream
  Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.
  The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot
  Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,
  From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam,
  London, one moment fallen and forgot.

  Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright
  Prick door and window; every street obscure
  Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure,
  Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:
  Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure
  Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.




VII. _Doves_


  AH, if man's boast and man's advance be vain,
  And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
  And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,
  That monstrous island of the middle main;
  If each inheritor must sink again
  Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
  Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?--
  I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

  What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
  Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
  Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's
  Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
  And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
  "God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."




VIII. _In the Reading-Room of the British Museum_


  PRAISED be the moon of books! that doth above
  A world of men, the sunken Past behold,
  And colour spaces else too void and cold
  To make a very heaven again thereof;
  As when the sun is set behind a grove,
  And faintly unto nether ether rolled,
  All night his whiter image and his mould
  Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

  Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,
  Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!
  Feebly along a venerable way
  They climb the infinite, or perish quite:
  Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,
  While in this liberal house thy face is bright.




IX. _Sunday Chimes in the City_


  ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow
  The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain
  Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain,
  And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;
  Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,
  Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:
  From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,
  Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

  Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower
  A subtle beauty on the empty hour,
  From all their dark throats aching and outblown;
  Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,
  Like the last gull that up some naked coast
  Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.




X. _A Porch in Belgravia_


  WHEN, after dawn, the lordly houses hide
  Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest
  (Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,
  Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,
  Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied
  Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest,
  Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,
  And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),

  Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,
  Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,
  Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft
  Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore
  Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,
  Which cannot but have been, for evermore.




XI. _York Stairs_


  MANY a musing eye returns to thee,
  Against the formal street disconsolate,
  Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,
  With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;
  And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity,
  Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight
  Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate;
  Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.

  Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus
  Till the next fury; teach the time and us
  Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:
  Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,
  Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud
  Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.




XII. _In the Docks_


  WHERE the bales thunder till the day is done,
  And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;
  Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,
  Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;
  Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,
  A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;
  Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,
  I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!

  O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,
  To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,
  Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,
  Sodden with human trespass and despair,
  Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,
  A sick mind follows into Eden air.




NOTES


_The Kings_: P. 3.

     II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.

_His Angel to his Mother_: P. 21.

     One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song,
     "Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming
     melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular
     Music of the Olden Time.

_Beside Hazlitt's Grave_: P. 47.

     St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of
     London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is
     grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now
     for some years stood in place of the interesting original
     one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer
     west wall of the church.

_The Vigil-at-Arms_: P. 48.

     Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in
     Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4,
     the last two lines coming in for repetitions.

_A Friend's Song for Simoisius_: P. 49.

     Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.

_The Inner Fate_: P. 64.

     It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any
     sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.

_The Acknowledgment_: P. 66.

     "The Prætor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical
     Brutus.

_The Cherry Bough_: P. 70.

  "Si quis adhuc isthic meminit Nasonis adempti,
      Et superest sine me nomen in urbe meum."
                      _Tristia_, Lib. III, El. X.

  "Atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto,
      Deponat lacrymis pocula mista suis."
                      _Idem_, Lib. V, El. IV.

_A Talisman_: P. 87.

     Many years after these lines were in print, it was pointed
     out to the author by a friend, a student of St. Bernard,
     how they have managed to echo in part a saying of that
     great Doctor, in his _De Consideratione_, Lib. I, Cap.
     VIII, Sec. 9:

     "Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates
     media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines
     ... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt
     Temperantiam."

_Fifteen Epitaphs_: P. 91.

     It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for
     translations), that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.

_A Footpath Morality_: P. 121.

     A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton
     in Berkshire, May, 1908.


OXFORD

_Ad Antiquarium_: P. 146.

     This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S.,
     1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that
     most ingeniose Place!"

_Martyrs' Memorial_: P. 147.

     The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by
     the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to
     commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge
     men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude (then
     dead), Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect
     to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference
     in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was
     written barely a month before his rather sudden death on
     August 11, 1890.

_Tom_: P. 149.

     The College is a century and a half older than the upper
     part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell
     is much older than either. "The Tom Tower [was] finished
     in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great
     Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to
     Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one
     hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal
     that all students should be within their College walls. It
     need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"

     J. WELLS, M.A., 1901. _Oxford and its Colleges_:
     Christ Church, pp. 205-206.

_The Old Dial of Corpus_: P. 153.

     The great Dial in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi
     College was not put up until 1605,--too late to have been
     contemporary with either Erasmus or Pole. The author
     discovered the error several years ago, but has never known
     how to correct it except by this caution. "Osney Bell"
     is Great Tom (see just above): Christ Church being next
     neighbour to Corpus; but Tom may or may not have been in
     place and condition to ring for curfew in the second year
     of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The closing line is meant to
     refer to the motto of the University, _Dominus illuminatio
     mea_, taken from the opening of Psalm XXVII.

_Undertones at Magdalen_: P. 156.

     "The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when
     this sonnet was written (1895), though it is so no longer.
     From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the
     Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on
     St. John Baptist's Day.


LONDON

_St. Peter-ad-Vincula_: P. 161.

     St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate
     dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the
     site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.

_York Stairs_: P. 169.

     Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at
     the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way
     from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the
     sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the
     seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.




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