LXXV.

TAKE wings of fancy, and ascend,

And in a moment set thy face Where all the starry heavens of space Are sharpen'd to a needle's end;

Take wings of foresight; lighten thro' The secular abyss to come,

And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb Before the mouldering of a yew;

And if the matin songs, that woke

The darkness of our planet, last, Thine own shall wither in the vast, Ere half the lifetime of an oak.

Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers

With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain; And what are they when these remain The ruin'd shells of hollow towers ?

LXXVI.

WHAT hope is here for modern rhyme
To him who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain

May bind a book, may line a box, May serve to curl a maiden's locks; Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,

And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same:
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.

LXXVII.

AGAIN at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess'd the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:
The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,

Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who show'd a token of distress?

No single tear, no mark of pain: O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
No,-mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.

LXXVIII.

"MORE than my brothers are to me," Let this not vex thee, noble heart! I know thee of what force thou art To hold the costliest love in fee.

But thou and I are one in kind,

As moulded like in nature's mint; And hill and wood and field did print The same sweet forms in either mind.

For us the same cold streamlet curl'd Thro' all his eddying coves; the same All winds that roam the twilight came In whispers of the beauteous world.

At one dear knee we proffer'd vows,

One lesson from one book we learn'd, Ere childhood's flaxen ringlet turn'd To black and brown on kindred brows.

And so my wealth resembles thine, But he was rich where I was poor, And he supplied my want the more As his unlikeness fitted mine.

LXXIX.

Ir any vague desire should rise,

That holy Death ere Arthur died Had moved me kindly from his side, And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;

Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,

The grief my loss in him had wrought, A grief as deep as life or thought, But stay'd in peace with God and man.

I make a picture in the brain;

I hear the sentence that he speaks; He bears the burthen of the weeks; But turns his burthen into gain.

His credit thus shall set me free;
And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
Unused example from the grave
Reach out dead hands to comfort me.

LXXX.

COULD I have said while he was here,
"My love shall now no further range;
There cannot come a mellower change,
For now is love mature in ear."

Love, then, had hope of richer store:
What end is here to my complaint?
This haunting whisper makes me faint,
"More years had made me love thee more."
But Death returns an answer sweet:
"My sudden frost was sudden gain,
And gave all ripeness to the grain
It might have drawn from after-heat."

LXXXI.

I WAGE not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face; No lower life that earth's embrace May breed with him can fright my faith.

Eternal process moving on,

From state to state the spirit walks; And these are but the shatter'd stalks, Or ruin'd chrysalis of one.

Nor blame I Death, because he bare
The use of virtue out of earth:
I know transplanted human worth
Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

For this alone on Death I wreak
The wrath that garners in my heart.
He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.

LXXXII.

DIP down upon the northern shore,
O sweet new-year, delaying long:
Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
Delaying long, delay no more.

I woo your love: I count it crime
To mourn for any overmuch;
I, the divided half of such
A friendship as had master'd Time;

Which masters Time indeed, and is
Eternal, separate from fears:
The all-assuming months and years
Can take no part away from this:

But Summer on the steaming floods,

And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,
And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,
That gather in the waning woods,

And every pulse of wind and wave
Recalls, in change of light or gloom,
My old affection of the tomb,
And my prime passion in the grave:
My old affection of the tomb,

A part of stillness, yearns to speak: "Arise, and get thee forth and seek A friendship for the years to come.

"I watch thee from the quiet shore;
Thy spirit up to mine can reach;
But in dear words of human speech
We two communicate no more."

And I, "Can clouds of nature stain
The starry clearness of the free?
How is it? Canst thou feel for me
Some painless sympathy with pain?"

And lightly does the whisper fall:
""T is hard for thee to fathom this:
I triumph in conclusive bliss,
And that serene result of all."

So hold I commerce with the dead;
Or so methinks the dead would say;
Or so shall grief with symbols play,
And pining life be fancy-fed.

Now looking to some settled end,

That these things pass, and I shall prove A meeting somewhere, love with love,

I crave your pardon, O my friend;

If not so fresh, with love as true,
I, clasping brother-hands, aver
I could not, if I would, transfer
The whole I felt for him to you.

For which be they that hold apart

The promise of the golden hours?
First love, first friendship, equal powers,
That marry with the virgin heart.

Still mine, that cannot but deplore,
That beats within a lonely place,
That yet remembers his embrace,
But at his footstep leaps no more,
My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest
Quite in the love of what is gone,
But seeks to beat in time with one
That warms another living breast.

Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,
Knowing the primrose yet is dear,
The primrose of the later year,
As not unlike to that of Spring.

LXXXV.

SWEET after showers, ambrosial air, That rollest from the gorgeous gloom Of evening over brake and bloom And meadow, slowly breathing bare

And I-my harp would prelude woe-
I cannot all command the strings:
The glory of the sum of things
Will flash along the chords and go.

LXXXVIII.

WITCH-ELMS that counterchange the floor
Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
And thou, with all thy breadth and height
Of foliage, towering sycamore;

How often, hither wandering down,

My Arthur found your shadows fair,
And shook to all the liberal air
The dust and din and steam of town:

He brought an eye for all he saw;

He mixt in all our simple sports;

They pleased him, fresh from broiling courts And dusty purlieus of the law.

O joy to him in this retreat,
Immantled in ambrosial dark,
To drink the cooler air, and mark
The landscape winking thro' the heat:

O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

O bliss, when all in circle drawn

About him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poet on the lawn:

Or in the all-golden afternoon

A guest, or happy sister, sung,

Or here she brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon:

Nor less it pleased in livelier moods, Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
Discuss'd the books to love or hate,
Or touch'd the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream;

But if I praised the busy town,

He loved to rail against it still, For "ground in yonder social mill, We rub each other's angles down,

"And merge," he said, "in form and gloss
The picturesque of man and man.”
We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,

Or cool'd within the gloomixg wave;
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fall'n into her father's grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in the pail, And buzzings of the honeyed hours.

LXXXIX.

HE tasted love with half his mind,

Nor ever drank the inviolate spring Where nighest heaven, who first could fling This bitter seed among mankind;

That could the dead, whose dying eyes
Were closed with wail, resume their life,
They would but find in child and wife
An iron welcome when they rise:

'T was well, indeed, when warm with wine,
To pledge them with a kindly tear,
To talk them o'er, to wish them here,
To count their memories half divine;

But if they came who passed away,
Behold their brides in other hands;
The hard heir strides about their lands,
And will not yield them for a day.

Yea, tho' their sons were none of these, Not less the yet-loved sire would make Confusion worse than death, and shake The pillars of domestic peace.

Ah dear, but come thou back to me:
Whatever change the years have wrought,
I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee.

XC.

WHEN rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish'd years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.
When summer's hourly-mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after form,
And like a finer light in light.

XCI.

Ir any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain, As but the canker of the brain; Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind.
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And tho' the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,
And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.

XCII.

I SHALL not see thee. Dare I say

No spirit ever brake the band That stays him from the native land, Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come Where all the nerve of sense is numb Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.