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and Other Poems (1894); The Father of the Forest and Other Poems (1895); The Year of Shame (including The Purple East, 1897); Collected Poems (1898); For England (1904).

There is scarcely a dissenting voice to the chorus that has hailed Watson as the foremost living English poet, next to Swinburne. Even before 1892 Tennyson had chosen him out for commendation. "Only a great poet," says the Spectator, "could have written. that line [the last line in the Prelude to the Hymn of the Sea]. The line seems to us the greatest which even great poets have written. Milton never conceived a more delicate and exquisite symbol of the awakening of youth to the beauty of a world, to which it contributes almost as much loveliness as it perceives in it, than the 'wondering rose' of Mr. Watson's."

WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE.

The old, rude church, with bare, bald tower, is here;
Beneath its shadow high-born Rotha flows;
Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near,
And with cold murmur lulling his repose.

Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near.

His hills, his lakes, his streams are with him yet. Surely the heart that read her own heart clear Nature forgets not soon: 'tis we forget.

We that with vagrant soul his fixity

Have slighted; faithless, done his deep faith wrong; Left him for poorer loves, and bowed the knee To misbegotten, strange new gods of song.

Yet, led by hollow ghost or beckoning elf
Far from her homestead to the desert bourn,
The vagrant soul returning to herself

Wearily wise, must needs to him return.

To him and to the power that with him dwell ·
Inflowings that divulged not whence they came;
And that secluded spirit unknowable,

The mystery we make darker with a name;

The somewhat which we name but cannot know,
Ev'n as we name a star and only see

His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
And ever hide him, and which are not he.

LACHRYME MUSARUM.

(October 6, 1892.)

Low, like another's, lies the laurelled head:
The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er:
Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild sea-shore,
Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,
Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread,
The master's feet shall tread.

Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute:
The singer of undying songs is dead.

So, in this season pensive-hued and grave,
While fades and falls the doomed, reluctant leaf
From withered Earth's fantastic coronal,
With wandering sighs of forest and of wave
Mingles the murmur of a people's grief

For him whose leaf shall fade not, neither fall.

He hath fared forth, beyond these suns and showers.
For us, the autumn glow, the autumn flame,

And soon the winter silence shall be ours:
Him the eternal spring of fadeless fame
Crowns with no mortal flowers.

Rapt though he be from us,

Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus;

Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each

Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach;
Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach;
Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home;
Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech;
Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam;
Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave:

His equal friendship crave:

And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech
Of Athens, Weimar, Stratford, Rome.

What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears,
To save from visitation of decay?

Not in this temporal sunlight, now, that bay
Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears
Sings he with lips of transitory clay;
For he hath joined the chorus of his peers
In habitations of the perfect day:

His earthly notes a heavenly audience hears,
And more melodious are henceforth the spheres,
Enriched with music stol'n from earth away.

He hath returned to regions whence he came.
Him doth the spirit divine

Of universal loveliness reclaim.

All nature is his shrine.

Seek him hence forward in the wind and sea,

In earth's and air's emotion or repose,

In every star's august serenity,

And in the rapture of the flaming rose.

There seek him, if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the Whole.

Yea, and forever in the human soul

Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

For lo! creation's self is one great choir,
And what is nature's order but the rhyme

Whereto the worlds keep time,

And all things move with all things from their prime?

Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?

In far retreats of elemental mind

Obscurely comes and goes

The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might:
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped:
Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said

Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale,
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!
And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs he trims his sail,
But far beyond our vision and our hail
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.

No more, oh, never now,

Lord of the lofty and the tranquil brow

Whereon nor snows of time

Have fall'n, nor wintry rime,

Shall men behold thee, sage and mage sublime.

Once, in his youth obscure,

The maker of this verse, which shall endure

By splendor of its theme that cannot die,

Beheld thee eye to eye,

And touched through thee the hand

Of every hero of thy race divine,

Ev'n to the sire of all the laurelled line,

The sightless wanderer on the Ionian strand,
Wide as his skies and radiant as his seas,
Starry from haunts of his Familiars nine,
Glorious Mæonides.

Yea, I beheld thee, and behold thee yet:
Thou hast forgotten, but can I forget?

The accents of thy pure and sovereign tongue,
Are they not ever goldenly impressed

VOL. XXIV.-4

On memory's palimpsest?

I see thy wizard locks like night that hung,

I tread the floor thy hallowing feet have trod;

I see the hands a nation's lyre that strung,

The eyes that looked through life and gazed on God.
The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer;
The grass of yesteryear

Is dead; the birds depart, the groves decay:
Empires dissolve and peoples disappear:
Song passes not away.

Captains and conquerors leave a little dust,
And kings a dubious legend of their reign;
The swords of Cæsars, they are less than rust:
The poet doth remain.

Dead is Augustus, Maro is alive;

And thou, the Mantuan of our age and clime,
Like Virgil, shalt thy race and tongue survive,
Bequeathing no less honeyed words to time,
Embalmed in amber of eternal rhyme,

And rich with sweets from every Muse's hive;
While to the measure of the cosmic rune
For purer ears thou shalt thy lyre attune,
And heed no more the hum of idle praise
In that great calm our tumults cannot reach,
Master who crown'st our immelodious days
With flower of perfect speech.

HOW WEARY IS OUR HEART.

Of kings and courts, of kingly, courtly ways
In which the life of man is bought and sold;
How weary is our heart these many days!

Of ceremonious embassies that hold
Parley with Hell in fine silken phrase,
How weary is our heart these many days!
Of wavering counsellors neither hot nor cold,
Whom from His mouth God speweth, be it told
How weary is our heart these many days!

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