Here sits the Butler with a flask

The silk star-broider'd coverlid

Unto her limbs itself doth mould Languidly ever; and, amid

Her full black ringlets downward roll'd,

there

The wrinkled steward at his task,
The maid-of-honor blooming fair;
The page has caught her hand in his :
Her lips are sever'd as to speak :
His own are pouted to a kiss:
The blush is fix'd upon her cheek.

V.

Till all the hundred summers pass,
The beams, that thro' the Oriel shine,
Make prisms in every carven glass,

And beaker brimm'd with noble wine.

With bracelets of the diamond bright: Her constant beauty doth inform

Stillness with love, and day with light.

Well were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men ; And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars, And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore;
And all that else the years will show,
The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,
The Federations and the Powers;
Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes;
For we are Ancients of the earth,

And in the morning of the times.

II.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

Thro' sunny decads new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap

The flower and quintessence of change.

III.

Ah, yet would I — and would I might !
So much your eyes my fancy take-
Be still the first to leap to light
That I might kiss those eyes awake!
For, am I right, or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song,

Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl'd, And evermore a costly kiss

The prelude to some brighter world.

IV.

For since the time when Adam first
Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes?

What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd? Where on the double rosebud droops

The fulness of the pensive mind; Which all too dearly self-involved, Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me; A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee neither hear nor see:

But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may give,
Are clasp'd the moral of thy life,
And that for which I care to live.

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there, O whisper to your glass, and say, "What wonder, if he thinks me fair?" What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise,

That float thro' Heaven, and cannot
light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court
By Cupid-boys of blooming hue-
But take it earnest wed with sport,
And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,

But it is wild and barren, A garden too with scarce a tree, And waster than a warren : Yet say the neighbors when they call, It is not bad but good land, And in it is the germ of all

That grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,
Nor cared for seed or scion !
And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,
And fiddled in the timber!

'T is said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move, And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down
Coquetting with young beeches ;

And briony-vine and ivy-wreath Ran forward to his rhyming, And from the valleys underneath Came little copses climbing.

The linden broke her ranks and rent

The woodbine wreaths that bind her,
And down the middle buzz! she went
With all her bees behind her:
The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two
By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shot alder from the wave,

Came yews, a dismal coterie ; Each pluck'd his one foot from the grave, Poussetting with a sloe-tree: Old elms came breaking from the vine, The vine stream'd out to follow, And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine From many a cloudy hollow.

And was n't it a sight to see,

When, ere his song was ended,
Like some great landslip, tree by tree,
The country-side descended;
And shepherds from the mountain-eaves
Look'd down, half- pleased, half-
frighten'd,

As dash'd about the drunken leaves
The random sunshine lighten'd!

O, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;
So youthful and so flexile then,

You moved her at your pleasure. Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs! And make her dance attendance; Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs, And scirrhous roots and tendons.

'Tis vain! in such a brassy age
I could not move a thistle;
The very sparrows in the hedge

Scarce answer to my whistle;
Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,

The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound

Like sleepy counsel pleading;

O Lord! 't is in my neighbor's ground,
The modern Muses reading.
They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening thro' there, i

And Methods of transplanting trees,
To look as if they grew there.
The wither'd Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travell'd seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbors clipt and cut,
And alleys, faded places,
By squares of tropic summer shut
And warm'd in crystal cases.

But these, tho' fed with careful dirt,
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,
The spindlings look unhappy.
Better to me the meanest weed

That blows upon its mountain,
The vilest herb that runs to seed
Beside its native fountain.

And I must work thro' months of toil,
And years of cultivation,
Upon my proper patch of soil

To grow my own plantation.
I'll take the showers as they fall,
I will not vex my bosom :
Enough if at the end of all
A little garden blossom.

ST. AGNES' EVE.

DEEP on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon :
My breath to heaven like vapor goes:
May my soul follow soon!
The shadows of the convent-towers
Slant down the snowy sward,
Still creeping with the creeping hours
That lead me to my Lord:
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies,
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.

As these white robes are soil'd and dark,
To yonder shining ground;

As this pale taper's earthly spark,
To yonder argent round;

So shows my soul before the Lamb,
My spirit before Thee ;

So in mine earthly house I am,
To that I hope to be.

Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,
Thro' all yon starlight keen,
Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,
In raiment white and clean.