And all the bugle breezes blew
Reveillee to the Breaking morn.

But what is this? I turn about,
I find a trouble in thine eye,
Which makes me sad l know not
why,

Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:
But ere the lark hath left the lea

I wake, and I discern the truth;
It is the trouble of my youth
That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

LXIX.

I DREAM'D there would be Spring no more,

That Nature's ancient power was lost:

The streets were black with smoke and frost,

They chatter'd trifles at the door

I wander'd from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs: I took the thorns to bind my brows, I wore them like a civic crown: I met with scoffs, I met with scorns From youth and babe and hoary hairs:

They call'd me in the public squares The fool that wears a crown of thorns: They call'd me fool, they call'd me child:

I found an angel of the night;

The voice was low, the look was bright;

He look'd upon my crown and smiled: He reach'd the glory of a hand,

That seem'd to touch it into leaf: The voice was not the voice of grief, The words were hard to understand.

In which we went thro' summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul? Then bring an opiate trebly strong, Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong

That so my pleasure may be whole; While now we talk as once we talk'd Of men and minds, the dust of change,

The days that grow to something strange,

In walking as of old we walk'd
Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress, and the mountain ridge. The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach."

I curso not nature, no, nor death;
For nothing is that errs from law.

We pass the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will b dim, with weeds;
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age? It rests with God.
O hollow wraith of dying fame,

Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-infolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name.
LXXIV.

As sometimes in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out to some one of his race:
So dearest, now thy brows are cold,

I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old.
But there is more than I can see,
And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing Death has
made

His darkness beautiful with thee.

LXXV.

I LEAVE thy praises unexpress'd
In verse that brings myself relief,
And by the measure of my grief
I leave thy greatness to be guess'd;
What practice howsoe'er expert

In fitting aptest words to things,
Or voice the richest-toned that sings,
Hath power to give thee as thou wert?
I care not in these fading days

To raise a cry that lasts not long, And round thee with the breeze of song

To stir a little dust of praise.
Thy leaf has perish'd in the green,
And, while we breathe beneath the

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 wano A man upon a stall may find,

And passing, turn the pace that tells A grief, then changed to something else,

Sung by a long forgotten mind.
But what of that? My dorken'd ways
Shall ring with muie all the same:
To breathe my loss is more than
fame,

To utter love more sweet than praise.

LXXVIII.

AGAIN at Christmas did we weare 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 hoodmanblind.

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.

LXXIX.

"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.

LXXX.

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 burden of the weeks; But turns his burden 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 ine.

LXXXI.

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."

LXXXII.

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.

LXXXIII.

DIP down upon the northern shore,
O sweet new-year delaying long;
Thou doest expectant natüre wrong;
Delaying long, delay no more.
What stays thee from the clouded
noons,

Thy sweetness from its proper place?
Can trouble live with April days,
Or sadness in the summer moons?
Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,
The little speedwell's darling blue,
Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of tire.
O thou, new-year, delaying long,

Delayest the sorrow in my blood, That longs to burst a frozen bud, And flood a fresher throat with song.

LXXXIV.

WHEN I contemplate all alone

The life that had been thine below, And fix my thoughts on all the glow To which thy crescent would have grown;

I see thee sitting crown'd with good,
A central warinth diffusing bliss

In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,

On all the branches of thy blood;
Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;
For now the day was drawing on,
When thou should'st link thy life

with one

Of mine own house, and boys of thine Had babbled "Uncle" on my knee;

But that remorseless iron hour Made cypress of her orange flower, Despair of Hope, and earth of thee. I seem to meet their least desire, To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.

I see their unborn faces shine
Beside the never-lighted fire.

I see myself an honour'd guest,
Thy partner in the flowery walk
Of letters, genial table-talk,
Or deep dispute, and graceful jest ;
While now thy prosperous labor fills
The lips of men with honest praise,
And sun by sun the happy days
Descend below the golden hills
With promise of a morn as fair;
And all the train of bounteous hours
Conduct by paths of glowing powers
To reverence and the silver hair;
Till slowly worn her earthly robe,

Her lavish mission richly wrought, Leaving great legacies of thought, Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

What time mine own might also flee, As link'd with thine in love and fate, And, hovering o'er the dolorous strait

To the other shore, involved in thee,

Arrive at last the blessed goal,

And He that died in Holy Land Would reach us out the shining hand, And take us as a single soul. What reed was that on which I leant? A backward fancy, wherefore wake The old bitterness again, and break The low beginnings of content.

LXXXV.

Tuis truth came borne with bier and pall,

I felt it, when I sorrow'd most,

Tis better to have loved and lost, That never to have loved at allO true in word, and tried in deed, Demanding, so to bring relief To this which is our common grief, What kind of life is that I lead; And whether trust in things above

Be dimm'd of sorrow, or sustain'd; And whether love for him have drain'd

My capabilities of love;

Your words have virtue such as draws
A faithful answer from the breast,
Thro' light reproaches, half exprest,
And loyal unto kindly laws.
My blood an even tenor kept,

Till on mine ear this message falls,
That in Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touch'd him, and he slept.
The great Intelligences fair

That range above our mortal state, In circle round the blessed gate, Received and gave him welcome there; And led him thro' the blissful climes, And show'd him in the fountain fresh

All knowledge that the sons of flesh Shall gather in the cycled times. But I remain'd whose hopes were dim, Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,

To wander on a darken'd earth, Where all things round me breathed of him.

O friendship, equal-poised control,
O heart, with kindliest motion warm,
O sacred essence, other form,
O solemn ghost, O crowned soul!
Yet none could better know than I,
How much of act at human hands
The sense of human will demands
By which we dare to live or die.
Whatever way my days decline,

I felt and feel, tho' left alone,
His being working in mine own,
The footsteps of his life in mine;
A life that all the Muses deck'd

With gifts of grace, that might ex

An image comforting the mind, And in my grief a strength reserved. Likewise the imaginative woe,

That loved to handle spiritual strife, Diffused the shock thro' all my life, But in the present broke the blow. My pulses therefore beat again

For other friends that once I met; Nor can it suit me to forget The mighty hopes that make us men. I woo your love : 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," ('an 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:

"Tis 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.

LXXXVI.

SWEET after showers, ambrosial air, That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom And meadow, slowly breathing bare The round of space, and rapt below Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, And shadowing down the horned flood

In ripples, fan my brows and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy
breath

Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odor streaming far,
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper Peace."
LXXXVII.

I PAST beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown;
I roved at random thro' the town,
And saw the tumult of the halls ;
And heard once more in college fanes
The storm their high-built organs
make,

And thunder-music, rolling, shake The prophets blazon'd on the panes; And caught once more the distant shout,

The measured pulse of racing oars Among the willows; paced the shores And many a bridge, and all about The same gray flats again, and felt The same, but not the same; and last

Up that long walk of limes I past To see the rooms in which he dwelt. Another name was on the door : I linger'd; all within was noise Of song, and clapping hands, and boys

That crash'd the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and

art;

And labor, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land; When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string;

And one would pierce an outer ring, And one an inner, here and there; And last the master-bowman, he, Would cleave the mark. A willing

ear

We lent him. Who, but hung to hear

The rapt oration flowing free From point to point, with power and grace

And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face. And seem to lift the form, and glow In azure orbits heavenly-wise; And over those ethereal eyes The bar of Michael Angelo.

LXXXVIII.

WILD bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes em-
ploy

Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy :
And I my harp would prelude woe,
I cannot all command the strings;
The glory of the sun of things
Will flash along the chords and go

LXXXIX.

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 brawl-
ing 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 fumbled 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 poets on the lawn: Or in the all-golden afternoon

A guest, or happy sister, sung,