(To Harold.)

You you see her there! Only fifteen when first you came on her, And then the sweetest flower of all the wolds,

So lovely in the promise of her May, So winsome in her grace and gaiety, So loved by all the village people here, So happy in herself and in her home Dobson (agitated). Theer, theer! ha' done. I can't abeär to see her. [Exit. Dora. A child, and all as trustful as a child!

Five years of shame and suffering broke the heart

That only beat for you; and he, the father,

Thro' that dishonour which you brought upon us,

Has lost his health, his eyesight, even his mind.

Harold (covering his face). Enough! Dora. It seem'd so; only there was left A second daughter, and to her you came Veiling one sin to act another.

Harold.

No!

And the Light is Victor, and the dark

ness

Dawns into the Jubilee of the Ages.

TO PROFESSOR JEBB, WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM. FAIR things are slow to fade away, Bear witness you, that yesterday 1

From out the Ghost of Pindar in you

Roll'd an Olympian; and they say 2

That here the torpid mummy wheat
Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet

As that which gilds the glebe of
England,

Sunn'd with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend for awhile,
If greeted by your classic smile,

Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna, Blossom again on a colder isle.

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE. (IN ENNA.)

FAINT as a climate-changing bird that flies

All night across the darkness, and at dawn

Falls on the threshold of her native land, And can no more, thou camest, O my child,

Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,

Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb

With passing thro' at once from state to state,

Until I brought thee hither, that the day,

When here thy hands let fall the gather'd flower,

Might break thro' clouded memories once again

On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale Saw thee, and flash'd into a frolic of song