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3.

And then I look'd up toward a mountain-tract,

That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:

I saw that every morning, far withdrawn Beyond the darkness and the cataract, God made himself an awful rose of dawn.

Unheeded and detaching, fold by fold, From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,

A vapor heavy, hueless, formless, cold, Came floating on for many a month and year,

Unheeded and I thought I would have spoken,

And warned that madman ere it grew too late :

But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,

When that cold vapor touch'd the palace gate,

And link'd again. I saw within my head

A gray and gap-tooth'd man as lean as death,

Who slowly rode across a wither'd heath,

And lighted at a ruin'd inn, and said:

4.

"Wrinkled hostler, grim and thin!

Here is custom come your way, Take my brute, and lead him in,

Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.

"Bitter barmaid, waning fast!

See that sheets are on my bed; What! the flower of life is past: It is long before you wed. "Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour, At the Dragon on the heath! Let us have a quiet hour,

Let us hob-and-nob with Death. "I am old, but let me drink; Bring me spices, bring me wine; I remember, when I think,

That my youth was half divine.

"Wine is good for shrivell'd lips,
When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamp'd in clay.

"Sit thee down, and have no shame, Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee: What care I for any name?

What for order or degree?

"Let me screw thee up a peg:

Let me loose thy tongue with wine: Callest thou that thing a leg?

Which is thinnest? thine or mine?

"Thou shalt not be saved by works: Thou hast been a sinner too: Ruin'd trunks on wither'd forks, Empty scarecrows, I and you!

"Fill the cup, and fill the can:

Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

"We are men of ruin'd blood;

Therefore comes it we are wise. Fish are we that love the mud,

Rising to no fancy-flies.

"Name and fame! to fly sublime Through the courts, the camps, the schools

Is to be the ball of Time,

Bandied in the hands of fools.
"Friendship!-to be two in one-
Let the canting liar pack!
Well I know, when I am gone,

How she mouths behind my back
"Virtue !-to be good and just-
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust,

Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell. "O! we two as well can look

Whited thought and cleanly life
As the priest, above his book
Leering at his neighbor's wife.
"Fill the cup, and fill the can:

Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

"Drink, and let the parties rave;
They are fill'd with idle spleen;
Rising, falling, like a wave,
For they know not what thy inean.

"He that roars for liberty

Faster binds a tyrant's power And the tyrant's cruel glee

Forces on the freer hour.

"Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.

"Greet her with applausive breath, Freedom, gayly doth she tread. In her right a civic wreath,

In her left a human head.

"No, I love not what is new; She is of an ancient house: And I think we know the hue

Of that cap upon her brows. "Let her go! her thirst she slakes

Where the bloody conduit runs: Then her sweetest meal she makes On the first-born of her sons.

"Drink to lofty hopes that coolVisions of a perfect State : Drink we, last, the public fool,

Frantic love and frantic hate. "Chant me now some wicked stave, Till thy drooping courage rise, And the glow-worm of the grave Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.

"Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;

Set thy hoary fancies free;

What is loathsome to the young

:

Savors well to thee and me.

"Change, reverting to the years, When thy nerves could understand What there is in loving tears,

And the warmth of hand in hand. "Tell me tales of thy first loveApril hopes, the fools of chance: Till the graves begin to move, And the dead begin to dance.

"Fill the can, and fill the cup: All the windy ways of men Are but dust that rises up,

And is lightly laid again.

"Trooping from their mouldy dens The chap-fallen circle spreads: Welcome, fellow-citizens,

Hollow hearts and empty heads! "You are bones, and what of that? Every face, however full, Padded round with flesh and fat, Is but modell'd on a skull. "Death is king, and Vivat Rex!

Tread a measure on the stones, Madam-if I know your sex,

From the fashion of your bones. "No, I cannot praise the fire

In your eye-nor yet your lip: All the more do I admire

Joints of cunning workmanship. "Lo! God's likeness-the ground-plan Neither modell'd, glazed, or framed: Buss me, thou rough sketch of man,

Far too naked to be shamed! "Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, While we keep a little breath! Drink to heavy Ignorance!

Hob-and nob with brother Death!

'Thou art mazed, the night is long,
And the longer night is near:
What! I am not all as wrong
As a bitter jest is dear.

"Youthful hopes, by scores, to all, When the locks are crisp and curl'd;

Unto me my maudlin gall

And my mockeries of the world.

"Fill the cup, and fill the can!

Mingle madness, mingle scorn! Dregs of life, and lees of man : Yet we will not die forlorn."

5.

The voice grew faint: there came a further change:

Once more uprose the mystic mountain range:

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THE EAGLE.

FRAGMENT.

HE clasps the crag with hooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

MOVE eastward, happy earth, and leave Yon orange sunset waning slow: From fringes of the faded eve,

O, happy planet, eastward go: Till over thy dark shoulder glow Thy silver sister-world, and rise To glass herself in dewy eyes That watch me from the glen below. Ah, bear me with thee, lightly borne,

Dip forward under starry light, And move me to my marriage-morn, And round again to happy night.

BREAK, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay.! And the stately ships go on

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
To their haven under the hill;
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

THE POET'S SONG.

THE rain had fallen, the Poet arose, He pass'd by the town and out of the street,

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A. TENNYSON.

Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier Grew side by side; and on the pavcthan their names, Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the ment lay park.

Huge Ammonites, and the first bones

And on the tables every clime and age of Time; Jumbled together; celts and calumets, Claymore and snow-shoe, toys in lava, fans

Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries, Laborious orient ivory sphere in The cursed Malayan crease, and battlesphere, [clubs From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls,

Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer,

His own forefathers' arms and armor hung.

And "this," he said, "was Hugh's at Agincourt;

And that was old Sir Ralph's at As

calon :

A good knight he ! we keep a chronicle With all about him," which he brought, and I

Dived in a hoard of tales that dealt with knights Half-legend, half-historic, counts and kings

Who laid about them at their wills and died;

And mixt with these, a lady, one that arm'd

Her own fair head, and sallying thro' the gate,

Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls.

"O miracle of women," said the book,

"O noble heart who, being strait-besieged

By this wild king to force her to his wish,

Nor bent, nor broke, nor shunn'd a soldier's death,

But now when all was lost or seem'd as lost

Her stature more than mortal in the burst

Of sunrise, her arm lifted, eyes on fire

Brake with a blast of trumpets from

the gate,

And, falling on them like a thunderbolt,

She trampled some beneath her horses' heels,

And some were whelm'd with missiles of the wall,

And some were push'd with lances

from the rock,

And part were drown'd within the whirling brook:

O miracle of noble womanhood!"

So sang the gallant glorious chron

icle; And, I all rapt in this, "Come out," he said.

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