head,

Yet all with sense of something vainly

mist,

Of something lost, but when I never wist.

How empty seems to me the populous street,

One figure gone I daily loved to meet,The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow

Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below!

And, ah, what absence feel I at my side, Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide,

What sense of diminution in the air Once so inspiring, Emerson not there! But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet

Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet,

And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey's end;

For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied,

A nature sloping to the southern side;
I thank her for it, though when clouds
arise

Such natures double-darken gloomy skies.
I muse upon the margin of the sea,
Our common pathway to the new To Be,
Watching the sails, that lessen more and
more,

Of good and beautiful embarked before; With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear

Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere. Whose friendly-peopled shore I some times see,

By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me,
Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun,
My moorings to the past snap one by

oue.

Even with the thought there tingles through my veins

Sense of unwarned renewal; I, the dead, Receive and house again the ardor fled, As once Alcestis; to the ruddy brim Feel masculine virtue flooding every limb, And life, like Spring returning, brings the key

That sets my senses from their winter free,

Dancing like naked fauns too glad for shame.

Her passion, purified to palest flame,
Can it thus kindle? Is her purpose this?
I will not argue, lest 1 lose a bliss
That makes me dream Tithonus' fortune
mine,

(Or what of it was palpably divine
Ere came the fruitlessly immortal gift; )
I cannot curb my hope's imperious drift
That wings with fire my dull mortality;
Though fancy-forged, 't is all I feel or see.

shown,

Of maiden rondure, like the rose halfblown.

If dream, turn real! If a vision, stay! Take mortal shape, my philtre's spell obey!

If hags compel thee from thy secret sky With gruesome incantations, why not I, Whose only magic is that I distil

A potion, blent of passion, thought, and will,

Deeper in reach, in force of fate more rich,

Than e'er was juice wrung by Thessalian witch

From moon-enchanted herbs, -a potion brewed

Of my best life in each diviner mood? Myself the elixir am, myself the bowl Seething and mantling with my soul of soul.

Taste and be humanized: what though the cup,

With thy lips frenzied, shatter? Drink it up!

If but these arms may clasp, o'erquited so, My world, thy heaven, all life means I

shall know.

for lips;

And as her neck my happy arms enfold,

Flooded and lustred with her loosened gold,

She whispers words each sweeter than a kiss:

Then, wakened with the shock of sudden bliss,

My arms are empty, my awakener fied, And, silent in the silent sky o'erhead, But coldly as on ice-plated snow, she gleams,

Herself the mother and the child of dreams.

Be set in heaven again by prayers and

tears

And quenchless sacrifice of all my years

leap, And life for life's redemption paid hold cheap!

But what resource when she herself descends

From her blue throne, and o'er her vassal bends

That shape thrice-deified by love, those eyes

Wherein the Lethe of all others lies? When my white queen of heaven's remoteness tires,

Herself against her other self conspires, Takes woman's nature, walks in mortal ways,

And finds in my remorse her beauty's praise?

Yet all would I renounce to dream again The dream in dreams fulfilled that made my pain,

My noble pain that heightened all my

years

ceive.

My moon is set; my vision set with her; No more can worship vain my pulses stir.

Goddess Triform, I own thy triple spell, My heaven's queen, queen, too, of my earth and hell!

THE BLACK PREACHER.

A BRETON LEGEND.

Ar Carnac in Brittany, close on the bay, They show you a church, or rather the gray

Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach,

Roofless and splintered with thunderstone,

'Mid lichen - blurred gravestones all alone;

is the kind of ruin strange sights to

That

see

may have their teaching for you and me.

Something like this, then, my guide had to tell,

Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell;

But since I might chance give his mean. ing a wrench,

He talking his patois and I EnglishFrench,

I'll put what he told me, preserving the tone,

In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own.

An abbey-church stood here, once on a time,

Built as a death-bed atonement for crime :

'T was for somebody's sins, I know not whose ;

But sinners are plenty, and you can choose.

Though a cloister now of the duskwinged bat,

'T was rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat, Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl, Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul.