SIR LAUNCELOT & QUEEN GUINEVERE. a Fragment. LIKE souls that balance joy and pain, Came in a sun-lit fall of rain. In crystal vapour everywhere Blue isles of Heaven laugh'd between, And, far in forest-deeps unseen, The topmost linden gather'd green From draughts of balmy air. Sometimes the linnet piped his song: Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel'd along, SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE. Hush'd all the groves from fear of wrong : By grassy capes with fuller sound In curves the yellowing river ran, To spread into the perfect fan, Then, in the boyhood of the year, She seem'd a part of joyous Spring: A gown of grass-green silk she wore, Now on some twisted ivy-net, Now by some tinkling rivulet, On mosses thick with violet, Her cream-white mule his pastern set: 207 And now more fleet she skimm'd the plains 208 SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE. Than she whose elfin prancer springs By night to eery warblings, When all the glimmering moorland rings As she fled fast thro' sun and shade, The rein with dainty finger-tips, A man had given all other bliss, To waste his whole heart in one kiss VOL. II. A FAREWELL. FLOW down, cold rivulet, to the sea, Thy tribute wave deliver : No more by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever. Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea, A rivulet then a river: No where by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever. But here will sigh thine alder tree, And here by thee will hum the bee, P |