Death

The knell was tolled--the requiem sung,
    The solemn burial-service read;
And tributes from the heart and tongue
    Were rendered to the dead.

The dead?--Religion answers, "No!
    She is not dead--She can not die!
A mortal left this vale of wo!--
    An angel lives on high!"

The earth upon her coffin-lid
    Sounded a hollow, harsh adieu!
The mound arose, and she was hid
    For ever from the view!

For ever?--Drearily the thought
    Passed, like an ice-bolt, through the brain;
When Faith the recollection brought
    That we shall meet again.

The mourners wound their silent way
    Adown the mountain's gentle slope,
Which, basking in the smile of May,
    Looked cheerfully as hope.

As hope?--What hope?--Tha...

    A Belgian Priest-Soldier Speaks: -


GURR! You 'cochon'! Stand and fight!
Show your mettle! Snarl and bite!
Spawn of an accursed race,
Turn and meet me face to face!
Here amid the wreck and rout
Let us grip and have it out!
Here where ruins rock and reel
Let us settle, steel to steel!
Look! Our houses, how they spit
Sparks from brands your friends have lit.
See! Our gutters running red,
Bright with blood your friends have shed.
Hark! Amid your drunken brawl
How our maidens shriek and call.
Why have YOU come here alone,
To this hearth's blood-spattered stone?
Come to ravish, come to loot,
Come to play the ghoulish brute.
Ah, indeed! We well are met,
Bayonet to bayonet.
God! I never killed a man:
Now I'll...

Sweet solitude, what joy to be alone--
In wild, wood-shady dell to stay for hours.
Twould soften hearts if they were hard as stone
To see glad butterflies and smiling flowers.
Tis pleasant in these quiet lonely places,
Where not the voice of man our pleasure mars,
To see the little bees with coal black faces
Gathering sweets from little flowers like stars.

The wind seems calling, though not understood.
A voice is speaking; hark, it louder calls.
It echoes in the far-outstretching wood.
First twas a hum, but now it loudly squalls;
And then the pattering rain begins to fall,
And it is hushed--the fern leaves scarcely shake,
The tottergrass it scarcely stirs at all.
And then the rolling thunder gets awake,
And from black clouds the lightning flashes break.<...

When I reflect with serious sense,
While years and years run on,
How soon I may be summoned hence -
There's cook a-calling John.

Our lives are built so frail and poor,
On sand and not on rocks,
We're hourly standing at Death's door -
There's some one double knocks.

All human days have settled terms,
Our fates we cannot force;
This flesh of mine will feed the worms -
They're come to lunch of course!

And when my body's turned to clay,
And dear friends hear my knell,
Oh let them give a sigh and say -
I hear the upstairs bell!

(The Argosy, March 1866.)


If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day,
    O, what a day to-day would be!
But now he's away, miles and miles away
    From me across the sea.

O little bird, flying, flying, flying
    To your nest in the warm west,
Tell him as you pass that I am dying,
    As you pass home to your nest.

I have a sister, I have a brother,
    A faithful hound, a tame white dove;
But I had another, once I had another,
    And I miss him, my love, my love!

In this weary world it is so cold, so cold,
    While I sit here all alone;
I would not like to wait and to grow old,
    But just to be dead and gone.

Make me fair when I lie dead on my bed,
    Fair where I am lying:
Perhaps he may come and ...

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews, sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well,
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from...

I.
I WAS the chief of the race—he had stricken my father dead—
But I gather’d my fellows together, I swore I would strike off his head.
Each of them look’d like a king, and was noble in birth as in worth,
And each of them boasted he sprang from the oldest race upon earth.
Each was as brave in the light as the bravest hero of song,
And each of them liefer had died than have done one another a wrong.
He lived on an isle in the ocean—we sail’d on a Friday morn—
He that had slain my father the day before I was born.

II.
And we came to the isle in the ocean, and there on the shore was he.
But a sudden blast blew us out and away thro’ a boundless sea.

III.
And we came to the Silent Isle that we never had touch’d at before,
Where a silent ocean always broke on a si...

Low as a lute, my love, beneath the call
Of storm, I hear a melancholy wind;
The memorably mournful wind of yore
Which is the very brother of the one
That wanders, like a hermit, by the mound
Of Death, in lone Annatanam. A song
Was shaped for this, what time we heard outside
The gentle falling of the faded leaf
In quiet noons: a song whose theme doth turn
On gaps of Ruin and the gay-green clifts
Beneath the summits haunted by the moon.
Yea, much it travels to the dens of dole;
And in the midst of this strange rhyme, my lords,
Our Desolation like a phantom sits
With wasted cheeks and eyes that cannot weep
And fastened lips crampt up in marvellous pain.

A song in whose voice is the voice of the foam
And the rhyme of the wintering wave,
And the to...

Good-night, my love, for I have dreamed of thee
In waking dreams, until my soul is lost--
Is lost in passion's wide and shoreless sea,
Where, like a ship, unruddered, it is tost
Hither and thither at the wild waves' will.
There is no potent Master's voice to still
This newer, more tempestuous Galilee!

The stormy petrels of my fancy fly
In warning course across the darkening green,
And, like a frightened bird, my heart doth cry
And seek to find some rock of rest between
The threatening sky and the relentless wave.
It is not length of life that grief doth crave,
But only calm and peace in which to die.

Here let me rest upon this single hope,
For oh, my wings are weary of the wind,
And with its stress no more may strive or cope.
One cry has dulle...

When in the early dawn I hear the thrushes,
    And like a flood of waters o'er my heart
The memory of another summer rushes,
    How can I rise up, and perform my part?

When in the languid eve I hear the wailing
    Of the uncomforted sad mourning dove,
Whose grief, like mine, seems deep as unavailing,
    What will I do with all this wealth of love?

When the sweet rain falls over hills and meadows,
    And the tall poplar's silver leaves are wet,
And, like my soul, the world seems draped in shadow,
    How shall I hush this passionate regret?

When the wild bee is wooing the red clover,
    And the fair rose smiles on the butterfly,
Missing thy smile and kiss, O love, my lover,
    Who on God's earth so desolate as I?

My tortured sense...

Not all thy flushing suns are set,
Herrick, as yet;
Nor doth this far-drawn hemisphere
Frown and look sullen ev'rywhere.
Days may conclude in nights, and suns may rest
As dead within the west;
Yet, the next morn, regild the fragrant east.

Alas ! for me, that I have lost
E'en all almost;
Sunk is my sight, set is my sun,
And all the loom of life undone:
The staff, the elm, the prop, the shelt'ring wall
Whereon my vine did crawl,
Now, now blown down; needs must the old stock fall.

Yet, Porter, while thou keep'st alive,
In death I thrive:
And like a phoenix re-aspire
From out my nard and fun'ral fire;
And as I prune my feathered youth, so I
Do mar'l how I could die
When I had thee, my chief preserver, by.

I'm up, I'm up, ...

Around me broods the dim, mysterious Night,
    Star-lit and still.
No whisper comes across the Plain,
Asleep beneath the breezes light,
Which scarcely stir the growing grain.
Slow chimes the quiet midnight hour
In some unseen and distant tower,
While round me broods the vague, mysterious Night,
    Star-lit, and cool, and still.

And I must desecrate this silent time
    Of drowsy dreams!
On mighty wings towards the sky,
Towards the stars, I have to climb
And o'er the sleeping country fly,
And such far-echoing clamour make
That all the villages must wake.
So must I desecrate this quiet time
    Of soft and drowsy dreams!

The hour comes ... soon must I say farewell
    To this fair earth.
Then to my little room I go
Where I ...

In Finland there is a Castle which is called the New Rock, moated about with a river of unfounded depth, the water black and the fish therein very distateful to the palate. In this are spectres often seen, which foreshew either the death of the Governor, or some prime officer belonging to the place; and most commonly it appeareth in the shape of an harper, sweetly singing and dallying and playing under the water.

It is reported of one Donica, that after she was dead, the Devil walked in her body for the space of two years, so that none suspected but that she was still alive; for she did both speak and eat, though very sparingly; only she had a deep paleness on her countenance, which was the only sign of death. At length a Magician coming by where she was then in the company of many other virgins, as soon as he beheld her he sai...

'There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only Poets know'; 'twas rightly said;
Whom could the Muses else allure to tread
Their smoothest paths, to wear their lightest chains?
When happiest Fancy has inspired the strains,
How oft the malice of one luckless word
Pursues the Enthusiast to the social board,
Haunts him belated on the silent plains!
Yet he repines not, if his thought stand clear,
At last, of hindrance and obscurity,
Fresh as the star that crowns the brow of morn;
Bright, speckless, as a softly-moulded tear
The moment it has left the virgin's eye,
Or rain-drop lingering on the pointed thorn.

WOODSTOCK, CONN., JULY 4, 1877

Not to myself this breath of vesper song,
Not to these patient friends, this kindly throng,
Not to this hallowed morning, though it be
Our summer Christmas, Freedom's jubilee,
When every summit, topmast, steeple, tower,
That owns her empire spreads her starry flower,
Its blood-streaked leaves in heaven's benignant dew
Washed clean from every crimson stain they knew, -
No, not to these the passing thrills belong
That steal my breath to hush themselves with song.
These moments all are memory's; I have come
To speak with lips that rather should be dumb;
For what are words? At every step I tread
The dust that wore the footprints of the dead
But for whose life my life had never known
This faded vesture which it calls its own.

If I should quit thee, sacrifice, forswear,
    To what, my art, shall I give thee in keeping?
    To the long winds of heaven?    Shall these come sweeping
My songs forgone against my face and hair?

Or shall the mountain streams my lost joys bear,
    My past poetic pain in the rain be weeping?
    No, I shall live a poet waking, sleeping,
And I shall die a poet unaware.

From me, my art, thou canst not pass away;
    And I, a singer though I cease to sing,
            Shall own thee without joy in thee or woe.

Through my indifferent words of every day,
    Scattered and all unlinked the rhymes shall ring
            And make my poem; and I shall not know.

    Thou tranquil night, and thou, O gentle ray
    Of the declining moon; and thou, that o'er
    The rock appearest, 'mid the silent grove,
    The messenger of day; how dear ye were,
    And how delightful to these eyes, while yet
    Unknown the furies, and grim Fate! But now,
    No gentle sight can soothe this wounded soul.
    Then, only, can forgotten joy revive,
    When through the air, and o'er the trembling fields
    The raging south wind whirls its clouds of dust;
    And when the car, the pondrous car of Jove,
    Omnipotent, high-thundering o'er our heads,
    A pathway cleaves athwart the dusky sky.
    Then would I love with storm-charged clouds to fly
    Along the cliffs, along the valleys deep,
    The headlong flight of frightened flocks to wa...

Not, not for thee,
Beloved child, the burning grasp of life
Shall bruise the tender soul. The noise, and strife,
And clamour of midday thou shall not see;
But wrapt for ever in thy quiet grave,
Too little to have known the earthly lot,
Time's clashing hosts above thine innocent head,
Wave upon wave,
Shall break, or pass as with an army's tread,
And harm thee not.

A few short years
We of the living flesh and restless brain
Shall plumb the deeps of life and know the strain,
The fleeting gleams of joy, the fruitless tears;
And then at last when all is touched and tried,
Our own immutable night shall fall, and deep
In the same silent plot, O little friend,
Side by thy side,
In peace that changeth not, nor knoweth end,
We too shall sleep.