Death

I

Descend ye Nine! descend and sing;
The breathing instruments inspire,
Wake into voice each silent string,
And sweep the sounding lyre!
In a sadly-pleasing strain
Let the warbling lute complain:
Let the loud trumpet sound,
'Till the roofs all around
The shrill echo's rebound:
While in more lengthen'd notes and slow,
The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow.
Hark! the numbers, soft and clear,
Gently steal upon the ear;
Now louder, and yet louder rise,
And fill with spreading sounds the skies;
Exulting in triumph now swell the bold notes,
In broken air, trembling, the wild music floats;
'Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

II

By Music, minds an equal tem...

Whither, O, my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?
For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,
And wait on thy appearing,
Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,
Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;
Alas! her presence lingers
No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;
Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed
By a strange unworldly rest,
Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.
Yet when their secret chambers I essayed
My spirit sank, dismayed,
Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed - but then ...

So many stones have been thrown at me,
That I'm not frightened of them anymore,
And the pit has become a solid tower,
Tall among tall towers.
I thank the builders,
May care and sadness pass them by.
From here I'll see the sunrise earlier,
Here the sun's last ray rejoices.
And into the windows of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat...
As for my unfinished page,
The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm
And delicate, will finish it.

That melancholy phrase "It might have been,"
    However sad, doth in its heart enfold
    A hidden germ of promise! for I hold
WHATEVER MIGHT HAVE BEEN SHALL BE.
    Though in
Some other realm and life, the soul must win
    The goal that erst was possible.    But cold
    And cruel as the sound of frozen mould
Dropped on a coffin, are the words "Has been."

"She has been beautiful" -"he has been great,"
    "Rome has been powerful," we sigh and say.
    It is the pitying crust we toss decay,
The dirge we breathe o'er some degenerate state,
An epitaph for fame's unburied dead.
God pity those who live to hear it said!

Filled is Life's goblet to the brim;
And though my eyes with tears are dim,
I see its sparkling bubbles swim,
And chant a melancholy hymn
    With solemn voice and slow.

No purple flowers,--no garlands green,
Conceal the goblet's shade or sheen,
Nor maddening draughts of Hippocrene,
Like gleams of sunshine, flash between
    Thick leaves of mistletoe.

This goblet, wrought with curious art,
Is filled with waters, that upstart,
When the deep fountains of the heart,
By strong convulsions rent apart,
    Are running all to waste.

And as it mantling passes round,
With fennel is it wreathed and crowned,
Whose seed and foliage sun-imbrowned
Are in its waters steeped and drowned,
    And give a bitter taste.

Above the lowly ...

"The Atlas summits were veiled in purple gloom,
But a golden moon above rose clear and free.
The cactus thicket was ruddy with scarlet bloom
Where, through the silent shadow, he came to me."

"All my sixteen summers were but for this,
That He should pass, and, pausing, find me fair.
You Stars! bear golden witness!    My lips were his;
I would not live till others have fastened there."

"Oh take me, Death, ere ever the charm shall fade,
Ah, close these eyes, ere ever the dream grow dim.
I welcome thee with rapture, and unafraid,
Even as yesternight I welcomed Him."


"Not now, Impatient one; it well may be
That ten moons hence I shall return for thee."

    I.

    O night, send up the harvest moon
    To walk about the fields,
    And make of midnight magic noon
    On lonely tarns and wealds.

    In golden ranks, with golden crowns,
    All in the yellow land,
    Old solemn kings in rustling gowns,
    The shocks moon-charmed stand.

    Sky-mirror she, afloat in space,
    Beholds our coming morn:
    Her heavenly joy hath such a grace,
    It ripens earthly corn;

    Like some lone saint with upward eyes,
    Lost in the deeps of prayer:
    The people still their prayers and sighs,
    And gazing ripen there.

    II.

    So, like the corn moon-ripened last,
    Would I, weary and gray,
    On golden memories ripen fast,
    And ripening pass awa...

Mourner, that dost deserve thy mournfulness,
    Call thyself punished, call the earth thy hell;
    Say, "God is angry, and I earned it well--
I would not have him smile on wickedness:"

Say this, and straightway all thy grief grows less:--
    "God rules at least, I find as prophets tell,
    And proves it in this prison!"--then thy cell
Smiles with an unsuspected loveliness.

--"A prison--and yet from door and window-bar
    I catch a thousand breaths of his sweet air!
    Even to me his days and nights are fair!
He shows me many a flower and many a star!
And though I mourn and he is very far,
    He does not kill the hope that reaches there!"

Child of loud-throated War! the mountain Stream
Roars in thy hearing; but thy hour of rest
Is come, and thou art silent in thy age;
Save when the wind sweeps by and sounds are caught
Ambiguous, neither wholly thine nor theirs.
Oh! there is life that breathes not; Powers there are
That touch each other to the quick in modes
Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive,
No soul to dream of. What art Thou, from care
Cast off, abandoned by thy rugged Sire,
Nor by soft Peace adopted; though, in place
And in dimension, such that thou might'st seem
But a mere footstool to yon sovereign Lord,
Huge Cruachan, (a thing that meaner hills
Might crush, nor know that it had suffered harm;)
Yet he, not loth, in favour of thy claims
To reverence, suspends his own; submittin...

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.

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.

Hers was a lonely, shadowed lot;
Or so the unperceiving thought,
Who looked no deeper than her face,
Devoid of chiselled lines of grace -
No farther than her humble grate,
And wondered how she bore her fate.

Yet she was neither lone nor sad;
So much of love her spirit had,
She found an ever-flowing spring
Of happiness in everything.

So near to her was Nature's heart
It seemed a very living part
Of her own self; and bud and blade,
And heat and cold, and sun and shade,
And dawn and sunset, Spring and Fall,
Held raptures for her, one and all.

The year's four changing seasons brought
To her own door what thousands sought
In wandering ways and did not find -
Diversion and content of mind.

She loved the tasks that filled e...

Ay, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath,
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, mid bowers and brooks,
And, dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.

Canst thou depart and be forgotten so,
STANHOPE thou canst not, no deare STANHOPE, no:
But in despight of death the world shall see,
That Muse which so much graced was by thee
Can black Obliuion vtterly out-braue,
And set thee vp aboue thy silent Graue.
I meruail'd much the Derbian Nimphes were dumbe,
Or of those Muses, what should be become,
That of all those, the mountaines there among,
Not one this while thy Epicediumsung;
But so it is, when they of thee were reft,
They all those hills, and all those Riuers left,
And sullen growne, their former seates remoue,
Both from cleare Darwin, and from siluer Doue,
And for thy losse, they greeued are so sore,
That they haue vow'd they will come there no more;
But leaue thy losse to me, that I should rue thee,
Vn...

The Rose was sick, and smiling died;
And, being to be sanctified,
About the bed, there sighing stood
The sweet and flowery sisterhood.
Some hung the head, while some did bring,
To wash her, water from the spring;
Some laid her forth, while others wept,
But all a solemn fast there kept.
The holy sisters some among,
The sacred dirge and trental sung;
But ah!what sweets smelt everywhere,
As heaven had spent all perfumes there!
At last, when prayers for the dead,
And rites, were all accomplished,
They, weeping, spread a lawny loom,
And closed her up as in a tomb.

Day breaks on England down the Kentish hills,
Singing in the silence of the meadow-footing rills,
Day of my dreams, O day!
I saw them march from Dover, long ago,
With a silver cross before them, singing low,
Monks of Rome from their home where the blue seas break in foam,
Augustine with his feet of snow.

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town,
- Beauty she was statue cold - there's blood upon her gown:
Noon of my dreams, O noon!
Proud and godly kings had built her, long ago,
With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,
With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there,
And the streets where the great men go.

Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales,
When the first star shivers and the last wave pales:
O evening dreams!

Oh, the brow that has never been shaded by care
The rosewreath of pleasure may smilingly wear,
And the heart that is wholly a stranger to gloom,
'Mid the din of existence may fearlessly bloom;
But the one that is blighted by sadness and pain,
And blighted too rudely to blossom again,
When its hold on a reed-like support is resigned.
Nor peace, nor composure, nor solace can find,
Nor strength to submit to the chastening rod,
Save only in stillness alone with its God!

And oh! if a blissful communion with Heaven
To earth-wearied spirits has ever been given,
If the loved and the distant, the lost and the dead,
Who smiled on our pathway a moment, and fled,
Who darkened our sunshine and saddened our mirth,
To prove that the soul has no home upon earth,
...

O thou well-tried in grief,

Grant to thy child relief,
And view with mercy this unhappy one!


The sword within thy heart,

Speechless with bitter smart,
Thou Lookest up towards thy dying son.


Thou look'st to God on high,

And breathest many a sigh
O'er his and thy distress, thou holy One!


Who e'er can know

The depth of woe

Piercing my very bone?
The sorrows that my bosom fill,
Its trembling, its aye-yearning will,

Are known to thee, to thee alone!


Wherever I may go,

With woe, with woe, with woe,
My bosom sad is aching!

I scarce alone can creep,

I weep, I weep, I weep,
My very heart is breaking.

The flowers at my window

My...