Family

'Tis summer still, yet now and then a leaf
Falls from some stately tree.    True type of life!
How emblamatic of the pangs that grief
Wrings from our blighted hopes, that one by one
Drop from us in our wrestle with the strife
And natural passions of our stately youth.
And thus we fall beneath life's summer sun.
Each step conducts us through an opening door
Into new halls of being, hand in hand
With grave Experience, until we command
The open, wide-spread autumn fields, and store
The full ripe grain of Wisdom and of Truth.
As on life's tott'ring precipice we stand,
Our sins like withered leaves are blown about the land.

How weary is it none can tell,
    How dismally the days go by!
I hear the tinkling of the bell,
    I see the cross against the sky.

The year wears round to Autumn-tide,
    Yet comes no reaper to the corn;
The golden land is like a bride
    When first she knows herself forlorn;

She sits and weeps with all her hair
    Laid downward over tender hands;
For stainèd silk she hath no care,
    No care for broken ivory wands;

The silver cups beside her stand;
    The golden stars on the blue roof
Yet glitter, though against her hand
    His cold sword presses for a proof

He is not dead, but gone away.
    How many hours did she wait
For me, I wonder? Till the day
    Had faded wholly, and the gate

Clanged to behin...

Leaves fall and flowers fade,
Days come and go:
Now is sweet Summer laid
Low in her leafy glade,
Low like a fragrant maid,
Low, low, ah, low.

Tears fall and eyelids ache,
Hearts overflow:
Here for our dead love's sake
Let us our farewells make
Will he again awake?
Ah, no, no, no.

Winds sigh and skies are gray,
Days come and go:
Wild birds are flown away:
Where are the blooms of May?
Dead, dead, this many a day,
Under the snow.

Lips sigh and cheeks are pale,
Hearts overflow:
Will not some song or tale,
Kiss, or a flower frail,
With our dead love avail?
Ah, no, no, no.

Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion youth's first fiery glow,
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!

Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,
Mark how ...

Since shed or cottage I have none,
I sing the more, that thou hast one;
To whose glad threshold, and free door
I may a Poet come, though poor;
And eat with thee a savoury bit,
Paying but common thanks for it.
Yet should I chance, my Wicks, to see
An over-leaven look in thee,
To sour the bread, and turn the beer
To an exalted vinegar;
Or should'st thou prize me as a dish
Of thrice-boil'd worts, or third-day's fish,
I'd rather hungry go and come
Than to thy house be burdensome;
Yet, in my depth of grief, I'd be
One that should drop his beads for thee.

I

There is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;
There is no metre that's half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. -
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art that they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and metre that none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,
And the world would be richer one poet the more.

II

A thought to lift me up to those
Sweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;
The lofty, lowly attitudes
Of bluet and of bramble-rose:
To lift me where my mind may reach<...

My wind is turned to bitter north,
That was so soft a south before;
My sky, that shone so sunny bright,
With foggy gloom is clouded o’er
My gay green leaves are yellow-black,
Upon the dank autumnal floor;
For love, departed once, comes back
No more again, no more.
A roofless ruin lies my home,
For winds to blow and rains to pour;
One frosty night befell, and lo,
I find my summer days are o’er:
The heart bereaved, of why and how
Unknowing, knows that yet before
It had what e’en to Memory now
Returns no more, no more.

I seek no more to bridge the gulf that lies
Betwixt our separate ways;
For vainly my heart prays,
Hope droops her head and dies;
I see the sad, tired answer in your eyes.

I did not heed, and yet the stars were clear;
Dreaming that love could mate
Lives grown so separate;--
But at the best, my dear,
I see we should not have been very near.

I knew the end before the end was nigh:
The stars have grown so plain;
Vainly I sigh, in vain
For things that come to some,
But unto you and me will never come.

The wind croons under the icicled eaves--
    Croons and mutters a wordless song,
And the old elm chafes its skeleton leaves
    Against the windows all night long.

Under the spectral garden wall,
    The drifts creep steadily high and higher
And the lamp in the cottage lattice small
    Twinkles and winks like an eye of fire.

But I see a vision of summer skies
    Growing out of the embers red,
Under the lids of my half-shut eyes,
    With my arms crossed idly under my head.

I see a stile, and a roadside lime,
    With buttercups growing about its feet,
And a footpath winding a sinuous line
    In and out of the billowy wheat.

For long ago in the summer noons,
    Under the shade of that trysting tree,
My love brought wheat e...

At the time when the stars are grey,
And the gold of the molten moon
Fades, and the twilight is thinned,
And the sun leaps up, and the wind,
A light rose, not of the day,
A stronger light than of noon.

As the light of a face much loved
Was the face of the light that clomb;
As a mother’s whitened with woes
Her adorable head that arose;
As the sound of a God that is moved,
Her voice went forth upon Rome.

At her lips it fluttered and failed
Twice, and sobbed into song,
And sank as a flame sinks under;
Then spake, and the speech was thunder,
And the cheek as he heard it paled
Of the wrongdoer grown grey with the wrong.

“Is it time, is it time appointed,
Angel of time, is it near?
For the spent night aches into day
When th...

I sat beneath a willow tree,
Where water falls and calls;
While fancies upon fancies solaced me,
Some true, and some were false.

Who set their heart upon a hope
That never comes to pass,
Droop in the end like fading heliotrope,
The sun's wan looking-glass.

Who set their will upon a whim
Clung to through good and ill,
Are wrecked alike whether they sink or swim,
Or hit or miss their will.

All things are vain that wax and wane,
For which we waste our breath;
Love only doth not wane and is not vain,
Love only outlives death.

A singing lark rose toward the sky,
Circling he sang amain;
He sang, a speck scarce visible sky-high,
And then he sank again.

A second like a sunlit spark
Flashed singing up his track;

I.

Beneath an old beech-tree
They sat together,
Fair as a flower was she
Of summer weather.
They spoke of life and love,
While, through the boughs above,
The sunlight, like a dove,
Dropped many a feather.

II.

And there the violet,
The bluet near it,
Made blurs of azure wet
As if some spirit,
Or woodland dream, had gone
Sprinkling the earth with dawn,
When only Fay and Faun
Could see or hear it.

III.

She with her young, sweet face
And eyes gray-beaming,
Made of that forest place
A spot for dreaming:
A spot for Oreads
To smooth their nut-brown braids,
For Dryads of the glades
To dance in, gleaming.

IV.

So dim the place, so blest,
One had not wondered
H...

The Text is that of Scott's Minstrelsy (1802). It was 'taken down from the recitation of a lady' (his mother's sister, Miss Christian Rutherford), and collated with a copy in the Tytler-Brown MS. The ballad is also called Gil Brenton, Lord Dingwall, Bangwell, Bengwill, or Brangwill, Bothwell, etc.

The Story is a great favourite, not only in Scandinavian ballads, but also in all northern literature. The magical agency of bed, blankets, sheets, and sword, is elsewhere extended to a chair, a stepping-stone by the bedside (see the Boy and the Mantle, First Series, p. 119), or the Billie Blin (see Young Bekie, First Series, pp. 6, 7, and Willie's Lady, p. 19). The Norwegian tale of Aase and the Prince is known to English readers in Dasent's Annie the Goosegirl<...