Happiness

Who is this who gently slips
Through my door, and stands and sighs,
Hovering in a soft eclipse,
With a finger on her lips
And a meaning in her eyes?

Once she came to visit me
In white robes with festal airs,
Glad surprises, songs of glee;
Now in silence cometh she,
And a sombre garb she wears.

Once I waited and was tired,
Chid her visits as too few;
Crownless now and undesired,
She to seek me is inspired
Oftener than she used to do.

Grave her coming is and still,
Sober her appealing mien,
Tender thoughts her glances fill;
But I shudder, as one will
When an open grave is seen.

Wherefore, friend,--for friend thou art,--
Should I wrong thee thus and grieve?
Wherefore push thee from my heart?
Of my morning...

Praise of the knights of old
May sleep: their tale is told,
And no man cares:
The praise which fires our lips is
A knight’s whose fame eclipses
All of theirs.

The ruddiest light in heaven
Blazed as his birth-star seven
Long years ago:
All glory crown that old year
Which brought our stout small soldier
With the snow!

Each baby born has one
Star, for his friends a sun,
The first of stars:
And we, the more we scan it,
The more grow sure your planet,
Child, was Mars.

For each one flower, perchance,
Blooms as his cognizance:
The snowdrop chill,
The violet unbeholden,
For some: for you the golden
Daffodil

Erect, a fighting flower,
It breasts the breeziest hour
That ever blew,
And bent or ...

A Conversation

We talked with open heart, and tongue
Affectionate and true,
A pair of friends, though I was young,
And Matthew seventy-two.

We lay beneath a spreading oak,
Beside a mossy seat;
And from the turf a fountain broke
And gurgled at our feet.

`Now, Matthew!' said I, `let us match
This water's pleasant tune
With some old border-song, or catch
That suits a summer's noon;

`Or of the church-clock and the chimes
Sing here beneath the shade
That half-mad thing of witty rhymes
Which you last April made!'

In silence Matthew lay, and eyed
The spring beneath the tree;
And thus the dear old man replied,
The grey-haired man of glee:

`No check, no stay, this streamlet fears,
How merrily it goes!

Honour to you who sit
Near to the well of wit,
And drink your fill of it!

Glory and worship be
To you, sweet Maids, thrice three,
Who still inspire me;

And teach me how to sing
Unto the lyric string,
My measures ravishing!

Then, while I sing your praise,
My priest-hood crown with bays
Green to the end of days!

Thou splendid child of southern skies!
    Thy brilliant plumes and graceful form
Are not so precious in mine eyes
    As those gray heralds of the morn,
Which in my own beloved land
    Welcome the azure car of spring,
When budding flowers and leaves expand
    On hawthorn boughs, and sweetly sing.

But thou art suited to the clime,
    The golden clime, that gave thee birth;
Where beauty reigns o'er scenes sublime,
    And fadeless verdure decks the earth;
Where nature faints beneath the blaze
    Of her own gorgeous crown of light,
And exiled eyes, with aching gaze,
    Sigh for the softer shades of night,

That memory to their dreams may bring
    Past scenes, to cheer their sleeping eye,
The dark green woods where linnets sing,
  ...

Charms, that call down the moon from out her sphere,
On this sick youth work your enchantments here!
Bind up his senses with your numbers, so
As to entrance his pain, or cure his woe.
Fall gently, gently, and a-while him keep
Lost in the civil wilderness of sleep:
That done, then let him, dispossess'd of pain,
Like to a slumbering bride, awake again.

High on his Patmos of the Southern Seas
Our northern dreamer sleeps,
Strange stars above him, and above his grave
Strange leaves and wings their tropic splendours wave,
While, far beneath, mile after shimmering mile,
The great Pacific, with its faery deeps,
Smiles all day long its silken secret smile.

Son of a race nomadic, finding still
Its home in regions furthest from its home,
Ranging untired the borders of the world,
And resting but to roam;
Loved of his land, and making all his boast
The birthright of the blood from which he came,
Heir to those lights that guard the Scottish coast,
And caring only for a filial fame;
Proud, if a poet, he was Scotsman most,
And bore a Scottish name.

Death, that long sought our poet, finds at last,
Dea...

Here where the coves indent the shore and fall
And fill with ebb and flowing of the tides;
Whereon some barge rocks or some dory rides,
By which old orchards bloom, or, from the wall,
Pelt every lane with fruit; where gardens, tall
With roses, riot; swift my gladness glides
To that old pasture where the mushroom hides,
The chicory blooms and Peace sits mid them all.
Fenced in with rails and rocks, its emerald slopes.
Ribbed with huge granite, where the placid cows
Tinkle a browsing bell, roll to a height
Wherefrom the sea, bright as adventuring hopes,
Swept of white sails and plowed of foaming prows,
Leaps like a Nereid on the ravished sight.

As the inhastening tide doth roll,
Dear and desired, along the whole
    Wide shining strand, and floods the caves,
    Your love comes filling with happy waves
The open sea-shore of my soul.

But inland from the seaward spaces,
None knows, not even you, the places
    Brimmed, at your coming, out of sight,
    --The little solitudes of delight
This tide constrains in dim embraces.

You see the happy shore, wave-rimmed,
But know not of the quiet dimmed
    Rivers your coming floods and fills,
    The little pools 'mid happier hills,
My silent rivulets, over-brimmed.

What, I have secrets from you?    Yes.
But, visiting Sea, your love doth press
    And reach in further than you know,
    And fills all these; and when you go,
There...

Oh, deem not they are blest alone
Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep;
The Power who pities man, has shown
A blessing for the eyes that weep.

The light of smiles shall fill again
The lids that overflow with tears;
And weary hours of woe and pain
Are promises of happier years.

There is a day of sunny rest
For every dark and troubled night;
And grief may bide an evening guest,
But joy shall come with early light.

And thou, who, o'er thy friend's low bier,
Sheddest the bitter drops like rain,
Hope that a brighter, happier sphere
Will give him to thy arms again.

Nor let the good man's trust depart,
Though life its common gifts deny,
Though with a pierced and broken heart,
And spurned of men, he goes to die.

For God h...

Gold-haired she stood among the golden-rod,
A girl, embodying all the Golden Age,
Who made that autumn day a glorious page
Out of a book of gold inspired of God
And made for Him by priests and worshippers
Of Truth and Beauty, putting their praise in gold.
The golden blossoms round her and, gold-rolled,
The fields before, were as a golden verse
Of which she was the bright initial: she!
My heart-song's gold beginning, from whom grew
Love's golden ritual, filled with aureate gleams
And music, which my soul read wonderingly
Within Love's book of gold, that mightily drew
Our souls together, binding them with dreams.

("Il semblait grelotter.")

[XXXVI., December, 1837.]


He seemed to shiver, for the wind was keen.
'Twas a poor statue underneath a mass
Of leafless branches, with a blackened back
And a green foot - an isolated Faun
In old deserted park, who, bending forward,
Half-merged himself in the entangled boughs,
Half in his marble settings. He was there,
Pensive, and bound to earth; and, as all things
Devoid of movement, he was there - forgotten.

Trees were around him, whipped by icy blasts -
Gigantic chestnuts, without leaf or bird,
And, like himself, grown old in that same place.
Through the dark network of their undergrowth,
Pallid his aspect; and the earth was brown.
Starless and moonless, a rough winter's night
Was letting down h...

Dark lies the earth, and bright with worlds the sky:
That soft, large, lustrous star, that first outshone,
Still holds us spelled with potent sorcery.


Dilating, shrinking, lightening, it hath won
Our spirit with its strange strong influence,
And sways it as the tides beneath the moon.


What impulse this, o'ermastering heart and sense?
Exalted, thrilled, the freed soul fain would soar
Unto that point of shining prominence,


Craving new fields and some unheard-of shore,
Yea, all the heavens, for her activity,
To mount with daring flight, to hover o'er


Low hills of earth, flat meadows, level sea,
And earthly joy and trouble.    In this hour
Of waning light and sound, of mystery,


Of shadowed love and beauty-veil...

Poor snail, that toilest at my weary feet,
Thou, too, must have thy burden! Life is sweet
If we would make it so. How vast a load
To carry all its days along the road
Of its serene existence! Christian-like,
It toils with patience, seeking sweet repose
Within itself when wearied with the throes
Of its life-struggle. The low sounds that strike
Upon the ear in wafts of melody,
Are cruel mockeries, O snail, of thee.
The cricket's chirp, the grasshopper's shrill tone,
The locust's jarring cry, all mock thy lone
And dumb-like presence. May this heart of mine,
When tried, put on a resignation such as thine.

Lais when young, and all her charms in flower,
    Lais, whose beauty was the fateful light
    That led great ships to anchor in the night
And bring their priceless cargoes to her bower,
Lais yet found her cup of sweet turned sour.
    Great Plato's pupil, from his lofty height,
    Zenocrates, unmoved, had seen the white
Sweet wonder of her, and defied her power.

She snared the world in nets of subtle wiles:
    The proud, the famed, all clamoured at her gate;
    Dictators plead, inside her portico;
Wisdom sought madness, in her favouring smiles;
    Now was she made the laughing-stock of fate:
    One loosed her clinging arms, and bade her go.

Well, you shall have that song which Leonard wrote:
It was last summer on a tour in Wales:
Old James was with me: we that day had been
Up Snowdon; and I wish’d for Leonard there,
And found him in Llanberis: then we crost
Between the lakes, and clamber’d half way up
The counter side; and that same song of his
He told me; for I banter’d him, and swore
They said he lived shut up within himself,
A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days,
That, setting the how much before the how,
Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, ‘Give,
Cram us with all,’ but count not me the herd!


To which ‘They call me what they will,’ he said:
‘But I was born too late: the fair new forms,
That float about the threshold of an age,
Like truths of Science waiting to be caught–

Safe in the magic of my woods
I lay, and watched the dying light.
Faint in the pale high solitudes,
And washed with rain and veiled by night,

Silver and blue and green were showing.
And the dark woods grew darker still;
And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;
And quietness crept up the hill;

And no wind was blowing

And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.

And there I waited breathlessly,
Alone; and slowly the holy three,
The three that I loved, together grew
One, in the hour of kn...

[1]

An Address To The Duke De La Rochefoucauld.[2]

While watching man in all his phases,
And seeing that, in many cases,
He acts just like the brute creation, -
I've thought the lord of all these races
Of no less failings show'd the traces
Than do his lieges in relation;
And that, in making it, Dame Nature
Hath put a spice in every creature
From off the self-same spirit-stuff -
Not from the immaterial,
But what we call ethereal,
Refined from matter rough.
An illustration please to hear.
Just on the still frontier
Of either day or night, -
Or when the lord of light
Reclines his radiant head
Upon his watery bed,
Or when he dons the gear,
To drive a new career, -
While yet with doubtful sway
The...