Heartbreak

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,<...

Up from the South come the birds that were banished,
    Frightened away by the presence of frost.
Back to the vale comes the verdure that vanished,
    Back to the forest the leaves that were lost.
Over the hillside the carpet of splendor,
    Folded through Winter, Spring spreads down again;
Along the horizon, the tints that were tender,
    Lost hues of Summer time, burn bright as then.

Only the mountains' high summits are hoary,
    To the ice-fettered river the sun gives a key.
Once more the gleaming shore lists to the story
    Told by an amorous Summer-kissed sea.
All things revive that in Winter time perished,
    The rose buds again in the light o' the sun,
All that was beautiful, all that was cherished,
    Sweet things and dear things and all thing...

            I.

The fight was o'er; the flashing through the gloom,
Which robes the cannon as he wings a tomb,
Had ceased; and sulphury vapours upward driven
Had left the Earth, and but polluted Heaven:
The rattling roar which rung in every volley
Had left the echoes to their melancholy;
No more they shrieked their horror, boom for boom;
The strife was done, the vanquished had their doom;
The mutineers were crushed, dispersed, or ta'en,
Or lived to deem the happiest were the slain.
Few, few escaped, and these were hunted o'er
The isle they loved beyond their native shore.
No further home was theirs, it seemed, on earth,
Once renegades to that which gave them birth;
Tracked like wild beasts, like them they sought the wild,
As to a Mother's bosom flies the ...

A shadowed form before the light,
A gleaming face against the night,
Clutched hands across a halo bright
Of blowing hair, - her fixed sight
Stares down where moving black, below,
The river's deathly waves in murmurous silence flow.

The moon falls fainting on the sky,
The dark woods bow their heads in sorrow,
The earth sends up a misty sigh:
A soul defies the morrow!

When in dry hollows, hilled with hay,
The vesper-sparrow sings afar;
And, golden gray, dusk dies away
Beneath the amber evening-star:
There, where a warm and shadowy arm
The woodland lays around the farm,
To meet you where we kissed, dear heart,
To kiss you at the tryst, dear heart,
To kiss you at the tryst!

When clover fields smell cool with dew,
And crickets cry, and roads are still;
And faint and few the fire-flies strew
The dark where calls the whippoorwill;
There, in the lane, where sweet again
The petals of the wild-rose rain,
To stroll with head to head, dear heart,
And say the words oft said, dear heart,
And say the words oft said!

If after times
Should pay the least attention to these rhymes,
I bid them learn
'Tis not my own heart here
That doth so often seem to break and burn -
O no such thing! -
Nor is it my own dear
Always I sing:
But, as a scrivener in the market-place,
I sit and write for lovers, him or her,
Making a song to match each lover's case -
A trifling gift sometimes the gods confer!

(After STRATO)

A fantasy that came to me
    As wild and wantonly designed
As ever any dream might be
    Unraveled from a madman's mind, -
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
    By cunning of the spider-brain,
    And woven, in an hour of pain,
To trap the giddy flies of thought.

I stood beneath a summer moon
    All swollen to uncanny girth,
And hanging, like the sun at noon,
    Above the center of the earth;
    But with a sad and sallow light,
    As it had sickened of the night
And fallen in a pallid swoon.
Around me I could hear the rush
    Of sullen winds, and feel the whir
Of unseen wings apast me brush
    Like phantoms round a sepulcher;
And, like a carpeting of plush,0
    A lawn unrolled beneath my feet,
    Bespangled o'er with flo...

Here, where the great hills fall away
To bays of silver sea,
I hold within my hand to-day
A wild thing, strange to me.

Behind me is the deep green dell
Where lives familiar light;
The leaves and flowers I know so well
Are gleaming in my sight.

And yonder is the mountain glen,
Where sings in trees unstirred
By breath of breeze or axe of men
The shining satin-bird.

The old weird cry of plover comes
Across the marshy ways,
And here the hermit hornet hums,
And here the wild bee strays.

No novel life or light I see,
On hill, in dale beneath:
All things around are known to me
Except this bit of heath.

This touching growth hath made me dream
It sends my soul afar
To where the Scottish mountains gleam
Ag...

Whether the way be dark or light
    My soul shall sing as I journey on,
As sweetly sing in the deeps of night
    As it sang in the burst of the golden dawn.

Nothing can crush me, or silence me long,
    Though the heart be bowed, yet the soul will rise,
Higher and higher on wings of song,
    Till it swims like the lark in a sea of skies.

Though youth may fade, and love grow cold,
    And friends prove false, and best hopes blight,
Yet the sun will wade in waves of gold,
    And the stars in glory will shine at night.

Though all earth's joys from my life are missed,
    And I of the whole world stand bereft,
Yet dawns will be purple and amethyst,
    And I cannot be sad while the seas are left.

For I am a part of the mighty whole;

Youth, with an arrogant air,
Passes me by:
Age, on his tottering staff,
Stops with a sigh.

"Here is a flower, "he says,
"I knew when young:
It keeps its oldtime place
The woods among.

"Fresh and fragrant as when
I was a boy;
Still is it young as then,
And full of joy.

"Years have not changed it, no;
In leaf and bloom
It keeps the selfsame glow,
And the same perfume.

"Time, that has grayed my hair,
And bowed my form,
Retains it young and fair
And full of charm.

"The root from which it grows
Is firm and fit,
And every year bestows
New strength on it.

"Not so with me. The years
Have changed me much;
And care and pain and tears
Have left their touch.

"It keeps a s...

    Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart.
    The last illusion is destroyed,
    That I eternal thought. Destroyed!
    I feel all hope and all desire depart,
    For life and its deceitful joys.
    Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease!
    Naught can requite thy miseries;
    Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs.
    Life is a bitter, weary load,
    The world a slough. And now, repose!
    Despair no more, but find in Death
    The only boon Fate on our race bestows!
    Still, Nature, art thou doomed to fall,
    The victim scorned of that blind, brutal power
    That rules and ruins all.

I.
I stand on the mark beside the shore
Of the first white pilgrim's bended knee,
Where exile turned to ancestor,
And God was thanked for liberty.
I have run through the night, my skin is as dark,
I bend my knee down on this mark . . .
I look on the sky and the sea.

II.
O pilgrim-souls, I speak to you!
I see you come out proud and slow
From the land of the spirits pale as dew. . .
And round me and round me ye go!
O pilgrims, I have gasped and run
All night long from the whips of one
Who in your names works sin and woe.

III.
And thus I thought that I would come
And kneel here where I knelt before,
And feel your souls around me hum
In undertone to the ocean's roar;
And lift my black face, my black hand,
Here, in your nam...

1.

Adieu, thou Hill! [1] where early joy
Spread roses o'er my brow;
Where Science seeks each loitering boy
With knowledge to endow.
Adieu, my youthful friends or foes,
Partners of former bliss or woes;
No more through Ida's paths we stray;
Soon must I share the gloomy cell,
Whose ever-slumbering inmates dwell
Unconscious of the day.

2.

Adieu, ye hoary Regal Fanes,
Ye spires of Granta's vale,
Where Learning robed in sable reigns.
And Melancholy pale.
Ye comrades of the jovial hour,
Ye tenants of the classic bower,
On Cama's verdant margin plac'd,
Adieu! while memory still is mine,
For offerings on Oblivion's shrine,
These scenes must be effac'd.


3

Adieu, ye mountains of the clime<...

. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me,
Importuning, one wet and mild March night.
We walked and talked together. O her tale
Was very common; thousands know it all!
Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;
Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;
A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls
"Taken on" a few months at a dressmaker's
In the crush of the "season;" thirteen shillings a week!
The fashionable people's dresses done,
And they flown off, these fifty extra girls
Sent - to the streets: that is, to work that gives
Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes
Respectable employers all demand
Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!
And she - "Why, I have gone on down and down,
And there's the gutter, look, that ...