Identity

Seven long years has the desert rain
Dropped on the clods that hide thy face;
Seven long years of sorrow and pain
I have thought of thy burial-place.

Thought of thy fate in the distant west,
Dying with none that loved thee near;
They who flung the earth on thy breast
Turned from the spot williout a tear.

There, I think, on that lonely grave,
Violets spring in the soft May shower;
There, in the summer breezes, wave
Crimson phlox and moccasin flower.

There the turtles alight, and there
Feeds with her fawn the timid doe;
There, when the winter woods are bare,
Walks the wolf on the crackling snow.

Soon wilt thou wipe my tears away;
All my task upon earth is done;
My poor father, old and gray,
Slumbers beneath the churchyard s...

When Gold, as fleet as zephyr's' pinion,
Escapes like any faithless minion,[1]
And flies me (as he flies me ever),[2]
Do I pursue him? never, never!
No, let the false deserter go,
For who would court his direst foe?
But when I feel my lightened mind
No more by grovelling gold confined,
Then loose I all such clinging cares,
And cast them to the vagrant airs.
Then feel I, too, the Muse's spell,
And wake to life the dulcet shell,
Which, roused once more, to beauty sings,
While love dissolves along the strings!

But, scarcely has my heart been taught
How little Gold deserves a thought,
When, lo! the slave returns once more,
And with him wafts delicious store
Of racy wine, whose genial art
In slumber seals the anxious heart...

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured again maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender Apr...

I heard, in darkness, on my bed,
    The beating of my heart
To servant feet and regnant head
    A common life impart,
By the liquid cords, in every thread
    Unbroken as they start.

Night, with its power to silence day,
    Filled up my lonely room;
All motion quenching, save what lay
    Beyond its passing doom,
Where in his shed the workman gay
    Went on despite the gloom.

I listened, and I knew the sound,
    And the trade that he was plying;
For backwards, forwards, bound and bound,
    'Twas a shuttle, flying, flying;
Weaving ever life's garment round,
    Till the weft go out with sighing.

I said, O mystic thing, thou goest
    On working in the dark;
In space's shoreless sea thou rowest,
    Concealed with...

What is it now that I shall seek
Where woods dip downward, in the hills;
A mossy nook, a ferny creek,
And May among the daffodils.

Or in the valley's vistaed glow,
Past rocks of terraced trumpet-vines,
Shall I behold her coming slow,
Sweet May, among the columbines?

With red-bud cheeks and bluet eyes,
Big eyes, the homes of happiness,
To meet me with the old surprise,
Her hoiden hair all bonnetless.

Who waits for me, where, note for note,
The birds make glad the forest trees?
A dogwood blossom at her throat,
My May among th' anemones.

As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms,
And dewdrops drink the moonlight's gleam,
My soul shall kiss her lips' perfumes,
And drink the magic of her dreams.

High is our calling, Friend! Creative Art
(Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,)
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part,
Heroically fashioned, to infuse
Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse,
While the whole world seems adverse to desert.
And, oh! when Nature sinks, as oft she may,
Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress,
Still to be strenuous for the bright reward,
And in the soul admit of no decay,
Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness
Great is the glory, for the strife is hard!

I saw a young heart in the grasp of pain;
    With bruised breast, and broken, bleeding wing
Shipwrecked on hopeless love's tempestuous main,
    Lay the poor tortured thing.

It pulsed with all the anguish of despair;
    It ached with all a fond heart's awful power;
Yet I, who stood unhurt above it there,
    Envied its lot that hour.

I, who have wasted all the sacred, deep
    Emotions of my soul in spendthrift fashion,
Until no sorrow now can make me weep -
    No joy stir me with passion.

I, who have scattered here and there the gold
    Of my heart's store, until I spent the whole;
Yet unto each so little gave to hold,
    That I enriched no soul.

I, who have sold the birthright of sweet tears,
    And no more feel a thrill in...

At midnight, in the room where he lay dead
Whom in his life I had never clearly read,
I thought if I could peer into that citadel
His heart, I should at last know full and well

What hereto had been known to him alone,
Despite our long sit-out of years foreflown,
"And if," I said, "I do this for his memory's sake,
It would not wound him, even if he could wake."

So I bent over him. He seemed to smile
With a calm confidence the whole long while
That I, withdrawing his heart, held it and, bit by bit,
Perused the unguessed things found written on it.

It was inscribed like a terrestrial sphere
With quaint vermiculations close and clear -
His graving. Had I known, would I have risked the stroke
Its reading brought, and my own heart nigh broke!

From the madding crowd they stand apart,
The maidens four and the Work of Art;

And none might tell from sight alone
In which had culture ripest grown,

The Gotham Million fair to see,
The Philadelphia Pedigree,

The Boston Mind of azure hue,
Or the soulful Soul from Kalamazoo,

For all loved Art in a seemly way,
With an earnest soul and a capital A.

    *    *    *    *    *

Long they worshiped; but no one broke
The sacred stillness, until up spoke

The Western one from the nameless place,
Who blushing said, "What a lovely vace!"

Over three faces a sad smile flew,
And they edged away from Kalamazoo.

But Gotham's haughty soul was stirred
To crush the stranger with one small word.

Deftly hidi...

The pride of every grove I chose,
The violet sweet and lily fair,
The dappled pink and blushing rose,
To deck my charming Cloe's hair.

At morn the nymph vouchsafed to place
Upon her brow the various wreath;
The flowers less blooming than her face,
The scent less fragrant than her breath.

The flowers she wore along the day,
And every nymph and shepherd said,
That in her hair they look'd more gay
Than glowing in their native bed.

Undress'd at evening, when she found
Their odours lost, their colours past,
She changed her look, and on the ground
Her garland and her eyes she cast.

That eye dropp'd sense distinct and clear
As any Muse's tongue could speak,
When from its lid a pearly tear
Ran trickling down her beauteous cheek.<...

High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west.

The flag of morn in conqueror's state
Enters at the English gate:
The vanquished eve, as night prevails,
Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

Ages since the vanquished bled
Round my mother's marriage-bed;
There the ravens feasted far
About the open house of war:

When Severn down to Buildwas ran
Coloured with the death of man,
Couched upon her brother's grave
The Saxon got me on the slave.

The sound of fight is silent long
That began the ancient wrong;
Long the voice of tears is still
That wept of old the endless ill.

In my heart it has not died,
The war that sleeps on Severn side;

Many there be excelling in this kind,
Whose well trick'd rimes with all inuention swell,
Let each commend as best shall like his minde,
Some Sidney, Constable, some Daniell.
That thus theyr names familiarly I sing,
Let none think them disparaged to be,
Poore men with reuerence may speake of a King,
And so may these be spoken of by mee;
My wanton verse nere keepes one certaine stay,
But now, at hand; then, seekes inuention far,
And with each little motion runnes astray,
Wilde, madding, iocond, and irreguler;
    Like me that lust, my honest merry rimes,
    Nor care for Criticke, nor regard the times.

What is the love of shadowy lips
That know not what they seek or press,
From whom the lure for ever slips
And fails their phantom tenderness?

The mystery and light of eyes
That near to mine grow dim and cold;
They move afar in ancient skies
Mid flame and mystic darkness rolled.

O, beauty, as thy heart o'erflows
In tender yielding unto me,
A vast desire awakes and grows
Unto forgetfulness of thee.

I.

Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea!
If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,
What should thy sons do? - anything but weep:
And yet they only murmur in their sleep.
In contrast with their fathers - as the slime,
The dull green ooze of the receding deep,
Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam,
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets.
Oh! agony - that centuries should reap
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years[235]
Of wealth and glory turned to dust and tears;
And every monument the stranger meet...

Having certain cares to drown,
To the sea I took them down:

And I threw them in the wave,
That engulfed them like a grave.

Swiftly then I plied the oar
With a light heart to the shore.

But behind me came my foes:
Like a nine-days’ corpse each rose,

And (a ghastly sight to see!)
Clutched the boat and grined at me!

With a heavy heart, alack,
To the land I bore them back.

Not in Water or in Wine
Can I drown these cares of mine.

But some day, for good and sure,
I shall bury them secure,

Where the soil is rich and brown,
With a stone to keep them down,

And to let their end be known,
Have my name carved on the stone;

So that passers-by may say,
“Here lie cares that had their day,”

New Year's Day at Asolo in the Trevisan

Scene. A large mean airy chamber. A girl, Pippa, from the Silk-mills, springing out of bed.


Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled,
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,
(Be they grants thou art bound to or gifts a...

    'Tis strange what different thoughts inspire
In men, Possession and Desire!
Think what they wish so great a blessing;
So disappointed when possessing!
    A moralist profoundly sage
(I know not in what book or page,
Or whether o'er a pot of ale)
Related thus the following tale.
    Possession, and Desire, his brother,
But still at variance with each other,
Were seen contending in a race;
And kept at first an equal pace;
'Tis said, their course continued long,
For this was active, that was strong:
Till Envy, Slander, Sloth, and Doubt,
Misled them many a league about;
Seduced by some deceiving light,
They take the wrong way for the right;
Through slippery by-roads, dark and deep,
They often climb, and often creep.
    Desire, the swifter ...

Tauler, the preacher, walked, one autumn day,
Without the walls of Strasburg, by the Rhine,
Pondering the solemn Miracle of Life;
As one who, wandering in a starless night,
Feels momently the jar of unseen waves,
And hears the thunder of an unknown sea,
Breaking along an unimagined shore.

And as he walked he prayed. Even the same
Old prayer with which, for half a score of years,
Morning, and noon, and evening, lip and heart
Had groaned: "Have pity upon me, Lord!
Thou seest, while teaching others, I am blind.
Send me a man who can direct my steps!"

Then, as he mused, he heard along his path
A sound as of an old man's staff among
The dry, dead linden-leaves; and, looking up,
He saw a stranger, weak, and poor, and old.

"Peace be unto thee, ...