Nature

The circle is broken, one seat is forsaken,
One bud from the tree of our friendship is shaken;
One heart from among us no longer shall thrill
With joy in our gladness, or grief in our ill.

Weep! lonely and lowly are slumbering now
The light of her glances, the pride of her brow;
Weep! sadly and long shall we listen in vain
To hear the soft tones of her welcome again.

Give our tears to the dead! For humanity's claim
From its silence and darkness is ever the same;
The hope of that world whose existence is bliss
May not stifle the tears of the mourners of this.

For, oh! if one glance the freed spirit can throw
On the scene of its troubled probation below,
Than the pride of the marble, the pomp of the dead,
To that glance will be dearer the tears whic...

What time the cricket unmolested sings,
And blundering beetles try their clumsy wings,
Leave me to meet the sweets of Even's hour
By hawthorn hedges when the May's in flower,
With light enough to guard my cautious tread,
As not to trample on the daisy's head,
Down beaten pathways of a wish'd extent,
Ev'n unimpeded by the bending bent
That, night and morning, bowing down with dew,
Sullies the brightness of the maiden's shoe.
There leave me musing 'neath the bow'ring ash,
Counting the knoll of bells, or spurting dash
Of muttering fountain-fall, with wild delight,
Till Even lose In the blank of Night.

I woke at midnight, and my heart,
My beating heart, said this to me:
Thou seest the moon, how calm and bright!
The world is fair by day and night,
But what is that to thee?
One touch to me, down dips the light
Over the land and sea.
All is mine, all is my own!
Toss the purple fountain high!
The breast of man is a vat of stone;
I am alive, I, only I!

One little touch and all is dark--
The winter with its sparkling moons,
The spring with all her violets,
The crimson dawns and rich sunsets,
The autumn's yellowing noons!
I only toss my purple jets,
And thou art one that swoons
Upon a night of gust and roar,
Shipwrecked among the waves, and seems
Across the purple hills to roam:
Sweet odours touch him from the foam,
And downward ...

    The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.
    It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine
    Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,
    And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

    It blooms once a year in summer moonlight,
    In a valley of dark fear full of pale moonlight:
    It blooms once a year, and dies in a night,
    And its petals disappear with the dawn's first light;
    And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids,
    With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shades
    To watch, hour by hour, the unfolding of the flower.

    When the world is full of night, and the moon reigns alone
    And drowns in silver light the known and the unknown,
    When each hut is a mound, ha...

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

        Remote from cities dwelt a swain,
        Unvexed by petty cares of gain;
        His head was silvered, and by age
        He had contented grown and sage;
        In summer's heat and winter's cold
        He fed his flock and penned his fold,
        Devoid of envy or ambition,
        So had he won a proud position.

        A deep philosopher, whose rules
        Of moral life were drawn from schools,
        With wonder sought this shepherd's nest,
        And his perplexity expressed:

        "Whence is thy wisdom? Hath thy toil
        O'er books consumed the midnight oil,
        Communed o'er Greek and Roman pages,
        With Plato, Socrates - those sages -
        Or fathomed Tully, - or hast travelled
        With wise Uly...

As a pale phantom with a lamp
    Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,
So glides the moon along the damp
    Mysterious chambers of the air.

Now hidden in cloud, and now revealed,
    As if this phantom, full of pain,
Were by the crumbling walls concealed,
    And at the windows seen again.

Until at last, serene and proud
    In all the splendor of her light,
She walks the terraces of cloud,
    Supreme as Empress of the Night.

I look, but recognize no more
    Objects familiar to my view;
The very pathway to my door
    Is an enchanted avenue.

All things are changed.    One mass of shade,
    The elm-trees drop their curtains down;
By palace, park, and colonnade
    I walk as in a foreign town.

The very ground b...

'Tis strange to think, there was a time
When mirth was not an empty name,
When laughter really cheered the heart,
And frequent smiles unbidden came,
And tears of grief would only flow
In sympathy for others' woe;

When speech expressed the inward thought,
And heart to kindred heart was bare,
And Summer days were far too short
For all the pleasures crowded there,
And silence, solitude, and rest,
Now welcome to the weary breast,

Were all unprized, uncourted then,
And all the joy one spirit showed,
The other deeply felt again;
And friendship like a river flowed,
Constant and strong its silent course,
For nought withstood its gentle force:

When night, the holy time of peace,
Was dreaded as the parting hour;
When speech and mirt...

Dormered and verandaed, cool,
Locust-girdled, on the hill;
Stained with weather-wear, and dull-
Streak'd with lichens; every sill
Thresholding the beautiful;

I can see it standing there,
Brown above the woodland deep,
Wrapped in lights of lavender,
By the warm wind rocked asleep,
Violet shadows everywhere.

I remember how the Spring,
Liberal-lapped, bewildered its
Acred orchards, murmuring,
Kissed to blossom; budded bits
Where the wood-thrush came to sing.

Barefoot Spring, at first who trod,
Like a beggermaid, adown
The wet woodland; where the god,
With the bright sun for a crown
And the firmament for rod,

Met her; clothed her; wedded her;
Her Cophetua: when, lo!
All the hill, one breathing blur,
Burst ...

A Young fig-tree its form lifts high

Within a beauteous garden;
And see, a goat is sitting by.

As if he were its warden.

But oh, Quirites, how one errs!

The tree is guarded badly;
For round the other side there whirrs

And hums a beetle madly.

The hero with his well-mail'd coat

Nibbles the branches tall so;
A mighty longing feels the goat

Gently to climb up also.

And so, my friends, ere long ye see

The tree all leafless standing;
It looks a type of misery,

Help of the gods demanding.

Then listen, ye ingenuous youth,

Who hold wise saws respected:
From he-goat and from beetles-tooth

A tree should be protected!

I.

Clad on with glowing beauty and the peace,
Benign, of calm maturity, she stands
Among her meadows and her orchard-lands,
And on her mellowing gardens and her trees,
Out of the ripe abundance of her hands
Bestows increase
And fruitfulness, as, wrapped in sunny ease,
Blue-eyed and blonde she goes
Upon her bosom Summer's richest rose.

II.

And he who follows where her footsteps lead,
By hill and rock, by forest-side and stream,
Shall glimpse the glory of her visible dream,
In flower and fruit, in rounded nut and seed:
She, in whose path the very shadows gleam;
Whose humblest weed
Seems lovelier than June's loveliest flower, indeed,
And sweeter to the smell
Than April's self within a rainy dell.

III.

Hers is...

When first Diana leaves her bed,
    Vapours and steams her looks disgrace,
A frowzy dirty-colour'd red
    Sits on her cloudy wrinkled face:

But by degrees, when mounted high,
    Her artificial face appears
Down from her window in the sky,
    Her spots are gone, her visage clears.

'Twixt earthly females and the moon,
    All parallels exactly run;
If Celia should appear too soon,
    Alas, the nymph would be undone!

To see her from her pillow rise,
    All reeking in a cloudy steam,
Crack'd lips, foul teeth, and gummy eyes,
    Poor Strephon! how would he blaspheme!

The soot or powder which was wont
    To make her hair look black as jet,
Falls from her tresses on her front,
    A mingled mass of dirt and sweat.
<...

The loveliest face! I turned to her
Shut in 'mid savage rocks and trees; -
'Twas in the May-time of the year,
And our two hearts were filled with ease -
And pointed where a wild-rose grew,
Suddenly fair in that grim place:
"We should know all, if we but knew
Whence came this flower, and whence - this face."

The loveliest face!    My thoughts went around:
"Strange sister of this little rose,
So softly 'scaped from underground;
O tell me if your beauty knows,
Being itself so fair a thing,
How came this lovely thing so fair,
How came it to such blossoming,
Leaning so strangely from the air?

"The wonder of its being born,
So lone and lovely - even as you -
Half maiden-moon, half maiden-morn,
And delicately sad with dew;
How came it ...

Thought is an unseen net wherein our mind
Is taken and vainly struggles to be free:
Words, that should loose our spirit, do but bind
New fetters on our hoped-for liberty:
And action bears us onward like a stream
Past fabulous shores, scarce seen in our swift course;
Glorious - and yet its headlong currents seem
Backwaters of some nobler purer force.

There are slow curves, more subtle far than thought,
That stoop to carry the grace of a girl's breast;
And hanging flowers, so exquisitely wrought
In airy metal, that they seem possessed
Of souls; and there are distant hills that lift
The shoulder of a goddess towards the light;
And arrowy trees, sudden and sharp and swift,
Piercing the spirit deeply with delight.

Would I might make these miracles my ow...

The Shepherd, looking eastward, softly said
"Bright is thy veil, O Moon, as thou art bright!"
Forthwith, that little cloud, in ether spread
And penetrated all with tender light,
She cast away, and showed her fulgent head
Uncovered; dazzling the Beholder's sight
As if to vindicate her beauty's right
Her beauty thoughtlessly disparaged.
Meanwhile that veil, removed or thrown aside,
Went floating from her, darkening as it went;
And a huge mass, to bury or to hide,
Approached this glory of the firmament;
Who meekly yields, and is obscured content
With one calm triumph of a modest pride.

The clouds that promise a glorious morrow
    Are fading slowly, one by one;
The earth no more bright rays may borrow
    From her loved Lord, the golden sun;
Gray evening shadows are softly creeping,
    With noiseless steps, o'er vale and hill;
The birds and flowers are calmly sleeping;
    And all around is fair and still.

Once loved I dearly, at this sweet hour,
    With loitering steps to careless stray,
To idly gather an opening flower,
    And often pause upon my way, -
Gazing around me with joyous feeling,
    From sunny earth to azure sky,
Or bending over the streamlet, stealing
    'Mid banks of flowers and verdure by.

You wond'ring ask me why sit I lonely
    Within my quiet, curtain'd room,
So idly seeking and clinging only

What saw I yesterday walking apart
In a leafy place where the cattle wait?
Something to keep for a charm in my heart -
A little sweet girl in a garden gate.
Laughing she lay in the gold sun's might,
And held for a target to shelter her,
In her little soft fingers, round and white,
The gold-rimmed face of a sunflower.

Laughing she lay on the stone that stands
For a rough-hewn step in that sunny place,
And her yellow hair hung down to her hands,
Shadowing over her dimpled face.
Her eyes like the blue of the sky, made dim
With the might of the sun that looked at her,
Shone laughing over the serried rim,
Golden set, of the sunflower.

Laughing, for token she gave to me
Three petals out of the sunflower; -
When the petals are withered and gone,...

The lily's withered chalice falls
Around its rod of dusty gold,
And from the beech-trees on the wold
The last wood-pigeon coos and calls.

The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter, hour by hour.

Pale privet-petals white as milk
Are blown into a snowy mass:
The roses lie upon the grass
Like little shreds of crimson silk.