Tune - "Oran-gaoil."



I.

    Behold the hour, the boat arrive;
        Thou goest, thou darling of my heart!
    Sever'd from thee can I survive?
        But fate has will'd, and we must part.
    I'll often greet this surging swell,
        Yon distant isle will often hail:
    "E'en here I took the last farewell;
        There, latest mark'd her vanish'd sail."

II.

    Along the solitary shore
        While flitting sea-fowl round me cry,
    Across the rolling, dashing roar,
        I'll westward turn my wistful eye:
    Happy, thou Indian grove, I'll say,
        Where now my Nancy's path may be!
    While thro' thy sweets she loves to stray,
        O tell me, does she muse on me?

She is not fair, as some are fair,
Cold as the snow, as sunshine gay:
On her clear brow, come grief what may,
She suffers not too stern an air;
But, grave in silence, sweet in speech,
Loves neither mockery nor disdain;
Gentle to all, to all doth teach
The charm of deeming nothing vain.

She join'd me: and we wander'd on;
And I rejoiced, I cared not why,
Deeming it immortality
To walk with such a soul alone.
Primroses pale grew all around,
Violets, and moss, and ivy wild;
Yet, drinking sweetness from the ground,
I was but conscious that she smiled.

The wind blew all her shining hair
From her sweet brows; and she, the while,
Put back her lovely head, to smile
On my enchanted spirit there.
Jonquils and pansies round her head
Gl...

Those unrequited in their love who die
Have never drained life's chief illusion dry.

It was beneath a waning moon when all the woods were sear,
And winds made eddies of the leaves that whispered far and near,
I met her on the old mill-bridge we parted at last year.

At first I deemed it but a mist that faltered in that place,
An autumn mist beneath the trees that sentineled the race;
Until I neared and in the moon beheld her face to face.

The waver of the summer-heat upon the drouth-dry leas;
The shimmer of the thistle-drift a down the silences;
The gliding of the fairy-fire between the swamp and trees;

They qualified her presence as a sorrow may a dream
The vague suggestion of a self; the glimmer of a gleam;
The actual unreal of the things that only seem.

Where once she came with welcome and glad eyes all loving-wise,
She passed and g...

Can I find True-Love a gift
    In this dark hour to restore her,
When body's vessel breaks adrift,
    When hope and beauty fade before her?
But in this plight I cannot think
    Of song or music, that would grieve her,
Or toys or meat or snow-cooled drink;
    Not this way can her sadness leave her.
    She lies and frets in childish fever,
All I can do is but to cry
"Sleep, sleep, True-Love and lullaby!"

Lullaby, and sleep again.
    Two bright eyes through the window stare,
A nose is flattened on the pane
    And infant fingers fumble there.
"Not yet, not yet, you lovely thing,
    But count and come nine weeks from now,
When winter's tail has lost the sting,
    When buds come striking through the bough,
    Then here's True-Love will...

Ah, give again the pitiless snow and sleet
November's leaves, or raving winds, that beat
The heart's own doors, or rain's long ache and fret!
Only, not spring and all this delicate sweet!
Or not this vision of a girl, so set
In April grass, in April violet!

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...

They have left you, little Henry, but they have not left you lonely -
    Brothers' hearts so knit together could not, might not separate dwell.
Fain to seek you in the mansions far away - One lingered only
    To bid those behind farewell!

Gentle Boy! - His childlike nature in most guileless form was moulded,
    And it may be that his spirit woke in glory unaware,
Since so calmly he resigned it, with his hands still meekly folded,
    Having said his evening prayer.

Or - if conscious of that summons - "Speak, O Lord, Thy servant heareth" -
    As one said, whose name they gave him, might his willing answer be,
"Here am I" - like him replying - "At Thy gates my soul appeareth,
    For behold Thou calledst me!"

A deep silence - utter silence, on his earthly home...

He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,
As he was carried oer the green.

His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee;
He knew those children of the Spring:
When he was well and on the lea
He held one in his hands to sing,
Which filled his heart with glee.

Infants, the children of the Spring!
How can an infant die
When butterflies are on the wing,
Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at Spring?

He held his hands for daisies white,
And then for violets blue,
And took them all to bed at night
That in the green fields grew,
As childhood's sweet delight.

And then he shut his little eyes,
And flowers would notice ...

To be the theme of every hour
The heart devotes to Fancy's power,
When her prompt magic fills the mind
With friends and joys we've left behind,
And joys return and friends are near,
And all are welcomed with a tear:--
In the mind's purest seat to dwell,
To be remembered oft and well
By one whose heart, though vain and wild,
By passion led, by youth beguiled,
Can proudly still aspire to be
All that may yet win smiles from thee:--
If thus to live in every part
Of a lone, weary wanderer's heart;
If thus to be its sole employ
Can give thee one faint gleam of joy,
Believe it. Mary,--oh! believe
A tongue that never can deceive,
Though, erring, it too oft betray
Even more than Love should dare to say,--
In Pleasure's dream or Sorrow's hour,
I...

If you are my friend...
Help me... to leave you
Or if you are my lover...
Help me... so I can be healed of you...
If I knew....
that the ocean is very deep... I would not have swam...
If I knew... how I would end,
I would not have began

I desire you...so teach me not to desire
teach me...
how to cut the roots of your love from the depths
teach me...
how tears may die in the eyes
and love may commit suicide

If you are prophet,
Cleanse me from this spell
Deliver me from this atheism...
Your love is like atheism... so purify me from this atheism

If you are strong...
Rescueme from this ocean
ForI don't know how to swim
The blue waves... in your eyes
drag me... to the depths
blue...
blue...
nothingbut t...

The waters make a music low:
The river reeds
Are trembling to the tunes of long ago,
Dead days and deeds

Become alive again, as on
I float, and float,
Through shadows of the golden summers gone
And springs remote.

Above my head the trees bloom out
In white and red
Great blossoms, that make glad the air about;
And old suns shed

Their rays athwart them. Ah, the light
Is bright and fair!
No suns that shine upon me now are bright
As those suns were.

And, gazing down into the stream,
I see a face,
As sweet as buds that blossom in a dream,
Ere sorrows chase

Fair dreams from men, and send in lieu
Sad thoughts. A wreath
Of blue-bells binds the head, a bluer blue
The eyes beneath.

This is my li...

The sin was mine; I did not understand.
So now is music prisoned in her cave,
Save where some ebbing desultory wave
Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.
And in the withered hollow of this land
Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,
That hardly can the leaden willow crave
One silver blossom from keen Winter's hand.

But who is this who cometh by the shore?
(Nay, love, look up and wonder!) Who is this
Who cometh in dyed garments from the South?
It is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss
The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,
And I shall weep and worship, as before.

Vallombrosa! I longed in thy shadiest wood
To slumber, reclined on the moss-covered floor,
To listen to Anio's precipitous flood,
When the stillness of evening hath deepened its roar;
To range through the Temples of Paestum, to muse
In Pompeii preserved by her burial in earth;
On pictures to gaze where they drank in their hues;
And murmur sweet songs on the ground of their birth.

The beauty of Florence, the grandeur of Rome,
Could I leave them unseen, and not yield to regret?
With a hope (and no more) for a season to come,
Which ne'er may discharge the magnificent debt?
Thou fortunate Region! whose Greatness inurned
Awoke to new life from its ashes and dust;
Twice-glorified fields! if in sadness I turned
From your infinite marvels, the sadness was just.
...

There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea,
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

The babe is at peace within the womb;
The corpse is at rest within the tomb:
We begin in what we end.

Two lights on a lowly altar;
Two snowy cloths for a Feast;
Two vases of dying roses;
The morning comes from the east,
With a gleam for the folds of the vestments
And a grace for the face of the priest.

The sound of a low, sweet whisper
Floats over a little bread,
And trembles around a chalice,
And the priest bows down his head!
O'er a sign of white on the altar --
In the cup -- o'er a sign of red.

As red as the red of roses,
As white as the white of snows!
But the red is a red of a surface
Beneath which a God's blood flows;
And the white is the white of a sunlight
Within which a God's flesh glows.

Ah! words of the olden Thursday!
Ye come from the far-away!
Ye bring us the Friday's victim
In His own love's olden way;

That day we wandered 'mid the hills, so lone
Clouds are not lonelier, the forest lay
In emerald darkness round us. Many a stone
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way:
And many a bird the glimmering light along
Showered the golden bubbles of its song.

Then in the valley, where the brook went by,
Silvering the ledges that it rippled from,
An isolated slip of fallen sky,
Epitomizing heaven in its sum,
An iris bloomed blue, as if, flower-disguised,
The gaze of Spring had there materialized.

I have forgotten many things since then
Much beauty and much happiness and grief;
And toiled and dreamed among my fellow-men,
Rejoicing in the knowledge life is brief.
"'Tis winter now, " so says each barren bough;
And face and hair proclaim 'tis wint...