They sat with hearts untroubled,
    The clear sky sparkled above,
And an ancient wisdom bubbled
    From the lips of a youthful love.

They read in a coloured history
    Of Egypt and of the Nile,
And half it seemed a mystery,
    Familiar, half, the while.

Till living out of the story
    Grew old Egyptian men,
And a shadow looked forth Rory
    And said, "We meet again!"

And over Aileen a maiden
    Looked back through the ages dim:
She laughed, and her eyes were laden
    With an old-time love for him.

In a mist came temples thronging
    With sphinxes seen in a row,
And the rest of the day was a longing
    For their homes of long ago.

"We'd go there if they'd let us,"
    They said with wounded pride:...

Wake thee, my dear--thy dreaming
    Till darker hours will keep;
While such a moon is beaming,
    'Tis wrong towards Heaven to sleep.

Moments there are we number,
    Moments of pain and care,
Which to oblivious slumber
    Gladly the wretch would spare.

But now,--who'd think of dreaming
    When Love his watch should keep?
While such a moon is beaming,
    'Tis wrong towards Heaven to sleep.

If e'er the fates should sever
    My life and hopes from thee, love,
The sleep that lasts for ever
    Would then be sweet to me, love;
But now,--away with dreaming!
    Till darker hours 'twill keep;
While such a moon is beaming,
    'Tis wrong towards Heaven to sleep.

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It Seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.
He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang tha...

A pen, to register; a key
That winds through secret wards
Are well assigned to Memory
By allegoric Bards.

As aptly, also, might be given
A Pencil to her hand;
That, softening objects, sometimes even
Outstrips the heart's demand;

That smooths foregone distress, the lines
Of lingering care subdues,
Long-vanished happiness refines,
And clothes in brighter hues;

Yet, like a tool of Fancy, works
Those Spectres to dilate
That startle Conscience, as she lurks
Within her lonely seat.

Oh! that our lives, which flee so fast,
In purity were such,
That not an image of the past
Should fear that pencil's touch!

Retirement then might hourly look
Upon a soothing scene,
Age steal to his allotted nook
Contented an...

Brain Engravings.


        Great wonder is the human brain,
        How it impressions doth retain,
        Inscribed on it are autographs,
        And there is also photographs.

        And every hill and plain and nook,
        It is deep graven in this book,
        A great variety here belongs,
        Snatches of sermons and of songs.

        Here you'll find are numerous themes,
        Both mighty thoughts and foolish dreams,
        Here love and hope so bright and fair,
        There hate and doubt and dark despair.

        And here is too the bower of bliss,
        Where youthful lovers first did kiss,
        Here are memories of childhood
        And of old ages thoughtful mood.

        View well the whole, ...

The Desert is parched in the burning sun
And the grass is scorched and white.
But the sand is passed, and the march is done,
We are camping here to-night.
    I sit in the shade of the Temple walls,
    While the cadenced water evenly falls,
    And a peacock out of the Jungle calls
    To another, on yonder tomb.
    Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom,
    Strange works of a long dead people loom,
Obscene and savage and half effaced -
An elephant hunt, a musicians' feast -
And curious matings of man and beast;
What did they mean to the men who are long since dust?
    Whose fingers traced,
    In this arid waste,
These rioting, twisted, figures of love and lust.

Strange, weird things that no man may say,
Things Humanity hides away; -
  ...

I

The cool grass blowing in a breeze
Of April valleys sooms and sways;
On slopes that dip to quiet seas
Through far, faint drifts of yellowing haze.
I lie like one who, in a dream
Of sounds and splendid coloured things,
Seems lifted into life supreme
And has a sense of waxing wings.
For through a great arch-light which floods
And breaks and spreads and swims along
High royal-robed autumnal woods,
I hear a glorious sunset song.
But, ah, Euterpe! I that pause
And listen to the strain divine
Can never learn its words, because
I am no son of thine.

How sweet is wandering where the west
Is full of thee, what time the morn
Looks from his halls of rosy rest
Across green miles of gleaming corn!

How sweet are dreams in shady n...

    "I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
    I woke, and found that life was duty.
    Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
    Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
    And thou shall find thy dream to be
    A noonday light and truth to thee."

Who would think this quiet breather
From the world had taken flight?
Yet within the form we see there
Wakes the golden King to-night.

Out upon the face of faces
He looked forth before his sleep:
Now he knows the starry races
Haunters of the ancient deep;

On the Bird of Diamond Glory
Floats in mystic floods of song:
As he lists Time's triple story
Seems but as a day is long.

From the mightier Adam falling
To his image dwarfed in clay,
He will at our voices calling
Come to this side of the day.

When he wakes, the dreamy-hearted,
He will know not whence he came,
And the light from which he parted
Be the seraph's sword of flame,

And behind it hosts supernal
Guarding the lost paradise,
And the tree of life...

The river hemmed with leaning trees
Wound through its meadows green;
A low, blue line of mountains showed
The open pines between.

One sharp, tall peak above them all
Clear into sunlight sprang
I saw the river of my dreams,
The mountains that I sang!

No clue of memory led me on,
But well the ways I knew;
A feeling of familiar things
With every footstep grew.

Not otherwise above its crag
Could lean the blasted pine;
Not otherwise the maple hold
Aloft its red ensign.

So up the long and shorn foot-hills
The mountain road should creep;
So, green and low, the meadow fold
Its red-haired kine asleep.

The river wound as it should wind;
Their place the mountains took;
The white torn fringes of their clouds

The holiest of all holidays are those
    Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
    The secret anniversaries of the heart,
    When the full river of feeling overflows;--
The happy days unclouded to their close;
    The sudden joys that out of darkness start
    As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
    Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
    White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
    White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;--a Fairy Tale
    Of some enchanted land we know not where,
    But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

He made him a love o' dreams--
He raised for his heart's delight--
(As the heart of June a crescent moon)
A frail, fair spirit of light.

He gave her the gift of joy--
The gift of the dancing feet--
He made her a thing of very Spring--
Virginal--wild and sweet.

But when he would draw her near
To his eager heart's content,
As a sunbeam slips from the finger-tips
She slipped from his hold and went.

Virginal--wild--and sweet--
So she eludes him still--
The love that he made of dawn and shade
Of dominant want and will.

For ever the dream of man
Is more than the dreamer is;
Though he form it whole of his inmost soul,
Yet never 'tis wholly his.

Only is given to him
The right to follow and yearn
The lovelines...

There is a bellowing in me, as of might
Unfleshed and visionless, mangling the air
With horrible convulse, as if it bare
The cruel weight of worlds, but could not fight
With the thick-dropping clods, and could but bite
A vapour-cloud! Oh, I will climb the stair
Of the great universe, and lay me there
Even at the threshold of his gate, despite
The tempest, and the weakness, and the rush
Of this quick crowding on me!--Oh, I dream!
Now I am sailing swiftly, as we seem
To do in sleep! and I can hear the gush
Of a melodious wave that carries me
On, on for ever to eternity!

They are the angels of that watery world,
With so much knowledge that they just aspire
To move themselves on golden fins,
Or fill their paradise with fire
By darting suddenly from end to end.

Glowing a thousand centuries behind
In pools half-recollected of the mind,
Their large eyes stare and stare, but do not see
Beyond those curtains of Eternity.

When twilight flows into the room
And air becomes like water, you can feel
Their movements growing larger in the gloom,
And you are led
Backward to where they live beyond the dead.

But in the morning, when the seven rays
Of London sunlight one by one incline,
They glide to meet them, and their gulping lips
Suck the light in, so they are caught and played
Like salmon on a heavenly fishing ...

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...

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...

        Nell ora, credo, che dell'oriente
            Prima raggio nel monte Citerea,
            Che di fuoco d'amor par sempre dente,
        Giovane e bella in sogno mi parea
            Donna vedere andar per una landa
            Cogliendo flori; e cantando dicea ;--
        Sappia qualunque'l mio nome dimanda,
            Ch'io mi son Lia, e vo movendo 'ntorno
            Le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda--
        Per piacermi allo specchio qui m'adorno;
            Ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga
            Dal suo ammiraglio, e siede tutto il giorno.

        Ell' è de'suoi begli occhi veder vaga,
            Com' io dell'adornarmi con le mani;
            Lei lo vodere e me l'ovrare appaga.

        DANTE, Purg. Canto xx...