Animula! vagula, Blandula,
Hospes, comesque corporis,
Quæ nunc abibis in Loca -
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis Jocos?


Translation. -


Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring Sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?
No more with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

I.

An English village, a summer scene,
A homely cottage, a garden green,
An opening vista, a cloudless sky,
A bee that hums as it passes by;
A babe that chuckles among the flowers,
A smile that enlivens the mid-day hours,
A wife that is fair as the sunny day,
A peace that the world cannot take away,
A hope that is humble and daily bread,
A thankful soul that is comforted,
A cosy cot and a slumbering child,
A life and a love that are undefiled,
A thought that is silent, an earnest prayer,
The noiseless step of a phantom there!


II.

A drunken husband, a wailing wife;
Oh, a weary way is the way of life!
A heartless threat and a cruel blow
And grief that the world can never know;
A tongue obscene and a will pervers...

"Drown'd! drown'd!" - Hamlet.


One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!

Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
Whilst the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing;
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing. -

Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly;
Not of the stains of her,
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.

Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Bash and undutiful:
Past all dishonor,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

Still, for all slips of hers,
One of Eve's family -
Wipe...

Yes, now the longing is o’erpast,
Which, dogg’d by fear and fought by shame,
Shook her weak bosom day and night,
Consum’d her beauty like a flame,
And dimm’d it like the desert blast.
And though the curtains hide her face,
Yet were it lifted to the light
The sweet expression of her brow
Would charm the gazer, till his thought
Eras’d the ravages of time,
Fill’d up the hollow cheek, and brought
A freshness back as of her prime,
So healing is her quiet now.
So perfectly the lines express
A placid, settled loveliness;
Her youngest rival’s freshest grace.

But ah, though peace indeed is here,
And ease from shame, and rest from fear;
Though nothing can dismarble now
The smoothness of that limpid brow;
Yet is a calm like this, in truth,
...

Io avrò sempre in odio la fenestra.

BETTER IS IT TO DIE HAPPY THAN TO LIVE IN PAIN.


    Always in hate the window shall I bear,
Whence Love has shot on me his shafts at will,
Because not one of them sufficed to kill:
For death is good when life is bright and fair,
But in this earthly jail its term to outwear
Is cause to me, alas! of infinite ill;
And mine is worse because immortal still,
Since from the heart the spirit may not tear.
Wretched! ere this who surely ought'st to know
By long experience, from his onward course
None can stay Time by flattery or by force.
Oft and again have I address'd it so:
Mourner, away! he parteth not too soon
Who leaves behind him far his life's calm June.

MACGREGOR.

O Son of mine, when dusk shall find thee bending
    Between a gravestone and a cradle's head---
Between the love whose name is loss unending
    And the young love whose thoughts are liker dread,---
Thou too shalt groan at heart that all thy spending
    Cannot repay the dead, the hungry dead.

Around me broods the dim, mysterious Night,
    Star-lit and still.
No whisper comes across the Plain,
Asleep beneath the breezes light,
Which scarcely stir the growing grain.
Slow chimes the quiet midnight hour
In some unseen and distant tower,
While round me broods the vague, mysterious Night,
    Star-lit, and cool, and still.

And I must desecrate this silent time
    Of drowsy dreams!
On mighty wings towards the sky,
Towards the stars, I have to climb
And o'er the sleeping country fly,
And such far-echoing clamour make
That all the villages must wake.
So must I desecrate this quiet time
    Of soft and drowsy dreams!

The hour comes ... soon must I say farewell
    To this fair earth.
Then to my little room I go
Where I ...

SAILOR

You, who have compassed land and sea,
Now all unburied lie;
All vain your store of human lore,
For you were doomed to die.
The sire of Pelops likewise fell,--
Jove's honored mortal guest;
So king and sage of every age
At last lie down to rest.
Plutonian shades enfold the ghost
Of that majestic one
Who taught as truth that he, forsooth,
Had once been Pentheus' son;
Believe who may, he's passed away,
And what he did is done.
A last night comes alike to all;
One path we all must tread,
Through sore disease or stormy seas
Or fields with corpses red.
Whate'er our deeds, that pathway leads
To regions of the dead.


SHADE

The fickle twin Illyrian gales
Overwhelmed me on the wave;
But you that live, ...

The spirit of beautiful faces,
The light on the forehead of Love,
And the spell of past visited places,
And the songs and the sweetness thereof;
These, touched by a hand that is hoary;
These, vext with a tune of decay,
Are spoiled of their glow and their glory;
And the burden is, “Passing away!
Passing away!”

Old years and their changes come trooping
At nightfall to you and to me,
When Autumn sits faded and drooping
By the sorrowful waves of the sea.
Faint phantoms that float in the gloaming,
Return with the whispers that say,
“The end which is quiet is coming;
Ye are weary, and passing away!
Passing away!”

It is hard to awake and discover
The swiftness that waits upon Time;
But youth and its beauty are over,
And Love has a...

The coup d’etat is blotted out
With fresher blood, with blacker crime,
As midnight horrors put to rout
The vaguer ghosts of twilight-time.

“Greeting from those who are to die!
Hail Caesar!” Draw the curtains round.
In vain! That mournful mocking cry
Pierces the purple with its sound.

And they who raise it enter too,
With spectral looks and noiseless tread,
Unbidden, hold their dread review,
Beside the Emperor’s very bed.

They sought in his deserted tent;
They found him in the German camp.
They tarry till the oil be spent
That feeds his life’s poor flickering lamp.

The hope of France, the “gilded youth,”
So answering the trumpet’s peal
As if revealing how, in sooth,
The gilding oft o’erlies the steel.

Soldiers A...

Sainted old man, for more than eighty years,
Thee - tranquilly and stilly-creeping - age,
Led to the confines of the sepulchre,
And thy last day on earth - but "Father - Lord -
Which art in heaven" - how pure a faith, and heart
Unmoved, amid the changes of this life,
And tumult of the world, - and oh! what hope, -
What love and constancy of the calm mind,
And tears to misery from the inmost heart
Flowing - at times, a brief sweet smile and voice
How bland, and studies, various and profound,
Of learned languages - but, ever first,
That learning which the oracles of God
Unfolds, even to the close of life's long day
Thy course accompanies!
But, thou, farewell,
And live - this mortal veil removed - in bliss;
Live with the saints in light, whom Christ had love...

I had remarked--how sharply one observes
When life is disappearing round the curves
Of yet another corner, out of sight!--
I had remarked when it was "good luck" and "good night"
And "a good journey to you," on her face
Certain enigmas penned in the hieroglyphs
Of that half frown and queer fixed smile and trace
Of clouded thought in those brown eyes,
Always so happily clear of hows and ifs--
My poor bleared mind!--and haunting whys.

There I stood, holding her farewell hand,
(Pressing my life and soul and all
The world to one good-bye, till, small
And smaller pressed, why there I'd stand
Dead when they vanished with the sight of her).
And I saw that she had grown aware,
Queer puzzled face! of other things
Beyond the present and her own young speed,

I

That one long dirge-moan sad and deep,
Low, muffled by the solemn stress
Of such emotion as doth steep
The soul in brooding quietness,
Befits our anguished time too well,
Whose Life-march is a funeral knell.

Dirge for a mighty Creed outworn
Its spirit fading from the earth,
Its mouldering body left forlorn:
Weak idol! feeding scornful mirth
In shallow hearts; divine no more
Save to some ignorant pagan poor;

And some who know how by Its light
The past world well did walk and live,
And feel It even now more bright
Than any lamp mere men can give;
So cling to It with yearning faith,
Yet own It almost quenched in death:

While many who win wealth and power
And honours serving at Its shrine,
Rather than lose their w...

I touch but the things which are near;
    The heavens are too high for my reach:
        In shadow and symbol and creed,
        I discern not the soul from the deed,
    Nor the thought hidden under, from speech;
And the thing which I know not I fear.

I dare not despair nor despond,
    Though I grope in the dark for the dawn:
        Birth and laughter, and bubbles of breath,
        And tears, and the blank void of death,
    Round each its penumbra is drawn,--
I touch them,--I see not beyond.

What voice speaking solemn and slow,
    Before the beginning for me,
        From the mouth of the primal First Cause,
        Shall teach me the thing that I was,
    Shall point out the thing I shall be,
And show me the path that I go?

...

'Ah! quit me not yet, for the wind whistles shrill,
Its blast wanders mournfully over the hill,
The thunder's wild voice rattles madly above,
You will not then, cannot then, leave me my love. - '

I must dearest Agnes, the night is far gone -
I must wander this evening to Strasburg alone,
I must seek the drear tomb of my ancestors' bones,
And must dig their remains from beneath the cold stones.

'For the spirit of Conrad there meets me this night,
And we quit not the tomb 'till dawn of the light,
And Conrad's been dead just a month and a day!
So farewell dearest Agnes for I must away, -

'He bid me bring with me what most I held dear,
Or a month from that time should I lie on my bier,
And I'd sooner resign this false fluttering breath,
Than my Agnes ...

I


So we had come at last, my soul and I,
Into that land of shadowy plain and peak,
On which the dawn seemed ever about to break
On which the day seemed ever about to die.


II


Long had we sought fulfillment of our dreams,
The everlasting wells of Joy and Youth;
Long had we sought the snow-white flow'r of Truth,
That blooms eternal by eternal streams.


III


And, fonder still, we hoped to find the sweet
Immortal presence, Love; the bird Delight
Beside her; and, eyed with sidereal night,
Faith, like a lion, fawning at her feet.


IV


But, scorched and barren, in its arid well,
We found our dreams' forgotten fountain-head;
And by black, bitter waters, crushed and dead,
Amon...

The sole true Something, This! In Limbo Den
It frightens Ghosts as Ghosts here frighten men
For skimming in the wake it mock'd the care
Of the old Boat-God for his Farthing Fare ;
Tho' Irus' Ghost itself he ne'er frown'd blacker on,
The skin and skin-pent Druggist crost the Acheron,
Styx, and with Puriphlegethon Cocytus,
(The very names, methinks, might thither fright us)
Unchang'd it cross'd, & shall some fated Hour
Be pulveris'd by Demogorgon's power
And given as poison to annilate Souls
Even now It shrinks them! they shrink in as Moles
(Nature's mute Monks, live Mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Light, then listen for its Sound;
See but to dread, and dread they know not why
The natural Alien of their negative Eye.

        'Tis a strange pla...

His Grace! impossible! what, dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall,
And so inglorious, after all?
Well, since he's gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now;
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we're told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
'Twas time in conscience he should die!
This world he cumber'd long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that's the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widows' sighs, nor orphans' tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
But what of that? his friends may...