I push on through the shaggy wood,
I round the hill: 't is here it stood;
And there, beyond the crumbled walls,
The shining Concord slowly crawls,

Yet seems to make a passing stay,
And gently spreads its lilied bay,
Curbed by this green and reedy shore,
Up toward the ancient homestead's door.

But dumbly sits the shattered house,
And makes no answer: man and mouse
Long since forsook it, and decay
Chokes its deep heart with ashes gray.

On what was once a garden-ground
Dull red-bloomed sorrels now abound;
And boldly whistles the shy quail
Within the vacant pasture's pale.

Ah, strange and savage, where he shines,
The sun seems staring through those pines
That once the vanished home could bless
With intimate, sweet loneliness....

I reached the cottage. I knew it from the card
He had given me--the low door heavily barred,
Steep roof, and two yews whispering on guard.

Dusk thickened as I came, but I could smell
First red wallflower and an early hyacinth bell,
And see dim primroses. "O, I can tell,"

I thought, "they love the flowers he loved." The rain
Shook from fruit bushes in new showers again
As I brushed past, and gemmed the window pane.

Bare was the window yet, and the lamp bright.
I saw them sitting there, streamed with the light
That overflowed upon the enclosing night.

"Poor things, I wonder why they've lit up so,"
A voice said, passing on the road below.
"Who are they?" asked another. "Don't you know?"

Their voices crept away. I heard no more
As I c...

The bugler sent a call of high romance,
"Lights out! Lights out!" to the deserted square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
"God, if it's this for me next time in France ...
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the other broken ones
Lying so stiff and still under the sky,
Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die."

    Inhuman man! curse on thy barb'rous art,
        And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye;
        May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
    Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart.

    Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field!
        The bitter little that of life remains:
        No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
    To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

    Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest,
        No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!
        The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head,
    The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest.

    Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait
        The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn;
        I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn,
    And curse the ...

The old enthusiasms
Are dead, quite dead, in me;
Dead the aspiring spasms
Of art and poesy,
That opened magic chasms,
Once, of wild mystery,
In youth's rich Araby.
That opened magic chasms.

The longing and the care
Are mine; and, helplessly,
The heartache and despair
For what can never be.
More than my mortal share
Of sad mortality,
It seems, God gives to me,
More than my mortal share.

O world! O time! O fate!
Remorseless trinity!
Let not your wheel abate
Its iron rotary!
Turn round! nor make me wait,
Bound to it neck and knee,
Hope's final agony!
Turn round! nor make me wait.

I

Unarmed she goeth; yet her hands
Strike deeper awe than steel-caparison'd bands.
No fatal hurt of foe she fears, -
Veiled, as with mail, in mist of gentle tears.


II

'Gainst her thou canst not bar the door:
Like air she enters, where none dared before.
Even to the rich she can forgive
Their regal selfishness, - and let them live!

God ne'er afflicts us more than our desert,
Though He may seem to overact His part:
Sometimes He strikes us more than flesh can bear;
But yet still less than grace can suffer here.

Bleak, in dark rags of clouds, the day begins,
That passed so splendidly but yesterday,
Wrapped in magnificence of gold and gray,
And poppy and rose. Now, burdened as with sins,
Their wildness clad in fogs, like coats of skins,
Tattered and streaked with rain; gaunt, clogged with clay,
The mendicant Hours take their somber way
Westward o'er Earth, to which no sunray wins.
Their splashing sandals ooze; their foosteps drip,
Puddle and brim with moisture; their sad hair
Is tagged with haggard drops, that with their eyes'
Slow streams are blent; each sullen fingertip
Rivers; while round them, in the grief-drenched air
Wearies the wind of their perpetual sighs.

I.

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gypsy, will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gypsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

II.

"You cannot eat your cake and have it too."
- Proverb.


How fever'd is the man, who cannot look
Upon his mortal day...

A river binds the lonely land,
A river like a silver band,
To crags and shores of yellow sand.

It is a place where kildees cry,
And endless marshes eastward lie,
Whereon looks down a ghostly sky.

A house stands gray and all alone
Upon a hill, as dim of tone,
And lonely, as a lonely stone.

There are no signs of life about;
No barnyard bustle, cry and shout
Of children who run laughing out.

No crow of cocks, no low of cows,
No sheep-bell tinkling under boughs
Of beech, or song in garth or house.

Only the curlew's mournful call,
Circling the sky at evenfall,
And loon lamenting over all.

A garden, where the sunflower dies
And lily on the pathway lies,
Looks blindly at the blinder skies.

And round t...

While Celia's Tears make sorrow bright,
Proud Grief sits swelling in her eyes;
The Sun, next those the fairest light,
Thus from the Ocean first did rise:
And thus thro' Mists we see the Sun,
Which else we durst not gaze upon.

These silver drops, like morning dew,
Foretell the fervour of the day:
So from one Cloud soft show'rs we view,
And blasting lightnings burst away.
The Stars that fall from Celia's eye
Declare our Doom in drawing nigh.

The Baby in that sunny Sphere
So like a Phaeton appears,
That Heav'n, the threaten'd World to spare,
Thought fit to drown him in her tears;
Else might th' ambitious Nymph aspire,
To set, like him, Heav'n too on fire.

“Would a man ’scape the rod?”
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,
“See that he turn to God
The day before his death.”

“Ay could a man enquire
When it shall come!” I say,
The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire
“Then let him turn to-day! “

Quoth a young Sadducee:
“Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls?”

“Son, there is no reply!”
The Rabbi bit his beard:
“Certain, a soul have I
We may have none,” he sneer’d.

Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,
The Right-hand Temple-column,
Taught babes in grace their grammar,
And struck the simple, solemn.

Rome, April 27, 1854

I

Now that we're almost settled in our house
I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

II

Always we'd have the new friend meet the old
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,
And there is salt to lengthen out the smart
In the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling,
For all that come into my mind are dead.

III

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning bette...

When first, descending from the moorlands,
I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.

When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had begun to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathways,
My steps the Border-minstrel led.

The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes:

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvelous source;

The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from h...

The happy men that lose their heads
They find their heads in heaven,
As cherub heads with cherub wings,
And cherub haloes even:
Out of the infinite evening lands
Along the sunset sea,
Leaving the purple fields behind,
The cherub wings beat down the wind
Back to the groping body and blind
As the bird back to the tree.

Whether the plumes be passion-red
For him that truly dies
By headsmen's blade or battle-axe,
Or blue like butterflies,
For him that lost it in a lane
In April's fits and starts,
His folly is forgiven then:
But higher, and far beyond our ken,
Is the healing of the unhappy men,
The men that lost their hearts.

Is there not pardon for the brave
And broad release above,
Who lost their heads for liberty
Or ...

She's tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face
With flashes of the old fun's animation
There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation
Bred of a past where troubles came apace.
She tells me that her husband, ere he died,
Saw seven of their children pass away,
And never knew the little lass at play
Out on the green, in whom he's deified.
Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone,
All simple faith her honest Irish mind,
Scolding her spoiled young saint, she labours on:
Telling her dreams, taking her patients' part,
Trailing her coat sometimes:    and you shall find
No rougher, quainter speech, nor kinder heart.

The immediate provocation to this fierce satire upon the Irish Parliament was the introduction of a Bill to put an end to the tithe on pasturage, called agistment, and thus to free the landlords from a legal payment, with severe loss to the Church.


As I stroll the city, oft I
See a building large and lofty,
Not a bow-shot from the college;
Half the globe from sense and knowledge
By the prudent architect,
Placed against the church direct,[1]
Making good my grandam's jest,
"Near the church" - you know the rest.[2]
    Tell us what the pile contains?
Many a head that has no brains.
These demoniacs let me dub
With the name of Legion[3] Club.
Such assemblies, you might swear,
Meet when butchers bait a bear:
Such a noise, and such haranguing,
When...

I. NOONDAY.

Two angry men - in heat they sever,
    And one goes home by a harvest field: -
"Hope's nought," quoth he, "and vain endeavor;
    I said and say it, I will not yield!

"As for this wrong, no art can mend it,
    The bond is shiver'd that held us twain;
Old friends we be, but law must end it,
    Whether for loss or whether for gain.

"Yon stream is small - full slow its wending;
    But winning is sweet, but right is fine;
And shoal of trout, or willowy bending -
    Though Law be costly - I'll prove them mine.

"His strawberry cow slipped loose her tether,
    And trod the best of my barley down;
His little lasses at play together
    Pluck'd the poppies my boys had grown.

"What then? - Why naught! She lack'...