In years defaced and lost,
Two sat here, transport-tossed,
Lit by a living love
The wilted world knew nothing of:
Scared momently
By gaingivings,
Then hoping things
That could not be.

Of love and us no trace
Abides upon the place;
The sun and shadows wheel,
Season and season sereward steal;
Foul days and fair
Here, too, prevail,
And gust and gale
As everywhere.

But lonely shepherd souls
Who bask amid these knolls
May catch a faery sound
On sleepy noontides from the ground:
"O not again
Till Earth outwears
Shall love like theirs
Suffuse this glen!"

Her little head just topped the window-sill;
She even mounted on a stool, maybe;
She pressed against the pane, as children will,
And watched us playing, oh so wistfully!
And then I missed her for a month or more,
And idly thought: "She's gone away, no doubt,"
Until a hearse drew up beside the door . . .
I saw a tiny coffin carried out.

And after that, towards dusk I'd often see
Behind the blind another face that looked:
Eyes of a young wife watching anxiously,
Then rushing back to where her dinner cooked.
She often gulped it down alone, I fear,
Within her heart the sadness of despair,
For near to midnight I would vaguely hear
A lurching step, a stumbling on the stair.

These little dramas of the common day!
A man weak-willed and fore-ordained t...

Fairest! put on awhile
    These pinions of light I bring thee,
And o'er thy own green isle
    In fancy let me wing thee.
Never did Ariel's plume,
    At golden sunset hover
O'er scenes so full of bloom,
    As I shall waft thee over.

Fields, where the Spring delays
    And fearlessly meets the ardor
Of the warm Summer's gaze,
    With only her tears to guard her.
Rocks, thro' myrtle boughs
    In grace majestic frowning;
Like some bold warrior's brows
    That Love hath just been crowning.

Islets, so freshly fair,
    That never hath bird come nigh them,
But from his course thro' air
    He hath been won down by them;--[1]
Types, sweet maid, of thee,
    Whose look, whose blush inviting,
Never did Love yet...

I.

It is not early spring and yet
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
And blotted banks of violet,
My heart will dream.
Is it because the windflower apes
The beauty that was once her brow,
That the white memory of it shapes
The April now?
Because the wild-rose wears the blush
That once made sweet her maidenhood,
Its thought makes June of barren bush
And empty wood?
And then I think how young she died
Straight, barren Death stalks down the trees,
The hard-eyed Hours by his side,
That kill and freeze.

II.

When orchards are in bloom again
My heart will bound, my blood will beat,
To hear the redbird so repeat,
On boughs of rosy stain,
His blithe, loud song, like some far strain
From out the past, among the blo...

Why did we meet long years of yore?
    And why did we strike hands and say
"We will be friends and nothing more";
    Why are we musing thus to-day?
    Because because was just because,
    And no one knew just why it was.

Why did I say good-by to you?
    Why did I sail across the main?
Why did I love not heaven's own blue
    Until I touched these shores again?
    Because because was just because,
    And you nor I knew why it was.

Why are my arms about you now,
    And happy tears upon your cheek?
And why my kisses on your brow?
    Look up in thankfulness and speak!
    Because because was just because,
    And only God knew why it was.

I wonder, can the night go by;
Can this shot arrow of travel fly
Shaft-golden with light, sheer into the sky
Of a dawned to-morrow,
Without ever sleep delivering us
From each other, or loosing the dolorous
Unfruitful sorrow!

What is it then that you can see
That at the window endlessly
You watch the red sparks whirl and flee
And the night look through?
Your presence peering lonelily there
Oppresses me so, I can hardly bear
To share the train with you.

You hurt my heart-beats' privacy;
I wish I could put you away from me;
I suffocate in this intimacy,
For all that I love you;
How I have longed for this night in the train,
Yet now every fibre of me cries in pain
To God to remove you.

But surely my soul's best dream is s...

I have been thinking of the victims bound
In Naples, dying for the lack of air
And sunshine, in their close, damp cells of pain,
Where hope is not, and innocence in vain
Appeals against the torture and the chain!
Unfortunates! whose crime it was to share
Our common love of freedom, and to dare,
In its behalf, Rome's harlot triple-crowned,
And her base pander, the most hateful thing
Who upon Christian or on Pagan ground
Makes vile the old heroic name of king.
O God most merciful! Father just and kind!
Whom man hath bound let thy right hand unbind.
Or, if thy purposes of good behind
Their ills lie hidden, let the sufferers find
Strong consolations; leave them not to doubt
Thy providential care, nor yet without
The hope which all thy attributes inspire,

Misfortune hath constrained me
To leave the lute and poetry,
Nor can I from their easing borrow
        Sleep for my sorrow.

Do I see true, or hath a dream
Flown forth from ivory gates to gleam
In phantom gold, before forsaking
        Its poor cheat, waking?

Oh, mad, mistaken humankind,
'Tis easy triumph for the mind
While yet no ill adventure strikes us
        And naught mislikes us.

In plenty we praise poverty,
'Mid pleasures we hold grief to be
(And even death, ere it shall stifle
        Our breath) a trifle.

But when the grudging spinner scants
Her thread and fate no surcease grants
From grief most deep and need most wearing,
        Less calm our bearing.

Ah, Tully, thou didst flee from Rome
With w...

By the side of a silvery streamlet,
    That flowed through meadows green,
Lay a youth on the verge of manhood
    And a boy of fair sixteen;
And the elder spake of the future,
    That bright before them lay,
With its hopes full of golden promise
    For some sure, distant day.

And he vowed, as his dark eye kindled,
    He would climb the heights of fame,
And conquer with mind or weapon
    A proud, undying name.
On the darling theme long dwelling
    Bright fabrics did he build,
Which the hope in his ardent bosom
    With splendor helped to gild.

At length he paused, then questioned:
    "Brother, thou dost not speak;
In the vague bright page of the future
    To read dost thou never seek?"
Then the other smiled and answered,<...

In the beginning God made thee
A woman well to look upon,
Thy tender body as a tree
Whereon cool wind hath always blown
Till the clean branches be well grown.

There was none like thee in the land;
The girls that were thy bondwomen
Did bind thee with a purple band
Upon thy forehead, that all men
Should know thee for God’s handmaiden.

Strange raiment clad thee like a bride,
With silk to wear on hands and feet
And plates of gold on either side:
Wine made thee glad, and thou didst eat
Honey, and choice of pleasant meat.

And fishers in the middle sea
Did get thee sea-fish and sea-weeds
In colour like the robes on thee;
And curious work of plaited reeds,
And wools wherein live purple bleeds.

And round the edges of thy cup<...

The mighty ocean rolls and raves,
To part us with its angry waves;
But arch on arch from shore to shore,
In a vast fabric reaching o’er,

With careful labours daily wrought
By steady hope and tender thought,
The wide and weltering waste above,
Our hearts have bridged it with their love.

There fond anticipations fly
To rear the growing structure high;
Dear memories upon either side
Combine to make it large and wide.

There, happy fancies day by day,
New courses sedulously lay;
There soft solicitudes, sweet fears,
And doubts accumulate, and tears.

While the pure purpose of the soul,
To form of many parts a whole,
To make them strong and hold them true,
From end to end, is carried through.

Then when the waters war b...

From the cool and dark-lipped furrows
    breathes a dim delight
Aureoles of joy encircle
    every blade of grass
Where the dew-fed creatures silent
    and enraptured pass:
And the restless ploughman pauses,
    turns, and wondering
Deep beneath his rustic habit
    finds himself a king;
For a fiery moment looking
    with the eyes of God
Over fields a slave at morning
    bowed him to the sod.
Blind and dense with revelation
    every moment flies,
And unto the Mighty Mother
    gay, eternal, rise
All the hopes we hold, the gladness,
    dreams of things to be.
One of all they generations,
    Mother, hails to thee!
Hail! and hail! and hail for ever:
    though I turn again
For they joy unto the human
    vesture...

Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's,
We were so much at one.
But O, in a minute she changed --
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.

A poet of one mood in all my lays,
    Ranging all life to sing one only love,
    Like a west wind across the world I move,
Sweeping my harp of floods mine own wild ways.

The countries change, but not the west-wind days
    Which are my songs.    My soft skies shine above,
    And on all seas the colours of a dove,
And on all fields a flash of silver greys.

I make the whole world answer to my art
    And sweet monotonous meanings.    In your ears
I change not ever, bearing, for my part,
    One thought that is the treasure of my years,
A small cloud full of rain upon my heart
    And in mine arms, clasped, like a child in tears.

Have I dreamed? or was it real,
    What I saw as in a vision,
When to marches hymeneal
In the land of the Ideal
    Moved my thought o'er Fields Elysian?

What! are these the guests whose glances
    Seemed like sunshine gleaming round me?
These the wild, bewildering fancies,
That with dithyrambic dances
    As with magic circles bound me?

Ah! how cold are their caresses!
    Pallid cheeks, and haggard bosoms!
Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses,
And from loose dishevelled tresses
    Fall the hyacinthine blossoms!

O my songs! whose winsome measures
    Filled my heart with secret rapture!
Children of my golden leisures!
Must even your delights and pleasures
    Fade and perish with the capture?

Fair they seemed,...

I.

Moonlight silvers the tops of trees,
Moonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall
And through the evening fall,
Clearly, as if through enchanted seas,
Footsteps passing, an infinite distance away,
In another world and another day.
Moonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,
Moonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,
And the boughs of elms grow green and cold,
Our footsteps echo on gleaming stones,
The leaves are stirred to a jargon of muted tones.
This is the night we have kept, you say:
This is the moonlit night that will never die.
Through the grey streets our memories retain
Let us go back again.

II.

Mist goes up from the river to dim the stars,
The river is black and cold; so let us dance
To flare of horns, and clang of cymbal...

Thou hast entered the land without shadows,
    Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long
Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded,
    And lips that could utter no song;
Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant,
    Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore,
And Earth with its gloom was forgotten,
    And Heaven is thine own evermore!

We see not the glorious vision,
    Nor the welcoming melodies hear,
That, from bowers of beauty Elysian,
    Float tenderly sweet to thine ear;
Round us, lie Earth's desolate midnight,
    Her winter-plains bare and untrod, -
Round thee, is the glad, morning sunlight
    That beams from the City of God!

Our eyes have grown heavy with weeping, -
    Thine, "the King in his beauty" behold
And thou leanest th...

Now the sun his blinking beam
Behind yon mountain loses,
And each eye, that might evil deem,
In blinded slumber closes:
Now the field's a desert grown,
Now the hedger's fled the grove;
Put thou on thy russet gown,
Shielded from the dews, my love,
And wander out with me.

We have met at early day,
Slander rises early,
Slander's tongues had much to say,
And still I love thee dearly:
Slander now to rest has gone,
Only wakes the courting dove;
Slily steal thy bonnet on,
Leave thy father's cot, my love,
And wander out with me.

Clowns have pass'd our noon-day screen,
'Neath the hawthorn's blossom,
Seldom there the chance has been
To press thee to my bosom:
Ploughmen now no more appear,
Night-winds but the thorn-bough mov...