Neighbour! for pity a hound cries on your steps
        With pleading eyes, with sore and weary feet.
Neighbour! your pity a poor beast doth implore;
        Hunger and cold are busy in the street.
Then, neighbour! pause; ’tis no good work you do.
“Off from my door!    I have no place for you.”

Neighbour, your mercy!    A heart of love is here,
        Within this weary body-love is rare,
And seldom comes to cry before our door.
        Then open wide, and take your little share.
Love pleads to be your servant, leal and true.
“Off from my step!    I have no place for you.”

From step to step abused, from door to door,
        Whipped by the wind, and beaten by the rain,
With hunger at his throat, he passes on;
        Yet one who follows shares the creat...

Rains have left the sea-banks ill to climb:
Waveward sinks the loosening seaboard’s floor:
Half the sliding cliffs are mire and slime.
Earth, a fruit rain-rotted to the core,
Drops dissolving down in flakes, that pour
Dense as gouts from eaves grown foul with grime.
One sole rock which years that scathe not score
Stands a sea-mark in the tides of time.
Time were even as even the rainiest clime,
Life were even as even this lapsing shore,
Might not aught outlive their trustless prime:
Vainly fear would wail or hope implore,
Vainly grief revile or love adore
Seasons clothed in sunshine, rain, or rime
Now for me one comfort held in store
Stands a sea-mark in the tides of time.
Once, by fate’s default or chance’s crime,
Each apart, our burdens each we bore;

Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim “I know you both,
“Have recognized your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!”
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?


How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament,
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro’ wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevart break again
To warmth and light and bliss?


I know! the world proscribes not love;
Allows my finger to caress
Your lips’ contour and downiness,
Provided it supply a glove.
The world’s good word! the Institute!<...

Between us now and here -
Two thrown together
Who are not wont to wear
Life's flushest feather -
Who see the scenes slide past,
The daytimes dimming fast,
Let there be truth at last,
Even if despair.

So thoroughly and long
Have you now known me,
So real in faith and strong
Have I now shown me,
That nothing needs disguise
Further in any wise,
Or asks or justifies
A guarded tongue.

Face unto face, then, say,
Eyes mine own meeting,
Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.

Thee freckled August, dozing hot and blonde
Oft 'neath a wheat-stack in the white-topped mead -
In her full hair brown ox-eyed daisies wound -
O water-gurgler, lends a sleepy heed:
Half-lidded eyes a purple iron-weed
Blows slimly o'er; beyond, a path-found pond
Basks flint-bright, hedged with pink-plumed pepper-grasses,
A coigne for vainest dragonflies, which glasses
        Their blue in diamond.

Oft from some dusty locust, that thick weaves
With crescent pulse-pods its thin foliage gray,
Thou, - o'er the shambling lane, which past the sheaves
Of sun-tanned oats winds, red with rutty clay,
One league of rude rail-fence, - some panting day,
When each parched meadow quivering vapor grieves,
Nature's Astrologist, dost promise rain,
In seeping language of t...

"THROUGH me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.

"All hope abandon ye who enter here."

Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
Over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd:
Whereat I thus: "Master, these words import
Hard meaning."    He as one prepar'd replied:
"Here thou must all distrust behind thee leave;
Here be vile fear extinguish'd. We are come
Where I have told thee we shall see the souls
To misery doom'd, who intellectual good
Have lost."    And when his hand he had stretch'd ...

I will go out to grass with that old King,
For I am weary of clothes and cooks.
I long to lie along the banks of brooks,
And watch the boughs above me sway and swing.
Come, I will pluck off custom's livery,
Nor longer be a lackey to old Time.
Time shall serve me, and at my feet shall fling
The spoil of listless minutes. I shall climb
The wild trees for my food, and run
Through dale and upland as a fox runs free,
Laugh for cool joy and sleep i' the warm sun,
And men will call me mad, like that old King.

For I am woodland-natured, and have made
Dryads my bedfellows,
And I have played
With the sleek Naiads in the splash of pools
And made a mock of gowned and trousered fools.
Helen, none knows
Better than thou how like a Faun I strayed.
And I ...

Lord, Thou hast stricken us, smitten us sore,
Winnowed us fine on the dread threshing-floor.
                "Had I not reason?--far you had strayed,
                Vain was My calling, you would not be stayed."

Low in the dust, Lord, our hearts now are bowed,
Roughly Thy share through our boasting has ploughed.
                "So as My ploughing prepares for the seed,
                So shall the harvest our best hopes exceed."

Lord, we have lost of our dearest and best,
Flung to the void and cast out to the waste.
                "Nay then, not one of them fell from My hand,
                Here at My side in their glory they stand."

How shall we start, Lord, to build life again,
Fairer and sweeter, and freed from its pain?
                "Build y...

Bring her again, O western wind,
Over the western sea:
Gentle and good and fair and kind,
Bring her again to me!

Not that her fancy holds me dear,
Not that a hope may be:
Only that I may know her near,
Wind of the western sea.

1875

If all the sermons good men preach
And all the precepts that they teach
    Were gathered into one
Unbroken line of silver speech,
The shining filament might reach
    From earth unto the sun.

If all the stories ever told
By wild romancers, young or old,
    Into a thread were drawn,
And from its cable coil unrolled,
'Twould span those misty hills of gold
    That heaven seems resting on.

If every folly, every freak,
From day to day, from week to week,
    Is written in "The Book,"
With all the idle words we speak,
Would it not crimson many a cheek
    Upon the page to look?

If all the good deeds that we do
From honest motives pure and true
    Shall there recorded be,
Known unto God and angels too,
Is it not sad...

A land, as far as the eye can see, where the waving grasses grow
Or the plains are blackened and burnt and bare, where the false mirages go
Like shifting symbols of hope deferred, land where you never know.

Land of the plenty or land of want, where the grey Companions dance,
Feast or famine, or hope or fear, and in all things land of chance,
Where Nature pampers or Nature slays, in her ruthless, red, romance.

And we catch a sound of a fairy's song, as the wind goes whipping by,
Or a scent like incense drifts along from the herbage ripe and dry
Or the dust storms dance on their ballroom floor, where the bones of the cattle lie.

If grief come early
Joy comes late,
If joy come early
Grief will wait;
Aye, my dear and tender!

Wise ones joy them early
While the cheeks are red,
Banish grief till surly
Time has dulled their dread.

And joy being ours
Ere youth has flown,
The later hours
May find us gone;
Aye, my dear and tender!

I


Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers
Breathed on the eyelids of love by music that slumbers,
Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow,
Thou comest mysterious,
In beauty imperious,
Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know.
Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken,
Helplessly shaken and tossed,
And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken,
My lips, unsatisfied, thirst;
Mine eyes are accurst
With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken;
And mine ears, in listening lost,
Yearn, yearn for the note of a chord that will never awaken.


II


Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,--
Resonant bar upon bar,--
The vibrating lyre
Of the spirit respond...

Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit
Caps occasion with an intellectual fit.
Yet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber'll hit
The bald and bóld blínking gold when áll's dóne
Right rooting in the bare butt's wincing navel in the sight of the sun.

(The Argosy, Feb. 1866.)


God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself,
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest fo...

Dead leaves are deep in all our forest walks;
    Their brightest tints not all extinguished yet,
    Shine redly glimmering through the dewy wet;
    And whereso'er thy musing foot is set,
The fragrant cool-wort lifts its emerald stalks.

How kindly nature wraps secure and warm,
    In the fallen mantle of her summer pride,
    These lovely tender things that peep and hide,
    Whom unawares thy curious eye hath spied,
For the long night of winter's frost and storm.

Still keeps the deer-berry its vivid green,
    Set in its glowing calyx like a gem;
    While hung above, a marvellous diadem
    Of tawny gold, the bittersweet's gray stem,
Strung with its globes of murky flame is seen.

The foot sinks ankle-deep in velvet moss,
    The shroud of...

The death of men is not the death
Of rights that urged them to the fray;
    For men may yield
    On battle-field
A noble life with stainless shield,
    And swords may rust
    Above their dust,
    But still, and still
    The touch and thrill
Of freedom's vivifying breath
    Will nerve a heart and rouse a will
    In some hour, in the days to be,
To win back triumphs from defeat;
And those who blame us then will greet
    Right's glorious eternity.

For right lives in a thousand things;
    Its cradle is its martyr's grave,
Wherein it rests awhile until
    The life that heroisms gave
Will rise again, at God's own will,
    And right the wrong,
    Which long and long
Did reign above the true and just;
And thro' the...

The sportive sylphs that course the air,
Unseen on wings that twilight weaves,
Around the opening rose repair,
And breathe sweet incense o'er its leaves.

With sparkling cups of bubbles made,
They catch the ruddy beams of day,
And steal the rainbow's sweetest shade,
Their blushing favorite to array.

They gather gems with sunbeams bright,
From floating clouds and falling showers
They rob Aurora's locks of light
To grace their own fair queen of flowers.

Thus, thus adorned, the speaking Rose,
Becomes a token fit to tell,
Of things that words can ne'er disclose,
And nought but this reveal so well.

Then take my flower, and let its leaves
Beside thy heart be cherished near,
While that confiding heart receives
The thought it whis...