Heart, we will forget him!
You and I, to-night!
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done, pray tell me,
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you're lagging,
I may remember him!

O waters fresh and sweet and clear,
Where bathed her lovely frame,
Who seems the only lady unto me;
O gentle branch and dear,
(Sighing I speak thy name,)
Thou column for her shapely thighs, her supple knee;
O grass, O flowers, which she
Swept with her gown that veiled
The angelic breast unseen;
O sacred air serene,
Whence the divine-eyed Love my heart assailed,
By all of ye be heard
This my supreme lament, my dying word.


Oh, if it be my fate
(As Heaven shall so decree)
That Love shall close for me my weeping eyes,
Some courteous friend I supplicate
Midst these to bury me,
Whilst my enfranchised spirit homeward flies;
Less dreadful death shall rise,
If I may bear this hope
To that mysterious goal.
For ne'er did weary so...

Vast was the wealth I carried in life's pack -
    Youth, health, ambition, hope and trust; but Time
    And Fate, those robbers fit for any crime,
Stole all, and left me but the empty sack.
Before me lay a long and lonely track
    Of darkling hills and barren steeps to climb;
    Behind me lay in shadows the sublime
Lost lands of Love's delight.    Alack!    Alack!

Unwearied, and with springing steps elate,
    I had conveyed my wealth along the road.
    The empty sack proved now a heavier load:
I was borne down beneath its worthless weight.
I stumbled on, and knocked at Death's dark gate.
    There was no answer.    Stung by sorrow's goad
    I forced my way into that grim abode,
And laughed, and flung Life's empty sack to Fate.

Unknown ...

Where Is Seen A Young Maiden, Dead, In The Act Of Departing, Taking Leave Of Her Family.


    Where goest thou? Who calls
    Thee from my dear ones far away?
    Most lovely maiden, say!
    Alone, a wanderer, dost thou leave
    Thy father's roof so soon?
    Wilt thou unto its threshold e'er return?
    Wilt thou make glad one day,
    Those, who now round thee, weeping, mourn?

    Fearless thine eye, and spirited thy act;
    And yet thou, too, art sad.
    If pleasant or unpleasant be the road,
    If gay or gloomy be the new abode,
    To which thou journeyest, indeed,
    In that grave face, how difficult to read!
    Ah, hard to me the problem still hath seemed;
    Not hath the world, perhaps, yet understood,
    If thou beloved,...

A track of moonlight on a quiet lake,
Whose small waves on a silver-sanded shore
Whisper of peace, and with the low winds make
Such harmonies as keep the woods awake,
And listening all night long for their sweet sake
A green-waved slope of meadow, hovered o'er
By angel-troops of lilies, swaying light
On viewless stems, with folded wings of white;
A slumberous stretch of mountain-land, far seen
Where the low westering day, with gold and green,
Purple and amber, softly blended, fills
The wooded vales, and melts among the hills;
A vine-fringed river, winding to its rest
On the calm bosom of a stormless sea,
Bearing alike upon its placid breast,
With earthly flowers and heavenly' stars impressed,
The hues of time and of eternity
Such are the pictures which th...

Letter VI. Despair.


I.

    I am undone. My hopes have beggar'd me,
    For I have lov'd where loving was denied.
    To-day is dark, and Yesterday has died,
    And when To-morrow comes, erect and free,
    Like some great king, whose tyrant will he be,
    And whose defender in the days of pride?


II.

    I am not cold, and yet November bands
    Compress my heart. I know the month is May,
    And that the sun will warm me if I stay.
    But who is this? Oh, who is this that stands
    Straight in my path, and with his bony ha...

A quaint old gabled cottage sleeps between the raving hills.
To right and left are livid strife, but on the deep, wide sills
The purple pot-flowers swell and glow, and o'er the walls and eaves
Prinked creeper steals caressing hands, the poplar drips its leaves.
Within the garden hot and sweet
Fair form and woven color meet,
While down the clear, cool stones, 'tween banks with branch and blossom gay,
A little, bridged, blind rivulet goes touching out its way.

Peace lingers hidden from the knife, the tearing blinding shell,
Where falls the spattered sunlight on a lichen-covered well.
No voice is here, no fall of feet, no smoke lifts cool and grey,
But on the granite stoop a cat blinks vaguely at the day.
From hill to hill across the vale
Storms man's terrific iron gale;<...

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory -
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Here in the dusk I see her face again
As then I knew it, ere she fell asleep;
Renunciation glorifying pain
    Of her soul's inmost deep.

I shall not see its like again! the brow
Of passive marble, purely aureoled, -
As some pale lily in the afterglow, -
    With supernatural gold.

As if a rose should speak and, somehow heard
By some strange sense, the unembodied sound
Grow visible, her mouth was as a word
    A sweet thought falters 'round.

So do I still remember eyes imbued
With far reflections - as the stars suggest
The silence, purity and solitude
    Of infinite peace and rest.

She was my all. I loved her as men love
A high desire, religion, an ideal -
The meaning purpose in the loss whereof
    God shall alone revea...

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...

Listen, and when thy hand this paper presses,
O time-worn woman, think of her who blesses
What thy thin fingers touch, with her caresses.

O mother, for the weight of years that break thee!
O daughter, for slow time must yet awake thee,
And from the changes of my heart must make thee.

O fainting traveller, morn is grey in heaven.
Dost thou remember how the clouds were driven?
And are they calm about the fall of even?

Pause near the ending of thy long migration,
For this one sudden hour of desolation
Appeals to one hour of thy meditation.

Suffer, O silent one, that I remind thee
Of the great hills that stormed the sky behind thee,
Of the wild winds of power that have resigned thee.

Know that the mournful plain where thou must wander

"O I am weary!" she sighed, as her billowy
Hair she unloosed in a torrent of gold
That rippled and fell o'er a figure as willowy,
Graceful and fair as a goddess of old:
Over her jewels she flung herself drearily,
Crumpled the laces that snowed on her breast,
Crushed with her fingers the lily that wearily
Clung in her hair like a dove in its nest.
And naught but her shadowy form in the mirror
To kneel in dumb agony down and weep near her!

"Weary?" Of what? Could we fathom the mystery?
Lift up the lashes weighed down by her tears
And wash with their dews one white face from her history,
Set like a gem in the red rust of years?
Nothing will rest her - unless he who died of her
Strayed from his grave, and in place of the groom,
Tipping her face, kneeling the...

Oh, for the fire that used to glow
In those my days of old!
I never thought a man could grow
So callous and so cold.
Ah, for the heart that used to ache
For those in sorrow’s ways;
I often wish my heart could break
As it did in those dead days.

Along my track of storm and stress,
And it is plain to trace,
I look back from the loneliness
And the depth of my disgrace.
’Twas fate and only fate I know,
But all mistakes are plain,
’Tis sadder than the afterglow,
More dreary than the rain.

But still there lies a patch of sun
That ne’er will come again,
Those golden days when I was one
Of Nature’s gentlemen.
And if there is a memory
Could break me down at last,
It sure would be the thought of this,
The sunshine in the pa...

We speak of the world that passes away, -
The world of men who lived years ago,
And could not feel that their hearts' quick glow
Would fade to such ashen lore to-day.

We hear of death that is not our woe,
And see the shadow of funerals creeping
Over the sweet fresh roads by the reaping;
But do we weep till our loved ones go?

When one is lost who is greater than we,
And loved us so well that death should reprieve
Of all hearts this one to us; when we must leave
His grave, - the past will break like the sea!

Our Skeeta was married, our Skeeta! the tomboy and pet of the place,
No more as a maiden we’d greet her, no more would her pert little face
Light up the chill gloom of the parlour; no more would her deft little hands
Serve drinks to the travel-stained caller on his way to more southerly lands;
No more would she chaff the rough drovers and send them away with a smile,
No more would she madden her lovers, demurely, with womanish guile
The “prince” from the great Never-Never, with light touch of lips and of hand
Had come, and enslaved her for ever a potentate bearded and tanned
From the land where the white mirage dances its dance of death over the plains,
With the glow of the sun in his glances, the lust of the West in his veins;

His talk of long drought-stricken stretches when the ton...

1.
Far, far away, O ye
Halcyons of Memory,
Seek some far calmer nest
Than this abandoned breast!
No news of your false spring
To my heart's winter bring,
Once having gone, in vain
Ye come again.

2.
Vultures, who build your bowers
High in the Future's towers,
Withered hopes on hopes are spread!
Dying joys, choked by the dead,
Will serve your beaks for prey
Many a day.

The beauty and the life
Of life’s and beauty’s fairest paragon
O tears! O grief! hung at a feeble thread
To which pale Atropos had set her knife;
The soul with many a groan
Had left each outward part,
And now did take his last leave of the heart:
Naught else did want, save death, ev’n to be dead;
When the afflicted band about her bed,
Seeing so fair him come in lips, cheeks, eyes,
Cried, ‘Ah! and can Death enter Paradise?‘

When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew.
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,