What will you give me, if I will wed?
        “A golden gown
        To come sweetly down,
And deck you from foot to head.”

How will you keep me, if I am cold?
        “By a heart so warm,
        The bravest storm
Dare not force through my strong hands’ hold.”

How will you please me, if I should thirst?
        “Why by the rape
        Of the purple grape,
Which the summer and sun have nursed.”

If I should hunger what may I eat?
        “For you the skies
        The falcon flies,
And the hounds on the stag are fleet.”

How can you comfort when fair youth dies,
        When the spirit’s fain
        For a purer gain,
Than the satisfied flesh supplies?

“But this I promise, when starved and cold
        A lo...

In her dark eyes dreams poetize;
The soul sits lost in love:
There is no thing in all the skies,
To gladden all the world I prize,
Like the deep love in her dark eyes,
Or one sweet dream thereof.

In her dark eyes, where thoughts arise,
Her soul's soft moods I see:
Of hope and faith, that make life wise;
And charity, whose food is sighs
Not truer than her own true eyes
Is truth's divinity.

In her dark eyes the knowledge lies
Of an immortal sod,
Her soul once trod in angel-guise,
Nor can forget its heavenly ties,
Since, there in Heaven, upon her eyes
Once gazed the eyes of God.

"It is not death that harrows us," they lipped,
"The soundless cell is in itself relief,
For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped
At unawares, and at its best but brief."

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone,
Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye,
As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone
From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead,
They should not, like the many, be at rest,
But stray as apparitions; hence I said,
"Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

"We are among the few death sets not free,
The hurt, misrepresented names, who come
At each year's brink, and cry to History
To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

"We are stript of rights; our shames...

Oh! hide those tempting eyes, that faultless form,
Those looks with feeling and with nature warm;
The neck, the softly-swelling bosom hide,
Nor, wanton gales, blow the light vest aside;
For who, when beauties more than life excite
Silent applause, can gaze without delight!
But innocence, enchanting maid, is thine;
Thine eyes in liquid light unconscious shine;
And may thy breast no other feelings prove,
Than those of sympathy and mutual love!

The other night I got the blues and tried to smile in vain.
I couldn’t chuck a chuckle at the foolery of Twain;
When Ward and Billings failed to bring a twinkle to my eye,
I turned my eyes to Hansard of the fifteenth of July.
I laughed and roared until I thought that I was growing fat,
And all the boarders came to see what I was laughing at:
It rose the risibility of some, I grieve to state,
That foolish speech of Brentnall’s in the Vote of Thanks debate.

O Brentnall, of the olden school and cold sarcastic style!
You’ll take another WORKER now and stick it on your file;
“We’re very fond of poetry,”, we hope that this is quite
As entertaining as the lines you read the other night.
We know that you are honest, but ’twas foolish to confess
You read and file the WORKER; we...

I hate this grinding poverty,
To toil, and pinch, and borrow,
And be for ever haunted by
The spectre of to-morrow.
It breaks the strong heart of a man,
It crushes out his spirit,
Do what he will, do what he can,
However high his merit!

I hate the praise that Want has got
From preacher and from poet,
The cant of those who know it not
To blind the men who know it.
The greatest curse since man had birth,
An everlasting terror:
The cause of half the crime on earth,
The cause of half the error.

I know not if she be unkind,
If she have faults I do not care;
Search through the world - where will you find
A face like hers, a form, a mind?
I love her to despair.

If she be cruel, cruelty
Is a great virtue, I will swear;
If she be proud - then pride must be
Akin to Heaven's divinest three -
I love her to despair.

Why speak to me of that and this?
All you may say weighs not a hair!
In her, - whose lips I may not kiss, -
To me naught but perfection is! -
I love her to despair.

Ah what avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.

From the first circle I descended thus
Down to the second, which, a lesser space
Embracing, so much more of grief contains
Provoking bitter moans.    There, Minos stands
Grinning with ghastly feature: he, of all
Who enter, strict examining the crimes,

Gives sentence, and dismisses them beneath,
According as he foldeth him around:
For when before him comes th' ill fated soul,
It all confesses; and that judge severe
Of sins, considering what place in hell
Suits the transgression, with his tail so oft
Himself encircles, as degrees beneath
He dooms it to descend.    Before him stand
Always a num'rous throng; and in his turn
Each one to judgment passing, speaks, and hears
His fate, thence downward to his dwelling hurl'd.

"O thou! who to this reside...

Io pensava assai destro esser sull' ale.

UNWORTHY TO HAVE LOOKED UPON HER, HE IS STILL MORE SO TO ATTEMPT HER PRAISES.


    I thought me apt and firm of wing to rise
(Not of myself, but him who trains us all)
In song, to numbers fitting the fair thrall
Which Love once fasten'd and which Death unties.
Slow now and frail, the task too sorely tries,
As a great weight upon a sucker small:
"Who leaps," I said, "too high may midway fall:
Man ill accomplishes what Heaven denies."
So far the wing of genius ne'er could fly--
Poor style like mine and faltering tongue much less--
As Nature rose, in that rare fabric, high.
Love follow'd Nature with such full success
In gracing her, no claim could I advance
Even to look, and yet was bless'd by chance.

When we are dead, some Hunting-boy will pass
And find a stone half-hidden in tall grass
And grey with age: but having seen that stone
(Which was your image), ride more slowly on.

I never climb a high hill
Or gaze across the lea,
But, Oh, beyond the two of them,
Beyond the height and blue of them,
I'm looking for the sea.

A blue sea--a crooning sea--
A grey sea lashed with foam--
But, Oh, to take the drift of it,
To know the surge and lift of it,
And 'tis I am longing for it as the homeless long for home.

I never dream at night-time
Or close my eyes by day,
But there I have the might of it,
The wind-whipped, sun-drenched sight of it,
That calls my soul away.

Oh, deep dreams and happy dreams,
Its dreaming still I'd be,
For still the land I'm waking in,
'Tis that my heart is breaking in,
And 'tis far where I'd be sleeping with the blue waves over me.

    Oh, be not led away.
Lured by the colour of the sun-rich day.
    The gay romances of song
Unto the spirit-life doth not belong.
    Though far-between the hours
In which the Master of Angelic Powers
    Lightens the dusk within
The Holy of Holies;    be it thine to win
    Rare vistas of white light,
Half-parted lips, through which the Infinite
    Murmurs her ancient story;
Hearkening to whom the wandering planets hoary
    Waken primeval fires,
With deeper rapture in celestial choirs
    Breathe, and with fleeter motion
Wheel in their orbits through the surgeless ocean.
    So, hearken thou like these,
Intent on her, mounting by slow degrees,
    Until thy song's elation
Echoes her multitudinous meditation.

--November 15, 1893

Here in the shade of the tree
The hours go by
Silent and swift,
Lightly as birds fly.
Then the deep clouds broaden and drift,
Or the cloudless darkness and the worn moon.
Waking, the dreamer knows he is old,
And the day that he dreamed was gone
Is gone.

“Oh, show me how a rose can shut and be a bud again!”
Nay, watch my Lords of the Admiralty, for they have the work in train.
They have taken the men that were careless lads at Dartmouth in ’Fourteen
And entered them at the landward schools as though no war had been.
They have piped the children off all the seas from the Falklands to the Bight,
And quartered them on the Colleges to learn to read and write!

Their books were rain and sleet and fog, the dry gale and the snow,
Their teachers were the horned mines and the hump-backed Death below.
Their schools were walled by the walking mist and roofed by the waiting skies,
When they conned their task in a new-sown field with the Moonlight Sacrifice.
They were not rated too young to teach, nor reckoned unfit to guide
When they formed ...

Land of the gentle and brave!
Our love is as wide as thy woe;
It deepens beside every grave
Where the heart of a hero lies low.

Land of the sunniest skies!
Our love glows the more for thy gloom;
Our hearts, by the saddest of ties,
Cling closest to thee in thy doom.

Land where the desolate weep
In a sorrow no voice may console!
Our tears are but streams, making deep
The ocean of love in our soul.

Land where the victor's flag waves,
Where only the dead are free!
Each link of the chain that enslaves
But binds us to them and to thee.

Land where the Sign of the Cross
Its shadow hath everywhere shed!
We measure our love by thy loss,
Thy loss by the graves of our dead!

Shine soft, ye trembling tears of light
That strew the mourning skies;
Hushed in the silent dews of night
The harp of Erin lies.

What though her thousand years have past
Of poets, saints, and kings, -
Her echoes only hear the last
That swept those golden strings.

Fling o'er his mound, ye star-lit bowers,
The balmiest wreaths ye wear,
Whose breath has lent your earth-born flowers
Heaven's own ambrosial air.

Breathe, bird of night, thy softest tone,
By shadowy grove and rill;
Thy song will soothe us while we own
That his was sweeter still.

Stay, pitying Time, thy foot for him
Who gave thee swifter wings,
Nor let thine envious shadow dim
The light his glory flings.

If in his cheek unholy blood
Burned for one ...

When Ruth was left half desolate,
Her Father took another Mate;
And Ruth, not seven years old,
A slighted child, at her own will
Went wandering over dale and hill,
In thoughtless freedom, bold.

And she had made a pipe of straw,
And music from that pipe could draw
Like sounds of winds and floods;
Had built a bower upon the green,
As if she from her birth had been
An infant of the woods.

Beneath her father's roof, alone
She seemed to live; her thoughts her own;
Herself her own delight;
Pleased with herself, nor sad, nor gay;
And, passing thus the live-long day,
She grew to woman's height.

There came a Youth from Georgia's shore
A military casque he wore,
With splendid feathers drest;
He brought them from the Cherokees;<...