Let a valiant Faith cross swords with Death,
And Death is certain to fall;
For the dead arise with joy in their eyes -
They were not dead at all.
If this were only a world of chance,
Then faith, with its strong white spark
Could burn through the sod and fashion a God,
And set Him to shine in the dark.

So in troublesome days, and in shadowy ways,
In the dire and difficult time,
We must cling, we must cling to our Faith, and bring
Our courage to heights sublime.
It is not a matter of hugging a creed
That will lift us up to the light,
But in keeping our trust that Love is just,
And that whatever is, is right.

When the hopes of this world into chaos are hurled,
And the devil seems running the earth,
When the bad folks stay and the good pass a...

("Charle! ô mon fils!")

[March, 1871.]


Charles, Charles, my son! hast thou, then, quitted me?
Must all fade, naught endure?
Hast vanished in that radiance, clear for thee,
But still for us obscure?

My sunset lingers, boy, thy morn declines!
Sweet mutual love we've known;
For man, alas! plans, dreams, and smiling twines
With others' souls his own.

He cries, "This has no end!" pursues his way:
He soon is downward bound:
He lives, he suffers; in his grasp one day
Mere dust and ashes found.

I've wandered twenty years, in distant lands,
With sore heart forced to stay:
Why fell the blow Fate only understands!
God took my home away.

To-day one daughter and one son remain
Of all my goodly show:
Welln...

Quanta invidia ti porto, avara terra.

HE ENVIES EARTH, HEAVEN, AND DEATH THEIR POSSESSION OF HIS TREASURE.


    O earth, whose clay-cold mantle shrouds that face,
And veils those eyes that late so brightly shone,
Whence all that gave delight on earth was known,
How much I envy thee that harsh embrace!
O heaven, that in thy airy courts confined
That purest spirit, when from earth she fled,
And sought the mansions of the righteous dead;
How envious, thus to leave my panting soul behind!
O angels, that in your seraphic choir
Received her sister-soul, and now enjoy
Still present, those delights without alloy,
Which my fond heart must still in vain desire!
In her I lived--in her my life decays;
Yet envious Fate denies to end my hapless days.

Argument.

Ocean Cave, Spanish Captive, Wild Indian Maid, Genius of Andes, and Spirits.

'Tis dawn: the distant Andes' rocky spires,
One after one, have caught the orient fires.
Where the dun condor shoots his upward flight,
His wings are touched with momentary light.
Meantime, beneath the mountains' glittering heads,
A boundless ocean of gray vapour spreads,
That o'er the champaign, stretching far below,
Moves now, in clustered masses, rising slow,
Till all the living landscape is displayed
In various pomp of colour, light, and shade,
Hills, forests, rivers, lakes, and level plain,
Lessening in sunshine to the southern main.
The Llama's fleece fumes with ascending dew;
The gem-like humming-birds their toils renew;
And there, by the wild river's devi...

It is usual
for people in this country
(out of pretended respect
but rather from an impertinent curiosity)
to desire to see
persons
after they are
dead.

It is my earnest request that no person
on any pretence whatever
may be permitted to see my
corpse
but those who
unavoidably must.

I desire to be buried
in the north side of the churchyard
of Tregynon
somewhere about the centre
my coffin to be made in the most
plain and simple manner
without the usual fantastical decorations
and the more
perishable the material
the better.

I desire that no undertaker
or professed performer of funerals
may be employed:
but that I may be conveyed
to the churchyard
in some country hears
which ...

Not they who know the awful gibbet's anguish,
    Not they who, while sad years go by them, in
The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish,
    Do suffer fullest penalty for sin.

'Tis they who walk the highways unsuspected,
    Yet with grim fear for ever at their side,
Who hug the corpse of some sin undetected,
    A corpse no grave or coffin-lid can hide -

'Tis they who are in their own chambers haunted
    By thoughts that like unbidden guests intrude,
And sit down, uninvited and unwanted,
    And make a nightmare of the solitude.

At evening when the aspens rustled soft
And the last blackbird by the hedge-nest laughed,
And through the leaves the moon's unmeaning face
Looked, and then rose in dark-blue leafless space;
Watching the trees and moon she could not bear
The silence and the presence everywhere.
The blackbird called the silence and it came
Closing and closing round like smoke round flame.
Into her heart it crept and the heart was numb,
Even wishes died, and all but fear was dumb--
Fear and its phantoms. Then the trees were enlarged,
And from their roundness unguessed shapes emerged,
Or no shape but the image of her fear
Creeping forth from her mind and hovering near.
If a bat flitted it was an evil thing;
Sadder the trees grew with every shadowy wing--
Their shape enlarged, thei...

(On Certain Realists.)

You with the quick sardonic eye
For all the mockeries of life,
Beware, in this dark masque of things that seem,
Lest even that tragic irony,
Which you discern in this our mortal strife,
Trick you and trap you, also, with a dream.

Last night I saw a dead man borne along
The city streets, passing a boisterous throng
That never ceased to laugh and shout and dance:
And yet, and yet,
For all the poison bitter minds might brew
From themes like this, I knew
That the stern Truth would not permit her glance
Thus to be foiled by flying straws of chance,
For her keen eyes on deeper skies are set,
And laws that tragic ironists forget.

She saw the dead man's life, from birth to death,--
All that he knew of love and ...

Sì breve è 'l tempo e 'l pensier sì veloce.

THE REMEMBRANCE OF HER CHASES SADNESS FROM HIS HEART.


    So brief the time, so fugitive the thought
Which Laura yields to me, though dead, again,
Small medicine give they to my giant pain;
Still, as I look on her, afflicts me nought.
Love, on the rack who holds me as he brought,
Fears when he sees her thus my soul retain,
Where still the seraph face and sweet voice reign,
Which first his tyranny and triumph wrought.
As rules a mistress in her home of right,
From my dark heavy heart her placid brow
Dispels each anxious thought and omen drear.
My soul, which bears but ill such dazzling light,
Says with a sigh: "O blessed day! when thou
Didst ope with those dear eyes thy passage here!"

MA...

To fetch clear water out of the spring
The little maid Margaret ran;
From the stream to the castle’s western wing
It was but a bowshot span;
On the sedgy brink where the osiers cling
Lay a dead man, pallid and wan.

The lady Mabel rose from her bed,
And walked in the castle hall,
Where the porch through the western turret led
She met with her handmaid small.
“What aileth thee, Margaret?” the lady said,
“Hast let thy pitcher fall?

“Say, what hast thou seen by the streamlet side,
A nymph or a water sprite,
That thou comest with eyes so wild and wide,
And with cheeks so ghostly white?”
“Nor nymph nor sprite,” the maiden cried,
“But the corpse of a slaughtered knight.”

The lady Mabel summon’d straight
To her presence Sir Hugh de Ver...

No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound obliterating everything.

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down, and it would be thick black dark for ever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams, nor death, which quivers with birth, but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

What is sleep?
It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill, but it does not alter me, nor help me.
And death would ache still, I am sure; it would be lambent, uneasy.
I wish it would be completely dark everywhere, inside me, and out, heavily dark ...

He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

My Lord, at last you have it! Now we know
Truth's not a phrase, justice an idle show.
Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.
Blood has washed blood clean, and, in the final dust
Your carrion will be purified. Yet, see,
Though your body perish, for your soul shall be
An immortality of infamy!

As evening falls,
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit halls which reach no end. . . .

Take my arm, then, you or you or you,
And let us walk abroad on the solid air:
Look how the organist’s head, in silhouette,
Leans to the lamplit music’s orange square! . . .
The dim-globed lamps illumine rows of faces,
Rows of hands and arms and hungry eyes,
They have hurried down from a myriad secret places,
From windy chambers next ...

And should she die, her grave should be
Upon the bare top of a sunny hill,
Among the moorlands of her own fair land,
Amid a ring of old and moss-grown stones
In gorse and heather all embosomed.
There should be no tall stone, no marble tomb
Above her gentle corse;--the ponderous pile
Would press too rudely on those fairy limbs.
The turf should lightly he, that marked her home.
A sacred spot it would be--every bird
That came to watch her lone grave should be holy.
The deer should browse around her undisturbed;
The whin bird by, her lonely nest should build
All fearless; for in life she loved to see
Happiness in all things--
And we would come on summer days
When all around was bright, and set us down
And think of all that lay beneath that turf
On which ...

Soul, dost thou fear
For to-day or to-morrow?
'Tis the part of a fool
To go seeking sorrow.
Of thine own doing
Thou canst not contrive them.
'Tis He that shall give them;
Thou may'st not outlive them.
So why cloud to-day
With fear of the sorrow,
That may or may not
Come to-morrow?

“And if there’s blood upon his hand,
‘Tis but the blood of deer.”
- W. Scott.


To beasts of the field, and fowls of the air,
And fish of the sea alike,
Man’s hand is ever slow to spare,
And ever ready to strike;
With a license to kill, and to work our will,
In season by land or by water,
To our heart’s content we may take our fill
Of the joys we derive from slaughter.

And few, I reckon, our rights gainsay
In this world of rapine and wrong,
Where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey
For the resolute and the strong;
Fins, furs, and feathers, they are and were
For our use and pleasure created,
We can shoot, and hunt, and angle, and snare,
Unquestioned, if not unsated.

I have neither the will nor the right to blame,<...

Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
All that frail stuff which will be - or which was.