This is my comfort when she's most unkind:
She can but spoil me of my means, not mind.

SIR OZANA LE CURE HARDY. SIR GALAHAD. SIR BORS DE GANYS.

            SIR OZANA.

All day long and every day,
From Christmas-Eve to Whit-Sunday,
Within that Chapel-aisle I lay,
    And no man came a-near.

Naked to the waist was I,
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
    The truncheon of a spear.

No meat did ever pass my lips
Those days. Alas! the sunlight slips
From off the gilded parclose, dips,
    And night comes on apace.

My arms lay back behind my head;
Over my raised-up knees was spread
A samite cloth of white and red;
    A rose lay on my face.

Many a time I tried to shout;
But as in dream of battle-rout,
My frozen speech would not well out;
    I could not even...

A blanket low and leaden,
Though rent across the west,
Whose darkness seems to deaden
The brightest and the best;
A sunset white and staring
On cloud-wrecks far away,
And haggard house-walls glaring
A farewell to the day.

A light on tower and steeple,
Where sun no longer shines,
My people, Oh my people!
Rise up and read the signs!
Low looms the nearer high-line
(No sign of star or moon),
The horseman on the skyline
Rode hard this afternoon!

(Is he, and who shall know it?,
The spectre of a scout?
The spirit of a poet,
Whose truths were met with doubt?
Who sought and who succeeded
In marking danger’s track,
Whose warnings were unheeded
Till all the sky was black?)

It is a shameful story
For our young...

After thy labour take thine ease,
Here with the sweet Pierides.
But if so be that men will not
Give thee the laurel crown for lot;
Be yet assur'd, thou shall have one
Not subject to corruption.

(Grandpapa Loquitur.)


You don't know Froissart now, young folks.
This age, I think, prefers recitals
Of high-spiced crime, with "slang" for jokes,
And startling titles;

But, in my time, when still some few
Loved "old Montaigne," and praised Pope's Homer
(Nay, thought to style him "poet" too,
Were scarce misnomer),

Sir John was less ignored. Indeed,
I can re-call how Some-one present
(Who spoils her grandson, Frank!) would read
And find him pleasant;

For,--by this copy,--hangs a Tale.
Long since, in an old house in Surrey,
Where men knew more of "morning ale"
Than "Lindley Murray,"

In a dim-lighted, whip-hung hall,
'Neath Hogarth's "Midnight Conversation,"
It stood; and oft 'twixt spring and fall,
With fon...

One bumper at parting!--tho' many
    Have circled the board since we met,
The fullest, the saddest of any
    Remains to be crowned by us yet.
The sweetness that pleasure hath in it,
    Is always so slow to come forth,
That seldom, alas, till the minute
    It dies, do we know half its worth.
But come,--may our life's happy measure
    Be all of such moments made up;
They're born on the bosom of Pleasure,
    They die midst the tears of the cup.

'Tis onward we journey, how pleasant
    To pause and inhabit awhile
Those few sunny spots, like the present,
    That mid the dull wilderness smile!
But Time, like a pitiless master,
    Cries "Onward!" and spurs the gay hours--
Ah, never doth Time travel faster,
    Than when his way lies among...

THE TURN
Brave infant of Saguntum, clear
Thy coming forth in that great year,
When the prodigious Hannibal did crown
His rage with razing your immortal town.
Thou looking then about,
Ere thou wert half got out,
Wise child, didst hastily return,
And mad'st thy mother's womb thine urn.
How summ'd a circle didst thou leave mankind
Of deepest lore, could we the centre find!

THE COUNTER-TURN

Did wiser nature draw thee back,
From out the horror of that sack;
Where shame, faith, honour, and regard of right,
Lay trampled on? The deeds of death and night
Urg'd, hurried forth, and hurl'd
Upon th' affrighted world;
Sword, fire and famine with fell fury met,
And all on utmost ruin set:
As, could they but life's miseries foresee,
No dou...

Wazíya came down from the North
from the land of perpetual winter.
From his frost-covered beard issued forth the sharp-biting,
shrill-whistling North-wind;
At the touch of his breath
the wide earth turned to stone, and the lakes and the rivers:
From his nostrils the white vapors rose,
and they covered the sky like a blanket.
Like the down of Magá[BJ] fell the snows,
tossed and whirled into heaps by the North-wind.
Then the blinding storms roared on the plains,
like the simoons on sandy Sahara;
From the fangs of the fierce hurricanes
fled the elk and the deer and the bison.
Ever colder and colder it grew,
till the frozen ground cracked and split open;
And harder and harder it blew,
till the hillocks were bare as the boulders.
...

O sweet illusions of Song,
    That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng
    Of the crowded thoroughfare!

I approach, and ye vanish away,
    I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by nigh an day,
    The melody soundeth on.

As the weary traveller sees
    In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees,
    That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
    And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh,
    Like mists together rolled,--

So I wander and wander along,
    And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,
    In the beautiful land of dreams.

But when I would enter the gate
    Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wander ...

EARL JOYCE he was a kind old party
Whom nothing ever could put out,
Though eighty-two, he still was hearty,
Excepting as regarded gout.

He had one unexampled daughter,
The LADY MINNIE-HAHA JOYCE,
Fair MINNIE-HAHA, "Laughing Water,"
So called from her melodious voice.

By Nature planned for lover-capture,
Her beauty every heart assailed;
The good old nobleman with rapture
Observed how widely she prevailed

Aloof from all the lordly flockings
Of titled swells who worshipped her,
There stood, in pumps and cotton stockings,
One humble lover OLIVER.

He was no peer by Fortune petted,
His name recalled no bygone age;
He was no lordling coronetted
Alas! he was a simple page!

With vain appeals he never bored her,
But...

I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land."
And I grew weary of the sun
Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;
That every year I have cried, "At length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call";
That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

So soft streams meet, so springs with gladder smiles
Meet after long divorcement by the isles;
When love, the child of likeness, urgeth on
Their crystal natures to a union:
So meet stolen kisses, when the moony nights
Call forth fierce lovers to their wish'd delights;
So kings and queens meet, when desire convinces
All thoughts but such as aim at getting princes,
As I meet thee. Soul of my life and fame!
Eternal lamp of love! whose radiant flame
Out-glares the heaven's Osiris,[H] and thy gleams
Out-shine the splendour of his mid-day beams.
Welcome, O welcome, my illustrious spouse;
Welcome as are the ends unto my vows;
Aye! far more welcome than the happy soil
The sea-scourged merchant, after all his toil,
Salutes with tears of joy, when fires betra...

Goldbrown upon the sated flood
The rockvine clusters lift and sway;
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.

A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.

Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Your clustered fruits to love's full flood,
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude!

When a daffodil I see,
Hanging down his head towards me,
Guess I may what I must be:
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buried.

Still serve me in my age, I pray,
As in my youth, O faithful one;
For years I've brushed thee every day--
Could Socrates have better done?
What though the fates would wreak on thee
The fulness of their evil art?
Use thou philosophy, like me--
And we, old friend, shall never part!

I think--I often think of it--
The day we twain first faced the crowd;
My roistering friends impeached your fit,
But you and I were very proud!
Those jovial friends no more make free
With us (no longer new and smart),
But rather welcome you and me
As loving friends that should not part.

The patch? Oh, yes--one happy night--
"Lisette," says I, "it's time to go"--
She clutched this sleeve to stay my flight,
Shrieking: "What! leave so early? No!"
To...

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
    And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
    And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
    Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
    In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
    To ease the sturdy pony's load
    When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
    Matters not much, nor to what it led, -
Something that life will not be balked of
    Without rude reason till hope is dead,
    And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
    A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
    Though it has been climbed, fo...

("Oh! qu'est-ce que c'est donc que l'Inconnu.")

[January, 1871.]


Who then - oh, who, is like our God so great,
Who makes the seed expand beneath the mountain's weight;
Who for a swallow's nest leaves one old castle wall,
Who lets for famished beetles savory apples fall,
Who bids a pigmy win where Titans fail, in yoke,
And, in what we deem fruitless roar and smoke,
Makes Etna, Chimborazo, still His praises sing,
And saves a city by a word lapped 'neath a pigeon's wing!

Rest, and be thankful! On the verge
Of the tall cliff rugged and grey,
But whose granite base the breakers surge,
And shiver their frothy spray,
Outstretched, I gaze on the eddying wreath
That gathers and flits away,
With the surf beneath, and between my teeth
The stem of the “ancient clay”.

With the anodyne cloud on my listless eyes,
With its spell on my dreamy brain,
As I watch the circling vapours rise
From the brown bowl up to the sullen skies,

My vision becomes more plain,
Till a dim kaleidoscope succeeds
Through the smoke-rack drifting and veering,
Like ghostly riders on phantom steeds
To a shadowy goal careering.

In their own generation the wise may sneer,
They hold our sports in derision;
Perchance to sophist, or sage, ...