How could I know, how could I guess
That here was your great happiness--
In mine? And how could I know
Your love infinite must grow?

Suddenly at dawn I wake
To see the cruse of colour break
Over the East, and then the gray
Creep up with light of common day ...
No, no, no! again that bright
Flashing, flushing, flooding light
Leading on day, until I ache
With love to see the dark world wake.

O, with such second flood your love
Painted my earth and heaven above,
With such wild magnificence
As bruised my heart in every sense,
In every nerve. Was ever man
Fit this renewed love to sustain?

Now in these days when Autumn's leaf
Is red and gold, and for a brief
Day the earth flowers ere it dies,
What if Spring came with new su...

Chill'd by unkind Honora's alter'd eye,
    "Why droops my heart with fruitless woes forlorn,"
    Thankless for much of good? - what thousands, born
    To ceaseless toil beneath this wintry sky,
Or to brave deathful Oceans surging high,
    Or fell Disease's fever'd rage to mourn,
    How blest to them wou'd seem my destiny!
    How dear the comforts my rash sorrows scorn! -
Affection is repaid by causeless hate!
    A plighted love is chang'd to cold disdain!
    Yet suffer not thy wrongs to shroud thy fate,
But turn, my Soul, to blessings which remain;
    And let this truth the wise resolve create,
    THE HEART ESTRANGED NO ANGUISH CAN REGAIN.

July 1773.

Were they but dreams?    Upon the darkening world
Evening comes down, the wings of fire are furled,
On which the day soared to the sunny west:
The moon sits calmly, like a soul at rest,
Looking upon the never-resting earth;
All things in heaven wait on the solemn birth
Of night, but where has fled the happy dream
That at this hour, last night, our life did seem?
Where are the mountains with their tangled hair,
The leafy hollow, and the rocky stair?
Where are the shadows of the solemn hills,
And the fresh music of the summer rills?
Where are the wood-paths, winding, long and steep,
And the great, glorious river, broad and deep,
And the thick copses, where soft breezes meet,
And the wild torrent's snowy, leaping feet,
The rustling, rocking boughs, the running st...

Here'sa song to mi brave old friend,
A friend who has allus been true;
His day's drawin near to its end,
When he'll leeav me, as all friends mun do.
His teeth have quite wasted away,
He's grown feeble an blind o' one ee,
His hair is all sprinkled wi' gray,
But he's just as mich thowt on bi me.

When takkin a stroll into th' taan,
He's potterin cloise at mi heels;
Noa matter whearivver aw'm baan,
His constancy nivver once keels.
His feyts an his frolics are o'er,
But his love nivver offers to fail;
An altho' some may fancy us poor,
They could'nt buy th' wag ov his tail.

If th' grub is sometimes rayther rough,
An if prospects for better be dark;
He nivver turns surly an gruff,
Or shows discontent in his bark.
Ther's nubdy can tice ...

    "Stay, mother, stay, for the storm is abroad,
And the tempest is very wild;
It's a fearful night with no ray of light,
Oh stay with your little child!"

    "Hush darling!" the mother, with white lips said -
"Lie still till I come again,
God's angels blest will watch o'er thy rest
While I am abroad in the rain!
    Thy father, child? - oh, I quake with fear
When I think where he may be,
And I dare not stay till the dawn of day -
I must hasten forth to see!"

    Then the young child buried her tangled curls
In the ragged counterpane,
While the half-clad mother went forth alone
In the blinding wind and rain.

    Down many a narrow, slippery lane,
Down many a long, dark street,
Went that shivering form thro' the pelting storm
O...

I.

Death's Eloquence.


When I shall go
Into the narrow home that leaves
No room for wringing of the hands and hair,
And feel the pressing of the walls which bear
The heavy sod upon my heart that grieves,
(As the weird earth rolls on),
Then I shall know
What is the power of destiny. But still,
Still while my life, however sad, be mine,
I war with memory, striving to divine
Phantom to-morrows, to outrun the past;
For yet the tears of final, absolute ill
And ruinous knowledge of my fate I shun.
Even as the frail, instinctive weed
Tries, through unending shade, to reach at last
A shining, mellowing, rapture-giving sun;
So in the deed of breathing joy's warm breath,
Fain to succeed,
I, too, in colorless longings, hope til...

Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee,
Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it,
Not to partake thy passion, my humility.

    Though I have watched so many mourners weep
    O'er the real dead, in dull earth laid asleep -
    Those dead seemed but the shadows of my days
    That passed and left me in the sun's bright rays.
    Now though you go on smiling in the sun
    Our love is slain, and love and you were one.
    You are the first, you I have known so long,
    Whose death was deadly, a tremendous wrong.
    Therefore I seek the faith that sets it right
    Amid the lilies and the candle-light.
    I think on Heaven, for in that air so clear
    We two may meet, confused and parted here.
    Ah, when man's dearest dies, 'tis then he goes
    To that old balm that heals the centuries' woes.
    Then Christ's wild cry in all the streets is rife: -
    "I am the Resurrection and th...

It is in sooth a lovely tress,
    Still curled in many a ring,
As glossy as the plumes that dress
    The raven's jetty wing.
And the broad and soul-illumined brow,
    Above whose arch it grew,
Was like the stainless mountain snow,
    In its purity of hue.

I mind the time 'twas given to me,
    The night, the hour, the spot;
And the eye that pleaded silently,
    "Forget the giver not."
Oh! myriads of stars, on high,
    Were smiling sweetly fair,
But none was lovely as the eye
    That shone beside me there!

Above our heads an ancient oak
    Its strong, wide arms held out,
And from its roots a fountain broke,
    With a tiny laughing shout;
And the fairy people of the wild
    Were bending to their rest,
As trusti...

The cataract, whirling down the precipice,
Elbows down rocks and, shouldering, thunders through.
Roars, howls, and stifled murmurs never cease;
Hell and its agonies seem hid below.
Thick rolls the mist, that smokes and falls in dew;
The trees and greenwood wear the deepest green.
Horrible mysteries in the gulph stare through,
Roars of a million tongues, and none knows what they mean.

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briars if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls b...

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provenial song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leav...

There is darkness behind the light -- and the pale light drips
Cold on vague shapes and figures, that, half-seen loom
Like the carven prows of proud, far-triumphing ships --
And the firelight wavers and changes about the room,

As the three logs crackle and burn with a small still sound;
Half-blotting with dark the deeper dark of her hair,
Where she lies, head pillowed on arm, and one hand curved round
To shield the white face and neck from the faint thin glare.

Gently she breathes -- and the long limbs lie at ease,
And the rise and fall of the young, slim, virginal breast
Is as certain-sweet as the march of slow wind through trees,
Or the great soft passage of clouds in a sky at rest.

I kneel, and our arms enlace, and we kiss long, long.
I am drowned in her...

It is not well
For me to dwell
On what upon that day befell,
On that dark day of fall befell;
When through the landscape, bowed and bent,
With Love and Death I slowly went,
And wild rain swept the firmament.

Ah, Love that sighed!
Ah, Joy that died!
And Heart that humbled all its pride;
In vain that humbled all its pride!
The roses ruin and rot away
Upon your grave where grasses sway,
And all is dim, and all is gray.

Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sun-light lazily lay,
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley’s restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless,
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Unceasingly, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye,
Over the lilies that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!

O Poesy is on the wane,
For Fancy's visions all unfitting;
I hardly know her face again,
Nature herself seems on the flitting.
The fields grow old and common things,
The grass, the sky, the winds a-blowing;
And spots, where still a beauty clings,
Are sighing "going! all a-going!"
O Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

The bank with brambles overspread,
And little molehills round about it,
Was more to me than laurel shades,
With paths of gravel finely clouted;
And streaking here and streaking there,
Through shaven grass and many a border,
With rutty lanes had no compare,
And heaths were in a richer order.
But Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

I sat beside the pasture stream,
When Beauty's sel...

She dried her tears and they did smile
To see her cheeks' returning glow
How little dreaming all the while
That full heart throbbed to overflow

With that sweet look and lively tone
And bright eye shining all the day
They could not guess at midnight lone
How she would weep the time away

    A woman's figure, on a ground of night
        Inlaid with sallow stars that dimly stare
        Down in the lonesome eyes, uplifted there
    As in vague hope some alien lance of light
    Might pierce their woe.    The tears that blind her sight -
        The salt and bitter blood of her despair -
        Her hands toss back through torrents of her hair
    And grip toward God with anguish infinite.
        And O the carven mouth, with all its great
    Intensity of longing frozen fast
        In such a smile as well may designate
    The slowly-murdered heart, that, to the last,
        Conceals each newer wound, and back at Fate
    Throbs Love's eternal lie - "Lo, I can wait!"