| Of that long cloud-bar in the West,
Whose nether edge, erelong, you see
The silvery chrism in turn anoint,
And then the tiniest rosy point
Touched doubtfully and timidly
Into the dark blue's chilly strip,
As some mute, wondering thing below,
Awakened by the thrilling glow,
Might, looking up, see Dian dip
One lucent foot's delaying tip
In Latmian fountains long ago.

Knew you what silence was before?
Here is no startle of dreaming bird
That sings in his sleep, or strives to
sing;

Nor noise of any living thing,
Here is no sough of branches stirred,
Such as one hears by night on shore;
Only, now and then, a sigh,
With fickle intervals between,
Such as Andromeda might have heard,
Sometimes far, and sometimes nigh,
And fancied the huge sea-beast unseen
Turning in sleep; it is the sea
That welters and wavers uneasily
Round the lonely reefs of Appledore.

fully

Feeling their way to my sense, sang, Say whether

66

They sit all day by the greenwood tree, The lover and loved, as it wont to be, When we- But grief conquered, and all together They swelled such weird murmur as haunts a shore

Of some planet dispeopled,

more!"

"Never

The lamp's clear gleam flits up the stair; I linger in delicious pain;

Ah, in that chamber, whose rich air
To breathe in thought I scarcely dare,
Thinks she, "Auf wiedersehen !"

'Tis thirteen years; once more I press
The turf that silences the lane;
I hear the rustle of her dress,
I smell the lilacs, and -ah, yes,
I hear "Auf wiedersehen!"

Sweet piece of bashful maiden art!

The English words had seemed too fain,

But these - they drew us heart to heart, Yet held us tenderly apart;

She said, "Auf wiedersehen!"

AFTER THE BURIAL.

YES, faith is a goodly anchor;
When skies are sweet as a psalm,
At the bows it lolls so stalwart,
In bluff, broad-shouldered calm.

And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its iron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory,
One broken plank of the Past,
That our human heart may cling to,
Though hopeless of shore at last!

To the spirit its splendid conjectures,
To the flesh its sweet despair,
Its tears o'er the thin-worn locket
With its anguish of deathless hair!

Immortal? I feel it and know it,
Who doubts it of such as she?
But that is the pang's very secret, —
Immortal away from me.

There's a narrow ridge in the graveyard

Would scarce stay a child in his race,
But to me and my thought it is wider
Than the star-sown vague of Space.

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your morals most drearily true;
But, since the earth clashed on her
coffin,

I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
"T is a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper pas-

sion

Tears down to our primitive rock.

"Rest your slippers on me," beamed the fender,

"I brighten at touch of your feet." "We know the practised finger,"

Said the books, "that seems like
brain";

And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.

Sang the pillow, "My down once quiv. ered

On nightingales' throats that flew Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz

To gather quaint dreams for you."

Ah me, where the Past sowed heart'sease,

The Present plucks rue for us men! I come back that scar unhealing Was not in the churchyard then. But, I think, the house is unaltered, I will go and beg to look At the rooms that were once familiar To my life as its bed to a brook.

Unaltered! Alas for the sameness That makes the change but more! "T is a dead man I see in the mirrors, 'Tis his tread that chills the floor!

To learn such a simple lesson,

Need I go to Paris and Rome, That the many make the household, But only one the home?

"T was just a womanly presence, An influence unexprest,

But a rose she had worn, on my gravesod

Were more than long life with the rest!

"T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle, 'T was nothing that I can phrase, But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,

And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.

For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne

To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.

Thou only aspirest the more,
Unregretful the old leaves shedding
That fringed thee with music before,
And deeper thy roots embedding
In the grace and the beauty of yore;
Thou sigh'st not, "Alas, I am older,
The green of last summer is sear!"
But loftier, hopefuller, bolder,
Winnest broader horizons each year.

To me 't is not cheer thou art singing:
There's a sound of the sea,
O mournful tree,

In thy boughs forever clinging,
And the far-off roar
Of waves on the shore
A shattered vessel flinging.

As thou musest still of the ocean
On which thou must float at last,
And seem'st to foreknow
The shipwreck's woe

And the sailor wrenched from the broken mast,

Do I, in this vague emotion,
This sadness that will not pass,
Though the air throbs with wings,
And the field laughs and sings,
Do I forebode, alas!

The ship-building longer and wearier,
The voyage's struggle and strife,
And then the darker and drearier
Wreck of a broken life?

A MOOD.

I Go to the ridge in the forest
I haunted in days gone by,
But thou, O Memory, pourest
No magical drop in mine eye,
Nor the gleam of the secret restorest
That hath faded from earth and sky:
A Presence autumnal and sober
Invests every rock and tree,
And the aureole of October
Lights the maples, but darkens me.

Pine in the distance,
Patient through sun or rain,
Meeting with graceful persistence,
With yielding but rooted resistance,
The northwind's wrench and strain,
No memory of past existence
Brings thee pain;

Right for the zenith heading,
Friendly with heat or cold,

Thine arms to the influence spreading
Of the heavens, just from of old,

remained,

And every night with yellow-bearded kings

His sleep was haunted, - mighty men of old,

Once young as he, now ancient like the gods,

And safe as stars in all men's memories.

Strange sagas read he in their sea-blue eyes

Cold as the sea, grandly compassionless; Like life, they made him eager and then mocked.

Nay, broad awake, they would not let him be;

They shaped themselves gigantic in the mist,

They rose far-beckoning in the lamps of heaven,

They whispered invitation in the winds, And breath came from them, mightier than the wind,

To strain the lagging sails of his resolve, Till that grew passion which before was wish,

And youth seemed all too costly to be staked

On the soiled cards wherewith men

played their game,

Letting Time pocket up the larger life, Lost with base gain of raiment, food, and roof.

"What helpeth lightness of the feet?" they said,

"Oblivion runs with swifter foot than they;

Or strength of sinew? New men come as strong,

And those sleep nameless; or renown in war?

Swords grave no name on the longmemoried rock

But moss shall hide it; they alone who wring

Some secret purpose from the unwilling gods

Survive in song for yet a little while
To vex, like us, the dreams of later

men,

selves a dream, and dreamlike all we did."