4.

Oh, love, love, no, love! not so, indeed!
You were just weak earth, I knew:
With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,

But a little good grain too.

5.

And such as you were, I took you for mine:
Did not you find me yours,

To watch the olive and wait the vine,
And wonder when rivers of oil and wine
Would flow, as the Book assures?

6.

Well, and if none of these good things came,
What did the failure prove?

The man was my whole world, all the same,

With his flowers to praise, or his weeds to blame,

And, either or both, to love.

7.

Yet this turns now to a fault-there! there!

That I do love, watch too long,

And wait too well, and weary and wear;
And 'tis all an old story, and my despair

Fit subject for some new song:

8.

How the light, light love, he has wings to fly
At suspicion of a bond:

How my wisdom has bidden your pleasure good-bye,
Which will turn up next in a laughing eye,

And why should you look beyond?

V.

ON THE CLIFF.

1.

I leaned on the turf,

I looked at a rock

Left dry by the surf;

For the turf, to call it grass were to mock: Dead to the roots, so deep was done

The work of the summer sun.

2.

And the rock lay flat

As an anvil's face:

No iron like that!

Baked dry; of a weed, of a shell, no trace: Sunshine outside, but ice at the core,

Death's altar by the lone shore.

3.

On the turf, sprang gay

With his films of blue,

No cricket, I'll say,

But a warhorse, barded and chanfroned too, The gift of a quixote-mage to his knight, Real fairy, with wings all right.

4.

On the rock, they scorch
Like a drop of fire

From a brandished torch,

Fell two red fans of a butterfly:

No turf, no rock, in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!

Is it not so

5.

With the minds of men?

The level and low,

The burnt and bare, in themselves; but then With such a blue and red grace, not theirs, Love settling unawares!

VI.

UNDER THE CLIFF.

1.

"Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no? Which needs the other's office, thou or I? Dost want to be disburthened of a woe,

And can, in truth, my voice untie

Its links, and let it go?

2.

“Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,
Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear.
No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited
With falsehood,-love, at last aware

Of scorn,―hopes, early blighted,

3.

"We have them; but I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:

Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
If they knew any way to borrow

A pathos like thy own?