Brought we but eyes like Mercury's, In thee what songs should waken!

Ab, with what lofty hope we came ! But we forget it, dream of fame, And scrawl, as I do here, a name.

NEW-YEAR'S EVE, 1850

AL FRESCO

This is the midnight of the century,

hark ! Through aisle and arch of Godminster have

gone Twelve throbs that tolled the zenith of the

dark, And mornward now the starry hands move

on; “ Mornward !” the angelic watchers say, “ Passed is the sorest trial; No plot of man can stay The hand upon the dial; Night is the dark stem of the lily Day." If we, who watched in valleys here below, Toward streaks, misdeemed of morn, our

faces turned When volcan glares set all the east aglow, We are not poorer that we wept and

yearned; Though earth swing wide from God's in

tent,
And though no man nor nation
Will move with full consent
In heavenly gravitation,
Yet by one Sun is every orbit bent.

a

THE dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me:
Away, unfruitful lore of books,
For whose vain idiom we reject
The soul's more native dialect,
Aliens among the birds and brooks,
Dull to interpret or conceive
What gospels lost the woods retrieve !
Away, ye critics, city-bred,
Who springes set of thus and so,
And in the first man's footsteps tread,
Like those who toil through drifted snow !
Away, my poets, whose sweet spell
Can make a garden of a cell !
I need ye not, for I to-day
Will make one long sweet verse of play.

Snap, chord of manhood's tenser strain!
To-day I will be a boy again;
The mind's pursuing element,
Like a bow slackened and unbent,
In some dark corner shall be leant.
The robin sings, as of old, from the limb !
The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush !
Through the dim arbor, himself more dim,
Silently hops the hermit-thrush,
The withered leaves keep dumb for him;
The irreverent buccaneering bee
Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery
Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor
With haste - dropt gold from shrine to

door;
There, as of yore,
The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup
Its tiny polished urn holds up,
Filled with ripe summer to the edge,
The sun in his own wine to pledge;
And our tall elm, this hundredth year
Doge of our leafy Venice here,
Who, with an annual ring, doth wed
The blue Adriatic overhead,
Shadows with his palatial mass
The deep canals of flowing grass.

O unestrangëd birds and bees !
O face of Nature always true !

Of some fallen nunnery's mossy sleep,
So, from the ruins of this day
Crumbling in golden dust away,
The soul one gracious block may draw,
Carved with some fragment of the law,
Which, set in life's prosaic wall,
Old benedictions may recall,
And lure some nunlike thoughts to take
Their dwelling here for memory's sake.

MASACCIO

IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL

O never-unsympathizing trees !
O never-rejecting roof of blue,
Whose rash disherison never falls
On us unthinking prodigals,
Yet who convictest all our ill,
So grand and unappeasable !
Methinks my heart from each of these
Plucks part of childhood back again,
Long there imprisoned, as the breeze
Doth every hidden odor seize
Of wood and water, hill and plain ;
Once more am I admitted peer
In the upper house of Nature here,
And feel through all my pulses run
The royal blood of wind and sun.

Upon these elm-arched solitudes
No hum of neighbor toil intrudes;
The only hammer that I hear
Is wielded by the woodpecker,
The single noisy calling his
In all our leaf-hid Sybaris;
The good old time, close-hidden here,
Persists, a loyal cavalier,
While Roundheads prim, with point of fox,
Probe wainscot-chink and empty box;
Here no hoarse-voiced iconoclast
Insults thy statues, royal Past;
Myself too prone the axe to wield,
I touch the silver side of the sbield
With lance reversed, and challenge peace,
A willing convert of the trees.

He came to Florence long ago,
And painted here these walls, that shone
For Raphael and for Angelo,
With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,
And died, we know not how or when.
The sbadows deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
“ And is this,” mused I, “all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to greater men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach ?”
“And who were they,” I mused, “ that

wrought
Through pathless wilds, with labor long,
The highways of our daily thought ?
Who reared those towers of earliest song
That lift us from the crowd to peace
Remote in sunny silences ?”

How chanced it that so long I tost A cable's length from this rich coast, With foolish anchors bugging close The beckoning weeds and lazy ooze, Nor had the wit to wreck before On this enchanted island's shore, Whither the current of the sea, With wiser drift, persuaded me ?

Out clanged the Ave Mary bells,
And to my heart this message came:
Each clamorous throat among them tells
What strong-souled martys died in flame
To make it possible that thou
Shouldst here with brother sinners bow.

Thoughts that great hearts once broke for,

we

Oh, might we but of such rare days Build up the spirit's dwelling-place ! A temple of so Parian stone Would brook a marble god alone, The statue of a perfect life, Far-shrined from earth's bestaining strife. Alas! though such felicity In our vext world here may not be, Yet, as sometimes the peasant's hut Shows stones which old religion cut With text inspired, or mystic sign Of the Eternal and Divine, Torn from the consecration deep

Breathe cheaply in the common air ;
The dust we trample heedlessly
Throbbed once in saints and beroes rare,
Who perished, opening for their race
New pathways to the commonplace.
Henceforth, when rings the health to those
Who live in story and in song,
O nameless dead, that now repose

Oh, could he have my share of din,

And I his quiet ! - past a doubt 'T would still be one man bored within,

And just another bored without.

Nay, when, once paid my mortal fee,

Some idler on my headstone grim Traces the moss-blurred name, will be

Think me the happier, or I him ?

a

“Madrid, January 15, 1879. I wrote some verses thirty odd years ago called Without and Within, and they originally ended with the author's looking up at the stars through six feet of earth and feeling dreadfully bored, while a passer-by deciphers the headstone and envies the supposed sleeper beneath. I was persuaded to leave out this ending as too grim but I often think of it. They have a fine name for this kind of feeling nowadays, and would fain make out pessimism to be a monstrous birth of our century. I suspect it has always been common enough, especially with naughty children who get tired of their playthings as soon as I do — the absurdity being that

then we are not content with smashing the toy which turns out to be finite — but everything else into the bargain.' J. R. L. to Miss Grace Norton. Letters II. 236.

GODMINSTER CHIMES

WRITTEN IN AID OF A CHIME OF BELLS

FOR CHRIST CHURCH, CAMBRIDGE

My coachman, in the moonlight there,

Looks through the side-light of the door; I hear him with his brethren swear,

As I could do, – but only more.

Flattening his nose against the pane,

He envies me my brilliant lot, Breathes on his aching fists in vain,

And dooms me to a place more hot.

He sees me in to supper go,

A silken wonder by my side, Bare arms, bare shoulders, and a row

Of flounces, for the door too wide.

GODMINSTER? Is it Fancy's play ?

I know not, but the word Sings in my heart, nor can I say

Whether 't was dreamed or heard;
Yet fragrant in my mind it clings .

As blossoms after rain,
And builds of balf-remembered things

This vision in my brain.
Through aisles of long-drawn centuries

My spirit walks in thought,
And to that symbol lifts its eyes

Which God's own pity wrought;
From Calvary shines the altar's gleam,

The Church's East is there,
The Ages one great minster seem,

That throbs with praise and prayer.
And all the way from Calvary down

The carven pavement shows
Their graves who won the martyr's crown

And safe in God repose;
The saints of many a warring creed

Who now in beaven have learned
That all paths to the Father lead

Where Self the feet have spurned.

And, as the mystic aisles I pace,

By aureoled workmen built, Lives ending at the Cross I trace

Alike through grace and guilt; One Mary bathes the blessed feet

With ointment from her eyes,