Ah, did we know to give her all her right, What wonders even in our poor clay were done!

It is not Woman leaves us to our night, But our brute earth that grovels from her sun.

Where shine you? On what happier fields and flowers?

Heaven's lamps renew their lustre less divine,

But only serve to count my darkened hours.

cross

Which meets me now where'er I once met

O'er these leaves her wrist has slid,
Thrilled with veins where fire is hid
'Neath the skin's pellucid veil,
Like the opal's passion pale;
This her breath has sweetened; this
Still seems trembling with the kiss
She half-ventured on my name,
Brow and cheek and throat aflame;
Over all caressing lies

Sunshine left there by her eyes;
From them all an effluence rare
With her nearness fills the air,
Till the murmur I half-hear
Of her light feet drawing near.

Rarest woods were coarse and rough,
Sweetest spice not sweet enough,
Too impure all earthly fire
For this sacred funeral-pyre;
These rich relics must suffice
For their own dear sacrifice.

Seek we first an altar fit

For such victims laid on it:
It shall be this slab brought home
In old happy days from Rome,
Lazuli, once blest to line
Dian's inmost cell and shrine.
Gently now I lay them there,
Pure as Dian's forehead bare,
Yet suffused with warmer hue,
Such as only Latmos knew.

Fire I gather from the sun
In a virgin lens: 't is done!
Mount the flames, red, yellow, blue,
As her moods were shining through,
Of the moment's impulse born,
Moods of sweetness, playful scorn,
Half defiance, half surrender,
More than cruel, more than tender,
Flouts, caresses, sunshine, shade,
Gracious doublings of a maid
Infinite in guileless art,
Playing hide-seek with her heart.

On the altar now, alas,
There they lie a crinkling mass,
Writhing still, as if with grief
Went the life from every leaf;
Then (heart-breaking palimpsest !)
Vanishing ere wholly guessed,
Suddenly some lines flash back,
Traced in lightning on the black,
And confess, till now denied,
All the fire they strove to hide.
What they told me, sacred trust,
Stays to glorify my dust,
There to burn through dust and damp
Like a mage's deathless lamp,
While an atom of this frame
Lasts to feed the dainty flame.

All is ashes now, but they
In my soul are laid away,

And their radiance round me hovers
Soft as moonlight over lovers,
Shutting her and me alone
In dream-Edens of our own;
First of lovers to invent
Love, and teach men what it meant.

THE PROTEST

I COULD not bear to see those eyes On all with wasteful largess shine,

And they who do their souls no wrong, But keep at eve the faith of morn, Shall daily hear the angel-song,

"To-day the Prince of Peace is born!"

MY PORTRAIT GALLERY

OFT round my hall of portraiture I gaze, By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy,

From stainless quarries of deep - buried days.

There, as I muse in soothing melancholy, Your faces glow in more than mortal youth, Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly,

The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden,

Now for the first time seen in flawless truth. Ah, never master that drew mortal breath Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death,

Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden!

Thou paintest that which struggled here below

Half understood, or understood for woe,
And with a sweet forewarning

Mak'st round the sacred front an aureole glow

Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning.

PAOLO TO FRANCESCA

I WAS with thee in Heaven: I cannot tell If years or moments, so the sudden bliss, When first we found, then lost, us in a kiss, Abolished Time, abolished Earth and Hell, Left only Heaven. Then from our blue there fell

The dagger's flash, and did not fall amiss, For nothing now can rob my life of this, That once with thee in Heaven, all else is

well.

Us, undivided when man's vengeance came, God's half-forgives that doth not here divide;

And, were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame,

To me 't were summer, we being side by side:

This granted, I God's mercy will not blame, For, given thy nearness, nothing is denied.

SONNET

SCOTTISH BORDER

The following letter to Mr. Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in which this sonnet was printed, is a little out of proportion as a head-note to a poem of fourteen lines, but it is too characteristic and too indicative of Lowell's extreme solicitude over his verse to be omitted. "There was one verse in the Border sonnet which, when I came to copy it, worried me with its lack of just what I wanted. Only one? you will say. Yes, all; but never mind this one most. Instead of

'Where the shy ballad could its leaves unfold' read dared its blooms.' I had liefer 'cup,' but cup is already metaphoric when applied to flowers, and Bottom the Weaver would be sure to ask in one of the many journals he edits

How unfold a cup? Does he mean one of those pocket drinking-cups - leathern inconveniences that always stick when you try to unfold 'em?' Damn Bottom! We ought not to think of him, but then the Public is made up of him, and I wish him to know that I was thinking of a flower. Besides, the sonnet is, more than any other kind of verse, a deliberate composition, and susceptible of a high polish," as the dendrologists say of the woods of certain trees. Or shall we say grew in secret bold'? I write both on the opposite leaf, that you may choose one to paste over and not get the credit of tinkering my rhymes.

dared its blooms

grew in secret bold.