Who art dearer, better! rather instantly Drop heavily down, . . . burst, shattered every- Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee XXX. I SEE thine image through my tears to-night, XXXI. THOU Comest! all is said without a word. By a mutual presence. Ah, keep near and close, With thy broad heart serenely interpose. With the look of its eyes. I miss the clear Be heir to those who are now exanimate. XXXIV. WITH the same heart, I said, I'll answer thee I dropped my flowers or brake off from a game, Not as to a single good, but all my good! XXXV. IF I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me? Shall I never miss These thoughts which tremble when bereft of For grief indeed is love and grief beside. those, Like callow birds left desert to the skies. XXXII. THE first time that the sun rose on thine oath And, looking on myself, I seemed not one Is laid down with the first ill-sounding note. A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float XXXIII. YES, call me by my pet-name! let me hear Alas! I have grieved so I am hard to love. XXXVI. WHEN We met first and loved, I did not build A still renewable fear. . . O love, O troth. . XXXVII. PARDON, oh, pardon, that my soul should make SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE. It is that distant years which did not take XXXVIII. FIRST time he kissed me, he but only kissed When the angels speak." A ring of amethyst Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed! With sanctifying sweetness, did precede. XXXIX. XLI. 227 I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts, Who paused a little near the prison-wall, XLII. My future will not copy fair my past”- I seek no copy now of life's first half; BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the And write me new my future's epigraph, grace To look through and behind this mask of me, The dim and weary witness of life's race!- In the new Heavens !-because nor sin nor woe, Nothing repels thee, . . . Dearest, teach me so XL. On, yes! they love through all this world of ours! I will not gainsay love, called love forsooth. Throw kerchiefs at a smile, and have no ruth And think it soon when others cry, "Too New angel mine, unhoped for in the world! XLIII. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. XLIV. BELOVED, thou hast brought me many flowers So, in the like name of that love of ours, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true, LADY GERALDINE'S COURTSHIP. "I invite you, Mister Bertram, to no scene for wordly speeches Sir, I scarce should dare-but only where God asked the thrushes first And if you will sing beside them, in the covert of my beeches, I will thank you for the woodlands, . . . for the human world, at worst." Then she smiled around right childly, then she gazed around right queenly, And I bowed-I could not answer; alternated light and gloom While as one who quells the lions, with a steady eye serenely, She, with level fronting eyelids, passed out stately from the room. Oh, the blessed woods of Sussex, I can hear them still around me, With their leafy tide of greenery still rippling up the wind. Oh, the cursed woods of Sussex! where the hunter's arrow found me, When a fair face and a tender voice had made me mad and blind! In that ancient hall of Wycombe, thronged the numerous guests invited, And the lovely London ladies trod the floors with gliding feet; 229 Thus she drew me the first morning, out across into the garden, And I walked among her noble friends and could not keep behind, [the warden And their voices low with fashion, not with feel- Spake she unto all and unto me-"Behold, I am Of the song-birds in these lindens, which are ing, softly freighted cages to their mind. "But within this swarded circle, into which the lime-walk brings us, Whence the beeches, rounded greenly, stand away in reverent fear, I will let no music enter, saving what the fountain sings us, Which the lilies round the basin may seem pure enough to hear. "The live air that waves the lilies, waves the slender jet of water Like a holy thought sent feebly up from soul of fasting saint. Whereby lies a marble Silence, sleeping! (Lough the sculptor wrought her), So asleep she is forgetting to say Hush!—a fancy quaint. "Mark how heavy white her eyelids! not a dream between them lingers. And the left hand's index droppeth from the lips upon the cheek; While the right hand-with the symbol rose held slack within the fingersHas fallen backward in the basin-yet this Silence will not speak! "That the essential meaning growing may exceed the special symbol, Is the thought as I conceive it: it applies more high and low. Our true noblemen will often through right nobleness grow humble, And assert an inward honor by denying outward show." "Nay, your Silence," said I, "truly, holds her symbol rose but slackly, Yet she holds it-or would scarcely be a Silence to our ken. And your nobles wear their ermine on the outside, or walk blackly [men. In the presence of the social law as mere ignoble "Let the poets dream such dreaming! madam, in these British islands, 'Tis the substance that wanes ever, 'tis the symbol that exceeds. Soon we shall have naught but symbol! and, for statues like this Silence, Shall accept the rose's image-in another case, the weed's." "Not so quickly," she retorted-"I confess, where'er you go, you Find for things, names-shows for actions, and pure gold for honor clear. But when all is run to symbol in the Social, I will throw you The world's book which now reads dryly, and sit down with Silence here." Half in playfulness she spoke, I thought, and half in indignation; Friends who listened, laughed her words off, while her lovers deemed her fair. A fair woman, flushed with feeling, in her noblelighted station Near the statue's white reposing-and both bathed in sunny air! With the trees round, not so distant but you heard their vernal murmur, And beheld in light and shadow the leaves in and outward move, And the little fountain leaping toward the sunheart to be warmer, There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own; Read the pastoral parts of Spenser-or the subtile interflowings Found in Petrarch's sonnets-here's the bookthe leaf is folded down! Or at times a modern volume-Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, Or at times I read there, hoarsely, some new poem of my making. Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking, And the chariot-wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth. After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast, She would break out, on a sudden, in a gush of woodland singing, [of rest. Like a child's emotion in a god-a naiad tired Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest For her looks sing too-she modulates her gestures on the tune; And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest, Then recoiling in a tremble from the too much 'Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal light and seem light above. to swell them on. Then we talked-oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the talking, Made another singing-of the soul! a music without bars. While the leafy sounds of woodlands-humming round where we were walking, Brought interposition worthy-sweet-as skies about the stars. And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them; She had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch, Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them, Or to teach the hill-side echo some sweet Tuscan In the in a song. Ay, for sometimes on the hill-side, while we sate down in the gowans, With the forest green behind us, and its shadow cast before, And the river running under, and across it from the rowans A brown partridge whirring near us, till we felt the air it bore birchen-wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange. In her utmost lightness there is truth-and often she speaks lightly, Has a grace in being gay, which even mournful souls approve, For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above. |