But where is she, the bridal flower,
That must be made a wife ere noon?
She enters, glowing like the moon
Of Eden on its bridal bower:

On me she bends her blissful eyes,

And then on thee; they meet thy look And brighten like the star that shook Betwixt the palms of paradise.

Oh, when her life was yet in bud,

He too foretold the perfect rose. For thee she grew, for thee she grows Forever, and as fair as good.

And thou art worthy; full of power;
As gentle; liberal-minded, great,
Consistent; wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.

But now set out: the noon is near,
And I must give away the bride;
She fears not, or with thee beside
And me behind her, will not fear:

For I that danced her on my knee,
That watched her on her nurse's arm,
That shielded all her life from harm,
At last must part with her to thee;

Now waiting to be made a wife,

Her feet, my darling, on the dead; Their pensive tablets round her head, And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,

The "wilt thou "answered, and again The "wilt thou" asked, till out of twain Her sweet "I will" has made ye one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read,
Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are signed, and overhead

Begins the clash and clang that tells

The joy to every wandering breeze; The blind wall rocks, and on the trees The dead leaf trembles to the bells.

Oh, happy hour, and happier hours Await them. Many a merry face Salutes them-maidens of the place, That pelt us in the porch with flowers.

Oh, happy hour, behold the bride

With him to whom her hand I gave. They leave the porch, they pass the grave That has to-day its sunny side.

To-day the grave is bright for me,

For them the light of life increased, Who stay to share the morning feast, Who rest to-night beside the sea.

Let all my genial spirits advance
To meet and greet a whiter sun;
My drooping memory will not shun
The foaming grape of Eastern France.

It circles round, and fancy plays,

And hearts are warmed, and faces bloom, As drinking health to bride and groom We wish them store of happy days.

Nor count me all to blame if I

Conjecture of a stiller guest, Perchance, perchance, among the rest And, though in silence, wishing joy.

But they must go, the time draws on,
And those white-favored horses wait:
They rise, but linger; it is late;
Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.

A shade falls on us like the dark
From little cloudlets on the grass,
But sweeps away as out we pass
To range the woods, to roam the park,

Discussing how their courtship grew,

And talk of others that are wed, And how she looked, and what he said, And back we come at fall of dew.

Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

The shade of passing thought, the wealth Of words and wit, the double health, The crowning cup, the three-times-three, And last the dance;-till I retire:

Dumb is that tower which spake so loud, And high in heaven the streaming cloud, And on the downs a rising fire;

And rise, O moon, from yonder down,
Till over down and over dale
All night the shining vapor sail
And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,
And catch at every mountain-head,
And o'er the friths that branch and spread
Their sleeping silver through the hills;

And touch with shade the bridal doors,
With tender gloom the roof, the wall;
And breaking let the splendor fall
To spangle all the happy shores

By which they rest, and ocean sounds,
And, star and system rolling past,
A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved through life of lower phase, Result in man, be born and think, And act and love, a closer link Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did, And hoped, and suffered, is but seed Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type Appearing ere the times were ripe, That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

MAUD.

I.

I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirred

By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trailed, by a whispered fright,

And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard

The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.

Villany somewhere! whose? One says, we are villains all.

Not he: his honest fame should at least by me be maintained:

But that old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall,

Dropped off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drained.

Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made them a curse, Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;

And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse

Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone?

363

But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind,

When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's ware or his word?

Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind

The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.

Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age-why not? I have neither hope nor trust;

May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,

Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine,

When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie;

Peace in her vineyard-yes!--but a company forges the wine.

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,

Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,

While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,

And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.

And Sleep must lie down armed, for the villanous centre-bits

Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,

While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits

To pestle a poisoned poison behind his crimson lights.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,

And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of chil dren's bones,

Is it
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hun-

peace or war? better, war! loud war by
land and by sea,

I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main.

Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?

Oh, having the nerves of motion as well as the nerves of pain,

Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;

Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before

the pit and the fear?

LONG have I sighed for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!

It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savor nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been

For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose,

Or an under lip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

out a sound,.

Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long

Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,

Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,

When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime,

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,

The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land?

I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal;

I know it, and smile a hard-set smile, like a stoic, or like

A wiser epicurean, and let the world have its way:

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;

The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

We are puppets, man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower;

Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game

That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?

Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;

We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother's shame;

However, we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth,

For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,

And he felt himself in his force to be Nature's crowning race.

As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth,

So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man;

He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base?

The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,

An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded

and poor;

The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.

I would not marvel at either, but keep a temperate brain;

For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more

Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice.

For the drift of the Maker is dark, and Isis hid by the veil.

Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?

Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide.

Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?

Or an infant civilization be ruled with rod or with knout?

I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide.

Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways,

Where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot,

365

She made me divine amends For a courtesy not returned.

And thus a delicate spark

Of glowing and growing light
Through the livelong hours of the dark
Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,
Ready to burst in a colored flame;
Till at last, when the morning came

In a cloud, it faded, and seems
But an ashen-gray delight.

What if with her sunny hair,
And smile as sunny as cold,
She meant to weave me a snare
Of some coquettish deceit,
Cleopatra-like as of old

To entangle me when we met,

To have her lion roll in a silken net
And fawn at a victor's feet.

Ah, what shall I be at fifty
Should Nature keep me alive,
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five?
Yet, if she were not a cheat,
If Maud were all that she seemed
And her smile were all that I dreamed,
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.

What if though her eye seemed full
Of a kind intent to me,
What if that dandy-despot, he,
That jewelled mass of millinery,
That oiled and curled Assyrian Bull
Smelling of musk and of insolence,
Her brother, from whom I keep aloof,
Who wants the finer politic sense
To mask, though but in his own behoof,
With a glassy smile his brutal scorn-
What if he had told her yester morn
How prettily for his own sweet sake
A face of tenderness might be feigned,
And a moist mirage in desert eyes,
That so, when the rotten hustings shake
In another month to his brazen lies,
A wretched vote may be gained!

For a raven ever croaks, at my side,

Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward,
Or thou wilt prove their tool.

Yea too, myself from myself I guard,
For often a man's own angry pride
Is cap and bells for a fool.

Perhaps the smile and tender tone
Came out of her pitying womanhood,
For am I not, am I not, here alone
So many a summer since she died,

My mother, who was so gentle and good?
Living alone in an empty house,
Here half-hid in the gleaming wood,
Where I hear the dead at mid-day moan,

And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,
And my own sad name in corners cried,
When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown
About its echoing chambers wide,

Till a morbid hate and horror have grown

Of a world in which I have hardly mixed,

And a morbid eating lichen fixed On a heart half-turned to stone.

O heart of stone, are you flesh, and caught
By that you swore to withstand?
For what was it else within me wrought
But, I fear, the new strong wine of love,
That made my tongue so stammer and trip
When I saw the treasured splendor, her hand,
Come sliding out of her sacred glove,
And the sunlight broke from her lip?

I have played with her when a child;
She remembers it now we meet.
Ah well, well, well, I may be beguiled
By some coquettish deceit.
Yet, if she were not a cheat,
If Maud were all that she seemed,
And her smile had all that I dreamed,
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.

VII.

DID I hear it half in a doze
Long since, I know not where?
Did I dream it an hour ago,
When asleep in this arm-chair?
Men were drinking together,
Drinking and talking of me:
"Well, if it prove a girl, the boy
Will have plenty: so let it be."
Is it an echo of something
Read with a boy's delight,
Viziers nodding together
In some Arabian night?
Strange, that I hear two men,
Somewhere, talking of me:
"Well, if it prove a girl, my boy
Will have plenty so let it be."

VIII.

SHE came to the village church,
And sat by a pillar alone;
An angel watching an urn
Wept over her carved in stone;

And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,

And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed

To find they were met by my own;

And suddenly, sweetly, my heart beat stronger
And thicker, until I heard no longer
The snowy-banded, dilettante,
Delicate-handed priest intone;

And thought, is it pride, and mused and sighed, "No surely, now it cannot be pride."