SONNET LXII.

THE SOUL'S SPHERE.

SOME prisoned moon in steep cloud-fastnesses,— Throned queen and thralled; some dying sun whose

pyre

Blazed with momentous memorable fire ;

Who hath not yearned and fed his heart with these?
Who, sleepless, hath not anguished to appease
Tragical shadow's realm of sound and sight
Conjectured in the lamentable night?

Lo! the soul's sphere of infinite images!

What sense shall count them? Whether it forecast
The rose-winged hours that flutter in the van
Of Love's unquestioning unrevealed span,-

Visions of golden futures: or that last

Wild pageant of the accumulated past

That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.

SONNET LXIII.

INCLUSIVENESS.

THE changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:

And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul's board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies ?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

May not this ancient room thou sitt'st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain

Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.

SONNET LXIV.

ARDOUR AND MEMORY.

THE Cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring;
The rosebud's blush that leaves it as it grows
Into the full-eyed fair unblushing rose;
The summer clouds that visit every wing
With fires of sunrise and of sunsetting;

The furtive flickering streams to light re-born
'Mid airs new-fledged and valorous lusts of morn,
While all the daughters of the daybreak sing :-

These ardour loves, and memory: and when flown
All joys, and through dark forest-boughs in flight
The wind swoops onward brandishing the light,
Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone
Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone;
With ditties and with dirges infinite.

SONNET LXV.

KNOWN IN VAIN.

As two whose love, first foolish, widening scope,
Knows suddenly, to music high and soft,

The Holy of holies; who because they scoff'd
Are now amazed with shame, nor dare to cope
With the whole truth aloud, lest heaven should ope;
Yet, at their meetings, laugh not as they laugh'd
In speech; nor speak, at length; but sitting oft
Together, within hopeless sight of hope

For hours are silent :--So it happeneth

When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze

After their life sailed by, and hold their breath.

Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze Thenceforth their incommunicable ways

Follow the desultory feet of Death?

SONNET LXVI.

THE HEART OF THE NIGHT.

FROM child to youth; from youth to arduous man;
From lethargy to fever of the heart;

From faithful life to dream-dowered days apart;
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban ;—
Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran

Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she
Accept her primal immortality,-

The flesh resume its dust whence it began?

O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath :
That when the peace is garnered in from strife,
The work retrieved, the will regenerate,
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!

SONNET LXVII.

THE LANDMARK.

WAS that the landmark? What,-the foolish well
Whose wave, low down, I did not stoop to drink,
But sat and flung the pebbles from its brink
In sport to send its imaged skies pell-mell,
(And mine own image, had I noted well!)—
Was that my point of turning ?—I had thought
The stations of my course should rise unsought,
As altar-stone or ensigned citadel.

But lo! the path is missed, I must go back,

And thirst to drink when next I reach the spring

Which once I stained, which since may have grown

black.

Yet though no light be left nor bird now sing
As here I turn, I'll thank God, hastening,

That the same goal is still on the same track.

SONNET LXVIII.

A DARK DAY.

THE gloom that breathes upon me with these airs
Is like the drops which strike the traveller's brow
Who knows not, darkling, if they bring him now
Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears.
Ah! bodes this hour some harvest of new tares,
Or hath but memory of the day whose plough
Sowed hunger once,—the night at length when thou,
O prayer found vain, didst fall from out my prayers?
How prickly were the growths which yet how smooth,
Along the hedgerows of this journey shed,

Lie by Time's grace till night and sleep may soothe !
Even as the thistledown from pathsides dead

Gleaned by a girl in autumns of her youth,
Which one new year makes soft her marriage-bed.

SONNET LXIX.

AUTUMN IDLENESS.

THIS Sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be over-run.
But with a blessing every glade receives

High salutation; while from hillock-eaves

The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun,
As if, being foresters of old, the sun

Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves.

Here dawn to-day unveiled her magic glass;

Here noon now gives the thirst and takes the dew;
Till eve bring rest when other good things pass.
And here the lost hours the lost hours renew

While I still lead my shadow o'er the grass,
Nor know, for longing, that which I should do.

THIS feast-day of the sun, his altar there
In the broad west has blazed for vesper-song;
And I have loitered in the vale too long
And gaze now a belated worshiper.
I not forget that I was 'ware,

Yet may

So journeying, of his face at intervals

Transfigured where the fringed horizon falls, –

A fiery bush with coruscating hair.

-

And now that I have climbed and won this height,
I must tread downward through the sloping shade
And travel the bewildered tracks till night.

Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed
And see the gold air and the silver fade

And the last bird fly into the last light.

나

SONNETS LXXI, LXXII, LXXIII.

THE CHOICE.

I.

EAT thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Surely the earth, that's wise being very old,
Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold
Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I

May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,

Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.

We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd, Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.

Now kiss, and think that there are really those,

My own high-bosomed beauty, who increase

Vain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way! Through many years they toil; then on a day They die not,-for their life was death,-but cease; And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.