loose

The people therefore, as they loved her well,

From then till noon no foot should pace the street,

No eye look down, she passing; but that all Should keep within, door shut, and window barr'd.

towers,

And shower'd the rippled ringlets to her knee ;

Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam,

slid

From pillar unto pillar, until she reach'd The gateway; there she found her palfrey

trapt

In purple blazon'd with armorial gold. Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:

The deep air listen'd round her as she rode, And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.

The little wide-mouth'd heads upon the spout

Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur Made her cheek flame: her palfrey's footfall shot

Light horrors thro' her pulses: the blind walls

Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead

Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she Not less thro' all bore up, till, last, she saw The white-flower'd elder-thicket from the field

Gleam thro' the Gothic archway in the wall.

Then she rode back, clothed on with chastity:

And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,

The fatal byword of all years to come,

One after one but even then she gain'd Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crown'd,

To meet her lord, she took the tax away And built herself an everlasting name.

THE DAY-DREAM.

PROLOGUE.

O LADY FLORA, let me speak:

While, dreaming on your damask cheek,
A pleasant hour has passed away
The dewy sister-eyelids lay.
As by the lattice you reclined,

I went thro' many wayward moods
To see you dreaming—and, behind,

A summer crisp with shining woods. And I too dream'd, until at last

Across my fancy, brooding warm, The reflex of a legend past,

And loosely settled into form. And would you have the thought I had, And see the vision that I saw, Then take the broidery-frame, and add A crimson to the quaint Macaw, And I will tell it. Turn your face,

Nor look with that too-earnest eyeThe rhymes are dazzled from their place And order'd words asunder fly.

THE SLEEPING PALACE.

I.

THE varying year with blade and sheaf Clothes and reclothes the happy plains,

THE DEPARTURE.

I.

AND on her lover's arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold,
And far across the hills they went

In that new world which is the old : Across the hills, and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day
The happy princess follow'd him.

II.

'I'd sleep another hundred years,

O love, for such another kiss ;' 'O wake for ever, love,' she hears,

O love, 'twas such as this and this." And o'er them many a sliding star,

And many a merry wind was borne, And, stream'd thro' many a golden bar, The twilight melted into morn.

III.

O eyes long laid in happy sleep!' "O happy sleep, that lightly fled !' 'O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep!'

O love, thy kiss would wake the dead! And o'er them many a flowing range

Of vapour buoy'd the crescent-bark, And, rapt thro' many a rosy change, The twilight died into the dark.

IV.

A hundred summers! can it be? And whither goest thou, tell me where?' 'O seek my father's court with me,

For there are greater wonders there.' And o'er the hills, and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Thro' all the world she follow'd him.

MORAL.

I.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay, And if you find no moral there, Go, look in any glass and say, What moral is in being fair.

Oh, to what uses shall we put

The wildweed-flower that simply blows? And is there any moral shut

Within the bosom of the rose?

II.

But any man that walks the mead,
In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead,

A meaning suited to his mind.
And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend; So 'twere to cramp its use, if I Should hook it to some useful end.

L'ENVOI.

I.

You shake your head. A random string
Your finer female sense offends.
Well-were it not a pleasant thing

To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men ; And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore; And all that else the years will show,

The Poet-forms of stronger hours, The vast Republics that may grow,

The Federations and the Powers; Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.

II.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

Thro' sunny decads new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap

The flower and quintessence of change.

III.

Ah, yet would I—and would I might! So much your eyes my fancy takeBe still the first to leap to light

That I might kiss those eyes awake!

For, am I right, or am I wrong,
To choose your own you did not care;
You'd have my moral from the song,

And I will take my pleasure there :
And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song,

Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl'd, And evermore a costly kiss

The prelude to some brighter world.

IV.

For since the time when Adám first
Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes,

What lips, like thine, so sweetly
join'd?

Where on the double rosebud droops
The fulness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me; A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may
give,

Are clasp'd the moral of thy life,
And that for which I care to live.

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there, O whisper to your glass, and say, 'What wonder, if he thinks me fair?' What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise

That float thro' Heaven, and cannot
light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court
By Cupid-boys of blooming hue-
But take it-earnest wed with sport,
And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,

But it is wild and barren,
A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren:
Yet say the neighbours when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all

That grows within the woodland.
O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !
And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

And fiddled in the timber!

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,
Such happy intonation,
Wherever he sat down and sung
He left a small plantation;
Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes,
The gouty oak began to move,
And flounder into hornpipes.
The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down

Coquetting with young beeches;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.

The linden broke her ranks and rent

The woodbine wreaths that bind her,
And down the middle, buzz! she went
With all her bees behind her:
The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,
The shock-head willows two and two
By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie ;
Each pluck'd his one foot from the grave,
Poussetting with a sloe-tree :