Ever and ever afresh they seem'd to grow. The ghastly Wraith of one that I know; A cry for a brother's blood: It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die. 2. Is it gone? my pulses beat What was it? a lying trick of the brain? Yet I thought I saw her stand, A shadow there at my feet, High over the shadowy land. It is gone; and the heavens fall in a gentle rain, When they should burst and drown with deluging storms The feeble vassals of wine and anger and lust, We are not worthy to live. XXIV. 1. SEE what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairily well With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design! 2. What is it? a learned man 3. The tiny cell is forlorn, 4. Slight, to be crush'd with a tap 5. Breton, not Briton; here Like a shipwreck'd man on a coast But only moves with the moving eye, Why should it look like Maud? Am I to be overawed By what I cannot but know Is a juggle born of the brain? 6. Back from the Breton coast, Sick of a nameless fear, Looking, thinking of all I have lost; An old song vexes my ear; 7. For years, a measureless ill, 8. Strange, that the mind, when fraugnt One would think that it well Might drown all life in the eye,- That it should, by being so overwrought, Suddenly strike on a sharper sense For a shell, or a flower, little things Which else would have been past by! And now I remember, I, When he lay dying there, I noticed one of his many rings (For he had many, poor worm) and thought It is his mother's hair. 9. Who knows if he be dead? Whether I need have fled? Am I guilty of blood? Comfort her, comfort her, all things good, Let me and my passionate love go by, Me and my harmful love go by: But come to her waking, find her asleep, Powers of the height, Powers of the deep, And comfort her tho' I die. XXV. COURAGE, poor heart of stone! I will not ask thee why Thou canst not understand That thou art left forever alone: Or if I ask thee why, Care not thou to reply: She is but dead, and the time is at hand When thou shalt more than die. XXVI. 1. O THAT 't were possible 2. When I was wont to meet her In the silent woody places By the home that gave me birth, We stood tranced in long embraces Mixt with kisses sweeter sweeter Than anything on earth. 3. A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee; Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be. 4. It leads me forth at evening, It lightly winds and steals In a cold white robe before me, At the shouts, the leagues of lights, 5. Half the night I waste in sighs, 6. T is a morning pure and sweet, 7. Do I hear her sing as of old, My bird with the shining head, My own dove with the tender eye? But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry, There is some one dying or dead, And a sullen thunder is roll'd; For a tumult shakes the city, 8. Get thee hence, nor come again, 9. Then I rise, the eavedrops fall, And the yellow vapors choke The great city sounding wido; The day comes, a dull red ball Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke On the misty river-tide. And my heart is a handful of dust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, Clamor and rumble, and ringing and clatter, And here beneath it is all as bad, For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so; To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad? But up and down and to and fro, Ever about me the dead men go; And then to hear a dead man chatter 2. Wretchedest age, since Time began, They cannot even bury a man; And tho' we paid our tithes in the days that are gone, Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read; It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead: There is none that does his work, not one; A touch of their office might have sufficed, 3. See, there is one of us sobbing, And another, a lord of all things, praying And another, a statesman there, betraying To tickle the maggot born in an empty head, 4. Nothing but idiot gabble! For the prophecy given of old And then not understood, Has come to pass as foretold; Not let any man think for the public good, But babble, merely for babble. For I never whisper'd a private affair Within the hearing of cat or mouse, No, not to myself in the closet alone, 10. Friend, to be struck by the public foe, Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin: 11. O me, why have they not buried me deep enough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper? Maybe still I am but half-dead; Then I cannot be wholly dumb; I will cry to the steps above my head, And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come To bury me, bury me Deeper, ever so little deeper. XXVIII. 1. But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the My life has crept so long on a broken wing Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls? To have look'd, tho' but in a dream, upon eyes so It is all used up for that. 7. Tell him now: she is standing here at my head; Not beautiful now, not even kind; He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind, But is ever the one thing silent here. She is not of us, as I divine; She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine. 8. But I know where a garden grows, That blow by night, when the season is good, 9. But what will the old man say? He laid a cruel snare in a pit To catch a friend of mine one stormy day; When be comes to the second corpse in the pit? fair, That had been in a weary world my one thing bright; And it was but a dream, yet it lighten'd my despair When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right, That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease, 3. And as months ran on and rumor of battle grew. "It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye, 4. Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told; Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar; And many a darkness into the light shall leap And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire. 5. Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind, We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind; It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill: I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd. THE BROOK; AN IDYL. 'HERE, by this brook, we parted; I to the East To me that loved him; for 'O brook,' he says, I come from haunts of coot and hern, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry dowr Till last by Philip's farm I flow For men may come and men may go "Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out, I chatter over stony ways, With many a curve my banks I fret I chatter, chatter, as I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever. "But Philip chatter'd more than brook or bird; Old Philip; all about the fields you caught His weary daylong chirping, like the dry High-elbow'd grigs that leap in summer grass. I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling, And here and there a foamy flake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel, And draw them all along, and flow "O darling Katie Willows, his one child! A maiden of our century, yet most meek; A daughter of our meadows, yet not coarse Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand; Her eyes a bashfui azure, and her hair In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the sheil Divides threefold to show the fruit within. "Sweet Katie, once I did her a good turn, Her and her far-off cousin and betrothed, James Willows, of one name and heart with her. For here I came, twenty years back,-the week Before I parted with poor Edmund; crost By that old bridge which, half in ruins then, Still makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam Beyond it, where the waters marry-crost, Whistling a random bar of Bonny Doon, And push'd at Philip's garden-gate. The gate, Half-parted from a weak and scolding hinge, Stuck; and he clamor'd from a casement, 'run' To Katie somewhere in the walks below, Run, Katie Katie never ran: she moved To meet me, winding under woodbine bowers, A little flutter'd with her eyelids down, Fresh apple-blossom, blushing for a boon. "What was it? less of sentiment than sense Had Katie; not illiterate; neither one Who babbling in the fount of fictive tears, And nursed by mealy-mouthed philanthropies, Divorce the Feeling from her mate the Deed. "She told me. She and James had quarrell' Why? What cause of quarrel? None, she said, no cause; If James were coming. Coming every day,' "O Katie, what I suffer'd for your sake! To learn the price, and what the price he ask'd, "Then, while I breathed in sight of haven, he, And with me Philip, talking still; and so I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, I murmur under moon and stars I linger by my shingly bars; And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come aud men may go, But I go on forever. Yes, men may come and go; and these are gone. Of Brunelleschi; sleeps in peace: and he, I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell "Yes," answer'd she. "Pray stay a little: pardon me; What do they call you?" "Katie." "That wer strange. What surname ?" "Willows." "No!" "That is my name." "Indeed!" and here he look'd so self-perplext, That Katie laugh'd, and laughing blush'd, till he Langh'd also, but as one before he wakes, Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream. Then looking at her; Too happy, fresh and fair, Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best bloom, To be the ghost of one who bore your name About these meadows, twenty years ago." "Have you not heard?" said Katie, "we came back. We bought the farm we tenanted before. THE LETTERS. 1. STILL on the tower stood the vane, I peer'd athwart the chancel pane 2. I turn'd and humm'd a bitter song That mock'd the wholesome human heart, And then we met in wrath and wrong, We met, but only meant to part. |