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Ever and ever afresh they seem'd to grow.
Was it he lay there with a fading eye?
"The fault was mine," he whisper'd, "fly!"
Then glided out of the joyous wood

The ghastly Wraith of one that I know;
And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,

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,
The little hearts that know not how to forgive:
Arise, my God, and strike, for we hold Thee just,
Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms,
That sting each other here in the dust;

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
Could give it a clumsy name.
Let him name it who can,
The beauty would be the same.

3.

The tiny cell is forlorn,
Void of the little living will
That made it stir on the shore.
Did he stand at the diamond door
Of his house in a rainbow frill?
Did he push, when he was uncurl'd,
A golden foot or a fairy horn
Thro' his dim water-world?

4.

Slight, to be crush'd with a tap
Of my finger-nail on the sand,
Small, but a work divine,
Frail, but of force to withstand,
Year upon year, the shock
Of cataract seas that snap
The three-decker's oaken spine
Athwart the ledges of rock,
Here on the Breton strand!

5.

Breton, not Briton; here

Like a shipwreck'd man on a coast
Of ancient fable and fear,-
Plagued with a flitting to and fro,
A disease, a hard mechanic ghost
That never came from on high
Nor ever arose from below,

But only moves with the moving eye,
Flying along the land and the main,-

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,
Back to the dark sea-line

Looking, thinking of all I have lost;

An old song vexes my ear;
But that of Lamech is mine.

7.

For years, a measureless ill,
For years, forever, to part,-
But she, she would love me still
And as long, O God, as she
Have a grain of love for me,
So long, no doubt, no doubt,
Shall I nurse in my dark heart,
However weary, a spark of will
Not to be trampled out.

8.

Strange, that the mind, when fraugnt
With a passion so intense

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?
However this may be,

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,
While I am over the sea!

Let me and my passionate love go by,
But speak to her all things holy and high,
Whatever happen to me!

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:
Courage, poor stupid heart of stone.-

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
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!

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,
When all my spirit reels

At the shouts, the leagues of lights,
And the roaring of the wheels.

5.

Half the night I waste in sighs,
Half in dreams I sorrow after
The delight of early skies;
In a wakeful doze I sorrow
For the hand, the lips, the eyes,
For the meeting of the morrow,
The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies.

6.

T is a morning pure and sweet,
And a dewy splendor falls
On the little flower that clings
To the turrets and the walls;
"T is a morning pure and sweet,
And the light and shadow fleet;
She is walking in the meadow,
And the woodland echo rings;
In a moment we shall meet;
She is singing in the meadow,
And the rivulet at her feet
Ripples on in light and shadow
To the ballad that she sings.

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,
And I wake, my dream is fled;
In the shuddering dawn, behold,
Without knowledge, without pity,
By the curtains of my bed
That abiding phantom cold.

8.

Get thee hence, nor come again,
Mix not memory with doubt,
Pass, thou deathlike type of pain,
Pass and cease to move about,
"T is the blot upon the brain
That will show itself without.

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.

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And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,

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
Is enough to drive one mad.

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,
But the churchmen fain would kill their church,
As the churches have kill'd their Christ.

3.

See, there is one of us sobbing,
No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying
To his own great self, as I guess;

And another, a statesman there, betraying
His party-secret, fool, to the press;
And yonder a vile physician, blabbing
The case of his patient,-all for what?

To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,
And wheedle a world that loves him not,
For it is but a world of the dead.

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,
Then to strike him and lay him low,
That were a public merit, far,

Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin:
But the red life spilt for a private blow-
I swear to you, lawful and lawless war
Are scarcely even akin.

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

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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,
Fairer than aught in the world beside,
All made up of the lily and rose

That blow by night, when the season is good,
To the sound of dancing music and flutes:
It is only flowers, they had no fruits,
And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;
For the keeper was one, so full of pride,
He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride;
For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes,
Would he have that hole in his side?

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;
Yet now I could even weep to think of it;
For what will the old man say

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,
The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,
Nor Britain's one sole God be the millionnaire:
No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace
Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note,
And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase,
Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore,
And the cobweb woven across the cannon's throat
Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.

3.

And as months ran on and rumor of battle grew.
"It is time, it is time, O passionate heart," said I
(For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and
true),

"It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,
That old hysterical mock-disease should die."
And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly
Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death;

4.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and
shames,

Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroil'd!
Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring
claims,

Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and
done,

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
And he for Italy-too late-too late:
One whom the strong sons of the world despise;
For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,
And mellow metres more than cent for cent;
Nor could he understand how money breeds,
Thought it a dead thing: yet himself could make
The thing that is not as the thing that is.
O had he lived! In our school-books we say,
Of those that held their heads above the crowd,
They flourish'd then or then but life in him
Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch'd
On such a time as goes before the leaf,
When all the wood stands in a mist of green,
And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved,
For which, in branding summers of Bengal,
Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air,
I panted, seems, as I re-listen to it,
Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

To me that loved him; for 'O brook,' he says,
"O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,
Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? re-
plies.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry dowr
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go
But I go on forever.

"Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out,
Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,
It has more ivy; there the river; and there
Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.

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
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

"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;
James had no cause: but when I prest the cause,
I learnt that James had flickering jealousies
Which anger'd her. Who anger'd James? I said.
But Katie snatch'd her eyes at once from mine,
And sketching with her slender-pointed foot
Some figure like a wizard's pentagram
On garden gravel, let my query pass
Unclaim'd, in flushing silence, till I ask'd

If James were coming. Coming every day,'
She answer'd, 'ever longing to explain,
But evermore her father came across
With some long-winded tale, and broke him short;
And James departed vext with him and her.'
How could I help her? Would I-was it wrong?"
(Claspt hands and that petitionary grace
Of sweet seventeen subdued me ere she spoke)
O would I take her father for one hour,
For one half-hour, and let him talk to me!
And even while she spoke, I saw where James
Made towards us, like a wader in the surf,
Beyond the brook, waist-deep in meadow-sweet.

"O Katie, what I suffer'd for your sake!
For in I went and call'd old Philip out
To show the farm: full willingly he rose :
He led me thro' the short sweet-smelling lanes
Of his wheat suburb, babbling as he went.
He praised his land, his horses, his machines;
He praised his ploughs, his cows, his hogs, his dogs;
He praised his hens, his geese, his gninea-hens;
His pigeons, who in session on their roofs
Approved him, bowing at their own deserts:
Then from the plaintive mother's teat, he took
Her blind and shuddering puppies, naming each,
And naming those, his friends, for whom they were:
Then crost the common into Darnley chase
To show Sir Arthur's deer. In copse and fern
Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail.
Then, seated on a serpent-rooted beech,
He pointed out a pasturing colt, and said:
That was the four-year-old I sold the squire.'
And there be told a long, long-winded tale
Of how the squire had seen the colt at grass,
And how it was the thing his daughter wish'd,
And how he sent the bailiff to the farm

To learn the price, and what the price he ask'd,
And how the bailiff swore that he was mad,
But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;
He them line: and five days after that
gave
He met the bailiff at the Golden Fleece,
Who then and there had offer'd something more,
But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;
He knew the man; the colt would fetch its price;
He gave them line: and how by chance at last
(It might be May or April, he forgot,
The last of April or the first of May)
He found the bailiff riding by the farm,
And, talking from the point, he drew him in,
And there he mellow'd all his heart with ale,
Until they closed a bargain, hand in hand.

"Then, while I breathed in sight of haven, he,
Poor fellow, could he help it? recommenced,
And ran thro' all the coltish chronicle,
Wild Will, Black Bess, Tantivy, Tallyho,
Reform, White Rose, Bellerophon, the Jilt,
Arbaces and Phenomenon, and the rest,
Till, not to die a listener, I arose,

And with me Philip, talking still; and so
We turn'd our foreheads from the falling sun,
And following our own shadows thrice as long
As when they follow'd us from Philip's door,
Arrived, and found the sun of sweet content
Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things well.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

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.
All gone. My dearest brother, Edmund, sleeps,
Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire,
But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome

Of Brunelleschi; sleeps in peace: and he,
Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words
Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb:

I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks
By the long wash of Australasian seas
Far off, and holds her head to other stars,
And breathes in converse seasons. All are gone."

So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile
In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind
Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o'er the brook
A tonsured head in middle age forlorn,
Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a low breath
Of tender air made tremble in the hedge
The fragile bindweed-bells and briony rings:
And he look'd up. There stood a maiden near,
Waiting to pass. In much amaze he stared
On eyes a bashful azure, and on hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within:
Then, wondering, ask'd her, "Are you from the
farm?"

"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.
Am I so like her? so they said on board.
Sir, if you knew her in her English days,
My mother, as it seems you did, the days
That most she loves to talk of, come with ms.
My brother James is in the harvest-field:
But she-you will be welcome-O, come in "

THE LETTERS.

1.

STILL on the tower stood the vane,
A black yew gloom'd the stagnant air,

I peer'd athwart the chancel pane
And saw the altar cold and bare.
A clog of lead was round my feet,
A band of pain across my brow;
"Cold altar, Heaven and earth shall meet
Before you hear my marriage vow."

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.

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