When all that hindered, all that vexed our love,

As tall rank weeds will climb the blade above,

When all but it has yielded to decay. We'll meet again upon some future day. When we have proved, each on his course alone,

The wider world, and learned what's now unknown,

Have made life clear, and worked out each a way,

We'll meet again,-we shall have much to say.

With happier mood, and feelings born anew,

Our boyhood's bygone fancies we'll re view, [play, Talk o'er old talks, play as we used to And meet again, on many a future day.

Some day, which oft our hearts shall

THE STREAM OF LIFE

O STREAM descending to the sea,
Thy mossy banks between,
The flow'rets blow, the grasses grow,
The leafy trees are green.

In garden plots the children play,
The fields the laborers till,
And houses stand on either hand,
And thou descendest still.

O life descending into death,
Our waking eyes behold,
Parent and friend thy lapse attend,
Companions young and old.

Strong purposes our mind possess,
Our hearts affections fill,

We toil and earn, we seek and learn,
And thou descendest still.

The lightning zigzags shoot across the sky

(Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie),

And through the vale the rains go sweeping by;

Ah me, and when in shelter shall we be? Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.

Cold, dreary cold, the stormy winds feel they

O'er foreign lands and foreign seas that stray

(Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie),

And doth he e'er, I wonder, bring to mind

The pleasant huts and herds he left behind?

And doth he sometimes in his slumbering

see

The feeding kine, and doth he think of

me,

My sweetheart wandering whereso'er it be?

Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.

The thunder bellows far from snow to

snow

(Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie),

And loud and louder roars the flood below.

Heigho! but soon in shelter shall we be : Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie),

Or shall he find before his term be sped, Some comelier maid that he shall wish to wed?

(Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.)

For weary is work, and weary day by day To have your comfort miles on miles away.

Home. Rose, and home, Provence and

La Palie.

I do not ask the tints that fill The gate of day 'twixt hill and hill; I ask not for the hues that fleet Above the distant peaks; my feet Are on a poplar-bordered road, Where with a saddle and a load A donkey, old and ashen-gray, Reluctant works his dusty way. Before him, still with might and main Pulling his rope, the rustic rein, A girl before both him and me, Frequent she turns and lets me see, Unconscious, lets me scan and trace The sunny darkness of her face And outlines full of southern grace.

Following I notice, yet and yet,
Her olive skin, dark eyes deep set,
And black, and blacker e'en than jet,
The escaping hair that scantly showed,
Since o'er it in the country mode,
For winter warmth and summer shade
The lap of scarlet cloth is laid.
And then, back-falling from the head,
A crimson kerchief overspread
Her jacket blue; thence passing down,
A skirt of darkest yellow-brown,
Coarse stuff, allowing to the view
The smooth limb to the woollen shoe.
But who-here's some one following
too,--

A priest, and reading at his book!
Read on, O priest, and do not look;
Consider, she is but a child,--
Yet might your fancy be beguiled.
Read on, O priest, and pass and go!
But see, succeeding in a row,
Two, three, and four, a motley train,
Musicians wandering back to Spain;
With fiddle and with tambourine,
A man with women following seen.
What dresses, ribbon ends, and flowers!
And, sight to wonder at for hours,--
The man,--to Phillip has he sat ?--
With butterfly-like velvet hat;
One dame his big bassoon conveys,
On one his gentle arm he lays;
They stop, and look, and something say,
And to "España" ask the way.

But while I speak, and point them

COME, POET, COME!

COME, Poet, come!

A thousand laborers ply their task,
And what it tends to scarcely ask,
And trembling thinkers on the brink
Shiver, and know not how to think.
To tell the purport of their pain,
And what our silly joys contain ;
In lasting lineaments portray
The substance of the shadowy day;
Our real and inner deeds rehearse,
And make our meaning clear in verse:
Come, Poet, come! for but in vain
We do the work or feel the pain,
And gather up the seeming gain,
Unless before the end thou come
To take, ere they are lost, their sum,

Come, Poet, come!

To give an utterance to the dumb,
And make vain babblers silent, come:
A thousand dupes point here and there,
Bewildered by the show and glare;
And wise men half have learned to
doubt

Whether we are not best without.
Come, Poet; both but wait to see
Their error proved to them in thee.

Come, Poet, come!

In vain I seem to call. And yet
Think not the living times forget.
Ages of heroes fought and fell
That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;

And countless hearts on countless years Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,

Rude laughter and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown.

Whoe'er, Whate'er Thou art,

Within the closest veil of mine own in. most heart.

What is it then to me

If others are inquisitive to see?

Why should I quit my place to go and ask

If other men are working at their task?
Leave my own buried roots to go
And see that brother plants shall grow ;
And turn away from Thee, O Thou most
Holy Light

To look if other orbs their orbits keep aright,

Around their proper sun,

Deserting Thee, and being undone.

O let me love my love unto myself alone, And know my knowledge to the world unknown;

And worship Thee, O hid One, O much sought,

As but man can or ought, Within the abstracted'st shrine of my least breathed on thought.

Better it were, thou sayest, to consent; Feast while we may, and live ere life be

spent ;

Close up clear eyes, and call the unstable sure,

The unlovely lovely, and the filthy pure; In self-belyings, self-deceivings roll, And lose in Action, Passion, Talk, the soul.

Nay, better far to mark off thus much air,

And call it Heaven: place bliss and glory there;

[sky, Fix perfect homes in the unsubstantial And say, what is not, will be by-and-bye. 1869.

PERCHE PENSA? PENSANDO S' IN

VECCHIA

LIFE IS STRUGGLE

To wear out heart, and nerves, and brain,

And give oneself a world of pain;
Be eager, angry, fierce, and hot,
Imperious, supple-God knows what,
For what's all one to have or not;
O false, unwise, absurd, and vain!
For 'tis not joy, it is not gain,
It is not in itself a bliss,
Only it is precisely this

That keeps us all alive.

To say we truly feel the pain,

And quite are sinking with the strain ;-
Entirely, simply, undeceived,
Believe, and say we ne'er believed
The object, e'en were it achieved,
A thing we e'er had cared to keep;
With heart and soul to hold it cheap,
And then to go and try it again;
O false, unwise, absurd, and vain!
O, 'tis not joy, and 'tis not bliss,
Only it is precisely this

That keeps us still alive.

1869.

To every clime, in every age, hath taught;

If in this human complex there be aught Not lost in death, as not in birth acquired, O then, though cold the lips that did convey

Rich freights of meaning, dead each living sphere

Where thought abode, and fancy loved to play,

Thou yet, we think, somewhere somehow still art,

And satisfied with that the patient heart The where and how doth not desire to hear. 1869.

IN A LONDON SQUARE

PUT forth thy leaf, thou lofty plane, East wind and frost are safely gone; With zephyr mild and balmy rain

The summer comes serenely on; Earth, air, and sun and skies combine To promise all that's kind and fair :But thou, O human heart of mine, Be still, contain thyself, and bear.

December days were brief and chill, The winds of March were wild and drear,

And, nearing and receding still,

Spring never would, we thought, be here.

The leaves that burst, the suns that shine,
Had, not the less, their certain date:-
And thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, refrain thyself, and wait.
1869.

ALL IS WELL

WHATE'ER you dream, with doubt possessed,

Keep, keep it snug within your breast,
And lay you down and take your rest;
Forget in sleep the doubt and pain,
And when you wake, to work again.
The wind it blows, the vessel goes,
And where and whither, no one knows.

"Twill all be well: no need of care; Though how it will, and when, and where,

We cannot see, and can't declare. In spite of dreams, in spite of thought, 'Tis not in vain, and not for nought, The wind it blows, the ship it goes, Though where and whither, no knows.

one 1869.