"DE GUSTIBUS

YOUR

YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If loves remain)

In an English lane,

By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice, -

A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,

The happier they!

Draw yourself up from the light of the moon, And let them pass, as they will too soon, With the bean-flowers' boon,

And the blackbird's tune,

And May, and June!

What I love best in all the world,
Is, a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands),
In a seaside house to the farther south,
Where the baked cicalas die of drouth,
And one sharp tree ('t is a cypress) stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands

To the water's edge. For, what expands
Without the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea, and not a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl barefooted brings and tumbles

WOMEN AND ROSES.

Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there 's news to-day,

- the king

Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,

Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling.

She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!

Queen Mary's saying serves for me,

(When fortune's malice

Lost her, Calais.)

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."

Such lovers old are I and she;
So it always was, so it still shall be!

Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone, on the poet's pages.
Then follow the women fresh and gay,
Living and loving and loved to-day.

Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,
Beauties unborn. And all, to one cadence,

They circle their rose on my rose-tree.

Dear rose, thy term is reached,
Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:
Bees pass it unimpeached.

73

Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb,
You, great shapes of the antique time!
How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you,
Break my heart at your feet to please you?
O to possess, and be possessed!

Hearts that beat 'neath each pallid breast!
But once of love, the poesy, the passion,

Drink once and die!- In vain, the same fashion,
They circle their rose on my rose-tree.

Dear rose, thy joy 's undimmed;
Thy cup is ruby-rimmed,

Thy cup's heart nectar-brimmed.

Deep as drops from a statue's plinth
The bee sucked in by the hyacinth,
So will I bury me while burning,
Quench like him at a plunge my yearning,

Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!

Fold me fast where the cincture slips,

Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure!

Girdle me once! But no, - in their old measure

They circle their rose on my rose-tree.

Dear rose without a thorn,

Thy bud's the babe unborn,

First streak of a new morn.

Wings, lend wings for the cold, the clear!

What's far conquers what is near.

Roses will bloom nor want beholders,

Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders. What shall arrive with the cycle's change?

A novel grace and a beauty strange.

I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her, Shaped her to his mind! - Alas! in like manner They circle their rose on my rose-tree.