Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’t is early morn,—
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.
’T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland, flying over Locksley Hall:
...
Lady Clara VERE DE VERE,
Of me you shall not win renown;
You thought to break a country heart
For pastime, ere you went to town.
At me you smiled, but unbeguiled
I saw the snare, and I retired:
The daughter of a hundred Earls,
You...
17—
i.
wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea—
And Willy’s voice in the wind, “O mother, come out to me.”
Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot go?
For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at the snow...
[October 25, 1854]
HALF a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said;
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred...
FIRST drink a health, this solemn night,
A health to England, every guest:
That man ’s the best cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.
May Freedom’s oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day:
That...
A Ballad of the Fleet
I.
AT Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
“Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!”
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: “’Fore God I am no coward...
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires: and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:
Not only we, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel...
SO all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyoness about their lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
...
Victor in poesy! Victor in romance!
Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears!
French of the French and lord of human tears!
Child-lover, bard, whose fame-lit laurels glance,
Darkening the wreaths of all that would advance
Beyond our strait their...
[Written at the request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s death, B.C. 19.]
I.
ROMAN Virgil, thou that singest
Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,
Ilion falling, Rome arising,
wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre;
