April, 1860
goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
But one such death remained to come;
The last poetic voice is dumb—
We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.
When Byron’s eyes were shut in death,
We...
“WHY, when the world’s great mind
Hath finally inclined,
Why,” you say, Critias, “be debating still?
Why, with these mournful rhymes
Learned in more languid climes,
Blame our activity
Who, with such passionate will,...
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.
Now my brothers call from the bay;
Now the great winds shorewards blow;
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
...
The Sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!...
Hark! ah, the nightingale!
The tawny-throated!
Hark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark,—what pain!
O wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still,—after many years, in distant lands,—
Still nourishing in thy bewildered brain
...
From “Thyrsis”
SO, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er,
Before the roses and the longest day—
When garden-walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And...
From “Sohrab and Rustum”
BUT the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon;—he flowed
Right for the...
Thou, who dost dwell alone;
Thou, who dost know thine own;
Thou, to whom all are known,
From the cradle to the grave,—
Save, O, save!
From the world’s temptations;
From tribulations;
From that fierce anguish
Wherein we...
He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save.
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian Sect which cried:
“Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave.”—
So spake the fierce...
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.
Her mirth the world required:
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be....
