• Come to me in my dreams, and then
    By day I shall be well again!
    For then the night will more than pay
    The hopeless longing of the day.

    Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times,
    A messenger from radiant climes,
    And smile on thy new world, and be
    As kind to others as to me!

    Or, as thou never cam'st in sooth,
    Come now, and let me dream it truth...

  • 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.

    Her life was turning, turning,
        In mazes of heat and sound.
    But for...

  • 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 Tertullian. But she sighed,
    The infant Church! of love she felt the tide
    Stream on her...

  • 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 languish;
    From that torpor deep
    Wherein we lie asleep,
    Heavy as death, cold as the...

  • 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 polar star, past Orgunjè,
    Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
    To hem his...

  • 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 chestnut-flowers are strewn—
      So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry,
        From the...

  • 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
    That wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, Old-world pain,—
          Say, will it never heal?
    ...

  • 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!
    Only, from the long line of spray
    Where the sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
    ...

  • 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.
        Children dear, let us away.
          This way, this way.

    Call her once before you go....

  •     “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,
        Are what we mean to be?”

        Critias, long since, I know
        (For Fate decreed...