True love’s own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
Gave to our Saxon speech:
Chief miracle of theme and touch
That upstart enviers adore:
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
No critic born since Charles was king
But sighed in smiling, as...
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
All night, from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.
Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,
Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weatherworn, galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that...
Are favoring ladies above thee?
Are there dowries and lands? Do they say
Seven others are fair? But I love thee:
Aultre n’auray!
All the sea is a lawn in our country;
All the morrow, our star of delay.
I am King: let me live on thy bounty!
Aulture n’auray!
To the fingers so light and so rosy
...
I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
By Severn shore,
The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.
Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose;
For so, alas,
With...
High above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play,
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay’s footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but...
I
as she FEARED IT WOULD BE
HERE in this room where first we met,
And where we said farewell with tears,
Here, where you swore “Though you forget,
My love shall deeper grow with years,”
Here, where the pictures on the wall,
The very rugs upon the floor,
The smallest objects you recall,—
I am awaiting you once more...
O ye who see with other eyes than ours,
And speak with tongues we are too deaf to hear,
Whose touch we cannot feel yet know ye near,
When, with a sense of yet undreamed-of powers,
We sudden pierce the cloud of sense that lowers,
Enwrapping us as ’t were our spirit’s tomb,
And catch some sudden glory through the gloom,
As Arctic sufferers...
Wouldst know the artist? Then go seek
Him in his labors. Though he strive
That Nature’s voice alone should speak
From page or canvas to the heart,
Yet is it passionately alive
With his own soul! Of him ’t is part!—
This happy failure, this is Art.
Once when the wind was on the roof,
And nature seemed to question fate,
A fiery angel, in a dream,
Called on a soul to contemplate.
“Look well about thy precincts, learn
What is thy gain, thy final stock,
Obtained from living day by day.”
(Hark, how the winds the elm-trees rock!)
The man’s soul cast a glance about.
The...
Myriads of motley molecules through space
Move round triumphant. By their whirlpool pace
Shall we be shaken? All in earth’s vast span,
Our very bodies, veer to other shapes,
Mid the mad dance one stubborn power escapes,
Looks on and marvels,—’t is the soul of man.
