Cast backward one forbidden glance, And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee

And with proud hands control its fiery prance?

With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow,

And eye remote, that inly sees
Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now
In some sea-lulled Hesperides,
Thou movest through the jarring street,
Secluded from the noise of feet

By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy
Land;-

No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.
Yet there is something round thy lips
That prophesies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the
eclipse

Notches the perfect disk with gloom; A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be,

From men and their unworthy fates, Though Florence had not shut her gates,

And Grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.

Ah! he who follows fearlessly

The beckonings of a poet-heart Shall wander, and without the world's decree,

A banished man in field and mart; Harder than Florence' walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far From home and friends, till death's

release,

And makes his only prayer for peace, Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!

ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD.

DEATH never came so nigh to me before,

Nor showed me his mild face: oft had 1 mused

Of calm and peace and deep forgetful

ness,

Of folded hands, closed eyes, and heart at rest,

And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf,

Of faults forgotten, and an inner place Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends;

But these were idle fancies, satisfied With the mere husk of this great mystery,

And dwelling in the outward shows of things.

Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams,

Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth

Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom,

With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content:

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladderup, Whose golden rounds are our calamities,

Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God

The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.

For good, not gravitating earthward yet,

But circling in diviner periods,
Are sent into the world,-no little thing,
When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn.
Ah, in this world, where every guiding
thread

Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death,

The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim !

How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's!

He bends above thy cradle now, or holds

His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nursling now; he watches thee

Slow learning, one by one, the secret things

Which are to him used sights of every day;

He smiles to see thy wondering glances

EURYDICE.

HEAVEN'S Cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain;

Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye
I suck the last drop of the sky;
With each hot sense I draw to the lees
The quickening out-door influences,
And empty to each radiant comer
A supernaculum of summer:
Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice
Could bring enchantment so profuse,
Though for its press each grape-bunch
had

The white feet of an Oread.

Through our coarse art gleam, now and then,

The features of angelic men:
'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint
Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;
The dauber's botch no more obscures
The mighty master's portraitures.
And who can say what luckier beam
The hidden glory shall redeem,

For what chance clod the soil may wait

To stumble on its nobler fate,
Or why, to his unwarned abode,
Still by surprises comes the God?
Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,
May meditate a whole youth's loss,
Some windfall joy, we know not whence,
Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,
And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,
Stripped of their simulated dark,
Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,
Girdling its valleyed poverty.

Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's

sway

Rebuilds the vanished yesterday;
For plated wares of Sheffield stamp
We gave the old Aladdin's lamp;
'Tis we are changed: ah, whither went
That undesigned abandonment,
That wise, unquestioning content,
Which could erect its microcosm
Out of a weed's neglected blossom,
Could call up Arthur and his peers
By a low moss's clump of spears,
Or, in its shingle trireme launched,
Where Charles in some green inlet
branched,

Could venture for the golden fleece
And dragon-watched Hesperides,
Or, from its ripple-shattered fate,
Ulysses' chances re-create?

When, heralding life's every phase,
There glowed a goddess-veiling haze,
A plenteous, forewarning grace,
Like that more tender dawn that flies
Before the full moon's ample rise?
Methinks thy parting glory shines
Through yonder grove of singing pines;
At that elm-vista's end I trace
Dimly thy sad leave-taking face,
Eurydice! Eurydice !

The tremulous leaves repeat to me
Eurydice Eurydice !

No gloomier Orcus swallows thee
Than the unclouded sunset's glow;
Thine is at least Elysian woe;
Thou hast Good's natural decay,
And fadest like a star away
Into an atmosphere whose shine
With fuller day o'ermasters thine,
Entering defeat as 't were a shrine ;
For us, we turn life's diary o'er
To find but one word,- Nevermore.
1845.

en;

I only know she came and went.

As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps

The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps ;I only know she came and went.

An angel stood and met my gaze,

Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.

O, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING.

I HAD a little daughter,
And she was given to me
To lead me gently backward

To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature,

Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her,

But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from

Still lingered and gleamed in her
hair;

For it was as wavy and golden,
And as many changes took,
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling
Upon me, her kneeling lover,
How it leaped from her lips to her eye-
lids,

And dimpled her wholly over,
Till her outstretched hands smiled also,
And I almost seemed to see

Here, life the undiminished man demands;

New faculties stretch out to meet new wants;

What Nature asks, that Nature also grants;

Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands,

And to his life is knit with hourly bands.

Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways,

Before you harden to a crystal cold Which the new life can shatter, but not mould;

Freedom for you still waits, still, look

ing backward, stays,

But widens still the irretrievable space.

LONGING.

Of all the myriad moods of mind
That through the soul come thronging,
Which one was e'er so dear, so kind,
So beautiful as Longing?