| Of that long cloud-bar in the West,
Whose nether edge, erelong, you see
The silvery chrism in turn anoint,
And then the tiniest rosy point
Touched doubtfully and timidly
Into the dark blue's chilly strip,
As some mute, wondering thing below,
Awakened by the thrilling glow,
Might, looking up, see Dian dip
One lucent foot's delaying tip
In Latmian fountains long ago.

Here is no startle of dreaming bird
Knew you what silence was before?
That sings in his sleep, or strives to
sing;

Nor noise of any living thing,
Here is no sough of branches stirred,
Such as one hears by night on shore;
Only, now and then, a sigh,
With fickle intervals between,
Such as Andromeda might have heard,
Sometimes far, and sometimes nigh,
And fancied the huge sea-beast unseen
Turning in sleep; it is the sea
That welters and wavers uneasily
Round the lonely reefs of Appledore.

THE WIND-HARP.

I TREASURE in secret some long, fine hair

Of tenderest brown, but so inwardly golden

I half used to fancy the sunshine there, So shy, so shifting, so waywardly rare,

Was only caught for the moment and

holden

While I could say Dearest! and kiss it, and then

In pity let go to the summer again.

I twisted this magic in gossamer strings Over a wind-harp's Delphian hollow; Then called to the idle breeze that swings

All day in the pine-tops, and clings, and sings

Mid the musical leaves, and said, "O,

follow

The will of those tears that deepen my words,

And fly to my window to waken these chords."

AFTER THE BURIAL.

YES, faith is a goodly anchor;
When skies are sweet as a psalm,
At the bows it lolls so stalwart,
In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm.
And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its íron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory,
One broken plank of the Past,
That our human heart may cling to,
Though hopeless of shore at last!

To the spirit its splendid conjectures,
To the flesh its sweet despair,
Its tears o'er the thin-worn locket
With its anguish of deathless hair!

Immortal? I feel it and know it,
Who doubts it of such as she?
But that is the pang's very secret, –
Immortal away from me.

There's a narrow ridge in the graveyard

Would scarce stay a child in his race,
But to me and my thought it is wider
Than the star-sown vague of Space.

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your moral most drearily true;
But, since the earth clashed on her
coffin,

I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
"T is a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

The Present plucks rue for us men! I come back that scar unhealing Was not in the churchyard then.

But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.

Unaltered! Alas for the sameness That makes the change but more! "Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors, 'Tis his tread that chills the floor!

To learn such a simple lesson,

Need I go to Paris and Rome, That the many make the household, But only one the home?

"T was just a womanly presence, An influence unexprest,

But a rose she had worn, on my gravesod

Were more than long life with the rest!

"T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle, 'T was nothing that I can phrase, But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,

And put on her looks and ways.

Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.

For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside

That looks over woodland and corn.

Thou only aspirest the more,
Unregretful the old leaves shedding
That fringed thee with music before,
And deeper thy roots embedding
In the grace and the beauty of yore;
Thou sigh'st not, "Alas, I am older,
The green of last summer is sear!"
But loftier, hopefuller, bolder,
Winnest broader horizons each year.

To me 't is not cheer thou art singing:
There's a sound of the sea,
O mournful tree,

In thy boughs forever clinging,
And the far-off roar

Of waves on the shore
A shattered vessel flinging.

As thou musest still of the ocean
On which thou must float at last,
And seem'st to foreknow
The shipwreck's woe

And the sailor wrenched from the broken mast,

Do I, in this vague emotion,
This sadness that will not pass,
Though the air throb with wings,
And the field laughs and sings,
Do I forebode, alas!

The ship-building longer and wearier,
The voyage's struggle and strife,
And then the darker and drearier
Wreck of a broken life?

A MOOD.

I Go to the ridge in the forest
I haunted in days gone by,
But thou, O Memory, pourest
No magical drop in mine eye,
Nor the gleam of the secret restorest
That hath faded from earth and sky:
A Presence autumnal and sober
Invests every rock and tree,
And the aureole of October
Lights the maples, but darkens me.

Pine in the distance,
Patient through sun or rain,
Meeting with graceful persistence,
With yielding but rooted resistance,
The northwind's wrench and strain,
No memory of past existence
Brings thee pain;

Right for the zenith heading,
Friendly with heat or cold,

Thine arms to the influence spreading
Of the heavens, just from of old,

played their game,

Letting Time pocket up the larger life, Lost with base gain of raiment, food, and roof.

"What helpeth lightness of the feet?" they said,

"Oblivion runs with swifter foot than they;

Or strength of sinew? New men come as strong,

And those sleep nameless; or renown in war?

Swords grave no name on the longmemoried rock

But moss shall hide it; they alone who wring

Some secret purpose from the unwilling gods

Survive in song for yet a little while
To vex, like us, the dreams of later

men,

Ourselves a dream, and dreamlike all we did."

II.

THORWALD'S LAY.

So Biörn went comfortless but for his thought,

And by his thought the more discomforted,

Till Eric Thurlson kept his Yule-tide feast:

And thither came he, called among the

rest,

Silent, lone-minded, a church-door to mirth :

But, ere deep draughts forbade such serious song

As the grave Škald might chant nor after blush,

Then Eric looked at Thorwald where he sat

Mute as a cloud amid the stormy hall, And said: "O Skald, sing now an olden song,

Such as our fathers heard who led great lives;

And, as the bravest on a shield is borne Along the waving host that shouts him king,

So rode their thrones upon the thronging seas!"

Then the old man arose; white-haired he stood,

White-bearded, and with eyes that looked afar

From their still region of perpetual snow, Beyond the little smokes and stirs of

men:

His head was bowed with gathered flakes of years,

As winter bends the sea-foreboding pine, But something triumphed in his brow and eye,

Which whoso saw it could not see and crouch:

Loud rang the emptied beakers as he mused,

Brooding his eyried thoughts; then, as an eagle

Circles smooth-winged above the windvexed woods,

So wheeled his soul into the air of song High o'er the stormy hall; and thus he

sang:

"The fletcher for his arrow-shaft picks out

Wood closest-grained, long-seasoned, straight as light;

And from a quiver full of such as these